English Literature

It is not unfitting to compare English Literature to a great tree whose far

spreading and ever fruitful branches have their roots deep down in the soil of the

past. Over such a tree, since the small beginnings of its growth, many

vicissitudes of climate have passed; periods of storm, of calm, of sunshine, and

of rain; of bitter winds and of genial life-bearing breezes; each change leaving its

trace behind in the growth and development of the living plant. It is obvious, then,,

that to present the complete history of such an organism in a few pages is

impossible; all that can be attempted in this article is to describe the main lines

of its life.

It should not be forgotten, at the outset, that English literature has been no

isolated growth. It has sprung from the common Aryan root, has branched off

from the primal stem, and has received, and continues to receive, in the course

of its growth, multitudinous influences from other literatures growing up around it,

as well as from those of an earlier time. Yet, as Freeman said, "We are

ourselves, and not somebody else", and one of the most remarkable things about

English literature is its power of assimilation. Latin, French, Italian, Greek,

Spanish literatures, to name only a few, have poured their influences upon us,

not once only, but time after time leaving their trace, and yet our character, our

language, our literature, remain unmistakably English. The ancestors of the

English (the Teutonic tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and some Frisians) spent

nearly one hundred and fifty years (455 to 600) in the conquest of the island from

the British tribes who had been abandoned by the Roman colonizers nearly fifty

years earlier, in 410. Little by little these fierce and hardy heathen tribes, after

much fighting among themselves for the supremacy, settled down, and a slow

process of civilization made itself felt among them. Christianity, preached by St.

Augustine in 597, bringing in its train education, science, and the arts, was the

main factor in this refining change. Such British tribes as had escaped the

English destroyer remained for a time almost entirely apart, though they and their

literature were afterwards to have no small influence upon the literary

development of England.

It is not unlikely that the written literature may have begun as early as the sixth

century, but at any rate, by the middle of the seventh century the traces of it are

clear in the work of Cædmon, according to the testimony of Bede. Between this

date and the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxon or Old English writers (recent

scholars often prefer the latter term as preserving the idea of continuity) produce

a body of literature in prose and verse such as was furnished by no other

Teutonic nation either in amount or quality during the same centuries. There are

extant at least 20,000 lines of verse, and of prose somewhat more. It is almost

certain, too, that a good deal has been lost. The language in which we possess it

is English of the oldest form, before any notable foreign admixture had taken

place. The verse, with rare exceptions, is of the Teutonic alliterative type.

Speaking generally, this body of literature may be classed under two great

periods: the first, when the monasteries of Northumbria were the homes of

learning, between about 670 and 800, when, according to the legend, Cædmon,

a lay brother of Whitby, received the gift of poetry and passed it on to not

unworthy followers; and the second, from the time of King Alfred (871), with some

spaces of interruption, to the early part of the eleventh century, when literature,

driven from the North by the Danes, came South and spoke in prose of the

vernacular. In all this work, more particularly in the verse, there is great variety.

Growth may be traced and changes of style.

Putting aside minor verse we come first upon the "Beowulf", a narrative poem

which, together with a few other fragments, is all we have of the old English epic.

It seems clear that the matter of it is much older than its present form. It is a

storehouse of the thinking and feeling of the forefathers of the English people

when they were still heathen and before they came to Britain, even though the

poem may not have been actually put together in its present form until the ninth

or tenth century. It gives a picture of very great interest of certain aspects of the

actual life of the people. The English temper of mind at its best, enduring and

heroic, pervades it throughout.

But this was before Christianity and the monasteries. After the introduction of the

new religion the first important record of literature comes under the patriarchal

name of Cædmon. It is clear from recent research that Cædmon himself only

wrote a very small portion of the so-called Cædmonian poems, but the story of

his vision, given by Bede, even if only legend, testifies clearly that the first poetry

produced in England began among the people and in religion. The chief interest

of the work lies, not in the actual subject-matter, Scriptural paraphrase, but in the

way the matter is treated, a Teutonic aspect being frequently given to the

narrative. The craving for freedom, the exultation in war, the longing for moral

goodness, the respect for women, all these and many other things come out in

the rendering of the "Fall of the Angels", the "Temptation of Man", and elsewhere.

It is quite clear that several hands have worked at the Cædmonian poems, but in

the next great group, a hundred years later, we come upon one individual poet

who has signed at least four poems with his name, Cynewulf, and he insists

upon our knowing him as the Ancient Mariner constrained the Wedding Guest.

He reveals his personality, he becomes real to us. His poems are religious, and

perhaps the finest is the "Christ". He is a poet of high order. Among the rest of

Old English poetry the elegies and the war poems stand out as the most original.

Old English prose, if we except St. Bede's lost translation of St. John's Gospel,

groups itself round two names, those of Alfred and Ælfric. Alfred (849-901) was

eager for his people's education, and his literary work consists chiefly of

translations of important books of his time: -- Gregory the Great's "Pastoral

Care", Orosius's "History of the World", Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy",

and (probably done under his superintendence) Bede's "Ecclesiastical History"

and Bishop Werfrith's "Dialogues". To some of these he added prefaces and

notes in simple, unaffected English, which make us realize his remarkable and

lovable character, both as man and king.

Many years after, Ælfric (c. 955-1025), Abbot of Eynsham, a much more

cultivated scholar, and a more finished, though not more attractive, prose writer

than Alfred, put forth volumes of homilies, saints' lives, translations of books of

the Old Testament, and other works, which were greatly and justly prized by his

hearers and readers.

The "Old English Chronicle", of which there are seven manuscripts, a record of

events in England from the sixth century to 1154, was meanwhile being written in

the monasteries, undisturbed by the many changes passing over England. It is

almost certain that Alfred encouraged this work and set it on a surer foundation,

perhaps himself adding portions of the record where it concerned his own reign.

One other piece of prose literature must be mentioned. In Wulfstan's "Address to

the English", with its vivid indignation at the sufferings of the people from the

Danes, the author is often as impassioned as an English reformer might be over

the abuses of present-day society. It brings us up in date to the last half-century

before the Norman Conquest.

The Norman Conquest is as important in the history of English literature as in

that of England's political and social life. It brought a new and invigorating

influence to bear upon the English genius, though in the immediate present of the

eleventh century it seemed a crushing disaster for the nation. For nearly one

hundred and fifty years the race, the language, and the literature of the people

were apparently stifled. It seemed as if everything became Norman-French. But

as long as the down-trodden English kept life in them the springs of poetry and

art could not dry up; and though Robert of Gloucester says that only "low men"

held to English at this time, yet there were a good many of these "low men", and

we have proof that the native population had still their songs and their wandering

bards, while in certain of the monasteries the monks went on chronicling events

in their mother tongue much as they had done when a Saxon king had ruled

England. The continuity of native verse and prose was never really broken, and

just as the English race was at last to absorb its foreign conquerors, and to gain

infinitely more than it had suffered from them, so English language and literature

were by the same means to be enriched and ennobled to an extent no one then

looking on could have dreamed of.

Yet at first literature was apparently silenced, and until the beginning of the

thirteenth century there is no writing of much importance except the "Old Fnglish

Chronicle", which ends in 1154. There was, of course, writing in Latin and in

French, and the French was even looked upon by some as likely to be more

enduring than the Latin. But the Latin writing was in reality no enemy to English;

it was the tongue, then as now, of the Church, and it was the medium for

communication between scholars and the language of nearly all books of

scholarship. The native work, however, never quite disappearing, revives

unmistakably at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and between that date

and the death of Chaucer in 1400 there is produced a great mass of literature of

endless variety but of varying value.

