CHAPTER IV.
LANDMARKS IN MODERN LITERATURE.

Most people read in such a desultory way that they never know whether they are really familiar with standard literature or not. All the books of one author are read because they are liked; and none of the books of another are known because the reader never managed to get interested, or never happened to have his or her attention called to that author’s books. A very simple working system is needed, with landmarks, as it were, set up here and there to guide the choice of books at all times and make it intelligent and just.

SHAKSPERE—1600.

English literature practically begins with Shakspere, who did his best work about 1600 A. D., three hundred years ago. Two important poets come before him—Spenser, who was still living when he began to be known as a successful dramatist, and Chaucer, who was a contemporary of Boccaccio and the first noteworthy writer in the then new English tongue, that tongue in which Norman-French had mingled with Anglo-Saxon in the common patois of the people, though pure French and Latin remained the languages of the court and of scholarship.

The language in which Chaucer wrote is now so antiquated that it is not easy for the ordinary person to read it. His “Canterbury Tales” are pleasant and cheerful, for he was an eminently sane man; but what he wrote has been often rewritten since his time till we are quite familiar with most of his stories and ideas through other channels.

Spenser, whose best work is the Faerie Queen, though he wrote so near the time of Shakspere, seems decidedly more antiquated; yet, as compared with Chaucer, he is easy reading. The Faerie Queen is one long series of beautiful and sensuous images, a mingling of fair women, brave knights, and ugly dragons which in his hands attain a dreamy charm. Says Taine, “He was pre-eminently a creator and a dreamer, and that most naturally, instinctively, and unceasingly. We might go on forever describing this inward condition of all great artists.... A character appears to them, then an action, then a landscape, then a succession of actions, characters, landscapes, producing, completing, arranging themselves before our eyes. This fount of living and changing forms is inexhaustible in Spenser. He has but to close his eyes and apparitions arise; they abound in him, crowd, overflow; in vain he pours them forth; they continually float up, more copious and more dense.” And we may add that the language in which he describes these dreams is as musical as the fancy of his imagery is rich. If one likes that sort of thing one can soon learn to read Spenser with ease and enjoyment, and in the whole range of English literature we shall find nothing so sensuously sweet as his poetry, in his own musical “Spenserian” stanza.

As we have said, for the ordinary reader English literature begins with Shakspere. He was the central figure of the brilliant era of Queen Elizabeth; but none of his fellow dramatists, not even “rare Ben Jonson” or Marlowe, are read today. For us they are dead, and Shakspere alone remains as the representative of the “Golden Age,” though perhaps we must include in it Bacon and Milton, writers who stand somewhat apart.

ROBINSON CRUSOE—1719.

The next principal epoch is just one hundred years later, when the reign of Queen Anne was adorned by the essayists, headed by Addison; by the “classic” poets, foremost among whom are Dryden and Pope; and by the first of the novel-writers, Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe. Here we find three different kinds of authors equally eminent. This “age” continued for seventy-five years,—indeed, we may say a hundred, expiring on the appearance of the poets Burns, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. It is called the “Classic Age,” because the leading writers, especially the poets (Dryden, Pope, etc.), tried to follow the classic models of Greece and Rome, and so produced work most highly polished and theoretically correct; but of course it was artificial and wanting in the instinctive and spontaneous elements of poetry as we know it in the nineteenth century poets. The term “classic,” however, does not apply to the novelists—Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and Goldsmith following Defoe and Bunyan. These novel writers were looked on as too low for critical attention; but the prose of Addison, Steel, Swift Johnson, and Goldsmith[2] was admired as prose had never been admired before, and our later age has accepted this prose as the greatest literary achievement of the eighteenth century.

The modern reader will find his chief interest in the literature of the nineteenth century. And now there are a few dates that we should remember.

BURNS—1786.

Burns prepared the way for the new poetry—a poetry simple, spontaneous, tender, and true, as the poetry of Pope was artificial, clever, and “elegant.” The Kilmarnock edition of Burns’s poems appeared in 1786. It was a country print of the immortal work of a rude country poet.

LYRICAL BALLADS—1798.

The “romantic movement” in poetry, as it was called, was really inaugurated in 1798—a date always to be remembered—by the little volume of Lyrical Ballads published jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge. This volume contained “The Rime of the Ancient Marinere” (Coleridge’s best poem) and “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey” (the best work of Wordsworth). No one paid much attention to the book, and but a limited number of copies were sold or given away. A few poets, however, read it and felt its spirit.

The first of these to take up the new poetic movement was Scott, in his Lay of the Last Minstrel, which at once became popular. For ten years Scott was the popular poet, but then he was succeeded by Byron, the poet of the dark and cynical. Close on the heels of Byron came Shelley and Keats. Last of all came Tennyson and Browning. Tennyson’s reputation was made by his two volumes of poems published in 1842; and Browning published some of his best work in the same year, though his fame did not come to him till many years later.

LAMB—1825.

So much for poetry. The prose essay lay dormant from the time of Goldsmith until Charles Lamb and De Quincey appeared. Lamb’s Essays of Elia began in the London Magazine in 1825; and that is a good date to remember as the beginning of the revival of the essay. At almost the same time we have De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater, with brilliant, impassioned prose; and during the next twenty-five years came Macaulay, the writer of oratorical prose, the splendid rhetorician and rhetorical painter of word pictures, and Carlyle, the apostle of work, the philosopher, the lecturer through the printed page, and last of all, Matthew Arnold and Ruskin, both critics—Ruskin by far the more brilliant and varied.

WAVERLEY—1814.

