"When on the threshold of the green recess,"
his dying glance rests upon the setting moon and the sufferer finds eternal peace. The general tone of this poem is painfully despairing, but this is relieved by the grandeur of the natural scenes and by many imaginative flights.
[Illustration: GRAVE OF SHELLEY, PROTESTANT CEMETERY, ROME.]
The year 1819 saw the publication of a work unique among Shelley's productions, The Cenci. This is a drama based upon the tragic story of Beatrice Cenci. The poem deals with human beings, human passions, real acts, and the natural world, whereas Shelley usually preferred to treat of metaphysical theories, personified abstractions, and the world of fancy. This strong drama was the most popular of his works during his lifetime.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF STANZA FROM "TO A SKYLARK".]
He returned to the ideal sphere again in one of his great poems, the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). This poem is the apotheosis of the French Revolution. Prometheus, the friend of mankind, lies tortured and chained to the mountain side. As the hour redemption approaches, his beloved Asia, the symbol of nature, arouses the soul of Revolution, represented by Demogorgon. He rises, hurls down the enemies of progress and freedom, releases Prometheus, and spreads liberty and happiness through all the world. Then the Moon, the Earth, and the Voices of the Air break forth into a magnificent chant of praise. The most delicate fancies, the most gorgeous imagery, and the most fiery, exultant emotions are combined in this poem with something of the stateliness of its Greek prototype. The swelling cadences of the blank verse and the tripping rhythm of the lyrics are the product of a nature rich in rare and wonderful melodies.
The Witch of Atlas (1820), Epipsychidion (1821), Adonais (1821), and the exquisite lyrics, The Cloud, To a Skylark and Ode to the West Wind are the most beautiful of the remaining works. The first two mentioned are the most elusive of Shelley's poems. With scarcely an echo in his soul of the shadows and discords of earth, the poet paints, in these works, lands—
"…'twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea, Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity;"
where all is—
"Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise."[23]
Adonais is a lament for the early death of Keats, and it stands second in the language among elegiac poems, ranking next to Milton's Lycidas. Shelley referred to _Adonais as "perhaps the least imperfect of my compositions." His biographer, Edward Dowden, calls it "the costliest monument ever erected to the memory of an English singer," who
"…bought, with price of purest breath, A grave among the eternal."
Mrs. Shelley put some of her most sacred mementos of the poet between the leaves of Adonais, which spoke to her of his own immortality and omnipresence:—
"Naught we know dies. Shall that alone which knows
Be as a sword consumed before the sheath
By sightless lightning?
* * * * *
He is a portion of the loveliness,
Which once he made more lovely."
Although some of Shelley's shorter poems are more popular, nothing that he ever wrote surpasses Adonais in completeness, poetic thought, and perfection of artistic finish.
Treatment of Nature.—Shelley was not interested in things themselves, but in their elusive, animating spirit. In the lyric poem, To Night, he does not address himself to mere darkness, but to the active, dream-weaving "Spirit of Night." The very spirit of the autumnal wind seems to him to breathe on the leaves and turn them—
"Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes."[24]
In his spiritual conception of nature, he was profoundly affected by Wordsworth; but he goes farther than the older poet in giving expression to the strictly individual forms of nature. Wordsworth pictures nature as a reflection of his own thoughts and feelings. In The Prelude he says:—
"To unorganic natures were transferred
My own enjoyments."
Shelley, on the other hand, is most satisfying and original when his individual spirit forms in night, cloud, skylark, and wind are made to sing, not as a reflection of his own mood, but as these spirit forces might themselves be supposed to sing, if they could express their song in human language without the aid of a poet. In the lyric, The Cloud, it is the animating spirit of the Cloud itself that sings the song:—
"I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
* * * * *
I sift the snow on the mountains below
And their great pines groan aghast."
He thus begins the song, To a Skylark—
"Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,"
and he likens the lark to "an unbodied joy."
He peoples the garden in his lyric, The Sensitive Plant, with flowers that are definite, individual manifestations of "the Spirit of Love felt everywhere," the same power on which Shelley enthusiastically relied for the speedy transformation of the world.
"A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew."
The "tulip tall," "the Naiad-like lily," "the jessamine faint," "the sweet tuberose," were all "ministering angels" to the "companionless Sensitive Plant," and each tried to be a source of joy to all the rest. No one who had not caught the new spirit of humanity could have imagined that garden.
In the exquisite Ode to the West Wind, he calls to that "breath of
Autumn's being" to express its own mighty harmonies through him:—
"O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
* * * * *
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."
We may fancy that the spirit forms of nature which appear in cloud and night, in song of bird and western wind, are content to have found in Shelley a lyre that responded to their touch in such entrancing notes.
General Characteristics.—Shelley's is the purest, the most hopeful, and the noblest voice of the Revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge lost their faith and became Tories, and Byron was a selfish, lawless creature; but Shelley had the martyr spirit of sacrifice, and he trusted to the end in the wild hopes of the revolutionary enthusiasts. His Queen Mab, Revolt of Islam, Ode to Liberty, Ode to Naples, and, above all, his Prometheus Unbound, are some of the works inspired by a trust in the ideal democracy which was to be based on universal love and the brotherhood of man. This faith gives a bounding elasticity and buoyancy to Shelley's thought, but also tinges it with that disgust for the old, that defiance of restraint, and that boyish disregard for experience which mark a time of revolt.
The other subject that Shelley treats most frequently in his verse is ideal beauty. He yearned all his life for some form beautiful enough to satisfy the aspirations of his soul. Alastor, Epipsychidion, The Witch of Atlas, and Prometheus Unbound, all breathe this insatiate craving for that "Spirit of Beauty," that "awful Loveliness."
Many of his efforts to describe in verse this democracy and this ideal beauty are impalpable and obscure. It is difficult to clothe such shadowy abstractions in clear, simple form. He is occasionally vague because his thoughts seem to have emerged only partially from the cloud lands that gave them birth. At other times, his vagueness resembles Plato's because it is inherent in the subject matter. Like Byron, Shelley is sometimes careless in the construction and revision of his verse. We shall, however, search in vain for these faults in Shelley's greatest lyrics. He is one of the supreme lyrical geniuses in the language. Of all the lyric poets of England, he is the greatest master of an ethereal, evanescent, phantomlike beauty.
