liiiiiiijli m.i ii m mm Mi II EX BIBLIOTHECA FRANCES A. YATES jfiret 3600^6 of Xiterature A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY M.A. AND HON'. D.LITT., OXON. ; HON. LL.D., ABERD. ; HON. D.LITT., DURH. FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY HON, FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD PRESIDENT (1909) OF THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON I 9 I 4 COPYRIGHT PREFACE This little book is not a mere abridgment of any History or Histories of the subject which the author has already written. He has endeavoured to utilise in it, not merely the experience thus gained, and the reading of more than half a century, but also the knowledge, of what is likely to be required by its possible users, furnished by practice long ago as a schoolmaster both in England and in Scotland, and more recently as a Professor of the matter and an Examiner in many different Universities. No information that the book gives is intended to supersede, and all information that it gives is intended to encourage and lead up to, the reading of the literature itself. For an Introduction of this sort, rhetorical praises of that literature, generally or as concerns in- dividuals, elaborate discussions of disputed points, attempts to make an interesting " story/' and other things of the kind (even perhaps those efforts to intro- duce politics, social matters, etc., which have recently been so popular), are not really so important as the drawing in outlines, as clear and strong as possible, of the actual progress and development of the actual literature as such. A conception of this is the founda- tion of all knowledge on the subject : it can be impressed, not indeed upon mere children, but as soon as some V A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE knowledge of individual authors like Scott and Shake- speare, and collections like The Golden Treasury, has been secured ; and experience shows that it is very com- monly wanting even at an advanced school stage and later. This little book is an endeavour to supply it. I would, without presuming to dictate," invite special attention, from teachers and students alike, to the Contents and the appended Conspectus and Glossary. They may look like mere obligatory mechanical furniture: if attended to, they will, I think, prevent some short- comings which are too often painfully obvious. So far as Literary History is useful at all, as an assistance to actual reading and as (though never a substitute for it) a stop-gap for that which cannot be at the time achieved, it can only perform its duty by supplying that mind- map of the general subject on which something has been said above. Attention to names and dates may be overdone, and over-attention to them may disgust some very promising pupils ; but neglect of them is fatal. Of attention to technical details of diction and versifica- tion exactly the same may be said, and unless this atten- tion to both matters is established early it is not often established at all. In the almost life-long experience above referred to, -I have found, not merely by raw schoolboys, but by candidates for the highest Govern- ment and University examinations, Layamon confused with Lydgate, Dryden put before Jonson, a passage of obviously Spenserian diction bestowed upon Chaucer, and a piece of as obviously Spenserian stanza attributed to Milton. Finally, I have aimed at being as much as possible understandable, without " writing down/' and as little as possible quotable. Nothing is more exasperating to PREFACE vii examiners, and nothing more deleterious to students, than the repetition of well-sounding phrases obviously got by rote, and connoting no knowledge in the writer. For my own part I always tell my students that if, in examinations, they repeat my lecture- or book-phrases I shall ''mark them down/' All I wish to do, and all I pretend to do, is to teach them how to read. And all this book attempts is to be a gradus ad lectionem, in which I have tried to give as much as possible of what ought to be learnt, nothing, so far as I could manage it, that will have to be unlearnt, and especially nothing of the windy talk which is bad everywhere, and nowhere worse than here.^ GEORGE SAINTSBURY. Edinburgh, Candlemas 1914- 1 I have to acknowledge much valuable help from Professors Ker and Gregory Smith and from my colleague Mr. A. Blyth Webster. CONTENTS CHAPTER I OLD ENGLISH OR ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE General scope of chapter — A.S. verse — Its characteristics and relation to modern poetry — Examples : Beowulf — Stories in fragment : Widsith, etc. — Deor : its importance — Miscel- laneous poems : Profane and Sacred — Caedmon — Genesis and Exodus — " Cynewulf *' — Saints' Lives — Miscellaneous pieces — General features of A.S. poetry — A.S. prose — Chronicle, Apollonius, Works of Alfred and ^^ilfric, etc. — Different styles in prose — An English library c. a.d. 1066 . CHAPTER II MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE, A.D. I2OO-I4OO Circumstances of the change from Old to Middle English — Length of the transition — Results of it about a.d. 1200 — Layamon — The Ormulum — The Moral Ode — The Ancren Riwle — Literature from 1200 to 1250 — The new Genesis and Exodus, The Owl and the Nightingale, etc. — Real interest in early M.E. literature — Fresh beginning after apparent lull about 1298 — Robert of Gloucester and verse-history — " Romance," its origin and subject — Its literary character — EngUsh examples — The alliterative revival — Lyric — Ham- pole — The fourteenth century — Prose and drama — The appearance of great individual writers — Langland — ^Ihe Vision of Piers Plowman — Gower — The Confessio Amantis — Chaucer — His general character and earher work — The Canterbury Tales — Great advance of literary character in them — Account of this in detail — Chaucer's diction — His versification — His prose — The Library in 1400 LX A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER III BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER PAGE Bad reputation of the fifteenth century, explicable but mistaken — Confusions and difficulties of the time — The English " Chaucerians " : Lydgate and Occleve — Hawes, Skelton, and Barclay — Ballads, carols, etc. — Early and Middle Scots literature : Barbour, etc. — James L and others — Henryson and Dunbar — Douglas and Lyndsay — Alexander Scott and Montgomerie — The drama : Mystery and Miracle plays — Moralities — Interludes — Newer poetry : Wyatt and Surrey — Importance of the sonnet, and of Surrey's blank verse — Poets between Surrey and Spenser : Gascoigne — Importance and value of this transition period — Its prose — Malory and the Morte d' Arthur — The Paston Letters, Fisher, Berners, etc. — Ascham and his friends — The Library about 1577 . 40 CHAPTER IV THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD Different senses of " EUzabethan " — The starting-point about 1580 — Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar — Lyly's Euphues — The new drama — Gorboduc, etc. — The University Wits " : Peele and others — Marlowe — Character and causes of Eliza- bethan greatness — Conditions of its drama — Stages of this — Shakespeare's nearest contemporaries — Shakespeare him- self : doubts about him — The Shakespearian quality — Non-dramatic poetry — The Faerie Queene — Lyric poetry — Sonnets — Historical and satiric poems — Prose — Hooker, Bacon's Essays, the Arcadia, and Raleigh — " Conceit " — The pamphlet — Short stories — Criticism — Other work : Translation — The Library c. 1600 .... 65 CHAPTER V JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LITERATURE The later stages of the larger " Elizabethan " time — Ben Jonson — Beaumont and Fletcher — Approach of decadence — Bad blank verse, etc., of Davenant and others — Massinger, Ford, and Shirley — Non-dramatic poetry — Drayton, Daniel, Fair- CONTENTS xi fax — W. Browne, Wither, and the " Heroic " Romancers — Sylvester — Lyric — Donne and Metaphysical " poetry — Cowley, Carew, Herrick, and Waller — Crashaw, Herbert, and Vaughan — Suckling, Lovelace, and others — Milton — His minor poems — Paradise Lost, etc. — Importance of his verse — Peculiar eminence of prose at this time — Its character — Burton — Fuller — Milton — Taylor — Sir Thomas Browne — Hobbes and Clarendon — The Authorised Version of the Bible — Weak points in Elizabethan literature — The change to which they led — The Library a little before 1660 . 100 CHAPTER VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD, 1660-1798 Peculiar character of the change at the Restoration — Names given to it — Its causes, and their workings — The first group of Restoration writers — Dryden, his verse — His dramas — His prose — His cardinal importance — Defects and merits of the new dispensation — Other poets and poems : Hudibras — Other dramatists : " Restoration " comedy — Tragedy : Otway and Lee — Prose contemporaries of Dryden : Temple and others — Degradation of the plain style — The rescue by Addison, Steele, and Swift — Their action in the periodical — L'Estrange and Defoe, The Taller, The Spectator, etc. — Swift's other works — Effects of the Addisonian periodical — The second stage of Augustan poetry : Pope — His curious imitableness — Other poets : Prior, Gay, Young, etc., and others still, of a different school — Thomson and blank verse — Lighter verse — Gray, Collins, Shenstone, etc. — Symptoms of change about 1760 : Ossian, Percy's Reliqiies, etc. — The growth of the novel — Defoe again — Swift again — The com- plete novel : Richardson — Fielding — Smollett, and Sterne — Great outburst of minor novel-writing — Johnson — His society : Goldsmith and others— The heralds of a new change : Cowper, Crabbe, Burns, and Blake— The Library a Uttle before 1800 .... • 129 CHAPTER VII THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD Early Nineteenth- century Literature, 1 798-1 834 Causes and character of the Romantic revival — Chief agencies and agents in it — The Lyrical Ballads : Coleridge — His xii A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE paramount and pervading influence — The principles of the Lyrical Ballads, and of Coleridge's other work — Wordsworth — Scott — Southey — Campbell — Moore — Landor — Byron — Shelley and Keats— Shelley — Keats — Their joint though various influence, and its character — The novel : Transition writers — Scott — Miss Austen — Significance of their work — Criticism : extensive cultivation of it — Hazlitt — Lamb — Leigh Hunt — Historians, their number and importance — The characteristics of nineteenth-century belles lettres — Theology, philosophy, science — Influence of the periodical in all departments — Reasons for division at this point — The reaUty of Victorian literature — The nineteenth-century Library ........ 173 CHAPTER VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE Poetry about 1830 — Transition poets — Tennyson up to 1842 — Browning — Later work of both — Their joint and separate characteristics in relation to their own time and others — Younger poets : Matthew Arnold — The " Spasmodics " — The " Pre-Raphaelite " poets — Character and peculiarities, important instances, and long-continued influence of their work — Progress of the novel : miscellaneous novelists, 1827-40 — Dickens : his comparative isolation — Thackeray : his influence on the novel generally— Other novelists of 1845-70 — TroUope, George Eliot," the Brontes, Reade, Kingsley — Their successors — George Meredith — R. L. Stevenson — Importance of style in both of these, and in the latest nineteenth century generally — Its working in depart- ments outside fiction — The first stage : De Quincey and Landor — Macaulay — Carlyle — Ruskin — Newman, Arnold, and others — Swinburne (in prose), Morris, and Pater . 204 ABSTRACT AxND CHRONOLOGICAL CONSPECTUS . 238 GLOSSARY OF TECHNICAL TERMS Alexandrine — Allegory — AlUteration — Anapaest — Anglo-Saxon — Aureate — Ballad — Belles- Lettres — Blank Verse — Burden — Biurlesque — Caesura — Carol — Chorus — Classic and Romantic — Comedy — Dactyl — Distich — Doggerel — Eclogue — Elegy — Elision — Epic and Romance — Epode — Equiva- lence — Essay — Farce — Feminine — Fif teener — Foot — Four- CONTENTS xiii teener — Heroic — Hexameter and Pentameter — Homily — Humour — " Humours *' — Iambic — Interlude — Lyric — Maga- zine and Review — Masque — Measure — Melodrama — Metre — Middle English — Octave — Ode — Old English — Opera — Pam- phlet — Parody — Pastoral — Pause — Picaresque — Pindaric — Poetical Justice — Poulter's Measure — Quatrain — Redun- dance — Refrain — Renaissance — Rhetoric — Rhyme — Rhyme Royal — Rhythm — Romance — Romantic — Satire — Sestet — Spondee — Sonnet — Stave — Strophe and Antistrophe — Style — Substitution — Terza Rima — Tragedy — Tragi - comedy — Triolet — Triplet — Trochee — Unity and Unities — Verse Paragraph — Wit . . . . . .257 INDEX 273 CONTRACTIONS USED IN TEXT^ A. S. = Anglo-Saxon = Old English. M.E. = Middle English. MS. = Manuscript. MSS. = Manuscripts. O.E. =01d English = Anglo-Saxon. Short Initial and other Contractions. — = *'born"; c — circa, **about"; ^/. = **died"; z^. i^. various dates"; flourished. " *'?-' after a date means that there is no certain information on the subject, but that the year given is the most probable. 1 It seemed better to use these than to expand them, because they are usual else- where, and should become familiar as early as possible. Further explanations of some (as well as, generally speaking, of all words put in inverted commas in text) will be found in the Glossary. CHAPTER I OLD ENGLISH OR ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE General scope of chapter— A.S. verse — Its characteristics and relation to modern poetry — Examples : Beowulf — Stories in fragment : Widsith, etc. — Deor : its importance — Miscellaneous poems : Profane and Sacred — Cadmon — Genesis and Exodus — " Cyne- wulf " — Saints* Lives — Miscellaneous pieces — General features of A.S. poetry — A.S. prose — Chronicle, Apollonius, Works of Alfred and iElfric, etc. — Different styles in prose — An English library c. A.D. 1066. The stock of Old English or Anglo-Saxon literature General which we possess is not large, nor is it extremely varied ; ^^^p^^^^^ but it is both large enough and varied enough to give us, in all reasonable probability, a fair proportional repre- sentation of that literature in its entirety. The period of its production is a very long one — certainly one of 500 years from c. a.d. 500 to c. 1000, with a few outlying 'examples later than the more modern date, and an unknown extension of time backwards from the more ancient. It is divided, hke all other literatures, into verse and prose ; and, as in almost all others, the verse appears to be earlier than the prose, though the prose is unusually early. This verse, however, of which we possess enough to A.s. verse, fill two or three pretty large volumes, is distinguished from that of almost all other literatures by being written IE I B A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. in one metre, or substitute for metre,^ which is itself almost peculiar to the group of Teutonic languages, of which A.S. is one. The lines or staves, which are not in the original MSS. divided from each other, consist of two halves, with a strong division (marked in some MSS. themselves) between them. In each of these halves there is a certain number of obviously accented syllables (usually two in the first, and at least one in the second) which are also alliterated (that is to say, they begin with the same consonant, or with a vowel). Its char- Proper study of this verse, as soon as there is time anci^^^^^^^ and opportunity, is not only desirable but almost relation to necessary for complete comprehension of later English modem poetry. It is quite true that the exact structure of it poetry. cannot be copied in present-day English, for reasons which will be unfolded later. Attempts to do so are either ugly, monotonous, and unsatisfactory to the modern English ear, or else (such as, for instance, some of Charles Kingsley's verses) agreeable but really quite different from the original cadence and construction.^ But this matters little. What matters very much is that we can find, in this verse, things not only still noticeable in English poetry but positively character- istic and distinctive of it. The great prominence of accent is one of these. It is very unsafe to say, as is so often said, that the structure of English verse during modem times depends wholly upon accent. It does not ; but accent is, beyond all doubt, the main, though not the only, factor in qualifying English words for their position in the verse or line. Alliteration, again, has nothing now to do with the structure of our verse ; but ^ "Metre" being taken as = " regularised rhythm" (see Glossary). There is well-marked rhythm in A.S., but whether the markings repeat themselves with sufficient regularity is a moot question. 2 For examples of this see Glossary. The later, or 14th century form (see pp. 26, 29) is rather more nearly manageable. I OLD ENGLISH OR ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 3 as an ornament it has persisted— sometimes in spite of strong attempts to make little of it— throughout our poetical history ; and no one has made more abundant and delightful use of it than the last great Enghsh poet, not now hving, Mr. Swinburne. The exclusive import- ance of the central pause has ceased, and attempts to revive it have been in most cases unsuccessful ; but the importance of the varied pause has been greater than in any other language, and has supphed one of their main instruments to such poets as Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, and Tennyson. But the most important characteristic by far of A.S. poetry for the modern student is none of these. It is that apparent irregu- larity which has been noticed, but which really means, not a haphazard distribution of unaccented syllables " left to take care of themselves,'' but a recognition of the fact that groups of syllables of different lengths can hold equivalent positions. To what extent this Equivalence is present in A.S., according to definite rules, is a question on which doctors differ : that it exists, after this fashion or that, no one with an ear who has heard or read a reasonable quantity of A.S. verse can doubt. Now this Equivalence — which exists in more limited forms in Greek and Latin, but which is totally absent from, for instance, French — has (though seldom critically recognised, and sometimes strenuously denied) existed in forms more exact than those of A.S., but more free than those of the classics, throughout the whole range of English poetry, and has constituted the secret of the charm of the verse of most of our greatest poets. Chaucer used it ; by it Shakespeare improved the fine but rather stiff blank verse of his predecessors into the greatest medium of all poetic history ; Milton, though some would question his use of it, in reality owes to that use most of the charm of his verse and all A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. its variety ; Coleridge, not quite knowing what he did, revived it magnificently in The Ancient Mariner and Christabel ; and all great poets since — Tennyson and Browning more especially — have employed it lavishly. There can be no doubt, in the mind of any one who has studied the phenomena of comparative literature to good result, that this modern Equivalence has its origin in the peculiar character of A.S. verse, and has been maintained by the presence of the A.S. element in the language and in the people. Examples: Among the examples which we possess of this verse, Beowulf. ^YiQ bulkiest, the most important, and in the popular sense the most interesting is tne tale of Beowulf — the only extant representative of epic, saga, or verse- romance in A.S. There is no certain reference to any- thing EngUsh in this poem; and though the unique MS. which we possess (and which has come down to us through great perils of fire and other destructive chances) is probably not older than the tenth century, the actual poem would seem more likely to have been written before our ancestors left the Continent. Carefully explored coincidences of name connect it with the beginning of the sixth century or the close of the fifth. But these and other matters concerning it are for larger histories than the present. For us it must be sufficient to say that Beowulf is a poem of rather more than 3000 lines divided into two unequal portions. The latter, smaller, and less interesting of these tells how the hero — now grown old and a king — saves his country from the ravages of a fire-drake (dragon). The former — longer and by far more interesting— deals with his expedition, while still a thane of King Hygelac (a name which gives the supposed historical connection), to succour another monarch, Hrothgar of Heorot, whose palace is the prey of a night-monster called Grendel — superhuman and I OLD ENGLISH OR ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 5 invulnerable by ordinary steel, but not immortal. Beowulf wrestles with the monster and tears off his arm, thereby kilhng him. But Grendel's mother renews the attacks on Heorot, and it is clear that the only way to finish the matter is to descend into the lake which is the monster's home and bring the hag to bay. This Beowulf does, and after being nearly beaten by his enemy, finds on the floor of the cavern a magic falchion, with which he cuts off her head, and that of the dead Grendel afterwards, though the sword itself, having performed its work, melts in the blood of the fiends. These are only the central incidents of a considerable story which gives us journeys by land and sea, not a little effective description of wild country and of the hospitable court-halls, admirable fighting, not bad feasting, and even a certain delineation of manners, if not exactly of character. The other remains of this " epic," and probably oldest stories in division of A.S., four in number, are all short, and with ^f^^^^' one exception all fragmentary. This exception is a etc. curious poem called Widsith or The Far-Traveller, which, in the form in which we have it, has, to something like certainty, been much rewritten and interpolated. It professes to summarise the peregrinations and the patronages of a wandering bard. Another member of the same (at that time) important profession has left us what is called The Complaint of Deor, a much more Deor : its important and poetical piece, recording the supersession ^^l^^^' of the author in favour, and his attempt to comfort himself by recalling others' sufferings, and by the recollection that " as their woes went over so may his." This last phrase forms what is called a refrain " or burden, the oldest in our language, and this refrain in turn, by its recurrence, makes something hke regular stanzas out of the mere batches of the usual Hne. Hence 6 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Deor is sometimes (and correctly from one point of view) called the only lyric in A.S/' The other two are exceedingly spirited but unfortu- nately short fragments of warlike story. One, W aldhere, connects itself with the great legend-history of Attila and the Burgundian kingdom, and we have the context in Latin ; the other, called The Fight at Finnsburg, gives part account of one of the conflagrations of wood-built strongholds so frequent in Scandinavian history, and has a connection of reference with Beowulf. Indeed the counter-references and connections in this limited stock of verse are relatively so numerous that one imagines the total of it not to have been originally very large. This small but probably very ancient body of romance Mis- or romanced history has no genuine evidence of Chris- ceiianeous tianity in it, and much that eoes the other way. Outside Profane of it we have another, probably a more modern, and (if we leave Beowulf out of the question) rather though not much larger body of pieces, not religious in character, or with such religious character as there is probably interpolated. This consists of a curious body of Riddles or elaborately metaphorical verse-descriptions of natural phenomena, etc. ; of a fragment of description of a sacked and wrecked city (very possibly Bath), called The Ruin ; of two remarkable allegories of human life (at least this seems the most probable interpretation, in their case, of the misty metaphorical diction of which A.S. poetry consists), to which the names of The Wan- derer and The Seafarer have been given ; and of two other much smaller pieces, which have been christened, with an even more imaginative latitude, The Wife's Complaint and The Husband's or Lover's Message. There is good work in all of these ; and The Ruin is perhaps the finest thing in A.S. poetry. I OLD ENGLISH OR ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 7 The great mass of that poetry, however, is occupied with very different subjects, and comes under the denomination of " Sacred,'' consisting partly of Trans- and lations or Paraphrases of the Scriptures, partly of Saints' Lives, and partly of miscellaneous pieces of a religious character. The first division, in its most interesting and probably oldest part — versions of Genesis and Exodus Casdmon. with large traditional additions — connects itself with the famous story told by Bede — the very beginning of English literary history of the personal kind — the story of Caedmon, the herdsman or cowstall-keeper of Whitby, of his bashfulness at being unable to take part in the singing usual at Saxon feasts, of his retirement to his charge, and of his inspiration by an angel to sing of the Creation and the Creator. The version which we possess Genesis (though later, and in West Saxon, not Northumbrian, as ^^^^^^ Caedmon's own would have been) has fairly demonstrable connection with this story ; and, though probably not by one hand, contains very fine passages. Our actual MS. belonged to Archbishop Usher, and was edited by Junius, a Dutch friend of Milton, who himself seems to have taken some touches from it for Paradise Lost, No other name is historically associated with any part of A.S. poetry ; but for a large and interesting batch of it the ingenuity of scholars has found another in a certain or uncertain " Cynewulf," whose name is sup- "Cyne- posed to be signed to these pieces, divers runes " or antique letters composing or suggesting that name being discovered in them ; and who has been fitted out, from these and others, not merely with a consider- able body of poems, but with a personality, sorrows, joys, sins, repentances, etc. Everybody may beheve in Cynewulf or not just as they hke ; but it is well to know what has been said about him. It is certain that there are fine things in the poems attributed to him ; though 8 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. most of them may be, and many certainly are, translated or adapted from Latin or other originals. The Andreas, an account of the miracles and mart3n:dom of St. Andrew, has no doubt a Greek origin ; but by comparison with a later Middle English version which we also possess, we can see how freely the imitators used their sources. In this and in other remaining Saints' Lives — whether by Cynewulf, or another, or many others, does not in the least matter — the Elene or story of the finding of the Cross by the mother of Constantine, the Guthlac (that of a saint tormented by the fiends of the Crowland fens), the Juliana (of a Christian girl persecuted by the heathen and tempted by the devil) — the same qualities which distinguish the Ruin and its group may be found, as also in a batch of pieces, likewise attributed to the sup- posed Cynewulf, found in our principal collection of miscellaneous O.E. work, the ''Exeter Book,'' and collect- ively called Christ, These qualities are again dis- coverable in some other Biblical versions, especially a fine one of the Apocryphal book of Judith, a grim Address of the Soul to the Body, and a Dream of the Rood [Cross], which has the additional interest of corresponding with passages found engraved on the Ruthwell Cross m Dumfriesshire, and on a reliquary at Brussels ; and in yet other pieces too many to particularise, down to a singular and only in part intelligible " Rhyming Poem," not much older than tne Conquest, and to the admirable Grave piece ('' For thee was a house built "), better known than almost any other A.S. verse to modern readers through Longfellow's translation. These qualities may be exaggerated, but can hardly escape notice. The apparent roughness of the poetry will not be much against it for long with an attentive reader, who has either a naturally sensitive or a well- trained ear. But its comparative monotony will produce I OLD ENGLISH OR ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 9 a more lasting effect, and will be, sooner or later, felt to be its principal drawback. Further, this monotony of form will be found to be somewhat incompatible with variety of tone in subject and temper. Brightness, ' cheerfulness, merriment are not things frequent in A.s! verse : its most congenial matter seems to lie in, and certainly its finest efforts are connected with, fate weird"), death, scenes of wildness and gloom, lamenta- tion, sufferings, struggle. For such themes the low and almost unbroken " croon " of the rhythm — resting upon what is technically termed a " trochaic " basis — furnishes an excellent medium ; and the profusion of metaphorical or allegorical periphrases which is the main character- istic of the diction adapts itself happily to the subjects. There is dignity, sincerity, and a kind of passion — chiefly religious or martial.^ But there is hardly any love- poetry, and no attempt at light, bright, glancing, and dancing measures, expressive of the joy of life, the beauty of nature and humanity. The late Mr. Matthew Arnold, who thought " high seriousness " the greatest quality of poetry, ought to have been more satisfied with Anglo-Saxon than he apparently was. The prose, naturally enough, escapes this monotony a. s. prose, to some extent in subject and to a much greater in form. We have indeed here also a comparatively great bulk of religious matter — translations of the Scriptures and of works of St. Augustine and St. Gregory, and very many Homilies " or short sermons, more Saints' Lives, etc. But we have also the famous Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,. Ohronicie, the oldest vernacular and contemporary history in the ^^^j^J^^^^ literature of the modern world ; the translations (with Alfred and ^Ifric, etc. ^ As, for instance, in the historical pieces about the Battles of Bninanburgh and Maldon. It may be added that beauty of description, though rare, is by no means unknown, as for instance in the fine alle- gorical-religious poem of the Phoenix, adapted from the Latin of Lactantius. lo A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. considerable original insertions here and there) made by or under the direction of King Alfred, from Bede, Orosius, Boethius ; at least one remarkable prose tale, Apol onius of Tyre ; some quasi-philosophical and scientific treatises, leechdoms (medical prescriptions), and other miscellanies, including an amusing and useful Colloquy, Latin and English, describing (and intended to be used for) the instruction of young and unlearned persons in the learned language. We know, too, much more about the actual authors of much of this prose, King Alfred himself. Abbot ^Elfric or Elfric, Bishop Werfrith, Archbishop Wulfstan, though many of the Homilies (including a collection, in part of no small literary merit, called, from the house in Norfolk which preserved them, the Blickling Homilies) are anonymous. And though perhaps there is nothing so fine from a literary point of view as the best pieces of fierce or gloomy or passionately religious verse noticed above, there is a more varied interest, not merely of subject, but, what is very rare, even to a certain extent of form. The Old English writers had, as we have seen, practi- cally only one style in verse, which hardly changed at all, or was at any rate subjected, when West Saxon became dominant, to what is called in modem times standard- Different isation.'* The prose- writers — as is natural — were under pros?. less restraint. It is probable that at first they formed them- selves somewhat on Latin — the language which seems to have been used for formal documents up to the sixth or even the seventh century. But almost at this latter date we find a natural easy way of writing, much less Latinised than some of the greatest Enghsh prose a thousand years later. And this (which begins with a famous scene of fighting between a King Cynewulf — not the imagined poet — and a rebellious and regicide thane of his) goes on quite naturally, varying itself I OLD ENGLISH OR ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE n •with the historical entries and the translations, the reports of Alfred's captains as to their voyages to the Baltic and the White Sea, the stories inset in the Homihes (for the "Dark" and Middle'' Ages liked their sermons to be interesting), the httle romance of ApoUonius and his wreck, and his ball-playing and his fiddle-plapng and his fascination of the king's daughter — and evolving a really good narrative style, though not perhaps one suitable for other purposes. Side by side, however, with this plain, style there arose another, more ornate and artificial, which was used, again by the Homily writers,- to dignify and ornament their subjects. In this the diction, the arrangement, and even the very accent- and alliteration-system of the verse were borrowed to an extent which varied, and which we can trace in different stages, but which at its furthest, as in some Homilies of iElfric, made very little difference, except in regularity of correspondence, between prose and verse. In fact we may, without impropriety, see in this ornamental prose the ancient mother " of things to which we shall come later, like the prose- verse of Macpherson, Blake, and Whitman, and the batches of inserted blank verse in Chaucer and in Ruskin. Thus it should be observed that if the actual per- formance of A.S. literature, considering the great length of time (as long as from Chaucer to Swinburne) which it had to develop itself, was not great, there were in it germs of the most promising and powerful character, requiring only something to cultivate and evolve them. It must be clear that if this could not be done in half a millennium by the internal resources of the language and the people, the principle or ''coefficient" of evolution must be supplied from without. It was so in good time ; and in the next chapter we shall see when, by what, and how. 12 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. There is probably no better way of summarising the literary history of a nation characteristically, and in a fashion likely to be remembered, than by giving, as it were, a short catalogue under heads of its library at successive times, so as to answer the question, " What reading would have been possible for a fairly educated person, able and desirous to read, towards the close of the Early English or Anglo-Saxon period, supposing there to have been a great public library at the time ? " An English One thing somewhat noticeable is that though he would library have had, except in paraplirase largely adulterated with 1066^ fiction, only small portions of the Bible that is commonly read now, he would have had some. And we may say next, though not quite with equal positiveness, that he would have had nothing or next to nothing corresponding to entire and large divisions of our modern libraries. No drama, no prose fiction of any length, little (though this is not quite uncontested) profane poetry, miscellaneous in subject and lyric in form ; indeed very little of what is called miscellaneous literature generally. But in verse- story he would have had Beowulf, with an uncertain number of other more or less similar romances or epics (call them which you will) of war, adventure, and the marvellous. The natural demand for fiction (whether it was recognised as fiction or not does not matter) was further met by a certain number of short prose tales, of which Apollonius of Tyre is our main if not our only representative. Some original history of his own country, the Chronicle, with perhaps other stuff of the same kind, was accompanied by translated histories of his own and others — the work of Alfred at its head, and perhaps forming its main body. He had a certain amount of scientific (chiefly medical) writings, and a few " oddments." On the other hand, he had a relatively large religious collection — the Para- phrases above referred to ; the " Saints* Lives " ; a good body of short sermons, sometimes admirably written ; and more or less sacred poetry. There must thus have been a certain want of breadth and variety in our imaginary Anglo-Saxon student's reading, I OLD ENGLISH OR ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 13 the effects of which must have been deepened by the absolute monotony of the form of the verse, which was his most imaginative food. The English library, like the English language and the English people, needed crossing and blending. And all the three got them. CHAPTER II MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE, A.D. I2OO--I4OO Circumstances of the change from Old to Middle English — Length of the transition — Results of it about a.d. 1200 — Layamon — The Ormulum — The Moral Ode — The Ancren Riwle — Literature from 1200 to 1250 — The new Genesis and Exodus, The Owl and the Nightingale, etc. — Real interest in early M.E. literature — Fresh beginning after apparent lull about 1298 — Robert of Gloucester and verse-history — " Romance," its origin and subject — Its literary character — English examples — The alliterative revival — Lyric — Hampole — The fourteenth century — Prose and drama — The appearance of great individual writers — Langland — The Vision of Piers Plowman — Gower — The Confessio Amantis — Chaucer — His general character and earlier work — The Canterbury Tales — Great advance of literary character in them — Account of this in detail — Chaucer's diction — His versification — His prose — The library in 1400. It will have been seen from the last chapter that Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, literature was by no means poor and beggarly,'' but that it was limited, and that certain inherent deficiencies made it unable to exceed its limits without external help. For a time it seemed as if the external influence would Be one rather of hindrance. The old delusion that the Norman Conquest directly killed Anglo-Saxon, though it has not perhaps entirely disappeared, is a delusion. The language had been failing in literary power long before, and hardly any original documents of importance (except a few scraps) seem to have been written after a.d. iooo. But 14 CH. II MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE 15 the indirect effects of the Conquest were undoubtedly at first very unfavourable to the resuscitation of the native literature. French" had already been a Court language in the time of Edward the Confessor. It naturally became the Court language of the Norman and Angevin kings. As late as the time of Richard Coeur de Lion the king of England could not speak EngHsh ; and a little earher it was regarded as extra- ordinary that the famous Abbot Samson of Bury St. Edmunds could not only preach in Enghsh but actually read Enghsh books. In the monasteries — the main if not the only homes of learning — French and Latin were the recognised languages : in the schools, French was the language in which boys were taught Latin and into which they construed it. We do not know how much we may have lost by the destruction of EngHsh writings or by using the old parchments for newer matter in one or other of the favoured tongues. But anything English takes a deal of killing ; and of Length all nations and languages in recorded history the English ^^^^^^^^^^^ nation and the English language have had the greatest power of assimilating foreign elements without surrender- ing their native character. In this case the process of blending was long; it could hardly be otherwise, consider- ing the manners and habits of the times, the course of political history, and not least the exhausted or half- exhausted condition of A.S. which has been noticed. From the two centuries between 1000 and 1200 we possess but scraps of verse and prose, the former visibly altering in form but of little consequence except to somewhat advanced students. A little after the later Results of date there appear three documents of great bulk and . T . A.D. 1200. real importance — two in verse, and one in prose — the Brut, a British history by the Shropshire priest Layamon ; the Ormulum (so called from its author, Orm or Ormin, i6 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. a monk perhaps of Durham, perhaps of East AngUa), which consists of paraphrases of the Church Gospels for each day; and the Ancren Riwle (" Rule of Anchoresses" or irregular nuns), by a writer not certainly identified. In these, though they are close enough to O.E. to have been at one time called " Semi-Saxon/' the most remark- able differences from it appear. These differences are not so very marked in the actual vocabulary — there are only a few score of Romance words (that is, words freshly imported from French or Latin) in the 32,000 lines or half-lines of the Brut. But there are not a few changes in grammar; and those in versification are unmistakable and most striking. In the Brut, for instance, the writer has an abundance of interesting, though mostly if not entirely legendary, matter to tell us. Here, for the first time in English, we meet the story of King Arthur, which had been popularised in Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth some fifty or sixty years earlier, and by others in French since. This is not indeed the full romantic Arthuriad with the Quest of the Graal, the adventures of knights-errant, and the loves of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere for its most important part. But it is the fullest account, up to its own date, of what may be called the quasi- historical part of the matter — the birth and succession of Arthur ; his wars with Saxons and Romans ; the treason of his wife and nephew ; and his reconquest of his kingdom at the price of his own life. And it con- tains a new and important item of the purely romantic kind — the passing of the king under the hands of a magic queen (here called Argante") and the "elves." There is also much else of interest — the story of Rowena and her beguilement of Vortigern being a sample of one kind, and that of Oriene (more commonly known as St. Ursula) and her corps of maidens or children, II MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE murdered by Pagans, and others. Some have even called it " the first English romance/' But, historically, the main interest of Layamon is in his versification, which tells us how — and how in a very much wider scope than that of mere versification — the foundation of our actual English language and literature was at this time being laid. That the author was not consciously throwing away the old A.S. method altogether is clear ; that something constantly prevents him from achieving it in anything like a competent fashion is clearer ; and that something else is as constantly present is clearest of all. Now this something else is of the highest possible importance. Never, even by accident, does the old Anglo-Saxon line or distich fall into two halves of regular iambic cadence, with four feet " in each and rhymed at the end. Layamon's book contains many such couplets or distichs," some quite perfect, such as this in the story of Lear (which is very fully told) : Gornoiille | was swi'the waer Swa beoth wifmen welihwaer (Goneril was very ware [ = " wary "] So be women everywhere) others more or less so. And (the most important point of all) in a second version, about fifty years later, there are many more completely rhymed examples. Now this metre (the so-called " octosyllabic couplet ") had been common in later or low " Latin and commoner in French ; and in it we perceive the first and most import- ant blending or importation of Romance material into English. The matter of the Ormulum is less interesting, for, as has been said, it is only a sort of sermon-paraphrase of the Gospels and the Acts,i and a dull one. But its form 1 This was the original plan ; but we actually possess only part of the Gospels. It begins (notice the curious spelling with the doubled C i8 A* FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. is very interesting indeed ; and enforces the same lesson as that of the Brut, with a variation which positively strengthens it. Layamon was — for the two were pretty certainly near contemporaries — hesitating or staggering between two models. Orm — whether he got the idea of his verse from Latin, or from French, or from anything else — adopted a form which is more close to French in principle than to any other language. His Unes, invariably, are of fifteen syllables in length, or (if you divide the long line into two) eight and seven. As this division is always possible, you have an equally invariable pause, break, or " caesura " at the eighth syllable. Yet further, these hues are composed, in- variably, of iambic feet with no substitution, but with an extra syllable or half-foot at the end of the second half-line. In all these points the metre is directly opposed to Anglo-Saxon principles. And though in another and a single point — rhymelessness — it keeps to those principles, the reason is probably a very simple one, that the author did not feel himself equal to the task of providing so many rhymes. The Moral But he had contemporaries who were bolder, though not so long-winded. The interesting piece called the Moral Ode or Poem is possibly older than the Ormulum, which it resembles in metre as far as the metrical skeleton goes. (now) (in) ( = years) (in) Ich am I nu el|der than | I was | a win|tre and | a lo]re (wield, can do) (did) Ich weal de mo[re than | I dude | ; mi wit|oh[t] to | be mo r^. consonants, intended to show the short pronunciation of the vowels) : Thiss boc is nemmnedd Ormulum (because) Forrthi thatt Orrmm itt wrohhte. And the author, almost anticipating Ascham centuries later, speaks of himself as Ice thatt thiss Ennglissh hafe sett Ennglisshe men to lare (learn). II MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE But the iambic fif teeners " rhyme, and they are much less monotonous, admitting substitution to some extent, and, although permitting, not so much inviting division into halves. There are not a few other poems of var3dng lengths, dated by scholars from 1200 or a httle before to 1250 or a httle later ; and invariably teaching the same lesson, that of a revival in Enghsh verse produced by the example and the actual admixture of French. The admixture of actual French works was still not very large, and it is quite erroneous to say that our prosody became French." For it retained obstinately that principle of substitution to which French is repugnant, and there are more and more appearances in it of the anapaest (^^-), a foot which Old French scholars will not allow in Old French poetry at all. The prose of this period is less interesting, but not The without attraction. The Ancren Riwle itself — the largest early document — has considerable interest of matter, for the advice given to the anchoresses (ladies who adopted a monastic life without binding themselves to any regular order) is kindly in temper and shrewd in wits, while some of the doctrinal and sermon-like passages are of a relatively high kind of eloquence. Whether it had a Latin or French original (the occurrence of actual French words suggests the latter) or not, it displays a command of prose style for various purposes which we do not find in A.S., and the same may be said of some minor prose tracts, all of them hkewise religious in tone and subject. What has, therefore, to be remembered as regards the period from the Conquest to about 1250 is that the first 100 or 150 years are almost a blank in positive results for us, though some of the latest A.S. hterature certainly dates from the earlier part of them, and some of the 20 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. earliest M.E. literature may date from the later part. But from 1200 to 1250 there was, almost certainly, a considerable production, all of it that we still possess exhibiting, with the cautions just given, the process of learning from French. This production culminated, though there are other interesting examples, in two remarkable pieces of verse representing the working of this French influence in different ways. These are a new Genesis and Exodus, interesting to compare with the old A.S. one, but still more interesting to compare with its contemporary The Owl and the Nightingale, a dispute or debate " between the two birds as to their merits. Both of these pieces are written in the rhymed octo- syllabic couplet, into which Layamon had so often stumbled, and which his rehandler (see above) was at this same time multiplying. But Genesis and Exodus inclines more to the English side of variety and sub- stitution (being in fact an anticipation of the metre of Spenser's February and Coleridge's Christabel), while The Owl and the Nightingale is closer to the French system of uniformity in number of syllables. It may seem, perhaps, to a hasty reader that this is all dry and mechanical stuff, that the power, the beauty, the enjoyment which people hope to get, and are entitled to get, from literature are not here. But this is certainly an example of the haste which is not speed — of the haste which, as Dante says, disgraces all work." If there is no very great power or beauty in the pieces mentioned already, and in others of the time, it is precisely for want of the education (as we may call it) which this dry and mechanical practice of form, with the concomi- tant influence exercised on diction and grammar, was providing. Interest and enjoyment are certainly present for any one who will take the very slight trouble neces- sary to get at them. There is kindUness, good sense. II MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE and a certain poetry of religion in the Ancren Riwle, which becomes actually powerful and passionate in some other pious pieces.^ There is actual story- interest in the Brut. In The Owl and the Nightingale there is the beginning of the quaint Hght satiric vein which, in the very same form, was later to give us Butler and Swift and Prior ; while the paraphrase of Genesis and Exodus really foretells something of the spirit and narrative force that Coleridge and Scott were, still longer afterwards, to get out of the metre. In the Proverbs of Alfred and of Hendyng there is the curious presence — already in the very terms we use — of those world-old formulations of popular wisdom which make one almost wonder at popular folly, such as " Burnt child fire dreads " and Far from eye, far from mind." For some reason there would appear to have been Fresh little— or Uttle now surviving— produced during the ^fTer'''''''^ earlier part of the second half of the thirteenth century apparent (1250-1300) ; but the processes just described were j^gs!^^"^ certainly going on, and it is probable that not a little work which we find only in MSS. of a later date was originally written now. At any rate, in the last years of the century and the earhest of the next, three most remarkable new provinces of Uterature were opened or reopened to English, which was now at last provided with the proper apparatus for cultivating them. The first was History. This, after the noteworthy achieve- ment of A.S. in prose, lasting up to the middle of the twelfth century, had been wholly abandoned to Latin— in which language EngHsh writers, WiUiam of Malmes- bury and others, form quite a creditable school, though one that does not concern us. But (apparently in 1298, 1 Especially The Wooing of Our Lord (the most emotional), and the manlier SouVs Ward. 22 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Robert of Gloucester and verse - history. Ro- mance," its origin and subject. just 500 years before Wordsworth and Coleridge, in Lyrical Ballads, again began a new stage in English literature, and at the same time recalled attention to mediaeval literature itself) Robert of Gloucester wrote a capital verse-chronicle in pretty regular rhymed four- teener or fifteener couplets, ^ often displaying much spirit. The same author is thought, on good grounds, to have been at least partly responsible for a very large and very interesting collection of Saints* Lives, which was frequently, as we should say now, re-edited,'* and which formed (the probably true original stories being embroidered and amplified by tradition) a body of what we may almost call religious novels. Many of these stories — such as those of St. Margaret, St. Catherine, St. Dorothea, St. Eustace, and others — are extremely beautiful, and positively romantic " in the best modern sense of that word. Indeed it has been thought, with good grounds of argument, that they may have been the originals, or part-originals at ^ The " fourteeners " ending in a " masculine " or single rhyme, the " fifteeners " in a " feminine " or double, supplied by the final e. How easily and spiritedly this metre, at so early a time, can run may be seen from the following lines on St. Dunstan, modernised in only the slightest degree of spelling, etc., so as not to interfere with the appreciation, (would not) And, for he nolde by his will [at] no time idle be (see about — get) A private smithy by his cell he 'gan him to he-see, (from) For when he must of orisons, rest[e] for weariness, (s) To work he would his hand^n do, to flv [from] idleness, (e) Servj he would [e] poor[e] men, the while he might [en]dure (took no hire of man) All the day for the love of God, he ne kept of man none hure, And when he sat at his work there, his hand[en] at his deed (prayed his prayers) And his heart with Jesus Christ, his mouth his bedes bede, (3) (places) So that all at one time, he was at three stedes. His hand[en] there, his heart at God, his mouth to bid his bedes. II MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE least, of the profane Romance ^ itself — the story of knight-errantry and love, often with a strong religious element remaining — which had arisen (chiefly in France or in French, but in a manner very difficult to compre- hend exactly) during the very late eleventh or early twelfth century. It developed partly and almost im- perceptibly, on the one side from an earher class of poem, the French Chansons de Geste, or family epics with Charlemagne and his peers for centre, on the other from " romantic " treatment of classical stories. But between these was another great branch — the greatest of all — which, sprung from the Arthurian stories noticed under Layamon, combined these with the religious-mystical legend of the Holy Grail or Vessel of the Last Supper ; the purely " romantic " one of the love of Sir Lancelot for Queen Guinevere, and, in parts, a large number of lesser romances, each with its special knight-hero, but in not a few cases arising out of, or artificially connected with, the main Arthurian legend. To whom the com- bination of these various elements may have been due is not certainly known ; but the most important part is assigned in MSS. to Walter Map or Mapes, an English- man {c. 1 170-1200), and his claims, though often attacked of late, have never been disproved. The quahties and charms of the best of these Romances its literary were almost entirely new in literature, though cbaracter. there had been attempts at something hke them in Greek from the fourth century onward. These attempts, however, entirely lacked the element called " chivalry,'* itself a combination of religious and definitely Christian devotion, of mysticism, and of a sometimes almost fantastic, but always passionate and never merely ^ This word originally means only something written in romance (French) language, but owing to the popularity of the story, religious or profane, was later transferred and restricted to that. See Glossary. 24 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. sensual, devotion to womankind. This chivalry — which included, or rather inspired, desperate valour and a reckless quest of adventure — displays itself in a fashion which some think monotonous, but others by no means so, in a very large number of stories. We have some- thing like a hundred in English from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century — all, until quite the later date, in verse. But the qualities of all, and the subjects of some, are absorbed and (except the actual versification) represented, in the great Morie d' Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory (see below). EngUsh In the case of almost, all these (the chief exception exampief^. |^gy^g Qawain and the Green Knight) we have French originals — indeed it is hardly an exaggeration to say that French, as a literature, supplied such originals to the whole of Europe. But these were, in the circumstances of language above described, written in some cases certainly, in others probably, in England and by English- men. Moreover, our English romances themselves are by no means mere translations ; they do not even regularly or usually keep the metrical form of their originals, and the spirit is often quite different. The English romance is not only the direct ancestor of the EngHsh novel, but it represents, as nothing else does, the breaking out of the rather sober and limited stem of Old English literature into bud and leaf and flower and fruit with infinite variety of delight. The whole of this volume could be easily filled with by no means full abstracts of the stories told in these romances ; indeed the whole of it would hardly hold such an abstract of the Arthurian cycle by itself. That has been made known in modem English by many writers, from Tenny- son downwards ; and it is certainly the greatest of all. But only a very few of the others are really poor stories ; and though no great poetry is to be found in them. II MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE many, if not most, are told in lively enough verse. The stock subjects of Romance have been sometimes complained of ; but in most cases the complaint is really an excuse for not taking the trouble to read them. The fine but not mawkish legend-moral of the already men- tioned Gawain and the Green Knight, with the hero's resistance in the main, but in part surrender to the combined temptation of a lady's blandishments and a talisman to preserve him in fight ; the adventures of Gawain's cousin Sir Yvain and a guardian lion ; the numerous variations on the story of the knight who changes his arms during a tournament to avoid recogni- tion ; others on the misdeeds of a wicked steward or seneschal ; the great love-legend (inferior to that of Lancelot and Guinevere, but possibly its suggester) of Tristram and Iseult ; the touching religious allegories or half-allegories of Sir Amadas (not Amadis) and Sir Isumbras (the latter the subject of a famous picture by Millais) ; the early, vigorous, and perhaps originally English adventures of Havelok and Horn ; endless minor tales of Sir Gawain and other Knights of the Round Table, not directly connected with the main Arthurian story ; not a few EngUsh versions of the Charlemagne and the classical romances above-mentioned ; the Seven Sages, a cluster of stories in a common framework which has a voluminous ancestry in Hebrew, Persian, other Eastern languages, and Greek ; the beautiful half- Eastern love-stories of Florice and Bla^tchefleur and of Parthenopaeus and his fairy mistress Mehor ; that of the other fairy, Mehisine, closely connected with the EngHsh- Angevin royal house ; the almost more unhistorical but very spirited romancing of the deeds of the Angevin hero, Richard Coeur de Lion ; the famous histories of local heroes, Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton, may be selected from others far too many to mention. There 26 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. was a time when, out of ignorance and conventionality, " as dull as a romance of chivalry " was a stock com- parison of reproach. This has long been wiped away ; and there are some now who would say, " Give me any novel that is not duller than the dullest romance of chivalry itself, and it will do," In some of these Romances there is visible — perhaps for the first time — a curious reaction or backwater in the general progress of English verse. Some authorities think that the old alliterative-accentual form never ceased out of the land, and that it is only by accident that we have nothing left of importance in it, save the broken attempts of Layamon, for some 300 years. If so, the accident is an odd one ; and in any case it is useless to The speak of what does not exist. But, at an uncertain alliterative ^[^^^^ e^uessed at as a little before the middle of the four- revival. ^ teenth century,^ such verse does reappear, m some romances, in one or two religious poems, etc. And after culminating in the great poem of The Vision of Piers Plowman (see below), it continues, though in a straggling and unprogi'essive fashion, till the beginning of the sixteenth. When, however, we compare it with the real O.E. originals certain marked differences are seen — differences which tell the same story as the new metrical poetry itself. The old poetry had, as has been said, a strong trochaic (-^) cadence about it; the new has an almost equally strong iambic-anapaestic or v^^-) tendency. The old never rhymed ; the new often com- Hampole. ^ Some have been inclined to associate the revival with the remark- able religious movement introduced in the northern counties by Richard Rolle of Hampole {d. 1349). But his chief work, The Prick of Conscience, is in metre (octosyllables with occasional decasyllabic extension), and though there is much alliteration in some of the beautiful religious lyrics attributed to him they also are regularly metrical. There is, however, a peculiar charm about these, and about some of the new alliterative poems not attributed to Hampole himself, which seems to be possibly due to some common influence. II MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE 27 bines rhyme with accent and alUteration, and sometimes achieves (as in the beautiful Pearl poem) quite com- phcated stanzas. Finally, the old alliteration was more or less strictly regulated ; the new is extremely casual, . being sometimes exaggerated and sometimes almost neglected, though oftenest the former. The third principal direction (see above, p. 21) in which a new departure was taken by English in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century was Lyric. The Lyric, absence, and the reason of the absence, of this in Old English have been pointed out above. Variety of metre is what Lyric requires first of all ; and it is scarcely too much to say that the love-motive is what is required next. Moreover, as lyric is essentially a vehicle of personal sentiment and personal observation, many more matters come within the range of poetical expres- sion. One well-known piece, " Sumer is ycumen in," and perhaps others, date from the thirteenth, while from the early fourteenth we have a charming collection in a single MS., where the proximity of EngUsh, French, and Latin examples shows us the patterns which English artists had before them, and the way in which they utilised these patterns, as well as the fact that (despite Orm's anticipation) Ascham's famous resolve (see above, p. 18, and below, p. 62) to write " English matters in the Enghsh tongue for English men was still a long way off, even in poetry. " Ahsoun " and " Lenten is come with love to toun forecast the supreme excellence which EngUsh was to attain in this department. Now, too, the great ballad-metre or common-measure finds almost its first example 1 in the rehgious song of Judas. In short, the material of Middle English— made more plastic 1 It had, of course, existed originally in the fourteener couplets (14.14:= 8.6.8.6), but it had not been definitely moulded into quatrain form. 28 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. in substance and variegated in colour by the admixture of the Romance element — is moulded and twisted by newly educated fingers into all sorts of delightful forms. The advance in prose was naturally slower. Prose, even in direct natural development, is, as has been said, almost always later than verse ; its forms are far less easily transferred from one language to another ; and lastly, there was, until the late twelfth century at any rate, very little prose of any kind in French to serve as The pattern. It is not till nearly the close of the fourteenth century^^^ that we get notable examples of it in English ; and then they are comparatively so few and so much of the nature of mere translation that it has been the fashion to give them even less attention than they deserve. But the fourteenth century itself added very largely to the three Prose and divisions just uoticcd, saw beyond all doubt the addition drama. them of drama,^ and in its later half contributed, for the first time,^ three great individual writers to English Literature. The These three are William Langland, whose birth-date of great^^^^ is quite unknown, and whose identity as a single person individual has been questioned, but who may be taken as about writers. contemporary with the next named ; John Gower, who may have been born as early as 1325 ; and Geoffrey Chaucer, whose birth is put, by argument rather than positive information, about fifteen years later. All must have been dead soon after the close of the century ; Chaucer almost certainly died in its concluding year. There is, though it has been much debated, little real importance, for students beginning the subject, in the ^ The exact dates of this are, however, so uncertain that account of it will be best postponed to the next chapter. 