In the novel the first great date to remember in the nineteenth century is 1814—the year of the publication of Waverley. Between the Vicar of Wakefield and Waverley no great work of fiction appeared, though Jane Austen was writing her artistic little stories. But when Waverley was published every one felt that a new era was at hand. The book at once became immensely popular. It did for the novel what the Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion had done for poetry—it introduced the romantic era in fiction.

HUGO, DUMAS, BALZAC—1830.

Scott held the field almost entirely to himself until 1830. In that year Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, and Balzac, all three acknowledging the genius and power of Scott, appeared in France. Hugo and Dumas were professed romanticists; but Balzac was a realist, and advocated ideas that were not generally accepted by the critics till many years later, though the common people bought his books freely.

It was Dickens who really made the realistic novel popular. The date to remember is 1835, the year in which Sketches by Boz appeared and Pickwick was begun. Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s first masterpiece, was published in 1848, and in 1858 George Eliot’s Adam Bede.

Since 1860 the forward movement in English literature seems to have stopped, and such writers as George Meredith and Thomas Hardy appear rather as belated members of the older group than representatives of any new type. With these we must include Tolstoi, Turgenev, and Ibsen.

In Stevenson, Kipling, and Barrie we undoubtedly have the beginning of a new literary movement, the importance of which it is impossible yet to estimate.

AMERICAN LITERATURE.

We have purposely omitted mention of the American authors, since they do not seem to fit into the movement of literary ideas in England. They are more simply and obviously artists, giving to the people what they can that they think the people will like, and each in his own way.

IRVING—1820.

Our first writer of importance was Irving, whose Sketchbook was published in 1820. Irving has been called the “American Addison.” He might almost as well be called the American Lamb, though Lamb’s essays did not begin to appear till five years later: and he was more of a story-teller than Lamb.

James Fenimore Cooper began his literary career as a professed imitator of Scott in 1820; but he soon developed a purely American romantic novel, the novel of the Indian. He is no very great novelist; but his books are still popular.

The first American poet was William Cullen Bryant, whose best poem, Thanatopsis, was written when he was eighteen, in 1812.

Between 1830 and 1840 appeared some of the best work of Poe, Longfellow, and Emerson; but they were as utterly distinct in their spirit and purposes as if they had belonged to different ages. Poe was the poetic inventor, the discoverer of the dramatic principles of plot in story-writing, and the original literary critic; Longfellow was the sweet singer of the people, the home poet, unoriginal but beloved by all; Emerson was the philosopher and man of letters combined, the serious essay writer and interpreter to the people of the new discoveries of the great students of philosophy.

Following Longfellow were the poets Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes, all of whose best work just preceded or just followed the Civil War.

SCARLET LETTER—1851.

The one great American novelist is Hawthorne, whose Scarlet Letter appeared in 1851—his first great novel—and whose best work was all completed prior to 1861, the year of his return from his consulship at Liverpool.

Many of our political leaders have been great writers, too. The first was Benjamin Franklin, whose Poor Richard’s Almanac and Autobiography must certainly be included among the great works of American letters. Then Daniel Webster, who stands among the first of great orators in the English language, was the author (between 1830 and 1860) of a series of speeches, many of which have been accepted as an important part of our literature. And among short masterpieces there is none greater than the Gettysburg speech of Abraham Lincoln, though it would not be proper to speak of him as a man of letters.

It will be seen that practically all of our great American literature appeared between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. Since the Civil War there has been a new era; but it is not our present purpose to estimate current writers.

SUMMARY.

To summarize the whole field, English and American, we may say that the literature that we call standard began with Shakspere, three hundred years ago. The first work in that period was Spenser’s Faerie Queen, the second Shakspere’s plays. Chaucer, who wrote two hundred years earlier, we may look on as the forerunner, who prepared the way for the epoch which opened so brilliantly with Spenser and Shakspere. Passing over the names of Bacon and Milton, who belong to the seventeenth century, but stand apart from the literary movement or merely suggested what was to come long after, we find the Queen Anne essayists as the characteristic literary workers at the beginning of the eighteenth century; and on either side of them the poets of the Classic Age, of whom Pope was high priest, and the author of Robinson Crusoe, the despised teller of tales who was to be the forerunner of a literary movement greater than any we have yet seen. The Classic Age ended with Goldsmith, and the Romantic movement, first perceived in Burns, really took definite form as a movement in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. Scott was the popularizer of the Romantic movement in both verse and prose. That movement reached its climax in 1830 in Hugo and Dumas. In that year Balzac inaugurated the realistic movement, whose forerunner was Jane Austen; but it is Dickens who, beginning in 1835, really made it as popular as Scott had made the Romantic movement by the Waverley novels. And while the Romantic movement was aristocratic, the Realistic movement, going back to the despised Robinson Crusoe, was highly democratic.

In Tennyson we find a poet who made the romantic thought into works of art that the people could appreciate; and in Longfellow we see much the same thing done for the realistic poetry, though Walt Whitman, a very imperfect artist, is the high priest of the democratic idea in poetry.

If we can only fix these dates and periods and dominant eras of thought in our minds, we shall have a framework in which we can fit all the varying phases of modern English literature.

CHAPTER V.
THE BEST POETRY AND HOW TO READ IT.

The reading and enjoyment of poetry may be said to be a fine art. Certainly no one is likely to have a taste for poetry who does not cultivate it. Yet nothing is so characteristic of the person of culture, and nothing is so likely to produce true culture, as the reading and study of the best poetry.