We come then to the Middle Ages, called "of Faith"; the age of the Crusades, "of

cathedrals, tournaments, old coloured glass, and other splendid things" the age

to which, in times of dryness, artists, lovers of romance, as well as pious souls

of all kinds, have often looked back and have drawn from it fresh inspiration. It

has stimulated in modern times new and noble movements in art and in poetry,

and its power of inspiration is not yet exhausted. It was an age of contrasts, of

faith and of unbelief, of extraordinary saintliness and of strange wickedness, of

reverence and of ribaldry. It was the great Catholic age, when the sacred robe of

the Church, spotted though it might be in places through human frailty, was still

unrent, whole, and she herself was everywhere acknowledged in Europe as the

Divinely appointed mother of men. The history of English literature from the

beginning of its revival in the thirteenth century is first that of transition (up to

about 1250), then of development for about eighty years, in which the work is

largely anonymous, finally, a period of achievement, the second half of the

fourteenth century, in which individual writers of power begin to emerge, and

among them one supreme artist, Geoffrey Chaucer. We trace, too, during these

ages the rise of the drama in the miracle-and morality-plays.

On the threshold of the revival stand two works: "The Brut" (1205), a poem of

30,000 lines concerning the history of Britain, written by Layamon, a patriotic

English priest of Worcester; full of more or less historical stories, partly

translated from French sources and written in an alliterative metre; and it gives us

the first account in English of King Arthur, the British hero. The second, a

religious work, "The Ormulum", a series of metrical homilies upon the daily

Gospels of the Church, was written by Ormin, an Augustinian canon. After this

the stream of English literature is continued in poems of great variety, of which

many are lyrics. In "The Owl and the Nightingale", a delightful poem standing at

the end of this "transition period", we have a happy combination of old and new

elements which have already begun to form a fresh native poetry. Nor had prose

been idle; one of the most interesting books of the time is the "Ancren Riwle"

(q.v.), a series of exhortations on their rule for a community of Dorsetshire nuns.

Passing on over these fifty years we are met by a further outpouring of literary

work, abundant and various, if not remarkably original, poetry always taking the

chief place. The main kinds of literature in this period of quick development are

romances; tales; religious works (legends of saints, treatises and homilies on

morality and religion); the great book called Cursor Mundi"; historical writings;

lyrics of love and religion, and songs of political and social life. In all this, French

influence is very strong, but there gradually appear among it English elements

which are now beginning to hold their own. The romances concerned with the

adventures of well-known heroes are the most prominent among all this literature,

and these in some cases are translated directly from the French, though never

without English touches. The religious work of this time is edifying, but the prose

homilies and treatises are sometimes very long and commonplace. Yet a simple

faith and tender piety, together with a most sane sense of humour and some

imagination, make the religious writings not unfrequently attractive, even from the

literary point of view. But regarded as literature, the lyrics of the thirteenth

century are perhaps the most remarkable. They are native, and though they bear

the marks of artistic culture in their matter, they remind us more of the country

than the town. There is a real though un-self-conscious love of nature in them,

and the promise of that peculiar and fine quality of the later English lyric which is

one of the glories of our literature. Nature, love, and religion are the inspiration of

these little medieval poems.

This multitudinous work formed a discipline and preparation, and resulted in the

achievements of the latter half of the century. The period 1360 to 1400 is marked

by a strong reassertion of the national spirit, and in literature there is a curious

reappearance of the Old English alliterative verse after 300 years of apparent

neglect. Amongst other poems in this metre there are four by an anonymous

writer of high poetic power, one of them, "The Pearl", of great beauty and of deep

religious feeling. To this alliterative class belongs too the well-known "Piers the

Plowman". Chaucer's work, coming almost at the same time, has to some

extent overshadowed this poem, but as a picture of the society and ideals of the

time it forms a complement to Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales". In "Piers the

Plowman" we have that grave outlook upon life which marks the English

character at its best, carried almost to excess. The author (or authors, we ought

now to say, for it has been recently proved that at least three writers must have

had a hand in its making) looks upon the society of his time as a realist". He

describes the world almost entirely on its dark side, and though the remedies he

offers are good (" Love is the physician of Life"), and though he never altogether

loses his belief in a Divine over-ruling order, yet there is an accent of uncertainty

and sometimes of despair in his voice.

Chaucer (1340-1400), on the other hand, does not care for problems of life or

dark thinking. His picture of society is, on the whole, from its bright side, when

men are out on holiday, and when over-seriousness would seem out of place.

Poetically, and in its structure, "Piers the Plowman" is much below Chaucer's

work, but its forcefulness, its pathos, its sincerity, its grim humour, its realistic

descriptiveness, and its dramatic moments make it a great poem. Chaucer's

work marks the full flowering of English literature in the Middle Ages, and it was

he who first raised English poetry to a European position. It is the custom of

historians of literature to divide the literary life of Chaucer into a French, an

Italian, and an English period, according as his work was influenced by the

manner of each national literature. This division represents a fact if it be

remembered that he carried on, all through his career, certain of the lessons he

had learned from the foreign source in the earlier time. There is little doubt that

the impulse to write verse came to Chaucer from France. Old English literature

was practically unknown to him, but he was saturated with French poetry, for the

literature of France was then, outside the classics, the most influential in Europe.

Among many shorter poems of this early time, the very first of which is a hymn

to the Blessed Virgin, the translation (in part) of the long French allegorical poem

of the "Romance of the Rose", and his original and most interesting elegy on the

"Death of Blanche the Duchess", are the most important. It is, however, after he

has come upon the literature of Italy -- Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio -- that his

true genius begins to show itself. "Troilus and Cressida", "The Parlement of

Foules", "The House of Fame", and "The Legend of Good Women" (the two last

unfinished), as well as some of the "Canterbury Tales", belong to this time. They

show him as a true artist, feeling his way through experiment to greater

perfection of work and developing his unique sense of humour. Then, in the later

years of his life, he strikes upon the fruitful idea of the Canterbury pilgrimage as a

framework in which to show the full power of his art in his picture of the life of his

own, and, to some extent of all, time; and into this frame he fitted tales he had

already written, as well as new ones. But, of it all, nothing exceeds the power

and truth of the "Prologue" to the "Tales". His picture of life and the commentary

upon it comes straight out of his own observation and character. As he saw men

so he fearlessly portrays them, the good, the bad, the indifferent. A few of his

tales reflect the coarseness of the time, and it is just possible that the apology

placed at the end of the manuscript of "The Parson's Tale" was written by himself

at the close of his life. But, however that may be, over all he writes he throws his

own sunny humour and wide charity, and in this as in the width of his

sympathies he is not unworthy to be named with Shakespeare. He is the one

supreme literary artist before Spenser, and the best brief summary of him" and

his work is given in that proverb quoted by Dryden in his criticism of Chaucer,

"Here is God's plenty". The name of John Gower (1330-1408) is linked by custom

with that of Chaucer, but we recognize now what his contemporaries did not, that

Gower's lengthy books in verse are the work rather of an expert journeyman than

of a genius. But we may legitimately class together the two writers in their

influence on the language. Both being widely read, they helped to make the East

Midland dialect in which they wrote the literary language of England, and by their

choice or rejection of French words welded the language into greater stability and

unity. The English language, at the end of the fourteenth century, had begun to

assume nearly that modern form we know. People, language, and literature had

now become wholly English.

After reviewing this brilliant half century of poetry, the prose of the same time

seems a poor matter. There is no great progress to record, nothing really original

of importance was written, and the style follows Latin models rather than the

simpler natural manner of the Old English prose. Chaucer wrote prose which in

its mediocrity is a curious contrast to his poetry. Sir John Mandeville's "Travels"

was a translation of an amusing book, and Wyclif's translation or paraphrase of

the Vulgate (in which, however, several other hands than his own had a share),

together with his vigorous but heretical tracts and sermons form the chief prose

work of this time.

