Short Histories of
the Literatures of
the World: III.
Edited by Edmund Gosse,
LL.D.
Short Histories of the
Literatures of the World
EDITED BY EDMUND GOSSE, LL.D.
Large Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. each Volume
ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE
By Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, M.A.
..FRENCH LITERATURE
By Prof. EDWARD DOWDEN, D.C.L. LL.D.
MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
By the EDITOR
ITALIAN LITERATURE
By RICHARD GARNETT, C.B., LL.D.
SPANISH LITERATURE
By JAMBS FITZMAURICE-KELLV
JAPANESE LITERATURE
By WILLIAM GEORGE ASTON, C.M.G., D.Lit.
BOHEMIAN LITERATURE
By FRANCIS, COUNT LOTZOW
RUSSIAN LITERATURE
By K. WALISZEWSKI
SANSKRIT LITERATURE
By Prof. A. A. MACDONBLL, Ph.D.
CHINESE LITERATURE
By Prof. HERBERT A. GILES, LL.D.
ARABIC LITERATURE
By Prof. CLEMENT HUART
AMERICAN LITERATURE
By Prof. W. P. TRENT
In preparation
MODERN SCANDINAVIAN LITERATURE
By Dr. GEORGE BRANDES
HUNGARIAN LITERATURE
By Dr. ZOLTAN BEOTHY
LATIN LITERATURE
By Dr. A. W. VERRALI.
PERSIAN LITERATURE
By Prof. E. DENISON Ross, Principal of the
Calcutta Madrassa
PROVENCAL LITERATURE
By Dr. H. OBLSNER
HEBREW LITERATURE
By Prof. PHILIPPE BHRGHR, of the Institut tie
France
Other volumes ivill follmv
LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN
All rights reserved
A Short History of
MODERN ENGLISH
LITERATURE
BY
EDMUND GOSSE
HON. M.A. OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
HON. LL.D. OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS
Xonfcon
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
M C M 1 1 1
First impression, November 1897
Second impression, May 1898
Third impression, May 1900
Fourth impression, September 1903
JUL 3 1 1957
Printed by BALLANTVNE, HANSON of Co.
At the Ballantyne Press
PREFACE
THE principal aim which I have had before me, in
writing this volume, has been to show the movement
of English literature. I have desired above all else
to give the reader, whether familiar with the books
mentioned or not, a feeling of the evolution of English
literature in the primary sense of the term, the dis-
entanglement of the skein, the slow and regular un-
winding, down succeeding generations, of the threads
of literary expression. To do this without relation to
particular authors, and even particular works, seems to
me impossible ; to attempt it would be to essay a vague
disquisition on " style " in the abstract, a barren thing at
best. To retain the character of an historical survey, with
the introduction of the obvious names, has seemed to me
essential ; but I have endeavoured to keep expression,
form, technique, always before me as the central interest,
rather than biography, or sociology, or mere unrelated
criticism. In this way only, by the elimination of half
the fascinating qualities which make literature valuable
to us, could it be possible in so few pages to give any-
thing but a gabble of facts. And the difficulties of omis-
sion have been by far the greatest that have assailed me.
If any one accuses me of injustice to an author, I must
acknowledge with despair that I have been " unjust" to
every one, if justice be an exhaustive statement of his
claims to consideration. No critical reader can be more
indignant at my summary treatment of a favourite of his
vi PREFACE
own than I have been at having to glide so swiftly over
mine. But the procession of the entire theme was the
one thing that seemed essential ; whether I have in any
measure been able to present it, my readers must judge.
The great pressure upon space has been relieved by
dividing the history of English literature into two por-
tions. If this series continues to receive the support of
the public, it is hoped that a volume on the archaic
section may bring the story down from the earliest
times to Robert of Brunne and Laurence Minot. In
my first three chapters I have further lightened my
labour by leaving out of consideration what was written
in this country in Latin or French, for, although this
may be material in dealing with thought in England, it
can have but a small connection with the history of
expression in the English language. I make no apology
for the prominence given throughout to the art of poetry,
for it is in verse that style can most definitely and to
greatest advantage be studied, especially in a literature
like ours, where prose has mainly been written without
any other aim than the na'fve transference of ideas or
statement of facts, like the prose of M. Jourdain, while
our national poetry, which is one of our main national
glories, has been a consecutive chain of consciously
elaborated masterpieces.
I have to acknowledge, with warm thanks, the kind-
ness of that distinguished mediaeval scholar, Prof. W. S.
McCormick, of the University of St. Andrews, who has
been so obliging as to read the proofs of my early
chapters. For other and more general acknowledg-
ments I must refer to my bibliographical appendix.
July 1897.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE AGE OF CHAUCER (1350-1400) . . . . I
II. THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES (1400-1560) ... 33
III. THE AGE OF ELIZABETH (1560-1620) 73
IV. THE DECLINE (l62O-l66o) 129
V. THE AGE OF DRYDEN (l66o-!7OO) l6l
VI. THE AGE OF ANNE (1700-1740) 197
VII. THE AGE OF JOHNSON (1740-1780) 232
VIII. THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH (1780-1815) .... 267
IX. THE AGE OF BYRON (1815-1840) 303
X. THE EARLY VICTORIAN AGE (1840-1870) .... 334
XI. THE AGE OF TENNYSON 360
EPILOGUE 386
BIOGRAPHICAL LIST 393
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 403
INDEX , , , , 409
A SHORT HISTORY OF
MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
I
THE AGE OF CHAUCER
1350-1400
IT is now a recognised fact that the continuity of English
literature is unbroken from Beowulf "and Caedmon down to
the present day. But although this is not to be denied,
it is convenient for practical purposes that we should
begin the study of modern English poetry and prose at
the point where the language in which these are written
becomes reasonably and easily intelligible to us. The
old classic writers looked upon Chaucer as " the father
of English literature " ; we look upon him as a figure
midway between the fathers and us, their latest sons, and
we are aware that for six or seven centuries before the
composition of the Vision of Piers Plowman and the
Canterbury Tales, Englishmen were writing what was
stimulating, and national, and worthy of our closest
attention. There came a great change in the fourteenth
century, but we have been rash in supposing that a com-
pletely new thing began at the close of the Middle Ages.
The traditions of early English survived, and were merely
2 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
modified. In Langland we shall presently meet with an
author untouched by modern forms and ideas, who wrote
in the manner and in the spirit of long generations of less-
gifted precursors. The more closely literary history is
studied, the less inclined shall we be to insist on a sudden
and arbitrary line of demarcation between the old epoch
and the new.
Yet, it being convenient to distinguish, for practical
purposes, between the Old and the Middle and New
English, we do discover in 1350 a date with which we
may make shift to begin the study of modern English
literature. About that time a modification in English
manners was introduced, which was of the highest im-
portance to writers and readers. After the first great
plague (1349) the residue gathered themselves together
into what was more like a nation than anything which
had existed in this country before, and this concentrated
people reasserted for itself, what it had partly lost for a
while, a national and native language. We may well
begin the study of modern literature from the approxi-
mate date of the recognition of English as the language
of England. Very rapidly after that the general use of
French disappeared, while the native dialects were drawn
together and moulded into one ; our present grammar,
and even our present vocabulary, being largely a creation
of the reign of Edward III. English became a highly
vitalised condensation of elements hitherto deemed irre-
concilable, elements which were partly Teutonic, partly
Latin.
With the exclusion of foreign forms of speech, in
future to be accepted only if molten into a firm and
consistent English, our intellectual life assumes a whole-
some insularity. When England was a political term,
THE ROMANCES OF CHIVALRY 3
including Anjou and Aquitaine, the forces of its intelli-
gence were scattered. It retires behind the barrier of
its narrow seas, and has no sooner divided itself from the
language and interests of Europe than it recreates a
literature of its own. The fusion of the native language
does not become complete until the end of the century,
but it had been working for fifty years previously. In
1362 French ceases to be the legal tongue of the realm,
and in 1363 the first English oration is made in Parlia-
ment by a minister who will address members no longer
in what is really a foreign tongue. All this movement is
made in resistance to Court habits and Court prejudices ;
it is a strictly popular movement, forcing upon the atten-
tion of the upper classes the will of the millions who
are ruled. The beginning of modern English literature,
therefore, is essentially democratic without being revolu-
tionary. It is the result of a break-down of the feudal
principle of isolation, and the consequence of a fusion
between the nobles and the professional and commercial
part of the population.
As we break into the literature of England at 1350,
we find ourselves in the midst of a considerable metrical
activity, which does not promise at first to arrest our
attention with anything very valuable or very salient.
The favourite secular reading of the age seems to have
been alliterative adaptations, mainly from the French, of
the old romances of chivalry. Perhaps the most readable,
and certainly a very typical example of these imitations
has come down to us in William of Palerme, the date
of the composition of which is probably about 1355.
The activity of the versifiers who carried on this facile
manufacture of romances was exercised in two direc-
tions : on the one hand they endeavoured to revive the
4 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
old native measures, and on the other they strove to
create a prosody analogous to that already accepted by
the Latin nations. Out of the former proceeded Langland,
and out of the latter Chaucer. The moment had come
for a sharp and final contest between accentuated allitera-
tion and rhyme. It was decided in favour of rhyme by
the successes of Chaucer, but in the early part of the
transitional period alliteration seemed to be in the as-
cendant. Many of the metrical romances mingled the
two forms, usually in a fashion that was exceedingly
ineffective and ungraceful.
The chivalrous and monastic romances of this purely
mediaeval period were, so far as we can now perceive, of
little literary value. They were commonly mere imita-
tions of translations ; they owed their plots and even
their sentiments to French precursors, and if they are
now to be studied, it is solely on account of their interest
for the philologist. It is believed that all through the
second half of the fourteenth century these paraphrases
were excessively numerous, especially in the West-Mid-
land dialect, and their literary insignificance was extreme.
They dealt with corrupt and fragmentary legends of the
Arthurian cycle, or with allegories which owed their form
and substance alike to that Roman de la Rose, which had
so profoundly impressed itself upon the aesthetic sense of
Europe. Every poet felt constrained to retire into a
bower or a bed, and there be subjected to a vision which
he repeated in verse when he awakened. Not Chaucer,
not even Langland, disdained to employ this facile con-
vention.
Among these monotonous romancists, most of them
entirely anonymous, there emerges dimly the figure of
one who was evidently a poet in the true sense, though
PEARL 5
not of a force sufficiently commanding to turn the tide of
poetry in a new direction. This is the mysterious West-
Midland writer, who, for want of a name, we have to call
the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. His
works nave come down to us in a solitary manuscript,
ana no contemporary notice of him has been discovered.
There is, indeed, no external evidence to prove that the
poet of Sir Gawain wrote the Pearl, Cleanness, and
Patience, which accompany it, but the internal evidence
is very strong. Not merely are these four poems highly
similar in vocabulary and style, but they excel by a like
altitude all other romances of their kind and age which
are known to exist. There is repeated, moreover, in
each of them a unique mood of austere spirituality, com-
bined with a rare sense of visual beauty in a manner in
itself enough to stamp the four poems as the work of one
man. Until, then, further discoveries are made, we may
be content to accept the author of Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight as the first poet of modern England, and
as a precursor, in measure, both of Langland and Chaucer.
Mr. Gollancz, who has edited and paraphrased the Pearl,
surprised at the excellence and complete obscurity of
this poet, has hazarded the conjecture that he may
be that Ralph Strode (the "philosophical Strode" of
Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida) whose writings were so
universally admired in the fourteenth century and seem
to be now completely lost. This is a suggestion of which
no more can be said than that it seems almost too good
to be true.
There were many romances written on the story of
Gawain during the later half of the fourteenth century.
Our author took many of his details from the Perceval
of Chretien de Troyes, and extended his poem to more
6 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
than 2500 lines. It is a wild fairy-tale, full of extravagant
and impossible adventures; full, too, of a marvellous sense
of physical and moral beauty, the intense combination of
which appears to me to form the distinctive feature of this
poet. The same qualities, in more stern and didactic
form, appear in Cleanness, which is a collection of Biblical
paraphrases, and in Patience, which retells the story of
Jonah ; but they take fresh lustre in the singularly beauti-
ful elegy on the daughter of the poet, which is called the
Pearl. This poem, for modern taste a little too gemmed
and glassy in its descriptive parts, possesses a delicate
moral elevation which lifts it high above all other alle-
gorical romances of its class. I am, however, inclined
to set the poetical merits of Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight higher still. The struggles of the knight to resist
the seductions of Morgan la Fay are described in terms
which must be attributed to the English poet's credit,
and the psychology of which seems as modern as it is
ingenious, while over the whole poem there is shed, like
a magical dye, the sunset colour of the passing Age of
Faith.
It seems on the whole to be probable that the charm-
ing poet, whom we do not dare to call Ralph Strode,
composed the four works of which we have just spoken,
between 1355 and 1360. In his hands the alliterative
paraphrase of the fourteenth century reached its most
refined expression. But the author of Sir Gawain had
not the narrative force, nor the author of Cleanness the
satiric fervour, to inaugurate a new school of English
poetry. His sweet and cloistered talent, with its love of
vivid colours, bright belts, sparkling jewels, and enamelled
flowers, passed into complete obscurity at the approach
of that vehement genius of which we have now to speak.
LANGLAND 7
The earliest poem of high value which we meet with
in modern English literature is the thrilling and mysterious
Vision of Piers Plowman. According to the view which
we choose to adopt, this brilliant satire may be taken as
closing the mediaeval fiction of England or as starting
her modern popular poetry. Visio willelmi de petro plow-
man is the only title of this work which has come down
to us, and the only contemporary hint of its authorship.
Although the popularity of the poem was extreme, the
writer is not mentioned in a single record. The Court
poets were in the ascendant, and preserved each others'
names ; the author of the Vision was outside the pale of
fashion, a preserver of antiquated forms, a barbarous
opponent of French tendencies in culture. It is neces-
sary, therefore, to make what use we can of reports set
down long after his death, and still better, of what revela-
tions he is induced to make in the course of his poem.
All these have been carefully examined, and their con-
jectural result is sufficient to enable us to form a toler-
ably distinct portrait of one of the greatest writers of
the Middle Ages.
There is little doubt that his name was WILLIAM
LANGLAND (or William of Langley) ; that he was born,
about 1332, at Cleobury Mortimer, in Shropshire ; that
he was of humble birth, though not of the humblest ;
that he was brought up for the Church, but never passed
out of the lesser orders ; that he suffered the loss of most
that was dear to him in the great plague of 1349 ; that
he came up to London and became a canonical singer —
became, in fact, a chaunter at St. Paul's, by which he
contrived to eke out a poor livelihood for Kit, his wife,
and for Nicolette, his daughter. He was a poor man,
" roaming about robed in russet," living, unseen, in a
8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
little house in Cornhill. His youth was spent wandering
on the Malvern Hills, which left so deep an impress on
his imagination that he mentions them three times in a
poem otherwise essentially untopographical. It has been
thought that he returned to Malvern at the close of his
life ; in 1399 he was probably at Bristol. He fades out
of our sight as the century closes. It was early reported
that he was a Benedictine at Worcester, and a fellow of
Oriel College at Oxford. Neither statement is confirmed,
and the second is highly improbable. Langland was a
man of the people, without social claims of any kind, an
observer of the trend of " average English opinion."
The Vision of Piers Plowman has come down to us in
not fewer than forty-five MS. copies. But these, on
collation, prove to belong to three distinct texts. It is
almost certain that Langland wrote the first draft of his
poem in 1362, rewrote it in 1377, and revised it again, with
large additions, somewhere between 1392 and 1398. Of
these, the earliest contains twelve, and the latest twenty-
three passus or cantos, the modifications being of so
general a character that the three texts may almost be
considered as distinct poems on the same subject. The
existence of the 1362 text gives Langland a remarkable
precedence among the poets of the age, a precedence
which is not always sufficiently recognised by those who
speak of Chaucer. It is improbable that we possess a line,
even of Chaucer's translation, earlier than about 1368,
while the literary value of Chaucer's work was for twenty
years after 1362 to remain much inferior to Langland's.
In the Vision of Piers Plowman the great alliterative school
of West-Midland verse culminated in a masterpiece, the
prestige of which preserves that school from being a
mere curiosity for the learned. In spite of its relative
LANGLAND 9
difficulty, Piers Plowman will now always remain, with
the Canterbury Tales, one of the two great popular
classics of the fourteenth century.
While Chaucer and the other Court poets, with an in-
stinctive sense of the direction which English prosody
would take, accepted the new metrical system, introduced
from Italy and France, Langland remained obstinately
faithful to the old English verse, the unrhymed allitera-
tive line of four beats, of which his poem is now the best-
known type and example :
" And then luted Love in a loud ndte.
Till the day dawned these ddmsels ddndd?
in its most obvious form ; in its more rugged shape :
" I have as much pity ofpdor men as ptdlar hath of cats
That would kill them ^ ifhecdtch them might, f or cdvetise of their skins?
It is a mistake to seek for perfect accuracy in Lang-
land's versification. He hurries on, often in breathless
intensity, and he does not trouble to consider whether he
has the proper number of " rhyme-letters " (the initial
letters of the strong syllables), or whether the syllables
themselves are not sometimes weak. The great thing is
to hasten forward, to pour forth the torrent of moral
passion. The poem should be read aloud, impetuously
but somewhat monotonously, and when the reader has
grasped the scheme of the metre its difficulties will be
found to have disappeared.
The poem which is generically called the Visio de
petro plowman consists of several portions which are not
closely or very intelligibly welded together. It must be
remembered that Langland is essentially inartistic : he
has no concern with the construction of his poem or the
balance of its parts. He has a solemn word to say to
io MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
England, and he must say it ; but the form in which he
says it is immaterial to him. He does not address a
critical audience; he speaks to the common people,
in common verse ; he is vates, not artifex, and for those
who trouble themselves about the exterior parts of
poetry he has a rude disdain. Even the figure of Piers
Plowman, which gives name to the whole, is not once
introduced until we are half through the original draft
of the poem. Of the three texts, that of 1377 is usually
considered the most perfect. This consists of a prologue,
in which the allegorical vision is introduced, and of four
cantos mainly dealing with the adventures of Meed the
Maid ; then follow, in three more cantos, the Vision of
the Seven Deadly Sins, who repent, and are led to the
shrine of Divine Truth by a mysterious ploughman
named Piers. This first poem ends, rather abruptly,
with a contest between Piers and a worldly priest about
the validity of indulgences.
To this, the proper Vision of Piers Plowman, are
appended the three long poems, in the same metre,
named Do-well, Do-bet (that is better), and Do-best. These
defy analysis, for they proceed upon no distinct lines.
Do-well is mainly didactic and hortative ; its sermons
made a deep impression on the contemporary conscience.
Modern readers, however, will turn with greater pleasure
to Do-bet, which contains the magnificent scene of the
Harrowing of Hell, which was not equalled for pure
sublimity in English poetry until Milton wrote. By this
time the reader perceives that Piers Plowman has become
a disguise of Christ Himself, Christ labouring for souls,
a man with men. In Do-bet the stormy gloom which
hangs over most of Langland's threatening and denun-
ciatory verse is lifted ; the eighteenth canto closes in
LAN GLAND 1 1
a diapason of lutes, of trumpets, "men ringing to the
resurrection," and all the ghosts of spiritual darkness
fleeing from the splendour of Easter morning. In Do-
best the poet's constitutional melancholy settles upon
him again. He sees life once more as it is — broken,
bitter, full of disappointment and anguish. He awakens
weeping, having seen Conscience start on a hopeless
pilgrimage in search of the lost and divine Plowman.
In the form of his great work Langland adopts the
mediaeval habit of the dream. But this is almost his only
concession to Latin forms. Alone among the principal
writers of his age he looks away from Europe, continues
the old Teutonic tradition, and is satisfied with an in-
spiration that is purely English. That he had read the
Roman de la Rose and the Ptterinage of Deguileville is
not to be doubted ; recent investigations into the work
and life of Rutebeuf (1230 7-1300 ?) have revealed re-
semblances between his religious satires and those of
Langland which can hardly be accidental. It is now
recognised that the vocabulary of the Vision contains
no fewer French words than that of Chaucer, from
which, indeed, it can scarcely be distinguished. But
the whole temper and tendency of Langland is English,
is anti-French ; he is quite insulated from Continental
sympathies. He is an example of what thoughtful
middle -class Englishmen were in the last years of
Edward III., during the great wars with France, and
while the plague, in successive spasms, was decimating
the country.
The Vision is full of wonderful pictures of the life of
the poor. Langland was no Wycliffite, as was early
supposed ; in his denunciations of clerical abuse there
was no element of heterodoxy. He saw but one thing,
12 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
the necessity of upright individual conduct ; of this con-
duct the ploughman on the Malvern Hills was one with
Pope or Christ — a living representation of that essential
Truth which is deity. The main elements in his stormy
volubility are sincerity and pity. Piers is " Truth's pil-
grim at the plough " ; he is obliged to expose the rich in
their greediness, their cruelty, their lasciviousness. Nor
does he see the poor as spotless lambs, but their sorrows
fill him with a divine pity, such a tenderness of heart as
modern literature had not until that time expressed, such
as modern life had until then scarcely felt. Another view
of Piers Plowman M. Jusserand acutely notes when he says
that it "almost seems a commentary on the Rolls of Par-
liament." It is an epitome of the social and political life
of England, and particularly of London, seen from within
and from below, without regard to what might be thought
above and outside the class of workers. It is the founda-
tion of the democratic literature of England, and a re-
pository of picturesque observations absolutely unique
and invaluable.
The firmness with which Langland began, and the
inflexibility with which he continued his life's work in
poetry, strangely contrast with the uncertain and tenta-
tive steps which his greater coeval took in the practice of
his art. It is now generally believed that the birth of
GEOFFREY CHAUCER must have taken place not long
before and not long after 1338 ; if this be the case, he
was probably about six years the junior of Langland.
But Chaucer was thirty-five years of age before he saw
his way to the production of anything really valuable
in verse. His career first throws light on his literary
vocation when we learn that, in 1359, he took part in
Edward III.'s famous invasion of France. He was taken
LANGLAND 13
prisoner in a skirmish in Burgundy, and was ransomed
by the King ; after nearly a year on French soil Chaucer
returned to England. It is not easy to overrate the
importance of this expedition, made at the very age when
the perceptions are most vivid. France set its seal on
the genius of the poet, and already, we cannot doubt,
the bias of his mind was formed. He was the personal
servant of the King's daughter-in-law ; he must have
shown himself courtly, for he presently becomes valet de
chambre to Edward himself. In this his early youth,
while Langland is identifying himself in poverty with the
ploughmen of the Malvern Hills, Chaucer is taking for
life the stamp of a courtier and a man of fashion.
He developed an ardent admiration for the chivalrous
and courtly poets of the France of his own day ; he
read, and presently he imitated, Machault, Guillaume de
Deguileville, Eustache Deschamps, and the less-known
master whom he calls "Graunson, flower of them that
make in France." He takes their emblems, their
blossoms, their conventional forms, and prepares to
introduce them, with unparalleled elegance, to gentle
readers in England. But still more than these his con-
temporaries, he admires the old masters of allegory,
Lorris and Meung, whose Roman de la Rose, in not
less than twenty-two thousand verses, had now for
nearly a hundred years been the model and masterpiece
of all mediaeval French poetry. To study French verse
in 1360 was to find the prestige of the Roman de la Rose
absolutely predominant. Poetry could scarcely be con-
ceived of, save in relation with that laborious allegory, so
tedious to us in its primitive psychology, so intensely
fascinating and seductive to the puerile imagination
of the Middle Ages. It was natural that Chaucer's
14 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
first essay should be to place this masterpiece in
English hands, and accordingly a translation of the
Romaunt of the Rose is the earliest known production
of the English poet.
That he completed this labour of love is uncertain.
Deschamps, in a famous ballad addressed to that
"grant translateur, noble Geoffrey Chaucier," compli-
ments him on having scattered the petals and planted
the tree of the Rose in the Island of the Giants, Albia.
But it is now believed that only the first 1705 lines of the
translation which we possess are Chaucer's, and even
these have been questioned. He certainly translated,
about 1366, an Ay B, Cy from Deguileville of Chalis ; this
we possess, and an original poem of about the same date,
the Complaint unto Pity, interesting because in it we
find the earliest known example of that very important
national stanzaic form, the rime royal of seven lines on
three rhymes. In 1369 the Duchess Blanche of Gaunt
died, and Chaucer celebrated her virtues in a long octo-
syllabic poem, in the course of which he told the story of
Alcyone and Ceyx. This is his first appearance as a lead-
ing English writer, although it is more than possible that
he had already written creditable works which time has
neglected to spare.
In the Book of the Duchess the hand of Chaucer is still
untrained, but that element of freshness, of April dewi-
ness and laughing brightness, which was to continue to
be his primal quality, is already prominent. Even on so
sad an occasion he cannot keep out of his elegy the pure
blue blaze of noon, the red and white of fallen flowers,
the song of birds, the murmur of summer foliage. The
great John of Gaunt is himself introduced, in a turn of
the forest, and the poet with delicate tact persuades him
CHAUCER i 5
to describe his wife and so regain composure. Chaucer
owed much to Machault in the external machinery of
this poem, which extends to thirteen hundred lines, but
the pathos and the charm are all his own. That he wrote
many other juvenile poems before he reached the age of
thirty or thirty-five, may be taken for certain, but they
are lost to us. It is possible that the loss is not serious,
for Chaucer was still in bondage to the French, and it is
highly unlikely that he dared, as yet, to sail away from
the convention of his masters.
He did not learn to be an original poet until he had
passed through France and left it behind him. In 1372
he went on the King's business to Genoa and Florence,
and this was the first of several Italian expeditions, in the
course of which his eyes were singularly opened to the
budding glories of the Renaissance, and his ears tuned
to the liquid magic of Italian verse. It may be conjec-
tured that he was chosen for this mission because of his
unusual acquaintance with the Italian tongue. It is diffi-
cult not to be convinced that he enjoyed the conversation
of Petrarch, though if he had known Boccaccio person-
ally he would hardly have called him Lollius ; he certainly
brought back to England the first echo of the fame of
Tuscan poetry and the first warmth of its influence on
European letters. Both these poets scarcely survived
Chaucer's first visit to their country. The ten years,
however, from 1372 to 1382 have left little mark on
Chaucer's actual production, so far as it has come down
to us. We may attribute to the close of that decade
the Complaint of Mars and the Parliament of Fowls,
poems of no very great value in themselves, but interest-
ing as showing that Chaucer had completely abandoned
his imitation of French models, in favour of a style more
1 6 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
fully his own, and more in harmony with classical and
Italian taste. In the latter of these pieces the study of
Dante and of Boccaccio is undisguised. Still, it is
curious to observe that at the age of about forty-five, one
of the greatest poets of Europe had, so far as we know,
composed absolutely nothing which could give him
prominence in literary history.
The excitement caused by the great democratic or
socialistic rising of 1381 was followed by, and perhaps
resulted in, a marvellous quickening of intellectual life
in England. There was an immediate revival in all the
branches of literature, and it is to this approximate date
that we owe the Bible of Wycliffe and the romance of
Sir John Mandeville ; now Gower, observing that " few
men indite our English," set down the Latin of his Vox
Clamantis in order that he might compose a long poem in
English " for King Richard's sake." Chaucer, too, who so
long while had been falteringly learning and attempting
to practise the art of song, ventured, about 1382, on the
composition of the Troilus and Cressida, the first work in
which the magnificence of Chaucer reveals itself. This
was an adaptation of // Filostrato of Boccaccio, in five long
books of rime royal. It has been shown that Chaucer
was not content with a translation from the Italian,
which would have occupied but a third of his poem, but
that more than half is, so far as we can discover, entirely
his own invention. He used the text of Boccaccio, whom
he mysteriously names " Lollius," as a centre round
which to weave the embroideries of his own fancy, and
it is a critical error to dismiss Troilus and Cressida as a
mere paraphrase. It is essentially an original poem of
great value and significance. The careful study of this
epos has revealed the fact that Chaucer's knowledge of
CHAUCER 17
Italian literature was not slight and superficial, as had
been supposed, but profound. He quotes, in the course
of Troilus and Cressida, from Dante, Petrarch, Benoit, the
Teseide of Boccaccio, and the Latin Trojan History of
Guido delle Colonne. While fascinated by the vigour of
these new sources of inspiration, he seems to have wholly
laid aside his study of his old beloved but languid poets
of France.
It may fairly be said that the narrative love-poetry of
England, which has developed in so many and so rich
directions, practically opens with Chaucer's delicate,
melancholy Troilus and Cressida. In the last book of this
work so little trace is found of that jollity and gust of life
which are held to be the special characteristics of this
great poet, that it has been conjectured that Chaucer was
now passing through some distressing crisis in his private
life. This sadness is certainly continued in what is his
next contribution to literature, the unfinished but ex-
tended visionary poem called the House of Fame. This
piece is written in octosyllabic rhymed verse, such as
Barbour had employed in the Bruce some ten years earlier.
It bears very numerous traces of the careful study of
Dante ; but no Italian poem has been discovered of
which it can be considered a paraphrase. In the House
of Fame Chaucer is seen to have gained great ease and
skill, to have learned to proceed without reference to
any model or master, and to have discovered how to
use that native fund of humour which he had hitherto
kept in abeyance. In short, it is here that we first begin
to catch the personal voice of Chaucer, a sound such as
English literature had never heard before in all the cen-
turies of its existence.
The spring of 1385 is the date now believed to be that
B
1 8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
at which Chaucer composed his next great work, the
admirable Legend of Good Women. It consists of a
prologue, followed by nine (or rather ten) stories of
virtuous classical heroines. The style of this poem
exemplifies a sudden advance in Chaucer's art, for
which it is difficult to account; and there is evidence
that it was regarded with astonishment by contem-
porary readers, as something which revealed a beauty
hitherto undreamed of. Here also he boldly adventures
upon the definition and evolution of character, the ten
"good women" being distinguished from one another
by numerous traits of psychology, delicately observed.
It is to be noticed, moreover, that it is in the Legend
of Good Women that Chaucer first employs his greatest
gift to English prosody, the heroic couplet of five beats
each line.
" A thousand times have I heard men tell
7 hat there is joy in heatfn and pain in helln —
so the Prologue opens, and this is the earliest of many
tens of thousands of "correct" ten-syllable couplets in
English. It is here that Chaucer adopts the daisy as his
flower of flowers, inventing a pretty legend that Alcestis
was transformed into a marguerite. But this blossom
had been adopted before his time by Machault and
others, Margaret being a common Christian name in
the royal house of France. Chaucer owed the idea of
this poem to Boccaccio, but in the treatment of it there
is little or no trace of exotic influences. He had now
learned to walk alone, without even a staff to support his
footsteps. We hasten on, however, because the Legend
of Good Women, admirable and charming as it is, seems
to the general student to be but the vestibule leading us
CHAUCER 19
to and preparing us for the vast and splendid temple of
the Canterbury Tales.
It is believed that Chaucer was approaching his fiftieth
year when it occurred to him to illustrate the daily life
of his age in England by means of a series of metrical
tales fitted into a framework of humorous reflection
and description. The phrase of Dryden cannot be
bettered : Chaucer took " into the compass of his Canter-
bury Tales the various manners and humours of the
whole English nation." He had been gradually reject-
ing the laboured tradition of the past ; he had been
gradually freeing himself from the vain repetitions, the
elegant, bloodless conventions, the superficial and arti-
ficial graces of the mediaeval minstrels. He had, after
long labour, and careful comparative study of Italian
models, contrived to create a form, a method of ex-
pression, which was extremely distinguished and entirely
individual to himself. One thing remained undone,
namely, to put this new manner of writing at the dis-
posal of a thoroughly new and a thoroughly national
subject. This he would now, about 1386, begin to do,
and by that act would rise into the first order of the
world's poets.
It is the opinion of Mr. Skeat that the first of the
Canterbury Tales to be conceived was the Monk's Tale,
and that this was originally designed to form part
of a Legend of Good Men, which was presently merged
in the larger work. There can be no question that
Chaucer was long engaged in collecting material for his
great panoramic poem before he began to put the parts
of it into such sequence as they now possess. Moreover,
we cannot doubt that he had by him abundant stores
of verse, composed earlier, and with no thought of the
20 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Canterbury Tales. Mr. W. S. McCormick points out as
examples of this incorporated matter, the " Legend of
St. Cecile," which received no change, and " Palemon
and Arcite/' which had to be rewritten. Until Henry
Bradshaw, with his brilliant critical instinct, discovered
or divined the plan on which the Canterbury Tales
must have been executed, the work appeared simply
chaotic. Further investigation has so far cleared up the
plan, that we are now able to realise fairly well how the
edifice rose in the architect's imagination, although but
a fragment was ever built. It is fortunate, indeed, that
Chaucer lived to complete the Prologue, which is not
merely one of the most enchanting of all poems, but is
absolutely essential to us in any consideration of the aim
of its author.
From the Prologue we learn that Chaucer's idea was
to collect at the Tabard Inn a number of persons, repre-
sentative of all ranks and classes in his day, all proposing
to start together on a pilgrimage. Each pilgrim
" In this voyage shall tellen tales twain —
To Canterbury-ward^ I mean it so,
And homeward he shall tellen other two?
each pilgrim, therefore, telling four tales in all. This
would have implied the writing of at least a hundred and
twenty narrative poems, and it seems astonishing that
Chaucer, whose health, we may surmise, was already
failing, and who looked upon himself as an old man,
should have been ready to adventure upon so vast an
enterprise. As it is, we possess about twenty-five finished
tales, a great mass of poetical literature, and as much,
perhaps, as we could now study with profit ; yet, as we
should always realise, not a fourth part of what the poet
CHAUCER 21
planned. That the writings of Chaucer (Troilus and
Cressida being the main exception) form a succession of
fragments, each abandoned as if in a fury of artistic im-
patience to make room for a more ambitious scheme, and
that the last and most splendid is the most fragmentary of
all, these are, indeed, pathetic considerations. Like Leo-
nardo da Vinci in another art, Chaucer was insatiable in
his zeal, and in trying to secure all the perfections he
brought no important enterprise to completion.
The pilgrims start in merriment from the Tabard, but
they never arrive at Canterbury ; the supper which mine
host was to give to the best teller was never eaten and
never ordered. The pilgrim who spoke first was the
Knight, whose tale of " Palemon and Arcite " had doubt-
less been for some time in the poet's desk, since it exem-
plifies the imitation of Boccaccio which Chaucer had by
1387 outworn ; it is the poet's grandest achievement in
his Italian manner. This tale has a noble remoteness
from the ordinary joys and sorrows of mankind ; it is
suitably placed in the mouth of " a very perfect, gentle
knight " ; but Chaucer, whose one design was to escape
from the superfine monotony of fourteenth-century lite-
rature, and to speak in variety and freshness to the
common reader, immediately relieves the strain by permit-
ting the rude Miller, with his coarse and humorous tale, to
burst in. These transitions are managed with great tact,
and, no doubt, if Chaucer had completed his design, they
would have been universal ; some dignified or feminine
figure would doubtless have separated the Miller from
the Reeve. We have an instance of Chaucer's feeling in
this matter in the case of the Prioress's Tale> where the
poignant story of Hugh of Lincoln is preluded by the
Shipman's gross and "merry" anecdote, and succeeded by
22 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
the portentous parody of " Sir Thopas." The tendency
of the age had run too heavily in the direction of lugu-
brious and fatal narratives ; Chaucer, keenly alive to the
wants of the general reader, sees that the facetious ele-
ment must no longer be omitted, nay, must actually pre-
ponderate, if the Canterbury Tales is to be a great popular
poem. Hence it is probable that as he progressed with
the evolution of his scheme, tragedies were more and
more excluded in favour of fun and high spirits, and
that the complexion of the work was growing more and
more cheerful up to the moment when it was suddenly
stopped by Chaucer's death. It is particularly to be
noted that Chaucer brings a specimen of every then
familiar form of literature into his scheme — animal
stories, fabliaux comic and serious, chivalric romances,
Italian legends, ballads, sermons, traveller's tales of
magic, Breton lays ; in short, whatever could be ex-
pected to form the intellectual pabulum of his readers
was so much grist to his mill, drawn in to increase the
variety and widen the scope of his variegated picture of
life.
Chaucer is the last and in certain aspects the greatest
of the mediaeval poets of Europe. Boccaccio had seen
the need of popularising the sources of poetry, of break-
ing down the thorny hedge of aristocratic protection
which guarded the rose of imagination from vulgar hands ;
but it was Chaucer who let the fresh winds of heaven
into that over-perfumed and over-privileged enclosure.
As Dante and Petrarch had immortalised the spiritual
dignity and delicacy of the Middle Age, as Villon was to
record in words of fire the squalid sufferings of its poor,
so Chaucer summed up the social pleasures and aspira-
tions of its burgher class in verses that remained without
CHAUCER 23
a rival. In an age preoccupied with ideas and images,
Chaucer, by extraordinary good luck, had the originality
to devote himself to character. Practically without a
guide, and restrained by the novelty and difficulty of his
task, he did not achieve his true work until old age had
come upon him, and we are tantalised to find him taken
from us at the very moment when he had at last achieved
a complete mastery over his material. What Chaucer
might not have produced had he lived ten years longer
no one can endure to conjecture.
For what he has left us, fragmentary and tentative
though it be, our gratitude should be unbounded. This
is by far the greatest name in our literature until Shake-
speare be reached. In the last ten years of the fourteenth
century, Chaucer not merely provided us with a mass
of enchanting verse, but he lifted the literature of his
country out of its barbarous isolation and subserviency,
and placed it in the foremost rank. It was not Chaucer's
fault if a feebler race, succeeding him, let England slip
back into a secondary or even a tertiary place. When
he died, barely over sixty years of age, in 1400, not one
writer in Europe surpassed him in reputation, not one
approached him in genius. The advance which he had
made in psychology was immense ; it was actually pre-
mature, for no one was discovered, even in Italy, who
could take advantage of his intelligent pre-eminence,
and reach from that standpoint to still higher things. If
the fifteenth century in Italy failed to take advantage of
the examples of Petrarch and Boccaccio, still more truly
may we say that in England it neglected to comprehend
the discoveries of Chaucer. His splendid art was mis-
understood, his quick and brilliant insight into human
nature obscured, and a partial return to barbarism sue-
24 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
ceeded his splendid poetic civilisation. Appreciate his
contemporaries and followers as we will, the closer our
comparative study is, the more completely do we become
convinced of the incomparable pre-eminence of Chaucer.
The prosody of Chaucer's later and more elaborate
works is not, as was so long supposed, an arbitrary or a
loose one. Even Dryden knew no better than to dis-
cover in the verse of the Canterbury Tales " a rude sweet-
ness of a Scotch tune " ; it is obvious that he was quite
unable to scan it. It was, on the contrary, not merely
not " rude," but an artistic product of the utmost deli-
cacy and niceness, a product which borrowed something
from the old national measure, but was mainly an intro-
duction into English of the fixed prosodies of the French
and the Italians, the former for octosyllabic, the latter
for decasyllabic verse. The rules of both, but especially
the latter, are set, and of easy comprehension ; to learn
to read Chaucer with a fit appreciation of the liquid
sweetness of his versification is as easy an accomplish-
ment as to learn to scan classical French verse, or easier.
But it must be remembered that, in its polished art, it
was a skill fully known only to its founder, and that, with
Chaucer's death, the power to read his verses as he wrote
them seems immediately to have begun to disappear.
Chaucer gave English poetry an admirable prosody, but
it was too fine a gift to be appreciated by those for whom
it was created.
An absence of critical judgment, at which it is need-
less to affect surprise, led the contemporaries and
successors of Chaucer to mention almost upon equal
terms with him his friend and elder JOHN GOWER.
To modern criticism this comparison has seemed, what
indeed it is, preposterous, and we have now gone
GOWER 25
a little too far in the opposite direction. Gower is
accused of extreme insipidity by those who, perhaps,
have not read much of the current poetry of his
day. He is sinuous, dull, uniform, but he does not de-
serve to be swept away with scorn. Much of his work
has great historical value, much of it is skilfully narrated,
and its long-winded author persists in producing some
vague claim to be considered a poet. Gower was pro-
bably ten or fifteen years older than Chaucer. His early
French verse has mainly disappeared ; but we possess his
Latin Vox Clamantis, and, what is much more important,
his English poem in 30,000 verses, the Confessio Amantis.
Of this there are two existing versions, the first dedi-
cated to Richard II., and composed about 1383, in which
Chaucer is mentioned with friendly compliment ; the
other dedicated to Henry IV., and possessing no mention
of Chaucer, the date being about 1393.
The Confessio Amantis consists of a prologue and eight
books, in octosyllabic rhymed verse. The prologue is a
strange prophetical performance, in the course of which
the poet sketches the history of the world. In the body
of the poem, the author, as a lover in despair, receives a
visit from Venus, who commends him for confession to
Genius, her priest. The lover's statement of his symp-
toms and experience fills seven of the books, the eighth
being occupied by his cure and absolution. The state-
ment is constantly interrupted by the disquisitions of
Genius, who tells one hundred and twelve stories by way
of illustration of the passions. Those who depreciate
Gower should recollect that this was the earliest large
compendium of tales produced in the English language.
Gower's use of English was far from being so consistent
or so firm as that of Chaucer. He wavered between
26 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
French, Latin, and English, and was an old man before
he persuaded himself to employ the new composite
tongue. He was an aristocrat, and it was with hesitation
that he persuaded himself to quit the courtly French
language. About 1399 Gower wrote an English poem
in rime royal, the Praise of Peace, and lived on, ccecus
et senex, until 1408, the admirer and panegyrist of
Henry IV. to the last.
The Northern dialect was illustrated by a great number
of writers, most of them anonymous, and either retaining
the alliterative forms of verse, or trying to adapt them to
romance metres. Among these, to HUCHOWN are attri-
buted the romances of Sweet Susan and the Great Geste of
Arthur. Whether the fine Scottish paraphrase of Lancelot
of the Lake, which Mr. Skeat has printed, is due to the
same vague Huchown, or Hugh, is uncertain. There was
a whole crop of Gawain and Arthur romances in the
Northern dialect ; but by far the most considerable poet
of Scotland in the fourteenth century was JOHN BARBOUR,
Archdeacon of Aberdeen, who repeatedly visited France,
and who, in a limited and inelastic but quite undeniable
shape, accepted or independently invented a Southern
prosody, not unlike that of Chaucer, but founded in
imitation of the Roman de la Rose. It would seem that
the writings of Barbour were once extremely numerous,
but only those of his late age survive. About 1375, being
then probably sixty years old, he began his long historical
romance of Ihe Bruce, which we still possess, which en-
joyed an immense popularity, and which is usually con-
sidered one of the glories of Scottish literature. Barbour
also wrote a Book of Troy, vi which fragments are preserved,
and after he was seventy composed, in conventional para-
phrase, a Legend of the Saints, of which more than thirty
BARBOUR 27
thousand verses have been printed. He was evidently a
very abundant writer, since the names of other important
works of his have come down to us.
It is by the Bruce alone, however, that we have to
judge Barbour. This is not a mere chronicle in octo-
syllabic rhymed verse ; it is a national epic of real
value. Barbour is not a brilliant writer, and, in strange
contradistinction to the Scotch poets who followed him,
he is austerely bare of ornament. He tells a patriotic
story very simply and fluently, with a constant appeal to
chivalrous instincts, and with a remarkable absence of all
mythological machinery. The Bruce, which is now com-
monly divided into twenty long books, is the chief literary
relic of old Scotland, and has, perhaps, never ceased to
make a successful appeal to the ingenium perfervidum
Scotorum. The intensity of Barbour's sense of the value
of personal independence, expressed in lines such as
ic Ah ! freedom is a noble thing . . .
He lives at ease that freely lives?
adds a sympathetic beauty to his otherwise somewhat
bald and dry historical narratives. His absence of
pedantry, his singular passion for truth in an age given
up to vagueness about fact, and his large grasp of events,
make us regret Barbour's tantalising lack of inspiration.
At the close of his life he indited that enormous trans-
lation of the Legenda Aurea which has been already
mentioned, and which they may read who can.
In spite of the great importance and popularity of
Langland's Vision, the retrograde and insular manner
of writing did not hold its own against the new prosody
and the influences from Italy and France. Much, how-
ever, was still written in the early alliterative manner, and
28 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
an anonymous Wycliffite, in the very last years of the
century, produced a powerful satire, entitled Piers the
Ploughmaris Creed, extending to more than eight hundred
verses. It is thought that to the same hand we owe the
Plougkmaiis Tale, long bound up among the poems of
Chaucer, to whose language and manner of writing it
bears no resemblance. The Creed is the better piece of
the two ; it is imitative of Langland, but its great vivacity
of style, and its value as illuminating the condition of
the middle and lower classes, and the dissensions in the
English Church, can scarcely be exaggerated. In this
poem the ploughman has no supernatural character or
attributes. The description of a rich Dominican convent
is perhaps the best-known specimen of a powerful poem
to the importance of which, strangely enough, Pope was
the first to draw attention. The author, though he had
not the vehement energy of Langland, was a close and
picturesque observer of manners. The date of the Creed
has been conjectured as 1394, and that of the Tale as
some years earlier than 1399. Another work of some-
what the same class, Richard the Redeless, an expostulation
with Richard II., has now pretty definitely been assigned
to the old age of Langland himself. It is to be supposed
that a vast amount of occasional verse of this national
kind was produced, but did not survive till the invention
of printing.
As early as the twelfth century we find evidences of
the performance in England of pageants and miracle
plays in which the rudiments of the modern drama must
have been observable. The earliest existing specimens,
however, date from the fourteenth century, and we are
able to judge of the literary value of these mysteries from
the cycle of York Plays, forty-eight of which are preserved
THE YORK PLAYS 29
in an almost contemporary MS. We find the drama here
no longer in a perfectly primitive state ; it is freed from
the liturgical ritual and manipulated by the hands of lay-
men. It is difficult to assign a date to the York Plays,
but they are conjectured to have been composed between
1350 and 1380. They are written in rhyme, and most of
them in stanzas ; they deal with passages of the Bible,
treated in such a way as to lead us to believe that what
we possess is but a fragment of a vast dramatisation of
the Scripture narrative, composed for a popular stage,
and played by the city guilds in Corpus Christi week.
The historical and linguistic interest of these miracle
pageants, of course, greatly exceeds their purely literary
value. It would be absurd to take them too seriously as
dramatic poems ; yet there is not merely much vivacity
and humour in their comic scenes, but an occasional
felicity of expression when they deal with the solemn
portions of the story which they popularised. There
were also Corpus Christi mysteries at Beverley, Chester,
Woodkirk, and Coventry ; the Reformation put a stop to
them all.
The splendid revival of poetry in England during the
fourteenth century was accompanied by no similar
awakening in prose. Our authors continued to affect
the same lisping, stumbling speech to which earlier
generations had accustomed themselves. It is no ill
task for a student to compare the prose treatises of
Chaucer with his poetry, the latter so supple, brilliant,
and vital, the former so dull and inert. The prose of the
second half of the fourteenth century is almost entirely
translated ; hardly any original performance of an Eng-
lish mind in it is worthy to be named.
About 1387 there was composed a prose treatise, entitled
30 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
the Testament of Love, which Mr. Bradley, with extraordi-
nary ingenuity, has shown to have been written, probably
in prison, by THOMAS USK, a London citizen who fell
under the displeasure of the Duke of Gloucester, and was
barbarously executed. It is a rambling sort of psycho-
logical autobiography, in imitation of Boethius. Usk
praises that " noble, philosophical poet," Chaucer, while
in his prologue he derides the habit of composing all
serious matters in Latin or in French, and recommends
his own book as a conspicuous innovation, so that he
may be thought to have been before the age in critical
insight. But to read the Testament of Love is to tramp
across acres of dry sand. The art of being interesting in
prose of English invention was yet to be discovered.
Two translations, the one lay, the other sacred, repre-
sent at its highest level of excellence the prose of the end
of the century. The most picturesque production of the
age is certainly the former of these, that geographical
romance called the Travels of Sir John Mandeville. These
spurious memoirs of a traveller who did not travel, were
written in French, as is now believed, by a certain Bearded
John of Burgundy, the pseudonym, perhaps, of an Eng-
lishman who had fled from his own country and lived
under that disguise at Liege. The original text was not
circulated until about 1371; the admirable English ver-
sion is some years later. Sir John Mandeville is a tissue
of plagiarisms from early travellers, carefully woven
together by a person who has enjoyed little personal
opportunity of observation. This absurd book, which
gulled the age to an amazing degree, is full of charm in
its original form, and tells its incredible tales in the best
mediaeval manner ; it has always been a storehouse of
romantic anecdote. It was of great service to the national
WYCLIFFE 31
speech, since, whoever the translator was, he wrote a
more graceful and fluent prose than any Englishman
had done before him.
A still more epoch-making event in English prose was
the formation of that paraphrase of the Vulgate which is
known as Wycliffe' s Bible. This was a composite work,
which occupied several heterodox hands from about
1380 to 1388. JOHN WYCLIFFE'S career as a reforming
Churchman had already reached its apogee before it
appears to have occurred to him, possibly under the
influence of Langland's great poem, that to appeal to
the masses of the English nation it was necessary to write
in their own language, and not, as he had hitherto so
effectively done, in Latin. His energy was thereupon,
during the four remaining years of his life, set on the
cultivation of the vernacular, and, above all, on the edit-
ing, for the first time, of a complete Bible in English.
He seems to have set his friend Nicholas of Hereford to
translate the Old Testament, and when that disciple, to
escape recantation, fled to Rome in 1382, his work was
found to be complete up to the middle of Baruch.
Wycliffe himself finished the Apocrypha, his version of
the New Testament being already done. He died in
1384, leaving his pupil and curate John Purvey, the
librarian of the Lollards, to revise the whole translation,
a task which was completed in 1388. The general
Prologue to the whole Bible is believed to be the work
of Purvey ; but the entire question of the authorship of
the Wycliffite books remains very obscure.
It is impossible to overestimate the gift of Wycliffe to
English prose in placing the Bible at the command of
every common reader. But the value of Wycliffe as an
independent writer may easily be exaggerated. If we
32 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
compare his New Testament with the work of Nicholas of
Hereford, we may conjecture that Wycliffe had a certain
conception of style undreamed of by his wooden disciple.
But his own manner is exceedingly hard and wearisome,
without suppleness of form. His sentences — except,
occasionally, in his remarkable Sermons — follow certain
Latinised formulas with fatiguing monotony. The danger
which beset English prose at this time was that it might
continue to lie inert in the state of clumsy flatness into
which the decay of Anglo-Saxon influences, and the too-
slavish following of Latin educational literature, had
plunged it. As a matter of fact, it did lie there for some
centuries, very slowly and very uncertainly rising in the
wake of English verse to the dignity of harmonious art.
II
THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES
1400-1560
IT is difficult to find any political or social reason for
the literary decadence of the close of the Middle Ages,
but the fact is patent that the reigns of the three Henries
in England were marked by a strange and complete
decline in the arts of composition. Not a single work of
signal merit, whether in prose or verse, distinguishes the
first half of the fifteenth century, and we are forced, in
order to preserve the historical sequence, to record the
careers and writings of men who at no other period
would demand particular attention in a survey so rapid
as this. In consequence, it is imperative that we should
dwell a little on the productions of Occleve and Lydgate,
although the original talent of these versifiers was small
and their acquired skill almost contemptible. They are
interesting, less from their pretensions to imagination
than from this semi-official position as recognised makers
of verse, carrying on the tradition of poetry, though with
none of its ecstasy and charm.
That Occleve and Lydgate were so imperfect in their
grasp of those principles of poetry which Chaucer had
formulated as to be unable to produce verse which had
a superficial resemblance to his, is the more curious
when we consider that they had enjoyed, or certainly
33 C
34 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
might have enjoyed, the advantage of that master's
personal instruction. Each of them was evidently more
than thirty when Chaucer died. Of the two, THOMAS
OCCLEVE may have been slightly the elder. Neither
had any real conception of the aim of Chaucer's work, or
of the progress in intellectual civilisation which he had
made. Even to remain where Chaucer left them was too
much for these feeble bards to achieve ; they crept back
into the barbarism of mediocrity. They imitated with
great humbleness those very Frenchmen whom Chaucer
had outgrown and had left behind him, and in their
timid, trembling hands English literature ceased to com-
mand the respect of Europe.
Their very peculiar prosody, which offers far greater
difficulty than those of Langland and Chaucer, is only
intelligible if we conjecture that they never understood
or early forgot the meaning of Chaucer's elaborate and
scientific versification. Occleve, who had been close to
Chaucer, had a greater appreciation of the new smooth-
ness and grace than JOHN LYDGATE, who had a most
defective ear, and knew it. His verses are not to be
scanned unless we suppose that he refused to follow
Chaucer in the employment of a solid and coherent
Southern prosody, but endeavoured to combine the use of
rhyme and a measure of stanzaic form, with some remnant
of the old national verse, retaining its strong accents and
its groups of redundant syllables. Lydgate's native speech
was Suffolk, and he used throughout life Saxon forms
and habits of locution which were unfamiliar and even
uncouth to a courtly London ear. Many critics, of
whom the poet Gray was the earliest, have attempted to
explain away the seeming rudeness of Lydgate, and to
minimise the mean impression which he gives. But no
OCCLEVE 35
argument will make his metrical experiments appear
successful, nor remove the conviction, of which he was
himself conscious, that his ear was bad and tuneless.
Occleve was a frivolous, tame-spirited creature, tainted
with insanity. He is fond of chatting about himself, and,
among other confidences, informs us that Chaucer wished
him to be properly taught, but that the pupil " was dull,
and learned little or naught." Occleve speaks so humbly
of his own poetical performances that it would be harsh
to dwell on their tedious character. The De Regimine
Prindpum (The Governail of Princes), which seems to
date from 1411, is written in Occleve's favourite rime
royal, and gives us as clear an impression of the man
himself, of his style, of his views regarding contemporary
history, and of his attitude towards the new English lan-
guage, as could be gained by a laborious study of the
remainder of his long-winded, monotonous works. It is
a brave spirit which tires not before the five thousand
lines of the De Regimine are closed, and one wonders
whether Henry V., for whose use the poem was com-
posed, ever became familiar with its contents. The
author, who represents himself as "ripe unto the pit"
with the results of an unseemly life, and as so cowardly
that he only backbites those whom he dislikes, had cer-
tainly not fallen into the sin of pride. We forgive much
to him, because he preserved for us the coloured portrait
of Chaucer.
It is no great praise of Lydgate to say that he had a
brisker talent than Occleve. Although he is careful to
speak of Chaucer with constant respect, he is hardly, as
Occleve was, his pupil. He rather imitates, often quite
servilely and as though Chaucer had never written, the
great French romantic poets of the fourteenth century.
36 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
A large part of Lydgate's life was spent in the Benedictine
monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, from which he made
occasional excursions to Oxford and Paris. The fecun-
dity of Lydgate was phenomenal ; Ritson, who deciphered
his manuscripts until he must have hated the poet's very
name, catalogued two hundred and fifty of his poems ; it
is said that at his death his existing verses must have ex-
ceeded 130,000 in number. No one living has read Lyd-
gate in his entirety, and but few of his works have yet
been edited. The excessive prolixity and uniformity of
his style, which never rises and cannot fall, baffles all but
the most persistent reader. His Troy Book is a transla-
tion from the Latin of Guido delle Colonne ; his Temple
of Glass a continuation of the House of Fame; his Falls of
Princes an imitation of a French paraphrase of Boccaccio,
but little distinction of style can be perceived, whether
the laborious epic is adapted from Italian or English or
French sources. The Falls of Princes, printed in 1494,
and accepted in the sixteenth century as a mediaeval
classic, has been the most popular of the longer poems
of Lydgate. It is believed to have been completed as
late as 1438, and it displays in interesting ways the rapid
development and modernisation of the English tongue.
The student who desires to receive a favourable im-
pression of the talent of Lydgate may be recommended
to select the prologue of this enormous poem ; he will
be rewarded by a conventional but pleasing eulogy of
Chaucer. Lydgate, as Gray says, "wanted not art in
raising the more tender emotions of the mind," and, on
occasion, he can be diffusely picturesque.
It is not probable that the entire works of Lydgate will
ever be made accessible to readers, nor is it to be conceived
that they would reward the labours of an editor. But
CLANVOWE 37
although it must be repeated that Lydgate is an author
of inferior value, excessively prosy and long-winded,
and strangely neglectful both of structure and of melody,
a selection could probably be made from his writings
which would do him greater justice than he does to him-
self in his intolerable prolixity. He has a pleasant vein
of human pity, a sympathy with suffering that leads him
to say, in a sort of deprecating undertone, very gentle
and gracious things. He is a storehouse of odd and
valuable antiquarian notes. His Pur le Roy, for instance,
is a rich and copious account of the entry of Henry VI.
into London in 1422 ; better known is his curious satire
of London Lackpenny. Lydgate belongs — it is vain to
deny it — to a period of retrogression and decay. But
he had his merits, and the way to appreciate his verses is
to compare them with the wretched, tuneless stuff put
forth by his pupils and followers, such as Benedict
Burgh.
A poet, Sir THOMAS CLANVOWE, who had studied the
manner of Chaucer with greater care than Lydgate, and
had a more melodious native talent than Occleve, wrote
about 1403 a short romance in an almost unique five-
line stanza, The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, in which the
author, although " old and unlusty," falls asleep by a
brook-side in May and hears the birds philosophising.
Even in this mellifluous piece, which flows on like the
rivulet it describes, the metrical laws of Chaucer are
found to be in solution. Here occurs that reference to
Woodstock which long led astray those who supposed
Chaucer to be the author of this poem. Longer and
much later, and still less like the genuine master, is the
over-sweet, tedious romance in more than two thousand
octosyllabic verses, boldly called Chaucer's Dream, though
38 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Chaucer is not in any way concerned in it. It is a para-
phrased translation of a vague, flowery story about a
pilgrimage to an island of fair ladies ; it contains a suc-
cession of pretty mediaeval pictures painted in faint, clear
colours, like the illuminations in a missal, pale and deli-
cate, in its affectation of primitive simplicity.
Of all poems of the fifteenth century, however, that
which is most faithful to the tradition of Chaucer, and
continues it in the most intelligent way, is the King's Quair
(or Book). The history of this work is as romantic as
possible, and yet probably authentic.1 JAMES I. of
Scotland, in 1405, not being yet eleven years old, was
treacherously captured by the English, in time of truce,
off Flamborough Head, and had been confined, first in
the Tower, then in Windsor Castle, for eighteen years,
when, seeing Johanne de Beaufort walking in the garden
below his prison window, he fell violently in love with
her. The match pleased the English Court ; they were
married early in 1424, and proceeded as King and Queen
to Scotland. The poem we are now discussing was
written in the spring and early summer of 1423, and it
describes, in exquisitely artless art, the progress of the
wooing. This poet was murdered, in conditions of
heartless cruelty, in 1437. We possess no other indubi-
table work of his except a Scotch ballade.
The Kings Quair, in more primitive periods of our
literary history, was accepted as a contribution to Scotch
poetry. But Dr. Skeat was the first to point out that
although the foundation of it is in the Northern dialect, it
1 In 1896 a very ingenious attempt was made by Mr. J. T. T. Brown to
throw doubt on the authenticity of the King's Quair ; but it cannot be said
that any convincing evidence against the accepted tradition was produced. Mr.
Brown's arguments were negative, and have been ably met by M. Jusserand.
JAMES I. 39
is carefully composed, as if in a foreign language, in the
elaborate Midland or Southern dialect as used, and
perhaps not a little as invented, by Chaucer. James I.,
indeed, is completely under the sway of his great pre-
decessor ; no poet of the century repeats so many phrases
copied from, or introduces so many allusions to, the
writings of Chaucer as he does. He was immersed, it is
evident, in the study and almost the idolatry of his
master ; the first violent emotion of his sequestered life
came upon him in that condition, and he burst into song
with the language of Chaucer upon his lips. In spite of
this state of pupilage, and in spite of his employment of
the old French machinery of a dream, allegorical person-
ages and supernatural conventions, the poem of James I.
is a delicious one. His use of metre was highly in-
telligent ; he neither deviated back towards the older
national prosody, like Lydgate, nor stumbled aimlessly
on, like Occleve ; he perceived what it was that Chaucer
had been doing, and he pursued it with great firmness,
so that, in the fifty or sixty years which divided the latest
of the Canterbury Tales from The Flower and the Leaf,
the Kings Quair is really the only English poem in
which a modern ear can take genuine pleasure.
In its analysis of moods of personal feeling, the King's
Quair marks a distinct advance in fluent and lucid ex-
pression. The poem is full, too, of romantic beauty; the
description of the garden, of the mysterious and lovely
being beheld wandering in its odorous mazes, of the
nightingale, "the little sweete nightingale" on "the
smale greene twistis," is more accomplished, of its kind,
than what any previous poet, save always Chaucer, had
achieved. The pathos of the situation, our sympathy
with the gallant and spirited royal poet, the historic
40 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
exactitude of the events so beautifully recorded, the
curious chance by which its manuscript was preserved
unknown until the end of last century — all combine to
give the King's Quair a unique position in English
literature. Alas ! as Rossetti sings :
" Alas ! for the ivoful thing
That a poet true and a friend of man
In desperate days of bale and ban
Should needs be born a king"
These lines remind us of the Ballads which form so
large and so vague a department of our national litera-
ture. It is difficult to know where to place the romantic
ballads, most of which have come down to us in a
language and a metre which cannot be much earlier, at
earliest, than the end of the sixteenth century. The
original types of these national poems may have existed
in the fifteenth century, but their antiquity is certainly a
matter of speculation. Not so dubious, however, is the
approximate date of the less beautiful but curious and
significant ballads of the Robin Hood cycle. The latest
general opinion about these is that they were brought
together, in something like their present form, soon after
1400. The earliest reference to the hero is found in
Piers Plowman ; but a Scottish chronicler, writing in 1420,
gives 1283 as the date when
" Little John and Robin Hood
Waythmen were commended good j
In Inglewood and Barnesdale
They used all this time their travail?
We may conjecture that soon after 1300 there began to
be composed ballads about a mythical yeoman who had
taken to the forest in Yorkshire a generation earlier ;
ROBIN HOOD 41
that all through the fourteenth century these ballads
continued to be made and repeated — " harped at feasts"-
until, soon after 1400, some crowder of superior poetical
skill selected the best, and composed the Geste of Robin
Hood ; and that throughout the fifteenth century other
Robin Hood ballads were made, less original and autho-
ritative than those in the Geste, and that these latest are
what we principally possess at present.
In the Geste of Robin Hood, which is a long poem of
456 stanzas, we possess the earliest and most genuine
version of the narrative now existing. Here we find the
good yeoman, Robin Hood, a proud and courteous out-
law, who has taken to the wood in Barnesdale. His
companions are Little John, William Scarlet or Scathe-
locke, and Much, the miller's son. Robin lives by hunt-
ing the King's deer, and by gallantly robbing such barons,
archbishops, and abbots as venture through his forest.
But he is generous, and if a knight who is in trouble
crosses his path, he will not let him go till they have
dined together. The great enemy of Robin Hood and
his men is the Sheriff of Nottingham, who represents
the terrors of the common law. The proud sheriff
accosts Little John, who says that his own name is Richard
Greenleaf, and is accepted into the sheriff's service ; he
betrays his master to Robin Hood under the forest, and
the poor sheriff is bound and humiliated. It is a blow
to our sentiment of romance, which has taught us since
our childhood to picture Robin Hood sitting at a venison
pasty, in the heart of Sherwood Forest, in company with
his sweetheart and wife, Maid Marian, to learn that
this lady is totally unknown to the genuine old ballads.
There were ancient stories about Friar Tuck and Maid
Marian, but not in connection with Robin Hood ; nor
42 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
were these stories, so far as we know, told in verse. The
earliest ballad in which Robin Hood and Maid Marian
are mentioned together is a very poor doggerel piece,
probably later than the time of Shakespeare. We may
notice that in the oldest ballads the scene is laid, indif-
ferently, in Barnesdale Forest, near Pontefract, and fifty
miles off in Sherwood Forest, near Nottingham. It has
been conjectured that there were originally two. cycles
of ballads, the one a Barnesdale set, the other a Sher-
wood set, and that the compiler of the Geste of Robin
Hood helped himself to material from each of them.
Lancastrian prose exemplifies the same conditions of
intellectual weariness and decadence which depressed
Lancastrian poetry ; but the decline is less marked, be-
cause in the preceding century verse had flourished
brilliantly, while prose had not flourished at all. After
1400 we begin to see the English language more freely,
though scarcely more gracefully, used, and for direct pur-
poses, not merely or mainly in the form of translations.
A very active and audacious talent was employed by
REGINALD PECOCK in confuting the errors of those
disciples of Wycliffe who were styled " Lollards." He
brought his attacks to a climax in 1449, when he was
made Bishop of Ghichester, and compiled his Represser of
overmuch Blaming of the Clergy. His other main produc-
tion, the Book of Faith, is of somewhat later date. His
sophistical ingenuity ultimately brought him to con-
fusion and shame. The matter of Pecock is paradoxical
and casuistical reasoning on controversial points, in
which he secures the sympathy neither of the new
thought nor of the old. That he wrote in English to
secure a wider audience, and that he is on the whole
fairly simple and direct in style, are symptoms of \\
CAPGRAVE 43
general advance of English as an accepted language fit
for literary and yet popular exercises. Still, the fate of
the brilliant Bishop of Chichester proves that the time
was not ripe for the discussion in English of .any but the
most obvious and harmless themes. Had Pecock con-
fined himself to the Latin language, he might have closed
a splendid career at Canterbury, instead of expiring like
a starved lamp under the extinguisher of his prison at
Thorney.
We see Pecock bring the vernacular into the service of
theological controversy, and we find another eminent
divine, JOHN CAPGRAVE, employing it for purely historical
purposes. The exact date of the composition of Cap-
grave's Chronicle of England is uncertain ; he was pro-
bably at work upon it through the second quarter of the
century ; it closes with the year 1417. He is a much
less rapid and audacious writer than Pecock. The atti-
tude of Capgrave's mind is archaically mediaeval, and he
possesses in large measure that blight of monotony and
tameness which mars almost all Lancastrian literature.
His historical importance is immense, especially if his
Latin writings are taken into consideration ; but from
the mere point of view of development of English style,
Capgrave is negligible. Yet, so miserable is the poverty
of the first half of the fifteenth century, when we have
mentioned Pecock and Capgrave, there is no other prose
writer to be named. English prose was still in its em-
bryonic condition. In a familiar class, the Paston Letters,
which date from 1422 onwards, offer us a precious oppor-
tunity of judging in what manner ordinary people of
position expressed themselves in the discussion of daily
experience.
The second half of the fifteenth century was in England
44 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
even more desperately barren of poetry than the first
In its absolute sterility, one solitary poem of merit de-
mands attention, as much for its rarity as its positive
charm. Some woman, whose name has not been pre-
served, wrote after 1450, but in close discipleship of
Chaucer, the beautiful little allegorical romances of
The Flower and the Leaf and the Assembly of Ladies.
She took the idea of the former from Eustache Des-
champs, who had composed three such poems, in one
of which he gave the prize to the leaf, and in another to
the flower ; but the English piece begins as a translation
of Machault's Dit du Vergier. It is accordingly wholly
French in tone and character, and, coming at the very
close of the Middle Ages, lights up, with a last flicker of
imitation, the indebtedness of English medieval poetry
to France. The charm of The Flower and the Leaf is,
however, very considerable ; the anonymous poetess has
a singularly graceful fluency, and she does not exag-
gerate, as do some of her Scottish successors, the orna-
ments of phraseology. Her poem well sums up the
eclectic mediasval mannerism. It opens with the praise
of spring. Before sunrise the writer goes into a grove,
where, listening for the nightingale, she turns down a
narrow path and comes to an arbour. She hears a
music of sweet voices, and sees advance a troop, "a
world of ladies," with one noblest figure, waving a branch
of agnus castus, in the midst of them. Then there
appear to her strange men-at-arms, a gorgeous cavalry,
who arrive, part, and joust. When the fight is over, the
ladies advance, and lead the victors to a giant laurel-tree.
These people were all in white ; but as they disappear, a
company in green comes strolling up, also marvellously
adorned. But the sun burns the flowers, and the ladies
THE FLOWER AND THE LEAF 45
too ; and then comes down a storm of wind and rain.
The white come to the succour of the green, and all
pass away in company. The poetess is left to the solemn
presence of Diana and of Flora, and must choose between
the Flower and the Leaf. " Unto the Leaf I owe mine
observance," she answers, and the romance is over.
The strange, delicate, unsubstantial poetry of mediaeval
chivalry is over, too, in these pretty and melodious exer-
cises in rime royal, the only considerable gift to early
English literature made by a woman. It is interesting to
observe that she betrays the half-century of developing
language which divides her from Chaucer's death by her
archaistic, that is to say, no longer perfectly natural, use
of metrical ornament.
From the miserable emptiness of English poetry after
1450, it is agreeable to turn to Scotland, where the art
was cultivated in some oddity and artificiality of form,
indeed, but, on the whole, with singular success. Save
in the one respect of the almost idolatrous study of
Chaucer, the course of poetry in Scotland seems to have
run in a totally independent channel. The Scotch poets
of the Renaissance are connected with the mediaeval
tradition, not by any Southern links, but by certain
chroniclers who closely imitated Barbour, and who are
only to be distinguished from him by their more modern
use of language. About 1420 ANDREW OF WYNTOUN, a
monk of St. Serfs, on Lochleven, completed an Original
Chronicle of Scotland, in nine books of octosyllabic verse;
he treated the subject from the "origin" of the world.
Wyntoun's history is less amusing than his fabulous
legends, which he tells eagerly and gaily, with a garrulous
credulity.
We pass on for some forty years, and, at the threshold
46 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
of the literary poetry of Scotland, are arrested by a
survivor of the old didactic chronicle-school. BLIND
HARRY, or Henry the Minstrel, composed about 1460,
in the Northern dialect, a long Acts and Deeds of Sir
William Wallace, in which, for the first time, the heroic
couplet was employed by a Scotch poet. Blind Harry
was therefore, no doubt, acquainted with the writings of
Chaucer, who invented that form of verse, but he displays
no other Southern characteristic. His Wallace is the
direct descendant of the Bruce of Barbour. This minstrel
shows a certain advance in the freedom of his narrative,
and in the psychological treatment of the hero he exhibits
an occasional liveliness which may or may not be wholly
voluntary, since the exigencies of rhyme drive him occa-
sionally to strange shifts. He is singularly prosy, and not
infrequently incoherent ; yet there is an air of sincerity
and good faith about the Wallace which commands
respect. Blind Harry, however, has none of the moral
elevation of Barbour, and is, in fact, a writer of scant
importance to any but philologists and historians.
Henryson must have been writing about the same
time as Blind Harry, but a century seems to divide them
in literary temperament. The latter belonged to the
Middle Ages ; the former was a child of the Renaissance,
and its introducer into Scottish poetry. Of the life of
ROBERT HENRYSON little is known; it is conjectured
that he was born about 1425, and died about 1506. He
was notary-public, and perhaps schoolmaster, at Dun-
fermline, and Dunbar tells us that he died there.
Allusions to the Abbey of Dunfermline, and to walks
"down on foot by Forth," add faintly to the picture
we form of a merry, philosophical bard. Every critic
quotes the stanza in which Henryson describes how he
HENRYSON 47
brightens the fire, wraps himself up, "takes a drink his
spirits to comfort/' and buries himself in the quair or
volume in which glorious worthy Chaucer wrote of fair
Cressid and lusty Troilus. This is one of those vivid,
personal pictures, so sadly rare in our early literature, in
which the veil of time seems suddenly rent for a moment
to let us look upon the great dead masters face to face.
It would be absurd to represent Henryson as habitually
lifted to such heights of felicitous expression; yet he is
commonly vivid, natural, and observant to a degree be-
yond any predecessor save Chaucer, whom he intelligently
followed. In some of his poems he is purely allegorical,
in the old French way. In Orpheus and Eury dice, which
comes down to us through a unique copy printed in
1508, a narrative in rime royal is followed by a moral in
the heroic couplet, and all tends to show that Orpheus is
the better spirit of man, which twitches the strings of the
harp of conscience and bids our foolish appetites return
heavenward. The moral nature of Henryson deems
that Chaucer had dealt too tenderly with the errors of
passion, and in a pitiful and dolorous Testament of
Cressid he shuts the door of mercy severely upon her.
In Robin and Makyne, breaking through the tradition of
solemn iambics for all subjects, Henryson bursts forth into
a light lyrical measure of a charming pastoral gaiety. This
ballad is the Scotch counterpart of the Nutbrown Maid,
an excellent English pastoral ballad or lyrical eclogue of
doubtful date.
Henryson's principal feat was that of translating, or
rather paraphrasing, AZsop's Fables into Scottish rime
royal. ^Esop had been printed in Latin in 1473, and in
Greek in 1480; Caxton Englished the Fables from the
French in 1483. It is believed that Henryson was in-
48 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
dependent of English influences, and his version may
date from about 1478. Of these fables a prologue and
thirteen narratives are all that have come down to us,
and this is much to be regretted, since in the realistic
vigour of these stories Henryson is at his best. All are
worth studying ; the hasty reader may be recommended
particularly to "The Cock and the Jasp" and "The
Uplands Mouse and the Burgess Mouse." No greater
compliment can be paid to the latter than is paid by M.
Jusserand, who, although a Frenchman, prefers Henry-
son's version to that of Lafontaine. In this agreeable
dominie of Dunfermline, we first meet with the rustic
vein, the homeliness in pastoral imagination, which has
continued to be characteristic of Scotch literature, and
which culminates in Burns.
A poem of poignant beauty and pathos, the Lament for
the Maker sy written by Dunbar about 1507, reveals to us
the fact that a whole school of reputable poets flourished
in Scotland at the Courts of James III. and James IV.
What we possess of the Scots poetry of that epoch is so
excellent in kind that we may well mourn that the writ-
ings of Sir Mungo Lockhart of the Lea, Quintin Shaw,
"good gentle" Stobo, and the rest of them have com-
pletely disappeared. Of the list of poets, apparently
belonging to his own age or to the generation immediately
preceding," "good Master" Walter Kennedy is the only
one of whose work we have any substantial fragments.
These present to us the idea that he was a link between
Henryson and Dunbar, but inferior in merit to both of
them. We gather, indeed, that Dunbar was recognised
at once as the first poet of the age, and we may console
ourselves by believing that in the ninety or a hundred
poems of his which we are fortunate enough to possess,
DUNBAR 49
we hold the fine flower of Scotch Renaissance poetry.
Dunbar, let it be plainly said, is the largest figure in
English literature between Chaucer and Spenser, to each
of whom, indeed, he seems to hold forth a hand.
The life of WILLIAM DUNBAR is very imperfectly
known to us. It is probable that he was born in 1460,
and that he died soon after 1520. He was a Lothian
man, educated at St. Andrews. After the murder of
James III., in 1488, Dunbar seems to have passed over
to France, as a secular priest, preaching his way through
Picardy to Paris, where a great many young Scotch-
men, some of them afterwards to be eminent, were then
studying. He seems to have travelled widely, visiting even
Holland, Spain, and Norway. In 1500 we find him back
in Scotland, and attached for the remainder of his life to
James IV. as Court poet, taking, among the many versifiers
of the age, the predominant appellation of "Rhymer of
Scotland" or Poet Laureate. In this capacity he was pre-
sent in London to negotiate the marriage of James IV.
and Margaret Tudor, in 1502; for which ceremony
Dunbar composed the most ambitious of his existing
works, The Thistle and the Rose. In 1507 the art of print-
ing was introduced into Scotland by Andrew Miller of
Rouen, and among the earliest productions of the press
was a collection of Dunbar's poems, including the
Golden Targe and the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy,
1508. He seems to have survived Flodden field in 1513,
but the remainder of his life is very vague.
Extreme richness and brightness of diction are the
characteristic qualities of Dunbar's verse. He is the first
to break up and cast behind him the monotonous con-
ventions of mediaeval style. His range is very wide,
sweeping from solemn hymns and lyrics of a poignant
D
50 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
melancholy to invectives and comic narratives of the
broadest merriment. Without doubt he specially prided
himself on his elaborate allegorical romances, in which
he gave free access to those "lusty roses of rhetoric"
with which he loved to adorn his verse. These allegories
are of the old familiar French school, distinguished only
by the extremely ornate and melodious verbiage of Dunbar.
There is less courtliness and more nature in the comic
lyrics of Dunbar, the sprightliness and vigour of which
are clouded for modest readers by their remarkable free-
dom of language. Fortunately the dark Northern dialect
and the eccentricities of Dunbar's spelling are veils to
hide our blushes. In the Testament of Andrew Kennedy,
a humorous will in verse, the influence of Villon upon
Dunbar has been perhaps a little hastily traced. The
pictures which this poet gives of the Court life are
curiously rough and coarse, heightened in colour, no
doubt, by the poet's singular gift for satire. The vitu-
perative verses of Dunbar, written apparently with the
maximum of violence and of good temper, remind us of
the tourneys of the Italian Humanists. They were merely
exercises in abusive rhetoric indulged in among excellent
friends. One of the best-known of Dunbar's poems,
the Dance of the Seven Deadly Sms, is of the graver
satirical class. Some of his religious pieces are not only
of a true sublimity, but display that lyrical element in
him which was so new in British poetry of artifice.