It is probably a fact that of all the volumes of poetry in the world, not one in a hundred is read. It would be almost impossible to read through from beginning to end the complete works of any well known poet, and nothing could be more foolish than to attempt to do so. Yet the average owner of a volume of poetry cannot think of anything else to do with it except let it alone, and generally chooses the latter alternative.

A poem is not like a story. One reads a story, enjoys it, and lays it aside. Few would care to read even the best novel more than once, or at most two or three times at widely separated intervals. A poem, on the other hand, cannot be understood or truly enjoyed even by the most cultivated until it has been read several times. In fact one reads a poem for quite a different purpose from that which leads one to read a story. A poem is more like a piece of music: one reads it when one wishes to be put into the mood which the poem or the music is intended to produce. The favourite mood produces happiness, and when we wish that kind of happiness we turn to the work of art which is able to produce it in us.

Now, evidently it is not every poet whose moods are like our own. It is true that we may wish to cultivate moods not natural to us; but there is a distinct limit even to these. It follows, therefore, that there are not many poets we will wish to study, or even to read more than once; and there are but few poems even of the poets we like which will have that perfect effect on us which will make us wish to repeat it often.

If one were asked to suggest the surest way to acquire a liking for poetry and a knowledge of it, the following would probably be the method suggested:

First, find one good poem that one could really like and read more than once with pleasure. There are few of us who could not name such a poem at once; but many of us go no farther.

Having chosen the first poem, one has thereby made choice of the first poet, a poet whose moods are in accord with one’s own and whom one is likely to be able to learn to like. Unless we can start with a liking, and proceed to another liking, we are not likely to go very far.

While one likes a poet rather than poems, when one’s taste is fully trained, the most successful readers of poetry know a poet by relatively few poems. One cannot read many poems many times, and as we cannot appreciate any poetry fully that we do not read many times, we must make a selection. Indeed we shall find that there are but few poems of any poet that produce in us the desired mood. For us, all the other poems are more or less failures, at least more or less imperfect. So the first principle in the successful reading of poetry is to select most rigidly.

While the special student of poetry may read the entire work of a poet, weigh each poem, and select judiciously those which he will reread and finally make a part of his inner circle of friends, the general reader must depend upon the selection of some one else to some extent, or at least he will read first those recommended to him, afterward dipping casually into others in the hope that he will find one he will wish to study more carefully. Such a selection, and one of the best ever made, is Matthew Arnold’s selection from the poems of Wordsworth. But even Matthew Arnold does not tell you what poem of Wordsworth’s to begin with. Another admirable selection of the “best poems” is Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury.” Yet even in that most lovers of poetry will miss many that have been excluded because they are not lyric, or because they are too long, or for some other reason which is not an essential one with the reader. Other selecters of poems have not been so fortunate, and when one can have a tolerably complete edition of a poet in his library, he will wish to make his own selection with the aid of such adviser as he may choose.

One of the easiest poets to begin with is Longfellow. We have already read the Psalm of Life. Let us read it again, and yet again.

Longfellow very aptly describes himself as a poet in that beautiful song of his “The Day is Done.”

And there is no better way to enjoy poetry than to read it aloud:

Turning over the leaves of your volume of Longfellow, mark these few poems to read first, and if you find one that you like, read it again. Perhaps you will be quite familiar with some, if not most in this list; but if there are some that you do not know, but that attract you on reading once, study those till you have learned to love them; in so doing you will have made a real beginning toward the culture that comes from a systematic study of poetry: “A Psalm of Life,” “The Reaper and the Flowers,” “Footsteps of Angels,” “Flowers,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “The Skeleton in Armour,” “The Village Blacksmith,” “The Rainy Day,” “God’s Acre,” “To the River Charles,” “Maidenhood,” “Excelsior,” “The Belfry at Bruges,” “The Arsenal at Springfield,” “The Norman Baron,” “The Bridge,” “Curfew,” “The Building of the Ship,” “The Builders,” “Pegasus in Pound,” “Beware,” “The Day is Done,” “The Old Clock on the Stairs,” “The Arrow and the Song,” “My Lost Youth,” “Paul Revere’s Ride” (Tales of a Wayside Inn), “The Birds of Killingworth,” “The Bell of Atri,” “The Children’s Hour,” “Hanging of the Crane,” and “Keramos.” These are not all the good poems, and some of these are not even the best; but they are a good list to choose from. Besides these you will perhaps like to read “Hiawatha” first, then “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” and finally “Evangeline”; but these longer poems are tales rather than poems, and one does not care to return to them as to the shorter gems.

Longfellow is a “humbler poet,” as he himself has expressed it, but he is none the less a poet; and in all literature you will not find a simpler poet, nor one easier to read and like.

Next to Longfellow, perhaps the most generally liked modern poet is Tennyson. Tennyson was not a great thinker, like Browning; he was rather the interpreter of the thinker poets, for the reader who could not read Wordsworth and the rest for himself. Tennyson set out in early life to master poetic technique, and he could write more different styles than any other great modern poet. Besides, his poems often have a swing (quite unlike the sweet melody of Longfellow’s) which fascinates many. And he was peculiarly and distinctly the poet of moods. “Break, Break, Break” is little more than a haunting melody in words; and the same may be said of most of the songs in “The Princess,” beautiful as they are.

It will take much more time to learn to like Tennyson than it required for Longfellow, for Tennyson is so various, and we must come at him in so many different ways.