After the death of Chaucer, poetry declined in quality with strange swiftness. For

the next one hundred and fifty years there is no great poet; the art of poetry,

chiefly owing to the scarcity of native poetical genius, but also partly to the swift

changes the language was undergoing and to the carelessness of those who

attempted verse, ceased to be finely exercised. The tradition of Chaucer almost

disappeared. In the earlier part of the fifteenth century Lydgate (1370?-1451?) and

Hoccleve (1370-1450?) tried to follow in the footsteps of the master they revered,

but frankly recognized their own failure. Their voluminous and mediocre work,

especially Lydgate's, is not without interest to the student, but certain

anonymous poets, such as the authors of "The Flower and the Leaf" and "London

Lickpenny" (formerly given to Lydgate), succeeded better than they, and the

latter poem shows that Chaucer's power of social satire had not disappeared.

Satire, as always in the decline after a rich imaginative period of verse, came to

the front as subject-matter for verse, and later in the century the scathing verse of

John Skelton (1460?-1529), though poor as art, is of interest in the light it throws

upon the social life of the times. This poet and Stephen Hawes (d. 1523?), who

tried in the "Pastime of Pleasure" to revive the old allegorical style, are the only

English names of any note in verse in the latter part of the century. In Scotland,

however, the followers of Chaucer, of whom the chief were King James I, Dunbar

Henryson, and Gawain Douglas, were producing and continued to produce poetry

worthy of immortality.

Fifteenth-century prose was less barren than the poetry of the age. Since the

Conquest nearly all serious subject-matter, with few exceptions, had been written

of in Latin, but with the invention of printing, and as the power to read and write

spread downwards, English prose became more widely recognized as a medium

for the treatment of many varied as well as more popular kinds of matter. Four

names -- Pecock, Fortescue, Caxton, Malory -- are recognized as leaders of this

movement, but out of their work only Sir Thomas Malory's has become classic.

His "Morte D'Arthur", which draws together as many stories and series of stories

about King Arthur as he could lay hands upon, is a work of genius, and remains

a living book. Its matter is of great intrinsic value and interest, but it is the beauty

of its strange child like style, its un-self-conscious appreciation of lovely and

noble things in man and nature, and its underlying religious mysticism, which

make it a book of the first order.

The medieval drama, which grew up during these centuries, was, with one or two

exceptions, not the work of poets or literary artists, yet it was one of the most

educative influences of the time. Beginning in connection with the liturgy of the

Church, there gradually developed; a whole cycle of religious plays, showing forth

the history of the world from the Creation to the Last Judgment. These, acted in a

series, in public places of the towns, at certain great church festivals, provided as

much instruction as amusement. There is no doubt that, in spite of passages in

them which may now seem to us materialistic or irreverent, these simple and

rude dramatic representations, both miracle-plays and the later developed

moralities, pressed home great religious truths upon the people. From the point

of view of the development of drama, we may say that English tragedy and

comedy have, at least to some extent, their roots in these crude plays in

doggerel verse.

Leaving the Middle Ages behind us, we come now to the threshold of the most

fateful epoch in the history of the English people -- the disruption of the Church,

or the so-called "Reformation". This was preceded and accompanied by the

earlier movement called the "Renaissance", which, having opened up fresh

branches of classical learning, more especially that of Greek poetry and

philosophy, awakened and stimulated the human mind both to good and to evil.

In England the "New Learning" movement, in the hands of men like More and

Colet tended to enlightenment and true learning. The "Utopia" of Sir Thomas

More, a book of the noblest ideals, represents its spirit at the best. But the effect

of the Renaissance on the manners and morals of those Englishmen who came

back imbued with its intoxication from Italy, was much lamented by

contemporary writers, as we find in Ascham's "Schoolmaster". Yet it is to this

acquaintance with Italy and its literature that we owe the revival of English poetry

after its long relapse since the death of Chaucer. In the work of Sir Thomas

Wyatt and of the Earl of Surrey, young men who had studied and felt the beauty

and power of the great Italian poets, we discover a new beginning, a new poetic

art. It was yet uncertain of itself, experimental, hesitating, and not engaged with

deep or very noble subject-matter, but, while observing certain common laws of

scansion and diction which the last one hundred years had ignored, attempted

new and better melodies.

The publication of Tottel's "Miscellany" in 1557, which contains the work of these

two poets, marks an epoch in literature; It set up a standard of poetic art below

which no future work could sink. The literary world of that age grew full of

expectation looking for a new poet who should embody still more fully the poetic

ideals of the time.

The new poet came in Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). Seldom has a young writer

been so immediately recognized and acclaimed by the accredited literary judges

of his own time as Spenser was. And posterity has agreed with their judgment.

He forms the second great landmark in English poetry after Chaucer, from whom

he received inspiration. He had been bred in the stimulating atmosphere of the

new learning and was greatly influenced by classic and Italian literature, but he

also appreciated earlier English literature, and the only master he openly

acknowledged was Chaucer. Spenser's poetry throughout is of wonderful beauty

in its art, and is marked by nobility of aim, purity of spirit, and reverence for

religion. His "minor poems" are many, and as Professor Saintsbury remarks,

would be "major poems" for any smaller poet. He was, for example, a satirist of

no mean order and a sonneteer, but in the general judgment, and rightly,

Spenser is the poet of the "Faerie Queene". All his special powers are shown

there, and all his character, one might almost say all his history. The large

allegorical ground-plan of the "Faerie Queene", not half completed, interesting as

it is, does not form the great attraction of the poem. That lies in the pure and

appealing beauty of the versification, in the varied and glorious description, often

minutely detailed, in the wealth of imagination, and in the impassioned love of

everything beautiful which enthrals the reader as it did the poet. That there are

flaws in the poem goes without saying, more especially as Spenser died leaving

it half finished.

The complete plan of the work cannot be gathered from the poem itself.

Spenser's letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, prefixed to all editions, is necessary to

make it clear. "The centre falls outside the circle." For Catholics, too, the

historical allegory is seriously marred by the anti-Catholic bias of the poet's time.

In places, the Church is bitterly assailed, though in other passages Spencer

clearly deprecates the desecration of monasteries, churches, altars, and images

as the work of the "Blatant Beast of Calumny". Nor does he give by any means

undiluted approval to the Anglican Church or the Puritans. Modern criticism,

however, places little emphasis upon any portion of the historical allegory,

regarding it as an antiquated hindrance rather than a living help to the true

appreciation of the poem. The more purely spiritual elements of the allegory,

such as the struggles of the human will against evil, aided by Divine power, are

those which are valued by discerning readers. Considered in its essential aspect,

the Faerie Queene" is "the poem of the noble powers of the human soul

struggling towards union with God". Spencer holds the supreme place among a

multitude of other poets of as real though of less genius than his in the sixteenth

century, and the work of these, outside the drama, is perhaps seen at its best in

the song and the sonnet, two forms which had now an extraordinary vogue.

Nearly a dozen anthologies of Elizabethan lyrics, of which the finest is England's

"Helicon" (1600), remain to show us the sweetness, beauty, and rarity of these

songs. The sonnets, one of the new Italian poetic forms, introduced by Surrey

and Wyatt, are less original, and many of them are translations from foreign

sources, but those of Sidney and Shakespeare, at least, stand out by their

exceptional force and beauty.

Among the many lesser poets of the time Michael Drayton (1563-1631) has been

singled out as especially representative of the general character of Elizabethan

poetical genius. He wrote every sort of poetry that was the fashion except moral

allegory. His work deserves more notice than is often given to it, and his name is

sometimes only associated with his long historical poem of the "Polyolbion".

This type of poetry reflects the patriotism of the age, and Samuel Daniel and

William Warner, both poets of some genius, also worked at it; The huge "Mirror

for Magistrates", begun in 1555, and not in its final edition until James I's reign,

had encouraged this kind of verse. Poetry of an argumentative and philosophic

type was produced towards the end of the century, but very little of value that

was religious, except the work of Robert Southwell. This heroic young Jesuit and

martyr wrote with a high object: to show to the brilliant young poets of his time,

whose love poems often expressed unworthy passion, "how well verse and virtue

sort together". And he did this by using the literary manner of the age, "weaving",

as he himself says, "a new web in their old loom". His book had a distinct

influence on contemporary and later poetry, touching even Ben Jonson and

perhaps Milton himself. Its quaintness of wit (allying it somewhat to the

"metaphysical" school of the next generation) are shot through with warm human

feeling which makes its direct appeal to the reader. And sincerity is the very note

of it all.

