A. Handbook 
 
 of 
 
 C. . j 
 riticism 
 
 AN ANALYSIS OF LITERARY FORMS IN PROSE 
 
 AND VERSE . 
 
 FOR ENGLISH STUDENTS 
 
 IN ADVANCED SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES 
 
 AND FOR LIBRARIES AND THE 
 
 GENERAL READER 
 
 BY 
 
 William Henry Sheran 
 
 HINDS, NOBLE & ELDREDGE, Publishers 
 -3 J -33-35 West isth Street, New York City 
 
Copyright, 1905, 
 By HINDS, NOBLE & ELDREDGE 
 
TO THE MEMORY OF 
 
 THE LATE 
 
 PROFESSOR FREDERICK MAX MULLER 
 
 With whom the Author spent many delightful days 
 
 as a pupil in the 
 
 * 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
 
 111 
 
 202824 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The purpose of the writer is to supply teachers and students 
 of literature with a suitable manual of literary criticism. As 
 Sidney Lanier pointedly remarked, there is no book extant in 
 any language which gives an analytical and comprehensive 
 survey of all the well-marked, widely varying, literary forms 
 which have differentiated themselves in the course of time 
 the letter, the essay, the oration, history, fiction, biography, 
 the lyric, the drama, the epic. I have attempted to furnish 
 such a survey as the vast range of subjects and the limitations 
 of a handbook allow. The student thus enjoys the advantage 
 of viewing critically the whole field of letters an advantage 
 which no other manual offers. 
 
 As a preliminary study, this handbook treats literature from 
 the vTewpomt ot a fine art. frrtorrrmon with all the fine an 
 
 literature ha\s its own' province, its own form and content. 
 And the art-form and art-content of literature should be ascer- 
 tained before the student makes any detailed study of the vari- 
 ous departments in which literary art finds expression. The 
 introductorjLj:hapters of this manual are devoted to such an 
 analysis. 
 
 A special claim in favor of this handbook is conciseness as 
 well as comprehensiveness. While dealing in a practical way 
 with all the departments of literature, I have endeavored to 
 give the briefest possible compendium >ef the best criticism. 
 The " first principles " of literary art are tersely set forth alid 
 their application to the various prose-forms and verse-forms is' 
 equally terse. In thus economizing the student's time and 
 attention, I have abbreviated the history of literary forms and 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 neglected to estimate their more minute differentiations 
 work which, after all, can only be suggested within the limits 
 of a manual covering such a large field. In drawing upon 
 the various sources of literary criticism, I have adopted the 
 same method of condensation ; often compressing into a single 
 paragraph the ideas of a critic, which have been elaborated 
 through several pages. The condensed account often takes 
 the place of, and is preferable to, the verbatim quotation. 
 
 In making selections from German and French sources for 
 this volume, I have availed myself of the criticism of Professor 
 Francis J. Schaefer, Ph. D., who has personally supervised 
 much of the work. The thanks of the author are also due to 
 the late Prof. Max Muller, of Oxford, who suggested the plan 
 of this handbook, and made some valuable suggestions as to the 
 selection of the subject-matter. 
 
 A full list of the writers, ancient and modern, to whom this 
 handbook is in any way indebted, will be found at the close of 
 the volume. References are also made in the text, and those 
 which usually occupy the place of foot-notes are incorporated 
 in the work itself, as I believe such an arrangement is more 
 satisfactory to the student. 
 
 If this handbook shall prove helpful to teachers and stu- 
 dents, the object for which it was written will be attained. 
 
 WILLIAM HENRY SHERAN. 
 
 Saint Paul, Minnesota, 
 
 June 4, 1905. 
 
CONTENTS 
 PART I 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Literature as a Fine Art* .1 
 
 II. Art-Form in Literature 7 
 
 III. The Word 15 
 
 IV. The Sentence 24 
 
 V. The Paragraph . , , j , . . . . . . .; . 33 
 
 VI. The Complete Composition*"". 7 ?- a~- *~ . . . _\ 40 
 
 VII. Art-Content in Literature : Sublimity 52 
 
 VIII. Beauty. . .. .,.-.. ... j. .J_ . 81 
 
 IX. Feeling - 69 
 
 X. Wit and Humor 75 
 
 XL Melody . . . .,-,........ .-.,.. . . . . 80 
 
 XII. Personality in Literary Art 84 
 
 XIII. Personality in Literary Art (continued) 
 
 93 
 
 PART II 
 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XIV. The Letter ........ ...... 108 
 
 XV. The Letter (continued) ..... ..... 113 
 
 XVI. The Letter (continued) .......... 118 
 
 XVII. The Letter (continued) .......... 121 
 
 XVIII. The Letter (continued) .......... 128 
 
 XIX. The Letter (continued) .......... 137 
 
 XX. The Letter (concluded) .......... 142 
 
 XXI. The Essay 4 .............. 150 
 
 XXII. The Essay (continued) .......... 153 
 
 XXIII. The Essay (continued) ........ . . 160 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 The Essay (continued) 
 
Vlll 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XXV. The Essay (continued) 175 
 
 XXVI. The Essay (continued) 178 
 
 XXVII. The Essay (concluded) 185 
 
 XXVIII. Biography 193 
 
 XXIX. Biography (continued) .201 
 
 XXX. Biography (concluded) 213 
 
 XXXI. History 225 
 
 XXXII. History (continued) 285 
 
 XXXIII. History (concluded) 248 
 
 XXXIV. The Oration . 263 
 
 XXXV. The Oration (continued) 274 
 
 XXXVI. The Oration (continued) 282 
 
 XXXVII. The Oration (continued) 295 
 
 XXXVIII. The Oration (concluded) 306 
 
 XXXIX. Fiction 327 
 
 XL, Fiction (continued) 340 
 
 XLI. The Novel 348 
 
 XLII. Representative Authors of Fiction 356 
 
 PART III 
 ANALYSIS OF POETIC FORMS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XLIII. Poetry 3 8 s 
 
 1 XLIV. Poetry (continued) 394 
 
 XLV. The Drama 404 
 
 XLVI. Characters of the Drama 410 
 
 XLVII. Ethics of the Drama 433 
 
 XLVIII. Representative Authors 439 
 
 XLTX. The Epic 4W 
 
 L. The Epic (continued) 487 
 
 LI. The Lyric 514 
 
 LI I. The Lyric (continued) 534 
 
 LI II. Conclusion 548 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 I. Special Bibliographies of the Letter, Essay, Biography, History, 
 
 Oration, Fiction, Poetry. 
 II. General Index. 
 
AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT TO PUBLISHERS AND 
 
 AUTHORS 
 
 NOTE. The student, teacher, and general reader are invited 
 to read the literary critics mentioned below, from whose 
 works selections have been made in the compilation of this 
 handbook ; they are also requested to remember the courtesy 
 of the publishers who granted permission to the author to 
 use these selections. 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York. 
 
 Raymond, George Lansing Poetry as a Representative Art. 
 
 Bain, Alexander English Composition and Rhetoric. 
 
 Hardwicke, Henry Oratory and Orators. 
 
 Sears, Lorenzo Occasional Addresses. 
 
 A. C McCLURG & COMPANY, Chicago. 
 
 Rabb, Kate Milner National Epics. 
 
 Spalding, John Lancaster Collected Works. 
 
 Chesterfield, Lord Letters. 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN & COMPANY, New York. 
 
 Newman, John Henry Collected Works. 
 
 Thomson, Daniel Greenleaf The Philosophy of Fiction. 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY, Boston. 
 
 Bates, Arlo Talks on Literature. 
 
 Browning, Robert Collected Works. 
 
 Stedman, Edmund Clarence Poets of America. 
 
 Stedman, Edmund Clarence Nature and Elements of Poetry. 
 
 DODD. MEAD & COMPANY, New York. 
 
 Mabie, H. W Collected Works. 
 
 THE CLARENDON PRESS, Oxford. 
 
 Moulton, Richard Green Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist. 
 
 ix 
 
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
 
 SCOTT, FORESMAN & COMPANY, Chicago. 
 
 Mathews, William Oratory and Orators. 
 
 Welsh, Alfred H. English Literature and Language. 
 
 A. C ARMSTRONG & SON, New York. 
 
 Hunt, Theodore W Literature and Style. 
 
 D. C. HEATH & COMPANY, Boston. 
 
 Moulton, Richard Green Literary Study of the Bible. 
 
 O'Connor, J. F. X Rhetoric and Oratory. 
 
 THE AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY, New York. 
 
 Shaw, Thomas B Manual of English Literature. 
 
 HENRY HOLT & COMPANY, Boston. 
 
 Perry, Thomas Sergeant History of Greek Literature. 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 
 English Men of Letters Series. 
 
 BENJAMIN H. SANBORN & COMPANY, Boston. 
 
 Mead, William Edward Composition and Rhetoric. 
 
 THE WERNER COMPANY, Akron, Ohio. 
 
 The New Werner Twentieth Century Encyclopedia (Britannica). 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, New York. 
 
 Forsyth, William Life of Cicero. 
 
 Marsh, George P Origin and History of the English 
 
 Language. 
 
 GEORGE BELL & SONS, London. 
 Bohn's Classical Libraries 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, New York. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew Essays in Criticism. 
 
 Pater, Walter Appreciations. 
 
 GINN & COMPANY, Boston. 
 
 Qajey & Scott Literary Criticism. . 
 
 Mace. William H Method in History. 
 
 Hudson. Rev. H. N Shakespeare, Life and Art. 
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi 
 
 TOTTN J. McVEY & COMPANY, Philadelphia. 
 
 Fenelon, Archbishop Three Dialogues on Eloquence. 
 
 J. H. COATES & COMPANY, Philadelphia. 
 
 Hutton, Richard Holt Essays in Criticism. 
 
 PENN PUBLISHING COMPANY, Philadelphia. 
 Beecher, Henry Ward Oratory. 
 
 W. J. WIDDLETON & COMPANY, New York City. 
 Trench, Richard Chenevix Study of Words. 
 
 THE CENTURY COMPANY, New York City. 
 The Century Dictionary 
 
 A full list of the Authors quoted in this Handbook will be found 
 among the Bibliographies at the close of the volume. See Appendices. 
 
>, , V J ?" v ;5J ". ' ',* 
 PART I 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 LITERATURE AS A FINE ART 
 
 Literature as a Fine Art. In the treatment of literature 
 the proposition which seems to stand most in need of assertion 
 at the present moment is, that literature is a fine art, and should 
 be studied in connection with the other fine arts. For the 
 same " first principles " which apply to painting, music, sculp- 
 ture, architecture, apply with equal force to literature.-.,. Like- 
 wise, literature has its own form and content, and a medium 
 far more subtle and complex than sound or color or stone. 
 
 The Affinity of Literature to Other Fine Arts. The rela- 
 tion that literary art sustains toward the other arts is aptly 
 expressed by Cicero: Omnes artes quasi uno vinculo con- 
 junguntur all the arts are bound together as by a com- 
 mon bond. Hence, literary art must have some affinity with 
 sculpture, painting, architecture; and this affinity is found in 
 the underlying principles of all art. These principles, as ex- 
 pressed by the Greeks, are unity, harmony, balance, propor- 
 tion. They form the common bond which binds all the arts 
 together. 
 
 The Source of These Principles. They are all found in 
 nature, and they were appropriated by the human artist. 
 " Art/' says Aristotle, " is mimesis or imitation of nature." 
 The things of nature are individualized, marked off as sepa- 
 rate units; and, thus separated, they exhibit unity, harmony, 
 
2 LITERATURE AS A FINE ART 
 
 balance, proportion. \ The more common illustrations are a 
 tree''6r a' flower: '"Even a superficial examination of these 
 ofyjec;t'.rv<ea}s. the*'/' flr-st principles " of art. Wherever one 
 of tliese principles is wanting, we call a thing deformed: 
 where all are absent we apply the term chaotic we call it 
 chaos. Man imitated the divine Artist ; and in building, carv- 
 ing, painting, writing, he applied the selfsame principles. 
 His art increased or decreased in merit according to the man- 
 ner in which these principles were applied. A Gothic cathe- 
 dral, a poem, a painting, will illustrate the manner of 
 application : each work of art is one, embodying the principle 
 of unity; the parts of each work harmonize, one with the 
 other; balance and proportion strike the eye at a glance, as 
 in the leaves of a flower or the branches of a tree. 
 
 The Relation of Literary Art .to Science. Both unite in 
 expressing the true; but the former adds beauty to the truth 
 of the assertion. Some illustrations : 
 
 Science: " The sun has spots upon its surface." 
 
 Art: " The orb of day is dashed with wandering isles of 
 night." 
 
 Science: " Autumn changes the leaves from green to red or 
 
 yellow." 
 Art: " Autumn lays a fiery finger on the leaves." 
 
 Science: " The rock-walls of my castle are impregnable." 
 Art: " My castle's strength will laugh a siege to scorn." 
 
 Science: " The rays of the sun grow in intensity as the sun 
 
 mounts toward the zenith." 
 
 Art: " The sun tricks his beams and with new spangled ore 
 flames in the forehead of the morning sky." 
 
 The primary object of all art is to express beauty, and it 
 is clear from these examples that literary art adds beauty to 
 the bare scientific assertion of a truth. 
 
THE ESTHETIC SENSE 3 
 
 Other Relationships of Science and Literary Art. Science 
 is limited to the true : literary art covers a much larger 
 field ; as a basis it may have the wholly true, the partially true 
 or the wholly false. As illustrations of the first class we may 
 take Biblical literature or popularized science; of the second 
 class there is the historical drama or novel, the great epics; 
 of the third class there is the realm of pure fiction. 
 
 Again, literary art is concrete, synthetical, creative; science 
 is abstract,, analytical, impersonal. While the latter appeals 
 to the intellect, the former makes its primary appeal to the 
 aesthetic sense and to the emotions. It is art that addresses 
 itself to the human in man; hence, in the older universities 
 the classics are called " the humanities." Literary art may 
 truthfully employ the language of -Terence Homo sum: 
 humani nihil a me alienum puto. 
 
 Once more, science deals with parts; literary art with 
 wholes. Plato has this to say of the literary structure: 
 " Every literary work ought to be put together like a living 
 creature, with due proportion of head, hands or feet and 
 body." As the parts in the animal organism are determined 
 by the vital principle^ animating them in such a manner 
 that all unconsciously develop into fitness and harmony, so 
 is it with a literary production a central thought or idea 
 acts in it like the. animating principle in the living organism, 
 making a complete creation to which it gives unity and 
 harmony 
 
 Literary Art and the -^Esthetic Sense. Inasmuch as liter- 
 ature is a fine art, its primary object is beauty, and its primary 
 appeal is^o the aesthetic sense. This sense is described as 
 our faculty, or power, of appreciating the beautiful, whether 
 in the physical, moral or intellectual order. Lessing de- 
 scribes it as our faculty of appreciating those ideals which j 
 art externalizes and renders concrete. The old rhetoricians 
 
4 LITERATURE AS A FINE ART 
 
 described it under the heading of good taste or the capability 
 of perceiving and estimating the beauties of nature and of 
 art. It is, therefore, a certain natural and instinctive sensi- 
 bility to beauty. As a fine taste judges food; so, metaphor- 
 ically, a fine taste, or the aesthetic sense, judges beauty. 
 
 A Universal Endowment. The aesthetic sense is as in- 
 nate to man as his physical sense of taste or touch, and it 
 is quite as universal. For the most ignorant savages have 
 some discernment of beauty. They possess an art, although 
 it be primitive and exceedingly crude. Witness their dress, 
 war ornaments, the painting of their bodies, their ballads, 
 tales and death-songs. The aesthetic sense varies in degree 
 according to the peculiar gifts, the location, the advantages 
 of culture, refinement, civilization, enjoyed by nations. Thus, 
 for example, the ancient Greeks possessed the keenest ap- 
 preciation of beauty; nature provided them with this special 
 gift, and also a most beautiful natural environment upon 
 which this talent could be exercised. They also enjoyed the 
 advantages of the rarest culture and the highest degree of 
 civilization. Add to all this their wonderful creative faculty, 
 and it is not surprising that they left the best models in every 
 department of the fine arts. 
 
 Improvement of the Esthetic Sense. It is improved by 
 locality. Witness the effect of the skies and landscape of 
 Italy or Greece upon the artists who have flourished in those 
 places. It is improved by discipline. In the same nation 
 note the difference between those who study the fine arts and 
 the untaught multitude. It is improved by -intelligence. 
 The extraordinary mental power of the Greeks was a strong 
 factor in the development of their esthetic sense. It enabled 
 them to judge a work of art, compare it with nature's original, 
 show the connection of parts and their relation to the whole. 
 
////: /ESTHETIC SENSE c 
 
 Thus, in analyzing an intricate masterpiece, reason told them 
 why and upon what grounds their artistic work was beautiful. 
 Finally, the aesthetic sense is developed by a good heart 
 by strong and virtuous affection. As Edmund Burke writes : 
 " He whose heart is indelicate or hard, he who has no admira- 
 tion of what is truly noble or praiseworthy, nor the proper 
 sympathetic sense of what is soft and tender, must have a 
 very imperfect appreciation of the highest beauties of art." 
 
 Lines of Development. They are two: delicacy and cor- 
 rectness. As our , appreciation of beauty grows it becomes 
 delicate; we see hidden beauties that escape the vulgar eye^ 
 we become sensible to the smallest blemishes. As our power 
 of appreciation develops it becomes more correct; we are 
 able to distinguish genuine from counterfeit beauties ; our 
 judgment improves so that we can classify and estimate 
 works of genius. The value of delicacy lies chiefly in dis- 
 cerning the true merit of a work ; the value of correctness, in 
 rejecting false pretensions to merit. 
 
 The Ultimate Judge of Merit. Our aesthetic sense is just 
 and true when it agrees with the general judgment of men. 
 The supreme court in this matter is not a school, nor a faction, 
 nor the popular fancy, but mankind in general. What all 
 men agree in admiring must be beautiful. The concurring 
 judgment or feeling of the race is the last court of appeal. 
 And the sound and natural state of our aesthetic sense is 
 ultimately determined by the general taste of mankind. As 
 illustrations of this irreversible and infallible judgment there 
 are the epics of Homer, Virgil, Milton ; the dramas of vEschy- 
 lus, Sophocles, Shakespeare ; the sculpture of Phidias; the arch- 
 itecture of the Gothic cathedral ; the painting of the Italian 
 masters, the music of Wagner; and so on through the 
 long list of the artists of every age, who, in spite of years, 
 are immortally young. 
 
6 LITERATURE AS A FINE ART 
 
 Practical Value. The 'literary artist should develop his 
 faculty for appreciating the beautiful, for he thus becomes 
 his own critic in choosing words and sentences, in writing 
 graceful and harmonious composition, and, above all, in 
 selecting high and worthy ideals for his art. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 ART-FORM IN LITERATURE. WORDS 
 
 Elements of Art- Form. These elements are the word, sen- 
 tence, paragraph, complete composition. Each element claims 
 its own definition, analysis and place in relation to the art- 
 form of literature. In the case of poetry, the paragraph yields 
 its name to the stanza, section, or to some other title, but the 
 idea of subordinate topics and divisions for which the para- 
 graph stands, is quite the same whether in verse or prose. It 
 remains to view each of the elements in detail. 
 
 Words in Relation to Literary Art. Words are the material 
 which the literary artist uses, as the painter uses colors, as the 
 musician uses the keys of a piano, as the sculptor uses mar- 
 ble. They are the simplest element of composition ; yet upon 
 their mastery the excellence of literary art depends in a large 
 measure. The right word, like the right key of the~piano, or 
 the right color in painting, always gives the proper tone to the 
 composition ; any other word would mar the harmony lessen 
 or destroy the effect. The skill of the artist is shown in the 
 selection of words as it is shown in the harmony of keys or 
 colors. 
 
 Various Definitions of Words. Words, says Plato, form 
 the body of composition, and thought forms its soul. Marsh 
 also describes words as the living vesture which thoughts find 
 for themselves. Schlegel likens words to amber in which 
 thousands of precious thoughts are preserved. Emerson goes 
 to geology for a suitable illustration : " Just as in some fossil, 
 
 7 
 
8 AKT-l'OKM IN LITERATURE 
 
 curious and beautiful shapes, the graceful fern or the finely 
 vertebrated lizard are preserved; so in words are beautiful 
 thoughts and images the imagination and feeling of past 
 ages." " Words," says Trench, " are not merely arbitrary 
 signs denoting ideas, but living powers; they are not like the 
 sands of the sea, innumerable, disconnected atoms, but growing 
 out of roots clustering in families, they connect and intertwine 
 themselves with all that men have been doing and thinking 
 and feeling from the beginning of the world till now. They 
 are a glorious inheritance which other generations by their 
 truth and toil have made ready for us." 
 
 The Origin of Words. As Trench remarks, there are two 
 theories concerning the origin of language. " One theory 
 would put language on the same level with the various arts 
 and inventions with which man has gradually adorned and en- 
 riched his life. It would make him by degrees to have in- 
 vented it just as he might have invented any of those, for him- 
 self; and from rude, imperfect beginnings, the inarticulate 
 cries by which he expressed his natural wants, the sounds by 
 which he sought to imitate the impression of the natural ob- 
 jects upon him, little by little to have arrived at that wondrous 
 organ of thought and feeling, which his language is often to 
 him now." This theory makes of language a gradual a^nd 
 complete evolution from the broken cries of the Baboon to the 
 glorious periods of a Cicero or a Webster. The second theory 
 is thus set forth by Trench : " God gave man language just as 
 He gave him reason, and just because He gave him reason; 
 for what is man's word but his reason, coming forth that it 
 may behold itself? They are indeed so essentially one and the 
 same that the Greek language has one word for them both. 
 God gave it to man because he could not be a man, that is, 
 a social being without it. Yet this must not be taken to af- 
 firm that man started at the first furnished with a full- formed 
 
WORDS 9 
 
 vocabulary of words. He did not thus begin the world with 
 mimes, but with the power of naming. God did not teach man 
 words as one of us teaches a parrot, but gave him a capacity 
 and then evoked the capacity which He gave. This point is 
 clear from Genesis : He brought the animals to Adam to see 
 what he would call them, and whatsoever Adam called every 
 living creature, that was the name thereof. Here we have 
 the clearest intimation of the origin, at once divine and human, 
 of words." 
 
 Partial Agreement of Both Theories. They agree in ad- 
 mitting an evolutionary process. They disagree in this : the 
 initial power of naming or coining words. One theory main- 
 tains that man had from the very beginning the full power and 
 capacity for naming things ; the other theory maintains that 
 man gained this power and capacity gradually, as his vocal or- 
 gans were gradually trained to the pronunciation of words, 
 Renan in his history of language says that all languages, like 
 all organisms, are subject to the law of gradual development. 
 Yet the primitive language possessed those elements necessary 
 to its integrity ; all were there, but confusedly and without dis- 
 tinction ; all were in the germ which slowly expanded into reg- 
 ular form and proportion. This law of language is the la\v 
 of all life as exhibited in organisms. We may liken it to the 
 growth of a tree springing out of, and unfolding itself from a 
 root, that root being the divine capacity for language with 
 which man was created. In this explanation of Renan we 
 have all that appears to be sound in both theories respecting 
 the origin of language. 
 
 How Words have Multiplied. Words multiplied as man ex- 
 tended his rule over nature, New facts, new discoveries, new 
 inventions, new arts, new philosophies, ne\v religions all 
 clamored for the new word and the new phrase. In this 
 
I0 ART-FORM IN LITERATURE 
 
 connection words are called the record of discoveries, the mile- 
 stones of human progress. For example, words like trinity, 
 Christian, pagan, monarchy, patriarch, democracy, theocracy, 
 tyranny, impressionist, realist, nominalist, reformation, revo- 
 lution, crusade, abolition, and a host of others, mark whole 
 epochs in human history. With a boundless world lying 
 around him and demanding to be catalogued and named, man 
 was compelled to add to his vocabulary; and as he advanced 
 in civilization and multipHed the arts and sciences, as well as 
 civil and religious institutions, this verbal addition was bound 
 to be enlarged. On thir point John Stuart Mill observes : 
 " Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects 
 ever make their way amc ,ig mankind or assume their proper 
 importance in the minds even of their inventors until aptly 
 selected words or phrases have, as it were, nailed them down 
 and held them fast." Some recent illustrations : the philosophy 
 of evolution represented by the " survival of the fittest " ; " the 
 struggle for existence " ; " the process of natural selection." 
 The late political movement in Ireland is immortalized by the 
 word " boycott." Similarly, such phrases and words as 
 ' sphere of influence/ ' the cross of gold,' ' abolition,' ' total ab- 
 stinence,' ' imperialism,' ' state rights,' ' reconstruction,' and 
 hundreds of other terms represent large movements in human 
 history, crystallized fragments of which are thus imbedded in 
 a nation's vocabulary. 
 
 And so, as Trench observes, words are the embodiment of 
 the feelings, thoughts and experiences of many nations. They 
 mark how far the moral and intellectual conquests of mankind 
 have advanced. They convey the mental treasures of one 
 period to the generations that follow. They sail safely across 
 gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck. We 
 speak of " Punic faith " to-day, although Carthage has been in 
 ruins over 2,000 years. 
 
WORDS 1 1 
 
 The Two-Fold Function of Words. A word when used by 
 the literary artist has two functions to perform. First, it calls 
 up an image of the thing it stands for. Secondly, it calls up a 
 set of ideas associated therewith. In the first case, it denotes 
 one thing; in the second case it connotes many things. The ar- 
 tist must consider this power of denotation and connotation. 
 For example, take the expressions, ' bad faith ' and ' Punic 
 faith.' They denote the same idea. But the second expres- 
 sion connotes much more than the first.- A legion of ideas are 
 associated with the word, Punic, which make a vivid and last- 
 ing impression, driving home the abstract idea contained in 
 the word, * bad.' Or, again, take the verb ' to boycott ' ; it de- 
 notes ' to ostracize ' or ' to let severely alone.' But, on the 
 other hand, it connotes a legion of vivid ideas, as the image of 
 Captain Boycott, hated and shunned by the Irish peasantry, 
 comes before the mind. " Mr. Jones, the Alderman, roots for 
 popularity in the ninth ward." " Our esteemed contemporary, 
 the democratic Free Press, is braying for a change in the ad- 
 ministration." Examples may be multiplied indefinitely. A 
 clever literary artist, like a judge of rare spices, detects at once 
 the flavor of words possessing any power of connotation ; and 
 the selection of a word often depends upon this varying and 
 subtle power. As Mr. Bates observes, " To suggest by the 
 choice of words those delicate and subtle ideas which are like 
 a fragrance or like the iridescent sheen of nacre is one of the 
 highest triumphs of literary art; and the nice artist in words 
 is certainly not less careful in regard to the connotation of 
 words than he is of their denotation.'* 
 
 Selection of Nouns. These are the most ancient part of 
 speech. In the art of writing they first claim our attention. 
 Before man could speak or write about any subject, he had to 
 name it. As the number of subjects is so great and so varied, 
 he soon possessed an unlimited number of substantives, that are 
 
I2 ART-FORM IN LITERATURE 
 
 commonly called nouns. The selection of the noun is perhaps 
 the easiest task for the literary artist. It is suggested by the 
 subject in hand. The power of connotation common to all 
 words is shared by the noun, especially when the connotation 
 is supported by the rest of the phrase or sentence. For this 
 purpose our language is rich in synonyms. The metaphori- 
 cal use of gender is also a consideration for the literary artist. 
 The genius of our language permits us, whenever it will add 
 beauty to our composition, to make the names of inanimate 
 objects either masculine or feminine, in a metaphorical sense. 
 For example, " Justice is the law of nature ; SHE alone con- 
 fers honor upon man." No other language offers this ad- 
 vantage, for in other languages every word has a fixed gender 
 which can on no occasion be changed. Finally, the declen- 
 sion of the noun claims attention. By abolishing cases we 
 have made the structure of English most simple. Simplicity 
 and ease are the chief benefits we derive from the use of prep- 
 ositions instead of case endings. Any foreigner realizes how 
 simple the English is because of this change. But it is a bene- 
 fit often gained at the expense of harmony : certain words must 
 be placed close by one another in a period to show that they 
 are connected in meaning, and frequently the words so placed 
 do not harmonize, thereby marring the beauty and rhythm of 
 the sentence. 
 
 Selection of Verbs. The verb is the most complex part of 
 speech, and therefore makes the heaviest demand upon the 
 reason of the writer. The choice of the verb depends upon 
 the writer's perception of truth. It contains a predicate or . 
 statement and thereby involves an exercise of reason. It car- 
 ries with it several subtle divisions of time. The exact expres- 
 sion of time usually accompanies the affirmation made by the 
 verb. Reason must weigh the affirmation from the viewpoint 
 of time as well as significance. As Dr. Blair writes, " On ac- 
 
WORHS j ^ 
 
 count of its importance this part of speech receives its name, 
 verb, from the Latin verhum the word. They (the verbs) 
 must have been coeval with men's first attempts toward the 
 formation of language, although it must have been the work 
 of a long time to rear them up to that accurate and complex 
 structure which they now possess. Owing to their subtle na- 
 ture, they possess a greater power of connotation than the 
 noun. Like ail modern European tongues, the English makes 
 use of the auxiliary verb. It renders language more simple 
 and easy in structure, having the same effect as the change from 
 the case-ending to the preposition. On the whole, it improves 
 the English as an art-medium." 
 
 Selection of Adjectives. The adjective makes a primary 
 appeal to the aesthetic sense. It is the flesh dressing out the 
 skeleton. It is called the cloth of gold on the field of literature. 
 The adjective more than any other part of speech justifies the 
 term art, as applied to writing. The selection of the adjective 
 requires both judgment and taste. The same is true of the ad- 
 verb, for both are the finishing touches given to the literary 
 canvas. The right adjective is determined partly by the 
 qualities or attributes of the substantives to which it be- 
 longs, and partly by the general effect of the whole composition. 
 Often an adjective which of right belongs to a certain sub- 
 stantive, must be modified in the interest of the general effect, 
 just as lively colors must often be " toned down " on the can- 
 vas. Perhaps no part of speech requires as much care as the 
 adjective. As Professor Mead observes : " Young writers are 
 tempted to make too free use of adjectives because they furnish 
 superlative forms of expression. They heap epithets upon ev- 
 ery substantive till it is smothered under qualifying words. It 
 is the mistake of the young painter with a pot of bright col- 
 ors." 
 
14 ART-FORM IN LITERATURE 
 
 Use of Particles. For final consideration there are the con- 
 nective particles; they mark the movement from one idea to 
 another, and thus form the connection of thoughts. These 
 particles increased as man advanced in civilization. The more 
 perfect language becomes, the more numerous are these parti- 
 cles. No language has such a plentiful supply of them as the 
 Greek the clearest proof of an unrivalled refinement and civ- 
 ilization. In English a great deal depends upon the proper 
 management of these particles. They make a composition ap- 
 pear firm and compact or disjointed and loose; they cause it 
 to march with a smooth and easy pace, or render its progress 
 rough and irregular. Particles are in constant demand; our 
 words have been brought to us from so many diverse sources 
 that, as it were, they straggle asunder ; they do not coalesce so 
 naturally in the structure of a sentence as the words of a 
 language built on one foundation. Hence, the need of parti- 
 cles. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE WORD 
 SOURCES OF ENGLISH WORDS 
 
 Universal Indebtedness. " The sources of our English vo- 
 cabulary are extremely various. No other tongue, ancient or 
 modern, has appeared in so many and so different phases ; and 
 no other people of high civilization has so completely disre- 
 garded the barriers of race and circumstance and adopted into 
 its speech so great a number of un-native words. The mak- 
 ing of the English language began, it may be said, with the 
 introduction of Roman rule and Roman speech among the 
 barbarous Celts of Britain, The Latin language, as the vehi- 
 cle of civilization, affected strongly the Celtic, and also the 
 speech of the Teutonic peoples, Saxons, Angles, and Jutes, 
 who in the fifth century obtained a footing on the island^ This 
 Teutonic tongue, while assimilating something both of the na- 
 tive Celtic idiom, and of the Latin in a Celtic guise, in time 
 became the dominant language. The speech thus formed 
 (called Anglo-Saxon or, as some prefer, Old English) was 
 raised almost to classic rank by the labors of Alfred and of 
 the numerous priests and scholars who sought to convey to 
 their countrymen in their native language the treasures of 
 Latin learning and the precepts of the Roman Catholic church. 
 Though uniting in the ninth century with an influx of Scan- 
 dinavian speech, and in the eleventh century, through the Nor- 
 man conquest, with the stream which flowed through France 
 from Rome, it remained the chief fountain of English. From 
 these two elements, the Teutonic and the Latin (the latter both 
 
 is 
 
j5 THE WORD 
 
 in its original form and as modified in the Romance tongues), 
 our language has been constructed ; although materials more or 
 less important have been borrowed from almost every known 
 speech." (See Century Dictionary, Preface, VII.) 
 
 The Native English. It is sometimes called Old English 
 or Anglo-Saxon. This Saxon source first claims our atten- 
 tion. As Herbert Spencer indicates, (Philosophy of Style) 
 there are special reasons for so doing, the most important be- 
 ing early association. A child's vocabulary is almost wholly 
 Saxon : he says, " I have," not " I possess " ; " I wish," not " I 
 desire " ; he floes not reflect, he thinks; he does not beg for 
 amusement, but for play; he calls things nice or nasty, not 
 pleasant or disagreeable. 
 
 The Special Value of Saxon to the Literary Artist. First 
 of all, our native vocabulary economizes attention because of 
 the brevity of the words ; secondly, it makes the widest appeal 
 because most generally understood ; thirdly, it is valuable be- 
 cause of the imitative character of the words (e. g? splash, 
 bang, roar, etc.) ; fourthly, it is valuable because the words 
 are concrete and specific, not generic and abstract; fifthly, it 
 is valuable because of its tendency to compounds; sixthly, it 
 is valuable because it furnishes the proper basis and main 
 structure of our present English; lastly, it is valuable on ac- 
 count of being so largely the language of emotion, wit and 
 pleasantry. A word about each of these separate merits. 
 
 Brevity. Saxon words are, for the most part, words of one 
 syllable. On this point Herbert Spencer observes (Philosophy 
 of Style) : " The superiority possessed by Saxon English is its 
 comparative brevity. If it be an advantage to express an ide? 
 in the smallest number of words, then will it be an advantage 
 to express it in the smallest number of syllables. If circuitous? 
 
SAXON WORDS ij 
 
 phrases and needless expletives distract the attention and di- 
 minish the strength of the impression produced, then do sur- 
 plus articulations also. A certain effort must be required to 
 recognize every vowel and consonant; some attention is ab- 
 sorbed by each syllable. Hence, the shortness of Saxon words 
 becomes a reason for their greater force." 
 
 Appeal. The best art makes the widest appeal. Literary 
 art makes the widest appeal when it employs the words most 
 easily understood. Owing to long familiarity and early asso- 
 ciation, the Saxon element enjoys the distinction of being most 
 easily understood. From childhood we learn the significance 
 of Saxon words. If we remember how slowly and with what 
 labor the appropriate ideas follow unfamiliar words in another 
 language, and how increasing familiarity with such words 
 brings greater rapidity and ease of comprehension ; and if we 
 consider that the same process must have gone on with the 
 words of our mother tongue from childhood upwards, we shall 
 clearly see that these words call up images with less loss of time 
 and energy than their later learnt synonyms. Hence, on ac- 
 count of the readiness with which the general reader recognizes 
 their power of denotation and of connotation, the great artists 
 in English literature have given them the preference/ Chaucer, 
 Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Bryant, Longfellow, Tennyson, 
 not to mention others, have used in certain pieces as high as 
 eighty per cent of Saxon words. |^ 
 
 Sound and Sense. The imitative character of Saxon words is 
 abundantly obvious. Perhaps no other language offers so 
 many illustrations : The whistling wind, roaring waves, hiss- 
 ing serpents, buzzing flies, crashing timbers, rattling hail. 
 The advantage of such a vocabulary to the literary artist 
 who wishes to describe a scene, is equally obvious. 
 
 Concreteness. The work of the artist, no matter what be the 
 medium, is to concrete some ideal. Now Saxon words are con- 
 
jg THE WORD 
 
 crete and specific ; they stand for things; the literary artist, 
 therefore, selects such words in order to give his composition 
 definiteness and vividness. The Saxon mind was not philosoph- 
 ical, or speculatively disposed ; it demanded not abstractions or 
 generalizations. What it did demand was the image, the real- 
 ity and the definite attributes of reality. As a consequence only 
 a very small percentage of Saxon words are abstract or vague 
 in meaning. 
 
 Tendency to Compounds. The Saxon element of our speech 
 is of the highest importance, because, like the Teutonic parent 
 tree, it permits compounds. These compounds give scope to 
 men of literary genius who thereby create new and most im- 
 portant epithets. New compounds flash out daily from the 
 English literary mint, and they are soon accepted as current 
 coin. The Saxon element deserves all the credit, for with other 
 languages tributary to ours such compounding is not possible. 
 Our strongest epithets such as ' death-dealing,' ' soul-shrink- 
 ing/ ' blood-curdling/ come from this source. 
 
 Syntactic Structure. Saxon words are not only the prevail- 
 ing element in our literary art ; they form the proper basis and 
 main structure of the English language. They supply the es- 
 sential parts of speech : the article, pronoun, preposition, nu- 
 meral, auxiliary verb, conjunction and all the little particles 
 that bind words into sentences and thus form the joints, sinews 
 and ligaments of the language. Saxon controls the gram- 
 matical inflections, the terminations of noun, of verb, and of 
 the comparative and superlative, and the entire syntactic struc- 
 ture. It makes all foreign words bend to its laws of declen- 
 sion and conjugation ; so that these foreign words are often 
 abridged and simplified. It is called the mortar of the Eng- 
 lish building. 
 
 French and Latin Elements. Next to the Saxon these ele- 
 ments are the largest and of most importance. In reality there 
 
LATIN AND FRENCH ELEMENTS 19 
 
 are two classes of Latin words, one class coming directly from 
 the old Roman; the other class coming indirectly from the 
 same source through the French or Norman. The first class 
 has three subdivisions corresponding to the same number of 
 periods in the history of the language. Concerning the oldest 
 Latin acquisition Marsh observes, they were introduced into 
 England at the time of the Roman conquest. For example, 
 such words as street, cheese; and cestcr, the ending of the 
 names of English towns. Christian missionaries brought the 
 next acquisition when England was brought under the domin- 
 ion of the cross. Latin was the official language of the Ro- 
 man Catholic Church, and it became the medium of general 
 religious, moral, and intellectual instruction. But the largest 
 acquisition direct from Roman sources was made during the 
 Humanist and Scholastic periods and in the golden age of 
 English literature when classic scholarship in Western Europe 
 unlocked the literary treasures of Greece and Rome. Since 
 then the flood-gates have been opened by such lexicographers 
 as Johnson, who have practically anglicised the whole Latin 
 dictionary. So that at the present time the percentage of 
 Latin is far in excess of any other element. 
 
 Value of this Element. The largest demand for Latin 
 words comes from science, philosophy and theology. Scien- 
 tific names are almost invariably either Latin or Greek. The 
 enormous growth of the sciences has had a corresponding ef- 
 fect upon Latin terminology. In like manner, philosophy 
 has made heavy demands upon the Latin element.- Philosoph- 
 ical writing, on account of its abstract character, has little use 
 for a Saxon vocabulary. Not more than twenty per cent of 
 the words employed in a modern philosophical treatise are 
 Saxon. The definition of evolution given by Herbert Spen- 
 cer and the amusing translation of it into Saxon may be taken 
 
20 THE WORD 
 
 as a fair example of the preference which must be had for Latin 
 in the department of philosophy. 
 
 The Latin Element in Literary Art. The literary artist 
 employs Latin words in the department of oratory. The os 
 magna sonans requires the large polysyllabic words such as 
 are supplied only by the Latin. A word which in itself em- 
 bodies the most important part of the idea to be conveyed, es- 
 pecially when that idea is an emotional one, may often with 
 advantage be a polysyllabic word. Thus it seems more forci- 
 ble to say, " it is magnificent/' than " it is grand." The word 
 vast is not so powerful a one as stupendous. Calling a 
 thing nasty is not so effective as calling it disgusting. There 
 seem to be several causes for this exceptional superiority of 
 certain long words. We may ascribe it partly to the fact 
 that a voluminous, mouth-filling epithet is, by its very size, 
 suggestive of largeness or strength. Witness the immense 
 pomposity of sesquipedalian verbiage; and when great power 
 or intensity has to be suggested, this association of ideas aids 
 the effect. A further cause may be that a word of several 
 syllables admits of more emphatic articulation; and, as em- 
 phatic articulation is a sign of emotion, the unusual impres- 
 siveness of the thing named is implied in it. A third cause is 
 that a long word (of which the latter syllables are generally 
 inferred as soon as the first are spoken) allows the hearers' 
 consciousness a longer time to dwell upon the quality predi- 
 cated an advantage results from keeping it before the mind 
 for an appreciable time. (Spencer, Philosophy of Style.) Not 
 only in oratory, but often in history, the literary artist will em- 
 ploy the long word for the reasons indicated by Spencer. For 
 example, the far-resounding periods of Macaulay or the pom- 
 pous style of Gibbon a style, however, more or less in keep- 
 ing with his grand theme make frequent demands upon the 
 polysyllabic word and sesquipedalian phrases. Power and 
 
LATIN .-I XI) 1'KKXCII ELEMENTS 21 
 
 euphony are gained, especially the latter, owing to the large 
 number of vowel sounds in Latin words. Sentence rhythm, 
 which is emphasized in the higher kinds of prose, may be more 
 easily maintained when Latin words are freely interspersed 
 with the Saxon; for the consonants of the latter can easily 
 cause a harsh, grating effect upon the ear, if too many Saxon 
 words are put in juxtaposition. 
 
 The French Element. What has been said concerning 
 words which are derived directly from the Latin, applies in 
 almost equal measure to words of French, Norman or Ro- 
 mance origin. The indirect reception of these words into 
 English, while it has occasioned some changes in orthography 
 and pronunciation, made no essential change in their nature. 
 On account of long domestication, these French and Romance 
 derivatives are more closely identified with our language than 
 the words of 'direct adoption from the Latin. Immediately 
 after the Norman conquest, French was used in the Court and 
 in English schools. It was the language of the bar. All ed- 
 ucated Englishmen used it. French literature came with the 
 conquest, and the translation of this literature into the native 
 speech of England, its naturalization as an English possession, 
 was the first movement in the manifestation of a new literary 
 life. 
 
 Domestication of French Words. How this took place is ex- 
 plained by Marsh : " the want of a sufficient nomenclature and 
 the convenience of rhythm and metre, as is very clearly seen 
 in all the older English writings, led to the employment of 
 many French words; and in an age when French was quite 
 as familiar to an educated man as English, a considerable por- 
 tion of French words would be introduced almost unconsciously 
 and with no objection on the part of the reader. About the 
 middle of the fourteenth century, schools were established in 
 which English was both taught as itself an object of study, and 
 
22 THE WORD 
 
 employed as a vehicle of instruction in other languages and 
 disciplines. Native poets, composing original works in their 
 own tongues, would naturally use the poetic diction in which 
 the productions of French literature had been clothed. French 
 literature had already attained a culture which eminently fit- 
 ted it for literary purposes, and made it a storehouse of poetic 
 wealth in words as well as in thought. This was a convenient 
 resource to writers struggling in vain to find adequate expres- 
 sion in the vocabulary of Saxon-English. Thus in the course 
 of a single generation a greater number of French words were 
 introduced into English than in the three previous centuries 
 which had elapsed since the Norman Conquest. The newly 
 adopted words were not indigenous, yet they were acknowl- 
 edged and felt to be as genuinely English as those whose 
 descent from the Gothic stock was most unequivocal." 
 
 Other Factors at Work. It would be a mistake to suppose 
 that the influx of French words was due to literature alone. 
 All the arts and sciences contributed their share. The blend- 
 ing of both races brought to England the French lawyer, arch- 
 itect, painter, glass-maker, brass-founder and the other handi- 
 craftsmen; they brought with them the vocabularies of their 
 respective arts. The sciences, too, medicine, physics, geogra- 
 phy, alchemy, astrology, all of which became known to Eng- 
 land chiefly through French channels, added numerous spe- 
 cific terms to the existing vocabulary; and these words soon 
 passed into the domain of common life and were incorporated 
 into the general tongue. 
 
 Present Percentages. Tt is difficult to get a correct estimate 
 of the foreign elements in English. In literary art about 
 40,000 words are employed, of which at least sixty per cent 
 are Saxon. According to the latest computation there are 
 over two hundred thousand words in the English language. 
 
OTHER ELEMENTS 23 
 
 As the Saxon element is almost stationary (only a few old 
 coins are recovered by such artists as Tennyson and Brown- 
 ing) there must be a vast expansion of the Latin element. 
 Other languages, with the possible exception of the Greek, have 
 not appreciably increased their contributions. Of our spoken 
 vocabulary as distinguished from the dictionary vocabulary, it 
 is estimated that eighty per cent is of Saxon origin. 
 
 Other Languages. The Greek element, strange to say, has 
 always been small possibly five per cent. Most of the 
 Greek words are found in the terminology of science and phil- 
 osophy. Other languages, Celtic, Italian, Arabic, etc., all 
 combined, yield scarcely five per cent. Here is another strange 
 fact : the process of anglicising the Celtic vocabulary never 
 took on definite shape; scarcely one hundred EngHsh words 
 now in use can be traced to the ancient British. The Saxon 
 and the Celt, so it seems, could never unite or amalgamate even 
 on linguistic lines, although bound together for centuries in 
 the closest association. 
 
 The Supreme Law of Selection. In selecting words from 
 the various sources, native and foreign, the literary artist must 
 keep in mind the effect aimed at, and choose the word best fit- 
 ted to that end, no matter what its origin may be. While as 
 a rule the native element has the preference in all our literary 
 masterpieces, such preference is always subordinate to the de- 
 mands of the art itself. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE SENTENCE 
 WORD COMBINATIONS. 
 
 The Sentence. The smallest combination of words making 
 complete sense is called the sentence. After selecting the right 
 word, the artist must find for it the right place in the sen- 
 tence. 
 
 Places of Emphasis. In every sentence there are two such 
 places the beginning, and the end. Important words should 
 occupy both positions. The end of the sentence is the place 
 of greatest emphasis. One illustration : " The red artillery 
 flashed far." How much better the arrangement of the poet : 
 " Far flashed the red artillery." 
 
 Purpose of Artistic Arrangement. Three results are. always 
 secured by the best artists in the marshalling of words vari- 
 ation, coherence, and rhythm or harmony of the sentence. 
 Variation is secured by mixing long and short sentences, peri- 
 odic and loose. The following rules of choice are laid down : 
 for vigor and emphasis use the short sentence; for detail and 
 rhythm use long sentences ; to hold attention and interest use 
 the periodic sentence; for ease and naturalness use loose sen- 
 tences; for point and antithesis use the balanced sentence. 
 
 The Short Sentence. A sentence of two words is undoubt- 
 edly short. A sentence of two or three lines is classified in 
 the same manner; whereas a larger number of lines would 
 
WORD COMBINATIONS 2 $ 
 
 pass over into the category of a long sentence. However, a 
 sentence of three lines is too long if one line will answer the 
 purpose. Short sentences are usually clear, and they add vi- 
 vacity by presenting a complete thought that can be taken in at 
 a glance. When too frequent, they break the main thought of 
 the paragraph into fragments so small that the style becomes 
 jerky, incoherent, and undignified. Yet in certain kinds of 
 composition like the compendium, chronicle, text-book, letter, 
 diary, short sentences are preferred. Wit and epigram like- 
 wise demand them. 
 
 The Long Sentence. Long sentences permit the expansion 
 of a thought, and give room for indispensable qualifying cir- 
 cumstances. They also serve to group related facts, and thus 
 establish a medium between the paragraph and the individual 
 statement. ' Certain kinds of work may, therefore, be best done 
 by long sentences. They best group together the elements of 
 a complex thought ; they afford opportunity for climax, and 
 give weight and dignity. On the other hand, long sentences 
 are often difficult to handle, often unduly heavy and confused ; 
 dependent clauses are frequently tangled with one another, so 
 that the reader can scarcely follow the thought. Moreover, 
 lightness and grace are not easily united in sentences that re- 
 quire a large space wherein to turn themselves (see Mead, 
 Rhetoric). On this point Minto observes: "No small ele- 
 ment in the mechanical art of sentence building is the adjust- 
 ment of the length of the sentence. The capacity of the reader 
 should first be taken Into account; a sentence intelligible to 
 one reader might not be easily grasped by another. A number 
 of long and complex sentences weary and confuse the modern 
 reader. It is true, the great artists "of Greece and Rome elab- 
 orated their periods, but the average power of attention is not 
 so high as in those ages, and hence many a modern- artist fails 
 by imitating classic models too closely. This is seen partic- 
 
2 5 THE SENTENCE 
 
 ularly in the case of the modern orator who uses long periods 
 he is almost always a failure, though he may possess every 
 other requirement. A cursory glance at our modern maga- 
 zines will show that the long sentence is no longer a favorite 
 in English prose." 
 
 Periodic Sentences. A periodic sentence is one in which the 
 sense is suspended until the end is reached. Since the periodic 
 structure makes possible a suspension of the most important 
 elements of the sentence, this form is peculiarly adapted to 
 forcible writing. One can thus stimulate the reader's at- 
 tention throughout the sentence, and present the weightiest 
 thought at the moment when he is best prepared to receive it. 
 According to Blair " This is the most pompous, musical and 
 oratorical manner of composing: Cicero abounds with such 
 sentences." Leading English orators like Burke or Webster, 
 have imitated Cicero. The periodic sentence is secured " by 
 bringing on predicates before what they are predicated of; 
 qualifications before what they qualify; by disposing of de- 
 scriptive adjuncts, results, conditions and alternatives, at the 
 outset." In this manner the sentence is raised to the highest 
 degree of unity ; and suspense, provided thought be not unduly 
 retarded, contributes to force. Moreover, an air of gravity 
 and dignity is given to the composition. On the other hand, 
 the disadvantages of the periodic sentence are obvious: they 
 are apt to be too long, and, if frequently used, they cause im- 
 patience and weariness, and are difficult to follow. The reader 
 or hearer is apt to lose the beginning before he arrives at the 
 end. No critic has expressed more clearly the defects of a 
 periodic or long sentence than De Quincey: " Such a sentence, 
 for example, begins with a series of ifs; perhaps a dozen lines 
 are occupied with expanding the conditions under which some- 
 thing is affirmed or denied ; here you cannot dismiss and have 
 done with the ideas as you go along; all is- hypothetic; all is 
 
WORD COMBINATIONS 2 *J 
 
 suspended in the air. The conditions are not fully to be under- 
 stood until you are acquainted with the dependency ; you must 
 give separate attention to each clause of this complex hypothe- 
 sis, and yet, having done that by a painful effort, you have done 
 nothing at all; for you must exercise a reacting attention 
 through the corresponding latter section, in order to follow 
 out its relations to all parts of the hypothesis which sustained 
 it. In fact, under the rude, yet also artificial character of this 
 style, each separate monster period is a vast arch, which, not 
 receiving its keystone, not being locked into self-supporting 
 cohesion until you reach its close, imposes of necessity upon 
 the unhappy reader all the superincumbent mass of its power- 
 ful weight through the main process of its construction." 
 The labyrinthian complexities of which De Quincey complains, 
 are fast dying out of modern prose. While the periodic sen- 
 tence is still used, it now rarely includes more than four or 
 five lines. 
 
 The Loose Sentence. The genius of the English language 
 calls for the loose sentence. And this kind must be of fre- 
 quent occurrence since our language does not permit the in- 
 versions requisite for the constant practice of suspending the 
 sense. The loose sentence is one which may be complete in 
 meaning at one or several points before the end. The element 
 of suspense is wanting; the meaning is gathered piece by 
 piece. Loose sentences, says Quackenbos, fulfil their function 
 as the instruments of familiar expression, and are free from 
 the stiffness that characterizes uniform periods. They are 
 not necessarily languid or unmusical; many of the best sen- 
 tences in English literature are loose. The reason why loose 
 sentences are suited to the genius of the English language is 
 pointed out by Greenough : " An inflected language generally 
 has a tendency to arrange ideas in such a manner that the 
 main predicate is withheld until all the modifications have been 
 
2 g THE SENTENCE 
 
 given, and the whole thought, with all its details is thus pre- 
 sented at once in an organized body." Hence, the predomi- 
 nance of the periodic style in such languages; but not so in 
 English, where prepositions take the place of inflections. Prep- 
 ositions imply the loose construction and the loose sentence. 
 If this grammatical reason did not exist, the literary artist 
 would still need the loose sentence in order to vary his ex- 
 pression as well as for ease and naturalness. 
 
 The Balanced Sentence. The balanced sentence is one in 
 which the words and phrases of one part correspond in form 
 and in position with those of another part. On this point of 
 balance, Hill observes, " The balance is greater or less, ac- 
 cording as the correspondence is more or less exact, and 
 according as it extends to a larger or smaller part of the sen- 
 tence." Balanced sentences often contain antithetical words 
 or clauses; but even when they do not, their advantages and 
 disadvantages are similar to those of antithesis. Balance 
 gives pleasure because it is an expression of symmetry one 
 of the fundamental principles of art. It captivates the ear and 
 helps to impress the memory and fix the attention. Moreover, 
 it adds clearness and simplicity to the style by facilitating the 
 comparison of things that are to be compared. Likewise, it 
 makes the style impressive. According to Bain, the superior 
 impressiveness of the balanced form can be explained in this 
 fashion : when a second statement runs in the same form as 
 one immediately preceding, the mind is partly relieved from 
 the effort needed to follow the new statement, and thus is bet- 
 ter prepared to feel the power of the thought itself. However, 
 excessive use of the balanced sentence imparts to composition 
 an affected and artificial character; for example, the style 
 of Johnson or Macaulay. These styles are often stilted, stiff 
 and unnatural because of the balanced sentence. Two rules 
 govern its use. In the first place, it should be used only when 
 
WORD COMBINATIONS 29 
 
 there is a call for it in the nature of the thought that is, 
 when there is a real correspondence between the meanings of 
 the clauses. In the second place, it must always be moder- 
 ately employed, even when the sense or meaning calls for it, 
 because it is a general law that all strong effects, of which bal- 
 ance is one, should be used with moderation. 
 
 A General Rule. The literary artist has all the foregoing 
 kinds of sentence from which to choose. Assuming that he 
 is a master in the art, he will not pick any one kind of sen- 
 tence to the exclusion of the other kinds he will be governed 
 by the law of variation. Herbert Spencer thus describes the 
 perfect artist : " Now he will be rhythmical and now irregular ; 
 here his language will be plain and there ornate ; sometimes his 
 sentence will be balanced and at other times unsymmetrical ; 
 for a while there will be considerable sameness, and then again 
 great variety. His mode of expression naturally responding 
 to his state of feeling, there will flow from his pen a composi- 
 tion changing to the same degree that the aspects of his 
 subject change; and his work will present to the reader that 
 variety needful to prevent continuous exertion of the same 
 faculties." 
 
 Coherence of the Sentence. Coherence is the law of inter- 
 nal arrangement. The relation of each part of the sentence 
 to other parts is thereby made clear and unmistakable. This 
 law implies that a sentence should be a unit both in thought 
 and in expression. There may be several ideas expressed, but 
 they should be homogeneous and form a whole or a unit. 
 Blair gives the following rules to secure coherence: (i) In 
 the course of the same sentence do not shift the scene. (2) 
 Avoid crowding the sentence with heterogeneous subjects. 
 (3) Avoid excess of parenthetical clauses. (4) Do not add 
 members after a full and perfect close. In all styles of compo- 
 
30 THE SENTENCE 
 
 sition it is often requisite to give in the same sentence several 
 distinct facts; in which case, the only guiding consideration 
 is comparative closeness of relationship. Coherence is of 
 three kinds. First, in the order of words: the rule is, all 
 words closely related in thought, should be placed together. 
 Secondly, in the order of phrases : phrases similar in signifi- 
 cance should be similar in form and length. Thirdly, in rela- 
 tion to connectives: connectives should denote with precision 
 the relation of words and phrases to the context. The literary 
 artist needs a most precise knowledge of connectives ; much of 
 the loose, vague and unsatisfactory writing of the present time 
 is due to ignorance regarding connectives. 
 
 Harmony of the Sentence. Two things are aimed at 
 agreeable modulation, and the sound so ordered as to become 
 expressive of the sense. Harmony depends upon the selec- 
 tion and collocation of words. The grating consonant must 
 he mixed with the smooth liquid. On this point Blair ob- 
 serves : " It is evident that words are most agreeable to the ear 
 which are composed of smooth and liquid sounds, where there 
 is a proper intermixture of vowels and consonants; without 
 too many harsh consonants rubbing against each other ; or too 
 many open vowels in succession, to cause a hiatus or disagree- 
 able opening of the mouth. It may always be assumed as a 
 principle, that whatever sounds are difficult in pronunciation, 
 are, in the same proportion, harsh and painful to the ear. 
 Vowels give softness, consonants strengthen the sound of 
 words. The music of language requires a just proportion of 
 both. As to words, long words are commonly more agreeable 
 to the ear than monosyllables they please it by the succes- 
 sion of sounds which they present to it. Among words of 
 any length those are the most musical which present an inter- 
 mixture of long and short syllables. A third consideration is 
 the disposition of words in a sentence; for, let the words them- 
 
WORD COMBINATIONS 31 
 
 selves be ever so well chosen and well sounding, yet if they be 
 ill-disposed, the music of the sentence is utterly lost." 
 
 Harmony in Sentence-Structure. First of all, the distribu- 
 tion of the several members is to be carefully attended to. It 
 is of importance to observe that whatever is easy and agree- 
 able to the organs of speech, always sounds grateful to the 
 ear. While a period is going on, the termination of each of 
 its members forms a pause or rest for pronunciation ; and 
 these rests should be so distributed as to make easy the course 
 of the breathing, and, at the same time, should fall at such 
 distances as to bear a certain musical proportion to each 
 other. The next thing which deserves attention is the close 
 or cadence of the whole sentence, which, as it is always the 
 part most sensible to the ear, demands the greatest care. Quin- 
 tilian writes : " Let there be nothing harsh or abrupt in the 
 conclusion of the sentence, for on that conclusion the mind 
 pauses and rests. This is the most material part in the struc- 
 ture of discourse. Here everyone expects to be gratified." 
 Though attention to the music of sentences must not be neg- 
 lected, yet it must be kept within proper bounds^ for all ap- 
 pearances of affectation are disagreeable. It may degenerate 
 into childish and puerile ornament, especially when there is no 
 equation between sound and sense. The current of sound 
 ought to be adapted to the tenor of the composition. Sentences 
 constructed with a fulness and swell are fitted to clothe ideas 
 important, magnificently sedate. But manifestly, it would be 
 absurd to use such a swell and cadence in any ordinary de- 
 scription or exposition of a theme. Themes that evoke intense 
 passion or emotion require a corresponding sound of words. 
 But ordinary artistic delicacy will see that there must always 
 be an affinity between the sound and the sense. 
 
 How the Artist is Trained. The best rule to follow in 
 order to master the music and harmony of the sentence is to 
 
~ 2 THE SENTENCE 
 
 read aloud the best models of prose. The custom of reading 
 aloud will train the ear to sentence-rhythm ; it imprints upon the 
 mind tlie correct forms of the sentence; so that when one 
 comes to write, one will instinctively fill out these forms. The 
 ear is attuned to sentence rhythm as it is attuned to the airs 
 of music. The practice of reading aloud is quite common in 
 England not so common in America. It is said of Newman, 
 our greatest master of prose, that he read aloud, every day, 
 a chapter of Cicero in order to train his ear to sentence-rhythm. 
 And the literary artist who would produce an English prose 
 masterpiece, cannot do better than train with such models as 
 Cicero, Newman, Arnold, Ruskin, Macaulay, reading aloud 
 their matchless prose music and becoming familiar not only 
 with sentence rhythm and harmony, but with their matchless 
 art in constructing and employing the various kinds of sen- 
 tence. These immortal writers training the ear to music, the 
 eye to symmetry and proportion, the mind to logical sequence, 
 and the aesthetic sense to a keen appreciation of beauty are 
 infallible guides to the " promised land." 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE PARAGRAPH 
 
 Definition. After mastering the various kinds of sentence, 
 the literary artist proceeds to consider their smallest combin- 
 ation known as the paragraph. Like the sentence, it is a unit, 
 but a larger unit, in the composition. As a unit it is marked 
 off by indentation; and, as a component part of the compo- 
 sition a link in the chain ,it hints in some way at what 
 has preceded it and foreshadows what is to come. It is de- 
 fined as a group of sentences clustering around a central idea 
 or topic which is subordinate to the main theme of the compo- 
 sition. The paragraph rests the eye by breaking the text; 
 but its main function is to mark- and elaborate the progressive 
 changes in the thought. It helps the reader to follow a writer 
 step by step. 
 
 Rules of Construction. First, let the opening sentence indi- 
 cate the subject of the paragraph. As a rule, each new para- 
 graph introduces and finishes a definite topic; and this topic 
 ought to be indicated at the outset. Secondly, make the open- 
 ing sentence short. This is done to secure the attention and 
 interest of the reader. In the beginning the reader is not 
 willing to wind through the mazes of the long sentence. 
 Thirdly, let the bearing of each sentence on what precedes be 
 clear and positive. This rule simply insists upon logical and 
 careful development. Fourthly, give smooth connection to 
 the various sentences comprised in the paragraph. Smooth 
 connection is one of the graces of artistic writing. 
 
 33 
 
THE PARAGRAPH 
 
 Principles Applied. The principles applied in the paragraph 
 are precisely the same as those applied in the sentence. The 
 same unity, coherence and harmony are demanded. There is 
 precisely the same organization. Unity in a paragraph im- 
 plies a sustained purpose and forbids digression and irrelevant 
 matter. The most common mistake with reference to unity is 
 to run into one paragraph what should be divided into two 
 or more. Even the best writers at times violate this rule ; they 
 introduce unnecessary digressions quite distinct from any le- 
 gitimate development of the specific topic. Coherence of the 
 paragraph implies consecutive arrangement, so that related 
 ideas are kept as close together as possible: in other words, 
 proximity is governed by affinity of ideas. When an idea is 
 put forward in the paragraph, the way to stamp it on the 
 mind is to give everything connected with it iterations, ex- 
 amples, illustrations and proofs before passing to another 
 topic. The nature of the subject and the style of the compo- 
 sition usually dictate a plan in the bringing forward of suc- 
 cessive particles. It constantly happens that a topic is re- 
 lated to several others, and as composition can move in only 
 one line it may be impossible to bring a paragraph into entire 
 accordance with the law. In such cases we must be content 
 to study the greatest proximity of related topics on the whole 
 (see Bain, Rhetoric Part I). The harmony of a paragraph 
 applies both to thought-development and to sentence-colloca- 
 tion. The harmonious development of thought excludes all 
 breaks or jarring transitions : it is secured by a rigorous ap- 
 plication of logic. Like the collocation of words in a sen- 
 tence, the collocation of sentences in a paragraph should be 
 made with a view to harmony. It depends on a happy ad- 
 mixture of the various kinds of sentence; it depends on such 
 a gradation of sentence as will bring the climax at the close of 
 the paragraph. Inasmuch as harmony is a constant quality 
 
THE PARAGRAPH 35 
 
 of good style, its application to the paragraph becomes ob- 
 vious. 
 
 Method. Paragraphs, says Barrett Wendell, are prevised, 
 that is, we arrange beforehand the qualities of a paragraph - 
 its length, the idea it will contain, the prominence it will have 
 in the composition ; whereas, in the case of sentences we revise 
 them after they are written, and apply then the principles of 
 criticism. Sentences are seldom deliberately planned ; they 
 are written first and then revised. Inasmuch as paragraphs 
 are considerable portions of the complete composition, their 
 prevision becomes a part of the general outline. 
 
 * ^ 
 
 The Number of Sentences. A paragraph may consist of a 
 single sentence only, but- commonly contains several. Says 
 Mead: "A. single paragraph is often a complete article in 
 miniature, since the paragraph may treat a topic so narrow 
 that the entife discussion will comprise but a few sentences." 
 In a long article a group of paragraphs sometimes discusses 
 with considerable fulness a single topic subordinate to the 
 main theme; and this group can be regarded as an article 
 within an article. Extremes of length or brevity are in any 
 case to be avoided. Paragraphs that are too long require too 
 much attention from the reader ; paragraphs that are too short 
 subdivide the thought unduly and make obscure the relations 
 of the larger parts of the discourse. For indicating the topic 
 and giving it some application, there should be at least a half 
 dozen sentences in each paragraph. 
 
 The Divisions of the Paragraph. Paragraphs admit of 
 several divisions. First, the long and short; these are inter- 
 changed so as to avoid monotony. The length of the para- 
 graph is largely determined by the subject matter of the com- 
 position. As Professor Genung writes : " There is no fixed 
 
~6 THE PARAGRAPH 
 
 measurement, but roughly speaking, less than a hundred words 
 make a short paragraph; more than three hundred words, 
 a long one." The use of short or long paragraphs is deter- 
 mined by the effect we wish to have. A solid, heavy and 
 serious subject is best treated in the long paragraph. A light, 
 racy topic demands the short paragraph. A second division 
 is the isolated and linked paragraph. The isolated form is 
 comparatively modern, but its use is growing rapidly in the 
 daily and weekly newspapers and in the magazines. The iso- 
 lated paragraph is short, varying in length from two or three 
 lines to a dozen rarely more. It deals with every conceiv- 
 able subject. It is a whole composition in miniature. The 
 reading public take very kindly to this paragraph. Usually 
 a column or two on the editorial page of our daily and weekly 
 newspapers will contain no other kind of writing. Telegraphic 
 reports are now finding the same channel, while book-reviews 
 in the very best magazines employ it. On the other hand, 
 the linked paragraph is found in more elaborate compositions. 
 As parts of a complete composition they require somewhat dif- 
 ferent construction from independent or isolated paragraphs. 
 Each paragraph in the series should indicate some relationship 
 with its neighbors there should be an unbroken thread bind- 
 ing all together. 
 
 Paragraph Linking. This is accomplished in various ways : 
 first, by carrying on an important word or phrase from one 
 paragraph to the following a favorite method with Matthew 
 Arnold. Second, by carrying on a very brief summary of the 
 thought developed in the preceding paragraph a favorite 
 method of Newman. It gives to the thought-sequence pecul- 
 iar power and dignity as well as clearness. Third, by letting 
 the last sentence of the paragraph suggest the topic of the fol- 
 lowing paragraph; this is the ordinary method of linking 
 paragraphs. 
 
THE PARAGRAPH ^ 
 
 Sentence Linking in the Paragraph. There are several rules 
 which apply to sentence-linking : first, the use of sentence-echo ; 
 the opening clause of one sentence echoes the thought and 
 wording of the last clause of the preceding sentence. Second, 
 by repeating the subject of the first sentence in the succeed- 
 ing sentences. This method is very effective in oratory; it 
 is very emphatic if the same word is employed in the repe- 
 tition. But in all kinds of literary art the subject is repeated 
 by means of the pronoun or synonyms or paraphrase of mean- 
 ing. A third method, by repeating the subject and pred- 
 icate, which is still more emphatic and often employed in such 
 parts of the oration as the exhortation. However, one must 
 guard against the stilted style which results from too much 
 repetition of this kind. Finally, sentences are linked by 
 means of connectives. Concerning their right use, Coleridge 
 observes : " A close reasoner and a good writer is generally 
 known by his pertinent use of connectives. Read a page of 
 Johnson ; you cannot alter one conjunction without spoiling 
 the sense. It is a linked strain throughout." Among con- 
 nectives, the most important are the cumulative conjunctions. 
 
 The Cumulative Conjunction. It is defined as one which 
 adds a new statement to preceding statements of the same 
 class, and having the same bearing upon the topic of the 
 paragraph. There are more than thirty of these in our 
 language. Those of the first rank are, and, but, for, yet, so, 
 moreover; they are the most beautiful connectives in Eng- 
 lish. And is the favorite Biblical connective; the best prose 
 writers often use it at the beginning of a sentence. Yet and 
 for as initial particles for the paragraph often appear in the 
 best prose. Moreover is the favorite connective of Newman ; 
 and in its usage he is now widely copied. Besides these cu- 
 mulatives of the first rank, we employ such single words as 
 also, yea, likewise, similarly, first, secondly, further, further- 
 
~g THE PARAGRAPH 
 
 more, etc. ; and such combinations as once more, in like man- 
 ner, yet another, then too, add to this. Ruskin seems to pre- 
 fer in like manner; while Herbert Spencer gives preference to 
 once more. So also makes a happy paragraph transition. Fa- 
 miliarity with prose masterpieces is the best teacher regarding 
 the right use of connectives. The literary artist needs to be 
 familiar with these words above all others in the language. 
 They are essential to consecutive writing, for they are the 
 hinges and joints of paragraph building. They are subdi- 
 vided into Adversative, such as but, notwithstanding; Illative, 
 indicating effect or consequence, the use of reasoning or argu- 
 ment, such as therefore, hence, thus, accordingly; Subordinate, 
 tying a subordinate clause or sentence to its principal, such as 
 if, provided that, when. There are other subdivisions of 
 minor importance. " On the right use of connectives," says 
 Bain, " the coherence of paragraphs depends." As in the con- 
 struction of sentences, so in the construction of paragraphs, 
 they are essential in dove-tailing one's work. Much art is 
 shown in their use. Their number is so large as to give all the 
 necessary connection to English composition. On the abuse 
 of particles, Hill observes : " The judicious use of connective 
 particles promotes clearness." But useful as is a connective 
 particle that expresses a real connection of thought, one that 
 serves no purpose is worse than useless, and one used for an 
 unsuitable purpose leads astray. But and and are frequent of- 
 fenders in both ways. They are properly used to connect 
 words or clauses closely related in meaning and similar in con- 
 struction. 
 
 A composition should never begin with but or with and; for 
 if nothing precedes the conjunction, there is nothing for it to 
 connect with what follows. A paragraph may so begin when 
 there is real opposition or real connection between two para- 
 graphs as wholes ; but usually a new paragraph indicates a 
 break in the sense too important to be bridged by a conjunction. 
 
THE PARAGRAPH 39 
 
 Method of Study. The artist learns by having the best 
 models before him in his studio. The paragraph should be 
 studied in the best prose authors Arnold, Newman, Ruskin, 
 Macaulay, George Eliot, Herbert Spencer. Analyze their 
 work ; lay bare the mechanism of their paragraph its skele- 
 ton. This may be done mentally while reading, for one rule 
 of right reading is to make mentally a synthesis of the plot 
 or plan as you read. Again, before writing a paragraph, 
 prepare a skeleton in like manner ; that is, arrange the leading 
 topic and the connected items of thought. " All orderly and 
 artistic work," says Pater, " presupposes a careful outline be- 
 forehand, not only of the whole composition, but of each para- 
 graph." The writer who does not follow such an outline, will 
 be a loose and slovenly workman. No man builds without a 
 plan for each room; no man should write without a similar 
 guide. 
 
CHAPTER vf 
 
 THE COMPLETE COMPOSITION 
 
 The Ideal Realized. The maxim of the ancients applies 
 here // coronal opus: the end crowns the work. The 
 word, the sentence, the paragraph, are but steps toward this 
 goal. The composition as a whole is the grand aim of the 
 writer, for in it his ideal is concreted, realized. The general 
 effect of the whole composition ought to be like the general 
 effect of a complete building or painting or piece of statuary. 
 The quality and merit of the art are thereby determined. As 
 a work of art, a composition when complete possesses unity, 
 harmony, balance, proportion. These principles are the very 
 alphabet of art; they make an important demand upon the 
 artist. 
 
 A Well Defined Plan. The first demand in all kinds of 
 literary art is a well defined plan for the composition. The 
 writer who works without a plan, cannot escape chaos and 
 confusion; whereas clearness is the first requisite of all good 
 writing. It is called the intellectual quality of style because 
 the intellect elaborates the plan of the composition ; the intellect 
 discovers at once the presence or absence of a plan in writing. 
 
 Evolution of a Plan. To work out a plan for a composition 
 one must carefully survey the subject and reduce one's ideas 
 to order. There are various methods employed. Some prefer 
 to write headings, giving form to ideas already clear, after- 
 wards combining and correcting them. This is called the 
 suggestive method, or, " thinking with the pen." One idea 
 
 40 
 
THE COMPLETE COMPOSITION 41 
 
 set down will suggest another until the paragraph is complete. 
 Some writers cannot think without the aid of the pen. Other 
 writers prefer to revolve the subject in their minds until the 
 plan is fully matured. They wait for the thought to " work 
 itself out," before penning a line. But whatever be the method, 
 a plan must precede clearness of expression. Artists of the 
 first rank, such as Newman, Arnold, Ruskin, always outline 
 their work. The same rule applies to verse as well as to prose. 
 Perhaps the most practical method to follow is to start with 
 the outline that first suggests itself. As the theme is developed, 
 both plan and composition may be altered or corrected. The 
 best writers are hardly ever satisfied with the first draught. 
 For example, Daniel Webster outlined several times his oration 
 on the Pilgrim Fathers ; Newman planned his Apologia four 
 times and then was not satisfied with the final draught. Car- 
 lyle's " Life of Frederick the Great " underwent several 
 revisions. A plan like a composition improves by careful re- 
 view ; but the first rough sketch, though it should lack com- 
 pleteness, ought to have coherence and unity there should 
 be some central idea round which all that is written clusters. 
 
 Qualities of a Complete Composition. As a work of art, 
 a complete composition is characterized by three qualities, an 
 intellectual quality, an emotional quality, an aesthetic quality. 
 The first quality is represented by the word clearness; the sec- 
 ond, by force; the third, by elegance. Each one of these qual- 
 ities deserves special notice. 
 
 Clearness. This quality is predicated of a composition 
 when its plan is well defined and when the writing itself appeals 
 to the average intellect. The best art always makes the widest 
 appeal. This is true of sculpture, painting, architecture and 
 music as well as the art of letters. In order to make the widest 
 appeal the literary artist must come down to the level of the 
 
42 THE COMPLETE COMPOSITION 
 
 average intellect to be intelligible to the average reader. The 
 maxim of Aristotle applies here : " Think the thoughts of 
 the wise, but use the language of the simple." Plainness and 
 simplicity of language are gained only by long practice in 
 picking and choosing words. Once more we may emphasize 
 the native element of our speech: the Saxon word is always 
 understood ; it makes the widest appeal. In his lectures on 
 writing English, Arlo Bates has this to say of clearness, and 
 the means of attaining it : 
 
 " Clearness is most obviously associated with the word and the 
 structure. If an author has carefully considered his work and the 
 unity of his composition ; if he has massed it properly in parts and 
 as a whole, if he has looked well to its coherence it is hardly 
 possible that he should fail of being readily understood. Close 
 attention to the mechanics of style will generally make a writer 
 intelligible, provided always, that he wishes his meaning to be 
 apprehended easily, and that he himself knows what he is attempt- 
 ing to say. It is no less needful to appeal to the average emotional 
 experiences of mankind in order to be clear to the general reader. 
 It must be remembered that all art is based on the assumption of 
 a community of human feelings ; in other words, upon the theory 
 that the fundamental emotions are shared by all mankind. The 
 more closely a writer holds to common humanity, to common 
 human experience, the more wide will be the range of his work, 
 and the more clear will he be in those very matters where clear- 
 ness is most difficult of attainment. To gain clearness it is neces- 
 sary first to avoid all vagueness of thought and all vagueness of 
 expression. It is needful to shun ambiguity of word or of phrase, 
 and that more subtle ambiguity which may arise from ill- 
 considered paragraphing, from misproportion, or from bad ar- 
 rangement of the parts of a composition. Finally, it is no less im- 
 portant to write with a constant remembrance of the audience 
 addressed ; to use their language and to appeal to the experiences 
 which are likely to be common to the average individual. These 
 are the principles upon which have been written the masterpieces 
 of the world." 
 
 Errors Regarding Clearness. The inexperienced writer sins 
 against clearness in two ways. First, by so expressing him- 
 
THE COMPLETE COMPOSITION 43 
 
 self that what he writes may mean more than one 
 thing. It is the sin of vagueness and ambiguity. It is often 
 the sin of such writers as Emerson, Carlyle, Brown- 
 ing. Emerson said of his own sentences : " They are in- 
 finitely repellant particles." Browning is purposely obscure, 
 and, on that account, the despair of modern criticism. A 
 second error is the introduction of a pedantic terminology. 
 Some compositions, like the garb of the primitive man, are 
 fantastic with feathers from science, philosophy, theology. 
 The most obscure references flatter the childish vanity of the 
 pedant and the young artist. Among great modern writers 
 James Russell Lowell is a shining example of the pedantic 
 workman. His page is full of literary allusions which appeal 
 only to the select and learned few. On the reception of his 
 book, " My Study Windows," Matthew Arnold wrote him 
 as follows : " My Dear Mr. Lowell : Your latest volume 
 gives me great pleasure, indeed. But your manifold references 
 and allusions often weigh down and crush your subject like 
 the shields of the Romans on the breast of Tarpeia." 
 
 Force. The second quality desirable in a composition is 
 force. As clearness represents the intellectual quality, so force 
 stands for the emotional quality of a composition. It appeals 
 to the emotions ; its purpose is to arouse feeling. A composi- 
 tion interests and stirs us because of it. Various names 
 are applied to this quality which awakens sympathy, 
 arouses passion and sets the imagination of the reader or 
 hearer at work. Whately calls it energy; Campbell, vivacity; 
 Bain, strength. Aristotle uses the Greek equivalent for en- 
 ergy. But science supplies the best term force. This qual- 
 ity must be understood to cover more than transient outbreaks 
 of emotion, or feeling at high tide ; it is used in the sense of 
 lasting vigor and power. 
 
44 THE COMPLETE COMPOSITION 
 
 The Basis of Force in Art-Form. First of all, there is the 
 specific term which gives force to composition. This term is 
 demanded on account of its vividness and its suggestiveness. 
 It gives concrete form to the work of the artist. For example, 
 compare sound with the definiteness and force of cry, roar, yell, 
 howl. In the specific term we have the power of connotation 
 or suggestiveness. For example, compare This man is deficient 
 in common sense, with. This man is a donkey. On this point 
 Baldwin observes : " The connotation or suggesiiveness of 
 words and phrases, which is their meaning for style, as dis- 
 tinguished from their denotation, which is their meaning for 
 business and logic, as it measures elegance, measures also 
 strength. The pursuit of force, then, is the pursuit of emo- 
 tional connotations, and emotional connotations attach espe- 
 cially to words familiar and specifically concrete. The habit 
 of the concrete and specific is the force of Homer, the force of 
 Dante and of Chaucer, the force of Newman and Tennyson, 
 the force of all great writers that choose to move our imagina- 
 tions directly. It is the strong way of narration and descrip- 
 tion because it is the way of emotional suggestion. Even the 
 most diverse styles, in so far as they have force, will be found 
 to have it by these means." (Baldwin, Rhetoric.) The value 
 of Saxon as supplying our concrete terms, once more becomes 
 obvious. 
 
 Figures of Speech as a Source. Figures of speech are em- 
 phatically the language of power. As soon as a writer 
 wishes to impress his earnestness upon you, he invariably 
 breaks out in figurative language. Even the untutored 
 swain finds a figure quite as handy as a club whenever 
 he wishes to express the vehemence of his emotion. Divine 
 wisdom always employed figurative language to impress the 
 truths of the Gospel upon the mind. For example, " The 
 Devil goeth about like a roaring lion." " Work not for the 
 
THE COMPLETE COMPOSITION 45 
 
 meat that perisheth, but for the meat of eternal life." "Ye 
 Scribes and Pharisees, ye are whitened sepulchres." Figurat- 
 ive language gives force to composition in proportion to the 
 universality of its appeal. Hence, figures should be drawn 
 from familiar sources. The best models in this regard are 
 the figures and parables in Holy Scripture. We cannot im- 
 prove upon the choice made by Divine Wisdom. No writing 
 possesses more force than Holy Scripture, because of this wise 
 selection of figurative language. On the value of figures to 
 give strength to style and to heighten emotion Dr. Blair writes 
 as follows : " We can always heighten the emotion by the 
 figures which we introduce, leading the imagination to a train 
 of agreeable or disagreeable, of exalting or debasing ideas 
 which correspond to the impressions that we choose to make. 
 When we want to render an object beautiful or magnificent, 
 we borrow images from the most beautiful or splendid scenes 
 of nature; we thereby throw a lustre over our object; we en- 
 liven the reader's mind and dispose him to go along with us 
 in the various impressions which we give him of the subject. 
 All this leads us to reflect on the wonderful power of language. 
 What a fine vehicle it has now become for all the conceptions 
 of the human mind. Not content with a simple communication 
 of ideas, it paints these ideas to the eye in the most forcible 
 and beautiful manner through the medium of figurative lan- 
 guage. So that language, from being a rude and imperfect 
 interpreter of men's wants and necessities, has now passed into 
 an instrument of the most delicate and refined luxury." 
 
 A Subjective Source. The great secret of force lies not only 
 in the marvellous power of language, but also in the marvel- 
 lous power of the human will and character. It lies in the 
 earnestness, sincerity and sympathy of the writer. A reader 
 of Carlyle is impressed at once with the intense earnestness of 
 the man, which gives to his words the force and weight of a 
 
4 5 THE COMPLETE COMPOSITION 
 
 sledge hammer. A reader of Newman, whatever be his reli- 
 gious convictions, cannot help seeing that the secret of his pow- 
 erful style, so forcible, yet so captivating, lies in the sincerity 
 and sympathy of the writer. The great orators of the world 
 a Demosthenes, or Bossuet, or Burke, or Webster, or Patrick 
 Henry are perhaps the best examples of this peculiar quality 
 in composition ; and no class of men are more earnest, sincere 
 and sympathetic than they. 
 
 Elegance. Elegance is the third and last quality required 
 in a complete composition. It is the quality that appeals to 
 the aesthetic sense or to our appreciation of beauty. For it is 
 the beautiful as expressed in art-form the select word-combi- 
 nation, variety in the sentence and paragraph, a happy choice 
 of figures and illustration, a harmonious development of the 
 complete composition. It, therefore, pertains to structural 
 beauty; and in the complete structure it reveals the personal 
 taste and culture of the artist. He reveals a quick appreciation 
 of beauty, a keen perception of the fitness of things, a power 
 to convey both in the choicest words; he reveals politeness, 
 a well-bred restraint, a complete freedom from any manner 
 of excess, a perfect adaptation of style to thought. And for 
 these various reasons he is called an elegant writer. 
 
 Etymological Meaning. The word, elegance, implies to select 
 - to pick and choose. When applied to composition, it means 
 to pick and choose from the vast mass of words, phrases, 
 sentences, paragraphs, thoughts, that which best suits our lit- 
 erary purpose and the requirements of art. 
 
 Scope of Elegance. As elegance is an appeal to the aesthetic 
 sense, it has to do with the complete structure of the composi- 
 tion, how it will affect the mind of the reader. The reader 
 must be pleased not only with the various parts, but with the 
 general effect of the whole composition. Hence, elegance is the 
 
EXPOSITION 47 
 
 result of the last touches of the great artist upon the literary 
 canvas. Newman wrote thus concerning Cicero : " Cicero 
 wrote elegantly because he had a keen appreciation of what is 
 fine in literary art. In his writings there is an exquisite adap- 
 tation of style to thought. He was acquainted with the best 
 models of Grecian literature he read them for happy turns 
 of phrase he read them for the emotion wedded to the 
 thoughts, which makes all thinking human. He wrote ele- 
 gantly because out of those models he would pick and choose 
 whatever made thought pleasing and expression beautiful." 
 
 Kinds of Composition. The complete composition admits 
 of four classifications, according to the subject matter and the 
 manner of writing. Of these four kinds of composition, the 
 first deals with persons or things it is called Descriptive; 
 the second deals with acts or events it is called Narrative; 
 the third deals with whatever admits of analysis or requires 
 explanation it is called Exposition; the fourth deals with 
 any material that may be used to convince the understanding 
 or to affect the will it is called Argument. As a rule, these 
 four kinds of composition are not distinct and separate in 
 literary art. The artist at times necessarily allows one kind 
 to run into another; thus, for example, a narrative work 
 will often be descriptive, an argumentative work will often 
 include exposition. It is possible, however, to have purely 
 argumentative, expository, descriptive or narrative writing. 
 Certain rules guide the artist in each class of work. 
 
 Exposition. When the artist adopts this style, he poses as 
 a teacher ; he aims at lucid explanation ; his object is to appeal 
 to the minds of his readers; he presents facts, analyses, collates 
 and combines them; he unfolds hidden meanings, the signifi- 
 cance of things complex and subtle. Although it appears in 
 artistic synthesis, exposition is only another Mme for analysis ; 
 
4 g THE COMPLETE COMPOSITION 
 
 and because it is so, the guiding- principle for the artist is 
 clearness clearness in statement of facts, clearness in 
 thought-division, clearness in analytical development of the 
 topic. So that the artist must give strict attention to his defini- 
 tions,- divisions, generalizations. A second principle sub- 
 ordinate to this is the principle of selection; that is of taking 
 from the varied details those particulars which, when massed 
 together, make the most vivid impression. This principle also 
 applies to description where a picture of the object described 
 ought to be presented to the mind. The necessity of some 
 method is likewise obvious ; no one method can be mentioned 
 as best in all cases, but in every expository composition, some 
 method of arrangement should be followed. This principle 
 applies to all kinds of writing, but in a special manner to 
 exposition, the object of which is to analyze and instruct 
 rather than to please the aesthetic sense. Along with these 
 principles must go the fundamental principles of all art 
 unity, harmony, balance, proportion. 
 
 Description. Description may be scientific or literary. 
 Scientific description is an exact statement of the truth re- 
 specting the qualities, characteristics, details, of an object. It 
 aims at the truth alone. Literary description mentions like- 
 wise the qualities and characteristics of an object, but so ar- 
 ranges and classifies them as to bring before the mind an image 
 or a picture of the object described. The image of the object 
 in the mind of the writer is transferred by written symbols 
 to the mind of the reader. This transfer is one of the tri- 
 umphs of literary art. There are various rules which assist 
 the writer in making this transfer. First, a cultivation of the 
 habit of visualizing things ; that is. seeing them as clearly in 
 your own imagination as you see them in reality and in fact. 
 The imagination should be trained to hold a photograph of 
 the object before the mind, as a painter keeps your photograph 
 
NARRATION 49 
 
 before him when enlarging your picture. The merit of lit- 
 erary description depends largely upon this power. Words- 
 worth calls it the training of the inward eye. A Second rule 
 is to find and express the central idea of the picture thus 
 mentally photographed. Two or three characteristic touches 
 are sufficient to suggest the whole. A third rule is to proceed 
 from the near to the remote; from the physical to the mental; 
 from the obvious to the obscure. This is but the natural 
 process of setting forth the characteristics of anything to 
 pass from the known to the unknown. A fourth rule is to 
 make the details of the description submit to the central 
 thought. These details are not suppressed; they are incident- 
 ally mentioned or suggested, but they are always kept sub 
 ordinate. A final rule is to open the composition with a 
 general view, a broad idea, of the thing, the person or the 
 scene to be pictured. This rule holds whether the description 
 be long or short. The reader should have a general view at 
 once; hence, the opening paragraph of an essay, the introduc- 
 tion of a speech, the preface of a book, the prologue of a play, 
 the beginning of any work of literary art, will be written for 
 this purpose. 
 
 Narration. Like description, this species of writing has 
 for its subject-matter either persons or things. Its purpose 
 is to tell of acts and events. Unlike description, it is not con- 
 cerned with pictorial work : what the person does or suffers, 
 not how he appears, is the main concern of the writer. As to 
 its artistic value, in telling the story of some human experience 
 or in supplying a record of events, the highest art is employed. 
 As movement is the law of life, it is the first principle applied 
 to narrative, which aims at telling the story of life. Action, 
 action, action, the classic definition of oratory, is the advice 
 given by the trained artist to the novice : keep the story moving: 
 cut out all particulars which unnecessarily impede its progress. 
 
- THE COMPLETE COMPOSITION 
 
 Omit every detail which can possibly be spared. A second 
 rule is that of method. As in description, so in narrative: 
 method is demanded for an intelligent presentation of the story. 
 It is looked for, and it constitutes much of the charm in 
 biography, history and fiction where narrative writing predom- 
 inates. Many biographers and historians fail, because at the 
 outset they adopted no method in their work. As examples of 
 methodical work read the biographical essays of Johnson, 
 Macaulay, the historical essays of Newman, the Biography of 
 Johnson by Boswell, the "Decline and Fall " by Gibbon. On 
 the importance of narrative Bates writes : " It is the form of 
 literature which most invariably appeals to men, and it is no 
 less that form which most affects human conduct. Men who 
 could not be brought to give ear to a sermon may be taught 
 by a parable or moved by a tale. It is in narrative that prose 
 rises most surely and indisputably to the rank of a fine art." 
 
 Argument. It is that kind of composition which appeals 
 rather to the understanding than to the aesthetic sense ; for it 
 supplies reasons in support of a proposition. In its literary 
 connection, the word is used collectively, as indicating a body 
 of reasons which, for example, would take the form of an essay. 
 More frequently, however, argument and persuasion are allied, 
 the one appealing to the reason, the other, to the feelings. 
 Taken together they form one department of literature ora- 
 tory. Inasmuch as argument addresses the understanding, it 
 presupposes a knowledge of logic. For argument deals with 
 propositions, and propositions are things to be proved or dis- 
 proved ; and proof consists of all that is brought forward to 
 sustain or refute the proposition, and it contains facts and 
 inferences so arranged as to be effective for the purpose. As 
 to the number and kind of arguments which may be employed, 
 it is the province of logic to supply such information, and a 
 detailed account of them cannot be given here. But in the 
 
ARGUMENT 5! 
 
 arrangement of them in a composition, the artist is guided by 
 two rules. The first of these rules calls for the strongest 
 arguments at the beginning and the end of the composition, 
 just as the most emphatic words are placed at the beginning 
 and the end of a sentence. The remaining arguments are 
 massed between these two points they form the body of the 
 composition. The second rule is not to employ too many 
 arguments, for where too many are. employed, the weak ones 
 are apt to have the very opposite effect from the one intended ; 
 and where very many are employed, some are bound to be 
 weak and ineffective. In the case of those selected, the artist 
 should present them in detail and in the strongest possible 
 manner. Such presentation requires the utmost clearness in 
 style. The short sentence, easily grasped and going directly 
 to the point, is preferable in the argumentative style. All the 
 wealth of language is employed to present the argument in a 
 variety of lights, and hold it before the mind until it is fully 
 grasped. Imagery and illustration also abound in this style. 
 All the wealth of rhetoric is employed to this end to make 
 the argument so effective that it must prevail. Hence, the ap- 
 peal to the jmagination and to the emotions, which usually ac- 
 companies argument. Feeling is the powerful ally of reason 
 in bending and subduing the will. As models of argument, 
 read the speeches of Cicero, Burke, Webster. On the prac- 
 tical application of argument to literary work Bates observes 
 that the most obvious use of it is in the plea of the lawyer, 
 the editorials of the newspaper, the essays or speeches establish- 
 ing scientific, literary, political and religious opinions. Who- 
 ever writes at all is sure to employ argument sooner or later, 
 and to a greater or less degree. Civilization differs from bar- 
 barism chiefly in that the strife has become intellectual instead 
 of physical ; and intellectual conflict is but another name for 
 argument. 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 ART-CONTENT TN LITERATURE 
 
 SUBLIMITY. 
 
 Meaning of the Term. The elements of art-form so far 
 reviewed the word, the sentence, the paragraph, the com- 
 plete composition have to do with the framework and form 
 of composition. The elements of art-content have to do with 
 the ideas expressed ; they are sublimity, beauty, feeling, humor, 
 wit, melody. These elements are called emotional, because 
 they appeal in a special manner to the emotions; and as the 
 primary purpose of all art is to arouse emotion, these elements 
 are of vital importance. For when ideas are expressed without 
 this emotional appeal we have, for example, a mathematical 
 or scientific treatise, but not literature properly so called. 
 These elements humanize writing and make it literature 
 
 Sublimity Defined. Sublimity is defined as that quality of 
 literary art which arouses our emotion by expressing boundless 
 extent or superior might. Longinus describes it as that quality 
 of composition which elevates the mind above itself, and fills 
 it with higher conceptions and noble pride. " The true sense/' 
 says Blair, " of sublime writing undoubtedly is such a descrip- 
 tion of objects or exhibition of sentiments, which are of them- 
 selves of a sublime nature, as shall give us strong impressions 
 of them.'* Bascom describes this element as follows : " Sub- 
 blimity and beauty are but two extremes, the higher and the 
 lower manifestations of the same quality." When the mind 
 
 52 
 
SUBLIMITY $ 
 
 is more than pleased, says Quackenbos, when it is elevated 
 and transported by the grandeur of the perceived idea, the 
 aesthetic emotion induced is commonly described as sublime. 
 Sublimity lies in the concord between majestic means and the 
 highest conceivable end, the noblest and most sacred purpose. 
 It is therefore the element of art-content, which yields the most 
 intense delight, the highest degree of which is united with 
 awe and solemnity. It is the element which makes the strong- 
 est emotional appeal. 
 
 Sources of Sublimity. Sublimity in literary art is due to 
 sublimity in nature, for the obvious reason that art is an 
 imitation of nature. There are two chief sources the physi- 
 cal sublime and the moral sublime. Both are found in nature. 
 The simplest form of the physical sublime is the vast, bound- 
 less, prospects of nature the limitless plain, the expanse of 
 ocean, the firmament of heaven. " All vastness," says Blair, 
 " produces the impression of sublimity. Remove all bounds 
 from any object and you presently render it sublime. And 
 you add to the sublimity by extending the object in depth and 
 height; as, for example, the fathomless gulf, the heaven- 
 ascending mountain, the starry heights above all." Such ex- 
 amples are more impressive than a plain of boundless extent. 
 Sources of the sublime, such as infinite space, endless numbers, 
 eternal duration, evoke the strongest emotion. ' The emotion 
 caused by the great and sublime in nature," says Burke, " when 
 those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and 
 astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions 
 are suspended with some degree of horror. In this case the 
 mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain 
 any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which 
 employs it. Hence, arises the great power of the sublime, 
 that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reas- 
 onings and hurries us on by an irresistible force. As the 
 
CA ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE 
 
 great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of 
 littleness is likewise in the same measure sublime. When 
 we attend to the infinite divisibility of matter, when we pursue 
 animal life into those excessively small and yet organized be- 
 ings, that are known only through the microscope, we become 
 amazed and confounded as at the vast itself." Nature 
 boundless inward in the atom, boundless outward in the whole 
 - is sublime under both aspects. 
 
 Infinity as a Source. Infinity has a tendency to fill the 
 mind with that source of delightful terror which is the most 
 genuine effect of the sublime. There are two infinites to feed 
 the imagination and inspire sublimity. First, the real Infinite 
 which is God Himself. No literature is so sublime as the He- 
 brew ; and this sublimity is due to the fact that the Hebrew 
 mind struggled to give adequate expression to the qualities and 
 attributes of God He Who existed before the foundations 
 of the world were laid Who holdeth all nations and all 
 worlds in the hollow of His hand. The real Infinite has in- 
 spired not only the most sublime passages of the Bible, but of all 
 other literature also. Besides the real Infinite, there is what 
 critics call the artificial infinite a counterfeit presentment, ex- 
 amples of which are supplied by nature and by art. This in- 
 finite in order to produce its effect, must have succession and 
 uniformity; succession is required in order that the parts may 
 be continued so long and in such a direction as to impress the 
 imagination with the idea that they are unending. For exam- 
 ple, the steppes of a desert, the waves of the ocean, the trees of 
 a forest. Uniformity of parts is necessary to artificial infinity; 
 otherwise the imagination would find a check at every change 
 variety in parts would break that changeless, smooth progres- 
 sion which alone can stamp on bounded objects the character 
 of infinity. Every artist, no matter what may be his medium, 
 employs the artificial infinite. For example, the aisle or dome 
 
SUBLIMITY 55 
 
 in architecture; the background and perspective in painting. 
 In literary art it is extensively employed. First of all, in words 
 which employ a negation of limitations such words as 
 boundless, limitless, never, forever, immortal, endless. Sec- 
 ondly, in figures of speech which reproduce the artificial 
 infinite of nature. For example, the " all-beholding sun/' 
 " plains where winds are weary of travel," " never-dying light 
 of the stars." Thirdly, in oratorical or poetic license, where 
 limitations are removed by the sweeping, unmodified statements 
 of emotion. Finally, in all kinds of literary work where the 
 imagination demands fullest freedom. The highest art in one 
 way or another must give the imagination scope by using this 
 kind of infinity. 
 
 Power as a Source. Like vastness or infinity, power pro- 
 duces sublimity. In general, great exhibitions of power al- 
 ways raise sublime ideas. For example, the earthquake, vol- 
 cano, thunder and lightning, great conflagrations, tornadoes, 
 the storm-tossed ocean. " I know of nothing sublime," says 
 Burke, " which is not some modification of power." And this 
 is found to be true on final analysis, for power is displayed 
 by the elements in the storm and conflagration ; it is displayed 
 by the waves of the ocean engulfing the huge ship as if it were 
 an eggshell ; it is displayed by the earth and the planets rolling 
 so swiftly in vast orbits ; and finally, by God Himself of Whom 
 the psalmist wrote : " Tremble, thou earth ! at the presence 
 of the Lord." The power of God, and the wonderful ways 
 in which that power is exerted, produce as many sublime ideas 
 
 as do His majesty and His infinity. 
 
 ' 
 
 Obscurity, Silence, Solitude. These qualities of nature pro- 
 duce the sublime. For example, the obscurity surrounding 
 ghosts and supernatural beings as typified in Hamlet's ghost 
 and Job's vision in the night. Of silence and solitude nature 
 
,5 ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE 
 
 supplies many examples such as great deserts like the Sahara ; 
 gloomy, pathless forests like the Black Forest of Germany; 
 the recesses of large mountain chains like the Andes or Alps ; 
 the lonesome ice fields of either pole. Perhaps the most sub- 
 lime spectacle in nature is the starry heavens, for in those 
 starry expanses all the physical sources of sublimity are pres- 
 ent vastness, power, silence, obscurity. Sublimity arising 
 from these sources depends in a large measure upon an ac- 
 companying terror. And the qualities just mentioned add a 
 note of terror. For example, how much the night adds to 
 the terror of the pathless wood or the raging tornado. The 
 value of obscurity is known to all artists. The architect made 
 the heathen temples dark, also the Gothic cathedral, the im~ 
 pressiveness of which depends largely on the dimly lighted 
 aisles, and the gloomy vault soaring away, as it were, into infin- 
 ity. Painting, like architecture, makes use of obscurity; the 
 dark or obscure background covers details which otherwise 
 would mar the general effect. And that effect is generally best 
 seen by a dim or subdued light. When painters attempt to give 
 clear representations of sublime ideas, says Burke, they always 
 fail. Similarly, the literary artist employs obscurity. The 
 sublime parts of a drama are acted in shadow ; imagery in 
 literary art is always most sublime when obscure. For ex- 
 ample, take the gloomy pomp and obscure coloring in the sub- 
 lime passages of Homer or Milton. Burke offers this explana- 
 tion : " It is our ignorance of things, that causes most of our 
 admiration and chiefly excites our emotion. Knowledge and 
 acquaintance make the most striking causes affect us but little. 
 It is thus with the vulgar, and all men are as the vulgar in 
 what they do not understand. As an example, the ideas of 
 eternity and infinity are among the most sublime and affecting 
 we have, yet there is nothing of which we really understand 
 so little, as of infinity and eternity. The imagination distorts 
 and magnifies whatever is not clearly known." In like manner, 
 
SUBLIMITY 57 
 
 solitude, silence and vacuity are sources of the sublime; they 
 excite fear and terror. The solitude of a Siberian prison with 
 its barren wastes of snow on every side stretching far away ; 
 the silence and barrenness of the great deserts like those of 
 Africa where the caravan crawls over lone and level sands 
 treeless, manless, forlorn; the awful silence of the vast ice 
 fields of either pole or of the starry heavens all stir the 
 deepest emotion. Solitary confinement is a dreadful punish- 
 ment; hence, the sublimity of Prometheus who endured three 
 thousand years of it. Some of the finest passages of literature 
 draw their sublimity from these sources. As examples, read 
 Milton's description of Hell or Chaos ; the " Prometheus Un- 
 bound " of Shelley; Byron's "Address to the Ocean " ; Dante's 
 " Purgatory " ; Goethe's " Faust " ; Humboldt's " Description 
 of South American Plains and Mountains " ; " The Death of 
 Arthur " by Tennyson ; Virgil's " Entrance to Tartarus." 
 
 Sound as a Source. The eye is not the only organ of sen- 
 sation by which a sublime emotion may be produced. Sound 
 has an equally great power, although it is more limited in 
 range. Excessive loudness alone is sufficient to overpower the 
 soul, to suspend its action and to fill it with terror. The noise 
 of vast cataracts, raging storms, of thunder or artillery, awak- 
 ens a great and awful sensation. The shouting of multitudes 
 has a similar effect ; so also the cries of wild beasts. As literary 
 examples of sublimity in sound, read Poe's " The Bells " ; the 
 " Knocking at the Gate " in " Macbeth "; the hovel scene in 
 " King Lear " ; the " Debate in Pandemonium " by Milton. 
 
 Animated Nature. Animated nature furnishes two sources 
 the moral sublime and the intellectual sublime. The moral 
 sublime is shown in two ways: first, in the moral strength 
 of superiority to passing impulse in the pursuit of great ob- 
 jects. For example, the toil and persistence of an Alexander, 
 
5 g ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE 
 
 Caesar, Columbus. Hence, heroic examples of this kind always 
 leave an indelible impress on the mind. A second source is 
 self-sacrifice, which is the highest moral heroism. The most 
 sublime moral example in this regard is the Redeemer of man- 
 kind. Likewise, the man who sacrifices himself for his friends, 
 family, or country is an example of the moral sublime. In- 
 stances in point are daring feats in war the themes of epic 
 and tragedy. The moral sublime exemplified in human beings 
 makes a far stronger appeal than any other ; hence, Divine Wis- 
 dom became incarnate and lived the life of man in order to win 
 humanity. 
 
 The Intellectual Sublime. Intellectual power, like moral 
 power, is a source of sublimity. Literature is full of sub- 
 lime passages dealing with intellectual greatness, as exhibited 
 in men like Solomon, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Newton, 
 Bacon. For a conspectus of these read Pope's " Temple of 
 Fame." Usually, intellectual and moral greatness combine to 
 give us the sublime human specimen. For example, Aquinas, 
 Bossuet, Galileo. The great heroes like Alexander or Caesar 
 are sublime examples of intellectual greatness and moral en- 
 durance. 
 
 Maleficent Power in the Moral Order. Power as exerted 
 by the higher orders of creation is often sublime. This power 
 is of two kinds, maleficent and beneficent. Maleficent power 
 is the infliction of suffering. Human suffering may proceed 
 from physical causes pestilence, famine, storms, floods, earth- 
 quakes, conflagrations; it may proceed from human agencies 
 such as the invasions of the Tartars, the Turks, the Goths, the 
 destruction of great cities, such as the sack of Troy, of 
 Carthage, of Rome ; it may proceed from supernatural agencies 
 such as the spiritual ruin of man by malignant spirits. But 
 whatever be the source, it has inspired the largest part of that 
 
. SU'BLIMITY 59 
 
 literature in which sublimity predominates. Some illustra- 
 tions : Thucydides took for his subject the great plague of 
 Athens; Ovid sang about a pestilence; Virgil and Homer dealt 
 with the ruin of Troy; Milton and Dante sang about the Fall 
 of Man; orators like Webster, Burke, Cicero, Mirabeau, De- 
 mosthenes, flourished in times of great national peril and dis- 
 aster. Tragedy has found its most sublime ideas in connection 
 with the sufferings and ruin of heroes, whether of the natural 
 or supernatural order. 
 
 Beneficent Power. The sublime of beneficent energy may 
 be traced in the great agents of the world working for the 
 good of mankind the sun, the elements, the forces of nature. 
 Likewise, beneficent power of men, angels, and of God Him- 
 self. Eulogistic literature is filled with sublime passages ex- 
 tolling the goodness of God. The great storehouse of such 
 literature is the Bible. Hebrew writers have exhausted the 
 language of sublimity in praise of Divine goodness. For 
 example, read the " Book of Psalms " or the letters in the New 
 Testament. The redemptive work of God who took the chosen 
 people out of the house of Egypt, and Who afterward brought 
 salvation to all mankind, is a most frequent inspiration to sub- 
 lime literature. It is a cherished department of literary effort 
 to grow sublime over great humanitarians like Solon, King 
 Alfred, Florence Nightingale and Francis Xavier. For ex- 
 ample, read the eulogistic literature in the department of the 
 essay and the oration. 
 
 Vocabulary of the Sublime. The sublime in English litera- 
 ture has its own symbols, and these symbols have a two- fold 
 office ; first, an adequate representation of an object, situation, 
 or event possessing sublimity. Bain observes : ' The good- 
 ness of our vocabulary on this head depends upon the abun- 
 dance and expressiveness of its words and phrases/* Whether 
 
5o ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE 
 
 for description of still life, or for narrating actions and events 
 we have an abundant supply. 
 
 Literature of the Sublime. Every nation has made some 
 contribution to the literature of the sublime. The Bible takes 
 first rank in this department, inasmuch as the Hebrew writers 
 and the Hebrew people were constantly occupied with thoughts 
 concerning the supernatural world ; they strove to find adequate 
 expression for the grandeur and magnificence of deity. Hence, 
 the constant recurrence of sublime passages in the Bible. Next 
 to the Bible, Milton may be mentioned for the element of sub- 
 limity ; it is a distinctive feature of his great epic in which he 
 has reproduced much of the sublimity of Homer, of Virgil, 
 and the Bible. The great epics of the world are remarkable 
 examples in point, and may be fairly classified with the liter- 
 ature of the sublime. Oratory is a department of literature 
 which deserves special mention on account of the number and 
 variety of its sublime passages; it may be ranked next to the 
 epic. The speeches of Burke, Webster, Patrick Henry, O'Con- 
 nell, Channing, Grattan, Wendell Phillips, Erskine, Everett 
 and many others, are noteworthy examples. And in this con- 
 nection Tragedy must not be forgotten. As illustrations of 
 sublimity the dramas of Shakespeare deserve special mention, 
 especially his great tragedies, Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth. 
 But sublimity does not belong to any single literary depart- 
 ment; it is not the exclusive possession of the epic or the 
 drama or the oration. As an element of art-content it ap- 
 pears in all departments, and whenever the thought justifies 
 its appearance. Sublime passages may be found in the lyric, 
 in history, in fiction. Occasionally, the essays of Macaulay, 
 of Ruskin, and of Newman are as sublime as the best orations 
 and the best epic poetry. Emotion, obeying the law of climax, 
 will rise and fall like the ocean v/ave, and according to the 
 idea with which it is associated, will reveal more or less sub 
 limity. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE (CONTINUED) 
 BEAUTY 
 
 Definition. Beauty is the second emotional element of art- 
 content. Next to sublimity it affords the highest pleasure to 
 the imagination. But the emotion it arouses is not so violent 
 as that of sublimity; it is of a calmer kind, more gentle and 
 soothing. It does not elevate the mind so much, but produces 
 an agreeable serenity. Sublimity arouses an emotion too vi- 
 olent to be lasting ; the pleasure arising from beauty admits of 
 longer continuance. Beauty differs from sublimity not only in 
 arousing a gentler and more lasting emotion, but also in the 
 greater variety of objects in which it is found. This variety of 
 objects is so great that no word in the language has a wider 
 application. For example, in the present instance it is applied 
 to art-content : it may also be applied to art- form. It is de- 
 fined by Aristotle as that quality of an object which excites gen- 
 tle and pleasurable emotion. This definition would ascribe 
 beauty to almost every external object that pleases the eye or 
 the ear, to a great number of the graces of art and to many 
 dispositions of the heart and the mind. Hence, the expres- 
 sions a beautiful flower, a beautiful building, a beautiful 
 character. 
 
 Chief Divisions. The chief divisions are : beauty in nature, 
 beauty in art. There are three sub-divisions of beauty in na- 
 
 61 
 
6 2 ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE 
 
 ture, or, rather, a three- fold natural basis for beauty color, 
 form or figure, movement. 
 
 Color as a Source. In color we have the simplest example 
 of beauty. Colors considered beautiful are of two kinds. The 
 first class are those with which there is a pleasing association 
 of ideas. For example : white, suggestive of innocence ; green, 
 suggestive of spring and rural scenes. The second class are 
 those that appear delicate rather than gloomy. Nature orna- 
 ments her work with those delicate colors which are the despair 
 of the artist. For example : the fine coloring of the morning 
 or evening sky. As to the reason why color is thus so beauti- 
 ful, Blair observes : " Here neither variety nor uniformity nor 
 any other principle that I know, can be assigned as the foun- 
 dation of beauty. We can refer it to no other cause but the 
 structure of the eye, which determines us to receive certain 
 modifications of the rays of light with more pleasure than oth- 
 
 Figure or Form as a Source. Figure, like color, opens to 
 us forms of beauty more complex and diversified. In figure, 
 regularity is the first source of beauty. By a regular figure is 
 meant one formed according to some certain rule, and not left 
 arbitrary or loose in the construction of its parts. For exam- 
 ple, a circle, a square or a hexagon pleases the eye by its regu- 
 larity as a beautiful figure. The second source of beauty in 
 figure is a graceful variety. It is a more fruitful source than 
 regularity, requiring more attention in all works designed 
 merely to please the eye. Plants, flowers and leaves are full 
 of variety and diversity. A straight canal cannot compare 
 with a meandering river. Cones and pyramids are beautiful, 
 but trees growing in their natural wildness are infinitely more 
 beautiful than when trimmed into cones and pyramids. A 
 garden is most beautiful when variety prevails. 
 
BEAUTY 63 
 
 Lines of Beauty. According to Hogarth, there are two 
 lines upon which the beauty of a figure principally depends. 
 One is the waving line or a curve bending backwards and for- 
 wards, somewhat in the form of the letter S. This he calls the 
 line of beauty, and shows how often it is found in shells and 
 flowers and other ornamental works of nature. It is also 
 found in the figures designed by painters and sculptors for the 
 purposes of decoration. The second line, which Hogarth calls 
 the line of grace, is the same waving curve, but in spiral form 
 around a solid body. For example, in nature, the vine curv- 
 ing around the tree ; in art, the marble thread running around 
 the pillar. Twisted pillars are also examples of it. Variety 
 thus plainly appears as a very important source of beauty. 
 Hogarth defines the art of drawing pleasing forms to be the 
 art of varying well. For the curved line, on account of its 
 perpetual blending and variation, breaks up the stiff regu- 
 larity of the straight line. 
 
 Movement as a Source of Beauty. Motion of itself is al- 
 ways pleasing, and bodies in motion are preferred to those at 
 rest. Movement is of two kinds gentle and rapid. Only 
 gentle movement belongs to the beautiful ; when it is swift or 
 very forcible, such as that of a torrent, it partakes of the sub- 
 lime. For example, the movement of a bird gliding through 
 the air is extremely beautiful ; the swiftness of lightning dart- 
 ing across the heavens is sublime. Motion in a straight line is 
 not so beautiful as in an undulating, waving, direction. And 
 motion upwards is more agreeable than downwards. For ex- 
 ample, the easy, curling motion of smoke and flame. Hogarth 
 observes that in our daily movements the business of life is 
 transacted in straight or plain lines, but all the graceful and 
 ornamental movements are made in waving lines. For exam- 
 ple, take the movement of persons behind a counter and com- 
 pare it with the movement of the same persons in a ball room 
 
5 4 ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE 
 
 or a parlor. The truth of Hogarth's observation will appear 
 at once. 
 
 A Combination of these Sources. Although color, form 
 and movement are separate sources of beauty and may be 
 treated, each in a distinct manner, yet in many beautiful ob- 
 jects they all meet, rendering beauty greater and more com- 
 plex. For example, in the morning or evening sky, the move- 
 ment v of the fleecy clouds, the tints of sunlight, the ethereal 
 forms of " the cloud-capped towers," the convex lines of the 
 sky. Again, in a natural landscape where there are flowers, 
 trees and animals, we have delicacy of color, gracefulness of 
 figure, and movement of bird and beast, all producing a pleas- 
 ant emotion. Perhaps the most complete assemblage of beau- 
 tiful objects that can anywhere be found, is presented by a rich, 
 natural landscape where there is a sufficient variety of objects 
 and a wealth of color, form and movement. The beauty of 
 the human countenance is of this complex kind : it arises from 
 color, the delicate shades of complexion, the play or movement 
 of feature, and the various lines that form the contour of the 
 face. Burke gives the following summary of physical beauty : 
 " On the whole, the qualities of beauty, in so far as they are 
 merely sensible qualities, are the following : first, to be compar- 
 atively small; secondly, to be smooth; thirdly, to have a va- 
 riety in the direction of the parts ; fourthly, to have those parts 
 not angular', but melted, as it were, into each other ; fifthly, to 
 be of a delicate frame, without any remarkable appearance of 
 strength ; sixthly, to have its colors clear and bright, but not 
 very strong and glaring, or, if it should have any glaring color, 
 to have it diversified with others." These are the properties 
 on which beauty depends ; properties that operate in nature, and 
 are less liable to be altered by caprice, or confounded by di- 
 versity of tastes, than any other. 
 
BEAUTY 65 
 
 Design as a Source of Beauty. The more obvious sources 
 of beauty in nature are color, form and movement. But un- 
 derneath these causes there is another which operates power- 
 fully in the same direction. It is the beauty of design. It 
 arises from the perception of means adapted to some end or of 
 parts adapted to the plan of the whole. For example, in con- 
 sidering the structure of a tree or a plant, we observe how all 
 the parts, the roots, the stem, the bark, the branches and leaves, 
 are suited to the growth and nutriment of the whole. Simi- 
 larly, when we examine the parts and members of a living or- 
 ganism, the happy adjustment of means to the end is at once 
 pronounced beautiful. The beauty of design is present every- 
 where in nature, from the tiniest blade or most delicate crystal 
 to the grandest creations of the planetary world. The presence 
 of design seems to be a reflection of the beauty of the Eternal 
 Mind reaching from end to end mightily and ordering all 
 things sweetly. 
 
 Design in Art. As art is an imitation of nature, we may 
 expect to find the same sources of beauty in the one as in the 
 other. To begin with design : if we examine any of the works 
 of art, a clock, a ship, a machine, a painting, a building, a 
 poem, the pleasure we have in the examination is enhanced by 
 a discovery of the beauty of design, the adaptation of parts to 
 the whole. This idea of fitness or design has an extensive in- 
 fluence over all the arts. It is the foundation of the beauty 
 which we discover in the proportions of doors, windows, arches, 
 pillars, in all the orders of architecture. Similarly, in a mas- 
 terpiece of painting, sculpture, poetry, the beauty of design is 
 always apparent. We cannot look upon any work of art 
 whatsoever, without being led by a natural association of ideas 
 to think of its end and design, and to examine the relation of 
 its parts to that design. And because design is fundamentally 
 only another name for the total effect produced by the primary 
 
56 ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE 
 
 laws of art, an object without design is an object deformed, ac- 
 cording to our ideas of beauty. 
 
 Design in Literary Art. It is of the utmost importance in 
 all kinds of literary art. In the essay, sermon, epic, drama, 
 lyric, we require a fitness, an adjustment of means to the end 
 which the author is supposed to have in view. For let a de- 
 scription be ever so rich, or the figures ever so elegant, yet if 
 they are out of place, if they are not proper parts of the whole, 
 and clash with the main purpose of the composition, they de- 
 stroy the beauty of the work nay, they are converted into 
 very .deformities. 
 
 Beauty in Literary Art. Beauty is a term applied to all 
 that pleases, either in the style, or sentiment, or from whatever 
 principle pleasure flows. This is the general meaning ap- 
 plied to the term. But there is a specific meaning whereby 
 beauty is used to signify a certain grace and amenity in the 
 turn of style and sentiment for which some authors have been 
 particularly distinguished. In this sense it denotes a style nei- 
 ther sublime nor vehemently passionate nor uncommonly spark- 
 ling, but such as raises in the reader an emotion of the gentler 
 kind, similar to what is raised by the contemplation of beauti- 
 ful objects in nature; which neither lifts the mind very high, 
 nor agitates it very much, but stirs feeling and imagination in 
 an agreeable, while quiet, way. It is the poetry of Virgil as 
 contrasted with that of Homer, the prose of Cicero as com- 
 pared with Demosthenes, the writings of a Fenelon, an Addi- 
 son or an Irving as compared with Bossuet, Swift, a Burke or 
 a Webster. Not that Virgil and the authors named are inca- 
 pable of sublimity, but their general manner is distinguished 
 by the character of beauty and grace, and a quiet charm which 
 differentiates them from such rugged, vehement and sublime 
 writers as Victor Hugo and Carlyle. 
 
BEAUTY 67 
 
 Beauty of Form and Content. Every literary artist ex- 
 presses the beautiful either in art- form or in art-content 
 either in the ideas set forth, or in the form of expression ; for 
 beauty is the primary object of all artistic work. Regarding 
 art-form, Burke writes as follows : " Words have a consider- 
 able share in exciting ideas of beauty they affect the mind 
 by raising in it ideas of those things for which custom has 
 appointed them to stand. Words, by their original and pic- 
 torial power have great influence over the passions; if we com- 
 bine them properly, we may give new life and beauty to the 
 simplest object. In painting, we may represent any fine figure 
 we please, but we never can give it those enlivening touches 
 which it may receive from words. For example, we can repre- 
 sent an angel in a picture by drawing a young man winged : but 
 what painting can furnish out anything so grand as the addi- 
 tion of one word 'the angel of the Lord'? Is there any 
 painting more grand or beautiful? " 
 
 Color Applying to Words. Beauty in literary art, like 
 beauty in nature, depends on color, form and movement. 
 Color applies to words. The English language possesses a 
 large vocabulary of color. First, a class of words used in the 
 literal sense : the names of the various colors themselves, white, 
 green, red, etc. ; the names of objects suggestive of color, snow, 
 water, flowers, etc. Secondly, color in a metaphorical sense: 
 the personal element in composition, the author's personality, 
 style, sympathies, training. In this sense color applies to 
 art-content, for the thought of the composition is invariably 
 colored by the personality of the author ; it is also colored by 
 the environment of the author, and hence the phrase, local 
 color, which is frequently employed in literary criticism. 
 
 Form a Source of Literary Beauty. Form in literature, as 
 in all the arts, is a source of beauty. The same rules regard- 
 
68 ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE 
 
 ing form in nature apply to art-form in literature. For exam- 
 ple, art-form in literature is as beautiful as form in a tree or 
 flower. The same fundamental laws of art are applied un- 
 ity, harmony, balance, proportion. Besides these, the many 
 species of prose and verse present almost as great variety of 
 form as nature herself. The human artist approaches the Di- 
 vine Artist in the beauty which arises from a happy diversity 
 in his miniature creations. 
 
 Movement a Source of Literary Beauty. Movement ap- 
 plies to thought, to art-content. All kinds of literary art con- 
 tain some movement. The most striking example is the ac- 
 tion in the development of the novel or the drama. Next to 
 these rank oratory and the epic. Movement when slow in 
 literature, is called beautiful ; when rapid, it produces the sub- 
 lime, like the stream that feeds Niagara. The succession of 
 our ideas, whether rapid or slow, is similar to movements in 
 nature, and produces similar effects. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE (CONTINUED) 
 
 FEELING 
 
 Definition. The third element of art-content is. called feel- 
 ing. Some critics prefer the term patlws. This element is 
 associated with the thought and humanizes literature as no 
 other element can do, because it is an expression of the human 
 in man. Feeling originates in the heart as thought originates 
 in the mind. In its actual exercise it makes up a large amount 
 of life-interest; hence, its intimate connection with literature, 
 which is the mirror and reflection of life. As an element of 
 art-content, it is that quality of the thought which produces 
 emotion in the reader ; although in a wider sense it belongs to 
 both art- form and art-content. In this general sense the whole 
 composition is intended to arouse some emotion ; for an appeal 
 to the aesthetic sense cannot be made successfully without this 
 corresponding result. 
 
 The Basis of Feeling. There are three important relation- 
 ships of life which furnish the basis of feeling. This three- 
 fold basis represents man in relation to the family, in relation 
 to society, and in relation to God. 
 
 Family Relationship. This relationship gives rise to 
 parental, filial and fraternal feeling, while the family itself is 
 a consequence of sexual feeling and regard. Parental feeling 
 holds an important place both in literature and in life; so, also, 
 
 69 
 
70 ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE 
 
 the reciprocal attachment of brothers and sisters. For ex- 
 ample, the grandest creations of the Greek drama depend on 
 filial and parental feeling. King Lear an3 Hamlet are admir- 
 able illustrations in our literature. The typical embodiment 
 of the parental relation is the regard of the mother for her own 
 child. The mother and child, as exemplified in the blessed Vir- 
 gin and her divine Son, have entered into art as a standing 
 type and conception, and they are clothed with all the tender- 
 ness and beauty that the painter can express on canvas or the 
 sacred poet introduce into the hymnal of the church. Liter- 
 ary art has exhausted its power of expression upon the paren- 
 tal relation which God holds toward the human race and which 
 a father and mother hold toward the family. The " fatherhood 
 of God and the brotherhood of man " is the ideal that evokes 
 today the strongest emotion in the human breast. Examples 
 of this kind of feeling, are almost coextensive with literature 
 itself; for hardly any class of artistic work is attempted with- 
 out this feeling entering into a part of it or pervading the 
 whole. 
 
 Man in Relation to Society. Man in this relation excites 
 feeling according to the amount and character of his social at- 
 tachments. Friendship is the first relation; it is the attach- 
 ment of persons not of the same family, as determined by com- 
 munity of likings. For example, members of the same club, 
 the same profession, the same country. In the ancient, as in 
 the modern world, this attachment figures it is found in 
 life and in literature. It was sometimes called " Platonic love." 
 For example, Horace refers to Virgil as dimidium vitae meae. 
 " David and Jonathan " is an example from Holy Writ. Ci- 
 cero's attachment to Atticus has added to the wealth of classic 
 literature In the modern world we have Moore and Byron; 
 Newman and Faber ; Goethe and Schiller. Perhaps the most 
 striking example of modern times is the friendship of Tenny- 
 
FEELING 7I 
 
 son for Arthur Hallam, a classmate at Cambridge. This 
 friendship enriched our literature with the In Memoriam 
 a poem unique in subject matter, but unrivaled as a work of 
 literary art. Friendship, as a rule, does not evoke the strong 
 emotion which pervades the In Memoriam. Cicero's De Ami- 
 citia is, on the whole, a more iust expression of it. 
 
 Attachment to Country. Patriotism is stronger than 
 friendship; the emotion which it evokes is deeper and more 
 abiding, for all nations agree with the orator : Dulce et decorum 
 est pro patriot mori it is a sweet and a beautiful thing to die 
 for one's country. Literary art owes a large debt to patriotic 
 feeling, especially the department of the lyric and of oratory. 
 Many of the masterpieces of prose and verse are inspired by 
 this feeling; and all writers of note have given some expres- 
 sion to it. After one's home, one's country stirs the deepest 
 emotion. The Teutonic and Celtic races are remarkable for 
 their love of country. All forms of literary art are used as 
 the vehicle of this universal feeling. 
 
 Religious Feeling. This feeling, like patriotism, is univer- 
 sal. In its ideal form it consists of love of God and love of 
 man for His sake. It is the substance of the answer to the 
 question, " What is the great commandment of the law ? " 
 This feeling resembles that of a child toward its parent ; it is 
 based on a recognition of divine goodness and protection. 
 From this point of view, God is a benign parent. He is 
 treated as an object to inspire love and affection ; His gifts and 
 goodness evoke the strongest feeling of which the human heart 
 is capable. The form of literary art best adapted to religious 
 feeling is the lyric. For example, the Book of Psalms, the 
 various hymnals used by Christian denominations ; such works 
 as Keble's Christian Year. Similarly, this feeling has an out- 
 let in oratory, as the large amount of sermon literature bears 
 
~ 2 ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE 
 
 witness; the Christian pulpit is aglow with the emotion in- 
 spired by Christ, the Savior, Who, because He was human as 
 well as divine, makes the strongest appeal to human love and 
 affection; His sufferings and death manifest God's goodness 
 in a special manner. Milton's Paradise Regained deals ade- 
 quately with this theme; Tasso and Dante, likewise, have 
 treated it. The great religious writers of every age and na- 
 tion never weary of it, for to the believer it is an inexhaustible 
 fountain of the keenest emotion. 
 
 Love as a Source. Love, as between man ana woman, is 
 called the master passion of the heart. It is the " cords of 
 Adam " binding the sexes together and insuring the futurity 
 of the race. It has found the most varied expression in art; 
 it is called the " everlasting theme " in literature. Browning 
 calls it " the greatest thing in the world," and devotes most 
 of his poetry to proofs of the assertion. This tender feeling 
 has inspired what is known as erotic literature. Literary art 
 puts in the foreground a description of the object; this in- 
 cludes, first of all, the personal charms of each lover, their 
 mental, moral and physical excellence, their reciprocal liking; 
 secondly, the beauty and charm of their surroundings all that 
 department of nature akin to affection, such as birds, flowers, 
 streams, trees, the scenery of repose and quiescence, which re- 
 flects the feelings of the entranced lovers; thirdly, the utter- 
 ances of the lovers themselves, ideas and words athrill with 
 emotion. As love is the master passion, it is more strongly 
 expressed than any other feeling. The passionate intensity 
 of love has taxed the capacity of language. It requires im- 
 agery both intense and original. As this passion often rises 
 to the heroic and sinks to the tragic, it is frequently the in- 
 spiration of the drama. For example, Antony and Cleopatra, 
 Romeo and Juliet, Heloise and Abelard. In this connection 
 the greatest interest lies in the plot. No other variety of ten- 
 
FEELING 73 
 
 der feeling is so well suited to give fascination to plot. Hence, 
 love is the main theme of the dramatist and novelist. Parental 
 feeling is strong, but the possibilities of plot are not so numer- 
 ous as in courtship. 
 