2 For Cynewulf (see above, p. 7-8) is only a guessed person ; and even the parallel guesswork which has assigned some of the romances and some of the alliterative poems just mentioned in groups to individual authors, has been able to give these phantoms neither name nor date. II MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE question whether we can make out any autobiographical details in the singular but really great poem called The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, with Langland. which there is now generally connected a briefer and more practical piece on the shortcomings of Richard II., to which the name of Richard the Redeless (''incapable of taking counsel ") has been given. There is still less importance for such students in the recent attempts to *' split up " the authorship, though perhaps they should be made aware of the fact that such attempts have been made. It should be sufficient for such students, and perhaps not only for them, that most of the best critics see no evidence of more than one hand in the main work, though that hand may have rehandled it more than once, and though in the great number of MSS. (more than fifty) there may be interpolations. William Langland " (they should also remember) is a very shadowy and not quite certain person. But the poem itself is the thing, and a very remarkable thing it is — written in the new -old alliterative manner above noticed, and giving the best examples of that manner, though showing also its hmitations and its defects. The subject is (Hke that of a large if not the larger proportion of the poems of the time) an allegory, or rather a succession of allegories which melt into, or more abruptly replace, each other in the exact " kaleidoscopic fashion of the dreams or visions which they represent. The poem is at once pohtical, religious, and social in character, dealing with the misrule and corruptions of Edward the Third's later years and the economical disturbance introduced by the French wars, and still more by the disbanded soldiery after the Peace of Bretigny, as well as by the Black Death (1349-62-69). It is also largely concerned with the ecclesiastical unrest, i;icluding Lollardism, though Langland is not a Lollard, 30 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. far as he goes in what would later be called a Puritan direction. Three main stages or versions of the poem, A, B, and C, were disentangled by the industry of the late Professor Skeat ; and the division is never likely to be much disturbed. A, the shortest and evidently the earliest, is mainly political in its allegory and moral ; B, the central version, adds a great deal of moral and more directly religious matter ; and C continues the develop- ment in the allegorical and mystical direction. Some passages in the poem have become almost famous — the The Vision Opening dream on Malvern Hills, with the vision of the PiowZln ^orld, and the Church, and Heaven, and Hell ; the keen political satire of the marriage of " Meed " (" reward " in the good sense, corruption in the bad), and the journey to Court and the scenes there ; the earhest Enghsh version of the " Bell-the-Cat fable ; the (then common) sketches of the Seven Deadly Sins, with vivid pictures of low London life ; the allegorical figures of Piers Plowman (first the just man, and lastly Christ Himself), Imaginatyf " (" human wisdom '*), Hawkyn the Active Man (the ordinary human being), and others ; the splendid description of Christ's Descent into Hell, and many more. The poem, especially if the reader concentrates his attention upon one version, is not very difficult to read as far as language goes — in fact it is quite an error to suppose that Langland has a more archaic diction than Chaucer. But the peculiar nature of its subjects, and its treatment of them, make it rather difficult to follow. This difficulty, however, can be easily surmounted, especially with the help of side-headings or a running abstract ; and then the reader will have at his command some of the greatest poetry in English before the sixteenth century — stuff worthy to rank in power and majesty, though not in sweetness, variety, or volume, with the best of Chaucer. II MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE Not much of such great poetry is to be found in the Gower. far more varied and voluminous (unfortunately also the much more verbose) work of Gower. An extremely fine passage (no doubt based on Ovid), describing the en- chantments of Medea, and one or two others, reach or approach greatness ; but not much else. Gower, how- ever, has hterary interests of no unimpor.tant kind. In the first place, he is the great and almost the last example of the ''trilingual" pecuUarity, which had done so much for English, and having done it, was now to cease. He seems to have written with equal facihty in English, French, and Latin, and of his four principal works one, the chief and best known, Confessio Amantis, is English ; one, Speciilum Meditantis, French ; and two, Vox Clam- antis and the Tripartite Chronicle, in Latin. With the The three last we have nothing to do here. The Confessio, a ^^^^^^1^ very long poem in octosyllabic couplets of a type closely but not slavishly following the French, has been rather variously judged. It is a collection of stories from ancient and recent literature, both sacred and profane, enshrined or embodied in an extensive allegorical frame- work (not too appropriate to the modern eye), wherein the poet confesses to Venus' Confessor, and is at the last dismissed from her service, as superannuated, by the goddess. In this framework there are but few traces of the humour, and absolutely nothing of the liveliness and varied character-touches which Chaucer would have put in. Gower 's style is facile, voluble, and insignifi- cant ; and except in rare instances his versification deserves verjr much the same description. But though he has nothing like the genius of either of his two con- temporaries, and nothing like the variety of Chaucer, he shows in his own way, and within his limits, to a not much less degree than they do, the increasing mastery of the 'language as a literary instrument. And there is very 32 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Chaucer. little doubt that his great collection of stories, though not in the least original, served to convey their story- subjects to some of the greatest English writers. Among them figure many of the best classical myths, some of the most interesting romance-themes, biblical narratives. Eastern tales from profane sources, the former subject of Apollonius of Tyre and the future one of Pericles ; including more than one which Chaucer (at one time an intimate friend of Gowe-r's) seems to have borrowed. But Chaucer himself — save in the one point of in- tensity or subhmity as compared with Langland — far exceeds these two contemporaries of his. To start English Literature with him — as used to be done — is indeed a grave and almost fatal mistake ; to regard him as wholly or mostly unconnected with his English predecessors, and as wholly or almost wholly a copyist of French and Italian, is a mistake nearly as grave, and not much less fatal. What Chaucer really did was (in a phrase of Tennyson's altered in application) to " catch and eariTer up and Utter the sum " of the accomplishment of Middle •work. English before his time, to add something of foreign example sometimes greatly improved in form, and to infuse both with very much more of native and individual genius, applied, in the case of form and spirit alike, to a vastly enlarged range of subjects. In doing this he displays a tone and temper not indeed universal like Shakespeare's, but covering an unusually wide range. Beginning (to accept the most probable and best supported theories on the subject) with actual, though very free and original, translation from the French of the famous Romance of the Rose} and passing ^ This, the work of two French poets, William of Lorris and John of Meung, with a considerable interval between them but within the thirteenth century, is a love-allegory complicated by its second author with much other matter. Its influence on the two following centuries was immense. His general character II MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE 33 through a stage of imitation to some extent of the same hterature in other works, he then, in consequence apparently of actual visits to Italy, betook himself to the study of its younger but at the time greater hterature in the work of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. This produced perhaps The House of Fame, an unfinished allegory full of humour, certainly the extremely fine romance of Troilus and Creseyde, a surprising example, at such an early date, of character-drawing and con- ception of society, containing also much fine poetry ; the Legend of Good Women, most interesting in its prologue ; and finally the greatest of his works (again un- finished), the Canterbury Tales, The plan of these, a The series of unconnected stories enclosed in a continuous (^^^^^^bury framework (in this case the history of the journey of ^ ' some pilgrims to Canterbury), may have been taken from Boccaccio's Decameron or from the Seven Sages (above noticed) ; the separate subjects are mostly traceable to this or that earlier text in one or other of the three languages. But Chaucer, as Shakespeare was to do after him, handles all his borrowings in such an original fashion that their exact origin and amount become questions of mere curiosity. He adds a great deal in actual bulk ; ^ he intersperses passages of humour, shrewd wit, and pure poetry to which there are no parallels in the originals ; and, above all, he manages to infuse that perception and grasp of character in which is the great glory of modern, and especially of English literature. Owing to the changes in education, a very much larger number of persons than was the case formerly, know the Prologue to the Tales, which contains sketches in this kind of writing hardly surpassed as far as they go. But the whole book has to be read in order ^ For instance, Troilus and Creseyde contains more than 8000 lines, of which less than 3000 can be traced to originals in Boccaccio. D A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. to see how cunningly Chaucer makes the speech, subjects, views of his personages work out the descriptions or, as it were, elaborate labels — like those attached to the dramatis personae of some plays — which he has given in the Prologue. This command of character-drawing — always humor- ous, sometimes briUiantly witty, not seldom pathetic, and romantic in all but the highest degree — is Chaucer's greatest possession, together with the almost inseparable power of telling a story " which accompanies it. But for the student as distinguished from the mere reader for pastime, the enormous advances which he enabled f Enghsh to take in matters of pure literature — in diction, in versification, in arrangement of verse-forms, and last, but by no means least, in furtherance of prose-writing — are the principal considerations. To this day, these advances are a wonder ; and they can only be reasonably explained or opened by a key which is in reality the key of all literary history. These things show themselves in one man ; but they are, only with considerable allowance, that man's work. They are in reaUty the work of all his predecessors in the particular stage of which he is the final and the complete representative, though he contributes to his representation a finer gift, a wider knowledge, and a more extensive and accurate craftsmanship than any one before him, or any one of his own contemporaries, has possessed. It is important, however, to give more particular account of the different respects in which this advance was effected. Chaucer's own contemporaries, who praised his " gold dew-drops " of speech, and his suc- cessors down to the greatest of them, Spenser, whose description of his master as a well of English undefiled " has been sometimes misunderstood — all these seem to have considered his diction as his most remarkable II MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE quality. There was, indeed, much to be said for this. Far as Chaucer is from being what Tennyson (with a pardonable because poetical exaggeration) called him, " the first warbler,'' he is the first warbler who is quite certain of his notes. The precision, the variety, and the beauty of his language are all quite marvellous. A short and easy way of sampling, though of course not of exhausting, them is to read first the description of the Prioress, with all its minute detail and good-natured satire, in the Prologue, and then the Prioress's own Tale, with its pictorial and narrative power, its exquisite pathos and piety, kept utterly clear of sentimentality and cant. After these the student should turn to the stately splendour of the description of the combats, of the temples, and of the prayers in the KnigMs Tale. To produce effects Hke these, the most complete mastery of language is required ; and Chaucer has it. His own praise of Dante, not one word will he fail,'* is absolutely true of himself. It is exactly what we do not find in any writer before him, and hardly in any after him till Spenser. He does sometimes condescend to the catchwords and commonplaces which form one of the greatest drawbacks to mediaeval writing ; but he does this seldom, and, hke Shakespeare in parallel case, not because he cannot avoid them, but because, at the moment, he does not choose to avoid them. The other great point of versification was no doubt His equally admired ; but, owing to circumstances which ^^^^^^ will be dealt with later, it was much less well understood. For some one hundred and twenty years people tried to write verse hke Chaucer's, and showed only that they did not understand his ways. For another sixty or seventy they wrote better in practice, but quite misunderstood him in theory ; and it is a question whether anybody except Spenser really (and whether even Spenser fully) 36 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. understood his verse till in 1775, nearly four hundred years after his own death, Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730-1786) found out most if not all of the secret.^ Chaucer's versification is in fact a reduction or promotion to perfect practice of the processes of blending Teutonic and Romance usages in the matter. Whether he had a thorough theoretical understanding of these processes in his own case is very doubtful : some very great and much later poets, such as Coleridge, have not had that. But some remarks of his own show u^ that he had — what all great poets, for instance Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold, have not had — an instinctive sense of what is not good metre, and an instinctive power of avoiding it. All that we have seen groped at in earlier Middle English is here actually accomplished. His works are almost entirely composed of arrangements in couplet of the octosyllable and decasyllabic ; and in more comphcated forms of the latter only. He probably had models for all of them in French : he certainly had predecessors for the most important of them, the octo- syllabic and decasyllabic couplets, in English. But everything that he touches becomes new. Far more than Gower, he breaks away from the moulds of the French octosyllabic couplet. His beautiful rhyme-royal (see Glossary) has a character, or rather a variety of charac- ters, utterly different from the few examples of the form existing in that language — there are none in English — before him. But above all, his decasyllabic couplets are his great work ; and the attempts to trace the secrets of their versification to French show a complete absence of ear. It was not indeed necessary that he should go to France at all, and he had not many examples there of ^ That is to say, the fact that in many cases the final e of words, not now existing or not pronounced in them, was counted as a syllable. n MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE 37 the couplet, though the decasyllable in other forms had been largely used in French. But his uses of the tri- syllabic foot (which can only be got rid of by the most extravagantly arbitrary and unnatural devices) of the Alexandrine (which is not quite so necessary, but which almost certainly exists), and above all of the mechanism of pause and overlapping which sometimes leaves the couplets separate and sometimes welds them into a larger whole — all these things have no place in French whatever. It is Chaucer who evolves them from the spirit and practice of English in immemorial ages, and who establishes them in that spirit and practice for all time to come. His work in prose is of course much less striking. His prose, but it is greater than some have thought. Middle English, as we have seen, was very slow to produce really good prose, and what there was till after Chaucer's time was almost wholly translation. His own work pretty certainly was. It includes two Canterbury tales. The first is a moral one, The Tale of Melibee, which is unfortunately very dull, but contains some exceedingly interesting blank-verse passages, interspersed, it would seem, unconsciously, and probably resulting from the poet's great practice in verse elsewhere, but showing how the form (which did not make its appearance as verse for more than a century later) naturally obtrudes itself when attention is paid to prose -writing. The Parson's Tale, as its title shows, is theological and follows more than one French and Latin original ; but its conclusion (if genuine) is a curious review of the poet's own works. Then there is a scientific treatise on the Astrolabe, an astronomical instrument then much used, with a pleasant introduction to Little Lewis my son " ; and, most interesting of all, a version of Boethius to compare with Alfred's. 38 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. In all these Chaucer's powers of innovation and re-formation are hardly less noticeable than in his verse ; but the time had not come for actual performance of equal value. The It will have been seen from the foregoing chapter how Library in greatly the " English Library " has been enlarged since we 1400. surveyed it at the close of the A.S. period ; and in summar- ising the additions we may add a few particulars — warning the student carefully that Chaucer, for instance, would in all probability not have been able to read a line of A.S. itself. But though nobody may have been in a position to compare or combine the two divisions of the national collection, the richness of the new bookcase (as we may call it) is undeniable. Until quite the close of the period the additions are chiefly in verse, but the volume and variety of these has been only too imperfectly sketched above. It is impossible to exaggerate the value of the great mass of Romance now available, whether from the side of mere aesthetic pleasure and education, or from, that of ethical development — for the " chivalric " ideal is one of the highest ever reached by humanity. At the close of the period Wyclif and his followers made the Scriptures far more accessible in the vernacular than they had been ; and much earlier Scripture history, combined and " romanced '* indeed with not a little legend, had been supplied in new and attractive form — the chief example of which is the huge poem called Cursor Mundi, " the best book of all," as an enthusiastic reader or copyist has described it in MS. Poetical treatment in English, not mere verse chronicle, of military and other stirring affairs, which had begun as early as the reign of Edward I., had recently been bestowed on the wars of Edward III. in lively ballads by Laurence Minot. Further, the great department of drama had been added to English literature, after being for a time confined to Latin. A dramatised version of the " Harrowing of Hell " (Christ's descent thereto) is supposed to be as old as 1322. And lastly, as has been shown in Chaucer's case, prose, which after all is the only possible literary instru- ment of all work, was beginning to be taken seriously in hand as such, with remarkable results already. The Eng- lish reader could once more read English history in business- like English prose (John of Trevisa's free version of Higden's Latin Polychronicon) , and perhaps a little before, certainly a little after Chaucer's death, the most interesting and II MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE delightful book yet written in that prose appeared in the shape of Sir John Mandeville's Voyages and Travels. Whether there ever was such a person as Sir John ; whether his book was originally written in Latin or French ; whether it is an ingeniously mado-up mosaic of previous writers or the record of an actual journey, helping itself (like such records to this day) from previous accounts — all these things would not matter to our book- collector and should not matter to the student for some time to come. Here, beyond all doubt as a fact, is something that this student's ancestor had before him — something that he could delight himself with — in simple, admirably fluent, and natural language — with none of the tricks and temptations of verse. It is true that most of the stories told by Sir John, or the person who took his name, are purely mythical, and that most of them could be, and indeed have been, as for in- stance by Mr. WilUam Morris, admirably treated in verse. But unfortunately, whatever may have been the case in ancient times, modern men will not read verse as freely as they will read prose, and there is a very large number of subjects, even of fiction, with a much larger of what is called the serious " kind, which cannot be treated suitably in verse at all. Now, and almost for the first time since the A.S. period, prose was used for other subjects besides religious ones. So, then, the reader of 1400 had a very considerable library to draw on ; and even if he had had nothing but the work of the principal writers of the last half of the precedmg century, Chaucer, Gower, Langland, Wychf's Bible, and Mandeville's Travels, he would not have been to be pitied. For these works contained not only much in themselves, but also the promise of infinitely more to follow. CHAPTER III BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER Bad reputation of the fifteenth century, explicable but mistaken — Confusions and difficulties of the time — The English ** Chaucer- ians " : Lydgate and Occleve — Hawes, Skelton, and Barclay — Ballads, carols, etc. — Early and Middle Scots literature : Barbour, etc. — James I. and others — Henryson and Dunbar — Douglas and Lyndsay — Alexander Scott and Montgomerie — The drama : Mystery and Miracle plays — Moralities — Interludes — Newer poetry : Wyatt and Surrey — Importance of the sonnet, and of Surrey's blank verse — Poets between Surrey and Spenser : Gascoigne — Importance and value of this transition period — Its prose — Malory and the Morte d' Arthur — The Paston Letters^ Fisher, Berners, etc. — Ascham and his friends — The Library about 1577. The division of English literature which intervenes between the death of Chaucer (say 1400) and the appear- ance of Spenser (say 1580) has often, especially as regards its first three-quarters or a Uttle more (1400-1540), been dismissed as dreary and uninteresting, while even in the last division there has been a tendency, after dwelling sUghtly on Wyatt and Surrey in the later years of Henry VIII., to hurry with only slightly reduced impatience, if not contempt, to the last half of his daughter's long and glorious reign. One of the chief lessons which students of this book should learn is that such an attitude is always unworthy of the scholar, and in all but the rarest cases does serious practical harm. Literature is a living and continuous organism, and you cannot break it up 40 CH. Ill BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER 41 and throw away or neglect some of the pieces without mischievous results of misapprehension as regards the other parts and the whole. If indeed we confine the word interesting " to its lowest and most popular sense, as designating merely something amusing or exciting as a pastime, there might be some justification for the disfavour in which this period is held. Its hundred and eighty years yield perhaps one single book, Malory's Morte Arthur, which answers to such a description in a perfect degree. Even those who can enjoy poetry as poetry sometimes complain that there is nothing for them here except the work of the two courtly poets above-named. But this last notion (like that of depreciating the value of the Scots poetry, which is one of the most interesting features of the time) is, as will be shown shortly, a mistake of ignorance or indolence, or perhaps of both together. And the absence (after all only comparative) of single books of the first interest is, for any one who will take the trouble to understand its probable causes, actually a source of interest in itself as regards the whole history. To appreciate the importance of the fifteenth century and of the first two-thirds or three-quarters of the sixteenth We must, as it were, survey it both piece- meal and generally, as well as from more than one point of view. We must see first what it did ; then what were the reasons why it did not do more and better ; and lastly what, putting aside its own actual achievements, was its preparation for the great creative age that was to follow. Some glances have already been made, in the last chapter, at the apparently surprising fact that the im- mense advance made by Chaucer was not immediately — was indeed not for a whole century — followed up. There A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. were plentiful poets, or at least verse-writers, some of them almost of middle age when Chaucer died, such as John Lydgate (1370 ?-i45i ?) and Thomas Occleve (1370 P-I450 ?), with others of less note who followed down to Stephen Hawes {d, 1523 ?), John Skelton (1460 ?- 1529 ?), and Alexander Barclay (1475-1552). They all admired Chaucer without stint ; they endeavoured to copy him in the eagerest and most industrious manner ; yet most of them, except the Scottish school to be mentioned presently, only succeeded in producing the most wretched and bungling work, not seldom descend- ing to sheer doggerel. The absence, in southern English during the earlier fifteenth century, of any poet or prose- writer of real genius, with the exception of Malory, will of course account for something, but not for everything. A person of real genius might well have been, and per- sons not of genius could not but be, hopelessly hampered by the great changes of grammar and pronunciation which were evidently going on about this time. It is a question whether Chaucer himself had not rather arbitrarily standardised matters in these respects ; it is, for instance, certain that the value of the final e, which represents a very large number of older disused inflections, was by no means uniformly recognised in his own later days, and began soon afterwards to fall into greater and ever greater disuse. It is certain also that the choice between English and French accentuation (the former always throwing back, and the latter always tending to the last syllable i), which he had exercised with artistic audacity, ceased (though very gradually) to be available for choice, and that in other ways the century was one of half-conscious transition. ^ Thus in five lines only of the Prologue (Character of the Knight) he gives the French " honoilr ** to the noun, and the English " hon'our " to the verb. in BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER People were only beginning, and hardly even that, to think of the technical teaching of English grammar, English style, EngUsh pronunciation, Enghsh versifica- tion, while on the other hand they found all these things constantly changing in practice. To understand the Confusions literature of this time, one should think of a man treading and gingerly on ice which breaks under his feet, or groping onhe^*^^^ in the dark with only fitful gleams of light to guide him ; time, or listening to a broken speech or piece of music, from which he has to extract the melody and the meaning by guess-work. These are not mere fanciful analogies. We know from his own words that at the very middle of the period, Caxton, the printer and translator — who in the latter capacity did no small, and in the former an incalculable, service to EngUsh literature — felt exactly like one of the victims just described when Margaret of Burgundy (an English princess) and Lord Rivers bade him translate from French. In French itself he found a fair language,'' that is to say, a tolerably settled style of grammar, etc., which enabled people to write vividly and pleasantly. When he tried to produce similar effects in EngUsh he found that he did not know how. This was in prose; but in verse it was worse. Sometimes the poets seem to have kept Chaucer before them, counted his s^dlables, and reproduced the number without caring or being able to allow for the altered pronunciation and accentuation. Sometimes they seem to have attempted to adapt these things to his rhythm, with an equally unfortunate result. Sometimes also it would appear as if all they could keep hold of was the order of the rhymes and the number of Unes in the stanza, the lines themselves taking their chance of rhythm and length. Before, however, saying anything more of the general kind concerning the literary character and value of A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. this period, it will be better to give a short but definite account of the actual literature which it contains. This may be most conveniently divided into four parts — the English Chaucerians and others in verse from Lydgate to Spenser; the Scottish poets, for the late and few prose- writers in Middle Scots," as it is called, are unimportant ; the preparatory stage of revival initiated by Wyatt and Surrey in England, and continuing for about forty years before the appearance of Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar and Lyly's Euphues definitely announced the great Elizabethan age ; and lastly, the English prose-writers of the whole time. The The first division itself may be with advantage English further divided into three stages — the life-time and work " Chaucer- ^ . , ^i ians " : of men who were actually contemporary with Chaucer ; Lydgate period of the Wars of the Roses, which saw very little literature ; and the reign of Henry VII., with the earliest years of that of his son. In the first part two names stand out in all histories, and perhaps no others need receive much attention in a First Book of English Literature. These are Lydgate and Occleve. The work of Lydgate, who was a monk of the great Abbey of St. Edmund's Bury, and is often called " the Monk of Bury,'* is enormously extensive, and has never yet been printed as a whole. Some individual pieces of it extend to thousands and tens of thousands of verses. They are all strongly tinged with the allegory which, from imita- tion of the Romance of the Rose (see above, p. 32), had become the chief feature of almost all Uterature that could in any way admit it ; but their subjects are fairly various. There are many Saints' Lives, a great com- pilation after Boccaccio on the Falls of Princes, a Tale of Thebes suggested by Chaucer's Knight's Tale, a vast translation-adaptation of a French religious allegory of the " Pilgrimage " kind, which we know best from Ill BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER Bunyan, and others besides minor poems in a few cases touching on events of the time. Lydgate was regarded by his contemporaries, and by the next generation or two, as nearly if not quite the equal, not merely of Gower, but of Chaucer, the three being often leashed together: but theirs was not a critical period. He followed Chaucer's chief measures, the octosyllabic and decasyllabic couplets and the rhyme-royal ; but could get none of his master's various music out of them, and sometimes broke down altogether, so that there is no comparison even between him and the much inferior " regularity " of Gower. Of Chaucer's other qualities, which made him so great a poet, Lydgate has nothing. He is generally one of the dullest of writers, and the one piece of his which is not dull, London Lick- penny, a short but very lively description of the bustle and costliness and sharp practice of the capital, is now denied to him by some who defend him in other ways. Occleve, who seems to have been a personal pupil of and Chaucer (as perhaps Lydgate also was), and to whom we owe what is very possibly a direct contemporary portrait of that great poet, wrote less and better, at least less incorrectly from the metrical point of view. But, except an account of his own early freaks and follies, his work also is the reverse of Uvely. The pair are at their best, and that very rarely, in purely rehgious verse. Both seem to have died about the middle of the century ; and after them we have, for nearly a generation, nothing in southern Enghsh verse that deserves to be mentioned here, though the first of the three poets, Hawes, Skelton, and Barclay, who specially represent Hawes, Henry the Seventh's reign, may possibly have known Lydgate. The work of all three is sufficiently different Barclay, in character. Hawes is a purely moral and allegorical poet, who, though he has flashes of real poetry now and 46 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. then, cannot get out of the formal hamper of the time. Skelton (though he also deals in allegory) is a sharp satirist of court ways, and more importantly a rebel in part to the sham Chaucerianism of the day, and an experimenter in a curious form of verse, almost but not quite doggerel, which is called Skeltonic/' ^ This has actual merit when compared with the lumbering rhyme-royal, the sUpshod octosyllables, and the deca- syllabics that do not seem to know what they themselves are, of his predecessors. Barclay is mainly a translator or paraphraser of foreign work in German (the Ship of Fools) and Italian (the Eclogues), both satirical. Although all the three are to some extent free from the very worst faults of their contemporaries, these faults, which are those of English fifteenth-century verse at large, are still visible in them. They are the constant presence of dull and sometimes quite inapposite allegory ; the clumsy handling of versification ; the use of a fiat and undistinguished diction, which they make only worse by what are called aureate " phrases, that is to say, gaudy Latinisms ; and the general lack of poetical crafts- manship as well as poetical spirit. In strange contrast to this is the fact — undoubted though difficult to give chapter and verse for in particular cases — that this very fifteenth century is the time in Ballads, which the beautiful old English ballads arose, and the carols, etc. time also of still more beautiful carols, or sheer popular songs, on subjects chiefly sacred but sometimes profane, which for truth of rhythm, sweetness of diction, and natural pathos and passion of feeling hardly yield to the productions of any time, language, or country. It is to these things, no doubt, that we owe the preservation, ^ Some attempt to derive this from French originals. But these originals have nothing of the specially English use of equivalence and substitution which distinguishes Skelton. Ill BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER during this comparatively dead time ^ in literary poetry, of the true poetical spirit which, when Hterature had dragged itself out of the hamper of the transition, was to give us " the melodious bursts that echo still of the great Elizabethans. The history of early Scottish Literature, which, though Early and not exactly conterminous with the present period, finds Middle its chief and most interesting development therein, is uterature: very curious. For a long time (during the whole of the Barbour. O.E. period and the earher part of that of M.E.) there was no distinction at all between the language of Northern England and that of Scotland proper; while from the later stage, in consequence probably of the extremely disturbed state of the country, no literature at all came for a long time. It has indeed been ques- tioned whether such a term as Old Scots has any proper designation. If it has, we have hardly any literature certainly belonging to it except the Brus and perhaps some other work of John Barbour (1316 ?- 1395), Archdeacon of Aberdeen, who was a rather older contemporary of Chaucer. Some indeed have identified a certain Huchowne, mentioned by Wyntoun the chronicler, with the author of some alliterative poems in northern English ; but there is no real evidence of this, and it is not even certain that Huchowne was a Scotsman. Barbour's own work is interesting and of considerable merit, showing good knowledge both of French and English poetry ; and its octosyllabic couplets form a spirited and agreeable medium for telling the ^ The student may find, in some books, a sharp distinction made and insisted upon between this literary or " Court " poetry on the one hand, and " Folk " or popular verse on the other, not merely at this time but earlier. Whatever may be the case in other literatures, it is not wise to lay too much stress on this in English, where, most fortunately, the two kinds have at almost all times intermixed with and influenced each other. 48 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. striking stories (not perhaps always strictly historical) of Robert Bnice's adventures. It was not, however, till the next century that the remarkable literary dialect known as Middle Scots came into existence ; and produced, or was used hy, a succession of really remarkable poets, though it was far less productive in prose. What makes this dialect so specially interesting is that it is an artificial or made one, arising from the study of Chaucer in the first place, and probably at no time corresponding exactly with any- thing spoken by the people of Scotland. It found, however, some poets of greater capacity than any of their English contemporaries ready to use it ; and it displayed, again in almost glaring contrast to the southern form, that " correctness of verse, grammar, and the like which is almost a necessity to artificially made languages. It continued to be written, though with decreasing volume and merit, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and its last considerable ex- ponent, Alexander Montgomerie (1556 ?-i6io ?), prob- ably did not die much before Shakespeare. But, even before the Union of the Crowns in 1603, something befell it not quite unlike the fate of A.S. five hundred years earlier ; and when that Union happened, the effect was much more directly fatal than that of the Norman Conquest in the other case. Like all artificial things, it had no seed of Ufe in it ; and the dialect of Montgomerie was a mere traditional imitation, a century or so older than its actual date. Scottish verse- writers — Drum- mond, Aytoun, Stirling, Hannay, and others — ^began to use ordinary English and to copy English poets ; and during the seventeenth century there is hardly a Scots poet of merit ; while the best Scottish prose-writers, such as Sir Thomas Urquhart and Sir George Mackenzie, are not pure Scots in their diction. Ill BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER 49 But during the time of this chapter, and of the first part of the next, this hybrid, imitative, artificial speech, or rather writing, suppUed a remarkable succession of poets. James the First of Scotland (1394-1437), not Tames I. long after Chaucer's death, appears, in the judgment of ^^^^^^ most though not all critics, to have written an allegorical poem, The Kings Quair [Book], in direct imitation of Chaucer himself, but with no little sweetness and colour.^ The chronicler Wyntoun (1350 ?-i420 ?), above- mentioned, uses the octosyllable with more freedom of substitution than Barbour. Henry the Minstrel (more familiarly " Blind Harry ") writes at some time in the fifteenth century (his birth- and death-dates are quite unknown), in decasyllabics of a rather more French mould than Chaucer's, a spirited though utterly un- historical account of Wallace, that the earlier hero of the Wars of Independence, on whom Barbour had been silent, might not lack his poet. Robert Henryson (dates again uncertain) displayed Henryson much greater and more varied poetical power than these, in an unusually good and varied collection of poems — Fables, a continuation or rather a different ending of Chaucer's Troilus and Creseyde which has singular power and pathos, and minor pieces of merit. Later, and at the junction of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, comes William Dunbar (1465 ?-i530 ?), in whom some have seen a writer not too weak to compete with Bums for the position of chief poet in Scots dialect, and who, putting mere comparison aside, possesses indisputable vigour, humour, power of description, passion now and then, and command of good verse always. Dunbar is a Chaucerian still, and affects the heavier and more " aureate " style of the time in such poems as The Golden 1 The metre, Chaucerian also, is rhyme-royal (see Glossary), a name which is supposed to be derived from this very book. E 50 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Targe and the Thistle and the Rose, But his poetical power is better displayed in some shorter pieces — the very spirited and fairly well-known Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins ; the coarse but in its opening beautiful Two Married Women and the Widow, written in alliterative verse ; and perhaps a sort of Canterbury Tale/' The Friars of Berwick, which is not much below Chaucer himself in his looser and lighter vein ; the solemn Lament for the Dead Makers [Poets], and not a few others. Douglas Shghtly younger comes Gavin Douglas (1474 ?-i522), , Bishop of Dunkeld and son of Archibald Bell-the-Cat, Lyndsay. ^ . . author of allegorical poems, Ki7ig Hart, the Palace of Honour, and (much more importantly) of a famous trans- lation of Virgil with original prologues inserted between the books, sometimes in the most extravagantly alliter- ated metre, but often showing good poetry, especially in the direction of nature-painting. Him follows another well-known name. Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount (1490 P-I555), with poems political, personal, and mis- cellaneous, as well as with a long dramatic composition,^ The Satire of the Three Estates, allegorical in main text and farcical in interludes. From Queen Mary's reign we Alexander have, besides anonymous and other singers, Alexander Scott (1525 P-I584), a poet of whom little if anything is known personally, but the author of some charming lyric. And so w^e come again to Montgomerie, who ends the list with a fair body of verse, the chief of it sonnets and a very popular allegory, The Cherry and the Slae [sloe]. He compares but poorly, though he is a true poet himself, not only with his contemporary Spenser, but with others of the EUzabethans. But with his earlier predecessors the case is quite reversed ; and any one who will take the very slight trouble neces- ^ This is the only English counterpart of a whole class of Early French plays called by the special name of sotie. Ill BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER sary to master the odd -looking but not really difficult dialect will find in Henryson and Dunbar a spirit and poetical execution which are utterly absent, not merely from Lydgate and from Occleve, but from Hawes and even from Skelton. We have just mentioned what is practically the only The drama in Middle Scots ; but the estabhshment of that "^^^^ ' Myste^"^ great kind in southern EngHsh is a feature of great and ' importance in the literature of the fifteenth century. Miracle There were certainly dramatic compositions earlier ; we have mentioned one of a rather rudimentary kind representing Christ's descent into or Harrowing of " Hell, which is probably as old as the first quarter of the fourteenth, while plays of Scriptural tenor (as all were at first) had been performed in Latin as far back as the twelfth. The exact origin of these performances has been much disputed, and attempts have been made to trace it back to village festivals and the like. Historically, the evidence is much in favour of a gradual development from the services of the Church, assisted perhaps on one side by the dramatic character of popular sports, and on the other by some trace of study of classical drama- tists like Terence. All our earlier plays are reUgious in character and subject, though often with farcical inter- ludes, entirely unscriptural, but connected somehow with the story of the piece. They seem to have been first acted in the church itself; then in the churchyards; and then on stages, sometimes by the guilds or trade- companies. As in other cases there is no doubt some literary indebtedness to French, but our plays are less regularly arranged. The French religious play was divided into Mysteries,'' dealing with Scripture, and " Miracles," dealing with the Virgin and the Saints ; but both terms are applied indiscriminately in EngHsh. We have four great collections of these plays, besides 52 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. minor ones and a few individual pieces. One, and perhaps the oldest, the York " collection, looks very- like a dramatisation of the Cursor Mundi (see above, p. 38) divided into short acts, rather than plays, of a few hundred lines each for the separate stories, and each intended to be acted by a special trade guild. Important towns seem to have employed playwrights to make them special versions of sacred story : besides the York, we have others connected with Chester, Coventry, and Wakefield. Unlike the French plays, which are almost invariably in octosyllabic couplet with a few triolets (see Glossary) interspersed, the English are in a vast variety of verses, including even the " Bums ** stanza, and must have had a great effect in familiarising the English ear with compUcated metres. From the simple Scripture history or Saint's Life, however, there pro- ceeded, as time went on, some striking variations. On the one hand, the overmastering allegorical tendency, which has been so often mentioned, and of which the fifteenth century is the great period, seized on the drama and produced " IMoralities " — plays in which the char- acters or most of them were abstract — Virtues, Vices, etc. — and which, with a few exceptions, are terribly dull. On the other hand, the farcical episodes above spoken of (which are in some cases almost independent farces, as in a long story of sheep-stealing introduced into the handling of the Epiphany in the Wakefield or Townley Plays) developed themselves into a . kind of drama called the Interlude (see Glossary), with us in fact an incipient comedy of the ruder and slighter kind. Some of the Saints' Lives, especially that of St. Mary Magdalene, developed in like fashion into elaborate dramas, with change of scene and abundant incident. It was undoubtedly from these various kinds, and not directly and solely from the study of the classics in Ill BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER the so-called ''Renaissance" (see Glossary), that the EHzabethan drama, as we call it, came ; though no doubt the classical studies helped. But they were not ab- solutely needed; and, if used alone, could not have produced some of the most noteworthy features of our great dramatic period. Mixture of comedy and tragedy ; rapid change of scene ; variety and number of characters ; and comparative indifference to a well- concocted and rather Umited plot, are directly opposed to the spirit and practice of the ancient drama : they are all of the very essence of the mediaeval, as they are of that which Shakespeare perfected. But (though these plays were in verse, and sometimes New not bad verse) we must come to Wyatt and Surrey, ^y^^^^ the two names which, in the blunter outUnes of the Surrey History of Enghsh Literature once current, used to follow Chaucer's almost directly, and with little to follow them until Spenser. Biographical detail is here impossible ; it must be sufficient to say that Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) represents the middle period of Henry the Eighth's reign before the " Terror " of its close ; and that Henry Howard, by courtesy Earl of Surrey (1517 ?- 1547), ^3.s almost the last victim of that Terror itself. They stand also thus near to each other not merely in chronology, but in the direct relation of master and pupil ; though Surrey did a good deal of work of a prob- ably independent kind, and of a much more advanced character than Wyatt's. Both represent— with what additional assistance from the contemporary Frenchmen who were influenced in the same manner it is impossible here to discuss — a new influence, that of Italian, on Enghsh poetry. Chaucer, as has been said, had derived much from ItaUan in point of subject ; yet he had not been much affected by its form or even by its spirit. But Italian since his time, though it had produced no 54 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. single writers equal to the three whom he knew, had continued to perfect itself in general literary expression, and was far ahead of French; while, by following Petrarch chiefly, it had developed a passionate kind of personal poetry which was also not elsewhere to be found. The critical exactness which the Italians had first adopted from the Proven9al school,^ and had after- wards confirmed by the revived Renaissance study of the classics themselves — an exactness which finds ex- pression in the first important critical book of the modern literatures, Dante^s De Vulgari Eloquio — had evolved divers short forms of verse, the canzone, the sestina, the madrigal, and above all the sonnet, mainly devoted to love poetry. These, though formally strict, were not so arbitrarily tricked as the kindred French forms above noticed. Import- Of these the Sonnet — a poem, in its strictest kind, of anceofthe fourteen lines, with the rhymes differently but always more or less intricately arranged — though not the longest or most elaborate, was the most universally popular, and it so happened that its almost unavoidable peculiari- ties gave exactly what was needed to reform English poetry. That poetry had suffered, as we have partly seen, from the omnipresence of dull and undistinguished allegory, from extreme diffuseness of handling, and from a most ungraceful, if not positively disgraceful, laxity of form. The want of bulk, the hardness of form-outline, and the almost necessary presence of real or assumed personal emotion in the sonnet, though they could not in all cases absolutely keep out these bad things, did so in some, and rendered them conspicuously ugly in all. Wyatt and Surrey both tried the sonnet, and it is most ^ The poets of the south and south-west of France, especially from the eleventh to the end of the thirteenth century. They were remark- able for the exactness and varied form of their lyrics. Ill BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER curious to observe how difficult they (and specially Wyatt, the elder and first experimenter) found it to adjust the rhythm of the hnes properly. Still they do manage it with only occasional lapses; and they try other metres for short poems with great success. Wyatt also makes efforts at the famous ItaUan terza rima, the metre of Dante (see Glossary). This, for some reason, is a very difficult metre in English, and has seldom been completely successful, even in the hands of such a poet as Shelley. Keeping closer to older Enghsh ways, but reducing these also to greater regularity, both Wyatt and Surrey adopt a variation of the old fourteener-couplet or ballad- measure, to which the curious name of " poulter[er]s measure " was given at the time (see Glossary). But next to the sonnet, and of more importance even than the sonnet, was an experiment which only Surrey made, and which resulted in the momentous, the epoch-making discovery of the powers of English " blank " verse. When we think of Shakespeare and Milton — even without adding the other great poets from Marlowe to Tennyson who have used the metre — we may be tempted to call this the greatest single step ever taken in the history of English verse. Surrey, who tried it in a translation of Virgil's Aeneid, Books II. and IV., and who for more than a generation was hardly followed at all, probably took this idea also from the Itahans, especially from the poet Alamanni. But he need not quite necessarily have done so. Chaucer, always popular since his death, was specially popular at this particular time} and an ear like Surrey's may very well have been and of caught by the strange blank verses, embedded in prose, which, as has been said, occur frequently, and sometimes verse, in batches, in the Tale of Melihee. There was also, under 1 The first collected edition of Chaucer's Works appeared in 1532. 56 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. the influence of the classical Renaissance, a distaste- absolutely wrong, but fashionable for a time — for rhyme as a barbarous thing, the product of the Dark Ages. But however it came about, it did come about. Naturally these first blank verses are a little stiff and awkward, as if the writer were uncertain of his way. There is a tendency (which was hardly got over till Shakespeare conquered it) to make every line come to an end in rhythm if not also in sense — to be, as it has been called, " end-stopped or single-moulded,'' and so to compose a monotonous series of disconnected utterances. But still there it was ; and before many years had passed the advantages of it for drama, where rhyme is always an intruder, were discovered by Thomas Sackville (1536-1608), and those for satire by George Gascoigne (1525-1577). Somewhat strangely, though Surrey's own pattern-piece was a considerable part of an epic poem, it was more than a hundred years before Milton showed what the measure could do in that way. But, once more, there it was ; and if any one will, en- larging the thought suggested above, think what EngUsh poetry would be without its blank -verse poems, he will feel that he can hardly pay too much homage and thanks to Henry Howard, whose hfe his namesake King cut off on a charge equally frivolous and tyrannical, when he had barely reached his thirtieth year. Poets It may seem surprising that, after so decided and Suire^y and P^^^^^^S ^ revolution as that effected by Wyatt and Spenser: Surrey, both of whom were, moreover, not merely Gascoigne. good Craftsmen but real poets, a more definite and general improvement should not have shown itself in English poetry at once. But this would be to mistake the processes of literary evolution, which cannot be too soon understood. When great and general changes seem to follow the work of one or two men it is because Ill BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENDER these men are 'the first to express something that had been long maturing. That was not the case with Wyatt and Surrey. They were really innovators, and their own uncertainty about points of metre, rhythm, and accentuation shows that they were so. It is not therefore surprising, especially if one takes into con- sideration the religious troubles of the time and the continued failure of great personal capacities, that it should have taken more than thirty years from Surrey's death, more than twenty from the actual printing (they had been known in MS. long before) of the poems of both in TotteVs Miscellany (1557), before Spenser appeared, and that there should have been hardly anything of really great poetical merit between, except Sackville's two short pieces, the Induction and the Complaint of Buckingham, in the curious, and, for advanced students, extremely instructive, but for the mere reader terribly uninteresting Mirror for Magistrates} But the time was not really lost, and to think it so is one of the numerous old errors about this subject which have not even yet been com- pletely corrected. In particular, there is to be found, not merely in the positively ^ood work of Sackville himself, but in the less attractive verse of Tusser, Turberville, Googe, Gascoigne, and others, one point of great importance. They never slip back into tha floundering doggerel of import- the fifteenth century in practice, and in the critical ^^lue^^^ discussions of poetry which at last make their appearance, of this we can see that this abstinence was deliberate, and that transition period, it is even leading some of them into a contrary mistake. Gascoigne, in a little book of Notes and Instructions, which is our first regular EngUsh treatise on poetics, ^ A great collection, by various hands, of tragical stories in verse from fabulous and real- British and English history, which appeared in constantly enlarged editions from 1559 to 1610. 58 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. says, though he regrets it, that we have in Enghsh only one foot, the iambic. This is quite wrong, and it is contradicted by the practice of his own time ; but it was evidently an established idea with professional verse- writers. And though it impoverishes English poetry terribly, and was soon absolutely disregarded, in a fashion which ought to have destroyed it, by Shake- speare himself, every one must see that the prevalence of the notion must have had one good effect — to kill the doggerel and to implant a definite if too restricted sense of rhythm in the English ear. Now as pronuncia- tion was even yet not settled, and as no poet of genius enough to take liberties had yet appeared, this regular if rather schoolboy versification was the best exercise and preparation possible.^ It was in fact the final benefit which this much abused and too often misunder- stood period of 1400-1580 conferred upon English literature, and it more than made up for the mischief of the earher doggerel from which it was a reaction. That never recurred, in the same form at least : this helped make its recurrence (at least in the same form) impossible, though we shall see fresh attacks of the disease and fresh applications of the remedy later. Indeed, properly regarded, the whole period shares this importance as the school-time of modern English verse. The splendid achievement of Chaucer remained as an achievement, remains till the present day, and will always remain. But as a pattern, except for men of genius who could disregard the merely con- temporary element in it, it had ceased to be possible, owing to the double change in the vocabulary of the language and in the manner of pronouncing and valuing it. Yet the century which followed, poor as it was in ^ Especially as the ballads and popular songs kept the freer rhythm going. Ill BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER poets, gave the vocabulary time to fill up, and the pronunciation time to settle; and the half-century of reforming experiment which came next, prepared the way for Spenser and his school. It may be taken as a paradox, but is a sober truth, that it was really a blessing that we had no good poets in Southern English during the fifteenth century. They could not, hke Chaucer, have summed up the past, for he had done it already ; and they were losing hold of it. The present was sHpping and crumbhng under them. They could not have anticipated the future, for the necessary instrument of language was not ready for them. They could only have given the sanction of their poetical spirit, if they had had it, to constantly shifting and dissolving diction and form. In the apparently more humdrum matter of prose, its prose, the record of the period is even better; for there is nothing, even in the earlier time, to apologise for, only a steady progress of schooling and exercising to record, with at least one splendid piece of actual achievement, standing to prose itself very much as Chaucer's does to verse. We saw that, by (or very soon after) the beginning of the fifteenth century, most promising beginnings had been made by Chaucer himself, by Trevisa, by Wyclif , and by " Mandeville,'' in extending the subjects and improving the form of prose. These efforts were continued, during the fifteenth itself, by Capgrave, Fortescue, and others, in the practice of writing on history and the kindred subjects of law and politics in English. A further extension, mistaken in some respects, but symptomatic of the spirit of the time, was made by Reginald Pecock's (1395-1460) resumption of Wyclif's endeavours to make scholastic philosophy and theology EngHsh. And not much after the middle of the century we find, almost earlier than anything of the kind in verse, the deliberate 6o A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. attempts of Caxton (1422 ?-i49i ?) to make English cope more easily with the fair language of French/' Malory Curiously enough, however, the masterpiece above and the referred to — a masterpiece rather retrospective than Euphues ^ and Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar made their "appearance. Neither of them — Euphues even less than the Calendar — is exactly a masterpiece ; but both, and the Calendar especially, show that English verse and Enghsh prose have entered at last on paths which will lead to masterpieces. And though the experimental character is still on both, something great is achieved in each actually. They called Spenser at the time the new poet,'' and few poets have ever better deserved the title. A duplicate of the label was not, so far as we know, attached by any one to Lyly, but the imitation which followed was immediate and unprecedented. The Shepherd's Calendar borrowed its title from an Spenser's older book, but with new applications in both words ^^^^^J^^*^ — " Shepherd's," because of the so-called pastoral ^ form imitated from Theocritus, Virgil, and some recent Renaissance poets in France and Italy ; Calendar," because the poems are distributed under the names of the months. It is in reality a collection of poems, amatory, ^ To be strictly accurate, the firat part of Euphues {The Anatomy of Wit) had appeared in the spring of i579 ; but the second and larger, Euphues and his England, did not follow till that of 1580. Between them the Shepherd's Calendar was entered on the Stationers' Register in December 1579. 2 This word " pastoral " is much used in and of the literature of the sixteenth and still more the seventeenth century, while it comes also into that of the eighteenth. The idea of shepherds having something special to do with poetry is a very old one, though, in modem times at any rate, it is nothing but an artificial tradition. It has, however, produced some very beautiful poetry, from Spenser's own work to Mr. Matthew Arnold's. 68 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. satirical, political, ecclesiastical, complimentary, and in fact miscellaneous. Euphues is a sort of novel, with not much story and with immense digressions on education and other matters. But the substance of neither is of half the importance of the form in both. It is manifest that Spenser is trying a large number of different metres and a form of poetic diction of his own ; and it is equally manifest that Lyly is, almost for the first time, deliber- ately endeavouring to write striking and beautiful prose. Little space as we can give here to individual books, some must be spared for each to show the nature and success of these endeavours. This success in Spenser's case, if not complete, is very great. Nine of his pieces are written in the new form of recast and precise metre, with little substitution for the most part, but attempting many different kinds, from the decasyllabic and octosyllabic couplets to very intricate lyrical stanzas. And instead of the wooden and un- distinguished quahty which has been noticed in most of his predecessors since Surrey, we find stateliness, music, variety, charm of all kinds. The solemn but not tedious regularity of the opening six-line stanzas in " January,'' and the wide range, cheerful or lamenting, of the lyric strophes in April " and " November," show quahties unUke anything in the preceding period except Sackville, and different even from his. But besides these Spenser tries, in the three others, the opposite irregular kind of verse, with ballad substitution and more, and so makes a link between Genesis and Exodus (see above, p. 20) in the thirteenth century and Coleridge's Christahel in the nineteenth. Hardly less remarkable is his diction. This is almost more original than his attempts in metre ; nobody since Chaucer seems to have thought of anythy^ Hke it in southern Enghsh, and it has the advan1;^ge over the IV THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD 69 poetic diction of Middle Scots of being very much less archaic and artificial, and drawn from a much wider range of sources. It is, however, to some extent both artificial and archaic, as it certainly was not the spoken language of the day (it may be doubted whether good poetic diction ever is) and there are a good many Chaucerisms in it. But Spenser blended these with large imitations from the Romance languages and from classical sources, as well as with a touch of Northern dialect — for the poet (1552 ?