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BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE
by
HENRY A. BEERS
Introduction and Supplementary Chapters on
the Religious and Theological Literature
of Great Britain and the United States
by
John Fletcher Hurst
New York: Eaton & Mains
Cincinnati: Jennings & Pye
Copyright, 1886, 1887, by
Phillips & Hunt
New York
Copyright, 1897, by
Eaton & Mains
New York
{3}
INTRODUCTION.
At the request of the publishers the undersigned has prepared this
Introduction and two Supplementary Chapters on the Religious and
Theological Literature of Great Britain and the United States. To the
preacher in his preparation for the pulpit, and also to the general
reader and student of religious history, the pursuit of the study of
literature is a necessity. The sermon itself is a part of literature,
must have its literary finish and proportions, and should give ample
proof of a familiarity with the masterpieces of the English tongue.
The world of letters presents to even the casual reader a rich and
varied profusion of fascinating and luscious fruit. But to the earnest
student who explores with thorough research and sympathetic mind the
intellectual products of countries and times other than his own, the
infinite variety, so strikingly apparent to the superficial observer,
resolves itself into a beautiful and harmonious unity. Literature is
the record of the struggles and aspirations of man in the boundless
universe of thought. As in physics the correlation and conservation of
force bind all the material sciences together into one, so in the world
of intellect all the diverse departments of mental life and action find
their common bond in literature. Even the {4} signs and formulas of
the mathematician and the chemist are but abbreviated forms of
writing--the stenography of those exact sciences. The simple
chronicles of the annalist, the flowing verses of the poet, clothing
his thought with winged words, the abstruse propositions of the
philosopher, the smiting protests of the bold reformer, either in
Church or State, the impassioned appeal of the advocate at the bar of
justice, the argument of the legislator on behalf of his measures, the
very cry of inarticulate pain of those who suffer under the oppression
of cruelty, all have their literature.
The minister of the Gospel, whose mission is to man in his highest and
holiest relations, must know the best that human thought has produced
if he would successfully reach and influence the thoughtful and
inquiring. Perhaps our best service here will be to suggest a method
of pursuing a course of study in literature, both English and American.
The following work of Professor Beers touches but lightly and scarcely
more than opens these broad and inviting fields, which are ever growing
richer and more fascinating. While man continues to think he will
weave the fabric of the mental loom into infinitely varied and
beautiful designs.
In the general outlines of a plan of literary study which is to cover
the entire history of English and American literature, the following
directions, it is hoped, will be of value.
1. Fix the great landmarks, the general periods--each {5} marked by
some towering leader, around whom other contemporary writers may be
grouped. In Great Britain the several and successive periods might
thus be well designated by such authors as Geoffrey Chaucer or John
Wiclif, Thomas More or Henry Howard, Edmund Spenser or Sir Walter
Raleigh, William Shakspere or Francis Bacon, John Milton or Jeremy
Taylor, John Dryden or John Locke, Joseph Addison or Joseph Butler,
Samuel Johnson or Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper or John Wesley,
Walter Scott or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth or Thomas
Chalmers, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, or William Makepeace
Thackeray.
A similar list for American literature would place as leaders in
letters: Thomas Hooker or Thomas Shepard, Cotton Mather, Jonathan
Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Philip Freneau, Noah Webster or James Kent,
James Fenimore Cooper or Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson or
Edward Everett, Joseph Addison Alexander or William Ellery Channing,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, or Nathaniel
Hawthorne.
2. The prosecution of the study might be carried on in one or more of
several ways, according either to the purpose in view or the tastes of
the student. Attention might profitably be concentrated on the
literature of a given period and worked out in detail by taking up
individual authors, or by classifying all the writers of the period {6}
on the basis of the character of their writings, such as poetry,
history, belles-lettres, theology, essays, and the like.
3. Again, the literature of a period might be studied with reference to
its influence on the religious, commercial, political, or social life
of the people among whom it has circulated; or as the result of certain
forces which have preceded its production. It is well worth the time
and effort to trace the influence of one author upon another or many
others, who, while maintaining their individuality, have been either in
style or method of production unconsciously molded by their _confreres_
of the pen. The divisions of writers may, again, be made with
reference to their opinions and associations in the different
departments of life where they have wrought their active labors, such
as in politics, religion, moral reform, or educational questions.
The influence of the great writers in the languages of the Continent
upon the literature of England and America affords another theme of
absorbing interest, and has its peculiarly good results in bringing the
student into close brotherhood with the fruitful and cultured minds of
every land. In fact, the possible applications of the study of
literature are so many and varied that the ingenuity of any earnest
student may devise such as the exigencies of his own work may require.
JOHN F. HURST,
_Washington_.
{7}
PREFACE.
In so brief a history of so rich a literature, the problem is how to
get room enough to give, not an adequate impression--that is
impossible--but any impression at all of the subject. To do this I
have crowded out everything but _belles-lettres_. Books in philosophy,
history, science, etc., however important in the history of English
thought, receive the merest incidental mention, or even no mention at
all. Again, I have omitted the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period,
which is written in a language nearly as hard for a modern Englishman
to read as German is, or Dutch. Caedmon and Cynewulf are no more a
part of English literature than Vergil and Horace are of Italian. I
have also left out {8} the vernacular literature of the Scotch before
the time of Burns. Up to the date of the union Scotland was a separate
kingdom, and its literature had a development independent of the
English, though parallel with it.
In dividing the history into periods, I have followed, with some
modifications, the divisions made by Mr. Stopford Brooke in his
excellent little _Primer of English Literature_. A short reading
course is appended to each chapter.
HENRY A. BEERS.
{9}
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
I. FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 1066-1400 . . . . . 11
II. FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER, 1400-1599 . . . . . . . 42
III. THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE, 1564-1616 . . . . . . . . . 76
IV. THE AGE OF MILTON, 1608-1674 . . . . . . . . . . 125
V. FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF
POPE, 1660-1744 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
VI. FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE FRENCH
REVOLUTION, 1744-1789 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
VII. FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH
OF SCOTT, 1789-1832 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
VIII. FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT
TIME, 1832-1886 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
IX. THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN
GREAT BRITAIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299
{11}
OUTLINE SKETCH
OF
ENGLISH LITERATURE.
CHAPTER I.
FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER.
1066-1400.
The Norman conquest of England, in the 11th century, made a break in
the natural growth of the English language and literature. The old
English or Anglo-Saxon had been a purely Germanic speech, with a
complicated grammar and a full set of inflections. For three hundred
years following the battle of Hastings this native tongue was driven
from the king's court and the courts of law, from parliament, school,
and university. During all this time there were two languages spoken
in England. Norman French was the birth-tongue of the upper classes
and English of the lower. When the latter finally got the better in
the struggle, and became, about the middle of the 14th century, the
national speech of all England, it was no longer the English of King
Alfred. It was a new language, a grammarless tongue, almost wholly
{12} stripped of its inflections. It had lost a half of its old words,
and had filled their places with French equivalents. The Norman
lawyers had introduced legal terms; the ladies and courtiers, words of
dress and courtesy. The knight had imported the vocabulary of war and
of the chase. The master-builders of the Norman castles and cathedrals
contributed technical expressions proper to the architect and the
mason. The art of cooking was French. The naming of the living
animals, _ox, swine, sheep, deer,_ was left to the Saxon churl who had
the herding of them, while the dressed meats, _beef, pork, mutton,
venison,_ received their baptism from the table-talk of his Norman
master. The four orders of begging friars, and especially the
Franciscans or Gray Friars, introduced into England in 1224, became
intermediaries between the high and the low. They went about preaching
to the poor, and in their sermons they intermingled French with
English. In their hands, too, was almost all the science of the day;
their _medicine_, _botany,_ and _astronomy_ displaced the old
nomenclature of _leechdom_, _wort-cunning,_ and _star-craft_. And,
finally, the translators of French poems often found it easier to
transfer a foreign word bodily than to seek out a native synonym,
particularly when the former supplied them with a rhyme. But the
innovation reached even to the commonest words in every-day use, so
that _voice_ drove out _steven_, _poor_ drove out _earm_, and _color_,
_use_, and _place_ made good their footing beside _hue,_ {13} _wont_,
and _stead_. A great part of the English words that were left were so
changed in spelling and pronunciation as to be practically new.
Chaucer stands, in date, midway between King Alfred and Alfred
Tennyson, but his English differs vastly more from the former's than
from the latter's. To Chaucer Anglo-Saxon was as much a dead language
as it is to us.
The classical Anglo-Saxon, moreover, had been the Wessex dialect,
spoken and written at Alfred's capital, Winchester. When the French
had displaced this as the language of culture, there was no longer a
"king's English" or any literary standard. The sources of modern
standard English are to be found in the East Midland, spoken in
Lincoln, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, and neighboring shires. Here the
old Anglian had been corrupted by the Danish settlers, and rapidly
threw off its inflections when it became a spoken and no longer a
written language, after the Conquest. The West Saxon, clinging more
tenaciously to ancient forms, sunk into the position of a local
dialect; while the East Midland, spreading to London, Oxford, and
Cambridge, became the literary English in which Chaucer wrote.
The Normans brought in also new intellectual influences and new forms
of literature. They were a cosmopolitan people, and they connected
England with the continent. Lanfranc and Anselm, the first two Norman
archbishops of Canterbury, were learned and splendid prelates of a {14}
type quite unknown to the Anglo-Saxons. They introduced the scholastic
philosophy taught at the University of Paris, and the reformed
discipline of the Norman abbeys. They bound the English Church more
closely to Rome, and officered it with Normans. English bishops were
deprived of their sees for illiteracy, and French abbots were set over
monasteries of Saxon monks. Down to the middle of the 14th century the
learned literature of England was mostly in Latin, and the polite
literature in French. English did not at any time altogether cease to
be a written language, but the extant remains of the period from 1066
to 1200 are few and, with one exception, unimportant. After 1200
English came more and more into written use, but mainly in
translations, paraphrases, and imitations of French works. The native
genius was at school, and followed awkwardly the copy set by its master.
The Anglo-Saxon poetry, for example, had been rhythmical and
alliterative. It was commonly written in lines containing four
rhythmical accents and with three of the accented syllables
alliterating.
_R_este hine tha _r_um-heort; _r_eced hlifade
_G_eap and _g_old-fah, gaest inne swaef.
Rested him then the great-hearted; the hall towered
Roomy and gold-bright, the guest slept within.
This rude energetic verse the Saxon _scop_ had sung to his harp or
_glee-beam_, dwelling on the {15} emphatic syllables, passing swiftly
over the others which were of undetermined number and position in the
line. It was now displaced by the smooth metrical verse with rhymed
endings, which the French introduced and which our modern poets use, a
verse fitted to be recited rather than sung. The old English
alliterative verse continued, indeed, in occasional use to the 16th
century. But it was linked to a forgotten literature and an obsolete
dialect, and was doomed to give way. Chaucer lent his great authority
to the more modern verse system, and his own literary models and
inspirers were all foreign, French or Italian. Literature in England
began to be once more English and truly national in the hands of
Chaucer and his contemporaries, but it was the literature of a nation
cut off from its own past by three centuries of foreign rule.
The most noteworthy English document of the 11th and 12th centuries was
the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. Copies of these annals,
differing somewhat among themselves, had been kept at the monasteries
in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere. The yearly entries
were mostly brief, dry records of passing events, though occasionally
they become full and animated. The fen country of Cambridge and
Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries. Here were the great abbeys
of Peterborough and Croyland and Ely minster. One of the earliest
English songs tells how the savage heart of the Danish {16} king Cnut
was softened by the singing of the monks in Ely.
Merie sungen muneches binnen Ely
Tha Cnut chyning reu ther by;
Roweth, cnihtes, noer the land,
And here we thes muneches sang.
It was among the dikes and marshes of this fen country that the bold
outlaw Hereward, "the last of the English," held out for some years
against the conqueror. And it was here, in the rich abbey of Burch or
Peterborough, the ancient Medeshamstede (meadow-homestead) that the
chronicle was continued for nearly a century after the Conquest,
breaking off abruptly in 1154, the date of King Stephen's death.
Peterborough had received a new Norman abbot, Turold, "a very stern
man," and the entry in the chronicle for 1170 tells how Hereward and
his gang, with his Danish backers, thereupon plundered the abbey of its
treasures, which were first removed to Ely, and then carried off by the
Danish fleet and sunk, lost, or squandered. The English in the later
portions of this Peterborough chronicle becomes gradually more modern,
and falls away more and more from the strict grammatical standards of
the classical Anglo-Saxon. It is a most valuable historical monument,
and some passages of it are written with great vividness, notably the
sketch of William the Conqueror put down in the year of his death
(1086) by one who had "looked upon him and at another time dwelt in his
court." {17} "He who was before a rich king, and lord of many a land,
he had not then of all his land but a piece of seven feet. . . .
Likewise he was a very stark man and a terrible, so that one durst do
nothing against his will. . . . Among other things is not to be
forgotten the good peace that he made in this land, so that a man might
fare over his kingdom with his bosom full of gold unhurt. He set up a
great deer preserve, and he laid laws therewith that whoso should slay
hart or hind, he should be blinded. As greatly did he love the tall
deer as if he were their father."
With the discontinuance of the Peterborough annals, English history
written in English prose ceased for three hundred years. The thread of
the nation's story was kept up in Latin chronicles, compiled by writers
partly of English and partly of Norman descent. The earliest of these,
such as Ordericus Vitalis, Simeon of Durham, Henry of Huntingdon, and
William of Malmesbury, were contemporary with the later entries of the
Saxon chronicle. The last of them, Matthew of Westminster, finished
his work in 1273. About 1300 Robert, a monk of Gloucester, composed a
chronicle in English verse, following in the main the authority of the
Latin chronicles, and he was succeeded by other rhyming chroniclers in
the 14th century. In the hands of these the true history of the Saxon
times was overlaid with an ever-increasing mass of fable and legend.
All real knowledge of the period {18} dwindled away until in Capgrave's
_Chronicle of England_, written in prose in 1463-64, hardly any thing
of it is left. In history as in literature the English had forgotten
their past, and had turned to foreign sources. It is noteworthy that
Shakspere, who borrowed his subjects and his heroes sometimes from
authentic English history, sometimes from the legendary history of
ancient Britain, Denmark, and Scotland, as in Lear, Hamlet, and
Macbeth, ignores the Saxon period altogether. And Spenser, who gives
in his second book of the _Faerie Queene_, a _resume_ of the reigns of
fabulous British kings--the supposed ancestors of Queen Elizabeth, his
royal patron--has nothing to say of the real kings of early England.
So completely had the true record faded away that it made no appeal to
the imaginations of our most patriotic poets. The Saxon Alfred had
been dethroned by the British Arthur, and the conquered Welsh had
imposed their fictitious genealogies upon the dynasty of the
conquerors. In the _Roman de Rou_, a verse chronicle of the dukes of
Normandy, written by the Norman Wace, it is related that at the battle
of Hastings the French _jongleur_, Taillefer, spurred out before the
van of William's army, tossing his lance in the air and chanting of
"Charlemagne and of Roland, of Oliver and the peers who died at
Roncesvals." This incident is prophetic of the victory which Norman
song, no less than Norman arms, was to win over England. The lines
which Taillefer {19} sang were from the _Chanson de Roland_, the oldest
and best of the French hero sagas. The heathen Northmen, who had
ravaged the coasts of France in the 10th century, had become in the
course of one hundred and fifty years, completely identified with the
French. They had accepted Christianity, intermarried with the native
women, and forgotten their own Norse tongue. The race thus formed was
the most brilliant in Europe. The warlike, adventurous spirit of the
vikings mingled in its blood with the French nimbleness of wit and
fondness for display. The Normans were a nation of knights-errant,
with a passion for prowess and for courtesy. Their architecture was at
once strong and graceful. Their women were skilled in embroidery, a
splendid sample of which is preserved in the famous Bayeux tapestry, in
which the conqueror's wife, Matilda, and the ladies of her court
wrought the history of the Conquest.
This national taste for decoration expressed itself not only in the
ceremonious pomp of feast and chase and tourney, but likewise in
literature. The most characteristic contribution of the Normans to
English poetry were the metrical romances or chivalry tales. These
were sung or recited by the minstrels, who were among the retainers of
every great feudal baron, or by the _jongleurs_, who wandered from
court to castle. There is a whole literature of these _romans d'
aventure_ in the Anglo-Norman dialect of French. Many of them are {20}
very long--often thirty, forty, or fifty thousand lines--written
sometimes in a strophic form, sometimes in long Alexandrines, but
commonly in the short, eight-syllabled rhyming couplet. Numbers of
them were turned into English verse in the 13th, 14th, and 15th
centuries. The translations were usually inferior to the originals.
The French _trouvere_ (finder or poet) told his story in a
straight-forward, prosaic fashion, omitting no details in the action
and unrolling endless descriptions of dresses, trappings, gardens, etc.
He invented plots and situations full of fine possibilities by which
later poets have profited, but his own handling of them was feeble and
prolix. Yet there was a simplicity about the old French language and a
certain elegance and delicacy in the diction of the _trouveres_ which
the rude, unformed English failed to catch.
The heroes of these romances were of various climes: Guy of Warwick,
and Richard the Lion Heart of England, Havelok the Dane, Sir Troilus of
Troy, Charlemagne, and Alexander. But, strangely enough, the favorite
hero of English romance was that mythical Arthur of Britain, whom Welsh
legend had celebrated as the most formidable enemy of the Sassenach
invaders and their victor in twelve great battles. The language and
literature of the ancient Cymry or Welsh had made no impression on
their Anglo-Saxon conquerors. There are a few Welsh borrowings in the
English speech, such as _bard_ and _druid_; but in the old Anglo-Saxon
literature there are {21} no more traces of British song and story than
if the two races had been sundered by the ocean instead of being
borderers for over six hundred years. But the Welsh had their own
national traditions, and after the Norman Conquest these were set free
from the isolation of their Celtic tongue and, in an indirect form,
entered into the general literature of Europe. The French came into
contact with the old British literature in two places: in the Welsh
marches in England and in the province of Brittany in France, where the
population is of Cymric race and spoke, and still to some extent
speaks, a Cymric dialect akin to the Welsh.
About 1140 Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, seemingly of Welsh
descent, who lived at the court of Henry the First and became afterward
bishop of St. Asaph, produced in Latin a so-called _Historia Britonum_
in which it was told how Brutus, the great grandson of Aeneas, came to
Britain, and founded there his kingdom called after him, and his city
of New Troy (Troynovant) on the site of the later London. An air of
historic gravity was given to this tissue of Welsh legends by an exact
chronology and the genealogy of the British kings, and the author
referred, as his authority, to an imaginary Welsh book given him, as he
said, by a certain Walter, archdeacon of Oxford. Here appeared that
line of fabulous British princes which has become so familiar to modern
readers in the plays of Shakspere and the poems of Tennyson: Lear and
his {22} three daughters; Cymbeline, Gorboduc, the subject of the
earliest regular English tragedy, composed by Sackville and acted in
1562; Locrine and his Queen Gwendolen, and his daughter Sabrina, who
gave her name to the river Severn, was made immortal by an exquisite
song in Milton's _Comus_, and became the heroine of the tragedy of
_Locrine_, once attributed to Shakspere; and above all, Arthur, the son
of Uther Pendragon, and the founder of the Table Round. In 1155 Wace,
the author of the _Roman de Rou_, turned Geoffrey's work into a French
poem entitled _Brut d' Angleterre_, "brut" being a Welsh word meaning
chronicle. About the year 1200 Wace's poem was Englished by Layamon, a
priest of Arley Regis, on the border stream of Severn. Layamon's
_Brut_ is in thirty thousand lines, partly alliterative and partly
rhymed, but written in pure Saxon English with hardly any French words.
The style is rude but vigorous, and, at times, highly imaginative.
Wace had amplified Geoffrey's chronicle somewhat, but Layamon made much
larger additions, derived, no doubt, from legends current on the Welsh
border. In particular the story of Arthur grew in his hands into
something like fullness. He tells of the enchantments of Merlin, the
wizard; of the unfaithfulness of Arthur's queen, Guenever; and the
treachery of his nephew, Modred. His narration of the last great
battle between Arthur and Modred; of the wounding of the king--"fifteen
fiendly wounds he had, one might in the least {23} three gloves
thrust--"; and of the little boat with "two women therein, wonderly
dight," which came to bear him away to Avalun and the Queen Argante,
"sheenest of all elves," whence he shall come again, according to
Merlin's prophecy, to rule the Britons; all this left little, in
essentials, for Tennyson to add in his _Death of Arthur_. This new
material for fiction was eagerly seized upon by the Norman romancers.
The story of Arthur drew to itself other stories which were afloat.
Walter Map, a gentleman of the Court of Henry II., in two French prose
romances, connected with it the church legend of the Sangreal, or holy
cup, from which Christ had drunk at his last supper, and which Joseph
of Arimathea had afterward brought to England. Then it miraculously
disappeared and became thenceforth the occasion of knightly quest, the
mystic symbol of the object of the soul's desire, an adventure only to
be achieved by the maiden knight, Galahad, the son of the great
Launcelot, who in the romances had taken the place of Modred in
Geoffrey's history, as the paramour of Queen Guenever. In like manner
the love-story of Tristan and Isolde was joined by other romancers to
the Arthur-Saga. This came probably from Brittany or Cornwall. Thus
there grew up a great epic cycle of Arthurian romance, with a fixed
shape and a unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day
and rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a
more artistic {24} handling by such modern English poets as Tennyson in
his _Idyls of the King_, by Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and many others.
There were innumerable Arthur romances in prose and verse, in
Anglo-Norman and continental French dialects, in English, in German,
and in other tongues. But the final form which the Saga took in
mediaeval England was the prose _Morte Dartur_ of Sir Thomas Malory,
composed at the close of the 15th century. This was a digest of the
earlier romances and is Tennyson's main authority.
Beside the literature of the knight was the literature of the cloister.
There is a considerable body of religious writing in early English,
consisting of homilies in prose and verse, books of devotion, like the
_Ancren Riwle_ (Rule of Anchoresses), 1225; the _Ayenbite of Inwyt_
(Remorse of Conscience), 1340, both in prose; the _Handlyng Sinne_,
1303; the _Cursor Mundi_, 1320; and the _Pricke of Conscience_, 1340,
in verse; metrical renderings of the Psalter, the Pater Noster, the
Creed, and the Ten Commandments, the Gospels for the Day, such as the
_Ormulum_, or Book of Orm, 1205; legends and miracles of saints; poems
in praise of virginity, on the contempt of the world, on the five joys
of the Virgin, the five wounds of Christ, the eleven pains of hell, the
seven deadly sins, the fifteen tokens of the coming judgment, and
dialogues between the soul and the body. These were the work not only
of the monks, but also of the begging friars, and in {25} smaller part
of the secular or parish clergy. They are full of the ascetic piety
and superstition of the Middle Age, the childish belief in the
marvelous, the allegorical interpretation of Scripture texts, the
grotesque material horrors of hell with its grisly fiends, the vileness
of the human body and the loathsome details of its corruption after
death. Now and then a single poem rises above the tedious and hideous
barbarism of the general level of this monkish literature, either from
a more intensely personal feeling in the poet, or from an occasional
grace or beauty in his verse. A poem so distinguished is, for example,
_A Luve Ron_ (A Love Counsel) by the Minorite friar, Thomas de Hales,
one stanza of which recalls the French poet Villon's _Balade of Dead
Ladies_, with its refrain.
"Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?"
"Where are the snows of yester year?
Where is Paris and Heleyne
That weren so bright and fair of blee[1]
Amadas, Tristan, and Ideyne
Yseude and alle the,[2]
Hector with his sharpe main,
And Caesar rich in worldes fee?
They beth ygliden out of the reign[3]
As the shaft is of the dee." [4]
A few early English poems on secular subjects are also worthy of
mention, among others, _The Owl and the Nightingale_, generally
assigned to the reign of Henry III. (1216-1272), an _Estrif_, {26} or
dispute, in which the owl represents the ascetic and the nightingale
the aesthetic view of life. The debate is conducted with much
animation and a spirited use of proverbial wisdom. _The Land of
Cokaygne_ is an amusing little poem of some two hundred lines,
belonging to the class of _fabliaux_, short humorous tales or satirical
pieces in verse. It describes a lubber-land, or fool's paradise, where
the geese fly down all roasted on the spit, bringing garlic in the
bills for their dressing, and where there is a nunnery upon a river of
sweet milk, and an abbey of white monks and gray, whose walls, like the
hall of little King Pepin, are "of pie-crust and pastry crust," with
flouren cakes for the shingles and fat puddings for the pins.
There are a few songs dating from about 1300, and mostly found in a
single collection (Harl, MS., 2253), which are almost the only English
verse before Chaucer that has any sweetness to a modern ear. They are
written in French strophic forms in the southern dialect, and sometimes
have an intermixture of French and Latin lines. They are musical,
fresh, simple, and many of them very pretty. They celebrate the
gladness of spring with its cuckoos and throstle-cocks, its daisies and
woodruff.
"When the nightingale sings the woodes waxen green
Leaf and grass and blossom spring in Averil, I ween,
And love is to my herte gone with a spear so keen,
Night and day my blood it drinks my herte doth me tene."[5]
{27} Others are love plaints to "Alysoun" or some other lady whose
"name is in a note of the nightingale;" whose eyes are as gray as
glass, and her skin as "red as rose on ris." [6] Some employ a burden
or refrain.
"Blow, northern wind,
Blow thou me, my sweeting.
Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, blow!"
Others are touched with a light melancholy at the coming of winter.
"Winter wakeneth all my care
Now these leaves waxeth bare.
Oft I sigh and mourne sare
When it cometh in my thought
Of this worldes joy, how it goeth all to nought"
Some of these poems are love songs to Christ or the Virgin, composed in
the warm language of earthly passion. The sentiment of chivalry united
with the ecstatic reveries of the cloister had produced Mariolatry and
the imagery of the Song of Solomon, in which Christ wooes the soul, had
made this feeling of divine love familiar. Toward the end of the 13th
century a collection of lives of saints, a sort of English _Golden
Legend_, was prepared at the great abbey of Gloucester for use on
saints' days. The legends were chosen partly from the hagiology of the
Church Catholic, as the lives of Margaret, Christopher, and Michael;
partly from the calendar of the English Church, as the {28} lives of
St. Thomas of Canterbury, of the Anglo-Saxons, Dunstan, Swithin--who is
mentioned by Shakspere--and Kenelm, whose life is quoted by Chaucer in
the _Nonne Presto's Tale_. The verse was clumsy and the style
monotonous, but an imaginative touch here and there has furnished a
hint to later poets. Thus the legend of St. Brandan's search for the
earthly paradise has been treated by Matthew Arnold and William Morris.
About the middle of the 14th century there was a revival of the Old
English alliterative verse in romances like _William and the Werewolf_,
and _Sir Gawayne_, and in religious pieces such as _Clannesse_
(purity), _Patience_ and _The Perle_, the last named a mystical poem of
much beauty, in which a bereaved father sees a vision of his daughter
among the glorified. Some of these employed rhyme as well as
alliteration. They are in the West Midland dialect, although Chaucer
implies that alliteration was most common in the north. "I am a
sotherne man," says the parson in the _Canterbury Tales_. "I cannot
geste rom, ram, ruf, by my letter." But the most important of the
alliterative poems was the _Vision of William concerning Piers the
Plowman_. In the second half of the 14th century French had ceased to
be the mother-tongue of any considerable part of the population of
England. By a statute of Edward III., in 1362, it was displaced from
the law courts. By 1386 English had taken its place in the schools.
The {29} Anglo-Norman dialect had grown corrupt, and Chaucer contrasts
the French of Paris with the provincial French spoken by his prioress,
"after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe." The native English genius
was also beginning to assert itself, roused in part, perhaps, by the
English victories in the wars of Edward III. against the French. It
was the bows of the English yeomanry that won the fight at Crecy, fully
as much as the prowess of the Norman baronage. But at home the times
were bad. Heavy taxes and the repeated visitations of the pestilence,
or Black Death, pressed upon the poor and wasted the land. The Church
was corrupt; the mendicant orders had grown enormously wealthy, and the
country was eaten up by a swarm of begging friars, pardoners, and
apparitors. The social discontent was fermenting among the lower
classes, which finally issued in the communistic uprising of the
peasantry, under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw. This state of things is
reflected in the _Vision of Piers Plowman_, written as early as 1362,
by William Langland, a tonsured clerk of the west country. It is in
form an allegory, and bears some resemblance to the later and more
famous allegory of the _Pilgrim's Progress_. The poet falls asleep on
the Malvern Hills, in Worcestershire, and has a vision of a "fair field
full of folk," representing the world with its various conditions of
men. There were pilgrims and palmers; hermits with hooked staves, who
went to Walsingham--and {30} their wenches after them--great lubbers
and long that were loth to work: friars glossing the Gospel for their
own profit; pardoners cheating the people with relics and indulgences;
parish priests who forsook their parishes--that had been poor since the
pestilence time--and went to London to sing there for simony; bishops,
archbishops, and deacons, who got themselves fat clerkships in the
Exchequer, or King's Bench; in short, all manner of lazy and corrupt
ecclesiastics. A lady, who represents holy Church, then appears to the
dreamer, explains to him the meaning of his vision, and reads him a
sermon the text of which is, "When all treasure is tried, truth is the
best." A number of other allegorical figures are next introduced,
Conscience, Reason, Meed, Simony, Falsehood, etc., and after a series
of speeches and adventures, a second vision begins in which the seven
deadly sins pass before the poet in a succession of graphic
impersonations, and finally all the characters set out on a pilgrimage
in search of St. Truth, finding no guide to direct them save Piers the
Plowman, who stands for the simple, pious laboring man, the sound heart
of the English common folk. The poem was originally in eight divisions
or "passus," to which was added a continuation in three parts, _Vita Do
Wel_, _Do Bet_, and _Do Best_. About 1377 the whole was greatly
enlarged by the author.
_Piers Plowman_ was the first extended literary work after the Conquest
which was purely English in character. It owed nothing to France but
the {31} allegorical cast which the _Roman de la Rose_ had made
fashionable in both countries. But even here such personified
abstractions as Langland's Fair-speech and Work-when-time-is, remind us
less of the Fraunchise, Bel-amour, and Fals-semblaunt of the French
courtly allegories than of Bunyan's Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and even of
such Puritan names as Praise-God Barebones, and Zeal-of-the-land Busy.
The poem is full of English moral seriousness, of shrewd humor, the
hatred of a lie, the homely English love for reality. It has little
unity of plan, but is rather a series of episodes, discourses,
parables, and scenes. It is all astir with the actual life of the
time. We see the gossips gathered in the ale-house of Betun the
brewster, and the pastry cooks in the London streets crying "Hote pies,
hote! Good gees and grys. Go we dine, go we!" Had Langland not
linked his literary fortunes with an uncouth and obsolescent verse, and
had he possessed a finer artistic sense and a higher poetic
imagination, his book might have been, like Chaucer's, among the
lasting glories of our tongue. As it is, it is forgotten by all but
professional students of literature and history. Its popularity in its
own day is shown by the number of MSS. which are extant, and by
imitations, such as _Piers the Plowman's Crede_ (1394), and the
_Plowman's Tale_, for a long time wrongly inserted in the _Canterbury
Tales_. Piers became a kind of typical figure, like the French
peasant, _Jacques Bonhomme_, and was {32} appealed to as such by the
Protestant reformers of the 16th century.
The attack upon the growing corruptions of the Church was made more
systematically, and from the stand-point of a theologian rather than of
a popular moralist and satirist, by John Wyclif, the rector of
Lutterworth and professor of Divinity in Baliol College, Oxford. In a
series of Latin and English tracts he made war against indulgences,
pilgrimages, images, oblations, the friars, the pope, and the doctrine
of transubstantiation. But his greatest service to England was his
translation of the Bible, the first complete version in the mother
tongue. This he made about 1380, with the help of Nicholas Hereford,
and a revision of it was made by another disciple, Purvey, some ten
years later. There was no knowledge of Hebrew or Greek in England at
that time, and the Wiclifite versions were made not from the original
tongues, but from the Latin Vulgate. In his anxiety to make his
rendering close, and mindful, perhaps, of the warning in the
Apocalypse, "If any man shall take away from the words of the book of
this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life,"
Wiclif followed the Latin order of construction so literally as to make
rather awkward English, translating, for example, _Quid sibi vult hoc
somnium?_ by _What to itself wole this sweven?_ Purvey's revision was
somewhat freer and more idiomatic. In the reigns of Henry IV. and V.
it was forbidden to read or to have any {33} of Wiclif's writings.
Such of them as could be seized were publicly burned. In spite of
this, copies of his Bible circulated secretly in great numbers.
Forshall and Madden, in their great edition (1850), enumerate one
hundred and fifty MSS. which had been consulted by them. Later
translators, like Tyndale and the makers of the Authorized Version, or
"King James' Bible" (1611), followed Wiclif's language in many
instances; so that he was, in truth, the first author of our biblical
dialect and the founder of that great monument of noble English which
has been the main conservative influence in the mother-tongue, holding
it fast to many strong, pithy words and idioms that would else have
been lost. In 1415; some thirty years after Wiclif's death, by decree
of the Council of Constance, his bones were dug up from the soil of
Lutterworth chancel and burned, and the ashes cast into the Swift.
"The brook," says Thomas Fuller, in his _Church History_, "did convey
his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn into the narrow seas;
they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wiclif are the emblem
of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over."
Although the writings thus far mentioned are of very high interest to
the student of the English language, and the historian of English
manners and culture, they cannot be said to have much importance as
mere literature. But in Geoffrey Chaucer (died 1400) we meet with a
poet of the first rank, whose works are increasingly read and {34} will
always continue to be a source of delight and refreshment to the
general reader as well as a "well of English undefiled" to the
professional man of letters. With the exception of Dante, Chaucer was
the greatest of the poets of mediaeval Europe, and he remains one of
the greatest of English poets, and certainly the foremost of English
story-tellers in verse. He was the son of a London vintner, and was in
his youth in the service of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, one of the sons
of Edward III. He made a campaign in France in 1359-60, when he was
taken prisoner. Afterward he was attached to the court and received
numerous favors and appointments. He was sent on several diplomatic
missions by the king, three of them to Italy, where, in all
probability, he made the acquaintance of the new Italian literature,
the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. He was appointed at
different times Comptroller of the Wool Customs, Comptroller of Petty
Customs, and Clerk of the Works. He sat for Kent in Parliament, and he
received pensions from three successive kings. He was a man of
business as well as books, and he loved men and nature no less than
study. He knew his world; he "saw life steadily and saw it whole."
Living at the center of English social and political life, and
resorting to the court of Edward III., then the most brilliant in
Europe, Chaucer was an eye-witness of those feudal pomps which fill the
high-colored pages of his contemporary, the French chronicler, {35}
Froissart. His description of a tournament in the _Knight's Tale_ is
unexcelled for spirit and detail. He was familiar with dances, feasts,
and state ceremonies, and all the life of the baronial castle, in bower
and hall, the "trompes with the loude minstralcie," the heralds, the
ladies, and the squires,
"What hawkes sitten on the perch above,
What houndes liggen on the floor adown."
But his sympathy reached no less the life of the lowly, the poor widow
in her narrow cottage, and that "trewe swynkere and a good," the
plowman whom Langland had made the hero of his vision. He is, more
than all English poets, the poet of the lusty spring, of "Aprille with
her showres sweet" and the "foules song," of "May with all her floures
and her greene," of the new leaves in the wood, and the meadows new
powdered with the daisy, the mystic Marguerite of his _Legend of Good
Women_. A fresh vernal air blows through all his pages.
In Chaucer's earlier works, such as the translation of the _Romaunt of
the Rose_ (if that be his), the _Boke of the Duchesse_, the _Parlament
of Foules_, the _Hous of Fame_, as well as in the _Legend of Good
Women_, which was later, the inspiration of the French court poetry of
the 13th and 14th centuries is manifest. He retains in them the
mediaeval machinery of allegories and dreams, the elaborate
descriptions of palaces, {36} temples, portraitures, etc., which had
been made fashionable in France by such poems as Guillaume de Lorris's
_Roman de la Rose_, and Jean Machault's _La Fontaine Amoureuse_. In
some of these the influence of Italian poetry is also perceptible.
There are suggestions from Dante, for example, in the _Parlament of
Foules_ and the _Hous of Fame_, and _Troilus and Cresseide_ is a free
handling rather than a translation of Boccaccio's _Filostrato_. In all
of these there are passages of great beauty and force. Had Chaucer
written nothing else, he would still have been remembered as the most
accomplished English poet of his time, but he would not have risen to
the rank which he now occupies, as one of the greatest English poets of
all time. This position he owes to his masterpiece, the _Canterbury
Tales_. Here he abandoned the imitation of foreign models and the
artificial literary fashions of his age, and wrote of real life from
his own ripe knowledge of men and things.
The _Canterbury Tales_ are a collection of stories written at different
times, but put together, probably, toward the close of his life. The
frame-work into which they are fitted is one of the happiest ever
devised. A number of pilgrims who are going on horseback to the shrine
of St. Thomas a Becket, at Canterbury, meet at the Tabard Inn, in
Southwark, a suburb of London. The jolly host of the Tabard, Harry
Bailey, proposes that on their way to Canterbury, each of the company
shall tell two tales, and two more on their way back, and {37} that the
one who tells the best shall have a supper at the cost of the rest when
they return to the inn. He himself accompanies them as judge and
"reporter." In the setting of the stories there is thus a constant
feeling of movement and the air of all outdoors. The little
"head-links" and "end-links" which bind them together, give incidents
of the journey and glimpses of the talk of the pilgrims, sometimes
amounting, as in the prologue of the _Wife of Bath_, to full and almost
dramatic character-sketches. The stories, too, are dramatically suited
to the narrators. The general prologue is a series of such
character-sketches, the most perfect in English poetry. The portraits
of the pilgrims are illuminated with the soft brilliancy and the minute
loving fidelity of the miniatures in the old missals, and with the same
quaint precision in traits of expression and in costume. The pilgrims
are not all such as one would meet nowadays at an English inn. The
presence of a knight, a squire, a yeoman archer, and especially of so
many kinds of ecclesiastics, a nun, a friar, a monk, a pardoner, and a
sompnour or apparitor, reminds us that the England of that day must
have been less like Protestant England, as we know it, than like the
Italy of some thirty years ago. But however the outward face of
society may have changed, the Canterbury pilgrims remain, in Chaucer's
description, living and universal types of human nature. The
_Canterbury Tales_ are twenty-four in number. There were {38}
thirty-two pilgrims, so that if finished as designed the whole
collection would have numbered one hundred and twenty-eight stories.
Chaucer is the bright consummate flower of the English Middle Age.
Like many another great poet, he put the final touch to the various
literary forms that he found in cultivation. Thus his _Knight's Tale_,
based upon Boccaccio's _Teseide_, is the best of English mediaeval
romances. And yet the _Rime of Sir Thopas_, who goes seeking an elf
queen for his mate, and is encountered by the giant Sir Olifaunt,
burlesques these same romances with their impossible adventures and
their tedious rambling descriptions. The tales of the prioress and the
second nun are saints' legends. The _Monk's Tale_ is a set of dry,
moral apologues in the manner of his contemporary, the "moral Gower."
The stories told by the reeve, miller, friar, sompnour, shipman, and
merchant, belong to the class of _fabliaux_, a few of which existed in
English, such as _Dame Siriz_, the _Lay of the Ash_, and the _Land of
Cokaygne_, already mentioned. The _Nonne Preste's Tale_, likewise,
which Dryden modernized with admirable humor, was of the class of
_fabliaux_, and was suggested by a little poem in forty lines, _Dou Coc
et Werpil_, by Marie de France, a Norman poetess of the 13th century.
It belonged, like the early English poem of _The Fox and the Wolf_, to
the popular animal-saga of _Reynard the Fox_. The _Franklin's Tale_,
whose scene is Brittany, and the _Wife of Baths' {39} Tale_, which is
laid in the time of the British Arthur, belong to the class of French
_lais_, serious metrical tales shorter than the romance and of Breton
origin, the best representatives of which are the elegant and graceful
_lais_ of Marie de France.
Chaucer was our first great master of laughter and of tears. His
serious poetry is full of the tenderest pathos. His loosest tales are
delightfully humorous and life-like. He is the kindliest of satirists.
The knavery, greed, and hypocrisy of the begging friars and the sellers
of indulgences are exposed by him as pitilessly as by Langland and
Wiclif, though his mood is not like theirs, one of stern, moral
indignation, but rather the good-natured scorn of a man of the world.
His charity is broad enough to cover even the corrupt sompnour of whom
he says,
"And yet in sooth he was a good felawe."
Whether he shared Wiclif's opinions is unknown, but John of Gaunt, the
Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry IV., who was Chaucer's life-long
patron, was likewise Wiclif's great upholder against the persecution of
the bishops. It is, perhaps, not without significance that the poor
parson in the _Canterbury Tales_, the only one of his ecclesiastical
pilgrims whom Chaucer treats with respect, is suspected by the host of
the Tabard to be a "loller," that is, a Lollard, or disciple of Wiclif,
and that because he objects to the jovial inn-keeper's swearing "by
Goddes bones."
{40} Chaucer's English is nearly as easy for a modern reader as
Shakspere's, and few of his words have become obsolete. His verse,
when rightly read, is correct and melodious. The early English was, in
some respects, more "sweet upon the tongue" than the modern language.
The vowels had their broad Italian sounds, and the speech was full of
soft gutturals and vocalic syllables, like the endings en, es, and e,
which made feminine rhymes and kept the consonants from coming harshly
together.
Great poet as Chaucer was, he was not quite free from the literary
weakness of his time. He relapses sometimes into the babbling style of
the old chroniclers and legend writers; cites "auctours" and gives long
catalogues of names and objects with a _naive_ display of learning; and
introduces vulgar details in his most exquisite passages. There is
something childish about almost all the thought and art of the Middle
Ages--at least outside of Italy, where classical models and traditions
never quite lost their hold. But Chaucer's artlessness is half the
secret of his wonderful ease in story-telling, and is so engaging that,
like a child's sweet unconsciousness, one would not wish it otherwise.
The _Canterbury Tales_ had shown of what high uses the English language
was capable, but the curiously trilingual condition of literature still
continued. French was spoken in the proceedings of Parliament as late
as the reign of Henry {41} VI. (1422-1471). Chaucer's contemporary,
John Gower, wrote his _Vox Clamantis_ in Latin, his _Speculum
Meditantis_ (a lost poem), and a number of _ballades_ in Parisian
French, and his _Confessio Amantis_ (1393) in English. The last named
is a dreary, pedantic work, in some 15,000 smooth, monotonous,
eight-syllabled couplets, in which Grande Amour instructs the lover how
to get the love of Bel Pucell.
1. Early English Literature. By Bernhard ten Brink. Translated from
the German by H. M. Kennedy. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1883.
2. Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English. (Clarendon Press
Series.) Oxford.
3. Langland's Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman. Wright's
Edition; or Skeat's, in Early English Text Society publications.
4. Chaucer: Canterbury Tales. Tyrwhitt's Edition; or Wright's, in
Percy Society publications.
5. Complete Writings. Morris's Edition. 6 vols. (In Aldine Series.)
[1] Hue.
[2] Those.
[3] Realm.
[4] Bowstring.
[5] Pain.
[6] Branch.
{42}
CHAPTER II.
FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER.
1400-1599.
The 15th century was a barren period in English literary history. It
was nearly two hundred years after Chaucer's death before any poet
came, whose name can be written in the same line with his. He was
followed at once by a number of imitators who caught the trick of his
language and verse, but lacked the genius to make any fine use of them.
The manner of a true poet may be learned, but his style, in the high
sense of the word, remains his own secret. Some of the poems which
have been attributed to Chaucer and printed in editions of his works,
as the _Court of Love_, the _Flower and the Leaf_, the _Cuckow and the
Nightingale_, are now regarded by many scholars as the work of later
writers. If not Chaucer's, they are of Chaucer's school, and the first
two, at least, are very pretty poems after the fashion of his minor
pieces, such as the _Boke of the Duchesse_ and the _Parlament of
Foules_.
Among his professed disciples was Thomas Occleve, a dull rhymer, who,
in his _Governail of Princes_, a didactic poem translated from the
Latin {43} about 1413, drew, or caused to be drawn, on the margin of
his MS. a colored portrait of his "maister dere and fader reverent,"
"This londes verray tresour and richesse,
Dethe by thy dethe hath harm irreparable
Unto us done; hir vengeable duresse
Dispoiled hath this londe of the swetnesse
Of Rhetoryk."
Another versifier of this same generation was John Lydgate, a
Benedictine monk, of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, a very
prolix writer, who composed, among other things, the _Story of Thebes_,
as an addition to the _Canterbury Tales_. His ballad of _London
Lyckpenny_, recounting the adventures of a countryman who goes to the
law courts at Westminster in search of justice,
"But for lack of mony I could not speede,"
is of interest for the glimpse that it gives us of London street life.
Chaucer's influence wrought more fruitfully in Scotland, whither it was
carried by James I., who had been captured by the English when a boy of
eleven, and brought up at Windsor as a prisoner of State. There he
wrote during the reign of Henry V. (1413-1422) a poem in six cantos,
entitled the _King's Quhair_ (King's Book), in Chaucer's seven lined
stanza which had been employed by Lydgate in his _Falls of Princes_
(from Boccaccio), and which was afterward called {44} the "rime royal,"
from its use by King James, The _King's Quhair_ tells how the poet, on
a May morning, looks from the window of his prison chamber into the
castle garden full of alleys, hawthorn hedges, and fair arbors set with
"The sharpe, greene, sweete juniper."
He was listening to "the little sweete nightingale," when suddenly
casting down his eyes he saw a lady walking in the garden, and at once
his "heart became her thrall." The incident is precisely like
Palamon's first sight of Emily in Chaucer's _Knight's Tale_, and almost
in the very words of Palamon, the poet addresses his lady:
"Ah, sweet, are ye a worldly creature
Or heavenly thing in likeness of nature?
Or are ye very Nature, the goddess,
That have depainted with your heavenly hand
This garden full of flowres as they stand?"
Then, after a vision in the taste of the age, in which the royal
prisoner is transported in turn to the courts of _Venus_, _Minerva_,
and _Fortune_, and receives their instruction in the duties belonging
to Love's service, he wakes from sleep and a white turtle-dove brings
to his window a spray of red gillyflowers, whose leaves are inscribed,
in golden letters, with a message of encouragement.
James I. may be reckoned among the English poets. He mentions Chaucer,
Gower, and Lydgate as his masters. His education was English, and so
was the dialect of his poem, although the {45} unique MS. of it is in
the Scotch spelling. The _King's Quhair_ is somewhat overladen with
ornament and with the fashionable allegorical devices, but it is, upon
the whole, a rich and tender love song, the best specimen of court
poetry between the time of Chaucer and the time of Spenser. The lady
who walked in the garden on that May morning was Jane Beaufort, niece
to Henry IV. She was married to her poet after his release from
captivity and became Queen of Scotland in 1424. Twelve years later
James was murdered by Sir Robert Graham and his Highlanders, and his
wife, who strove to defend him, was wounded by the assassins. The
story of the murder has been told of late by D. G. Rossetti, in his
ballad, _The King's Tragedy_.
The whole life of this princely singer was, like his poem, in the very
spirit of romance.
The effect of all this imitation of Chaucer was to fix a standard of
literary style, and to confirm the authority of the East-Midland
English in which he had written. Though the poets of the 15th century
were not overburdened with genius, they had, at least, a definite model
to follow. As in the 14th century, metrical romances continued to be
translated from the French, homilies and saints' legends and rhyming
chronicles were still manufactured. But the poems of Occleve and
Lydgate and James I. had helped to polish and refine the tongue and to
prolong the Chaucerian tradition. The literary English never again
slipped {46} back into the chaos of dialects which had prevailed before
Chaucer.