In reaching Dunbar we find that we have escaped
from the dead air of the late Middle Ages. The poetry of
this writer is defective in taste — rhetorical, over-ornate ;
he delights to excess in such terms as "crystalline,"
"redolent," "aureate," and "enamelling." He never
escapes — and it is this which finally leads us to refuse the
DUNBAR 51
first rank to his gorgeous talent — from the artificial in
language. He does not display any considerable intel-
lectual power. But when all this is admitted, the activity
and versatility of Dunbar, his splendid use of melody
and colour, his remarkable skill in the invention of varied
and often intensely lyrical metres, his fund of animal
spirits, combine to make his figure not merely an ex-
ceedingly attractive one in itself, but as refreshing as a
well of water after the dry desert of the fifteenth century
in England. It is a matter for deep regret that the early
verse of this great writer is lost, one fears beyond all hope
of its recovery. The analogy of Dunbar with Burns is
very striking, and has often been pointed out ; but the
difference is at least that between a jewel and a flower,
the metallic hardness of Dunbar being a characteristic
of his style which is utterly out of harmony with the
living sensitiveness of his greater successor. This metal
surface, however, is sometimes burnished to a splendour
that few poets have ever excelled ; for intricate and almost
inaccessible elaboration of rhyme-effects, Dunbar's Ballad
to Our Lady is one of the most extraordinary feats in the
language.
The consideration of the Scotch poets of the Renais-
sance has, however, carried us a little way beyond their
English contemporaries. In poetry there was nothing
that could compete for a moment, not merely with
Dunbar, but with the lesser writers of his school; but
in prose there took place, about 1470, a very remarkable
revival, analogous to the sudden development of poetry
just one hundred years earlier. At the extinction of the
Lancastrian dynasty, modern English prose, hitherto a
mere babbling of loose incoherent clauses, began to take
form and substance. It is evident from various indica-
52 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
tions that the awkwardness and deadness of English
prose had struck many persons of influence at the
Yorkist Court. Caxton tells us of the anxiety which
the King's sister, Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, felt for
the cultivation of a pure English. One of the first who
attempted to reform the use of the vernacular was the aged
Lancastrian Lord Chancellor, Sir JOHN FORTESCUE, who,
having written pregnantly and abundantly in Latin, began,
when he was probably approaching eighty years of age,
to compose in English, and produced, in 1471, a Declara-
tion upon Certain Writings out of Scotland, a retractation
of his Lancastrian arguments and an acknowledgment
of Edward IV. A year or two later, it would seem,
Fortescue wrote his more important treatise, the Difference
between an A bsolute and a L imited Monarchy. H e deserves
the praise of being our earliest political historian. For-
tescue is one of our greatest Latin authorities on consti-
tutional law, and as a writer on definitely national themes
in a purely colloquial English he is an innovator among
those who wrote, if not in Latin or French, in a style
obviously translated from one of those tongues. His
sentences are short, but abrupt and inelegant ; he per-
forms his task, and we acknowledge his courage, but we
cannot pretend to enjoy the manner of delivery.
The man, however, to whom English prose owes its
popular vehicle is WILLIAM CAXTON, whose Recueil of the
Histories of Troy, translated in 1471 from the French of
Raoul Lefevre, was printed by his own hand at Cologne.
In 1476 he brought his press over to Westminster, and
began his career as the Aldus of England; the first-fruits
of his printing-press being the Dictes of the Philosophers,
1477, by the second Earl RIVERS, who also deserves " a
singular laud and thanks" as one of the pioneers of
MALORY 53
our prose. Caxton, besides the immortal fame which he
won as the introducer of printing into England, was a
lucid and idiomatic writer, whose style may be observed
in various translations, as well as in shorter and more
original " prologues" and "epilogues." It is highly to
Caxton's credit that he saw that English prose, in order
to become an instrument worthy of the language, must
be vitalised. What passed for Lancastrian prose had
been dead, heavy, cold as a clod, and as opaque. Caxton,
without any very great genius for writing, was at least
vivid and amusing. When he excuses himself for scrib-
bling, unauthorised, an epilogue to Lord Rivers' s Dictes,
saying that " peradventure the wind had blown over the
leaf," Caxton introduces a playfulness, a lightness of touch
that had been hitherto unknown in English prose. He
was a man, not of genius, but of industry and taste, born
at a fruitful moment.
Not Fortescue, nor Rivers, nor Caxton, however, can
compare with the writer who first achieved the feat of
writing English prose that should have the charm of
English verse. To the great name of Sir THOMAS MAL-
CORE or MALORY it would scarcely be possible to pay too
high an encomium. Unhappily, of his person we know
absolutely nothing ; he was " the servant of Jesu both
day and night," and that shadow in the mist of piety is
all we see of the immortal author of the Morte d? Arthur.
For two centuries past the legends of Arthur and his
Table Round had permeated the English fancy ; verse
romances, translated or imitated from the French, each
engaged with some fragment or other of the vast myste-
rious story, had been the popular reading of gentle and
simple. Malory came forward, at the moment when
English prose felt itself able at last to compete with
54 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
verse, and presented to the new dynasty a compilation
of the whole Arthurian cycle, selected and arranged with
infinite art, and told in a style that was as completely
novel as it was beautiful and effective.
Much has been said of an English epic of Arthur, and
Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Tennyson in turn essayed
or approached it. Each of them was, or would have
been, indebted to the old chronicle of Malory ; it is
questionable if any of them has, or would have, excelled
him. He came at the moment when the charm of these
exquisite tales of chivalry was taking its sunset colours.
No longer credulously believed, it was necessary that
stories which were already beginning to be questioned,
the real propriety of which was fading with the passage
of those Middle Ages, of which they were the purest ex-
pression, should be clarified of their coarsest improba-
bilities, their wildest outrages upon credence, and that
their appeals to sentiment, to beauty of idea, should be
carefully gathered into a posy. In 1470 much was still
believed that we reject, much still passed for gospel truth
that we can hardly put up with in a fairy-tale. Men's
minds were passing through a transition, from the child-
like credulity of the Middle Ages to the adolescent igno-
rance of the Renaissance. However much Malory might
pare away,1 he might be trusted to preserve enough to
astonish a modern reader.
To say that Malory's style is better than that of any of
his predecessors is inadequate, for, in the broad sense,
he had no predecessors. English prose, as a vehicle for
successive and carefully distinguished moods of romantic
mystery, plaintive melancholy, anger, terror, the intoxi-
cating fervour of battle, did not exist before he wrote the
Morte d* Arthur. His sentences are short, but they have
MALORY 5 5
nothing of the dryness of Fortescue's ; if he is languid,
it is because he desires to produce the impression of
languor, not, like Caxton, because he is inherently a light
weight in literature. The effect which Malory has pro-
duced on generations of English readers is greater than
we are accustomed to realise. He tinges the whole Eng-
lish character ; he is the primal fount of our passion for
adventure, and of our love of active chivalry. The tales
he tells are old ; the Britons, as William of Malmesbury
tells us, had been raving about Arthur for centuries, when
he felt it his duty to reprove them. Since then the beau-
tiful, fantastic cycle had grown and grown, till it covered
the whole imagination of Western Europe as with a dewy
cobweb. But it was Malory, and not any Frenchman or
Celt, who drew the bright lines together, and produced,
out of such evanescent material, one of the great books
of the world.
Under the House of York the art of writing English
verses became almost extinct. John Kay, Edward IV.'s
royal poet, paraphrased exclusively from Latin, and he
was succeeded by Bernard Andre, who wrote in French.
The work done by Langland and Chaucer threatened to
be entirely undone, and English poetry was once more
ready to submit to the tyranny of Continental Europe.
With the accession of the Tudor dynasty a change for the
better came in, and the reign of Henry VII. was illus-
trated by certain writers, not of the first excellence, but
yet deserving great praise for having taken up the tradition
of English imaginative writing. Hawes, Barclay, and
Skelton were almost exactly contemporaneous, and all
three began to write after the visit of Dunbar to London,
on the occasion of the marriage of James IV., in 1503.
It is hardly fantastic to attribute to the example of the
56 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
highly lettered and poetic Court of Scotland the sudden
revival of English verse after more than half a century of
total obscuration. In nothing else, however, do Skelton,
Barclay, and Hawes, three very distinct types, resemble
one another.
A very interesting link between Lydgate and Spenser
is formed by STEPHEN HAWES. The only work of his
which demands our notice is the long allegory of the
Pastime of Pleasure, in six thousand verses of rime royal,
finished about the year 1506, and printed three years
later by Wynkyn de Worde. This poem is of peculiar
interest as being an elaborately artificial attempt to re-
suscitate the mediaeval romance of allegorical chivalry,
which was by that date passing out of fashion. Stephen
Hawes, with calm disdain for modern Tudor taste, goes
back to the mode of two hundred years earlier, and in-
vents a poem in the manner of Jean de Meung. The
speaker of this piece is called Grande Amour, and he
walks distractedly in a glorious valley full of flowers, till
at moonrise he finds himself at the foot of a copper
image, and lies down there to sleep. The lady Fame
appears to him, attended by her greyhounds, Governance
and Grace, and tells him that far away, in the magical town
of Music, lives La Belle Pucelle, but that the way to this
castle perilous is defended by giants. She leaves him,
and he wanders on until he sees the turrets and battle-
ments of the fortress of Moral Document. He slays
giants, storms the castle, and after serving apprentice-
ships with the ladies Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, he
pushes on to the city of Music and finds La Belle Pucelle.
Their meeting in the garden is prettily described ; but
many things get mixed together, and the poem, now half
ended, loses all coherence. The hero vanquishes many
SKELTON 57
giants and releases many ladies with his sword Clara
Prudence ; then marries, grows old and dies, while Time
and Eternity compose his epitaph.
" For though the daye be never so long.
At last the bells ringeth to evensong?
is the only couplet commonly remembered of this languid
and artificial poem, affected and tedious to a degree, and
yet strangely permeated with the sense of romantic
beauty. Hawes was an extravagant admirer of Lydgate,
whose prosodical heresies affect his measure unfavour-
ably.
ALEXANDER BARCLAY, who, although "born beyond
the cold river of Tweed," used the Southern dialect, and
wrote at Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire, did useful if
somewhat humble work by paraphrasing in English
several of the Latin eclogues of -^Eneas Sylvius and of
Mantuan, and Brandt's huge Suabian satire of the Nar-
renschiff or Ship of Fools. But Barclay was a dull and
clumsy versifier, and far more interest attaches to the
strange experiments in metre of his " rascal " rival, JOHN
SKELTON. In 1489 this curious person was created Poet
Laureate at the University of Oxford, and in 1493 made
laureate to the King at Cambridge, being habited for
the occasion in a green and white dress, with a wreath
of laurel, and the word Calliope embroidered in golden
letters of silk on his gown. From the earliest infancy of
the Duke of York (afterwards Henry VIII.) Skelton was
his tutor, and Erasmus called him the decus et lumen of
British letters. He has the reputation of disgusting
ribaldry, but when he chooses to be sober, Skelton is
delicately ornate to affectation. His great claim to our
notice is that he was the first to break up the monotony
58 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
of English verse. His Chaplet of Laurel is a piece of
laborious allegory which Hawes might have signed, but
the real talent of Skelton lies in his wild and breathless
short-line poems, half romance, half burlesque, of which
Philip Sparrow is the type. The Chaplet of Laurel itself
is broken by odd, frenzied lyrics, one of which is the
famous
" Merry Margaret,
As midsummer flower )
Gentle as falcon,
Or hawk of the tower?
This rattling verse lent itself to the poet's fierce diatribes
against Wolsey, who drove his tormentor at last into
sanctuary in Westminster Abbey for the remainder of
his life. There are amazing passages in Colin Clout and
the Tunning of Elinour Rumming which go far to justify
Pope's unkind epithet of "beastly Skelton." Warton
has aptly described this poet's versification as " anoma-
lous and motley," but it was a powerful solvent of the
stiff, tight, traditional metre of the fifteenth century.
By this time the brief summer-time of the Renaissance
in Scotland had been brought to a sudden close at
Flodden, but in the meanwhile much had been pro-
duced in the wild and coarse, but highly intelligent
Court of James IV. which it would doubtless greatly
interest us to read. But in Scotland there was a far
slighter chance of the preservation of a literary product
than in the south of England, and even the introduc-
tion of the printing-press did not suffice to ensure survival
to the mass of Scotch poetry, whose authors are to us
nothing now but names. Probably we possess the
best of all in Dunbar, whose brilliant virility and splen-
dour of fancy are not repeated in GAVIN DOUGLAS, the
GAVIN DOUGLAS 59
famous Bishop of Dunkeld, whose gifts the Scottish critics
have been inclined a little to overrate. His is, however,
a picturesque personality ; a son of Archibald " Bell the
Cat/' Earl of Angus, educated at St. Andrews and Paris,
identified with all the stormiest intrigues of his age, the
poetical bishop appeals to the fancy as the hero of a stir-
ring romance. But his original poems, his laborious
allegories the Palace of Honour and King Heart ', are of a
kind now familiar and even wearisome to us in our
descent of the Middle Ages, and in the gorgeousness of
his verbiage Douglas only repeats, without surpassing,
Dunbar. His fancy, however, inflamed by the reading
of the classics, adopts humanist forms, and his picture of
Love, no infant genius, but a man with square limbs,
clad in green, like a hunter, is no mediaeval deity.
After the disaster of Flodden in 1513, the part taken by
Douglas became a very prominent one. In these distract-
ing times he had turned to the classics, and was translating
Ovid to comfort himself. His famous version of the jEneid
belongs to 1512-13. Under James V. his fortunes rose :
he was made Abbot of Aberbrothock and Bishop of Dun-
keld, and for many years " all the Court was ruled by the
Earl of Angus and Mr. Gawain Douglas, but not well."
How he fought for the Archbishopric of St. Andrews,
and how his turbulent ambition overreached itself ; how
he fled to Wolsey, and died of the plague in Lord Dacre's
house in London in 1522, are parts of the romance of
literary history. His Virgil is written in heroic couplets,
with " prologues " in stanzaic form prefixed to the books ;
these prologues have been praised for the graceful studies
of conventionalised natural objects which they present.
But Gavin Douglas is most interesting as a writer in
whom we can watch the change from the mediae val to
60 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
the humanist attitude in the act of abruptly taking
place.
It is not necessary to dwell at any length on the work
of Sir DAVID LYNDESAY, James V.'s Lyon King-of-arms, in
whom the brilliant school of Scotch Renaissance poetry
closes. Lyndesay's interests and instincts were not artistic,
and it is plain that he wrote in verse mainly because it
was the only convenient weapon to his hand. He con-
tinued to compose allegories in the outworn taste of his
predecessors, but even this insipid form concealed a re-
forming enthusiasm for current politics and the spleen of
a practical satirist. He attacked ecclesiastical corruption,
and was a supporter of Knox, in rough language and
with a terrible fluency lashing all the sins and follies of
his age. The rapid reader, whom the bulk of Lyndesay's
works might alarm, may discover what manner of man
and what manner of poet he was by reading the Testa-
ment and Complaint of the Papingo, or dying parrot.
The reign of Henry VIII. is illustrious in the history of
literature for the progress which it encouraged in English
prose. Verse made little mark in the early years of the
reign ; but the King himself was solicitous about the
improvement and free use of prose, and was aided in his
designs by men of competent genius. In particular, the
violent constitutional changes which had marked the
fifteenth century naturally called for a school of his-
torians. It is true that the art of political history, so long
held in the traditional grasp of the chronicler, was not to
be learned in a day. The critic of the progress of litera-
ture observes with extreme interest the change which is
introduced by the perception by English writers of the
genius and mission of Froissart. The early Tudor his-
torians, of whom Edward Hall and Robert Fabian are the
LORD BERNERS 61
most notable, show, in their consciousness of the fact that
the authorities do not always agree, a glimmering of the
historic instinct. But they are dull and credulous. To
Fabian the placing of a new weather-cock on the steeple
of St. Paul's or the tale of dishes at a city feast is a
momentous matter. Hall, who begins to tell a story
better than Fabian, often loses the point of it in some
silly detail. Both, as it has been observed, improve as
they reach a later date.
It is difficult to understand why, in an age so con-
stantly in relation with France, it should have taken more
than a century for the genius and influence of Froissart
to have made themselves felt in England. A historian so
cognisant of English affairs should, one would suppose,
naturally attract English readers, but it is evident that,
after the independent reformation of the English lan-
guage in the fourteenth century, the knowledge of French
rapidly went out of fashion. John Bourchier, Lord
BERNERS, was Governor of Calais when, about 1520,
Henry VIII. desired him to perform that translation of
the Croniqucs which was printed by Pynson in 1523; and
although Berners was already an elderly man, and had
not, so far as we know, enjoyed any practice in literature,
his native talent was such, and his mind so accurately
tuned to that of Froissart, that the translation he pro-
duced marked an epoch in the writing of English history,
and was a notable addition to ftie still rare monuments of
harmonious prose.
Of scarcely less importance was the work to which the
same translator next turned, the rendering into fluent and
picturesque prose of the romance of Huon de Bordeatix,
the great popularity of which settled for English readers
the form of much of the elfin chivalry, even by that time
62 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
no longer credible or possible, but highly stimulating
to the imagination, which still moves a childish fancy ;
and in the pages of Berners's Huon, the fairy monarch,
Oberon, first stepped on the shores of England.
A deepening of the sense of religion and a quicker
intellectual life, such as the incidents of Henry VIII.'s
reign tended to encourage, left their direct mark upon
literature in England. Men like Linacre and Colet had
returned from Italy. Men like Erasmus had come to us,
with their hearts and brains inflamed with new ideas, and
it was the lads who listened at their feet who were to be the
pioneers of thought in the coming age of reform. These
humanists, unfortunately, in their desire for Catholic
sympathy, trusted too much to Latin, and not enough to
the vernacular. It is to be regretted that Sir THOMAS
MORE, the greatest humanist, perhaps the greatest in-
tellect of his time, gave so much to Europe that was
meant for England. His masterpiece, the Utopia, was
not published by himself, but in his excellent Life of
Richard III. we see reflected on English history, for the
first time, the pure light that Berners had so happily
borrowed from Froissart. Hallam has, however, gone
too far, both positively and relatively, in calling this
"the first example of good English language." The
same writer has described More's Richard II 7. as "the
first book I have read through without detecting any
remnant of obsolete forms." It is difficult to compre-
hend what Hallam meant by " obsolete," for More
employs the phraseology of his own time not less
freely than, for instance, Bishop Fisher does in his
sermons. It is right, however, to recognise in More an
easy, fluid grace which had been very rare before him,
and is frequent in his writings.
THE BIBLE 63
But More is not more lucid or simple than his arch-
adversary, WILLIAM TYNDALE, to whom we owe the in-
estimable gift of an English New Testament in 1526^
followed in 1535 by an entire Bible, in which Miles
Coverdale co-operated. In fact, it is dangerous to use
comparative terms of praise and blame to these masters of
early Tudor prose. The language was rapidly developing,
and they moved with it. They shared its shortcomings
and its advantages ; they were carried onward in the
rush of its advance. But the introduction into every
English household of the Bibley translated into prose
of this fluid, vivid period, is, after all, by far the most
important literary fact of the reign of Henry VIII. It
coloured the entire complexion of subsequent English
prose, and set up a kind of typical harmony in the
construction and arrangement of sentences.
It would be an error, however, to exaggerate the
general condition of prose in Tudor times. It had
thrown off a large proportion of the stiffness and dul-
ness of mediaeval language, and it had learned from
Malory, Berners, and More the art of rising on occasion
to pathetic, and even splendid eloquence. The work of
Coverdale and Cranmer, appealing as it did to the
million, rendered the arrangement of English thoughts
in fine English language a not unfamiliar feat. We owe
much to the theological writers of the middle of the
sixteenth century, and to none more than to the com-
mittee of divines who, under Cranmer's guidance, gave
1 It is important to notice that Tyndale's translation of the New Testament
was quite independent both of Wycliffe and of Wycliffe's original, the Vulgate.
Erasmus had by this time printed the Greek text, and it was directly from that
source— although unquestionably with constant reference to Luther's German
version of 1522— that Tyndale performed his work.
64 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
us, in 1549, the exquisite adaptation of homilies and
collects called the Book of Common Prayer. It is remark-
able, however, that translation is still predominant, and
that the mannerism of the foreign author and the genius
of his language still impresses itself upon the English
translator. Harmonious as Cranmer is, he becomes
homely, and even rough, when he leaves the liturgical
diction which he borrowed from the Latin of the Catholic
Church. The straightforward colloquial wit of Latimer
is often very inspiring, and we thrill to-day at Foxe's
plain and poignant stories, but neither in Foxe nor in
Latimer do we find what is truly called style.
At an age when most was borrowed, and all was
experimental, it was very curious to see how the con-
dition of English prose struck our earliest academic
critic, THOMAS WILSON, in his Art of Rhetoric, 1553.
He speaks of the English of the time in other terms than
those which we, looking forward and backward, are now
inclined to use ; but he asserts certain laws which it is
easy for us to see were those which most of the Tudor
writers of that age, men as unlike as Cavendish and
Ascham, Bale and Leland, were unanimous in following.
Writers, according to Wilson, ought "to speak as is
commonly received," and who does that more than
Latimer ? They are not " to seek to be overfine, nor yet
overcareless," and we are reminded of the wholesome,
elegant roughness of the Toxophilus (1545). "To speak
plainly and nakedly after the common sort of men in
few words " is the motto of this simple critic, and in no
work of that or any age is this ideal more bluntly lived
up to than it is in GEORGE CAVENDISH'S breezy and
familiar Life of Wolsey. But, again, Wilson speaks of
some who " seek so far for outlandish English that they
THE COURT OF LOVE 65
forget altogether their mother's language/' and we are
reminded of the lay translators, who were not always or
often so reserved, or so comparatively chastened, in their
vocabulary as was Sir THOMAS NORTH in his version of
Amyot's Plutarch.
The Art of Rhetoric tells us that there was already an
affectation of archaism — "the fine courtier will talk
nothing but Chaucer." He notes, too, the pedantry of
the Humanists, so crammed with classical allusion and
quotation "that the simple can but wonder at their talk";
the fashion for tasteless neologisms, for the constant
planting of some awkward " inkhorn term," not one out
of a score of which was destined to strike root and live,
even for a generation. All these are faults and follies,
and Wilson critically derides them. We can trace them
one by one in the minor authors of the age. But these
eccentricities, these affectations, if we will, displayed an
almost feverish preoccupation with the art of writing.
Success might not often crown the effort, but the effort
is made ; we are far already from that deadness of the
fifteenth century, when the chronicler tells his dreary
sentences, mumbling and dropping them like the beads
of an old conventional rosary. By 1550 the language
has become highly vitalised, and although we cannot yet
say that any great ease has been gained in the manoeu-
vring of sentences, though grand thoughts are enve-
loped still in cumbrous phrases, and the measure is
still monotonous and rough, the road is being busily
made which will presently lead us up to Hooker and
to Bacon.
When Wilson spoke, however, of the " fine courtiers
who will talk nothing but Chaucer," was he not rather
thinking of that very striking archaistic poem, the Court
E
66 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
of Love, which was actually attributed to Chaucer himself
in the edition of 1561 ? This poem has been the theme
of much discussion. It was probably not written earlier
than 1540, and it is unintelligible, unless we regard it as
a deliberate and purely imitative attempt to resuscitate
the mediaeval romance in a humanistic age. With the
earlier poems formerly attributed to Chaucer we can see
that the anonymous authors intended no fraud, but that
the excellence of their accidental productions led sub-
sequent editors, in their laxity, to fasten to the car of the
greatest mediaeval poet everything which seemed to them
fairly worthy to share in his triumph. But this explana-
tion does not cover the Court of Love, a mock-antique of
nearly fifteen hundred lines, the versification and language
of which instantly bewray it to a philologist as certainly
later than the Middle Ages. It seems plain that in this
remarkable poem we have a conscious literary exercise,
almost a forgery, from the hand of a very clever poet,
who was a student of James I. and of Lydgate as well as
of Chaucer.
Who this poet was we can at present offer no conjec-
ture. " Philogenet, of Cambridge, Clerk," is the author,
but under this pseudonym he has remained undetected
by modern criticism. The imitation of the Chaucerian
manner is close, but the writer has an ease and a melodious
flow of versification denied to Hawes or Barclay, so far
as we can judge by their existing works ; and, in spite
of its intentional archaism, the Court of Love reads as
though it was written a generation later than the Pastime
of Pleasure. It contains a considerable number of words
of the "aureate" class, otherwise mainly used by the poets
of the Northern dialect, and I have elsewhere suggested
that it is the work of a Scotch poet deliberately writing
TOTTEL'S MISCELLANY 67
in the English tongue. The author begs that "metricians"
will excuse his little skill, but the curious point is that in
respect of metre he is far more accomplished than any
other poet of the first half of the sixteenth century, with
the doubtful exception of Skelton. We must look at the
Cotirt of Love as a literary exercise, not without analogy
to the paintings of the pre-Raphaelites, in which a modern
artist, rebelling against the tendencies of his own age,
resolutely returns to discarded ideals and obsolete forms
of art. Another such exercise, of still later date, is the
Scotch poem of the Court of Venus, by HOLLAND. With
these puzzling compositions the schools of mediaeval
poetry in Great Britain definitely close.
Simultaneously with this archaistic revival, which was
of no real importance, there was a movement in the op-
posite direction which was of a revolutionary character,
and which led directly to the adoption of new and final
rules in English prosody. The historic evidences of this
highly important movement are, unhappily, lost to us.
We can hardly reconstruct, even by conjecture, what
were the ties which bound together the group of brilliant
young poets whose work, most of it posthumous, was
published by Tottel in his well-known miscellany of
Songs and Sonnets in 1557. We know that Sir THOMAS
WYATT the elder, and Henry Howard, Earl of SURREY,
were the leaders of the school. Sir Francis Bryan was
another member, but we know not which were his con-
tributions. All these were dead when the volume of
1557 was, as is supposed, edited by NICHOLAS GRIMALD,
who inserted many of his own poems. Lord Vaux was
another of the " uncertain authors," and so, it is believed,
were John Heywood, Barnabee Googe, and Churchyard,
who, alone of the whole group, survived until the age
68 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
of Shakespeare. It is evident that all these men could
hardly be considered contemporaries, and the verse col-
lected by Tottel must have been composed at various
times within the space of some thirty years. It repre-
sents, no doubt, a selection of the poems produced by
poets of widely-different habits and degree, but all in the
new manner, in defiance of mediaeval tradition.
Among these new poets the earliest are the greatest.
The merit of Surrey and Wyatt so far surpasses that of
their successors that they have, to some excess, mono-
polised the credit of innovation. Wyatt, born in 1503,
was much the oldest of the group ; he was an active
diplomatist and traveller, and evidently a man whose
mind was peculiarly open to foreign influences. He
died in 1542. As to the Earl of Surrey, in spite of his
high lineage, his eminence as a writer, and the romantic
incidents of his life and death, we are singularly ignorant
of the facts of his earlier career. He was perhaps born
in 1516 ; he was certainly executed on Tower Hill, in
circumstances of bewildering obscurity, in January 1547.
Tradition declares that, like Wyatt, but in more fantastic
conditions, Surrey visited Italy in his youth. In the
legends of a later generation the poet was represented
as conducted by Cornelius Agrippa through the mazes
of necromancy, and shown his Geraldine in a magic
mirror. All this, and more, is valuable only as proving
the hold which the romantic idea of Surrey had taken on
the popular mind. Wyatt is understood to have nursed a
hopeless passion for Queen Anne Bullen, whose brother
George was one of the group of new poets. The whole
movement seems inspired by an uneasy amorous chivalry,
seeking modern forms for its expression.
In this our tantalising ignorance of the events which
SURREY 69
led to the composition of the poems, we are driven to an
examination of the poems themselves. This, at first sight,
seems to help us little, since they are strung together
without any revelation of chronological order. Those of
Wyatt, Surrey, and Grimald are, however, by great good
fortune, distinguished from the anonymous mass, and
as we examine these more closely, certain indications
become plainly visible. In the volume of 1557, the
earliest verses are those of Surrey, and they claim
this pre-eminence from their excellent value. Surrey
was, without question, the most flexible talent in the
group, and in all probability the one who pointed out
the road to the others. It is certain that he was pre-
cocious, and he may have been writing as early as 1536,
that is to say, six years before the death of Wyatt. There
seems evident in the majority of Wyatt' s poems a timidity
which contrasts with the boldness of Surrey, and, although
it must be confessed that the dates present us with great
difficulties, we have the impression that Surrey was the
master-spirit, as he was certainly the purer and finer
poet. It is not desirable, however, to distinguish too
closely between those two great harbingers of modern
lyrical poetry. Wyatt seems to have borrowed most
from France, Surrey most from Italy, and the latter was
at that moment the more fruitful source of inspiration.
It was noted by the editor of 1557 that the whole
group of new poets excelled in the art of writing "in
small parcels." By this he meant in short lyrics, as
contrasted with the lumbering and pompous forms of
mediaeval poetry. We are prepared to find the new
writers eager to adopt from Continental literature such
metres and types as should be most useful to them in
carrying out this design, and accordingly we find the
70 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
contributions of Surrey opening with an essay in terza
rima, the earliest in the language. To Wyatt and to
Surrey conjointly is due the honour of having intro-
duced the sonnet from Italy, and, what was to be of
less, importance, the rondeau from France. It is not
impossible that the sonnet also may have come to Wyatt
from France, and not directly from Italy, since these
were the days of Mellin de St. Gelais and of C16ment
Marot. In another publication, issued a fortnight after
the Miscellany, Tottel printed some translations of Virgil
done by Surrey into blank verse. The adoption of this
metre shows the quickness and delicacy of Surrey's taste,
for it was but very recently invented in Italy, and the
Sofonisba of Trissino (1515) was the only work in which
it had attained any prominence. Surrey, whose instinct
for prosody was phenomenal, must have met with this
play, or possibly with 'Sannazaro's timid essay in the
Arcadia, and at once transplanted blank verse from a
soil in which it would never flourish, to one in which it
would take root and spread in full luxuriance.
It is to Surrey and Wyatt, then, that we owe the direc-
tion our modern lyric poetry has taken. Their songs
and sonnets are of a Petrarchan character ; they begin,
in English, that analysis of the malady of love, that im-
pulsive, singing note of emotion, which has since enriched
our literature with some of the loveliest lyrics in the
world. Their own work was not, in comparison with
what presently succeeded it, of the highest excellence.
They were forerunners, progenitors — they prophesied
of better things. Their elegies are easy and flowing,
their songs graceful, their sonnets (especially Surrey's)
remarkable for the daring with which real scenes and
persons are introduced into the impassioned descant.
GRIMALD 71
Wyatt is sometimes a little weighed down by remnants
of the mediaeval vocabulary and movement, and his ear
is singularly uncertain ; but when he pours out such a
strain of tender song as " Forget not yet," and we com-
pare this with anything that had preceded it in English
of the same class, we have to acknowledge his extreme
sensitiveness to valuable exotic models. In this high
service to poetry, Grimald (who was possibly an Italian by
birth — Niccol6 Grimaldi) took a part which has scarcely
received due attention. He was two or three years
younger than Surrey, and he wrote, at his best, with
more smoothness of melody than either of the elder
friends. His lyric beginning "What sweet relief" was
not equalled again until the Elizabethan age, and Grimald
was particularly happy in the use of a rhymed couplet
of alternately twelve and fourteen syllables, which was
intended, perhaps, to represent the French alexandrine.
This curious measure, which was not Grimald' s invention,
became excessively popular during the next half-century,
sank into doggerel jingle, was cast out with mockery, and
has never been seriously used since 1600. Such are the
whimsical fates of metrical innovations, for the sonnet
and blank verse, which long seemed to have sunken into
oblivion under the popularity of this twelve-fourteen
measure, only waited until its brief day had closed to
rise into honoured and permanent use.
The period between 1530 and 1545 probably includes
all that was of primary importance in this first renaissance
of English poetry. What strikes us in it pre-eminently
is its complete emancipation from the mediaeval tradi-
tions which had bound all previous writers of verse. It
was the earliest British recognition of the new laws which
European lyric had made for itself, but it was essentially
72 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
a premature recognition of it. The accentuation of Eng-
lish was still uncertain, although a comparison of the
iambic line of Wyatt and of Surrey suggests that a marked
solidification of metre took place after 1535. Neither of
these poets was great ; skilful, elegant, eminently enlight-
ened and unattached, they lacked the force of thought
and richness of imagination which might have stamped
their innovations on popular practice. So that the school
of Wyatt and Surrey remains something isolated and
ineffectual, breaking with a posy of delicate flowers and
a few graceful playthings the great empty space which
divides the mediaeval from the Elizabethan age. It is
not, however, in any way correct to say that Wyatt and
Surrey were " precursors " of the latter. If they pro-
phesied of anything, it was of a graceful age of humanistic
and Petrarchan poetry, gentle, smooth, and voluble, such
as came to France, but was excluded from England by a
forcible evolution of national spirit in a quite different
direction.
Ill
THE AGE OF ELIZABETH
1560-1610
THE accession of Queen Elizabeth, in 1558, was imme-
diately followed by such a quickening of the political,
social, and religious life of England as makes a veritable
epoch in history. In literature, too, we are in the habit of
regarding the development and range of those " spacious"
times as having been extraordinary. Ultimately, indeed,
nothing that the world has seen has been more extra-
ordinary, but this expansion of the national temperament
did not by any means reach the sphere of letters at once.
For the first twenty years of the Queen's reign English
literature was apparently stationary in its character, un-
adorned by masterpieces, and oblivious of distinction in
style. If we look more closely, however, we may see
that these years, inactive although they seem, were years
of valuable preparation, education, and whetting of the
national appetite.
The sentiment of the early Tudors, in all things con-
nected with the mind, had been narrow and opposed to
the movements of Continental thought. But Elizabeth,
although her vehement Protestantism might seem to cut
her off from European sympathy, was in reality much
more drawn to its intellectual manifestations than her
predecessors had been. It would be more to the point,
74 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
perhaps, to say that her subjects were drawn into the
general life of the world more than theirs had been.
Everywhere new emotions, a new order of thought, were
abroad, and what had passed over Italy long before, and
had seized France half a century earlier, now invaded
England. With the death of Mary, the bondage of the
Middle Ages was finally broken through ; a rebellion
against the ascetic life was successful ; a reaction against
exclusive attention to religious ideas set in, almost with
violence, among men of a literary habit of mind. Cal-
vinism, a new phase of the ascetic instinct, made a foot-
ing in England, but it advanced slowly, and allowed
literature time to develop by the side of it. In short,
there obtained, from wider knowledge of the material
world, from slackening theological torment, from a larger
commerce with mankind, a reassertion of human nature, a
new pleasure in the contemplation of its joys, its passions,
its physical constitution. It is to this altered outlook
upon life and man that we owe the glories of Elizabethan
literature.
But these glories were not able to display themselves
at once. In the tradition of English writing, especially
of English verse, everything was still primitive and feeble,
uncertain and inconsistent. The lyrics of Wyatt and
Surrey had given a suggestion of a path which poetry
might take, but a pretty copy of verses here and there
flashing in the midst of a sea of jingling prose, did not
show that even the gentle lesson of Tottel's Miscellany
had been practically learned. We have but to compare
what was written in England in 1560 with the slightly
earlier literature of Italy, or even of France, to see that
this country still languished in a kind of barbarism. To
contrast the madrigals and epigrams of Marot, which it
TRANSLATIONS 75
is perfectly fair to compare with work of the same class
produced by the early Elizabethans, is to draw a parallel
between the product of an accomplished and in his way
perfectly modern master, and the stumblings of ignorant
scholars, who, eager to learn, yet know not what they
should be learning.
The best that can be said, indeed, of the early Eliza-
bethans is, that they were conscious of their deficiencies,
and that they spared no pains in groping after self-educa-
tion. They avoided no labour which might help them
to improve the English language, to make its vocabulary
rich enough and its syntax supple enough for the designs
they had before them. But it is very strange for us to
observe how little their vigour was aided by intelligence
or their activity by sureness of touch. Humanism came
upon the nation, but in forms curiously foreign to the
rest of Europe ; it came in an almost infantine curiosity
to become acquainted with the ideas of the ancient
classics, without taking any trouble to reproduce the
purity of their style or to preserve the integrity of their
language. England was flooded with " translations " in
prose and verse ; it has become the fashion of late to
find surprising merits in the former, but no one has yet
been bold enough to champion the latter. Lovers of
paradox may hold that Adlington (1566) is a picturesque
writer on lines dimly suggested by Apuleius, or that
Heliodorus is sufficiently recognisable in the "witty and
pleasant" pages of Underdo wne (1569). But in dealing
with verse we are on firmer ground, and it may safely be
asserted that viler trash, less representative of the original,
less distinguished in language, less intelligent in intention,
is not to be found in the literature of the world, than in
the feeble, vague, and silly verse-translations from the
76 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
classics which deformed the earlier years of Elizabeth's
reign. Phaer (1558) would be the worst of all translators
of Virgil were he not surpassed in that bad eminence
by the maniac Stanyhurst (1582). As for the group of
gentlemen who put Seneca into rhyme — the Newtons
and Nevilles and Studleys and Nuces — they, in their own
words, "linked lie, with jingling chains, on wailing Limbo
shore," the complete mockery of every stray reader who
comes across them. Arthur Golding, who paraphrased
the Metamorphoses of Ovid (1565-67), was the best of this
large class of verse-translators of the early part of the
reign ; he possessed no genius, indeed, but a certain
limpidity and sweetness in narrative lifts him out of
the "limbo" of the Jasper Heywoods and the Church-
yards.
This labour of translating occupied a vast number of
persons at the Universities and the Inns of Court, where,
as we are told in 1559, " Minerva's men and finest wits
do swarm." Much, possibly the majority of what was
written, never reached the printing-press at all. More
interesting, perhaps, but scarcely more meritorious than
the work of the translators, were the attempts at original
or imitative poetry. The earliest name is that of Bar-
nabee Googe, whose most important poem, the Cupido
Conquered, shows, like the Temple de Cupido of Marot (the
comparison is cruel for Googe), a tendency to return to
mediaeval forms of allegory, and to the school of the
Roman de la Rose. George Turbervile, a translator from
Mantuan and Boccaccio, wrote so-called "songs and
sonnets" (1567) of his own. The Romeus and Juliet of
Arthur Broke has the interest of having certainly been
enjoyed by Shakespeare. These and other minor poets
of this experimental period were greatly hampered by
SACKVILLE 77
their devotion to the tiresome couplet of alternate six
and seven beats, a measure without a rival in its capacity
for producing an effect at once childish and pedantic.
But it is in the frequent and popular miscellanies of this
age, and particularly in the Paradise of Dainty Devises
(1576) and the Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions
(1578), that the triviality and emptiness of early Eliza-
bethan verse-style may be most conveniently studied.
Poetry was in eager request during these years, but the
performance was not ready to begin ; the orchestra was
tuning up.
One musician, indeed, there was who produced for a
very short time a harmony which was both powerful and
novel. The solitary poet of a high order between Dunbar
and Spenser is THOMAS SACKVILLE, afterwards Lord
Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset. Born in 1536, he went
early to Oxford, and became locally celebrated for
"sonnets sweetly sauced," which have entirely disap-
peared ; we may conjecture that they were of the school
of Wyatt. In 1561 there was played at Whitehall the
" great mask " or tragedy of Gorbuduc, by Sackville and
his friend Norton. Finally, the second or 1563 edition
of the narrative miscellany called A Mirror for Magis-
trates contained two contributions, an " Induction " and
a story of " Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham," from
the pen of Sackville : it is supposed that these were
written about 1560. In the latest of these compositions
the poet, addressing himself by name, says that it was
his purpose " the woeful fall of princes to describe " in
future poems ; but this he was prevented from doing by
his absorption in political and public life. He rose to
the highest offices in the state, living on until 1608, but
is not known to have written another line of verse.
78 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Sackville's poetical life, therefore, closed at about the
same age as Keats's did ; he is among " the inheritors of
unfulfilled renown." His withdrawal from the practice
of his art probably delayed the development of English
literature by a quarter of a century, since of Sackville's
potentiality of genius there can be no question. What
he has left to us has a sombre magnificence, a stately ful-
ness, absolutely without parallel in his own age. The
poetlings around him were timid, crude, experimental,
but Sackville writes like a young and inexperienced
master perhaps, yet always like a master. He shows
little or not at all the influence of Wyatt and Surrey, but
with one hand he takes hold of the easy richness of
Chaucer and with the other of the majesty of Dante, to
whose Inferno the plan of his Induction is deeply indebted.
In his turn, Sackville exercised no slight fascination over
the richer, more elaborate and florid, but radically cog-
nate fancy of Spenser ; and even Shakespeare must have
read and admired the sinister fragments of the Lord
High Treasurer. Scarce an adjective here and there
survives to show Sackville faintly touched by the taste-
less heresies of his age. His poetry is not read, partly
because of its monotony, partly because the subject-
matter of it offers no present entertainment ; but in the
history of the evolution of style in our literature the
place of Sackville must always be a prominent one.
It is to be noted, as a sign of the unhealthy condition
of letters in this hectic age, that although it produced
experiments in literature, it encouraged no literary men ;
that is to say, the interest in books was so faint and un-
settled, that no one man was persuaded to give his life
to the best literature, or any considerable portion of his
life. The only exception may seem to be that of GEORGE
ASCHAM 79
GASCOIGNE, whose talent needed but to have equalled
his ambition to reach the highest things. Unfortunately;
his skill was mediocre, and though he introduced from
Italy the prose comedy, the novel, and blank verse satire,
and was the first translator of Greek tragedy and the
earliest English critic — success in any one of which de-
partments might have immortalised him — he was tame
and trifling in them all. He was still writing actively
when, in 1577, he died prematurely, at the age of forty.
Nash, in the next generation, summed up the best that
can be said for Gascoigne in describing him as one
"who first beat the path to that perfection which our
best poets have aspired to since his departure."
What has been said of the verse of the early Eliza-
bethan period is in some measure true of its prose, with
the exception that bad taste and positive error were less
rampant because there was much less ambition to be
brilliant and less curiosity in experiment. The prose of
this period is not to be sharply distinguished from that
of the earlier half of the century. It presents to us no
name of a creator of style, like Cranmer, and no narrator
with the vivacity of Cavendish. ROGER ASCHAM, who
survived until 1568, was the leading writer of the age in
English ; his influence was strenuously opposed to the
introduction of those French and Italian forces which
would have softened and mellowed the harshness of the
English tongue so beneficially, and he was all in favour
of a crabbed imitation of Greek models, the true beauty
of which, it is safe to say, no one in his day compre-
hended in the modern spirit. It is impossible to call
Ascham an agreeable writer, and pure pedantry to insist
upon his mastery of English. His efforts were all in an
academic direction, and his suspicion of ornament was
8o MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
in diametric opposition to the instinct of the nation, as
to be presently and in the great age abundantly revealed.
Meanwhile to Ascham and his disciples the only thing
needful seemed to be " to speak plainly and nakedly after
the common sort of men in few words." North sacri-
ficed, indeed, all distinction, but secured a merry species
of vigour, in his paraphrase of Amyot's translation of
Plutarch. A deserved popularity was won by Day's
1563 translation of the Latin of Foxe's so-called Book of
Martyrs and by Holinshed's familiar Chronicles, of which
Shakespeare made abundant use. In a sketch less hur-
ried than this must be, the laborious compilations of
Grafton and of Stow would demand an attention which
we dare not give to them here. All these compositions
were of value, but the progress of English prose is not
apparent in any of them.
On no point of literary criticism have opinions differed
more than as to the place of JOHN LYLY in the develop-
ment of style. Extravagantly admired at the time of its
original publication, ridiculed and forgotten for two cen-
turies, the Euphues (1579-80) has recovered prestige only
to have its claims to originality contested. It has been
elaborately shown that Lyly owed his manner and sys-
tem to the Spaniard Guevara, and his use of English to
Lord Berners, while the very balance of his sentences
has been attributed to imitation of the Prayer-Book. In
all this there seems to me to be too much attention paid
to detail ; looking broadly at the early prose of Eliza-
beth's reign, it is surely impossible not to recognise that
a new element of richness, of ornament, of harmony, an
element by no means wholly admirable, but extremely
noticeable, was introduced by Lyly ; that, in short, the
publication of Euphues burnishes and suddenly animates
LYLY 8 1
— with false lights and glisterings, if you will, but still
animates — the humdrum aspect of English prose as
Ascham and Wilson had left it. Splendour was to be one
of the principal attributes of the Elizabethan age, and
Euphues is the earliest prose book which shows any
desire to be splendid.
It is a very tedious reading for us, this solemn romance
of a young Athenian of the writer's own day, who visits
Naples first and then England. But to the early ad-
mirers of EuphueSy its analysis of emotion, its wire-drawn
definitions of feeling, its high sententiousness, made it
intensely attractive. Above all, it was a book for ladies ;
in an age severely academic and virile, this author turned
to address women, lingeringly, lovingly, and he was re-
warded as Richardson was two centuries later, and as M.
Paul Bourget has been in our own day. Of the faults of
Euphues enough and to spare is said in all compilations
of criticism. Lyly's use of antithesis is always severely
reproved, yet it broke up successfully the flat-footed dul-
ness of his predecessors ; his method of drawing images
from fabulous zoology and botany is ridiculed, and de-
servedly, for it degenerates into a trick ; yet it evidences a
lively fancy ; his whole matter is sometimes styled " a
piece of affectation and nonsense," yet that merely proves
the critic to have never given close attention to the book
he condemns. The way Lyly says things is constantly
strained and sometimes absurd, but his substance is
always noble, enlightened, and urbane, and his influence
was unquestionably as civilising as it was extensive. As
to his Euphuism, about which so much has been writ-
ten, it was mainly a tub to catch a whale, — a surprising
manner consciously employed to attract attention, like
Carlylese. It had no lasting effects, fortunately, but for
F
82 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
the time it certainly enlivened the languid triviality of
the vernacular.
Of infinitely greater importance was the revolution
effected in poetry, in the same eventful year 1579, by
the publication of the Shepherds Calender of EDMUND
SPENSER. With this book we begin a new era ; we
stand on the threshold, not of a fashion or a period,
but of the whole system of modern English poetry.
The strange obscurity which broods over most of
Elizabethan biography — where the poetry was every-
thing and the poet little regarded — lifts but seldom
from the life of Spenser. He may have been born
in 1552 ; some translations of his from Petrarch and
Joachim du Bellay, already showing the direction of his
reading, were printed in 1569; from 1570 to 1576 he
was at Cambridge, where he fell into a literary, but ex-
tremely tasteless and pedantic set of men, who, neverthe-
less, had the wit to perceive their friend's transcendent
genius ; and during three obscure years, while we lose
sight of him, we gather that he was bewitched by the
charming form and character of Sir Philip Sidney, his
junior by two years. The influence of Sidney was not
beneficial to Spenser, for that delightful person had
accepted the heresy of the Cambridge wits, and was
striving to bring about the " general surceasing and
silence of bald rhymers," and the adoption in English
of classic forms of rhymeless quantitative verse, entirely
foreign to the genius of our prosody.
For a moment it seemed as though Spenser would
succumb to the authority of Sidney's Areopagus, and
waste his time and art on exercises in iambic trimeter.
But at the end of 1579 came the anonymous publication
of the Shepherd's Calender, and in the burst of applause
SPENSER 83
which greeted these lyric pastorals, the danger passed.
The book consisted of twelve eclogues, distantly modelled
on those of Theocritus, and more closely upon Virgil
and Mantuan ; they were in rhymed measures of extreme
variety, some of the old jingling kind, from which Spenser
had not yet escaped, others of a brilliant novelty, con-
veying such a music as had yet been heard from no
English lips. " June " is the most stately and imagina-
tive of these eclogues, while in " May " and " September"
we see how much the poet was still enslaved by the evil
traditions of the century. The Shepherd's Calender is
momentous in its ease and fluent melody, its novelty of
form, and its delicate grace. Throughout England, with
singular unanimity, " the new poet " was hailed with
acclamation, for, as Sidney quaintly put it two years
later, "an over-faint quietness" had " strewn the house for
poets," and the whole nation was eager for song. Yet
we must remember that the positive value of these arti-
ficial pastorals of 1579 might easily be, and sometimes
has been, overrated.
Spenser now disappears from our sight again. We
divine him employed in the public service in Ireland,
associated there with Raleigh, and rewarded by the manor
and castle of Kilcolman. We get vague glimpses of the
composition, from 1580 onwards, of a great poem of
chivalry, in which Spenser is encouraged by Raleigh, and
in 1590 there are published the first three books of the
Faerie Queen. From this time forth to the end of his
brief life, Spenser is unchallenged as the greatest of the
English poets, no less pre-eminent in non-dramatic verse
among his glorious coevals than Shakespeare was pre-
sently to be in dramatic. He published in 1591 his
Complaints, a collection of earlier poems ; Colin Clout's
84 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Come Home Again in 1595, Amoretti and Epithalamia in
the same year, three more books of the Faerie Queen and
the Four Hymns in 1596. The close of his life was made
wretched by the excesses of the Irish rebels, who burned
Kilcolman in October 1598. Spenser, reduced to penury,
fled to England, and died " for lack of bread " in London,
on the i6th of January 1599.
It is by the Faerie Queen that Spenser holds his sove-
reign place among the foremost English poets. Taken
without relation to its time, it is a miracle of sustained
and extended beauty ; but considered historically, it is
nothing less than a portent. To find an example of
British poetry of the highest class, Spenser had to search
back to the Middle Ages, to Chaucer himself. So great
was the change which two centuries had made in lan-
guage, in prosody, in attitude to life, that Spenser could
practically borrow from Chaucer little or nothing but a
sentimental stimulus. The true precursors of his great
poem were the Italian romances, and chiefly the Orlando
Furioso. It is not to be questioned that the youth of
Spenser had been utterly enthralled by the tranquil and
harmonious imagination of Ariosto. In writing the chival-
rous romance of the Faerie Queen, Spenser, although he
boasted of his classical acquirements, was singularly little
affected by Greek, or even Latin ideas. There was no
more of Achilles than of Roland in his conception of a
fighting hero. The greatest of all English poems of
romantic adventure is steeped in the peculiar enchant-
ment of the Celts. It often seems little more or less than
a mabinogi extended and embroidered, a Celtic dream
tempered with moral allegory and political allusion. Not
in vain had Spenser for so many years inhabited that
"most beautiful and sweet country," the Island of Dreams
SPENSER 85
and melancholy fantasy. Cradled in the richness of
Italy, trained in the mistiness of Ireland, the genius of
Spenser was enabled to give to English poetry exactly
the qualities it most required. Into fields made stony
and dusty with systematic pedantry it poured a warm
and fertilising rain of romance.
The first three books of the Faerie Queen contain the
most purely poetical series of pictures which English
literature has to offer to us. Here the Italian influence
is still preponderant ; in the later books the Celtic spirit
of dream carries the poet a little too far into the realms
of indefinite fancy. A certain grandeur which sustains
the three great cantos of Holiness, Temperance, and
Chastity fades away as we proceed. It would be, indeed,
not difficult to find fault with much in the conduct of this
extraordinary poem. The construction of it is loose and
incoherent when we compare it with the epic grandeur
of the masterpieces of Ariosto and Tasso. The heroine,
Queen Gloriana, never once makes her appearance in
her own poem, and this is absurd. That a wind of
strange hurry and excitability seems to blow the poet
along so fast that he has no time to consider his grammar,
his rhymes, or even his continuity of ideas, but is obliged,
if the profanity be permitted, to " faggot his fancies as
they fall" — this is certainly no merit ; while the constant
flattery of Elizabeth has been to some fastidious spirits
a stumbling-block.
But these are spots in the sun. The rich and volup-
tuous colour, the magical landscape, the marvellous
melody, have fascinated young readers in every genera-
tion, and will charm the race till it decays. More than
any other writer, save Keats, Spenser is interpenetrated
with the passion of beauty. All things noble and comely
86 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
appeal to him ; no English poet has been so easy and
yet so stately, so magnificent and yet so plaintive. He
is pre-eminent for a virile sweetness, for the love and
worship of woman, for a power of sustaining an im-
pression of high spectacular splendour. What should
constitute a gentleman, and in what a world a gentleman
should breathe and move — these are his primary con-
siderations. His long poem streams on with the panoply
of a gorgeous masque, drawn through the resonant
woodlands of fairyland, in all the majestic pomp of
imitative knight-errantry. And then his music, his in-
comparable harmony of versification, the subtlety of
that creation of his, the stanza which so proudly bears
his name — the finest single invention in metre which
can be traced home to any English poet ! All these
things combine to make the flower of Edmund Spenser's
genius not the strongest nor the most brilliant, perhaps,
but certainly the most delicately perfumed in the whole
rich garden of English verse.
The splendid achievement of Spenser saved our litera-
ture once and for all from a very serious danger. Ascham,
whose authority with the university wits of the succeeding
generation was potent, had deliberately stigmatised rhyme
as barbarous. This notion exercised many minds, and
was taken up very seriously by that charming paladin of
the art, Sir PHILIP SIDNEY. His experiments may be
glanced at in the pages of the Arcadia, and they were
widely imitated. They followed, but were of the same
order as the stilted Seneca tragedies, to which we shall pre-
sently refer, and, like them, were violently in opposition
to the natural instinct of English poetry. Spenser would
now have none of these " reformed verses," and in one
of his early pieces, "The Oak and the Briar," went far to
SIDNEY 87
vindicate by his practice a freedom of prosody which was
not to be accepted until the days of Coleridge and Scott.
Of the works of Sidney himself, it is difficult to know
how far they influenced taste to any wide degree, for
they were mainly posthumous. To the Astrophel and
Stella we shall presently return. The Arcadia — that
"vain, amatorious poem," as Milton calls it, a heavy
pastoral romance in poetical prose and prosy verse,
founded on the lighter and more classical Arcadia of
Sannazaro — though written perhaps in 1580, just after
the publication of Eupkues, was not printed until 1590.
The most valuable work of Sidney, who purposed no
monument of books to the world, was the Defense of
Poesy, an urbane and eloquent essay, which labours
under but one disadvantage, namely, that when it was
composed in 1581 there was scarcely any poesy in
England to be defended. This was posthumously printed
in 1595-
There was, however, one department in poetry of
superlative importance, in which neither Spenser nor
even Sidney took a prominent part. It is strange that
the former, with all his accomplishments in verse, left
the pure spontaneous lyric, the /^eXo?, untouched ; the
latter, essaying it on pedantic lines and in a perverse
temper, produced the grotesque experiments embedded
in the Arcadia, the effect of which on subsequent litera-
ture was wholly evil. Neither of these great men gave
due recognition to a new thing, quite unknown in the
English of their own early youth, which revolutionised
the speech and style of the nation, and which has done
more than anything else to stamp on subsequent English
poetry its national character. This was the Song, as in-
troduced, almost simultaneously, and as by an unconscious
88 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
impulse, by a myriad writers in the last decade but one
of the sixteenth century. The successes of English verse
had hitherto been of a stately kind ; the forms used had
scarcely ever been at all felicitous if they strayed from
the rigid mediaeval stanzas and rhythms. Lyric had
awakened in Italy and then in France without encourag-
ing even its direct imitators in England, such as Surrey
and Wyatt, to any but a timid elegance. It may be
broadly said that, until 1580, the only examples of lyric
in English had been fragments or offshoots of rude
folk-song.
The change of note is one of the most extraordinary
and the least accountable phenomena in the history of
literature. Quite abruptly, we find a hundred poets able
to warble and dance where not one could break into a
tune or a trot a year or two before. It is difficult to
assign priority or an exact date in this matter. If Sidney
wrote —
" Weep) neighbours, weep, do you not hear it said
That Love is dead? "
(which was not printed until 1598) as early as some critics
suppose, he does, in spite of his pedantries, deserve a
place among the precursors. We are more sure of Lyly,
whose
" Cupid and my Campaspe plafd"
was in print in 1584. Among the anthologies, the earliest
in which the true song-note is faintly heard is Clement
Robinson's Handful of Pleasant Delights, also of 1584.
The claim of Constable is now known to rest upon a
misprint, and the date of Campion's first songs, which,
in 1601, had so passed from hand to hand that they had
ELIZABETHAN SONGS 89
grown " as coin cracked in exchange/' is uncertain. An
examination of Greene's romances, in which poetry of all
kinds was included, shows a sudden alteration, a brisk
exchange of the old dull trudge for brilliant measures
and lively fancy about the year 1588, and in 1589 Lodge
abruptly throws aside his cumbersome pedestrian style.
Without falling into a dogmatic statement, these indica-
tions will suffice to show when the reformation, or rather
creation, of English song occurred.
What caused it ? No doubt the general efflorescence
of feeling, the new enlightenment, the new passion of
life, took this mode of expressing itself, as it took others,
in other departments of intellectual behaviour. But this
particular manifestation of tuneful, flowery fancy seems
to have been connected with two artistic tendencies, the
one the cultivation of music, the other the study of recent
French verse. The former is the more easy to follow.
The year 1588 was the occasion of a sudden outburst of
musical talent in this country ; it is, approximately, the
date of public recognition of the exquisite talent of Tallis,
Bird, and Dowland, and the foundation of their school
of national lute-melody. This species of chamber-music
instantly became the fashion, and remained so for at least
some quarter of a century. It was necessary to find
words for these airs, and the poems so employed were
obliged to be lucid, liquid, brief, and of a temper suited
to the gaiety and sadness of the instrument. The de-
mand created the supply, and from having been heavy
and dissonant to a painful degree, English lyrics suddenly
took a perfect art and sweetness. What is very strange
is that there was no transition. As soon as a composer
wanted a trill of pure song, such as a blackcap or a
whitethroat might have supplied, anonymous bards,
90 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
without the smallest training, were able to gush forth
with —
" O Love, they wrong thee much
That say thy sweet is bitter,
When thy rich fruit is such
As nothing can be sweeter.
Fair house of joy and bliss,
Where truest pleasure is,
I do adore thee;
I know thee what thou art,
I serve thee with my heart,
And fall before thee"
(a little miracle which we owe to Mr. Bullen's researches) ;
or, in a still lighter key, with —
" Now is the month of maying,
When merry lads are playing,
Each with his bonny /ass,
Upon the greeny grass;
The Spring, clad all in gladness,
Doth laugh at Winters sadness,
And to the bagpipes sound
The nymphs tread out their ground?
This joyous semi-classical gusto in life, this ecstasy in
physical beauty and frank pleasure, recalls the lyrical
poetry of France in the beginning of the sixteenth cen-
tury, and the influence of the Pleiade on the song-
writers and sonneteers of the Elizabethan age is not
questionable. It is, however, very difficult to trace this
with exactitude. The spirit of Ronsard and of Remy
Belleau, and something intangible of their very style, are
discerned in Lodge and Greene, but it would be danger-
ous to insist on this. A less important French writer,
however, Philippe Desportes, enjoyed, as we know, a
great popularity in Elizabethan England. Lodge says
of him that he was " ordinarily in every man's hands/'
ELIZABETHAN SONGS 91
and direct paraphrases of the amatory and of the reli-
gious verse of Desportes are frequent.
The trick of this light and brilliant sensuous verse once
learned, it took forms the most various and the most
delightful. In the hands of the best poets it rapidly
developed from an extreme naivete* and artless jigging
freedom to the fullest splendour of song. When Lodge,
in 1590, could write —
" Like to the clear in highest sphere,
Where all imperial beauty shines,
Of self-same colour is her hair,
Whether unfolded or in twines j
Heigh ho, fair Rosaline /
Her eyes are sapphires set in snow,
Refining heaven by every wink ;
The gods do fear whenas they glow,
And I do tremble, when I think,
Heigh ho, would she were mine ! "
there was no technical lesson left for the English lyric to
learn. But the old simplicity remained awhile side by
side with this gorgeous and sonorous art, and to the
combination we owe the songs of Shakespeare and Cam-
pion, the delicate mysteries of England's Helicon, the
marvellous short flights of verbal melody that star the
music-books down to 1615 and even later. But then the
flowers of English lyric began to wither, and the jewels
took their place ; a harder, less lucid, less spontaneous
method of song-writing succeeded.
Meanwhile, in close connection with the creation of
the Elizabethan lyric, the development of the sonnet had
been progressing. It passed through a crisis in 1580,
when THOMAS WATSON published his singularly success-
ful Hecatompathia, a volume of a hundred sonnets in a
vicious form of sixteen lines. In spite of the popularity of
92 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
this overrated volume, the metrical heresy did not gain
acceptance, and Watson himself, in a later collection, re-
jected it. In 1580 and 1581 Sidney was writing sonnets
in a shape not dangerously differing from the accepted
Italian standards, but he also encouraged the composition
of quatorzains, poems of fourteen lines ending in a rhymed
couplet. Unfortunately, this spurious form became
generally accepted in England, in defiance of all Conti-
nental precedent. It received imperious sanction from
the practice of Shakespeare and Spenser, and, in spite of
efforts made by Donne and others, this false sonnet was
in universal employment in England until the time of
Milton.
Perhaps in consequence of this radical error of con-
struction, which is fatal to the character of the poem,
the vast body of Elizabethan sonnets, of which more
than a thousand examples survive, suffers from a mono-
tony of style, from which even the gracious genius of
Spenser was not entirely able to escape in \i\sAmoretti. Of
course, infinitely the most valuable of these sonnet-
cycles — the only one, indeed, which still lives — is that
in which Shakespeare has enshrined the mysteries of a
Platonic passion of friendship, fervid and wayward to
the frontier of inverted instinct, which has been and
always will be the crux of commentators. Yet even here
it is to be noted that when Shakespeare leaves the soli-
tary relation which was moving him, at this certain
moment, so vehemently, he loses his magic and his
melody and falls into the same affected insipidity and
monotony as the other sonneteers of the age. The
Astrophel and Stella of Sidney, posthumously printed in
1591, let loose this new fashion of amorosity upon the
world, and the period during which the rage for cycles
JOHN HEYWOOD 93
of quatorzains lasted may be defined as from 1592 to
about 1598.
All this time, a prodigious new birth had been making
its appearance in English literature. A living drama was
created, which, almost without a childhood, sprang into
magnificent maturity. In the Middle Ages, the verna-
cular mysteries had enjoyed their day of popularity in
England as in other parts of Europe, and of these miracle
plays we still possess four cycles. After fourteenth-century
" miracles " had come the fifteenth-century " moralities "
and "moral interludes," which were the connecting
link between the Mediaeval and the Renaissance stage.
The latest of the inglorious mediaeval playwrights had
been JOHN HEYWOOD, whose rollicking Interludes were
probably acted between 1520 and 1540 ; after his time
the " morality " was an acknowledged survival, no longer
in sympathy with the needs of the age. Much has been
written, and much is doubtless still to be discovered, with
regard to English drama between the York Mysteries and
Gorbuduc, but it lies outside the scope of our inquiry.
These "miracles" and "merry plays" were almost en-
tirely devoid of purely literary merit, and were mainly of
service in preserving in England the habit of witnessing
and enjoying public performances on the stage.
Between the decay of the moralities and the foundation
of a genuine native drama, an attempt was made to intro-
duce into England a dramatic literature founded directly
on the ancients, — on the comedy of Plautus and the
tragedy of Seneca. This effort ultimately failed in this
country as completely as it succeeded in France, but it must
be remembered that it made a gallant struggle for exist-
ence during thirty years. Of these pseudo-classical plays
the earliest and most remarkable is the farce of Ralph Roister
94 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Bolster. This was written by the Head-master of Eton, Dr.
Nicholas Udall, about 1551, and was, therefore, almost
exactly contemporaneous with the opening of modern
comedy in France, in the Eugene of Jodelle (1552). If
these two plays are compared, their similarity of system is
remarkable ; each depends on the exploitation of a single
farcical incident, adapted from the classical form to local
conditions, with a certain simple insistence on analysis
of character. It is curious to examine these two almost
childish farces, which have a good deal in common, and
to reflect that from these apparently cognate seedlings
there presently sprang trees so widely distinct as Shake-
speare and Moliere. But it would perhaps be more cor-
rect to say that the seedling of which Ralph Roister Doister
was the cotyledon never really reached maturity at all,
but withered incontinently away. Other Terentian or
Plautan plays were Still's Gammer Gurtoris Needle (1566)
and Gascoigne's prose version of Ariosto's Gli Suppositi
(1561).
We have already spoken of the rage for translating
Seneca which invaded England at the beginning of
Elizabeth's reign. The anti- romantic spirit of these
tragedies, with its insistance on correctness and simpli-
city of plot, was contemplated by the English nation as
by the French, but while the latter accepted, the former
rejected it. The Gorboduc of Sackville is mainly interest-
ing as showing how the spirit of Seneca could harden
into stone or plaster a romantic genius of the most
ductile order. Thomas Hughes (1587) endeavoured to
make a positive pastiche of Seneca in an Arthurian
tragedy. Scholars and wits of the academic type per-
sisted in trying to force this exotic and entirely unsym-
pathetic product on unwilling English ears, and no less
THE CREATION OF A DRAMA 95
a poet than Samuel Daniel, in the full Shakespearean
heyday, polished in the true Senecan manner a stately
Cleopatra (1592) and a stiff Philotas. But the classical
tradition, thus amply presented, was deliberately and
finally rejected by English taste.
We have now reached the most extraordinary event in
the history of English literature — the sudden creation of
a secular, poetic drama — in the exercise of which letters
first became a profession in this country, and in the
course of the intensely rapid development of which the
greatest writer of the world was naturally evolved. It is
necessary to warn the general reader that the processes
of this development are extremely obscure, and that
almost all its early events are dated and correlated solely
by the conjectures of successive commentators, who have
to base their theories on atoms of fact or of still less solid
report. The dates supplied by the ordinary books of
reference are here exceedingly misleading, for the year
may be that either of the first performance, or of the
registration, or of the publication of each piece, and the
first and last of these may be divided by many years.
For instance, the extremely important tragedy of Dr.
Faustus was not printed until 1601, but it was acted in
1588 ; still more notably, several of Shakespeare's early
plays were still in MS. six years after his death. We get
our information from rudely kept and imperfect registers,
or from the diary of a single manager. Yet it is believed
that between 1580 and 1640 not fewer than two thou-
sand distinct plays were acted in England, and of these
more than five hundred are extant. Through this vast
crowd of imperfect witnesses, often with scarcely a clue,
the student of Elizabethan drama has to thread his path.
The researches of several students, extremely valuable
96 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
and original as they are, suffer from the lack of a sense
of the frail tenure of irrefutable fact on which their
systems are built up. The discovery of a single journal
kept from 1585 to 1600 might turn our dramatic histories
to something like waste paper. It seems proper to point
out that while no part of our inquiry is of a more romantic
interest, none is more uncertain and conjectural in its
detail.
It appears, however, that the result of the experiments
in farce and in Senecan melodrama, of which brief men-
tion has been made above, was, at first, confined to the
production of an abundance of rough and incoherent
plays, often no more than a succession of unconnected
scenes, addressed mainly to the eye. It is probable that
we possess a highly favourable example of these inco-
herent pieces in the Arraignment of Paris, by GEORGE
PEELE, in which a classical story is faintly treated, with
occasional passages of extraordinary suavity of blank
verse and grace of fancy. We retain, moreover, eight
so-called court -comedies by Lyly, produced between
1580 and 1590. These, mainly written in prose, are alle-
gorical and doubtless political satires, not at all dramatic
in character, although broken up into dialogue, and to
be considered rather in connection with the Euphues
than as plays. Lyly, notwithstanding, had his influence
in the romanticising of the English stage.
Out of the unpromising chaos of which these were the
floating islands which have preserved the most consist-
ency, there unexpectedly sprang the solid group of
important writers who immediately preceded Shake-
speare, and were, in fact, our first real dramatists, the
earliest to conceive of tragedy and comedy in their
modern sense. During the plague of 1586 all theatres
KYD 97
were closed, and it seems almost indubitable that
when they reopened they were catered for by play-
wrights to whom the idea of a new art had meanwhile
presented itself, and who had discussed its methods in
unison. Of these, some, like Kyd and Peele, had been
writing at an earlier time, in the old vague way ; others,
principally Greene, Lodge, and the anonymous author
of that brilliant domestic drama, Arden of Feversham, in
all probability now opened their dramatic career. In
some vague way, the original leadership in the new
fashion of writing seems attributable to THOMAS KYD,
who had been a translator not merely of Seneca, but
of the French Senecan, Garnier, and now saw the
error of his theories. Kyd is a sort of English Lazare
de Bai'f, the choragus who directed the new dramatists
and led them off. His early plays have disappeared,
and Kyd's archaic Spanish Tragedy, acted in 1587, shows
him still in the trammels of pseudo- classicism. This
fierce play, nevertheless, is pervaded by a wild wind of
romantic frenzy which marks an epoch in English drama.
In Peele's King David and Fair Bethsabe, perhaps a year
or two later, there is a surprising advance in melody and
the manipulation of blank verse.
Far more important, however, in every way, appears
to have been the action of ROBERT GREENE on drama.
Here again, unfortunately, much is left to conjecture,
since, while the novels of Greene have been largely pre-
served, his plays have mainly disappeared. It has been
taken for granted, but on what evidence it is hard to tell,
that his early dramas, produced perhaps between 1583
and 1586, were of the Senecan order, and that Greene
was converted to the new tragical manner by Kyd, or
even by Marlowe, who was several years his junior.
G
98 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
This theory is founded upon the close resemblance to
the style of Tamburlaine met with in the Orlando and
the Alphonsus of Greene ; but we cannot be assured that
the phenomenon is not a converse one, and the result of
Marlowe's improvement upon Greene's rough essays. It
is the undoubted merit of the older writer, that, though
he lacks vigour, concentration, and selection, he is more
truly the forerunner of the romantic Shakespeare than
any other of the school. In Greene, the new spirit of
Renaissance sensuousness, so unbridled in Marlowe, is
found to be restrained by those cool and exquisite moral
motives, the elaboration of which is the crowning glory
of Shakespeare. Faint and pale as Greene's historical
plays must be confessed to be, they are the first speci-
mens of native dramatic literature in which we see fore-
shadowed the genius of the romantic English stage. If
we turn to France again, where a moment ago we found
Jodelle so near to our own Udall, we see that in one
generation the two schools have flown apart, and that
while Greene and Kyd are prophesying of Shakespeare
with us, GreVin and Larivey have already taken a stride
towards Moliere.
By far the most brilliant personage in this pre-Shake-
spearian school, however, was CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.
Born in the same year as Shakespeare, he showed much
superior quickness of spirit, and was famous, nay, was dead,
almost before the greater writer had developed individual
character. Between 1587 and 1593 Marlowe was cer-
tainly the most prominent living figure in English poetry,
with the single exception of Spenser. Long obscured by
prejudice against the ultra-romanticism of his style and
the heterodoxy of his opinions, it may be that of late
Marlowe has been celebrated with some exaggeration
MARLOWE 99
of eulogy. He has been spoken of as manifestly in the
first order of poets, as of like rank with ^schylus, and
greater than Corneille. That his genius, cut off in his
thirtieth year by the hand of a murderer, had unfathom-
able possibilities, is not to be denied. His treatment
of blank verse, which, though he habitually uses it
monotonously and deadly, he can at a moment's notice
transform into a magnificent instrument of melody,
amounts, in these exceptional instances, to a positive
enchantment. He breaks loose from the prison of
mediaeval convention in thought and style as no Eng-
lishman had been able to do before him. He was an
" alchemist of eloquence," as Nash called him, who had
discovered several of the rarest secrets of magic in litera-
ture. To a rare degree he exemplified the passion, the
virility, the audacious, and, indeed, reckless intellectual
courage of the new English spirit. His epic paraphrase
of Hero and Leander shows him as intelligently enamoured
of plastic beauty as his tragedy of Edward II. proves him
alive to the long-forgotten art of dramatic psychology.
His was, indeed, a majestic imagination, and yet, judg-
ing Marlowe by what we actually possess of his writings,
we need to moderate the note of praise a little. By the
side of what Shakespeare was immediately to present to
us, the grandiloquence of Tamburlaine seems childish,
the necromantic scenes of Faustus primitive and empty,
the execution of the well-conceived Jew of Malta savage
and melodramatic. Only in reaching Edward II. do we
feel quite persuaded that Marlowe was not merely a poet
of amazing fire of imagination and melody of verse, but
also a consummate builder of plot and character. This
drama is probably almost exactly of the same date as the
Two Gentlemen of Verona, and was written at the same
ioo MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
age. There can be no question that in 1593 the per-
formance and even the promise of Marlowe were greater
than that of Shakespeare, who seems to take a leap for-
wards the moment that his formidable rival is removed.
All that can be now said is that, had both poets died on
the same day, it is certain that Marlowe would appear to
us the greater genius of the two. He is spasmodic and
imperfect, his felicities are flashes in a coarse and bom-
bastic obscurity of style, his notions of construction are
barbarously primitive ; yet he preserves the perennial
charm of one who has been a pioneer, who has cried in
the wilderness of literature.
The old notion that WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was an
untaught genius, warbling his wood-notes wild, has long
been discarded. We now perceive that he was " made "
not less than " born " ; that, whether " born " or " made,"
he was the creature of his time, and of a particular phase
of his time, to such an extent that he seems to us not so
much an Elizabethan poet as Elizabethan poetry itself.
His very life, of which enough is known to make him
personally more familiar to us than are most of his less
illustrious compeers, is more typical than individual in
its features. In Shakespeare an heroic epoch culminates;
he is the commanding peak of a vast group of mountains.
It is therefore vain to consider him as though he stood
alone, a solitary portent in a plain. More than any other
of the greatest poets of the world, he rises, by insensible
degrees, on the shoulders and the hands of a crowd of
precursors, yet so rapidly did this crowd collect that our
eyes are scarcely quick enough to perceive the process.
It is perhaps useful, in so very summary a sketch as this,
to take the date of Marlowe's death, 1593, and start by
seeing what Shakespeare had by that time done.
SHAKESPEARE 101
He was twenty-nine years of age. If he had come up
from Stratford in 1586, he had been already seven years
in London, but no mention of his name survives earlier
than Christmas 1593. He had published nothing, but
was then preparing Venus and Adonis for the press.
How had these seven years, then, during which Marlowe
had been so active and so prominent, been employed
by Shakespeare ? Unquestionably in learning the secret
of his art and in practising his hand on every variety
of exercise. It seems likely that he had become an
actor soon after his arrival in London, probably join-
ing that leading company, " the Lord Strange's men,"
when it was formed in 1589. Early in 1592 the Rose
Theatre was opened on the Bankside, and Shakespeare
continued, no doubt, to act there until the more commo-
dious Globe could receive his colleagues and himself in
1599. Mr. Sidney Lee believes that as early as 1591 the
actor began to be a dramatist. There is no evidence
of great precocity on Shakespeare's part. What he
abandoned early, he never learned to excel in ; as an
example, it may be pointed out that he remains inferior
both to Spenser and to Marlowe in the province of
rhymed narrative. To the great business of his life, the
composition of plays, he applied himself at first as an
apprentice. There can be little question that all his
early dramatic work consisted in the revising and com-
pleting of sketches by older men. These older men
would, no doubt, in the main be anonymous playwrights,
whose works are now as extinct as their names. But
Shakespeare would also imitate and recast the dramatic
sketches of those poets of an older generation who
had started the new comedy and the new tragedy in
England. From Peele, from Greene, from Marlowe
102 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
most of all, he would borrow, and that without stint or
scruple, exactly what he needed to form the basis of
his own composite and refulgent style.
That criticism has been too pedagogic in attempting to
fix what must, for lack of documentary evidence, be left
uncertain in detail, need not prevent us from admitting
that certain hypotheses about the early Shakespeare are,
at least, highly probable. The struggle between rhyme
and blank verse, gradually ending in the triumph of the
latter, is certainly an indication of date not to be despised.
That other hands than that of Shakespeare are to be
traced in the plays attributed to his youth must be
allowed, without too blind a confidence in plausible con-
jectures as to the authorship of the non-Shakespearian
portions. By the light of what patient investigation has
achieved, we find Shakespeare, by 1593, identified with
five or six plays, three of which may be held to be,
practically, his unaided and unsuggested work, Loves
Labour Lost, the Comedy of Errors, and the Two Gentlemen
of Verona. In these we particularly note the struggle
still going on for mastery between rhyme and blank
verse, and the general effect is one of brightness, grace,
and prettiness ; the key of feeling is subdued, the deeper
wells of human passion are left untroubled. Each of
these plays — even the Two Gentlemen, which suggested
greater things — leaves an impression of sketchiness, of
slightness, on the mind, when we compare it with later
masterpieces.
It is difficult not to be persuaded that in 1593 some-
thing of critical import happened which revealed his own
genius to Shakespeaie. Marlowe died; the jealousy of
the surviving elder playwrights broke out angrily against
the Joannes Factotum from Stratford ; the play-houses
SHAKESPEARE 103
were again closed on account of the plague ; it is just
possible that Shakespeare went to Germany and Italy.