-99), though bom in London, belonged to a Lancashire family, — and seems occasion- ally to have made words for himself. At any rate, the resulting compound, though not so good as it was subsequently made in The Faerie Queene, is a beautiful one, and has to no small extent served as a pattern and origin to English poetic diction ever since. In combina- tion with the metre it does really supply something new in English poetry, and at the same time something which we feel to be connected with all the English poetry that we know down to that of the present day. The effect is not easily describable as a whole, though it is possible to pull it to pieces a Uttle and discover its secrets to some extent. But if it is difficult to describe or define, it is perfectly easy to feel, even for any boy or girl in his or her teens who has been tolerably educated, and who is ever going to take any intelhgent interest in poetry at all. A page of Chaucer modernised only a very little in spelling and not at all in words, a page of Spenser adjusted only to modern use of capitals and the hke, and a page of Tennyson as it is, printed side by side and studied a little, would make an in- valuable lesson. If Lyly's (1554 ?-i6o6 ?) achievement in Euphues was Lyiy's far less than Spenser's in the Calendar, and if the former never came anywhere near the latter's still greater 70 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. achievement in The Faerie Queene^ there are some excuses for him besides inferiority of genius. He had a much less attractive subject or subjects, and, great as had been the advance of prose in the hundred and eighty years behind him, it cannot be said that any forms of it, Uke the forms of verse from Wyatt to Gascoigne, had been suggested. Ascham had died some ten years before, leaving a good plain model, but with hardly any attempt at ornament save a little alliteration and antithetic balance. Lyly set himself to fashion a prose that should be ornate. He retained and exaggerated the alliteration and the antithesis, but he added other devices to them, especially one very pecuUar trick, the origin of which has been sought in Spanish, in Latin, and elsewhere, but which no one, except his mere imitators, had ever or has ever used to the same extent. This consisted in larding his prose with endless similes, themselves arranged so as to display both alliteration and antithesis to the utmost, and drawn sometimes from classical history and literature, but oftener from the curious and fanciful unnatural history which the mediaeval imagination had evolved from things of the kind in ancient authorities like PHny. An extract below, though we cannot give many extracts, is almost necessary to illustrate this.^ The effect is not even at first very dehghtful, and soon becomes intolerably monotonous to the modem reader ; but it must be remembered that it was the first deUberate attempt to beautify prose as prose. The new We cannot, on the other hand, assign to any particular drama. person, or to any particular date, the restarting of the' ^ " For as the precious stone, Sandastra, hath nothing in outward appearance but that which seemeth black, but being broken, poureth forth beams like the sun : so virtue sheweth but bare to the outward eye, but being pierced with inward desire, shineth like crystal." IV THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD 7^ great kind of drama, which is neither pure poetry nor pure prose ; but we know fairly well about what time it took place, and we know some of the persons who effected it. During the forty years or so which were occupied by the last stage noticed in the preceding chapter, the activity of drama and the rapidity of its transformations were surprising ; but it seemed better not to speak much of them there. The Reformation practically put an end to the miracle-plays, and the extreme Reformers disliked dramatic performances of any kind, partly because of their former connection with the Church, and partly from an impartial objection to all amusements and to most literature. But the popular appetite of the time for these very performances was keen ; they were as welcome, or more so, in the houses of the nobility and at Court ; and the fact that moralities and interludes had been established, before the ban on the older kind of play, made indulgence of this appetite easier. It was customary, moreover, for persons of distinction and privilege to extend their protection and give their names to companies of players. The Morahty itself rapidly changed (we have a striking example of this* in Bale's King Johan [John]) into a historical drama ; the Interlude became first a farce and then a comedy ; the prose versions of the romances, and the romantic stories of such miracle plays as 5^. Mary Magdalene, promoted plays on general subjects. Between 1530 and 1580 we have a very large bulk of work, much of it anonymous, or ascribed to names which are hardly more than names to us, and (which is still worse) much of if very uncertainly dated. But even before 1540 John Heywood, who has also left us proverbs, epigrams, etc., wrote not a few interludes which are comedies in Uttle. The study of the classics, as noted above, gave assistance in making the plays 72 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. more regular and substantial, and they came more and more near, if not in dramatic and poetical merit, in the general features also noted above, to the kind of drama which every educated person knows in Shakespeare. Gorboduc, It used to be considered sufficient to single out from this medley dramatic experiment three plays — Gammer Gurtons Needle^ perhaps by Bishop Still ; Ralph Roister Doister, by Nicholas Udal the schoolmaster ; and Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex, by Sackville the poet and a certain Norton — as, to reverse the order, the first English tragedy, the first English comedy, and the first English farce. Such positive appellations are always rather dangerous ; but there is a certain justification about these. Gorboduc (1561) is a stiff and uninteresting play, arranged with long speeches and little action, in the classical manner of the Roman tragedian Seneca, which was repeatedly rejected by English taste, but possessing the real and important peculiarity of being the first English play to be written in blank verse — as stiff as the rest of it, but opening endless possibilities. Ralph Roister Doister (1550), though written in a sort of doggerel, has in the same way much in it suggested by Latin comedy, is not unamusing, and has something like a plot. Gammer Gurtons Needle (1566) is more doggerelish and somewhat coarser, but more in the genuine way of future developments. Except, however, in the blank verse, these plays do not tell us nearly so much about what was going to happen as does the huddle of sometimes very shapeless dramatic compositions which, to the number of some scores still existing, were also produced before 1580. They show the strangest medley of morahty and interlude, morahty and history, morahty and romance, classical imitations in the Gorboduc style, pure farce, and half a dozen other kinds; in all sorts of metres, often doggerehsh, and with subjects taken IV THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD from all sorts of sources, profane and sacred, historical and romantic, popular and learned. They are mostly the roughest novice-work ; but it is only after going through them that any one can thoroughly understand the origin and nature of the great and famous Eliza- bethan drama which followed. If their existence is ignored, such understanding is impossible, though it is not necessary for any but thorough students to read them all, or for beginners to read any. The merit of selecting, unravelUng, or disentangling "The the complex constituents of that drama to some con- University . Wits : siderable though not final extent from this welter and p^^ie and tangle of hit-or-miss experiment is justly assigned to a others, group of writers, most of whom were friends, and who were certainly in some cases beginning to work at the time when The Shepherd's Calendar and Euphues ap- peared. Indeed Lyly himself was one of them, though his plays stand rather apart from those of the others, and though he does not occupy anything Uke such a position }n the history of drama as he does in the history of prose. These others, whose work is more homogeneous, are George Peele (1558 ?-i597), Robert Greene (1560 ?- 1592), Thomas Lodge (1558 ?-i625), Christopher Marlowe (1564 P-I593), Thomas Nash, and Thomas Kyd (uncertain dates). All, or almost all, were Oxford or Cambridge men. The whole group is often called, from a phrase used at the time, " The University Wits ; and they represent the combined influence of past English litera- ture, and the new classical culture of the Renaissance. To this last Lyly was specially devoted, all his certain plays (Endymion, Campaspe, etc.) owing their subjects to it ; while his peculiarities of style and the abundance of prose which he uses (rare at the time in drama) are also characteristic. Peele, the next eldest of the group, shows well, in the Ust of plays attributed (one perhaps 74 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. uncertainly) to him, the great variety of subject which characterises this drama. David and Bethsabe is biblical ; Edward I, historical in general subject, though very unhistorical in treatment and detail. The Battle of Alcazar deals with famous contemporary events (the death or disappearance of King Sebastian of Portugal in battle with the Moors). The Arraignment of Paris is classical, Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes (the doubtful one) mere romance, and An Old Wives' Tale (which deals with something Uke the subject of Milton's Comus), romantic mixed with other matter. But the great interest of Peele lies in the way in which he softens and beautifies the stiff blank-verse of Gorboduc, and of some intermediate plays, into a style still too much inclined to let the hues stand singly, and so not to get the advantages of what is called the " verse paragraph,'' but occasionally attaining real charm as poetry. Greene, though perhaps more remarkable for his pamphlets (see below) and his poems than for his plays ; Lodge, of whom the same may be said ; Nash, a sharp satirist and pamphleteer Ukewise ; and Kyd, whose name is connected, not merely with The Spanish Tragedy, one of the most popular of the new plays in a style to be noticed presently, but with Cornelia, a fresh attempt to introduce the Latin-French kind of classical tragedy, fortunately again with no success — were minor Peeles in choice of subject and character of work. But he and they are all inferior to Christopher Marlowe, perhaps the youngest of all, and a short-lived man, but the first great dramatist in English ; the master in more than one respect of Shakespeare ; and as a poet merely to be judged by passages, one of the greatest in our tongue. Marlowe, though he does not yet perceive the full quali- ties of blank verse, which were left for Shakespeare himself to discover, equals Peele in sweetness, and IV THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD surpasses him in grandeur of verse.i Like Peele, too, but with more powerful handhng, he deals with subjects remarkably different :— two plays on the great barbarian conqueror Tamburlaine or Tamerlane ; one on the legend, lately made popular in Germany, of the Enchanter Faustus ; one on a classical subject. Dido, Queen of Carthage] the first great Enghsh example of the chronicle or history-play, Edward 11. ; The Massacre at Paris, dealing with the contemporary St. Bar- tholomew ; and The Jew of Malta, a capital instance of the new " Tragedy of Horror (or, as it is less well called, of Blood to which Kyd's chief work, The Spanish Tragedy, also belongs.^ But besides perfecting these various kinds by his abiUty as a playwright, and ennobling them by his splendid verse as a poet, Marlowe did something more for EngUsh literature. It is a commonplace but not altogether unjust charge against the mediaeval part of that Uterature, that it is devoid of signs of personal character on the author's part. With the exception of Chaucer' and one or two others, usually anonymous, this does apply to English up to the time of which we are speaking ; but Marlowe's case is quite altered. A strong, almost a violent, personality appears in his work, aspiring after beauty certainly, but also after the vast, the terrible, the vague, and embodying these aspirations in the selection and treatment of his subjects. The irresistibleness of Tamburlaine ; the oceans of blood which he sheds with no savage exultation, but as if the thing had to be done ; his driving the kings of Asia as mere beasts of draught ; his passion for his wife Zeno- ^ Ben Jonson's praise of his " mighty line " is well known and well deserved. 2 All the plays of this group were probably written later than 1580 and before 1595. 76 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. crate, and his amazed indignation at the insolence of nature in making her die ; the desires which make Faustus sell his soul to the Fiend, and his agony when the price is about to be levied ; the manifold devices whereby the Jew of Malta wreaks his hatred and his revenge on Christians, — all these things have a gigantesque and indeed superhuman character which might easily be extravagant to the point of absurdity (it approaches this nearest in the Jew), but which is redeemed and carried off by the splendid poetry in which they are couched, and the enthusiasm which is seen in the poet for the wonders and terrors he is describing. Character This enthusiasm for everything that it touches — and causes leading to what is called in modern times a sort of bethan^' megalomania — extends in every direction during Eliza- greatness, bethan times, and Ues at the root of its literary great- ness. It combines with perfect artistic restraint perhaps only in Shakespeare; and even in his early work — such as Titus Andronicus, in the kind of Horror tragedy " ; as The Comedy of Errors, in that of drama with a strong farcical element ; and as Love's Labour s Lost, in romantic comedy, somewhat overdosed again with, farce — the extravagance above referred to is present. But everywhere it prompts the poet, the dramatist, even the prose-writer pure and simple, to attempt great things and to treat them greatly. And it either directly causes, or luckily meets with, a complementary provision of literary craftsmanship which enables it to express itself fully. To some slight notice of the various kinds and instances of this expression, other than those already touched, we must devote the rest of the chapter. The causes of this great intellectual and emotional wave have been much debated. The victory of one side in the religious struggle of the two preceding genera- tions, and the enthusiasm raised by struggle and victory IV THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD 77 alike ; the patriotism similarly excited by the war with Spain ; the personal loyalty (exaggerated sometimes no doubt and misunderstood, but certainly existing) towards Ehzabeth herself ; the immense increase of learning due to the Renaissance generally, but arriving late in England ; the excitement — both of a lower kind for gain, and of a higher for quest and knowledge and glory — caused by the opening of new countries and also commerces both West and East, — all these things and others have been eagerly suggested and copiously dis- cussed. Perhaps there is something in them as causes ; certainly it is well to be aware of their existence as facts. But some of them as certainly, if not all together, have existed at times which were not extraordinarily famous for literature ; and perhaps it is better, especially at the stage for which such a book as this is intended, to con- centrate attention upon what was actually done and how it was done, not on the dubious and not strictly necessary question why it was done. What is certain is that the wave, not too extrava- gantly to be compared to the flood of glowing molten metal that is turned out of a crucible extracted from the furnace, found, Uke that, a system of channels pre- pared in the sands of time for its reception. These channels had been drawn by the humble efforts, in schooUng and preparation, of the period which we last surveyed, and they were now to come into use. Any one who knows the period well can, in thought, survey the whole field and its branching rivulets of Uterature like a map ; nor is it difficult to construct a copy of that map for others. The division which has attracted most attention, Conditions which contains most matter of interest for the general ^^^^^ reader, and which has by some critics been exalted to the very highest position among all the divisions of 78 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. English literature, is that of which alone we have given some minute account already — the drama. The very high praise which it has received (and which was itself a revolt against late seventeenth and eighteenth century neglect) has, as is almost always the case, brought about a fresh reaction. There was a time when it was con- sidered as a whole, if not exactly worthless, so faulty that even Shakespeare was not exempted from con- demnation ; and more recently it has sometimes been questioned whether, outside Shakespeare, the Eliza- bethan drama is much more than a curiosity. But this will never be the opinion of any critic who possesses the necessary taste for poetry, trained by critical education, and furnished with the industry necessary to acquaint himself fully with the matter ; and it is not necessary to take so much trouble as this in order to acquire a fair knowledge and judgment on the subject. There is indeed no division of literature, English or other, which must be so shocking to persons who draw up rigid rules for different kinds of verse, or prose-writing, and expect these to be followed by all examples of the kind. There are not many such divisions in which, even if such a severe demand is not made, the student will find so much inequality. Further, there is hardly any which, at least as originally printed (most of the MSS. of these plays have been lost or destroyed in one way or another), comes before the reader under such disadvantages. There was no regular law of copyright at the time, and little means of enforcing it if there had been, while it was of course very important to a company of players to keep the plays written for them to themselves as long as possible. Therefore, in many cases, these plays were never printed at all before their author's death. More- over, what we now call editing was almost un- known until the seventeenth century was far advanced. IV THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD and the printers of the time were in most cases careless and in many very ignorant. Those readers of Shake- speare, and even of others, who are only acquainted with modern editions, might hardly recognise the originals, which, by the labour of many successive scholars in his case and a few others, have been worked up into their present forms. Lists of dramatis personae, stage direc- tions, even division into acts and scenes, are constantly wanting ; and the text itself, often taken from rough acting copies, and never, save in the rarest of cases, corrected by the author himself, frequently requires as much pains taken with it as if it were a Greek MS. never edited at all. But when allowance has been made for all these things and for others — the inexperience of some writers, the too easy writing of others, the coarseness of the time in language, and so forth — there remains such a body of composition as is simply wonderful. From Sackville to Shirley we have hundreds on hundreds of plays, mostly by named authors (though often by authors about whom we know little save their names), but in some cases anonymous. Some of these plays, of course, but extraordinarily few, are wholly, or almost wholly, rubbish. The proportion of the remainder in which real goodness appears, be it only in a single character or a single scene, a passage or two, or a hne or two, is very large indeed, and the further proportion, that of the better ones, in which there are to be found more than flashes, is perhaps more surprising still. Moreover, the quaUty of this goodness is the most wonderful thing of all, for in some not bad periods of literature nothing like it is to be discovered. The period of this great drama, from Peele to Shirley, stages of is composed of stages which overlap each other so much that it is difficult to divide them without giving false 8o A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. impressions, and these impressions should be more care- fully guarded against than they usually are. One thinks, from stories as well as histories, of Shakespeare and Jonson as companions, and so in a way they were ; yet Jonson wrote no play till Shakespeare had almost reached the middle of his career, and continued to write for more than twenty years after Shakespeare's death. We are apt to think of Beaumont and Fletcher as repre- senting a distinctly younger school than Shakespeare, and so in fact they do ; yet Beaumont died in the same year with Shakespeare, while Fletcher survived him hardly a decade. By keeping a fairly careful eye on the facts and dates, it is possible to steer clear of really harmful confusion, and we may hope to do so in the brief account of the whole matter to be given in this chapter and the next. Yet the whole period is so crowded and full that cautions can hardly be too many. George Chapman (1559-1634), who probably wrote plays, and almost certainly wrote poems, before Shakespeare had written anything, continued to write till long after Fletcher, about the same time as Jonson, and only a few years before the closing of the London theatres in the Rebellion put an end to the whole thing. James Shirley (1596- 1666), who survived not only this but the twenty years' interval, and Uved and wrote till after Dryden had begun, was born before the first certain and distinct notice of Shakespeare's work that we possess. Further, Chapman and Shirley, who were contemporaries for forty years, actually wrote at least one play together. Yet there is a marked difference between the styles of the two when separate. On the whole, the student will best keep to the right path if he conceives Eliza- bethan drama as in its purely elementary stage before Peele ; as brought into great but imperfect activity by the Marlowe group ; and as carried into perfection by IV THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD Shakespeare, round v^hose earlier time and work the work, though in some cases not the time, of Chapman himself, Marston, Dekker, Webster, Middleton, Hey- wood, and Tourneur may be gathered. Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher, though much of their work is contemporary with these, represent changes which will, with the still later stage represented by Massinger, Ford, and Shirley, be best taken in the next chapter. Even from the subordinate group which has been Shake- first named (but without including Shakespeare himself), ^peare's the power, the variety, the marvellous Ufe and colour contem- of the Elizabethan drama could be not ill comprehended, poraries. From Chapman we have a large collection of plays, including some capital comedies {All Fools the best) and a remarkably fine though gloomy and somewhat bombastic series of tragedies from recent French history, dealing with actual persons (Bussy D'Ambois, Biron, and Chabot), which excited the admiration of the youthful Dryden and the disapproval of his later judgment — a valuable commentary on the change of taste. John Marston (1575 ?-i634) time was on close enough terms of friendship with Ben Jonson to write a play with him and Chapman (a capital one too. Eastward Ho !), but at another in company with Dekker fell out with Ben and was beaten by him (at least Ben said so). He is in this and in the few other particu- lars we have of him a curious instance of the curious lives of these dramatists. His career in youth is sug- gested by such quarrels, and by the character of his whole work — a passionate poem on the classical story of Pygmalion and the Image, some of the very coarsest and fiercest of the coarse and fierce satires of the end of EUzabeth's reign, and a series of powerful but extrava- gantly gloomy and horror-mongering " tragedies, Antonio and Mellida, Sophonisba, etc., with comedies G 82 A FERST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. {What You Will, etc.), which have Uttle laughter except of a sardonic kind in them. But all this seems to have led up to a quiet later life as a country clergyman, and a total abstinence from letters. Thomas Dekker's own plays, especially Old Fortunatus, are somewhat chaotic, but abound in charming natural touches, as in The Shoe- maker s Holiday, a pleasant comedy ; while one of his characters in another play, Bellafront, is almost Shake- spearian in truth to nature.^ So are also, in different and more tragic ways, Beatrice- Joanna, the heroine of Thomas Middleton's (1570 ?-i627) greatest play, The Changeling,^ and her villain-lover De Flores ; while the same author^s abundant work supplies also another tragedy {The Witch) which has curious connections with Macbeth, a remarkable pohtical drama {The Game of Chess), and a very interesting series of plays representing ordinary London hfe, treated from the half-reaUst, half- romantic standpoint of the time. From Cyril Tourneur (1575 ?-i626) we have only two plays, and those of the deepest dye of the " Horror " class. The Atheist* s Tragedy and The Revenger s Tragedy, but he can write lines and even passages of the greatest poetry. ^ Of the same kind, but greater still, is John Webster (1580 ?-i625), the author of the famous Duchess of Malfy and Vittoria Corombona, who has been not more finely than justly ^ Dekker's birth and death dates are quite unknown : his working time was probably from about 1595 to about 1630. 2 This and some others of Middleton's were written, after a fashion common at the time, and more than once glanced at here, in collabora- tion with another playwright, William Rowley. 3 A single line, well known in quotation, though perhaps not quite so well known with its context — Mother ! come from that poisonous woman there ! (the speech of a daughter whose parent has advised her to shame), is a good instance of the kind of thing, frequent here, which you may search whole periods of English literature, and almost whole literatures of other countries, without finding. IV THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD 83 called by Mr. Swinburne an inlet of the sea which is Shakespeare.'' Thomas Heywood (?-i65o) — the most voluminous of all (author or part-author of some two hundred plays, about a fifth of which we possess) — is of a quieter and more domestic temper, though he has some fine scenes of foreign adventure, more than one spirited dramatising of Enghsh history, and one piece of almost intolerable pathos, A Woman Killed with Kindness. The importance of Shakespeare himself may seem to demand longer notice than this book can easily afford, but there is more likehhood of actual acquaintance with his work than in other cases. On one question which has recently been discussed with the most unnecessary abundance it is possible, and perhaps desirable, to speak authoritatively even to students beginning hterature. That question concerns the assignment of what are known as " the plays of Shakespeare " to some one else, preferably Bacon. As to this it is sufficient to say : I. That all " external " evidence (title-pages, quota- Shake- tions, and references of contemporaries or near sue- ^^^g^^^^f. cessors and the Uke) without exception assigns the doubts authorship of these plays to WilUam Shakespeare of about him. Stratford-on-Avon. II. That all internal evidence (that is to say, the quahty and character of the work itself) shows it to be different from that of any other known writer of the time. III. That, in particular, there is hardly any one to whom a skilled critic would less soon ascribe authorship of these plays than to Bacon. IV. That the arguments actually brought against Shakespeare's authorship are the flimsiest and most fantastic that have ever been advanced even in Hterary squabbles — which are fertile in such things. 84 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. From these positions it will be difficult to find a single person, thoroughly versed in hterature in general, and Elizabethan Hterature in particular, as well as in the theory and practice of comparative criticism, who will dissent. The present writer, the greater part of whose life has been spent in acquainting himself with such matters, does not know of one such person, dead or The alive, who is or has been a " Baconian/' To explain, spearlan however, in what the particular character or quality quaUty. above mentioned consists, and to put that explanation in a few words, is impossible. It can be analysed to a certain extent, but not finally ; though it can be felt, to a certain other and much greater extent, by a very young reader of intelligence, fair education, and a natural taste for literature. Its difficulty as well as its greatness is well hit off in the phrase of Shakespeare's first great critic in times subsequent to his own — of the first great critic in EngUsh hterary history — the poet Dry den. He was the man who of all modem and perhaps ancient poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul/' said Dry den, who compressed and slightly heightened the opinion in talking elsewhere of Shakespeare's universal mind." EarUer, John Hales (1584-1656), a man of great literary power, and still greater reputation, him- self a contemporary of Shakespeare for more than thirty years, and one who must have known all about him, had said in a kind of hyperbole that whatever any poet had said well he would produce it better said in Shake- speare. Reducing this to the strict and Uteral truth — that wherever Shakespeare says something hke what another poet has said he says it better, and that in a thousand places he says magnificently what no other poet has ever said at all — we get, with Dryden's judg- ment, a useful and not in the least exaggerated estimate of him from two sides. His range of thought is almost IV THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD unlimited, and his power of expressing that thought is equally so. He has not chosen— if he had done so he must have narrowed his range in both ways — always to write in a grand style on grand subjects. Being one of the most natural of men — as he had to be, to be also one of the greatest— he had, hke other people, to learn his business, and to do some prentice-work in learning it. Working as a playwright for his Hving, not writing in a palace for his own pleasure, he had sometimes to consider tastes which were popular then but are not now. But even in his earhest and least perfect work — even in the horror-tragedy and the farce-comedy men- tioned above — we can find things to be hardly bettered elsewhere ; and in his greatest work we are constantly finding things that cannot be equalled anywhere. He took the verse — sweet and splendid at its best, but a little monotonous and declamatory — of Peele and Marlowe, and he made it, by use of the devices of over- lapped lines, varied pauses, trisyllabic feet, and redun- dant syllables, the most magnificent and versatile metre known to poetry. He took from all sides (and probably invented in supplement) words which made the largest vocabulary of English yet used in literature. He accepted subjects of the most varied kinds, and treated them in the most original ways. He created characters as a great sculptor makes images, only in- fusing hfe into them as well ; and he also created the art of constructing a play by character, and not by mere mechanical plot. In the long series of EngUsh histori- cal dramas partly improved — but so much improved ! — from previous attempts ; in the few but almost finer Roman tragedies, especially Antony and Cleopatra ; in the delightful romantic comedies. As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing, which again he practically invented ; in the four unapproached tragic 86 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. masterpieces of Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Othello ; and in the remarkable trio, rather difficult to classify {Cymbeline, The Winter* s Tale, and The Tempest), with which he probably finished his work, — he showed all these masteries and more. He put in his plays, now and then, prose almost as unsurpassable as his verse, and lyrics which to this day are amongst the most exquisite in English. And so, with the exception of dull-silly folk, who are unfortunately numerous, and clever-silly folk, who are unfortunately not unknown, he is recognised by all as the greatest writer of England, perhaps the greatest of the world. But though this dramatic expression of the Uterary outburst of the late sixteenth century in England has secured the principal attention of posterity from its novelty, its intrinsic excellence, its variety, its volume, and the fact that it produced the unrivalled master just referred to, it would be a fatal mistake to think that no other divisions require attention or repay study. On the contrary, there is hardly a branch of hterature — even some which were later to be somewhat arrested in development — which does not flourish in the wonderful quarter-century from 1580 to 1603. Poetry proper — that is to say, poetry which does not adopt the dramatic form — ranks next to the drama, partly, but by no means wholly or mainly because here also there is one promi- nent figure, already partly discussed — that of Spenser. Although this great poet has traditionally held and deserved the title of " the poets' poet,'' he has never lacked depredators, and very lately they have not been few or insignificant. Yet the student may rest assured that appreciation of Spenser is one of the tests of a person's appreciation of poetry as poetry. Had he written nothing but The Shepherd's Calendar this could not be said. But ten years later he followed it up with IV THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD 87 the first instalment of The Fame Queene, and at different The times, before his too early death in 1599, with more of qI'J^^^ this poem and with others, which, taken together, rank second only to Shakespeare's work as demonstrations of the magnificence of EUzabethan Hterature. Basing himself to some extent, for episodes and general treat- ment, on the great Italian verse-romances of Ariosto and Tasso — but taking a quite original subject, retaining or rather reviving in a marvellously changed spirit the EngUsh allegorical tendency of former centuries — Spenser has, in The Faerie Queene, produced a poem itself often imitated, but never approached, in which the very number and variety of its attractions may perhaps partly account for some of the failure to enjoy it. Profit- ing by his experiments in the Calendar , he now produced an entirely original stanza,^ the famous " Spenserian of nine lines (eight of them decasyllabic and the ninth an Alexandrine, rhymed ababbcbcc), which is in itself the most beautiful of all such arrangements, and which has the remarkable faculty of connecting itself with its companion stanzas as no other does. To supply this with a proper diction, he again improved on that of his first book, making it less archaic and dialectic, imparting more of the classical and continental elements, softening and dignifying it, and so composing a style which has practically been the foundation of all English poetic diction of the more elaborate kind since. He used this verse and this language first to tell his story, and, secondly, as we may say, to illustrate it with word- pictures ; and he did both with such intricate and mani- fold art that people who either cannot simply enjoy, or are foiled in their endeavours to analyse, have been ^ It is sometimes said that he took it from the Italians. This is simply false : there is no such stanza in Italian or in any other lan- guage. 88 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. discontented with him. Not so fit readers. The story of The Faerie Queene is ostensibly an allegory of the Virtues and their correspondent or opponent Vices — not seldom doubled with further allegories of a political, ecclesiasti- cal, and even personal type. But it is quite possible to discard these allegories, or at any rate to pay very little attention to them, and to read it as a pure story of knightly adventure. We have, unluckily, only half of it ; and it is therefore not possible to be quite sure how the twelve different books were to be finally knit to- gether ; but to accuse it of incoherency is for the same reason quite unjust, and there are actually hints in what we have of things which were to follow and effect the knitting. Meanwhile, verse and language carry the reader on (if he is a fit reader) with a soft and unbroken motion, unknown in any other poem. And all the while the same instruments effect the " illustration " above spoken of — a series of word- and verse-pictures, now of background, now of action itself, which, for beauty and variety and a dream-like procession and connection, are again unmatched in literature. Spenser, except in a few touches, hardly attempts, and certainly does not achieve, character — the point in which he is chiefly distinguished from Shakespeare. But the two supplement each other wonderfully. Shakespeare is the master of Life ; Spenser the master of Dream, which Shakespeare himself acknowledged to be as human as Life itself. But just as Shakespeare was preceded, accompanied, and followed by a crowd of dramatists only inferior to himself, so was Spenser, not indeed preceded, but accom- panied and followed by a still greater crowd of poets, some emulating his own achievements, some trying Lyric lines which he did not himself attempt. The earliest poetry. development, however, that of lyric, was of this latter IV THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD 89 class. It may seem strange that Spenser should have given us so Uttle of this, for there are beautiful patches of it in the Calendar ; his command of what has been called the greater ode " Mn the poems entitled Epi- thalamion and Prothalamion is almost unsurpassed, and there are passages in The Faerie Queene — notably the song of Phaedria and that sung in the Bower of Bliss (Book II.) — where the stately stanza takes a lyric tone of the softest and most varied beauty. But for some reason he did not affect it much. On the other hand, chiefly though not wholly in collections ^ of the kind which TptteVs Miscellany had started many years before, in plays and pamphlets and independently, numerous writers, some already mentioned, some not — Lodge, Breton, Greene, Constable, Campion, Raleigh, and many others — did the most delightful things, adapted to music of all sorts ; deaUng, though mainly with love, with subjects of all kinds, and exhibiting the newly acquired powers of the language in the most triumphant and delectable fashion. Shakespeare, as has been said, here also heads, if Spenser does not, the chorus of singers, and it has been easy for men of taste in modern times to compile, from the various sources above glanced at, anthologies of EUza- bethan song which it is, once more, impossible to surpass in any other time or in any other language. The actual title of TotteVs Miscellany was Songs and Sonnets, and, as we saw, it was strictly deserved, though ^ By this is meant not a short song in uniform stanzas of moderate compass, but an elaborate concerted arrangement like Lycidas, Dryden's Alexander's Feast, (iray's Bard and Progress of Poesy, or, in more modern times, Tennyson's Lotos- Eaters and Vision of Sin. 2 Often entitled with the quaint '* conceit " of the time, as in The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576) and The Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578). But these were both before Spenser, and not very brilliant. The fine things are in Clement Robinson's Handful of Pleasant Delights (1584), The Phoenix Nest (i593), and above all in England's Helicon (1600) and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody (1602). 90 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. the word sonnet was, till much later, rather loosely used. For some reason, however, the strict sonnet was very- little practised for more than thirty years after Tottel Sonnets, appeared. Then, especially in the last decade of the century, an extraordinary number of sonnet-collections came out. In this group Spenser and Shakespeare both appear, and Shakespeare's sonnets are the greatest in all the world's literature. But almost all the poets just mentioned, and others, especially Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), whose work is among the best of all, followed the fashion — Sidney indeed may be said to have restarted it. Students should beware of attaching too much importance to attempts recently made, with good intentions and with a most laudable industry, to derogate from the originality of these sonnets, and even of Eliza- bethan poetry generally, by alleging imitation of earlier French poets, especially Desportes, of Italians from Petrarch downwards, and of some Spaniards. It is true that Petrarch is to a certain extent the original of many, if not most, of them ; that the French poets of the so-called Pleiade imitated him and other ItaUans, and that the EUzabethans were acquainted with, and to some extent followed, all of these. But the test of poetry is not originality of subject, or even of thought ; for all subjects are open, and all thoughts are possible, to every human mind. It is the originality of treatment in which the individual power comes out. And here Elizabethan poetry can acknowledge its debts and show a balance after paying them as few other poetries can. Nor was it wanting in larger attempts at verse-narra- tive, though they were mostly dwarfed by The Faerie Queene. An interesting historical school arose, of which Michael Drayton (1563 ?-i63i — The Barons' Wars, Heroical Epistles, etc.), Samuel Daniel (1562-1619 — IV THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD The Civil Wars, etc.), William Warner (1558 ?-i6o9-- Albion's England) were members ; philosophical poetry (a doubtful kind, but one in which Spenser had set a fine example) made its appearance ; and the imperfect Historical and second-hand satiric experiments of Barclay, Wyatt, ^"^^ . and Gascoigne were revived and improved in direct poems, following of the Latin satirists by Hall (afterwards Bishop), Lodge, Donne, Marston, Tourneur, and others. Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece stand at the head of a number of short-long poems on which the episodes of The Faerie Queene undoubtedly had much influence ; and almost every kind of poetry, epigram, pastoral, and what not, had its devotees. The achievements in prose of the great EUzabethan Prose, period are less brilUant in appearance, and they are subject to the disadvantage which, in all but a very few cases, attaches to prose as distinguished from verse. Except in those cases, prose, which is mainly devoted to exposition of fact, or statement and defence of opinion, becomes in a way obsolete when later expositions of the fact with fuller knowledge, or treatments of opinion from new points of view, are made ; a great poem, depending in no degree on fact or opinion, but only on poetical treatment, can never be superseded. But to the historian and the student of history there is no such difference between the two ; and the earhest attempts in all divisions of literature retain their interest. Those earhest attempts, in a fully developed vocabulary, and with a range of knowledge still definitely comparable to that of modern times, date from our present time in almost every department of Uterature. Even the newspaper and the novel, though the former is still absent as such, and the latter very rudimentary till later, find their originals after a fashion here. Moreover, which is of the first importance for the present purpose. A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. the method of treatment, the preparation of styles suit- able for all prose purposes^ is still more in direct relation with modem literature. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that we here come to the point up to which everything earher is preparatory, from which everything later is derived. If the student does not understand what has gone before he will not understand this : if he does not understand this thoroughly, and on all sides, he will make continual mistakes about what has followed. Hooker, The greatest books of purely EUzabethan Uterature Bacon's prosc — books which can never become obsolete, and the " ' which started important styles — are Richard Hooker's Arcadia, Laws of Ecclesiustical Polity (1594-97) and Francis Raleigh. Bacon's Essays (1597), the former entirely written within the reign, the latter much enlarged later. Hooker is often coupled or contrasted with Lyly as an exponent of a plain and sober style. His own is indeed quite devoid of Lyly's fantastic ornaments, but it possesses much higher merit, because of the quiet but extremely effective arrangement of its sentences. They rise, con- tinue at a certain level, and fall again, without the shghtest imitation of verse, either in rhythm or diction, but with a result hardly less satisfactory to the ear than that of fine verse itself, and adapted, as verse never can be completely, to sober argument and exposition. Bacon's first Essays (the first in EngUsh with a single exception just previous to them, and of no importance) may have been prompted by the famous French examples of Montaigne, though they are very different in style, being compressed to the utmost degree, and consisting rather of axiomatic headings for future expansion than of fully worked out thoughts. Later, however, he wrote less tersely. A third book, now much more of a curiosity than these, but in itself almost as important as a begin- THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD ning, is Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, a prose romance of the pastoral kind, with large intermixtures of verse, which was written for his sister, the Countess of Pem- broke, perhaps partly by her, and pubHshed, four years .after his death, in 1590. Its style is not directly euphu- istic, but almost as mannered and artificial ; and it contrasts, no less remarkably, with the unaffected and scholarly but not in the least pedantic manner of Hooker. Sir Walter Raleigh's (1552 ?-i6i8) unequal but in parts splendid History of the World was written later, during his imprisonment, but it represents the Eliza- bethan way of thought, and the less " conceited " form of Elizabethan style, very admirably.^ It is, however, in a much larger group of individually smaller prose works that the feature just referred to — one of the most noteworthy, and one of the most de- bated in English literature — specially appears. " Con- ceit " in this sense is a term applied to thoughts, and to the corresponding phrases that express them, avoiding simple and straightforward utterance deliberately, and trying for novelty, intricacy, suggestion, and surprise. Euphuism itself may be said to be a system of conceits ; the Arcadia, as has been said, is full of them. At its best and at its worst, conceit is, as it were, the ruling "Conceit." passion of the Elizabethan writer. Shakespeare illus- trates both the good side of it, in his most magnificent passages, and the bad *in his caricatures and parodies of the fashion.2 A slightly changed handling of conceit gave, in turn, the erudite and pregnant disquisitions of the Jacobean writers, and the metaphysical " poetry 1 Raleigh had actually published, in 1591, a striking account of Sir Richard Grenville's famous death-fight at Flores. 2 In his earliest work he has been thought to be using it sincerely and without suspicion of its faults. But one had better not be too sure of this, especially as regards Love's Labour's Lost, 94 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. of the Carolines, 1 both of which we shall meet in the next chapter. And when the tide turned, as we shall see in the chapter after that, nothing was more characteristic of the Restoration than the dishke of what was now called false wit,'' an ingenious name for conceit itself. Indeed, to the present day, even persons who sincerely love literature and poetry for themselves can be divided into two classes — those who enjoy conceit, and those who, if they do not exactly hate, disUke it. Conceit, in fact, is one of the numerous points of difference which distin- guish the Romantic from the Classic ideal of hterature. The EUzabethan " pamphleteers " (a general term which has been rather specially utiUsed in regard to them) illustrate this pecuharity of style very largely ; but having mentioned the fact, we may be better concerned with the contents of their works, which are of great importance to the understanding of the general hterary character of the time. There being, as has been said, an intense interest in all sorts of subjects, and a desire to write about them ; there being also nothing Uke the modem periodical to receive and publish " articles on these subjects ; people, if they wanted to write, had to write, and people who wanted to read had to read. The little separate books. And they did. Almost everybody, pamphlet, except Shakespeare, wrote pamphlets ; for the first issue of Bacon's Essays might well be called one, and Spen- ser's State of Ireland, not published till after his death, is a poUtical pamphlet of the first class. Nicholas Breton (1545 ?-i626 ?) was nothing but a pamphleteer, for we also speak of verse-pamphlets at this time. Raleigh, Greene, Lodge, Dekker, Middleton, Nash, and many ^ The student should resolutely refuse the term Cdooolian, which has been recently used. It has no authority ; it is bad in formation ; its only excuse (to avoid clashing with the feminine name Caroline ") is puerile ; and it at least suggests a false quantity. IV THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD others wrote them. A whole furious and curious series of pamphlets on the differeftce between Puritan and anti-Puritan conceptions of the Church of England exists, by many different writers, and is called, from the nick- name taken on one side, the " Martin Marprelate " controversy. Pamphlets were written not merely on religion and politics (both very dangerous subjects at the time), but on all sorts of themes down to trade. But perhaps the most interesting divisions of them (some of the members of which exceed pamphlet scale) are devoted to two subjects which had never yet figured largely in English prose — novel-writing and criticism. Euphues produced a whole brood of shorter stories, short some directly connected with it, and sometimes written stories, by persons of the quality of Lodge and Greene, both of whom in turn supplied Shakespeare with subjects for his plays. Their friend Nash is thought by some, though perhaps not quite correctly, to have made a greater stride than any one else towards the modern novel in his Unfortunate Traveller, which describes the experiences of an adventurer in Henry the Eighth's reign, and the loves (probably invented) of the poet Surrey and his " Geraldine." But the criticism is important to us doubly, both as Criticism, a new kind of Uterature in itself, and as dealing with all other kinds. Hitherto, as has once or twice been noticed, writing in mediaeval England had been almost wholly uncritical. In 1553 Wilson, Ascham's friend (see above, p. 62), had published an Art of Rhetoric ; Ascham himself had made critical remarks in his Schoolmaster ; Gascoigne (see above, pp. 57-8) had written short but pithy notes on poetry. But earlier and meanwhile a very large modern critical literature had accumulated in Italy, and a not inconsiderable one in France ; and this, hke other things, found disciples to estabhsh it in 96 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. English. King James the Sixth of Scotland wrote (1584), probably under the guidaJhce of Gascoigne, of the great French poet Ronsard, and of his tutor Buchanan, a com- panion to Gascoigne's own tract, with special reference to Scots verse. A treatise, too large almost to be called a pamphlet, was published in 1589, but probably com- posed earlier, by an unknown writer, probably George or Richard Puttenham, and a much briefer one by WilUam Webbe in 1586, which contains the first overflow of dehght at " the new poet,'* Spenser. All tliis was closely connected with a dispute about the introduction of classical metres in English. Outside of these purely technical matters, great interest had been excited by Sidney's Apology for Poetry} itself caused by a Puritan attack on the stage from the pen of Stephen Gosson, and just at the end of our period a memorable duel took place (1602) on the classical metre question between two poets. Campion the song-writer (who had no reason to decry EngUsh rhymed verse, for he wrote it exquisitely) and Samuel Daniel, who, in a short space, has left us as much general as special good sense on the subject. Except Hooker, the ecclesiastical writers of the actual reign of Elizabeth were scarcely up to the standard which we shall find reached by their immediate succes- sors ; and Bacon's philosophical work was mostly later. Other translation, which, to a short-sighted judge, might work: seem superfluous now and to have done its work, was iat?on' almost at its zenith, and, besides flooding the language with new words and phrases, it set great patterns in the actual versions. North's Plutarch (1579) earlier, and Florio's Montaigne (1603) later, are among the most ^ Sidney certainly wrote this about the great year 1579-80, the year of The Shepherd's Calendar and Euphues and the first " University Wit '* plays ; but, like most of his work, it was not published till after his death, in 1595. IV THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD important books in English prose, not merely from the immense influence they exerted (probably no books except the Bible were so much read for a time), but from the raciness and vigour of the translations themselves. Great collections of the voyages and travels which were of so much practical interest to the time, and were one of its chief glories, began later to be made : the theory and practice of education, which had occupied men Hke Ascham and Lyly, was still more technically considered by other men hke Richard Mulcaster (1530 ?-i6ii), head-master of Merchant Taylors' and St. Paul's. In fact, as we began by saying, there was hardly any department of hterary activity in which the energy of the time did not at least strive to make itself felt, and there were few in which it did not achieve memorable / results. / As we pursue the survey of possible catalogues of an English Library at different epochs, we come here to a stage of certainly almost starthng enlargement and exalta- tion in a very short time. The enlargement is no doubt partly due to the invention of printing ; but the exaltation is so only in a very small degree. It is easier, no doubt, for a man to write good books when he has an increased number of other books, easily accessible and readable, before him ; but it is also easier for him to write bad ones, and more likely that he will do so. The other causes of an apparent increase of actual genius which have been set forth in the foregoing chapter have, of course, much more to do with it. But the result is certain. A glance at the former summaries will show both what was present and what was absent earlier. At the beginning of the present period, say a little before 1380, there were only two books of certainly first-class quality on the shelves we are ima- gining — Chaucer's Works and Malory's Morte d'Arthur, — though some of no despicable kind had been added in the half-century before, especially since the Queen's accession. Now, in 1600 or thereabouts, the owner of the library could The have added, even to this highest (or rather central) shelf. Library the poems of Spenser and much more than half the 1600. plays of Shakespeare, including some of his best. But he H 98 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. also had at his disposal a great many more books which contained, in different proportions, matter of the first class, and a great many more which were much better than they could have been at an earlier period — the plays ^ of the University Wits (including the masterpieces of Marlowe) and of the earliest of those later dramatists who were contemporary with Shakespeare, forming the newest and most striking section. In poetry there were the new Miscellanies, containing delightful lyrics by the score, if not the hundred ; the historical pieces of Drayton and Daniel ; the sonneteers from Sidney and Watson onwards ; the satirists, and some admirable translations, of which the Tasso (or Godfrey of Bulloigne, 1600) of Fairfax, just appear- ing at the moment, was only the best. In prose the acquisitions were of course much larger in bulk, and if they were not quite so much distinguished by that enthusiastic imagination which animated the verse, there was no want of instruction, or even of delight, pro- portionate to that bulk. The verse - translation just noticed was largely exceeded in quantity by that in prose which has been mentioned above. If Lyly's Euphues and Sidney's Arcadia were not very interesting novels in the modern sense, they were at any rate remarkable literary attempts at the novel, which could not yet be born ; and they were accompanied by crowds of translations and adaptations of stories from French, Italian, and Spanish. These latter often formed part of the curious new pamphlet literature, which could not have existed without the press, and which now gave readers something to read about on almost every kind of subject. The " chronicle," or bare and more or less clumsy records of events, had been already enlivened by Holinshed (1578) and others, and was just passing into real history in the hands of Raleigh and KnoUes [History of the Turks, 1604 — perhaps our first accomplished history). Fresh on the shelves were those first Essays of Bacon, which were to have so large and delightful a family in the following centuries. Various translations of the Bible, which a careful collector might have accumulated from the days of Tyndale (1525-31) onwards, already contained much of the material of the greater one which was to begin in a few years. Amid the angry and mostly inferior controversial work of the time. Hooker's great book provided something like a ^ Remembering always that a good many were not printed till later, or at all (see above, p. 78). THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN PERIOD companion in prose to Spenser and Shakespeare in verse. And if the book-buyer was thoroughly interested in Htera- ture, there would have been a small collection of work of a kind unknown but a generation before, the criticism of Ascham, Wilson, Gascoigne, being reinforced by Putten- ham and Webbe. There were as yet no newspapers ; ^ scientific and philosophical writing was still generally in Latin, though it was on the very verge of ceasing to be confined thereby. But in almost every other respect the library was complete in kinds, though some of them might hardly yet have got out of their rudiments. 1 There used to be a fable about one published in the Armada time ; but it was only a fable. A Weekly News, issued by Nathaniel Butter in 1622, is generally said to be the earliest. CHAPTER V JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LITERATURE The later stages of the larger " Elizabethan " time — Ben Jonson — Beaumont and Fletcher — Approach of decadence — Bad blank verse, etc., of Davenant and others — Massinger, Ford, and Shirley — Non-dramatic poetry — Drayton, Daniel, Fairfax — W. Browne, Wither, and the "Heroic" Romancers — Sylvester — Lyric — Donne and Metaphysical " poetry — Cowley, Carew, Herrick, and Waller — Crashaw, Herbert, and Vaughan — Suckling, Lovelace, and others — Milton — His minor poems — Paradise Lost, etc. — Importance of his verse — Peculiar eminence of prose at this time — Its character — Burton — Fuller — Milton — Taylor — Sir Thomas Browne — Hobbes and Clarendon — The Authorised Version of the Bible — Weak points in Elizabethan literature — The change to which they led — The Library a little before 1660. The As was explained in the preceding chapter, the subject later ^j^^ present offers no really sharp division from that staces 01 %/ XT the larger of its predecessor, and as far as the Uves of actual be^han"'* ^^^^ors are concerned, is indissolubly spUced to it. Yet time. since the larger Elizabethan Uterature possesses, as was also explained, a Uving spirit of its own, that spirit may be expected to pass through variations or stages corre- sponding to those of ordinary Ufe. And the historical divisions here answer to these stages in a very remark- able manner. EUzabethan literature proper is youth or rather young manhood, with its exuberance, dis- cursiveness, and hope ; Jacobean is middle age, more sober and concentrated, if less enterprising ; CaroUne, CH. V JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LITERATURE though showing no points of actual dotage, as some other Uterary periods do, does show something hke what is called " decadence/' though this decadence is reUeved by the presence of individual writers of such power and charm as almost beUe this general character, and by whole classes of delightful work. And then comes a revolution (to be dealt with in the next chapter), which obviates actual decay altogether by replacing the old growth with a new. But we shall not meet in this chapter, as we did in the last, great new kinds of Htera- ture — the isolated work of Milton is the only apparent exception, and that an individual one, not a new kind or class. And in some cases, notably that of criticism, there is almost an arrest of progress. Yet even in criticism this arrest is not noticeable Ben in the first name which we have to mention — one to Jonson. some extent postponed from the last chapter — that of Ben Jonson. Jonson, perhaps the last,^ was also the best of the Ehzabethan critics ; and his entire work, which is large and varied, is pervaded by the spirit of criticism. It consists not merely of drama and of non- dramatic poetry, but of prose, both dramatic and non- dramatic ; and though he seems to have begun to write nearly twenty years before Shakespeare's death, he is always, not, as used to be fooUshly thought, a grudging and spiteful rival of the Master, but an independent and to some extent recalcitrant successor. Now as his influence was very great — for he really deserves to some extent the title of Dictator of Litera- ture during his time, as only two other men, Dry den and his own half-namesake Samuel Johnson, have deserved ^ We do not know when his principal critical work, Discoveries or Timber — a most interesting combination of adopted and original observations — was written ; but it probably represents notes made at different times of his life. The very pungent and lively Conversations, reported by Drummond of Hawthornden, date from 1618. I02 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. it since — and as his attitude was generally consistent in everything that he wrote, he merits very particular attention. The character of purely EUzabethan litera- ture in the Umited sense had been, as we have seen, unUmited and spontaneous exuberance of attempt, disdaining or transcending mere rule. Rule was what Jonson strove to produce and observe. Although he certainly had not the advantage of the full school and university training of the time, he was a very good scholar, especially, though not merely, in Latin ; and by means of the writers of both classical languages, especially the post-Augustan Latins, he endeavoured to correct EngUsh. He thought, though his admiration of Shakespeare was expressed splendidly and unmis- takably in more than one passage, that Shakespeare was a loose, careless, and irregular writer ; ^ and though he did not attempt to copy strict classical originals in drama or contemporary French imitations of them he paid more attention to apparent unity of plot than Shakespeare did. He wrote indeed a large collection of masques (plays usually for amateurs to act, in which plot and character almost disappear, and the dialogue which remains is subordinated to music and to elaborate scenery and machinery). And his unfinished pastoral drama. The Sad Shepherd, apparently written late in hfe, is a deUghtful thing, and with Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess makes one of the prettiest pairs in Enghsh Uterature. But his two Roman plays, Sejanus and Catiline, contrast most remarkably with Shake- speare's, consisting mainly of stately speeches, often Uterally translated from Sallust and Tacitus. And the bulk of his dramatic work presents a pecuhar form 1 It cannot be leamt too early that Jonson*s testimony as to Shake- speare, not wholly favourable as it is, is absolutely decisive as to the Shakespearian authorship of the plays. V JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LITERATURE 103 of comedy, with rather elaborate plots, but with the characters arranged almost wholly with a view to the display of what were then called humours — that is to say, special tastes, hobbies, folHes, or even vices of individuals or classes. His poems, often exceedingly beautiful, are classical in form and title, epigrams, epodes/' and the Hke. And his prose, of which, unfortunately, much was lost by a fire in his study, differs notably from Lyly's on the one side and from Bacon's on another, by an attempt, not at all unsuccess- ful, at classical plainness and simplicity, while it differs from Hooker's on a third, by much less musical rhythm. ^ The pair of dramatists who rank with Jonson as next Beaumont to Shakespeare in general greatness — Francis Beaumont p^^^^j^^j. (1584-1616) and John Fletcher (1579-1625) — may be considered as having made their departure from him in the opposite direction, that of the Romantic, not the Classical side. Their work is very extensive : it consists of fifty-two plays, being the largest that we have from any single or joint authorship of the time. The range of subject, if not that of thought and poetry, is also wider than Shakespeare's, and very much wider than Jonson's ; while, unlike the latter's, it consists almost equally of tragedy and comedy, or tragi-comedy, with one admirable example of farce-burlesque on a large scale. The Knight oj the Burning Pestle, Re- garded from the side of versification, it exhibits a great extension of a feature which is also notable in Shakespeare's latest plays, the Hcence of the redundant syllable. 