In the history of every literature the development of prose is later
than that of verse. The latter being, by its very form, artificial, is
cultivated as a fine art, and its records preserved in an early stage
of society, when prose is simply the talk of men, and not thought
worthy of being written and kept. English prose labored under the
added disadvantage of competing with Latin, which was the cosmopolitan
tongue and the medium of communication between scholars of all
countries. Latin was the language of the Church, and in the Middle
Ages churchman and scholar were convertible terms. The word _clerk_
meant either priest or scholar. Two of the _Canterbury Tales_ are in
prose, as is also the _Testament of Love_, formerly ascribed to
Chaucer, and the style of all these is so feeble, wandering, and
unformed that it is hard to believe that they were written by the same
man who wrote the _Knight's Tale_ and the story of _Griselda_. _The
Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundeville_--the forerunner of that
great library of Oriental travel which has enriched our modern
literature--was written, according to its author, first in Latin, then
in French, and, lastly, in the year 1356, translated into English for
the behoof of "lordes and knyghtes and othere noble and worthi men,
that conne not Latyn but litylle." The author professed to have spent
over thirty years in Eastern travel, to have penetrated as far {47} as
Farther India and the "iles that ben abouten Indi," to have been in the
service of the Sultan of Babylon in his wars against the Bedouins, and,
at another time, in the employ of the Great Khan of Tartary. But there
is no copy of the Latin version of his travels extant; the French seems
to be much later than 1356, and the English MS. to belong to the early
years of the fifteenth century, and to have been made by another hand.
Recent investigations make it probable that Maundeville borrowed his
descriptions of the remoter East from many sources, and particularly
from the narrative of Odoric, a Minorite friar of Lombardy, who wrote
about 1330. Some doubt is even cast upon the existence of any such
person as Maundeville. Whoever wrote the book that passes under his
name, however, would seem to have visited the Holy Land, and the part
of the "voiage" that describes Palestine and the Levant is fairly close
to the truth. The rest of the work, so far as it is not taken from the
tales of other travelers, is a diverting tissue of fables about
gryfouns that fly away with yokes of oxen, tribes of one-legged
Ethiopians who shelter themselves from the sun by using their monstrous
feet as umbrellas, etc.
During the 15th century English prose was gradually being brought into
a shape fitting it for more serious uses. In the controversy between
the Church and the Lollards Latin was still mainly employed, but Wiclif
had written some of his tracts in English, and, in 1449, Reginald
Peacock, Bishop of {48} St. Asaph, contributed, in English, to the same
controversy, _The Represser of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy_. Sir
John Fortescue, who was chief-justice of the king's bench from
1442-1460, wrote during the reign of Edward IV. a book on the
_Difference between Absolute and Limited Monarchy_, which may be
regarded as the first treatise on political philosophy and
constitutional law in the language. But these works hardly belong to
pure literature, and are remarkable only as early, though not very
good, examples of English prose in a barren time. The 15th century was
an era of decay and change. The Middle Age was dying, Church and State
were slowly disintegrating under the new intellectual influences that
were working secretly under ground. In England the civil wars of the
Red and White Roses were breaking up the old feudal society by
decimating and impoverishing the baronage, thus preparing the way for
the centralized monarchy of the Tudors. Toward the close of that
century, and early in the next, happened the four great events, or
series of events, which freed and widened men's minds, and, in a
succession of shocks, overthrew the mediaeval system of life and
thought. These were the invention of printing, the Renascence, or
revival of classical learning, the discovery of America, and the
Protestant Reformation.
William Caxton, the first English printer, learned the art in Cologne.
In 1476 he set up his press and sign, a red pole, in the Almonry at
Westminster. Just before the introduction of printing the demand {49}
for MS. copies had grown very active, stimulated, perhaps, by the
coming into general use of linen paper instead of the more costly
parchment. The scriptoria of the monasteries were the places where the
transcribing and illuminating of MSS. went on, professional copyists
resorting to Westminster Abbey, for example, to make their copies of
books belonging to the monastic library. Caxton's choice of a spot
was, therefore, significant. His new art for multiplying copies began
to supersede the old method of transcription at the very head-quarters
of the MS. makers. The first book that bears his Westminster imprint
was the _Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers_, translated from the
French by Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, a brother-in-law of Edward
IV. The list of books printed by Caxton is interesting, as showing the
taste of the time, as he naturally selected what was most in demand.
The list shows that manuals of devotion and chivalry were still in
chief request, books like the _Order of Chivalry_, _Faits of Arms_, and
the _Golden Legend_, which last Caxton translated himself, as well as
_Reynard the Fox_, and a French version of the _Aeneid_. He also
printed, with continuations of his own, revisions of several early
chronicles, and editions of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. A translation
of _Cicero on Friendship_, made directly from the Latin, by Thomas
Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, was printed by Caxton, but no edition of a
classical author in the original. The new learning of the Renascence
had not, as {50} yet, taken much hold in England. Upon the whole, the
productions of Caxton's press were mostly of a kind that may be
described as mediaeval, and the most important of them, if we except
his edition of Chaucer, was that "noble and joyous book," as Caxton
called it, _Le Morte Darthur_, written by Sir Thomas Malory in 1469,
and printed by Caxton in 1485. This was a compilation from French
Arthur romances, and was by far the best English prose that had yet
been written. It may be doubted, indeed, whether, for purposes of
simple story telling, the picturesque charm of Malory's style has been
improved upon. The episode which lends its name to the whole romance,
the death of Arthur, is most impressively told, and Tennyson has
followed Malory's narrative closely, even to such details of the scene
as the little chapel by the sea, the moonlight, and the answer which
Sir Bedwere made the wounded king, when bidden to throw Excalibur into
the water, "'What saw thou there?' said the king. 'Sir,' he said, 'I
saw nothing but the waters wap and the waves wan.'"
"I heard the ripple washing in the reeds
And the wild water lapping on the crag."
And very touching and beautiful is the oft-quoted lament of Sir Ector
over Launcelot, in Malory's final chapter: "'Ah, Launcelot,' he said,
'thou were head of all Christian knights; and now I dare say,' said Sir
Ector, 'thou, Sir Launcelot, there thou liest, that thou were never
matched of earthly {51} knight's hand; and thou were the courtiest
knight that ever bare shield; and thou were the truest friend to thy
lover that ever bestrode horse; and thou were the truest lover of a
sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou were the kindest man that
ever strake with sword; and thou were the goodliest person ever came
among press of knights; and thou were the meekest man and the gentlest
that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight
to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.'"
Equally good, as an example of English prose narrative, was the
translation made by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, of that most
brilliant of the French chroniclers, Chaucer's contemporary, Sir John
Froissart. Lord Berners was the English governor of Calais, and his
version of Froissart's _Chronicles_ was made in 1523-25, at the request
of Henry VIII. In these two books English chivalry spoke its last
genuine word. In Sir Philip Sidney the character of the knight was
merged into that of the modern gentleman. And although tournaments
were still held in the reign of Elizabeth, and Spenser cast his _Faery
Queene_ into the form of a chivalry romance, these were but a
ceremonial survival and literary tradition from an order of things that
had passed away. How antagonistic the new classical culture was to the
vanished ideal of the Middle Age may be read in _Toxophilus_, a
treatise on archery published in 1545, by Roger Ascham, a Greek
lecturer in Cambridge, and the {52} tutor of the Princess Elizabeth and
of Lady Jane Grey. "In our forefathers' time, when Papistry as a
standing pool covered and overflowed all England, few books were read
in our tongue saving certain books of chivalry, as they said, for
pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in monasteries by
idle monks or wanton canons: as one, for example, _Morte Arthure_, the
whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points, in open
manslaughter and bold bawdry. This is good stuff for wise men to laugh
at or honest men to take pleasure at. Yet I know when God's Bible was
banished the Court, and _Morte Arthure_ received into the prince's
chamber."
The fashionable school of courtly allegory, first introduced into
England by the translation of the _Romaunt of the Rose_, reached its
extremity in Stephen Hawes's _Passetyme of Pleasure_, printed by
Caxton's successor, Wynkyn de Worde, in 1517. This was a dreary and
pedantic poem, in which it is told how Graunde Amoure, after a long
series of adventures and instructions among such shadowy personages as
Verite, Observaunce, Falshed, and Good Operacion, finally won the love
of La Belle Pucel. Hawes was the last English poet of note whose
culture was exclusively mediaeval. His contemporary, John Skelton,
mingled the old fashions with the new classical learning. In his
_Bowge of Courte_ (Court Entertainment or Dole), and in others of his
earlier pieces, he used, like Hawes, Chaucer's seven-lined stanza. But
his later {53} poems were mostly written in a verse of his own
invention, called after him _Skeltonical_. This was a sort of
glorified doggerel, in short, swift, ragged lines, with occasional
intermixture of French and Latin.
"Her beautye to augment.
Dame Nature hath her lent
A warte upon her cheke,
Who so lyst to seke
In her vysage a skar,
That semyth from afar
Lyke to the radyant star,
All with favour fret,
So properly it is set.
She is the vyolet,
The daysy delectable,
The columbine commendable,
The jelofer amyable;
For this most goodly floure,
This blossom of fressh colour,
So Jupiter me succour,
She florysheth new and new
In beaute and vertew;
_Hac claritate gemina,
O gloriosa femina, etc._"
Skelton was a rude railing rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and
original poet with a buffoon; coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure,
but always vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his
profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his
clerical character. His _Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng_ is a study of
very low life, reminding one slightly of Burns's _Jolly {54} Beggars_.
His _Phyllyp Sparowe_ is a sportive, pretty, fantastic elegy on the
death of a pet bird belonging to Mistress Joanna Scroupe, of Carowe,
and has been compared to the Latin poet Catullus's elegy on Lesbia's
sparrow. In _Speke_, _Parrot_, and _Why Come ye not to Courte?_ he
assailed the powerful Cardinal Wolsey with the most ferocious satire,
and was, in consequence, obliged to take sanctuary at Westminster,
where he died in 1529. Skelton was a classical scholar, and at one
time tutor to Henry VIII. The great humanist, Erasmus, spoke of him as
the "one light and ornament of British letters." Caxton asserts that
he had read Virgil, Ovid, and Tully, and quaintly adds, "I suppose he
hath dronken of Elycon's well."
In refreshing contrast with the artificial court poetry of the 15th and
first three quarters of the 16th century, was the folk-poetry, the
popular ballad literature which was handed down by oral tradition. The
English and Scotch ballads were narrative songs, written in a variety
of meters, but chiefly in what is known as the ballad stanza.
"In somer, when the shawes[1] be sheyne,[2]
And leves be large and longe,
Hit is full merry in feyre forest
To here the foulys song.
"To se the dere draw to the dale,
And leve the hilles hee,[3]
And shadow them in the leves grene,
Under the grene-wode tree."
[55]
It is not possible to assign a definite date to these ballads. They
lived on the lips of the people, and were seldom reduced to writing
till many years after they were first composed and sung. Meanwhile
they underwent repeated changes, so that we have numerous versions of
the same story. They belonged to no particular author, but, like all
folk-lore, were handled freely by the unknown poets, minstrels, and
ballad reciters, who modernized their language, added to them, or
corrupted them, and passed them along. Coming out of an uncertain
past, based on some dark legend of heart-break or bloodshed, they bear
no poet's name, but are _ferae naturae_, and have the flavor of wild
game. In the forms in which they are preserved few of them are older
than the 17th century, or the latter part of the 16th century, though
many, in their original shape, are, doubtless, much older. A very few
of the Robin Hood ballads go back to the 15th century, and to the same
period is assigned the charming ballad of the _Nut Brown Maid_ and the
famous border ballad of _Chevy Chase_, which describes a battle between
the retainers of the two great houses of Douglas and Percy. It was
this song of which Sir Philip Sidney wrote, "I never heard the old song
of Percy and Douglas but I found myself more moved than by a trumpet;
and yet it is sung but by some blind crouder,[4] with no rougher voice
than rude style." But the style of the ballads was not always rude.
{56} In their compressed energy of expression, in the impassioned
abrupt, yet indirect way in which they tell their tale of grief and
horror, there reside often a tragic power and art superior to any
English poetry that had been written since Chaucer, superior even to
Chaucer in the quality of intensity. The true home of the ballad
literature was "the north country," and especially the Scotch border,
where the constant forays of moss-troopers and the raids and private
warfare of the lords of the marches supplied many traditions of
heroism, like those celebrated in the old poem of the _Battle of
Otterbourne_, and in the _Hunting of the Cheviot_, or _Chevy Chase_,
already mentioned. Some of these are Scotch and others English; the
dialect of Lowland Scotland did not, in effect, differ much from that
of Northumberland and Yorkshire, both descended alike from the old
Northumbrian of Anglo-Saxon times. Other ballads were shortened,
popular versions of the chivalry romances which were passing out of
fashion among educated readers in the 16th century, and now fell into
the hands of the ballad makers. Others preserved the memory of local
countryside tales, family feuds, and tragic incidents, partly
historical and partly legendary, associated often with particular
spots. Such are, for example, _The Dowie Dens of Yarrow_, _Fair Helen
of Kirkconnell_, _The Forsaken Bride_, and _The Twa Corbies_. Others,
again, have a coloring of popular superstition, like the beautiful
ballad concerning {57} _Thomas of Ersyldoune_, who goes in at Eldon
Hill with an Elf queen and spends seven years in fairy land.
But the most popular of all the ballads were those which cluster about
the name of that good outlaw, Robin Hood, who, with his merry men,
hunted the forest of merry Sherwood, where he killed the king's deer
and waylaid rich travelers, but was kind to poor knights and honest
workmen. Robin Hood is the true ballad hero, the darling of the common
people, as Arthur was of the nobles. The names of his Confessor, Friar
Tuck; his mistress, Maid Marian; his companions, Little John,
Scathelock, and Much, the Miller's son, were as familiar as household
words. Langland, in the 14th century, mentions "rimes of Robin Hood,"
and efforts have been made to identify him with some actual personage,
as with one of the dispossessed barons who had been adherents of Simon
de Montfort in his war against Henry III. But there seems to be
nothing historical about Robin Hood. He was a creation of the popular
fancy. The game laws under the Norman kings were very oppressive, and
there were, doubtless, dim memories still cherished among the Saxon
masses of Hereward and Edric the Wild, who had defied the power of the
Conqueror, as well as of later freebooters, who had taken to the woods
and lived by plunder. Robin Hood was a thoroughly national character.
He had the English love of fair-play, the English readiness to shake
hands and {58} make up, and keep no malice when worsted in a square
fight. He beat and plundered the rich bishops and abbots, who had more
than their share of wealth, but he was generous and hospitable to the
distressed, and lived a free and careless life in the good green wood.
He was a mighty archer, with those national weapons, the long-bow and
the cloth-yard-shaft. He tricked and baffled legal authority in the
person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby appealing to that
secret sympathy with lawlessness and adventure which marked the
free-born, vigorous yeomanry of England. And finally the scenery of
the forest gives a poetic background and a never-failing charm to the
exploits of "the old Robin Hood of England" and his merry men.
The ballads came, in time, to have certain tricks of style, such as are
apt to characterize a body of anonymous folk-poetry. Such is their use
of conventional epithets; "the red, red gold," "the good, green wood,"
"the gray goose wing." Such are certain recurring terms of phrase like,
"But out and spak their stepmother."
Such is, finally, a kind of sing-song repetition, which doubtless
helped the ballad singer to memorize his stock, as, for example,
"She had'na pu'd a double rose,
A rose but only twae."
{59}
Or again,
"And mony ane sings o' grass, o' grass,
And mony ane sings o' corn;
An mony ane sings o' Robin Hood,
Kens little whare he was born.
It was na in the ha', the ha',
Nor in the painted bower;
But it was in the gude green wood,
Amang the lily flower."
Copies of some of these old ballads were hawked about in the 16th
century, printed in black letter, "broad sides," or single sheets.
Wynkyn de Worde printed, in 1489, _A Lytell Geste of Robin Hood_, which
is a sort of digest of earlier ballads on the subject. In the 17th
century a few of the English popular ballads were collected in
miscellanies, called _Garlands_. Early in the 18th century the Scotch
poet, Allan Ramsay, published a number of Scotch ballads in the
_Evergreen_ and _Tea-Table Miscellany_. But no large and important
collection was put forth until Percy's _Reliques_, 1765, a book which
had a powerful influence upon Wordsworth and Walter Scott. In Scotland
some excellent ballads in the ancient manner were written in the 18th
century, such as Jane Elliott's _Lament for Flodden_, and the fine
ballad of Sir Patrick Spence. Walter Scott's _Proud Maisie is in the
Wood_, is a perfect reproduction of the pregnant, indirect method of
the old ballad makers.
In 1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks, {60} and many Greek
scholars, with their MSS., fled into Italy, where they began teaching
their language and literature, and especially the philosophy of Plato.
There had been little or no knowledge of Greek in western Europe during
the Middle Ages, and only a very imperfect knowledge of the Latin
classics. Ovid and Statius were widely read, and so was the late Latin
poet, Boethius, whose _De Consolatione Philosophiae_ had been
translated into English by King Alfred and by Chaucer. Little was
known of Vergil at first hand, and he was popularly supposed to have
been a mighty wizard, who made sundry works of enchantment at Rome,
such as a magic mirror and statue. Caxton's so-called translation of
the _Aeneid_ was in reality nothing but a version of a French romance
based on Vergil's epic. Of the Roman historians, orators, and
moralists, such as Livy, Tacitus, Caesar, Cicero, and Seneca, there was
an almost entire ignorance, as also of poets like Horace, Lucretius,
Juvenal, and Catullus. The gradual rediscovery of the remains of
ancient art and literature which took place in the 15th century, and
largely in Italy, worked an immense revolution in the mind of Europe.
MSS. were brought out of their hiding places, edited by scholars and
spread abroad by means of the printing-press. Statues were dug up and
placed in museums, and men became acquainted with a civilization far
more mature than that of the Middle Age, and with models of perfect
{61} workmanship in letters and the fine arts. In the latter years of
the 15th century a number of Englishmen learned Greek in Italy and
brought it back with them to England. William Grocyn and Thomas
Linacre, who had studied at Florence under the refugee, Demetrius
Chalcondylas, began teaching Greek, at Oxford, the former as early as
1491. A little later John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's and the founder of
St. Paul's School, and his friend, William Lily, the grammarian and
first master of St. Paul's (1500), also studied Greek abroad, Colet in
Italy, and Lily at Rhodes and in the city of Rome. Thomas More,
afterward the famous chancellor of Henry VIII., was among the pupils of
Grocyn and Linacre at Oxford. Thither also, in 1497, came in search of
the new knowledge, the Dutchman, Erasmus, who became the foremost
scholar of his time. From Oxford the study spread to the sister
university, where the first English Grecian of his day, Sir Jno. Cheke,
who "taught Cambridge and King Edward Greek," became the incumbent of
the new professorship founded about 1540. Among his pupils was Roger
Ascham, already mentioned, in whose time St. John's College, Cambridge,
was the chief seat of the new learning, of which Thomas Nash testifies
that it "was as an universitie within itself; having more candles light
in it, every winter morning before four of the clock, than the four of
clock bell gave strokes." Greek was not introduced at the universities
without violent {62} opposition from the conservative element, who were
nicknamed Trojans. The opposition came in part from the priests, who
feared that the new study would sow seeds of heresy. Yet many of the
most devout churchmen were friends of a more liberal culture, among
them Thomas More, whose Catholicism was undoubted and who went to the
block for his religion. Cardinal Wolsey, whom More succeeded as
chancellor, was also a munificent patron of learning and founded Christ
Church College, at Oxford. Popular education at once felt the impulse
of the new studies, and over twenty endowed grammar schools were
established in England in the first twenty years of the 16th century.
Greek became a passion even with English ladies. Ascham in his
_Schoolmaster_, a treatise on education, published in 1570, says, that
Queen Elisabeth "readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day, than
some prebendarie of this Church doth read Latin in a whole week." And
in the same book he tells how calling once upon Lady Jane Grey, at
Brodegate, in Leicestershire, he "found her in her chamber reading
_Phaedon Platonis_ in Greek, and that with as much delite as some
gentlemen would read a merry tale in _Bocase_," and when he asked her
why she had not gone hunting with the rest, she answered, "I wisse, all
their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in
Plato." Ascham's _Schoolmaster_, as well as his earlier book,
_Toxophilus_, a Platonic dialogue on archery, bristles with quotations
from the Greek and Latin {63} classics, and with that perpetual
reference to the authority of antiquity on every topic that he touches,
which remained the fashion in all serious prose down to the time of
Dryden.
One speedy result of the new learning was fresh translations of the
Scriptures into English, out of the original tongues. In 1525 William
Tyndal printed at Cologne and Worms his version of the New Testament
from the Greek. Ten years later Miles Coverdale made, at Zurich, a
translation of the whole Bible from the German and the Latin. These
were the basis of numerous later translations, and the strong beautiful
English of Tyndal's _Testament_ is preserved for the most part in our
Authorized Version (1611). At first it was not safe to make or
distribute these early translations in England. Numbers of copies were
brought into the country, however, and did much to promote the cause of
the Reformation. After Henry VIII. had broken with the Pope the new
English Bible circulated freely among the people. Tyndal and Sir
Thomas More carried on a vigorous controversy in English upon some of
the questions at issue between the Church and the Protestants. Other
important contributions to the literature of the Reformation were the
homely sermons preached at Westminster and at Paul's Cross by Bishop
Hugh Latimer, who was burned at Oxford in the reign of Bloody Mary.
The English Book of Common Prayer was compiled in 1549-52. More was,
perhaps, the best {64} representative of a group of scholars who wished
to enlighten and reform the Church from inside, but who refused to
follow Henry VIII. in his breach with Rome. Dean Colet and John
Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, belonged to the same company, and Fisher
was beheaded in the same year (1535) with More, and for the same
offense, namely, refusing to take the oath to maintain the act
confirming the king's divorce from Catherine of Arragon and his
marriage with Anne Boleyn. More's philosophy is best reflected in his
_Utopia_, the description of an ideal commonwealth, modeled on Plato's
Republic, and printed in 1516. The name signifies "no place"
(_Outopos_), and has furnished an adjective to the language. The
_Utopia_ was in Latin, but More's _History of Edward V. and Richard
III._, written in 1513, though not printed till 1557, was in English.
It is the first example in the tongue of a history as distinguished
from a chronicle; that is, it is a reasoned and artistic presentation
of an historic period, and not a mere chronological narrative of events.
The first three quarters of the 16th century produced no great original
work of literature in England. It was a season of preparation, of
education. The storms of the Reformation interrupted and delayed the
literary renascence through the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and
Queen Mary. When Elizabeth came to the throne, in 1558, a more settled
order of things began, and a period of great national prosperity and
{65} glory. Meanwhile the English mind had been slowly assimilating
the new classical culture, which was extended to all classes of readers
by the numerous translations of Greek and Latin authors. A fresh
poetic impulse came from Italy. In 1557 appeared _Tottel's
Miscellany_, containing songs and sonnets by a "new company of courtly
makers." Most of the pieces in the volume had been written years
before, by gentlemen of Henry VIII.'s court, and circulated in MS. The
two chief contributors were Sir Thomas Wiat, at one time English
embassador to Spain, and that brilliant noble, Henry Howard, the Earl
of Surrey, who was beheaded in 1547 for quartering the king's arms with
his own. Both of them were dead long before their work was printed.
The pieces in _Tottel's Miscellany_ show very clearly the influence of
Italian poetry. We have seen that Chaucer took subjects and something
more from Boccaccio and Petrarch. But the sonnet, which Petrarch had
brought to great perfection, was first introduced into England by Wiat.
There was a great revival of sonneteering in Italy in the 16th century,
and a number of Wiat's poems were adaptations of the sonnets and
_canzoni_ of Petrarch and later poets. Others were imitations of
Horace's satires and epistles. Surrey introduced the Italian blank
verse into English in his translation of two books of the _Aeneid_.
The love poetry of _Tottel's Miscellany_ is polished and artificial,
like the models which it followed. Dante's {66} Beatrice was a child,
and so was Petrarch's Laura. Following their example, Surrey addressed
his love complaints, by way of compliment, to a little girl of the
noble Irish family of Geraldine. The Amourists, or love sonneters,
dwelt on the metaphysics of the passion with a tedious minuteness, and
the conventional nature of their sighs and complaints may often be
guessed by an experienced reader from the titles of their poems:
"Description of the restless state of a lover, with suit to his lady to
rue on his dying heart;" "Hell tormenteth not the damned ghosts so sore
as unkindness the lover;" "The lover prayeth not to be disdained,
refused, mistrusted, nor forsaken," etc. The most genuine utterance of
Surrey was his poem written while imprisoned in Windsor--a cage where
so many a song-bird has grown vocal. And Wiat's little piece of eight
lines, "Of his Return from Spain," is worth reams of his amatory
affectations. Nevertheless the writers in _Tottel's Miscellany_ were
real reformers of English poetry. They introduced new models of style
and new metrical forms, and they broke away from the mediaeval
traditions which had hitherto obtained. The language had undergone
some changes since Chaucer's time, which made his scansion obsolete.
The accent of many words of French origin, like _nature_, _courage_,
_virtue_, _matere_, had shifted to the first syllable, and the _e_ of
the final syllables _es_, _en_, _ed_, and _e_, had largely disappeared.
But the language of poetry tends {67} to keep up archaisms of this
kind, and in Stephen Hawes, who wrote a century after Chaucer, we still
find such lines as these:
"But he my strokes might right well endure,
He was so great and huge of puissance." [5]
Hawes's practice is variable in this respect, and so is his
contemporary, Skelton's. But in Wiat and Surrey, who wrote only a few
years later, the reader first feels sure that he is reading verse
pronounced quite in the modern fashion.
But Chaucer's example still continued potent. Spenser revived many of
his obsolete words, both in his pastorals and in his _Faery Queene_,
thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction, but incurring
Ben Jonson's censure, that he "writ no language." A poem that stands
midway between Spenser and late mediaeval work of Chaucer's
school--such as Hawes's _Passetyme of Pleasure_--was the _Induction_
contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, in 1563 to a
collection of narrative poems called the _Mirrour for Magistrates_.
The whole series was the work of many hands, modeled upon Lydgate's
_Falls of Princes_ (taken from Boccaccio), and was designed as a
warning to great men of the fickleness of fortune. The _Induction_ is
the only noteworthy part of it. It was an allegory, written in
Chaucer's seven-lined stanza and described with a somber imaginative
power, the figure of Sorrow, her abode {68} in the "griesly lake" of
Avernus and her attendants, Remorse, Dread, Old Age, etc. Sackville
was the author of the first regular English tragedy, _Gorboduc_, and it
was at his request that Ascham wrote the _Schoolmaster_.
Italian poetry also fed the genius of Edmund Spenser (1552-99). While
a student at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, he had translated some of the
_Visions of Petrarch_, and the _Visions of Bellay_, a French poet, but
it was only in 1579 that the publication of his _Shepheard's Calendar_
announced the coming of a great original poet, the first since Chaucer.
The _Shepheard's Calendar_ was a pastoral in twelve eclogues--one for
each month in the year. There had been a great revival of pastoral
poetry in Italy and France, but, with one or two insignificant
exceptions, Spenser's were the first bucolics in English. Two of his
eclogues were paraphrases from Clement Marot, a French Protestant poet,
whose psalms were greatly in fashion at the court of Francis I. The
pastoral machinery had been used by Vergil and by his modern imitators,
not merely to portray the loves of Strephon and Chloe, or the idyllic
charms of rustic life; but also as a vehicle of compliment, elegy,
satire, and personal allusion of many kinds. Spenser, accordingly,
alluded to his friends, Sidney and Harvey, as the shepherds, Astrophel
and Hobbinol, paid court to Queen Elizabeth as Cynthia, and introduced,
in the form of anagrams, names of the High-Church Bishop of London,
Aylmer, {69} and the Low-Church Archbishop Grindal. The conventional
pastoral is a somewhat delicate exotic in English poetry, and
represents a very unreal Arcadia. Before the end of the 17th century
the squeak of the oaten pipe had become a burden, and the only piece of
the kind which it is easy to read without some impatience is Milton's
wonderful _Lycidas_. The _Shepheard's Calendar_, however, though it
belonged to an artificial order of literature, had the unmistakable
stamp of genius in its style. There was a broad, easy mastery of the
resources of language, a grace, fluency, and music which were new to
English poetry. It was written while Spenser was in service with the
Earl of Leicester, and enjoying the friendship of his nephew, the
all-accomplished Sidney, and was, perhaps, composed at the latter's
country seat of Penshurst. In the following year Spenser went to
Ireland as private secretary to Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton, who had
just been appointed Lord Deputy of that kingdom. After filling several
clerkships in the Irish government, Spenser received a grant of the
castle and estate of Kilcolman, a part of the forfeited lands of the
rebel Earl of Desmond. Here, among landscapes richly wooded, like the
scenery of his own fairy land, "under the cooly shades of the green
alders by the Mulla's shore," Sir Walter Raleigh found him, in 1589,
busy upon his _Faery Queene_. In his poem, _Colin Clouts Come Home
Again_, Spenser tells, in pastoral language, how "the shepherd of the
{70} ocean" persuaded him to go to London, where he presented him to
the Queen, under whose patronage the first three books of his great
poem were printed, in 1590. A volume of minor poems, entitled
_Complaints_, followed in 1591, and the three remaining books of the
_Faery Queene_ in 1596. In 1595-96 he published also his _Daphnaida_,
_Prothalamion_, and the four hymns _On Love_ and _Beauty_, and _On
Heavenly Love_ and _Heavenly Beauty_. In 1598, in Tyrone's rebellion,
Kilcolman Castle was sacked and burned, and Spenser, with his family,
fled to London, where he died in January, 1599.
The _Faery Queene_ reflects, perhaps, more fully than any other English
work, the many-sided literary influences of the renascence. It was the
blossom of a richly composite culture. Its immediate models were
Ariosto's _Orlando Furioso_, the first forty cantos of which were
published in 1515, and Tasso's _Gerusalemme Liberata_, printed in 1581.
Both of these were, in subject, romances of chivalry, the first based
upon the old Charlemagne epos--Orlando being identical with the hero of
the French _Chanson de Roland_--the second upon the history of the
first Crusade, and the recovery of the Holy City from the Saracen. But
in both of them there was a splendor of diction and a wealth of
coloring quite unknown to the rude mediaeval romances. Ariosto and
Tasso wrote with the great epics of Homer and Vergil constantly in
mind, and all about them was the brilliant light of Italian art, in its
early freshness {71} and power. The _Faery Queene_, too, was a tale of
knight-errantry. Its hero was King Arthur, and its pages swarm with
the familiar adventures and figures of Gothic romance; distressed
ladies and their champions, combats with dragons and giants, enchanted
castles, magic rings, charmed wells, forest hermitages, etc. But side
by side with these appear the fictions of Greek mythology and the
personified abstractions of fashionable allegory. Knights, squires,
wizards, hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods, Idleness, Gluttony, and
Superstition jostle each other in Spenser's fairy land. Descents to
the infernal shades, in the manner of Homer and Vergil, alternate with
descriptions of the Palace of Pride in the manner of the _Romaunt of
the Rose_. But Spenser's imagination was a powerful spirit, and held
all these diverse elements in solution. He removed them to an ideal
sphere "apart from place, withholding time," where they seem all alike
equally real, the dateless conceptions of the poet's dream.
The poem was to have been "a continued allegory or dark conceit," in
twelve books, the hero of each book representing one of the twelve
moral virtues. Only six books and the fragment of a seventh were
written. By way of complimenting his patrons and securing contemporary
interest, Spenser undertook to make his allegory a double one, personal
and historical, as well as moral or abstract. Thus Gloriana, the Queen
of Faery, stands not only for Glory but for Elizabeth, {72} to whom the
poem was dedicated. Prince Arthur is Leicester, as well as
Magnificence. Duessa is Falsehood, but also Mary Queen of Scots.
Grantorto is Philip II. of Spain. Sir Artegal is Justice, but likewise
he is Arthur Grey de Wilton. Other characters shadow forth Sir Walter
Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, Henry IV. of France, etc.; and such public
events as the revolt of the Spanish Netherlands, the Irish rebellion,
the execution of Mary Stuart, and the rising of the northern Catholic
houses against Elizabeth are told in parable. In this way the poem
reflects the spiritual struggle of the time, the warfare of young
England against Popery and Spain.
The allegory is not always easy to follow. It is kept up most
carefully in the first two books, but it sat rather lightly on
Spenser's conscience, and is not of the essence of the poem. It is an
ornament put on from the outside and detachable at pleasure. The
"Spenserian stanza," in which the _Faery Queene_ was written, was
adapted from the _ottava riwa_ of Ariosto. Spenser changed somewhat
the order of the rimes in the first eight lines and added a ninth line
of twelve syllables, thus affording more space to the copious
luxuriance of his style and the long-drawn sweetness of his verse. It
was his instinct to dilate and elaborate every image to the utmost, and
his similes, especially--each of which usually fills a whole
stanza--have the pictorial amplitude of Homer's. Spenser was, in fact,
a great painter. His poetry {73} is almost purely sensuous. The
personages in the _Faery Queene_ are not characters, but richly colored
figures, moving to the accompaniment of delicious music, in an
atmosphere of serene remoteness from the earth. Charles Lamb said that
he was the poet's poet, that is, he appealed wholly to the artistic
sense and to the love of beauty. Not until Keats did another English
poet appear so filled with the passion for all outward shapes of
beauty, so exquisitely alive to all impressions of the senses. Spenser
was, in some respects, more an Italian than an English poet. It is
said that the Venetian gondoliers still sing the stanzas of Tasso's
_Gerusalemme Liberata_. It is not easy to imagine the Thames bargees
chanting passages from the _Faery Queene_. Those English poets who
have taken strongest hold upon their public have done so by their
profound interpretation of our common life. But Spenser escaped
altogether from reality into a region of pure imagination. His aerial
creations resemble the blossoms of the epiphytic orchids, which have no
root in the soil, but draw their nourishment from the moisture of the
air.
"_Their_ birth was of the womb of morning dew,
And _their_ conception of the glorious prime."
Among the minor poems of Spenser the most delightful were his
_Prothalamion_ and _Epithalamion_. The first was a "spousal verse,"
made for the double wedding of the Ladies Catherine and {74} Elizabeth
Somerset, whom the poet figures as two white swans that come swimming
down the Thames, whose surface the nymphs strew with lilies, till it
appears "like a bride's chamber-floor."
"Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,"
is the burden of each stanza. The _Epithalamion_ was Spenser's own
marriage song, written to crown his series of _Amoretti_, or love
sonnets, and is the most splendid hymn of triumphant love in the
language. Hardly less beautiful than these was _Muiopotmos; or, the
Fate of the Butterfly_, an addition to the classical myth of Arachne,
the spider. The four hymns in praise of _Love_ and _Beauty_, _Heavenly
Love_ and _Heavenly Beauty_, are also stately and noble poems, but by
reason of their abstractness and the Platonic mysticism which they
express, are less generally pleasing than the others mentioned.
Allegory and mysticism had no natural affiliation with Spenser's
genius. He was a seer of visions, of _images_ full, brilliant, and
distinct, and not like Bunyan, Dante, or Hawthorne, a projector into
bodily shapes of _ideas_, typical and emblematic, the shadows which
haunt the conscience and the mind.
1. A First Sketch of English Literature. By Henry Morley.
2. English Writers. By the same. Vol. iii. From Chaucer to Dunbar.
{75}
3. Skeat's Specimens of English Literature, 1594-1579. Clarendon Press
Series.
4. Morte Darthur. Globe Edition.
5. Child's English and Scottish Ballads. 8 vols.
6. Hale's edition of Spenser. Globe.
7. "A Royal Poet." Irving's Sketch-Book.
[1] Woods.
[2] Bright.
[3] High.
[4] Fiddler.
[5] Trisyllable--like _creature_, _neighebour_, etc, in Chaucer.
{76}
CHAPTER III.
THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE.
1564-1616.
The great age of English poetry opened with the publication of
Spenser's _Shepheard's Calendar_, in 1579, and closed with the printing
of Milton's _Samson Agonistes_, in 1671. Within this period of little
less than a century English thought passed through many changes, and
there were several successive phases of style in our imaginative
literature. Milton, who acknowledged Spenser as his master, and who
was a boy of eight years at Shakspere's death, lived long enough to
witness the establishment of an entirely new school of poets, in the
persons of Dryden and his contemporaries. But, roughly speaking, the
dates above given mark the limits of one literary epoch, which may not
improperly be called the Elisabethan. In strictness the Elisabethan
age ended with the queen's death, in 1603. But the poets of the
succeeding reigns inherited much of the glow and splendor which marked
the diction of their forerunners; and "the spacious times of great
Elisabeth" have been, by courtesy, prolonged to the year of the
Restoration (1660). There is a certain likeness {77} in the
intellectual products of the whole period, a largeness of utterance,
and a high imaginative cast of thought which stamp them all alike with
the queen's seal.
Nor is it by any undue stretch of the royal prerogative that the name
of the monarch has attached itself to the literature of her reign and
of the reigns succeeding hers. The expression "Victorian poetry" has a
rather absurd sound when one considers how little Victoria counts for
in the literature of her time. But in Elisabethan poetry the maiden
queen is really the central figure. She is Cynthia, she is Thetis,
great queen of shepherds and of the sea; she is Spenser's Gloriana, and
even Shakspere, the most impersonal of poets, paid tribute to her in
_Henry VIII_., and, in a more delicate and indirect way, in the little
allegory introduced into _Midsummer Night's Dream_.
"That very time I marked--but thou could'st not--
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took
At a fair vestal throned by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow
As he would pierce a hundred thousand hearts.
But I might see young Cupid's fiery dart
Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passed on
In maiden meditation, fancy free"--
an allusion to Leicester's unsuccessful suit for Elisabeth's hand.
The praises of the queen, which sound through {78} all the poetry of
her time, seem somewhat overdone to a modern reader. But they were not
merely the insipid language of courtly compliment. England had never
before had a female sovereign, except in the instance of the gloomy and
bigoted Mary. When she was succeeded by her more brilliant sister, the
gallantry of a gallant and fantastic age was poured at the latter's
feet, the sentiment of chivalry mingling itself with loyalty to the
crown. The poets idealized Elisabeth. She was to Spenser, to Sidney,
and to Raleigh, not merely a woman and a virgin queen, but the champion
of Protestantism, the lady of young England, the heroine of the
conflict against popery and Spain. Moreover Elisabeth was a great
woman. In spite of the vanity, caprice, and ingratitude which
disfigured her character, and the vacillating, tortuous policy which
often distinguished her government, she was at bottom a sovereign of
large views, strong will, and dauntless courage. Like her father, she
"loved a _man_," and she had the magnificent tastes of the Tudors. She
was a patron of the arts, passionately fond of shows and spectacles,
and sensible to poetic flattery. In her royal progresses through the
kingdom, the universities and the nobles and the cities vied with one
another in receiving her with plays, revels, masques, and triumphs, in
the mythological taste of the day. "When the queen paraded through a
country town," says Warton, the historian of English poetry, "almost
every {79} pageant was a pantheon. When she paid a visit at the house
of any of her nobility, at entering the hall she was saluted by the
Penates. In the afternoon, when she condescended to walk in the
garden, the lake was covered with tritons and nereids; the pages of the
family were converted into wood-nymphs, who peeped from every bower;
and the footmen gamboled over the lawns in the figure of satyrs. When
her majesty hunted in the park she was met by Diana who, pronouncing
our royal prude to be the brightest paragon of unspotted chastity,
invited her to groves free from the intrusions of Acteon." The most
elaborate of these entertainments of which we have any notice, were,
perhaps, the games celebrated in her honor by the Earl of Leicester,
when she visited him at Kenilworth, in 1575. An account of these was
published by a contemporary poet, George Gascoigne, _The Princely
Pleasures at the Court of Kenilworth_, and Walter Scott has made them
familiar to modern readers in his novel of _Kenilworth_. Sidney was
present on this occasion, and, perhaps, Shakspere, then a boy of
eleven, and living at Stratford, not far off, may have been taken to
see the spectacle, may have seen Neptune, riding on the back of a huge
dolphin in the castle lake, speak the copy of verses in which he
offered his trident to the empress of the sea, and may have
"heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back,
Utter such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at the sound."
{80} But in considering the literature of Elisabeth's reign it will be
convenient to speak first of the prose. While following up Spenser's
career to its close (1599), we have, for the sake of unity of
treatment, anticipated somewhat the literary history of the twenty
years preceding. In 1579 appeared a book which had a remarkable
influence on English prose. This was John Lyly's _Euphues, the Anatomy
of Wit_. It was in form a romance, the history of a young Athenian who
went to Naples to see the world and get an education; but it is in
substance nothing but a series of dialogues on love, friendship,
religion, etc., written in language which, from the title of the book,
has received the name of _Euphuism_. This new English became very
fashionable among the ladies, and "that beauty in court which could not
parley Euphuism," says a writer of 1632, "was as little regarded as she
which now there speaks not French."
Walter Scott introduced a Euphuist into his novel the _Monastery_, but
the peculiar jargon which Sir Piercie Shafton is made to talk is not at
all like the real Euphuism. That consisted of antithesis,
alliteration, and the profuse illustration of every thought by
metaphors borrowed from a kind of fabulous natural history. "Descend
into thine own conscience and consider with thyself the great
difference between staring and stark-blind, wit and wisdom, love and
lust; be merry, but with modesty; be sober, but not too sullen; {81} be
valiant, but not too venturous." "I see now that, as the fish
_Scolopidus_ in the flood _Araxes_ at the waxing of the moon is as
white as the driven snow, and at the waning as black as the burnt coal;
so Euphues, which at the first increasing of our familiarity was very
zealous, is now at the last cast become most faithless." Besides the
fish _Scolopidus_, the favorite animals of Lyly's menagerie are such as
the chameleon, which, "though he have most guts draweth least breath;"
the bird _Piralis_, "which sitting upon white cloth is white, upon
green, green;" and the serpent _Porphirius_, which, "though he be full
of poison, yet having no teeth, hurteth none but himself."
Lyly's style was pithy and sententious, and his sentences have the air
of proverbs or epigrams. The vice of Euphuism was its monotony. On
every page of the book there was something pungent, something quotable;
but many pages of such writing became tiresome. Yet it did much to
form the hitherto loose structure of English prose, by lending it point
and polish. His carefully balanced periods were valuable lessons in
rhetoric, and his book became a manual of polite conversation and
introduced that fashion of witty repartee, which is evident enough in
Shakspere's comic dialogue. In 1580 appeared the second part, _Euphues
and his England_, and six editions of the whole work were printed
before 1598. Lyly had many imitators. In Stephen Gosson's _School
{82} of Abuse_, a tract directed against the stage and published about
four months later than the first part of Euphues, the language is
distinctly Euphuistic. The dramatist, Robert Greene, published, in
1587, his _Menaphon; Camilla's Alarum to Slumbering Euphues_, and his
_Euphues's Censure to Philautus_. His brother dramatist, Thomas Lodge,
published; in 1590, _Rosalynde: Euphues's Golden Legacy_, from which
Shakspere took the plot of _As You Like It_. Shakspere and Ben Jonson
both quote from _Euphues_ in their plays, and Shakspere was really
writing Euphuism, when he wrote such a sentence as "Tis true, 'tis
pity; pity 'tis 'tis true."
That knightly gentleman, Philip Sidney, was a true type of the lofty
aspiration and manifold activity of Elizabethan England. He was
scholar, poet, courtier, diplomatist, statesman, soldier, all in one.
Educated at Oxford and then introduced at court by his uncle, the Earl
of Leicester, he had been sent to France when a lad of eighteen, with
the embassy which went to treat of the queen's proposed marriage to the
Duke of Alencon, and was in Paris at the time of the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew, in 1572. Afterward he had traveled through Germany,
Italy, and the Netherlands, had gone as embassador to the Emperor's
Court, and every-where won golden opinions. In 1580, while visiting
his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, at Wilton, he wrote, for her
pleasure, the _Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia_, which {83} remained in
MS. till 1590. This was a pastoral romance, after the manner of the
Italian _Arcadia_ of Sanazzaro, and the _Diana Enamorada_ of
Montemayor, a Portuguese author. It was in prose, but intermixed with
songs and sonnets, and Sidney finished only two books and a portion of
a third. It describes the adventures of two cousins, Musidorus and
Pyrocles, who are wrecked on the coast of Sparta. The plot is very
involved and is full of the stock episodes of romance: disguises,
surprises, love intrigues, battles, jousts and single combats.
Although the insurrection of the Helots against the Spartans forms a
part of the story, the Arcadia is not the real Arcadia of the Hellenic
Peloponnesus, but the fanciful country of pastoral romance, an unreal
clime, like the Faery Land of Spenser.
Sidney was our first writer of poetic prose. The poet Drayton says
that he
"did first reduce
Our tongue from Lyly's writing, then in use,
Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies,
Playing with words and idle similes."
Sidney was certainly no Euphuist, but his style was as "Italianated" as
Lyly's, though in a different way. His English was too pretty for
prose. His "Sidneian showers of sweet discourse" sowed every page of
the _Arcadia_ with those flowers of conceit, those sugared fancies
which his contemporaries loved, but which the taste of a severer {84}
age finds insipid. This splendid vice of the Elisabethan writers
appears in Sidney, chiefly in the form of an excessive personification.
If he describes a field full of roses, he makes "the roses add such a
ruddy show unto it, as though the field were bashful at his own
beauty." If he describes ladies bathing in a stream, he makes the
water break into twenty bubbles, as "not content to have the picture of
their face in large upon him, but he would in each of those bubbles set
forth the miniature of them." And even a passage which should be
tragic, such as the death of his heroine, Parthenia, he embroiders with
conceits like these: "For her exceeding fair eyes having with continued
weeping got a little redness about them, her round sweetly swelling
lips a little trembling, as though they kissed their neighbor Death; in
her cheeks the whiteness striving by little and little to get upon the
rosiness of them; her neck, a neck indeed of alabaster, displaying the
wound which with most dainty blood labored to drown his own beauties;
so as here was a river of purest red, there an island of perfectest
white," etc.
The _Arcadia_, like _Euphues_, was a lady's book. It was the favorite
court romance of its day, but it surfeits a modern reader with its
sweetness, and confuses him with its tangle of adventures. The lady
for whom it was written was the mother of that William Herbert, Earl of
Pembroke, to whom Shakspere's sonnets are thought to have been {85}
dedicated. And she was the subject of Ben Jonson's famous epitaph.
"Underneath this sable herse
Lies the subject of all verse,
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother;
Death, ere thou hast slain another
Learn'd and fair and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee."
Sidney's _Defense of Poesy_, composed in 1581, but not printed till
1595, was written in manlier English than the _Arcadia_, and is one of
the very few books of criticism belonging to a creative and uncritical
time. He was also the author of a series of love sonnets, _Astrophel
and Stella_, in which he paid Platonic court to the Lady Penelope Rich
(with whom he was not at all in love), according to the conventional
usage of the amourists.
Sidney died in 1586, from a wound received in a cavalry charge at
Zutphen, where he was an officer in the English contingent, sent to
help the Dutch against Spain. The story has often been told of his
giving his cup of water to a wounded soldier with the words, "Thy
necessity is yet greater than mine." Sidney was England's darling, and
there was hardly a poet in the land from whom his death did not obtain
"the meed of some melodious tear." Spenser's _Ruins of Time_ were
among the number of these funeral songs; but the best of them all was
by one Matthew Royden, concerning whom little is known.