Several of these causes, perhaps combined to intensify
his intellectual vitality. His company, now under the
patronage of Lord Hunsdon, set to work again early in
1594. Shakespeare printed Venus and Adonis, a romance
of the vain pursuit of unwilling adolescent beauty. This
was perhaps the period of the agony of the Sonnets;
but Shakespeare soon left transitory and tentative things
behind him, and prepared for that solemn and specta-
cular energy on the results of which the world has
been gazing in wonder ever since, that vigour which was
to be exercised for eighteen years upon the consumma-
tion of English poetry. Between 1593, when drama was
still in its essence primitive, and the close of the century,
Shakespeare gave his attention mainly to history-plays
and to idyllic comedies, reaching in the latter the highest
level which this species of drama has attained in any
language ; Midsummer Night's Dream (1595) leading us
on by romantic plays, each more exquisite than the last,
to a positive culmination of blossoming fancy in the As
You Like It, of 1599.
With Alfs Well that Ends Well and Julius Ccesar a new
departure may be traced. Shakespeare seems suddenly to
take a more austere and caustic view of life, and expresses
it in sinister romance, or, more triumphantly, in tragedy
of the fullest and most penetrating order. In 1601 he
took an old play of Hamlet, perhaps originally written
by Kyd, and rewrote it, possibly not for the first time.
This final revision has remained by far the most durably
popular of Shakespeare's works upon the stage. He
had now reached the very summits of his genius, and if we
oblige ourselves to express an opinion as to the supreme
104 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
moment in his career, the year 1605 presently offers us
an approximate date. We stand on the colossal peak of
King Lear, with Othello on our right hand and Macbeth
on our left, the sublime masses of Elizabethan mountain
country rolling on every side of us, yet plainly dominated
by the extraordinary central cluster of aiguilles on which
we have planted ourselves. This triple summit of the
later tragedies of Shakespeare forms the Mount Everest
of the poetry of the world. If Macbeth dates from 1606,
there were still four years of splendid production left to
the poet, work of recovered serenity, of infinite sweetness,
variety, and enchantment, but, so far as concerns grasp
of the huge elements of human life, a little less heroic
than the almost supernatural group of tragedies which
had culminated in King Lear. And then, probably in
the spring of 1611, the magician, fresh from the ringing
melodies of A Winter's Tale and of the Tempest, with
all his powers and graces fresh about him, breaks his
staff, leaves his fragments for Fletcher to finish, and
departs for Stratford and the oblivion of a civic life.
After five years' silence — incomprehensible, fabulous
silence in the very prime of affluent song — Shakespeare
dies, only fifty-two years of age, in 1616.
From 1593 to 1610, therefore, the volcanic forces of
Elizabethan literature were pre-eminently at work.
During these seventeen years Spenser was finishing the
Faerie Queen, Bacon and Hooker were creating modern
prose, Jon son was active, and Beaumont and Fletcher
beginning to be prominent. These, to preserve our moun-
tain simile, were majestic masses in the landscape, but the
central cone, the truncation of which would reduce the
structure to meanness, and would dwarf the entire scheme
of English literature, was Shakespeare. Very briefly, we
SHAKESPEARE 105
may remind ourselves of what his work for the press
in those years consisted. He published no dramatic
work until 1597. The plays to which his name is, with
more or less propriety, attached, are thirty -eight in
number; of these, sixteen appeared in small quarto form
during the poet's lifetime, and the title-pages of nine or
ten of these "stolen and surreptitious" editions, origin-
ally sold at sixpence each, bear his name. We have
the phenomenon, therefore, of a bibliographical in-
difference to posterity rare even in that comparatively
unlettered age. It is curious to think that, if all Shake-
speare's MSS. had been destroyed when he died, we
should now possess no Macbeth and no Othello ', no Twelfth
Night and no As You Like It. In 1623 the piety of two
humble friends, Heminge and Condell — whose names
deserve to be carved on the forefront of the Temple of
Fame — preserved for us the famous folio text. But the
conditions under which that text was prepared from what
are vaguely called Shakespeare's " papers " must have
been, and obviously were, highly uncritical. The folio
contained neither Pericles nor the Two Noble Kinsmen,
yet participation in these is plausibly claimed for
Shakespeare. What other omissions were there, what
intrusion of lines not genuinely his ?
This question has occupied an army of investigators,
whose elaborate and conflicting conjectures have not
always been illuminated with common sense. More than
a hundred years ago, one of the wittiest of our poets
represented the indignant spirit of Shakespeare as assur-
ing his emendators that it would be
" Better to bottom tarts and cheesecakes nice
Than thus be patched and cobbled in one's grave?
and since that date whole libraries have been built over
io6 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
the complaining ghost. Within the last quarter of a
century, systems by which to test the authenticity and
the chronology of the plays have been produced with
great confidence, metrical formulas which are to act as
reagents and to identify the component parts of a given
passage with scientific exactitude. Of these "verse-
tests" and "pause-tests" no account can here be given.
That the results of their employment have been curious
and valuable shall not be denied ; but there is already
manifest in the gravest criticism a reaction against excess
of confidence in them. At one time it was supposed
that the "end-stopt" criterium, for instance, might be
dropped, like a chemical substance, on the page of Shake-
speare, and would there immediately and finally deter-
mine minute quantities of Peele or Kyd, that a fragment
of Fletcher would turn purple under it, or a greenish
tinge betray a layer of Rowley. It is not thus that poetry
is composed; and this ultra-scientific theory showed a
grotesque ignorance of the human pliability of art.
Yet, although the mechanical artifice of this class of
criticism carries with it its own refutation, it cannot but
have been useful for the reader of Shakespeare that this
species of alchemy should be applied to his text. It has
dispersed the old superstition that every word printed
within the covers of the folio must certainly be Shake-
speare's in the sense in which the entire text of Tennyson
or of Victor Hugo belongs to those poets. We are now
content to realise that much which is printed there was
adapted, edited, or accepted by Shakespeare ; that he
worked in his youth in the studios of others, and that in
middle life younger men painted on his unfinished can-
vases. But there must be drawn a distinction between
Shakespeare's share in the general Elizabethan dramatisa-
SHAKESPEARE 107
tion of history, where anybody might lend a hand, and
the creation of his own sharply individualised imagina-
tive work. If the verse-tester comes probing in Macbeth
for bits of Webster, we send him packing about his busi-
ness ; if he likes to analyse Henry VL he can do no harm,
and may make some curious discoveries. With the re-
velation of dramatic talent in England there had sprung
up a desire to celebrate the dynastic glories of the country
in a series of chronicle-plays. It is probable that every
playwright of the period had a finger in this gallery of
historical entablatures, and Shakespeare, too, a modest
artisan, stood to serve his apprenticeship here before in
Richard III. he proved that his independent brush could
excel the brilliant master-worker Marlowe in Marlowe's
own approved style. He proceeded to have a chronicle
in hand to the close of his career, but he preserved for
this class of work the laxity of evolution and lack of
dramatic design which he had learned in his youth ; and
thus, side by side with plays the prodigious harmony of
which Shakespeare alone could have conceived or exe-
cuted, we have an epical fragment, like Henry F., which
is less a drama by one particular poet, than a fold of the
vast dramatic tapestry woven to the glory of England by
the combined poetic patriotism of the Elizabethans. Is
the whole of what we read here implicit Shakespeare,
or did another hand combine with his to decorate this
portion of the gallery ? It is impossible to tell, and the
reply, could it be given, would have no great critical
value. Henry V. is not Othello.
One of the penalties of altitude is isolation, and in re-
viewing rapidly the state of literary feeling in England in
Elizabethan and Jacobean times, we gain the impression
that the highest qualities of Shakespeare remained in-
io8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
visible to his contemporaries. To them, unquestionably,
he was a stepping-stone to the superior art of Jonson, to
the more fluid and obvious graces of Beaumont and
Fletcher.- Of those whose inestimable privilege it was to
meet Shakespeare day by day, we have no evidence that
one perceived the supremacy of his genius. The case is
rather curious, for it was not that anything austere or
arrogant in himself or his work repelled recognition, or
that those who gazed were blinded by excess of light.
On the contrary, it seemed to his own friends that they
appreciated his amiable, easy talent at its proper value ;
he was " gentle " Shakespeare to them, and they loved
both the man and his poetry. But that he excelled them
all at every point, as the oak excels the willow, this, had
it been whispered at the Mermaid, would have aroused
smiles of derision. The elements of Shakespeare's per-
fection were too completely fused to attract vulgar wonder
at any one point, and those intricate refinements of style
and of character which now excite in us an almost
superstitious amazement did not appeal to the rough
and hasty Elizabethan hearer. In considering Shake-
speare's position during his lifetime, moreover, it must
not be forgotten that his works made no definite appeal
to the reading class until after his death. The study of
" Shakespeare " as a book cannot date further back than
1623.
For another century the peak of the mountain was
shrouded in mists, although its height was vaguely con-
jectured. Dryden, our earliest modern critic, gradually
perceived Shakespeare's greatness, and proclaimed it in
his Prefaces. Meanwhile, and on until a century after
Shakespeare's death, this most glorious of English names
had not penetrated across the Channel, and was abso-
SHAKESPEARE 109
lutely unrecognised in France. Voltaire introduced
Shakespeare to French readers in 1731, and Hamlet
was translated by Ducis in 1769. Here at home, in the
generations of Pope and Johnson, the magnitude of Shake-
speare became gradually apparent to all English critics,
and with Garrick his plays once more took the stage.
Yet into all the honest admiration of the eighteenth
century there entered a prosaic element ; the great-
ness was felt, but vaguely and painfully. At the end of
the age of Johnson a generation was born to whom, for
the first time, Shakespeare spoke with clear accents.
Coleridge and Hazlitt expounded him to a world so
ready to accept him, that in regarding the great Revival
of 1800 Shakespeare seems almost as completely a
factor in it as Wordsworth himself. In the hands of
such critics, for the first time, the fog cleared away
from the majestic mountain, and showed to the gaze
of the world its varied and harmonious splendour.
That conception of Shakespeare, which is to-day uni-
versal, we owe, in a very great measure, to the intuition
of S. T. Coleridge.
It was the poet-critics of one hundred years ago who
made the discovery that Shakespeare was not an unac-
countable warbler of irregular rustic music, but the
greatest of the poetic artists of the world ; that in a cer-
tain way he sums up and fulfils the qualities of national
character, as Dante and Calderon, Moliere and Goethe
do, but to a still higher and fuller degree. It was they
who first made manifest to us that in the complex fulness
of Shakespeare's force, its equal potency in passion and
beauty and delicate sweetness, in tragic rage and idyllic
laughter, in acrid subtlety and infantile simplicity, we
have the broadest, the most substantial, the most elaborate
no MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
specimen of poetical genius yet vouchsafed to mankind.
Whatever there is in life is to be found in Shakespeare ;
there rises the culminating expression of man's happiest
faculty, the power of transfiguring his own adventures,
instincts, and aspirations in the flushed light of memory,
of giving to what has never existed a reality and a dura-
bility greater than the gods can render to their own
habitations.
The deep study of Shakespeare is a disastrous pre-
paration for appreciating his contemporaries. He rises
out of all measurement with them by comparison, and
we are tempted to repeat that unjust trope of Landor's
in which he calls the other Elizabethan poets mushrooms
growing round the foot of the Oak of Arden. They had,
indeed, noble flashes of the creative light, but Shake-
speare walks in the soft and steady glow of it. As he
proceeds, without an effort, life results ; his central quali-
ties are ceaseless motion, ceaseless growth. In him, too,
characteristics are found fully formed which the rest of
the world had at that time barely conceived. His liber-
ality, his tender respect for women, his absence from
prejudice, his sympathy for every peculiarity of human
emotion — these are miraculous, but the vigour of his
imagination explains the marvel. He sympathised be-
cause he comprehended, and he comprehended because
of the boundless range of his capacity. The quality in
which Shakespeare is unique among the poets of the
world, and that which alone explains the breadth, the
unparalleled vivacity and coherency of the vast world of
his imagination, is what Coleridge calls his " omnipresent
creativeness," his power of observing everything, of for-
getting nothing, and of combining and reissuing impres-
sions in complex and infinite variety. In this godlike
BEN JONSON in
gift not the most brilliant of his great contemporaries
approached him.
With the turn of the century a reaction against pure
imagination began to make itself felt in England, and
this movement found a perfect expositor in BEN JONSON.
Born seven years later than Shakespeare, he worked, like
his fellows, in Henslowe's manufactory of romantic drama,
until, in consequence of running a rapier through a man
in 1598, the fierce poetic bricklayer was forced to take
up an independent position. The immediate .result was
the production of a comedy, Every Man in his Humour,
in which a new thing was started in drama, the study of
what Jonson called " recent humours or manners of men
that went along with the times." In other words, in the
midst of that luxurious romanticism which had cul-
minated in Shakespeare, Ben Jonson set out to be what
we now call a "realist" or a "naturalist." In doing
this, he went back as rigidly as he could to the methods
of Plautus, and fixed his "grave and consecrated eyes"
on an academic scheme by which poetry was no longer
to be a mere entertainment but a form of lofty mental
gymnastic. Jonson called his solid and truculent pic-
tures of the age "comic satires," and his intellectual
arrogance combining with his contempt for those who
differed from him, soon called down upon his proud and
rugged head all the hostility of Parnassus. About the
year 1600 Jonson's pugnaciousness had roused against
him an opposition in which, perhaps, Shakespeare alone
forbore to take a part. But Jonson was a formidable
antagonist, and when he fought with a brother poet, he
had a trick, in a double sense, of taking his pistol from
him and beating him too.
A persistent rumour, constantly refuted, will have it
ri2 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
that Shakespeare was one of those whom Jonson hated.
The most outspoken of misanthropes did not, we may be
sure, call another man " star of poets " and " soul of the
age " without meaning what he said ; but there may have
been a sense in which, while loving Shakespeare and
admiring his work, Jonson disapproved of its tendency.
It could hardly be otherwise. He delighted in an iron
style, hammered and twisted ; he must have thought that
Shakespeare's "excellent phantasy, brave notions, and
gentle expressions" had a flow too liquid and facile.
Jonson, with his Latin paraphrases, his stiff academic
procession of ideas, could but dislike the flights and
frenzies of his far less learned but brisker and airier
companion. And Jonson, be it remembered, had the
age on his side. To see Julius Ccesar on the boards
might be more amusing, but surely no seriously minded
Jacobean could admit that it was so instructive as a per-
formance of Sejanus or of Catiline, which gave a chapter
of good sound Roman history, without lyric flowers or
ornaments of style, in hard blank verse. Even the
ponderous comedies of Ben Jonson were put forth by
him, and were accepted by his contemporaries, as very
serious contributions to the highest culture. What other
men called "plays" were "works" to Jonson, as the old
joke had it.
Solid and of lasting value as are the productions of
Jonson, the decline begins to be observed in them.
Even if we confine our attention to his two noblest
plays — the Fox (1605) and the Alchemist (1610) — we
cannot but admit that here, in the very heyday and
glory of the English Renaissance, a fatal element is
introduced. Charm, ecstasy, the free play of the emo-
tions, the development of individual character — these are
BEN JONSON 113
no longer the sole solicitude of the poet, who begins to
dogmatise and educate, to prefer types to persons and
logic to passion. It is no wonder that Ben Jonson was
so great a favourite with the writers of the Restoration,
for he was their natural parent. With all their rules
and unities, with all their stickling for pseud-Aristotelian
correctness, they were the intellectual descendants of
that poet who, as Dryden said, "was willing to give
place to the classics in all things." For the next fifty
years English poetry was divided between loyalty to
Spenser and attraction to Ben Jonson, and every year
the influence of the former dwindled while that of the
latter increased.
Not the less does Ben Jonson hold a splendid and
durable place in our annals. His is the most vivid and
picturesque personal figure of the times ; he is the most
learned scholar, the most rigorous upholder of the dignity
of letters, the most blustering soldier and insulting dueller
in the literary arena ; while his personal characteristics,
" the mountain belly and the rocky face," the capacity for
drawing young persons of talent around him and capti-
vating them there, the volcanic alternations of fiery wit
and smouldering, sullen arrogance, appeal irresistibly
to the imagination, and make the "arch-poet" live in
history. But his works, greatly admired, are little read.
They fail to hold any but a trained attention ; their
sober majesty and massive concentration are highly
praiseworthy, but not in a charming direction. His
indifference to beauty tells against him. Jonson, even
in his farces, is ponderous, and if we acknowledge " the
flat sanity and smoke-dried sobriety" of his best pas-
sages, what words can we find for the tedium of his
worst ? He was an intellectual athlete of almost un-
H
H4 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
equalled vigour, who chose to dedicate the essentially
prosaic forces of his mind to the art of poetry, because
the age he lived in was pre-eminently a poetic one.
With such a brain and such a will as his he could not
but succeed. If he had stuck to bricklaying, he must
have rivalled Inigo Jones. But the most skilful and
headstrong master - builder cannot quite become an
architect of genius.
There is no trace of the strict Jonsonian buskin in
FRANCIS BEAUMONT and JOHN FLETCHER ; as even con-
temporary critics perceived, they simply continued the
pure romanticism of Shakespeare, and they seemed to
carry it further and higher. We no longer think their
noon brighter than his " dawning hours," but we admit
that in a certain sense the great Twin Brethren pro-
ceeded beyond him in their warm, loosely-girdled plays.
They exaggerated all the dangerous elements which he
had held restrained ; they proceeded, in fact, downwards,
towards the inevitable decadence, gay with all the dol-
phin colours of approaching death. It is difficult to
assign to either writer his share in the huge and florid
edifice which bears their joint names. Their own
age attributed to Fletcher the "keen treble" and to
Beaumont the " deep bass " — comedy, that is, and
tragedy respectively. Modern investigation has found
less and less in their work which can be definitely
ascribed to Beaumont, who, indeed, died so early as
1616. It is generally believed that the partnership lasted
no longer than from 1608 to 1611, and that the writing
of only some dozen out of the entire fifty-five plays was
involved in it. Were it not that the very noblest are
among these few, which include the Maids Tragedy and
Philaster, A King and No King and the Knight of the
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 115
Burning Pestle, we might almost disregard the shadowy
name of Beaumont, and treat this whole mass of
dramatic literature as belonging to Fletcher, who went
on writing alone, or with Massinger, until shortly before
his death in 1625. The chronological sequence of these
dramas, only about ten of which were printed during
Fletcher's lifetime, remains the theme of bold and con-
tradictory conjecture.
We have to observe in these glowing and redundant
plays a body of lyrico-dramatic literature, proceeding
directly from and parallel to the models instituted by
Shakespeare, and continued for nearly ten years after his
death. Nothing else in English is so like Shakespeare as
a successful scene from a romantic comedy of Fletcher.
Superficially, the language, the verse, the mental attitude
often seem absolutely identical, and it is a singular
tribute to the genius of the younger poet that he can
endure the parallel for a moment. It is only for a
moment ; if we take Fletcher at his very best — in the
ardent and melodious scenes of the False One, for in-
stance, where, amid an array of the familiar Roman
names, we find him desperately and directly challenging
comparison with Antony and Cleopatra — we have only to
turn from the shadow back to the substance to see how
thin and unreal is this delicately tinted, hectic, and
phantasmal picture of passion by the side of Shake-
speare's solid humanity. Jonson has lost the stage
because his personages are not human beings, but types
of character, built up from without, and vitalised by no
specific or personal springs of action. Beaumont and
Fletcher are equally dead from the theatrical point of
view, but from an opposite cause : their figures have not
proved too hard and opaque for perennial interest, but
n6 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
too filmy and undulating ; they possess not too much,
but too little solidity. They are vague embodiments of
instincts, faintly palpitating with desires and emulations
and eccentricities, but not built up and set on firm feet
by the practical genius of dramatic creation.
Yet no conception of English poetry is complete with-
out a reference to these beautiful, sensuous, incoherent
plays. The Alexandrine genius of Beaumont and Fletcher
was steeped through and through in beauty; and so
quickly did they follow the fresh morning of Elizabethan
poetry that their premature sunset was tinged with dewy
and "fresh-quilted" hues of dawn. In the short span
of their labours they seem to take hold of the entire
field of the drama, from birth to death, and Fletcher's
quarter of a century helps us to see how rapid and direct
was the decline. If the talent of Jonson had been more
flexible, if the taste of Fletcher had not been radically
so relaxed and luxurious, these two great writers should
have carried English drama on after the death of
Shakespeare — with less splendour, of course, yet with
its character unimpaired. Unfortunately, neither of
these excellent men, though all compact with talent,
had the peculiar gift opportune to the moment's need,
and ten years undid what it had taken ten years to
create and ten more to sustain.
Around these leading figures there are grouped an
infinite number of dramatists, some almost as deserving
as Fletcher and Jonson of detailed notice, others scarcely
lifted visibly out of the bewildering crowd of playwrights.
Before the close of the reign of James I. it is believed
that more than a thousand plays had been produced in
London, and but few of these were without some spark
of psychological audacity or lyrical beauty. This is the
MARSTON: CHAPMAN 117
serried mountain-mass which, on a hasty glance, seems
no more than the shoulders and bastions out of which
the huge peak of Shakespeare rises. Most of the more
salient of these secondary and tertiary dramatists are
exceedingly unequal, and assert the fame they pos-
sess on the score of one or two brilliant fragments
exalted by Lamb or by later critics, by whom the cult of
these writers has been pushed to some extravagance. It
must suffice here to pass rapidly over the claims of these
playwrights. Among pure Elizabethans, fellow-workers
with the young Shakespeare, THOMAS DEKKER claims
respect for a certain pitiful compassionateness, a tender
lyric sweetness, which occasionally finds very delicate
expression in brief passages which may atone for pages
upon pages of flabby incoherence. JOHN MARSTON,
whose versification owes much to Marlowe, was a harsh
and strident satirist, a screech-owl among the singing-
birds ; in the first decade of the seventeenth century
he produced a series of vigorous rude tragedies and
comedies which possess a character of their own, not
sympathetic at all, but unique in its consistent note of
caustic misanthropy, and often brilliantly written.
The ponderous GEORGE CHAPMAN, who has other and
better claims upon us than his dramas offer — since he was
the admirable translator of Homer — issued between 1598
and 1608 a series of bombastic historical tragedies and
loosely articulated romantic comedies which have been
admired by thorough-going fanatics of the Elizabethan
drama, but in which, to a common observer, the faults
seem vastly to outweigh the rare and partial merits.
The errors of the school, its extravagance of sentiment,
its brutal insensibility, its turgid diction, its mean and
cruel estimate of women, its neglect of dramatic struc-
n8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
ture, its incoherence, are nowhere seen in greater relief
than in the laborious dramas of Chapman.
Of these men we can form a more or less distinct per-
sonal impression. Others, of higher merit as writers for
the stage, are absolutely shrouded voices. In the centre
of the choir, but quite invisible, stands the figure of
THOMAS HEYWOOD, a voluble secondary writer in the
class of Shakespeare and Fletcher, claiming " an entire
hand, or at least a main finger," in no fewer than 220
plays. He is remarkable chiefly for a pleasing medio-
crity in picturesqueness, a prosaic, even spirit of flowing
romance. Heywood rises once to real force of emotion
in the naked, sombre atonement of A Woman Killed with
Kindness. To THOMAS MIDDLETON the sweet uniformity
of Heywood seemed insipid, and he strove after constant
effect in violent complexity of plot and the vicissitudes
of piratical adventure. He attempted every species of
drama, and his reputation is weakened by his careless
comedies, of which too many have survived. Had none
but those fantastic imbroglios the Changeling and the
Spanish Gipsy come down to us, Middleton would rank
higher among the English poets than he does. Although
a great many of his plays are lost, he is still weighed
down by his abundance. For many years he was
associated with William Rowley, an actor -author of
whom little definite is known.
Much greater than these, greater in some respects than
any but Shakespeare, is JOHN WEBSTER, who requires
but a closer grasp of style and a happier architecture to
rank among the leading English poets. The Duchess of
Malfy, which is believed to have been produced in 1612,
has finer elements of tragedy than exist elsewhere out-
side the works of Shakespeare. In a ruder form, we find
WEBSTER 119
the same distinguished intensity of passion in the earlier
White Devil. Webster has so splendid a sense of the
majesty of death, of the mutability of human pleasures,
and of the velocity and weight of destiny, that he rises to
conceptions which have an ^Eschylean dignity ; but, un-
happily, he grows weary of sustaining them, his ideas of
stage-craft are rudimentary and spectacular, and his
single well-constructed play, Appius and Virginia, has a
certain disappointing tameness. Most of the Elizabethan
and Jacobean dramatists are now read only in extracts,
and this test is highly favourable to Webster, who strikes
us as a very noble poet driven by the exigencies of fashion
to write for a stage, the business of which he had not
studied and in which he took no great interest. Of
CYRIL TOURNEUR, in whom the qualities of Webster are
discovered driven to a grotesque excess, the same may
be said. His two lurid tragedies surpass in horror of
iniquity and profusion of ghastly innuendo all other
compositions of their time. Cyril Tourneur is prince
of those whose design is " to make our flesh creep," and
occasionally he still succeeds. This list of playwrights
might be indefinitely lengthened. Nothing has been
said of Day, of Chettle, of Field, of Tailor; but our
general survey would be merely confused by an attempt
to distinguish too clearly the vanishing points in the
crowded panorama.
In this glowing spring-tide of Elizabeth, all human
speech so naturally turned to verse that men of high
talent became poets when nature perhaps intended
them to be historians or philosophers. In the laureate,
SAMUEL DANIEL, we meet with the first example of poetry
beginning to wither on the bough. Daniel's grace,
smoothness, and purity seem to belong to a much later
120 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
period, and to a time when the imagination had lost its
early fervour. He wrote lengthy historical poems, be-
sides numerous sonnets, masques, and epistles. These
last, which have the merit of brevity, are Daniel's most
attractive contribution to English literature, and are singu-
larly elegant in their stately, limpid flow of moral reflec-
tion. In prose, Daniel showed himself one of the most
instructed of our early critics of poetry. Another philo-
sophical writer, on whose style the turbulent passion of
the age has left but little mark, is the great Irish jurist,
Sir JOHN DAVYS, who, in his youth, composed several
poems of the highest merit in their limited field. In
his Nosce Teipsum, a treatise of considerable length and
perspicuous dignity, dealing with the immortality of the
soul, Davys was the first to employ on a long flight
the solemn four-line stanza of which the type is supplied
by the Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Three years
earlier, in 1596, he had printed a most ingenious philo-
sophical poem, Orchestra, in praise of dancing ; but the
delicacy of Davys's talent is best seen in a little work
less known than either of these, the Hymns of Astrcea.
Both Daniel and Davys offer early and distinguished
examples of the employment of imagination to illuminate
elaborate mental processes.
Each of these men might easily have given his talent
all to prose. Their friend and companion, MICHAEL
DRAYTON, was not a better poet, but he was much more
persistently devoted to the cultivation of the art of verse,
and regarded himself as absolutely consecrated to the
Muses. During a life more prolonged than that of most
of his contemporaries, he never ceased to write — fever-
ishly, crudely, copiously, very rarely giving to his work
that polish which it needed to make it durable. Of his lyri-
DRAYTON 121
cal vocation there could be no doubt ; yet, if Daniel and
Davys were prose-men who wrote poetry, Drayton was
a prosaic poet. His masterpiece of topographical inge-
nuity, the Poly-Olbion, a huge British gazetteer in broken-
backed twelve-syllable verse, is a portent of misplaced
energy. In his earlier historical pieces Drayton more
closely resembles Daniel, whom, however, he exceeds in
his lyrics as much as he limps behind him in his attempts
at gnomic verse. Drayton writes like a man, and a few
of his odes are still read with fervour ; but his general
compositions, in spite of all their variety, abundance, and
accomplishment, fail to interest us ; a prosy flatness
spoils his most ambitious efforts. He helps us to com-
prehend the change which was to come in sixty years,
and through Cowley he prophesies of Dryden. Now,
did space permit, we should speak of the coarse and fus-
cous satirists of the Elizabethan time, and of such sym-
bolists as the fantastic Lord Brooke. But these, interesting
as in themselves they are, must hardly detain us here.
In the opening years of the seventeenth century the
imitation of Spenser was cultivated by many disciples,
among whom the most interesting were the Fletchers,
cousins of the dramatist, and William Browne of Tavi-
stock. In this group the predominant talent was that of
GILES FLETCHER, to whom, indeed, the rarer quality can
scarcely be denied. He was the author of the finest reli-
gious poem produced in English literature between the
Vision of Piers Plowman and Paradise Lost. In several
passages of his fourfold Chrisfs Victory and Triumph
(1610) Giles Fletcher solved the difficult problem of how
to be at once gorgeous and yet simple, majestic and yet
touching. At his apogee he surpasses his very master,
for his imagination lifts him to a spiritual sublimity. In
122 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
the beatific vision in his fourth canto we are reminded
of no lesser poem than the Paradiso. It is right to say
that these splendours are not sustained, and that Giles
Fletcher is often florid and sometimes merely trivial.
The sonorous purity and elevation of Giles Fletcher at his
best give more than a hint of the approaching Milton, and
he represents the Spenserian tradition at its very highest.
But a poet was in the field who was to sweep the plea-
sant flowers of the disciples of Spenser before him as
ruthlessly as a mower cuts down the daisies with his
scythe. In this age of mighty wits and luminous
imaginations, the most robust and the most elaborately
trained intellect was surely that of JOHN DONNE. Born
as early as 1573, and associated with many of the purely
Elizabethan poets, we have yet the habit of thinking of
him as wholly Jacobean, and the instinct is not an
erroneous one, for he begins a new age. His poems
were kept in manuscript until two years after his death
in 1631, but they were widely circulated, and they exer-
cised an extraordinary effect. Long before any edition
of Donne was published, the majority of living English
verse-writers were influenced by the main peculiarities
of his style. He wrote satires, epistles, elegies, sonnets,
and lyrics, and although it is in the last mentioned that
his beauties are most frequent, the essence of Donne,
the strange personal characteristic which made him so
unlike every one else, is redolent in all. He rejected
whatever had pleased the Elizabethan age ; he threw the
fashionable humanism to the winds ; he broke up the
accepted prosody ; he aimed at a totally new method in
diction, in illustration, in attitude. He was a realist, who
studded his writings with images drawn from contempo-
rary life. For grace and mellifluous floridity he substi-
DONNE 123
tuted audacity, intensity, a proud and fulgurant darkness,
as of an intellectual thunder-cloud.
Unfortunately, the genius of Donne was not equal to
his ambition and his force. He lacked the element
needed to fuse his brilliant intuitions into a classical
shape. He aimed at becoming a great creative reformer,
but he succeeded only in disturbing and dislocating lite-
rature. He was the blind Samson in the Elizabethan
gate, strong enough to pull the beautiful temple of
Spenserian fancy about the ears of the worshippers, but
powerless to offer them a substitute. What he gave to
poetry in exchange for what he destroyed was almost
wholly deplorable. For sixty years the evil taint of
Donne rested on us, and our tradition is not free from it
yet. To him — almost to him alone — we owe the tortured
irregularities, the monstrous pedantries, the alembicated
verbiage of the decline. " Rhyme's sturdy cripple," as
Coleridge called him, Donne is the father of all that is
exasperating, affected, and "metaphysical" in English
poetry. He represented, with Marino in Italy, Gongora
in Spain, and Bartas and D'Aubigne* in France, that
mania for an inflamed and eccentric extravagance of
fancy which was racing over Europe like a hideous new
disease ; and the ease and rapidity with which the infec-
tion was caught, shows how ready the world of letters
was to succumb to such a plague. That Donne, in
flashes, and especially in certain of his lyrics, is still able
to afford us imaginative ecstasy of the very highest order
— he has written a few single lines almost comparable
with the best of Shakespeare's — must not blind us, in a
general survey, to the maleficence of his genius. No one
has injured English writing more than Donne, not even
Carlyle.
124 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Side by side with the magnificent efflorescence of
poetical and particularly of dramatic talent in England,
there was a certain development of prose also, but it was
curiously inadequate to the needs of the race. With
relative exceptions, prose remained, till the end of this
period, either rude or else fantastic, and in either case
encumbered. With Spenser and Marlowe and Shake-
speare, there is but one master of prose worthy to be
mentioned, and that is the "obscure, harmless" priest
who wrote the Ecclesiastical Polity. RICHARD HOOKER
was of the generation of Raleigh, Sidney, and Fulke
Greville, those paladins of the English Renaissance, and
where he sat with downcast eyes, henpecked, withdrawn
into the " blessed bashfulness " of his little country study,
he reflected in the intellectual order their splendid qualities.
He had been for a few years Master of the Temple, where
he "spake pure Canterbury," that is to say, proclaimed
a conservative Anglicanism as opposed to the " Geneva "
of the Calvinists. But his masterpiece was prepared for
the press in the retreat of Boscombe, under the scourge
of his terrible mother-in-law. The first four books of it
appeared in 1594, another in 1597, and then in 1600
Hooker died prematurely, "worn out, not with age, but
study and holy mortifications." The last three books of
the Polity were ready for the press, but within a few days
of his death they had disappeared, and what we now
possess in their place is of doubtful authenticity.
Hooker is the first important philosophical and religious
English writer. He is the earliest to perceive the import-
ance of evolution, the propriety of preparing and conduct-
ing to a conclusion a great, consistent scheme. He sees
things clearly and coolly in an age when controversial
passion and political turmoil turned all other men's blood
HOOKER 125
to fever. When he was at the Temple he had felt the
pulse of life ; he was profoundly aware of the demands
and requirements of the age ; but something infinitely
serene in his intellectual nature lifted Hooker, even in the
act of disputation, far above the wrangling of the sects.
In his masterpiece, the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, we
find no trace of that violent provinciality which is so tire-
some in Elizabethan prose ; the author spreads his wings
broadly and gently, he dismisses all ideas which are not
germane to humanity. This singular majesty of Hooker
is aided by the fact that his First Book, in which the
reader learns to become acquainted with him, particu-
larly exemplifies his breadth. It deals with the general
principle of law in the universe ; it is a solemn eulogy of
the diapason of discipline in nature.
The style of Hooker is distinguished by a sober and
sustained eloquence. Certain of his contemporaries
might equal him in purple passages, but not one of them
approached his even flight. He was Latinised, not as
his lumbering predecessors had been, but in the true
humanistic spirit ; and he had studied Aristotle and
Plato with constant advantage to his expression. Hooker
is, indeed, one of the earliest of our authors, in prose or
verse, to show the influence of pure Hellenic culture.
The limpidity and elegance of his periods are extraordi-
nary. When all England was in bondage, Hooker alone
freed himself from the clogged concatenation of phrases
which makes early English prose so unwieldy ; yet he
gained his liberty at no such cost of grace and fulness
as Bacon did in the snip-snap of his Essays. Hooker
discovered, by the help of the ancients and the Bible, a
middle way between long-drawn lusciousness and curt
formality. He does not strive after effect ; but when he
126 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
is moved, his style is instinct with music. He never
abuses quotation ; he never forgets that he has an argu-
ment to conduct, and that life is short. In other words,
he is the first great writer of practical English prose, and
for a long time there is none other like unto him.
The vices of obscurity and uncouthness, indeed, weigh
heavily upon most of the prose of this period. When
prose wished to please, it was as stiff and florid as the
gala-dress of Elizabeth's Court ; when it merely wished
to instruct, nothing could be more inelegant and hum-
drum. Some of the abundant literature of geographical
adventure was spirited and forcible; it reached its highest
point of merit in Raleigh's Guiana of 1596. The novel,
or rather prose romance in its most rudimentary shape,
had been essayed by Greene, Lodge, Nash, and others,
in a form which displayed a pitiful poverty by the side
of the vividly psychological drama of the next genera-
tion. Criticism made a variety of primitive essays, of
which Daniel's Defence of Rhyme is perhaps the least im-
perfect. These pamphlets attempted to give a humanistic
solution to the practical literary problems of the day,
but seldom proceeded beyond a vague and learned
trifling with the unessential. Finally, in the year 1597
sketches of ten of Bacon's sagacious Essays appeared. No
work in the English language has been praised with more
thoughtless extravagance. It has one great merit, it
tended to break up the encumbered, sinuous Elizabethan
sentence, and prepare for prose as Dryden and Halifax
wrote it. But its ornament is largely borrowed from the
school of Lyly and Lodge, its thoughts are common-
places, and its arrangement of parts is desultory and
confused ; while Bacon's real mastery of English was a
thing which came to him later, and will occupy our
THE BIBLE 127
attention in the following chapter. For superficial pur-
poses, there are only two books of Elizabethan prose
in which we need to study the progress of that species
of literary expression, namely, the Euphues of Lyly, a
brilliant experiment, and the Ecclesiastical Polity of
Hooker, a permanent classic.
A literary enterprise of far-reaching importance was
set in motion by James I. when he called together at
Hampton Court, in 1604, a conference to discuss the
propriety of finally revising the English version of the
Scriptures. An adroit and practical scheme, drawn up
by the hand of the King himself, was laid before the
delegates for their consideration. It was accepted, and
in 1607 a committee of nearly fifty divines set to work to
produce an Authorised Version which should supersede
the not entirely satisfactory Bishops' Bible, issued by
Archbishop Parker in 1568. The general editorship of
the revision was placed in the hands of the most learned
personage in an erudite age, LANCELOT ANDREWES,
Bishop of Winchester, who was also responsible for
some parts of the work in detail. Andrewes was cele-
brated for his elegant and impassioned delivery, he was
stella prcedicantium, and he seems to have had a positive
genius for the cadences of ecclesiastical language. It
must not be overlooked that the English of the version
of 1611, which is what was alone in use until the present
generation, was not truly Jacobean, or even Elizabethan,
but an archaic and eclectic arrangement of phrases, the
bulk of which had come down to Andrewes and his
colleagues from Parker, and so from Cranmer, and so
from Coverdale and Tyndale, and so from Wycliffe and
Purvey, and represented, in fact, a modification of a
mediaeval impression of the Vulgate. The Authorised
128 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
English Bible represents the tongue of no historical
period, but is an artificial product, selected with ex-
quisite care, from the sacred felicities of two centuries
and a half. Its effect upon later authorship has been
constant, and of infinite benefit to style. Not a native
author but owes something of his melody and his charm
to the echo of those Biblical accents, which were the
first fragments of purely classical English to attract his
admiration in childhood.
IV
THE DECLINE
1620-1660
THE decline of letters in England began almost as soon
as Shakespeare was in his grave, and by the death of
James I. had become obvious. The period which we
have now to consider was illuminated by several names
of very high genius both in prose and verse, and by
isolated works of extraordinary value and beauty. In
spite, however, of the lustre which these give to it, no
progress was made for forty years in the general struc-
ture of literature ; at best, things remained where they
were, and, in literary history, to stop still is to go back.
It is possible that we should have a different tale to tell
if the most brilliant Englishman who survived Shake-
speare had realised what it was possible to do with the
tongue of his country. At the close of James's reign
FRANCIS BACON stood, as Ben Jonson put it, " the mark
and acme of our language," but he gave its proficients
little encouragement. He failed, for all his intuition, to
recognise the turn of the tide ; he thought that books
written in English would never be citizens of the world.
Anxious to address Europe, the universe, he felt no in-
terest in his English contemporaries, and passed through
the sublime age of Elizabethan poetry without conceding
the fact of its existence.
"9 I
130 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
But after his fall, in May 1621, Bacon wakened afresh
to the importance of his native language. In a poignant
letter to the King, who was to " plough him up and sow
him with anything," he promised a harvest of writings in
the vernacular. In 1605 he had already made a splendid
contribution to criticism in his Advancement of Learn-
ing; otherwise, he had mainly issued his works in
Ciceronian Latin. But in 1621 he finished his History
of Henry VI L; in 1624 he was writing the New Atlantis ;
in 1625 the Essays (first issued in nucleus in 1597, and
meagrely enlarged in 1612) were published in full, and
the Sylva Sylvarum was completed. These works, with
his public and private letters, combine to form the
English writings of Bacon. They constitute a noble
mass of work, but there is no question that the repu-
tation of Bacon dwindles if we are forced to cut away
his Latin books ; he no longer seems to have taken
the whole world of knowledge into his province. And
in his English works, considered alone, we have to
confess a certain poverty. He who thought it the first
distemper of learning, that men should study words and
not matter, is now in the singular condition of having
outlived his matter, or, at least, a great part of it, while
his words are as vivid as ever. We could now wish
that he could have been persuaded to " hunt more after
choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clear com-
position of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the
clauses," qualities which he had the temerity to profess
to despise.
Bacon described himself as "a bell-ringer, who is up
first to call others to church." The Advancement of
Learning was dictated by this enthusiasm. He would
rise at cock-crowing to bid the whole world welcome to
BACON 1 3 1
the intellectual feast. This is the first book in the English
language which discusses the attitude of a mind seeking
to consolidate and to arrange the stores of human know-
ledge. It was planned in two parts, the first to be a
eulogy of the excellence of learning — its " proficience " —
and the second to be a survey of the condition of the
theme — its " advancement." Bacon had little leisure
and less patience, and his zeal often outran his judg-
ment in the act of composition. The Advancement is
written, or finished at least, obviously in too great haste ;
the Second Book is sometimes almost slovenly, and the
close of it leaves us nowhere. But the opening part, in
which Bacon sums up first the discredits and then the dig-
nity of learning, defending wisdom, and justifying it to its
sons, remains one of the great performances of the seven-
teenth century. The matter of it is obsolete, human know-
ledge having progressed so far forwards and backwards
since 1605 ; and something dry and unripe in Bacon's
manner — which mellowed in later life — diminishes our
pleasure in reading what is none the less a very noble
work, and one intended to be the prologue to the author's
vast edifice of philosophical inquiry. At this point, how-
ever, he unluckily determined to abandon English brick
for Latin stone.
This futile disregard of his own language robs English
literature of the greater part of its heritage in Bacon.
He desired an immortality of readers, and fancied that
to write in English would "play the bankrupt with
books." Hence, even in his Essays we are conscious
of a certain disdain. The man is not a serious com-
poser so much as a collector of maxims and observa-
tions ; he keeps his note-book and a pencil ever at his
side, and jots down what occurs to him. If it should
132 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
prove valuable, he will turn it out of this ragged and
parochial English into the statelier and more lasting
vehicle of Latin. He has no time to think about style ;
he will scribble for you a whole book of apophthegms in
a morning. The Essays themselves — his " recreations/'
as he carelessly called them — are often mere notations or
headings for chapters imperfectly enlarged, in many cases
merely to receive the impressions of a Machiavellian in-
genuity. They are almost all too short ; the longest,
those on " Friendship " and " Gardens," being really the
only ones in which the author gives himself space to turn
round. As a constructor of the essay considered as a
department of literary art, Bacon is not to be named
within hail of Montaigne.
Bacon desired that prose should be clear, masculine,
and apt, and these adjectives may generally be applied
to what he wrote with any care in English. He was
so picturesque a genius, and so abounding in intellectual
vitality, that he secured the graces without aiming at
them. His Essays hold a certain perennial charm, artless
as they are in arrangement and construction ; but the
student of literature will find greater instruction in ex-
amining the more sustained and uplifted paragraphs of
the Advancement, where he can conveniently parallel
Bacon with Hooker, the only earlier prose- writer who
can be compared with him. He will observe with
interest that the diction of Bacon is somewhat more
archaic than that of Hooker.
When Bacon died, in 1626, he left English literature
painfully impoverished. For the next fifteen years it
may be said that prose of the higher kind scarcely
existed, and that there threatened to be something like
a return to barbarism. But two works which belong to
BURTON 133
a slightly earlier period must first of all be discussed.
No book is more characteristic of the age, of its merits
alike and of its faults, than that extraordinary emporium,
the Anatomy of Melancholy, first issued in 1621. ROBERT
BURTON, a clergyman, mainly resident at Christ Church,
Oxford, was the author of this vast monograph on what
we should now call neurasthenia. The text of Burton
has been unkindly styled a collection of clause-heaps,
and he is a typical example of that extreme sinuosity,
one of the detestable tricks of the schools, to which the
study of the ancients betrayed our early seventeenth-
century prose-writers. Of the width of reading of such
men as Bacon and Burton and Hales there have been
no later specimens, and these writers, but Burton above
all others, burden their folio pages with a gorgeous
spoil of " proofs " and " illustrations " from the Greek
and Latin authors. The Anatomy of Melancholy, though
started as a plain medical dissertation, grew to be, prac-
tically, a huge cento of excerpts from all the known
(and unknown) authors of Athens and Rome. All
Burton's treasure was in Minerva's Tower, and the
chamber that he fitted up there has been the favourite
haunt of scholars in every generation. In his own his
one book enjoyed a prodigious success, for it exactly
suited and richly indulged the temper of the time. But
Burton, delightful as he is, added nothing to the evolu-
tion of English prose in this its dangerous hour of crisis.
The vogue of his entertaining neurotic compendium really
tended to retard the purification of the language.
In 1623 was published a volume of prose so beautiful
and unique that it must be mentioned here in spite of
its comparative obscurity, A Cypress Grove, by the ornate
Scotch poet, WILLIAM DRUMMOND of Hawthornden. This
134 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
was in substance nothing but a chain of philosophical
arguments against the fear of death ; but in manner it was
of a delicate fulness and harmony, a deliberate and studied
mellifluousness, which reminds the reader of nothing so
much as of the more elaborate passages of De Quincey.
Never before in English, and not again for a generation,
was prose written with so obvious an attention to the
balance of clauses and the euphony of phrases as is to be
discovered in this curious little treatise of Drummond's,
who deserves to be remembered, therefore, among the
constructors of melodious style.
With these exceptions, prose between Bacon and the
school of 1640 is mainly of a trivial importance — the
work of such fiery divines as Hall and Donne being ex-
cepted. Under Charles I. the growth of English prose
was arrested, save where it blossomed forth in the
fashionable imitations of the clear and lively sketches of
Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle. In 1598, Casaubon,
to whom and to Scaliger the modern literatures of Europe
owe so great a debt, had edited Theophrastus with a lumi-
nous commentary. JOSEPH HALL, by his Characterisms
(1608), and Sir THOMAS OVERBURY, by his Characters
(1614), had made the composition of similar short essays in
humorous philosophy the rage. Theophrastus had con-
fined himself to studies of the intrinsic behaviour of repre-
sentative men. Bishop Hall, in his dignified little book,
had added the qualifications for holding certain special
offices. In the generation of which we are speaking, the
example of Theophrastus, as seen through Hall and
Overbury, combined with the imitation of Bacon to pro-
duce a curious school of comic or ironic portraiture,
partly ethical and partly dramatic, typical examples of
which are the Microcosmography of Earle, Owen Feltham's
DONNE 135
Resolves, the Country Parson of George Herbert, and even,
we may say, the later pamphlets of Dekker. No small
addition to the charm of these light essays-in-little was
the hope of discovering in the philosophical portrait the
face of a known contemporary. This sort of literature
culminated in Europe in the work of La Bruyere, but
not until 1688, and was afterwards elaborated by Addison.
Meanwhile, it is true, the divines, and the great Dean
of St. Paul's at their head, were preaching their obscure
and disquieting sermons. JOHN DONNE died in 1631,
but it was not until nine years later that an imperfect
collection of his addresses was published. He is the
noblest of the religious writers of England between
Hooker and Jeremy Taylor ; and the qualities which
mark his astonishing poems, their occasional majesty,
their tossing and foaming imagination, their lapses into
bad taste and unintelligibility, the sinister impression of
a strange perversity of passion carefully suppressed in
them — all these, though to a less marked degree, distin-
guish the prose of Donne. Its beauties are of the savage
order, and they display not only no consciousness of any
rules which govern prose composition, but none of that
chastening of rhetoric which had been achieved under
Elizabeth by Hooker. Such books of Donne's as his
paradox of suicide, the Biathanatos, unquestionably ex-
hibit sympathy with what was morbid in the temper of
the time ; they are to theology what the tragedies of Ford
are to drama. Probably the strongest prose work pro-
duced in England during the dead time of which we have
spoken is WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH'S Religion of Protes-
tants (1637). Tms divine was somewhat slighted in his
own age, as giving little show of learning in his dis-
courses ; but the perspicuity of his style and the force of
136 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
his reasoning commended him to the Anglican divines of
the Restoration. It is characteristic that Tillotson had
a great admiration for this humane latitudinarian, and
that Locke wrote, " If you would have your son reason
well, let him read Chillingworth."
The masterpiece of Chillingworth stands almost alone,
in a sort of underwood of Theophrastian character-
sketches. The fashion for these studies was greatly
encouraged by the decay of the drama, and particu-
larly by that of comedy. To understand the causes and
symptoms of that decay, we have to reconsider the
position of Ben Jonson. By 1625 the deaths of all the
Predecessors, followed by those of Shakespeare, of Beau-
mont, and finally of Fletcher, left Jonson in a condition
of undisputed prestige. He had always been the most
academic and dictatorial of the group, and now there
was no one to challenge his supremacy. With health
and a competency, it is probable that Ben Jonson would
now have begun to exercise a wide authority, and he
might have seriously modified the course of our literary
history ; but he was cramped by poverty, and in 1626
he was struck down, at the age at which Shakespeare
had died, by paralysis. Jonson lived eleven years longer,
but the spirit had evaporated from his genius, and he
was but the sulky shadow of himself. The worst of it
was that in some melancholy way he seems to have
dragged English drama down with him, a blind Samson
in his despair. The confused self-consciousness of those
last comedies which Dryden cruelly styled his " dotages"
is reflected in the work of the young men who clustered
round him, who comforted his gloomy hours of public
failure, and who were proud to accept the title of his
poetic sons.
BEN JONSON 137
In temperament Jonson differed wholly from the other
leaders of Elizabethan drama. They, without exception,
were romantic ; he, by native bias, purely classical. It
is not difficult to perceive that the essential quality of
his mind had far more in common with Corneille and
with Dryden than with Shakespeare. He was so full of
intelligence that he was able to adopt, and to cultivate
with some degree of zest, the outward forms of roman-
ticism, but his heart was always with the Latins, and his
favourite works, though not indeed his best, were his
stiff and solid Roman tragedies. He brought labour to
the construction of his poetry, and he found himsel
surrounded by facile pens, to whom he seemed, or
fancied that he seemed, " barren, dull, lean, a poor
writer." He did not admire much of that florid orna-
ment in which they delighted, and which we also have
been taught to admire. He grew to hate the kind of
drama which Marlowe had inaugurated. No doubt,
sitting in the Apollo room of the Old Devil Tavern, with
his faithful Cartwright, Brome, and Randolph round
him, he would truculently point to the inscription above
the chimney, Insipida poemata nulla recitantor, and not
spare the masters of that lovely age which he had out-
lived. He would speak " to the capacity of his hearers,"
as he tells us that the true artificer should do, and they
would encourage him, doubtless, to tell of doctrines and
precepts, of the dignity of the ancients, of Aristotle,
"first accurate critic and truest judge" of poetry. They
would listen, nor be aware that, for all his wisdom, and
all the lofty distinction of his intellect, the palmy hour
of English drama — that hour in which it had sung out
like a child, ignorant of rules and precepts — had passed
for ever.
138 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
If the learning and enthusiasm of Jonson could not
save it, it received little sustenance from other hands.
One blow after another weakened and distracted it ;
almost year by year, and with a sinister rapidity, it
sank into desuetude. The deaths of Shakespeare and
Beaumont placed tragedy and romantic comedy mainly
in the lax hands of Fletcher, who for some eight years
more poured forth his magnanimous and sunshiny plays,
so musical, so dissolute, so fantastic. Already, in this
beautiful dramatic literature of Fletcher's, we have
sunken below the serene elevation of Shakespeare.
PHILIP MASSINGER joins Fletcher, and about 1624 is
found taking his place as the most active and popular
dramatic poet of the hour. By this time the flood of
unequal, hurried plays, poured forth by Hey wood and
Middleton, is beginning to slacken, and soon these belated
Elizabethans are dead or silent. Massinger holds the field,
with an impetus that never equals that of Fletcher, and
a tamer versification, a prosier, less coherent construction.
More serious and solid than his predecessors, he has less
fire and colour than they, and less of the tumultuous
ecstasy that carried them on its wings. He dies in 1640.
Meanwhile, in JAMES SHIRLEY a placid and elegant
talent makes its appearance, recurring, without vehe-
mence or thrill, to the purely ornamental tradition of
Shakespeare and Fletcher, and continuing, with a mild
monotony, to repeat the commonplaces of the school
until they are hopelessly out of fashion. Then, last of
all, in a final brief blaze of the sinking embers, we
encounter JOHN FORD, perhaps as genuine a tragic poet
as any one of his forerunners, Shakespeare alone ex-
cepted, reverting for a moment to the old splendid
diction, the haughty disregard of convention, the con-
THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA 139
tempt for ethical restrictions. And so the brief and
magnificent school of English drama, begun by Marlowe
scarcely more than a generation before, having blazed
and crackled like a forest fire fed with resinous branches,
sinks almost in a moment, and lingers only as a heap of
white ash and glowing charcoal.
The causes of the rapid decline of the drama have
been sought in the religious and political disturbances
of the country ; but, if we examine closely, we find that
stage-poetry had begun to be reduced in merit before
those disturbances had taken definite shape. It will
probably be safer to recognise that the opening out of
national interests took attention more and more away
from what had always been an exotic entertainment, a
pleasure mainly destined for the nobles and their re-
tainers. There was a general growth of enthusiasm,
of public feeling, throughout England, and this was not
favourable to the cultivation of a species of entertain-
ment such as the drama had been under Elizabeth, a
cloistered art destined exclusively for pleasure, without
a didactic or a moral aim. For many years there con-
tinued to persist an interest in the stage wide enough
to fill the theatres, in spite of the growing suspicion of
such amusements ; but the audiences rapidly grew less
select and less refined, less able to appreciate the good,
and more tolerant of the rude and bad. In technique
there was a falling off so abrupt as to be quite astonish-
ing, and not easily to be accounted for. The " sons " of
Ben Jonson, trained as they had been at his feet, sank
into forms that were primitive in their rudeness. The
curious reader may pursue the vanishing genius of poetic
drama down through the writings of Randolph, of Jasper
Mayne, of Cartwright, till he finds himself a bewildered
140 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
spectator of the last gibberings and contortions of the
spectre in the inconceivable " tragedies " of Suckling.
If the wits of the universities, highly trained, scholarly
young men, sometimes brilliantly efficient in other
branches of poetry, could do no better than this, what
wonder that in ruder hands the very primitive notions
with regard to dramatic construction and propriety were
forgotten. Before Shakespeare had been a quarter of
a century in his grave, Shirley was the only person left
writing in England who could give to fiction in dialogue
the very semblance of a work of art.
We must pause for a moment to observe a highly
interesting phenomenon. At the very moment when
English drama was crumbling to dust, the drama of
France was springing into vigorous existence. The con-
jectured year of the performance of our last great play,
the Broken Heart, of Ford, is that of the appearance of the
earliest of Corneille's tragedies. So rapidly did events
follow one another, that when that great man produced Le
Cidy English drama was moribund ; when his Rodogune
was acted, it was dead ; and the appearance of his Age'silas
saw it re-arisen under Dryden in totally different forms,
and as though from a different hemisphere. It is impos-
sible not to reflect that if the dramatic instinct had been
strong in Milton, the profoundest of all religious tragedies
might happen to be not that Polyeucte which we English
have enviously to admire in the literature of France, but
a play in which the noblest ideas of Puritanism might
have been posed against worldly philosophy and sensual
error. Yet even for a Milton in 1643 the ground would
not have been clear as it was for Corneille. He had but
to gather together and lift into splendid distinction ele-
ments whose main fault had been their imperfection.
CARTWRIGHT 141
For him, French tragedy, long preparing to blossom, was
reaching its spring at last ; for us, our too brief summer
was at an end, and, cloyed with fruit, the drama was
hurrying through its inevitable autumn. If Ben Jonson,
tired and old, had felt any curiosity in glancing across
the Channel, he might have heard of the success of a
goodly number of pieces by a poet destined, more exactly
than any Englishman, to carry out Jonson's own ideal of a
tragic poet. He had desired that a great tragedian should
specially excel in " civil prudence and eloquence," and to
whom can these qualities be attributed if not to Cor-
neille ? The incoherent and scarce intelligible English
dramatists of the decline were as blankly ignorant of the
one as of the other.
The laxity of versification which our poetic drama per-
mitted itself had much to answer for in the degradation
of style. Ben Jonson had been too stiff ; Shakespeare,
with a divine instinct, hung balanced across the point
which divides hardness of versification from looseness ;
but in the soft hands of Fletcher, the borders were already
overpast, his followers became looser and more sinuous
still, and the comparative exactitude of Massinger and
Shirley was compromised by their languor. The verse of
Ford, it is true, is correct and elegant, with a slight rigi-
dity that seems pre-Shakespearian. But among the names
which follow these we find not one that understood what
dramatic blank verse should be. If there be an excep-
tion, it is WILLIAM CARTWRIGHT, whose plays, although
they smell too much of the lamp, and possess no aptitude
for the theatre, pour a good deal of waxen beauty into
moulds of stately metre. It was of this typical Oxford
poet, who died, still very young, in 1643, that Ben Jonson
said, " My son Cartwright writes all like a man."
142 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
In one department of poetry, however, there is some-
thing else to chronicle than decline. The reign of
Charles I., so unillustrious in most branches of literature,
produced a very fine school of lyric poets. Among these
JOHN MILTON was easily the greatest, and between the
years 1631 and 1637 he contributed to English literature
about two thousand of the most exquisite, the most per-
fect, the most consummately executed verses which are
to be discovered in the language. This apparition of
Milton at Horton, without associates, without external
stimulus, Virtue seeing " to do what Virtue would, by his
own radiant light," this is one of the most extraordinary
phenomena which we encounter in our history. Milton
was born in 1608, and proceeded to Cambridge in 1625,
where he remained until 1632. During these seven years
the eastern University was one of the main centres of
poetical animation in the country ; several true poets
and a host of poetasters were receiving their education
there. The poems of Dr. Donne, handed about in
MS., were universally admired, and were the objects of
incessant emulation.
Of all this environment, happily but surprisingly, not
a trace is to be found on Milton. We find, indeed, the
evidences of a loving study of Shakespeare and of the
ancients, and in his earliest work a distinct following of
those scholars of Spenser, Giles and Phineas Fletcher,
who had been prominent figures at Cambridge just be-
fore Milton came into residence. What drew the young
Milton to Giles Fletcher it is not difficult to divine. That
writer's Christ's Victory and Triumph had been a really
important religious poem, unequal in texture, but rising
at its highest to something of that pure magnificence of
imagination which was to be Milton's aim and glory.
MILTON 143
Phineas Fletcher had composed a Scriptural poem, the
Apollyonists, which was published in 1627. This was a
fragment on the fall of the rebel angels, and Milton must
have been greatly struck with it, for he paid it the com-
pliment of borrowing considerably from it when he came
to write Paradise Lost. When, at the close of 1629,
Milton began his Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity,
he was still closely imitating the form of these favourites
of his, the Fletchers, until the fifth stanza was reached,
and then he burst away in a magnificent measure of his
own, pouring forth that hymn which carried elaborate
lyrical writing higher than it had ever been taken before
in England.
But, gorgeous as was the Nativity Ode, it could not
satisfy the scrupulous instinct of Milton. Here were fire,
melody, colour ; what, then, was lacking ? Well, purity
of style and that " doric delicacy " of which Milton was
to be the prototype— these were lacking. We read the
Nativity Ode with rapture, but sometimes with a smile.
Its language is occasionally turbid, incongruous, even
absurd. We should be sorry that "the chill marble
seems to sweat," and that " the sun in bed . . . pillows
his chin upon an orient wave," if these were not like the
tricks of a dear and valued friend, oddities that seem part
of his whole exquisite identity. Such excrescences as
these we have to condone in almost all that we find
delightful in seventeenth-century literature. We may
easily slip into believing these conceits and flatnesses to
be in themselves beautiful ; but this is a complacency
which is to be avoided, and we should rather dwell on
such stanzas of the Nativity Ode as xix. and xxiv., in
which not a word, not a syllable, mars the distinguished
perfection of the poem, but in which every element com-
144 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
bines to produce a solemn, harmonious, and imposing
effect.
The evolution of Milton continued, though in 1630 we
find him (in the Passion) returning to the mannerisms
of the Fletchers. But, in the " Sonnet on his Twenty-
Third Birthday " he is adult at last, finally dedicated, as a
priest, to the sacred tasks of the poetic life, and ready
to abandon all "the earthly grossness" which dragged
down the literature of his age. And next we hear him
put the golden trumpet to his lips and blow the melodies
of " At a Solemn Music," in which no longer a trace of
the "metaphysical" style mars the lucid perfection of
utterance, but in which words arranged with consummate
art summon before us a vision not less beatific than is
depicted by Dante in his Paradiso or by Fra Angelico in
his burning frescoes. Beyond these eight-and-twenty
lines, no poet, and not Milton himself, has proceeded.
Human language, at all events in English, has never
surpassed, in ecstasy of spiritual elevation or in pure
passion of melody, this little canzonet, which was, in
all probability, the first-fruits of Milton's retirement to
Horton.
In the sylvan Buckinghamshire village, " far from the
noise of town, and shut up in deep retreats," Milton
abandoned himself to study and reflection. He was
weighed upon, even thus early, by a conviction of his
sublime calling ; he waited for the seraphim of the
Eternal Spirit to touch his lips with the hallowed fire of
inspiration, and he was neither idle nor restless, neither
ambitious nor indifferent. He read with extreme eager-
ness, rising early and retiring late; he made himself
master of all that could help him towards his mysterious
vocation in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English.
MILTON 145
To mark the five years of his stay at Horton, he pro-
duced five immortal poems, L 'Allegro, II Penseroso,
Arcades, Comus, Lycidas, all essentially lyrical, though
two of them assume the semi-dramatic form of the
pageant or masque, a species of highly artificial poetry
to which Ben Jonson and Campion had lent their
prestige in the preceding age.
The ineffable refinement and dignity of these poems
found a modest publicity in 1645. But the early poetry
of Milton captured little general favour, and one small
edition of it sufficed for nearly thirty years. No one
imitated or was influenced by Milton's lyrics, and until
the eighteenth century was well advanced they were
scarcely read. Then their celebrity began, and from
Gray and Collins onward, every English poet of emi-
nence has paid his tribute to // Penseroso or to Lycidas.
If we examine closely the diction of these Horton poems,
we shall find that in almost all of them (in Comus least)
a mannerism which belonged to the age faintly dims
their purity of style. Certain little tricks we notice are
Italianisms, and the vogue of the famous Marino, author
of the A done, who had died while Milton was at Cam-
bridge, was responsible, perhaps, for something. But,
on the whole, lyrical poetry in this country has not
reached a higher point, in the reflective and impersonal
order, than is reached in the central part of L? Allegro
and in the Spirit's epilogue to Comus.
Other lyrics there were less imperishable than these,
yet excellent in their way, and vastly more popular than
Milton's. Almost without exception these were the work
of non-professional authors — soldiers, clergymen, or
college wits — thrown off in the heat of youth, and given
first to the world posthumously, by the piety of some
K
146 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
friend. Of the leading lyrists of the earlier Cavalier
group of the reign of Charles I., WILLIAM HABINGTON
was the only one who published his poems in his life-
time. The forerunner of them all, and potentially the
greatest, was THOMAS CAREW, who as early as 1620 was
probably writing those radiant songs and "raptures"
which were not printed until twenty years later. To an
amalgam of Carew and Donne (whose poems, also, were
first published posthumously, in 1633) most of the
fashionable poetry written in England between 1630 and
1660 may be attributed. Carew invented a species of
love-poetry which exactly suited the temper of the time.
It was a continuation of the old Elizabethan pastoral, but
more personal, more ardent, more coarse, and more
virile. He was the frankest of hedonists, and his glowing
praise of woman has genuine erotic force. In technical
respects, the flexibility and solidity of his verse was
remarkable, and, though he greatly admired Donne, he
was able to avoid many of Donne's worst faults. Carew
cultivated the graces of a courtier ; he was a Catullus
holding the post of sewer-in-ordinary to King Charles I.
His sensuality, therefore, is always sophisticated and well
bred, and he is the father of the whole family of gallant
gentlemen, a little the worse for wine, who chirruped
under Celia's window down to the very close of the
century. Indeed, to tell the truth, what began with
Carew may be said to have closed with Congreve.
Of the same class are Sir JOHN SUCKLING, who wrote
some fifteen years later, and RICHARD LOVELACE, who in-
ditedthe typical song of aristocratic insubordination, as late
as 1642 and onwards. The courtly race re-emerged after
the Restoration in Sedley and Dorset, and was very melo-
diously revived in Rochester. Like his latest scholar, Carew
GEORGE HERBERT 147
made a very pious end ; but the lives of all these men had
been riotous and sensuous, and their songs were struck
from their wild lives like the sparks from their rapiers. Of
a different class, superficially, were the lyrics of Habing-
ton and of GEORGE HERBERT, a devout Catholic gentle-
man and a mystical Anglican priest. Here there was more
artifice than in Carew, and less fire. Herbert, in particu-
lar, is the type of the maker of conceits. Full of deli-
cate ingenuity, he applies the tortured methods of Donne
to spiritual experience, gaining more lucidity than his
master at the expense of a good deal of intensity. But
Herbert also, in his own field, was a courtier, like the
lyrists of the Flesh, and he is close to Suckling and the
other Royalists in the essential temper of his style. He
was himself a leader to certain religious writers of the next
generation, whose place is at the close of this chapter.
The Temple is by far the best-known book of verses of
the whole school, and it deserves, if hardly that pre-emi-
nence, yet all its popularity. Herbert has an extraordi-
nary tenderness, and it is his privilege to have been able
to clothe the common aspirations, fears, and needs of the
religious mind in language more truly poetical than has
been employed by any other Englishman. He is often
extravagant, but rarely dull or flat ; his greatest fault lay
in an excessive pseudo-psychological ingenuity, which
was a snare to all these lyrists, and in a tasteless delight
in metrical innovations, often as ugly as they were unpre-
cedented. He sank to writing in the shape of wings and
pillars and altars. On this side, in spite of the beauty of
their isolated songs and passages, the general decadence
of the age was apparent in the lyrical writers. There
was no principle of poetic style recognised, and when the
spasm of creative passion was over, the dullest mechanism
148 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
seemed good enough to be adopted. There are whole
pages of Suckling and Lovelace which the commonest
poetaster would now blush to print, and though it may
be said that most of these writers died before their
poems passed through the press, and had therefore no
opportunity for selection, the mere preservation of so
much crabbed rubbish cannot be justified.
A word must be spared for THOMAS RANDOLPH, a
"son" of Ben Jonson, whose early death seems to have
robbed us of a poet of much solidity and intellectual
weight. He came nearer, perhaps, than any other man
of his time to the sort of work that the immediate suc-
cessors of Malherbe were just then doing in France ; he
may, for purposes of parallelism, be not inaptly styled an
English Racan. His verse, stately and hard, full of
thought rather than of charm, is closely modelled on
the ancients, and inspires respect rather than affection.
Randolph is a poet for students, and not for the general
reader ; but he marks a distinct step in the transition
towards classicism.
About 1640 there was an almost simultaneous revival
of interest in prose throughout the country, and a dozen
writers of ability adopted this neglected instrument. It
is not easy to describe comprehensively a class of litera-
ture which included the suavity of Walton, the rich
rhetoric of Browne, the arid intelligence of Hobbes, the
roughness of Milton, and the easy gaiety of Howell. But
we may feel that the reign of Charles I. lacked a Pascal,
as that of Elizabeth would have been greatly the better
for a Calvin. What the prose of England under the Com-
monwealth wanted was clearness, a nervous limpidity ;
it needed brevity of phrase, simplicity and facility of dic-
tion. The very best of our prose-authors of that great and
CAROLEAN PROSE 149
uneasy period were apt, the moment they descended from
their rare heights of eloquence, to sink into prolixity and
verbiage. In escaping monotony, they became capri-
cious ; there was an ignorance of law, an insensibility to
control. The more serious writers of an earlier period
had connived at faults encouraged by the pedantry of
James I. This second race, of 1640, were less pedantic,
but still languid in invention, too ready to rest upon the
ideas of the ancients, and to think all was done when
these ideas were re-clothed in brocaded language. But as
we descend we find the earnestness and passion of the
great struggle for freedom reflected more and more on
the prose of the best writers. The divines became some-
thing more than preachers ; they became Protestant tri-
bunes. The evolution of such events as Clarendon
encountered was bound to create a scientific tendency
in the writing of history — a tendency diametrically op-
posed to the " sweet raptures and researching conceits "
which Wotton thought praiseworthy in the long-popular
Chronicle of Sir Richard Baker (1641). Even style showed
a marked tendency towards modern forms. At his best
Walton was as light as Addison, Browne as brilliantly
modulated as Dr. Johnson, while the rude and naked
periods of Hobbes directly prepared our language for
the Restoration.
Milton as a prose-writer fills us with astonishment.
The poet who, in Comns, had known how to obtain effects
so pure, so delicate, and so graceful that verse in England
has never achieved a more polished amenity, deliberately
dropped the lyre for twenty years, and came forward as
a persistent prose pamphleteer of so rude and fierce a
kind that it requires all our ingenuity to see a relation
between what he was in 1635 and was, again, in 1641.
150 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Critics have vied with one another in pretending that
they enjoy the invective tracts of Milton ; they would
persuade us, as parents persuade children to relish their
medicine, that the Apology for Smectymnuus is eloquent,
and Eikonoklastes humorous. But, if we are candid, we
must admit that these tracts are detestable, whether for
the crabbed sinuosity of their style, their awkward and un-
seemly heat in controversy, or for their flat negation of all
the parts of imagination. If they were not Milton's, we
should not read one of them. As they are his, we are
constrained to search for beauties, and we find them in
the Areopagitica, more than half of which is singularly
noble, and in certain enthusiastic pages, usually autobio-
graphical, which form oases in the desert, the howling
desert, of Milton's other pamphlets.
CLARENDON was by a few months Milton's senior, yet
in reading him we seem to have descended to a later age.
That he owed not a little to the Theophrastian fashion
of his youth is certain ; but the real portraits which he
draws with such picturesque precision are vastly superior
to any fantastical abstractions of Overbury or Earle.
Clarendon writes, in Wordsworth's phrase, with his eye
upon the object, and the graces of his style are the result
of the necessity he finds of describing what he wishes
to communicate in the simplest and most convincing
manner. The History of the Great Rebellion is not the
work of a student, but of a soldier, an administrator, a
practical politician in stirring times. To have acted a
great part publicly and spiritedly is not enough, as we
are often reminded, to make a man the fit chronicler of
what he has seen and done ; but in the case of Clarendon
these advantages were bestowed upon a man who, though
not a rare artist in words, had a marked capacity for
JEREMY TAYLOR 151
expression and considerable literary training. It is his
great distinction that, living in an age of pedants, he had
the courage to write history — a species of literature
which, until his salutary example, was specially over-
weighted with ornamental learning — in a spirit of com-
plete simplicity. The diction of Clarendon is curiously
modern ; we may read pages of his great book without
lighting upon a single word now no longer in use. The
claims of the great Chancellor to be counted among the
classics of his country were not put forward in the
seventeenth century, the first instalment of his history
remaining unprinted until 1752, and the rest of it until
1759.
In JEREMY TAYLOR we reach one of those delightful
figures, all compact of charm and fascination, which
tempt the rapid historian to pause for their contem-
plation. No better words can be used to describe
him than were found by his friend, George Rust, when
he said, " This great prelate had the good humour of a
gentleman, the eloquence of an orator, the fancy of a
poet, the acuteness of a schoolman, the profoundness of
a philosopher, the wisdom of a chancellor, the reason of
an angel, and the piety of a saint. He had devotion
enough for a cloister, learning enough for a university,
and wit enough for a college of virtuosi." Fancy was
the great quality of Taylor, and it covers, as with brocade,
all parts of the raiment of his voluminous writings. His
was a mind of rare amenity and sweetness ; he was an
eclectic, and the earliest great divine to free himself
completely from the subtleties and " spinosities " of the
schools. So graceful are his illustrations and pathetic
turns of divinity, that his prose lives in its loftier parts as
no other religious literature of the age does, except, per-
152 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
haps, the verse of George Herbert. Yet even Jeremy
Taylor suffers from the imperfections of contemporary
taste. His unction is too long-drawn, his graces too
elaborate and gorgeous, and modern readers turn from
the sermons which his own age thought so consummate
in their beauty to those more colloquial treatises of
Christian exposition and exhortation of which the Holy
Living and the Holy Dying are the types.
We note with particular interest those prose-writers of
the pre-Restoration period who cultivated the easier and
more graceful parts of speech and made the transition
more facile. As a rule, these were not the writers most
admired in their own age, and IZAAK WALTON, in par-
ticular, holds a position now far higher than any which
he enjoyed in his long lifetime. Yet modern biography
may almost be said to have begun in those easy,
garrulous lives of Donne and Wotton which he printed
in 1640, while in the immortal Complete Angler (1653) we
still possess the best -written technical treatise in the
language. Familiar correspondence, too — a delightful
department of literature — owes much of its freedom and
its prestige to the extremely entertaining Epistolce Ho-
Eliana (1645), in which JAMES HOWELL surpassed all
previous letter-writers in the ease and liveliness of his
letters. And among these agreeable purveyors of amuse-
ment, civilisers of that over-serious age, must not be
omitted THOMAS FULLER, indignant as he might have
been at being classed with persons so frivolous. His
activity between 1639, when he published the Holy
War, and 1661, when he died, was prodigious. With-
out endorsing the extravagant praise of Coleridge, we
must acknowledge that the wit of Fuller was amazing,
if he produced too many examples of it in forms a
SIR THOMAS BROWNE 153
little too desultory for modern taste. He was all com-
pact of intellectual vivacity, and his active fancy helped
him to a thousand images as his pen rattled along. In
such writers we see the age of the journalist approach-
ing, although as yet the newspaper, as we under-
stand it, was not invented. Fuller would have made
a superb leader-writer, and Howell an ideal special
correspondent. There was little in either of them of
the solemnity of the age they lived in, except the long-
windedness of their sentences. In them we see English
literature eager to be freed from the last fetters of the
Renaissance.
But Sir THOMAS BROWNE hugged those fetters closer
to himself, and turned them into chased and fretted orna-
ments of gold. He was one of those rare prose- writers
whom we meet at intervals in the history of literature,
who leave nothing to improvisation, but balance and
burnish their sentences until they reach a perfection
analogous to that of very fine verse. Supported by his
exquisite ear, Browne permits himself audacities, neolo-
gisms, abrupt transitions, which positively take away our
breath. But while we watch him thus dancing on the
tight-rope of style, we never see him fall ; if he lets go
his footing in one place, it is but to amaze us by his agility
in leaping to another. His scheme has been supposed
to be founded on that of Burton, and certainly Browne
is no less captivated by the humours of melancholy. But
if Burton is the greater favourite among students, Browne
is the better artist and the more imaginative writer.
There is, moreover, much more that is his own, in rela-
tion to parts adapted from the ancients, than in Burton.
We find nothing of progress to chronicle in Browne,
but so much of high, positive beauty that we do not class
154 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
him in the procession of the writers of his time, but
award him a place apart, as an author of solitary and
intrinsic charm.
On the other hand, a writer far less charming than
Browne, and now widely neglected, did serviceable work
in clarifying and simplifying prose expression, and in
preparing for the lucidity of the restoration. THOMAS
HOBBES was the most brilliant pure intelligence between
Bacon and Locke ; but his metaphysical system is now
known to have been independent of the former, and
derived from French sources. His views are embodied
in his Leviathan (1651), a work of formidable extent, not
now often referred to except by students, but attractive
still from the resolute simplicity of the writer's style. In
the next age, and especially when deism began to de-
velop, Hobbes exercised a great influence, but this ceased
when Locke gained the public ear.
As the century slipped away, English poetry came
more and more under the spell of a corrupted Petrarch-
ism. The imitation of Petrarch, seen through Marino
and Tasso, penetrated all the poetic systems of Western
Europe. It involved us, in English, in a composite style,
exquisite and pretentious, simple, at once, and affected.
A complicated symbolism, such as Donne had inaugu-
rated, came into almost universal fashion, and verse was
decomposed by an excess of antithesis, of forced com-
parisons, of fantastic metaphors. We have seen that, in
the hands of the dramatists, blank verse, no longer under-
stood, offered a temptation to loose and languid writing.
In lyric poetry the rhyme presented some resistance,
but everything tended to be too fluid and lengthy. The
poets indulged themselves in a luxurious vocabulary ; like
the Ple"iade, a hundred years earlier, they yearned after
HERRICK 155
such words as "ocymore, dyspotme, oligochronian."
Similar defects had been seen in the Alexandrian poets
of Greece, in Ausonius, in the followers of Tasso; they
were at that moment rife in the French of the latest
Ronsardists and in the Spanish of Gongora. These
dolphin colours are constantly met with in dying litera-
tures, and the English Renaissance was now at its last
gasp.