JOHN KEATS, 1795-1821
[Illustration: JOHN KEATS. From the painting by Hilton, National
Portrait Gallery.]
Life.—John Keats, the son of a keeper of a large livery stable, a man "fine in common sense and native respectability," was born in Moorfields, London, in 1795. He attended school at Enfield, where he was a prize scholar. He took special pleasure in studying Grecian mythology, the influence of which is so apparent in his poetry. While at school, he also voluntarily wrote a translation of much of Vergil's AEneid. It would seem as if he had also been attracted to Shakespeare; for Keats is credited with expressing to a young playmate the opinion that no one, if alone in the house, would dare read Macbeth at two in the morning.
When Keats was left an orphan in his fifteenth year, he was taken from school and apprenticed to a surgeon at Edmonton, near London.
When seventeen, he walked some distance to borrow a copy of Spenser's Faerie Queene. A friend says: "Keats ramped through the scenes of the romance like a young horse turned into a spring meadow." His study of Grecian mythology and Elizabethan poetry exerted a stronger influence over him than his medical instructor. One day when Keats should have been listening to a surgical lecture, "there came," he says, "a sunbeam into the room and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray: and I was off with them to Oberon and fairy land."
He made a moderately good surgeon; but finding that his heart was constantly with "Oberon and the fairy land" of poesy, he gave up his profession in 1817 and began to study hard, preparatory to a literary career.
His short life was a brave struggle against disease, poverty, and unfriendly criticism; but he accomplished more than any other English author in the first twenty-five years of life. Success under such conditions would have been impossible unless he had had "flint and iron in him." He wrote:—
"I must think that difficulties nerve the spirit of a man. They make his Prime Objects a Refuge as well as a Passion."
Late in 1818, after he had published his first volume of verse, he met Fanny Brawne, a girl of eighteen, and soon fell desperately in love with her. The next six months were the happiest and the most productive period of his life. His health was then such that he could take long walks with her. In the first spring after he had met her, he wrote in less than three hours his wonderful Ode to a Nightingale, while he was sitting in the garden of his home at Wentworth Place, Hampstead, near London, listening to the song of the bird. Most of his famous poems were written in the year after meeting her.
In February, 1820, his health began to decline so rapidly that he knew that his days were numbered. His mother and one of his brothers had died of consumption, and he had been for some time threatened with the disease. He offered to release Miss Brawne from her engagement, but she would not listen to the suggestion. She and her mother tried to nurse him back to health. Few events in the history of English authors are tinged with a deeper pathos than his engagement to Miss Brawne. Some of the letters that he wrote to her or about her are almost tragic. After he had taken his last leave of her he wrote, "I can bear to die—I cannot bear to leave her."
[Illustration: WENTWORTH PLACE, KEATS'S HOME IN HAMPSTEAD.]
Acting on insistent medical advice, Keats sailed for Italy in
September, 1820, accompanied by a stanch friend, the artist Joseph
Severn. On this voyage, Keats wrote a sonnet which proved to be his
swan song:—
"Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores."
While he lay on his sick bed in Rome, he said: "I feel the flowers growing over me." In February, 1821, he died, at the age of twenty-five years and four months. On the modest stone which marks his grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, there was placed at his request: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." His most appropriate epitaph is Shelley's Adonais.
[Illustration: GRAVE OF KEATS, ROME.]
Poems.—In 1817 he published his first poems in a thin volume, which did not attract much attention, although it contained two excellent sonnets: On First Looking into Chapman's Homer and On the Grasshopper and Cricket, which begins with the famous line:—
"The poetry of earth is never dead."
We may also find in this volume such lines of promise as:—
"Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown
The reading of an ever changing tale."
A year later, his long poem, Endymion, appeared. The inner purpose of this poetic romance is to show the search of the soul for absolute Beauty. The first five lines are a beautiful exposition of his poetic creed. Endymion, however, suffers from immaturity, shown in boyish sentimentality, in a confusion of details, and in an overabundance of ornament. This poem met with a torrent of abuse. One critic even questioned whether Keats was the real name of the author, adding, "we almost doubt whether any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody." Keats showed himself a better critic than the reviewers. It is unusual for a poet to recognize almost at once the blemishes in his own work. He acknowledged that a certain critic—
"…is perfectly right in regard to the 'slipshod' Endymion… it is as good as I had the power to make it by myself. I have written independently, without judgement, I may write independently and with judgement hereafter."
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF ORIGINAL MS. OF ENDYMION.]
The quickness of his development is one of the most amazing facts in literary history. He was twenty-three when Endymion was published, but in the next eighteen months he had almost finished his life's work. In that brief time, he perfected his art and wrote poems that rank among the greatest of their kind, and that have influenced the work of many succeeding poets, such as Tennyson, Lowell, and Swinburne.
[Illustration: ENDYMION. From mural painting by H.O. Walker,
Congressional Library, Washington, D.C.]
Nearly all his greatest poems were written in 1819 and published in his 1820 volume. The Eve of St. Agnes (January, 1819) and the Ode to a Nightingale (May, 1819) are perhaps his two most popular poems; but his other masterpieces are sufficiently great to make choice among them largely a matter of individual preference.
The Eve of St. Agnes is an almost flawless narrative poem, romantic in its conception and artistic in its execution. Porphyro, a young lover, gains entrance to a hostile castle on the eve of St. Agnes to see if he cannot win his heroine, Madeline, on that enchanted evening. The interest in the story, the mastery of poetic language, the wealth and variety of the imagery, the atmosphere of medieval days, combine to make this poem unusually attractive. The following lines appeal to the senses of sight, odor, sound, and temperature,[25] as well as to romantic human feeling and love of the beautiful:—
"…like a throbbing star
Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose;
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odor with the violet,—
Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows
Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window panes; St. Agnes' moon hath set."
The fact that Keats could write the Ode to a Nightingale in three hours is proof of genius. This poem pleases lovers of music, of artistic expression, of nature, of romance, and of human pathos. Such lines as these show that the strength and beauty of his verse are not entirely dependent on images of sense:—
"Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath."
The Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Ode on Melancholy, Lamia, and Isabella,—all show the unusual charm of Keats. He manifests the greatest strength in his unfinished fragment Hyperion, "the Götterdämmerung of the early Grecian gods." The opening lines reveal the artistic perfection of form and the effectiveness of the sensory images with which he frames the scene:—
"Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud."
General Characteristics.—Keats is the poetic apostle of the beautiful. He specially emphasizes the beautiful in the world of the senses; but his definition of beauty grew to include more than mere physical sensations from attractive objects. In his Ode to a Grecian Urn, he says that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," and he calls to the Grecian pipes to play—
"Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone."
Those poets who thought that they could equal Keats by piling up a medley of sense images have been doomed to disappointment. The transforming power of his imagination is more remarkable than the wealth of his sensations.
His mastery in choosing, adapting, and sometimes even creating, apt poetic words or phrases, is one of his special charms. Matthew Arnold says: "No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats." Some of his descriptive adjectives and phrases, such as the "deep-damasked wings" of the tiger-moth, have been called "miniature poems." In the eighty lines of the Ode to a Nightingale, we may note the "full-throated ease" of the nightingale's song, the vintage cooled in the "deep-delved earth," the "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" of the beaker "full of the warm South," "the coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine," the sad Ruth "amid the alien corn," and the "faery lands forlorn."
A contemporary critic accused Keats of "spawning" new words, of converting verbs into nouns, of forming new verbs, and of making strange use of adjectives and adverbs. Some contemporaries might object to his "torchèd mines," "flawblown sleet," "liegeless air," or even to the "calm-throated" thrush of the immortals. Modern lovers of poetry, however, think that he displayed additional proof of genius by enriching the vocabulary of poetry more than any other writer since Milton.
Keats was not, like Byron and Shelley, a reformer. He drew his first inspiration from Grecian mythology and the romantic world of Spenser, not from the French Revolution or the social unrest of his own day. It is, however, a mistake to say that he was untouched by the new human impulses. There is modern feeling in the following lines which introduce us to the two cruel brothers in Isabella:—
"…for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torchèd mines and noisy factories.
* * * * *
For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
And went all naked to the hungry shark;
For them his ears gushed blood; for them in death
The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
Lay full of darts."
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Matthew Arnold wrote of Keats: "He is with Shakespeare." Andrew Bradley, a twentieth century professor of poetry in the University of Oxford, says: "Keats was of Shakespeare's tribe." These eminent critics do not mean that Keats had the breadth, the humor, the moral appeal of Shakespeare, but they do find in Keats much of the youthful Shakespeare's lyrical power, mastery of expression, and intense love of the beautiful in life. When Keats said: "If a sparrow comes before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel," he showed another Shakespearean quality in his power to enter into the life of other creatures. At first he wrote of the beautiful things that appealed to his senses or his fancies, but when he came to ask himself the question:—
"And can I ever bid these joys farewell?"
he answered:—
"Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts."[26]
In Isabella, the Ode to a Nightingale, Lamia, and Hyperion, he was beginning to paint these "agonies" and "the strife"; but death swiftly ended further progress on this road. Before he passed away, however, he left some things that have an Elizabethan appeal. Among such, we may mention his welcome to "easeful death," his artistic setting of a puzzling truth:—
"…Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips,
Bidding adieu,"
his line to which the young world still responds:—
"Forever wilt thou love and she be fair,"
and especially the musical call of his own young life, "yearning like a God in pain."
THOMAS DE QUINCEY, 1785-1859
[Illustration: THOMAS DE QUINCEY. From the painting by Sir J.W.
Gordon, National Portrait Gallery.]
Life.-Thomas de Quincey was born in Manchester in 1785. Being a precocious child, he became a remarkable student at the age of eight. When he was only eleven, his Latin verses were the envy of the older boys at the Bath school, which he was then attending. At the age of fifteen, he was so thoroughly versed in Greek that his professor said of him to a friend: "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one." De Quincey was sent in this year to the Manchester grammar school; but his mind was in advance of the instruction offered there, and he unceremoniously left the school on his seventeenth birthday.
For a time he tramped through Wales, living on an allowance of a guinea a week. Hungering for books, he suddenly posted to London. As he feared that his family would force him to return to school, he did not let them know his whereabouts. He therefore received no money from them, and was forced to wander hungry, sick, and destitute, through the streets of the metropolis, with its outcasts and waifs. He describes this part of his life in a very entertaining manner in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
When his family found him, a year later, they prevailed on him to go to Oxford; and, for the next four years, he lived the life of a recluse at college.
In 1808 he took the cottage at Grasmere that Wordsworth had quitted, and enjoyed the society of the three Lake poets. Here De Quincey married and lived his happiest years.
The latter part of his life was clouded by his indulgence in opium, which he had first taken while at college to relieve acute neuralgia. At one time he was in the habit of taking an almost incredible amount of laudanum. Owing to a business failure, his money was lost. It then became necessary for him to throw off the influence of the narcotic sufficiently to earn a livelihood, In 1821 he began to write. From that time until his death, in 1859, his life was devoted mainly to literature.
[Illustration: ROOM IN DOVE COTTAGE OCCUPIED BY WORDSWORTH,
COLERIDGE, AND DE QUINCEY.]
Works.—Nearly all De Quincey's writings were contributed to magazines. His first and greatest contribution was The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, published in the London Magazine. These Confessions are most remarkable for the brilliant and elaborate style in which the author's early life and his opium dreams are related. His splendid, yet melancholy, dreams are the most famous in the language.
De Quincey's wide reading, especially of history, supplied the material for many of them. In these dreams he saw the court ladies of the "unhappy times of Charles I.," witnessed Marius pass by with his Roman legions, "ran into pagodas" in China, where he "was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms," and "was buried for a thousand years, in stone coffins, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids" in Egypt.
His dreams were affected also by the throngs of people whom he had watched in London. He was haunted by "the tyranny of the human face." He says:—
"Faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries: my agitation was infinite, my mind tossed, and surged with the ocean."
Sound also played a large part in the dreams. Music, heart-breaking lamentations, and pitiful echoes recurred frequently in the most magnificent of these nightly pageants. One of the most distressing features of the dreams was their vastness. The dreamer lived for centuries in one night, and space "swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity."