 Ancient and Modern. Treatment. Tender feeling and senti- 
 ment between the sexes did not reach its highest development 
 in ancient literature. Love was second to war in interest, al- 
 though it claims some attention. For example, Helen in 
 Homer ; Dido in Virgil. But war, nevertheless, " arms and 
 the man " , was the main theme. The great tragedians of 
 Greece made their plots turn on the element of strife and hatred 
 rather than love ; they introduced female characters like Antig- 
 one, but these did not appear in love-relationships. The be- 
 ginning of erotic art in Greece was in the lyric field; and the 
 first great example was the renowned Sappho. Then followed 
 Theocritus, and Bion. The Greek anthology forms quite a 
 volume of erotic literature. Among the Latins, Catullus, Ovid, 
 Horace, and Propertius make love their main theme. Like the 
 Greek writers, the Latins were all licentious. Hence, the ne- 
 cessity for expurgated editions of the classics. Virgil is per- 
 haps the cleanest of the classic writers. The most remarkable 
 love-poem of antiquity is " Hero and Leander " ; it was written 
 during the decadence of Greek literature. It has much of the 
 merit of the Biblical love-story the story of Ruth. But the 
 licentious Pagan who deified lust, failed to treat love in a man- 
 ner which would reflect credit on human nature. It remained 
 for Christian influence to redeem Pagan morality and sanctify 
 love in the marriage bond. As we approach modern times 
 love becomes a more important element in literary art. The 
 literary treatment of it was purified by chivalry and Christian- 
 ity. The Troubadours in France; Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio; 
 Ariosto and Tasso, are evidences of its growing importance. 
 In England, Chaucer was the earliest erotic poet. Spenser 
 
74 ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE 
 
 worked at the same theme. It remained for Shakespeare to 
 eclipse all his predecessors in writing of love. It inspires the 
 largest part of modern English fiction, and with religious feel- 
 ing divides the honors of the lyric field. 
 
 Summary. The realm of feeling is as large as life itself, 
 the main channels of which the family, society, country and 
 cree d have been indicated. In relation to art-content, it is 
 the element sought whenever literature is read. Cor ad cor 
 loquitur. The heart of the reader seeks the heart of the writer 
 in the thoughts touched with emotion. It is the presence of 
 this element in oratory, which moves an audience to the accept- 
 ance of truth. " There can be no eloquence," says Matthews, 
 " without deep feeling. Thoughts must come red-hot from 
 the heart. It is not enough for the orator to have the ordinary 
 passions of our nature; he must be a magazine of sensibility, 
 an electric battery, a Leyden jar, charged to a plenum ; he 
 must have an abnormal emotional system united with the men- 
 tal a rare depth and fire of nature." Emotion is the life 
 the very soul of the lyric. Take, for example, " Lead Kindly 
 Light," or " The Holy City," and note the contagious feeling 
 which exhales from each line and thought. Some patriotic 
 lyrics have all the power of a charm or incantation, owing to 
 this element of art-content. The novel and the drama are 
 filled with it; and although history aims at an unemotional 
 style, the thoughts themselves dealing with one's own country, 
 its sorrows and joys, must excite the deepest emotion. 
 
 Literary Examples. QEnone, Antigone, Job, Menelaus, 
 Dido, Hero, Romeo, Jeptha, King John, The Virgin Mary, 
 Desdemona, Cordelia, King Arthur, Hallam, Prometheus, the 
 Redeemer of Mankind. (For a full list of classic themes in- 
 volving deep feeling, see Bain, Rhetoric, Part II.) 
 
CHAPTER X 
 ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE (CONTINUED) 
 
 WIT AND HUMOR 
 
 Wit and Humor. These elements of art-content are so near- 
 ly allied in meaning, they must be treated together. They are 
 in reality two species of the same element, and they have this 
 characteristic in common, they arise out of some kind of in- 
 congruity, some form of contrast. Wit is more purely intel- 
 lectual than humor. The word, wit, is derived from the Saxon, 
 wit'in, and primarily it meant intellect. In the time of Shakes- 
 peare and Pope it was a synonym for mental power. Drydcn 
 defined wit as thoughts and words elegantly adapted to the sub- 
 ject. Wit has a narrower meaning now. In its modern sense, 
 as defined by Locke, it is the faculty of associating ideas in a 
 new and unexpected manner, the power of invention, continu- 
 ance, and ingenuity. Humor, on the other hand, is more ele- 
 mental, more persuasive, more a matter of character and tem- 
 permanent. While wit is allied to talent, humor partakes of 
 the wider reach, the ampler flow, the deep unconsciousness of 
 genius. Wit is the swift play and flash of mind ; humor flows 
 from character, it is an expression of character, and, next to 
 feeling, the most thoroughly humanizing element in literary 
 art. As Pater describes it, humor is the expression of the 
 whole nature of man, it is full of heart, it has tenderness, sym- 
 pathy, piety, sadness; and the laughter it evokes is without 
 malice or bitterness. 
 
 75 
 
^5 ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE 
 
 Examples. Cervantes and Shakespeare may be taken as 
 models in the use of both wit and humor. The wit of Dean 
 Swift and Daniel O'Connell is almost proverbial; although in 
 the former it was associated with a keen and biting sarcasm, 
 and, at times, with a most repulsive vulgarity. Some authors 
 temper this element of art-content with a kindly feeling as 
 Chaucer, Shakespeare, Addison, Burns, Scott. Other writers, 
 like Swift, Pope and Voltaire, mix with it a fund of bitterness 
 and malignity. 
 
 The Basis of Wit. In its most distinctive feature, wit is a 
 play upon words, owing to the many meanings attached to the 
 same word. The ingenuity which some writers display in this 
 work is remarkable. Often, too, it degenerates into unpardon- 
 able silliness, especially in conversation. The punster becomes 
 an inveterate bore. The paradox like the pun lies at the foun- 
 dation of wit ; it is a proposition which contains some apparent 
 and startling contradiction what oft was thought but ne'er 
 so well expressed. A brilliant simile or metaphor is most fre- 
 quently the basis of wit, for there is no better way afforded to 
 express incongruities. For example, " Bright like the sun 
 her eyes the gazers strike, and like the sun they shine on all 
 alike." 
 
 Mistakes Regarding Its Use. Bain points out three vices 
 in this connection. First, coarseness. The search for witti- 
 cism has to be controlled by refinement or delicacy Some of 
 the greatest wits have over-stepped this boundary, such as 
 Aristophanes among the ancients; Rabelais, Swift and Pope 
 among moderns. Secondly, obscurity. Like every other ef- 
 fect of style, wit must be intelligible to those addressed. Far- 
 fetched allusions are condemned, whatever be their purpose. 
 Thirdly, excess. In constantly aiming at wit, the greatest risk 
 is, the tendency toward overdoing it. Like all striking effects, 
 
// /'/ JVD HUMOR jj 
 
 it palls by too much repetition, and the torturing of language 
 may be carried to a point where meaning is wholly sacrificed. 
 
 Wit of Different Peoples. All nations possess wit in some 
 measure, for it is a part of the endowment of our common hu- 
 man nature. But races of a cold, sluggish temperament, like 
 the Germans or Russians, are not remarkable for the gift. It 
 rather belongs to the southern races where the soul sparkles in 
 epigram and paradox and figures of speech. For the spright- 
 liness of intellect displayed in wit, no race equals the Celt. 
 Take away from English literature the Irish and Scotch 
 contributions, and very little wit would be left. Shakespeare, 
 of course, would remain, but the exception only proves the 
 rule. 
 
 Value of Wit. In literary art wit is valuable in the same 
 way that spice is valuable in food it gives a certain flavor 
 and piquancy not otherwise obtainable. It creates laughter, 
 and this has a wholesome emotional effect. It brightens many 
 a literary page just as it brightens many a life. From some 
 kinds of literary art it is rigidly excluded, owing to the seri- 
 ousness of the subject-matter. It is a powerful weapon in de- 
 bate, often winning where heavy argument fails, like the 
 pebble in David's sling. In common with humor, it claims 
 comedy as its special literary channel. 
 
 The Basis of Humor. Like wit, humor rests upon incon- 
 gruities, and like wit it excites mirth or laughter. It depends 
 upon the follies and foibles of mankind an unfailing foun- 
 tain of inspiration. It differs from wit, in that its usual ac- 
 companiment is sympathy and tender feeling an innocent 
 raillery, a good-natured smile. By this mixture of tender 
 and kindly feeling with the ludicrous effect, it offends no one 
 and pleases everybody. Of the basis of humor, Sydney Smith 
 
78 ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE 
 
 - himself one of the best humorists in our literature ob- 
 serves : " As you increase incongruity you increase humor ; as 
 you diminish it, you diminish humor. If a tradesman of a 
 corpulent and respectable appearance, with habiliments some- 
 what ostentatious, were to slide down gently into the mud, and 
 decorate a pea-green coat, I am afraid we would all have the 
 barbarity to laugh. If his hat and wig, like treacherous ser- 
 vants, were to desert their falling master, it would certainly not 
 diminish our propensity to laugh. But if he would sit in the 
 mud and threaten the passers-by with his wrath, he would cer- 
 tainly heighten still more the humor of the situation." 
 
 Humor in Fiction. Humor plays an important part in 
 fiction. Sometimes it pervades a whole work, as, for example, 
 Pickwick Papers. The humor of Dickens has for its back- 
 ground the sorrow and suffering of -the poorer classes; and 
 because of its pathetic associations, is always tender and good- 
 natured. According to some critics, its presence in such abund- 
 ance is the main reason why Dickens retains his hold upon 
 popular favor. In like manner, George Eliot, Thackeray and 
 Hawthorne have used humor to advantage. In fact, all our 
 novelists have had occasion to employ it, for it is hardly pos- 
 sible to construct a plot or describe human life without intro- 
 ducing situations which are humorous in the extreme. 
 
 Value of Humor. Humor is a fountain of joy in life, the 
 great redeemer of the pessimist. It saves the grave character 
 from absurdity. It is a refuge from crushing care and calam- 
 ity. It is the most useful resource of men in whose tempera- 
 ment the tragic note is dominant. Similarly, it exercises a re- 
 deeming influence upon literature, relieving the tediousness of 
 lengthy narrative, breaking like sunshine through the rifted 
 clouds of tragic drama, and diffusing over the whole field of 
 
WIT AND HUMOR 70 
 
 pure letters a peculiar warmth and tenderness, as if it bid us 
 remember the human heart whereby we live. 
 
 Comedy in Relation to Wit and Humor. Comedy will be 
 treated elsewhere in detail, but it remains to note here that this 
 species of literature is the store-house of wit and humor. For 
 comedy is professedly witty and humorous. The history of 
 comedy from the days of Aristophanes is one long effort to 
 place upon the stage the follies, foibles and idiosyncrasies of 
 mankind. The ways in which a man may make a fool of him- 
 self are countless, and comic characters have represented this 
 type in every age. Perhaps our best illustrations are Pickwick, 
 Falstaff, Don Quixote. But comic writers have not confined 
 themselves to the drama or the novel. Verse is often employed 
 as in the case of Moore, Saxe and Holmes. The short essay 
 is now the most popular vehicle. Witness the efforts of " Mr. 
 Dooley," Mark Twain and William Nye in this prose-form. 
 The brief paragraph is the favorite form in journalism. Some 
 papers, like Punch, Puck, Judge, and Life, are made up of such 
 paragraphs, and are devoted exclusively to wit and humor. 
 These paragraphs deal with the oddities, incongruities, irrel- 
 evances of men, and indulge in all manner of caricature. The 
 cosmopolitan character of our American population offers a 
 tempting field for this kind of journalism. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE (CONTINUED)/ 
 MELODY 
 
 Definition. The sixth and last element of art-content is 
 melody. It is defined as a succession of musical or agreeable 
 sounds. It depends essentially upon tones of relative pitch, 
 successively arranged. It is established by any particular 
 rhythmic arrangement, as in some popular dance-times ; by the 
 intervals of a single chord, as in arpeggio phrases; by a dia- 
 tonicorder, as in scale passages ; by the harmonic connections 
 between successive chords, as in simple choral writing. In re- 
 lation to composition it implies rhythm and harmony such a 
 succession of words as will yield agreeable and musical sounds. 
 It is present both in prose and in verse ; although poetry, on ac- 
 count of its more intimate connection with music, possesses a 
 larger amount of melody than prose. 
 
 Emotional Value. The emotional value of music is so pro- 
 nounced and so obvious that no discussion of it is needed here ; 
 and melody is simply an identification, more or less limited, of 
 music with written language. All good prose and verse con- 
 tain melody, without which their appeal to the emotions would 
 be very much impaired, if not entirely lost. 
 
 Basis of Melody. In securing melody, or a succession of 
 musical sounds, a writer must take into account, first of all, the 
 letters of the alphabet. Some letters are friends of melody; 
 
 So 
 
MELODY g r 
 
 other letters are enemies. The vowel and the liquid are the 
 chief sources of melody; while the consonant with no music in 
 its soul, is a deadly enemy. Yet language could not maintain 
 its timbre or fibre without the consonant ; so that the artist must 
 be careful to keep the consonant while snwt luring it in liquid 
 and vowel sounds. There are twenty-three consonants, four- 
 teen vowels in accent, with the same out of accent, in our 
 language. Our wealth of vowel sounds is uncommon. The 
 harmonious blending of these letters and sounds is in a large 
 measure the basis of melody. 
 
 Words the Basis of Melody. Words are, in respect to 
 melody, a combination of letters ; and the same rule applies to 
 the word-variation. Words must be so arranged in the 
 sentence, as to produce a succession of agreeable and musical 
 sounds. For this purpose long words are alternated with 
 short words, and harsh-sounding words are so blended with 
 smooth, liquid ones, as to be agreeable in the combined ef- 
 fect. Undeniably, the harsh-sounding and abrupt words are 
 monosyllabic ones of Saxon origin not altogether, but in 
 large part. On the other hand, the smooth, liquid words are 
 pollysyllabic and of Latin origin. Besides the due alternation 
 of long and short, there should also be the due alternation of 
 emphatic and unemphatic words. A proper distribution of em- 
 phasis is essential to melody. As Blair remarks, the location 
 of the accent must be so varied as not to offend the ear by 
 monotone. 
 
 Sentences in Connection with Melody. Harmony and 
 rhythm of sentence have been considered already. The liter- 
 ary artist both in prose and verse must be very careful about 
 the selection of words that will have a fitness, not only from 
 the view-point of thought, but also from the view-point of 
 sound. For example, a word may exactly express the thought- 
 
g 2 ART-CONTENT IN LITERATURE 
 
 connection, but fail completely to carry the sentence-rhythm 
 the sound-connection. To borrow a figure from electricity, a 
 word may easily break the circuit. Alliteration is another 
 source of melody in the sentence. It is used extensively in 
 prose and verse. Similarity in sound arising from alliteration, 
 makes it easier to sustain the melody of the sentence. But al- 
 literation is often carried to excess as in the prose and verse 
 of Swinburne. It was carried to excess by the Anglo-Saxons ; 
 for example, see Beowulf. The danger from excessive allit- 
 eration is monotone. 
 
 Melody in the Paragraph. Throughout the paragraph there 
 is a larger rhythm than in the sentence. As the voice rises 
 and falls in the sentence, so feeling rises and falls in ,the para- 
 graph. Its highest point is called the climax. It is a common 
 method of the literary artist so to construct the paragraph that 
 the volume of sound will increase to the very end. For ex- 
 ample, paragraphs at the close of orations or at the close of sec- 
 tions in any department of prose. Of course, the rhythm and 
 melody of the paragraph will depend upon the construction of 
 the sentences and, the way that they are linked and coordinated. 
 Similarly, the melody of the whole composition will depend 
 upon paragraph-linking as well as upon the construction of the 
 sentence. 
 
 Melody in Thought. Melody is an emotional element be- 
 longing to art-content, and as such depends upon the smooth 
 and musical succession of ideas as well as of words. This suc- 
 cession must, first of all, be logical ; thoughts must be sequent 
 and coherent, in order to furnish a proper basis for melody. 
 The vigorous march of elocution must be accompanied by the 
 vigorous march of ideas. The two- fold Logos the word and 
 the idea must be melodious. Otherwise the composition is 
 vox, ct praeterea nihil Stedman writes that the very look of 
 
MELODY 83 
 
 certain words conveys certain ideas to the mind ; they seem as 
 entities to display the absolute color, form, expression, asso- 
 ciated with their meanings, just as their seen rhythm and mel- 
 ody sound themselves to the ear (Stedman, Elements of Poetry, 
 Page 174). Of ideas he might have written in the same vein, 
 for what is meant by a poetic idea if not one that is musical, 
 melodious at bottom their seen rhythm and melody sound 
 themselves to the ear. Inseparable in all high grades of liter- 
 ary art, the musical word and the musical idea blend in a beau- 
 tiful whole. It is akin to the rhythm of nature " not a planet, 
 but in her motion like an angel sings." It is akin to the melody 
 of life " not sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh, but 
 sweet bells of one accord, imitating the music of the spheres." 
 
 General Remarks. All grand speech, whether in prose or 
 verse, is rhythmic. There is a melody in the majestic periods 
 of a Webster, a Cicero, a Gibbon or a Macaulay, just as in the 
 grand organ-voice of a Milton or a Homer. This universal 
 and mysterious potency is felt in all prose worthy of the name, 
 and in all verse which deserves the name of poetry. The an- 
 cients studied the melody and musical effects of prose with the 
 same ardor that they displayed in mastering the musical effects 
 of poetry. If Cicero be, as Newman asserts, the greatest mas- 
 ter of prose composition that the world has seen, he is so in a 
 large measure because he is the greatest master of prose melody- 
 And if Newman be without a peer in English prose, it is 
 because he imitated Cicero so closely. But when the last word 
 is uttered concerning the mere technique of melody, the con- 
 ditions under which it is present in prose and verse, it remains 
 to observe that melody is inborn and has its dwelling place in 
 the soul of the artist. Rules may guide, they cannot create 
 it; for it comes forth with the ideas of the true artist, as light 
 comes with the sun. The supreme artist has music in his 
 soul an incommunicable gift of melodious expression. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 PERSONALITY IN LITERARY ART 
 
 Definition. It is a truism that the personality of the artist 
 is reflected in his art. As a matter of fact, all art is personal, 
 in that it is some personal ideal externalized and rendered con- 
 crete. It is the thought, the idea, the concept, of some indi- 
 vidual made known in color or word or stone. No matter what 
 may be the medium, the informing idea, the creative act, is a 
 personal contribution to art. Personality in literary art is 
 quite as obvious as in painting, sculpture or music. In litera- 
 ture it receives the name of style, although the term is equally 
 applicable to all the arts. For example, we have styles of 
 painting, styles of architecture. The term simply indicates the 
 presence of personality in the manner of artistic expression. 
 Personality is incapable of a scientific definition : it is that pe- 
 culiar combination of intellect and imagination plus other gifts 
 and soul qualities, which differentiates one human being from 
 another, and which in its totality often gives us the artistic 
 temperament and the artistic genius. A writer speaks about 
 the "abysmal depths of personality:" he might also speak 
 about the abysmal mysteries of personality. For, in the He- 
 brew turn of phrase, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. 
 But although personality in itself cannot be fathomed or de- 
 fined, nevertheless, like electricity, it may be known through its 
 manifestations; and its manifestation in literary art is called 
 style 
 
 Style in Literature. Style is defined as the peculiar mam^r 
 in which a writer expresses his thoughts through the medium 
 
 84 
 
CORRECTNESS S- 
 
 of words. It applies to both art-form and art-content, for it is 
 an external picture of the ideas in the mind of the artist, and 
 of the order in which they exist 'there. The definition of Buf- 
 fdn that the style is the man is but another way of stating that 
 a creative personality is at work upon ideas and words, shaping 
 both according to some preconceived plan. Let two individu- 
 als write on the same subject; we see in their productions their 
 peculiar modes of thinking, the extent of their knowledge, their 
 taste and feeling. The portrait executed by the most skilful 
 painter does not more fully represent the countenance than 
 the productions of the pen exhibit the characteristics of the 
 mind. 
 
 Four Qualities of Style. These qualities are common in 
 some degree to all good writing : correctness, clearness, vivid- 
 ness, iiaturalness. 
 
 Correctness. It is a quality of style which implies the use 
 of words that are purely English. It implies that these words 
 be used in their true and proper sense, and that the construc- 
 tion of phrases and sentences follow the rules of grammar. 
 Hence, barbarisms, solecisms, and improprieties of all kinds 
 are opposed to correctness. Correctness is necessary in all 
 kinds of writing and, although it is not regarded as a high ex- 
 cellence, the absence of it is ever thought disgraceful. Incor- 
 rectness in the use of words and in the construction of sentences 
 is evidence of careless intellectual habits and unfinished educa- 
 tion. Occasional errors are pardoned in conversation, owing to 
 hurry of thought and rapidity of expression ; but no excuse can 
 be offered for errors in writing, because there is sufficient time 
 for reflection, for the due arrangement of thought and the 
 right modelling of expression. Correctness may be obtained, 
 first of all, by writing. " Writing maketh an exact man." 
 Such practice makes us familiar with the right use of words 
 
g5 PERSONALITY IN LITERARY ART 
 
 and the correct development of thought. A second method 
 is extensive reading familiarity with the best that has been 
 thought and written. The value of good models is the same 
 in the studio of the literary artist as in the studio of the painter. 
 Our greatest prose writers Newman, Ruskin, Arnold, Ma- 
 caulay, Lowell, Burke, Eliot, Scott, Addison, De Quincey 
 ought to be familiar to all who aim at correctness of style. 
 
 Clearness. It implies that the expressions used are such as 
 convey the true meaning of the writer. Thus defined, it is 
 opposed to ambiguity, and obscurities of every kind, from 
 whatever source they may arise. The value of clearness is 
 obvious : we write in order to communicate our thoughts to 
 others. If we do not make ourselves understood, we fail 
 of our object in writing. The meaning of a written passage 
 should be so clear as to become evident at the first glance. 
 On this point Quintilian observes that the meaning of a written 
 composition should strike the mind as the light of the sun 
 strikes the eyes. Hence, clearness in style is a word similar 
 in meaning to transparency as applied to air, to glass, or 
 to water. Sometimes an exception to this rule is allowed. 
 For example, a regard for delicacy or decency precludes the 
 too distinct expression of a thought. Again, certain artists, 
 like Browning, are purposely vague, defending the use 
 of obscurity on artistic grounds. Occasionally, too, lawyers 
 and debaters are compelled to be obscure, owing to the weakness 
 of their side of the case. But in spite of these exceptions, the 
 general rule obtains to speak and to write our thoughts in the 
 clearest manner possible. 
 
 Vividness. This quality of good style requires that the 
 thoughts be expressed in such a manner as to arrest and fix 
 the attention of the reader. Vividness springs from a desire 
 to awaken interest. Viewed in this light, it is an effort on the 
 
VIVIDNESS 87 
 
 part of the writer to supply in a written composition what is 
 effected in conversation by the tones of the voice and the 
 expression of the countenance. It is a quality of the highest 
 excellence and contributes largely to the success of the writer. 
 There are five ways of rendering a style vivid. First, by the 
 use ofjy>ecific_ as opposed to general terms. Here we come 
 upon the necessity of using the Saxon word and the well- 
 chosen adjective. Second, by an ex^mo^dinary arrangement 
 of wordsn__a_sejitac^. Every language has some manner of 
 words of a sentence, which, from the frequency 
 of its occurrence, may be called its common or ordinary mode 
 of arrangement. This is especially true of the English lan- 
 guage in which the grammatical construction is often made 
 to depend on the juxtaposition of words. Vividness is the 
 result of departing from this common arrangement. It is 
 called the inverted style, more in vogue in poetry than in prose, 
 owing to a greater need for vividness. A third way of secur- 
 ing vividness is by omittingLunnecesflnrY wn'Hr nnH pkgg by 
 cutting out conjunctions like "and"; by multiplying periods 
 instead. Hence, the use of the short clean-cut sentence in the 
 prose of modern times. A fourth way of securing vividness 
 is by climax and antithesis. Climax is considered a great 
 beauty in composition. It is prominent both in prose and in 
 verse. It consists in making the members of a sentence rise 
 and grow in importance, or in so arranging the sentences of 
 a paragraph that there will be a gradually ascending scale of 
 effects to the very close. Like climax, antithesis renders a 
 style vivid. It is founded on the contrast or opposition of two 
 objects. It has this effect to make each of the contrasted 
 objects appear in a stronger light. It is employed to advantage 
 by the artist in colors and in words. In order to render an 
 antithesis more complete, the sentences or clauses expressing 
 the contrasted ideas should be similarly constructed. Besides 
 these ways, it remains to notice interrogation and repetition. 
 
gg PERSONALITY IN LITERARY ART 
 
 The former often arouses interest by challenging denial. Both 
 are favorite methods of the orator to drive a truth home. 
 Certain kinds of prose rarely use the question mark ; the sober 
 essay and critical review have scarcely any use for it. A final 
 device to secure vividness is the treatment of past events as 
 if they belonged to the present time, by changing the tense 
 of the verb. Historians often use this device to enliven their 
 pages. It may be used in many kinds of descriptive work. 
 
 Naturalness. The fourth quality of good writing is nat- 
 uralness. It requires that a writer, in the choice of his 
 words, in the form of his sentences, in the ornaments he uses, 
 in his terms of thought and expression, should commend 
 himself to every man of good sense and good taste as having 
 pursued the course best suited to the subject and to the occa- 
 sion. Naturalness is opposed to all kinds of affectation. There 
 is hardly any defect of style so painful and offensive as af- 
 fectation. It is offensive in life and conduct, doubly so in 
 composition. It is a defect peculiar to many young writers. 
 The spell of old classic writers consists largely in this quality 
 of naturalness and simplicity. Naturalness is sacrificed when- 
 ever there is an employment of unusual words or idioms, a 
 desire for excessive ornament or an attempt to be forcible 
 through extravagance of expression. 
 
 Various Kinds of Style. Thus far we have seen only those 
 qualities which belong of necessity to any and every class of 
 good composition. It remains to view a number of styles 
 which may be regarded as types. While each individual 
 writer has a manner all his own in expressing thought, still 
 there are forms of expression which in the process of time have 
 become fixed or crystallized. Broadly speaking, there are a 
 number of styles which the artist will instinctively employ in 
 dealing with certain subjects or elaborating certain kinds of 
 
THE DIFFUSE STYLE fy 
 
 thought. Narrative, description, exposition, argument, ana- 
 lytic and synthetic work, will demand a corresponding varia- 
 tion of style, regardless of the manner best suited to the genius 
 of the writer. In other words, there is an objective as well as 
 a subjective quality of style in all art of the highest order. 
 The following types or kinds of style are found in general use. 
 
 The Diffuse Style. One of the first and most obvious dis- 
 tinctions in style is that feature which arises from the spread- 
 ing out of thoughts. This distinction constitutes the diffuse 
 style. A diffuse writer unfolds his thought fully; he places 
 it in a variety of lights, he gives the reader every possible 
 assistance for understanding it completely. He is not careful 
 to express it at first in its full strength, because he intends to 
 repeat the impression, and what he lacked in strength he pro- 
 poses to supply by copiousness. Writers of this kind generally 
 love magnificence and amplification. Their periods run out 
 into some length and give room for ornament of every kind, 
 which they admit freely. This style has its faults and ad- 
 vantages. The extreme of diffuseness makes a composition 
 weak and languid. It tires the reader by endless paraphrase 
 and repetition. Besides thus weakening the composition, dif- 
 fuseness is apt to lead to a confused and chaotic development of 
 the theme; because a writer, especially an inexperienced one, 
 is likely to be led away from the point at issue by a tangled 
 web of sentences. On the other hand, a reasonable degree of 
 diffuseness is sometimes required by the theme. For example, 
 in the works that appeal particularly to the intellect and the 
 understanding there is an advantage in using this style. Some 
 matters must be treated in the fullest detail. Hence, in plead- 
 ing at the bar diffuseness is permissible; also to the clergyman 
 in the pulpit, for ordinary minds are slow to grasp ideas unless 
 they are iterated and reiterated. Exposition of truth in any 
 department requires the diffuse style. 
 
90 PERSONALITY IN LITERARY ART 
 
 Concise Style. This style, as the name indicates, is just 
 the opposite of diffuseness. For it compresses thought, while 
 the diffuse style expands thought. A concise writer uses 
 the fewest possible words. He employs none save those that 
 are most expressive ; he lops off every redundancy. Ornament 
 is not rejected, but he uses it for the sake of force rather than 
 grace; he never presents the same thought twice. His sen- 
 tences are arranged with compactness and strength rather than 
 with cadence and harmony. The utmost precision is studied 
 in theme. The faults and advantages of this style are obvious. 
 Too much conciseness ends in abruptness and obscurity it 
 leads to a manner too pointed and epigrammatical. Any 
 writer who goes to the extreme of conciseness offends good 
 taste quite as much as the man who would wear his business 
 suit or " talk shop " in the drawing room. But obscurity is the 
 great fault of too great conciseness, . as it thereby defeats the 
 purpose of all writing namely, the communication of ideas. 
 Horace, the great literary critic, points this out : " Brevis esse 
 labor o, obscurus Ho " I try to be concise, and in so doing I 
 become obscure. On the other hand, there are certain advant- 
 ages from its use, if conciseness be not pushed too far. First, 
 economy of attention. The mind is always delighted whenever 
 the attention is economized that is, whenever ideas can be 
 grasped with little or no strain upon the attention. In this 
 connection Herbert Spencer observes that all writers should 
 have this point economy of attention in view. ( Spencer, 
 Philosophy of Style.} A second advantage of conciseness 
 is to secure the direct treatment of a theme. A writer cannot 
 ramble in his thought if he must weigh and economize his 
 words. Just as in writing a telegraphic message, the cost 
 of each word keeps one from rambling, so a concise style, if 
 adhered to, will save the composition from wearisome para- 
 phrase. The concise style is sometimes employed in descrip- 
 tive writing, because it is brisk and lively. The strength and 
 
THE IDIOMATIC STYLE 9 ! 
 
 vividness of a description often depend on one or two happy 
 strokes rather than in much amplification of details. This 
 style is likewise used in addresses to the passions. In these 
 addresses it is dangerous to be diffuse, because it is difficult to 
 support the proper warmth and emotion for any length of time. 
 Writers who incline toward this style as a general feature of 
 their work, are Prescott, Emerson, Arnold, Addison, Steele. 
 De Quincey, on the other hand, inclines toward the diffuse 
 style, as do also Macaulay, Ruskin and Newman. 
 
 The Idiomatic Style. It is sometimes said of a style that 
 it is easy or idiomatic. These epithets are generally found 
 together, and where one is justly applied, the other follows as 
 a natural consequence. A style -which is idiomatic will appear 
 to have been easily practiced and will be easily understood. By 
 an idiomatic style is meant a manner of . writing in which the 
 phrases, forms of sentences, and arrangement of the words and 
 clauses are such as belong to the English language. Every 
 language has peculiarities of this kind by which it is charac- 
 terized ; and the style in which these peculiarities abound is 
 called, idiomatic. In the employment of the idiomatic style 
 there is some danger lest a writer becomejoose and slovenly ; 
 although such a style is most strictly correct in construction 
 and clear in meaning. It is employed, first of all, in conver- 
 sation ; for then our minds are fixed on the matter rather than 
 on the form, and we employ the natural, idiomatic turns of 
 phrase. Secondly, it is used in letter-writing, which in form 
 approaches conversation ; for then the natural, not the artificial, 
 man is at work. There is a tendency to employ this style in 
 all modern prose. Our classic writers are beginning to appre- 
 ciate the native idiom more and more; and as the influence 
 of Latin and Greek over our speech is apt still further to 
 decline, we may expect this tendency to bec6me mofe and more 
 pronounced. The idiomatic style is always pleasing to the 
 
9 2 PERSONALITY IN LITERARY ART 
 
 reader; the expression is free, familiar; and the meaning is 
 gathered at a glance. 
 
 Among living writers who are inclined to use the idiomatic 
 style, we may mention Wilfred Ward, William Mallock, Mark 
 Twain, Louise Imogen Guiney, Alice Meynell, Thomas Went- 
 worth Higginson, and a number of others; as time goes on, 
 this style is apt to grow more and more in popular favor. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 PERSONALITY (CONTINUED) 
 
 The Labored Style. Opposed to the easy and idiomatic 
 manner of writing, is what we call the labored style. This 
 style gives evidence of great pains on the part of the writer - 
 the burning of midnight oil ; and it requires the closest attention 
 and effort in order that it may be understood. The arrange- 
 ment of the words and clauses is often inverted ; the sentences 
 are long and involved; the whole composition is highly and 
 painfully artificial. This style usually lacks clearness, smooth- 
 ness and naturalness. Three methods are recommended for 
 overcoming this tendency to over-elaboration. First, com- 
 pose with greater rapidity ; ordinarily, the form of expression 
 that first presents itself is easy and idiomatic. Second, the 
 writing of letters, journals, diaries, where less care is de- 
 manded. Third, familiarity with writers whose style is easy 
 and idiomatic such authors as Goldsmith and Irving. 
 
 The Barren Style. The epithet, barren, applies to style 
 when there is a nakedness and want of connection in the 
 thoughts and expressions, when trains of thought are started 
 but only partially followed out, giving the composition a half- 
 finished character. This is especially true of the paragraph 
 when dismissed with one or two sentences. In this style 
 repetitions of the same words and phrases are frequent, and 
 all that pertains to the use of words and the form of ex- 
 pressions is commonplace. Barrenness of style may owe its 
 origin either to lack of invention, or to lack of ideas and words. 
 
 93 
 
Q 4 PERSONALITY IN LITERARY ART 
 
 Whenever it arises from the former, the writer is unable to 
 trace the relations between his thoughts ; he is unable to make 
 inferences and draw conclusions. This defect is remedied by 
 maturity and by discipline of the mental powers ; also by prac- 
 tice in amplification. Fabricando fit faber. When barrenness of 
 style results from lack of ideas and words, there is no better 
 remedy than the reading of classic English writers acquaint- 
 ance with the best that has been thought and said, not only 
 in English literature, but in all literature. 
 
 The Luxuriant Style. This style is just the opposite of the 
 barren style, in every respect. It is characterized by redundancy 
 of words and phrases, especially by a profusion of imagery, 
 and an exuberance of figurative language. Instead of se- 
 lecting what is choice and best fitted to the subject, the writer 
 pours out all his wealth of ornament and expression. He 
 attempts to write in a commanding, imposing* manner, which 
 takes the form of extravagant epithets and figures of speech. 
 This style belongs to youth ; Cicero calls it the overflow of 
 youthful feeling. In luxuriance of style, not only youth, but. 
 racial temperament must be taken into account. For example, 
 the races of southern Europe as compared with those of the 
 north. The style of Italian or Spanish prose resembles the 
 gardens of the tropics, so luxuriant is the growth ; whereas a 
 more becoming severity prevails in northern climes. Three 
 remedies are suggested for this luxuriance: First, the prun- 
 ing-knife the removal of all unnecessary words and phrases. 
 Often whole sentences must be recast with a view to 
 greater simplicity. Secondly, careful attention should be paid 
 to metaphor and simile. A luxuriant style usually offends 
 against good taste in these particulars. Hence, the necessity 
 of watching figures in order that they may not accumulate 
 too rapidly; also, that they may not be mixed. The mixed 
 figure is always a sign of this style. Finally, the choice of a 
 
THE FORCIBLE STYLE 95 
 
 topic which will not be beyond the ability of the writer. Youth 
 is always prone to this error. 
 
 The Forcible Style. The epithet, forcible, is applied to a 
 style which in a plain, distinct and irresistible manner urges 
 upon us the opinions and views of the writer. The forcible 
 style is an evidence of excitement. The writer is interested 
 in his subject, and is desirous that others share the same feel- 
 ings with himself. It implies a full persuasion of the truth, 
 the importance of what is said, and such an exhibition of 
 reasons as cannot fail to produce conviction. Hence, the forci- 
 ble style is dependent in a great degree upon intellectual habits, 
 and implies a well-disciplined mind. It requires some skill 
 in the use of language, but derives little benefit from what may 
 be termed mere ornaments of style. The forcible style is well 
 suited to the discussion of political subjects ; and in the history, 
 of our country, especially in times of great popular excitement, 
 many eminent examples are found. For example, in the Revo- 
 lution, Patrick Henry, James Otis, President Adams ; in the 
 late Civil War and the Abolition Movement that preceded it, 
 Wendell Phillips, Webster, Clay, Calhoun ; in the temperance 
 movement, John B. Gough, George Prentiss and others. In 
 our late financial excitement, William Jennings Bryan and 
 Bourke Cochran. All these men are shining examples of the 
 forcible style. This style must often be employed, not only 
 before popular audiences, but at the bar and in the pulpit, 
 whenever an argument needs to be driven home, or a heated 
 controversy is carried on. 
 
 The Feeble or Languid Style. Opposed to the forcible style, 
 is what rhetoricians call the feeble or languid style. The feeble 
 style is indicative of the whole character of the writer. The 
 man whose style is feeble is usually slothful in his habits and 
 inefficient in his plans and conduct. His view of his subject 
 
05 PERSONALITY IN LITERARY ART 
 
 is cold and indifferent ; his words are general terms, destitute 
 of vividness ; his sentences are long and loose, most likely 
 to resemble his trousers, and fitting the thought quite as poorly. 
 Literary art has no place for this style, although it occasionally 
 creeps in, despite the efforts of watchful criticism. There is 
 a class of writers who attempt to employ force and vehemence 
 when their style is not supported by strength of thought or 
 real feeling. Their work is worse than exhibitions of the 
 feeble style ; it becomes rant and mere declamation. In such 
 instances we have confident assertion instead of strong reason- 
 ing, and all the artificial helps of exclamation, climax, interro- 
 gation, antithesis. But while force and vehemence of style, 
 like a deep and powerful current, sweep every obstacle before 
 them, rant and declamation are fitly represented by the broad 
 and shallow stream, noisy, but powerless. 
 
 The Dignified Style. The foundations of an elevated or 
 dignified style are laid in the thoughts. These thoughts have 
 more of originality and sublimity than those which 
 come from ordinary minds. These thoughts are accompanied 
 by an appropriate and sustained emotion, which elevates the 
 mind of the reader. In reading a production in an elevated 
 style, our attention is so taken up by the thought that we seldom 
 have any regard for the language ; and if at any time we stop 
 with this object in view, it is but to express our admiration. 
 The words used are admirably suited to the feelings and 
 thoughts they clothe. The selection of these words seems not 
 to be the result of effort and care, and we regard them as the 
 language in which the author ordinarily thinks and converses. 
 The sentences are full and flowing, but at the same time, 
 unlabored and simple in their composition. There is a uniform 
 dignity about them which is characteristic of an elevated style. 
 There is a majesty and grandeur in the quiet but resistless 
 power with which the language carries one along ; as if we were 
 
THE PEDANTIC OR POMPOUS STYLE gj 
 
 moving down some majestic river. Like the forcible style, this 
 style of writing has little need of ornament ; for ornament is 
 required to sustain the common styles to beautify and re- 
 fresh the deserts of commonplace thought and expression. 
 But in the elevated style there is sufficient exaltation of thought 
 and feeling without the aid of ornament. Examples of this 
 style: Irving, Prescott, Robertson, Newman. History and 
 biography employ it, as a rule. 
 
 The Pedantic or Pompous Style. Unsuccessful attempts 
 after the elevated or dignified manner of writing, result in 
 what is called the pedantic or pompous style. The pedant is 
 fond of showing book-knowledge ; and a pedantic style is char- 
 acterized by the use of such terms and phrases as are obsolete, 
 uncommon, or derived from dead languages. And the style 
 is made pompous by the use of long, high-sounding words and 
 phrases. The young lawyer, preacher or essayist is often 
 guilty of adopting this style ; and he always offends good taste 
 by his efforts to appear learned and weighty. Some literary 
 men of high standing, like James Russell Lowell, Emerson, 
 and Macaulay, often err on the side of pedantry. Many a 
 writer errs in the adoption of a pompous style which neither 
 the subject nor the writer can properly sustain. It is the case 
 of the small boy walking around in a man's clothes. 
 
 The Neat or Elegant Style. These terms are applied to 
 style with particular reference to what is called the turn of 
 expression. They denote, also, especially the latter, the nature 
 of the ornament used. Their force is understood when they 
 are applied to any production in the arts. When so applied, 
 we declare that the work of art is not only free from faults, 
 but that it is executed in such a way as exhibits the skill of the 
 artist and gives us pleasure. So in the case of style. We say 
 that a style is neat and elegant, when the turns of expression 
 
9 g PERSONALITY IN LITERARY. ART 
 
 are such as happily convey the thoughts and are well suited 
 to the subject and occasion. The turns of expression must 
 necessarily depend both on the choice of words and the compo- 
 sition of the sentence. The neat style is also closely connected 
 with the thought that is conveyed. Thus, for example, in the 
 forcible or vehement style, we have bold turns of expression ; in 
 the elevated and dignified style, we have sublime and grand 
 turns of expression. In the neat style there is simply a justness 
 in the thoughts and a finish in the mode of expressing them. 
 At the same time, the writer is careful to avoid every fault. 
 The neat style, as thus explained, is ever pleasing ; and to some 
 classes of writing, peculiarly well suited. This style .differs 
 essentially from the easy idiomatic style, because it gives evi- 
 dence of labor in the composition. It seems the result to 
 which mediocrity of talent has attained by patient and praise- 
 worthy exertion. Neatness and elegance in style demand that 
 all coarse and homely words be avoided, even though their use 
 may give more vividness to the expression. In the selection 
 of imagery the characteristics of this style are found. The 
 imagery selected is both beautiful and expressive, calculated 
 to excite a pleasurable feeling. It is the imagery chosen by 
 an Irving or an Addison. Of all English writers, Addison is 
 perhaps the finest example; his essays are models of neatness 
 and elegance.' Hence, Johnson advises the English student to 
 give his days and nights to the study of Addison. Besides 
 these various styles of writing which come from the various 
 uses of words, phrases, sentences, metaphors, similes, there are 
 four kinds dependent partly on the thought to be expressed, 
 and partly on the readers to whom such writing is addressed. 
 These styles are called the Intellectual, the Literary, the Im- 
 passioned and the Popular. 
 
 The Intellectual Style. It is defined as that style wherein 
 the thought or subject-matter is emphasized more than 
 
THE INTELLECTUAL STYLE QQ 
 
 the form. The great question with a writer who employs 
 this style is : How can I make the truth intelligible? How can 
 the minds of my readers be most effectually reached ? Hence, 
 the writer emphasizes the intrinsic merit of his composition, 
 not this or that manner. The writer who employs the intel- 
 lectual style feels, first of all, that he must have a clear and 
 full perception of the truth to be communicated. He must be 
 profoundly convinced that it is the truth ; and be filled with 
 the desire to communicate it. Hence, the intellectual style is 
 based on the essential value of the truth as independent of any 
 worth that may lie in the special exposition of it. This style is 
 sometimes called the philosophical, because it is used mainly in 
 philosophical treatises; it is the style of Bacon, Spencer, Dar- 
 win, Locke. But it is used in all writings .marked by a 
 persistent prominence of the subject-matter over the form. 
 The intellectual style is characterized, not only by emphasis 
 of subject-matter over form, but also by breadth of view. The 
 writer who employs this style successfully, is a man with depth 
 of insight and a wide range of information. He is gifted with 
 mental many-sidedness; and his readers are impressed with 
 the vast range of his knowledge. For example, Spencer, Em- 
 erson. The intellectual style is characterized, not only by the 
 predominance of subject-matter over form, and comprehensive- 
 ness of view on the part of the writer, but also by sobriety of 
 spirit. This is one of the manifest marks of any writer of 
 sterling merit, or any style of permanent influence. It is to 
 this type of authorship that Mr. Arnold refers in his sug- 
 gestive phrase : " Intellectual seriousness." By this he means 
 a sense of responsibility becoming any one whose mission in 
 the world is the discovery and circulation of the truth. It is 
 what Cicero calls that elevation of spirit and sentiment dealing 
 with high themes in an exalted manner, immeasurably above 
 all that is trivial and common. This feature of style, sobriety 
 of spirit or intellectual seriousness, is ethical as well as intellec- 
 
I00 PERSONALITY IN LITERARY ART 
 
 tual. The writer shows this ethical or moral value in various 
 ways : First, by an impartial accuracy of statement. Second- 
 ly, by a judicial gravity of mind that will, insure honest 
 results in the face of temptation to the contrary. Thirdly, 
 by the supremacy of judgment over passion, and by the su- 
 premacy of conscience over personal preference. Fourthly, by 
 a loyal devotion to the interests of the truth. For example, 
 Edmund Burke; Carlyle. 
 
 The Literary Style. This style lies midway between the 
 intellectual and the popular ; it borders more closely upon the 
 former than the latter. It is called literary because it is the 
 style in which literature, strictly so-called, is expressed; it is 
 the style of the library and the man of letters. On the one 
 side, it is far removed from the scientific, technical and specu- 
 lative manner of expression. On the other side, it carefully 
 excludes the ordinary and the commonplace. For in this style 
 is reflected the best literary art and taste. This style is most 
 strongly emphasized in the golden ages of letters. For exam- 
 ple, the Age of Pericles in Greece; the Augustan Age; the Age 
 of Louis XIV; the Age of Elizabeth. 
 
 Some Features of this Style. First, ease and flexibility. 
 There is at all times the evidence of fluency and facility of 
 touch. The impression is that the writer has a vocabulary 
 more than sufficient for all demands. There is also a freedom 
 of mental movement ; the thought easily adapting itself to the 
 ever changing temperament of the author. There, is nothing 
 rigid, conventional or academic. It is the special charm of 
 the essays of Lamb and of Addison. In addition to ease and 
 flexibility we may note a further and most significant element 
 of the literary style its artistic finish. Form and thought 
 are quite distinct in literary art, and it is true to say that 
 there is such a feature of style as grace and beauty of 
 
THE IMPASSIONED STYLE IOI 
 
 form an outward attractiveness differing -in* character and 
 independent of the subject-matter itself. Arttf.'tbis: outward 
 attractiveness is especially emphasized in what is called the 
 literary style. In a word, the element of correct and disciplined 
 taste enters as an integral factor; and where it is especially 
 prominent, makes the style literary rather than intellectual. 
 For example, in the writings of Ruskin or of Hawthorne, 
 where the subject-matter is set forth in a way satisfactory to 
 the demands of the most sensitive taste. 
 
 The Impassioned Style. By the impassioned style is meant 
 a manner of writing which is emotional, persuasive, fervid ; 
 appealing not so strongly to the intellect and aesthetic sense as 
 to the passions. Hence, the impassioned style differs ma- 
 terially from the intellectual and the literary style. This is 
 the favorite style among forensic writers ; it is the style of the 
 orator : for example, in history, Carlyle's " French Revolu- 
 tion " ; in fiction, Walter Scott's " Heart of Midlothian." It 
 has no place in scientific or philosophical works. Three ele- 
 ments are found in this style of writing: First, the element of 
 passion. It is from this element that the name of the style 
 is derived. This element indicates that the heart is engaged 
 as well as the head ; that emotion is allied to thought ; that 
 there is something more in view than mere instruction or enter- 
 tainment. This element is called the lyric element of prose 
 expression, because, like the lyric in verse, it is an appeal to 
 the emotions it stirs our feeling. For example, Speeches of 
 Webster, Burke, Cicero. The second element of the impas- 
 sioned style is personality. Personality, while it is exhibited 
 in all styles, is more pronounced in this style than in any other. 
 The individual aims at leaving an impression. Hence, the 
 great orators of the world have been invariably men of great 
 personality. The third and final element of the impassioned 
 style is power. By this element, the emotion felt by the writer 
 
I02 PERSONALITY IN LITERARY ART 
 
 is transferred 'to -'the 'reader. De Quincey calls the class of 
 litef^turrc{apat)le of ( so arousing the reader the literature of 
 power. ' Power is allied to personality. It is personality act- 
 ing, or in a transitive state. But it is larger in scope, for it 
 implies, not only personality, but also a mastery of the 
 cogent elements of expression. In other words, the medium 
 of the thought the language must be so handled as to 
 permit the burning thoughts of the writer to set the reader or 
 hearer afire. For example: Webster's Reply to Hayne; Pat- 
 rick Henry's Speech ; Burke on Warren Hastings. 
 
 The Popular Style. By the popular style is meant one that 
 is not altogether unintellectual or unliterary or unemotional ; 
 but one that is not distinctly marked by any of these character- 
 istics. For some degree of mental excellence as of literary and 
 persuasive excellence it must possess in order to be assigned 
 a place among the prominent classes of English style. But it 
 reaches the level of the common people by presenting these 
 qualities in a modified degree. It is called popular for three 
 reasons : First, because it is so easily understood ; it appeals 
 to the average intellect and the common people. Hence, in 
 the popular style both words and thoughts are plain, simple, 
 easily grasped. Secondly, it is called popular because it is 
 practical. The term practical is opposed to theory, specula- 
 tion, mere scholarship as such. Hence, the themes treated in 
 this style are those having a practical bearing, those in which 
 the general mass of mankind feel the keenest interest. And 
 in the manner of treatment the author is careful to use only 
 those expressions and illustrations which' appeal to the multi- 
 tude. For example, William Jennings Bryan, in his treatment 
 of the money question. The various sciences are thus popu- 
 larized. Thirdly, the popular style is unmethodical and ram- 
 bling. There is no close consecutive reasoning, no attempt at 
 artistic development in sentence or paragraph. The writer is 
 
CONCLUDING REMARKS 
 
 governed by the impulse of the moment rather than by law 
 or logic or careful preparation. Hence, it is sometimes called 
 the capricious or extemporaneous style of writing. Reminis- 
 cences, memoirs, speeches to the multitudes, popularized 
 science, all kinds of letters and miscellaneous writing. Irv- 
 ing's "Sketch-Book"; Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress"; 
 Holmes' " Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." 
 
 Concluding Remarks. The different styles of writing thus 
 far reviewed indicate the presence of personality in literary art ; 
 they reflect the scholarship, the imagination, the intellect, and 
 the peculiar temperament of the artist. But aside from the 
 phenomena which may be classified, and which give to us the 
 barren, concise, luxuriant and other styles of writing, there 
 remains an indefinable element, felt rather than understood or 
 named, which makes a certain piece of literary art the author's 
 own; and we have no other way to designate it except by 
 naming it after the person of the artist. Thus, for example, 
 we call a piece of work Tennysonian, Shakespearian, Baconian, 
 because the personality of the author is indelibly stamped upon 
 it. It is the incommunicable power supplied by every artist 
 that enters into every masterpiece. It is the most elusive and 
 intangible element in art; yet upon its presence and discovery 
 much of our pleasure depends. After art-form and art-con- 
 tent are analyzed and the results tabulated, this elusive element 
 remains the personal impress which an artist inevitably sets 
 upon his production an impress which yields as many styles 
 as there are individual artists, for the hackneyed saying of 
 Buffon is true : " The style is the man." In describing how this 
 individuality affects writing. Pater observes : " The ways in 
 which individuality shows itself are numerous. Each writer, 
 for instance, may be said to make his own vocabulary ; he con- 
 sciously increases his knowledge of words, deliberately chooses 
 certain terms for particular uses, and carefully decides upon 
 
I04 PERSONALITY IN LITERARY ART 
 
 the special term which in each case seems to him best adapted 
 to convey his meaning. Besides this, he unconsciously has 
 a preference toward this word or that ; he is influenced by asso- 
 ciation, by the suggestions which are aroused in his mind by 
 this synonym or that, and is in every decision swayed in one 
 direction or another by the fineness of his perceptions, the 
 nature of his temperament, and by all those minute and mingled 
 elements which make up what we know as character. All 
 these conscious and all these unconscious causes help to bring 
 it about, that every writer shall make for himself what Walter 
 Pater calls a vocabulary faithful to the coloring of his own 
 spirit; and the same principle may be traced through all the 
 divisions of literary art, whether they be of structure or of 
 quality." Walter Pater in his " Essays on Style " lays stress 
 upon the presence of mind in literary art : it is the individual 
 characteristic according to which art must be judged. " I 
 call the necessity of mind in style, that architectural conception 
 of work, which foresees the end in the beginning and never 
 loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, 
 till the last sentence does but, with undiminished vigor, unfold 
 and justify the first. This is the more intimate quality of 
 good style, to which the aptitudes of the medium and the 
 ornaments of scholarship are both subservient. For all art 
 requires always its logic, its comprehensive reason insight, 
 foresight, retrospect, in simultaneous action." According to 
 Pater, individuality is expressed, not only by the presence of 
 mind, but by the presence of soul also. He ascribes to mind 
 the plan, the architecture of literary art; to soul he ascribes 
 an immediate sympathetic contact; by soul the artist reaches 
 us through sympathy and a kind of immediate contact. It is 
 the emotional element united to the logical or architectural 
 element ; through this quality of soul you recognize the person 
 in the book you feel the personality of the artist. The fol- 
 lowing descriptions of the perfect artist may fittingly close this 
 
CRITICISM BY CARDINAL NHH'MAN 
 
 discussion : one is from the pen of Herbert Spencer ; the other 
 from Cardinal Newman. Spencer writes : " When the powers 
 of speech are fully developed, and the ability of the intellect to 
 utter the emotions is complete, then fixity of style will dis- 
 appear; the perfect writer will express himself as Junius, when 
 in the Junius frame of mind ; when he feels as Lamb felt, will 
 use a like familiar speech ; and will fall into the ruggedness of 
 Carlyle when in a Carlylean mood. His mode of expression 
 will naturally respond to his state of feeling, and there will 
 flow from his pen a composition changing to the same degree 
 that the various aspects of his subject change." Cardinal 
 Newman writes: 
 
 Criticism by Cardinal Newman. " The art of letters is the 
 method by which a speaker or writer brings out in words worthy 
 of his subject and sufficient for his audience or readers the 
 thoughts which impress him. Literature is therefore of a per- 
 sonal character; it consists in the enunciations and teachings of 
 those who have a right to speak as representatives of their kind, 
 and in whose words their brethren find an interpretation of 
 their own sentiments, a record of their own experiences, and 
 a suggestion for their own judgments. A great author is not 
 one who merely has a copia verborum, whether in prose or in 
 verse, and can, as it were, turn out at his will any number of 
 splendid phrases and swelling sentences ; but he is one who has 
 something to say, and knows how to say it. I do not claim for 
 him, as such, any great depth of thought, or breadth of view, or 
 philosophy, or sagacity, or knowledge of human nature, or experi- 
 ence of human life, though these additional gifts he may have, 
 and the more he has of them, 'the greater he is ; but I ascribe to 
 him. as his characteristic gift, in a large sense the faculty of 
 expression. He is master of the twofold Logos, the thought and 
 the word, distinct, but inseparable from each other. He may, 
 if so be, elaborate his compositions, or he may pour out his impro- 
 visations; but in either case he has but one aim which he keeps 
 steadily before him and is conscientious and single-minded in ful- 
 filling. That aim is to give forth what he has within him ; and 
 from his very earnestness it comes to pass that, whatever be the 
 
I0 6 PERSONALITY IN LITERARY ART 
 
 splendor of his diction or the harmony of his periods, he has 
 within him the charm of an incommunicable simplicity. What- 
 ever be his subject, high or low, he treats it suitably and for its 
 own sake. If he is a poet, nil moliter inepte. If he is an orator, 
 then, too, he speaks not only distincte and splendide, but also, 
 apte. His page is the lucid mirror of his mind and life. . . I 
 He writes passionately because he feels keenly ; forcibly, because 
 he conceives vividly, he sees too clearly to be vague ; he is too seri- 
 ous to be otiose; he can analyze his subject, and therefore he is 
 rich ; lie embraces it as a whole and in its parts, and therefore he is 
 consistent ; he has a firm hold of it and therefore he is luminous. 
 When his imagination wells up, it overflows in ornament; when 
 his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He always has 
 the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. 
 If he is brief, it is because few words suffice ; when he is lavish of 
 them, still each word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the 
 vigorous march of his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but 
 all cannot say; and his sayings pass into proverbs among his 
 people, and his phrases become household words and idioms of 
 their daily speech, which is -tessellated with the rich fragments of 
 his language, as we see in foreign lands the marbles of Roman 
 grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern palaces. 
 Such preeminently is Shakespeare among ourselves ; such pre- 
 eminently Virgil among the Latins; such in their degree are all 
 those writers who in every nation go by the name of classics. To 
 particular nations they are necessarily attached from the circum- 
 stance of the variety of tongues, and the peculiarities of each ; but 
 so far they have a catholic and ecumenical character that what 
 they express is common to the whole race of man, and they alone 
 are able to express it. If then the power of speech is a gift as 
 great as any that can be named ; if the origin of language is by 
 many philosophers even considered to be nothing short of divine ; 
 if by means of words the secrets of the heart are brought to light, 
 pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief is carried off, sympathy con- 
 veyed, counsel imparted, experience recorded, and wisdom per- 
 petuated ; if by great authors the many are drawn up into unity, 
 national character is fixed, a people speaks, the past and the fu- 
 ture, the East and the West, are brought into communication with 
 each other ; if such men are, in a word, the spokesmen and 
 prophets of the human family, then it will not answer to make 
 
CRITICISM BY CARDINAL NEWMAN 107 
 
 light of literature or to neglect its study ; rather we may be sure 
 that, in proportion as we master it in whatever language, and im- 
 bibe its spirit, we shall ourselves become in our own measure the 
 ministers of like benefits to others, be they many or few, be they 
 in the obscurer or the more distinguished walks of life, who are 
 united to us by social ties and are within the sphere of our per- 
 sonal influence." 
 
PART II. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 THE LETTER 
 
 Divisions of Literary Art. Literary art occupies two dis- 
 tinct fields the field of verse and the field of prose. In the 
 field of verse there are three principal subdivisions the 
 drama, the epic, the lyric. In the field of prose there are more 
 subdivisions, six of which deserve attention: the letter, the 
 essay, the sermon or oration, history, biography, fiction. These 
 are called prose-forms; taken together they divide and cover 
 the prose department of literary art. 
 
 The Letter. The first standard prose- form is called the 
 letter. A letter is defined as a written message or communica- 
 tion from one person to another. Hence, the use of the word 
 " correspondence " to indicate this branch of composition. Be- 
 sides this specific meaning, a general meaning attaches to the 
 word. When the plural form of the word is used it is a syn- 
 onym for all literature, and embraces in its meaning all the 
 departments of literary art. Hence, our expression, " The Re- 
 public of Letters/' signifying the whole field of literature. 
 Examples of such usage : First, Dean Swift : " Pericles was 
 an able minister, an excellent orator and a man of letters." 
 Second, Matthew Arnold : " The valuable thing in letters is 
 the judgment which forms itself insensibly along with fresh 
 
 108 
 
THE LETTER IO9 
 
 knowledge." Third, James Russell Lowell : " Pupils should 
 be given a tincture of letters as distinguished from mere 
 scholarship." 
 
 Importance. The letter, as a standard prose- form, is one 
 of the most important branches of composition, as it enters 
 so largely into the daily business of life. In our age almost 
 everyone is under the necessity of conveying his opinions or 
 his feelings through the medium of the letter. 
 
 Rank Among Prose-Forms. From a literary point of view 
 the letter ranks next to the essay; it is lowest in the scale of 
 prose-forms, because it approaches the nearest to ordinary con- 
 versation, has the least trace of art in its construction and per- 
 mits the largest freedom. It occupies a middle place between 
 the serious and amusing species of composition. It discloses 
 more of the individual character and personality of the writer 
 than any other prose-form ; hence, the expression, " the life and 
 letters " in books of biography. As a matter of fact, we can- 
 not draw near to the personality of a great writer without read- 
 ing his letters ; and no department of literary art affords more 
 pleasure than such reading. An attractive feature of current 
 magazines is the publication of letters. For example, the letters 
 of literary men published in the Century, Scribner's, and Har- 
 per's magazine. 
 
 Historical Value. The letter is a vehicle not only for the 
 feelings, opinions and reflections of the writer ; it often affords 
 a picture of the times in which it was written, and hence con- 
 tains valuable material for literary and political history. For 
 example, the best history of our late Civil War, written by the 
 secretaries of President Lincoln, contains several hundred 
 letters, from generals and soldiers who were in the struggle. 
 Janssen's " History of the German People " publishes letters 
 
IIO ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 of Luther and correspondence of the German princes. Hence, 
 letters explain and illuminate incidentally much of the national, 
 religious, domestic and social conditions and the course of pub- 
 lic events. Other examples : the War of the Roses in England, 
 explained by the correspondence of the Paston family; the 
 Oxford Movement, illuminated by the letters of Pusey, Ward, 
 Froude, Keble, and Newman. 
 
 In Relation to Other Literary Forms. The letter may be 
 called the literary atom because it is found in so many other 
 literary forms. Besides the department of history, where the 
 letter is beginning to figure so prominently, it is found in all 
 kinds of biography. For example, read the letters in Bos- 
 well's "Life of Johnson," or Morley's "Life of Gladstone." 
 In the drama it helps to interpret character and complicate the 
 plot. For example, the letters in " Macbeth," " Hamlet," 
 "King Lear," and "Othello." In fiction the love-letter is 
 frequently met with. Sometimes a long correspondence is 
 given, as in the case of Glory Quayle in " The Christian." 
 In journalism letters appear from the regular and casual 
 correspondent. Perhaps the best known collection of letters is 
 found in the New Testament. Thus, the letter justifies its 
 claim to be regarded as the literary atom. 
 
 Various Kinds of Letter. There are five kinds of letter 
 which occupy a place in literature: the letter of friendship, 
 the news-letter, the official letter, the open letter, the love-letter. 
 These letters form a part of literature because they are filled 
 with sentiment, emotion, feeling, wit, humor and other quali- 
 ties that humanize them. The business letter is excluded from 
 this category, for, although some art is required in its construc- 
 tion, yet it has no claim to be regarded as literature : it appeals 
 to the commercial rather than to the aesthetic sense. It care- 
 fully excludes sentiment, emotion or anything that might sug- 
 
THE LETTER ! 1 1 
 
 gest imagination. If is in the main impersonal, cold, Colorless. 
 If it possesses any persuasive power, this merit is not ordinarily 
 the result of literary excellence. 
 
 The Letter of Friendship. As the name indicates, this let- 
 ter represents correspondence between friends. Many cele- 
 brated examples are found in the history of literature, such as 
 the letters of Cicero, Newman, Moore, Byron, Pope, Goethe, 
 Carlyle, Browning. The literary value of such correspondence 
 is enhanced in three ways: by the importance of the subject 
 treated ; by wit, humor, feeling and other humanizing qualities ; 
 by the rank and merit of those who write such letters. Hence, 
 the curiosity which the public has ever shown concerning the 
 letters of eminent men; the public expects some revelation of 
 character, and as a rule is not disappointed. As letters from 
 one friend to another make the nearest approach to conversa- 
 tion, there is more character displayed in them than in other 
 productions prepared for public view. The writer is informal, 
 at ease; and heart and fancy wield the pen. Hence, the first 
 requisite for such letters is to be natural and simple. A stiff, 
 formal manner is as bad in a letter as it is in conversation or 
 in company. The style must not be too highly polished - 
 neat and correct, but no more. All nicety about words betrays 
 study; care in the selection of sentences or in the arrangement 
 of thoughts should not appear. For the best letters are such 
 as the authors have written with most facility. 
 
 Subject-Matter. The subject-matter of such letters is as 
 wide in range as the scope of human affection. All things in 
 the heavens above and in the earth beneath and in the waters 
 under the earth have found their way into letters of friendship. 
 But perhaps the most frequent topics are personal welfare, 
 affairs of the heart, business. For example, in the letters of 
 Cicero, what concerned him most was his political success, and 
 
j I2 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 he received from Atticus much sound advice in reference to 
 his public conduct what should, or what should not, be done 
 under certain circumstances. The character and calling of the 
 correspondents will have a determining influence upon the 
 subject-matter selected; as, for example, the letters of Thomas 
 Carlyle and Matthew Arnold are full of literary topics a 
 panorama of literary allusions. On the other hand, the letters 
 of Keble and Newman breathe the spirit of religion. The en- 
 vironment of the correspondents often furnishes the chief top- 
 ics; as, for example, in the letters of Walpole and Montague 
 the presence of local color is everywhere discoverable. 
 
 Utility of these Letters. The historical value of letters 
 has been noted ; the value of letters of friendship to the depart- 
 ment of biography cannot be over-estimated. For, as New- 
 man writes, " It has ever been a truism with me that the real 
 life of a man is in his letters; not only for biography, but 
 for arriving at the inside of things, the publication of letters 
 is the true method/' " The friendly letter availeth much for 
 the understanding of men," as a wise Elizabethan once wrote. 
 
 Amount of Such Literature. Nearly all literary men of any 
 note have kept letters of friendship ; some prominent men like 
 Walpole have left several volumes. A rather strange exception 
 to this rule is William Shakespeare no authenticated letter 
 from him has ever been found. Next to literary men, states- 
 men and clergymen of high rank or prominence in the church 
 have contributed to this department ; also scientists, like Hux- 
 ley ; lawyers, physicians, teachers. In all, twenty-five thousand 
 volumes would not be an unfair estimate. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE LETTER (CONTINUED) 
 
 THE NEWS-LETTER 
 
 Definition. The title indicates the purpose of this letter 
 which, since the rise of journalism, has become a household 
 word in every land. Like the letter of friendship, it con- 
 tributes directly to the great body of literature; for, frequently, 
 the newspaper correspondent is a literary artist of high rank. 
 In the early history of journalism it was not uncommon to 
 give a journal the title of news-letter. For example, the News- 
 letter once published in London, and in Philadelphia. At that 
 time news was supplied by correspondents who would canvass 
 a locality and present their material in the form of a letter. 
 So that the newspaper then was little more than a collection 
 of letters. 
 
 Style of the News-Letter. As a rule it has the same easy 
 style, the same freedom of treatment as the letter of friendship. 
 In the matter of gathering news, no fixed method can be ap- 
 plied, nor can any fixed style be predicated of such correspond- 
 ence. Much depends upon the temperament and gifts of the 
 writer; much upon the character of the journal for which the 
 news-letter is written. For example, the news-letters appearing 
 in our best journals and periodicals exhibit the graces of style 
 and the methodical treatment which one finds in the essay. 
 They are intended for the public eye a critical public - 
 and hence the writer pays as much attention to literary form 
 
 113 
 
T I4 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 as to subject-matter. For example, compare the style of a 
 news-letter appearing in Harper's or the Century magazine 
 with the news-letter style in the ordinary journal. As a matter 
 of fact, news-letters appearing in our art-journals and maga- 
 zines are as finished in form and as literary in character as 
 any other department of prose. 
 
 Subject-Matter. With regard to subject-matter, the news- 
 letter enjoys the largest range. War, politics, religion, science, 
 art, fashion, are treated with the fullest freedom a freedom 
 which justifies Matthew Arnold in the remark that the news- 
 letter is a miniature of all passing ervents. A large number of 
 news-letters are as ephemeral as the subjects treated. The 
 most permanent news-letter deals with foreign travel, with 
 eminent personages, with, the latest and best books or publica- 
 tions. From these three sources, history, biography, and lit- 
 erary criticism receive valuable and permanent additions. The 
 first source : foreign travel was never so large as at present ; 
 never before was there such a study of the institutions, customs 
 and manners of strange peoples ; hence, the large and growing 
 volume of news-letters. Again, there is a watchful jealousy 
 among all civilized nations, and accordingly an eager demand 
 for news from the special correspondent; for example, the 
 news-letters of Mr. Russel, in the London Times; Richard 
 Harding Davis, in Harper's Weekly. Among foreign trav- 
 elers there are bands of scholars representing the large uni- 
 versities and working in the interests of various sciences, such 
 as geology, archaeology ; their letters and correspondence found 
 in university journals are a valuable addition to literature : for 
 example, correspondence of Russell Harris in the Cambridge 
 University Record. Finally, the news-letter from missionaries 
 in foreign lands is of permanent value to the church historian. 
 Both Catholic and Protestant journals give prominence to these 
 letters. Besides these letters there is the news-letter occupy- 
 
THE LETTER 115 
 
 ing a permanent place in literature, supplying- material not 
 only for history, but for biography as well. Such letters de- 
 scribe eminent men in the various walks of life. The perma- 
 nence of these letters depends upon the subjects treated rather 
 than upon any graces of literary form. The abiding greatness 
 of the human hero often immortalizes such literary work when 
 the art of the workman has no other claim to immortality. 
 For example, in the late Napoleon revival, news-letters, worth- 
 less as examples of literary art, were dug up and published as 
 biography. They will survive because of the subject treated. 
 A whole library of this character has grown up around such 
 men as Bismarck, Leo XIII, Gladstone, Newman ; and it will 
 survive because of the permanent interest the world will take in 
 these men. 
 
 In Relation to Literary Criticism. . A large body of literary 
 criticism comes from news-letters; they announce the latest 
 books and publications, analyzing and passing judgment upon 
 tire contents. Literary criticism in England and in America 
 flows through the news-letter as a favorite channel ; and on 
 both sides of the water the best journals and magazines regu- 
 larly devote some space to this correspondence. The finest 
 literary talent is employed. For example, Lang, Zangwill, in 
 England ; Curtis, Howells, in America. Besides their perma- 
 nent value as criticism, these letters are an invaluable guide to 
 the reading public. As Frederick Harrison observes : " Ow- 
 ing to the enormous activity of the modern press and the mod- 
 ern pen, good books are buried in voluminous seas ran 
 nantes in gurgite vasto; and the critic who discovers- those 
 books worth reading conveys an inestimable favor upon the 
 public." 
 
 The Official Letter. The official letter, as the title implies, 
 is the document and product of authority. In the administra- 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 tion of government this prose-form has always been employed. 
 Hence, the archives of church and state possess a large mass 
 of literature from this source. In every capital city of the 
 world the archives are filled with official correspondence. Ow- 
 ing to the increasingly complex relations which governments 
 now sustain toward their subjects and toward each other, the 
 volume of official correspondence is constantly growing. 
 
 The Literary Value of these Letters. As a rule, the official let- 
 ter, like the business letter, makes no direct contribution to 
 literature in the strict sense of that word. For ordinarily it 
 is a plain formal statement of duty or command, giving no 
 room to fancy or emotion. But indirectly, all official corre- 
 spondence possesses some literary value, because it furnishes 
 material for history. All historians rely upon official archives. 
 The latest examples : Janssen working in the Berlin archives ; 
 Ludwig Pastor in the archives of the Vatican ; Bancroft and 
 Freeman in the archives of Washington and London. The 
 historical novel, treating past events with fanciful freedom, 
 likewise employs official correspondence as the basis of im- 
 aginary plots. Imaginary letters are introduced as written 
 by prominent officials of church and state. For example, 
 Walter Scott's treatment of medieval history. 
 
 Species of this Letter. Two kinds of official correspondence 
 form an exception to the general laws : encyclical letters and 
 those that come under the head of diplomatic correspondence. 
 These letters, when written by gifted men, are among the finest 
 expressions of literary art. For example : the letters of Cicero 
 when "Roman consul; the diplomatic correspondence of Talley- 
 rand; the encyclical letters of Leo XIII. Read the letter of 
 Daniel Webster on the impressment of American seamen, 
 written to Lord Ashburton when Webster was Secretary of 
 State. The official letter, says Arnold, when it takes the form 
 of diplomatic correspondence, gives free rein to certain human- 
 
THE LETTER H 7 
 
 izing qualities that characterize the best literature. Emotion, 
 persuasiveness, beauty of form and of thought, are very often, 
 though not always, the characteristics of such writing. Cer- 
 tain it is, however, that in spite of official chilliness and self- 
 suppression there is a large play of personality. Moreover, 
 the arts of diplomacy require at times all the subtlety and 
 wealth of language, justifying Talleyrand's dictum that lan- 
 guage was made to conceal thought. John Morley, writing 
 about the biography of Talleyrand, makes this observation : 
 " I find in his diplomatic correspondence a complete revelation 
 of the man who exhausted all the arts of the primitive serpent 
 in dealing with contemporary rulers." The encyclical letter, 
 like diplomatic correspondence, is often a revelation of per- 
 sonality. If the author happens to be a literary artist, as in 
 the case of Sixtus IV., Leo X., or Leo XIII., the encyclical 
 letter will exhibit all the charm and merit of the best literature. 
 Richard Clarke, speaking about the letters of Leo XIII., ob- 
 serves that they rank among the best- specimens of epistolary 
 correspondence. A refinement of taste, a deep and varied 
 scholarship, and above all, the impress of an extraordinary 
 personality give to these letters a permanent place in literature. 
 
 Style. The official letter in form and in style : In form 
 it is suggestive of the essay, giving no place to rambling 
 thought or looseness of expression ; it is characterized by pre- 
 cision of statement, method and regularity. In style it aims 
 at preserving official dignity ; all the formalities of social, polit- 
 ical and religious life are strictly observed. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 THE LETTER (CONTINUED) 
 
 The Open Letter. The open letter may be called the liter- 
 ary paradox, for the term, letter, connotes privacy, whereas 
 the open letter courts publicity. Although addressed to some 
 prominent member of society, nevertheless, it is intended for 
 the public. It is more carefully written than the letter of 
 friendship, because it is meant for publication. In style and 
 finish it approaches the essay or treatise in fact it may be 
 called an essay plus the formalities of epistolary correspon- 
 dence. 
 
 Occasion for this Letter. The occasion is usually a grave 
 one some great political or religious upheaval. For ex- 
 ample, the late Armenian massacres which were the occasion 
 of an open letter addressed by Mr. Gladstone to the Duke of 
 Westminster. The war between Spain and America occa- 
 sioned the writing of an open letter by Minister De Lome to 
 the American people. The first open letter written by an 
 Englishman was that of St. Gildas to the ancient Britons, 
 pleading for certain church reforms. Since that time the open 
 letter has often appeared as an index of vicissitudes in political 
 and religious life. The most elaborate open letter in English 
 literature is that of Cardinal Newman to the Duke of Nor- 
 folk, wherein the author attempts to allay public feeling in the 
 matter of Vaticanism. 
 
 Publicity of Such Letters. They attain a wide publicity, ow- 
 ing to the excitement which prevails at the time they are 
 
 118 
 
THE LETTER l JQ 
 
 written. As soon as the open letter is received, it is given 
 to the public press by the person to whom it is addressed - 
 this with the full consent and understanding of the author. 
 Sometimes the open letter is made a feature of the weekly 
 periodical or the magazine. For example, the letters that 
 appear in the New York Sun or the Century Magazine let- 
 ters addressed to the editor, but intended for the public. 
 
 Style. The style of the open letter is dignified and formal, 
 calm, dispassionate. It is written, as a rule, by some prom- 
 inent citizen an official of the church, it may be, or of the 
 state ; and it treats of subjects which appeal to the whole com- 
 munity. As it is intended to be a calm, critical survey of some 
 warmly debated problem, the open letter appeals to the under- 
 standing, rather than to the imagination. The personality of 
 the writer, which shines through the ordinary letter, is kept 
 out of this work. It is occupied with argument, exposition, a 
 plain statement of facts. 
 
 The Love-Letter. The love-letter, as the name implies, is 
 a branch of erotic literature. It deals with the tender passion 
 which has inspired so much that is pure and vile in the world's 
 classics. Like the letter of friendship, the love-letter possesses 
 the charm of incommunicable individualistic traits; for here, 
 if anywhere, personality appears and appeals. This letter is 
 sometimes defined as a lyric in prose. Heart and fancy wield 
 the pen. 
 
 Universality of Appeal "All the world loves a lover"; and. 
 as a consequence, the whole world reads the love-letter. No 
 man or woman is so poorly educated as to feel incompetent to 
 write a love-letter. Hence, if all the love-letters written could 
 be collected, the world would not contain the books. In every 
 home, under lock and key, there is a small packet of them, 
 
I20 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 too sacred for the public eye, yet withal, the purest kind of 
 literature. 
 
 Style. The style of the love-letter is highly emotional, vary- 
 ing with every mood and fancy, extravagant to a degree 
 almost incredible, but well understood by those who have ex- 
 perienced the spell of this tender passion. The style may be 
 compared to a tropic flower garden, it is so luxuriant, so brim- 
 ful of beauty; metaphor, simile, all kinds of figure and all 
 kinds of illustration, abound. Perhaps the best examples of 
 its luxuriance are found in the Epithalamium of Spenser and 
 the sonnets of Petrarch and Shakespeare. Like the letter of 
 friendship, it is free, easy, familiar no method but " the 
 heart's way." 
 
 Literary Use. The love-letter is prominent in works of fic- 
 tion. Sometimes it is introduced to elaborate the plot, fre- 
 quently adding thereto the element of complexity; sometimes 
 it serves as a summary of the action a delightful bit of retro- 
 spect or a breathing space like the lyric pause in dramatic 
 action. Such modern writers as Hall Caine, Henry James, 
 William Dean Howells, Marion Crawford, and others employ 
 the letter quite extensively. For example, the letters of Glory 
 Quayle in " The Christian"; although hers are not all love- 
 letters. 
 
 Publication of these Letters. The modern tendency to un- 
 lock all secrets and reveal all affairs of personal and private 
 character has seriously interfered with the privacy of the love- 
 letter. It is often published now in order to satisfy the some- 
 what morbid craving of the modern public. Several volumes, 
 like the " Love-Letters of an Englishwoman," have been enjoy- 
 ing an extensive circulation. It is only another example of 
 the popularity of erotic literature. There may be a difference 
 of opinion as to the propriety of publishing such letters, but 
 there is no question as to their literary value. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 THE LETTER (CONTINUED) 
 
 History of the Letter. The letter is one of the oldest prose- 
 forms in literature. It constitutes a part, sometimes a very 
 considerable part, of the literary life of historic peoples. From 
 time immemorial kings and princes sent words of greeting to 
 contemporary rulers, using the letter as their literary vehicle. 
 For example, the letter of Arius, King of the Spartans, to 
 Onias, high priest of Israel. Ambassadors and missionaries 
 through it made known their messages to the nations of the 
 earth. The use of the letter gradually crept into commercial 
 life, and after a time the lower as well as the higher ranks of 
 society began to employ it. 
 
 The Letter in Hebrew Literature. The epistolary litera- 
 ture of the Bible constitutes a department of the highest im- 
 portance. According to Dr. Moulton, three classes of compo- 
 sition come under the head of letter or epistle. The first and 
 largest class is made up of letters in the strictest sense, the 
 Epistles of Pastoral Intercourse. These have the full form 
 of epistolary correspondence, commencing with a salutation 
 from the Apostle, with whom other names are joined in some 
 cases, to a distinct church or fellow worker, and ending with 
 further salutations and sometimes an autograph message, and 
 with greetings general or by name. All pastoral affairs are 
 discussed with freedom. For example, the first letter to the 
 Corinthians, where St. Paul talks about church factions, moral 
 laxity, and other matters which come under pastoral super- 
 
 121 
 
I22 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 vision. A second class Moulton calls the Epistolary Treatise, 
 wherein the customary form of the letter is preserved while 
 the author enters upon a long dissertation concerning religious 
 doctrine. For example, in the letter to the Romans, the doc- 
 trine of Faith. A third class is called the Epistolary Manifes- 
 to; it is a circular letter addressed to the various churches. For 
 example, the general epistle of Saint Peter. Concluding his 
 analysis, Moulton remarks: " The epistles occupy in the New 
 Testament the place occupied by prophecy in the Old Testa- 
 ment. The prophets could move amongst their fellow coun- 
 trymen and bring to bear upon them the power of vocal ad- 
 dress. On the other hand, the apostles addressed those who 
 were scattered through distant cities, and could communicate 
 with the church as a whole only by letter. The analogous 
 Old Testament form the gnomic epistle is to be found in 
 wisdom literature. Like the Old Testament essay, it is crude, 
 poorly organized, yet sufficiently definite to be traceable. For 
 example, the third Book of Wisdom is a gnomic epistle; its 
 introduction makes clear that it is delivered in writing, and 
 on the application of a delegate who represents others besides 
 himself; the suggestion is of the intercourse that prevailed 
 between wise men at a distance, such as Solomon and Hiram 
 of Tyre." 
 
 Saint Paul the Representative Hebrew Author of Letters. 
 
 Of the large number of letter writers, Saint Paul ought to be 
 given first place, for among men of world-wide reputation there 
 is no author quite so prominent as the Apostle of the Gentiles. 
 Next to the Divine Founder of Christianity, there is no person- 
 ality so great in the New Testament, and a charming revela- 
 tion of this personality is given in the letters. These letters 
 are translated into every known language; they are read in 
 the churches of all Christian denominations ; they are univers- 
 ally admired on account of the nobility of character which they 
 
THE LETTER 12 $ 
 
 reveal. These letters are valuable in the highest degree as an 
 exposition of Christian doctrine ; but aside from their theolog- 
 ical value, they possess a permanent literary value. They are 
 filled with emotion, beauty, sublimity, pathos those qualities 
 that humanize writing and make it literature. They are four- 
 teen in number, and together form about one- fourth of the 
 New Testament. 
 
 How Classified. The letters of St. Paul are classed as open 
 letters because, although directed to separate churches and 
 communities, they were providentially intended to teach the 
 Church universal. With the exception of the letter to Phil- 
 emon they are open letters from one of the highest officials 
 of the Church written for the edification and instruction 
 of all the faithful. The letter to Philemon is private in char- 
 acter and must be classified among letters of friendship. 
 
 Special Literary Merit. The letters of Saint Paul reveal the 
 chief personality of primitive Christian times, excepting, of 
 course, the Divine Founder of Christianity. And the first 
 claim to consideration, from a literary point of view, rests upon 
 this fact the revelation of Saint Paul's character and per- 
 sonality his passion for righteousness, his burning zeal and 
 enthusiasm his intense love of humanity his courage, 
 charity, learning, eloquence all those traits that glorify 
 human nature and exalt human character are revealed in his 
 letters. The letters of Saint Paul are not only a revelation of 
 his own personality; they reveal the normal working of the 
 oriental imagination ; they reveal its normal development, as 
 the later writings of Saint John and the Book of Job reveal 
 its abnormal flights. The oriental imagination is the chief 
 glory of Hebrew literature. In Saint Paul it finds expression 
 in all kinds of metaphor, simile, personification. The letters 
 are full of such figures as " The Word of God is a two-edged 
 sword ; " " The wages of sin is death ; " " A door was opened 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 unto me in the Lord ; " " We are temples of the Holy Spirit." 
 All his imaginative work is normal, practical, severely simple; 
 like the parables of our Lord, in no way suggestive of the 
 grandeur or weirdness of the Apocalypse. Yet this imagina- 
 tive work is distinctly oriental. It is nature and life as both 
 appear beneath the Syrian skies. A third characteristic of his 
 letters is the frequent literary allusion. Like all great writers, 
 Saint Paul made many literary allusions. They are drawn 
 chiefly from early Hebrew books ; only three or four references 
 are made to profane writers. Quotations from the Old Testa- 
 ment are found in profusion throughout his letters ; for exam- 
 ple, about one-fifth of the letter to the Hebrews is in the form 
 of quotation. Saint Paul's range of reading beyond Hebrew 
 literature was evidently narrow ; although complete as regards 
 his own people. When Saint Paul addressed letters to the 
 Greeks and the Romans an opportunity was afforded to him 
 to display a knowledge of classic literature. Only one or two 
 classic quotations occur; among them one from Aratus of 
 Cilicia, a Greek lyric poet. But Saint Paul did not 
 have classic lore for an object he sought rather the souls of 
 men, and knew little else save the things of heaven. A fifth 
 characteristic of the letters of Saint Paul is their wealth of 
 feeling and emotion a characteristic of the best literature. 
 The fulness of a passionate and zealous heart finds expression 
 in his literary work as it found expression in missionary labors. 
 His boundless enthusiasm for religion and his intense, pas- 
 sionate, love of humanity fill his letters with emotion ; making 
 him the idolized apostle of the Protestant and the Roman Cath- 
 olic world. In comparison with him the other apostles are 
 frozen spirits, attractive in the order of grace, but without those 
 splendid passions and affections which immortalize the life and 
 letters of Saint Paul. The only apostle who approaches him 
 in largeness of heart and mind is Saint John. As a conse- 
 quence of this emotion, Saint Paul in his letters adheres closely 
 
THE LETTER 
 
 to the oriental style of writing, the distinguishing features of 
 which are first the frequent use of exclamations. His letters 
 abound in exclamations. For example, " O the depth of tht 
 riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God ! " " O man, 
 who art thou that repliest against God ! " Secondly, the frequent 
 use of the question mark. For example, in the letter to the 
 Romans over two hundred sentences are found in the form 
 of questions. Thirdly, the frequent use of exhortation and 
 the employment of the imperative rather than the subjunctive 
 mood for that purpose. Very frequently the argument is in- 
 terrupted by exhortations, as if heart and brain were in con- 
 stant rivalry emotion continually arresting the processes of 
 thought. All these features render his style vivid and im- 
 pressive. Judged by our severe northern standards of criti- 
 cism, this style is ill-suited to letters and much better adapted 
 to purposes of oratory. Saint Paul is accused of emphasizing 
 to excess these features of the oriental style, but the critic must 
 take into account the character of the writer, and the peculiar 
 temperament of southern nations. It is a strange fact that 
 his style was not modified by contact with the Romans, and 
 especially with the Greeks. The supreme test of a great genius 
 is to break the shackles of early environment. Saint Paul bore 
 the test in his religious work, earning the title of Apostle of the 
 Gentiles. But in his literary work he never rose above his 
 early Hebrew environment. In the matter and form of his 
 writings he remained to the very end a Hebrew of the 
 Hebrews. 
 
 The Letter Among the Greeks and Latins. There are very 
 few examples of the letter in ancient classic literature; al- 
 though many writers of a later period have left letters both 
 in Latin and in Greek. No authentic letter written by Plato 
 or Aristotle or the great dramatists or historians of Greece 
 has come down to us. And, if we except Cicero and Pliny, 
 
I2 6 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 the same statement applies to classic Roman authors. There 
 are allusions in Thucydides, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy and 
 other classic historians, going to show that the letter was a 
 familiar prose-form both in Greece and in Rome. But very 
 little care seems to have been exercised in preserving such 
 literary remains until we come to the Christian era. In the 
 case of Greece, the absence of the letter may be explained by 
 the destruction of the national archives the inevitable result 
 of conquest after conquest. In Christian times, besides the 
 letters of Basil, Chrysostom, Ignatius and other Greek fathers, 
 we have the collection of Alciphron, who lived in the latter 
 half of the second century, A. D. He collected three books 
 of letters, one hundred in all ; they are written in the best Attic, 
 and describe rather minutely the social life of Greece; perhaps 
 the best part of the collection are those letters that passed 
 between Glycera and Menander. The letters of Phalaris which, 
 if genuine, would be the oldest in Greek literature, are proven 
 to be spurious by Bentley, the English critic. However, they 
 are written in excellent Greek, and belong most probably to 
 the second century of the Christian era. 
 
 Letters of the Church Fathers. Concerning these letters, 
 Newman in his historical sketches offers the following criti- 
 cism : 
 
 Criticism by Cardinal Newman. " These ancient Fathers 
 (Greek and Latin) have left behind them just that kind of litera- 
 ture which more than any other represents the abundance of the 
 heart, which more than any other approaches to conversation : I 
 mean correspondence. Why is it that we feel an interest in 
 Cicero which we cannot feel in Demosthenes or Plato? Plato 
 is the very type of soaring philosophy, and Demosthenes, of 
 forcible eloquence; Cicero is something more than orator and 
 sage; he is not a mere ideality, he is a man and a brother; he 
 is one of ourselves. We do not merely believe it or infer it, 
 but we have the enduring and living evidence of it how? In 
 
THE LETTER 
 
 1-27 
 
 his letters. Now the case of the Church Fathers is parallel 
 to that of Cicero. We have their letters in a marvelous pro- 
 fusion. We have above 400 letters of Saint Basil ; above 200 
 of Saint Augustine. Saint Chrysostom has left us about 240; 
 Saint Gregory, the same number; Saint Nilus close on to 1,400; 
 Saint Isidore, 1,440. The Blessed Theodoret, 146; Saint Leo, 
 140; Saint Cyprian, 80 or 90; Saint Jerome, 100; Saint Ambrose, 
 90 ; Saint Bernard, the last of the Fathers, supplies 4/14 * * * 
 These letters are of very various characters, compared one with 
 another; a large portion of them were intended simply for the 
 parties to whom they are addressed ; a large portion of them 
 consist of brief answers to questions asked of the writer, or a 
 few words of good counsel or spiritual exhortation, disclosing his 
 character either by the topic selected, or his mode of dealing with 
 it. Many are doctrinal ; great numbers again are strictly ecclesi- 
 astical. Many are historical and biographical; some might be 
 called state papers ; some narrate public translations, and how the 
 writer felt towards them, or why he took part in them. For 
 example, Pope Gregory's epistles give us the same sort of insight 
 into the holy solicitude for the universal Christian people which 
 possessed him, that minute vigilance, yet comprehensive superin- 
 tendence of the chief pastor, which in a very different field nf 
 labor is seen in the Duke of Wellington's dispatches on the cam- 
 paign, which tells us so much more about. him than any panegyri- 
 cal sketch. On the other hand, the letters of Saint Isidore and 
 Saint Nilus consist of little more than one or two terse, pithy, 
 pregnant sentences, which may be called sermonets, and are often 
 as vivid as if we heard them. Saint Chrysostom's are for the 
 most part crowded into the three memorable years in which the 
 sufferings of exile gradually ripened into a virtual martyrdom. 
 Others, as some of those of Saint Jerome and Saint Ambrose, are 
 meditations on mystical subjects. Those of Saint Dionysius nf 
 Alexandria, which are but fragments, recount the various trials 
 of the time, and are marked with a vigorous individuality which 
 invests the narrative with an interest far higher than historical " 
 (Newman, Historical Sketches). 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 THE LETTER (CONTINUED) 
 
 CICERO'S LETTERS 
 
 Cicero, the Classic Representative of Ancient Epistolary 
 Writing. Among ancient classic authors, Cicero holds first 
 place as a writer of letters. In tracing the history of this 
 prose-form, he, like Saint Paul, deserves special notice. A 
 word about his life : on the steep side of one of the Volscian 
 hills, below which the river Liris, now the Garigliano, flowed in 
 a winding channel to the sea, not far distant from the kingdom 
 of Naples, lay the ancient town of Arpinum. In the neigh- 
 borhood of this town, where the Fibreno joins its small tribu- 
 tary stream to the waters of the Liris, amidst rocks and hills 
 and the loveliest of Italian landscapes, Cicero was born on the 
 third of January, B. C. 106. He was slain in 43 B. C. 
 
 His Career in Brief. He served in the Social War in 89; 
 traveled in Greece and Asia 79-77 ; Quaestor in Sicily in 75 ; 
 accused Verres in 70; Edile in 69; Pretor in 66; Consul sup- 
 pressing Catiline in 63; Proconsul in Sicily, 51-50; joined 
 Pompey 49-48 ; Philippics against Antony 44 ; proscribed and 
 slain by the second Triumvirate in 43. 
 
 General Estimate. Cicero is an example of the highest type 
 of pagan culture. Few men have been more praised, and 
 iew more vilified than Cicero. Two reasons may be assigned 
 the distinguished place he holds in history the weakness and 
 
 128 
 
CICERO'S LETTERS 129 
 
 strength of character which he alternately displayed in public 
 office and in private life. The chief fault in Cicero's moral 
 character was a want of sincerity. In a different sense of the 
 word from that expressed by Saint Paul, he wished to become 
 all things to all men. His private correspondence and his 
 public speeches were often in direct contradiction with each 
 other as to the opinions he expressed of his contemporaries; 
 and he lavished compliments in the Senate and the Forum 
 upon men whose conduct he disliked, and whose characters he 
 abhorred. One recognizes in him the arts and the vanity of 
 the politician. But, on the other hand, there were many sterling 
 qualities far outweighing this weakness qualities which will 
 forever entitle Cicero to the respect and homage of mankind. 
 
 As a Writer. His literary work is divided into three 
 classes : orations, philosophical treatises, letters. His orations 
 are fifty-six in number. They have been the models of oratory 
 in all countries ever since his time. To the second division 
 belong treatises on Philosophy, from which we derive all our 
 knowledge of the Greek systems which succeeded the schools 
 of Plato and Aristotle. The third division embraces Cicero's 
 letters. Cicero found the Latin language barren, crude, dis- 
 sonant ; he found it brick and left it marble. On his merit as 
 a writer, Cardinal Newman observes : " Cicero's art lies in 
 converting the very disadvantages of the Latin language into 
 beauties, in enriching it with metaphors and circumlocutions, 
 in pruning it of harsh and uncouth expressions, in systematiz- 
 ing its structure ; and herein we find that copia dicendi which 
 gained Cicero the high testimony of Caesar to his inventive 
 powers, and which we may add, constitutes him the greatest 
 master of composition that the world has seen." 
 
 His Letters. The letters of Cicero, next to his orations, 
 are the most valuable part of his literary work. They are 
 
I30 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 valuable, first of all, as a history of his domestic life from 
 his fortieth year almost to the day of his death. Like the 
 letters of Saint Paul in this regard, they reveal a charming 
 personality a character incapable of the apostle's zeal or 
 aggressiveness, but yet, so upright, pure and noble as to win 
 universal admiration even in Christian times when the standard 
 of moral excellence is so high. " These letters," writes De 
 Quincey, " open a door to his domestic life ; to say nothing of 
 their exquisite Latinity they are full of playful wit ; they have 
 a freshness and reality which no narrative of by-gone events 
 can ever hope to attain ; they show that Cicero was a man of 
 genial soul, of a most kind and amiable disposition ; they show 
 that he is always the scholar and the gentleman ; no one hav- 
 ing more of that refined polish which the Romans described 
 by the expressive word, Urbanitas." For, in the whole of 
 his correspondence, not a single coarse word or vulgar idea 
 occurs. 
 
 A Revelation of Private Life. The letters of Cicero as a 
 revelation of his private life, emphasize some traits of his 
 character, notably his passionate fondness for books and for 
 friends. Regarding books he writes to Atticus : " When my 
 librarian brought in and arranged my books, it seemed as if 
 my house had suddenly gotten a soul." Again he writes : 
 " I would sooner sit in my library with a bust of Aristotle 
 above my head than in a consul's chair. I envy not Croesus 
 with all his wealth and broad acres : give me only the power 
 to purchase books." Cicero was a constant book-buyer, gather- 
 ing parchments, rolls and manuscripts from all parts of the 
 empire. The letters of Cicero reveal his passionate love, not 
 only for books, but for friends as well. Hence his letters 
 are to some extent a history of many important personages 
 of his time. He corresponded with a number of public men ; 
 
CICERO'S LKTTHRS I ^ I > 
 
 for example, Antony, Croesus, Caesar, Brutus. Fully fifty 
 men of note in Roman History are mentioned in his letters. 
 
 Friendship for Atticus. The friendship between Cicero and 
 Atticus occupies the largest space in his letters. It was a 
 friendship cordial, sincere, begun in youth and never varying 
 during all the vicissitudes of their lives. On this point Niebuhr 
 remarks that there is no parallel case of such friendship in 
 early Roman history ; as the citizen lived simply for his coun- 
 try, having no regard for private or social affections. Cicero 
 possessed these affections, and cultivated friendship to a 
 degree which few Romans could comprehend. 
 
 An Autobiography. The letters of Cicero have all the 
 merits of autobiography. Cicero and Atticus lived on terms 
 of absolute confidence; and their long unbroken friendship 
 made it possible for Cicero to entrust Atticus with all kinds 
 of secrets respecting himself and his family. Hence, the 
 letters are a complete revelation of his private and domestic 
 life; in them are told his most secret plans and purposes; his 
 cares and troubles, whether at home or before the public. As 
 he writes to Terentia : "I consult Atticus about everything." 
 Accordingly, these letters appeal to our age, so curious to know 
 all the secrets about great lives. 
 
 The Character of Cicero as Revealed in His Letters. In- 
 sincerity has already been noted as revealed in his political 
 speeches. Aside from this, two glaring defects appear in his 
 character, otherwise so pure and noble. First, a lack of 
 self-reliance: he seldom trusted his own judgment; he feared 
 too much the hiss of the multitude. If he had not received 
 the counsel and support of Atticus, his public life doubtless 
 would have been a failure. The second defect in the character 
 of Cicero was an excitable, impulsive, disposition. It is sur- 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 prising to note in his letters how rapidly he sinks from exalted 
 moods to the depths of despair. He writes to Atticus : " I 
 am so disheartened and discouraged at times that, were it not 
 for your friendly counsel, I should commit suicide." And in 
 his last reverses, when the Roman Republic fell, Cicero would 
 certainly have committed suicide if Atticus had not exerted 
 his powerful influence, restraining this mercurial friend. 
 
 The Literary Value of His Correspondence. The letters 
 of Cicero satisfy all critical demands as a revelation of char- 
 acter. They are likewise valuable on account of their literary 
 form and content. The style is that easy, flowing, familiar 
 one, characteristic of letters of friendship. His style is a model 
 for all writings of that class. It is the style of Saint Paul, 
 minus the oriental features; for in it there are few question 
 marks or exclamations, and very little imagery. In this lit- 
 erary work, Cicero impresses the reader not only as artless 
 and unstudied, but as a man with unlimited resources in 
 thought, in language, and in the amplification of his theme; 
 and this impression, doubtless, led Newman to rank him as 
 the greatest master of composition that the world has seen. 
 
 Characteristics of His Epistolary Style. There are three 
 characteristics that lend value to the letters of Cicero : first, a 
 methodical development of thought a characteristic of all his 
 literary work and one rather too strongly emphasized in these 
 letters of friendship. Cicero was a profound student of phi- 
 losophy as well as of literature; believing that a thorough 
 study of the former is essential for successful interpretation 
 of and work in the latter; and in his letters he applied too 
 rigorously that method of thought-development, so highly val- 
 ued in his orations and philosophical works. A second char- 
 acteristic : a wealth of literary allusions and references ; he 
 was familiar with all the departments of classic verse and 
 
CICERO'S LETTERS 133 
 
 prose. His favorite authors : in poetry, Homer and ^schylus ; 
 in philosophy, Plato, Aristotle and Zeno ; in history, Xenophon 
 and Polybius. He writes to Atticus : " The orator, the 
 dramatist and the historian are the great educators of man- 
 kind." A final characteristic is the introduction of wit, humor, 
 pleasantry of all kinds. Unlike Saint Paul, Cicero often for- 
 gets his seriousness and severity, and his page is brightened 
 with the playful arid humorous side of life; hence, humanizing 
 elements find a large expression in his letters. Like Saint 
 Paul, Cicero was capable of most intense feeling, but then 
 he employs the language of despair, not of hope. In the art 
 of writing letters and orations, Cicero, since his time, has 
 been the world's model; his influence upon these departments 
 of prose, always pronounced, has never waned. The following 
 criticism from the pen of an English biographer, Mr. Forsyth, 
 may fittingly close this examination of the letters of Cicero : 
 
 Criticism by Forsyth. " I propose to notice a few of these 
 early letters to Atticus somewhat in detail, for they will give 
 us a good idea of Cicero's style and habits of thought, and 
 also show the cordial friendship that existed between these two 
 eminent men a friendship as frank as it was sincere, which 
 never varied during all the vicissitudes of their lives, and was 
 terminated only by death. In the first letter written in the lat- 
 ter part of the year to Atticus in Epirus on the Western coast 
 of the Adriatic, where, in the neighborhood of Buthrotus, he 
 had recently purchased an estate, Cicero begins by alluding 
 in feeling language of affectionate sorrow to the death of his 
 cousin, or, as he calls him, brother Lucius the only son of 
 his uncle Lucius who had, as we have seen, been associated 
 with him in the prosecution of Verres. Cicero greatly deplored 
 his loss, and speaks of him as a man endowed with every ex- 
 cellence, and distinguished by great sweetness of disposition. He 
 next refers to a subject which was a fertile source of domestic 
 annoyance for many years, the unhappy disagreement between 
 Quintets and his wife Pomponia, who was a sister of Atticus. 
 Quintus was a man of hasty temper, easily vexed, but soon ap- 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 peased, and Pomponia seems to have been a lady rather apt to take 
 offence, and jealous of her imagined rights, what we may call 
 touchy, and inclined to stand on her dignity. A little anecdote 
 which Cicero relates of her in one of his letters, and which will 
 be afterwards mentioned, exhibits her in a sulky and unamiable 
 mood. Terentia also and Pomponia did not get on very well to- 
 gether. The frequent quarrels of the ill-matched pair, Quintus 
 and Pomponia, caused great distress both to Cicero and Atticus ; 
 Atticus naturally took his sister's part, and his displeasure at his 
 brother-in-law's conduct was most probably the reason why, at a 
 later period he abandoned the idea he once entertained of accom- 
 panying Quintus, in the capacity of qusestor, to his praetorian 
 government in Asia Minor. Cicero was not at all blind to- his 
 brother's faults, but he also knew the many good points of his 
 character ; and it is pleasant to read the kind and affectionate 
 terms in which he always speaks of him, until unhappily they 
 quarrelled many years after, as I shall have occasion to relate in 
 a subsequent part of this work. In the letter to which I am now 
 alluding, he tells Atticus that he might appeal to Pomponia her- 
 self to say how earnestly he had endeavored to induce her hus- 
 band to treat her with proper affection. Quintus was displeased 
 at this interference, and Cicero says that he had written to him 
 to appease him as a brother, to admonish him as a junior, and 
 to reprove him as an offender. Other topics in the same letter 
 are two matters of business in which Atticus was interested, but 
 about which nothing certain is now known. Cicero takes occa- 
 sion also to correct his friend in a point of law, and tells him 
 that the doctrine of adverse possession has no application in a 
 case of trust or question of guardianship ; which is very much 
 what an English lawyer would say at the present day. Atticus 
 had asked him to employ his good offices in reconciling Lucius 
 to him, for they had had a quarrel ; and Cicero assures him that 
 he had done so, but to little purpose. He next congratulates 
 Atticus on his recent purchase in Epirus, and begs him to re- 
 member to get anything which may be suitable for his own Tus- 
 culan villa ; ' for there/ he says, ' in that place alone do I find 
 rest and repose from all my troubles and toil/ This is the first 
 mention that occurs in Cicero's writings of his favorite villa at 
 Tusculum, which he seems to have bought only a short time be- 
 fore. He concludes the letter by telling Atticus that Terentia 
 
CICERO'S LETTERS 135 
 
 is suffering a good deal from rheumatism in the limbs ; and that 
 she and his darling Tulliola send their best compliments to him, 
 and his sister and mother. The last words are : 4 Be assured that 
 I love you like a brother.' In the next letter, which is short, 
 Cicero promises that Atticus shall not again have to complain of 
 him as a negligent correspondent, and begs his friend, who has 
 plenty of leisure, to copy a good example. He mentions that 
 Fonteius has purchased the home of Rabirius at Naples, which 
 Atticus had had some thoughts of buying; and says that his 
 brother Quintus now seemed to be on good terms with Pom- 
 ponia, and that they were both staying at his country residence 
 near Arpinum. The manner in which he communicates the next 
 piece of intelligence is disappointing, if we accept the usual read- 
 ing. It is the death of his own father, and all he says on the 
 subject is this: ' My father died on the 25th of November.' He 
 then turns off to ask Atticus to look out for appropriate orna- 
 ments for his Tusculan villa. This looks, to say the least, cold 
 and unfeeling; and yet Cicero was the very reverse of being 
 either cold or unfeeling. We have seen that he deplored in the 
 language of genuine sorrow the loss of his cousin Lucius, and 
 we learn that his grief for the death of his daughter Tullia was 
 so excessive that he was derided for it by his enemies. We are 
 therefore surprised to find him noticing so shortly and dismiss- 
 ing so summarily the death of his excellent father. But the 
 truth is that what we call sentiment was almost wholly unknown 
 to the ancient Romans, in whose writings it would be as vain to 
 look for it as to look for traces of Gothic architecture amongst 
 classic ruins. And this is something more than a mere illustra- 
 tion. It suggests a reason for the absence. Romance and senti- 
 ment came from the dark forests of the North, when Scandi- 
 navia and Germany poured forth their hordes to subdue and 
 people the Roman Empire. The life of a citizen of the Republic 
 of Rome was essentially a public life. The love of country was 
 there carried to an extravagant length, and was paramount to 
 and almost swallowed up the private and social affections. The 
 State was everything ; the individual comparatively nothing. In 
 one of the letters of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius to Pronto, 
 there is a passage in which he says that the Roman language 
 had no word corresponding with the Greek ^vAooropca , the 
 affectionate love for parents and children. Upon this Xiebuhr 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 remarks that the feeling was ' not a Roman one ; but Cicero 
 possessed it in a degree which few Romans could comprehend, 
 and hence he was laughed at for the grief which he felt at the 
 death of his daughter Tullia.' His divorce from Terentia ap- 
 pears to be a violent exception to the general rule of his charac- 
 ter ; and we shall have to consider hereafter whether he can or 
 cannot be justified for his conduct on that occasion. In these 
 first letters we get a few glimpses of his domestic life. He tells 
 Atticus that his daughter Tulliola, his darling (delicce nostrce), 
 is betrothed to Calpurnius Piso Frugi. This event, which we 
 should have thought full of interest to him, he mentions in the 
 most lacoAic manner Tulliolam C. Pisoni L. F. Frugi despon- 
 dimus. frhe young lady was then only nine, or at the most 
 eleve^^ars old. Atticus had promised her a present, and Cicero 
 tells him that she looked upon her father as bail for the perform- 
 ance, but he intended rather to forswear the obligation than 
 make it good. In another letter he says that Tulliola has brought 
 her action (diem dat), and summoned bail." 
 
 Thus we learn the kindly disposition, the playful moods 
 of the real Cicero, about whose letters there is/a charm to 
 which we have nothing comparable in all antiquity. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 THE LETTER (CONTINUED) 
 
 CHESTERFIELD 
 
 Lord Chesterfield. In English literature we coimt a num- 
 ber of distinguished authors who have left permanent con- 
 tributions in the shape of letters ; among these, n^jj|^pre 
 distinguished than the " first gentleman of Europe," the glory 
 of the reign of Queen Anne Lord Chesterfield. Like Saint 
 Paul and Cicero, Lord Chesterfield enjoys a world-wide 
 reputation ; and any summary of the history of letter-writing 
 howsoever meagre, could not exclude him from special notice. 
 
 BiographicSi^ata. The fourth Earl of Chesterfield, Philip 
 Dormer Stanhoplywas born in London on September 22, 1694; 
 in his early training he had all the advantages that wealth and 
 nobility afforded. His education, begun under private tutors, 
 was completed at Cambridge. He traveled much on the con- 
 tinent, admired the French above all other continental races 
 and resolved on his return to teach his boorish countrymen, 
 their art of deportment and good manners. He observed the 
 sharp contrast between the polite, polished Frenchman and 
 the rough, ill-mannered Saxon. He entered the House of 
 Commons, but his oratory was ineffective ; he lacked force and 
 power ; he drifted into the House of Lords ; was several times 
 a British Ambassador on the continent and once Lord Lieu- 
 tenant of Ireland. On the whole, his political life was not 
 brilliant, but it brought him into contact with the eminent men 
 
 137 
 
I3 g ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 of his time. Chesterfield is described as a man of splendid 
 intellect, extraordinary fervor and energy, a close observer 
 of life and conduct. He had lived in courts and grew accus- 
 tomed to all kinds of diplomatic warfare; he knew all the 
 literary and political lights of his day. Like Matthew Arnold, 
 he was an apostle of sweetness and light to the British Philis- 
 tine. To him Dr. Johnson was a typical Briton, and as Ches- 
 terfield termed him, ' a respectable Hottentot.' He contin- 
 ually .complains about our Teutonic love of the vast, the 
 vulgar and the horrible. 
 
 The Charm of His Manners. The name of Chesterfield has 
 become a synonym for good breeding and politeness. It is 
 associated in our minds with all that is graceful in manner, 
 attractive in appearance and polite in speech. He was the most 
 popular man of his age. His manners were so- fascinating 
 and his personal appearance so attractive that he was styled 
 the first gentleman of Europe. He forced life, writes Saints- 
 bury, to yield him all the happiness that it is capable of afford- 
 ing; socially, his career was like a triumphal procession, not 
 the dull round of cares allotted to most men. He may be 
 considered as a splendid type of the successful man of the 
 world. 
 
 Literary Work. The literary work of Chesterfield is ex- 
 tensive. His long life was largely one of leisure; and he 
 devoted much of it to various kinds of writing. He wished 
 to become known as a patron of letters and of literary men. 
 But his fame as a writer rests exclusively upon a volume of 
 letters written to his son and grandson, and first published 
 in 1744. 
 
 Subject-Matter of the Letters. The letters, taken collec- 
 tively, are a system of precepts intended to train a man for 
 
CHESTERFIELD , ,, , 
 
 worldly success. According to Chesterfield, there are three 
 chief sources of success in this world : first, knowledge; second, 
 energy ; third, manners. The letters of Chesterfield lay almost 
 equal stress upon knowledge, energy and good manners. On 
 the value of knowledge he writes thus : " You cannot expect 
 to succeed in this world without knowledge, for an ignorant 
 man is contemptible and insignificant ; he may be said to exist 
 < he does not live. However industrious or however ]K)lite 
 you may be, you will never gain the highest respect of people 
 unless you possess a cultivated intelligence." Lord Chester- 
 field emphasizes two kinds of knowledge : first, the knowledge 
 of books. " I would have you," he writes to his son, " ac- 
 quainted with the best that has been thought and written ; for 
 acquaintance with the best thought will bring you into the com- 
 pany of the ablest minds; it will stimulate high and right 
 thinking in yourself; and such company will be a refuge from 
 the cares of active life. Those men are unfortunate who have 
 not in youth acquired a taste for such study. They are, so 
 to speak, exiles from the best society." The second kind of 
 knowledge which Chesterfield recommends, is that of men. 
 He writes : " In the word, knowledge, I comprehend not only 
 a knowledge of books, but also a knowledge of the world - 
 that knowledge which is gained from actual contact with living 
 men; and which for practical purposes is more valuable even 
 than that of books. It is true that a knowledge f the world 
 can be acquired only in the world ; but I would have you begin 
 this study now, in the miniature world around you ; make a 
 careful study of your school companions ; observe their conduct 
 the chief traits of each character, and compare one character 
 with another These studies will serve as a basis for the knowl- 
 edge of mankind. Remember that your success in after life 
 depends largely upon your ability to deal with our fellow men; 
 and you cannot deal with them successfully unless you study 
 and know them. They must be studied as you study books." 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 Energy and Application. After knowledge, Chesterfield 
 urges energy as the second source of worldly success. He 
 constantly repeats this advice to his son, to be energetic, active, 
 industrious. And in one of his letters he employs that fre- 
 quently quoted maxim : Whatever is worth doing at all, is 
 worth doing well. Writing about energy as a factor in 
 worldly success, Chesterfield insists upon the necessity of form- 
 ing in youth a just estimate of the value of time. " W r hoever 
 values time aright will form habits of industry. He will be 
 energetic and active. What I do, and ever shall regret, is the 
 time which while young I lost in mere idleness and in doing 
 nothing. This is a common defect of youth against which I 
 beg you will be most carefully upon your guard. Every mo- 
 ment may be of some use, even moments devoted to pleasure 
 and recreation, for the mind may be always alert ; and society 
 will yield knowledge as well as pleasure." Again he writes : 
 " Whatever you do, do it with all your power, with all your 
 energies centered therein for the time being. Success depends 
 upon the concentration and the awakening of all one's energies ; 
 while failure is too frequently the result of a slovenly and par- 
 tial application of these energies. I beg of you to pardon my 
 repetition of this advice, but I would have you energetic in 
 youth, especially in the mastery of knowledge; for remember 
 that whatever knowledge you do not solidly lay the foundation 
 of in youth, .you will never be master of while you breathe." 
 
 Good Manners. Finally, the letters of Chesterfield empha- 
 size the necessity of good manners as a condition and source 
 of success in the world. His letters have become famous on 
 account of their extensive and careful treatment of this sub- 
 ject. Fourteen letters are devoted exclusively to a discussion 
 of the rules of right conduct ; and throughout the remaining 
 letters this subject is repeatedly introduced. He writes : " You 
 must always expect to hear more or less from me upon the 
 
CHESTERPIELD ! 4 I 
 
 subject of good manners. Great talent and industry will gain 
 the esteem of mankind ; but politeness and good manners are 
 equally necessary to success. Intrinsic merit will win the ad- 
 miration of all : it will not win the affections of any. All 
 people are not judges of great learning and talent ; but all men 
 understand civility ; they understand when conduct is obliging 
 and agreeable; they easily and quickly determine good-breed- 
 ing." Chesterfield is accused of over-estimating the value of 
 politeness. But the world agrees with him in three particu- 
 lars : first, that any man who respects himself should on all 
 occasions and under all circumstances act the gentleman; sec- 
 ond, that good breeding is to all worldly qualifications what 
 charity is to all Christian virtues ; third, that for success in pub- 
 lic life, politeness and good manners are absolutely necessary. 
 
 Literary Merit of His Letters, The style, as well as the 
 subject-matter, makes these letters immortal. For the man 
 who advocated theaitmost gracefulness in conduct, and who ex- 
 hibited it in his life, was no less graceful in the manner of 
 his writing. " The letters," says Hutton, "are models of neat- 
 ness, elegance, purity of diction ; they are ideal in the graceful 
 adjustment of form to subject-matter/' Chesterfield in this 
 species of composition gives the following advice to his cor- 
 respondent : " The art of letter-writing is by no means an 
 easy one to master. The familiar letters which you write 
 should be patterned after conversation, where the highest art 
 is to conceal art ; a letter of that kind should seem easy, natural 
 and not smell of the lamp; the smallest traces of artifice are 
 offensive. Above all, let your letters speak what ' I trust in 
 God you will always feel the utmost gentleness and hu- 
 manity." 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 THE LETTER (CONTINUED) 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS EXAMPLES 
 
 \ 
 
 Pliny. Pliny, surnamed " The Younger," in order to dis- 
 tinguish him from the elder Pliny, his uncle, was born at 
 Como, Italy, 62 A. D. ; died 1 13 A. D. He took the name of 
 Caecilius from his father, who had married Plinia, the elder 
 Pliny's sister. Pliny is described as a man of refined taste, 
 highly accomplished, devoted to literature, kind and indulgent 
 to his freedmen and his slaves, gentle and considerate in all 
 his family relations, just in his dealings, munificent in the use 
 of his wealth, humane and forgiving to all who had offended 
 him. He was a lawyer by profession, a pupil of the famous 
 Quintilian. His letters were directed for the most part, to 
 the Emperor Trajan who had the sincerest regard and affec- 
 tion for their author. 
 
 Value of these Letters. There are few remains of Latin 
 prose literature so elegant, interesting and varied as Pliny's 
 letters. They were written and published on the model of 
 Cicero's letters, and they cannot fairly be called inferior to 
 those of Cicero himself. They are all carefully composed 
 and couched in the most graceful and polished Latinity. Blair 
 writes the following criticism : " Pliny's letters are one of the 
 most celebrated collections which the ancients have given us, 
 in the epistolary way. They are elegant and polite, and ex- 
 hibit a very pleasing and amiable view of the author. Indeed, 
 they are too elegant and fine; and it is not easy to avoid 
 
 142 
 
MISCELLANEOUS EXAMPLES 
 
 thinking that the author is casting an eye towards the pub- 
 lic, when he is appearing to write only for his friends. Noth- 
 ing, indeed, is more difficult than for an author, who publishes 
 his own letters to divest himself altogether of attention to the 
 opinion of the world in what he says; by which means he 
 becomes much less agreeable than a man of parts would 
 be, if without any constraint of this sort he were writing to 
 his intimate friend." 
 
 Pascal. He was born at Clermont-Ferrand on June IQ, 
 1623 ; died at Paris, August 19, 1662. He was a distinguished 
 French philosopher, geometrician, writer. His literary ac- 
 tivity was due to his connection with the celebrated monastery 
 of Port-Royal. He rose to the highest literary excellence in 
 setting forth and defending the doctrines of Port-Royal against 
 the Jesuits. As a result we have a collection of letters that 
 enjoy a world-wide reputation. 
 
 Value of His Letters. The following criticism is offered 
 by Professor Saintsbury : 
 
 Criticism by Saintsbury. " These letters of Pascal are the 
 first example of French prose which is at once considerable in 
 bulk, varied and important in matter, perfectly finished in form. 
 They owe not a little to Descartes, for Pascal's indebtedness to 
 his predecessor is unquestionably from the literary side. The 
 unanimity of eulogy as to the style of these wonderful letters 
 has sometimes tempted foreigners who feel or affect to feel 
 an inability to judge for themselves, into a kind of scepticism 
 for which there is absolutely no ground. The first example of 
 polite controversial irony since Lucian, these letters have con- 
 tinued to be the best example of it during more than two cen- 
 turies, in which the style has been sedulously practiced, and in 
 which they have furnished a model to generation after genera- 
 tion without being surpassed by any of the works to which they 
 have shown the way. The unfailing freshness and charm of 
 the contrast between the importance, the gravity, in some cases 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 the dry and abstruse nature of their subjects and the light- 
 ness, sometimes almost approaching levity in its special sense, 
 of the manner in which these subjects are attacked, is a triumph 
 of literary art of which no familiarity dims the splendor, and 
 which no lapse of time can ever impair. The vividness and 
 distinction of Pascal's phrase, his singular faculty of inserting 
 in the gravest and most impassioned meditation, what may 
 almost be called quips of thought and diction without any loss 
 of dignity, the intense earnestness of meaning, weighting but 
 not confusing the style, all appear in his ' Thoughts ' and 
 ' Letters.' " 
 
 " Junius." An unknown writer employing this signature, 
 wrote a volume of world-famous letters, the authorship of 
 which has baffled the critics of two centuries. These letters 
 were written between January 21, 1769, and January 21, 1772. 
 They were published in the Public Advertiser, a popular news- 
 paper of the period. They attacked the King and the officials 
 of government. Edmund Burke remarked in the House of 
 Commons, " For my part, when I read this attack upon the 
 King, I own my blood ran cold ; Kings, Lords and Commons 
 are the sport of his fury." The authorship of these letters 
 has been attributed to no less than thirty-five persons prob- 
 ably to none with a better show of reason than to Sir Philip 
 Francis. But although the authorship is unknown, these let- 
 ters, next to those of Chesterfield, are the most famous in our 
 literature. 
 
 Value of the Letters. Mr. Wade, in his preface to The Let- 
 ters offers the following criticism : " As there is little in the 
 subject-matter of these famous epistles that could confer upon 
 them such enduring celebrity, they must be mainly indebted 
 for it to the writer's extraordinary powers, the varied resources 
 of which have enabled him, with the peculiar characteristic of 
 genius, to dignify and immortalize that which in its own na- 
 ture, is secondary and perishable. In this respect Junius 
 
MISCELLANEOUS EXAMPLES 1 45 
 
 stands alone he is the Napoleon of public writers; and, like 
 the author of the first and noblest epic, though he has a host 
 of imitators, he is still without an equal." Mr. John M. Good, 
 a contemporary critic, writes : " The classic purity of their lan- 
 guage, the exquisite force and perspicuity of their argument, 
 the keen severity of their reproach, the extensive information 
 they evince, their fearless and decisive tone, and, above all, their 
 stern and steady attachment to the purest principles of the con- 
 stitution, acquired for them, with almost electric speed, a popu- 
 larity which no series of letters have since possessed, nor per- 
 haps ever will; and, what is of far greater consequence, 
 diffused among the body of the people a clearer knowledge of 
 their constitutional rights than they had ever before attained. 
 Enveloped in the cloud of a fictitious name, the writer of these 
 letters, unseen himself, beheld with secret satisfaction the vast 
 influence of his labors, and enjoyed the universal hunt that 
 was made to detect him in his disguise he beheld the people 
 extolling him, the court execrating him, the ministers, and 
 more than ministers, trembling beneath the lash of his" invisible 
 hand." 
 
 Newman. Cardinal Newman, " the English Cicero," was 
 born in London, Feb. 21, 1801 ; died at Edgboston, August 1 1, 
 1890. An unrivalled master of English prose, Newman has 
 left several volumes of letters, two of which were published 
 recently. The following criticism of his style is offered by 
 the Editor of this Manual : There is a peculiar charm about 
 the prose writings of Newman, particularly so after his liter- 
 ary powers had fully matured. This charm is emphasized in 
 his letters, where the restraints of publicity are thrown off, and 
 a revelation of his winning personality is made. If the letter 
 be a revelation of character, then the letters of Newman are a 
 literary prize, for they reveal those traits and gifts of mind 
 and heart, which endear him to the English world. There is 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 the full play of humor, the vivacity of spirit, which resembles a 
 youth on holiday, the warmth and color of personal experience, 
 the frequent allusion drawn from his stores of classic learning, 
 and above all, a fund of good nature. In his letters, the asper- 
 ities of polemic writing give place to ' humanism ' in the strict 
 sense of that word. As Tennyson says : " A warmth within 
 the breast, melts the freezing reason's colder part." There is, 
 in the style of Newman, a twofold quality the intellectual 
 quality resulting from the careful discipline of an extraordi- 
 nary mind the freedom from artifice, the colloquial manner; 
 the grace, ease, and charm which result from this happy union, 
 are perceived at a cursory glance. Perhaps Newman is 
 equaled by no other writer in combining a hap-hazard manner 
 with a very definite purpose. 
 
 It is necessary to notice here, in connection with his letters, 
 only that happy colloquial manner, that urbanity and half- 
 careless desultoriness which characterize so much of his epis- 
 tolary correspondence; for if we accept the open letter ad- 
 dressed to the Duke of Norfolk, a letter which approaches 
 the essay or treatise in style, we must see how closely he 
 modelled his epistolary style upon Cicero, whose urbanity, ease 
 and freedom suggest the polite familiarity of conversation 
 without any accompanying tendency to be either commonplace 
 or vulgar. But after the last word of criticism is uttered, the 
 charm of Newman's letters is the charm of a unique and de- 
 lightful personality. 
 
 Pope and Swift. A choice collection of letters comes from 
 the pens of Pope and Swift and their contemporary friends, a 
 collection which Blair calls the most celebrated in our litera- 
 ture. He writes : " This collection is, on the whole, an en- 
 tertaining and agreeable one; it contains very much wit and 
 ingenuity. It is not, however, altogether free from the fault 
 imputed to Pliny's epistles, of too much study and refinement. 
 
-MISCELLANEOUS EXAMPLES 
 
 In the variety of letters from Pope and his friends, we find 
 many that are written with ease and a beautiful simplicity. 
 The letters of Dean Swift exhibit his character fully, with all 
 its defects ; hence they are not open to the charge of artificiality. 
 But such is not the case with Mr. Pope the censure of writ- 
 ing letters in too artificial a manner falls heaviest upon him ; he 
 is too fond of writing like a wit, and his letters to ladies are 
 full of affectation." 
 
 Walpole. Horace Walpole, the fourth Earl of Oxford, was 
 born at London, October 5, 1717; died there March 2, 1797. 
 His literary activity lay chiefly in the department of Memoirs 
 and Letters; of the former the most remarkable are the Me- 
 moirs of George II. and George III. Of the latter, many vol- 
 umes were written, some fourteen in all. The following criti- 
 cism is offered by William P. Courtney : " The pen was ever in 
 Walpole's hand and his entire compositions would fill many vol- 
 umes. But his delightful Letters are the crowning glory of 
 his life. His correspondents were numerous and wide- 
 spread." The Letters were published at different dates, but. 
 the standard collection is that by Peter Cunningham (9 vols., 
 1857). Walpole has been styled the best letter-writer in the 
 English language; and few, indeed, are the names which can 
 compare with his. In these letters his very foibles are penned 
 for our amusement, and his love of trifles for, in the words 
 of another Horace, he was ever " nescis quid meditans nugarum 
 ct totus in illis " minister to our instruction. Through the 
 medium of the letter he communicated to his friends every 
 fashionable scandal, every social event, and the details of every 
 political struggle in English life. Perhaps the best critical es- 
 timate of the author may be found in Macaulay's sketch of his 
 life and character. 
 
 Montagu and Sevigne. Lady Mary Montagu and Madame 
 de Sevigne are perhaps the most distinguished women-writers 
 
I4 g ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 in this department of literature. The former was a contem- 
 porary of Pope, born in London in 1690; died in 1762; the 
 latter was born at Paris, 1626; died, 1696. The letters of 
 both women are classics. 
 
 Criticism by Thomas B. Shaw. " Lady Mary Montagu de- 
 scribed her travels over Europe and the East in those delightful 
 letters which have given her in English literature a place resem- 
 bling that of Madame de Sevigne in the literature of France. 
 Lady Mary was the first traveler who gave a familiar, picturesque 
 and animated account of Oriental society, particularly of the 
 internal life and manners of the Seraglio, to which her sex and 
 her high position gave her unusual facilities of access. Ad- 
 mirable common sense, observation, vivacity, extensive reading 
 without a trace of pedantry, and a pleasant tinge of half-playful 
 sarcasm, are the qualities which distinguish her correspondence. 
 The style is perfection ; the simplicity and natural elegance of 
 the high-born and high-bred lady combined with the ease of 
 the thorough woman of the world. The moral tone, indeed, is 
 far from being high, for neither the character nor the career 
 of Lady Mary had been such as to cherish a very scrupulous 
 delicacy. I have compared her to Madame de Sevigne, but 
 the differences between the two charming writers are no less 
 striking than the resemblances. In Lady Mary there is no trace 
 of that intense and even morbid maternal affection which 
 breathes through every line of the letters addressed to Madame 
 de Grignan ; nor is there any of that fetish-like worship of 
 the court which seems to pervade everything written in the 
 chilling and tinsel atmosphere that surrounded Louis XIV. In 
 wit, animation, and the power of hitting off, by a few felicitous 
 touches, a character or a scene, it is difficult to assign the palm of 
 superiority. Lady Mary was unquestionably a woman of far 
 higher intellectual calibre, and of a much wider literary develop- 
 ment. She can reason and draw inferences where Madame de 
 Sevigne can only gossip, though it must be allowed that her gos- 
 sip is the most delicious in the world." . . . 
 
 Owing to her intimacy with the French Court, her letters 
 are valuable from an historical point of view as well as for 
 charm of expression. 
 
MISCELLANEOUS EXAMPLES 149 
 
 Modern Examples. The singular charm and grace of style 
 found in the following collections is admitted by all critics : 
 The Letters of Matthew Arnold, Coleridge, Carlyle, the 
 Brownings, Shelley, Moore, Byron, Johnson, Goldsmith, 
 Cowper, Goethe, Schiller, Voltaire, Balzac, Renan, Gladstone, 
 Emerson, Hawthorne, Lincoln, and the encyclical Letters of 
 Leo XIII. Some of these collections are combined with the 
 biographies of the authors, which must tend to make them 
 all the more entertaining and instructive. Almost every lit- 
 erary man of note in modern times has made some contribution 
 to this department of literature. (For choice specimens of the 
 Letter, see Appendix I.) 
 