In the midst of these extravagancies, like Meleager
winding his pure white violets into the gaudy garland
of the late Greek euphuism, we find ROBERT HERRICK
quietly depositing his Hesperides (1648), a volume which
contained some of the most delicious lyrics in the lan-
guage. This strange book, so obscure in its own age,
so lately rediscovered, is a vast confused collection of
odes, songs, epithalamia, hymns, and epigrams tossed
together into a superficial likeness to the collected poems
of Martial, with whom (and not at all with Catullus)
Herrick had a certain kinship. He was an isolated
Devonshire clergyman, exiled, now that his youth was
over, from all association with other men of letters,
grumbling at his destiny, and disdaining his surround-
ings, while never negligent in observing them with the
most exquisite fidelity. The level of Herrick's perform-
ance is very high when we consider the bulk of it.
He contrives, almost more than any other poet, to fill
his lyrics with the warmth of sunlight, the odour of
flowers, the fecundity of orchard and harvest-field.
This Christian cleric was a pagan in grain, and in his
petulant, lascivious love-poems he brings the old rituals
to the very lych-gate of his church and swings the
thyrsus under the roof-tree of his parsonage. He
writes of rustic ceremonies and rural sights with infinite
156 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
gusto and freshness, bringing up before our eyes at
every turn little brilliant pictures of the country -life
around him in Devonshire. Herrick is almost guiltless
of the complicated extravagance which was rife when
his single book appeared.
Crashaw and Vaughan, on the contrary, were full of
it, and yet they demand mention, even in a superficial
sketch of our poetry, for certain spiritual and literary
qualities. RICHARD CRASHAW, a convert to Catholicism,
who closed a hectic life prematurely in the service of the
Holy House at Loretto in 1650, was a student of the
Spanish and Italian mystics, and, in particular, we cannot
doubt, of St. John of the Cross. His religious ecstasy
and anguish take the most bewildering forms, sometimes
plunging him into Gongorism of the worst description
(he translated Marino and eclipsed him), but sometimes
lifting him to transcendental heights of audacious, fiery
lyricism not approached elsewhere in English. HENRY
VAUGHAN was an Anglican mystic of quite another type,
delicate, meditative, usually a little humdrum, but every
now and then flashing out for a line or two into radiant
intuitions admirably worded. In both there is much
obscurity to be deplored ; but while we cultivate Crashaw
for the flame below the smoke, we wait in Vaughan for
the light within the cloud.
Among the poets we have mentioned, and among the
great majority of Commonwealth versifiers, there is to be
traced no attempt to modify any further than Donne had
essayed to do the prosody which had come into use with
Spenser and Sidney. But it is now necessary to dwell
on a phenomenon of paramount importance, the rise of
a definite revolt against the current system of versifica-
tion. Side by side with the general satisfaction in the
WALLER 157
loosely sinuous verse of the day, there was growing up
a desire that prosody should be more serried, strenuous,
neat, and " correct." Excess of licence led naturally to
a reaction in favour of precision. It was felt desirable
to pay more attention to the interior harmony of verse,
to avoid cacophony and what had been considered
legitimate poetic licences, to preserve grammatical purity
— in short, to sacrifice common sense and sound judg-
ment a little less to fancy. Most obvious reform of all,
it was determined to resist the languid flow of syllables
from line to line, but to complete the sense as much
as possible in a nervous couplet. It has been custom-
ary to consider this reform as needless and impertinent.
I am of opinion, on the other hand, that it was not
merely wholesome but inevitable, if English versification
was to be preserved from final ruin. It was not until
more than a century of severe and rigid verse-writing
by rule had rehabilitated the worn-out instrument of
metre that it became once more fitted to produce
harmonies such as those of Coleridge and Shelley.
From high up in the seventeenth century careful
students have detected a tendency towards the smoother
and correcter, but tamer prosody. I do not think that
the beginnings of the classical heroic couplet in Eng-
land can be explored with advantage earlier than in the
works of Sir John Beaumont, who, dying in 1627, left
behind him a very carefully written historical poem of
Bosworth Field. George Sandys, the translator, in the
course of his extensive travels, seemed to have gained
French ideas of what the stopped couplet should be.
But when all claims and candidates have been con-
sidered, it is really to EDMUND WALLER that is due the
"negative inspiration" (the phrase is borrowed from
158 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Sainte-Beuve) of closing up within bands of smoothness
and neatness the wild locks of the British muse. He was
the English Malherbe, and wrote with the same constitu-
tional contempt for his predecessors. Dryden accepted
him as the forerunner of the classic school, and calls him
" the first that made writing [verse] easily an art ; first
showed us how to conclude the sense most commonly
in distichs." Waller appears to have accepted this reform
definitely about 1627 (Malherbe's strictly parallel reform
dates from 1599), and he persisted in it long without
gaining a single scholar. But in 1642 Sir John Denham
joined him with his smooth, arid, and prosaic Cooper's
Hilly and Cowley and Davenant were presently converted.
These four, then, poets of limited inspiration, are those
who re-emerge in the next age as the harbingers of
vigorous prosody and the forerunners of Dryden and
Pope.
It is in verse that we can study, far more easily than
in prose, the crisis in English literature which we have
now reached. That there is a distinction between the
manner of Wilkins and of Tillotson, for instance, can be
maintained and proved, yet to insist upon it might easily
lead to exaggeration. But no one with an ear or an eye
can fail to see the difference between Herrick and
Denham ; it cannot be too strongly affirmed ; it is ex-
ternal as well as intrinsic, it is a distinction of form as
well as essence. Denham, to put it otherwise, does not
very essentially differ as a versifier from such a poet as
Falconer, who lived one hundred and twenty years later.
But between him and his exact contemporary Crashaw a
great gulf is fixed ; they stand on opposite platforms of
form, of sentiment, of aim. In the years immediately
preceding the Commonwealth, literature fell very low in
ROMANCES OF CHIVALRY 159
England. But we must not forget that it was a com-
posite age, an age of variegated experiments and highly
coloured attempts. One of these deserves a certain
prominence, more for what it led to than what it was.
So long as the drama reigned amongst us, prose
fiction was not likely to flourish, for the novel is a play,
with all the scenery and the scene-shifting added, written
for people who do not go to the theatre. But Sidney's
example was still occasionally followed, and in the
middle of the seventeenth century the huge romances
of the French began to be imported into England and
imitated. The size of the originals may be gathered when
it is said that one of the most popular, the Ctiop&tre of
Calprenede, is in twenty-three tomes, each containing
as much as a volume of a Mudie novel. The English
translations began to be very numerous after 1650, a
version of the Grand Cyrus, in nearly 7000 pages, enjoy-
ing an immense success in 1653. It is difficult to speak
of these pompous, chivalric romances without ridiculing
them. A sketch of the plot of one reads like a burlesque.
The original works of the English imitators of these
colossal novels are of inferior merit to the original pro-
ducts of the Rambouillet school ; the unfinished Parthe-
nissa, composed in " handsome language" by Lord
Orrery in 1654, is the best known of the former. The
great vogue of these romances of chivalry was from 1650
to 1670, after which they were more or less merged in
the " heroic " plays in rhymed verse which Dryden made
popular. Their principal addition to literature was an
attempt to analyse and reproduce the rapid emotional
changes in the temperament of men and women, thus
vaguely and blindly preparing the way for the modern
realistic novel of psychology, and, more directly, for the
160 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
works of Richardson. They were the main secular read-
ings of Englishwomen during the final decade preceding
the Restoration, and in their lumbering diffuseness and
slackness they exemplify, to an almost distressing degree,
the main errors into which, notwithstanding the genius
of one or two individuals, and the high ambition of many
others, English literature had sunken.
Between 1645 and 1660 the practice of literature
laboured under extraordinary disabilities. First among
these was the concentration of public interest on political
and religious questions ; secondly, there was the suspi-
cion and enmity fostered between men, who would other-
wise have been confreres^ by these difficulties in religion
and politics ; thirdly, there was the languor consequent
on the too-prolonged cultivation of one field with the
same methods. It seems paradoxical to say of an age
that produced the early verse of Milton and the prose of
Browne and Jeremy Taylor, that it was far gone in
decadence ; but these splendid and illuminating excep-
tions do not prevent the statement from being a correct
one. England needed, not a few beacons over a waste
of the waters of ineptitude, but a firm basis of dry land
on which to build a practicable style for daily service ;
and to get this the waters had to be drained away, and
the beautiful beacons extinguished, by the cataclysm of
the Restoration.
THE AGE OF DRYDEN
1660-1700
THE year 1660 provides us with a landmark which is
perhaps more salient than any other in the history of
English literature. In most instances the dates with
which we divide our chronicle are merely approxima-
tions, points empirically taken to mark the vague transi-
tion from one age to another. But when Monk went
down to Dover to welcome the agitated and astonished
Charles, it was not monarchy only that he received into
England, but a fresh era in literature and the arts. With
that act of his, the old English Renaissance, which had
long been dying, ceased to breathe, and a new departure
of intellectual civilisation began. Henceforth the ideals
of the leading minds of England were diametrically
changed. If they had looked westwards, they now
looked towards the east. Instantly those men who
still remained loyal to the Jacobean habit passed out
of fashion, and even out of notice, while those who had
foreseen the new order of things, or had been constitu-
tionally prepared for it, stood out on a sudden as
pioneers and leaders of the new army of intelligence.
Before we consider, however, whither that army was
to march, we must deal with a figure which belonged
neither to the bankrupt past nor to the flushed and
161 L
1 62 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
animated future. During twenty years Milton, but for
an occasional sonnet, had said farewell to poetry. Not
that the power had left him, not that the desire and
intention of excelling in verse had passed away, but
because other aspects of life interested him more, and
because the exact form his great song should ultimately
take had not impressed itself upon him. Milton per-
mitted youth and middle age to pass, and remained
obstinately silent. The Restoration caught him at his
studies, and exposed him suddenly to acute personal
danger. Towards merely political opponents Charles II.
could afford to show himself lenient, and in politics
there is no evidence that Milton had ever been in-
fluential. It is customary to think that Milton's official
position laid him open to resentment, but in the day
of its triumph the Monarchy could disdain an old paid
servant of the Parliament, an emeritus -Secretary for
Foreign Tongues to the Council. What it could less
easily overlook was the author of Eikonoklastes, that
rabid pamphlet in which not only the tenure of kings
was savagely railed at, but the now sacred image of the
martyred Charles I. was covered with ignominious ridi-
cule. Milton's position was not that of Dryden or of
Waller, who had eulogised Cromwell, and could now
bow lower still to praise the King. He stood openly
confessed as one of the most violent of spiritual regicides.
We might easily have lost our epic supremacy on the
scaffold in August 1660, when the poet was placed so
ominously in the custody of the Serjeant- at -Arms. It
seems probable that, to combine two legends, Davenant
interceded with Morice on his behalf, and so helpless a
rebel was contemptuously forgiven. We find him dis-
charged in December 1660; and when the physical agita-
MILTON 163
tions of these first months had passed away, we conceive
the blind man settling down in peace to his majestic task.
His vein, he tells us, flowed only from the autumnal to
the vernal equinox, and in the spring of 1661 the noblest
single monument of English poetry doubtless began to
take definite form. " Blind, old, and lonely," as in Shelley's
vision of him, he was driven from prosperity and ease
by the triumph of the liberticide, only that he might in
that crisis become, what else he might have failed to be,
" the sire of an immortal strain," " the third among the
sons of light."
There is reason to believe that Milton had already
determined what should be the form and character
of his Paradise Lost when Cromwell died. In 1663 he
completed the poem. Two years later, at Elwood's
suggestion, " What hast thou to say of Paradise found ? "
he began the second and the shorter work, which he
finished in 1665. The choral tragedy of Samson Agonistes
followed, perhaps in 1667, which was the year of the
publication of Paradise Lost ; Paradise Regained and
Samson were printed together in 1671. Three years
later Milton died, having, so far as is known, refrained
from the exercise of verse during the last seven years
of his life. It was, we may believe, practically between
1661 and 1667 that he built up the gorgeous triple struc-
ture on which his fame as that of the first among modern
heroic poets is perennially sustained. The performances
of Milton are surprising, yet his reticences are almost
more amazing still. He sang, when the inspiration was
on him, "with impetus and astro" and when the fit
was off, could remain absolutely silent for years and
years.
The Milton of the Restoration has little affinity with
1 64 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
the lyrical Milton whose work detained us in the last
chapter. He appears before us now solely in the aspect
of an epic poet (for the very choruses in Samson are
scarcely lyrical). He is discovered in these austere and
magnificent productions, but particularly in Paradise
Lost, as the foremost, and even in a broad sense the
only epic poet of England. The true epos of the ancient
literatures had detailed in heroic sequence the achieve-
ments of the national hero, supported and roused and
regulated by the immediate intervention of the national
deities. It had been notable for its elevation, its sim-
plicity, its oneness of purpose. The various attempts
to write literary epics in England before Milton's time
had failed, as they have failed since, and his only models
were the Iliad and the ^Eneid ; although it is not to be
questioned that his conscious design was to do for his
own country what Tasso, Ariosto, and Camoens, glories of
the Latin race in the sixteenth century, had done for theirs.
Those poets had forced the sentiments and aspirations
of a modern age into the archaic shape of the epos, and
had produced works which did not much resemble, in-
deed, the Iliad or the Odyssey, but which glorified Italian
or Portuguese prowess, flattered the national idiosyn-
crasy, and preserved the traditional extent and something
of the traditional form of the ancient epic.
There was, however, another great predecessor to
whom, in the general tenor of his epic, Milton stood in
closer relation than to the ancients or to the secular
moderns. The one human production which we occa-
sionally think of in reading Paradise Lost is the Divine
Comedy. In Milton, as in Dante, it is not the prowess of
any national hero which gives the poem its central in-
terest, but the sovereign providence of God. Dante, how-
MILTON 165
ever, was emboldened, by the circumstances of his epoch
and career, to centre the interest of his great trilogy in
present times, giving, indeed, to a theme in essence highly
imaginative, and as we should say fabulous, an air of
actuality and realism. Milton touches modern existence
nowhere, but is sustained throughout on a vision of stu-
pendous supernatural action far away in the past, before
and during the very dawn of humanity. Such a story as
Paradise Lost communicates to us could be credible and
fascinating only to persons who had taken in the mys-
teries of the Hebrew Bible with their mother's milk, and
who were as familiar with Genesis as with the chronicles
of their own country. The poem presupposes a homely
knowledge of and confidence in the scheme of the Old
Testament, and in this sense, though perhaps in this
sense only, those are right who see in Paradise Lost a
characteristically "puritan" poem. If we take a Puritan
to be a man steeped in Bible lore, then we may say that
only " puritans " can properly appreciate the later poems
of Milton, although there is much in the texture of these
works which few Puritans, in the exacter sense, would, if
they understood it, tolerate. It is a very notable fact
that the only English epic is also the only epic taken
from Biblical sources. So great has been the force of
Milton that he has stamped on English eyes the picture
he himself created of the scenes of Genesis, and Huxley
complained that it was the seventh book of Paradise Lost,
and not any misreading of Moses, which had imprinted
indelibly on the English public mind its system of a false
cosmogony.
The Fall and the Redemption of Man were themes of
surpassing interest and importance, but at the first blush
they might seem highly improper for lengthy treatment
1 66 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
in blank verse. We shudder to think how they would
have been dealt with by some of Milton's sterner co-
religionists— how in Milton's youth they had been
treated, for instance, by Sylvester and by Quarles.
But it is necessary to insist that Milton stood not
closer, intellectually, to such a divine as Baxter than he
did to, let us say, such a seriously minded lay-church-
man as Cowley. He was totally separated from either,
and in all aesthetic questions was, happily for us, a law
unto himself. Hence he allowed himself a full exercise
of the ornaments with which his humanistic studies had
enriched him. His brain was not an empty conventicle,
stored with none but the necessities of devotion : it was
hung round with the spoils of paganism and garlanded
with Dionysiac ivy. Within the walls of his protesting
contemporaries no music had been permitted but that of
the staidest psalmody. In the chapel of Milton's brain,
entirely devoted though it was to a Biblical form of wor-
ship, there were flutes and trumpets to accompany one
vast commanding organ. The peculiarity of Milton's
position was that among Puritans he was an artist, and
yet among artists a Puritan.
Commentaries abound on the scheme, the theology,
the dogmatic ideas of Paradise Lost and Regained.
These, it may boldly be suggested, would scarcely in
these days be sufficient to keep these epics alive, were
it not for the subsidiary enchantments of the very orna-
ment which to grave minds may at first have seemed
out of place. Dryden, with his admirable perspicuity,
early perceived that it was precisely where the language
of the Authorised Version trammelled him too much
that Milton failed, inserting what Dryden calls " a track
of scripture " into the text. It is where he escapes from
MILTON 167
Scriptural tradition that the grandiose or voluptuous
images throng his fancy, and the melody passes from
stop to stop, from the reed-tone of the bowers of Para-
dise to the open diapason of the council of the rebel
angels. As he grew older the taste of Milton grew more
austere. The change in the character of his ornament is
deeply marked when we ascend from the alpine meadows
of Paradise Lost to the peaks of Paradise Regained, where
the imaginative air is so highly rarefied that many readers
find it difficult to breathe. Internal evidence may lead
us to suppose Samson Agonistes to be an even later
manifestation of a genius that was rapidly rising into
an atmosphere too thin for human enjoyment. Milton
had declared, in a sublime utterance of his early life,
that the highest poetry was not "to be obtained by the
invocation of Dame Memory and her siren daughters,"
but by the direct purification of divine fire placed on
the lips of the elect by the hallowed fingers of the
seraphim. That inspiration, he did not question, ulti-
mately came to him, and in its light he wrote. But we
do him no dishonour after these years if we confess that
he owed more of his charm than he acknowledged to the
aid of those siren daughters. He was blind, and could
not refresh the sources of memory, and by-and-by the
sirens, like his own earthly daughters, forsook him, leav-
ing him in the dry and scarce-tolerable isolation of his
own integral dignity. Without his ineffable charm the
Milton of these later poems would scarcely be readable,
and that charm consists largely in two elements — his
exquisite use of pagan or secular imagery, and the un-
equalled variety and harmony of his versification.
The blank verse of the epics has been at once the
model and the despair of all who have attempted that
1 68 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
easiest and hardest of measures since the end of the
seventeenth century. On his manipulation of this form
Milton founds his claim to be acknowledged the greatest
artist or artificer in verse that the English race has pro-
duced. The typical blank iambic line has five full and
uniform stresses, such as we find in correct but timid
versifiers throughout our literature. All brilliant writers
from Shakespeare downwards have shown their mastery
of the form by the harmonious variation of the number
and value of these stresses ; but Milton goes much
further in this respect than any other poet, and, with-
out ever losing his hold upon the norm, plays with it as
a great pianist plays with an air. His variations of
stress, his inversions of rhythm, what have been called
his " dactylic " and " trochaic " effects, add immeasurably
to the freshness and beauty of the poem. When we
read Paradise Lost aloud, we are surprised at the absence
of that monotony which mars our pleasure in reading
most other works of a like length and sedateness. No
one with an ear can ever have found Milton dull, and
the prime cause of this perennial freshness is the amaz-
ing art with which the blank verse is varied. It leaps
like water from a spring, always in the same direction
and volume, yet never for two consecutive moments in
exactly the same form.
To us the post-Restoration writings of Milton possess
a greater value than all else that was produced in verse
for more than a hundred years; but in taking an his-
torical survey we must endeavour to realise that his
influence on the age he lived in was nil, and that to
unprejudiced persons of education living in London
about 1665, the author of Paradise Lost was something
less than Flecknoe or Flatman. Nor to us, who see
MILTON 169
beneath the surface, does he present any features which
bring him into the general movement of literature. He
was a species in himself — a vast, unrelated Phoenix. In
his youth, as we have seen, Milton had been slightly
subjected to influences from Shakespeare, Spenser, and
even the disciples of Spenser ; but after his long silence
he emerges with a style absolutely formed, derived from
no earlier poet, and destined for half a century to influence
no later one. Critics amuse themselves by detecting in
Paradise Lost relics of Du Bartas, of Vondel, of Cowley,
even of lesser men ; but these were mere fragments of
ornament disdainfully transferred to Milton's magnifi-
cent edifice as material, not as modifying by a jot the
character of its architecture. It is very strange to think
of the aged Milton, in stately patience, waiting for death
to come to him in his relative obscurity, yet not doubting
for a moment that he had succeeded in that " accom-
plishment of greatest things " to which his heart had
been set at Cambridge more than forty years before.
We turn from Milton, then, wrapped like Moses in a
cloud, and the contrast is great when we concentrate
our attention on the state of letters in England around
the foot of his mountain ; for here, at least, there was no
isolation, but a combined unison of effort in a single
direction was the central feature of the moment. During
the strenuous political agitation of the Commonwealth,
literature had practically come to an end in England.
There were still, of course, men of talent, but they were
weak, discouraged, unilluminated. Some were trying to
keep alive, in its utter decrepitude, the Jacobean method
of writing ; others were looking ahead, and were ready,
at the cost of what capricious beauty remained in English
verse, to inaugurate a new school of reason and correct-
i;o MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
ness. When 1660 brought back the Court, with its Latin
sympathies, the first of these two classes faded like ghosts
at cockcrow. Herrick, Shirley, Vaughan long survived
the Restoration, but no notice of them or of their writings
is to be found in any of the criticisms of the age. On
the other hand, the second class came forth at once
into prominence, and four small poets — Waller, with his
precise grace ; Denham, with his dry vigour ; Davenant,
who restored the drama ; Cowley, who glorified intellect
and exact speculation — were hailed at once as the masters
of a new school and the martyrs to a conquered bar-
barism. It was felt, in a vague way, that they had been
holding the fort, and theirs were the honours of a relieved
and gallant garrison.
The Commonwealth, contemplating more serious
matters, had neglected and discouraged literature. The
monarchy, under a king who desired to be known as a
patron of wit, should instantly have caused it to flourish ;
but for several years after 1660 — why, we can hardly tell
— scarcely anything of the least value was composed. The
four poets just enumerated, in spite of the fame they had
inherited, wrote none but a few occasional pieces down to
the deaths of Cowley (1667) and Davenant (1668). There
was a general consciousness that taste had suffered a re-
volution, but what direction it was now to take remained
doubtful. The returning cavaliers had brought the
message back from France that the savagery of English
letters was to cease, but something better than Davenant's
plays or even Cowley's odes must surely take its place.
The country was eager for guidance, yet without a guide.
No one felt this more perspicuously than the youthful
Dryden, who described his own position long afterwards
by saying that in those days he " was drawing the out-
FRENCH INFLUENCES 171
lines of an art without any living master to instruct " him
in it.
The guidance had to come from France, and the
moment of the Restoration was not a fortunate one.
The first great generation after Malherbe was drawing to
a close, and the second had not quite begun. The de-
velopment of English literature might have been steadier
and purer, if the exiled English courtiers had been kept
in Paris ten years longer, to witness the death of Mazarin,
the decay of the old Academic coterie, and the rise of
Boileau and Racine. They left Chapelain behind them,
and returned home to find Cowley — poets so strangely
similar in their merits and in their faults, in their ambi-
tions and in their failures, that it is hard to believe the
resemblance wholly accidental. They had left poetry in
France dry, harsh, positive, and they found it so in Eng-
land. The only difference was that on this side of the
Channel there was less of it, and that it was conducted
here with infinitely less vigour, resource, and abundance.
There was no Corneille in London, no Rotrou ; the
authority of Waller was late and feeble in comparison
with that bequeathed by Malherbe.
It was, nevertheless, important to perceive, and the
acutest Englishmen of letters did at once perceive, that
what had been done in France about thirty years before
was now just being begun in England ; that is to say, the
old loose romantic manner, say of Spenser or of Ronsard,
was being totally abandoned in favour of " the rules," the
unities, a closer prosody, a drier, exacter system of
reasoning. Unfortunately, up to 1660 there was little real
criticism of poetic style in France, and little effort to be
dexterously complete all through a composition. Happy
lines, a brilliant passage, had to excuse pages of flatness and
i;2 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
ineptitude. So it was in England. A few single lines of
Cowley are among the most beautiful of the century, and
he has short jets of enchanting poetry, but these lie scat-
tered in flat wildernesses of what is intolerably grotesque.
The idea of uniform excellence was to be introduced,
directly in France and then incidentally here, by Boileau,
who was writing his first great satires when Charles II.
was in the act of taking possession of his throne.
Even in these first stumbling days, however, the new
school saw its goal before it. The old madness, the old
quaint frenzy of fancy, the old symbolism and impres-
sionism had utterly gone out. In their place, in the place
of this liberty which had turned to licence, came the
rigid following of " the ancients." The only guides for
English verse in future were to be the pole-star of the
Latin poets, and the rules of the French critics who
sought to adapt Aristotle to modern life. What such a
poet as Dryden tried to do was regulated by what, read-
ing in the light of Scaliger and Casaubon, he found the
Latins had done. This excluded prettiness altogether,
excluded the extravagances and violent antics of the
natural school, but admitted, if the poet was skilful
enough to develop them, such qualities as nobility of
expression, lucidity of language, justice of thought, and
closeness of reasoning, and these are the very qualities
which we are presently to discern in Dryden.
Meanwhile, although poetry, in the criticism of poetry,
was the subject uppermost in the minds of the men of
wit and pleasure who clustered around the Court of
Charles, attention was paid, and with no little serious-
ness, to the deplorable state of prose. Here the distinc-
tion between old and new could not be drawn with as
much sharpness as it could in verse, yet here also there
THE ROYAL SOCIETY 173
was a crisis imminent. The florid, involved, and often
very charming prose of such writers as Jeremy Taylor,
Fuller, and Henry More, was naturally destined to be-
come obsolete. Its long-windedness, its exuberance, its
caprices of style, marked it out for speedy decay ; its
beauties, and they have been already dwelt upon, were
dolphin colours. A time had come when what people
craved in prose was something simpler and terser in
form, less ornate, less orotund, more supple in dealing
with logical sequences of ideas. England had produced
several divines, essayists, and historians of great dis-
tinction, but she had hitherto failed to bring forth a
Pascal.
The returning Royalists had left behind them in Paris
an Academy which, with many faults, had yet for a
quarter of a century been a great power for good in
France. It had held up a standard of literature, had
enforced rules, had driven the stray sheep of letters into
something resembling a flock. The first important step
taken in intellectual life after the Restoration was the
foundation in England of a body which at its initiation
seemed more or less closely to resemble the French
Academy. In 1661 Cowley had issued his Proposition
for the Advancement of Learning, the direct result of
which was the institution of the Royal Society in 1662,
with the King as patron, and Lord Brouncker, the mathe-
matician, as first president. Cowley's tract was merely
the match which set fire to a scheme which had long
been preparing for the encouragement of experimental
knowledge. As every one is aware, the Royal Society
soon turned its attention exclusively to the exacter
sciences, but most of the leading English poets and prose-
writers were among its earlier members, and it does
174 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
not seem to have been observed by the historians of
our literature that the original scope of the assembly in-
cluded the renovation of English prose. According to
the official definition of the infant Royal Society, they
" exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural
way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a
native easiness, bringing all things as near the mathe-
matical plainness as they can," and passed " a resolution
to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of
style." No literary Academy could have done more ; and
although the Royal Society soon dropped all pretensions
to jurisdiction over prose-writing, this early action, coming
when it did, can but have been of immense service to the
new school. Nor must it be forgotten that among these
savants who bound themselves to the exercise of lucidity
and brevity in composition were Boyle, Clarendon,
Barrow, Evelyn, Pearson, South, Pepys, Stanley, Burnet,
the very representatives of all that was most vivid in the
prose of the age. Of these not all survived to learn the
lesson that they taught, but it is therefore, perhaps, the
more significant that they should have accepted it in
principle.
In all this movement JOHN DRYDEN'S place was still
insignificant. In his thirtieth year he was, as a later
Laureate put it, faintly distinguished. But he was pre-
sently to find his opportunity in the resuscitation of
dramatic poetry. From before the death of Ben Jonson
the stage had begun to languish, and its decline cannot
in fairness be attributed entirely to the zeal of the
Puritans. But in 1641 Parliament had issued an ordi-
nance ordaining that public stage-plays should cease,
those who had been in the habit of indulging in these
spectacles of lascivious pleasure being sternly recom-
THE REVIVAL OF THE DRAMA 175
mended to consider repentance, reconciliation, and peace
with God. This charge being found insufficient, an Act
was passed in 1648 ordering that all theatres should
be dismantled, all convicted actors publicly whipped,
and all spectators fined. An attempt to perform the
Bloody Brother of Fletcher merely proved that the
authorities were in deadly earnest, for the actors
were carried off to prison in their stage clothes. The
drama is a form of art which cannot exist in a vacuum ;
starved of all opportunities of exercise, English play-
writing died of inanition. Nothing could be more abjectly
incompetent and illiterate than the closet-dramas printed
during the Commonwealth. Men who had not seen a
play for twenty years had completely forgotten what a
play should be. It is scarcely credible that an art which
had been raised to perfection by Shakespeare, should in
half a century sink into such an abysm of feebleness as we
find, for example, in the unacted dramas of the Killigrews.
Nor did a spark of poetry, however wild and vague,
survive in these degenerate successors of the school of
Fletcher.
In the midst of this extremity of decay the theatres were
once more opened. In 1656 Sir WILLIAM DAVENANT
ventured to invite the public to " an entertainment by
declamation and music, after the manner of the ancients,"
at Rutland House, in the City. This was the thin end of the
wedge indeed ; but it has been wrongly described as a play,
or even an opera. There was no dialogue, but extremely
long rhapsodies in prose (which must surely have been
read) were broken by songs and instrumental music.
As no harm came of this experiment, in 1658 Davenant
dared to open the old dismantled Cockpit in Drury Lane,
and there produced his English opera, the Siege of Rhodes,
1 76 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
which had been already seen at Rutland House. This
dramatic production, afterwards greatly enlarged, was
prodigiously admired in the Court of Charles II., and
was looked upon as the starting-point of the new drama.
The critics of the Restoration are never tired of applaud-
ing this " perfect opera," the versification of which was
smooth and ingeniously varied indeed, yet without a
touch of even rhetorical poetry. As nothing befell the
daring Davenant, he was emboldened to bring out
five-act plays, tragedies and comedies of his own, at
Drury Lane, and, almost immediately after the King's
return, patents were granted both to him and to Killigrew.
In Betterton, Harris, and Mrs. Sanderson (for women
now first began to take women's parts) a school of young
actors was presently discovered, and the stage flourished
again as if Puritanism had never existed.
But it was one thing to have clever actors and a pro-
tected stage, and quite another to create a dramatic
literature. It might be very well for enthusiastic con-
temporaries to say that in his plays Davenant " does out-
do both ancients and the moderns too/' but these were
simply execrable as pieces of writing. The long silence
of the Commonwealth weighed upon the playwrights.
Only one man in this first period wrote decently, a robust,
vigorous imitator of Ben Jonson, JOHN WILSON, whose
comedies and tragedies reproduced the manner of that
master with remarkable skill. This, however, proved to
be a false start. The new drama was no more to spring
from the study of Ben Jonson than from a dim reminis-
cence of Shakespeare and Fletcher. It was to come
from France, and mainly from Corneille. The old,
almost simultaneous translation of the Cid, by Joseph
Rutter, was forgotten; but in the years just preceding
DRYDEN 177
the Restoration Sir William Lower had published a
series of versions of Corneille's tragedies, and these had
been widely admired. In his attempts at lyrical drama,
Davenant was undoubtedly imitating not Corneille only,
but Quinault. Early in his critical career, Dryden
announced that the four great models were Aristotle,
Horace, Ben Jonson, and Corneille ; and though he
refers vaguely and largely to the dramatists of Italy
and Spain, fearing by too great praise of a French-
man to wound English susceptibilities, it is plain that
Dryden in his early tragedies is always eagerly watching
Corneille.
In that valuable and admirable treatise, An Essay of
Dramatic Poesy, 1668, published when he had already
produced five of his dramatic experiments, Dryden very
clearly and unflinchingly lays down the law about thea-
trical composition. Plays are for the future to be " regu-
lar"— that is to say, they are to respect the unities of time,
place, and action ; " no theatre in the world has anything
so absurd as the English tragi-comedy," and this is to be
rigorously abandoned ; a great simplicity of plot, a broad
and definite catastrophe, an observation of the laws of
stage decorum, these are to mark the English theatre in
future, as they already are the ornament of the French.
After all this, we are startled to discover Dryden turning
against his new allies, praising the English irregularity,
finding fault with Corneille, and finally unravelling his
whole critical web with a charming admission : " I ad-
mire the pattern of elaborate writing, but — I love Shake-
speare." The fact is that the great spirit of Dryden, here
at the practical outset of his career, was torn between
two aims. He saw that English poetry was exhausted,
disillusioned, bankrupt, and that nothing short of a com-
M
1 78 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
plete revolution would revive it ; he saw that the Latin
civilisation was opening its arms, and that England was
falling into them, fascinated like a bird by a snake (and
Dryden also was fascinated and could not resist) ; yet,
all the time, he was hankering after the lost poetry, and
wishing that a compromise could be made between
Shakespeare and Aristotle, Fletcher and Moliere. So,
with all his effort to create " heroic drama " in England,
no really well-constructed piece, no closely wrought and
highly polished Cinna was to reward Dryden for his culti-
vation of the unities.
He could not, of course, foresee this, and the success
which followed his suggestion, made in 1664, that " the
excellence and dignity of rhyme " should be added to
serious drama, must have made him look upon him-
self as a great and happy innovator. Etheredge, in the
graver scenes of his Comical Revenge, instantly adopted
the rhyming couplet, Dryden's own tragedies followed,
and blank verse was completely abandoned until 1678.
During these fourteen years, Sedley, Crowne, Settle,
Otway, and Lee, in succession between 1668 and 1675,
came to the front as industrious contributors to the
tragic stage, each, with a touching docility, accepting
the burden of rhyme ; we therefore possess a solid
mass of dramatic literature, much of it quite skilful in
its own way, produced in a form closely analogous to
that of the French. These are what were known as the
" heroic plays," of which Dryden's Conquest of Granada is
the type. This strange experiment has received from the
critics of more recent times little but ridicule, and it may
be admitted that it is not easy to approach it with sym-
pathy. Still, certain facts should make it important to
the literary historian. The taste for heroic drama showed
DRYDEN 179
a singularly literary preoccupation on the part of the
public. To listen to the "cat and puss" dialogue, the
cTTL^ofjuvOia, required a cultivated attention, and the ear
which delighted in the richness of the rhyme could
hardly be a vulgar one.
The advantages of the system lay in the elegance and
nobility of the impression of life, the melody of the
versification ; its disadvantages were that it encouraged
bombast and foppery, and was essentially monotonous.
All was magnificent in those plays ; the main personages
were royal, or on the steps of the throne. The heroic
plays demanded a fuller stage presentment than the
age might supply. If the Indian Emperor could now be
acted under the management of Mr. Imr6 Kiralfy, we
should probably be charmed with the sonorous splendour
of its couplets and the gorgeous ritual of its scenes. The
Rehearsal (1672), with its delicious fooling, only added to
the popular predilection for these royal tragedies. But
Dryden, who had invented them, grew tired of them, and
in All for Love, in 1678, he "disencumbered himself from
rhyme." The whole flock of tragic poets immediately
followed him, and heroic plays were an exploded
fashion.
If we turn to these ponderous tragedies now, it is
principally, however, to study the essays which are
prefixed to them. In the general interest awakened
concerning the technique of literature, these were fre-
quent ; Lestrange, whose business it was to read them,
complained that " a man had as good go to court with-
out a cravat as appear in print without a preface." But
Dryden's, composed, perhaps, in rivalry with the Examens
of Corneille, are by far the most important, and form
the first body of really serious and philosophical criti-
i8o MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
cism to be discovered in English. We must not expect
absolute consistency in these essays. They mark the
growth of a mind, not the conditions of a mind settled
in a fixed opinion. As fresh lights came up on his horizon,
as he read Ben Jonson less and Shakespeare more, as
Boileau and Bossu affected his taste, as Racine rose into
his ken, and as he became more closely acquainted with
the poets of antiquity, Dryden's views seem to vacillate,
to be lacking in authority. But we err if this remains
our final opinion ; we mistake the movement of growth
for the instability of weakness. To the last Dryden was
a living force in letters, spreading, progressing, stimu-
lating others by the ceaseless stimulus which he himself
received from literature.
And while we study these noble critical prefaces we
perceive that English prose has taken fresh forms and a
new coherency. Among the many candidates for the
praise of having reformed our wild and loose methods
in prose, JOHN EVELYN seems to be the one who best
deserves it. He was much the oldest of the new writers,
and he was, perhaps, the very earliest to go deliberately
to French models of brevity and grace. Early in
the Commonwealth he was as familiar with La Motte
le Vayer as with Aristotle ; he looked both ways and
embraced all culture. Yet Evelyn is not a great writer ;
he aims at more than he reaches ; there is notable in his
prose, as in the verse of Cowley, constant irregularity of
workmanship, and a score of faults have to be atoned for
by one startling beauty. Evelyn, therefore, is a pioneer ;
but the true artificers of modern English prose are a
group of younger men of divers fortunes, all, strangely
enough, born between 1628 and 1633. In genealogical
order the names of the makers of modern style may be
TILLOTSON 181
given thus — Temple, Barrow, Tillotson, Halifax, Dry den,
Locke, and South.
Among these, the tradition of the eighteenth century
gave the first place to JOHN TILLOTSON, Archbishop of
Canterbury, whose influence on his contemporaries, and
particularly on Dryden, was supposed to be extreme.
Later criticism has questioned the possibility of this,
and, indeed, it can be demonstrated that until after he
was raised to the primacy in 1691 the publications of
Tillotson were scattered and few ; he seemed to with-
draw from notice behind the fame of such friends as
Barrow and Wilkins. But it must not be forgotten that
all this time Tillotson was preaching, and that as early as
1665 his sermons were accepted as the most popular of
the age. The clergy, we are told, came to his Tues-
day lectures "to form their minds," and if so, young
writers may well have attended them to form their
style. The celebrated sweetness of Tillotson's char-
acter is reflected in his works, where the storms and
passions of his career seem to have totally subsided.
Urbanity and a balanced decorum are found throughout
the serene and insinuating periods of this elegant lati-
tudinarian. It was said of him that "there never was a
son of absurdity that did not dislike, nor a sensible reader
who did not approve his writings." He was a typical
child of the Restoration, in that, not having very much
to say, he was assiduous in saying what he had in the
most graceful and intelligible manner possible.
By the side of Tillotson, ISAAC BARROW appears pon-
derous and even long-winded. He belongs to the new
school more by what he avoids than by what he attains.
He was a man of great intellectual force, who, born into
an age which was beginning to stigmatise certain faults
1 82 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
in its predecessor, was able to escape those particular
errors of false ornament and studied quaintness; but
could not train his somewhat elephantine feet to dance on
the tight-rope of delicate ease. The matter of Barrow is
always solid and virile, and he has phrases of a delightful
potency. In considering the place of the great divines
in the movement of literature, it is to be borne in mind
that sermons were now to a vast majority of auditors
their principal intellectual pabulum. In days when
there were no newspapers, no magazines, no public
libraries, and no popular lectures, when knowledge was
but sparsely distributed in large and costly books, all
who were too decent to encounter the rough speech and
lax morality of the theatre had no source of literary
entertainment open to them except the churches. We
groan nowadays under the infliction of a long sermon,
but in the seventeenth century the preacher who stopped
within the hour defrauded an eager audience of a plea-
sure. It is not necessary to suppose that with the decay
of puritanical enthusiasm the appetite for listening to
sermons came .to an end. On the contrary, public taste
became more eclectic, and a truly popular divine was
more than ever besieged in his pulpit. To these condi-
tions the preachers lent themselves, and those who had
literary skill revelled in opportunities which were soon
to quit them for the essayist and the journalist. Nor
was the orthodoxy of the hour so strenuous that it
excluded a great deal of political and social allusion.
Sermons and books of divinity were expected to enter-
tain. There are few treatises of the age so lively as
the religious pamphlets of the unidentified author of
the Whole Duty of Man, and it was an appreciator
of the wicked wit of South who protested that his
'EMPLE 183
addresses should be called, not Sunday, but week-day
sermons.
From the rapid and luminous compositions of the
divines, it was but a step to the masters of elegant mun-
dane prose. Cruel commentators have conspired to
prove that there was no subject on which Sir WILLIAM
TEMPLE was so competent as to excuse the fluency with
which he wrote about it. That the matter contained in
the broad volumes of his Works is not of great extent or
value must be conceded; but style does not live by matter
only, and it is the bright modern note, the ease and
grace, the rapidity and lucidity, that give to Temple his
faint but perennial charm. He is the author, too, of one
famous sentence, which may be quoted here, although
our scope forbids quotation, because it marks in a very
clear way the movement of English prose. Let us
listen to the cadence of these words :
" When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best,
but like a /reward child, that must be played with and humoured a
little to keep it quiet till it Jails asleep, and then the care is over"
This is the modern manner of using English. It is
divided by an abysm from the prose of the Common-
wealth, and in writing such a sentence Temple showed
himself nearer to the best authors of our living age than
he was to such contemporaries of his own as Hobbes or
Browne.
Of all those, however, who contrived to clarify and
civilise the prose of the Restoration, and to make it a
vehicle for gentle irony and sparkling humour, the most
notable was " Jotham, of piercing wit and pregnant
thought." There exists some tiresome doubt about the
bibliography of the Marquis of HALIFAX, for his anony-
1 84 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
mous miscellanies were not collected until 1704, when
he had been nine years dead. But no one questions the
authenticity of Advice to a Daughter ; and if internal
evidence, proof by style and temper, are worth anything
at all, they must confirm the tradition that it is to the
same pen we owe the Character of a Trimmer and the
Anatomy of an Equivalent. In these ironic tracts, so
adroit, so grave, so graceful, we find ourselves far indeed
from the storm and turmoil of the Commonwealth. In
Halifax we see the best and the most sympathetic side
of the Restoration, its conservative scepticism, its reserve,
its urbane and moderate virtue. In a letter to Cotton,
Halifax confesses that his favourite reading had always
been Montaigne, and he is a link between that delicious
essayist and the Spectators and Tatlers of a later age.
It was characteristic of the new age, anxious to fix the
grounds of opinion and base thought in each province
exactly, that it should turn to the phenomena of the
human mind and inquire into the sources of knowledge.
This work fell particularly to the share of that candid
and independent philosopher JOHN LOCKE, and the cele-
brated Essay on the Human Understanding (1690), in
which he elaborates the thesis that all knowledge is
derived from experience, marks a crisis in psychological
literature. Locke derived all our ideas from sensation
and reflection, believing the mind to be a passive
recipient of simple ideas, which it cannot in the first
instance create, but can retain, and can so modify and
multiply as to form that infinity of complex ideas which
we call the Understanding. In short, he protested against
the empirical doctrine of " innate notions " being brought
into the world by the soul. Where Locke's method and
teaching, however, were peculiarly useful were in their
LOCKE 185
admirable challenge to those pedantic assumptions and
baseless propositions which had up to his time disturbed
philosophy. Locke refuses to parley with the obscurities
of the schools, and he sits bravely in the dry and search-
ing light of science.
Locke's contributions to theology are marked by the
same intense determination to arrive at truth, and he was
accused of having been the unconscious father of the
deists. But, in fact, in religion, as in philosophy, his
attitude is not so much sceptical as scrupulous. He
ardently desires to get rid of the dubious and the non-
essential. His candour is not less displayed in his trac-
tates on education and government. Everywhere Locke
is the embodiment of enlightened common-sense, tolera-
tion, and clairvoyance. He laid his hand on the jarring
chords of the seventeenth century, and sought to calm
and tune them, and in temperament, as in influence, he
was the inaugurator of a new age of thought and feeling.
He was the most liberally-minded man of his time, and
in his modesty, candour, and charity, no less than in the
astounding reverberations caused by his quiet philoso-
phical utterances, Locke reminds us of Charles Darwin.
As a writer he is not favourably represented by the
Essay, which is arid in form, and at no time was he in
possession of an attractive style ; but in some of his
more familiar treatises we see how lucid and simple
he could be at his best, and how completely he had
exchanged the ornate manner of the Commonwealth for
a prose that was competent to deal with plain matters
of fact.
We dwell, more or less lovingly, on these names of
the precursors of a modern prose, yet not one of them,
not Halifax, not Tillotson, not Temple, survives as the
1 86 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
author of any book now generally read by the larger
public. Even the Prefaces of Dryden, it must regretfully
be admitted, are no longer familiar to any but literary
readers. The Restoration prose most effectively appre-
ciated by the masses, and still alive on the shelves of the
booksellers, is that of writers never recognised at all by
the polite criticism of their own day. In a country book-
shop you will no longer happen upon the Sacred Theory
of the Earth or upon Public Employment preferred to Soli-
tude, but you will upon Pepys' Diary and the Pilgrim's
Progress and A Call to the Unconverted.
These works do not stand on the same or even or.
neighbouring levels of literary merit ; but they have this
in common, that neither Baxter nor Bunyan nor Pepys
set any value on literature, or concerned himself at all with
the form under which he transmitted his ideas. There was
this difference, however, that while Bunyan was uncon-
sciously a consummate artist and a man instinct with
imagination, the other two impress us solely by the strik-
ing quality of the narrative, or the exhortations which
they impart in the first words that occur to them. It is
to JOHN BUNYAN, therefore, that our attention must here
for a moment be given. Like Milton, he was an ana-
chronism in the age of Charles II., and we observe with
surprise that it was in an epoch of criticism, of reason,
of combined experimental eclecticism, that two isolated
men of genius put forth, the one an epic poem, the other
a couple of religious allegories, steeped in the purest and
most ideal romance, and each unrivalled in its own class
throughout other and more propitious ages of English
literature. Nor, though the simple, racy compositions
of Bunyan may not seem to have had any very direct
influence on literature of the more academic kind, has
BUNYAN 187
the stimulus of his best books on humble minds ceased
ever since, but has kept the language of the poor always
hardy and picturesque, with scarcely less instant benefit
than the Bible itself. Whether these narratives, and, most
of all, the Life and Death of Mr. Badman, had not a
direct influence on the realistic novel of the middle of
the following century, is a question which criticism has
scarcely decided ; but that they prepared the minds of
the readers of those novels is beyond all doubt.
During the first twenty years after the Restoration,
poetry was very little cultivated in England outside the
limits of the heroic drama. That new instrument, the
couplet, was acknowledged to be an admirable one, and
to have excluded all competitors. But very little advance
had been made in the exercise of it during the forty
years which had followed the publication of Denham's
Cooper's Hill. Dryden, for all his evidence of force, was
disappointing his admirers. He had shown himself a
supple prose-writer, indeed ; but his achievements in
verse up to his fiftieth year were not such as could claim
for him any pre-eminence among poets. He was at last
to discover his true field ; he was about to become the
greatest English satirist, and in doing so to reveal quali-
ties of magnificent metrical power such as his warmest
followers had not dreamed of. Since the Elizabethans
had cultivated a rough and obscure species of satire
moulded upon Persius, serious work of this class had
gone out of fashion. But in the reign of Charles I. a
rattling kind of burlesque rhyming, used for similar pur-
poses in most of the countries of Europe, came into
service for parodies, extravagant fables, and satirical
attacks. In France, Scarron raised it to the level of
literature, but it was known in England before the days
1 88 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
of Scarron. Cleveland had used it, and Sir John Mennis,
in whose Musarum Delicicz we find —
"He that fights and runs away
May live to fight another day; "
and later on it was brought into great popularity by
Cotton and SAMUEL BUTLER. The famous Hudibras of
the latter, " written in the time of the Late Wars," was
kept in MS. till 1663, when the publication of so gross a
lampoon on the Presbyterians became possible. It was
greatly relished, and though it is a barbarous and ribald
production of small literary value, it is still praised, and
perhaps occasionally read. It affords rare opportunities
for quotation, every few pages containing a line or
couplet of considerable facetiousness. Hudibras was
incessantly imitated, and the generic term Hudibrastics
was invented for this kind of daring doggerel.
Butler, however, is a mere episode. Genuine satire
was reintroduced by Marvell, and ten years later revived
by Oldham. The example of that very gifted, if sinister,
young man, seems to have finally directed Dryden's
attention to a species of poetry which must already have
occupied his thoughts in the criticism of Casaubon as
well as in the marvellous verse of Boileau. Dryden did
not, however, at first directly imitate the ancients or
strike an intrepid blow at contemporary bad taste. His
Absalom and Achitophel (1681-82) is political in character,
a gallery of satirical portraits of public men, so painted as
to excite to madness the passions of a faction at a critical
moment. No poem was ever better timed. Under the
thin and acceptable disguise of a Biblical narrative, the
Tory poet gibbeted without mercy the heads and notables
of the rival party. The two poems which closely fol-
DRYDEN'S SATIRES 189
lowed it bore the same stamp. In MacFlecknoe the
manner is more closely that of Boileau, whom Dryden
here exceeds in force of bludgeon as far as he lags behind
him in skill of rapier practice. But these four satires
hold together, and should always be read in unison. In
them Dryden suddenly rises to the height of his genius.
Everything about him has expanded — the daring elo-
quence, the gusto of triumphant wit, and above all the
majestic crash of the couplet, have for the first time been
forged into a war-trumpet, through which the trumpeter
can peal what notes he wishes.
For the next twenty years, in spite of his congenital
irregularity of performance, Dryden continued to be
incomparably the greatest poet of his age. Although he
wrote personal satire no more, he never lost that reso-
nance, that voluminous note which the anger of 1681 had
ripened in him. In The Hind and the Panther he softened
the music a little, and embroidered a harsh garment with
beautiful ornament of episode. In his successive odes
and elegies, his copious verse-translations, his songs and
his fables, he enlarged his ground, and even in his tra-
gedies and comedies fell no longer below an average of
merit which would have sufficed to make another man
famous. This may be a proper moment for a considera-
tion of Dryden's place in English poetry. It is certain
that of those who are undeniably the leaders of our song
he is far from being the most beloved. The fault is not
all his, nor all that of the flat and uninspiring epoch in
which he lived. A taste for poetry at the present day
often involves no intellectual consideration whatever.
Charm alone is made the criterium of excellence, and we
often praise nothing but that which startles us by the
temerity of fancy or the morbidezza of artistic detail. But
MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Dryden, like Horace and Dante, judged otherwise. In
his own words, " They cannot be good poets who are not
accustomed to argue well." When he congratulated the
age of which he was the greatest ornament on its poetical
superiority, he was thinking mainly of intelligence and of
workmanship. We value these qualities less, perhaps too
little ; but, at all events, we shall do no justice to Dryden
if we exclude them from our main conception of his aims.
What he wished to do, and what he did, was to follow
the great Latin poets with a close, yet easy reverence,
and to observe, more obliquely, what the consummate
Frenchmen of his own time were achieving. To all this
he added a noble roughness and virility of speech which
was part of his English birthright, a last legacy from
the Chaucer and Shakespeare whom he still had the
width of vision to admire. Dryden's exuberant vivacity,
his solidity of judgment, his extraordinary command of
all the rhetorical artifices of poetry, pointed him out as a
leader of men, and should prepare us to find his influence
the dominant one in all verse-writing in England for a
hundred years after his death. It was Dryden who gave
impetus and direction to the oratorical and anti-lyrical
movement which continued to rule English poetry until,
in its final decay, it was displaced by the romantic
naturalism of Wordsworth.
The foundation and development of modern English
comedy on the pure Terentian basis is, from a technical
point of view, one of the most remarkable features of the
epoch which we are examining. The romantic comedy,
in which Shakespeare had excelled, and in which even
Shirley might be considered respectable, had vanished
entirely with the closing of the theatres. What passed
for comedy at the Restoration was of the Jonsonian type,
WYCHERLEY: CONGREVE 191
the comedy of humours — we have already spoken of
Wilson's efforts in this direction. But the true modern
comedy, of which Corneille's Le Menteur (1642) is the
first finished example, comedy as Moliere understood it,
was imported into England by Etheredge, in the Man of
Mode. Sedley, too, less elegantly, was also an innovator ;
and a few years later WILLIAM WYCHERLEY, who had
written a couple of farces or imbroglios in the Spanish
style, produced in the Country Wife a vigorous and spark-
ling imitation of L'Ecole des Femmes, and followed it up
with the Plain Dealer, one of the most brutally cynical,
but none the less one of the best-constructed pieces
which have ever held the stage. With his magnificent
gaiety and buoyancy, Wycheriey exaggerated and dis-
figured the qualities which should rule the comic stage,
but they were there ; he was a ruffian, but a ruffian of
genius. Wycheriey and Etheredge represented comedy
under Charles II. At the very close of the century
there came the young wits whom I have elsewhere
attempted to distinguish by calling them the Orange
School. Of these WILLIAM CONGREVE was the greatest ;
his reign was short, from 1693 to 1700, but it was
extremely brilliant. No one, perhaps, in any country,
has written prose for the stage with so assiduous
a solicitude for style. Congreve balances, polishes,
sharpens his sentences till they seem like a set of
instruments prepared for an electrical experiment ; the
current is his unequalled wit, and it flashes and leaps
without intermission from the first scene to the last.
The result is one of singular artificiality ; and almost
from the outset — from the moment, at all events, that
Congreve's manner ceased to dazzle with its novelty —
something was felt, even by his contemporaries, to be
192 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
wanting. The something, no doubt, was humanity,
sympathy, nature.
Sir John Vanbrugh has none of Congreve's pre-emi-
nence in style. He has no style at all : he simply throws
his characters at one another's heads, and leaves them to
fight it out as they will. But he has great fire and vigour
of redundant fancy. After him came Farquhar, with his
mess-room tone, and what Pope called his "pert, low
dialogue," but also with a manly tenderness that excused
his faults. Steele followed, with his lachrymose comedies
of sentiment ; and in Susannah Centlivre the music that
Etheredge had begun to so sprightly a tune, came to an
ignominious finale. Of all the brilliant body of litera-
ture so produced in some forty years, not one piece has
held the stage. There were moral reasons for this inevi-
table exclusion. If merit of a purely literary or even
theatrical kind were alone to be considered, revivals of
Wycherley and Congreve ought to be frequent. But the
fact is that Restoration comedy is of a universal profli-
gate coarseness which enters into the very essence of the
plot and is ineradicable. It is only by dint of the most
delicate pilotage that one or other of these admirably
written comedies is now and again, in an extremely
modified form, safely steered across the footlights. In
1698 the non-juror Jeremy Collier made an attack on
the immorality and profaneness of the English stage.
The public was on Collier's side, and his blows were so
efficient that they practically killed, not indecency only,
but the practice of comedy itself.
No general survey of the close of the seventeenth cen-
tury could be complete without a reference to the cele-
brated dispute as to what was called the Old and the New
Philosophy. It occupied all the countries of Europe,
BENTLEY 193
but chiefly France, where the private sessions of the
French Academy were torn with disputes about the rela-
tive importance of the ancient and the modern writers.
It was raised very definitely by Fontenelle in 1688, and
by Perrault, each of whom was on the side of the
moderns. In this country, in 1692, Temple, with volu-
minous elegance and pomp, printed a solemn defence of
the Greeks and Latins, and took occasion to praise, in
terms of the most exaggerated hyperbole, certain Epistles
of Phalaris, supposed to be written in Attic Greek by a
Sicilian tyrant of the sixth century before Christ. No-
body possessed Phalaris, and to meet a sudden demand,
a publisher issued an edition of his text. Charles Boyle,
the editor, though a young man of slight erudition,
doubted the authenticity of the Letters ; but they were
proved to be spurious in the immortal dissertation by
RICHARD BENTLEY, a publication which marks an era
in the development of European scholarship. It is
the most brilliant piece of destructive commentary that,
perhaps, was ever published, and it revealed in Bentley
a critic of an entirely new order. But even more extra-
ordinary was the textual and verbal work of Bentley,
whose discovery, as Bunsen has pointed out, is the sci-
ence of historical philology. Into the controversy which
raged around the phantom of Phalaris, Swift presently
descended ; but he added nothing to scholarship, and
what he gave to literature must be treated in the next
chapter. Meanwhile it is not uninstructive to find
Bentley closing these forty years of mainly critical move-
ment with such an exact criticism of the ancients as no
one since the days of Scaliger had approached.
Throughout the period from 1660 to 1700 the word
" criticism " has had incessantly to invade our narrative.
N
194 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Looked upon broadly, this was the least creative and the
most critical ©f all the main divisions of our literary
history. The Renaissance had finally departed ; after
a lingering illness, marked at first by fantastic conceits,
then by utter insipidity, it had died. It was necessary
to get hold of something quite living to take its place,
and what France originally, and then England from
1660 onwards, chose, was the imitatio veterum, the litera-
ture, in prose and verse, which seemed most closely to
copy the models of Latin style. Aristotle and Horace
were taken not merely as patterns, but as arbiters. No
feature was permitted unless classical authority for it
could be produced, and it was needful at every step to
test an innovation by the rules and the unities. Hence
the temper of the age became essentially critical, and
to discuss the machinery of the musical box more im-
portant than to listen to the music. Instead of the
licentious use of any stanzaic form that might suit the
whim of the poet, serious verse was practically tied down
to the heroic couplet of two rhyming lines of five beats
each. This had been mainly the creation of Waller
in England, as the regular pendulous alexandrine was
of Malherbe in France. Rhyme of this exact and
balanced kind had been defended, even for plays, by
Dryden, on the ground that it is that "which most
regulates the fancy, and gives the judgment its busiest
employment."
All this is much out of fashion nowadays, and to our
impressionist critics, eager for sensations — for the " new
note," for an "individual manner" — must seem preposter-
ous and ridiculous. But a writer like Dryden, responsible
for the movement of literature in the years immediately
succeeding the Restoration, had a grave task before
THE RESTORATION STAGE 195
him. He was face to face with a bankruptcy ; he had
to float a new concern on the spot where the old had
sunken. That uniformity of manner, that lack of salient
and picturesque individuality, which annoy the hasty
reader, were really unavoidable. Dryden and Tillotson,
Locke and Otway, with their solicitude for lucidity of
language, rigidity of form, and closeness of reasoning,
were laying anew the foundations upon which literature
might once more be built. It is better to build on
Malherbe and Dryden, even if we think the ground-
plan a little dull, than upon Marino and Gongora.
Unfortunately, in an age so closely set upon externals
and the manipulation of language, it was likely that the
inward part of literature might be neglected. Accord-
ingly, while the subjects of the latest Stuarts were polish-
ing their couplets and clarifying their sentences, they
neglected the natural instincts of the heart. It was an
age of active intellectual curiosity, but not of pathos
or of passion. The stage was for ever protesting the
nobility of its sentiments, yet, save in Venice Preserved,
it is difficult to find a single Restoration play where
there is any tenderness in the elevation, any real tears
behind the pomp of the rhetoric. The theatre was so
coarse that its printed relics remain a scandal to Euro-
pean civilisation, and that the comedies of Otway and
Southerne (for the tragedians were the greatest sinners
when they stooped to farce) could ever have been acted
to mixed audiences, or to any audience at all, can hardly
be conceived. It would, of course, be very narrow-
minded to judge the whole age by its plays. It had its
pure divines, its refined essayists and scholars, its austere
philosophers. But we cannot go far wrong in taking
that redoubtable gossip Pepys as a type of the whole.
196 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
It was not an enthusiastic, nor a delicate, nor an impas-
sioned age, and we must not look for intensity in its
productions. What we should admire and should be
grateful for are its good sense, its solidity of judgment,
and its close attention to thoroughness and simplicity
in workmanship.
VI
THE AGE OF ANNE
1700-1740
DURING the final years of the reign of William III. litera-
ture in England was in a stagnant condition. Almost
the only department in which any vitality was visible
was comic drama, represented by Congreve, Gibber,
Vanbrugh, and Farquhar. A vast quantity of verse was
poured forth, mainly elegiac and occasional, but most of
it of an appalling badness. At the death of Dryden, in
1700, only two noticeable non-dramatic poets survived.
Garth, who had just published a polished burlesque, the
Dispensary, under the influence of Boileau's Le Lutrin,
and Addison, whose hyperbolic compliments addressed
to " godlike Nassau " were written in verse which took
up the prosody of Waller as if Dryden had never existed.
In criticism the wholesome precepts of Dryden seemed
to have been utterly forgotten, and Rymer, a pedagogue
upon Parnassus, was pushing the rules of the French
Jesuits to an extreme which excluded Shakespeare, Flet-
cher, and Spenser from all consideration, and threatened
the prestige of Dryden himself. In prose Bishop Burnet
was writing, but he properly belongs to an earlier and
again to a later age. Samuel Clarke was preaching,
Steele was beginning to feel his way, Shaftesbury was
privately printing one short tract. On the whole, it was
197
1 98 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
the lowest point reached by English literature during the
last three hundred years. The cause of such sterility and
languor can scarcely be determined. The forces which
had been introduced in the first decade after the Restora-
tion were exhausted, and it was necessary to rest a little
while before taking another start.
But in 1702 Queen Anne ascended the throne, and her
brief reign is identified with a brilliant revival in English
letters, in the hands of a group of men of the highest
accomplishment and originality. It must be noted, how-
ever, that this revival did not take place until the Queen
was near her end, and that of the writers of the age of Anne
but few had published anything considerable until within
three years of her death. It would be historically more
exact to distinguish this period in literature as the age
of George I., the years from 1714 to 1727 being those
in which some of the most characteristic works of the
school were published ; but the other name has become
hallowed by long practice, and George I. certainly deserves
as little as any monarch who ever reigned the credit of
being a judicious patron of letters. It is interesting,
indeed, to note that by 1714 almost all the characteristic
forces of the age were started. Pope had reached his
Homer; Swift was pouring forth tracts ; Shaftesbury,
Arbuthnot, Mandeville, and even Berkeley had pub-
lished some of their most typical writings ; while the
Tatler and the Spectator had actually run their course.
All this activity, however, dates from the very close of
Queen Anne's life. Between 1711 and 1714 a perfect
galaxy of important works in prose and verse burst
almost simultaneously from the London presses. It was
as though a cloud which had long obscured the heavens
had been swept away by a wind, which, in so doing, had
THE JESUIT CRITICS 199
revealed a splendid constellation. In 1702 no country
in civilised Europe was in a more melancholy condi-
tion of intellectual emptiness than England ; in 1712 not
France itself could compare with us for copious and
vivid production.
Meanwhile, almost unperceived, the critic had begun
to make his appearance, for the first time, in the form
with which we have since been familiar. The French
asserted that it was Castelvetro and Piccolomini, Italian
writers of the end of the sixteenth century, who first
taught that just comprehension of the Poetics of Aristotle
in which modern criticism began. These scholars, how-
ever, were unknown in England, where it was the French
critics, and, in particular, Rapin and Le Bossu, who intro-
duced to us the Aristotelian criticism of imaginative litera-
ture. Rene Rapin, in particular, exercised an immense
authority in this country, and was the practical law-giver
from the last quarter of the seventeenth century onward.
Rymer and Dennis founded their dogmas entirely on his
Reflections, merely modifying to English convenience his
code of rules. Rapin has been strangely forgotten ;
when he died in 1687, he was the leading critic of Europe,
and he is the writer to whom more than to any other is
due the line taken by English poetry for the next hun-
dred years. The peculiarity of his Reflections, which were
promptly translated into English, was, that they aimed
at adapting the laws and theories of Aristotle to modern
practice. As is often the case, Rapin was less rigid than
his disciples ; he frequently develops a surprisingly just
conception of what the qualities of the highest literature
should be.
The school of Rapin, who moulded the taste and
practice of the young men who were to be the pioneers
200 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
of the age of Anne, claimed for Aristotle the unbounded
allegiance of all who entered the domain of verse.
Every man of judgment was blindly to resign his own
opinions to the dictates of Aristotle, and to do this
because the reasons given for these rules are as con-
vincing and as lucid as any demonstration in mathe-
matics. But Aristotle had approached literature only as
a philosopher ; for Rapin they claimed the merit of
having been the first to apply the Aristotelian principles
to modern practice. The English disciples of Rapin
accepted his formulas, and used them to give literature
a new start, and thus Rapin came to be the father of
eighteenth-century criticism. The first review of a book
in the modern sense may be said to have been JOHN
DENNIS'S tract on a fashionable epic of the moment,
published in 1696 ; here was a plea for sober judgment,
something that should be neither gross praise nor wild
abuse. The subject of this tract was negligible, but
Dennis presently came forward with dissertations on
more serious forms of literature. Dennis has been reso-
lutely misjudged, in consequence of his foolish attitude
towards his younger contemporaries in old age, but in
his prime he was a writer of excellent judgment. He was
the first English critic to do unstinted justice to Milton
and to Moliere, and he was a powerful factor in preparing
public opinion for the literary verdicts of Addison.
It is not to be supposed that critics of the prestige of
Dennis or Rymer would address the public from a less
dignified stage than that of a book, or, at worst, a sixpenny
pamphlet. But at the close of the reign of William III.
we meet with the earliest apparition of literary criticism
in periodical publications. In other words, the news-
paper was now beginning to take literary form, and the
EARLY JOURNALISM 201
introduction of such a factor must not be left unmentioned
here. The first reviews printed in an English newspaper
were those appended by Dunton to the Athenian Gazette
in 1691 ; but these were not original, they were simply
translated out of the Journal des Savans. Notices of
books, in the modern sense, began to be introduced
very timidly into some of the news-sheets about the
year 1701. Nor was this the only direction in which
literary journalism was started ; men of real importance
began to take part in newspaper-writing, and the English
press may name among the earliest of its distinguished
servants such personages as Atterbury, Kennet, Hoadley,
and Defoe.
While, therefore, we cannot claim for the opening
years of the century the production of any master-
pieces, and while its appearance, from an intellectual
point of view, is to us quiescent, yet without doubt
the seeds of genius were swelling in the darkness.
In all departments of thought and art, Englishmen were
throwing off the last rags of the worn-out garments of
the Renaissance, and were accustoming themselves to
wear with comfort their new suit of classical formulas.
In poetry, philosophy, history, religion, the age was
learning the great lesson that the imagination was no
longer to be a law unto itself, but was to follow closely
a code dictated by reason and the tradition of the an-
cients. Enthusiasm was condemned as an irregularity,
the daring use of imagery as an error against manners.
The divines were careful to restrain their raptures, and
to talk and write like lawyers. Philosophical writers
gladly modelled themselves on Hobbes and Locke, the
nakedness of whose unenthusiastic style was eminently
sympathetic to them, although they conceived a greater
202 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
elegance of delivery necessary. Their speculations be-
came mainly ethical, and the elements of mystery and
romance almost entirely died out. Neither the pursuit
of pleasure nor the assuaging of conscience, no active
force of any kind, became supreme with the larger class
of readers ; but the new bourgeois rank of educated
persons, which the age of Queen Anne created, occu-
pied itself in a passive analysis of human nature. It
loved to sit still and watch the world go by ; an appetite
for realistic description, bounded by a decent code, and
slipping neither up into enthusiasm nor down into scep-
ticism, became the ruling passion of the age. During
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, common-sense
had been by no means characteristic of the English race,
which had struggled, flaunted, or aspired. It now went
back to something like its earlier serenity, and in an age
of comparatively feeble emotion and slight intensity took
things as they were. In Shaftesbury, a writer of provi-
sional but extraordinary influence, we see this common-
sense taking the form of a mild and exuberant optimism ;
and perhaps what makes the dark figure of Swift stand
out so vividly against the rose-grey background of the
age is the incongruity of his violence and misanthropy in
a world so easy-going.
In chronological sequence, it should, perhaps, be the
theology of the early part of the reign of Anne which
should first attract us, but it need not detain us long.
The golden age of Anglican theology had long passed
away, and in the progress of latitudinarianism, culminat-
ing, through Locke, in the pronounced deists, literature
as an art has little interest. A tolerant rationalism was
not likely to encourage brilliant writing, the orthodox
churchmen wrote like wrangling lawyers, and the non-
CLARKE 203
jurors and dissenters, who produced some vigorous
scholars later on, were now as dreary as their opponents.
Of the early deists, Shaftesbury alone was a man of
style, and him we shall presently meet with in another
capacity. Among the theologians, the most eminent
writer was SAMUEL CLARKE, "the greatest English re-
presentative of the a priori method of constructing a
system of theology." His once famous collection of
Boyle Lectures (1704-5) long seemed a classic to admiring
readers, and still affects our conventional notions of
theology. Clarke, however, has few readers to-day, and
his manner of statement, which resembles that of a
mathematician propounding a theorem, is as tedious
to us now as it was fascinating to the group of young
controversialists who clustered round Clarke during his
brief career at Cambridge. In the hands of Clarke and
his school, theological writing followed the lines laid
down for it by Tillotson, but with a greatly accentuated
aridity and neatness. In the search for symmetry these
authors neglected almost every other excellence and orna-
ment of literary expression.
If philosophy at the opening of the eighteenth century
could give a better account of itself, it was mainly because
the leading philosopher was a born writer. The third
Earl of SHAFTESBURY has been strangely neglected by
the historians of our literature, partly because his scheme
of thought has long been rejected, and partly because his
style, in which some of the prolixity of the seventeenth
century still lingered, was presently obliterated by the
technical smartness of Addison and Swift. With the
meaning of Shaftesbury's doctrine of virtue, and with the
value of his optimism and plea for harmony, we have
nothing here to do, but his influence on writing in his
204 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
own age and down the entire eighteenth century is highly
important to us. Commonly as the fact is overlooked,
Shaftesbury was one of the literary forces of the time —
he was, perhaps, the greatest between Dryden and Swift.
He died in 1713, two years after his miscellaneous treatises,
written at intervals during the fifteen years preceding, had
been published in those handsome volumes of the Charac-
teristics. Shaftesbury's long residences in Holland gave
him the opportunity of becoming thoroughly acquainted
with the movement of Continental thought to an extent
doubtless beyond any previous writer of English prose.
The effect is seen on his style and temper, which are less
insular than those of any of the men with whom it is
natural to compare him. It is to be noted also that
Shaftesbury was the earliest English author whose works
in the vernacular were promptly admired abroad, and
he deserves remembrance as the first who really broke
down the barrier which excluded England from taking
her proper place in the civilisation of literary Europe.
The writers who were to shine in prose immediately
after the death of Shaftesbury were distinguished for
the limpid fluency and grace of their manner. In this
Shaftesbury did not resemble them, but rather set an
example for the kind of prose which was to mark the
central years of the century. There is nothing about
him which reminds us of the nobleman that writes with
ease : he is elaborate and self-conscious to the highest de-
gree, embroidered with ornament of dainty phraseology,
anxious to secure harmony and yet to surprise the fancy.
The style of Shaftesbury glitters and rings, proceeding
along in a capricious, almost mincing effort to secure
elegance, with a sort of colourless euphuism, which is
desultory and a little irritating indeed, yet so curious that
SHAFTESBURY 205
one marvels that it should have fallen completely into
neglect. He is the father of aestheticism, the first Eng-
lishman who developed theories of formal virtue, who
attempted to harmonise the beautiful with the true and
the good. His delicate, Palladian style, in which a certain
external stiffness and frigidity seem to be holding down
a spirit eager to express the passion of beauty, is a very
interesting feature of the period to which we have now
arrived. The modern attitude of mind seems to meet us
first in the graceful, cosmopolitan writings of Shaftesbury,
and his genius, like a faint perfume, pervades the contem-
plation of the arts down to our own day. Without a
Shaftesbury there would hardly have been a Ruskin or a
Pater.
Be this as it may, it is quite certain that the brilliant
school of poets who began to make their appearance just
as Shaftesbury was dying, owed to him the optimism of
their religious and philosophical system. But it was
mainly to the French that they were indebted for the
impetus which started them; and if France had already
made a deep mark on our literature between 1660 and
1674, it made another, not less indelible, in 1710. What
the influence of Rapin, thirty-five years before, had done
to regulate taste in England, and to enforce the rules laid
down by the ancients, had not proved stimulating to
poetic genius, and, with the death of Dryden, we have
seen that poetry practically ceased to exist in England.
When it returned it was mainly in consequence of the
study of another Frenchman, but this time of a poet,
Boileau, whose influence on the mind of Pope, care-
fully concealed by the latter, was really far greater than
any critic has ventured to confess. There were certain
qualities in Boileau which can but have appealed directly
206 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
to the young Pope, who in 1710 was twenty-two years
of age. Boileau had not been so closely wedded to
pedantic rules as his friends the Jesuit critics were. He
had insisted on inspiration, on the value of ceaseless
variety, on obedience to the laws of language. The pre-
face to the 1701 edition of his works is one of the land-
marks of European criticism, and we can scarcely doubt
that it awakened a high spirit of emulation in the youth-
ful Pope. In it Boileau had urged that none should ever
be presented to the public in verse but true thoughts and
just expressions. He had declaimed against frigidity of
conceit and tawdry extravagance, and had proclaimed
the virtues of simplicity without carelessness, sublimity
without presumption, a pleasing air without fard. He
had boldly convicted his predecessors of bad taste, and
had called his lax contemporaries to account. He had
blamed the sterile abundance of an earlier period, and
the uniformity of dull writers. Such principles were
more than all others likely to commend themselves to
Pope, and his practice shows us that they did.
We cannot think of the poetry of the age of Anne and
not of ALEXANDER POPE. As little ought we to analyse
Pope and fail to admit what he owes to Boileau. The
" Law-giver of Parnassus" gave laws, it is certain, to the
hermit of Windsor Forest. The work of no other great
English writer has coincided with that of a foreigner so
closely as Pope's does with that of Boileau. The French
satirist had recommended polish, and no one practised
it more thoroughly than Pope did. Boileau discouraged
love -poetry, and Pope did not seriously attempt it.
Boileau paraphrased Horace, and in so doing formulated
his own poetical code, in L'Art Poetique ; Pope did
the same in the Essay on Criticism. Boileau specially
POPE 207
urged the imitation of Homer on young poets, and
Pope presently devoted himself to the Iliad. In Le
Lutrin Boileau had written the best mock-heroic, till
Pope, in closely analogous form, surpassed him in the
Rape of the Lock. The Satires of Pope would not have
been written but for those of his French predecessor ;
and even Pope's Elegy and Eloisa can be accounted for
in the precepts of Boileau. The parallel goes very far
indeed : it is the French poet first, and not the English
one, who insists that the shepherds of pastoral must not
speak as they do in a country village. Pope's very
epitaphs recall Boileau's labours with the inscriptions of
the Petite Academic. That purity and decency of phrase
which the school of Pope so beneficially introduced into
the coarse field of English literature had been strenu-
ously urged on Frenchmen by Boileau. It cannot be too
strongly emphasised that it is not so much to Dryden,
whose influence on Pope has certainly been exaggerated,
as to the author of Le Lutrin , that the poetry of the age
of Anne owed its general impulse, and its greatest poet
the general tendency of almost every branch of his pro-
duction. It is true that Pope told Spence that " I learned
versification wholly from Dryden's works," his prosody
being a continuation and development of that of Dryden ;
but in the use to which he put his verse, it was certainly
the great Frenchman (who died two months before Pope's
earliest important poem was published) that was his
master. Walsh had told him, in 1706, that " the best of
the modern poets in all languages are those that have
the nearest copied the ancients " \ but we may not doubt
that it was through Boileau that Pope arrived at a com-
prehension of Horace, and so of Aristotle.
For more than thirty years Pope was so completely the
208 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
centre of poetical attention in England that he may
almost be said to have comprised the poetry of his time.
There is no second instance of an English poet pre-
serving for so long a period a supremacy comparable to
his. It is possible to defend the position that one or two
other versemen of the age did some particular thing
better than Pope, though even this requires argument ;
but it is quite certain that he alone excelled over a wide
range of subjects. The fact of Pope's poetical ubiquity,
however, is rendered much less miraculous by the con-
sideration that if he triumphed over the entire field, the
area of that field was extremely restricted. There was
never a period, from the Middle Ages till to-day, when
the practice of verse was limited to so few forms as it
was under the reign of Pope. Lyrical writing, save in
the mildest and most artificial species, was not cultivated ;
there was no poetical drama, tragic or comic ; there was
no description of nature, save the merest convention ;
there was scarcely any love-poetry ; no devotional verse
of any importance ; no epic or elegy or ode that de-
served the name. Poetry existed, practically, in but
three forms — the critical or satirical, the narrative or
didactic, and the occasional — these three, indeed, being
so closely correlated that it is not always very easy to
distinguish them.
It was Pope's aim to redeem verse from unholy uses,
to present to the reader none but true thoughts and
noble expressions, and to dedicate the gravest form to
the highest purpose. His actual practice was not at first
so exalted. The boyish Pastorals scarcely call for notice ;
but in the Essay on Criticism he achieved at twenty-one
a work of rare grace and authority. He began where
other poets have left off, and it is not a little characteristic
PRIOR: POPE 209
of Pope's temperament that he should not open with
strong, irregular verse, and push on to the comparative
stagnation of the critical attitude, but should make this
latter the basis of his life-work. The Essay is in most
respects inferior to its French prototype, more hastily
and irregularly composed, and with far less ripeness of
judgment ; but it is graceful and eloquent, and for the
eighteenth century it provided an almost unchallenged
code of taste. MATTHEW PRIOR in the same year, though
more than twice the age of Pope, ventured upon the
earliest publication of his poems, bringing from the close
of the seventeenth century a certain richness of style
which we find not in the younger man. His ballads and
songs, with their ineffable gaiety, his satires and epigrams,
so lightly turned, enriched the meagre body of English
verse with a gift, much of which should really be attri-
buted to the age of Dryden. But Prior was not less
closely related to the generation of Pope in his Horatian
attitude and his brilliant Gallic grace. He was, however,
but an occasional trifler with his charming muse, and
had none of the younger master's undeviating ambition.