{86} Another typical Englishman of Elisabeth's reign was Walter
Raleigh, who was even more versatile than Sidney, and more
representative of the restless spirit of romantic adventure, mixed with
cool, practical enterprise that marked the times. He fought against
the Queen's enemies by land and sea in many quarters of the globe; in
the Netherlands and in Ireland against Spain, with the Huguenot Army
against the League in France. Raleigh was from Devonshire, the great
nursery of English seamen. He was half-brother to the famous
navigator, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and cousin to another great captain,
Sir Richard Grenville. He sailed with Gilbert on one of his voyages
against the Spanish treasure fleet, and in 1591 he published a report
of the fight, near the Azores, between Grenville's ship, the Revenue,
and fifteen great ships of Spain, an action, said Francis Bacon,
"memorable even beyond credit, and to the height of some heroical
fable." Raleigh was active in raising a fleet against the Spanish
Armada of 1588. He was present in 1596 at the brilliant action in
which the Earl of Essex "singed the Spanish king's beard," in the
harbor of Cadiz. The year before he had sailed to Guiana, in search of
the fabled El Dorado, destroying on the way the Spanish town of San
Jose, in the West Indies; and on his return he published his _Discovery
of the Empire of Guiana_. In 1597 he captured the town of Fayal, in
the Azores. He took a prominent part in colonizing {87} Virginia, and
he introduced tobacco and the potato plant into Europe.
America was still a land of wonder and romance, full of rumors,
nightmares, and enchantments. In 1580, when Francis Drake, "the
Devonshire Skipper," had dropped anchor in Plymouth harbor, after his
voyage around the world, the enthusiasm of England had been mightily
stirred. These narratives of Raleigh, and the similar accounts of the
exploits of the bold sailors, Davis, Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert, and
Drake; but especially the great cyclopedia of nautical travel,
published by Richard Hakluyt, in 1589, _The Principal Navigations,
Voyages, and Discoveries made by the English Nation_, worked powerfully
on the imaginations of the poets. We see the influence of this
literature of travel in the _Tempest_, written undoubtedly after
Shakspere had been reading the narrative of Sir George Somers's
shipwreck on the Bermudas or "Isles of Devils."
Raleigh was not in favor with Elizabeth's successor, James I. He was
sentenced to death on a trumped-up charge of high treason. The
sentence hung over him until 1618, when it was revived against him and
he was beheaded. Meanwhile, during his twelve years' imprisonment in
the Tower, he had written his _magnum opus_, the _History of the
World_. This is not a history, in the modern sense, but a series of
learned dissertations on law, government, theology, magic, war, etc. A
chapter with such a caption as the following {88} would hardly be found
in a universal history nowadays: "Of their opinion which make Paradise
as high as the moon; and of others which make it higher than the middle
region of the air." The preface and conclusion are noble examples of
Elisabethan prose, and the book ends with an oft-quoted apostrophe to
Death. "O eloquent, just: and mighty Death! Whom none could advise,
thou has persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all
the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and
despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-fetched greatness, all
the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with
these two narrow words, _hic jacet_."
Although so busy a man, Raleigh found time to be a poet. Spenser calls
him "the summer's nightingale," and George Puttenham, in his _Art of
English Poesy_ (1589), finds his "vein most lofty, insolent, and
passionate." Puttenham used _insolent_ in its old sense, _uncommon_;
but this description is hardly less true, if we accept the word in its
modern meaning. Raleigh's most notable verses, _The Lie_, are a
challenge to the world, inspired by indignant pride and the weariness
of life--the _saeva indignatio_ of Swift. The same grave and caustic
melancholy, the same disillusion marks his quaint poem, _The
Pilgrimage_. It is remarkable how many of the verses among his few
poetical remains are asserted in the MSS. or by tradition to have been
"made by Sir Walter {89} Raleigh the night before he was beheaded." Of
one such poem the assertion is probably true, namely, the lines "found
in his Bible in the gate-house at Westminster."
"Even such is Time, that takes in trust,
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays as but with earth and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days;
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust!"
The strictly _literary_ prose of the Elisabethan period bore a small
proportion to the verse. Many entire departments of prose literature
were as yet undeveloped. Fiction was represented--outside of the
_Arcadia_ and _Euphues_ already mentioned--chiefly by tales translated
or imitated from Italian _novelle_. George Turberville's _Tragical
Tales_ (1566) was a collection of such stories, and William Paynter's
_Palace of Pleasure_ (1576-1577) a similar collection from Boccaccio's
_Decameron_ and the novels of Bandello. These translations are mainly
of interest, as having furnished plots to the English dramatists.
Lodge's _Rosalind_ and Robert Greene's _Pandosto_, the sources
respectively of Shakspere's _As You Like It_ and _Winter's Tale_, are
short pastoral romances, not without prettiness in their artificial
way. The satirical pamphlets of Thomas Nash and his fellows, against
"Martin Marprelate," an anonymous writer, or {90} company of writers,
who attacked the bishops, are not wanting in wit, but are so cumbered
with fantastic whimsicalities, and so bound up with personal quarrels,
that oblivion has covered them. The most noteworthy of them were
Nash's _Piers Penniless's Supplication to the Devil_, Lyly's _Pap with
a Hatchet_, and Greene's _Groat's Worth of Wit_. Of books which were
not so much literature as the material of literature, mention may be
made of the _Chronicle of England_, compiled by Ralph Holinshed in
1577. This was Shakspere's English history, and its strong Lancastrian
bias influenced Shakspere in his representation of Richard III. and
other characters in his historical plays. In his Roman tragedies
Shakspere followed closely Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's
_Lives_, made in 1579 from the French version of Jacques Amyot.
Of books belonging to other departments than pure literature, the most
important was Richard Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_, the first four
books of which appeared in 1594. This was a work on the philosophy of
law and a defense, as against the Presbyterians, of the government of
the English Church by bishops. No work of equal dignity and scope had
yet been published in English prose. It was written in sonorous,
stately and somewhat involved periods, in a Latin rather than an
English idiom, and it influenced strongly the diction of later writers,
such as Milton and Sir Thomas Browne. Had the _Ecclesiastical Polity_
been written one hundred, or perhaps even fifty, {91} years earlier, it
would doubtless have been written in Latin.
The life of Francis Bacon, "the father of inductive philosophy," as he
has been called--better, the founder of inductive logic--belongs to
English history, and the bulk of his writings, in Latin and English, to
the history of English philosophy. But his volume of _Essays_ was a
contribution to general literature. In their completed form they
belong to the year 1625, but the first edition was printed in 1597 and
contained only ten short essays, each of them rather a string of
pregnant maxims--the text for an essay--than that developed treatment
of a subject which we now understand by the word essay. They were,
said their author, "as grains of salt that will rather give you an
appetite than offend you with satiety." They were the first essays
so-called in the language. "The word," said Bacon, "is late, but the
thing is ancient." The word he took from the French _essais_ of
Montaigne, the first two books of which had been published in 1592.
Bacon testified that his essays were the most popular of his writings
because they "came home to men's business and bosoms." Their alternate
title explains their character: _Counsels Civil and Moral_, that is,
pieces of advice touching the conduct of life, "of a nature whereof men
shall find much in experience, little in books." The essays contain
the quintessence of Bacon's practical wisdom, his wide knowledge of the
world of {92} men. The truth and depth of his sayings, and the extent
of ground which they cover, as well as the weighty compactness of his
style, have given many of them the currency of proverbs. "Revenge is a
kind of wild justice." "He that hath wife and children hath given
hostages to fortune." "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some
strangeness in the proportion." Bacon's reason was illuminated by a
powerful imagination, and his noble English rises now and then, as in
his essay _On Death_, into eloquence--the eloquence of pure thought,
touched gravely and afar off by emotion. In general, the atmosphere of
his intellect is that _lumen siccum_ which he loved to commend, "not
drenched or bloodied by the affections." Dr. Johnson said that the
wine of Bacon's writings was a dry wine.
A popular class of books in the 17th century were "characters" or
"witty descriptions of the properties of sundry persons," such as the
Good Schoolmaster, the Clown, the Country Magistrate; much as in some
modern _Heads of the People_ where Douglas Jerrold or Leigh Hunt
sketches the Medical Student, the Monthly Nurse, etc. A still more
modern instance of the kind is George Eliot's _Impressions of
Theophrastus Such_, which derives its title from the Greek philosopher,
Theophrastus, whose character-sketches were the original models of this
kind of literature. The most popular character-book in Europe in the
17th century was La Bruyere's _Caracteres_. But {93} this was not
published till 1588. In England the fashion had been set in 1614, by
the _Characters_ of Sir Thomas Overbury, who died by poison the year
before his book was printed. One of Overbury's sketches--the _Fair and
Happy Milkmaid_--is justly celebrated for its old-world sweetness and
quaintness. "Her breath is her own, which scents all the year long of
June, like a new-made hay-cock. She makes her hand hard with labor,
and her heart soft with pity; and when winter evenings fall early,
sitting at her merry wheel, she sings defiance to the giddy wheel of
fortune. She bestows her year's wages at next fair, and, in choosing
her garments, counts no bravery in the world like decency. The garden
and bee-hive are all her physic and surgery, and she lives the longer
for it. She dares go alone and unfold sheep in the night, and fears no
manner of ill, because she means none; yet to say truth, she is never
alone, but is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts and
prayers, but short ones. Thus lives she, and all her care is she may
die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers stuck upon her
winding-sheet."
England was still merry England in the times of good Queen Bess, and
rang with old songs, such as kept this milkmaid company; songs, said
Bishop Joseph Hall, which were "sung to the wheel and sung unto the
pail." Shakspere loved their simple minstrelsy; he put some of them
into the mouth of Ophelia, and scattered snatches of {94} them through
his plays, and wrote others like them himself:
"Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song,
That old and antique song we heard last night,
Methinks it did relieve my passion much,
More than light airs and recollected terms
Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times.
Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain.
The knitters and the spinners in the sun
And the free maids that weave their threads with bones
Do use to chant it; it is silly sooth
And dallies with the innocence of love
Like the old age."
Many of these songs, so natural, fresh, and spontaneous, together with
sonnets and other more elaborate forms of lyrical verse, were printed
in miscellanies, such as the _Passionate Pilgrim_, _England's Helicon_,
and Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_. Some were anonymous, or were by
poets of whom little more is known than their names. Others were by
well-known writers, and others, again, were strewn through the plays of
Lyly, Shakspere, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and other dramatists.
Series of love sonnets, like Spenser's _Amoretti_ and Sidney's
_Astrophel and Stella_, were written by Shakspere, Daniel, Drayton,
Drummond, Constable, Watson, and others, all dedicated to some mistress
real or imaginary. Pastorals, too, were written in great number, such
as William Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_ and _Shephera's Pipe_
(1613-1616) and Marlowe's charmingly rococo little idyl, {95} _The
Passionate Shepherd to his Love_, which Shakspere quoted in the _Merry
Wives of Windsor_, and to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply.
There were love stories in verse, like Arthur Brooke's _Romeo and
Juliet_ (the source of Shakspere's tragedy), Marlowe's fragment, _Hero
and Leander_, and Shakspere's _Venus and Adonis_, and _Rape of
Lucrece_, the first of these on an Italian and the other three on
classical subjects, though handled in any thing but a classical manner.
Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere, that he "could not have written an
epic: he would have died of a plethora of thought." Shakspere's two
narrative poems, indeed, are by no means models of their kind. The
current of the story is choked at every turn, though it be with golden
sand. It is significant of his dramatic habit of mind that dialogue
and soliloquy usurp the place of narration, and that, in the _Rape of
Lucrece_ especially, the poet lingers over the analysis of motives and
feelings, instead of hastening on with the action, as Chaucer, or any
born story-teller, would have done.
In Marlowe's poem there is the same spendthrift fancy, although not the
same subtlety. In the first two divisions of the poem the story does,
in some sort, get forward; but in the continuation, by George Chapman
(who wrote the last four "sestiads"), the path is utterly lost, "with
woodbine and the gadding vine o'ergrown."
One is reminded that modern poetry, if it has {96} lost in richness,
has gained in directness, when one compares any passage in Marlowe and
Chapman's _Hero and Leander_ with Byron's ringing lines:
"The wind is high on Helle's wave,
As on that night of stormy water,
When Love, who sent, forgot to save
The young, the beautiful, the brave,
The lonely hope of Sestos' daughter."
Marlowe's continuator, Chapman, wrote a number of plays, but he is best
remembered by his royal translation of Homer, issued in parts from
1598-1615. This was not so much a literal translation of the Greek, as
a great Elisabethan poem, inspired by Homer. It has Homer's fire, but
not his simplicity; the energy of Chapman's fancy kindling him to run
beyond his text into all manner of figures and conceits. It was
written, as has been said, as Homer would have written if he had been
an Englishman of Chapman's time. Certainly all later versions--Pope's
and Cowper's and Lord Derby's and Bryant's--seem pale against the
glowing exuberance of Chapman's English. His verse was not the heroic
line of ten syllables, chosen by most of the standard translators, but
the long fourteen-syllabled measure, which degenerates easily into
sing-song in the hands of a feeble metrist. In Chapman it is often
harsh, but seldom tame, and in many passages it reproduces wonderfully
the ocean-like roll of Homer's hexameters.
{97}
"From his bright helm and shield did burn a most unwearied fire,
Like rich Autumnus' golden lamp, whose brightness men admire,
Past all the other host of stars when, with his cheerful face,
Fresh washed in lofty ocean waves, he doth the sky enchase."
Keats's fine ode, _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_, is
well-known. Fairfax's version of Tasso's _Jerusalem Delivered_ (1600)
is one of the best metrical translations in the language.
The national pride in the achievements of Englishmen, by land and sea,
found expression, not only in prose chronicles and in books, like
Stow's _Survey of London_, and Harrison's _Description of England_
(prefixed to Holinshed's _Chronicle_), but in long historical and
descriptive poems, like William Warner's _Albion's England_, 1586;
Samuel Daniel's _History of the Civil Wars_, 1595-1602; Michael
Drayton's _Baron's Wars_, 1596, _England's Heroical Epistles_, 1598,
and _Polyolbion_, 1613. The very plan of these works was fatal to
their success. It is not easy to digest history and geography into
poetry. Drayton was the most considerable poet of the three, but his
_Polyolbion_ was nothing more than "a gazeteer in rime," a
topographical survey of England and Wales, with tedious
personifications of rivers, mountains, and valleys, in thirty books and
nearly one hundred thousand lines. It was Drayton who said of Marlowe,
that he "had in him those brave translunary things that the first poets
had;" and there are brave {98} things in Drayton, but they are only
occasional passages, oases among dreary wastes of sand. His
_Agincourt_ is a spirited war-song, and his _Nymphidia; or, Court of
Faery_, is not unworthy of comparison with Drake's _Culprit Fay_, and
is interesting as bringing in Oberon and Robin Goodfellow, and the
popular fairy lore of Shakspere's _Midsummer Night's Dream_.
The "well-languaged Daniel," of whom Ben Jonson said that he was "a
good honest man, but no poet," wrote, however, one fine meditative
piece, his _Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland_, a sermon apparently
on the text of the Roman poet Lucretius's famous passage in praise of
philosophy,
"Suave mari magno, turbantibus aequora ventis," etc.
But the Elisabethan genius found its fullest and truest expression in
the drama. It is a common phenomenon in the history of literature that
some old literary form or mold will run along for centuries without
having any thing poured into it worth keeping, until the moment comes
when the genius of the time seizes it and makes it the vehicle of
immortal thought and passion. Such was in England the fortune of the
stage play. At a time when Chaucer was writing character-sketches that
were really dramatic, the formal drama consisted of rude miracle plays
that had no literary quality whatever. These were taken from the Bible
and acted at first by the priests as illustrations of Scripture history
and additions to the {99} church service on feasts and saints' days.
Afterward the town guilds, or incorporated trades, took hold of them
and produced them annually on scaffolds in the open air. In some
English cities, as Coventry and Chester, they continued to be performed
almost to the close of the 16th century. And in the celebrated Passion
Play, at Oberammergau, in Bavaria, we have an instance of a miracle
play that has survived to our own day. These were followed by the
moral plays, in which allegorical characters, such as Clergy, Lusty
Juventus, Riches, Folly, and Good Demeanaunce, were the persons of the
drama. The comic character in the miracle plays had been the Devil,
and he was retained in some of the moralities side by side with the
abstract vice, who became the clown or fool of Shaksperian comedy. The
"formal Vice, Iniquity," as Shakspere calls him, had it for his
business to belabor the roaring Devil with his wooden sword
. . "with his dagger of lath
In his rage and his wrath
Cries 'Aha!' to the Devil,
'Pare your nails, Goodman Evil!'"
He survives also in the harlequin of the pantomimes, and in Mr. Punch,
of the puppet shows, who kills the Devil and carries him off on his
back, when the latter is sent to fetch him to hell for his crimes.
Masques and interludes--the latter a species of {100} short farce--were
popular at the Court of Henry VIII. Elisabeth was often entertained at
the universities or at the inns of court with Latin plays, or with
translations from Seneca, Euripides, and Ariosto. Original comedies
and tragedies began to be written, modeled upon Terence, and Seneca,
and chronicle histories founded on the annals of English kings. There
was a Master of the Revels at court, whose duty it was to select plays
to be performed before the queen, and these were acted by the children
of the Royal Chapel, or by the choir boys of St. Paul's Cathedral.
These early plays are of interest to students of the history of the
drama, and throw much light upon the construction of later plays, like
Shakspere's; but they are rude and inartistic, and without any literary
quality.
There were also private companies of actors maintained by wealthy
noblemen, like the Earl of Leicester, and bands of strolling players,
who acted in inn-yards and bear-gardens. It was not until stationary
theaters were built and stock companies of actors regularly licensed
and established, that any plays were produced which deserve the name of
literature. In 1576 the first play-house was built in London. This
was the _Black Friars_, which was located within the liberties of the
dissolved monastery of the Black Friars, in order to be outside of the
jurisdiction of the Mayor and Corporation, who were Puritan, and
determined in their opposition to the stage. For the same reason the
{101} _Theater_ and the _Curtain_ were built in the same year, outside
the city walls in Shoreditch. Later the _Rose_, the _Globe_, and the
_Swan_, were erected on the Bankside, across the Thames, and play-goers
resorting to them were accustomed to "take boat."
These early theaters were of the rudest construction. The six-penny
spectators, or "groundlings," stood in the yard, or pit, which had
neither floor nor roof. The shilling spectators sat on the stage,
where they were accommodated with stools and tobacco pipes, and whence
they chaffed the actors or the "opposed rascality" in the yard. There
was no scenery, and the female parts were taken by boys. Plays were
acted in the afternoon. A placard, with the letters "Venice," or
"Rome," or whatever, indicated the place of the action. With such rude
appliances must Shakspere bring before his audience the midnight
battlements of Elsinore and the moonlit garden of the Capulets. The
dramatists had to throw themselves upon the imagination of their
public, and it says much for the imaginative temper of the public of
that day, that it responded to the appeal. It suffered the poet to
transport it over wide intervals of space and time, and "with aid of
some few foot and half-foot words, fight over York and Lancaster's long
jars." Pedantry undertook, even at the very beginnings of the
Elisabethan drama, to shackle it with the so-called rules of Aristotle,
or classical unities of time and place, {102} to make it keep violent
action off the stage and comedy distinct from tragedy. But the
playwrights appealed from the critics to the truer sympathies of the
audience, and they decided for freedom and action, rather than
restraint and recitation. Hence our national drama is of Shakspere,
and not of Racine. By 1603 there were twelve play-houses in London in
full blast, although the city then numbered only one hundred and fifty
thousand inhabitants.
Fresh plays were produced every year. The theater was more to the
Englishman of that time than it has ever been before or since. It was
his club, his novel, his newspaper all in one. No great drama has ever
flourished apart from a living stage, and it was fortunate that the
Elisabethan dramatists were, almost all of them, actors and familiar
with stage effect. Even the few exceptions, like Beaumont and
Fletcher, who were young men of good birth and fortune, and not
dependent on their pens, were probably intimate with the actors, lived
in a theatrical atmosphere, and knew practically how plays should be
put on.
It had now become possible to earn a livelihood as an actor and
playwright. Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn, the leading actors of
their generation, made large fortunes. Shakspere himself made enough
from his share in the profits of the _Globe_ to retire with a
competence, some seven years before his death, and purchase a handsome
{103} property in his native Stratford. Accordingly, shortly after
1580, a number of men of real talent began to write for the stage as a
career. These were young graduates of the universities, Marlowe,
Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lyly, Lodge, and others, who came up to town and
led a Bohemian life as actors and playwrights. Most of them were wild
and dissipated, and ended in wretchedness. Peele died of a disease
brought on by his evil courses; Greene, in extreme destitution, from a
surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herring; and Marlowe was stabbed in
a tavern brawl.
The Euphuist Lyly produced eight plays from 1584 to 1601. They were
written for court entertainments, in prose and mostly on mythological
subjects. They have little dramatic power, but the dialogue is brisk
and vivacious, and there are several pretty songs in them. All the
characters talk Euphuism. The best of these was _Alexander and
Campaspe_, the plot of which is briefly as follows. Alexander has
fallen in love with his beautiful captive, Campaspe, and employs the
artist Apelles to paint her portrait. During the sittings, Apelles
becomes enamored of his subject and declares his passion, which is
returned. Alexander discovers their secret, but magnanimously forgives
the treason and joins the lovers' hands. The situation is a good one,
and capable of strong treatment in the hands of a real dramatist. But
Lyly slips smoothly over the crisis of the action and, in place of
passionate scenes, gives {104} us clever discourses and soliloquies,
or, at best, a light interchange of question and answer, full of
conceits, repartees, and double meanings. For example:
"_Apel_. Whom do you love best in the world?
"_Camp_. He that made me last in the world.
"_Apel_. That was a God.
"_Camp_. I had thought it had been a man," etc.
Lyly's service to the drama consisted in his introduction of an easy
and sparkling prose as the language of high comedy, and Shakspere's
indebtedness to the fashion thus set is seen in such passages as the
wit combats between Benedict and Beatrice in _Much Ado about Nothing_,
greatly superior as they are to any thing of the kind in Lyly.
The most important of the dramatists, who were Shakspere's forerunners,
or early contemporaries, was Christopher or--as he was familiarly
called--Kit Marlowe. Born in the same year with Shakspere (1564), he
died in 1593, at which date his great successor is thought to have
written no original plays, except the _Comedy of Errors_ and _Love's
Labour's Lost_. Marlowe first popularized blank verse as the language
of tragedy in his _Tamburlaine_, written before 1587, and in subsequent
plays he brought it to a degree of strength and flexibility which left
little for Shakspere to do but to take it as he found it.
_Tamburlaine_ was a crude, violent piece, full of exaggeration and
bombast, but with passages here and there of splendid {105}
declamation, justifying Ben Jonson's phrase, "Marlowe's mighty line."
Jonson, however, ridiculed, in his _Discoveries_, the "scenical
strutting and furious vociferation" of Marlowe's hero; and Shakspere
put a quotation from Tamburlaine into the mouth of his ranting Pistol.
Marlowe's _Edward II._ was the most regularly constructed and evenly
written of his plays. It was the best historical drama on the stage
before Shakspere, and not undeserving of the comparison which it has
provoked with the latter's _Richard II_. But the most interesting of
Marlowe's plays, to a modern reader, is the _Tragical History of Doctor
Faustus_. The subject is the same as in Goethe's _Faust_, and Goethe,
who knew the English play, spoke of it as greatly planned. The opening
of Marlowe's _Faustus_ is very similar to Goethe's. His hero, wearied
with unprofitable studies, and filled with a mighty lust for knowledge
and the enjoyment of life, sells his soul to the Devil in return for a
few years of supernatural power. The tragic irony of the story might
seem to lie in the frivolous use which Faustus makes of his dearly
bought power, wasting it in practical jokes and feats of legerdemain;
but of this Marlowe was probably unconscious. The love story of
Margaret, which is the central point of Goethe's drama, is entirely
wanting in Marlowe's, and so is the subtle conception of Goethe's
Mephistophiles. Marlowe's handling of the supernatural is
materialistic and downright, as befitted an age which believed in
witchcraft. The {106} greatest part of the English _Faustus_ is the
last scene, in which the agony and terror of suspense with which the
magician awaits the stroke of the clock that signals his doom are
powerfully drawn.
"_O lente, lente currile, noctis equi!_
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.
O soul, be changed into little water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!"
Marlowe's genius was passionate and irregular. He had no humor, and
the comic portions of _Faustus_ are scenes of low buffoonery.
George Peele's masterpiece, _David and Bethsabe_, was also, in many
respects, a fine play, though its beauties were poetic rather than
dramatic, consisting not in the characterization--which is feeble--but
in the eastern luxuriance of the imagery. There is one noble chorus--
"O proud revolt of a presumptuous man," etc.
which reminds one of passages in Milton's _Samson Agonistes_, and
occasionally Peele rises to such high Aeschylean audacities as this:
"At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt,
And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings,
Sit ever burning on his hateful bones."
Robert Greene was a very unequal writer. His plays are slovenly and
careless in construction, and he puts classical allusions into the
mouths of milkmaids and serving boys, with the grotesque pedantry and
want of keeping common among the {107} playwrights of the early stage.
He has, notwithstanding, in his comedy parts, more natural lightness
and grace than either Marlowe or Peele. In his _Friar Bacon and Friar
Bungay_, and his _Pinner of Wakefield_, there is a fresh breath, as of
the green English country, in such passages as the description of
Oxford, the scene at Harleston Fair, and the picture of the dairy in
the keeper's lodge at merry Fressingfield.
In all these ante-Shaksperian dramatists there was a defect of art
proper to the first comers in a new literary departure. As compared
not only with Shakspere, but with later writers, who had the
inestimable advantage of his example, their work was full of
imperfection, hesitation, experiment. Marlowe was probably, in native
genius, the equal at least of Fletcher or Webster, but his plays, as a
whole, are certainly not equal to theirs. They wrote in a more
developed state of the art. But the work of this early school settled
the shape which the English drama was to take. It fixed the practice
and traditions of the national theater. It decided that the drama was
to deal with the whole of life, the real and the ideal, tragedy and
comedy, prose and verse, in the same play, without limitations of time,
place, and action. It decided that the English play was to be an
action, and not a dialogue, bringing boldly upon the mimic scene
feasts, dances, processions, hangings, riots, plays within plays,
drunken revels, beatings, battle, murder, and sudden death. It
established blank verse, {108} with occasional riming couplets at the
close of a scene or of a long speech, as the language of the tragedy
and high comedy parts, and prose as the language of the low comedy and
"business" parts. And it introduced songs, a feature of which
Shakspere made exquisite use. Shakspere, indeed, like all great poets,
invented no new form of literature, but touched old forms to finer
purposes, refining every thing, discarding nothing. Even the old
chorus and dumb show he employed, though sparingly, as also the old
jig, or comic song, which the clown used to give between the acts.
Of the life of William Shakspere, the greatest dramatic poet of the
world, so little is known that it has been possible for ingenious
persons to construct a theory--and support it with some show of
reason--that the plays which pass under his name were really written by
Bacon or some one else. There is no danger of this paradox ever making
serious headway, for the historical evidence that Shakspere wrote
Shakspere's plays, though not overwhelming, is sufficient. But it is
startling to think that the greatest creative genius of his day, or
perhaps of all time, was suffered to slip out of life so quietly that
his title to his own works could even be questioned only two hundred
and fifty years after the event. That the single authorship of the
Homeric poems should be doubted is not so strange, for Homer is almost
prehistoric. But Shakspere was a modern Englishman, and at the time of
his death the first English colony in {109} America was already nine
years old. The important known facts of his life can be told almost in
a sentence. He was born at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, married when he
was eighteen, went to London probably in 1587, and became an actor,
playwriter, and stockholder in the company which owned the Blackfriars
and the Globe Theaters. He seemingly prospered in his calling and
retired about 1609 to Stratford, where he lived in the house that he
had bought some years before, and where he died in 1616. His _Venus
and Adonis_ was printed in 1593, the _Rape of Lucrece_ in 1594, and his
_Sonnets_ in 1609. So far as is known, only eighteen of the
thirty-seven plays generally attributed to Shakspere were printed
during his life-time. These were printed singly, in quarto shape, and
were little more than stage books, or librettos. The first collected
edition of his works was the so-called "First Folio" of 1623, published
by his fellow-actors, Heming and Condell. No contemporary of Shakspere
thought it worth while to write a life of the stage-player. There are
a number of references to him in the literature of the time; some
generous, as in Ben Jonson's well-known verses; others singularly
unappreciative, like Webster's mention of "the right happy and copious
industry of Master Shakspere." But all these together do not begin to
amount to the sum of what was said about Spenser, or Sidney, or
Raleigh, or Ben Jonson. There is, indeed, nothing to show that his
contemporaries understood what a man they had {110} among them in the
person of "Our English Terence, Mr. Will Shakespeare!" The age, for
the rest, was not a self-conscious one, nor greatly given to review
writing and literary biography. Nor is there enough of self-revelation
in Shakspere's plays to aid the reader in forming a notion of the man.
He lost his identity completely in the characters of his plays, as it
is the duty of a dramatic writer to do. His sonnets have been examined
carefully in search of internal evidence as to his character and life,
but the speculations founded upon them have been more ingenious than
convincing.
Shakspere probably began by touching up old plays. _Henry VI._ and the
bloody tragedy of _Titus Andronicus_, if Shakspere's at all, are
doubtless only his revision of pieces already on the stage. The
_Taming of the Shrew_ seems to be an old play worked over by Shakspere
and some other dramatist, and traces of another hand are thought to be
visible in parts of _Henry VIII._, _Pericles_, and _Timon of Athens_.
Such partnerships were common among the Elisabethan dramatists, the
most illustrious example being the long association of Beaumont and
Fletcher. The plays in the First Folio were divided into histories,
comedies, and tragedies, and it will be convenient to notice them
briefly in that order.
It was a stirring time when the young adventurer came to London to try
his fortune. Elisabeth had finally thrown down the gage of battle to
Catholic Europe, by the execution of Mary Stuart, in 1587. {111} The
following year saw the destruction of the colossal Armada, which Spain
had sent to revenge Mary's death, and hard upon these events followed
the gallant exploits of Grenville, Essex, and Raleigh.
That Shakspere shared the exultant patriotism of the times, and the
sense of their aloofness from the continent of Europe, which was now
born in the breasts of Englishmen, is evident from many a passage in
his plays.
"This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in a silver sea,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
England, bound in with the triumphant sea!"
His English histories are ten in number. Of these _King John_ and
_Henry VIII._ are isolated plays. The others form a consecutive
series, in the following order: _Richard III._, the two parts of _Henry
IV._, _Henry V._, the three parts of _Henry VI._, and _Richard III_.
This series may be divided into two, each forming a tetralogy, or group
of four plays. In the first the subject is the rise of the house of
Lancaster. But the power of the Red Rose was founded in usurpation.
In the second group, accordingly, comes the Nemesis, in the civil wars
of the Roses, reaching their catastrophe in the downfall of both
Lancaster and York, and the tyranny of Gloucester. The happy
conclusion is finally reached in the last play of the series, when this
new usurper is overthrown in turn, and Henry {112} VII., the first
Tudor sovereign, ascends the throne, and restores the Lancastrian
inheritance, purified, by bloody atonement, from the stain of Richard
II.'s murder. These eight plays are, as it were, the eight acts of one
great drama; and if such a thing were possible, they should be
represented on successive nights, like the parts of a Greek trilogy.
In order of composition, the second group came first. _Henry VI._ is
strikingly inferior to the others. _Richard III._ is a good acting
play, and its popularity has been sustained by a series of great
tragedians, who have taken the part of the king. But, in a literary
sense, it is unequal to _Richard II._, or the two parts of _Henry IV_.
The latter is unquestionably Shakspere's greatest historical tragedy,
and it contains his master-creation in the region of low comedy, the
immortal Falstaff.
The constructive art with which Shakspere shaped history into drama is
well seen in comparing his King John with the two plays on that
subject, which were already on the stage. These, like all the other
old "Chronicle histories," such as _Thomas Lord Cromwell_ and the
_Famous Victories of Henry V._, follow a merely chronological, or
biographical, order, giving events loosely, as they occurred, without
any unity of effect, or any reference to their bearing on the
catastrophe. Shakspere's order was logical. He compressed and
selected, disregarding the fact of history oftentimes, in favor of the
higher truth of fiction; bringing together a crime and its punishment,
as cause and effect, even {113} though they had no such relation in the
chronicle, and were separated, perhaps, by many years.
Shakspere's first two comedies were experiments. _Love's Labour's
Lost_ was a play of manners, with hardly any plot. It brought together
a number of humors, that is, oddities and affectations of various
sorts, and played them off on one another, as Ben Jonson afterward did
in his comedies of humor. Shakspere never returned to this type of
play, unless, perhaps, in the _Taming of the Shrew_. There the story
turned on a single "humor," Katherine's bad temper, just as the story
in Jonson's _Silent Woman_ turned on Morose's hatred of noise. The
_Taming of the Shrew_ is, therefore, one of the least Shaksperian of
Shakspere's plays; a _bourgeois_, domestic comedy, with a very narrow
interest. It belongs to the school of French comedy, like Moliere's
_Malade Imaginaire_, not to the romantic comedy of Shakspere and
Fletcher.
The _Comedy of Errors_ was an experiment of an exactly opposite kind.
It was a play, purely of incident; a farce, in which the main
improbability being granted, namely, that the twin Antipholi and twin
Dromios are so alike that they cannot be distinguished, all the amusing
complications follow naturally enough. There is little
character-drawing in the play. Any two pairs of twins, in the same
predicament, would be equally droll. The fun lies in the situation.
This was a comedy of the Latin school, and resembled the _Menaechmi_ of
Plautus. Shakspere never returned to this type of {114} play, though
there is an element of "errors" in _Midsummer Night's Dream_. In the
_Two Gentlemen of Verona_ he finally hit upon that species of romantic
comedy which he may be said to have invented or created out of the
scattered materials at hand in the works of his predecessors. In this
play, as in the _Merchant of Venice_, _Midsummer Night's Dream_, _Much
Ado about Nothing_, _As You Like It_, _Twelfth Night_, _Winters Tale_,
_All's Well that Ends Well_, _Measure for Measure_, and the _Tempest_,
the plan of construction is as follows. There is one main intrigue
carried out by the high comedy characters, and a secondary intrigue, or
underplot, by the low comedy characters. The former is by no means
purely comic, but admits the presentation of the noblest motives, the
strongest passions, and the most delicate graces of romantic poetry.
In some of the plays it has a prevailing lightness and gayety, as in
_As You Like It_ and _Twelfth Night_. In others, like _Measure for
Measure_, it is barely saved from becoming tragedy by the happy close.
Shylock certainly remains a tragic figure, even to the end, and a play
like _Winter's Tale_, in which the painful situation is prolonged for
years, is only technically a comedy. Such dramas, indeed, were called,
on many of the title-pages of the time, "tragi-comedies." The low
comedy interlude, on the other hand, was broadly comic. It was
cunningly interwoven with the texture of the play, sometimes loosely,
and by way of variety or relief, as in the episode of {115} Touchstone
and Audrey, in _As You Like It_; sometimes closely, as in the case of
Dogberry and Verges, in _Much Ado about Nothing_, where the blundering
of the watch is made to bring about the _denouement_ of the main
action. The _Merry Wives of Windsor_ is an exception to this plan of
construction. It is Shakspere's only play of contemporary,
middle-class English life, and is written almost throughout in prose.
It is his only pure comedy, except the _Taming of the Shrew_.
Shakspere did not abandon comedy when writing tragedy, though he turned
it to a new account. The two species graded into one another. Thus
_Cymbeline_ is, in its fortunate ending, really as much of a comedy as
_Winter's Tale_--to which its plot bears a resemblance--and is only
technically a tragedy, because it contains a violent death. In some of
the tragedies, as _Macbeth_ and _Julius Caesar_, the comedy element is
reduced to a minimum. But in others, as _Romeo and Juliet_, and
_Hamlet_, it heightens the tragic feeling by the irony of contrast.
Akin to this is the use to which Shakspere put the old Vice, or Clown,
of the moralities. The Fool in _Lear_, Touchstone in _As You Like It_,
and Thersites in _Troilus and Cressida_, are a sort of parody of the
function of the Greek chorus, commenting the action of the drama with
scraps of bitter, or half-crazy, philosophy, and wonderful gleams of
insight into the depths of man's nature.
The earliest of Shakspere's tragedies, unless _Titus Andronicus_ be
his, was, doubtless, _Romeo and {116} Juliet_, which is full of the
passion and poetry of youth and of first love. It contains a large
proportion of riming lines, which is usually a sign in Shakspere of
early work. He dropped rime more and more in his later plays, and his
blank verse grew freer and more varied in its pauses and the number of
its feet. _Romeo and Juliet_ is also unique, among his tragedies, in
this respect, that the catastrophe is brought about by a fatality, as
in the Greek drama. It was Shakspere's habit to work out his tragic
conclusions from within, through character, rather than through
external chances. This is true of all the great tragedies of his
middle life, _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _Lear_, _Macbeth_, in every one of
which the catastrophe is involved in the character and actions of the
hero. This is so, in a special sense, in _Hamlet_, the subtlest of all
Shakspere's plays, and if not his masterpiece, at any rate the one
which has most attracted and puzzled the greatest minds. It is
observable that in Shakspere's comedies there is no one central figure,
but that, in passing into tragedy, he intensified and concentrated the
attention upon a single character. This difference is seen, even in
the naming of the plays; the tragedies always take their titles from
their heroes, the comedies never.
Somewhat later, probably, than the tragedies already mentioned, were
the three Roman plays, _Julius Caesar_, _Coriolanus_, and _Antony and
Cleopatra_. It is characteristic of Shakspere that he invented the
plot of none of his plays, but took {117} material that he found at
hand. In these Roman tragedies, he followed Plutarch closely, and yet,
even in so doing, gave, if possible, a greater evidence of real
creative power than when he borrowed a mere outline of a story from
some Italian novelist. It is most instructive to compare _Julius
Caesar_ with Ben Jonson's _Catiline and Sejanus_. Jonson was careful
not to go beyond his text. In _Catiline_ he translates almost
literally the whole of Cicero's first oration against Catiline.
Sejanus is a mosaic of passages, from Tacitus and Suetonius. There is
none of this dead learning in Shakspere's play. Having grasped the
conception of the characters of Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Anthony, as
Plutarch gave them, he pushed them out into their consequences in every
word and act, so independently of his original, and yet so harmoniously
with it, that the reader knows that he is reading history, and needs no
further warrant for it than Shakspere's own. _Timon of Athens_ is the
least agreeable and most monotonous of Shakspere's undoubted tragedies,
and _Troilus and Cressida_, said Coleridge, is the hardest to
characterize. The figures of the old Homeric world fare but hardly
under the glaring light of modern standards of morality which Shakspere
turns upon them. Ajax becomes a stupid bully, Ulysses a crafty
politician, and swift-footed Achilles a vain and sulky chief of
faction. In losing their ideal remoteness, the heroes of the _Iliad_
lose their poetic quality, and the lover of Homer experiences an
unpleasant disenchantment.
{118}
It was customary in the 18th century to speak of Shakspere as a rude
though prodigious genius. Even Milton could describe him as "warbling
his native wood-notes wild." But a truer criticism, beginning in
England with Coleridge, has shown that he was also a profound artist.
It is true that he wrote for his audiences, and that his art is not
every-where and at all points perfect. But a great artist will
contrive, as Shakspere did, to reconcile practical exigencies, like
those of the public stage, with the finer requirements of his art.
Strained interpretations have been put upon this or that item in
Shakspere's plays; and yet it is generally true that some deeper reason
can be assigned for his method in a given case than that "the audience
liked puns," or, "the audience liked ghosts." Compare, for example,
his delicate management of the supernatural with Marlowe's procedure in
_Faustus_. Shakspere's age believed in witches, elves, and
apparitions; and yet there is always something shadowy or allegorical
in his use of such machinery. The ghost in _Hamlet_ is merely an
embodied suspicion. Banquo's wraith, which is invisible to all but
Macbeth, is the haunting of an evil conscience. The witches in the
same play are but the promptings of ambition, thrown into a human
shape, so as to become actors in the drama. In the same way, the
fairies in _Midsummer Night's Dream_ are the personified caprices of
the lovers, and they are unseen by the human characters, whose likes
and dislikes they control, save in the instance where {119} Bottom is
"translated" (that is, becomes mad) and has sight of the invisible
world. So in the _Tempest_, Ariel is the spirit of the air and Caliban
of the earth, ministering, with more or less of unwillingness, to man's
necessities.
Shakspere is the most universal of writers. He touches more men at
more points than Homer, or Dante, or Goethe. The deepest wisdom, the
sweetest poetry, the widest range of character, are combined in his
plays. He made the English language an organ of expression unexcelled
in the history of literature. Yet he is not an English poet simply,
but a world-poet. Germany has made him her own, and the Latin races,
though at first hindered in a true appreciation of him by the canons of
classical taste, have at length learned to know him. An ever-growing
mass of Shaksperian literature, in the way of comment and
interpretation, critical, textual, historical, or illustrative,
testifies to the durability and growth of his fame. Above all, his
plays still keep, and probably always will keep, the stage. It is
common to speak of Shakspere and the other Elisabethan dramatists as if
they stood, in some sense, on a level. But in truth there is an almost
measureless distance between him and all his contemporaries. The rest
shared with him in the mighty influences of the age. Their plays are
touched here and there with the power and splendor of which they were
all joint heirs. But, as a whole, they are obsolete. They live in
books, but not in the hearts and on the tongues of men. The {120} most
remarkable of the dramatists contemporary with Shakspere was Ben
Jonson, whose robust figure is in striking contrast with the other's
gracious impersonality. Jonson was nine years younger than Shakspere.
He was educated at Westminster School, served as a soldier in the low
countries, became an actor in Henslowe's company, and was twice
imprisoned--once for killing a fellow-actor in a duel, and once for his
part in the comedy of _Eastward Hoe_, which gave offense to King James.
He lived down to the times of Charles I. (1635), and became the
acknowledged arbiter of English letters and the center of convivial wit
combats at the _Mermaid_, the _Devil_, and other famous London taverns.
"What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid; heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whom they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life." [1]
The inscription on his tomb, in Westminster Abbey, is simply
"O rare Ben Jonson!"
Jonson's comedies were modeled upon the _vetus comaedia_ of
Aristophanes, which was satirical in purpose, and they belonged to an
entirely different school from Shakspere's. They were classical and
not romantic, and were pure comedies, admitting {121} no admixture of
tragic motives. There is hardly one lovely or beautiful character in
the entire range of his dramatic creations. They were comedies not of
character, in the high sense of the word, but of manners or humors.
His design was to lash the follies and vices of the day, and his
_dramatis persona_ consisted for the most part of gulls, impostors,
fops, cowards, swaggering braggarts, and "Pauls men." In his first
play, _Every Man in his Humor_ (acted in 1598), in _Every Man Out of
his Humor_, _Bartholomew Fair_, and indeed, in all of his comedies, his
subject was the "spongy humors of the time," that is, the fashionable
affectations, the whims, oddities, and eccentric developments of London
life. His procedure was to bring together a number of these fantastic
humorists, to play them off upon each other, involve them in all manner
of comical misadventures, and render them utterly ridiculous and
contemptible. There was thus a perishable element in his art, for
manners change; and however effective this exposure of contemporary
affectations may have been, before an audience of Jonson's day, it is
as hard for a modern reader to detect his points as it will be for a
reader two hundred years hence to understand the satire upon the
aesthetic craze in such pieces of the present day, as _Patience_ or the
_Colonel_. Nevertheless, a patient reader, with the help of copious
foot-notes, can gradually put together for himself an image of that
world of obsolete humors in which Jonson's comedy dwells, and can
admire the dramatist's solid good {122} sense, his great learning, his
skill in construction, and the astonishing fertility of his invention.
His characters are not revealed from within, like Shakspere's, but
built up painfully from outside by a succession of minute, laborious
particulars. The difference will be plainly manifest if such a
character as Slender, in the _Merry Wives of Windsor_, be compared with
any one of the inexhaustible variety of idiots in Jonson's plays; with
Master Stephen, for example, in _Every Man in his Humor_; or, if
Falstaff be put side by side with Captain Bobadil, in the same comedy,
perhaps Jonson's masterpiece in the way of comic caricature.
_Cynthia's Revels_ was a satire on the courtiers and the _Poetaster_ on
Jonson's literary enemies. The _Alchemist_ was an exposure of
quackery, and is one of his best comedies, but somewhat overweighted
with learning. _Volpone_ is the most powerful of all his dramas, but
is a harsh and disagreeable piece; and the state of society which it
depicts is too revolting for comedy. The _Silent Woman_ is, perhaps,
the easiest of all Jonson's plays for a modern reader to follow and
appreciate. There is a distinct plot to it, the situation is extremely
ludicrous, and the emphasis is laid upon single humor or eccentricity,
as in some of Moliere's lighter comedies, like _Le Malade Imaginaire_,
or _Le Medecin malgre lui_.
In spite of his heaviness in drama, Jonson had a light enough touch in
lyric poetry. His songs have not the careless sweetness of
Shakspere's, but they have a grace of their own. Such pieces as his
{123} _Love's Triumph_, _Hymn to Diana_, _The Noble Mind_, and the
adaptation from _Philostratus_,
"Drink to me only with thine eyes,"
and many others entitle their author to rank among the first English
lyrists. Some of these occur in his two collections of miscellaneous
verse, the _Forest_ and _Underwoods_; others in the numerous masques
which he composed. These were a species of entertainment, very popular
at the court of James I., combining dialogue with music, intricate
dances, and costly scenery. Jonson left an unfinished pastoral drama,
the _Sad Shepherd_, which, though not equal to Fletcher's _Faithful
Shepherdess_, contains passages of great beauty, one, especially,
descriptive of the shepherdess
"Earine,
Who had her very being and her name
With the first buds and breathings of the spring,
Born with the primrose and the violet
And earliest roses blown."
1. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature.
2. Palgrave's Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics.
3. The Courtly Poets from Raleigh to Montrose. Edited by J. Hannah.
4. Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. (First and Second Books.)
5. Bacon's Essays. Edited by W. Aldis Wright
{124}
6. The Cambridge Shakspere. [Clark & Wright.]
7. Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets.
8. Ben Jonson's Volpone and Silent Woman. (Cunningham's or Gifford's
Edition.)
[1] Francis Beaumont. _Letter to Ben Jonson_.
{125}
CHAPTER IV.
THE AGE OF MILTON.
1608-1674.
The Elisabethan age proper closed with the death of the queen, and the
accession of James I., in 1603, but the literature of the fifty years
following was quite as rich as that of the half-century that had passed
since she came to the throne, in 1557. The same qualities of thought
and style which had marked the writers of her reign, prolonged
themselves in their successors, through the reigns of the first two
Stuart kings and the Commonwealth. Yet there was a change in _spirit_.
Literature is only one of the many forms in which the national mind
expresses itself. In periods of political revolution, literature,
leaving the serene air of fine art, partakes the violent agitation of
the times. There were seeds of civil and religious discord in
Elisabethan England. As between the two parties in the Church there
was a compromise and a truce rather than a final settlement. The
Anglican doctrine was partly Calvinistic and partly Arminian. The form
of government was Episcopal, but there was a large body of
Presbyterians in the Church who desired a change. In {126} the ritual
and ceremonies many "rags of popery" had been retained, which the
extreme reformers wished to tear away. But Elisabeth was a
worldly-minded woman, impatient of theological disputes. Though
circumstances had made her the champion of Protestantism in Europe, she
kept many Catholic notions, disapproved, for example, of the marriage
of priests, and hated sermons. She was jealous of her prerogative in
the State, and in the Church she enforced uniformity. The authors of
the _Martin Marprelate_ pamphlets against the bishops, were punished by
death or imprisonment. While the queen lived things were kept well
together and England was at one in face of the common foe. Admiral
Howard, who commanded the English naval forces against the Armada, was
a Catholic.
But during the reigns of James I. (1603-1625) and Charles I.
(1625-1649) Puritanism grew stronger through repression. "England,"
says the historian Green, "became the people of a book, and that book
the Bible." The power of the king was used to impose the power of the
bishops upon the English and Scotch Churches until religious discontent
became also political discontent, and finally overthrew the throne.
The writers of this period divided more and more into two hostile
camps. On the side of Church and king was the bulk of the learning and
genius of the time. But on the side of free religion and the
Parliament were the stern conviction, the fiery zeal, the excited
imagination of English Puritanism. The {127} spokesman of this
movement was Milton, whose great figure dominates the literary history
of his generation, as Shakspere's does of the generation preceding.