 Works of Criticism. No attempt has been made, as yet, to 
 deal adequately with the criticism of the Letter. Criticism 
 exists, but only in a fragmentary form, and in connection with 
 other and more important works. Perhaps the largest amount 
 of it is to be found in prefaces to volumes of Letters ; in Biog- 
 raphies and Memoirs, and in the larger Encyclopaedias. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 THE ESSAY 
 
 A Standard Prose-Form. The essay is a term applied to a 
 species of prose-writing which ranks just above the letter on the 
 scale of prose-forms. It is recognized as a standard prose- 
 form ; and in English literature has held a place since the days 
 of Queen Elizabeth. At the present time it is the most popular 
 form in the prose department, owing to the universal popu- 
 larity of magazines and other periodical literature. 
 
 The Meaning of the Word. The word, essay, comes direct- 
 ly from the French; indirectly, from the Latin. Originally 
 it denoted a certain weight equivalent to i l / 2 drachmae. In 
 French it had the meaning of trial, contest, or attempt. In 
 English the word essay, retained this meaning; it signified 
 a trial of strength, and applied equally to physical and mental 
 acts. For example, a boat-race in the English Channel 
 was called a " brilliant essay " by a sixteenth century writer. 
 Outside of literature, the word still retains the meaning of 
 trial or attempt. For example, Irving's Sketch-Book: " Our 
 first essay in travel to catch fish was along a mountain brook. " 
 Tennyson's Ode to Memory: " Thou needs must love thy 
 first essay." The accent is thrown on the last syllable wherever 
 the word is used in its literal meaning. 
 
 The Word, Essay, in Literature. The word essay meant 
 originally a rough draft or first effort in practice. It implied 
 a want of finish, an irregular, crude piece of work. Thus de- 
 
 '150 
 
THE ESSAY l $ l 
 
 fined, the essay embraced all kinds of miscellaneous writing. 
 For example, Cowley speaks thus of his translations : " This 
 essay is but to show you how the classics look in English 
 habit." Dryden writes: "I have made an essay of a letter 
 to your Highness one which must needs be corrected." The 
 word essay applied equally to verse. For example, Addison 
 referred to his tragedy of Cato as a " modest essay." The 
 best 'poetical work of Pope received the title of essay: " The 
 Essay on Man." " The Essay on Criticism." The title of 
 essay is no longer applied to poetry. 
 
 Modern Use. In modern times the word essay is restricted 
 to prose. It is applied by some writers to a whole volume 
 in prose. For example, Cardinal Newman's " Essay in Aid 
 of a Grammar of Assent " or his " Essay on the Development 
 of Christian Doctrine;" both of these are large and complete 
 volumes. Locke's "Essay on the Human Understanding;" 
 Burke's "Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful;" Freeman's 
 " Essay on the Norman Conquest ;" Butler's " Essay on Nat- 
 ural and Revealed Religion " are all examples in point. It is so 
 used whenever a writer feels that his effort lacks compre- 
 hensiveness or whenever the subject of the prose volume is 
 partially or inadequately treated. This application of the term 
 to a whole volume is gradually dying out. The essay, as now 
 understood, properly applies to a single, distinct, department 
 of prose. 
 
 A Definition of the Essay as a Standard Prose-Form. 
 Lord Bacon, who first employed this prose-form in English, 
 defines his essays as a series of notes set down significantly. 
 He writes in the preface : " I have called these brief notes 
 essays ; the word is late, but the thing: is ancient ; for Seneca's 
 Epistles, if you mark them well, are naught but essays." 
 Bacon adopted this prose-form from the French, using Mon- 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 taigne as a model ; and he evidently employed the term in its 
 primitive meaning as a crude literary attempt, fragmentary 
 rather than complete. In modern times the essay represents 
 something quite different from a rough draft or first sketch. 
 During the past three centuries it has been improved and pol- 
 ished by such writers as Addison, Dryden, Lamb, Macaulay, 
 Arnold, and at present it represents the very best literary work 
 of which a prose writer is capable. It is defined as a brief 
 prose Composition, highly finished, with unity of theme and 
 methodical development of thought. 
 
 A Work of Art. Because the essay possesses unity of theme 
 and methodical development, it ranks higher than the letter 
 on the scale of prose-forms. In fact, it is distinguished from 
 all miscellaneous writing by these characteristics. On the 
 other hand, it is distinguished from higher prose-forms by its 
 briefness. This characteristic has always marked the essay. 
 The treatment given to any theme in an essay is necessarily 
 incomplete and inadequate, owing to limitations. In this re- 
 spect the essay bears the same relation to higher prose-forms 
 that the Lyric bears to higher forms in poetry. Like the 
 Lyric, the essay is brief; and, like the Lyric, it demands the 
 highest literary finish and perfection. Addison, who has done 
 some of the best work in this department, gives the following 
 descriptive definition of the essay : " The essay is neither a 
 dissertation nor a thesis ; properly speaking, it is a work of art, 
 and must conform to artistic rules. Hence, it requires unity; 
 it must hang together, and round itself off into a separate lit- 
 erary entity. When written, the essay should be able to remain 
 a lasting contribution to literature." De Quincey writes : " An 
 essayist should make every sentence sparkle; he is never per- 
 mitted to be a dull or slovenly workman. He should be always 
 at his best; for the narrow limit within which the essayist 
 works demands superior merit in the performance." 
 
? CHAPTER XXII 
 
 ft 
 
 THE ESSAY (CONTINUED) 
 
 Origin and Development. The essay is found in the oldest 
 literature. As Bacon remarks, the name is new, but the thing 
 itself is ancient. In the Bible and in the oldest Greek and Latin 
 literature, the essay holds a place. 
 
 The Biblical Essay. The Hebrews did not give to the essay 
 that isolated character which it now possesses. We have no 
 evidence that it was ranked by them as an independent prose- 
 form; they invariably made it a part of a chapter or a book. 
 And it resembles in the Bible the linked essay of modern times 
 where several essays deal with a single theme, and afterward 
 become chapters in a large volume. The literary study of the 
 Bible demands the separation of verse from prose and their 
 subdivision into the various literary forms. Among these 
 forms, the essay in prose and the lyric in verse are found scat- 
 tered throughout the mass of Hebrew literature. The essay 
 prevails' in those parts occupied with story, history and moral 
 philosophy. For example, Exodus, Judges, Ecclesiasticus and 
 Ecclesiastes and throughout the Wisdom literature. 
 
 Definition. The Biblical essay is denned by Moulton as " a 
 number of miscellaneous thoughts collected around a common 
 theme." It lacks the coherence and literary finish of the 
 modern essay. The Biblical essay is much shorter than the 
 modern essay. It resembles the essays of Lord Bacon. The 
 Biblical essay developed from two sources : In Wisdom litera- 
 
 153 
 
I54 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 ture it came from the proverbs, the order being: first, the 
 proverb ; second, the proverb-cluster ; finally, the essay. In the 
 historical Books, the essay was the first crude attempt of 
 Hebrew writers to give unity and coherence to incidents of their 
 narrative. Incidents in the life of these wandering nomads 
 became themes or titles for their Historical essays. Hebrew 
 writers, in sharp contrast with the Greeks, cared very little for 
 art-form. Hence, the prose forms of the Bible, including the 
 essay, are not only the oldest but perhaps the poorest models 
 from an artistic point of view. However, there is no doubt 
 that Montaigne, Bacon and Feltham imitated the Biblical essay 
 in some particulars, especially in their synthesis of thought and 
 brevity of sentence. Their talent for packing thought in the 
 smallest compass was evidently stimulated by Biblical example. 
 Montaigne admitted that the Bible taught him how to express 
 his thoughts. in the briefest and simplest way. And this is the 
 chief reason why the Bible remains a prose model for writers 
 of every age. 
 
 The Essay Among the Greeks. In Greek literature the 
 essay is found as a distinct prose-form. The Greeks who have 
 furnished all models in verse and prose, have left a body of 
 literature in the form of the essay. Considered as a literary 
 form, the essay among the Greeks was of late growth. The 
 first literary effort of the Greeks consisted in song and narra- 
 tive, culminating in the epic. After the singer came the his- 
 torian, when the Greeks were willing to exchange myths and 
 legends for the facts of history. The lyric, the drama, the epic 
 in verse, and history, biography and fiction in prose, preceded 
 the essay in Greek literature. 
 
 A Period of Criticism. When Xenophon, the first Greek 
 essayist appeared, 430 B. C, Greek literature had passed 
 through its greatest creative period; just as English literature 
 
THE ESSAY ,^ 
 
 had done when Addison and Steele began to write. When 
 Xenophon appeared, an age of criticism had succeeded ages of 
 literary creation, and Greek society had grown complex, self- 
 conscious and introspective. Materials for criticism, both in 
 life and literature, had accumulated before the essays of Xeno- 
 phon appeared. Xenophon was an Athenian by birth. Like 
 London in the English world, Athens was then the center of 
 literary activity in Greece ; and Xenophon found abundant ma- 
 terial for criticism in the Athenian life and literature, just as 
 Acldison found it in the England of the eighteenth century. 
 Like Addison, Xenophon preferred to treat of social, domestic 
 and political matters in his essays. The literary reputation of - 
 Xenophon rests upon three kinds of work : history in the 
 Anabasis ; the historical novel in the Cyropaedia or boyhood 
 of Cyrus ; and finally, the essay. Of his voluminous essays ten 
 are still preserved ; by far the larger number are lost. Among 
 those preserved, we find such titles as Domestic Economy, 
 Horsemanship, the Duties of a Cavalry Officer, the Revenues 
 of Athens, Praise of a Spartan King. The essays preserved 
 are, with two exceptions, essays in criticism. They are brief 
 compositions in prose, highly finished, with unity of theme. 
 In these essays Xenophon supplied the literary world with a 
 new prose-form which has been in vogue ever since his time, 
 430 B. C. 
 
 Classifications of Greek Essay. The Greeks divided the 
 essay into five classes, the monograph, dialogue, symposium, 
 eulogy and memoir. 
 
 Monograph. The monograph, as' the name indicates, is an 
 essay dealing with a single theme and representing the original 
 discoveries or investigations of a single writer. It was sup- 
 plied by Xenophon in his essay on horsemanship; because the 
 writer believed that his essay contained an original investiga- 
 
!^6 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 tion into the methods for raising and training horses. In 
 modern times the monograph is exactly synonymous with the 
 scientific essay. It is applied to all brief prose compositions 
 embodying original research. As science deals with parts and 
 details of a class or species, this prose-form is admirably suited 
 to scientific investigation. 
 
 Modern Use. All scientists of modern times have made use of 
 the monograph. Some celebrated examples of the monograph 
 in modern scientific literature : Pasteur's Monograph on the 
 Silk Worm; Huxley's Monograph on a Piece of Chalk; Mi- 
 vart's Monograph on the Skeleton; Darwin's Monograph on 
 Coral Reefs; Virchow's Monograph on the formation of Cells; 
 Tyndall's Monograph on Heat as a Mode of Motion. Original 
 investigation in any department of science is now published, as 
 a rule, in the form of the monograph. This use is as old as 
 science itself; for there is in ancient Greek literature a mono- 
 graph by Euclid on Optics; and another on Harmony of 
 Sounds by the same writer. The monographs of Archimedes 
 on Spirals and on the Measurement of the Circle, are examples 
 in point. 
 
 The Dialogue. In the department of science the Greek 
 essay was called a monograph to indicate its chief character- 
 istics as a work of individual research. In philosophy the es- 
 say received two names, it was called either a dialogue or a 
 symposium. It received the title of dialogue when two per- 
 sons were introduced ; when more than two were represented, 
 it was named a symposium. 
 
 Definition of Dialogue. The dialogue is defined as a brief 
 prose composition with unity of theme, wherein the thought- 
 development is carried on by the conversation of two per- 
 sons. This method of thought-development satisfied the re- 
 
THE ESSAY 
 
 quirements of philosophical discussion ; allowing scope for de- 
 bate and introducing the disputants personally to the reader. 
 Hence, in Greek essays upon philosophy we are introduced to 
 the famous teachers of the Academy and the Lyceum, Socra- 
 tes, Plato, Aristotle, Xenocrates, Polemo. The dialogue is 
 sometimes called the Socratic method ; as it was his favorite 
 method of imparting knowledge. Cicero, who was a member 
 of the Greek Academy, writes : " The Academy employs the 
 dialogue merely to compare together different opinions, to see 
 what may be advanced on either side, and to leave one's listen- 
 ers free in forming their judgments." This was precisely its 
 purpose in the philosophical essay of the Greeks. It was not 
 introduced for the purpose of character study, as we find it in 
 the drama. The revelation of character was never the primary 
 purpose of the essayist. The subject treated, not the persons 
 treating it, absorbed his attention. If the names of the de- 
 baters were introduced, it was done simply to engage the at- 
 tention of the readers and satisfy the demands of discussion. 
 On this point Aristotle observes : " Whosoever aims at instruct- 
 ing men, should engage their attention in his subject by his 
 manner of treatment." Hence, the Greek use of the dialogue 
 in the unattractive prose of philosophy. It enlivened the work, 
 redeeming to some extent the barrenness of speculation. 
 
 Kinds of Dialogue. In the form of dialogue the ancient phil- 
 osophers wrote most of the essays handed down to us. The 
 dialogue as found in these essays, is conducted in two ways : 
 first, as direct conversation, where none but the speakers ap- 
 pear ; the author himself remaining in the background. This 
 is the method of Plato. Secondly, the dialogue reported with 
 such modifications and comments as will give the author a 
 prominent place in the essay. This is the method of Aristotle 
 which Cicero learned in the Academy, adopted in his work, and 
 which he praises as the most satisfactory way of treating phil- 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 osophy. Plato intended the dialogue for entertainment and in- 
 struction. While he made no attempt to depict characters as 
 they were drawn by Aeschylus or Sophocles there was a studied 
 attempt in all his essays to make the speakers consistent and in 
 a measure true to life. Hence, they were exhibited as polite in 
 conversation, graceful in manner and passionate in debate. 
 
 The Greek Essay. Among the philosophical essays of 
 Greece the dialogues of Plato and Aristotle hold first rank; 
 they were models for Greek and Latin writers ; and in English 
 literature they have many imitators. Dr. Blair writes of 
 Plato : " In his dialogues the scenery and circumstances are 
 beautifully painted ; the conversation is supported with much 
 dramatic coloring, for Plato was an idealist; he possessed the 
 poetic as well as the philosophic temper ; his imagination was 
 quite as active as his intellect ; as we may see in Phaedo and 
 the Republic. Philosophy did not furnish the desired scope 
 for his luxuriant imagination ; hence, Plato had recourse to al- 
 legory and fiction." 
 
 The Dialogue-Essay in English Literature. In English 
 literature Bishop Berkeley imitated Plato. The philosophical 
 essays of Berkeley written in the form of dialogue are unriv- 
 alled imitations of the Greek master. One point of difference : 
 Berkeley cares less for the pictorial setting and environment of 
 his characters ; whereas, Plato cared as much for scenery as a 
 dramatist. David Hume, like Bishop 'Berkeley, made use of 
 Plato as a model. A collection of essays called " Dialogues on 
 Natural Religion," were written by Hume in imitation of 
 Plato. Hume is unquestionably one of the finest writers of 
 English prose ; but in the management of the dialogue he lacks 
 the imaginative power of Plato. However, his style, less florid 
 and figurative, seems to be better adapted to the requirements 
 of philosophical discussion. Mallock, Lilly, Mivart and Ward 
 
THE ESSAY 
 
 are modern writers who occasionally use the form of dialogue 
 in essays on philosophical subjects. But this method is no 
 longer popular; the dialogue and the philosophical theme so 
 treated are rapidly passing from the realm of the essay to the 
 novel with a purpose. Aristotle's method of putting the author 
 in the foreground together with the leaders of the dialogue, was 
 imitated by Lucian and Cicero, but he has no imitators in Eng- 
 lish literature. The dialogues of Lucian are not philosophy ; 
 they are rather satirical essays on the pedantry of philosophy ; 
 they also ridicule the Pagan gods ; they are gay and humorous ; 
 full of pleasantry after the fashion of Voltaire. They add 
 the comments of the author to the dialogue and manage to 
 keep Lucian in the foreground, just as Aristotle had previously 
 done. Cicero is the only distinguished writer in philosophy, 
 who adopted the method of Aristotle. Of his method Cardinal 
 Newman writes as follows : " A peculiarity of Cicero's phil- 
 osophical discussions is the form of dialogue in which most of 
 them are conveyed the method followed by Aristotle. Cice- 
 ro gained great advantages by adopting this method ; in contro- 
 verted questions he was not obliged to discover his own views ; 
 he could detail opposing arguments clearly; he could add his 
 own views and comments throughout the essay ; he carried the 
 reader on by short stages and easy journeys. The dignity of 
 his speakers, their mutual courtesy ; the eloquence displayed on 
 both sides, the clearness and terseness of the style throw a pe- 
 culiar charm around his philosophical essays." 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 THE ESSAY (CONTINUED) 
 
 The Symposium. The symposium was a Greek essay in 
 which three or more persons carried on a spirited conversation. 
 It contained more life and movement than the dialogue, owing 
 to the number of speakers engaged. All kinds of themes were 
 discussed, as they are now discussed in the popular magazine. 
 
 Origin. Xenophon wrote the first symposium in Greek. 
 This essay has come down to us : it is called " The Banquet." 
 In it we are introduced to Socrates and a party of disputants 
 around a banquet table. The Greek symposium, unlike the 
 Greek dialogue, offered several topics for discussion, thereby 
 adding variety of theme to variety of speakers. Plato em- 
 ployed the symposium in philosophy, but his favorite form of 
 the essay was the dialogue. In one example he introduces the 
 pupils and the work of the Academy. The symposium was a 
 popular form of Greek and Latin literature during the long 
 struggle between rival schools of philosophy and between 
 Christanity and Paganism. Apologists and sophists employed 
 it. It was intended to appeal to the people, like a certain class 
 of novels written for purposes of controversy. Cardinal New- 
 man introduced the symposium into the Oxford controversy. 
 A collection of essays written by him is called " The Story of 
 a Convert." This work is a story only in name; it contains 
 neither plot nor character-drawing. It is the Greek symposium 
 copied from Xenophon and Plato, and found to be a successful 
 method of defending his position. In the department of fiction 
 
 160 
 
THE ESSAY 
 
 George Eliot's " Scenes from a Clerical Life " is a collection of 
 essays in which clerical characters are grouped after the fashion 
 of the Greek symposium ; there is no plot or character-drawing, 
 but the grouping is so arranged as to throw considerable light 
 upon clerical life in the Church of England. The symposium 
 in fiction was the forerunner of the short story which has now 
 attained such great popularity. 
 
 Use in Criticism. In English criticism there is one notable 
 example of the symposium the first one appearing in Eng- 
 lish literature ; it was written by John Dryden and published in 
 1668. It is called an essay on dramatic poesy, and deals at 
 considerable length with the principles of dramatic art. This 
 symposium is remembered rather on account of the novel form 
 than the thought ; although his justification of rhyme in pref- 
 erence to blank verse in the drama was a new departure. Dry- 
 den contended that rhyme was quite as natural in the drama as 
 blank verse and that it gave a necessary check to the imagina- 
 tion. Dryden introduces five speakers and varies the themes 
 as the essay develops, in imitation of th'e Greeks. 
 
 The Modern Symposium. The modern symposium differs 
 from the Greek model in three ways : first, it deals with a single 
 theme; secondly, it offers a fuller treatment of the subject and 
 usually engages more persons in the discussion ; thirdly, in- 
 stead of being published as a single essay wherein the thought- 
 development is carried on by conversation, the modern sym- 
 posium is a small collection of essays printed together, linked to 
 a single theme, and presenting that theme from various points 
 of view. The symposium is a leading feature of all high-class 
 periodicals, whether newspapers or magazines. The quarterly 
 magazines alone are excepted from the general rule. All the 
 great problems of modern life are discussed in this manner, and 
 the advantage is obvious. Two magazines make a specialty of 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 the symposium: the Nineteenth Century (British) and the 
 North American Review. Almost every issue contains a sym- 
 posium on some public question. 
 
 The Eulogium. The fourth class of Greek essays received 
 the name of eulogium. Eulogistic literature in prose took first 
 the form of the essay ; afterwards it was about equally divided 
 between the essay and the department of oratory. The eulogy 
 was an essay written in praise of some important personage. 
 It applied equally to the living and the dead. It was an out- 
 growth of hero-worship which found expression in Homer, 
 Hesiod, and the epic-cycle long before the advent of prose com- 
 position. Because of the human theme, the eulogy made a 
 wider and stronger appeal than any other class of essay. It 
 had a place in the miscellaneous writings of all Greek authors 
 of note, and it is found today in every class of periodical liter- 
 ature. Its existence is a proof that the world honors the il- 
 lustrious living and dead in all countries and in every age. 
 
 Origin. The earliest eulogy found in Greek literature was 
 written by Xenophon in praise of a Spartan king. Xenophon 
 summarizes the virtues of his royal hero, emphasizing two in 
 particular his piety and strict discipline. Xenophon wrote 
 another eulogy called " The Recollections of Socrates. It is 
 the work of an admiring and affectionate disciple. In both es- 
 says the Greek writer idealized his subject; praise is bestowed 
 without discrimination. Among ancient writers the most dis- 
 tinguished author of eulogies, outside the field of oratory, was 
 Plutarch. One hundred and ten essays written by Plutarch are 
 preserved ; of these forty-six are eulogies. These eulogies deal 
 with celebrated characters in Greek and Roman history; they 
 are brief biographies such as are now printed in Quarterly Re- 
 views. Quintilian constantly refers to Plutarch as ff Laudator 
 temporis acti." The aim of Plutarch was to glorify and popu- 
 
THE ESSAY ,63 
 
 larize the heroes of the past. Hence he dwells continually upon 
 the wonderful deeds and virtues of historic idols. His page 
 glorifies both Greek and Roman. His essays are compared with 
 those of Macaulay : in both there is the sweeping assertion ; the 
 startling paradox; the long pompous sentence. Like Macau- 
 lay, though often inaccurate, he had a vast range of informa- 
 tion. These eulogies were collected and published as " Plu- 
 tarch's Lives." Besides the eulogies, there are nine examples 
 of the symposium and seventeen dialogues among the essays of 
 Plutarch. 
 
 In English. In English literature, Dr. Johnson imitated 
 Plutarch. He wrote a large number of essays which were 
 used as prefaces in an edition of the English Poets. These es- 
 says eulogized the poets of England, each according to his 
 merit; they were biographical and critical. Unlike Plutarch, 
 Johnson mingled praise and blame, as the subject required ; and 
 Johnson's fame rests upon this essay work in biographical 
 criticism, not upon his dramas or his<^itcionax^. The essays 
 were afterward collected and published as " Lives of the 
 Poets." The method of Johnson was adopted by contempo- 
 rary essayists ; he divided the essay into two parts giving about 
 equal space to biographical data and to criticism. Macaulay 
 imitated him in the essay on Milton the first that Tie pub- 
 lished and the one that made his reputation. Reviewers of any 
 note since the time of Johnson follow his method in their 
 magazine articles. Johnson gave the largest space to the mer- 
 its and virtues of a writer ; he placed the defects and faults in 
 the background ; and because the note of praise was the pre- 
 dominant note, his essays on English authors must be classified 
 as eulogies. Eulogistic literature finds a place in all English 
 magazines the great channels of essay-publication. 
 
 Modern Use. Some reasons are obvious for the surprising 
 growth of eulogistic literature in the form of the essay. This 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 growth is due in a measure to the growth of periodicals and 
 magazines. It follows the law of supply and demand. Topics 
 that appeal to the people are essential to the success of any pub- 
 lication. Hence, the mass of eulogies on persons who are, or 
 who have been popular idols ; they satisfy the demands of the 
 multitude. A second reason the multiplication of themes. 
 The educational and moral advantages of democracy, develop- 
 ing individual life, character and .personality, multiply themes 
 suitable to the eulogy. A third reason : the prevailing modern 
 tendency to know the secrets of extraordinary success in every 
 department of human endeavor; hence, the general desire to 
 draw near to great lives and pluck out the heart of their mys- 
 tery. " It is," says Emerson, " the old story of the moth and 
 the flame the riddle of the human sphinx." 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 THE ESSAY (CONTINUED) 
 
 The Memoir. Besides the monograph, the dialogue, the 
 symposium and the eulogy, there is a class of essays in ancient 
 and modern literature called memoirs. 
 
 Meaning of the Word. The term memoir in literature has 
 various meanings and is applied to different kinds, of literary 
 work. There are two distinct meanings attached to the word. 
 First, it is used as a synonym for memoranda or notes taken 
 by a writer in study, travel, observation ; miscellaneous items on 
 any subject, without unity or order. For example, the note- 
 book or scrap-book of an author. Secondly, it is defined as an 
 essay relating to some subject within the writer's memory 
 some subject personally known to the author. 
 
 As an Essay^ As an essay, the memoir embraces three kinds 
 of subjects. First, it deals with events in the life of some per- 
 son intimately known to the author ; in which case, it is classi- 
 fied as biography. For example, the Memorabilia of Xeno- 
 phon dealing with events in the life of Socrates, with whom 
 Xenophon as a pupil was intimately acquainted. An example 
 in modern literature: Talleyrand's memoirs dealing with the 
 life of Napoleon. Secondly, the memoir as an essay treating 
 events in the author's own life. The memoir is then classified 
 as autobiography. For example, the Apology of Socrates is 
 an essay in defence of his conduct : the Apologia of Newman 
 reviewing religious changes in his own life, is a collection of 
 essays autobiographical in character. The memoirs of Gibbon 
 
 165 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 the historian, Hume the philosopher, and Dryden the critic, 
 belong to the same class. Thirdly, the memoir is an essay in 
 natural history, dealing with the life of some plant or animal. 
 It does not reveal the profound research or enlarged informa- 
 tion expected in the monograph. It is rather material for 
 scientific investigation than the result of careful scholarship. 
 For example, the essays of Aiidubon on the birds of America, 
 collected in five volumes and published as memoirs in ornithol- 
 ogy. Darwin's Memoirs on Orchids and Climbing Plants. 
 Memoirs of John Burroughs on the characteristics of Amer- 
 ican animals. This use of the memoir was adopted from the 
 French, who apply it to any essay or collection of essays on 
 animal or plant life. When animal or plant life was treated 
 in a fictitious manner by ancient writers, or events narrated 
 as if occurring among human beings, and intended to enforce 
 some lesson, then the memoir was called an apologue. An 
 apologue among the Greeks took the form of prose. For ex- 
 ample, the essays of yEsop commonly known as fables. In 
 English literature it is found in verse and prose : for example, 
 the Hind and Panther ; the story of Gulliver. 
 
 Basis of the Memoir. Throughout its various applications, 
 the memoir is based upon some reminiscences or recollections of 
 the author. It is always written from the point of view of per- 
 sonal contact or experience. 
 
 As Biography. The difference between memoirs and regular 
 biography : Regular biography deals with an individual life in 
 a systematic, consecutive and complete manner; whereas me- 
 moirs are at best but fragments, glimpses or partial views of 
 the individual life. Hence memoirs bear the same relation to 
 biography proper as a kaleidoscope does to a picture. Because 
 the themes are. fragmentary and disconnected, memoirs always 
 take the form of essays. The plural, memoirs, is used in pref- 
 
THE ESS A}' 
 
 erence to the singular, because these essays are collected and 
 found iw volume form. 
 
 Literary Value. Memoirs are a species of prose. In com- 
 position they admit of the same freedom of treatment as a 
 letter. The author has the fullest liberty in the matter of se- 
 lecting topics, and he may ramble at will ; he usually casts aside 
 the dignity of serious prose, and fills his page with anecdote, 
 story, sketch, entertaining trifles of all kinds. But one quality 
 is demanded the composition should be written in a lively 
 style and convey some knowledge worth acquiring. French 
 writers excel in this class of work. Memoirs are more popular 
 in France than in any other country. The English people, ow- 
 ing to national temperament, demand a more serious kind of 
 prose. One class of memoir, called the apologue, has been pop- 
 ular in England, owing to the national love for moral allegory. 
 The apologue is fictitious biography in essay-form, enforcing 
 some moral lesson. 
 
 Tracts and Pamphlets. English writers employ all the 
 classes of essay found in Greek literature, using the same titles 
 and copying closely the Greek models. They have added cer- 
 tain kinds of essay-writing which came into existence with the 
 art of printing. Of these the pamphlet is first in the order of 
 time. The pamphlet has always been a popular essay in Eng- 
 land. Disraeli wrote : " Wherever pamphlets abound, there 
 is freedom; "and therefore the English have been a nation of 
 pamphleteers. The pamphlet is defined as a brief, controver- 
 sial essay a treatise in miniature. It deals with problems of 
 current interest, usually with political and religious matters. 
 
 A Special Pleader. The pamphlet is a special pleader, always 
 partisan in tone. In supporting a creed or party, it may be de- 
 scriptive, satirical, didactic ; but it is always controversial. It 
 is a record of popular feeling and its history represents the 
 
ANALYSIS OP PROSE-FORMS 
 
 changeful currents of public opinion, from the time that print- 
 ing began in England. 
 
 Synonyms. Sometimes the pamphlet was called a tract ; the 
 terms are synonymous now and apply to the same kind of es- 
 say. For example, the Tracts of Newman and Pusey have the 
 same significance as pamphlets. Originally, however, the pam- 
 phlet was more elaborate and had a wider circulation. 
 
 History of Tracts and Pamphlets. The history of tracts 
 and pamphlets is the most interesting chapter in the literary his- 
 tory of England. It is the record of great national debates 
 carried on by the most gifted literary men, with all the bitter- 
 ness and hostility the Saxon can command. The first national 
 debate in England arose over the subject of religion. In the 
 fourteenth century the Lollard doctrines and those of Wick- 
 liffe were warmly debated. Wickliffe and the Lollards sharp- 
 ened the British appetite for pamphlets. Next came the Hu- 
 manist movement, multiplying this class of essay in England. 
 Humanism dated from Petrarch who dug up the ancient Latin 
 and Greek classics and started a revival of learning. Human- 
 ism reversed the medieval ideals, making the most of this 
 world by centering thought upon man and nature and thus 
 placing the arts and sciences first in the curriculum of study. A 
 craze for the new gospel swept over Europe, England included ; 
 the evangelists of resurgent paganism were the tract and 
 pamphlet. Universities poured forth an endless stream of these 
 essays. In the publications of Caxton for 1490, tracts and 
 pamphlets have a large place ; they were the source of popular 
 instruction before magazines and newspapers came into exis- 
 tence. Among the Humanists of England, Sir Thomas More 
 was the most illustrious pioneer. The period of his life ex- 
 tending from 1478 to 1535, witnessed the hardest struggles of 
 the New Learning in England. More's first pamphlet, shortly 
 
THE ESSAY ^ 
 
 after leaving Oxford, was an attempt to reconcile the New 
 Learning with the Did. This pamphlet called "Ad Dorpium " 
 was widely circulated and helped to break down monastic prej- 
 udice against the revivalists of the ancient classics, and es- 
 pecially against the sciences. More lamented the treatment of 
 Roger Bacon and pleaded for a liberal attitude toward 
 the sciences. More did not antagonize the ancient religion, but 
 he did believe that the time spent by the Schoolmen in barren 
 speculation could be more profitably employed in studying the 
 arts and sciences. English reformers made use of tracts and 
 pamphlets. In their attacks upon the English Church they in- 
 variably employed this kind of essay. Erasmus, the best liter- 
 ary critic of the time, regretted these theological quarrels on 
 account of their evil effects upon literature. The best talent of 
 England was wasted, so he thought, upon vile, unworthy pro- 
 ductions. The tract and pamphlet o-f the Reformation were 
 too hastily prepared to have literary merit. In form and in 
 subject-matter they were cheap, vulgar, degrading a filthy 
 channel of abuse and calumniation, exhausting the vocabulary 
 of hate and scurrility. Men who might have made lasting 
 contributions to literature spent their days on this ephemeral 
 work of religious controversy. 
 
 The Puritan Tract. The Reformation reached a climax in 
 Puritanism. The best specimens of puritan literature are the 
 " Mar-Prelate Tracts " published in 1589; and the " Root and 
 Branch Pamphlets " published in 1640. These puritan tracts 
 and pamphlets were directed against the Church of England ; 
 and their aim was to uproot the idea of a religious hierarchy. 
 Hence, the title " Root and Branch Pamphlets/' The Mar- 
 Prelate tracts originated in a religious persecution of the Puri- 
 tans by Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, who acted under 
 orders from Queen Elizabeth. The Puritans refused to sub- 
 scribe to those doctrines of the English Church maintaining a 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 hierarchy. In the Mar-Prelate tracts the bishops and clergy 
 were bitterly attacked. Martin Mar-Prelate contributed forty 
 numbers to these tracts. Other writers like Penry, Throgmar- 
 tin, Udal, swelled the list, all of which were named after Martin 
 Mar-Prelate. The Mar-Prelate Tracts provoked replies, the 
 most brilliant of which were written by Thomas Nash a 
 pamphleteer whose chief weapon was satire. Nash wrote five 
 pamphlets in reply, after the style of Dean Swift. "A Month's 
 Mind for Pious Martin," was the most popular of these. The 
 Church of England employed the pamphlet as effectively as the 
 Puritans. But notwithstanding an increase in volume, tracts 
 and pamphlets at the close of the i6th and during the I7th cen- 
 tury were a worthless addition to literature. 
 
 Essays of Milton. The Mar-Prelate Tracts were followed 
 by the " Root and Branch Pamphlets." John Milton was the 
 chief contributor; he headed the list with a dozen essays 
 against Prelacy. These essays are unworthy of the author of 
 Paradise Lost. Outside of religious controversy, Milton wrote 
 prose with some sanity and merit ; his essays on Education and 
 the Liberty of the Press are preserved from a mass of mediocre 
 prose. The great author passes this criticism on his own ef- 
 forts : " I reluctantly left the calm and pleasing fields of litera- 
 ture, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, in order to em- 
 bark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes." During 
 Milton's lifetime the publication of tracts and pamphlets was 
 the chief literary industry. Religious and political quarrels 
 brought on the Revolution. From 1640 to 1662, while the 
 Revolution was in progress, more than twenty thousand tracts 
 and pamphlets were circulated; they are preserved, many of 
 them, in the British Museum a literary monument to the 
 fiercest struggle on English soil. Two names deserve mention, 
 besides that of Milton : Lord Halifax, a political pamphleteer, 
 three volumes of whose essays are preserved ; and Daniel 
 
THE ESSAY ,~, 
 
 Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, who was sent to the 
 pillory in 1704 for publishing religions tracts. 
 
 Pamphlets of the i8th Century. I n the i8th century the 
 pamphlet underwent a wholesome change. While still con- 
 troversial in character, it was written with more skill and taste. 
 In the hands of Addison, Steele, Burke and Atterbury, this 
 kind of essay became as polished and refined as any other class 
 of literature. Addison expended as much time and care upon 
 his political pamphlets written in defense of the Government, 
 as he did upon essays for the Spectator. The most valued 
 writings of Edmund Burke are found in pamphlet form. Two 
 political events in the i8th century multiplied the pamphlet. 
 The War of the Spanish Succession and the French Revolu- 
 tion. In the former case Addison, Steele and Dean Swift 
 were the distinguished pamphleteers; in the latter, Edmund 
 Burke. Dean Swift as a pamphleteer had no equal among 
 contemporary writers. His qualifications for controversy in- 
 cluded a fund of wit and humor, unrivalled satire, a strong 
 party bias, an unlimited vocabulary of abuse. The political 
 pamphlets which made his reputation are four in number : 
 ' The Conduct of the Allies " a pamphlet dealing with the 
 War of the Spanish Succession. Bolingbroke admitted that 
 the circulation of this pamphlet kept the \Vhig party in power. 
 The other three are : " The Barrier Treaty ; " " Thoughts on 
 Public Affairs;" "The Public Spirit of the Whigs." Dean 
 Swift spent eleven years (1710-1721) writing political tracts 
 and pamphlets, and contributing political essays to the W T hig 
 Examiner, the organ of his favorite party. He also contrib- 
 uted several essays to the Tatler and the Spectator. A con- 
 temporary of Addison and Steele, Dean Swift lacked their 
 grace and finish ; his style was that of the Puritan. According 
 to Addison, he wielded his pen as he would a club. 'Outside 
 the domain of politics, Dean Swift left some fine specimens of 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 the pamphlet. Two essays, humorous and satirical, are worthy 
 of mention : " A modest proposal for preventing the children 
 of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents." 
 In this essay the proposal was to fatten and eat the surplus 
 children. Swift's masterpiece of satire, outside of politics, is 
 the essay called " An Argument Against Abolishing Christ;, 
 anity." 
 
 ,\T Essays of Atterbury. While Dean Swift defended 'the 
 Whig party, Atterbury wrote against the Whigs, and, like 
 Swift, employed the essay in pamphlet form. Atterbury was 
 a bishop, the leader of the High Church party, and next to 
 x Swift the ablest pamphleteer of the time. According to Swift, 
 Atterbury by his writings, set everything on fire. These 
 essayists crossed swords ; and in a work called " The Battle 
 
 of the Books," Swift administered a crushing blow to his 
 rival. Years afterward, he exclaimed : 
 V genius I had when I wrote that book." 
 
 /| rival. Years afterward, he exclaimed : " Great God ! what a 
 \j genius I 
 
 Essays of Burke. The French Revolution, like the Spanish 
 Succession, engaged the best writers and increased the volumes 
 of tracts and pamphlets. The Satanic School of which Byron 
 and Shelley were the leaders, sang the praises of the Revolu- 
 tion in English verse ; Shelley, had he the power, would 
 have reproduced in England the anarchy that disgraced 
 France in 1793. In prose as well as verse, the merits of the 
 Revolution were discussed by Englishmen. It was found 
 necessary to stem the tide of infidelity and anarchy setting 
 toward England; and Edmund Burke, like Dean Swift, was 
 the man for the hour. He wrote two t pamphlets : the first 
 one published in 1756 was called a "Vindication of Natural 
 Society." It was a clever satire aimed at Bolingbroke and the 
 deistic School. In this pamphlet Burke argued that civilized 
 society ought to be abolished in favor of savagery or the 
 
THE ESSAY 
 
 purely natural state, because civilization is attended by so 
 many abuses, miseries, crimes. These sarrte reasons were 
 urged against Christianity by the Deistic School of France 
 and England. Burke saw that the rationalism which would 
 overthrow revealed religion, was equally calculated to under- 
 mine political government. He foretold the political revo- 
 lution of '93 fully twenty years before it occurred. The same 
 reasons which justified anarchy in religious society, justified 
 anarchy in political and civilized society. The pamphlet was 
 meant to be a reduction to an absurdity of atheistic principles. 
 In 1790 Burke wrote a second pamphlet called " Reflections 
 on the Revolution in France/' Like the first one, it attacked 
 atheism ; and added a condemnation of the French Revolution. 
 It established the fame of Bwfte in England and on the Con-^ 
 
 / ^^^^ 
 
 tinent. Diderot, replying, said : " In spite of Edmund 
 Burke, belief in God and submission to Kings will be at an 
 end in a few years." Eleven editions of this pamphlet were ^ 
 sold during the first year of its publication. It was followed 
 by another pamphlet called, "An Appeal from the New to// 
 the Old Whigs." This was a vindication of his criticism ^ 
 on the French Revolution. He replied to Diderot and Tom; , 
 Paine. Paine had written the " Rights of Man " - a pam- 
 phlet justifying the French Revolution and attacking Ed- 
 mund Burke. A War of Pamphlets followed, with the result 
 that anarchy and infidelity, while possessing many friends 
 among Englishmen, gained no considerable power in England. 
 
 Tracts and Pamphlets of the igth Century. The Tractarian 
 Movement, sometimes called the Oxford Movement, derives 
 its name from the circulation of tracts and pamphlets. The 
 Tractarians, like the Puritans aimed at a religious reformation 
 and employed this kind of essay as the Puritans had done in 
 the days of Milton. Three literary men of note were con- 
 nected with the movement: Keble, Pusey and Newman. 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 Their essays were called " Tracts for the Times." Of these 
 Keble wrote four; the remaining eighty-six were written 
 by Pusey and Newman. The most famous essay of the col- 
 lection was Tract 90, written by Newman. Pusey wrote one 
 remarkable pamphlet, the " Eirenicon." In this essay he tried 
 to establish a basis of unity between the Church of England 
 and the Church of Rome. Tract 90 had a similar purpose 
 to harmonize the 39 Articles with the Catholic Belief. In the 
 political as well as the religous world tracts continue to play 
 an important part. They are circulated publicly and privately 
 in the interests of every kind of reform. America imitates 
 England in the production of these essays. Men prominent 
 in Church and State have occasion at one time or another to 
 write pamphlets which circulate by thousands and enlighten 
 the public on the problems and issues of the day. Much of 
 the work formerly done by tracts and pamphlets printed in 
 isolated form, is now accomplished by the Leader in our 
 magazines and chief periodicals. 
 
CHAPTER XXV 
 THE ESSAY (CONTINUED) 
 
 The Leader. Along with the tract and pamphlet, the age 
 of printing added the Leader to the various species of the 
 essay. The leader, as the name indicates, is the most promi- 
 nent essay in a magazine or periodical. In newspapers it is 
 called the chief editorial; in magazines, the leading article. 
 The Leader in magazines is the best written essay; it is sup- 
 posed to make the widest appeal to the public ; it is written by 
 men of the finest literary culture. It is usually the opening 
 essay, though not always so; and at the present time the title 
 of the Leader and the name of the author are printed in heavy 
 type on the cover of the magazine. 
 
 Literary Merit. The magazine Leader in most cases is a 
 permanent contribution to literature. The essays of Steele, 
 Addison. Coleridge, Carlyle, Macaulay, were first published 
 as Leaders in magazines, and afterward collected in their 
 present form. 
 
 Publication of Leaders. The printing of Leaders is as old 
 as periodical literature itself. When Steele published the first 
 English magazine during the War of the Spanish Succession, 
 1799, the very first issue contained a Leader from the pen of 
 the editor; and Addison or Steele contributed Leaders as long 
 as the " Tatler " and " Spectator " were published by them. 
 The same method was employed by Jeffrey when the Edin- 
 burgh Review was started. For years he contributed the 
 
I7 6 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 Leaders, assisted occasionally by Sydney Smith; these men 
 were succeeded by Carlyle, Christopher North and others who 
 followed the same plan. Today the Quarterly Reviews and 
 all magazines of any note publish Leaders. 
 
 The Chief Editorial. The Leader in the newspaper, like 
 the Leader in the magazine, is expected to make a special ap- 
 peal. But the Editorial work in newspapers cannot compare 
 with ^ literary work in magazines. There are two exceptions: 
 First, the Leader written in the London Times which is the 
 official organ of the government. The chief editorial of the 
 London Times is written by a specialist; it occupies two or 
 three columns daily; it is understood to express in a semi- 
 official way the policy of the British Government. It is an 
 essay as carefully and ably written as any appearing in maga- 
 zines. In America, the Leader published in the New York 
 Sun is an essay of exceptional merit. So, also, are the Lead- 
 ers of the New York Tribune, The Pioneer Press and a 
 few other newspapers. But as a rule, this essay is ephemeral, 
 too hastily written for permanence. 
 
 Subjects Treated. In magazines, the Leader may deal with 
 almost any theme. As a rule, however, these themes come 
 under six heads : criticism, biography, history, science, phil- 
 osophy, religion. Such subjects are of permanent interest 
 and give permanence to literature. The first Leader in maga- 
 zine literature was an essay in criticism. The author was a 
 self-constituted judge of British society its weaknesses and 
 short-comings; these themes were the subject-matter of the 
 essays of Steele and Addison. Gradually, the field of criticism 
 widened, taking in history with Macaulay, biography with 
 Carlyle, politics with Burke and Jeffrey. Religion, philoso- 
 phy, science were added by such writers as Huxley, Arnold. 
 George Eliot, Mivart, Spencer, Lilly, Mallock. The field 
 
THE ESSAY 177 
 
 of Addison and Steele was narrow in comparison with the 
 vast range of subject-matter treated in the modern essay. 
 
 Popularity. The Leader often sells a magazine and creates 
 a demand for several editions. It is the first essay to be read 
 on the editorial page of a newspaper. As might be expected, 
 it has considerable influence in moulding public opinion. Un- 
 fortunately, the personal element is dying out of modern 
 journalism that element which the public sought and re- 
 spected in former years the element of which Horace Gree- 
 ley and James Gordon Bennett and Charles A. Dana were such 
 shining examples. Instead of this, we have the " inspired " 
 articles, the impersonal voices of wealth and creed and party. 
 Concerning Horace Greeley, it was written : " The name of 
 the editor was a household word in thousands of homes, and 
 it was with a feeling very closely akin to that of personal 
 affection that Mr. Greeley was regarded by the readers of the 
 " Tribune." Modern conditions seems to make such a thing 
 an impossibility now ; hence, the waning influence of modern 
 journalism upon the masses. 
 
CHAPTER XXVI 
 THE ESSAY (CONTINUED) 
 REPRESENTATIVE ESSAYISTS 
 
 Their Number. Any nation possessing an extensive litera- 
 ture may claim several essayists among its gifted literary 
 men. Thus Xenophon, Plutarch and ^Esop among the 
 Greeks; Cicero and Nepos among the Latins; Montaigne in 
 France; Bacon, Addison, Macaulay, Arnold, in England. A 
 dozen or more names might be added to these, from each 
 civilized nation, ancient and modern, and the list would not 
 be complete. 
 
 Plutarch as an Essayist. Plutarch was born at Chaeronea, 
 Bceotia, Greece, about 46 A. D. His famous essays are part 
 biographical and part moral. The first class consists of forty- 
 six " parallel lives ; " in these essays he devotes equal space 
 to Greek and Roman heroes. The second class consists of 
 essays moral and philosophical, known as " Opera Moralia." 
 The following criticism is offered by Muller : " In spite of all 
 exceptions on the score of inaccuracy, want of information, or 
 prejudice, Plutarch's essays must remain one of the most 
 valuable relics of Greek literature, not only because they stand 
 in the place of many volumes of lost history, but also because 
 they are written with a graphic and dramatic vivacity, such as 
 we find in few biographies, ancient or modern ; because they are 
 replete with reflections which, if not profound, are always 
 moderate and sensible ; and because the author's aim through- 
 
 178 
 
REP RESENT A TIVE ESS A YISTS , -, } 
 
 out is to enforce the highest standard of morality of which 
 a heathen was capable. He stands before us as the legate, the 
 ambassador, and the orator, on behalf of those institutions 
 whereby the old-time men were rendered wise and virtuous." 
 Concerning the biographical essays, Mr. Paley writes as fol- 
 lows: "These essays are works of great learning and re- 
 search, and they must have taken years in their compilation. 
 Plutarch must have had access to a great store of books, and 
 his diligence as an historian cannot be questioned, if his accu- 
 racy is in some points impeached." Concerning the Opera 
 Moralia, he writes : " These consist of above sixty essays, 
 some of them long, and many of them rather difficult; their 
 literary value is greatly enhanced by the large number of cita- 
 tions from lost Greek poems, especially verses of the dram- 
 atists, among whom Euripides holds first place. They 
 evince a mind of vast and varied resources, historical as well 
 as philosophical the mind of an inquirer and a seeker after 
 knowledge, rather than that of an exponent or an opponent 
 of any particular philosophical system. Plutarch's Greek is 
 not fluent, easy or even clear. He uses many words not in 
 the ordinary Greek vocabulary, and he too often constructs 
 long sentences, the thread of which separately, as well as the 
 connection, cannot be traced without close attention. Hence, 
 he is not attractive as a writer, so far as style is concerned, 
 and he is often diffuse and carries his discussions to an un- 
 necessary length." 
 
 Xenophon , Cicero , Nepos. Xenophon and Cicero have al- 
 ready been reviewed; their essays are among the best which 
 have come down to us from antiquity. The dialogue-essays of 
 Cicero have never been surpassed in purity and charm of style. 
 The biographical essays attributed to Cornelius Nepos cannot 
 be overlooked in any account of the ancient classic essayists. 
 As a writer of this type, his style is so excellent, pure and at- 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 tractive that he is used in almost every school and college by 
 the students of Latin literature. As to the biographer of 
 Nepos, nothing definite has been ascertained. He was prob- 
 ably a native of Verona, Italy, and lived in the first century, 
 B. C. From the essays it may be inferred that he was a friend 
 of Cicero. In- imitation of Plutarch he wrote essays on the 
 lives of illustrious men. Schwabe in his history of Roman 
 literature offers this criticism : " Nepos has left us speci- 
 mens of the oldest Latinity; his essays are valuable for their 
 lucidity of arrangement, unpretentious tone, and fair and 
 sympathetic judgments ; but they hardly attain even a moder- 
 ate level of accuracy and trust-worthiness as historical essays ; 
 at times, also, the style is inferior owing to the frequency of 
 popular and colloquial idioms." 
 
 Montaigne. The most famous of French essayists, was 
 born in Dordogne, Feb. 28, 1533; died, Sept. 13, 1592. He 
 was educated at home under a private tutor, and at Bordeaux 
 College where he studied law. For a time he was attached to 
 the Court of Francis II. He traveled extensively in Germany, 
 Italy and Switzerland. At the French Court and during 
 these travels, he had an opportunity to study the men and the 
 society of his time. As a close observer of social affairs and 
 of the actions of men, he resembles Bacon and Lord Chester- 
 field. The benefit of these observations is given to us in his 
 essays, which are, according to some critics, the most valuable 
 collection in this department of French literature. Concern- 
 ing the style of his essays Montaigne himself offers this criti- 
 cism : " It is a natural, simple and unaffected speech that I 
 love, so written as it is spoken, and such upon the paper as it 
 is in the mouth, a pithy, sinewy, full, strong, compendious 
 and material speech, not so delicate and affected as vehement 
 and piercing rather difficult than tedious, void of affecta- 
 tion, free, loose, and bold, so that every member of it seems 
 
REPRESENTATIVE ESSAYISTS xgi 
 
 to make a body ; not pedantical, nor friar-like, nor lawyer-like, 
 but rather downright soldier-like. I decided to walk with my 
 pen as I go with my feet, and let my mind move with its own 
 natural step, not the steps of the dancing school or as those 
 who leap on horseback because they are not strong enough in 
 their legs to march on foot. The titles of my chapters em- 
 brace not always the matter, they often but glance at it by 
 some mark." " There is," says Morley, " a grace in Mon- 
 taigne's simplicity, a mixture of the Latin training with the 
 homely vigor of his country's speech, that no translation fair- 
 ly reproduces. The full enjoyment of Montaigne is reserved 
 for those who read his essays through attentively. One may 
 live long in the world and never come to know even a near 
 friend as completely as orrf may know Montaigne by an at- 
 tentive reading of his essays." 
 
 Criticism by George Saintsbury. " The book of Montaigne's 
 essays has hardly been second in influence to any of the modern 
 world. This influence is almost equally remarkable in point of 
 matter and in point of form, as regards the subsequent history 
 of thought and as regards the subsequent history of literature. 
 The latter aspect may be taken first. Montaigne is one of the 
 few great writers who have not only perfected but have also 
 invented a literary form. The essay as he gave it had no fore- 
 runner in modern literature, and no direct ancestor in the litera- 
 ture of classical times. It is indeed not improbable that it owes 
 something to the body of tractates by different authors and of 
 different dates, which goes under the name of Plutarch's Morals, 
 and it also bears some resemblance to the miscellaneous work 
 of Lucian. But the resemblance is in both cases at most that 
 of suggestion. It has been suggested that the form which the 
 essays assumed was in a way accidental, and this of itself pre- 
 cludes the idea of a definite model even if such a model could 
 be found. Beginning with the throwing together of a few 
 stray thoughts and quotations linked *by a community of sub- 
 ject, the author by degrees acquires more and more certainty 
 of hand, until he produces such masterpieces as the essay on 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-.FORMS 
 
 the poetry of Virgil." "In the arrangement, as in the selec- 
 tion of his language, he is equally original, mixing Latin archaic 
 and provincial words with a good deal of freedom, but by no 
 means to excess. There is little or no trace in him of the in- 
 terminable sentence which is the drawback of early prose in 
 all languages when it has to deal with anything more difficult 
 to manage than mere narrative. As a rule, he is careless of 
 definitely rhythmical cadence, though his sentences are always 
 pleasant to the ear. But the principal characteristic of his prose, 
 style is its remarkable ease and flexibility. These peculiarities, 
 calculated in themselves to exercise a salutary influence on a 
 language as yet somewhat undisciplined, acquired by accident an 
 importance of an extraordinary kind. For, in the subsequent 
 reformation of the French language only two writers of the older 
 date held their ground, and these two were Rabelais and Mon- 
 taigne. The essays of Montaigne, the popularity of which no 
 academic censorship could touch, thus kept on through the suc- 
 ceeding centuries, and perpetuated a treasury of French in which 
 every generation could behold the riches of their ancestors. The 
 study of these essays influenced all the great prose-writers of 
 France, and they could not fail to be influenced in the direction 
 which it was most important that they should take by the racy 
 phrase, the quaint and picturesque vocabulary, and unconstrained 
 constructions of Montaigne." 
 
 Lord Bacon. Francis Bacon, the English contemporary of 
 Montaigne, was born in 1561 and died in 1626. A student 
 at Cambridge, an English Ambassador, a member of Parlia- 
 ment, Lord Chancellor, a jurist, statesman, historian, phil- 
 osopher, Lord Bacon has an additional title to fame for hav- 
 ing left among his literary bequests to posterity a small 
 volume of essays which now serve more perhaps than any other 
 achievement to render his name immortal. A volume of 
 criticism has been written on this small volume of essays. 
 For, in every age since their production, and among all peo- 
 ples critics Have arisen who passed judgment upon them. 
 
REP RESENT ATI I'll ESSAYISTS 
 
 Criticism by Thomas B. Shaw. " Among the English writ- 
 ings of Bacon the most important is the little volume entitled 
 Essays, the first edition of which he published in 1597, and 
 which was several times reprinted, with additions, the last, in 
 1625. These are short essays on an immense variety of sub- 
 jects, from grave questions of morals and policy down to the 
 arts of amusement and the most trifling accomplishments ; and 
 in them appears, in a manner more appreciable to ordinary in 
 tellects than in his elaborate philosophical works, the wonderful 
 union of depth and variety which characterize Bacon. The in- 
 tellectual activity they display is literally pretentious; the im- 
 mense multiplicity and aptness of unexpected illustration is only 
 equalled by the originality with which Bacon manages to treat 
 the most worn-out and commonplace subject, such, for instance, 
 as friendship or gardening. No one was ever so concise as 
 Bacon; and in his mode of writing there is that remarkable 
 quality which gives to the style of Shakespeare such a strong- 
 ly marked individuality ; that is, a combination of the intellectual 
 and imaginative, the closest reasoning in the coldest metaphor, 
 the condensed ^brilliancy of an illustration identified with the 
 development of^thought. Many of the essays are absolutely op- 
 pressive from the power of thought compressed into the smallest 
 possible compass." 
 
 " Of Bacon's moral works the most valuable are the essays. 
 It is impossible to praise too highly writings which have been so 
 widely read and so universally admired. The matter is of the 
 familiar, practical kind that ' comes home to men's bosoms.' The 
 thoughts are weighty, and even when not original have acquired 
 a peculiar and unique tone by passing through the crucible of 
 Bacon's mind. A sentence from the essays can rarely be mis- 
 taken for the production of any other writer. His short, pithy 
 sayjngs have, become popular mottoes and household words. The 
 style is CQiaint, original, abounding in allusions and witticisms 
 and rich even to gbrgeousness with piled up analogies and meta- 
 phors." 
 
 Criticism by Dugald Stewart. " In Bacon's essays the su- 
 periority of his genius appears to the greatest advantage; the 
 novelty and depth of his reflections often receiving a strong 
 
jg 4 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 relief from the triteness of his subject. The volume may be 
 read from beginning to end in a few hours, and yet after the 
 twentieth perusal, one -seldom fails to remark in it something 
 overlooked before. This is a characteristic of all Bacon's writ- 
 ings, and is only to be accounted for by the inexhaustible aliment 
 they furnish to our thoughts." 
 
CHAPTER XXVII 
 THE ESSAY (CONCLUDED) 
 
 Representative English Essayists. Besides Lord Bacon, 
 the representative English essayists are Addison, Carlyle, De 
 Quincey, Jeffrey, Lamb, Macaulay, Smith, Steele, Swift, Mi- 
 vart, Mallock, Huxley, Lilly, Harrison, Arnold. A large 
 number of others, like Hume and Milton have written essays, 
 but their larger works lie in other departments of literature. 
 Only a few of the many who deserve honorable mention can 
 be dealt with here. 
 
 Joseph Addison. He claims our attention as one of the 
 greatest of the English essayists. His father was an eminent 
 clergyman of the Church of England, at Milston in Wiltshire, 
 where the son was born in 1672; he died in 1719. Originally 
 intended for the Church he drifted into literature and politics, 
 principally through Dryden's influence over him, and the pa- 
 tronage of Lord Somers. Like Bacon, he became celebrated 
 through his essays which are far more voluminous than those 
 of his illustrious predecessor and which have evoked a large 
 amount^of criticism. 
 
 Criticism by Blair. " Mr. Addison is, beyond doubt, in the 
 English language, one of the most perfect examples of the writer ; 
 and, on the whole, the safest model for imitation. He is freest 
 from considerable defects which the language affords. Perspicu- 
 ous and pure he is in the highest degree; his precision, indeed, 
 not very great ; yet nearly as great as his subjects require ; the 
 construction of his sentences is easy, agreeable, and commonly 
 
 185 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 very musical, carrying a character of smoothness more than of 
 strength. In figurative language he is rich,~~particularly in sim- 
 iles and metaphors which are so employed as to render his style 
 splendid, without being gaudy. There is not the least affecta- 
 tion in his manner. We see no marks of labor nothing forced 
 or constrained : on the contrary, we discover great elegance joined 
 with great ease and simplicity. He is, in particular, distinguished 
 by a character of modesty and of politeness, which appears in all 
 his writings. No autTior has a more popular and insinuating 
 manner, and the great regard which he everywhere shows for 
 virtue and religion, recommends him highly. His style, per- 
 fectly suited to essays, lacks sufficient strength for the higher 
 and more elaborate species of composition." 
 
 Criticism by Allibone. " Perhaps no English writer has 
 been so fortunate as Addison in uniting so many discordant 
 tastes in a unanimous verdict of approbation. Brown has been 
 thought pedantic, Johnson inflated, Taylor conceited, and Burke 
 exuberant ; but the graceful simplicity of Addison delights alike 
 the rude taste of the uneducated and the classic judgment of the 
 learned. All critics must agree with Dr. Johnson, who says 
 ' whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not 
 cyarse, elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and 
 nights to the volumes of Addison/ The immense fertility of in- 
 vention displayed in these charming essays, the variety of their 
 subjects, and the singular felicity of their treatment will ever 
 place them among the masterpieces of criticism. Nothing is too 
 lofty or too lowly for his pen the principles of morality and 
 religion the colored ribbons of the ladies the grandeur of 
 Milton the gossip of the tea-party. This essayist was long 
 esteemed the finest model of elegant yet idiomatic English prose ; 
 and even now the student finds qualities that never can become 
 obsolete a never- failing cleverness and limpidity of expression, 
 and a singular appropriateness between the-language and the 
 thought." 
 
 Macaulay. He was born at Rothley Temple, Leicester- 
 shire, October 25, 1800; died at Holly Lodge, December 28, 
 1859. He graduated at Cambridge, giving while there most 
 
REPRESENTATIVE ESSAYISTS I S; 
 
 attention to the classics. He held several official positions, 
 but devoted most of his life to literature. His fame rests upon 
 a " History of England," a volume of ballads, and several vol- 
 umes of essays. 
 
 Criticism by Mark Pattison. " The literary outfit of Ma- 
 caulay was as complete as has ever been possessed by any Eng- 
 lish writer; and if it wants the illumination of philosophy, it has 
 an equivalent resource in a practical acquaintance with affairs, 
 with administration, with the interior of cabinets and the humor of 
 popular assemblies. Nor was this knowledge merely stored in 
 his memory it was always at his command. Whatever his 
 subject, he pours over it his stream of illustration, drawn from 
 the records of all ages and countries. Figures from history 
 ancient and modern, sacred and secular ; characters from plays 
 and novels, from Plautus down to Walter Scott and Jane Aus- 
 ten ; images and similes from poets of every age and every 
 nation ; shrewd thrusts from satirists, wise saws from sages, pleas- 
 antries caustic or pathetic from humorists, all these fill Macau- 
 lay's essays with the bustle and variety of some glittering masque 
 and cosmoramic revel of great books and heroical men. His 
 style fs^eioTefaH else, the style of great literary knowledge. His 
 essays are not merely instructive as history; they are, like Mil- 
 ton's blank verse, freighted with the spoils of all the ages. They 
 are literature as well as history. In their diversified contents 
 the Essays are a library by themselves ; for those who, having 
 little time for study, want one book which may be a substitute 
 for many, we would recommend the Essays in preference to any- 
 thing else." 
 
 Criticism by Alfred Welch. " What impresses the reader of 
 Macaulay is his skill in the delineation_aL-diaracter his ener- 
 getic^ impassioned^ tone. From 'hisfvast and well-digested read- 
 ing proceed the abounding mass and weight of his style, a river 
 of ideas and facts urged forward by an internal heat. He is so 
 opulent that he makes criticism almost a creative art, and the 
 author or work reviewed becomes a hint for the construction of 
 picturesque dissertations, magnificent comparisons, and a glow- 
 ing dialectic. His style is characterized by a wealth of illustra- 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 tion and adornment, antithesis of ideas, regular sequence of 
 thought, harmonious construction and incomparable lucidity." 
 
 Criticism by Dean Milman. " Macaulay's essays, for the 
 most part, relate to English history. In virtue of their inimita- 
 ble style, these essays will always give Macaulay a high place 
 among English classics. His style was eminently his own, but 
 his own not by strange words, or strange collocation of words, 
 by phrases of perpetual occurrence, or the straining after orig- 
 inal and striking terms of expression. Its characteristics were 
 vigor and animation, copiousness, clearness, above all, sound 
 English, now a rare excellence. The vigor and life were un- 
 abating; perhaps in that conscious strength which cost no exer- 
 tio.n he did not always gauge and measure the force of his own 
 words. Those who studied the progress of his writing might 
 perhaps see that the full stream, though it never stagnated, might 
 at first overflow its banks; in later days it ran with a more direct, 
 undivided torrent. His copiousness had nothing timid, diffuse, 
 Asiatic no ornament for the sake of ornament. As to its 
 clearness, one may read a sentence of Macaulay twice to judge 
 of its full force, never to comprehend. His English was pure, 
 both in idiom and in words, pure to fastidiousness, not that he 
 discarded, or did not make free use of the plainest and most 
 homely terms, but every word must be genuine English, nothing 
 that approached real vulgarity, nothing that had not the stamp 
 of popular use, or the authority of sound English writers, noth- 
 ing unfamiliar to the common ear." 
 
 Thomas Carlyle. He was born at Ecclefechan in Dum- 
 frieshire on December 4, 1795; his. life and work belong to 
 the nineteenth century. He is one of the most original of all 
 English essayists. Perhaps it would be true to say that 
 his influence has been greater than that of any other. English 
 essayist, not excepting Macaulay himself. His voluminous 
 writings belong, for the most part, to the departments of His- 
 tory, Biography and the Essay. The amount of criticism is 
 large and varied, corresponding with the influence of the man, 
 
REPRESENTATIVE ESSAYISTS ^9 
 
 who, in spite of his many defects, is one of the largest and 
 richest personalities in literature. 
 
 Criticism by William H. Sheran. The style of Carlyle was 
 quite normal until he began the study of German literature. Any 
 reader of his early essays would be satisfied with the respect 
 shown toward the English idiom by the young Scotch critic. But 
 as his idiosyncracies developed with years, as he became im- 
 mersed more and more in German literature the study of 
 Richter, Goethe, and others his style lost its normal natural 
 character; foreign idioms and turns of phrase began to appear; 
 the extraordinary passion and intensity of the man broke all the 
 prescribed bonds of speech, and, as a consequence, we have in 
 his later writings a violation of about all the rules of grammar 
 and rhetoric, and all the accepted canons of good taste, as if a 
 cyclone in the literary order, had swept through his pages, tossing 
 fragments of sentences about, wrenching and twisting idioms and 
 phrases into an almost unrecognizable mass of verbal ruin, up- 
 heaving and uprooting the very foundations and the finer growth 
 of our speech. Carlyle rides the whirlwind and directs the storm, 
 enjoying, apparently, the havoc he makes with verbs and pro- 
 nouns, cases and conjunctions. He gives his fiery indignation 
 and enthusiasm full play, regardless of the laws of English 
 speech. He strikes with sledge-hammer force, like Thor with 
 his glittering hammer, dashing mountains to the earth; only, 
 instead of a hammer, he used fragments of sentences. Hence, 
 Carlyle is sometimes called a literary savage. Yet, after making 
 the necessary deductions for his brutal use of rhetoric, one must 
 admit that no English writer is more forcible, more noble in the 
 pursuit of high ideals, than Carlyle. He was dissatisfied with 
 the existing order of society, as he found it in his day, and, ac- 
 cordingly, he became an iconoclast like Shelley. ^He attacked 
 social institutions with the same vehemence and bitter sarcasm; 
 but, unlike Shelley, he spared religion and morality he could 
 never be an advocate of free love or pen the blasphemy of the 
 author of " Queen Mab." His early Calvinistic training made 
 him as severe in morals as a prophet of the Old Testament ; and 
 although, he lost all faith in Christianity, he never openly at- 
 tacked the faith of his countrymen. In religion, he was, toward 
 the end of his life, an avowed Agnostic. He frankly admits 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 this in a letter to Emerson. Carlyle is a great name in English 
 Criticism, deserving to rank with Dryden, Johnson, and Arnold. 
 In range of information and devotion to his work, he was greater 
 perhaps than any other English critic. He will be always re- 
 membered for his two famous sayings, " Genius is an infinite 
 capacity for taking pains ;" " whatever you do, do it with all 
 your might." Carlyle should be remembered, not only for his 
 moral maxims, but also for his interest in German literature, 
 and in Northern Mythology. He was the first Englishman of 
 Letters to devote himself to German studies, and to such an ex- 
 tent that Goethe admitted, Carlyle knew German literature and 
 History better than the Germans themselves. He was also a pio- 
 neer in unfolding the literary riches of Northern Mythology ; he 
 lamented the fact that while Southern Mythology found adequate 
 treatment at the hands of a Homer or a Virgil, there had been 
 no Homer to sing of the heroes of the North. His own studies, 
 though meagre and superficial, were nevertheless sufficient to 
 show the immense literary possibilities of Northern Mythology. 
 
 Criticism by James Russell Lowell. " Carlyle is the first in 
 insight of English critics and the most vivid of English writers. 
 The remarkable feature of Mr. Carlyle's criticism is the sleuth- 
 hound instinct with which he presses on to the matter of his 
 theme never turned aside by a false scent, regardless of the 
 outward beauty of form, sometimes almost contemptuous of it, 
 in his hunger after the intellectual nourishment which it may hide. 
 The delicate skeleton of admirably articulated and related parts, 
 which underlies and sustains every true work of art, and keeps 
 it from sinking on itself a shapeless heap, he would crush re- 
 morselessly, to come at the marrow of meaning. In his critical 
 essays he had the advantage of a well-defined theme, and of 
 limits which kept his natural extravagance within bounds and 
 compelled some sort of discretion and compactness. The great 
 merit of his essays lies in a criticism based on wide and various 
 study, which, careless of tradition, applied its standard to the 
 real and not the contemporary worth of the literary performance 
 to be judged. But in proportion as his humor gradually over- 
 balanced the other qualities of his mind, his taste for the eccen- 
 tric, amorphous, and violent in men became excessive, disturbing 
 more and more his perception of the more commonplace attributes 
 
REPRESENTATIVE ESSAYISTS ]t) \ 
 
 which give consistency to portraiture. No other writer com- 
 pares with him for vividness. He is himself a witness, and 
 makes us witnesses of whatever he describes. This is genius 
 beyond question ; and of a very, rare quality. If not a profound 
 thinker, he had what was next best he felt profoundly, and 
 his cry came out of the depth. With the gift of song Carl vie 
 would have been the greatest of epic poets since Homer. With- 
 out it, to modulate and harmonize and bring parts into their 
 proper relation, he is the most amorphous of humorists, the most 
 shining avator of whim the world has ever seen. Beginning 
 with a hearty contempt for shams, he came at length to believe 
 in brute force as the only reality, and has as little sense of justice 
 as Thackeray allowed to women. Still, with all deductions, he 
 remains the profoundest critic and the most dramatic imagina- 
 tion of modern times such vivid pictures of events, such living 
 conceptions of character, we find nowhere else in prose. As an 
 inspirer and awakener his value cannot be overestimated." 
 
 Matthew Arnold. A representative English essayist of 
 modern times, Matthew Arnold was born in 1822; died in 
 1888. He was a son of the famous Dr. Arnold of Rugby, 
 and a member of a family distinguished in English literature. 
 Like Carlyle and Macaulay, he devoted his life to letters, ex- 
 celling both in verse and prose. His favorite prose-form was 
 the essay, and the bulk of his prose writing lies in this de- 
 partment. His essays, like those of Acldison, are most highly 
 finished productions. Like Johnson, he was a critic, but on 
 a larger scale; he resembles Carlyle in the range and freedom 
 of his criticism. To his countrymen he professed to be an 
 apostle of culture in the highest and best sense of that word. 
 The many volumes of his prose deal with the various aspects 
 of culture. 
 
 Criticism by William H. Sheran. The essays of Arnold are 
 among the best in English literature the result of a splendid 
 literary gift, and the highest classical culture. 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 The purpose throughout all his criticism is to make known the 
 best that has been thought and said in the world. ' As a critic 
 of life, he aimed at the highest ideals, sought to make culture, 
 sweetness, and light prevail among his countrymen. He imi- 
 tated the example set by Lord Chesterfield, in the matter of im- 
 proving the conduct and manners of his fellows, just as in lit- 
 erature he was a constant student and imitator of Newman. The 
 least valuable part of his criticism deals with the Bible and 
 theological subjects. Arnold had not the mental and scholarly 
 equipment necessary for producing any work of permanent value 
 in those departments. The poetry of Arnold should be noted on 
 account of its quality. Nowhere is his literary gift shown to 
 better advantage. "Dover Beach," " Obermann," "The Fu- 
 ture," are lyrics of the best class ; as a dramatist, he was a fail- 
 ure, having no talent for character creation. 
 
 Criticism by Richard Hutton. " There is in the style of 
 Arnold much sweetness, beauty and light, calm contemplation and 
 exquisite polish. The essays are a collection of some of our best 
 prose. His style is often plain and business-like, sometimes col- 
 loquial, never highly ornamental, occasionally marred by ' damna- 
 ble iteration/ A vein of sarcasm and of rich humor may be 
 found in it at times, but never the biting cynicism of Carlyle. A 
 finished expression was at most times his studious care. Traces 
 of the French idiom may be found, but for the most part, he ex- 
 hibits classic purity in idiom and in diction/' 
 
CHAPTER XXVIII 
 BIOGRAPHY 
 
 Meaning of the Term. The word, biography, signifies writ- 
 ing which deals with life. It is life-history; and wherever in- 
 dividual life is manifested, the material for biography is sup- 
 plied. The word is used in a double sense. In its widest 
 meaning it includes the life-history of plant, animal, man and 
 the orders of life above man so far as they are revealed to us. 
 Thus, for example, we have the Biography of the Climbing 
 Plant; the Biography of Napoleon; the Biography of Christ. 
 Biography in its widest meaning deals with the same subjects 
 as biology, but in a different manner. Biology is a science 
 treating of all the phenomena of life; it aims at discovering 
 and classifying all the data concerning life; whereas biogra- 
 phy selects only such data as will make the strongest appeal 
 and awaken the liveliest interest. It selects those facts of life 
 which individualize the subject and mark it off from the 
 species. For example, peculiar traits of character or lines of 
 conduct in the human hero. And these selected facts of life 
 are given not in the form o a scientific treatise, as is the 
 case with the various departments of biology. They are pre- 
 sented in the form of a story which gives scope to the imagi- 
 nation and the personal bias and the creative genius of the 
 author. Biography in the strictest sense is a department of 
 literature dealing with human life. When individual human 
 life is treated we have Biography proper; whereas collective 
 human life, for example, the life of a nation, a race or a period, 
 when so treated, is called History. 
 
 193 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 The Relation of Biography to History. The provinces of 
 the historian and biographer are distinct, although closely re- 
 lated. On this point, Leslie Stephen, the author of the Dic- 
 tionary of National Biography, observes : " Biography is 
 closely related to history because most events are connected 
 with some particular person. For example, it would be im- 
 possible to describe the Norman Conquest without some ref- 
 erence to Harold or William the Conqueror. And so with 
 every, other period. Hence, history depends upon biography 
 for its material ; it selects that part of every man's life which 
 belongs to the public, and leaves the details of his private life 
 to the biographer." It follows that the study of biography 
 is supplementary to that of history ; it furnishes those portions 
 of the individual story which the historian passes over. It 
 also gives a better chance to study human character, because 
 the individual life is presented in its completeness. 
 
 The Relation of Biography to Other Departments of Litera- 
 ture. Biography furnishes subject matter for all departments 
 of literature. It supplies those humanizing elements which 
 distinguish literature as such from other kinds of writing, 
 especially from science and philosophy. The amount of 
 biography employed in the different departments of literature 
 varies, but it is present in all, and is of vital interest in all. 
 
 Some Illustrations.- The letter tells either of the author's 
 own life and experience, or that some other person. Two 
 departments of the essay are strictly biographical the 
 memoir and the eulogy. Besides these, the essay in criticism 
 is in a large measure biographical ; for example, the critical 
 essays of Macaulay and Johnson divide their space about 
 equally between biography and criticism. One division of 
 oratory is wholly biographical, namely, the panegyric. And 
 when not exclusively such, the oration either employs bio- 
 
BIOGRAPHY 
 
 graphical data or makes some individual life the central topic. 
 For example, the orations of Cicero and Demosthenes hinge 
 upon such characters as Catiline or Philip. Webster and 
 Burke make an equally profitable use of biography. Another 
 department of oratory, the Christian sermon, deals for the 
 most part with important personages of the Church ; the bulk 
 of this literature is an exhortation to imitate the individual 
 life of Christ, and biographical data of this life are continual- 
 ly employed. The largest use of biography outside of history, 
 is found in the drama and in fiction, which is a part of 
 dramatic literature. The individual is reproduced in his 
 habit as he lived, and facts of biography are needed for the 
 purpose. The best examples in English are the historical 
 dramas of Shakespeare; and the historical novel as written 
 by Lytton or Walter Scott. A novel or drama which attempts 
 to reproduce any historical personage must do so through 
 the medium of biography. The epic, in like manner owes 
 much to biography, although the bulk of the long narrative 
 poems which receive this title present heroes about whom few 
 details are known; yet the facts, though scant, belong to 
 biography. And, last of all, the lyric tells the brief story of 
 a passing mood or feeling, and thus gives a glimpse of in- 
 dividual life. Although brief, the lyric is intensely human 
 and personal, and a record of the facts of life. Thus, all de- 
 partments of literature employ biographical matter. As Wal- 
 ter Pater writes : " Literature is biography in solution ; for 
 the human element is ever present in one form or another." 
 
 Sources of Biography. Biography proper deals with his- 
 torical personages, men and women of eminence who have 
 lived and left traces of their lives. Hence, the biographer 
 works with documents, for documents are the traces left by 
 the thoughts and actions of men of former times; through 
 
I0 ,6 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 documents the biographer learns all that can be learned of the 
 illustrious persons of the past. 
 
 The Collection of Documents. The first work of a biogra- 
 pher is to collect documents, all the accessible sources of in- 
 formation. This work was never easy, although much easier 
 now than in ancient times. The increased facilities for con- 
 sulting archives and libraries make the- work much easier. 
 The earliest scholars consulting, as they did, not all the docu- 
 ments, nor even the best documents, used whatever were at 
 hand ; and, hence, traces of their ignorance in the early 
 biographical works. For example, Plutarch's " Lives " in 
 which imagination so often goes into partnership with fact. 
 At the present time the libraries and archives of the world 
 are thrown open to the scholars ; expeditions are sent out 
 yearly by the various governments for the discovery and col- 
 lection of documents. Besides the large public collections in 
 museums and archives, there are equally valuable private col- 
 lections. These are owned either by individuals or corpo- 
 rations. For example, the Monks of the East still hold in 
 their monasteries invaluable documents. Several modern at- 
 tempts have been made to centralize and create one large store- ^ 
 house of documents ; for example, the first Napoleon enter- * 
 tained the design of concentrating at Paris the archives of the 
 whole of Europe, and for that purpose he actually conveyed 
 to Paris the archives of Belgium, Castile, the Holy Roman 
 Empire and others, all of which the French Government was^ 
 compelled to restore. The British Museum at London repre- 
 sents another attempt to form a merger of international docu- 
 ments. But the most widely representative collection, and the 
 most precious, is the Vatican Library, opened some years ago 
 by Leo XIII to the scholars of Europe. 
 
BIOGRAPHY 
 
 Various Methods of Making Documents Accessible to the 
 Biographer. Besides opening the large libraries of the world 
 to those who wish to consult them, the study of original 
 documents is now aided in various ways : First, by the pub- 
 lication of elaborate catalogues ; each Government issues such 
 catalogues of its own archives, museums, and libraries; and 
 this policy, universal at the present time, enables the biogra- 
 pher to locate his material. Second, by the training of ex- 
 perts who pass upon the genuineness of documents ; each gov- 
 ernment employs a number of these; they are assisted by 
 various societies of research : for example, the Society of the 
 Bollandists, the Imperial Academy of Vienna, the German 
 Historical Society. Third, by transcription of original docu- 
 ments ; they are transcribed or often photographed and spread 
 broadcast, enabling the biographer to consult the documents 
 in his home library. Fourth, by liberal appropriations from 
 Governments, Universities, Societies, enabling research parties 
 to visit distant countries and discover documents; for ex- 
 ample, Palestine, Egypt and Greece at the present time have 
 parties working in the interests of various governments. 
 When Renan began his Life of Christ, the French Govern- 
 ment paid his expenses in' Palestine and aided him in collect- 
 ing material. 
 
 The Classification of Biographical Matter. After finding 
 the necessary sources, it remains to classify and arrange 
 the material, so that no important section of it will be over- 
 looked. Biographers adopt several methods of consulting 
 documents and collecting material. First, they take notes 
 from original documents and out of a mass of extracts, memo- 
 randa, etc., they construct their biographies. Another method 
 is to read the original documents and quote from memory. 
 This method is no longer in vogue on account of liability to 
 error. In autobiography quotation from memory is some- 
 
I9 g ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 times employed when documents are not at hand. Now the 
 documents are carefully grouped according to date, second, 
 according to origin; third, according to contents; fourth, ac- 
 cording to form. In this way, nothing essential is missed ; 
 all the facts necessary are present although in isolated form. 
 It remains to organize these facts into a biographical syn- 
 thesis. 
 
 The Various Kinds of Documents Consulted by the Biogra- 
 pher. The biographer finds material wherever the individual 
 has left a trace of his life- record. This record is large or 
 small according to the prominence of the individual and his 
 rank in society. Sometimes the life-record will involve al- 
 most all departments of contemporary literature ; for example, 
 the life of Napoleon, Bismarck, Leo XIII. Sometimes the 
 record is confined to a small village or state and all the in- 
 formation obtainable would come from the consultation of a 
 few documents. The immediate sources of information are 
 six in number, and they are classified as follows : First, 
 Church records giving information as to place and time of 
 birth, baptism and church affiliation. Second, family records, 
 dealing with parentage, ancestry, family connections, social 
 standing, migrations, family possessions, etc. Third, City 
 and State records showing the relation of the individual to 
 civic society; the business, legal and political relations of the 
 citizen to the State; for example, transfer of property, regis- 
 trations for office, voting, marriage, death, offices held. 
 Fourth, contemporary journals containing criticism of in- 
 dividual acts; the opinions of contemporaries regarding indi- 
 vidual conduct. Fifth, private papers; among these the most 
 important are diaries, memoirs and the letters of contem- 
 poraries. Sixth, the published works throwing light upon 
 character, ability, attainments. Of the published works au- 
 tograph letters are the most valuable, as a revelation of charac- 
 
BIOGRAPHY 
 
 ter. Very often, in the case of public or literary men the pub- 
 lished works will contain uu'tographical matter in the shape of 
 memoirs, journals, reminiscences. These documents are the 
 usual sources of information regarding individual life. But 
 besides these there are other and more remote sources. For 
 example, the private correspondence and the published works 
 of contemporaries; opinions of associates handed down by 
 tradition; records left in monuments, inscriptions, medals, in 
 various arts, wherever traces of human life are preserved. 
 The extent of such records will depend upon the prominence 
 of the person. 
 
 The Grouping of Facts Order of Time.- 1 - In biography it 
 is the rule to follow the order of time, or what is known as 
 the chronological order. This is done without difficulty in 
 the case of individual life; whereas many difficulties present 
 themselves when the story of collective life is written. The 
 biographer uses each year as a central point for organizing 
 and grouping his data ; whereas the historian must constantly 
 violate the order of time ; he must go back constantly in order 
 to bring up the details of his historical picture. This is very 
 remarkable when history is written on a vast scale. For ex- 
 ample, Gibbon's History of Rome. The biographer having 
 the thread of only one individual life to follow, need never 
 violate the order of time.- There is a natural development 
 from beginning to end. 
 
 Order of Place. Besides the chronological order, there is 
 the order of place. Human actions always involve the rela- 
 tion of place as well as time; and the facts of biography are 
 arranged so as to correspond to the place where as well as the 
 time when the individual lived. This order, sometimes called 
 the geographical order, makes history so complex owing to 
 the various centers for grouping facts; whereas, in biography 
 
200 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 it is subordinate to the chronological order, and makes no 
 trouble whatever. 
 
 Minor Methods. There are minor ways of grouping facts 
 outside any direct consideration of space or time, though 
 dependent on both. This grouping is based upon the four- 
 fold activity of human life. First in the physical order: this 
 grouping involves all questions regarding physical appearance 
 and wellbeing; geographical or artificial environment and the 
 physical development under such conditions. This grouping 
 takes place at various times in the progress of the work. A 
 second grouping of facts will involve mental activities, the 
 conditions of mental life and growth, natural endowment and 
 the various ways in which it was developed and expressed. 
 A third grouping involves the moral life; various lines of 
 conduct followed in relation to right and wrong or the 
 claims of duty. This grouping is the most difficult as it 
 involves all questions of character. The portrait of character 
 must emerge from this group. In drawing this portrait, 
 biographers and historians have committed untold crimes by 
 suppressing facts, by ascribing false motives, by over-draw- 
 ing positions, by interpreting acts, not according to the mind 
 of the author, but according to the whim or prejudice of the 
 biographer. Fourth, grouping of facts will center in the re- 
 ligious life of the individual, and will include all matters per- 
 taining to religion. In biography, the last two groups, cen- 
 tering in morality and religion, furnish what is called the 
 higher life of the individual ; and the writer gives them the 
 largest space, as the chief value of this kind of literature is to 
 instruct by ethical and religious example. 
 
CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 BIOGRAPHY (CONTINUED) 
 
 Various Kinds of Biography. Authors of biography have 
 selected various methods of describing individual life. First 
 of all, they present the life-story either in an abbreviated or 
 a complete form. The abbreviated form covering the larger 
 part of this literature, includes many subdivisions. 
 
 The Obituary. The first and most general of these 
 divisions is the obituary notice, which contains only a few 
 facts, such as the time of birth and death, the place where the 
 life was spent, with a word perhaps about the occupation and 
 character of the deceased. The majority of mankind must be 
 satisfied with this- meager account. The obituary notice is a 
 feature of all modern periodicals from the lowest to the high- 
 est grade ; for example, the most obscure newspaper ; Harper's 
 Monthly Magazine; both publish this kind of biography in 
 every issue. In the best journals it is given the title of Ne- 
 crology. This form also appears in dictionaries of biography 
 where the editors, as a rule, are compelled to treat each life in 
 the briefest possible manner. Each modern civilized nation 
 publishes a dictionary of National Biography. Besides these 
 National works, cities and towns prepare such dictionaries, 
 limiting the scope to their own districts and defraying the ex- 
 pense from city funds. For example, the largest cities of the 
 United States have all made provision of this kind. Various 
 important societies in Church and State issue such publica- 
 tions a recent work issued by the Masonic Fraternity gives 
 
 20 1 
 
202 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 brief lives of all the prominent Masons in our country, from 
 George Washington to President Roosevelt. Religious 
 Orders in the Church keep such records, which receive the 
 name of annals or chronicles. This was the method of writ- 
 ing English history before the avowed historian appeared. 
 For example, chronicles of Knight, Holinshed, the Anglo- 
 Saxon chronicle, the chronicles of Monks. The Jesuits use 
 the peculiar title " Relations ; " their dictionary of biographx 
 has been frequently edited, and Parkman found it invaluable 
 in writing of the Jesuit martyrs in America. These annals or 
 chronicles sometimes extend to all prominent men of the coun- 
 try. For example, the early chronicles kept by the Religious 
 Orders in England were national in scope and furnish the 
 basis of English history for several centuries. The best of 
 these is known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle it covers the 
 period from 853-1154, or from the reign of Alfred to that of 
 Henry II. There are four divisions of it, corresponding to 
 the four Monastic houses which were engaged in its compi- 
 lation. It was kept in turn by the Monks of Winchester, 
 Mercia, Abingdon and Northumbria. It supplies biographical 
 data concerning the reigning kings, and prelates of the 
 Church, with some meagre account of the various wars in 
 which the Saxons were engaged. Supplementary to this is 
 the chronicle kept by the Monks of Glastonbury, known as the 
 Chronicle of St. Neot; and another, which belongs to the 
 Monks of Peterborough. Besides the chronicles furnished by 
 leading Monasteries, which are the composite works of 
 monks, there are a number of valuable chronicles, the work of 
 individual writers. For example, the Chronicle of Ingulphus, 
 Abbot of Croyland in 1075. His chronicle extends from 650 - 
 1109, but it is chiefly occupied with the distinguished men of 
 his order. Individual authors who have written biographi- 
 cal chronicles, are numerous in English literature. Besides 
 Ingulphus, there are two well known examples : First, 
 
BIOGRAPHY 203 
 
 Mathew Paris 1200-1 259. He was a Benedictine Monk, and 
 a graduate of the University of Paris. He received- the 
 patronage of Henry III, who requested him to write brief 
 biographical accounts of all the celebrated men then living in 
 the English realm. This account was afterward expanded 
 by him into a dictionary of National Biography, and included 
 the reigns of preceding kings. The second author, Raphael 
 Holinshed (1577-1624) under orders from Queen Elizabeth 
 compiled a biography similar to that of Matthew Paris. It is 
 much larger and the separate biographies are more elaborate. 
 At the present time Biographical Dictionaries are not confined 
 to a particular class or nation. Two examples of this cosmo- 
 politan character : the French Academy has recently published 
 a Dictionary of Universal Biography ; all the distinguished 
 men of the world are given a place in it. In the English lan- 
 guage our best Dictionary of Universal Biography is pub- 
 lished by the Century Company, New York. It rs much 
 smaller than the French work, consisting only of one large 
 volume, but more useful because more easily consulted. 
 
 The Eulogy. A second form of abridged biography is 
 known as the eulogy. It is more elaborate than the obituary 
 notice, necrology or biographical chronicle. There are two 
 classes of the eulogy : the essay which appears in periodicals ; 
 the panegyric prepared for delivery. Both kinds of eulogy 
 appear at the death or on the anniversary of the individual. 
 Both present the life-record in some detail, but both have this 
 disadvantage : the eulogist selects only those facts which are 
 worthy of praise and commendation; the justification being 
 that only favorable things should be said concerning the dead. 
 Hence, the abbreviated and one-sided view in the eulogy. 
 This is particularly true of the national or religious hero. 
 For example, in narrating the life of George Washington, our 
 eulogists will never refer to the fact that he was rarely seen 
 

 
 at public worship and tliat he was inclined to adopt a rather 
 liberal moral standard. Or take the example of Pius IX: 
 our eulogists remember all his saintly virtues, but omit any 
 reference to the lack of statesmanship and his -carelessness as 
 a Temporal Ruler. The eulogist in the essay or panegyric is 
 always a friend and special pleader; and hence this species of 
 biography is very misleading and unreliable. But there is one 
 advantage derived from a study of it, its method of con- 
 densation it crowds the largest number of facts into the 
 smallest compass, giving a rapid survey of a life with the 
 omission of useless details. 
 
 Importance. The eulogy, whether written or delivered, oc- 
 cupies a large place in English literature. Our leading essay- 
 ists and orators almost without exception, have left examples 
 of it. And its misleading character as to the individuals 
 treated, does not impair its literary value. On the contrary, it 
 is always considered a specimen of fine writing; the orator or 
 essayist doing his very best for the person whom he sets out 
 to praise. Three examples of the written eulogy : First, the 
 essay on Saint John Chrysostom by Cardinal Newman. 
 Second, the Eulogy on Shakespeare by James Russell Lowell. 
 Third, the Eulogy on Napoleon by Channing. Three ex- 
 amples of the eulogy in the form of a panegyric : First, the 
 the panegyric on O'Connell by Wendel Phillips. Second, 
 the panegyric on Washington by Edward Everett. Third, the 
 panegyric on Jefferson and Adams by Daniel Webster. The 
 eulogy will always remain popular for two reasons : first, be- 
 cause it deals with persons and presents biography in a most 
 pleasing form ; secondly, because it gratifies a universal appetite 
 for hero-worship. 
 
 The Diatribe and Philippic. The eulogy presents the 
 bright side of human life. There is a class of literature. 
 
BIOGRAPHY 205 
 
 biographical in character, which presents the darker side. 
 Various names are applied according to the degree of preju- 
 dice or hatred shown by the author. Thus, we have opposed 
 to the eulogy, the diatribe, the libel, the satire. And opposed 
 to the panegyric we have the philippic, or when the orator 
 becomes violently partisan we have the tirade. These titles 
 indicate the varying degrees of human hate or prejudice. 
 Owing to intense party strife, freedom of the press, and free- 
 dom of speech, we have an abundance of this literature con- 
 nected with the great names in English history. Most of this 
 work is ephemeral, dying with the passions of the hour. But 
 a percentage of it is permanent, owing to the literary skill of 
 the author. For example: The satires of Swift or Junius; 
 the philippics of Edmund Burke. 
 
 The Critique. Between these extremes of the eulogy and 
 the philippic there is a class of literature in which the authors 
 avoid the extremes of love and hatred ; they attempt to give a 
 fair, impartial account of life and character. This literature 
 appears in our best reviews and periodicals. It is commonly 
 called a critique or essay in criticism. Like all abridged biog- 
 raphy, it summarizes the main facts of the life, and bases a 
 critical opinion upon this summary. The leading quarterly 
 and monthly magazines publish this kind of biography in every 
 issue. The essay in criticism is found not only in quarterly 
 magazines, but also as prefaces to books. The prefatory 
 sketch of the author's life is accompanied by a criticism of the 
 work to which it forms an introduction. A more elaborate 
 essay with an effort to be absolutely fair in criticism is found 
 in encyclopedias where large numbers of these brief lives are 
 published. For example, according to the announcement of 
 the editors, the Encyclopedia Brittannica contains abridged 
 biographies of 27,000 persons of all ages, races, and ranks in 
 
20 6 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 society. The American, National, and Chambers' Encyclo- 
 pedias contain perhaps an equal number. 
 
 Biographical Critics. The professional critic as represented 
 
 in quarterly magazines, encyclopedias and elsewhere, com- 
 bines biography with criticism. This example was set by John 
 Dryden in the prefaces to his edition of the Shakespearean 
 plays. Dryden introduced the essay, one-half of which was 
 devoted to biography and the other half to criticism a 
 method faithfully followed ever since his day in what is termed 
 the essay in criticism. Samuel Johnson employed the same 
 method in his lives of the English poets. Francis Jeffrey, the 
 Founder of the Edinburgh Review and its professional critic 
 for twenty-six years, followed the same plan. Throughout 
 the four large volumes of criticism left by Jeffrey, it is the uni- 
 form rule to give a biographical summary first, and criticism 
 afterward. Lord Macaulay, who was a contributor to the 
 Review, followed the example of the editor. The latest pro- 
 fessional critic in English is Matthew Arnold, who left twelve 
 volumes of prose, a large amount of which represents collected 
 prefaces he wrote for the publishers of English classics. In 
 the absence of any large or influential school of criticism, like 
 the French Academy, we have depended upon individual au- 
 thority. Hence, Dryden in his day made and unmade literary 
 reputations ; the same remark applies to such critics as Jeffrey, 
 Macaulay, Johnson. 
 
 Private Papers. Abridged biography sometimes takes the 
 form of private journals, diaries, memoirs and letters. All 
 these divisions come under the general head of private pa- 
 pers. These papers are autobiographical in character; they 
 deal with particular periods or noteworthy incidents and rem- 
 iniscences of the author's life. However numerous, these 
 papers do not present a full biography ; they are at best only de- 
 
BIOGRAPHY 207 
 
 tached fragments. But they give valuable information and 
 help to interpret the life-record. In most cases the author of 
 a complete biography relies upon the private papers for a con- 
 firmation of his statements regarding conduct and- character ; 
 these papers are quoted continually ; there is no other evidence 
 so direct or convincing. One recent illustration : when Pur- 
 cell charges Cardinal Manning with jealousy and spite toward 
 Newman, he publishes fully a dozen letters written by ftTan- 
 ning; and these letters leave no doubt in the reader's mind ; for 
 "tfiey prove that Manning used all his influence at Rome to 
 keep Newman from the Cardinalate. These letters are a reve- 
 lation of Manning's character A large number of private pa- 
 pers receive the title of memoirs. Sometimes .they are called 
 recollections or reminiscences. For example: The Recol- 
 lections of an M. P., recently written. They are so named be- 
 cause as a rule they are written at the close of life when its 
 labors and experiences may be calmly surveyed. Under these 
 circumstances, we have the memoirs of Hume, Dryden, Gibbon, 
 Carlyle. On the other hand, journals or diaries are kept dur- 
 ing the period of active life; they bear the dates on which ev- 
 ery fresh incident or reminiscence is chronicled. But like 
 memoirs, they are only valuable fragments or partial views of 
 the life-record. 
 
 The Private Journal. The private journal was first kept 
 by members of the various courts of Europe. It was the usual 
 court practice during the Middle Ages. Each prince kept a 
 private journal. On this point Lord Bacon remarks in the 
 Advancement of Learning: "Princes hath, upon point of 
 honor and policy, both, journals kept of what had passed day 
 by day." These journals were filled with court gossip, the 
 exchange of royal visits, the social events and functions. They 
 had little literary merit, and were never published. From the 
 court the custom spread to the nobility and to the officials of 
 
208 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 the Church. Then the private journal began to be of some use. 
 It was elaborated by such writers as Madam De Stael, Mon- 
 taigne, Fenelon. In England it was in general use during the 
 age of Alexander Pope. He refers in the Dunciad to his age 
 of " Journals, Medleys, Mercies, Magazines." And the im- 
 plication is that it contained little literary merit. Private 
 journals were kept by missionaries and travelers ever since 
 the beginning of the era of discovery in the fifteenth century. 
 For example, much of the biography of St. Francis Xavier is 
 known from a private journal which he kept in India and 
 China. The biography of Columbus depends upon a journal 
 which he wrote during his voyages to America, as it was neces- 
 sary to keep a private journal in order to give a true account of 
 his travels to the home government. The private journal in- 
 volving travel and exploration yields the most attractive ma- 
 terial owing to incident and adventure. Some modern exam- 
 ples : The private journal kept by Livingstone while exploring 
 South Africa ; the recent visit of George Kennan to Siberia, of 
 Nansen to the neighborhood of the Pole. These journals have 
 been expanded into books of travel which are now general fa- 
 vorites. At the present time there is a tendency to publish these 
 autobiographical fragments, journals and memoirs without 
 weaving them into a formal life story. And there is no class 
 of literature more popular than the journal of Amiel translated 
 recently by Mrs. Humphrey Ward ; the journal of Maria Bas- 
 kertsief, the Russian artist; or the diary of the Opium Eater 
 by Thomas De Quincey. 
 
 Memoirs and Letters. Among private papers the memoir 
 and the letter are highly valuable for purposes of biography. 
 No biography is now compiled without including them, provid- 
 ing they may be obtained. The memoir is an essay dealing 
 with some important event, incident or experience. As there 
 are many such events in a lifetime, a number of these papers are 
 
BIOGRAPHY 269 
 
 written, and the plural form of the word is used. Memoirs 
 may be as numerous as private letters. For example, the mem- 
 oirs of Lord Nelson just published form two volumes. Mem- 
 oirs, like private journals, are autobiographical ; an exception to 
 this rule occurs when an author writes of an intimate personal 
 friend; but in such cases the author plays some part in the 
 reminiscence. For example, in the memoirs of Napoleon writ- 
 ten by Talleyrand the author is a factor in what he describes. 
 Memoirs are now published in separate volumes ; as views of 
 life they are disconnected and fragmentary, and should be read 
 in connection with a larger and more complete narrative. The 
 reason for their present popularity is the fact that they treat of 
 the more important and interesting events, leaving out all the 
 minor details. Every rank of society now publishes memoirs. 
 Some recent examples in the United States : in the army, the 
 memoirs of Sheridan, Grant, Sherman ; in the navy, the mem- 
 oirs of Captain Mahan ; in the Church, the memoirs of Edward 
 E. Hale and Archbishop Spaulding. Among American men of 
 letters, the memoirs of Poe, Bryant, Longfellow. Among Am- 
 erican statesmen, the memoirs of Franklin, Marshall, and Lin- 
 coln. The publication of letters is now equally general. The 
 very latest are those of Carlyle, Arnold, the correspondence of 
 our colonial Governors ; the letters written to Washington, now 
 issued in five volumes. 
 
 Class Biography. Abridged biography sometimes deals 
 with certain classes of society, persons of the same calling or 
 profession. The number of persons thus included, compels the 
 biographer to be brief; and this kind of writing is called class 
 biography. Class biography although abbreviated, is far more 
 elaborate than necrology, biographical essays or private pa- 
 pers. It is the nearest approach that we have in abridged bi- 
 ography to the complete life-record of the individual. It aims 
 at giving a connected account of the chief events, and these are 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 unified by the particular calling or profession which is kept 
 constantly in view. 
 
 Examples. The example of writing class biography was set 
 by Plutarch in the first century of the Christian era. He se- 
 lected forty-six celebrated men from Greek and Roman his- 
 tory, and wrote their biographies by pairs according to their 
 profession or calling. Thus he pairs off Csesar and Alexander ; 
 Cicero and Demosthenes ; Solon and Valerius ; and so on down 
 the list of celebrities and professions. Hence, his work is 
 sometimes called Parallel Lives. These lives are works of 
 great learning and research ; and they are written at consider- 
 able length. They have been translated and frequently imi- 
 tated, and the imitation of them has given us class biography. 
 
 English Imitators. The earliest imitator of Plutarch 
 among English authors was John Bale, a Protestant Bishop of 
 the fifteenth century, who wrote a series of lives ; taking for his 
 subject the illustrious authors of England. The work was 
 written in Latin, but has since been translated. A second ex- 
 ample of the 1 7th century is Isaak Walton. Walton wrote the 
 lives of Anglican divines. The series is incomplete, but the 
 work is a good example of class-biography. A more repre- 
 sentative w^ork than either of these is the " Lives of the Poets/' 
 written by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century. This 
 work written in ten small volumes appeared in 1781. These 
 lives of the poets are, on the whole, the best of Johnson's 
 v. orks ; the narratives are as entertaining as any novel ; the re- 
 marks on life and on human nature are eminently shrewd and 
 profound. The criticism contained in the work is the judg- 
 ment of a mind vigorous and acute. A class-biography irr im- 
 itation of Plutarch was written by Hartley Coleridge, son of 
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1832. It is called " Lives of 
 Northern Worthies," and deals with the celebrated men of 
 Great Britain. These lives were written as essays for Black- 
 
BIOGRAPHY 211 
 
 wood's Magazine; afterward, they were enlarged and pub- 
 lished in volume form. The prose style of Coleridge, lively 
 and brilliant, is better adapted to biography than the lumbering 
 style of Johnson. In religion, we have a large number of class- 
 biographies. Three noted examples: First, the lives of Eng- 
 lish martyrs by John Foxe, who lived during the reign of 
 yueen Elizabeth. This work deals with the Protestant mar- 
 tyrs who died during the reign of Queen Mary. Second, Al- 
 ban Butler, born at Northampton, England, 1711 ; died in St. 
 Omer's, France, in 1773. Published the Lives of the Saints, 
 a class-biography based upon the Acta Sanctorum. The work 
 is reliable as to facts ; but the matter is poorly arranged and the 
 style is unattractive. This work has had a wide circulation be- 
 cause it has no competitors in English. Third, Walter Far- 
 quhar Hook 1798-1875. He wrote two important works: 
 a dictionary of ecclesiastical biography and the " Lives of 
 the Archbishops of Canterbury " the latter running through 
 14 volumes. Hook is a trustworthy biographer and he had ac- 
 cess to all the materials. 
 
 Some Recent and Valuable Sets of Class-Biography. The 
 Lives of the Saints, edited by S. Baring Gould, an English 
 clergyman of the Established Church. This series was begun 
 1872 ; is not yet completed. The Beacon Lights of History, a 
 series of the world's most distinguished men, written by John 
 Lord and published in fifteen volumes. Lives of the Popes, 
 a series in course of preparation ; six volumes finished, written 
 by Ludwig Pastor, translated into English. Lives of Emi- 
 nent Philosophers, a series of fifteen volumes, edited by Wil- 
 liam Knight, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University 
 of St. Andrews. English Men of Letters, a series edited by 
 John Morley, forty-two volumes finished ; others in course of 
 preparation. American Men of Letters, series edited by 
 Charles Dudley Warner. It has reached the fourteenth vol- 
 
212 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 time. Lives of American Statesmen, edited by John T. Morse, 
 twenty-eight volumes completed; series unfinished. Lives of 
 Eminent British Statesmen by John Morley, twelve volumes. 
 Lives of Great Commanders, a series edited by General James 
 Grant Wilson ; eighteen volumes have appeared ; series not yet 
 completed. Lives of Great Artists, collected and edited by 
 Frederick G. Stephens ; thirty-nine volumes. 
 
CHAPTER XXX 
 BIOGRAPHY (CONCLUDED) 
 
 Complete Biography. Complete biography deals with in- 
 dividual life in the most satisfactory manner. It aims at fur- 
 nishing a complete life-record ; and to that end employs necrolo- 
 gies, eulogies, memoirs, letters, and whatever else may throw 
 light upon the person's career. It supplies an amount of detail 
 omitted in partial biographies. The author of such biography 
 has access to Church, State and private papers ; and quotes at 
 considerable length the opiniqns of contemporaries. The pub- 
 lication is not hurried, as is often the case in class-biography ; 
 plenty of time is taken to collect and sift the material ; so that 
 a complete biography often takes several years in the prepara- 
 tion for the press. For example, John Morley has spent several 
 years on his Life of Gladstone just published. Carlyle spent 
 three years, and made several trips to Germany in his prepara- 
 tion of the Life of Frederick the Great. 
 
 Classification. Complete biography is classified in various 
 ways. On the part of authorship it is divided into three 
 classes. It is written either by the author himself or by an- 
 other, or by several others In the first case we have an auto- 
 biography. For example, the Apologia of Newman ; in the 
 second case, individual biography. For example: the Life of 
 Christ by Geike; in the third case we have composite biogra- 
 phy: for example, the Life of Lincoln by his secretaries, Nico- 
 lay and Hay. Of these three classes, autobiography is the 
 most satisfactory. The author knows best where to get 
 
 213 
 
2I4 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 materials relative to his own life. He knows best the motives 
 which have governed his own life and conduct. He should 
 be the best interpreter of his own acts. Composite biography 
 is usually written by me'mbers of religious orders or by socie- 
 ties. Biography is produced in this way: for example, the 
 lives and deeds of the Saints by the Bollandists. Often a 
 composite biography is written by the family of the deceased. 
 A recent example: the life of Huxley by his, wife and son. 
 The arriount of this literature is comparatively small. Biogra- 
 phy, as a rule, is written by a single author. 
 
 Examples of Representative Biographers. Some recent and 
 select examples of biographical writing: The' Life of Thomas 
 Arnold by Dean Stanley. Stanley was private chaplain of 
 Queen Victoria, dean of Westminster, and historian and theo- 
 logian. As an historian he. wrote memorials of Canterbury 
 and a history of Westminster Abbey; essays on the Jewish 
 Church and the Apostolic Age. As a theologian his chief 
 works are " The Relations of Church and State," a study of 
 Presbyterianism. Dr. Arnold, the subject of his biography, 
 lived from- 1795 to. 1842. He was a noted English educator, 
 head master of Rugby; the father of Matthew and Thomas 
 Arnold, both celebrated in English literature; professor of 
 Modern History in Oxford, 1841. His historical works are 
 Lectures on Modern History, History of Rome. A second 
 example: The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell 
 the most widely known and best written biography in English. 
 A word about the author: Boswell was born at Edinburgh 
 in 1740; died at London in 1795; a lawyer by profession; an 
 intimate friend and companion of Johnson for twenty years, 
 and, as he writes in the preface, thoroughly acquainted with 
 the story of Johnson's life. A word about the work: The 
 author makes use of all the sources from which data could be 
 secured. The private papers and correspondence of Johnson 
 
BIOGRAPHY 215 
 
 were voluminous, as he was the leading litterateur of his age; 
 besides the material which was turned over to him, Roswell 
 makes use of his perosnal knowledge of the man, anecdotes, 
 conversations and personal recollections. On the value of this 
 supplementary knowledge Boswell writes as follows: " What 
 I consider as the peculiar value of my work is the quantity it 
 contains of Johnson's conversations." On this careful prepa- 
 ration of the materials, Boswell writes : 
 
 " The labor and anxious attention with which I have collected 
 and arranged the materials of this biography will hardly be con- 
 ceived by those who read it with careless facility. Were I to 
 detail the books and papers which I have consulted, and the in- 
 quiries which I have found it necessary to make by various chan- 
 nels, I should probably be thought ridiculously ostentatious. But 
 I will not suppress my satisfaction in the consciousness that by 
 recording the life of the 'brightest ornament of the i8th cen- 
 tury,' I have largely provided for the instruction and entertain- 
 ment of mankind." 
 
 The following excerpts from the introduction to Johnson's 
 Life written by Boswell, will throw light on the biographer's 
 method : 
 
 " To write the life of him who excelled all mankind in writing 
 the lives of others, and who, whether we consider his extraor- 
 dinary endowments, or his various works, has been equalled by 
 few in any age, is an arduous, and may be reckoned in me a 
 presumptuous task. Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in 
 conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man's 
 life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the 
 preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and 
 elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent 
 persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect ex- 
 ample of biography that was ever exhibited. But although he 
 at different times, in a desultory manner, committed to writing 
 many particulars of the progress of his mind and fortunes, he 
 never had persevering diligence enough to form them into a 
 
2I 6 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 regular composition. Of these memorials a few have been pre- 
 served; but the greater part was consigned by him to the flames, 
 a few days before his death. As I had the honor and happiness 
 of enjoying his friendship for upwards of twenty years; as I had 
 the scheme of writing his life constantly in view ; as he was well 
 apprised of this circumstance and from time to time obligingly 
 satisfied my inquiries, by communicating to me the incidents of 
 his early years ; as I acquired a facility in recollecting, and was 
 very assiduous in recording, his conversation, of which the ex- 
 traordinary vigor and vivacity constituted one of the first fea- 
 tures of his character ; and as I have spared no pains in obtain- 
 ing materials concerning him, from every quarter where I could 
 discover that they were to be found, and have been favored with 
 the most liberal communications by his friends ; I flatter myself 
 that few biographers have entered upon such a work as this with 
 more advantages, independent of literary abilities, in which I am 
 not vain enough to compare myself with some great names who 
 have gone before me in this kind of writing. Instead of melting 
 down my materials into one mass, and constantly speaking in 
 my own person, by which I might have appeared to have more 
 merit in the execution of the work, I have resolved to adopt and 
 enlarge upon the excellent plan of Mr. Mason, in his Memoirs 
 of Gray. Wherever narrative is necessary to explain, connect 
 and supply, I furnish it to the best of my abilities; but in the 
 chronological series of Johnson's life, which I trace as distinctly 
 as I can year by year, I produce, wherever it is in my power, his 
 own minutes, letters or conversation, being convinced that this 
 mode is more lively, and will make my readers better acquainted 
 with him, that even most of those were who actually knew him, 
 but could know him only partially; whereas there is here an ac- 
 cumulation of intelligence from various points, by which his char- 
 acter is more fully understood and illustrated. Indeed, I cannot 
 conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man's life, than 
 not only relating all the most important events of it in their 
 order, but interweaving what he privately wrote, and said and 
 thought ; by which mankind are enabled as it were to see him live, 
 and to ' live o'er each scene ' with him, as he actually advanced 
 through the different stages of his life. Had his other friends 
 been as diligent and ardent as I was, he might have been almost 
 entirely preserved. As it is, I will venture to say that he will 
 
BIOGRAPHY 2i; 
 
 be seen in this work more completely than any man who has 
 ever yet lived. And he will be seen as he really was ; for I pro- 
 fess to write, not his panegyric, which must be all praise, but his 
 Life ; which, great and good as he was, must not be supposed to 
 be entirely perfect. To be as he was, is indeed subject of pane- 
 gyric enough to any man in this state of being; but in every 
 picture there should be shade as well as light, and when I deline- 
 ate him without reserve, I do what he himself recommended, both 
 by his precept and example. If the biographer writes from per- 
 sonal knowledge, and makes haste to gratify the public curiosity, 
 there is danger lest his interest, his fear, his gratitude, or his 
 tenderness, overpower his fidelity, and tempt him to conceal, if 
 not invent. There are many who think it an act of piety to hide 
 the faults or failings of their friends, even when they can no 
 longer suffer by their detection ; we therefore see whole ranks of 
 characters adorned with uniform panegyric, and not to be known 
 from one another but by extrinsic and casual circumstances. 
 ' Let me remember/ says Hale, ' when I find myself inclined to 
 pity a criminal, that there is likewise a pity due to the country/ 
 If we owe regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more 
 respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue and to truth. On this 
 subject Plutarch writes : ' Nor is it always in the most dis- 
 tinguished achievements that men's virtues or vices may be best 
 discerned ; but very often an action of small note, a short saying 
 or a jest, shall distinguish a person's real character more than 
 the greatest sieges or the most important battles/ ' 
 
 Boswell continues : 
 
 " To this may be added the sentiments of the very man whose 
 life I am about to exhibit. The business of the biographer is 
 often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which 
 produce vulgar greatness to lead the thoughts into domestic pri- 
 vacies, and display the minute details of daily life, where exterior 
 appendages are cast aside, and men excel each other only by 
 prudence and by virtue. The account -of Thuanus is with great 
 propriety said by its author to have been written that it might 
 lay open to posterity the private and familiar character of that 
 man, cujus ingenium et candorem ex ipsius scriptis sunt olim sem- 
 per miraturi, whose candor and genius will to the end of time be 
 
2I g ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 by his writings preserved in admiration. There are many invisi- 
 ble circumstances, which, whether we read as inquirers after 
 natural or moral knowledge, whether we intend to enlarge our sci- 
 ence or increase our virtue, are more important than public oc- 
 currences. Thus Sallust, the great master of nature, has not for- 
 got in his account of Catiline, to remark, that his walk was now 
 quick, and again slow, as an indication of a mind revolving with 
 violent commotion. Thus, the story of Melancthon affords a 
 striking lecture on the value of time, by informing us that when 
 he had made an appointment, he expected not only the hour but 
 the minute to be fixed, that the day might not run out in the idle- 
 ness of suspense; and all the plans and enterprises of De Witt 
 are now of less importance to the world than that part of his 
 personal character, which represents him as careful of his health, 
 and negligent of his life. But biography has often been allotted 
 to writers who seem very little acquainted with the nature of their 
 task, or very negligent about the performance. They rarely 
 afford any other account than might be collected from public 
 papers, but imagine themselves writing a life, when they exhibit 
 a chronological series of actions or preferments ; and have so little 
 regard to the manner or behaviour of their heroes, that more 
 knowledge may be gained of a man's real character by a short 
 conversation with one of his servants than from a formal and 
 studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his 
 funeral. There are, indeed, some natural reasons why these nar- 
 ratives are often written by such as were not likely to give much 
 instruction or delight, and why most accounts of particular per- 
 sons are barren and useless. If a life be delayed until interest 
 and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but must 
 expect little intelligence ; for the incidents which give excellence 
 to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon 
 escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition. We 
 know how few can portray a living acquaintance, except by its 
 most prominent and observable particularities, and the grosser 
 features of his mind ; and it may be easily imagined how much 
 of this little knowledge may be lost in imparting it, and how soon 
 a succession of copies will lose all resemblance of the original." 
 (Rambler, No. 60.) 
 
BIOGRAPHY 219 
 
 Bosvvell goes on to say : 
 
 " I am fully aware of the objections which may be made to 
 the minuteness on some occasions of my detail of Johnson's con- 
 versation, and how happily it is adapted for the petty exercise of 
 ridicule by men of superficial understanding- and ludicrous fancy : 
 but I remain firm and confident in my opinion, that minute par- 
 ticulars are frequently characteristic, and always amusing, when 
 they relate to a distinguished man. I am, therefore, exceedingly 
 unwilling that anything, however slight, which my illustrious 
 friend thought it worth his while to express, with any degree of 
 point, should perish. For this almost superstitious reverence I 
 have found very old and venerable authority, quoted by our great 
 modern Prelate, Seeker, in whose tenth sermon there is the fol- 
 lowing passage : ' Rabbi David Kimchi, a noted Jewish com- 
 mentator, who lived about five hundred years ago, explains that 
 passage in the first Psalm, * His leaf also shall not wither,' from 
 Rabbis yet older than himself, thus : That ' even the idle talk,' 
 so he expresses it, ' of a good man ought to be regarded ; ' the 
 most superfluous things he saith are always of some value. And 
 other ancient authors have the same phrase, nearly in the same 
 sense.' Of one thing I am certain, that considering how highly 
 the small portion which we have of the table-talk and other anec- 
 dotes of our celebrated writers is valued, and how earnestly it is 
 regretted that we have not more, I am justified in preserving 
 rather too many of Johnson's sayings than too few ; especially as 
 from the diversity of dispositions it cannot be known with cer- 
 tainty beforehand, whether what may seem trifling to some, and, 
 perhaps, to the collector himself, may not be most agreeable to 
 many ; and the greater number that an author can please in any 
 degree, the more pleasure does there arise to a benevolent mind. 
 To those who are weak enough to think this is a degrading task, 
 and the time and labor which have been devoted to it misem- 
 ployed, I shall content myself with opposing the authority of the 
 greatest man of any age, Julius Casar, of whom Bacon observes, 
 that 'In his book of Apophthegms which he collected, we see that 
 he esteemed it more honor to make himself but a pair of tables, 
 to take the wise and pithy words of others than to have every 
 word of his own to be made an apophthegm or an oracle.' (Ad- 
 vancement of Learning, Book i.) Having said thus much by 
 
220 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 way of introduction, I commit the following pages to the candour 
 of the public." 
 
 John Morley. He was born at Blackburn, Lancashire, Dec. 
 24, 1838. He received his education at Oxford where he 
 graduated in 1859; he entered the legal profession in 1860; 
 afterwards, he became the editor of the Fortnightly Review 
 and the Pall Mall Gazette. For a number of years he has 
 occupied a seat in Parliament and taken an active part in na- 
 tional politics. His literary work has been extensive, much 
 of it in the department of biography. The most recent con- 
 tribution to this department is his Life of William Gladstone. 
 
 Criticism by The London Quarterly Review. " There are 
 three aspects in which Mr. Morley's great work can, and in the 
 long run must, be appreciated its aspect as a work of literary 
 art ; its psychological aspect as a sympathetic appreciation of one 
 of the greatest personalities of his time ; its historical aspect as 
 presenting a survey, which must needs be concise without being 
 inadequate, of the long series of political events associated with 
 Mr. Gladstone's career and subjected to his influence. These 
 several aspects are so organically connected in the biographical 
 synthesis that they cannot be wholly dissociated in the critical an- 
 alysis. No biography which neglects any one of them can be held 
 to attain to the highest order of merit; but, if due allowance be 
 made for Mr. Morley's personal sympathies and political pre- 
 possessions, never suppressed, and yet never obtruded, we shall 
 hardly place Mr. Morley's biography in any class lower than the 
 first. It is a great portrait of a great man. The biography is 
 long, even as biographies go now; but its length cannot be said 
 to be excessive, jn view of the unusual duration of Mr. Glad- 
 stone's public career, the unparalleled fullness of his life, and the 
 wide range of his interests. It has been said that only a syndi- 
 cate could write the life of such a man, and only an encyclopaedia 
 could contain it. Mr. Morley has accomplished the work single- 
 handed ; he has completed it in three years ; and he has com- 
 pressed the results into three volumes. Further than this com- 
 pression could not profitably go. His words are seldom wasted. 
 
BIOGRAPHY 
 
 They are the distilled essence of documents innumerable, the 
 condensed record of one of the most active and many-sided ca- 
 reers in British history, a brief epitome of more than half a cen- 
 tury crowded with great political events, unexampled in social 
 and economic change. Nevertheless, severely as Mr. Morley has 
 condensed his materials, he retains at all times perfect mastery 
 over them. His biography is no mere bald and jejune calendar 
 of incidents, controversies, or events, but an articulated narra- 
 tive, well proportioned in its parts, instinct with life and move- 
 ment, in which the rare but necessary documents to be quoted fall 
 naturally into their places as touches conducive to the complete- 
 ness of the portrait. In style too, the book is admirably suited 
 to its subject. The dominant note is a grave and lofty dignity, 
 but lighter tones are not infrequent ; and their introduction is well 
 attuned to the spirit of the whole composition. It abounds in 
 felicitous phrases and well chosen epith.ets ; and there is no lack 
 of those pungent apophthegms and pregnant reflections which 
 bespeak the man of letters who has himself handled great affairs. 
 As a single specimen of Mr. Morley 's graver manner we may 
 take his description of the scene on the introduction of the first 
 Home Rule Bill. ' Of the chief comrades or rivals of the min- 
 ister's own generation the strong administrators, the eager and 
 accomplished debaters, the sagacious leaders the only survivor 
 now comparable to him in eloquence or in influence was Mr. 
 Bright. That illustrious man seldom came into the House in 
 those distracted days; and on this memorable occasion his stern 
 and noble head was to be seen in dim obscurity. Various as were 
 the emotions in other regions of the House, in one quarter re- 
 joicing was unmixed. There, at least, was no doubt and no mis- 
 giving. There, pallid and tranquil, sat the Irish leader, whose 
 hard insight, whose patience, energy and spirit of command had 
 achieved this astounding result, and done that which he had 
 vowed to his countrymen that he would assuredly be able to do. 
 On the benches round him, genial excitement rose almost to tu- 
 mult. Well it might. For the first time since the Union, the 
 Irish case was at last to be pressed in all its force and strength, 
 in every aspect of policy and of conscience, by the most power- 
 ful Englishman then alive. More striking than the audience was 
 the man; more striking than the multitude of eager onlookers 
 from the shore was the rescuer with deliberate valour facing the 
 
22 2 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 
 
 floods ready to wash him down ; the veteran Ulysses who, after 
 more than half a century of combat, service, toil, thought it not 
 too late to try a further ' work of noble note.' In the hands of 
 such a master of the instrument, the theme might easily have 
 lent itself to one of those displays of exalted passion which the 
 House had marvelled at in more than one of Mr. Gladstone's 
 speeches on the Turkish question, or heard with religious rever- 
 ence in his speech on the Affirmation Bill in 1883. W'hat the 
 occasion now required was that passion should burn low, and 
 reasoned persuasion hold up the guiding lamp. An elaborate 
 scheme was to be unfolded, an unfamiliar policy to be explained 
 and vindicated. Of that best kind of eloquence which dispenses 
 with declamation, this was a fine and sustained example. There 
 was a deep, rapid, steady, onflowing volume of argument, expo- 
 sition, exhortation. Every hard or bitter stroke was avoided. 
 Now and again a fervid note thrilled the ear and lifted all hearts. 
 But political oratory is action, not words-action, character, will, 
 conviction, purpose, personality. As this eager muster of men 
 underwent the enchantment of periods exquisite in their balance 
 and modulation, the compulsion of his flashing glances and ani- 
 mated gesture, what stirred and commanded them was the recol- 
 lection of natural service, the thought of the speaker's mastering 
 purpose, his unflagging resolution and strenuous will, his strength 
 of thew and sinew well tried in long years of resounding war, 
 his unquenched conviction that the just cause can never fail. 
 Few are the heroic moments in our parliamentary politics, but 
 this was one ' (iii, 311-2). ' Even the bitterest adversary of the 
 policy here referred to must acknowledge that this is literary 
 work of the highest order. We may follow it up with a few de- 
 tached quotations illustrating Mr. Morley's felicities of expres- 
 sion and appreciation, premising at the same time that they lose 
 more than half their effect by being detached from their context. 
 Here, for a first example, is a shrewd attempt to explain the 
 baffling antinomies of Mr. Gladstone's personality. ' An illus- 
 trious opponent once described him, by way of hitting his singu- 
 lar quality of disposition, as an ardent Italian in the custody of 
 a Scotsman. It is easy to make too much of race, but when we 
 are puzzled by Mr. Gladstone's seeming- contrarieties of tempera- 
 ment, his union of impulse with caution, of passion with circum- 
 spection, of pride and fire with self-control, of Ossianic flight with 
 
BIOGRAPHY j_> 
 
 a steady foothold on the solid earth, we may perhaps find a sort 
 of explanation in thinking of him as a Highlander in the custody 
 of a lowlander ' (i, 18). There are in Morley's portrait, at any 
 rate, no dark or doubtful lineaments; and, did space permit, we 
 could quote passage after passage to heighten the picture of his 
 laborious, high-minded, and conscientious persistence in the 
 profitable use of rare and high gifts, and in the scrupulous dis- 
 charge of all the duties imposed on him by life and its circum- 
 stances. Nevertheless, it was a pre-established harmony between 
 his best gifts and the proper field for their employment that made 
 him a politician. He might have been anything, as Huxley said. 
 But unless he had followed his early and rather schwdnncrisch 
 impulse to take orders, it is certain that in any civil walk of life 
 he must have gravitated sooner or later to politics. He was es- 
 sentially a man of action, although he was a great deal more, and 
 had several qualities, gifts, and even failings which are seldom 
 found so highly developed in men of action of the class to which 
 he belonged. Mr. Morley puts all this very well in his opening 
 pages. ' It is true that what interests the world in Mr. Gladstone 
 is even more what he was than what he did ; his brilliancy, charm, 
 and power ; the endless surprises ; his dualism, or more than 
 dualism ; his vicissitudes of opinion ; his subtleties of mental 
 progress ; his strange union of qualities never elsewhere found 
 together ; his striking unlikeness to other men in whom great and 
 free nations have for long periods placed their trust. . . . 
 Some may think in this connection that I have made the pre- 
 ponderance of politics excessive in the story of a genius of signal 
 versatility, to whom politics were only one interest among many. 
 . . . Yet, after all, it was to his thoughts, his purposes, his 
 ideals, his performances as statesman, in all the widest signifi- 
 cance of that lofty and honorable designation, that Mr. Glad- 
 stone owes the lasting substance of 'his fame. His life was ever 
 'greatly absorbed-' he said, 'in working the institutions of his 
 country/ Here we mark a signal trait. Not for two centuries, 
 since the historic strife of Anglican and Puritan, had our island 
 produced a ruler in whom the religious motive was paramount 
 in the like degree. He was not only a political force, but a 
 moral force. He strove to use all the powers of his own genius 
 and the powers of the state for moral purposes and religious. 
 Nevertheless, his mission in all its forms was action. He had 
 
224 
 
 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 none of that detachment, often found among superior minds, 
 wLich we honour for its disinterestedness, even while we lament 
 its impotence in result. The track in which he moved, the in- 
 struments that he employed, were the track and the instruments, 
 the sword and the trowel, of political action ; and what is called 
 the Gladstonian era was distinctively a political era." (The 
 Quarterly Review, 1905, pp. i, 2, 3.) 
 
 Minor Examples of Biography. The Life of Audubon by 
 Elliot Cowes and Maria Audubon a composite biography. 
 John J. Audubon, America's greatest ornithologist, born at 
 New Orleans, 1780-1851; of French descent, and educated 
 in France celebrated for his drawings of birds. His chief 
 works are, The Birds of America; Quadrupeds of America. 
 The Life of John Ruskin, by W. G. Collingwood. Ruskin di- 
 vides with Newman the honors of first place in English prose ; 
 celebrated as an art critic, and reformer of English taste in 
 architecture and painting. Best known of his works are, The 
 Seven Lamps of Architecture; the Stones of Venice; Modern 
 Painters. Life of Louis Pasteur by Rene Vallery Radot. 
 Pasteur, the leading scientist of France, in the past century, 
 celebrated for his researches in bacteria, born at Jura, 1822- 
 1895. Institutes bearing his name and founded for the treat- 
 ment of hydrophobia and kindred germ diseases, exist in the 
 large cities of America and Europe. Besides these lives we 
 have as recent editions, the Life of Cromwell by President 
 Roosevelt; the Life of Bismarck by Butler; the Life of New- 
 man by Waller and Burrow. 
 
CHAPTER XXXI 
 HISTORY 
 
 History is one of the most important of the standard prose- 
 forms. It is the oldest prose-form of which we have an au- 
 thentic account. It supplies material for every department of 
 literature ; and, in turn, borrows from all departments whether 
 of verse or of prose. Hence, the interpretation and appreci- 
 ation of literature depend in a large measure upon a knowledge 
 of history. 
 
 Meaning of the Word. It is derived from the Greek word, 
 istoria. which signifies knowledge obtained by learned inquiry 
 or investigation. According to the Greek, istoor signifies a 
 wise man, a judge, or a critic. And the result of his investiga- 
 tion was known as history. This definition from the origin 
 of the word does not differentiate history from the sciences, all 
 of which are the result of learned investigation. 
 
 Definition According to Usage. According to usage, his- 
 tory has both a general and a specific meaning. In general it 
 means the prose narrative of past events, as probably true 
 as human testimony will allow. In its widest sense it includes 
 the record of all animate and inanimate orders of being. For 
 example, the History of the Stars by Chambers; the His- 
 tory of the Earth by Seeley; the so-called Natural Histories 
 dealing with animal and plant life. But in the strict sense 
 history is confined to the human record. It is defined as 
 the prose narrative of past events, having for its subject-mat- 
 
 225 
 
226 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 ter collective human life. In this way it is distinguished from 
 biography, which deals with individual human life. The col- 
 lective life either of tribes or nations or the whole human race 
 is the proper field and theme for the historical writer. 
 