From 1711, to follow the career of Pope is to take part
in a triumph in which the best of his contemporaries
secures but a secondary part. The Rape of the Lock
(1712-14) lifted Pope at once to the first rank of living
European poets. In lightness of handling, in elegance
of badinage, in exquisite amenity of style — that is to say,
in the very qualities which Latin Europe had hitherto,
and not without justice, denied us — the little British bar-
barian surpassed all foreign competitors. This is the
turning-point of English subserviency to French taste.
Pope and his school had closely studied their Boileau,
and had learned their lesson well, so well that for the
o
210 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
future England is no longer the ape of the French, but
is competent, more and more confidently as the century
descends, to give examples to the polite world.
A few years later all the countries of Europe were taking
these examples, and the imitation of Pope grew to be the
rage from Sweden to Italy. Meanwhile, the youth of four-
and-twenty was gaining mastery in his art. The Messiah
(of 1712) reached a pitch of polished, resonant rhetoric
hitherto undreamed of, and was a " copy of verses" which
became the model and the despair of five generations of
poets. Each of these productions stamped more defi-
nitely the type of "classical" versification, tone, and
character, and all Pope had now to do was to enlarge
his knowledge of human nature, and to cultivate that
extreme delicacy of phrase and rapidity of intellectual
movement which were his central peculiarities.
He had early learned to master the art of poetry ; but
although he was already famous, none of those works in
which he was to concentrate and illustrate the whole
thought and fashion of his age were yet written. Pope
was far more than the most skilful of versifiers : he was
the microcosm of the reign of George I. There is scarcely
a belief, a tradition, an ideal of that age which is not to
be discovered lucidly set down in the poems of Pope,
who was not vastly above his epoch, as some great
poetical prophets have been, but exactly on a level
with it, and from our distance its perfect mirror. But
before he took up this work of his advanced years he
gave the remainder of his youth to a task of high and
fertile discipline. From 1713, when Swift was going
about begging subscriptions for " the best poet in Eng-
land, Mr. Pope, a Papist," till 1725, when the Odyssey
appeared, he was mainly occupied in translating from
POPE 2 1 1
the Greek, or in revising the translations of others. His
individuality was so strong, or his realisation of Hellenic
art so imperfect, that he conceived a Homer of his own,
a Homer polished and restrained to polite uses, no
longer an epic poet, but a conteur of the finest modern
order, fluent, manly, and distinguished, yet essentially
a writer of Pope's own day and generation. The old
complaints of Pope's Homer are singularly futile. It was
not an archaistic or a romantic version that England and
her subscribers wanted ; they desired a fine, scholarly
piece in the taste of their own times, and that was exactly
what Pope was competent to give them.
But if they were the gainers by his twelve years'
labour, so was he. The close study of the Homeric
diction gave firmness and ease to his style, concentrated
his powers, determined his selection of poetic material.
What Pope wrote during the Homeric period was not
considerable in extent, but it included his only incursions
into the province of love, the beautiful Elegy to the
Memory of an Unfortunate Lady and the Eloisa to Abelard
(1717). These years, however, marked the solidification
of the school of which he was the acknowledged leader,
even though some of its members seemed his enemies.
Addison, his great rival, had published in 1713 his
tragedy of Cato, in which the rules of Horace were applied
with stringent exactitude, the result being of an exquisite
frigidity. In the same year Gay came forward, a skilful
and fairly independent satellite of Pope ; between 1713
and 1726 contributing a copious and sprightly flow of
short pastorals, songs, and epistles. The elegant Arch-
deacon of Clogher, too, Thomas Parnell, wrote with
gravity and wit under the direct stimulus of Pope's
friendship. He died in 1718, and the posthumous collec-
212 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
tion which his master issued four years later contained
some harmonious odes and narratives which have not
quite disappeared from living English literature. Tickell,
who loved Addison and hated Pope, was writing, between
1719 and 1722, poems which owed more to Pope than to
Addison, and in particular an elegy on the great essayist
which is one of the most dignified funeral pieces in the
language. Prior, who died in 1721, had finally collected
his writings in 1718, and Swift ever and anon put forth
an erratic fragment of vivid caustic verse. All this record
of poetical activity dates from those years during which
Pope was buried in Homer, but through it all his own
claim to the highest place was scarcely questioned,
although he was the youngest of the group.
Pope emerged from Homer in 1725, ready to take his
place again in militant literature. But the world was not
the same to him. Of his elders and compeers half passed
away while he was finishing the Iliad — Garth, Parnell,
Addison, Lady Winchelsea, and Prior. Congreve and
Gay grew languid and fatigued. The great quarrels of
Pope's life began, and the acrid edge was set on his
temper. But Atterbury had long ago assured him that
satire was his true forte, and Swift encouraged him to
turn from melancholy reflection on the great friends he
had lost, to bitter jesting with the little enemies that
remained to him. In 1728-29 the Dunciad lashed the
bad writers of the age in couplets that rang with the
crack of a whip. During the remainder of his life, Pope
was actively engaged in the composition and rapid pub-
lication of ethical and satirical poems, most of which
appeared in successive folio pamphlets between 1731 and
1738. It has been conjectured that all these pieces were
fragments of a great philosophical poem which he in-
POPE 213
tended one day to complete, with the addition of that
New Dunciad (1742) which was the latest of Pope's im-
portant writings. Among these scattered pieces the most
famous are the four parts of the Essay on Man, the
Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, and the successive Imitations
of Horace.
In these poems of the maturity of Pope there is no
longer any distinct trace of French influence. They
mark the full coming of age of the English classical
school. The lesson first taught by the Royalists who
came back from the Continent in 1660 was now com-
pletely learned ; criticism had finished its destructive
work long before, and on the basis so swept clear of all
the ruins of the Renaissance a new kind of edifice was
erected. In the Fables of Dryden, in the tragedies of
Otway and Congreve (the Mourning Bride), something
was left of the sonorous irregularity of the earlier seven-
teenth century, a murmur, at least, of the retreating
wave. But in such a satire as of the Use of Riches
not the faintest echo of the old romantic style remains.
It is not fair, in such a conjunction, to take passages in
which the colloquial wit of Pope is prominent ; but
here are verses which are entirely serious, and intended
to be thoroughly poetical :
" Consult the genius of the place in all',
That tells the waters or to rise or fall,
Or helps the ambitious hill the heavens to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades;
Now breaks, or now directs, the intending lines ;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs"
Is this poetry or not ? That is the question which
has troubled the critics for a hundred years, and seems
214 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
as little to be capable of solution as the crux of pre-
destination and free-will. That it is not poetry of the
same class as a chorus out of Prometheus Unbound or
a tirade out of the Duchess of Malfy is obvious ; but
this is no answer to the query. Certain facts need to
be observed. One is, that to several successive genera-
tions of highly intelligent men this did appear to be
poetry, and of a very high order. Another is, that since
the revolution compassed by Wordsworth we have been
living under a prejudice in favour of the romantic
manner which may or may not be destined to last much
longer. If another revolution in taste should overwhelm
us, Adonais and Tintern Abbey may easily grow to seem
grotesquely unreadable. It is wise, therefore, not to
moot a question which cannot be solved, as Matthew
Arnold tried to solve it, by calling "Dryden and Pope
not classics of our poetry, but classics of our prose."
Pope was not a classic of prose ; he wrote almost ex-
clusively in a highly finished artistic verse, which may
evade the romantic formulas, but is either poetry or
nothing. The best plan is to admit that it is poetry, and
to define it.
In their conception of that class of poetry, then, of
which the later works of Pope supply the most brilliant
example, the English classicists returned to what the
French had taught them to believe to be a Latin
manner. They found in the admirable poets of anti-
quity, and particularly in Horace, a determination to
deal with the average and universal interests and obser-
vations of mankind, rather than with the exceptional,
the startling, and the violent. They desired to express
these common thoughts and emotions with exquisite
exactitude, to make of their form and substance alike
POPE 2 i 5
an amalgam of intense solidity, capable of a high polish.
If we had asked Pope what quality he conceived that
he had achieved in the Essay on Man, he would have
answered, " Horatii curiosa felicitas," the consummate
skill in fixing normal ideas in such a way as to
turn common clay into perdurable bronze. By the
side of such a design as this it would have seemed to
him a poor thing to dig out rough ore of passion, like
Donne, or to spin gossamer-threads of rainbow-coloured
fancy, like Shelley. We may not agree with him, be-
cause we still live in a romantic age. It is hardly likely,
moreover, that, whatever change comes over English
taste, we shall ever return exactly to the Boileauesque-
Horatian polishing of commonplaces in couplets. But
to admire Ibsen and Tolstoi, and to accept them as
imaginative creators, is to come back a long way towards
the position held by Pope and Swift, towards the sup-
position that the poet is not a child dazzled by lovely
illusions and the mirage of the world, but a grown-up
person to whom the limits of experience are patent, who
desires above all things to see mankind steadily and
perspicuously. In its palmy days at least, that is to say
during the lifetime of Pope, "classical" English poetry
was, within its narrow range, an art exquisitely per-
formed by at least one artist of the very first class.
That this height was not long sustained, and that decline
was rapid, will be our observation in a later chapter.
More durable has been the impress on our prose of the
great critical contemporaries of Pope. One of the land-
marks in the history of literature is the date, April 12,
1709, when Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff began to circulate his
immortal lucubrations in the first gratis number of the
Tatler. Here, at last, the easy prose of everyday life
216 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
had found a medium in which, without a touch of
pedantry, it could pass lightly and freely across the
minds of men. The place which those newspapers
hold in our memory is quite out of proportion with the
duration of their issue. We hardly realise that the Tatler
lasted only until January 1711, and that the Spectator
itself, though started two months later, expired before
the close of i£i2. Three years and eight months suf-
ficed to create the English essay, and lift it to an
impregnable position as one of the principal forms of
which literature should henceforth consist. In this
great enterprise, the importance of which in the his-
tory of literature can hardly be exaggerated, popular
opinion long gave the main, almost the exclusive
credit to JOSEPH ADDISON. But the invention of the
periodical essay we now know to have been RICHARD
STEELE'S, and of the 271 Tatlers only 42 are certainly
Addison's.
In the Spectator their respective shares were more
exactly balanced, and the polished pen of Addison took
precedence. We gather that, of these immortal friends,
Steele was the more fertile in invention, Addison the
more brilliant and captivating in execution. It was
cruel in Swift, and only partly true, to say that politics
had turned Steele from "an excellent droll" into "a
very awkward pamphleteer " ; yet Steele could be
awkward. "The elegance, purity, and correctness"
which delighted all readers of the essays were contri-
buted by Addison, and were appreciated in his own age
to a degree which appears to us slightly exaggerated,
for we have learned to love no less the humour and
pathos of Steele. Without the generous impulse of
Steele the unfailing urbanity of Addison might have
THE TATLER 217
struck a note of frigidity. Contemporaries; who eagerly
welcomed their daily sheet, in which Mr. Spectator re-
tailed the reflections and actions of his club, did not
pause to think how much of its unique charm depended
on the fortunate interaction of two minds, each lucid,
pure, and brilliant, yet each, in many essential quali-
ties, widely distinguished from the other. "To enliven
morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality,"
was indeed a charming design when practised by two
moralists, each of whom was witty in a different
direction from the other.
The presentation of the first number of the Tatler to
the town marked nothing less than the creation of
modern journalism. Here, as in so much else, France
had been ahead of us, for since 1672 the Mercure and its
successors had satisfied the curiosity of Parisians as to
things in general. Quicquid agunt homines, said the
motto, and it was Steele who made the discovery for
Englishmen that the daily diversion of the newspaper was
one which might be made so fascinating and so neces-
sary that the race might presently be unable to dispense
with it. The earliest English newspaper is usually said
to be that leaf issued in 1622, under the pseudonym of
Mercurius Britannicus, by Nathaniel Butter ; but the
sheets of this kind, generically known as Mercuries, had
little of the aspect of a modern journal. The Public In-
telligencer (1663), of Roger L' Estrange, had more of the
true newspaper character, and began the epoch of the
gazettes, " pamphlets of news," as they were called. The
Daily Courant (1702) was the earliest daily journal. In
all these precursors of the Tatler there had been scarcely
a touch of literature. In his opening number Steele
offered an unprecedented olio, combining social gossip,
218 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
poetry, learning, the news of the day, and miscellaneous
entertainment ; and he appealed at once to a whole
world of new readers.
The result was something of so startling and delight-
ful a novelty that the town was revolutionised. At first
the anonymity was well preserved ; but in the fifth Tatler
Addison recognised a remark he had made to Steele, and
in the eighteenth he was dragged into the concern. As
the periodical continued, and the taste of the public be-
came gauged, the portion given to news was reduced,
and the essay took a more and more prominent place.
It is generally conjectured that this was due to Addison's
influence, whose part in the whole transaction was the
academic one of pruning and training the rough shoots
that sprang from Steele's vigorous wilding. If Steele
continued, however, to be predominant on the Tatler,
Addison so completely imprinted his own image upon
the later journal that to this day Mr. Spectator is an equi-
valent of Addison's name. The famous circle of typical
figures, the Club, was broadly sketched by Steele, but it
was Addison who worked the figures up to that minute
perfection which we now admire in Will Honeycomb
and Sir Roger de Coverley. So complete was the co-
operation, however, that it would be rash to decide too
sharply what in the conception of the immortal essays
belongs to one friend and what to the other.
In examining the light literature of a hundred years
earlier, we were confronted by the imitation of Theo-
phrastus, and now, in the Spectator, we meet with it again.
The best of the modern Theophrastians was La Bruyere,
and it were idle to deny that the characters of Addison
were originally modelled on French lines. It would be
a serious error indeed to think of Addison as a mere
THE SPECTATOR 219
imitator of the Caracteres, as Marivaux was later of
the Spectator, but English criticism has hardly been
content to admit the closeness of the earlier resem-
blance. Addison and Steele did not consider it their
duty to satirise particular persons, and they possessed a
gift in the dramatic creation, as distinguished from the
observation, of types such as La Bruyere did not possess,
or, at all events, did not exercise ; but the invention of
combining a moral essay with a portrait in a general,
desultory piece of occasional literature was not theirs,
but La Bruyere's. His field, however, was limited to the
streets of cities, and he did nothing to expand the general
interests of his contemporaries ; he was a delightful
satirist and most malicious urban gossip. But Addison
and Steele had their eye on England as well as on
London ; their aim, though a genial, was an ethical and
elevated one ; they developed, studied, gently ridiculed
the country gentleman. In their shrewdly civil way they
started a new kind of national sentiment, polite, easy,
modern, in which woman took her civilising place ;
they ruled the fashions in letters, in manners, even in
costume. They were the first to exercise the generous
emancipating influence of the free press, and an epoch
in the history of journalism was marked when, the pre-
face to Dr. Fleetwood's Sermons being suppressed by
order of the House of Commons, fourteen thousand
copies of it were next morning circulated in the columns
of the Spectator.
In several ways, however, these marvellous journals
were proved to be ahead of their age. When the Spec-
tator ceased, at the close of 1712, there was a long obscu-
ration of the light of the literary newspaper. Political
heat disturbed the Guardian, and later ventures enjoyed
220 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
even smaller success. To the regret of all true lovers of
literature, Addison and Steele were presently at daggers
drawn in opposed and quite inglorious news-sheets. But
the experiment had been made, and the two famous
journals may live all the more brilliantly in our memory
because their actual existence was not too lengthy to
permit them to come to life again in the more durable
form of books.
We have hitherto said nothing of JONATHAN SWIFT,
yet he flows right across the present field of our vision,
from William III. to George II. His course is that of a
fiery comet that dashes through the constellation of the
wits of Anne, and falls in melancholy ashes long after the
occultation of the last of them. The friend and com-
panion of them for a season, he pursues his flaming
course with little real relation to their milder orbits, and
is one of the most singular and most original figures that
our history has produced. Swift was a bundle of para-
doxes— a great churchman who has left not a trace on
our ecclesiastical system, an ardent politician who was
never more than a fly on the wheel. He is immortal on
the one side on which he believed his genius ephemeral ;
he survives solely, but splendidly, as a man of letters.
His career was a failure : he began life as a gentleman's
dependent, he quitted it " like a poisoned rat in a hole " ;
with matchless energy and ambition, he won neither place
nor power ; and in the brief heyday of his influence
with the Ministry, he who helped others was impotent
to endow himself. Swift is the typical instance of the
powerlessness of pure intellect to secure any but intellec-
tual triumphs. But even the victories of his brain were
tainted ; his genius left a taste of brass on his own palate.
That Swift was ever happy, that his self-torturing nature
SWIFT 221
was capable of contentment, is not certain ; that for a
long period of years he was wretched beyond the lot of
man is evident, and those have not sounded the depths of
human misery who have not followed in their mysterious
obscurity the movements of the character of Swift.
His will was too despotic to yield to his misfortunes ;
his pride sustained him, and in middle life a fund of restless
animal spirits. We know but little of his early years, yet
enough to see that the splendida bilis, the sceva indignatio,
which ill-health exacerbated, were his companions from
the first. We cannot begin to comprehend his literary
work without recognising this. His weapon was ink, and
he loved to remember that gall and copperas went to the
making of it. It was in that deadest period, at the very
close of the seventeenth century, that his prodigious
talent first made itself apparent. With no apprenticeship
in style, no relation of discipleship to any previous French
or English writer, but steeped in the Latin classics, he pro-
duced, at the age of thirty, two of the most extraordinary
masterpieces of humour and satire which were ever
written, the Tale of a Tub and the Battle of the Books.
It was not until five or six years later (1704) that he gave
them together, anonymously, to the press. In the Tale
of a Tub every characteristic of Swift's style is revealed —
the mordant wit, the vehement graceful ease, the stringent
simplicity. To the end of his days he never wrote better
things than the description of the goddess of Criticism
drawn by geese in a chariot, the dedication to Prince
Posterity with its splendid hilarity and irony, the doubly
distilled allegorical apologue of the Spider and the Bee.
In his poisonous attacks on the deists, in his gleams of
sulky misanthropy, in the strange filthiness of his fancy, in
the stranger exhilaration which seizes him whenever the
222 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
idea of madness is introduced — in all these things Swift
reveals his essential character in this his first and per-
haps greatest book. Although every one admired it, the
Tale of a Tub was doubtless fatal to his ambition, thus
wrecked at the outset on the reef of his ungovernable
satire. The book, to be plain, is a long gibe at theology,
and it is not surprising that no bishopric could ever be
given to the inventor of the Brown Loaf and the Uni-
versal Pickle. He might explain away his mockery,
declare it to have been employed in the Anglican cause,
emphasise the denial that his aim was irreligious ; the
damning evidence remained that when he had had the
sacred garments in his hands he had torn away, like
an infuriated ape, as much of the gold fringe as he
could. The fact was that, without any design of im-
piety, he knew not how to be devout. He always, by
instinct, saw the hollowness and the seamy side. His
enthusiasms were negative, and his burning imagination,
even when he applied it to religion, revealed not heaven
but hell to him.
The power and vitality of such a nature could not be
concealed ; they drew every sincere intellect towards him.
Already, in 1705, Addison was hailing Swift as "the most
agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest
genius of the age." We take him up again in 1711, when
the slender volume of Misc -Hanies reminds us of what
he had been as a writer from the age of thirty-five to
forty-five. The contents of this strange book name for
us the three caustic religious treatises, the first of Swift's
powerful political tracts (the Sacramental Test\ various
other waifs and rags from his culminating year, 1708, gibes
and flouts of many kinds revealing the spirit of " a very
positive young man," trifles in verse and prose to amuse
SWIFT 223
his friends the Whig Ministers or the ladies of Lord
Berkeley's family. Nothing could be more occasional
than all this ; nothing, at first sight, less imbued with
intensity or serious feeling. Swift's very compliments
are impertinent, his arguments in favour of Christianity
subversive. But under all this there is the passion of
an isolated intellect, and he was giving it play in the
frivolities of a compromising humour.
The published writings of Swift during the first forty-
four years of his life were comprised in two volumes of
very moderate dimensions. But if the purely literary
outcome of all this period had been exiguous, it was now
to grow scantier still. At the very moment when the
group of Anne wits, led by Pope and Addison, were enter-
ing with animation upon their best work, Swift, almost
ostentatiously, withdrew to the sphere of affairs, and for
ten years refrained entirely from all but political author-
ship. His unexampled Journal to Stella, it is true, belongs
to this time of obscuration, but it is hardly literature,
though of the most intense and pathetic interest. Swift
now stood " ten times better " with the new Tories than
ever he did with the old Whigs, and his pungent pen
poured forth lampoons and satirical projects. The
influence of Swift's work of this period upon the style of
successive English publicists is extremely curious ; he
began a new order of political warfare, demanding lighter
arms and swifter manoeuvres than the seventeenth century
had dreamed of. Even Halifax seems cold and slow
beside the lightning changes of mood, the inexorable
high spirits of Swift. That such a tract as the Sentiments
of a Church of England Man, with its gusts of irony, its
white heat of preposterous moderation, led on towards
Junius is obvious; but Swift is really the creator of the
224 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
whole school of eighteenth-century rhetorical diatribe
on its better side, wherever it is not leaden and conven-
tional. It may be said that he invented a vital polemical
system, which was used through the remainder of the
century by every one who dealt in that kind of literature,
and who was at the same time strong enough to wield
such thunderbolts.
That no one, until the time of Burke, who had other
ammunition of his own, could throw these bolts about with
anything of Swift's fierce momentum, it is scarcely neces-
sary to say. His velocity as an antagonist was extraordi-
nary. He was troubled by no doubt of his own opinion,
nor by any mercy for that of his enemy. He was the first
Englishman to realise, in the very nest of optimism, that
the public institutions of a society could be, and probably
were, corrupt. In the generation of Shaftesbury this dis-
covery was really a momentous one. Mandeville made
it soon after, but to his squalid moral nature the shock
was not so great as it was to Swift's. That most things
were evil and odious in the best of all possible worlds
was a revelation to Swift that exhilarated him almost to
ecstasy. He could hardly believe it to be true, and
trembled lest he should be forced to admit that, after all,
Pope and Shaftesbury were sound in their optimism.
But his satire probed the insufficiency of mankind in
place after place, and there gradually rose in Swift,
like an intoxication, a certainty of the vileness of the
race. When he was quite convinced, madness was close
upon him, but in the interval he wrote that sinister and
incomparable masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels, in which
misanthropy reaches the pitch of a cardinal virtue,
and the despicable race of man is grossly and finally
humiliated.
ARBUTHNOT: MANDEVILLE 225
Swift declared that if the world had contained a dozen
Arbuthnots, Gulliver's Travels should have been burned.
The charming physician was not only one of the very
few persons whom Swift respected, but of his own gene-
ration the first to come completely under his literary
influence. If we take the lash out of the style of Swift, we
have that of JOHN ARBUTHNOT, who can often hardly be
distinguished from his friend and master. Without per-
sonal ambition of any kind, no vanity deterred Arbuthnot
from frankly adopting, as closely as he could, the manner
of the man whom he admired the most. As he was a
perfectly sane and normal person, with plenty of wit and
accomplishment, and without a touch of misanthropy,
Arbuthnot served to popularise and to bring into general
circulation the peculiar characteristics of Swift, and to
reconcile him with his contemporaries.
Swift would have been well content to be named with
Arbuthnot, but to find Mandeville's works bracketed with
his own would have given him a paroxysm of indignation.
Yet they were really so closely allied in some essentials
of thought that it is natural to regard them together.
BERNARD DE MANDEVILLE was a misanthropical Dutch
doctor settled in London, who attacked the optimism of
Shaftesbury in a coarse but highly effective and readable
volume called the Fable of the Bees. For twenty years after
this he was a pariah of the English press, writing odious,
vulgar, extremely intelligent books, in which he extended
his paradoxical thesis that private vices are public benefits.
Mandeville was a daring thinker, who permitted no tradi-
tional prejudice, no habit of decency, to interfere with
the progression of his ideas. He was by far the ablest
of the English deists, and though all the respectability
of his time drew away from him, and voted him, like the
p
226 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
grand jury of Middlesex, a public nuisance, he was not
without his very distinct influence on the progress of
English literature. He was an emancipator of thought,
a rude and contemptuous critic of the conventions. In
himself base and ugly — for all his writings reveal a gross
individuality — the brute courage of Mandeville helped
English speculation to slip from its fetters. His style is
without elegance, but, what is strange in a foreigner, of a
remarkable homeliness and picturesque vigour.
Another writer who was kept outside the sacred ring
of the Anne wits was DANIEL DEFOE, who comes in
certain aspects close to Mandeville, but has a far wider
range and variety. Several dissimilar writers are com-
bined in Defoe, all, with one exception, of a pedestrian
and commonplace character. He was in his earlier
years the very type of what was called " a hackney
author," that is to say, a man of more skill than principle,
who let out his pen for hire, ready at his best to support
the Ministry with a pamphlet, at his worst to copy docu-
ments for stationers or lawyers. In these multifarious
exercises Defoe was as copious as any journalist of our
own time, and from 1700 to 1720 had a very large share
in the miscellaneous writing of the day. The literary
character which these humdrum productions illustrate
seems to have been far from fascinating. All that we
can praise in this Defoe of the pamphlets and journals is
industry and a sort of lucid versatility. He was a factor
in the vulgarisation of English, and he helped, in no
small measure, to create a correct, easy, not ungraceful
style for common use in the eighteenth century.
But as he approached the age of sixty, Defoe suddenly
appeared in a new light, as the inaugurator of a new
school of English prose fiction. In 1719 he published the
DEFOE 227
immortal romance of Robinson Crusoe. Everything which
had been written earlier than this in the form of an
English novel faded at once into insignificance before
the admirable sincerity and reality of this relation. It is
difficult to conjecture what it was that suggested to the
veteran drudge this extraordinary departure, so perfectly
fresh, spirited, and novel. The idea of the European sailor
marooned on an oceanic island had been used in 1713 by
Marivaux in his novel of Les Effets Surprenants, but
there is no further similarity of treatment. In his later
picaresque romances Defoe is manifestly influenced by
Le Sage, but Robinson Crusoe can scarcely be traced to
French or Spanish models. It was an invention, a great,
unexpected stroke of British genius, and it was imme-
diately hailed as such by the rest of Europe. It was one
of the first English books which was widely imitated on
the Continent, and it gave direction and impetus to the
new romantico-realistic conception of fiction all over
the world. The French, indeed, followed Defoe more
directly than the English themselves, and his most ob-
vious disciples are Provost, Rousseau, and Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre. It was in his £mile, where he prefers
Defoe as an educator to Aristotle, Pliny, or Buffon, that
Rousseau finally drew the full admiration of Europe upon
Robinson Crusoe. In England, however, the bourgeois
romances of Defoe long remained without influence and
without prestige, widely read indeed, but almost furtively,
as vulgar literature fit for the kitchen and the shop.
In Defoe and Mandeville we have strayed outside the
inner circle of Queen Anne wits. We return to its centre
in speaking of Bolingbroke and Berkeley. With the pro-
gress of criticism, however, the relative value of these
two typical eighteenth - century names is being slowly
228 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
but decisively reversed. The fame of BOLINGBROKE,
once so universal, has dwindled to a mere shadow. He
lives as an individual, not any longer as a writer. His
diffuse and pompous contributions to theistical philo-
sophy are now of interest mainly as exemplifying several
of the faults of decaying classicism — its empty rhetoric,
its vapid diction, its slipshod, inconsistent reasoning. In
fact, if Bolingbroke demands mention here, it is mainly
as a dreadful example, as the earliest author in which the
school which culminated in Pope, Addison, and Swift is
seen to have passed its meridian and to be declining.
The cardinal defect of classicism was to be its tendency
to hollowness, to intellectual insincerity and partisan-
ship, and this defect is so clearly exposed in Bolingbroke
that we read him no longer.
The opposite fate has rewarded the clear and starry
genius of GEORGE BERKELEY. In his own day respected,
but not highly regarded as a writer, he has gradually so
strengthened his hold upon us by the purity of his taste,
that in an age of predominance in prose we regard him
as a master. In spite of Shaftesbury, Berkeley is the
greatest English thinker between Locke and Hume, and
as a pure metaphysician he is perhaps without a rival.
His person and his character were as charming as his
genius, and when he came up to London for the first
time in 1713 he conquered all hearts. Pope expressed
everybody's conviction when he declared that there had
been given "to Berkeley every virtue under heaven."
He had at that time already circulated his curious hypo-
thesis of phenomenalism, his theory that what we see
and touch is only a symbol of what is spiritual and
eternal — that nothing is, but only seems to be. His
writings, long pondered and slowly produced, culminated
BERKELEY 229
in 1744 in the brilliant and paradoxical treatise on the
merits of tar-water, which was afterwards called Siris.
Locke had almost removed philosophy outside the
confines of literature ; Shaftesbury had shown that the
philosopher could be elegant, florid, and illustrative ; it
remained for Berkeley to place it for a moment on the
level of poetry itself. There had, perhaps, been written
in English no prose so polished as that of Berkeley.
Without languor or insipidity, with a species of quiet,
unstrained majesty, Berkeley achieved the summit of a
classic style. No student of the age of Anne should fail
to study that little volume of dialogues which Berkeley
issued under the title of Hylas and Philonous. It belongs
to the annus mirabilis 1713, when Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot,
Addison, Steele, were all at the brilliant apex of their
genius, and when England had suddenly combined to
present such a galaxy of literary talent as was to be
matched, or even approached, nowhere on the continent
of Europe.
Theology, which had taken so prominent a place in
the literature of the seventeenth century, fell into insig-
nificance after the year 1700. We have already spoken
of Clarke, a stiff and tiresome writer, but the best of his
class. To compare Hoadley with Massillon, or Sherlock
with Saurin, is but to discover how great an advantage
the French still preserved over us, who had never, even
in the palmy days of our theology, enjoyed a Bossuet.
Perhaps the most spirited contribution to religious litera-
ture published in the early years of the century was
Law's Serious Call (1729), a book isolated from its com-
peers in all qualities of style and temper, the work of a
Christian mystic who seemed to his contemporaries that
hateful thing " an enthusiast."
230 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
The period of English literature which we have now
roughly sketched is one of the most clearly denned and
homogeneous in our history. In its consideration we
are not troubled by the variety and diversity of its aims,
by the multitude of its proficients, or by the distribution
of its parts. All is definite, exiguous ; all, or almost all,
is crystallised round a single point ; that point is common-
sense applied to the imagination, to the highest parts of
man. In all the expressions of this definite spirit, whether
in Pope or Clarke, in Addison or Berkeley, we find a
tendency to the algebraic formula, rather than to colour,
fancy, or fire. In other words, pure intelligence does
the work of literature, intelligence applied alike to con-
crete forms and abstract ideas, actively and energetically
applied, without sentimentality or enthusiasm. The age
of Anne succeeded in raising this literature of mathe-
matical intelligence to the highest pitch of elegant re-
finement. But before it closed there were manifest signs
of the insufficiency of such a manner to support a complex
artistic system.
What in the hands of Pope and Addison was so
brilliant and novel that all the world was charmed, could
but prove in those of their disciples cold, mechanical, and
vapid. There were very dangerous elements in the
optimism of the time, in its profound confidence in the
infallibility of its judgment, in the ease with which it had
become accustomed to rigid rules of composition, in the
dry light of formalism by which it was so prompt to
observe art and nature. These might satisfy for a
moment, might produce a single crop of splendid litera-
ture, but they bore no fruit for the morrow. Even the
prevalent admiration of the authors of antiquity was a
source of danger, for these great fountain-heads of
THE SCHOOL OF QUEEN ANNE 231
imagination were regarded not as they really wrote,
but as seen distorted through the spectacles of the
French Jesuit critics. The poets of antiquity were
cultivated as incomparable masters of rhetoric, and on
the basis of Horace, and even of Homer, there was
founded a poetry totally foreign to antique habits of
thought.
We have not, however, to consider what dangers lay
ahead of the system, but what it produced in the first
quarter of the eighteenth century, and for this, within
limits, we can have little but praise. England now
joined, and even led, the movement of European nations
from which she had hitherto been excluded as a barbarian.
In a " polite " age the English writers became the most
polite. Pope and Addison had nothing more to learn
from their Continental contemporaries ; they became
teachers themselves. In their hands the English lan-
guage, which had been a byword for furious individu-
ality and unbridled imaginative oddity, became a polished
and brilliant instrument in the hands of an elegant and
well-bred race. So far, if we go no further, all was well.
A little group of scholars and gentlemen, closely identified
in their personal interests, had taken English literature
under their care, and had taught it to express with ex-
quisite exactitude their own limited and mundane sensa-
tions. These were paving the way for a frigid formalism
which would become intolerable in the hands of their
followers ; but in their own day, in their brief Augustan
age, the direct result was not merely brilliant in itself, but
of an infinite benefit to English as a vehicle for an easy
and rapid exercise of the intelligence.
VII
THE AGE OF JOHNSON
1740-1780
THE period which we have just quitted was one of effort
concentrated in one middle-class coterie in London, an
age of elegant persiflage and optimistic generalisation
marshalled by a group of highly civilised and "clubable"
wits. That at which we have now arrived was the exact
opposite. Its leading exponents were not associates, or,
in most cases, even acquaintances ; its labours were not in
any large degree identified with London, but with places
all over the English-speaking world. From 1712 to 1735
attention is riveted on the mutual intercourse of the men
who are writing, and then upon their works. From 1740
to 1780 the movements of literature, rather than those
of men of letters, are our theme. Solitary figures closely
but unconsciously and accidentally related to other
solitary figures, ships out of call of one another, but blown
by the same wind — that is what the age of Johnson
presents to us.
If the combination of personal communication, so
interesting in the earlier age, is lacking now, it is made
up for to us by the definition of the principal creative
impulses, which prove, to our curiosity and surprise, in-
dependent of all personal bias. The similarity between
Swift and Arbuthnot, between Pope and Parnell, is easily
THOMSON 233
explained by their propinquity. But how are we to account
for the close relation of Gray and Collins, who never
met ; of Fielding and Richardson, who hated one another
at a distance ; of Butler at Bristol, and Hume at Ninewells ?
This central period of the eighteenth century took a
wider and more democratic colouring ; its intellectual life
was more general, we had almost said more imperial.
Letters could no longer be governed by the dictatorship
of a little group of sub-aristocratic wits met in a coffee-
house to dazzle mankind. The love of literature had
spread in all directions, and each province of the realm
contributed its genius to the larger movement.
In poetry, which must occupy us first, the forces which
now attract our almost undivided attention are not those
which appealed to contemporary criticism. Pope and
his school had given a perfect polish to the couplet, had
revived a public interest in satire and philosophic specu-
lation in verse, had canonised certain forms of smooth
and optimistic convention, had, above all, rendered the
technique of "heroic verse" a thing which could be
studied like a language or a science. It was strictly in
accordance with the traditions of literature that no sooner
was the thing easy to do than the best poets lost interest
in doing it. It was Thomson who made the first re-
sistance to the new classical formula, and it is, in fact,
Thomson who is the real pioneer of the whole romantic
movement, with its return to nature and simplicity.
This gift would be more widely recognised than it is if
it had not been for the poet's timidity, his easy-going
indolence. The Winter of Thomson, that epoch-making
poem, was published earlier than the Dunciad and the
Essay on Man, earlier than Gulliver's Travels and the
Political History of the Devil; it belongs in time to the
234 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
central period of Queen Anne. But in spirit, in
temper, in style, it has nothing whatever to do with
that age, but inaugurates another, which, if we consider
exactly, culminated, after a slow but direct ascent, in
Wordsworth.
The positive interest which the poetry of the middle of
the eighteenth century now possesses for us may be
slight ; its relative or historical interest is very great In
it we see English verse timidly reasserting its character-
istic qualities and resuming forbidden powers. The
change was gradual, without revolution, without violent
initiative. Passion did not suddenly return in its bolder
forms, but an insidious melancholy shook the pensive
bosom. For nearly eighty years the visual world, in its
broader forms, had scarcely existed for mankind ; it was
not to be expected that shy and diffident poets, such as
were those of this new period, men in most cases of sub-
dued vitality, should flash out into brilliant colourists and
high-priests of pantheism. They did their work gingerly
and slowly ; they introduced an obvious nature into
their writings; they painted, with a deprecating pencil,
familiar scenes and objects. With Thomson they re-
moved the fog that had obscured the forms of landscape,
with Gray they asserted the stately beauty of mountains,
with Young they proclaimed anew the magic of moon-
light, with Walpole they groped after the principles of
Gothic architecture. That their scenes were painted in
grey and greenish neutral-tint, that their ruined arches
were supported on modern brickwork, that falsity and
fustian, a hollow eloquence and a frigid sententiousness
spoiled many of their enterprises, is not to the point.
We must occupy ourselves, not with what they failed to
do, but with their faltering successes. They were the
THOMSON 235
pioneers of romanticism, and that is what renders them
attractive to the historian.
Nor was it in England only, but over all Europe, that
the poets of the age of Johnson were the pioneers of
romantic feeling and expression. In the two great
movements which we have indicated — in a melancholy
sensibility pointing to passion, in a picturesqueness of
landscape leading to direct nature-study — the English
were the foremost of a new intellectual race. As a child
of the eighteenth century, Stendhal, reminded the French,
" Le pittoresque — comme les bonnes diligences et les
bateaux a vapeur — nous vient d'Angleterre." It came to
France partly through Voltaire, who recorded its mani-
festations with wonder, but mainly through Rousseau,
who took it to his heart. Not instantly was it accepted.
The first translator of the Seasons into French dared
not omit an apology for Thomson's "almost hideous
imagery," and it took years for the religious melancholy
of Young to sink into German bosoms. But when there
appeared the Nouvelle Helo'ise, a great and catastrophic
work of passion avowedly built up on the teaching of the
English poets of the funereal school, a book owing every-
thing to English sensibility, then the influence of British
verse began, and from 1760 to 1770 the vogue and imita-
tion of it on the Continent was in full swing. To the
European peoples of that time Young was at least as
great an intellectual and moral portent as Ibsen has
been to ours.
It was in a comparative return to a sombre species of
romanticism, and in a revolt against the tyranny of the
conventional couplet, that these poets mainly affected
English literature. JAMES THOMSON is at the present
hour but tamely admired. His extraordinary freshness,
236 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
his new outlook into the whole world of imaginative life,
deserve a very different recognition from what is com-
monly awarded to him. The Hymn which closes the
Seasons was first published in 1730, when Pope was still
rising towards the zenith of his fame. It recalled to Eng-
lish verse a melody, a rapture which had been entirely un-
known since Milton's death, more than sixty years before.
We may be told that the close observation of natural
phenomena which made the four books of the Seasons so
illustrious had never, although scouted or disregarded,
been entirely lost. The names of Lady Winchelsea, of
Gay, even of John Philips, may be quoted to prove to us
that the poets still had eyes, and knew a hawk from a
hernshaw. But these pedestrian studies of nature had no
passion in them ; they were but passages of an inventory
or of a still-life painting. With Thomson, and mainly
with his majestic Hymn, another quality came back to
poetry, the ecstasy of worship awakened by the aspect
of natural beauty. We can but wonder what lines
such as
" Ye forests bend, ye harvests wave, to Him;
Breathe your still song into the reapers heart,
As home he goes beneath the joyous moon"
could have meant to readers such as Warburton and
Hurd. We may answer — To them, as to Johnson, they
could have meant nothing at all ; and here began the
great split between the two classes of eighteenth-century
students of poetry — those who clung to the old forms,
and exaggerated their aridity, down to the days of Hayley
and Darwin ; and those who falteringly and blindly felt
their way towards better things, through Gray, and Percy's
Reltques, and Warton's revelation of the Elizabethans.
Another powerful innovator was EDWARD YOUNG, but
YOUNG 237
his influence was not so pure as that of Thomson. The
author of Night Thoughts was an artist of a force ap-
proaching that of genius, but his error was to build that
upon rhetoric which he should have based on imagina-
tion. The history of Young is one of the most curious
in the chronicles of literature. Born far back in the
seventeenth century, before Pope or Gay, he wrote in the
manner of the Anne wits, without special distinction,
through all the years of his youth and middle life. At
the age of sixty he collected his poetical works, and ap-
peared to be a finished mediocrity. It was not until
then, and after that time, that, taking advantage of a
strange wind of funereal enthusiasm that swept over him,
he composed the masterpiece by which the next genera-
tion knew him, his amazingly popular and often highly
successful Night Thoughts. It was in the sonorous blank
verse of this adroit poem that the vague aesthetic melan-
choly of the age found its most striking exposition. It
was hardly completed (in 1744) before a prose rival and
imitation, the Meditations among the Tombs of Harvey,
deepened its effect and surpassed it in popularity, though
never approaching it in real literary ability. These two
books, so pompous, unctuous, and hollow — the one
illuminated by passages of highly artistic execution, the
other mere barren bombast — occupied the fancies of
men for well-nigh one hundred years, surviving the great
revival, and successfully competing with Wordsworth
and Keats.
This sepulchral rhetoric in Miltonic verse, whether
embodied in Young's rolling iambics or compressed into
the homelier vigour of Blair's Grave, was what passed for
poetry par excellence one hundred and fifty years ago.
With this taste the style in grottoes, urns, and tombs
238 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
closely corresponded, and to this much of the superficial
character of what was most enjoyed in Gray, Collins, and
even Goldsmith, may be traced. The great gift of the
first two of this trio was the renewed elaboration of their
verse-form. Thomson had revived the beautiful Spen-
serian measure ; in the Odes of THOMAS GRAY and of
WILLIAM COLLINS a variety of stanzaic forms illustrated
a return to pre-Drydenic variety and ease of prosody. To
a world that scarcely appreciated the meaning of verse
which was not either a succession of five-beat couplets
or a mass of stiff blank verse, Gray introduced choral
measures, richly and elaborately rhymed, full of compli-
cated triumphal melody ; Collins, at the same moment,
in a lower key, whispering rather than shouting, fashioned
his delicate, cold, aerial music. Unhappily, in the middle
of the eighteenth century everything conspired to drag
the pioneers of free art back to the bondage of rhetoric,
and the work of Gray and Collins was instantly retarded
and parodied by the frosty talent of Akenside, in whose
hands the newly found lyrical fire was turned to ice.
The impact of Gray on Europe was delayed, but could
not be suppressed. The Elegy in a Country Churchyard is
the direct precursor, not only of Chateaubriand, but of
Lamartine, and is the most characteristic single poem
of the eighteenth century.
From 1740 to 1760 the Thomsonian and the Graian
influences were predominant. About the latter date there
was a relapse into something of the old Jesuit precision.
In Churchill and his companions, regardless of the more
solemn and Latin satire which Johnson had been culti-
vating, a return was made to the lighter and more primi-
tive forms which Pope had used. For a moment the
sombre romantic school seemed swept out of existence,
OSSIAN 239
but the popularity of the savage couplets of Churchill was
brief. All that was left of the reaction was soon seen in
the modified classicism of Goldsmith, with its didactic
couplets as smooth and as lucid as Pope's, its humanity
and grace, its simplicity and picturesque sweetness. In
the Deserted Village (1770) we have the old kind of
starched poetry at its very best, and at its latest, since
after Goldsmith the movement which had begun with
Pope ceased to possess any real vitality.
The close of this central period of the eighteenth cen-
tury was stilted and inefficient in poetry. The rigidity
of the classical system, now outworn after the exercise of
one hundred years and more, strangled thought and ex-
pression, and forced those who desired to write to use
mere centos of earlier and freer masters. The elegiac
school had lasted but a very few years ; its successes
are dated almost exclusively between 1742 and 1760.
The new poetic feeling, however, never fell into com-
plete desuetude, for at the very moment when Gray and
Young were becoming silent, several new forces asserted
themselves, all moving in the direction of reform in
taste. Of these the earliest was the revelation, between
1760 and 1763, of the mysterious paraphrases of Ossian ;
in 1765 Bishop Percy issued his Reliques of primitive
English poetry ; in 1770 the untimely death of Chatterton
revealed an extraordinary genius of a novel kind; and
from 1777 onwards Thomas Warton, in his History of
English Poetry, was recalling readers to masterpieces of
art and passion that were not bound down to the rules
nor dwarfed by the classical tradition. Of all these
elements the least genuine was undoubtedly the first
mentioned, but it is equally certain that it was the
strongest. The vogue of OSSIAN through all Europe
240 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
became immense ; no real British writer, not Shake-
speare himself, enjoyed so universally the respect of
Europe as the shadowy Ossian did at the close of the
eighteenth century. Critics of high position gravely
discussed the relative magnitude of Homer and of the
author of Fingal, and by no means invariably gave the
crown to the Greek. The key to the extraordinary suc-
cess of these Caledonian forgeries is that they boldly
offered to release the spirit of Europe from its pedagogic
bondage. No one, not even Goethe, was anxious to
inquire too closely concerning the authority ot frag-
ments which professed to come to us from an extreme
antiquity, tinged with moonlight and melancholy, exempt
from all attention to the strained rules and laws of com-
position, dimly primitive and pathetically vague, full of
all kinds of plaintive and lyrical snggestiveness. When
Napoleon, in 1804, desired to give the highest possible
praise to a new, modern, brilliantly emancipated, literary
production, he could find no better epithet for it than
" vraiement Ossianique." And this suggests in what light
we have to regard Macpherson's forgeries, so irritating
to our cultivated taste in their bombastic pretentiousness.
It was not what they were that fascinated Europe, it was
what they suggested, and the product is what we read in
Goethe, Byron, Chateaubriand.
The greatest literary discovery, however, of the middle
of the eighteenth century was the novel. In late years
criticism has dwelt more and more seriously on the posi-
tion of those who practically created the most entertain-
ing and the most versatile of all the sections of modern
literature. With due respect to the writers of fiction
from the sixteenth century down to Defoe and Marivatix,
it was in the year 1740 that the European novel, as we
RICHARDSON 241
understand it, began to exist. The final decay of the
theatre led to the craving on the part of English readers
for an amusement which should be to them what the
seeing of comedies had been to their parents, and of
tragedies to their grand-parents. The didactic plays of
such writers as Lillo, who lived until 1739, were prac-
tically the latest amusements of the old school of play-
goers, who were weary of drama, weary of the old pompous
heroic story, of chronicles of pseud-Atalantic scandal, of
the debased picaresque romance. Something entirely
new was wanted to amuse the jaded mind of Europe,
and that new thing was invented by the fat little printer
of Salisbury Court. SAMUEL RICHARDSON conceived
what Taine has called the "Roman anti-romanesque,"
the novel which dealt entirely with a realistic study of
the human heart set in a frame of contemporary middle-
class manners, not in any way touched up or heightened,
but depending for the interest it excited solely on its
appeal to man's interest in the mirrored face of man.
It was a particularly fortunate thing that in this far-
spreading work of Richardson's he was accompanied by
several writers who were almost his coevals, who were
not subjugated by his prestige, but each of whom pushed
on the same important reform in a province peculiarly
favourable to himself. In considering the first great
blossoming of the English novel, we find that a single
quarter of a century included all the great novels of the
age, and that Richardson was neither imitated nor over-
shadowed, but supported by such wholly original fellow-
labourers as Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith.
Each of our first five novelists presented a gift of his own
to the new-born infant, prose fiction, and we must now
consider what these gifts were.
Q
242 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
What was Richardson's addition to literature may be
described in a condensed form as a combination of art
in the progress of a narrative, force in the evolution of
pathos, and morality founded upon a profound study of
conduct. Of the group, he was the one who wrote least
correctly ; Richardson, as a pure man of letters, is the
inferior, not merely of Fielding and Sterne, but of Smol-
lett. He knows no form but the tedious and imperfect
artifice of a series of letters. He is often without distinc-
tion, always without elegance and wit ; he is pedantic, care-
less, profuse ; he seems to write for hours and hours, his
wig thrown over the back of a chair, his stockings down
at heel. But the accidents of his life and temperament
had inducted him into an extraordinary knowledge of the
female heart ; while his imagination permitted him to
clothe the commonplace reflections of very ordinary
people in fascinating robes of simple fancy. He was
slow of speech and lengthy, but he had a magic gift
which obliged every one to listen to him.
The minuteness of Richardson's observations of com-
mon life added extremely to the pleasure which his
novels gave to readers weary of the vagueness, the
empty fustian of the heroic romances. His pages ap-
pealed to the instinct in the human mind which delights
to be told over again, and told in scrupulous detail, that
which it knows already. His readers, encouraged by his
almost oily partiality for the moral conventions, gave
themselves up to him without suspicion, and enjoyed
each little triviality, each coarse touch of life, each pro-
saic circumstance, with perfect gusto, sure that, however
vulgar they might be, they would lead up to the triumph
of virtue. What these readers were really assisting at
was the triumph of anti-romantic realism.
FIELDING 243
Very different in kind; though of equal value to litera-
ture, is the gift to his generation of HENRY FIELDING,
whose Joseph Andrews in 1742 succeeds so oddly to the
Pamela of 1740-41. He also set out to copy human
nature faithfully and minutely, but his view of life was
more eclectic than that of Richardson. A much greater
writer, in his own virile way one of the most skilful of all
manipulators of English, he is saved by his wider learn-
ing and experience from the banality of Richardson.
As Mr. Leslie Stephen has well said, Fielding, more than
any other writer, gives the very form and pressure of the
eighteenth century. He is without the sensibility of
Richardson, which he disdained ; his observation of the
movements of the heart is more superficial ; he cannot
probe so deeply into the fluctuating thoughts of woman.
He has the defects of too great physical health ; he is
impatient of the half-lights of character, of nervous im-
pressionability. He can spare few tears over Clarissa, and
none at all over Clementina ; he laughs in the sunshine
with Ariosto. He also is a moralist, but of quite another
class than Richardson ; he is pitiful of the frailties of in-
stinct, sorry for those who fall from excess of strength.
Hence, while Richardson starts the cloistered novel of
psychology, of febrile analysis, Fielding takes a manlier
note, and deals with conduct from its more adventurous
side.
The various qualities of Fielding are seen to successive
advantage in Joseph Andrews (1742) with its profuse
humour, in Jonathan Wild(yja$) with its cynical irony, in
Amelia (1751) with its tenderness and sentiment ; but it
is in Tom Jones (1749) that the full force of the novelist
is revealed. This was the first attempt made by any
writer to depict in its fulness the life of a normal man,
244 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
without help from extraordinary conditions or events,
without any other appeal to the reader than that made
simply to his interest in a mirror of his own affections,
frailties, hopes, and passions. Fielding, in each of his
works, but in Tom Jones pre-eminently, is above all things
candid and good-humoured. He is a lover of morals, but
he likes them to be sincere ; he has no palliation for their
rancid varieties. He has his eye always on conduct ; he
is keen to observe not what a man pretends or protests,
but what he does, and this he records to us, sometimes
with scant respect for our susceptibilities. But it has
been a magnificent advantage for English fiction to
have near the head of it a writer so vigorous, so virile, so
devoid of every species of affectation and hypocrisy. In
all the best of our later novelists there has been visible
a strain of sincere manliness which comes down to them
in direct descent from Fielding, and which it would be a.
thousand pities for English fiction to relinquish.
By LAURENCE STERNE the course of fiction was re-
versed a little way towards Addison and Steele in the
two incomparable books which are his legacy to English
literature. We call Tristram Shandy (1760-67) and A
Sentimental Journey (1768) novels, because we know not
what else to call them ; nor is it easy to define their
fugitive and rare originality. Sterne was not a moralist in
the mode of Richardson or of Fielding ; it is to be feared
that he was a complete ethical heretic ; but he brought
to his country as gifts the strained laughter that breaks
into tears, and the melancholy wit that saves itself by an
outburst of buffoonery. He introduced into the coarse
and heavy life of the eighteenth century elements of
daintiness, of persiflage, of moral versatility ; he prided
himself on the reader's powerlessness to conjecture what
SMOLLETT 245
was coming next. A French critic compared Sterne, most
felicitously, to one of the little bronze satyrs of antiquity
in whose hollow bodies exquisite odours were stored.
He was carried away by the tumult of his nerves, and it
became a paradoxical habit with him to show himself
exactly the opposite of what he was expected to be.
You had to unscrew him for the aroma to escape. His
unseemly, passionate, pathetic life burned itself away at
the age of fifty-four, only the last eight of which had
been concerned with literature. Sterne's influence on
succeeding fiction has been durable but interrupted.
Ever and anon his peculiar caprices, his selected
elements, attract the imitation of some more or less
analogous spirit. The extreme beauty of his writing has
affected almost all who desire to use English prose as
though it were an instrument not less delicate than
English verse. Nor does the fact that a surprising
number of his "best passages" were stolen by Sterne
from older writers militate against his fame, because he
always makes some little adaptation, some concession
to harmony, which stamps him a master, although
unquestionably a deliberate plagiarist. This fantastic
sentimentalist and disingenuous idealist comes close,
however, to Richardson in one faculty, the value which
he extracts from the juxtaposition of a variety of trifling
details artfully selected so as to awaken the sensibility
of ordinary minds.
If in Sterne the qualities of imagination were height-
ened, and the susceptibilities permitted to become as
feverish and neurotic as possible, the action of TOBIAS
SMOLLETT was absolutely the reverse. This rough and
strong writer was troubled with no superfluous refine-
ments of instinct. He delighted in creating types of
246 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
eccentric profligates and ruffians, and to do this was to
withdraw from the novel as Richardson, Fielding, and
Sterne conceived it, back into a form of the picaresque
romance. He did not realise what his greatest compeers
were doing, and when he wrote Roderick Random (1748)
he avowedly modelled it on Gil Bias, coming, as critics
have observed, even closer to the Spanish picaros spirit
than did Le Sage himself. If Smollett had gone no
further than this, and had merely woven out of his head
one more romance of the picaresque class, we should
never have heard of him. But his own life, unlike those
of his three chief rivals, had been adventurous on land
and under sail, and he described what he had seen and
suffered. Three years later he published Peregrine Pickle
(1751), and just before he died, in 1771, Humphrey Clinker.
The abundant remainder of his work is negligible, these
three books alone being worthy of note in a sketch of
literature so summary as this.
In the work of the three greater novelists the element
of veracity is very strong, even though in the case of
Sterne it may seem concealed beneath a variegated affec-
tation of manner. In each, however, the main aim, and
the principal element of originality, is the observation of
mankind as it really exists. But Smollett was not great
enough to continue this admirable innovation ; he went
back to the older, easier, method of gibbeting a peculiarity
and exaggerating an exception. He was also much in-
ferior to his rivals in the power of constructing a story,
and in his rude zeal to "subject folly to ridicule, and
vice to indignation," he raced from one rough episode
to another, bestowing very little attention upon that
evolution of character which should be the essence of
successful fiction. The proper way to regard Smollett
SMOLLETT 247
is, doubtless, as a man of experience and energy, who
was encouraged by the success of the realistic novel
to revive the old romance of adventure, and to give
it certain new features. The violence of Smollett is
remarkable ; it was founded on a peculiarity of his own
temper, but it gives his characters a sort of contortion
of superhuman rage and set grimaces that seem mechani-
cally horrible. When young Roderick Random's cousin
wishes to tease him, he has no way of doing it short of
hunting him with beagles, and when it is desired that
Mrs. Pickle should be represented as ill tempered, a
female like one of the Furies is evoked. But while it is
easy to find fault with Smollett's barbarous books, it is
not so easy to explain why we continue to read them
with enjoyment, nor why their vigorous horse-play has
left its mark on novelists so unlike their author as Lever,
Dickens, and Charles Reade. Smollett's best book, more-
over, is his latest, and its genial and brisk comicality has
done much to redeem the memory of earlier errors of
taste.
With the work of these four novelists, whose best
thoughts were given to fiction, were associated two or
three isolated contributions to the novel, among which
the Vicar of Wakefield and Rasselas are the most cele-
brated. Neither Johnson nor Goldsmith, however, would
have adopted this form, if a direct and highly successful
appeal to the public had not already been made by
Richardson and Fielding. These masterly books were
episodic ; they have little importance in our general
survey. We judge them as we judge the flood of novels
which presently rushed forth in all the languages of
Europe, as being the results of a novelty which the
world owes to the great English pioneers. The novel,
248 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
indeed, was the first gift of a prominent kind which the
world owed to England. The French boudoir novel, as
exemplified by Crebillon fits, faded out of existence when
Richardson rose over the Continent. The lucidity, direct-
ness, and wholesomeness of this new species of fiction
made a way for it at once ; within a marvellously short
space of time all Europe was raving over Pamela and
Clarissa. The anti-romantic novel swept heroic and
picaresque fiction out of the field, and it was the un-
common good fortune of the humdrum old printer to
prepare the way for Rqusseau and Goethe, to be imi-
tated by Voltaire, and to win the enthusiastic adulation
of Diderot and of Marmontel, who preferred Sir Charles
Grandison to all the masterpieces of antiquity. The type
of novel invented in England about 1740-50 continued
for sixty or seventy years to be the only model for Con-
tinental fiction ; and criticism has traced on every French
novelist, in particular, the stamp of Richardson, if not of
Sterne and Fielding, while the Anglomania of Rousseau
is patent to the superficial reader.
The literature which exercised so wide an influence,
and added so greatly to the prestige and vital force of
English manners of thought, is not to be disregarded as
trivial. The introduction of the novel, indeed, was to
intellectual life as epoch-making as the invention of
railways was to social life : it added a vast and inex-
haustibly rich province to the domain of the imagination.
The discovery that a chronicle of events which never
happened to people who never existed, may be made, not
merely as interesting and probable, but practically as
true as any record of historical adventure, was one of
most far-reaching importance. It was what Fielding
called " the prosai-comi-epos " of the age, invented for the
JOHNSON 249
ceaseless delight of those who had tasted the new pleasure
of seeing themselves as others saw them. The realistic
novel was as popular as a bit of looking-glass is among
savages. It enabled our delighted forefathers to see what
manner of men they were, painted without dazzling or
"sub-fuse" hues, in the natural colours of life. For us
the pathos of Richardson, the sturdy, manly sense of
Fielding, the sensibility of Sterne, the unaffected humanity
of Goldsmith, possess a perennial charm, but they cannot
be to us quite what they were to those most enviable
readers who not merely perused them for the first time,
but had never conceived the possibility of seeing anything
like them. That fresh eagerness we never can recover.
The complex age illustrated by such poets as Young,
and such novelists as Fielding, found its fullest personal
exponent in Dr. SAMUEL JOHNSON, not the greatest writer,
indeed, in English literature, but perhaps the most massive
figure of a man of letters. The gradual tendency of the
century had more and more come to be concentrated upon
attention to common-sense, and in Johnson a character was
developed, of noble intelligence, of true and tender heart,
of lambent humour, in whose entire philosophy every
impulse was subordinated to that negative virtue. John-
son became, therefore, the leading intellect of the country,
because displaying in its quintessence the quality most
characteristic of the majority of educated men and women.
Common-sense gave point to his wit, balance to his
morality, a Tory limitation to his intellectual sympathy.
He keeps the central path ; he is as little indulgent to en-
thusiasm as to infidelity ; he finds as little place in his life
for mysticism as for coarse frivolity. Vita fumus, and it
is not for man to waste his years in trying to weigh the
smoke or puff it away ; bravely and simply he must
250 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
labour and acquiesce, without revolt, without speculation,
in "all that human hearts endure." This virile hold
upon facts, this attitude to conduct as a plain garment
from which the last shred of the Shaftesbury gold-lace
optimism had been torn, explains the astounding influence
Johnson wielded during his lifetime. His contempo-
raries knew him to be thoroughly honest, profoundly
intelligent, and yet permeated by every prejudice of the
age. They loved to deal with facts, and no man had so
large a stock of them at his disposal as Johnson.
For nearly fifty years Johnson was occupied in literary
composition. Yet his books are not so voluminous as
such a statement would lead us to expect. It is doubtful
whether, with a competency, Johnson would have written
at all, for he was ponderously indolent, moving slowly, and
easily persuaded to stop, loving much more to read, to
ponder, and to talk than to write, and, indeed, during long
periods of his career unable to put pen to paper. Of his
principal productions the most famous may be called
occasional, for they were written suddenly, under a
pressing need for money, in a jet of violent energy which
was succeeded by prolonged inertia. He essayed every
species of composition, and it cannot be said that he was
unsuccessful in any, according to the estimate of the age.
His two poems, satires imitated from Juvenal, are less
" poetical," perhaps, in the recent sense than any writ-
ings of their reputation in the language, but the solidity
and sententiousness of their couplets kept them mode-
rately popular for more than half a century. As an
essayist, it is less fair to judge Johnson by his Ramblers
than by his lighter and less pompous Idlers ; yet even the
former were till lately habitually read. He lent his
dignified and ponderous imagination to the task of pro-
JOHNSON 251
ducing fiction, and Rasselas takes its place among the
minor classics of our tongue. Towards the end of his
life, Johnson came forward four times with a weighty
pamphlet as completely outside the range of practical
politics as those of Carlyle. He is also the writer of two
diaries of travel, of sermons, of a tragedy, of certain
critical ana — all of them, in the strict sense, occasional,
and almost unprofessional.
The only works on which Johnson can be said to have
expended elaborate attention are his Dictionary, which
scarcely belongs to literature, and his Lives of the English
Poets (1779-81). The latter, indeed, is his magnum opus;
on it, and on it alone, if we except his reported sayings,
the reputation of Johnson as a critic rests. This ex-
tremely delightful compendium can never cease to please
a certain class of readers, those, namely, who desire intel-
lectual stimulus rather than information, and who can
endure the dogmatic expression of an opinion with which
they disagree. No one turns to Johnson's pages any
longer to know what to think about Milton or Gray ; no
one any longer considers that Cowley was the first correct
English poet, or that Edmund Smith was a great man.
Half Johnson's selected poets are read no longer, even by
students ; many of them never were read at all. What we
seek in these delightful volumes is the entertainment to be
obtained from the courageous exposition, the gay, bold
decisiveness, the humour and humanity of the prodigious
critic, self-revealed in his preferences and his prejudices.
There are no " perhaps's " and " I think's ; " all is peremp-
tory and assertive; you take the judgment or you leave it,
and if you venture to make a reservation, the big voice
roars you down. This remarkable publication closes the
criticism of the century ; it is the final word of the move-
252 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
ment which had been proceeding since 1660 ; it sums it
up so brilliantly and authoritatively that immediate revolt
from its principles was a matter of course. During the
very same years Thomas Warton was publishing his
History of English Poetry, in which all the features were
found which Johnson lacked — broad and liberal study,
an enthusiasm for romance, a sense of something above
and beyond the rules of the Jesuits, a breadth of real
poetry undreamed of by Johnson. Warton knew his
subject ; Johnson did not. Warton prophesied of a dawn-
ing age, and Johnson stiffly contented himself with the
old. Warton was accurate, painstaking, copious ; Johnson
was careless, indolent, inaccurate ; yet, unfair as it seems,
to-day everybody still reads Johnson, and no one opens
the pages of Warton.
The extraordinary vitality of Johnson is one of the most
interesting phenomena in literary history. That the
greater part of it did not exhale with the fading memory
of his friends is due to the genius of his principal dis-
ciple. It has been customary to deny capacity of every
kind to JAMES BOSWELL, who had, indeed, several of the
characteristics of a fool ; but the qualities which render
the Life of Johnson one of the great books are not acci-
dental, and it would be an equal injustice to consider
them inherent in the subject. The life and letters of
Gray, which Mason had published in 1775, gave Boswell
a model for his form, but it was a model which he ex-
celled in every feature. By Mason and Boswell a species
of literature was introduced into England which was
destined to enjoy a popularity that never stood higher
than it does at this moment. Biographies had up to
this time been perfunctory affairs, either trivial and un-
essential collections of anecdotes, or else pompous eulogies
JOHNSON 253
from which the breath of life was absent. But Mason
and Boswell made their heroes paint their own portraits,
by the skilful interpolation of letters, by the use of anec-
dotes, by the manipulation of the recollections of others ;
they adapted to biography the newly discovered formulas
of the anti-romantic novelists, and aimed at the produc-
tion of a figure that should be interesting, lifelike, and
true.
It was a very happy accident which made Dr. Johnson
the subject of the first great essay in this species of por-
traiture. Boswell was a consummate artist, but his sitter
gave him a superb opportunity. For the first time,
perhaps, in the history of literature, a great leader of in-
tellectual society was able after his death to carry on un-
abated, and even heightened, the tyrannous ascendency
of his living mind. The picturesqueness of his dictatorial
personage, his odd freaks and pranks, his clearness of
speech, his majestic independence of opinion, went on
exercising their influence long after his death, and exercise
it now. Still, in the matchless pages of Boswell we see
a living Johnson, blowing out his breath like a whale,
whistling and clucking under the arguments of an oppo-
nent, rolling victoriously in his chair, often " a good deal
exhausted by violence and vociferation." Never before
had the salient points in the character and habits of a
man of genius been noted with anything approaching to
this exactitude and copiousness, and we ought to be
grateful to Boswell for a new species of enjoyment.
By the side of Johnson, like an antelope accompanying
an elephant, we observe the beautiful figure of OLIVER
GOLDSMITH. In spite of Johnson's ascendency, and in
spite of a friendship that was touching in its nearness,
scarcely a trace of the elder companion is to be dis-
254 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
covered in the work of the younger. Johnson's style is
massive, sonorous, ponderous ; enamoured of the pomp
of language, he employs its heaviest artillery for trifles,
and points his cannon at the partridge on the mountains.
The word which Johnson uses is always the correct one
so far as meaning goes, but it is often more weighty than
the occasion demands, and more Latin. Hence it was,
no doubt, that his spoken word, being more racy and
more Saxon, was often more forcible than his printed
word. There is no ponderosity about Goldsmith, whose
limpid and elegant simplicity of style defies analysis. In
that mechanical and dusty age he did not set up to be
an innovator. We search in vain, in Goldsmith's verse
or prose, for any indication of a consciousness of the
coming change. He was perfectly contented with the
classical traditions, but his inborn grace and delicacy of
temper made him select the sweeter and the more elegant
among the elements of his time. As a writer, purely, he
is far more enjoyable than Johnson ; he was a poet of
great flexibility and sensitiveness; his single novel is much
fuller of humour and nature than the stiff Rasselas ; as a
dramatist he succeeded brilliantly in an age of failures ;
he is one of the most perfect of essayists. Nevertheless,
with all his perennial charm, Goldsmith, in his innocent
simplicity, does not attract the historic eye as the good
giant Johnson does, seated for forty years in the undis-
puted throne of letters.
Through the first half of the eighteenth century, those
who speculated with any freedom on the principles of
religion and on its relation to conduct were loosely
classed together as deists. In its general denunciation
of independent thought, the age made no distinction be-
tween the optimistic rationalists, who proceeded from
THE DEISTS 255
Shaftesbury, and philosophic scepticism of a critical or
even destructive kind. Those who approach the subject
from the purely literary standpoint, as we do in these
pages, are in danger of underrating the intellectual im-
portance of this undermining of faith, because it was con-
ducted by men whose talent and whose command of
style were insufficient to preserve their writings. On the
other hand, all the most eminent and vital authors com-
bine to deride and malign the deists and to persuade
us of their insignificance. When we see Swift, in his
magnificent irony, descend like an eagle upon such an
intellectual shrewmouse as Collins, whose principal
modern advocate describes him as " always slipshod in
style and argument, and tedious in spite of his brevity,"
we think the contest too unequal to be interesting. Nor
does a brief literary history afford us occasion to dilate
on such very hackney writers as Toland and Tindal,
Whiston and Leslie.
Towards the middle of the century, however, the habit
of mind engendered by the humble, but sometimes en-
tirely sincere, destructive deists, bore fruit in a species
of literature which they had not dreamed of. There
can be little question that the progress of critical specu-
lation, the tendency to take obvious things for granted no
longer, but to discuss their phenomena and distinguish
their bases, led to the happiest results in the province of
history. To the period which we have now reached,
belong three histories of high rank — all three, as it was
long believed, of the very highest rank — Hume, Robert-
son, Gibbon. If modern taste no longer places the first
two of these in quite so exalted a position as the eigh-
teenth century did, each, at any rate, so far surpassed any
previous rival as to be considered in another class. In
256 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
the trio we do not hesitate to recognise the pioneers of a
new kind of literature, the earliest scientific historians of
the English school. Till 1753, history in England had
meant no more than the compilation of memoirs ; it was
now to be a branch of creative literature, carefully con-
structed and subjected to wholesome criticism.
Born in 1711, DAVID HUME began in 1736 to publish
philosophical treatises, and in 1741 to be an essayist in
a broader and less technical field. His studies in the
British constitution and his inquiries into political pre-
cedents led him gradually to attempt a History of Great
Britain from the Union to his own day. The volume
containing James I. and Charles I. appeared in 1754, and
produced an extraordinary sensation. Hume's long prac-
tice in philosophy had prepared him to excel in the
specious presentment of facts, and the point of view
which he chose to adopt was novel, and calculated to
excite a great deal of discussion. His book was read
with as much avidity as a novel by Richardson or Fielding
— a result which was aided by the simplicity and elegance
of his style, which proceeds, limpid, manly, and serene,
without a trace of effort. The History was concluded by
a sixth volume in 1762, and Hume lived on for fourteen
years more, dying in the enjoyment of an uncontested
fame, as the greatest of modern historians.
This position it would be absurd to say that he has main-
tained. Hume had little of the more recently developed
conscientiousness about the use of materials. If he found
a statement quoted, he would indolently adopt it without
troubling to refer to the original document. He was
willing to make lavish use of the collections of Thomas
Carte, a laborious and unfortunate predecessor of his,
whose Jacobite prejudices had concealed his considerable
HUME: ROBERTSON 257
pretensions as an historical compiler. Carte died just
when Hume's first volume appeared, and this fact per-
haps saved Hume from some unpleasant animadversions.
Modern critics have shown that Hume's pages swarm
with inaccuracies, and that, what is a worse fault, his
predilections for Tory ideas lead him to do wilful injustice
to the opponents of arbitrary power. All this, however,
is little to the point ; Hume is no longer appealed to as
an authority. He is read for his lucid and beautiful
English, for the skill with which he marshals vast trains
of events before the mental eye, for his almost theatrical
force in describing the evolution of a crisis. If we com-
pare his work from this point of view with all that had
preceded it in English literature, we shall see how emi-
nent is the innovation we owe to Hume. He first made
history readable.
Ten years younger than Hume, there can be no ques-
tion that WILLIAM ROBERTSON owed his initiation as a
writer to the more famous philosopher. In 1759, when
still a minister in a parish in Edinburgh, he produced his
History of Scotland, in which he dealt with the half-cen-
tury preceding the point where Hume began. This was
the first, and remained the most famous, of a series of
historical works which achieved a success the incidents
of which read to us now as almost fabulous. If the
record can be believed, Robertson was the British author
who, of all in the eighteenth century, was continuously
the best paid for what he wrote. In Robertson the faults
as well as the merits of Hume were exaggerated. His
style, with a certain Gallic artificiality, was nevertheless
extremely brilliant and graceful, and in the finish of its
general summaries surpassed that of the elder historian.
But Robertson was still more unwilling than Hume to
R
258 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
turn to the original sources of knowledge, still more con-
tent to take his facts second-hand, and not less superficial
in his estimate of the forces underlying the movements of
political and social history. It may be doubted whether
the exercise of such research as we think inevitable for
such a task, and as both Hume and Robertson disdained,
might not have spoiled that brilliant, if always inadequate,
evolution which so deeply fascinated their contemporaries,
and may still, for a while, dazzle ourselves. What they
wrote was not so much history in the exact sense, as a
philosophical survey of events, in which they thought it,
not admissible only, but proper, to tincture the whole
with the colour of their own convictions or political views.
They were, in fact, empirics, who prepared the world of
readers for genuine scientific history, and the founder of
the latter was Gibbon.
To EDWARD GIBBON, who timidly deprecated com-
parison with Robertson and Hume, criticism is steadily
awarding a place higher and higher above them. He is,
indeed, one of the great writers of the century, one of
those who exemplify in the finest way the signal merits
of the age in which he flourished. The book by which
he mainly survives, the vast Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, began to appear in 1776, and was not completed
until 1788. It was at once discovered by all who were
competent to judge, that here was a new thing intro-
duced into the literature of the world. Mezeray and
Voltaire had written in French, Hume and Robertson
in English, historical works which had charming qualities
of the rhetorical order, but which did not pass beyond
the rudimentary stage of history, in which the hasty
compilation of documents, without close investigation
of their value, took the place of genuine and inde-
GIBBON 259
pendent research. At length in Gibbon, after a life of
forty years mostly spent in study and reflection, a writer
was found who united " all the broad spirit of compre-
hensive survey with the thorough and minute patience
of a Benedictine." After long debate, Gibbon fixed
upon the greatest historical subject which the chronicle
of the world supplied ; undaunted by its extreme ob-
scurity and remoteness, he determined to persevere in
investigating it, and to sacrifice all other interests and
ambitions to its complete elucidation. The mysterious
and elaborate story of the transition from the Pagan to
the Christian world might well have daunted any mind,
but Gibbon kept his thoughts detached from all other
ideas, concentrating his splendid intellect on this vast
and solitary theme, until his patience and his force
moved the mountain, and "the encyclopaedic history,"
as Freeman calls it, "the grandest of all historical de-
signs," took form and shape in six magnificent volumes.
Some modern critics have found the attitude of
Gibbon unsympathetic, his manner cold and superficial,
his scepticism impervious to the passion of religious
conviction. We may admit that these charges are well
founded, and set them down to the credit of the age in
which he lived, so averse to enthusiasm and ebullition.
But to dwell too long on these defects is to miss a
recognition of Gibbon's unique importance. His style
possesses an extraordinary pomp and richness ; ill
adapted, perhaps, for the lighter parts of speech, it is
unrivalled in the exercise of lofty and sustained heroic
narrative. The language of Gibbon never flags ; he
walks for ever as to the clash of arms, under an im-
perial banner ; a military music animates his magnificent
descriptions of battles, of sieges, of panoramic scenes of
26o MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
antique civilisation. He understood, as few historical
writers have done, how much the reader's enjoyment
of a sustained narrative depends on the appeal to his
visual sense. Perhaps he leaned on this strength of
his style too much, and sacrificed the abstract to the
concrete. But the book is so deeply grounded on per-
sonal accurate research, is the result of reflection at once
so bold and so broad, with so extraordinary an intuition
selects the correct aspect where several points of view
were possible, that less than any other history of the
eighteenth century does the Decline and Fall tend to
become obsolete, and of it is still said, what the most
scientific of historians said only a generation ago,
" Whatever else is read, Gibbon must be read too."
History, fiction, poetry — these were the three depart-
ments in which the literature of the centre of the
eighteenth century in England mainly excelled, so far
as form was concerned, and of these we have now given
a rapid survey. If we consider philosophy, we must
revert again to Hume, the leading utilitarian of the
age, and as a critic of thought without a rival. It is
difficult, however, to give to the philosophical writings
of Hume more prominence in such an outline as this
than we give to those of Locke, although his merit as a
writer on speculative subjects is never quite so negative as
Locke's. The limpid grace of his style is apparent even
in a production so technical as the Treatise of Human
Nature. Still less must Hutcheson, Hartley, or Reid
detain us, prominent as was the position taken by each
of these in the development of philosophical speculation.
Philosophy by this time had become detached from belles
lettres; it was now quite indifferent to those who prac-
tised it whether their sentences were harmonious or no.
BUTLER 261
Their sole anxiety was to express what they had to say
with the maximum of distinctness. Philosophy, in fact,
quitted literature and became a part of science.
Nor was theology more amenable to the charms
of style. The one great man of religious intellect,
JOSEPH BUTLER, was wholly devoid of literary curiosity,
and austerely disdainful of the manner in which his
thoughts were expressed. When his thought is direct,
Butler's style is lucid and simple ; but when, as is often
the case, especially in the Analogy, he packs his sen-
tences with labouring complexities of argument, he be-
comes exceedingly clumsy and hard. Butler stood in
complete isolation, as utterly distinct from his contem-
poraries as Milton had been from his. But if we descend
to the commoner ground of theology, we scarcely meet
with features more appropriate to our present inquiry.
The controversy of Lowth with Warburton was lively,
but it was not literature ; the sceptics and the Unitarians
did not conduct their disquisitions with more elegance
than the orthodox clergy ; while Paley, whose Horcs
Paulines comes a little later than the close of our present
period, seems to mark in its worst form the complete
and fatal divorce of eighteenth-century theology from
anything like passion or beauty of form. A complete
aridity, or else a bombastic sentimentality, is the mark
of the prose religious literature of the time. In the
hands of Hurd or Hugh Blair we have come far, not
merely from the gorgeous style of Fuller and Taylor,
but from the academic grace of Tillotson and the noble
fulness of Barrow. This decay of theological literature
was even more strongly marked in France, where, after
the death of Massillon, we meet with no other noticeable
name until the nineteenth century opens. It was due,
262 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
without doubt, to the suspicion of enthusiasm and
highly strung religious feeling which was felt throughout
Europe in the generations preceding the Revolution.