But it is, of course, in the drama that we find all the well-known poets -- with the

one exception of Spenser -- putting forth their greatest force. The sudden rise of

the drama in the latter half of the sixteenth century is the most remarkable

phenomenon of this supremely remarkable literary age. It has never been fully

accounted for. Many of the contemporary records concerning plays and the

theatre have undoubtedly been lost, so that we have to form our own judgment of

Elizabethan dramatic literature and its causes upon, comparatively speaking,

insufficient grounds. Out of some 2000 plays known to have been acted, only

about 500 exist, as far as we know, and discoveries of new contemporary

testimony or work might revolutionize our judgment on the history of Elizabethan

drama. However that may be, the facts, as we have them, are that in the earlier

half of the sixteenth century we find scarcely any dramatic work that would

enable us to foresee the rise of the great romantic drama. Miracle-plays were

acted up to 1579, but clearly no great development could come from these, and

still less, perhaps, from the scholarly movement towards a so-called classical

drama, imitations of the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence, such as "Ralph

Roister Doister", named the "first English comedy", or of the dramas of Seneca,

as in "Gorboduc", the "first English tragedy". There was also a popular

tragi-comic drama of a somewhat rude kind (such as Shakespeare travestied in

the play of "Pyramus and Thisbe" in the "Midsummer Night's Dream"), but this

was no more prophetic than the others. Then suddenly there appear between

1580 and 1590 plays with life, invention, and imagination in them, often faulty

enough, but living. The predecessors of Shakespeare, Peele, Greene, Kyd, and

others, but most of all that wild and poetic genius, Marlowe, "whose raptures

were all air and fire", and who practically created our dramatic blank verse,

prepare the way for Shakespeare. Rejecting, gradually, by a sort of instinct,

those elements in the drama of the past that were alien to the English genius,

they struck out, little by little, the now well-known type of Elizabethan romantic

drama which in Shakespeare's hands was to attain its highest. And

Shakespeare's genius made of it not only a vehicle for the expression of

Elizabethan ideals of drama and of life, but a mouthpiece of humanity itself.

Shakespeare belongs not to England but to the whole world, and most modern

nations have vied with each other in acute and wondering appreciation of his

genius. A mass of critical literature has grown up round his name, discussing

problems literary, artistic, personal, of every kind, and continues to grow.

Shakespeare and his work furnish inexhaustible matter for meditation upon

almost every human interest and problem. After his time there are some fine

dramatists, but none can approach him in completeness and height of genius.

Ben Jonson, Chapman, Webster, Ford, Massinger, and Shirley -- the two last

Catholic converts -- with others, carry on the line of dramatic writing with genius,

skill, and energy, but the glory gradually departs until one is led to think that if

the theatres had not been closed in 1640 on account of the civil war they would

have ceased of themselves for want of good plays. Not only had the technical

skill in versification, dialogue, and plot decayed, but the moral tone had so much

degenerated that most of the hard charges brought against the drama by the

Puritans at this time seem well justified.

When we turn to Elizabethan prose we find it a much inferior and less practised

form of art than verse. No standard of good prose towards which writers might

aim was recognized, and the masterpieces of the Elizabethan age are few.

Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity" has rightly, by its weighty argument and its

grave eloquence, won a place among classics. Lyly in his two volumes of

"Euphues" was the first, perhaps, to treat prose as equally worthy with poetry of

artistic elaboration, and his book, a medley of story-telling and moralizing, often

most excellent as well as interesting in its ethical musing, instituted a fashion of

speech and writing from which for some years few writers stood aloof. Sir Philip

Sidney's "Arcadia", a long pastoral romance of sentiment, however, broke the

spell and in its turn created a vogue. The novels of this time follow the "Euphues"

or the "Arcadia" in most examples, but there is also a third type in the work of

Nash, the novel of wild and reckless adventure, which was afterwards to become

famous in the greater work of Smollet. Criticism of poetry, history, often in the

form of chronicles, geography, and adventure, such as in Hakluyt's collection of

"Voyages", together with innumerable translations from classical and modern

authors, were some of the matters treated in prose. In the novel, as in the drama,

the foreign influences, especially those of Spain and Italy, are easy to trace.

Though not of the first order of art, the Elizabethan prose is yet most attractive,

for it reflects the varied interests and the complex character of the strange and

wonderful time of the sixteenth century, and it exhibits in their early stages

certain forms of literature, such as criticism and the novel, which were afterwards

to develop into orders of the first importance. It is scarcely needful to say that

Catholics, of necessity, in this epoch, for them, of disaster and persecution, took

little part in the great output of literature.

From one point of view the history of English poetry would seem to be a record of

action and reaction, of a struggle between one type of poetry and another,

between that in which the matter delivered is all important, and that where

correctness of form is the chief end at which the poets aim -- between, in fact,

the romantic and the classical schools. This general trend may be most clearly

seen in the work of the crowd of secondary poets in any age, but the few who

excel will be found to combine and reconcile in themselves, more or less, the

opposing elements, though, naturally, both small and great poets will exhibit

some individual bias, however slight, towards one type of work or another. This

statement is practically true of the seventeenth century. In the very heart of the

romantic poetry of the immediate successors of the Elizabethans, there arose, in

the early years of the century, a few young men who began to write verse of

another kind altogether, whose work was not developed to its full meaning,

however, until Dryden took it up. Meanwhile, one matchless poet, John Milton,

living through the greater part of the century, went his own way ("his soul was

like a star and dwelt apart"), taking little notice of prevailing types or

subject-matter, fusing romantic and classical elements into one superb kind of

work that we can find no name for but "Miltonic".

Before looking in any detail at seventeenth-century verse, it is well to glance at

the general character of the age. it is a contrast to that which had preceded it.

The Elizabethan time had been exuberant almost to intoxication, rejoicing in the

great range of possibilities for human life that new knowledge, exploration, and

learning seemed to open out before it. But over this mood at the end of the

century there passed a change. Questioning succeeded the brilliant joy in things

as they had appeared; self-consciousness followed the almost impersonal delight

in life; the very foundations of religion, politics, and social life were called up for

investigation. There had in reality always been a good deal of unrest beneath the

surface, even after the settlement of these matters attempted and apparently in

part accomplished by Elizabeth. Now the unrest increased, and a sceptical

spirit, light or sad, according to the author's temperament, pervades much of the

most capable writing. At the same time there are religious writers who express

both in prose and verse the best spirit of the Anglican Church when under the

sway of Archbishop Laud, and now there rises also to its full height the great

Puritan movement (already, however, split up into a growing number of sects),

strongly and narrowly affirmative of certain views concerning Divine and human

things, passing oftener than not into intolerance and wild fanaticism. Milton, on

the whole, represents this movement at its best, though its weaknesses may be

discovered, especially in his prose work, even in him.

At the beginning of the reign of James I we find the group of poets whose

inspiration was Spenser, amongst whom the chief are the two Fletchers, William

Browne, and George Wither. All have a sweetness and fullness in their work

which links them to the Elizabethans. Passing on to the reign of Charles I, we

are struck by a more widely spread order of poets, men who, at their best, are all

more or less touched by the desire to find behind material objects an imaginative

idea, "the search for the after-sense", and who in trying to express that which

they thought they found used an over-abundance of imagery, sometimes

beautiful, but often pedantic and fantastic to the point of absurdity. To these Dr.