The drama went on in the course marked out for it by Shakspere's
example, until the theaters were closed, by Parliament, in 1642. Of
the Stuart dramatists, the most important were Beaumont and Fletcher,
all of whose plays were produced during the reign of James I. These
were fifty-three in number, but only thirteen of them were joint
productions. Francis Beaumont was twenty years younger than Shakspere,
and died a few years before him. He was the son of a judge of the
Common Pleas. His collaborator, John Fletcher, a son of the bishop of
London, was five years older than Beaumont, and survived him nine
years. He was much the more prolific of the two and wrote alone some
forty plays. Although the life of one of these partners was
conterminous with Shakspere's, their works exhibit a later phase of the
dramatic art. The Stuart dramatists followed the lead of Shakspere
rather than of Ben Jonson. Their plays, like the former's, belong to
the romantic drama. They present a poetic and idealized version of
life, deal with the highest passions and the wildest buffoonery, and
introduce a great variety of those daring situations and incidents
which we agree to call romantic. But while Shakspere seldom or never
overstepped the modesty of nature, his successors ran into every
license. They {128} sought to stimulate the jaded appetite of their
audience by exhibiting monstrosities of character, unnatural lusts,
subtleties of crime, virtues and vices both in excess.
Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are much easier and more agreeable
reading than Ben Jonson's. Though often loose in their plots and
without that consistency in the development of their characters which
distinguished Jonson's more conscientious workmanship, they are full of
graceful dialogue and beautiful poetry. Dryden said that after the
Restoration two of their plays were acted for one of Shakspere's or
Jonson's throughout the year, and he added, that they "understood and
imitated the conversation of _gentlemen_ much better, whose wild
debaucheries and quickness of wit in repartees no poet can ever paint
as they have done." Wild debauchery was certainly not the mark of a
gentleman in Shakspere, nor was it altogether so in Beaumont and
Fletcher. Their gentlemen are gallant and passionate lovers, gay
cavaliers, generous, courageous, courteous--according to the fashion of
their times--and sensitive on the point of honor. They are far
superior to the cold-blooded rakes of Dryden and the Restoration
comedy. Still the manners and language in Beaumont and Fletcher's
plays are extremely licentious, and it is not hard to sympathize with
the objections to the theater expressed by the Puritan writer, William
Prynne, who, after denouncing the long hair of the cavaliers in his
tract, _The {129} Unloveliness of Lovelocks_, attacked the stage, in
1633, with _Histrio-mastix: the Player's Scourge_; an offense for which
he was fined, imprisoned, pilloried, and had his ears cropped.
Coleridge said that Shakspere was coarse, but never gross. He had the
healthy coarseness of nature herself. But Beaumont and Fletcher's
pages are corrupt. Even their chaste women are immodest in language
and thought. They use not merely that frankness of speech which was a
fashion of the times, but a profusion of obscene imagery which could
not proceed from a pure mind. Chastity with them is rather a bodily
accident than a virtue of the heart, says Coleridge.
Among the best of their light comedies are _The Chances_, _The Scornful
Lady_, _The Spanish Curate_, and _Rule a Wife and Have a Wife_. But
far superior to these are their tragedies and tragi-comedies, _The
Maia's Tragedy_, _Philaster_, _A King and No King_--all written
jointly--and _Valentinian_ and _Thierry and Theodoret_, written by
Fletcher alone, but perhaps, in part, sketched out by Beaumont. The
tragic masterpiece of Beaumont and Fletcher is _The Maid's Tragedy_, a
powerful but repulsive play, which sheds a singular light not only upon
its authors' dramatic methods, but also upon the attitude toward
royalty favored by the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which
grew up under the Stuarts. The heroine, Evadne, has been in secret a
mistress of the king, who marries her to Amintor, a gentleman of his
court, {130} because, as she explains to her bridegroom, on the wedding
night,
"I must have one
To father children, and to bear the name
Of husband to me, that my sin may be
More honorable."
This scene is, perhaps, the most affecting and impressive in the whole
range of Beaumont and Fletcher's drama. Yet when Evadne names the king
as her paramour, Amintor exclaims:
"O thou hast named a word that wipes away
All thoughts revengeful. In that sacred name
'The king' there lies a terror. What frail man
Dares lift his hand against it? Let the gods
Speak to him when they please; till when, let us
Suffer and wait."
And the play ends with the words
"On lustful kings,
Unlooked-for sudden deaths from heaven are sent,
But cursed is he that is their instrument."
Aspatia, in this tragedy, is a good instance of Beaumont and Fletcher's
pathetic characters. She is troth-plight wife to Amintor, and after
he, by the king's command, has forsaken her for Evadne, she disguises
herself as a man, provokes her unfaithful lover to a duel, and dies
under his sword, blessing the hand that killed her. This is a common
type in Beaumont and Fletcher, and was drawn originally from
Shakspere's _Ophelia_. All their good women have the instinctive
fidelity of a dog, and a superhuman patience and devotion, {131} a
"gentle forlornness" under wrongs, which is painted with an almost
feminine tenderness. In _Philaster, or Love Lies Bleeding_, Euphrasia,
conceiving a hopeless passion for Philaster--who is in love with
Arethusa--puts on the dress of a page and enters his service. He
employs her to carry messages to his lady-love, just as Viola, in
_Twelfth Night_, is sent by the Duke to Olivia. Philaster is persuaded
by slanderers that his page and his lady have been unfaithful to him,
and in his jealous fury he wounds Euphrasia with his sword. Afterward,
convinced of the boy's fidelity, he asks forgiveness, whereto Euphrasia
replies,
"Alas, my lord, my life is not a thing
Worthy your noble thoughts. 'Tis not a life,
'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away."
Beaumont and Fletcher's love-lorn maids wear the willow very sweetly,
but in all their piteous passages there is nothing equal to the natural
pathos--the pathos which arises from the deep springs of character--of
that one brief question and answer in _King Lear_.
"_Lear_. So young and so untender?
"_Cordelia_. So young, my lord, and true."
The disguise of a woman in man's apparel is a common incident in the
romantic drama; and the fact, that on the Elisabethan stage the female
parts were taken by boys, made the deception easier. Viola's situation
in _Twelfth Night_ is precisely similar to Euphrasia's, but there is a
{132} difference in the handling of the device which is characteristic
of a distinction between Shakspere's art and that of his
contemporaries. The audience in _Twelfth Night_ is taken into
confidence and made aware of Viola's real nature from the start, while
Euphrasia's _incognito_ is preserved till the fifth act, and then
disclosed by an accident. This kind of mystification and surprise was
a trick below Shakspere. In this instance, moreover, it involved a
departure from dramatic probability. Euphrasia could, at any moment,
by revealing her identity, have averted the greatest sufferings and
dangers from Philaster, Arethusa, and herself, and the only motive for
her keeping silence is represented to have been a feeling of maidenly
shame at her position. Such strained and fantastic motives are too
often made the pivot of the action in Beaumont and Fletcher's
tragi-comedies. Their characters have not the depth and truth of
Shakspere's, nor are they drawn so sharply. One reads their plays with
pleasure and remembers here and there a passage of fine poetry, or a
noble or lovely trait. But their characters, as wholes, leave a fading
impression. Who, even after a single reading or representation, ever
forgets Falstaff, or Shylock, or King Lear?
The moral inferiority of Beaumont and Fletcher is well seen in such a
play as _A King and No King_. Here Arbaces falls in love with his
sister, and, after a furious conflict in his own mind, finally succumbs
to his guilty passion. He is rescued from {133} the consequences of
his weakness by the discovery that Panthea is not, in fact, his sister.
But this is to cut the knot and not to untie it. It leaves the
_denouement_ to chance, and not to those moral forces through which
Shakspere always wrought his conclusions. Arbaces has failed, and the
piece of luck which keeps his failure innocent is rejected by every
right-feeling spectator. In one of John Ford's tragedies, the
situation which in _A King and No King_ is only apparent, becomes real,
and incest is boldly made the subject of the play. Ford pushed the
morbid and unnatural in character and passion into even wilder extremes
than Beaumont and Fletcher. His best play, the _Broken Heart_, is a
prolonged and unrelieved torture of the feelings.
Fletcher's _Faithful Shepherdess_ is the best English pastoral drama.
Its choral songs are richly and sweetly modulated, and the influence of
the whole poem upon Milton is very apparent in his _Comus_. _The
Knight of the Burning Pestle_, written by Beaumont and Fletcher
jointly, was the first burlesque comedy in the language, and is
excellent fooling. Beaumont and Fletcher's blank verse is musical, but
less masculine than Marlowe's or Shakspere's, by reason of their
excessive use of extra syllables and feminine endings.
In John Webster the fondness for the abnormal and sensational themes,
which beset the Stuart stage, showed itself in the exaggeration of the
terrible into the horrible. Fear, in Shakspere--as in {134} the great
murder scene in _Macbeth_--is a pure passion; but in Webster it is
mingled with something physically repulsive. Thus his _Duchess of
Malfi_ is presented in the dark with a dead man's hand, and is told
that it is the hand of her murdered husband. She is shown a dance of
madmen and, "behind a traverse, the artificial figures of her children,
appearing as if dead." Treated in this elaborate fashion, that
"terror," which Aristotle said it was one of the objects of tragedy to
move, loses half its dignity. Webster's images have the smell of the
charnel house about them.
"She would not after the report keep fresh
As long as flowers on graves."
"We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves,
That, ruined, yield no echo.
O this gloomy world!
In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!"
Webster had an intense and somber genius. In diction he was the most
Shaksperian of the Elisabethan dramatists, and there are sudden gleams
of beauty among his dark horrors, which light up a whole scene with
some abrupt touch of feeling.
"Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young,"
says the brother of the Duchess, when he has procured her murder and
stands before the corpse. _Vittoria Corombona_ is described in the old
editions as "a night-piece," and it should, indeed, be {135} acted by
the shuddering light of torches, and with the cry of the screech-owl to
punctuate the speeches. The scene of Webster's two best tragedies was
laid, like many of Ford's, Cyril Tourneur's, and Beaumont and
Fletcher's, in Italy--the wicked and splendid Italy of the Renaissance,
which had such a fascination for the Elisabethan imagination. It was
to them the land of the Borgias and the Cenci; of families of proud
nobles, luxurious, cultivated, but full of revenges and ferocious
cunning; subtle poisoners, who killed with a perfumed glove or fan;
parricides, atheists, committers of unnamable crimes, and inventors of
strange and delicate varieties of sin.
But a very few have here been mentioned of the great host of dramatists
who kept the theaters busy through the reigns of Elisabeth, James I.,
and Charles I. The last of the race was James Shirley, who died in
1666, and whose thirty-eight plays were written during the reign of
Charles I. and the Commonwealth.
In the miscellaneous prose and poetry of this period there is lacking
the free, exulting, creative impulse of the elder generation, but there
is a soberer feeling and a certain scholarly choiceness which commend
themselves to readers of bookish tastes. Even that quaintness of
thought, which is a mark of the Commonwealth writers, is not without
its attraction for a nice literary palate. Prose became now of greater
relative importance than ever before. Almost every distinguished
writer of {136} the time lent his pen to one or the other party in the
great theological and political controversy of the time. There were
famous theologians, like Hales, Chillingworth, and Baxter; historians
and antiquaries, like Selden, Knolles, and Cotton; philosophers, such
as Hobbes, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and More, the Platonist; and
writers in rural science--which now entered upon its modern,
experimental phase, under the stimulus of Bacon's writings--among whom
may be mentioned Wallis, the mathematician; Boyle, the chemist, and
Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood. These are
outside of our subject, but in the strictly literary prose of the time,
the same spirit of roused inquiry is manifest, and the same disposition
to a thorough and exhaustive treatment of a subject which is proper to
the scientific attitude of mind. The line between true and false
science, however, had not yet been drawn. The age was pedantic, and
appealed too much to the authority of antiquity. Hence we have such
monuments of perverse and curious erudition as Robert Burton's _Anatomy
of Melancholy_, 1621; and Sir Thomas Browne's _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_,
or _Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors_, 1646. The former of
these was the work of an Oxford scholar, an astrologer, who cast his
own horoscope, and a victim himself of the atrabilious humor, from
which he sought relief in listening to the ribaldry of barge-men, and
in compiling this _Anatomy_, in which the causes, symptoms,
prognostics, and cures of {137} melancholy are considered in numerous
partitions, sections, members, and subsections. The work is a mosaic
of quotations. All literature is ransacked for anecdotes and
instances, and the book has thus become a mine of out-of-the-way
learning, in which later writers have dug. Lawrence Sterne helped
himself freely to Burton's treasures, and Dr. Johnson said that the
_Anatomy_ was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours
sooner than he wished to rise.
The vulgar and common errors which Sir Thomas Browne set himself to
refute, were such as these: That dolphins are crooked, that Jews stink,
that a man hath one rib less than a woman, that Xerxes's army drank up
rivers, that cicades are bred out of cuckoo-spittle, that Hannibal
split Alps with vinegar, together with many similar fallacies touching
Pope Joan, the Wandering Jew, the decuman or tenth wave, the blackness
of negroes, Friar Bacon's brazen head, etc. Another book in which
great learning and ingenuity were applied to trifling ends, was the
same author's _Garden of Cyrus; or, the Quincuncial Lozenge or Network
Plantations of the Ancients_, in which a mystical meaning is sought in
the occurrence throughout nature and art of the figure of the quincunx
or lozenge. Browne was a physician of Norwich, where his library,
museum, aviary, and botanic garden were thought worthy of a special
visit by the Royal Society. He was an antiquary and a naturalist, and
deeply read in the schoolmen and the Christian fathers. He was {138} a
mystic, and a writer of a rich and peculiar imagination, whose thoughts
have impressed themselves upon many kindred minds, like Coleridge, De
Quincey, and Emerson. Two of his books belong to literature, _Religio
Medici_, published in 1642, and _Hydriotaphia; or, Urn Burial_, 1658, a
discourse upon rites of burial and incremation, suggested by some Roman
funeral urns, dug up in Norfolk. Browne's style, though too highly
Latinized, is a good example of Commonwealth prose, that stately,
cumbrous, brocaded prose, which had something of the flow and measure
of verse, rather than the quicker, colloquial movement of modern
writing. Browne stood aloof from the disputes of his time, and in his
very subjects there is a calm and meditative remoteness from the daily
interests of men. His _Religio Medici_ is full of a wise tolerance and
a singular elevation of feeling. "At the sight of a cross, or
crucifix, I can dispense with my hat, but scarce with the thought or
memory of my Saviour." "They only had the advantage of a bold and
noble faith, who lived before his coming." "They go the fairest way to
heaven, that would serve God without a hell." "All things are
artificial, for Nature is the art of God." The last chapter of the
_Urn Burial_ is an almost rithmical descant on mortality and oblivion.
The style kindles slowly into a somber eloquence. It is the most
impressive and extraordinary passage in the prose literature of the
time. Browne, like Hamlet, loved to "consider too curiously." His
subtlety {139} led him to "pose his apprehension with those involved
enigmas and riddles of the Trinity--with incarnation and resurrection;"
and to start odd inquiries; "what song the Syrens sang, or what name
Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women;" or whether, after
Lazarus was raised from the dead, "his heir might lawfully detain his
inheritance." The quaintness of his phrase appears at every turn.
"Charles the Fifth can never hope to live within two Methuselahs of
Hector." "Generations pass, while some trees stand, and old families
survive not three oaks." "Mummy is become merchandise; Mizraim cures
wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams."
One of the pleasantest of old English humorists is Thomas Fuller, who
was a chaplain in the royal army during the civil war, and wrote, among
other things, a _Church History of Britain_; a book of religious
meditations, _Good Thoughts in Bad Times_, and a "character" book, _The
Holy and Profane State_. His most important work, the _Worthies of
England_, was published in 1662, the year after his death. This was a
description of every English county; its natural commodities,
manufactures, wonders, proverbs, etc., with brief biographies of its
memorable persons. Fuller had a well-stored memory, sound piety, and
excellent common sense. Wit was his leading intellectual trait, and
the quaintness which he shared with his contemporaries appears in his
writings in a fondness for puns, droll turns of expressions, and bits
of eccentric {140} suggestion. His prose, unlike Browne's, Milton's,
and Jeremy Taylor's, is brief, simple, and pithy. His dry vein of
humor was imitated by the American Cotton Mather, in his _Magnalia_,
and by many of the English and New England divines of the 17th century.
Jeremy Taylor was also a chaplain in the king's army, was several times
imprisoned for his opinions, and was afterward made, by Charles II.,
Bishop of Down and Connor. He is a devotional rather than a
theological writer, and his _Holy Living_ and _Holy Dying_ are
religious classics. Taylor, like Sidney, was a "warbler of poetic
prose." He has been called the prose Spenser, and his English has the
opulence, the gentle elaboration, the "linked sweetness long drawn out"
of the poet of the _Faery Queene_. In fullness and resonance, Taylor's
diction resembles that of the great orators, though it lacks their
nervous energy. His pathos is exquisitely tender, and his numerous
similes have Spenser's pictorial amplitude. Some of them have become
commonplaces for admiration, notably his description of the flight of
the skylark, and the sentence in which he compares the gradual
awakening of the human faculties to the sunrise, which "first opens a
little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives
light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds
the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills." Perhaps the
most impressive single passage of Taylor's is the concluding chapter in
{141} _Holy Dying_. From the midst of the sickening paraphernalia of
death which he there accumulates, rises that delicate image of the
fading rose, one of the most perfect things in its wording, in all our
prose literature: "But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the
clefts of its hood, and at first it was as fair as the morning, and
full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece; but when a ruder breath
had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and
unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness and to decline to
softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head and broke
its stock; and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its
beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces."
With the progress of knowledge and discussion many kinds of prose
literature, which were not absolutely new, now began to receive wider
extension. Of this sort are the _Letters from Italy_, and other
miscellanies included in the _Reliquiae Wottonianae_, or remains of Sir
Henry Wotton, English embassador at Venice in the reign of James I.,
and subsequently Provost of Eton College. Also the _Table Talk_--full
of incisive remarks--left by John Selden, whom Milton pronounced the
first scholar of his age, and who was a distinguished authority in
legal antiquities and international law, furnished notes to Drayton's
_Polyolbion_, and wrote upon Eastern religions, and upon the Arundel
marbles. Literary biography was represented by the charming little
_Lives_ of good old Izaak Walton, the first {142} edition of whose
_Compleat Angler_ was printed in 1653. The lives were five in number,
of Hooker, Wotton, Donne, Herbert, and Sanderson. Several of these
were personal friends of the author, and Sir Henry Wotton was a brother
of the angle. The _Compleat Angler_, though not the first piece of
sporting literature in English, is unquestionably the most popular, and
still remains a favorite with "all that are lovers of virtue, and dare
trust in providence, and be quiet, and go a-angling." As in Ascham's
_Toxophilus_, the instruction is conveyed in dialogue form, but the
technical part of the book is relieved by many delightful digressions.
_Piscator_ and his pupil _Venator_ pursue their talk under a
honeysuckle hedge or a sycamore tree during a passing shower. They
repair, after the day's fishing, to some honest ale-house, with
lavender in the window, and a score of ballads stuck about the wall,
where they sing catches--"old-fashioned poetry but choicely
good"--composed by the author or his friends, drink barley wine, and
eat their trout or chub. They encounter milkmaids, who sing to them
and give them a draft of the red cow's milk, and they never cease their
praises of the angler's life, of rural contentment among the cowslip
meadows, and the quiet streams of Thames, or Lea, or Shawford Brook.
The decay of a great literary school is usually signalized by the
exaggeration of its characteristic traits. The manner of the
Elisabethan poets was {143} pushed into mannerism by their successors.
That manner, at its best, was hardly a simple one, but in the Stuart
and Commonwealth writers it became mere extravagance. Thus Phineas
Fletcher--a cousin of the dramatist--composed a long Spenserian
allegory, the _Purple Island_, descriptive of the human body. George
Herbert and others made anagrams and verses shaped like an altar, a
cross, or a pair of Easter wings. This group of poets was named, by
Dr. Johnson, in his life of Cowley, the metaphysical school. Other
critics have preferred to call them the fantastic or conceited school,
the later Euphuists, or the English Marinists and Gongorists, after the
poets Marino and Gongora, who brought this fashion to its extreme in
Italy and in Spain. The English _conceptistas_ were mainly clergymen
of the established Church, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Quarles, and
Herrick. But Crashaw was a Roman Catholic, and Cowley--the latest of
them--a layman.
The one who set the fashion was Dr. John Donne. Dean of St. Paul's,
whom Dryden pronounced a great wit, but not a great poet, and whom Ben
Jonson esteemed the best poet in the world for some things, but likely
to be forgotten for want of being understood. Besides satires and
epistles in verse, he composed amatory poems in his youth, and divine
poems in his age, both kinds distinguished by such subtle obscurity,
and far-fetched ingenuities, that they read like a series of puzzles.
When this poet has occasion to write a valediction {144} to his
mistress upon going into France, he compares their temporary separation
to that of a pair of compasses:
"Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like the other foot obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun."
If he would persuade her to marriage he calls her attention to a flea--
"Me it sucked first and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be."
He says that the flea is their marriage-temple, and bids her forbear to
kill it lest she thereby commit murder, suicide, and sacrilege all in
one. Donne's figures are scholastic and smell of the lamp. He
ransacked cosmography, astrology, alchemy, optics, the canon law, and
the divinity of the schoolmen for ink-horn terms and similes. He was
in verse what Browne was in prose. He loved to play with distinctions,
hyperboles, paradoxes, the very casuistry and dialectics of love or
devotion.
"Thou canst not every day give me thy heart:
If thou canst give it then thou never gav'st it;
Love's riddles are that though thy heart depart,
It stays at home and thou with losing sav'st it."
Donne's verse is usually as uncouth as his thought. But there is a
real passion slumbering under these ashy heaps of conceit, and
occasionally {145} a pure flame darts up, as in the justly admired
lines:
"Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheek and so divinely wrought
That one might almost say her body thought."
This description of Donne is true, with modifications, of all the
metaphysical poets. They had the same forced and unnatural style. The
ordinary laws of the association of ideas were reversed with them. It
was not the nearest, but the remotest, association that was called up.
"Their attempts," said Johnson, "were always analytic: they broke every
image into fragments." The finest spirit among them was "holy George
Herbert," whose _Temple_ was published in 1631. The titles in this
volume were such as the following: Christmas, Easter, Good Friday, Holy
Baptism, The Cross, The Church Porch, Church Music, The Holy
Scriptures, Redemption, Faith, Doomsday. Never since, except, perhaps,
in Keble's _Christian Year_, have the ecclesiastic ideals of the
Anglican Church--the "beauty of holiness"--found such sweet expression
in poetry. The verses entitled _Virtue_--
"Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright," etc.
are known to most readers, as well as the line,
"Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, makes that
and the action fine."
The quaintly named pieces, the _Elixir_, the _Collar_, the _Pulley_,
are full of deep thought and spiritual {146} feeling. But Herbert's
poetry is constantly disfigured by bad taste. Take this passage from
_Whitsunday_,
"Listen, sweet dove, unto my song,
And spread thy golden wings on me,
Hatching my tender heart so long,
Till it get wing and fly away with thee,"
which is almost as ludicrous as the epitaph, written by his
contemporary, Carew, on the daughter of Sir Thomas Wentworth, whose soul
. . . "grew so fast within
It broke the outward shell of sin,
And so was hatched a cherubin."
Another of these Church poets was Henry Vaughan, "the Silurist," or
Welshman, whose fine piece, the _Retreat_, has been often compared with
Wordsworth's _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_. Francis Quarles'
_Divine Emblems_ long remained a favorite book with religious readers,
both in Old and New England. Emblem books, in which engravings of a
figurative design were accompanied with explanatory letterpress in
verse, were a popular class of literature in the 17th century. The
most famous of them all were Jacob Catt's Dutch emblems.
One of the most delightful of English lyric poets is Robert Herrick,
whose _Hesperides_, 1648 has lately received such sympathetic
illustration from the pencil of an American artist, Mr. E. A. Abbey.
Herrick was a clergyman of the English Church, {147} and was expelled
by the Puritans from his living, the vicarage of Dean Prior, in
Devonshire. The most quoted of his religious poems is, _How to Keep a
True Lent_. But it may be doubted whether his tastes were prevailingly
clerical; his poetry certainly was not. He was a disciple of Ben
Jonson and his boon companion at
. . . "those lyric feasts
Made at the Sun,
The Dog, the Triple Tun;
Where we such clusters had
As made us nobly wild, not mad.
And yet each verse of thine
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine."
Herrick's _Noble Numbers_ seldom rises above the expression of a
cheerful gratitude and contentment. He had not the subtlety and
elevation of Herbert, but he surpassed him in the grace, melody,
sensuous beauty, and fresh lyrical impulse of his verse. The conceits
of the metaphysical school appear in Herrick only in the form of an
occasional pretty quaintness. He is the poet of English parish
festivals and of English flowers, the primrose, the whitethorn, the
daffodil. He sang the praises of the country life, love songs to
"Julia," and hymns of thanksgiving for simple blessings. He has been
called the English Catullus, but he strikes rather the Horatian note of
_Carpe diem_, and regret at the shortness of life and youth in many of
his best-known poems, such as {148} _Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may_,
and _To Corinna, To Go a Maying_.
Abraham Cowley is now less remembered for his poetry than for his
pleasant volume of Essays, published after the Restoration; but he was
thought in his own time a better poet than Milton. His collection of
love songs--the _Mistress_--is a mass of cold conceits, in the
metaphysical manner; but his elegies on Crashaw and Harvey have much
dignity and natural feeling. He introduced the Pindaric ode into
English, and wrote an epic poem on a biblical subject--the
_Davideis_--now quite unreadable. Cowley was a royalist and followed
the exiled court to France. Side by side with the Church poets were
the cavaliers--Carew, Waller, Lovelace, Suckling, L'Estrange, and
others--gallant courtiers and officers in the royal army, who mingled
love and loyalty in their strains. Colonel Richard Lovelace, who lost
every thing in the king's service and was several times imprisoned,
wrote two famous songs--_To Lucasta on going to the Wars_--in which
occur the lines,
"I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more."
and _To Althaea from Prison_, in which he sings "the sweetness, mercy,
majesty, and glories of his king," and declares that "stone walls do
not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage." Another of the cavaliers was
sir John Suckling, who formed a plot to rescue the Earl of Stratford,
raised a troop of horse {149} for Charles I., was impeached by the
Parliament and fled to France. He was a man of wit and pleasure, who
penned a number of gay trifles, but has been saved from oblivion
chiefly by his exquisite _Ballad upon a Wedding_. Thomas Carew and
Edmund Waller were poets of the same stamp--graceful and easy, but
shallow in feeling. Waller, who followed the court to Paris, was the
author of two songs, which are still favorites, _Go, Lovely Rose_, and
_On a Girdle_, and he first introduced the smooth correct manner of
writing in couplets, which Dryden and Pope carried to perfection.
Gallantry rather than love was the inspiration of these courtly
singers. In such verses as Carew's _Encouragements to a Lover_, and
George Wither's _The Manly Heart_--
"If she be not so to me,
What care I how fair she be?"
we see the revolt against the high, passionate, Sidneian love of the
Elisabethan sonneteers, and the note of _persiflage_ that was to mark
the lyrical verse of the Restoration. But the poetry of the cavaliers
reached its high-water mark in one fiery-hearted song by the noble and
unfortunate James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, who invaded Scotland in
the interest of Charles II., and was taken prisoner and put to death at
Edinburgh in 1650.
"My dear and only love, I pray
That little world of thee
Be governed by no other sway
Than purest monarchy."
{150} In language borrowed from the politics of the time, he cautions
his mistress against _synods_ or _committees_ in her heart; swears to
make her glorious by his pen and famous by his sword; and with that
fine recklessness which distinguished the dashing troopers of Prince
Rupert, he adds, in words that have been often quoted,
"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all."
John Milton, the greatest English poet except Shakspere, was born in
London in 1608. His father was a scrivener, an educated man, and a
musical composer of some merit. At his home Milton was surrounded with
all the influences of a refined and well ordered Puritan household of
the better class. He inherited his father's musical tastes, and during
the latter part of his life, he spent a part of every afternoon in
playing the organ. No poet has written more beautifully of music than
Milton. One of his sonnets was addressed to Henry Lawes, the composer,
who wrote the airs to the songs in _Comus_. Milton's education was
most careful and thorough. He spent seven years at Cambridge where,
from his personal beauty and fastidious habits, he was called "The lady
of Christ's." At Horton, in Buckinghamshire, where his father had a
country seat, he passed five years more, perfecting himself in his
studies, and then traveled for fifteen months, {151} mainly in Italy,
visiting Naples and Rome, but residing at Florence. Here he saw
Galileo, a prisoner of the Inquisition "for thinking otherwise in
astronomy than his Dominican and Franciscan licensers thought." Milton
is the most scholarly and the most truly classical of English poets.
His Latin verse, for elegance and correctness, ranks with Addison's;
and his Italian poems were the admiration of the Tuscan scholars. But
his learning appears in his poetry only in the form of a fine and
chastened result, and not in laborious allusion and pedantic citation,
as too often in Ben Jonson, for instance. "My father," he wrote,
"destined me, while yet a little child, for the study of humane
letters." He was also destined for the ministry, but, "coming to some
maturity of years and perceiving what tyranny had invaded the
Church, . . . I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence, before
the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and
forswearing." Other hands than a bishop's were laid upon his head.
"He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter," he
says, "ought himself to be a true poem." And he adds that his "natural
haughtiness" saved him from all impurity of living. Milton had a
sublime self-respect. The dignity and earnestness of the Puritan
gentleman blended in his training with the culture of the Renaissance.
Born into an age of spiritual conflict, he dedicated his gift to the
service of Heaven, and he became, like Heine, a valiant soldier in the
war for {152} liberation. He was the poet of a cause, and his song was
keyed to
"The Dorian mood
Of flutes and soft recorders such as raised
To heighth of noblest temper, heroes old
Arming to battle."
On comparing Milton with Shakspere, with his universal sympathies and
receptive imagination, one perceives a loss in breadth, but a gain in
intense personal conviction. He introduced a new note into English
poetry, the passion for truth and the feeling of religious sublimity.
Milton's was an heroic age, and its song must be lyric rather than
dramatic; its singer must be in the fight and of it.
Of the verses which he wrote at Cambridge, the most important was his
splendid ode _On the Morning of Christ's Nativity_. At Horton he
wrote, among other things, the companion pieces, _L'Allegro_ and _Il
Penseroso_, of a kind quite new in English, giving to the landscape an
expression in harmony with two contrasted moods. _Comus_, which
belongs to the same period, was the perfection of the Elisabethan court
masque, and was presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634, on the occasion of
the installation of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales.
Under the guise of a skillful addition to the Homeric allegory of
Circe, with her cup of enchantment, it was a Puritan song in praise of
chastity and temperance. _Lycidas_, in like manner, was the perfection
of the Elisabethan {153} pastoral elegy. It was contributed to a
volume of memorial verses on the death of Edward King, a Cambridge
friend of Milton's, who was drowned in the Irish Channel in 1637. In
one stern strain, which is put into the mouth of St. Peter, the author
"foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then at their height."
"But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once and smite no more."
This was Milton's last utterance in English verse before the outbreak
of the civil war, and it sounds the alarm of the impending struggle.
In technical quality _Lycidas_ is the most wonderful of all Milton's
poems. The cunningly intricate harmony of the verse, the pressed and
packed language with its fullness of meaning and allusion make it
worthy of the minutest study. In these early poems, Milton, merely as
a poet, is at his best. Something of the Elisabethan style still
clings to them; but their grave sweetness, their choice wording, their
originality in epithet, name, and phrase, were novelties of Milton's
own. His English masters were Spenser, Fletcher, and Sylvester, the
translator of Du Bartas's _La Sepmaine_, but nothing of Spenser's
prolixity, or Fletcher's effeminacy, or Sylvester's quaintness is found
in Milton's pure, energetic diction. He inherited their beauties, but
his taste had been tempered to a finer edge by his studies in Greek and
Hebrew poetry. He was the last of the Elisabethans, and {154} his
style was at once the crown of the old and a departure into the new.
In masque, elegy, and sonnet, he set the seal to the Elisabethan
poetry, said the last word, and closed one great literary era.
In 1639 the breach between Charles I. and his Parliament brought Milton
back from Italy. "I thought it base to be traveling at my ease for
amusement, while my fellow-countrymen at home were fighting for
liberty." For the next twenty years he threw himself into the contest,
and poured forth a succession of tracts, in English and Latin, upon the
various public questions at issue. As a political thinker, Milton had
what Bacon calls "the humor of a scholar." In a country of endowed
grammar schools and universities hardly emerged from a mediaeval
discipline and curriculum, he wanted to set up Greek gymnasia and
philosophical schools, after the fashion of the Porch and the Academy.
He would have imposed an Athenian democracy upon a people trained in
the traditions of monarchy and episcopacy. At the very moment when
England had grown tired of the Protectorate and was preparing to
welcome back the Stuarts, he was writing _An Easy and Ready Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth_. Milton acknowledged that in prose he
had the use of his left hand only. There are passages of fervid
eloquence, where the style swells into a kind of lofty chant, with a
rithmical rise and fall to it, as in parts of the English Book of
Common Prayer. But in {155} general his sentences are long and
involved, full of inventions and latinized constructions. Controversy
at that day was conducted on scholastic lines. Each disputant, instead
of appealing at once to the arguments of expediency and common sense,
began with a formidable display of learning, ransacking Greek and Latin
authors and the fathers of the Church for opinions in support of his
own position. These authorities he deployed at tedious length and
followed them up with heavy scurrilities and "excusations," by way of
attack and defense. The dispute between Milton and Salmasius over the
execution of Charles I. was like a duel between two knights in full
armor striking at each other with ponderous maces. The very titles of
these pamphlets are enough to frighten off a modern reader: _A
Confutation of the Animadversions upon a Defense of a Humble
Remonstrance against a Treatise, entitled Of Reformation_. The most
interesting of Milton's prose tracts is his _Areopagitica: A Speech for
the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing_, 1644. The arguments in this are
of permanent force; but if the reader will compare it, or Jeremy
Taylor's _Liberty of Prophesying_, with Locke's _Letters on
Toleration_, he will see how much clearer and more convincing is the
modern method of discussion, introduced by writers like Hobbes and
Locke and Dryden. Under the Protectorate Milton was appointed Latin
Secretary to the Council of State. In the diplomatic correspondence
which was his official duty, and in the composition of his tract, {156}
_Defensio pro Populo Anglicano_, he overtasked his eyes, and in 1654
became totally blind. The only poetry of Milton's belonging to the
years 1640-1660 are a few sonnets of the pure Italian form, mainly
called forth by public occasions. By the Elisabethans the sonnet had
been used mainly in love poetry. In Milton's hands, said Wordsworth,
"the thing became a trumpet." Some of his were addressed to political
leaders, like Fairfax, Cromwell, and Sir Henry Vane; and of these the
best is, perhaps, the sonnet written on the massacre of the Vaudois
Protestants--"a collect in verse," it has been called--which has the
fire of a Hebrew prophet invoking the divine wrath upon the oppressors
of Israel. Two were on his own blindness, and in these there is not
one selfish repining, but only a regret that the value of his service
is impaired--
"Will God exact day labor, light denied?"
After the restoration of the Stuarts, in 1660, Milton was for a while
in peril, by reason of the part that he had taken against the king. But
"On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness and with dangers compassed round
And solitude,"
he bated no jot of heart or hope. Henceforth he becomes the most
heroic and affecting figure in English literary history. Years before
he had planned an epic poem on the subject of King {157} Arthur, and
again a sacred tragedy on man's fall and redemption. These experiments
finally took shape in _Paradise Lost_, which was given to the world in
1667. This is the epic of English Puritanism and of Protestant
Christianity. It was Milton's purpose to
"assert eternal Providence
And justify the ways of God to men,"
or, in other words, to embody his theological system in verse. This
gives a doctrinal rigidity and even dryness to parts of the _Paradise
Lost_, which injure its effect as a poem. His "God the father turns a
school divine:" his Christ, as has been wittily said, is "God's good
boy:" the discourses of Raphael to Adam are scholastic lectures: Adam
himself is too sophisticated for the state of innocence, and Eve is
somewhat insipid. The real protagonist of the poem is Satan, upon
whose mighty figure Milton unconsciously bestowed something of his own
nature, and whose words of defiance might almost have come from some
Republican leader when the Good Old Cause went down.
"What though the field be lost?
All is not lost, the unconquerable will
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield."
But when all has been said that can be said in disparagement or
qualification, _Paradise Lost_ remains the foremost of English poems
and the {158} sublimest of all epics. Even in those parts where
theology encroaches most upon poetry, the diction, though often heavy,
is never languid. Milton's blank verse in itself is enough to bear up
the most prosaic theme, and so is his epic English, a style more
massive and splendid than Shakspere's, and comparable, like
Tertullian's Latin, to a river of molten gold. Of the countless single
beauties that sow his page
"Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks
In Valombrosa,"
there is no room to speak, nor of the astonishing fullness of substance
and multitude of thoughts which have caused the _Paradise Lost_ to be
called the book of universal knowledge. "The heat of Milton's mind,"
said Dr. Johnson, "might be said to sublimate his learning and throw
off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser
parts." The truth of this remark is clearly seen upon a comparison of
Milton's description of the creation, for example, with corresponding
passages in Sylvester's _Divine Weeks and Works_ (translated from the
Huguenot poet, Du Bartas), which was, in some sense, his original. But
the most heroic thing in Milton's heroic poem is Milton. There are no
strains in _Paradise Lost_ so absorbing as those in which the poet
breaks the strict epic bounds and speaks directly of himself, as in the
majestic lament over his own blindness, and in the invocation to
Urania, which open the third and seventh {159} books. Every-where,
too, one reads between the lines. We think of the dissolute cavaliers,
as Milton himself undoubtedly was thinking of them, when we read of
"the sons of Belial flown with insolence and wine," or when the Puritan
turns among the sweet landscapes of Eden, to denounce
"court amours
Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,
Or serenade which the starved lover sings
To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain."
And we think of Milton among the triumphant royalists when we read of
the Seraph Abdiel "faithful found among the faithless."
"Nor number nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth or change his constant mind,
Though single. From amidst them forth he passed,
Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustained
Superior, nor of violence feared aught:
And with retorted scorn his back he turned
On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed."
_Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_ were published in 1671. The
first of these treated in four books Christ's temptation in the
wilderness, a subject that had already been handled in the Spenserian
allegorical manner by Giles Fletcher, a brother of the Purple Islander,
in his _Christ's Victory and Triumph_, 1610. The superiority of
_Paradise Lost_ to its sequel is not without significance. The
Puritans were Old Testament men. Their God was the Hebrew Jehovah,
whose single divinity the Catholic mythology had overlaid with the
{160} figures of the Son, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. They
identified themselves in thought with his chosen people, with the
militant theocracy of the Jews. Their sword was the sword of the Lord
and of Gideon. "To your tents, O Israel," was the cry of the London
mob when the bishops were committed to the Tower. And when the fog
lifted, on the morning of the battle of Dunbar, Cromwell exclaimed,
"Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered: like as the sun
riseth, so shalt thou drive them away."
_Samson Agonistes_, though Hebrew in theme and in spirit, was in form a
Greek tragedy. It had chorus and semi-chorus, and preserved the
so-called dramatic unities; that is, the scene was unchanged, and there
were no intervals of time between the acts. In accordance with the
rules of the Greek theater, but two speakers appeared upon the stage at
once, and there was no violent action. The death of Samson is related
by a messenger. Milton's reason for the choice of this subject is
obvious. He himself was Samson, shorn of his strength, blind, and
alone among enemies; given over
"to the unjust tribunals, under change of times,
And condemnation of the ungrateful multitude."
As Milton grew older he discarded more and more the graces of poetry,
and relied purely upon the structure and the thought. In _Paradise
Lost_, although there is little resemblance to Elisabethan work--such
as one notices in _Comus_ and the {161} Christmas hymn--yet the style
is rich, especially in the earlier books. But in _Paradise Regained_
it is severe to bareness, and in _Samson_, even to ruggedness. Like
Michelangelo, with whose genius he had much in common, Milton became
impatient of finish or of mere beauty. He blocked out his work in
masses, left rough places and surfaces not filled in, and inclined to
express his meaning by a symbol, rather than work it out in detail. It
was a part of his austerity, his increasing preference for structural
over decorative methods, to give up rime for blank verse. His latest
poem, _Samson Agonistes_, a metrical study of the highest interest.
Milton was not quite alone among the poets of his time in espousing the
popular cause. Andrew Marvell, who was his assistant in the Latin
secretaryship and sat in Parliament for Hull, after the Restoration,
was a good Republican, and wrote a fine _Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's
Return from Ireland_. There is also a rare imaginative quality in his
_Song of the Exiles in Bermuda_, _Thoughts in a Garden_, and _The Girl
Describes her Fawn_. George Wither, who was imprisoned for his
satires, also took the side of the Parliament, but there is little that
is distinctively Puritan in his poetry.
1. Milton's Poetical Works. Edited by David Masson. Macmillan.
2. Selections from Milton's Prose. Edited by F. D. Myers. (Parchment
Series.)
{162}
3. England's Antiphon. By George Macdonald.
4. Robert Herrick's Hesperides.
5. Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and Hydriotaphia. Edited by
Willis Bund. Sampson Low & Co., 1873.
6. Thomas. Fuller's Good Thoughts in Bad Times.
7. Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler.
{163}
CHAPTER V.
FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF POPE.
1660-1744.
The Stuart Restoration was a period of descent from poetry to prose,
from passion and imagination to wit and understanding. The serious,
exalted mood of the Civil War and the Commonwealth had spent itself and
issued in disillusion. There followed a generation of wits, logical,
skeptical, and prosaic, without earnestness, as without principle. The
characteristic literature of such a time is criticism, satire, and
burlesque, and such, indeed, continued to be the course of English
literary history for a century after the return of the Stuarts. The
age was not a stupid one, but one of active inquiry. The Royal
Society, for the cultivation of the natural sciences, was founded in
1662. There were able divines in the pulpit and at the
universities--Barrow, Tillotson, Stillingfleet, South, and others:
scholars, like Bentley; historians, like Clarendon and Burnet;
scientists, like Boyle and Newton; philosophers, like Hobbes and Locke.
But of poetry, in any high sense of the word, there was little between
the time of Milton and the time of Goldsmith and Gray.
{164} The English writers of this period were strongly influenced by
the contemporary literature of France, by the comedies of Moliere, the
tragedies of Corneille and Racine, and the satires, epistles, and
versified essays of Boileau. Many of the Restoration writers--Waller,
Cowley, Davenant, Wycherley, Villiers, and others--had been in France
during the exile, and brought back with them French tastes. John
Dryden (1631-1700), who is the great literary figure of his generation,
has been called the first of the moderns. From the reign of Charles
II., indeed, we may date the beginnings of modern English life. What
we call "society" was forming, the town, the London world. "Coffee,
which makes the politician wise," had just been introduced, and the
ordinaries of Ben Jonson's time gave way to coffee-houses, like Will's
and Button's, which became the head-quarters of literary and political
gossip. The two great English parties, as we know them to-day, were
organized: the words _Whig_ and _Tory_ date from this reign. French
etiquette and fashions came in and French phrases of convenience--such
as _coup de grace_, _bel esprit_, etc.--began to appear in English
prose. Literature became intensely urban and partisan. It reflected
city life, the disputes of faction, and the personal quarrels of
authors. The politics of the Great Rebellion had been of heroic
proportions, and found fitting expression in song. Rut in the
Revolution of 1688 the issues were constitutional and to be settled by
the arguments of lawyers. Measures were in {165} question rather than
principles, and there was little inspiration to the poet in Exclusion
Bills and Acts of Settlement.
Court and society, in the reign of Charles II. and James II., were
shockingly dissolute, and in literature, as in life, the reaction
against Puritanism went to great extremes. The social life of the time
is faithfully reflected in the diary of Samuel Pepys. He was a
simple-minded man, the son of a London tailor, and became, himself,
secretary to the admiralty. His diary was kept in cipher, and
published only in 1825. Being written for his own eye, it is
singularly outspoken; and its naive, gossipy, confidential tone makes
it a most diverting book, as it is, historically, a most valuable one.
Perhaps the most popular book of its time was Samuel Butler's
_Hudibras_ (1663-64), a burlesque romance in ridicule of the Puritans.
The king carried a copy of it in his pocket, and Pepys testifies that
it was quoted and praised on all sides. Ridicule of the Puritans was
nothing new. Zeal-of-the-land Busy, in Ben Jonson's _Bartholomew
Fair_, is an early instance of the kind. There was nothing laughable
about the earnestness of men like Cromwell, Milton, Algernon Sidney,
and Sir Henry Vane. But even the French Revolution had its humors; and
as the English Puritan Revolution gathered head and the extremer
sectaries pressed to the front--Quakers, New Lights, Fifth Monarchy
Men, Ranters, etc.--its grotesque sides came uppermost. Butler's hero
is a Presbyterian Justice of the Peace {166} who sallies forth with his
secretary, Ralpho--an Independent and Anabaptist--like Don Quixote with
Sancho Panza, to suppress May games and bear-baitings. (Macaulay, it
will be remembered, said that the Puritans disapproved of bear-baiting,
not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to
the spectators.) The humor of _Hudibras_ is not of the finest. The
knight and squire are discomfited in broadly comic adventures, hardly
removed from the rough, physical drolleries of a pantomime or a circus.
The deep heart-laughter of Cervantes, the pathos on which his humor
rests, is, of course, not to be looked for in Butler. But he had wit
of a sharp, logical kind, and his style surprises with all manner of
verbal antics. He is almost as great a phrase-master as Pope, though
in a coarser kind. His verse is a smart doggerel, and his poem has
furnished many stock sayings, as, for example,
"'Tis strange what difference there can be
'Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee."
_Hudibras_ has had many imitators, not the least successful of whom was
the American John Trumbull, in his revolutionary satire _M'Fingal_,
some couplets of which are generally quoted as Butler's, as, for
example,
"No man e'er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law."
The rebound against Puritanism is seen no less plainly in the drama of
the Restoration, and the {167} stage now took vengeance for its
enforced silence under the Protectorate. Two theaters were opened
under the patronage, respectively, of the king and of his brother, the
Duke of York. The manager of the latter, Sir William Davenant--who had
fought on the king's side, been knighted for his services, escaped to
France, and was afterward captured and imprisoned in England for two
years--had managed to evade the law against stage plays as early as
1656, by presenting his _Siege of Rhodes_ as an "opera," with
instrumental music and dialogue in recitative, after a fashion newly
sprung up in Italy. This he brought out again in 1661, with the
dialogue recast into riming couplets in the French fashion. Movable
painted scenery was now introduced from France, and actresses took the
female parts formerly played by boys. This last innovation was said to
be at the request of the king, one of whose mistresses, the famous Nell
Gwynne, was the favorite actress at the King's Theater.