1 Regarded from the side of spirit and temper, ^ As thus : If I had swelled the soldier or intend|ed An act in person leading to dishon|our, As you would fain have forced me, witness Hea|ven Whose clearest understanding of all truth | is " etc., etc. I04 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Beaumont and Fletcher show a rather more mixed state than their great master (and, as some would have it, fellow- worker in one play, The Two Noble Gentlemen), Their moraUty is less pure, their passion lower and more sentimental ; and they are less universal than he is in the higher sense, though they perhaps appeal more to the average man. They, as well as Jonson, were much more popular than Shakespeare after the Restora- tion, and they even continued to be acted constantly during the eighteenth century. This was no doubt partly due to their having more vulgarly attractive subjects, treated with a great deal of purely theatrical ability. But there is splendid poetry in a large part of their work (probably in all of that with which Beaumont was concerned). Their plays are, to this day, almost always agreeable to read ; and they have a peculiar grasp of everyday character, especially of hght and lively, but what we may call, with allowance for the manners of the time, fairly well-bred youth of both sexes. Approach There are some really great names still to mention, deace^^" total number of dramatists between Shake- speare's death and the closing of the theatres (1643) is very large ; but most of them must be dismissed un- named or barely named. The two best, Massinger and Ford, were both EUzabethans proper of some standing, but the work of both was done in later reigns. In both, and in all others of this time, there appears a certain second-hand touch which is conspicuously absent from the sometimes inferior work of the earher school. Every now and then we feel quite sure that they have actually read or heard the plays of Shakespeare and others ; even when there is no special point to be identified, there is a sort of bookish flavour which occurs at other times of literary history, and always indicates an age of some- thing Uke decadence. Moreover, in all but the greatest V JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LITERATURE 105 above referred to, and even to some extent in them, there is noticeable a distinct falHng off in technicaUties. The redundance above mentioned, though occasionally effective, is a very dangerous licence, and particularly liable to abuse, as are also, unless they are used with great care and skill, the other Ucences of overlapping, shifted pause, and even trisyllabic feet. Want of skill and want of care with these will speedily make verse into mere rickety, wobbhng prose. And as blank Bad blank verse has not, like the broken-down stanzas of the verse, etc., followers of Chaucer, rhyme to keep at any rate the nant and lines in some order, there is risk of something as bad as, others, or worse than, the doggerel of the fifteenth century. Now, this actually appears, not merely in the lower kind of dramatists, but in men of talent and real poets like Sir William Davenant (i 606-1 668) and Sir John SuckUng (1609-1642). This degeneracy, though in itself merely ugly, is historically very important, for, with other things to be mentioned presently, it beyond all doubt helped to occasion the great changes which will be noticed in the next chapter. Of the three dramatists referred to above, however, Massinger, Philip Massinger (1583-1640), John Ford {1590 ?- I^^ty.'''^ 1650 ?), and James Shirley (1596-1666), the first two are not much affected by this disease, while Shirley, though he shows signs of it sometimes, can get rid of it, when it pleases him to-shake it off. Massinger's plays, though many of them are lost, are still numerous, and display, both in tragedy and comedy, a great deal of power. He has not the exquisite strokes of poetry which distinguish such a man as, for instance, Dekker, who actually worked with him and infused them some- times into his comrade's work. His character-drawing is not very deep or individual ; his tragedy is not heart- rending, nor his comedy dehcately humorous. But The io6 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Virgin Martyr, which he wrote with Dekker, is charming, and several others, The Roman Actor, for instance, are stately and imposing tragedies, while A New Way to Pay Old Debts is one of the most powerful comedies or tragi-comedies of manners in Enghsh. Ford, on the other hand, has not left us much inde- pendent work, and a good deal of what he wrote, alone or with others, is lost. The somewhat morbid tone which we perceive in all this school and time exaggerates itself in him to the highest, indeed in his two best plays to an unnatural pitch, but he is able to carry his readers with him by the intensity of his passion and pathos. He has left us, too, a historical play, Perkin Warbeck, which, though somewhat stiff and statuesque, is probably the best thing of the kind out of Shakespeare. He exhibits, in a fashion somewhat redeemed by his genius, the re- lapse towards the horror - tragedy, which is noticeable now, and which others display without the assistance of that redeeming quahty. Shirley, again, a very voluminous dramatist, the author of about forty plays, masques, etc., and, as has been said, the latest-Uved of the whole group, is more like a weaker Beaumont-and-Fletcher in a single person than either Ford or Massinger. Indeed, to some extent his work " throws back " to things much earlier than the twin dramatists, for we have from him an actual morahty. Honour and Riches, with a more fully drama- tised version, Honoria and Mammon. It is in Shirley, in short, that the bookish or hterary tendency, the signs of a regular " school " of drama, appear most; and as he is the most definite scholar, so he is the last of his school. But he has left us some fine plays, many interesting ones, and not a httle poetry of another sort, the best known piece of which is that beginning The glories of our blood and state.'' V JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LITERATURE 107 Others must be briefly mentioned, but cannot be quite left out. Of two already named, Davenant and Suckling, the former not merely, like Shirley, outUved the Restoration and wrote after it, but, unlike Shirley, was largely instrumental (see next chapter) in intro- ducing a new school of drama. Richard Brome (?-i652 ?), who was a servant {i.e. a sort of secretary or page) to Ben Jonson, followed his master's manner to some extent, with less genius and learning, but with more lightness and stage-knowledge, in a dozen Hvely comedies, the chief of them The Northern Lass, in which a frequent stage device, the use of dialect, is employed. Thomas Randolph (1605-1635), who stood to Ben in the more honourable relation of son," ^ and died young, left some dramas of a strongly academic cast, and not so actable as Brome's, but of not a Uttle literary value. No others, perhaps, deserve actual mention here ; but there were many, and we possess a considerable number of anonymous plays, some of them of very great merit, and showing the extraordinary diffusion of the dramatic impulse at the time. Nor should we omit the curious body of Shakespearian Doubt fuls,'' as they are called, or plays attributed to Shakespeare. There are some seventeen in all, but in most of them he pretty cer- tainly had no hand, and none of them was included in the original ^ edition of his works. The most strictly noteworthy of these are Edward III. and Arden of Fever sham, besides the above-mentioned Tivo Noble Gentlemen, which is undoubtedly in part or in whole by Beaumont and Fletcher. Edward III. is ^ Not a few of the younger men of letters of the time called them- selves Jonson's " sons." 2 In a later folio (the third) some were admitted, and one of these, Pericles, has held its gromid. If Shakespeare did not write the whole of it, which is possible, it is almost impossible that any one else should have written some parts. io8 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. dramatic poetry. like Shakespeare in versification, Arden of Feversham in grasp of character ; but neither in other ways, especially in choice of subject. Non- In non-dramatic poetry the period is still more dis- tinguished than in dramatic, even if we take Milton out as standing by himself ; but that " school-character which has just been noted in the drama is also, and even more, visible here. The main school-influences are three, those of Spenser, Jonson, and Donne (see below) ; but they are broken into by certain others, especially of a technical kind, to which it is very important that attention should be paid. Drayton, The longer poems of the first quarter of the seventeenth Fairfax ^^^^^^Y* from Spenser's death to the reign of Charles L, are much influenced by The Faerie Queene, but only in two important cases are they allegorical. Drayton and Daniel continued their work during this period, and we learn from Drayton ^ that a distaste for stanzas was setting in, and a return to the decasyllabic couplet — a form not very much used since Chaucer's time. It was, however, noted here (see above, p. 37) that in Chaucer's verse itself two different kinds of this couplet show themselves, one more or less confining the sense and sound to the couplet itself, the other allowing both to nm on and over. By a very curious repetition of circum- stances, the stopped form seems to have been propagated just in the same way again (see above, p. 37) as that in which Chaucer had, to all appearance, first conceived it. He had written over a thousand of such couplets as terminations to the rhyme-royal or seven-Uned stanzas of Troilus. Now just after Spenser's death there appeared (as was briefly mentioned above) a translation ^ Not only is there this intimation, but to complete it we'have from Sir John Beaumont, elder brother of Francis the dramatist, an en- thusiastic recommendation of the stopped couplet itself. V JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LITERATURE 109 of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered by Edward Fairfax. It was written, not in Spenserian stanzas (though the influence of Spenser was strong on it) nor in rhyme-royal, but in the octave or eight-hne stanza of the ItaHans, which also ends in a couplet. These couplets tended to isolate themselves from the six earlier verses, just as the last two lines of the Shakespearian sonnet do ; and the sound seems to have been pleasing to the people. Drayton himself wrote many of his later poems in such couplets, arranged continuously, though he used other metres, especially the Alexandrine, in his great description of England, the Polyolbion, But this verse is not good in Enghsh for a continuance. Still, as we have seen, as this century went on, a great w. Browne, tendency to relax verse, to make it easier to write and more flowing to read, set in, and tliis attacked not "Heroic" merely the blank verse of drama, but the couplet of Romancers, narrative and other non-dramatic verse. People began to run on their couplets, both octosyllabic (which also was written much at tliis time) and decasyllabic. If carefully done, this can be very agreeable, and it was so in the verse of Wilham Browne (1591-1643) and George Wither (1588-1667), both strongly Spenserian in sorr^e ways, though not in stanza. But, as in blank verse, this ease and fluency tended towards looseness and neglect, so that in narrative poets of the times of Charles I., when a kind of verse-romance came to be rather largely written, though the verse never becomes as harsh and doggerelUsh as that of the fifteenth century, the sentences begin to be of quite disproportionate length, the rhymes appear almost merged in a flood of running verse, and, worst of all, the writer begins to be incoherent, observes no real connection in his thought, and allows himself to be carried on with such volubiUty that neither he nor his reader can be very certain of what he is talking no A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. about. These errors appear in the work, otherwise often quite beautiful, of Shakerley Marmion (1603-1639, Cupid and Psyche), John Chalkhill (? — ? ^, Thealma and Clearchus), and, above all, WilHam Chamberlayne (1619- 1689, Pharonnida). Sylvester. There was still a great fancy for translation about this time, and besides Fairfax, one of the most popular poets of the time was Joshua Sylvester (1563-1618), who rendered into quaint Enghsh the poem of the French Huguenot poet Du Bartas on the Creation, with such acceptance that one may find some echoes of it in Milton himself. The allegorical poems above referred to, of the two Fletchers, Giles' (1558-1623) Christ's Victory and Phineas' (1582-1650) The Purple Island, are fine but long-winded, and written in not very happy alterations of the Spenserian stanza ; while something like a relapse upon the old habit of choosing poetry as a vehicle for subjects much better treated in prose, appeared in the philosophical - religious epics, if we may call them so, of Joseph Beaumont (1616-1699, Psyche) and Henry More (1614-1687, The Song of the Soul). Yet though there is much beautiful poetry in these long poems, it is scarcely in them that the principal poetical charm of the poetry of the first half of the seventeenth century consists. This is to be found in Lyric. its lyric. With this eldest and most delightful kind of verse Spenser, as has been said, did not deal very largely. But it was also pointed out that in the dramas and pamphlets of the EUzabethan time proper, as. well as in collections definitely devoted to poems of the kind, that kind was very fertile. These collections did not wholly cease, but it became more and more customary ^ This poet's date is very uncertain ; but he knew Spenser, who died in 1599, and Izaak Walton, who published Chalkhill's poem in 1683. V JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LITERATURE iii for poets to issue their own work separately. Drayton in his later years wrote very delightful lyrics : Jonson's ^ own — such as the universally known Drink to me only X ' with thine eyes " (a wonderful mosaic from Greek prose, not verse) — offered a model of classical correctness and almost severity combined with romantic feeling ; and there was a new, pecuhar, and extremely powerful influence to which we have not yet referred except by a glance. John Donne (1573-1631) was some thirty years Donne old at the Queen's death, and it is probable that the f^^^ larger part of his lyrical work had then been written, physical" But it had not been pubUshed ; and as in later hfe he poetry, took orders and became famous as a preacher, no authoritative edition of it was hkely. It was, however, much handed about in MS., and its powerful and strange qualities had undoubtedly much to do with the rise and popularity of what has been rather unfortunately called metaphysical " poetry. This word was originally and properly used by Dry den, in connection with Donne and others, to denote what it strictly means, " something beyond or behind the merely natural " ; but it is not certain that even Dr. Johnson, who took it up and made it popular in his Lives of the Poets, did not shghtly con- fuse its meaning with the more ordinary one of ab- strusely philosophical/'- and the confusion has largely prevailed since. The poetry so called was in fact a natural outgrowth, or even a mere continuation in certain special directions, of the habit of " conceit " already noticed (see above, p. 93). Instead of expressing himself plainly or directly the poet seeks the most indirect fashion of innuendo — elaborate and at first sight incongruous similes and metaphors ; comphcated allu- sions to classical and other matters ; sometimes deliber- ate puns or plays on a word or phrase. Moreover, Donne himself happened to possess a temperament 112 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. as obvious and as remarkable as Marlowe's, though quieter and deeper — a mixture of intense passion, deep melancholy, and a tendency to meditations remote and afar " from the ostensible subject. All this, as well as, in another department of it, the strong satiric temper which he likewise possessed, showed itself in his poems ; and, finding a large number of kindred spirits in the younger poets of the day, it produced, by contagion and imitation, the great body of frequently exquisite lyric verse which is also collectively known as Caroline," and sometimes (with considerable but not entire justice) Cavalier." Cowley, A chapter at least would be required to give separate H^e^Tck ^^^^^^^ ^^ty ^ Ymes to this large body of poets, and ' Their great peculiarity is that though many, in fact most. Waller. Qf them are justly classed as " minor " poets, there is hardly one in whom you may not and do not find passages worthy of a poet of the very first class. Of the four most generally known, Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) was a writer of long poems (such as the Davideis) as well as short, and the introducer of a peculiar kind of verse called " Pindaric," an irregular imitation of the Greek poet's strophic " forms, which became rather un- fortunately popular. But he wrote also a vast number of small pieces of the kind with which we are now dealing, " metaphysical " enough in the sense of conceit, but wanting the finest and strangest flavour of Donne's verse. Thomas Carew (1598 ?-i639), a courtier, one of Ben Jonson's " sons," and a fervdd admirer of Donne, has left us very little verse, but some of it is quite ex- quisite. Robert Herrick (1591-1674), the least known in his own time and for long after, has been for a century the most popular of all ; deserving this by the variety, daintiness, and fresh country feehng of his profane poems, and the singularly contrasted quality of some of V JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LITERATURE ii his sacred ones. Edmund Waller (1606-1687), the last of the four, has most of the characteristics of the next age mixed with some of this — smooth verse (see next chapter), including a good deal of couplet in longer poems, and light, sparkling, but rather thin and shallow lyrics. Next to this group for notoriety may be placed Crashaw, the religious poets — Richard Crashaw (1613 ?-i649, one of the most extravagant but also one of the most Vaughan. poetical of the metaphysicals), George Herbert (1593- 1633, a more sober but still fanciful author of poems [The Temple), which, with Keble's Christian Year, are the most characteristic of all Anglican verse), and Henry Vaughan (1622-1695, who can rise higher than Herbert and be almost quainter than Crashaw, but is more unequal than either) — and the courtiers and amatory writers Suckling and Richard Lovelace (1618-1658), Suckling, the latter author of few but charming serious things, a^dot^iSs and the former a light poet of hardly surpassed grace. Beyond these none can be said to be famiHar to the ordinary reader, but it would be easy, if it were hkely to be of any use here, to enumerate Uterally dozens of verse- writers, who, it may be, have done nothing exactly great, whose poetry as a whole has the characteristics of a school rather than those of an individual, and yet among whose work you can, as was said above, be pretty sure of finding something for the like of which you may look in vain before 1580 and ^ between 1660 and 1798 — some- thing which contains the appealing thought, the original expression, the soft or grave musical sound, and some- times the vivid picture to the eye which together make up true poetry. 4 Contemporary with all those as yet mentioned in this chapter, though slightly younger than most of them, ^ Except in the work of Blake. I 114 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. was the poet who is commonly ranked as second only to Milton. Shakespeare, John Milton (1608-1674). Different as Milton was from most of these contemporaries, and sharply contemptuous as he was of some of them, he did not disdain to learn a good deal from them and their forerunners, and in all the poems which he wrote before he turned to politics the chief difference between him and them is that he is better. Even this advantageous His minor distinction does not appear at once, for his boyish poems poems. nearly so good as those of some others, and it was not till his " three and twentieth year " (com- memorated in a sonnet), and hardly even then, that he showed what he could do. For the next seven years (till 1637) he wrote not much but consummately ; then he was silent in poetry for more than twenty, except for a few sonnets, and only in the last years of his life did he produce his chief poems in point of bulk and import- ance of form — Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), Samson Agonistes (1671). Yet what he had written earlier would have been almost enough for a first-class poet. His Ode on the Nativity combined religious enthusiasm of the highest kind, with stateliness greater even than Spenser's (whose pupil Milton allowed himself to be), classical knowledge wider and better utilised than Jonson's, a command of pure poetic sound equal to the greatest tilings of Donne and much more constant, with something borrowed from Italian, of which language he was a great student, and which infused softness and harmony. His Italian studies were also possibly responsible for his taking up the sonnet (which, after the great outburst at the end of Elizabeth's reign, had not been very popular in England) and employing it in a form nearer to Italian practice. The two charming pieces L* Allegro and // Penseroso were Italian in their titles, but in metre (the mixed V JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LITERATURE 115 octosyllabic and heptasyllabic couplet of Shakespeare, Fletcher, Browne, and others), scenery, and temper quite English. Some beautiful fragments of a masque char- acter {Arcades) were followed by a complete and exquisite masque (as Milton himself termed it, but more Uke a regular lyrical drama), to which the name of Comus has been given later ; and this was in its turn succeeded by the great elegy of Lycidas, in which competent judges have seen one of the most unique achievements of English poetry. All these were written between 1630 and 1637. When, as has been said, many years later, and after Paradise the Civil War, Milton resumed poetical work, it was not to minor poems that he devoted himself, but to the great epics and the sacred tragedy.^ In all three he displayed, with an increase of majestic thought and expression, the almost unsurpassed command of versification and diction by which he is distinguished. In Comus he had already used blank verse with great success, but without keeping quite to one style ; he now elaborated a style of his own in this metre, which has influenced every writer of it in English since. Probably in a fit of temper, he not merely abandoned but abused rhyme here ; but he returned to it afterwards in the " choruses of Samson Agonistes. From first to last Milton, not merely by the greatness of his themes and thought, which are peculiar to himself and cannot be repeated, but by a mastery of versification (his diction, though magnificent in itself, was easily, and indeed generally has been caricatured by injudicious followers) which practically completed the education, as we may call it, of English poetry. We saw that after Spenser had put things in the right way ^ He had in his youth planned a very large number of such tragedies, as well as some from profane histories, and among these were the subjects of his great epic itself. ii6 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. as to rhymed stanzas, and after Shakespeare had achieved perfection in dramatic blank verse, disorder and laxity had set in. These faults Milton corrected (and corrected for good," as we say, so long as any one chooses to go to him) in a surprising variety of metres. U Allegro, II Penseroso, the Arcades fragments, and the later part of Comus display the mixed eight and seven syllable line, which constitutes the octosyllabic couplet, with a mixture of ease and accuracy not to be surpassed ; Lycidas is, almost by itself, an object lesson in prosody, from the extraordinary skill with which lines of different length, rhymed as it seems at first irregularly or even left without any rhyme at all, compose a complete symphony in verse, and make as it were their own musical accompaniment. The varied metres (some very audaciously devised) of Samson Agonistes, fine as they are, require careful study thoroughly to appreciate them. But it is in the blank verse of Paradise Lost, for whic?i that of Comus is a kind of exercise, like The Shepherd* s 'Kalendar for The Faerie Queene, that the great subject of study for the student of English literature lies. In it Milton achieved the ne plus ultra, in at least one direction, of metrical composition. By combining his lines through variation of pause and overlapping of sense into verse - paragraphs, he attained at once the Import- effect of blank verse, of couplet, and of stanza ; by anceof maintaining steadily the grammatical and rhetorical interdependence of these paragraphs in a clear order, he avoided the incoherence, amounting in some cases to sheer uninteUigibleness, of his couplet contemporaries (see above, p. 109). But his arrangement of the individual line is the most extraordinary thing. He allows himself large license of substituted feet, both disyllabic and trisyllabic, and so, with his variety of pause, avoids monotony to the greatest possible extent. But he never V JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LITERATURE 117 by any chance lets the Une get out of order, or permits it to lose its cadence or shape. With him and with Shakespeare in hand, carefuljy studied and thoroughly understood, all secrets of EngHsh versification are open to the student. And he will find, the more he considers the unsurpassed, almost unapproached magnificence of the thought and imagery, the characters and the stories which these poets have given us, how enormously the gift is enhanced by the methods of giving. Despite, however, the great achievements of this Peculiar first half of the seventeenth century in drama and in eminence poetry, it may be questioned whether it is not, when at ms^ compared with other periods, most remarkable for its time, developments of prose. Even Milton owes something of his great position as a man of letters to his prose- writing, and that of the period as a whole stands, in reference to the preceding, in a much higher position in this respect than in the other. It has been pointed out how hard it is to disengage even the work of the latest sixteenth century from that of its successors, ' both in poetry and in drama ; while if the disengagement could be effected, all sorts of curious but rather idle allowances and calculations would have to be made before any one could .weigh the results against each other. But the case of prose is quite different. We gave all due credit to Lyly and to Hooker for the advances they made and the patterns they set. But direct following of Lyly could only be mischievous, though his general purpose of adornment was creditable, and the style of Hooker, admirable and beautiful, placid and reconcil- ing, as it is, was certainly fit only for a few subjects, perhaps only for its own special purpose of theological argument. Moreover, not only in Lyly's but in others, ultra-'* conceit," exaggerated quaintness, and other Ii8 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. faults appear. Even Bacon's early Essays were, as we saw, crushed and squeezed together so as to make rather a collection of somewhat rugged prose epigrams than a flowing rhythmical discourse. In his later ones, indeed, and in other work repre- sentative of the reigns of James and Charles, he eased, smoothed, and graced his style not a Uttle, although it never attained the beauty which was to distinguish the best writers of the second quarter of the century. Foretastes of that beauty were, however, given by other Elizabethans proper, such as Raleigh (in whose great and unequal History of the World some passages of extra- ordinary beauty appear), and Fulke Greville (Sidney's friend, biographer, and superior in prose-writing though not in verse), but above all by Donne, whose sermons (all the work of his later life) display the qualities noticed in his verse, with almost incredible results of beauty, in prose which is quite genuine prose and does not imitate verse in any undue measure. And as time went on, new writers of still greater power disclosed them- selves, all, however, forming, more or less, on this side or on that, a curious division, something of which has been already indicated as regards Lyly and Hooker themselves, but which emphasised itself as the history proceeded after a fashion parallel, though much more marked, to something which has been noticed in the poetry. Its Elizabethan quaintness, Jacobean learning (the character. King's own pretensions to this were well founded, if those to wisdom were not, and his subjects followed him), as well as the melancholy musical meditation which distinguishes the Caroline period, were all wrought together, one being more prominent at one time and another at another, in a band of great writers who, though some obvious faults may be pointed out in most of them, have never been, and it is safe to say never V JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LITERATURE will be, surpassed as masters and almost magicians in English prose. ^ The most Ehzabethan of these in quaintness, though Burton, his very title shows the presence of a later spirit, is Robert Burton (1577-1640), author of The Anatomy of Melan- choly (1621), a book which, ever since its appearance, has been the delight, perhaps not of very many, but of most of the fittest readers. Although it has often been at least partially imitated since, it is difficult to think of the book as having been genuinely and spontaneously conceived at any other time than this. It is, in method and ostensible arrangement, the most orderly and scientific of treatises, the causes, symptoms, and possible cures of the disease with which it deals being most logically mapped out under heads and sub-heads. But this is in reality only an outline or skeleton, upon which or within which are imposed the most intricate and multiform digressions, largely composed of endless quotations on the subject, or things connected with it, from ancient and modem writers (Burton knows and quotes the great dramatists of his own time), sometimes translated as well as given in the original, and heaped together in strange breathless sentences occasionally showing no regular syntax whatever. Yet Burton can, when he pleases, write regularly and exceedingly well, in a style of the plainer kind, but full of humour and feeling. Undoubtedly, however, he allows quaintness to get a little the better of him ; and this is also the case with a younger writer, some of whose work is rather Uke Burton's, but who devoted himself more — for they were both in orders — to the special business of his profession. 1 Jonson*s great influence made, in prose, for a style less beautiful than theirs, but closer, though not unduly close like Bacon's, plainer, and more suited to business purposes. . I20 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Fuller. Thomas Fuller's (1608-1661) wit was highly praised by Coleridge, and very popular in his own earher time, though it was attacked after the great change in prose (see next chapter) at the Restoration. It is perhaps sometimes out of place in his sermons, though scarcely in his miscellaneous works, or even in his Church History. But there is a certain childishness in him which puts him far below Burton, while as a writer he cannot touch the great group which follows, and of each of whose members we must say a Uttle — Hobbes, Clarendon, Milton, Taylor, and Browne. With the exception of Hobbes (who was bom in the year of the Armada, but wrote or pubhshed nothing in Enghsh till he had reached middle age, and did not die till 1679), these were post-Elizabethan in the strict sense. But, as is common with such groups, they were bom pretty close together — Browne in 1605, Milton and Clarendon in 1608, and Taylor, the youngest, in 1613. They illustrate those diverging types of prose of which we have spoken, Milton, Taylor, and Browne representing the omate style, which they were to carry to a pitch the utmost possible at the time, and indeed were to see superseded; Clarendon and Hobbes the plainer, which was to survive them and indeed to estabUsh itself as the common standard style of EngUsh, for ordinary purposes, during a period which does not seem to have closed yet. Milton. It is a common saying, and a fairly tme one, that good poets are usually good prose-writers, but it is only very partially tme of Milton. He is one of the greatest of poets, and he has written some of the greatest of prose sentences, but hardly any even of these is quite free from blots and flaws, and his general prose style is only tolerable because there is always a chance of coming upon these nuggets. It is curious that he. V JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LITERATURE 121 who in verse can write sentences twenty lines long and more with perfect grammatical clearness, in prose gets into the most inextricable tangles of clauses. He Latinises far too much, as is indeed not quite surprising in a man who was writing Latin for official purposes more frequently than EngUsh, and he forgets that Latin constructions will not always do in our tongue. So that, though he is in his own way one of our greatest masters of ornate style, he shows the defects of that style and way. It is unfortunate, doubtless, that most of his prose work is political, and written in a state of violent partisan temper. His most famous work, the Areopagitica (an address to ParUament against censorship of the press), has some of this, but not much ; and his curious and interesting, but avowedly not critical, Uttle Histories (of England in early times and of Muscovy) hardly any at all. But these latter do not give opportunity for the grander outbursts of his pamphlets and of the Areo- pagitica itself. Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), a clergyman, and later Taylor, a bishop, was, with Donne, the greatest of a great band of divines who, about this period, made the pulpit the means of enriching English prose with matter which, unlike most oratory, was really literature. Some, including distinguished judges like Coleridge and De Ouincey, have thought him the greatest of all our prose- writers, but this is hardly the case. He is undoubtedly one of our greatest masters of ornate prose, but he rather overdid the ornament. Elaborate similes, intro- duced by the same monotonous phrase, So have I seen,'' become tiresome after a time, however prettj^ they may be individually. Length and comphcation of sentence, the great drawbacks of the period, constantly mar his composition. But his skill in making prose musical was almost supreme ; and for those who consider 122 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Sir Thomas Browne. Hobbes and Clarendon. sweetness the chief thing to be aimed at, he is easily first. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), the eldest of this trio, is also the greatest. He was a physician, and for his time a considerable man of science ; but he was also a scholar and man of letters of the finest kind. His Vulgar Errors (1646), his longest work, is not only extremely learned, but positively amusing in its collec- tion and cool criticism of eccentric popular beliefs of the time in natural history. His earher Religio Medici (1642), a defence of reasoned orthodoxy ; his Urn Burial (1658) and Garden of Cyrus, in places too fanciful, but magnificently worded discourses, somewhat in the manner of Burton ; and his unfinished and uncorrected Christian Morals represent, with some slight faults and drawbacks, the highest point yet reached by our tongue in prose. Browne has been wrongly charged with defects in grammar, for English grammar is only an induction from great English writers, of whom he is one of the greatest, and there were no authoritative rules of it in his time, whatever there may have been since. He has been with more justice accused — and he had practically invited the accusation himself — of over-Latinising. It is quite true, not only that he Anglicises Latin words in an unusual fashion, but that he uses these and better known ones in senses which, without some knowledge of Latin or Greek, nobody is Ukely to understand. But readers then, though less numerous, were more thor- oughly educated than they are to-day ; and Browne is not to be blamed for not writing to an audience which he did not contemplate, and which indeed did not exist. The other two writers who have been mentioned. Clarendon (Edward Hyde, Earl of, 1 608-1 674), and Thomas Hobbes, were of a different and plainer school, and were almost obliged to be so by their subjects. V JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LITERATURE Clarendon {History of the Rebellion, written late) was in literature a political historian, as in life he was an active statesman. Hobbes [Leviathan) was a philosopher, and one whose special object was to strip philosophy of any glamour of words, to give these latter the sharpest and most clearly defined meanings, and to avoid abstractions, metaphors, and the like as much as possible. Nevertheless he is a very great writer indeed ; one of our greatest in the argumentative way. For though his premisses are often arbitrary and mistaken, and his attempt to treat language as if it were a set mathematical symbol, a worse mistake still, yet his clearness, force, and occasional eloquence of expression can hardly be overpraised. He manages his sentences and paragraphs perfectly : there is scarcely any con- temporary writer who surpasses him in this respect, though Browne has a great advantage in it over Taylor, Milton, and others. On the other hand. Clarendon, with many gifts, fails in this very particular. His sentences are sometimes monstrous, a single one filling a large page ; and though this is occasionally due to mere clumsy punctuation, or lack of punctuation, it is by no means always so. But he can describe admirably; and (partly taking pattern, it may be, from French) he is almost the first English writer to give vividly drawn characters of persons. Florid prose of the other kind would never have done for this, and accordingly he does not use it ; but he is, though he came after Knollys and Raleigh, in a more complete sense than either, the first and one of the greatest of our historians from the combined histori- cal and literary point of view. ^j^^ Nor must we omit — indeed there is nothing of greater Authorised importance — the Authorised Version of the Bible, which ^^^^-^^ was published in 1611, but had been in preparation for Bible. 124 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. some years before. This translation was, of course, based to a large extent upon earlier ones, which had been produced for the best part of a century, but it far ex- ceeds them all in beauty and standard quality of English. Like that of Spenser's verse, its language was not exactly that of its own or any time. But there was no reason why it should be ; and the importance of the substance, the special attention to it which was soon afterwards drawn by the political and ecclesiastical conditions of the time, its abiding currency, and its intrinsic merits, gave it an influence on succeeding writers, both in prose and verse, to which there is probably no parallel. And we could perhaps have no more decisive evidence of the extraordinary diffusion of literary power during this period than the composition of such a work at the very middle of it. For it must be remembered that the translators of the Bible were a considerable body, nearly fifty in number, and that among them not a single writer who has done other Uterary work of the highest or even a very high class was included. They selected and improved upon the work of their predecessors ; they performed and polished their own ; and they arranged (a most difficult thing to do) this compound of new and old into one artistic whole, with an unerring- ness which could only arise from the presence of a great Uterary " atmosphere — of a diffused power of literary production and appreciation among educated folk at large. Weak Thus, whether we look at the whole production of the points in larger Ehzabethan period (for we must here take the bethan contents of these two chapters together for survey), or literature, whether we look only at such things as The Faerie Queene, as Shakespeare's works, as the Authorised Version, as the prose masterpieces of Browne, and the poems of Milton — adding to them the innumerable V JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LITERATURE 125 achievements of those " minor writers in this time whom the majors of other times have not equalled at their greatest — it may seem impossible to value or to praise it too highly. And in truth, if the abundance and the consummateness of the best things are taken together, there probably is no period that surpasses, if there is any that equals it. But a critical estimate, while not abating one jot of this admiration, will admit at once that it was not a perfect period by any means, and will add, if any one objects What period is ? " that its imperfections were of a kind almost as dangerous as its qualities were splendid and charming. In the first place, to borrow a striking remark of a great French writer ^ about himself, " If the Elizabethans had not genius, it was all up with them.'* Genius can transcend rule ; but you cannot always count on genius, and that which is not genius cannot do without some rule. We have plentiful examples of this, from the earlier " Horror plays to the minor metaphysical poets. It took but a very Uttle to make tragedy into a mess of bombastic phrase, unnatural action, and horrors which themselves become merely ludicrous. Comedy was in equal danger of becoming coarse, trivial, and tiresome. The " vaulting ambition " of the poetry too often overleapt itself ; the conceits became puerile. Above all, the regular technical machinery of diction and versification was still so unsettled that it was constantly coming to pieces. As a result of these defects, Enghsh was still unpro- The vided with the means and methods of ordinary Hterary ^^""^f^^j^ work. This is a matter which does not concern poetry, they led. for that has nothing to do with the ordinary, and is not wanted at all unless it is extraordinary. But all the energy and all the achievement of these two generations had not succeeded in producing, if indeed any one had 1 The novelist Balzac. 126 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. tried to produce, a straightforward prose style, suitable for the business uses of everyday life, which prose is more specially bound to subserve. There could be nothing more splendid than the great ornate prose of Donne, Raleigh, Browne, Taylor, and Milton (at his best). But such prose could only be in place in certain departments of Uterature, and not always there. Even in a writer like Clarendon, who was not always anxious to achieve very important rhetorical effects, inexperience in what may be called the mechanical part of writing was still prominent. To select, for the most part at any rate, language which most people could understand ; to arrange it clearly in sentences of orderly construction and moderate if varied length; to look first of all at the purpose — explanation, information, conviction, or whatever it might be — and not at the composition of a beautiful piece of writing, these were things which still required to be learnt. It was impossible that there should not be some disappearance or suspension of the finest results while the process of learning was going on ; and this was a great loss. But there was also some gain, and this gain remained to the credit of the lan- guage and the literature even when a new stage more like the Elizabethan had in turn opened. The space between these was again a long one — nearly a century and a half. What it was, and what it did, we must now attempt to see. The If we suppose a man about the close of the great Civil Library War and before the Restoration, disgusted with public a little affairs and retiring to his library, it may not be un- before interesting to see what accessions might have been made 1660. to it, if his father and himself had done their duty, since the beginning of the century. There would not have been such a contrast as that father would have enjoyed in comparison with his own ancestors at the time of our last survey, nor would there be any very striking general difference of spirit and character, except to an exceedingly V JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LITERATURE 127 acute and rather " foresighted " or " second-sighted " critic. But the bulk would have increased vastly, and while in some departments there would be a distinct falling off, in others there would be a great advance. Hundreds of plays, including the latest and most of the greatest works of Shakespeare, nearly the whole of Jonson, much of Shakespeare's other contemporaries, and the whole of Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and scores of minors, would now fill the shelves, though the critical reader would notice a sad falling off (as to some formal points) in the latest additions. The bookcases devoted to poetry would be in much the same case. He would find indeed no second Faerie Qiieene ; and how^ever much private information he might have about literary matters, it is not certain that he would have found out that Paradise Lost was even in preparation, though it may have been. But a little short of this level the ranges of long poems of merit were largely extended to receive the later work of Drayton and Daniel, the quaint and popular paraphrases of Sylvester, the Spenserian allegories of the Fletchers, and the philosophical poems of Joseph Beaumont and More. If he found (as he easily might) these latter rather tough reading, there was an entirely new body of " heroic " romance in verse, the work of Chalkhill and Marmion and many others, leading up to the best of all, Pharonniday published just (1659) about the time we are supposing. Above all he could, if he cared for it, revel in poetry on a smaller scale, both directly lyrical and of other kinds. Hundreds and almost thousands of charming pieces from Campion and Jonson and Drayton to Milton's own minor work (complete by this time) and the whole flock of Caroline poets were at his disposal. Yet, bountiful as the Muses of verse and drama had been, it may almost be said that in actual comparison the greatest enrichment of the library was in prose; for Shakespeare and other poets had been common to it at both stages. Against Hooker, almost alone in 1600, many writers, com- bining charm of manner and importance of bulk and matter, were now to be set. There was not indeed yet any great prose fiction (though a few English writers were trying not merely to translate), only very rudimentary newspapers, and, except in Ben Jonson's case, a positive break-off of that criticism which in the Elizabethan time had looked so promising. But Bacon had largely increased and improved his Essays, and had followed them up with The Advancement of Learning and other things in English, 128 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. v though he still clung rather nervously to Latin. Jonson himself had left not much but fine prose in a strong, plain style, which was full of future. The unique eccentricity of Burton's Anatomy must have been read and re-read by any lover of literature ; while he had in the miscellaneous works of Browne, in the sermons of Donne and Taylor and others, in the nobler and less perturbed passages of Milton's pamphlets, and in many other places prose which, almost for the first time, could give the actual pleasure of poetry a little altered — the pleasure of literature itself, apart from its subject. For less serious and intense enjoyment there began to be written books like Walton's Angler, Howell's Letters, Cowley's Essays (to be noticed again) — things read- able and re-readable simply for amusement and pastime. Lastly, there had been available for nearly fifty years the unsurpassed and unmatched union of the greatest matter with the most admirable form in the Authorised Ver- sion of the Scriptures. The time indeed was the full harvest-tide of what has been called the larger Elizabethan characteristics, and almost all their fruits could be gathered in by those who chose. CHAPTER VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD, 1660-I798 Peculiar character of the change at the Restoration — Names given to it — Its causes, and their workings — The first group of Re- storation writers — Dry den, his verse — His dramas — His prose — His cardinal importance — Defects and merits of the new dispensa- tion — Other poets and poems : Hudibras — Other dramatists : ** Restoration " comedy — Tragedy : Otway and Lee — Prose con- temporaries of Dryden : Temple and others — Degradation of the plain style — The rescue by Addison, Steele, and Swift — Their action in the periodical — L' Estrange and Defoe, The Tatler, The Spectator, etc. — Swift's other works — Effects of the Addisonian periodical — The second stage of Augustan poetry : Pope — His curious imitableness — Other poets: Prior, Gay, Young, etc., and others still, of a different school — Thomson and blank verse — Lighter verse — Gray, Collins, Shenstone, etc. — Symptoms of change about 1760 : Ossian, Percy's Reliques, etc. — The growth of the novel — Defoe again — Swift again — The complete novel : Richardson — Fielding — Sn£iollett, and Sterne — Great outburst of minor novel-writing — Johnson — His society : Goldsmith and others — The heralds of a new change : Cowper, Crabbe, Burns, and Blake — The Library a httle before 1800. The change which came over EngHsh Literature at or about the Restoration is Hke nothing that we have seen hitherto, and not quite hke anything (even the reaction from it which will put an end to this chapter) that will be seen later. That literature, since its beginning, had, as even this slight survey of it will have shown, under- gone wide and deep alterations of character. But these changes had never been rapid ; they had seldom if ever 129 K / Peculiar character of the change at the Restora- tion. I30 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. been what may be called deliberate ; and they had, to a very large extent, been dependent on other changes in the language itself, to which there was nothing here to correspond in the very least degree. The revojutjon now to be_jiiscuss was delibe rate : it rather affected the language thajL was affected by it ; and it was extra- ordinajiiyjrapid. Of coufsFtHe"whokTace of the litera- ture was not changed at once ; that could not possibly happen unless a Black Death in the natural order of things, or some humanly caused process of extermination like Alva's government in the Netherlands, or the French Revolution, had destroyed every writer over the age of thirty. What are commonly considered Milton's greatest works were published, and some of them certainly produced, after the Restoration ; Sir Thomas Browne, if he published nothing, lived for nearly a quarter of a century later ; Shirley, Fuller, Taylor, Waller lived and wrote for shorter periods ; Vaughan nearly, and one or two minor poets like Sir Edward Sherburne quite, reached the eighteenth century. But almost if not quite every writer under thirty after this date uses a perfectly different style, and exhibits a sharply contrasted manner of thinking. Moreover, things were written showing that this was not merely a chance difference of view, which had stolen upon people without their knowing it, but a conscious and planned revolution. Names To this great change and its results more than one to^t^ different name has been given ; and a very great deal of discussion has taken place about its causes and circum- stances. The period which followed it and exhibited its principles has been called the Augustan,'' the " Neo-classic," or even the Gallo-classic " period, as well as by more periphrastic terms The Age of Prose and Sense," etc., etc. Qf these Gallo-classic " should VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 131 be on no account adopted, for it is an ugly and bastard word, and it implies, as will be shown presently, a danger- ously wrong conception of the movement. " Augus- tan is elegant, traditional, and unobjectionable provided it is used only as a ticket/* It arose from the fact that the Augustan period of Latin was thought the best, and from the innocent self-conceit (almost all periods are innocently self -conceited, though they seldom know it) of the eighteenth century, which thought itself superior to " the last age," the age of " false wit," and so forth. The Emperor Augustus, too, had been complimented on having " found Rome brick and left it marble," a compliment which Dr. Samuel Johnson transferred to Dry den, the great inaugurator of this Augustan " age in literary application. Used as thus meant, it may seem ridiculous now ; but there is not much harm in it if the circumstances, as just ex- plained, are well understood. Yet Neo-classic," though again a hybrid word, is perhaps the most exact and the most Ukely to keep off error. For it indicates, as will be shown, the general attitude of the time pretty accu- rately, and it distinguishes that time as hardly anything else can from the various " Romantic " periods before and after itself, and from, the Renaissance, when people despised vernaculars altogether, and thought that all real literature should be written in actual Greek or Latin. But what brought this age of hterature and its charac- teristics about ? An answer which was long popular, which was formulated with splendid rhetoric if not poetry, in a famous but utterly erroneous passage of Pope, and which almost originated the epithet " Gallo- classic " above mentioned, assigned it to French influence." Now, as Tennyson has said, A lie that is half a truth is ever the worst of lies. 132 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. In this particular case the answer is not so much as half or even a quarter true ; but there is just enough truth in it to make it dangerous. In its foolishest and falsest form it used to be put somewhat thus : King Charles 11. and several cavaliers were exiled in France during the Commonwealth ; and during that time there was some fine French literature. King Charles and his cavaliers took a fancy to this fine French literature. So when they came home they said, ' Let us have some- thing like this fine French literature.' And then they went and did it.'' Now all this, except the last state- ment, or the inference from it, is true enough, but the connection between the various preUminary statements and the conclusion simply does not exist. King Charles and his cavaUers could not have done anything of the kind, for you cannot change the fashion of a literature as you can change that of a hat or a wig or an upper or nether garment. Only a very httle of the new English literature is an imitation of French, and the most direct instance of that imitation — the introduction of rhymed verse in plays — lasted, as a popular fashion, but a very few years. The explanation, in short, is totally in- adequate. The thing was due to far deeper and wider causes, which would have worked had French literature been at the time in as great a state of prostration as German was, and to which any effect that French literature had was scarcely more than that of the fly on the wheel. Its causes Of these causes the greatest of all was, no doubt, that mysterious need of change which betrays itself in all human affairs, which exerts itself at irregular intervals, but which always recurs — that need which the poet just quoted has said to be implanted Lest one good custom should corrupt the world, VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 133 and which his greatest contemporary has dealt with as the law whereby man is hurled From change to change unceasingly, His soul's wings never furled. The great Elizabethan age had done greatly and more than greatly ; but it was time for it to go. And it had actually to some extent, as we have seen, approached " corruption/' The extravagant conceits of Cleveland,^ the broken verse of Suckhng and Davenant, the in- coherent periods of Chamberlayne and others in verse, of almost all, including even the sober Clarendon, in prose — all these things and others needed correction. But there were other causes still. Such an age of excitement and enthusiasm could not last indefinitely, and the sordid collapse of institutions, manners, reUgion in the Common- wealth helped the degradation of letters. Wars of national enthusiasm — even sometimes of sheer national jealousy — exalt the nation's spirit; but wars of mere ecclesiastical or political partisanship always degrade it. In the English civil strife, chivalry, fideUty, sincerity, morality, and other good things had sunk ; and the lofty, insolent, and passionate " spirit which animated and was expressed by the writing of men from Spenser and Raleigh down to Lovelace and Montrose — which was found even on the other side in such men as Milton and MarvelP — gave way to a mere desire to make the best of things and to mind your own business. The first of these causes — the disappearance of en- and their thusiastic and romantic temper — was certain to have an workings. 1 John Cleveland (1613-1658), an extremely vigorous poUtical poet on the Royalist side, also wrote miscellaneous pieces in the " meta- physical " style, which have become a sort of byword. 2 Andrew Marvell (i 621-1678), a friend of Milton, in his youth a poet of singular charm and dignity in different styles, later a sharp satirist and an independent member of Parliament. 