To present with such force and reality these grotesque and weird fancies, these vague horrors, and these deep oppressions required a powerful imaginative grasp of the intangible, and a masterly command of language.
In no other work does De Quincey reach the eminence attained in the Confessions, although his scholarly acquirements enabled him to treat philosophical, critical, and historical subjects with wonderful grace and ease. His biographer, Masson, says, "De Quincey's sixteen volumes of magazine articles are full of brain from beginning to end." The wide range of his erudition is shown by the fact that he could write such fine literary criticisms as On Wordsworth's Poetry and On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, such clear, strong, and vivid descriptions of historical events and characters as The Caesars, Joan of Arc, and The Revolt of the Tartars, and such acute essays on unfamiliar topics as The Toilette of a Hebrew Lady, The Casuistry of Roman Meals, and The Spanish Military Nun.
He had a contemplative, analytic mind which enjoyed knotty metaphysical problems and questions far removed from daily life, such as the first principles of political economy, and of German philosophy. While he was a clear thinker in such fields, he added little that was new to English thought.
The works which rank next to The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater are all largely autobiographical, and reveal charming glimpses of this dreamy, learned sage. Those works are Suspiria de Profundis (Sighs from the Depths), The English Mail Coach, and Autobiographic Sketches. None of them contains any striking or unusual experience of the author. Their power rests upon their marvelous style. Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow in Suspiria de Profundis and the Dream Fugue in the Mail Coach are among the most musical, the most poetic, and the most imaginative of the author's productions.
General Characteristics.—De Quincey's essays show versatility, scholarly exactness, and great imaginative power. His fame, however, rests in a large degree upon his style. One of its most prominent characteristics is, precision. There are but few English essayists who can compare with him in scrupulous precision of expression. He qualifies and elaborates a simple statement until its exact meaning becomes plainly manifest. His vocabulary is extraordinary. In any of the multifarious subjects treated by him, the right word seems always at hand.
Two characteristics, which are very striking in all his works, are harmony and stateliness. His language is so full of rich harmonies that it challenges comparison with poetry. His long, periodic sentences move with a quiet dignity, adapted to the treatment of lofty themes.
De Quincey's work possesses also a light, ironic humor, which is happiest in parody. The essay upon Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts is the best example of his humor. This selection is one of the most whimsical:—
"For, if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he come, to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop."
De Quincey's gravest fault is digression. He frequently leaves his main theme and follows some line of thought that has been suggested to his well-stored mind. These digressions are often very long, and sometimes one leads to another, until several subjects receive treatment in a single paper. De Quincey, however, always returns to the subject in hand and defines very sharply the point of digression and of return. Another of his faults is an indulgence in involved sentences, which weaken the vigor and simplicity of the style.
Despite these faults, De Quincey is a great master of language. He deserves study for the three most striking characteristics of his style,—precision, stateliness, and harmony.
SUMMARY
The tide of reaction, which had for same time been gathering force, swept triumphantly over England in this age of Romanticism.
Men rebelled against the aristocracy, the narrow conventions of society, the authority of the church and of the government, against the supremacy of cold classicism in literature, against confining intellectual activity to tangible commonplace things, and against the repression of imagination and of the soul's aspirations. The two principal forces behind these changes were the Romantic movement, which culminated in changed literary ideals, and the spirit of the French Revolution, which emphasized the close kinship of all ranks of humanity.
The time was preeminently poetic. The Elizabethan age alone excels it in the glory of its poetry. The principal subjects of verse in the age of Romanticism were nature and man. Nature became the embodiment of an intelligent, sympathetic, spiritual force. Cowper, Burns, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats constitute a group of poets who gave to English literature a new poetry of nature. The majority of these were also poets of man, of a more ideal humanity. The common man became an object of regard. Burns sings of the Scotch peasant. Wordsworth pictures the life of shepherds and dalesmen. Byron's lines ring with a cry of liberty for all, and Shelley immortalizes the dreams of a universal brotherhood of man. Keats, the poet of the beautiful, passed away before he heard clearly the message of "the still sad music of humanity."
While the prose does not take such high rank as the poetry, there are some writers who will not soon be forgotten. Scott will be remembered as the great master of the historical novel, Jane Austen as the skillful realistic interpreter of everyday life, De Quincey for the brilliancy of his style and the vigor of his imagination in presenting his opium dreams, and Lamb for his exquisite humor. In philosophical prose, Mill, Bentham, and Malthus made important contributions to moral, social, and political philosophy, while Coleridge opposed their utilitarian and materialistic tendencies, and codified the principles of criticism from a romantic point of view.
REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY
HISTORICAL
Gardiner[27], Green, Walker, or Cheney. For the social side, see
Traill, V., VI., and Cheney's Industrial and Social History of
England.
LITERARY
The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vols. XI., XII.
Courthope's A History of English Poetry, Vol. VI.
Elton's A Survey of English Literature from 1780-1830, 2 vols.
Herford's The Age of Wordsworth.
Brandes's Naturalism in England (Vol. IV. of Main Currents in
Nineteenth Century Literature.)
The Revolution in English Poetry and Fiction (Chap. XXII. of Vol. X. of Cambridge Modern History.)
Hancock's The French Revolution and the English Poets.
Scudder's Life of the Spirit in the Modern English Poets.
Symons's The Romantic Movement in English Poetry.
Reynolds's The Treatment of Nature in English Poetry between Pope and
Wordsworth.
Mackie's Nature Knowledge in Modern Poetry.
Brookes's Studies in Poetry (Blake, Scott, Shelley, Keats).
Symons's William Blake.
Payne's The Greater English Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Keats,
Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth).
Stephen's Hours in a Library, 3 vols. (Scott, De Quincey, Cowper,
Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge).
Dowden's Studies in Literature, 1879-1877.
Bradley's Oxford Lectures on Poetry (Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats).
Lowell's Among my Books, Second Series (Wordsworth, Keats).
Ainger's Life of Lamb. (E.M.L.)
Lucas's Life of Charles Lamb.
Goldwin Smith's Life of Cowper. (E.M.L.)
Wright's Life of Cowper.
Shairp's Robert Burns. (E.M.L.)
Carlyle's Essay on Burns.
Lockhart's Life of Scott., Hutton's Life of Scott. (E.M.L.)