Upon the stage, thus reconstructed, the so-called "classical" rules of
the French theater were followed, at least in theory. The Louis XIV.
writers were not purely creative, like Shakspere and his contemporaries
in England, but critical and self-conscious. The Academy had been
formed in 1636, for the preservation of the purity of the French
language, and discussion abounded on the principles and methods of
literary art. Corneille not only wrote tragedies, but essays on
tragedy, and {168} one in particular on the _Three Unities_. Dryden
followed his example in his _Essay of Dramatic Poesie_ (1667), in which
he treated of the unities, and argued for the use of rime in tragedy in
preference to blank verse. His own practice varied. Most of his
tragedies were written in rime, but in the best of them, _All for
Love_, 1678, founded on Shakspere's _Antony and Cleopatra_, he returned
to blank verse. One of the principles of the classical school was to
keep comedy and tragedy distinct. The tragic dramatists of the
Restoration, Dryden, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Lee, and others, composed
what they called "heroic plays," such as the _Indian Emperor_, the
_Conquest of Granada_, the _Duke of Lerma_, the _Empress of Morocco_,
the _Destruction of Jerusalem_, _Nero_, and the _Rival Queens_. The
titles of these pieces indicate their character. Their heroes were
great historic personages. Subject and treatment were alike remote
from nature and real life. The diction was stilted and artificial, and
pompous declamation took the place of action and genuine passion. The
tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up on
Shakspere, but to see how great an artist Racine was, in his own
somewhat narrow way, one has but to compare his _Phedre_, or
_Iphigenie_, with Dryden's ranting tragedy of _Tyrannic Love_. These
bombastic heroic plays were made the subject of a capital burlesque,
the _Rehearsal_, by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, acted in 1671
at the King's Theater. The indebtedness of {169} the English stage to
the French did not stop with a general adoption of its dramatic
methods, but extended to direct imitation and translation. Dryden's
comedy, _An Evening's Love_, was adapted from Thomas Corneille's _Le
Feint Astrologue_, and his _Sir Martin Mar-all_, from Moliere's _L'
Etourdi_. Shadwell borrowed his _Miser_ from Moliere, and Otway made
versions of Racine's _Berenice_ and Moliere's _Fourberies de Scapin_.
Wycherley's _Country Wife_ and _Plain Dealer_, although not
translations, were based, in a sense, upon Moliere's _Ecole des Femmes_
and _Le Misanthrope_. The only one of the tragic dramatists of the
Restoration who prolonged the traditions of the Elisabethan stage, was
Otway, whose _Venice Preserved_, written in blank verse, still keeps
the boards. There are fine passages in Dryden's heroic plays, passages
weighty in thought and nobly sonorous in language. There is one great
scene (between Antony and Ventidius) in his _All for Love_. And one,
at least, of his comedies, the _Spanish Friar_, is skillfully
constructed. But his nature was not pliable enough for the drama, and
he acknowledged that, in writing for the stage, he "forced his genius."
In sharp contrast with these heroic plays was the comic drama of the
Restoration, the plays of Wycherley, Killigrew, Etherege, Farquhar, Van
Brugh, Congreve, and others; plays like the _Country Wife_, the
_Parson's Wedding_, _She Would if She Could_, the _Beaux' Stratagem_,
the _Relapse_, and the _Way of the World_. These were in prose, and
represented {170} the gay world and the surface of fashionable life.
Amorous intrigue was their constantly recurring theme. Some of them
were written expressly in ridicule of the Puritans. Such was the
_Committee_ of Dryden's brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, the hero of
which is a distressed gentleman, and the villain a London cit, and
president of the committee appointed by Parliament to sit upon the
sequestration of the estates of royalists. Such were also the
_Roundheads_ and the _Banished Cavaliers_ of Mrs. Aphra Behn, who was a
female spy in the service of Charles II., at Antwerp, and one of the
coarsest of the Restoration comedians. The profession of piety had
become so disagreeable that a shameless cynicism was now considered the
mark of a gentleman. The ideal hero of Wycherley or Etherege was the
witty young profligate, who had seen life, and learned to disbelieve in
virtue. His highest qualities were a contempt for cant, physical
courage, a sort of spendthrift generosity, and a good-natured readiness
to back up a friend in a quarrel, or an amour. Virtue was
_bourgeois_--reserved for London trades-people. A man must be either a
rake or a hypocrite. The gentlemen were rakes, the city people were
hypocrites. Their wives, however, were all in love with the gentlemen,
and it was the proper thing to seduce them, and to borrow their
husbands' money. For the first and last time, perhaps, in the history
of the English drama, the sympathy of the audience was deliberately
sought for the seducer and the rogue, and the laugh {171} turned
against the dishonored husband and the honest man. (Contrast this with
Shakspere's _Merry Wives of Windsor_.) The women were represented as
worse than the men--scheming, ignorant, and corrupt. The dialogue in
the best of these plays was easy, lively, and witty; the situations in
some of them audacious almost beyond belief. Under a thin varnish of
good breeding, the sentiments and manners were really brutal. The
loosest gallants of Beaumont and Fletcher's theater retain a fineness
of feeling and that _politesse de coeur_--which marks the gentleman.
They are poetic creatures, and own a capacity for romantic passion.
But the Manlys and Homers of the Restoration comedy have a prosaic,
cold-blooded profligacy that disgusts. Charles Lamb, in his ingenious
essay on "The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century," apologized for
the Restoration stage, on the ground that it represented a world of
whim and unreality in which the ordinary laws of morality had no
application.
But Macaulay answered truly, that at no time has the stage been closer
in its imitation of real life. The theater of Wycherley and Etherege
was but the counterpart of that social condition which we read of in
Pepys's _Diary_, and in the _Memoirs_ of the Chevalier de Grammont.
This prose comedy of manners was not, indeed, "artificial" at all, in
the sense in which the contemporary tragedy--the "heroic play"--was
artificial. It was, on the contrary, far more natural, and,
intellectually, of {172} much higher value. In 1698 Jeremy Collier, a
non-juring Jacobite clergyman, published his _Short View of the
Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage_, which did much toward
reforming the practice of the dramatists. The formal characteristics,
without the immorality, of the Restoration comedy, re-appeared briefly
in Goldsmith's _She Stoops to Conquer_, 1772, and Sheridan's _Rival_,
_School for Scandal_, and _Critic_, 1775-9, our last strictly
"classical" comedies. None of this school of English comedians
approached their model, Moliere. He excelled his imitators not only in
his French urbanity--the polished wit and delicate grace of his
style--but in the dexterous unfolding of his plot, and in the wisdom
and truth of his criticism of life, and his insight into character. It
is a symptom of the false taste of the age that Shakspere's plays were
rewritten for the Restoration stage. Davenant made new versions of
_Macbeth_ and _Julius Caasar_, substituting rime for blank verse. In
conjunction with Dryden, he altered the _Tempest_, complicating the
intrigue by the introduction of a male counterpart to Miranda--a youth
who had never seen a woman. Shadwell "improved" _Timon of Athens_, and
Nahum Tate furnished a new fifth act to _King Lear_, which turned the
play into a comedy! In the prologue to his doctored version of
_Troilus and Cressida_, Dryden made the ghost of Shakspere speak of
himself as
"Untaught, unpracticed in a barbarous age."
{172} Thomas Rymer, whom Pope pronounced a good critic, was very severe
upon Shakspere in his _Remarks on the Tragedies of the Last Age_; and
in his _Short View of Tragedy_, 1693, he said, "In the neighing of a
horse or in the growling of a mastiff, there is more humanity than,
many times, in the tragical flights of Shakspere." "To Deptford by
water," writes Pepys, in his diary for August 20, 1666, "reading
Othello, Moor of Venice; which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good
play; but, having so lately read the _Adventures of Five Hours_, it
seems a mean thing."
In undramatic poetry the new school, both in England and in France,
took its point of departure in a reform against the extravagances of
the Marinists, or conceited poets, specially represented in England by
Donne and Cowley. The new poets, both in their theory and practice,
insisted upon correctness, clearness, polish, moderation, and good
sense. Boileau's _L' Art Poetique_, 1673, inspired by Horace's _Ars
Poetica_, was a treatise in verse upon the rules of correct
composition, and it gave the law in criticism for over a century, not
only in France, but in Germany and England. It gave English poetry a
didactic turn and started the fashion of writing critical essays in
riming couplets. The Earl of Mulgrave published two "poems" of this
kind, an _Essay on Satire_, and an _Essay on Poetry_. The Earl of
Roscommon--who, said Addison, "makes even rules a noble poetry"--made a
metrical version of Horace's _Ars Poetica_, {174} and wrote an original
_Essay on Translated Verse_. Of the same kind were Addison's epistle
to Sacheverel, entitled _An Account of the Greatest English Poets_, and
Pope's _Essay on Criticism_, 1711, which was nothing more than
versified maxims of rhetoric, put with Pope's usual point and
brilliancy. The classicism of the 18th century, it has been said, was
a classicism in red heels and a periwig. It was Latin rather than
Greek; it turned to the least imaginative side of Latin literature and
found its models, not in Vergil, Catullus, and Lucretius, but in the
satires, epistles, and didactic pieces of Juvenal, Horace, and Persius.
The chosen medium of the new poetry was the heroic couplet. This had,
of course, been used before by English poets as far back as Chaucer.
The greater part of the _Canterbury Tales_ was written in heroic
couplets. But now a new strength and precision were given to the
familiar measure by imprisoning the sense within the limit of the
couplet, and by treating each line as also a unit in itself. Edmund
Waller had written verse of this kind as early as the reign of Charles
I. He, said Dryden, "first showed us to conclude the sense most
commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of those before him, runs on
for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath to overtake
it." Sir John Denham, also, in his _Cooper's Hill_, 1643, had written
such verse as this:
"O, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example as it is my theme!
{175}
Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."
Here we have the regular flow, and the nice balance between the first
and second member of each couplet, and the first and second part of
each line, which characterized the verse of Dryden and Pope.
"Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long resounding march and energy divine."
Thus wrote Pope, using for the nonce the triplet and alexandrine by
which Dryden frequently varied the couplet. Pope himself added a
greater neatness and polish to Dryden's verse and brought the system to
such monotonous perfection that he "made poetry a mere mechanic art."
The lyrical poetry of this generation was almost entirely worthless.
The dissolute wits of Charles the Second's court, Sedley, Rochester,
Sackville, and the "mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease" threw off a
few amatory trifles; but the age was not spontaneous or sincere enough
for genuine song. Cowley introduced the Pindaric ode, a highly
artificial form of the lyric, in which the language was tortured into a
kind of spurious grandeur, and the meter teased into a sound and fury,
signifying nothing. Cowley's Pindarics were filled with something
which passed for fire, but has now utterly gone out. Nevertheless, the
fashion spread, and "he who could do nothing else," said Dr. Johnson,
{176} "could write like Pindar." The best of these odes was Dryden's
famous _Alexander's Feast_, written for a celebration of St. Cecilia's
day by a musical club. To this same fashion, also, we owe Gray's two
fine odes, the _Progress of Poesy_ and the _Bard_, written a
half-century later.
Dryden was not so much a great poet, as a solid thinker, with a
splendid mastery of expression, who used his energetic verse as a
vehicle for political argument and satire. His first noteworthy poem,
_Annus Mirabilis_, 1667, was a narrative of the public events of the
year 1666, namely: the Dutch war and the great fire of London. The
subject of _Absalom and Ahitophel_--the first part of which appeared in
1681--was the alleged plot of the Whig leader, the Earl of Shaftesbury,
to defeat the succession of the Duke of York, afterward James II., by
securing the throne to Monmouth, a natural son of Charles II. The
parallel afforded by the story of Absalom's revolt against David was
wrought out by Dryden with admirable ingenuity and keeping. He was at
his best in satirical character-sketches, such as the brilliant
portraits in this poem of Shaftesbury, as the false counselor,
Ahitophel, and of the Duke of Buckingham as Zimri. The latter was
Dryden's reply to the _Rehearsal_. _Absalom and Ahitophel_ was
followed by the _Medal_, a continuation of the same subject, and _Mac
Flecknoe_, a personal onslaught on the "true blue Protestant poet,"
Thomas Shadwell, a political and literary foe of Dryden. Flecknoe, an
{177} obscure Irish poetaster, being about to retire from the throne of
duncedom, resolved to settle the succession upon his son, Shadwell,
whose claims to the inheritance are vigorously asserted.
"The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense. . . .
The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull
With this prophetic blessing--Be thou dull."
Dryden is our first great satirist. The formal satire had been written
in the reign of Elisabeth by Donne, and by Joseph Hall, Bishop of
Exeter, and subsequently by Marston, the dramatist, by Wither, Marvell,
and others; but all of these failed through an over violence of
language, and a purpose too pronouncedly moral. They had no lightness
of touch, no irony and mischief. They bore down too hard, imitated
Juvenal, and lashed English society in terms befitting the corruption
of Imperial Rome. They denounced, instructed, preached, did every
thing but satirize. The satirist must raise a laugh. Donne and Hall
abused men in classes: priests were worldly, lawyers greedy, courtiers
obsequious, etc. But the easy scorn of Dryden and the delightful
malice of Pope gave a pungent personal interest to their sarcasm,
infinitely more effective than these commonplaces of satire. Dryden
was as happy in controversy as in satire, and is unexcelled in the
power to reason in verse. His _Religio Laici_, 1682, was a poem in
defense of the {178} English Church. But when James II. came to the
throne Dryden turned Catholic and wrote the _Hind and Panther_, 1687,
to vindicate his new belief. Dryden had the misfortune to be dependent
upon royal patronage and upon a corrupt stage. He sold his pen to the
court, and in his comedies he was heavily and deliberately lewd, a sin
which he afterward acknowledged and regretted. Milton's "soul was like
a star and dwelt apart," but Dryden wrote for the trampling multitude.
He had a coarseness of moral fiber, but was not malignant in his
satire, being of a large, careless, and forgetting nature. He had that
masculine, enduring cast of mind which gathers heat and clearness from
motion, and grows better with age. His _Fables_--modernizations from
Chaucer and translations from Boccaccio--written the year before he
died, are among his best works.
Dryden is also our first critic of any importance. His critical essays
were mostly written as prefaces or dedications to his poems and plays.
But his _Essay on Dramatic Poesie_, which Dr. Johnson called our "first
regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing," was in the shape
of a Platonic dialogue. When not misled by the French classicism of
his day, Dryden was an admirable critic, full of penetration and sound
sense. He was the earliest writer, too, of modern literary prose. If
the imitation of French models was an injury to poetry it was a benefit
to prose. The best modern prose is French, and it was the essayists of
the {179} Gallicised Restoration age--Cowley, Sir William Temple, and,
above all, Dryden--who gave modern English prose that simplicity,
directness, and colloquial air, which marks it off from the more
artificial diction of Milton, Taylor, and Browne.
A few books whose shaping influences lay in the past belong by their
date to this period. John Bunyan, a poor tinker, whose reading was
almost wholly in the Bible and Fox's _Book of Martyrs_, imprisoned for
twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching at conventicles, wrote and,
in 1678, published his _Pilgrim's Progress_, the greatest of religious
allegories. Bunyan's spiritual experiences were so real to him that
they took visible concrete shape in his imagination as men, women,
cities, landscapes. It is the simplest, the most transparent of
allegories. Unlike the _Faery Queene_, the story of _Pilgrim's
Progress_ has no reason for existing apart from its inner meaning, and
yet its reality is so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the
Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of
Death with the same belief with which they read of Crusoe's cave or
Aladdin's palace.
It is a long step from the Bedford tinker to the cultivated poet of
_Paradise Lost_. They represent the poles of the Puritan party. Yet
it may admit of a doubt, whether the Puritan epic is, in essentials, as
vital and original a work as the Puritan allegory. They both came out
quietly and made little noise at first. But the _Pilgrim's Progress_
got at once {180} into circulation, and not even a single copy of the
first edition remains. Milton, too--who received 10 pounds for the
copyright of _Paradise Lost_--seemingly found that "fit audience though
few" for which he prayed, as his poem reached its second impression in
five years (1672). Dryden visited him in his retirement and asked
leave to turn it into rime and put it on the stage as an opera. "Ay,"
said Milton, good humoredly, "you may tag my verses." And accordingly
they appeared, duly tagged, in Dryden's operatic masque, the _State of
Innocence_. In this startling conjunction we have the two ages in a
nut-shell: the Commonwealth was an epic, the Restoration an opera.
The literary period covered by the life of Pope, 1688-1744, is marked
off by no distinct line from the generation before it. Taste continued
to be governed by the precepts of Boileau and the French classical
school. Poetry remained chiefly didactic and satirical, and satire in
Pope's hands was more personal even than in Dryden's, and addressed
itself less to public issues. The literature of the "Augustan age" of
Queen Anne (1702-1714) was still more a literature of the town and of
fashionable society than that of the Restoration had been. It was also
closely involved with party struggles of Whig and Tory, and the ablest
pens on either side were taken into alliance by the political leaders.
Swift was in high favor with the Tory ministers, Oxford and
Bolingbroke, and his pamphlets, the _Public Spirit of the Whigs_ and
the {181} _Conduct of the Allies_, were rewarded with the deanery of
St. Patrick's, Dublin. Addison became Secretary of State under a Whig
government. Prior was in the diplomatic service. Daniel De Foe, the
author of _Robinson Crusoe_, 1719, was a prolific political writer,
conducted his _Review_ in the interest of the Whigs and was imprisoned
and pilloried for his ironical pamphlet, _The Shortest Way with the
Dissenters_. Steele, who was a violent writer on the Whig side, held
various public offices, such as Commissioner of Stamps and Commissioner
for Forfeited Estates, and sat in Parliament. After the Revolution of
1688 the manners and morals of English society were somewhat on the
mend. The court of William and Mary, and of their successor, Queen
Anne, set no such example of open profligacy as that of Charles II.
But there was much hard drinking, gambling, dueling, and intrigue in
London, and vice was fashionable till Addison partly preached and
partly laughed it down in the _Spectator_. The women were mostly
frivolous and uneducated, and not unfrequently fast. They are spoken
of with systematic disrespect by nearly every writer of the time,
except Steele. "Every woman," wrote Pope, "is at heart a rake." The
reading public had now become large enough to make letters a
profession. Dr. Johnson said that Pope was the first writer in whose
case the book-seller took the place of the patron. His translation of
Homer, published by subscription, brought him between eight and nine
thousand {182} pounds and made him independent. But the activity of
the press produced a swarm of poorly-paid hack-writers, penny-a-liners,
who lived from hand to mouth and did small literary jobs to order.
Many of these inhabited Grub Street, and their lampoons against Pope
and others of their more successful rivals called out Pope's _Dunciad_,
or epic of the dunces, by way of retaliation. The politics of the time
were sordid and consisted mainly of an ignoble scramble for office.
The Whigs were fighting to maintain the Act of Succession in favor of
the House of Hanover, and the Tories were secretly intriguing with the
exiled Stuarts. Many of the leaders, such as the great Whig champion,
John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, were without political principle
or even personal honesty. The Church, too, was in a condition of
spiritual deadness. Bishoprics and livings were sold and given to
political favorites. Clergymen, like Swift and Lawrence Sterne, were
worldly in their lives and immoral in their writings, and were
practically unbelievers. The growing religious skepticism appeared in
the Deist controversy. Numbers of men in high position were Deists;
the Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, and Pope's brilliant friend,
Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, the head of the Tory ministry, whose
political writings had much influence upon his young French
acquaintance, Voltaire. Pope was a Roman Catholic, though there is
little to show it in his writings, and the underlying thought of his
famous _Essay {183} on Man_ was furnished him by Bolingbroke. The
letters of the cold-hearted Chesterfield to his son were accepted as a
manual of conduct, and La Rochefoucauld's cynical maxims were quoted as
authority on life and human nature. Said Swift:
"As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
From nature, I believe them true.
They argue no corrupted mind
In him; the fault is in mankind."
The succession which Dryden had willed to Congreve was taken up by
Alexander Pope. He was a man quite unlike Dryden, sickly, deformed,
morbidly precocious, and spiteful; nevertheless he joined on to and
continued Dryden. He was more careful in his literary workmanship than
his great forerunner, and in his _Moral Essays_ and _Satires_ he
brought the Horatian epistle in verse, the formal satire and that
species of didactic poem of which Boileau had given the first example,
to an exquisite perfection of finish and verbal art. Dryden had
translated Vergil, and so Pope translated Homer. The throne of the
dunces, which Dryden had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope, in his
_Dunciad_, passed on to two of his own literary foes, Theobald and
Colley Cibber. There is a great waste of strength in this elaborate
squib, and most of the petty writers, whose names it has preserved, as
has been said, like flies in amber, are now quite unknown. But,
although we have to read it with notes, to get the point of its
allusions, it is easy to {184} see what execution it must have done at
the time, and it is impossible to withhold admiration from the wit, the
wickedness, the triumphant mischief of the thing. The sketch of
Addison--who had offended Pope by praising a rival translation of
Homer--as "Atticus," is as brilliant as any thing of the kind in
Dryden. Pope's very malignity made his sting sharper than Dryden's.
He secreted venom, and worked out his revenges deliberately, bringing
all the resources of his art to bear upon the question of how to give
the most pain most cleverly.
Pope's masterpiece is, perhaps, the _Rape of the Lock_, a mock heroic
poem, a "dwarf Iliad," recounting, in five cantos, a society quarrel,
which arose from Lord Petre's cutting a lock of hair from the head of
Mrs. Arabella Fermor. Boileau, in his _Lutrin_, had treated, with the
same epic dignity, a dispute over the placing of the reading desk in a
parish church. Pope was the Homer of the drawing-room, the boudoir,
the tea-urn, the omber-party, the sedan-chair, the parrot cage, and the
lap-dogs. This poem, in its sparkle and airy grace, is the topmost
blossom of a highly artificial society, the quintessence of whatever
poetry was possible in those
"Teacup times of hood and hoop,
And when the patch was worn,"
with whose decorative features, at least, the recent Queen Anne revival
has made this generation familiar. It may be said of it, as Thackeray
said of {185} Gay's pastorals: "It is to poetry what charming little
Dresden china figures are to sculpture, graceful, minikin, fantastic,
with a certain beauty always accompanying them." The _Rape of the
Lock_, perhaps, stops short of beauty, but it attains elegance and
prettiness in a supreme degree. In imitation of the gods and goddesses
in the Iliad, who intermeddle for or against the human characters, Pope
introduced the Sylphs of the Rosicrucian philosophy. We may measure
the distance between imagination and fancy, if we will compare these
little filagree creatures with Shakspere's elves, whose occupation it
was
"To tread the ooze of the salt deep,
Or run upon the sharp wind of the north, . . .
Or on the beached margent of the sea,
To dance their ringlets to the whispering wind."
Very different were the offices of Pope's fays:
"Our humble province is to tend the fair;
Not a less pleasing, though less glorious, care;
To save the powder from too rude a gale,
Nor let the imprisoned essences exhale. . . .
Nay oft in dreams invention we bestow
To change a flounce or add a furbelow."
Pope was not a great poet; it has been doubted whether he was a poet at
all. He does not touch the heart, or stimulate the imagination, as the
true poet always does. In the poetry of nature, and the poetry of
passion, he was altogether impotent. {186} His _Windsor Forest_ and
his _Pastorals_ are artificial and false, not written with "the eye
upon the object." His epistle of _Eloisa to Abelard_ is declamatory
and academic, and leaves the reader cold. The only one of his poems
which is at all possessed with feeling is his pathetic _Elegy to the
Memory of an Unfortunate Lady_. But he was a great literary artist.
Within the cramped and starched regularity of the heroic couplet, which
the fashion of the time and his own habit of mind imposed upon him, he
secured the largest variety of modulation and emphasis of which that
verse was capable. He used antithesis, periphrasis, and climax with
great skill. His example dominated English poetry for nearly a
century, and even now, when a poet like Dr. Holmes, for example, would
write satire or humorous verse of a dignified kind, he turns
instinctively to the measure and manner of Pope. He was not a
consecutive thinker, like Dryden, and cared less about the truth of his
thought than about the pointedness of its expression. His language was
closer-grained than Dryden's. His great art was the art of putting
things. He is more quoted than any other English poet, but Shakspere.
He struck the average intelligence, the common sense of English
readers, and furnished it with neat, portable formulas, so that it no
longer needed to "vent its observation in mangled terms," but could
pour itself out compactly, artistically, in little, ready-made molds.
But his high-wrought brilliancy, this unceasing point, soon fatigue.
His {187} poems read like a series of epigrams; and every line has a
hit or an effect.
From the reign of Queen Anne date the beginnings of the periodical
essay. Newspapers had been published since the time of the Civil War;
at first irregularly, and then regularly. But no literature of
permanent value appeared in periodical form until Richard Steele
started the _Tatler_, in 1709. In this he was soon joined by his
friend, Joseph Addison and in its successor the _Spectator_, the first
number of which was issued March 1, 1711, Addison's contributions
outnumbered Steele's. The _Tatler_ was published on three, the
_Spectator_ on six, days of the week. The _Tatler_ gave political
news, but each number of the _Spectator_ consisted of a single essay.
The object of these periodicals was to reflect the passing humors of
the time, and to satirize the follies and minor immoralities of the
town. "I shall endeavor," wrote Addison, in the tenth paper of the
_Spectator_, "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with
morality. . . . It was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy
down from Heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have
it said of me that I have brought Philosophy out of closets and
libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at
tea-tables and in coffee-houses." Addison's satire was never personal.
He was a moderate man, and did what he could to restrain Steele's
intemperate party zeal. His character was dignified and pure, and his
strongest emotion seems to have {188} been his religious feeling. One
of his contemporaries called him "a parson in a tie wig," and he wrote
several excellent hymns. His mission was that of censor of the public
taste. Sometimes he lectures and sometimes he preaches, and in his
Saturday papers, he brought his wide reading and nice scholarship into
service for the instruction of his readers. Such was the series of
essays, in which he gave an elaborate review of _Paradise Lost_. Such
also was his famous paper, the _Vision of Mirza_, an oriental allegory
of human life. The adoption of this slightly pedagogic tone was
justified by the prevalent ignorance and frivolity of the age. But the
lighter portions of the _Spectator_ are those which have worn the best.
Their style is at once correct and easy, and it is as a humorist, a sly
observer of manners, and above all, a delightful talker, that Addison
is best known to posterity. In the personal sketches of the members of
the Spectator Club, of Will Honeycomb, Captain Sentry, Sir Andrew
Freeport, and, above all, Sir Roger de Coverley, the quaint and honest
country gentleman, may be found the nucleus of the modern prose fiction
of character. Addison's humor is always a trifle grave. There is no
whimsy, no frolic in it, as in Sterne or Lamb. "He thinks justly,"
said Dr. Johnson, "but he thinks faintly." The _Spectator_ had a host
of followers, from the somewhat heavy _Rambler_ and _Idler_ of Johnson,
down to the _Salmagundi_ papers of our own Irving, who was, perhaps,
Addison's latest and {189} best literary descendant. In his own age
Addison made some figure as a poet and dramatist. His _Campaign_,
celebrating the victory of Blenheim, had one much-admired couplet, in
which Marlborough was likened to the angel of tempest, who
"Pleased the Almighty's orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm."
His stately, classical tragedy, _Cato_, which was acted at Drury Lane
Theater in 1712, with immense applause, was pronounced by Dr. Johnson
"unquestionably the noblest production of Addison's genius." It is,
notwithstanding, cold and tedious, as a whole, though it has some fine
declamatory passages--in particular the soliloquy of Cato in the fifth
act--
"It must be so: Plato, thou reasonest well," etc.
The greatest of the Queen Anne wits, and one of the most savage and
powerful satirists that ever lived, was Jonathan Swift. As secretary
in the family of Sir William Temple, and domestic chaplain to the Earl
of Berkeley, he had known in youth the bitterness of poverty and
dependence. Afterward he wrote himself into influence with the Tory
ministry, and was promised a bishopric, but was put off with the
deanery of St. Patrick's, and retired to Ireland to "die like a
poisoned rat in a hole." His life was made tragical by the forecast of
the madness which finally overtook him. "The stage darkened," said
Scott, "ere the curtain fell." Insanity {190} deepened into idiocy and
a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he spoke hardly
ever a word. He had directed that his tombstone should bear the
inscription, _Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit_. "So
great a man he seems to me," wrote Thackeray, "that thinking of him is
like thinking of an empire falling." Swift's first noteworthy
publication was his _Tale of a Tub_, 1704, a satire on religious
differences. But his great work was _Gulliver's Travels_, 1726, the
book in which his hate and scorn of mankind, and the long rage of
mortified pride and thwarted ambition found their fullest expression.
Children read the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, to the flying
island of Laputa and the country of the Houyhnhnms, as they read
_Robinson Crusoe_, as stories of wonderful adventure. Swift had all of
De Foe's realism, his power of giving veri-similitude to his narrative
by the invention of a vast number of small, exact, consistent details.
But underneath its fairy tales, _Gulliver's Travels_ is a satire, far
more radical than any of Dryden's or Pope's, because directed, not
against particular parties or persons, but against human nature. In
his account of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, Swift tries to show--looking
first through one end of the telescope and then through the other--that
human greatness, goodness, beauty disappear if the scale be altered a
little. If men were six inches high instead of six feet--such is the
logic of his tale--their wars, governments, science, religion--all
their institutions, {191} in fine, and all the courage, wisdom, and
virtue by which these have been built up, would appear laughable. On
the other hand, if they were sixty feet high instead of six, they would
become disgusting. The complexion of the finest ladies would show
blotches, hairs, excrescences, and an overpowering effluvium would
breathe from the pores of the skin. Finally, in his loathsome
caricature of mankind, as Yahoos, he contrasts them to their shame with
the beasts, and sets instinct above reason.
The method of Swift's satire was grave irony. Among his minor writings
in this kind are his _Argument against Abolishing Christianity_, his
_Modest Proposal_ for utilizing the surplus population of Ireland by
eating the babies of the poor, and his _Predictions of Isaac
Bickerstaff_. In the last he predicted the death of one Partridge, an
almanac maker, at a certain day and hour. When the time set was past,
he published a minute account of Partridge's last moments; and when the
subject of this excellent fooling printed an indignant denial of his
own death, Swift answered very temperately, proving that he was dead
and remonstrating with him on the violence of his language. "To call a
man a fool and villain, an impudent fellow, only for differing from him
in a point merely speculative, is, in my humble opinion, a very
improper style for a person of his education." Swift wrote verses as
well as prose, but their motive was the reverse of poetical. His gross
and cynical humor vulgarized whatever it touched. He leaves us no
illusions, {192} and not only strips his subject, but flays it and
shows the raw muscles beneath the skin. He delighted to dwell upon the
lowest bodily functions of human nature. "He saw bloodshot," said
Thackeray.
1. Macaulay's Essay, The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration.
2. The Poetical Works of John Dryden. Globe Edition. Macmillan & Co.
3. Thackeray's English Humorists of the Last Century.
4. Sir Roger de Coverley. New York: Harper, 1878.
5. Swift's Tale of a Tub, Gulliver's Travels, Directions to Servants,
Polite Conversation, The Great Question Debated, Verses on the Death of
Dean Swift.
6. The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope. Globe Edition. Macmillan &
Co.
{193}
CHAPTER VI.
FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.
1744-1789.
Pope's example continued potent for fifty years after his death.
Especially was this so in satiric and didactic poetry. Not only Dr.
Johnson's adaptations from _Juvenal_, London, 1738, and the _Vanity of
Human Wishes_, 1749, but Gifford's _Baviad_, 1791, and _Maeviad_, 1795,
and Byron's _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, 1809, were in the
verse and manner of Pope. In Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_, 1781,
Dryden and Pope are treated as the two greatest English poets. But
long before this a revolution in literary taste had begun, a movement
which is variously described as The Return to Nature, or The Rise of
the New Romantic School.
For nearly a hundred years poetry had dealt with manners and the life
of towns, the gay, prosaic life of Congreve or of Pope. The sole
concession to the life of nature was the old pastoral, which, in the
hands of cockneys, like Pope and Ambrose Philips, who merely repeated
stock descriptions at second or third hand, became even more artificial
than a _Beggar's Opera_ or a _Rape of the {194} Lock_. These, at
least, were true to their environment, and were natural, just _because_
they were artificial. But the _Seasons_ of James Thomson, published in
installments from 1726-30, had opened a new field. Their theme was the
English landscape, as varied by the changes of the year, and they were
written by a true lover and observer of nature. Mark Akenside's
_Pleasures of Imagination_, 1744, published the year of Pope's death,
was written like the _Seasons_, in blank verse; and although its
language had much of the formal, didactic cast of the Queen Anne poets,
it pointed unmistakably in the new direction. Thomson had painted the
soft beauties of a highly cultivated land--lawns, gardens,
forest-preserves, orchards, and sheep-walks. But now a fresh note was
struck in the literature, not of England alone, but of Germany and
France--romanticism, the chief element in which was a love of the wild.
Poets turned from the lameness of modern existence to savage nature and
the heroic simplicity of life among primitive tribes. In France,
Rousseau introduced the idea of the natural man, following his
instincts in disregard of social conventions. In Germany Bodmer
published, in 1753, the first edition of the old German epic, the
_Nibelungen Lied_. Works of a similar tendency in England were the
odes of William Collins and Thomas Gray, published between 1747-57,
especially Collins's _Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands_, and
Gray's _Bard_, a pindaric, in which the last survivor of the Welsh
bards invokes vengeance on {195} Edward I., the destroyer of his guild.
Gray and Mason, his friend and editor, made translations from the
ancient Welsh and Norse poetry. Thomas Percy's _Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry_, 1765, aroused a taste for old ballads. Richard Hurd's
_Letters on Chivalry and Romance_, Thomas Warton's _History of English
Poetry_, 1774-78, Tyrwhitt's critical edition of Chaucer, and Horace
Walpole's Gothic romance, the _Castle of Otranto_, 1765, stimulated
this awakened interest in the picturesque aspects of feudal life, and
contributed to the fondness for supernatural and mediaeval subjects.
James Beattie's _Minstrel_, 1771, described the educating influence of
Scottish mountain scenery upon the genius of a young poet. But the
most remarkable instances of this passion for wild nature and the
romantic past were the _Poems of Ossian_ and Thomas Chatterton's
literary forgeries.
In 1762 James Macpherson published the first installment of what
professed to be a translation of the poems of Ossian, a Gaelic bard,
whom tradition placed in the 3d century. Macpherson said that he made
his version--including two complete epics, _Fingal_ and _Temora_, from
Gaelic MSS., which he had collected in the Scottish Highlands. A
fierce controversy at once sprang up over the genuineness of these
remains. Macpherson was challenged to produce his originals, and when,
many years after, he published the Gaelic text, it was asserted that
this was nothing but a translation of his own English into modern
Gaelic. Of {196} the MSS. which he professed to have found not a scrap
remained: the Gaelic text was printed from transcriptions in
Macpherson's handwriting or in that of his secretaries.
But whether these poems were the work of Ossian or of Macpherson, they
made a deep impression upon the time. Napoleon admired them greatly,
and Goethe inserted passages from the "Songs of Selma" in his _Sorrows
of Werther_. Macpherson composed--or translated--them in an abrupt,
rhapsodical prose, resembling the English version of Job or of the
prophecies of Isaiah. They filled the minds of their readers with
images of vague sublimity and desolation; the mountain torrent, the
mist on the hills, the ghosts of heroes half seen by the setting moon,
the thistle in the ruined courts of chieftains, the grass whistling on
the windy heath, the gray rock by the blue stream of Lutha, and the
cliffs of sea-surrounded Gormal.
"A tale of the times of old!"
"Why, thou wanderer unseen! Thou bender of the thistle of Lora; why,
thou breeze of the valley, hast thou left mine ear? I hear no distant
roar of streams! No sound of the harp from the rock! Come, thou
huntress of Lutha, Malvina, call back his soul to the bard. I look
forward to Lochlin of lakes, to the dark billowy bay of U-thorno, where
Fingal descends from Ocean, from the roar of winds. Few are the heroes
of Morven in a land unknown."
Thomas Chatterton, who died by his own hand {197} in 1770, at the age
of seventeen, is one of the most wonderful examples of precocity in the
history of literature. His father had been sexton of the ancient
Church of St. Mary Redcliff, in Bristol, and the boy's sensitive
imagination took the stamp of his surroundings. He taught himself to
read from a black-letter Bible. He drew charcoal sketches of churches,
castles, knightly tombs, and heraldic blazonry. When only eleven years
old, he began the fabrication of documents in prose and verse, which he
ascribed to a fictitious Thomas Rowley, a secular priest at Bristol in
the 15th century. Chatterton pretended to have found these among the
contents of an old chest in the muniment room of St. Mary Redcliff's.
The Rowley poems included two tragedies, _Aella_ and _Goddwyn_, two
cantos of a long poem on the _Battle of Hastings_, and a number of
ballads and minor pieces. Chatterton had no precise knowledge of early
English, or even of Chaucer. His method of working was as follows: He
made himself a manuscript glossary of the words marked as archaic in
Bailey's and Kersey's English dictionaries, composed his poems first in
modern language, and then turned them into ancient spelling, and
substituted here and there the old words in his glossary for their
modern equivalents. Naturally he made many mistakes, and though Horace
Walpole, to whom he sent some of his pieces, was unable to detect the
forgery, his friends, Gray and Mason, to whom he submitted them, at
once pronounced them {198} spurious. Nevertheless there was a
controversy over Rowley, hardly less obstinate than that over Ossian, a
controversy made possible only by the then almost universal ignorance
of the forms, scansion, and vocabulary of early English poetry.
Chatterton's poems are of little value in themselves, but they are the
record of an industry and imitative quickness, marvelous in a mere
child, and they show how, with the instinct of genius, he threw himself
into the main literary current of his time. Discarding the couplet of
Pope, the poets now went back for models to the Elisabethan writers.
Thomas Warton published, in 1753, his _Observations on the Faerie
Queene_. Beattie's _Minstrel_, Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_,
William Shenstone's _Schoolmistress_, and John Dyer's _Fleece_, were
all written in the Spenserian stanza. Shenstone gave a partly humorous
effect to his poem by imitating Spenser's archaisms, and Thomson
reproduced in many passages the copious harmony and luxuriant imagery
of the _Faerie Queene_. The _Fleece_ was a poem on English
wool-growing, after the fashion of Vergil's _Georgics_. The subject
was unfortunate, for, as Dr. Johnson said, it is impossible to make
poetry out of serges and druggets. Dyer's _Grongar Hill_, which
mingles reflection with natural description in the manner of Gray's
_Elegy written in a Country Churchyard_, was composed in the
octosyllabic verse of Milton's _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_.
Milton's minor poems, which had hitherto been neglected, {199}
exercised a great influence on Collins and Gray. Collins's _Ode to
Simplicity_ was written in the stanza of Milton's _Nativity_, and his
exquisite unrimed _Ode to Evening_ was a study in versification, after
Milton's translation of Horace's _Ode to Pyrrha_, in the original
meters. Shakspere began to to be studied more reverently: numerous
critical editions of his plays were issued, and Garrick restored his
pure text to the stage. Collins was an enthusiastic student of
Shakspere, and one of his sweetest poems, the _Dirge in Cymbeline_, was
inspired by the tragedy of _Cymbeline_. The verse of Gray, Collins,
and the Warton brothers, abounds in verbal reminiscences of Shakspere;
but their genius was not allied to his, being exclusively lyrical, and
not at all dramatic. The Muse of this romantic school was Fancy rather
than Passion. A thoughtful melancholy, a gentle, scholarly
pensiveness, the spirit of Milton's _Il Penseroso_, pervades their
poetry. Gray was a fastidious scholar, who produced very little, but
that little of the finest quality. His famous _Elegy_, expressing a
meditative mood in language of the choicest perfection, is the
representative poem of the second half of the 18th century, as the
_Rape of the Lock_ is of the first. The romanticists were quietists,
and their scenery is characteristic. They loved solitude and evening,
the twilight vale, the mossy hermitage, ruins, glens, and caves. Their
style was elegant and academic, retaining a little of the stilted
poetic diction of their classical {200} forerunners. Personification
and periphrasis were their favorite mannerisms: Collins's Odes were
largely addressed to abstractions, such as Fear, Pity, Liberty, Mercy,
and Simplicity. A poet in their dialect was always a "bard;" a
countryman was "the untutored swain," and a woman was a "nymph" or "the
fair," just as in Dryden and Pope. Thomson is perpetually mindful of
Vergil, and afraid to speak simply. He uses too many Latin epithets,
like _amusive_ and _precipitant_, and calls a fish-line
"The floating line snatched from the hoary steed."
They left much for Cowper and Wordsworth to do in the way of infusing
the new blood of a strong, racy English into our exhausted poetic
diction. Their poetry is impersonal, bookish, literary. It lacks
emotional force, except now and then in Gray's immortal _Elegy_, in his
_Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College_, in Collins's lines, _On
the Death of Thomson_, and his little ode beginning, "How sleep the
brave?"
The new school did not lack critical expounders of its principles and
practice. Joseph Warton published, in 1756, the first volume of his
_Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope_, an elaborate review of
Pope's writings _seriatim_, doing him certainly full justice, but
ranking him below Shakspere, Spenser, and Milton. "Wit and satire,"
wrote Warton, "are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion
are eternal. . . . He stuck to {201} describing modern manners; but
those manners, because they are familiar, artificial, and polished,
are, in their very nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse.
Whatever poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed he withheld and
stifled. Surely it is no narrow and niggardly encomium to say, he is
the great Poet of Reason, the first of Ethical authors in verse."
Warton illustrated his critical positions by quoting freely not only
from Spenser and Milton, but from recent poets, like Thomson, Gray,
Collins, and Dyer. He testified that the Seasons had "been very
instrumental in diffusing a general taste for the beauties of nature
and landscape." It was symptomatic of the change in literary taste
that the natural or English school of landscape gardening now began to
displace the French and Dutch fashion of clipped hedges, regular
parterres, etc., and that Gothic architecture came into repute. Horace
Walpole was a virtuoso in Gothic art, and in his castle, at Strawberry
Hill, he made a collection of ancient armor, illuminated MSS., and
bric-a-brac of all kinds. Gray had been Walpole's traveling companion
in France and Italy, and the two had quarreled and separated, but were
afterward reconciled. From Walpole's private printing-press, at
Strawberry Hill, Gray's two "sister odes," the _Bard_ and the _Progress
of Poesy_, were first printed, in 1757. Both Gray and Walpole were
good correspondents, and their printed letters are among the most
delightful literature of the kind.
{202} The central figure among the English men of letters of that
generation was Samuel Johnson (1709-84), whose memory has been
preserved less by his own writings than by James Boswell's famous _Life
of Johnson_, published in 1791. Boswell was a Scotch laird and
advocate, who first met Johnson in London, when the latter was
fifty-four years old. Boswell was not a very wise or witty person, but
he reverenced the worth and intellect which shone through his subject's
uncouth exterior. He followed him about, note-book in hand, bore all
his snubbings patiently, and made the best biography ever written. It
is related that the doctor once said that if he thought Boswell meant
to write _his_ life, he should prevent it by taking _Boswell's_. And
yet Johnson's own writings and this biography of him have changed
places in relative importance so completely, that Carlyle predicted
that the former would soon be reduced to notes on the latter; and
Macaulay said that the man who was known to his contemporaries as a
great writer was known to posterity as an agreeable companion.
Johnson was one of those rugged, eccentric, self-developed characters,
so common among the English. He was the son of a Lichfield
book-seller, and after a course at Oxford, which was cut short by
poverty, and an unsuccessful career as a school-master, he had come up
to London, in 1737, where he supported himself for many years as a
book-seller's hack. Gradually his great learning {203} and abilities,
his ready social wit and powers as a talker, caused his company to be
sought at the tables of those whom he called "the great." He was a
clubbable man, and he drew about him at the tavern a group of the most
distinguished intellects of the time, Edmund Burke, the orator and
statesman, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the portrait painter,
and David Garrick, the great actor, who had been a pupil in Johnson's
school, near Lichfield. Johnson was the typical John Bull of the last
century. His oddities, virtues, and prejudices were thoroughly
English. He hated Frenchmen, Scotchmen, and Americans, and had a
cockneyish attachment to London. He was a high Tory, and an orthodox
churchman; he loved a lord in the abstract, and yet he asserted a
sturdy independence against any lord in particular. He was deeply
religious, but had an abiding fear of death. He was burly in person,
and slovenly in dress, his shirt-frill always covered with snuff. He
was a great diner out, an inordinate tea-drinker, and a voracious and
untidy feeder. An inherited scrofula, which often took the form of
hypochondria and threatened to affect his brain, deprived him of
control over the muscles of his face. Boswell describes how his
features worked, how he snorted, grunted, whistled, and rolled about in
his chair when getting ready to speak. He records his minutest traits,
such as his habit of pocketing the orange peels at the club, and his
superstitious way of {204} touching all the posts between his house and
the Mitre Tavern, going back to do it, if he skipped one by chance.
Though bearish in his manners and arrogant in dispute, especially when
talking "for victory," Johnson had a large and tender heart. He loved
his ugly, old wife--twenty-one years his senior--and he had his house
full of unfortunates--a blind woman, an invalid surgeon, a destitute
widow, a negro servant--whom he supported for many years, and bore with
all their ill-humors patiently.
Among Johnson's numerous writings the ones best entitled to remembrance
are, perhaps, his _Dictionary of the English Language_, 1755; his moral
tale, _Rasselas_, 1759; the introduction to his _Edition of Shakspere_,
1765; and his _Lives of the Poets_, 1781. Johnson wrote a sonorous,
cadenced prose, full of big Latin words and balanced clauses. Here is
a sentence, for example, from his _Visit to the Hebrides_: "We were now
treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the
Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived
the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion. To abstract
the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were
endeavored, and would be foolish, if it were possible." The difference
between his colloquial style and his book style is well illustrated in
the instance cited by Macaulay. Speaking of Villier's _Rehearsal_,
Johnson said, "It has not wit enough to keep it sweet;" then paused and
{205} added--translating English into Johnsonese--"it has not vitality
sufficient to preserve it from putrefaction." There is more of this in
Johnson's _Rambler_ and _Idler papers_ than in his latest work, the
_Lives of the Poets_. In this he showed himself a sound and judicious
critic, though with decided limitations. His understanding was solid,
but he was a thorough classicist, and his taste in poetry was formed on
Pope. He was unjust to Milton and to his own contemporaries, Gray,
Collins, Shenstone, and Dyer. He had no sense of the higher and
subtler graces of romantic poetry, and he had a comical indifference to
the "beauties of nature." When Boswell once ventured to remark that
poor Scotland had, at least, some "noble, wild prospects," the doctor
replied that the noblest prospect a Scotchman ever saw was the road
that led to London.
The English novel of real life had its origin at this time. Books like
De Foe's _Robinson Crusoe_, _Captain Singleton_, _Journal of the
Plague_, etc., were tales of incident and adventure rather than novels.
The novel deals primarily with character and with the interaction of
characters upon one another, as developed by a regular plot. The first
English novelist, in the modern sense of the word, was Samuel
Richardson, a printer, who began authorship in his fiftieth year with
his _Pamela_, the story of a young servant girl, who resisted the
seductions of her master, and finally, as the reward of her virtue,
became his wife. _Clarissa Harlowe_, {206} 1748, was the tragical
history of a high spirited young lady, who being driven from home by
her family, because she refused to marry the suitor selected for her,
fell into the toils of Lovelace, an accomplished rake. After
struggling heroically against every form of artifice and violence, she
was at last drugged and ruined. She died of a broken heart, and
Lovelace, borne down by remorse, was killed in a duel by a cousin of
Clarissa. Sir _Charles Grandison_, 1753, was Richardson's portrait of
an ideal fine gentleman, whose stately doings fill eight volumes, but
who seems to the modern reader a bore and a prig. All of these novels
were written in the form of letters passing between the characters, a
method which fitted Richardson's subjective cast of mind. He knew
little of life, but he identified himself intensely with his principal
character and produced a strong effect by minute, accumulated touches.
_Clarissa Harlowe_ is his masterpiece, though even in that the
situation is painfully prolonged, the heroine's virtue is
self-conscious and rhetorical, and there is something almost
ludicrously unnatural in the copiousness with which she pours herself
out in gushing epistles to her female correspondent at the very moment
when she is beset with dangers, persecuted, agonized, and driven nearly
mad. In Richardson's novels appears, for the first time, that
sentimentalism which now began to infect European literature. _Pamela_
was translated into French and German, and fell in with that current
{207} of popular feeling which found fullest expression in Rousseau's
_Nouvelle Heloise_, 1759, and Goethe's _Leiden des Jungen Werther_,
which set all the world a-weeping in 1774.