134 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. effect upon the substance of poetry ; and the second — the rise of the business-hke motive — was as certain to have an effect on prose. How these effects, positive and negative, were produced, and what followed for nearly a century and a half, will be the subject of this chapter. When changes of this sort take place in hterature it always happens that more or fewer men, destined to carry them out, are born pretty close together. The vulgar way of describing what they do is to say that they ' ' produced ' ' the changes. The more sensible and scholarly way is to regard them as having had the will and power to express what a much larger number of people were thinking and feehng half-consciously, and certainly with- out the will or power to express their thoughts and emo- The first tions. At this time there was a very remarkable group group oi q{ ^^^^ j^gj^ ^Y^Q i^^^ I^QPj^ fj-Qjn five-and-twenty Restora- ' i i i tion to thirty years earher, very close to each other, and wTiters. y^j^Q ^^re now of an age to take advantage of the oppor- tunities of expression which the Restoration, and the estabUshment of comparative quiet in Church and State, gave them. These men were John Dryden (1631- 1700), Sir William Temple (1628-1699), John Tillotson (afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, 1630-1694), Sir George Savile (afterwards Marquess of HaUfax, 1633-1695), Robert South (1634-1716), Thomas Sprat (afterwards Bishop of Rochester, 1635-1713), and John Locke (1632-1704). It should be observed, and is of the greatest importance, that only one of these, Dryden, was a poet, though he was certainly a host in himself. Tillotson, South, and Sprat ^ were divines ; Locke was ^ Sprat did write verse ; but it was not poetry. And his importance here comes entirely from his prose History of the Royal Society (1667), in which he directly and elaborately attacks the ornate style and recommends the plain. VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 135 a philosopher ; Temple and Halifax were poUtical and miscellaneous writers. It is perhaps even more significant that Dryden was not merely a dramatist as well as a poet (that has always been a common conjunction) but a prose- writer as well, and one who wrote much and exercised a very great influence, perhaps the greatest of all, in prose as well as in verse. He succeeded, in fact, to something very much like the position of Ben Jonson, being not only, like him, poet, dramatist, and prose-writer at the same time, but in part of his prose work a critic, and a much greater one than Jonson. In all these capacities he deserves careful attention ; for in him we may see, not only the beginning of the hterary ideas of the time, but very long steps onward towards the perfecting of them. It was most fortunate for Enghsh hterature that Dryden, Dryden, who did not begin to write regularly till he was approaching middle hfe, but who then wrote steadily for full forty years, retained a strong tincture of the older spirit and tastes alongside of the new. To accuse him of, or to credit him with, " Euphuism is to give that word a much more honourable meaning than it deserves ; but he had not a little left of the vigour, the spirit, and even of the* disdain of mere rules which characterised the Elizabethans. Undoubtedly, however, his main bent was towards criticism and a reasonable regularity. When he began to write seriously he adopted the heroic couplet, and the newer — that is to say, the stopped or closed — form of it. He used in it few trisyllabic feet, if any, preferring "ehsion*' (which, however, he conducted on the sound principle that you cannot eUde what you must pronounce), and taking the hcense of triplets (three hues rhyming together instead of two) and Alexandrines (six feet instead of five). But he was a very skilful and wide-ranging master of metre ; 136 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. writing lyrics sometimes almost of the old bewitching sort, as well as others of " Pindaric kind, and songs in purely trisyllabic cadence, which had not a Uttle in- fluence. On the whole, however, his greatest instru- ment was the stopped heroic above mentioned, which, after practising it in miscellaneous poems and plays for some twenty years, he used in his great satires, written on the occasion of the struggles after the Popish Plot and the disputes of James II/s reign — Absalom and Achitophely The Medal, MacFlecknoe, The Hind and the Panther (1681-1687). In Dryden's heroics English verse learnt again the precision and strength of rhythm which had been relaxed and forgotten in large parts of Caroline poetry. This firm, massive, soUdly-ordered couplet-verse could at times supply a medium for very noble poetry ; but it was the best possible for the purposes of satire, polemic, exposition, etc., and whether it suited its subjects or not, it admitted no tampering with metrical rule. When, long afterwards, the great and more purely poetic themes and moods were revived, it was found somewhat stiff and narrow for them : at this time it could do little or no harm, and it did much good. His Except, however, that it served as an exercising dramas, ground for Dry den before these greater achievements of his, the use of it in drama deserved no such praise or even excuse. Englishmen were eager for theatrical amuse- ments after their twenty years' deprivation of them. All the old master - playwrights save Shirley were dead, and he was looked on as quite out of date ; but Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher were still played, and a new kind of comedy, with a Uttle help from Moliere and other French writers, was fashioned to some extent after theirs, and written chiefly in prose. But tragedy for a time fell under the power of rhyme — also, as has been VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 137 said, with a touch of French influence — and rhyme made a mess of it. The orderly, fastidious, and sentimental- rhetorical manner of Racine, even the less conventional and sometimes magnificent, but still declamatory method of Corneille, would have been too tame for EngHsh audiences. And though there is less blood and thunder in the " heroic plays which Dry den and others fashioned than in the old horror-dramas, they are generally quite as unnatural and sometimes much more absurd. Dryden himself, however, was too much of a critic to approve them long, and returned to blank verse with good results. The best of his " heroic " plays is the Conquest of Granada (1672) ; of his blank verse tragedies, All For Love (1678), a very audacious and, considering all things, surprisingly successful attempt to rival Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, It is of course inferior, but for a long time it was thought equal if not better, nor can there be a more useful way of understanding the different tone of dramatic poetry, and indeed of literature generally, at the two epochs, than to read these two plays one after the other. As far as concerns the general course of English His prose, c literary history, which we are trying to make clear, Dryden is of as much importance in prose as in poetry, and much more than in drama, where his comedy is not very distinguished, and his tragedy partly a mistaken experiment, partly an attempt to make sheer intellectual force do the work of poetic imagination. But in prose, as in poetry proper, he saw what not merely his own age but generations to come were fitted for and wanted, and he put them in a position to get it. Dryden's prose is indeed, from this point of view, even more remarkable than his verse ; for this last had been led up to by other writers, while the prose, with a slight and very recent exception in Cowley's Essays, was like nothing before. 138 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Its secrets were partly negative and partly positive. Perhaps the greatest of all was his recognition of the fact that conversational English was getting more fit for literary use, and his success in making it so. His style exactly carries out the Shakespearian phrase familiar but by no means vulgar/' though some of his followers made it the latter. It is not merely popular. Indeed Dryden, who was a well-educated and well-read man, if not exactly what is called a scholar, introduces a good many technical terms, and can argue quite scholastically when it suits his purpose. But he is always clear : he mixes long and short sentences with skill ; he can be pointed and epigrammatic, or weighty and argumentative, as he pleases, and in this or that way he achieves effects sometimes quite startlingly modem. It is hardly possible to select a sentence from the great writers of his own earlier time, who were in some cases still contemporary with him, without its betraying their pre-Restoration quality^ When Dryden, in ironical proof of Shadwell's loyalty, admits that " the wine duties rise considerably by his claret,'' he says what any one who had the wits to say it would have said, or would say, in no cUfferent form from the time when he set the example to the present day, and what no one except Shakespeare would have said before. His We have dwelt on him longer than on some greater cardinal writers bccause of this peculiar position of his. It may ance. almost be said that as Chaucer sums up the whole accomplishment of Middle Enghsh, so Dryden forecasts almost the whole accomplishment of his own later time with the eighteenth century added. No Dryden, no Pope and no Addison ; no Dryden, Pope, and Addison (it may almost be said), no Johnson.^ The very novel, 1 That is, as Johnson stands. He must always have been great, and he might have been greater without them ; but he would have been different. VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 139 with which he had nothing directly to do, and which was the one great and almost original work of the eighteenth century, could hardly have been perfected without the easy prose style of which he was the first master ; and the very rebels against eighteenth-century conventions, of whom we shall have to speak later, often started the rebellion by a sort of relapse upon Dryden in order to revolt against Pope. He is as it were a centra l hinge upon which th e new framework of English litera- ture turns. In this new work we shall miss a great deal. No one Defects will trouble himself about the quest of that final beauty th?nel which Marlowe's greatest passage ^ acknowledges as the dispensa- perpetual but vain object of the poet. Imagination, that imagination which was assigned by Shakespeare as the very substance of which the poet is compact, and defined by him as something " bodying forth the forms of things unknown," will be expressly limited by Addi- son to ideas furnished by the senses, and especially sight. Enthusiasm will become a word of mild pity or sharp scorn. But there will be compensations. To " run down,'' as it is called, the eighteenth century is a sign of a very shallow wit, which only looks for things that are not there, and neglects to look further for those that are. We shall find, in poetry itself, much good verse of the middle kind, descriptive, argupientative, and the like ; some charming lighter work ; and the beginnings of better things than these. We shall indeed find very httle fine drama, except a brief season of artificial comedy. But the uses of the new prose will be continu- ous, varied, and most interesting in history, biography, letter-writing, philosophy, and many other branches ; ^ Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least Which into words no virtue can digest. I40 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. there will be the immense gain of the novel, and we shall find everywhere an atmosphere of comfort and common- sense which, though it may discontent high-flying ex- pectations, the wise will welcome in its place and time. Other It can hardly be surprising, after what has been said, poets and f^^^ j-^^j^ ^j^^^ Called Doetry outside of Dryden's Hudihras. work during his life. A few amateurs of Charles II. 's time, Rochester (1648-1680), Sedley (1639 ?-i70i), Dorset (1638-1706), and others, and one or two professional writers, of whom the best was the dramatist and in a way novelist Aphra Behn (1640-1689), kept up practice in lyric of a kind not far inferior to that which had distinguished the reign of his father. But there was not very much of this, and it gradually dwindled away. Hardly a line of such verse was written by any one born after the Restoration. So, too, and in an even greater degree, the famous poem which, in the first years of triumph of the royal cause, covered its adversaries with immortal ridicule — th e Hudib rasJ;L662-i6y8) of Samuel Butler (1612-1680), was, though its author satirised the metaphysical poets, a sort of metaphysical burlesque. Later still, poUtical satire took another direction, and the value of the heroic couplet for it (Hudibras was in octosyllables) was demonstrated by John Oldham (1653-1683) even before Dryden wrote in this style. There was a good#deal of similar verse written by Sir John Denham, Andrew Mary gll (who has been mentioned above, p. 133 note, as a friend and fellow of Milton), and others. Some of the actual " poetry of the time, such as the rather famous Essay on Translated Verse of Lord Roscommon (1633-1685), showed almost a return to the old mediaeval practice of treating any subject, however unsuitable, in verse itself ; yet Roscommon was a man of taste, and even tried to imitate Milton. A great deal of very bad verse was written in the form of VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 141 the irregular Pindaric which Cowley had introduced. But it may almost be said that, with the exception of the few lyrics referred to above, no poetry proper was written during the forty years of Dryden's pre-eminence except by Dryden himself. Although one must speak rather slightingly of the other drama of this time, excepting that of Dryden and that ^.r^^^^- tists ■ "Re- of a group to be soon mentioned, it was, in point of bulk, storation " a very important feature of " Restoration literature, comedy, as the whole age of Dryden is often loosely denominated.^ It was exceedingly popular, and was indeed almost the only kind of writing by which men could make money independently of the gifts of patrons. Even before the actual Restoration Davenant, who had some interest with Cromwell, had managed to get performed, first a sort of musical entertainment, and then a piece called the Siege of Rhodes y which is half an opera and half a heroic play. Both these kinds (the opera to some extent succeeding the masque) became popular, as well as the hybrid sort of comedy described above, and some strangely mis- handled versions of older writers. Shakespeare, though not (as it used erroneously to be thought) neglected, was terribly travestied about this time ; even Davenant, who passed for Shakespeare's own godson, and Dryden, his greatest critical admirer, taking part in this low business with a vulgarising of The Tempest, while a man like Thomas Shadwell, Dryden's MacFlecknoe," could complacently boast that " he had made Timon into a play.'' The theatrical, however, if not the hterary spirit of drama was still abroad. Shadwell (1642-1692) him- self, though not a good writer, was a clever playwright and observer of manners, and some of his plays. Bury 1 There is no harm in the name (which appropriately enough desig- nates the beginning of this Hterature), provided that the date, some thirty years later, of its most famous comedies is not forgotten (see below). f 142 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Fair, Epsom Wells, The Squire of Alsatia, etc., have been drawn on by writers like Scott and Macaulay since. The nearest approaches to Mohere were made by two gentlemen of the court, Sir George Etherege (1655 P-iGgi, Sir Fopling Flutter) and William Wycherley (1640 ?- 1716), especially the latter (The Country Wife, The Plain Dealer). They introduced a kind of comedy which, not very regular in plot and very irregular in morality, presented sharply if rather artificially drawn characters, more than abundantly provided with witty dialogue. Years later, and chiefly in the reign of Wilham the Third, three other writers, Wilham Congreve (1670-1729, the best of all). Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726), and George Farquhar (1678-1707), took this up and improved it into really brilliant stuff. But their neglect of decorum brought upon them, upon Dryden, and upon others, a violent attack by Jeremy Collier (1650-1726), a famous nonjuring clergyman, to which Dryden practically pleaded guilty, and against which Congreve and one or two more made very lame defences. Tragedy : Earher in tragedy, John Crowne (1640 ?-i703 ?) had Le^^^^^^ taken up the heroic style, but the chief tragic authors of Charles II. 's reign were Thomas Otway (1651-1685) and Nathaniel Lee (1653 ?-i692). Two of Otway's plays, Venice Preserved and The Orphan, were famous for generations, their popularity being mainly due to the pathetic parts they afforded in the heroines. Lee, a much better poet than Otway, died mad, and perhaps was at no time very sane ; so that, except when he wrote with Dryden, as he did once or twice, his work is some- what incoherent, though full of fine things. His master- piece. The Rival Queens, was long as popular as Otway's. But very little of all this drama is even read now, and the comedies of Otway are not in the least worth reading. Their wit, some remarkable critical essays by Lamb, VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD i Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Macaulay, and a modern collected edition, have secured for Wycherley, Congreve {Love for Love, The Way of the World), Vanbrugh {The Relapse, The Confederacy) , and Farquhar {The Beaux* Stratagem) a more permanent audience ; and some of the best scenes of Congreve and Vanbrugh cannot be surpassed in English, while there is hardly anything better, for mere wit, in Moliere himself, though they have not his deeper knowledge of human nature. In prose, despite the premier position rightly assigned Prose to him above in general style, Dryden does not so com- contem- pletely dwarf his contemporaries as he does in verse. D^yderf: His subjects were rather limited; his work being chiefly Temple literary criticism in independent essays,^ or prefaces to his plays and poems, his translations, and the like. Their themes were larger and more varied. As for Tillotson, his definitely literary importance is almost confined to the fact that Dryden is said to have acknowledged indebtedness to him in point of style. But Dryden, like some other if not many great authors, was the least conceited of men, and had sense enough to see that acknowledging your indebtedness to others only does you harm in the eyes of those whose opinion is worthless. Both dates and the actual contents of Tillotson's writings are against the notion. But he was a good writer and preacher, and sermons, read as well as heard, were still a very great power in the land. Sir Wilham Temple, a statesman and diplomatist of great abihty, but timid and somewhat time-serving, had something of Dryden's mixture of the old and the new in him, and has left varied essays of great interest and not a httle charm. ^ His earliest work of importance in this kind, the Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), is not only of great importance as the first thoroughly literary and craftsmanlike piece of English criticism, but as an example, and almost a manifesto, of the new prose style — plain, conversational, but vigorous and not unpolished. A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE CH. He was unlucky in taking up, with very insufficient knowledge, a part in the famous Quarrel of the Ancients and Modems (see below on Swift), but he ended his essay on it with one of the finest sentences in the English language.2 Halifax left httle, and some of that little is not quite certainly his. But it is of great moment, containing as it does the first thoroughly competent political writing in English. South was a great reasoner, a master of humorous attack, and the most eloquent preacher of his day ; and though his style, as was necessi- tated by the characteristics of that day, was less strangely beautiful than that of Donne or Taylor, it was clearer, and for general use more forcible. On the style of Locke opinions have varied much, but it is quite certain that his world-famous Essay on the Human Understanding cannot be misunderstood by anybody, except by those who have not brains enough to understand it in whatever style it might have been written. In all these writers we find the same characteristics — " strict atten- tion to business " and a desire to make themselves understood by any ordinarily good understanding. Irony, the figure of speech most appropriate to the plain style, appears in most of them. Degrada- The drawback, however, of this plain style in prose is pi^^nstyie^ an obvious one. Its object is to be clear, conversational, intelligible to the average person. Now the average person of all ages has been accustomed to use colloquial abbreviations, familiar catchwords, shorthand expres- sions, and what we call slang. Why not use these also ? ^ This dispute, originating in Italy about the close of the Renaissance, raged at intervals for nearly a century and a half. It was a very silly one, the Ancients being not better than the Modems nor worse, but different. 2 When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep ; and then the care is over." VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 145 In other words, why not be not only f amihar but vulgar ? In Dryden's own day, especially the later part of it, this question was answered practically, and in the affirmative. Gentlemen Uke Sir Roger L'Estrange (1616-1704), scholars Hke Bentley, divines like Collier, indulged in colloquialisms of the kind, and there was considerable danger of their invading hterature generally. But The fortunately the tendency was observed, and directly ^dd^son^ combated, by a new school of distinguished writers, who Steele, and arose at the extreme end of the seventeenth century. They were, for a time at least, all friends ; they united in establishing a new and important kind in literature ; and they all set themselves, as we may say, to reform literary manners, and not literary manners only. Their names — among the most famous in our history — were Joseph Addison (1672-1719), Richard Steele (1672- 1729), and Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Addison, who was a friend of Dryden's, and his collaborator, was an accomplished scholar in the not very profound University type of liis day, and had written, both in Latin and English, verse and prose, of some merit but of no great importance, before the close of the seventeenth century ; exhibiting also in one piece that complete misunderstanding of earlier English hterature which Dryden had not shared, much less initiated, but which was to discredit great part of the eighteenth century.^ Steele, like Addison an Oxford man, had not estabhshed himself there, but had gone into the army, taken to writing plays, and also (as for a short time was common with literary men) to pubUc life. Swift, a relation of Dryden's, a dependent for a long time of Sir Wilham Temple's, by place of birth though not by family an Irishman, was the eldest of the three, but had had less ^ Chaucer is an obsolete and unpolished buffoon, Spenser a dull moralist, etc., etc. But it is fair to say that he repented this later. L 146 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch opportunity of showing a genius which was far greater than that of Addison and Steele. He had pubHshed Httle or nothing save some very bad Pindarics/' but he had written two things of very great power, the - pohtical-ecclesiastical satire of A Tale of a Tub, a masterpiece of irony, and the Uttle satirical sketch, The Battle 0} the Books, a contribution to that '' Ancient and Modern Quarrel " which has been mentioned, and again a masterpiece of the hghter kind. Their Meanwhile the kind of Hterature which is termed m\he " periodical,'' long delayed, was getting itself ready. We periodical, have Seen how the Ehzabethan pamphlet was a rather clumsy attempt to supply the want ; and in the seven- teenth century attempts at the actual newspaper became more and more common. The most famous before 1700 was the Observator of the just -mentioned Sir Roger L*Estrange L'Estrange, a man of great abiUty and unflinching energy The T^cui^, RoyaUst side, something of a scholar, and master The Spec- ' of a style somewhat, as has been said, vulgarised, but iator, etc. forcible, popular, and effective in a very high degree. His paper was purely pohtical and controversial ; but on the other side, and a little later, Daniel Defoe, already a busy writer on all sorts of subjects, but still far off his final fame as a novehst, started a remarkable attempt called The Review, which he carried on single-handed for a time. From this Steele, or more probably Steele instigated by Swift (who had an almost uncanny habit, not merely of doing great things himself, but of suggest- ing them to his friends), devised The Tatler, and sum- moned Addison to his help. All three wrote in this ; but party politics soon divided them, and when The Tatler was dropped and the still more famous Spectator was substituted, Addison and Steele wrote with only minor helpers, and Addison soon became the master spirit. These periodicals were not exclusively or even prim- VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 147 arily political, though in general spirit, and in some special articles, they took the Whig side strongly. Nor, after a few early numbers of The Tatler, did they pretend to deal regularly with " news," home or foreign. They were nothing if not critical. Swift wrote in The Tatler a direct attack on the vulgarisms of speech and style above noted; and he and his coadjutors showed in practice how clearness and plainness could be attained without in the least degrading style. His own, whether in straightforward narration, exposition, or in ironical argument, is unmatched for force. Addison's, and in a rather less degree Steele's, is not easily surpassed for ease and a certain sort of grace. In intellectual power Swift was by far the greatest of the three, and even that habit of abandoning the carrying out of his ideas to others which has been noticed, and his indifference alike to fame and to profit arising from his work, did not prevent him from leaving books of tran- scendent genius. Indeed this term, which should not be lightly used, is perhaps applicable to no English writer of the eighteenth century so safely as to him*. The two little masterpieces above mentioned were published in 1704, and were followed by several smaller works. Swift's chiefly of a pohtical kind — for Swift's strongest interest ^^^^^ was always in politics. The incoming of the Hanover line put an end to his active share in these, but he revenged himself in the famous Drapiers Letters (1724) on a question of Irish coinage, and more worthily in the great satirical tale of Gulliver s Travels (1726). Other things, and especially a charming though still satirical Polite Conversation (1738), showed at once his own mastery of the plain style, and the suitableness of that style, when thoroughly mastered and kept from degrading itself, for many kinds of subject to which the ornate form would have been totally unsuitable. 148 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Effects This raising of the plain style, in which Addison and Add^^ Steele took part, is one of the main points of importance sonian of the new periodical, but it has others of a more periodical, yg^ried kind. It brought practically all branches of literature (for both Addison and Steele were sincerely religious, and the former wrote not a few articles on professedly sacred subjects) into a sort of common society, which in its turn was presented to the ordinary reader and to what is called " society " itself. Literary criti- cism (Addison's papers on Milton are famous), the fashions and amusements of the day, popularised philo- sophy (Addison's papers on Imagination are really the doctrine of Locke made easy), and a great number of other things were discussed in them. But what we see now to have been one of their most important influences was exercised on the novel. This, which was to be the most popular kind of literature ever known, was, for reasons not impossible to explain but out of place here, very long indeed in getting into prominent existence. Neither Addison nor Steele wrote anything that can be properly called a novel. Swift came nearer to it in his above-mentioned Gulliver s Travels and even his Polite Conversation. But all three helped to elaborate the easy style, without which the romance ^ was indeed possible but hardly the novel ; ^ while Steele first imagined, and Addison then developed, the remarkable series of " Coverley Papers," which are as it were chap- ters of a novel already, and only need fiUing up to be a novel complete. Not only were the Tatler and Spectator extremely popular at the time, but they continued to be imitated during the entire century, and remained, in a way difficult ^ The difference between these two is not easy to put shortly ; but it may be said that the romance deals chiefly with story and incident, the novel with character and the conversation which ex- hibits it. VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 149 to parallel in any other case, classics not merely of style but of manners and thought during that whole period. It is one of the most pregnant signs of change to be found anywhere that, at that century's end. Miss Austen ^ objects to The Spectator, not merely as out of date but as coarse and improper. As often happens in such cases, some of the most distinguished writers of the day were attracted to these periodicals. Pope (see below) wrote in them, but the greatest prose -writer, greater than any other except Swift, was the philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753). The success and influence of Locke caused indeed a great determination towards a certain kind of philosophy. Much of it (though not Berkeley's or David Hume's (1711-1776), who followed him) was shallow enough, and adjusted to the general ''common sense" of the time. But it mostly (not wholly, as in the case of Bernard de Mandeville, 1670-1733) kept people away from the merely vulgar style. The singular declension of poetry proper which we The second noticed in the time of Dryden continued for some ten ^}^^^ r 1 • 1 1 T-» 1 -i Augustan years after his death. But then there arose a writer — poetry: Uke Addison in being Dryden 's own pupil, though not in i^ope. personal relations with him — as to whose position in poetry there have been violent disputes, but who was regarded for a long time as a very chief in the matter, and who certainly set patterns which were followed through- out the century. Tliis was Alexander Pope (1688-1744), who, according to his own (unfortunately not always trustworthy) account, began to write verses when almost a child, and who certainly pubhshed some of remarkable technical accomplishment before he became a man. These juvenile poems were all imitative in subject — in ^ See Northanger Abbey, not published till long after 1800, but written earlier. I50 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. fact Pope was never very original — and their style was a following of that of Dry den, gradually made more precise, and avoiding the licenses which Dryden had allowed himself. The result was absolute perfection of that quality which was known to the age as smooth- ness." The metre is all but exclusively (Pope's work in others fills but a few pages) the heroic couplet ; that couplet is almost invariably closed at the end ; it hardly ever contains more than the strict ten syllables to each hne ; the iambic cadence is scarcely ever broken, and there is as a rule a well-marked pause so near the centre of each hne that you can divide a batch of them almost right down the middle, hke the parting of a head of hair, without cutting into a word. Before long Pope applied the couplet to more import- ant subjects. He began (1713) a translation of Homer which brought him in very large sums of money and was liighly esteemed, though nothing can be less like the original. He composed an Essay on Criticism (171 1), which in substance is only a patchwork of often mis- understood and nowhere really coherent borrowings from Latin and French writers, though it exhibits Pope's incomparable powers of expression within certain limits. But the hveliest, the most original in a way, and probably the best thing he ever wrote was the famous Rape of the Lock (1712-1714), a burlesque or mock- heroic poem on an incident in polite society, which he pubhshed in two forms, and which, in both, comes as near perfection as anything of a very artificial kind can do. Two more passionate serious pieces, the Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady and Eloisa to Abelard, showed how far Pope could go in this direction. Then he took to a pecuUar kind of light verse satire, professedly imitated from Horace, but diversified by violent attacks on his literary enemies, which forms the material of the famous VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 151 Dunciad (1728, much re-written later) and most of the Satires and Epistles of his closing years, up to his death in 1744. A single famous line of Pope's own — What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed, especially if we add to it some such words as, at least in this particular style,'' will describe, and has frequently been recognised as describing, his pecuUar poetic char- acter. Passion and imagination, except to a small ex- tent in the two poems above noted, are almost excluded by his choice of themes ; and elaborate appeal to the mind's eye and the mind's ear by gorgeous description of nature and varied harmony of verse was not required — might indeed hardly have been understood by his readers. Few poets have ever thought less originally or less profoundly ; few have shown less power of system- atic grasp of subject. But nobody, except perhaps Horace himself, has ever had such a gift of neat, terse, telling expression. This power, with his craftsmanship in perfecting the kind of versification above described, and the touches of something higher than his* usual vein in the Elegy y the Eloisa, the close of the Dunciad, and one or two more places, make the question Was Pope a poet ? " (which was asked pretty early, and has often been repeated since) absurd. Was he a great poet ? " is a rather more difficult one to answer. But the safe position is that he was one of the greatest of poets in a class which is some way below the greatest. He seems to have claimed for himself a combination of " poetry " with " wit," and his possession of the latter, in more than one of its senses, and in a very high degree, cannot be disputed. Unfortunately his strongest points were extremely imitable ; and it is almost as safe to say that none of the 152 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. greatest poets can be imitated in their strongest points. Even his epigrammatic expression was not unfrequently equalled by men of quite second or third-rate order like Richard Savage (1697-1743) and Charles Churchill (1731-1764). As for his versification, it was so purely a a matter of mechanism that it was exactly copied almost at once, as a singular incident showed. Tiring of the severe work of translating Homer with very slight if any knowledge of Greek, he engaged two other persons, Broome and Fenton, both better scholars than himself, and experienced versifiers, to help him in the Odyssey, To this day no competent critic, although furnished with information as to the books done by these auxiUaries, has been able to distinguish any difference in the char- acter of the work. And so it continued till the very close of the century. In 1783, seventy years after Pope had begun the Homer, John Hoole, a friend of Dr. Johnson, a civil servant, and a man of letters, translated Ariosto in couplet. The medium is as unsuitable in the one case as in the other, and Hoole had not Pope's saving grace of expression ; but, as far as the versifica- tion goes, there is very httle to choose. As Cowper about the same time said, every rhymester had the tune by heart. We must not refuse to acknowledge in this a certain triumph of its own kind. A man who can devise some- thing that admits of no improvement in its own way, and which satisfies the demands of the majority of his contemporaries and successors for nearly an entire century ^ may not be a great poet, but is certainly a very great man of letters. Nor, unsuitable as this couplet may be to the very greatest poetry, had it few or small ^ Even this limitation is not strictly necessary : as lat€ as 1830, and even later, there were those who thought Pope's style the per- fection of English verse. VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 153 capacities for poetic work. It is, with Dryden's, the ■ best medium for satire ever known ; it was used, after Pope's day, by Johnson for the Vanity of Human Wishes with its splendid close, and later, by Goldsmith for the attractive picture of The Deserted Village. Artificial as ^ it is, it served for the first efforts of realist poetry in English by Crabbe. And, as has been said, it cannot, when taken with Dryden's, be refused the full credit of having thoroughly beaten regular rhythm into the English ear.i Pope indeed was not Uke Dryden, in having, to use his own words in his most powerful piece of satire, — the passage on Atticus " (Addison), — " no brothers near his throne." In his later years, as will be seen in a moment, there were some poets whose work, whether they meant it or not, was really opposed to his in spirit as in form ; in his earlier there were others who were quite independent of him. Swift him- self, if not a great poet, was a very skilful versifier in the octosyllabic couplet and in anapaest ; while Matthew other Prior (1664-1721) holds almost the first place in Enghsh P^^^^* for one small but very interesting class, the so-called Young Verse of Society," which is written in light metre and ^tc manner on chance occasions. No one except Thackeray has ever surpassed him, and only two or three nineteenth- century poets have equalled him in this combination of humour and feeling, shown in such things as the famous To a Child of Quahty " and the less popular but pro- founder " Lines Written in Mezeray's History of France." John Gay (1685-1732), the intimate friend both of Pope and Swift, is now known chiefly by his Fables, but he wrote many other things, all of the lighter kind, and some of the shorter of these are nearly as good as Prior. ^ It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that this accom- plishment was typical of the " Augustan " mission generally to regular- ise, rationalise, and produce a standard. 154 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Edward Young (1683-1765), a slightly older man than Pope, long outlived him, and it was late (1742-1744) before he produced his still famous though not now much read Night Thoughts, the stiff and declamatory blank verse of which sometimes becomes really fine ; but he even preceded Pope in Pope's own kind of satire {The Universal Passion, 1725). Thomas Parnell (1679- 1718), also a member of the Addison group, and once famous for the Eastern apologue of The Hermit, is chiefly noted now for some curious anticipations ^ of the description of natural scenery and the thoughts caused by it, which did not become general till the influence of Pope had waned. But none of these poets could pretend to anything like the position and influence which were almost at once exercised, and which continued to be exercised, by Pope himself. And others It is, however, almost invariably noticeable that still, of a when such a predominance as this establishes itself, different . • . • . i i • ^ school. exceptions to it, and more and more conscious revolts against it, take place. The existence of these, their progress, and the ups-and-downs in it constitute the great interest of the poetry of the last three-quarters of the eighteenth century from the historical point of view. Hardly anybody, poet or critic, till very late in the century disputed the predominance itself ; but in prac- tice there were some powerful influences rivalling or working against it. In the first place, there was blank verse. This, as we have seen, recovered its place in dramatic poetry pretty soon ; but admiration of Milton did not lead to much imitation of him till the eighteenth century began and had even advanced some way. There were only casual and (as in John Philips's (1676- ^ There are still more striking ones in the generally inferior work of Lady Winchelsea (1660 ?-i72o), a friend of Pope's again, but of an older generation. VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 155 1708) Cider and Splendid Shilling) half-burlesque at- tempts before the appearance (1726) of James Thomson's Thomson (1700-1748) Winter, followed by the rest of The ^^^^^ Seasons, The great popularity of this, partly caused and partly assisted by a general desire for some alternative to the couplet, brought about a good many other blank verse poems, and blank verse continued, though not regarded with favour by critics (even by so great a one as Dr. Johnson), to be written throughout the century. Even in Thomson, however, to some extent, and in all others before Cowper (sometimes even in him), the imitation of Milton was a httle disastrous. Milton, though never conventional, is not easy ; and eighteenth- century poetry, though it could be easy enough, always inclined to the conventional, so that blank verse itself became stiff and artificial. If it were not tumid and gorgeous," Johnson scornfully said, it would be mere prose ; and his contemporaries certainly justified him to some extent. They were so afraid of writing prose that they became tumid always, though sometimes not at all gorgeous. Still, it was an alternative to the couplet ; and the nature of Thomson's subject supported it in a way of which more presently. Even better was another exception, or rather pair of exceptions, which, though not showing themselves quite so early as Milton's time, were fortified by the great examples noted above. Swift and Prior, before as well as during the time of Pope. These were the use of the octosyllabic couplet and that of trisyllabic (anapaestic) measures. The former is the one metre which has held its ground at every period and stage of EngUsh literature, from its first appearance in Layamon seven hundred years ago till the present day. Its popularity in serious use had been strengthened by Milton's earlier poems, in comic and satiric by Hudibras. Taken up, as it now was. 156 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. by two writers of the highest reputation, it could not be forbidden or despised by the narrowest critics. Even before them Dry den had written in the trisyllabic or anapaestic measures, which, though very old in basis and never quite absent from popular song, had been mainly confined to this song till that great poet took them up. Now, both these metres were largely used. Lighter and Prior's anapaests, written with extraordinary spirit verse. grace, continued to be employed for light work throughout the century. Grongar Hill (1726), a very beautiful serious poem by John Dyer (1700-1758) in octosyllables, appeared in the same year as Thomson's Winter ; and both were even better reliefs and contrasts to the fashionable heroic than blank verse itself. Neither of them encouraged incorrect or doggerel rhythm, but both were essentially free in treatment. The highest authorities — Shakespeare, Fletcher, Milton — had always sanctioned the omission of one syllable in the octosyllable couplet, and this made an instant variety of hne-cadence, iambic and trochaic becoming mixed. Nobody, indeed, till Chatterton's and Blake's time dared to admit trisyllables in these. But the anapaestic measures admitted the mixture of disyllabic feet quite easily, and so the great principles, institutions, and in a word Ufe- pulses of English poetry. Equivalence and Substitution, were kept in evidence. In most cases except Prior's (who has left us definite expression of his dissatisfaction with the couplet) these various forms were probably chosen, by the poets who used them, with no conscious intention of standing up against it, and merely because what they chose suited their tastes and their subjects. But by degrees a new generation arose who were evidently bent on innovation as such. The greatest of these were Thomas Gray (1716-1771) and WilUam CoUins (1721-1759), while VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 157 William Shenstone (1714-1763), though a much smaller Gray, poet, may be grouped with them. He wrote in all sorts ^^'^^ of measures, but he preferred easy if rather rickety etc. anapaests, Uke those of his Pastoral Ballad ; ^ and he has left us prose notes which show that he was thoroughly dissatisfied with the prevailing practice and theory of the time. Collins, a poet of the purest kind, began with some Eclogues, in commonplace and rather bad couplets. But for the few and often exquisite Odes and smaller pieces by which he is known (few — for his life was short, and he was insane during great part of it) — Liberty, The Passions, The Superstitions of the Highlands, How Sleep the Brave," The Death of Thomson, etc. — he chose lyric measures, sometimes Greek in system, sometimes purely English, and in one instance {Evening) used un- rhymed stanzas. Gray's exquisite but still more careful and leisurely work shows a classicism which is Greek rather than Roman, and an attention to kinds of modern literature, such as Welsh and Norse, which are purely Romantic, a studious avoidance of heroic couplet, and, considering the Umits of his work, a very wide and miscellaneous selection of subject. His famous Elegy, though it may come short of the greatest seventeenth- and nineteenth-century work, has been described as " the perfection of such poetry as every one can under- stand ; The Bard, and The Progress of Poesy, are speci- mens of the elaborate ode fashioned on the strict Greek pattern ; and in part of his unfinished Ode on Vicissitude he has anticipated the very spirit and manner of Words- worth. In all these poets — least in Shenstone, but even in him, and most in ColUns — one feels a curious sense of ^ My banks they are furnished with bees Whose murmur invites one to sleep ; My grottoes are shaded with trees, And my hills are white over with sheep, etc. etc. 158 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Symptoms of change about 1760 : Ossian, Percy's Reliques, etc. discontent ; of groping after something new and more natural ; of a feeling for nature which is quite absent from Pope and mostly so from his contemporaries ; together with at least traces of that quest for something remote and afar/' something beyond rule and liney^y^ without which the greatest poetry can hardly exist. ^ A little later, about 1760, came a memorable set of books, pubUshed, in most cases, without the least under- standing or common purpose between the authors, but foreshadowing, and leading directly up to, a great literary counter-revolution. These were James Mac- pherson's Ossian (1760-1763), published at first in parts, and entitled Fingal and Temora, Percy's Reliques (1765), Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), and Kurd's Essays on Chivalry and Romance (1762), with, a little later still, the extraordinary work of the ill-fated boy Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770). All these went in a direction exactly contrary to that of Pope, and (though not so exactly, for the ballad of " Chevy. Chase " had been praised in The Spectator) that of Addison. The tendency of the whole century, and of its first half more particularly, was towards common-sense attention to town Uf e first of all, with a distinct contempt for matters mediaeval. Ossian, forgery or not (a point with which the student need not trouble himself just yet), dealt with most uncertain times of the Dark Ages, in a vague and mystical style, full of elaborate descrip- tions of wild and gloomy natural scenery ; introduced but shadowy characters fighting obscurely for unknown , causes ; and dealt with the whole in a curious sort of verse-prose or prose-verse, as different as possible from the neat and precise style of the time. The Reliques collected, with some spurious things and a good many modern tamperings, a large proportion of the best old ballads and not a little other older poetry. It would be VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 159 difEcult to name a book which had more to do with the Romantic Revival. Horace Walpole's novel (see below for that kind generally) was an imitation romance of the supernatural kind — romance and the supernatural being two things which the men of the time generally scorned. Kurd's Essays boldly attacked the Umitation of the standards of criticism to classical patterns, arguing that there was a Romantic as well as a Classical unity/' that one time could not prescribe to another, and so forth. And lastly, Chatterton, forging what he called the " Rowley " poems of a supposed fifteenth- century writer at Bristol, revived the precious irregulari- ties of ballad measure and copied its diction, incorrectly enough no doubt, but with a poetic value which was rather strangely absent from his abundant verse in ordinary English, and which had a great effect on his successors. For the moment, however, these yearnings or gropings after the Romantic did not come to very much practically, and it was perhaps as well that they did not, for the time was not quite ready. People's notions of Romantic quality itself and of its great home, mediaeval hterature, were very vague and inexact ; and a good deal of historical and hterary work had to be done before they could be improved. It was therefore positively salutary, in more ways than one, that the greatest literary influence of the third quarter of the century — that of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) — tended on the whole to express these innovations, especially as such repression, like the process of " cutting back " in gardening, almost always strengthens the growth. But, before we consider John- son himself, it will be well to take note of the remarkable advance in one long-missing department of literature which began when he was a boy, and in which he lived to take a part — though a rather outside part— himself. i6o A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Various glances have already been made, in the course of this short history, at the growth of prose fiction and the way in which it was in one way or another hampered. And we saw how what might at first sight have been thought to hamper it again — the prevalence of a business- like spirit in thought and style — really helped it. People wanted amusement as well as business ; and the plain and easy style of writing, if not better for actual romance, was better for the novel — that is to say, for the kind of fiction which deals with character and with more or less everyday events. The Spaniards as well as the French had been beforehand with us in this respect, and imita- tion of the former, especially of Cervantes {Don Quixote), and of the latter, especially Le Sage {Gil Bias), helped us a httle. But the eighteenth century was to see England taking the absolute lead in the kind, and furnishing back patterns to France herself and to Germany, for Spanish and ItaUan hterature were not in a condition vigorous enough to receive them. The first EngUshman to produce a considerable body of prose fiction which was important as hterature was Daniel Defoe. He was nearly or quite sixty, and had been writing an immense volume of verse and prose — travels and journahsm, pamphlets, and what not else — when, in 1719, he produced the world-renowned story of Robinson Crusoe, and followed it up rapidly with others, less known and more unequal, but at their best not less remarkable. In these books Defoe, as he had always done, utiUsed much that had been written before, — Robin- son Crusoe itself is a sort of abstract, made and supple- mented by genius, of innumerable " voyages and travels which a century of busy and adventurous exploration had accumulated. The very remarkable Adventures of Captain Singleton describes the interior of Africa with a precision which can hardly have been attained without VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD i6i some knovv^ledge of the Portuguese explorers, the only- people who had penetrated there. The Memoirs of a Cavalier may have been constructed in the same way from actual experiences. But Moll Flanders, a study of lower and lowest class London hfe, can hardly be other than original in all but its general plan, which is that of the Spanish picaresque novel (one which deals with picaros or rogues). And the same is the case with another. Colonel Jack. Defoe's secret is the laborious and unerring way in which he accumulates detail (whether second-hand or originally observed and im- agined), and tells his story in a fashion which makes it seem absolutely true. He has no intimate or artistic grasp of character, and his stories are rather successions of incident than the working out of a regular plot. But he had got at " verisimilitude/' as it is called — truth and lifelikeness — as nobody had done before ; and, in some of his books at least, he had not gone beyond quite ordinary events. He has no fine writing, though his descriptions can be very vivid ; his conversation, though commonplace enough, is exactly what people concerned would have said. In other words, he has written the novel, if not the complete novel. Gulliver's Travels came later than Defoe, and may swift have owed a very little to him in some ways, but it has a again, far higher intellectual quality. In main purpose, indeed, it is a sharp and continuous satire on the follies and faults of humanity. But Swift's own genius, and the turn of the general tide towards novel-writing, made it also a story which is almost independent of this purpose, and which can be read and has been read by thousands without any, or with hardly any, attention to the satire. StiQ, both this and most of Defoe's were either stories of pure adventure, that is to say, rather romances than novels, or that lower kind of novel just mentioned which M i62 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. deals with the tricks and crimes of vulgar hfe. Nor had either (though Swift did something Hke it in his Polite Conversation) drawn, in prose narrative, a character hke those common in drama, .that is to say, a vivid and well-separated personality whom we should recognise if we met him or her in real hfe. This accompUshment, and the companion one of representing actual manners and society, were left unachieved for a time, though not for a long time. The Between 1740 and 1760 four writers of curiously novel*-^^^ contrasted genius sohdly estabUshed the Enghsh novel Richard- in forms which have undergone only minor alterations son, extensions since. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), a printer, wrote Pamela (1740 — the adventures of a girl of the lower class but thrown into higher society, who is tempted and persecuted but resists and triumphs), Clarissa (a contrasted picture of that higher society itself), and Sir Charles Grandison, an elaborate portrait of what Richardson thought a perfect gentleman and *' a good man,'' contrasting crosswise with Lovelace, the bad hero of Clarissa. In these books he showed a great power of analysing motive and rendering conversation, but was terribly long-winded, and made his work more so by a system of writing the novels in sets of letters from the characters to each other. Johnson, who had personal obligations to him and admired his books, admitted that if you read them for the story you would hang yourself. Nor was Richardson very well acquainted with the talk and manners of the higher society which Fielding, he attempted to depict. Henry Fielding (1707-1754), on the other hand, a man of good family and education but small means, who had begun with not very briUiant play-writing, was tempted by some absurdities and priggishnesses in Pamela to caricature it, in what turned out to be something far higher than a caricature, the VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 163 admirable novel of Joseph Andrews (1742), one of the personages in which, the Reverend Abraham Adams, is the first great character in EngUsh fiction. He followed this up with Jonathan Wild, the ironic picture, a Uttle in Swift's manner, of a real scoundrel of the time, with the masterpiece of Tom Jones, and with a fourth novel, Amelia, highly appreciated by some great judges. Fielding used the direct narrative form, interspersing it, however, with fair description and much digressive address to the reader, like that of Thackeray later. He attended very specially to the construction of plot {Tom Jones has been considered a model and standard in this way), but above all he produced characters of such absolute lifehkeness as had never been seen before in the novel and rarely in the drama. In fact, at this early stage, he accompUshed work which has never been surpassed and only once or twice equalled. Nor, with the necessary allowance for change of manners, etc., which has long had to be made, is it at all probable that it will ever be surpassed. Both he and Richardson, however, had strictly con- Smollett, fined themselves to contemporary English life.^ Tobias Smollett (1721-1771), who followed quickly, introduced the interest of foreign travel and adventure, combining it, however, with a fair share of the new novel-qualities, and adding some special touches, such as his professional experiences as a naval surgeon, in his first book, Roderick Random, and to a less extent in his second. Peregrine Pickle ; the humours " (see above, p. 103) of minor national pecuUarities, as in the Welshman Morgan and the Scotsman Lismahago, the ways of fashionable resorts hke Bath, and many others. Lastly, Laurence Sterne and (1713-1768), a Yorkshire clergyman, if he did not exactly Sterne. 1 Richardson in Sir Charles Grandison has Italian scenes and characters, but they have no local or distinguishing quality. i64 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. invent, " put/' as we say, " together " specimens of the eccentric novel in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. In the first of these novels there is no story, and merely a succession of sketches and episodes in the second; but they abound in witty and humorous touches — quaint tricks of style, quotations and adapta- tions from forgotten books, a very strong infusion of the sentimentality which was being imported from France, and now and then singularly vivid inset sketches of character and manners, my Uncle Toby being the most famous. Great out- To understand the true importance of the work of burst of these four men we should not confine ourselves to the ^qI^. intrinsic excellence of their particular books, great, writing. especially in the case of Fielding, as that was. We should regard it as a set of incursions or explorations into different parts of a hitherto unknown and almost forbidden country, the riches and attractions of which they disclosed, but only in parts, though each of them took a different part. More timid adventurers could follow in their steps ; bolder ones could follow, not their steps, but their general example, and try fresh districts of the new region for themselves. It is certain that in a very few years — before, in fact, Sterne had written — the novel, which had been one of the lowest esteemed, least frequently cultivated, and most unsatisfactory of literary kinds, began to be one of the most popular, was written in very large numbers, and continued in various forms to be so. By degrees, too, even the slight tend- ency to resort to unusual and adventurous incident, which had been retained by novehsts, was found to be unnecessary ; and Frances Burn ey (1752-1840), in Evelina (1778), showed that an interesting novel could be made out of almost purely ordinary occurrences. Towards the end of the century this system was indeed VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 165 reversed in the " Terror and M ystery novel of Mrs. Radcliffe (1764-1822)711.;^ G. i:ewIs~Ti775-i8i8), and others, as well as in the novels of revolutionary purpose, instigated by the troubles in France, which were written by Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809), William Godwin (1756-1836), and others still. But these were only some of the signs of the Romantic movement to be noticed at the end of this chapter and in the whole of the next. Mrs. Radcliffe and Godwin will recur. It was observed above that the writing of a novel by Johnson is a very noteworthy thing. Rasselas (1759) is indeed not even quite so much of a pure novel as Euphues itself, and it is, though with more skill, equally made the vehicle or instrument of a serious purpose. It is in fact a counterpart, in prose fiction, of its author's Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) in verse. But that such an author should have tried such a form at all shows the influence and popularity that the form itself had obtained. Samuel Johnson is not uncommonly taken as a typical Johnson, man of letters of the middle and later, but Jiot quite latest, eighteenth century, and though he had some weaknesses, few centuries could but be proud of such a representative. His early struggles, his personal peculi- arities, his ill-health, and other things have been made matters of common knowledge, as is hardly the case with any other author, by James Boswell's unequalled bio- graphy, and through the almost equally famous essays on that book by men like Macaulay and Carlyle. But he was so strong an intellectual personahty that different and more fortunate ways of life would probably not have altered him much. He had actually leanings, and 1 Usually called "Monk" Lewis from the title, The Monk, of his best known novel. Mrs. Radcliffe's most famous book was The Mysteries of Udolpko. i66 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. decided ones, towards Romanticism of a kind ; but neo- classicism was the orthodox Uterary creed of his time, and the ruUng passion, the essential humour of Johnson's spirit, was a general orthodoxy or conservatism, though this was not incompatible with the utmost independence on minor points. His great influence, not altogether easy to understand (for only a few could hear his explosive but vigorous conversation, and his published works ^ were few, and not of a kind at first sight likely to exercise much influence), undoubtedly postponed the triumph of the Romantic movement itself, but enabled him to leave us an example of the earlier and opposite literary stage at its very best. His verse is rhetorical and of the Pope kind ; but the before-mentioned conclusion of The Vanity of Human Wishes is one of the very finest pieces of rhetorical poetry to be found from Juvenal to Victor Hugo. His prose, though occasionally ponderous and always rather too much inclined to a mechanical arrangement of balance and antithesis, gave an immense dead Uft to the dulness into which EngUsh prose had again fallen after Addison, and has furnished much to all standard styles since. Nor must it be forgotten that his manliness and independence of character did much — almost incalculably much — to redeem literature from the taint of disrepute and servility into which it had fallen after the brief heyday in Queen Anne's reign, and w^hich Pope's selfish satire had positively encouraged. Hissociety: Johnson was the centre of a literary society which. Goldsmith thoue:h bv no means in exact accordance with his views and others. ^ ^ His famous Dictionary y his essays of the Spectator kind [The Rambler y The Idler, etc.), a very few poems, a play [Irene), and some political pamphlets, with Rasselas itself, and his Journey to the Western Islands, almost exhaust the list. His famous Lives of the Poets, containing at once his most popular and his most excellent work, were not written till the last years of his life, long after the in- fluence spoken of was solidly established. VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 167 on all points, still possessed a certain common character, and represents the later eighteenth century as that of Addison, Steele, Swift, Pope, Prior, Gay, etc., had represented the earher. This included the great actor Garrick, who was also a man of letters in his way ; Oliver Goldsmith, poet, essayist, dramatist, and novelist (1728-1774), who had a more versatile and flexible genius than Johnson's, a delightful Irish humour, a charming style, and who, as his great friend said of him, touched all kinds of literature, and touched nothing that he did not adorn ; Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the most literary of English orators, whose style was less artificial than Johnson's, but equally improved upon the extreme plain variety, and sometimes eloquent in the very highest degree ; James Boswell (1740-1795), the greatest if not the wisest of English biographers ; and Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), the greatest if not the most amiable or respectable of EngUsh historians. Goldsmith's Deserted Village (1769), in verse, and in prose his Vicar of Wakefield (1762-1766) (an irregular novel which became popular all over Europe), his Citizen of the World and other Essays, as well as his fwo famous plays,^ She Stoops to Conquer and The Good-natured Man ; Burke's speeches and his great pamphlet attacks on the ^ The drama in the eighteenth century requires but little notice. In the early years Steele wrote plays recognising to some extent the criticisms of Collier (see above, p. 142), and Colley Gibber, Mrs. Cent- livre, and others continued the ** Restoration " lines with less scruple. Fielding, as has been said, was a dramatist, as were, in their different fashions. Gay [The Beggars' Opera), the poets Young and Thomson, and even Dr. Johnson himself. The theatre indeed was as popular as ever, and very large numbers of new plays were written ; while the old ones, as well as these new, were performed by actors of whom David Garrick (1717-1779), already mentioned, was the chief, and who have been sometimes thought to have reached (not only in his case) the highest level of English stage performance. But, as literature, the new work was of little value, Goldsmith's (as noted in the text), and that of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), The Rivals, The Critic, The School for Scandal, being the chief exceptions. i68 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. French Revolution ; and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ; must always rank as English classics. History indeed had been, hke fiction, one almost of the special growths of the eighteenth century, largely owing to the example set earher by two natives of Scotland, David Hume (1711-1776) and William Robertson (1721- 1793). Hume, as was said above, belonged also to the group of the philosophers, who, though generally of a more superficial kind than Berkeley or himself, were very numerous. Literary criticism again, though except in the case of Johnson not of much value, and even in him still limited by the narrow ideas of the time, was largely practised. So was the essay, though it was rather hampered by the cut-and-dried Spectator pattern. In fact it may be emphasised that in every kind of hterature likely to benefit by the existence of a com- monly recognised, clear, plain style of prose-writing, and in those subsidiary kinds of poetry which require, not lofty imagination or a supreme technical skill, but ease, deftness, and suitableness to satirical, political, and similar subjects, the eighteenth century acquitted itself in a way contempt of which would only show that the contemner's notions were far narrower than its own. It was a great century too, perhaps our greatest, for letter- writing, and the letters of Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), Horace Walpole, and Gray showed, and when published helped to disseminate, easy and polished expression. Yet, though it had all these accomplishments, and though much of its literature has to this day a curious faculty of amusing, and as it were resting, the mind of more troubled generations, though, too, it was the first century in which English literature exercised con- siderable influence abroad, there was something wanting in it, and the sense of the want, felt to some extent early VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 169 as shown above, showed itself in multiple forms later. The causes of the complete change will be best dealt with at the beginning of the next chapter. But signs of it became more and more frequent and striking. In the last twenty years of the century four poets, remarkably different in circumstances and character, heralded this change. William Cowper (1731-1800), a much older man than the others, but kept back by mental illness for some twenty years, began to write late (about 1780), and showed some of the earUer characteristics in style. But he devoted himself enthusiastically to description of rural scenes, and attacked the style of Pope directly, while in an unfinished poem called Yardley Oak he antici- pated Wordsworth both in spirit and in the quahty of his blank verse. George Crabbe (1754-1832) turned from the general optimism or sentimentality of the century to what is now called realism,'* and though his manner was somewhat old-fashioned, introduced an entirely new style of description, and a temper almost as novel, in his poem of The Village (1782). Robert Burns (1759-1796), partly by rehandhng older Scottish songs, and partly by his own original work, introduced most powerful agents of change — his Scottish dialect, his varied and to the age ^ novel metres, his passionate love poetry, and his vivid and unfamiliar description all contributing. And lastly, WilUam Blake (1757-1827), though he can hardly be said to have influenced his con- temporaries at all, expressed by anticipation the purest characteristics, in form and spirit alike, of Romantic poetry. Fresh schools of novel-writing, partly noticed above, arose, together with clumsy attempts at historical romance and many other things. Most of this latter work was mistaken and mediocre, though there was some 1 As was noted above, the " Burns metre " is Provencal in origin, and is common in Middle English romances and plays. lyo A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. brilliant poetical satire — the Rolliad (1784-1785) and the work of Wolcot (1738-1819, " Peter Pindar on the Whig side, and the Anti- Jacobin (1797-1798) by Canning, Ellis, and Frere on the Tory — to relieve it. It was only towards the extreme end that a really new school arose, and to this we must turn in the next chapter. The The additions, in individual books, of this long period to Library the English Library were enormous ; and almost more im- a little portant in kinds than in numbers. We saw how, at 1660 before or thereabouts, though there was a certain amount of 1800. (mostly translated) fiction in prose, it was, with few excep- tions, themselves not very good, of the most worthless character. Nor can the first forty years of the present period (i 660-1 700) add anything of the first class but TJie Pilgrim's Progress (1678) of John Bunyan (i 628-1688), with minor books of merit by him, though there was still larger addition in mere bulk. But 1 700-1 800 tells a different tale. Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe and the companions of the latter ; Pamela and Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison ; Joseph Andrews and Jonathan Wild and Tom Jones and Amelia ; Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphrey Clinker ; Tristram Shandy and the Sentimeyital Journey, — what a shelf would these only, with- out their numerous and innumerable companions and successors, make in comparison, with any that the de- partment of the novel could show before ! And it went on filling for the whole time. In the chief other section which was slow in presenting itself, that of the newspaper or periodical, the accomplish- ment was not so signal, but the progress was still great. Papers of strict " news," and to some extent of comment on that news, became commoner even between 1660 and 1700, while, a hundred years later, the library racks and reading- boards began to show names — The Times, The Globe, The Morning Post — familiar in the corresponding places still. Much earlier, and in ways more directly or at least more exclusively concerning literature, had appeared the Addi- sonian essay-periodical, still to be seen in (slightly changed) existence as the " articles " of weekly papers ; and a little later the earliest examples of the monthly review or magazine. The time was indeed far off when large libraries would have to transport their masses of this kind of litera- VI THE AUGUSTAN OR NEO-CLASSIC PERIOD 171 ture to suburban store-houses; but to a shrewd observer that time was almost in sight. In books proper of the older classes the period was fertile enough, both prose and verse. Its bookcases of poetry now contained Hudihras and the poems of Dryden, those of Prior and Pope and their lesser contemporaries ; the abundant stores of light verse which the student may find in the famous Collection or Miscellany made by the book- seller Dodsley about the middle of the eighteenth century ; the work (partly to be found in the same place) of Gray and Collins; the singular achievement of Chatterton, and (not to mention scores of other things and persons) the promise and performance alike of the great concluding quartet, Cowper, Crabbe, Burns, and Blake. In drama the quantity of the additions would indeed far exceed the quality, though this last would not be lacking in the examples noted above. But it is in what is called " serious prose that the work of value added to the list of English classics would be found most abundant ; while in some cases that value would be very high indeed. From Dryden (again) and the great group of prose-writers noticed with him, the succession never failed through the further group of Swift and the ** Queen Anne " men on- wards. Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon most of all, formed (for men like KnoUes and Clarendon are isolated) the English historical school. Berkeley and Hume again contributed epoch-making work in philosophy ; and produced indirectly a vast literature, inferior to theirs but not contemptible, of following, or of controversy. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), if it does not found the dubious and con- tentious science of Political Economy, gives its first and perhaps greatest English classic. Johnson's original printed work (see above), if it expresses his actual genius inade- quately, was widely read at the time, and is worth reading at all times ; while his humbler Dictionary actually starts (once more) the mustering and consideration of English words and their uses in an orderly and coherent fashion. Theologians of the first class, with the exception of Berkeley again and Bishop Butler {Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion, 1736), add little to the choicer shelves, for the causes which tended to stunt poetry at the time did not encourage loftier theology ; but abundance of respect- able work was done here also. And to the already men- tioned " new bookcases '* (surprising already in number and contents) we must add one for which it is difficult to find a single label — that which is to contain letters, diaries. 172 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. vi biographies, and autobiographies — " books about people," as the cant phrase goes. With Samuel Pepys (163 3- 1703) and John Evelyn (1620-1706) and Roger North (165 3-1 734) — writers of diaries, or notes on their own times and ex- periences, who would have deserved fuller notice above had we room for it — in Charles II. 's reign ; with the letters of Chesterfield and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Horace Walpole in the eighteenth century ; with Miss Burney's (Madame D'Arblay's) Diary in its later years ; with John- son's Lives of the Poets and Boswell's Life of Johnson — with hundreds of lesser books of the same kind or kinds — here once more is a startling exchange of emptiness for fulness. The collector of 1800 would probably (see next chapter) by that time have dusted and ransacked older shelves which his immediate predecessors had unwisely neglected ; but he would be almost as unwise if he in his turn neglected the additions made by those predecessors themselves. CHAPTER VII THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD Early Nineteenth-century Literature, 1798-1834 Causes and character of the Romantic revival — Chief agencies and agents in it — The Lyrical Ballads : Coleridge — His paramount and pervading influence — The principles of the Lyrical Ballads, and of Coleridge's other work — Wordsworth — Scott — Southey — Campbell — Moore — Landor — Byron — Shelley and Keats — Shelley — Keats — Their joint though various influence, and its character — The novel : Transition writers — Scott — Miss Austen — Significance of their work — Criticism : extensive cultivation of it — Hazlitt — Lamb — Leigh Hunt — Historians, their number and importance — The characteristics of nineteenth-century belles lettres — Theology, philosophy, science — Influence of the periodical in all departments — Reasons for division at this point — The reality of Victorian literature — The nineteenth-century Library. The changes sketched or glanced at in the last pages Causes of the foregoing chapter, and now to be considered, have ^^^^^^^^ naturally been the subject of even more debate, as to of the their causes and character, than those referred to on its ^^^^^^^^ first page. The character will form the subject of the present chapter. As to the causes, there is no room to discuss them, but the student may as well take note of them at once, and will find no difficulty in fiUing in the details of fact and argument later. They usually run as follows : a desire for larger, deeper, higher ranges of imagination in poetry and thought in prose ; discontent with the somewhat confined scope of expression in both 173 174 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. divisions — the few and narrowly ruled metres in verse ; the plain undistinguished style in prose ; the dull and colourless language in both. These, with the shifting of interest from the town to the country (the " Return to Nature/' as it is rather too sweepingly called), supply the chief internal influences — those which must have worked even if there had been no others. But they were power- fully reinforced by a second class, more accidental and external in character ; the study of older and especially mediaeval literature, with the resulting discovery that there had been true poetry which had known nothing of the arbitrary rules of neo-classicism ; the extension of such study to Eastern and Continental letters ; the special influence of German, which, after being behind all other Uteratures in Europe for next to two centuries, had taken a great start under Lessing, Goethe, and others in the last half of the eighteenth ; the French Revolution, with its double effect, first of a great revolt against existing institutions, and then of a vast patriotic reaction in England against the crimes and the folUes of that Revolution itself. Chief Once more a radical change was shown by, if not a^d^^^^en exactly due to, a group of men, born about the same fn u.^^^"^ time, and working, not by any means always consciously together, but for the same real ends. The most im- portant of these were William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Robert Southey (1774-1843) (jointly called the Lake School " from the place of residence of Wordsworth for almost his whole hfe, Southey for most of his, and Coleridge for some years), Walter Scott (1771-1832), Charles Lamb (1775-1834), WilHam Hazhtt (1778-1830), with, a httle later, Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), George Lord Byron (1788-1824), later still, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792- 1822), and latest of all John Keats (1795-182 1). Here, VII THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD however, the rule which we found applying formerly is reversed in an almost startHng fashion. Every man in the earlier group, except Dry den, was wholly or all but wholly a prose- writer. Every one of these men, except Hazhtt, was more or less a poet, and most of them were great poets. And the book which served as, if not exactly a manifesto like Dryden's Essay and Sprat's History} yet as an exemplification of the new ideals, was a book of poetry, the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, The published in 1798. Both men had written before, though ^^^^^^^^ in no such starthng style or spirit. Indeed there was coieridge. always, as was natural, a considerable eighteenth-century leaven in Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott, while Byron affected actually to prefer Pope and his school to his own work and that of his contemporaries. It was not till Shelley's work in verse and Thomas De Ouince3^'s (1785-1859) in prose that pure romanticism appeared in original writing, not merely in criticism ; but both these writers were strongly under the influence of Coleridge, and in different ways Wordsworth, Southey, Scott, and even Byron felt that strange and almost unexampled power which no man in English literature has ever exercised in the same way and to the same extent. He was unfortunately a man of weak will, irregular and self-indulgent habits, and perhaps (even if he had been free from these) naturally more capable of planning and suggesting than of performance. He has left us hundreds of pages of poetry, the really consum- mate parts of which do not extend to many hundred Unes ; and a not inconsiderable body of prose work, much of which consists of merely reported lectures or conversation ; while hardly more than a single volume, the Biographia Literaria, is a fair realisation of the mighty schemes he was always forming. 1 See above, p. 134. 176 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. His para- He could (as the world never knew till the best part, mount and q£ ^ centurv after his death, when some frae^ments were pervading influence. pubHshed under the title of Anima Poetae) write ex- tremely beautiful prose of a kind which had then no model ; but he was content, in his published work, to use awkward and sometimes unintelligible sentences, which he himself admitted to be like Surinam toads, with their young ones hanging all about them." The exceptional pieces of his verse noted above are among the greatest and purest examples of poetry itself that we have in EngHsh. The great ornate prose-writers of the nineteenth century were to take up the very methods which he had jotted down in pocket-books and left hidden ; he absolutely revolutionised and restarted English criticism ; and there was not a man of any literary power with whom he came in contact who did not show the traces of his influence, as if Coleridge had touched him with a magic rod. Wordsworth, a strong rather than fine nature, and with leanings always to- wards the prosaic, was never quickened to his best efforts till he had worked with Coleridge ; a chance meeting at Oxford with Coleridge changed Southey from a bookish but desultory boy into a strenuous man of letters ; Scott, though he no doubt knew its powers, owed the popular metre of his early poems directly to a chance hearing of Christabel, read from a manuscript copy long before its publication ; and Hazlitt, afterwards his bitter enemy and one of the bitterest writers of his day, has left almost a rhapsody of eulogy of Coleridge's powers, and con- fessed that he was the only person from whom he (Haz- litt) learnt anything. The student has been repeatedly cautioned against attributing too much to the action and influence of individuals, but he can go less wrong in that direction here than almost anywhere. Almost may we say that Coleridge was the English romantic VII THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD 177 movement, Coleridge was the inspirer of nineteenth- century Uterature. And yet (for it is worth repetition as perhaps the most glaring paradox, and certainly one of the most memorable lessons and warnings in literary history) Coleridge has left us just one finished poem of perfect quaUty, and just one prose work which is (and that not wholly) worthy of his powers. The general effect of this remarkable influence of his The talk, of his personaUty, and of the few documents in which q^^^j^^^^^ he allowed it to find literary expression, was furthered. Lyrical reproduced, and extended by all the writers mentioned ^^^^^^ above and many others. The most complete of these documents in poetry was the only important contribu- tion which he gave to the Lyrical Ballads themselves (Christahel and other things which ought to have been there being, as usual, not ready). The Rime of the Ancient Manner. This poem itself was at first little understood and less liked, the eighteenth - century spirit, even in Southey, being still strong enough to make it seem a Dutch attempt at German sublimity,*' as he called it, and a cock-and-bull story,'' as others did. The critics contrasted its metre — the full equivalenced ballad stanza with extension of lines at pleasure — with the " sweet and polished " measures of Dryden, Pope, and Gray. And Wordsworth's splendid blank verse Lines on Tintern Abbey, which closed the volume as The Ancient Mariner had opened it, were, though less dishked (for the critics were accustomed to blank verse, and there was no archaic language, supernatural incident, or the like to disturb them), hardly more understood. Now The Ancient Mariner and Tintern Abbey together almost supply in little a survey of what Romantic poetry was going to be. Imagination was to have free play, and no longer to be confined to ideas furnished by the senses." Language was to be selected, not according to the rules of an N 178 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. arbitrary and stale " poetic diction/' but solely for its better adaptation to the feelings and aims of the poet. Metre, instead of being confined to a few, and those rather stiff and narrow, forms, was to recover the great old English Uberty in equivalence and substitution of feet, line -arrangement, and rhyme. An intense appreciation of Nature was to supplement rather than to oust, but in supplementing to deepen and widen immensely, that study of man which, in the narrowest sense, had been alone admitted as proper for mankind. The governing ideal of the poet was no longer to choose subjects or modes of expression by authority or rule ; but (as Coleridge afterwards expressed it in reference to his own and Wordsworth's intentions) on the one hand, when touching unfamiliar objects, to procure that wilUng suspension of disbehef which constitutes poetic faith," on the other, when deahng with things familiar, to awaken the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom." " Sweetness " was certainly not to be sUghted, but polish " in the Pope sense might take its chance. In the same passage Coleridge was to compare the poet's effect to the sudden charm which moonlight or sunset diffuses over a known and familiar landscape." Now this was a conception of poetry of which, as such, the eighteenth century and the whole Augustan age had never dreamt, and which it would certainly have repudi- ated. Dryden had been able to reach it now and then from his older inspiration. ColUns had reached it frequently, Gray sometimes, Blake continually. Bums not seldom. But Pope's scheme absolutely excluded anything of the kind. The questions of the future were to be : — " Can you reahse the unfamihar and ^/z^srealise the familiar in the sense of the two principles above given ? And when you have done this, can you put the VII THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD 179 result in metrical language ^ of as beautiful, varied, and expressive forms as possible, with as much appeal as may be to the mind's eye and ear ? Coleridge, as has been said, unluckily did not do very and of much to carry into practice the ideas so admirably other^^^^^ expressed ; but some of what he did was consummate, work, and, unlike The Ancient Mariner, it borrowed nothing from mere archaism and less from the purely super- natural. Christahel and Kuhla Khan are, the one an unfinished romance with still something of the super- natural in it, the other the mere beginning of a poem, said to have been suggested by or composed in a dream, and reading very much Uke one. But, tantalising as they may be, they contain more of the spirit of poetry pure and simple than even The Ancient Mariner itself. In Kuhla Khan especially, Coleridge has given an object- lesson in the differences between poetry and prose, by taking for his opening an actual prose passage of an Elizabethan travel -book, putting it in metre, and slightly altering the diction. In Christahel he has revived — scarcely, it would seem, knowing what he did, and imagining that he was making a new accentual metre — the old equivalenced octosyllabic couplet of Genesis and Exodus and of Spenser's Fehruary. And he taught this particular metre to Scott, to Byron, and to others ; wliile the principles of it, applied to metre gener- ally, restored the vitaUty of Enghsh poetry. Wordsworth had no lessons of this kind to give ; in Words- fact his ideas, both as to diction and to metre, were very w^^^^- different from Coleridge's, though he could often write very fine blank verse and sometimes equally fine lyrical poetry of the stateher kind, such as the famous Ode on Recollections of Immortality, as well as admirable sonnets. When he tried trisyllabic measures, or hght verse of any 1 For Wordsworth's ideas on this, see below. i8o A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. kind, he was apt to be singsong and trivial. His forte was a certain class of subject — the description of natural objects and the effect (a kind of adoration) which they produced on him — and the treatment of it in a peculiar spirit of his own. Even here he was not invariably to be trusted, for certain crotchets of his about the ''lan- guage of rustics being the best for poetry, with an occa- sional selection of trivial matters upon which to employ this, were unfortunate. But no one has ever carried further that devotion to nature just mentioned, that tendency to regard and to expound natural objects and effects as manifestations of a Divine Presence, not merely deserving man's attention and almost his worship, but capable of' teaching, inspiring, healing troubles, and the Uke. He has put his beliefs — certainly with no rustic language — in the two magnificent poems above named and in many others ; and with all his inequality — for long stretches of his poems differ only from prose in possessing a sort of undistinguished metre — he not only contributed to EngUsh literature fine poems, but almost 1 instilled into it a new spirit and phase of poetry. Scott. The influence and character of Scott were of an entirely different kind. Wordsworth was a very bad narrator, took httle interest in Uterature as literature, or indeed in any subject but Nature and his own poetry, and kept inveterately out of the world. Scott was emphatically a man of action as well as of letters, an enormous reader, enthusiastically devoted to mediaeval history and literature, a professional lawyer (first in actual practice and then in an official post for many years), social, many-sided. He began with translations and imitations from the German, that cause of revolt (see above, p. 174) having special influence on him. But 1 " Almost," for, as has been said, Cowper had anticipated him to some extent in Yardley Oak. VII THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD i8i the vast stores of Scottish and other legend and romance which he had accumulated required some outlet, and the casual hearing of Christabel, above noticed, gave clearer form to hints which he, to a much larger extent than Coleridge himself, must have taken from the original romances. In 1805, seven years after the Lyrical Ballads, appeared the famous Lay of the Last Minstrel, which almost at once, and still rather in spite of the critics, seized the public ear. Scott's un- surpassed faculty of story-telling, the brilliant and lively character of the verse, the unfamiUar and striking incidents, above all a characteristic well put by the great statesman William Pitt, then just at the close of his life, more than accounted for this. Pitt, who though a scholar was not usually much interested in modem literature, observed that he could have expected the scenes of the Lay from a painter but not from a poet. There is nothing perhaps which better expresses one side of the new poetry — its appeal directly to the mind's eye — and the contrast of its varied and briUiant word- painting when compared with the drab-coloured, dry, and if not crude, almost wholly intellectual character of so much eighteenth-century work. Scott kept up the general system, though he varied the particular metres, in the unprecedentedly popular and even more unprecedentedly influential poems which followed — MarmioHy The Lady of the Lake, Rokeby, The Lord of the Isles, etc. — till he gave up verse for prose, and, escaping from the competition of Byron, achieved in the new field an even greater triumph than in the old. But in all his work he constantly inserted ad- mirable lyrics, often in the more dashing style, as in Bonnie Dundee " and Young Lochinvar,'' where he re-established the anapaestic measure for good and all in Enghsh verse ; sometimes in a remoter, quieter, but i82 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. even more precious and exquisite fashion, as in " Proud Maisie." His volume and the rapidity of his composition made these perfect things comparatively rare ; but the student, however far he pursues his studies, will never keep the right road if he allows himself to think Scott an inferior poet. Southey. Southey was perhaps better as a prose-writer (see below) than as a poet ; but his poetry joined that of the others in producing a great effect at the time, and it was ranked highly even by some who, for poHtical or personal reasons, disUked its author. People now know little of it except a few short pieces — Blenheim " and The Inchcape Rock and " The Well of St. Keyne " in light, tripping, or swinging rhythm, and the beautiful Holly Tree " and " My days among the dead are past " in a higher and more serious style. But some of his longer poems, though now almost unread, were powerful in their day, and ought to be read by any one who would thoroughly appreciate English poetry. The unrhymed Thalaba the Destroyer and the rhymed but irregularly versed Curse of Kehama are by far the finest. In the rest he was too prone to adopt a blank verse nearly as prosaic as Wordsworth's at its worst and never near that at its best. But the subjects and treatment of all — the wild Eastern stories of Thalaba and Kehama, the chivalrous ones of Joan oj Arc and Madoc and Roderick the Goth, all helped to shake the public out of its rut of modern " poUshed " common-sense notions. He made, indeed, a mistake in trying to write Enghsh hexameters. But more than twenty years earher he had intimated distinctly, not merely in practice but in theory, and in terms far more correct than Coleridge's later, the great secret of EngUsh verse, the equivalence of two short syllables to one long one, and the liberty of substituting the two for the one. VII THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD 183 To these four most influential poets, born in the " seventies of the eighteenth century, at least three others, who date from the same decade, should be joined, though they were not entirely at one with the new school, and had classical leanings of various kinds. Thomas Campbell. Campbell (1777-1844), indeed, in his longer poems, was almost wholly an eighteenth-century poet. But his two greater songs, Hohenlinden and ''The Battle of the Baltic," with some minor pieces, are essentially romantic in subject, metre, and other points. Thomas Moore (1779- Moore. 1852) was master of a couplet, satiric and other, which smacked very strongly of the older ways. But his most famous long poem, Lalla Rookh, though not of the finest, purest Romantic kind in spirit or handUng, went all the way with the new school in subject ; and his very numerous lyrics (most of them written to Irish or other airs, including some of the poet's own, for Moore was a skilled musician) were quite unUke eighteenth-century work, had immense popular influence, and include some things of real and lasting beauty, such as " Oft in the stilly night,'' " I saw from the beach," and When in death I shall calm recUne." In particular, their com- plicated metres, which adopt the most unusual (though generally justifiable) variations and licenses, were, con- sidering the popularity just mentioned, a most powerful instrument in correcting the mistaken limitations of the older school. Very different from these was Walter Savage Landor Landon (1775-1864). In the best sense, he was more of a classic " than any English poet since Milton, or perhaps Gray, for he was a thorough scholar, and followed, in his verse at least, the classical practice of simple forms, straightforward expression, and economy of words. But though there was mannerism in him there was no convention, and though there was something of Dryden 184 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. there was nothing of Pope. His first long poem, Gehir (1798), showed the pecuUarity of his position ; but many of his lyrics are even more curious examples of Romantic spirit in classical form. The eighteenth-century leaven which has been noticed as continuing to show itself in all these does not appear at all in the two younger, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, of the great trio who succeed, and are themselves influenced by, the Lake School or by Scott. How much of the older temper there really was in the Bvron. third and eldest, Byron, it is impossible to say. It is certain that, except in a few metrical respects, none of his own best work is in the least hke that of the " Augus- tan masters whom he professedly admired. His earhest poems. Hours oj Idleness (1807) English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), with one or two later pieces, no doubt show their influence ; but the poems wliich brought him his popularity from Childe Harold (1812) onwards were, if not of the purest Romantic spirit, of the now almost fashionable Romantic costume and subject. Scott's or Spenser's metre for form ; foreign travel, adventure, etc., for matter ; and the peculiar attempted blend of passion, misanthropy, and what may be called mental and moral indigestion, which the Germans had concocted during their period of what they call Storm and Stress," which Mrs. Radchffe and the Terror novehsts had borrowed, and which was one of the stage pro- perties " of popular Romanticism — all these appear in Byron. He had a great facihty and not a little force in writing, an intense interest in himself (a poet must always have an interest in something), varied and picturesque experiences of scene and action, perhaps some real passion, and great intellectual ability, especially in the direction of witty narrative and description. Some of his best passages are really great in their way ; VII THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD 185 and much of his last work, the extensive but unfinished comic epic of Don Juan, is not easily to be surpassed in its kind. For better or for worse he took England by storm for a time, and the Continent for a much longer time; and though it is almost impossible, when he is read with Coleridge or Wordsworth, Shelley or Keats, to think that he can belong to the same school, he was one of the chief forces which made a breach for Romanticism in the fortress-walls of custom and prejudice. On the other hand, Shelley and Keats made httle sheiiey impression at home for the time ; and, until quite re- ^"^^ Keats, cently, none whatever abroad ; yet generation after generation of Enghsh critics, from points of view some- times very different and almost opposed, have attributed greater and greater importance to them. From one or from both of them almost every poet of real merit since has drawn inspiration ; and it has been more and more recognised that, wliile both represent nineteenth-century poetry, they represent it in two different and strikingly contrasted ways. Both may be said, though they were actually bom a little within the frontier of the eighteenth century, to have altogether escaped the critical ideas prevalent in it. For both, when they began to write, the great Romantic poets already noticed were part of the literary influences that affected them; and both were in a position to avail themselves, if they chose, of that re- discovery of older English hterature, backwards from 1660, which had been going on with accelerated motion during the eighteenth century itself. Shelley, the higher born of the two, in easier circum- sheliey. stances, stronger in health, and more regularly educated than Keats, was also the more strictly original, though at first he might not seem so. He began, however, as some others of the greatest poets have done, with quite i86 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. worthless and imitative work in verse, and in prose with two of the shghtest and silUest novels of the now stale Terror school, Zastrozzi and 5/. Irvyne. When, in Queen Mob, he turned to somewhat better things, he borrowed Southey's rhymeless scheme in Thalaba, and his first stanza is obviously based on the elder poet's. Even in Alastor (1815), the first of his really great poems, his blank verse is evidently suggested by Wordsworth's in some degree. But already in this, and still more later, everything that he did became Shelley's work and no- body else's. What the subject was mattered very httle : extravagantly revolutionary ideas in pohtics, religion, and morals ; incoherent romances of adventure illus- trating these ; dramas, songs, and mystical adaptations of classical myths — all turn to a glorious effect of poetry, often indistinctly outlined, but always bathed in splendid hazes of hght and colour. Once only perhaps, in the great Elizabethan drama of The Cenci, does Shelley present a solid substance of narrated or dramatised action. In one of the finest and most characteristic of his longer poems, The Witch of Atlas, there is hardly any substance at all — only a tissue of most beautiful dream. Another, Adonais, though the subject — the actual death of Keats — ogives it more apparent reaUty, streams off, in the same manner, into gorgeous if sometimes dim imaginings which are poetry pure and simple, like Kubla Khan itself. If there is any drawback to this characteristic, which certainly makes Shelley, Uke Spenser, rather a poet's and poet-lover's poet than one for the average person, it must necessarily show less in short lyrics, where solid substance is not expected. And few competent critics deny that, taking volume and quality together, Shelley is the greatest lyric poet in Enghsh, if not the greatest in the world's Uterature. But even his wife, herself a woman of genius and loyal to her husband as few wives VII THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD 187 have been, complained of a certain want of human interest " in some of his work. There was nothing thus remote and afar " in the Keats, poetry of Keats ; and he differed from Shelley in many other ways. At no time was his verse so feeble as Shelley's earhest ; and this was no doubt partly due to the fact that, from the very first, he was not only a spontaneous singer but an earnest student of his own art. As a mere boy he fell in with the EHzabethans, and was delighted with them ; later he came, for a time, under the influence of Leigh Hunt (see below), a small poet but no small critic. Keats deliberately took up the cudgels against Pope, Pope's master the great French critic and satirist Boileau, and the ideas of the classical school generally. And when he published his first long poem, Endymion (1818), he took one of the most certain ways of shocking the still mainly neo-classically-minded critics of the time, by adopting the overlapped heroic couplet of Marmion and Chamberlayne (see above, p. 110). It made them furious ; and there is no doubt that Keats did to some extent succumb to its pecuHar tempta- tions (see above, as before) of verbiage and incoherence. Even Shelley doubted whether anybody could get to the end of the poem for the difficulties that the author had interposed. Yet the verse at its best is extra- ordinarily beautiful ; the story, though not clear or full, and the characters, though not elaborate, appeal to human emotions, and above all the poem swarms with pictures, exquisite alike in colour and in form, in figure and in scene-painting. But Keats was nothing if not critical in practice, if he had not much time to be critical in theory, and he saw the faults of Endymion. To correct them he tried the octave stanza-form in Isabella, and with still better results, an exceedingly bold rever- sion, in heroic couplet, to the joint manners of Milton i88 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. and Dryden — Miltonisms in language and the Drydenian licenses of Alexandrine and triplet — in Lamia, In his last long poem, Hyperion, attempted in two forms but finished in neither, he tried blank verse and, perhaps necessarily, fell back upon Milton only for model. He did great things there also. The Eve of St. Agnes ^ is a short poem in Spenserians which is almost fault- less ; and the unfinished Eve of St, Mark is an adaptation of the rare best form of Gower^s octosyllables, which nobody save Gower had tried, which 'Gower himself could not have gone anywhere near, and which was afterwards taken up, with admirable results, by Mr. William Morris. But Keats would not have been the nineteenth-century poet which, in all but birth, he was eminently, if he had not also appUed liimself to lyric, and he would not have been the great poet that he was if he had not succeeded in it. His lyrics are not so numerous as Shelley's, but he never goes wrong either in song measures such as ''In a drear nighted December," in ballads hke ''La Belle Dame sans Merci,'' in the more stately ode arrangements hke the famous " Grecian Urn " and its companions, or in his few but admirable sonnets. Their joint Perhaps there is something in this studiousness of though Keats — in the way in which, without in the least copying influence, borrowing in the lower sense of these words, he re- and its turns to the greater examples of elder Enghsh poetry, character, ^^^j^^g lessons from them, and continues them independ- ently, which accounts for his enormous influence on his successors. Keats " fished the murex up " — that is to say, rediscovered the secret of colour in verse — said Browning. The close affiUation of Tennyson to Keats ^ This, with the others just mentioned and some odes, etc., appeared in 1820 : The Eve of St. Mark and (at least as collected) La Belle Dame sans Merci " were posthumous. VII THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD 189 has escaped no competent student ; and through Tenny- son a directly traced connection with the pre-Raphaelite school (see next chapter) is patent. And this gives him a pecuUar place in any history of EngUsh literature, even on the smallest scale. But, even in such a history, there is something more to be said of him and of Shelley. They, between them, were the first fully to develop the two great principles which have distinguished our poetry from 1798 to the present day from that of the period from 1660 to 1798. These principles are the increased appeal to the mind's eye, and the increased appeal to the mind's ear. Eighteenth-century poets — with exceptions of course, but with exceptions which prove the rule — had, as has been said, addressed themselves almost wholly to the intellect, with a certain very limited supplement of address to such emotions aCs were recognised as proper and normal, and another to a still more Umited taste " which amused itself with expression strictly regulated according to authority and classical pattern. With what is styled " aesthetic " appeal, that is, appeal to what may be called the senses of the mind, they would have very little to do. They circumscribed the endless possibiUties of the use of sound in language and metre as closely as they could ; and it is hardly before Cowper, not at all (except in fragments) before Thomson, that we can find an elaborate and vividly felt picture of scene in verse. With regard to the latter point, Pitt's surprise at the pictorial effects of the Lay oj the Last Minstrel has been quoted ; but, though precaution as to undervaluing Scott must be repeated, Scott's effects are Uttle more than scene-painting in the lower sense compared to Wordsworth's pictures of things seen, Coleridge's of I90 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. things imagined, Shelley's of things dreamt, Keats's of things seen, imagined, dreamt, and felt. So too in regard to sound. Whole realms of aesthetic suggestion, which the older school had deUberately ignored or shut off, were opened to the poet and his readers. The vocabulary allowed was enormously increased in mere words : the stock use of them, and of phrase, was avoided. Instead of a very few metres, reduced to their simplest and most monotonous terms, the poet was left to recover, discover, or invent any combinations of foot and hne that he could induce to pass the muster of general English poetic laws as they are shown, for instance, in Shake- speare and Milton. And in handhng these he was given a large though not unlimited license of equivalence and substitution. He was allowed and encouraged to play on similar or contrasted vowel-sounds Hke a musician on notes. He could cut his Unes, or stretch them, to any extent that the ear admitted. Add to this the vastly widened range of subject, and the complete aboli- tion of arbitrary rules about literary kinds,*' and some idea may be formed of the increased inheritance and powers upon which the nineteenth-century poet entered. The influence of this great wave of the rising tide of thought and feeling was hardly less remarkable in prose fiction ; but it was exercised in a curiously different fashion, and though the changes effected were almost equally momentous, they were effected by far fewer persons — in fact by two only, one of whom for a long time had no disciples. This was due, no doubt, to the much more recent origin of the novel, and to the fact that, while the poet was enabled to go back to the great sources and patterns of Ehzabethan and mediaeval literature, only the latter, which was not easily accessible, could do much for the writer of romances, and even that VII THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD 191 could do little for the novelist proper. A slight glance was made, in the last chapter, at the fortunes of fiction after the four great novehsts had started it on its way. It had, though still rather looked down on, never ceased to be extremely popular ; and therefore, as all popular literature must be, it was very largely produced. Miss Burney had struck the vein of strictly ordinary hfe in Evelina, but had not worked it far. The Terror and the Revolutionary novels had not done much, though the former had largely increased the element of description ; and both had somewhat deepened the exploration of character. Quite at the close of the century Maria Edge- worth (1767-1849) took up and bettered Smollett's utiHs- ing of the " national '* sources in her charming Irish stories, and advanced upon Miss Bumey somewhat in books of ordinary hfe ; but it may be questioned whether she was not at her very best in tales intended for children. Of the two great novehsts referred to above, Jane Austen (1775-1817), who was to distance both these literary elder sisters of hers, could not get pubhshed for some time ; and although Scott tried prose fiction early, he threw it aside for a time, to profit by the extraordinary popularity of his verse-stories. When this popularity began a little to wane, he scott. bethought him of his abandoned attempts in prose, looked them up, and produced Waverley (1814), a book which at once revolutionised fiction, and estabhshed, in secure existence, a kind of literature which had been more or less unsuccessfully attempted at rare intervals for at least two thousand years — the Historical Novel. The causes of this failure can only be slightly summarised here ; the chief of them was the absence, not so much of actual historical knowledge in the ordinary sense, as of an extension of that knowledge to the literature, habits, ways, etc., of former times. Just before Scott, 192 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Mrs. Radcliffe and Godwin,^ both persons of unusual ability, had made the most absurd mistakes for want of this extension or combination. Now Scott l^ew a very great deal about all the things of which knowledge was required ; his poetical work had already shown excep- tional powers, both of teUing a story and of fitting it with proper scenery, etc. And he was now to prove that he possessed another all-important faculty, the faculty of making conversation, and telhng his story through it, as no other noveUst, not even Fielding, had previously done. Incidentally, he at first adopted from Smollett and Miss Edgeworth the " national " appeal, and the first batch of his novels, which were produced in extra- ordinarily rapid succession, was devoted to Scotland, while in the second and third of these {Guy Mannering and The Antiquary) he showed that the historical setting was by no means necessary to him. Later, he passed to purely English history in Ivanhoe and Kenilworth, to foreign in Quentin Durward and others. And though his almost incredible industry and fertiUty of production, his broken health (no doubt partly due to this overpressure), and severe financial troubles towards the close of his career slightly affected his later works, yet, even if these had been much worse than they were, they would have sufficed to give patterns of a new and almost in- exhaustible kind of fiction. Meanwhile Miss Austen 2 was doing parallel work in another kind, not so new, not perhaps so popular, but astonishingly renovated, and more inexhaustible even 1 William Godwin (1756-1836) is best known as a political philo- sopher [Political Justice, 1793), who preached a sort of amiable anarch- ism, and exercised, for a time, extraordinary influence on his juniors. But he was also a novelist : his most fam.ous books being Caleb Williams (1794) and St. Leon (i799)- 2 Her novels — Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, etc. — were published between iSii and 1818. But some of them had been written before the close of the eighteenth century. VII THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD 193 than the other. Scott's form was the romance, largely indeed supplied with pure novel-quality — in character, conversation, and so on — but mainly dealing with in- cident, and more or less startling incident. Miss Austen's was the novel of strictly ordinary life — the scheme, in fact, of Miss Bumey and Miss Edgeworth, but even more self-denying than theirs in respect of anything out-of- the-way/' The woes of a girl at a dance when her thoughtless partner has deserted her ; the appearance of a village street seen from the door of the village shop ; the question whether the heroine shall walk or drive to a dinner-party at the edge of her uncle's park ; the pompous patronage of a country great lady ; a walk through the streets of Bath with the chance whether the right person will turn up or not — to these things did Miss Austen (with an audacity which we fail to reahse now because people have been doing the things after her for a century) exclusively incUne. But, possessing a literary genius of which Miss Burney had not a tenth nor Miss Edgeworth a quarter, she managed to infuse it into the treatment of all of them ; to create characters which are as much alive as Shakespeare's or Fielding's and more " modern " ; to set them working in the quietest but most unerring fashion ; and to suffuse both their con- versation and her own narrative with a pecuUar quiet irony, a little like Addison's, but more evasive and of a finer quality — in fact, a counterpart of Swift's in power, with all the savagery, and the gloom, and the coarseness taken out. It is of the first importance for the student of litera- signifi- ture, from the historical side, not to be content with , their work. the fact that Scott wrote a large and Miss Austen a small number of interesting novels, but to see and understand how these novels led the way in each case to a practically unlimited production of their respective kinds for the 194 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. future. It does not matter that Scott's line, though followed at once, was not very well followed for a long time, or that, for a time almost as long. Miss Austen's was scarcely followed at all. The point is that here were two kinds of fiction which, without any mere slavish copying or duplicating, could be followed up indefinitely. The range of the historical novel, though not quite unhmited, is exceedingly large, and that of the novel of ordinary hfe is absolutely unhmited. It could have been seen by any good critic then, and it has been abundantly proved since, that no material of actual hfe is uninterest- ing if it is treated in the right manner ; and that if it is treated in the right manner, it will interest not only the age in and about which it is written but all other ages. But the further development of the novel had better be reserved for the next chapter. Nothing very great was done in it after Miss Austen's early death, and before the limit of this, except by Scott himself, whose whole life and work all but touched that hmit. Criticism : The next most important development of the Roman- cuir^ation niovement was Criticism — hke the novel, if not a new of it. at least a renovated and largely developed product. There had indeed been a good deal of it during the eight- eenth century, and in the hands of Addison and Johnson, if in no others, it had had some vogue. But it had never been exactly popular; and in the earher part of the century at least, the periodical of the Spectator kind had not been developed enough to stimulate its produc- tion, though such periodicals as there were gave it a home. Later, however (as was noticed in the summary of the last chapter), regular ''reviews" of something like the modem kind, the chief being the Critical and the Monthly, came into existence ; and, both in these and in independ- ent publications, a large and brilliant company of writers, often poets themselves and always interested in poetry, VII THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD took part. It has already been mentioned that Coleridge practically re-created the art in Enghsh. Even Words- worth made not too fortunate excursions into it. If Scott had not been so great, as a poet and a noveUst, he would still have held no small place in Uterature for his criticism, which is abundant, and has hardly any defect but the rare one of excessive good nature. Southey was a professional critic for nearly the whole of his Ufe, and in the practice of criticism developed his wonderful prose style. Landor wrote criticism which was crotchety, but learned and sometimes acute. Byron would prob- ably have been a very good critic if he had been less wilfully wayward. 1 Shelley wrote an admirable if rather abstract Defence of Poetry ; and in both his and Keats's letters there are frequent signs of critical power. But the critics wholly, or mainly so, of the period besides Coleridge (most of them, as has been said, owing much to him), are Lamb, Hazhtt, Leigh Hunt, and Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850) among the elder writers, John Wilson (1785-1854) Christopher North John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854 ?), and De Quincey among the younger. All these, except Jeffrey, were on the Roman- tic side ; but there was unfortunately about this time a great deal of poUtical rancour which overflowed into criticism, and sometimes made critics untrue to their strict literary creed, while sometimes also innovators in pontics were genuine conservatives in Uterature and vice versa, Jeffrey would probably always have been unjust to Scott and to Wordsworth, whatever their poHtics ; but Keats, the worst treated of all, undoubtedly paid the penalty, not of his own political views, which were neither strong nor obtrusive, but of those of his friends. 1 He took a part in one of the stages of the dispute (see above, p. 151) whether Pope was a poet; and though he took on the whole the wrong side, he said some very shrewd things. 196 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Jeffrey and his periodical, the Edinburgh Review (started 1802), began this on the Whig side by attacks on the Lake poets, who, though at first favouring revolutionary ideas, had become staunch Conservatives ; but the practice was unfortunately taken up, and re- torted with an increase of acerbity, by Lockhart, Wilson, and others on the Tory side in the Quarterly Review (1809) and Blackwood's Magazine (1817), and specially by two men, one elder and one younger, Wilham Gifford (1756-1826) and John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), Haziitt. who can only be mentioned here.^ HazUtt was perhaps worse than either in allowing not merely poHtical but social and personal jealousy to colour his criticism. But he was the greatest of the set next to Coleridge, if not sometimes his equal and even superior, and his power of essay-writing, both critical and other, has never been surpassed. In general discussions of poetry, in reviews of individual authors, and in the miscellaneous pieces referred to, Haziitt has the true ''aestheticism " — that is to say, he can enjoy, and express his enjoyment of, a work of hterature or art as other people can enjoy, but can generally not express their enjoyment of, things which submit themselves more directly to the bodily senses. To Haziitt a poem, a play, a novel is what are to others agreeable food, dehcious wine, a lovely face, a grand or charming prospect, an exquisite perfume, a stirring or soothing piece of music. There had been a ^ The two notorious articles on Keats and Tennyson in the Quarterly , the authorship of which was long debated, are now known to be Croker' s. Gifford did some useful work on bad poets in the late eighteenth century, and edited Joiison, Massinger, and (in part) Shirley most creditably ; but towards contemporaries he lost all but political sympathy, and became a mere carper. Croker was a man of talent, and did not fully deserve the obloquy which, for different reasons, he received at the hands of men so different as Macaulay, Thackeray, and Lord Beaconsfield ; but, merely as a critic, he was both short-sighted and savage. VTI THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD I97 little of this before in Dryden, and perhaps in Gray, but hardly anything in any one else. To him the ItaUan word gusto — which is not so much our taste as taste intensified or rapturous, and which he often used — was early appHed, and he deserved it. Lamb had less energy, a more delicate and fitful Lamb, appreciation, and a narrower range, while he had also, during the greater part of his hfe, much regular business work to do, and was troubled by mental disease in his family which occasionally affected himself, while Hazlitt was wholly a man of letters, and, though he died early, a strong man. Lamb's work is not large in bulk, but it is exquisite in quaUty, and the famous Essays of Elia, which are only in part literary, have perhaps more definitely marked originahty than anything of Hazhtt's. His selections from, and short appreciations of, EHza- bethan drama are the very finest things of their kind, and have exercised immense influence since ; while he has a power, which is almost unique in Uterature, of attracting by his writings a sort of personal affection. Happy is the student who comes to know and to love Lamb early : he will seldom go wrong in Uterary matters afterwards. Leigh Hunt had less genius than either of these, but Leigh is by no means an unimportant person in our history. * He was a poet as well as a prose-writer ; and in both capacities he did things which were very influential. As was noted, Keats was no doubt for a time strongly affected by Hunt's theories of poetical criticism and by his studies in poetry. In prose, on the other hand, no single person did so much to change the old, rather formal, and now somewhat obsolete Spectator-model of Essay into the kind which exists at the present day. In these Essays, of which he wrote many volumes, chiefly in periodicals (indeed he once emulated Defoe's feat by 198 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. writing one wholly himself), he dealt with almost every conceivable variety of subject. But a very large number of them were hterary, and though Hunt had neither the strength of Hazhtt nor the deUcacy of Lamb, while in intellectual depth and range he cannot even be men- tioned with Coleridge, he had a wider scope than either of his two friends, for HazUtt knew httle or nothing but English, and Lamb cared Uttle for anything else. Hunt was a good Italian and a fair French scholar, and helped, in this way also, to accompUsh that broadening and varying of Uterary patterns, interests, and so forth which our Uterature required, and which it was one of the great functions of the Romantic movement to supply. Historians, This same influence and character of study displayed itself in all the other branches of Uterature at the time. number . and im- The great historical achievement of Gibbon was indeed portance. j^ot repeated ; it is doubtful whether it ever will be. But his example was followed in all directions by men of industry and talent, if not of genius, and sometimes of genius in a lesser degree. Southey apphed that prose style of his which has been mentioned before, and which is the very perfection of plainer but not too plain Enghsh prose — still hardly in the sHghtest degree obsolete or even old-fashioned, dignified, but not elaborately rhythmical — in several histories — of Brazil, of the Peninsular War, etc., and in historical biographies of which the Life of Nelson is an acknowledged masterpiece, while that of Wesley is not much inferior. WilUam Mitford (1744-1827), who was also our first really well- informed and thorough - going writer on versification, produced a remarkable though not faultless History of Greece. WilUam Roscoe (1753-1831), in another direc- tion, did work of great influence on the ItaUan Renais- sance with his lives of Lorenzo de Medici and Leo X, VII THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD 199 And an invaluable group, Sharon Turner (1768- 1847), John Lingard (1771-1851), and Sir Francis Palgrave (1788-1861), for almost the first time, treated EngUsh history itself thoroughly by going to sources and documents ; for though Hume had far excelled all earUer historians in literary merit, his briUiant composi- tion had been partisan, inaccurate, and superficial. Henry Hallam (1777-1859), too, deserves particular notice here, because he was the first to combine serious study of general and of literary history. His works had long titles, but what are known for shortness as his Middle Ages (18 18), Constitutional History of England (1827), 3.nd Literature of Europe (1839) showed this combination in a way comparatively unique up to the time, and positively excellent. Even men whose principal work was of different kind, like Scott, Campbell, Moore, and Hazlitt, wrote histories. Of greater importance here was Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868), who devoted him- self to ecclesiastical history, writing on that of the Jews and the early Christians, works which led up to his great history of Latin Christianity (1856). The n'ew classical histories, revolutionising popular conceptions on their subjects, of Arnold, Thirlwall, and Grote, were a Uttle later than these, but may be grouped with them. What has been said on the four great branches of The char- what used to be called belles lettres — poetry, prose fiction, ^^ine-^^^ criticism and other essay-writing, and history — should teenth- perhaps be cross-summarised here ^ that the student may ^^J]^^^^ understand the full interest and importance of the period, uttres. Now, as in the Elizabethan time, but with much fuller knowledge to assist them, if not now quite so universal a diffusion of genius to utilise it, men helped each other in the general task of renovating and re-creating and ^ The characteristics here mentioned will be found even more developed in the next chapter. For belles lettres see Glossary. 200 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. Theology, philo- sophy, science. Influence of the periodical in all de- partments. extending literature. The historians furnished the poets and the noveUsts with fresh and infinitely varied subjects ; the poets and the novelists in their turn taught the historians not to treat their subjects in the dry chronicle manner, nor in the less dry but superficial fashion of the party pamphlet ; but to try and bring out the human and the picturesque elements so as to make history aUve. The critics and the essay-writers took all this poetry, fiction, history as their province also, and refashioned it anew, commented on it, prepared it for general con- sumption and enjoyment. And all this was enormously assisted by the multiplica- tion of the new periodicals. The very juxtaposition of articles on various subjects in these facilitated a com- munity of Uterary interest, and helped to do away with that boxing off of kinds and departments which had been one of the greatest faults of the neo-classic period. Poems (except in the so-called " Reviews ''i) from the first, prose fiction pretty soon, critical and other essays necessarily and naturally, found a home in these periodi- cals; and if larger histories could hardly do so, most historians got into the habit of contributing to them studies on episodes or parts of their subjects which could be conveniently separated. In some other departments advance was delayed or hindered, at least from the purely hterary point of view. We said httle of sermons, or of theological writing gener- ally, during the eighteenth century, for after Berkeley there was Uttle or nothing of real literary merit to notice ; and though there was still much sermon-writing and ^ The distinction between ** Review " and Magazine " has been long neglected, but it had a reasonable origin. The " Review," as its name properly imported, was confined to discussion of politics, litera- ture, and what not : the " Magazine," with the same justification, was a store-house which received and distributed all kinds of literatiure — poems, stories, essays, criticisms, etc. VII THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD 20I reading, the stuff of it was dry in every sense. Nor, though the controversy between orthodoxy and un- orthodoxy produced some famous books, especially Butler's Analogy (mentioned above) in earher and Paley's Evidences (1794) in later years, was either of these, or any other such book, of much literary value. The Evan- gelical revival was not a Kterary one, though it produced some beautiful hymns from Cowper, Charles Wesley, and others ; and the great Oxford Movement, which was to be very literary indeed, did not begin till quite the close of the period of this chapter. In philosophy, Coleridge — so often to be mentioned first as pioneer — had been again the first to acquaint himself with the great new developments which Kant, taking his own start from Hume, had begun in Germany. But to no subject were Coleridge's unsystematic habits, his lack of clear style, and his inability to finish what he began, more fatal ; and though much was to be done after him, and in a way through his influence, little was done by him. Moreover philosophy, which had in ancient times, and since the Renaissance if not in the Middle Ages, been also something like a branch of belles lettres, and which in the eighteenth century had specially endeavoured to adapt itself to ordinary comprehension, now tended, in consequence mainly of this Germanising, to become a specialised science with an abstruse terminology. So, too, the great advances in the physical sciences tended more and more to draw their practitioners away from literature. Yet even here the periodical exercised some of the peculiar influence which was indicated above, and helped to popularise the more unpopular departments. In some senses there has been no actual break, in the Reasons movement inaugurated by Coleridge and Wordsworth, g^oiiat' from their time till the present day ; but there is, about this point. 