Johnson gave the name of "metaphysical", and to see them at their worst one

should look at his quotations from them in his "Life of Cowley". The movement

was not confined to England; Italy, France, and Spain had felt it earlier. John

Donne (whose verse belongs in date to the reign of Elizabeth) is reckoned as the

founder of this school in England. Herrick and the amourists known as "Cavalier

Lyrists" form one group in it, and Crashaw, Herbert, and Vaughan, religious

poets, together with Herrick, are the only ones whose work has secured

immortality. Crashaw, a fervent Catholic convert, whose religious verses are often

very beautiful, shows in a marked degree the great strength and the great

weakness of this school. Professor Saintsbury, the most discerning critic of this

poetical group, has said that if Crashaw "could but have kept himself at his best

he would have been the greatest of English poets". Of another Catholic poet,

William Habington, Crashaw's contemporary, but less than he, though

occasionally writing fine passages, the same critic remarks that he is "creditably

distinguished" from too many others "by a very strict and remarkable decency of

thought and language".

But this was poetry which could not develop; it was a kind of second crop from

the Elizabethan field, and it gradually withered away. Some time before its end,

certain young poets, several of whom had been in France, exiled with the Queen,

Henrietta Maria, and had caught a new spirit, turned to fresh ways of verse.

Edmund Waller (1605-1687) led the way as early as 1620. Denham, Cowley, and

Davenant (a Catholic and romantic, brought up in the house of Lord Brooke, Sir

Philip Sidney's friend) followed him in varying degrees. These young poets

initiated a change of far-reaching effect. In their hands poetry took on another

aspect. It discarded nearly all forms of metre except the heroic couplet, refused

to use any but rather commonplace imagery, and turning away from all

passionate emotion, tended to treat of subjects which belonged to the intellect

rather than to imagination or feeling. Satire or didactic poetry gradually usurped

almost the whole field. But this was not accomplished in full until Dryden came.

It was he who stamped this school with its leading marks, and gave the heroic

couplet its "long resounding march and energy divine". Yet the restricted and

prosaic subject-matter of this verse -- satiric, didactic, and argumentative work on

religion ("The Hind and the Panther" Was written in the cause of the Church) and

politics -- has made some critics deny to it, unjustly, the name of poetry. it is

poetry of a certain restricted kind.

John Dryden (1631-1700), had he lived in a time more favourable to imaginative

work, would have written verse more purely poetic. He had about him something

of the amplitude, inventiveness, and freedom of the Elizabethans, and the history

of his poetic development shows him passing from stage to stage of excellence.

Though he was the crown and chief of the so-called "classical school", he was

indeed deeply tinged with romantic feeling, and he himself knew and

acknowledged that poetry was capable of a higher flight and wider range than it

had ever taken in his own day. He was, moreover, a man of many powers. He

was a prolific dramatist, and his critical writings have made an epoch in the

history of English prose. In the course of his life he changed his politics and his

religion; and though doubts have been cast upon his good faith in this respect,

the most recent criticism is of opinion that he had nothing but spiritual ends to

gain by his conversion to Catholicism. It is unfortunate that we cannot exonerate

him as an author from the charge of that sensuality which mars a good deal of

his dramatic writing -- it is no better and sometimes worse than the immoral

thought brilliantly witty drama of his time. He himself at the close of his life wrote

a full apology for this trait in his work.

Dryden's lines on Milton show the exalted estimate he had formed of his greater

and earlier contemporary, and time has proved the general truth of it. The poetry

of Milton (1608-1674) has become an English classic, and "Paradise Lost" has

been translated into many tongues. It is regarded as the one great epic in

English, and its fame has somewhat overshadowed that of Milton's earlier work --

"L'Allegro", "Il Penseroso", "Comus", and "Lycidas" -- poems within their own

limits as perfect as anything he ever did. It is when we turn to his prose that we

realize, from the immeasurable difference between it and his verse, how

comparatively low the received standard of prose must have been. "Milton, the

great architect of the paragraph and the sentence in verse, seems to be utterly

ignorant of the laws of both in prose, or at least utterly incapable or careless of

obeying those laws." Yet it contains some splendid passages more like poetry

than prose, but the controversial matter which is the subject of most of it -- to

say nothing of its often violent manner -- is scarcely interesting to the present

generation. Prose in the seventeenth century had an eventful history, and in spite

of the lack of a high common standard, produced some masterpieces. At the

beginning of it there is the weighty work of Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626),

embracing in many volumes matters of natural science, philosophy , history,

ethics, worldly wisdom, even fiction, and in the "Essays" and the "Advancement

of Learning" especially, adding to English classics. Lord Clarendon's "History"

presents a noble gallery of portraits; there is Sir Thomas Browne (accounted by

his enthusiastic admirers one of the greatest prose writers in all the range of

English) is the finest of the rhetorical, fantastic, and wholly delightful set of

writers who arose at this time, treating in a semi-speculative fashion a wide,

various range of subject-matter. A number of religious and devotional works

appear, among which the sermons of Jeremy Taylor stand high, and John

Bunyan in "The Pilgrim's Progress" produced a masterpiece of English. Nor must

we forget the Authorized Version of the Bible, in 1611 -- a work of a wonderful

prose style, eclectic, drawn from many sources, and yet having the appearance

of absolute naturalness and simplicity. Preaching was a notable feature of the

time, and the very long sermons of Tillotson, Barrow, Stillingfleet, and others

make good literature. Dryden claimed Archbishop Tillotson as his master in

prose, and it is when we come to Dryden's own work in the latter half of the

century that we find prose beginning to take its place as "the other harmony" of

verbal artistic expression. On the whole, it is the mark of Restoration prose to

become conversational, and we may say that modern prose, easy, flexible, and

fitted for general use, arose in Dryden's critical prefaces.

Dryden died in 1700, and with the opening of the eighteenth century we pass into

an age of strongly marked characteristics. The Revolution by which the Stuart

dynasty was displaced had been accomplished, involving, naturally, great

changes in the fortunes of religious and political life, particularly disastrous to the

Catholic Faith in England. In its earlier stages the century is filled by the party

strife of Whigs and Tories, and by the religious movements known as Methodism

and Deism -- two strange opposites. In the upper classes there was a general

lowering of spiritual and emotional temperature -- to be enthusiastic was "bad

form" -- and religion and literature equally suffered. The growing middle class

seems to some extent to have escaped this tepidity, and the preaching of

Methodism touched their hearts. The "Church of England", now the State

"established" Church, was, however, in a state of spiritual poverty -- many of her

best clergy having left her for conscience' sake at the time of the Act of

Uniformity. As far as the current stream of poetry was concerned, it had become

an affair of a circle of leisured and fashionable people. A great admiration

prevailed for the classics and classical principles, seen generally through the

eyes of French critics.

The century opened badly for literature. For years there had not been such a

barren literary time. Dryden had just died, and though much verse was being

written, it was mostly poor. In prose, there were few men of any mark. The only

work showing power was the drama, in the brilliant and immoral comedies of

Congreve, Vanburgh, and Farquhar. But within ten years there was a remarkable

change. Pope came to the front in verse, and for many years poetry was to be

almost synonymous with his name. In prose there was a galaxy of genius, Swift

(1667-1746), Addison (1672-1719), Steele (1671-1726), Berkeley (1685-1753), to

mention only a few, in whose hands modern prose -- mature, varied, capable,

combining, when at its best, strength, sweetness, grace, and magnificence --

becomes henceforth a secure possession of English literature. But this was not

all at once. Prose had first to go through a discipline from the hands not only of

writers just mentioned, together with the great novelists in the first half of the

century, but from Dr. Johnson and those who followed him, especially the

historians Gibbon and Robertson. It thus took on a certain formality and

stateliness not known before.

Pope and Johnson are the two names that dominate almost tyrannically the first

and second half respectively of the eighteenth century. Most of the elements of

his age are more or less represented in the work of Alexander Pope (1688-1744),

though, as a Catholic, his religious sympathies lay in another direction than

those of his day. His first important poem, the "Essay on Criticism", hays down

rules for the guidance of critics according to the prevalent classical ideals; his

"Rape of the Lock", perhaps his best poem, gives a brilliant and witty picture of

the high society of his time; his translation of Homer is a Greek story told in an

eighteenth-century manner; his "Essay on Man" is a versifying of Shaftesbury's

philosophy; and the "Essays and Epistles" and the "Dunciad" are didactic and

satiric. Dryden and Pope share between them the chief honours of English satire.