Perhaps we might begin with such mere pretty rhythms as “Airy, Fairy Lilian” and “Claribel”; how much better than these shall we find “The Lady of Shallott,” “Break, Break, Break,” and all the songs in “The Princess.” “The Princess” itself is rather a tedious poem, certainly one which we would not care to read twice in succession; but the songs scattered through it are as nearly perfect as that sort of poetry well could be. “The May Queen” is a pretty and fascinating simple story that may touch us more deeply than we would own; and a poem of a different kind which might appeal particularly to our mood is “Locksley Hall,” following it with “Locksley Hall Twenty Years After,” which we may not like so well. Some will like to puzzle over the philosophy of “The Two Voices,” others the pretty story of “The Miller’s Daughter” or “The Talking Oak,” or the poetic “Ulysses” and “Lotus-Eaters,” while others will wish to pass on to “Maud” with its varied rhythms. In “Maud” there is one often quoted passage which may be all that one will care to reread—the passage beginning, “Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown.” Nothing could be more perfectly and exquisitely rhythmical. And yet of all Tennyson’s poem, it is probably the shortest that we shall like best, such as “The Flower in the Crannied Wall” and “Crossing the Bar,” or such a stirring war poem as “Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Nearly all of Tennyson’s poems that he has retained in his complete works are well written and worth reading once; but if you ever come to like the higher poets you will find his best thinking expressed there better, and will turn to Tennyson more and more for the swinging music of his shorter songs, with their mood-making rhythms and haunting images.

And now let us turn to one of the great poets—to Browning. Most of us will be entirely unable to read the greater part of his poetry at all, and whether it is good or bad we must leave it to the critics to say. It will be best to buy him in a volume of selections, such as that he made himself from his own poems and published in two volumes. We may make our selection from that, though in other collections we may find other poems we shall like quite as much as any of these.

First of all, let us say that it will probably take many days to learn to like even a few of Browning’s poems; but once we have learned to like them they will be dearer to us than all the other poets. We measure his greatness by the intensity of the liking we have for what we do like.

Perhaps we have read “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix” and found nothing very wonderful in it. If we ever come to love Browning, it will be because he was himself a lover, and we shall admire him because he was a fighter against the discouragements and littlenesses of the world.

Let us begin with his love poems—such a simple poem as “A Woman’s Last Word.” We shall not understand all of it; but no matter—we shall like it none the less on that account, and we shall like it the better the more we read it. Then let us read “Love Among the Ruins.” We shall not understand all of that, either, but some we shall understand, and there will be new things to discover each time we reread, which should be many times. Possibly we shall never get tired of reading it over. And then we may read at pleasure such poems as “The Last Ride Together,” “Any Wife to Any Husband,” “In a Year,” “Misconceptions,” “Two in the Campagna,” and “Evelyn Hope.” There will be others which in time we shall be drawn to read, such as “In a Gondola” and “The Statue and the Bust”; but the important thing is to learn to love, and to like to read and reread, two or three.

And now let us turn to that other side of Browning, his philosophy as a fighter and a struggler in the world. Begin with “Rabbi Ben Ezra.” In a week, or a month, or a year, we may not have mastered it—indeed probably we shall never master it. So much the better; then we shall go on reading it and rereading it, and getting help and inspiration from it. There will be certain stanzas that will seem meant for us, and these we will mark, and in the margin we will make notes none will understand but ourselves.

Once master this one poem, and enough is accomplished—or at least the rest will take care of itself. We shall then read “Saul,” and the haunting “Abt Vogler,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” “Prospice” and “A Grammarian’s Funeral.”

There are other poems—yes, a good many others; but if you once come to love two or three, so that you like to turn to them, and find comfort in reading them, you will find the others for yourself, and if you do not find them, you will probably get all the more good out of the old ones.

We have perhaps said enough as to the manner of studying poetry, illustrating by the three poets we have considered. The reader will now be able to take up the following for himself, upon the hints given with each.

If you like Longfellow, read some of the best poems of the other New England poets—Whittier’s “Barefoot Boy,” “Barbara Frietchie,” “Maud Muller,” “Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” and “Snow-Bound”; Holmes’s “The Chambered Nautilus,” “The One Hoss Shay,” “The Last Leaf,” and “Old Ironsides”; Lowell’s “Vision of Sir Launfal,” and “The First Snow-Fall”; and Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.” “To a Water Fowl,” and “The Death of the Flowers.”

Some may trace a likeness between the three great poems of Poe, “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Bells,” and Tennyson; but Poe will be found unique in his weird mood and rhythmic use of words.

From the lyric poems of Tennyson, turn to Shelley’s “The Skylark” (one of the most beautiful poems in our language), and his “The Cloud,” and “Ode to the West Wind”; and after picking up such little gems as “Love’s Philosophy,” we may learn to like “Alastor” and “The Sensitive Plant.”

Once Byron was almost worshiped, while today we hardly do him justice. He is the poet of the “dark mood,” and we shall probably find this mood in its greatest purity in his dramatic poems “Manfred” and “Cain,” of each of which he is himself the hero. Rather than read entire such long poems as “Childe Harold,” “The Giaour,” “The Corsair,” and “Don Juan,” it will be better to read the striking passages—at least at first. We must judge from our taste for Byron how much we shall read of him.

No one should fail to read Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” If we would read further, we may perhaps choose first “St Agnes’ Eve,” “Ode to Autumn” and “Endymion.” It takes a fine poetic taste to appreciate Keats, for he is a poet “all of beauty,” rich, fragrant, sensuous beauty, such beauty as we shall find nowhere else; but his thoughts and emotions of love and conquest over life are not very great.