 Factors in the Construction of History. In the construc- 
 tion of history the two chief factors are science and art. 
 Science collects the facts, ascertains their truth by an exhaust- 
 ive examination of documents. Thus science deals with the 
 sources of history and supplies all the material. An examina- 
 tion of these " sources " is precisely the same kind of work as 
 an examination of the different strata of rock or the different 
 flora and fauna of the earth. Hence like geology and botany 
 history is fundamentally scientific. There is this difference, 
 however, between the science of history and other sciences. 
 Historical facts are only known indirectly by the help of their 
 traces. Historical knowledge is essentially indirect knowledge. 
 The facts of other sciences are known by direct observation ; the 
 facts of history depend upon documents and human testimony. 
 One illustration : By direct personal observation we can prove 
 the existence of the law of gravitation. We can prove the 
 existence of an historical Alexander only on the testimony of 
 contemporary witnesses and records. Hence, history is called 
 an indirect science in order to distinguish it from the direct 
 sciences. On that account it is none the less reliable. 
 
 Art as a Factor in History. When the facts of history are 
 authenticated and collected, the artist begins to group, co- 
 ordinate and mass them in a literary structure. Thus history 
 may be compared to architecture, the brick and stone of which 
 are historical facts. The artist begins with a plan or outline, 
 and he applies at once the fundamental principles of art 
 unity, harmony, balance, proportion. The historian so ar- 
 ranges his facts as to give not merely a dead image, but a living 
 
HISTORY 
 
 representation of the past. On this point Symonds writes: 
 " The magic wand of the historian touches the grave, and na- 
 tions reappear clothed in their habit as they lived/' Finally, 
 the historian is a literary artist who gives to his subject-matter 
 all the grace and charm of style found in other departments of 
 literature. 
 
 History in Relation to Other Arts. History is often com- 
 pared with architecture on account of its massiveness, magni- 
 tude, the unity and complexity of its design. The Gothic 
 cathedral in which a single unifying idea dominates a world of 
 detail and complexity is not a greater work of art than the 
 masterpieces of history. History bears a close resemblance to 
 painting on account of the large amount of pictorial work in- 
 volved. It is a succession of grand pictures of battlefield and 
 forum and palace, a picture gallery of celebrities who figured in 
 church, state, society. Hence history has many a foreground 
 and back-ground so many that the phrase, historical per- 
 spective, is a common one in criticism. It means that the artist 
 must take the viewpoint of the age he is describing, and select 
 those personages and events for the foreground of his pictures, 
 which deserve prominence; at the same time outlining in the 
 background all the others. But history is more nearly allied 
 to dramatic art than to painting ; for it attempts more than the 
 mere picture of past heroes and events. It attempts to re- 
 create the great characters of antiquity. Like the drama, it 
 presents them as living and acting. Hence Balmez called his- 
 tory a grand drama. But while history contains most of the 
 material out of which the drama has evolved, it is not con- 
 cerned exclusively or even primarily with the individual hero. 
 The nation, the state, the government; the acts of collective 
 human life as revealed in the acts of a state or of a government 
 hold first place and and are an historian's first concern. All 
 
22 g ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 individuals, whether heroes or not, should be subordinate to 
 the main theme a nation's origin, development, life. 
 
 The Art-Content of History. It is a nation's life. Nation 
 al life like individual life, obeys two laws: first, the law of 
 continuity this means that there are no breaks or leaps in 
 the life of a people. Development may hasten or may slacken, 
 but it is always continuous. The operation of this law of con- 
 tinuity makes history a unit ; it is the basis for the organization 
 of its facts into an artistic whole. The second law is that of 
 differentiation. It means that the life of a-people takes on new 
 forms in the process of development ; new ideas, new move- 
 ments, new forms of government, new customs. These changes 
 are not unlike the changes from childhood to maturity and 
 old age in the life of the individual. 
 
 The Five-Fold Life of a Nation.* "An examination of the 
 life of any people will reveal certain permanent features com- 
 mon to the history of all civilized nations. These phases of 
 national life are political, religious, educational, industrial and 
 social. These are further emphasized by the fact that each 
 has a great organization, called an institution, around which it 
 clusters, and whose purpose, plan of work, and machinery are 
 peculiar to itself. For political life the center is the institu- 
 tion called government; for religious life, the church ; for intel- 
 lectual life, the school; for industrial life, occupation; for social 
 life, the family. Hence, the phrase, institutional life, which is 
 often employed to designate this five-fold activity of the na- 
 tion." The law of differentiation is now applied so thoroughly 
 that we often think of the government without the church, the 
 church without the school ; and histories are written, which deal 
 with only one of the five phases of national life, to the exclusion 
 of all the others. For example, the history of the Church of 
 
 * For full development of this idea see Professor Mace : Method in His- 
 story,page 11 seqq. 
 
HISTORY 229 
 
 England ; the political history of Great Britain ; the history of 
 British education ; the history of the British industrial system. 
 
 The Origin of Institutional Life. The primitive history of 
 all peoples shows that, in the beginning, institutional life pre- 
 sented itself to man's consciousness as a simple and undivided 
 whole. For example, in early Hebrew history Abraham did 
 not separate in thought his political from his religious duties, 
 nor did he think of his avocation and social interests as dif- 
 ferent and disconnected. In his time there were only the 
 germs of a government, a church, a school, an industrial sys- 
 tem; and these were so interwoven with other interests that 
 they constituted one great life. But between that time and 
 the present the principle of differentiation has done its work 
 so perfectly that we often think of the government without 
 the church coming into mind; and so with other institutions. 
 These institutions have become great crystallized centers of life 
 around which the thoughts and feelings of a people grow. 
 
 Value of Institutional Life. Growth in the life of a nation 
 becomes permanent by being embodied through law or custom, 
 in its appropriate institution. For example, growth in politi- 
 cal thought and feeling finds entrance into government, as the 
 history of theocracy, monarchy and democracy clearly shows. 
 Growth in religious life found entrance into the world, and 
 paganism and Judaism yielded to Christianity, while Christi- 
 anity itself has through the ages elaborated its appropriate in- 
 stitution. The same growth is permanent in our industrial, 
 educational and social institutions. 
 
 Institutional Life the Basis of Civilization. Because of this 
 permanent institutional life, progress is possible, the advance of 
 civilization is assured ; for one generation profits by the achieve- 
 ments of all its predecessors. 
 
230 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 The Organic Unity of Institutional Life. While the life 
 of a people flows in one mighty stream of five currents, it is 
 nevertheless an organic whole. There is not one destiny for 
 government, another for the church, another still for the school, 
 and a different one for industrial and social interests ; but all 
 these constitute one life, one destiny. Hence, a great event 
 cannot occur in one kind of institutional life without affecting 
 all the others. One illustration : The liberation of the slaves 
 in the Southern States. It affected religion by cleaving in 
 twain all the religious denominations of the United States, 
 save one. It affected politics by making the solid South for- 
 ever democratic ; it affected education by opening new problems 
 in the intellectual test of voters ; it affected industry by chang- 
 ing slave-labor to paid labor, thus bankrupting hundreds of 
 Southern planters; finally, it affected society by raising the 
 question whether a negro should be the social equal of his 
 white companion and neighbor. A change in any kind of 
 institutional life is bound to be felt in all the others. The de- 
 gree to which it will be felt will depend upon the amount and 
 character of the change. For example, the change from 
 Paganism to Christianity was so radical as to be seriously felt 
 in all phases of institutional life ; whereas, the political change 
 from monarchy to democracy in such countries as France and 
 the United States did not materially alter other institutions. 
 
 Various Kinds of History^. Each kind of institutional life 
 supplies material for history. The records of church, school, 
 government and the social and industrial records comprise the 
 material furnished to the historian. It remains to organize this 
 material into an artistic unity. Various methods ,of organiza- 
 tion are employed, giving us several distinct kinds of history. 
 
 Basis of Unity. First of all, the basis of unity may be any 
 one of the five national institutions, to the exclusion of all the 
 
HISTORY 231 
 
 others. Hence, the histories dealing separately with church, 
 school, government, and so on. Secondly, the basis of unity 
 may be any one of the five kinds of institutional life for a single 
 period or in a single locality. For example, the history of the 
 French Church in the Middle Ages; or the history of the 
 Church in Brittany. Fourthly, the basis of unity may be all 
 kinds of institutional life for a single period. For example, 
 the colonial history of the United States ; Hume's History of 
 the Anglo-Saxons. Or it may concern only a locality, for 
 example, the history of Rhode Island or Massachusetts. All 
 these kinds of history are subject to national limitations and 
 deal with the various phases of national life. Another class 
 of history deals with institutional life independent of any na- 
 tional limitations. For example, a history of the Church uni- 
 versal ; a history of government ; a history of education. 
 These histories are international or cosmopolitan in character. 
 
 Most Difficult Species. Of these various kinds of history 
 the most difficult to write is the complete life of a nation. 
 This difficulty arises from two sources : the abundance of ma- 
 terial supplied by the five phases of national life, an abundance 
 which compels the historian to adopt a rigorous method of se- 
 lection. The second difficulty is the exact disposition of se- 
 lected facts in order rightly to portray the national life as 
 contrasted with the political, social or religious life. The chief 
 objection against national histories has been that they have 
 given undue prominence to political life and neglected the in- 
 dustrial, social and intellectual life of the people. Such his- 
 tories are not lacking in unity, but they violate the laws of 
 symmetry and proportion. 
 
 Various Methods of Writing History. In writing history 
 the author deals with documents. Documents are the traces 
 left in past time by the thoughts and actions of men. For the 
 
232 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 most part, these documents are found in archives, although 
 monuments, coins, inscriptions or any traces of the human 
 record are regarded and classified as documents. Each kind 
 of institutional life possesses archives. There are archives of 
 family, society, church and state. For the want of these 
 archives the history of many periods in the past of humanity 
 must remain forever unknown or only be guessed at from 
 fragmentary traces in metal, brick, stone and mounds of earth. 
 The cave-dwellers, mound-builders and Aztecs are examples 
 in point their history is almost unknown. 
 
 The Grouping of Facts. The historical facts derived from 
 documents are grouped in various ways. It is the second step 
 in the construction of history. The primary method of group- 
 ing is to follow the order of occurrence. Each historical fact 
 belongs to a definite time and place ; so that the writer, no mat- 
 ter what be the place or scope of his history, will observe a 
 chronological order which marks their succession of events in 
 time, and a geographical order which marks their succession in 
 a given place. Besides these two kinds of order, there is a 
 larger grouping determined by the scope of the history itself, 
 whether it be a partial or complete history of a nation. The 
 method of grouping will then follow either the lines of institu- 
 tional life taken separately, and covering a partial history of a 
 people, or it will be fully national in scope. 
 
 Grouping of Facts (Continued). The grouping of facts 
 from which the customs and modes of life of a people are 
 inferred is conducted along various lines; four of which are 
 usual and common in history ; these four lines are rustic, urban, 
 provincial and national. Modes of country life differ from 
 those of the city ; while provincial traits are distinct from 
 national traits. So that a separate grouping of facts will 
 occur in each case. So marked are these lines of distinction 
 
HISTORY 
 
 that histories arc written on the basis of each grouping. For 
 example, the history of peasant life in Switzerland; the his- 
 tory of city life in London ; the history of New England 
 as contrasted with the history of the United States. The 
 sixth and last order of grouping is based upon the biography 
 of representative men. National life is expressed through 
 individuals, whose personal career, at least for a time, is identi- 
 fied with that of the nation. So that history is filled with 
 segments of biography which are used for the purpose of 
 grouping national acts. In nations under monarchical rule, a 
 complete biography is used, namely, that of the king or ruler ; 
 all national acts find expression through time and are grouped 
 around the story of his life. Republics have a greater va- 
 riety, but the same principle of grouping is employed. But 
 history is more than the continuous narrative of events. It 
 is the collective facts, plus the inferences which the historian 
 draws regarding the habits of a people, their national traits, 
 customs, character. While the process of grouping facts is 
 going on, a second process occupies the mind of the writer. 
 It is the process of interpretation. Without an attempt to 
 interpret these facts, history would be a lifeless chronicle of 
 past events. The true life of the nation, its manners, ethics, 
 customs, character, would be wanting. 
 
 Various Methods of Interpreting Historical Facts. After 
 
 the grouping of historical facts takes place, the interpretation 
 of these facts follows in order to determine the customs, habits, 
 character, life of a nation. Historical -interpretation means 
 that the motives of national acts are set forth, together with 
 the moral consequences. National life and conduct, like indi- 
 vidual life, follows a code of morality and is governed by ethi- 
 cal principles. The historian must interpret national acts in 
 the light of the principles. This is the most difficult task in re 
 lation to history. One illustration : The United States recent- 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 ly engaged in war and acquired foreign territory. Three mo- 
 tives have been assigned. First, a desire to extend the blessings 
 of free government to oppressed peoples. Second, national 
 greed, selfishness, commercial advantages. Third, a desire to 
 assert and extend national power, the policy of imperialism. 
 No matter how these national acts are interpreted, they affect 
 our national honor, our national character. They have an ethi- 
 cal significance, because right and wrong, justice and honesty, 
 are involved. 
 
CHAPTER XXXII 
 HISTORY (CONTINUED) 
 
 Various Methods of Historical Interpretation. The inter- 
 pretation of historical facts is the personal contribution of the 
 author to history. It is his estimate of national morals, charac- 
 ter and life from a review of national acts. It is the chief 
 source of error in historical writing. So many false interpre- 
 tations have been given that history is called a conspiracy 
 against the truth. There are two ways in which to account 
 for these false interpretations : an imperfect knowledge of the 
 facts, the prejudice of the author. An imperfect knowledge 
 of the facts may arise from a scarcity of material. Original 
 documents are often scarce and fragmentary, especially in the 
 case of nations of great antiquity. Inferences in such cases 
 are in a large measure the guess of the historian. Imagination 
 takes the place of fact. Hence, the fictitious narratives con- 
 cerning the earliest inhabitants of America, Europe, or Asia. 
 An imperfect knowledge of the facts may arise from lack of 
 scholarship. The author is unable or unwilling to collect the 
 facts available. Ancient historians were often unable to con- 
 sult original documents owing to the poor condition of libraries 
 and archives, their own poverty and the difficulties of travel. 
 Much of this difficulty is now overcome by our modern facili- 
 ties for editing and consulting manuscripts and by the large 
 sums of money available for historical research. 
 
 Prejudice a Source of Error. The most fruitful source of 
 error is the prejudice of the historian. If history be a con- 
 
 235 
 
236 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 spiracy against the truth it is so because all historians have 
 suffered from some kind of prejudice. The historian belongs 
 to some nation, some creed, some profession; is a member of 
 some political party, is influenced by some social rank. Hence, 
 his interpretation of historical facts is modified and colored by 
 national, religious, political or social prejudice. In spite of 
 many honest efforts at impartiality, these kinds of prejudice are 
 traceable in every history written. 
 
 National Prejudice. Of the various kinds of prejudice the 
 most general and obvious is national prejudice. The tendency 
 to exalt one's country at the expense of others is a universal 
 weakness from which the historian has not escaped. The keen 
 rivalry of neighboring nations often increases this prejudice. 
 For example, the case of England and France. Centuries of 
 rivalry between these nations have so vitiated historical writing 
 that no one expects to learn the truth regarding France from 
 English histories. In like manner the histories of other 
 nations have been filled with falsehood. The tendency to de- 
 fend one's country has led to all kinds of false interpretation, 
 sometimes to the forging or suppression of documents. When 
 it is a question of incriminating his own country the historian 
 often prefers falsehood and the suppression of facts. 
 
 Religious Prejudice. Religion has a firmer hold on the 
 affections of men than love of country. It is a stronger kind 
 of prejudice to overcome. It has left behind it a trail of false- 
 hood wherever rival creeds have flourished. On account of 
 this prejudice, most of the history composed since the Reforma- 
 tion must be rewritten. Catholic and Protestant historians 
 are about equally guilty in the matter of prejudice. And the 
 creed of the infidel has not saved him from similar error. For 
 example, the history of Gibbon, so admirable and trustworthy 
 in many ways, is poisoned by religious prejudice. The chap- 
 
HISTORY 237 
 
 ters dealing with Christianity, according to Dean Milman, 
 are the most dishonest pages Gibbon lias written. The preju- 
 dice of such writers as Froude, Macaulay, Freeman, is obvious, 
 Even such an historian as Lingard, who made an heroic effort 
 to be impartial, does not escape religious prejudice. 
 
 Party Prejudice. The influence of party and social rank 
 are minor kinds of prejudice but are equally effective in vitiat- 
 ing history. Party bitterness often reaches the same excess as 
 religious or national prejudice. It is easy to discover from 
 internal evidence to what party the historian belongs, and what 
 may be his rank in society; that internal evidence will be a 
 one-sided view of national events. 
 
 The Removal of Prejudice. At the present time there are 
 several agencies at work, tending to destroy prejudice and im- 
 prove historical writing. Three of these are noteworthy: 
 First of all, the modern facilities afforded for getting at his- 
 torical truth. There never was a time when the honest his- 
 torian had a better opportunity to do reliable work. The great 
 archives of the world 'are all open to him. There never was a 
 time when so many original sources of information were ac- 
 cessible. Today every government supports its own society 
 of historical research, and spends thousands of dollars in equip- 
 ping libraries and multiplying documents for critical investi- 
 gation. In this matter, the example of governments is fol- 
 lowed by two kinds of institutional life the Church, and the 
 school. The Church has opened her archives and placed a 
 premium on historical investigation by inviting the leading 
 scholars of the world to Rome. The leading universities of 
 America and Europe send out bands of scholars annually for 
 the purpose of collecting historical data. At the present time 
 the University of Chicago has three bands at work, one in 
 Mexico, another in South America, a third in Palestine. In 
 
238 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 like manner, other American universities and those of the old 
 world, are engaged in historical investigation. As a result 
 the historian is enabled to give a more accurate account, no 
 matter what department he is working in. Along with in- 
 creased facilities for knowing historical facts, there is a grow- 
 ing desire for accuracy, both on the part of writers and read- 
 ers the outcome of the modern scientific spirit. This spirit 
 has opened a new era in the treatment of history. 
 
 Cosmopolitan Spirit. A second agency at work is the cos- 
 mopolitan as opposed to the national spirit. National barriers 
 are fast breaking down, enabling the historical writer to over- 
 come the prejudice of race. Commerce and increased facilities 
 of travel make it possible for one nation to become acquainted 
 with another as never before. A truer concept of human 
 brotherhood exists, and a better appreciation of what foreign 
 peoples have accomplished. The narrow patriotism that would 
 falsify the national record for the sake of national pride or 
 glory, is fast disappearing. 
 
 Universal Toleration. Religious prejudice, like national 
 prejudice, is yielding to the spirit of universal toleration. 
 Fanaticism which was mainly responsible for historical false- 
 hood, is dying out. The historian who belongs to one creed 
 can now write with tolerable fairness concerning another creed. 
 An occasional writer still appears, like Charles Henry Lea, the 
 historian of the Inquisition; but the class he represents no lon- 
 ger appeals to the general public. Perhaps the strongest 
 corrective of prejudice is the modern diffusion of knowledge. 
 A well-informed public will not permit repetition of the old lies 
 concerning race or creed or party. A comparison of the re- 
 cent work done by Jansen, Pastor, Bancroft and Freeman with 
 previous historians will show a marked decline in all kinds 
 of prejudice and an increasing respect for historical truth. 
 
HISTORY 
 
 Literary Style in Historical Composition. After grouping 
 facts and interpreting them without prejudice, the historian 
 considers the literary style in which his facts and inferences 
 will be expressed. There is a general agreement regarding 
 certain qualities of this style ; that it be clear, animated, digni- 
 fied, as befits a. serious subject. Blair repeating the observa- 
 tions of Quintilian, has this to say concerning the style in which 
 history ought to be written : " The purpose of history should 
 determine its style, that purpose is to record truth for the in- 
 struction of mankind. The purpose of history is to enlarge our 
 view of national and human character; it presents important 
 facts which when seen in connection with their causes, and 
 when studied in their effects, become our guides to right con- 
 duct, supplying ouf want of experience. History thus be- 
 comes our moral teacher, and on that account the style in which 
 it is written ought to be grave and dignified, addressing itself 
 to our judgment rather than to our imagination, and excluding 
 flippancy, levity, sarcasm, invective, wit and humor, and all 
 qualities which would detract from the seriousness of the sub- 
 ject." These characteristics, gravity and dignity, demand the 
 periodic or long sentence, which is elaborated with all the 
 wealth and force of language; these qualities do not exclude 
 ornament, but the imagery must correspond with seriousness 
 and dignity no degrading similes or metaphors are permit- 
 ted. These qualities demand the long paragraph as well as 
 the long sentence, both of which add impressiveness and weight 
 to the style. 
 
 Various Kinds of Style Employed. Aside from the general 
 characteristics of gravity and dignity, the historian varies his 
 style in three ways. When presenting facts and telling the 
 sequence of events he employs the narrative style. The main 
 feature of this style is to set forth facts, incidents and events in 
 the order of their occurrence and with as much economy of at- 
 
240 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 tention as possible. It is most frequently employed in histori- 
 cal composition because the author is dealing, for the most 
 part, with narrative. Occasionally, however, he pauses in the 
 narrative to draw a picture or paint a scene ; hence the pictorial 
 style in historical composition, which is a considerable vari- 
 ation from the narrative form. Finally, after grouping a num- 
 ber of facts, incidents and events, the historian pauses to draw 
 a number of inferences, account for national acts by assigning 
 motives. In doing so he employs the philosophic style which 
 varies considerably from either narrative or pictorial work. 
 
 The Narrative Style. In the narrative style three qualities 
 are involved : the selection of facts, their combination in 
 the story, and the progress or movement of the story. Hence, 
 the narrative style is the art of story-telling in historical 
 composition. This art demands vividness, which makes the 
 story brisk and interesting; directness, which goes straight to 
 the conclusion toward which the sequence of incidents and 
 events is leading. In using the narrative style the writer 
 must, first of all, select material ; he must pick and choose, for 
 what can be said concerning a given story or train of events 
 is only a small portion of what might be said. So that a good 
 story-teller is recognized by what he omits as well as by what 
 is said. For example, in telling the story of a battle the 
 historian is confronted with a mass of details concerning the 
 movements of the troops and the incidents of the struggle. 
 He cannot narrate them all ; he must leave out the larger num- 
 ber of them. So many histories contain dull, wearisome 
 narrative because their authors have not mastered the art of 
 telling a story ; they regard all incidents of equal importance ; 
 they have not learned how to present those prominent events 
 which would suggest the others less prominent and of neces- 
 sity suppressed. No method of selecting details applies in 
 every case ; but in every story we are concerned to know where 
 
HISTORY 241 
 
 the scenes are laid, who are the leading characters; what are 
 the motives and lines of their conduct; what is the aim or pur- 
 pose of the story. As for the rest, it must be determined by 
 circumstances and the skill of the artist. 
 
 Proportion. A second quality of the narrative style is pro- 
 portion. Proportion is a fundamental law of art. In this case 
 it means some plan whereby a certain amount of space will be 
 accorded to each group of facts or incidents an arrangement 
 based upon the relative importance of such groups to the whole 
 work. Proportion, then, in the narrative, will depend upon 
 the scope and extent of the work. If the plan allows of much 
 detailed elaboration, we may expect the narrative to be crowded 
 with incidents ; we may expect the relations of cause and effect 
 to be fully explained, and all the ideas associated with the main 
 thread of the story to be given ample space in the composition. 
 Such provision is always made in the plan of the best histories. 
 
 Movement. A third and final quality of the narrative style 
 is movement. Constant progression is demanded in the story. 
 Something new and attractive is continually required in order 
 to stimulate the curiosity of the reader and hold his attention. 
 The motive of telling the story must often appear, in order to 
 prevent it from being a mere bundle of disjointed facts. In 
 the best histories the progress of the narrative is always rapid, 
 a swiftly moving current which halts only when a scene is to 
 be painted or when the end of each story requires the personal 
 reflections and interpretation of the author. Among English 
 historians, Hume, Gibbon and Prescott are regarded as our 
 greatest masters of the narrative style. 
 
 Descriptive Style. Pictorial work in history demands the 
 descriptive style. Like the illustrations in a modern journal, 
 pictorial work is necessary to impart vividness. It also sup- 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 plies the theatre, stage and scenery for the action of the na- 
 tional drama. It presents the national heroes, the leading 
 characters, giving a picture of each. Hence, the descriptive 
 style is called word-painting. For example, in writing the 
 history of any people it would be necessary to describe the 
 country where they flourished; their principal cities, build- 
 ings, battlefields, and objects of a similar character. A 
 variety of methods are employed in word-painting, two of 
 which are in general use. The first is called the objective 
 method, wherein an attempt is made to describe the object as 
 truthfully as possible without any reference to the emotions it 
 arouses. This attempted reproduction of the object is merely 
 an enumeration of the principal features taken in the order 
 in which they are presented to the eye. While reading these 
 details, the imagination of the reader must construct the pic- 
 ture. The second is called the subjective method, when the 
 author tells about the emotion excited by the details which he 
 passes in review. The imagination and the fancy of the 
 author play upon the object and transform it into something 
 which reflects his own personality. This personal element is 
 scarcely ever eliminated from descriptive work; although in 
 historical composition it is less prominent than in any other 
 kind of writing because the historian is acting in the official ca- 
 pacity of a critic or judge of national conduct, and according- 
 ly, must suppress emotion and give an impersonal character 
 to his work. On the other hand, the personal or subjective 
 element has widest scope whenever history loses its judicial 
 character and passes into the realm of fiction. For example, 
 the personality of Walter Scott reflected in his historical 
 novels. No historian can expect to succeed without a fair 
 mastery of this style; for no matter how skilfully a narrative 
 may be constructed, it will grow monotonous unless pictorial 
 work be introduced from time to time; these pictures care- 
 fully executed and frequently introduced, enkindle the read- 
 
///.STOAT 
 
 er's imagination and appeal to his sense of beauty ; they afford 
 periods of relief and entertainment by allowing the eye to 
 rest upon the leading personages and upon the scenes in which 
 these personages are engaged. Thus, in a special manner, 
 description is the artistic setting of historical composition, 
 giving scope to the literary and aesthetic gifts of the writer. 
 
 The Philosophic Style. Besides narrative and descriptive 
 work, there is another kind of style employed in history. It 
 is used whenever the historian offers an interpretation of his- 
 torical facts, and, in consequence, it is named the philosophic 
 or judicial style of writing. This style differs materially 
 from narration or description. It is often called the judicial 
 style, for the historian passes judgment upon historical acts 
 in the same manner as a judge upon the bench. With the 
 utmost degree of calmness and impartiality he is expected to 
 deliver an opinion regarding national conduct, and the mis- 
 fortune of history has been that, while preserving the judicial 
 style and temper, his judgment has so often been contrary to 
 the evidence. This style of writing is plain, severe, dignified, 
 without ornament or much elaboration. The arts and deco- 
 rations of rhetoric which characterize descriptive work are 
 laid aside; the sole aim of the writer being to state his 
 opinion in the clearest and most definite manner possible. 
 This style is employed at the end of chapters, at the close of 
 important national events, at the death of leading national 
 characters or whenever the historian finds it necessary to pass 
 judgment upon any group of events. 
 
 Some Representative Stylists in History. Each nation 
 possessing an extensive literature claims one or two historians 
 distinguished for their style. Of ancient classic authors 
 Thucydides among the Greeks and Livy among the Latins are 
 celebrated for the exquisite literary finish given to their work. 
 
244 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 The following comparison of the style of both writers is given 
 by Blair: "Thucydides ranks as the greatest historian of 
 antiquity; next to him we must place Livy; and both have 
 attained that exalted position owing to the incomparable 
 beauty of their style. Thucydides flourished in the golden 
 age of Greek literature; he had enormous wealth, and leisure 
 necessary to recast and polish his work. His history displays 
 in full perfection that supreme and unapproachable beauty of 
 form, .of which the Greeks alone possessed the secret. Livy 
 enjoyed similar advantages in wealth and leisure; but the 
 language in which he wrote was not susceptible of the same 
 polish and refinement." Thucydides' style is seen at its best 
 in the orations which crowd the pages of his history; in his 
 pen-pictures of the heroes who figured in the Peloponnesian 
 v/ar, and in his descriptions of the various battles by land and 
 sea. His narrative work is not so successful ; he tries often to 
 compress facts within too narrow limits and shares with Taci- 
 tus the odium of being at times very vague and obscure; he 
 did not possess the highest talent as a story-teller. Perhaps 
 the strongest feature of his writing is his dramatic power, the 
 vividness with which he paints the great scenes and events. 
 Thucydides was the first who introduced orations; and the 
 addresses with which his history abounds are among the most 
 valuable remains which we have of ancient eloquence. On 
 the other hand, Livy is excelled by no historian whatever in 
 the art of narration. He manages to keep the attention of the 
 reader even when recounting the driest details the story 
 never tarries, while the classic purity of his style, the elo- 
 quence of his speeches, the skill with which he depicts the 
 play of emotion in his leading characters have deservedly en- 
 titled him to universal popularity. In style and language he 
 represents the best period of Latin prose-writing. If he 
 writes with less finish and less perfect rhythm than his model, 
 
HISTORY 
 
 Cicero, he excels him in the varied structure of his periods 
 and in the adaptation of the style to the subject-matter. 
 
 Method of the Ancients. This criticism does not include 
 questions of fact or fidelity to historical truth. For it was 
 on the artistic rather than on the critical side of history that 
 stress was almost universally laid in antiquity; and the thing 
 that above all others was expected from the historian was not 
 so much a scientific investigation and accurate exposition of 
 the truth, as its skilful presentation in such a form as would 
 charm and interest the reader. In this sense Cicero speaks of 
 history as an oratorical work as if the oration were its pre- 
 dominant feature; and Quintilian speaks of it as a prose- 
 poem. So that it was by their artistic merits that the ancient 
 historians would stand or fall. 
 
 Modern Scientific Method. The method of treating history 
 as a species of literature was the method employed by Thucy- 
 dides, and Livy, and the ancient classic writers generally. 
 This method prevailed down through the Middle Ages to the 
 close of the eighteenth century. The literary method was 
 then superseded by the scientific method, the author of which 
 was George Niebuhr. He was born in 1776 and died in 
 1831; of German parentage, although born in Copenhagen. 
 He is known as the founder of the Modern Scientific School 
 of History. He reversed the ancient classic conception re- 
 garding the purpose of history; declaring that history was 
 science, not literature. In three particulars he represents a 
 departure from the ancient canons of historical composition. 
 First, he depreciates style, attaching no importance to literary 
 form or finish. Concerning the proper style to be employed 
 Niebuhr writes : " The style of history ought to be similar 
 to the style of any scientific treatise, a plain statement of truth, 
 nothing more. The attention given by the ancients to literary 
 
24 6 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 finish was a mistake, a waste of time. I expect that my read- 
 ers will find sufficient attraction in the matter of my history 
 without pausing to consider the manner of writing." A 
 second departure from the ancient style was the stress laid 
 by Niebuhr upon institutions, tendencies, political and social 
 movements, not upon the lives of celebrated individuals. Nie- 
 buhr continues : " The mistake of historians has been a love 
 of hero-worship which has made of history little more than 
 a tissue of inflated biography. The great man has over- 
 shadowed every other consideration. I prefer to transfer the 
 reader's attention to the acts of the nation, the manners, habits, 
 institutions, the vast and varied life of the people." A third 
 departure was the elimination of the element of fiction. The 
 beautiful orations which made ancient history so attractive 
 had to go, for history is a science, not literature. Niebuhr is 
 responsible for eliminating the oration from modern history. 
 In the same manner the myths and legends which made ex- 
 cellent literature were excluded from history. In his History 
 of Ancient Rome, he destroys many a beautiful legend about 
 the origin and early growth of the Roman race. To Niebuhr 
 we may trace the beginning of that destructive criticism which 
 has dealt so unkindly with the records and legends of the 
 Hebrew people. 
 
 Influence of Niebuhr. The appearance of Niebuhr marked 
 a new epoch in historical writing. His example was followed 
 by all the German historians of any note. They disregarded 
 style and literary finish, and worked upon history as they 
 would work upon any scientific treatise. The immediate 
 effect of Niebuhr's example was the rise of the Tubingen 
 School, whose founder was Ferdinand Baur. Baur was born 
 in 1/92; died in 1860. The same destructive criticism which 
 Niebuhr directed against Roman myths and legends, was 
 directed against the Bible by Baur and the Tubingen School. 
 
HISTORY 
 
 This school is celebrated for its bitter attack upon the divinity 
 of Christ and the supernatural element in the Bible. Baur's 
 critical history of the Hebrews reduces miracle to the same 
 status as a myth, or explains away the wonderful event by 
 assigning- natural causes. An unexpected application of Nie- 
 buhr's method was made to German history by Doctor Janssen. 
 The traditional lies and calumnies concerning the old church 
 were handled in the same manner as Roman myths. The 
 publication of evidence placed many of the Reformers in an 
 entirely new light before the public. The private life of 
 Martin Luther was revealed by the publication of letters and 
 official correspondence. Statements made by Janssen are in 
 every case supported by documentary evidence. In his His- 
 tory of the Popes, now in course of preparation, Ludwig 
 Pastor employs the same method, and certain Popes like Alex- 
 ander VI suffer in the same manner as Martin Luther. Per- 
 haps the most distinguished disciple of Niebuhr is Theodore 
 Mommsen who continued Niebuhr's work in writing Roman 
 history and employed Niebuhr's methods. 
 
 The following estimate of Niebuhr and the modern German 
 historians is given by Mr. Garnett, an English critic : 
 
 Criticism by Garnett. " From the point of view of industry 
 and scholarship, modern German historians like Niebuhr and 
 Mommsen are deserving of all praise; they have created a new 
 era in historical writing when fact takes the place of fiction, and 
 mere guesswork is supplanted by evidence. The best tribute 
 to their painstaking zeal, and devotion to truth, is that the his- 
 torians of other nations have imitated their example in trying 
 to get at the truth of history. But the German historians, al- 
 most without exception, make the grave mistake of disregard- 
 ing the artistic side of history; their style is almost uniformly 
 dull and wearisome it lacks life, color, movement. The nar- 
 rative is painfully slow, owing to the mass of details crowded 
 into the page. They gather all the facts with the greatest dili- 
 gence, but seem to be unable to organize them to the best ad- 
 vantage." 
 
CHAPTER XXXIII 
 HISTORY (CONTINUED) 
 
 Representative Stylists in French History. In contrast 
 with the unpolished style of German historians is the atten- 
 tion paid by the French to literary form and finish. French 
 writers are conceded to be the unrivaled masters of modern 
 prose; partly because of their language, and partly on ac- 
 count of the artistic instinct which is stronger in the French 
 than in any other modern nation. It has often been remarked 
 that if we could add the merit of German scholarship to their 
 work, we would reach the ideal in the art of writing history. 
 French historians are not so active as the Germans in col- 
 lecting material, nor are they so careful in weighing evidence. 
 Like the ancient classic writers, their chief concern seems to 
 be the finished and attractive form rather than the matter. 
 
 Guizot. Of the representative historians of France, Wil- 
 liam Francis Guizot deserves special mention, as being the 
 best known and most widely appreciated historian outside his 
 own country. Guizot was born in 1787; died in 1874; a 
 prolific writer, Professor of Literature at the Sorbonne, and a 
 member of the French Academy. His collected writings com- 
 prise sixty volumes, including translations of Shakespeare 
 and Gibbon. His chief historical works are a History of 
 Civilization in Europe, a History of Civilization in France. 
 
 The following estimate of Guizot is given by Richard Hut- 
 ton, an English critic: 
 
 248 
 
HISTORY 249 
 
 Criticism by Hutton. " As an historian, Guizot reached the 
 highest point of fame. His histories place him among the best 
 writers of France and of Europe; his works must be regarded 
 as classics of modern historical research, and an evidence of 
 the great advance in the treatment of modern history, which has 
 marked the last half century. Guizot approaches the German 
 type in scholarship and accuracy. He is perhaps the most re- 
 liable of the French historians. Like the Germans, he employs 
 a style which is not remarkable either for imagery or systematic 
 narrative or beauty of description. In this respect he is unlike 
 any of his countrymen. The strength of the style comes, above 
 all things, from his thought ; he has written grandly because 
 he has thought profoundly. His phrase is never glowing or 
 flowery, but always full of meaning. Without the aid of imagery 
 his writings are powerful, with a flavor of sententiousness and 
 at times a tendency to be dogmatic. It is the style of the logician, 
 never yielding to levity or humor. Guizot treated history as 
 a social science. He introduced among French historians a 
 more critical spirit, and taught them the superior value of con- 
 clusions drawn from facts. He applied to history those laws 
 which science applies to other phenomena. He was the first to 
 present a complete analysis of the divers elements which com- 
 pose the social body; he formulated the historic law of mutual 
 dependences, pointing out the reciprocal influence of the indi- 
 vidual upon society, and society upon the individual. He also 
 applied the law of evolution to history, seeing therein successive 
 and progressive transformations. To quote his own words: 
 ' In the hands of an all-powerful Providence the history of a 
 people is never interrupted or broken and never re-commences.' 
 Guizot had many personal qualities which fitted him for historical 
 writing : he was cool and cautious in temperament ; without bias, 
 either national or religious; a sincere believer, in an age of 
 scoffing infidelity ; and a consistent defender of liberty and order 
 against the attacks of absolutism and anarchy." 
 
 Jules Michelet. Besides Guizot, two other French writers 
 should be mentioned in connection with French History. 
 The first of these is Jules Michelet born in 1798; died in 
 1874. He occupied the Chair of History in the College of 
 
250 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 France. Like Guizot, he was a prolific writer, one who con- 
 tributed to many departments of literature. His chief histori- 
 cal work is a History of France, upon which he spent forty 
 years. Other works of considerable merit are his History of 
 the Roman Republic; History of the Knights Templar and a 
 History of the French Revolution. 
 
 Criticism by George Saintsbury. " The literary character- 
 istics of Michelet are among the most clearly marked, also among 
 the most peculiar French literature. In the details of his style 
 he is quite original and individual. His sentences and para- 
 graphs are as different as possible from the orderly architecture 
 of French classic prose. He often omits the verb, breaks or 
 twists the phrase, and gives a grotesque finish to his work, 
 in many points resembling Carlyle. His style is just the oppo- 
 site of Guizot and the German school. To Michelet, history is 
 always picturesque ; it is a series of pictures. His imagina- 
 tion is constantly at work and excited like Carlyle, images 
 are continually dancing before his mind. Michelet called his- 
 tory ' the Resurrection ' the awakening of the dead ; and while 
 it is often difficult to adjust his work to ascertained facts, yet 
 his pictures are always possible ; his descriptions are instinct 
 with genius, and always life-like. There are no dead bones in 
 Michelet, no hint of the dissecting table as in Guizot ; and where- 
 as the style of Guizot is hard, cold and analytic, the style of 
 Michelet is glowing with sentiment, full of fire, a synthesis true 
 to life, and stimulating in the highest degree. In reading him 
 one is constantly reminded of Victor Hugo or Carlyle." 
 
 Ernest Renan. A representative writer of modern French 
 prose is Joseph Ernest Renan who was born in 1823 and 
 died in 1892. A member of the French Academy and recog- 
 nized as one of the best prose writers France has produced. 
 He wrote a History of the Origins of Christianity in six 
 volumes, one of which is his celebrated Life of Christ. Be- 
 sides the history, he left two valuable works in criticism; one 
 on the origin of language, the other an estimate of the doc- 
 trines of Averroes. 
 
HISTORY 2SI 
 
 Criticism by Mark Pattison. The historical work of Kenan 
 may be compared with that of Macaulay in style and in popu- 
 larity ; although Renan deserves more credit for historical re- 
 search, and he also had a greater regard for historical truth. 
 In either case it was the style that won popular favor. As an 
 illustration of the popularity of Renan, twenty-four editions of 
 his Life of Christ were sold in three years. ' In analyzing the 
 style of Renan we find/ says Mark Pattison, an English critic, 
 * the greatest care in the choice and collocation of words ; each 
 sentence is symmetrically formed with the nicest appreciation of 
 rhythm and effect. His narrative never tires ; on the contrary, 
 it invites and allures the reader so that one is loath to lay down 
 the volume. In his descriptive work there is a tendency to paint 
 in glowing colors, and perhaps an undue prominence given to 
 the flowers of fancy ; so that, for example, in his descriptions of 
 Palestine one feels like being introduced into fairyland. It would 
 be difficult to name another modern French author who for grace 
 and charm of diction ca-n compare with Renan." 
 
 English Historians. If we compare the work of English 
 historians with that of the French or Germans we find it some- 
 what inferior both in amount and in quality. We have not 
 so large a number of specialists engaged in the department 
 of history, nor is historical study so successfully prosecuted in 
 English schools as in France or Germany. The greatest mas- 
 ters of English style like Newman, Ruskin, Kingsley, Steven- 
 son, have given little attention to this species of composition; 
 at best they have written only historical sketches or historical 
 romances. For the most part they employed their talents 
 in other departments of literature or science. Biography, 
 oratory and fiction have made a much stronger appeal to them 
 than history. As a consequence, the history of England is 
 written in fragments; the British colonies and dependencies 
 receive even scantier treatment. We have no history to place 
 side by side with Michelet's History of France or Janssen's 
 History of the German People. And although our literature 
 is as rich and varied and as excellent as any in other depart- 
 
252 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 ments, we have very few names to redeem our historical writ- 
 ing from an unenviable mediocrity. 
 
 Venerable Bede. The first English writer of prominence 
 who should be mentioned, although not a great stylist, is the 
 Venerable Bede, justly called the Father of English History. 
 His Ecclesiastical History, composed in the early part of the 
 eighth century, is in reality a political history of England 
 down to that date, for it comprises all that is known of early 
 English history, whether ecclesiastical or poltical. A note- 
 worthy feature of Bede's history is the amount of research 
 which it represents. His method of quoting authorities and 
 of weighing their evidence proves his unwillngness to imitate 
 either classic authors or his own contemporaries in the matter 
 of blending fact with fiction. As he states in the preface, 
 " I have labored sincerely to commit to writing only such 
 reliable things as I could gather from the works of scholars 
 and from common tradition for the purpose of rightly in- 
 structing posterity. If I have written anything not delivered 
 according to the truth, the reader must not impute the same 
 to me, for in all that I have written I have labored honestly 
 to render a faithful account." The Latin style of Bede is 
 correct, plain and clear but not remarkable for any quality 
 distinguishing it from ordinary Church Latinity. The 
 charming personality of Bede, like that of Alfred, has won 
 him even greater fame than his history. 
 
 Earl of Clarendon. The first English historian who de- 
 serves to be ranked as a stylist is ^Edward Hyde, better known 
 as the Earl of Clarendon. He was born in 1608; died in 
 1674. A university graduate and a member of the Long 
 Parliament, Clarendon took part in the English Civil War, 
 which he afterward made the subject of his history. As the 
 materials were derived from the author's personal experience, 
 
HISTORY 253 
 
 the work is of high value, and places Clarendon among the 
 leading historians of England ; while the dignity, strength and 
 polish of his style rank him as one of our classic prose-writers. 
 Clarendon was a royalist, and his history in places is an ex- 
 cellent illustration of party prejudice. As the period 
 covered is barely forty years, his work is also a fair illustra- 
 tion of how English history is written in fragments. There 
 are two noteworthy features of his history it is written 
 rather in the form of Memoirs than of history, as if the Civil 
 War were an episode in the author's own life rather than a 
 part of the history of England. A second feature is the ex- 
 cellent manner in which the leading characters of the Civil 
 War are delineated. The fine analysis of character and its 
 dramatic presentation are not the least among the gifts of 
 Clarendon. His prose is distinctively modern in tone and 
 phrase as contrasted with the involved, lumbering style which 
 Milton, Bacon and Raleigh employed in their historical 
 writings. 
 
 David Hume. The next stylist after Clarendon, in the 
 order of time, is David Hume, the Scotch philosopher, essay- 
 ist and historian. Some critics, like Henry Morley, regard 
 Hume as our greatest stylist in the department of history, 
 ranking him ahead of Macaulay, Gibbon or Prescott. The 
 History of England, written by Hume, beginning with the in- 
 vasion of Julius Caesar, extends to the reign of James I. This 
 was the first historical work in English planned on an exten- 
 sive scale. The merits of the plan, says Morley, and the in- 
 comparable clearness and beauty of the narration soon over- 
 came the indifference of the public, and the history gradually 
 but successfully rose to the highest popularity and took its place 
 among the prose classics of our language, a place it has ever 
 since retained. There is a certain exquisite ease and vivacity 
 about Hume's narrative which has never been surpassed. He 
 
254 
 
 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 possessed all the qualities of a good story-teller; and, besides 
 this merit, his descriptive power was of the very highest order 
 he pictures the great battles and scenes of important events 
 in such a way as to excite the interest of the dullest reader. 
 Perhaps the harshest criticism of Hume is of his indolence, 
 accepting so much of his material from second-hand sources 
 and not troubling himself too much about accuracy. Thus, 
 there are legendary and half-mythological stories told in the 
 first volume of his history which ordinary accuracy would 
 have excluded. In spite of his belief and attitude on religious 
 matters, Hume wrote a history which has at present a wider 
 circulation than any other on the same subject. 
 
 Lord Macaulay. The best known stylist in English history 
 is Lord Macaulay, whose work, like that of Clarendon, is 
 fragmentary. Scarcely two hundred years of English history 
 are covered by it. Whatever be the correct estimate of his 
 work, Macaulay had a rather peculiar view of what a history 
 should be. In one of his critical essays he defines a perfect 
 history as a compound of poetry and philosophy, impressing 
 general rules on the mind by a vivid representation of particu- 
 lar characters and incidents. Elsewhere he defines the perfect 
 historian as one in whose work the character and spirit of an 
 age are exhibited in miniature. He relates no fact, attributes 
 no expression to his characters, which is not authenticated by 
 sufficient testimony ; the true historian shows us the court, the 
 camp, the senate. He shows us also the nation. He considers 
 no anecdote, no peculiarity of manner, no familiar saying as too 
 insignificant for his notice, which is not too insignificant to 
 illustrate the operation of laws, of religion and of education, 
 and to mark the progress of the human mind 
 
 Criticism by Frederic Harrison. Macaulay's theory of 
 what a history should be is far better than his performance. 
 
HISTORY 
 
 His work is full of mistakes ; although he had at hand all the 
 material necessary for an accurate account. His love for strik- 
 ing antitheses led him to make statements which a sound judg- 
 ment would have modified. The fact is, Macaulay was carried 
 away by the glamor and glitter of a highly artificial style and 
 sacrificed the truth of his narrative for the sake of striking 
 effects ; the sweeping generality, the grand climax, the splendid 
 paradox all needed the element of fiction in order that they 
 might be sustained; but notwithstanding his lack of judgment 
 and accuracy, the magnificence of his style won him instant 
 popularity, and he remains the literary idol of those who mistake 
 rhetorical tinsel for sound taste and genuine merit. We may not 
 inappropriately call him the glorified journalist. While Mac- 
 aulay had undoubted genius in the manipulation of words and the 
 marshalling of sentences, he lacked the scholarship, patience, 
 moderation and sound judgment necessary to the historian. 
 
 Edward Gibbon. By far the greatest name in English his- 
 torical literature is that of Edward Gibbon who was born in 
 1737; died in 1794. By turns a catholic, protestant and in- 
 fidel, he finally settled down to a sort of philosophic deism. 
 Educated at the English universities and in Switzerland, Gib- 
 bon displayed at all times an insatiable appetite for reading 
 and study ; he was known at home and in school as a diligent 
 student. 
 
 Criticism by Thomas Shaw. The History of the Decline 
 and Fall of the Roman Empire is undoubtedly one of the greatest 
 monuments of industry and genius. The task he undertook was 
 to give a connected narrative of one of the most eventful periods 
 in the annals of the world. It embraced a period of thirteen 
 centuries, accounting for the greatest religious and social changes 
 that have ever modified the destinies of our race; the rise and 
 progress of Christianity and Mahomedanism. The institutions 
 of Feudalism and Chivalry; the establishment of the modern 
 European nations. The complexity .of the subject was as re- 
 markable as its extent. Not the least noteworthy feature is the 
 full and varied references and quotations with which he supports 
 
256 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 his assertions. Very few statements made by Gibbon have been 
 modified by more recent historical study. Guizot calls him the 
 most accurate of our historians. The style of Gibbon is remark- 
 ably pompous, elaborate and dignified. Owing to the immense 
 preponderance of the Latin over the Saxon element in his dic- 
 tion he is the least English of all our writers of the first class. 
 The French idiom abounds. His chief sin against good taste is 
 the too gorgeous and highly colored tone in his descriptions. 
 His imagination was sensuous and he dwells with greater enthu- 
 siasm upon material than moral grandeur. There is in much of 
 his work an offensive cynicism, as if he were recording the story 
 of a race of fools. It is a trace of the influence of Voltaire upon 
 his life and character. 
 
 Henry Hallam. A modern English historian who illus- 
 trates the method of writing history on institutional rather 
 than national lines, is Henry Hallam, who died in 1859. 
 Hallam was a lawyer by profession, an excellent classical 
 scholar, one who possessed an accurate and profound ac- 
 quaintance with the language, literature, history and institu- 
 tions of modern Europe, Hallam wrote a constitutional his- 
 tory of England, beginning with Henry VII. It covers a 
 period of three hundred years 
 
 Criticism by Macaulay. " On the whole, Mr. Hallam is far 
 better qualified than any other writer of our time for the office 
 which he has undertaken. He has great industry and great 
 acuteness. His knowledge is extensive, various and profound. 
 His mind is equally distinguished by the amplitude of its grasp 
 and by the delicacy of its tact. His speculations have none of 
 that vagueness which is the common fault of political philosophy. 
 On the contrary they are strikingly practical, and teach us not 
 only the general rule, but the mode of applying it to solve par- 
 ticular cases. In this respect they often remind us of the dis- 
 courses of Machiavelli. The manner of the book is, on the 
 whole, not unworthy of the matter. The language, even when 
 most faulty, is weighty and massive, and indicates strong sense 
 in every line. It often rises to an eloquence, not florid or im- 
 
HISTORY 
 
 257 
 
 passioned, but high, grave and sober; such as would become a 
 state paper or a judgment delivered by a great magistrate. In 
 this respect the character of Mr. Hallam's mind corresponds 
 strikingly with that of his style. His work is eminently judicial. 
 The whole spirit is that of the Bench he sums up with a calm, 
 steady impartiality, turning neither to the right nor to the left, 
 glossing over nothing, exaggerating nothing. On a general 
 survey, we do not scruple to pronounce the Constitutional His- 
 tory the most impartial book we have ever read." 
 
 Henry Buckle. An English historian who imitated Guizot 
 in writing about civilization, is Henry Thomas Buckle, born 
 in 1821 ; died 1862. His History of Civilization in England, 
 complete in two volumes, appeared in 1860 and caused a sen- 
 sation in Europe and America. The special doctrine he 
 sought to uphold was that climate, soil, food, and the aspects 
 of nature are the determining factors in intellectual progress. 
 
 Criticism by Robert Flint. " Buckle had a high ideal of the 
 historian's duties, and he laboriously endeavored to realize it, 
 but he fancied himself far more successful in the attempt' than 
 he really was, and greatly underrated what had been accomplished 
 by others. He brought a vast amount of information from the 
 most varied and distant sources to confirm his opinions, and the 
 abundance of his materials never perplexed or burdened him in 
 his argumentation ; nevertheless, examples of well-conducted his- 
 torical inductions are rare in his pages ; he sometimes altered and 
 distorted the facts. He was very apt, when he had proved a 
 favorite opinion true, to infer it to be the whole truth. His intel- 
 lect was comprehensive and vigorous, but neither classically 
 cultured nor scientifically disciplined; it was amazingly stored 
 with facts, but not rich in ideas ; it was ambitious in aspiration, 
 confident to excess in its own powers, and exceptionally uncon- 
 scious of where its knowledge ceased and its ignorance began. 
 Buckle was deficient in imagination, poetical feeling, and sym- 
 pathy ; hence he was narrow and harsh in his judgments on cer- 
 tain great periods of time and large classes of men, on antiquity 
 and the Middle Ages, on the clergy and statesmen, on heroes and 
 martyrs. But he was fearlessly honest according to his lights, 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 and gave expression to the most distasteful of his opinions with 
 a manly openness. He paid great attention to his style; it may 
 be pronounced equal to the subject, precise enough for the de- 
 mands of science, full, flowing and flexible enough for every pur- 
 pose of history. It is lucid when the business of the writer is to 
 state, explain, or illustrate ; and whenever anger at the oppressor, 
 or sympathy with the oppressed calls upon it, it ascends to tones 
 worthy of Edmund Burke himself." 
 
 William Prescott. Among authors of history, our greatest 
 stylist is William Hickling Prescott, born in 1796; died in- 
 1859. A graduate of Harvard College, Prescott took up 
 the study of Spanish history, the result of his work being a 
 History of Ferdinand and Isabella; History of Phillip II; 
 The Conquest of Mexico ; and The Conquest of Peru. He also 
 left a considerable volume of critical essays. 
 
 Criticism by Robert Wace. " As an historian, Prescott 
 stands in the direct line of literary descent from Robertson, whose 
 influence is clearly discernible in his method and style. But 
 while Robertson was in some measure the initiator of a movement 
 dealing with Spanish history, Prescott came to the task when the 
 range of information was incomparably wider. He worked, 
 therefore, upon more assured ground; his sifting of authorities 
 was more thorough, and his method less restricted, both in the 
 selection of details and in their graphic presentation. At the 
 same time, Prescott cannot be classed as in the highest sense a 
 philosophic historian. His power lies chiefly in the clear grasp 
 of fact, in selection and synthesis, in the vivid narration of inci- 
 dent. For extended analysis he had small liking and faculty, 
 his critical insight is limited in range, and he confines himself 
 almost wholly to the concrete elements of history. When he does 
 venture upon more abstract criticism, his standards are often com- 
 monplace and superficial. And the world-scheme to which he 
 relates events is less profound than the thought of his time alto- 
 gether warranted. If these things, however, indicate failure 
 from the point of view of ideal history, they at least make for 
 popularity. Few historians have had in a higher degree that 
 
HISTORY 259 
 
 artistic feeling in the broad arrangement of materials which 
 insures interest. The course of his narrative is unperplexed by 
 doubtful or insoluble problems ; no pretense at profundity or 
 subtlety saps the vitality of his characters or interrupts the flow 
 of incident with dissertation or digression. The painting is 
 filled in with primary colors and with a free hand ; and any sense 
 of crudity which may be awakened by close inspection, is com- 
 pensated by the vigor and massive effectiveness of the whole. 
 Though Prescott did not bring to his work the highest scientific 
 grasp, he brought to it scientific conscientiousness and thorough- 
 ness within his limitations, while his dominant pictorial faculty 
 gave to his treatment a superscientific brilliancy. The romance of 
 history has seldom had an abler exponent, and the large number of 
 editions and translations of his works attests their undiminished 
 fascination." 
 
 George Bancroft. An American historian, whose name de- 
 serves mention with that of Prescott, is George Bancroft, 
 who was born in 1800 and died in 1891 ; and who spent forty 
 years of his life upon a history of the United States. The 
 first volume was published in 1834, and the tenth or last, in 
 1874. Bancroft also wrote a history of the Constitution of 
 the United States, which compares very favorably with Hal- 
 lam's Constitutional History of England, both from the point 
 of view of style and research. 
 
 Criticism by Henry Tuckerman. " Mr. Bancroft carefully 
 prepared himself for the task of writing a history of his coun- 
 try. After securing the best scholarship training that his own 
 country afforded, he spent some years in the German universities 
 of Gottingen and Heidelberg. To the task of writing a History 
 of the United States he brought great and patient industry, an 
 eloquent style, and a capacity to array the theme in the garb of 
 philosophy. Throughout he is the earnest advocate of demo- 
 cratic institutions ; and in the early volumes, where, by the nature 
 of the subject there is little scope for attractive detail, by infusing 
 a reflective tone he rescues the narrative from dryness and 
 monotony. Instead of a series of facts arranged without any 
 
260 ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 unity of sentiment, we have the idea and principle of civic ad- 
 vancement towards freedom, as a thread upon which the incidents 
 are strung. He is remarkably diligent in unfolding the experi- 
 ences of the first discoverers, and the political creeds of the early 
 settlers ; many curious and authentic details of aboriginal habits 
 are also given ; there are everywhere signs of research and genu- 
 ine enthusiasm. Owing to the unequal interest of the subject, the 
 same glow and finish are not uniformly perceptible in the style 
 in which we occasionally discern an obvious strain after rhetorical 
 effect. Sometimes, also, the author's political opinions are too 
 often apparent. But these are incidental defects. The general 
 spirit, execution, and effect of the work are elevated, genial, and 
 highly instructive. Mr. Bancroft has vindicated his right to com- 
 pose the annals of his country by giving to the record that vital- 
 ity both of description and of thought which distinguishes true 
 history from a mere collation of facts. He combines in his style 
 the traits of a two-fold culture the speculative tendency of the 
 German, and the vivid delineation of the English historian; in a 
 word, he gives us pictures, like the one, and arguments and sug- 
 gestions, like the other, carefully stating the fact, and earnestly 
 deducing from it the idea ; he is more comprehensive as a philos- 
 opher than a limner, and yet no tyro in the latter's art, for here 
 and there we encounter a character as tersely drawn, and a scene 
 as vividly painted, as any of those which have rendered the best 
 modern historians popular. But it is the under-current of 
 thought rather than the brilliant surface of description which 
 gives intellectual value to Bancroft's History, and has secured 
 for it so 'high and extensive a reputation. In sentiment and prin- 
 ciples, it is thoroughly American ; but in its style and philosophy 
 it has that broad and eclectic spirit appropriate both to the gen- 
 eral interest of the subject and the enlightened sympathies of the 
 age. Perhaps the best way to appreciate the literary merits of 
 Bancroft's History is to compare it with the cold and formal an- 
 nals familiar to our childhood. Unwearied and patient in re- 
 search, discriminating in the choice of authorities, and judicious 
 in estimating testimony, Bancroft has the art and the ardor, the 
 intelligence and the tact, required to fuse into a vital unity the 
 narrative thus carefully gleaned. He knows how to condense 
 language, evolve thought from fact, and make incident and char- 
 acterization illustrate the progress of events. This bold, active, 
 
HISTORY 26l 
 
 concentrated manner is what is needed to give permanent and 
 living interest to history. Portraits of individuals, scenes preg- 
 nant with momentous results and philosophic inferences alternate 
 in his pages. The character of Pitt, the death of Montcalm, and 
 the rationale of Puritanism, are very diverse subjects, yet they 
 are each related to the development of the principle of freedom 
 on this continent, and, accordingly, received both the artistic and 
 analytical treatment of the American historian." 
 
 Francis Parkman. Born at Boston, 1823 ; died, 1893. He 
 studied at Harvard University, graduating with high honors 
 in 1844; taught for one year in the University. His writings 
 belong to the department of history and of fiction. His his- 
 torical writings deal with early pioneer, missionary and Indian 
 life in North America. Chief works: Jesuits in North Amer- 
 ica; Montcalm and Wolfe; Pioneers of France in the New 
 World. 
 
 Criticism by Henry Tuckerman. " Parkman hunted the buf- 
 falo, fraternized with the Indians, and thus gained that practical 
 knowledge of aboriginal habits and character which enabled him 
 to delineate the subject chosen with singular truth and effect. 
 The result of his studies and experiences is not only a reliable 
 and admirably planned narrative, but one of the most pictur- 
 esque and romantic produced in America. Few subjects are 
 more dramatic and rich in local associations ; and the previous 
 discipline and excellent style of the author have imparted to his 
 historical work a permanent attraction." 
 
 John Fiske. A native of New England, born at Hartford, 
 Conn., 1842; studied the classics and law at Harvard Uni- 
 versity ; held position of Librarian and Professor of Philosophy 
 at Harvard for many years. His writings belong to the de- 
 partments of history, philosophy, and criticism. His chief 
 works are the " American Revolution " and the " Beginnings 
 of New England." 
 
ANALYSIS OF PROSE-FORMS 
 
 Criticism by the Editor 1 of this Manual. <k The name of 
 John Fiske is familiar to every American school boy. As a 
 painstaking, conscientious historian he has few equals in the 
 field of historical inquiry. Self-reliance, a freedom from preju- 
 dice, the very freshness of life, are characteristics which impress 
 the reader at once; add to them the charm of a style flexible, 
 vivid, picturesque, meeting all the requirements of historical 
 narrative and description. Readers may differ from him in 
 matters of evolution and theology, but all must be fascinated by 
 his manner of treating historical subjects." 
 
CHAPTER XXXIV 
 
 THE ORATION 
 
 The oration is called a standard prose- form ; it is recognized 
 as such in all ancient and modern literature. It has always 
 been a distinct division of prose; although oratory has found 
 occasional expression in history, in the drama and the epic. 
 The term, oration, is selected in preference to speech, discourse, 
 or address ; although these words are often used as synonyms. 
 There are two reasons for this selection. First, the word, 
 oration, in its widest meaning, embraces all the work done in 
 this prose division whatever is written or prepared for pub- 
 lic delivery. For example, Lord Bacon writes in the Ad- 
 vancement of Learning : " Orations are pleadings, speeches, 
 invectives, apologies, laudations, polemics and the like." 
 Macaulay in his work on the Athenian orators, writes : " The 
 Greek oration from its humble beginnings in the Agora be- 
 came the most powerful weapon against the encroachments 
 of tyranny." A second reason for its employment : the term, 
 oration, more strongly than any other, connotes the best liter- 
 ary work done by the orator. In the strictest sense it stands 
 for the most elaborate effort of the public speaker. Hence, 
 modern volumes of this species of prose are called orations 
 rather than addresses, discourses, or speeches; and the term, 
 oration, is selected to represent this prose-form in literature. 
 
 The Oration Defined. The oration is a finished prose com- 
 position intended for public delivery. It is prepared for some 
 special occasion ; hence, it is the best literary work of the ora- 
 
 263 
 
264 THE ORATION 
 
 tor. It involves the art of writing, and thus differs from 
 oratory which is concerned with the art of interpreting to an 
 audience what is written. Oratory is concerned with voice, 
 gesture, manner the personal appearance of the orator ; the 
 oration is his literary product. 
 
 The Oration Compared with the Essay. The oration is 
 similar to the essay in three particulars. First, in its brief- 
 ness. Like the essay, it is a minor prose-form. However 
 elaborate or finished an oration may be, it never reaches the 
 proportion of a volume like history, biography or fiction. 
 Hence it is classified with the letter and the essay as a minor 
 prose-form. A second similarity : the oration, like the essay, 
 possesses unity of theme and methodical development of 
 thought. Hence both are fundamentally artistic. A final 
 similarity : the oration, like the essay, demands the highest 
 kind of literary talent. The orations holding a permanent 
 place in literature are invariably the work of superior talent. 
 
 Some Differences. The oration differs from the essay in five 
 particulars. First, in purpose. The oration is intended to 
 be spoken ; the essay, to be read. The one appeals to the ear ; 
 the other, to the eye. Hence the oration must be so com- 
 posed as to accomplish its purpose immediately ; whereas, the 
 essay admits of re-reading and careful survey. A second 
 difference : the oration differs from the essay in power of ap- 
 peal. Its success depends largely upon its power of arousing 
 emotion in an audience. Hence, the art-content of an oration 
 differs not in kind, but in degree, from that of the essay. 
 Sublimity, humor, feeling, in fact all the elements of art-con- 
 tent are present in a larger degree, and their presence makes 
 the oration a higher grade of literature than the essay. A 
 third difference : the orator is permitted to repeat his thoughts 
 until they are driven home and the required emotion is aroused. 
 
THE ORATION 2 6$ 
 
 The orator's success depends largely upon the skill with which 
 these repetitions are made. Such repetitions would spoil the 
 style of an essay. For example, the chief defect in Matthew 
 Arnold's essays is the needless repetition of ideas. Aristotle 
 speaks about the orator's gift of tautology; and all critics 
 agree on this point, that in the oration the same ideas must 
 be repeated in different words ; the same thoughts must be 
 restated until the orator is sure that he has made the necessary 
 impression. Among orators Cicero excels for this talent of 
 iteration of repeating the same thought in diversified forms. 
 This repetition, which is a merit in the oration, would be a 
 serious defect in any other department of literature. A fourth 
 difference between the oration and the essay: this difference 
 is vividness of style. The oration makes a stronger appeal 
 to the emotions than does the essay; hence the style of the 
 former is characterized by frequent inversions, striking figures, 
 by question marks and exclamations, by all the arts which 
 make language impressive. This vividness of style is foreign 
 to the essay, and out of place in any prose composition except 
 the oration. The fifth difference between the oration and the 
 essay lies in the plan or outline which the writer follows. The 
 plan of the oration is more complex, more elaborate; the nat- 
 ural divisions of the theme are treated in a more formal way. 
 If we compare the introduction of the essay with the intro- 
 duction of the oration, this point of difference will appear. 
 The orator usually recognizes his audience; the essayist as a 
 rule proceeds directly to the development of the theme. 
 
 Characteristics of the Introduction. An immediate recog- 
 nition of the audience is required by the plan and purpose of 
 an oration. " From the outset/' says Aristotle, " the purpose is 
 to gain admission, as it were, into the mind of the audience, 
 and to establish a bond of sympathy between speaker and 
 hearer. For, without some bond of sympathy and good feel- 
 
2 66 THE ORATION 
 
 ing, an audience will not be open to enlightenment or persua- 
 sion." Quintilian writes : " In giving an introduction to his 
 speech the orator must have as his object the preparation of 
 his hearers to listen more readily and attentively." On the 
 other hand, the essayist assumes that his work will be read; 
 he makes no special effort either in the opening paragraph or 
 in any other part to win recognition. His appeal is intel- 
 lectual rather than emotional. He relies upon his literary 
 reputation or upon the popularity of the magazine wherein 
 his work appears. The purpose of an introduction in oratory 
 is to win the audience as well as to introduce a subject for 
 discussion. Hence, the introduction of the theme amounts 
 to the introduction of a public speaker. And the speaker in 
 his opening words must reveal certain qualities in order to 
 gain admission into the mind and heart of his audience. 
 
 Qualities Required. Among these qualities the first one 
 favorably to impress an audience is calmness in manner and 
 in language. Calmness implies strength, self-reliance, a mas- 
 tery of the situation. Calmness at once disposes the audience 
 favorably toward the speaker. Calmness in language is de- 
 manded in an introduction, because the audience at the begin- 
 ning is passionless, unmoved. Emotion is to be aroused by 
 gradual and growing appeals; hence, the vivid style which 
 characterizes other parts of the oration is not a characteristic 
 of the introduction. The style employed is plain, simple, with- 
 out ornament; giving no expression to vehemence or passion. 
 
 An Exception. When the emotion of the audience is already 
 aroused before the speaker begins, then the calm, formal in- 
 troduction is changed to an immediate, emotional appeal. For 
 example, the orations of Mirabeau during the French Revolu- 
 tion ; the orations of Cicero during the Catilinian rebellion ; 
 the orations of Wendell Phillips during the slavery agitation. 
 
TH ORATION 267 
 
 These, however, are exceptional cases; the orator as a rule 
 must arouse the audience gradually ; he begins calmly and 
 proceeds with an ever-increasing warmth and vehemence. 
 
 Seriousness. The second quality of an orator revealed by 
 the introduction is seriousness. This quality is indispensable 
 if the orator would exercise any considerable influence over 
 his hearers. The subjects of the best orations do not offer 
 any room for levity or pleasantry. They are subjects con- 
 nected with temporal or spiritual salvation, or they repre- 
 sent great crises in life; and hence from the very outset the 
 audience looks for seriousness in the speaker. Quintilian 
 writes : " Only a serious, earnest, speaker can convince or per- 
 suade an audience when great interests are at stake." The 
 pulpit orator above all others, says Fenelon, is required to be 
 serious. On his word depends the salvation of souls. Hence, 
 an amusing story, an anecdote or pleasantry of any kind must 
 be kept out of the introduction in the highest type of the ora- 
 tion. There are certain classes of oratory in which pleasantry 
 is suitable in the introduction and throughout the speech ; but 
 seriousness in word and in manner is demanded on all impor- 
 tant occasions. 
 
 Politeness. The third quality that an introduction should 
 reveal is politeness. In the introduction of a speech an audi- 
 ence discovers at once whether the speaker is arrogant or 
 proud or ill-mannered. An audience, like society, is won by 
 a display of politeness. Hence, the opening words should be 
 free from the slightest trace of vulgarity. Quintilian writes : 
 " The first impression that a speaker makes upon an audience 
 ought to be unmistakable evidence that he is a gentleman." 
 Politeness implies two things : a respect for ourself and respect 
 for the audience. And unless a speaker respects both himself 
 and his hearers he cannot hope to exercise much influence or 
 
268 THE ORATION 
 
 accomplish much in the matter of persuasion. The form of 
 politeness most pleasing to an audience is modesty in the per-' 
 sonal claims of the speaker. " Whatever be the talent or 
 reputation of the orator," says Cicero, " he cannot afford to 
 parade it; he must exercise a becoming reserve. Affectation 
 of any kind ruins an orator as it does an actor." Cicero 
 among the ancients, the French among modern orators, 
 showed the greatest respect for the audience. Their exor- 
 diums are models of politeness. 
 
 The Plan. The plan of the oration differs from that of 
 the essay not only in the introduction, but also in the perora- 
 tion. The closing paragraph in an essay does not differ from 
 other parts. It completes the development of the theme; but 
 there is no change in the style, and there is no purpose re- 
 quiring special treatment of the subject. But there is a special 
 purpose which the orator seeks to accomplish in the perora- 
 tion. At the beginning, there is a direct effort to win the 
 audience; at the close, there is an effort to leave a lasting im- 
 pression. Hence", the closing part is written in a style ex- 
 tremely vivid. It is the best piece of writing in the composi- 
 tion. It is a summary of thought, a climax of feeling, and 
 the literary form is the most highly finished of which the 
 speaker is capable. Aristotle sums up the purpose of a per- 
 oration as follows : " In the peroration the orator endeavors 
 for the last time to dispose the hearers favorably toward views 
 or opinions already expressed ; he summarizes the chief points 
 in the oration and places his hearers under the influence of the 
 passions; so that they feel most keenly pity, terror, hatred, 
 emulation. He places that idea last upon which the strength 
 of his case should rest." 
 
 Appeal to the Passions. The plan of an oration, unlike 
 the plan of an essay or of any other prose-form, makes the 
 
THE ORATION" 269 
 
 largest provision for the excitement of the passions; and the 
 art displayed in this excitement is so subtle and complex as 
 to place the oration among the highest grades of literature. 
 The passions are the springs of human action. Men cannot 
 be persuaded unless their passions are stirred. An orator 
 cannot control his audience or persuade men to act unless he 
 plays upon their feelings and emotions. This part, called the 
 pathetic part in the oration, is the most difficult to handle. 
 Hence, Cicero writes : " The highest power of an orator con- 
 sists in exciting the minds of men to anger or to hatred or to 
 grief, or in recalling them from these more violent emotions 
 to gentleness and compassion." On the necessity of exciting 
 the passions Aristotle writes : " When an audience has been 
 brought to a state of excitement, then persuasion is effected, 
 but not till then." Quintilian bears the same testimony to 
 the pathetic part of an oration : " Throughout the whole of 
 an oration there is^ room for addresses to the feelings; nor 
 does the art of oratory present any subject that requires 
 greater study; for the nature of the feelings is varied and 
 should be treated with the greatest care." As to other parts 
 of the oration, moderate and limited powers of mind will do. 
 For example, the establishment of proofs the appeal to 
 reason and to the intellect these things are of minor im- 
 portance as compared -with the power to make an audience 
 weep or feel angry or respond to any other emotion. Yet 
 it is this power that is supreme in oratory. The very life and 
 soul of eloquence are shown in the effect produced on the 
 feelings. 
 
 Ways of Exciting the Passions. Various are the ways of 
 exciting and controlling the feelings of an audience. The foun- 
 dation of all successful literary work in the way of the pathetic 
 is to place in concrete form, to paint in words, those objects 
 which excite passion. This is called pictorial work in an ora- 
 
270 THE ORATION 
 
 tion. For example, the parables in the teaching of the Savior. 
 Picltorial work ranks first in this connection, because it appeals 
 to the multitude untrained in the development of abstract 
 ideas. The multitude cannot follow a line of abstract reason- 
 ing without frequent and suitable illustration. A picture like 
 the parable is necessary to stamp a truth on the mind of the 
 people. Pictorial work in the oration embraces all the meth- 
 ods, whereby ideas are made concrete ; hence, metaphor, simile, 
 personification, all the figures of speech are pressed into serv- 
 ice. 
 
 Scope. Pictorial work in the oration will also include the 
 illustrious events and characters of history. The orator de- 
 pends as much upon the concrete examples of history as upon 
 figures of speech. For instance, in sermon literature, the pic- 
 torial work dealing with the lives of the martyrs or with 
 scenes of early conflict in Galilee, Greece or Rome. Pictures 
 from history make a powerful appeal to the emotions, espe- 
 cially when they are drawn from the history of one's own 
 country or when they concern objects made sacred by religion. 
 Pictorial work in the oration owes a debt not only to history, 
 but to the drama and the epic. The orator has always drawn 
 heavily upon these sources. The department of literature 
 represented by the oration, is perhaps the heaviest borrower 
 in the matter of classic pictures. Milton and the tragedies 
 of Shakespeare furnish the best pictorial work we have in 
 English. English orators like Burke, Webster and Chatham 
 show the greatest familiarity with the dramas of Greece, and 
 the epics of Virgil and Homer. 
 
 Modern Use. Pictorial work in the modern oration is 
 characterized by briefness. . The picture is drawn in a few 
 lines, where the orators of a century ago would devote as 
 many pages. Pictorial work in a large measure is required 
 
THE ORATION 27 1 
 
 from the American orator. Our pulpit or platform oration 
 when successful, contains a wealth of illustration. An Eng- 
 lish audience demands less pictorial work. For example, the 
 parochial sermons of Newman and Lidclon would be failures, 
 if preached to American audiences. Plainness and freedom 
 from illustration satisfy the unimaginative English mind. 
 
 Value. Concerning pictorial work, Quintilian writes : 
 " Whosoever shall best conceive images that will represent 
 to the mind of the audience absent objects, will have the 
 greatest power in moving the feelings. This power depends 
 upon the fertility and the vividness of the orator's imagina- 
 tion. Hence the public speaker without imaginative power 
 is of a certainty doomed to failure." Aristotle advises the 
 greatest care in the training of the imagination for those who 
 aim at becoming public speakers. He writes : " All audiences 
 delight in surveying images, and they are moved far more by 
 impressive imagery than by any mental work in an oration ; 
 because it is not by naked, bold, statements of fact, but by 
 pictures that make them see the facts, that assemblies are 
 moved." Accordingly, among figures of speech the metaphor 
 is the orator's figure. 
 
 The Demand for Such Work. Frequent and suitable illus- 
 trations are demanded in the oration addressed to the multi- 
 tude. The orator meets this demand in two ways. He offers 
 the work done by others, or his own work. The best speakers 
 have adopted both methods. For example, in the Bunker 
 Hill oration by Webster, there is the picture of Columbus on 
 the deck of a vessel ; the picture of the Battle of Bunker Hill ; 
 the picture of American prosperity all drawn by himself - 
 all original. There are also pictures from classic sources: 
 Milton, Virgil, and Homer are quoted literally. A speaker is 
 permitted to take a picture bodily from any source whatso- 
 
272 THE ORATION 
 
 ever, providing the borrowed work will illustrate his theme. 
 And it is not necessary to give credit to the original author, 
 as in other departments of literature. 
 
 Use of Poetry. The employment of pictorial work done 
 in poetry is an old custom with orators. Cicero recommends 
 the study of poetry for the sake of imagery and illustration, 
 because in this regard poetry bears the closest affinity to ora- 
 tory. A favorite method with preachers is to paraphrase the 
 psalms and other pictorial work of the Holy Scriptures, turn- 
 ing into prose and retaining the Biblical language of such 
 pieces as suit the sermon. For example, in Newman these 
 paraphrases not only of psalms, but of other Biblical passages, 
 occur constantly. Another method followed by preachers is 
 to take bodily the illustrations found in sermon-volumes the 
 work of other clergymen. A sermon written by a first-class 
 author in any language is certain to contain some useful illus- 
 trations in the shape of texts or figures of speech. Sermons 
 on the same subject by different clergymen will yield an abun- 
 dance of pictorial work. Kence, the necessity of reading ser- 
 mon literature, an extensive knowledge of which is the best 
 equipment for the pulpit. 
 
 Original Work. The orator must depend upon his own 
 illustrations as well as upon those furnished from various 
 literary sources. The work done by others may be extensive 
 and abundant; nevertheless, he cannot always depend upon 
 such sources; they are not always at hand. Illustrations de- 
 mand a careful training in descriptive writing; because they 
 are, for the most part, of a descriptive character. In this work 
 the oration requires the greatest brevity and vividness. Hence, 
 the orator should be a trained writer in all kinds of descriptive 
 work. To draw a picture in words requires almost as much 
 skill as to draw it in colors. It is the testimony of all speak- 
 
THE ORATION 273 
 
 ers of eminence that years of practice in composition are neces- 
 sary before one can effectively illustrate a sermon or an ora- 
 tion. 
 
 A Two-fold Need. Without careful literary training, this 
 material cannot be used to advantage, and hence among the 
 qualifications of a successful speaker, two are worthy of 
 special emphasis : extensive reading with a view to collect and 
 employ the illustrations found in the various departments of 
 literature; secondly, a careful training in composition enabling 
 the speaker to prepare the raw material and supply his own 
 illustration. Quintilian writes : " In order to gain a mastery 
 over illustration, which means in turn a mastery over the 
 audience, two kinds of work are required: the labor of crit- 
 ical reading and the greater labor of careful writing. Illus- 
 trations will never be forcible or energetic unless they acquire 
 strength from great practice in both reading and writing. 
 For the labor of writing, if left destitute of models from read- 
 ing, passes away without effect, as having no director. Read- 
 ing supplies the models for imitation; and writing enables us 
 to make our own illustration as strong and effective as the 
 model we imitate." Cicero observes : " What is so pleasant 
 to be heard and understood as an oration adorned and pol- 
 ished, enriched with varied and beautiful illustrations; what, 
 on the contrary, is so disappointing and barren as an oration 
 without such ornament?" 
 
CHAPTER XXXV 
 THE ORATION (CONTINUED) 
 ARGUMENT IN THE ORATION 
 
 Argument, like pictorial work, occupies a large place in the 
 oration. It comes first in the order of development; and by 
 some critics is ranked first in importance. Its importance is de- 
 termined to some extent by the species of oration. For ex- 
 ample, an oration in defense of some criminal at the bar of 
 justice; an oration in praise of some hero. Argument in the 
 oration is an appeal to reason; just as pictorial work is an 
 appeal to the emotions. The selection and arrangement of 
 arguments require as much care as the selection of suitable 
 illustrations. Truths may be presented to an audience in two 
 ways : first, in an abstract form, appealing directly to the in- 
 tellect, and aiming at conviction ; secondly, in a concrete form, 
 appealing to the emotions and aiming at persuasion. The 
 usual method in the oration is to state truths in the abstract 
 form and then to apply illustrations, thus giving the same 
 truth a concrete form. Two examples Newman writes : 
 ' Theologians are apt to be lacking in the acquisition of sci- 
 ence." The same truth follows in concrete form: "St. 
 Augustine and St. Thomas knew less about science than a 
 modern peasant." Lacordaire writes : " The Justice of God 
 will prevail ; " immediately afterward, in concrete form, " Con- 
 sider the fiery furnace of Hell where fallen men and angels 
 writhe in torment." When argument takes the abstract form 
 it is occupied with principles, with genus and species, cause 
 
 274 
 
ARGUMENT IN THE ORATION 275 
 
 and effect. Inasmuch as it is applied logic, it employs the 
 abstract vocabulary of logic; and, in every premise and infer- 
 ence, appeals directly to the intellect. Hence, argument exer- 
 cises the reasoning power of an orator; just as illustration or 
 pictorial work employs his imaginative power. 
 
 The Demands of Argument. Argument involves both 
 philosophy and rhetoric ; philosophy, because its very existence 
 depends upon that part of philosophy known as logic. And 
 after arguments are constructed, rhetoric determines their 
 order and arrangement in the oration. Rhetoric determines 
 the place in the speech where they will be most effective, and 
 the style and manner of expression. A debate among ancient 
 critics took place over the relative value of philosophy and 
 rhetoric in the making of an orator. Aristotle quarreled with 
 the Rhetoricians of Greece. He declared that philosophy, 
 inasmuch as it discovered the sources and aided in the 
 construction of argument, was of more value to a speaker than 
 rhetoric which merely arranged the argument and supplied 
 suitable expression. The Rhetoricians contended that unless 
 the arguments were properly arranged and most forcibly ex- 
 pressed, they might as well be omitted from a speech. The 
 appeal would be lost upon the audience. Cicero, in summar- 
 izing the needs of an orator, places logic first. He writes : 
 ' The orator ought to have the subtlety of the dialectician, the 
 grasp of a philosopher, the diction of a poet, the voice and 
 gesture of the greatest actors." The amount of abstract rea- 
 soning in an oration will be determined by the character of the 
 audience; a highly educated audience can follow it without 
 much need of illustration. Hence, in orations before learned 
 bodies, in all academic speaking, arguments are advanced in 
 abstract form, demonstrating that which is true, but in a man- 
 ner dry. bare and exact. The speaker proceeds in correct 
 syllogistic form, and with mathematical precision. Very little 
 
276 THE ORATION 
 
 else is given to the audience except the solid proofs of the 
 proposition. 
 
 Logic and the Masses. The abstract method of reasoning 
 cannot be followed with success when a speaker addresses the 
 uneducated masses. The common people do not understand 
 abstractions. The terminology of the schools is a foreign lan- 
 guage to them ; they demand that the speaker lay aside those 
 terms v and employ a language known to all words making 
 a universal appeal ; they demand that rhetoric be added to 
 philosophy, not only in the construction and arrangement of 
 arguments, but also, that each of these arguments be driven 
 home by a number of forcible illustrations. For them the 
 skeleton of thought requires flesh and blood. For example, 
 the New Testament reveals the proper method and the proper 
 language to use in speaking to the multitude. We cannot 
 improve upon the method employed by the great Teacher of 
 humanity. 
 
 Kinds of Argument Employed. Among the various kinds 
 of argument three are found most frequently in the oration. 
 First, the abridged syllogism used in all kinds of deductive 
 reasoning. The public speaker gives the syllogism a literary 
 treatment. He argues extra formam. He cuts out either the 
 major or the minor premise; and in doing so destroys the 
 formalism of logic; yet the abridged syllogism is none the 
 less effective. An example : " The human soul is a sub- 
 stance essentially spiritual ; hence, it is immortal." Sometimes 
 the whole syllogism is expressed in a single proposition. For 
 example, " A just God punishes crime." The abridgment 
 of the syllogism is usually accompanied by an extended para- 
 phrase of the premise expressed. For example, Newman 
 frequently devotes a paragraph to the amplification of a major 
 or a minor premise. And in the paragraph immediately fol- 
 
ARGUMENT IN Till' ORATION 277 
 
 lowing, gives a similar expansion to his inference or conclu- 
 sion. The public speaker may express both the major and 
 minor of a syllogism, but he never does so in a formal way. 
 He adds to each some amplification, either a proof or an expo- 
 sition of the major or minor, and as in the case of an abridged 
 syllogism, a paragraph or more may be devoted to each major 
 or minor. Aristotle writes concerning the abridged syllo- 
 gism : " It is the very body of proof in the oration. When 
 one of the premises is not expressed, but understood, the style 
 of the reasoner is rendered more natural and more in accord- 
 ance with the demands of the popular assembly. The sword 
 of the dialectician is hidden; only the velvet scabbard ap- 
 pears." 
 
 The Dilemma. The dilemma is an argument frequently 
 used by the orator. It consists of two or more alternatives 
 presented to an adversary, and then follows a refutation of 
 any he may select. Polemic oratory is filled with dilemmas. 
 The great controversialists of the past used the dilemma as a 
 favorite argument. A modern example : Mr. Bryan thus 
 addresses the Republicans: "If you hold the Filipinos, you 
 must hold them either as citizens or as subjects. But you 
 cannot hold them as citizens without admitting them to a 
 plane of equality with Americans; you cannot hold them as 
 subjects without overthrowing the Constitution of the United 
 States." The dilemma is not so popular now in the modern 
 pulpit, because the pulpit has grown less controversial. The 
 sermon literature of the. Reformation period and down to the 
 middle of the present century is full of the dilemma. 
 
 Arguments from Example. The third kind of argument 
 employed most frequently by the public speaker is the argu- 
 ment from example. It is a form of inductive reasoning that 
 appeals to the multitude; because all men are constantly em- 
 
278 THE ORATION 
 
 ploying it. It is the source of many popular fallacies owing 
 to the hasty and incomplete generalization which character- 
 izes the popular employment of this method. People often 
 draw a general conclusion from one or two examples ; when a 
 hundred examples might be cited, proving the contrary. It 
 was a recognition of this popular weakness to leap at general 
 conclusions, that drew forth the awful condemnation of the one 
 by whom scandal cometh. In the moral order no argument 
 is more powerful for good or evil than the one drawn from 
 human example. Hence, the trite maxim of Cicero : " Ex- 
 empla trahunt "< Examples compel attention. Witness the 
 influence of example upon religious and political life ; how the 
 multitude may be drawn into error and held in error by the 
 example of a few illustrious men. Hence, among the various 
 equipments of the orator ancient critics insist upon the study 
 of biography a knowledge of those human examples which 
 may be employed with such telling effect. And Fenelon, in 
 his treatise on pulpit eloquence, places the study of religious 
 biography next to that of philosophy, so powerful is the ex- 
 ample of the illustrious dead in the church to convince and 
 persuade the living. 
 
 Kinds of Argument. The common means of argument 
 and persuasion are two the example, and the abridged 
 syllogism. Of examples, there are two species ; one species is 
 the quoting of real matters of fact, the events of time as they 
 have actually happened; the other species is the fabrification 
 of examples by the speaker. One species deals with fact ; the 
 other, with fable or fiction. 
 
 Fictitious Example. Both ancient and modern orators 
 made considerable use of the fable or fictitious example. Par- 
 ables are fictitious examples which serve as well as those based 
 on fact. Pulpit orators have always employed fictitious ex- 
 
ARGUMENT IN THE ORATION 279 
 
 amples. For example, experiences in their own lives or in the 
 lives of others which are purely fanciful; yet illustrate or en- 
 force some lesson. On the construction of fables Aristotle 
 writes : " A speaker in bringing forward such fictitious work, 
 should use for a model those examples that are actual fact. In 
 the fable there should be all the force of probability, all the 
 appearance of truth." For example, " The sower who went 
 forth to sow, scattering grain on poor and stony soil " ; le- 
 gends concerning the martyrs, illustrating their courage and 
 constancy. It is essential to all good fiction to resemble fact 
 and truth ; and fictitious examples in the oration are no excep- 
 tion to this rule. 
 
 Example as a Basis of Argument. The example, whether 
 real or fictitious, is the basis of several kinds of argument. 
 The first kind is the general law or principle which is con- 
 firmed by the various examples adduced; they are either ad- 
 duced as positive proof of a general proposition, or a general 
 proposition is inferred from a number of them. In the first 
 case they are used as a corroboration of the general law or 
 principle; in the second case they are employed like the data 
 of any science; they are the material for inductive reasoning. 
 This is the ordinary way of employing examples. Another 
 kind of argument based upon example is called analogy. 
 Analogy is founded upon agreement, likeness, resemblance. 
 A resemblance between two things may be so great as to war- 
 rant us in inferring that the resemblance extends beyond our 
 actual knowledge. For example, the agreement that the plan- 
 ets around us are inhabited is an argument from analogy; 
 because they resemble the earth in shape, movement, atmos- 
 phere, illumination, we infer that they also resemble the earth 
 in the matter of inhabitants. One sentence in Patrick Henry's 
 famous speech contains an argument from analogy : " Caesar 
 
280 THE ORATION 
 
 had his Brutus; Charles the First, his Cromwell; and George 
 the Third may profit by their example/' 
 
 Abundance of Analogy. The world is filled with analo- 
 gies, with objects bearing some resemblance or likeness to one 
 another; and hence the orator has a wide field and the choic- 
 est materials. Perhaps the most extensive works in English 
 literature based upon analogy are Bishop Butler's Analogies 
 between natural and revealed religion ; and Henry Drummond's 
 Natural Law and the Spiritual World. The pulpit orator 
 uses the old but forcible arguments from analogy. The 
 angels were all tempted once; and those that withstood the 
 trial were confirmed in everlasting glory; so we stand in re- 
 lation to the same goal. The martyrs fought the same spirit- 
 ual fight under even more adverse circumstances. False analo- 
 gies are as easily and as plausibly drawn as false inferences 
 from a few examples. Hence, the sophistries and the mass 
 of worthless argument in the orations of the special pleader. 
 
 Arrangement. The arrangement of arguments in the ora- 
 tion is compared to that of men on a battlefield. It is the test 
 of rhetorical power just as the construction of arguments is 
 the test of rational power. John Quincy Adams in his Treat- 
 ise on Oratory, writes : ' You can find a hundred persons 
 able to produce good ideas upon any subject for 'the one who 
 can marshal them to the best advantage. Methodical argument 
 is to the orator what tactics are to military art ; and as victory 
 has almost always fallen to the best tactician, so victory in elo- 
 quence belongs to him who can make the most methodical 
 arrangement of his arguments and ideas. There is no part 
 of the oration in which the consummate orator will be so de- 
 cidedly manifest as in this arrangement." 
 
 Two Laws. The various ways of making this arrange- 
 ment will depend in a measure upon the kind of oration and 
 
ARGUMENT IN THE ORATION 2 8l 
 
 upon the character of the audience. After allowing for vari- 
 ous circumstances, critics insist upon the observance of two 
 laws. The law of climax, an ascending scale of effects; an 
 ever-increasing strength and force in the arguments which 
 are advanced. An anti-climax in a speech is fatal unless the 
 speech is a specimen of comedy. This law of climax is pe- 
 culiar to the drama, the novel, the oration and the epic. The 
 reader or hearer must be carried on by an ever-increasing 
 emotional or intellectual appeal. The second law in the ar- 
 rangement of arguments is called the law of exclusion. It 
 is briefly the rejection of all kinds of argument either weak, 
 or ineffective so far as the audience is concerned. An audi- 
 ence abhors weakness of any kind as Nature abhors a vacuum. 
 Weakness in voice, physique, language or argument is always 
 disappointing. Strength in these particulars challenges ad- 
 miration and bespeaks an ideal orator. One of the most 
 profitable literary studies is to dissect the great orations and 
 compare the amount of argument with the amount of illus- 
 tration, and note hoW rational and imaginative power are 
 combined in the amplification of the theme. 
 
CHAPTER XXXVI 
 THE ORATION (CONTINUED) 
 
 STYLE IN THE ORATION 
 
 Style. There is a style or manner of writing which is 
 peculiar to the oration ; and this style contributes in a large 
 measure to the success of the public speaker. The master- 
 pieces of oratory in all languages are written in practically 
 the same style. This style, sometimes called oratorical, is 
 characterized by a subtle musical beauty or cadence running 
 elusively through the prose. The cadences in the oration are 
 not marked by the sameness of poetic lines ; they are not gov- 
 erned like the regular measures in poetry, they are always 
 wide-ranging and delicately shifting, so as never to compel 
 direct recognition. Yet these prose rhythms are always sym- 
 bolic of the mood of the passage. They are compared to tones 
 which give to the human voice depth and tenderness and sug- 
 gestiveness. " It is possible," says Aristotle, " to impose upon 
 a series of simple words by delicately sensitive adjustment, a 
 power over the feelings and imagination like that of an in- 
 cantation." This power is exercised by the public speaker to 
 the fullest extent ; and results in fastening the attention of the 
 audience upon what is said. The best grades of oratory will 
 always include prose rhythm. 
 
 Variations of Style. The manner of writing will vary ac- 
 cording to the various parts of the oration and according to 
 the various classes into which it is divided. Each distinct part 
 
 282 
 
STYLE IN THE ORATION 283 
 
 of the oration, such as the exordium, the argumentative part, 
 the peroration, will require a different style. The style of the 
 exordium is plain, simple, passionless, except when passion is 
 already aroused as in the case of Cicero against Catiline. The 
 style in the peroration is almost the reverse of this; expres- 
 sion is taxed to the utmost in the final appeal all the wealth 
 and beauty of language are employed. Another contrast of 
 style exists between the argumentative part and the appeal to 
 the emotions. In the former, there is the utmost precision in 
 thought and language ; in the latter, there is the largest amount 
 of freedom in the literary development the manner of writ- 
 ing is free and easy because the pictorial quality which arouses 
 emotion must have sufficient amplification. Thus there are 
 sharp contrasts in the style of the oration, corresponding to the 
 important divisions. A test of first-class workmanship is the 
 power to vary the manner of writing so as to meet the re- 
 quirements of each division. Good judgment demands these 
 changes. " Style," says Aristotle, " will be in good taste, if it 
 be not only expressive of feeling and character, but also if it 
 be happily adjusted to the subject-matter." This adjustment 
 is preserved, if the style be neither careless on questions of im- 
 portance nor dignified on such questions or subjects as are 
 mean and trifling. And a style which is thus made appropri- 
 ate, invests the subject with persuasive efficacy; for the audi- 
 ence is thereby cheated into the persuasion that the orator is 
 speaking with sincerity, even though he may not be; because 
 under such circumstances men stand affected in that manner 
 and employ exactly that kind of style which he employs. 
 Moreover, every condition, habit and emotion of life must 
 have style of language exactly suited to it ; for example, the 
 audience detects at once, knows instinctively, the natural lan- 
 guage of passion ; so also, the natural style of argument ; 
 hence, if there be no adjustment, if the orator keeps one man- 
 ner of expression, regardless of the subject-matter, he is bound 
 
284 THE ORATION 
 
 to be judged as artificial and unnatural ; he loses his power to 
 move the audience because the style makes it impossible for 
 him to interpret his thoughts and emotions aright ; his oratory 
 becomes idle declamation. 
 
 All Orators Alike. There is a family likeness among all 
 great orators in this regard : by long practice in composition 
 they can adapt their style of writing with perfect propriety to 
 every shade of thought and emotion. This adaptation is 
 termed the natural style the style in which a writer speaks 
 as he thinks and feels, and which depends on his temperament 
 and the nature of his subject. Herbert Spencer, in his Philos- 
 ophy of Style, calls this the perfect manner of writing. He 
 says : ' This style will sometimes be plain ; sometimes or- 
 nate; sometimes the sentences will be balanced, and at other 
 times unsymmetrical ; for a time there will be sameness ; then 
 great variety ; the mode of expression naturally responding to 
 the state of feeling and the composition changing to the same 
 degree that aspects of the subject change." 
 
 Variations of Style According to Species. The style of 
 writing varies, not only according to the various parts of an 
 oration, but also according to the various species into which 
 the oration is divided. In connection with the various species 
 of the oration, Aristotle specifies three kinds of style. First, 
 the demonstrative style. It is employed when the oration 
 gives blame or praise to a particular person. Under this head 
 is included all panegyrics, funeral orations, and orations on 
 anniversaries, and at festivals. It is the manner of writing 
 that belongs to the pulpit. The second is called the delibera- 
 tive style. It is employed when the oration is delivered in 
 parliament. It is the style of statesmen, and is some'times 
 called parliamentary oratory. The third is called the judicial 
 
/AT THE ORATION 285 
 
 style. It is employed in court trials. It is employed in accu- 
 sation and defense; and it is sometimes called forensic. 
 
 The Demonstrative Style. The demonstrative style, as 
 Aristotle terms it, is employed in the forum and in the pulpit 
 on great anniversaries and festivals. It is easily distinguished 
 from other forms of oratory. The epithet, demonstrative, 
 was used by Aristotle to denote the prevalence of emotion. 
 The speaker has for his main purpose an emotional appeal. 
 Hence, Quintilian calls it the impassioned style. It stands 
 in sharp contrast with the calm, intellectual, appeal which 
 characterizes the judicial style the cold statement of the law 
 and the evidence. Praise or blame is the object of demon- 
 strative oratory. And the statement of either by a public 
 speaker is always attended with emotion. Pulpit oratory is 
 largely occupied with praise or blame. For example, the 
 praise of God, angels, saints, the illustrious dead ; or the con- 
 demnation of those whose lives are evil and vicious. 
 
 Emotion. The chief characteristic, then, of demonstrative 
 oratory is the element of emotion. It is the work of the heart, 
 the affections; it is animated, magnetic, spirited; the passion 
 of the speaker is communicated to the audience. It offers the 
 widest scope to applause and enthusiasm. The prose develop- 
 ment is akin to the external progress of the drama, each di- 
 vision becoming more vivid and vital than the preceding. 
 Hence, in the forum, the praise of the national hero, amid 
 increasing enthusiasm and excitement; or, in the pulpit, the 
 mission and revival sermon with their dramatic intensity and 
 fervor. 
 
 Examples. For emotional effect compare the funeral ora- 
 tions of Bossuet with the Neglect of Divine Warnings by 
 Newman; or the invective of Demosthenes against Philip of 
 Macedon with the invective of Burke against Warren Hast- 
 
2 86 THE ORATION 
 
 ings or the invective of Cicero against Verres and Catiline. 
 Emotion in the demonstrative style follows two lines : the 
 tender and the pathetic; for example, the sufferings of the 
 hero praised ; or, the bold and vehement, as the condemnation 
 of the criminal. The subject-matter of pulpit oratory contains 
 the emotional element in perhaps the largest measure. For 
 all theology centers in the saddest of all symbols the cross 
 with its connotation of suffering, sacrifice, death. There can 
 be no v more powerful appeal than this to human emotion. 
 The subject-matter of pulpit oratory is filled with sublimity; 
 and this element of art-content always evokes emotion. The 
 demonstrative style in the pulpit depends upon the sublime 
 themes of the supernatural world; and, outside the pulpit, on 
 the sublime actions of the human hero. In either case, sub- 
 limity plays an important part as an emotional factor. 
 
 Element of Power. A second characteristic of the demon- 
 strative style is the element of power. While all styles of 
 oratory have this element to a degree, the demonstrative style 
 possesses it in the largest measure. The language of this style 
 is emphatically the language of power. This element is a ne- 
 cessary consequence of the presence of feeling. It follows from 
 the appeal to the emotions. It is the literary result of pas- 
 sion. 
 
 Demands of the Multitude. Accordingly, those methods 
 whereby a style is made vivid ( for example, figures of speech ; 
 short sentences with a repetition of noun and verb; the most 
 vigorous illustration; the question mark and interrogation 
 and other rhetorical devices,) are employed by the speaker. 
 There is a freedom from restraint in the demonstrative style, 
 as compared with judicial or parliamentary oratory. The 
 speaker addresses the multitude, and hence is exempt from 
 the criticism of learned judges or select assemblies. The 
 traditions, customs and criticism of court or parliament re- 
 
STYLE JN THE ORATION 287 
 
 strain an orator from exerting his power to the utmost. But 
 the multitude impose no such checks or restraints ; they demand 
 the language of power, they look for the element of power 
 which characterizes demonstrative oratory. This element of- 
 ten runs to excess both in style and in delivery, and the speaker 
 is applauded and his purpose accomplished ; whereas, such ex- 
 cess would excite only derision before a select audience for 
 example, a stump speaker before the Supreme Court. 
 
 The Deliberative Style. --The deliberative style is employed 
 in oratory, when the oration is delivered before some represen- 
 tative assembly. For example, a congress or parliament. 
 The individual members of such an audience are the select rep- 
 resentatives of the people; and they act, as a rule, in some 
 official capacity. Hence, the deliberative style of oratory flour- 
 ishes wherever the people have full or partial representative 
 government. For example, in a republic or limited monarchy. 
 In modern times, with the growth of the national spirit and 
 representative government, every parliament can boast of dis- 
 tinguished orators. Some examples: The Spanish Parlia- 
 ment, Emil Castelar; the Italian Parliament, Crispi; German 
 Parliament, Windhorst; French Parliament, Mirabeau; Eng- 
 lish Parliament, Gladstone and O'Connell; American Parlia- 
 ment, Webster and Calhoun ; Canadian Parliament, Sir John 
 Macdonald and Wilfred Laurier. Every nation can boast of 
 several masters of the deliberative style. In the parliaments of 
 Greece and Rome, Socrates, Demosthenes, Cato, and Cicero. 
 
 Opinions of This Style. This manner of writing an ora- 
 tion is partly explained by the term deliberative. To deliberate 
 implies stress on the rational element; it indicates the preva- 
 lence of reason over emotion. Concerning the language em- 
 ployed in this style, Quintilian observes : " The language ought 
 to be uniformly simple and grave, and more distinguished for 
 
288 THE ORATION. 
 
 studied thoughts than for studied phraseology. Canning 
 writes as follows : " The House of Commons is a deliberative 
 body of men, and the oration before the House should conform 
 to its predominant character ; the correct parliamentary speaker 
 avoids mere ornament and declamation ; or, if these be em- 
 ployed at all, they must seem to spring naturally out of the 
 subject; the style should be that of an animated conversation 
 on public business ; there must be method also, but this should 
 be felt in the effect rather than seen in the manner. No formal 
 divisions, set exordiums, or perorations, as the old rhetoricians 
 taught, will suit the deliberative style of oratory today. The 
 deliberative oration owes much of its weight to the calm, ra- 
 tional, impressive manner in which it is written. But what 
 adds most weight is the authority of the speaker who, as a 
 member of parliament and often as premier, exercises the 
 power entrusted to him by the people." 
 
 Changes in This Style. Under what circumstances will 
 this style of oratory change? In periods of great national ex- 
 citement the ordinary calm manner yields to feeling and pas- 
 sion. Then the parliamentary speaker makes the most pow- 
 erful appeal to the emotions; for indignation is then to be 
 kindled or allayed, and the minds of the audience are to be 
 moved to fear, hatred, pity, benevolence. During these peri- 
 ods or critical emergencies in national life, the very finest speci- 
 mens of oratory have been produced ; for example, the Athenian 
 State in danger from Philip ; the Roman State in danger from 
 Catiline; the American Union in danger from secession. 
 
 Periods of Excitement. It is noteworthy that in ancient 
 as well as in modern times, the deliberative style has changed 
 whenever parliament undertakes a great State trial. For ex- 
 ample, the Trial of Warren Hastings, the Impeachment of 
 President Johnson, or whenever parliament attempts some rad- 
 
STYLE IN THE ORATION 289 
 
 ical change in the laws of the realm. For example, the re- 
 peal of the May Laws in Germany, the Act of Union between 
 Ireland and England; the imposition of taxes without repre- 
 sensation in the American colonies. Because of such abnormal 
 conditions, deliberative oratory undergoes a radical change; 
 but calls forth as a consequence the best speakers both in an- 
 cient and in modern times Demosthenes, Cicero, Burke, 
 Webster, Sheridan, Gladstone, Chatham. -All these men ap- 
 peared during periods of abnormal national excitement. 
 
 Modern Influences. In modern times deliberative oratory 
 has come under the influence of two distinct forces the com- 
 mercial spirit, and the reduction of government to a science. 
 These influences have taken away from the deliberative ora- 
 tion almost all traces of the demonstrative style. " A remark- 
 able change," says Matthews, " has come over the House of 
 Commons since the days of Edmund Burke, when English de- 
 liberative oratory was enlivened by explosions of passion which 
 shook the House; when sallies of wit, graceful imagery and 
 classic quotations adorned every deliberative effort. Today 
 the deliberative speaker states his views plainly, tersely, with 
 little preamble and less embellishment ; and having delivered 
 himself of what he has to say, he concludes as abruptly as he 
 began. The brilliant speech has yielded to the cold business 
 talk based upon a bundle of statistics. Rhetoric as such, and 
 eloquence as such, seem to be no longer a part of the normal 
 working of the British Parliament." 
 
 Our Parliamentary Style. The American Parliament 
 seems to be following the British example and employing the 
 deliberative style in the strictest degree. The Congressional 
 Record, which publishes the speeches of our parliamentary 
 speakers, is little more than a mass of facts, analyzed testimony, 
 cold reasoning, barren precedents and principles the skeleton 
 
20,0 THE ORATION 
 
 of oratory without flesh or soul. Hence, the unwarranted in- 
 ference that the days of oratory are rapidly passing away. 
 The deliberative style will always be affected by racial tem- 
 perament; and, in the parliaments of the Latin races, we may 
 expect it to give considerable scope to fancy, imagination, 
 feeling. Yet, among all races, the style of parliamentary or- 
 atory should remain substantially as Quintilian defines it a 
 style, simple, grave, without much ornament or imagery a 
 style in which reason prevails over emotion. A deliberative 
 assembly will always be engaged upon the discussion of what is 
 honorable, useful or necessary to the State ; and this three- fold 
 subject-matter demands the largest exercise of reason and the 
 smallest amount of fancy or imagination. 
 
 The Judicial Style. This is the manner of writing or 
 presenting arguments in a Court of Justice. It deals with ev- 
 idence, with law, with a judge and jury. It is sometimes 
 called forensic oratory ; it belongs to the legal profession, just 
 as demonstrative oratory belongs to the forum and pulpit, and 
 deliberative oratory to parliament. 
 
 The Term. The oration addressed to a judge, gives us 
 the term judicial; it was in the days of Aristotle an elaborate 
 appeal to reason, and a still more elaborate appeal to the pas- 
 sions. Hence, Aristotle in his treatment of the judicial style 
 states the various ways of moving the judge, arousing his 
 passions, so that he might sometimes decide according to his 
 feelings and not according to the law and evidence. This 
 method was universally employed by the pleaders in ancient 
 Courts of Justice. It would be absurd to employ such a style 
 in any high courts of justice today. For example, a case 
 could never be won in the supreme courts of Great Britain or 
 America by an emotional appeal. There is not the slightest 
 chance for such success. 
 
STYLE IN THE ORATION 
 
 Trial by Jury. Trial by jury has transferred this emo- 
 tional appeal from the judge to the jurymen ; and precisely with 
 the same purpose as the ancients had in view. The history of 
 jurisprudence shows frequent cases wherein a criminal, even a 
 murderer, has been acquitted because of the emotional appeal. 
 Two examples : Senator Voorhees of Indiana has secured the 
 acquittal of a number of murderers when the evidence was all 
 against them, and when their guilt was established beyond the 
 shadow of a doubt. The late Colonel Ingersoll has a similar 
 record as a lawyer. The lawyer of modern times is not more 
 successful with jurymen than the lawyer of ancient times 
 with judges who were often moved to grant a verdict against 
 the evidence. 
 
 Divisions. The divisions of a forensic oration are five: 
 the exordium; statement of facts; the proof of what we ad- 
 vance; refutation of the opposing counsel; and the perora- 
 tion. 
 
 Exordium. The exordium in judicial oratory is far more 
 explicit and formal than in any other department of oratory. 
 The speaker at the outset states in clear, unmistakable terms 
 to judge and jury what he is going to prove concerning his 
 client; what he is going to infer from a statement of facts in 
 the case. This explicitness was accompanied in ancient times 
 by an attempt to conciliate the judges. Hence, we find in the 
 classic exordium a frequent digression in praise of the Judge 
 his honesty, high-mindedness. These compliments are still 
 paid to juries ; and they form a part of the exordium in modern 
 forensic oratory. The statement of facts is always made in a 
 peculiar style. Very much depends upon the coloring of these 
 statements. The best legal talent is often employed upon the 
 manipulation of facts, so as to blind or mislead a jury. 
 
20,2 THE ORATION 
 
 Some Characteristics of the Judicial Style. The style of 
 introduction in judicial oratory differs from that of the usual 
 exordium : it is more explicit and formal. The speaker an- 
 nounces the points which will be the divisions of his oration ; 
 his style at the outset is characterized by the utmost clearness 
 and brevity, in order that the jury may see the exact matter at 
 issue. The history of the case in detail follows this explicit 
 and formal introduction. And the judicial style is somewhat 
 peculiar in the statement of details or the facts in the case. 
 The success of an oration in a Court of Justice will often de- 
 pend upon the manipulation of facts so as to give them an in- 
 nocent, or guilty, coloring. As a lawyer is engaged for spe- 
 cial pleading, all his legal talent will often be employed to 
 make the worse appear the better reason ; and he will manipu- 
 late the facts in the interests of his client the story will be 
 colored according to some pre-arranged plan. This manipula- 
 tion of facts in judicial oratory is compared with the arrange- 
 ment of objects in a picture. In the foreground of the picture 
 the orator places all those facts that sustain and establish his 
 side of the legal controversy. These facts are brought out in 
 the clearest light, while the background is occupied with every 
 detail that would invite an adverse decision. PurceH's Life of 
 Cardinal Manning is an example in point; Purcell placed all 
 the little defects and faults in the foreground of the picture, 
 shrouding in the background all the grand redeeming traits in 
 the character of the English Cardinal. A lawyer may destroy 
 character in precisely the same way. 
 
 False Inferences. The style of the judicial oration is pe- 
 culiar not only in the arrangement of facts, but in" the amount 
 of false inferences drawn from facts. Hence, this kind of 
 oration is filled with sophistry. False reasoning of every kind 
 abounds. In attempting to prove his case, a lawyer is per- 
 mitted to deceive the minds of the jury as well as to mislead 
 
STYLE IN THE ORATION 293 
 
 their sympathies. He is permitted to do what would be 
 ethically wrong outside a court-room. 
 
 The Peroration. The peroration in the judicial style re- 
 ceives special attention. It is carefully written and memorized 
 even when the body of the speech is extemporaneous or given 
 from notes. The final impression made upon the jury is held 
 to be of such importance as to warrant the elaborate perora- 
 tions found in judicial oratory. The judicial oration does not 
 offer the same scope that other kinds of oratory furnish. The 
 speaker addresses only a small body of men ; in the delivery 
 there is not so much room for eloquence as before a parliament 
 or popular assembly. In fact, a lawyer, accustomed for years 
 to address juries, is unfit to make a success of popular or de- 
 monstrative oratory; his manner is that of the plain, quiet 
 talker, not that of the orator. 
 
 Kinds of Pleading. An interesting study in the judicial 
 style is a comparison between the pleadings of the lower and 
 higher courts ; the former is a style akin to that of demonstra- 
 tive oratory ; the latter suggests the style of the deliberative as- 
 sembly. In England eloquence has been comparatively rare 
 in the court-room. One reason is the technicality which per- 
 vades every branch of English law. Special pleading seems 
 to have the effect of cramping and confining the intellect. 
 Owing to its enormous and unwieldly mass, the English law 
 is unfavorable to the cultivation of oratory. The establish- 
 ment of so many precedents, the growth of law reports, the 
 statutes of parliament ; the gradual extension of the province 
 so as to cover every possible case all combine to annihilate 
 mere oratory as such. In ancient times, in the flourishing 
 periods of Greek and Roman forensic oratory, the laws were 
 few in number and very simple, and the judges were vested 
 with large discretion ; they were governed to a large extent by 
 
294 THE ORATION 
 
 personal wishes and feelings. Hence, the frequent attempts to 
 win their favor and to play upon their sympathies. 
 
 As years go on, we may expect the science of law to become 
 more and more exact and comprehensive, leaving less room for 
 the exercise of discretionary power on the part of judges, 
 and, therefore, less room for aught else save precedent, fact, 
 and evidence. 
 
CHAPTER XXXVII 
 
 THE ORATION (CONTINUED) 
 
 HISTORY OF THE ORATION 
 
 Antiquity. The oration, like the essay, is found in the 
 oldest literature. It is as old as human society itself, because 
 the most primitive society had a public speaker in its prophet 
 or chief or high-priest. As soon as leaders of men appeared i"n 
 any walk of life, the orator also appeared ; for, aside from its 
 literary value, the oration, like the sceptre, is a symbol of pow- 
 er exerted by one person over a multitude. The best proof of 
 the antiquity of the oration is its presence in all the early his- 
 tories of the world. The earliest historians quote the speeches 
 of generals, statesmen and religious leaders. Sometimes these 
 speeches form the bulk of a volume of ancient history. As 
 example, Caesar, Livy,- Thucydides, and the historian of the 
 Hebrews may be quoted. The oration occupies a prominent 
 place in their narrative. 
 
 Among the Hebrews. In Hebrew literature the oration is 
 found, but rather in a fragmentary than in a complete form. 
 Hebrew writers cared little for art- form; hence their oration 
 is as crudely finished as their letter or their essay. The ora- 
 tion is represented partly by the elaborate speeches in the 
 epic of Job. There are also numerous speeches scattered 
 through the prophetical writings and New Testament; these 
 cannot be well appreciated from a literary standpoint, be- 
 cause of the condensed and crude form in which they are 
 
 295 
 
THE ORATION 
 
 reported. The book of Deuteronomy is an exception to the 
 Biblical rule in the matter of speeches. This book might be 
 called the " Orations and Songs of Moses." There are four 
 orations in Deuteronomy; they were delivered by Moses to 
 the people of Israel, and they are reported with greater com- 
 pleteness than any other orations in the Bible. They resem- 
 ble the orations found in the history of Livy, and Thucydides. 
 An intense interest is awakened in these orations from the 
 pathetic situation in which they are delivered : the leader of 
 the Hebrews, after wandering for years in the desert, at last 
 draws near to the Promised Land ; and yet he realizes that he 
 can never enter it. For passionate appeal these orations are 
 unrivalled; they share the chief glory of Hebrew literature 
 in depth of feeling, sublimity, tenderness and an exalted style 
 in harmony with the sentiments expressed. In the orations 
 delivered by Moses, the subject-matter itself was calculated to 
 stir the strongest emotions the captivity in Egypt where 
 Israel had suffered such long and cruel persecutions the 
 years of sorrow in the wilderness their struggles and tribu- 
 lations and the farewell of an old and faithful leader who 
 shared all their sufferings, but was not permitted to share 
 the happiness of the Promised Land. Nowhere is the tragic 
 note stronger in the mournful story of this exiled nation. The 
 only parallel in modern history is the Farewell of Napoleon to 
 the Old Guard of France. 
 
 Form of Hebrew Oratory. Hebrew oratory frequently 
 takes the form of denunciation and complaint. This form is 
 conspicuous in the prophetical portion of Holy Scripture. 
 The prophets were, for the most part, men of great eloquence. 
 The invective of Demosthenes or Burke is often equalled by 
 these inspired reformers of Israel. 
 
 Among the Greeks. The oration holds a prominent place 
 in Greek literature, because it played a prominent part in 
 
HISTORY OF THE ORATION 297 
 
 Greek political life. The Greeks believed that eloquence was 
 of celestial origin; they ascribed it to the invention of a god 
 who, on account of this art, was the Messenger and Interpre- 
 ter of Olympus. Oratory flourished in Greece because for a 
 long time it was a free State ; and, in the history of the world, 
 free States alone have fostered oratory. One of the first acts 
 of a tyrant, or of a despotic government, is to muzzle speech, 
 destroy eloquence ; it is their only safety. A despotic govern- 
 ment wishes its subjects to be driven, not to be persuaded; 
 hence there is no toleration for oratory. 
 
 Under Greek Democracy. Oratory was a power in the 
 flourishing periods of Greek democracy; it was the key to 
 the highest dignities the passport to the supreme dominion 
 of the State. Hence, the eagerness to acquire this art; elo- 
 quence was taught as the occupation of a life. It was one 
 of the chief objects of education in Greek schools. Literature, 
 science, art, were to be mastered on the theory that an orator 
 must be a man of universal knowledge. Moral duties were 
 taught for the reason that none but a good man could be an 
 orator. Learning, wisdom, even virtue itself, were valued 
 only as they ministered to the purposes of eloquence. As a 
 result of this passionate devotion and careful study, the Greeks 
 brought this art to the highest perfection. The oration as 
 a work of art, reached the term of its evolution in Greece; 
 the orators of all nations since then have been mere imita- 
 tors of Athenian models ; just as all dramatic writers have imi- 
 tated Sophocles or ^schylus, and all epic writers, Homer. It 
 is the glory of Grecian literature to have supplied the best 
 models in every department of verse and prose. 
 
 The Golden Age. The golden age of Grecian eloquence 
 extended from the time of Solon 600 B. C. to that of Alex- 
 ander, 336 B. C. Within this space flourished the most re- 
 
298 TH E ORATION 
 
 nowned orators of Greece; it was the brightest period in their 
 political history. Athens alone produced the great orators. 
 As an Ionian city, it possessed the rich intellectual qualities 
 of that brilliant race. The free form of government adopted 
 by Athens was also a factor. Cicero who studied at Athens, 
 as a member of the Greek Academy, writes : " The art of 
 eloquence is not the common property of all Greece, but seems 
 to belong to Athens alone. For I never heard of Argive, 
 Corinthian or Theban orators; and I never read of a single 
 orator among the Lacedaemonians." 
 
 The Athenian School. The Athenians themselves were 
 conscious of their superiority in. matters of eloquence. Iso- 
 crates, one of their brilliant speakers, wrote in his famous 
 panegyric, 380 B. C., as follows : " Athens has so distanced 
 the world in power of thought and speech, that her disciples 
 have become the teachers of all other men. She has brought 
 it to pass that the name of Greece should be thought no longer 
 a matter of race, but a matter of intelligence ; and this name 
 should henceforth be given to the participators in our culture 
 rather than to the sharers in our racial origin." The school 
 of Athenian oratory claims seven distinguished names. The 
 first of these is Pericles. It is claimed for Pericles that he 
 was the first Athenian who composed and put into writing an 
 oration designed for the public. This speech, as reported to 
 us by Thucydides, is one of the noblest monuments of antiqui- 
 ty. It was delivered in the Westminster of Athens, Cerami- 
 cus, over the graves of those who fell in the Peloponnesian 
 war. Pericles was one of the most remarkable men of an- 
 tiquity ; he was the champion of Greek democracy, the ruler of 
 Athens for nearly forty years. He gained his marvelous in- 
 fluence over the Athenians by his moral character and his 
 eloquence. He spent vast sums in beautifying Athens and 
 making it an art-center. The names of the artists employed 
 
HISTORY OF THE ORATION 
 
 by him would fill a small volume. He built the Parthenon 
 and the Temple of Athens. In his long lifetime there 
 flourished at Athens the poets, ^schylus, Sophocles and 
 Euripides ; the philosophers, Anaxagoras, Zeno, Socrates ; the 
 painter, Polygnotus; the sculptors, Myron and Phidias. The 
 age of Pericles is compared, so far as literature and eloquence 
 are concerned, with the age of Augustus in Rome; Louis 
 XIV in France; Elizabeth in England. 
 
 Successors of Pericles. Pericles was succeeded by six dis- 
 tinguished orators : Lysias, a lawyer by profession ; Isocrates. 
 a teacher of rhetoric, and known among the Greeks as the 
 " Old Man Eloquent ; " Isacus, the instructor of Demosthenes 
 and the author of a treatise on Oratory; ^Eschines, a lawyer 
 and rival of Demosthenes; finally, Demosthenes himself. 
 These men are the best representatives of Greek eloquence; 
 they compare favorably with Webster, Burke, Chatham and 
 Sheridan in English ; their work is, for the most part, pre- 
 served ; they are known in Greek literature as the flower of the 
 Athenian school. 
 
 Demosthenes. Of these speakers, Demosthenes enjoys the 
 widest reputation; he is more fortunate than the others in 
 having a larger number of his speeches preserved, and thereby 
 giving posterity a better chance to estimate his merits. 
 Twenty-seven speeches known to be genuine are handed 
 down ; thirty-four of doubtful origin are ascribed to him, or 
 sixty-one in all. He is also more fortunate in having ap- 
 peared during a great national struggle when the occasion 
 makes the orator. He enjoyed an advantage over all orators 
 of other nations in having a more perfect medium for his art; 
 inasmuch as the Greek language is admittedly a finer medium 
 for expression than any other language either ancient or 
 modern. In addition to this, Demosthenes owes the plan of 
 
300 THE ORATION 
 
 his orations to Pericles, who left him perfect models of what 
 the oration ought to be. With all these advantages, he is 
 given first place; only three others, Cicero, Bossuet and Ed- 
 mund Burke, approach him in excellence, although twenty- 
 four centuries have passed since his birth, and a dozen nations 
 flourishing in that time, have added hundreds of names to 
 the list of orators. 
 
 The Oration Among the Romans. The Romans derived 
 their knowledge of the arts from the Greeks, including every 
 department of literature. For several hundred years they 
 were rude, illiterate, unskilled in anything except the art of 
 war. After the conquest of Greece, they began to study the 
 arts, and leading Roman scholars cither studied at Athens, 
 like Cicero, or had Greek teachers brought to Rome. The 
 Greek masterpieces circulated widely in Italy. As a free 
 state, Rome encouraged public speaking; and it was the 
 opinion of Cicero that the art of eloquence, after that of arms, 
 became the pride of the Roman commonwealth. The Romans 
 had certain racial characteristics favorable to oratory. They 
 were a grave people, serious almost to a fault. They were 
 passionately devoted to their country ; and patriotism is always 
 an inspiration to eloquence. An additional inspiration came 
 from their territorial expansion ; they outgrew the narrowness 
 and provincialism of Italy; a certain magnificence of thought 
 and language followed their magnificent conquests; so that 
 Newman could justly say of Cicero : " He spoke Roman, not 
 Latin; and he was inspired, not by a petty State, but by the 
 orbis terrarum, and the world-wide glance of the Roman 
 eagle." Only one nation in modern history gives equal inspira- 
 tion to the orator the mistress of the seas, whose drum- 
 beat is heard round the world. 
 
 Oratory and the Republic. The Romans in the days of 
 the Republic, added more names than the Greeks to the list 
 
HISTORY OF THE ORATION 301 
 
 of orators. In his dialogues on oratory, Cicero mentions 
 fully one hundred names, including the famous generals, sena- 
 tors and statesmen of the Republic ; such names as Brutus, 
 Cato, Scipio, Antony, Caesar, appearing among them. But if 
 we make an exception of Cicero, the work of the others was 
 much inferior to that of the Greeks. Oratory passed away 
 with the Republic. A century after the death of Cicero, 
 Tacitus bewails the decay of eloquence, in the following 
 words : " Why is it that former ages were so distinguished 
 for the genius and renown of orators and our own age so 
 bereft of this glory as to scarcely retain the very name; for 
 we style none such now except the ancients; the speakers of 
 the present day are called pleaders, barristers, anything, in 
 fact, rather than orators." 
 
 Studies of Quintilian. Quintilian was the last Roman who 
 distinguished himself by the study of oratory; but he sought 
 fame as a teacher and critic, not as a public speaker. For 
 twenty years he presided over the Roman School of Oratory. 
 He resembles Aristotle in coming after the great orations of 
 his country had been written, and in passing judgment upon 
 them in a volume of criticism. Quintilian attempted a revival 
 of the art, but a despot ruled in Rome, and the revival meant 
 little more than the publication of some worthless panegyrics 
 on a Roman tyrant. The world acknowledges a large debt to 
 Quintilian ; his work in criticism has been a text-book in the 
 hands of students since his time. 
 
 Modern Oratory. France and England are leading nations 
 in modern eloquence; and they bear considerable resemblance 
 to Greece and Rome. In relation to the arts, France seems 
 to have inherited the genius of Greece, so that her capital city 
 is justly styled the modern Athens; while London is the 
 modern center of the orbis terrarum; and the imperial Eng- 
 
302 THE ORATION 
 
 lishman bears a striking* resemblance to the imperial Roman. 
 France has produced two orators who are often compared 
 with Demosthenes : Mirabeau in the forum, and Bossuet in the 
 pulpit. The speeches of both contain those elements of pas- 
 sion and power which characterize the orations of the Athen- 
 ian orator. Intense religious and political excitement gave 
 both the necessary opportunity. When Mirabeau appeared 
 in the French Assembly, he hurled defiance and scorn on the 
 nobility and King, as Demosthenes had done against Philip; 
 and he roused the people to the same passionate fury ; he ac- 
 tually goaded them to madness by his eloquent recital of their 
 wrongs and his vehement denunciation of their rulers. It is 
 noteworthy that Mirabeau appeared with the Revolution and 
 the Republic; he would have been an impossibility under the 
 Monarchy. 
 
 Bossuet. Besides Mirabeau, France produced another ora- 
 tor -who compares favorably with Demosthenes. The orations 
 of Bossuet are often quoted as the highest standard of modern 
 pulpit eloquence. In comparison with the Greek master- 
 pieces, these pulpit orations possess the same vehemence and 
 passion, the same power to influence the mind and captivate 
 the imagination. Bossuet had the advantage of a more sub- 
 lime and inspiring theme, but the medium of his art was 
 less perfect. Many of the sermons of Bossuet exist only in 
 notes or rough sketches. His funeral orations are handed 
 down in complete form ; as a funeral orator Bossuet is without 
 an equal. As a rule, Bossuet spoke from notes or outlines; 
 he did not memorize or write out a sermon except for some 
 great state occasion; he trusted to the inspiration of the mo- 
 ment; hence some of his best efforts, like those of Chatham, 
 are lost. Besides the classics, Bossuet relied upon three 
 sources of sacred eloquence : the homilies of St. Chrysostom 
 and St. Augustine and the Prophets of the Old Testament. 
 
HISTORY OF THE ORATION 303 
 
 Fenelon writes that in Bossuet the Old Testament was trans- 
 figured into a man; next to these studies, his favorite author 
 was Homer. A copy of Homer was his constant companion. 
 In this particular, Bossuet resembles all the illustrious orators 
 who made a life-long study of some epic either Homer or 
 Virgil or Milton. Bossuet flourished under a monarchy, but 
 he enjoyed the immunity of the pulpit. Within the sanctuary 
 he could thunder against regal vices and be amply protected 
 by his sacred office. Paganism offered no such scope or safe- 
 guard to the eloquence of antiquity. 
 
 The Oration in England. The characteristic difference 
 between French and English eloquence is that which existed 
 of old between Greece and Rome. The French, as greater 
 artists, adopted higher ideals both of pleasing and persuading. 
 The English took up eloquence on a lower key, adopting the 
 utilitarian standard, caring little for polish or symmetry. The 
 temperament of the people, their natural coldness, chilled. the 
 glow of emotion and destroyed that passionate fire which is 
 the soul of eloquence; they demanded greater soberness than 
 the French, and fewer flowers of the imagination. Hence, 
 the custom, centuries old, in the English courts and parliament 
 to argue from strict law, statute or precedent, which involves 
 knowledge rather than oratory, reason rather than emotion. 
 Hence, too, their ancient custom of reading sermons in the 
 pulpit, as if oratory were a useless luxury. A strange nation- 
 al pride has materially assisted their phlegmatic temperament 
 and compelled their statesmen, lawyers and clergymen to adopt 
 the extreme of studied coolness and composure. Yet in spite 
 of these drawbacks England has produced some of the finest 
 orators known to history. 
 