Pope's picture of Atticus (Addison) and Dryden's of Zimri (Buckingham) have no

equals in our satiric literature. The subject-matter of Pope's poetry may

sometimes fail to interest us, but the versification always claims attention. Pope

refined and polished and super-refined the heroic couplet until it became the

most perfect instrument for satiric verse; It has not the original vigour and variety

of Dryden's couplet, but it has a finer finish and a more subtle thrust.

The greatest strength of literature, however, at this time went into prose, and the

prose writers contemporary with Pope are men of genius, with Swift by far the

greatest of them. His "Tale of a Tub" and "Gulliver's Travels" -- to mention only

the two greatest of his writings -- show a power of intellect and imagination

worthy to be employed upon much finer subject matter. The first part of "Gulliver's

Travels" finds him, perhaps, at his happiest, and is less marred by the bitter rage

against men and life, and the touches of foulness, which spoil so much of his

work. He is, too, one of the great humourists, and his style is marked by

sincerity, clearness, force, flexibility, and sometimes grace.

But the greatest work in prose, on the whole, was done by Addison and Steele in

the essays of "The Tatler" and "The Spectator". They were men of less genius

than Swift, but who looked at life humanly and wished to add to men's peace and

happiness. They expressed with wit, kindliness, and literary skill their views and

their intentions. Their definite aim was to bring together the opposing parties in

politics and religion by showing them how much of life and interests they

possessed in common, and by gentle raillery and wellbred exhortation, to "rub off

their corners". They did accomplish much of this; everybody, regardless of

politics, read the Essays, which came out several times a week, or daily, and

everyone enjoyed and talked them over. Polite literature by this means

permeated and helped to refine the great and growing middle class.

Another form of prose which arises now, and was destined to even a much

greater future than the essay, was the novel. The modern novel is born with the

work of Richardson and Fielding -- the work of the one viewing things from an

emotional standpoint, that of the other giving a more comprehensive and objective

picture of life. Richardson wrote out of his own native feeling and somewhat

restricted experience; Fielding, equally original, was largely and beneficially

influenced by Cervantes and the novel of Spain. Both are men of genius, whose

work grips the reader, but their offences against good taste and morality will

always prevent their becoming household companions as Scott and Dickens

have become. Smollett and Sterne continue the life of the novel, and Goldsmith,

in his masterpiece, "The Vicar of Wakefield", has earned the gratitude of all

readers. Biography, philosophy, and history have a large and distinguished place

in the prose of this time. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) accomplished many kinds

of literature. His earliest attempt as well as his latest is biography; of essays he

wrote many, but his genius is not best suited to that form, and the work is too

often ponderous and mannered; novel and ethical treatise are combined in the

delightful pages of "Rasselas". His great dictionary is philology with an

autobiographical flavour; his lives of the poets are partly biographical, but mainly

critical, while criticism fills a good space in his edition of Shakespeare. But it is

not only the range and value of all this work which makes it so attractive, but -- in

spite of its limitations -- the sincere, strong, kindly character that animates every

line of it.

"That fellow calls forth all my powers", said Johnson of Burke. Edmund Burke

(1729-1797) is now looked upon as England's greatest political philosopher, and

his writings belong in subject-matter to history and politics, rather than to

literature. Their style, however, rich, imaginative, full of energy, varied to suit its

theme, moving among worlds of knowledge, and selecting just the right word and

illustration in each place, puts him among the great literary writers of the century.

Both Johnson and Burke are touched with the romantic spirit, but Johnson would

have vigorously repudiated any charge of romanticism in his work, and indeed he

stood as a great bulwark against the flood of new thought and feeling which,

becoming apparent after the death of Pope, had been rising little by little,

especially in poetry, ever since the twenties. The great romantic movement, so

difficult to define, and yet so easy to trace, becomes the supreme point of

interest for the literary historian in the later eighteenth century. There is no class

of poetry written during this time but stands in some relation to it, and its

influence, as we have said, may be seen, though less clearly, in many of the

prose writings.

This movement was for the widening and deepening of literature. New fields of

subject-matter were taken in hand, and the treatment of these gradually became

more imaginative and emotional than it had been since the Elizabethan age.

Nature and human life, after suffering from somewhat frigid treatment at the

hands of the classical school, seemed to unstiffen and to become warm, living,

and natural with the romantic writers. But this was a very gradual process, and

began in the very heart of the classical movement; we may even see traces of it

in the unrealized longings of Pope himself, who loved Spenser, and who wished

he could write a fairy tale. We see the change coining in the gradual rise of fresh

metres, and especially of blank verse, in opposition to the heroic couplet; in fact

the struggle of romantic against classic centred to some extent round these two

forms.

But just as marked is the choice of new subject-matter. "Nature for her own

sake" -- natural description imbedded in other matter, or even forming the sole

subject of poems -- now occupy the writer. Human life, in aspects neglected by

the school of Pope, begins to assert itself. And all this new matter, treated first in

a melancholy moralizing spirit, gradually grows in imaginative strength,

simplicity, and naturalness, until we reach the poetry of Wordsworth and

Coleridge, in which the movement is brought to its height and at the same time

takes on a new freshness and impetus. James Thomson (1700-1748) published

his blank-verse poem of "The Seasons" in 1726-30, and, even though there are

many traces in it of the school of Pope, it sounds the first clear note of revolt. It

is the first blank-verse poem of importance in the century, and the first important

poem devoted to natural description. Many new elements are found in it, too,

such as the interest in the poor and the labouring class, and in lands beyond

England, as well as a new feeling and affection for animals. In 1748, the year of

his death, Thomson published his "Castle of Indolence", the best imitation of

Spenser's verse and manner that exists, and this was another sign of change.

There were many poems written in blank verse or in Spenserian stanza between

this poet and the work of Gray, whose contribution to the romantic movement is

seen perhaps most clearly in his translations from the Icelandic and Gaelic,

where he opened up a new field of subject-matter for the interest of readers and

the use of poets. And Gray's poems, small in quantity, but exquisitely finished,

were not his only work; as a prose writer he gives us in his letters and journals

firsthand and beautiful descriptions of nature in unaffected English. But his poetry

is less simple, and, with its restraint of manner, might in some aspects be

claimed by the classical school. It is in the decade after his death that we find

the movement towards the more natural style expressing itself unmistakably in

the half-mournful glamour of Macpherson's rhythmical prose "translations" of the

Celtic poetry of Ossian, in the poems of the unhappy boy-genius Chatterton, and

in the collection of "Percy Ballads".

Following on these, however, there is a strong attempt at reaction in the poetry of

Dr. Johnson, Churchill, and Goldsmith -- though Goldsmith's charming poems are

more romantic than he knew. But in the next few years the battle is quickly won

for romance by four poets: Burns, Cowper, Crabbe, and Blake, whose

significance in the movement is more fully recognized now than it was then.

Burns, who wrote the best of his poetry in a mixed Scottish dialect, had been

nourished on the best English poets of the past, and the clearness and precision

of his verse as well as its satirical and didactic subject-matter belongs to the

school of Pope at its best. But, on the other hand, the essential spirit of his

satire, in contrast with the detached coldness of Pope's, is a consuming fire, as

Swinburne has pointed out, while his songs, full of melody and passionate

feeling, though all in the line of previous Scottish poetry, were new as regards

England, and were truly romantic in tone and manner. There are poems and

passages of verse that we wish Burns had never written, but the largest part of

his work belongs to our great literary store of things noble and humane.