202 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE CH. the reign of William the Fourth, a rather notable division Une between the generation which first worked that movement out and those which followed. In the year 1835 Wordsworth, who was himself to live for a good many years longer, wrote a poem, almost the last striking thing that he did, on the death of James Hogg (1770-1835), the " Ettrick Shepherd," a friend of Scott's, a vain and unsettled sort of person, but possessed of real gifts both as poet and as story-teller. He took occasion, however, also to notice the recent departure of far more important men ; ^ Scott himself, Charles Lamb, Coleridge above all, Crabbe, and the poetess Mrs. Hemans (1793-1835), a pathetic and respectable verse- writer of a class that we have had no room to discuss at length here. Byron, Keats, and Shelley, though so much younger than most of these, had gone years earlier. Southey was to live some time longer, but not in full possession of his powers. Moreover, remarkable repre- sentatives of a fresh stage, Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, had already begun or were just beginning to write. So that a real gap, though not so deep in kind as that which we noted at 1660 and 1798, as far as principles were concerned — a gap at least between personalities — is apparent as one looks back at this point. The reality Moreover this gap coincided with the beginning of one torian' longest and, for the greater part of it, in literature literature, at least of the most glorious reigns that any EngUsh sove- reign has enjoyed, while some of the greatest writers who had just begun continued till nearly the end of that reign. Victorian hterature is almost more of a real thing in fact, and less of a misnomer in name, than any term of the same kind, and we may justly, however inadequately, treat it in a single chapter. ^ The exact dates will be found above at the first mention of their names. VII THE FIRST ROMANTIC PERIOD From this point onward it becomes almost impossible The nine- to record, in any satisfactory manner, individual accessions teenth- of notable books and authors to the English Library, century Nor is it so necessary, or even so advantageous, as in former Library, cases, because these books and authors are, in cases where they would deserve special notice here, still in what may be called " general circulation," and will become known, more or less as a matter of course, to every student of English literature who has a taste for it as he grows older. The sketches of the two divisions of nineteenth-century literature given in the preceding chapter, and in that which follows, will hardly bear further reduction, and need no repetition. Let it only be remembered that, throughout the whole century, the novel, and in the wide sense the newspaper, are the departments increasing and to increase in number, while, from 1815 to 1870 at least, the novel increases also in diversity of excellence. Poetry has an even more brilliant record, for the actual production of poets and schools of poetry of the first magnitude never ceases for a hundred years and more from 1798 — Tennyson overlapping Words- worth and Swinburne Tennyson from the end of the eight- eenth to the beginning of the twentieth — while in three sub-periods of about twenty years each, from 1798 to 1822, from 1830 to 1850, and from 1865 or thereabouts to 1885, there were such constellations of poetic light as have rarely been seen. All the prose branches of belles lettres, history, criticism, and the like, continued likewise to flourish, and from 1830 onwards theology, though scarcely philosophy, became once more an important branch of literature. That the rubbish has increased with the riches may be granted and could not be helped. But it will be well for the student always to remember the wise words of one of the best of librarians, the late Dr. Richard Garnett of the British Museum : " It is difficult to know for certain what is rubbish to-day ; and it is quite impossible to know what will be rubbish to-morrow." CHAPTER VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE Poetry about 1830 — Transition poets — Tennyson up to 1842 — Browning — Later work of both — Their joint and separate characteristics in relation to their own time and others — Younger poets : Matthew Arnold — The " Spasraodics *' — The "Pre-Raphaelite'* poets — Character and peculiarities, important instances, and long-continued influence of their work — Progress of the novel : miscellaneous novelists, 1827-40 — Dickens: his comparative isolation — Thackeray : his influence on the novel generally — Other novelists of 1845-70 — TroUope, " George Eliot," the Brontes, Reade, Kingsley — Their successors — George Meredith — R. L. Stevenson — Importance of style in both of these, and in the latest nineteenth century generally — Its working in departments outside fiction — The first stage : De Quincey and Landor — Macaulay — Carlyle — Ruskin — Newman, Arnold, and others — Swinburne (in prose), Morris, and Pater. Poetry In 1830 and in 1832 Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), son 1830 ^ of a Lincolnshire clergyman, published two small volumes of Poems ; and in the second year named Robert Browning (1812-1889), son of a clerk in the Bank of England, pubHshed a short piece of blank verse called Pauline. Tennyson died sixty-two years after the pubUcation of his first book, and Browning fifty-seven years after that of his. Very many poets and some very great ones were bom during this long period, but none who could challenge the supremacy of these two. Nor has any such appeared since, though it is now more than a century since the birth of the younger of the 204 CH. VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE 205 pair, and more than twenty years since the death of both. The youngest poet whom we mentioned with any detail in the last chapter was Keats, who was born four- teen years before Tennyson. In the interval others had come into the world who were to do good work later. Of these were Thomas Hood (1799-1845), author of much humorous verse and prose and of some serious poetry The Haunted House,'' the popular Bridge of Sighs," and some beautiful short lyrics) which nearly approaches the great ; Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-1839), Transition one of those who have come nearest to Prior in verse of p^^*^* society,'* and a master also of the grim-grotesque style in ''The Red Fisherman"; Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) and George Darley (1795-1846), exquisite if fantastic lyrists ; the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), whose Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) had great and long-continued popularity, and who wrote some better things still The Jacobite's Epitaph " and "The Last Buccaneer") in verse; and Sir Henry Taylor (1800-1886), author of fine literary dramas [Philip van Artevelde, 1834). ^ But none of these came anywhere near the importance and influence of their juniors, Tennyson and Browning themselves, who, moreover — a point also of supreme importance to literary history — were the first who can be said thoroughly to have absorbed the teaching and influences of the first Romantic school, to have entered into the inheritance, not merely of Coleridge and Wordsworth, but of Shelley and Keats. Even before his own first volume, Tennyson had con- Tennyson up to 1842. ^ To these should be added, but separately, one of the most re- markable writers of all but purely comic verse in English or any literature, Richard Harris Barham (1788-1845), author of The Ingoldshy Legends (1840-1847). 2o6 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. tributed not a few pieces to an earlier one called Poems by Two Brothers (1826) (it should have been " three/' as it included work by both his elders, Charles and Frederick). But, as with Shelley and some others, we find in these no traces whatever of the powers and peculiarities which he was so soon to show. The 1830 and 1832 volumes, on the contrary, exhibited a most marked poetic personality, and though they did not attract much general attention, were violently and scornfully attacked by some critics. It is a curious instance of the want of understanding which often prevails between younger and older generations in the same movement, that Coleridge, of whose own metrical lessons Tennyson was almost the completest exponent, doubted his metre ; and that Wordsworth was not quite sure of his interpre- tation of the country. These were private expressions of opinion ; but reviewers were much more unfavourable. It is only fair to say that, except in point of metre, where he was always faultless, Tennyson in his early work gave some handles to criticism, and that he practic- ally acknowledged the fact by such extensive alterations, made in these very poems, that readers of them in their latest forms might hardly recognise them, in some cases, without the titles. His model was now Keats more than any one else ; and Keats had recognised in himself affecta- tions and mawkishnesses which Tennyson even exaggerated. But when these easily removable faults were justly allowed for, there remained an individuahty and a promise which no one should have missed. His very first poem in his very first volume, Claribel," which he wisely kept, practically unaltered, in its place throughout his Ufe, is a very short lyric, containing no story and no character-drawing. It has some sUghtly affected and unusual phrase, and some dialect words. But it carries the two appeals which were said above to VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE 207 be those of nineteenth-century poetry — to the mind's eye and to the mind's ear — with a vague but inspiriting touch of one of the universal poetic motives, the sense of Death contrasted with Life — to a pitch which you will hardly find even in Coleridge, Shelley, or Keats for elaboration and completeness of artistic effect.^ And yet Claribel " is a mere trifle, compara- tively speaking. Its quaUties are shown, to more advantage for the ordinary reader, even in the 1830 volume, by the Ode to Memory," the Recollections of the Arabian Nights," " The Dying Swan," " A Dirge," and others ; while that of 1832 contained the far finer and more elaborate " Lady of Shalott," " CEnone," " The Palace of Art," "A Dream of Fair Women," and "The Lotos Eaters." Yet all these had faults in them, and Tennyson let no less than ten years pass before he pubUshed another pair of volumes, correcting the old work and adding new pieces, some of these last of still higher quality, such as " Movie d' Arthur," " Ulysses " (one of the very greatest pieces of blank verse in the language), " Locksley Hall," and ''The Vision of Sin," the last of which is a wonderful concerted piece of various metres in form, and one of Tennyson's most successful in treatment of subject. This collection was issued in the year 1842. It made known, to those who chose to know it, the presence of a new poet, of absolutely the first class, in EngUsh Uterature. The progress and reception of Browning's work were different, but not so very different at first. The short poem mentioned above, Pauline (rather in Shelley's ^ The student should compare with it three examples not far re- moved in general kind, Coleridge's Grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn," Keats's above-mentioned " December" piece, and Shelley's " O World, O Life, O Time." They are, in ascending measure, much greater poems ; but they are nothing like such elaborate works of art. 2o8 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. manner, and with a good deal about Shelley himself in it) passed almost unnoticed. It showed already that quahty which was long almost universally and is even yet commonly called obscurity/' but in which some of perhaps the best judges have seen and see little more than a very rapid, and as it were shorthand, thought and expression of thought. This appeared still more in his next and longer work, Paracelsus (1835), ^ sort of drama, and most of all in Sordello (1839), which, during many years, remained a by-word for unintelligibility. A httle before it he had written the more regular play of Strafford (1837). All these, being long pieces of con- nected subject, showed him at some disadvantage owing to the peculiarity above noticed, though he had dis- covered a charming lyric faculty in one or two inserted songs. Fortunately, he now turned to shorter poems, and, beginning the year before Tennyson's great revela- tion (1841) but finishing four years after it (1846), issued in parts a collection whimsically called, from the orna- ments on the Jewish High Priest's vestments. Bells and Pomegranates. This contained plays, short pieces half narrative, half soliloquy (a kind which he made specially his own), but also many great lyrics. Few did, but anybody might, now recognise another poet of almost if not quite the first rank, and of the special nineteenth- century species. Obscurity and eccentricity have been at times positively and unduly popular. But the early middle of the nineteenth century was not one of these times, and Browning had still many years to wait for general acceptance. Later Tennyson, whom only very obstinate or very dull both people could profess not to understand, and who in some parts of his work, " The May Queen," Dora," etc., appealed, if not exactly to the vulgar, at any rate to much more commonplace tastes than those which VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE 209 enjoyed the poems enumerated above, made way, not with extreme rapidity, but surely and ever more swiftly, after 1842. In 1847 he published The Princess (a serio- comic epic of great beauty in the serious parts, enriched in its second edition with lyrics more beautiful still),, and in 1850 In Memoriam, a series of elegies on his friend Arthur Hallam's death, which, though sometimes over- praised and very often mispraised, none but a poet of the first rank could have written. In this year too he was made Poet Laureate, and wrote, in 1852, his Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington. A mere Ust of his full work with the shortest abstract of contents would be too much for us here. We must be content to say that Maud (1855), The Idylls of the King (1859), ^nd many volumes of miscellaneous poems — generally en- titled from the first piece, but in one case, and the finest, called Ballads (1880) — sustained and varied, if they did not raise, his fame. At one time (1875 and later) he tried, partly under the encourage- ment of a great actor, Sir Henry Irving, the acting drama {Harold, Queen Mary, Becket, etc.), but though there was, as a matter of course, fine poetry in his plays, he was not the magician who could get rid of the divorce so long existing between the theatre and literature. For many years the " British public " still, as he said, would not Uke Browning ; but he paid no attention to its likes or dishkes, issuing, in no hurry but at his own pleasure, Christmas Eve and Easter Day in 1850, Men and Women in 1855. But it was not till 1864 that a new collection. Dramatis Personae, following upon one of his entire work up to the time (except Pauline), put him, with the generaUty, in his true place beside Tennyson. Perhaps indeed it was not till The Ring and the Book (1868-1869), a huge poem in four volumes, found a new p 2IO A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE cn. public to appreciate it. He now had not only admirers but fanatical and even rather foolish partisans or idolaters ; and the effect of this was not wholly good, for it encouraged him, during the rest of his Ufe, to hurry out volumes chiefly composed of rather loose blank verse. But he never lost the power of exquisite lyric-writing, while even his other verse could be fine, and his last volume, Asolando, pubhshed just as he died, was thoroughly worthy of him. Their joint Although the details just given may seem insufficient separate such great and recently interesting poets, they character- are fuUer than in previous cases of equal or greater rank, rdatl t reason of this is that nowhere else, in a great their own poetic period, are there two poets who, in a manner so time and singularly complete, express the general poetic character others. ^£ ^j^^^ time and of poetry generally. Chaucer, Gower, and Langland do it for their own day almost as completely as was possible, but then that day was a Hmited one. Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton do it, after a fashion, for the great Elizabethan or English Renaissance time ; but Shakespeare is rather too much, as the famous saying goes, ''for all time*' to represent his own specially, and the other two leave much out. Master Tennyson and Browning — it is a task which will take the student some time after he has outgrown this book — and you have the origins of practically all subsequent poetry from the date when they began. The readers of these pages, when they are a little older, will have passed the time which, Uke other times, talks fooUshly of the htera- ture (in this case ''Victorian" hterature) immedi- ately preceding it; and they will be able to see how directly the great Pre-Raphaehte school, to which we shall come presently, and the not yet classed poets who followed and are writing at the present moment, derive from Tennyson and Browning, as well as how completely VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE 211 Tennyson and Browning sum up the poetical achieve- ment (purely individual touches being left out) of the earUer nineteenth century. And as soon as any such reader feels — as it may be hoped many will feel — a distinct appreciation of poetry, let him read any piece of contemporary verse, then a piece of Swinburne's or Rossetti's, then one of Tennyson's or Browning's, then one of Shelley's or Keats's, and having done this turn to anything, however good, in the poets from Dryden to Crabbe, except Blake. He will, if he is ever going to understand Uterature at all, see that the first group of specimens are of one family, the last of another. It is not, however, to be supposed that Tennyson's Younger influence — still less that Browning's — was accepted with ^^^^^^^^^j^^^ the dociUty which had for the most part been shown to Arnold. Dryden, to Pope, and to Johnson. Such dociUty would have been quite contrary to the independent, experi- mental, and questing spirit of Romanticism. For a time they had no contemporaries of importance, except those mentioned at the beginning of this chapter as intermediate or transition writers, and the lady whom Browning himself married ; ^ while Browning, though he taught much to poetic enthusiasts, was, till he became an old man, too httle popular to arouse any rivalry. But it was otherwise with Tennyson. Not long after he had taken his definite and Ufe-long — if not age-long — position by the 1842 volumes, there came into the field a man not much more than ten years younger than 1 Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861), who was five years older than her husband, published poems before him, and became popular, in a way, long before he did. She has been described as " a great poetess and almost a great poet," and she possessed much lyrical gift, alloyed with a false sort of sentiment, now Byronic, now mawkish and *' gushing," as well as a terrible deficiency in taste for language and rhyme. She had, in fact, something in common with the Spasmodics " (see below). ^12 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. himself, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), a son of the historian already mentioned. Arnold was even more remarkable as a prose-writer (that part of his work must be postponed for a Uttle), and this prose work was definitely, deUberately, indeed almost exclusively devoted to criticism. He had been more regularly educated than Tennyson, who, though he went to Cambridge, never took a degree there, and had only been at a country grammar-school, while Matthew Arnold was a Winchester and Rugby boy, a scholar of Balliol, and a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He had, moreover, imbued himself with German ideas, especially from Goethe, and French criticism, especially from Sainte-Beuve, and he did not think Tennyson classical or critical enough. The ancients, and especially the Greek critics (the elder of whom knew no language but their own, and were therefore unable to appreciate the effect of translation), had held that the subject was the great if not the only thing in poetry. Goethe had eagerly taken this up, and seemed at least to maintain that only what you can translate in poetry matters — a doctrine from which his own sometimes exquisite lyrics would suffer pretty heavily. Taking these and other ideas up, Arnold endeavoured to re-classicise EngUsh poetry. But he did not in the least succeed in practice. His own poems, with some curious slips of taste and ear, are often very beautiful, but though they are sometimes less free and florid in language than those of Tennyson and Browning, there is Httle real difference between them, and Arnold sometimes unconsciously echoes Tennyson himself. But though his doing this is of great historical interest, it was not necessary for him to do anything of the kind ; for he came very Uttle short of being a poet of the first class in a thoroughly nineteenth-century style. His classical play, Merope, is a dull sort of thing, VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE 213 and his unrhymed verses are as unsuccessful as that kind has usually been. But in Sohrab and Rustum/' with its fine blank verse not too Miltonic ; in Tristram and Iseult/' in various metres, especially a loose but lovely decasyllabic couplet v^hich was later taken up by William Morris ; and in a large number of minor poems of essen- tially nineteenth-century character, the beauty of the treatment, if it does not entirely obscure the subject, frequently makes the reader forget all about it. Of these are The Forsaken Merman," The Scholar Gipsy and its sequel Thyrsis,*' the two latter celebra- tions of Oxford, and expressions of the vague melancholy and dissatisfaction, itself nothing if not Romantic, of the time. A little later, about the middle of the century and The shghtly before Maud (in which, after a fashion of his, ^^^^jf^,. Tennyson showed that he could take his rivals on their own ground and beat them), came what is called the Spasmodic school, a sort of exaggeration of this Romantic disquiet, recalUng to some extent the excess of the early German Romantic writers. The chief members of this, P. J. Bailey (1816-1892) {Festus), Sidney Dobell (1824-1874) (Balder), Alexander Smith (1830-1867) (A Life Drama), would have been great poets if they could, and sometimes were by no means bad ones. But they were extravagant, uncritical, sometimes merely silly ; and the best thing they produced was the charming parody- drama of Firmilian by WilUam Edmonstoune Aytoun (1813-1865), who did much other good work in verse and prose. Although the school itself lasted not long, and had no formal constitution, Festus at least had very wide vogue and not a Uttle influence. The same tend- encies revive from time to time, and Firmilian is not in the least obsolete ; so that those who pooh-pooh the admission of the Spasmodics to history are scarcely wise. 214 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. The "Pre- These attempts — at classical reaction and at exag- Raphaei- ^ S^^^^^^ Romanticism — ^were failures, though in counter- " acting each other they were useful. A new, real, and valuable development came a Uttle later still in the shape of what is called — not quite happily, but, for want of a better name, tolerably — the " Pre-Raphaelite school. The close connection between poetry and painting in the new literature has already been pointed out ; and it happened that about the forties " of the century certain young painters, following to some extent the critical ideas of Mr. Ruskin (see below), devoted themselves to the counterpart in art of the mediaeval influence which had had so great an effect in letters. One of these, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), was equally great as poet and as painter ; and he and his still younger friends, WiUiam Morris (1834-1896) and Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), were the first and greatest members of the school in poetry. But they were not in the least hostile to Tennyson or to Browning ; on the contrary, they were ardent admirers of both, and they represented, not a breach with but a further develop- ment of, the poetic ideals and methods which, beginning with Coleridge, had been continued by Shelley and Keats, and carried to perfection by the two then Uving leaders. To perfection in one sense but not in another. All true art is infinitely wide as well as long ; and if any form cannot be varied and can only be imitated, Hke the verse of Pope, it is an infalUble sign that it is not of the highest kind. These young poets (as they were about 1859) ^^^f if no positive advantage of genius over Tenny- son and Browning, a relative one of knowledge. Much more was known about the great ages of the past, Middle, Renaissance, and earher modem, than had been known earher ; comparative study of literature and history and painting and sculpture and music had VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE 215 become more common. Into this new heritage they entered. The precise influences which worked on the three were rather different in each case. All, as no Pre- Raphaelite could help being, were strongly mediaeval ; but they took their mediaevaUsm from rather different sources. Rossetti, who was of three-parts ItaUan blood, went straight to the beautiful work of his ancestors, the forerunners and contemporaries of Dante. Swin- burne, who was very widely read in many languages, mingled pure classical, especially Greek, influences with French older and newer, and English of almost every period, but especially the EUzabethan. Morris was almost purely EngUsh or Scandinavian, and the EngHsh period he most affected was that of Chaucer, the Chau- cerians, and Malory. Partly from the effect of these studies, and partly no doubt from that of natural dis- position, Rossetti was specially and in perfection master of the sonnet, though also of other kinds of lyric and of the ballad romance ; Swinburne of almost every kind of poetry, but especially of lyric ; and Morris (though also possessing a charming Ijoical faculty) of narrative romance, in which he recovered the fluency and power of adaptation of the old Middle EngUsh writers, with much more than their poetical gift and with an almost Chaucerian ease. Rossetti's sister, Christina (1830- 1894), was hardly if at all the inferior of her brother, and in the judgment of some disputes with Mrs. Browning, while in that of others she seems easily to carry off, the title of the greatest of English poetesses. Richard Watson Dixon (1833-1900), hke Morris, be- longed to the school from Oxford days, and though his poetry never during his Ufetime attracted the attention which it deserved, was at his best a poet of the truest and of a very rare kind. And soon after the 2i6 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. publication 1 of the first works of the school they were widely and eagerly imitated. Much of this imitation, as mere imitation always is, was worthless, or at best a creditable exercise. But in at least two writers, Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844-1881) and a second James Thomson (1854-1882), it was produced by writers of sufficient genius and individuaUty to deserve mention here. Character This school, the last great one in EngUsh, and one the . influence of which is hardly yet exhausted, though it ties, ^ niay have been recently blended with minor ingredients, represents, as has been said, no revolt from the previous stage, any more than that stage represented revolt from its own predecessor ; but simply a further development of those great principles of varied appeal to the senses of the mind, of the tendency to extend and vary subject, and of that towards lyrical and " occasional verse. There is no doubt that the whole school was to some extent influenced by the double profession of its practical founder, Rossetti, in pushing, farther than even Keats and Tennyson had done, the attempt to render form and colour in poetry. Pitt (see above) would have been still more astonished than he was when reading The Lay of the Last Minstrel if he had chanced upon these poets. They imported also, more largely than Tennyson or even Browning had done, archaic or foreign locutions; while, in Swinburne more particularly, the phraseology of the Authorised Version (always affected by great writers in prose and verse) was utiUsed with increased effect. But what was again most remarkable in all of them was ^ That pubUcation was, in Dante Rossetti's case, deferred by domestic circumstances for some years, but he was the eldest and the most originally influential. Morris and Swinburne had made their first appearances with little notice, but the former's Life and Death of Jason ( 1 866-1 867) and Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (1865) at once arrested public attention. VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE 217 the almost illimitable spirit of experiment which ani- mated their exercises in metre. They never transgressed the sound traditional laws of English prosody, which are all to be found in Shakespeare and Milton, and which have been outlined throughout this little book. But they employed the central principle of liberty to its fullest extent, Christina Rossetti especially playing the very boldest (though still quite legitimate) tricks with the instrument. Swinburne, in the dedication of his most famous book. Poems and Ballads (1866), to the great painter Burne- Jones, described the poetical region among many other characteristics as A land of clear colours and stories And a murmur of musical flowers. It would be necessary to quote all the other particulars in the context in order to give a full idea of the work of these seven poets ; but the two selected lines sum up not ill the beauty, the pastime, the perfume, and the music which their work attempts to give and does give to those who are able to receive them. It follows from what has been said that it is almost important impossible even to make a catalogue of their multi- instances, farious work. Rossetti's is the smallest in bulk, but both it and his sister's contain what are called sonnet sequences " — series of sonnets on the same or kindred subjects which almost constitute long poems ; and the longest and finest of his ballad-romances. Rose Mary, runs to more than a thousand Unes. Morris, after a volume of delightful and extremely novel short poems, the Defence of Guinevere (1858), took to the long ones above named, The Life and Death of Jason, The Earthly Paradise (a huge series of narratives, partly from mediaeval, partly from classical sources, introduced and 2i8 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE CH. connected by a sort of frame like that of Chaucer or Gower), Sigurd the Volsung, Swinburne tried every- thing, plays, not for acting [Atalanta in Calydon, Chastelard, Bothwell, Erechtheus), and long poems {Tristram of Lyonesse), but chiefly produced volumes of the general type so common in the century, sometimes entitled from their first piece, but really collections of disconnected and more or less lyrical work — three series of Poems and Ballads, Songs before Sunrise, etc. Christina Rossetti in the same way named her earUer volumes from pieces of some length. Goblin Market (1861) and The Prince's Progress, but wrote mainly lyrics. Canon Dixon produced one long poem, Mano, in the (for EngUsh) rather unusual terza rima of Dante, but most of his work was also lyrical, as was that of O'Shaugh- nessy, who indeed wrote nothing of any length except some adaptations of the Old French poetess, Marie de France. Thomson, strongly imbued with pessimist ideas, embodied them in one poem of considerable length. The City of Dreadful Night, but most of his work is also of the short poem " kind, and long- This point is of importance for the study of the influence^ historical progress of EngUsh poetry. In long poems of their the importance of action, plot, and so forth, on which work. critics Uke Matthew Arnold laid special stress, is very great. But it is practically impossible for any one to keep, throughout a long poem, the height of passionate expression, the elaborate and gorgeous word-painting, and the varied appeals of music which Romantic poetry demands. Even Milton could not do this, and though Spenser went far towards it, he did not quite succeed, and, in the opinion of some, sacrificed general to detailed effect. In short poems, however, if the poet has the genius and will take the pains, he may hope to attain the object of entrancing and absorbing the reader by such VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE 219 a combination throughout. And it is at this stimulation or enchantment that these poets, like all poets of the nineteenth century except Wordsworth and (in theory) Arnold himself, specially aimed. Even William Morris (who was first of all a romancer of a somewhat archaic character, to whom verse and prose came almost in- differently) was yet, in The Defence of Guinevere and in some later books, quite on the level of his fellows in the lyrical way. Dramatic work is not more decidedly the special kind of the EUzabethan period, nor satiric and didactic that of the Augustan, than lyric is of the Victorian. Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats had shown this in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. But it was the Victorian poets who were to demonstrate it even more fully. And though certain tricks in language of the three leaders have been abandoned, though in some cases rougher metres and unrhymed or irregular arrangements have been attempted, and though other efforts at innovation have been made, it will not be found that any serious revolution had been achieved even up to Mr. Swinburne's very recent death. Somewhat later than the appearance of the new poets Progress mentioned at the beginning of this chapter there ^^^^f. appeared also a new start in the novel. Novels had miscei- continued to be v^itten in crowds: but only two of igneous novelists the greatest writers had contributed to them, and one 1827-40 ' of these, Miss Austen, had found few followers as yet. Scott, too, Hved till after the appearance of Tennyson. The immense popularity and profit of his achievement had indeed excited plenty of attempts to imitate him, but the most successful things, those of G. P. R. James (1801-1860) and Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882), were scarcely of the first class in this way. Many writers, great or almost great in other ways, Hogg, Hunt, De Quincey, Wilson, Lockhart, even Moore, wrote novels 220 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. of this or that kind : and between 1817 and 1830 Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) (who took up the series thirty years later still in his last novel, Gryll Grange, i860) wrote in Headlong Hall and others to Crotchet Castle, a kind of " eccentric " novel (see above on Sterne, p. 164), the purely literary character of which was very high indeed. The great War with France had caused the growth of specialist novels in naval and military affairs, of which Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) and Charles Lever (1806-1872) were the chief practitioners, and Marryat at least an unsurpassed one in his own kind. Moreover the remarkable and frequently varying talent of Edward George Bulwer, afterwards Lord Lytton (1803-1873), appeared as early as 1827 with Falkland, the first of a series, changing remarkably in kind, and at one time so popular as to earn for him the position, in some estimations, of ''greatest living novel- ist.'' But nobody had approached Scott in his own Une of historical and adventurous fiction ; and few people had even attempted to develop that immense field of perfectly ordinary life and manners which, as we saw. Miss Austen had opened. In particular nobody had yet been able to shake off (Marryat perhaps came nearest to doing so) the sort of artificial dialect which, borrowed to a great extent from the stage, hung upon the novel. Very close (according to the old rule) to the birth- years of Tennyson and Browning occurred those of two future novehsts, one of whom was to produce work of a class in a way eccentric, but at its best first-rate, while the other was to give, both to the historical and to the domestic novel, an almost entirely new inspiration. And these were followed, also as usual, by others only second to themselves. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) suffered some hardships VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE 221 in his youth and was very irregularly educated, but Dickens: took early (at the age of seventeen) to newspaper work, p^^^j.^^^^^ and when just of age began to write the Sketches by Boz, isolation, soon afterwards collected — things half essay and half story, owing not a little to Leigh Hunt and to Theodore Hook.i A chance commission gave him the opportunity of writing the wonderful and quite unique Pickwick Papers (1837), the freshest and most unalloyed expres- sion of his peculiar genius. It made, and deserved to make, his fortune. He followed it up next year with his first regular novel, Oliver Twist, and continued writing for more than thirty years till he died suddenly in 1870, leaving an unfinished piece, Edwin Drood. These novels have probably on the whole been more widely read than any others in Enghsh with the single exception of Scott's, which had twenty years' start. Dickens himself came near to the historical novel in Barnaby Rudge, and dehberately attempted it in A Tale of Two Cities. But his usual form, apart from The Pickwick Papers which stands alone, is a sort of cross between the novel of ordinary Ufe and the fantastic tale, the humours and eccentricities of in- dividuals being enlarged sometimes, especially in his later books, to the point of exaggeration and even of caricature. David Copper field (1849-1850), perhaps commonly thought his masterpiece, has much that is autobiographical in it, and less than any other of pure extravaganza, though it has something of the melo- dramatic. His work has never been successfully imitated, and can be very severely criticised in parts; but while it has attraction for readers of almost all classes, some of those who find most fault with it critic- ally read it oftenest. 1 A writer (1788-1841) of brilliant though in great part wasted talent, who was an active and popular novelist and journalist between 1820 and 1840. 222 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) was the son of an official high in the East Indian service, in- herited a small fortune, though he managed to spend it or lose it soon, and was educated at Charterhouse and generally, (^g^jy^l^j-j^g^^ fjg began, even as an undergraduate, to write for publication, and never gave up the practice, to which indeed, before long, he was indebted for his livelihood. But he was persistently unlucky, and it was years, and even many years, before he got his wonderful powers really to work. During these years he tried everything, light verse of unique character, reviews, burlesque and other tales, poUtical articles especially on foreign affairs, travels at home and abroad, in fact, anything that the numerous papers for which he wrote could demand or would accept. In nearly all this work there appeared a singular and as yet almost unexampled kind of humour resulting from the union of deep feehng with the wildest surface of some- times apparently cynical and extravagant jesting, and with intimate thought on human affairs. At last one large and one small thing, the great satirical novel of Vanity Fair (1846-1848) and the slight but charming sketch of the manners of society in Mrs. Perkins's Ball, opened his proper place to him, when two-thirds of his Ufe, which was to be a short one, were gone. In his last stage he produced three more novels, Pendennis, Esmond, and The Newcomes, of the greatest kind, a fifth. The Virginians, of more disputed merit, and a sixth. The Adventures of Philip, which, though containing some of his best things, is perhaps inferior as a whole ; more of his charming verse, " merry and sad to tell," and some miscellaneous things, especi- ally a series of essays. Roundabout Papers (1860-1863), in which his literary character and powers are almost completely miniatured. VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE 223 In Thackeray's case, as in others here, it is important to consider, not merely this nature and its result in work, but the relation of it as work to past and future Utera- ture. Thackeray's peculiar blend of humour and pathos, of the sharpest satire with the profoundest melancholy, does not appeal to — in fact is not comprehended by — everybody. To appreciate it thoroughly you must love art for art's sake and nature for nature's sake." Except in some rather external points he^is not more imitable than Dickens, though he is much less popular. But when we leave his intentional burlesques — and even to some extent in them — we find something which is not in Dickens and which can be followed. This is the selection of subjects, and the treatment of them, in exact adjustment to the chances and ways of ordinary modern life — in other words, Miss Austen's plan revived and re-created in a manUer and larger fashion. In his, as in her case, this sacrifice of appeal to extraordinary incident was accompanied by an extraordinary command of human character, and of life in its most superficially trivial as well as in its fundamentally deepest points. This might in either case be hard enough to follow. But the general system could be followed, and was. Unlike Miss Austen, too, who, deliberately and no doubt wisely, refused to try the historical novel, Thackeray tried it in Esmond, which some have thought his very greatest book, and again left not merely work consummate in itself but great pattern-work. In it he improves upon Scott by giving a more exact picture of the ways, manners, and even language of the time, deeper drawn if not more life-Hke characters, and that pecuUar blended attitude or temper of his which has been noted above — that of the outwardly impartial but in- wardly sympathetic onlooker who, in deed and in truth, sees most of the game. He thus follows Fielding 224 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. and Scott himself as a regenerator of the novel, and novelists still pursue the ways he opened. Other And, yet once more, the advent of these two capital 0^845- ii^^veHsts was actually succeeded by that of numerous 70. lesser but not so very much lesser ones, as well as by that of a crowd, which need not be noticed, of followers lesser still. CharlesReade (1814-1884), Anthony Trollope(i8i5- 1882), Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) and her younger sister Emily, Mary Ann Evans George Eliot ") (1819-1880), and Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) were all born before 1820 and close to one another, and therefore came in time to experience, and to some extent to assimilate, the influence of the two still greater writers. Reade has something of Dickens in him ; all the others more or less of Thack- eray. But all had enough of individual talent, and sufficient imbaement with the general tendency of the time, to have produced, in all probability, remarkable work if England had been so unfortunate as to have no Thackeray and no Dickens. They all exemplified what we may call the new expatiation of the novel — the handhng of it with extended subjects, modernised phrase, occasional indulgence in the new (see below) ornate prose, mixture of novel and romance in plot, and redoubled attention to individual not typical character, more or less carefully analysed, as well as additional study of what is called local colour," that is to say, attention to the manners, language, fashions, etc., of the time dealt with. Troiiope, Reade, beginning very late (1852), and wasting much Eik)T*'^^ of his time upon second-rate play -writing, showed, the ' when he came to write novels, especially in It is Brontes, Never Too Late to Mend (1856) and The Cloister and Reade Kingsley. Hearth (1862), a strange compound of original genius, acquired scholarship and reading, and a most laborious collection of details from newspapers and VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE 225 books to work and colour up his own inventions. Trollope, who was in the Civil Service, and also did not publish very early, was one of the most prolific novelists of the century and one of the most characteristic. With one or two early and later excursions into different kinds, which were not great successes, his novels from The Warden (1855) and Bar Chester Towers to his death, over forty in number, were occupied with vivid representation of the actual society of his time — reproduced with less genius, than Thackeray's, and more superficial and ephemeral, but almost as life-like. The other three were more ambitious. Charlotte {Jane Eyre, 1847) and Emily Bronte (the third sister, Anne, wrote also, but was less noteworthy) threw a good deal more of the older and more emotional romance into their work, though not going out of their way for any very extraordinary incident. They were nothing if not passionate ; but combined with their passion minute details of manners. George EHot," again a very late -writing noveUst [Scenes of Clerical Life, 1857, Adam Bede next year), while quite unlike the Brontes in most ways, also made passion, though of a less florid kind, a strong element in her novels, but (especially in her later work) combined this with the apparently opposite element of a peculiar, half- scientific, half-philosophical technicality. In one book, Romola (1863), she essayed the new historical novel of the type of Esmond. Charles Kingsley,^ beginning with small and immature but singularly picturesque and romantic studies {Yeast, Alton Locke) of the dis- turbed political and social time of 1848-1849, passed to the great historical novels of Hypatia (1853) (deahng with 1 Not to be confused with his younger brother Henry (1830-1876), also a novelist of talent approaching genius, but less varied and less poetical. Charles was actually a poet, writing little, but sometimes exquisitely. Q 226 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITEfeATURE ch. the last days of the Roman Empire and of pagan philo- sophy) and Westward Ho I (1854) (with the wars of Eng- land and Spain in the sixteenth century). Opinions as to his later books, Two Years Ago (1857) Hereward the Wake (1866) have varied. But his adventure in what has been here called the eccentric novel, or at least story-book,^ The Water Babies (1863), a delightful tangle of science, poetry, satire, description of nature, and things in general, showed his extraordinary versa- tiUty. Their And this process of what we may call world-explora- successors. ^j^j^ fiction of old times and new, of novel- and romance- subjects, of society and the Hfe of thought, of everything human in short, continued (with new recruits of only slightly less power) for a very long time. It was de- veloped, in one direction chiefly, by a noveUst about ten years younger than George Ehot and Kingsley, George Meredith (1829-1911), and in another by one twenty years younger still, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850- 1894), who, though the most* fervent of Meredith's admirers, himself wrote in quite a different style. George Both of these were also writers in verse (Meredith Meredith. ^3^5 distinctly a poet, though of a rather eccentric kind), and both of them devoted themselves entirely to litera- ture. Meredith's first considerable work, which was also perhaps his best, was a novel entitled The Ordeal of Richard Fever el (1859). Although this first book attracted notice at once from those who were capable of appreci- ating it, it was not popular, and he had to write against public taste for nearly as long as Browning, whom he in some way resembles, while in others there is an ^ These things were tried, about the same period and later, not nnfre- quently, but naturally with various success. The most famous of all — a book never likely to be forgotten, and a rare masterpiece of fantastic humour — was Alice in Wonderland (1865), by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1908), who called himself ** Lewis Carroll." VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE 227 equally strong resemblance to Dickens. His subjects are usually quite ordinary, and he contrives, like Dickens, to make them extraordinary. But his means of doing this are as different as possible from Dickens's. They consist chiefly (and here the resemblance to Browning comes in, though Meredith carries them much further) in an excessively contorted and unusual style, intensely literary, requiring not a httle mental gymnastic on the part of the reader to get the better of it, and unfortu- nately sometimes tempting those who do not understand it to make as if they did. But Meredith was a man of undoubted genius, a master of character, and (when he would let it be seen) of story. His popularity, when it came, turned, as in Browning's case, to an almost furious partisanship, and he has exercised great influence. But critical opinion about him has not yet got settled from extremes. Stevenson's way of fiction was the romance rather r. l. than the novel; and when, after many trials, he had Stevenson, made a successful appeal to the pubUc in Treasure Island (1883), he stuck to it. Like Meredith's, his prin- cipal concern — both in novel-writing and in the somewhat Hazlitt-hke essays which some of his admirers preferred even to his novels — was style. But he set himself to import- attain this in a different way. Meredith had shaped a^ce of style in himself in hterature without dehberately imitating both these anybody, or rather by dehberately writing as nobody else had done. Stevenson acquired his style by laborious imitations of other styles, Meredith's included. It is a disputed question whether he ever attained one that was distinctly and certainly his own ; but his quest of it, in connection with the character of his novels, made him very interesting. The greatest romance-writers and historical novehsts of the earlier nineteenth century — • Scott in Enghsh, and Dumas in French — had been 228 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. rather careless, merely as writers ; and Thackeray, though possessing a marvellous and unique style of his own, had written quite simply, and had even allowed himself occasionally to make slips in minute details of composi- tion. George EUot had charged her style latterly with technical terminology, and Kingsley, especially in his early work, had taken up the methods of Mr. Rusldn (see below) in description. But no novelist (unless we go back to Sterne) till Meredith, and after him hardly any- body in modern times till Stevenson, had obviously made his manner of writing an object, almost apart from the tale he had to tell, and in the This carefulness and troubling about style in prose is ^^^^s^t the most remarkable development, on that side of litera- century ture, during the nineteenth century, and it is, as might generally, be expected, specially noticeable in the department to which we are coming — that of essay- writing, both critical and other. It should be remembered that when the great change to " Augustanism " took place about 1660, there was — ^in poetry and prose alike — a general tendency to turn away from elaborate and gorgeous writing, from attention to comphcated metre in the one case, and to varied and elaborate rhythm in the other. When this general tendency was reversed, its effects might be ex- pected to be felt in both " harmonies " (as Dry den called prose and verse) of language. But it must also be re- membered that, during the EUzabethan period itself, elaborate prose had been (except in the premature and mainly false experiment of Lyly) later than elaborate verse, and the fact repeated itself now. Coleridge indeed, the eternal pioneer, had (see above, p. 176) been first here also, and had written elaborate, highly coloured, definitely rhythmical prose almost before the beginning of the century. But the time was in fact so well provided by the action of the work of Johnson, VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE 229 Burke, and Gibbon on the earlier Augustan plain style, that there v^as no urgent necessity for it to look for new things. Still, the appetite for colour and sound v^as sure to make itself felt in prose before very long, and at least by the third if not the second decade of the century it did so, and continued to do so in successive waves or stages, particularly in the departments of criticism, its work- essay-writing, and history. The first stage may be ^ represented by three men, all noticed before, and outside^^ all born some way within the eighteenth century — De fiction. Quincey, Wilson, and Landor. Then we may take two great practitioners in all the kinds just mentioned, strongly contrasted with each other — Macaulay and Carlyle ; next the epoch-making influence of Mr. Ruskin, with the quieter if not directly opposed Oxford school represented by Cardinal Newman, Dean Mansel, Mr. Froude, and (with a difference) Matthew Arnold; and lastly the prose Pre-RaphaeUte developments. In the first group there are remarkable differences The first between De Quincey and Wilson on the one hand and stage: Dt Landor on the other. Both of the former were essenti- and ally contributors to periodicals, and the only book of Landor. importance which either of them wrote, De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, appeared first in the London Magazine. Landor, whose pecuUar temper would have made it nearly impossible for him either to edit or to contribute to any periodical, produced most of his voluminous prose in book-form, as Imaginary Con- versations between historical or invented persons. Wilson was by far the weakest and most unequal of the three, though his position on Blackwood's Magazine gave him great influence, but De Quincey and Landor are among the greatest of EngUsh prose-writers. The former, who had no poetical gift, dehberately set about making prose a rival to poetry ; Landor had no need to do this, 230 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. being himself perfectly capable of writing poetry of a high class and in no small volume. But his prose was actually more ornate than his verse. And we find in his dream-descriptions, of which he was very fond, and in such famous passages of De Quincey as the visions of "Our Lady of Sorrow," ''The English Mail Coach," "Savannah la Mar," etc., pieces of prose which not merely permit but actually invite arrangement in "feet," though these feet do not repeat themselves, after the same or closely similar patterns, as in the case with verse. In imaginative or passionate subjects, to which both are much addicted, this prose can be used with great effect, and is then a deUghtful possession. But it is not very well suited for others ; and it has, as it had had in the seventeenth century, the great danger of being liable to break down and become tawdry or ridiculous. In fact Wilson's very often does this, and De Quincey's occasion- ally approaches collapse. Landor's more classical style escapes better, but is sometimes ponderous when he tries to be grand, and trivial when he attempts hghtness. The next pair can hardly be said to have derived anything from, or to have been at all affected by, these of whom they were sUghtly younger contemporaries. But they show equally, in their own different ways, the general desire to get to something beyond the mere standard style, good as it was, which had resulted from the influence of Johnson, Burke, and Gibbon on the plainer Augustan method, and which was represented at Macauiay. its best by Southey. When Macaulay sent his famous essay on Milton, which he himself denounced later as " gaudy and ungraceful," to the editor of the Edinburgh Review, Jeffrey asked him where on earth he got his style ? " No answer on his part has survived ; but some have tried to give it for him — alleging Burke, Gibbon, Hazhtt, and others. The truth is that it is the VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE 231 antithetic manner of Johnson and his contemporaries, emphasised and re-made w^ith something of the pecuhar individuaUsm of the nineteenth century. The sentences become much shorter ; the antitheses simpler and more obvious. Constant allusions to history and hterature are brought in ; proper names are freely used, but very often (here the resemblance to Gibbon comes) peri- phrases are substituted for them. A curious amount of detail in fact is supphed, somev^hat in Defoe's way, to supply an air of verisimilitude ; and the most careful pains are taken never to venture a hesitating or qualified statement. All is perfectly clear, and the reader feels, not merely that he understands everything (which gives him a pleasant sensation of equality), but that he has met a man who knows a great deal more than he does, and has settled every question that comes up (which tempers the other feehng with a generous humility). Macaulay apphed and perfected this style in a long and famous series of Essays on historical and literary sub- jects before he used it in his still more famous History of England, which, beginning with a retrospective sketch, deals at immense but never tedious length with the reign of James II. and part of that of William III. For what is called " readableness " Macaulay has never had a superior ; and it is only after some time that the style begins to seem a little noisy and monotonous, only after a good deal of independent and comparative study that the matter is found to be rather treacherously superficial and one-sided. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), an older man than c^riyie. Macaulay, but with some early disadvantages, began with even less innovation upon the standard style than Macaulay had shown. His Lije of Schiller (1825) is, as far as manner goes, merely a very good example of this style itself. But the subject is tell-tale, for it intimated 232 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. an acquaintance, which amounted to a devotion, with German Hterature — for some sixty or seventy years past the home of the eccentric, the extravagant, and the passionate — as well as an attempt to master the philosophy of history and hterature generally. Carlyle's nature and his studies took but little time in breaking through and remaking this style. From Swift and Sterne in English ; from the disciples and caricaturists of these two, Hamann, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul Richter in German ; from the perfervid and eccentric genius of his own countrymen, such as Sir Thomas Urquhart ; and above all from his own restless, melancholy, volcanic temperament, he fashioned an extraordinary manner, which showed itself first, and with a sort of juvenile extravagance, in Sartor Resartus (1831). Then, besides many Essays on history and literature, he wrote The French Revolution (1837), perhaps on the whole his masterpiece ; a marvellously painstaking treatment of Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845) ; a sombre com- ment on English pohtics in Chartism ; a singularly brilliant specimen of his power of conceiving and revivifying history in Past and Present (1843), also poUtical, and a later work on contemporary subjects, but not obsolete by any means, called Latter-day Pamphlets (1850) ; some vivid but not well - proportioned Lectures on Heroes ; a characteristic but singularly attractive Life of his friend Sterhng ; and lastly, the immense, almost chaotic, but wonderfully rich and varied Frederick the Second, which cost him fourteen years' labour. Carlyle's style horrified even a generation which had outgrown most of the purely neo-classic restrictions ; and before this horror had quite died out, new points of view had succeeded his. But for more than a quarter of a cen- tury he had more influence than any other prose-writer on young men of intelligence, though they might very VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE 233 seldom agree with all of his views or even with most of them ; he was a chief inspirer of men of genius like Ruskin, Froude, and Kingsley ; and there is little doubt that he will, for all time, keep his place as the most forcible, thoughtful, and " magnetic " representative of the combined principles of obstinate individuahty, keen interest, and wide knowledge which characterise Vic- torian literature. It was not till 1843 — when Carlyle and Macaulay Rusid: were already men of middle age, and, as cricketers say, thoroughly well set — that a new landmark of Enghsh prose was made by A Graduate of Oxford,'' and a very young one, John Ruskin (1819-1900), in the shape of the first volume of Modern Painters, Its author was to live nearly as long as Tennyson himself after this his first work, and, though not to fill the whole of his Hfe to the very end with fresh publications, as Tennyson did, to compose a spacious shelf-ful. Modern Painters itself was to occupy twenty years and fill six large volumes; The Stones of Venice (1851-1853), an almost proportionately voluminous work, took three ; and The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) ^^e first of a long series of smaller books supplemented by curious attempts at a kind of periodical, Fors Clavigera (1871 onwards), etc. In these the author, taking, almost for the first time in English, the so-called Fine Arts for his principal subject, and applying his principles in them and his studies of them with an immense expatiation into literature, politics, political economy especially, and almost everything else, developed (partly under the influence of Carlyle) a vast but rather incoherent gospel or set of opinions which does not directly concern us here. But the literary form which the expression of this gospel took concerns us very much. In the first place, the influence of the arts infused into Ruskin's style an 234 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. attention to the colour and form of natural as well as artificial objects which only technical writers had hitherto attempted, and which went far beyond even the efforts of the poets from the " Lake " School and Scott in verse onward. Lastly, still in the spirit of these arts, he boldly built up his sentences by innumerable added strokes. Never, since the seventeenth century, had an author dared such long sentences as Ruskin allowed himself ; yet these sentences were perfectly clear as well as admirably modulated. His chief fault was indulgence in actual blank verse, though he managed so skilfully as to carry this off in a way. In short, " word-painting " became a definite and deliberate art in his hands ; and there were many to learn it of him. Newman, Concurrently, however, with this and earUer, certain fnd*^^^' other " graduates of Oxford " were producing styles which others. addressed themselves more to the intellect proper under the influence, in part at least, of the great Oxford Movement " in religion. The eldest and greatest of these writers, as well as one of the early chiefs of the movement itself, was John Henry Newman (1801- 1890), afterwards Cardinal. Newman was a great preacher; but his pulpit practice did not confine him to what is called an oratorical style, and his own is in fact the perfection of the standard " chastened by a more purely classical form in one direction, but coloured and enhvened not a httle by touches approaching Romanticism, and by half-poetic rhythm. Nothing, however, was more abhorrent to Newman than the least gaudiness ; and there grew from his example a newest- classical manner, which displayed itself, with individual changes, in many writers both in and out of Oxford at the time, and in three Oxford men more particularly. Henry Longueville Mansel (1820-1871), a philosopher as well as a theologian, clave to the severer side in his sermons VIII VICTORIAN LITERATURE 235 and lectures, but almost or quite rivalled Newman in the grave music which he extracted from it. James Anthony Froude (1818-1894) developed in his large History of England in Tudor times, in his Short Studies, and else- where, a variety equally musical and more picturesque, if also more unequal. Matthew Arnold at first wrote a very quiet and classical style, but afterwards, partly from his study of foreign models, added much more " trickery.'' Yet no one maintained the credit of essay- writing, especially in Uterary subjects, at a higher level, and no one had so much to do with the recovery and extension of critical practice. All these influences continued to work during the last Swinbume quarter of the nineteenth century, but they were mixed j^Q^jg^ ^* with others still. As usual, the Pre-Raphaehte quality and Pater. Ungered for some time, after showing itself in verse, before it attacked prose, but it did not fail to do so. Morris, as has been said, was a voluminous and effective prose- writer, but not in modem style at all. But Swinburne's criticism fills many volumes, and from its very first con- siderable example, the William Blake of 1868, it dis- played, along with great individuality, a very strong blend of Ruskin's manner. And that manner reappeared, though with a still greater personal difference and with some indebtedness to Matthew Arnold, in the last writer to whom ^ we can give prominence here, Walter ^ As in almost all the chapters of this book, but more than ever, the writer is compelled by want of space to be silent about many of whom he would fain speak. John Stuart Mill (i 806-1 873) in philosophy, Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) and Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) in science, are instances in two branches of what may be called applied literature ; in literature proper, W- E. Henley (1849- 1903), a poet and critic of great vigour and originality; Andrew Lang (1844-1912), a master of style in prose and verse alike; and Sir W. S. Gilbert (1836-1911) (see Glossary under " Burlesque"), perhaps the only writer, for more than a century, who has taken away the reproach of the drama by combining theatrical and literary merit of a rare kind. But there are so many others in all divisions that it is dangerous even to name these few. 236 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ch. viii Horatio Pater (1839-1894). His work and Meredith's, sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both together, have been the latest influences of great power, and display themselves up to this very moment. On the whole these changes and influences in style worked almost as well in prose as in verse. The business of verse is first of all, if not wholly, to delight — to appeal by the use of musical and pictorial language to those who wish and who are able to feel. The business of prose is, first of all, though perhaps not wholly, to instruct, to inform, to develop the opportunities for those who wish to know. This has been done, in both directions, by the poetry and by the prose of the nineteenth century, as it had never been done before except between 1580 and 1660. It has not been possible here to give many details — less possible in the case of prose, with its enormous extension to the ever-widening provinces of human knowledge, than in that of poetry, with its appeal, chiefly, though in varying form, to the always more or less stable range of human feeUng. But the endeavour has been made to set forth in outUne what happened as to expression in both these great divisions. For the history of literature is the history of expression. ABSTRACT AND CHRONOLOGICAL CONSPECTUS o p o (L) - ^ O a; t3 ^B-^ ^ rR ^ ^ ^ c/2 cd tn o ^ t-^.S ojQ ci.