Next to Browning, perhaps the greatest poet of the nineteenth century is Wordsworth. He is the very opposite of Browning standing to Nature as Browning does to humanity. We shall find his creed stated in a poem which is one of the greatest in the English language, called simply “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey”; and much the same thought we shall find expressed in more lyric form in his famous “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” Unquestionably the best of Wordsworth is to be found in Matthew Arnold’s selections in the “Golden Treasury” series, and this is better to possess than the bulky complete works, much of which we shall find exceedingly dull and almost fatal to our liking for any poetry whatever. But there are also many beautiful simple poems of Wordsworth’s which we should easily learn to like, among them, “We Are Seven,” “Lucy Gray,” “She Was a Phantom of Delight,” “Three Years She Grew,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (Daffodils), and many of his sonnets, such as that to “Milton,” “On Westminster Bridge,” “To the River Duddon—Afterthought,” “The World Is too Much With Us,” etc.

Of the older poets, Burns stands by himself, one of the most popular of all poets who wrote in the English language. Best of all his poems are his simple love songs, such as “My Luve is Like the Red, Red Rose,” “Jean,” “Highland Mary,” and “To Mary in Heaven.” Who can forget “Bannockburn,” “Ye Banks and Braes of Bonnie Doon,” and “John Anderson my Jo?” “The Man’s the Gowd for a’ That,” and that beautiful little poem, “To a Mouse,” are unique, because they show us the simple heart of a man in all its struggling simplicity. Some, too, will like to read and reread “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” In the reading of Burns one can hardly go wrong; yet after all there is much even in Burns that we might well spare, and many and many a line of his poetry has no such charm as the poems we have mentioned; yet the reader who has learned to like these will, on reading any other poem, know and discover the difference almost at the first line.

If one wishes to find in poetry comfort for a weary mood, one will not look for it in such poets as Pope and Dryden, with their clever lines. Pope has more quotable lines than almost any other poet except Shakspere; and his “Essay on Man” is interesting, and perhaps we may even find some charm in “The Rape of the Lock”; but on the whole one will miss little by reading him in a book of quotations.

Milton is different. He is the one noble and lofty poet of the English language. We shall not find any modern philosophy in him; but what is finer in its imagery and rhythm than his “Hymn to the Nativity”! And such lyrical poems as “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” will be found to possess an easy and surprising charm. “Paradise Lost” we should never read more than a page or two at a time, for it is too great, too lofty for the common mind to bear it long; but who would miss the pleasure of reading this single page or two once a month or once a year?

There are certain single poems which no student of poetry will fail to read and reread as he does the poems of the great poets whom we study as men as well as the author of certain poems. One of these is Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” another is Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” and his “Christabel”; Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs” and the “Song of the Shirt”; Wolfe’s “Burial of Sir John Moore”; Cowper’s “Alexander Selkirk”; Campbell’s “Hohenlinden”; and such bits as Ben Jonson’s “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes,” and Goldsmith’s “When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly.”

There are other poems by less known poets, which only the individual reader will find and make his own. For myself, I know no poems I like better to read than Matthew Arnold’s “Tristram and Iseult,” “Switzerland,” and “Dover Beach”; while many admire poems by Emerson and George Eliot and Dickens in the same way, though we are not accustomed to think of these writers as among the great poets. Though Edward FitzGerald’s “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” is a translation, it is one of the most popular poems in the English language, and considered also one of the greatest.

Note: Many of the poems here mentioned may be found in “A Selection from the Great English Poets,” edited by Sherwin Cody.

CHAPTER VI.
HOW TO STUDY SHAKSPERE.

The best way to study Shakspere is to go to see his plays at the theatre, especially when they are presented as Edwin Booth or Henry Irving have played them. What a change from the way in which they were presented in Shakspere’s own time! Then the scenery was so crude that they had to put out a sign on the stage saying, “This is a Forest,” etc. And all the women’s parts were played by boys or young men. There were no Mrs. Siddonses or Ellen Terrys in those days. It is said that Beethoven himself was not a very good piano player, and probably never heard some of his most beautiful sonatas played as Paderewski plays them today. Shakspere probably never saw his plays acted so well as they have been acted many times since his day.

The first great actor to make Shakspere classic was David Garrick, a friend of Sam Johnson. He was graceful, light, airy, and gay, yet made an instant success by the naturalness with which he played Richard III, and then Lear, and then Macbeth. Garrick was not an ideal Hamlet, but he gave good support to the famous Peg Woffington, who made her fame in Ophelia on the same stage with Garrick. The most seductive of Woffington’s characters was Rosalind in As You Like It, and she played Portia in the Merchant of Venice with only less charm.

The stage mantle of Garrick fell on John Philip Kemble, who brought to Shakspere’s plays accurate and truthful scenery and costumes. Hamlet was his favourite part—and as he was a meditative and scholarly rather than a fiery actor, he made a deep impression with it. Sarah Siddons was his sister. She was called the Queen of Tragedy, and was indeed an ideal Roman matron in her impassioned acting of great parts, coupled with a dignified, almost commonplace everyday life. In a famous picture Sir Joshua Reynolds painted her as the tragic muse. She played Lady Macbeth as probably no one else has ever played it, indeed it is said when she was studying the part she became so frightened at her own impersonation that she rushed up stairs and jumped into bed with her clothes on. In Queen Katharine (Henry VIII), she played the part so realistically that the Surveyor, to whom she had said, “You were the Duke’s Surveyor, and lost your office on complaint of the tenants,” came off the stage perspiring with emotion and said, “That woman plays as if the thing were in earnest. She looked me so through and through with her black eyes that I would not for the world meet her on the stage again!”

Edmund Kean was a little man, but he played Shylock in the Merchant of Venice and Richard III as they had never been played before. Iago, too, was a famous character of his. He was admired by the aged widow of David Garrick, who called him David’s successor, and he was praised by Byron.