Yonge's Life of Scott. (G.W.)
Goldwin Smith's Life of Jane Austen. (G.W.)
Helm's Jane Austen and her Country House Comedy.
Mitton's Jane Austen and her Times.
Adams's The Story of Jane Austen's Life.
Knight's Life of Wordsworth, 3 vols., Myers's Life of Wordsworth
(E.M.L.), Raleigh's Wordsworth.
Robertson's Wordsworth and the English Lake Country.
Traill's Life of Coleridge (E.M.L.), Caine's Life of Coleridge
(G.W.), Garnett's Coleridge.
Sneath's Wordsworth, Poet of Nature and Poet of Man.
Mayne's The New Life of Byron, 2 vols, Nichol's Life of Byron
(E.M.L.), Noel's Life of Byron. (G.W.)
Trelawney's Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron.
Dowden's Life of Shelley, 2 vols., Symonds's Life of Shelley (E.M.L.), Sharp's Life of Shelley (G.W.). Francis Thompson's Shelley.
Clutton-Brock's Shelley: The Man and the Poet.
Hogg's Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley(contemporary).
Angeli's Shelley and his Friends in Italy.
Colvin's Life of Keats (E.M.L.), Rossetti's Life of Keats (G.W.),
Hancock's John Keats.
Miller's Leigh Hunt's Relations with Byron, Shelley, and Keats.
Arnold's Essays in Criticism, Second Series (Keats).
H. Buxton Forman's Complete Works of John Keats (includes the Letters, the best edition).
Masson's Life of De Quincey. (E.M.L.)
Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature (De Quincey).
SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
Blake.—Some of his best poems are given in Ward, IV., 601-608; Bronson, III., 385-403; Manly, I., 301-304; Oxford, 558-566; Century, 485-489, and in the volume in The Canterbury Poets.
Point out in Blake's verse (a) the new feeling for nature, (b) evidences of wide sympathies, (c) mystical tendencies, and (d) compare his verses relating to children and nature with Wordsworth's poems on the same subjects.
Cowper.—Read the opening stanzas of Cowper's Conversation and note the strong influence of Pope in the cleverly turned but artificial couplets. Compare this poem with the one On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture or with The Task, Book IV., lines 1-41 and 267-332, Cassell's National Library, Canterbury Poets, or Temple Classics and point out the marked differences in subject matter and style. What forward movement in literature is indicated by the change in Cowper's manner? John Gilpin should be read for its fresh, beguiling humor.
For selections, see Bronson,[28] III., 310-329; Ward, III., 422-485; Century, 470-479; Manly, I., 285-294.
Burns.—Read The Cotter's Saturday Night, For a' That and a' That,
To a Mouse, Highland Mary, To Mary in Heaven, Farewell to Nancy, I
Love My Jean, A Red, Red Rose. The teacher should read to the class
parts of Tam o' Shanter.
The Globe edition contains the complete poems of Burns with
Glossary. Inexpensive editions may be found in Cassell's National
Library, Everyman's Library, and Canterbury Poets. For selections,
see Bronson, III., 338-385; Ward. III., 512-571; Century, 490-502;
Manly, I., 309-326; Oxford, 492-506.
In what ways do the first three poems mentioned above show Burns's sympathy with democracy? Quote some of Burns's fine descriptions of nature and describe the manner in which he treats nature. How does he rank as a writer of love songs? What qualities in his poems have touched so many hearts? Compare his poetry with that of Dryden, Pope, and Shakespeare.
Scott.—Read The Lady of the Lake, Canto III., stanzas iii.-xxv., or Marmion, Canto VI., stanzas xiii.-xxvii. (American Book Company's Eclectic English Classics, Cassell's National Library, or Everyman's Library.) Read in Craik, V., "The Gypsy's Curse" (Guy Mannering), pp. 14-17, "The Death of Madge Wildfire" (Heart of Middlothian), pp. 30-35, and "The Grand Master of the Templars" (Ivanhoe), pp. 37-42. The student should put on his list for reading at his leisure: Guy Mannering, Old Mortality, Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, and The Talisman.
In what kind of poetry does Scott excel? Quote some of his spirited heroes, and point out their chief excellences. How does his poetry differ from that of Burns? In the history of fiction, does Scott rank as an imitator or a creator? As a writer of fiction, in what do his strength and his weakness consist? Has he those qualities that will cause him to be popular a century hence? What can be said of his style?
Jane Austen.—In Craik, V., or Manly. II, read the selections from Pride and Prejudice. The student at his leisure should read all this novel.
What world does she describe in her fiction? What are her chief qualities? How does she differ from Scott? Why is she called a "realist"?
Wordsworth.—Read I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, The Solitary Reaper, To the Cuckoo, Lines Written in Early Spring, Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower, To my Sister, She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways, She Was a Phantom of Delight, Alice Fell, Lucy Gray, We Are Seven, Intimations of Immortality from Recollection of Early Childhood, Ode to Duty, Hart-Leap Well, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Michael and the sonnets: "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free," "Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour," and "The world is too much with us, late and soon." Some students will also wish to read The Prelude (Temple Classics or A.J. George's edition), which describes the growth of Wordsworth's mind.
All the above poems (excepting The Prelude) may be found in the volume Poems of Wordsworth, chosen and edited by Matthew Arnold (Golden Treasury Series, 331 pp., $1). Nearly all may also be found in Page's British Poets of the Nineteenth Century (923 pp., $2). For selections, see Bronson, IV., 1-54; Ward, IV., 1-88; Oxford 594-618; Century, 503-541; Manly, I., 329-345.
Refer to Wordsworth's "General Characteristics" (pp. 393-396) and select the poems that most emphatically show his special qualities. Which of the above poems seems easiest to write? In which is his genius most apparent? Which best presents his view of nature? Which best stand the test of an indefinite number of readings? In what do his poems of childhood excel?
Coleridge.—Read The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, Youth and Age; Bronson, I., 54-93; Ward, IV., 102-154; Page, 66-103; Century, 553-565; Manly, I., 353-364; Oxford, 628-656.