In one department of letters this period was very rich.
Whether they owed it or no to their familiarity with
Parisian society and social modes, those strangely assorted
friends, Gray and HORACE WALPOLE, exceeded all their
English contemporaries in the composition of charm-
ingly picturesque familiar letters. Less spontaneous,
but of an extreme elegance and distinction, were the
letters addressed by the fourth Earl of Chesterfield to
his natural son, a correspondence long considered to
be the final protocol of good breeding in deportment.
Of a totally different character were the caustic political
invectives issued in the form of correspondence, and
under the pseudonym of Junius, between 1769 and 1772 ;
but these were letters which gave no pleasure to the
recipients, and the form of which precluded all reply.
It is, perhaps, not fair to include Junius among the
letter-writers, but the correspondence of Chesterfield,
Walpole, and Gray will certainly bear comparison with
the best in the same class which was produced in France
during the eighteenth century. Walpole, in particular,
excels all the French in the peculiarly Gallic combina-
tion of wit, mundane observation, and picturesque, easy
detail.
We have spoken of the dawn of a revived romanticism
in poetry. The signs of it were not less obvious in the
prose of this period. Gray, with his fervent love of
mountain scenery and recognition of the true sublime,
is at the head of the naturalists. But great praise is due
to the topographical writers who more and more drew
attention to the forms of natural landscape. The ob-
LANDSCAPE 263
servations of Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Gilbert White,
although made towards the close of the period we are
examining, were not published until much later. Gilpin,
in particular, is a pathetic instance of a man full of appre-
ciation of natural beauty, prevented by the tradition of
his time from expressing it ; sensible of the charm of the
visible world, yet tongue-tied and bound by sterile habits
of repression. After the seal of a hundred years had
been set on the eyes and mouths of men, it was not
suddenly or without a struggle that they could welcome
and respond to a revived consciousness of the loveliness
of wild scenery.
The central portion of the eighteenth century marks a
progress in the democratisation of literature. The love
of books and the habit of reading spread rapidly and
widely through all parts of the country and all ranks of
society. The world of letters was no longer, as it had
been in the age of Anne, a small circle of sub-aristo-
cratic bourgeois who wrote for one another and for the
polite toilets of London. The capital was no longer
remarkable for the importance of its literary representa-
tives ; the life of letters was in the provinces, was
almost cosmopolitan. English literature now, for the
first time, became European, and in order to obtain
that distinction it was forced more and more to cast
aside its original characteristics and to relinquish its
insularity. That it did so with effect is proved by the
very interesting fact that while up to this date we have
seen England either solitary or affected by Italy or France
without the knowledge of those powers, we find it now
suddenly producing the most powerfully radiating litera-
ture in Europe, and forming the taste of Germany, France,
and the world. The final actor in the work of fusing the
264 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Saxon and the Latin literatures in one general style was
Rousseau, who combined, as Mme. de Stael noted, the
taste and habits of France with the ideas and sentiments
of the North.
The freedom and rough simplicity of English life,
its energy, its cultivation of truth and sincerity —
qualities, no doubt, viewed by the Continental Anglo-
maniacs under too rosy a light, but still, in outline, re-
cognisably national — these were what fascinated, in their
different ways, Voltaire, PreVost, Diderot, and above all
Rousseau. Conducted by these enthusiasts, the litera-
ture of barbarous England was received with open arms
in all the academies and salons of Europe, and a new
literature was everywhere stimulated into existence by the
rivalry of such Englishmen as Young, Richardson, and
Hume. On the other hand, it is impossible to overlook
the influence of Montesquieu on such English minds as
those of Gray, Gibbon, and Adam Ferguson ; and the
Scotch writers, in particular, consciously Gallicised their
style, in the pursuit of that elegant plausibility which they
found so charming in French models. These reverbera-
tions of taste aided one another, and increased the facility
with which English and Continental readers acquainted
themselves mutually with the rival literature. But this
marks a condition of things hitherto unparalleled, and we
may roughly give the year 1750 as the date at which the
wall which had from the earliest times surrounded and
concealed our intellectual products, began to crumble
down and expose us to the half-admiring, half-scornful
gaze of Europe.
This communion with exotic forms of intelligence, and
the renewed sympathy for antique and romantic forms
of thought and expression, tended, no doubt, to prepare
SENSIBILITY 265
our literature for the revolution which was corning. But
even so late as 1780 there were few signs of change.
Individual men of genius forced the language to say for
them and through them things which had not been said
before, but the pedagogic shackles were practically un-
loosened. It was in the insidious forms of " sensibility/'
as it was called, the new species of tender and self-
satisfying pity, that the rigid rules of life were being
most directly broken. This warm stream of sentiment,
amounting at times to something like enthusiasm, tended
to melt the horny or stony crust which the recognised
conditions of thought had spread over every kind of
literature. Grace, eloquence, intellectual curiosity, dignity
—all these were still possible under the hard formular
regime ; but the more spiritual movements of the mind —
lyrical passion, daring speculation, real sublimity, splendid
caprice — were quite impossible within a space so cramped,
and were, as a matter of fact, scarcely attempted.
When we consider, then, how unfavourable the con-
ditions were in which literature was confined during the
central years of the eighteenth century, we may marvel,
not at the poverty, but at the richness of the actual pro-
duct. If the creation of the novel was the greatest
triumph of the age, it was not its only one. These years
brought forth a number of men whose intellectual vitality
was so commanding that it negatived the sterile qualities
of the soil from which they sprang. If Butler, Gibbon,
Johnson, and Gray had been born in an age which aided
instead of retarding the flow of their ideas, their periods
might have been fuller, their ornament more splendid.
But so intense was their individuality, so definite their
sense of what their gift was to the age, that they over-
came their disabilities and produced work which we,
266 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
regarding it with deep sympathy and respect, cannot
conceive being cast in a form more pertinent or more
characteristic. And it is a sentimental error to suppose
that the winds of God blow only through the green tree ;
it is sometimes the dry tree which is peculiarly favourable
to their passage.
VIII
THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH
1780-1815
THE period which immediately preceded and accom-
panied the French Revolution was one of violent and
complete transition in English literature. The long frost
of classicism broke up ; the sealed fountains of romantic
expression forced their way forth, and then travelled
smoothly on upon their melodious courses. The act of
release, then, is the predominant interest to us in a
general survey, and the progress of liberated romance
the main object of our study. Poetry once more
becomes the centre of critical attention, and proves the
most important branch of literature cultivated in England.
The solitary figure of Burke attracts towards the condi-
tion of prose an observation otherwise riveted upon the
singularly numerous and varied forms in which poetry is
suddenly transforming itself. As had been the case two
hundred years before, verse came abruptly to the front in
England, and absorbed all public attention.
Among the factors which led to the enfranchisement
of the imagination, several date from the third quarter of
the eighteenth century. Johnson's famous and divert-
ing Lives of the Poets was raised as a bulwark against
forces which that sagacious critic had long felt to be
advancing, and which he was determined to withstand.
268 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
The Aristotelian rules, the monotony of versification, the
insistence on abstract ideas and conventional verbiage —
the whole panoply of classicism under which poetry had
gone forth to battle in serried ranks since 1660 was now
beginning to be discredited. The Gallic code was found
insufficient, for Gray had broken up the verse ; Collins
had introduced a plaintive, flute-like note ; Thomson
had looked straight at nature ; then the timid protest had
given scandal, while Churchill and Goldsmith had gone
back to the precise tradition. But 1760-70 produced a
second and stronger effort in revolt, founded on archaistic
research. Antiquaries had gone dimly searching after
the sources of Middle English, and Chatterton had forged
the Rowley poems ; Warton had glorified Spenser, and
Percy had edited his inspiring Reliques. Most of all, the
pent-up spirit of lyricism, that instinct for untrammelled
song which the eighteenth century had kept so closely
caged, had been stimulated to an eager beating of its wings
by the mysterious deliverances of the pseudo-Ossian.
On the whole, this last, although now so tarnished
and visibly so spurious, seems to have been at that time
the most powerful of all the influences which made for
the revival of romanticism in England. Thousands of
readers, accustomed to nothing more stimulating than
Young and Blair, reading the Desolation of Balclutha
and Ossian's Address to the Sun with rapture, found a
new hunger for song awakened in their hearts, and felt
their pulses tingling with mystery and melody. They
did not ask themselves too closely what the rhapsody
was all about, nor quibble at the poorness of the ideas
and the limited range of the images. What Gessner gave
and Rousseau, what the dying century longed for in that
subdued hysteria which was presently to break forth in
COWPER 269
political violence, was produced to excess by the vibra-
tions of those shadowy harp-strings which unseen fingers
plucked above the Caledonian graves of Fingal and
Malvina. Ossian had nothing of positive and solid value
to present to Europe ; but it washed away the old order
of expression, and it prepared a clear field for Goethe,
Wordsworth, and Chateaubriand.
But, in the meantime, four poets of widely various
talent arrest our attention during the last years of the
century. Of these, two, Cowper and Crabbe, endeavoured
to support the old tradition ; Burns and Blake were en-
tirely indifferent to it — such, at least, is the impression
which their work produces on us, whatever may have
been their private wish or conviction. Certain dates are
of value in emphasising the practically simultaneous
appearance of these poets of the transition. Cowper's
Table Talk was published in 1782, and the Task in 1785.
Crabbe's clearly defined first period opens with the Can-
didate of 1780, and closes with the Newspaper of 1785.
Blake's Poetical Sketches fate from 1783, and the Songs of
Innocence from 1787. If the world in general is acquainted
with a single bibliographical fact, it is aware that the
Kilmarnock Burns was issued in 1786. Here, then, is a
solid body of poetry evidently marked out for the notice
of the historian, a definite group of verse inviting his
inspection and his classification. Unfortunately, attrac-
tive and interesting as each of these poets is, it is ex-
ceedingly difficult to persuade ourselves that they form
anything like a school, or are proceeding in approximately
the same direction. If a writer less like Crabbe than
Burns is to be found in literature, it is surely Blake, and a
parallel between Cowper and Burns would reduce a critic
to despair.
270 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
At first sight we simply see the following general phe-
nomena. Here is WILLIAM COWPER, a writer of great
elegance and amenity, the soul of gentle wit and urbane
grace, engaged in continuing and extending the work of
Thomson, advancing the exact observation of natural
objects, without passion, without energy, without a trace
of lyrical effusion, yet distinguished from his eighteenth-
century predecessors by a resistance to their affected,
rhetorical diction ; a very pure, limpid, tender talent, all
light without fire or vapour. Then, here is GEORGE
CRABBE, whom Byron would have done better to call
" Dryden in worsted stockings," a dense, rough, strongly
vitalised narrator, without a touch of revolt against the
conventions of form, going back, indeed — across Gold-
smith and Pope — to the precise prosody used by Dryden
at the close of his life for telling tragical stories ; a writer
absolutely retrogressive, as it at first seems, rejecting all
suggestion of change, and completely satisfied with the
old media for his peculiar impressions, which are often
vehement, often sinister, sometimes very prosaic and dull,
but generally sincere and direct — Crabbe, a great, solid
talent, without grace, or flexibility, or sensitiveness.
Then here is WILLIAM BLAKE, for whom the classic
forms and traditions have nothing to say at all ; whose
ethereal imagination and mystic mind have taken their
deepest impressions from the Elizabethan dramatists and
from Ossian ; whose aim, fitfully and feverishly accom-
plished, is to fling the roseate and cerulean fancies of his
brain on a gossamer texture woven out of the songs of
Shakespeare and the echoes of Fingal's airy hall ; a poet
this for whom time, and habit, and the conventions. of
an age do not exist ; who is no more nor less at home
in 1785 than he would be in 1585 or 1985 ; on whom
BURNS 271
his own epoch, with its tastes and limitations, has left no
mark whatever ; a being all sensitiveness and lyric passion
and delicate, aerial mystery.
And finally, here is ROBERT BURNS, the incarnation
of natural song, the embodiment of that which is most
spontaneous, most ebullient in the lyrical part of nature.
With Burns the reserve and quietism of the eighteenth
century broke up. There were no longer Jesuit rules
of composition, no longer dread of enthusiasm, no
longer a rigorous demand that reason or intellect should
take the first place in poetical composition. Intellect,
it must be confessed, counts for little in this amazing
poetry, where instinct claims the whole being, and yields
only to the imagination. After more than a century of
sober, thoughtful writers, Burns appears, a song-intoxi-
cated man, exclusively inspired by emotion and the stir
of the blood. He cannot tell why he is moved. He
uses the old conventional language to describe the new
miracle of his sensations. " I never hear," he says, " the
loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon,
or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers in
an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of
soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry." This
is the prose of the eighteenth century; but when the
same ideas burst forth into metre :
" The Muse, nae poet ever f and her,
Till by himseV he learned to wander,
A down some trotting burris meander,
And no think langj
O sweet to stray, and pensive ponder
A heart-felt sang"—
we start to discover that here is something quite novel,
272 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
a mode of writing unparalleled in its easy, buoyant
emotion since the days of Elizabeth.
We have spoken of Burns as he comes to us in the
sequence of the great poets of Britain. In Scottish poetry
he takes a somewhat different place. Here he seems not
one in a chain, but the supreme artist to whom all others
are merely subsidiary. Scotch Doric verse appears to
us like a single growth, starting from the rich foliage
of Dunbar and his compeers, up the slender stem of
Alexander Scott, of the Sempills, of Montgomery, of Allan
Ramsay, of the song-writers of the eighteenth century,
swelling into the fine opening bud of Fergusson, only to
break into the single aloe-blossom of the perfect Burns.
All local Scottish verse, from the early sixteenth century
until to-day, presupposes Burns ; it all expands towards
him or dwindles from him. If his works were entirely
to disappear, we could re-create some idea of his genius
from the light that led to it and from the light that with-
draws from it. This absolute supremacy of Burns, to
perfect whose amazing art the Scottish race seemed to
suppress and to despoil itself, is a very remarkable
phenomenon. Burns is not merely the national poet
of Scotland ; he is, in a certain sense, the country itself :
all elements of Scotch life and manners, all peculiarities
of Scotch temperament and conviction, are found em-
broidered somewhere or other on Burns's variegated
singing-robes.
It is obvious that these four great poets of the Eighties
are not merely " great " in very various degree, but are
singularly unlike one another. Cowper so literary,
Crabbe so homely, Blake so transcendental, Burns so
spontaneous and passionate — there seems no sort of
relation between them. The first two look backward
CRABBE 273
resolutely, the third resolutely upward, the fourth broadly
stretches himself on the impartial bosom of nature, care-
less of all rules and conventions. It appears impossible
to bring them into line, to discover a direction in which
all four can be seen to move together. But in reality
there is to be discovered in each of them the protest
against rhetoric which was to be the keynote of revolt,
the protest already being made by Goethe and Wieland,
and so soon to be echoed by Alfieri and Andre Chenier.
There was in each of the four British poets, who illu-
minated this darkest period just before the dawn, the
determination to be natural and sincere. It was this that
gave Cowper his directness and his delicacy ; it was this
which stamps with the harsh mark of truth the sombre
vignettes of Crabbe, just as truly as it gave voluptuous
ecstasy to the songs of Blake, and to the strong, homely
verse of Burns its potent charm and mastery.
It was reality that was rising to drive back into
oblivion the demons of conventionality, of "regular
diction," of the proprieties and machinery of composi-
tion, of all the worn-out bogies with which poetical old
women frightened the baby talents of the end of the
eighteenth century. Not all was done, even by these
admirable men : in Burns himself we constantly hear the
old verbiage grating and grinding on ; in his slow move-
ments Crabbe is not to be distinguished from his pre-
decessors of a hundred years ; Cowper is for ever
showing qualities of grace and elegant amenity which
tempt us to call him, not a forerunner of the nineteenth,
but the finest example of the eighteenth-century type.
Yet the revolt against rhetorical convention is upper-
most, and that it is which is really the characteristic
common feature of this singularly dissimilar quartette;
s
274 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
and when the least inspired, the least revolutionary of
the four takes us along the dismal coast that his child-
hood knew so well, and bids us mark how
" Here on its wiry stem, in rigid bloom,
Grows the salt lavender that lacks perfume ;
Here the dwarf sallows creep, the septfoil harsh,
And the soft, shiny mallow of the marsh,"
we observe that the reign of empty verbiage is over, and
that the poets who shall for the future wish to bring
concrete ideas before us will do so in sincere and exact
language. That position once regained, the revival of
imaginative writing is but a question of time and of
opportunity.
A very singular circumstance was the brevity of dura-
tion of this school of the Eighties, if school it can be
called. Burns was unknown until 1786, and in 1796 he
died. Cowper's original productions, so far as they were
not posthumous, were presented to the world in 1782
and 1785, and for nine years before his death in 1800,
he had been removed from human intercourse. Blake
remained as completely invisible as any one of his own ele-
mental angels, and his successive collections can scarcely
be said to have done more than exist, since even those
which were not, like the Prophetic Books, distributed
in a species of manuscript were practically unobserved.
Crabbe had a very curious literary history : his career was
divided into two distinct portions, the one extending from
1780 to 1785, the other continued from 1807 ; from his
thirty-first to his fifty-third year Crabbe was obstinately
silent. We may say, therefore, that the transitional
period in English poetry, hanging unattached between
the classical and the romantic age, lasted from 1780 to
1786. During these seven years a great deal of admirable
ERASMUS DARWIN 275
verse was brought before the observation of English
readers, who had to make the best they could of it until
the real romantic school began in 1798. In Cowper,
Crabbe, Burns, and Blake, we look in vain for any exotic
influence of any importance. Cowper was a good scholar
and translated Homer, but Greek poetry left no mark on
his style ; the others were innocent of ancient learning,
and they were united in this also, that they are exclu-
sively, almost provincially, British.
Meanwhile, the old classical tradition did not perceive
itself to be undermined. If criticism touched these poets
at all — Blake evaded it, by Burns it was bewildered — it
judged them complacently by the old canons. They did
not possess, in the eyes of contemporaries, anything of
the supreme isolation which we now award to them.
The age saw them accompanied by a crowd of bards
of the old class, marshalled under the laureateship of
Whitehead, and of these several had an air of importance.
Among these minnows, ERASMUS DARWIN was a triton
who threw his preposterous scientific visions into verse
of metallic brilliance, and succeeded in finishing what
Dryden had begun. But with this partial and academic
exception, everything that was written, except in the form
of satire, between 1780 and 1798, in the old manner,
merely went further to prove the absolute decadence and
wretchedness to which the classical school of British
poetry was reduced.
It was a happy instinct to turn once more to foreign
forms of poetic utterance, and a certain credit attaches
to those who now began to cultivate the sonnet. Two
slender collections, the one by Thomas Russell, and the
other by William Lisle Bowles, both of which appeared
in 1789, exhibited the results of the study of Petrarch.
276 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Of these two men, Russell, who died prematurely in
1788, was the better as well as the more promising
poet ; his Philoctetes in Lemnos is doubtless the finest
English sonnet of the century. But he attracted little
notice ; while Bowles was fortunate enough to extend
a powerful and, to say the truth, an unaccountable
spell over Coleridge, who doubtless brought to the mild
quatorzains of Bowles much more than he found there.
Russell was the first English imitator of the budding
romantic poetry of Germany. It is necessary to mention
here the pre-Wordsworthian, or, more properly, pre-
Byronic, publications of Samuel Rogers — the Poems
of 1786, the accomplished and mellifluous Pleasures of
Memory of 1792, the Epistle to a Friend of 1798. These
were written in a style, or in a neutral tint of all safe
styles mingled, that elegantly recalls the easier parts of
Goldsmith. Here, too, there was some faint infusion of
Italian influence. But truly the early Rogers survives
so completely on traditional sufferance that it is not
needful to say more about it here ; a much later Rogers
will demand a word a little further on.
But an event was now preparing of an importance in
the history of English literature so momentous that all
else appears insignificant by its side. In June 1797 a
young Cambridge man named SAMUEL TAYLOR COLE-
RIDGE, who was devoted to poetry, paid a visit to another
young Cambridge man named WILLIAM WORDSWORTH,
who was then settled with his sister Dorothy near Crew-
kerne, in Dorset. The Wordsworths had been deeply
concerned in poetical experiment, and William showed
to his guest a fragment which he had lately composed
in blank verse ; we may read it now as the opening of
the first book of the Excursion. Coleridge was over-
WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE 277
whelmed ; he pronounced the poem " superior to any-
thing in our language which in any way resembled it,"
and he threw in his lot unreservedly with Wordsworth.
The brother and sister were then just in the act to move
to a house called Alfoxden, in West Somerset, where
they settled in July 1797. Coleridge was then living at
Nether Stowey, close by, a spur of the Quantocks and
two romantic coombes lying between them. On these
delicious hills, in sight of the yellow Bristol Channel,
English poetry was born again during the autumn
months of 1797, in the endless walks and talks of the
three enthusiasts — three, since Dorothy Wordsworth,
though she wrote not, was a sharer, if not an originator,
in all their audacities and inspirations.
Wordsworth and Coleridge had each published collec-
tions of verses, containing some numbers of a certain
merit, founded on the best descriptive masters of the
eighteenth century. But what they had hitherto given
to the public appeared to them mere dross by the
glow of their new illumination. Dorothy Wordsworth
appears to have long been drawn towards the minute
and sensitive study of natural phenomena ; William
Wordsworth already divined his philosophy of land-
scape ; Coleridge was thus early an impassioned and
imaginative metaphysician. They now distributed their
gifts to one another, and kindled in each a hotter fire
of impulse. A year went by, and the enthusiasts of
the Quantocks published, in September 1798, the little
volume of Lyrical Ballads which put forth in modest
form the results of their combined lucubrations. Mrs.
S. T. Coleridge, who was not admitted to the meditations
of the poetic three, gaily announced that "the Lyrical
Ballads are not liked at all by any," and this was, rather
278 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
crudely put, the general first opinion of the public. It
is proper that we should remind ourselves what this
epoch-making volume contained.
It was anonymous, and nothing indicated the author-
ship, although the advertisements might reveal that
South ey, Lamb, Lloyd, and Coleridge himself were of
the confraternity to which its author or authors belonged.
The contributions of Wordsworth were nineteen, of
Coleridge only four ; but among these last, one, the
Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, was of preponderating
length and value, "professedly written," so the preface
said, " in imitation of the style as well as of the spirit of
the elder poets." This very wonderful poem, Coleridge's
acknowledged masterpiece, had been composed in Novem-
ber 1797, and finished, so Dorothy records, on "a beauti-
ful evening, very starry, the horned moon shining." A
little later Christabel was begun, and, in " a lonely farm-
house between Porlock and Lynton " (probably early in
1798), Kubla Khan was improvised. Neither of these,
however, nor the magnificent Ode to France, nor Fears in
Solitude, make their appearance in the Lyrical Ballads
of 1798. In this volume Wordsworth is predominant,
and his contributions exemplify two of his chief aims in
poetical revolution. He desired to destroy the pompous
artificiality of verse-diction and to lower the scale of
subjects deemed worthy of poetical treatment ; in this he
was but partly judicious, and such experiments as "Anec-
dote for Fathers " and the " Idiot Boy " gave scoffers an
occasion to blaspheme. But Wordsworth also designed
to introduce into verse an impassioned consideration of
natural scenes and objects as a reflection of the complex
life of man, and in this he effected a splendid revolution.
To match such a lyric as the "Tables Turn'd" it was
WORDSWORTH 279
necessary to return to the age of Milton, and in the " Lines
written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," Wordsworth
somewhat shyly slipped in at the end of the volume a state-
ment of his literary creed, and an example of the new
manner of writing so noble, so full, and so momentous,
that it has never been excelled, even by himself.
Thus, in a little russet volume published at Bristol,
and anonymously put forth by two young men of ex-
treme social obscurity, the old order of things literary
was finally and completely changed. The romantic
school began, the classic school disappeared, in the
autumn of 1798. It would be a great error, of course,
to suppose that this revolution was patent to the world :
the incomparable originality and value of "Tintern
Abbey " was noted, as is believed, by one solitary reader ;
the little book passed as a collection of irregular and
somewhat mediocre verse, written by two eccentric
young men suspected of political disaffection. But the
change was made, nevertheless ; the marvellous verses
were circulated, and everywhere they created disciples.
So stupendous was the importance of the verse written
on the Quantocks in 1797 and 1798, that if Wordsworth
and Coleridge had died at the close of the latter year we
should indeed have lost a great deal of valuable poetry,
especially of Wordsworth's ; but the direction taken by
literature would scarcely have been modified in the
slightest degree. The association of these intensely
brilliant and inflammatory minds at what we call the
psychological moment, produced full-blown and perfect
the exquisite new flower of romantic poetry.
Burns had introduced " a natural delineation of
human passions ; " Cowper had rebelled against " the
gaudiness and inane phraseology " of the eighteenth
280 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
century in its decay ; Crabbe had felt that " the language
of conversation in the middle and lower classes of
society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure."
These phrases, from the original preface of 1798, did not
clearly enough define the objects of Wordsworth and
Coleridge. To the enlarged second edition, therefore,
of 1800, the former prefixed a more careful and lucid
statement of their distinguishing principles. This pre-
face, extending to nearly fifty pages, is the earliest of
those disquisitions on the art of verse which would
give Wordsworth high rank among critics if the lustre
of his prose were not lost in the blaze of his poetry.
During these last two years of the century the absolute
necessity for a radical reform of literature had impressed
itself upon many minds. Wordsworth found himself
the centre of a group of persons, known to him or
unknown, who were anxious that " a class of poetry
should be produced " on the lines indicated in " Tintern
Abbey," and who believed that it would be " well adapted
to interest mankind permanently," which the poetry
of the older school had manifestly ceased to do. It
was to these observers, these serious disciples, that the
important manifesto of 1800 was addressed. This was
no case of genius working without consciousness of its
own aim; there was neither self-delusion nor mock-
modesty about Wordsworth. He considered his mission
to be one of extreme solemnity. He had determined
that no " indolence" should "prevent him from en-
deavouring to ascertain what was his duty," and he was
convinced that that duty was called to redeem poetry
in England from a state of "depravity," and to start
the composition of "poems materially different from
those upon which general approbation is [in 1800] at
WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE 281
present bestowed." He was determined to build up a
new art on precept and example, and this is what he
did achieve with astonishing completeness.
In the neighbourhood of the Quantocks, where he
arrived at the very moment that his powers were at
their ripest and his genius eager to expand, Wordsworth
found himself surrounded by rustic types of a pathetic
order, the conditions of whose life were singularly
picturesque. He was in the state of transition between
the ignorance of youth and that hardness and density
of apprehension which invaded his early middle life.
His observation was keen and yet still tender and
ductile. He was accompanied and stimulated in his
investigations by his incomparable sister. To them
came Coleridge, swimming in a lunar radiance of sym-
pathy and sentimental passion, casting over the more
elementary instincts of the Wordsworths the distinc-
tion of his elaborate intellectual experience. Together
on the ferny hills, in the deep coombes, by " Kilve's
sounding shore," the wonderful trio discussed, conjec-
tured, planned, and from the spindles of their talk there
was swiftly spun the magic web of modern romantic
poetry. They determined, as Wordsworth says, that
"the passions of men should be incorporated with the
beautiful and permanent forms of nature." All elements
were there — the pathetic peasants, the pure solitudes of
hill and wood and sky, the enthusiastic perception of
each of these, the moment in the history of the country,
the companionship and confraternity which circulate the
tongues of fire — and accordingly the process of com-
bination and creation was rapid and conclusive.
There are, perhaps, no two other English poets of
anything like the same importance who resemble one
282 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
another so closely as do Wordsworth and Coleridge at
the outset of their career. They were engaged together,
to a degree which it is difficult for us to estimate
to-day, in breaking down the false canons of criticism
which rhetorical writers had set up; and in recurring
to a proper and beautiful use of common English. In
so doing and writing in close companionship, interested
in the same phenomena, immersed in the same scenery,
it is not extraordinary that the style that each adopted
strictly resembled the style of the other. This is espe-
cially true of their blank verse, a form which both
sedulously cultivated, in which both enshrined some
of their most characteristic thoughts, and in which
both were equally engaged in destroying that wooden
uniformity of pause and cadence with which Akenside
had corrupted the cold but stately verse of Thomson.
Who was to decide by whom the " Nightingale " and
by whom the "Night-Piece" of 1798 were written?
The accent, the attitude, were almost precisely identical.
Yet distinctions there were, and as we become familiar
with the two poets these predominate more and more
over the superficial likeness. Coleridge is conspicuous, to
a degree beyond any other writer between Spenser and
Rossetti, for a delicate, voluptuous languor, a rich melan-
choly, and a pitying absorption without vanity in his own
conditions and frailties, carried so far that the natural
objects of his verse take the qualities of the human Cole-
ridge upon themselves. In Wordsworth we find a purer,
loftier note, a species of philosophical severity which is
almost stoic, a freshness of atmosphere which contrasts
with Coleridge's opaline dream -haze, magnifying and
distorting common things. Truth, sometimes pursued to
the confines or past the confines of triviality, is Words-
WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE 283
worth's first object, and he never stoops to self-pity,
rarely to self-study. Each of these marvellous poets is
pre-eminently master of the phrase that charms and
intoxicates, the sequence of simple words so perfect that
it seems at once inevitable and miraculous. Yet here
also a very distinct difference may be defined between
the charm of Wordsworth and the magic of Coleridge.
The former is held more under the author's control than
the latter, and is less impulsive. It owes its impressive-
ness to a species of lofty candour which kindles at the
discovery of some beautiful truth not seen before, and
gives the full intensity of passion to its expression. The
latter is a sort of ^Eolian harp (such as that with which
he enlivened the street of Nether Stowey) over which
the winds of emotion play, leaving the instrument often
without a sound or with none but broken murmurs, yet
sometimes dashing from its chords a melody, vague and
transitory indeed, but of a most unearthly sweetness.
Wordsworth was not a great metrist ; he essayed com-
paratively few and easy forms, and succeeded best when
he was at his simplest. Coleridge, on the other hand,
was an innovator ; his Christabel revolutionised English
prosody and opened the door to a thousand experiments ;
in Kubla Khan and in some of the lyrics, Coleridge
attained a splendour of verbal melody which places him
near the summit of the English Parnassus.
In an historical survey such as the present, it is neces-
sary to insist on the fact that although Coleridge survived
until 1834, and Wordsworth until 1850, the work which
produced the revolution in poetic art was done before
the close of 1800. It was done, so far as we can see,
spontaneously. But in 1798 the Wordsworths and their
friend had proceeded to Germany, for the stated pur-
284 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
pose of acquainting themselves with what the Teutonic
world was achieving in literature. In Hamburg they
visited the aged Klopstock, but felt themselves far more
cordially drawn towards the work of Burger and Schiller,
in whom they recognised poets of nature, who, like them-
selves, were fighting the monsters of an old, outworn
classicism. Wordsworth was but cautiously interested ;
he had just spoken scornfully of " sickly and stupid
German tragedies." Coleridge, on the other hand, was
intoxicated with enthusiasm, and plunged into a de-
tailed study of the history, language, and philosophy of
Germany. Burger, whose Lenore (1774) had started
European romanticism, was now dead ; but Goethe
and Schiller were at the height of their genius. The
last-mentioned had just produced his Wallenstein, and
Coleridge translated or paraphrased it in two parts ; these
form one of the very few versions from any one language
into another which may plausibly be held to excel the
original. In the younger men, with whom Coleridge
should have been in more complete hirmony — in Tieck,
in the young, yet dying Novalis, in the Schlegels — Cole-
ridge at this time took but little interest. The fact is
that, tempting as was to himself and Wordsworth then,
and to us now, the idea of linking the German to the
English revival, it was not very easy to contrive. The
movements were parallel, not correlated ; the wind of
revolt, passing over European poetry, struck Scandi-
navia and Germany first, then England, then Italy and
France, but each in a manner which forced it to be
independent of the rest.
For the next fifteen years poetry may be said to have
been stationary in England. It was not, for that reason,
sluggish or unprolific ; on the contrary, it was extremely
WORDSWORTH 285
active. But its activity took the form of the gradual
acceptance of the new romantic ideas, the slow expul-
sion of the old classic taste, and the multiplication of
examples of what had once for all been supremely ac-
complished in the hollows of the Quantocks. The career
of the founders of the school during these years of settle-
ment and acceptation may be briefly given. At the very
close of 1799, Wordsworth went back to his own Cum-
brian county, and for the next half-century he resided,
practically without intermission, beside the little lakes
which he has made so famous, Grasmere and Rydal.
Here, after marrying in 1802, he lived in great sim-
plicity and dignity, gradually becoming the centre of a
distinguished company of admirers. From 1799 to 1805
he was at work on the Prelude, a didactic poem in which
he elaborated his system of natural religion ; and he
began at Grasmere to use the sonnet with a persistent
mastery and with a freedom such as it had not known
since the days of Milton. In 1814 the publication of
the Excursion made a great sensation, at first not wholly
favourable, and gave to the service of Wordsworth some
of the pleasures of martyrdom. In 1815 the poet col-
lected his lyrical writings.
This date, 1814-15, therefore, is critical in the career
of Wordsworth : it forced his admirers and his de-
tractors alike to consider what was the real nature of
the innovation which he had introduced, and to what
extreme it could be pushed. In 1815 he once more
put forth his views on the art of verse in a brilliant
prose essay, which may be regarded as his final, or
at least maturest utterance on the subject. At this
moment a change came over the aspect of his genius :
he was now forty-five years of age, and the freshness
286 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
of his voice, which had lasted so long, was beginning
to fail. He had a brief Virgilian period, when he wrote
" Laodamia " and " Dion," and then the beautiful talent
hardened into rhetoric and sing-song. Had Wordsworth
passed away in 1815 instead of 1850, English literature
had scarcely been the poorer. Of Coleridge there is even
less to be said. His career was a miserable tissue of
irregularity, domestic discord, and fatal indulgence in
opium. In 1812 he recast his old drama of Osoric as
Remorse, a fine romantic tragedy on Jacobean lines. He
was occasionally adding a few lines to the delicious
pamphlet of poetry which at length found a publisher
in 1817 as Sibylline Leaves. Yet even here, all that was
really important had been composed before the end of
the eighteenth century. Save for one or two pathetic
and momentary revivals of lyric power, Coleridge died
as a poet before he was thirty.
The name of ROBERT SOUTHEY has scarcely been men-
tioned yet, although it is customary to connect it indis-
solubly with those of his great friends. He was slightly
younger than they, but more precocious, and as early as
1793 he somewhat dazzled them by the success of his Joan
of Arc. From that time forth until shortly before his
death, in 1843, Southey never ceased to write. He was
always closely identified in domestic relations with Words-
worth, whose neighbour he was in the Lakes for forty
years, and with Coleridge, who was his brother-in-law.
He early accepted what we may call the dry bones of the
romantic system, and he published a series of ambitious
epics — Thalaba, in 1801 ; Madoc, in 1805 ; Kehama, in
1810 ; Roderick, in 1814 — which he intended as contri-
butions to the new poetry. His disciple and latest
unflinching admirer, Sir Henry Taylor, has told us that
CAMPBELL 287
Southey " took no pleasure in poetic passion " — a melan-
choly admission. We could have guessed as much from
his voluminous and vigorous writing, from which ima-
gination is conspicuously absent, though eloquence,
vehemence, fluency, and even fancy are abundant. The
best part of Southey was his full admiration of some
aspects of good literature, and his courageous support
of unpopular specimens of these. When Wordsworth
was attacked, Southey said, in his authoritative way, " A
greater poet than Wordsworth there never has been,
nor ever will be." He supported the original romantic
movement by his praise, his weighty personality, the
popular character of his contributions. But he added
nothing to it ; he could not do so, since, able and
effective man of letters as he was, Southey was not, in
any intelligible sense, himself a poet.
What effect the new ideas could produce on a per-
fectly ductile fancy may be observed in a very interesting
way in the case of THOMAS CAMPBELL. This young
Scotchman, born in 1777, had evidently seen no poetry
more modern than that of Johnson, Goldsmith, and
Rogers, when he published his Pleasures of Hope in 1799.
The very name of this work discovered its adhesion to
eighteenth-century tradition. It was a tame, " correct "
essay, in a mode already entirely outworn. As a student
it had been Campbell's pride to be styled " the Pope of
Glasgow." When he became aware of them, he rejected
all the proposed reforms of Wordsworth, whose work he
continued to detest throughout his life ; but in 1800 he
proceeded to Germany, where he fell completely under
the spell of the romantic poets of that nation, and in
1803 gave to the world " Lochiel," " Hohenlinden," and
the "Exile of Erin." These were succeeded by other
288 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
spirited ballads, amatory and martial, and in 1809 by a
romantic epic in Spenserian stanza, Gertrude of Wyoming,
in which Campbell's style is wholly Teutonised. After
this Campbell wrote little that was readable, and his
fame, once far greater than that of Coleridge and Words-
worth, has now dwindled to an unjust degree. He had a
remarkable gift for lucid, rapid, and yet truly poetical
narrative ; his naval odes or descants, the " Battle of the
Baltic " and " Ye Mariners of England," are without rivals
in their own class, and Campbell deserves recognition as
a true romanticist and revolutionary force in poetry,
although fighting for his own hand, and never under the
flag of Wordsworth and Coleridge. For the time being,
however, Campbell did more than they — more, perhaps,
than any other writer save one— to break down in popular
esteem the didactic convention of the classic school.
A still greater force in popularising and fixing the
romantic tradition was Sir WALTER SCOTT in the poetry
of his early middle life — that is to say, from 1799 to
1814. From the dawn of childhood he had shown an
extraordinary passion for listening to chivalrous and
adventurous tales, and for composing the like. He was
fortunate enough to see and to be greatly moved by
Burns ; and as he advanced, the intense Scotticism of his
nature was emphasised by the longing to enshrine Scotch
prowess and nature in picturesque verse. The mode in
which this was to be done had not even dimly occurred
to him, when he met with that lodestar of romanticism,
the Lenore of Burger ; he translated it, and was led to
make fresh eager inroads into German poetry, with which
he was much more in sympathy than Wordsworth was,
or even Coleridge. As early as 1799 Scott published a
version of Goetz von Berlichingen. Even Goethe, how-
SIR WALTER SCOTT 289
ever, did not at this time persuade Scott to make a deep
study of literature ; he was still far more eager to learn
in the open school of experience. He imitated a few
German ballads, and he presently began to collect the
native songs of his own country ; the far-reaching result
was the publication of the Scottish Minstrelsy (1802).
Still, nothing showed that Walter Scott was likely to
become an original writer, and he was thirty-four when
Europe was electrified with the appearance of the Lay of
the Last Minstrel in 1805. Then followed Marmion in
1808, the Lady of the Lake in 1810, and the Lord of
the Isles in 1815, not to speak of other epical narratives
which were not so successful. Meanwhile, the publica-
tion of Waverley, in 1814, opened another and a still
more splendid door to the genius of Scott, and he
bade farewell to the Muses. But from 1805 to 1815 he
was by far the most prominent British poet ; as Words-
worth put it, Scott was " the whole world's darling," and
no one, perhaps, before or since, has approached the
width and intensity of his popularity. While Words-
worth distributed a few hundreds of his books, and
Coleridge could not induce his to move at all, Scott's
poetry sold in tens of thousands, and gave the tone to
society. At the present day something of the charm
of Scott's verse-narratives has certainly evaporated ; they
are read for the story, a fatal thing to confess about
poetry. The texture of Scott's prosody is thinner and
looser than that of his great contemporaries, nor are
his reflections so penetrating or so exquisite as the
best of theirs. Nevertheless, the divine freshness and
exuberance of Scott are perennial in several of his
episodes, and many of his songs are of the highest
positive excellence. Perhaps if he had possessed a more
290 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
delicate ear, a subtler sense of the phases of landscape,
something of that mysticism and passion which we un-
willingly have to admit that we miss in his poetry, he
might not have interpreted so lucidly to millions of
readers the principles of the romantic revival. With
his noble disregard of self, he bade those who sought
the higher qualities find them in Wordsworth ; but Scott
also, with his vigour of invention and his masculine sense
of flowing style, took a prominent and honourable part
in the reformation of English poetry.
These, then, were the influences at work during
the fifteen years with which the century opened, and
so completely was the old tradition overcome that
poetry of the class of Johnson and Pope abruptly
ceased, not, indeed, to be admired, but to be composed.
A little group of pious writers, of whom Bloomfield and
Grahame may be named, endeavoured to keep blank
verse and the heroic couplet as they had received it
from their Thomsonian forefathers. But although the
Farmers Boy (1798) and the Sabbath (1802) had many
imitators and enjoyed a preposterous popularity, their
influence was quite outside the main channels of literary
activity. The critics stormed against the reforms intro-
duced by Wordsworth, and ridiculed his splendid experi-
ments. But after the preface of 1800 nobody who had
any genuine poetic gift could go on writing in the
eighteenth-century way, and, as a curious matter of
fact, no one except the satirists did attempt to do so.
But it is time to turn to the condition of prose, which,
however, offers us at this juncture in our history fewer
phenomena of importance. The one great prose-writer of
the close of the eighteenth century was EDMUND BURKE,
and his peculiarities are to be studied to best effect in what
BURKE 291
he wrote between 1790 and his death in 1797. Burke is
therefore strictly transitional, and it is not less rational
to consider him as the forerunner of De Quincey than
as the successor of Robertson and Gibbon. He is really
alone in the almost extravagant splendour of his oratory,
too highly coloured for the eighteenth century, too hard
and resonant for the nineteenth. When Burke is at his
best, as for instance in the Letter to a Noble Lord of 1796,
it is difficult to admit that any one has ever excelled him
in the melody of his sentences, the magnificence of his
invective, the trumpet-blast of his sonorous declamation.
It is said that Burke endeavoured to mould his style on
that of Dryden. No resemblance between the richly
brocaded robes of the one and the plain russet of the
other can be detected. It is not quite certain that the
influence of Burke on succeeding prose has been alto-
gether beneficial ; he has seemed to encourage a kind of
hollow vehemence, an affectation of the " grand style "
which in less gifted rhetoricians has covered poverty of
thought. We must take Burke as he is, without com-
paring him with others ; he is the great exception, the
man essentially an orator whose orations were yet litera-
ture. There is an absence of emotional imagination,
however, in Burke which is truly typical of the rhetor.
In this, as in so much else, Burke is seen still to belong
to the eighteenth century. He died just when the young
folks in Western Somerset were working out their revo-
lutionary formulas in verse ; he missed even the chance
of having these presented to his attention. We may be
absolutely certain, however, that he would have rejected
them with as much scorn and anger as he evinced for the
political principles of the French Revolution. Whoever
might have smiled on Goody Blake and Betty Foy, it
292 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
would not have been the fierce and inflexible author of
the letters On a Regicide Peace.
It was, perhaps, a fortunate thing for literature that
Burke should die at that juncture and at the meridian
of his powers. His last Tracts sum up the prose of
the century with a magnificent burst of sincere and
transcendent ardour. He retains the qualities which
had adorned the dying age, its capacity in the manipu-
lation of abstract ideas, its desire for the attainment
of intellectual truth, its elegant and persuasive sobriety,
its limited but exquisitely balanced sense of literary
form. But Burke was a statesman too, and here he
turns away from his eighteenth-century predecessors ;
he will be bound by no chains of abstract reasoning.
Theories of politics were to him " the great Serbonian
bog " ; he refused to listen to metaphysical discussions ;
when he was dealing with American taxation, " I hate
the very sound of them," he said. As he grew older, his
mind, always moving in the train of law and order, grew
steadily more and more conservative. He rejected the
principles of Rousseau with scorn, and when there arose
before him a "vast, tremendous, unformed spectre" in
the far more terrific guise of the French Revolution,
Burke lost not a little of his self-command. He died
with the prophetic shrieks of the Regicide Peace still
echoing in men's ears ; he died without a gleam of hope
for England or for Europe, his intellect blazing at its
highest incandescence in what he believed to be the
deepening twilight of the nations.
Against Burke there wrote the revolutionary rhetori-
cians, those who saw the colours of dawn, not of sunset, in
the blood-red excesses of the French. Richard Price and
Joseph Priestley were the leaders of this movement in idea;
GODWIN 293
but in style they remained heavy and verbose, handing
down the heritage of Locke to Bentham and Godwin.
Priestley, after, in 1791, having his house wrecked and his
scientific instruments destroyed, as a popular punishment
for his sympathy with the Revolution, lived on until 1804
to see something like a justification of his prophecies.
These men were the pathetic victims of Burke's splendid
indignation, but in 1791 a direct attack on the Reflections
took up the cudgels in defence. This was the once-
famous Rights of Man, by Tom Paine, an audacious work,
the circulation of which was so enormous that it had
a distinct effect in colouring public opinion. A sturdier
and more modern writer of the same class was WILLIAM
GODWIN, whose Political Justice (1793) shows a great
advance in lucidity and command of logical language.
He has been compared, surely to his own moral ad-
vantage, with Condorcet ; but there is no question that
he was curiously related to the French precursors of the
Revolution, and particularly to Rousseau and Helvetius,
from whom he caught, with their republican ardour, not
a little of the clear merit of their style.
The spirit of change was everywhere in the air, and it
showed itself in the field of diverting literature no less
than in that of political controversy. The growth of
mediaevalism in fiction has been traced back to Horace
Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), where the supernatural
was boldly introduced into pseudo- Gothic romance.
This innovation was greatly admired, and presently,
having been reinforced by the influence of German neo-
inediaeval narrative, was copiously imitated. In the last
decade of the eighteenth century, Mrs. Radcliffe, M. G.
Lewis, and Beckford, presently followed by Maturin,
founded what has been called the School of Terror, ir?
294 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
the form of romantic novels in which fear was treated as
the dominant passion. These " bogey " stories were very
widely appreciated, and they served both to free the
public mind from the fetters of conventional classic
imagery, and to prepare it to receive impressions of
enthusiasm and wonder. After having been shut up for
more than a hundred years in the cage of a sort of
sceptical indifferentism, the nature of man was blinded
by the light of liberty, and staggered about bewildered by
very strange phenomena. These crude romance-writers
had a definite and immediate influence on the poets with
whom the beginning of the next chapter will deal, but
they also affected the whole future of English prose
romance.
The Revolutionists created, mainly in order to impress
their ideas more easily upon the public, a school of fiction
which is interesting as leading in the opposite direction
from Mrs. Radcliffe and Maturin, namely, towards the
realistic and philosophical novel as we know it to-day.
Bage, Hannah More, Holcroft, and even Godwin are
not read any longer, and may be considered as having
ceased to occupy any prominent position in our litera-
ture. But they form a valuable link between Fielding
and Smollett on the one hand, and Jane Austen and the
modern naturalistic school on the other. When the age
was suddenly given over to sliding panels and echoing
vaults, and the touch in the dark of " the mealy and
carious bones of a skeleton," these humdrum novelists
restored the balance of common-sense and waited for a
return to sanity. The most difficult figure to fit in to
any progressive scheme of English fiction is FRANCES
BURNEY, who was actually alive with Samuel Richardson
and with Mr. George Meredith. She wrote seldom, and
JANE AUSTEN 295
published at long intervals ; her best novels, founded on
a judicious study of Marivaux and Rousseau, implanted on
a strictly British soil, were produced a little earlier than
the moment we have now reached. Yet the Wanderer
was published simultaneously with Waverley. She is a
social satirist of a very sprightly order, whose early
Evelina and Cecilia were written with an ease which she
afterwards unluckily abandoned for an aping of the pom-
posity of her favourite lexicographer. Miss Burney was
a delightful novelist in her youth, but, unless she influ-
enced Miss Austen, she took no part in the progressive
development of English literature.
In 1800 MARIA EDGEWORTH openec^ with Castle Rack-
rent, the long series of her popular, nioral, and fashion-
able tales. Their local colouring and distinctively Irish
character made them noticeable; but even the warm
praise of Scott and the more durable value of her stories
for children have not prevented Miss Edgeworth from
becoming obsolete. She prepares the way for the one
prose-writer of this period whose genius has proved
absolutely perdurable, who holds no lower a place in
her own class than is held in theirs by Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Scott— for that impeccable JANE AUSTEN,
whose fame becomes every day more inaccessible to the
devastating forces of time and shifting fashion. It has
long been seen, it was noted even by Macaulay, that the
only writer with whom Jane Austen can fairly be com-
pared is Shakespeare. It is obvious that she has nothing
of his width of range or sublimity of imagination ; she
keeps herself to that two-inch square of ivory of which
she spoke in her proud and simple way. But there is no
other English writer who possesses so much of Shake-
speare's inevitability, or who produces such evidence of a
like omniscience. Like Balzac, like Tourgenieff at his best,
296 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Jane Austen gives the reader an impression of knowing
everything there was to know about her creations, of being
incapable of error as to their acts, thoughts, or emotions.
She presents an absolute illusion of reality ; she exhibits
an art so consummate that we mistake it for nature. She
never mixes her own temperament with those of her
characters, she is never swayed by them, she never
loses for a moment her perfect, serene control of them.
Among the creators of the world, Jane Austen takes a
place that is with the highest and that is purely her own.
The dates of publication of Miss Austen's novels are
misleading if we wish to discover her exact place in the
evolution of English literature. Astounding as it appears
to-day, these incomparable books were refused by pub-
lishers from whose shops deciduous trash was pouring
week by week. The vulgar novelists of the Minerva
Press, the unspeakable Musgraves and Roches and Rosa
Matildas, sold their incredible romances in thousands,
while Pride and Prejudice went a-begging in MS. for
nearly twenty years. In point of fact the six immortal
books were written between 1796 and 1810, although
their dates of issue range from 1811 to 1818. In her
time of composition, then, she is found to be exactly the
contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge in their re-
form of poetry, instead of impinging on the career of Sir
Walter Scott as a romance-writer. Her methods, how-
ever, in no degree resemble those of the poets, and she
has no conscious lesson of renaissance to teach. She
does not share their interest in landscape ; with her the
scenery is a mere accessory. If she is with them at all, it
is in her minute adherence to truth, in her instinctive
abhorrence of anything approaching rhetoric, in her
minute observation and literary employment of the detail
THE EDINBURGH REVIEW 297
of daily life. It is difficult to say that she was influenced
by any predecessor, and, most unfortunately, of the
history of her mind we know almost nothing. Her re-
serve was great, and she died before she had become an
object of curiosity even to her friends. But we see that
she is of the race of Richardson and Marivaux, although
she leaves their clumsy construction far behind. She
was a satirist, however, not a sentimentalist. One of the
few anecdotes preserved about her relates that she refused
to meet Madame de Stael, and the Germanic spirit was
evidently as foreign to her taste as the lyricism born of
Rousseau. She was the exact opposite of all which the
cosmopolitan critics of Europe were deciding that Eng-
lish prose fiction was and always would be. Lucid, gay,
penetrating, exquisite, Jane Austen possessed precisely
the qualities that English fiction needed to drag it out of
the Slough of Despond and start it wholesomely on a
new and vigorous career.
One curious result of the revolution in literary taste
was the creation of an official criticism mainly intended
to resist the new ideas, and, if possible, to rout them.
The foundation of the Edinburgh Review m 1802 is a
remarkable landmark in the history of English literature.
The proposition that a literary journal should be started
which should take the place of the colourless Monthly
Review was made by Sydney Smith, but FRANCIS JEFFREY,
a young Scotch advocate, was editor from the first, and
held the post for six-and-twenty years. He was a half-
hearted supporter of the Scoto-Teutonic reformers, but
a vehement opponent, first of Coleridge and Wordsworth,
afterwards of Shelley and Keats. The finer raptures of
poetry were not revealed to Jeffrey, and in the criticism
of their contemporaries he and his staff were often guilty
298 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
of extraordinary levity. Yet, on the whole, and where
the prejudices of the young reviewers were not involved,
the Edinburgh did good work, and it created quite a new
standard of merit in periodical writing. To counteract
its Whiggishness the Ministerial party founded in 1809
the Tory Quarterly Review, and put that bitter pedant and
obscurantist, Gifford, in the editorial chair. This periodical
also enjoyed a great success without injuring its rival,
which latter, at the close of the period with which we are
dealing, had reached the summit of its popularity and a
circulation in those days quite unparalleled. Readers of
the early numbers of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly
will to-day be surprised at the emotion they caused and
the power which they wielded. They are often smart,
sometimes witty, rarely sound, and the style is, as a rule,
pompous and diffuse. The modern reader is irritated by
the haughty assumption of these boyish reviewers, who
treat genius as a prisoner at the bar, and as in all pro-
bability a guilty prisoner. The Quarterly was in this re-
spect a worse sinner even than the Edinburgh : if Jeffrey
worried the authors, Gifford positively bit them. This
unjust judging of literature, and particularly of poetry —
what is called the " slashing " style of criticism — when it
is now revived, is usually still prosecuted on the lines laid
down by Jeffrey and Gifford. It gives satisfaction to the
reviewer, pain to the author, and a faint amusement to
the public. It has no effect whatever on the ultimate
position of the book reviewed, but, exercised on occasion,
it is doubtless a useful counter-irritant to thoughtless
or venal eulogy. If so, let the credit be given to the
venerable Blue-and-yellow and Brown Reviews.
A book which is little regarded to-day exercised so
wide and so beneficial an influence on critical thought
SIR WALTER SCOTT 299
at the beginning of the century that it seems imperative
to mention it here. The Curiosities of Literature , by Isaac
D' Israeli, was not a masterpiece, but its storehouses of
anecdote and cultivated reflection must have familiarised
with the outlines of literary history thousands who would
have been repelled by a more formal work. We dare
not speak here at any length of Cobbett and Combe, of
Bentham and Dugald Stewart, of Horner and Mackintosh
and Mary Wollstonecraft. Of all these writers, in their
various ways, it may safely be said that their ideas were
of more importance than their style, and that, interesting
as they may severally be, they do not illustrate the
evolution of English literature.
During the later years of this period romantic fiction
fell into great decay. Out of its ashes sprung the histori-
cal novel, the invention of which was boldly claimed
by Miss Jane Porter, whose Thaddeus of Warsaw, long
cherished by our great-grandfathers, and not entirely
unknown to our fathers, had some faint merit. Other
ladies, with the courage of their sex, but with remarkably
little knowledge of the subject, attacked the muse of
history. But nothing was really done of importance
until Sir WALTER SCOTT turned his attention from
poetry to prose romance. Waverley was not published
till 1814, and the long series of novels really belong to
the subsequent chapter. They had, however, long been
prepared for, and it will be convenient to consider them
here. Scott had written a fragment of an historical novel
(afterwards Waverley) in 1805, and in 1808 he had taken
up the useful task of preparing for the press an anti-
quarian story by Strutt, called Queenhoo Hall. His long
poems of the same decade had necessitated the approach
to historical study in a romantic and yet human spirit.
300 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
From his earliest years Scott had been laying up, from
Scottish and from German sources, impressions which
were to be definitely useful to him in the creation of his
great novels. At last, in the maturity of forty-three
years, he began the gigantic work which he was not
to abandon until his death in 1832.
It is difficult to speak of the novels of Sir Walter
Scott in a perfectly critical spirit. They are a cherished
part of the heritage of the English-speaking race, and
in discussing them we cannot bring ourselves to use
regarding them anything but what to foreign critics
seems the language of hyperbole. The noble geniality
of attitude which they discover in the author, their
perennial freshness, their variety, their "magnificent
train of events," make us impatient of the briefest
reference to their shortcomings in execution. But it
is, perhaps, not the highest loyalty to Scott to attempt
to deny that his great books have patent faults : that
the conduct of the story in Rob Roy is primitive, that
the heroines of Ivanhoe are drawn with no psychological
subtlety, that there is a great deal that is terribly heavy
and unexhilarating in the pages of Peveril of the Peak.
It is best, surely, to admit all this, to allow that Scott
sometimes wrote too rapidly and too loosely, that his
antiquarianism sometimes ran away with him, that his
pictures of mediaeval manners are not always quite con-
vincing. He has not the inevitable perfection of Jane
Austen ; he makes no effort to present himself to us as
so fine an artist.
When this is admitted, let the enemy make the best
they can of it. We may challenge the literatures of the
world to produce a purer talent, or a writer who has
with a more brilliant and sustained vivacity combined
SIR WALTER SCOTT 301
the novel with the romance, the tale of manners with the
tale of wonder. Scott's early idenl was Fielding, and he
began the Waverley series in rivalry with Tom Jones, but
he soon left his master. If Scott has not quite the in-
tense sympathy with humanity nor quite the warm blood
of Fielding, he has resources which the earlier novelist
never dreamed of. His design was to please the modern
world by presenting a tale of the Middle Ages, and to do
this he had to combat a wide ignorance of and lack of
sympathy with history ; to create, without a model,
homely as well as histrionic scenes of ancient life ; to
enliven and push on the narrative by incessant con-
trasts, high with low, tragic with facetious, philosophical
with adventurous. His first idea was, doubtless, to dwell
as exclusively as possible with Scottish chivalry. But
Guy Mannering, once severely judged by the very ad-
mirers of Scott, now esteemed as one of his best books,
showed what genius for humorous portraiture was pos-
sessed by the creator of Dandie Dinmont and Dominie
Sampson ; while the Antiquary, in its pictures of seaside
life in a fishing-town of Scotland, showed how close and
how vivid was to be his observation of rustic society.
In all the glorious series there are but two which a
lover of Scott would wish away. It is needless to men-
tion them ; their very names recall to us that honourable
tragedy of over-strain, of excessive imaginative labour,
which bowed his head at length to the ground. The life
of Scott, with its splendeurs et miseres — the former so hos-
pitably shared, the latter so heroically borne — forms a
romance as thrilling as any of his fictions, and one neces-
sary to our perfect comprehension of his labours. Great
as had been the vogue of his poems, it was far exceeded by
that of his novels, and when Scott died his was doubtless
302 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
the strongest naturalistic influence then being exercised
in Europe. All the romances of Alexandre Dumas and
Victor Hugo sprang directly from him ; he had inspired
Fouque* in Germany, Manzoni in Italy, and Fernan
Caballero in Spain. Wherever historical fiction of a
picturesque and chivalrous order was produced, it bore
the stamp of Walter Scott upon its margin. Nor with
the decline of the imitations is it found that the original
ceases to retain its hold on the interest of the English
race.
Walter Scott, so long a European force, has now,
foiled by the victory of the school of Balzac, retired once
more to the home he came from, but on British soil there
is as yet no sign of any diminution of his honour or
popularity. Continental criticism is bewildered at our
unshaken loyalty to a writer whose art can be easily
demonstrated to be obsolete in many of its characteristics.
But English readers confess the perennial attractiveness
of a writer whose " tone " is the most perfect in our
national literature, who has left not a phrase which is
morbid or petulant or base, who is the very type of that
generous freedom of spirit which we are pleased to
identify with the character of an English gentleman.
Into the persistent admiration of Sir Walter Scott there
enters something of the militant imperialism of our race.
IX
THE AGE OF BYRON
1815-1840
IT is noticeable that the early manifestations of the
reforming spirit in English literature had been accom-
panied by nothing revolutionary in morals or conduct.
It is true that, at the very outset, Wordsworth, Southey,
and Coleridge had been inclined to a "pantisocratic" sym-
pathy with the principles of the French Revolution, and
had leaned to the radical side in politics. But the spirit
of revolt was very mildly awakened in them, and when
the Reign of Terror came, their aspirations after demo-
cratic freedom were nipped in the bud. Early in the
century Wordsworth had become, what he remained, a
Church and State Tory of the extreme type ; Southey,
who in 1794 had, "shocking to say, wavered between
deism and atheism," promptly developed a horror for
every species of liberal speculation, and contributed with
gusto to the Quarterly Review. Temperament and cir-
cumstance combined to make Scott a conservative in
politics and manners. Meanwhile, it was in the hands of
these peaceful men that the literary revolution was pro-
ceeding, and we look back from 1815 with a sense of
the extraordinary modesty and wholesome law-abiding
morality of the generation which introduced romanticism
in this country.
304 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
No section of English literature is, we will not say
more innocent merely, but more void of the appearance
of offence than that which was produced by the romantic
reformers of our poetry. The audacity of Wordsworth
and Coleridge was purely artistic ; it was bounded by
the determination to destroy certain conventions of style,
and to introduce new elements and new aspects into the
treatment of poetry. But these novelties include nothing
that could unsettle, or even excite, the conscience of the
least mature of readers. Both these great writers spoke
much of passion, and insisted on its resumption by an
art which had permitted it to escape too long. But by
passion Wordsworth understood no unruly turbulence
of the senses, no revolt against conventional manners,
no disturbance of social custom. He conceived the
term, and illustrated his conception in his poetry, as in-
tense emotion concentrated upon some object of physical
or pathetic beauty — such as a mountain, a child, a flower
— and led directly by it into the channel of imaginative
expression. He saw that there were aspects of beauty
which might lead to danger, but from these he and
Scott, and even Coleridge, resolutely turned away their
eyes.
To all the principal writers of this first generation, not
merely vice, but coarseness and licence were abhorrent,
as they had been to no earlier race of Englishmen. The
rudeness of the eighteenth century gave way to a cold
refinement, exquisitely crystal in its highest expressions,
a little empty and inhuman in its lower ones. What the
Continental nations unite to call our "hypocrisy," our
determination not to face the ugly side of nature at all,
to deny the very existence of the unseemly instincts, now
came to the front. In contrast to the European riot,
BYRON 305
England held her garments high out of the mire, with a
somewhat mincing air of excessive virtue. The image
was created of Britannia, with her long teeth, prudishly
averting her elderly eyes from the cancan of the nations.
So far as this refinement was genuine it was a good thing
— the spotless purity of Wordsworth and Scott is matter
for national pride — but so far as it was indeed hypo-
critical, so far as it was an exhibition of empty spiritual
pride, it was hateful. In any case, the cord was drawn
so tight that it was bound to snap, and to the generation
of intensely proper, conservative poets and novelists there
succeeded a race of bards who might plausibly be con-
sidered profligates, socialists, and atheists. Our literature
was to become " revolutionary " at last.
In the Sixth Lord BYRON the pent-up animal spirits
of the new era found the first channel for their violence,
and England positively revelled in the poetry of crime
and chaos. The last of a race of lawless and turbulent
men, proud as Lucifer, beautiful as Apollo, sinister as
Loki, Byron appeared on the scenes arrayed in every
quality which could dazzle the youthful and alarm the
mature. His lovely curly head moved all the women to
adore him ; his melancholy attitudes were mysteriously
connected with stories of his appalling wickedness ; his
rank and ostentation of life, his wild exotic tastes, his
defiance of restraint, the pathos of his physical infirmity,
his histrionic gifts as of one, half mountebank, half arch-
angel, all these combined to give his figure, his whole
legend, a matchless fascination. Nor, though now so
much of the gold is turned to tinsel, though now the
lights are out upon the stage where Byron strutted,
can we cease to be fascinated. Even those who most
strenuously deny him imagination, style, the durable
u
306 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
parts of literature, cannot pretend to be unmoved by the
unparalleled romance of his career. Goethe declared
that a man so pre-eminent for character had never
existed in literature before, and would probably never
appear again. This should give us the note for a com-
parative estimate of Byron : in quality of style he is most
unequal, and is never, perhaps, absolutely first-rate ; but
as an example of the literary temperament at its boiling-
point, history records no more brilliant name.
Byron was in haste to be famous, and wrote before
he had learned his art. His intention was to resist the
incursion of the romantic movement, and at the age of.
twenty-one he produced a satire, the aim of which, so
far as it was not merely splenetic, was the dethronement
of Wordsworth and Coleridge in favour of Dryden and
Pope. In taste and conviction he was reactionary to the
very last; but when he came to write, the verse poured
forth like lava, and took romantic forms in spite of him.
His character was formed during the two wild years of
exile (June 1809 to August 1811), when, a prey to a
frenzied restlessness, he scoured the Mediterranean,
rescued Turkish women, visited Lady Hester Stanhope,
swam across the Hellespont, rattled at the windows of
seraglios, and even — so Goethe and the world believed—
murdered a man with a yataghan and captured an island
of the Cyclades. Before he began to sing of Lara and
the Giaour he was himself a Giaour, himself Lara and
Conrad ; he had travelled with a disguised Gulnare, he
had been beloved by Medora, he had stabbed Hassan to
the heart, and fought by the side of Alp the renegade ;
or, if he had not done quite all this, people insisted
that he had, and he was too melancholy to deny the
impeachment.
BYRON 307
Languid as Byron affected to be, and haughtily indo-
lent, he wrote with extraordinary persistence and rapidity.
Few poets have composed so much in so short a time.
The first two cantos of Childe Harold in 1812 lead off
the giddy masque of his productions, which for the next
few years were far too numerous to be mentioned here
in detail. Byron's verse romances, somewhat closely
modelled in form on those of Scott, began with the
Giaour in 1813, and each had a beautiful, fatal hero,
" of one virtue and a thousand crimes," in whom tens of
thousands of awe-struck readers believed they recognised
the poet himself in masquerade. All other poetry in-
stantly paled before the astounding success of Byron,
and Scott, who had reigned unquestioned as the popular
minstrel of the age, " gave over writing verse-romances "
and took to prose. Scott's courtesy to his young rival
was hardly more exquisite than the personal respect
which Byron showed to one whom he insisted in ad-
dressing as " the Monarch of Parnassus " ; but Scott's
gentle chieftains were completely driven out of the field
by the Turkish bandits and pirates. All this time Byron
was writing exceedingly little that has stood the attacks
of time ; nor, indeed, up to the date of his marriage in
1815, can it be said that he had produced anything of
any real poetical importance. He was now, however,
to be genuinely unhappy and candidly inspired.
Adversity drove him in upon himself, and gave him
something of creative sincerity. Perhaps, if he had
lived, and had found peace with advancing years, he
might have become a great artist. But that he never
contrived to be. In 1816 he left England, shaking its
dust from his feet, no longer a pinchbeck pirate, but
a genuine outlaw, in open enmity with society. This
308 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
enfranchisement acted upon his genius like a tonic, and
in the last eight years of his tempestuous and lawless life
he wrote many things of extraordinary power and even
splendour. Two sections of his work approach, nearer
than any others, perfection in their kind. In a species of
magnificent invective, of which the Vision of Judgment
(1822) is the finest example, Byron rose to the level of
Dryden and Swift; in the picturesque satire of social
life — where he boldly imitated the popular poets of
Italy, and in particular Casti and Pulci — his extreme
ease and versatility, his masterly blending of humour
and pathos, ecstasy and misanthropy, his variegated
knowledge of men and manners, gave him, as Scott
observed, something of the universality of Shakespeare.
Here he is to be studied in Beppo (1818) and in the un-
matched Don Juan of his last six years. It is in these
and the related works that we detect the only perdurable
Byron, the only poetry that remains entirely worthy of
the stupendous fame of the author.
It is the fatal defect of Byron that his verse is rarely
exquisite. That indescribable combination of harmony
in form with inevitable propriety in language which
thrills the reader of Milton, of Wordsworth, of Shelley,
of Tennyson — this is scarcely to be discerned in Byron.
We are, in exchange, presented with a rapid volume of
rough melody, burning words which are torches rather
than stars, a fine impetuosity, a display of personal tem-
perament which it has nowadays become more inte-
resting to study in the poet than in the poetry, a great
noise of trumpets and kettle-drums in which the more
delicate melodies of verse are drowned. These refine-
ments, however, are imperceptible to all but native
ears, and the lack of them has not prevented Byron
BYRON 309
from seeming to foreign critics to be by far the greatest
and the most powerful of our poets. There was no diffi-
culty in comprehending his splendid, rolling rhetoric;
and wherever a European nation stood prepared to in-
veigh against tyranny and conventionality, the spirit of
Byron was ready to set its young poets ablaze.
Hence, while in England the influence of Byron on
poetry was not in the least degree commensurate with
his fame, and while we have here to look to prose-
writers, such as Bulwer, as his most direct disciples, his
verse inspired a whole galaxy of poets on the Continent.
The revival of Russian and Polish literature dates from
Byron ; his spirit is felt in the entire attitude and in not
a few of the accents of Heine and of Leopardi; while
to the romantic writers of France he seemed the final
expression of all that was magnificent and intoxicating.
Neither Lamartine nor Vigny, Victor Hugo nor Musset,
was independent of Byron's influence, and in the last-
mentioned we have the most exact reproduction of the
peculiar Byronic gestures and passionate self-abandon-
ment which the world has seen.
In Don Juan Byron had said that " poetry is but
passion." This was a heresy, which it would be easy to
refute, since by passion he intended little more than a
relinquishing of the will to the instincts. But it was also
a prophecy, for it was the reassertion of the right of the
individual imagination to be a law to itself, and all sub-
sequent emancipation of the spirit may be traced back
to the ethical upheaval of which Byron was the storm-
thrush. He finally broke up the oppressive silence which
the pure accents of Wordsworth and Coleridge had not
quite been able to conquer. With Byron the last rags of
the artificiality which had bound European expression
310 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
for a century and a half were torn off and flung to the
winds. He taught roughly, melodramatically, inconsist-
ently, but he taught a lesson of force and vitality. He
was full of technical faults, drynesses, flatnesses ; he
lacked the power to finish ; he offended by a hundred
careless impertinences ; but his whole being was an altar
on which the flame of personal genius flared like a
conflagration.
The experiment which Byron made was repeated with
a more exquisite sincerity by PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY,
who resembled him in belonging to the aristocratic class,
and in having a strong instinctive passion for liberty and
toleration. The younger poet, however, showed still less
caution than the elder, and while yet a boy gained a
dangerous reputation for violent radical prejudices and
anti-social convictions. Partly on this account, and
partly because the transcendental imagination of Shelley
was less easy than Byron's piratical romance for common
minds to appreciate, the poetry of the former was almost
completely unrecognised until many years after his death,
and Byron's deference to Shelley was looked upon as a
fantastic whim of friendship. The younger poet was
erratic at Eton and Oxford, being expelled from the latter
for a puerile outburst of atheism. Born in 1792, the
productions of Shelley were already numerous when, in
his Alastor (1816), he first showed any definite disposition
for the higher parts of poetry. This majestic study in
blank verse was superior in melody and in imaginative
beauty to anything that had been written in English,
other than by Wordsworth and Coleridge in their youth,
since the romantic age began. The scholarship of Milton
and Wordsworth was obvious, but Alastor contains pas-
sages descriptive of the transport of the soul in the
SHELLEY 311
presence of natural loveliness in which a return to the
Hellenic genius for style is revealed.
Shelley lived only six years longer, but these were
years of feverish composition, sustained, in spite of
almost complete want of public sympathy, at a fiery
height of intensity. He left England, and in that exile
was brought immediately into contact with Byron, with
whom he formed an intimacy which no eccentricity on
either side sufficed to dissolve. That he was serviceable
to Byron no one will deny ; that Byron depressed him
he did not attempt to conceal from himself ; yet the
esteem of the more popular poet was valuable to the
greater one. The terror caused by the vague rumour of
Shelley's rebellious convictions was not allayed by the
publication of Laon and Cythna (1817), a wild narrative of
an enthusiastic brother and sister, martyrs to liberty. In
1818 was composed, but not printed, the singularly perfect
realistic poem of Julian and Maddalo. Shelley was now
saturating himself with the finest Greek and Italian classic
verse — weaving out of his thoughts and intellectual ex-
periences a pure and noble system of aesthetics. This
he illustrated in 1820 by his majestic, if diffuse and some-
times overstrained lyrical drama of Prometheus Unbound,
with which he published a few independent lyrics which
scarcely have their peer in the literature of the world ;
among these the matchless Ode to the West Wind must
be named. The same year saw the publication of the
Cencit the most dramatic poetic play written in English
since the tragedy of Venice Preserved. Even here,
where Shelley might expect to achieve popularity, some-
thing odious in the essence of the plot warned off the
public.
He continued to publish, but without an audience ; nor
312 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
did his Epipsychidion, a melodious rhapsody of Platonic
love, nor his Adonais, an elegy of high dignity and splen-
dour, in the manner of Moschus and in commemoration
of Keats, nor the crystalline lyrics with which he eked out
his exiguous publications, attract the slightest interest.
Shelley was, more than any other English poet has been,
le banni de Hesse. Then, without warning, on the 8th
of July 1822 he was drowned while yachting in the Gulf
of Spezia. He left behind him unrevised, amid a world
of exquisite fragments, a noble but vague gnomic poem,
the Triumph of Life, in which Petrarch's Trionfi are
summed up and sometimes excelled.
A life of disappointment and a death in obscurity were
gradually followed by the growth of an almost exag-
gerated reputation. Fifty years after his death Shelley
had outshone all his contemporaries — nay, with the ex-
ception of Shakespeare, was probably the most passion-
ately admired of all the English poets. If this extremity
of fame has once more slightly receded, if Shelley holds
his place among the sovereign minstrels of England, but
rather abreast of than in front of them, it is because time
has reduced certain of his violent paradoxes to common-
places, and because the world, after giving several of his
axioms of conduct full and respectful consideration, has
determined to refrain from adopting them. Shelley, when
he was not inspired and an artist, was a prophet vaguely
didactic or neurotically prejudiced ; his is the highest ideal
of poetic art produced by the violence of the French
Revolution, but we are too constantly reminded of that
moral parentage, and his sans-culottism is no longer ex-
hilarating, it is merely tiresome. There are elements,
then, even in Shelley, which have to be pared away ;
but, when these are removed, the remainder is beautiful
SHELLEY 313
beyond the range of praise — perfect in aerial, choral
melody, perfect in the splendour and purity of its
imagery, perfect in the divine sweetness and magnetic
tenderness of its sentiment. He is probably the English
writer who has achieved the highest successes in pure
lyric, whether of an elaborate and antiphonal order, or
of that which springs in a stream of soaring music
straight from the heart.
Closely allied as he was with Byron in several respects,
both of temperament and circumstance, it is fortunate
that Shelley was so very little affected by the predomi-
nance of his vehement rival. His intellectual ardour
threw out, not puffs of smoke, as Byron's did, but a
white vapour. He is not always transparent, but always
translucent, and his mind moves ethereally among in-
corporeal images and pantheistic attributes, dimly at
times, yet always clothed about with radiant purity Of
the gross Georgian mire not a particle stuck to the robes
of Shelley. His diction is curiously compounded of
forcible, fresh mintages, mingled with the verbiage of
the lyric poets of the eighteenth century, so that at his
best he seems like ^Sschylus, and at his worst merely
like Akenside. For all his excessive attachment to revo-
lutionary ideas, Shelley retains much more of the age
of Gray than either Keats, Coleridge, or Wordsworth ;
his style, carefully considered, is seen to rest on a basis
built about 1760, from which it is every moment spring-
ing and sparkling like a fountain in columns of ebullient
lyricism. But sweep away from Shelley whatever gives
us exquisite pleasure, and the residuum will be found
to belong to the eighteenth century. Hence, paradoxical
as it sounds, the attitude of Shelley to style was in the
main retrograde ; he was, for instance, no admirer of
314 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
the arabesques of the Cockney school. He was, above
all else, a singer, and in the direction of song he rises at
his best above all other English, perhaps above all other
modern European poets. There is an ecstasy in his best
lyrics and odes that claps its wings and soars until it is
lost in the empyrean of transcendental melody. This
rhapsodical charm is entirely inimitable ; and in point of
fact Shelley, passionately admired, has been very little
followed, and with success, perhaps, only by Mr. Swin-
burne. His genius lay outside the general trend of our
poetical evolution ; he is exotic and unique, and such
influence as he has had, apart from the effect on the
pulse of the individual of the rutilant beauty of his
strophes, has not been very advantageous. He is often
hectic, and sometimes hysterical, and, to use his own
singular image, those who seek for mutton-chops will
discover that Shelley keeps a gin-palace.
A third influence at work in this second romantic
generation was that consciously formed on Elizabethan
and Italian lines. The group of poets which culminated
in Keats desired to forget all that had been written in
English verse since about 1625, and to continue the
work of such Italianated poets as Fletcher and the
disciples of Spenser. There can be no question that
a very prominent part in heralding this revival was taken
by Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets
(1808), a book which seemed to be unnoticed at first, but
which was devoured with ecstasy by several young men
of good promise, and particularly by Hunt, Keats,
Procter, and Beddoes. While Leigh Hunt was being
imprisoned for libelling the Prince Regent, in 1812, he
made a very minute study of the Parnaso Italiano, and
particularly of Ariosto. Between 1814 and 1818 he
KEATS 315
published several volumes, in which the Italians were
closely and fervidly imitated ; among these the Story of
Rimini holds a really important place in the evolution of
English poetry. Hunt was very promptly imitated by
Keats, who was eleven years his junior, and in every
element of genius immeasurably his superior. A certain
order of critics has never been able to forgive Leigh
Hunt, who, it must be admitted, lacked distinction in his
writings, and taste in his personal relations ; but Hunt
was liberal and genial, and a genuine devotee of poetry.
Of the other writers who formed what was rudely called
the Cockney school, under the presidency of Hunt, J. H.