Each age seems to have had its actor. Garrick was Johnson’s friend. Kean belonged to Byron’s day, and the actor of Dickens’s time was Macready. The great American actor was Edwin Booth, who made us familiar with the whole line of Shaksperean tragic characters during nearly the whole of the last half of the nineteenth century. Who that has seen him slip on to the stage as the hunchback Richard III, or walk in the calm dignity of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, attired all in black velvet, can ever imagine those characters in any other personation!

The great tragedies seem to be the plays in which great actors have become most famous; but no play of Shakspere’s, not even the Merchant of Venice, has been more popular than Romeo and Juliet. In the time of Garrick a certain Barry Spanger was said to be the ideal Romeo. Charles Kemble, son of Philip, played it with great success. And his daughter Fanny Kemble was brought out as Juliet, much against her wish, to save her father’s fortunes. She had had no training for the stage; but the play ran for one hundred and twenty nights with the greatest success.

There have been other great actors and actresses, all of whom (if English) have been famous in Shaksperean roles—Adelaide Neilson, Charlotte Cushman, and the American Edwin Forrest—and even many foreigners have tried Shakspere. Salvini was the greatest of Othellos, and Adelaide Ristori was famous as Lady Macbeth. Even Bernhardt has taken the part of Hamlet. In our own time Henry Irving and Ellen Terry have been the best known performers of Shakspere’s characters; but it would seem that all talented actors and actresses sooner or later test their greatness by attempting these roles.

The true way to study Shakspere is by becoming fond of his characters; and this can be done most successfully only by seeing them on the stage. But we can learn to picture in our minds the parts they played in the great human drama, fashioning from imagination the scenes and personalities.

Children should be introduced to Shakspere in the delightful “Tales from Shakspere” by Charles and Mary Lamb. The first thing is to get the stories and the great characters, and the poetic antique language of Shakspere himself may make this a little difficult at first.

Then we may read such a book as Mrs. Jameson’s “Heroines of Shakspere,” in which we find the women of Shakspere’s plays described in simple modern language.

Then let us read the plays themselves, without thought of notes or comments, for the mere human interest of the story and the characters.

Probably the best play to begin with is the Merchant of Venice. Read it rapidly, passing lightly over the more commonplace portions. First you will come to the scene at Portia’s house, when the wooers are opening the caskets in the hope that they may be lucky enough to win the wealthy lady. But Portia really loves Bassanio and wants him to choose aright, as he does, and she is charmingly happy because he is successful.

But the great scene of the play is in the fourth act, when Shylock brings Antonio before the court, demanding his pound of flesh. Portia, disguised as a lawyer, appears to save his life. How graciously she does it! How much a man and woman too she is! How beautiful her speech about mercy, “dropping as the rain from heaven”!

Once having read the play through like this, for the story and the characters, lay it aside and at some future time read it again more thoroughly, stopping to enjoy Launcelot Gobbo, the clown, and the talkative Gratiano.

So with each rereading the interest in the play will grow, till you have become very fond not only of Portia and her friends, but of Shakspere, too.

Next to the Merchant of Venice the most popular of Shakspere’s plays is Romeo and Juliet. In this the balcony scene is the most famous, in which Romeo comes to woo Juliet; but among the characters the most interesting will perhaps be Mercutio, Romeo’s talkative and jolly friend, and Juliet’s queer old nurse.

Of the tragedies, Hamlet is undoubtedly the greatest, but it is the hardest to read, and must be read many times to be fully appreciated. We are struck in the very first scene by the personality of the ghost, and of Hamlet’s friend, Horatio, that quiet, calm gentleman who looks sympathetically on throughout the play, and lives to tell the story of Hamlet’s infirm will. Polonius is a conventional old fool, but full of worldly wisdom, and the father of the brave Laertes and the sweet and pathetic Ophelia. How unhappy a girl she is! She is not very strong, not very brave; but we are sorry indeed for her, and in mere reading really shed tears when she sings her sweetly crazy songs. How strange and interesting, too, is Hamlet’s mother, and his scene with her toward the end of the play! And who can forget the conversation with the grave-diggers! Throughout we feel the atmosphere of philosophy and thought. Hamlet is indeed a very great and interesting play, but one requiring much time and leisurely thought. It is impossible to hurry in reading Hamlet.

Next in greatness to Hamlet is, perhaps, Lear. In the very first act we are struck with the beautiful nature of Cordelia, though she utters very few words. She does not appear again until the end; yet the poor interesting Fool is always talking about her to Lear. We detest the two ungrateful daughters, Goneril and Regan, and sympathize with Edgar, the outcast son of Gloucester. How strange it seems that this fool, this insane old man, this homeless son pretending to be crazy, and this absent daughter, should hold our interest so perfectly!

More romantic, more polished, more correct in stage-craft, so that many call it Shakspere’s greatest play, is Othello. Yet we have no such love for the beautiful Desdemona as we had for Cordelia, or Juliet, or Portia. Iago is a masterpiece of scheming treachery, and we are somewhat sorry for the handsome and abused Moor Othello; but we can never like him quite as well as some of the others.

Macbeth is another great tragedy, and Lady Macbeth is a marvellous portrayal of a bad woman. We are interested in the witches and their prophecies, and we know how true is Macbeth’s ambition, and the greater ambition of his wife who drives him on. But in Macbeth there is no one to love, as there is in others of the plays.

In Julius Caesar it is the patriotic fervour of Brutus, mistaken though it may be, that interests us most, though we like to declaim the speech of Antony at Caesar’s funeral.