How do The Ancient Mariner and Christabel manifest the spirit of Romanticism? What are the chief reasons for the popularity of The Ancient Mariner? Would you call this poem didactic? Select stanzas specially remarkable for melody, for beauty, for telling much in few words, for images of nature, for conveying an ethical lesson. What feeling almost unknown in early poetry is common in Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner, Wordsworth's Hart-Leap Well, Burns's To a Mouse, On Seeing a Wounded Hare Limp by Me, A Winter Night, and Cowper's On a Goldfinch Starved to Death in his Cage?
The advanced student should read some of Coleridge's prose criticism in his Biographia Literaria (Everyman's Library). The parts best worth reading have been selected in George's Coleridge's Principles of Criticism (226 pp., 60 cents) and in Beers's Selections for the Prose Writings of Coleridge (including criticisms of Wordsworth and Shakespeare, 146 pp., 50 cents).
Note how fully Coleridge unfolds in these essays the principles of romantic criticism, which have not been superseded.
Byron.—Read The Prisoner of Chillon (Selections from Byron, Eclectic English Classics), Childe Harold, Canto III., stanzas xxi-xxv. and cxiii., Canto IV., stanzas lxxviii., and lxxix. "Oh, Snatch'd away in Beauty's Bloom," "There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away," and from Don Juan, Canto III., the song inserted between stanzas lxxxvi. and lxxxvii. All these poems will be found in the two volumes of Byron's works in the Canterbury Poets' series.
Selections are given in Bronson, IV., 125-174; Ward, IV., 244-303; Page, 170-272; Oxford, 688-694; Century, 586-613; Manly, I., 378-393.
From the stanzas indicated in Childe Harold, select, first, the passages which best illustrate the spirit of revolt, and, second, the passages of most poetic beauty. What natural phenomena appeal most to Byron? What qualities make The Prisoner of Chillon a favorite? Why is his poetry often called rhetorical?
Shelley.—Read Adonais, To a Skylark, Ode to the West Wind, To Night, The Cloud, The Sensitive Plant, and selections from Alastor and Prometheus Unbound. Shelley's Poetical Works, edited by Edward Dowden (Globe Poets), contains all of Shelley's extant poetry. Less expensive editions are in Canterbury Poets, Temple Classics, and Everyman's Library. Selections are given in Bronson, IV., 182-227; Ward, IV., 348-416; Page, 275-369; Oxford, 697-717; Century, 614-638; Manly, I., 394-411.
Under what different aspects do Adonais and Lycidas view the life after death? Has Shelley modified Wordsworth's view of the spiritual force in nature? Does Shelley use either the cloud or the skylark for the direct purpose of expressing his own feelings? Why is he sometimes called a metaphysical poet? What is the most striking quality of Shelley's poetic gift?
Keats.—Read The Eve of St. Agnes, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, Hyperion (first 134 lines), La Belle Dame sans Merci, Isabella, and the sonnets: On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, On the Grasshopper and Cricket, When I have Fears that I May Cease to Be, Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art. The best edition of the works of Keats is that by Buxton Forman. The Canterbury Poets and Everyman's Library have less expensive editions. All the poems indicated above may be found in Page's British Poets of the Nineteenth Century. For selections, see Bronson, IV., 230-265; Ward, IV., 427-464; Oxford, 721-744; Century, 639-655; Manly, I., 413-425.
By direct reference to the above poems, justify calling Keats "the apostle of the beautiful," in both thought and language. Give examples of his felicitous use of words and phrases. Show by illustrations his mastery in the use of the concrete. To what special senses do his images appeal? Was he at all affected by the new human movement? Why does Arnold say, "Keats is with Shakespeare"? In what respects is he like the Elizabethans?
De Quincey.—Read Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow (Craik, V., 264-270). The first chapters of The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Everyman's Library; Temple Classics; Century, 683-690; Manly, II., 357-366) are entertaining and will repay reading.
Does his prose show any influence of a romantic and poetic age? Compare his style with that of Addison, Gibbon, and Burke. In what respects does De Quincey succeed, and in what does he fail, as a model for a young writer?
Lamb.—From the Essays of Elia (Cassell's National Library; Everyman's Library, Temple Classics) read any two of these essays: A Dissertation upon Roast Pig, Old China, Dream Children, New Year's Eve, Poor Relations. For selections, see Craik, V., 116-126; Century, 575-578; Manly, II., 337-345.
In what does Lamb's chief charm consist? Point out resemblances and differences between his Essays and Addison's.
Landor, Hazlitt, and Hunt.—Good selections are given in Craik, V.;
Chambers, III.; Manly, II. Inexpensive editions of Landor's Imaginary
Conversations and Pericles and Aspasia may be found in the Camelot
Series. Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, Lectures on the
English Poets, Lectures on the English Comic Writers, and Table
Talk are published in Everyman's Library. The Camelot Series and
the Temple Classics also contain some of Hazlitt's works. A
selection from Leigh Hunt's Essays is published in the Camelot
Series.
What are the main characteristics of Landor's style? Select a passage which justifies the criticism: "He writes in marble." Give some striking thoughts from his Imaginary Conversations. Compare his style and subject matter with Hazlitt's. Show that Hazlitt has the power of presenting in an impressive way the chief characteristics of authors. Select some pleasing passages from Leigh Hunt's Essays. Compare him with Addison and Lamb.
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER VIII:
[Footnote 1: Prelude, Book XI.]
[Footnote 2: gold.]
[Footnote 3: For a' That and a' That.]
[Footnote 4: Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle.]
[Footnote 5: Hart-Leap Well.]
[Footnote 6: Intimations of Immortality.]
[Footnote 7: Wordsworth's Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern
Abbey.]
[Footnote 8: Retirement.]
[Footnote 9: Conversation.]
[Footnote 10: I Love My Jean.]
[Footnote 11: remedy.]
[Footnote 12: Epistle to John Lapraik.]
[Footnote 13: The Vision.]
[Footnote 14: Sonnet: "The world is too much with us."]
[Footnote 15: Hart Leap Well.]
[Footnote 16: A Day-Dream.]
[Footnote 17: Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV.]
[Footnote 18: Ibid., Chapter XXII.]
[Footnote 19: Manfred, Act I.]
[Footnote 20: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III.]
[Footnote 21: The Dream.]
[Footnote 22: Adonais, Stanza xlix]
[Footnote 23: Epipsychidion.]