 Reasons for Oratorical Growth. Three reasons are as- 
 signed for the prominence of the oration in the literature of 
 
304 THE ORATION 
 
 the English. The first is their freedom, and love of discussion ; 
 they have always enjoyed representative government, and the 
 utmost freedom in debate is a marked characteristic of the 
 British parliament which gives the same scope to oratory that it 
 had in the republics of antiquity. A second reason is the 
 vicissitudes, religious and political, through which England 
 has passed from a small island kingdom to a world-wide 
 empire. The revolutions that accompanied so many colonial 
 settlements frequently roused the nation to intense passion 
 and produced orators like Chatham and Sheridan and Burke. 
 The religious revolutions were equally successful in making 
 orators and in furnishing an opportunity for eloquence. Dis- 
 senters, Puritans, Calvinists; the long struggle for supremacy 
 between Protestant and Catholic, were in turn an inspiration 
 to the pulpit. " The clash of creeds," said Disraeli, " has 
 kept the English pulpit at furnace heat from the days of Mil- 
 ton down to our own." The religious revolutions are repre- 
 sented by such orators as Latimer, Wiseman, Channing, 
 Wesley. A final reason for the prominence of oratory in 
 English literature is the clash of races, especially the struggle 
 for independence as in the case of the American colonies and 
 Ireland. These struggles are represented by Grattan, Curran, 
 O'Connell, Patrick Henry, Gladstone, Disraeli. So long as 
 there exists a clash of creeds and races in England, so long 
 must oratory continue to flourish in spite of the temperament 
 of the people. 
 
 The Future of Oratory. The oration will remain an im- 
 portant factor in literature and in life, because the conditions 
 which produced it in the past, will continue to exist. The 
 growth of representative governments and the prevalence of 
 Christianity over the world are conditions in its favor. Chris- 
 tianity opened a new avenue to the career of eloquence, and 
 this more than compensates for any losses sustained in parlia- 
 
HISTORY OP THE ORATION 305 
 
 ments or in courts of justice. The modern scientific spirit has 
 modified the appeal to the emotions and introduced more cor- 
 rectness in the development of thought. But the oration will 
 remain substantially what it was a composition appealing 
 to reason, sentiment, passion, imagination. The masses will 
 always demand it; and the leaders of men will always em- 
 ploy it. 
 
CHAPTER XXXVIII 
 
 THE ORATION (CONTINUED) 
 
 REPRESENTATIVE ORATORS 
 
 Demosthenes. He was born at Paeania, Attica, in 384 
 B. C., and died 322 B. C. He entered public life as a speaker 
 in the Popular Assembly, in 355. His chief orations are the 
 Philippics, the Olynthiacs, On the Peace, On the Embassy, 
 and On the Crown. The best modern editions are those of 
 Bekker (1823) ; Sauppe and Baiter (1850) ; Dindorf (1867) ; 
 Whiston (1859). The orations of Demosthenes derived their 
 inspiration from the struggle against the encroachments of 
 Philip of Macedon. 
 
 Criticism by Blair. " Despising the affected and florid man- 
 ner which the rhetoricians of that age followed, Demosthenes 
 returned to the forcible and manly eloquence of Pericles ; and 
 strength and vehemence form the principal characteristics of his 
 style. Never had orator a finer field than Demosthenes in his 
 Olynthiacs and Philippics, which are his capital orations, and, 
 no doubt, to the nobleness of the subject, and to that integrity 
 and public spirit which eminently breathe in them, they are in- 
 debted for much of their merit. The subject is to rouse the 
 indignation of his countrymen against Philip of Macedon, the 
 public enemy of the liberties of Greece ; and to guard them against 
 the insidious measures, by which that crafty prince endeavored to 
 lay them asleep to danger. In the prosecution of this end, we 
 see him taking every proper method to animate a people, re- 
 nowned for justice, humanity, and valour, but in many instances 
 become corrupt and degenerate. He boldly taxes them with 
 their venality, their indolence, and indifference to the public cause ; 
 
 306 
 
DEMOSTHENES 307 
 
 while, at the same time, with all the art of an orator, he recalls 
 the glory of their ancestors to their thoughts, shows them that 
 they are still a flourishing and a powerful people, the natural 
 protectors of the liberty of Greece, and who wanted only the 
 inclination to exert themselves, in order to make Philip tremble. 
 With his contemporary orators who were in Philip's interest, 
 and who persuaded the people to peace, he keeps no measures, but 
 plainly reproaches them as the betrayers of their country. He 
 not only prompts to vigorous conduct, but he lays down the 
 plan of that conduct ; he enters into particulars ; and points out, 
 with great exactness, the measures of execution. This is the 
 strain of these orations. They are strongly animated, and full 
 of the impetuosity and fire of public spirit. They proceed in a 
 continued train of inductions, consequences, and demonstrations, 
 founded on sound reason. The figures which he uses are never 
 sought after; but always rise from the subject. He employs 
 them sparingly, indeed; for splendor and ornament are not the 
 distinctions of this orator's composition. It is an energy of 
 thought peculiar to himself, which forms his character, and sets 
 him above all others. He appears to attend much more to 
 things than to words. We forget the orator, and think of the 
 business. He warms the mind, and impels to action. He has 
 no parade and ostentation ; no method of insinuation ; no labored 
 introductions; but is like a man full of his subject, who, after 
 preparing his audience by a sentence or two for hearing plain 
 truths, enters directly on business. Demosthenes appears to 
 great advantage, when contrasted with ^Eschines in the celebrated 
 oration f Pro Corona/ ^schines was his rival in business, and 
 personal enemy ; and one of the most distinguished orators of 
 that age. But when we read the two orations, Aeschines is 
 feeble in comparison with Demosthenes, and makes much less 
 impression on the mind. His reasonings concerning the law 
 that was in question, are indeed very subtle; but his invective 
 against Demosthenes is general and ill-supported. Whereas, 
 Demosthenes is a torrent that nothing can resist. He bears down 
 his antagonist with violence; he draws his character in the 
 strongest colors ; and the particular merit of that oration is, that 
 all the descriptions in it are highly picturesque. There runs 
 through it a strain of magnanimity and high honor: the orator 
 speaks with that strength and conscious dignity which great 
 
308 THE ORATION 
 
 actions and public spirit alone inspire. Both orators use great 
 liberties with each other; and, in general, that unrestrained li- 
 cense which ancient manners permitted, even to the length of 
 abusive names and downright scurrility, as appears both here 
 and in Cicero's Philippics, hurts and offends a modern ear. 
 What those ancient orators gained by such a manner in point 
 of freedom and boldness, is more than compensated by want of 
 dignity ; which seems to give an advantage, in this respect, to 
 the greater decency of modern speaking. The style of Demos- 
 thenes is strong and concise, though sometimes it must not be 
 dissembled, harsh and abrupt. His words are very expressive; 
 his arrangement is firm and manly, and though far from being 
 unmusical, yet it seems difficult to find in him that studied, but 
 concealed number, and rhythmus, which some of the ancient crit- 
 ics are fond of attributing to him. Negligent of these lesser 
 graces, one would rather conceive him to have aimed at the 
 sublime which lies in sentiment. His action and pronunciation 
 are recorded to have been uncommonly vehement and ardent ; 
 which, from the manner of his composition, we are naturally led 
 to believe. The character which one forms of him, from reading 
 his works, is of the austere, rather than the gentle kind. He 
 is on every occasion grave, serious, passionate; takes everything 
 on a high tone; never lets himself down, nor attempts anything 
 like pleasantry. If any fault can be found with his admirable 
 eloquence, it is, that he sometimes borders on the hard and dry. 
 He may be thought to want smoothness and grace ; which Diony- 
 sius of Halicarnassus attributes to his imitating too closely the 
 manner of Thucydides, who was his great model for style, and 
 whose history he is said to have written eight times over with 
 his own hand. But these defects are far more than compensated 
 by that admirable and masterly force of masculine eloquence, 
 which, as it overpowered all who heard it, cannot, at this day, be 
 read without emotion." 
 
 Criticism by Henry Hardwicke. " To his admirable delivery, 
 Demosthenes, in his orations, joined the equal force of great and 
 noble expressions, of lively descriptions, of pathetic passages, and 
 of rhetorical images proper to affect and make strong impressions 
 upon the mind. In short, nearly all of his orations are full of 
 expressive figures, of frequent apostrophes, and reiterated inter- 
 
DEMOSTHENES 300 
 
 rogations, which gave life and vigor to, and animated all he 
 said. Longinus, in his comparison between Demosthenes and 
 Cicero, compares the eloquence of the former to lightning, and 
 of the latter to a great fire. He says the eloquence of Demos- 
 thenes is a whirlwind and a clap of thunder that overturns all 
 things, and that of Cicero like a great fire which devours all 
 things. So that violence and impetuousness make up the char- 
 acter of Demosthenes' eloquence, and the progress of a great 
 fire, which advances by degrees, together with the heat and in- 
 sinuating virtue of fire, are the qualities of that of Cicero. The 
 Grecian breaks out like thunder. The Roman warms and in- 
 flames like a great fire. Longinus therefore adds that Demos- 
 thenes never failed of success, when he was to strike terror into 
 the minds of his audience, and to work upon them by strong 
 representations and violent motions. But when it was necessary 
 to go to the very heart, and to insinuate ones' self into the mind, 
 by all those graces and pleasing charms which eloquence is 
 mistress of; then it was that Cicero's art was triumphant, and 
 that his diffused, enlarged discourse succeeded far better than 
 the more close and concise style of Demosthenes ; and the one 
 has no more eclat, in the surprising strength of his reasons, than 
 the other by the^warming and affecting emotions he raises. It is 
 said that before the time of Demosthenes, there existed three dis- 
 tinct styles of eloquence: that of Lysias, mild and persuasive, 
 quietly engaged the attention, and won the assent of an audience ; 
 that of Thucydides, bold and animated, awakened the feelings 
 and powerfully forced conviction on the mind ; while that of 
 Isocrates was, as it were, a combination of the former two. De- 
 mosthenes can scarcely be said to have proposed any individual 
 as a model, although he bestowed so much untiring labor on 
 the historian of the Peloponnesian war. He rather culled all that 
 was valuable from the various styles of his great predecessors, 
 working them up, and blending them into one harmonious whole : 
 not, however, that there is such a uniformity or mannerism in 
 his works as prevents him from applying himself with versatility 
 to a variety of subjects; on the contrary, he seems to have had 
 the power of carrying each individual style to perfection, and 
 of adapting himself with equal excellence to each successive 
 topic. In the general structure of many of his sentences, he 
 resembles Thucydides; but he is more simple and perspicuous, 
 
310 'THE ORATION 
 
 and better calculated to be quickly comprehended by an audi- 
 ence. On the other hand, his clearness In narration, his elegance 
 and purity of diction, and (to borrow a metaphor from a sister 
 art) his correct keeping, remind the reader of Lysias. But the 
 argumentative part of the speeches of Lysias are often deficient 
 in vigor; whereas earnestness, power, zeal, rapidity, and passion, 
 seated in his heart, and emanated from its profoundest depths, 
 The mystery of his wonderful influence, then, lay in his honesty. 
 It is this, joined to his action, that gave warmth and tone to his 
 feelings, an energy to his language, and an impression to his 
 manner, before which every imputation of insincerity must have 
 vanished. The chief characteristics of Demosthenes' oratory 
 were strength, energy, and sublimity, aided by an emphatic and 
 vehement elocution. Liberty and eloquence, which are twin born, 
 and which die together, expired in Greece, with their noble de- 
 fender, Demosthenes, and eloquence relapsed again into the 
 feeble manner introduced by the sophists." 
 
 Cicero. A sketch of the life of Cicero has been given in 
 this volume (see the Letter). It was at the age of thirty- 
 nine that he began to distinguish himself as a deliberative 
 orator. When he attained to the consulship he was forty- 
 three. It was then that the moral qualities of his character 
 were the highest, and his genius shone forth with the greatest 
 splendor; for then he delivered his famous orations against 
 Catiline. 
 
 Criticism by Rev. J. O'Conor. " Cicero was always careful 
 to lay out his oration, in accordance with the plan which he pro- 
 posed in his rhetorical works. He pays greatest attention to 
 the introductions containing the ethical proof; the body of the 
 speech relating the facts and the arguments deducted from those 
 facts ; lastly the peroration, addressing itself to the moral sense of 
 the judges. These were the parts to which he paid most atten- 
 tion. His skill as an orator is best shown in " the proof." He 
 accounts for everything naturally, and converts objections into a 
 confirmation of his own argument. Then he emphasizes all this 
 by amplification and exaggeration. He has not the force of 
 Demosthenes, but has what an ancient critic ascribes to him, ' the 
 
CICERO 3 , r 
 
 copiousness of Plato, and the sweetness of Isocrates.' Strength 
 and simplicity cannot be claimed for him, but no one will deny 
 that he has copiousness and soundness of treatment; we may 
 add, wealth and harmony of diction, solid and sententious argu- 
 ment, a brilliant and poetic imagination. He carried his audience 
 more by persuasion than by conviction. He captivates his hearers, 
 flatters their vanity, rouses their selfishness, and stirs up their 
 hopes and fears. Cicero had also a great fund of wit, in 
 which respect he differed from Demosthenes, who, when he at- 
 tempted to be facetious, made . himself ridiculous. Cicero had 
 also at his command, intense irony and sarcasm that never failed 
 to be effective. Many faults have been attributed to the Roman 
 orator ; his copiousness sometimes runs to wordiness ; the sound 
 sometimes exceeds the sense ; the style is too artificial ; the 
 speaker sometimes merely tries to display his verbal power, sac- 
 rificing everything to his vanity. However, his faults are more 
 than outweighed by his excellences. Cicero said, * the perfect 
 orator is the perfect man ; ' and there is no doubt that he tried 
 to be a perfect man according to his own ideas. But his nature 
 was decidedly weak. His constant aim was to do right, and his 
 mistakes were those of the judgment rather than of the heart. 
 His vanity and his desire to be popular with all men was his one 
 great misfortune. But we can pardon many other faults in view 
 of the eminence he attained in his art. Two magnificently 
 planned orations are the one in ' Defence of Milo/ and the 
 ' Manilian Law/ The ' Pro Archias ' is replete with the spirit 
 of poetry, and the speeches against Catiline are models of in- 
 vective." 
 
 Criticism by Blair. " The object in this period most worthy 
 to draw our attention, is Cicero himself ; whose name alone sug- 
 gests everything that is splendid in oratory. With the history 
 of his life and with his character, as a man and a politician, we 
 have not at present any direct concern. We consider him only as 
 an eloquent speaker, and in this view, it is our business to remark 
 both his virtues, and his defects, if he has any. His virtues are, 
 beyond controversy, eminently great. In all his orations there 
 is high art. He begins, generally, with a regular exordium ; and 
 with much preparation and insinuation prepossesses the hearers 
 and studies to gain their affections. His method is clear, and his 
 
312 THE ORATION 
 
 arguments are arranged with great propriety. His method is 
 indeed more clear than that of Demosthenes; and this is one 
 advantage which he has over him. We find everything in its 
 proper place ; he never attempts to move till he has endeavored 
 to convince : and in moving, especially the softer passions, he is 
 very successful. No man that ever wrote, knew the power and 
 force of words better than Cicero. He rolls them along with the 
 greatest beauty and pomp; and in the structure of his sentences 
 is curious and exact to the highest degree. He is always full 
 and flowing, never abrupt. He is a great amplifier of every 
 subject; magnificent, and in his sentiments highly moral. His 
 manner is on the whole diffuse, yet it is often happily varied, and 
 suited to the subject. In his four orations, for instance, against 
 Catiline, the tone and style of each of them, particularly the first 
 and last, is very different, and accommodated with a great deal 
 of judgment to the occasion and the situation in which they were 
 spoken. When a great public object rouses his mind, and de- 
 mands indignation and force, he departs considerably from that 
 loose and declamatory manner to which he inclines at other 
 times, and becomes exceedingly cogent and vehement. This is 
 the case in his orations against Antony, and in those too against 
 Verres and Catiline. Together with those high qualities which 
 Cicero possessed, he is not exempt from certain defects, of which 
 it is necessary to take notice. For the Ciceronian eloquence is 
 a pattern so dazzling by its beauties, that, if not examined with 
 accuracy and judgment, it is apt to betray the unwary into a 
 faulty imitation; and I am of the opinion that it has sometimes 
 produced this effect. In most of his orations, especially those 
 composed in the early part of his life, there is too much art; 
 even carried the length of ostentation. There is too visible a 
 parade of eloquence. He seems often to aim at obtaining admira- 
 tion, rather than at operating conviction, by what he says. 
 Hence, on some occasions, he is showy, rather than solid ; and 
 diffuse, where he ought to have been pressing. His sentences 
 are at all times round and sonorous; they cannot be accused of 
 monotony, for they possess variety of cadence ; but from too great 
 a study of magnificence, he is sometimes deficient in strength. 
 On all occasions, where there is the least room for it, he is full 
 of himself. His great actions, and the real service which he had 
 performed to his country, apologizes for this in part; ancient 
 
CICERO 
 
 manners, too, imposed fewer restraints from the side of decorum ; 
 but, even after these allowances are made, Cicero's ostentation of 
 himself cannot be wholly palliated ; and his orations, indeed, all 
 his works, leave on our minds the impression of a good man, but, 
 withal of a vain man." 
 
 The following comparison of Cicero and Demosthenes by 
 Blair is worthy of insertion here: 
 
 On the subject of comparing Cicero and Demosthenes, much 
 has been said by critical writers. The different manners of these 
 two princes of eloquence, and the distinguishing characters of 
 each, are so strongly marked in their writings, that the com- 
 parison is, in many respects, obvious and easy. The character 
 of Demosthenes is vigor and austerity: that of Cicero is gentle- 
 ness and insinuation. In the one you find more manliness ; in 
 the other, more ornament. The one is more harsh, but more 
 spirited and cogent ; the other more agreeable, but, withal, looser 
 and weaker. To account for this difference, without any 
 prejudice to Cicero, it has been said that we must look to the 
 nature of their different auditories: that the refined Athenians 
 followed with ease the concise and convincing eloquence of 
 Demosthenes ; but that a manner more popular, more flowery, 
 and declamatory was requisite in speaking to the Romans, a 
 people less acute, and less acquainted with the arts of speech. 
 But this is not satisfactory. For we must observe that the Greek 
 orator spoke much oftener before a mixed multitude than the 
 Roman. Almost all the public business of Athens was transacted 
 in popular assemblies. The common people were his hearers and 
 his judges; whereas, Cicero generally addressed himself to the 
 Patres Conscript*, or, in criminal trials, to the Praetor and the 
 Select Judges ; and it cannot be imagined that the persons of 
 highest rank and best education in Rome required a more diffuse 
 manner of pleading- than the common citizens of Athens, in order 
 to make them understand the cause, or relish the speaker. Per- 
 haps we shall come nearer the truth by observing, that to unite 
 together all the qualities, without the least exception, that form a 
 perfect orator, and to excel equally in each of those qualities, is 
 not to be expected from the limited powers of human genius. The 
 highest degree of strength is, I suspect, never found united with 
 
314 THE ORATION 
 
 the highest degree of smoothness and ornament; equal attentions 
 to both are incompatible ; and the genius that carries ornament 
 to its utmost length is not of such a kind as can excel as much 
 in vigor. For there plainly lies the characteristical difference 
 between these two celebrated orators. It is a disadvantage to 
 Demosthenes that, besides his conciseness, which sometimes pro- 
 duces obscurity, the language in which he writes is less familiar to 
 most of us than the Latin, and that we are less acquainted with 
 the Greek antiquities than we are with the Roman. We read 
 Cicero with more ease, and of course, with more pleasure. Inde- 
 pendent of this circumstance, too, he is no doubt, in himself, a 
 more agreeable writer than the other. But notwithstanding this 
 advantage, I am of opinion that, were the state in danger, or some 
 great public interest at stake, which drew the serious attention 
 of men, an oration in the spirit and strain of Demosthenes would 
 have more weight, and produce greater effects, than one in the 
 Ciceronian manner. Were Demosthenes' Philippics spoken in a- 
 British assembly, in a similar conjuncture of affairs, they would 
 convince and persuade at this day. The rapid style, the vehement 
 reasoning, the disdain, anger, boldness, freedom which perpetu- 
 ally animate them, would render their success infallible over 
 any modern assembly. I question whether the same can be said 
 of Cicero's oration; whose eloquence, however beautiful, and 
 however well suited to the Roman taste, yet borders oftener on 
 declamation, and is more remote from the manner in which we 
 now expect to hear real business and causes of importance 
 treated/ Cicero's orations against Verres have been regarded 
 by many writers as among the most splendid monuments of his 
 genius. Of the six orations against Verres which have come 
 down to us, Cicero delivered but one. Soon after the trial was 
 begun, Verres, overwhelmed by the evidence of guilt which was 
 produced against him, without awaiting the decision of the court, 
 went into voluntary exile. If he had made a defence, the other 
 five speeches would doubtless have been delivered." 
 
 Jacques Benigne Bossuet. He was born at Dijon, France, 
 September 27, 1627, and died at Paris, April 12, 1704. He 
 ranks as the most celebrated orator France has produced. 
 His chief works are an exposition of Catholic Doctrine, a 
 
BOSSUET 315 
 
 Treatise on Universal History, History of the Variations of 
 the Protestant Church and the Funeral Orations upon which 
 his fame as an orator rests. 
 
 Criticism by William Mathews. " What schoolboy is not 
 familiar with the religious terror with which, in his oraisons 
 funebres, the ' Demosthenes of the pulpit,' Bossuet, thrilled the 
 breasts of seigneurs and princesses, and even the breast of that 
 King before whom other kings trembled and knelt, when, taking 
 for his text the words, ' Be wise, therefore, O ye kings ! be in- 
 structed, ye judges of the earth ! ' he unveiled to his auditors the 
 awful reality of God the Lord of all empires, the chastiser of 
 princes, reigning above the heavens, making and unmaking king- 
 doms, principalities and powers ; or, again, with the fire of a lyric 
 poet and the zeal of a prophet, called on nations, princes, nobles 
 and warriors, to come to the foot of the catafalque which strove 
 to raise to heaven a magnificent testimony of the nothingness of 
 man ? At the beginning of his discourses the action of ' the 
 eagle of Meaux/ we are told, was dignified and reserved ; he con- 
 fined himself to the notes before him. Gradually ' he warmed 
 with his theme, the contagion of his enthusiasm seized his hear- 
 ers; he watched their rising emotion; the rooted glances of a 
 thousand eyes filled him with a sort of divine frenzy ; his notes 
 became a burden and a hindrance; with impetuous ardor he 
 abandoned himself to the inspiration of the moment; with the 
 eyes of the soul he watched the swelling hearts of hearers ; their 
 concentrated emotions became his own ; he felt within himself the 
 collected might of the orators and martyrs whose collected essence, 
 by long and repeated communion he had absorbed into himself; 
 from flight to flight he ascended, until, with unflagging energy, 
 he towered straight upwards, and dragged the wrapt contem- 
 plation of his audience along with him in its ethereal flight.' At 
 such times, says the Abbe Le Dieu, it seemed as though the 
 heavens were open and celestial joys were about to descend upon 
 these trembling souls, like tongues of fire on the day of Pente- 
 cost. At others times, heads bowed down with humiliation, or 
 pale upturned faces with streaming eyes, lips parted with broken 
 ejaculations of despair, silently testified that the spirit of re- 
 pentance had breathed on many a hardened heart." 
 
316 THE ORATION 
 
 Criticism by F. O'Connor. " The oratory of Bossuet knew 
 three distinct phases, the first of which was marked by extreme 
 detail in the treatment of the subject, the second by pathos in the 
 narration and power of diction ; the third by increased symmetry 
 of construction, and propriety of arrangement. In point of merit 
 the last is the least, and the first, the most praiseworthy. The 
 speaker draws largely upon Holy Writ and sacred writings for 
 means of rousing the emotions and depends principally upon the 
 early classic writers for smoothness of style and grace of finish. 
 The orator himself is no less deserving of admiration than his 
 oratory is of praise. Living though he did, at a time when the 
 king's will was supreme, he still recognized his conscience as 
 his only guide, never stooped to flattery and never catered to the 
 popular passions. He aimed especially at edification, consist- 
 ency and truth, and seldom failed to reach his mark." 
 
 Edmund Burke. He was born at Dublin, January 12, 
 1729, and died at Beaconsfield, England, in July, 1797. 
 Burke was a celebrated writer as well as orator. His cele- 
 brated speeches were made at the trial of Warren Hastings, and 
 in advocacy of the freedom of the press, fair treatment of 
 America, Catholic emancipation and economical reform. His 
 name is identified with whatever is great, elevated, and just, 
 in statesmanship and legislation. He is also famous for his 
 speeches and pamphlets on the French Revolution. 
 
 Criticism by John Morley. " With all his hatred for the 
 bookman in politics, Burke owed much of his own distinction to 
 that generous richness and breadth of judgment which had been 
 ripened in him by literature and his practice in it. Like some 
 other men in our history, he showed that books are a better 
 preparation for statesmanship than early training in the sub- 
 ordinate posts and among the permanent officials of a public de- 
 partment. There is no copiousness of literary reference in his 
 work, such as over-abound in our civil and ecclesiastical pub- 
 licists of the 1 7th century. Nor can we truly say that there is 
 much, though there is certainly some, of that tact which litera- 
 ture is alleged to confer on those who approach it in a just spirit 
 
BURKE 
 
 and with the true gift. The influence of literature on Burke lay 
 partly in the direction of emancipation from the mechanical 
 formulae of practical politics; partly in the association which 
 it engendered, in a powerful understanding like his, between 
 politics and the moral forces of the world, and between political 
 maxims and the old and great sentences of morals ; partly in 
 drawing him, even when resting his case on prudence and ex- 
 pediency, to appeal to the widest and highest sympathies ; partly, 
 and more than all, in opening his thoughts to the many conditions, 
 possibilities, and ' varieties of untried being/ in human character 
 and situation, and so giving an incomparable flexibility to his 
 methods of political approach. This flexibility is not to be found 
 in his manner of composition. That derives its immense power 
 from other sources ; from passion, intensity, imagination, size, 
 truth, cogency of logical reason. Those who insist on charm, on 
 winningness in style, on subtle harmonies and fine exquisiteness 
 of suggestion, are disappointed in Burke ; they even find him stiff 
 and over-colored. And there are blemishes of this kind. His 
 banter is nearly always ungainly, his wit blunt, as Johnson said, 
 and often unseasonable. As is usual with a man who has not true 
 humor, Burke is also without true pathos. The thought of 
 wrong or misery moved him less to pity for the victim than 
 to anger against the cause. Again, there are some gratuitous and 
 unredeemed vulgarities ; some images that make us shudder. But 
 only a literary fop can be detained by speeches like these. The 
 varieties of Burke's literary or rhetorical method are very strik- 
 ing. It is almost incredible that the superb imaginative amplifi' 
 cation of the description of Hyder Ali's descent upon the Car- 
 natic should be from the same pen as the grave, simple, unadorned 
 Address to the King (1777), where each sentence falls on the 
 ear with the accent of some golden-tongued oracle of the wise 
 gods. His stride is the stride of a giant, from the sentimental 
 beauty of the pictures of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, or the 
 red horror of the tale of Debi Sing in Rungpore, to the learning, 
 positiveness and cool judicial mastery of the Report on the Lords' 
 Journals (1794), which Philip Francis, no mean judge, declared 
 on the whole to be the ' most eminent and extraordinary ' of all 
 his productions. But even in the coolest and dryest of his pieces, 
 there is the mark of greatness, of grasp, of comprehension. In 
 all its varieties, Burke's style is noble, earnest, deep-flowing, be- 
 
318 THE ORATION 
 
 cause his sentiment was lofty and fervid, and went with sincerity 
 and ardent disciplined travail of judgment. He had the style 
 of his subjects; the amplitude, the weightiness, the laborious- 
 ness, the sense, the high flight, the grandeur, proper to a man 
 dealing with imperial themes, with the fortunes of great societies, 
 with the sacredness of law, the freedom of nations, the justice 
 of rulers. Burke will always be read with delight and edifica- 
 tion, because in the midst of discussions on the local and the acci- 
 dental, he scatters apophthegms that take us into the regions of 
 lasting^ wisdom. In the midst of the torrent of his most strenu- 
 ous and passionate deliverances, he suddenly rises aloof from 
 his immediate subject, and in all tranquillity reminds us of some 
 permanent relation of things, some enduring truth of human life 
 or human society. We do not hear the organ tones of Milton, 
 for faith and freedom had other notes in the eighteenth century. 
 There is none of the complacent and wise-borrowed sagacity of 
 Bacon, for Burke's were days of personal strife and fire and civil 
 division. We are not exhilarated by the cheerfulness, the polish, 
 the fine manners of Bolingbroke, for Burke had an anxious con- 
 science and was earnest and intent that the good should triumph. 
 And yet Burke is among the greatest of those who have wrought 
 marvels in the prose of our English tongue." 
 
 Criticism by Albert Smyth. " Edmund Burke is sometimes 
 ranked first among the writers of English prose of the eighteenth 
 century. There is something imperial in his style. His sonorous 
 sentences roll and toss in profuse and majestic eloquence. His 
 thought streams from him, an impetuous and abundant torrent. 
 His resplendent rhetoric surges forward with the pomp and state 
 and endless barbaric variety of a Roman triumph. His eager- 
 ness and exuberance betrayed him at times into grave faults of 
 manner. His early and successful imitation of Bolingbroke 
 by no means a flawless model set a permanent mark upon 
 him. The high virtues of simplicity and sobriety are not his. In 
 imagination and expression he is magnificent, in the proudest 
 sense of that much misapplied term ; but his literary taste is not 
 absolutely pure, nor his sense of proportion true, and his style is 
 often overheated. Whatever the place to which he may be en- 
 titled among the masters of English prose, it is not likely that 
 any writer will take precedence of him for subtle political wis- 
 
WEBSTER 
 
 319 
 
 dom and serious and fruitful reflection upon the principles of 
 government and legislation. Mr. John Morley has said of Burke's 
 three pieces on the American War : ' They are an example with- 
 out fault of all the qualities which the critic, whether a theorist or 
 an actor, of great political situations should strive by night and 
 by day to possess. If their subject were as remote as the quarrel 
 between the Corinthians and Corcyra, or the war between Rome 
 and the allies, instead of a conflict to which the world owes 
 the opportunity of the most important of political experiments, we 
 should still have everything to learn from the author's treatment, 
 the vigorous grasp of masses of compressed detail, the wide 
 illumination from great principles of human experience, the strong 
 and masculine feeling for the two great political ends of Justice 
 and Freedom, the large and generous interpretation of expediency, 
 the morality, the vision, the noble temper.' However transient, 
 commonplace, or personal the theme, Burke never left it with- 
 out investing it with the splendor of history or introducing into 
 it considerations drawn from the widest range of political institu- 
 tions. Now that the violence of party strife has abated, and the 
 figures and events of one hundred years ago may be impartially 
 studied, it is unlikely that there should be any dissent from Mr. 
 Lecky's opinion: ' No other politician or writer has thrown the. 
 light of so penetrating a genius on the nature and working of 
 the British Constitution, has impressed his principles so deeply on 
 both of the great parties in the State, and has left behind him a 
 richer treasure of political wisdom applicable to all countries and 
 to all times. . . . There is perhaps no English prose writer 
 since Bacon whose works are so thickly starred with thought. 
 The time may come when they will be no longer read. The time 
 will never come in which men would not grow the wiser by read- 
 ing them.' " 
 
 Daniel Webster. He was born at Salisbury, New Hamp- 
 shire, in 1782, and died at Marshfield, Massachusetts, in 1852. 
 Like Edmund Burke, he was famous as a statesman, orator 
 and lawyer. His chief public speeches, (aside from those 
 delivered in Congress and at the bar) are orations delivered 
 on the anniversary at Plymouth, on the laying of the corner 
 stone of Bunker Hill Monument, on the deaths of Jefferson 
 
THE ORATION 
 
 and Adams. By many critics he is regarded as the superior 
 of Burke, and the greatest of English orators. 
 
 Criticism by Rufus Choate. " Webster possessed in a won- 
 derful degree an indefinable personal magnetism which impressed 
 every one with a sense of greatness. His face, his eyes, his 
 voice, were such that whoever looked upon him and heard him 
 speak, felt intuitively that he was a man of most extraordinary 
 powers. Sydney Smith, when he saw him, exclaimed, ' Good 
 heavens he is a small cathedral by himself ' ; and Carlyle, writ- 
 ing of him, said, ' He is a magnificent specimen. As a logic 
 fencer or parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back 
 him at first sight against all the extant world. The tanned com- 
 plexion; the amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under 
 the precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only 
 to be blown ; the mastiff mouth accurately closed, I have not 
 traced so much of silent Berserker rage that I remember of in 
 any man/ His multiform eloquence became at once so much ac- 
 cession to permanent literature, in the strictest sense, solid, attrac- 
 tive, and rich. Recall what pervaded all these forms of display, 
 and every effort in every form : that union of naked intellect, in 
 its largest measure, which penetrates to the exact truth of the 
 matter in hand by intuition or by inference, and discerns every- 
 thing which may make it intelligible, probable and credible to 
 another, with an emotional and moral nature profound, passionate, 
 and ready to kindle, and with imagination enough to supply a 
 hundredfold more of illustration and aggrandizement than his 
 taste suffered him to accept ; that union of greatness of soul with 
 depth of heart which made his speaking almost more an exhi- 
 bition of character than of mere genius ; the style not merely 
 pure, clear Saxon, but so constructed, so luminous as far as be- 
 comes prose, so forcible, so abounding in unlabored felicities, the 
 words so choice, the epithet so pictured, the matter absolute 
 truth, or the most exact and spacious resemblance the human wit 
 can devise ; the treatment of the subject, if vou have regard to 
 the kind of truth he had to handle, political, ethical, legal, as 
 deep as Paley's, or Locke's, or Butler's, yet that depth and that 
 completeness of sense made transparent as crystal waters, raised 
 on winged language, vivified, fused, and poured along in a tide 
 of emotion fervid, and incapable to be withstood. The quality 
 
WEBSTER 
 
 of Webster's imagination, which was of an historical, rather 
 than poetical cast, had much to do with the power and peculiar 
 charm of his oratory. But it was his simplicity of diction, and 
 his perfect mastery of pure, idomatic English, which gave to his 
 discourses their distinctive classic elegance, and made them 
 worthy of a permanent place in our literature. As specimens, 
 therefore, of a correct, clear, and vigorous style of composition, 
 full of warmth and vitality, these orations are worthy of the 
 most careful attention of every one who would perfect himself 
 in the use of the English tongue; as notable examples of per- 
 suasive discourse, logical, forcible and convincing, they especially 
 commend themselves to those who aspire to distinction as public 
 speakers ; as containing lessons of the purest and most disinter- 
 ested patriotism, they appeal to Americans everywhere, and 
 should be read and studied by every American youth." 
 
 Criticism by William Mathews. " Webster was not a rhetori- 
 cian like Everett and Wirt. Though nice in his choice of words, 
 he was not, like Pinkney and Choate, constantly racking dic- 
 tionaries to obtain an affluence of synonyms. Though possess- 
 ing an ample command of expression, he rarely wastes a word. 
 He once criticised Watts for saying in a hymn that an angel 
 moved ' with most amazing speed/ The line, he said, conveyed 
 no sense. ' It would amaze us/ he added, ' to see an oyster move 
 a mile a day ; it would not amaze us to see a greyhound run a mile 
 a minute : ' No one of our great orators had a greater horror 
 of epithets and adjectives, or more heartily despised all grand- 
 iloquence or sesquipedalia verba. For all cant and rhetorical 
 trickery, for all * bunkum ' talk and windy declamation about 
 ' the shades of Hampden and Sidney ' and ' the eternal rights of 
 man/ for cheap enthusiasm and spread-eagles generally, he 
 had a supreme scorn. Few orators of equal imagination have so 
 few figures of speech. There are more metaphors in ten pages 
 of Burke than in all of Webster's works. In discussing a subject 
 he loses no time in circumlocutions or digressions. He uses no 
 scattering fowling-piece that sends its shot around the object to 
 be hit, but plants his rifle-ball in the very center of the target. 
 Commonly he prepared himself with conscientious care for his 
 speeches, not by writing them out, but by thinking over and 
 over what he had to say, all the while mentally facing his audi- 
 
THE ORATION 
 
 ence. In many passages, no doubt, the very language was pre- 
 chosen, selected with the nicest discrimination, especially on 
 critical occasions, and in the closing paragraphs or the perora- 
 tion. Some of Webster's indiscriminate eulogists are fond of 
 comparing him with Burke. The difference was, that one had 
 the very highest order of talent, the other had genius. Burke 
 was, like the poet, ' of imagination all compact,' and to this he 
 added profound culture, earnestness and moral sensibility ; Web- 
 ster's forte was in dialectics, in calm, masterly exposition, in mas- 
 sive strength of style, in all the qualities that give men leader- 
 ship in debate. As another has said, ' Where Webster reasoned, 
 Burke philosophized; where Webster was serene, equable, pon- 
 derous, dealing his blows like an ancient catapult, Burke was 
 clamorous, fiery, multitudinous, rushing forward like his own 
 ' whirlwind of cavalry.' Webster was the Roman temple, stately, 
 solid, massive; Burke, the Gothic cathedral, fantastic, aspiring, 
 and many-colored. The sentences of Webster roll along like the 
 blasts of the trumpet on the night air ; those of Burke are like the 
 echoes of an organ in some ancient minster. Webster advances, 
 in his heavy logical march, and his directness of purpose, like 
 a Caesarean legion, close, firm, serried, ^square ; Burke, like an 
 oriental procession, with elephants and trophies, and the pomp 
 of banners. Webster never could have delivered any one of the 
 speeches of Burke on the trial of Hastings, blazing as they do 
 with the splendors of a gorgeous rhetoric; nor could Burke, on 
 the other hand, have made that overwhelming extempore reply to 
 Hayne, so full and running over with mingled logic, wit, irony, 
 satire, persuasion, and pathos." 
 
 Various Estimates of the Oration, Oratory, and the Ora- 
 tor. In every age the oration has received extraordinary 
 praise and attention. Perhaps its most ardent admirers may 
 be found in the history of the English speaking race who from 
 time immemorial have defended and preserved the largest free- 
 dom of speech. So that in closing our study of this prose- 
 form it may be well to include some estimates of oratory fur- 
 nished by modern men of genius. 
 
VARIOUS ESTIMATES 
 
 Estimate by Henry Ward Beecher. " I hold that oratory has 
 this test and mark of divine providence, in that God, when He 
 makes things perfect, signifies that He is done by throwing over 
 them the robe of beauty ; for beauty is the divine thought of excel- 
 lence. All things growing in their earlier stages, are crude. All 
 of them are in vigorous strength, it may be; but not until the 
 blossom comes, and the fruit hangs pendant, has the vine evinced 
 for what it was made. God is a God of beauty ; and beaut v is 
 everywhere the final process. When things have come to that, 
 they have touched their limit. Now, a living force that brings to 
 itself all the resources of imagination, all the inspirations ot feel- 
 ing, all that is influential in body, in voice, in eye, in gesture, in 
 posture, in the whole animated man, is in strict analogy with the 
 divine thought and the divine arrangement ; and there is no mis- 
 construction more utterly untrue and fatal than this : that oratory 
 is an artificial thing, which deals with baubles and trifles, for the 
 sake of making bubbles of pleasure for transient effect on mer- 
 curial audiences. So far from that, it is the consecration of the 
 whole man to the noblest purposes to which one can address him- 
 self the education and inspiration of his fellow-men by all 
 that there is in thought, by all that there is in feeling, by all that 
 there is in all of them, sent home through the channels of taste 
 and of beauty. And so regarded, oratory should take its place 
 among the highest departments of education. It is said that 
 books, and especially newspapers, are to take the place of the 
 living voice. Never ! never ! The miracle of modern times, in 
 one respect, is the press ; to it is given a wide field and a wonr 
 derful work; and when it shall be clothed with all the moral 
 inspirations, with all the ineffable graces, that come from sim* 
 plicity and honesty and conviction, it will have a work second 
 almost to none other in the land. Like the light, it carries knowl- 
 edge every day round the globe. What is done at St. Paul's in 
 the morning is known, or ever half the day has run round, in 
 Wall Street, New York. What is done in New York at the ris- 
 ing of the sun, is, before the noontide hour known in California. 
 By the power of the wire, and of the swift-following engine, the 
 papers spread at large vast quantities of information before myriad 
 readers throughout the country : but the office of the papers is 
 simply to convey information. Thev cannot plant it. Thev can- 
 not open the soil and put it into the furrow. They can- 
 
THE ORATION 
 
 not enforce it. It is given only to the living man, standing be- 
 fore men with the seed of knowledge in his hand, to open the 
 furrows in the living souls of men, and sow the seed, and cover 
 the furrows again. Not until human nature is other than it is, 
 will the function of the living voice the greatest force on earth 
 among men cease. Not until then will the orator be useless, 
 who brings to his aid all that is fervid in feeling ; who incarnates 
 in himself the truth ; who is for the hour the living reason, as 
 well as the reasoner ; who is for the moment the moral sense ; 
 who carries in himself the importunity and the urgency of zeal ; 
 who brings his influence to bear upon men in various ways ; who 
 adapts himself continually to the changing conditions of the men 
 that are before him ; who plies them by softness and by hard- 
 ness, by light and by darkness, by hope and by fear ; who stimu- 
 lates them or represses them at his will. Nor is there, let me 
 say, on God's footstool, anything so crowned and so regal as the 
 sensation of one who faces an audience in a worthy cause, and 
 with amplitude of means, and defies them, fights them, controls 
 them, conquers them. Great is the advance of civilization ; mighty 
 are the engines of force, but man is greater than that which he 
 produces. Vast is that machine which stands in the dark uncon- 
 sciously lifting, lifting the only human slave the iron slave 
 the Corliss engine ; but he that made the engine is greater than 
 the engine itself. Wonderful is the skill by which the most ex- 
 quisite mechanism of modern life, the watch, is constructed ; but 
 greater is the man that made the watch than the watch that is 
 made. Great is the press, greAjj; are the hundred instrumentali- 
 ties and institutions and customs of society ; but above all is man. 
 The living force is greater than any of its creations greater 
 than society, greater than its laws. ' The Sabbath was made 
 for man, and not man for the Sabbath/ saith the Lord. Man is 
 greater than his own institutions. And this living force is worthy 
 of all culture of all culture in the power of beauty ; of all cul- 
 ture in the direction of persuasion; of all culture in the art of 
 reasoning. To make men patriots, to make men Christians, to 
 make men the sons of God, let all the doors of heaven be opened, 
 and let God drop down charmed gifts winged imagination, all- 
 perceiving reason, and all-judging reason. Whatever there is 
 that can make men wiser and better let it descend upon the 
 head of him who has consecrated himself to the work of man- 
 
VARIOUS ESTIMATES 
 
 -V5 
 
 kind, and who has made himself an orator for man's sake and for 
 God's sake."* 
 
 Estimate by John Lancaster Spalding. " Oratory is the 
 greatest of the arts greater than music, than poetry, than 
 painting, than sculpture. The orator must gather into unity and 
 harmony all that other artists achieve separately must be at 
 once musician, painter, poet, sculptor, architect ; must be able to 
 take the human mind and heart and imagination for his instru- 
 ment and play upon it all the infinite divine cadences of rhythm 
 and reason. He must stand forth before men as a man clothed 
 with the resonance of the thunder-crash and with the searching 
 power of the forked lightning ; must sing to his audience and com- 
 mand them and subdue them to his every mood and thought ; 
 must have power to transport them into the midst of sublime 
 scenes, of tumultuous oceans, of white and eternally serene 
 mountain peaks; he must know all the melodies that soothe like 
 the lullabies of mothers; must be able to plead as only love can 
 plead to rouse like a clarion's 'note; must be able to find his 
 way through the labyrinthian windings of the heart of man, with 
 all its passions and prejudices, and issue forth heralded as a 
 conqueror. His words must be as full of music as a poet's, as 
 clear-cut as a statue, as symmetrical as the noblest monument, as 
 rightly ordered as an army in battle array ; his thought must un- 
 fold itself like the budding leaves and the blossoming flowers; 
 and from the center and heart of it all he must rise and reveal 
 himself, not as an actor, but as a man and messenger sent by 
 God to proclaim truth and vindicate the right. He must have 
 knowledge of history, of literature, of religion, of science, of the 
 world. He must be all alive with the subject he discusses. If 
 his thoughts be not new, they must glow with a light not seen be- 
 fore; and they must be pure and high that they may appeal to 
 what is best in man. He must utter, not what the arithmetical 
 understanding would suggest, but what the soul would speak to 
 souls. His language must be beautiful ; his words simple, chaste 
 and crystalline; his phrases must sparkle and glow like jewels 
 on the brow of beauty. But he must ever bear in mind that mere 
 vesture cannot hide the unreality and vacancy of what is false and 
 
 *" Oratory" By permission of the Penn Publishing Co. 
 
326 THE ORATION 
 
 vulgar. Right words are born of true thoughts ; and true 
 thoughts of noble life. Those alone who take infinite pains can 
 hope to become orators. There is no seeming trifle which may 
 be neglected/ for perfection is the result of attention to little 
 things. He who would excel must inure himself to the labor of 
 writing and rewriting what he would utter. The pen is to the 
 mind what the plough is to the field. Ploughs do not sow the 
 seed, but without the culture they give it will not thrive and yield 
 rich harvest, however fertile the soil. When meditation and com- 
 position shall have made him ^familiar with every phase of his 
 subject, lucid order, accurate expression, and copious language 
 will come as the fountains burst and leap in spring. Having 
 aroused and illumined his own spiritual being, he will have a 
 message and the skill rightly to deliver it to his audience ; and 
 not to them only, but to the wider world to which the wings of 
 the press shall bear his words. The public-speaking which has 
 politics and business for its subject is useful and important, but 
 Fame blows not her trumpet above the heads of those who do 
 this work. They are talkers, riot orators ; fortunate if they talk 
 logically, forcibly, to the point, while they keep themselves free 
 from slang and other offense against the laws of speech. But 
 he who would utter memorable things in perfect form must dwell 
 in higher regions where gleams the light of ideal aims and ends ; 
 must think no labor too great, no self-denial too hard, if it help 
 him to become a master. Like the mighty Grecian, he must love 
 solitude, be willing, if need be, to dwell in caves by the resound- 
 ing shores of the loud ocean; must take for his companions the 
 immortal minds who have left record of themselves in books. He 
 must abstain, train himself like an athlete, and accustom himself 
 to all exercises that invigorate and sharpen the intellect or harden 
 and supple the body. He must stand aloof from the crowds and 
 despise the applause of the vulgar and the notoriety which is with- 
 in the reach of criminals and prize-fighters. He must be wholly 
 serious and sincere and keep his conscience pure, though he have 
 not bread to eat. Great manhood alone can make great oratory 
 possible. Above all, the orator must be a lover of truth and 
 justice. His sympathies must go forth to the toilers who do the 
 world's work and are God's children. Wherever there is oppres- 
 sion and wrong, he must be ready in the name of the Lord to de- 
 fend and make good." 
 
CHAPTER XXXIX 
 FICTION 
 
 Definition. The term, fiction, is of Latin origin and has 
 various meanings when employed in English. The widest 
 meaning attached to the term makes it a synonym for fash- 
 ioning, moulding, shaping, devising, or making. For ex- 
 ample, Edmund Burke writes : " We never dreamt that par- 
 liaments had any right to force a currency of their own fiction 
 in the place of that which is real." A second meaning at- 
 tached to the word is that of fallacy or false deduction. Hence 
 the phrase : " A fiction of the brain." Bacon writes : 
 " They see thoroughly into the fallacies and fictions of this 
 kind of reasoning." A third meaning connects fiction with 
 literature; in a literary sense, fiction signifies that which is 
 feigned, invented or imagined. Fiction is a term applied to 
 any product of the imagination and has little to do with facts 
 and realities. Like poetry, it gives to the imagination the 
 largest possible range. Hence it may be applied to any liter- 
 ary product of the imagination, whether in prose or verse or 
 in a narrative or dramatic form. For example, the parables 
 of the Bible, or the Cyropsedia of Xenophon or the Hind and 
 Panther of Dryden may be considered as fiction. In fact, all 
 departments of literature contain certain elements of fiction. 
 Examples abound everywhere. 
 
 Restricted Meaning. The term, fiction, is now employed 
 in a restricted sense. It marks a sharply defined prose-form 
 in literature, and it implies story-telling or narrative. In con- 
 
 327 
 
328 FICTION 
 
 nection with this prose-form three words are employed almost 
 as synonyms the novel, romance, 'fiction. If we take 
 fiction in its strict modern meaning as a prose-form of litera- 
 ture, then romance and the novel may be accepted as names 
 for separate divisions of this prose literature; romance em- 
 bracing the earlier work, and the novel, the later work done 
 in the field of fiction. 
 
 Origin of the Name Romance. The term, romance, was 
 
 first applied to the fiction of the Middle Ages; originally, it 
 embraced not only stories of adventure and legend in prose 
 but also ballad forms and long narrative poems. The trou- 
 badours, who were the novelists and story-tellers of their time, 
 employed the Romance language; whence we have the term 
 romance which has become a synonym for fiction. 
 
 Subject-Matter. The subject-matter of the romance em- 
 braces all kinds of heroic, marvellous and supernatural inci- 
 dents derived either from history or from legend. For exam- 
 ple, the Romance of Charlemagne; the Arthurian Romance. 
 Hallam writes : " The fiction of the Middle Ages rests upon 
 three columns chivalry, gallantry, religion." This fiction 
 was designated as romance and written by natives of the north 
 of France. Knight-errantry, the crusades, feudalism, a general 
 spirit of adventure, furnished plenty of incident. 
 
 Scope. But romance is not a peculiar creation of the Mid- 
 dle Ages. It is a characteristic of the youthful period in the 
 growth of every nation. The romantic period is sharply de- 
 fined in every national literature. It embraces all that is 
 legendary, mythical and semi-historical in every age of the 
 world. 
 
 Three Kinds of Treatment. The romance deals with its 
 subject-matter in three principal ways, thus producing three 
 
ROMANCE 
 
 varieties more or less distinct. In the first place, it may be 
 frankly romantic in the exercise of the imagination, present- 
 ing events and characters that are beyond the range of any 
 rational belief. The author has either a childish belief in 
 what he relates or he tells the fanciful tale for the entertain- 
 ment of his readers. For example, Oriental fiction belongs 
 to this class: The Arabian nights, Arcadia, New Atlantis. 
 In the second place, the author may relate impossible events, 
 but in such a way as to give them a deceptive air of truth. 
 For example, the adventures of Robinson Crusoe or the story 
 of the Nautilus ; Utopia. In the third place, the author may 
 use these imaginary events and characters in a symbolic way ; 
 and then romance takes on the character of allegory. For 
 example, Pilgrim's Progress,, the Holy Grail, Gulliver's 
 Travels. 
 
 The Structure of the Romance. The romance resembles 
 the epic in plan and purpose. It is divided into books and 
 chapters; and like the epic introduces characters for the sake 
 of the narrative or story. Like the epic, it employs the 
 grand style, but it is hampered by the prose medium of ex- 
 pression. It resembles the epic in emphasizing the liberties 
 rather than the limitations of the imagination. In spite of 
 its prose-medium, it ranks with the epic as our most highly 
 imaginative literature. 
 
 Plot in Romance. The romance contains very little plot. 
 The narrative is as simple and runs on with as little subtilty 
 and entanglement as epic narrative. The grouping of events ; 
 the deeds and experiences of the various personages; their 
 relations, thoughts, dispositions, all belong to a simple crude 
 state of society. Hence, the plot is easily understood and un- 
 raveled. One reason why the plot is so simple : the romance 
 follows the simple chronological order; and the skill of the 
 
330 FICTION 
 
 writer is not expended in weaving subtilties, but in beautiful 
 descriptions. The arts by which the narrative is made vivid 
 and effective, are fully displayed. The plot may involve a 
 single story, the adventures of a single hero like Robinson 
 Crusoe; or it may deal with several distinct series of adven- 
 tures or experiences. For example, King Arthur and the 
 Round Table. There is always a common bond like the 
 Round Table for these distinct narratives. 
 
 Characters. The characters of the romance are seldom 
 lifelike or human; they are giants, dwarfs, fairies, monsters, 
 angels, demons; they are often animals or personified natural 
 objects; but very rarely are they real men and women. The 
 highly imaginative character af romance naturally implies its 
 remoteness from the actual world ; so that real men and 
 women would be singularly out of place in it. Hence, the 
 romance does not concern itself with the great problems of 
 human life. It deals with human life in a superficial way; 
 and if we except the great allegorical romances, God and the 
 spiritual world receive superficial treatment in the romance. 
 The modern romance comes nearer to earth and to reality 
 than the romances of history, but the imagination still runs 
 riot 
 
 Sources of the English Romance. The English romance 
 drew its material from five chief sources : the native or Celtic 
 source; the French source dating from the Norman conquest; 
 the classic source reviving the story of Troy and the legends 
 concerning Solomon, Alexander the Great and others; the 
 Latin source divided equally between Spain and Italy. There 
 are then in English literature five distinct cycles of romance. 
 
 Arthurian Cycle. The first is called the Arthurian Cycle. 
 It dates from the twelfth century when Geoffrey of Mon- 
 
ROMANCE 331 
 
 mouth wrote a fanciful history of the old British kings. For 
 300 years myth and legend grew up around Arthur and the 
 Knights of the Round Table. Sir Thomas Malory collected 
 the various romances and published them in 1485 under one 
 title, " The Death of Arthur." From this work of Malory 
 comes the Arthurian Cycle ; episodes from this cycle have been 
 done into modern English by various writers; for example, 
 the lyric treatment of "Tristram and Iseult " by Matthew 
 Arnold. The fullest treatment of the Arthurian Cycle in 
 modern English is found in epic form : the " Idylls of the 
 King " . by Tennyson. Tennyson drew all his material for 
 this epic from Malory's collection. This cycle of Arthur 
 contains all the elements of genuine romance, improbable ad- 
 ventures, marvellous struggles with giants and dragons all 
 that is widely imaginative. It also contains the chivalry and 
 gallantry and the purity of life which mark the Middle Ages. 
 Although Arthur was a British chieftain of 'the sixth century, 
 the romanticists clothe him with all the glory of a contem- 
 porary knight. 
 
 Treatment of Passion. The Arthurian Cycle is remarka- 
 ble for its treatment of passion religious passion is happily 
 idealized in Sir Galahad's Quest of the Holy Grail; earthly 
 passion in its highest and purest form in Arthur; guilty pas- 
 sion in Lancelot and Guinevere. In his epic narrative Ten- 
 nyson gives prominence to the purifying and ennobling in- 
 fluence of religion. The second cycle of English romance 
 comes from France and dates from the Norman conquest. 
 During the Middle Ages, England had a French court, French 
 schools, and for the most part French literature. French 
 romance circulated in England. The marvelous stories con- 
 cerning Charlemagne were the basis of a cycle similar to that 
 of King Arthur. It assumed the form of extravagant history, 
 and biography. Charlemagne is represented as having twelve 
 
332 FICTION 
 
 peers similar in character to the Knights of the Round Table. 
 These romances first appeared in England in the thirteenth 
 century. The most popular romance of the Charlemagne 
 cycle was the song of Roland, one of the twelve peers. 
 Several translations of it were made into English. But the 
 cycle of Charlemagne had no permanent place or influence in 
 English literature. An English version, called " Charles the 
 Great," was published by Caxton in 1490. Besides the great 
 cycle of Charlemagne, many separate romances from French 
 sources came into England. For example, the Romance of 
 the Rose, Flower and Leaf re- written by Chaucer. Another 
 example: Valentine and Orson, translated into English and 
 published by Copeland in 1560. 
 
 The Spanish Cycle. Spanish romance centers in two 
 heroes : Amadis De Gaul and the Cid. The former was a son 
 of the French King; three books of romance concerning him 
 appeared in the first years of the fourteenth century. They 
 were in 1540 translated into French and brought to England. 
 Many English translations of this cycle are extant. The best 
 modern translation was made by Robert Southey, in four 
 volumes, published in 1803. Spanish romance reached the 
 height of its popularity during the age of Queen Elizabeth 
 who was called the fair Oriana after one of the heroines in 
 Amadis De Gaul. Besides Amadis De Gaul, there were 
 romances concerning a native Spanish hero of the Middle 
 Ages ; they were called the " Chronicle of the Cid/' as they 
 first appeared in the form of history. French, English and 
 Italian translations were made, that of Robert Southey being 
 the best in English. Spanish fiction in the Middle Ages fur- 
 nished a large amount of material for English authors. This 
 influence continued until the religious and commercial rival- 
 ries of both countries developed an intense national hatred. 
 The influence of Spanish romance upon English letters may 
 
ROMANCE 333 
 
 be said to close with Cervantes. Spanish romance familiar- 
 ized English readers with a larger variety of abnormal crea- 
 tures than they found in native or French sources giants, 
 dwarfs, demons, and the wonders of fairyland. 
 
 The Outlaw. The Spanish romance is also responsible 
 for the literary treatment of the outlaw. English romanti- 
 cists grew fond of this theme and a large portion of English 
 romance is devoted to such heroes as Hereward The Saxon, 
 Payn Peverel, and the Robin Hood cycle. Outlaw stories in 
 Spain and England were first treated in ballad form, and were 
 a part of the folk lore of both countries before their introduc- 
 tion into prose romance as episodes and cycles. The long 
 struggle between the Moors and the Spaniards, and a similar 
 struggle between the Saxons and the Normans supplied 
 plenty of material for this kind of romance. 
 
 Italian Romance. Italy shared the romantic life of the 
 Middle Ages, and contributed a large number of stories to 
 romantic literature. The stories of Boccaccio are an example. 
 His " Amento " was improved by Sannazarro in the fifteenth 
 century, and the title was changed to Arcadia. Sir Philip Sid- 
 ney imitated the Italian model ; he changed the setting of the 
 story but retained the name. Thomas Greene, a contemporary 
 of Shakespeare, wrote on the same subject ; and Shirley finished 
 the English series in 1640. The pastoral romance, although 
 rather tame in comparison with stories of war and adventure, 
 became very popular in the age of Elizabeth. Besides the 
 pastoral romance, Boccaccio wrote in the genuine style of the 
 romanticist. His Palamon and Arcite, a story of two The- 
 ban youths, gives the largest scope to the imagination. It 
 was translated and considerably modified by John Dryden. 
 Boccaccio wrote three romantic pieces which were closely 
 imitated by Chaucer. The first was called Teseide a story 
 
334 
 
 reproduced by Chaucer under the title of the " Knight's 
 Tale;" a second called " Filostrato," the basis of Chaucer's 
 " Troilus and Cressida." The Italian method of mixing 
 prose and verse in the romance was not adopted by Chaucer, 
 although later English writers employed it. For example, the 
 romance of Lalla Rookh. 
 
 The Decameron. The third and most important work of 
 Boccaccio was the Decameron a collection of one hundred 
 stories with a common bond or thread of interest running 
 through them. These stories mark a transition from the old 
 romance ; some of them are intensely realistic and even grossly 
 licentious. They were written after the great plague of Flor- 
 ence in 1348. They represent a group of refugees from that 
 city amusing themselves like Chaucer's Pilgrims by telling 
 stories. On the influence of the Decameron, Dunlop the his- 
 torian of English fiction, writes as follows : " There are few 
 works which have had an equal influence on literature with 
 the Decameron of Boccaccio. In England its effects were 
 powerful. It inspired the Confessio Amantis of John Gower. 
 From it Chaucer adopted the notion of the frame in which 
 he has enclosed his Canterbury Tales. In some instances 
 he has merely versified the stories and episodes of the De- 
 cameron. As early as 1566 an English translation of the 
 Decameron was made by Painter under the title of the Palace 
 of Pleasure; and the effect was speedily visible on the litera- 
 ture of the country. Henry Morley compares the Decameron 
 with the Canterbury Tales, and finds the' latter in accord 
 with the high moral and religious ideals which characterize 
 the romance of the Middle Ages. He writes : " The pilgrims 
 to the Shrine of St. Thomas A'Becket are like the Knights of. 
 the Round Table, the very soul of honor and purity, while the 
 men and women of the Decameron reflect the debased state 
 of morals in the Italy of the fourteenth century." 
 
ROMANCE 335 
 
 As a Basis of English Romance. Italian romance asso- 
 ciates the names of Petrarch and Ariosto with that of Boc- 
 caccio. The romance of Petrarch, like that of the Middle 
 Ages, idealizes woman in the person of Laura. This work 
 cast in poetic form, involved the writing of several hundred 
 sonnets. The sonnets of Shakespeare are an English imita- 
 tion of Petrarch ; there is the same kind of connection or 
 thread of interest running through them, the same theme, 
 with a slightly different estimate of the felicities of married 
 life. Both writers agree upon the immortality which would 
 come from their literary effort to express a morbid and un- 
 natural passion. 
 
 Ariosto. Ariosto produced excellent types of medieval 
 chivalry. The story that influenced English writers, and be- 
 came exceedingly popular in England was his Orlando Furi- 
 oso; this story ranks ahead of the Decameron. It is placed 
 first in Italian romance. It involves all the old themes of 
 war, adventure, love, chivalry. Lord Byron, like Chaucer, 
 went to Italy for many of his subjects ; he admired the Orlando 
 Furioso, and wrote an imitation of it, called Don Juan. 
 Byron contrived to infuse his own scepticism, melancholy, and 
 hatred of humanity into the English imitation ; otherwise the 
 Italian romance is faith fuly reproduced. But Italy did more 
 than furnish models for English writers. Through Italy 
 came the revival of learning in Western Europe; and with it 
 came the classic cycles of romance. In Italy the Humanists 
 in the persons of Petrarch, Dante, Boccaccio, Leo X, re- 
 vived the study of the ancient classics. The heroes of Pagan 
 mythology and early Greek and Roman history became themes 
 for romantic treatment. Long romances were written in 
 Italy, England and France concerning such persons as Alex- 
 ander, Cyrus. Virgil, Caesar, Priam; these were called the 
 classic cycles of romance. 
 
336 FICTION 
 
 Classic Cycles. The classic cycles of romance come under 
 four heads. First, those that were written by Greek or Latin 
 authors and re-printed in Western Europe; for example, the 
 Atlantis by Plato; Babylonica by Xenophon; Appolonius o 
 Tyre by Dionysius; yEthiopica by Heliodorus. Secondly, 
 those cycles that paraphrased the ancient classics : for example, 
 the romance of Troy, of Annas, of Thebes. Thirdly, those 
 cycles based upon classic history not yet versified ; for ex- 
 ample, the Cycle of Alexander. Fourthly, those cycles that 
 merely reproduce the names of antiquity, the rest being the 
 imaginative work of the medieval writer; for example the 
 Romance of Thebes, and Carthage. 
 
 The Classic Cycle in England. The oldest writer of classic 
 romance in England was an Anglo-Norman trouvere named 
 Benoit. He belonged to the Court of Henry II. In the year 
 1184 he brought out a story called " The Romance of Troy." 
 It contained 30,000 lines, and covered the whole heroic period 
 of Greek history. In this lengthy work he describes the arts, 
 manners, life of the Middle Ages; although he does not state 
 why such matters should be introduced in a romance of 
 Greece. The romance of Benoit circulated in all the states of 
 Western Europe. Another romance, called the " Trojan 
 War," was published by Joseph of Exeter. It was written 
 soon after Benoit's work, and had little merit compared with 
 the former. The Troy-book of Lydgate, declared to be the 
 first book printed in English, was a translation of it, brought 
 out by Caxton, 1474. A popular romance of the classic cycle 
 was the story of Thebes. . Lydgate translated this story from 
 the French, and Chaucer used part of it in his Canterbury 
 Tales. It is noteworthy that the classic cycle in France and 
 England was originally written in verse; as soon as the first 
 prose composition appeared, in the second half of the fifteenth 
 century, the reading public at once lost interest in the classic 
 
ROMANCE 337 
 
 romance. The last classic romances published by Caxton 
 were those of the ^ineid and* of Paris. Both were translated 
 from the French. The most popular classic romance in Eng- 
 land during the Middle Ages was the story of Alexander. 
 It was published in seven languages. Caxton made an Eng- 
 lish translation at the close of the fifteenth century. Alexan- 
 der appealed to the imagination of the Middle Ages, for it was 
 a period of war with Asia. The crusaders, on their way to 
 the Holy City, sang about the Asiatic expedition of Alexan- 
 der. The ballad-writers and romanticists accumulated myth 
 and legend until a whole library of romance centered in this 
 hero. 
 
 Contributions from Northern Europe. English romance 
 was enriched with material from northern Europe, although 
 the great cycles came from the south and the west. Romance 
 in the north took the form of ballad or epic literature; the 
 romance was called an Edda or a Saga by the Finns, Danes, 
 and Scandinavian races. The best imitation of the northern 
 Edda, as regards literary form, is the Indian romance, Hia- 
 watha. Out of the northern material, two heroes were fur- 
 nished to English romantic writers. The first and most im- 
 portant was Siegfried, who appeared in England as King 
 Horn. Siegfried is the Arthur of Teutonic romance. He 
 is the central figure of the Heldenbuch wherein is found a col- 
 lection of German heroes. Siegfried is also the hero of the 
 Nibelungenlied. This long narrative poem- is written in the 
 style of all medieval romance; and the work contains all the 
 German legends concerning Siegfried. A comparison be- 
 tween the literary treatment of Siegfried and Arthur in Eng- 
 lish romance, reveals several points of similarity. War and 
 love are the connecting links in each story. In each, the treat- 
 ment of love, though often extravagant and fantastic, displays 
 a genuine elevation of sentiment, and these northern roman- 
 
338 FICTION 
 
 ces reveal nowhere that shameless freedom taken by Boccaccio 
 and other southern authors. In the treatment of war, there is 
 some difference; Arthur of English romance is a knight who 
 defies the power of men alone; whereas, Siegfried yields to no 
 power whatsoever, whether of heaven, or earth, or hell. He 
 has the old pagan temper of the hero who is invincible, mak- 
 ing even the fates tremble. Hence, the Christian coloring of 
 the German romance is not so marked as that of Arthur; the 
 German hero is often compared to a Titan of Pagan myth- 
 ology. In the English version of Siegfried, known as King 
 Horn, the hero becomes a viking of the north; he is an ad- 
 venturer on sea and land; he visits Iceland, where several 
 Sagas record his deeds of bravery; he also fights the infidel 
 in Holy Land. This German hero ranks with Alexander and 
 Charlemagne as a fruitful source of romance. 
 
 Havelock. The second hero from the north is Havelock, 
 the Dane. The story is called an Anglo-Danish romance, be- 
 cause part of the scene is laid in England, part in Denmark. 
 The basis of this romance is the frequent migration of Danes to 
 England during the Middle Ages. Havelock, a Danish 
 prince, weds an English princess and becomes king of both 
 countries. The story belongs to the first half of the twelfth 
 century. Havelock is a hero of much smaller proportions 
 than Siegfried, although his struggles for both kingdoms were 
 long and fierce. This romance first appeared in France; the 
 oldest English version of it is ascribed to Geoffrey Gaimar, an 
 Anglo-Norman trouvere. On account of its direct relation 
 with England the story of Havelock became popular at once. 
 Besides these romances of northern origin, a large amount of 
 ballad literature and folk-lore came from the north. These 
 ballads which may be styled miniature romances, dealt with 
 the Vikings adventurers from northern Europe, who went 
 on perilous expeditions to England, Ireland, Iceland, and even 
 
ROMANCE 339 
 
 Greenland. The largest number of these Sagas are found 
 in Iceland. 
 
 Reasons for Abundant Growth. The romance of the Mid- 
 dle Ages owes its existence to four distinct causes which ope- 
 rated in England as well as on the continent. The first of 
 these was the crusades, bringing western Europe into contact 
 with Asia and opening a wide field for war and adventure. 
 A second cause was the pilgrimage craze which spread over 
 Europe, owing to the intense religious enthusiasm of the 
 Middle Ages. Besides the international pilgrimages to the 
 Holy Sepulchre in Palestine, and to the tombs of the martyrs 
 in Rome, each nation had its special shrine. For example, 
 the Shrine of St. Thomas A'Becket at Canterbury; Loch 
 Deorg, in Ireland; Guadaloupe, in Spain; Mariazell, in Aus- 
 tria; Eberhardsclausen, in Germany. Hence, the basis for 
 those numerous stories which circulated like the Canterbury 
 Tales, the best modern copy of which is The Tales of a Way- 
 side Inn. A third cause for the multiplication of romances 
 in this period was the revival of learning and a quenchless 
 zeal to outrank the ancient classics in the literary treatment 
 of heroes. It is strange that the Middle Ages, revealing such 
 good taste and genius in other fine arts (for example, sculp- 
 ture, architecture, painting) did not reveal the same taste and 
 judgment in literary matters. A final cause for the growth 
 of romance was the national spirit; each nation of western 
 Europe, as soon as it was carved out of the Roman Empire, 
 began to cultivate its own national heroes, and these heroes 
 were selected in preference to foreign themes. 
 
CHAPTER XL 
 
 FICTION (CONTINUED) 
 
 Native English Romance.-r- English authors used materials 
 from northern and southern Europe. In the beginning they 
 merely translated or parodied the romances of the continent. 
 In the fourteenth century they began to use English themes 
 and English scenery, and gave to their work a native color- 
 ing. The age of Queen Elizabeth saw the best types pro- 
 duced of English romance. The first of these types is an 
 allegorical romance, written in 1342. It was called the 
 Vision of Piers Plowman. This allegory involves monks and 
 knights, and the manners and customs of the Middle Ages. 
 It also contains personified virtues and vices. All are in- 
 troduced on a grand scale; and the romantic character of the 
 piece is sustained by placing the characters in Dreamland. 
 The author, while asleep, has nine visions, and his work is a 
 faithful record of these. Throughout this allegorical romance 
 there is a large amount of moralizing which is a distinct de- 
 parture from the romance of the Middle Ages. The author 
 aims at reforming the English Church and English society. 
 Since the Vision of Piers Plowman was written, the allegori- 
 cal romance has been a favorite in England. There are four 
 noteworthy examples of this type, produced at later periods. 
 Spenser's " Fairie Queen "; Dean Swift's " Tale o/f the Tub," 
 Addison's " Vision of Mirza," Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Prog- 
 ress." The " Fairie Queen " ranks above the others in its 
 rich blazonry of romantic ideals ; the allegory involves an 
 ethical system for the complete regulation of human conduct. 
 
 340 
 
In this religious and ethical application of the romance, the 
 practical side of English character is revealed. Mere ro- 
 mance as such, did not satisfy. Later on, the same practical 
 trait of character gives us the novel with a purpose. 
 
 Romance of Travel. The second type of native English 
 romance is that of travel. English romance based upon 
 travel began to develop when England became a great sea 
 power and a rival of Spain and France in such remote regions 
 as Asia and America. The wildest stories were circulated 
 concerning the natives of those far-off lands. Imagination 
 ran riot; mariners like Robinson Crusoe were wrecked on 
 islands of which geography has taken no account. Travelers 
 like Sir John Mandeville were finding cities of pearl and gold 
 among the most barbarous peoples. Romantic marriages like 
 that between Captain Rolfe and Pocahontas added the element 
 of love to that of war and adventure. As adventure in the 
 Holy Land inspired the romance of the Middle Ages, so ad- 
 venture in the New World beyond the Atlantic inspired the 
 romance of succeeding periods. English soldiers of fortune, 
 like Frobisher and Drake, roamed the seas and brought home 
 plenty of material for romantic treatment. 
 
 Euphues and Smith.; The first specimen of the romance 
 of travel appears in the Age of Queen Elizabeth, written by 
 John Lily. He describes the travels of an Athenian youth 
 called Euphues. The Greek is represented as a wanderer in 
 Italy and in England ; and in both places he becomes a for- 
 saken lover. Pictures of Italian and English landscape are 
 drawn; the manners and customs of both peoples, portrayed. 
 According to Euphues, the ideal woman of whom romanti- 
 cists dreamed and wrote, was the Queen of England. An- 
 other example of this type is called the True Travels of Cap- 
 
34 2 FICTION 
 
 tain John Smith, reciting his adventures in America, his mar- 
 velous exploits with the Indians. 
 
 In Relation to the Drama. Romance of travel by sea and 
 land was reflected in the drama. For example, the Spanish 
 Curate by Fletcher; The Tempest by Shakespeare. Both 
 dramas are based upon adventures on land and sea. It was 
 common for the hero of romance to meet with the fate of 
 Prospero to be wrecked on an island peopled by monsters 
 of the Caliban type. Such were the stories told by sea-cap- 
 tains at English firesides when English vessels sailed every 
 sea in search of new lands. Out of these stories came the 
 finest type of the romance of travel Robinson Crusoe. 
 
 Fictitious Travel.- Travel, both fictitious and real, ha,s fur- 
 nished romance. For example, " The Travels of Gulliver " ; 
 "The Ancient Manner"; "The Citizen of the World"; 
 'The Voyage- of Wilkins" ; "The Shipwreck of John 
 Daniel." In modern times, travel forms an important feature 
 in English fiction. For instance, the literary characters of 
 Kipling move between England and India; Rider Haggard 
 used Africa as a background and setting; Robert Louis 
 Stevenson, America and the Islands of the Pacific. English 
 authors of romance enjoy exceptional privileges, owing to the 
 vast expansion of the British Empire. 
 
 The Historical Romance. The third type of native Eng- 
 lish romance deals with history and is called the historical 
 romance. It is more fruitful than all the others combined. 
 The first historical romance was written by John Barclay in the 
 closing years of the reign of Elizabeth. This first publica- 
 tion was called Argenis. The author describes it as a " state- 
 ly fable in the manner of history." At once it was translated 
 into five languages, and. since its publication, the historical 
 
ROMANCE 343 
 
 romance has been popular in England. The story deals with 
 England's struggle against Philip of Spain, and the destruc- 
 tion of the Spanish Armada. This type of romance 
 flourished, owing to the long wars which England has kept 
 up with races in remote quarters of the earth. The soldier 
 of fortune, such as Thackeray describes at Waterloo, is the 
 usual hero. In historical romances the history of some great 
 war like the American Revolution, or the struggle against 
 Napoleon, is involved. As an example, the stories of Water- 
 loo by Maxwell ; or the " Peninsular War,' ' by the same au- 
 thor. The "Highlanders in Spain"; the "Spy" by Feni- 
 more Cooper ; the " Memoirs of a Cavalier," by De Foe, are 
 illustrations of the same type. 
 
 In America. Early American history is treated in the 
 romances of Cooper and Irving; Carleton and Lever furnish 
 that of Ireland ; while the " Scottish Chiefs " fairly represents 
 the historical romance of Scotland. A more adequate treat- 
 ment of history is found in the historical novel such as that 
 supplied by Bulwer Lytton. When the novel took the place 
 of the romance in the development of fiction, two important 
 changes were made; first, the events of history were narrated 
 with greater regard for truth and accuracy; secondly, the 
 characters of history were reproduced in their habit as they 
 lived, not as impossible beings. 
 
 The Romantic Movement. The romantic movement in 
 English history began at the dawn of the nineteenth century. 
 Five prominent authors are identified with its origin : Wal- 
 ter Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, Burns, Coleridge. The 
 movement is called a re-discovery and vindication of the con- 
 crete. It was a protest against eighteenth century methods; 
 the moralizing, the abstractions, the perpetual search for 
 standards and canons, the artificial classicism of such writers 
 
344 FICTION 
 
 as Alexander Pope. The romantic movement developed 
 along two lines : First, it aimed at giving the imagination 
 larger scope by discarding the abstract and the general, the 
 terminology and artifice of the schools; it substituted, in- 
 stead, a treatment of concrete things, the individual realities 
 around us. Hence, the romantic movement was called a re- 
 turn to nature ; and its most noteworthy representatives in the 
 beginning were Burns and Wordsworth. These writers were 
 constantly employed on scenes of nature; they described man 
 as he lives a peasant on the Scottish highlands, or a shep- 
 herd in the Westmoreland Valley; whereas, the eighteenth 
 century writer would tell in rhyming couplets that man is a 
 rational animal. Compare the " Essay on Ma-n " with the 
 " Cotter's Saturday Night " and the " Excursion," and the 
 meaning of the romantic movement becomes clear. It gave, 
 not general, but particular views of life life concreted in 
 meadow, stream and cottage. Secondly, the romantic move- 
 ment represented a return to the past, to that historical ma- 
 terial which lends itself to imaginative treatment. Hence, 
 such writers as Walter Scott, who recalled the glory of the 
 Middle Ages. It is said of Walter Scott that he re-created 
 the Middle Ages. It is certain that his work revived a gen- 
 eral interest in that period of English history. 
 
 Scott's Environment. Walter Scott lived in what is known 
 as the Border District, between Scotland and England the 
 home of romance where rival ' English and Scottish lords 
 struggled for mastery. A study of the legends connected 
 with his native place led Scott to write romance. After 
 writing in verse many of these legends, such as " Marmion " 
 and the " Lord of the Isles," he treated in prose and on a 
 larger scale the crusades and the romantic adventures of the 
 Middle Ages. He became the head of the romantic school 
 tn England; his influence extended beyond England, and on 
 
ROMANCE 345 
 
 the continent his romances were translated and published. 
 In England he had Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, for a follovv- 
 
 Growth of the Movement. The romantic movement started 
 by Burns and Walter Scott, soon spread throughout England ; 
 and the best writers either devoted their whole life to it, like 
 Wordsworth, or contributed something to its advancement. 
 Wordsworth spent fifty years on that part of his work which 
 meant a " return to nature." Coleridge contributed the 
 Lyrical Ballads in imitation of Walter Scott's early work ; he 
 also contributed the " Ancient Mariner." Byron's most ex- 
 tensive work, Don Juan, was a valuable addition in spite of 
 its cynicism. Shelley made substantial contributions in the 
 " Witch of Atlas," " Alastor," and the " Revolt of Islam." 
 The " Witch of Atlas " is his best story an allegorical 
 romance wherein Fancy personified as a witch wanders over 
 the face of the earth. The romantic movement, reviving the 
 history of the Middle Ages, revived an interest in the religion 
 of that period. The English Church of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury was compared with the English Church of the Middle 
 Ages. Hence, the reaction against protestantism and puri- 
 tanism, and the return to Catholic ideals, doctrines and prac- 
 tices. Two classes of reformers arose: the ritualists who 
 brought back the altars, lights, vestments, the sculpture and 
 painting which characterized the English Church of the Mid- 
 dle Ages; the tractarians, who restored Catholic doctrine 
 and dogma, as far as possible. Shortly after the romantic 
 movement began, these two classes appeared. Cardinal New- 
 man acknowledges his indebtedness to Walter Scott, whose 
 writings first turned his attention toward Catholicism. Ke- 
 ble, another tractarian, tried to give the English Church a 
 romantic character, and the result was a. volume called the 
 Christian Year. When Cardinal Newman wrote the " Via 
 
34 6 FICTION 
 
 Media " he believed that the English Church could be cath- 
 olicized according to the ideals of the Middle Ages. Other 
 tractarians were of the same opinion. These ideals are still 
 cherished by Englishmen; and hence the romantic movement 
 is silently but rapidly undoing the work of the Reformation. 
 
 The Revolt Against Realism. The romantic movement, 
 so popular at the present time, represents a revolt against 
 realism, the school of which Dickens is the best type, and Zola 
 the worst type. The reading public is weary of the realistic 
 story with its dull commonplace and matter-of-fact, so that 
 any fiction now aiming at popularity must be either wholly 
 or in part romantic. Among the modern .novelists who have 
 made the largest contributions to this movement, Robert 
 Louis Stevenson ranks first ; Stevenson composed the wildest 
 stories of adventure, in such books as " St. Ives," " Treasure 
 Island," "The Master of Ballantrae " and "Tales of the 
 Southern Sea." His stories are clean, wholesome; and he 
 enjoys the distinction of being a great stylist as well as a suc- 
 cessful author of romance. For the mastery of style, no 
 better modern writer can be read or studied. Like Steven- 
 son, William Morris has contributed largely to romance. His 
 chief stories are " Ogier, the Dane " and " Sigurd, the Vol- 
 sung." Morris opened a new field by treating the romances 
 of Iceland. His translations of the Northern Sagas are a 
 valuable addition to English literature. Since the death of 
 Stevenson, the most striking figure in modern romance has 
 been Rudyard Kipling. When his Anglo-Indian stories first 
 found their way to the western world, they were immediately 
 associated with the adventures of Rider Haggard in Africa; 
 and the adventures of Stevenson in the Southern Sea. 
 Thackeray had prepared the way for Indian romance by writ- 
 ing about Colonel Newcome ; but its fullest treatment is found 
 in Kipling's stories. Kipling added what he called the true 
 
ROMANCE 347 
 
 romance when he wrote his Jungle books. They are the ro- 
 mances of the animals. He interprets the conduct of wolves, 
 bears, panthers, elephants, and translates their language into 
 English. Kipling is not a romanticist in the sense that Ste- 
 venson was, for he employs always a realistic setting and 
 says much about real things; whereas, Stevenson built his 
 literary fabrics on dreams. Kipling is not a romanticist in 
 the sense that Scott was, for while Scott was constantly look- 
 ing backward to past ages, Kipling believes in the romance 
 of the present; he believes there is as much romance in shot 
 and shell as in the old tournaments or the older Round Table. 
 
 Romance and Science. The romantic movement some 
 thirty years ago began to develop along scientific lines; the 
 discoveries of science, marvelous in themselves, became still 
 more marvelous under this idealizing process. Examples of 
 this kind of romance are " Elsie Venner," written in 1861 by 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes; it was followed in 1871 by the 
 " Coming Race," written by Bulwer Lytton. The " Coming 
 Race " sets forth the Utopia of the age of electricity. Many 
 of the sciences, notably Sociology, Political Economy and 
 Astronomy, furnish a fruitful field to the romanticist; Bel- 
 lamy's "Looking Backward," Ward's " Marcella " are ex- 
 amples in point. The romantic movement, at present so 
 strong in the United States, deals with our early colonial his- 
 tory and with the types of character that flourished in such 
 an environment. As yet American history has not sufficient 
 perspective for romanticism. It is too recent; but the events 
 connected with the discovery of America can be employed to 
 advantage. 
 
CHAPTER XLI 
 
 FICTION (CONTINUED) 
 
 THE NOVEL 
 
 Rank. The novel holds a higher place in fiction than the 
 romance. It presents a more careful study of life and char- 
 acter. Like the drama, it gives us character-creations; 
 whereas the romance resembles the epic, because it gives the 
 greatest prominence to incidents and adventures; and the 
 hero in the romance is treated for the sake of the story. 
 Hence, the ease with which a novel is dramatized in com- 
 parison with the romance whose characters like King Arthur 
 are shadowy and uncertain even in outline; and whose situ- 
 ations are so often wildly impossible. 
 
 . Meaning of the Word. The word, novel, originally meant 
 something new and striking, something strange and unusual ; 
 hence, at one time its use as a synonym for news or tidings. 
 It had this meaning from the old French whence it is de- 
 rived ; and this meaning was retained during the age of Queen 
 Elizabeth. For example, Ben Jonson writes, " Are there any 
 novels this morning, sir?" Massinger writes, "You promise 
 some novels that may delight us." 
 
 Restricted Meaning. In fiction the novel is defined as a 
 prose narrative involving as much plot and intricacy as a 
 drama ; it presents a picture of real life and possible men and 
 women. It is like the drama in substance and purpose; plot 
 and motive and character-revelation are similar in both, and 
 
 348 
 
THE NOVEL 349 
 
 the dialogue employed in both has the same purpose. Hence, 
 the novel in its modern form, must be regarded as a part of 
 dramatic literature. The many novels presented on the mod- 
 ern stage, are a proof of dramatic value. Marion Craw- 
 ford, a leading modern novelist, has this to say on the dra- 
 matic value of the novel : " A novel is, after all, a play ; and 
 perhaps it is nothing but a substitute for the real play with 
 live characters, scene-shifting and footlights. Accordingly, 
 it is true that any really good novel can be dramatized." 
 Again, he writes : " A novel is excellent according to the 
 degree in which it produces the illusions of a good play." 
 
 Relation to Romance. While the novel is thus allied with 
 the drama, it retains many features of the romance from which 
 it has evolved. First of all, it retains the prose- form; it also 
 retains the method of direct prose narration. The dialogue is 
 frequently supplemented by the narrative of the author. 
 Hence, the action in the novel need not be so complete or so 
 self-explanatory as in the drama; for the author can easily 
 inform or explain where the dialogue fails to bring matters 
 out clearly. 
 
 Stages of Evolution. The novel has passed through three 
 stages of evolution, and hence three distinct classes are found 
 in literature. 
 
 The Romantic Novel. The romantic novel comes first in 
 the order of time. As the name indicates, it is closely allied 
 to romance. As compared with other novels, it gives less 
 prominence to the plot and less prominence to the characters. 
 As it marks but the first step from romance toward reality 
 the characters presented have greater definiteness they are 
 creations that approach more nearly to the real men and 
 women of the world. But while these characters are less 
 
FICTION 
 
 vague and shadowy there is still, as in the romance, the largest 
 liberty of fiction. The plot is very slight. Hence, the ro- 
 mantic novel is rarely dramatized. For example, Richard- 
 son's "Pamela" published in 1740 and called the first novel 
 in English literature. The contents of this novel are quite 
 different from the romances that preceded it; there are no de- 
 scriptions of gorgeous palaces; no warring knights or en- 
 chanted castles. Traces of the romance are found in the 
 allegory which forms a part of Pamela; also in the adven- 
 tures of the heroine who is abducted and has several hair- 
 breadth escapes; finally, in the prose- form of the story there 
 is likewise the same slender plot. But the characters of 
 Pamela are all possible men and women; and because they 
 approach reality, Richardson has been called a realist. It is 
 significant that even in his early time, Richardson called one 
 of his novels a dramatic narrative. A more recent example 
 of the romantic novel is " The Last Days of Pompeii " by 
 Bulwer Lyttoir. Traces of the romance are found in such 
 characters as Arbaces, the Egyptian; and in such descrip- 
 tions as the amphitheatre just before the eruption of Vesu- 
 vius. But the plot is not as subtle and elaborate as that of 
 a drama; yet the reader is brought face to face with certain 
 grim realities of life. According to the demands of the ro- 
 mantic novel the human element is for the most part natural 
 and life-like. 
 
 The Idealistic Novel. A second class of novels was de- 
 veloped when the novel advanced completely beyond the lim- 
 its of romanticism. The second class is called idealistic. It 
 differs from the romantic novel in that it never violates the 
 fundamental realities of life ; although employing the liberties 
 of fiction; whereas, the romantic novel often presents a char- 
 acter or a scene that is wildly impossible. This truthfulness 
 to fundamental reality does not prevent the artist from treat- 
 
THE NOVEL 35! 
 
 ing his subject in a highly imaginative manner. In fact, the 
 term idealistic implies that the imagination is allowed suffi- 
 cient range, and that it is continually at work redeeming from 
 their grossness and other defects the realities of life. Char- 
 acters are idealized; the back-ground and stage-setting are 
 idealized views of nature. It is precisely this idealizing pro- 
 cess which makes the novel a work of art ; for, as De Quincey 
 wrote, art is such, not only because it imitates and reproduces 
 nature, but also because it transforms, idealizes and beautifies 
 the material offered by nature. 
 
 Indications of Idealism. Idealism in the novel finds ex- 
 pression in three ways: first, in the scenery or stage-setting. 
 The picture work in the novel must supply the ever-changing 
 scenes which accompany the action of a drama. In this work 
 the author enjoys the privilege of a painter; and may choose 
 such background and scenery as will interpret and sustain 
 the dramatic action of the novel. These pictures reproduc- 
 ing landscape, forest, sea, are highly idealized views of na- 
 ture; and in drawing them the author reveals his mastery 
 of words as an art-medium. And just as the modern stage 
 makes a special feature of its elaborate and beautiful scenery, 
 so the modern novel emphasizes this picturework of the 
 author in order to assist the dialogue. These idealized views 
 of nature are seen to best advantage when the author skilfully 
 chooses a region or district which easily lends itself to ideal- 
 ization. For example, " The Mill on the Floss/' or, the Isle 
 of Man in " The Christian," or Trelingham Court by the sea, 
 in the " New Antigone." A still better effect is gained when 
 the author chooses a place with an historical background. 
 For example, Florence in " Romola " ; or Rome in the novels 
 of Marion Crawford. 
 
 Idealization of Character. This idealizing process involves 
 not only the scenery, but the characters as well. The noveU 
 
352 FICTION 
 
 like the drama, aims at character-creation ; and the best nov- 
 elists are those who create character as well as paint scenery. 
 For example, such characters as Romola, Savonarola, Adam 
 Bede, are as successfully drawn as Hamlet or Lear or Mac- 
 beth. The characters in the novel are expected to be perfect 
 after their kind; and this perfection involves some departure 
 from reality, though never to such an extent as to place any 
 character beyond the pale of possibility. This idealizing pro- 
 cess appears at its best in the chief hero or heroine of the 
 novel. There is more room and a greater demand in such 
 cases for idealization. 
 
 Idealization of Plot. Idealism finds expression not only 
 in characters and scenery ; it also appears in the plot. The 
 plot of a novel, like that of drama, attempts a portrayal of 
 the entanglements of actual life. But this reproduction is ac- 
 companied by a considerable play of imagination. Situa- 
 tions are colored and improved so that the reality present in 
 outline furnishes a basis for that work of beauty called art. 
 It is quite enough if there be sufficient realism in the plot to 
 produce an illusion on the mind of the reader. Next to the 
 creation of character the development of the plot makes the 
 heaviest demand upon the author who is an idealist. For the 
 complex conditions of modern life must be portrayed with a 
 large degree of truth ; and these conditions do not favor ideal- 
 ism. Society in a crude and simple state yields much more 
 readily to imaginative treatment. 
 
 Some Examples. The writers of the idealistic novel are 
 legion; the best representatives are Thackeray, Hawthorne, 
 Meredith, George Eliot. Our best living representative in 
 America is James Lane Allen. Some modern authors of 
 idealistic fiction have written the romantic novel as well. For 
 example, Lord Lytton ; the bulk of his fiction is an example 
 
THE NOVEL 
 
 of modern idealism; but he has also written " Rienzi," the 
 " Pilgrims of the Rhine," the " Last Days of Pompeii/' in 
 which the romantic element prevails. 
 
 The Realistic Novel. Realism is the third and final step 
 in the development of the novel. It is the outcome of two 
 distinct influences exercised upon modern literature. The 
 first influence is utilitarian ; the novel for its own sake, or art 
 for its own sake, becomes an untenable proposition; it should 
 be employed for a higher purpose ; hence, the use of the novel 
 as a teacher to enforce some lesson in ethics, religion, politics. 
 While the idealist aims at art for its own sake and is satisfied 
 in gratifying our aesthetic nature by beautiful creations, the 
 realist demands the novel with a purpose the novel that 
 goes beyond the realm of art and plays the role of instructor 
 to mankind. In response to this utilitarian influence we have 
 modern novels teaching all kinds of doctrines, from Bellamy's 
 " Looking Backward " justifying socialism, to " Robert Els- 
 mere," preaching agnosticism. The novel with a purpose 
 teaches good and evil, according to the moral equipment of 
 the author. It has worked several notable revolutions in 
 modern history. For example, the novels of Dickens com- 
 pletely revolutionized the poor-law system and the educational 
 system in England. A novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe was 
 largely-zesponsible for our late civil war, and the ultimate 
 abolition of slavery. It is claimed that one million, four hun- 
 dred thousand copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin were put into 
 circulation before 1861. 
 
 Influence of Science. The scientific spirit is a noteworthy 
 influence exercised upon modern fiction. Like the utilitarian 
 spirit, it demands the intensely realistic in the novel. Imagi- 
 nation or fancy must have no place in the story ; things must 
 be represented as they are set forth in all their nakedness, 
 
354 
 
 deformity, ugliness. Those who, like Zola, have yielded fully 
 to this influence, have ruined the novel as a work of art. 
 The fundamental error of the realist rests in assuming that a 
 higher grade of art is produced when every detail of nature is 
 specified. Zola justifies his position in the following language : 
 " The experimental novel which is sometimes called realistic, 
 aims at presenting this whole truth of nature, not a beautiful 
 fragment. The close observer finds relations which involve 
 every possible aspect of the moral and physical world. And 
 unless he be false to his profession the truly artistic writer will 
 deal with every possible aspect and manifestation of nature." 
 
 The Position of Zola. Zola defends his position by assert- 
 ing that every manifestation of nature, no matter how re- 
 pulsive, is a legitimate theme for art. The most satisfactory 
 reply to Zola is furnished by Goethe ; he writes : " It is the 
 province of science to take note of all phenomena of nature; 
 but the highest art must satisfy ethical and aesthetic demands, 
 while remaining true to nature. It must pick and choose 
 from the material offered. By its very nature art is selective 
 and must discriminate; for it cannot find the beautiful or the 
 ethically sound in every aspect of the material and moral 
 world." Again, Goethe writes: "Art is, as Aristotle de- 
 scribes, an imitation of nature; but this does not mean to 
 imitate blindly; it means that the artist must select and com- 
 bine from nature those materials into which he breathes his 
 own vivifying ideal."- The best literary artists agree with 
 Goethe ; Matthew Arnold writes : " The province of art is 
 to make a judicious selection of those views of life, which in 
 themselves do not offend the moral or aesthetic sense. The 
 drama or the novel, even when compelled to treat of the mor- 
 ally depraved, is never compelled to go beyond the bounds 
 of decency." Ruskin writes : " The dissecting* table has 
 no place in the province of art. Under the plea of fidelity 
 
////: A'O/ '/:'/. 
 
 to nature and to the laws of art, novelists of the realistic 
 school pander to the most vicious appetites, and thus lower 
 the moral standard." The foremost living writers in mod- 
 ern literature belonging to the school of realism are Zola, 
 Tolstoi, Ibsen, Henry James, William Dean Howells. The 
 " Kreutzer Sonata," the " Resurrection " and " La Terre " 
 are perhaps the vilest productions of this school. Modern 
 English fiction is almost evenly divided between romanticism 
 and realism in a modified form. 
 
 The Dramatic Element. The dramatic element in fiction 
 plot, characters, dialogue, are treated in full in the depart- 
 ment of the drama. The technique of the drama, given 
 elsewhere, should be studied in connection with the depart- 
 ment of fiction. 
 
 / i/ltfvft /cJi^M- ^ e^tWZ-~ fr 
 
 'tf^Ms-J*' 
 
CHAPTER XLII 
 
 FICTION (CONTINUED) 
 
 REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS 
 
 The Story in Hebrew Literature. Two charming stories 
 the Story of Ruth and the Story of Tobias form inter- 
 esting episodes in the history of Israel. They are the best ex- 
 amples of the short story obtainable from ancient sources. 
 How much historic truth lies at the foundation of both is a 
 question that does not concern us here; some critics refer to 
 these stories as splendid examples of " poetic fiction." But 
 the conservative view, as expressed by Dr. Francis Gigot 
 seems to be more reasonable : " the books are both his- 
 torical, were intended to be so by their authors; and, conse- 
 quently, both stories rest upon a foundation of fact. Never- 
 theless, as stories they belong to the department of literature ; 
 in plot, character-sketching, dialogue and imaginative color- 
 ing, they approach more closely to the Greek ideal than any 
 other species of Hebrew writing." 
 
 The Story of Ruth. The authorship of the Story of Ruth 
 is anonymous; some critics ascribe it to Samuel; others, to 
 Ezechias. The precise date of its composition is likewise un- 
 known, although from the mixture of styles it is regarded as 
 a post-exile work based on a pre-exile narrative. The story 
 which Goethe calls " the loveliest little idyl that has come 
 down to us/' tells about the marriage of Ruth and Boaz. In 
 the time of the barley-harvest Ruth availed herself of the per- 
 mission granted by the Mosaic Law and went to glean in the 
 
 356 
 
THE STORY OF RUTH 
 
 field of Boaz, a rich raan of the place. Soon she makes 
 known her claim of marriage to him, as next of kin. She 
 marries him and becomes the mother of Obed, the grandfather 
 of David. The story closes with a brief genealogy which 
 constitutes its main historical value. 
 
 Criticism by Richard Moulton. " If the chief distinction of 
 the Idyl be its subject-matter of love and domestic life, then in 
 all literature there is no more typical Idyl than the Book of Ruth. 
 Following the Book of Judges, which has been filled with blood- 
 shed and violence and the heroism of the sterner virtues, it comes 
 upon us like a benediction of peace. It contains no trace of war 
 or high politics; the disasters of its story are the troubles of 
 family life exile, bereavement, poverty ; while its grand inci- 
 dents are no more than the yearly festivities of country life, and 
 the formal transfers of property that must go on although king- 
 doms rise and fall. 
 
 Now the interest of the idyl changes to the picturing of 
 popular manners and customs. We have before us all the bustle 
 and excitement of wheat and barley harvest in an agricul- 
 tural community: the progress of the reapers, and the maidens 
 gleaning behind them, the common meal in the heat of the day, 
 the master coming down to look on and exchange greetings with 
 his people. We see the stranger shyly joining the gleaners, the 
 story of her faithfulness known to all, from the humblest reaper 
 to Boaz himself. With a strange charm there come" to us across 
 the gulf of centuries the delicate attentions shown to Ruth by all, 
 the little contrivances by which she is made to glean plentifully 
 without knowing who has befriended her, the place of honor ac- 
 corded her at the meal. No detail of social life is too. petty for 
 the idyl, not even the way in which Ruth eats her portion of 
 food till she is sufficed, and what she leaves she brings to her 
 lonely mother-in-law at home. The gloomy day of Naomi's life 
 is to have light at eventide, and the first gleam of that light is the 
 name of the master who has been so hospitable : Boaz is recog- 
 nized as one near of kin, and Naomi rallies herself to the task 
 of seeking a resting place for the loving Ruth. More manners 
 and customs follow, and those of the quaintest. Ruth follows 
 exactly the instructions of Naomi in going through the strange 
 
FICTION 
 
 ritual by which she must claim the wealthy and powerful land- 
 owner as next of kin. The story is not too short to prevent our 
 catching the tenderness with which Boaz shields the stranger 
 from the breath of gossip, nor the refined courtesy by which he 
 treats the great service asked of him as a favor done to himself : 
 ' Blessed be thou of the Lord, my daughter : thou hast showed 
 more kindness in the latter end than at the beginning, inasmuch 
 as thou followedst not young men, whether poor or rich.' The 
 scene changes to give us the minutiae of legal procedure in the 
 gate of the city ; and here again contrast of character appears, 
 between the nameless kinsman who is ready to do everything that 
 is just, and Boaz, who will go further and be generous. So, with 
 all formalities, the land of Elimelech is redeemed, and Boaz takes 
 Ruth to wife, in order that, according to the interesting Hebrew 
 law, the child born to them may be considered to have revived 
 the line of his grandfather. The long delayed happiness of 
 Naomi becomes full as the women of the city move in procession 
 to lay the new-born babe in her bosom, and sing to her how his 
 name shall be famous in Israel : ' and he shall be unto thee a re- 
 storer of life, and a nourisher of thine old age : for thy daughter- 
 in-law, which loveth thee, which is better to thee than seven 
 sons, hath borne him.' And the simple idyl in its last words 
 joins itself on to the main stream of history by telling that the 
 new-born Obed was the father of Jesse, and Jesse was the father 
 of King David himself." 
 
 The Story of Tobias. This story is the first of the deutero- 
 canonical writings. It relates the virtues and trials of To- 
 bias, a pious Israelite, who undergoes many afflictions/ such 
 as exile, captivity, blindness. Many critics regard the work 
 as an historical romance inculcating" moral lessons like the 
 parables of our Lord. 
 
 Criticism by Gigot. " It will be easily seen from these general 
 contexts that the Book of Tobias inculcates important religious 
 truths, such as the value of prayers and almsdeeds, the minis- 
 terial function of the holy angels towards men, the power of evil 
 spirits over wicked men, the chief duties of parents toward their 
 children, gratitude to God for his various benefits. Hence, it is 
 
IN GREEK LITERATURE 359 
 
 not surprising to find that scholars should have been divided con- 
 cerning the actual purpose of the writer, and should have re- 
 garded as such the setting forth of these truths. The narrative 
 was written to show that the truly righteous man who continues 
 to trust in God, in good works and in prayer is amply rewarded at 
 last. Piety may suffer for a while, it receives its recompense in 
 the end. The story is not unlike our modern novel with a pur- 
 pose." 
 
 Fiction in Greek Literature. Much of Greek literature 
 lies in the department of epic and drama where the imagina- 
 tion was given more scope. The Greeks had little inclination 
 to clothe dramatic literature in the garb of prose. One. re- 
 calls the Republic of Plato and the Cyropaedia of Xenophon 
 as examples of that imaginative treatment of a theme, akin to 
 the best fiction. In point of fact, the Cyropaedia is an his- 
 torical romance. It belongs to the classic or golden age. In 
 the silver age there are many examples of romance, such as 
 the Babylonia of Jamblicus, the Habrocomes and Antheia of 
 Xenophon of Ephesus, the Ethiopics of Heliodorus, the Cli- 
 topho and Leucippe of Tatius, the Daphnis and Chloe of 
 Longus. 
 
 Criticism by Thomas Perry. " In its own time, as we have 
 said, this fantastic forged literature was of great service in fur- 
 thering the development of a new form of composition which was 
 destined to have much influence on modern writing, and the 
 qualities of the Greek romance, the impossible adventures, the 
 succession of catastrophes, the complicated intrigues, the intense 
 love-making, had long formed the ingenious exercises of orators 
 and speakers who lived by entertaining hearers and readers. 
 The tendency of literature towards the discussion of love themes 
 we have noticed even in Euripides, and we have seen how much 
 more distinct it became when Greek letters found their new home 
 at Alexandria. Obviously, the disconnected manner in which 
 this favorite subject was treated in the later days by men who 
 sought to concentrate all their acuteness upon a brief declama- 
 tion or essay, stood in the way of a patient development of the 
 
FICTION 
 
 study of the individual character. It furthered the production 
 of rather a number of vivid scenes than of a carefully composed 
 whole, and the Greek romances that have come down to us 
 abound in incident; they lack psychological unity. Invention is 
 exhausted in devising a succession of events ; there is no growth, 
 no careful study of character. The fragmentary nature of the 
 previous studies for the romance were not the only cause of the 
 absence of careful treatment of character; another explanation 
 may be found in that law of intellectual economy which forbids 
 the combination of exciting incidents with psychological analysis. 
 If a succession of catastrophes will sustain the reader's interest, 
 there is no necessity of strengthening this by describing the men- 
 tal growth of the hero and heroine. It is only when readers 
 have learned every possible combination of flood, flames, earth- 
 quakes, wild beasts, robbers, murderers, and poisons, and they 
 no longer shudder at grewsome casualties because they know that 
 there is salvation only a few pages ahead, that the more delicate 
 and more difficult work of portraying a human being begins. 
 The Greek romance did not attain this point, which was left for 
 modern times, yet it is sufficiently creditable that before their 
 final intellectual extinction this wonderful race should have com- 
 pleted their task of founding every form of literature on which 
 posterity was to work. 
 
 Greek romances do not concern themselves, after the man- 
 ner of contemporary English novels, with the instances of social 
 life in the drawing-room but their whole tone is that of con- 
 ventional society. The hero and heroine are always of gentle 
 blood; the populace has its modern equivalent in the chorus 
 of an Italian opera ; they fill the humble position of rabble, citi- 
 zens, soldiers, and the like. The action of the stories is dis- 
 tinctly busied only with the aristocratic victims of circumstan- 
 ces. This pastoral presents rustic life, devoid of its grimness, 
 and only as it appears to people of position. Yet when this 
 is granted it must also be acknowledged that although the pic- 
 ture drawn is a conventional one, it is yet well drawn. It is a 
 fairyland, but a charming fairy-land that the author puts before 
 us. The love of Daphnis and Chloe knows all the delays and 
 hindrances that an ingenious invention can devise, but its setting 
 is more attractive than the story itself. The pictures are the 
 work of a time which lacked any real enthusiasm, which, indeed, 
 
IN LATIN LITERATURE 361 
 
 was affected by some of the most worthless interests, but the 
 idyllic touches here and there show that the old Greek spirit 
 had not wholly died. It was, however, lamentably checked with 
 rhetorical artifices ; the language is a mass of wilful prettinesses, 
 enough to place the story among the sophistical productions, 
 although its exact date cannot be determined. It was translated 
 by Amyot in 1559 A. D., but its ground was already taken, and 
 although it enjoyed great popularity, the pastorals of Italy and 
 Spain had firm hold of the popular taste, and the work of Longus 
 remained a sort of literary curiosity, a wonderful example of 
 grace mingled with the abundant literary artifice of a dying 
 civilization." 
 
 Among the Latins. The era of fiction among the Latins, 
 like the same era among the Greeks, came after the golden 
 age, so far at least, as prose is concerned. As Latin litera- 
 ture is, for the most part, an imitation of the Greek, Latin 
 classic writers, imitated the Greeks in employing poetic chan- 
 nels for all work of the imagination. After the Augustan 
 age passed away, many prose romances appeared, representa- 
 tive authors of which are Petronius Arbiter and Apuleius. 
 
 Petronius Arbiter. The date of his birth is unknown ; he 
 died about 66 A. D. He was a Roman author often identi- 
 fied with a certain Caius Petronius whom Tacitus mentions. 
 Scarcely anything is known of his life. In their history of 
 Roman Literature, Teuffel and Schwabe have this to say : 
 " To Nero's time belongs the character novel of Petronius 
 Arbiter, no doubt the same Petronius whom Nero compelled 
 to kill himself. The novel was written in twenty books, only 
 fragments of which remain. It was a satire on the society 
 of Nero's time, and, doubtless, provoked the dissolute emperor 
 to extreme measures. Though steeped in obscenity, this 
 novel is not only highly important for the history of man- 
 ners and language, but it is also a work of art, full of spirit, 
 fine insight into human nature, wit of a high order and genial 
 humor. The story contains a mixture of verse and prose. 
 
362 FICTION 
 
 Criticism by John Dunlop. " The taste for the Sybarite and 
 Milesian fables increased during the reign of the emperors. 
 Many imitators of Aristides appeared, particularly Clodius Al- 
 binus, the competitor of the Emperor Severus, whose stories 
 have not reached posterity, but are said to have obtained a 
 celebrity to which their merit hardly entitled them. It is strange 
 that Severus, in a letter to the Senate, in which he upbraids its 
 members for the honors they had heaped on his rival, and the 
 support they had given to his pretensions, should, amid accusa- 
 tions that concerned him more nearly, have expressed his chief 
 mortification to arise from their having distinguished that person 
 as learned, who had grown hoary in the study of old wives' 
 tales, such as the Milesian-Punic fables. " Major fuit dolor, 
 quod ilium pro literato laudandum plerique duxistis, cum ille 
 neniis quibusdam anilibus occupatus, inter Milesias Punicas 
 Apuleii fuit, et ludicra literaria consenesceret." But the most 
 celebrated fable of ancient Rome is the work of Petronius Arbi- 
 ter, perhaps the most remarkable fiction which has dishonored 
 the literary history of any nation. It is the only fable of that 
 period now extant, but is a strong proof of the monstrous cor- 
 ruption of the times in which such a production could be toler- 
 ated, though no doubt, writings of bad moral tendency might be 
 circulated before the invention of printing, without arguing the 
 depravity they would have evinced, if presented to the world 
 subsequent to that period. 
 
 A story nearly the same with that in Petronius exists under 
 the title of the Widow who was Comforted, in the book known 
 in this country by the name of the Seven Wise Masters, which 
 is one of the oldest collections of oriental stories. There, how- 
 ever, the levity of the widow is aggravated by the circumstance 
 that the husband had died in consequence of alarm at a danger 
 to which his wife had been exposed, and that she consented to 
 mutilate his body in order to give it a perfect resemblance to 
 that of the malefactor which had been taken down from the cross. 
 This story of female levity has frequently been imitated, both 
 in its classical and oriental circumstances. It is the " Fabliau 
 De le Femme qui se fist putain siir la fosse de son mari" 
 Pere du Halde, in his History of China, informs us that it is a 
 common story in that empire; but the most singular place for 
 the introduction of such a tale was the Rule and Exercise of Holv 
 
IN LATIN LITERATURE 363 
 
 Dying, by Jeremy Taylor, where it forms part of the 5th chap- 
 ter, entitled, " Of the Contingencies of Death and Treating our 
 Dead " (vol. 5). The Latin writers seem to have been uniform- 
 ly more happy in their episodes than in the principal subject." 
 
 Lucius Apuleius. He was born at Meclaura, Numidia, 
 about 125 A. D. He is known as a Roman Platonic philos- 
 opher and rhetorician. He is famous in literature for hav- 
 ing written an " Apology " and the romance of the " Golden 
 Ass." 
 
 Criticism by Henry Wilson. " There is little of Apuleius' 
 own invention in the work on which his fame principally rests. 
 The Metamorphoses or Golden Ass (which latter title seems not 
 to be the author's own, but to have been bestowed in compli- 
 ment), was founded on a narrative in the Metamorphoses of 
 Lucius of Patrae, a work extant in the time of Photius. From 
 Photius' account (impugned, however, by Wieland and P. L. 
 Courier) this book would seem to have consisted of a collection 
 of marvelous stories related in an inartistic fashion, and in per- 
 fect good faith. The literary capabilities of this particular nar- 
 rative attracted the attention of Apuleius' contemporary, Lucian, 
 who proceeded to work it up in his own manner, adhering, as 
 Photius seems to indicate, very closely to the original, but giving 
 it a comic and satiric turn. Apuleius followed this rifacimcnto, 
 making it, however, the ground-work of an elaborate romance, 
 interspersed with numerous episodes, of which the beautiful story 
 of Cupid and Psyche is the most celebrated, and altering the 
 denouement to suit the religious revival of which he was an 
 apostle. There is no reason to conclude with Warburton, that 
 he wrote in direct antagonism to Christianity; or with Thomas 
 Taylor, that ' his intention was to show that the man who gives 
 himself to a voluptuous life becomes a beast.' The book is. 
 nevertheless, a remarkable illustration of the contemporary reac- 
 tion against a period of scepticism, of the general appetite for 
 miracle and magic, and of the influx of Oriental and Egyptian 
 ideas into the old theology. It is also composed with a well- 
 marked literary aim, defined by Kretzschmann as the emulation 
 of the Greek sophist, and the transplantation of their tours dc 
 
364 FICTION 
 
 force into the Latin language. Nothing, indeed, is more charac- 
 teristic of Apuleius than his versatility, unless that it be his 
 ostentation and self-confidence in the display of it. The digni- 
 fied, the ludicrous, the voluptuous, the horrible, succeed each 
 other with bewildering rapidity ; fancy and feeling are every- 
 where apparent, but not less so affectation, meretricious ornament, 
 and that effect to say everything finely which prevents any- 
 thing being said well. The Latinity has a strong African colour- 
 ing, and is crammed with obsolete words, agreeably to the taste 
 of the time. Few books accordingly suffer less by translation. 
 When these defects are mitigated or overlooked, the Golden Ass 
 will be pronounced a most successful work, original in treatment 
 though not in invention, invaluable as an illustration of ancient 
 manners, and full of entertainment from beginning to end. The 
 most famous and poetically beautiful portion is the episode of 
 Cupid and Psyche, adapted from a popular legend of which 
 traces are found in most fairy mythologies, which explains the 
 seeming incongruity of its being placed in the mouth of an old 
 hag. As observed by Friedlander, this discriminating recog- 
 nition of the beauty of a wild flower of folk lore is as much to 
 the credit of Apuleius' taste and feeling as the invention of it 
 could have been to his imagination. The allegorical purport he 
 has infused into it is his own, and entirely in the spirit of the 
 Platonic philosophy. Don Quixote's adventure with the wine- 
 skins, and Gil Bias' captivity among the robbers, are palpably 
 borrowed from Apuleius ; and several of his humorous episodes, 
 probably current as popular stories long before his time, reappear 
 in Boccaccio." 
 
 Cervantes. He was born near Madrid in 1547; died in 
 Madrid, 1616. He became a soldier of fortune under Don 
 John of Austria, spent five years in slavery, in Algiers; and. 
 on the whole, led rather a romantic life. He wrote a large 
 number of novels, plays and romances. Outside of Spain 
 he is best known as the author of Don Quixote a work 
 which entitles him to rank among the greatest authors of fic- 
 tion. 
 
IN SPANISH LITERATURE 365 
 
 Criticism by Henry Watts. " There had appeared, up to 
 1605, no book since the invention of printing which had so many 
 readers. To that artificial age, reared in the insipid extrava- 
 gances of the successors of Amadis, Don Quixote was as the 
 dawn of a new revelation. The humour, equally simple and 
 deep, the easy, careless grace of the narrative, the fine wisdom 
 and tenderness, the true charity, of this book which professed 
 to be a burlesque of the romances of chivalry, were qualities as 
 rare as they were delightful in Spanish literature. Even those 
 who missed the allegory and were insensible to the~ satire could 
 not but enjoy the story with its fresh and lively pictures of na- 
 tional life and character. That which has become, to use the 
 phrase of Sainte-Beuve, ' The book of humanity,' was no less 
 successful in its age -as a book of popular recreation. The author 
 himself was probably amazed at his own success. Like his great 
 contemporary, Shakespeare, while careful of his lesser works he 
 seemed to have abandoned his masterpiece to the printers with 
 scarcely a thought of his literary reputation. All the first edi- 
 tions of Don Quixote swarm with blunders of the most extraor- 
 dinary kind, proving that Cervantes could never have revised the 
 printing, even if he had looked through his manuscript before 
 committing it to the press. He is made to forget in one chapter 
 what he had written in another. He confounds even the names 
 of his characters, calling Sancho's wife Theresa in one place and 
 Maria in another 'the very blunders of which he afterwards 
 accused his enemy, Avellaneda. He makes Sancho ride his ass 
 immediately after it had been stolen by Gines de Passamonte, 
 and bewail its loss when it had been recovered. He confounds 
 time, place, and persons, and abounds in inaccuracies and ana- 
 chronisms, to the distraction of his readers, the perturbation of 
 his critics, and the serious grief of his admirers. The style of 
 this first part of Don Quixote, in spite of occasional passages of 
 beauty which are among the models of the Castilian tongue, is 
 loose, slovenly and inartistic. 
 
 In one sense Don Quixote is indeed a satire ; but the follies it 
 ridicules are those common to all humanity and to every age, and 
 the satire is of that rare kind which moves not to depreciation but 
 to love and pity of the object to sympathy rather than to con- 
 tempt, and to tears as well as laughter. Don Quixote and Sancho 
 Panza are permanent types individualized. They are as true 
 
3 66 FICTION 
 
 for all times as for the sixteenth century for all the world as 
 for Spain. The antithesis of the pure imagination without un- 
 derstanding and the commonplace good sense without imagina- 
 tion which these two represent, is the eternal conflict which pos- 
 sesses the world. The secret of the marvelous success of Don 
 Quixote, of the extraordinary popularity which makes it not 
 only the great book of Spain but a book for all mankind, has been 
 aptly described by Coleridg'e to lie in the rare combination of 
 the permanent with the individual which the genius of the au- 
 thor has been enabled to achieve. Don Quixote is not only the 
 perfect man of imagination, less the understanding, but he is a 
 living picture of the Spanish hidalgo of the time of Philip II. 
 Sancho is the ideal commonplace man of sense, less the imagi- 
 nation, and also the pure Manchegan peasant. In the carrying 
 out of his happy conception, Cervantes was doubtless careless of 
 his own main purpose, so that this burlesque of romance has be- 
 come a real picture of life this caricature of chivalry the truest 
 chivalric model this life of a fool the wisest of books." 
 
 Boccaccio. He was born at Certaldo, near Florence, in 
 1313, and died in 1375. Like Cervantes in relation to Span- 
 ish literature, Boccaccio is the representative Italian novelist. 
 He left works on history, geology, theology, and mythology, 
 some of them written in Latin. His commentaries on Dante, 
 together with many poems, are extant. His fame as a writer 
 rests on the Decameron, a collection of one hundred stories. 
 
 Criticism by F. Hueffer. " In the chronological enumeration 
 of our author's writings we now come to his most important 
 work, the Decameron, a collection of one hundred stories, pub- 
 lished in their combined form in 1353, although mostly written- at 
 an earlier date. This work marks in a certain sense the rise 
 of Italian prose. It is true that Dante's Vita Nuova was written 
 before, but its involved sentences, founded essentially on Latin 
 constructions, cannot be compared with the infinite suppleness 
 and precision of Boccaccio's prose. The Cento Novelle Antiche, 
 on the other hand, which also precedes the Decameron in date, 
 can hardly be said to be written in artistic language according 
 to definite rules of grammar and style. Boccaccio for the first 
 
IN ITALIAN LITERATURE 367 
 
 time speaks a new idiom, flexible and tender, like the character 
 of the nations, and capable of rendering all the shades of feel- 
 ing, from the coarse laugh of cynicism to the sigh of hopeless 
 love. It is by the name of ' Father of Italian Prose' that Boc- 
 caccio ought to be chiefly remembered. Like most progressive 
 movements in art and literature, Boccaccio's remoulding of Italian 
 prose may be described as a ' return to nature.' It is indeed 
 the nature of the Italian people itself which has become articulate 
 in the Decameron; here we find southern grace and elegance, 
 together with that unveiled naivete of impulse which is so strik- 
 ing and so amiable a quality of the Italian character. The un- 
 desirable complement of the last-mentioned feature, a coarseness 
 and indecency of conception and expression hardly comprehensi- 
 ble to the northern mind, also appears in the Decameron, particu- 
 larly where the life and conversation of the lower classes are the 
 subject of the story. At the same time, these descriptions of 
 low life are so admirable, and the character of popular parlance 
 rendered with such humor as often to make the frown of moral 
 disgust give way to a smile. It is not surprising that a style 
 so concise and yet so pliable, so typical and yet so individual, as 
 that of Boccaccio, was of enormous influence on the further 
 progress of a prose in a manner created by it. This influence 
 has indeed prevailed down to the present time, to an extent bene- 
 ficial upon the whole, although frequently fatal to the develop- 
 ment of individual writers. Novelists like, Giovanni Florentine 
 or Franco Sacchetti are completely under the sway of their great 
 model ; and Boccaccio's influence may be discerned equally in the 
 plastic fulness of Machiavelli and in the pointed satire of Areti- 
 no. Without touching upon the individual merits of Lasca, 
 Bandello, and other novelists of the cinquecento, it may be as- 
 serted that none of them created a style independent of their 
 great predecessor. One cannot indeed but acquiesce in the au- 
 thoritative utterance of the Academia della Crusca, which holds 
 up the Decameron as the standard and model of Italian prose. 
 Even the Delia Cruscan writers themselves have been unable to 
 deprive the language wholly of the fresh spontaneity of Boccac- 
 cio's manner, which in modern literature we again admire in 
 Manzoni's Promessi sposi. A detailed analysis of a work so 
 well known as the Decameron would be unnecessary. The de- 
 scription of the plague of Florence preceding the stories is uni 
 
368 FICTION 
 
 versally acknowledged to be a masterpiece of epic grandeur and 
 vividness. It ranks with the paintings of similar calamities by 
 Thucydides, Defoe and M-anzoni. Like Defoe, Boccaccio had 
 to draw largely upon hearsay and his own imagination, it being 
 almost certain that in 1348 he was at Naples, and therefore no 
 eye-witness of the scenes he describes. The stories themselves, 
 a hundred in number, range from the highest pathos to the 
 coarsest licentiousness. 
 
 Victor Hugo. He was born at Besancon in 1802, and died 
 at Paris in 1885. He was celebrated both as a poet and as 
 the leader of the French romantic school. He wrote a num- 
 ber of tragedies and several small volumes of lyrics. The 
 number of his works in prose and verse would make a small 
 library. Perhaps the best known outside of France are " The 
 Toilers of the Sea-," and " Les Miserables." 
 
 Criticism by Rene Doumic. " What impresses the reader of 
 Victor Hugo is the poetic quality of his style. This quality to- 
 gether with his love of romance, must impress the critic at once. 
 It is not for originality or for vigor of thought that Victor Hugo 
 is remarkable. He has very few ideas, and he relied rather on 
 the initiative of others and the impulse that came from others. 
 He defines his soul as a crystal reflecting the variegated colors of 
 the world a shell that echoed its thousand voices. In this way 
 he vindicates his sincerity amid his various changes of opinion 
 and the countless inspirations that govern his soul. His ideas 
 were not grand, though he frequently employs the grand style. 
 He never read profoundly in the book of nature ; his psychology 
 skimmed only the surface of truth. What was truly grand in 
 him was the imagination which enlarged and distorted every 
 object; throwing all things out of plumb and just proportion. 
 Hence, his stories are filled with giants, titans, gods, heroes, mon- 
 sters he describes these with unwonted brilliance. But we 
 do not find real men and women in his books. His emotion lacks 
 the note of sincerity which we find in other great authors. It 
 is in his literary form and finish that Victor Hugo must lay 
 claim to all his superiority as a writer. In this respect he 
 stands without a rival among his countrymen. The only modern 
 
IN FRENCH LITERATURE 369 
 
 French authors who approach him are Balzac, Renan and 
 Michelet. Although commonplace in his ideas and wholly in- 
 capable of analyzing the deeper emotions and dramatic play of 
 the human heart, he excels in description, in word-painting, in 
 evoking grand scenes where knight and hero may hold their most 
 brilliant tournament. His ideas are images, he thinks in pic- 
 tures. As an example of his style, read the Battle of Waterloo, 
 or his descriptions of Notre Dame. He has a special talent for 
 the grand narrative wherein the details are expressive and strik- 
 ing. Like Macaulay, he is famous for enumeration and striking 
 antitheses. He also possessed the keenest sense of rhythm and 
 mastered in a high degree the art of versification. Doubtless time 
 will consign the greater part of his work to oblivion, but enough 
 of it will remain to secure for him a permanent place among the 
 great poets and romanticists of his age. Among authors of fic- 
 tion his name will live with Balzac, Dumas, Zola and Flaubert." 
 
 Alexander Dumas. He was born at Aisne, in France, 
 1803; died at Puys, 1870. He became noted as an author 
 of plays and novels. Besides these he published a number of 
 works dealing with history and personal reminiscence. Of 
 his stones, the best known are the " Count of Monte Cristo " ; 
 " The Mohicans of Paris " and the " Three Musketeers." He 
 shares with Hugo the glory of leading the romantic movement 
 in France. 
 
 Criticism by James Farnsworth. " Dumas is one of the 
 most remarkable characters that the nineteenth century produced. 
 His life was filled with romance, and his wildest work may be 
 said to be only a reflection of his personal experience. His suc- 
 cess in founding the ' Review of the World ' tempted him into 
 trying his skill at historical romances. The influence of Walter 
 Scott is plainly visible in the work that followed. The appear- 
 ance of Monte Cristo excited universal interest; the effect was 
 like the publication of Robinson Crusoe or Waverly. The ex- 
 traordinary color, the never-flagging spirit, the endless surprises, 
 and the air of nature which was cast over the most extravagant 
 situations make this work worthy of the popularity it enjoved 
 in almost every country of the world. The vast quantity of his 
 
FICTION 
 
 work interfered with it's quality. He wrote too rapidly, some- 
 thing after the fashion of Lord Byron, and paid too little atten- 
 tion to recasting and revision. In this respect his son, ' Alex- 
 andre Fils,' is far superior, although he does not exhibit the 
 genius of his father. Owing to their undue expansion and in- 
 terminable development many of his stories h'ave grown decidedly 
 unpopular. Of his numerous plays, two or three may be re- 
 garded as a permanent contribution to French Comedy." 
 
 
 
 Walter Scott. He was born at Edinburgh in 1771, and 
 died at Abbotsford in 1832. He is one of the most cele- 
 brated novelists in English literature, famed not only for the 
 amount, but also for the quality of his work. Scott divided 
 his labors between poetry and prose, and many of his ballads 
 are familiar to every English household. The Waverly 
 Novels are his literary masterpieces. Scott is the recognized 
 leader of the romantic movement in England. 
 
 Criticism by William Henry Sheran. Sir Walter Scott occu- 
 pies a prominent place in English Fiction. He is the first, and 
 perhaps the greatest, of our romantic writers. His early home 
 was in the Border District, renowned for its traditions, folk-lore, 
 and ballads, all harking back to the ages of chivalry and romance 
 Cumberland was near by, and the Eildon Hills and Edinburgh 
 Castle. In his veins ran the blood of the Border chieftain. From 
 youth his memory was stored with wild tales of what those Border 
 chieftains had dared and done their quarrels and raids, and 
 feats of horsemanship. At his mother's knee, and in the library, 
 he collected a mass of material, out of which came those beautiful 
 pictures of the age of chivalry. Unlike Dickens, 4ie gave no 
 attention to contemporary manners or characters ; he lived in the 
 past with the knights and ladies, on the cloth of gold. He sought 
 the romantic element in English and Scotch history; crusaders 
 and pretenders to the English throne engaged his talent; for 
 them he weaves the garment of medieval glory; he gives them 
 spears and coats of mail, and richly caparisoned steeds, and bids 
 them joust once more, or die in the Holy Land, fighting against 
 the infidel. His historical romances are occupied with the cru- 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 37 r 
 
 sades, whereas, those novels which are less romantic in character, 
 have to do with queens and kings of Scotland and England. 
 There are traces of the influence of Shakespeare in the work of 
 Scott; for, just as Shakespeare based his historical plays on the 
 actual record of the English kings, allowing his imagination free 
 scope at the same time, so Walter Scott took a few facts from 
 medieval history and used them as the basis of an imaginary 
 wonderland. Like Shakespeare, he selected material which of- 
 fered the finest opportunity for plot and imaginative treatment. 
 But here the comparison closes, for while Shakespeare's imagina- 
 tion was in the highest sense creative, that of Walter Scott could 
 only supply a fascinating story wherein characters with shadowy 
 outlines are introduced for the sake of the narrative. These 
 characters compared with Hamlet or Lear, are like splendid 
 photographs or dissolving views compared with the living 
 reality. Yet how many have been delighted with those dissolv- 
 ing views of an enchanting period which historical blasphenr 
 has called the " Dark Ages." 
 