Coleridge said that to pass from Richardson's books to those of Henry
Fielding was like going into the fresh air from a close room heated by
stoves. Richardson, it has been affirmed, knew _man_, but Fielding
knew _men_. The latter's first novel, _Joseph Andrews_, 1742, was
begun as a travesty of _Pamela_. The hero, a brother of Pamela, was a
young footman in the employ of Lady Booby, from whom his virtue
suffered a like assault to that made upon Pamela's by her master. This
reversal of the natural situation was in itself full of laughable
possibilities, had the book gone on simply as a burlesque. But the
exuberance of Fielding's genius led him beyond his original design.
This hero, leaving Lady Booby's service, goes traveling with good
Parson Adams, and is soon engaged in a series of comical and rather
boisterous adventures.
Fielding had seen life, and his characters were painted from the life
with a bold, free hand. He was a gentleman by birth, and had made
acquaintance with society and the town in 1727, when he was a handsome,
stalwart young fellow, with high animal spirits and a great appetite
for pleasure. He soon ran himself into debt and began writing for the
stage; married, and spent his wife's fortune, living for awhile in much
splendor as a {208} country gentleman, and afterward in a reduced
condition as a rural justice with a salary of 500 pounds of "the
dirtiest money on earth." Fielding's masterpiece was _Tom Jones_,
1749, and it remains one of the best of English novels. Its hero is
very much after Fielding's own heart, wild, spendthrift, warm-hearted,
forgiving, and greatly in need of forgiveness. The same type of
character, with the lines deepened, re-appears in Captain Booth, in
_Amelia_, 1751, the heroine of which is a portrait of Fielding's wife.
With Tom Jones is contrasted Blifil, the embodiment of meanness,
hypocrisy, and cowardice. Sophia Western, the heroine, is one of
Fielding's most admirable creations. For the regulated morality of
Richardson, with its somewhat old-grannified air, Fielding substituted
instinct. His virtuous characters are virtuous by impulse only, and
his ideal of character is manliness. In _Jonathan Wild_ the hero is a
highwayman. This novel is ironical, a sort of prose mock-heroic, and
is one of the strongest, though certainly the least pleasing, of
Fielding's writings.
Tobias Smollett was an inferior Fielding with a difference. He was a
Scotch ship-surgeon and had spent some time in the West Indies. He
introduced into fiction the now familiar figure of the British tar, in
the persons of Tom Bowling and Commodore Trunnion, as Fielding had
introduced, in Squire Western, the equally national type of the
hard-swearing, deep-drinking, fox-hunting Tory squire. Both Fielding
and Smollett were of the {209} hearty British "beef-and-beer" school;
their novels are downright, energetic, coarse, and high-blooded; low
life, physical life, runs riot through their pages--tavern brawls, the
breaking of pates, and the off-hand courtship of country wenches.
Smollett's books, such as _Roderick Random_, 1748, _Peregrine Pickle_,
1751, and _Ferdinand Count Fathom_, 1752, were more purely stories of
broadly comic adventure than Fielding's. The latter's view of life was
by no means idyllic; but with Smollett this English realism ran into
vulgarity and a hard Scotch literalness, and character was pushed to
caricature. "The generous wine of Fielding," says Taine, "in
Smollett's hands becomes brandy of the dram-shop." A partial exception
to this is to be found in his last and best novel, _Humphrey Clinker_,
1770. The influence of Cervantes and of the French novelist, Le Sage,
who finished his _Adventures of Gil Blas_ in 1735, are very perceptible
in Smollett.
A genius of much finer mold was Lawrence Sterne, the author of
_Tristram Shandy_, 1759-67, and the _Sentimental Journey_, 1768.
_Tristram Shandy_ is hardly a novel: the story merely serves to hold
together a number of characters, such as Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim,
conceived with rare subtlety and originality. Sterne's chosen province
was the whimsical, and his great model was Rabelais. His books are
full of digressions, breaks, surprises, innuendoes, double meanings,
mystifications, and all manner of odd turns. {210} Coleridge and
Carlyle unite in pronouncing him a great humorist. Thackeray says that
he was only a great jester. Humor is the laughter of the heart, and
Sterne's pathos is closely interwoven with his humor. He was the
foremost of English sentimentalists, and he had that taint of
insincerity which distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine sentiment,
like Goldsmith's, for example. Sterne, in life, was selfish,
heartless, and untrue. A clergyman, his worldliness and vanity and the
indecency of his writings were a scandal to the Church, though his
sermons were both witty and affecting. He enjoyed the titilation of
his own emotions, and he had practiced so long at detecting the latent
pathos that lies in the expression of dumb things and of poor, patient
animals, that he could summon the tear of sensibility at the thought of
a discarded postchaise, a dead donkey, a starling in a cage, or of
Uncle Toby putting a house fly out of the window, and saying, "There is
room enough in the world for thee and me." It is a high proof of his
cleverness that he generally succeeds in raising the desired feeling in
his readers even from such trivial occasions. He was a minute
philosopher, his philosophy was kindly, and he taught the delicate art
of making much out of little. Less coarse than Fielding, he is far
more corrupt. Fielding goes bluntly to the point; Sterne lingers among
the temptations and suspends the expectation to tease and excite it.
Forbidden fruit had a relish for him, and his pages {211} seduce. He
is full of good sayings, both tender and witty. It was Sterne, for
example, who wrote, "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb."
A very different writer was Oliver Goldsmith, whose _Vicar of
Wakefield_, 1766, was the earliest, and is still one of the best,
novels of domestic and rural life. The book, like its author, was
thoroughly Irish, full of bulls and inconsistencies. Very improbable
things happened in it with a cheerful defiance of logic. But its
characters are true to nature, drawn with an idyllic sweetness and
purity, and with touches of a most loving humor. Its hero, Dr.
Primrose, was painted after Goldsmith's father, a poor clergyman of the
English Church in Ireland, and the original, likewise, of the country
parson in Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_, 1770, who was "passing rich
on forty pounds a year." This poem, though written in the fashionable
couplet of Pope, and even containing a few verses contributed by Dr.
Johnson--so that it was not at all in line with the work of the
romanticists--did, perhaps, as much as any thing of Gray or of Collins
to recall English poetry to the simplicity and freshness of country
life.
Except for the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith, and, perhaps, a few
other plays, the stage had now utterly declined. The novel, which is
dramatic in essence, though not in form, began to take its place, and
to represent life, though less intensely, yet more minutely, than the
theater could do. In the novelists of the 18th century, the life {212}
of the people, as distinguished from "society" or the upper classes,
began to invade literature.
Richardson was distinctly a bourgeois writer, and his
contemporaries--Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith--ranged over
a wide variety of ranks and conditions. This is one thing which
distinguishes the literature of the second half of the 18th century
from that of the first, as well as in some degree from that of all
previous centuries. Among the authors of this generation whose
writings belonged to other departments of thought than pure literature
may be mentioned, in passing, the great historian, Edward Gibbon, whose
_Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ was published from 1776-88, and
Edmund Burke, whose political speeches and pamphlets possess a true
literary quality. The romantic poets had addressed the imagination
rather than the heart. It was reserved for two men--a contrast to one
another in almost every respect--to bring once more into British song a
strong individual feeling, and with it a new warmth and directness of
speech. These were William Cowper (1731-1800) and Robert Burns
(1759-96). Cowper spoke out of his own life experience, his agony, his
love, his worship and despair; and straightway the varnish that had
glittered over all our poetry since the time of Dryden melted away.
Cowper had scribbled verses when he was a young law student at the
Middle Temple in London, and he had contributed to the _Olney Hymns_,
published in 1779 by his friend and pastor, the Rev. John Newton; but
{213} he only began to write poetry in earnest when he was nearly fifty
years old. In 1782, the date of his first volume, he said, in a letter
to a friend, that he had read but one English poet during the past
twenty years. Perhaps, therefore, of all English poets of equal
culture, Cowper owed the least impulse to books and the most to the
need of uttering his inmost thoughts and feelings. Cowper had a most
unhappy life. As a child, he was shy, sensitive, and sickly, and
suffered much from bullying and fagging at a school whither he was sent
after his mother's death. This happened when he was six years old; and
in his affecting lines written _On Receipt of My Mother's Picture_, he
speaks of himself as a
"Wretch even then, life's journey just begun."
In 1763 he became insane and was sent to an asylum, where he spent a
year. Judicious treatment restored him to sanity, but he came out a
broken man and remained for the rest of his life an invalid, unfitted
for any active occupation. His disease took the form of religious
melancholy. He had two recurrences of madness, and both times made
attempts upon his life. At Huntingdon, and afterward at Olney, in
Buckinghamshire, he found a home with the Unwin family, whose kindness
did all which the most soothing and delicate care could do to heal his
wounded spirit. His two poems _To Mary Unwin_, together with the lines
on his mother's picture, were almost the first examples of deep {214}
and tender sentiment in the lyrical poetry of the last century. Cowper
found relief from the black thoughts that beset him only in an ordered
round of quiet household occupations. He corresponded indefatigably,
took long walks through the neighborhood, read, sang, and conversed
with Mrs. Unwin and his friend, Lady Austin; and amused himself with
carpentry, gardening, and raising pets, especially hares, of which
gentle animals he grew very fond. All these simple tastes, in which he
found for a time a refuge and a sheltered happiness, are reflected in
his best poem, _The Task_, 1785. Cowper is the poet of the family
affections, of domestic life, and rural retirement; the laureate of the
fireside, the tea-table, the evening lamp, the garden, the green-house,
and the rabbit-coop. He draws with elegance and precision a chair, a
clock, a harpsichord, a barometer, a piece of needle-work. But Cowper
was an out-door as well as an in-door man. The Olney landscape was
tame, a fat, agricultural region, where the sluggish Ouse wound between
plowed fields and the horizon was bounded by low hills. Nevertheless
Cowper's natural descriptions are at once more distinct and more
imaginative than Thomson's. _The Task_ reflects, also, the new
philanthropic spirit, the enthusiasm of humanity, the feeling of the
brotherhood of men to which Rousseau had given expression in France and
which issued in the French Revolution. In England this was the time of
Wilberforce, the antislavery agitator; of Whitefield, the eloquent
revival preacher; {215} of John and Charles Wesley, and of the
Evangelical and Methodist movements which gave new life to the English
Church. John Newton, the curate of Olney and the keeper of Cowper's
conscience, was one of the leaders of the Evangelicals; and Cowper's
first volume of _Table Talk_ and other poems, 1782, written under
Newton's inspiration, was a series of sermons in verse, somewhat
intolerant of all worldly enjoyments, such as hunting, dancing, and
theaters. "God made the country and man made the town," he wrote. He
was a moralizing poet, and his morality was sometimes that of the
invalid and the recluse. Byron called him a "coddled poet." And,
indeed, there is a suspicion of gruel and dressing-gowns about him. He
lived much among women, and his sufferings had refined him to a
feminine delicacy. But there is no sickliness in his poetry, and he
retained a charming playful humor--displayed in his excellent comic
ballad, _John Gilpin_; and Mrs. Browning has sung of him,
"How when one by one sweet sounds and wandering lights departed
He bore no less a loving face, because so broken-hearted."
At the close of the year 1786 a young Scotchman, named Samuel Rose,
called upon Cowper at Olney, and left with him a small volume, which
had appeared at Edinburgh during the past summer, entitled _Poems
chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, by Robert Burns_. Cowper read the
book through {216} twice, and, though somewhat bothered by the dialect,
pronounced it a "very extraordinary production." This momentary flash,
as of an electric spark, marks the contact not only of the two chief
British poets of their generation, but of two literatures. Scotch
poets, like Thomson and Beattie, had written in Southern English, and,
as Carlyle said, _in vacuo_, that is, with nothing specially national
in their work. Burns's sweet though rugged Doric first secured the
vernacular poetry of his country a hearing beyond the border. He had,
to be sure, a whole literature of popular songs and ballads behind him,
and his immediate models were Allan Ramsay and Robert Ferguson; but
these remained provincial, while Burns became universal.
He was born in Ayrshire, on the banks of "bonny Doon," in a clay biggin
not far from "Alloway's auld haunted kirk," the scene of the witch
dance in _Tam O'Shanter_. His father was a hard-headed, God-fearing
tenant farmer, whose life and that of his sons was a harsh struggle
with poverty. The crops failed; the landlord pressed for his rent; for
weeks at a time the family tasted no meat; yet this life of toil was
lightened by love and homely pleasures. In the _Cotter's Saturday
Night_, Burns has drawn a beautiful picture of his parents' household,
the rest that came at the week's end, and the family worship about the
"wee bit ingle, blinkin' bonnily." Robert was handsome, wild, and
witty. He was universally susceptible, and his first songs, like his
last, were of "the lasses." His head had been {217} stuffed, in
boyhood, with "tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies,
brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles,
dead-lights," etc., told him by one Jenny Wilson, an old woman who
lived in the family. His ear was full of ancient Scottish tunes, and
as soon as he fell in love he began to make poetry as naturally as a
bird sings. He composed his verses while following the plow or working
in the stack-yard; or, at evening, balancing on two legs of his chair
and watching the light of a peat fire play over the reeky walls of the
cottage. Burns's love songs are in many keys, ranging from strains of
the most pure and exalted passion, like _Ae Fond Kiss_ and _To Mary in
Heaven_, to such loose ditties as _When Januar' Winds_ and _Green Grow
the Rashes O_.
Burns liked a glass almost as well as a lass, and at Mauchline, where
he carried on a farm with his brother Gilbert, after their father's
death, he began to seek a questionable relief from the pressure of
daily toil and unkind fates, in the convivialities of the tavern.
There, among the wits of the Mauchline Club, farmers' sons, shepherds
from the uplands, and the smugglers who swarmed over the west coast, he
would discuss politics and farming, recite his verses, and join in the
singing and ranting, while
"Bousin o'er the nappy,
And gettin' fou and unco happy."
To these experiences we owe not only those excellent drinking songs,
_John Barleycorn_ and _Willie {218} Brewed a Peck o' Maut_, but the
headlong fun of _Tam O'Shanter_, and the visions, grotesquely terrible,
of _Death and Dr. Hornbook_, and the dramatic humor of the _Jolly
Beggars_. Cowper had celebrated "the cup which cheers but not
inebriates." Burns sang the praises of _Scotch Drink_. Cowper was a
stranger to Burns's high animal spirits, and his robust enjoyment of
life. He had affections, but no passions. At Mauchline, Burns, whose
irregularities did not escape the censure of the kirk, became involved,
through his friendship with Gavin Hamilton, in the controversy between
the Old Light and New Light clergy. His _Holy Fair_, _Holy Tulzie_,
_Two Herds_, _Holy Willie's Prayer_, and _Address to the Unco Gude_,
are satires against bigotry and hypocrisy. But in spite of the
rollicking profanity of his language, and the violence of his rebound
against the austere religion of Scotland, Burns was at bottom deeply
impressible by religious ideas, as may be seen from his _Prayer under
the Pressure of Violent Anguish_, and _Prayer in Prospect of Death_.
His farm turned out a failure, and he was on the eve of sailing for
Jamaica, when the favor with which his volume of poems was received,
stayed his departure, and turned his steps to Edinburgh. There the
peasant poet was lionized for a winter season by the learned and polite
society of the Scotch capital, with results in the end not altogether
favorable to Burns's best interests. For when society finally turned
the cold shoulder on {219} him, he had to go back to farming again,
carrying with him a bitter sense of injustice and neglect. He leased a
farm in Ellisland, in 1788, and some friends procured his appointment
as exciseman for his district. But poverty, disappointment, irregular
habits, and broken health clouded his last years, and brought him to an
untimely death at the age of thirty-seven. He continued, however, to
pour forth songs of unequaled sweetness and force. "The man sank,"
said Coleridge, "but the poet was bright to the last."
Burns is the best of British song-writers. His songs are singable;
they are not merely lyrical poems. They were meant to be sung, and
they are sung. They were mostly set to old Scottish airs, and
sometimes they were built up from ancient fragments of anonymous,
popular poetry, a chorus, or stanza, or even a single line. Such are,
for example, _Auld Lang Syne_, _My Heart's in the Highlands_, and
_Landlady, Count the Lawin_. Burns had a great, warm heart. His sins
were sins of passion, and sprang from the same generous soil that
nourished his impulsive virtues. His elementary qualities as a poet
were sincerity, a healthy openness to all impressions of the beautiful,
and a sympathy which embraced men, animals, and the dumb objects of
nature. His tenderness toward flowers and the brute creation may be
read in his lines _To a Mountain Daisy_, _To a Mouse_, and _The Auld
Farmer's New Year's Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie_. Next
after love and good {220} fellowship, patriotism is the most frequent
motive of his song. Of his national anthem, _Scots wha hae wi' Wallace
bled_, Carlyle said: "So long as there is warm blood in the heart of
Scotchman, or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war ode."
Burns's politics were a singular mixture of sentimental toryism with
practical democracy. A romantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes
of the exiled Stuarts, and to have been "out" in '45 with the Young
Pretender was a popular thing in parts of Scotland. To this purely
poetic loyalty may be attributed such Jacobite ballads of Burns as
_Over the Water to Charlie_. But his sober convictions were on the
side of liberty and human brotherhood, and are expressed in the _Twa
Dogs_, the _First Epistle to Davie_, and _A Man's a Man for a' that_.
His sympathy with the Revolution led him to send four pieces of
ordnance, taken from a captured smuggler, as a present to the French
Convention, a piece of bravado which got him into difficulties with his
superiors in the excise. The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect,
but in the classical English, is in the stilted manner of his century,
and his prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by his
constant lapse into rhetorical affectation and fine writing.
1. T. S. Perry's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century.
2. James Thomson. The Castle of Indolence.
3. The Poems of Thomas Gray.
{221}
4. William Collins. Odes.
5. The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Edited by
Matthew Arnold. Macmillan, 1878.
6. Boswell's Life of Johnson [abridged]. Henry Holt & Co., 1878.
7. Samuel Richardson. Clarissa Harlowe.
8. Henry Fielding. Tom Jones.
9. Tobias Smollett. Humphrey Clinker.
10. Lawrence Sterne. Tristram Shandy.
11. Oliver Goldsmith. Vicar of Wakefield and Deserted Village.
12. William Cowper. The Task and John Gilpin.
13. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns.
{222}
CHAPTER VII.
FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT.
1789-1832.
The burst of creative activity at the opening of the 19th century has but
one parallel in English literary history, namely, the somewhat similar
flowering out of the national genius in the time of Elisabeth and the
first two Stuart kings. The later age gave birth to no supreme poets,
like Shakspere and Milton. It produced no _Hamlet_ and no _Paradise
Lost_; but it offers a greater number of important writers, a higher
average of excellence, and a wider range and variety of literary work
than any preceding era. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley,
and Keats are all great names; while Southey, Landor, Moore, Lamb, and De
Quincey would be noteworthy figures at any period, and deserve a fuller
mention than can be here accorded them. But in so crowded a generation,
selection becomes increasingly needful, and in the present chapter,
accordingly, the emphasis will be laid upon the first-named group as not
only the most important, but the most representative of the various
tendencies of their time.
{223}
The conditions of literary work in this century have been almost unduly
stimulating. The rapid advance in population, wealth, education, and the
means of communication has vastly increased the number of readers. Every
one who has any thing to say can say it in print, and is sure of some
sort of a hearing. A special feature of the time is the multiplication
of periodicals. The great London dailies, like the _Times_ and the
_Morning Post_, which were started during the last quarter of the 18th
century, were something quite new in journalism. The first of the modern
reviews, the _Edinburgh_, was established in 1802, as the organ of the
Whig party in Scotland. This was followed by the _London Quarterly_, in
1808, and by _Blackwood's Magazine_, in 1817, both in the Tory interest.
The first editor of the _Edinburgh_ was Francis Jeffrey, who assembled
about him a distinguished corps of contributors, including the versatile
Henry Brougham, afterward a great parliamentary orator and
lord-chancellor of England, and the Rev. Sydney Smith, whose witty
sayings are still current. The first editor of the _Quarterly_ was
William Gifford, a satirist, who wrote the _Baviad_ and _Maeviad_ in
ridicule of literary affectations. He was succeeded in 1824 by James
Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law of Walter Scott, and the author of an
excellent _Life of Scott_. _Blackwood's_ was edited by John Wilson,
Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, who, under
the pen-name of "Christopher North," contributed to his magazine a series
{224} of brilliant, imaginary dialogues between famous characters of the
day, entitled _Noctes Ambrosianae_, because they were supposed to take
place at Ambrose's tavern in Edinburgh. These papers were full of a
profuse, headlong eloquence, of humor, literary criticism, and
personalities interspersed with songs expressive of a roystering and
convivial Toryism and an uproarious contempt for Whigs and cockneys.
These reviews and magazines, and others which sprang up beside them,
became the _nuclei_ about which the wit and scholarship of both parties
gathered. Political controversy under the Regency and the reign of
George IV. was thus carried on more regularly by permanent organs, and no
longer so largely by privateering, in the shape of pamphlets, like
Swift's _Public Spirit of the Whigs_, Johnson's _Taxation No Tyranny_,
and Burke's _Reflections on the Revolution in France_. Nor did politics
by any means usurp the columns of the reviews. Literature, art, science,
the whole circle of human effort and achievement passed under review.
_Blackwood's_, _Fraser's_, and the other monthlies, published stories,
poetry, criticism, and correspondence--every thing, in short, which
enters into the make-up of our magazines to-day, except illustrations.
Two main influences, of foreign origin, have left their trace in the
English writers of the first thirty years of the 19th century, the one
communicated by contact with the new German literature of the latter half
of the 18th century, and in particular {225} with the writings of Goethe,
Schiller, and Kant; the other springing from the events of the French
Revolution. The influence of German upon English literature in the 19th
century was more intellectual and less formal than that of the Italian in
the 16th and of the French in the 18th. In other words, the German
writers furnished the English with ideas and ways of feeling rather than
with models of style. Goethe and Schiller did not become subjects for
literary imitation as Moliere, Racine, and Boileau had become in Pope's
time. It was reserved for a later generation and for Thomas Carlyle to
domesticate the diction of German prose. But the nature and extent of
this influence can, perhaps, best be noted when we come to take up the
authors of the time one by one.
The excitement caused by the French Revolution was something more obvious
and immediate. When the Bastile fell, in 1789, the enthusiasm among the
friends of liberty and human progress in England was hardly less intense
than in France. It was the dawn of a new day: the shackles were stricken
from the slave; all men were free and all men were brothers, and radical
young England sent up a shout that echoed the roar of the Paris mob.
Wordsworth's lines on the _Fall of the Bastile_, Coleridge's _Fall of
Robespierre_ and _Ode to France_, and Southey's revolutionary drama, _Wat
Tyler_, gave expression to the hopes and aspirations of the English
democracy. In after life Wordsworth, looking back regretfully to those
years of promise, {226} wrote his poem on the _French Revolution as it
appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement_.
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven. Oh times
In which the meager, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country in romance."
Those were the days in which Wordsworth, then an under-graduate at
Cambridge, spent a college vacation in tramping through France, landing
at Calais on the eve of the very day (July 14, 1790) on which Louis XVI.
signalized the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile by taking the oath
of fidelity to the new Constitution. In the following year Wordsworth
revisited France, where he spent thirteen months, forming an intimacy
with the republican general, Beaupuis, at Orleans, and reaching Paris not
long after the September massacres of 1792. Those were the days, too, in
which young Southey and young Coleridge, having married sisters at
Bristol, were planning a "Pantisocracy," or ideal community, on the banks
of the Susquehannah, and denouncing the British government for going to
war with the French Republic. This group of poets, who had met one
another first in the south of England, came afterward to be called the
Lake Poets, from their residence in the mountainous lake country of
Westmoreland and Cumberland, with which their names, and that of
Wordsworth, especially, are forever associated. The so-called "Lakers"
{227} did not, properly speaking, constitute a school of poetry. They
differed greatly from one another in mind and art. But they were
connected by social ties and by religious and political sympathies. The
excesses of the French Revolution, and the usurpation of Napoleon
disappointed them, as it did many other English liberals, and drove them
into the ranks of the reactionaries. Advancing years brought
conservatism, and they became in time loyal Tories and orthodox Churchmen.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the chief of the three, and, perhaps, on
the whole, the greatest English poet since Milton, published his _Lyrical
Ballads_ in 1798. The volume contained a few pieces by his friend
Coleridge--among them the _Ancient Mariner_--and its appearance may
fairly be said to mark an epoch in the history of English poetry.
Wordsworth regarded himself as a reformer of poetry; and in the preface
to the second volume of _Lyrical Ballads_, he defended the theory on
which they were composed. His innovations were twofold, in
subject-matter, and in diction. "The principal object which I proposed
to myself in these poems," he said, "was to choose incidents and
situations from common life. Low and rustic life was generally chosen,
because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a
better soil in which they can attain their maturity . . . and are
incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature."
Wordsworth discarded, in theory, the poetic diction of his predecessors,
{228} and professed to use "a selection of the real language of men in a
state of vivid sensation." He adopted, he said, the language of men in
rustic life, "because such men hourly communicate with the best objects
from which the best part of language is originally derived."
In the matter of poetic diction Wordsworth did not, in his practice,
adhere to the doctrine of this preface. Many of his most admired poems,
such as the _Lines written near Tintern Abbey_, the great _Ode on the
Intimations of Immortality_, the _Sonnets_, and many parts of his longest
poems, _The Excursion_ and _The Prelude_, deal with philosophic thought
and highly intellectualized emotions. In all of these and in many others
the language is rich, stately, involved, and as remote from the "real
language" of Westmoreland shepherds, as is the epic blank verse of
Milton. On the other hand, in those of his poems which were consciously
written in illustration of his theory, the affectation of simplicity,
coupled with a defective sense of humor, sometimes led him to the
selection of vulgar and trivial themes, and the use of language which is
bald, childish, or even ludicrous. His simplicity is too often the
simplicity of Mother Goose rather than of Chaucer. Instances of this
occur in such poems as _Peter Bell_, the _Idiot Boy_, _Goody Blake and
Harry Gill_, _Simon Lee_, and the _Wagoner_. But there are multitudes of
Wordsworth's ballads and lyrics which are simple without being silly, and
which, in their homeliness and clear {229} profundity, in their
production of the strongest effects by the fewest strokes, are among the
choicest modern examples of _pure_, as distinguished from decorated, art.
Such are (out of many) _Ruth_, _Lucy_, _A Portrait, To a Highland Girl_,
_The Reverie of Poor Susan_, _To the Cuckoo_, _The Reaper_, _We Are
Seven_, _The Pet Lamb_, _The Fountain_, _The Two April Mornings_, _The
Leech Gatherer_, _The Thorn_, and _Yarrow Revisited_.
Wordsworth was something of a Quaker in poetry, and loved the sober drabs
and grays of life. Quietism was his literary religion, and the
sensational was to him not merely vulgar, but almost wicked. "The human
mind," he wrote, "is capable of being excited without the application of
gross and violent stimulants." He disliked the far-fetched themes and
high-colored style of Scott and Byron. He once told Landor that all of
Scott's poetry together was not worth sixpence. From action and passion
he turned away to sing the inward life of the soul and the outward life
of Nature. He said:
"To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
And again:
"Long have I loved what I behold,
The night that calms, the day that cheers;
The common growth of mother earth
Suffices me--her tears, her mirth,
Her humblest mirth and tears."
Wordsworth's life was outwardly uneventful. The companionship of the
mountains and of his {230} own thoughts; the sympathy of his household;
the lives of the dalesmen and cottagers about him furnished him with all
the stimulus that he required.
"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie:
His only teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills."
He read little, but reflected much, and made poetry daily, composing, by
preference, out of doors, and dictating his verses to some member of his
family. His favorite amanuensis was his sister Dorothy, a woman of fine
gifts, to whom Wordsworth was indebted for some of his happiest
inspirations. She was the subject of the poem beginning "Her eyes are
wild," and her charming _Memorials of a Tour in the Scottish Highlands_
records the origin of many of her brother's best poems. Throughout life
Wordsworth was remarkably self-centered. The ridicule of the reviewers,
against which he gradually made his way to public recognition, never
disturbed his serene belief in himself, or in the divine message which he
felt himself commissioned to deliver. He was a slow and serious person,
a preacher as well as a poet, with a certain rigidity, not to say
narrowness, of character. That plastic temperament which we associate
with poetic genius Wordsworth either did not possess, or it hardened
early. Whole sides of life were beyond the range of his sympathies. He
{231} touched life at fewer points than Byron and Scott, but touched it
more profoundly. It is to him that we owe the phrase "plain living and
high thinking," as also a most noble illustration of it in his own
practice. His was the wisest and deepest spirit among the English poets
of his generation, though hardly the most poetic. He wrote too much,
and, attempting to make every petty incident or reflection the occasion
of a poem, he finally reached the point of composing verses _On Seeing a
Harp in the shape of a Needle Case_, and on other themes more worthy of
Mrs. Sigourney. In parts of his long blank-verse poems, _The Excursion_,
1814, and _The Prelude_--which was printed after his death in 1850,
though finished as early as 1806--the poetry wears very thin and its
place is taken by prosaic, tedious didacticism. These two poems were
designed as portions of a still more extended work, _The Recluse_, which
was never completed. _The Excursion_ consists mainly of philosophical
discussions on nature and human life between a school-master, a solitary,
and an itinerant peddler. _The Prelude_ describes the development of
Wordsworth's own genius. In parts of _The Excursion_ the diction is
fairly Shaksperian.
"The good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket."
A passage not only beautiful in itself, but dramatically true, in the
mouth of the bereaved mother {232} who utters it, to that human instinct
which generalizes a private sorrow into a universal law. Much of _The
Prelude_ can hardly be called poetry at all, yet some of Wordsworth's
loftiest poetry is buried among its dreary wastes, and now and then, in
the midst of commonplaces, comes a flash of Miltonic splendor--like
"Golden cities ten months' journey deep
Among Tartarian wilds."
Wordsworth is, above all things, the poet of Nature. In this province he
was not without forerunners. To say nothing of Burns and Cowper, there
was George Crabbe, who had published his _Village_ in 1783--fifteen years
before the _Lyrical Ballads_--and whose last poem, _Tales of the Hall_,
came out in 1819, five years after _The Excursion_. Byron called Crabbe
"Nature's sternest painter, and her best." He was a minutely accurate
delineator of the harsher aspects of rural life. He photographs a Gypsy
camp; a common, with its geese and donkey; a salt marsh, a shabby village
street, or tumble-down manse. But neither Crabbe nor Cowper has the
imaginative lift of Wordsworth,
"The light that never was on sea or land
The consecration and the poet's dream."
In a note on a couplet in one of his earliest poems, descriptive of an
oak tree standing dark against the sunset, Wordsworth says: "I recollect
distinctly the very spot where this struck me. {233} The moment was
important in my poetical history, for I date from it my consciousness of
the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by
the poets of any age or country, and I made a resolution to supply, in
some degree, the deficiency." In later life he is said to have been
impatient of any thing spoken or written by another about mountains,
conceiving himself to have a monopoly of "the power of hills." But
Wordsworth did not stop with natural description. Matthew Arnold has
said that the office of modern poetry is the "moral interpretation of
Nature." Such, at any rate, was Wordsworth's office. To him Nature was
alive and divine. He felt, under the veil of phenomena,
"A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thought: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused."
He approached, if he did not actually reach, the view of Pantheism, which
identifies God with Nature; and the mysticism of the Idealists, who
identify Nature with the soul of man. This tendency was not inspired in
Wordsworth by German philosophy. He was no metaphysician. In his
rambles with Coleridge about Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, when both were
young, they had, indeed, discussed Spinoza. And in the autumn of 1798,
after the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_, the two friends went
together to Germany, where Wordsworth spent half a year. But the
literature {234} and philosophy of Germany made little direct impression
upon Wordsworth. He disliked Goethe, and he quoted with approval the
saying of the poet Klopstock, whom he met at Hamburg, that he placed the
romanticist Burger above both Goethe and Schiller.
It was through Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), who was pre-eminently
the _thinker_ among the literary men of his generation, that the new
German thought found its way into England. During the fourteen months
which he spent in Germany--chiefly at Ratzburg and Goettingen--he had
familiarized himself with the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant
and of his continuators, Fichte and Schelling, as well as with the
general literature of Germany. On his return to England, he published,
in 1800, a free translation of Schiller's _Wallenstein_, and through his
writings, and more especially through his conversations, he became the
conductor by which German philosophic ideas reached the English literary
class.
Coleridge described himself as being from boyhood a book-worm and a
day-dreamer. He remained through life an omnivorous, though
unsystematic, reader. He was helpless in practical affairs, and his
native indolence and procrastination were increased by his indulgence in
the opium habit. On his return to England, in 1800, he went to reside at
Keswick, in the Lake Country, with his brother-in-law, Southey, whose
industry supported both families. During his last nineteen {235} years
Coleridge found an asylum under the roof of Mr. James Gilman, of
Highgate, near London, whither many of the best young men in England were
accustomed to resort to listen to Coleridge's wonderful talk. Talk,
indeed, was the medium through which he mainly influenced his generation.
It cost him an effort to put his thoughts on paper. His _Table
Talk_--crowded with pregnant paragraphs--was taken down from his lips by
his nephew, Henry Coleridge. His criticisms of Shakspere are nothing but
notes, made here and there, from a course of lectures delivered before
the Royal Institute, and never fully written out. Though only hints and
suggestions, they are, perhaps, the most penetrative and helpful
Shaksperian criticism in English. He was always forming projects and
abandoning them. He projected a great work on Christian philosophy,
which was to have been his _magnum opus_, but he never wrote it. He
projected an epic poem on the fall of Jerusalem. "I schemed it at
twenty-five," he said, "but, alas! _venturum expectat_." What bade fair
to be his best poem, _Christabel_, is a fragment. Another strangely
beautiful poem, _Kubla Khan_--which came to him, he said, in sleep--is
even more fragmentary. And the most important of his prose remains, his
_Biographia Literaria_, 1817, a history of his own opinions, breaks off
abruptly.
It was in his suggestiveness that Coleridge's great service to posterity
resided. He was what J. S. Mill called a "seminal mind," and his thought
{236} had that power of stimulating thought in others, which is the mark
and the privilege of original genius. Many a man has owed to some
sentence of Coleridge's, if not the awakening in himself of a new
intellectual life, at least the starting of fruitful trains of reflection
which have modified his whole view of certain great subjects. On every
thing that he left is set the stamp of high mental authority. He was
not, perhaps, primarily, he certainly was not exclusively, a poet. In
theology, in philosophy, in political thought, and literary criticism, he
set currents flowing which are flowing yet. The terminology of
criticism, for example, is in his debt for many of those convenient
distinctions--such as that between genius and talent, between wit and
humor, between fancy and imagination--which are familiar enough now, but
which he first introduced, or enforced. His definitions and apothegms we
meet every-where. Such are, for example, the sayings: "Every man is born
an Aristotelian or a Platonist." "Prose is words in their best order;
poetry, the best words in the best order." And among the bits of subtle
interpretation, that abound in his writings, may be mentioned his
estimate of Wordsworth, in the _Biographia Literaria_, and his sketch of
Hamlet's character--one with which he was personally in strong
sympathy--in the _Lectures on Shakspere_.
The Broad-Church party, in the English Church, among whose most eminent
exponents have been Frederic Robertson, Arnold of Rugby, {237} F. D.
Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and the late Dean Stanley, traces its
intellectual origin to Coleridge's _Aids to Reflection_; to his writings
and conversations in general, and particularly to his ideal of a national
Clerisy, as set forth in his essay on _Church and State_. In politics,
as in religion, Coleridge's conservatism represents the reaction against
the destructive spirit of the eighteenth century and the French
revolution. To this root-and-branch democracy he opposed the view, that
every old belief, or institution, such as the throne or the Church, had
served some need, and had a rational idea at the bottom of it, to which
it might be again recalled, and made once more a benefit to society,
instead of a curse and an anachronism.
As a poet, Coleridge has a sure, though slender, hold upon immortal fame.
No English poet has "sung so wildly well" as the singer of _Christabel_
and the _Ancient Mariner_. The former of these is, in form, a romance in
a variety of meters, and in substance, a tale of supernatural possession,
by which a lovely and innocent maiden is brought under the control of a
witch. Though unfinished and obscure in intention, it haunts the
imagination with a mystic power. Byron had seen _Christabel_ in MS., and
urged Coleridge to publish it. He hated all the "Lakers," but when, on
parting from Lady Byron, he wrote his song,
"Fare thee well, and if forever,
Still forever fare thee well,"
{238} he prefixed to it the noble lines from Coleridge's poem, beginning
"Alas! they had been friends in youth."
In that weird ballad, the _Ancient Mariner_, the supernatural is handled
with even greater subtlety than in _Christabel_. The reader is led to
feel that amid the loneliness of the tropic sea, the line between the
earthly and the unearthly vanishes, and the poet leaves him to discover
for himself whether the spectral shapes that the mariner saw were merely
the visions of the calenture, or a glimpse of the world of spirits.
Coleridge is one of our most perfect metrists. The poet Swinburne--than
whom there can be no higher authority on this point (though he is rather
given to exaggeration)--pronounces _Kubla Khan_, "for absolute melody and
splendor, the first poem in the language."
Robert Southey, the third member of this group, was a diligent worker and
one of the most voluminous of English writers. As a poet, he was lacking
in inspiration, and his big Oriental epics, _Thalaba_, 1801, and the
_Curse of Kehama_, 1810, are little better than wax-work. Of his
numerous works in prose, the _Life of Nelson_ is, perhaps, the best, and
is an excellent biography.
Several other authors were more or less closely associated with the Lake
Poets by residence or social affiliation. John Wilson, the editor of
_Blackwood's_, lived for some time, when a young man, at Elleray, on the
banks of Windermere. He was an {239} athletic man of out-door habits, an
enthusiastic sportsman, and a lover of natural scenery. His admiration
of Wordsworth was thought to have led him to imitation of the latter, in
his _Isle of Palms_, 1812, and his other poetry.
One of Wilson's companions, in his mountain walks, was Thomas De Quincey,
who had been led by his reverence for Wordsworth and Coleridge to take up
his residence, in 1808, at Grasmere, where he occupied for many years the
cottage from which Wordsworth had removed to Allan Bank. De Quincey was
a shy, bookish little man, of erratic, nocturnal habits, who impresses
one, personally, as a child of genius, with a child's helplessness and a
child's sharp observation. He was, above all things, a magazinist. All
his writings, with one exception, appeared first in the shape of
contributions to periodicals; and his essays, literary criticisms, and
miscellaneous papers are exceedingly rich and varied. The most famous of
them was his _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_, published as a
serial in the _London Magazine_, in 1821. He had begun to take opium, as
a cure for the toothache, when a student at Oxford, where he resided from
1803 to 1808. By 1816 he had risen to eight thousand drops of laudanum a
day. For several years after this he experienced the acutest misery, and
his will suffered an entire paralysis. In 1821 he succeeded in reducing
his dose to a comparatively small allowance, and in shaking off his
torpor so as to become capable of literary work. {240} The most
impressive effect of the opium habit was seen in his dreams, in the
unnatural expansion of space and time, and the infinite repetition of the
same objects. His sleep was filled with dim, vast images; measureless
cavalcades deploying to the sound of orchestral music; an endless
succession of vaulted halls, with staircases climbing to heaven, up which
toiled eternally the same solitary figure. "Then came sudden alarms,
hurrying to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives; darkness and
light; tempest and human faces." Many of De Quincey's papers were
autobiographical, but there is always something baffling in these
reminiscences. In the interminable wanderings of his pen--for which,
perhaps, opium was responsible--he appears to lose all trace of facts or
of any continuous story. Every actual experience of his life seems to
have been taken up into a realm of dream, and there distorted till the
reader sees not the real figures, but the enormous, grotesque shadows of
them, executing wild dances on a screen. An instance of this process is
described by himself in his _Vision of Sudden Death_. But his
unworldliness and faculty of vision-seeing were not inconsistent with the
keenness of judgment and the justness and delicacy of perception
displayed in his _Biographical Sketches_ of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
other contemporaries: in his critical papers on _Pope, Milton, Lessing,
Homer and the Homeridae_: his essay on _Style_; and his _Brief Appraisal
of the Greek Literature_. His curious scholarship is seen in his
articles on the _Toilet of a {241} Hebrew Lady_, and the _Casuistry of
Roman Meals_; his ironical and somewhat elaborate humor in his essay on
_Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts_. Of his narrative pieces the
most remarkable is his _Revolt of the Tartars_, describing the flight of
a Kalmuck tribe of six hundred thousand souls from Russia to the Chinese
frontier: a great hegira or anabasis, which extended for four thousand
miles over desert steppes infested with foes; occupied six months' time,
and left nearly half of the tribe dead upon the way. The subject was
suited to De Quincey's imagination. It was like one of his own opium
visions, and he handled it with a dignity and force which make the
history not altogether unworthy of comparison with Thucydides's great
chapter on the Sicilian Expedition.
An intimate friend of Southey was Walter Savage Landor, a man of kingly
nature, of a leonine presence, with a most stormy and unreasonable
temper, and yet with the courtliest graces of manner and with--said
Emerson--a "wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and inexhaustible." He
inherited wealth, and lived a great part of his life at Florence, where
he died, in 1864, in his ninetieth year. Dickens, who knew him at Bath,
in the latter part of his life, made a kindly caricature of him as
Lawrence Boythom, in _Bleak House_, whose "combination of superficial
ferocity and inherent tenderness," testifies Henry Crabb Robinson, in his
_Diary_, was true to the life. Landor is the most purely classical of
English writers. Not merely his themes {242} but his whole way of
thinking was pagan and antique. He composed, indifferently, in English
or Latin, preferring the latter, if any thing, in obedience to his
instinct for compression and exclusiveness. Thus portions of his
narrative poem, _Gebir_, 1798, were written originally in Latin, and he
added a Latin version, _Gebirius_, to the English edition. In like
manner his _Hellenics_, 1847, were mainly translations from his Latin
_Idyllia Heroica_, written years before. The Hellenic clearness and
repose which were absent from his life, Landor sought in his art. His
poems, in their restraint, their objectivity, their aloofness from modern
feeling, have something chill and artificial. The verse of poets like
Byron and Wordsworth is alive; the blood runs in it. But Landor's
polished, clean-cut _intaglios_ have been well described as "written in
marble." He was a master of fine and solid prose. His _Pericles and
Aspasia_ consists of a series of letters passing between the great
Athenian demagogue, the hetaira, Aspasia, her friend, Cleone of Miletus,
Anaxagorus, the philosopher, and Pericles's nephew, Alcibiades. In this
masterpiece the intellectual life of Athens, at its period of highest
refinement, is brought before the reader with singular vividness, and he
is made to breathe an atmosphere of high-bred grace, delicate wit, and
thoughtful sentiment, expressed in English "of Attic choice." The
_Imaginary Conversations_, 1824-1846, were Platonic dialogues between a
great variety of historical characters; between, for example, Dante and
Beatrice, Washington {243} and Franklin, Queen Elisabeth and Cecil,
Xenophon and Cyrus the Younger, Bonaparte and the President of the
Senate. Landor's writings have never been popular; they address an
aristocracy of scholars; and Byron--whom Landor disliked and considered
vulgar--sneered at the latter as a writer who "cultivated much private
renown in the shape of Latin verses." He said of himself that he "never
contended with a contemporary, but walked alone on the far eastern
uplands, meditating and remembering."
A schoolmate of Coleridge, at Christ's Hospital, and his friend and
correspondent through life, was Charles Lamb, one of the most charming of
English essayists. He was an old bachelor, who lived alone with his
sister Mary a lovable and intellectual woman, but subject to recurring
attacks of madness. Lamb was "a notched and cropped scrivener, a votary
of the desk," a clerk, that is, in the employ of the East India Company.
He was of antiquarian tastes, an ardent play-goer, a lover of whist and
of the London streets; and these tastes are reflected in his _Essays of
Elia_, contributed to the _London Magazine_ and reprinted in book form in
1823. From his mousing among the Elisabethan dramatists and such old
humorists as Burton and Fuller, his own style imbibed a peculiar
quaintness and pungency. His _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_,
1808, is admirable for its critical insight. In 1802 he paid a visit to
Coleridge at Keswick, in the Lake Country; but he felt or {244} affected
a whimsical horror of the mountains, and said, "Fleet Street and the
Strand are better places to live in." Among the best of his essays are
_Dream Children_, _Poor Relations_, _The Artificial Comedy of the Last
Century_, _Old China_, _Roast Pig_, _A Defense of Chimney-sweeps_, _A
Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis_, and _The Old
Benchers of the Inner Temple_.
The romantic movement, preluded by Gray, Collins, Chatterton, Macpherson,
and others, culminated in Walter Scott (1771-1832). His passion for the
medieval was first excited by reading Percy's _Reliques_, when he was a
boy; and in one of his school themes he maintained that Ariosto was a
greater poet than Homer. He began early to collect manuscript ballads,
suits of armor, pieces of old plate, border-horns, and similar relics.
He learned Italian in order to read the romancers--Ariosto, Tasso, Pulci,
and Boiardo, preferring them to Dante. He studied Gothic architecture,
heraldry, and the art of fortification, and made drawings of famous ruins
and battle-fields. In particular he read eagerly every thing that he
could lay hands on relating to the history, legends, and antiquities of
the Scottish border--the vale of Tweed, Teviotdale, Ettrick Forest, and
the Yarrow, of all which land he became the laureate, as Burns had been
of Ayrshire and the "West Country." Scott, like Wordsworth, was an
out-door poet. He spent much time in the saddle, and was fond of horses,
dogs, hunting, and salmon-fishing. He had a keen {245} eye for the
beauties of natural scenery, though "more especially," he admits, "when
combined with ancient ruins or remains of our forefathers' piety or
splendor." He had the historic imagination, and, in creating the
historical novel, he was the first to throw a poetic glamour over
European annals. In 1803 Wordsworth visited Scott at Lasswade, near
Edinburgh; and Scott afterward returned the visit at Grasmere.
Wordsworth noted that his guest was "full of anecdote and averse from
disquisition." The Englishman was a moralist and much given to
"disquisition," while the Scotchman was, above all things, a _raconteur_,
and, perhaps, on the whole, the foremost of British story-tellers.
Scott's Toryism, too, was of a different stripe from Wordsworth's, being
rather the result of sentiment and imagination than of philosophy and
reflection. His mind struck deep root in the past; his local attachments
and family pride were intense. Abbotsford was his darling, and the
expenses of this domain and of the baronial hospitality which he there
extended to all comers were among the causes of his bankruptcy. The
enormous toil which he exacted of himself, to pay off the debt of 117,000
pounds, contracted by the failure of his publishers, cost him his life.
It is said that he was more gratified when the Prince Regent created him
a baronet, in 1820, than by all the public recognition that he acquired
as the author of the Waverley Novels.
Scott was attracted by the romantic side of {246} German literature. His
first published poem was a translation made in 1796 from Burger's wild
ballad, _Leonora_. He followed this up with versions of the same poet's
_Wilde Jaeger_, of Goethe's violent drama of feudal life, _Goetz Van
Berlichingen_, and with other translations from the German, of a similar
class. On his horseback trips through the border, where he studied the
primitive manners of the Liddesdale people, and took down old ballads
from the recitation of ancient dames and cottagers, he amassed the
materials for his _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, 1802. But the
first of his original poems was the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, published
in 1805, and followed, in quick succession, by _Marmion_, the _Lady of
the Lake_, _Rokeby_, the _Lord of the Isles_, and a volume of ballads and
lyrical pieces, all issued during the years 1806-1814. The popularity
won by this series of metrical romances was immediate and wide-spread.
Nothing so fresh, or so brilliant, had appeared in English poetry for
nearly two centuries. The reader was hurried along through scenes of
rapid action, whose effect was heightened by wild landscapes and
picturesque manners. The pleasure was a passive one. There was no deep
thinking to perplex, no subtler beauties to pause upon; the feelings were
stirred pleasantly, but not deeply; the effect was on the surface. The
spell employed was novelty--or, at most, wonder--and the chief emotion
aroused was breathless interest in the progress of the story. Carlyle
said that Scott's genius was _in extenso_, {247} rather than _in
intenso_, and that its great praise was its healthiness. This is true of
his verse, but not altogether so of his prose, which exhibits deeper
qualities. Some of Scott's most perfect poems, too, are his shorter
ballads, like _Jock o' Hazeldean_, and _Proud Maisie is in the Wood_,
which have a greater intensity and compression than his metrical tales.