Reynolds and Charles Wells had talent, but JOHN KEATS
was one of the greatest poets that any country has pro-
duced. The compositions which place the name of this
stable-keeper's son with those of Shakespeare and Milton
were written between 1817, when he first ceased to be
stiff and affected, and 1820, when the failure of his
health silenced his wonderful voice. Within this brief
space of time he contrived to enrich English literature
with several of the most perennially attractive narrative-
poems in the language, not mere snatches of lyrical song,
but pieces requiring sustained effort and a careful con-
structive scheme, Endymion, Lamia, the Eve of St. Agnes,
the Pot of Basil, Hyperion. When he wrote his latest
copy of verses, Keats had not completed twenty-five
years of life, and it is the copious perfection of work
accomplished so early, and under so many disadvantages,
which is the wonder of biographers. He died unap-
preciated, not having persuaded Byron, Scott, or Words-
worth of his value, and being still further than Shelley
was from attracting any public curiosity or admiration.
His triumph was to be posthumous ; it began with the
3i6 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
magnanimous tribute of Adonais, and it has gone on
developing and extending, until, at the present moment,
it is Keats, the semi-educated surgeon's apprentice, cut
down in his crude youth, who obtains the most suffrages
among all the great poets of the opening quarter of the
century. To a career which started with so steady a
splendour, no successes should have been denied. It is
poor work to speculate about might-have-beens, but the
probable attainments of Keats, if he could have lived,
amount, as nearly as such unfulfilled prophecies can ever
do, to certainty. Byron might have become a sovereign,
and Shelley would probably have descended into politics ;
Keats must have gone on to further and further culmina-
tion of poetic art.
Nothing in English poetry is more lovely than those
passages in which Keats throws off his cockney excesses
and sings in the note of classic purity. At these moments,
and they were growing more and more frequent till he
ceased to write, he attains a depth of rich, voluptuous
melody, by the side of which Byron seems thin, and
even Shelley shrill. If we define what poetry is in its
fullest and deepest expression, we find ourselves describ-
ing the finest stanzas in the maturer works of Keats. His
great odes, in which, perhaps, he is seen to the most
advantage as an artist in verse, are Titanic and Titianic —
their strength is equalled only by the glow and depth
of their tone. From Spenser, from Shakespeare, from
Milton, from Ariosto, he freely borrowed beauties of
style, which he fused into an enamel or amalgam, no
longer resembling the sources from which they were
stolen, but wearing the impress of the god-like thief
himself. It is probable that, marvellous as is such a
fragment as Hyperion, it but faintly foreshadows the
KEATS 317
majesty of the style of which Keats would shortly have
been master. Yet, enormous as are the disadvantages
under which the existing work of Keats labours, we are
scarcely conscious of them. We hold enough to prove
to us how predominant the imagination was in him, how
sympathetic his touch as an artist. He loved " the prin-
ciple of beauty in all things," and he had already, in
extreme youth, secured enough of the rich felicity of
phrase and imperial illumination, which marks the
maturity of great poets, to hold his own with the best.
No one has lived who has known better than he how
to " load every rift of his subject with ore."
It is impossible, too, not to recognise that Keats has
been the master-spirit in the evolution of Victorian
poetry. Both Tennyson and Browning, having in child-
hood been enchained by Byron, and then in adolescence
by Shelley, reached manhood only to transfer their alle-
giance to Keats, whose influence on English poetry since
1830 has been not less universal than that of Byron on
the literature of the Continent. His felicities are exactly
of a kind to stimulate a youthful poet to emulation, and
in spite of what he owes to the Italians — to whom he
went precisely as Chaucer did, to gain richness of poeti-
cal texture — the speech of Keats is full of a true British
raciness. No poet, save Shakespeare himself, is more
English than Keats ; none presents to us in the harmony
of his verse, his personal character, his letters and his
general tradition, a figure more completely attractive,
nor better calculated to fire the dreams of a generous
successor.
The friend and biographer of Byron, THOMAS MOORE,
was in sympathy with the poets of revolution, and was
long associated with them in popular estimation. At
3i8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
the present moment Moore is extremely disdained by
the critics, and has the greatest possible difficulty in
obtaining a fair hearing. He is scarcely mentioned,
save to be decried and ridiculed. This is a reaction
against the reputation which Moore long continued
to enjoy on rather slight grounds, but it is excessive.
As a lyrical satirist, his lightness of touch and buoyant
wit give an Horatian flavour to those collections of
epistles and fables of which the Fudge Family in Paris
(1818) began a series. But the little giddy bard had a
serious side ; he was profoundly incensed at the un-
sympathetic treatment of his native island by England,
and he seized the "dear harp of his country" in an
amiable frenzy of Hibernian sentiment. The result was
a huge body of songs and ballads, the bulk of which are
now, indeed, worthless, but out of which a careful hand
can select eight or ten that defy the action of time, and
preserve their wild, undulating melancholy, their sound
as of bells dying away in the distance. The artificial
prettiness and smoothness of Moore are seen to perfec-
tion in his chain of Oriental romances, Lalla Rookh
(1817), and these, it is to be feared, are tarnished beyond
all recovery.
The five years from 1816 to 1821 were the culmi-
nating years of the romantic movement. The spirit of
poetry invaded every department of English ; there
were birds in every bush, and wild music burdened
every bough. In particular, several writers of an older
school, whom the early movement of Wordsworth and
Coleridge had silenced, felt themselves irresistibly moved
to sing once more, and swell the new choir with their
old voices ; it was eras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique
amavit eras amet. Among those who had loved more
CRABBE 319
than twenty years before was Samuel Rogers, who came
forward with a Jacqueline bound up with Byron's Lara —
strange incongruity, a Methody spinster on the arm of a
dashing dragoon. Save on this solitary occasion, how-
ever, the amiable Muse of Rogers never forgot what was
due to her self-respect, and clung close to the manner
of Goldsmith, slowly and faintly relaxing the rigour of
versification in a blank verse Italy, but never, in a single
graceful line, quite reaching the point of poetry. The
other revenant, GEORGE CRABBE, did better. After a
silence almost unbroken for two-and-twenty years, he
resumed his sturdy rhyming in 1807, and in 1810 en-
riched the language with a poem of really solid merit,
the Borough, a picture of social and physical conditions in
a seaside town on the Eastern Coast. Crabbe never ex-
celled, perhaps never equalled, this saturnine study of the
miseries of provincial life ; like his own watchman, the
poet seems to have no other design than to "let in truth,
terror, and the day." Crabbe was essentially a writer of
the eighteenth century, bound close by the versification
of Churchill and those who, looking past Pope, tried to
revive the vehement music of Dryden ; his attitude to
life and experience, too, was of the age of 1780. Yet he
showed the influence of romanticism and of his contem-
poraries in the exactitude of his natural observation and
his Dutch niceness in the choice of nouns. He avoided,
almost as carefully as Wordsworth himself, the vague
sonorous synonym which continues the sound while
adding nothing to the sense. As Tennyson used to say,
" Crabbe has a world of his own," and his plain, strong,
unaffected poetry will always retain a certain number of
admirers.
This second generation of romanticism was marked
320 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
by a development of critical writing which was of the
very highest importance. It may indeed be said, without
much exaggeration, that at this time literary criticism, in
the modern sense, was first seriously exercised in Eng-
land. In other words, the old pseudo-classic philosophy
of literature, founded on the misinterpretation of Aristotle,
was completely obsolete ; while the rude, positive expres-
sion of baseless opinion with which the Edinburgh and
the Quarterly had started, had broken down, leaving room
for a new sensitive criticism founded on comparison with
ancient and exotic types of style, a sympathetic study of
nature, and a genuine desire to appreciate the writer's
contribution on its own merits. Of this new and fertile
school of critics, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and
Lamb were the leaders.
It is noticeable that the utterances of these writers
which have made their names famous were, as a rule,
written on occasion, and in consequence of an oppor-
tunity which came seldom and as a rule came late.
Hunt's best work in criticism dates from 1808 until
1840 indeed, but only because during those years he
possessed or influenced successive journals in which
he was free to speak his mind. Hazlitt, on the other
hand, was thirty-five years of age before his intro-
duction to the Edinburgh Review enabled him in 1814
to begin his articles on the English comic writers.
To the accident that Hazlitt was invited to lecture at
the Surrey Institution we owe his English Poets and
his essays on Elizabethan literature. Lamb and De
Quincey found little vehicle for their ideas until the
periodical called London was issued in 1820; here the
Essays of Elia and the Opium-Eater were published, and
here lesser writers, and later Carlyle himself with his Life.
CHARLES LAMB 321
and Writings of Schiller, found a sympathetic asylum.
It was therefore to the development and the increased
refinement of periodical literature that the new criticism
was most indebted, and newspapers of a comparatively
humble order, without wealth or influence behind them,
did that for literature which the great Quarterly Reviews,
with their insolence and their sciolism, had conspicuously
failed to achieve.
With the definite analysis of literary productions we
combine here, as being closely allied to it, the criticism
of life contributed by all these essayists, but pre-eminently
by CHARLES LAMB. This, perhaps the most beloved of
English authors, with all his sufferings bravely borne, his
long-drawn sorrows made light of in a fantastic jest,
was the associate of the Lake poets at the outset of their
career. He accepted their principles although he wholly
lacked their exaltation in the presence of nature, and was
essentially an urban, not a rural talent, though the tale of
Rosamund Gray may seem to belie the judgment. The
poetry of his youth was not very successful, and in the
first decade of the century Lamb sank to contributing
facetious ana to the newspapers at sixpence a joke. His
delicate Tales from Shakespeare (1807), and the Specimens
of 1808, of which we have already spoken, kept his
memory before the minds of his friends, and helped to
bring in a new era of thought by influencing a few young
minds. Meanwhile he was sending to certain fortunate
correspondents those divine epistles which, since their
publication in 1837, nave placed Lamb in the front rank
of English letter-writers. But still he was unknown,
and remained so until in 1818 the young publisher Oilier
was persuaded to venture on a collection of Lamb's
scattered writings. At last, at the age of forty-five, he
x
322 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
began to immortalise himself with those Essays of Elia,
of which the opening series was ultimately given to the
world as a volume in 1823.
The career of THOMAS DE QUINCEY began even later,
and was even more obscure. Ten years younger than
Lamb, and like him an admirer and disciple of Words-
worth and Coleridge, De Quincey made no serious attempt
to excel in verse, and started in prose not earlier than,
as has been already noted, 1821, the book of the Opium-
Eater appearing anonymously the following year. He
had now put out from shore, and we find him for the
future, practically until his death in 1859, swimming "in
the midst of a German Ocean of literature," and rarely
consenting to quit the pen. His collected works, with
difficulty saved, just before his end, out of a chaos of
anonymity, first revealed to the general public the quality
of this astonishing author. In the same way, to chron-
icle what Wilson contributed to literature is mainly to
hunt for Nodes Ambrosiance in the file of Blackwoorfs
Magazine. To each of these critical writers, diverse
in taste and character, yet all the children of the new
romantic movement, the advance of the higher jour-
nalism was the accident which brought that to the
surface which might otherwise have died in them un-
fertilised and unperceived.
Of this group of writers, two are now found to be
predominant — Lamb for the humour and humanity of
his substance, De Quincey for the extraordinary oppor-
tunity given by his form for the discussion of the
elements of style. Of the latter writer it has been
said that "he languished with a sort of despairing
nympholepsy after intellectual pleasures." His manner
of writing was at once extremely splendid and extremely
DE QUINCEY 323
precise. He added to literature several branches or pro-
vinces which had up to his day scarcely been cultivated
in English ; among these, impassioned autobiography,
distinguished by an exquisite minuteness in the analysis
of recollected sensations, is pre-eminent. He revelled
in presenting impressions of intellectual self-conscious-
ness in phrases of what he might have called sequacious
splendour. De Quincey was but little enamoured of
the naked truth, and a suspicion of the fabulous hangs,
like a mist, over all his narrations. The most elaborate
of them, the Revolt of the Tartars, a large canvas covered
with groups of hurrying figures in sustained and painful
flight, is now understood to be pure romance. The first
example of his direct criticism is Whiggism in its Relations
to Literature, which might be called the Anatomy of a
Pedant.
De Quincey is sometimes voluble and flatulent, some-
times trivial, sometimes unpardonably discursive. But
when he is at his best, the rapidity of his mind, its
lucidity, its humour and good sense, the writer's pas-
sionate loyalty to letters, and his organ-melody of style
command our deep respect. He does not, like the
majority of his critical colleagues, approach literature
for purposes of research, but to obtain moral effects.
De Quincey, a dreamer of beautiful dreams, disdained
an obstinate vassalage to mere matters of fact, but sought
with intense concentration of effort after a conscientious
and profound psychology of letters.
With this group of literary critics may be mentioned
one who was not without relation with them, and who
was yet widely distinct. The men of whom we have
been speaking sought their inspiration mainly in the
newly recovered treasures of early national poetry and
324 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
prose. These were also formative elements in the mind
of WALTER SAVAGE LAND OR ; but he imitated more
closely than they the great classics of antiquity, and,
in particular, Pindar, ^Eschylus, and Cicero. As early
as 1795 he had occasionally published poetry ; his con-
centrated and majestic Gebir (1798) is certainly one of
the pioneers of English romanticism. But Landor, with
his tumultuous passions and angry self-sufficiency, led
a youth tormented by too much emotional and social
tempest and too little public encouragement to become
prominent in prose or verse. It was in the comparative
serenity of middle age, and during his happy stay in or
near Florence from 1821 to 1828, that he wrote the
Imaginary Conversations, and became one of the great
English men of letters. No other work of Lander's has
achieved popularity, although much of his occasional
prose and verse has called forth the impassioned praise
of individuals.
The Conversations display, in stiff and Attic form,
dramatic aptitudes, for confirmation of which we search
in vain the pages of his academic plays. These his-
toric dialogues, strange as it seems, were refused by
publisher after publisher ; but, at length, in 1824, two
volumes of them were issued, and the world was gained.
This great series of stately colloquies holds a unique
position in English literature. The style of Landor is
too austere, too little provided with ornament, too strenu-
ously allusive to please the running reader. But in a
mingling of dignity and delicacy, purity and vehemence,
into what is an amalgam of all the rarer qualities of
thought and expression, Landor ranks only just below
the greatest masters of language. His genius is impeded
by a certain haughty stiffness ; he approaches majestic-
HALLAM 325
ally, and sometimes nimbly, but always protected from
the reader by a suit of mail, always rendered inacces-
sible by an unconquerable shyness.
The second romantic generation was marked by the
rise of a school of historians inferior only to the great
classic group of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. In the
full tide of monarchical reaction, William Mitford com-
pleted, in 1810, his History of Greece, a book eloquent
and meritorious in its way, but to be superseded by the
labours of Grote. Sharon Turner, a careful imitator
of Gibbon, illustrated the Anglo-Saxon period of our
chronicles, and the Scottish metaphysician, Sir James
Mackintosh, towards the close of his life, occupied
himself with the constitutional history of England. Of
more importance was the broad and competent English
history of Lingard, a Catholic priest at Ushaw, whose
work, though bitterly attacked from the partisan point
of view, has been proved to be in the main loyal and
accurate. These excellent volumes appeared in 1819,
and deserve the praise which should be given in rheto-
rical times to histories of modest learning and research.
It was the ambition of Southey, who was an admirable
biographer, to excel in history also. In Brazil and in
the Peninsular war he found excellent subjects, but his
treatment was not brilliant enough to save his books
from becoming obsolete. The second of these was,
indeed, almost immediately superseded by Sir W.
Napier's History of the War in the Peninsula (1828), a
masterpiece of military erudition.
These names, however, merely lead us up to that of
HENRY HALLAM, whose View of the Middle Ages, in
1818, announced to the world a brilliantly gifted writer
on political history. His Constitutional History of
326 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
England came nine years later. In his old age
Hallam made a track through the previously path-
less waste of general European literature. His gravity
is supported by a vast basis of solid knowledge,
his judgment is sane and balanced, and to his im-
mediate contemporaries his style appeared remarkable
for "succinctness and perspicuous beauty." But the
modern writer is not so well pleased with Hallam, who
begins to be the Georgian type of the falsely impressive.
His felicities are those which Macaulay emphasised and
carried to a further precision ; his faults are his own,
and they are a want of intuitive sympathy with the
subject under discussion, and a monotonous and barren
pomp of delivery which never becomes easy or flexible.
The far-famed "judgment," too, of Hallam is not as
wide as we could wish. He is safe only in the dis-
cussion of recognised types, and the reader searches
his critical pages in vain for signs of the recognition of
an eccentric or abnormal talent. The most laudable
tendency of the historians of this age, seen in Hallam,
indeed, but even more plainly in secondary writers, such
as P. F. Tytler, Coxe, and James Mill, was towards the
adoption of a scientific accuracy. It was the aim of
these men to reject mere legend and rhetorical super-
stition, and to build, as one of them said, " the history
of a country upon unquestionable muniments." In this
way they pointed directly to that scientific school of
history which has been one of the glories of the later
years of the nineteenth century.
The splendid achievements of Miss Austen in the novel
and Sir Walter Scott in romance tended somewhat to
the discouragement of their immediate successors. The
Waverley Novels continued to be poured forth, in rapid
NOVELISTS 327
and splendid succession, throughout the years which we
are now considering, and they obscured the fame of all
possible rivals. Yet there were, during this period,
secondary writers, independent of the influence of
Scott, whose novels possessed sterling merit. From
that interesting Scottish author, Mary Brunton, whose
Self-Control (1811) and Discipline (1814) are excellent
precursors of a long series of " kail-yard " fiction, there
naturally descended the delightful Miss Ferrier, whose
Marriage (1818) charmed not only the author of Waverley,
but a host of lesser readers, by its lively humour and its
delicious satire of many types of Scotch womanhood.
Miss Ferrier would be a Doric Jane Austen, were her skill
in the evolution of a plot a little better trained, and her
delineation of character a little more sternly restrained
from caricature. The story of her delicate tact in sooth-
ing the shattered faculties of Sir Walter Scott has
endeared Miss Ferrier to thousands who never read her
three amusing novels. J. G. Lockhart, though Scott's
son-in-law, was not his disciple in four novels of a
modern and more or less psychological class. Adam
Blair (1822) is the best of these, and escapes the frigidity
of the author's one classical romance, Valerius (1821), a
highly accomplished attempt to resuscitate domestic
society under Trajan.
Romance was continued on somewhat the same lines
which had made Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis so popular.
The grisly story of Melmoth the Wanderer, by Maturin,
with its horrible commerce with demons, and its scenes of
bombastic passion, dates from 1820. Mrs. Percy Shelley,
as befitted the widow of so great a magician of language,
reached a purer style and a more impressive imagination
in her ghastly romance of Frankenstein, which has given
328 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
an image (usually misquoted) to everyday English
speech, and may still be read with genuine terror and
pity. A very spirited and yet gloomy novel, the Ana-
stasius of Hope (1819) appeared at a time when the
public were ablaze with the pretensions of Byron ; the
hero of this daring, piratical romance is all that the noble
poet desired himself to be supposed to be. James Morier
opened a series of tales of Oriental manners by the
publication of Hajji Baba in 1824 ; the satire of Persian
manners was brilliant enough and keen enough to call
forth a remonstrance against this "very foolish business"
from the Shah himself. Morier was anxious to turn the
enormous success of this his first book to account, but
in further publications he was less successful. He tried
to be serious, while his genius led him to the laughable.
Native talent and a hopeless absence of taste and
judgment were never more strangely mingled than in
John Gait, who, after vainly essaying every department
of letters, published in middle life an admirable comic
novel, the Annals of the Parish (1821), and set all Scotland
laughing. It is the autobiography of a country minister,
and describes the development of society in a thriving
lowland village with inimitable humour and whimsicality.
Gait went on pouring forth novels almost until his death
in 1839, but he never hit the target again so plainly in
the bull's eye.
Byron was scarcely dead before his influence began
to display itself in the work of a multitude of writers
of " fashionable " novels, dealing mainly with criminals
of high birth, into the desperate texture of whose lives
there was woven a thread of the ideal. In this school
of fiction two young men rose to the highest distinction,
and " thrilled the boys with dandy pathos " in a lavish
LYTTON 329
profusion. Of these elegant and fluent novelists the
younger made his appearance first, with Vivian Grey>
in 1826, but his rival was close behind him with Falkland
in 1827 and Pelham in 1828. Through the next twenty
years they raced neck by neck for the suffrages of the
polite. In that day EDWARD LYTTON BULWER, after-
wards the first Lord LYTTON, seemed a genius of the
very highest order, but it was early perceived that his
dandiacal attitude was not perfectly sincere, that the
graces of his style were too laboured and prolix, and
that the tone of his novels fostered national conceit and
prejudice at the expense of truth. His sentiment was
mawkish, his creations were unsubstantial and often pre-
posterous. But the public liked the fastidious elaborate-
ness of a gentleman who catered for their pleasures
"with his fingers covered with dazzling rings, and his
feet delightfully pinched in a pair of looking - glass
boots" ; and Bulwer Lytton certainly possessed extra-
ordinary gifts of activity, versatility, and sensitiveness
to the requirements of his readers. What has shattered
the once-glittering dome of his reputation is what early
readers of Zanoni called his " fearfully beautiful word-
painting," his hollow rhetoric, his puerile horrors. To-
wards the end of his glorious career Lord Lytton
contrived to prune his literary extravagances, and his
latest works are his best.
To early contemporaries the novels of BENJAMIN
DISRAELI, long afterwards Earl of BEACONSFIELD,
seemed more extravagant and whimsical than even
those of Bulwer. Disraeli, too, belonged to the great
company of the dandies — to the Brummels and Lauzuns
of literature. His early novels were baffling miscellanies
of the wildest and the most foppish folly combined with
330 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
rare political wit and a singular clairvoyance. A like
inconsistency marked their style, which is now almost
crazy in its incoherence, and now of a florid but re-
strained beauty to which Bulwer, with all his machinery
of rhetoric, never attained. Contarini Fleming (1832)
may be said to record a step towards the emancipation
of English romance, in its extraordinary buoyancy of
Byronic stimulus. But as a writer, Disraeli was at his
best and steadily improving from Venetia (1837) to
Tancred (1847). In these novels he is less tawdry in his
ornament, less glittering in his affectation of Voltairean
epigram, less inflated and impracticable than in his
earlier, and certainly than in his two latest novels,
those curious fruits of his old age. The dandy style,
of which Barbey d'Aurevilly was the contemporary type
in France, is best studied in England in Disraeli, whose
novels, though they no longer appeal to the masses,
preserve better than Bulwer's the attention of cultivated
readers. In these Byronic novelists, who preserved for
their heroes "the dear corsair expression, half savage,
half soft," love of the romance of pure adventure was
handed down, across Dickens and Thackeray, and in
an indirect way Bulwer and Disraeli are the progenitors
of the Ouidas and Rider Haggards of a later age.
A very peculiar talent — in its fantastic nature, perhaps,
more delicate and original than any of these — was that of
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK, the learned friend and corre-
spondent of Shelley. This interesting satirist displayed
a survival of the eighteenth-century temper in nine-
teenth-century forms, and thought of Voltaire when
the rest of the world was thinking of Scott, whom
Peacock considered "amusing only because he misre-
presented everything." The new was singularly odious
PEACOCK 331
to him ; it was only in the old, the classical, the Attic,
that he could take any pleasure. The poetry of Peacock,
both serious and ludicrous, has a charm of extreme
elegance ; but the qualities of his distinguished mind
are best observed in his curious satirical or grotesque
romances, seven in number, of which Headlong Hall
(1816) was the first, and Nightmare Abbey (1818) doubtless
the most entertaining. His latest novel, Gryll Grange,
appeared so late as 1860, and Peacock outlived all his
contemporaries, dying at a great age in 1866. He totally
disregarded English traditions of romance-writing, and
followed the eighteenth-century type of French conte.
In his eccentric, discursive way, he is the wittiest English
writer of the age, and after almost passing into oblivion,
he is once more becoming a prominent favourite with
readers of fastidious taste.
The fourth decade of this century was, on the whole,
a period of rest and exhaustion in the literature of this
country. In poetry it was marked by the disappearance
into silence of those who had done most to make the
age what it was, a time of progress and revolt. The
younger poets were dead, their elder brethren were
beginning to pass away, and those who survived the
longest, in particular Wordsworth and Landor, con-
tinued to add to the bulk, but not signally to the value
of their works. Yet Tennyson, little observed or praised,
was now producing the most exquisite and the most
brilliantly varied of his lyrics. Discouraged at his recep-
tion, he had published, when this chapter closes, nothing
since 1833. The solitary young poet who deserved to be
mentioned in the same breath, Elizabeth Barrett, was
famous before 1840, but not for those pieces of which
her riper taste chiefly approved, or those for which
332 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
posterity is still admiring her after sixty years. In this lull
of the poetic world the voice of Robert Browning was
yet unheard, though it had spoken out in Paracelsus and
Strafford. But the sportive fancy of Hood, already near-
ing the close of his brief life, was highly appreciated,
and Praed, though still uncollected, had left a splendid
memory to his friends. Where poets were so few, the
pure talent of Hartley Coleridge, the greater S. T. Cole-
ridge's eldest, unhappy son, may claim a word. A group
of dramatists and lyrical writers, among whom Beddoes
is by far the greatest, link the generation of Keats and
Shelley with that of Tennyson and the Brownings ; but
most of them are nebulous, and the most eminent mere
asteroids in comparison with the planets which preceded
and followed them.
In prose more vigorous influences were at work. In
1825 Macaulay marked an epoch in criticism by contri-
buting to the Edinburgh Review his elaborate article on
Milton, the earliest example in English of the modern
tiude, or monograph in miniature, which has since
become so popular a province of letters. When our
period closes, Macaulay is a Cabinet minister. His
career as an essayist was mainly prior to 1840, at which
date he had shown himself neither ballad-writer nor
historian. In his famous reviews he created a species
of literature, partly biographical, partly critical, which
had an unrivalled effect in raising the average of
culture. Countless readers found in the pages of
Macaulay's Essays their earliest stimulus to independent
thought and the humane study of letters. Carlyle, five
years the senior of Macaulay, had been much slower in
reaching the great mass of the public. His graceful
Life of Schiller (1825) having failed to achieve a world-
CARLYLE 333
wide sensation, Carlyle deliberately and most success-
fully set himself to insist upon attention by adopting a
style of extreme eccentricity, full of Germanisms, vio-
lently abrupt and tortuously parenthetical, a lingo which
had to be learned like a foreign language. In the recep-
tion ultimately given to Sartor Resartus (1834) he was
assured of the success of his stratagem, and he continued,
to his eminent personal advantage, to write, not in Eng-
lish, but in Carlylese for the remainder of his life.
The names crowd upon us as we endeavour to dis-
tinguish what literature was when Queen Victoria
ascended the throne. Marryat was at the climax of
his rapidly won nautical fame ; the cavaliers of G. P. R.
James were riding down innumerable lonely roads ; the
first Lord Lytton was in the midst of the series of his
elaborately heroical romances, not cast in gold, perhaps,
but richly parcel-gilt ; Disraeli had just culminated in
Henrietta Temple. Such were the forces which up to
1840 were the most active in purely popular literature.
None of them, perhaps, was of the highest order either
in imagination or in style, but each in his own way was
repeating and emphasising the lesson of the romantic
revolution of 1798.
THE EARLY VICTORIAN AGE
1840-1870
IN spite of the interesting elements which we have just
endeavoured to indicate, the history of English literature
between 1825 and 1840 was comparatively uneventful.
The romantic revolution was complete: the new spirit
had penetrated every corner of literary production, and
the various strains introduced from Germany, from Celtic
sources, from the resuscitated study of natural landscape,
from the habit of contemplating radical changes in poli-
tical, religious, and social ideas, had settled down into
an accepted intellectual attitude, which itself threatened
to become humdrum and conventional. But this menace
of a new classicism passed away under the mental storm
and stress which culminated in 1848, a second and less
radical revolution on the lines of that which was then
half a century old, a revolution which had, in English
literature, the effect of unsettling nothing that was
valuable in the new romantic tradition, but of scouring
it, as it were, of the dust and cobwebs which were
beginning to cloud its surface, and of polishing it to
the reflection of more brilliant and delicate aspects of
nature.
In this second revival of thought and active expression
the practice of publishing books grew with a celerity
334
VICTORIAN VERSE 335
which baffles so succinct a chronicle as ours. It be-
comes, therefore, impossible from this point forwards to
discuss with any approach to detail the careers of
individual authors. All that we can now hope to do
is to show in some degree what was the general trend
and what were the main branches of this refreshed and
giant body of literature. Between the accession of the
Queen and the breaking put of the war with Russia the
profession of letters flourished in this country as it had
never done before. It is noticeable that in the first
years of the century the men of genius are sharply
distinguished from the herd of negligible men of talent.
We recognise some ten or twelve names so far isolated
from all the rest that, with little injustice, criticism may
concentrate its attention on these alone. But in the
second revival this was not the case : the gradations are
infinitely slow, and a sort of accomplished cleverness,
highly baffling to the comparative critic, brings us down
from the summit, along innumerable slopes and invidi-
ously gentle undulations. Nowhere is it more difficult
to know whom to mention and whom to omit.
In poetry, a body of writing which had been kept
back by the persistent public neglect of its immediate
inspirers, Shelley and Keats, took advantage of the
growing fame of those authors to insist on recognition
for itself. Hence, although Alfred Tennyson had been
a published author since 1826, the real date of his
efflorescence as a great, indisputable power in poetry
is 1842 ; Elizabeth Barrett, whose first volume appeared
in 1825, does not make her definite mark until 1844; anc*
Robert Browning, whose Pauline is of 1833, begins to find
readers and a discreet recognition in 1846, at the close
of the series of his Bells and Pomegranates. These three
336 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
writers, then, formed a group which it is convenient to
consider together : greatly dissimilar in detail, they pos-
sessed distinctive qualities in common ; we may regard
them as we do Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, or
Byron, Shelley, and Keats. The vogue, however, of this
latest cluster of poets was destined to develop more
slowly, perhaps, but much more steadily and for a
longer period than that of any previous trio. After fifty
years of production and increasing popularity two of
them were still amongst us, in the enjoyment of an
almost unparalleled celebrity. It is important, so far
as possible, to clear away from our minds the impression
which half a century of glory has produced, and to see
how these poets struck their first candid admirers in the
forties.
In the first place, it is obvious that their unquestion-
able merits were dimmed by what were taken to be
serious defects of style. Oddly enough, it was ALFRED
TENNYSON who was particularly assailed for faults which
we now cheerfully admit in Miss Barrett, who to her
own contemporaries seemed the most normal of the
three. That Keats was "misdirected" and "unripe"
had been an unchallenged axiom of the critical faculty ;
but here were three young writers who were calmly
accepting the formulas of Keats and of " his deplorable
friend Mn Shelley," and throwing contempt on those
so authoritatively laid down by the Edinburgh Review.
Tennyson was accused of triviality, affectation, and
quaintness. But his two volumes of 1842 were published
at a moment when public taste was undergoing a radical
change. The namby-pamby of the thirties was disgusting
the younger men, and the new burden imposed by the
Quarterlies was being tossed from impatient shoulders.
TENNYSON 337
When R. H. Home, in 1844, called upon English-
men to set aside "the thin gruel of Kirke White" and
put to their lips "the pure Greek wine of Keats/' he
not only expressed a daring conviction to which many
timider spirits responded, but he enunciated a critical
opinion which the discussions of fifty years have not
superseded.
What such candid spirits delighted in in the Tennyson
of 1842 was the sensuous comprehensiveness of his verse.
He seemed to sum up, in a composite style to which he
gradually gave a magic peculiarly his own, the finest
qualities of the school that had preceded him. He
studied natural phenomena as closely as Wordsworth
had, his melodies were almost as liquid and aerial as those
of Coleridge, he could tell a story as well as Campbell, his
songs were as pure and ecstatic as Shelley's, and for
depth and splendour of colour Keats hardly surpassed
him. As soon, therefore, as the general public came to
recognise him, he enchanted it. To an enthusiastic
listener the verse of Tennyson presently appeared to
sum up every fascinating pleasure which poetry was
competent to offer, or if anything was absent, it was
supposed to be the vigour of Byron or the manly
freshness of Scott. To the elements he collected from
his predecessors he added a sense of decorative beauty,
faintly archaic and Italian, an unprecedented refinement
and high finish in the execution of verse, and a philo-
sophical sympathy with the broad outlines of such
social and religious problems as were engaging the best
minds of the age. Those who approached the poetry of
Tennyson, then, were flattered by its polished and dis-
tinguished beauty, which added to their own self-respect,
and were repelled by none of those austerities and
Y
338 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
violences which had estranged the early readers of
Wordsworth and Shelley.
ELIZABETH BARRETT, also, pleased a wide and in-
fluential circle. Although her work was less pure than
Tennyson's, and has proved to be less perennial, there
were many readers of deliberate judgment who preferred
it to his. Their nerves were pleasurely excited by the
choral tumult of Miss Barrett's verse, by her generous
and humane enthusiasm, and by the spontaneous im-
pulsiveness of her emotion. They easily forgave the
slipshod execution, the hysterical violence, the Pythian
vagueness and the Pythian shriek. More critical readers
were astonished that one who approached the composi-
tion of poetry with an almost religious sense of responsi-
bility, whose whole life was dedicated to the highest aims
of verse, who studied with eclectic passion the first
classics of every age, should miss the initial charm, and
should, fresh from Sophocles and Dante, convey her
thoughts in a stream which was seldom translucent and
never calm. In some of her lyrics, however, and more
rarely in her sonnets, she rose to heights of passionate
humanity which place her only just below the great
poets of her country.
About the year 1850, when, as Mrs. Browning, she was
writing at her best, all but a few were to be excused
if they considered her the typical vates, the inspired
poet of human suffering and human aspiration. But
her art, from this point onward, declined, and much of
her late work was formless, spasmodic, singularly tune-
less and harsh, nor is it probable that what seemed
her premature death, in 1861, was a real deprivation to
English literature. Mrs. Browning, with great afflatus
and vigour, considerable beauty of diction, and not a
ROBERT BROWNING 339
little capacity for tender felicity of fanciful thought, had
the radical fault of mistaking convulsion for strength, and
of believing that sublimity involved a disordered and
fitful frenzy. She was injured by the humanitarian sen-
timentality which was just coming into vogue, and by
a misconception of the uses of language somewhat ana-
logous to that to which Carlyle had resigned himself.
She suffered from contortions produced by the fumes of
what she oddly called
" The lighted altar booming rfer
The cloitds of i?icense dim and hoar* \
and if "the art of poetry had been a less earnest object
to " her, if she had taken it more quietly, she might have
done greater justice to her own superb ambition.
When the youthful ROBERT BROWNING, in 1846,
carried off in clandestine marriage the most eminent
poetess of the age, not a friend suspected that his fame
would ever surpass hers. Then, and long afterwards, he
was to the world merely "the man who married Elizabeth
Barrett," although he had already published most of his
dramas, and above all the divine miracle- play of Pippa
Passes. By his second book, Paracelsus (1835), he had
attracted to him a group of admirers, small in number,
but of high discernment ; these fell off from what seemed
the stoniness of Strafford and the dense obscurity of
Sordello. At thirty-five Robert Browning found himself
almost without a reader. The fifteen years of his married
life, spent mainly in Italy, were years of development, of
clarification, of increasing selective power. When he
published Men and Women (1855), whatever the critics
and the quidnuncs might say, Browning had surpassed
his wife and had no living rival except Tennyson. He
340 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
continued, for nearly forty years, to write and publish
verse ; he had no other occupation, and the results of his
even industry grew into a mountain. After 1864 he was
rarely exquisite ; but The Ring and the Book, an immense
poem in which one incident of Italian crime is shown
reflected on a dozen successive mental facets, interested
everybody, and ushered Browning for the first time to
the great public.
Browning was in advance of his age until he had be-
come an elderly man. His great vogue did not begin
until after the period which we deal with in this chapter.
From 1870 to 1889 he was an intellectual force of the
first class ; from 1850 to 1870 he was a curiosity, an
eccentric product more wondered at than loved or
followed. His analysis was too subtle, and his habit of
expression too rapid and transient, for the simple early
Victorian mind ; before his readers knew what he was
saying, he had passed on to some other mood or subject.
The question of Browning's obscurity is one which has
been discussed until the flesh is weary. He is often
difficult to follow ; not unfrequently neglectful, in the
swift evolution of his thought, whether the listener can
follow him or not ; we know that he liked " to dock the
smaller parts-o'-speech." In those earlier years of which
we speak, he pursued with dignity, but with some dis-
appointment, the role of a man moved to sing to others
in what they persisted in considering no better than a
very exasperating mode of pedestrian speech. So that
the pure style in Browning, his exquisite melody when he
is melodious, his beauty of diction when he bends to
classic forms, the freshness and variety of his pictures —
all this was unobserved, or noted only with grudging and
inadequate praise.
DICKENS 341
The one prose -writer who in years was the exact
contemporary of these poets, but who was enjoying a
universal popularity while they were still obscure, the
greatest novelist since Scott, the earliest, and in some
ways still the most typical of Victorian writers, was
CHARLES DICKENS. English fiction had been straying
further and further from the peculiarly national type
of Ben Jonson and Smollett — the study, that is, of
" humours," oddities, extravagant peculiarities of inci-
dent and character — when the publication of the Pickwick
Papers, which began in 1836, at once revealed a new
writer of colossal genius, and resuscitated that obsolete
order of fiction. Here was evident, not merely an ex-
traordinary power of invention and bustle of movement,
but a spirit of such boundless merriment as the literature
of the world had never seen before. From the book-
publication of Pickwick, in 1838, until his death, in 1870,
Dickens enjoyed a popularity greater than that of any
other living writer. The world early made up its mind
to laugh as soon as he spoke, and he therefore chose
that his second novel, Oliver Twist, should be a study in
melodramatic sentiment almost entirely without humour.
Nicholas Nickleby combined the comic and the sensa-
tional elements for the first time, and is still the type of
Dickens's longer books, in which the strain of violent
pathos or sinister mystery is incessantly relieved by farce,
either of incident or description. In this novel, too, the
easy-going, old-fashioned air of Pickwick is abandoned in
favour of a humanitarian attitude more in keeping with
the access of puritanism which the new reign had brought
with it, and from this time forth a certain squeamishness
in dealing with moral problems and a certain " gush "
of unreal sentiment obscured the finer qualities of the
342 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
novelist's genius. The rose-coloured innocence of the
Pinches, the pathetic deaths, to slow music, of Little
Nell and Little Dombey, these are examples of a
weakness which endeared Dickens to his enormous
public, but which add nothing to his posthumous
glory.
The peculiarity of the manner of Dickens is its ex-
cessive and minute consistency within certain arbitrary
limits of belief. Realistic he usually is, real he is scarcely
ever. He builds up, out of the storehouse of his memory,
artificial conditions of life, macrocosms swarming with
human vitality, but not actuated by truly human in-
stincts. Into one of these vivaria we gaze, at Dickens's
bidding, and see it teeming with movement ; he puts a
microscope into our hands, and we watch, with excited
attention, the perfectly consistent, if often strangely
violent and grotesque adventures of the beings com-
prised in the world of his fancy. His vivacity, his
versatility, his comic vigour are so extraordinary that
our interest in the show never flags. We do not inquire
whether Mr. Toots and Joe Gargery are "possible"
characters, whether they move and breathe in a common
atmosphere ; we are perfectly satisfied with the evolu-
tions through which their fascinating showman puts
them. But real imitative vitality, such as the characters
of Fielding and Jane Austen possess, the enchanting
marionettes of Dickens never display : in all but their
oddities, they are strangely incorporeal. Dickens leads
us rapidly through the thronged mazes of a fairy-land,
now comic, now sentimental, now horrific, of which we
know him all the time to be the creator, and it is merely
part of his originality and cleverness that he manages
to clothe these radically phantasmal figures with the
LEVER: MARRY AT 343
richest motley robes of actual, humdrum, "realistic"
observation.
For the first ten years of the Victorian era, Dickens
was so prominent as practically to overshadow all
competitors. When we look back hastily, we see
nothing but his prolific puppet-show, and hear nothing
but the peals of laughter of his audience. There were
not wanting those who, in the very blaze of his early
genius, saw reason to fear that his mannerisms and his
exaggerations would grow upon him. But until 1847
he had no serious rival ; for Bulwer, sunken between
his first brilliancy and his final solidity, was producing
nothing but frothy Zanonis and dreary Lucretias, while
the other popular favourites of the moment had nothing
of the master's buoyant fecundity. High spirits and
reckless adventure gave attractiveness to the early and
most rollicking novels of CHARLES LEVER ; but even
Charles O'M alley, the best of them, needs to be read
very light-heartedly to be convincing. FREDERICK
MARRYAT wrote of sailors as Lever did of dragoons,
but with a salt breeziness that has kept Peter Simple
and Mr. Midshipman Easy fresh for sixty years. Marryat
and Lever, indeed, come next to Dickens among the
masculine novelists of this age, and they, as he is, are
of the school and following of Smollett. Gay carica-
ture, sudden bursts of sentiment, lively description,
broken up by still livelier anecdote, with a great non-
chalance as to the evolution of a story and the propriety
of its ornament — these are the qualities which charac-
terise the novelists of the early Victorian age. In our
rapid sketch we must not even name the fashionable
ladies who undertook at this time, in large numbers,
to reproduce the foibles and frivolities of " society."
344 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
The name of THOMAS CARLYLE was mentioned in the
last chapter, and he went on writing until about 1877,
but the central part of his influence and labour was
early Victorian. No section of Carlyle's life was so
important, from a literary point of view, as the first
period of twelve years in London. In 1833, discomfited
by persistent want of success, he was on the point of
abandoning the effort. " I shall quit literature ; it does
not invite me," he wrote. But in this depressed mood
he sat down to the solid architecture, toil "stern and
grim," of the French Revolution, composed at Cheyne
Walk in a sour atmosphere of "bitter thrift." In 1837
it appeared with great eclat, was followed in 1838 by
the despised and thitherto unreprinted Sartor Resartus,
and by the four famous series of Carlyle's public lectures.
Of these last, Hero Worship was alone preserved. But
all this prolonged activity achieved for the disappointed
Carlyle a tardy modicum of fame and fee. He pushed
the " painting of heroisms " still further in the brilliant
improvisation called Past and Present, in 1843, and
with this book his first period closes. He had worked
down, through the volcanic radicalism of youth, to a
finished incredulity as to the value of democracy. He
now turned again to history for a confirmation of his
views.
But meanwhile he had revealed the force that was in
him, and the general nature of his message to mankind.
His bleak and rustic spirit, moaning, shrieking, roaring,
like a wild wind in some inhospitable northern wood-
land, had caught the ear of the age, and sang to it a
fierce song which it found singularly attractive. First, in
subject ; after the express materialism of Bentham, Owen,
and Fourier, prophets of the body, the ideal part of
CARLYLE 345
man was happy to be reminded again of its existence,
even if by a prophet whose inconsistency and whose
personal dissatisfaction with things in general tended to
dismay the soul of the minute disciple. It was best not
to follow the thought of Carlyle too implicitly, to con-
sider him less as a guide than as a stimulus, to allow his
tempestuous and vague nobility of instinct to sweep
away the coverings of habit and convention, and then
to begin life anew. Emerson, an early and fervent
scholar, denned the master's faculty as being to "clap
wings to the sides of all the solid old lumber of the
world." Carlyle's amorphous aspirations excited young
and generous minds, and it was natural that the preacher
of so much lawless praise of law should seem a law-giver
himself. Yet it is difficult to decide what Carlyle has
bequeathed to us, now that the echoes of his sonorous
denunciations are at last dying away. Standing be-
tween the Infinite and the individual, he recognises no
gradations, no massing of the species ; he compares
the two incomparable objects of his attention, and scolds
the finite for its lack of infinitude as if for a preventable
fault. Unjust to human effort, he barks at mankind like
an ill-tempered dog, angry if it is still, yet more angry if
it moves. A most unhelpful physician, a prophet with
no gospel but vague stir and turbulence of contradiction.
We are beginning now to admit a voice and nothing
more, yet at worst what a resonant and imperial clarion
of a voice !
For, secondly, in manner he surprised and delighted
his age. Beginning with a clear and simple use of
English, very much like that of Jeffrey, Carlyle delibe-
rately created and adopted an eccentric language of his
own, which he brought to perfection in Sartor Resartus.
346 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Founded on a careful selection of certain Greek and
German constructions, introduced so as to produce an
irregular but recurrent effect of emphasis, and at poig-
nant moments an impression as of a vox humana stop
in language, skilfully led up to and sustained, the
euphuism of Carlyle was one of the most remarkable
instances on record of a deliberately artificial style
adopted purely and solely for purposes of parade, but
preserved with such absolute consistency as soon to
become the only form of speech possible to the speaker.
Early critics described it as a mere chaos of capitals and
compounds and broken English ; but a chaos it was not
—on the contrary, it was a labyrinth, of which the power-
ful and insolent inventor was most careful to preserve
the thread.
We have hitherto been speaking of a solvent Carlyle
as essayist, lecturer, critic, and stripper-off of social
raiment. It was presently discovered that on one side
his genius was really constructive. He became the finest
historian England had possessed since Gibbon. The
brilliant, episodical French Revolution was followed by
a less sensational but more evenly finished Cromwell in
1845, and by that profoundly elaborated essay in the
eighteenth-century history of Germany, the Life of
Friedrich //., in 1858. By this later work Carlyle out-
stripped, in the judgment of serious critics, his only
possible rival, Macaulay, and took his place as the first
scientific historian of the early Victorian period. His
method in this class of work is characteristic of him as
an individualist; he endeavours, in all conjunctions, to
see the man moving, breathing, burning in the glow and
flutter of adventure. This gives an extraordinary vitality
to portions of Carlyle's narrative, if it also tends to dis-
MACAULAY 347
turb the reader's conception of the general progress of
events. After the publication of the Friedrich, Carlyle
continued to live for nearly twenty years, writing occa-
sionally, but adding nothing to his intellectual stature,
which, however, as time passed on, grew to seem
gigantic, and was, indeed, not a little exaggerated by the
terror and amazement which the grim old Tartar pro-
phet contrived to inspire in his disciples and the world
in general.
Born after Carlyle, and dying some twenty years before
him, THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY pressed into a short
life, feverishly filled with various activity, as much work
as Carlyle achieved in all his length of days. The two
writers present a curious parallelism and contrast, and
a positive temptation to paradoxical criticism. Their
popularity, the subjects they chose, their encyclopaedic
interest in letters, unite their names, but in all essentials
they were absolutely opposed. Carlyle, with whatever
faults, was a seer and a philosopher ; English literature
has seen no great writer more unspiritual than Macaulay,
more unimaginative, more demurely satisfied with the
phenomenal aspect of life. In Carlyle the appeal is
incessant — sursum corda ; in Macaulay the absence of
mystery, of any recognition of the divine, is remarkable.
Macaulay is satisfied with surfaces, he observes them with
extraordinary liveliness. He is prepared to be entertain-
ing, instructive, even exhaustive, on almost every legiti-
mate subject of human thought ; but the one thing he
never reaches is to be suggestive. What he knows he
tells in a clear, positive, pleasing way ; and he knows so
much that often, especially in youth, we desire no other
guide. But he is without vision of unseen things ; he
has no message to the heart ; the waters of the soul are
348 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
never troubled by his copious and admirable flow of
information.
Yet it is a narrow judgment which sweeps Macaulay
aside. He has been, and probably will long continue to
be, a most valuable factor in the cultivation of the race.
His Essays are not merely the best of their kind in exist-
ence, but they are put together with so much skill that
they are permanent types of a certain species of literary
architecture. They have not the delicate, palpitating life
of the essays of Lamb or of Stevenson, but taken as
pieces of constructed art built to a certain measure, fitted
up with appropriate intellectual upholstery, and adapted
to the highest educational requirements, there is nothing
like them elsewhere in literature. The most restive of
juvenile minds, if induced to enter one of Macaulay's
essays, is almost certain to reappear at the other end
of it gratified, and, to an appreciable extent, cultivated.
Vast numbers of persons in the middle Victorian
period were mainly equipped for serious conversation
from the armouries of these delightful volumes. The
didactic purpose is concealed in them by so genuine and
so constant a flow of animal spirits, the writer is so con-
spicuously a master of intelligible and appropriate illus-
tration, his tone and manner are so uniformly attractive,
and so little strain to the feelings is involved in his
oratorical flourishes, that readers are captivated in their
thousands, and much to their permanent advantage.
Macaulay heightened the art of his work as he pro-
gressed ; the essays he wrote after his return from India
in 1838 are particularly excellent. To study the construc-
tion and machinery of the two great Proconsular essays,
is to observe literature of the objective and phenomenal
order carried almost to its highest possible perfection.
MACAULAY 349
In 1828, in the Edinburgh Review, Macaulay laid down
a new theory of history. It was to be pictorial and vivid;
it was to resemble (this one feels was his idea) the
Waverley Novels. To this conception of history he re-
mained faithful throughout his career; he probably owed
it, though he never admits the fact, to the reading of
Augustin Thierry's Conque'te d 'Angleterre. Macaulay had
been a popular essayist and orator for a quarter of a
century, when, in 1849, he achieved a new reputation
as an historian, and from this date to 1852, when
his health began to give way, he was at the head
of living English letters. In his history there meet us
the same qualities that we find in his essays. He is
copious, brilliant, everlastingly entertaining, but never
profound or suggestive. His view of an historical
period is always more organic than Carlyle's, because
of the uniformity of his detail. His architectonics are
excellent; the fabric of the scheme rises slowly before
us; to its last pinnacle and moulding there it stands,
the master-builder expressing his delight in it by an
ebullition of pure animal spirits. For half the pleasure
we take in Macaulay's writing arises from the author's
sincere and convinced satisfaction with it himself. Of
the debated matter of Macaulay's style, once almost
superstitiously admired, now unduly depreciated, the
truth seems to be that it was as natural as Carlyle's
was artificial ; it represented the author closely and un-
affectedly in his faults and in his merits. Its monotonous
regularity of cadence and mechanical balance of periods
have the same faculty for alternately captivating and
exasperating us that the intellect of the writer has. After
all, Macaulay lies a little outside the scope of those who
seek an esoteric and mysterious pleasure from style. He
350 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
loved crowds, and it is to the populace that his life's work
is addressed.
If the strongly accentuated and opposed styles of Carlyle
and Macaulay attracted the majority of lively pens during
the early Victorian period, there were not wanting those
who were anxious to return to the unadorned practice of
an English that should entirely forget its form in the
earnest desire to say in clear and simple tones exactly
what it wanted to say. Every generation possesses such
writers, but from the very fact of their lack of ambition
and their heedlessness of the technical parts of composi-
tion they seldom attain eminence. Perhaps the most
striking exception in our literature is JOHN HENRY NEW-
MAN, whose best sermons and controversial essays display
a delicate and flexible treatment of language, without
emphasis, without oddity, which hardly arrests any atten-
tion at first — the reader being absorbed in the argument
or statement — but which in course of time fascinates, and
at last somewhat overbalances the judgment, as a thing
miraculous in its limpid grace and suavity. The style
which Newman employs is the more admired because of
its rarity in English ; it would attract less wonder if the
writer were a Frenchman. If we banish the curious
intimidation which the harmony of Newman exercises,
at one time or another, over almost every reader, and
examine his methods closely, we see that the faults to
which his writing became in measure a victim in later
years — the redundancy, the excess of colour, the languor
and inelasticity of the periods — were not incompatible
with what we admire so much in the Sermons at St.
Marys Church and in the pamphlets of the Oxford
Movement.
These imperfections in the later works of Newman —
NEWMAN 351
obvious enough, surely, though ignored by his blind
admirers — were the result of his preoccupation with other
matters than form. His native manner, cultivated to a
high pitch of perfection in the Common Room at Oriel,
was abundant, elegant, polished, rising to sublimity when
the speaker was inspired by religious fervour, sinking to
an almost piercing melancholy when the frail tenor of
human hopes affected him, barbed with wit and ironic
humour when the passion of battle seized him. His in-
tellect, so aristocratic and so subtle, was admirably served
through its period of storm and stress by the armour of
this academic style. But when the doubts left Newman,
when he settled down at Edgbaston among his wor-
shippers, when all the sovereign questions which his soul
had put to him were answered, he resigned not a little
of the purity of his style. It was Newman's danger, per-
haps, to be a little too intelligent ; he was tempted to
indulge a certain mental indolence, which assailed him,
with mere refinements and facilities of thought. Hence,
in his middle life, it was only when roused to battle,
it was in the Apologia of 1864 and A Grammar of Assent
of 1870, that the F6nelon of our day rose, a prince of
religious letters, and shamed the enemies of his com-
munion by the dignity of his golden voice. But on other
occasions, taking no thought what he should put on, he
clothed his speech in what he supposed would best
please or most directly edify his immediate audience,
and so, as a mere writer, he gradually fell behind those
to whose revolutionary experiments his pure and styptic
style had in early days offered so efficient a rivalry.
But the influence of the Anglican Newman, now suf-
fused through journalism, though never concentrated
in any one powerful disciple, has been of inestimable
352 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
service in preserving the tradition of sound, unemphatic
English.
The fifth decade of the century was a period of
singular revival in every branch of moral and intel-
lectual life. Although the dew fell all over the rest of
the threshing-floor, the fleece of literature was not un-
moistened by it. The years 1847-49 were the most fertile
in great books which England had seen since 1818-22. It
was in the department of the novel that this quickening
of vitality was most readily conspicuous. Fiction took
a new and brilliant turn ; it became vivid, impassioned,
complicated ; in the hands of three or four persons of
great genius, it rose to such a prominent place in the
serious life of the nation as it had not taken since the
middle career of Scott. Among these new novelists
who were also great writers, the first position was taken
by WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, who, though born
so long before as 1811, did not achieve his due rank in
letters until Vanity Fair was completed in 1848. Yet
much earlier than this Thackeray had displayed those
very qualities of wit, versatility, and sentiment, cooked
together in that fascinating and cunning manner which
it is so difficult to analyse, which were now hailed as an
absolute discovery. Barry Lyndon (1840) should have
been enough, alone, to prove that an author of the first
class had arisen, who was prepared to offer to the sickly
taste of the age, to its false optimism, its superficiality,
the alterative of a caustic drollery and a scrupulous
study of nature. But the fact was that Thackeray had
not, in any of those early sketches to which we now
turn back with so much delight, mastered the technical
art of story-telling. The study of Fielding appeared to
reveal to him the sort of evolution, the constructive
THACKERAY 353
pertinacity, which had hitherto been lacking. He read
Jonathan Wild and wrote Barry Lyndon; by a still
severer act of self-command, he studied Tom Jones
and composed Vanity Fair. The lesson was now
learned. Thackeray was a finished novelist ; but, alas !
he was nearly forty years of age, and he was to die at
fifty-two. The brief remainder of his existence was
crowded with splendid work ; but Thackeray is unques-
tionably one of those writers who give us the impression
of having more in them than accident ever permitted
them to produce.
Fielding had escorted the genius of Thackeray to the
doors of success, and it became convenient to use the
name in contrasting the new novelist with Dickens, who
was obviously of the tribe of Smollett. But Thackeray
was no consistent disciple of Fielding, and when we
reach his masterpieces — Esmond, for instance — the re-
semblance between the two writers has become purely
superficial. Thackeray is more difficult to describe in a
few words than perhaps any other author of his merit.
He is a bundle of contradictions — slipshod in style, and
yet exquisitely mannered ; a student of reality in conduct,
and yet carried away by every romantic mirage of senti-
ment and prejudice ; a cynic with a tear in his eye, a
pessimist that believes the best of everybody. The
fame of Thackeray largely depends on his palpitating
and almost pathetic vitality ; he suffers, laughs, reflects,
sentimentalises, and meanwhile we run beside the giant
figure, and, looking up at the gleam of the great spec-
tacles, we share his emotion. His extraordinary power
of entering into the life of the eighteenth century, and
reconstructing it before us, is the most definite of his
purely intellectual claims to our regard. But it is the
z
354 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
character of the man himself — plaintive, affectionate,
protean in its moods, like April weather in its changes
— that, fused with unusual completeness into his works,
preserves for us the human intensity which is Thackeray's
perennial charm as a writer.
Two women of diverse destiny, but united in certain
of their characteristics, share with Thackeray the glory
of representing the most vivid qualities of this rnid-
Victorian school of fiction. In 1847 the world was
startled by the publication of a story of modern life
named Jane Eyre, by an anonymous author. Here were
a sweep of tragic passion, a broad delineation of ele-
mental hatred and love, a fusion of romantic intrigue
with grave and sinister landscape, such as had never been
experienced in fiction before ; to find their parallel it was
necessary to go back to the wild drama of Elizabeth.
Two years later Shirley ', and in 1853 Villette, continued,
but did not increase, the wonder produced ^ Jane Eyre;
and just when the world was awakening to the fact that
these stupendous books were written by Miss CHARLOTTE
BRONTE, a schoolmistress, one of the three daughters of
an impoverished clergyman on the Yorkshire wolds, she
died, early in 1855, having recently married her father's
curate. The story of her grey and grim existence at
Haworth, the struggles which her genius made to disen-
gage itself, the support she received from sisters but little
less gifted than herself, all these, constantly revived, form
the iron framework to one of the most splendid and most
durable of English literary reputations.
Neither Charlotte Bronte, however, nor her sisters,
Emily and Anne, possessed such mechanical skill in the
construction of a plot as could enable them to develop
their stories on a firm epical plan. They usually pre-
MRS. GASKELL 355
ferred the autobiographic method, because it enabled
them to evade the constructive difficulty; and when, as
in Shirley, Charlotte adopted the direct form of narra-
tive, she had to fall back upon the artifice of a school-
room diary. This reserve has in fairness to be made ;
and if we desire to observe the faults as well as the
splendid merits of the Brontean school of fiction, they
are displayed glaringly before us in the Wuthering Heights
of Emily, that sinister and incongruous, but infinitely
fascinating tragedy (1847).
Much more of the art of building a consistent plot was
possessed by ELIZABETH CLEGHORN GASKELL; indeed,
she has written one or two short books which are tech-
nically faultless, and might be taken as types of the novel
form. Strange to say, the recognition of her delicate and
many-sided genius has never been quite universal, and
has endured periods of obscuration. Her work has not
the personal interest of Thackeray's, nor the intense
unity and compression of Charlotte Bronte's. It may
even be said that Mrs Gaskell suffers from having done
well too many things. She wrote, perhaps, a purer and
a more exquisite English than either of her rivals, but
she exercised it in too many fields. Having in Mary
Barton (1848) treated social problems admirably, she
threw off a masterpiece of humorous observation in
Cranford (1853), returned in a different mood to manu-
facturing life in North and South, conquered the pastoral
episode in Cousin Phillis, and died, more than rivalling
Anthony Trollope, in the social-provincial novel of Wives
and Daughters (1866). Each of these books might have
sustained a reputation ; they were so different that they
have stood somewhat in one another's way. But the
absence of the personal magnetism — emphasised by the
356 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
fact that all particulars regarding the life and character
of Mrs. Gaskell have been sedulously concealed from
public knowledge — has determined a persistent under-
valuation of this writer's gifts, which were of a very
high, although a too miscellaneous order.
From dealing with these glories of the middle Victorian
period, we pass, although he long outlived them all, to
one more glorious still. Full of intellectual shortcom-
ings and moral inconsistencies as is the matter of JOHN
RUSKIN, his manner at its best is simply incomparable.
If the student rejects for the moment, as of secondary
or even tertiary importance, all that Ruskin wrote during
the last forty years of his life, and confines his attention
to those solid achievements, the first three volumes of
Modern Painter sy the Stones of Venice ', and the Seven
Lamps of Architecture, he will find himself in presence
of a virtuoso whose dexterity in the mechanical part
of prose style has never been exceeded. The methods
which he adopted almost in childhood — he was a
finished writer by 1857 — were composite ; he began by
mingling with the romantic freshness of Scott qualities
derived from the poets and the painters, "vialfuls, as
it were, of Wordsworth's reverence, Shelley's sensitive-
ness, Turner's accuracy." Later on, to these he added
technical elements, combining with the music of the
English Bible the reckless richness of the seventeenth-
century divines perhaps, but most certainly and fatally
the eccentric force of Carlyle. If, however, this olla-
podrida of divergent mannerisms goes to make up the
style of Ruskin, that style itself is one of the most
definite and characteristic possible.
What it was which Ruskin gave to the world under
the pomp and procession of his effulgent style, it is, per-
JOHN RUSKIN 357
haps, too early yet for us to realise. But it is plain that
he was the greatest phenomenal teacher of the age; that,
dowered with unsurpassed delicacy and swiftness of
observation, and with a mind singularly unfettered by
convention, the book of the physical world lay open before
him as it had lain before no previous poet or painter,
and that he could not cease from the ecstacy of sharing
with the public his wonder and his joy in its revelations.
It will, perhaps, ultimately be discovered that his elabo-
rate, but often whimsical and sometimes even incoherent
disquisitions on art resolve themselves into this — the
rapture of a man who sees, on clouds alike and on
canvases, in a flower or in a missal, visions of illumi-
nating beauty, which he has the unparalleled accom-
plishment of being able instantly and effectively to
translate into words.
The happy life being that in which illusion is most
prevalent, and Ruskin's enthusiasm having fired more
minds to the instinctive quest of beauty than that of
any other man who ever lived, we are guilty of no
exaggeration if we hail him as one of the first of bene-
factors. Yet his intellectual nature was from the start
imperfect, his sympathies always violent and para-
doxical; there were whole areas of life from which
he was excluded; and nothing but the splendour and
fulness of his golden trumpets concealed the fact that
some important instruments were lacking to his orchestra.
It was as a purely descriptive writer that he was always
seen at his best, and here he was distinguished from
exotic rivals — at home he had none — by the vivid moral
excitement that dances, an incessant sheet-lightning,
over the background of each gorgeous passage. In
this effect of the metaphysical temperament Ruskin is
35 8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
sharply differentiated from Continental masters of de-
scription and art initiation — from Fromentin, for in-
stance, with whom he may be instructively contrasted.
The excessive popularity enjoyed by the writings of
JOHN STUART MILL at the time of his death has already
undergone great diminution, and will probably continue
to shrink. This eminent empirical philosopher was a
very honest man, no sophist, no rhetorician, but one
who, in a lucid, intelligible, convincing style, placed
before English readers views of an advanced character,
with the value of which he was sincerely impressed.
The world has since smiled at the precocious artificiality
of his education, and has shrunk from something arid
and adust in the character of the man. Early associated
with Carlyle, he did not allow himself to be infected by
Carlylese, but carefully studied and imitated the French
philosophers. His System of Logic (1843) and his Political
Economy (1848) placed his scientific reputation on a firm
basis. But Mill could be excited, and even violent, in
the cause of his convictions, and he produced a wider,
if not a deeper impression by his remarkable sociological
essays on Liberty (1859) and the Subjection of Women
(1869). He is, unfortunately for the durability of his
writings, fervid without being exhilarating. Sceptical and
dry, precise and plain, his works inspire respect, but do
not attract new generations of admirers.
The greatest of Victorian natural philosophers, CHARLES
DARWIN, was a man of totally different calibre. He had
not the neatness of Mill's mind, nor its careful literary
training, and he remained rather unfortunately indifferent
to literary expression. But he is one of the great arti-
ficers of human thought, a noble figure destined, in utter
simplicity and abnegation of self, to perform one of the
CHARLES DARWIN 359
most stirring and inspiring acts ever carried out by a
single intelligence, and to reawaken the sources of
human enthusiasm. Darwin's great suggestion, of life
evolved by the process of natural selection, is so far-
reaching in its effects as to cover not science only, but
art and literature as well ; and he had the genius to
carry this suggested idea, past all objections and ob-
stacles, up to the station of a biological system the most
generally accepted of any put forth in recent times. In
the years of his youth there was a general curiosity
excited among men of science as to the real origins of
life ; it became the glory of Charles Darwin to sum up
these inquiries in the form of a theory which was slowly
hailed in all parts of the world of thought as the only
tenable one. From 1831 to 1836 he had the inestimable
privilege of attending, as collecting naturalist, a scientific
expedition in the waters of the southern hemisphere.
After long meditation, in 1859 his famous Origin of
Species was given to the public, and awakened a furious
controversy. In 1871 it was followed by the Descent of
Man, which, although more defiant of theological pre-
judice, was, owing to the progress of evolutionary ideas
in the meanwhile, more tamely received. Darwin lived
long enough to see the great biological revolution, which
he had inaugurated, completely successful, and — if that
was of importance to a spirit all composed of humble
simplicity — his name the most famous in the intellectual
world.
XI
THE AGE OF TENNYSON
THE record of half a century of poetic work performed
by ALFRED TENNYSON between 1842, when he took his
position as the leading poet after Wordsworth, and 1892,
when he died, is one of unequalled persistency and sus-
tained evenness of flight. If Shakespeare had continued
to write on into the Commonwealth, or if Goldsmith
had survived to welcome the publication of Sense and
Sensibility, these might have been parallel cases. The
force of Tennyson was twofold : he did not yield his
pre-eminence before any younger writer to the very last,
and he preserved a singular uniformity in public taste
in poetry by the tact with which he produced his con-
tributions at welcome moments, not too often, nor too
irregularly, nor so fantastically as to endanger his hold
on the popular suffrage. He suffered no perceptible
mental decay, even in the extremity of age, and on his
deathbed, in his eighty-fourth year, composed a lyric as
perfect in its technical delicacy of form as any which he
had written in his prime. Tennyson, therefore, was a
power of a static species : he was able, by the vigour
and uniformity of his gifts, to hold English poetry
stationary for sixty years, a feat absolutely unparalleled
elsewhere ; and the result of various revolutionary move-
ments in prosody and style made during the Victorian
TENNYSON 361
age was merely in every case temporary. There was
an explosion, the smoke rolled away, and Tennyson's
statue stood exactly where it did before.
In this pacific and triumphant career certain critical
moments may be mentioned. In each of his principal
writings Tennyson loved to sum up a movement of
popular speculation. In 1847 feminine education was in
the air, and the poet published his serio-comic or senti-
mentalist-satiric educational narrative of the Princess, the
most artificial of his works, a piece of long-drawn ex-
quisite marivaudage in the most softly gorgeous blank
verse. In 1850, by inevitable selection, Tennyson suc-
ceeded Wordsworth as Laureate, and published anony-
mously the monumental elegy of In Memoriam. This
poem had been repeatedly taken up since the death,
seventeen years before, of its accomplished and be-
loved subject, Arthur Hallam. As it finally appeared,
the anguish of bereavement was toned down by time,
and an atmosphere of philosophic resignation tempered
the whole. What began in a spasmodic record of
memories and intolerable regret, closed in a confession
of faith and a repudiation of the right to despair. The
skill of Tennyson enabled him to conceal this irregular
and fragmentary construction ; but In Memoriam remains
a disjointed edifice, with exquisitely carved chambers and
echoing corridors that lead to nothing. It introduced
into general recognition a metrical form, perhaps in-
vented by Ben Jonson, at once so simple and so salient,
that few since Tennyson have ventured to repeat it, in
spite of his extreme success.
The Crimean war deeply stirred the nature of Tenny-
son, and his agitations are reflected in the most feverish
and irregular of all his principal compositions, the Maud
362 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
of 1855. This volume contains ample evidence of a
hectic condition of feeling. It is strangely experimental ;
in it the poet passes on occasion further from the classical
standards of style than anywhere else, and yet he rises
here and there into a rose-flushed ecstasy of plastic
beauty that reminds us of what the statue must have
seemed a moment after the breath of the Goddess en-
flamed it. The volume of 1855 is an epitome of all
Tennyson in quintessence — the sumptuous, the simple,
the artificial, the eccentric qualities are here ; the passion-
ately and brilliantly uplifted, the morbidly and caustically
harsh moods find alternate expression ; the notes of
nightingale and night-jar are detected in the strange
antiphonies of this infinitely varied collection.
For the remainder of his long life Tennyson concen-
trated his talents mainly on one or two themes or classes
of work. He desired to excel in epic narrative and in
the drama. It will be found that most of his exertions
in these last five-and-twenty years took this direction.
From his early youth he had nourished the design of
accomplishing that task which so many of the great poets
of England had vainly desired to carry out, namely, the
celebration of the national exploits of King Arthur. In
1859 the nrst instalment of Idylls of the King was, after
many tentative experiments, fairly placed before the
public, and in 1872 the series closed. In 1875 Tennyson
issued his first drama, Queen Mary; and in spite of the
opposition of critical opinion, on the stage and off it, he
persisted in the successive production of six highly
elaborated versified plays, of which, at length, one,
Beckety proved a practical success on the boards. That
the enforced issue of these somewhat unwelcome dramas
lessened the poet's hold over the public was obvious, and
TENNYSON 363
almost any other man in his seventy-sixth year would
have acquiesced. But the artistic energy of Tennyson
was unconquerable, and with a juvenile gusto and a
marvellous combination of politic tact and artistic passion
the aged poet called the public back to him with the
four irresistible volumes of ballads, idyls, songs, and
narratives of which the Tiresias of 1885 was the first, and
the Death of (Enone of 1892 the fourth. It would be
idle to pretend that the enchanting colours were not a
little faded, the romantic music slightly dulled, in these
last accomplishments ; yet, if they showed something of
the wear and tear of years, they were no " dotages," to
use Dryden's phrase, but the characteristic and still
admirable exercises of a very great poet who simply was
no longer young. When, at length, Tennyson passed
away, it was in the midst of such a paroxysm of national
grief as has marked the demise of no other English
author. With the just and reverent sorrow for so dear a
head, something of exaggeration and false enthusiasm
doubtless mingled. The fame of Tennyson is still, and
must for some years continue to be, an element of dis-
turbance in our literary history. A generation not under
the spell of his personal magnificence of mien will be
called upon to decide what his final position among the
English poets is to be, and before that happens the
greatest of the Victorian luminaries will probably, for a
moment at least, be shorn of some of his beams.
The long-drawn popularity of the mellifluous and
polished poetry of Tennyson would probably have re-
sulted, in the hands of his imitators, in a fatal laxity
and fluidity of style. But it was happily counteracted
by the example of ROBERT BROWNING, who asserted
the predominance of the intellect in analytic production,
364 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
and adopted forms which by their rapidity and naked-
ness were specially designed not to cover up the mental
process. If the poetry of the one was like a velvety
lawn, that of the other resembled the rocky bed of a
river, testifying in every inch to the volume and velocity
of the intellectual torrent which formed it. So, a couple
of centuries before, the tumultuous brain of Donne had
been created to counterpoise and correct the voluptuous
sweetness of the school of Spenser. If any mind more
original and powerful than Browning's had appeared in
English poetry since Donne, it was Dryden, in whose
masculine solidity, and daring, hurrying progression of
ideas, not a little of the author of The Ring and the
Book may be divined. But if Donne had subtlety and
Dryden weight, in Browning alone can be found, com-
bined with these qualities, a skill in psychological
analysis probably unrivalled elsewhere save by Shake-
speare, but exerted, not in dramatic relation of character
with character, but in self-dissecting monologue or web
of intricate lyrical speculation.
In Browning and Tennyson alike, the descent from
the romantic writers of the beginning of the century was
direct and close. Each, even Browning with his cosmo-
politan tendencies, was singularly English in his line of
descendence, and but little affected by exotic forces.
Each had gaped at Byron and respected Wordsworth ;
each had been dazzled by Shelley and had given his
heart to Keats. There is no more interesting object-
lesson in literature than this example of the different
paths along which the same studies directed two poets
of identical aims. Even the study of the Greeks, to
which each poet gave his serious attention, led them
further and further from one another, and we may
BROWNING 365
find what resemblance we may between Tithonus and
Cleon, where the technical form is, for once, iden-
tical. Tennyson, loving the phrase, the expression,
passionately, and smoothing it and caressing it as a
sculptor touches and retouches the marmoreal bosom
of a nymph, stands at the very poles from Browning,
to whom the verbiage is an imperfect conductor of
thoughts too fiery and too irreconcilable for balanced
speech, and in whom the craving to pour forth re-
dundant ideas, half-molten in the lava turmoil, is not
to be resisted. There have been sculptors of this class,
too — Michelangelo, Rodin — hardly to be recognised as
of the same species as their brethren, from Praxiteles
to Chapu. But the plastic art embraces them all, as
poetry is glad to own, not the Lotus - Eaters only, but
Sordello also, and even Fifine at the Fair.
The course of Browning's fame did not run with the
Tennysonian smoothness any more than that of his
prosody. After early successes, in a modified degree —
Paracelsus (1835), even Strafford (1837) — the strenuous
epic narrative of Sordello (1840), written in a sort of
crabbed shorthand which even the elect could hardly
penetrate, delayed his appreciation and cast him back
for many years. The name of Robert Browning became
a byword for wilful eccentricity and inter-lunar dark-
ness of style. The successive numbers of Bells and
Pomegranates (1841-46) found him few admirers in a
cautious public thus forewarned against his " obscurity,"
and even Pippa Passes, in spite of its enchanting moral
and physical beauty, was eyed askance. Not till 1855
did Robert Browning escape from the designation of
" that unintelligible man who married the poet " ; but
the publication of the two volumes of Men and Women,
366 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
in which the lyrical and impassioned part of his genius
absolutely culminated, displayed, to the few who have
eyes to see, a poet absolutely independent and of the
highest rank.
Then began, and lasted for fifteen years, a period in
which Browning, to a partial and fluctuating degree, was
accepted as a power in English verse, with his little band
of devotees, his wayside altars blazing with half-prohi-
bited sacrifice ; the official criticism of the hour no longer
absolutely scandalised, but anxious, so far as possible, to
minimise the effect of all this rough and eccentric, yet
not " spasmodic " verse. In Dramatis Persona (1864),
published after the death of his wife, some numbers
seemed glaringly intended to increase the scandal of
obscurity ; in others, notably in Rabbi Ben Ezra, heights
were scaled of melodious and luminous thought, which
could, by the dullest, be no longer overlooked ; and
circumstances were gradually preparing for the great
event of 1868, when the publication of the first volume
of The Ring and the Book saw the fame of Browning, so
long smouldering in vapour, burst forth in a glare that
for a moment drowned the pure light of Tennyson
himself.
From this point Browning was sustained at the height
of reputation until his death. He was at no moment
within hailing distance of Tennyson in popularity, but
among the ruling class of cultivated persons he enjoyed
the splendours of extreme celebrity. He was, at last,
cultivated and worshipped in a mode unparalleled,
studied during his lifetime as a classic, made the object
of honours in their very essence, it might have been
presupposed, posthumous. After 1868 he lived for more
than twenty years, publishing a vast amount of verse,
MATTHEW ARNOLD 367
contained in eighteen volumes, mostly of the old
analytic kind, and varying in subject rather than in
character. In these he showed over and over again the
durable force of his vitality, which in a very unusual
degree paralleled that of Tennyson. But although so
constantly repeating the stroke, he cannot be said to
have changed its direction, and the volume of the blow
grew less. The publication of these late books was
chiefly valuable as keeping alive popular interest in the
writer, and as thus leading fresh generations of readers
to what he had published up to 1868.
As a poet and as a prose-writer MATTHEW ARNOLD
really addressed two different generations. It is not
explained why Arnold waited until his thirty-eighth year
before opening with a political pamphlet the extensive
series of his prose works. As a matter of fact it was not
until 1865 that, with his Essays in Criticism, he first
caught the ear of the public. But by that time his career
as a poet was almost finished. It is by the verses he
printed between 1849 and 1855 that Matthew Arnold
put his stamp upon English poetry, although he added
characteristic things at intervals almost until the time of
his death in 1888. But to comprehend his place in the
history of literature we ought to consider Arnold twice
over — firstly as a poet mature in 1850, secondly as a prose-
writer whose masterpieces date from 1865 to 1873. In
the former capacity, after a long struggle on the part of
the critics to exclude him from Parnassus altogether, it
becomes generally admitted that his is considerably the
largest name between the generation of Tennyson and
Browning and that of the so-called pre-Raphaelites. Be-
sides the exquisite novelty of the voice, something was
distinctly gained in the matter of Arnold's early poetry —
368 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
a new atmosphere of serene thought was here, a philoso-
phical quality less passionate and tumultuous, the music
of life deepened and strengthened. Such absolute purity
as his is rare in English poetry ; Arnold in his gravity
and distinction is like a translucent tarn among the
mountains. Much of his verse is a highly finished
study in the manner of Wordsworth, tempered with
the love of Goethe and of the Greeks, carefully avoiding
the perilous Tennysonian note. His efforts to obtain
the Greek effect led Matthew Arnold into amorphous
choral experiments, and, on the whole, he was an in-
different metrist. But his devotion to beauty, the com-
posure, simplicity, and dignity of his temper, and his
deep moral sincerity, gave to his poetry a singular charm
which may prove as durable as any element in modern
verse.