Antony and Cleopatra makes an excellent play to read, for Cleopatra is so well known as a character that we already have a point of familiarity to start with. We feel that we are reading history, and these great Roman plays of Shakspere’s are probably the best history we shall ever get. With Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra we should also include Coriolanus, to be studied third in the series.

If we do not care for tragedy we shall have passed from Romeo and Juliet or the Merchant of Venice to As You Like It, one of the best of Shakspere’s lighter comedies. It is less deep, but not less charming than the heavier plays. The delightful Rosalind, disguised as a young man in the woods, the melancholy Jaques, and the amusing clown Touchstone, create an atmosphere of refinement which we will find nowhere else.

I myself like Much Ado About Nothing as well as any of the comedies. It tells the story of Benedick and Beatrice, who were never going to marry, they were such wits both of them! Yet they were tricked into it, and apparently enjoyed it after all. Where else will you find a woman joker?

The Taming of the Shrew is an interesting play if you admire a wilful, stubborn, pretty woman such as Kate was, and would like to know how her husband brought her into charming subjection. It is a very pretty play, and not less interesting for being somewhat out of date among our modern ideas of women.

But of all Shakspere’s comic characters, none is more original or famous than Falstaff. We meet him first in Henry V, perhaps the best of Shakspere’s historical plays. He is a wit, a coward, and a blow-hard, but Shakspere never makes him overdo any of these traits, and so we cannot but find him intensely amusing. He reappears in the Merry Wives of Windsor, which Shakspere is said to have written in order to please Queen Elizabeth.

The most intensely dramatic of the histories, and the first to read is Richard III. Richard is a scheming, daring fellow; and our love for the little princes put to death in the tower gives us a point of affection. Besides, this is the drama all the great tragic actors have been especially fond of playing.

Next to Richard III is Henry VIII, which is said to be only partly Shakspere’s. In it is Henry’s great minister Wolsey, whose fall from power we witness as an event more tragic than death.

Last of all let us read the Tempest, that romantic play which Shakspere probably wrote at the end of his career, as a sort of calm retrospect; for we may think of Prospero as Shakspere himself.

There are other good plays of Shakspere’s; but if we have not time to read all, these are the best to begin with.

The two poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, are not the best of reading; but the sonnets are the very highest form of lyric poetry. They are entirely different from the plays, and those who like the plays often do not care at all for the sonnets, while many not familiar with the plays read the sonnets with admiration. Many believe they tell Shakspere’s own story of love for a man friend, and, in the last division from No. 126 on, for a dark woman. The sonnets to the man are the better, and if one reads them over a few times and feels the poet’s reflection on change, time, and human love, he will certainly not doubt that here we really do come face to face with Shakspere in his own proper character. These sonnets help us to a knowledge of the man and a personal liking for him such as we get for his characters when we read his plays.

CHAPTER VII.
THE BEST ENGLISH ESSAYS.

Many people fancy that essays are not popular or easy reading; but when Addison published his Spectator, this little sheet of essays came out every morning, as a daily paper, and was immensely successful. Today there are not many standard novels that sell better than Lamb’s Essays. Macaulay was read in his day from one end of the English-speaking world to the other, and so was Carlyle. Ruskin, who was essentially an essayist, though of a peculiar type, received a hundred thousand dollars a year as profits on his books, which he published himself through George Allen, a printer in a small country town. And in our own country Emerson is a sort of bible to many people.

Those who learn to like essays become very fond of them, and it is only to people who never have read them much that they seem dry. The fact is, there are only certain writers and certain of their works that we shall care for.

If you like epigram, one of the best books to read is Bacon’s Essays. Each essay is very short; the subjects are of everyday interest; and the sentences are short and sharp. One does not care to read much of such a book at a time—only a few pages. But Bacon’s Essays is a book to own and take up for half an hour now and then through a number of years. We read these essays much as we do favourite poems.

Bacon belongs to the time of Shakspere, and his language is a little antiquated. Much less so is that of Addison, who wrote over a hundred years later. There is a certain story-like character in his essays that makes them especially interesting. He tells us about Will Honeycomb and Sir Roger de Coverley. Sir Roger, of whom he writes in a series of essays, is especially interesting. Then Addison has humorous little papers on Advice in Love, the art of flirting the fan, etc., etc.

Swift, who wrote about the same time as Addison, is still more of a story teller. Gulliver’s Travels is often classed as a novel, though as a matter of fact it was written as a satirical essay on the foibles of England in Swift’s day. Next to Gulliver’s Travels we are likely to be most interested in A Tale of a Tub, and The Battle of the Books, which are more regular essays than Gulliver.

But the greatest of all the old essayists is Lamb. His most famous essay is that On Roast Pig, in which he tells the story of the origin of roast pig as a dish. Only less interesting is Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist, and the essay on Poor Relations.

The charm of Lamb is his humour, his good nature, his kindly heart, his quaint way of saying things. We learn to love him. No one has ever equalled him or imitated him. And when we have read his essays, we want to read his life—how he gave up the woman he loved to care for his poor sister who had killed her mother in a fit of insanity and had often to go to the asylum through all her life. Lamb was fond of his glass, and fond of the city, and fond of his friends. When we know him we must love him, and nothing else matters.

If we have a taste for the curious and lofty in description, we shall like De Quincey, the opium-eater. In the Confessions of an English Opium Eater we have an account of himself and his opium-eating, which is rather dry; but his wonderful dreams fascinate us. These we find at their best in his masterpieces Suspiria de Profundis and The English Stage Coach, which are indeed the height of impassioned prose, lofty poetry without meter, splendid dreams and fancies.