In William Cowper (1731-1800) we come to a poet whose influence is more and

more recognized as of first importance in the romantic trend of

eighteenth-century poetry. Living the most retired of lives, and not writing much

until over fifty years of age, he has left a body of poetry marked with his own

gentle, affectionate, humorous, and sometimes tragic genius, much of which has

become classic in English. His best long poem, "The Task", in blank verse,

contains his most original work in the clear and simple descriptions of natural

scenery. He also, like Gray, was one of the best of our letter-writers. George

Crabbe (1754-1832) wrote nearly all his poetry in the heroic couplet, but used

that form with more freedom than his contemporaries. Much of his work is of the

story kind, and some of his poems are like novels in verse. Though he chose a

hackneyed form for his work, and though all his sketches and stories tend to

edification in a didactic way, he is never dull, and his analysis of motive and

temperament and his realism are strangely modern in the antiquated setting of

the heroic couplet. His work deserves more notice than English readers as a rule

give to it. William Blake (1757-1827), the fourth of these poets, is one of those

geniuses who belong to no one time or place. Some of the simple and charming

poems in his two best known little volumes, "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of

Experience", might have been written by an Elizabethan, while his long mystical

works in verse, not truly poetical, show him in the light of a dreamer whose

dreams are rooted in some spiritual reality which only a very few readers can

discern with him. But his poetry, as a whole, though scarcely heeded at all by

the public of his own day, has been found, as it has received more attention

recently, to contain within itself the germs of many later developments of thought

and feeling in society and literature. He was an engraver and painter as well as a

poet, and his work in these capacities cannot be neglected if one wishes to

understand the character of his genius.

Crabbe and Blake carry us on into the nineteenth century, but before their death

Wordsworth and Coleridge accomplished the first of their epoch-making work.

With these two poets we enter upon the story of our modern literature.

Wordsworth and Coleridge are still in some sense with us, as their predecessors

of the seventeenth and eighteenth century are not. All English modern poets are

directly or indirectly influenced by them. They deliberately determined to be

missionaries in poetry, and they accomplished a mission in the face of great

discouragement and opposition. The small volume of "Lyrical Ballads" published

in 1798, when they were young men together under thirty, made a revolution in

poetry and was the fulfilment of nearly all that the romantic writers had been

trying half unconsciously to bring about. The "Ancient Mariner", which opened

the book, and the "Tintern Abbey Lines", which closed it, to say nothing of the

many successes and few failures which fill up the space between, were alone

enough to set up a poetic standard of high and peculiar significance. In these

poems there was accurate nature-description of the best kind, shot through with

the poet's own imagination and feeling; there was love of, and interest in vivid

human life, regardless of class or country; there was weighty ethical matter

without dullness. It is perhaps in this seriousness with which life is viewed that

we find one of the key-notes of the poetical literature of the later Victorian age. It

has been said of William Wordsworth (1770-1850) that he wrote of "what is in all

men", and the leading ideas of his poetry are indeed those in which all natural

and sane human beings can join. The healing and joy-giving power of nature, the

strength, beauty, and pathos of the simplest human affections, more especially

as seen in the less sophisticated men and women of the poorer classes in the

country, may be realized by all. But Wordsworth had also a philosophy of nature

and her relationship to human beings which was the foundation of all his

teaching, and which he expounded in poem after poem, in passages often of very

great beauty, and in much variety of style. It may be here noticed that

Wordsworth's style varies more than the ordinary judgment gives him credit for. In

his eagerness for freedom from conventional phrasing, he strove, as he himself

tells us in his prose critical prefaces to the poems, for utter simplicity of

language which to us at times seems bare and even puerile in its effect; but he is

capable more than most of a richness of style and diction, especially in his blank

verse, that is the very opposite of his own theory. He has many styles, and no

critical summing up of his manner is ever quite satisfactory to the Wordsworthian

who realizes this.

The poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) does not represent the poet

with anything like the same fullness as does that of Wordsworth. Those of

Coleridge's poems which are of the first order of poetry are few, but they are

inimitable and perfect of their kind, and have a melody of peculiar witchery.

Coleridge was a greater, wider genius than Wordsworth, and his deepest

thoughts went into pedestrian prose. He has left only fragmentary work on

philosophy and criticism behind him, but even that has affected and still affects

the thought of our own time. Had Coleridge possessed the will-power and

endurance of Wordsworth in addition to his own genius, no one can tell to what

heights he might have attained. His career is a tragedy of character.

On these two poets when young men, as well as on Southey and others, the

altruistic philosophy of the French revolutionary movement had a profound effect,

and in Wordsworth's "Prelude" we may see to some extent the extraordinary and

stimulating influence of these ideas upon some of the young and generous

English minds. But in spite of much that was true in it, the elements of error,

inadequacy, and crudeness in this philosophy became apparent, especially in

the course of the French Revolution and a revulsion from it fell upon both

Coleridge and Wordsworth. Wordsworth alone of the two emerged from the trial

unembittered -- thanks to nature and to his sister Dorothy -- though how crucial

to his life this crisis was he has himself told us. No one can properly understand

the poetry of this time, nor of the following age of Shelley, Byron, and Keats, if he

does not to some extent realize the high and generous hopes raised by the ideas

of the Revolution in certain ardent minds in England. They saw countless evils

and oppression in the social life of the time, and here, in the working out of the

ideas of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, seemed a full remedy. The three poets

just mentioned lived in the reaction from these hopes. Byron was embittered,

partly from personal causes, and partly because of the state of the society in

which he lived. He saw no redemption at hand. Shelley was fired by the

revolutionary principles as he found them interpreted by the rationalism of

Godwin, even while he shared, too, in the reaction caused by the excesses of

France. Keats never entered into them at all, but turned by a sort of instinct away

from the dreariness of life, as he saw it around hum, to nature and beauty.

But there is one great writer who was untouched either by the action or reaction

of the revolutionary ferment. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) loved the past and

believed in it and to the end of his life he was conservative in religion and politics.

In his novels and in much of his poetry he made popular those romantic elements

in the life of the past which are more particularly associated with the Ages of

Faith. His close and affectionate description of the Scottish scenery he loved so

much was a strong influence in developing the care for natural scenery which has

become one of the leading marks of the nineteenth century. His poetry at its very

best is found in many of his short songs and ballads, and in detached passages

of his longer poems, and it is verse not unworthy to be placed beside the finest

romantic work of the time. But his best-known narrative poems -- "The Lay of the

Last Minstrel", "Marmion", and "The Lady of the Lake" -- have all through a great

and special charm, and their style, clear, rapid, full of energy, together with their

almost faultless diction, make them worthy of their place among our classics.

The popularity of Scott's narrative poetry was overshadowed, however, by the

narrative work of Lord Byron, but to our gain, since this led Scott to turn to

another form of art and to produce "The Waverley Novels".

Of the three young poets of genius whose short lives accomplished such

remarkable poetic work, Lord Byron (1788-1824) is now perhaps the least

influential, though at the time his fame overshadowed every other writer of verse.

His extraordinarily vigorous satires, marked by his study of Pope, whose poetry

he championed in a literary controversy of the time, are unique in the energy of

their style and the strength and sting of their wit. It is unfortunate that a large part

of them are marred, for the ordinary reader, by their extreme voluptuousness. His

verse tales of romantic adventure are imaginative, but pail upon us by their

tendency to sentimentality. His songs and occasional pieces, together with

"Childe Harold" -- parts of which have fine nature-description -- show him in a

more agreeable poetic light. His many dramas are not truly dramatic, but are

rather the outpouring of his own powerful mind seeking an outlet. If we are

inclined to take an anti-Byronic attitude, it is well to remember, first, that his

brilliant, undisciplined, passionate work, though it never reached the height of the

noblest art, yet taught a lesson of force, vitality, and sincerity to an age which, in

spite of its good, was marked by much artificiality, callousness, and insincerity

in both life and literature. He did this in a rude and melodramatic way, but he did

it. And secondly, let those who judge Byron's wild private career not forget to

read the last poem that he wrote, and realize that a change of temper, aspiration

towards nobler things, was awakening in him before he died.