[Footnote 24: Ode to the West Wind.]
[Footnote 25: For a discussion of the different sensory images of the poets, see the author's Education of the Central Nervous System, pages 109-208.]
[Footnote 26: Sleep and Poetry.]
[Footnote 27: For full titles, see p. 50.]
[Footnote 28: For full titles, see p. 6.]
CHAPTER IX: THE VICTORIAN AGE, 1837-1900
History of the Period.—In the two periods of English history most remarkable for their accomplishment, the Elizabethan and the Victorian, the throne was occupied by women. Queen Victoria, the granddaughter of George III., ruled from 1837 to the beginning of 1901. Her long reign of sixty-three years may be said to close with the end of the nineteenth century.
For nearly fifty years after the battle of Waterloo (1815), England had no war of magnitude. In 1854 she joined France in a war against Russia to keep her from taking Constantinople. Tennyson's well-known poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade, commemorates an incident in this bloody contest, which was successful in preventing Russia from dismembering Turkey.
When the Turks massacred the Christians in Bulgaria in 1876, Russia fought and conquered Turkey. England again intervened, this time after the war, in the Berlin Congress (1878). In return for her diplomatic services and for a guaranty to maintain the integrity of certain Turkish territory, England received from Turkey the island of Cyprus. As a result of this Congress, the principalities of Roumania, Servia, and Bulgaria were formed, but the Turk was allowed to remain in Europe. A later English prime minister, Lord Salisbury (1830-1903), referring to England's espousal of the Turkish cause, said that she had "backed the wrong horse." The bloody war of 1912-1913 between Turkey and the allied armies of Bulgaria, Servia, Montenegro, and Greece was the result of this mistake.
An important part of England's history during this period centers around the expansion, protection, and development of her colonies in Asia, Australia, Africa, and America. England was then constantly agitated by the fear that Russia might grow strong enough to seize India or some other English colonial possessions.
A serious rebellion in India (1857) led England to take from the East India Company the government of that colony. "Empress of India" was later (1876) added to the titles of Queen Victoria. Had India not been an English colony, literature might not have had Kipling's fascinating Jungle Books and Hindu stories. England's protectorate over Egypt (1882) was assumed in order to strengthen her control over the newly completed Suez Canal (1869), which was needed for her communication with India and her Australian colonies.
The Boer war in South Africa (1899-1902)required the largest number of troops that England ever mustered into service in any of her wars. The final outcome of this desperate struggle was the further extension of her South African possessions.
In the nineteenth century, England's most notable political achievement was "her successful rule over colonies, ranging from India, with its 280,000,000 subjects, to Fanning Island with its population of thirty." Her tactful guidance was for the must part directed toward enabling them to develop and to govern themselves. She had learned a valuable lesson from the American revolution.
Ireland, however, failed to secure her share of the benefits that usually resulted from English rule. She was neither regarded as a colony, like Australia, nor as an integral part of England. For the greater part of the century her condition was deplorable. The great prime minister, William E. Gladstone (1809-1898), tried to secure needed home rule for her, but did not succeed. Toward the end of the century, more liberal laws regarding the tenure of the land and more self-government afforded some relief from unjust conditions.
During the Victorian age the government of England became more democratic. Two reform bills (1867 and 1884) gave almost unrestricted suffrage to men. The extension of the franchise and the granting of local self-government to her counties (1888) made England one of the most democratic of all nations. Her monarch has less power than the president of the United States.
The Victorian age saw the rise of trades unions and the passing of many laws to improve the condition of the working classes. As the tariff protecting the home grower of wheat had raised the price of bread and caused much suffering to the poor, England not only repealed this duty (1846) but also became practically a free-trade country. The age won laurels in providing more educational facilities for all, in abridging class privileges, and in showing increasing recognition of human rights, without a bloody revolution such as took place in France. A rough indication of the amount of social and moral progress is the decrease in the number of convicts in England, from about 50,000 at the accession of Victoria to less than 6000 at her death.
An Age of Science and Invention.—In the extent and the variety of inventions, in their rapid improvement and utilization for human needs, and in general scientific progress, the sixty-three years of the Victorian age surpassed all the rest of historic time.
When Victoria ascended the throne, the stage coach was the common means of traveling; only two short pieces of railroad had been constructed; the electric telegraph had not been developed; few steamships had crossed the Atlantic. The modern use of the telephone would then have seemed as improbable as the wildest Arabian Nights' tale. Before her reign ended, the railroad, the telegraph, the steamship, and the telephone had wrought an almost magical change in travel and in communication.
The Victorian age introduced anaesthetics and antiseptic surgery, developed photography, the sciences of chemistry and physics, of biology and zoölogy, of botany and geology. The enthusiastic scientific worker appeared in every field, endeavoring to understand the laws of nature and to apply them in the service of man. Science also turned its attention to human progress and welfare. The new science of sociology had earnest students.
[Illustration: CHARLES DARWIN.]
The Influence of Science on Literature.—The Victorian age was the first to set forth clearly the evolution hypothesis, which teaches the orderly development from simple to complex forms. While the idea of evolution had suggested itself to many naturalists, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was the first to gain a wide hearing for the theory. After years of careful study of nature, he published in 1859 The Origin of Species by Natural Selection, an epoch-making work, which had a far-reaching effect on the thought of the age.
The influence of his doctrine of evolution is especially apparent in Tennyson's poetry, in George Eliot's fiction, in religious thought, and in the change in viewing social problems. In his Synthetic Philosophy, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), philosopher and metaphysician, applied the doctrine of evolution not only to plants and animals but also to society, morality, and religion.
Two eminent scientists, John Tyndall (1820-1893) and Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), did much to popularize science and to cause the age to seek a broader education. Tyndall's Fragments of Science (1871) contains a fine lecture on the Scientific Use of the Imagination, in which he becomes almost poetic in his imaginative conception of evolution:—
"Not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone the nobler forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but the human mind itself,—emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena,—were once latent in a fiery cloud… All our philosophy, all our poetry, all our science, and all our art,—Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael,—are potential in the fires of the sun."
[Illustration: JOHN TYNDALL.]