 Criticism by Alfred Welsh. " The vast sums which Scott's 
 prose and verse won, show how extensive was his popularity. 
 He was the favorite of his age, read over the whole of Europe. 
 He was the masterspirit that entered over the wide field of his- 
 torical romance and gleaned its wealth for posterity. Without 
 writing specifically for ethical aims, he wrote with ethical truth, 
 and is full charged with the morality of the future. Apart from 
 their historical value, which is great, the Waverly series cre- 
 ated an improved taste a taste for good sense and genuine 
 feeling, as opposed to vapid sentimentalism and romantic ex- 
 travagance. With all his delight in Highland chiefs and Border 
 thieves, he has a true brotherhood with men, and continually 
 hints some tie between the reader and the vast varieties of being, 
 ever with an eye and a heart to ' Make channels for the 
 streams of love where they may -broadly run/ Doubtless, with- 
 out being professedly so, he wished to be useful. It filled his 
 eyes with tears to be told that he was doing great good by his 
 attractive and noble tales. His fundamental honesty and his 
 wide humanity would form an a priori guarantee that his works, 
 on the whole, should contribute to the amelioration of man and 
 society. On his deathbed it consoled him that he had not com- 
 
FICTION 
 
 promised the interests of virtue. He said to his son-in-law: 
 ' Lockhart, I may have but a minute to speak to you. My dear, 
 be a good man be virtuous, be religious be a good man. 
 Nothing else will give you comfort when you come to lie here.' ' ; 
 
 Criticism by Richard Hutton. " The most striking feature 
 of Scott's romances is that, for the most part, they are 
 pivoted on public rather than mere private interests and pas- 
 sions. v With but few exceptions (The Antiquary, St. Ronan's 
 Well, and Guy Mannering are the most important) Scott's 
 novels give us an imaginative view, not of mere individuals, but 
 of individuals as they are affected by the public strifes and 
 social divisions of the age. And this it is which gives his books 
 so large an interest for old and young, soldiers and statesmen, 
 the world of society and the recluse, alike. You can hardly 
 read any novel of Scott's and not become better aware what 
 public life and political issues mean. And yet there is no arti- 
 ficiality, no elaborate attitudinizing before the antique mirrors 
 of the past, like Bulwer's, no dressing out of clothes-horses like 
 G. P. R. James. The boldness and the freshness of the present 
 are carried back into the past, and you see Papists and Puri- 
 tans, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Jews, Jacobites, and Freeboot- 
 ers, preachers, schoolmasters, mercenary soldiers, gipsies and 
 beggars, all living the sort of life which the reader feels that in 
 their circumstances and under the same conditions of time and 
 place and parentage, he. might have lived too. Indeed, no man 
 can read Scott without being more of a public man, whereas the 
 ordinary novel tends to make its readers rather less of one than 
 before. Next, though most of these stories are rightly called 
 romances, no one can avoid observing that they give that side 
 of life which is unromantic, quite as vigorously as the romantic 
 side. This was not true of Scott's poems, which only expressed 
 one-half of his nature, and were almost pure romances. But in 
 the novels the business of life is even better portrayed than its 
 sentiments. Mr. Bagehot, one of the ablest of Scott's critics, 
 has pointed out this admirably in his essay on The Waverly 
 Novels. ' Many historical novelists,' he says, ' especially those 
 who with care and pains have read up the detail, are often evi- 
 dently in a strait how to pass from their history to their senti- 
 ment. The fancy of Sir Walter could not help connecting the 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 two. If he had given us the English side of the race to Derby, 
 he would have described the Bank of England paying in six- 
 pences, and also the loves of the cashier.' No one who knows 
 the novels well, can question this. Fergus Maclvor's ways and 
 means, his careful arrangements for receiving subsidies in black- 
 mail, are as carefully recorded as his lavish highland hospitali- 
 ties; and when he sends his silver cup to the Gaelic bard who 
 chaunts his greatness, the faithful historian does not forget to 
 let us know that the cup is his last, and that he is hard-pressed 
 for the generosities of the future. So, too, the habitual thievish- 
 ness of the highlanders is pressed upon us quite as vividly as 
 their gallantry and superstitions. And so careful is Sir Walter 
 to paint the petty pedantries of the Scotch traditional conser- 
 vatism, that he will not spare even Charles Edward of whom 
 he draws so graceful a picture the humiliation of submitting 
 to old Bradwardine's ' solemn act of homage,' but makes him 
 go through the absurd ceremony of placing his foot on a cushion 
 to have its brogue unlatched by the dry old enthusiast of her- 
 aldic lore. Indeed it wife because Scott so much enjoyed the 
 contrast between the high sentiment of life and its dry and often 
 absurd detail, that his imagination found so much freer a vent 
 in the historical romance, than it ever found in the romantic 
 poem. Yet he clearly needed the romantic excitement of pictur- 
 esque scenes and historical interests, too. I do not think he 
 would ever have gained any brilliant success in the narrow region 
 of the domestic novel. He said, himself, in expressing his ad- 
 miration of Miss Austen, ' The big bow-wow strain I can do 
 myself, like any now going, but the exquisite touch which ren- 
 ders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, 
 from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied 
 to me/ Indeed, he tried it to some extent in St. Roman's Well, 
 and so far as he tried it, I think he failed. Scott needed a cer- 
 tain largeness of type, a strongly-marked class-life, and, where 
 it was possible, a free, out-of-doors life, for his delineations. 
 No one could paint beggars and gipsies, and wandering fiddlers, 
 and mercenary soldiers, and peasants and farmers and lawyers, 
 and magistrates, and preachers, and courtiers, and statesmen, 
 and best of all perhaps, queens and kings with anything like his 
 ability. But when it came to describing the small differences 
 of manner, differences not due to> external habits, so much as 
 
374 
 
 DICTION 
 
 to internal sentiment or education, or mere domestic circum- 
 stance, he was beyond his proper field. 
 
 Charles Dickens. He was born near Portsmouth, England, 
 in 1812; died at Rochester, in 1870. A portion of his 
 youth was spent in newspaper work; afterward, he became 
 a contributor to various magazines, quickly establishing his 
 unrivalled fame as a novelist. His name is a household word 
 wherever the English language is spoken. The most popular 
 of his novels are the " Pickwick Papers," " David Copper- 
 field," and " Old Curiosity Shop." 
 
 Criticism by Adolphus Ward. " Nature, when she gifted 
 Dickens with sensibility, observation, and imagination, had be- 
 stowed upon him yet another boon in the quality which seems 
 more prominent than any other in his whole being. The vigor 
 of Dickens a mental and moral vigpr supported by a splen- 
 did and physical organism was the parent of some of his 
 foibles ; amongst the rest, of his tendency to exaggeration. No 
 fault has been more frequently found with his workmanship 
 than this ; nor can he be said to have defended himself very 
 successfully on this head when he declared that he did ' not 
 recollect ever to have heard or seen the charge of, exaggeration 
 made against a feeble performance, though, in its feebleness, it 
 may have been most untrue.' But without this vigor he could 
 not have been creative as he was ; and in him there were ac- 
 cordingly united with rare completeness a swift responsiveness 
 to the impulses of humor and pathos, an inexhaustible fertility in 
 discovering and inventing materials for their exercise, and the 
 constant, creative desire to give to these newly-created materials 
 a vivid, plastic form. And the mention of this last-named gift 
 in Dickens suggests the query whether, finally, there is anything 
 in his manner as a writer which may prevent the continuance of 
 his extraordinary popularity. No writer can be great without 
 a manner of his own ; and that Dickens had such a manner his 
 most supercilious censurer will readily allow. His terse narra- 
 tive power, often intensely humorous in its unblushing and un- 
 winking gravity, and often deeply pathetic in its simplicity, is as 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 375 
 
 characteristic of his manner as is the supreme felicity of his 
 phrase, in which he has no equal. But no distaste for his man- 
 nerisms is likely to obscure the sense of his achievements in the 
 branch of literature to which he devoted the full powers of his 
 genius and the best energies of his nature. He introduced, in- 
 deed, no new species of prose fiction into our literature. In the 
 historical novel he made two far from unsuccessful essays, in 
 the earlier of which in particular Barnaby Rudge he showed 
 a laudable desire to enter into the spirit of a past age; but he 
 was without the reading or the patience of either the author 
 of Waverly or the author of The Virginians, and without the 
 fine historic enthusiasm which animates the broader workman- 
 ship of Westward Ho. For the purely imaginative romance, 
 on the other hand, of which in some of his works Lord Lytton 
 was the most prominent representative in contemporary Eng- 
 lish literature, Dickens' genius was not without certain affini- 
 ties ; but, to feel his full strength, he needed to touch the earth 
 with his feet. Thus it is no mere phrase to say of him that 
 he found the ideal in the real, and drew 'his inspirations from 
 the world around him." 
 
 Criticism by Beresford Chancellor. " We are somewhat 
 tenacious of applying the epithet of ' novelist ' to the author of 
 ' Pickwick/ however, for in the strict sense of the word he was 
 not a novelist. ' He was a poor story-teller he was not a 
 great plotter/ says Mr. Lang; and this is only too apparent in 
 most of the work he did, in ' Martin Chuzzlewit ' no less than 
 in ' Pickwick.' ' Our Mutual Friend ' and ' Great Expectations ' 
 show, indeed, an effort not wholly unsuccessful to combine in- 
 tricacy of plot with their author's peculiar genius for character 
 sketching; but particularly in Dickens' earlier work, all such 
 attempts are sadly to seek. It is for this reason that the small 
 tale he wrote in collaboration with Wilkie Collins has more claim 
 to be considered in the light of a novel, according to strict rules, 
 than any of the larger works which emanated from his pen 
 alone; for_no_greater English master of plot and soisatipn has 
 lived_ jthaiL the author of * The Moonstone? But Dickens has 
 been accused of other delinquencies besides that of being de- 
 fective in the more important attributes of the novelist proper. 
 He is called vulgar; he is said never to have succeeded in draw- 
 
376 FICTION 
 
 ing a lady or a gentleman ; he is attacked for want of true pathos, 
 of being, in other words, a maudlin sentimentalist. Nowadays, 
 it seems to have become an accepted proposition, that anything 
 to do with the lowest classes is necessarily vulgar, for which 
 reason ' Oliver Twist ' is attacked on this head with more as- 
 perity than ' David Copperfield/ or ' Bleak House.' Nothing 
 is so absurd. Vulgarity, using the word in its more extended 
 significance, has its home almost entirely among the middle 
 classes, more particularly the higher middle class, and often 
 among those of a still more elevated standing. To pretend to 
 be what one is not, to ape one's betters, to be ashamed of one's 
 poorer relations, in short all the forms of snobbery which are 
 nowadays so rampant, really form a vulgarity of the worst and 
 most virulent type. Now there is no instance on record of a 
 writer of fiction who set himself more sturdily to show up the 
 falsity and baseness of such conduct, with the exception of 
 Thackeray, than Dickens. It is, therefore, absurd to accuse him 
 of harboring what he tried to destroy. Throughout the mas- 
 ter's works, we see the same hatred of sham and cant, the same 
 pity for poverty and oppression, the same noble endeavor to do 
 his Utmost to lighten the burdens of the poor by making them a 
 bye-word and a scandal. ' Un honnete homme que la vue des 
 iniquites humaines faisait bondir,' as a writer in the Figaro (of 
 April, 1886), once described him. In the man himself what 
 we find of kindly generosity, of large-heartedness, of tender 
 sympathy, of joyous good-humor, of inexhaustible fun and un- 
 ostentatious simplicity, is recorded by those who knew him best 
 and loved him most. Sala and James Payne, Rimmer and Ward, 
 Langton and Dolby, have all told us how the more intimate the 
 association, the more lovable he became; and Thackeray has 
 paid to him in the ' Four Georges ' one of the noblest tributes 
 which a writer can pay to a brother author who is being set in 
 continual opposition to him. But, above all, it is in Forster's 
 ' Life,' and in Dickens' own letters and speeches, that the true 
 features of the man are best revealed. With less sterling quali- 
 ties, few men could have come through the ordeal of applause 
 and adulation which left Dickens unsullied. Like all pre-emi- 
 nent men, he was self-made; but equally like every true leader, 
 he was by birth and nature a gentleman. He was not a snob as 
 Thackeray_was^ since he was not always imagining himself one. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 He was florid in his tastes, and sometimes flashy in his dress, 
 as he often was in his style ; but it was the period in which much 
 jewelry and obtrusive cravats were in vogue, in literature as 
 well as in social life. But everything in his outward appear- 
 ance became, we are told, subservient to the power of his eyes. 
 ' Eyes/ says one who knew him, ' of the bluest blue ; eyes which 
 danced and sparkled with sunniest merriment and yet which 
 quickly softened into serious sympathy ; eyes which were bril- 
 liant and searching, and seemed always to be kindly, though 
 keenly, reading the person to whom he was talking, yet which 
 never hardened into sternness ; eyes in which especially you could 
 discern all the humanity and humour, the noble intellectual possi- 
 bilities and the manly tenderness of their possessor.' ' 
 
 George Eliot. She was born in Warwickshire, England, 
 in 1819, and died in London in 1880 a woman of remark- 
 able gifts and extraordinary achievements. As a scholar and 
 writer she has few equals in our literature. Some critics re- 
 gard her as our greatest novelist. Her literary work consists 
 of poems, translations, essays, reviews and novels. For some 
 time she was assistant editor of the Westminster Review. In 
 fiction her best known books are ' The Mill on The Floss/ 
 ' Romola/ and ' Adam Bede.' 
 
 Criticism by Richard Holt Hutton. " What is remarkable in 
 George Eliot is the striking combination in her of very deep 
 speculative power with a very great and realistic imagination. It 
 is rare to find an intellect so skilled in the analysis of the deepest 
 psychological problems, so completely at home in the conception 
 and delineation of real characters. George Eliot discusses the 
 practical influences acting in men and women, I do not say with 
 the ease of Fielding for there is a touch of carefulness, often of 
 over-carefulness in all she does, but with much of his breadth 
 and spaciousness, the breadth and spaciousness, one must re- 
 member, of a man who had seen London life in the capacity of a 
 London police magistrate. Nay, her imagination has, I do not 
 say of course the fertility, but something of the range and the 
 delight in rich historic colouring, of Sir Walter Scott's, while 
 it combines with it something too of the pleasure in ordered 
 
378 FICTION 
 
 learning, and the laborious marshalling of the picturesque re- 
 sults of learning, though her learning is usually in a very 
 different field, which gives the flavor of scholastic pride to the 
 great genius of Milton. Not that I think George Eliot's fine 
 verse entitles her to be described as a poet, though the poetic 
 side of her mind has been deep enough and true enough to lend 
 richness, depth, and harmony to her romances. I am only 
 pointing out now how much she is besides a novelist, how in- 
 evitable it was that in her novels she should range far beyond 
 the region of the most successful novelist of recent times, far 
 beyond that little world of English society which has determined 
 for novelists of the most different type of genius, for Miss 
 Austen, for Mrs. Gaskell, for Mr. Trollope, for Thackeray, and 
 for many less successful, but still very successful contemporaries, 
 their peculiar field of work. It is, indeed, a great help towards 
 understanding her true genius to compare George Eliot with 
 the school of society-novelists of whom I have spoken. What 
 one remarks about the works of those who have studied any 
 particular society as a whole far more deeply than they have 
 studied the individual characters in it, is that their creations all 
 stand on one level, are delineated, with great accuracy, down 
 to the same not very considerable depth, and no further; that 
 all, in short, are bas-reliefs cut out on the same surface. The 
 novelists of this school are perfectly inexhaustible in resource on 
 the special social ground they choose, and quite incapable of 
 varying it. And all of them disappoint us in not giving more 
 insight into those deeper roots of character which lie beneath 
 the social surface. George Eliot as a novelist has points of 
 connection with both of these schools of art, besides some char- 
 acteristics peculiarly her own. There is the same flowing ease 
 of manner, clearness of drawing, delicacy of finish, and absence 
 of excitement, which characterize the modern semi-satirical 
 school. But there is less of play in the surface-painting, more 
 of depth in the deeper characters imagined, a broader touch, a 
 stronger, direct fashion of delineation, less of manner-paint- 
 ings, and more of the bare naturalism of human life. On the 
 other hand, there is nothing of the Rembrandt-like style of Miss 
 Bronte : the light flows more equally over George Eliot's pic- 
 tures ; one finds nothing of the irregular emphasis with which 
 Cnrrer Bell's characters are drawn, or of the strong subjective 
 
/AT E,V(,7./.S7/ LITERATURE 379 
 
 colouring which tinges all her scenes. George Eliot's imagina- 
 tion, like Miss Bronte's, loves to go to the roots of character, 
 and portrays best by broad, direct strokes; but there the like- 
 ness between them, so far as there is any, ends. The reasons 
 for the deeper method and for the directer style are hardly likely 
 to have been similar in the two cases. Miss Bronte can scarcely 
 be said to have had any large, instinctive knowledge of human 
 nature : her own life and thoughts were exceptional, cast in 
 a strongly marked but not very wide mould ; her imagination 
 was solitary ; her experience was very limited ; and her own per- 
 sonality tinged all she wrote. She ' made out ' the outward life 
 and manner of her dramatis personal by the sheer force of her 
 own imagination; and as she always imagined the will and the 
 affections as the substance and center of her characters, those of 
 her delineations which are successful at all are deep, and'-their 
 manner broad. George Eliot's genius is exceedingly different. 
 Her genial, broad delineations of human life have, as I said just 
 now, more perhaps of the breadth of Fielding than of any of 
 the manners-painters of the present day. For these imagine 
 life only as it appears in a certain dress and sphere, which are 
 a kind of artificial medium for their art, life as affected by 
 drawing-rooms. George Eliot has little, if any, of their capacity 
 for catching the under-tones and allusive complexity of this sort 
 of society. She has, however, observed the phases of a more 
 natural and straightforward class of life, and she draws her 
 external world as much as possible from observation though 
 some of her Florentine pictures must have been suggested more 
 by literary study than by personal experience instead of imag- 
 ining it, like Miss Bronte, out of the heart of the characters 
 she wishes to paint. The English manners she delights in, are 
 chiefly of the simplest and most homely kind, of the rural 
 farmers and laborers, of the half-educated portion of the coun- 
 try middle-class, who have learnt no educated reticence, and 
 of the resident country gentry and clergy in their relations with 
 these rough-mannered neighbors. This is a world in which she 
 could not but learn a direct style of treatment. The habit of 
 concealing, or at most, of suggesting rather than downright ex- 
 pressing, what is closest to our hearts, is, as we know, a result 
 of education. It is quite foreign to the class of people whom 
 George Eliot knows most thoroughly, and has drawn with the 
 
3 g FICTION 
 
 fullest power. All her deepest knowledge of human nature has 
 probably been acquired among people who speak their thoughts 
 with the directness, though not with the sharp metallic ring, of 
 Miss Bronte's Yorkshire heroes. But instead of almost luxuriat- 
 ing, as Miss Bronte appears to do, in the startling emphasis of 
 this mannerism, and making all her characters precipitate them- 
 selves in speech in the way best calculated to give a strongly- 
 marked picture of the conception in her own brain, George 
 Eliot has evidently delighted to note all the varieties of form 
 which varying circumstances give to these direct and simple 
 manners, and takes as much pleasure in painting their different 
 shades as Miss Austen does in guiding her more elaborate con- 
 versations to and fro so as to elicit traits of personal character. 
 Directness of delineation is, indeed, evidently natural to the 
 author of ' Adam Bede,' but it has no tendency whatever to take, 
 with her, that form of concentrated intensity which is assumed 
 in Miss Bronte : her style has all the general composure and 
 range of tone of the life she paints, and shows her as much in 
 sympathy with the dumb and stolid phases of rural society as 
 with its more active forms. There was something of the poet in 
 both. But George Eliot's poetry is rooted in the more intellec- 
 tual emotions, Miss Bronte's was in the most personal. George 
 Eliot's poetic tendencies are rather of the kind to soften out- 
 lines and harmonize the effects of her pictures. Miss Bronte's, 
 on the other hand, were adapted to express the passion of her 
 own imagination; and while the effect was graphic and unique, 
 it was monotonous, and not unfrequently, unreal. George Eliot, 
 with a faith like that of her own ' Dinah,' would, to my mind, 
 be one of the greatest intellectual personages the world had ever 
 seen. Her imagination would gain that vivacity and spring the 
 absence of which is its only artistic defect; her noble, ethical 
 conceptions would win certainty and grandeur; her singularly 
 just and impartial judgment would lose the tinge* of gloom 
 which now seems always to pervade it; and her poetic feelings 
 would be no longer weighed down by the superincumbent mass 
 of a body of sceptical thought with which they struggle for the 
 mastery in vain. Few minds at once so speculative and so cre- 
 ative, have ever put their mark on literature. If she cannot 
 paint the glow of human enterprise like Scott, or sketch with 
 the easy rapidity of Fielding, she can do what neither of them 
 
'///. \CKKRAY 381 
 
 could do see and explain the relation of the hroadest and 
 commonest life to the deepest spring of philosophy and science. 
 With a quicker pulse of life, with a richer, happier faith, I 
 hardly see the limit to her power." 
 
 Thackeray. He was born at Calcutta in 1811, and died at 
 London in 1863. After finishing his education at Cambridge 
 he devoted himself seriously to literature, and became one 
 of England's greatest novelists. His best known works are 
 / \uiity Fair, Pendennis and The Newcomcs. 
 
 Criticism by Thomas Shaw. " Of his works as a whole it 
 may be said that they are full of humor and irony, the moral 
 purpose of. the writer not so clearly evident, but yet present in 
 them all. Social foibles, individual weaknesses, the lesser sins 
 of society, are all shown up and treated with quiet satire. Most 
 of his smaller writings are collected in the four volumes of Mis- 
 cellanies published in 1857. Here appears the poetry of Thack- 
 eray. It has been well said, ' Thackeray was not essentially 
 poetic ; that is, he did not look at everything through the medium 
 of the poetic faculty; his thoughts and imaginings were not al- 
 ways governed by a poetic law. He concealed what was poetic 
 in his nature. He is half ashamed of the sentiment which must 
 have expression. The characters he loves best are the charac- 
 ters where emotion and affection hold their sway, and he cannot 
 keep telling you so, as he writes, but he does it with a sort of 
 bashful reticence. He was thoroughly English in the structure 
 of his mind. He could have wept as well as a native of South- 
 ern Europe, and sometimes the eye is moist, but the old Gothic 
 spirit despises a man in tears ; and so he stands proudly up in 
 self-reliance and a generous manliness. The poetry of his nature 
 was something he ever kept in the recess of his soul. It gave a 
 tenderness to his rebuke, it shed a beauty on his conceptions ; 
 and as his countenance was lit with an expression of almost 
 womanly tenderness, so his writing is pervaded with a gentle 
 and loving pathos. 
 
 Hawthorne. He was born in Massachusetts July 4, 1804; 
 died at Plymouth, N. H., in 1864. After graduating at 
 
382 % FICTION 
 
 Bowdoin College, he served some years as a State official, his 
 last public appointment being United States consul at Liver- 
 pool. He is the most celebrated among American novelists. 
 His best stories are The Scarlet Letter, House of Seven 
 Gables, and The Marble Faun. 
 
 Criticism by Henry Tuckerman. " Hawthorne is distin- 
 guished for the finish of his style, and the delicacy of his psy~ 
 chological insight. He combines the metaphysical talent of 
 Brown with the refined diction of Irving. For a period of more 
 than twenty years he contributed, at intervals, to annuals and 
 magazines, the most exquisite fancy sketches and historical nar- 
 ratives, the merit of which was scarcely recognized by the public 
 at large, although cordially praised by the discriminating few. 
 These papers have been recently collected under the title of 
 Twice-told Tales, and Mosses from an Old Manse; and, seen 
 by the light of the author's present reputation, their grace, wis- 
 dom, and originality are now generally acknowledged. But it is 
 through the two romances entitled The Scarlet Letter, and The 
 House of the Seven Gables, that Hawthorne's eminence has been 
 reached. They are remarkable at once for a highly finished and 
 beautiful style, the most charming artistic skill, and intense char- 
 acterization. To these intrinsic and universal claims, they add 
 that of native scenes and subjects. Imagine such an anatomizer 
 of the human heart as Balzac, transported to a provincial town 
 of New England, and giving to its houses, streets, and history 
 the analytical power of his genius, and we realize the triumph 
 of Hawthorne. Bravely adopting familiar materials, he has 
 thrown over them the light and shadow of his thoughtful mind, 
 eliciting a deep significance and a prolific beauty ; if we may 
 use the expression, he is ideally true to the real. His invention 
 is felicitous, his tone magnetic ; his sphere borders on the super- 
 natural, and yet a chaste expression and a refined sentiment 
 interlie his most earnest utterance ; he is more suggestive than 
 dramatic. The early history of New England has found no 
 such genial and vivid illustration as his pages afford. At all 
 points his genius touches the interests of human life; now over- 
 flowing with a love of external nature as gentle as that of 
 Thomson, now intent upon the quaint or characteristic in life 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 with humor as zestful as that of Lamb, now developing the 
 horrible or pathetic with something of John Webster's dramatic 
 terror, and again buoyant with a fantasy as aerial as Shelley's 
 conceptions. And, in each instance, the staple of charming in- 
 vention is adorned with the purest graces of style. Hawthorne 
 died with the pure and permanent fame of genius, having em- 
 balmed the experience he enjoyed in Italy and England in the 
 romances of The Marble Faun and Our Old Home. What we 
 admire in this writer's genius is his felicity in the use of com- 
 mon materials. It is very difficult to give an imaginative scope 
 to a scene or a topic which familiarity has robbed of illusion. It 
 is by the association of ideas, by the halo of remembrance and 
 the magic of love, that an object usually presents itself to the 
 mind under fanciful relations. From a foreign country our na- 
 tive spot becomes picturesque ; and from the hill of manhood 
 the valley of youth appears romantic; but that is a peculiar and 
 rare mental alchemy which can transmute the dross of the com- 
 mon and the immediate into gold. Yet so does Hawthorne. 
 His Old Apple Dealer yet sits by the Old South Church, and the 
 IVilley House is inscribed every summer-day by the penknives 
 of ambitious cits. He is able to illustrate, by his rich invention 
 places and themes that are before our very eyes and in our daily 
 speech. His fancy is as free of wing at the north end of Boston, 
 or on Salem turn-pike, as that of other poets in the Vale of Cash- 
 mere or amid the Isles of Greece. He does not seem to feel the 
 necessity of distance, either of time or space, to realize his 
 enchantments. He has succeeded in attaching an ethereal inter- 
 est to home subjects, which is no small triumph. Somewhat of 
 that poetic charm which Wilson has thrown over Scottish life 
 in his Lights and Shadows, and Irving over English in his 
 Sketch-Book, and Lamb over Metropolitan in his Elia, has Haw- 
 thorne cast around New England, and his tales here and there 
 blend, as it were, with traits which endear these authors. His 
 best efforts are those in which the human predominates. Inge- 
 nuity and moral significancy are finely displayed, it is true, in 
 his allegories: but sometimes they are coldly fanciful, and do not 
 win the sympathies as in those instances where the play of the 
 heart relieves the dim workings of the abstract and supernatural. 
 Hawthorne, like all individualities, must be read in the appro- 
 priate mood. This secret of appreciation is now understood, as 
 
FICTION 
 
 regards Wordsworth. It is due to all genuine authors. To 
 many, whose mental aliment has been exciting and coarse, the 
 delicacy, meek beauties, and calm spirit of these writings will 
 but gradually unfold themselves; but those capable of placing 
 themselves in relation with Hawthorne, will discover a native 
 genius for which to be grateful and proud, and a brother whom 
 to know is to love. He certainly has done much to obviate the 
 reproach which a philosophical writer, not without reason, has 
 cast upon our authors, when he asserts their objec.t to be to as- 
 tonish rather than please." 
 
 Stevenson. He was born at Edinburgh in 1850, and died 
 in 1894. He received his education at the University of 
 Edinburgh; was called to the bar, but never practiced law, 
 devoting the whole of his life to literature. He is one of 
 the great_styji_sts ^n_oux_Jjinguage, L j;anking with Hume and 
 Macaulay. 
 
 Criticism by William H. Sheran. Mr. Stevenson enjoys the 
 reputation of being the modern representative of the romantic 
 school of fiction. There are others of high repute, for roman- 
 ticism is now the vogue, but there is hardly any other whose 
 name we would care to link with that of Walter Scott. In many 
 respects Mr. Stevenson resembles Sir Walter; there is the same 
 charm of personality, the same large-heartedness and nobility of 
 soul, the same struggle with the unkind fate which in the one 
 took the form of bankruptcy, and in the other, that of the great 
 white plague. Like Scott, he loved adventure, romance, the 
 ' call of the wild ' in man and in nature. There was in him a 
 combination of literary and story-telling charm, the former re- 
 sulting from a long and severe apprenticeship. There can be no 
 doubt but that Stevenson labored many years to acquire that 
 charming style, which, so far as style goes, must rank him above 
 Scott ; for the latter wrote too much and too hurriedly to give 
 minute attention to forms of expression and nicely adjusted word- 
 combinations such as we discover in Stevenson. It has been 
 objected that the style of Stevenson is a little deficient in natural- 
 ness, a trifle over-wrought ; critics detect here and there the 
 artificial note. Yet it is the style which captivates the reader, 
 
STEVENSON 385 
 
 and gives to his writings a claim to immortality. But the claim 
 rests upon other ground as well, for Stevenson had the true 
 genius for story-telling. The reader of ' Treasure Island ' or 
 * The Suicide Club,' or ' John Silver ' cannot escape the con- 
 viction that the author is a master in the art of weaving plot, and 
 of holding the attention as if by spell or magic. The magic wand 
 of Prospero seems to have been recovered by him, and, as he 
 waves it over remote scenes and ages, all the burial places of 
 romance give up their dead. His life was shortened by disease 
 the fate of many a literary genius, or he might have made a 
 still stronger claim to universal recognition, but like Keats or 
 Shelley, he has left ample proof of his genius. 
 
 Other Famous Writers. The writers of fiction are legion, 
 and all those who deserve special mention are so numerous 
 that it is quite impossible to give them space in this manual. 
 Writers like Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Sudermann, Tolstoi, 
 William Dean Howells, Henry James, James Lane Allen and 
 a host of others come to mind at once. But those mentioned 
 and criticised may be taken as representatives of what fiction 
 is at its best; they are names long identified with the highest 
 and best that has been produced in this department of liter- 
 ary art. The following estimate of the value of fiction from 
 the pen of one of our most accomplished critics and men of 
 culture may fittingly close an extended analysis and study of 
 the subject. 
 
 General Criticism by Hamilton Wright Mabie. " Fiction, 
 as a literary form, has steadily advanced in importance as the 
 social idea has gained in clearness and control ; has steadily deep- 
 ened and broadened as the sense of social obligation and the 
 feeling of social sympathy have deepened and broadened. ' Sir 
 Charles Grandison ' and ' Pamela ' have a lessened interest for a 
 generation who have known what life meant to ' Adam Bede ' 
 and ' Anna Karenina ; ' but the difference between the earlier 
 and later novelists is not so great as the difference between our 
 ancestors and ourselves. We no longer weep over the misfor- 
 tunes of romantic gentlemen and the misery of lovelorn ladies 
 
386 FICTION 
 
 of high degree; life has become so earnest, through our new 
 consciousness of the community of suffering among all men, 
 that we are no longer touched by the old conventional devices 
 of the novelists. The great novels of today are so pervaded by 
 life, so profoundly vitalized by genuine insight and sympathy, 
 that they often seem more real to us than the experiences through 
 which we actually pass. We accept nothing as art which does 
 not first convince us of its reality as life. It would be easy 
 and profitable to point out the individual contributions of the 
 great novelists to the science which concerns itself with men 
 in their social relations ; but it must suffice to emphasize the sig- 
 nificance of fiction as a form of literary art. Each master of this 
 modern art has illustrated some aspect of social life, some form 
 of social influence, some peculiar social condition. The novel of 
 tendency has been only a little more emphatic, a little more con- 
 sciously directed to a given end, than the great mass of novels 
 of the first rank. ' Romola ' and 'Anna Karenina ' are as defi- 
 nite and decisive in their purpose as ' Uncle Tom's Cabin,' or 
 ' Ramona.' Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Bjornson, Tour- 
 gueneff, Balzac, Spielhagen, Zola, Daudet, are never triflers; 
 whatever their differences and their defects, they are always pro- 
 foundly in earnest to represent the fact as they see it. The fact 
 may be repulsive, even loathsome, but it is always a fact worth 
 considering "because of its human significance. Tourgueneff's 
 ' Annals of a Sportsman/ Mrs. Stowe's * Uncle Tom's Cabin,' 
 Mrs. Jackson's ' Ramona,' Walter Besant's ' All Sorts and Con- 
 ditions of Men,' have each produced results so definite and 
 marked as to be unmistakable; but these stories have not been 
 more earnest in tone than Daudet's ' Nabob ' or ' Jack,' Thack- 
 eray's ' Vanity Fair,' Balzac's ' Eugenie Grandet,' George Eliot's 
 ' Middlemarch.' Each of these admirable works, like all works 
 of their rank, has touched life at first hand, and portrayed or in- 
 terpreted it with masterly insight and power. In each the social 
 instinct has been evident, and each in turn has disclosed some 
 social fact in its large relations and results. To see life as it is 
 and men as they are, is the common purpose of all great writers 
 of fiction. So complete and searching has been the survey of 
 social life by the novelists that 'the society of today, with all its 
 gradations and differences, could be reproduced from the pages 
 of fiction. From the days of Fielding to those of Charles Reade, 
 
STEl'HNSON 387 
 
 English life has never missed faithful record at the hands of 
 those who have comprehended it, because they have pierced it 
 with their sympathetic insight. Every great political movement 
 like Chartism, every striking political incident like the Gordon 
 riots, every form of discontent and agitation among the lower 
 classes, has had fit and often lasting record. While George Eliot 
 has set forth the tremendous force of inheritance and environ- 
 ment, the vigorous and often coarse brush of Dickens has painted, 
 on a great canvas, the homely life of the common people; and 
 .the inimitable art of Thackeray, equally akin to irony and tears, 
 has made us permanent possessors of the social habit and charac- 
 ter of the last century. The virile genius of Bjornson, in the 
 latest work of his hand, ' Flags in the City and the Harbor,' deals 
 with some of the most obscure problems of social and family 
 life; Tourgueneff has made Russian character under the pressure 
 of absolutism comprehensible to us ; Tolstoi commands the atten- 
 tion of a new constituency of readers deeply moved by the mar- 
 velous fidelity with which he produces phases of experience, hid- 
 den processes of character, at once remote and familiar ; while of 
 Zola it must be confessed, whatever we think of his themes and 
 his art, that he at least assumes to lay bare the very heart of 
 certain social conditions in France. Fiction is unquestionably the 
 most attractive and influential form through which men of liter- 
 ary genius express themselves today ; and no fact of social sig- 
 nificance, no human relationship, no class limitation, capacity or 
 condition, will escape the instinctive search for life which pos- 
 sesses this generation. That which the student of social ques- 
 tions seeks as matter of science the novelist seeks as matter of 
 art." 
 
PART III 
 
 CHAPTER XLIII 
 
 POETRY 
 
 Before dealing- with the main divisions of this department 
 of literature, it is necessary to present some criticism on 
 poetry in general, with the view to obtain a clear understand- 
 ing of what poetry is, how it differs from prose, and what 
 qualities of literary art are therein displayed to best advantage. 
 The criticism that follows, taken from standard authors, is 
 the best obtainable on the subject. 
 
 Criticism by William Wordsworth. " What is meant by the 
 word poet? What is a poet? To whom does he address him- 
 self? And what language is to be expected from him? He is a 
 man speaking to men : a man, it is true, endowed with more 
 lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a 
 greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive 
 soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man 
 pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices 
 more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him ; delight- 
 ing to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested 
 in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create 
 them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has 
 added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent 
 things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in him- 
 self passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those 
 produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the gen- 
 eral sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly 
 resemble the passions produced by real events, than anything 
 which from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are 
 accustomed to feel in themselves : whence, and from practice, he 
 
VIEWED BY WORDSWORTH 389 
 
 has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he 
 thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, 
 by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in 
 him without immediate external excitement. But whatever por- 
 tion of this faculty we may suppose even the greatest Poet to 
 possess, there cannot be a doubt that the language which it will 
 suggest to. him, must often, in liveliness and truth, fall short of 
 that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual pres- 
 sure of those passions, certain shadows of which the Poet thus 
 produces, or feels to be produced, in himself." 
 
 Principle of Selection. " However exalted a notion we would 
 wish to cherish of the character of a Poet, it is obvious that while 
 he describes and imitates passions, his employment is in some 
 degree mechanical, compared with the freedom and power of real 
 and substantial action and suffering. So that it will be the wish 
 of the Poet to bring his feelings near to those of the persons 
 whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time, per- 
 haps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound 
 and identify his own feelings with theirs ; modifying only the 
 language which is thus suggested to him by a consideration that 
 he describes for a particular purpose, that of giving pleasure. 
 Here, then, he will apply the principle of selection which has been 
 already insisted upon. He will depend upon this for removing 
 what otherwise would be painful or disgusting in the passion ; 
 he will feel that there is no necessity to trick out or to elevate 
 nature; and, the more industriously he applies this principle, the 
 deeper will be his faith that no words, which his fancy or im- 
 agination can suggest, will be comparable with those which are 
 the emanations of reality and truth." 
 
 Language. " But it may be said by those who do not object to 
 the general spirit of these remarks, that, as it is impossible for 
 the Poet to produce upon all occasions language as exquisitely 
 fitted for the passion as that which the real passion itself sug- 
 gests, it is proper that he should consider himself as in the situa- 
 tion of a translator, (who does not scruple to substitute excel- 
 lencies of another kind for those which are unattainable by him ; 
 and endeavors occasionally to surpass his original, in order to make 
 some amends for the general inferiority to which he feels that he 
 
390 POETRY 
 
 must submit. But this would be to encourage idleness and un- 
 manly despair. Further, it is the language of men who speak 
 of what they do not understand ; who talk of poetry as of a matter 
 of amusement and idle pleasure; who will converse with us as 
 gravely about a taste for poetry, as they express it, as if it were a 
 thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or 
 Sherry. Aristotle, I have been told, has said, that poetry is the 
 most philosophic of all writing: it is so: its object is truth, not 
 individual and local, but general, and operative ; not standing upon 
 external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion ; 
 truth which is its own testimony, which gives competence and 
 confidence to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives it 
 from the same tribunal. Poetry is the image of man and nature. 
 The obstacles which stand in the way of the fidelity of the Biogra- 
 pher and Historian, and of their consequent utility, are incalcu- 
 lably greater than those which are to be encountered by the Poet 
 who comprehends the dignity of his art. The Poet writes under 
 one restriction only, namely, the necessity of giving immediate 
 pleasure to a human being possessed of that information which 
 may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, 
 an astronomer or a natural philosopher, but as a Man. Except 
 this one restriction, there is no object standing between the Poet 
 and the image of things ; between this and the Biographer and His- 
 torian, there are a thousand." 
 
 Poet and Scientist." To this knowledge which all men carry 
 about with them, and to these sympathies in which, without any 
 other discipline than that of our daily life, we are fitted to take 
 delight, the Poet principally directs his attention. He considers 
 man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind 
 of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting 
 properties of nature. And thus the Poet, prompted by this feel- 
 ing of pleasure, which accompanies him through the whole course 
 of his studies, converses with general nature, with affections akin 
 to those, which, through the labor and length of time, the Man of 
 Science has raised up in himself, by conversing with those par- 
 ticular parts of nature which are the objects of his studies. The 
 knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of Science is pleasure; 
 but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as the necessary part 
 of our existence, our natural and inalienable inheritance; the other 
 
VIEWED BY WORDSWORTH 
 
 is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by 
 no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow- 
 beings. The Man of Science seeks truth as a remote and un- 
 known benefactor ; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude : the 
 Poet, winging a song in which all human beings join with him, 
 rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly 
 companion. / Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowl- 
 edge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance 
 of all science.! Emphatically may it be said of the Poet, as Shakes- 
 peare hath said of man, ' That he looks before and after/ He 
 is the rock of defence for human nature ; an upholder and pre- 
 server, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In 
 spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, 
 of laws and customs : in spite of things silently gone out of mind, 
 and things violently destroyed ; the Poet binds together by passion 
 and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread 
 over the whole earth, and over all time. The objects of the Poet's 
 thoughts are everywhere ; though the eyes and senses of men are, 
 it is true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he 
 can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. 
 Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge it is as immortal 
 as the heart of man. If the labors of Men of Science should ever 
 create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, 
 and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will 
 sleep then no more than at present ; he will be ready to follow the 
 steps of the Man of Science, not only in those general indirect 
 effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst 
 of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of 
 the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper ob- 
 jects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if 
 the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to 
 us, and the relations under which the"y are contemplated by the 
 followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and 
 palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the 
 time should ever come when what is now called science, thus 
 familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form 
 of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the 
 transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a 
 dear and genuine inmate of the household of man. It is not, 
 then, to be supposed that any one, who holds that sublime notion 
 
POETRY 
 
 of Poetry which I have attempted to convey, will break in upon 
 the sanctity and truth of his pictures by transitory and accidental 
 ornaments, and endeavor to excite admiration of itself by arts, 
 the necessity of which must manifestly depend upon the assumed 
 meanness of his subject." 
 
 Distinction of Language." What has been thus far said applies 
 to Poetry in general ; but especially to those parts of composition 
 where the Poet speaks through the mouths of his characters ; and 
 upon this point it appears to authorize the conclusion that there 
 are few persons of good sense, who would not allow that the 
 dramatic parts of composition are defective, in proportion as they 
 deviate from the real language of nature, and are colored by a 
 diction of the Poet's own, either peculiar to him, as an individual 
 poet, or belonging simply to Poets in general ; to a body of men 
 who, from the circumstance of their composition being in metre, 
 it is expected will employ a particular language. It is not, then, 
 in the dramatic parts of composition that we look for this distinc- 
 tion of language ; but still it may be proper and necessary where 
 the Poet speaks to us in his own person and character. To this 
 I answer by referring the reader to the description before given 
 of a Poet. Among the qualities there enumerated as principally 
 conducing to form a poet, is implied nothing differing in kind from 
 other men, but only in degree. The sum of what was said is, that 
 the Poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater 
 promptness to think and feel without immediate external excite- 
 ment, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feel- 
 ings as are produced in him, in that manner. 
 
 Summary. " I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow 
 of powerful feelings : it takes its origin from emotion recollected 
 in tranquillity : the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of 
 reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, 
 kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is 
 gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. 
 In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a 
 mood similar to this, it is carried on ; but the emotion, of whatever 
 kind, and in whatever degree, from various causes, is qualified by 
 various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, 
 which are voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, 
 
VIEWED BY WORDSWORTH 
 
 be in a state .of enjoyment If Nature be thus cautious to preserve 
 in a state of enjoyment a being so employed, the J'oet ought to 
 .profit by the lesson held forth to him, and ought especially to take 
 care, that, whatever passions he communicates to his reader, those 
 passions, if his reader's mind be sound and vigorous, should al- 
 ways be accompanied with an overbalance of pleasure. Now the 
 music of harmonious metrical language, the sense of difficulty 
 overcome, and the blind association of pleasure which has 'been 
 previously received from works of rhyme or metre of the same 
 or similar construction, an indistinct perception perpetually re- 
 newed of language closely resembling that of real life, and yet, in 
 the circumstance of metre, differing from it so widely all these 
 imperceptibly make up a complex feeling of delight, which is of 
 the most important use in tempering the painful feeling always 
 found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper pas- 
 sions. This effect is always produced in pathetic and impassioned 
 poetry; while, in lighter compositions, the ease and gracefulness 
 with which the poet manages his numbers are themselves con- 
 fessedly a principal source of the gratification of the reader. All 
 that is necessary to say, however, upon this subject, may be 
 effected by affirming, what few persons will deny, that of two 
 descriptions, either of passions, manners, or characters, each of 
 them equally well executed, the one in prose and the other in 
 verse, the verse will be read a hundred times where the prose is 
 read once." 
 
CHAPTER XLIV 
 POETRY (CONTINUED) 
 
 Criticism by Shelley. " Poetry, in a general sense, may be 
 defined to be * the expression of the imagination :' and poetry is 
 connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over 
 which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, 
 like the alterations of an ever-changing wind over an ^olian 
 lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. 
 But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps 
 within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, 
 and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal 
 adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impres- 
 sions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate 
 its chords to the motions of that which strikes them, in a de- 
 termined proportion of sound; even as the musician can accom- 
 modate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at play by 
 itself will express its delight by its voice and motions ; and every 
 inflexion of tone and every, gesture will bear exact relation to a 
 corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions which 
 awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression; 
 and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died 
 away, so the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions 
 the duration of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the 
 cause. In relation to the objects which delight a child, these 
 expressions are what poetry is to higher objects. The savage 
 (for the savage is to ages what the child is to years) expresses 
 the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a simi- 
 lar manner; and language and gesture, together with plastic or 
 pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect 
 of those objects, and of his apprehension of them. Man in 
 society, with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the 
 object of the passions and pleasures of man ; an additional class 
 of emotions produces an augmented treasure of expressions ; 
 and language, gesture, and the imitative arts become a,t once 
 
 394 
 
VIEWED BY SHELLEY 
 
 the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture, the 
 chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony. 
 
 Origin of Poetry. " In the youth of the world, men dance 
 and sing and imitate natural objects, observing in these actions, 
 as in all others, a certain rhythm or order. And, although all 
 men observe a similar, they observe not the same, order, in the 
 motions of the dance, in the melody of the song, in the combina- 
 tions of language, in the series of their imitations of natural ob- 
 jects. For there is a certain order or rhythm belonging to each 
 of these classes of mimetic representation, from which the hearer 
 and the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleasure than 
 from any other: the sense of an approximation to this order has 
 been called taste by modern writers. Every man in the infancy 
 of art observes an order which approximates more or less closely 
 to that from which this highest delight results ; but the diversity 
 is not sufficiently marked, as that its gradations should be sensi- 
 ble, except in those instances where the predominance of this 
 faculty of approximation to the beautiful (for so we may be per- 
 mitted to name the relation between this highest pleasure and its 
 cause) is very great. Those in whom it exists in excess are 
 poets, in the most universal sense of the word ; and the pleasure 
 resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of 
 society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to 
 others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community. 
 Their language is vitally metaphorical ; that is, it marks the 
 before unapprehended relation of things and perpetuates their 
 apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, 
 through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of 
 pictures of integral thoughts ; and then, if no new poets should 
 arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus 
 disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of 
 human intercourse. These similitudes of relations are finely said 
 by Lord Bacon to be ' the same footsteps of nature impressed 
 upon the various subjects of the world' and he considers the 
 faculty which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms com- 
 mon to all knowledge. In the infancy of society every author 
 is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to 
 be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful ; in a word, 
 the good which exists in the relation subsisting, first between 
 
39 6 POETRY 
 
 existence and perception, and secondly between perception and 
 expression. Every original language near to its source is in it- 
 self the chaos of a cyclic poem : the copiousness of lexicography 
 and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, 
 and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of 
 poetry." 
 
 Work of Poets. " But poets, or those who imagine and ex- 
 press this indestructible order, are not only the authors of lan- 
 guage and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary 
 and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders 
 of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the 
 teachers who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful 
 and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the in- 
 visible world which is called religion. Hence, all originaf re- 
 ligions are allegorical or susceptible of allegory, and, like 
 Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according 
 to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they ap- 
 peared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legisla- 
 tors, or prophets : a poet essentially comprises and unites both 
 these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present, 
 as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present 
 things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the 
 present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the 
 fruit of latest time. 
 
 Materials of Poetry. " Language, color, form, and religious 
 and civil habits of action are all the instruments and ma- 
 terials of poetry; they may be called poetry by that figure of 
 speech which considers the effect as a synonym of the cause. 
 But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrange- 
 ments of language, and, especially, metrical language, which are 
 created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within 
 the invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature 
 itself of language, which is a more direct representation of the 
 actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of 
 more various and delicate combinations than colour, form, or 
 motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the control of that 
 faculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarily 
 produced by the imagination, and has relation to the thoughts 
 
VIEWED BY SHELLEY 397 
 
 alone; but all other materials, instruments and conditions of art 
 have relations among each other, which limit and interpose be- 
 tween conception and expression. The former is as a mirror 
 which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of 
 which both are mediums of communication. Hence, the fame of 
 sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers 
 of the great masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that 
 of those who have employed language as the hieroglyphic of their 
 thoughts, has never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense 
 of the term; as two performers of equal skill will produce un- 
 equal effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators 
 and founders of religions, so long as their instructions last, alone 
 seems to exceed that of poets in the restricted sense; but it can 
 scarcely be a question whether, if we deduct the celebrity which 
 their flattery of the gross opinions of the vulgar usually con- 
 ciliates, together with that which belonged to them in their 
 higher character of poets, any excess will remain. We have thus 
 circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of that art which 
 is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of the 
 faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circle still 
 narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured and 
 unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and 
 verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy. Sounds as well as 
 thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that 
 which they represent, and a perception of the order of those rela- 
 tions has always been found connected with a perception of the 
 order of the relations of thoughts. Hence, the language of poets 
 has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence 
 of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely 
 less indispensable to a communication of its influence than the 
 words themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. 
 Hence, the vanity of translation ; it were as wise to cast a violet 
 into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its 
 color and odor, as to seek to transfuse from one language into 
 another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again 
 from its seed, or it will bear no flower and this is the burden 
 of the curse of Babel." 
 
 Poets and Prose Writers. " An observation of the regular 
 mode of the recurrence of harmony in the language of poetical 
 
39 g POETRY 
 
 minds, together with its relation to music, produced metre, or a 
 certain system of traditional forms of harmony and language. 
 Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should accommodate 
 his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony, which 
 is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed convenient and 
 popular, and to be preferred, especially in such composition as in- 
 cludes much action ; but every great poet must inevitably innovate 
 upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his 
 peculiar versification. The distinction between poets and prose 
 writers is a vulgar error. The distinction between philosophers 
 and poets has been anticipated. Plato was essentially a poet 
 the truth and splendor of his imagery, and the melody of his 
 language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive. 
 He rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, 
 because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested in 
 shape and action, and he forebore to invent any regular plan of 
 rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the varied 
 pauses of his style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence of his 
 periods, but with little success. Lord Bacon was a poet. His 
 language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the 
 sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philoso- 
 phy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and then 
 bursts the circumference of the reader's mind, and pours itself 
 forth together with it into the universal element with which it has 
 perpetual sympathy. All the authors of revolutions in opinion 
 are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as 
 their words unveil the permanent analogy of things by images 
 which participate in the life of truth ; but as their periods are 
 harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in themselves the ele- 
 ments of verse; being the echo of the eternal music. Nor are 
 those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of 
 rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects, less 
 capable of perceiving and teaching the. truth of things, than those 
 who have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante and Milton 
 (to confine ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the 
 very loftiest power." 
 
 Functions of the Poetic Faculty." The functions of the poetic 
 faculty are twofold ; by one it creates new materials of knowledge, 
 and power, and pleasure ; by the other it engenders in the mind a 
 
VIEWED BY SHELLEY 
 
 desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain 
 rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good. 
 The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at 
 periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating prin- 
 ciple, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceeds 
 the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal 
 laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy 
 for that which animates it." 
 
 Poetry and Knowledge.- " Poetry is indeed something divine. 
 It is at once the center and circumference of knowledge ; it is 
 that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science 
 must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of 
 all other systems of thought ; it is that from which all spring, 
 and that which adorns all ; and that which, if blighted, denies the 
 fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the 
 nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. 
 It is the perfect and the consummate surface and bloom of all 
 things ; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture 
 of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of un- 
 faded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What 
 were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship what were the scenery 
 of this beautiful universe which we inhabit ; what were our con- 
 solations on this side of the grave and what were our aspira- 
 tions beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire 
 from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calcu- 
 lation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power 
 to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man 
 cannot say, ' I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even 
 cannot say it ; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which 
 some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to 
 transitory brightness ; this power arises from within, like the 
 colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, 
 and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either 
 of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable 
 in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the 
 greatness of the results ; but when composition begins, inspira- 
 tion is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that 
 Kis ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble 
 shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. 
 
4 00 POETRY 
 
 A Record of the Best Minds. " Poetry is the record of the best 
 and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. We are 
 aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feelings some- 
 times associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our 
 own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing un- 
 bidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression : so 
 ^ that even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot be 
 but pleasure, participating as it does .in the nature of its object. 
 It is, as it were, the interpenetration of a diviner nature through 
 our own ; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, 
 which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only 
 as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. These and correspond- 
 ing conditions of being are experienced principally by those of 
 the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; 
 and the state of mind produced by them is at -war with every 
 base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and 
 friendship is essentially linked with such emotions ; and whilst 
 they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets 
 are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most 
 refined organizations, but they can colour all that they combine 
 with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world ; a word, a trait 
 in the representation of a scene or a passion will touch the en- 
 chanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced 
 these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the 
 past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beau- 
 tiful in the world ; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which 
 haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language 
 or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news 
 of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide, because 
 there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit 
 which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems 
 from decay the visitations of the divinity in man. Poetry turns 
 all things to loveliness ; it exalts the beauty of that which is most 
 beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed ; it 
 marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and 
 change ; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable 
 things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving 
 within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous 
 sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its 
 secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which 
 
VIEWED BY SHELLEY 4 Oi 
 
 flow from death through life ; it strips the veil of familiarity from 
 the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is 
 the spirit of its forms. All things exist as they are perceived : 
 at least in relation to the percipient. * The mind is its own place, 
 and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' But 
 poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the ac- 
 cident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its 
 own figured curtain, or withdraws life's dark veil from before 
 the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our 
 being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which .the 
 familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe 
 of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our 
 inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the 
 wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we .per- 
 ceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the 
 universe, after it has. been annihilated in our minds by the recur- 
 rence of impressions blunted by reiteration. It justifies the bold 
 and true words of Tasso : ' Non merita nome di creatore, se non 
 Iddio ed il Poetaf * 
 
 Qualities of a Poet- " A poet, as he is the author to others of 
 the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue and glory, so he ought per- 
 sonally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illus- 
 trious of men. As to his glory, let time be challenged to declare 
 whether the fame of any other institutor of human life be com- 
 parable to that of a poet. That he is the wisest, the happiest, and 
 the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible : 
 the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, 
 of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into 
 the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men : and the 
 exceptions, as they regard those who possessed the poetic faculty 
 in a high, yet inferior degree, will be found on consideration to 
 confine rather than destroy the rule. Let us for a moment stoop 
 to the arbitration of popular breath, and usurping and uniting 
 in our own persons the incompatible characters of accuser, wit- 
 ness, judge, and executioner, let us decide, without trial, testi- 
 mony, or form, that certain motives of those who are ' there sit- 
 ting where we may not soar/ are reprehensible. Let us assume 
 that Homer was a drunkard., that Virgil was a flatterer, that 
 Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon 
 
4 02 POETRY 
 
 was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was 
 a poet-laureate. It is inconsistent with the division of our sub- 
 ject to cite living poets, but posterity has done ample justice to 
 the great names now referred to. Their errors have been 
 weighed and found to have been dust in the balance ; if their sins 
 ' were as scarlet, they are now white as snow ; ' they have been 
 washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time. Ob- 
 serve in what a ludicrous chaos the imputations of real or 
 fictitious crime have been confused in the contemporary calumnies 
 against poetry and poets ; consider how little is as it appears 
 or appears as it is; look to your own motives, and judge not, lest 
 ye be judged." 
 
 Poetry and Logic." Poetry, as has been said, differs in this 
 respect from logic, that it is not subject to the control of the 
 active powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence have 
 no necessary connection with the consciousness or will. It is pre- 
 sumptuous to determine that these are the necessary conditions of 
 all mental causation, when mental effects are experienced unsus- 
 ceptible of being referred to them. The frequent recurrence of 
 the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may produce in the 
 mind a habit of order and harmony correlative with its own na- 
 ture and with its effects upon other minds. But in the intervals 
 of inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, 
 a poet becomes a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux 
 of the influences under which others habitually live. But as he is 
 more delicately organized than other men, and sensible to pain 
 and pleasure, both his own and that of others, in a degree un- 
 known to them, he will avoid the one and pursue the other with 
 an ardour proportioned to this difference. And he renders him- 
 self obnoxious to calumny when he neglects to observe the cir- 
 cumstances under which these objects of universal pursuit and 
 flight have disguised themselves in one another's garments." 
 
 Sources of Criticism. Besides the critics quoted in the 
 foregoing pages, the criticism of Aristotle, Horace, Vida, 
 Boileau, not to mention, such critics as Johnson, Puttenham, 
 Sidney, Gosse, Stedman, Lacy, Arnold, in our own tongue, 
 ought to be familiar to the student. Authorities ancient and 
 
VIEWED BY SHELLEY 403 
 
 modern form a small library. But throughout this mass of 
 criticism there is a large amount of repetition; and the pas- 
 sages quoted, here, while avoiding such repetition, exhibit the 
 matter fairly well out of English stores, giving the student 
 a fair estimate of what poetry is, and the place it holds in 
 literature. There remains to consider the chief divisions of 
 poetry : the drama, the epic and the lyric. 
 
CHAPTER XLV 
 THE DRAMA 
 
 Definition.- The word, drama, is derived from the Greek 
 (drawo) and signifies action. Aristotle defines the drama as 
 an action complete, organic, with unity of theme and purpose. 
 Lessing defines it as the mirror of human life; he calls it the 
 highest form of literary art inasmuch as the dramatic artist 
 holds the mirror up to life in its most complex and subtle 
 relations. The drama is a work of art because it is an imita- 
 tion; it imitates action; it presents personages as real and as 
 acting. Hence, Schlegel calls dramatic art an imitation in 
 the way of action. The drama originated in man's love of 
 imitation.. " To imitate," says Aristotle, " is instinctive in 
 man from his infancy; and from imitation all men naturally 
 receive pleasure imitation in voice and gesture, in dress and 
 decoration, in character and action." But of these various 
 imitations, character and action are vitally related to the 
 drama. 
 
 Meaning of an " Action." The action in dramatic art has 
 a specific meaning. It implies an operation of the will ; a 
 fulfillment or carrying out of a personal resolution. The 
 action must, therefore, present itself to the human mind as 
 having its source in a human or superhuman will ; in other 
 words, persons, and not brutes or the inferior creation, must 
 be represented as acting. Hence, the standard phrase, Dra- 
 m-atis personae. The action of a drama connotes an actor; 
 hence, dramas are written to be acted to be interpreted by 
 
 404 
 
THE ACTION 
 
 an actor. Therefore, properly speaking, the literary drama is 
 a misnomer. The title, literary drama, is sometimes used of 
 works kept apart from the stage; but the true drama is in- 
 separable from the actor and the stage. The action of the 
 drama has for its necessary correlative the actor. He is the 
 interpreter of the action; and he is always kept in mind by 
 the dramatic artist. Hence, there is a vital connection be- 
 tween the dramatic art and the histrionic art. 
 
 
 
 The First Requirement for the Action. The drama ap- 
 peals, in the first place, to our intelligence. Therefore, the 
 action of the play should have a logical sequence a begin- 
 ning, a middle, and an end. The beginning states the cause 
 of the action ; the middle, the development of the action ; the 
 end, the result of the action; hence, in the drama there is a 
 premise, an argument, and a conclusion. 
 
 The Second Requirement for the Action. The action should 
 contain a unifying idea an idea that gives organic unity 
 and completeness to the drama. Aristotle calls it the dramatic 
 idea ; he calls it dramatic, because it involves such a theme as 
 love, jealousy, ambition a theme which impels men to act; 
 the dramatic idea involves, besides the general theme of 
 love or ambition, a particular theme such as the love of 
 Romeo ; the ambition of Caesar. In other words, the dra- 
 matic idea is concreted in some personal example. For ex- 
 ample, the personification of ambition leading to moral ruin 
 in Macbeth. 
 
 A Third Requirement for the Action. The drama is based 
 on the truth of life; hence, probability is essential to the action. 
 An improbable theme, or the improbable treatment of a theme, 
 is but a travesty of dramatic art. The action must appeal 
 to the audience as natural and likely -to occur. 
 
406 THE DRAMA 
 
 A Fourth Requirement for the Action. The action in- 
 volves incidents, a series of happenings; these incidents lie 
 about every dramatic idea in greater or less proportion. The 
 dramatic idea cannot stand unless supported by these inci- 
 dents. For example, the assassination of a man or the be- 
 heading of a woman would give no other sensation than that 
 of horror; but when we know with all the attendant circum- 
 stances, that one is Robespierre and the other Marie Antoi- 
 nette, we feel at jDnce the force of the dramatic idea. In 
 other words, the conditions and the cause, as well as the re- 
 sult of the action, are essential. The incidents and happen- 
 ings that support the action are organized into acts. Custom 
 has divided dramas of serious import into five acts; but this 
 is largely a convenience ; there is no arbitrary number. Aris- 
 totle makes no mention of acts ; though the Greek plays had 
 irregular pauses sustained by the chorus. Shakespeare's plays 
 were not originally so divided. The acts as parts of a drama, 
 are separated by an interval. The spectator supposes certain 
 things to pass in the intervening time things of.no ma- 
 terial interest, though occurring in the natural development 
 of the dramatic idea. For example, the twenty years' sleep 
 of Rip Van Winkle. Moreover, there are particular reasons 
 why there should be periods of rest. There are many plays 
 of great intensity where the chief actor could not bear the 
 strain, physical, mental, and emotional. For example, Julius 
 Caesar, Richelieu; among modern dramas, Cyrano de Ber- 
 gerac. The intervals between the acts allow rest and a hus- 
 bandry of resources. Again, the several acts present distinct 
 pictures, and so assist in the final and full understanding of 
 the drama. Modern custom divides a drama into acts; the 
 acts, into scenes ; and all contribute to intelligent work and 
 to the general understanding of the play in the performance. 
 Each scene accomplishes something, and the sum of these 
 scenes makes the act, as the sum of the acts makes the play. 
 
THE ACTION 407 
 
 The length of acts and scenes cannot be determined with 
 mathematical precision. The length of an act is determined 
 by what that act has to accomplish. Acts are long and short, 
 and vary like paragraphs in an essay, according to the im- 
 portance of their subordinate themes. 
 
 The Fifth Requirement for the Action. The action of the 
 drama must possess importance and magnitude. The object 
 of the struggle such as the drama implies, ought to have suffi- 
 cient dignity to command general attention. Hence, the chief 
 characters of the drama are, as a rule, people from the higher 
 walks of life statesmen, kings, cardinals, commanders ; 
 also supernatural beings angels, devils, gods. These char- 
 acters naturally excite interest. The importance and magni- 
 tude of the action depend not only upon the natural dignity 
 of the chief characters, but also upon the importance of their 
 acts. For example, a king playing chess ; a king playing 
 for a neighboring crown. In other words, both character 
 and action should be important. Judged by this standard the 
 Crucifixion furnishes the best material for a drama. 
 
 The Sixth Requirement for the Action. The action of the 
 drama should represent all that is important to the under- 
 standing of the play, in the strong excitement of the charac- 
 ters and in a continuously progressive increase of effects. 
 The action must be capable of the strongest dramatic excite- 
 ment; that is to say, it must contain many thrilling moments, 
 climax succeeding climax, till the final catastrophe; person- 
 ages must be represented in their most intimate emotional 
 relations with each other, in order to excite a corresponding 
 emotion in the audience. Moreover, the struggle of the hero 
 should be such as the audience may easily understand and 
 sympathize with. Hence, the elemental and universal pas- 
 sions love, hatred, cruelty, revenge, ambition, are the best 
 
408 THE DRAMA 
 
 themes for the drama. They make the widest appeal, and 
 are capable of the strongest dramatic excitement. 
 
 Divisions of the Action. The smallest division of the ac- 
 tion is the scene. Scenes are of two kinds : first, the painted 
 picture, commonly known as the scenery of the stage; sec- 
 ondly, what actually takes place, what is said and done by the 
 players. It is, therefore, a segment of the action. Each act 
 has its special function a distinctness and a relative com- 
 pleteness of its own. An act is made up of scenes, just as a 
 play is made up of acts. Each act, to the smallest particle, 
 must have a definite purpose ; so with each scene. All scenes 
 are incidents leading up to a main incident called the climax. 
 Threads run through the drama, binding the smallest parts 
 together, like nerves in the human body. 
 
 First Requirement for the Scene. A scene must accom- 
 plish something toward the general result. The impression 
 made by a scene may be very strong of itself, very beautiful 
 or very pathetic ; but if it does not belong in every fibre to the 
 action, dramatic law has no pardon for it. 
 
 Second Requirement for the Scene. Each scene must be 
 in sequence. It must occupy its proper place in the develop- 
 ment of the action; it must sustain a gradual scale leading 
 up to the climax and down to the catastrophe. The skill of 
 the dramatic artist is shown by so arranging the scenes as to 
 secure an orderly, yet ever-increasing momentum in the action 
 of the drama. 
 
 The Dialogue in the Scene. The dialogue is, as a rule, 
 required to make a scene. The greater part of the action is 
 carried on in dialogue. The dialogue implies two persons 
 either in harmony with each other, or at variance. Their 
 
THE MONOLOGUE 400 
 
 agreement or opposition furthers the action. Most scenes 
 are, of necessity, dialogues. Human life is thus best presented 
 to an audience. Like every particle in the dramatic struc- 
 ture, the dialogue must follow certain laws. First, it must 
 be organic, with definiteness of purpose. Secondly, it must 
 always advance the action. Thirdly, it should be suitable to 
 character in thought and dialect; so as to express the finer 
 relations between the people of the play. 
 
 Some Characteristics of the Dialogue. As variety in speech 
 is the rule of life, so great variety marks the dialogue. It 
 is as varied as character and social standing. The second 
 characteristic of the dialogue is contrast of thought. This con- 
 trast is its great stimulus. It is carried on, not by words 
 alone, but by look and gesture. In fact, the manner and 
 bearing of the actors should figure quite as prominently as 
 the words exchanged. The action of the drama would be 
 quite tame without such aids. Finally, the dialogue gets over 
 ground rapidly; hence, its common use in dramatic scenes. 
 The greater the number of persons in the scene, the slower 
 the action ; and slowness of action is fatal ; the audience grows 
 weary. With the dialogue usually go " asides," or remarks 
 aside, and the monologue. " Asides " are natural and com- 
 mon enough in life. They appear artificial only when actors 
 are clumsy. They are a part of the dramatic machinery. 
 They keep the audience in touch with the development of the 
 action. They are sometimes a material part of the action. 
 For example, Macbeth : " Stars, hide your fires." 
 
 The Monologue. The monologue is also very useful. In 
 supreme moments it is entirely natural. The drama is life, 
 and men make their most serious resolves in solitude alone. 
 Hence, the naturalness of the monologue. The monologue 
 gives the hero of the modern stage opportunity to reveal to 
 the audience his most secret feeling and volition. Its use. 
 
4IO THE DRAMA 
 
 however, is limited; because the influence of the struggle of 
 each man on every purpose of the drama is so great that every 
 isolation of the individual must be specially justified. Only 
 where a rich inner life has been concealed for a long time 
 in the general play, does the audience tolerate its private reve- 
 lation. The audience cares little for the quiet expression of 
 an individual so long as the connection and contrasts may be 
 gleaned from a dialogue. 
 
 Pauses. Monologues represent a pause for rest in the 
 
 action. They place the speaker in a significant manner be- 
 fore the audience. Hence, they need in advance of them- 
 selves an excited tension of feeling in the audience. They 
 may open a scene, or be placed between two scenes of an ex- 
 citing character. But they must always be constructed dra- 
 matically; that is, by weighing both sides of the struggle they 
 must win something significant for the action itself. For 
 example, Hamlet's two soliloquies; Macbeth's air drawn dag- 
 ger. Aside from dramatic uses, the monologue, which is as a 
 rule a literary gem, becomes a favorite passage with the pub- 
 lic. In the construction of scenes the monologue, dialogue, 
 and " asides " represent the lyric or emotional element ; the 
 epic element is represented by the messenger. Hence, the 
 announcements by messenger are an important part in our 
 drama. They relieve the tension, give the audience a pause 
 for breath. These announcements are called the epic element 
 because they recite in the third person the deeds of the hero 
 or chief character. These narratives represent portions of the 
 action which cannot be conveniently staged. For example, 
 a great battle or popular commotion, the results of which are 
 reported by messengers to the audience. In this connection, 
 announcements by messenger are essential to the integrity 
 of the action. In the Greek drama, notably those of ^Eschy- 
 lus, whole scenes were given up to narratives from messen- 
 
THE EPISODE 4 ! ! 
 
 gers; in the modern drama there are no messenger-scenes as 
 such ; but messengers are still an important part, a necessary 
 adjunct. 
 
 Groups in the Scene. The grouping of characters was 
 unknown to the Greeks. It necessarily belongs to the modern 
 drama wherein there is a large scope of life. Groups con- 
 sist of three or more persons on the stage ; hence, they intro- 
 duce the picturesque element and heighten the effect. It be- 
 comes the dramatist's care to give employment to all these 
 people; for the picturesque element has its share in dramatic 
 composition. Groups impress the audience partly by their 
 picture, as in pantomime or tableaux; and partly by their 
 energy or movement which prepares or closes a situation, 
 thus binding together the common action of the drama. In 
 plays that concern an uprising of the people, or in historical 
 dramas, frequent grouping of characters is essential. In 
 modern plays it is customary to have all the prominent charac- 
 ters on the stage in the closing scene, just before the last fall 
 of the curtain. The final result of the action is thus more 
 clearly understood, and the picturesque effect upon the audi- 
 ence is vivid and lasting. It is a vivid summary of the action, 
 having the same office in the drama that a peroration has in 
 a speech. 
 
 The Episode in the Scene. An episode is an interruption 
 of the action, or, as the Greeks term it, a " standing still." 
 The episode concerns some element in the piece, or it may be 
 a mere interruption 1 without any reference to the drama. For 
 example, the boy playing the harp for Brutus in his tent on 
 the calm night before the battle of Pharsalia. In Denman 
 Thompson's " Old Homestead," the Salvation Army march- 
 ing and playing before Grace Church, New York; in the 
 " Sign of the Cross," the Pagan girl's song before Mercia. 
 
THE DRAMA 
 
 Shakespeare's clowns and fools are introduced mainly fo; 
 episode to give the audience pleasing moments of rest from 
 the intensity of the action. The episode should permit the 
 action to be resumed without a jar to the memory or the at- 
 tention. Hence, the episode should be brief. But of all these 
 elements in a scene, the dialogue is most important, inas- 
 much as it carries on the action. The purpose of every dia- 
 logue is to bring into prominence from the assertions and 
 counter-assertions a result which impels the action further. 
 The dialogue stands for strife and struggle; in it perception 
 is matched against perception ; emotion against emotion ; voli- 
 tion against volition, and out of this storm and stress the 
 action grows. Hence, as Schlegel observes, " Dialogue is the 
 creator of Dramatic action; for man thus appears under 
 powerful restraint, excitement, or transformation. In the 
 dialogue appear those peculiarities which bring men effectively 
 into conflict with other men, namely, force of sentiment, vio- 
 lence of will, achievement hindered through passionate desire ; 
 in a word, all the issues of moral conflict appear in the dia- 
 logue; and dramatic action is nothing more than a condensed 
 history of these moral issues." 
 
 The Painted Picture in Relation to the Scene. A scene 
 consists not only of what takes place in dialogue, monologue, 
 episode, but it also consists of a painted picture, commonly 
 known as stage scenery. Scenery plays a large part in the 
 economy of the modern drama. The first principle to be ob- 
 served in its use, is laid down by Aristotle : " The scenery 
 should be organic with the play and- should never by 
 imperfection destroy the illusion." Imperfections in scenery 
 arise in various ways: ist, by over-elaboration; 2d, by undue 
 proportion in mechanical effects; by too much color and im- 
 pressiveness. 
 
THE FIl'E ACTS 4x3 
 
 A Second Principle. Scenery should be subordinate to the 
 acting; scenery, after all, is only the background. Hence, it 
 should give the largest showing to the human element. Poor 
 dramas require elaborate scenery for support. The classic 
 drama needs but a minimum of such assistance. As a matter 
 of fact, too much scenic display mars the action, divides and 
 distracts the attention of the audience. Moreover, the inani- 
 mate can only have an accidental contact with man in the mat- 
 ter of action; the pictorial scene is valuable for impressions; 
 and it may go a step beyond that and " garnish a moment of 
 influence in the progress of the story"; but it is necessarily 
 subordinate. Change of scenery is demanded by the chang- 
 ing environment of the action; time and place must be con- 
 sidered in the pictorial scene. Considerable skill and taste 
 may be shown in this regard, so much so that the " pictorial 
 staging of a play " is now considered a fine art. 
 
 The Act in the Drama. Horace is the main authority for 
 dividing a drama into five acts. In the Ars Poetica he writes : 
 " Neve, minor, neve sit quint o productior actu fabula." 
 " Let your play consist of five acts, nor more, nor less." The 
 authority of Horace is enforced by modern custom and prac- 
 tice. But the five-act division is purely arbitrary. " There 
 is nothing," writes Dr. Blair, " in the nature of dramatic 
 composition which fixes this number rather than any other; 
 and it had been much better if no such number had been as- 
 certained, but every play had been allowed to divide itself into 
 as many parts or intervals as the subject naturally pointed 
 out." In the Greek tragedies at certain intervals the actor 
 retired and the chorus continued with songs; but these inter- 
 vals were extremely unequal and irregular, sometimes divid- 
 ing the play into three parts; sometimes into seven or eight 
 parts. As custom has now divided every play into five acts, 
 it remains to consider the especial office assigned to each act. 
 
THE DRAMA 
 
 The Special Office or Function of the First Act. The first 
 act ought to contain a clear exposition of the subject. This 
 exposition Aristotle calls the prologue of the drama. The 
 first act ought to be so managed as to awaken the curiosity 
 of the spectators ; it ought to furnish them with materials for 
 understanding the sequel. The first act should make the audi- 
 ence acquainted with the personages who are to appear, with 
 their several views and interests, and with the situation of 
 affairs at the time when the play commences. In early times, 
 a single actor appeared and recited the situation in a few 
 lines : for example, the plays of ^Eschylus and Euripides began 
 in this way; hence, the strict meaning of the word, prologue, 
 corresponding exactly to the preface of a book. Now, the 
 situation appears and the subject is made to open itself by con- 
 versation among the first actors who are brought upon the 
 stage. In other words, the prologue, formerly distinct, be- 
 comes a function of the first act. Thus, for example, the first 
 act of Macbeth : it presents the chief characters Macbeth, 
 Lady Macbeth, Duncan, Banquo, The Weird Sisters. It pre- 
 sents the exact situation. Macbeth tempted in three ways : by 
 an ungovernable ambition ; by the powers of evil ; by a heartless 
 wife. The relations between the chief actors are at least in- 
 dicated; also the lines along which the play will develop. In 
 other words, the situation of affairs is clearly set forth. 
 Facts of time, place, circumstances, color, tone, character 
 all furnish the basis of the action. 
 
 The Special Office of the Second Act. As the first act is 
 occupied with the basis of the action, so the second act is de- 
 voted to the development of the action. The action of a 
 drama proceeds from the very outset toward a point called 
 the climax; and from the very outset should speed like an 
 arrow from the string. This rapidity is gained in the second 
 act by a change from general impressions to particular and 
 
THE FIFE ACTS 
 
 specific ones. The first act presents all the needful general 
 impressions; the second act is devoted to a specific treatment 
 of the hero. For example, the murder of Duncan occupies 
 the whole of the second act in Macbeth. In other words, the 
 hero does something which keeps the attention and promises a 
 climax. The object of the first act is to get the attention of 
 the audience; the object of the second act is to hold the atten- 
 tion, and the drama must do this at all hazards. Hence, 
 the second act will present the hero as doing something which 
 keeps the audience in suspense. Suspense as to the issue 
 should remain in the mind when the second act closes. For 
 example, the murder of Duncan and the flight of his sons : 
 will Macbeth succeed to the throne? will the sons of Duncan 
 return and be revenged ? Suspense as to the outcome always 
 heightens the interest. Hence, the second act presents what 
 is called a situation. A situation is the state of persons in a 
 scene with regard to others. In a sense, all scenes are situ- 
 ations, but the technical meaning is confined to points of 
 special interest where expectation is peculiarly alert as to what 
 the characters will say and do. The second act is called by 
 critics the act of ascent owing to the rising movement of the 
 action. And while it advances the hero toward the climax, 
 it has another function to perform : it introduces the counter- 
 play. By counter-play is meant the action of those characters 
 opposed to the hero. Such action begins at the close of the 
 second act. For example, in Macbeth the flight of Duncan's 
 sons into England and Ireland, which is the basis of the 
 counter-movement against the hero. The complications re- 
 sulting from the counter-play prolong the suspense and give 
 a necessary delay to the action, which otherwise too direct, 
 would bring the drama too quickly to an end. 
 
 The Third Act in the Drama. The function of the third 
 act is to present the climax. By climax in a drama is meant 
 
THE DRAMA 
 
 the highest point in the ascending scale of dramatic action. 
 Dramatic action is compared to a pyramid in its rise and fall. 
 On the one side it mounts to the apex which is called the 
 climax of the action; thence it falls on the other side to the 
 base which is called the catastrophe. The third act is held to 
 be most important inasmuch as it presents the hero at the 
 height of his success and at the same time on the threshold 
 of his reverses. It is not necessarily the act that excites great- 
 est sympathy ; for the catastrophe as a rule stirs deeper emotion. 
 It simply indicates that the hero or figure of chief interest 
 has reached a decisive moment in his career. For example, 
 in Macbeth, when Banquo is slain and his son escapes. 
 Here Macbeth has reached the culminating point in his suc- 
 cesses and is on the threshold of reverses. Hence, the climax 
 in the third act is called the turning point of dramatic action. 
 Suspense continues, for the solution is not yet in sight, though 
 dimly indicated ; but expectation is quickened ; for the chief 
 character or hero is in the supreme crisis of the drama; he is 
 placed in a position of peril. As the climax presents the re- 
 sults of the rising movement ; as all that preceded finds therein 
 a crowning point, the poet needs to use all the splendor of 
 poetry and all the skill of dramatic art, in order to make 
 vividly conspicuous this middle or turning point of his artistic 
 creation. For example, the banquet scene in Macbeth the 
 murderer's struggle with the ghost, the fearful struggles with 
 his own conscience, the social festivity and royal splendor 
 all are pictured with the finest art of Shakespeare 
 
 The Fourth Act in the Drama. The special office of the 
 fourth act is to present the return of the action ; hence, it lies 
 between the climax and the catastrophe, between the apex and 
 the base of the dramatic pyramid. As the second act repre- 
 sents the ascent of the action ; so the fourth act represents the 
 descent. The second and third acts are filled with obstacles 
 
THE FIVE ACTS 
 
 and entanglements; the fourth opens a solution. Up to the 
 climax of the drama, the hero, as a rule, appears in a desire 
 working from within outward, changing by his own force 
 the life-relations in which he came upon the stage. From 
 the climax on, what the hero has done reacts upon himself 
 and gains power over him. The external world which he 
 fought in the ascent of the action, now stands in the strife 
 above him. And this adverse influence becomes continually 
 more powerful and victorious until at last in the final catas- 
 trophe it compels the hero to yield to its irresistible force. 
 The gradual fall of the hero, called technically, the return of 
 the action, is exemplified in Macbeth, fourth act. What the 
 royal murderer has done reacts upon himself. First, the 
 witches show a long line of future kings Banquo's descend- 
 ants; thereby foreshadowing Macbeth's defeated purpose in 
 slaying Banquo. Secondly, Macduff escapes to England, 
 forms an alliance with Malcolm for the overthrow of Mac- 
 beth ; thereby completing the counter-play against the hero. 
 In this alliance the murder of Duncan reacts upon the hero, 
 threatening to overwhelm him. Thus the fourth act in every 
 drama is occupied with the fatal consequences of the hero's 
 deeds. 
 
 The Special Office of the Fifth Act. The fifth act com- 
 pletes the drama. It presents the last stage of the falling 
 action. The conditions of the plot are about to be fulfilled. 
 There are suggestions of finality in the words and deeds of 
 the characters. Vigor, intensity, interest, surprise, still con- 
 tinue, but the horizon closes down. For example, when Lady 
 Macbeth walks in her sleep and reveals her madness we know 
 that the springs of action in the play, at least from this side, 
 are available no more. One by one, the hopes of Macbeth, 
 based on prophecy, are destroyed. In the fifth act, movement 
 is more rapid than in any part of the play : details, as far as 
 
4i 8 THE DRAMA 
 
 possible, are omitted. There is no broad elaboration of 
 scenes. The fifth act presents the catastrophe or what the 
 ancients called the exodus. It is, briefly, an important deed 
 overcoming the hero and closing the action. Through this 
 deed the chief characters of the drama are relieved from 
 trouble. For example, the battle between Macbeth and Mac- 
 duff in the fifth act. The external world which the hero 
 conquered, deals a death-blow in the catastrophe; whence 
 conies the term tragedy. The catastrophe is, as regards liter- 
 ary form, brief, simple, free from ornament. The dramatic 
 artist aims solely at being impressive. Hence, the brief scenes 
 pulsate with life. For rapid and skilful handling of the 
 catastrophe there is no better example than the closing scenes 
 of Macbeth. But however sudden, and even in manner of 
 accomplishment, surprising, may be the catastrophe, it should 
 not be unprepared, but like every other part of the action, 
 should preserve its organic connection with the whole. Sud- 
 den suicides which terminate so many tragedies, and the pa- 
 ternal blessings which close an equal number of comedies, 
 should be something more than a signal for the fall of the 
 curtain ; they should be a logical outgrowth and natural close 
 of the drama. The end of the play must be organic; that is, 
 it must be in proportion with cause and effect ; it should afford 
 a commanding point where the whole action may be recalled ; 
 the interest and curiosity of the audience must be fully satis- 
 fied. 
 
CHAPTER XLVI 
 CHARACTERS OF THE DRAMA 
 
 The Characters. The action of a drama, divided into scenes 
 and acts, is carried on by means of characters; these charac- 
 ters are called dramatis personae. The dramatic artist must 
 create these characters; and in so doing must justify the 
 claim of the drama that it holds the mirror up to nature. As 
 an artist, he will give to his characters those general traits 
 and dispositions which make them natural and human. Sec- 
 ondly, he will clothe them with specific traits which individ- 
 ualize each one. His art is tested chiefly in this regard; to 
 individualize his creations, distinguishing by happy strokes 
 the one from the other. The. inventive power of the poet 
 is taxed in producing the artistic appearance of a rich indi- 
 vidual life; because he puts together a few vital expressions 
 in such a manner that the person, understood and felt by him, 
 is intelligible to the audience as a characteristic being. The 
 artist can present only single strokes; out of these the audi- 
 ence or the reader must picture the fullness of characteristic 
 life. This is made possible by the suggestive power of the 
 artist; just as a few lines drawn on a canvas by a skilful hand 
 bring out the form of a human countenance; so a few words 
 skilfully used on the literary canvas may sharply define any 
 character in a drama. This suggestive power, in order to 
 accomplish its purpose, implies the active co-operation of the 
 audience. The imagination of the audience must be at work 
 upon the suggestions given. 
 
 Three Underlying Principles. However the method and 
 scope of characterization may vary under the influence of 
 
 419 
 
420 THE DRAMA 
 
 different historical epochs and different tendencies and tastes 
 of races or nations, there are three principles underlying this 
 branch of dramatic art. The first principle : the character 
 in a drama must have distinctiveness. Whatever its part in 
 the action, it must be sufficiently marked in its distinctive fea- 
 tures to interest the audience. This is particularly true of the 
 leading characters; and even the lesser characters should have 
 distinctive and distinguishing traits. As in real life so in 
 dramatic art, individual and personal traits ought to be suffi- 
 ciently-pronounced to awaken interest, and furnish a distinct 
 type. The second principle: besides impressing the imagi- 
 nation with distinctness, each character must be consistent 
 with itself; this consistency must appear between its con- 
 duct in the action and the features it has established as its 
 own. In order to secure this result, the dramatic artist will 
 first have distinctly conceived the character; and his con- 
 ception expressed in the growth and progress of the play, will 
 determine the totality of the character he creates. If it be a 
 historical personage, the character in the drama should har- 
 monize, as far as possible, with the character established by 
 the facts of history. But while the creative artist is permitted 
 to modify the historic character, he is obliged to present his 
 own character creation as consistent from the first act to the 
 last. For example, Shakespeare could not introduce Macbeth 
 as a courageous man ; and in the last act show him to be a 
 coward. A character may be complex and at the same. time 
 consistent with itself; that is, it may exhibit good and evil 
 traits, as men in real life exhibit them; but consistency de- 
 mands that these traits, once emphasized, be carried through 
 the drama. The third principle: a character should be di- 
 rectly effective with regard to the dramatic action in which 
 it takes part; that is to say, the influence it exerts upon the 
 progress of the action, should correspond to its distinctive 
 features in other words, the conduct of the play should al- 
 
THE CHARACTERS 42I 
 
 ways spring from the nature of the characters. Hence, even 
 the minor characters should not idly intervene ; their conduct 
 should be significant, vitally related to the action. The only 
 exception to this rule is the episode which may be detached 
 from the action, placed as it were, in parenthesis as a breath- 
 ing space for actors and audience. On the other hand, the 
 chief characters should determine the course of the action 
 which should harmonize with their distinctive traits and fea- 
 tures. Chance is thereby excluded from dramatic action, in- 
 asmuch as it flows naturally from the characters. Whatever 
 is said or done in the drama springs as naturally from the 
 characters as the herb from the earth or light from the sun. 
 For example, given the character of Macbeth or his wife, and 
 we may naturally expect murders. However the method and 
 scope of characterization may vary among different races or 
 in different historical epochs, these principles : distinctiveness, 
 self-consistency, effectiveness, always and everywhere apply 
 to character-drawing. 
 
 Characters Most Suitable and Proper for the Drama. 
 
 Aristotle furnishes two rules respecting the selection of char- 
 acters. First, as to external dignity; the chief characters of 
 a drama, like those of the epic, should be illustrious, of high 
 rank, thereby dignifying the action of the drama, and giving 
 it magnitude; but as the drama is a mirror of life, all ranks 
 and conditions ought to be represented, omitting, of course, 
 the most degrading and mean circumstances. The second 
 rule, as to morals; the persons represented should be mixed 
 characters, in which good and evil traits are found, such 
 in fact as we meet in the world : they afford the most proper 
 field for displaying without any bad effect on morals, the 
 vicissitudes of life. They interest us most deeply, as they 
 display emotions and passions which we have all been con- 
 scious of. Human nature in .its. strength and weakness is 
 
THE DRAMA 
 
 thus presented as found in actual life. On the other hand, 
 perfectly unmixed characters either of good or ill men are 
 not the fittest; for the distress of the one, being wholly un- 
 merited, hurts and shocks us ; and the sufferings of the other 
 excite no pity. The dramatic artist should so introduce his 
 personages, and the incidents relating to them, as to leave 
 upon the audience impressions favorable to virtue and to 
 the administration of Providence. The drama should excite 
 pity for the virtuous in distress. Under no conditions is 
 the dramatic artist permitted to exhibit human life so as to 
 render virtue an object of aversion. If innocent persons suf- 
 fer, their sufferings ought to be attended with such circum- 
 stances as will make virtue appear amiable and admirable. 
 
 The Chief Character of the Drama. The drama should 
 have only one chief character or hero, about whom all the 
 the persons, however great their manner, arrange themselves. 
 Hence, the drama is thoroughly monarchical in arrangement; 
 the unity of its action depends essentially upon this fact, 
 that the action is controlled by one dominant character. The 
 interest of the audience must be directed for the most part 
 toward one person. The highest dramatic processes of but 
 few persons can be elaborated in a single drama ; and of these 
 few the audience should not be left in doubt as to the most 
 important person. One exception to this rule is permitted 
 when the relations of two lovers form the material and plot 
 of the drama, these persons are looked upon as enjoying 
 equal privileges; and are treated as a unit in leading and 
 controlling the action. Hence, we have dramas called " Romeo 
 and Juliet " ; " Troilus and Cressida " ; " Anthony and Cleo- 
 patra." With this exception, dramatic unity demands a single 
 hero, as the leading character. The scenes at the beginning 
 of the drama, giving color to the whole piece, should also 
 give the moral fibre of the hero. Shakespeare manages his 
 
THE CHARACTERS 
 
 heroes with wonderful skill. Before his heroes are entangled 
 in the difficulties of a tragic action, he allows them to express 
 the trend of their character, so that the audience may know 
 distinctly what is to follow. For example, Hamlet, Othello, 
 Macbeth, Brutus, Richard III, Caesar. 
 
 Subordinate Characters. Besides being distinct, self-con- 
 sistent and effective, the subordinate characters should present 
 a variety and contrast to the audience; because dramatic 
 action relies chiefly upon contrast for its development; the 
 weak will must clash with the strong one; virtue must battle 
 with vice; one social rank must cross swords with another, 
 as happens in actual life. The intermingling of races and 
 creeds in modern life gives the widest scope to the dramatic 
 artist, adding the clash of nationalities and religions. Less- 
 ing calls this contrast of character the soul of the modern 
 drama; and his remark is equally applicable to the drama of 
 the ancients. 
 
 Revelation of Character. Every person in the drama, 
 whether chief or subordinate, should show the fundamental 
 traits of his or her character, as distinctly, as quickly and as 
 attractively as possible. The dramatic artist has no place 
 for a hidden character howsoever subordinate. His skill lies 
 exclusively in the revelation of those traits and features which 
 make character what it is a moral engraving, the imprint 
 and impress of a life-struggle upon an inherited moral individ- 
 uality. Beyond these rules which have an universal applica- 
 tion, no general law can be laid down respecting the manners, 
 speech, costume, of persons in the drama; inasmuch as these 
 accidents are regulated by place and time, the particular 
 customs of different countries. 
 
 Forms of the Drama. The drama is divided into two 
 forms, according as it is employed upon the light and gay or 
 
424 THE DRAMA 
 
 upon the grave and affecting incidents of human life. The 
 one is called comedy; the other, tragedy. Tragedy embraces 
 the high passions, the virtues, crimes and sufferings of men; 
 comedy tells of their humors, follies and pleasures. Tragedy 
 is the highest form of literary art, inasmuch as it exhibits 
 human life under the strongest emotion and under the most 
 trying and critical situations ; thereby demanding all the wealth 
 of expression and the profoundest knowledge of the human 
 heart. It ranks higher than the epic, because the epic exhibits 
 human character by narrations and descriptions of the poet ; 
 whereas tragedy sets the personages themselves before us, 
 as living and speaking. 
 
 The Aim of Tragedy. Aristotle defines the aim of tragedy 
 as the purging and purifying of our passions by means of pity 
 and terror. Dr. Blair interprets this to mean that tragedy 
 is intended to improve our virtuous sensibilities ; to make men 
 more sensible to virtue. The purpose of tragedy is accom- 
 plished when we are interested in behalf of virtue; when we 
 are moved to compassion for the distressed; when we 
 are led to guard against errors in our own conduct, by seeing 
 their consequences in the lives of other men. Tragedy is 
 thus a great moral force a literary power making for right- 
 eousness. 
 
 Origin of Tragedy. The word tragedy comes from the 
 Greek tragos, signifying a goat, and ode, a song. The origin 
 of tragedy was none other than the song sung at the festival 
 of Bacchus when a goat was offered in sacrifice. After the 
 sacrifice the priests sang hymns or lyric poems ; these hymns 
 were sung sometimes by the whole company, sometimes by 
 separate bands answering alternately to each other; making 
 what we call a chorus with its strophe and antistrophe. In 
 order to throw some variety into this entertainment and to 
 
425 
 
 relieve the singers, a person was introduced who, between the 
 songs, should give a recitation. Thespis, who lived aBout 
 536 years before the Christian era, made this innovation ; and, 
 as it met with approval, ^schylus, who came 50 years after 
 him, and who is properly the father of tragedy, went a step 
 farther, introduced a dialogue between two persons or actors, 
 in which he contrived to interweave some interesting story 
 and brought his actors on a stage adorned with proper scenery 
 and decorations. All that these actors recited was called epi- 
 sodes or additional song. The songs of the chorus were made 
 to relate no longer to Bacchus, their original subject, but to 
 the story in which the actors were concerned. This began to 
 give the drama a regular form, which was soon after brought 
 to perfection by Sophocles and Euripides. It is remarkable 
 in how short a space of time tragedy grew up among the 
 Greeks, from its rudest beginnings to its most perfect state. 
 For Sophocles, the greatest and most correct of all the tragic 
 poets flourished only seventy years after Thespis. The chorus 
 was the foundation of the ancient tragedy. It was not an orna- 
 ment added to it, or a contrivance designed to render it more 
 perfect. It was the original entertainment to which the dra- 
 matic dialogue was an addition. In process of time the 
 chorus, from being the principal, became a mere accident of 
 the tragedy, until at last in the modern tragedy the chorus has 
 disappeared altogether. All there is to remind one of the 
 chorus in a modern theatre, is the orchestra before the foot- 
 lights. 
 
 Recitations. The recitations introduced were of an epic 
 character, parts of the Iliad, or epic poems relating to the gods 
 and the Greek heroes. The Greeks employed bands of wan- 
 dering minstrels at their feasts of Bacchus, to recite their epic 
 pieces, just as Shakespeare and his strolling players were em- 
 ployed at the court of Elizabeth or James. These declaimers 
 
426 THE DRAMA 
 
 were called rhapsodes. They exercised their art in 
 emulation; by long recitation they strove to tire each other 
 down. Out of this emulation came the dialogue. Thus we 
 have the epic element presented by the rhapsodes and the 
 lyric element by the chanting priests of Bacchus, who were 
 called the chorus. The chorus and the rhapsodes alternated 
 in the divisions of the work, called strophe and antistrophe. 
 Thespis (535 B. C.) made a change; he introduced an actor 
 chosen from the rhapsodes. This actor, instead of merely 
 alternating his recitations with the song of the chorus, carried 
 on a dialogue with its leader. The chorus stood round its 
 leader, upon the steps of the Bacchic altar. The actor himself 
 stood on a table near by and wearing a mask, personated 
 some deity or hero. Thus, the epic element changed to the 
 tragic. yEschylus introduced a second actor, and cut down 
 the functions of the chorus. Sophocles added a third actor, 
 and the preponderance of the dialogue was made complete. 
 The actor introduced by Thespis played in turn the part of 
 all the prominent figures in the legend, from gods and kings 
 down to heralds and messengers. He counterfeited their ap- 
 pearance, spoke their sentiments, exhibited their passions. Af- 
 terwards, when two or three actors were introduced, the vital 
 elements of all tragic performance were present namely, im- 
 personation and dialogue and tragedy became distinguished 
 as a new art. Thespis separated tragedy from the function 
 of religious worship ; he exhibited tragedies in Athens dealing 
 with Greek history and mythology. The actors gradually 
 changed places with the chorus ; the steps of the Bacchic altar 
 were transformed into a stage. The chorus and its leader 
 were relegated to the footlights where now, in the form of 
 a rudimentary organ, they furnish music while the curtain 
 is down. Here a question arises, Has the drama gained or 
 lost by the abolition of the chorus? Dr. Blair observes in 
 reply : " It must be admitted that the chorus tended to render 
 
TRAGEDY 
 
 more magnificent, more instructive and more moral." 
 Carried on by singing and accompanied by music, the chorus 
 n>. doubt diversified the entertainment greatly, and added to 
 its splendor. But these advantages were outweighed by such 
 difficulties as render the exclusion of the chorus from modern 
 plays almost imperative. Private transactions, plots and 
 schemes of confederates, must go on at times ; hence, the 
 scenery demanded excludes the old-time chorus which always 
 occupied the stage. Again, the tragic drama is a natural and 
 probable imitation of human life ; hence, no persons should ap- 
 pear, save those necessary to the action ; any others are unnat- 
 ural and improbable. Moreover, the mixture of music and song 
 with the dialogue of the actors is an unnatural circumstance, 
 destroying resemblance to actual life. It was warranted some- 
 what by the ritual of Bacchus and the pastoral life of Greece, 
 but it has no resemblance to the real life of today. " One use," 
 says Dr. Blair, " might still be made ,of the ancient chorus, 
 and it would be a considerable improvement to the modern 
 theatre. While the curtain is down between the acts, the 
 chorus might be introduced, whose music and songs should 
 have a relation to the incidents of the preceding act, and to the 
 disposition which those incidents are presumed to have awak- 
 ened in the audience. By this means the tone of passion 
 would be kept up, and all the good effects of the ancient chorus 
 preserved, whereas our modern orchestra strikes a foreign 
 and discordant note; and as a rule the musical selections have 
 no relation whatever to the play in progress." 
 
 Growth of the Dialogue. With the decline of the chorus 
 the dialogue came more and more into prominence. In the 
 Thespian drama it had a prominent part ; but consisted of long 
 narratives and had little resemblance to conversation in real 
 life. -^Eschylus corrected this artistic error: he made the 
 dialogue vivid and lively; to give more life he introduced a 
 
42 g THE DRAMA 
 
 second actor ; thus drawing the attention of the audience from 
 the songs of the chorus to the spoken and acted parts of the 
 play. The variety and vividness of the dialogue was still 
 further increased by Sophocles who introduced a third actor. 
 The unnatural conversations between actor and chorus were 
 set aside ; and the choral odes were treated as so many resting- 
 places in' the dialogue. With the addition of a third actor, 
 Sophocles made the dialogue embrace a greater complexity 
 of incidents and exhibit a more varied play of character. He 
 brought the three actors simultaneously upon the stage in a 
 manner suggestive of the group-scenes in the modern drama, 
 thereby increasing the effect. The dialogue of Greek tragedy 
 differs from that of the modern drama in two important points. 
 First, and especially, in the greater prominence which it as- 
 signs to narrative, a prominence due partly to the epic element 
 in its origin; partly to the refinement of Greek feeling which 
 preferred the narrative to the actual exhibition of deeds of 
 blood and violence ; and partly to the in frequency of soliloquies 
 and asides which were impossible owing to the presence of the 
 chorus. The dialogue of the Greek tragedy varied in length 
 from the modern drama, sometimes embracing forty lines, 
 sometimes four or five hundred lines. As a rule its parts were 
 longer and exhibited less passion than the modern dialogue. 
 
 Characters of Greek Tragedy. In the development of 
 Greek tragedy ^schylus, Sophocles and Euripides represented 
 characters after an ideal fashion. In delineating the charac- 
 ters of heroes, their aim was not like Shakespeare to hold the 
 mirror up to nature, but to people their stage with heroes of 
 ideal strength and grandeur; and the force of their genius 
 is no where more apparent than in the success with which 
 they accomplished their task. They elevated the minds of 
 the audience by a majestic picture of the heroic world. The 
 gods and heroes of their tragedies are the offspring of a. 
 
1 
 
 heroic age. Superhuman strength, courage, iron will and iron 
 endurance are their characteristic qualities. They have none 
 of the frailties and weaknesses of human beings. No force 
 can bend them nor tender motive allure them from their 
 course. For example, Prometheus, Clytemnestra. In con- 
 trast with the heroes, the lesser characters exhibit the weak- 
 nesses and frailties of humankind. For example, the nymphs 
 in Prometheus ; the maidens in the Septem. Female characters 
 played an unimportant part, especially in the earlier tragedies, 
 for the tender passions were touched but slightly. Arms 
 and the hero were the favorite themes; the heroism sung in 
 the epic was impersonated in the tragedy. 
 
 General Characteristics of Greek Tragedy. With the rise 
 of tragedy, the poetry of Greece completed the natural process 
 of its evolution. From the epic, tragedy derived its legen- 
 dary subjects and its graceful and majestic measure. From 
 lyric poetry it inherited a wealth of metrical forms and a 
 splendor of diction which were capable of expressing every 
 shade of feeling and passion. The new art in turn trans- 
 formed the material of the epic, giving it a more brilliant 
 and impressive shape. The serene and leisurely narrative 
 of the epic was intensified into an action rapid, concise, trans- 
 acted before the very eyes of the audience/ The narrow and 
 personal interests of the old lyric were exchanged for medita- 
 tions of deeper moment, the great principles and eternal prob- 
 lems of the universe. The result was a new art surpassing 
 all previous work in vividness of effect and in profound 
 earnestness of moral feeling. The general characteristics of 
 the Greek tragedy as thus evolved are four in number. First, 
 ethical elevation of tone and purpose. The tone of the Greek 
 tragedy is essentially meditative and religious, A vein of 
 earnest thoughtfulness runs through it. The chief actors 
 meditate upon the dark mystery of existence, the ways of 
 
430 THE DRAMA 
 
 Providence, the destiny of mankind, much after the fashion 
 of Hamlet. The modern tragedy seldom rises to the same 
 level of impressiveness. The second characteristic of Greek 
 tragedy is a graceful harmony of form and structure which 
 has never been surpassed. Beauty, no less than truth and 
 impressiveness, was the constant aim of the ancient tragic 
 writers. The influence of a keenly developed aesthetic sense 
 appeared in every part of their work, in choice of subjects 
 as well as in mode of treatment. Scenes are laid before stately 
 palaces and temples of the gods. Plots are invested with the 
 charm of romance and legend, graceful movement, gorgeous 
 dress, princely language and bearing the commonplace 
 raised into a region of ideal splendor; over all is the air of 
 a lofty and exalted idealism. A third characteristic : the sim- 
 plicity and lucid clearness of the plot. Everything tending 
 to confuse or divert the mind, is carefully excluded. The ac- 
 tion is brief, straightforward, concentrated, as it should be, on 
 a single point. Characters are few in number, only three at 
 most appearing at the same time. This severe and lucid form 
 of the Greek tragedy makes a sharp contrast with the modern 
 play, which is more involved and obscure, requiring at times 
 considerable effort on the part of the audience to unravel and 
 understand it. A fourth characteristic : the delicate treat- 
 ment of those deeds of physical horror and atrocity which 
 form the catastrophe of most tragedies. Such deeds must 
 either be exhibited before the eyes of the spectators or enacted 
 behind the scenes and revealed by narrative. The Greeks 
 preferred the latter method. Scenes of active violence and 
 brutal murder such as the Elizabethan dramatists delighted 
 to exhibit, were rarely shown upon the Greek stage. Only 
 two examples can be found in the extant Greek plays : that 
 of Ajax in Sophocles, and Evadne in Euripides. The reason 
 for their exclusion was a refinement and delicacy which re- 
 garded the actual commission of such -atrocities as a sight 
 
GREEK TRAGEDY 43! 
 
 too terrible for the feelings of the audience. The Greek tra- 
 gedy exhibiting these four general characteristics, ethical gran- 
 deur of tone, graceful harmony of form, clearness of plot, 
 and delicacy of treatment, assumed, as was natural, a some- 
 what different aspect in the hands of the three greatest artists. 
 In yEschylus the grandeur and religious depth of the concq>- 
 tion were more conspicuous than artistic form. In Euripides 
 the moral impressiveness and ideal beauty of the older drama 
 give place to a more secular tone and a more realistic manner 
 of treatment. Plots became more complex; music, as in the 
 modern opera, began to encroach upon the sense and the 
 poetry. It was only in Sophocles that the various elements 
 of classical tragedy moral inspiration, simplicity, ideal 
 beauty were blended together. Hence, Sophocles, though 
 excelled in some respects by ^Eschylus and Euripides, has 
 justly been regarded as the typical representative of Greek 
 tragedy in its highest perfection. Tragedy completed its evo- 
 lution in Sophocles ; it has not been improved or vitally modi- 
 fied since his day. Roman, French and English tragedy are 
 simply imitation with some accidental modifications peculiar 
 to these races. 
 
CHAPTER XLVII 
 ETHICS OF THE DRAMA 
 
 The Ethical Side. The drama may be viewed from an 
 ethical as well as an aesthetic standpoint. As a work of art. 
 it appeals to the aesthetic sense, and forms a separate depart 
 ment of literature. As a work involving the operations of 
 the human will, it belongs to the department of Ethics. It 
 is a mirror of human conduct, and therefore has an ethical 
 significance. The ethical purpose of the drama is stated by 
 Aristotle to be the purification of our passions by means of 
 pity and terror. That is to say, we should be terrified by the 
 misdeeds, the crimes of men as presented in the drama; we 
 should be moved to pity on account of the misfortunes which 
 follow these misdeeds, the awful suffering resulting both to 
 the innocent and the guilty. And the benefit arising from 
 this two-fold effect should be a purification of the passions so 
 as to conform them to right conduct. The ethical proposi- 
 tion underlying the drama is this : vice must be punished ; 
 virtue must be rewarded. Not only this, but virtue must be 
 represented as more attractive than vice, and more worthy 
 of imitation. For example, in " King Lear," the vice of 
 Goneril and Regan is punished by murder and suicide; the 
 victims of Edgar and Kent are rewarded by their joint suc- 
 cession to the throne of Britain. 
 
 Opinion of Blair. On the ethical purpose of the drama. 
 Dr. Blair writes as follows : 
 
 ' The purpose of the drama is accomplished when we are in- 
 terested in behalf of virtue ; when we are moved to compassion 
 
 432 
 
THE l-l lllCAL SIDE 
 
 for the distressed, when we are led to guard against errors in our 
 own conduct, by seeing their consequences in the lives of other 
 men. The drama is thus a great moral force making for right- 
 
 The Extent of This Ethical Purpose. An ethical purpose 
 is commonly confined to all serious drama of which tragedy 
 is the chief representative. In the lighter forms of the drama 
 there is no ethical purpose, the aim being simply to furnish 
 amusement. Yet there are forms of comedy so vile and 
 suggestive that the modern stage in this particular is uni- 
 versally condemned as immoral. So popular have become 
 these light plays thus mixed with suggestions of vice, that 
 outside the domain of tragedy, by far the greater number of 
 dramas are unclean and ethically unsound. The drama has 
 furnished evidences of the most shocking immorality. For 
 example, the living pictures on the ancient Roman stage; 
 the drama of the Restoration, to which Dryden was a con- 
 tributor; the modern Extravaganza or Vaudeville; modern 
 plays like " Iris," " Sappho " and the " Resurrection." 
 
 The Basis of Morality in the Drama. The drama is the 
 mirror of contemporary life; hence, its ethical standard is 
 determined by the morality of the age in which it is produced. 
 Every age sets up its own principles of right and wrong. 
 In general, there is a marked difference between the drama 
 of Christian and pagan times. The pagans were more licen- 
 tious, lax ; their moral standard was lower than that of 
 Christian times. Hence, the ancient classic drama cannot 
 compare with the modern drama in the matter of purity. 
 Scenes which the Greek and Roman applauded, would be 
 hissed from the modern stage. An immoral incident in a 
 modern play is often tolerated, but an immoral object as a 
 sustained purpose, would be fatal. Hence, the withdrawal 
 
434 THE DRAMA 
 
 of so many plays like Sappho, or the re-casting of them, so 
 as to eliminate the immoral purpose. 
 
 Reasons for the Low Pagan Standard. First, the idea of 
 Fate, or Destiny, which was resistless and inexorable. This 
 religious belief contributed directly to lower the moral stand- 
 ard of the ancient classic drama; because it annihilated free 
 will ;* it taught the hero that it was vain for him to struggle 
 against vicious inclination. The hero was doomed by Des- 
 tiny to follow a certain course, whether right or wrong. 
 Some examples : In ^Eschylus, Clytemnestra murders Aga- 
 memnon, and afterwards pleads that it is not she, but Destiny 
 that has done the deed. In Euripides, Orestes is pursued by 
 the furies, and he cries out in justification of the murder 
 that Fate was guilty of the crime. He could not avert what 
 the gods had in store for him. In other words, he was not 
 responsible for his own acts. In Sophocles, Antigone breaks 
 the existing laws of the realm : " Destiny wills it." Be- 
 sides the influence of Fate or Destiny the Pagan gods in many 
 cases set a poor example of moral conduct. Like Venus, 
 many of them were the deification of vice. They were repro- 
 duced on the Greek and Roman stage in all their moral de- 
 formity. Hence, religion among the pagans was the great 
 enemy of virtue and morality. Another reason for the de- 
 pravity of the ancient classic stage was the pagan treatment 
 of woman. In real life and on the stage, she was treated 
 as the toy and plaything of passion. The pagan concept of 
 marriage permitted concubinage and polygamy. Hence, the 
 hero of the pagan drama was often represented with as many 
 wives as the divinity he adored. An instance of this freedom 
 is furnished by Shakespeare in King Lear; the pagan Glos- 
 ter and his illegitimate son, Edmund. A new sense of decency 
 seems to have been created by the Christian exaltation of 
 
THE MYSTERY PLAY 435 
 
 woman ; just as a new ethical standard arose from the vindi- 
 cation of free-will and individual accountability. 
 
 Religion and the Ethics of the Drama. The Church used 
 her influence to redeem the drama, just as she was instru- 
 mental in improving and elevating all the arts. She made 
 the drama the teacher of religion and morality; hence, the 
 existence of the old mystery and morality plays. The oldest 
 reference to the mystery plays in our literature is the play 
 of St. Catherine, presented in the Convent of Dunstable in 
 1119. The play deals with the miracles and martyrdom of 
 the Saint. Mysteries, or miracle plays abound in the early 
 literature of all the Catholic countries of Europe : Spain, 
 Germany, France, Italy, possess an abundance of this litera- 
 ture. Every large cathedral, monastery and convent school 
 had its stage. The Divine Comedy of Dante is only a long 
 narrative form of mystery plays enacted at Florence plays 
 that dealt with heaven, hell and purgatory. These plays were 
 composed and acted by Monks ; the cathedral was often trans- 
 formed into a theatre; the costumes were furnished by the 
 rich vestry of the church ; they personified angels, devils, 
 saints and martyrs. The comic element was supplied by the 
 Devil who took the part of a clown or jester. 
 
 Materials. The material for the mystery plays was drawn 
 from the Bible and from early church history. For example, 
 we have such titles as the Creation of the World, the Fall 
 of Man, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Crucifixion of 
 our Lord. In this manner the church utilized the drama 
 as a teacher of religion. The church employed the drama 
 as a teacher of morality, and the morality plays are the re- 
 sult. These plays were contemporary with the old mystery 
 or miracle plays; they were a product of the Middle Ages, 
 and the first to employ them were the Norman trouveres. 
 
436 THE DRAMA 
 
 They can be traced back through short Latin texts to the 
 eleventh century. From France these plays were brought 
 into England where they at once became popular. They also 
 spread to Germany, Italy and Spain; so that we may say 
 the church employed the drama for five centuries as the 
 teacher of morality. The morality plays satisfied the love 
 for moral allegory which manifests itself in so many periods 
 of English literature. 
 
 Earliest English Example. The earliest English morality 
 play extant dates back to 1343. It was called the Pride of 
 Life. This drama supplies a good definition of the morality 
 play. Man is represented as the King of life; the various 
 virtues and vices pride, anger, envy, avarice; patience, hu- 
 mility, abstinence, come in turn and make their appeals to 
 him ; the ethical lesson being that he repels all the vices and 
 welcomes all the virtues. Thus the earlier English morality 
 plays from the reign of Henry VI, to Henry VIII, throw 
 into allegorical form the conflict between good and evil in 
 the mind and life of man. Every virtue is personified and 
 held up for admiration. Every vice takes also some hideous, 
 repellent form. Such titles as the Punishment of Gluttony, 
 the Fall of Pride, the Rebuke of Envy, indicate the ethical 
 lesson and purpose of the morality plays. 
 
 Absence of Art. Neither the mystery nor morality playi- 
 exhibit any high degree of art. These plays are little more 
 than loose bundles of dialogues thrown together without plot 
 coherence or unity. In English literature not one of these 
 has survived as an artistic model. This is all the more 
 strange since they were written at a time when painting, 
 sculpture, architecture, and all the other fine arts flourished. 
 The fact is explained in two ways : first, the imperfect con- 
 dition of the medium made a high grade of art impossible. 
 
ETHICS OF MODERN DRAMA 437 
 
 The languages of Western Europe were in a very crude, im- 
 perfect condition. If we except the Italian, the medium 
 through which Dante and Petrarch worked, no living language 
 at the time was sufficiently flexible or polished for the best 
 grades of literary art. For example, in English, the plays of 
 Shakespeare could not have been written before his time, 
 even if the genius to produce them had previously existed. 
 A second reason is the lack of training on the part of the 
 monks. They had not the best models before them, or at 
 least did not use them to advantage. In their dramatic works 
 there is little trace of classic training. It is also urged that 
 in the case of the miracle plays the monks did not wish to 
 depart from the simplicity of the Biblical narrative ; whereas 
 the morality or allegorical plays could be only lengthy dia- 
 logues at best; no room existing for character creation or 
 subtlety of plot. But however it may be explained, whether on 
 the ground of lack of medium or genius or training or unsuit- 
 ableness of material, it cannot be urged that Christianity 
 antagonized the drama. The very existence of the miracle 
 and morality plays is proof of the very opposite attitude. 
 Although not a high grade of art, miracle and morality plays 
 accomplished the purpose for which they were written ; they 
 taught religious truth, and the very highest standard of 
 morality. And these religious and ethical lessons were of 
 supreme value to the multitude, even though they were not 
 enforced by all the subtlety and charm of dramatic art. 
 
 The Ethics of the Modern Drama. It is generally admitted 
 that the modern drama represents neither a high grade of art 
 nor a high standard of morality. Zangwill, the English critic, 
 says of the modern play that it consists of drivel and devil. 
 The criticism is just, for all our representative authors of 
 dramatic literature seem to be afflicted with moral degeneracy. 
 Some examples : Henry Ibsen, representing Scandinavian lit- 
 
43 g THE DRAMA 
 
 erature; he has written some thirty dramas, most of which are 
 unfit for reading or presentation on the stage; the vilest are 
 Love's Comedy, the Doll House, and the Lady from the Sea. 
 A few of his expurgated plays have been well received in 
 England and America, on account of their literary merit. In 
 his dramas, Ibsen aims at destroying the marriage bond, and 
 giving unrestrained liberty to all the natural passions. Like 
 Ibsen, Tolstoi has corrupted Russian literature. His novels 
 as soon as written, are dramatized, not only in Russia, but 
 throughout the English speaking world, where he enjoys a 
 large and unsavory reputation. As an example of his ethical 
 standard, the Kreutzer Sonata was forbidden to pass through 
 the United States mails, but the English translators and pub- 
 lishers managed to dispose of half a million copies. His latest 
 work, The Resurrection, was hissed from the Londo'n stage, 
 recast, and played in New York City. Tolstoi, like Ibsen, is 
 a pure pagan in morals, believes in no restraint. His recent 
 excommunication from the Greek Church happened more on 
 account of his ethical than his religious teaching. Herman 
 Sudermann, the leading living German dramatist, belongs to 
 the same category as Ibsen and Tolstoi. His chief plays, the 
 End of Sodom, Home, and a Question of Honor, were pro- 
 hibited by the German Government on account of their im- 
 morality. These plays were welcomed in Paris, and Suder- 
 mann is acting as playwright for Sara Bernhardt, supplying 
 a new drama every year. He is a prolific writer, a dramatic 
 genius, but he has used his pen to degrade the modern stage. 
 
 The Outlook. From an ethical standpoint, we may hope 
 for better things, at least in the English-speaking world where 
 there has always been a healthy reaction from stage disease 
 and corruption. Already our playwrights show signs of re- 
 turning moral sanity. The public is beginning to demand a 
 higher standard, and the playwrights respond, as a matter of 
 course. 
 
CHAPTER XLVIII 
 THE DRAMA (CONTINUED) 
 REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS 
 
 The Drama of Job. The authorship of this drama is still 
 an unsettled question in Old Testament criticism. Jewish tra- 
 dition, as expressed in the Talmud, assigns it to Moses 
 a view in which some modern critics concur. Modern scholar- 
 ship can fix neither the date nor the authorship, although from 
 internal evidence it is clear that the drama was written some 
 time between the seventh and fourth centuries before Christ. 
 In matter, if not in form, Job may be regarded as one of the 
 oldest specimens of dramatic literature. 
 
 Criticism by William Davidson." The Poem of ' Job ' so 
 remarkable for imaginative power and literary skill, was un- 
 questionably intended to set forth theological doctrine God, 
 man, evil, good, suffering, hope, destiny. The thesis of the book 
 is that suffering in the present life is not precisely proportioned 
 to ill desert. On the contrary, the righteous suffer: yet the 
 drama teaches that God is, and God is good. Job's attitude 
 throughout is that of the man who is trying to understand God, 
 not denying His existence or mocking at His rule. Job teaches 
 us, first of all, that the drama of our earthly life has a significance 
 which earth does not exhaust. Secondly, the government of the 
 Most High contemplates issues which are beyond us. Thirdly, 
 it may be necessary to prove disinterested goodness to men, 
 angels and devils. This drama of human suffering teaches that 
 pain may be a privilege rather than a punishment ; that the lofti- 
 est spirits may have to pass through it as a trial of their loyalty 
 rather than a chastisement for their transgressions; and that in 
 such cases it behooves them to bear, as the Lord's chosen ones, 
 
 439 
 
440 
 
 THE DRAMA 
 
 the burden and the mystery of life, as pregnant with a deeper 
 significance hereafter to be made known." 
 
 Literary Form. A majority of writers agree in calling 
 Job a drama, although Milton refers to it as an epic with 
 a dramatic setting. On this point Driver writes as follows: 
 "It is of the nature of a drama not yet emancipated from- the 
 lyric element. It may be termed a dramatic poem, for its 
 principal parts are constructed in the form of a dialogue, and 
 the action which it represents passes through the successive 
 stages of entanglement, development and solution. The action 
 is, however, largely internal and mental, the successive scenes 
 exhibiting the varying moods of a great soul struggling with 
 the mystery of fate, rather than trying external situations. 
 The constructive imagination of the writer is conspicuous 
 throughout ; it reveals itself in the bold conceptions, the free, 
 flowing outlines of the whole poem ; also in the wealth, variety 
 and finish of its detailed imagery. Only a close study of the 
 book can give an idea of the richness and multitude of its 
 metaphors, the concentrated vigor of its phraseology, !its 
 depth of human feeling, its portraiture of life and the express- 
 iveness of the descriptions of external nature." 
 
 Criticism by Professor Moulton. " The dominant impression 
 is that of a magnificent drama. No element of dramatic effect 
 is wanting the great ash-mound is the stage the crowd of 
 spectators resemble the Greek chorus the changes of the sky 
 are a fitting dramatic background. Interest in character abounds 
 -Eliphoz, Jophar and Bildad are distinct creations. But the 
 essence of the drama lies in the action. The whole world of 
 literature hardly contains a more remarkable piece of dramatic 
 movement than the changes of position taken by Job in the 
 course of the dialogue with the Friends. To dramatic effect, 
 however, must be added epic; the description of the Heavenly 
 Court is epical ; also in the mode in which Heaven deals with 
 Job the seeming conspiracy of earth and heaven, which robs 
 Job of all his. possessions. The lyric element is also present, as 
 
AESCHYLUS 
 
 441 
 
 for example in the Curse the elegy of a Broken Heart. As to 
 the central idea of the dialogue, it is a philosophical discussion 
 dramatized. The subject discussed is the mystery of human 
 suffering and its bearing upon the righteous government of the 
 world. Each section of the drama is the representation of a dif- 
 ferent philosophical attitude to this question." 
 
 -ffischylus. He was a native of Attica, born in the year 
 525 B. C., and died in Sicily, 456 B. C. He took part in the 
 great battles of the Persian War, having been wounded at 
 Marathon. Afterward he gave his attention to the drama. 
 He is called the " Father of Greek Tragedy/' More than sixty 
 dramas were written by him ; seven are extant ; of these, the 
 best are the Persae, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Vinc- 
 tus, and the Orestean Trilogy. 
 
 Criticism by William Ward. " The classic period of the 
 Greek drama includes yEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. 
 These are the names of its three great masters ; in the progress of 
 their art there is an unbroken continuity. ^Eschylus had fought 
 against those Persians whose rout he celebrated with patriotic 
 pride in the " Persae." He was trained in the Eleusinian mys- 
 teries, and was a passionate upholder of the institution most in- 
 timately associated with the primitive political traditions of the 
 past the Areopagus. He had been born in the generation 
 after Solon, to whose maxims he fondly clung; he must have 
 belonged to that anti-democratical party which favored the Spar- 
 tan alliance, and it was the Warian development of Hellenic life 
 and the philosophical system based upon it with which his re- 
 ligious and moral convictions were imbued. Thus, even upon 
 the generation which succeeded him, the chivalrous spirit and dic- 
 tion of his poetry, and the unapproached sublimity of his drama- 
 tic imagination, fell, as it falls upon later posterity, like the note 
 of a mightier age." 
 
 Criticism by A. E. Haigh. " ^schylus, if we consider the 
 variety and significance of the work which he accomplished, ap- 
 pears to have been one of the greatest poetic geniuses that the 
 
442 DRAMA 
 
 world has ever seen. The influence which he exercised upon the 
 growth of Greek tragedy was so powerful and decisive, that he 
 may be regarded as its founder. In the hands of Thespis and 
 his successors, the drama had scarcely advanced beyond the em- 
 bryonic stage, and its future was still uncertain. ./Eschylus, in 
 the course of a single generation, expanded and developed its 
 latent capacities with such masterly power and such completeness 
 of result, that its general character was henceforth finally set- 
 tled, and the task of subsequent poets became comparatively easy. 
 His activity was not confined to any one branch of theatrical 
 representation, but covered the entire field, and effected an equal 
 transformation in the structure,, the spirit and the external ap- 
 pearance of tragedy. The most obvious characteristics of Eschy- 
 lus, are grandeur, loftiness and massive strength. His dramas 
 are colossal creations, planned and executed with a largeness 
 of design and a depth of purpose to which it would be difficult to 
 find any parallel. Every part of the composition, from the plot? 
 and characters to the language and versification, is fashioned on 
 the same imposing scale, and the effect of the whole is to impress 
 the mind with a sense of unapproachable power and majesty. 
 The material for his tragedies is drawn from very various 
 quarters, and covers nearly the whole ground of Greek myth- 
 ology. Some of them seem to be based on mere oral tradition 
 and not on previous literature. As regards plot, there is very 
 little of it in his dramas, at least, in the modern sense; there are 
 no sudden obstacles, unexpected developments or rapid vicissi- 
 tudes of situation. The construction is so simple that the ulti- 
 mate issue is known to the audience from the very first. The 
 choral odes are long; between these come the brief but impas- 
 sioned dialogues in which -the characters work out their doom, 
 and the inevitable justice of the gods advances slowly but surely 
 to its appointed end." 
 
 Sophocles. He was born at Colonus, near Athens, 495 
 B. C. ; died at Athens, 406 B. C. He was one of the Athenian 
 generals in the Samian War. He contended for the tragic 
 prize in 468, defeating ^Eschylus; in turn, he was defeated 
 by Euripides. Of his extant plays the best known are CEdipus 
 Tyrannus, Antigone, Electra, and Ajax. 
 
SOPHOCLES 443 
 
 Criticism by Professor Mahaffy. " Sophocles devoted all his 
 energy to the production of those famous works of art, which 
 gave him such a hold over the Athenian public that he came to 
 be considered the very ideal of a tragic poet, and was worshipped 
 after his death as a hero, under the title of Dexion. He is said 
 to have won twenty tragic victories. The author of the " Poetic " 
 and the Alexandrian critics follow the judgment of the Attic 
 public, and most modern critics have agreed with them that the 
 tragedies of Sophocles are the most perfect that the world has 
 seen." 
 
 Criticism by Thomas Sergeant Perry, " The general cus- 
 tom of critics is to refer to Sophocles as the great poet of the age 
 of Pericles, as is Shakespeare of the Elizabethan age, Racine of 
 that of Louis XIV. The inevitable comparison between his work 
 and that of ^Eschylus makes clear the difference between the 
 man who works with unfamiliar tools in rapidly changing con- 
 ditions, r and his successor who finds the paths cut and laid out, 
 so that it falls to him to devote himself to perfecting the task in 
 hand. Sophocles found the drama established, and he developed 
 its capacities; he deepened its human interest by modifying sub- 
 limities and heroics in the direction of real human life, changing 
 the mythological monster into a man with perfectly natural 
 sorrows, joys, ambitions, sufferings, etc. Again, ^schylus made 
 full use of his opportunities to terrify the spectators with ghastly 
 scenes. Sophocles, on the other hand, lets solemn pathos and 
 religious awe take the place of complete terror. In reviewing 
 the total impression of what has come down to us from the hands 
 of Sophocles, what strikes us is the calmness and self-possession 
 of his art, a quality that is more readily perceived than described, 
 for the nearer an object comes to perfect beauty, the more diffi- 
 cult it is to define it, except with that one word. When it has 
 marked qualities that give one side more prominence than an- 
 other, we are no longer dumb. In English literature, for ex- 
 ample, Milton has been described with exactness, whereas count- 
 less volumes have struggled with Shakespeare, and his work, at 
 its best, yet defies the most industrious commentators to say just 
 wherein its merit lies. In the same way the rounded perfection 
 of Sophocles baffles anyone who tries his hand at conveying a 
 full impression of his many attractive qualities. 
 
444 
 
 THE DRAMA 
 
 Criticism by Blair. " Sophocles is the most masterly of the 
 three Greek tragedians, the most correct in the conduct of his 
 subjects, the most just in his sentiments. He is likewise eminent 
 for- his descriptive talent; for example, the description of the 
 death of CEdipus or of Haemon is a perfect pattern of what de- 
 scription should be in a tragedy. While ^Eschylus is the Father 
 of Greek Tragedy, he exhibits the defects as well as the beauties 
 of an early original writer ; he is bold, nervous, animated, yet very 
 obscure and difficult to be understood; his style is crowded too 
 much with metaphors; it is often harsh and abrupt. He has 
 much fire, elevation, force, but less of tenderness than Sophocles. 
 He delights in the marvellous, the uncanny, the blood-curdling; 
 for example, the Ghost of Darius, or the furies in Eumenides. 
 On the contrary, Sophocles is content with the human, the natural 
 the mirror held up, not to mythology, but to nature." 
 
 Euripides. The third and last of the famous Greek 
 tragedians was born 480 B. C., and died 406 B. C. He was 
 a native of Salamis, lived during the invasion of Xerxes, 
 studied rhetoric under Prodicus, and at the age of twenty-five 
 began to write dramas. He wrote seventy-five plays in all; 
 eighteen of which are extant. The most famous are 
 " Hecuba," " Iphigenia," " Electra," " Ion " and " Bacchse." 
 