}:^ si 5 be O rt > c 8 g ^ c S O ^ (U P o c ^ o c '2 CTj to ^ 8 CO < W Pi O O ^ nj g C o u c C ^ ^ CX O «ii t/) c _ u i2 ^ u > n3 c oJ - -.i: g o > ^ 1^ T* O T!} ^ C C ?i 0, 3 3 V) in J? |2i 25 •I ^ 5 . . s ewulf knov Cyn Not 238 ? . I llr|l|IU||irsi e go '/! 0) 0 « ,Q Q D E f« ll -go C Q o*© i S V pqpq: fcr Q t:. 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Also in continuous arrange- ment by a few English poets, the chief of them being Drayton in Polyolhion, and Browning in Fifine at the Fair. Allegory. Literally a '* talking about something else." Used generally for a story in verse or prose where moral, religious, or other senses are conveyed by implication. Spenser's Faerie Queene and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress are the greatest alle- gories in English ; but the most prolific time for such things was from 1350 to 1550. Alliteration. The use of words beginning with the same letter or letters. In Old Enghsh (where any vowel will also make it) a definite constituent of versification, and revived as such in Middle English poetry during the late fourteenth, fifteenth, and very early sixteenth centuries. Afterwards, and to the present day, very frequently used (though in the Elizabethan and Augustan periods sometimes sneered at), not as a con- stituent of versification, but as an ornament of verse. Anapaest. A foot of two short syllables (" unaccented," as some call them) and one long (" accented "). Used sometimes by itself, sometimes in Substitution (which see) for iambs in ordin- ary verse, (^w— ) Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) literature is that from the earliest times to the twelfth century (1155 the chief known date). Aureate = " gilded." A term applied to the pompous Latin- ised forms of words and phrases used in the fifteenth and early 1 A considerable number of these terms are necessarily prosodic. But the explanation of them has been cut down to the lowest point. The more advanced or more curious student may be referred to A Historical Manual of English Prosody iX-on^ow, Macmillan & Co.). Other items, such as " Classic," " Romantic,' " Renaissance," are more fully dealt with. 257 s 258 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE sixteenth centuries, such as " golden candle matutine " for the sun. Ballad. A short poem, generally with some story in it (the " Robin Hood " Ballads are almost our earliest examples), and as a rule in stanzas of short Hues. The special " ballad-" also called " common "-measure, is a four-lined stanza, the first and third lines (which have four iambic feet) being sometimes, and the second and third (which have three) being always rhymed together.^ " Long " (four octosyllables rhymed alternately) and "short" (see Poulter's) measures, as well as lengthened stanzas (from five to nine lines) , as in The A ncient Mariner, are sometimes used. When the French form Ballade is employed, it means something different — a poem still short, but seldom telling a story, and with the rhymes the same all through, but arranged in complicated order (see Triolet). Such poems were written by Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and others in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and also, some thirty or forty years ago, by modern poets. Belles-Lettres (hyphen sometimes disused in English). A French term more properly restricted, in its original language, to rhetoric, poetry, and grammatical or critical writing ; but frequently extended, especially in English use, to all branches of literature which are not strictly scientific in intention. Blank Verse. A series of unrhymed decasyllabic lines, which appears first in Surrey's translation of the Aeneid, and of which the greatest example, not dramatic, is Paradise Lost. Since about 1700 it has been constantly used in non-dramatic poetry, while in drama, since 1570-1580, it has been (save for a very brief interval about 1 665-1 680) the recognised form for serious plays in verse. Burden. (Or Refrain.) The same line (or a line very slightly altered) recurring at the end of stanzas in the same poem. 1 Typical example : The other was a softer voice, As soft as honey-dew ; Quoth he, ^' The man hath penance done, And penance more will do." The term " ballad-measure" is sometimes, but confusingly and incorrectly, applied to the j/^-line stanza of Chaucer's Sir Thopas \ His shield was all of gold so red, And therein was a boares head, A carbuncle beside ; And there he swore, on ale and bread, How that the giant shall be dead, Betide what betide I There are ballads in this metre, but far fewer than in the other. It is, on the other hand, very common in romances, and is often called the "romance-six." Its original names in Latin and French were versus caudatus or rime couee tailed rhyme"), from the short line following the longer ones. GLOSSARY OF TECHNICAL TERMS Burlesque, from Italian burla, '*a jest," is a teim. sometimes rather loosely used for several comic styles of writing. Parody (which see) is one kind of it, and others have been distinguished as " heroi-comic," " mock-heroic," etc. Generally speaking, the burlesque effect is attained, either by taking something more or less grand or serious, and treating it in a ludicrous manner; or by reversing the process and giving apparently solemn treat- ment to low or ridiculous subjects. But, as a rule, these processes are a good deal mixed. Satire (which see) often avails itself of burlesque, but by no means always. Pure burlesque may be found in Chaucer's Rime of Sir Thopas, where the weaker romances are parodied, in parts of Butler's Hudihras, wherein the Roundhead party is made ridiculous, and in a succession of plays, Buckingham's Rehearsal and Fielding's Tom Thumb, wherein contemporary dramatic absurdities are travestied or presented in a ludicrous aspect. Canning's Rovers, where the Rehearsal kind is shown combined with political satire, is rather mixed. Burlesque drama became again very popular in the middle of the nineteenth century, and, with much that was merely ephemeral, produced the remarkable work of the late Sir William Gilbert (H.M.S. Pinafore, The Mikado, etc.), which is burlesque of almost the highest kind, transcending mere individual travesty. Caesura. See Pause. Carol. Originally a dance accompanied with song ; then the song only ; lastly and specially a religious song. Chorus. A lyrical interlude between the acts of Greek plays. Sometimes employed in English, the most famous examples being in Samson Agonistes. Classic and Romantic. Two words very difficult to explain accurately, but constantly recurring in all modern literary history, and very important to understand, at least in a general way, as early as possilDle. Their original and derivative meanings have little to do with their applied senses. " Classic " was originally applied to the classes into which Roman citizens were divided, and then, by a common figure, to a citizen of the first class or to some excellent thing or person. As at the Renaissance (which see), the ancient literatures of Greece and Rome were (with some reason) thought superior to modern productions, the terms " classics," " classical," etc., were applied to them. " Romantic," on the other hand, originally meant something written in one of the modern languages descended from Latin, especially the first and most important of these, French. But as a large part, and by far the most popular part, of such books consisted of the stories which we now call " Romances," the name was specially affixed to them. In the distinctive sense, however, of the title-words of this note, the meaning is trans- 26o A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE f erred a long way further. " Classic with us generally means literature which aims first of all at perfection according to the standards which the Greeks and Romans set up ; attention to plot and action, careful and restrained use of language, general submission to rule. (" Neo-c\a,ssic," a term sometimes used in this book, refers to the excessive, inaccurate, and sometimes irrational exaggeration of this system, which characterised the Italian critics of the sixteenth, the French of the seventeenth, and the English of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.) " Romantic," on the other hand, has come to mean the qualities opposed to these, and shown in early French literature, in part of Italian and Spanish, and in almost the whole of English except during what has been here called the " Augustan period " — comparative negligence of rule as such ; indulgence of individual character ; use of words, even if unfamiliar, to produce the most brilliant effect ; judgment by enjoyment of the result rather than by measurement of the means. All sorts of antitheses have been devised to bring out the contrast. Putting aside instances unsuitable to this book, classical precision has been opposed to Romantic vagueness ; Classicism has been said to be ** method," Romanticism " energy," and there are many others. But at the present stage the student will derive most benefit from examples. Spenser, Shakespeare, the Caroline lyrists, as well as most of our poets and of our greatest prose-writers since Coleridge, are definitely Romantic. Milton, Dryden, Landor, and perhaps Matthew Arnold are mixed ; Addison, Pope, and most of the eighteenth-century writers are classic or neo-classic. Comedy (originally from Greek klo^jlos, " a revel "). A kind of drama opposed to Tragedy (which see), as being intended to cause laughter rather than tears, and to reflect actual ordinary life rather than exceptional incidents. Various kinds of Comedy are often (more or less accurately) discriminated in English literary history. " Romantic " comedy, the liighest kind of all (exemplified in such a piece as Shakespeare's As You Like It), is, as an original thing, English (and perhaps Spanish) only, though it has been imitated in other languages. It combines high poetical and romantic appeal with the moving of laughter, and requires perhaps, if not the very greatest, the most varied powers of any literary kind. *' Humour "-comedy, of which Ben Jonson was the inventor, or at least regulariser, takes special oddities or peculiarities of individuals as its main instru- ment. The " comedy of manners," which, partly imitated from the French, came in after the Restoration, and has more or less persisted since, is an attempt to reflect the society of the day as the author sees it, or thinks he sees it. This, at its best, is some- times called " high " comedy. " Low " comedy, wliich at its GLOSSARY OF TECHNICAL TERMS 261 lowest is called Farce, exaggerates and at the same time de- grades the comic appeal by introducing vulgar action and speech, practical jokes, romping, excessive play on words, and the like. At its worst it is perhaps the lowest kind of literature ; but a good farce may be a very good, though it is a very difficult thing. DactyL A foot of one long and two short syllables (-^J). Distich. Much the same as " couplet " — two lines of more or less parallel formation. If the A.S. line is separated at the pause, it becomes a distich. Doggerel properly means verse that is incorrect in metre ; but it is often used of sing-song or clumsy versification and language, not positively unmetrical. (See on Skelton in text.) Eclogue. Properly, from the Greek iKXoyr), a " selection " or " extract." Then any short poem, but especially a Pastoral (which see). Elegy. Properly, from the Greek ^Xeyos, a song of mourn- ing." But since a particular metre (a hexameter followed by a pentameter) was much used in these songs, the adjective " ele- giac " came to be used of this metre without regard to subject. In English this adjective is sometimes thus applied to the quatrains of Gray's Elegy and even of Tennyson's In Memoriam. Elision, a term taken from classical prosody, means the " crushing out " of one vowel when two come together. This appears in the suppression of the e of the definite article, so common in the eighteenth century, " th' attentive " for " the attentive," and so forth. It was much abused about this period, and perhaps is never really wanted in English verse. (See Equivalence.) Epic and Romance. Two terms used to distinguish, some- times ancient and modern narrative poetry, sometimes different kinds of modern. The strict Epic, according to ancient defini- tion, should have grave and dignified treatment, a single main subject — though episodes (that is to say, minor stories connected with the subject, but not directly leading to the conclusion) are permitted — a definite hero, and orderly arrangement. Per- haps Paradise Lost is the only English poem which thoroughly answers to this ; and even there the question has been asked, " Who is the hero ? " Some have also thought that the older modern poems — the French Chansons de Geste, the Icelandic Sagas, perhaps Beowulf, etc. — are more like epics than the in- numerable stories of the twelfth, thirteenth, and later centuries, which (most of them being originally French ; see Classic and Romantic) are called Romances. These depend more upon separate incident and less upon connected plot, the construction is often irregular, and the motive of love has more importance 262 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE than in the ancient epic. To illustrate further, Spenser's Faerie Queene would have been an epic, at least in scheme, if he had carried out the plan which he mentions in his Preface ; and some of the Books, especially L, II., and V., have epic character in themselves. But the poem is essentially a romance in treat- ment, and very large portions of it have no epic character at all. Epode. In Greek the third member of a lyric group after strophe and antistrophe, as in Gray's Bard. Horace's Latin Epodes are separate poems, and Ben Jonson uses the name in this way. Equivalence (the great distinction between English and French poetry, which our language owes partly to Latin, but much more to the original habits of Anglo-Saxon) means the acceptance of two short (" unaccented ") syllables as the equiva- lent of one long (" accented "), and, by consequence, of a three- syllable foot as " equivalent " to a two-syllable. The free|zing Tana|is through a waste of snows (which Pope himself thought the most beautiful line he had written) shows this. But most people of that day would have made it by Elision (which see) The free|zing Tan* is, etc., which is hardly beautiful at all. Essay. Properly and derivatively a ** trial," perhaps originally, as of metals, in the sense now restricted to the form " ^7ssay " ; but very early used, in the French noun and verb, for *' attempt " of any kind. Both meanings seem to combine in the literary use of the term, which dates from the sixteenth cen- tury, and was made popular all over Europe by Montaigne. This use, from the beginning, has properly designated a treat- ment of subjects on a smaller scale and in a lighter manner than a formal " book " requires. Exceptions such as Locke's Essa^' on the Human Understanding, whether due to real or false modesty, are better not imitated. Farce. See Comedy. Feminine rhyme = double — strictly with the final e counting. Fifteener. See Fourteener. Foot. The combination of syllables, long and short, *' ac- cented " and " unaccented," which constitutes and determines the character of Metre (which see). The three commonest feet in English are the iamb, the trochee, and the anapaest ; next come the spondee and dactyl (see all these names). Perhaps no others are indisputable. GLOSSARY OF TECHNICAL TERMS Fourteener. A line of seven iambic feet or fourteen syllables at the lowest. The stars are dimly seen among the shadows of the bay." If there is a double or feminine rhyme, this becomes a *' fif- teener." Heroic is a word used in several significations which it is important to distinguish. The original application came from Italian criticism in the later sixteenth century, when the term " heroic " poem was used to denote something like the " epic " of the ancients (who had themselves used the word in regard to epic itself, and to epic verse), but with less strict rules and a greater approach to the variety of romance. Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered is a pattern " heroic " poem, though Milton himself applied the name to Paradise Lost. From this the term passed to the prose romances, which (though our English A rcadia is one of the earliest of them) were principally written in France during the first half of the seventeenth century, and then to the " heroic play " of Dry den and his contemporaries, which was to a large extent imitated from those romances. But there also grew up a habit, partially justified, as has been said, by the ancients, of applying the term " heroic " to the particular verse used for epic or heroic poetry. And so we speak of the " heroic couplet " of two decasyllabics or (less commonly) of the decasyllabic itself as the " heroic " line. Hexameter and Pentameter. Two lines very largely used, either together or (in the case of the hexameter) alone, in Greek and Latin poetry. The hexameter consists of six feet, dactyls or spondees (which see) at pleasure, except that the fifth is usually a dactyl and the sixth always a spondee. The pentameter is of five, but curiously split up into halves of two and a half feet, according to some minor rules not here important. Ever since the Renaissance, attempts have been made to introduce these lines, and especially the hexameter, in English (see Manual of English Prosody), but never successfully. Moreover, an ex- tremely bad habit has grown up of using " hexameter " to mean the English Alexandrine, "pentameter" still more commonly for the English heroic, and " tetrameter " for the English octo- syllable. This is quite unnecessary, really ignorant, and altogether confusing, unscholarly, and wrong, for an iambic " pentameter " line would be one of ten feet, and " hexameter " has been used for centuries by itself in a special and totally different acceptation. Homily. A sermon, generally rather short. Term specially used in relation to Old and Early Middle English discourses. Humour. See Wit, and text, p. 222, under Thackeray. 264 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE "Humours." See Comedy, and text, p. 103, under Jonson. Iambic. A foot of one short (or " unaccented ") syllable followed by one long (or " accented **). The commonest in English verse since the twelfth century. {^—) Interlude. A kind of drama, often allegorical, which was very popular in the early and middle sixteenth century. The name most obviously means " a play interposed between two other things, plays or not ; but a " play between two or more persons ** has been suggested, and neither will always suit. Lyric. Almost everybody knows a lyric when he sees it ; but it is less easy to define than to recognise, and people have contended a good deal about the exact meaning of the word. The original and derivative sense is " something accompanied by the lyre*' the great Greek musical instrument ; and some have thought to make it simply equivalent to " song." No doubt any lyric may be sung ; but so may many things that are hardly lyrics. Others, looking at the substance, have urged that a lyric must be something expressing the direct thoughts and emotions of the poet ; but this is obscure, difficult to apply, and probably much too narrow. And yet others, looking chiefly at the form, have thought that it must be a poem rather short than long ; capable of being sung ; excluding those regular and unvaried metres which are generally used for poems of great length, such as the hexameter in Greek and Latin, the heroic couplet and blank verse in English. It has also been said that lyrics are that kind of poetry which is farthest away from prose. Whether a Ballad and whether a Sonnet is a lyric are questions on which the student may reserve decision till later. Examples are better for him at this time. Spenser's Epithalamion and Milton's Lycidas are lyrics ; but so are Shakespeare's " Under the Green- wood Tree " and Lovelace's " Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind." Wordsworth's Ode on Recollections of Immortality comes under the heading, as well as Keats's " In a Drear-nighted December" and Shelley's " O World ! O Life ! O Time ! " But nobody would call Paradise Lost or the Faerie Queene, Absalom and Achitophel or The Dunciad a lyric. Magazine and Review. See text, p. 260, note. Masque. See text, p. 102. Measure, " Common " and " Long," see Ballad. For " Short," see Poulters. Melodrama originally meant (from the Greek fjAXos) drama where music and song are introduced. But from some association, accidental rather than essential, it has come to mean a drama of incident, always rather exaggerated, and generally in the tragic or tragi-comic (which see) direction. Metre. An arrangement of a line in some definite rhythm GLOSSARY OF TECHNICAL TERMS 265 (which see) and of Hnes in correspondence with each other. The point distinguishing poetry from prose. Middle English. A term appUed, perhaps most properly, to the hterature between 1200 and 1400, but sometimes extended to include that of the fifteenth century. Early Middle English generally means that of the thirteenth. Octave. A stanza or set of eight lines rhymed in various orders. The most famous is the Italian Ottava rima, which con- cludes with a heroic couplet (lines of eleven syllables in Italian, of ten usually in English) . Interesting examples of different kinds of octave in English are Chaucer's Monk's Tale and Byron's Don Juan. Ode. A Greek word meaning anything sung. It is specially, though not universally (the numerous exceptions being due mainly to Horace's example) taken to mean a rather elaborate composition in concerted metre. Old English. See Anglo-Saxon (which, it may be observed, is not only the older name, but has been kept by some of the best scholars, Continental as well as English, to the present day). Opera. An Italian term meaning " work." It began to be applied in English, in the later seventeenth century, to theatrical entertainments, which included much music and spectacle. At first in Dry den, and even in Gay, the literary part remained im- portant ; but it has since been largely reduced if not abolished. Pamphlet (derivation questioned), a small book, of a sheet or two only, stitched together, not bound. Used for all sorts of subjects in reference to Elizabethan literature, but in modern times commonly restricted to controversial or occasional writings. Parody is a peculiar form of burlesque in which the verse and phrase of the original — generally a poem, but not always — are kept as nearly as possible, but caricatured and made laughable, though not by any means necessarily contemptible. Parody is very old — as old, even in what we have, as Aristophanes (fifth century B.C.). But in English the nineteenth century was particularly fertile in it, and there are no better parodies than those of Rejected Addresses (1812) by James and Horace Smith, the Bon Gaultier Ballads (1845) by Professor Aytoun and Sir Theodore Martin, the works of C. S. Calverley (1831-1884) and "Lewis Carroll," H. D. Traill (1842-1900), and others. The excellence and indeed the possibility of parody depend upon the presence of some distinct " mannerism," as it is called, in the original writer parodied. Nobody has ever parodied Shakespeare to any effect ; almost any clever youth can parody Milton. Pastoral. See text, p. 67, note. . Pause (sometimes called by the Latin name caesura) is the 266 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE break in the line at the end of a word, which to some extent makes two parts of it, and may be used so as to diversify the rhythm. Its varied employment is one of the things which most distinguish classic and neo-classic verse from others. Pope, for instance, almost always has one pause, and that near the middle. Shakespeare and Milton put it anywhere, introduce several pauses in a line, and (Shakespeare especially) sometimes have none at all. In the use of the pause lies the great secret of blank verse. Picaresque. See text, p. i6i. Pindaric. Properly, a very complicated system of versifica- tion adopted by Pindar and other Greek poets, the structure of which will be found exactly reproduced in Gray's Bard. Im- properly used (by Cowley first, and by many others after him) to denote a much easier system of constructing stanzas of irregular length, composed of verses also of different lengths, and rhymed in no regular order. Poetical Justice. The punishing of vice and rewarding of virtue in dramatic, poetic, or other fiction. It requires to be very carefully managed, as the result is equally offensive whether it be clumsily exaggerated and obtruded, or ostentatiously neglected. It is usually a great instrument of the melodramatist (see Melodrama), Poulter's Measure. The couplet of Alexandrine and four- teener, much used by the earlier Elizabethan poets : Laid in my quiet bed, in study as I were, I saw within my troubled head a heap of thoughts appear. It breaks up easily into a quatrain of lines containing respect- ively six, six. eight, and six syllables, and is then called " Short Measure," as often in hymns : To keep the lamp alive, With oil we fill the bowl ; 'Tis water makes the willow thrive, And grace that feeds the soul. Quatrain. A batch or stanza of four lines, as in Gray's Elegy (decasyllabic) and Tennyson's In Memoriam (octosyllabic). Redundance is the allowance of an extra syllable at the end of a line : Into I a bit]ter fashlion of | complain|ing. Refrain. See Burden. Renaissance (lit. " re-birth." Matthew Arnold, some time ago, introduced the form " Renascence," which should be avoided. GLOSSARY OF TECHNICAL TERMS for there is no Latin word venascentia, and *' Renaissance is a distinct technical term of time, especially current as regards architecture, while " renascence " would be general. There have been at least three or four distinct " renascences " in English literature, but only one " Renaissance.") A term applied to the period of fresh and direct study of the ancient classics, which, with other influences, resulted in the passage of mediaeval into modern literature, art, philosophy, and many other things. This began in Italy very soon after Dante's time, and was specially active there during the fifteenth century. From Italy it passed to France, and from France to England. With us it hardly begins till the early sixteenth, and may be said to last throughout that century, but it is at all times much more strongly romantic and less specially classic than with the Southern nations. Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bacon show the different sides of the English Renaissance best. But when the word is used generally, there is usually a more distinct reference to the classical revival and influence. Rhetoric. Originally the art of oratory ; then the art of writing, or at least prose-^Nritmg, generally. In modern times a bad sense is sometimes attached to the word and its adjective " rhetorical," so as to mean something pompous in style and insincere in meaning. Rhyme is the employment of (usually final) syllables of the same sound in corresponding places of lines or verses, as in A King's face Should show grace. Sometimes there is also " middle " or " internal " rhyme, as in The votive frigate soft, aloft, or For a promise broke, not for first words spoke, or The thatch of the byres will serve their fires, when all the cattle are slain. For ** full " or, as it is sometimes called, " consonant " rhyme in English, the consonants following the vowel must be the same ; " assonance " or rhyme on the vowel onty (as " face " and " grate ") is not allowed with us. So also the same words (i.e. the same in consonants before as well as after the vowel), even if they have, and are used in, different senses, are forbidden in English. The student may sometimes see the term " head- rhyme." This is an unnecessary and confusing substitute for " alliteration," and should be avoided. The word is also spelt 268 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE " rhime," " ryme," and " rime," and at one time was thought to come from A.S. rim. It is, however, more probably through Fr. rime (rithme), from Latin and Greek rhythmus (pvd/jids), and is thus the same word as " rhythm.'" In any case " rhyme " is the best spelhng, to avoid confusion with " hoar-frost.** Rhyme Royal. A stanza of seven decasyllabic lines rhymed ababbcc.^ First used in English by Chaucer in Troilus ; very frequent in the fifteenth century, occasionally used till the seventeenth, then almost entirely dropped till taken up by William Morris. Rhythm. The arrangement of words in such order as to produce a recognisable musical effect. Repeated or correspond- ent rhythm becomes Metre (which see). Romance. See Epic and Romance. Romantic. See Classic and Romantic. Satire. A kind or kinds of literature, the name, origin, and nature of which are subject to some confusion. There are two etymological sources for it which have no real connection with each other — the Greek Satyr, a demi-god of fantastic and dis- orderly attributes (whence the Satyric drama, a sort of farce or after-piece to serious plays), and the Roman saticra, a kind of popular medley, permitting, but not necessarily employing, abuse of individuals. The Greeks themselves had used many forms of satiric literature (as Aristophanes in comedy and Archilochus in lyric) for what we call satiric purposes ; but the Romans justly prided themselves on having originated the regular " satire " (which they also, and later, called sermo) of Ennius, Lucilius, Horace, Persius, Juvenal, etc. This is a moral discourse in verse, often attacking individuals, but always, or almost always, keeping the general moral or at least social purpose in view. But they also, as in Catullus, Martial, and Horace himself, used lyric as a vehicle of satire, and probably, though we have none left, drama also. In English we have adopted all these meanings and applications of the word, but have to some extent kept the Roman specialisation. In the wide sense any form of prose or verse, sermon or novel, oration or history, philosophical dialogue or what not, may " satirise " things or persons, states of society, religious or political conditions, etc. etc. But the word " Satire *' in the stricter sense is still kept for something like, and at first directly imitated from, the Latin sermo — as the satires of Marston, Hall, Donne, and others in Elizabethan times ; those of Oldham and of Dryden (the greatest of all) after the Restoration ; 1 These letter-symbols are always used to indicate the order of rhyming \x\ the lines. Here, for instance, the first line rhymes to the third, the second to the fourth and sixth, and the two last together. Numerals are used in the same way to designate the number of syllables in each line. Thus 8686 is the *' common " measure. GLOSSARY OF TECHNICAL TERMS 269 Young's and Pope's and Churchill's in the eighteenth century. Yet since the Romantic revival at the beginning of the nineteenth this kind, though practised by Byron, and imitated from him by the first Lord Lytton (Bulwer), by the late Mr. Alfred Austin, and others, has constantly declined, and no attempt to revive it has produced anything of the first class. Sestet. A batch or stanza of six lines. Sometimes called sixain, and even (very wrongly and absurdly) " sextant." Sonnet. A poem of fourteen lines, sometimes, but in English rarely, extended to eighteen or more. The arrangement of the rhymes of the sonnet varies greatly in Italian, its original lan- guage. In English the two principal forms are the so-called ** English " or " Shakespearian " form of three quatrains and a couplet, and the Italian or " Petrarchian " form of an " octave " and " sestet," the latter with intertwisted rhymes. Spondee. A foot of two long (" accented ") syllables ( ). Stave. A term often applied to the unit of Anglo-Saxon or Old English verse to distinguish it from the metrical " line " of Middle and later literature. A fair specimen of its ordinary form is WridaS under wolcnum wynnsum geblowen. Writheth [in the sense of " growing up," " flourishing "] under welkins [clouds] winsomely blowing. But it is sometimes immensely extended, as in Gelic was he pam leohtsun steorrum. Lof sceolde he Dryhtens wyrcean. Like was he to the lightsome stars. Praise should he of God work out. Strophe and Antistrophe (lit. " turn " or " twist " and *' counter-turn "). Elaborate stanzas in Greek lyric poetry, where in the strophe each line may be different from the next, but every one must have a corresponding line in the antistrophe. The pair are completed by another form, the Epode (which see). Style. A term used with rather varying senses. Derived originally from the name of the Roman writing instrument, it was early employed, in Latin itself, to designate the manner of writing, and soon extended to that of speaking. It thus came to mean, in the modern languages, composition generally ; and, more particularly, the special way of writing and speaking shown by different authors, or usual in different kinds of writing — " the style of Milton," " the oratorical style," " the familiar style," etc. As early as the sixteenth century it was described by a Spanish writer in Latin as " a habit of speech flowing from each man's nature," and this was more epigrammatically repeated two 270 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE centuries later by the French naturahst Buffon (in words rather differently quoted) as " le style c'est rhomme [or de Thomme] meme." Still more recently there has been a tendency to speak of " style " more in the abstract, as something, if not exactly separable from " meaning," yet capable of being considered in- dependently thereof. Controversies exist on this subject, and for some time the student had perhaps better content himself with the earlier meanings of " way of writing '* as found in individual writers, in different classes of books, and at different periods of the same literature. Substitution. The use of one foot for another on the principle of Equivalence (which see), as of the trisyllabic for a dissyllabic in the example given. Terza Rima. A stanza (or triplet) of three lines, the first and third rhyming together, the middle rhyming to the first and third of the next. As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay, This was the tenor of my waking dream. Methought I sat beside a parting way Thick strewn with summer dust, and a great stream Of people there was hurrying to and fro, Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam. *' Fro " will rhyme to the next stanza in the same way. Tragedy. A serious drama, with an unhappy ending, which appeals, more or less throughout, to the sympathies of the audience or reader. Mere misfortunes, sufferings, and deaths are not in themselves necessarily tragic, though the word is constantly thus misapplied. True tragedy (and it is most noticeable that Aristotle and Shakespeare, who have sometimes been thought irreconcilable, both agree here) involves, on the part of the person or persons principally concerned, some fault, not in itself of a hateful character, which brings about his unhappy end, such as Hamlet's irresolution ; Lear's selfish relinquishment of his crown, thoughtlessness of consequences, and violent temper ; Othello's unreasoning jealousy ; even Macbeth's ambition. We mast not only be sorry for, or awed at, the event, but for and at the human circumstances and characteristics which have brought about the event. Tragi-comedy. A word obvious enough in its literal mean- ing, " a mixture of tragedy and comedy," but rather variously used. The severe neo-classic critics (see Classic), who regarded this mixture as bad in itself, held all Shakespeare's tragedies (and most of his " Histories "), except perhaps Titus Andronicus, to be tragi-comedies. More rationally, " tragi-comedy " is used GLOSSARY OF TECHNICAL TERMS either of a play with a happy ending, which has some elements in it that might have turned to tragedy (as in Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing, and still more his Measure for Measure), or positively tragic scenes, as in A Winter's Tale and Cymbeline ; or else of one which blends a tragic plot and a comic one, having little or nothing to do with each other, except that the same characters may figure in both. This last is not a good kind, and Shakespeare never indulges in it ; but it is common in other Elizabethans and in Restoration dramatists. Such scenes as the Gravediggers' in Hamlet and the Porter's in Macbeth — even as those of the Fool's and Edgar's satire or gibberish in Lear — do not constitute a tragi-comedy, for they are often simply foils or reliefs to throw up the tragedy higher, and the humour of them itself sometimes grows tragic in the context. Triolet. One of several artificial but pretty forms of verse, which were largely practised in France, and to some extent in England, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It con- sisted of eight lines ; the first repeated twice as fourth and seventh, the second once as eighth. The form of this class most imitated in English, as for instance by Chaucer, was the ballade (see above), a piece with variations, but most commonly in three stanzas with a burden or refrain at the end of each, and a shorter fourth or envoi, summing it up with the refrain likewise. Triplet. A batch of three lines rhymed more or less with each other. Trochee. A foot of two syllables, one long (" accented one short (" unaccented ") . The common foot (if we may speak of feet at all there) in A.S. verse, and quite usual in later English. (--) Unity and Unities. Terms much used at one time .in critical discussion of poetry and drama. " Unity " generally means composition under some definite and single plan, not random and haphazard writing. The "Unities" of Action, Time, and Place were rules supposed to be derived from Greek, and incumbent on modern dramatists. Verse Paragraph. An arrangement, of blank verse more particularly, in which more or less long batches of lines are con- nected together, not merely in sense, but by devices of pause and overlapping in the lines themselves. First developed, if not exactly discovered, by Shakespeare, very largely used by Milton, and copied from the two by later poets. "Wit (and Humour). The natures and differences of these two modes of the comic or jocular have been much discussed. The best short distinction is that Wit appeals solely to the understanding ; while Humour blends with this an appeal to the emotions. INDEX OF NAMES AND TITLES {For Subjects see Contents. The Chronological Conspectus, being a sort of cross-index in itself, just as this is an Alphabetical Conspectus, is not here included.) Absalom and Achitophel, 136, 264 Adam Bede, 225 Addison, 138, 139, 145-149, 153, 158, 166, 167, 193, 194, 260 Address of Soul to Body, 8 Adonais, 186 Advancement of Learning, 127 Adventures of Captain Singleton, 160 ^Ifric, 10, II Aeneid (Surrey's translation), 55, 258 Ainsworth, H., 219 Alamanni, 55 A last or, 186 Albion's England, 91 Alexander, Sir W., see Stirling Alexander's Feast, 89 note Alfred, King, 10, 11, 37 Alice in Wonderland, 226 note All Fools, 81 All For Love, 137 Alton Locke, 225 Amelia, 163 Analogy (Butler's), 171, 201 Anatomy of Melancholy, The, 119, 128 Ancient Mariner, The Rime of the, 4, 177-179, 258 Ancren Riwle, The, 15, 18, 21 Andreas, 8 Angler, The, 128 Anima Poetae, 176 Anti- Jacobin, The, 170 Antiquary, The (Scott's), 192 Antonio and Mellida, 81 Antony and Cleopatra, 85, 137 Apollonius of Tyre, 10, 11, 12, 32 Apology for Poetry, 96 Arcades, 115 Arcadia, The, 93, 98, 263 Archilochus, 268 Arden of Feversham, 107, 108 Areopagitica, 121 Ariosto, 87, 157 Aristophanes, 265, 268 Aristotle, 270 Arnold, Dr., 199 Arnold, Matthew, 9, 36, 67 note, 212, 213, 218, 229, 235, 260, 266 Arraignment of Paris, The, 74 Arthur of Little Britain, 61 Arthurian Legend, The, 23 Ascham, 27, 62, 63, 66, 70, 95, 97, 99 Asolando, 210 ^5 You Like It, 85, 260 Atalanta in Calydon, 216 note, 218 Atheist's Tragedy, The, 82 Austen, Miss, 149, 191-194, 219, 220, 223 273 274 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Austin, Mr. A., 269 " Authorised Version," The, 123 124, 127 Aytoun, Sir R., 48 Aytoun, W. E., 213, 265 Bacon, 83, 84, 92, 94, 96, 98, 103, 118. 127, 267 Bailey, P. J., 213 Balder, 213 Bale, Bishop, 71 Ballads (Tennyson's), 209 Balzac, 125 note Barbour, 47, 49 Bar Chester Towers, 225 Barclay, 42, 46 Bard, The (Gray*s), 89 note, 266 Barham, 205 Barnaby Rudge, 221 Barons' Wars, The, 90 Barrett, Miss, see Browning, Mrs. Battle of Alcazar, The, 74 Battle of the Books, The, 146 Beaconsfield, Lord, 196 note Beaumont and Fletcher, 80, 103, 104, 106, 127, 136 Beaumont, Sir John, 108 note Beaumont, Joseph, no Beddoes, 205 Bede, The Venerable, 7, 10 Beggar's Opera, The, 167 note Behn, Aphra, 140 Bells and Pomegranates, 208 Bentley, 145 Beowulf, 4, 5, 6, 12, 261 Berkeley, 149, 200 Bevis of Hampton, 25 Biographia Literaria, 175 Blackwood's Magazine, 196, 229 Blake ,W., 11, 113 note, 156, 169, 178, 211 Blickling Homilies, 10 " Blind Harry " (Henry the Minstrel), 49 Boccaccio, 33 Boethius, 10, 37 Boileau, 187 Bon Gaultier Ballads, 265 Book of Common Prayer, 62 Boswell, 165, 167 Bothwell (Swinburne's), 218 Breton, N., 89, 94 Brome, 107 Brontes, The, 224, 225 Broome, 152 Browne, Sir T., 66, 120, 122, 124, 126, 128, 130 Browne, W., 109 Browning (Mrs.), E. B., 211 note, 215 Browning, R., 4, 133, 188, 202, 204-211, 215, 216, 220, 226, 227, 257 Brus (Barbour's), 47 Brut, The, see Layamon Buchanan, 96 Buckingham, Duke of, 259 Bulwer, 220, 269 Bunyan, 42, 170, 257 Burke, 167, 229, 230 Burney, Miss, 164, 172, 191, 193 Burns, 49, 52, 169, 178 Burton, 119, 128 Bury Fair, 142 Butler, Joseph, bishop and theo- logian, 171, 201 Butler, Samuel, satirist, 21, 140 Butter, N., 99 Byron, 174, 184, 185, 195, 202, 204, 207 Caedmon, 7 Caleb Williams, 192 note C[alverley], C. S., 265 Campbell, 183, 199 Campion, 89, 96, 127 Canning, 170, 259 Canterbury Tales, The, 33 sq., 60 Capgrave, 59 Carew, 112 Carlyle, 202, 229, 231-233 " Carroll, Lewis," 226 note, 265 Castle of Otranto, 158, 159 Catiline, 102 Catullus, 268 Caxton, 43, 60 Cenci, The, 186 Centlivre, Mrs., 167 note Cervantes, 160 INDEX OF NAMES AND TITLES 275 Chalkhil}, 110, 127 Chamberlayne, 110, 133, 187 Changelings The, 82 Chapman, 80, 81 Chartism, 232 Chastelardy 218 Chatterton, 156, 158, 159 Chaucer, 3, 11, 28-39, 53, 55, 58, 59) 63, 68, 69, 97, 105, 108, 138, 145 note, 210, 215, 218, 258, 259, 265, 268, 271 Chaucer and Chaucerians, 40-50 Cheke, Sir John, 62 Cherry and the Slae, The, 50 Chesterfield, Lord, 168 Childe Harold, 184 Christ, 8 Christabel, 4, 20, 68, 176-179, 181 Christian Morals, 122 Christian Year, The, 113 Christmas Eve and Easter Day, 209 Christ's Victory, no Chronicle, The A.S., 9 sq. Church History (Fuller's), 120 Churchill, 152, 269 Cibber, Colley, 167 note Cider, 155 Citizen of the World, The, 167 City of Dreadful Night, The, 218 Civil Wars, The, 91 Clarendon, 120, 122, 123, 133 Clarissa, 162 Cleveland, 133 Cloister and the Hearth, The, 224 Coleridge, 4, 20, 21, 22, 68, 121, 174-179, 181, 189, 195, 196, 198, 201, 202, 205, 206, 207, 214, 219, 228, 260 Collier, Jeremy, 142, 145, 167 note Collins, 156, 157, 178 Colloquy {TEXiric' s) , 10 Colonel Jack, 161 Comedy of Errors, The, 76 Complaint of Deor, 5, 6 Complaint, The Wife's, 6 Comus, 74, 115, 116 Confessio Amantis, 31, 32 Confessions of an English Opium- Eat er, 229 Congreve, 142, 143 Conquest of Granada, The, 137 Constable, 89 Country Wife, The, 142 Coverdale, 61 " Coverley Papers," The, 148 Cowley, 112, 128, 137, 141, 266 Cowper, 152, 155, 169, 180 note, 189, 201 Crabbe, 153, 167, 202 Cranmer, 61 Crashaw, 113 Critical Review, The, 194 Croker, 196 Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (Carlyle*s), 232 Cross, The Ruthwell, 8 Crotchet Castle, 220 Crowne, 142 Cupid and Psyche, no Curse of Kehama, The, 182 Cursor Mundi, 38, 52 Cymbeline, 86, 271 Cynewulf, King, 10 Cynewulf (supposed poet), 7, 8 28 note Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, 50 Daniel, S., 65, 90, 96, 98, 108, 127 Dante, 20, 33, 35, 54, 55, 215, 267 Darley, 205 Darwin, 235 note Davenant, 105, 107, 133, 141 David Copperfield, 221 Davideis, 112 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The, 168 Defoe, 146, 160-162, 231 Dekker, 81, 82, 94, 105 Denham, Sir J., 140 Deor, Complaint of, 5, 6 De Quincey, 131, i75, ^95, 219, 229, 230 Deserted Village, The, 153, 167 Desportes, 90 De Vulgari Eloquio, 54 Dickens, 202, 220, 221, 223, 224, 227 Dictionary (Johnson's), 166 note Dido, 75 Discoveries (Jonson's), loi note 276 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Dixon, Canon, 215, 218 Dobell, S., 213 Dodgson, C. L., see Carroll, Lewis " Dodsley's Miscellany j 171 Don Juan, 185, 264 Don Quixote, 160 Donne, 91, 108, in, 112, 114, 118, 121, 126, 127, 128, 144, 268 Dorset, Earl of, 140 Douglas, Gavin, 50, 63 note Dramatis Personae, 209 Drapier's Letters, The, 147 Drayton, 65, 90, 98, 108, 109, in, 127, 257 Dream of the Rood, 8 Drummond (of Hawthorn den), 48, loi note Dryden, 80, 81, 84, loi, in, 131, 134-143, 145, 149, 150, 153, 156, 175, 177, 178, 183, 188, 196, 211, 228, 257, 260, 268 Du Bartas, no Duchess of Malfy, The, 82 Dumas, 227 Dunbar, 49, 50 Dunciad, The, 151, 264 Dyer, 156 Earthly Paradise, The, 217, 218 Eastward Ho / 81 Ecclesiastical Polity, The Laws of , 92 Edgeworth, Miss, 191, 192, 193 Edinburgh Review, The, 196, 230 Edward II., 75 Edward III., 107 Elegy, Gray's, 157, 266 Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady, 150, 151 Elene, 8 Elia, Essays of, 197 " Eliot, George," 224, 225, 228 Ellis, 170 Eloisa to Abelard, 150, 151 Emma, 192 note Endymion (Keats's), 187 Endymion (Lyly's), 73 English Bards and Scotch Review- ers, 184 Ennius, 268 Epithalamion (Spenser's), 89, 264 Epsom Wells, 142 Erechtheus, 218 Esmond, 222, 225 Essay on Criticism (Pope's), 150 Essay of Dramatic Poesy (Dry- den's), 143 note, 175 Essay on the Human Understand- ing, 144 Essay on Translated Verse (Ros- common's), 140 Essays (Bacon's), 92, 94, 98, 127 Essays (Carlyle's), 232 Essays (Cowley's), 128, 137 Essays (Goldsmith's), 167 Essays (Lamb's), 197 Essays (Leigh Hunt's), 197 Essays (Macaulay's), 231 Essays on Chivalry and Romance (Hurd's), 158, 159 Etherege, Sir G., 142 Euphues and Euphuism, 44, 67- 70, 73, 92, 93, 95, 98, 135 Evans, M. A., see ''Eliot, George" Eve of St. Agnes, 188 Eve of St. Mark, 188 Evelina, 164, 191 Evelyn, 172 Evidences, Paley's, 201 Fables (Gay's), 153 Fables (Henryson's), 49 Faerie Queene, The, 60, 86-91, 108, 127, 257, 264 Fairfax, 98, 109 Faithful Shepherdess, The, 102 Falkland, 220 Falls of Princes, 44 Farquhar, 142, 143 Faustus, Dr., 74, 75 February (Spenser's) in Shepherd's Calendar, 20, 98, 179 Fenton, 152 Ferrex and Porrex, 72 Festus, 213 Fielding, 162-164, 167 note, 192, 223 Fight at Finnsburgh, 6 Fingal, 158 Firmilian, 213 INDEX OF NAMES AND TITLES 277 Fisher, Bishop, 61 Fletcher, Giles and Phineas, no Fletcher, John, see Beaumont and Fletcher Florice and Blanchefleur, 25 Ford, 104-106, 127 Fors Clavigera, 233 Fortescue, Sir J., 59 Frederick II. (Carlyle*s), 232 French Revolution, The (Carlyle's), 232 Frere, 170 Friars of Berwick, The, 50 Froissart (Berners's), 61 Fronde, 229, 233, 235 Fuller, 120, 130 Game of Chess, The, 82 Gammer Gurton's Needle, 72 Garden of Cyrus, The, 122 Garnett, Dr. R., 203 Garrick, 167 and note Gascoigne, 56-58, 95, 96, 99 Gawain and the Green Knight, 24, 25 G^ay, 153, 167 and note Gehir, 184 Genesis and Exodus (A.S.), 7 Genesis and Exodus (M.E.), 20, 68, 179 Gibbon, 167, 168, 198, 230, 231 Gifford, 196 Gilbert, Sir W., 235 note, 259 Gil Bias, 160 Globe, The, 170 Gloucester, Robert of, 22 Goblin Market, 218 Godwin, 165, 192 Goethe, 174, 212 Golden Targe, The, 49, 50 Goldsmith, 153, 167 Good-natured Man, The, 167 Gorboduc, 72, 74 Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant In- ventions, 89 note Gosson, Stephen, 96 Gower, 28, 31, 32, 188, 210, 218, 258 Grave poem, 8 Gray, 156, 157, i68, 177, 178, 230, 262, 266 Greene, 73, 74, 89, 94, Greville, Fulke, 118 Grongar Hill, 156 Grote, 199 Gryll Grange, 220 Gulliver's Travels, 147, 148, 161 Guthlac, 8 Guy Mannering, 192 Guy of Warwick, 25 Hales, John, 84 Halifax, Marquess of, 134, 135, 144 Hall, Bishop, 91, 268 Hallam, A. H., 209 Hallam, H., 199 Hamann, 232 Hamlet, 86, 271 Hampole, Richard Rolle of, 26 note Handful of Pleasant Delights, A, 89 note Hannay, P., 48 Harrowing of Hell, The, 38, 51 Hawes, 42, 45, 46 Hazlitt, 143, 174, 175, 176, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 227 Headlong Hall, 220 Hemans, Mrs., 202 Henley, W. E., 235 note Henryson, 49 Herbert, G., 113 Hercward the Wake, 226 Hermit, The, 154 Heroes and Hero Worship, Lectures on (Carlyle's), 232 Herrick, 112, 113 Hey wood, John, 71 Heywood, Thomas, 83 Hind and the Panther, The, 136 History of the Church (Fuller's), 120 History of England (Fronde's), 235 History of England (Macaulay's), 231 History of Latin Christianity (Milman's), 199 History of the Middle Ages, etc. (Hallam's), 199 History of the Rebellion (Claren- don's), 123 278 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE History of the Royal Society (Sprat's), 134 note, 175 History of the Turks (KnoUes's), 98, 123 History of the World (Raleigh's), 93, 118, 123 Hobbes, 120, 122, 123 Hogg, 201, 219 Hoi croft, 165 Holinshed, 98 Homer (Pope's), 152 Honoria and Mammon, 106 Honour and Riches, 106 Hood, 205 Hook, Theodore, 221 Hooker, 92, 96, 98, 103, 117, 118 127 Hoole, 152 Horace, 150, 151, 262, 268 Hours of Idleness, 184 House of Fame, The, 33 Howell, James, 128 Huchowne, 47 Hudibras, 140, 155, 259 Hugo, Victor, 166 Hume, 149, 167, 199, 201 Humphrey Clinker, 170 Hunt, Leigh, 143, 174, 187, 195, 197, 198, 219, 221 Huon of Burdeux, 61 Huxley, 235 note Hypatia, 225 Hyperion, 188 Idler, The, 166 note Idylls of the King, 209 // Penseroso, 114, 116 Imaginary Conversations, 229 Ingoldsby Legends, The, 205 note In Memoriam, 209, 266 Irene, 166 note Isabella, 187 It is Never Too Late to Mend, 224 Ivanhoe, 192 James I. (of Scotland), 49 James VI. of Scotland and I. of England, 96 James, G. P. R., 219 Jane Eyre, 225 Jeffrey, 195, 196, 230 Jerusalem Delivered, 263 Jew of Malta, The, 74, 75 Joan of Arc, 182 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, loi, in, 131, 138, 152, 153, 155, 159, 162, 165-168, 194, 228, 230, 231 Jonathan Wild, 163 Jonson, Ben, 65, 75 note, 80, 81, 101-103, 108, III, 114, 119 note, 127, 135, 136, 260, 262 Journey to the Western Islands, 166 note Judas, 27 Judith, 8 Juliana, 8 Junius (scholar), 7 Juvenal, 166, 268 Kant, 201 Keats, 174, 185-190, 195, 196 note, 202, 205-207, 211, 214, 219, 264 Keble, 113 Kenilworth, 192 King Hart, 50 King Johan, 71 King Lear, 86, 270 Kingslcy, Charles, 2, 224-226, 228, 233 Kingsley, Henry, 225 note King's Quair, The, 219 Knight of the Burning Pestle,The, 103 Knighfs Tale, The, 35 Knolles, 98 Kubla Khan, 179, 186 Kyd, 73, 75 Lady of the Lake, The, 181 Lalla Rookh, 183 V Allegro, 114, 116 Lamb, 142, 174, ^95, i97, 198, 202 Lament for Dead Makers, 50 Lamia, 188 Landor, 183, 184, 195, 229, 230, 260 Lang, A., 235 note Langland, 28-30, 32, 210 INDEX OF NAMES AND TITLES 279 Latter-day Pamphlets, 232 Lay oj the Last Minstrel, The, 181, 189 Layamon (the Brut), 15-17, 20, 23, 26, 155 Lays of Ancient Rome, 205 Lee, 142 Legend of Good Women, The, 33 Le Sage, 160 Lessing, 174 L'Estrange, Sir Roger, 145, 146 Letters, The Paston, 61 Letters (Howell's), 128 Lever, 220 Leviathan, 123 Lewis ('* Monk 165 Lichtenberg, 232 Life and Death of Jason, 216 note, 217 Life Drama, A, 213 Lingard, 199 Lives of the Poets (Johnson's), in, 166 note Locke, 134, 144, 148, 149 Lockhart, 195, 196, 219 Lodge, 73, 89, 91, 94, 95 London Lickpenny, 45 London Magazine, The, 229 Longfellow, 8 Lord of the Isles, The, 181 Lorris, William of, 32 note Lotos-Eaters, The, 89 note Lovelace, 113, 133, 264 Love's Labour's Lost, 76 Lucilius, 268 Lycidas, 89 note, 115, 264 Lydgate, 42-45, 258 Lyly, 44, 67-70, 73, 92, 97, 98, 113, 117, 118 Lyndsay, Sir D., 50 Lyrical Ballads, 22, 175, 177 Lytton, Lord, see Bulwer Macaulay, 142, 143, 190 note, 205, 229, 230, 231 Macbeth, 86, 270 Macflecknoe, 136 Mackenzie, Sir G., 48 Macpherson, J., 11, 158 Madoc, 182 Malmesbury, William of, 21 Malory, Sir Thomas, 24, 41, 42, 60, 61, 97, 215 Mandeville, Bernard de, 149 Mandeville, Sir John, 39, 59 Mano, 218 Mansel, 229, 235 Map or Mapes, Walter, 23 Marlowe, 55, 73-76, 85, 98, 112, 139 Marmion, S., no, 187 Marmion (Scott's), 181 Marryat, 220 Marston, 81, 91, 268 Martial, 268 Martin Marpr elate, 95 Martin, Su: T., 265 Marvell, 133, 140 Massinger, 104-106, 127 Maud, 209, 213 Measure for Measure, 271 Medal, The, 136 Melibee, Tale of, 37, 55 Melusine, 25 Memoirs of a Cavalier, 161 Men and Women, 209 Meredith, George, 226-228 Merope, 212 Message, The Husband's or Lover's, 6 Meung, John of, 32 note Middleton, T., 82, 94 Mikado, The, 259 Mill, J. S., 235 note Milman, 199 Milton, 3, 7, 55, 74, loi, 108, no, 114-117, 120, 121, 124, 126, 128, 130, 133, 140, 148, 154, 155, 183, 187, 190, 210, 217, 218, 230, 260, 264, 266, 269 Minot, Laurence, 38 Mirror for Magistrates, The, 57 Mitford, 198 Modern Painters, 194, 233 Moliere, 136, 143 Moll Flanders, 161 Monk, The, 165 Monk's Tale, The, 265 Montaigne, 92 Montaigne (Florio's), 96 28o A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Montgomerie, 48, 50 Monthly Review ^ The, 194 Montrose, 133 Moore, 183, 199, 219 More, Henry, 110, 127 More, Sir J., 61 Morning Post, The, 170 Morris, W., 39, 188, 213-219, 268 Morte d* Arthur (Malory's), 24, 41, 60, 61, 97 Mrs. Perkinses Ball, 222 Much Ado about Nothing, 85, 271 Mulcaster, 97 Mysteries of Udolpho, The, 165 Nash, 73, 74, 94, 95 Nelson, Life of (Southey's), 198 Newcomes, The, 222 Newman, 229, 234, 235 New Way to Pay Old Debts ^ A, 106 Night Thoughts, 154 North, Sir R., 96 North, Roger, 172 Northanger Abbey, 149 note Northern Lass, The, 107 Observator, The, 146 Occleve, 41, 45 Ode on Recollections of Immor- tality (Wordsworth's), 179 Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, 209 Ode on the Nativity (Milton's), 114 Odes (Collins's), 157 Odes (Gray's), 157 Odes (Keats's), 188 Old Fortunatus, 82 Oldham, 140, 268 Old Wives' Tale, An, 74 Oliver Twist, 221 Ordeal of Richard Fever el, The, 226 Orm and the Ormulum, 15-18 Orphan, The, 142 O'Shaughnessy, 216, 218 Ossian, 158 Othello, 86 Otway, 142 Owl and the Nightingale, The, 20, 21 Palace of Honour, The, 50 Paley, 201 Palgrave, Sir F., 199 Pamela, 162 Paracelsus, 208 Paradise Lost, 7, 114, 116, 127, 258, 261, 263, 264 Paradise Regained, 114 Paradise of Dainty Devices, A, 89 note Parnell, 154 Parson's Tale, The, 37 Past and Present, 232 Paston Letters, The, 61 Pastoral Ballad, 157 Pater, 235, 236 Pauline, 204, 207, 209 Peacock, T. L., 220 Pearl, The, 27 Pecock, Reginald, 59 Peele, 73, 74, 79, 80, 85 Pendennis, 222 Pepys, 172 Percy, Bishop, 158, 159 Peregrine Pickle, 163 Pericles, 32, 107 note Perkin Warbeck, 106 Persius, 268 Peter Pindar," see Wolcot Petrarch, 33, 90 Pharonnida, no, 127 Philip, The Adventures of, 222 Philip van Artevelde, 205 Philips, John, 154 Phoenix, The, 9 note Phoenix Nest, The, 89 note Pickwick Papers, The, 221 Piers Plowman, The Vision of, 26, 28-30 Pilgrim's Progress, 170, 257 Pinafore, H.M.S,, 259 Pindar, 266 Pitt, W., 181, 189, 216 Plain Dealer, The, 142 Pleiade, The, 90 Plutarch (North's), 96 Poems and Ballads (Swinburne's), 217 Poems by Two Brothers, 206 Poetical Rhapsody, A, 89 note INDEX OF NAMES AND TITLES 281 Polite Conversation (Swift's), 147, 148, 162 Polyolbion, 109 Pope, 131, 138, 139, 149-154, 158, 166, 167, 177, 178, 187, 195 note, 260, 262, 269 Praed, 205 Prick of Conscience, The, 26 note Pride and Prejudice, 192 note Prince's Progress, The, 218 Princess, The, 209 Prior, 21, 153, 155, 156, 167 Prioress's Tale, The, 35 Progress of Poesy, The, 89 note Prothalamion (Spenser's), 89 Proverbs of Alfred, 21 Proverbs of Hendyng, 21 Psyche, 110 Purple Island, The, no Puttenham, G. or R., 96, 99 Quarterly Review, The, 196 Queen Mab, 186 Quentin Durward, 192 Radcliffe, Mrs., 165, 192 Raleigh, Sir W., 65, 89, 93, 94, 126, 133 Ralph Roister Doister, 72 Rambler, The, 166 note Randolph, 107 Rape of Lucrece, The, 91 Rape of the Lock, The, 150 Rasselas, 165, 166 note Reade, C, 224, 225 Rehearsal, The, 259 Rejected Addresses, 265 Religio Medici, 122 Reliques (Percy's), 158, 159 Revenger's Tragedy, The, 82 Review (Defoe's), 146 Rhyming Poem, The, 8 Richard the Redeless, 29 Richardson, 162, 163 Richter, J. P., 232 Ring and the Book, The, 209 Riddles, A.S., 6 Rival Queens, The, 142 Robertson, 168 Robin Hood " Ballads, 258 Robinson Crusoe, 160 Rochester, Earl of, 140 Roderick Random, 163 Roderick the Goth, 182 Rokeby, 181 Rolle, R., see Hampole Rolliad, The, 170 Roman Actor, The, 106 Romance of the Rose, 32, 144 Romola, 225 Ronsard, 96 Roscoe, 198 Roscommon, Earl of, 140 Rose Mary, 217 Rossetti, Christina, 215-218 Rossetti, D. G., 211, 214-218 Roundabout Papers, 222 Rovers, The, 259 Rowley, W., 82 note Ruin, The, 6 Ruskin, J., 11, 214, 228, 233-235 Sackville, 56, 57, 68, 72, 79 Sad Shepherd, The, 102 Sainte-Beuve, 212 Saints' Lives, 22 Samson, Abbot, 15 Samson Agonistes, 114, 115, 116, 259 Sartor Resartus, 232 Satire of the Three Estates, The, 50 Savage, 152 Scenes of Clerical Life, 225 Schiller, Life of (Carlyle's), 231 Scott, Alexander, 50 Scott, Sir Walter, 21, 142, 174, i75> 176, 180-182, 189, 191- 194, 202, 219, 220, 221, 223, 224, 227, 234 Seafarer, The, 6 Seasons, The, 155 Sedley, Sir C, 140 Sejanus, 102 Seneca, 72 Sense and Sensibility, 192 note Sentimental Journey, ^,164 Seven Lamps of Architecture, The, 233 Seven Sages, The, 25, 33 Shadwell, 138, 141, 142 282 A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Shakespeare, 3, 33, 35, 48, 53, 55, 56, 65, 66, 76, 78, 80, 82- 86, 88, 90, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, loi, 102, 103, 104, 114, 115, 116, 117, 127, 138, 141, 190, 210, 217, 260, 264, 266, 269, 271 Shakespearian Doubtfuls," 107 She Stoops to Conquer, 167 Shelley, 3, 174, 185-190, 195, 202, 205, 206, 207, 208, 211, 214, 219, 264 Shenstone, 157 Shepherd's Calendar, The, 44, 67- 69, 73, 86-89 Sherburne, Sir E., 130 Sheridan, 167 note Ship of Fools, The, 46 Shirley, 66, 79, 80, 105, 106, 127, 130, 136 Shoemaker's Holiday, The, 82 Short Studies (Fronde's), 235 Sidney, Sir P., 90, 93, 96, 98, 118 Siege of Rhodes, The, 141 Sir Amadas, 25 Sir Charles Grandison, 162 Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, 74 Sir Fopling Flutter, 142 Sir Isumhras, 25 Sir Thopas, 258, 259 Skeat, Professor, 30 Skelton, 41, 45, 46 Sketches by Boz, 221 Smith, Adam, 171 Smith, Alex., 213 Smith, J. and H., 265 Smollett, 163, 192 Song of the Soul, The, 110 Sophonisba, 81 Sordello, 208 SouVs Ward, 21 note South, 133, 144 Southey, 174-177, 182, 195, 230 Spanish Tragedy, The, 74, 75 Spectator, The, 146-149, 168, 194 Spenser, 20, 34, 35, 40, 67-69, 86-89, 91, 94, 97, 99, 108, 109, 114, 115, 124, 127, 133, 145 note, 188, 210, 218, 257, 260, 262, 264, 267 Splendid Shilling, The, 155 Sprat, 134 Squire of Alsatia, The, 142 State of Ireland, The, 94 Steele, 145-148, 167 and note Sterling, Life of (Carlyle's), 232 Sterne, 163, 164, 220, 232 Stevenson, R. L., 226-228 Still, Bishop, 72 Stirling, Sir W. Alexander, Earl of, 48 St. Irvyne, 186 St. Leon, 192 note St. Mary Magdalene, 52, 71 Stones of Venice, The, 233 Strafford, 208 Suckling, Sir J., 105, 113, 133 Surrey, Earl of, 40, 53-57, 66, 68, 95, 258 Swift, 21, 144, 145-148, 153, 155, 161, 162, 163, 167, 193, 232 Swinburne, 3, 11, 203, 211, 214- 219 Sylvester, no, 127 Tale of a Tub, A, 146 Tale of Thebes, 44 Tale of Two Cities, A, 221 Tamburlaine, 74, 75 Tasso, 87, 109, 263 Tatler, The, 146-149 Taylor, Sir H., 205 Taylor, Bishop J., 120-122, 126, 128, 130, 144 Temora, 158 Tempest, The, 86, 141 Temple, Sir W., 134, 135, 143, 144 Tennyson, 3, 4, 24, 32, 35, 55, 69, 131, 132, 188, 196 note, 202, 203, 204-213, 215, 216, 219, 220, .266 Thackeray, 153, 163, 196 note, 202, 222-225, 228 Thalaba the Destroyer, 182, 186 Thealma and Clearchus, no Theocritus, 67 Thirl wall, 199 Thistle and the Rose, The, 50 Thomson, James (I.), 155, 167 note, 189 Thomson, James (II.), 216, 218 INDEX OF NAMES AND TITLES 283 Tillotson, 134, 143 Times, The, 170 Timon [of Athens], 141 Tintern Abbey, Lines on, 177-179 Titus Andronicus, 76, 270 Tom Jones, 163 Tom Thumb, 259 TotteVs Miscellany, 57, 65, 89 Tourneur, 82, 91 Traill, H. D., 265 Treasure Island, 227 Trevisa, John of, 38, 59 Tristram Shandy, 164 Troilus and Creseyde, Chaucer's, 33, 108, 268 Trollope, Anthony, 224, 225 Turberville, 57 Tusser, 57 Twelfth Night, 85 Two Married Women and th^. Widow, The, 50 Two Noble Gentlemen, The, 104, 107 Two Years Ago, 226 Tyndale, 61, 98 Tyrwhitt, 36 Udal, 72 Unfortunate Traveller, The, 93 Universal Passion, The, 154 Urn Burial, 122 Urquhart, Sir T., 48, 232 Usher, Archbishop, 7 Utopia, 61 Vanbriigh, 142, 143 Vanity Fair, 222 Vanity of Human Wishes, The, 105, 166 Vaughan, 113, 130 Venice Preserved, 142 Venus and Adonis, 91 Vicar of Wakefield, The, 167 Village, The, 169 Virgil, 67 Virgin Martyr, The, 106 Virginians, The, 222 Vision of Sin, The, 89 note Vittoria Corombona, 82 Vulgar Errors, 122 Waldhere, 6 (Blind Harry's), 49 Waller, 113 Walpole, H., 158, 159, 168 Walton, Izaak, no note, 128 Wanderer, The, 6 Warden, The, 225 Warner, 91 Water Babies, The, 226 Watson, T., 98 Waverley, 191 Wealth of Nations, The, 171 Weekly News, The (1622), 99 Werfrith, Bishop, 10 Wesley, Charles, 201 Wesley, Life of (Southey's), 198 Westward Ho ! 226 What You Will, 82 Whitman, Walt, 11 Widsith, 5 William Blake (Swinburne's), 235 Wilson, John Christopher North "), 195, 219, 229, 230 Wilson, Thomas, 62, 95, 99 Winchelsea, Lady, 154 note Winter (Thomson's), 155, 156 Winter's Tale, A, 86, 130, 271 Witch, The, 82 Witch of Atlas, The, 186 Wither, 109 Wolcot (" Peter Pindar"), 170 Woman Killed with Kindness, A 83 Wooing of Our Lord, The, 21 note Wordsworth, 22, 36, 157, 174-180, 189, 195, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 264 Wortlcy - Montagu, Lady Mary, 108 Wulfstan, Archbishop, 11 Wyatt, Sir T., 40, 53-57, 66 Wycherley, 142 Wyclif, 39, 59 Wyntoun, 47, 49 Yardley Oak, 169, 180 note Yeast, 225 Young, 154, 167 note, 269 Zastrozzi, 186 Printed by R. h R. 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