From 1814 to 1831 Scott wrote and published the _Waverley_ novels, some
thirty in number; if we consider the amount of work done, the speed with
which it was done, and the general average of excellence maintained,
perhaps the most marvelous literary feat on record. The series was
issued anonymously, and takes its name from the first number, _Waverley,
or 'Tis Sixty Years Since_. This was founded upon the rising of the
clans, in 1745, in support of the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart,
and it revealed to the English public that almost foreign country which
lay just across their threshold, the Scottish Highlands. The _Waverley_
novels remain, as a whole, unequaled as historical fiction, although,
here and there a single novel, like George Eliot's _Romola_, or
Thackeray's _Henry Esmond_, or Kingsley's _Hypatia_, may have attained a
place beside the best of them. They were a novelty when they appeared.
English prose fiction had somewhat declined since the time of Fielding
and Goldsmith. There were truthful, though rather tame, delineations of
provincial life, like Jane Austen's _Sense and Sensibility_, 1811, and
{248} _Pride and Prejudice_, 1813; or Maria Edgeworth's _Popular Tales_,
1804. On the other hand, there were Gothic romances, like the _Monk_ of
Matthew Gregory Lewis, to whose _Tales of Wonder_ some of Scott's
translations from the German had been contributed; or like Anne
Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_. The great original of this school of
fiction was Horace Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, 1765, an absurd tale of
secret trap-doors, subterranean vaults, apparitions of monstrous mailed
figures and colossal helmets, pictures that descend from their frames,
and hollow voices that proclaim the ruin of ancient families.
Scott used the machinery of romance, but he was not merely a romancer, or
a historical novelist even, and it is not, as Carlyle implies, the
buff-belts and jerkins which principally interest us in his heroes.
_Ivanhoe_ and _Kenilworth_ and the _Talisman_ are, indeed, romances pure
and simple, and very good romances at that. But, in novels such as _Rob
Roy_, the _Antiquary_, the _Heart of Midlothian_, and the _Bride of
Lammermoor_, Scott drew from contemporary life, and from his intimate
knowledge of Scotch character. The story is there, with its entanglement
of plot and its exciting adventures, but there are also, as truly as in
Shakspere, though not in the same degree, the observation of life, the
knowledge of men, the power of dramatic creation. No writer awakens in
his readers a warmer personal affection than Walter Scott, the brave,
honest, kindly gentleman, the noblest {249} figure among the literary men
of his generation.
Another Scotch poet was Thomas Campbell, whose _Pleasures of Hope_, 1799,
was written in Pope's couplet, and in the stilted diction of the
eighteenth century. _Gertrude of Wyoming_, 1809, a long narrative poem
in Spenserian stanza, is untrue to the scenery and life of Pennsylvania,
where its scene is laid. But Campbell turned his rhetorical manner and
his clanking, martial verse to fine advantage in such pieces as
_Hohenlinden_, _Ye Mariners of England_, and the _Battle of the Baltic_.
These have the true lyric fire, and rank among the best English war-songs.
When Scott was asked why he had left off writing poetry, he answered,
"Byron _bet_ me." George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was a young man of
twenty-four, when, on his return from a two years' sauntering through
Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece, and the Levant, he published, in the
first two cantos of _Childe Harold_, 1812, a sort of poetic itinerary of
his experiences and impressions. The poem took, rather to its author's
surprise, who said that he woke one morning and found himself famous.
_Childe Harold_ opened a new field to poetry, the romance of travel, the
picturesque aspects of foreign scenery, manners, and costumes. It is
instructive of the difference between the two ages, in poetic sensibility
to such things, to compare Byron's glowing imagery with Addison's tame
_Letter from Italy_, written a century before. _Childe {250} Harold_ was
followed by a series of metrical tales, the _Giaour_, the _Bride of
Abydos_, the _Corsair_, _Lara_, the _Siege of Corinth_, _Parasina_, and
_Prisoner of Chillon_, all written in the years 1813-1816. These poems
at once took the place of Scott's in popular interest, dazzling a public
that had begun to weary of chivalry romances, with pictures of Eastern
life, with incidents as exciting as Scott's, descriptions as highly
colored, and a much greater intensity of passion. So far as they
depended for this interest upon the novelty of their accessories, the
effect was a temporary one. Seraglios, divans, bulbuls, Gulistans,
Zuleikas, and other Oriental properties, deluged English poetry for a
time, and then subsided; even as the tide of moss-troopers, sorcerers,
hermits, and feudal castles had already had its rise and fall.
But there was a deeper reason for the impression made by Byron's poetry
upon his contemporaries. He laid his finger right on the sore spot in
modern life. He had the disease with which the time was sick, the
world-weariness, the desperation which proceeded from "passion incapable
of being converted into action." We find this tone in much of the
literature which followed the failure of the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic wars. From the irritations of that period, the disappointment
of high hopes for the future of the race, the growing religious
disbelief, and the revolt of democracy and free thought against
conservative reaction, sprang what Southey called the "Satanic {251}
school," which spoke its loudest word in Byron. Titanic is the better
word, for the rebellion was not against God, but Jupiter, that is,
against the State, Church, and society of Byron's day; against George
III., the Tory cabinet of Lord Castlereigh, the Duke of Wellington, the
bench of Bishops, London gossip, the British Constitution, and British
cant. In these poems of Byron, and in his dramatic experiments,
_Manfred_ and _Cain_, there is a single figure--the figure of Byron under
various masks--and one pervading mood, a restless and sardonic gloom, a
weariness of life, a love of solitude, and a melancholy exaltation in the
presence of the wilderness and the sea. Byron's hero is always
represented as a man originally noble, whom some great wrong, by others,
or some mysterious crime of his own, has blasted and embittered, and who
carries about the world a seared heart and a somber brow. Harold--who
may stand as a type of all his heroes--has run "through sin's labyrinth"
and feeling the "fullness of satiety," is drawn abroad to roam, "the
wandering exile of his own dark mind." The loss of a capacity for pure,
unjaded emotion is the constant burden of Byron's lament.
"No more, no more, O never more on me
The freshness of the heart shall fall like dew."
and again,
"O could I feel as I have felt--or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanished scene;
{252}
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish tho' they be,
So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me."
This mood was sincere in Byron; but by cultivating it, and posing too
long in one attitude, he became self-conscious and theatrical, and much
of his serious poetry has a false ring. His example infected the minor
poetry of the time, and it was quite natural that Thackeray--who
represented a generation that had a very different ideal of the
heroic--should be provoked into describing Byron as "a big, sulky dandy."
Byron was well fitted by birth and temperament to be the spokesman of
this fierce discontent. He inherited from his mother a haughty and
violent temper, and profligate tendencies from his father. He was
through life a spoiled child, whose main characteristic was willfulness.
He liked to shock people by exaggerating his wickedness, or by perversely
maintaining the wrong side of a dispute. But he had traits of bravery
and generosity. Women loved him, and he made strong friends. There was
a careless charm about him which fascinated natures as unlike each other
as Shelley and Scott. By the death of the fifth Lord Byron without
issue, Byron came into a title and estates at the age of ten. Though a
liberal in politics he had aristocratic feelings, and was vain of his
rank as he was of his beauty. He was educated at Harrow and at Trinity
College, Cambridge, where he was idle and {253} dissipated, but did a
great deal of miscellaneous reading. He took some of his Cambridge
set--Hobhouse, Matthews, and others--to Newstead Abbey, his ancestral
seat, where they filled the ancient cloisters with eccentric orgies.
Byron was strikingly handsome. His face had a spiritual paleness and a
classic regularity, and his dark hair curled closely to his head. A
deformity in one of his feet was a mortification to him, though it did
not greatly impair his activity, and he prided himself upon his powers as
a swimmer.
In 1815, when at the height of his literary and social _eclat_ in London,
he married. In February of the following year he was separated from Lady
Byron, and left England forever, pursued by the execrations of outraged
respectability. In this chorus of abuse there was mingled a share of
cant; but Byron got, on the whole, what he deserved. From Switzerland,
where he spent a summer by Lake Leman, with the Shelleys; from Venice,
Ravenna, Pisa, and Rome, scandalous reports of his intrigues and his wild
debaucheries were wafted back to England, and with these came poem after
poem, full of burning genius, pride, scorn, and anguish, and all hurling
defiance at English public opinion. The third and fourth cantos of
_Childe Harold_, 1816-1818, were a great advance upon the first two, and
contain the best of Byron's serious poetry. He has written his name all
over the continent of Europe, and on a hundred memorable spots has made
the scenery his own. On the field of Waterloo, on "the castled {254}
crag of Drachenfels," "by the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone," in
Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs, in the Coliseum at Rome, and among the
"Isles of Greece," the tourist is compelled to see with Byron's eyes and
under the associations of his pilgrimage. In his later poems, such as
_Beppo_, 1818, and _Don Juan_, 1819-1823, he passed into his second
manner, a mocking cynicism gaining ground upon the somewhat stagy gloom
of his early poetry--Mephistophiles gradually elbowing out Satan. _Don
Juan_, though morally the worst, is intellectually the most vital and
representative of Byron's poems. It takes up into itself most fully the
life of the time; exhibits most thoroughly the characteristic
alternations of Byron's moods and the prodigal resources of wit, passion,
and understanding, which--rather than imagination--were his prominent
qualities as a poet. The hero, a graceless, amorous, stripling, goes
wandering from Spain to the Greek islands and Constantinople, thence to
St. Petersburg, and finally to England. Every-where his seductions are
successful, and Byron uses him as a means of exposing the weakness of the
human heart and the rottenness of society in all countries. In 1823,
breaking away from his life of selfish indulgence in Italy, Byron threw
himself into the cause of Grecian liberty, which he had sung so
gloriously in the _Isles of Greece_. He died at Missolonghi, in the
following year, of a fever contracted by exposure and overwork.
Byron was a great poet but not a great literary {255} artist. He wrote
negligently and with the ease of assured strength, his mind gathering
heat as it moved, and pouring itself forth in reckless profusion. His
work is diffuse and imperfect; much of it is melodrama or speech-making
rather than true poetry. But on the other hand, much, very much of it,
is unexcelled as the direct, strong, sincere utterance of personal
feeling. Such is the quality of his best lyrics, like _When We Two
Parted_, the _Elegy on Thyrza_, _Stanzas to Augusta_, _She Walks in
Beauty_, and of innumerable passages, lyrical and descriptive, in his
longer poems. He had not the wisdom of Wordsworth, nor the rich and
subtle imagination of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats when they were at
their best. But he had greater body and motive force than any of them.
He is the strongest personality among English poets since Milton, though
his strength was wasted by want of restraint and self-culture. In Milton
the passion was there, but it was held in check by the will and the
artistic conscience, made subordinate to good ends, ripened by long
reflection, and finally uttered in forms of perfect and harmonious
beauty. Byron's love of Nature was quite different in kind from
Wordsworth's. Of all English poets he has sung most lyrically of that
national theme, the sea, as witness among many other passages, the famous
apostrophe to the ocean, which closes _Childe Harold_, and the opening of
the third canto in the same poem,
"Once more upon the waters," etc.
{256} He had a passion for night and storm, because they made him forget
himself.
"Most glorious night!
Thou wert not sent for slumber! Let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,
A portion of the tempest and of thee!"
Byron's literary executor and biographer was the Irish poet, Thomas
Moore, a born song-writer, whose _Irish Melodies_, set to old native
airs, are, like Burns's, genuine, spontaneous, singing, and run naturally
to music. Songs such as the _Meeting of the Waters_, _The Harp of Tara_,
_Those Evening Bells_, the _Light of Other Days_, _Araby's Daughter_, and
the _Last Rose of Summer_ were, and still are, popular favorites.
Moore's Oriental romance, _Lalla Rookh_, 1817, is overladen with ornament
and with a sugary sentiment that clogs the palate. He had the quick
Irish wit, sensibility rather than passion, and fancy rather than
imagination.
Byron's friend, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), was also in fiery
revolt against all conventions and institutions, though his revolt
proceeded not, as in Byron's case, from the turbulence of passions which
brooked no restraint, but rather from an intellectual impatience of any
kind of control. He was not, like Byron, a sensual man, but temperate
and chaste. He was, indeed, in his life and in his poetry, as nearly a
disembodied spirit as a human creature can be. The German poet, Heine,
said that liberty was the religion of this century, {257} and of this
religion Shelley was a worshiper. His rebellion against authority began
early. He refused to fag at Eton, and was expelled from Oxford for
publishing a tract on the _Necessity of Atheism_. At nineteen, he ran
away with Harriet Westbrook, and was married to her in Scotland. Three
years later he deserted her for Mary Godwin, with whom he eloped to
Switzerland. Two years after this his first wife drowned herself in the
Serpentine, and Shelley was then formally wedded to Mary Godwin. All
this is rather startling, in the bare statement of it, yet it is not
inconsistent with the many testimonies that exist, to Shelley's singular
purity and beauty of character, testimonies borne out by the evidence of
his own writings. Impulse with him took the place of conscience. Moral
law, accompanied by the sanction of power, and imposed by outside
authority, he rejected as a form of tyranny. His nature lacked
robustness and ballast. Byron, who was at bottom intensely practical,
said that Shelley's philosophy was too spiritual and romantic. Hazlitt,
himself a Radical, wrote of Shelley: "He has a fire in his eye, a fever
in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech,
which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine complexioned and
shrill voiced." It was, perhaps, with some recollection of this
last-mentioned trait of Shelley the man, that Carlyle wrote of Shelley
the poet, that "the sound of him was shrieky," and that he had "filled
the earth with an inarticulate wailing."
{258}
His career as a poet began characteristically enough, with the
publication, while at Oxford, of a volume of political rimes, entitled
_Margaret Nicholson's Remains_, Margaret Nicholson being the crazy woman
who tried to stab George III. His boyish poem, _Queen Mab_, was
published in 1813; _Alastor_ in 1816, and the _Revolt of Islam_--his
longest--in 1818, all before he was twenty-one. These were filled with
splendid, though unsubstantial, imagery, but they were abstract in
subject, and had the faults of incoherence and formlessness which make
Shelley's longer poems wearisome and confusing. They sought to embody
his social creed of Perfectionism, as well as a certain vague Pantheistic
system of belief in a spirit of love in nature and man, whose presence is
a constant source of obscurity in Shelley's verse. In 1818 he went to
Italy, where the last four years of his life were passed, and where,
under the influences of Italian art and poetry, his writing became deeper
and stronger. He was fond of yachting, and spent much of his time upon
the Mediterranean. In the summer of 1822, his boat was swamped in a
squall off the Gulf of Spezzia, and Shelley's drowned body was washed
ashore, and burned in the presence of Byron and Leigh Hunt. The ashes
were entombed in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, with the epitaph, _Cor
cordium_.
Shelley's best and maturest work, nearly all of which was done in Italy,
includes his tragedy, _The Cenci_, 1819, and his lyrical drama,
_Prometheus {259} Unbound_, 1821. The first of these has a unity, and a
definiteness of contour unusual with Shelley, and is, with the exception
of some of Robert Browning's, the best English tragedy since Otway.
_Prometheus_ represented to Shelley's mind the human spirit fighting
against divine oppression, and in his portrayal of this figure, he kept
in mind not only the _Prometheus_ of Aeschylus, but the Satan of
_Paradise Lost_. Indeed, in this poem, Shelley came nearer to the
sublime than any English poet since Milton. Yet it is in lyrical, rather
than in dramatic, quality that _Prometheus Unbound_ is great. If Shelley
be not, as his latest editor, Mr. Forman, claims him to be, the foremost
of English lyrical poets, he is at least the most lyrical of them. He
had, in a supreme degree, the "lyric cry." His vibrant nature trembled
to every breath of emotion, and his nerves craved ever newer shocks; to
pant, to quiver, to thrill, to grow faint in the spasm of intense
sensation. The feminine cast observable in Shelley's portrait is borne
out by this tremulous sensibility in his verse. It is curious how often
he uses the metaphor of wings: of the winged spirit, soaring, like his
skylark, till lost in music, rapture, light, and then falling back to
earth. Three successive moods--longing, ecstasy, and the revulsion of
despair--are expressed in many of his lyrics; as in the _Hymn to the
Spirit of Nature_, in _Prometheus_, in the ode _To a Skylark_, and in the
_Lines to an Indian Air_--Edgar Poe's favorite. His passionate desire to
lose {260} himself in Nature, to become one with that spirit of love and
beauty in the universe, which was to him in place of God, is expressed in
the _Ode to the West Wind_, his most perfect poem:
"Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is;
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone.
Sweet, though in sadness, be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! be thou me, impetuous one!"
In the lyrical pieces already mentioned, together with _Adonais_, the
lines _Written in the Euganean Hills_, _Epipsychidion_, _Stanzas Written
in Dejection near Naples_, _A Dream of the Unknown_, and many others,
Shelley's lyrical genius reaches a rarer loveliness and a more faultless
art than Byron's ever attained, though it lacks the directness and
momentum of Byron.
In Shelley's longer poems, intoxicated with the music of his own singing,
he abandons himself wholly to the guidance of his imagination, and the
verse seems to go on of itself, like the enchanted boat in _Alastor_,
with no one at the helm. Vision succeeds vision in glorious but
bewildering profusion; ideal landscapes and cities of cloud "pinnacled
dim in the intense inane." These poems are like the water-falls in the
Yosemite, which, tumbling from a height of several thousand feet, are
shattered into foam by the air, and waved about over the valley. Very
beautiful is this descending spray, and the rainbow dwells in its {261}
bosom; but there is no longer any stream, nothing but an irridescent
mist. The word _etherial_, best expresses the quality of Shelley's
genius. His poetry is full of atmospheric effects; of the tricks which
light plays with the fluid elements of water and air; of stars, clouds,
rain, dew, mist, frost, wind, the foam of seas, the phases of the moon,
the green shadows of waves, the shapes of flames, the "golden lightning
of the setting sun." Nature, in Shelley, wants homeliness and relief.
While poets like Wordsworth and Burns let in an ideal light upon the
rough fields of earth, Shelley escapes into a "moonlight-colored" realm
of shadows and dreams, among whose abstractions the heart turns cold.
One bit of Wordsworth's mountain turf is worth them all.
By the death of John Keats (1796-1821), whose elegy Shelley sang in
_Adonais_, English poetry suffered an irreparable loss. His _Endymion_,
1818, though disfigured by mawkishness and by some affectations of
manner, was rich in promise. Its faults were those of youth, the faults
of exuberance and of a tremulous sensibility, which time corrects.
_Hyperion_, 1820, promised to be his masterpiece, but he left it
unfinished--"a Titanic torso"--because, as he said, "there were too many
Miltonic inversions in it." The subject was the displacement, by Phoebus
Apollo, of the ancient sun-god, Hyperion, the last of the Titans who
retained his dominion. It was a theme of great capabilities, and the
poem was begun by Keats, {262} with a strength of conception which leads
to the belief that here was once more a really epic genius, had fate
suffered it to mature. The fragment, as it stands--"that inlet to severe
magnificence"--proves how rapidly Keats's diction was clarifying. He had
learned to string up his looser chords. There is nothing maudlin in
_Hyperion_; all there is in whole tones and in the grand manner, "as
sublime as Aeschylus," said Byron, with the grave, antique simplicity,
and something of modern sweetness interfused.
Keats's father was a groom in a London livery-stable. The poet was
apprenticed at fifteen to a surgeon. At school he had studied Latin, but
not Greek. He, who of all English poets had the most purely Hellenic
spirit, made acquaintance with Greek literature and art only through the
medium of classical dictionaries, translations, and popular mythologies;
and later through the marbles and casts in the British Museum. His
friend, the artist Haydon, lent him a copy of Chapman's Homer, and the
impression that it made upon him he recorded in his sonnet, _On First
Looking into Chapman's Homer_. Other poems of the same inspiration are
his three sonnets, _To Homer_, _On Seeing the Elgin Marbles_, _On a
Picture of Leander_, _Lamia_, and the beautiful _Ode on a Grecian Urn_.
But Keats's art was retrospective and eclectic, the blossom of a double
root; and "golden-tongued Romance with serene lute" had her part in him,
as well as the classics. In his seventeenth year he {263} had read the
_Faery Queene_, and from Spenser he went on to a study of Chaucer,
Shakspere, and Milton. Then he took up Italian and read _Ariosto_. The
influence of these studies is seen in his poem, _Isabella, or the Pot of
Basil_, taken from a story of Boccaccio; in his wild ballad, _La Belle
Dame sans Merci_; and in his love tale, the _Eve of Saint Agnes_, with
its wealth of medieval adornment. In the _Ode to Autumn_, and _Ode to a
Nightingale_, the Hellenic choiceness is found touched with the warmer
hues of romance.
There is something deeply tragic in the short story of Keats's life. The
seeds of consumption were in him; he felt the stirrings of a potent
genius, but knew that he could not wait for it to unfold, but must die
"Before high-piled books, in charactry
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain."
His disease was aggravated, possibly, by the stupid brutality with which
the reviewers had treated _Endymion_; and certainly by the hopeless love
which devoured him. "The very thing which I want to live most for," he
wrote, "will be a great occasion of my death. If I had any chance of
recovery, this passion would kill me." In the autumn of 1820, his
disease gaining apace, he went on a sailing vessel to Italy, accompanied
by a single friend, a young artist named Severn. The change was of no
avail, and he died at Rome a few weeks after, in his twenty-sixth year.
{264}
Keats was, above all things, the _artist_, with that love of the
beautiful and that instinct for its reproduction which are the artist's
divinest gifts. He cared little about the politics and philosophy of his
day, and he did not make his poetry the vehicle of ideas. It was
sensuous poetry, the poetry of youth and gladness. But if he had lived,
and if, with wider knowledge of men and deeper experience of life, he had
attained to Wordsworth's spiritual insight and to Byron's power of
passion and understanding, he would have become a greater poet than
either. For he had a style--a "natural magic"--which only needed the
chastening touch of a finer culture to make it superior to any thing in
modern English poetry and to force us back to Milton or Shakspere for a
comparison. His tombstone, not far from Shelley's, bears the inscription
of his own choosing: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." But
it would be within the limits of truth to say that it is written in large
characters on most of our contemporary poetry. "Wordsworth," says
Lowell, "has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their
forms." And he has influenced these out of all proportion to the amount
which he left, or to his intellectual range, by virtue of the exquisite
quality of his technique.
1. Wordsworth's Poems. Chosen and edited by Matthew Arnold. London,
1879.
2. Poetry of Byron. Chosen and arranged by Matthew Arnold. London, 1881.
{265}
3. Shelley. Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Lyrical
Pieces.
4. Landor. Pericles and Aspasia.
5. Coleridge. Table Talk, Notes on Shakspere, The Ancient Mariner,
Christabel, Love, Ode to France, Ode to the Departing Year, Kubla Khan,
Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, Youth and Age, Frost at
Midnight.
6. De Quincey. Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Flight of a Tartar
Tribe, Biographical Sketches.
7. Scott. Waverley, Heart of Midlothian, Bride of Lammermoor, Rob Roy,
Antiquary, Marmion, Lady of the Lake.
8. Keats. Hyperion, Eve of St. Agnes, Lyrical Pieces.
9. Mrs. Oliphant's Literary History of England, 18th-19th Centuries.
{266}
CHAPTER VIII.
FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT TIME.
1832-1886.
The literature of the past fifty years is too close to our eyes to
enable the critic to pronounce a final judgment, or the literary
historian to get a true perspective. Many of the principal writers of
the time are still living, and many others have been dead but a few
years. This concluding chapter, therefore, will be devoted to the
consideration of the few who stand forth, incontestably, as the leaders
of literary thought, and who seem likely, under all future changes of
fashion and taste, to remain representative of their generation. As
regards _form_, the most striking fact in the history of the period
under review is the immense preponderance in its imaginative literature
of prose fiction, of the novel of real life. The novel has become to
the solitary reader of to-day what the stage play was to the audiences
of Elisabeth's reign, or the periodical essay, like the _Tatlers_ and
_Spectators_, to the clubs and breakfast-tables of Queen Anne's. And,
if its criticism of life is less concentrated and brilliant than the
drama gives, it is far {267} more searching and minute. No period has
ever left in its literary records so complete a picture of its whole
society as the period which is just closing. At any other time than
the present, the names of authors like Charlotte Bronte, Charles
Kingsley, and Charles Reade--names which are here merely mentioned in
passing--besides many others which want of space forbids us even to
mention--would be of capital importance. As it is, we must limit our
review to the three acknowledged masters of modern English fiction,
Charles Dickens (1812-1870), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863),
and "George Eliot" (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880).
It is sometimes helpful to reduce a great writer to his lowest term, in
order to see what the prevailing bent of his genius is. This lowest
term may often be found in his early work, before experience of the
world has overlaid his original impulse with foreign accretions.
Dickens was much more than a humorist, Thackeray than a satirist, and
George Eliot than a moralist; but they had their starting-points
respectively in humor, in burlesque, and in strong ethical and
religious feeling. Dickens began with a broadly comic series of
papers, contributed to the _Old Magazine_ and the _Evening Chronicle_,
and reprinted in book form, in 1836, as _Sketches by Boz_. The success
of these suggested to a firm of publishers the preparation of a number
of similar sketches of the misadventures of cockney sportsmen, to
accompany plates by the {268} comic draughtsman, Mr. R. Seymour. This
suggestion resulted in the _Pickwick Papers_, published in monthly
installments, in 1836-1837. The series grew, under Dickens's hand,
into a continuous, though rather loosely strung narrative of the doings
of a set of characters, conceived with such exuberant and novel humor
that it took the public by storm, and raised its author at once to
fame. _Pickwick_ is by no means Dickens's best, but it is his most
characteristic, and most popular, book. At the time that he wrote
these early sketches he was a reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_.
His naturally acute powers of observation had been trained in this
pursuit to the utmost efficiency, and there always continued to be
about his descriptive writing a reportorial and newspaper air. He had
the eye for effect, the sharp fidelity to detail, the instinct for
rapidly seizing upon and exaggerating the salient point, which are
developed by the requirements of modern journalism. Dickens knew
London as no one else has ever known it, and, in particular, he knew
its hideous and grotesque recesses, with the strange developments of
human nature that abide there; slums like Tom-all-Alone's, in _Bleak
House_; the river-side haunts of Rogue Riderhood, in _Our Mutual
Friend_; as well as the old inns, like the "White Hart," and the "dusky
purlieus of the law." As a man, his favorite occupation was walking
the streets, where, as a child, he had picked up the most valuable part
of his education. His tramps about London--often after {269}
nightfall--sometimes extended to fifteen miles in a day. He knew, too,
the shifts of poverty. His father--some traits of whom are preserved
in Mr. Micawber--was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea prison,
where his wife took lodging with him, while Charles, then a boy of ten,
was employed at six shillings a week to cover blacking-pots in Warner's
blacking warehouse. The hardships and loneliness of this part of his
life are told under a thin disguise in Dickens's masterpiece, _David
Copperfield_, the most autobiographical of his novels. From these
young experiences he gained that insight into the lives of the lower
classes, and that sympathy with children and with the poor which shine
out in his pathetic sketches of Little Nell, in _The Old Curiosity
Shop_, of Paul Dombey, of Poor Jo, in _Bleak House_, of "the
Marchioness," and a hundred other figures.
In _Oliver Twist_, contributed, during 1837-1838, to _Bentley's
Miscellany_, a monthly magazine of which Dickens was editor, he
produced his first regular novel. In this story of the criminal
classes the author showed a tragic power which he had not hitherto
exhibited. Thenceforward his career was a series of dazzling
successes. It is impossible here to particularize his numerous novels,
sketches, short tales, and "Christmas Stories"--the latter a fashion
which he inaugurated, and which has produced a whole literature in
itself. In _Nicholas Nickleby_, 1839; _Master Humphrey's Clock_, 1840;
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, 1844; _Dombey and Son_, 1848; {270} _David
Copperfield_, 1850; and _Bleak House_, 1853, there is no falling off in
strength. The last named was, in some respects, and especially in the
skillful construction of the plot, his best novel. In some of his
latest books, as _Great Expectations_, 1861, and _Our Mutual Friend_,
1865, there are signs of a decline. This showed itself in an unnatural
exaggeration of characters and motives, and a painful straining after
humorous effects; faults, indeed, from which Dickens was never wholly
free. There was a histrionic side to him, which came out in his
fondness for private theatricals, in which he exhibited remarkable
talent, and in the dramatic action which he introduced into the
delightful public readings from his works that he gave before vast
audiences all over the United Kingdom, and in his two visits to
America. It is not surprising, either, to learn that upon the stage
his preference was for melodrama and farce. His own serious writing
was always dangerously close to the melodramatic, and his humor to the
farcical. There is much false art, bad taste, and even vulgarity in
Dickens. He was never quite a gentleman, and never succeeded well in
drawing gentlemen or ladies. In the region of low comedy he is easily
the most original, the most inexhaustible, the most wonderful of modern
humorists. Creations such as Mrs. Nickleby, Mr. Micawber, Sam Weller,
Sairy Gamp, take rank with Falstaff and Dogberry; while many others,
like Dick Swiveller, Stiggins, Chadband, Mrs. Jellyby, and Julia Mills
are almost {271} equally good. In the innumerable swarm of minor
characters with which he has enriched our comic literature, there is no
indistinctness. Indeed, the objection that has been made to him is
that his characters are too distinct--that he puts labels on them; that
they are often mere personifications of a single trick of speech or
manner, which becomes tedious and unnatural by repetition; thus,
Grandfather Smallweed is always settling down into his cushion, and
having to be shaken up; Mr. Jellyby is always sitting with his head
against the wall; Peggotty is always bursting her buttons off, etc.,
etc. As Dickens's humorous characters tend perpetually to run into
caricatures and grotesques, so his sentiment, from the same excess,
slops over too frequently into "gush," and into a too deliberate and
protracted attack upon the pity. A favorite humorous device in his
style is a stately and roundabout way of telling a trivial incident as
where, for example, Mr. Roker "muttered certain unpleasant invocations
concerning his own eyes, limbs, and circulating fluids;" or where the
drunken man who is singing comic songs in the Fleet received from Mr.
Smangle "a gentle intimation, through the medium of the water-jug, that
his audience were not musically disposed." This manner was original
with Dickens, though he may have taken a hint of it from the mock
heroic language of _Jonathan Wild_; but as practiced by a thousand
imitators, ever since, it has gradually become a burden.
It would not be the whole truth to say that the {272} difference
between the humor of Thackeray and Dickens is the same as between that
of Shakspere and Ben Jonson. Yet it is true that the "humors" of Ben
Jonson have an analogy with the extremer instances of Dickens's
character sketches in this respect, namely: that they are both studies
of the eccentric, the abnormal, the whimsical, rather than of the
typical and universal--studies of manners, rather than of whole
characters. And it is easily conceivable that, at no distant day, the
oddities of Captain Cuttle, Deportment Turveydrop, Mark Tapley, and
Newman Noggs will seem as far-fetched and impossible as those of
Captain Otter, Fastidious Brisk, and Sir Amorous La-Foole.
When Dickens was looking about for some one to take Seymour's place as
illustrator of Pickwick, Thackeray applied for the job, but without
success. He was then a young man of twenty-five, and still hesitating
between art and literature. He had begun to draw caricatures with his
pencil when a schoolboy at the Charter House, and to scribble them with
his pen when a student at Cambridge, editing _The Snob_, a weekly
under-graduate paper, and parodying the prize poem _Timbuctoo_ of his
contemporary at the university, Alfred Tennyson. Then he went abroad
to study art, passing a season at Weimar, where he met Goethe and
filled the albums of the young Saxon ladies with caricatures; afterward
living, in the Latin Quarter at Paris, a Bohemian existence, studying
art in a desultory way, and seeing men and cities; {273} accumulating
portfolios full of sketches, but laying up stores of material to be
used afterward to greater advantage when he should settle upon his true
medium of expression. By 1837, having lost his fortune of 500 pounds a
year in speculation and gambling, he began to contribute to _Fraser's_,
and thereafter to the _New Monthly_, _Cruikshank's Comic Almanac_,
_Punch_, and other periodicals, clever burlesques, art criticisms by
"Michael Angelo Titmarsh," _Yellow Plush Papers_, and all manner of
skits, satirical character sketches, and humorous tales, like the
_Great Hoggarty Diamond_ and the _Luck of Barry Lyndon_. Some of these
were collected in the _Paris Sketch-Book_, 1840, and the _Irish
Sketch-Book_, 1843; but Thackeray was slow in winning recognition, and
it was not until the publication of his first great novel, _Vanity
Fair_, in monthly parts, during 1846-1848, that he achieved any thing
like the general reputation which Dickens had reached at a bound.
_Vanity Fair_ described itself, on its title-page, as "a novel without
a hero." It was also a novel without a plot--in the sense in which
_Bleak House_ or _Nicholas Nickleby_ had a plot--and in that respect it
set the fashion for the latest school of realistic fiction, being a
transcript of life, without necessary beginning or end. Indeed, one of
the pleasantest things to a reader of Thackeray is the way which his
characters have of re-appearing, as old acquaintances, in his different
books; just as, in real life, people drop out of mind and then turn
{274} up again in other years and places. _Vanity Fair_ is Thackeray's
masterpiece, but it is not the best introduction to his writings.
There are no illusions in it, and, to a young reader fresh from Scott's
romances or Dickens's sympathetic extravagances, it will seem hard and
repellant. But men who, like Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its
bitterness and felt its hollowness, know how to prize it. Thackeray
does not merely expose the cant, the emptiness, the self-seeking, the
false pretenses, flunkeyism, and snobbery--the "mean admiration of mean
things"--in the great world of London society: his keen, unsparing
vision detects the base alloy in the purest natures. There are no
"heroes" in his books, no perfect characters. Even his good women,
such as Helen and Laura Pendennis, are capable of cruel injustice
toward less fortunate sisters, like little Fanny; and Amelia Sedley is
led, by blind feminine instinct, to snub and tyrannize over poor
Dobbin. The shabby miseries of life, the numbing and belittling
influences of failure and poverty upon the most generous natures, are
the tragic themes which Thackeray handles by preference. He has been
called a cynic, but the boyish playfulness of his humor and his kindly
spirit are incompatible with cynicism. Charlotte Bronte said that
Fielding was the vulture and Thackeray the eagle. The comparison would
have been truer if made between Swift and Thackeray. Swift was a
cynic; his pen was driven by hate, but Thackeray's by love, and it was
not {275} in bitterness but in sadness that the latter laid bare the
wickedness of the world. He was himself a thorough man of the world,
and he had that dislike for a display of feeling which characterizes
the modern Englishman. But behind his satiric mask he concealed the
manliest tenderness, and a reverence for every thing in human nature
that is good and true. Thackeray's other great novels are _Pendennis_,
1849; _Henry Esmond_, 1852; and _The Newcomes_, 1855--the last of which
contains his most lovable character, the pathetic and immortal figure
of Colonel Newcome, a creation worthy to stand, in its dignity and its
sublime weakness, by the side of Don Quixote. It was alleged against
Thackeray that he made all his good characters, like Major Dobbin and
Amelia Sedley and Colonel Newcome, intellectually feeble, and his
brilliant characters, like Becky Sharp and Lord Steyne and Blanche
Amory, morally bad. This is not entirely true, but the other
complaint--that his women are inferior to his men--is true in a general
way. Somewhat inferior to his other novels were _The Virginians_,
1858, and _The Adventures of Philip_, 1862. All of these were stories
of contemporary life, except _Henry Esmond_ and its sequel, _The
Virginians_, which, though not precisely historical fictions,
introduced historical figures, such as Washington and the Earl of
Peterborough. Their period of action was the 18th century, and the
dialogue was a cunning imitation of the language of that time.
Thackeray was strongly {276} attracted by the 18th century. His
literary teachers were Addison, Swift, Steele, Gay, Johnson,
Richardson, Goldsmith, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, and his special
master and model was Fielding. He projected a history of the century,
and his studies in this kind took shape in his two charming series of
lectures on _The English Humorists_ and _The Four Georges_. These he
delivered in England and in America, to which country he, like Dickens,
made two several visits.
Thackeray's genius was, perhaps, less astonishing than Dickens's, less
fertile, spontaneous, and inventive; but his art is sounder, and his
delineation of character more truthful. After one has formed a taste
for his books, Dickens's sentiment will seem overdone, and much of his
humor will have the air of buffoonery. Thackeray had the advantage in
another particular: he described the life of the upper classes, and
Dickens of the lower. It may be true that the latter offers richer
material to the novelist, in the play of elementary passions and in
strong, native developments of character. It is true, also, that
Thackeray approached "society" rather to satirize it than to set forth
its agreeableness. Yet, after all, it is "the great world" which he
describes, that world upon which the broadening and refining processes
of a high civilization have done their utmost, and which, consequently,
must possess an intellectual interest superior to any thing in the life
of London thieves, traveling showmen, and coachees. Thackeray is {277}
the equal of Swift as a satirist, of Dickens as a humorist, and of
Scott as a novelist. The one element lacking in him--and which Scott
had in a high degree---is the poetic imagination. "I have no brains
above my eyes," he said; "I describe what I see." Hence there is
wanting in his creations that final charm which Shakspere's have. For
what the eyes see is not all.
The great woman who wrote under the pen-name of George Eliot was a
humorist, too. She had a rich, deep humor of her own, and a wit that
crystallized into sayings which are not epigrams, only because their
wisdom strikes more than their smartness. But humor was not, as with
Thackeray and Dickens, her point of view. A country girl, the daughter
of a land agent and surveyor at Nuneaton, in Warwickshire, her early
letters and journals exhibit a Calvinistic gravity and moral severity.
Later, when her truth to her convictions led her to renounce the
Christian belief, she carried into Positivism the same religious
earnestness, and wrote the one English hymn of the religion of humanity:
"O, let me join the choir invisible," etc.
Her first published work was a translation of Strauss's _Leben Jesu_,
1846. In 1851 she went to London and became one of the editors of the
Radical organ, the _Westminster Review_. Here she formed a
connection--a marriage in all but the name--with George Henry Lewes,
who was, like {278} herself, a freethinker, and who published, among
other things, a _Biographical History of Philosophy_. Lewes had also
written fiction, and it was at his suggestion that his wife undertook
story writing. Her _Scenes of Clerical Life_ were contributed to
_Blackwood's Magazine_ for 1857, and published in book form in the
following year. _Adam Bede_ followed in 1859, the _Mill on the Floss_
in 1860, _Silas Marner_ in 1861, _Romola_ in 1863, _Felix Holt_ in
1866, and _Middlemarch_ in 1872. All of these, except _Romola_, are
tales of provincial, and largely of domestic, life in the midland
counties. _Romola_ is a historical novel, the scene of which is
Florence, in the 15th century, the Florence of Macchiavelli and of
Savonarola. George Eliot's method was very different from that of
Thackeray or Dickens. She did not crowd her canvas with the swarming
life of cities. Her figures are comparatively few, and they are
selected from the middle-class families of rural parishes or small
towns, amid that atmosphere of "fine old leisure," whose disappearance
she lamented. Her drama is a still life drama, intensely and
profoundly inward. Character is the stuff that she works in, and she
deals with it more subtly than Thackeray. With him the tragedy is
produced by the pressure of society and its false standards upon the
individual; with her, by the malign influence of individuals upon one
another. She watches "the stealthy convergence of human fates," the
intersection at various angles of the planes of character, the power
{279} that the lower nature has to thwart, stupefy, or corrupt the
higher, which has become entangled with it in the mesh of destiny. At
the bottom of every one of her stories, there is a problem of the
conscience or the intellect. In this respect she resembles Hawthorne,
though she is not, like him, a romancer, but a realist.
There is a melancholy philosophy in her books, most of which are tales
of failure or frustration. The _Mill on the Floss_ contains a large
element of autobiography, and its heroine, Maggie Tulliver, is,
perhaps, her idealized self. Her aspirations after a fuller and nobler
existence are condemned to struggle against the resistance of a narrow,
provincial environment, and the pressure of untoward fates. She is
tempted to seek an escape even through a desperate throwing off of
moral obligations, and is driven back to her duty only to die by a
sudden stroke of destiny. "Life is a bad business," wrote George
Eliot, in a letter to a friend, "and we must make the most of it."
_Adam Bede_ is, in construction, the most perfect of her novels, and
Silas Marner of her shorter stories. Her analytic habit gained more
and more upon her as she wrote. _Middlemarch_, in some respects her
greatest book, lacks the unity of her earlier novels, and the story
tends to become subordinate to the working out of character stories and
social problems. The philosophic speculations, which she shared with
her husband, were seemingly unfavorable to her artistic growth, a
circumstance which {280} comes apparent in her last novel, _Daniel
Deronda_, 1877. Finally in the _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_,
1879, she abandoned narrative altogether, and recurred to that type of
"character" books which we have met, as a flourishing department of
literature in the 17th century, represented by such works as Earle's
_Microcosmographie_ and Fuller's _Holy and Profane State_. The moral
of George Eliot's writings is not obtruded. She never made the
artistic mistake of writing a novel of purpose, or what the Germans
call a _tendenz-roman_; as Dickens did, for example, when he attacked
imprisonment for debt, in _Pickwick_; the poor laws, in _Oliver Twist_;
the Court of Chancery, in _Bleak House_; and the Circumlocution office,
in _Little Dorrit_.
Next to the novel, the essay has been the most overflowing literary
form used by the writers of this generation--a form, characteristic, it
may be, of an age which "lectures, not creates." It is not the essay
of Bacon, nor yet of Addison, nor of Lamb, but attempts a complete
treatment. Indeed, many longish books, like Carlyle's _Heroes and Hero
Worship_ and Ruskin's _Modern Painters_, are, in spirit, rather
literary essays than formal treatises. The most popular essayist and
historian of his time was Thomas Babington Macaulay, (1800-1859), an
active and versatile man, who won splendid success in many fields of
labor. He was prominent in public life as one of the leading orators
and writers of the Whig party. He sat many times in the House of
Commons, as member for Calne, for Leeds, and {281} for Edinburgh, and
took a distinguished part in the debates on the Reform bill of 1832.
He held office in several Whig governments, and during his four years'
service in British India, as member of the Supreme Council of Calcutta,
he did valuable work in promoting education in that province, and in
codifying the Indian penal law. After his return to England, and
especially after the publication of his _History of England from The
Accession of James II._, honors and appointments of all kinds were
showered upon him. In 1857 he was raised to the peerage as Baron
Macaulay of Rothley.
Macaulay's equipment, as a writer on historical and biographical
subjects, was, in some points, unique. His reading was prodigious, and
his memory so tenacious, that it was said, with but little
exaggeration, that he never forgot any thing that he had read. He
could repeat the whole of _Paradise Lost_ by heart, and thought it
probable that he could rewrite _Sir Charles Grandison_ from memory. In
his books, in his speeches in the House of Commons, and in private
conversation--for he was an eager and fluent talker, running on often
for hours at a stretch--he was never at a loss to fortify and
illustrate his positions by citation after citation of dates, names,
facts of all kinds, and passages quoted _verbatim_ from his
multifarious reading. The first of Macaulay's writings to attract
general notice was his article on _Milton_, printed in the August
number of the _Edinburgh Review_, for 1825. The editor, Lord Jeffrey,
in {282} acknowledging the receipt of the MS., wrote to his new
contributor, "The more I think, the less I can conceive where you
picked up that style." That celebrated style--about which so much has
since been written--was an index to the mental character of its owner.
Macaulay was of a confident, sanguine, impetuous nature. He had great
common sense, and he saw what he saw quickly and clearly, but he did
not see very far below the surface. He wrote with the conviction of an
advocate, and the easy omniscience of a man whose learning is really
nothing more than "general information," raised to a very high power,
rather than with the subtle penetration of an original or truly
philosophic intellect, like Coleridge's or De Quincey's. He always had
at hand explanations of events or of characters, which were admirably
easy and simple--too simple, indeed, for the complicated phenomena
which they professed to explain. His style was clear, animated, showy,
and even its faults were of an exciting kind. It was his habit to give
piquancy to his writing by putting things concretely. Thus, instead of
saying, in general terms--as Hume or Gibbon might have done--that the
Normans and Saxons began to mingle about 1200, he says: "The great
grandsons of those who had fought under William and the great grandsons
of those who had fought under Harold began to draw near to each other."
Macaulay was a great scene painter, who neglected delicate truths of
detail for exaggerated distemper effects. He used the {283} rhetorical
machinery of climax and hyperbole for all that it was worth, and he
"made points"--as in his essay on _Bacon_--by creating antithesis. In
his _History of England_, he inaugurated the picturesque method of
historical writing. The book was as fascinating as any novel.
Macaulay, like Scott, had the historic imagination, though his method
of turning history into romance was very different from Scott's. Among
his essays, the best are those which, like the ones on _Lord Clive_,
_Warren Hastings_, and _Frederick the Great_, deal with historical
subjects; or those which deal with literary subjects under their public
historic relations, such as the essays on _Addison_, _Bunyan_, and _The
Comic Dramatists of the Restoration_. "I have never written a page of
criticism on poetry, or the fine arts," wrote Macaulay, "which I would
not burn if I had the power." Nevertheless his own _Lays of Ancient
Rome_, 1842, are good, stirring verse of the emphatic and declamatory
kind, though their quality may be rather rhetorical than poetic.
Our critical time has not forborne to criticize itself, and perhaps the
writer who impressed himself most strongly upon his generation was the
one who railed most desperately against the "spirit of the age."
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was occupied between 1822 and 1830 chiefly
in imparting to the British public a knowledge of German literature.
He published, among other things, a _Life of Schiller_, a translation
of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, and two volumes of translations from the
German {284} romancers--Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Fouque, and
contributed to the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign Review_, articles on
Goethe, Werner, Novalis, Richter, German playwrights, the _Nibelungen
Lied_, etc. His own diction became more and more tinctured with
Germanisms. There was something Gothic in his taste, which was
attracted by the lawless, the grotesque, and the whimsical in the
writings of Jean Paul Richter. His favorite among English humorists
was Sterne, who has a share of these same qualities. He spoke
disparagingly of "the sensuous literature of the Greeks," and preferred
the Norse to the Hellenic mythology. Even in his admirable critical
essays on Burns, on Richter, on Scott, Diderot, and Voltaire,
which are free from his later mannerism--written in English, and
not in Carlylese--his sense of spirit is always more lively than
his sense of form. He finally became so impatient of art as to
maintain--half-seriously--the paradox that Shakspere would have
done better to write in prose. In three of these early essays--on
the _Signs of the Times_, 1829; on _History_, 1830; and on
_Characteristics_, 1831--are to be found the germs of all his later
writings. The first of these was an arraignment of the mechanical
spirit of the age. In every province of thought he discovered too
great a reliance upon systems, institutions, machinery, instead of upon
men. Thus, in religion, we have Bible Societies, "machines for
converting the heathen." "In defect of Raphaels and Angelos and
Mozarts, we have royal {285} academies of painting, sculpture, music."
In like manner, he complains, government is a machine. "Its duties and
faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable."
Against the "police theory," as distinguished from the "paternal"
theory of government, Carlyle protested with ever-shriller iteration.
In _Chartism_, 1839; _Past and Present_, 1843; and _Latter-day
Pamphlets_, 1850, he denounced this _laissez faire_ idea. The business
of government, he repeated, is to govern; but this view makes it its
business to refrain from governing. He fought most fiercely against
the conclusions of political economy, "the dismal science," which, he
said, affirmed that men were guided exclusively by their stomachs. He
protested, too, against the Utilitarians, followers of Bentham and
Mill, with their "greatest happiness principle," which reduced virtue
to a profit-and-loss account. Carlyle took issue with modern
liberalism; he ridiculed the self-gratulation of the time, all the talk
about progress of the species, unexampled prosperity, etc. But he was
reactionary without being conservative. He had studied the French
Revolution, and he saw the fateful, irresistible approach of democracy.