 Criticism by Professor R. C. Jebb. " Euripides is the media- 
 tor between ancient and modern drama No great poet is more 
 difficult to estimate justly, and none has been judged more un- 
 fairly. Euripides was only fifteen years younger than Sophocles. 
 But when Euripides began to write, it must have been clear to 
 any man of his genius and culture that, though an established 
 prestige might be maintained, a new poet who sought to construct 
 tragedy on the old basis would be building on sand. For, first, 
 the popular religion itself the very foundation of tragedy had 
 been undermined. Secondly, scepticism had begun to be busy 
 with the legends which that religion consecrated. Neither gods 
 nor heroes commanded all the old unquestioning faith. Lastly, 
 an increasing number of the audience in the theatre began to be 
 destitute of the training, musical and poetical, which had prepared 
 an earlier generation to enjoy the chaste and placid grand- 
 
ARISTOPHANES 445 
 
 eur of ideal Tragedy. Euripides made a splendid effort to main- 
 tain the place of tragedy in the spiritual life of Athens by modi- 
 fying its interests in the sense which his own generation required. 
 Could not the heroic persons still excite interest if they were 
 made more real if, in them, the passions and sorrows of every- 
 day life were portrayed with greater vividness and directness? 
 And might not the less cultivated part of the audience at least 
 enjoy a thrilling plot, especially i-f taken from the home-legends 
 of Attica? Euripides became the virtual founder of the Roman- 
 tic Drama. In so far as his work fails, the failure is one which 
 probably no artistic tact could then have wholly avoided. The 
 frame within which he had to work was one which could not be 
 stretched to his plan. The chorus, the masks, the narrow stage, 
 the conventional costumes, the slender opportunities for change of 
 scenery, were so many fixed obstacles to the free development of 
 tragedy in the new direction. But no man of his time could 
 have broken free from these traditions ; in attempting to do so, 
 he must have wrecked either his fame or his art. It is not the 
 fault of Euripides if in so much of his work we feel the want of 
 harmony between matter and form. Art abhors compromise; 
 and it was the misforune of Attic tragedy in his generation that 
 nothing but a compromise could save it. 
 
 Aristophanes. Among authors of Greek comedy, Aris- 
 tophanes is fairly representative. He was born 446 B. C. and 
 died not later than 380 B. C. He is sometimes called the 
 Pagan Voltaire, because his plays tend to bring the gods into 
 contempt. His best known plays are the " Frogs," the 
 " Clouds/' the " Wasps " and the " Birds." 
 
 Criticism by Professor R. C. Jebb. " Comedy, as we have it 
 in Aristophanes, is a public commentary on the every-day life of 
 Athens, in great things and small. Politics and society, states- 
 men and private persons, are criticised with unsparing freedom. 
 The satire is unscrupulously personal. Old Athens knew no re- 
 spect for private life when it seemed to be for the good of the 
 city that the vices of a citizen should be lashed. Aristophanes 
 was not only a great satirist, but a great poet. His comedies 
 unite elements which meet nowhere in literature. There is a play 
 
44 6 THE DRAMA 
 
 of fancy, as extravagant as in a modern Burlesque. The whole 
 world is turned topsy-turvy. Gods and mortals alike are whirled 
 through the motley riot of one great carnival. There is a humor 
 as delicate, a literary satire as keen, as the most exquisite wit 
 could offer to the most subtle appreciation. And there are lyric 
 strains of a wild woodland sweetness hardly to be matched, save 
 in Shakespeare. He claims for himself, and justly, that he is 
 outspoken on the side of virtue and against vice." 
 
 Criticism by Thomas Sergeant Perry. " Aristophanes repre- 
 sents, not only wit and satire, but half of the divided spirit of 
 Athens, and to speak of him merely as a great writer is to do 
 him but scant justice. Aristophanes is great because he personi- 
 fies an important part of the Athenian people; his hatred of the 
 destructive war ; his detestation of the new intellectual ferment, 
 his abhorrence of the democracy, are beyond and outside of his 
 personal feelings they count as the expression of a large part of 
 an eager people. As regards the laws of the drama, Aristophanes 
 adhered strictly to them, and his dramas are some of the finest 
 specimens we have in the department of Comedy." 
 
 Among the Latins. The regular Roman drama was of 
 foreign origin a mere imitation of the Greek. Unfortu- 
 nately there is very little of the Roman drama extant, especially 
 those creations that belong to the classic age. We know only 
 the titles of the tragedies written by Lucius, Andronicus 
 and Ennius. The tragedies of Seneca are the only ones which 
 we possess, plays in which not only the Greek themes are em- 
 ployed, but likewise the Greek method. However, two writers 
 of Roman comedy are famous; their extant dramas rescue 
 Latin literature from absolute sterility in this department. 
 
 Plautus. M. Accius Plautus was a celebrated comic poet; 
 he was the son of a freedman, born in Umbria about 525 
 A. U. C. He was called Plautus from his splay-feet, a defect 
 common to the Umbrians. Twenty plays of this writer have 
 ccrme down to us; although, in his age, about one hundred 
 
PLAUTUS 447 
 
 and thirty plays bore his name. His best known plays are 
 the " Captive," " Rudens," " Mostellaria," and " Mensechmi." 
 
 Criticism by Charles Anthon. " In each plot of Plautus there 
 is sufficient action, movement and spirit. The incidents never 
 flag, but rapidly accelerate the catastrophe. But if we regard 
 his plays in the mass, there is a considerable, and perhaps too 
 great uniformity in his fables; they hinge for the most part on 
 the love of some dissolute youth for a courtesan, his employment 
 of a slave to defraud a father of a sum sufficient for his expensive 
 pleasures, and the final discovery that his mistress is a free-born 
 citizen. The Latin style of Plautus excels in briskness of dia- 
 logue as well as purity of expression, and has been extolled by 
 the learned Roman grammarians who declared that if the Muses 
 were to speak Latin, they would employ his diction. There can 
 be no doubt but that Plautus wonderfully improved and refined 
 the Latin language. The chief excellence of Plautus is generally 
 reputed to consist in the wit and comic force of his dialogue. At 
 times he degenerates into buffoonery and scurrility, but like other 
 dramatists he was obliged to appeal to baser elements of society." 
 
 Publius Terentius. He was a celebrated Latin comic poet, 
 born about the 56oth year of Rome. In his earliest youth he 
 was a slave. He composed, or rather adapted from the Greek, 
 a large number of plays, six of which are extant. Of these 
 the " Adelphi," " Hecyra " and " Eunuchus " are best known. 
 
 Criticism by Professor Smith. " The plots of Terence, as a 
 rule, are taken from Greek sources. In the additions and alter- 
 ations which he made, he has given proof of good taste and judg- 
 ment. He was a more careful observer of the unities of time and 
 place than Plautus or any of his predecessors. Terence instead 
 of resorting to buffoonery in order to hold his audience, had re- 
 course to the double plot, thus increasing the public interest in the 
 play without pandering to the viler tastes of the rabble. Ancient 
 critics are agreed that the special talent of this author is re- 
 vealed in the delineation of characters and manners, and in the 
 inimitable art with which he wove incidents into the dramatic 
 story. All the inferior passions which form the scope of comedy 
 
THE DRAMA 
 
 are nicely observed and adequately expressed. Like Plautus, he 
 did much to polish the rugged Latin: Cicero refers to him as 
 " omnia dulcia dicens." His comedies are remarkable for their 
 elegance of dialogue, presenting a constant flow of easy, genteel, 
 polite conversation. The difference between Terence and Plautus 
 lies in the fact that the former wrote for the refined and educated 
 few, whereas the latter strove to satisfy the ignorant multitude." 
 
 Goethe. Among the Germans, Goethe ranks first as a poet 
 and dramatist. He was born at Frankfort in 1749 and died 
 at Weimar in 1832. His father, a man of means, bore the title 
 of Imperial Councillor. Goethe graduated in Law from the 
 University of Strasburg, but gave up the legal profession for 
 literary pursuits. He held many positions of honor under 
 the government; his travels were confined to Italy. He was 
 on familiar terms with Carlyle and knew English literature 
 thoroughly. Schiller, his contemporary, was a life-long friend. 
 The best known dramas of Goethe are "The Accomplices," 
 " Stella " and " Faust," the last play winning him international 
 fame. 
 
 Criticism by William Lindemann. " Goethe passed through 
 a number of stages as a poet and dramatist. As he grew in years 
 and in knowledge he responded to the influence of the Romantic 
 Movement. He laid aside classic canons and joined the proces- 
 sion led by Walter Scott and Wordsworth in the ' return to na- 
 ture/ As years went by, he gave himself up more and more to 
 the contemplation and study of nature. Like Wordsworth he 
 began to assent to a higher pantheism. Nature became all to 
 him, as the last traces of Christian teaching faded from his mind. 
 In 1776 he wrote as follows: "All things are to be found in 
 nature. Nature is wholly and at all times complete. Her 
 crown is love. All debt and merit alike belong to her. No 
 original being corresponds wholly to the root-idea ; behind each 
 the higher idea lies hidden that is my God.' Again, he writes 
 to Herder concerning Christ : ' The legend of Christ is a proof 
 that the world can continue ten million years and no one reach 
 a correct judgment regarding these matters.' Goethe developed 
 
GOETHE 449 
 
 an extraordinary love of nature, a love which led him to pursue 
 so ardently the study of the physical sciences. Evidence of such 
 study appears in all his later poetry. As an author of lyrics, 
 Goethe deserves the highest commendation. Many of his ballads 
 are household treasures throughout the Fatherland. It is cus- 
 tomary to regard Goethe as a poet of the head rather than the 
 heart; and the bulk of his writings may be quoted in support 
 of this contention. Nevertheless, Goethe possessed the passion- 
 ate heart of the poet; his lyrics thrill with emotion. And if we 
 had not these, the many love affairs in which he was personally 
 involved, would be ample proof of the existence of extraordinary 
 passion. In the language of England's bard, Goethe ' loved not 
 wisely, but too well.' If one would doubt that he possessed a 
 heart or affection in the highest degree, let him read the poem 
 to Faust. In his treatment of the drama, Goethe, while employ- 
 ing classic themes, <ieparted somewhat from classic canons of 
 taste, and from classic methods. In place of belief in the gods, 
 which inspired fear in man, Goethe substituted a religion of hu- 
 manity, a humanitarianism which was intended to ennoble human 
 nature. While preserving the skeleton of the ancient fables, 
 Goethe dressed them out in modern motive, breathing modern 
 life into the dead past. Goethe observes strictly the three drama- 
 tic unities. The number of acts is limited to five. He pre- 
 serves the form and the admirable simplicity of the Greek drama. 
 
 Criticism by Thomas Carlyle. " Shakespeare and Goethe, 
 unlike innumerable others, are vital; their construction begins at 
 the heart, and flows outward as the life-streams do, fashioning 
 the surface, as it were, spontaneously. Those Macbeths and Fal- 
 staffs, accordingly, those Fausts and Philinas, have a verisimili- 
 tude and life that separates them from all other fictions of late 
 ages. All others, in comparison, have more or less the nature of 
 hollow wizards, constructed from without inwards, painted like 
 and deceptively put in motion. Many years ago on finishing our 
 perusal of Wilhelm Meister, with a very mixed sentiment in other 
 respects, we could not but feel that here lay more insight into the 
 elements of human nature, and a more poetically perfect combin- 
 ing of these, than in all the other fictitious literature of our gener- 
 ation. In Goethe's works, chronologically arranged, we see this 
 above all things: a mind working itself into clearer and clearer 
 
450 THE DRAMA 
 
 freedom, gaining a more and more perfect dominion of its world. 
 " Werther " we call the voice of the world's despair ; passionate, 
 uncontrollable is this voice ; not yet melodious and supreme as 
 nevertheless we at length hear it in the wild apocalyptic " Faust!' 
 like a death-song of departing worlds; no voice of joyful ' morn- 
 ing stars singing together ' over a Creation, but of red, nigh-ex- 
 tinguished, midnight stars, in spheral swan-melody, proclaiming, 
 ' It is ended/ In the next period we have what might be styled 
 Pagan or JEthenic in character ; meaning thereby an anthropomor- 
 phic character akin to that of old Greece and Rome. ' Wilhelm 
 Meister ' is of that stamp : warm, hearty, sunny, human endeavor, 
 a free recognition of Life in its depth, variety, and majesty; as 
 yet no divinity recognized there. Also, the ' Venetian Epigrams ' 
 are of the like Old Ethenic tone musical, joyfully strong; true, 
 yet not the whole truth. The Old World is now in ashes ; doubt 
 has been reduced to denial. But after the smoke and flame are 
 blown away, the sun shines clear again over the ruin. In the 
 third and final period, melodious reverence becomes triumphant. 
 " Faust " is saved, redeemed. What all must admire in Goethe is 
 his utmost clearness, all-piercing faculty of vision. A nobler 
 power of insight than this of Goethe you in vain look for, since 
 Shakespeare passed away. For Goethe, as for Shakespeare, the 
 world lies all translucent. Again, we must admire in both, but 
 especially in Goethe, an extraordinary " Figurativeness," for this 
 grand light-giving intellect, as all such are, is an imaginative one. 
 Because of the spell of such a powerful imagination, perennial, 
 as a possession forever, Goethe's history and writings abide : a 
 thousand-voiced ' melody of wisdom/ which he that has ears may 
 hear. He who was of compass to know and feel more than any 
 other man, this is the record of his knowledge and feeling." 
 
 Criticism by Bishop Spalding. " Goethe, whom the consent 
 of the enlightened has placed in the narrow circle of the few really 
 great minds of the world, was not an ideal man. He had even 
 grave faults. In his relations with women he was not always 
 either wise or moral. He never wholly outgrew the influence 
 of Spinoza, Voltaire, and Rousseau. He was not a Christian. 
 In the presence of his country's awful humiliations he remained 
 passive and seemingly indifferent, consented even to receive the 
 decoration of the Legion of Honor from Napoleon, in the hour 
 
GOETHE 
 
 of his triumph over Germany. In fact, he dearly loved a king 
 or a duke, however uninteresting or vulgar the man might be. 
 They who would make him a demi-god, do not see him as he 
 is ; and he is great enough as he is, not to need the douhtful help 
 of false praise. Even as a writer he is not without serious de- 
 fects. It is only in his best lyrics that he is altogether admirable. 
 In his prose he is not (infrequently diffuse, commonplace, tiresome 
 even. As he grew older he became the victim of allegory, sym- 
 bolism, and didacticism. Few find " Wilhelm Meister " an inter- 
 esting novel, and still fewer can read the second part of " Faust " 
 at all. Yet, find fault with him as one may, he is, both as a man 
 and as an author, worthy of the most serious study, for the world 
 has had few men who teach so well the things we all most need 
 to learn. His industry was unwearying, his sympathies were all- 
 embracing, and whatever concerned man interested him. His 
 aim, which he never lost sight of even for a moment, was to up- 
 build his own being, to raise, as he said, as high as possible the 
 apex of the pyramid whose base and foundation had been given 
 him. His ideal is life in its completeness, life brought into har- 
 mony with all that is true, good and fair. Think of living, is his 
 motto Live in the whole, in God and in all that He has made. 
 Whatever he does, and his occupations are of the most varied 
 kind, he always holds in view his own self-culture. He was 
 Counselor of a Grand Duke, Minister of Public Instruction, su- 
 perintendent of the theatre, and of public works, a scientist, an 
 antiquarian, a critic of literature and of art, as well as a poet, a 
 dramatist, and a novelist. He practiced drawing, painting and 
 engraving. He strove to make himself a sculptor. He studied 
 everything, and sought to find in everything he did or learned, 
 the means of his own improvement. In power of imagination he 
 is inferior to Shakespeare, but he is his superior in culture, in 
 seriousness of purpose, and in the painstaking care with which he 
 followed his vocation, throughout a long life, even to the very 
 end. He was not only acquainted with the best which was 
 known, but he had studied human life in all its phases, had 
 meditated profoundly on all the great problems, had traveled and 
 beheld the masterpieces of art, had observed everything, investi- 
 gated everything. His thoughts are elevated and profound ; his 
 attitude toward the world is uniformly tolerant and kindly: his 
 style is classic. He is full of patience, courage, and cheerfulness. 
 
452 
 
 THE DRAMA 
 
 His appreciativeness and interest are active and enlightened. His 
 faith in reason is absolute ; his poetic insight and inspiration are 
 deep and genuine;' his moral teaching is wholesome and invigor- 
 ating. If not a Christian, he is still less a denier and scoffer. On 
 the contrary, the spirit in which he thinks and strives is that of 
 modesty, reverence, and self-renunciation, of mildness, sympathy, 
 and helpfulness. He is a builder, not a destroyer; a diffuser of 
 light and sweetness, not a sower of discord and hatred. His 
 coldness is apparent only; his selfishness is that of the man of 
 genius, whose work is imperative, whose task is imposed by a 
 master who must be obeyed. Of the poets, he is the greatest 
 moralist and the most suggestive thinker. He may be called the 
 creator of the literature of Germany ; he is the author of the 
 best educational novel, and of one of the few world-dramas. He 
 gave the impulse which led Scott to write the Waverly novels, 
 and he was the inspirer of Carlyle, who, however, never, at- 
 tained the clearness of vision, the repose, the breadth, the amenity, 
 the kindliness, and sanity of the master. He is less intense than 
 Dante, who was too preoccupied with the hatreds and strifes of 
 his age; he is more conscious of a high purpose than Shakes- 
 peare, who hardly seems to have personal views at all, who comes 
 so near saying everything that it is difficult to divine his real 
 thoughts. Goethe knows what he wants, and he perceives clearly 
 the means by which his aims are realized." 
 
 Henrik Ibsen.^He was born at Skien, Norway, in 1828. 
 He studied medicine, but; later on, applied himself to literature. 
 Few literary men have shown greater zeal and devotion to their 
 life-work. Already he has earned the title of " Shakespeare 
 of the North." His dramas (outside the drama there is very 
 little from his pen) are translated into every modern language. 
 The best known plays are " Love's Comedy," " Brand," 
 "Ghosts/' the "Master-Builder" and "An Enemy of the 
 People." 
 
 Criticism by William H. Sheran. It is customary to refer 
 to Ibsen as the modern Shakespeare. Certainly, it may be said 
 of him that no foreign playwright has had such welcome, both in 
 
IBSEN 
 
 453 
 
 England and America, as has Ibsen. His plays have been trans- 
 lated several times into English, and our best; critics are of the 
 opinion that even in translation they outrank anything produced 
 by our native genius during the past two hundred years, if they 
 have not actually won a place beside the immortal production! 
 of the Bard of Avon. Ibsen served a brief apprenticeship in 
 " Catilina " and the " Feast at Solhaug," when the skill of the 
 master workman began to assert itself; for the "Vikings" and 
 " Ghosts," which followed soon after, are the perfect flowering 
 of his genius. In selecting materials, Ibsen, like Shakespeare, 
 made use of the early history of his country ; thus, the " Vikings " 
 resembles " King Lear " and " Cymbeline." In this connection 
 it may be said that no playwright illustrates better than Ibsen 
 the dramatic possibilities of northern mythology. But Ibsen, 
 unlike Shakespeare, traveled in foreign lands, and studied human 
 life and the masterpieces of art in France, Italy, and other 
 countries. Yet, true to his Norwegian or Teutonic temperament, 
 he admires moral beauty rather than sensuous beauty, and dis- 
 appointed in his quest after moral beauty, he distrusted his fel- 
 low man and became a pessimist of the most pronounced type. 
 He is a pessimist who distrusts his fellow man, and who permits 
 his pessimism to assume an iconoclastic attitude toward the exist- 
 ing conventionalities of society. In his greater tragedies there is 
 an echo of Shelley's hatred for the existing order of things. But, 
 although a pessimist, he does not proceed to the lengths of 
 Schopenhauer he does not teach that life itself is an evil, or that 
 happiness is unattainable. He believes, on the contrary, that 
 man would be happy under other conditions. He 'believes that 
 if man is robbed of happiness, it is because of society, the con- 
 ventional rules and ideas of duty, which starve and slay man's 
 moral nature. This is exactly the plea of Shelley. And one 
 reason for the popularity of Ibsen is, that such doctrine has struck 
 a responsive chord in the English speaking world. Not that the 
 English race would do away with the accepted canons of right 
 conduct, but there is a feeling that the accepted conventionalities 
 of modern society exact too much impose too much restraint. 
 Ibsen, therefore, quarrels with man for retaining these tra- 
 ditional conventionalities his pessimism is the pessimism of in- 
 dignation ; he is indignant because man allows himself to be 
 swayed bv a social tyrant. Another characteristic is Ibsen's lack 
 

 THE DRAMA 
 
 of sympathy with any kind of suffering. He believes that man's 
 road to greatness lies through pain and sorrow ; the discipline of 
 suffering is needed for the development of a healthy moral na- 
 ture. Therein we find an echo of Shakespeare sweet are the 
 uses of adversity. In pain, adversity and oppression the highest 
 virtues of our race grow and blossom. 
 
 Finally, the critic of Ibsen notices how much he has accom- 
 plished with commonplace material ; his characters are not the 
 great personages of the earth, kings, queens, statesmen, heroes, 
 etc., they are taken from the lower walks of life ; yet his dramas 
 hold an audience spellbound by economy of attention, the skilful 
 management of plot, the subtle analysis of motive, and a wierd, 
 grim atmosphere like that which hangs over a volcano ready to 
 belch forth at any time " redounding smoke and ruddy flame." 
 Perhaps there is not sufficient relief afforded to the audience from 
 this morbid intensity, and, therefore, Shakespeare, if not so 
 strictly artistic, is far more natural by introducing clowns and 
 episodes as a needed relief. But Ibsen writes the drama with a 
 purpose, whereas, Shakespeare holds up the mirror to nature, 
 smiling amid her tears. In either case tragedy has gained the 
 highest peaks in the mountain range of human passion. 
 
 Hermann Sudermann. He was born at Matzicken, East 
 Prussia, in 1857. By common consent he is regarded as one 
 of the world's greatest dramatists, promising to excel even his 
 own gifted countryman, the creator of Faust. He is a disciple 
 of Ibsen. His best known plays are the " Joy of Living," 
 " The End of Sodom," " Home," and " Honor." 
 
 Criticism by William Lindemann. " The fame of Hermann 
 Sudermann began with the drama called * Honor,' which was pub- 
 lished in 1889. The technique of this drama followed traditional 
 lines, although throughout the work we see evidences of the Ro- 
 mantic movement or ' return to nature,' which characterizes the 
 modern drama in Germany and elsewhere. The thesis of the 
 play is revolutionary in the extreme, an echo of the pessimism of 
 Ibsen. It amounts to this, as stated in Siidermann's own words : 
 there is no such thing as honor. What we call honor is merely 
 the shadow which we cast when the bright sun of popular ap- 
 
SIIDERMANN 455 
 
 plause shines full upon us. The saddest feature about ' honor ' 
 is that there are as many kinds as there are classes of society. 
 But in passing this judgment the dramatist has forgotten to note 
 that there is such a thing as ' guilty honor,' the shadow cast by 
 evil deeds when the light of conscience falls on them. There is 
 throughout the play a shameful realism which paints the lower 
 classes in all their viciousness and naked deformity. The author 
 seems to take a special delight in creating harrowing scenes such 
 as excite one's indignation rather than one's pity. Similarly, in 
 the ' End of Sodom,' although the avowed purpose of the author 
 is to cause a wholesome terror of evil in the minds of those dis- 
 posed thereto. The author would thus work a moral reforma- 
 tion by painting the immoral in the most hideous and revolting 
 light. But this position cannot be maintained either from the 
 standpoint of good art or good morals. For, first of all, accord- 
 ing to the laws of art, a character must be possible ; and the hero 
 of the ' End of Sodom-' is an impossible character ; he is abso- 
 lutely unthinkable. Again, the highest art while yielding to us 
 the largest amount of aesthetic pleasure, should never wound our 
 moral sentiments and feelings. Yet, from the beginning to the 
 end of this drama, the author makes such a mistake he leads us 
 into a world from whose stifling atmosphere we would as gladly 
 escape as from a charnel house. By placing the morals of the 
 upper and lower classes in opposition, Siidermann secures his 
 most powerful dramatic effects. It cannot be denied that the 
 artist has presented to us the most powerful scenes that passion 
 can display ; although we must confess that many of them are at 
 the same time inartistic and gruesome. The contrast and con- 
 flict of classes are splendid material for the modern dramatist, and 
 Siidermann has taken advantage of it." 
 
 " In the tragedy called ' John/ Siidermann attempted the his- 
 torical drama with some success. Three distinct motives arc dis- 
 closed in it : the first is the love of Salome, the daughter of Hero- 
 dias, for John the Baptist ; the second is the desire of the Baptist 
 for the Holy One; the third is the story of Josephus that John 
 was murdered because they feared the effect of his socialistic 
 speeches. Only the first motive is dominant throughout the play. 
 The others fail, or rather are brought to no definite issue. This 
 drama, like the preceding, reveals Siidermann's mastery over the 
 springs of passion ; also, a decided improvement in character- 
 
456 THE DRAMA 
 
 creation. The technique or finish indicates that Siidermann has 
 attained the zenith of his glory as an artist.' 
 
 " The proper sphere or province of Siidermann is the romance. 
 'Frau Sorge ' is, on the whole, his finest work ; he does not 
 dabble in modern problems, socialistic or ethical, nor does he go 
 back to the infant ideals of Romanticism. In this romantic novel 
 he teaches the supreme lesson of life the performance of duty. 
 In the struggle between duty and inclination, his ideal character 
 is always on the side of the former, and attains symmetry of 
 growth and perfection of moral nature in the divinely appointed 
 way the way of trial and toil and suffering. Sudermann, in 
 spite of his many and obvious defects, will doubtless end his 
 career by winning the very highest place in German dramatic 
 literature." 
 
 Moli$re. He was born at Paris in 1622, and died there in 
 1673. He was a graduate of the Jesuit College in Paris. At 
 the early age of twenty-three he began to devote his entire 
 time to acting and play-writing. He placed himself at the 
 head of a troop of actors, performing both in the provinces 
 and in Paris where he settled down. He is by far the most 
 celebrated of the French dramatists, occupying the same place 
 in French comedy that Shakespeare does in English tragedy. 
 
 Criticism by Rene Doumic. " Moliere is a genius purely 
 French or Gallic. His literary ancestors were not Greeks, as in 
 the case of Racine, nor Romans and Spaniards, as in the case of 
 Corneille, but our own story-tellers, the ancient authors of French 
 legend and song, that hallowed group of which Rabelais and 
 Reguier are worthy representatives. The inspiration drawn from 
 those old fables and stories pervades Moliere's work, traceable 
 alike in his minor pieces and in his most important dramas. It is 
 a grave mistake, sometimes made, to distinguish between the Mo- 
 liere of high and low grade comedy. The most we can affirm 
 is that while the method differs somewhat, the spirit and manner- 
 isms remain the same ; so that we may recognize in " the Misan- 
 thrope " and " The Fourbiers De Scapin " the hand of the same 
 author. Moliere's relationship to the older Gallic authors of 
 comedy is also revealed in his freedom of treatment ; he has the 
 
MOLIERE 457 
 
 greatest contempt for traditional rules and conventionalities. He 
 writes : ' You are a gay lot with your rules and conventionali- 
 ties whereby you only embarrass the ignorant and stultify us more 
 and more every day. For my part, I adopt only one rule is it 
 not the greatest of all? to please?' This freedom of treatment 
 is manifested not only in the construction of the drama but in the 
 author's manner of viewing life, a view so comprehensive as to 
 include all that is dark, unlovely and frivolous. One looks in 
 vain throughout Moliere for those splendid poetic impulses 
 which are manifest in Aristophanes and Shakespeare outbreaks 
 of passion which often occur in the midst of the grossest buf- 
 foonery. Apart from so many characters capable of exciting 
 laughter or ridicule, there are none illumined by the rays of the 
 ideal. Among his numerous coquettes and prudes, only Henriette 
 represents true feminine virtue, and she is lacking in the ideal 
 grace and charm of a woman. How much different in this re- 
 spect are the women of Shakespeare ! Moliere considers that the 
 ridiculous is essential to man's nature. According to him, it is 
 indissolubly wedded even to virtue. Hence, he is never afflicted 
 at the sight of it ; the sentiment he reveals in the presence of vice 
 is not anger but only curiosity. He takes little care to preach 
 virtue or to attach any moral lessons to the conclusion of his 
 drama. In fact, Moliere gives no precepts, he simply chronicles 
 facts. He knows that in reality evil men who are the most clever, 
 are also the strongest, at least in most cases. He demonstrates 
 this ; and the only lesson we may learn from his plays is to mis- 
 trust therri. But we recognize Moliere's Gallic ancestry in his 
 gaiety of spirit and the tone of his raillery. With him, however, 
 raillery is often cruel. Certain misfortunes which are tragic and 
 which should excite sentiments of pity, have only a comic side for 
 Moliere. He treats as comic some materials which rightly be- 
 long to tragedy." 
 
 " Notwithstanding the fact that Moliere is the greatest French 
 comedian, the impression we get from his work is one of sadness 
 and bitterness. This is not a proof that the author was morose, 
 or that his laugh was not genuine. It is only a proof that he 
 was a profound student of human nature, penetrating more deep- 
 ly, perhaps, than any other author into the secrets of the human 
 heart. For sadness is the last word of all profound investigation 
 of life. If we study the art of Moliere from the viewpoint of 
 
458 THE DRAMA 
 
 external qualities the merit that strikes us most is deftness of 
 touch and a certain magnificence of execution. His characters 
 are exhibited on a grand scale, in a somewhat princely fashion ; 
 grand traits are pictured at the expense of minor tones and tints, 
 and these almost overshadow the finer points of character. Each 
 scene is made up of one idea, and one only this with a view to 
 produce but one effect. Richness and magnificence of language 
 accompany the elaborate scenes, and add much to a style that is 
 strong, firm, and natural. Moliere adopts a free and easy style of 
 versification, such as becomes the comic dialogue. In this par- 
 ticular he broke with tradition. There are some violations of 
 idiom, forced turns of phrase and wild, uncouth metaphor 
 errors due in a measure to the astonishing rapidity with which 
 he wrote. Then, too, it must be remembered that he wrote not 
 for reading but for recitation, and the stage has its own rules 
 and liberties peculiarly its own. Properly speaking, Moliere has 
 no style, for style with him varies with every character and shapes 
 itself according to such demands. In this respect Moliere proves 
 his kinship with the great masters of dramatic art. The humor 
 of Moliere while sometimes of a common-place order, never de- 
 generates into punning ; he indulges in all kinds of pleasantry, 
 and his jokes are sometimes perpetrated with thrilling effect." 
 
 " Moliere is without question the greatest of comic writers in 
 a nation devoted to comedy. His plays reflecting the national 
 love of art, are perfect models of artistic skill : more than this, they 
 are a perfect mirror of the society of his own age, and of humani- 
 ty in all ages." 
 
 William Shakespeare. He was born at Stratford-on-Avon 
 1564, and died there in 1616. Very few facts concerning his 
 life are known. Where or when Shakespeare was educated 
 is unknown. About 1587 Shakespeare went to London and 
 sought his fortune in connection with the stage. His relation- 
 ship with the Globe and Blackfriars is well known. He gained 
 considerable wealth, the result of his labors both as an actor 
 and author. Of the numerous plays left by him the best known 
 tragedies are " Othello," "King Lear," "Hamlet," "Mac- 
 beth" and "Julius Caesar"; the best known comedies are. 
 
SHAKESPEARE 
 
 41 Taming of the Shrew," "Merchant of Venice," ^Measure 
 for Measure," " Comedy of Errors " and the " Tempest." 
 
 Criticism of Shakespeare. The amount of criticism dealing 
 with Shakespeare, if collected, would easily fill a small libraiy. 
 Critics of every nation and age have vied with each other in 
 sounding the note of praise. By universal consent he is 
 styled the greatest of dramatists, unapproached by any ancient 
 or modern writer. Among English critics, Dryden, Johnson, 
 Pope, Carlyle, Hazlitt, White, Lowell, Moulton, Mabie, Dow- 
 den, have given special attention to Shakespeare. And foreign 
 critics, like Goethe, Schlegel, Ulrici, not to mention a host 
 of others, have gleaned in the same fruitful field. A volume 
 is needed to deal adequately with such a theme. 
 
 / Criticism by James Russell Lowell. " It may be reckoned 
 one of the rarest pieces. of good luck that ever fell to the share 
 of a race, that (as was true of Shakespeare) its most rhythmic 
 genius, its acutest intellect, its profoundest imagination, and its 
 healthiest understanding should have been combined in one man, 
 and that he should have arrived at the full development of his 
 powers at the moment when the material in which he was to work 
 - that wonderful composite called English, the best result of the 
 
 X confusion of tongues was in its freshest perfection. The Eng- 
 lish speaking nations should build a monument to the misguided 
 enthusiasts of the Plain of Shinar; for, as the mixture of many 
 bloods seems to have made them the most vigorous of modern 
 races, so has the mingling of divers speeches given them a lan- 
 guage which is perhaps the noblest vehicle of poetic thought that 
 ever existed. Had Shakespeare been born fifty years earlier, he 
 would have been cramped by a book-language not yet flexible 
 enough for the demands of rhythmic emotion, not yet sufficiently 
 popularized for the natural and familiar expression of supreme 
 thought, not yet so rich in metaphysical phrase as to render pos- 
 sible that ideal representation of the great passions, which is the 
 aim and end of Art, not yet subdued by practice and general con- 
 sent to a definiteness of accentuation essential to ease and con- 
 gruity of metrical arrangement. Had he been born fifty years 
 
460 THE DRAMA 
 
 later, his ripened manhood would have found itself in an Eng- 
 land absorbed and angry with the solution of political and re- 
 ligious problems, from which his whole nature was averse, in- 
 stead of that Elizabethan social system, ordered and planetary in 
 functions and degrees as the angelic hierarchy of the Areopagite, 
 where his contemplative eye could crowd itself with various and 
 brilliant pictures and whence his impartial brain one lobe of 
 which seems to have been Normanly refined and the other Saxon- 
 ly Sagacious could draw its morals of courtly and worldly 
 wisdom, its lessons of prudence and magnanimity. In estimating 
 Shakespeare, it should never be forgotten, that, like Goethe, he 
 was essentially observer and artist, and incapable of partisanship. 
 The passions, actions, sentiments, whose character and results he 
 delighted to watch and to reproduce, are those of man in society 
 as it existed ; and it no more occurred to him to question the right 
 of that society to exist than to criticise the divine ordination of 
 the seasons. His business was with men as they were, not with 
 man as he ought to be with the human soul as it is shaped or 
 twisted into character by the complex experience of life, not in its 
 abstract essence, as something to be saved or lost. The scope 
 of the higher drama is to represent life, not every-day life, it is 
 true, but life lifted above the plane of bread-and-butter associa- 
 tions, by nobler reaches of language, by the influence at once in- 
 spiring and modulating of verse, by an intenser play of passion 
 condensing that misty mixture of feeling and reflection which 
 makes the ordinary atmosphere of existence into flashes of 
 thought and phrase whose brief, but terrible, illumination prints 
 the outworn landscape of every-day upon our brains, with its 
 little motives and mean results, in lines of tell-tale fire. The 
 moral office of tragedy is to show us our own weaknesses ideal- 
 ized in grander figures and more awful results to teach us that 
 what we pardon in ourselves as venial faults, if they seem to have 
 but slight influence on our immediate fortunes, have arms as 
 long as those of kings, and reach forward to the catastrophe of 
 our lives, that they are dry- rotting the very fibre of will and con- 
 science, so that, if we should be brought to the test of a great 
 temptation or a stringent emergency, we must be involved in a 
 ruin as sudden and complete as that we shudder at in the unreal 
 scene of the theatre. But the primary object of a tragedy is not 
 to inculcate a formal moral. Representing life, it teaches, like 
 
SIl-lKHSPEARE 461 
 
 life, by indirection, by those nods and winks that are thrown 
 away on us blind horses in such profusion. We may learn, to be 
 sure, plenty of lessons from Shakespeare. We are not likely to 
 have kingdoms to divide, crowns foretold us by weird sisters, a 
 father's death to avenge, or to kill our wives from jealousy; but 
 Lear may teach us to draw the line more clearly between a wise 
 generosity and a loose-handed weakness of giving; Macbeth, 
 how one sin involves another, and forever another, by a fatal 
 parthenogenesis, and that the key which unlocks forbidden doors 
 to our will or passion leaves a stain on the hand, that may not be 
 so dark as blood, but that will not out ; Hamlet, that all the noblest 
 gifts of person, temperament, and mind slip like sand through 
 the grasp of an infirm purpose ; Othello, that the perpetual silt of 
 some one weakness, the eddies of a suspicious temper depositing 
 their one impalpable layer after another, may build up a shoal on 
 which an heroic life and an otherwise magnanimous nature may 
 bilge and go to pieces. All this we may learn, and much more, 
 and Shakespeare was no doubt well aware of all this, and more; 
 but I do not believe that he wrote his plays with any such didac- 
 tic purpose. He knew human nature too well not to know that 
 one thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning 
 that, where one man shapes his life by precept and example, 
 there are a thousand who have it shaped for them by impulse and 
 by circumstances. He did not mean his great tragedies for scare- 
 crows, as if the nailing of one hawk to the barn-door would pre- 
 vent the next from coming down souse into the hen-yard. No, 
 it is not the poor bleaching victim hung up to moult its draggled 
 feathers in the rain that he wishes to show us. He loves the 
 hawk-nature as well as the hen-nature; and if he is unequalled in 
 anything, it is in that sunny breadth of view, that impregnability 
 of reason, that looks down all ranks and conditions of men, all 
 fortunes and misfortunes, with the equal eye of the pure artist." 
 
 Criticism by Thomas Shaw. " A general conception of the 
 dramatic genius of Shakespeare must be founded upon an exami- 
 nation of all his pieces ; and while the historical dramas show how 
 he could free his mind from the trammels imposed by the neces- 
 sity of adhering to real facts and persons, the romantic portion of 
 his pieces, or those founded upon fiction, will equally prove that 
 the freedom of an ideal subject did not deprive him of the strictest 
 
462 THE DRAMA 
 
 fidelity to general nature. The characters that move through the 
 action of these latter dramas exhibit the same consummate ap- 
 preciation of the general and the individual in humanity ; and 
 though he has occasionally stepped over the boundary of ordinary 
 human nature, and has created a multitude of supernatural be- 
 ings, fairies, spirits, witches and other creatures of the imagina- 
 tion, even in these, the severest consistency and the strictest veri- 
 similitude never for a moment abandoned him. They are always 
 constantcs sibi; we know that such -beings do not and cannot 
 exist ; but we irresistibly feel, in reading the scenes in which they 
 appear, that if they did exist, they could not exist other than as 
 he has painted them. The data being established, the consequen- 
 ces, to the most remote and trivial details, flow from them in a 
 manner that no analysis can gainsay. In the mode of delineating 
 passion and feeling Shakespeare proceeds differently from all 
 other dramatic authors. They, even the greatest among them, 
 create a personage by accumulating in it all such traits as their 
 reading and observation show to usually accompany the funda- 
 mental elements which go to form its constitution : and thus they 
 all, more or less, fall into the error of making their personages 
 embodiments of such a moral peculiarity. They give us ad- 
 mirable and complete monographies of ambition, of avarice, of 
 hypocracy, and the like. Moreover, in the expression of their 
 feelings, whether tragic or comic, such characters almost univer- 
 sally describe the sensations they experience. But men and 
 women of Shakespeare exactly resemble the men and women of 
 strong emotion or other powerful moral impression; we indicate 
 to others what we feel, rather, and far more powerfully, by what 
 we suppress than what we utter. In this respect the men and 
 women of Shakespeare exactly resemble the men and women of 
 real life, and not the men and women of the stage. Nor has he 
 ever fallen into the common error of forgetting the infinite com- 
 plexity of human character. If we analyze any one of the promi- 
 nent personages of Shakespeare, though we may often at first 
 sight perceive in it the predominance of some one quality or pas- 
 sion, on a nearer view we shall find that the complexity of its 
 moral being goes on widening and deepening with every new 
 attempt on our part to grasp or sound the whole extent of its 
 individuality. 
 
 " In the expression of strong emotion, as well as in the delinea- 
 
SlIAKESrEAKE 
 
 tion of character, Shakespeare is superior to all other dramatists, 
 superior to all other poets. He never finds it necessary, in order 
 to produce the effect he desires, to have recourse in the one case to 
 violent or declamatory rhetoric, or in the other to unusual or ab- 
 normal combinations of qualities. In him we meet with no sen- 
 timental assassins, no moral monsters, 
 
 ' Blessed with one virtue and a thousand crimes.' 
 
 Without overstepping the ordinary limits of human experience, 
 he is always able to interest or instruct us with the exhibition of 
 general passions and feelings, manifesting themselves in the way 
 we generally see them in the world. He is like the great painter 
 of antiquity, who produced his ever-varying effects by the aid of 
 four simple colors. In the expression, too, he uniformly draws, 
 at least in the finest passages, his illustrations from the most sim- 
 ple and familiar objects, from the most ordinary scenes of life. 
 When a great occasion presents itself, he ever shows himself 
 equal to that occasion. There are, indeed, in his works many 
 passages where he has allowed his taste for intellectual subtleties 
 to get the better of his judgment, and where his passion for 
 playing upon words a passion which was the literary vice of 
 the day, and the effects of which are traceable in the writings of 
 Bacon as well as in his is permitted to cool the enthusiasm 
 excited by the situation or the feelings of the speaker. But the 
 indulgence in conceits generally disappears in the great culmi- 
 nating moments of intense passion : and while we are speaking 
 of this defect with due critical severity, we must not forget that 
 there are occasions when the intense moral agitation is not in- 
 compatible with a morbid and feverish activity of the intellect, 
 and that the most violent emotion sometimes finds a vent in the 
 intellectual contortions of a conceit. Nevertheless, it cannot l>e 
 denied that Shakespeare very often runs riot in the indulgence 
 of this tendency, to the injury of the effect designed and in defi- 
 ance of the most evident principles of good taste. His style is 
 unquestionably a very difficult one in some respects : and this ob- 
 scurity is not to be attributed, except of course, in some particu- 
 lar instances, to the corrupt state in which his writings have 
 descended to us, and still less to the archaism or obsoleteness of 
 his diction. Many of the great dramatists his contemporaries. 
 for example Massinger and Ford, are in this respect as different 
 
464 THE DRAMA 
 
 from Shakespeare as if they had been separated from him by two 
 centuries of time their writings being as remarkable for the 
 limpidity and clearness of expression as his are occasionally for 
 its complexity. It is, therefore, not to the remoteness of the 
 period that we must ascribe this peculiarity. Indeed in this re- 
 spect Shakespeare's language will present nearly as much diffi* 
 culty to an English as to a foreign student. We must look for 
 the cause of this in the enormously developed intellectual and 
 imaginative faculty in the poet; leading him to make metaphor 
 of the boldest kind the ordinary tissue of his style. The thoughts 
 rise so fast under his pen, and successively generate others with 
 such a portentous rapidity, that the reader requires almost as 
 great an intellectual vivacity as the poet, in order to trace the 
 leading idea through the labyrinth of subordinate illustration. 
 In all figurative writing the metaphor, the image, is an orna- 
 ment, something extraneous to the thought it is intended to illus- 
 trate, and may be detached from it, leaving the fundamental idea 
 intact : in Shakespeare the metaphor is the very fabric of the 
 thought itself and entirely inseparable from it. His diction may 
 be compared to some elaborate monument of the finest Gothic 
 architecture in which the superficial glance losses itself in an in- 
 extricable maze of sculptural detail and fantastically fretted 
 ornamentation, but where a close examination shows that every 
 pinnacle, every buttress, every moulding is an essential member 
 of the construction. This imitation union of the reason and the 
 imagination is a peculiarity common to Shakespeare and Bacon, 
 in whose writings the severest logic is expressed in the boldest 
 metaphor, and the very titles of whose books and the very defi- 
 nitions of whose philosophical terms are frequently images of 
 the most figurative character. There is assuredly no poet, an- 
 cient or modern, from whose writings may be extracted such a 
 number of profound and yet practical observations applicable to 
 the common affairs and interests of life ; observations expressed 
 with the simplicity of a casual remark, yet pregnant with the con- 
 densed wisdom of philosophy ; exhibiting more than the acute- 
 ness of De Rochefoucauld, without his cynical contempt for hu- 
 manity, and more than practical good sense of Moliere, with a 
 far wider and more universal applicability. In the picturing of 
 abnormal and supernatural states of existence, as in the delinea- 
 tion of every phase of mental derangement, or the sentiments 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 or 
 
 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 and actions of fantastic and supernatural beings, Shakespeare 
 exhibits the same coherency and consistency in the midst of what 
 at first sight appears altogether to transcend ordinary experi- 
 ence. Every grade of folly, from the verge of idiocy to the 
 most fantastic eccentricity, every shade of moral perturbation, 
 from the jealousy fury of Othello to the frenzy of Lear or the 
 not less touching madness of Ophelia, is represented in his plays 
 with a fidelity so complete that the most experienced physiologists 
 have affirmed that such intellectual disturbances may be studied 
 in his pages with as much profit as in the actual patients of a 
 madhouse." 
 
 Other Dramatists. Perhaps there is no department of lit- 
 erature so rich and varied as the drama. Every nation, 
 ancient as well as modern, lays claim to excellence in gifted 
 playwrights and stage productions. The student of English 
 literature is familiar with the contemporaries of Shakespeare 
 - Marlowe, Fletcher, Greene, Chettle, Ford, Massinger, Beau- 
 mont, Webster, Dekker, and many others. Continental litera- 
 ture can boast a Schiller in Germany, a Corneille, Racine 
 and Hugo in France, a Camoens in Portugal, a Cervantes in 
 Spain; for every nation has had its golden age when the 
 dramatist flourished. At all times the stage has appealed 
 to the people ; they have seen thereon, as in a mirror, a reflec- 
 tion of their own human life, its faults and foibles, its glory 
 and shame; they have seen the smiles of comedy and the 
 blinding tears of tragedy. The drama shows us the soul in 
 action, and its greatest works reveal the individual soul in 
 collision with a higher will, a stronger force, as represented 
 by the decrees of fate, the family or the State. There is no 
 literary work more complex, instructive or fascinating none 
 which repays the student so much for his time and application. 
 We may close the criticism of the drama with two observa- 
 tions made by master minds the life of humanity is a grand 
 drama the whole world is a stage, and we are the players. 
 
CHAPTER XLIX 
 THE EPIC 
 
 Origin of the Epic. At the root of the epic was the popular 
 worship of heroes. This worship filled heaven with the gods 
 of mythology; and around their earthly career legends and 
 myths grew up and flourished in the traditions of the people. 
 In these legends the epic writer found material for his long 
 narrative poem. The mythology furnishing the basis for epics, 
 deals with the forces and elements of nature which were 
 deified, as well as with the human hero. In this connection 
 Professor Jebb writes of Homer : " The early religion of the 
 Greeks was chiefly a sense of divinity in the forces of outward 
 nature; so that among the gods of Olympus are those repre- 
 senting the elements, the seasons, the divisions of earth and 
 water, etc. ; these gods were fully as heroic in character as 
 those who had inherited heaven or those who, as human heroes, 
 earned deification." The epic treatment of this material cor- 
 responds with the traditional treatment of it; hence, it is 
 almost wholly fictitious. But certain elements of truth remain 
 in the composition of the epic. For example, Jebb finds three 
 elements of truth in Homer. First, his epics are true in em- 
 ploying historical material for setting and outline; they are 
 true in selecting some characters or heroes who actually have 
 a place in human history, although the events in their lives 
 as given in the epics are for the most part fictitious. Finally, 
 they are true in giving a faithful picture of the social manners 
 and institutions which existed at the time. These elements of 
 truth found in Homer, extend throughout the whole realm of 
 epic literature. 
 
 466 
 
COMPARED WITH THE LYRIC 
 
 The Epic Compared with the Lyric The epic deals with 
 the real or fictitious events of history ; hence, it is objective in 
 character; whereas, the lyric deals with the writer's own 
 thoughts and emotions. In other words, the lyric is purely 
 subjective. It is self-expression in the matter of love, hatred, 
 grief, hope, or in any other of the various passions. As dis- 
 tinguished from the lyric, epic poetry was recited, not set 
 to music; the author was kept in the background; the events 
 of the story, not the personal feelings of the author, held 
 the attention of reader or hearer. As a natural result of the 
 material treated, the lyric is a brief poem. The expression of 
 intense emotion, like the duration of any passion, is incapable 
 of long continuance. For example, the climax of grief, joy, 
 hatred, or any passion is brief in nature; and must be so in 
 art; and the lyric which is its form of expression cannot be 
 drawn out to any length without violating the law of nature. 
 This is true, even when a large number of lyrics cluster around 
 a single theme as in the In Memoriam of Tennyson ; for each 
 lyric is brief, having a separate topic. Tennyson defines these 
 lyrics as " short swallow-flights of song that dip their wings 
 in tears and skim away." The epic, on the contrary, is a long 
 narrative poem, dealing with the story of some hero, and in- 
 volving a large number of events and episodes. The material 
 is such that the epic must run through many chapters or 
 cantos ; it often reaches the proportions of a good-sized volume. 
 
 Epic and Lyric Combined. The epic often contains lyric 
 elements, because it frequently gives expression to intense emo- 
 tion. For example, the hymns of the angels or the prayers 
 of our first parents quoted in Milton ; the frequent and passion- 
 ate invocation of the gods in Virgil and Homer. These are 
 purely lyrical in character. While they do not change the 
 form and matter of the epic line, they are separated by quota- 
 
468 THE EPIC 
 
 tion marks, and are understood by the author and reader to 
 be distinct from the epic story. 
 
 The Epic Compared with the Drama. As compared with 
 the drama, the epic is narrated; the drama is acted. The 
 drama is concerned primarily with character creation. The 
 events in a drama are stated in order to unfold character; 
 they are seen in the light of character-development; whereas, 
 the events in the epic, like the events of history, are made inter- 
 esting 1 on their own account. 
 
 Leading Characters Compared. If we compare leading 
 characters of the epic, for example, Achilles or Ulysses, with 
 leading characters of the drama, for example, Hamlet or 
 Othello, the difference between epic and dramatic treatment 
 appears at once. The main point of difference is magnitude 
 and uncertainty of outline. The epic hero as represented in 
 Achilles or Ulysses, is unreal, a human shadow, distorted and 
 magnified beyond the range of probability ; as a rule, this hero 
 is an impossible idealization of human qualities and human 
 deeds. Thus, epic characters are aptly described as sprites, 
 goblins, ghosts, flitting with magnified forms in the twilight 
 of history. Hence, too, the frequent introduction of the super- 
 natural in order to sustain epic grandeur and magnificence. 
 The epic writer constantly destroys human limitations and 
 his imagination takes refuge in the supernatural. For exam- 
 ple, Homer forgets Achilles and the plain of Troy, and spends 
 much of his time and talent around Olympus. In Paradise 
 Lost, Adam is made a mere pigmy among supernatural heroes. 
 In the broad light of day the traditional epic hero is an absurd 
 creation; hence, Milton felt that he was born an age too late, 
 because he could not clothe Adam with that unnatural, super- 
 human magnificence, as older epic writers had done with 
 primitive heroes. But he found a remedy in the heroes of an- 
 
469 
 
 ether world and another race. Angels take the place of pagan 
 gods; and heaven and hell, like Olympus, claim the splendid 
 imagery of the epic. The drama, on the other hand, is a 
 mirror of nature ; Hamlet and Othello are real human beings. 
 The characters of the drama are all possible human types; they 
 are perfectly natural in their qualities and deeds; the success 
 of the drama depends upon faithfulness to reality; whereas in 
 the epic there is a constant tending toward an impossible ideal- 
 ism. Hence, in the drama we have character-creation in the 
 true sense of the word ; while the creations of the epic are ex- 
 travagant and imaginary. 
 
 Dramatic Use of Epic Material. Drama often makes use 
 of epic material, just as the epic often embraces lyric material. 
 But the long narrative undergoes almost a complete trans- 
 formation. The supernatural machinery is either cut out or 
 relegated to the back-ground ; the long speeches are cut down 
 to those of ordinary conversation; the extravagant imagery 
 and language are so modified as to suit an ordinary human 
 being; the dramatic situations are multiplied; so that while 
 one trait of character was displayed in the epic, half a dozen 
 appear in the clash of wills and motives peculiar to the drama. 
 The heroes live and act and interpret themselves to us by 
 all the complexity of movement known to actual living. The 
 Homeric narrative was thus treated by the Greek dramatists; 
 the epic of Faust by Goethe is a striking modern example of 
 such treatment. Paradise Lost, on the contrary, has never 
 been dramatized because the supernatural machinery could not 
 be staged or eliminated with success. It is made a vital part 
 of the story. Adam's life, as written by Milton, presents too 
 small a number of dramatic situations ; the whole story would 
 have to be re-written, in order to constitute a drama. 
 
 Types of the Epic. The two most notable and most typical 
 forms of epic poetry are the primitive epic and the so-called 
 
47 THE EPIC 
 
 modern epic. The former is a growth rather than a crea- 
 tion ; at least the people who handed down the myth or tradi- 
 tion are responsible for its enlargement, quite as much as the 
 poet whose name it bears. The poem is written on a grand 
 scale and relies upon the supernatural as well as the human 
 element in the story. 
 
 The modern epic is likewise on a grand scale and uses the 
 supernatural. But there is this main point of difference. The 
 modern epic writer is self-conscious and introduces the personal 
 element frequently. Milton devotes a page to his own blind- 
 ness, he speaks of having fallen on evil days ; of having started 
 the epic late in life, and other matters quite foreign to the nar- 
 rative. This self-consciousness is stronger still in Dante, who 
 uses the epic in order to place many of his personal enemies in 
 hell. This self-consciousness or personal equation is quite un- 
 known in the older epics. And the epic writer, like the his- 
 torian or the dramatist, ought to keep himself in the back- 
 ground. 
 
 Rank of the Epic. The epic poem is universally allowed to 
 be, of all poetical works, the most dignified, and at the same 
 time, the most difficult of execution. To contrive a story 
 which shall please and interest all readers, by being at once 
 entertaining, important and instructive; to fill it with suitable 
 incidents; to enliven it with a variety of characters, and of 
 descriptions; and throughout a long work, to maintain that 
 propriety of sentiment, and that elevation of style, which the 
 epic character requires, is unquestionably a very high effort of 
 poetical genius. Hence, so very few have succeeded in the 
 attempt, that strict critics will hardly allow any other poems 
 to bear the name of epic, except the Iliad and the ^Eneid. 
 
 Dispute as to Definition. There is no subject, it must be 
 confessed, on which critics have displayed more pedantry, than 
 
DEFINITION 
 
 on this. By tedious disquisitions, founded on a servile sub- 
 mission to authority, they have given such an air of mystery 
 to a plain subject, as to render it difficult for an ordinary 
 reader to conceive what an epic poem is. By Bossu's defini- 
 tion, it is a discourse invented by art purely to form the man- 
 ners of men by means of instruction disguised under the alle- 
 gory of some important action, which is related in verse. 
 This definition would suit several of vEsop's Fables, if they 
 were somewhat extended, and put into verse; and accord- 
 ingly, to illustrate his definition, the critic draws a parallel, in 
 form, between the construction of one of ^Esop's Fables and 
 the plan of Homer's Iliad. The first thing, says he, which 
 either a writer of fables, or of heroic poems does, is to choose 
 some maxim or point of morality, to inculcate which, is to 
 be the design of his work. Next, he invents a general story, 
 or a series of facts, without any names, such as he judges will 
 be most proper for illustrating his intended moral. Lastly, he 
 particularizes his story; that is, if he be a fabulist he intro- 
 duces his dog, his sheep and his wolf; or, if he be an epic 
 poet, he looks into ancient history for some proper names 
 of heroes to give to his actors ; and then his plan is completed. 
 
 Correct Definition. The plain account of the nature of an 
 epic poem is the recital of some illustrious enterprise in a 
 poetical form. This is as exact a definition as there is 
 any occasion for, on this subject. It comprehends several 
 other poems besides the Iliad of Homer, the ^neid of Virgil 
 and the Jerusalem of Tasso, which are, perhaps, the three most 
 regular and complete epic works that ever were composed. 
 3ut to exclude all poems from the epic class, which are not 
 formed exactly upon the same model as these, is the pedantry 
 of criticism. We can give exact definitions and descriptions 
 of minerals, plants, and animals ; and can arrange them with 
 precision, under the different classes to which they belong, 
 
47 2 THE EPIC 
 
 because nature affords a visible unvarying standard, to which 
 we refer them. But with regard to works of taste and im- 
 agination, where nature has fixed no standard, but leaves 
 scope for beauties of many different kinds, it is absurd to at- 
 tempt defining, and limiting them with the same precision. 
 Criticism, when employed in such attempts, degenerates into 
 trifling questions about words and names only. One, therefore, 
 can have no scruple to class such poems, as Milton's Paradise 
 Lost, Lucan's Pharsalia, Statins' Thebiad, Ossian's Fingal 
 and Temora, Carmen's Lusiad, Voltaire's Henriade, Cam- 
 bray's Telemachus, Glover's Leonidas, Wilkie's Epigoniad, 
 under the same species of composition with the Iliad and the 
 yEneid ; though some of them approach much nearer than 
 others to the perfection of these celebrated works. They are, 
 undoubtedly, all epic ; that is, poetical recitals of great adven- 
 tures ; which is all that is meant by this denomination of poetry. 
 
 Moral Value. Though one cannot by any means allow 
 that it is the essence of an epic poem to be wholly an allegory, 
 or a fable contrived to illustrate some moral truth, yet it is 
 certain that no poetry is of a more moral nature than this. 
 Its effect in promoting virtue is not to be measured by any 
 one maxim, or instruction which results from the whole his- 
 tory, like the moral of one of ^Esop's fables. This is a poor 
 and trivial view of the advantage to be derived from perusing 
 a long epic work, that at the end we shall be able to gather 
 from it some common-place morality. Its effect arises from 
 the impression which the parts of the poem separately, as well 
 as the whole taken together, make upon the mind of the reader ; 
 from the great examples which it sets before us, and the high 
 sentiments with which it warms our hearts. The end which 
 it proposes is to extend our ideas of human perfection, or, 
 in other words, to excite admiration. Now this can be ac- 
 complished only by proper representation of heroic deeds and 
 
CHARACTERISTICS 
 
 virtuous characters. For high virtue is the object which all 
 mankind are formed to admire; and, therefore, epic poems 
 are, and must be, favorable to the cause of virtue. Valor, 
 truth, justice, fidelity, friendship, piety, magnanimity, are the 
 objects which, in the course of such compositions, are pre- 
 sented to our minds, under the most splendid and honorable 
 colors. In behalf of virtuous personages, our affections are 
 engaged; in their designs, and their distresses, we are inter- 
 ested; the generous and public affections are awakened; the 
 mind is purified from sensual and mean pursuits, and accus- 
 tomed to take part in great heroic enterprises. It is indeed 
 no small testimony in honor of virtue, that several of the most 
 refined and elegant entertainments of mankind, such as that 
 species of poetical composition which we now consider, must 
 be grounded on moral sentiments and impressions. This is 
 a testimony of such weight that, were it in the power of skep- 
 tical philosophers to weaken the force of those reasonings 
 which establish the essential distinctions between vice and 
 virtue, the writings of epic poets alone were sufficient to refute 
 their false philosophy ; showing by that appeal which they con- 
 stantly make to the feelings of mankind in favor of virtue, that 
 the foundations of it are laid deep and strong in human nature. 
 
 Characteristics of the Epic. The general strain and spirit 
 of the epic composition sufficiently mark its distinction from 
 the other kinds of poetry. In pastoral writing the reigning 
 idea is innocence and tranquillity. Compassion is the great ob- 
 ject of tragedy; ridicule, the province of comedy. The pre- 
 dominant character of the epic is. admiration excited by heroic 
 actions. It is sufficiently distinguished from history, both 
 by its political form and the liberty of fiction which it assumes. 
 It is a more calm composition than tragedy. It admits, nay. 
 requires, the pathetic and the violent, on particular occasions; 
 but the pathetic is not expected to be its general character. 
 
474 ' THE EPIC 
 
 It requires, more than other species of poetry, a grave, equal, 
 and supported dignity. It takes in a greater compass of time 
 and action than dramatic writing admits, and thereby allows 
 full display of characters. Dramatic writings display charac- 
 ters chiefly by means of sentiments and passions ; epic poetry, 
 chiefly by means of actions. The emotions, therefore, which it 
 raises are not so violent, but they are more prolonged. These 
 are the general characteristics of this species of composition. 
 But, in order to give a more particular and critical view of it, 
 let us consider the epic poem under three heads ; first, with 
 respect to the subject or action ; secondly, with respect to the 
 actors or characters; and lastly, with respect to the narration 
 of the poet. 
 
 The Action of the Epic. The action, or subject of the epic 
 poem, must have three properties; it must be one; it must be 
 great; it must be interesting: First, it must be one action 
 or enterprise which the poet chooses for his subject. I have 
 frequently had occasion to remark the importance of unity 
 in many kinds of composition in order to make a full and 
 strong impression upon the mind. With the highest reason, 
 Aristotle insists upon this, as essential to epic poetry; and it 
 is, indeed, the most material of all his rules respecting it. For 
 it is certain that, in the recital of heroic adventures, several 
 scattered and independent facts can never affect a reader so 
 deeply, nor engage his attention so strongly, as a tale that is 
 one and connected, where the several incidents hang upon one 
 another, and are all made to conspire for the accomplishment 
 of one end. In a regular epic, the more this unity is rendered 
 sensible to the imagination, the better will be the effect; and, 
 for this reason, as Aristotle has observed, it is not sufficient for 
 the poet to confine himself to the actions of one man, or to 
 those things which happened during a certain period of time ; 
 but the unity must lie in the subject itself; and arise from all 
 
THE ACTION 
 
 the parts combining into one whole. In all the great epic 
 poems, unity of action is sufficiently apparent. Virgil, for in- 
 stance, has chosen for his subject, the establishment of ^Eneas 
 in Italy. From the beginning to the end of the poem, this 
 object is ever in our view, and links all the parts of it together 
 with full connection. The unity of the Odyssey is of the same 
 nature; the return and re-establishment of Ulysses in his own 
 country. The subject of Tasso, is the recovery of Jerusalem 
 from the infidels; that of Milton, the expulsion of our first 
 parents from Paradise; and both of them are unexceptionable 
 in the unity of the story. The professed subject of the Iliad is 
 the anger of Achilles, with the consequences which it pro- 
 duced. The Greeks carry on many unsuccessful engagements 
 against the Trojans, as long as they are deprived of the as- 
 sistance of Achilles. Upon his being appeased and reconciled 
 to Agamemnon, victory follows, and the poem closes. It must 
 be owned, however, that the unity, or connecting principle, is 
 not quite so sensible to the imagination here, as in the ^Eneid. 
 For, throughout many books of the Iliad, Achilles is out of 
 sight; he is lost in inaction, and the fancy terminates on no 
 other object than the success of the two armies which we see 
 contending in war. 
 
 Interpretation of Epic Action. The unity of the epic action 
 is not to be strictly interpreted, as if it excluded all episodes, 
 or subordinate actions. It is necessary to observe here, that 
 the term episode is employed by Aristotle, in a different sense 
 from what we now give to it. It was a term originally applied 
 to dramatic poetry, and hence, transferred to epic; and by 
 episodes in an epic poem, it should seem that Aristotle under- 
 stood the extension of the general fable, or plan of the poem, 
 into all its circumstances. What his meaning was, is indeed 
 not very clear; and this obscurity has occasioned much alter- 
 cation among critical writers. Bossu, in particular, is so per- 
 
476 THE EPIC 
 
 plexed upon this subject, as to be almost unintelligible. But 
 dismissing so fruitless a controversy, what we now understand 
 by episodes, are certain actions or incidents, introduced into 
 the narration, connected with the principal action, yet not so 
 essential to it, as to destroy, if they had been omitted, the main 
 subject of the poem. Of this nature are the interview of 
 Hector with Andromache, in the Iliad ; the story of Cacus, and 
 that of Nisus and Euryalus, in the ^neid; the adventures of 
 Tancred with Erminia and Clorinda, in the Jerusalem ; and the 
 prospect of his descendants exhibited to Adam in the last 
 books of Paradise Lost. 
 
 Episodes. Such episodes as these are not only permitted 
 to an epic poet, but provided they are properly executed, are 
 great ornaments to his work. The rules regarding them are 
 the following : First, they must be naturally introduced ; they 
 must have a sufficient connection with the poem; they must 
 seem inferior parts that belong to it; not mere appendages 
 stuck to it. The episode of Olinda and Sophronia in the sec- 
 ond book of Tasso's Jerusalem is faulty, by transgressing this 
 rule. It is too detached from the rest of the work, and, being 
 introduced so near the opening of the poem, misleads the 
 reader to an expectation that it is to be of some future conse- 
 quence, whereas it proves to be connected with nothing that 
 follows. In proportion as any episode is slightly related to 
 the main subject, it should always be the shorter. The pas- 
 sion of Dido in the yneid, and the snares of Armida in the 
 Jerusalem, which are expanded so fully in these poems, cannot 
 with propriety be called episodes. They are constituent parts 
 of the work, and form a considerable share of the intrigue 
 ^f the poem. In the next place, episodes ought to present to 
 us objects of a different kind from those which go before, and 
 those which follow in the course of the poem. Because it is 
 principally for the sake of variety that episodes are introduced 
 
EPISODES 477 
 
 into an epic composition. In so long a work they tend to 
 diversify the subject and to relieve the reader by shifting the 
 scene. In the midst of combats, therefore, an episode of the 
 martial kind would be out of place; whereas Hector's visit to 
 Andromache in the Iliad, and Erminia's adventure with the 
 shepherd in the seventh book of the Jerusalem, afford us a 
 well-judged and pleasing retreat from camps and battles. 
 Lastly, as an episode is a professed embellishment, it ought to 
 be particularly elegant and well finished ; and accordingly, it 
 is, for the most part, in pieces of this kind that poets put 
 forth their strength. The episodes of Teribazus and Ariana, 
 in Leonidas, and of the death of Hercules, in the Epigoniad, 
 are the two greatest beauties in these poems. 
 
 The Unity of the Epic Action. This necessarily supposes 
 that the action be entire and complete : that is, as Aristotle well 
 expresses it, that it have a beginning, a middle, and an end. 
 Either by relating the whole, in his own person, or by intro- 
 ducing some of his actors to relate what had passed before the 
 opening of the poem, the author must always contrive to give 
 us full information of everything that belongs to his subject ; 
 he must not leave our curiosity, in any article, ungratified ; 
 he must bring us precisely to the accomplishment of his plan, 
 and then conclude. The second property of the epic action 
 is that it be great; that it have sufficient splendor and impor- 
 tance both to fix our attention and to justify the magnificent 
 apparatus which the poet bestows upon it. This is so evi- 
 dently requisite as not to require illustration ; and, indeed, 
 hardly any who have attempted epic poetry, have failed in 
 choosing some subject sufficiently important, either by the 
 nature of the action or by the fame of the personages concerned 
 in it. 
 
 Advantage of Antiquity. It contributes to the grandeur 
 of the epic subject, that it be not of a modern date, nor fall 
 
47 g ^ THE EPIC 
 
 within any period of history with which we are intimately 
 acquainted. Both Lucan and Voltaire have, in the choice of 
 their subjects, transgressed this rule, and they have, upon that 
 account, succeeded worse. Antiquity is favorable to those 
 high and august ideas which epic poetry is designed to raise. 
 It tends to aggrandize, in our imagination, both persons and 
 events : and what is still more material, it allows the poet the 
 liberty of adorning his subject- by means of fiction. Whereas, 
 as soon as he comes within the verge of real and authenticated 
 history, this liberty is abridged. He must either confine him- 
 self wholly, as Lucan has done, to strict historical truth, at 
 the expense of rendering his story jejune ; or if he goes beyond 
 it, like Voltaire in his Henriade, this disadvantage follows, 
 that, in well-known events, the true and the fictitious parts of 
 the plan do not naturally mingle and incorporate with each 
 other. These observations cannot be applied to dramatic writ- 
 ing, where the personages are exhibited to us, not so much 
 that we may admire, as that we may love or pity them. Such 
 passions are much more consistent with the familiar historical 
 knowledge of the persons who are to be the objects of them ; 
 and even require them to be displayed in the light and with 
 the failings of ordinary men. Modern and well-known his- 
 tory, therefore, may furnish very proper materials for tragedy. 
 But for epic poetry, where heroism is the ground-work and 
 where the object in view is to excite admiration, ancient or 
 traditionary history is assuredly the safest region. There the 
 author may lay hold on names, and characters, and events not 
 wholly unknown, on which to build his story, while, at the 
 same time, by reason of the distance of the period, or of the 
 remoteness of the scene, sufficient scope is left him for fiction 
 and invention. 
 
 The Third Property. The third property required in the 
 epic poem is, that it be interesting. It is not sufficient for 
 
CHARACTERS 479 
 
 this purpose that it be great. For deeds of mere valor, how 
 heroic soever, may prove cold and tiresome. Much will de- 
 pend on the happy choice of some subject, which shall by its 
 nature, interest the public; as when the poet selects for his 
 hero one who is the founder, or the deliverer, or the favorite, 
 of his nation; or when he writes of achievements that have 
 been highly celebrated, or have been connected with important 
 consequences to any public cause. Most of the great epic 
 poems are abundantly fortunate in this respect, and must have 
 been very interesting to those ages and countries in which 
 they were composed. 
 
 Management of Plan. But the chief circumstance which 
 renders an epic poem interesting, and which tends to interest 
 not one age or country alone, but all readers, is the skilful con- 
 duct of the author in the management of his subject. He must 
 so contrive his plan as that it shall comprehend many affecting 
 incidents. He must not dazzle us perpetually with valiant 
 achievements, for all readers tire of constant fighting and bat- 
 tles; but he must study to touch our hearts. He may some- 
 times be awful and august, he must often be tender and 
 pathetic, he must give us gentle and pleasing scenes of love, 
 friendship, and affection. The more an epic poem abounds 
 with situations which awaken the feelings of humanity, the 
 more interesting it is ; and these form always the favorite pass- 
 ages of the work. No poets are so happy in this respect as 
 Virgil and Tasso. 
 
 Characters of Heroes. Much, too, depends upon the char- 
 acters of the heroes for rendering the poem interesting, that 
 they be such as shall strongly attach the readers, and make 
 them take part in the dangers which the heroes encounter. 
 These dangers, or obstacles, form what is called the nodus 
 or the intrigue of the epic poem, in the judicious conduct of 
 
4 80 THE EPIC 
 
 which, consists much of the poet's art. He must rouse our 
 attention, by a prospect of the difficulties which seem to threat- 
 en disappointment to the enterprise of his favorite personages ; 
 he must make these difficulties grow and thicken upon us by 
 degrees; till, after having kept us for some time in a state of 
 agitation and suspense, he paves the way, by a proper prepara- 
 tion of incidents, for the winding up of the plot in a natural 
 and probable manner. It is plain that every tale which is 
 designed to engage attention, must be conducted on a plan of 
 this sort. 
 
 The Close. A question has been moved, whether the nature 
 of the epic poem does require that it should always end suc- 
 cessfully? Most critics are inclined to think that a successful 
 issue is the most proper; and they appear to have reason on 
 their side. An unhappy conclusion depresses the mind, and 
 is opposite to the elevating emotions which belong to this 
 species of poetry. Terror and compassion are the proper sub- 
 jects of tragedy ; but as the epic poem is of larger compass 
 and extent, it were too much, if after the difficulties and troub- 
 les which commonly abound in the progress of the poem, 
 the author should bring them all at last to an unfortunate 
 issue. Accordingly, the general practice of the epic poet is 
 on the side of a prosperous conclusion ; not, however, without 
 some exceptions. For two authors of great name, Lucan and 
 Milton, have held a contrary course ; the one concluding with 
 the subversion of the Roman liberty; the other, with the ex- 
 pulsion of man from Paradise. 
 
 Time. With regard to the time or duration of the epic 
 action, no precise boundaries can be ascertained. A consid- 
 erable extent is always allowed to it, as it does not necessarily 
 depend on those violent passions which can be supposed to 
 have only a short continuance. The Iliad, which is formed 
 
CHARACTERS 4 8l 
 
 upon the anger of Achilles, has, with propriety, the shortest 
 duration of any of the great epic poems. According to Bossu, 
 the action lasts no longer than forty-seven days. The action 
 of the Odyssey, computed from the taking of Troy to the peace 
 of Ithaca, extends to eight years and a half; and the action 
 of the ^Eneid, computed in the same way from the taking of 
 Troy to the death of Turnus, includes about six years. But 
 if we measure the period only of the poet's own narration, or 
 compute from the time in which the herb makes his first ap- 
 pearance till the conclusion, the duration of both these last 
 poems is brought within a much smaller compass. The 
 Odyssey, beginning with Ulysses in the island of Calypso, 
 comprehends fifty-eight days only; and the ^neid beginning 
 with the storm which throws ^Eneas upon the cost of Africa, 
 is reckoned to include, at the most, a year and some months. 
 
 Personages. As it is the business of an epic poet to copy 
 after nature and to form a probably interesting tale, he must 
 study to give all his personages proper and well-supported 
 characters, such as display the features of human nature. This 
 is what Aristotle calls giving manners to the poem. It is 
 by no means necessary that all his actors be morally good ; 
 imperfect, nay, vicious characters may find a proper place; 
 though the nature of epic poetry seems to require that the prin- 
 cipal figures exhibited should be such as tend to arouse admira- 
 tion and love, rather than hatred or contempt. But whatever 
 the character be which a poet gives to any of his actors, he 
 must take care to preserve it uniform and consistent with it- 
 self. Everything which that person says or does must be 
 suited to it, and must serve to distinguish him from any other. 
 Poetic characters may be divided into two kinds, general and 
 particular. General characters are wise, brave, virtuous, with- 
 out any further distinction. Particular characters express the 
 species of bravery, of wisdom, of virtue, for which any one is 
 
482 THE EPIC 
 
 eminent. They exhibit the peculiar features which distinguish 
 one individual from another, which mark the difference of 
 the same moral quality in different men, according as it is 
 combined with other dispositions in their temper. In drawing 
 such particular characters, genius is chiefly exerted. How far 
 each of the three great epic poets have distinguished themselves 
 in this part of composition, shall afterwards be shown in re- 
 marking upon their works. It is sufficient now to mention, 
 that it is in this part that Homer has principally excelled ; 
 Tasso has come the nearest to Homer ; and Virgil has been the 
 most deficient. It has been the practice of all epic poets to 
 select some one personage whom they distinguish above all 
 the rest, and make the hero of the tale. This is considered 
 essential to epic composition, and is attended with several ad- 
 vantages. It renders the unity of the subject more sensible, 
 when there is one principal figure, to which, as to a center, 
 all the rest refer. It tends to interest us more in the enterprise 
 which is carried on, and it gives the poet an opportunity of 
 exerting his talents for adorning and displaying one charac- 
 ter with peculiar splendor. It has been asked, Who, then, 
 is the hero of Paradise Lost? The devil, it has been answered 
 by some critics ; and, in consequence of this idea, much ridicule 
 and censure have been thrown upon Milton. But they have 
 mistaken that author's intention by proceeding upon a sup- 
 position that in the conclusion of his poem the hero must needs 
 be triumphant. Whereas, Milton followed a different plan 
 and has given a tragic conclusion to a poem otherwise epic 
 in form. For Adam is undoubtedly his hero ; that is, the cap- 
 ital and most interesting figure in his poem. 
 
 Supernatural Personages. Besides human actors, there are 
 personages of another kind that usually occupy no small place 
 in epic poetry, that is, the gods, or supernatural beings. This 
 brings us to the consideration of what is called the machinery 
 
CHARACTERS 
 
 of the epic poem ; the nicest and most difficult part of the sub- 
 ject. Critics appear to have gone to the extreme on both sides. 
 Almost all the French critics decide in favor of the machinery 
 as essential to the constitution of an epic poem. They quote 
 that sentence of Petronius Arbiter, as if it were an oracle, 
 "per ambages, Deorumque ministeria, procipitandus est liber 
 spiritus" and hold that, though a poem had every other requis- 
 ite tha L could be demanded, yet it could not be ranked in the 
 epic class, unless the main action was carried on by the inter- 
 vention of the gods. This decision seems to be founded on 
 no principle or reason whatever, unless a superstitious rever- 
 ence for the practice of Homer and Virgil. These poets very 
 properly embellished their story by the traditional tales and 
 popular legends of their own country; according to which all 
 the great transactions of the heroic times were intermixed 
 with the fables of their deities. But does it thence follow that 
 in other countries and in other ages, where there is not the like 
 advantage of current superstition and popular credulity, epic 
 poetry must be wholly confined to antiquated fictions and fairy 
 tales? Lucan has composed a very spirited poem, certainly 
 of the epic kind, where neither gods nor supernatural beings 
 are at all employed. The author of Leonidas has made an 
 attempt of the same kind, not without success; and beyond 
 doubt, wherever a poet gives us a regular heroic story, well 
 connected in its parts, adorned with characters, and supported 
 with proper dignity and elevation, though his agents be, every 
 one of them, human, he has fulfilled the chief requisites of this 
 sort of composition and has a just title to be classed with epic 
 writers. But though one cannot admit that machinery is es- 
 sential or necessary to the epic plan, neither can one agree with 
 some late critics of considerable name, who are for excluding 
 it totally, as inconsistent with that probability and impression 
 of reality which they think should reign in this kind of writ- 
 ing. Mankind do not consider poetical writings with so phil- 
 
484 THE EPIC 
 
 osophical an eye. They seek entertainment from them ; and 
 for the bulk of readers, indeed for almost all men, the marve- 
 lous has a great charm. It gratifies and fills the imagination ; 
 and gives room for many a striking and sublime description. 
 In epic poetry in particular, where admiration and lofty ideas 
 are supposed to reign, the marvelous and supernatural find, 
 if any where, their proper place. They both enable the poet 
 to aggrandize his subject by means of those august and solemn 
 objects which religion introduces into it; and they allow him 
 to enlarge and diversify his plan, by comprehending with it 
 heaven, and earth, and hell, men, and invisible beings, and the 
 whole circle of the universe. At the same time, in the use of 
 this supernatural machinery, it becomes a poet to be temperate 
 and prudent. He is not at liberty to invent what system of 
 the marvelous he pleases. It must always have some founda- 
 tion in popular belief. He must avail himself in a decent 
 manner either of the religious faith or the superstitious credul- 
 ity of the country wherein he lives or of which he writes, so 
 as to give an air of probability to events which are most con- 
 trary to the common course of nature. Whatever machinery 
 he employs, he must take care not to overload us with it; not 
 to withdraw human actions and manners too much from view, 
 not to obscure them under a cloud of incredible fictions. He 
 must always remember, that his chief business is to relate to 
 men the actions and the exploits of men; that it is by these 
 principally he is to interest us and to touch our hearts ; and 
 that if probability be altogether banished from his work, it can 
 never make a deep or a lasting impression. Indeed, there 
 would seem nothing more difficult in epic poetry than to adjust 
 properly the mixture of the marvelous with the probable, so 
 as to gratify and amuse us with the one without sacrificing 
 the other. It seems needless to observe that these observations 
 affect not the conduct of Milton's work : whose plan being 
 altogether theological, his supernatural beings form not the 
 
NARRATION' ^ 
 
 machinery but are the principal actors in the poem. With 
 regard to allegorical personages, fame, discord, love, and the 
 like, it may be safely pronounced that they form the worst 
 machinery of any. In description they are sometimes allow- 
 able, and may serve for embellishment ; but they should never 
 be permitted to bear any share in the action of the poem. For 
 being plain and admitted fictions, mere names of general ideas 
 to which even fancy cannot attribute any existence as persons, 
 if they be introduced as mingling with human actors, an in- 
 tolerable confusion of shadows and realities arises and all 
 consistency of action is utterly destroyed. 
 
 Narration. In the narration, which is the last head that re- 
 mains to be considered, it is not material whether the poet 
 recounts the whole story in his own character, or introduces 
 some personages to relate any part of the action that had 
 passed before the poem opens. Homer follows the one meth- 
 od in his Iliad, and the other in his Odyssey. Virgil has, in 
 this respect, imitated the conduct of the Odyssey ; Tasso, that 
 of the Iliad. The chief advantage which arises from any of 
 the actors being employed to relate part of the story is that it 
 allows the poet, if he choose, to open with some interesting 
 situation of affairs, informing us afterward of what had passed 
 before that period ; and gives him the greater liberty of spread- 
 ing out such parts of the subject as he is inclined to dwell upon 
 in person, and of comprehending the rest with a short recital. 
 Where the subject is of great extent, and comprehends the 
 transactions of several years, as in the Odyssey and the yEneid, 
 this method . therefore seems preferable. When the subject 
 is of smaller compass, and of shorter duration, as in the Iliad. 
 and the Jerusalem, the poet may without disadvantage relate 
 the whole in his own person, as is done in both these poems. 
 In the presentation of the subject, the invocation of the muse, 
 and other ceremonies of the introduction, poets may vary at 
 
486 THE EPIC 
 
 their pleasure. It is perfectly trifling to make these little 
 formalities the object of precise rule, any farther than that 
 the subject of the work should always be clearly proposed, 
 and without affected or unsuitable pomp. For, according to 
 Horace's noted rule, no introduction should ever set out too 
 high, or promise too much, lest the author should not fulfil 
 the expectations he has raised. What is of most importance 
 in the tenor of the narration is that it be perspicuous, animated, 
 and enriched with all the beauties of poetry. No sort of com- 
 position requires more strength, dignity, and fire, than the epic 
 poem. It is the region within which we look for everything 
 that is sublime in description, tender in sentiment, and bold and 
 lively in expression ; and, therefore, though an author's plan be 
 faultless, and his story never so well conducted, yet if he be 
 feeble, or flat in style, destitute of affecting scenes, and de- 
 ficient in poetic coloring, he can have no success. The orna- 
 ments which epic poetry admits, must all be of the grave and 
 chaste kind. Nothing that is loose, ludicrous, or affected, finds 
 any place. All objects which it presents, ought to be either 
 great, or tender, or pleasing. Descriptions of disgusting or 
 shocking objects, should as much as possible be avoided ; and 
 therefore the fable of the Harpies in the third book of the 
 ^Eneid, and the allegory of Sin and Death in the second book 
 of Paradise Lost, had been better omitted. 
 
CHAPTER L 
 THE EPIC (CONTINUED) 
 REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS 
 
 Homer. He is the poet who, according to very ancient 
 tradition, is credited with the authorship of the Iliad and the 
 Odyssey, besides a number of hymns written in honor of the 
 gods. Nothing is known of his life or his personality ; indeed, 
 modern destructive criticism has led us to doubt whether such 
 a person as Homer ever existed at all. Seven Grecian cities 
 claim to be his birthplace. According to Professor Mahaffy, 
 the home of the original Homer seems to have been about 
 Smyrna ; and although his date is quite uncertain, it need not 
 be placed before 800 B. C, and not after 700 B. C. 
 
 Criticism by William E. Gladstone. " The poems of Homer 
 do not constitute merely a great item of the splendid literature 
 of Greece ; but they have a separate position,- to which none other 
 can approach. They, and the manners they describe, constitute 
 a world of their own ; and are served by a sea of time, whose 
 breadth has not been certainly measured, from the firmly set 
 continent of recorded tradition and continuous fact. In this sea, 
 they lie as a great island. And in this island we find not merely 
 details of events, but a scheme of human life and character, com- 
 plete in all its parts. We are introduced to man in every relation 
 of which he is capable ; in every one of his arts, devices, institu- 
 tions; in the entire circle of his experience. There is no other 
 author whose case is analogous to this, or of whom it can be 
 said that the study of him is not a mere matter of literary criti- 
 cism, but is a full study of life in every one of its departments." 
 
 Homer His Own Witness." When we use the word Homer, 
 we do not mean a person historically known to us, like Pope or 
 
 487 
 
4 88 THE EPIC 
 
 Milton. We mean in the main the author, whoever, or whatever 
 he was, of the wonderful poems called respectively, not by the 
 author, but by the world, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. His name 
 is conventional, and its sense in etymology is not very different 
 from that which would be conveyed by our phrase, * the author/ 
 Great artists may be knowable from their works; and there is a 
 singular transparency in the mind, as there is also in the limpid 
 language of Homer. Old as he is, the comprehensive and sys- 
 tematic study of him is still young. It had hardly begun before 
 the I9th century. With the primary source of information found 
 in his text, we have to combine two others: (i) the scattered 
 notices supplied by ancient tradition; and, (2) the valuable and 
 still growing illustrations furnished by the study of language, 
 and by the discoveries and learned study of ancient remains." 
 
 Our Earliest View of Him. " At the first dawn of the historic 
 period, we find the poems established in popular renown; and so 
 prominent that a school of minstrels takes the name of Homer- 
 idae from making it their business to preserve and to recite them. 
 Still, the question as to whether the poems, as we have them, can 
 be trusted, whether they present substantially the character of 
 what may be termed original documents, is one of great, but 
 gradually diminishing difficulty. It is also of importance, be- 
 cause of the nature of their contents. In the first place, they give 
 a far greater amount of information, than is to be found in any 
 other literary production of the same compass. In the second 
 place, that information, speaking of it generally, is to be had no- 
 where else. In the third place, it is information of the utmost 
 interest, and even of great moment. It introduces to us, in the 
 very beginnings of their experience, the most gifted people of the 
 world, and enables us to judge how they became such as in later 
 times we know them ; how they began to be fitted to dis- 
 charge the splendid part, allotted to them in shaping the destinies 
 of the world. And this picture is exhibited with such a fulness 
 both of particulars and of vital force, that perhaps never in any 
 country has an age been so completely placed upon record. Final- 
 ly, amidst the increase of archaic knowledge on all sides, we begin 
 to find a multitude of points of contrast between the Homeric 
 poems and the primitive history of the world, as it is gradually 
 revealed . by records, monuments, and language ; so that they 
 
489 
 
 are coming more and more to constitute an important factor 
 in the formation of that history." 
 
 '* The place and office of the Greeks in regard to letters, and 
 to the culture of the human mind throughout all time, have been 
 admirably described in the opening section of Mr. J ebb's Primer 
 of Greek Literature. It is quite idle for modern theorists to 
 suppose that we can dispense with their aid, or shake off what 
 some would call a thraldom. This could only be done by going 
 back to a state which, whatever its equipments in certain re- 
 spects, would be, in essential points, one nearer to barbarism 
 than that which we now hold. The work of the Greeks has been 
 done once for all, and for all mankind. 
 
 Homer's Relation to It. " The qualities that mark Greek letters 
 in general are pre-eminently found in Homer ; such as force, 
 purpose, measure, fitness, directness, clearness, and completeness. 
 To these he adds a richness and variety, a comprehensive uni- 
 versality, which is given only to the highest genius. The force, 
 which marks a full and healthy development in mind and body, 
 is in the Greeks generally, not thrown idly about, but addressed 
 to an aim. The thought is in strict proportion to the subject, and 
 the language is fitted exactly to the thought. It goes to its end 
 by the straightest road. The clearness of Homer is unrivalled in 
 literature. The passages in which his meaning is open to the 
 smallest shade of doubt, either as to thought or language, might 
 perhaps be counted on the fingers. Such a clearness could hardly 
 survive the advent of philosophy. It was the privilege of the 
 childhood of the race, a true, though an Herculean childhood. 
 Lastly; the assertion may create greater surprise in some, but it 
 is true, that Homer's forms of expression are in a very high 
 degree complete, as a statue shaped and polished to the finger- 
 nail was in the Roman proverb complete ; not merely in their 
 main outlines, but in refined and subtle detail. The whole of 
 these eminently Greek qualities may be summed up in one phrase 
 poetic truth." 
 
 His Characteristic Style. " Besides his general prerogative as 
 an universal genius, and besides the properties in which Homer 
 is followed, and as it were, reproduced, in his countrymen, he 
 has other particular gifts of his own. For example, he is prob- 
 ably the most characteristic of all poets. Traits personal to him- 
 
490 
 
 THE EPIC 
 
 self, inhere in his whole work, and perpetually reappear upon the 
 surface. Sir Walter Scott has admirably described the fine style 
 of Swift as the style which puts the right words in the right 
 places. No more just sentence could have been written on the 
 style of Homer. But the merit thus described is essentially gen- 
 eral. Homer has also the special quality, that all he produces 
 carries the maker's mark. But the maker's mark, when too 
 prominent, constitutes what is called mannerism. With Homer, 
 the maker's mark never obtrudes the maker, or places him be- 
 tween the reader and the theme. It never interferes with the 
 aim and matter of the poem. Only it is there, ready when 
 wanted. If we look for it, we find it. We then discover that in 
 him what we call style, while he has the simplest of all styles, is 
 also, setting aside the class of mannerists, perhaps the most pecu- 
 liar to the individual. It would be hardly possible to quote five 
 lines from him, which must not at once by internal evidence be 
 recognized as his. Even in the smallest shred of the painting, the 
 painter's touch is seen. So that though imitated often, in form 
 and in material, the imitations of him are known by their trick and 
 effort, not by their likeness." 
 
 Homer's Relation to Greek Poetry in Its Several Branches. 
 " Passing from these fragmentary remarks, a few words may 
 be added on Homer's more direct contributions to the literature 
 of his country, and indeed of the world. From him has been 
 drawn the epic, which I suppose contests with the drama the 
 title to supremacy among the kinds of poetry. It seems to me, 
 however, that Homer stands in a nearer relation, than has com- 
 monly been perceived, to the theatre of his country. And this, 
 not only on account of the remarkable degree in which he con- 
 ducts the action of his poems through the medium of the speeches. 
 In its earliest acknowledged stage the Greek drama shows us but 
 a single actor or reciter, together with a chorus chanting odes 
 in honor of Dionusos : upon which chorus there certainly devolved 
 the office of passing judgments, according to right and truth, 
 upon the action of the piece. Now Homer, reciting his own 
 poems, was himself an actor, using a musical accompaniment : 
 and he introduces from time to time, under the name of Tis (tis), 
 a personage extrinsic to the action, who performs the part of 
 a judicious observer, and is the organ, like the chorus, of a 
 
HOMER 4QI 
 
 sound public opinion. The poetry of Homer appears to have 
 supplied the basis of the hymns which arc untruly associated 
 with his name as their composer; and it is easy to perceive how 
 the elegy might find food from his laments (thretws) over the 
 dead, and the war-song of Turtaios derive its inspiration from 
 the whole strain of the Iliad. In the view of Aristophanes, he 
 seems to have been properly the poet of war. The triumphal 
 hymn of praise, or paian, is commemorated in the Iliad, as al- 
 ready established in use." 
 
 To Oratory. " There is one noble branch of Greek Literature, 
 which we cannot but refer markedly to Homer, namely, its politi- 
 cal oratory. For the oratory of argument and sarcasm, we turn 
 to the embassy of the Ninth Ilaid in the barrack of Achilles : for 
 the oratory of passion and withering invective, to the debate in 
 the assembly of the First Book, or to the wonderful speech of 
 Odysseus in reply to the insolence of the Scherian Prince, given in 
 the Eighth Odyssey. I know not where to find grander models ; 
 and I cannot think Achilles in any way inferior to Demosthenes. 
 Nor was this a bye-blow of the poet's genius. We have seen that 
 the subject of public speech had a large and well-defined place 
 in his mind ; and one of the very few passages in his poems, that 
 can be called properly descriptive (introduced however in a 
 speech), will be found in the eight splendid lines of the Third 
 Iliad (216-223), which celebrate the eloquence of Odysseus." 
 
 To History. " Less direct than the relation of Homer to the 
 oratory of Greece, but still sufficiently perceptible, is the manner 
 in which his poems supply the first suggestion of the great work 
 of the historians. Apart from the mere incidents of the war of 
 Troy, or from whatever nucleus of truth there may be in the ad- 
 ventures of Odvsseus. Homer is the historian of their age in the 
 picture he has given us of its mind, its institutions and its man- 
 ners. Nor does it seem possible to account for the large num- 
 ber of important pre-Troic Legends that he has introduced, es- 
 pecially into the Iliad, upon any other ground than this, that the 
 bard of the heroic age, making use of the only vehicle it afforded, 
 worked with positive historic aims." 
 
 Philosophy a Marked Exception. " But if Homer can thus be 
 exhibited as the father of Greek letters in most of their branches, 
 
492 THE EPIC 
 
 there is one great exception, which belongs to a later develop- 
 ment. That exception was the philosophy of Greece, which 
 seems to have owed its first inception to the Asiatic contact es- 
 tablished after the great eastern migration. The absence of all 
 abstract or metaphysical ideas from Homer is truly remark- 
 able. Of all poets, he is the most objective and the least 
 speculative. Of the impersonated Unseen, no poet has made 
 such effective employment; of the Unseen, except as con- 
 nected with impersonation, he never I think makes use, unless 
 on two occasions; one (vol. vii. 36) where the ships of the 
 Phaiakes are as swift as a wing, or as a thought ; and the other, 
 when he compares the agitated mind of Hera with the quickened 
 intelligence of a man stimulated and informed with much travel 
 (//. xv. 30). The nearest approach to these cases is perhaps 
 to be found in such passages as the reflection of Achilles on the 
 mixed dispensation of life, and its preponderating sadness. But 
 this is incorporated thought. Two caskets are on the floor of 
 heaven : the contents are respectively good and evil. From them 
 Zeus dispenses the mixed fortunes of some, and the unmixed 
 misery of others. Homer was not an optimist. But neither 
 did he multiply gratuitous perplexities. The controversies of 
 materialism were unknown to him. All the world, all life, all 
 experience, filled his magazine; for him mind and matter had 
 suffered no breach of harmony. Human life had an aspect 
 mostly sad: but the universe, as to its general constitution, was 
 still in tune." 
 
 Criticism by Professor R. C. Jebb. " Achilles and Odysseus 
 are two characters which always had a strong hold upon the Greek 
 imagination. The Greek idea of human perfection was a wise 
 mind in a beautiful body, good counsel joined to a noble action. 
 Noble action is pre-eminently represented by Achilles, good coun- 
 sel by Odysseus. Odysseus is brave, but he is especially the 
 man of subtle intellect and ready resource. It was a grave fault 
 of the Greeks that they cared too little whether that quickness 
 of wit which they so much admired, was or was not honest. It 
 is strange that the noble Homeric conception of Odysseus should 
 have been lowered by later Greek poets who, dwelling chiefly 
 on his subtlety, sometimes made him an unscrupulous knave, 
 reckless of everything except personal gain. No such shadow 
 
HOMER 
 
 ever fell on the Homeric Achilles. His irresistible might and 
 splendor in war, his stormy human passions, his fine sense, fitting 
 in the son of a goddess, for what is soothing or strengthening 
 in the messages of the gods, his love passing the love of women, 
 his foresight of an early death, even when life was most daz- 
 zling, made him glow before the Greek imagination with an im- 
 mortal youth, as the very type of chivalry in their race. The 
 early ambitions of Alexander the Great were fired by this Homeric 
 vision of Achilles. Nothing can show better how vividly the 
 Homeric Poems wrought in Greek life and history than to see 
 how real the young Greek hero at Troy was to the young Greek 
 conqueror of the East." 
 
 Homeric Theology. " The Odyssey bears the marks of a later 
 time than the llaid. Still, there is a general agreement between 
 the two poems in the broad features of the age which they de- 
 scribe. Each poem is a picture of an heroic age on which the 
 poet looks back as far-off in the past, but for his idea of which, 
 he draws in some measure on his own days. The deities of the 
 Iliad are colossal men and women, stronger and fairer than mor- 
 tals, able to work wonders and to take any form they please, but 
 not all-powerful or all-wise, and often immoral. They dwell on 
 the high-crowned mountain Olympus, and are called the Olym- 
 pian gods. Zeus, a sensual, passionate, but genial person (Jupi- 
 ter, the sky), is their chief, having overthrown the dynasty of his 
 father Cronus (Saturn), which preceded the Olympian dynasty. 
 Next to Zeus are four great deities Here, his queen, with 
 whom he quarrels much; Apollo; Athene (who represents 
 especially intelligence) ; and Poseidon, god of the sea. Other 
 gods sometimes dispute the supremacy of Zeus, and he quells 
 them by threats or by force. The gods act on man chiefly by 
 hurting or comforting his body in some way, and expect some 
 offerings of savoury food and wine. In the Odyssey we find a 
 more spiritual conception. Olympus has become a shadowy, far- 
 off place, where the gods dwell apart. Zeus is now indisputably 
 supreme. The gods now act not only on man's body, but also, 
 and chiefly, on his mind and heart. They also wander over the 
 earth in disguise, spying out who are just among men. The 
 Homeric poems did much towards establishing a fixed standard 
 type for each deity, and reconciling the inconsistencies of different 
 
494 TUE RPIC 
 
 local worships. But they did not create this theology, which was 
 far older." 
 
 Homeric Morality. " The Homeric gods punish a man for dis- 
 obeying or affronting them in any way ; but they do not always 
 punish him for immoral actions. Fear of the gods, then, though 
 powerful as far as it goes, would not go very far towards making 
 the Homeric man moral. For that he needs a moral law, inde- 
 pendent of his religion. Among the warriors of the Iliad, such a 
 law is represented chiefly by what the Greeks call Aidos, and 
 which is often nearly what we call the sense of honor. Along 
 with this, there is another principle which comes out more clearly 
 in the Odyssey than in the Iliad, this is nemesis, literally ' dis- 
 tribution, then, that feeling which is roused in the mind by an un- 
 just distribution moral indignation. A man feels aidos for 
 the opinion of his neighbors. He feels nemesis when his own 
 sense of right is shocked. In the Odyssey we find a riper moral 
 sense than in the Iliad, and a much larger number of words to 
 express moral distinctions. The age of reflection has begun, as 
 the bits of proverbial philosophy in the Odyssey show. Homeric 
 morality is high relatively to Homeric relation ; but, as a rule, the 
 Homeric man recognizes duties, not towards his fellow-creatures 
 as such, but only towards certain classes of them, who stand in 
 a special relation to himself, as masters, or dependents, or 
 guests, or suppliants." 
 
 Criticism by Frederick Schlegel. " The reiish with which 
 the ancient Greeks appreciated the Homeric poems was ma- 
 terially enhanced by patriotic associations, whilst we are interested 
 in them chiefly as vivid and beautiful representations of heroic 
 life. They are free from the charge of narrow views, or adul- 
 atory panegyrics exclusively bestowed on a particular lineage a 
 charge such as may be justly preferred against the old songs 
 of Arabia, or those of Ossian. Breathing the spirit of purest 
 freedom, their representations of the phenomena of nature and 
 of the varieties of human character, evince a sensibility pure and 
 universal. A whole world opens out before us as we read them, 
 a world of living and moving imagery. The two prominent 
 figures, Achilles and Ulysses, seem to start from the canvas into 
 warm life ; yet they are but characters and ideas so general as 
 
HOMER 495 
 
 to be found repeated in nearly all Greek Hero legends ; though 
 never again sketched with so masterly a hand, or so exquisitely 
 finished. Achilles, a hero destined to exhaust all the delights of 
 mortality, whilst still in the bloom and pride of youthful vigor, 
 doomed moreover to be cut off by tragic fate in the prime of his 
 days, is the loftier conception of the two: an echo of this chord 
 may be found in the character of many a hero in the legends of 
 various lands ; next in beauty to the Grecian, perhaps, those of 
 our own northern clime. The legendary traditions of heroic 
 times, among the sprightliest nations, are overshadowed by elegiac 
 sensibilities, plaints full of tenderness, and sometimes shrouded 
 in sombre grief. As if the transition from an age of glorious 
 freedom and heroism had impressed succeeding generations with 
 a feeling of dreary confinement, or the bard would transfer to the 
 fictions of those times exclusively, reminiscences of some pristine 
 state of bliss, deep-seated in the bosom o.f the whole human 
 family. A less magnificent, but still richly-attractive form of 
 poetic heroism is presented in the person of Ulysses, the roving, 
 travelled hero, discreet, and experienced as brave, fitted to under- 
 go danger and encounter adventures of every sort. Ample scope 
 is thus afforded for portraying, in easy flowing style, the rare 
 sights and products of foreign lands. In energy and pathos, the 
 epics of the north, in brilliant coloring, those of the east, as far 
 as our acquaintance extends, may compare with, if they do not 
 surpass, the Homeric poems. But the peculiar distinction of the 
 latter is the amount of living truth and clearness blended in har- 
 monious unison with an almost infantile simplicity and affluent 
 fancy. The narrative, whilst entering into minute detail with 
 all the garrulousness of age, never grows tiresome, owing to the 
 extreme freshness and grace of imagery ever and anon dex- 
 trously shifted. Character, passion, and dialogue are. unfolded 
 with dramatic skill, and individual circumstances described with 
 almost historical fidelity. From this last quality, which com- 
 pletely distinguishes Homer from all other even Grecian - 
 bards, he possibly derives his name. Homeros signifies a surety 
 or witness : and on account of his truthful accuracy as a minstrel 
 of the heroic time, he richly deserves this appellation. To us he 
 is, indeed, Homeros, a surety as well as a witness of the epic 
 pges in their genuine state. As for the other meaning, relative 
 to his blindness, also involved in the word, it is clearly conjee- 
 
496 THE 
 
 tural, forming part of a tissue of inventions respecting the life 
 of one wholly unknown to us in his person, and it is undeserving 
 of a moment's consideration. Without the direct testimony of 
 Milton it would be sufficiently apparent from internal evidence 
 in his poems, that he saw only with the eye of the spirit, and 
 tasted not the exhilarating joyousness of sunlight. A melancholy 
 haze broods over the page of Ossian, and it may reasonably be 
 inferred that the gloom of night shaded the minstrel's brow. 
 But whoever would ascribe the composition of the Iliad and 
 Odyssey, the most lucid and transparent of all the poems of 
 antiquity, to a blind bard must, before pronouncing such a ver- 
 dict, determine to shut his own eyes to every kind of proof and 
 argument. In whatever century the Homeric poems originated, 
 they transport us into times when the heroic element was fast 
 approaching dissolution, or had just expired. Two worlds ap- 
 pear to meet in them : the wondrous past which seemed to be 
 never very far remo'ved from the poet's gaze, whilst occasionally 
 it stood vividly before him ; and the present breathing world, in 
 the midst of which he lived and moved. 
 
 Virgil. Publius Virgilius Maro was born near Mantua in 
 70 B. C. ; died at Brundisium in 19 B. C. Next to Homer, he 
 is the most famous of classic epic writers. He was an intimate 
 friend of Horace and enjoyed the patronage of Maecenas. The 
 last years of his life were spent in Campania. Besides the 
 ^Eneid, he wrote a number of Eclogues and Georgics. 
 
 Criticism by Professor W. Sellar. " The work which re- 
 mained for Virgil to accomplish was the addition of a great 
 Roman epic to literature. 
 
 It was desirable to select a single heroic action which should 
 belong to the cycle of legendary events celebrated in the Homeric 
 poems, and which should be associated with the whole fortunes 
 of Rome and with the supreme interests of the hour. The only 
 subject which in any way satisfied these apparently irreconcilable 
 conditions was that of the wanderings of ^Eneas and of his final 
 settlement in Latium. The story, though not of Roman origin, 
 but of a composite growth, had been familiar to the Romans 
 from the beginning of their literature ; and had been recognized 
 
VIRGIL 497 
 
 by official acts of senate and people as associated with the na- 
 tional fortunes. The subject enabled Virgil to tell over again 
 and to give novelty to the tale of the fall of Troy, and to tell 
 a tale of sea-adventure similar to that of the wanderings of 
 Odysseus. But the special applicability of his subject to his 
 purposes was determined by the claim which the Julii, a patrician 
 family of Alban origin, made to descent from lulus, the sup- 
 posed son of JEneas and founder of Alba Longa. The personal, 
 as distinct from the national and artistic, motives of the poem 
 could be satisfied by this subject alone. The JEneid is thus at 
 once the epic of the national life under its new conditions and 
 an imitative epic of human actions, manners, and character. 
 The true keynote of the poem is struck in the line with which 
 the poem closes: 
 
 ' Tantcz molts erat Romanam condcrc gcntem* 
 
 The idea which underlies the whole action of the poem is that 
 of the great part played by Rome in the history of the world, 
 that part being from of old determined by divine decree, and 
 carried out through the virtue of her sons. The idea of universal 
 empire is thus the dominant idea of the poem. With this idea, 
 that of the unbroken continuity of the national life is intimately 
 associated. The reverence for antiquity, for old customs and 
 the traditions of the past, was a large element in the national 
 sentiment, and has a prominent place in the Mncid. So, too, has 
 the feeling of local attachment and of the power of local associa- 
 tion over the imagination. It might be said of the manner of 
 life represented in the 2Eneid that it is no more true to any actual 
 condition of human society than that represented in the Eclogues. 
 But may not the same be said of all idealizing restoration of a 
 remote past in an age of advanced civilization? The life repre- 
 sented in the (Edipus Tyrannus or in King Lear is not the life 
 of the Periclan nor of the Elizabethan age, nor is it conceivable 
 as the real life of a prehistoric age. The truth of such a repre- 
 sentation is to be judged, not by its relation to any actual state 
 of things ever realized in the world, but by its relation to an 
 ideal of the imagination the ideal conception of how man, 
 endowed with the gifts and graces of a civilized time, but who 
 had not yet lost the youthful buoyancy of a mo-e primitive age, 
 might play his part under circumstances which would afford 
 
49 g THE EPIC 
 
 scope for the passions and activities of a vigorous personality, 
 and for the refined emotions and subtle reflections of an era 
 of high intellectual and moral cultivation. The verdict of most 
 readers of the sEneid will be that Virgil does not satisfy this con- 
 dition, as it is satisfied by Sophocles and Shakespeare. Yet there 
 is a considerable attraction, in the compromise which Virgil has 
 produced, between the life which he knew by experience and that 
 which he saw in the past of his imagination. There is a cour- 
 tesy, dignity, and consideration for the feelings of others in the 
 manners of his chief personages, such as might be exhibited by 
 the noblest and most commanding natures in an age of chivalry 
 and in an age of culture. The charm of primitive simplicity is 
 present in some passages of the JEneid, the spell of luxurious 
 pomp in others. The actual delight of voyaging past beautiful 
 islands, familiar to travelers in the Augustan age, is enhanced 
 by the suggestion of the adventurous spirit which sent the first 
 explorers abroad in search of unknown settlements. Where Vir- 
 gil is least real, and least successfully ideal, and where conse- 
 quently he is most purely imitative, is in the battle-scenes of the 
 later books. They afford scope, however, to his patriotic desire 
 to do justice to the martial energy of the Italian races; and 
 some of them have a peculiar beauty from the pathos with which 
 the death of some of the more interesting personages of his story 
 is described." 
 
 Even those, who have been insensible to the representative 
 and to the human interest of the lEneid, have generally recog- 
 nized the artistic excellence of the poem. This is conspicuous 
 both in the conception of the. action and the arrangement of 
 its successive stages and in the workmanship of details. In 
 variety of interest and finish of execution the first eight books 
 are superior to the last four. Each of the former has a large 
 and distinct sphere of interest, and they each contribute to the 
 impression of the work as a whole. In the first book, we have 
 the spectacle of the storm, of the prophecy of Jove, and of the 
 building of Carthage; in the second, the spectacle of the de- 
 struction of Troy ; in the third, the voyage among the islands 
 and coasts of the Mediterranean; in the fourth, the tragedy of 
 Dido; in the fifth, the rest in the Sicilian bay, at the foot of 
 Mount Eryx ; in the sixth, the revelation of the spiritual world 
 of Virgo's imagination, and of the souls of those who built up 
 
499 
 
 the greatness of Rome in their pre-existent state, in their shad- 
 owy dwelling-place; in the seventh, the arrival of the Trojans 
 at the mouth of the Tiber and the gathering of the Italian 
 clans; in the eighth, the first sight of the hills of Rome, and 
 the prophetic representation of the great crises in. Roman his- 
 tory leading up to the greatest of them all, the crowning vic- 
 tory of Actium. Among these books we may infer that Virgil 
 assigned the palm to the second, the fourth, and the sixth, as 
 he selected them to read to Augustus and the members of the 
 imperial family. The interest flags in the last four; nor is it 
 possible to feel the culminating sympathy with the final 
 combat between Hector and Achilles. Yet a personal interest is 
 awakened in the adventures and fate of Pallas, Lausus, and 
 Camilla.. Virgil may himself have become weary of the suc- 
 cession of battle-scenes ' eadem horrida bella,' which the re- 
 quirements of epic poetry rather than the impulses of his own 
 genius or the taste of his readers called upon him to portray ; 
 and this may partly account for the sense of discouragement 
 which he is supposed to have felt at the end of his labors. There 
 is not only a less varied interest, there is greater inequality of 
 workmanship of the later books, owing to the fact that they had 
 not received their author's final revisal. Yejt in them there are 
 many lines and passages of great power, pathos, and beauty. 
 Virgil brought the two great instruments of varied and con- 
 tinuous harmony and of a rich, chastened, and noble style to 
 the highest perfection of which the Latin tongue was capable. 
 The rhythm and style of the JEneid is more unequal than the 
 rhythm and style of the Georgics, but is a larger and more 
 varied instrument. The note of his supremacy among all the 
 poetic artists of his country is that subtle fusion of the music 
 and the meaning of language which touches the deepest and 
 most secret springs of emotion. He touches especially the emo- 
 tions of reverence and of a yearning for a higher spiritual life, 
 and the sense of nobleness in human affairs, in great institutions, 
 and great natures ; the sense of the sanctity of human affections, 
 of the imaginative spell exercised by the past, of the mystery 
 of the unseen world. This is the secret of the power which his 
 words have had over some of the deepest and greatest natures 
 both in ages of faith and in more positive times. No words 
 more subtly and truly express the magic of his style than those 
 
5 00 THE EPIC 
 
 in which Dr. Newman characterizes ' his single words and 
 phrases, his pathetic half-lines, giving- utterance as the voice of 
 nature herself to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better 
 things, which is the experience of her children in every age/ ' 
 
 Criticism by Charles Anthon, LL.D." The JEnei-d has 
 for its subject the settlement of the Trojans in Italy. This pro- 
 duction belongs to a nobler class of poetry than the Georgics, 
 and is, perhaps, equally perfect in its kind. It ranks, indeed, 
 in the very highest order, and it was in this exalted species that 
 Virgil was most fitted to excel. Undisturbed by excess of pas- 
 sion, and never hurried away by the current of ideas, he calmly 
 consigned to immortal verse the scenes which his fancy had 
 first painted as lovely, and which his understanding had after- 
 ward approved. The extent, too, and depth of the design pro- 
 posed in the ALncid, rendered this subjection to the judgment 
 indispensable. It would be absurd to suppose, with some critics, 
 that Virgil intended to give instruction to princes in the art of 
 settling colonies (Catrou, CEuvres de Virgile, vol. 3, p. 486), or 
 to supply Augustus with political rules for the government and 
 legislation of a great empire ; but he evidently designed, not 
 merely to deduce the descent of Augustus and the Romans from 
 yneas and his companions, but, by creating a perfect char- 
 acter in hi's hero, to shadow out the eminent qualities of his 
 imperial patron ; to recommend his virtues to his countrymen, 
 who would readily apply to him the amiable portrait; and per- 
 haps to suggest that he was the ruler of the world announced 
 of old by the prophecies and oracles of the Saturnian land. 
 (/n. '6, 789, seqq.) No one who has read the Mneid, and 
 studied the historical character of Augustus, or the early events 
 of his reign, can doubt that JEneas is an allegorical represen- 
 tation of that emperor. The chief objection which critics in 
 all ages have urged against the 2Ene\d, or at least, against the 
 poetical character of its author, is the defect in what forms the 
 most essential quality of a poet, originality and the power of 
 invention. It has never, indeed, been denied that he possessed 
 a species of invention, if it may be so called, which consists 
 in placing ideas that have been preoccupied in a new light, or 
 presenting assemblages, which have been already exhibited, in 
 a new point of view. Nor has it been disputed that he often 
 
VIRGIL 50I 
 
 succeeds in bestowing on them the charm of novelty, by the 
 power of more perfect diction, and by that poetic touch which 
 transmutes whatever it lights on, into gold. But it is alleged 
 that he has contrived few incidents, and opened up no new 
 veins of thought. It is well known that the Roman dramatic 
 writers, instead of contriving plots of their own, translated the 
 masterpieces of Sophocles, Euripides, and Menander. The same 
 imitative spirit naturally enough prevailed in the first attempts 
 at epic poetry. When any beautiful model exists in an art, it 
 so engrosses and intimidates the mind, that we are apt to 
 think that, in order to^execute successfully any work of a simi- 
 lar description, the approved prototype must be imitated. It is 
 supposed that what had pleased once, must please always; and 
 circumstances, in themselves unimportant, or perhaps accidental, 
 are converted into general and immutable rules. It was nat- 
 ural, then, for the Romans, struck with admiration at the sublime 
 and beautiful productions of the epic muse of Greece, to follow 
 her lesson with servility. The mind of Virgil also led him to 
 imitation. His excellence lay in the propriety, beauty, and 
 majesty of his poetical character, in his judicious contrivance of 
 composition, his correctness of drawing, his purity of taste, his 
 artful adaptation of the conception of others to his own purposes, 
 and his skill in the combination of materials. Accordingly, when 
 Virgil first applied himself to frame a poem, which might cele- 
 brate his imperial master, and emulate the productions of Greece, 
 in a department of poetry wherein she was as yet unrivalled, 
 he first naturally bent a reverent eye on Homer ; and, though he 
 differed widely from his Grecian master in the qualities of his 
 mind and genius, he became his most strict and devoted disciple. 
 The Latin dramatists, in preparing their pieces for the stage, had 
 frequently compounded them of the plots of two Greek plays, 
 melted, as it were, into one ; and thus compensated for the want 
 of invention and severe simplicity of composition by greater 
 richness and variety of incident. From their example, Virgil 
 comprehended in his plan the arguments both of the Iliad and 
 Odyssey; the one serving him as a guide for the wanderings 
 and adventures of his hero previous to the landing in Latium, and 
 the other as a model for the wars which he sustained in Italy, to 
 gain his destined bride, Lavinia. He had thus before him all the 
 beauties and defects of Homer, as lights to gaze at and as rocks 
 
502 
 
 THE EPIC 
 
 to be shunned with the judgment of ages on both, as a chart which 
 might conduct him to yet greater perfection." 
 
 Dante. Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265, and 
 died at Ravenna in 1321. He was, like his father, a member 
 of the Guelph party. Later on, he strove to unite the Guelph 
 and Ghibellines, and thus became known as the " First Italian." 
 His immortal poem was written while the author suffered ex- 
 ile for his political views. He wandered from one country to 
 another, according to one account, yisiting Oxford. He 
 shares with Homer, Virgil and Milton the honor of being one 
 of the four great epic writers of the world. His English 
 translators, Gary, Norton and Longfellow, are widely known. 
 
 Criticism by Thomas Carlyle. " I give Dante my highest 
 praise when I say of his Divine Comedy that it is, in all senses, 
 genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there is a canto fcrnw; 
 it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his simple Terza rima, 
 doubtless helped him in this. The essence and material of the 
 work are themselves rhythmic. Its depth and rapt passion and 
 sincerity make it musical ; go deep enough, there is music every- 
 where. A true inward symmetry, what one calls an architectural 
 harmony, reigns in it, proportionates it all : architectural ; which 
 also partakes of the character of music. The three kingdoms, 
 Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, look out on one another like com- 
 partments of a great edifice, a great supernatural world-cathedral, 
 piled up there, stern, solemn, awful. It is at bottom the sincercst 
 of all poems, and sincerity is also the measure of its worth. It 
 came deep out of the author's heart of hearts ; and it goes deep, 
 and through long generations, into ours. Perhaps one ought to 
 say that intensity is the prevailing character of Dante's genius ; 
 his greatness has concentred itself into fiery emphasis and depth ; 
 he pierces down into the very heart of Being I know nothing 
 so intense as Dante. There is a brevity, an abrupt precision in 
 him : Tacitus is not briefer, more condensed. It is strange with 
 what a sharp, decisive grace he snatches the true likeness of a 
 matter ; cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire. Dante's paint- 
 ing is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness as of fire 
 
DANTS 503 
 
 in dark night; taken on the wider scale it is every way noble, 
 and the outcome of a great soul. Dante is the spokesman of the 
 Middle Ages ; the thought they lived by stands here, in everlasting 
 music. These sublime ideas of his, terrible and beautiful, are 
 the fruit of the Christian Meditation of all good men who had 
 gone before him. As to his influence and permanence, Dante 
 speaks, to the noble, the pure and great, in all times and places. 
 Neither does he grow obsolete; he burns as a pure star, fixed 
 there in the firmament, at which the great and high of all ages 
 kindle themselves : he is the possession of all the chosen of 
 the world for uncounted time." 
 
 Criticism by Brother Azarias. " A study of the * Divina 
 Commedia/ in any of its aspects, must needs be a study of the 
 age in which it was produced, of the man out of the fulness 
 of whose soul it issued in notes strong and clear, and of the 
 various influences that made their impress upon both the man 
 and the poem. Of all the supreme efforts of creative genius, the 
 ' Divina Commedia ' is that that can least be taken out of the 
 times and circumstances that gave it birth. Its contemporary 
 history and its contemporary spirit constitute its clearest and 
 best commentary." 
 
 " The age of Dante was preeminently a Catholic age. It was 
 an age when men lived in one faith, had one ritual, recited one 
 creed, were taught one and the same doctrine and practice, and 
 breathed a common religious atmosphere. In this respect there 
 is a marked contrast between the Time-spirit of that day and the 
 Time-spirit of the present. The great chorus of modern thought 
 is a loud proclaiming of pessimism and the despair that would 
 destroy a hereafter, annihilate the soul, and ignore a Personal 
 Divinity. It acts in open defiance of the whole Christian codes 
 of the spiritual truth and the spiritual law that are essential ele- 
 ments in all modern conduct and modern thinking. ' Its crown- 
 ing dogma,' says a recent writer, ' is written even now between 
 the lines in many a dainty volume, that evil has a secret holiness, 
 and sin a consecrating magnificence/ Now of this agnostic 
 spirit must we divest ourselves in entering upon a study of 
 Dante's masterpiece. There we wi 1 ! find no doubt. All is in- 
 tense earnestness. The light of faith guides the poet's steps 
 through the hopeless chambers of Hell with a firmness of con- 
 
504 
 
 THE EPIC 
 
 viction that knows no wavering; it bears him through the 
 sufferings of purgatory, believing strongly in its reality ; it raises 
 him on the wings of love and contemplation into heaven's em- 
 pyrean, where he really hopes to enjoy bliss far beyond aught 
 whereof he sings. If we would understand the animating 
 principle of the poem, it behooves us to cast aside all idea 
 that these divisions of it were a mere barbarous and cumber- 
 some machinery. Not in this fashion are epoch-making works 
 constructed. Dante believed in the existence of these places 
 and in the reality of their woes and their joys as firmly as he 
 believed in himself. The simple faith pervading this poem 
 contrasts strikingly with the spirit animating ' Faust/ The lat- 
 ter is designed to represent the innate conflict of the savage 
 in man against established law and order in the moral, social, and 
 physical world. Mephistopheles is the evil genius of the hero. 
 He impersonates the negation of truth and goodness. But much 
 as the spirit-world figures in Goethe's masterpiece, it does so 
 not as a living reality, but as a mere scaffolding whereby Goethe 
 builds up the artistic structure of the experiences gathered from 
 study and observation, or found in the recesses of his own large 
 worldly heart. And what is the uppermost lesson that one may 
 read on every page of that wonderful panorama of modern life? 
 As we understand it, we read simply the dark lesson, that only 
 through the experiences that come of all manner of self-indul- 
 gence and self-gratification may one reach the broader view of 
 life and attain perfection. This is attempting to make one's 
 own way out of the wood of error and wrong-doing at the risk 
 of being devoured by the beasts of predominant sin and passion. 
 The hero is guilty of crime the most atrocious; he brings ruin 
 in his wake ; up to his last hour, he is sensual and covetous ; he 
 deserts not his sins ; rather his sins desert him. There are 
 regrets; in one instance there is remorse; but there is no con- 
 version. And yet, as though in mockery of the Christian ideal 
 of personal purity and holiness, this sinful soul is triumphantly 
 borne to heaven amid the songs of angels. The poet represents 
 him as saved by the only saving principle on, or above, or under 
 the > earth the principle of Love: 'Whoever striving exerts 
 himself, him can we redeem, and if he also participates in the 
 Jove from on high, the Blessed Host shall meet him with heartiest 
 welcome.' Faust, like Dante in his poem, is the special object 
 
DANTE 
 
 505 
 
 of womanly love. She whose heart he broke pleads in his behalf 
 before the Mater Gloriosa, and her prayer is heard. Faust is 
 saved. Through wreck and ruin of soul and body he reaches 
 the solution of life's riddle. ' Faust ' is a poem of selfishness. 
 How does Dante treat the same theme of struggle and salvation ? 
 How does he introduce the same element of womanly love? 
 Beatrice, after upbraiding Dante for his sins, says : ' God's high 
 destiny would be broken if Lethe were passed and such food were 
 tasted without the repentance that breaks forth in tears.' Such 
 is womanly love in Dante's conception : spiritual, elevating, en- 
 nobling, strengthening, ideal. These characteristics we fail to 
 see in Goethe's conception. To his mind, womanly love is merely 
 a blind love, all-enduring and all-forgiving. But ' Faust ' is 
 the world-poem of this century, even as the ' Divina Commedia ' 
 is of the thirteenth. Goethe is the mouthpiece of the modern 
 world ; the Middle Ages sing through Dante. And as each was 
 a child of his age, the personality of each is a determining element 
 written into the fibre of both great poems." 
 
 " The music of the ' Paradise ' is the music of spiritual life ; 
 and the music of spiritual life can be interpreted only by those 
 into whose existence spiritual life enters as a living, breathing 
 reality. It is a music articulate and familiar to each religious 
 man. It throbs in his every aspiration. His ear has been at- 
 tuned to its exquisite cadences ; its harmony vibrates through 
 the pages of the spiritual book he reads ; it is re-echoed in the 
 sermons and exhortations he hears and in the hymns he chants ; 
 his whole life is the clearest commentary upon this poem rather 
 his life is itself the living poem from which Dante has made 
 a marvelous though still imperfect transcript. In the noblest 
 themes of that transcript, he recognizes echoes of the thoughts, 
 sentiments, and aspirations that in his own breast are continu- 
 ously humming unspeakable music. The fervor and love and 
 high thought that are all so grandly intensified in the terse 
 rhythm of the ' Divina Commedia** are the ferver and love and 
 high thought that are daily moving tens of thousands of men 
 and women to lead the spiritual life therein portrayed in obedience 
 to the Love Divine that rules hearts and sways the heavens in 
 perpetual harmony. The religious man in sauntering through 
 the vast aisles and chapels of this noble cathedral of song, here 
 admiring a tender and touching picture, there gazing upon a 
 
506 THE EPIC 
 
 scene of terror penciled in vivid colors, again drinking in the 
 sweet and inspiring strains of its clear organ-tones, feels that 
 beneath its solemn arches his soul may rest, for he is at home 
 in his Father's House." 
 
 Milton. John Milton was born in 1608 and died in 1674. 
 He was the son of a London Scrivener. He studied at St. 
 Paul's School and at Christ's College, Cambridge. Milton 
 was made Latin Secretary to the new Commonwealth which 
 was inaugurated by Crofiwell. The writings of Milton are 
 voluminous, divided between verse and prose. Much of his 
 prose work is polemic ; his verse is lyric and dramatic as well 
 as epic; the Ode on the l.ativity, the Sonnet to Shakespeare, 
 the Sannson Agonistes sh^re with Paradise Lost the glory of 
 being supremely great literature. Milton is the fourth great 
 epic writer in the order of time. 
 
 Criticism by Mark Pattison. " Poetry has been defined as 
 ' the suggestion of noble grounds for the noble emotions/ and, 
 in this respect, none of the world-epics there are at most five 
 such in existence can compete with Paradise Lost. The 
 melancholy pathos of Lucretius, indeed, pierces the heart with a 
 two-edged sword more keen than Milton's, but the compass of 
 Lucretius' horizon is much less, being limited to this earth and 
 its inhabitants. The horizon of Paradise Lost is not narrower 
 than all space, its chronology not shorter than eternity ; the globe 
 of our earth a mere spot in the physical universe, and that uni- 
 verse itself, a drop suspended in the infinite empyrean. His as- 
 pirations had thus reached ' one of the highest arcs that human 
 contemplation circling upwards can make from the glassy sea 
 whereon she stands/ (Doctr. and Disc.). Like his contem- 
 porary, Pascal, his mind had beaten her wings against the prison 
 walls of human thought. 
 