De Quincey wrote a great deal, and much that is merely dry and scholarly. But often he has something quaint and curious, such as his “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” and wonderful stories such as the Flight of the Tartars and the Spanish Nun.

Carlyle wrote in such a jagged, queer, hard style that nowadays few people can get used to a book like Sartor Resartus. The philosophy of Sartor will be found in a delightfully simple essay entitled Characteristics, the point of view in which is deeply interesting. Another simple and readable essay is that on Burns, and the essay on Goethe is worth reading, and that on Jean Paul Richter. Perhaps when one gets used to him one will wish to read Heroes and Hero-Worship, The French Revolution (or a part of it), and last of all that queer philosophy of clothes, Sartor Resartus.

If one cares for philosophy he should certainly read Emerson’s original essays, beginning with those on Compensation, Self-Reliance, Love, the Over-Soul, Friendship, Circles, and Nature.

Emerson’s essays have no beginning or end, and one might as well begin in the middle as anywhere else. He does simply one thing and that is interpret man in the light of modern transcendental philosophy. He had caught the great philosophic idea that God, man, and nature are but one substance, governed by the same laws, reaching out to infinity, and kin to everything within the bounds of infinity. Every common thing in life he views again from this new point of view; and the revelation is wonderful. Emerson does not discuss this philosophy or tell us anything about it; but he makes us see the whole world in the transforming light of it.

In his two original volumes of essays he does this supremely well; and then in many later volumes he does it over and over. Such volumes, good in their way but less original than the first, are Representative Men, Society and Solitude, and Conduct of Life.

Macaulay is not read nearly as much nowadays as he was in his own time. His style is oratorical, and highflown oratory, especially in essays, is not popular today. For all that, one cannot well afford to miss reading the famous descriptive essays on the Trial of Warren Hastings, Lord Clive, Milton (in which will be found the famous description of the Puritans), and the essay on History. There are two first rate essays on Samuel Johnson, the best one being a review of Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, beginning at the point at which Macaulay finishes with Croker and takes up Boswell. Another good essay is that on Frances Burney or Madame D’Arblay. Those who have time will even wish to read Macaulay’s History of England, with its wonderful and gorgeous descriptions, that make the scene live before the eyes.

Of splendid modern prose writers, Ruskin is one of the greatest. It takes a little effort and a little choosing to learn to like him; but those who will take the pains to study him will be richly rewarded.

About the simplest thing he wrote was Ethics of the Dust, a series of conversations with some young girls about nature and everyday life. Children of ten are said to have read this book and liked it; yet it is by no means childish, and anyone might enjoy it.

Next in general interest and simplicity is Sesame and Lilies—a queer title. The first chapter is “Of King’s Treasuries”—meaning books; and the second “Of Queens’ Gardens,” meaning the dominion over nature and society which culture gives a woman. This is one of the very best books ever written on How and What to Read, though written in a very symbolic style that will require more than one reading fully to understand it.

Another book of quite a different kind is called in Ruskin’s odd fashion Crown of Wild Olives. It is a series of essays on work and the things in life worth working for.

These three books are short, and perhaps at first many will not like them very much; but liking will grow with time.

There is a book, however, that will well repay getting and reading in part, from time to time, for many years. That is Modern Painters. It is in four large volumes, and from the title one might suppose it was a technical history of modern painting. This is not the fact, however. It is a popular study of the noblest element in art, and throughout the four volumes one will find marvellous pictures of word-painting, such as Ruskin’s description of Turner’s Slave Ship, when he is discussing sea-painting. He talks of art and nature, always looking at art from the point of view of nature; and the volumes are so well divided into chapters and sections, each with its title and sub-title, that one can pick out an interesting subject here, and another there. It will be of especial interest and value to any one who cares at all about art. Ruskin wrote the first volume of this work before he was twenty-four, and it is perhaps the most brilliant thing he ever did. It is full of life and colour and splendid word-painting.

The reader who believes in culture and wishes to cultivate the esthetic and refined should certainly read Matthew Arnold’s book Culture and Anarchy. It requires a close and logical mind to appreciate and understand him, and to read and like him is not easy, but a liking for his chapter on Sweetness and Light is an excellent test of one’s real success in the cultivation of culture.

It will be seen that there are good essays of many types. There is the epigrammatic discussion of everyday matters, such as we find in Bacon, and in quite a different way in Emerson; and there is the quaint and playful humour of Addison and Lamb; there is the splendid rhetoric of De Quincey and of Macaulay, and the splendid word-painting of Ruskin; there is the preaching of Carlyle, and the literary lecturing of Matthew Arnold. If we cannot know all, we must choose our bent and follow the lines we like best.

The most popular form of the essay is that of Addison and Lamb, the quaint, amusing, human badinage on familiar topics, full of love, and full of sense. Along this line there are a few good modern books—Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Ik Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor, Charles Dudley Warner’s Backlog Studies, and Barrie’s My Lady Nicotine and When a Man’s Single.[3]

The essay can never be read in a hurry, nor by one who feels himself rushed. The great essayists wrote in the most leisurely manner possible, a very little at a time, and only when in precisely the right mood. In the same way must they be read—alone, before an open fire, of a long winter evening. The woman who delights in these things will sit curled up in a great easychair, her head tipped against the back, the light well shaded over her shoulder. The man will, if he is a smoker, inevitably want his pipe. No modern cigar will do, and the vulgarity of chewing is utterly inconsistent with a taste for reading essays. It is the refined, the imaginative, and the dreamy who will especially delight in this form of literature.

Note: Most of the essays mentioned in this chapter will be found in a volume entitled “The Best English Essays,” edited by Sherwin Cody.