He had no faith in government "by counting noses," and he hated talking
parliaments; but neither did he put trust in an aristocracy that spent
its time in "preserving the game." What he wanted was a great
individual ruler, a real king or hero; and this doctrine he set forth
afterward most fully in _Hero Worship_, 1841, and {286} illustrated in
his lives of representative heroes, such as his _Cromwell's Letters and
Speeches_, 1845, and his great _History of Frederick the Great_,
1858-1865. Cromwell and Frederick were well enough; but as Carlyle
grew older, his admiration for mere force grew, and his latest hero was
none other than that infamous Dr. Francia, the South American dictator,
whose career of bloody and crafty crime horrified the civilized world.
The essay on _History_ was a protest against the scientific view of
history which attempts to explain away and account for the wonderful.
"Wonder," he wrote in _Sartor Resartus_, "is the basis of all worship."
He defined history as "the essence of innumerable biographies." "Mr.
Carlyle," said the Italian patriot, Mazzini, "comprehends only the
individual. The nationality of Italy is, in his eyes, the glory of
having produced Dante and Christopher Columbus." This trait comes out
in his greatest book, _The French Revolution_, 1837, which is a mighty
tragedy, enacted by a few leading characters, Mirabeau, Danton,
Napoleon. He loved to emphasize the superiority of history over
fiction as dramatic material. The third of the three essays mentioned
was a Jeremiad on the morbid self-consciousness of the age, which shows
itself in religion and philosophy, as skepticism and introspective
metaphysics; and in literature, as sentimentalism, and "view-hunting."
But Carlyle's epoch-making book was _Sartor Resartus_ (The Tailor
Retailored), published in _Fraser's {287} Magazine_ for 1833-1834, and
first reprinted in book form in America. This was a satire upon shams,
conventions, the disguises which overlie the most spiritual realities
of the soul. It purported to be the life and "clothes-philosophy" of a
certain Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, Professor der Allerlei Wissenschaft--of
things in general--in the University of Weissnichtwo. "Society," said
Carlyle, "is founded upon cloth," following the suggestions of Lear's
speech to the naked bedlam beggar: "Thou art the thing itself:
unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as
thou art;" and borrowing also, perhaps, an ironical hint from a
paragraph in Swift's _Tale of a Tub_: "A sect was established who held
the universe to be a large suit of clothes. . . . If certain ermines
or furs be placed in a certain position, we style them a judge; and so
an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a bishop." In
_Sartor Resartus_ Carlyle let himself go. It was willful, uncouth,
amorphous, titanic. There was something monstrous in the combination,
the hot heart of the Scot married to the transcendental dream of
Germany. It was not English, said the reviewers; it was not sense; it
was disfigured by obscurity and "mysticism." Nevertheless even the
thin-witted and the dry-witted had to acknowledge the powerful beauty
of many chapters and passages, rich with humor, eloquence, poetry,
deep-hearted tenderness, or passionate scorn.
Carlyle was a voracious reader, and the plunder {288} of whole
literatures is strewn over his pages. He flung about the resources of
the language with a giant's strength, and made new words at every turn.
The concreteness and the swarming fertility of his mind are evidenced
by his enormous vocabulary, computed greatly to exceed Shakspere's, or
any other single writer's in the English tongue. His style lacks the
crowning grace of simplicity and repose. It astonishes, but it also
fatigues.
Carlyle's influence has consisted more in his attitude than in any
special truth which he has preached. It has been the influence of a
moralist, of a practical, rather than a speculative, philosopher. "The
end of man," he wrote, "is an action, not a thought." He has not been
able to persuade the time that it is going wrong, but his criticisms
have been wholesomely corrective of its self-conceit. In a democratic
age he has insisted upon the undemocratic virtues of obedience,
silence, and reverence. _Ehrfurcht_--reverence--the text of his
address to the students of Edinburgh University, in 1866, is the last
word of his philosophy.
In 1830 Alfred Tennyson (1809- ----), a young graduate of Cambridge,
published a thin duodecimo of 154 pages, entitled _Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical_. The pieces in this little volume, like the _Sleeping
Beauty_, _Ode to Memory_, and _Recollections of the Arabian Nights_,
were full of color, fragrance, melody; but they had a dream-like
character, and were without definite theme, resembling an artist's
studies, or {289} exercises in music--a few touches of the brush, a few
sweet chords, but no aria. A number of them--_Claribel_, _Lilian_,
_Adeline_, _Isabel_, _Mariana_, _Madeline_--were sketches of women; not
character portraits, like Browning's _Men and Women_, but impressions
of temperament, of delicately, differentiated types of feminine beauty.
In _Mariana_, expanded from a hint of the forsaken maid, in Shakspere's
_Measure for Measure_, "Mariana at the moated grange," the poet showed
an art then peculiar, but since grown familiar, of heightening the
central feeling by landscape accessories. The level waste, the
stagnant sluices, the neglected garden, the wind in the single poplar,
re-enforce, by their monotonous sympathy, the loneliness, the hopeless
waiting and weariness of life in the one human figure of the poem. In
_Mariana_, the _Ode to Memory_, and the _Dying Swan_, it was the fens
of Cambridge and of his native Lincolnshire that furnished Tennyson's
scenery.
"Stretched wide and wild, the waste enormous marsh,
Where from the frequent bridge,
Like emblems of infinity,
The trenched waters run from sky to sky."
A second collection, published in 1833, exhibited a greater scope and
variety, but was still in his earlier manner. The studies of feminine
types were continued in _Margaret_, _Fatima_, _Eleanore_, _Mariana in
the South_, and _A Dream of Fair Women_, suggested by Chaucer's _Legend
of Good {290} Women_. In the _Lady of Shalott_, the poet first touched
the Arthurian legends. The subject is the same as that of _Elaine_, in
the _Idylls of the King_, but the treatment is shadowy, and even
allegorical. In _Oenone_ and the _Lotus Eaters_, he handled Homeric
subjects, but in a romantic fashion, which contrasts markedly with the
style of his later pieces, _Ulysses_ and _Tithonus_. These last have
the true classic severity, and are among the noblest specimens of
weighty and sonorous blank verse in modern poetry. In general,
Tennyson's art is unclassical. It is rich, ornate, composite, not
statuesque, so much as picturesque. He is a great painter, and the
critics complain that in passages calling for movement and action--a
battle, a tournament, or the like--his figures stand still as in a
tableau; and they contrast such passages unfavorably with scenes of the
same kind in Scott, and with Browning's spirited ballad, _How we
brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix_. In the _Palace of Art_,
these elaborate pictorial effects were combined with allegory; in the
_Lotus Eaters_, with that expressive treatment of landscape, noted in
_Mariana_; the lotus land, "in which it seemed always afternoon,"
reflecting and promoting the enchanted indolence of the heroes. Two of
the pieces in this 1833 volume, the _May Queen_ and the _Miller's
Daughter_, were Tennyson's first poems of the affections, and as
ballads of simple, rustic life, they anticipated his more perfect idyls
in blank verse, such as _Dora_, the _Brook_, _Edwin Morris_, and {291}
the _Gardener's Daughter_. The songs in the _Miller's Daughter_ had a
more spontaneous, lyrical movement than any thing that he had yet
published, and foretokened the lovely songs which interlude the
divisions of the _Princess_, the famous _Bugle Song_, the no-less
famous _Cradle Song_, and the rest. In 1833 Tennyson's friend, Arthur
Hallam, died, and the effect of this great sorrow upon the poet was to
deepen and strengthen the character of his genius. It turned his mind
in upon itself, and set it brooding over questions which his poetry had
so far left untouched; the meaning of life and death, the uses of
adversity, the future of the race, the immortality of the soul, and the
dealings of God with mankind.
"Thou madest Death; and, lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made."
His elegy on Hallam, _In Memoriam_, was not published till 1850. He
kept it by him all those years, adding section after section, gathering
up into it whatever reflections crystallized about its central theme.
It is his most intellectual and most individual work, a great song of
sorrow and consolation. In 1842 he published a third collection of
poems, among which were _Locksley Hall_, displaying a new strength of
passion; _Ulysses_, suggested by a passage in Dante: pieces of a
speculative cast, like the _Two Voices_ and the _Vision of Sin_; the
song _Break, Break, Break_, which preluded _In Memoriam_; and, lastly,
some additional {292} gropings toward the subject of the Arthurian
romance, such as _Sir Galahad_, _Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere_ and
_Morte d' Arthur_. The last was in blank verse, and, as afterward
incorporated in the _Passing of Arthur_, forms one of the best passages
in the _Idylls of the King_. The _Princess, a Medley_, published in
1849, represents the eclectic character of Tennyson's art; a medieval
tale with an admixture of modern sentiment, and with the very modern
problem of woman's sphere for its theme. The first four _Idylls of the
King_, 1859, with those since added, constitute, when taken together,
an epic poem on the old story of King Arthur. Tennyson went to
Malory's _Morte d' Arthur_ for his material, but the outline of the
first idyl, _Enid_, was taken from Lady Charlotte Guest's translation
of the Welsh _Mabinogion_. In the idyl of _Guinevere_ Tennyson's
genius reached its high-water mark. The interview between Arthur and
his fallen queen is marked by a moral sublimity and a tragic intensity
which move the soul as nobly as any scene in modern literature. Here,
at least, the art is pure and not "decorated;" the effect is produced
by the simplest means, and all is just, natural, and grand. _Maud_--a
love novel in verse--published in 1855, and considerably enlarged in
1856, had great sweetness and beauty, particularly in its lyrical
portions, but it was uneven in execution, imperfect in design, and
marred by lapses into mawkishness and excesses in language. Since 1860
Tennyson has added little of permanent {293} value to his work. His
dramatic experiments, like _Queen Mary_, are not, on the whole,
successful, though it would be unjust to deny dramatic power to the
poet who has written, upon one hand, _Guinevere_ and the _Passing of
Arthur_, and upon the other the homely, dialectic monologue of the
_Northern Farmer_.
When we tire of Tennyson's smooth perfection, of an art that is over
exquisite, and a beauty that is well-nigh too beautiful, and crave a
rougher touch, and a meaning that will not yield itself too readily, we
turn to the thorny pages of his great contemporary, Robert Browning
(1812- ----). Dr. Holmes says that Tennyson is white meat and Browning
is dark meat. A masculine taste, it is inferred, is shown in a
preference for the gamier flavor. Browning makes us think; his poems
are puzzles, and furnish business for "Browning Societies." There are
no Tennyson societies, because Tennyson is his own interpreter.
Intellect in a poet may display itself quite as properly in the
construction of his poem as in its content; we value a building for its
architecture, and not entirely for the amount of timber in it.
Browning's thought never wears so thin as Tennyson's sometimes does in
his latest verse, where the trick of his style goes on of itself with
nothing behind it. Tennyson, at his worst, is weak. Browning, when
not at his best, is hoarse. Hoarseness, in itself, is no sign of
strength. In Browning, however, the failure is in art, not in thought.
{294}
He chooses his subjects from abnormal character types, such as are
presented, for example, in _Caliban upon Setebos_, the _Grammarian's
Funeral_, _My Last Duchess_, and _Mr. Sludge, the Medium_. These are
all psychological studies, in which the poet gets into the inner
consciousness of a monster, a pedant, a criminal, and a quack, and
gives their point of view. They are dramatic soliloquies; but the
poet's self-identification with each of his creations, in turn, remains
incomplete. His curious, analytic observation, his way of looking at
the soul from outside, gives a doubleness to the monologues in his
_Dramatic Lyrics_, 1845, _Men and Women_, 1855, _Dramatis Personae_,
1864, and other collections of the kind. The words are the words of
Caliban or Mr. Sludge; but the voice is the voice of Robert Browning.
His first complete poem, _Paracelsus_, 1835, aimed to give the true
inwardness of the career of the famous 16th century doctor, whose name
became a synonym with charlatan. His second, _Sordello_, 1840, traced
the struggles of an Italian poet who lived before Dante, and could not
reconcile his life with his art. _Paracelsus_ was hard, but _Sordello_
was incomprehensible. Mr. Browning has denied that he is ever
perversely crabbed or obscure. Every great artist must be allowed to
say things in his own way, and obscurity has its artistic uses, as the
Gothic builders knew. But there are two kinds of obscurity in
literature. One is inseparable from the subtlety and difficulty of the
thought or the compression {295} and pregnant indirectness of the
phrase. Instances of this occur in the clear deeps of Dante,
Shakspere, and Goethe. The other comes from a vice of style, a
willfully enigmatic and unnatural way of expressing thought. Both
kinds of obscurity exist in Browning. He is a deep and subtle thinker;
but he is also a very eccentric writer, abrupt, harsh, disjointed. It
has been well said that the reader of Browning learns a new dialect.
But one need not grudge the labor that is rewarded with an intellectual
pleasure so peculiar and so stimulating. The odd, grotesque impression
made by his poetry arises, in part, from his desire to use the artistic
values of ugliness, as well as of obscurity; to avoid the shallow
prettiness that comes from blinking the disagreeable truth: not to
leave the saltness out of the sea. Whenever he emerges into clearness,
as he does in hundreds of places, he is a poet of great qualities.
There are a fire and a swing in his _Cavalier Tunes_, and in pieces
like the _Glove and the Lost Leader_; and humor in such ballads as the
_Pied Piper of Hamelin_ and the _Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister_,
which appeal to the most conservative reader. He seldom deals directly
in the pathetic, but now and then, as in _Evelyn Hope_, the _Last Ride
Together_, or the _Incident of the French Camp_, a tenderness comes
over the strong verse
"as sheathes
A film the mother eagle's eye,
When her bruised eaglet breathes."
{296} Perhaps the most astonishing example of Browning's mental vigor
is the huge composition, entitled _The Ring and the Book_, 1868, a
narrative poem in twenty-one thousand lines, in which the same story is
repeated eleven times in eleven different ways. It is the story of a
criminal trial which occurred at Rome about 1700, the trial of one
Count Guido for the murder of his young wife. First the poet tells the
tale himself; then he tells what one-half of the world says and what
the other; then he gives the deposition of the dying girl, the
testimony of witnesses, the speech made by the count in his own
defense, the arguments of counsel, etc., and, finally, the judgment of
the pope. So wonderful are Browning's resources in casuistry, and so
cunningly does he ravel the intricate motives at play in this tragedy
and lay bare the secrets of the heart, that the interest increases at
each repetition of the tale. He studied the Middle Age carefully, not
for its picturesque externals, its feudalisms, chivalries, and the
like; but because he found it a rich quarry of spiritual monstrosities,
strange outcroppings of fanaticism, superstition, and moral and mental
distortion of all shapes. It furnished him especially with a great
variety of ecclesiastical types, such as are painted in _Fra Lippo
Lippi_, _Bishop Blougram's Apology_, and _The Bishop Orders his Tomb in
St. Praxed's Church_.
Browning's dramatic instinct has always attracted him to the stage.
His tragedy, _Stratford_ (1837), {297} was written for Macready, and
put on at Covent Garden Theater, but without pronounced success. He
has written many fine dramatic poems, like _Pippa Passes_, _Colombo's
Birthday_, and _In a Balcony_; and at least two good acting plays,
_Luria_ and _A Blot in the Scutcheon_. The last named has recently
been given to the American public, with Lawrence Barrett's careful and
intelligent presentation of the leading role. The motive of the
tragedy is somewhat strained and fantastic, but it is, notwithstanding,
very effective on the stage. It gives one an unwonted thrill to listen
to a play, by a living English writer, which is really literature. One
gets a faint idea of what it must have been to assist at the first
night of _Hamlet_.
1. Dickens. Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield,
Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities.
2. Thackeray. Vanity Fair, Pendennis, Henry Esmond, The Newcomes, The
Four Georges.
3. George Eliot. Scenes of Clerical Life, Mill on the Floss, Silas
Marner, Romola, Adam Bede, Middlemarch.
4. Macaulay. Essays, Lays of Ancient Rome.
5. Carlyle. Sartor Resartus, French Revolution, Essays on History,
Signs of the Times, Characteristics, Burns, Scott, Voltaire, and Goethe.
6. The Works of Alfred Tennyson (6 vols.). London: Strahan & Co., 1872.
{298}
7. Selections from the Poetical Works of Robert Browning. (2 vols.)
London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1880.
8. E. C. Stedman's Victorian Poets.
9. Henry Morley's English Literature in the Reign of Victoria.
(Tauchnitz Series.)
{299}
CHAPTER IX.
THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN GREAT BRITAIN.
BY JOHN FLETCHER HURST.
Miracle plays, rude dramatic representations of the chief events in
Scripture history, were used for popular instruction before the invention
of printing. In England they began as early as the twelfth century.
Moral plays, or moralities, were of the same origin, though dating from
the fifteenth century. These were somewhat more refined than the miracle
plays, and usually set forth the excellence of the virtues, such as
truth, mercy, and the like. Both miracle and moral plays were under the
conduct of the clergy.
John Bale (1495-1563) was Bishop of Ossory, and wrote much for popular
reform. He was the author of nineteen miracle plays. Lord Edward
Herbert, of Cherbury (1581-1648), wrote a deistical work, _De Religione
Gentilium_, the first of that school of writers which later appeared in
Bolingbroke. John Spotiswood (1565-1639), Archbishop of St. Andrews and
afterward Chancellor of Scotland, wrote a voluminous _History of the
Church of Scotland_. George Sandys (1577-1643), {300} distinguished also
as one of the earliest literary characters in America, wrote metrical
versions of several of the poetical books of the Bible, and also a
tragedy called _Christ's Passion_.
John Knox (1505-1572), the great Scotch reformer and polemic, while more
prominent as the preacher and spokesman of the Scotch Reformation, wrote
_First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regimen of Women_
(1558), and the _Historie of the Reformation of Religion within the
Realme of Scotland_, published after his death. John Jewel (1522-1571)
wrote in Latin his _Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae_. William Whittingham
(1524-1589), who succeeded Knox as pastor of the English Church at
Geneva, aided in making the Genevan Version of the Bible and also
co-operated in the Sternhold and Hopkins translation of the Psalms.
John Fox (1517-1587) was the author of the _Book of Martyrs_, whose full
title was _Acts and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Days, Touching
Matters of the Church_. An abridgment of the work has had a very wide
circulation. John Aylmer (1521-1594) replied to Knox's _First Blast of
the Trumpet_ in a work called _An Harbor for Faithful and True Subjects_.
Nicholas Sanders (1527-1580), a Roman Catholic professor of Oxford, wrote
_The Rock of the Church_, a defense of the primacy of Peter and the
Bishops of Rome. Robert Parsons (1546-1610), a Jesuit, wrote several
works in advocacy of Roman Catholicism and some political tracts.
{301}
John Rainolds (1549-1607), a learned Hebraist of Oxford, wrote many
ecclesiastical works in Latin and English. He was a chief promoter of
King James's Version of the Bible. Miles Smith, (died 1624), Thomas
Bilson (1536-1616), John Boys (1560-1643), and George Abbot (1562-1633),
Archbishop of Canterbury, were all co-workers on the King James
translation of the Scriptures.
Next in importance to the English Bible in its effect upon literature
stands the English Prayer Book, which is the rich mosaic of many minds.
It came through _The Prymer_ of the fourteenth century, and contained the
more fundamental and familiar portions of the _Book of Common Prayer_,
such as the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, the Litany, and the
Apostles' Creed. This compilation differed in form and somewhat in
content in the different dioceses in England, and was partly in Latin and
partly in English. In 1542 an attempt was made to produce a common form
for all England and to have it entirely in English. The Committee of
Convocation, who had the work in charge, were prevented from making it
complete through the refusal of Henry VIII to continue the approval which
he had given to the appointment of the committee. However, under Edward
VI a commission, headed by Archbishop Cranmer, carried their work
through, and it was accepted and its use made compulsory by Parliament.
It was published in 1549 as the _First Prayer Book of Edward VI_. Three
years later the _Second Prayer {302} Book of Edward VI_ was issued, it
being a revision of the First, also under the shaping hand of Cranmer.
The _Prayer Book_ received its final revision and substantially its
present form in the reign of Elizabeth, in 1559, although in 1662 there
was added to the Morning and Evening Prayer a Collection of Prayers and
Thanksgivings upon Several Occasions. Gathering thus through three
centuries the choice treasures of confession and devotion of the strong
and reverent English nation, it has been a large element in the literary
training, not only of communicants in the Anglican, the Episcopal, and
the Methodist Churches, but, in a measure, also of those who have
received their religious instruction and have worshiped in other branches
of the Protestant Church.
The work of the Assembly of Divines at Westminster (1643-1649),
particularly the _Confession of Faith_, and the _Shorter Catechism_,
became, as specimens of strong and pure English, potent factors in the
intellectual and literary discipline of the Presbyterians in all parts of
the world.
The modern psalms and hymns, or the simplified and popularized forms of
the earlier and mediaeval worship, have had vastly to do with the daily
thought and education of the people into whose life they have brought not
only increase of lofty devotion but also a positive and stimulative
culture.
Foremost of these collections was that made by Thomas Sternhold, John
Hopkins, and others, and {303} known as the _Psalter of Sternhold and
Hopkins_, published in 1562. Francis Rouse made a version in 1645,
which, after revision, was adopted in 1649, and largely used by the
Scotch Church. A new version was that by Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady,
which appeared in 1696, and has since been called the _Psalter of Tate
and Brady_. The first English hymn book adapted for public worship was
that of Isaac Watts, appearing about 1709, although several minor
collections and individual productions had preceded Watts, among which
should be mentioned those of Joseph Stennett, John Mason, and the fine
hymns of Bishop Ken and Joseph Addison.
A little later the prolific and spiritual Charles Wesley, aided by the
somewhat stricter taste of his more celebrated brother, John, began
(1739) his wonderful series of published hymns, which, together with
those of Watts, have since formed the larger portion of the Protestant
hymnody of the world. Others of the eighteenth century who have made
contributions to the sacred lyrics of the Church are John Byrom
(1691-1763), Philip Doddridge (1702-1751), Joseph Hart (1712-1768), Anne
Steele (1716-1778), Benjamin Beddome (1717-1795), John Cennick
(1717-1755), Thomas Olivers (1725-1799), Joseph Grigg (1728-1768),
Augustus M. Toplady (1740-1778), and Edward Perronet (died 1792).
Approaching our own time, the ranks of our hymn writers include James
Montgomery {304} (1771-1854), whose _Christian Psalmist_ was published in
1825, Thomas Kelly, of Dublin (1769-1855); Harriet Auber (1773-1832),
Reginald Heber (1783-1826), Sir Robert Grant (1785-1838), Josiah Conder
(1789-1855), Charlotte Elliott (1789-1871), Sir John Bowring (1792-1872),
Henry Francis Lyte (1793-1847), John Keble (1792-1866), whose _Christian
Year_ came out in 1827; John H. Newman (1801-1890), Sarah Flower Adams
(1805-1849), and Horatius Bonar (1808-1869).
Richard Mant (1776-1848), Henry Alford (1810-1871), F. W. Faber
(1815-1863), John Mason Neale (1818-1866), Miss Catherine Winkworth (born
1829), and some others, have given many beautiful and stirring
translations from the Latin and German hymns of the ancient and mediaeval
periods.
Theological writers of the middle of the seventeenth century are
numerous. Chief of those belonging to the Anglican Church may be named
Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich (1574-1656), whose _Episcopacy by Divine
Right_ was replied to in _Smectymnus_, the joint production of five
dissenting divines: Stephen Marshal, Edward Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew
Newcomer, and William Spurston; James Ussher (1580-1656), a man of vast
literary learning and most known by his _Sacred Chronology_, published
after his death; Thomas Fuller and Jeremy Taylor, mentioned in a previous
chapter; John Cosin (1594-1672), who wrote chiefly devotional treatises;
William Chillingworth {305} (1602-1664), whose _Religion of Protestants_
has had a wide circulation; John Pearson (1612-1686), whose _Exposition
of the Creed_ became a standard; Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), whose
_Intellectual System of the Universe_ dealt a stunning blow to the
atheism of his day, and Isaac Barrow (1630-1677), the learned
vice-chancellor of Cambridge, wit, mathematician, and theologian all in
one, who left a rich legacy in his _Sermons_.
Of the Non-conforming authors deserving notice Richard Baxter (1615-1691)
is the most voluminous, if not also the most luminous. Controversy
engaged his pen almost constantly, but his most permanent works were his
_Call to the Unconverted_ and _The Saints' Everlasting Rest_. John Owen
(1616-1683) was a leading Puritan writer, and under Cromwell was
vice-chancellor of Oxford University. His _Commentary on the Epistle to
the Hebrews_ and his book on _The Holy Spirit_ are still in use and
highly prized. His pen was strong rather than elegant. John Bunyan's
immortal allegory throws a halo on universal literature. John Howe
(1630-1705), the chief author among the Puritans, wrote many strong
works, among which of special note are _The Living Temple_ and _The
Office and Work of the Holy Spirit_. He was Cromwell's chaplain.
The spiritual writings of Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661), the Scotch
divine; the _Annotations on the Psalms_ by Henry Ainsworth (died 1662),
an Independent, who was an exile in Holland for {306} conscience' sake;
the expository writings of Thomas Manton (1620-1677); the _Synopsis_ of
Matthew Poole (1624-1679), later abridged into his celebrated
_Annotations upon the Bible_; the sermons of Stephen Charnock
(1628-1680), particularly the one on "The Divine Attributes;" and _An
Alarm to Unconverted Sinners_, by Joseph Alleine (1633-1688), which has
had an immense circulation, form a galaxy in the theological firmament of
the time of Milton.
A later group of theological writers in the latter part of the
seventeenth century contains the commanding figures of Symon Patrick
(1626-1707), bishop and author of a _Commentary on the Old Testament_;
John Flavel (1627-1691) and his works on practical piety; John Tillotson
(1630-1694), the Anglican archbishop, whose eloquent sermons are still
held in high repute; Robert South (1633-1716), the great pulpit orator,
whose discourses are an ornament to the English tongue; Edward
Stillingfleet (1635-1699), from whose prolific pen came several valuable
treatises, one of which was _The Antiquities of the British Churches_;
and William Beveridge (1637-1708), whose _Private Thoughts upon Religion_
is still in much esteem. To these we may add Thomas Ken (1637-1710), the
good bishop now best known as the author of _Praise God, from Whom all
Blessings Flow_; Benjamin Keach (1640-1704), a Baptist preacher of much
note and author of _Gospel Mysteries Opened_, which, like his other
writings, is marred by an {307} excessive use of figures; Gilbert Burnet
(1643-1709), the writer and bishop, who mingled freely in the political
affairs of the day and wrote much on a variety of subjects, one being a
_History of the Reformation of the Church of England_; William Wall
(1646-1728), the prominent defender of infant baptism; Humphrey Prideaux
(1648-1724), who wrote the _Connection of the Old and New Testaments_;
and Matthew Henry (1662-1714), still valued for his quaint and suggestive
_Commentary on the Scriptures_.
Here, too, belong George Fox (1624-1690) and Robert Barclay (1648-1690),
the heroic founder and the learned champion of the Society of Friends,
the former's _Journal_ and the latter's _Apology for the True Christian
Divinity_ being worthy of special note. William Penn (1644-1718), more
eminent as the chief colonizer of Pennsylvania, also wrote many powerful
works in advocacy of Quaker teachings; and William Sewel's (1650-1726)
_History of the Quakers_ is a notable contribution to the literature of
that much-misunderstood and persecuted people.
Among those who graced the first half of the eighteenth century we find
the Irish man of letters, Charles Leslie (1650-1722), who gave among
others a celebrated treatise on _A Short and Easy Method with the
Deists_; Francis Atterbury (1662-1732), Bishop of Rochester, whose
_Sermons_ still survive; William Wollaston (1659-1724), known as the
author of _The Religion of Nature_, a plea for truth; Samuel Clarke
(1675-1729), the {308} philosophical writer of _The Demonstration of the
Being and Attributes of God_; Matthew Tindal (1657-1733), the leading
deist of his day, whose chief work was _Christianity as Old as Creation_;
Robert Wodrow (1679-1734), a Scotch preacher who wrote a _History of the
Sufferings of the Church of Scotland_; and Thomas Wilson (1663-1755),
Bishop of Sodor and Man for fifty-seven years and the author of many
useful works on the Scriptures and Christianity. Bishop Joseph Butler
(1692-1752) appeared as the champion of Christianity and successfully
answered the deistical tendency of Tindal and others by his _Analogy of
Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of
Nature_, which, though obscure in style, is still in high repute for its
massive thought and mighty logic.
Thomas Stackhouse (1680-1752) and his _History of the Bible_; John
Bampton (1689-1751), whose estate still speaks at Oxford in defense of
Christianity in the annual lectures on Divinity; Daniel Waterland
(1683-1740), in his defense of the divinity of Christ; and Joseph Bingham
(1668-1723), in his learned treatise on _The Antiquities of the Christian
Church_, are also in the front rank of this period. Daniel Neal
(1678-1743), in his _History of the Puritans_; John Leland (1691-1766),
the Dublin preacher, in his _View of the Deistical Writers_; and Philip
Doddridge (1702-1751), in his _Family Expositor_ and his briefer and more
famous _Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul_, furnished valuable
contributions to theological literature.
{309}
The latter half of the eighteenth century was prolific of letters.
Noteworthy among those who wrote on religious themes are the following:
Nathaniel Lardner (1684-1768), who wrote _The Credibility of the Gospel
History_; William Law (1687-1761), whose _Serious Call to a Holy Life_
and _Christian Perfection_ are still powerful works; Richard Challoner
(1691-1781), a Roman Catholic author of many practical and devotional
works and of a _Version of the Bible_, much prized in his own Church;
Alban Butler (1700-1773), who compiled _The Lives of the Saints_; William
Warburton (1698-1779), in his _Divine Legation of Moses_; Alexander
Cruden (1701-1770), the Scotch author of the famous _Concordance to the
Holy Scriptures_; and Lord George Lyttleton (1708-1773), the author of
_Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul_.
In the same category belong: Robert Lowth (1710-1787), whose book on
_Hebrew Poetry_ is still consulted; James Hervey (1713-1758), whose
_Meditations_ became very popular; Hugh Blair (1718-1800), the Scotchman
whose _Sermons_ for many years rivaled his _Lectures on Rhetoric_ in
popularity; Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), illustrious in the annals of
chemical discovery, who wrote _Institutes of Natural and Revealed
Religion_, and is one of the most distinguished Socinian writers; and
William Paley (1743-1805), whose _Natural Theology_ and _Horae Paulinae_
are still standard works.
During this period also came the great impulse {310} to the literature of
the common people through the tireless pen of John Wesley (1703-1791),
whose _Sermons and Notes on the New Testament_ have had a powerful
influence wherever the Wesleyan revival has spread. James McKnight
(1721-1800), the scholarly commentator and harmonist; John Fletcher
(1729-1785), the sweet-souled defender of Methodism and author of _Checks
to Antinomianism_; Bishop Richard Watson (1737-1816), the learned
apologist; Augustus M. Toplady (1740-1778); the hymnist and polemic;
Joseph Milner (1744-1797), the Church historian; Thomas Coke (1747-1814),
in his _Commentary on the Old and New Testaments_; and Andrew Fuller
(1754-1815) were authors of marked force and ability.
Belonging to the first quarter of the nineteenth century the leading
theological productions are _The Immateriality and Immortality of the
Soul_, by Samuel Drew (1765-1833); the _Translation of the Book of Job_,
by John Mason Good (1764-1827); the popular _Commentaries on the Bible_
by Thomas Scott (1747-1821), Adam Clarke (1762-1832), and Joseph Benson
(1748-1821); the _Sermons_ of Robert Hall (1764-1831), the great Baptist
preacher; the _Introduction to the Literary History of the Bible_, by
James Townley (died 1833); the missionary narratives of Henry Martyn
(1781-1812), William Ward (1769-1822) and John Williams (1796-1839); and
the pathetic story of _The Dairyman's Daughter_, by Legh Richmond
(1772-1827). A little later in this century the first ranks {311} of
theological scholarship include the Wordsworths--Christopher (1774-1846),
the brother of the poet, and his two sons, Charles (1806-1892) and
Christopher, Jr. (1809-1885).
_Tracts for the Times_, written by a group of men styling themselves
Anglo-Catholics, whose leaders were Edward B. Pusey (1800-1882), John H.
Newman (1801-1890), John Keble (1792-1866), Richard H. Froude and others,
began in 1833, and for several years continued to be published, reaching
ninety in number. Their main purpose was a discussion and defense of the
character and work of the Established Church, but a large result was that
several of the leading spirits, with about two hundred clergymen and the
same number of prominent laymen, became Roman Catholics. This
High-Church series of writings was followed in 1860 by _Essays and
Reviews_, a volume containing seven articles, whose authors were
Frederick Temple (born 1821), Rowland Williams (1817-1870), Baden Powell
(1796-1860), Henry B. Wilson (born 1804), C. W. Goodwin, Mark Pattison
(1813-1884), and Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893). The purpose of these men
was to liberalize the thought of the Church. They accomplished this
result, and with it the overthrow of the faith of some.
Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), the great Scotch preacher, left much fruit
of his pen, the most celebrated being _Astronomical Discourses_. Other
distinguished books are: _A Practical View of {312} Christianity_, by
William Wilberforce (1759-1833); _Horae Homileticae_, by Charles Simeon
(1759-1836); _The Lives of Knox and Melville_, by Thomas McCrie
(1772-1835); _Horae Mosaicae_, by George Stanley Faber (1773-1854); _The
Scripture Testimony to the Messiah_, by John Pye Smith (1774-1851);
_Theological Institutes_, by the Wesleyan theologian, Richard Watson
(1781-1833); the _Histories of the Jews_ and _of Christianity_, by Henry
Hart Milman (1791-1868); the _Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature_, by
John Kitto (1804-1854); _Mammon_, by John Harris (1804-1856); the
_Theological Essays_ of John Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872);
_Missions the Chief End of the Christian Church_, by Alexander Duff
(1806-1878); the _Sermons_ of Frederick William Robertson (1816-1853);
and _The Life and Epistles of Paul_, by William J. Conybeare (1815-1857)
and John S. Howson (1816-1885).
The latter half of the present century has been marked by many strong and
profound theological publications, of which we may name as worthy of
particular notice: _The Introduction to the Study of the Holy
Scriptures_, by Thomas Hartwell Horne (1780-1862); _Historic Doubts
Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte_, by Richard Whately (1787-1863);
_Apologia pro Vita Sua_ of John H. Newman (1801-1890); _The Typology of
Scripture_, by Patrick Fairbairn (1805-1892); _The Eclipse of Faith_, by
Henry Rogers (1806-1877); the _Notes on the Parables and Miracles_, by
Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1886); {313} _The Temporal Mission of the
Holy Ghost_, by Henry Edward Manning (1808-1892); the series of lectures
on the Scriptures, by John Gumming (1810-1881); the _Greek New
Testament_, edited by Henry Alford (1810-1871); and the same by Samuel
Prideaux Tregelles (1813-1875); the historical works of Arthur Penrhyn
Stanley (1815-1881); _Hypatia, or Old Foes with a New Face_, by Charles
Kingsley (1819-1875); _Ecce Homo_, by John Robert Seeley (1834-1895); the
_Sermons_ of Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892); and _Natural Law in the
Spiritual World_, the brilliant venture of the beloved and lamented Henry
Drummond (1851-1897), whose _Greatest Thing in the World_ bids fair to
become a Christian classic.
{317}
AMERICAN LITERATURE.
PREFACE.
This little volume is intended as a companion to the _Outline Sketch of
English Literature_, published last year for the Chautauqua Circle. In
writing it I have followed the same plan, aiming to present the subject
in a sort of continuous essay rather than in the form of a "primer" or
elementary manual. I have not undertaken to describe or even to
mention every American author or book of importance, but only those
which seemed to me of most significance. Nevertheless I believe that
the sketch contains enough detail to make it of some use as a
guide-book to our literature. Though meant to be mainly a history of
American _belles-lettres_ it makes some mention of historical and
political writings, {318} but hardly any of philosophical, scientific,
and technical works.
A chronological rather than a topical order has been followed, although
the fact that our best literature is of recent growth has made it
impossible to adhere as closely to a chronological plan as in the
English sketch. In the reading courses appended to the different
chapters I have named a few of the most important authorities in
American literary history, such as Duyckinck, Tyler, Stedman, and
Richardson.
HENRY A. BEERS.
{319}
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE COLONIAL PERIOD, 1607-1765 . . . . . . . . . 321
II. THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD, 1765-1815 . . . . . . 365
III. THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION, 1815-1837 . . . . 400
IV. THE CONCORD WRITERS, 1837-1861 . . . . . . . . . 434
V. THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS, 1837-1861 . . . . . . . 472
VI. LITERATURE IN THE CITIES, 1837-1861 . . . . . . 511
VII. LITERATURE SINCE 1861 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 554
VIII. THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN
AMERICA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 594
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609
{321}
OUTLINE SKETCH OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.
CHAPTER I.
THE COLONIAL PERIOD.
1607-1765.
The writings of our colonial era have a much greater importance as
history than as literature. It would be unfair to judge of the
intellectual vigor of the English colonists in America by the books
that they wrote; those "stern men with empires in their brains" had
more pressing work to do than the making of books. The first settlers,
indeed, were brought face to face with strange and exciting
conditions--the sea, the wilderness, the Indians, the flora and fauna
of a new world--things which seem stimulating to the imagination, and
incidents and experiences which might have lent themselves easily to
poetry or romance. Of all these they wrote back to England reports
which were faithful and sometimes vivid, but which, upon the whole,
hardly rise into the region of literature. "New England," said
Hawthorne, "was then in a {322} state incomparably more picturesque
than at present." But to a contemporary that old New England of the
seventeenth century doubtless seemed any thing but picturesque, filled
with grim, hard, worky-day realities. The planters both of Virginia
and Massachusetts were decimated by sickness and starvation, constantly
threatened by Indian wars, and troubled by quarrels among themselves
and fears of disturbance from England. The wrangles between the royal
governors and the House of Burgesses in the Old Dominion, and the
theological squabbles in New England, which fill our colonial records,
are petty and wearisome to read of. At least, they would be so did we
not bear in mind to what imperial destinies these conflicts were slowly
educating the little communities which had hardly as yet secured a
foothold on the edge of the raw continent.
Even a century and a half after the Jamestown and Plymouth settlements,
when the American plantations had grown strong and flourishing, and
commerce was building up large towns, and there were wealth and
generous living and fine society, the "good old colony days when we
lived under the king," had yielded little in the way of literature that
is of any permanent interest. There would seem to be something in the
relation of a colony to the mother country which dooms the thought and
art of the former to a hopeless provincialism. Canada and Australia
are great provinces, wealthier and more populous than the {323}
thirteen colonies at the time of their separation from England. They
have cities whose inhabitants number hundreds of thousands, well
equipped universities, libraries, cathedrals, costly public buildings,
all the outward appliances of an advanced civilization; and yet what
have Canada and Australia contributed to British literature?
American literature had no infancy. That engaging _naivete_ and that
heroic rudeness which give a charm to the early popular tales and songs
of Europe find, of course, no counterpart on our soil. Instead of
emerging from the twilight of the past, the first American writings
were produced under the garish noon of a modern and learned age.
Decrepitude rather than youthfulness is the mark of a colonial
literature. The poets, in particular, instead of finding a challenge
to their imagination in the new life about them, are apt to go on
imitating the cast off literary fashions of the mother country.
America was settled by Englishmen who were contemporary with the
greatest names in English literature. Jamestown was planted in 1607,
nine years before Shakspeare's death, and the hero of that enterprize,
Captain John Smith, may not improbably have been a personal
acquaintance of the great dramatist. "They have acted my fatal
tragedies on the stage," wrote Smith. Many circumstances in _The
Tempest_ were doubtless suggested by the wreck of the _Sea Venture_ on
"the still vext Bermoothes," as described by William Strachey in his
_True Repertory of the Wrack and {324} Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates_,
written at Jamestown, and published at London in 1510. Shakspere's
contemporary, Michael Drayton, the poet of the _Polyolbion_, addressed
a spirited valedictory ode to the three shiploads of "brave, heroic
minds" who sailed from London in 1606 to colonize Virginia; an ode
which ended with the prophecy of a future American literature:
"And as there plenty grows
Of laurel every-where,--
Apollo's sacred tree--
You it may see
A poet's brows
To crown, that may sing there."
Another English poet, Samuel Daniel, the author of the _Civil Wars_,
had also prophesied in a similar strain:
"And who in time knows whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores~.~.~.
What worlds in the yet unformed Occident
May come refined with accents that are ours."
It needed but a slight movement in the balances of fate, and Walter
Raleigh might have been reckoned among the poets of America. He was
one of the original promoters of the Virginia colony, and he made
voyages in person to Newfoundland and Guiana. And more unlikely things
have happened than that when John Milton left Cambridge in 1632, he
should have been tempted to follow Winthrop and the colonists of
Massachusetts Bay, {325} who had sailed two years before. Sir Henry
Vane, the younger, who was afterward Milton's friend--
"Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old"--
came over in 1635, and was for a short time Governor of Massachusetts.
These are idle speculations, and yet, when we reflect that Oliver
Cromwell was on the point of embarking for America when he was
prevented by the king's officers, we may, for the nonce, "let our frail
thoughts dally with false surmise," and fancy by how narrow a chance
_Paradise Lost_ missed being written in Boston. But, as a rule, the
members of the literary guild are not quick to emigrate. They like the
feeling of an old and rich civilization about them, a state of society
which America has only begun to reach during the present century.
Virginia and New England, says Lowell, were the "two great distributing
centers of the English race." The men who colonized the country
between the Capes of Virginia were not drawn, to any large extent, from
the literary or bookish classes in the Old Country. Many of the first
settlers were gentlemen--too many, Captain Smith thought, for the good
of the plantation. Some among these were men of worth and spirit, "of
good means and great parentage." Such was, for example, George Percy,
a younger brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who was one of the
original adventurers, and the author of _A Discourse of the Plantation
of the Southern Colony of Virginia_, {326} which contains a graphic
narrative of the fever and famine summer of 1607 at Jamestown. But
many of these gentlemen were idlers, "unruly gallants, packed thither
by their friends to escape ill destinies;" dissipated younger sons,
soldiers of fortune, who came over after the gold which was supposed to
abound in the new country, and who spent their time in playing bowls
and drinking at the tavern as soon as there was any tavern. With these
was a sprinkling of mechanics and farmers, indented servants, and the
off-scourings of the London streets, fruit of press gangs and jail
deliveries, sent over to "work in the plantations."
Nor were the conditions of life afterward in Virginia very favorable to
literary growth. The planters lived isolated on great estates, which
had water fronts on the rivers that flow into the Chesapeake. There
the tobacco, the chief staple of the country, was loaded directly upon
the trading vessels that tied up to the long, narrow wharves of the
plantations. Surrounded by his slaves, and visited occasionally by a
distant neighbor, the Virginia country gentleman lived a free and
careless life. He was fond of fox-hunting, horse-racing, and
cock-fighting. There were no large towns, and the planters met each
other mainly on occasion of a county court or the assembling of the
Burgesses. The court-house was the nucleus of social and political
life in Virginia as the town-meeting was in New England. In such a
state of society schools were necessarily few, and popular education
did {327} not exist. Sir William Berkeley, who was the royal governor
of the colony from 1641 to 1677, said, in 1670, "I thank God there are
no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these
hundred years." In the matter of printing, this pious wish was
well-nigh realized. The first press set up in the colony, about 1681,
was soon suppressed, and found no successor until the year 1729. From
that date until some ten years before the Revolution one printing-press
answered the needs of Virginia, and this was under official control.
The earliest newspaper in the colony was the _Virginia Gazette_,
established in 1736.
In the absence of schools the higher education naturally languished.
Some of the planters were taught at home by tutors, and others went to
England and entered the universities. But these were few in number,
and there was no college in the colony until more than half a century
after the foundation of Harvard in the younger province of
Massachusetts. The college of William and Mary was established at
Williamsburg chiefly by the exertions of the Rev. James Blair, a Scotch
divine, who was sent by the Bishop of London as "commissary" to the
Church in Virginia. The college received its charter in 1693, and held
its first commencement in 1700. It is perhaps significant of the
difference between the Puritans of New England and the so-called
"Cavaliers" of Virginia, that while the former founded and supported
Harvard College in 1636, and Yale in 1701, of {328} their own motion,
and at their own expense, William and Mary received its endowment from
the crown, being provided for in part by a deed of lands and in part by
a tax of a penny a pound on all tobacco exported from the colony. In
return for this royal grant the college was to present yearly to the
king two copies of Latin verse. It is reported of the young Virginian
gentlemen who resorted to the new college that they brought their
plantation manners with them, and were accustomed to "keep race-horses
at the college, and bet at the billiard or other gaming tables."
William and Mary College did a good work for the colony, and educated
some of the great Virginians of the Revolutionary era, but it has never
been a large or flourishing institution, and has held no such relation
to the intellectual development of its section as Harvard and Yale have
held in the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Even after the
foundation of the University of Virginia, in which Jefferson took a
conspicuous part, southern youths were commonly sent to the North for
their education, and at the time of the outbreak of the civil war there
was a large contingent of southern students in several northern
colleges, notably in Princeton and Yale.
Naturally, the first books written in America were descriptions of the
country and narratives of the vicissitudes of the infant settlements,
which were sent home to be printed for the information of the English
public and the encouragement of {329} further immigration. Among books
of this kind produced in Virginia the earliest and most noteworthy were
the writings of that famous soldier of fortune, Captain John Smith.
The first of these was his _True Relation_, namely, "of such
occurrences and accidents of note as hath happened in Virginia since
the first planting of that colony," printed at London in 1608. Among
Smith's other books, the most important is perhaps his _General History
of Virginia_ (London, 1624), a compilation of various narratives by
different hands, but passing under his name. Smith was a man of a
restless and daring spirit, full of resource, impatient of
contradiction, and of a somewhat vainglorious nature, with an appetite
for the marvelous and a disposition to draw the long bow. He had seen
service in many parts of the world, and his wonderful adventures lost
nothing in the telling. It was alleged against him that the evidence
of his prowess rested almost entirely on his own testimony. His
truthfulness in essentials has not, perhaps, been successfully
impugned, but his narratives have suffered by the embellishments with
which he has colored them, and, in particular, the charming story of
Pocohontas saving his life at the risk of her own--the one romance of
early Virginian history--has passed into the realm of legend.
Captain Smith's writings have small literary value apart from the
interest of the events which they describe, and the diverting but
forcible {330} personality which they unconsciously display. They are
the rough-hewn records of a busy man of action, whose sword was
mightier than his pen. As Smith returned to England after two years in
Virginia, and did not permanently cast in his lot with the settlement
of which he had been for a time the leading spirit, he can hardly be
claimed as an American author. No more can Mr. George Sandys, who came
to Virginia in the train of Governor Wyat, in 1621, and completed his
excellent metrical translation of Ovid on the banks of the James, in
the midst of the Indian massacre of 1622, "limned" as he writes "by
that imperfect light which was snatched from the hours of night and
repose, having wars and tumults to bring it to light instead of the
muses." Sandys went back to England for good, probably as early as
1625, and can, therefore, no more be reckoned as the first American
poet, on the strength of his paraphrase of the _Metamorphoses_, than he
can be reckoned the earliest Yankee inventor, because he "introduced
the first water-mill into America."
The literature of colonial Virginia, and of the southern colonies which
took their point of departure from Virginia, is almost wholly of this
historical and descriptive kind. A great part of it is concerned with
the internal affairs of the province, such as "Bacon's Rebellion," in
1676, one of the most striking episodes in our ante-revolutionary
annals, and of which there exist a number of narratives, some of them
anonymous, and only rescued {331} from a manuscript condition a hundred
years after the event. Another part is concerned with the explorations
of new territory. Such were the "Westover Manuscripts," left by
Colonel William Byrd, who was appointed in 1729 one of the
commissioners to fix the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina,
and gave an account of the survey in his _History of the Dividing
Line_, which was only printed in 1841. Colonel Byrd is one of the most
brilliant figures of colonial Virginia, and a type of the Old Virginia
gentleman. He had been sent to England for his education, whe |