The Arnold of the prose was superficially a very dif-
ferent writer. Conceiving that the English controversial-
ists, on whatever subject, had of late been chiefly engaged
in " beating the bush with deep emotion, but never start-
ing the hare," he made the discovery of the hare his
object. In other words, in literature, in politics, in
theology, he set himself to divide faith from superstition,
to preach a sweet reasonableness, to seize the essence
of things, to war against prejudice and ignorance and
national self-conceit. He was full of that "amour des
choses de 1'esprit " which Guizot had early perceived in
him ; he was armed with a delicious style, trenchant,
swift, radiantly humorous; but something made him
inaccessible, his instincts were fine and kindly without
being really sympathetic, and he was drawn away from
his early lucidity to the use of specious turns of thought
and sophisms. We live too close to him, and in an intel-
GEORGE ELIOT 369
lectual atmosphere of which he is too much a component
part, to be certain how far his beautiful ironic prose-
writings will have durable influence. At the present
moment his prestige suffers from the publication of two
posthumous volumes of letters, in which the excellence
of Matthew Arnold's heart is illustrated, but which are
almost without a flash of genius. But his best verses are
incomparable, and they will float him into immortality.
Charlotte Bronte died in 1855, Thackeray in 1862, Eliza-
beth Gaskell in 1865. GEORGE ELIOT (Marian Evans),
although born in the same decade, began to write so late
in life and survived so long that she seemed to be part of
a later generation. From the death of Dickens in 1870
to her own in 1880, she was manifestly the most pro-
minent novelist in England. Yet it is important to
realise that, like all the other Victorian novelists of
eminence until we reach Mr. George Meredith, she was
born in the rich second decade of the century. It was
not until some years after the death of Charlotte Bronte
that Scenes of Clerical Life revealed a talent which owed
much to the bold, innovating spirit of that great woman,
but which was evidently exercised by a more academic
hand. The style of these short episodes was so delicately
brilliant that their hardness was scarcely apparent.
The Scenes certainly gave promise of a writer in the first
rank. In Adam Bede, an elaborate romance of bygone
provincial manners, this promise was repeated, although,
by an attentive ear, the under-tone of the mechanism was
now to be detected. In the Mill on the Floss and Silas
Marner a curious phenomenon appeared — George Eliot
divided into two personages. The close observer of
nature, mistress of laughter and tears, exquisite in the
intensity of cumulative emotion, was present still, but she
2 A
370 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
receded ; the mechanician, overloading her page with
pretentious matter, working out her scheme as if she were
building a steam-engine, came more and more to the
front. In Felix Holt and on to Daniel Deronda the second
personage preponderated, and our ears were deafened
by the hum of the philosophical machine, the balance of
scenes and sentences, the intolerable artificiality of the
whole construction.
George Eliot is a very curious instance of the danger
of self-cultivation. No writer was ever more anxious to
improve herself and conquer an absolute mastery over
her material. But she did not observe, as she entertained
the laborious process, that she was losing those natural
accomplishments which infinitely outshone the philo-
sophy and science which she so painfully acquired. She
was born to please, but unhappily she persuaded herself,
or was persuaded, that her mission was to teach the
world, to lift its moral tone, and, in consequence, an
agreeable rustic writer, with a charming humour and
very fine sympathetic nature, found herself gradually
uplifted until, about 1875, she sat enthroned on an educa-
tional tripod, an almost ludicrous pythoness. From the
very first she had been weak in that quality which more
than any other is needed by a novelist, imaginative in-
vention. So long as she was humble, and was content to
reproduce, with the skilful subtlety of her art, what she
had personally heard and seen, her work had delightful
merit. But it was an unhappy day when she concluded
that strenuous effort, references to a hundred abstruse
writers, and a whole technical system of rhetoric would
do the wild-wood business of native imagination. The
intellectual self-sufficiency of George Eliot has suffered
severe chastisement. At the present day scant justice is
A. TROLLOPE: C. READE 371
done to her unquestionable distinction of intellect or
to the emotional intensity of much of her early work.
Two writers of less pretension exceeded George Eliot
as narrators, though neither equalled her in essential
genius at her best. In ANTHONY TROLLOPE English
middle-class life found a close and loving portrait-painter,
not too critical to be indulgent nor too accommodating to
have flashes of refreshing satire. The talent of Trollope
forms a link between the closer, more perspicuous natural-
ism of Jane Austen and the realism of a later and coarser
school. The cardinal merit of the irregular novels of
CHARLES READE was their intrepidity ; the insipid tend-
ency of the early Victorians to deny the existence of
instinct received its death-blow from the sturdy author
of Griffith Gaunt, who tore the pillows from all arm-
holes, and, by his hatred of what was artificial, sacerdotal,
and effeminate, prepared the way for a freer treatment
of experience. His style, although not without serious
blemishes, and ill sustained, has vigorous merits. Through
the virile directness of Charles Reade runs the chain which
binds Mr. George Meredith and Mr. Hardy to the early
Victorian novelists.
A certain tendency to the chivalric and athletic ideals
in life, combining a sort of vigorous Young Englandism
with enthusiastic discipleship of Carlyle, culminated in
the breezy, militant talent of CHARLES KINGSLEY. He
was full of knightly hopes and generous illusions, a
leader of "Christian Socialists," a tilter against wind-
mills of all sorts. He worked as a radical and sporting
parson in the country, finding leisure to write incessantly
on a hundred themes. His early novels, and some of his
miscellaneous treatises, written half in jest and half in
earnest, enjoyed an overwhelming success. But Kingsley
372 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
had no judgment, and he overestimated the range of his
aptitudes. He fancied himself to be a controversialist
and an historian. He engaged in public contest with a
strong man better armed than himself, and he accepted
a professorial chair for which nothing in his training had
fitted him. His glory was somewhat tarnished, and he
died sadly and prematurely in 1875. But his best books
have shown an extraordinary tenacity of life, and though
he failed in many branches of literature, his successes
in one or two seem permanent. In verse, his ballads
are excellent, and he made an experiment in hexa-
meters which remains the best in English. If his early
socialistic novels begin to be obsolete, Hypatia (1853)
and Westward Ho! (1855) have borne the strain of
forty years, and are as fresh as ever. The vivid style of
Kingsley was characteristic of his violent and ill-balanced,
but exquisitely cheery nature.
With Kingsley's should be mentioned a name which,
dragged down in the revulsion following upon an ex-
cessive reputation, is now threatened by an equally
unjust neglect. With Kingsley there came into vogue
a species of descriptive writing, sometimes very appro-
priate and beautiful, sometimes a mere shredding of the
cabbage into the pot. To achieve success in this kind
of literature very rare gifts have to be combined, and
not all who essay to " describe " present an image to our
mental vision. In the more gorgeous and flamboyant
class Ruskin had early been predominant ; in a quieter
kind, there was no surer eye than that of ARTHUR
PENRYN STANLEY. Quite early in his career he at-
tracted notice by an excellent Life of Dr. Arnold
(1844); but the peculiar phenomenal faculty of which we
are here speaking began to be displayed much later in
FROUDE 373
his Sinai and Palestine (1856) — where, save in the use
of colour, he may be compared with M. Pierre Loti —
and in his extremely vivid posthumous correspondence.
It will be a pity if, in the natural decay of what was ephe-
meral in Stanley's influence, this rare visual endowment
be permitted to escape attention.
A group of historians of unusual vivacity and merit
gave to the central Victorian period a character quite
their own. Of these writers — warm friends or bitter
enemies in personal matters, but closely related in the
manner of their work — five rose to particular eminence.
Two of them are happily still with us, and are thus
excluded from consideration here. This is the less im-
portant, perhaps, in that the purely literary elements of
this school of history are to be sought much less in the
Bishop of Oxford and Dr. S. R. Gardiner than in Froude,
Freeman, and Green. Of the group, JAMES ANTHONY
FROUDE was the oldest, and he was at Oxford just at
the time when the Tractarian Movement was exciting
all generous minds. Greatly under the influence of
Newman in the forties, Froude took orders, and was
closely connected with the High Church party. With
this body Freeman also, though less prominently, was
and remained allied, and his anger was excited when
Froude, instead of following Newman to Rome, or stay-
ing with the dismayed Tractarian remnant, announced
his entire defection from the religious system by the
publication of the Nemesis of Faith in 1849. From
this time forth the indignation of Freeman was con-
centrated and implacable, and lasted without inter-
mission for more than forty years. The duel between
these men was a matter of such constant public enter-
tainment that it claims mention in a history, and
374 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
distinctly moulded the work of both these interesting
artists.
In the line taken up by Froude he owed something
to the advice of Carlyle, more to the spirit of close and
sympathetic research inculcated by Sir Francis Palgrave.
He set himself to a History of England from the Fall of
Wolsey to the Destruction of the Spanish Armada, and
this huge work, in twelve volumes, was completed in
1870. Attacked by specialists from the very first, this
book was welcomed with ever-increasing warmth by the
general public. Froude had an extraordinary power of
holding the interest of the reader, and he appealed
directly, and with seldom-failing success, to the instincts
of the average man. He was curiously unaffected by
those masters of popular history who held the ear of
the world during his youth ; he bears little trace of
Macaulay and none of Carlyle in the construction of his
sentences. He held history to be an account of the
actions of men, and he surpassed all his English pre-
decessors in the exactitude with which he seemed to
re-embody the characters and emotions of humanity,
blowing the dust away from the annals of the past.
That he was a partisan, that he was violently swayed
(as pre-eminently in his daring rehabilitation of Henry
VIII.) not so much by a passion for facts as by
philosophical prejudices, took away from the durable
value of his writing, but not from its immediate charm.
Froude possessed in high degree that faculty of imagi-
native and reproductive insight which he recognised as
being one of the rarest of qualities ; unhappily, it cannot
be said that he possessed what he himself has described
as "the moral determination to use it for purposes of
truth only."
FREEMAN 375
But if it is impossible to admit that Froude had the
infatuation for veracity which may coexist with an
inveterate tendency to blunder about details, there are
yet very sterling merits in Froude's work which the
attacks of his enemies entirely fail to obscure. If we
compare him with Hallam and Macaulay, we see a regular
advance in method. With all his judicial attitude, Hallam
seldom comprehends the political situation, and never
realises personal character ; Macaulay, though still unable
to achieve the second, accurately measures the first ;
Froude, with astonishing completeness, is master of both.
It is this which, together with the supple and harmonious
beauty of his periods, gives him the advantage over that
estimable and learned, but somewhat crabbed writer,
EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN, whose great History of
the Norman Conquest was completed in 1876. It is
said that Froude worked up his authorities, inflamed
his imagination, and then, with scarcely a note to
help his memory, covered his canvas with a flowing
brush. Freeman, on the other hand, is never out of
sight of his authorities, and in many instances, through
pages and pages, his volumes are simply a cento of
paraphrases from the original chroniclers. He gained
freshness, and, when his text was trustworthy, an ex-
treme exactitude ; but he missed the charm of the fluid
oratory of narrative, the flushed and glowing improvisa-
tion of Froude. In consequence, the style of Freeman
varies so extremely that it is difficult to offer any general
criticism of it. In certain portions of the Rufus, for
instance, it reaches the very nadir of dreariness ; while
his famous "night which was to usher in the ever-
memorable morn of Saint Calixtus " suggests how finely
he might have persuaded himself to see and to describe.
376 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
The cardinal gift of Freeman, however, was certainly
not his painstaking treatment of authorities, but the re-
markable breadth of his historic view. I have heard that
he once said that he never could decide whether modern
history should begin with Napoleon I. or with the patri-
arch Abraham. In one or the other case he saw the
great map of history outrolled before his mental vision
as perhaps no other man has seen it ; and when to a
portion of the vast subject so sanely comprehended he
applied his rare analytical genius, the result was surpris-
ingly convincing. The utterances of Freeman on the
large trend of historical philosophy are therefore of
particular value, and it is regretable that they are com-
paratively few. It is on this side of his genius that his
influence on younger historians has been so great. In
JOHN RICHARD GREEN a poet in history combined the
picturesqueness of Froude with something of the industry
and breadth of Freeman. The Short History of the English
People, in 1874, produced a sensation such as is rarely
effected in these days by any book that is not a master-
piece of imaginative art It treated history in a new vein,
easily, brightly, keenly, sometimes with an almost jaunty
vivacity. The danger of Green lay in his excess of poetic
sensibility, his tendency to be carried away by his flow of
animal spirits, to confound what was with what must or
should have been ; but he was a delightful populariser
of history, a man of strongly emphasised character who
contrived to fascinate a world of readers by charging his
work with evidences of his own gay subjectivity.
A tradition, handed down, perhaps, from the practice
of the schoolmen, encourages philosophy to dispense
with all aesthetic aids to expression. The names of
Berkeley and Hume are sufficient to remind us that
MR. HERBERT SPENCER 377
these barren and rigid forms of technical language are not
obligatory; but Locke and Butler are almost excluded
from mention in the history of style by the repulsive
bareness of their diction. Nor is the greatest philo-
sopher of these latest times in any way solicitous about
the form of his address, which is yet at times, and when
he warms to his subject, sympathetic and persuasive.
But there are two reasons, among many, why the name
of Mr. HERBERT SPENCER must not be omitted from
such a summary as ours : firstly, because no Englishman
of his age has made so deep an intellectual impression
on foreign thought, or is so widely known throughout
Europe ; and, secondly, because of the stimulating effect
which his theories have exercised over almost every
native author of the last twenty years.
Mr. Spencer adopted from Auguste Comte, who in-
vented the term, the word " sociology," which implies a
science of politics and society. He started from the
position of Comte, but he soon went much further.
His central theory is that society is an organism, a form
of vital evolution, not to be separated from the general
growth of Man. Mr. Spencer, nevertheless, considers
himself an ultra-individualist, who brings, not biology
only, but all precedent forces of knowledge to the aid
of his ideas. He summons us to witness, in all phases
of existence, the vast cosmical process of evolution pro-
ceeding. His admirers have not failed to point out
that in his Principles of Psychology (1855) the theory of
Darwin was foreseen. But Mr. Spencer did not become
a power in thought until long after that time. His
most famous works appeared between 1872 and 1884.
The world, unable to grasp his grander conceptions,
has been greatly entertained by his lighter essays, in
378 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
which his personal style appears to most advantage.
He warns us of the perils the individual runs in the
extension of the responsibilities of the State. He fights
against the coming slavery of socialism. He sharply
distinguishes the duty of the family from the charge
of the State, and has even dared to attack the divine
right of Parliaments. But these are but straws floating
on the flood of his enormous theory of sociological
phenomena.
From the large class who have adorned and enriched
the natural sciences with their investigations and obser-
vations, there project two men whose gift for elegant and
forcible expression was so great as to win for them a
purely literary reputation also. Such men grow rare
and rarer, as the statement of scientific fact tends to
become more and more abstruse and algebraic. JOHN
TYNDALL, the physicist, conciliated critical opinion by
the boldness with which he insisted on the value of the
imagination in the pursuit of scientific inquiry. He had
remarkable rhetorical gifts, and in his early publications
on mountain structure he cultivated a highly coloured
style, influenced by Ruskin, and even by Tennyson.
Perhaps the best-written of his philosophical treatises
is the Forms of Water (1872), where his tendency to
polychromatic rodomontade is kept in some check. A
purer and a manlier style was that of THOMAS HENRY
HUXLEY, the biologist, whose contributions to contro-
versy, in which he showed a remarkable courage and
adroitness, were published as Lay Sermons, Addresses,
and Reviews, in 1870. It was Huxley's passion to " war
upon the lions in the wood," and his whole life through
he was attacking the enemies of thought, as he conceived
them, and defending the pioneers of evolution. In the
HUXLEY 379
arena of a sort of militant philosophical essay, the colour
of which he borrowed in measure from his beloved
Hume, Huxley was ready for all comers, and acquitted
himself with unrivalled athletic prowess. Of his morpho-
logical and physiographical work this is no place to
speak.
The wealth of secondary verse in the central Victorian
period was great, but it is not possible to preserve the
proportion which regulates this volume and yet record
its features here in detail. Certainly, on the face of
things, no poet (except Arnold) between Browning
and the pre-Raphaelites constrains our attention. The
tendency to be affected by the polished amenity of
Tennyson's style was successively experienced by gene-
rations, not one of which found itself strong enough to
rise in successful revolt. In the middle of the century
a group of writers, inspired by the study of Goethe's
Faust, and anxious to enlarge the emotional as well as
the intellectual scope of British verse, attempted a revo-
lution which preserves some historical interest. Both
Tennyson and Browning were violently affected by their
experiments, which closely resembled those of the much
later Symbolists in France. The more impressionist
and irregular passages of Maud are, in fact, the most
salient records in English literature of "spasmodic"
poetry, the actual leaders of which are now of little note.
The Tennysonian tradition, however, put a great strain
on the loyalty of young writers, and at length a move-
ment was organised which involved no rebellion against
the Laureate, but a very valuable modification of the
monotony of his methods. The emergence of a compact
body of four poets of high rank between 1865 and 1870
is a fact of picturesque importance in our literary history.
38o MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
The impulse seems to have been given to them, in the
first instance, by the writings and the personal teachings
of Ruskin; on their style may be traced the stamp of
a pamphlet, long disdained, which becomes every year
more prominent in its results. It would be difficult to say
what was exactly the effect on the pre-Raphaelites of the
paraphrase of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam published
in 1859 by Edward FitzGerald, but the melody of this
translation, and its peculiar fragrance, were the most
original elements introduced into English verse for forty
years. The strange genius of FitzGerald, so fitfully and
coyly revealed, has given a new quality to English verse,
almost all recent manifestations of which it pervades.
If, however, the quickening effect of the frail leaf of
intoxicating perfume put forth by FitzGerald is manifest
on the prosody of the poets of 1870, far different influ-
ences are to be traced in the texture of their style. Their
genius was particularly open to such influences, for their
charm was the composite charm of a highly elaborated
and cultivated product, by the side of which even the
polish of Tennyson at first appeared crude and primitive.
The attraction of the French romances of chivalry for
William Morris, of Tuscan painting for D. G. Rossetti, of
the spirit of English Gothic architecture for Christina
Rossetti, of the combination of all these with Greek and
Elizabethan elements for Mr. Swinburne, were to be
traced back to start-words given by the prophetic author
of the Seven Lamps of Architecture. In each case, finding
that the wine of imaginative writing had become watered
in England, their design was to crush anew in a fiery
vintage what Keats had called " Joy's grape."
These poets were all mediaeval in their spirit, but with
a medievalism that swept them on, not to asceticisms
THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 381
of an intellectual species, but to a plastic expansion in
which they achieved a sort of new renaissance. In them
all, even in the saintly Christina, the instinct of physical
beauty was very strongly developed ; each of them was
a phenomenal and sensuous being, dried up in the east
wind of mere moral speculation, and turning to pure,
material art, with its technical and corporeal qualities, for
relief and satisfaction. They found the texture of those
species of poetry in which they desired to excel much
relaxed by the imitation of imitations of Tennyson.
That great poet himself was in some danger of succumb-
ing to flattery of what was least admirable in his talent.
The date of their first books — the Defence of Guenevere
(1858), Goblin Market, the Early Italian Poets, and the
Queen Mother and Rosamond (all 1861) — gives a false im-
pression of the place the four poets occupy in the history
of influence, for these volumes hardly attracted even
the astonishment of the public, and the publication of
Atalanta in Calydon (1865) really marked the beginning
of a sensation which culminated in the overwhelming
success of D. G. Rossetti's Poems in 1870.
For a moment the victory of the four, exacerbating
the public mind in some cases with elements of mystery,
scandal, and picturesque inscrutability, tended to confuse
the real development of Victorian poetry. At first, in their
blaze of colour and blare of trumpets, nothing else was
heard or seen. Then, as the landscape quieted again, the
great figures were rediscovered in the background —
Tennyson as dominant as ever, with a new freshness of
tint ; Browning extremely advanced, lifted from the
position of an eccentricity to be an object of worship ;
Matthew Arnold the poet dragged from the obscurity to
which his prose successes had condemned him ; while a
382 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
number of small celebrities who had been enjoying an
exaggerated esteem found themselves fatally relegated
to a surprising inferiority. In short, what had been
conceived to be the disturbing introduction of these
young people of genius, of this generation of knockers
at the door, had set the critical balance of matters
straight again, and had given the really considerable
personages of an elder time an opportunity to assert
their individual forces.
But another matter of importance, which was hardly
perceived at the time, now calls for emphatic state-
ment in the briefest survey of Victorian poetry. It
was in the verse of these so-called revolutionaries
that the dogmas of the original naturalists of 1795
found their fullest and most conservative echo. No
poet since Coleridge's day, not even Tennyson, had
understood the song, as that master had conceived it,
with more completeness than Christina Rossetti ; no poet
since Keats, not even Tennyson, had understood the
mission of Keats better than D. G. Rossetti did. And in
these writers of 1865 the school of ecstasy and revolt,
with its intermixture of mysticism, colour, melody, and
elaboration of form, reached its consistent and deliberate
culmination. Into the question of their relative degree
of merit it would be premature to inquire here ; we are
chiefly concerned with the extraordinary note of vitality
which these four poets combined to introduce into
English imaginative literature, founded, in the truest
spirit of evolution, on an apprehension and adaptation
of various elements in precedent art and letters.
Almost immediately upon the apparition of the so-
called " pre-Raphaelite " poets, and in many cases in
positive connection with them, there happened a great
WALTER PATER 383
and salutary quickening of the spirit of literary criticism
in England. It remained largely individualist, and there-
fore liable to an excess of praise and blame which was
not philosophical in character or founded upon a just
conception of the natural growth of literary history.
But the individual judgments became, to a marked de-
gree, more fresh, more suggestive, more penetrating, and
were justified by greater knowledge. The influence of
French methods was apparent and wholly beneficial.
The severer spirits read Sainte Beuve to their healing, and
as years went on the more gorgeous pages of Theophile
Gautier and Paul de St. Victor were studied in England
by those who undertook most conscientiously the task
of literary criticism. The time has, happily, not come
to discuss with any fulness the merits and shortcomings
of a school still labouring among us ; but the most original
and the most philosophical of the group, WALTER PATER,
has been too remarkable a force in our generation to
remain unnamed here. During his lifetime of more than
fifty years, Pater never succeeded in achieving more than
a grudging and uncertain recognition from his contem-
poraries. He died, almost obscure, in 1894, and since
that time his fame, and above all his influence, have
been rising by leaps and bounds. As it was till lately
desirable to demand attention for the splendid propor-
tions of his prose, so full and stately in its ornate harmony,
so successful in its avoidance of the worn and obvious
tricks of diction, its slender capitals so thickly studded
with the volutes and spirals of concentrated ornament,
so now a word seems no less to be needed lest Pater
should be ignorantly imitated, a word of warning against
something heavy, almost pulpy, in his soft magnificence
of style. His deliberate aim was the extraction from
384 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
literature, from art, of " the quickened sense of life."
As he loved to say with Novalis, philosophiren ist vivi-
ficiren, and the task of the best criticism is to maintain
the ecstasy of intellectual experience. The mind of
Pater underwent an austere metamorphosis in advancing
years, but this elevated hedonism of his youth enclosed
his main gift to his generation.
We are, however, in danger of entangling our impres-
sions with one another if we pursue too low down the
threads which we have attempted to hold through more
than five centuries from Langland and Chaucer to Huxley
and Pater. We must drop them here, leaving them loose,
for they are parts of a living organism, and we cannot
presume to say in what direction their natural growth
will lead them next, nor what relative value their parts
may take in fuller perspective. We have spoken of nothing
which was not revealed in its general aspect and direction
at least five-and-twenty years ago. In periods of very
rapid literary development this would be a time long
enough to bring about the most startling changes. Within
the boundaries of one quarter of a century the English
drama did not exist, and Hamlet was complete. In 1773
Dr. Johnson accompanied Boswell to the Hebrides, and
in 1798 the Lyrical Ballads were published. But there is
no evidence to show that the twenty-five years through
which we have just passed have been years of a very
experimental tendency. Fifteen or twenty of them were
overshadowed, and their production stunted, by the per-
manence of great, authoritative personages, still in full
activity. The age was the age of Tennyson, and he held
his kingship, an absolute monarch, against all comers,
until his death in 1892. We may anticipate that future
historians may make that date the starting-point for a
CONCLUSION 385
new era, but this is for us scarcely matter even for
speculation. Up to 1892, certainly, we can affirm the
maintenance, without radical change of any kind, of the
original romantic system, now just one hundred years
old. With a myriad minor variations and adaptations,
poetry in England, and therefore prose, is still what it
became when Wordsworth and Coleridge remodelled it in
1797 in the coombes of the Quantocks.
2 B
EPILOGUE
IN attempting to follow the course of a great literature
and to survey the process of its growth, one reflection can
never escape the historian, however little it may gratify his
vanity. He forms his opinions, if he be fairly instructed
and tolerably conscientious, on a series of aesthetic prin-
ciples, guided in their interpretation by the dictates of
his own temperament. There has as yet been dis-
covered no surer method of creating a critical estimate
of literature ; and yet the fragility and vacillation of this
standard is patent to every one whose brains have not
become ossified by vain and dictatorial processes of
"teaching." Nowhere is an arrogant dogmatism more
thoroughly out of place than in a critical history of style.
In our own day we have read, in the private letters of
Matthew Arnold — one of the most clairvoyant observers
of the last generation — judgments on current books and
men which are already seen to be patently incorrect.
The history of literary criticism is a record of conflicting
opinion, of blind prejudice, of violent volte -faces, of
discord and misapprehension. If we could possess the
sincere opinions of Ben Jonson, Dryden, Addison, Vol-
taire, Hazlitt, Goethe, and M. Jules Lemaitre on Hamlet,
we should probably doubt that the same production
could be the subject of them all. In the seventeenth
century Shakespeare was regarded as one of a multi-
386
EPILOGUE 387
tude, a little more careless and sometimes a little more
felicitous than his fellows. To the eighteenth century
he became a Gothic savage, in whose "wood-notes wild"
the sovereignty of Nature was reasserted, as if by acci-
dent. It was left to the nineteenth century to discover
in him the most magnificent of the conscious poetic
artists of the world. But what will the twentieth
century think ?
We are not, I think, so helpless as these admissions
and examples would indicate, nor is there the least
valid reason why we should withdraw from the ex-
pression of critical opinion because of the dangers
which attend it. I must hold, in spite of the censure
of writers of an older school who possess every claim
upon my gratitude and my esteem, that certain changes
have recently passed over human thought which alter
the whole nature of the atmosphere in which criticism
breathes. A French professor of high repute has attacked,
as an instance of effrontery and charlatanism, the idea that
we can borrow for the study of literature help from the
methods of Darwin and Hackel. He scoffs at the notion
of applying to poetry and prose the theory which supposes
all plant and animal forms to be the result of slow and
organic modification. With every respect for the autho-
rity of so severe a censor, I venture to dissent entirely
from his views. I believe, on the contrary, that what
delays the progress of criticism in England, where it is
still so primitive and so empirical, is a failure to employ
the immense light thrown on the subject by the illustra-
tions of evolution. I believe that a sensible observation
of what Darwin and Mr. Herbert Spencer have demon-
strated ought to aid us extremely in learning our trade as
critics and in conducting it in a business-like manner.
388 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
In the days of the Jesuits, when modern criticism
began in Europe, it was the general opinion that
literature had been created, fully armed, in polite an-
tiquity ; that Homer — especially Homer as explained by
Aristotle — had presented the final perfection of literature.
If any variation from this original archaic type was ever
observed, it must be watched with the greatest care ; for
if it was important, it must be dangerous and false. The
only salvation for style was to be incessantly on one's
guard to reject any offshoots or excrescences which,
however beautiful they might seem in themselves, were
not measurable by the faultless canon of antiquity. The
French critics, such as Rapin and Bossu, were saved by
their suppleness of intelligence and by dealing solely
with a Latin people from the monstrosities which befell
their Teutonic and English adherents. But it is in-
structive to see where persistence in this theory of the
unalterable criterium lands an obstinate writer like
Rymer. He measures everybody, Shakespeare among
the rest, on the bed of Procrustes, and lops our giants
at the neck and the knees.
The pent-up spirit of independence broke forth in
that Battle of the Ancients and Moderns which is of so
much secondary interest in the chronicles of literature.
People saw that we could not admit that there had been
in extreme antiquity a single act of special literary crea-
tion constituting once for all a set of rigid types. But
the Jesuits had at least possessed the advantage of an
idea, monstrous though it might be. Their opponents
simply rejected their view, and had nothing definite to
put in its place. Nothing can be more invertebrate than
the criticism of the early eighteenth century. Happy,
vague ideas, glimmering through the mist, supplied a
EPILOGUE 389
little momentary light and passed away. Shaftesbury,
amid a great deal of foppery about the Daemon which
inspires the Author with the Beautiful and the Amiable,
contrived to perceive the relation between poetry and
the plastic arts, and faintly to formulate a system of
literary aesthetics. Dennis had the really important
intuition that we ought to find out what an author
desires to do before we condemn him for what he has
not done. Addison pierced the bubble of several pre-
posterous and exclusive formulas. But England was as
far as the rest of Europe from possessing any criterium
of literary production which could take the place of the
rules of the Jesuits. Meanwhile, the individualist method
began to come into vogue, and to a consideration of this
a few words must be spared.
The individualist method in literary criticism has been
in favour with us for at least a century, and it is still in
vogue in most of our principal reviews. It possesses
in adroit hands considerable effectiveness, and in its
primary results may be entirely happy. It is in its
secondary results that it leads to a chaotic state of
opinion. It is, after all, an adaptation of the old theory
of the unalterable type, but it merely alternates for the
one "authority of the Ancients" an equal rigidity in a
multitude of isolated modern instances. It consists in
making a certain author, or fashion, or set of aesthetic
opinions the momentary centre of the universe, and in
judging all other literary phenomena by their nearness
to or remoteness from that arbitrary point. At the
beginning of the present century it seduced some of
the finest minds of the day into ludicrous and grotesque
excesses. It led Keats into his foolish outburst about
Boileau, because his mind was fixed on Beaumont
390 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
and Fletcher. It led De Quincey to say that both the
thought and expression of one of Pope's most perfect
passages were " scandalously vicious/' because his mind
was fixed on Wordsworth. In these cases Wordsworth
and Fletcher were beautiful and right ; but Pope and
Boileau were, on the surface, absolutely in opposition
to them ; Pope and Boileau were therefore hideous and
wrong. Yet admirers of classic poetry have never ceased
to retort from their own equally individualist point of
view, and to a general principle of literary taste we find
ourselves none the nearer. What wonder if the outside
world treats all critical discussion as the mere babble of
contending flute-players ?
But what if a scientific theory be suggested which
shall enable us at once to take an intelligent pleasure in
Pope and in Wordsworth, in Spenser and in Swift ? Mr.
Herbert Spencer has, with infinite courage, opened the
entire world of phenomena to the principles of evolu-
tion, but we seem slow to admit them into the little
province of aesthetics. We cling to the individualist
manner, to that intense eulogy which concentrates its
rays on the particular object of notice and relegates all
others to proportional obscurity. There are critics, of
considerable acumen and energy, who seem to know
no other mode of nourishing a talent or a taste than
that which is pursued by the cultivators of gigantic
gooseberries. They do their best to nip off all other
buds, that the juices of the tree of fame may be con-
centrated on their favourite fruit. Such a plan may be
convenient for the purposes of malevolence, and in
earlier times our general ignorance of the principles
of growth might well excuse it. But it is surely time
that we should recognise only two criteria of literary
EPILOGUE 391
judgment. The first is primitive, and merely clears the
ground of rubbish ; it is, Does the work before us, or
the author, perform what he sets out to perform with
a distinguished skill in the direction in which his powers
are exercised ? If not, he interests the higher criticism
not at all ; but if yes, then follows the second test :
Where, in the vast and ever-shifting scheme of literary
evolution, does he take his place, and in what relation
does he stand, not to those who are least like him, but
to those who are of his own kith and kin ?
At the close, then, of a rapid summary of the features
of literary expression in England, I desire to state my
conviction that the only way to approach the subject
with instruction is to regard it as part of the history of
a vast living organism, directed in its manifestations by
a definite, though obscure and even inscrutable law of
growth. A monument of poetry, like that which Tenny-
son has bequeathed to us, is interesting, indeed, as the
variegated product of one human brain, strongly indi-
vidualised by certain qualities from all other brains
working in the same generation. But we see little if we
see no more than the lofty idiosyncrasy of Tennyson.
Born in 1550 or in 1720, he would have possessed the
same personality, but his poetry, had he written in verse,
could have had scarcely a remote resemblance to what
we have now received from his hand. What we are in
the habit of describing as " originality " in a great modern
poet is largely an aggregation of elements which he has
received by inheritance from those who have preceded
him, and his " genius " consists of the faculty he possesses
of selecting and rearranging, as in a new pattern or
harmony, those elements from many predecessors which
most admirably suit the only "new" thing about him,
392 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
his unique set of personal characteristics. Tennyson is
himself ; his work bears upon it the plain stamp of a
recurrent, consistent individuality. Yet it is none the
less almost an amalgam of modified adaptations from
others. The colour of Tennyson would not be what it is
if Keats had never lived, nor does his delicacy of observa-
tion take its line of light without a reference to that of
Wordsworth. The serried and nervous expression of
Pope and the melodic prosody of Milton have passed, by
a hereditary process, into the veins of their intellectual
descendant. He is a complex instance of natural selec-
tion, obvious and almost geometrical, yet interfering not
a whit with that counter-principle of individual variation
which is needful to make the poet, not a parasite upon his
artistic ancestors, but an independent output from the
main growing organism. And what is patently true of
this great representative poet of our days is in measure
true also of the smallest and apparently the most eccen-
tric writer in prose or verse, if he writes well enough to
exist at all. Every producer of vital literature adds an
offshoot to the unrolling and unfolding organism of
literary history in its ceaseless processes of growth.
BIOGRAPHICAL LIST
OF AUTHORS MENTIONED IN THIS VOLUME
ADDISON, JOSEPH 1672-1719
AKENSIDE, MARK 1721-1770
ANDREWES, LANCELOT .... 1555-1626
ARBUTHNOT, JOHN 1667-1735
ARNOLD, MATTHEW 1822-1888
ASCHAM, ROGER 1515-1568
AUSTEN, JANE 1775-1817
BACON, FRANCIS, VISCOUNT ST. ALBANS 1561-1626
BAGE, ROBERT 1728-1801
BARBOUR, JOHN .... I3i6(?)-i395
BARCLAY, ALEXANDER . . . i475(?)-i552
BARROW, ISAAC 1630-1677
BEAUMONT, FRANCIS .... 1584-1616
BEAUMONT, SIR JOHN .... 1582-1627
BEDDOES, THOMAS LOVELL . . . 1803-1849
BENTLEY, RICHARD 1662-1742
BERKELEY, GEORGE 1685-1753
BERNERS, JOHN BOURCHIER, LORD . 1467-1533
BLAIR, ROBERT . . . . . 1699-1746
BLAKE, WILLIAM 1757-1827
BLIND HARRY fl. i5th Cent.
BOLINGBROKE, HENRY ST. JOHN, VlSCOUNT 1678-1751
BOSWELL, JAMES 1740-1795
BOWLES, WILLIAM LISLE . . . 1762-1850
393
394 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
BROKE, ARTHUR ^.1563
BRONTE, CHARLOTTE .... 1816-1855
BRONTE, EMILY 1818-1848
BROWNE, SIR THOMAS .... 1605-1682
BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT . . 1806-1861
BROWNING, ROBERT 1812-1889
BRUNTON, MARY 1778-1818
BUNYAN, JOHN 1628-1688
BURKE, EDMUND 1729-1797
BURNEY, FANNY 1752-1840
BURNS, ROBER^ 1759-1*796
BURTON, ROBERT 1577-1640
BUTLER, JOSEPH 1692-1752
BUTLER, SAMUEL 1612-1680
BYRON, GEORGE GORDON, LORD . . 1788-1824
CAMPBELL, THOMAS 1777-1844
CAMPION, THOMAS .... i567(?)-i62o
CAPGRAVE, JOHN 1393-1464
CAREW, THOMAS .... i595(?)-i645(?)
CARLYLE, THOMAS 1795-1881
CARTE, THOMAS 1686-1754
CARTWRIGHT, WILLIAM . . . 1611-1643
CAVENDISH, GEORGE . . . 1500-1561 (?)
CAXTON, WILLIAM .... i422(?)-i49i
CHAPMAN, GEORGE .... i559(?)-i634
CHATTERTON, THOMAS .... 1752-1770
CHAUCER, GEOFFREY . . . i34o(?)-i4oo
CHESTERFIELD, PHILIP, EARL OF . . 1694-1773
CHILLINGWORTH, WILLIAM . . . 1602-1644
CHURCHILL, CHARLES .... 1731-1764
CHURCHYARD, THOMAS . . . I52o(?)-i6o4
CLANVOWE, SIR THOMAS /. circa 1400
BIOGRAPHICAL LIST
395
CLARENDON, EDWARD, EARL OF . . 1609-1674
CLARKE, SAMUEL 1675-1729
COLERIDGE, HARTLEY .... 1796-1849
COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR . . . 1772-1834
COLLINS, WILLIAM 1721-1759
CONGREVE, WILLIAM .... 1670-1729
CONSTABLE, HENRY 1562-1613
COVERDALE, MlLES 1488-1568
COWLEY, ABRAHAM 1618-1667
COWPER, WILLIAM 1731-1800
CRABBE, GEORGE 1754-1832
CRANMER, THOMAS 1489-1556
CRASHAW, RICHARD 1612-1649
DANIEL, SAMUEL 1562-1619
DARWIN, CHARLES 1809-1882
DARWIN, ERASMUS 1731-1802
DAVENANT, SIR WILLIAM . . . 1606-1668
DAVYS, SIR JOHN .... i565(?)-i6i8
DEFOE, DANIEL .... i66i(?)-i73i
DEKKER, THOMAS . . . i57o(?)-i64i(?)
DENHAM, SIR JOHN 1615-1669
DENNIS, JOHN .... . 1657-1734
DE QUINCEY, THOMAS .... 1785-1859
DICKENS, CHARLES ..... 1812-1870
DISRAELI, BENJAMIN .... 1804-1881
D'ISRAELI, ISAAC ... . 1766-1848
DONNE, JOHN .... . 1573-1631
DOUGLAS, GAWIN .... i474(?)-i522
DRAYTON, MICHAEL ... . 1563-1631
DRUMMOND, WILLIAM . . . . 1585-1649
DRYDEN, JOHN 1631-1700
DUNBAR, WILLIAM . . . 1460 (?)-i 520 (?)
396 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
EDGEWORTH, MARIA .... 1767-1849
ELIOT, GEORGE (EVANS, MARIAN) . . 1819-1880
ETHEREDGE, SIR GEORGE . . 1634-1693 (?)
EVELYN, JOHN 1620-1706
FARQUHAR, GEORGE 1678-1707
FERGUSSON, ROBERT .... 1750-1774
FERRIER, SUSAN EDMONSTONE . . 1782-1854
FIELDING, HENRY I7°7-I754
FITZGERALD, EDWARD .... 1809-1883
FLETCHER, GILES .... 1585 (?)-i623
FLETCHER, JOHN . . . . . 1579-1625
FLETCHER, PHINEAS 1582-1650
FORD, JOHN 1586-1639 (?)
FORTESCUE, SIR JOHN . . . I394(f)-i476(?)
FOXE, JOHN 1517-1587
FREEMAN, EDWARD AUGUSTUS . . 1823-1892
FROUDE, JAMES ANTHONY . . . 1818-1894
FULLER, THOMAS 1606-1661
GALT, JOHN 1779-1839
GARTH, SIR SAMUEL .... 1661-1719
GASCOIGNE, GEORGE . . . I525(?)-I577
GASKELL, ELIZABETH CLEGHORN . . 1810-1865
GAY, JOHN ...... 1685-1732
GIBBON, EDWARD 1737-1794
GIFFORD, WILLIAM 1756-1826
GILPIN, WILLIAM ..... 1724-1804
GODWIN, WILLIAM 1756-1836
GOLDING, ARTHUR ..../. i6th Cent.
GOLDSMITH, OLIVER 1728-1774
GOOGE, BARNABEE 1540-1594
GOWER, JOHN i325(?)-i4o8
BIOGRAPHICAL LIST
397
GRAY, THOMAS 1716-1771
GREEN, JOHN RICHARD .... 1837-1883
GREENE, ROBERT .... i56o(?)-i592
GRIMALD, NICHOLAS 1519-1562
GROTE, GEORGE 1794-1871
HABINGTON, WILLIAM .... 1605-1654
HALIFAX, GEORGE SAVILE, MARQUIS OF. 1633-1695
HALL, JOSEPH 1574-1656
HALLAM, HENRY 1777-1859
HAWES, STEPHEN d. 1523 (?)
HAZLITT, WILLIAM 1778-1830
HENRYSON, ROBERT. . . . 1430 (?)-i 506 (?)
HERBERT, GEORGE I593-I^33
HEREFORD, NICHOLAS OF . . . /. 1390
HERRICK, ROBERT 1591-1674
HEYWOOD, JOHN .... 1497 (?)-i 580 (?)
HEYWOOD, THOMAS. . . . i57o(?)-i65o(?)
HOBBES, THOMAS 1588-1679
HOLINSHED, RAPHAEL . . . . d. 1580 (?)
HOOD, THOMAS ..... 1799-1845
HOOKER, RICHARD . . . . . 1554-1600
HOPE, THOMAS i77o(?)-i83i
HORNE, RICHARD HENGIST . . . 1803-1884
HOWELL, JAMES .... i594(?)-i666
HUME, DAVID 1711-1776
HUNT, LEIGH 1784-1859
HUXLEY, THOMAS HENRY . . . 1825-1895
JAMES I. OF SCOTLAND .... 1394-1437
JAMES, G. P. R 1801-1860
JEFFREY, FRANCIS, LORD. . . . 1773-1850
JOHNSON, SAMUEL 1709-1784
JONSON, BENJAMIN 1574-1637
398 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
KEATS, JOHN 1795-1821
KENNEDY, WALTER . I46o(?)-i5o7
KINGSLEY, CHARLES 1819-1875
KYD, THOMAS fl. 1590
LAMB, CHARLES 1775-1834
LANDOR, WALTER SAVAGE . . . 1775-1864
LANGLAND, WILLIAM . . . i33o(?)-i4oo(?)
LATIMER, HUGH .... i48s(?)-i555
LAW, WILLIAM 1686-1761
LEE, NATHANIEL .... 1645 (?)-i692
LEVER, CHARLES JAMES .... 1806-1872
LINGARD, JOHN ...... 1771-1851
LOCKE, JOHN 1632-1704
LOCKHART, JOHN GIBSON . . . 1794-1854
LODGE, THOMAS .... i557(?)-i625
LOVELACE, RICHARD .... 1618-1658
LYDGATE, JOHN .... i372(?)-i448(?)
LYLY, JOHN i553(?)-i6o6
LYNDSAY, SIR DAVID .... 1490-1555
LYTTON, EDWARD, FIRST LORD . . 1803-1873
MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON,
MACPHERSON, JAMES
MALORY, SIR THOMAS
MANDEVILLE, BERNARD DE
MARLOWE, CHRISTOPHER .
MARRYAT, FREDERICK
MARSTON, JOHN
MARVELL, ANDREW .
MASSINGER, PHILIP .
MIDDLETON, THOMAS
MILL, JOHN STUART.
LORD . 1800-1859
. 1736-1796
/. i5th Cent.
1564-1593
1792-1848
. 1621-1678
. 1583-1640
i57o(?)-i627
. 1806-1873
BIOGRAPHICAL LIST 399
MILTON, JOHN 1608-1674
MITFORD, WILLIAM 1744-1827
MOORE, THOMAS 1779-1852
MORE, SIR THOMAS 1478-1535
MORIER, JAMES JUSTINIAN . . . 1780-1849
MORRIS, WILLIAM 1834-1896
NAPIER, SIR WILLIAM FRANCIS PATRICK 1785-1860
NASH, THOMAS 1567-1601
NEWMAN, JOHN HENRY .... 1801-1890
NORTH, SIR THOMAS . . . 1535 (?)-i6o2 (?)
NORTON, THOMAS 1532-1584
OCCLEVE, THOMAS .... i37o(?)-i45o(?)
OLDHAM, JOHN 1653-1683
ORRERY, ROGER BOYLE, EARL OF . . 1621-1679
OTWAY, THOMAS 1652-1685
OVERBURY, SIR THOMAS .... 1581-1613
PAINE, THOMAS 1737-1809
PALGRAVE, SIR FRANCIS .... 1788-1861
PARNELL, THOMAS 1679-1718
PATER, WALTER HORATIO . . . 1839-1894
PEACOCK, THOMAS LOVE .... 1785-1866
PEARSON, JOHN 1613-1686
PECOCK, REGINALD 1390-1460
PEELE, GEORGE .... i55o(?)-i598(?)
PEPYS, SAMUEL 1633-1703
PERCY, THOMAS 1729-1811
PHAER, THOMAS .... i5io(?)-i56o
POPE, ALEXANDER 1688-1744
PORTER, JANE 1776-1850
PRAED, WINTHROP MACKWORTH . . 1802-1839
400 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
PRESTON, THOMAS .
PRICE, SIR UVEDALE
PRIESTLEY, JOSEPH .
PRIOR, MATTHEW .
QUARLES, FRANCIS .
I537-I598
1747-1829
1733-1804
1664-1721
1592-1644
RALEIGH, SIR WALTER .... 1552-1618
RANDOLPH, THOMAS 1605-1635
READE, CHARLES 1814-1884
RICHARDSON, SAMUEL .... 1689-1761
RIVERS, ANTHONY WOODVILLE, EARL . d. 1483
ROBERTSON, WILLIAM .... 1721-1793
ROGERS, SAMUEL 1763-1855
ROSSETTI, CHRISTINA GEORGINA . . 1830-1894
ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL . . . 1828-1882
RUSKIN, MR. JOHN 1819-1900
RUSSELL, THOMAS 1762-1788
SACKVILLE, THOMAS, EARL OF DORSET . 1536-1608
SCOTT, SIR WALTER .... 1771-1832
SHAFTESBURY, A. A., THIRD EARL OF . 1671-1713
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM .... 1564-1616
SHELLEY, MARY 1798-1851
SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE . . . 1792-1822
SHIRLEY, JAMES 1596-1666
SIDNEY, SIR PHILIP 1554-1586
SKELTON, JOHN i46o(?)-i52o
SMITH, SYDNEY 1771-1845
SMOLLETT, TOBIAS 1721-1771
SOUTH, ROBERT 1633-1716
SOUTHEY, ROBERT 1774-1843
SPENCER, MR. HERBERT .... b. 1820
SPENSER, EDMUND I552~I599
BIOGRAPHICAL LIST 401
STANLEY, ARTHUR PENRYN . . . 1815-1881
STANLEY, THOMAS 1625-1678
STANYHURST, RICHARD .... 1547-1618
STEELE, SIR RICHARD .... 1672-1729
STERNE, LAURENCE 1713-1768
STILL, JOHN 1543-1608
STRODE, RALPH ..../. i4th Cent.
SUCKLING, SIR JOHN .... 1609-1643
SURREY, HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF . 1517-1547
SWIFT, JONATHAN 1667-1745
SWINBURNE, MR. ALGERNON CHARLES . b. 1837
TAYLOR, JEREMY ..... 1613-1667
TEMPLE, SIR WILLIAM .... 1628-1699
TENNYSON, ALFRED, FIRST LORD . . 1809-1892
THACKERAY, WILLIAM MAKEPEACE . . 1811-1863
THOMSON, JAMES ..... 1700-1748
TICKELL, THOMAS . . . . . 1686-1740
TILLOTSON, JOHN 1630-1694
TOURNEUR, CYRIL ..../. i7th Cent.
TROLLOPE, ANTHONY .... 1815-1882
TURBERVILE, GEORGE . . . 1530 (?)-l6oo (?)
TURNER, SHARON 1768-1847
TYNDALE, WILLIAM 1484-1536
TYNDALL, JOHN 1820-1893
UDALL, NICHOLAS 1506-1556
USK, THOMAS d. 1388
V \NBRUGH, SIR JOHN . 1664-1726
VAUGHAN, HENRY . • . . . . 1622-1695
VAUX, THOMAS, LORD . 1511-1562
2 C
402 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
WALLER, EDMUND 1605-1687
WALPOLE, HORACE 1717-1797
WALTON, IZAAK 1593-1683
WARTON, THOMAS 1728-1790
WATSON, THOMAS 1557-1592
WEBSTER, JOHN . . . . fl. i7th Cent.
WELLS, CHARLES JEREMIAH . . . 1800-1879
WHITE, GILBERT 1720-1793
WILSON, JOHN i622(?)-i696(?)
WILSON, THOMAS .... i526(?)-i58i(?)
WITHER, GEORGE 1588-1667
WORDSWORTH, DOROTHY . . . 1771-1855
WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM .... 1770-1850
WYATT, SIR THOMAS .... 1503-1542
WYCHERLEY, WILLIAM .... 1640-1715
WYCLIFFE, JOHN . i324(?)-i384
WYNTOUN, ANDREW OF . t fl. i5th Cent.
YOUNG, EDWARD ..... 1683-1765
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
To a sketch of the history of English literature it is hardly
possible to append a useful bibliography which shall
not be of extravagant dimensions. Merely to chronicle
what has been performed by native scholars and critics
would require a volume in itself. But it may possibly
be of some service to readers to indicate briefly what
has been most recently published in the earlier pro-
vinces of the subject, and what books will aid the
student in obtaining an exact acquaintance with par-
ticular epochs and lives. I make no scruple in men-
tioning first, for this particular purpose, those popular
collections prepared by many hands, the English Poets
(1880-94), edited, in five volumes, by Mr. T. Humphrey
Ward, and English Prose Selections (1893-97), edited, also
in five volumes, by Sir Henry Craik. We must face the
fact that the body of English literature is of immense
extent, and that the general reader has not the time to
study every department of it. These books offer to him
selected extracts. If he is born to read, a specimen will
tempt him on to a whole book, and a book to a whole
author. Nor is merely partial information, in a reader
whose professional attention has to be directed else-
where, worthy of so much scorn as professors are apt
to give it. Common-sense abhors a system which should
exclude from the enjoyment of English literature any
403
404 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
one who cannot pass an examination on the Treatise of
the Astrolabe, and it is a pleasure to quote the courageous
words of Mr. Arthur James Balfour : " So far from a
little knowledge being undesirable, a little knowledge is
all that on most subjects any of us can hope to attain ;
and as a source, not of worldly profit, but of per-
sonal pleasure, it may be of incalculable value to its
possessor."
The author of a general treatise, however, would be
indeed tame -spirited if he satisfied himself with the
prospect of such unambitious readers as these, and of
no others. For those who desire to proceed further
and deeper, certain guides, especially in the earlier parts
of the history of modern English literature, must be
named. Within the last fifteen years an immense pro-
gress has been made in mediaeval study. In preparing
for a literary estimate of the later Middle Age in Eng-
land, no living man has performed so much as Professor
Skeat, to whom we owe an absolute revision of the texts
of Chaucer, and of several of his leading poetical con-
temporaries, based upon scientific principles of philo-
logy. Mr. Skeat's final edition of Chaucer, in six volumes
(1896), is invaluable to the student, and supersedes all
previous work in the same field. In obtaining a correct
text, the copies of the MSS. published by the Chaucer
Society have been found serviceable. For thirty years,
moreover, Mr. Skeat had been giving his attention to
William Langland, and after having produced, for the
Early English Text Society, an edition of Piers Plow-
man, in four volumes (1867-84), he went over the whole
work again in what is now the standard text, issued at
Oxford, in two volumes, in 1886. In 1897 he collected
the principal pieces, in prose and verse, which criticism
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 405
had gradually rejected from the canon of Chaucer, into
a single volume. This includes Usk's Testament of Love,
the Plowman's Tale, and most of the poems formerly
attributed to Chaucer, but now proved not to be his.
The labours of Mr. Skeat are of inestimable value to
students of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, but they
must be reminded that he has chosen to leave the purely
literary aspect almost untouched, and to concentrate
himself mainly on grammar and philology.
The publications of the English Text Society include
Barbour, Wycliffe, and many of the verse-romance
writers. Blind Harry, Dunbar, the Kingis Quair,
Holland, and others have been carefully edited by
the Scottish Text Society (1883-97). Gower's Confessio
Amantis has still to be read in Reinhold Pauli's three
volumes of 1857. Lydgate, although Dr. Schick has
lately printed and annotated the Temple of Glass, and
Dr. Koeppel the Story of Thebes, awaits a general editor.
The minor poems of Occleve (or Hoccleve) were dealt
with by Dr. Furnivall in 1892. Miss L. Toulmin Smith
transcribed and edited the York Mystery Plays in
1885. Mr. I. Gollancz printed the poem called Pearl,
with a paraphrase, in 1891. The vast researches of the
late Professor Child of Harvard College resulted in
his English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-94), by
far the most important contribution to this difficult
subject. Mr. ]. ]. Jusserand, in LEpopte Mystique de
William Langland (1893) and Le Roman d'un Roi
d£cosse (1895), has thrown light on the temper of the
English Middle Ages. Professor McCormick has been
specially engaged on the text of Troilus and Cressida.
Wycliffe and his associates have attracted the notice of
Mr. T. Arnold, who edited the Select English Works in
406 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
1869-71, and of Mr. Skeat. The Wycliffe Society has
also done good work. The sixteenth century has not
of late greatly appealed to English scholars. Hawes
must still be read in the imperfect edition of the Percy
Society (1845), Skelton still where Dyce left him in 1843,
while a critical text and commentary of Surrey is a real
desideratum. Mr. Arber's useful reprints have placed
several of the minor writers of the early years of Eliza-
beth within reach. Before leaving the mediaeval period,
moreover, the names of Professors Lounsbury and Ten
Brink must be mentioned.
From the end of the sixteenth century onwards, almost
every department of English literature has received the
attention of students, and there are few authors, even of
the third or fourth order, who have not found at least
one recent editor. It would manifestly be impossible to
give in this place a list of these editions which should
have any pretence to completeness. The lives of Spenser
and of Bacon have been treated by Dean Church, that
of Sidney by Symonds, and that of Shakespeare by a
hundred writers, among whom Professor Dowden and
Mr. Sidney Lee (in the Dictionary of National Bio-
graphy) must be mentioned. Mr. Bullen has edited
Campion, Marlowe, Middleton, Day, and several of the
important lyrical collections of the Elizabethan age.
The Life and Letters of Donne have been collected by
the writer of these pages. The text of Shakespeare was
edited by W. G. Clark and Dr. W. Aldis Wright, and
has recently been revised by the latter ; the editions of
Furness, Furnivall, and Gollancz have each a peculiarity
and a merit. Mr. Swinburne has published critical
volumes on Ben Jonson, on George Chapman, and on
Shakespeare. The vast compilations of Mr. Fleay deserve
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 407
respect. The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, which
occupied Spedding from 1861 to 1874, still retains its
authority. The most recent texts of Spenser are those of
Dr. Grosart, and (the Faerie Queen alone) of Mr. T. ]. Wise.
Milton occupied almost simultaneously the attention
of a great number of adequate biographers and editors.
Among the former are pre-eminent Masson (1859-80),
Mark Pattison (1879), Stopford Brooke (1879), and Adolf
Stern (1877-79). The *ext °f Milton's prose works has
been neglected, and the edition of Symmons (1806) is
still the best ; to that of the poems far more attention has
been given by Prof. Masson, by Prof. Hales, and still more
recently by Mr. Verity. A valuable contribution to a
knowledge of the prosody of Milton is the treatise by Mr.
Robert Bridges (1893). Dry den, whose works, with an
admirable life, were edited by Sir Walter Scott in 1808,
was carefully revised by Professor Saintsbury (1882-93),
who had already published a life of Dryden in 1881.
The poetical works of Butler were edited, with a new
biography, by Mr. R. B. Johnson in 1893. The life of
Locke has been written by Dr. Fowler (1880), and that
philosopher has found a recent editor in Mr. A. C. Fraser.
In connection with Bunyan, the excellent work of Mr. J.
Brown must be recorded. Cowley, Crashaw, Quarles,
and Henry More have been edited by Dr. Grosart, Waller
by Mr. Drury, Donne by Mr. E. K. Chambers, Marvell
by Mr. Aitken, and Herrick by five or six competing
scholars. With the exception of Dryden, the Restoration
dramatists have not as yet received their full meed of
critical attention, although an Edinburgh reprint gives
us, among others, Wilson, Davenant, and Crowne ; Mr.
Ward's Sir John Vanbrugh (1893) is a model for what
yet remains to be done in this direction.
4o8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
With the opening of the eighteenth century, it becomes
almost impossible to follow the minute progress of biblio-
graphy. It is desirable, however, to remember that the
action of a great body of careful revisers is for ever
modifying both the biography and the text of our prin-
cipal classics. Professor Courthope has completed the
editing of Pope, on the basis of materials collected by
Croker, and partly manipulated by Mr. Elwin. Mr.
Austin Dobson, besides what he has definitely done for
Prior, Gay, Goldsmith, and Horace Walpole, has, in
the general course of his essays, elucidated the minute
literary history of the eighteenth century in a multitude
of ways. Steele and Arbuthnot owe much to the in-
dustry of Mr. Aitken. The great Johnsonian of recent
years has been Dr. G. Birkbeck Hill. Mr. A. C. Eraser's
labours on Berkeley, those of Miss Foxcroft on Halifax,
those of Sir Henry Craik on Swift, those of Mr. Glad-
stone on Bishop Butler, and those of Mr. Bury on
Gibbon, deserve careful attention. This list is so imper-
fect as to offer to numberless students of the eighteenth
century a positive injustice, for which the writer of
this little volume apologises on the ground of the very
limited space at his command. An examination, how-
ever, of the books thus discursively mentioned will
suffice to save readers from many of those mistakes
which are repeated from handbook to handbook by the
unwary.
INDEX
Absalom and Achitophel, 188, 189
Adam Bede, 369
Addison, Joseph, 197, 211, 212, 216-
220, 222, 223, 389
Adlington, 75
Adonais, 312
Advancement of Learning, 130, 131
A las for, 310
All for Love, 179
Amelia, 243
Analogy of Religion, 261
Anastatius, 328
Anatomy of Melancholy, 133
Andrew of Wyntoun, 45
Andrew es, Lancelot, 127
Antiquary, 301
Apologia, Newman's, 351
Arbuthnot, John, 225
Arcadia, 87
Arden of Feversham, 97
Areopagitica, 150
Arnold, Matthew, 214, 367-369, 381
Arraignment of Paris, 96
Art of Rhetoric, 64, 65
Ascham, Roger, 64, 79, 80
Assembly of Ladies, 44, 45
Astrophel and Stella, 87
Atalanta in Calydon, 381
Austen, Jane, 295-297
BACON, Francis, 125, 126, 129-132
Bage, 294
Baker, Sir Richard, 149
Ballads, 40-42, 405
Barbour, John, 17, 26, 27
Barclay, Alexander, 57
Barrow, Isaac, 181, 182
Barry Lyndon, 352
Beaconsfield, Earl of, 328-330, 333
Beaumont, Francis, 114-116
Beaumont, Sir John, 157
Beckett 362
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 332
Bells and Pomegranates, 335, 365
Bentley, Richard, 193
Beppo, 308
Berkeley, George, 228-229
Berners, Lord, 61, 62
Bible, English, 31, 32, 63, 127, 128
Blair, Robert, 237
Blake, William, 269-275
Blind Harry, 46
Bloomfield, 290
Boccaccio, 15, 16, 17
Boileau, 172, 180, 188, 189, 197,
205, 206, 207, 209
Bolingbroke, Viscount, 228
Book of the Duchess, 14, 15
Borough, The, 319
Boswell, James, 252, 253
Bosivorth Field, 157
Bowles, William Lisle, 275, 276
Boyle, Charles, 193
Bronte, Charlotte, 354, 355
Browne, Sir Thomas, 148, 153
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 331,
335, 338, 339
Browning, Robert, 332, 335, 339,
340, 363-367, 381
Bruce, The, 26, 27
409
4io INDEX
Brunton, Mary, 327
Bunyan, John, 186, 187
Burke, Edmund, 290
Burney, Frances, 294, 295
Burns, Robert, 269-275
Burton, Robert, 133, 153
Butler, Joseph, 261
Butler, Samuel, 188
Byron, Lord, 305-310, 328
CAMPBELL, Thomas, 287, 288
Campion, Thomas, 88, 91
Candidate, 269
Canterbury Tales, 18-22
Capgrave, John, 43
Carew, Thomas, 146
Carlyle, Thomas, 320, 321, 332, 333,
344-347, 349
Cartwright, William, 137, 141
Castle of Otranto, 293
Castle Rackrent, 295
Cato, 211
Cavendish, George, 64
Caxton, William, 47, 52, 53
Cenci, The, 311
Centlivre, Susannah, 192
Chapman, George, 117
Charles CPMalley, 343
Chatterton, Thomas, 230
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 8, 9, 12-24, 65,
78, 404
Chaucer's Dream, 37
Childe Harold, 307
Chillingworth, William, 135, 136
Christabel, 278
Churchill, Charles, 239
Clanvowe, Sir Thomas, 37
Clarendon, Earl of, 149, 150, 151
Clarke, Samuel, 197, 203
Cleveland, Sir John, 188
Coleridge, Hartley, 332
Coleridge, S. T., 109, no, 123, 276-
283, 320
Collier, Jeremy, 192
Collins, Anthony, 255
Collins, William, 238, 268
Comical Revenge, 178
Complete Angler, 152
Comus, 145, 149
Confessio Amantis, 25-26, 405
Confessions of an Opium-Eater, 320,
322
Congreve, William, 191, 213
Conquest of Granada, 178
Constable, Henry, 88
Constitutional History of England,
325, 326
Contarini Fleming, 330
Cooper's Hill, 158, 187
Corneille, Pierre, 137, 140, 141, 176,
177, 191
Court of Love, 65, 66
Cowley, Abraham, 158, 169-173
Cowper, William, 269-275
Crabbe, George, 269-275, 280, 319
Cranford, 355
Cranmer, Thomas, 63, 64, 79, 127
Crashaw, Richard, 156
Cuckoo and the Nightingale, The
37
Curiosities of Literature, 299
Cypress Grove, A, 133
DANIEL, Samuel, 95, 119, 120
Daniel Deronda, 370
Darwin, Charles, 358, 359, 377
Darwin, Erasmus, 275
Davenant, Sir William, 158, 162,
170, I75> 176
Davys, Sir John, 120
Decline and Fall of the Roman Em-
pire, 258-259
Defoe, Daniel, 226, 227
Deguileville, G. de, n, 13, 14
Dekker, Thomas, 117, 135
Denham, Sir John, 158, 170
Dennis, John, 199, 200,389
De Quincey, Thomas, 134, 320, 322,
32S
Descent of Man, 359
INDEX
411
Desportes, Philippe, 90
Dickens, Charles, 341-343
Dispensary, The, 197
D'Israeli, Isaac, 299
Don Juan, 308, 309
Donne, John, 92, 122, 123, 135, 142
Douglas, Gavin, 58-60
Dramatis Persona, 366
Drayton, Michael, 121
Drummond, William, 133
Dryden, John, 19, 108, 113, 136,
158, 1 66, 172, 174-180, 187, 1 88-
190, 194, 207, 213, 270, 291
Duchess of Malfy, 118
Dunbar, William, 48-51, 55
Early Italian Poets ; Rossetti's, 381
Ecclesiastical Polity •, 124-127
Edgeworth, Maria, 295
Edinburgh Review, 297, 298, 320,
332, 349
Edward II., 99
Eikonoklastes, 162
Elia, 320, 322
Eliot, George, 369, 370
Eloisa to Abelard, 21 1
Epipsychidion, 313
Esmond, 353
Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 177
Essays, Bacon's, 125, 126, 130
Essays in Criticism, 367
Etheredge, Sir George, 178, 191
Euphues, 80, 81, 127
Evelyn, John, 180
Every Man in his Humoiir, 1 1 1
Examens, of Corneille, 1 79
Excursion, 276, 285
FABIAN, Robert, 60, 61
Faerie Queen, 83-86
Falls of Princes, 36
Farmer's Boy, 289
Faustus, Dr., 95, 99
Felix Holt, 370
Feltham, Owen, 134
Ferrier, Miss, 327
Fielding, Henry, 243, 244, 352,
353
Fitz-Gerald, Edward, 380
Fletcher, Giles, 121, 122, 142
Fletcher, John, 104, 114-116, 175
Flower and the Leaf, The, 44, 45
Ford, John, 135, 137, 140
Fortescue, Sir John, 52
Fox, The, 112
Foxe, 64, 80
Frankenstein, 327
Freeman, Edward Augustus, 375,
376
French Revolution, 344, 346
Friedrtch II., 347
Froissart, 61
Froude, James Anthony, 373, 374
Fudge Family in Paris, 318
Fuller, Thomas, 152, 153
GALT, John, 328
Gammer Gur ton's Needle, 94
Garth, Samuel, 197
Gascoigne, George, 94
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 355,
356
Gebir, 324
Gertrude of Wyoming, 288
Geste of Robin Hood, 40-42
Giaour, The, 307
Gibbon, Edward, 258-260
Gifford, William, 298
Gilpin, William, 263
Goblin Market, 381
Godwin, William, 293
Goethe, Wolfgang von, 240, 288
Golding, Arthur, 76
Goldsmith, Oliver, 239, 247, 253,
254
Googe, Barnabee, 76
Gorbuduc, 77, 93, 94
Cover nail of Princes, 35
Gower, John, 16, 24-26
Graham, 289
412
INDEX
Grammar of Assent, ^,351
Gray, Thomas, 234, 236, 238, 262,
268
Green, John Richard, 376
Greene, Robert, 89, 97, 98, 126
Griffith Gaunt, 371
Grimald, Nicholas, 67-71
Gryll Grange, 331
Guy Manner ing, 301
HABINGTON, William, 146, 147
HajjiBaba, 328
Halifax, Marquis of, 183, 184
Hall, Edward, 60, 6 1
Hall, Joseph, 134
Hallam, Henry, 325
Hamlet, 103, 109
Hawes Stephen, 56, 57
Hazlitt, William, 109, 320
Headlong Hall, 331
Henrietta Temple, 333
Henryson, Robert, 46-48
Herbert, George, 135, 147
Hereford, Nicholas of, 31
Hero and Leander, 99
Herrick, Robert, 155, 156
Heywood, John, 93
Hey wood, Thomas, 118
Hobbes, Thomas, 148, 149, 154
Hoccleve, see Occleve
Holingshed, Raphael, 80
Hood, Thomas, 332
Hooker, Richard, 124-127
Hope James J., 328
Horce Paulines, 261
Home, Richard Hengist, 337
Howell, James, 148, 152
Huchown, 26
Hudibras, 188
Hume, David, 256, 257
Humphrey Clinker, 246
Hunt, Leigh, 314, 315, 320
Huon de Bordeaux, 61, 62
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 378
Hyperion, 315
Idylls of the King, 362
Imaginary Conversations, 324, 325
Indian Emperor , The, 179
In Memoriarn, 361
Interludes, Heywood's, 93
Italy, 319
Ivanhoe, 300
Jacqueline, 319
James I. of Scotland, 38-40
James, G. P. R., 333
Jane Eyre, 354
Jeffrey, Francis, Lord, 297
Jew of Malta, 99
Johnson, Samuel, 247, 249-253, 267,
384
Jonson, Ben, 111-114, 129, 136-138,
141, 177
Joseph Andrews, 243
Journal to Stella, 223
Julian and Maddalo, 311
KEATS, John, 315-317, 336, 337
Kennedy, Walter, 48, 49
King David and Fair Bethsabe, 97
King's Quair, 38-40
Kingsley, Charles, 371, 372
Kubla Khan, 283
Kyd, Thomas, 97
Lady of the Lake, The, 289
LallaRookh, 318
Lamb, Charles, 314, 320, 321
Lancelot of the Lake, 26
Landor, Walter Savage, no, 324.
325
Langland, William, 7-11, 404
Loon and Cythna, 3 1 1
Lara, 319
Law, William, 229
Lay of the Last Minstrel, 289
Lear, King, 104
Legend of Good Women, 18
Lenore, of Burger, 284, 288
Lestrange, Sir Roger, 179
INDEX
413
letter to a Noble Lord, 291
Lever, Charles, 343
Life of Schiller, 321, 332
Lingard, John, 325
Lives of the English Poets, 251,
267
Locke, John, 136, 154, 184, 185
Lockhart, John Gibson, 327
Lodge, Thomas, 89, 91, 126
London, 320
Lord of the Isles, The, 289
Lower, Sir William, 177
Lycidas, 145
Lydgate, John, 33-37, 66, 405
Lyly, John, 80-82, 88, 96
Lyndesay, Sir David, 60
Lyrical Ballads, 277
Lytton, first Lord, 309, 328, 329,
333
MACAULAY, Thomas B,, Lord, 332,
347-350
Macbeth, 104, 105
Machault, 13, 15, 18
Mackintosh, Sir James, 325
Malory, Sir Thomas, 53-55
Man of Mode, 191
Mandeville, Bernard de, 224, 225,
226
Marino, 145
Marivaux, 219, 240
Marlowe, Christopher, 97-100
Marmion, 289
Marriage, 327
Marryat, Frederick, 333, 343
Marston, John, 117
Marvell, Andrew, 188
Mason, William, 252, 253
Massinger, Philip, 138
Maud, 361, 379
Men ana Women, 339, 365
Mennis, Sir John, 188
Middleton, Thomas, 118
Midsummer Nighfs Dream, 103
Mill, John Stuart, 358
Milton, John, 142-145, 148, 149,
150, 161-169
Mirror for Magistrates, 77
Mitford, William, 325
Modern Painters, 356
Moore, Thomas, 317, 318
More, Sir Thomas, 62
Morris, William, 380-382
Morte d> Arthur, 53-55
Mr. Midshipman Easy, 343
NAPIER, Sir William, 325
Nash, Thomas, 99, 126
Nemesis of Faith, 373
Newman, John Henry, 350-352
Nicholas Nickleby, 341
Night Thoughts, 237
Nightmare Abbey, 331
Nodes Ambrosiantz, 322
Norman Conquest, 375
North, Sir Thomas, 65
Nutbrown Maid, The, 47
OCCLEVE, Thomas, 33-35* 4°5
Ode on Chrisfs Nativity, 143
Oldham, John, 188
Oliver Twist, 341
On a Regicide Peace, 292
Origin of Species, 359
Ossian, 239, 240, 268, 269
Otway, Thomas, 178, 195
Overbury, Sir Thomas, 134
PAINE, Tom, 293
Paley, 261
Pamela, 243
Paracelsus, 339
Paradise Lost, 163-169
Paradise Regained, 163
Parnell, Thomas, 211
Past and Future, 344
Pastime of Pleasure, 56, 57
Paslon Letters, 43
Pater, Walter Horatio, 383
Pauline, 335
Peacock, Thomas Love, 330, 33 1
414
INDEX
Pearl, 5, 6, 405
Pecock, Reginald, 42, 43
Peele, George, 96, 97
Pelham, 329
Pepys, Samuel, 186, 195
Percy's Reliques, 239, 268
/Vfcr Simple, 343
Peverilofthe Peak, 300
Phaer, 76
Pickwick Papers, 341
/Y^r-y /fo Plowman's Creed, 28
Pilgrim's Progress, 186
/*#a /few«, 339, 365
/Yam Dealer, 191
Pleasures of Hope, 287
Pleasure* of Memory, 276
Political Justice, 293
Poly-Olbion, 121
Pope, Alexander, 205-215, 408
Porter, Jane, 299
Praed, W. M., 332
Prelude, The, 285
Price, Richard, 292
Price, Sir Uvedale, 263
Pride and Prejudice, 296
Priestley, Joseph, 292
Princess, The, 361
Principles of Psychology, 377
Prior, Matthew, 209
Prometheus Unbound, 311
Purvey, John, 31, 127
Quarterly Review, 298, 303
Queen Mary, 362
Queen Mother and Rosamond, 381
Queenhoo Hall, 299
RADCLIFFE, Mrs, 293
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 83, 126
Ralph Roister Doister, 93, 94
Randolph, Thomas, 148
Rape of the Lock, 207, 209
Rapin, Rene*, 199, 200, 205, 388
Rasselas, 247, 251
Reade, Charles, 371
Rehearsal, 179
Religion of Protestants, 135
Remorse, 286
Represser of overmuch Blaming, 42
Revolt of the Tartars, 323
Reynolds, John Hamilton, 315
Richardson, Samuel, 241, 242
Rights of Man, 293
Ring and the Book, The, 340, 366
Rivers, Earl, 52, 53
Rob Roy, 300
Robertson, William, 257, 258
Robin Hood Ballads, 40-42
Robinson Crusoe, 227
Roderick Random, 246
Rogers, Samuel, 276, 319
Rolland, 67
Roman de la Rose, 5, 13
Rosamund Gray, 321
Rossetti, Christina, 380-382
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 380-382
Rousseau, J. J., 227, 235, 248, 293
Rowley, William, 118
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayydm, 380
Ruskin, John, 356-358
Russell, Thomas, 275
Rust, George, 151
Rutebeuf, n
Rutter, Joseph, 176
Sabbath, The, 289
Sackville, Thomas, 77, 78
Samson Agonistes, 163, 164
Sandys, George, 157
Sartor Resartus, 333, 344, 345
Scott, Sir Walter, 288, 289, 299-302,
303, 307, 327
Seasons, The, 233-236
Seneca, 76, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97
Sermons at St. Mary's, 350
Seven Lamps of Architecture, 356
Shaftesbury, third Earl, 197, 202,
203-205, 389
Shakespeare, William, 91, 92, 95,
100-110, 112, 141, 177
INDEX
415
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 163, 310-314,
336
Shepherd's Calender, 82, 83
Ship of Fools, 57
Shirley, James, 138, 140, 190
Sidney, Sir Philip, 86, 87, 88, 92
Silas iMarner, 369
Sir Gaivain and the Green Night ', 5, 6
Skelton, John, 57, 58
Smith, Sydney, 297
Smollett, Tobias, 245-247, 343
Songs of Innocence, 269
Sonnets, Shakespeare's, 92, 103
Sordello, 339, 365
South, Robert, 174
Southey, Robert, 286, 287, 303, 325
Spanish Tragedy, 297
Specimens of the Dramatic Poets, 314,
321
Spectator, 218, 219
Spencer, Mr. Herbert, 377
Spenser, Edmund, 82-86, 92, 314
Stanley, Arthur Penryn, 372, 373
Stanyhurst, 76
Steele, Richard, 216-218
Sterne, Laurence, 244, 245
Still, John, 94
Stones of Venice, 356
Strafford, 365
Strode, Ralph, 5
Surrey, Earl of, 67-72
Swift, Jonathan, 193, 210, 220-225,
255
Swinburne, Mr. A. C, 314, 380-382
Table Talk, 269
Tale of a Tub, 221, 222
Tales from Shakespeare, 321
Tamburlaine, 99
Task, The, 269
Tatler, 215-218
Taylor, Jeremy, 151, 152
Temple, Sir William, 183, 193
Temple, The, 147
Temple of Glass, 36
Tennyson, first Lord, 319, 331, 335-
337, 360-365, 381, 384, 391
Testament of Cressid, 47
Testament of Love, 30, 405
Thackeray, William Makepeace,
352
Thaddeus of Warsaw, 299
Theophrastus, 134, 136, 218
Thierry, Augustin, 349
Thistle and the Rose, The, 49
Thomson, James, 233-236, 268
Tickell, Thomas, 212
Tillotson, John, 136, 181, 203
Tom Jones, 243, 301
Tottefs Miscellany, 67-70, 74
Tourneur, Cyril, 119
Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 30,
31
Tristram Shandy, 244
Troilus and Cressida, 16, 17, 21, 405
Trollope, Anthony, 371
Turbervile, George, 76
Turner, Sharon, 325
Two Gentlemen of Verona, 99
Tyndale, William, 63
Tyndall, John, 378
UDALL, Nicholas, 94
Underdowne, 75
Usk, Thomas, 29, 30, 405
Utopia, 62
Valerius, 327
Vanbrugh, Sir John, 192
Vanity Fair, 352, 353
Vaughan, Henry, 156
Venetia, 330
Venice Preserved, 195
Venus and Adonis, 101, 103
Vicar of Wakefield, 247, 254
View of the Middle Ages, 325
Villette, 354
Vision of Judgment, 308
Vision of Piers Plowman, 7-12
Vivian Grey, 329
416
INDEX
WALLER, Edmund, 157, 158
Walpole, Horace, 262, 293
Walsh, William, 207
Walton, Izaak, 148, J49, 152
Warton, Thomas, 239, 252, 268
Watson, Thomas, 91, 92
Waverley, 289, 299
Webster, John, 118, 119
Wells, Charles, 315
Westward He >, 372
Whiggism in its Relations to Litera-
ture, 323
White, Gilbert, 263
White, Henry Kirke, 337
White Devil, 119
William of Paler me, 3
Wilson, John, 176
Wilson, Thomas, 64, 65
Wives and Daughters, 355
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 276, 277
Wordsworth, William, 150, 214, 276-
283, 289, 303
Wuthering Heights, 355
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 67-72
Wycherley, William, 191
Wycliffe, John, 31, 32, 127, 406
York Plays, 29, 405
Young, Edward, 236, 237
Zanoni, 329, 343
THE END
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON &* Co.
Edinburgh <&» London
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