Keats and Shelley invite comparison; their difference and their likeness are

equally striking. They lived the same length of time, did all their work before

thirty, dying young and with tragedy. They left behind them poetry of the highest

order -- their lyrics are masterpieces -- containing the promise of still finer work.

They were the devoted lovers of beauty, believing in it as the supreme reality, and

were in earnest over their art, both of them leaving behind grave poems

expressing their unfinished, and therefore often unsatisfactory and misleading,

philosophy of life. Each poet also has written remarkable prose. It is a great

mistake to consider Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) as the "ineffectual angel"

sketched by Matthew Arnold. He was quite half human, and not at all ineffectual.

His most ethereal lyrics will be found to possess a basis of logical thought, while

his prose writings show him as a thinker quite capable of keeping the imagination

in her place. There are signs, too, in the development of his work that he was

growing more and more capable of preserving the balance of the intellect and the

imagination. The work that he accomplished in his short life is much and varied.

Putting aside his early poems, there is the almost perfect "Adonais", the grave

and beautiful lyrical drama of "Prometheus Unbound", in which he states his

hopes (not always well grounded and apparently anti-Christian, though he

reverenced certain elements in Christianity) for the future of the world; there is a

crowd of short and exquisite lyrics -- the highest watermark of English poetry of

this kind -- as well as the fateful and mystic "Triumph of Life", to say nothing of

many others, and amongst them some fine dramatic work in blank verse. And he

was only twenty-eight when he was drowned. Upon his errors of thought and of

conduct we need not dwell. They are plain before us in his life. Outside his

literary work, and, now and then intruding into it, a certain crudity of youth

appears. But all he does and says is in good faith, and for his errors he suffered

bitterly during his short life. One of the noblest and most discerning of tributes

ever paid to his genius has been lately published from the pen of the now

well-known Catholic poet, Francis Thompson. John Keats (1795-1821)

accomplished less actual work, but had in him, it is generally allowed, greater

potentiality of genius. He started life handicapped in circumstance and physical

health, while he had no influence or following in his own short lifetime, and "it is

the copious perfection of work accomplished so early and under so many

disadvantages which is the wonder of biographers". His odes on "The

Nightingale", "A Grecian Urn", and "Autumn" are supreme art. Some of his

narrative poems are among the best of their kind and his fragment of "Hyperion"

shows what he might have accomplished had he lived to practise this graver type

of poetry. His fame, however, is now established, and his poetic influence has

been one of the strongest in the nineteenth century.

After the death of Keats poetry seems for a time to have exhausted itself. There

is little to chronicle except the chirpings of small poets until the great age of

Victorian poetry opens with Tennyson and Browning. But, to fill up the early

years of the century, there is fine work in prose. The great series of Sir Walter

Scott's novels extend from 1814 to 1831, and many smaller efficient writers are

ranged round this central figure. The wild enthusiasm with which the Waverley

novels were received can perhaps never be renewed. A multitude of causes have

tended to divert and disturb the public taste for these great books, and it now

fluctuates sometimes farther from, sometimes nearer to, them. But such work as

his is immortal, and regardless of human fluctuations, it will, and does, appeal

always to a multitude of readers -- learned or unlearned -- whose mind and

imagination are open to receive the gifts of genius apart from the trend of fashion.

Scott's novels are full of kindly humanity, of close and accurate drawing of many

types of character, only to be equalled by Shakespeare or Chaucer, of wide and

detailed historical knowledge, though, to Catholic regret, he never understood or

adequately represented the Church, handled magnificently with equal imagination

and sanity, so that age after age lives again, not only as the dry facts of history

which have been brought laboriously together "bone to his bone", but as a living

human world whose dwellers have been raised out of silence to their feet by the

creative voice -- "an exceeding great army". Of Scott's work even more than of

Chaucer's, we may say, with Dryden, "Here is God's plenty".

Scott died in 1832, and the Victorian age opened in literary faintness. Alfred

Tennyson and Robert Browning were on the verge of the horizon, but it was not

until 1840 or so that there came that dazzling revival of literature such as had not

been seen since the Elizabethan age, and which in extent and swiftness of

production eclipsed that age. Into the causes of this it is impossible here to

enter. Tennyson and Browning are leaders among the poets far into the century,

while Elizabeth Barrett Browning makes a distant third. Tennyson and Browning

are representative of the most important phases of the Victorian age, universally

acknowledged, though general opinion is still divided as to their relative merits.

Both are artists of a high order, but Tennyson is the greater and more consistent.

Both feel the importance, gravity, and interest of life. Both take a religious view of

life and have that spirit of reverence which is lacking in many of their followers.

Both believe in their mission to call men to forsake materialism, and each, in his

own particular way, is a lover of natural beauty. Browning's sympathies are, in a

sense, wider than Tennyson's, but Tennyson's feeling goes deeper, perhaps, on

the great religious and moral questions than Browning's.

If we are still too near Tennyson and Browning to be able to form a true estimate

of them, we are even less able to judge the writers of the latter half of the

nineteenth century. The numerous streams of literature become bewildering to

follow. We distinguish before the end of the career of the two greatest poets the

fine but smaller figures of Rossetti, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, and others,

doing work of true genius though not all of equal power. None of them, however,

have the vivid inspirations of great, impelling, impersonal ideas such as filled

Wordsworth and Shelley. The note of melancholy and uncertainty concerning life

and its meaning and the future beyond this life, is always more or less there in

undertone. The optimism of Browning and the faith of Tennyson are not to be

found, but their love of beauty is fervent and stimulating.

In the last quarter of the century poetry has taken on many strange and

sometimes beautiful forms. A high level of excellence has prevailed on the whole.

Poets of remarkable promise and achievement have appeared. Amongst these ,

Francis Thompson (1859-1907), in the opinion of most, takes the commanding

place. The appreciation of him by well-known and most able critics has been

extraordinarily unamimous and unstinted. He seems "to have reached the peaks

of Parnassus at a bound". He has been compared with almost every great

previous English poet, and whatever may be the more balanced verdict of the

future, his poetic immortality is assured. And his Catholic religion was his

deepest inspiration.

The prose which grew up around the greatest Victorian poetry was worthy of its

company. A brilliant group of writers as well as of thinkers in many spheres of

knowledge and art appeared, and in this respect the age has surpassed the

Elizabethan. The development of the novel is the most distinguishing mark of

Victorian prose literature. Dickens and Thackeray follow upon Scott, with a host

of other novelists, men and women, of varying grades of power, who come up to

our own day. Graver forms of literature also have been many and splendid. There

are the essayists, with Lamb and Hazlitt as the chief; the historians with

Macaulay and Carlyle, Froude, Freeman, and Green; Ruskin, with his immense

and varied work upon art, economics, and the conduct of life, and whose

influence, all for good, in spite of the vagaries of literary taste, is still strong and

growing. The enormous extent and range of theological literature is a remarkable

feature of the last fifty years, and here the writings of John Henry Newman stand

out as a supreme "literary glory". Newman touched poetry with imagination,

grace, and skill, but it is by his prose that he is recognized as a great master of

English style. While all critics agree that the "Apologia" is a masterpiece, and

that "nothing he wrote in prose or verse is superfluous", there is some difference

of opinion as to the respective literary values of his earlier and later work. R.H.

Hutton, however, one of his acutest non-Catholic critics, considers that "in irony,

in humour, in imaginative force, the writings of the later portions of his career far

surpass those of his theological apprenticeship".

Catholic writers are now many. After long years of repression they have their full

freedom in the arena of literature, and there is more than a promise that when the

history of the twentieth century comes to be written many Catholic names will be

found in the highest places on the roll of honour.

K.M. WARREN

Transcribed by Douglas J. Potter

Dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume V

Nihil Obstat, May 1, 1909. Remy Lafort, Censor

Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York

The Catholic Encyclopedia: NewAdvent.org