Unlike Keats in his Lamia, Tyndall is firm in his belief that science will not clip the wings of imagination. In the same lecture he says:—
"How are we to lay hold of the physical basis of light, since, like that of life itself, it lies entirely without the domain of the senses? We are gifted with the power of imagination and by this power we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of the senses… Bounded and conditioned by coöperant reason, imagination becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer. Newton's passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was at the outset a leap of the imagination."
Huxley was even a more brilliant interpreter of science to popular audiences. His so-called Lay Sermons (1870) are invigorating presentations of scientific and educational subjects. He awakened many to a sense of the importance of "knowing the laws of the physical world" and "the relations of cause and effect therein." Nowhere is he more impressive than where he forces us to admit that we must all play the chess game of life against an opponent that never makes an error and never fails to count our mistakes against us.
[Illustration: THOMAS HUXLEY. From the painting by Collier,
National Portrait Gallery.]
"The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong man shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated—without haste, but without remorse. * * * * * "Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws."[1]
We find the influence of science manifest in much of the general literature of the age, as well as in the special writings of the scientists. Science introduced to literature a new interest in humanity and impressed on writers what is known as the "growth idea." Preceding literature, with the conspicuous exception of Shakespeare's work, had for the most part presented individuals whose character was already fixed. This age loved to show the growth of souls. George Eliot's novels are frequently Darwinian demonstrations of the various steps in the moral growth or the perversion of the individual. In Rabbi Ben Ezra, Browning thus expresses this new idea of the working of the Divine Power:—
"He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance."
The Trend of Prose; Minor Prose Writers.—The prose of this age is remarkable for amount and variety. In addition to the work of the scientists, there are the essays and histories of Macaulay and Carlyle, the essays and varied prose of Newman, the art and social philosophy of Ruskin, the critical essays of Matthew Arnold and Swinburne.
One essayist, Walter Pater (1839-1894), an Oxford graduate and teacher, who kept himself aloof from contemporary thought, produced almost a new type of serious prose, distinguished for color, ornamentation, melody, and poetic thought. Even such prosaic objects as wood and brick were to his retrospective gaze "half mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows where." His object was to charm his reader, to haunt him with vague suggestions rather than to make a logical appeal to him, or to add to his world of vivid fact, after the manner of Macaulay. A quotation from Pater's most brilliant essay, Leonardo Da Vinci, in the volume, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry[2] (1873) will show some of the characteristics of his prose. This description of Da Vinci's masterpiece, the portrait of Mona Lisa, has added to the world-wide fame of that picture—
"Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with its maladies has passed!… She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands."
The period from 1780 to 1837 had only two great writers of fiction,—Scott and Jane Austen; but the Victorian age saw the novel gain the ascendancy that the drama enjoyed in Elizabethan times.
In addition to the chief novelists,—Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and Kipling,—there were many other writers who produced one or more excellent works of fiction. In this class are the Brontë sisters, especially Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) and Emily Brontë (1818-1848), the daughters of a clergyman, who lived in Haworth, Yorkshire. They had genius, but they were hampered by poverty, lack of sympathy, and peculiar environment. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) is a thrilling story, which centers around the experiences of one of the great nineteenth-century heroines of fiction. This virile novel, an unusual compound of sensational romance and of intense realism, lives because the highly gifted author made it pulsate with her own life. Unlike Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë's powerful novel, Wuthering Heights (1847) is not pleasant reading. This romantic novel is really her imaginative interpretation of the Yorkshire life that she knew. If she had humanized Wuthering Heights, it could have been classed among the greatest novels of the Victorian age. She might have learned this art, had she not died at the age of thirty. "Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone," wrote Charlotte Brontë of her sister Emily.
Among the other authors who deserve mention for one or more works of fiction are: Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873), a versatile writer whose best-known work is The Last Days of Pompeii; Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), whose Cranford (1853) is an inimitable picture of mid-nineteenth century life in a small Cheshire village; Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), whose Barchester Towers is a realistic study of life in a cathedral town; Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), who stirs the blood in Westward Ho! (1855), a tale of Elizabethan seamen; Charles Reade (1814-1884), author of The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), a careful and fascinating study of fifteenth-century life; R.D. Blackmore (1825-1900), whose Lorna Doone (1869) is a thrilling North Devonshire story of life and love in the latter part of the seventeenth century; J.M. Barrie (1860- ), whose The Little Minister (1891) is a richly human, sympathetic, and humorous story, the scene of which is laid in Kirriemuir, a town about sixty miles north of Edinburgh. His Sentimental Tommy (1896), although not so widely popular, is an unusually original, semi-autobiographical story of imaginative boyhood. This entire chapter could be filled with merely the titles of Victorian novels, many of which possess some distinctive merit.
The changed character of the reading public furnished one reason for the unprecedented growth of fiction. The spread of education through public schools, newspapers, cheap magazines, and books caused a widespread habit of reading, which before this time was not common among the large numbers of the uneducated and the poor. The masses, however, did not care for uninteresting or abstruse works. The majority of books drawn from the circulating libraries were novels.
The scientific spirit of the age impelled the greatest novelists to try to paint actual life as it impressed them. Dickens chose the lower classes in London; Thackeray, the clubs and fashionable world; George Eliot, the country life near her birthplace in Warwickshire; Hardy, the people of his Wessex; Meredith, the cosmopolitan life of egotistical man; Kipling, the life of India both in jungle and camp, as well as the life of the great outer world. These writers of fiction all sought a realistic background, although some of them did not hesitate to use romantic touches to heighten the general effect. Stevenson was the chief writer of romances.
The Trend of Poetry: Minor Poets.—The Victorian age was dominated by two great poets,—Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. Browning showed the influence of science in his tendency to analyze human motives and actions. In one line of Fra Lippo Lippi, he voices the new poetic attitude toward the world:—
"To find its meaning is my meat and drink."
Browning advanced into new fields, while Tennyson was more content to make a beautiful poetic translation of much of the thought of the age. In his youth he wrote:—
"Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time."
From merely reading Tennyson's verse, one could gauge quite accurately the trend of Victorian scientific thought.
The poetry of both Browning and Tennyson is so resonant with faith that they have been called great religious teachers. Rudyard Kipling, the poet of imperialistic England, of her "far-flung battle line," attributes her "dominion over palm and pine" to faith in the "Lord God of Hosts."