 " Milton's diction is the elaborated outcome of all the best 
 words of all antecedent poetry, not by a process of recollected 
 reading and storage, but by the same mental habit by which we 
 learn to speak our mother-tongue. Only, in the case of the poet, 
 the vocabulary acquired has a new meaning superadded to the 
 
MILTON 
 
 words, from the occasion on which they have been previously 
 employed by others. Words, over and above their dictionary 
 significance, connote all the feeling which has gathered round 
 them by reason of their employment through a hundred genera- 
 tions of song. In the words of Mr. Myers, ' without ceasing 
 to be a logical step in the argument, a phrase becomes a centre 
 of emotional force. The complex associations which it evokes 
 modify the associations evoked by other words in the same pass- 
 age, in a -way distinct from logical or grammatical conception.' 
 The poet suggests much more than he says, or, as. Milton him- 
 self has phrased it, * more is meant than meets the ear.' For 
 the purpose of poetry, a thought is the representative of many 
 feelings, and a word is the representative of many thoughts. 
 A single word may thus set in motion in us the vibration of a 
 feeling first consigned to letters 3,000 years ago. For oratory 
 words should be winged, that they may do their work of per- 
 suasion. For poetry, words should be freighted with association 
 of feeling, that they may awaken sympathy. It is the suggestive* 
 power of words that the poet cares for, rather than their current 
 denotation. How laughable are the attempts of the commenta- 
 tors to interpret a line in Virgil as they would a sentence in 
 Aristotle's Physics! Milton's secret lies in his mastery over the 
 rich treasures of this inherited vocabulary. He wielded it as 
 his own, as a second mother-tongue, the native and habitual 
 idiom of his thought and feeling, backed by a massive frame of 
 character, and ' a power which is got within me to a passion.' 
 (Areopagitica. ) 
 
 " When Wordsworth came forward at the end of the eigh- 
 teenth century with his famous reform of the language of 
 English poetry, the Miltonic diction was the current coin paid 
 out by every versifier. Wordsworth revolted against this dialect 
 as unmeaning, hollow, gaudy, and, in phraseology altogether 
 abandoned it, reverting to the common language of ordinary life. 
 It was necessary to do this in order to recount poetry with the 
 sympathies of men, and make it again a true utterance, instead of 
 the ingenious exercise in putting together words which it had 
 become. In projecting this abandonment of the received tradi- 
 tion, it may be thought that Wordsworth was condemning the 
 Miltonic system of expression in itself. But this was not so. 
 Milton's language had become, in the hands of the imitators of 
 
5 o8 THE EPIC 
 
 the eighteenth century, sound without sense, a husk without 
 the kernel, a body of words without the soul of poetry. .Milton 
 had created and wielded ft? 17 instrument which was beyond the 
 control of any less than himself. He wrote it as a living- lan- 
 guage ; the poetasters of the eighteenth century wrote it as a 
 dead language, as boys make Latin verses. Their poetry is to 
 Paradise Lost, as a modern Gothic restoration is to a genuine 
 Middle-Age church. It was against the feeble race of imitators, 
 and not against the master himself, that the protest of the Lake 
 poet was raised. He proposed to do away with the Miltonic. 
 vocabulary altogether, not because it was in itself vicious, but 
 because it could now only be employed at second-hand. One 
 draw-back there was attendant upon the style chosen by Milton, 
 viz., that it narrowly limited the circle of his readers. All words 
 are addressed to those who understand them. The Welsh triads 
 are not for those who have not learnt Welsh ; an English poem 
 is only for those who understand English. But of understand- 
 ing English there are many degrees; it requires some education 
 to understand literary style at all. A large majority of the 
 natives of any country possess, and use, only a small fraction of 
 their mother-tongue. These people may be left out of the 
 discussion. Confining ourselves only to that small part of our 
 millions which we speak of as the educated classes that is, 
 those whose schooling is carried on beyond fourteen years of age 
 it will be found that only a small fraction of the men, and a 
 still smaller fraction of the women, fully apprehend the meaning 
 of words. This is the case with what is written in the ordinary 
 language of books. When we pass from a style in which words 
 have only their simple significance, to a style of which the effect 
 depends on the suggestion of collateral association, we leave 
 behind the majority even of these few. This is what is meant 
 by the standing charge against Milton that he is too learned. 
 
 ' The style of Paradise Lost is then only the natural expression 
 of a soul thus exquisitely nourished upon the best thoughts and 
 finest words of all ages. It is the language of one who lives 
 in the companionship of the great and the wise of past time. 
 It is inevitable that when such a one speaks, his tones, his accent, 
 the melodies of his rhythm, the inner harmonies of his linked 
 thoughts, the grace of his illusive touch, should escape the com- 
 mon ear. To follow Milton one should have at least tasted the 
 
MILTON 
 
 same training through which he put himself. ' 7V qnoijuc d 
 tinge dco! The many cannot see it, and they complain that the 
 poet is too learned. They would have Milton talk like Uunyan 
 or William Cobbett, whom they understand. Milton did attempt 
 the demagogue in his pamphlets, only with the result of blemish- 
 ing his fame and degrading his genius. The best poetry is that 
 which calls upon us to rise to it, not that which writes down 
 to us. 
 
 ' There is an element of decay and death in poems which we 
 vainly style immortal. Some of the sources of Milton's power 
 are already in process of drying up. I do not speak of the 
 ordinary caducity of language, in virtue of which every effusion 
 of the human spirit is lodged in a body of death. Milton suffers 
 little as yet from this cause. There are few lines in his poems 
 which are less intelligible now than they were at the time they 
 were written. This is partly to be ascribed to his limited vocab- 
 ulary, Milton, in his verse, using not more than eight thousand 
 words, or about half the number used by Shakespeare. Nay, 
 the position of our earlier writers has been improved by the 
 mere spread of the English language over a wider area. Addi- 
 son apologized for Paradise Lost falling short of the JEncid, 
 because of the inferiority of the language in which it was written. 
 " So divine a poem in English is like a stately palace built of 
 brick." The defects of English for purposes of rhythm and 
 harmony are as great now as they ever were, but the space that 
 our speech fills in the world is vastly increased, and this increase 
 of consideration is reflected back upon our older writers. But 
 if, as a treasury of poetic speech, Paradise Lost has gained by 
 time, it has lost far more as a storehouse of divine truth. We 
 at this day are better able than ever to appreciate its force of 
 expression, its grace of phrase, its harmony of rhythmical move- 
 ment, but it is losing its hold over our imagination. Strange to 
 say, this failure of vital power in the constitution of the poem 
 is due to the very selection of subject by which Milton sought 
 to secure perpetuity. Not content with being the poet of men, 
 and with describing human passions and ordinary events, he 
 aspired to present the destiny of the whole race of mankind, 
 to tell the story of creation, and to reveal the councils of heaven 
 and hell. And he would raise this structure upon no unstable 
 base, but upon the sure foundation of the written Word. It 
 
5IO THE EPIC 
 
 would have been a thing incredible to Milton that the hold of 
 the Jewish Scriptures over the imagination of English men 
 and women could ever be weakened. This process, however, 
 has already commenced. The demonology of the poem has 
 already, with educated readers, passed" from the region of fact 
 into that of fiction. Not so, universally, but with a large number 
 of readers, the angelology can be no more than what the critics 
 call machinery. And it requires a violent effort from any of our 
 day to accommodate our conceptions to the anthropomorphic 
 theology of Paradise Lost. Were the sapping process to con- 
 tinue at the same rate for two more centuries, the possibility 
 of epic illusion would be lost to the whole scheme and economy 
 of the poem. Milton has taken a scheme of life for life itself. 
 Had he, in the choice of subject, remembered the principle of 
 the Aristotelean Poetic (which he otherwise highly prized), that 
 men in action are the poet's proper theme, he would have raised 
 his imaginative fabric on a more permanent foundation ; upon 
 the appetities, passions, and emotions of men, their vices and 
 virtues, their aims and ambitions, which are a far more constant 
 quantity than any theological system. This, perhaps, was what 
 Goethe meant when he pronounced the subject of Paradise Lost 
 to be abominable, with a fair outside, but rotten inwardly/ '' 
 
 Criticism by Lord Macaulay. " The only poem of modern 
 times which can be compared with the Paradise Lost is the Divine 
 Comedy. The subject of Milton, in some points, resembled that 
 of Dante ; but he has treated it in a widely different manner. 
 We cannot, we think, better illustrate our opinion respecting 
 our own great poet, than by contrasting him with the father of 
 Tuscan literature. The poetry of Milton differs from that of 
 Dante as the hieroglyphics of Egypt differed from the picture 
 writing of Mexico. The images which Dante employs speak /or 
 themselves ; they stand simply for what they are. Those of 
 Milton have a signification which is often discernible only to 
 the initiated. Their value depends less on what they directly 
 represent than on what they remotely suggest. However strange, 
 however grotesque, may be the appearance which Dante under- 
 takes to describe, he never shrinks from describing it. He gives 
 us the shape, the color, the sound, the smell, the taste ; he counts 
 the numbers ; he measures the size. His similies are the illustra- 
 
MILTON r,j 
 
 tions of a traveler. Unlike those of other poets, and especially 
 of Milton, they are introduced in a plain, businesslike, manner; 
 not for the sake of any beauty in the objects from which they are 
 drawn ; not for the sake of any ornament which they may impart 
 to the poem; but simply in order to make the meaning of the 
 writer as clear to the reader as it is to himself. The ruins of the 
 precipice which led from the sixth to the seventh circle of hell, 
 were like those of the rock which fell into the Adige on the 
 south of Trent. The cataract of Phlegethon was like that of 
 Aqua Cheta at the monastery of St. Benedict. The place where 
 the heretics were confined in burning tombs resembled the vast 
 cemetery of Aries. 
 
 " Poetry which relates to the beings of another world, ought 
 to be at once mysterious and picturesque, indeed, beyond any 
 that ever was written. Its effect approaches to that produced 
 by the pencil or the chisel. But it is picturesque to the exclusion 
 of all mystery. This is a fault on the right side, a fault insep- 
 arable from the plan of Dante's poem, which, as we have already 
 observed, rendered the utmost accuracy of description necessary. 
 Still, it is a fault. The supernatural agents excite an interest ; 
 but it is not the interest which is proper to supernatural agents. 
 \Ye feel that we could talk to the ghosts and demons, without 
 any emotion of unearthly awe. We could, like Don Juan, ask 
 them to supper, and eat heartily in their company. Dante's 
 angels are good men with wings. His devils are spiteful, ugly, 
 executioners. His dead men are merely living men in strange 
 situations. The scene which passes between the poet and Far- 
 inata is justly celebrated. Still, Farinata in the burning tomb 
 h exactly what Farinata would have been at an auto da ft. 
 Xothing can be more touching than the first interview of Dante 
 and Beatrice. Yet, what is it but a lovely woman chiding, with 
 sweet, austere composure, the lover for whose affection she is 
 grateful, but whose vices she reprobates? The feelings which 
 give the passage its charm would suit the streets of Florence 
 as well as the summit of the Mount of Purgatory. 
 
 " To return for a moment to the parallel which we have been 
 attempting to draw between Milton and Dante, we would add 
 that the poetry of these great men has in a considerable degree 
 taken its character from their moral qualities. They are not 
 egotists. They rarely obtrude their idiosyncrasies on their read- 
 
THE EPIC 
 
 ers. They have nothing in common with those modern beggars 
 for fame, who extort a pittance from the compassion of the in- 
 experienced, by exposing the nakedness and sores of their minds. 
 Yet it would be difficult to name two writers whose works have 
 been more completely, though undesignedly, colored by their 
 personal feelings. The character of Milton was peculiarly dis- 
 tinguished by loftiness of spirit; that of Dante, by intensity of 
 feeling. In every line of the Divine Comedy we discern the 
 asperity which is produced by pride struggling with misery. 
 There is perhaps no work in the world so deeply and uniformly 
 sorrowful. The melancholy of Dante was no fantastic caprice. 
 It was not, as far as at this distance of time can be judged, the 
 effect of external circumstances. It was from within. Neither 
 love nor glory, neither the conflicts of earth nor the hope of 
 heaven, could dispel it. It turned every consolation and every 
 pleasure into its own nature. It resembled that noxious Sar- 
 dinian soil of which the intense bitterness is said to have been 
 perceptible even in its honey. His mind was, in the noble lan- 
 guage of the Hebrew poet, ' a land of darkness, as darkness it- 
 self, and where the light was as darkness/ The gloom of his 
 character discolors all the passions of men, and all the face of 
 nature, and tinges with its own livid hue the flowers of Paradise 
 and the glories of the eternal throne. All the portraits of him 
 are singularly characteristic. No person can look on the fea- 
 tures, noble even to ruggedness, the dark furrows of the cheek, 
 the haggard and woeful stare of the eye, the sullen and con- 
 temptuous curve of the lip, and doubt that they belong to a man 
 too proud and too sensitive to be happy. Milton was, like Dante, 
 a statesman and a lover; and, like Dante, he had been unfor- 
 tunate in ambition and in love. He had survived his health and 
 his sight, the comforts of his home and the prosperity of his 
 party. Of the great men by whom he had been distinguished at 
 his entrance into life, some had been taken away from the evil 
 to come; some had carried into foreign climates their uncon- 
 querable hatred of oppression ; some were pining in dungeons ; 
 and some had poured forth their blood on scaffolds. Venal and 
 licentious scribblers, with just sufficient talent to clothe the 
 thoughts of a pander in the style of a bellman, were now the 
 favorite writers of the sovereign and of the public. It was a 
 loathsome herd, which could be compared to nothing so filthy 
 
MINOR EPICS 
 
 as to the rabble of ' Comus,' grotesque monsters, half bestial, 
 half human, dropping with wine, bloated with gluttony, and 
 reeling in obscene dances. Amidst these, that fair Muse was 
 placed, like the chaste lady of -the lofty, spotless, and serene, 
 to be chattered at, and pointed at, and grinned at, by the whole 
 rout of satyrs and goblins. If ever despondency and asperity 
 could be excused in any man, they might have been excused in 
 Milton. But the strength of his mind overcame every calamity. 
 Neither blindness, nor gout, nor age, nor penury, nor domestic 
 afflictions, nor political disappointments, nor abuse, nor proscrip- 
 tion, nor neglect, had power to disturb his sedate and majestic 
 patience. His spirits do not seem to have been high, but they 
 were singularly equable. His temper was serious, perhaps stern ; 
 but it was a temper which no sufferings could render sullen or 
 fretful. Such as it was when, on the eve of great events, he 
 returned from his travels, in the prime of health and manly 
 beauty, loaded with literary distinctions, and glowing with patri- 
 otic hopes; such it continued to be when, after having experi- 
 enced every calamity which is incident to our nature, old, poor, 
 sightless, and disgraced, he retired to his hovel to die." 
 
 Minor Epics. The minor epics of the world are the Ra- 
 mayana, Maha-bharata, Kalevala, Beowulf, Nibelungen Lied, 
 Song of Roland, Shah-namah, Poem of the Cid, Orlando 
 Furioso, Lusiad, Jerusalem Delivered, Messiad. The condi- 
 tions for the production of the primitive epic exist but once 
 in a nation's growth ; and most nations have been fortunate 
 enough to take advantage of the opportunity. Constructed 
 upon the noblest principles of art and pervaded by the eternal 
 calm of the immortals, the above-mentioned epics are of un- 
 dying interest to the nations whose gifted sons produce them. 
 But it was given to their more exalted brethren Homer, 
 Virgil, Dante, and Milton to break down national barriers 
 and appeal with almost equal interest to every nation and to 
 every age; and for this reason the latter were selected here 
 as the best representatives of the epic. 
 
CHAPTER LI 
 THE LYRIC 
 
 Its Place. The lyric occupies the third, or lowest place", 
 among standard verse-forms. It is preceded by the drama 
 and the epic, and like the letter in prose, is lowest on the scale, 
 so far as value an'd importance are concerned. 
 
 Origin of the Term. The term, lyric, derived from the 
 word, lyra, was first applied to a musical instrument of the 
 harp family. At a later date it was applied to the songs 
 adapted to the harp or lyre, and in this connection involved 
 both music and poetry. For the lines thus written were com- 
 posed for the sole purpose of being set to music. Hence, lyric 
 poetry among the ancients was known as songs or psalms. 
 
 Present Scope. At the present time the lyric has a wider 
 significance, meaning not only poetry set to music, but all 
 miscellaneous work outside the domain of the epic and the 
 drama. 
 
 Exceptions. An exception is made of what is called didac- 
 tic poetry. ^*This class lies outside the domain of epic and 
 drama, yet it cannot be classified as lyric. Its length and 
 sustained thought, together with an almost complete absence of 
 emotion, give it anything but a lyric character. The fact is 
 that didactic poetry represents an abnormal creation; it is an 
 attempt to combine philosophy or science with the imaginative 
 process of poetry. The result is neither good philosophy nor 
 genuine poetry. The didactic poem, as Blair remarks, dif- 
 
THE LYRIC 
 
 fers only in form, not in scope or substance, from a philosoph- 
 ical, a moral or a critical treatise in prose. Thus, so far as 
 it can be classified at all, it belongs to the department of phil- 
 osophy rather than poetry. A second exception is sometimes 
 made of the satire, and pastoral poetry. But these often take 
 a lyric form. Otherwise, they are heroic in character, and 
 belong to epic literature. 
 
 Marks of the Lyric. Briefness. The lyric is recognized 
 in four ways. First, by its briefness. It is invariably a brief 
 production. This is due to the fact that the author uses the 
 lyric as a vehicle for intense passion or a passing mood. In- 
 tense passion is by nature of short duration, and in art must 
 have the briefest expression. It is, therefore, as Tennyson de- 
 scribes it, " a short swallow-flight of song/' 
 
 Emotional Value. The lyric is also recognized on account 
 of its emotional value. It is always intended to arouse the 
 feelings of the reader or hearer. Its success depends upon 
 the amount of passion thus aroused. And because of this 
 appeal to the emotions, the lyric is made the most musical of 
 all literary work. Among primitive or savage races, it acted 
 as a spell or incantation, so strong was its influence over the 
 emotions. Among the most highly civilized nations, the lyric 
 known as the national anthem has an almost equal influence. 
 
 Subjectivity. The lyric is recognized on account of its sub- 
 jectivity. It expresses the feeling of the writer; it represents 
 his own mood or passion, not the mood or passfon of another. 
 Hence, it is quite different from the drama wherein the author 
 describes the thoughts and feelings of characters which he has 
 created; also, from the epic wherein external events and cir- 
 cumstances are described. Both the drama and the epic are 
 objective, whereas the lyric is a self- revelation on the part of 
 the author. 
 
 Flexibility of Form. The lyric is known by its flexibility 
 
516 THE LYRIC 
 
 of form. The least art is required in the plan of a lyric. It 
 is adjusted so as to express every feeling, mood and fancy. 
 Like the letter, it may be made highly artificial; but in such 
 cases the charm is lessened or destroyed. Its normal condi- 
 tion is one of largest freedom. Thus, the psalm in Hebrew 
 literature and the ballad in the folk-lore of all nations are 
 unrivalled representatives of the lyric. 
 
 Meter and Style in the Lyric. Lyric poetry is nowhere 
 more varied than in its metre, and it offers an interesting field 
 for the study of this element of poetic form. It uses feet of 
 all kinds and lines of every length. No particular foot is es- 
 pecially characteristic, the kind of foot being determined by 
 the spirit of the poem. The most common lines are the 
 tetrameter and pentameter. The use of end rhyme is almost 
 universal in modern lyrics. There is also an abundance of 
 alliteration and assonance ; and likewise a studied effort to give 
 vowel sounds the preference. These elements determine in 
 large measure the quality and effect of the music. The very 
 diversity of lyric meter makes specific directions impossible. 
 
 Style. In style the lyric is subject to the same laws as 
 other literature; but the various qualities are nowhere mani- 
 fested more fully and vividly. Intellectual qualities of style 
 are less strongly marked, for the lyric is not predominantly in- 
 tellectual in substance. As a rule, however, it is more subtle 
 and abstruse than the epic; because subjective moods or states 
 often so highly complex are less easy to express than simple 
 epic narrative. Emotional qualities of style are expected to be 
 present in the fullest measure. Wit, humor, pathos, sublim- 
 ity, beauty, melody, are all present. The lyric covers the 
 whole range of feeling. The emotion that is universal and 
 thoroughly human prevails. Hence, grief, devotion, love, pa- 
 triotism, hope, are the constant theme and determine the style 
 of the lyric. i , 
 
THE LYRIC 
 
 Suggestiveness. One characteristic of the lyric style is its 
 suggest! veness. The lyric is the most highly suggestive form 
 of literature, owing to the narrow limits within which the 
 artist must work. This suggest iveness applies both to thought 
 development and to illustration or picture work. The artist 
 has not room to give every thought or every picture in detail. 
 Often the slightest hint must serve where a paragraph of 
 amplification would be given in prose, and would be required 
 to express the thought in fuH. Hence, the condensed or con- 
 cise style of the lyric. The intellect and imagination of the 
 reader are thus kept active. This is particularly true of the 
 lyric produced in a highly civilized state of society. For ex- 
 ample, Pindar, Horace, Tennyson. 
 
 In Relation to Epic and Drama. As a work of art, the 
 lyric is inferior to the epic or the drama. It requires neither 
 an elaborate plan nor character creation. Like the letter in 
 prose, the lyric is ubiquitous; it enters into the composition of 
 both drama and epic. These higher verse forms originated 
 in the lyric, and both retain lyric elements. The drama grew 
 out of the hymn ; the epic came from the hymn and the ballad. 
 At the present time the lyric retains a three-fold relation to 
 the drama first, in the songs sung by the various characters 
 in the progress of dramatic action; second, in the orchestral 
 music or interludes between the acts ; third, in the prelude and 
 epilogue of the drama. For example, the lyrics scattered 
 through the plays of Shakespeare would form a small volume. 
 And they are still more numerous in the Greek drama, owing 
 to the important part taken by the chorus. 
 
 In the Epic. The lyric is frequently employed in the con- 
 struction of the epic. Both ancient and modern epics employ 
 material drawn from the supernatural world. Epic heroes are 
 invariably associated with angels or deities. Hence, hvmns. 
 
THE LYRIC 
 
 prayers, invocations, are woven into the story. For example, 
 the prayers of yEneas on his voyage to Italy; the prayers of 
 our first parents in Paradise Lost; the invocations of Dante 
 in passing through purgatory, hell, heaven. 
 
 In Relation to Prose. The lyric finds its way into almost 
 every department of prose, especially the letter, essay, oratory, 
 and fiction. It is there in the form of quotation, and is often 
 demanded by the highly emotional character of the work. 
 
 Classification. Lyrics are classified, first of all, on the 
 basis of form; so that we have, for example, the song, the 
 sonnet, the ode, and the quatrain. Secondly, they are class- 
 ified according to the emotion which they excite. These emo- 
 tions may be religious, patriotic, amorous, humorous; hence, 
 the hymn or dirge, the national anthem, the love-song, the 
 ballad, lampoon. As the prevailing mood is identified with 
 the subject-matter, this last division is really based upon the 
 themes treated, such as God, country, man, art, nature. 
 
 The Sacred Lyric. As the title indicates, it deals with God 
 and the supernatural world. It is inspired by religion. It 
 is the oldest lyric in literature; for besides such ancient pro- 
 ductions as the Indian and Vedic Hymns, this lyric was sung 
 by Moses and Miriam after the passage of the Red Sea. The 
 Book of Psalms is the best known collection of sacred lyrics 
 in the Hebrew literature; although throughout the books of 
 the Old Testament a number of fine lyrics are scattered, as, 
 for example, the odes of David and Hannah in the books of 
 Samuel, celebrating the mercy and goodness of the Lord. 
 
 Causes of Lyric Growth. On account of their national iso- 
 lation the Hebrews developed a subjective quality in their 
 character; they brooded, meditated upon themselves and their 
 
THE LYRIC 
 
 Creator, and their many sacred lyrics are the literary result 
 of such meditation. To this cause we may add the rich and 
 varied natural scenery of Palestine. All the charm and va- 
 riety of Oriental tropic scenery are present ; so that no country 
 furnishes better material for imaginative work. As a con- 
 sequence, we have the grand imagery of the Hebrew Psalms. 
 
 The Sacred Lyric in the Christian Era. The hymns of 
 Christians in all countries and ages are classified as sacred 
 lyrics which have about the same significance as the psalms 
 under the old dispensation. There are several references to 
 hymns in the New Testament, as for example, after the insti- 
 tution of the Lord's Supper, our Lord and His Apostles sung 
 a hymn ; the words of St. Matthew are, " And when they had 
 sung a hymn they went out into the Mount of Olives." So 
 also when St. Paul and Silas were thrown into prison, they 
 had a song-service in the jail at which their fellow prisoners 
 attended. It is clear from St. Paul's letters that hymns and 
 singing were a part of the divine service in the oldest Chris- 
 tian churches, notably in the Church of Corinth. Pliny wrote 
 to Trajan that on appointed days the Christians assembled and 
 sang hymns to Christ. Tertullian writes that after the Love- 
 feast (Agapa) each worshipper was invited to come forward 
 and sing a hymn in God's praise. 
 
 Greek and Roman Missals. The mass-book, or missal, em- 
 ployed in all branches of the Catholic Church is, for the most 
 part, a collection of sacred lyrics. From a literary view-point, 
 the missal is an attempt to regulate the song-service accom- 
 panying the Eucharistic sacrifice; hence, from the hitroibo or 
 opening hymn, to the last oration or prayer, we find such 
 lyric pieces as the Gloria, Kyrie, Offertory, Preface, Agnus 
 Dei, prayers cmd sequences. The meter and form of the lyric 
 are preserved in many of the sequences. For example, the 
 
20 THE LYRIC 
 
 Dies Irce and Lauda Sion. Besides the sacred lyrics incorpo- 
 rated into the missal, there were special hymns for important 
 feasts, processional hymns in which the Greek and Latin 
 Churches were equally productive. The Te Deum may be 
 taken as a fair illustration. 
 
 Breviaries. The breviary, like the missal, is lyric in char- 
 acter. The majority of the hymns are taken from the Book 
 of Psalms. In connection with these there are a number 
 from Christian sources. The addition of hymns from Chris- 
 tian writers can be traced as far back as the ninth century. 
 The breviary is an outgrowth of monastic life, as the com- 
 pilation of the hymns clearly indicates. Before the Council 
 of Trent, each monastery, diocese and large city had its own 
 lyric collection ; now only three kinds of breviaries are per- 
 mitted the Mozarabic, Ambrosian, and Roman ; the latter 
 being the official breviary of the Catholic clergy. An admir- 
 able translation of the Roman breviary was made into English 
 by the late Marquis of Bute. 
 
 Christian Hymn Books. The third and most important 
 source of the sacred ode is the Christian hymn-book. The 
 Therapeutse or Essene Jews were the first to use hymn-books ; 
 and Eusebius, the historian, declares that the early Christians 
 borrowed the hymn-book from them. The hymn-book was 
 first used in the Church of Antioch, 107 A. D. Ignatius 
 counsels congregational singing in his letter to the Christians 
 of Antioch : " Let the brethren form themselves into a choir 
 and sing praise to the Father in Christ Jesus." From Antioch, 
 congregational singing spread throughout the eastern churches. 
 In the Greek Church hymn-books were called tropologia; a 
 few of these date back as far as the fifth century, and they 
 are preserved in manuscript form in the libraries of Moscow 
 and Rome. Famous compilers of the tropologia were Ana- 
 
THE LYRIC 52 1 
 
 tolius, Patriarch of Constantinople; St. John Chrysnstmn; 
 Saints Cosmas and Saba. The tropologia contain hymns from 
 almost every saint on the Greek calendar down to the seventh 
 century. The writing of hymns seemed to be one of the 
 requisites of canonization. In the Latin Church the use of 
 hymn-books began with Saint Hilary and Saint Ambrose. 
 The earliest reference that we have to a hymn-book in the 
 Latin Church is found in Saint Jerome's Commentary on 
 Galatians; in the preface Jerome refers to a book of hymns 
 written by Saint Hilary and in use in the Diocese of Poitiers 
 in 356. Saint Ambrose introduced congregational singing 
 into the church at Milan. Saint Augustine refers to this as 
 follows : " Then it was first appointed that, after the manner ' 
 of the Eastern Church, hymns and songs be sung, lest the 
 people grow weary." Ambrosian music and the Ambrosian 
 hymn-book were in vogue down to the time of Gregory the 
 Great, when the Gregorian service came into use. After the 
 downfall of the Roman Empire all the nations of Western 
 Europe had hymn-books, each in its own language. The 
 chief writers in the Western Church were Venerable Bede, 
 (who wrote eleven hymns) and Alfred the Great, for the 
 Saxon Church ; Charlemagne and St. Bernard in France ; Jcsn 
 DuJcis Memoria is a celebrated hymn by St. Bernard. In 
 Italy, Thomas De Celano, who wrote the Dies Ircc; he was the 
 companion and biographer of Saint Francis of Assissi. Jaco- 
 bus De Benedictis, a Franciscan, who wrote the Stabat Ma- 
 ter. In Germany, Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, who 
 wrote the celebrated hymn, "Jerusalem the Golden." And 
 Hartmann, who compiled the German hymn-book in the four- 
 teenth century. Martin Luther deserves special mention; he 
 re-established congregational singing, which had fallen into 
 disuse; he composed a German hymn-book, still in use in 
 the Lutheran Church. His most famous hymn is a para- 
 
522 
 
 THE LYRIC 
 
 phrase of the 46th psalm : Our Lord, a tower of strength 
 " Ein feste berg ist unscr Gott!' 
 
 English Hymns. The first English hymn-book in the na- 
 tive tongue was published by order of Henry the Eighth, 6th 
 of May, 1545. It was called the "King's Primer," and by 
 royal mandate was used throughout the kingdom. It was 
 modeled on the Breviary and it contained English translations 
 of the best known Ambrosian and other early hymns. The 
 English hymn-book changed with each succeeding reign. 
 Under Queen Elizabeth, the King's Primer was thrown out 
 as ungodly, and a Geneva hymn-book, tinctured with Calvin- 
 ism, was substituted. It was a strange combination of Luth- 
 eran, Catholic and Biblical hymns, with considerable additions 
 from the original work of William Keith, an exiled Scotchman 
 at Geneva. 
 
 Books of Common Prayer. From the middle of the six- 
 teenth century to the present time, the English Church has em- 
 ployed Books of Common Prayer. These Books were author- 
 ized by law; they were modified from time to time by the 
 reigning sovereigns, notably by Edward the Sixth and Queen 
 Elizabeth. The Book of Common Prayer is one of the finest 
 products in English literature, and like King James' version 
 of the Bible, should be read for its literary value. This Book 
 contains all the lyric pieces in the Mass, besides a choice selec- 
 tion from the Book of Psalms and early Christian hymns. 
 
 Notable Compilations. Besides the Book of Common 
 Prayer, five hymn-books have been compiled, and used from 
 time to time in English church service. First, the Puritan 
 Hymn-book compiled by George Wither, still used in some 
 of the non-conformist churches. Second, the hymn-book writ- 
 ten by John Wesley who imitated Luther in providing original 
 
THE LYRIC 
 
 hymns for the Methodist Church. Tjtfra, Bishop Heber's. 
 The hymns of Heber are found hy^\'try Protestant hymn- 
 book. The Church of England ejrfployed his collections at the 
 beginning of the seventeenth Century. His hymns are still 
 popular with all classes of Protestants. Fourth, John Keble's. 
 His collection provides a hymn for every Sunday and feast 
 day ; it is known as the " Christian Year." It is all original 
 work. Cardinal Newman wrote as follows concerning the 
 Christian Year : ' The Christian Year made its appearance 
 in 1827. It is not necessary for me to praise a book which 
 has already become one of the classics of the language. When 
 the general tone of religious literature was nerveless and 
 impotent, Keble struck an original note and woke up in the 
 hearts of thousands a new music, the effect of his lyrics was 
 so deep, so pure, so beautiful." Fifth, Frederick William 
 Faber's. Faber is best known to Catholic England. In 1836 
 Faber took the Newdigate prize at Oxford for a poem on the 
 Knights of St. John. Wordsworth and Coleridge were his 
 intimate friends. Wordsworth said that Faber might easily 
 become the first poet of his time, if he gave his whple attention 
 to poetry. His hymns forming a considerable volume, are used 
 by Catholics and Protestants alike. The present Catholic 
 hymn-book owes- a large debt to Faber. He was the most 
 fervent and zealous convert of the Oxford movement. 
 
 Other Contributions to the English Sacred Lyric. The 
 chief classic writers have contributed hymns to sacred litera- 
 ture. Among these John Milton ranks first. There are three 
 famous hymns written by Milton : the Nativity, the Passion. 
 Circumcision. The ode on the Nativity, constructed on the 
 model of the Pindaric odes, is very elaborate, and by all 
 critics regarded as one of our very best lyrics. Milton trans- 
 lated into verse many fine selections from the Hebrew psalms: 
 among them the psalm, " The Lord is My Shepherd." is 
 
 
524 THE LYRIC 
 
 regarded as the best. John Dryden gave some attention to 
 hymnology. The English translation of the Veni Creator 
 now in use, is from his pen. Dryden's ode on Sacred Music 
 (in honor of Saint Cecelia) is accorded the first place in our 
 literature. Alexander Pope gave less attention than Dryden 
 to hymn-writing; his lyric work is devoted to epitaph and 
 elegy. His ode on Saint Cecilia has been admired for its 
 correctness of diction, but it is cold and labored. His best 
 hymn is called the " Universal Prayer," opening with the line, 
 " Father of all, in every age." It was written to correct the 
 impression that the author of the " Essay on Man " was a 
 pantheist. Addison began a translation of the psalms in 1698, 
 but never completed it ; and, although the fragment left us is 
 , highly polished, it has never been popular. He also wrote 
 o -^ thirteen original hymns, the most remarkable of which is " The 
 ^Soul's Sabbath." Robert Burns left one lyric among his 
 poems; its title is, " To Mary in Heaven." ~~Wordsw6rtrrwrote 
 on a similar subject. One line of Wordsworth has immortal- 
 ized his hymn, his description of the Blessed Virgin as " our 
 tainted Nature's solitary boast." Lord Byron published a 
 small volume of lyrics in 1815, dealing with religious sub- 
 jects. The volume was called Hebrew Melodies ; many of the 
 themes were furnished by the Old Testament, such as the 
 Song of Saul, Jeptha's Daughter, All is Vanity. Modern 
 hymn-books have t\vo selections from Byron, one called the De- 
 struction of Sennacherib " The Assyrian came down like the 
 wolf on the fold." The other lyric is a paraphrase of the 
 1 37th psalm " By the waters of Babylon we sat down and we 
 wept." A section of the lyrics left by Thomas Moore is devot- 
 ed to hymns. There are thirty-three pieces in all, some of them 
 quite as musical as anything he has written. The most pop- 
 ular one is the hymn beginning with the line, " Sound the 
 loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea." 
 
THE LYRIC 
 
 Miscellaneous Contributions. The great English prose 
 writers of the nineteenth century, Newman, Ruskin, Arnold, 
 Lowell, have each contributed to the department of the lyric. 
 A volume by Newman, styled " Occasional Verses," is devoted 
 almost exclusively to religious subjects; this volume contains 
 the hymn so universally admired, " Lead, Kindly Light." 
 Hymns approaching it in popularity are the " Holy City " and 
 the " Recessional." Among American authors, John Greenleaf 
 Whittier holds first place as a lyric writer, dealing with re- 
 ligious themes. Like John Wesley, Whittier belongs to the 
 evangelical school ; his lyrics are hymns of prayer and praise, 
 and he rarely descends to polemics. The " Invocation " and 
 the " Centennial Hymn " may be taken as fair examples of 
 his work. Many of his hymns are prayers for the abolition 
 of slavery; and he became a strong factor in the Abolition 
 movement. The modern non-Catholic hymn-books contain se- 
 lections from the lyrics of Longfellow, Tennyson, Whittier, 
 and Kipling. The "Recessional" and the "Holy City," 
 " The Psalm of Life " and the " Salutation to the New Year," 
 are four hymns of exceptional merit ; and with " Lead, Kindly 
 Light," form the richest contribution which the iQth century 
 has made to hymnology. ' 
 
 The National Lyric. This species is known under the title 
 of the national song or anthem. As the name idicates, it is 
 inspired by patriotic feeling. No nation is so poor or so insig- 
 nificant as not to have a favorite national song or anthem. 
 Englishmen are familiar with " God Save the King " ; Amer- 
 icans, Frenchmen and Germans respond to the " Star Spangled 
 Banner," the " Marseillaise" and the " Watch on the Rhine." 
 Similarly, all peoples have consecrated some lyrics as the high- 
 est expression of patriotic feeling. In watching the effect of 
 such anthems upon the multitude, one may easily understand 
 how poetry, even in its primitive crudeness. acted upon the 
 
526 TI1E LYRIC 
 
 savage like a spell or incantation. The effect of this lyr : <* i^ 
 best seen when the nations are marching to battle and keepir o 
 time to the wild, grand music of war. 
 
 The Heroic Lyric. The sacred lyric deals with the super- 
 natural hero and the supernatural world. The heroic lyric is 
 confined to the human hero and the present world which has 
 been a theatre for the display of his exalted character and 
 shining virtues. This species of lyric, like the epic, is inspired 
 by hero-worship. The oldest lyric of this class referred to 
 in Hebrew literature, begins with the line : " Saul slew his 
 thousands; David, his tens of thousands/' It is the keynote 
 of all the ancient literature under this head. In modern times, 
 the heroes of peace are added to those of war, and this lyric 
 has gradually widened in scope so as to include all orders of 
 brilliant individual achievement. Each nation has supplied 
 a number of lyric poets who were devoted to such lyric work. 
 Each nation of any note has produced poets like David, Pindar, 
 Horace, Tennyson, who have sung about national heroes 
 laureate poets who have immortalized the noble living and the 
 noble dead. 
 
 The Plaintive Lyric. The plaintive lyric is called the elegy. 
 It is expressive of sorrow the sorrow caused by death and 
 separation. Sometimes, it expresses the gentler emotions un- 
 connected with death ; but its usual theme is the bier, the pall, 
 the grave, and the dark cypress that guards God's acre. As 
 it is a poem of a temperate character, it admits no boldness of 
 meter, thought or language, nor any sudden or violent transi- 
 tions of emotion. It has the muffled, subdued movement of 
 the dirge, thus sanctifying but not concealing the grief that 
 must have way. Perhaps the most perfect illustration of this 
 lyric is Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Among 
 ancient classic poems, the " Tristia " of Ovid are the most 
 
THE BALLAD 527 
 
 , Iterated elegies. Shelley's lament over Keats, Milton's 
 J! ; Lycidas " anc l Tennyson's " In Memoriam " are well known 
 examples in English literature. Some of the psalms are 
 splendid examples of lamentation. The Lamentations of Jere- 
 mias and of the captives by the " Waters of Babylon " are the 
 very soul of sadness clothed in lyric form. 
 
 The Ballad. The word is derived from the old French, 
 bailer, to dance, and originally meant a song sung to the 
 rhythmic movement of a dancing chorus. Later, the word 
 was applied to a particular form of old French lyrics. In 
 England, the ballad was the common name given to simple 
 tales told in a simple verse. It signified the poetry of the com- 
 mon people; so that Folk-song and Ballad were synonymous, 
 as they are so considered in Germany. The ballad is noted for 
 .its directness, freshness and freedom from those artificial re- 
 straints which the learning of the schools inflicts upon poetry. 
 On this point Stedman observes : " Primitive ballads have a 
 straightforward felicity; many of them a conjuring melody, 
 as befits verse and music born together. Their gold is virgin, 
 from the rock-strata, and none the better for refining and 
 burnishing. No language is richer in them than the English." 
 Gummere, quoting Stevenson, describes the ballad as verse 
 dealing with the eternal life of man spent under sun and rain, 
 and in rude physical effort. Further, he calls the ballad. 
 " the poetry of the people, poetry which once came from the 
 people as a whole, from the compact body as yet undivided by 
 lettered or unlettered taste, representing the sentiment neither 
 of individuals nor of a class. It inclines to the narrative, the 
 concrete and exterior, and it has no mark of the artist or his 
 sentiment ; it must be the outcome and expression of a whole 
 community, and this community must be homogeneous 
 must belong to a time when, in a common atmosphere of 
 ignorance, so far as book-lore is concerned, one habit of 
 
$2$ THE LYRIC 
 
 thought and one standard of action animate every member 
 from prince to ploughboy. When learning came among the 
 folk, it drove the ballad first into byways, and then altogether 
 out of living literature." 
 
 Content of the Ballad. Simplicity of thought and speech 
 and a x naturalness peculiar to the primitive man are ear-marks 
 of the ballad. It gives us a sense of tradition and a flavor of 
 spontaneity, riches of the emotions and of direct vision, pov- 
 erty of intellect and reflection. Its poetic diction is un- 
 schooled, close to life. 
 
 Meter and Imagery The meter is not labored, irregular, 
 and hardly melodious when judged by the strictest canons; 
 however, it shows a clear and certain sense of general harmony. 
 Assonance often does the work of rhyme. Figures are few 
 and recurrent, always unforced, and for the most part uncon- 
 scious. The language of primitive or simple passion is itera- 
 tion, not figure; so that ballads poor in imagery are full of 
 iteration. 
 
 Purpose. The ballad, like other species of the lyric, was 
 made for singing, and to some extent was made in singing. 
 The melody was by no means the device of a minstrel to enter- 
 tain the throng, but the concerted work of a throng to entertain 
 itself. There can be no doubt that from the dance came the 
 fact and the terms of meter the steps and windings of both 
 are inseparable. The dance was the center and in one way 
 the origin of all the songs of the people. " No singing, no 
 dance; and conversely, no dance, no singing" this, as Gum- 
 mere puts it, is the history of the ballad in a nutshell. 
 
 Communal Origin. The question has often been discussed 
 whether the community or the individual should be credited 
 
BALLAD 
 
 with the authorship of the ballad. Writers like Mullenhoff and 
 Schlegel declare that the making of ballads could never have 
 been a communal process; because all poetry rests upon a 
 union of nature and art ; it has a purpose and plan, and there- 
 fore belongs to an artist. On the other hand, such authorities 
 as Grimm assert that it is the " folk," not the individual, 
 which pours its own flood of poetry over far-off events, thus 
 giving to us the folk-lyric or ballad. It is probably the most 
 reasonable solution of the difficulty to say that both the indi- 
 vidual and the community were factors ; the individual origin- 
 ating the poem, the " folk " changing and amplifying it, 
 adding stanzas and changing lines to suit the communal fancy. 
 As it is difficult to see how a ballad could begin to be without 
 some individual conceiving and originating it; so, in like 
 manner, it is unreasonable to suppose that the " folk " adopted 
 and sung it without many alterations and variations; perhaps, 
 after some generations, recasting the whole piece. 
 
 Amount and Use of Such Literature. The ballad literature 
 of every nation is voluminous. Much of it is not collected, 
 notably the ballads of the Celt, the Spaniard and the Italian. 
 Child has collected the ballads of Scotland and England, 
 basing his work on the previous labors of Motherwell and 
 Scott. Bugeaud and Champfleury have collected the ballads 
 of France, and those of Northern Europe have been edited 
 and criticised by Taloy, Kretschmar and Grimm. The Gaelic 
 League promises to do as much for the rich folklore of Ireland. 
 The use of the ballad is admitted by all critics in the con- 
 struction of primitive epics. It is easy to show survivals of the 
 ballad in the poetry of Homer and in all the older epics. 
 Moreover, it may be added that the Greek drama sprang from 
 the sacred choruses of village vintagers. Ballads are the joy 
 of the peasant class. " Let me make the people's songs, and 
 I care not who makes their laws " - thus spoke O'Connell. 
 
530 THE LYRIC 
 
 Ballads reach the heart of the people. The country seems to 
 have aided in their making; the bird's note rings in them, the 
 tree has lent her whispers, the stream its murmur, the village 
 bell its tinkling tune. Ballads are a voice from secret places, 
 from silent peoples, and old times long dead ; and as such they 
 stir us in a strangely intimate fashion to which artistic verse 
 can never attain. 
 
 The Sonnet. The sonnet forms an important division of 
 the lyric. The word, sonnet, is a diminutive for song, and sig- 
 nifies a short poem. As used in literature, the sonnet is a 
 lyric of fixed form, limited to fourteen lines, with a prescribed 
 disposition of rhymes. The form is of Italian origin. A 
 sonnet, according to the Italian model, is written in five-foot 
 measure ; though the lines may be eight feet in length. 
 
 Divisions. The sonnet consists of two divisions or group- 
 ings. The first is called the major group and contains eight 
 lines hence the term, octave, which is applied to it. The 
 second or minor group, contains six lines, and is called a sex- 
 tette. According to Petrarch, this divison corresponds to 
 question and answer; the octave presenting some problem or 
 question ; the sextette furnishing some solution or reply. But 
 the modern sonnet often fails to meet this requirement. In 
 the construction of the sonnet the Italian writers observed 
 certain rules which still prevail. First, the sonnet must con- 
 fine itself to one leading idea, thought or feeling. Second, it 
 must be so developed as to leave in the reader's mind a sense 
 of completeness ; it must be a complete composition in minia- 
 ture. Third, the rhyme, however varied, must have not more 
 than three 'variations in the sextette; and two in the octave. 
 Finally, the style of the sonnet must be free from any vague- 
 ness or obscurity, and from all harsh-sounding words or word 
 combinations. In the last particular, the musical speech of 
 
THE SONNET 
 
 Italy has a decided superiority over the English tongue. Ow- 
 ing to the application of these rules, the sonnet is the most 
 perfect work of art in the department of the lyric. 
 
 Origin of the Sonnet. The sonnet made its first appearance 
 at the beginning of the twelfth century, and in Italy. Like 
 many forms of Italian poetry it originated in Provence. At 
 once it came into popular favor. And the Italian writers 
 famous for their connection with the revival of learning, all 
 wrote sonnets. Dante, Petrarch and Michael Angelo are rep- 
 resentative authors of the sonnet. During his youth, and be- 
 fore his exile from Florence, Dante wrote lyric poetry in the 
 ballad and sonnet form. Seventy-eight genuine sonnets were 
 collected and published in a work called the " Lyrics of 
 Dante." These lyrics were translated into English by Fred- 
 erick Pollock in 1843. 
 
 * , 
 
 Petrarch an Author. But the most famous Italian author 
 of sonnets is Petrarch. His volume written on the life and 
 death of Laura has no equal in sonnet literature. Shelley 
 describing these lyrics says, "They are as spells which unseal 
 the inmost enchanted fountains of delight." Besides the cycle 
 of sonnets dedicated to Laura, there are a number dealing with 
 such miscellaneous subjects as virtue, fame, Divinity. There 
 are various English translators of Petrarch ; the best transla- 
 tion of the sonnets was made by Reeve in 1868. 
 
 The Sonnet in England. The sonnet was brought from 
 Italy to England where it appeared in the form of translation. 
 The first English author of the sonnet was Sir Thomas Wyatt, 
 who lived during the reign of Henry the Eighth. Wyatt was 
 likewise the first English author of satires in classical form. 
 His work in the sonnet began by translations from Petrarch. 
 His lyrics are preserved, not on account of their merit, but 
 
532 
 
 THE LYRIC 
 
 as a literary landmark the beginning of Italian influence 
 upon English literature. 
 
 English Classic Writers of the Sonnet. The first of these 
 is Shakespeare. The sonnets of Shakespeare were completed 
 in 1598. The whole collection, 156 in all, was published in 
 1609, or 13 years before the first folio edition of the plays. 
 These sonnets are divided into two groups one group deal- 
 ing with Shakespeare's friendship for a man whose name is 
 withheld. This group contains 126 sonnets which are con- 
 nected like the lyrics of the In Memoriam. The second group 
 of forty sonnets are written in imitation of Petrarch's Laura; 
 they idealize some unknown woman whose name is also kept 
 secret. The sonnets of Shakespeare are often obscure and 
 irregular in form. In some measure they follow the Italian 
 model, but like the drajnas, aften violate the rules of art. 
 The sonnets of Milton come next in the order of time; they 
 are not so numerous as those of Shakespeare, but in tech- 
 nique they are a higher grade of work. Milton wrote in both 
 the English and Italian languages, and he had a better appre- 
 ciation of musical values. Three of his sonnets are famous : 
 the Massacre of Piedmont; the Assault on the City; his Dead 
 
 'e, With Milton, the sonnet disappeared from English 
 poetry for 100 years. It was despised by Pope and Dry den. 
 It reappeared in England with the Romantic movement. Cole- 
 rjdge, Wordsworth and Shelley employed it. Two large col- 
 lections were left by Wordsworth the Ecclesiastical sonnets 
 which run through several hundred, and give the history of 
 Christianity in miniature. The bigot and the artist are equally 
 evident in this collection. The second collection is dedicated 
 to the River Duddon, and a moire charming collection outside 
 Keats and Shakespeare cannot be found in our literature, 
 The sonnets of Keats are compared to a tropic flower garden. 
 They are unrivaled examples of sensuousness. Other authors 
 
Qj3J^**4 
 
 '533 
 
 who deserve mention are Tennyson, Longfellow, RossettL^ 
 Richard Wai^on Gilder, Maurice ^pmtfs Egan, Aul^jy^f5e 
 Vere. Modern magazines and periodicals take kindly to the 
 sonnet; and perhaps it represents a sufficient tax ii|K>n the 
 modern Muse accustomed to only short swallow-flights of song. 
 
CHAPTER LII 
 THE LYRIC (CONTINUED) 
 REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS 
 
 Pindar. The celebrated lyric poet of Bceotia was born in 
 522 B. C, and died at the age of eighty years. He was in 
 the prime of life when Xerxes invaded Greece and when the 
 battles of Thermopylae and Salamis were fought. He had 
 among his patrons Hiero of Syracuse, Theron of Agrigentum ; 
 Amyntas, king of Macedonia; also, many of the free cities 
 of Greece. He was honored and loved by the Ionian states for 
 himself as well as for his art. The Athenians made him their 
 public guest. The only class of poems which enable us to 
 judge of Pindar's general style are his Triumphal Odes, al- 
 though he wrote hymns and dirges and almost every variety 
 of lyric. He is regarded as the father of lyric poetry. 
 
 Criticism by Charles Anthon. " Pindar begins an ode full 
 of the lofty conception which he has formed of the glorious 
 destiny of the victor; and he seems, as it were, carried away 
 by the flood of images which his conception pours forth. He 
 does not attempt to express directly the general idea, but follows 
 the train of thought which it suggests into details, though with- 
 out losing sight of their reference to the main subject. There 
 is in the Pindaric odes an extraordinary variety of style and 
 expression. In respect of metre, every ode of Pindar has an 
 individual character, no two odes being of the same metrical 
 structure. A severe dignity pervades the odes ; the mythical 
 narrations are developed with great fullness ; the ideas are lim- 
 ited to the subject; there is throughout a general character of 
 calmness and elevation. The language has a slight Doric tinge 
 
 534 
 
SAPPHO 535 
 
 which adds to its brilliancy and dignity. The scholar comes 
 to the study of Pindar, as to that of one whom fable and history, 
 poetry and criticism have alike delighted to honor. The writers 
 of Greece speak of him as the man whose birth was celebrated 
 by the songs and dances of the deities themselves, in joyous an- 
 ticipation of those immortal hymns which he was to frame in 
 their praise. Pindar is not merely a devout, but he is also an 
 eminently moral poet. Plato observes of him, in the Menon, 
 that he maintained the immortality of the soul ; and he lays down 
 with remarkable distinctness, the doctrine of future happiness 
 or misery. Hence, his poems abound with maxims of the highest 
 morality. Of his extensive literary labors, we have remaining 
 at the present day forty-five triumphal odes, together with some 
 few fragments of his other productions." 
 
 Criticism by Doctor Blair. " Pindar is the great father of 
 lyric poetry ; his genius was sublime ; his expressions are beauti- 
 ful and happy ; his descriptions picturesque. The ancients ad- 
 mired him greatly. Our pleasure in reading him is somewhat 
 diminished by his rapid and abrupt style and by his obscure 
 allusions to particular families and cities unknown to us. He 
 was imitated by Euripides and Sophocles in the choral lyrics 
 and by the Latin School." 
 
 Sappho. She was a native of Lesbos, and probably spent 
 most of her life at Mytilene. Her date cannot be fixed with 
 certainty, but she must have lived about the beginning of the 
 6th century B. C, as she was a contemporary of Alcaeus and 
 Pittacus. Her life, like that of Homer, is unknown, although 
 legend and fable have been busy, sometimes at the expense 
 <jf her morals and character. Her poetry is preserved only 
 in fragments, but from these fragments it is clear that she 
 was incomparably the greatest lyric poetess the world has ever 
 seen. 
 
 Criticism by James A. Plowden. " In antiquity the fame 
 of Sappho rivalled that of Homer. She was called ' the poetess ' 
 as he was called ' the poet/ Different writers style her ' the tenth 
 
536 THE LYRIC 
 
 Muse,' ' the flower of the Graces,' a ' Miracle,' ' the beautiful ' ; 
 the last epitaph referring to her writings. Her poems were ar- 
 ranged in nine books. The few remains which have come down 
 to us amply testify to the justice of the praises lavished upon 
 Sappho by the ancients. The perfection and finish of every 
 line, the correspondence of sense and sound, the incomparable 
 command over all the most delicate resources of verse, and the 
 exquisite symmetry of the complete odes raise her into the very 
 first rank of technical poetry at once, while her direct and fervent 
 painting of passion has never been since surpassed. Her frag- 
 ments bear witness to a profound feeling for the beauty of 
 nature ; we know from other sources that she had a peculiar 
 delight in flowers, and especially in the rose. The ancients also 
 attributed to her a considerable power in satire." 
 
 Horace. Quintus Horatius Flaccus was born at Venusium, 
 65 B. C, and lived to the age of fifty-eight years. Like Pin- 
 dar and Sappho among the Greeks, Horace is known as the 
 best lyric writer among the Romans. Horace took part in the 
 civil war, joining the army of Brutus and flying from the 
 field of Philippi. After the accession of Augustus, he lived 
 under the patronage of Maecenas, who provided the poet with 
 an ample stipend. His works are divided into odes, epodes, 
 satires and epistles ; his fame and merit as a lyric writer have 
 been admitted by the critics of every nation and age. 
 
 Criticism by Alexander Smith. " The lyrics of Horace are 
 imitations of the Greek poets. One cannot escape the conviction 
 that, like the poetry of Alexander Pope, these lyrics are con- 
 structed in a highly artificial manner ; the stronger and more 
 powerful feelings of human nature are seldom displayed in them, 
 owing to the presence of this artificial note. His best lyrics are 
 those descriptive of country life ; for the beauties of nature he had 
 as keen an appreciation and relish as Sappho. Besides this, he 
 had clear judgment, strong good sense and purity of taste." 
 
 Criticism by Blair. " The name of Horace cannot be men- 
 tioned without particular praise ; that * Curiosa Felicitas ' which 
 
PETRARCH 537 
 
 has been remarked in his expression; the sweetness, elegance 
 and spirit of many of his lyrics ; the thorough knowledge of the 
 world, the excellent sentiments and natural easy manner, which 
 distinguish his satires and epistles all contribute to render him 
 one of those very few authors whom one never tires of reading, 
 and from whom, were every other monument destroyed, we 
 should be led to form a very high idea of the taste and genius 
 of the Augustan age. Of all the writers of lyrics, ancient or 
 modern, there is none that, in point of correctness, harmony, and 
 happy expression, can vie with Horace. He has descended 
 from the Pindaric rapture to a more moderate degree of eleva- 
 tion, and joins connected thought and good sense with the highest 
 beauties of poetry. The peculiar character in which he excels, 
 is grace and elegance ; and in this style of composition no poet 
 has ever attained to a greater perfection than Horace. No poet 
 supports a moral sentiment with more dignity, touches a gay 
 one more happily, or possesses the art of trifling more agreeably 
 when he choses to trifle. His language is so fortunate that with 
 a single word or epithet he often conveys a whole description 
 to the fancy. Hence, he ever has been, and ever will continue 
 to be, a favorite author with all persons of taste." 
 
 Petrarch. Francesco Petrarch was born at Arezzo, Italy, 
 in 1304, and died near Padua in 1374. He studied at Mont- 
 pelier, where he remained until he was eighteen. He was 
 crowned poet laureate in Rome, 1341. His chief works belong 
 to the department of the lyric; they are sonnets and odes in 
 honor of Laura. His letters and orations are numerous, and 
 he wrote a number of controversial and polemical treatises. 
 All critics admit his title to first place among Italian lyric 
 poets. 
 
 Criticism by Frederick Schlegel. " The lyric poetry of 
 
 Petrarch must be classified as love-song, and should be com- 
 pared with the love-song of Spain and Germany to be duly 
 comprehended. On instituting a comparative examination, Pe- 
 trarch's especial characteristic will be found to consist in a more 
 artistic spiritual platonism than is evinced by any other love- 
 
THE LYRIC 
 
 poet of the Middle Ages. Some of his commentators have gone 
 so far as to contend that his Laura was no historic personage 
 at all, but a mere personification of his ideal fancy. This, in 
 turn, has been stoutly denied; proofs have been adduced from 
 the church registers not only of her actual existence, but also 
 of her marriage and her numerous family. A still stronger proof 
 is a lovely portrait of her in the Petrarch collection at Florence. 
 The verse of Petrarch is not deficient in that allegorical spirit 
 which is so generally characteristic of mediaeval minstrelsy. In 
 metrical skill, as also in the cultivation of his native idiom, he 
 is undoubtedly entitled to be ranked among the foremost bards 
 who composed in any of the Romanic tongues." 
 
 Criticism by J. A. Symonds. " As an author, Petrarch must 
 be considered from two points of view first, as a writer of 
 Latin verse and prose ; secondly, as an Italian lyrist. In the 
 former capacity he was speedily outstripped by more fortunate 
 scholars and contemporaries. His epistles, and ' Epic of Africa ' 
 on which he set such store, exhibited a comparatively limited 
 command of Latin metre; his treatises and orations are not 
 remarkable for purity of diction. But as a lyrist, Petrarch oc- 
 cupies a very different position. We can say with Shelley that 
 his lyrics are spells which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains 
 of the delight which is the grief of love. Petrarch, in his mon- 
 umental series of odes and sonnets, depicted all the moods of a 
 real passion, and presented them in a style of such lucidity, with 
 so exquisite a command of rhythmical resources, and with hu- 
 manity of emotion so simple and so true, as to render his por- 
 trait of a lover's soul applicable to all who have loved and will 
 love for ages. Regarding Laura, we derive no clear conception 
 either of her person or her character. She is not so much a 
 woman as woman in the abstract ; and perhaps on this very ac- 
 count the poems written for her by her lover have been taken 
 to the heart by countless lovers who came after him. The 
 method of his art is so generalizing, while his feeling is so 
 natural, that every man can see himself reflected in the singer, 
 and his mistress shadowed forth in Laura. The same criticism 
 might be passed on Petrarch's description of nature. That he 
 felt the beauties of nature keenly, is certain, and he frequently 
 touches them with obvious appreciation. Yet he has written 
 
SCHILLER 
 
 nothing so characteristic of Vancluse as to be inapplicable to 
 any solitude where there are woods and water. His lyrics are, 
 therefore, one long melodious monody poured from the poet's 
 soul, with the indefinite form of a beautiful woman seated in a 
 lovely landscape, a perpetual object of delightful contemplation. 
 English readers may be referred to a little book on Petrarch 
 by Henry Reeve, and to Symond's ' Renaissance in Italy/ " 
 
 Schiller. He was born in Wurtemberg in 1759 and died at 
 Weimar in 1805. He became a famous German lyric poet, 
 dramatist and historian, publishing in all seventeen volumes. 
 He divides honors with Goethe in the department of the drama, 
 but is superior to every other German poet in the sweetness 
 and tenderness of his lyrics. 
 
 Criticism by Professor Sievers. " Schiller began his literary 
 career at the age of twenty-two. He wrote dramas of which the 
 best known are ' The Robbers/ ' Maria Stewart ' and ' William 
 Tell/ These dramas alone would place an author high on the 
 ladder of literary fame. But Schiller wrote ballads and lyrics 
 as well lyrics which place him first among German writers in 
 this species of composition. His great lyric rival was Goethe 
 who admitted that Schiller outstripped him in the race. Schil- 
 ler's masterpiece is the world-famous lyric the ' Song of the 
 Bell/ This lyric within a small compass presents an impressive 
 picture of the course of human life, varying its melody with 
 subtle art to suit the changing aspects of the theme. * The 
 Genius/ ' The Ideal/ and ' The Walk ' are lyrics which compare 
 favorably with the ' Song of the Bell/ These lyrics of Schiller 
 express in clear and noble language some of the highest feelings 
 excited in a poetic mind by the contemplation of human life 
 and destiny/' 
 
 Criticism by Frederick SchlegeL " In the impassioned pro- 
 ductions of his early prime, we see Schiller incessantly moved by 
 the conflict of inner emotions; he is urged onwards by the en- 
 thusiastic hopes to improve the existing state of all things. A 
 sort of violent optimisim has taken possession of him and this 
 optimism finds the sweetest of lyric expression. In tfce serious 
 
54 THE LYRIC 
 
 lyrics of every nation, feeling must preponderate over thought, 
 and have as it were a commanding aim if it is to be suitably 
 expressed in melody. Now seriousness is a characteristic of 
 all the lyrics written by Schiller ; they are poems with a purpose ; 
 the feeling pervading them is genuine, and no lyric poet ever 
 lived who knew better how to touch the springs of feeling. The 
 same observation holds good of his dramas, as anyone who has 
 read Maria Stewart or William Tell can bear witness." 
 
 Heine. Heinrich Heine was born in 1799 and died in 1856. 
 He was of Jewish descent. At one time he studied with the 
 view of entering the legal profession, but he attended no lec- 
 tures at the University except those on literature, by Schlegel. 
 He began to write lyric poems in 1822 and continued to do 
 so until his death. Heine devoted himself to journalism and 
 satire as well as to lyric poetry. His prose is sullied by irrev- 
 erence and blasphemy, his satire, like that of Swift, touches 
 at times the lowest depths of vulgarity, and the prose style 
 itself is not calculated to contribute to his literary fame. 
 Heine will be remembered as a lyric writer who in this species 
 of composition ranks next to Schiller. 
 
 Criticism by Matthew Arnold. " I wish to mark Heine's 
 place in modern European literature, the scope of his activity, and 
 his value. I cannot attempt to give here a detailed account of 
 his life, or a description of his separate works. In May, 1831, 
 he went over his Jordan, the Rhine, and fixed himself in his 
 new Jerusalem, Paris. There, henceforward, he lived, going 
 in general to some French watering-place in the summer, but 
 making only one or two short visits to Germany during the 
 rest of his life. His works, in verse and prose, succeed each 
 other without stopping ; a collected edition of them, filling seven 
 closely-printed octavo volumes, has been published in America ; 
 in the collected editions of few people's works is there so little 
 to skip. Those who wish for a single good specimen of him 
 should read his first important work, the work which made his 
 reputation, the Reisebilder, or ' Travelling Sketches ' : prose and 
 verse, wit and seriousness, are mingled in it, and the mingling 
 
ALFRED DR MUSSET 54 , 
 
 of these is characteristic of Heine, and is nowhere to be seen 
 practiced more naturally and happily than in his Rciscbilder. 
 
 ' The magic of Heine's poetical form is incomparable ; he 
 chiefly uses a form of old German popular poetry, a ballad-form 
 which has more rapidity and grace than any ballad-form of ours ; 
 he employs this form with the most exquisite lightness and ease, 
 and yet it has at the same time the inborn fulness, pathos, and 
 old-world charm of all true forms of popular poetry. Thus in 
 Heine's poetry, too, one perpetually blends the impression of 
 French modernism and clearness with that of German sentiment 
 and fulness; and to give this blended impression is, as I have 
 said, Heine's great characteristic." 
 
 Alfred De Musset. He was born in 1810 and died in 
 1857. He studied and lived in Paris. In his twentieth year 
 he published his first volume of poetry. He wrote several 
 plays and a number of short stories, all well received ; but his 
 chief work lay in the department of the lyric. If not the 
 greatest French lyric author, he is among her foremost lyric 
 representatives; all critics admit the supreme excellence of his 
 work. 
 
 Criticism by Rene Doumic. " The three qualities which Al- 
 fred de Musset possessed were elegance, insight and inspiration ; 
 with these he achieved the grandest flights of epic poetry. One 
 more quality should be added, sadness. No French poet is more 
 uniformly sorrowful. He seems to be master of all the ideas 
 associated with grief, and he has clothed them all with exquisite 
 imagery. His definition, or rather law of poetry is that the more 
 sorrowful and hopeless the poet is, the more beautiful he will 
 sing. This law certainly applies to De Musset and his class of 
 lyrists. His poems, for the most part, are gloomy meditations 
 on death and oblivion and the insufficiency of human love to 
 satisfy man's heart, the disappointment and final regret which 
 attends pleasure. The deepest emotions are aroused by his med- 
 itations on such themes meditations which stamp this lyric 
 genius as the worst kind of a pessimist. For, out of this vale 
 of tears and lamentation and despair, Faith points to no exit or 
 deliverance De Musset has neither Faith nor Hope. As to 
 
c 4 2 THE LYRIC 
 
 literary form, De Musset is unrivalled, his technique is perfect, 
 yet not the result of overmuch study or artifice. In moments 
 of passion his style reaches a precision and exactness which form 
 the basis of lasting merit. One may observe throughout his 
 work traces of a strong and rich and varied imagination; his 
 genius not wide in scope gained thereby in profundity. We 
 may conclude by remarking that he has fathomed and depicted 
 the intensity, the depth of the agony of the human soul for all 
 time. Higher praise than this cannot be accorded to a lyric 
 poet. We may also observe in conclusion that his poetry is a 
 reflection of his own life its gloom and pessimism, its vices 
 and excesses it was a life of sin with the inevitable sorrow, 
 the primrose path that closed in dejection and despair." 
 
 Tennyson. He was born at Somersby, in Lincolnshire, 
 1810, arid succeeded Wordsworth as Laureate in 1850. He 
 was educated at Cambridge, where in 1829 he gained the 
 Chancellor's medal for a prize poem. In 1830 he published 
 his first volume under the title of " Poems, Chiefly Lyrical." 
 It had a very cold reception, some reviewers calling it " Dismal 
 Drivel." Ten years of study and retirement, and Tennyson 
 again ventured to publish his lyrics, this time with marked 
 success. His popularity has grown ever since. It is safe 
 to claim for him first place among the lyric writers in English 
 literature. His chief poems are Locksley Hall, the Princess, 
 the Idylls of the King, Maud, The Lotus Eaters, In Memoriam. 
 Short pieces of exquisite beauty are "Break, Break, Break"; 
 " Crossing the Bar " ; " The Poet " ; " Spring " ; " Vastness." 
 
 Criticism by William H. Sheran. If we compare Tenny- 
 son with his predecessors, we find that he differs from them, or 
 rather is superior to them, in several respects. First of all, we 
 note his greater power of condensation in accordance with the 
 genius and method of lyric poetry ; he is able to compress his 
 thought within narrower limits; he is able to say in a few lines 
 what his predecessors would spread over as many pages. Terse- 
 ness is, then, a characteristic of Tennyson. As an example, one 
 may cite the ' Splendor Falls on Castle Walls/ or, ' Break, Break, 
 
SHELLEY 543 
 
 Break/ or, ' Flow Down Cold Rivulet/ Within equal limits it 
 seems quite impossible to make language more expressive. A 
 second characteristic in which he excels his predecessors, is the 
 happy union of word-picture and music. The ' Splendor Falls 
 on Castle Walls ' may be taken as an illustration in point. Here 
 we have a complete medieval picture in four short lines, and 
 framed in the most exquisite music. The ' Palace of Art ' is 
 another illustration, any stanza of which would offer a theme for 
 a canvas any stanza of which would convince the reader that 
 Tennyson is a very great master of English harmonics, perhaps 
 the greatest of all our musical writers, at least on a plane with 
 Shelley, Keats, Spenser and Milton. Besides the exquisite 
 character of Tennyson's painting and music, the critic must note 
 his perfect technique, the happy choice of themes, the high moral 
 tone, and the sustained quality of his work. In the matter of 
 literary form, he has fewer imperfect lines and meters than any 
 other great English writer; the subjects which he selected gave 
 the largest scope to lyric genius subjects like the * In Me- 
 moriam,' or ' Enoch Arden/ exciting the deepest emotion. It is 
 not necessary to publish an abridged edition of his works, either 
 to.exclude unsavory passages, or to secure a just estimate of his 
 poetic talent. Every line of Tennyson may be read for beauty 
 of form and fancy, for painting and music, as well as for moral 
 and spiritual profit. 
 
 Shelley. He was born in Sussex, England, August 5th, 
 1792 ; died in Italy, July 8th, 1822. He was educated at Eton 
 and Oxford. Like many men of Literary genius, Shelley suf- 
 fered from moral lapses; a wild, uncontrollable passion which 
 set at defiance all laws and restraints imposed by State, Church, 
 or society. Generosity, charity, a passionate love of liberty, 
 were the better traits of his character. As an artist in the de- 
 partment of lyric poetry, he has no superior, and few equals 
 among Englishmen: Representative lyrics are his odes to 
 the Skylark and to the West Wind. 
 
 Criticism by Professor Dowden. " Although Shelley wrote 
 narrative poems and one great tragedy, his genius was primarily 
 
544 THE LYRIC 
 
 lyrical, and his poetry tells more to a reader who is acquainted 
 with his character and events of his life than to one who knows 
 the poems only as if they had fallen out of the air from some 
 invisible singer. No poet ever sang more directly out of his 
 own feelings his joys, his sorrows, his desires, his regrets; and 
 what he has written acquires a fuller meaning when we under- 
 stand its source and its occasion. Shelley's poetry belongs also 
 to a particular epoch in the world's history the revolutionary 
 epoch and what may fairly be described as the body of doc- 
 trine which forms the intellectual background of his imaginative 
 visions can be comprehended only when we consider his work 
 in relation to the period of which it is the outcome. ' A beautiful 
 and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings 
 in vain ' so Matthew Arnold, with a variation of Joubert's sen- 
 tence on Plato, denned his conception of Shelley. The charm of 
 the phrase must not render us insensible of its remoteness from 
 the fact. Shelley was no angel, whether of celestial or diabolic 
 race, but most human in his passions, his errors, his failure, his 
 achievement. Nor was it in the void that he lived and moved ; 
 he belonged in an eminent degree to the revolutionary movement 
 of his own day." 
 
 Longfellow. He was born in Maine, February 27, 1807; 
 died at Cambridge, 1882. He studied at Bowdoin College, 
 became a distinguished linguist, traveled much in foreign coun- 
 tries, taught Belles-Lettres in Harvard College. Longfel- 
 low wrote a considerable amount of prose and verse ; his chief 
 literary distinction is that of a lyric writer. As a lyrist, he 
 divides with Poe the first honors in American literature. His 
 best work associates his name with Keats and Tennyson. 
 
 Criticism by Martin Williston. " It is not a gracious office 
 to analyze the qualities of the true poet or to attempt to classify 
 his work after scientific canons. Longfellow did not belong to 
 that class of singers who are rapt away with violent and un- 
 controllable inspirations ; his creations are never spasmodically 
 born. He was no ' God intoxicated ' man, across whose uncon- 
 scious spirit the madness of a mighty mood sweeps and carries 
 him into what heavens and deeps he knows not. Rather he was 
 
LONGFELLOW 
 
 a listening soul, bringing- an intelligent ear to the oracle, and 
 interpreting through his own calm and generous wisdom the 
 message learned. He communed with nature; he kept her fel- 
 lowship, but was never made beside himself by even her greatest 
 communications. He was an intent observer of the universe, 
 never losing his own judgment or surrendering his thought ful- 
 ness. Whether he would have been more Pythian in his muse 
 and less calmly wise had he not at the outset of his course been 
 immersed in the Romanticism of modern Europe, and felt the 
 subduing power of mediaeval reminiscence amid the stately tem- 
 ples of the Old World, is questionable. He was fully in sympathy 
 with whatever is valuable or nobly characteristic in the civilization 
 of this America of ours which is at once the youngest and the 
 oldest on earth. It was his nature to see things as he did, 
 meditatively, deliberatively, with an instinctive reference to the 
 things that had been. He delighted in the twilight view of men 
 who had passed by, and he loved to spend dreamy hours amid 
 the withdrawn centuries, musing on the life that had filled this 
 world, a life so like and so unlike that which was even then 
 going past under the high noon of the glaring present. As he 
 went further down the descent of years he imbibed somewhat 
 more fully than at first the spirit of a primitive age, and looked 
 at the universe with deeply questioning eyes, less and less dis- 
 posed to think most things explicable. He was nearly seventy 
 when he wrote the ' Mask of Pandora/ and in this impressive 
 poem he reveals his altered mood toward the mysteries of being. 
 Nature has grown more oracular, her explanations less distinct 
 than he had believed them to be. At all times he held his soul 
 devoutly ready to be awakened by the voices of God to the world ; 
 his was the reverent and worshipful muse, and his singing, there- 
 fore, was eagerly heard by the multitude. He wished to utter 
 that which the usual man could take into his heart and find food 
 for his diviner self. It was this lofty humanity that gave him 
 the unwearying love of so many millions. He loved to find the 
 field of celestial enterprise among homely and familiar exper- 
 iences. He chose for his themes brave deeds of simple men, the 
 patient suffering of quiet and inconspicuous people, heroism 
 where no pageantry surrounded it. He culled the flowers of 
 history for their sweetness of self-sacrifice, and searched the 
 past to illumine by its most radiant examples the nobler possi- 
 
54 6 THE LYRIC 
 
 bilities of the sober present. He never thought himself a solar 
 genius, to be set at last among the fixed stars of the heaven of 
 fame, but he valued the fame of his genius for the light it 
 could shed upon the path that is daily trod by the working 
 throng of our crowded world. He was completely subjective to 
 his method. What is the best way to employ this interior man? 
 How can we make our lives sublime? What is beautiful and 
 suitable in this middle world between the final good and ill? 
 These are the questions that may be heard beneath the harmonies 
 of his perfect verse. Longfellow is not the most original of 
 poets. He does not attempt the profundities of . psychology, nor 
 venture new explanations of the frame of things. On the other 
 hand, he was never a slavish adherent of dogmatic opinions, 
 whether in the realm of faith or science, though most of his life 
 satisfied with the ordinary Christian account of the higher revela- 
 tion of man to his God. He did not care for an agitating investi- 
 gation into the undeclared secrets of moral and material existence. 
 His genius did not lead him to search for his first principles. He 
 rested in a large faith in the Invisible. He was willing to be 
 quiet in a noble agnosticism that assumed what knowledge could 
 not assert, but was luminous with a rational trust in the all- 
 enfolding goodness of God. He believed that so long as man 
 continued on earth, he could not learn all things, quite ready 
 to concede 
 
 'I do not know, nor will I vainly question 
 Those pages of the mystic book which hold 
 
 The story still untold. 
 But without rash conjecture or suggestion 
 Turn its last leaves in reverence and good heed 
 
 Until 'the End' I read.' 
 
 He had no fondness for that morbid analysis of human nature 
 so characteristic of the modern school of fiction, whose most 
 distinguished and principal representative is found in George 
 Eliot. Art he held to be constructive and creative, not inquis- 
 itorial nor surgical. It was no vivisection of the human soul he 
 was aiming at, but the vivifying of human nature with divine im- 
 pulses. He penetrated his descriptions and reports of the world 
 with his own pure spirit, and so conveyed a virtue with every 
 reception of his blessed communication. We become better as 
 we confer with this unordained priest of moral beauty, this 
 
LONGFELLOW 
 
 547 
 
 singing servitor of all truth, who has the gifts of God to bestow, 
 and the highest promises of existence to declare to us. He 
 pictures the exquisite things, honor, magnanimity, love and all 
 events, using the outer life as studio and canvas for this scenic 
 art of the soul." 
 
CHAPTER LIIL 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 Thoughts from Matthew Arnold's Essay in Criticism. 
 
 " The critical power is of lower rank than the creative. True ; 
 but in assenting to this proposition, one or two things are to be 
 kept in mind. It is undeniable that the exercise of a creative 
 power, that a free creative activity, is the highest funtion of 
 man ; it is proved to be so by man's finding in it his true happi- 
 ness. But it is undeniable, also, that men may have the sense 
 of exercising this free creative activity in other ways than in 
 producing great works of literature or art; if it were not so, all 
 but a very few men would be shut out from the true happiness of 
 all men. They may have it in well-doing, they may have it in 
 learning, they may have it even in criticising. This is one thing 
 to be kept in mind. Another is, that the exercise of the creative 
 power in the production of great works of literature or art, 
 however high this exercise of it may rank, is not at all epochs 
 and under all conditions possible; and that, therefore, labor may 
 be vainly spent in attempting it, which might with more fruit be 
 used in preparing for it, in rendering it possible. This creative 
 power works with elements, with materials; what if* it has not 
 those materials, those elements, ready for its use ? In that case 
 it must surely wait till they are ready. Now, in literature I 
 will limit myself to literature, for it is about literature that the 
 question arises the elements with which the creative power 
 works are ideas; the best ideas on every matter which literature 
 touches, current at the time. At any rate we may lay it down 
 as certain that in modern literature no manifestation of the 
 creative power not working with these can be very important 
 or fruitful. And I say current at the time, not merely accessible 
 at the time ; for creative literary genius does not principally show 
 itself in discovering new ideas, that is rather the business of the 
 philosopher. The grand work of literary genius is a work of 
 synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery ; its gift 
 
 548 
 
ARNOLD ON CRITICISM 
 
 lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intel- 
 lectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, 
 when it finds itself in them ; of dealing divinely with these ideas, 
 presenting them in the most effective and attractive combina- 
 tions making beautiful works with them, in short. Hut it 
 must have the atmosphere, it must find itself amidst the order 
 of ideas, in order to work freely; and these it is not so easy to 
 command. This is why great creative epochs in literature are 
 so rare, this is why there is so much that is unsatisfactory in 
 the productions of many men of real genius; because for the 
 creation of a master-work of literature two powers must concur, 
 the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the 
 man is not enough without the moment ; the creative power has, 
 for its happy exercise, appointed elements, and those elements are 
 not in its own control. Nay, they are more within the control 
 of the critical power. It is the business of the critical power, 
 as I said in the words already quoted, ' in all branches of knowl- 
 edge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object 
 as in itself it really is.' Thus, it tends, at last, to make an intel- 
 lectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail 
 itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely 
 true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces ; to 
 make the best ideas prevail. Presently, these new ideas reach 
 society, the touch of truth is the touch of life, and there is a 
 stir and growth everywhere ; out of this stir and growth come the 
 creative epochs of literature. 
 
 " The critic should have a disinterested endeavor to learn and 
 propagate the best that is known and thought in the world and 
 thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas. By the very 
 nature of things, as England is not all the world, much of the best 
 that is known and thought in the world cannot be of English 
 growth, must be foreign; by the nature of things, again, it is 
 just this that we are least likely to know, while English thought 
 is streaming in upon us from all sides, and takes excellent care 
 that we shall not be ignorant of its existence. The English critic 
 of literature, therefore, must dwell much on foreign thought, and 
 with particular heed on any part of it, which, while significant and 
 fruitful in itself, is for any reason specially likely to escape him. 
 Again, judging is often spoken of as the critic's own business, and 
 so in some sense it is; but the judgment which almost insensibly 
 
550 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 forms itself in a fair and clear mind, along with fresh knowledge, 
 is the valuable one ; and thus knowledge, and ever fresh knowl- 
 edge, must be the critic's great concern for himself. And it is 
 by communicating fresh knowledge, and letting his own judg- 
 ment pass along with it but insensibly, and in the second place, 
 not the first, as a sort of companion and clue, not as an abstract 
 law-giver that the critic will generally do most good to his 
 readers. Sometimes, no doubt, for the sake of establishing an 
 author's place in literature, and his relation to a central standard 
 (and if this is not done, how are we to get at our best in the 
 world?) criticism may have to deal with a subject-matter so fa- 
 miliar that fresh knowledge is out of the question, and then it 
 must be all judgment; an enunciation and detailed application 
 of principles. Here the great safeguard is never to let oneself 
 become abstract, always to retain an intimate and lively con- 
 sciousness of the truth of what one is saying, and, the moment 
 this fails us, to be sure that something is wrong. Still, under 
 all circumstances, this mere judgment and application of princi- 
 ples is, in itself, not the most satisfactory work to the critic ; 
 like mathematics, it is tautological, and cannot well give us, like 
 fresh learning the sense of creative activity. I am bound by my 
 own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavor to learn and 
 pro'pagate the best that is known and thought in the world. How 
 much of current English literature comes into this " best that is 
 known and thought in the world ? ' Not very much, I fear : 
 certainly less at this moment than of the current literature of 
 France or Germany. Well, then, am I to alter my definition of 
 criticism, in order to meet the requirements of a number of 
 practicing English critics, who, after all, are free in their choice 
 of a business? That would be making criticism lend itself just 
 to one of those alien practical considerations, which, I have said, 
 are so fatal to it. One may say, indeed, to those who have to 
 deal with the mass so much better disregarded of current 
 English literature, that they may at all events endeavor, in dealing 
 with this, to try it, so far as they can, by the standard of the 
 best that is known and thought in the world; one may say, that 
 to get anywhere near this standard, every critic should try and 
 possess one great literature, at least, besides his own ; and the 
 more unlike his own, the better. But after all, the criticism I 
 am really concerned with- the criticism which alone can much 
 
ARNOLD O.V CRITICISM ss , 
 
 help us for the future, the criticism which, throughout Europe, 
 is at the present day meant, when so much stress is laid on 
 the importance of criticism and the critical spirit is a criticism 
 which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual 
 purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and 
 working to a common result ; and whose members have, for their 
 proper outfit, a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern an- 
 tiquity, and of one another. Special, local, and temporary ad- 
 vantages being put out of account, that modern nation will in 
 the intellectual and spiritual sphere make most progress, which 
 most thoroughly carries out this program. And what is that but 
 saying that we too, all of us, as individuals, the more thoroughly 
 we carry it out, shall make the more progress? There is so 
 much inviting us ! what are we to take, what will nourish us 
 in growth towards perfection? That is the question which, 
 with the immense field of life and of literature lying before him. 
 the critic has to answer; for himself first, and afterwards for 
 others. I conclude with what I said at the beginning: to have 
 the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great 
 proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have 
 it; but then, criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, 
 ever widening its knowledge. Then it may have, in no con- 
 temptible measure, a joyful sense of creative activity ; a sense 
 which a man of insight and conscience will prefer to what he 
 might derive from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate cre- 
 ation. And, at some epochs, no other creation is possible. Still, 
 in full measure, the sense of creative activity belongs only to 
 genuine creation ; in literature we must never forget that. But 
 what true man of letters ever can forget it? It is no such 
 common matter for a gifted nature to come into possession of a 
 current of true and living ideas, and to produce amidst the in- 
 spiration of them, that we are likely to underrate it. The epochs 
 of yEschylus and Shakespeare make us feel their pre-eminence. 
 In an epoch like those is, no doubt, the true life of literature; 
 there is the promised land, towards which criticism can only 
 beckon. That promised land it will not be ours to enter, and 
 we shall die in the wilderness : but to have desired to enter it, to 
 have saluted it from afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction 
 among contemporaries ; it will certainly be the best title to esteem 
 with posterity." 
 
APPENDIX I. 
 
 WORKS USED IN THE COMPILATION OF THIS HANDBOOK 
 SELECT CRITICISM 
 
 Aristotle Rhetoric and Poetics. 
 
 A^arias, Brother Philosophy of Literature. 
 
 An'.old, Matthew Essays in Criticism. 
 
 Ba^ehot, Walter Literary Studies. 
 
 Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth Literary Criticism. 
 
 Bates, Arlo Talks on Literature. v 
 
 Bosanquet, Bernard History of ^Esthetics, 
 
 Brink, Bernard Egidius Ten Literary Elements. 
 
 Brooke, Stopford English Literature. 
 
 Blair, Hugh Rhetoric, 
 
 Brunetiere, Ferdinand History and Literature. 
 
 Burke, Edmund The Sublime and Beautiful. 
 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Biographia Literaria. 
 
 Cook, Albert Samuel Art of Poetry. 
 
 Corson, Hiram Aims of Literary Study, i 
 
 Crashaw, William/ Henry Interpretation of Literature. 
 
 Courthope, William- John Life in Poetry. 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas Essays on Style and Language. 
 
 Dryden, John Essays on Dramatic Poetry. 
 
 Dowden, Edward Studies in Literature. 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo Thoughts on Modern Literature, 
 
 Gibbon, Edward Essay on Study of Literature. 
 
 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Art and Nature. 
 
 Horace Art and Poetry. 
 
 Hartmann, Ernest von Theory of Aesthetics. 
 
 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Literature as an Art. 
 
 Hunt, Theodore William Studies in Literature and Style. 
 
 Hazlitt, William Dramatic Literature. 
 
 Jordan, Alfred Literature and Science. 
 
 Kingsley, Charles Literary Lectures. 
 
 Kames, Lord Elements of Criticism. 
 
 Lewes, George Henry Success in Literature. 
 
 Longinus The Sublime. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell Literary Criticism. 
 
 Mabie, Hamilton Wright Short Studies in Literature. 
 
 Macaulay, Thomas Babington Critical Essays. 
 
 Minto, William Manual of English Prose. 
 
 Moiilton, Richard Green Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist. 
 
 Morley, Henry Manual of English Literature. 
 
 Miiller. Max Science of Language. 
 
 553 
 
554 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 Newman, John Henry Lecture on Literature. 
 
 Fallen, Conde Benoist Philosophy of Literature. \s 
 
 Pater, Walter Appreciations. 
 
 Pope, Alexander Essay in Criticism. 
 
 Quintilian Institutes. 
 
 Renton, William Logic of Style. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin Theory of Literature. 
 
 Sears, Lorenzo Principles of Literary Criticism. 
 
 Schopenhauer, Arthur Art of Literature. 
 
 Sherman, L. A Analytics of Literature. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert Philosophy of Style. 
 
 Stae'l, Madame de Literature and Society. 
 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis Essay on Style. 
 
 Stedman, Edmund Clarence Nature and Elements of Poetry. 
 
 Symonds, John Addington Essay on Literature. 
 
 Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe English Literature. 
 
 Warner, Charles Dudley Literature and Life. ^ 
 
 Whitney, William Dwight Language Study. 
 
 Whitman, Walt Poetry of the Future. 
 
 Winckelmann, John History of Ancient Art. 
 
 Wolff, Eugene Studies of Poetry. 
 
 Wylie, Laura Johnson Evolution of English Criticism. 
 
 Winchester, Caleb Thomas Some Principles of Literary CritJ 
 
 cism. 
 
 APPENDIX II 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY SELECT READING 
 THE LETTER 
 
 Arnold, Matthew Letters, I Vol. 
 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Letters, 2 Vols. 
 
 Browning, Robert Letters, 2 Vols. 
 
 Burke, Edmund Letters on a Regicide Peace. 
 
 Bismarck, Prince Otto von Letters to a Noble Lord. 
 
 Bismarck, Prince Otto von Love Letters, I Vol. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas Letters, 2 Vols. 
 
 Cicero Letters, I Vol. 
 
 Chesterfield, Lord .Letters to His Son. 
 
 Clifford, Mrs. William Love -Letters, I Vol. 
 
 Fraser, Mrs. Henry Letters from Japan. 
 
 Gallienne. Richard Le Love Letters of the King. 
 
 Guerin, Eugenie de Letters. 
 
 Goldsmith, Oliver Letters of a Nobleman. 
 
 Hugo, Victor Letters, I Vol. 
 
 " Junius " Letters. 
 
 Kingsley, Charles Letters and Memoirs. 
 
 Lang, Andrew Letters to Dead Authors. 
 
 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley Letters, I Vol. 
 
 Newman, John Henry Letters, 2 Vols. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Nicoll, William Robertson Letters on Life. 
 
 Paul, Saint Letters. 
 
 {liny Letters. 
 
 Swift, Dean Letters. 
 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis Letters, 2 Vols. 
 
 Stowe, Harriet Beecher Letters and Life. 
 
 Schiller, Johann Friedrich von Correspondence. 
 
 Sevigne, Madame De Letters. 
 
 Thaxter, Celia Letters. 
 
 Walpole, Horace Letters, 4 Vqls. 
 
 Webster, Daniel Letter on the Impressment of Amer 
 ican Seamen. 
 Wallace, Henry Letters to a Tom Boy. 
 
 APPENDIX III 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY SELECT READING 
 THE ESSAY 
 
 Arnold, Matthew Essays in Criticism. 
 
 Addison, Joseph The Spectator. 
 
 Barry, William Essays. 
 
 Bacon, Francis Essays, I Vol. 
 
 Browne, Sir Thomas Essays and Reviews. 
 
 Brownson, Orestes Essays and Reviews. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas Essays, 6 Vols. 
 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Essays. 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas Essays. 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo Essays. 
 
 Fairbairn, Andrew Martin Essays and Reviews. 
 
 Goldsmith, Oliver Citizen of the World, and Miscel- 
 laneous Essays. 
 
 Hume, David Essays, Literary, Moral and Po- 
 litical. 
 
 Huxley, Thomas Essays. 4 Vols. 
 
 Harrison, Frederic Essays. 
 
 Hunt. Leigh The " Indicator." 
 
 Hazlitt, William The Round Table and Political 
 
 Essays. 
 
 Jeffrey, Francis Critical Essays and Reviews. 
 
 Johnson, Samuel Lives of the Poets. 
 
 Lamb, Charles Essays of Elia. 
 
 Lillv, William Samuel Essays Political and Moral. 
 
 Locke, John Essays on Human Understanding. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell Among My Books, etc., and Reviews. 
 
 Macaulay, Thomas Babington Essavs. 
 
 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de Florios Edition. 
 
 Mivart, St. George Essays Critical and Scientific. 
 
 Mabie, Hamilton Wright Essays and Appreciations. 
 
556 APPENDIX 
 
 Newman, John Henry Essays Critical and Historical; Es- 
 says on Miracles. 
 
 Pater, Walter Appreciations. 
 
 Repplier, Agnes Essays. 
 
 Ruskin, John Modern Painters. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert Philosophy of Style. 
 
 Saintsbury, George French Novelists. 
 
 Stephen, Leslie Hours in a Library. 
 
 Spalding, John Lancaster Opportunity, and Other Essays. 
 
 Smith, Sydney Essays and Reviews. 
 
 Swift, Jonathan Battle of the Books. 
 
 APPENDIX IV 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY SELECT READING 
 BIOGRAPHY 
 
 Austin, George Lancaster Life of Wendell Phillips. 
 
 Barrows, John Henry Life of Beecher. 
 
 Boswell, James Life of Johnson. 
 
 Butler, Arthur John Life of Dante. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas Biographical Essays. 
 
 Cavendish, George Life of Wolsey. 
 
 Century Company Dictionary, Proper Names. 
 
 Chateaubriand, Frangois Rene, 
 
 Vicomte de Memoirs. 
 
 Cross, John Walter Life of George Eliot. 
 
 Cooper, Thomas Biographical Dictionary. 
 
 Farrar, Frederick William Life of St. Paul. 
 
 Fields, James Thomas Biographical Sketches. 
 
 Fronde, James Anthony Life of Carlyle. 
 
 Geike, Cunningham Life of Christ. 
 
 Gibbon, Edward Memoirs. 
 
 Hale, Edward Everett Life of Lowell. 
 
 Hewlett, Maurice . . . / Life of Richard Yea and Nay. 
 
 Hudson, Henry Life of Shakespeare. 
 
 Huxley, Leonard Life of Thomas Henry Huxley. 
 
 Jesse, John Heneage Memoirs of the English Court. 
 
 Lang, Andrew Life of Mary Queen of Scots. 
 
 Morley, John Life of William Ewart Gladstone. 
 
 Newman, John Henry Apologia Pro Vita Sua. 
 
 Purcell, Edmund Sheridan Life of Cardinal Manning. 
 
 Plutarch Biogranhical Essays. 
 
 Renan, Ernest . Recollections of Childhood. 
 
 Raleigh, Walter Sir Life of Milton. 
 
 Roche, James Jeffrey Life of "Royle O'Reilly. 
 
 Sanborn, Francis Benson T.jfe of Emerson. 
 
 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de Memoirs of Naooleon. 
 
 Tennyson, Hallam Memoir of Tennvson. 
 
 Tyler, Moses Coit Life of Patrick Henry. 
 
 Warner, Charles Dudley Life of Cromwell. 
 
 
APPENDIX 557 
 
 Watson, John Life of The Master. 
 
 Ward, Adolphus William Life of Charles Dickens. 
 
 American Men of Letters Series. 
 
 English Men of Letters Series. 
 
 Famous Women of the French CourtSeries. 
 
 Foreign Statesmen Series. 
 
 Franklin Series of Biography 
 
 Great Commander Series. 
 
 Public Men of To-day Series. 
 
 Saintly Lives Series. 
 
 Women of Colonial Times Series. 
 
 World's Epoch Makers Series. 
 
 APPENDIX V 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY SELECT READING 
 HISTORY 
 
 Acton, Lord Historical Lectures. 
 
 Bancroft, George History of the United States. 
 
 Buckle, Henry Thomas History of Civilization. 
 
 Beers, Henry Augustin English Romanticism. 
 
 Courthope, William John...>> History of English Poetry. 
 
 Cheney, Mrs. Emma The Civil War. 
 
 Donaldson, James History of Education. 
 
 Farrar, Frederick William History of Interpretation. 
 
 Freeman, Edward Augustus The Norman Conquest. 
 
 Fischer, George History of the Reformation. 
 
 Froude, James Anthony History of England. 
 
 Fay, Theodore History of Germany. 
 
 Gardiner, Samuel Rawson History of England. 
 
 Gibbon, Edward Roman Empire. 
 
 Guizot, Francois History of Civilization. 
 
 Grote, George History of Greece. 
 
 Hartmann, Sadakichi American Art. 
 
 Harnack, Adolf History of Dogma. 
 
 Hume, David History of England. 
 
 Janssen, John German People. 
 
 Irving, Washington The Conquest of Granada. 
 
 Lodge, Henry Cabot American Colonies. 
 
 Livy History of Rome. 
 
 Lecky, Wm. E. H European Morals. 
 
 Lea, Charles Henry Spanish Inquisition. 
 
 Lingard, John History of England. 
 
 Mahaffy, John P Greek Literature. 
 
 Maitland, Samuel Roffey Dark Ages. 
 
 Macaulay, Lord History of England. 
 
 Merivale. Charles History of the Romans. 
 
 Motley, John Lothrop The Dutch Republic. 
 
558 APPENDIX 
 
 Milman, Henry Hart Latin Christianity. 
 
 MacMaster, John Bach United States, History of 
 
 McCarthy, Justin Our Own Times, History of 
 
 Mommsen, Theodor Roman History. 
 
 Newman, John Henry Historical Sketches. 
 
 Napier, Sir William The Peninsular War. 
 
 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg Roman History. 
 
 Painter, Franklin Verzelius Newton. History of Education. 
 
 Parkman, Francis Pioneers of North America. 
 
 Prescott, William Hickling The Conquest of Mexico. 
 
 Prior, Edward Gothic Art. 
 
 Roosevelt, Theodore Naval War of 1812. 
 
 Schlegel, Frederick Modern Europe. 
 
 Schwill, Ferdinand Philosophy of History. 
 
 Saintsbury, George History of Criticism. 
 
 Tarbell, Frank Bigelow History of Greek Art. 
 
 Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe The French Revolution. 
 
 Van Dyke, John History of Painting. 
 
 Watson, Thomas History of France. 
 
 Wilson, Woodrow History of American People. 
 
 APPENDIX. VI 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY SELECT READING 
 THE ORATION 
 
 ^S 
 
 Adams, John Speeches. 
 
 Beecher, Henry Ward Speeches and Lectures. 
 
 Bossuet, Jacques Funeral Orations. 
 
 Bourdaloue, Louis Sermons. 
 
 Brougham, Lord Orations. 
 
 Burke, Edmund Speeches. 
 
 Chatham, Lord Speeches. 
 
 Choate, Rufus Addresses. 
 
 Chrysostom, St. John Homilies. 
 
 Cicero Against Catiline. 
 
 Clay, Henry Speeches. 
 
 Curran, John Philpott Addresses. 
 
 Demosthenes Against Philip. 
 
 Edwards, Jonathan Sermons. 
 
 Erskine, Lord Defense of Gordon and Paine. 
 
 Everett, Edward Plymouth Addresses. 
 
 Fenelon, Archbishop Sermons. 
 
 Fox, Charles . Addresses. 
 
 Farrar, Frederick William Sermons. 
 
 Gladstone, William Ewart Speeches. 
 
 Gough, John Bartholomew Temperance Addresses. 
 
 Grattan, Henry Speeches. 
 
 Henry, Patrick Speeches. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Jefferson, Thomas Orations. 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham Gettysburg Speech. 
 
 Little, Canon Knox Sermons. 
 
 Liddon, Henry Parry Sermons. 
 
 Mirabeau, Gabriel Comte de Orations. 
 
 Alontalambert, Comte de Orations. 
 
 Newman, John Henry Sermons and Lectures. 
 
 O'Connell, Daniel Speeches. 
 
 Pitt, William (The Younger) Orations. 
 
 Sheil. Richard Lalor Speeches. 
 
 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley Speeches. 
 
 Stanley, Lord Lectures and Addresses. 
 
 Wesley, John Addresses. 
 
 W T alpole, Horace Speeches. 
 
 Webster, Daniel Orations. 
 
 CONTEMPORARY ORATORS 
 
 Bryan, William Jennings Dolliver. Senator. 
 
 Castelar, Emilio Finerty, John. 
 
 Cockran, William Bourke Augustino, Fra. 
 
 Hillis, Newell Dwight, Morley. John. 
 
 Hirsch, Rabbi Didon". Pere. 
 
 Ireland, John Redmond, John. 
 
 Little, Canon Knox Roosevelt, Theodore. 
 
 Choate, Joseph H Spalding, John Lancaster. 
 
 Biilow, Count von Harper, William Rainey. 
 
 APPENDIX VII 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY SELECT READING 
 
 FICTION 
 
 Allen. Grant Tents of Shem. 
 
 Alcott, Louisa May Little Women. 
 
 Austen, Jane Pride and Prejudice. 
 
 Barry. William New Antigone. 
 
 Barne, James Matthew The Little Minister. 
 
 Balzac, Honore de A Lily of the Valley. 
 
 Beaconsfield, Lord Vivian Grey. 
 
 Black. William In Silk Attire. 
 
 Bjornson, Bjornstjerne The Fisher Maiden. 
 
 Blackmore, Richard Doddridge Lorna Doone. 
 
 Boccaccio Decameron. 
 
 Bronte, Charlotte Tane Eyre. 
 
 Cable, George Washington Old Creole Days. 
 
 Caine, Hall The Christian. 
 
 Cervantes Don Quixote. 
 
 Cooper, James Fennimore Leather Stocking Tales. 
 
 559 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Corelli, Marie Wormwood. 
 
 Crawford, Marion Saracinesca. 
 
 Croly, George Tarry Thou Till I Come. 
 
 Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe. 
 
 Daudet, Alphonse : Little Masterpieces. 
 
 Dickens, Charles Pickwick Papers. 
 
 Doyle, Conan Hound of the Baskervilles. 
 
 Dumas, Alexandre Monte Cristo, The Count of. 
 
 Edgeworth, Maria Castle Rack Rent. 
 
 Eggleston, Edward The Graysons. 
 
 Eliot, George Romola. 
 
 Fielding, Henry Tom Jones. 
 
 Frederic, Harold The Damnation of Theron Ware. 
 
 Goldsmith, Oliver Vicar of Wakefield. 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel The Scarlet Letter. 
 
 Haggard, Rider Montezuma's Daughter. 
 
 Hugo, Victor Les Miserables. 
 
 Ingelow, Jean John Jerome. 
 
 Hart, Francis Bret Ward of the Golden Gate. 
 
 Howells, William Dean World of Chance. 
 
 James, Henry The Ambassadors. 
 
 Jerome, Jerome Klapka John Ingerfield. 
 
 Kingsley, Charles Hypatia. 
 
 Kipling, Rudyard The Light That Failed. 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage Pericles and A^spasia. 
 
 Lang, Andrew Gold of Fairnilee. 
 
 Lever, Charles Charles O'Malley. 
 
 Lytton, Lord Last Days of Pompeii. 
 
 McCarthy, Justin Huntley If I Were King. 
 
 MacLaren, Ian Beside The Bonnie Brier Bush. 
 
 Malet, Lucas . Sir Richard Calmady. 
 
 Mallock, William Hurrell The Old Order Changeth. 
 
 Meredith, George Diana of the Crossways. 
 
 Moore, George A Mummer's Wife. 
 
 Oliphant, Mrs Margaret A Beleagured City. 
 
 Parker, Gilbert Seats of the Mighty. 
 
 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart Gates Ajar. 
 
 Rabelais, Francois Pantagruel. 
 
 Richardson, Samuel Pamela. 
 
 Rives, Amelie The Quick or the Dead. 
 
 Schreiner, Olive Story of an African Farm. 
 
 Scott, Walter Waverly Novels. 
 
 Sienkiewicz, Henryk Quo Vadis. 
 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis Dr. Jeykel and Mr. Hyde. 
 
 Smollett, Tobias Humphrey Clinker. 
 
 Sterne, Laurence Tristram Shandy. 
 
 Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom's Cabin. 
 
 Thackerey, William Makepeace Vanity Fair. 
 
 Trollope, Anthony Orley Farm. 
 
 Tolstoi, Count Leo War and Peace. 
 
 Turgenev, Ivan .Rudin. 
 
 Twain, Mark Prince and Pauper. 
 
 Ward, Mrs Humphrey . Robert Elsmere. 
 
 Wallace, General Lew . . . . Ben Hur. 
 
 Wharton, Edith ... Valley of Decision. 
 
56. 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 Weyman, Stanley Castle Inn. 
 
 Wiggin, Kate Douglas Timothy's Quest. 
 
 Wister, Owen The Virginian. 
 
 Westcott, Edward Noyes David Harum. 
 
 Zangwill, Israel Children of the Ghetto. 
 
 Zola, Emile Rome and Paris. 
 
 APPENDIX VIII 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY SELECT READING 
 
 THE DRAMA 
 
 Beaumont & Fletcher Philaster. 
 
 Byron, Lord Manfred. 
 
 Browning, Robert Pippa Passes. 
 
 Congreve, William . Love for Love. 
 
 Dryden, John Spanish Friar. 
 
 Euripides Tragedies. 
 
 yEschylus Tragedies. 
 
 Ford, John The Broken Heart. 
 
 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Faust. 
 
 Goldsmith, Oliver She Stoops to Conquer. 
 
 Howells, William Dean Out of the Question. 
 
 Ibsen, Henrik Ghosts. 
 
 Jonson, Ben Masques. 
 
 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Christus. 
 
 Moliere, Jean Baptiste Comedies. 
 
 Marlowe, Christopher Tamburlaine. 
 
 Massinger, Philip The New Way to Pay Old Debts. 
 
 Milton, John Samson Agonistes. 
 
 Phillips, Stephen Herod. 
 
 Racine, Jean Baptiste Tragedies. 
 
 Shakespeare, William Greater Tragedies. 
 
 Sophocles .Tragedies. 
 
 Schiller, Johann Friedrich von William Tell. 
 
 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley The Rivals. 
 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Prometheus Unbound. 
 
 Swinburne, Charles Algernon Atalanta in Calydon. 
 
 Symonds, John Addington Francesca Da Rimini ( a translation). 
 
 Shaw, Bernard Plays for Puritans. 
 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis Deacon Brodie. 
 
 Strong, L. C. (editor) Stage Lovers' Series. 
 
 Siidermann, Hermann The Joy of Living. 
 
 Terence Comedies. 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Becker. 
 
 Tolstoi, Count Leo The Resurrection. 
 
 Udall, Nicholas Ralph Roister Doister. 
 
 Upton, George Standard Operas. 
 
 Webster, John The Duchess of Malfi. 
 
 Wagner, Wilhelm Richard Valkyrie, and Parsifal. 
 
562 APPENDIX 
 
 APPENDIX IX 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY SELECT READING 
 THE EPIC 
 
 Arnold, Edwin The Light of Asia. 
 
 Arnold, Edwin Light of the World. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew Sohrab and Rustum. 
 
 Ariosto, Ludovico Orlando Furioso. 
 
 Barham, Alfred Nibelungen Lied (Translation) . 
 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Aurora Leigh. 
 
 Browning, Robert The Ring and the Book. 
 
 Byron, Lord Childe Harold. 
 
 Camoens, Luis de The Lusiad. 
 
 Campbell, Thomas Gertrude of Wyoming. 
 
 Chapman, George Homer (Translation) . 
 
 Crawford, John The Kalevala (Translation). 
 
 Dante The Divine Comedy. 
 
 Dryden, John Hind and Panther. 
 
 Eliot, George Legend of Jubal. 
 
 Fairfax, Sir Edward Jerusalem Delivered. 
 
 Griffith, Robert Ramayana (Translation). 
 
 Goldsmith, Oliver The Deserted Village. 
 
 Hall, John Leslie Beowulf (Translation). 
 
 Homer The Iliad, and the Odyssey. 
 
 Kloostock, Friedrich Gottlieb The Messiad. 
 
 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Evangeline, and Hiawatha. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell The Vision of Sir Launfal. 
 
 Milton, John Paradise Lost, and Paradise Re- 
 gained. 
 
 Moore, Thomas . , Lalla Rookh. 
 
 Montgomery, Robert Omnipresence of Deity. 
 
 O'Hagan, John Song of Roland (Translation). 
 
 Ormsby, John The Cid (Translation) . 
 
 Pope, Alexander Homer (Translation) . 
 
 Roy, Chandra Maha-bharata (Translation). 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter The Lady of the Lake. 
 
 Spenser, Edmund Fairie Queen. 
 
 Tasso, Torquato Jerusalem Delivered. 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Idylls of the King, and The Princess. 
 
 Virgil Aeneid. 
 
 Wilkinson, Richard Cleaver Saul. 
 
 Wordsworth, William The Excursion, 
 
APPENDIX 563 
 
 APPENDIX X 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY SELECT READING 
 THE LYRIC 
 
 Arnold, Matthew Lyrics. 
 
 Austin, Alfred Lyrics. 
 
 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey Later Lyrics. 
 
 Burns, Robert Lyrics. 
 
 Browning, Robert Lyrics. 
 
 Bryant, William Cullen Thanatopsis, Waterfowl, and other 
 
 Lyrics. 
 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Sonnets. 
 
 Byron, Lord Lyrics. 
 
 Campbell, Thomas Lyrics. 
 
 Dryden, John St. Cecilia's Day. 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo Threnody. 
 
 Eean, Maurice Francis Sonnets. 
 
 Field, Eugene Songs, and Other Verse. 
 
 Goldsmith, Oliver The Traveler. 
 
 Golden Treasury American Songs and Lyrics. 
 
 Guiney, Louise Imogen Lyrics. 
 
 Gray, Thomas Elegies and Odes. 
 
 Gilder, Richard Watson Sonnets. 
 
 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Lyrics. 
 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell The Last Leaf. 
 
 Henley, William Ernest Hawthorn and Lavender. 
 
 Herbert, George Religious Hymns. 
 
 Horace Odes, and Lyrics. 
 
 Heine, Heinrich Lyrics. 
 
 Keats, John Odes, and Sonnets. 
 
 Keble, John The Christian Year. 
 
 Kipling, Rudyard The Recessional. 
 
 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Lyrics. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell Commemorative Odes. 
 
 Lanier, Sidney Songs, and Lyrics. 
 
 _Moore, Thomas Irish Melodies. 
 
 % Milton, John Lycidas, and Sonnets. 
 
 "Mackay, Eric Lyric Love Letters. 
 
 Meynell, Alice Lyrics 
 
 Newman, John Henry Lead Kindly Light 
 
 O'Reilly, John Boyle Landing of the Pilgrims. 
 
 Poe, Edgar Allen The Bells, Raven, etc. 
 
 Pindar Lvncs 
 
 Riley, James Whitcomb Pipes C 
 
 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Sonnets and Lyrics. 
 
 Sappho Lyrics. 
 
 Swinburne, Algernon Charles Songs of North Sea. 
 
 Stedman, Edmund Clarence Mater Coronata. 
 
564 APPENDIX 
 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Skylark, Cloud, etc. 
 
 Shakespeare, William Lyrics. 
 
 Spenser, Edmund Epithalamium. 
 
 Spalding, John Lancaster Poet's Praise. 
 
 Schiller, Johann Friedrich von Lyrics. 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred Lyrics. 
 
 Tabb, John Batholomew Sonnets. 
 
 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler Poems of Passion. 
 
 Wordsworth, William Sonnets, and Odes. 
 
 Whittier, John Greenleaf Lyrics. 
 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abbot of Croyland, 202. 
 
 A'Becket, St. Thomas, 334. 
 
 Abelard, 72. 
 
 Act in the Drama, 413 ; the ist func- 
 tion of, 414; the 2nd, 414; the 3rd, 
 415; the 4th, 416; the 5th, 417. 
 
 Action, Divisions of, 408 ; meaning 
 of, 404 ; requirements for, 405, 406, 
 407. 
 
 Adam, origin of words, 9. 
 
 Adam Bede, author of, 380. 
 
 Adams, John Quincy, on oratory, 
 280. 
 
 Addison, Joseph, 155, 524; elegant 
 style, 98; essayist, 175, 185; essays 
 of, loo. 
 
 Adjectives, 13. 
 
 ^neid, 498. 
 
 ^schines, orator, 307. 
 
 ./Eschylus, 158, 297, 425, 441 ; char- 
 acters of, 428; dramas of, 5, 410; 
 epochs of, 551. 
 
 jEsop, memoirs, 166. 
 
 Esthetic Sense, improvement of 
 the, 4; its practical value, 6; its 
 primary appeal to literary art, 3; 
 lines of development, 5 ; ultimate 
 judge of merit, 5; a universal en- 
 dowment, 4. 
 
 Affinity of Literature to other Fine 
 Arts, i. 
 
 Ajax, in Sophocles, 430. 
 
 Alciphron, letters of, 126. 
 
 Alexander, example of moral sub- 
 lime, 57. 
 
 Allen, James Lane, idealistic novel- 
 ist, 352. 
 
 Allibone, criticism on Addison, 186. 
 
 America, romance in, 343. 
 
 Analogy, in argument, 279. 
 
 Ancients, method of, 245. 
 
 Anglo-Saxon, chronicle, 202. 
 
 " Anna Karenina," 385. 
 
 Anthon, Charles, criticism on P>n- 
 dar, 534 ; on Plautus, 447 ; on Vir- 
 gil, 560. 
 
 565 
 
 Antiquity, advantage of, 477. 
 
 Apologia of Newman, memoir, 165. 
 
 Apology of Socrates, memoir, 165. 
 
 Arabic, use in literature, 23. 
 
 Aratus, poet, 124. 
 
 Arbaces, 350. 
 
 Arbiter, Petronius, Roman author, 
 36i. 
 
 Argument, arrangement of, 280; 
 definition of, 50; demands of, 275; 
 in composition, 47; in oration, 
 274 ; kinds of, 276. 
 
 Ariosto, 73; romance, 335.- 
 
 Aristophanes, 445 ; errors in wit, 
 76. 
 
 Aristotle, 406; dialogues of, 158; 
 on drama, 404; on force, 43; on 
 oration, 265; on oratory, 290; re- 
 marks, i. 
 
 Arius, letter of, 121. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 32, 99, 209; 
 critic, 206; criticism on Heine, 
 540 ; essay in criticism, 548 ; es- 
 sayist, 191; letters of, 112; model 
 on paragraph, 39; on Lowell's 
 allusions, 43; on the letter, 108; 
 on the novel, 354; outlines work, 
 
 4i. 
 
 Arnold, Thomas, 214. 
 Arrangement of words, purpose of, 
 
 24. 
 Art, absence of in morality plays, 
 
 436; content, 61, 69. 
 Art-Form, elements of, 7. 
 Arthur. King, 331. 
 Arthurian Cycle, 330. 
 Artist, Divine, 68; human, 68. 
 Artists, Great, lives of, 12. 
 Ashburton, Lord, letter to, 116. 
 Athenian School of Oratory, 298. 
 Attachment to Country, 71. 
 Atterbury, pamphlet, 172. 
 Atticus, 134. 
 
 Audubon, life of, 224: memoirs, 166. 
 Aurelius, Emperor Marcus, 135. 
 
566 INDEX 
 
 Autobiography of Cicero. 131. 
 Azarias, Brother, criticism on 
 Dante, 503. 
 
 Bacchic altar, 426. 
 
 Bacchus, 425. 
 
 Bacon, Lord, 207, 253, 395 ; essay- 
 ist, 182 ; on oration, 263. 
 
 Bain, on balanced sentence, 28; 
 rhetoric, 34, 74; says, 59. 
 
 Balance, 68. 
 
 Baldwin, rhetoric, 44. 
 
 Bale, John, imitator, 210. 
 
 Ballad, The, 527; content of, 528. 
 
 Balmez, 227. 
 
 Bancroft, George, historian, 238, 
 259, 260. 
 
 Barren Style, 93. 
 
 Bascom, on subliniity, 52. 
 
 Basil, letters of, 126. 
 
 Basis, of feeling, 69; of humor, 77; 
 of melody, 80; of melody-words, 
 81. 
 
 Baskertsief, Maria, 208. 
 
 Bates, Arlo, on application of argu- 
 ment, 51 ; says of clearness, 42. 
 
 Battle of Waterloo, 369. 
 
 Beauty, definition of, 61 ; in lit- 
 erary art, 66; of form, 67. 
 
 Bede, Venerable, writer, 252. 
 
 Beecher, Henry Ward, on oratory, 
 
 323- 
 
 Bennett, James Gordon, journalism, 
 177. 
 
 Benoit, writer of romance, 336. 
 
 Beowulf, alliteration carried to ex- 
 cess, 82; epic, 513. 
 
 Berkeley, Bishop, dialogue-essay, 
 158. 
 
 Bernhardt, Sara, 438. 
 
 Bible, sublime passages in, 60. 
 
 Biblical Essay, definition, 153. 
 
 Biographer, 166, 197, 198. 
 
 Biographers, examples of, 214. 
 
 Biographical Matter, classification 
 of, 197. 
 
 Biography, 108, 194; class, 209; 
 class, sets of, 211 ; complete clas- 
 sification, 213 ; definition of, 193 ; 
 kinds of, 201 ; minor examples, 
 224 ; sources of, 195. 
 
 Biology, 193. 
 
 Bjornson, 387. 
 
 Black Forest, example of silence 
 and solitude, 56. 
 
 Blair, Dr., comparison of style. 
 244; criticism on Addison, 185; 
 criticism on Cicero, 311 ; criticism 
 on Demosthenes, 306 ; criticism 
 on Horace, 536 ; criticism on Pin- 
 dar, 535 ; criticism of Pliny let- 
 ters, 142; criticism on Sophocles, 
 444; on beauty, 62; on drama, 
 426, 427; on ethical purpose, 432; 
 on figures of speech, 45; on sub- 
 limity, 52; on the importance of 
 verbs, 12, 13; style in history, 
 
 239- 
 
 Boaz, field of, 357. 
 
 Boccaccio, Italian writer, 73, 366. 
 
 Bolingbroke, 171, 172. 
 
 Bollandists, Society of, 197. 
 
 Book of Psalms, 71. 
 
 Book of Wisdom, epistle, 122. 
 
 Books of Common Prayer, 522. 
 
 Bossuet, Jacques Benigne, orator, 
 302, 314; sincerity of, 46; writings 
 of, 66. 
 
 Boswell, James, 214, 215 ; example 
 of narration, 50; Life of Johnson, 
 no. 
 
 Bowdoin College, 382. 
 
 Breviaries, Lyric, 520. 
 
 Briefness of Lyric, 515. 
 
 Bronte, Miss, 379; poetry of, 380. 
 
 Browning, defines love, 72 ; errors 
 of, 43 ; obscurity of, 43 ; use of 
 foreign words, 23. 
 
 Bryan, William Jennings, example, 
 forcible style, 95. 
 
 Bryant, preference of Saxon, 17. 
 
 Buckle, Henry, historian, 257. 
 
 Buffon, saying of, 103. 
 
 Btmyan's Pilgrim's Progress, 340. 
 
 Burke, Edmund, explains effect of 
 the sublime, 56; model of argu- 
 ment, 51 ; on beauty, 64; on pow- 
 er of sublime, 53 ; orator, 316 ; 
 pamphlet, 171 ; philippics of, 205 ; 
 sincerity of, 46 ; use of periodic 
 sentences, 26. 
 
 Burroughs, John, memoirs, 166. 
 
 Burrow, biography, 224. 
 
 Butler, biography, 222. 
 
 Butler. Alban, 211. 
 
 Butler's, Bishop, analogies, 280. 
 
 Byron, Lord, 172, 370; Lyrics, 524. 
 
 Caesar, Julius, 219; example of mo- 
 ral sublime, 58; oration, 295. 
 
 Caine, Hall, use of love letters, 120, 
 
Campbell, on force, 43. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 209; criticism on 
 Dante, 502; criticism on Goethe. 
 449; errors of, 43; essay, 175; 
 essayist. 188; force of, 45; 
 " French Revolution," 101 ; letters 
 of, 112; sublime writer, 66. 
 
 Catholic Historians, 236. 
 
 Cato, tragedy of, 151. 
 
 Celt, ballads of the, 529; excels in 
 wit, 77. 
 
 Celtic, Anglicising of, 23; affected 
 by the Latin, 15; use in litera- 
 ture, 23. 
 
 Century Company, biography, 203. 
 
 Century Dictionary, reference, 16. 
 
 Century, Nineteenth (British), sym- 
 posium, 162. 
 
 Cervantes, model in wit and humor. 
 76; Spanish writer, 364. 
 
 Chamber's Encyclopedia, 206. 
 
 Chambers, History of Stars, 225. 
 
 Chancellor, Beresford, criticism on 
 Dickens, 375. 
 
 Channing, sublime passages, 60. 
 
 Character, idealization of, 351 ; rev- 
 elation of, 423. 
 
 Characters of the Drama, 419, 468; 
 compared, 468; the chief, 422; 
 subordinate, 423. 
 
 Charlemagne, of romance, 338. 
 
 Chartism, 387. 
 
 Chaucer, erotic poet, 73 ; force of, 
 44; preference of Saxon, 17. 
 
 Chesterfield, Lord, 180 : biographical 
 data, 137 ; charm of manner of, 
 138; letters of, I37 138. 
 
 Chesterfield, literary work of, 138. 
 
 Chesterfield, on good manners, 140. 
 
 Chesterfield urges energy and appli- 
 cation, 140. 
 
 Chesterfield's Letters, literary merit 
 of, 141. 
 
 Choate, Rufus, criticism on Web- 
 ster, 320. 
 
 Christ, biography of, 193; life of. 
 250. 
 
 Christian Hymn Books. 520. 
 
 Christian Year, by Keble, 345. 
 
 Christianity, origin of, 250. 
 
 Chrysostom, Saint John, eulogy on. 
 204; letters of, 126. 
 
 Cicero, 32. 313, 398: as a writer, 
 129; career of, 128: character of. 
 131 ; classic representative of an- 
 
 cient letter writers, 128; criticism 
 of, 133; De Amicitia, 71; epis- 
 tolary style, characteristics of, 
 132; essayist, 179; expressions, 
 i ; friendship for Atticus, 131 ; 
 general estimate of, 128; letters 
 of, in, 129, 130, 131 ; melody, 83; 
 model of argument, 51 ; on his- 
 tory, 245; on oration, 273; on 
 style, 94; orator, 265, 310; us* of 
 periodic sentences, 26. 
 
 Cicero's Letters, literary value, 132. 
 
 Civil War, English, 252. 
 
 Civil War, our late, 109. 
 
 Clarke, Richard, on letters of Ix-o 
 XIII., 117. 
 
 Classic Cycles, in England, 336. 
 
 Classification, of letters, 123; of 
 lyric, 518. 
 
 Clearness, errors regarding, 42; of 
 composition, 41 ; of style, 86. 
 
 Cleopatra, 72. 
 
 Climax, law of, 281. 
 
 Clytemnestra, 429. 
 
 Cobbett, William, 509. 
 
 Cochran, Bourke, forcible style, 95. 
 
 Coherence, of paragraph, 34. 
 
 Coleridge, essay, 175; on Don 
 Quixote, 366; romance, 343. 
 
 Coleridge, Hartley, imitator, 210. 
 
 Color, applied to words, 67; source 
 of beauty, 62. 
 
 Columbus. 208; example of moral 
 sublime, 58. 
 
 Comedy, 424 ; relation to wit, 79. 
 
 Composition, complete, 40; kinds 
 of, 47; qualities of complete, 41. 
 
 Concise Style, oo. 
 
 Conclusion, 548. 
 
 Conjunction, cumulative. 37. 
 
 Construction, rules of, of para- 
 graph, 33. 
 
 Corneille, 465. 
 
 Correctness, of style, 85. 
 
 Cosmopolitan Spirit, history, 238. 
 
 " Count of Monte Cristo," 369. 
 
 Cowley. 151. 
 
 Crawford. Marion, novels of, 351 : 
 use of love letters, 120. 
 
 Criticism. 550; sources of. 402. 
 
 Critics. Biographical. 206. 
 
 Critique. The. 205. 
 
 Crusoe. Robinson, 171. 
 
 Cyropardia. 155: of Xenophon, 327. 
 359 
 
568 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Dana, Charles A., journalism, 177. 
 
 Dante, 73, 502, 504, 511; force of, 
 44. 
 
 David, platonic love, 70. 
 
 David's sling, 77. 
 
 Davidson, William, criticism on 
 
 . "Job," 439. 
 
 Davis, Richard Harding, news- 
 letters, 114. 
 
 Decameron, The, romance, 334, 
 
 367- .> 
 Definition of epic, dispute as to, 
 
 470; of essay, 151. 
 Deistic School, 173. 
 Demosthenes, 313; orator, 299, 306; 
 
 prose of, 66 ; sincerity of, 46. 
 De Musset, Alfred, lyric poet, 541. 
 De Quincey, Thomas, 27, 102, 208; 
 
 diffuse style, 91 ; on defects of 
 
 long sentence, 26; on essay, 152. 
 Description, Literary, 48; meaning 
 
 of, 48; scientific, 48. 
 Descriptive composition, 47; style, 
 
 241. 
 De Sevigne, Madame, letter writer, 
 
 148. 
 Design in Art, 65 ; in literary art, 
 
 66; source of beauty, 65. 
 Deuteronomy, orations in, 296. 
 De Vere, Aubrey, sonnets of, 533. 
 Dialogue, 155 ; characteristics of, 
 
 409; definition of, 156; e^say, in 
 
 English literature, 158;.- growth 
 
 of, 427; kinds of, 157. 
 Diatribe, 204. 
 
 Dickens, Charles, novelist, 374, 376. 
 Diderot, 173. 
 Dido, in Virgil, 73. 
 Diffuse Style, 89. 
 Dignified Style, 96. 
 Dilemma, The, argument, 277. 
 Disraeli, on pamphlet, 167. 
 Divisions of beauty, 61 ; of literary 
 
 art, 108; of sonnet, 530. 
 Documents, collection of, 196. 
 Doll House, The, drama, 438. 
 Don Quixote, 365, 366; adventure, 
 
 364; comic character, 79. 
 Doumic, Rene, criticism on De 
 
 Musset, 541 ; criticism on Hugo. 
 
 368; criticism on Moliere, 456. 
 Dowden, Professor, criticism on 
 
 Shelley, 543- 
 Drama, The, definition, 404; ethics 
 
 of modern, 437 ; forms of, 423 ; 
 
 of Job, 439; religion and ethics 
 
 of, 435- 
 
 Dramatic element, in fiction, 355. 
 Dramatis Personse, of Miss Bronte, 
 
 379- 
 
 Dramatists, 465. 
 Dryden, John, 151; critic, 206; 
 
 memoir, 166; sacred music, 524; 
 
 symposium, 161. 
 
 Duke of Norfolk, letter to, 146. 
 Dumas, Alexander, French writer, 
 
 369- 
 Dunlop, John, criticism by, 362. 
 
 Earl of Clarendon, historian, 252. 
 Edinburgh Review, 175. 
 Edmund, son of Gloster, 434. 
 Egan, Maurice Francis, sonnets of, 
 
 533- 
 
 Elegance, etymological meaning, 
 46; scope of, 46. 
 
 Elegant Style, 97. 
 
 Elements of Art-Form, 7. 
 
 Eliot, George, genius of, 379; ideal- 
 istic novelist, 352; model on para- 
 graph, 39; novelist, 377; poetry 
 of, 380; symposium, 161. 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen, 203. 
 
 " Elsie Venner," romance, 347. 
 
 Emerson, 97 ; errors of, 43 ; on eulo- 
 gy, 164; words illustrated by, 7. 
 
 Emotion, in oratory, 285. 
 
 Emotional Value, of lyric, 515; of 
 melody, 80. 
 
 Emphasis, places of, 24. 
 
 Empire, Holy Roman, 196. 
 
 Encyclopedia Brittannica, 205. 
 
 England, 383; Church of, 170; son- 
 nets in, 531. 
 
 English Historians, 251. 
 
 English Hymns, 522. 
 
 English Literature, eulogy in, 163. 
 
 English, morality play, 436. 
 
 English Romance, 335, 340; sources 
 of, 330. 
 
 English Sacred Lyric, 523. 
 
 English Words, French and Latin 
 elements, 18; native, 16; sources 
 of, 15 ; their universal indebted- 
 ness, 15; value of Latin element, 
 19- 
 
 Epic, characteristics of, 473; close 
 of, 480 ; compared with drama, 
 468; heroes of, 479; in the, 517; 
 management of plan, 479; moral 
 
INDEX 
 
 value, 472 ; origin of, 466 ; person- 
 ages of, 481 ; rank of, 4/0; super- 
 natural personages, 482; third 
 property of, 478 ; types of, 469. 
 
 Epic Action, 474 ; interpretation of. 
 475; time of, 480; unity of, 477. 
 
 Epic Material, dramatic use 01,469. 
 
 Episodes, 476. 
 
 Essay, 165; among the Greeks, 154; 
 meaning in literature, 150; mean- 
 ing of, 150; modern use of word, 
 
 151. 
 
 Essayists, English, 185; representa- 
 tive, number of, 178. 
 
 Ethical Purpose, extent of, 433. 
 
 Ethical Side, of drama, 432. 
 
 Eulogistic Literature, 59. 
 
 Eulogium, 162 ; modern use of, 163. 
 
 Eulogy, 155, 203, 204. 
 
 Euphues, romance, 341. 
 
 Euripides, 444; characters, 428; 
 dramatist, 179. 
 
 Europe, Northern, romance from. 
 
 337- 
 
 Evadne, in Euripides, 430. 
 
 Evolution of the novel, 349. 
 
 Example, argument from, 277; fic- 
 titious, 278. 
 
 Exposition, in composition, 47; 
 meaning of, 47. 
 
 Faber, hymn books, 523; platonic 
 love, 70. 
 
 Facts, grouping of, 199; minor 
 ways of grouping, 200; order of 
 place, 199. 
 
 Farnsworth, James, criticism on 
 Dumas, 369. 
 
 Falstaff, comic character, 79. 
 
 Family Relationship, 69. 
 
 Feeling, element of art-content, 69. 
 
 Ferdinand, history of, 258. 
 
 Fiction, 108, 340; meaning of, 327. 
 
 Fielding, 386. 
 
 Figure, source of beauty, 62. 
 
 Figures of Speech, 44. 
 
 Fiske, John, criticism of, 262; his- 
 torian, 261. 
 
 Flaubert, author, 369. 
 
 Flexibility of Form, of lyric, 515. 
 
 Flint, Robert, criticism on Buckle, 
 
 257- 
 
 Florence, mystery plays at, 435. 
 Force, Basis of. 44; in composition, 
 
 43 
 
 569 
 
 Forcible Style, 95. 
 
 Forensic Oratory, 293. 
 
 Form, source of beauty, 62; source 
 
 of literary beauty, 67. 
 Foxe, John, 211. 
 Franklin, memoirs, 209. 
 Freeman's, essay, 151; history, 237. 
 French Academy, 206. 
 French Church, middle ages, 231. 
 French Element, 21 ; on English 
 
 words, 18. 
 
 French History, stylists in, 248. 
 French Sources, b. 
 French Words, Domestication of, 
 
 21. 
 Froude, history, 237 ; letters of, 
 
 no. 
 Funeral Oration of Bossuet, 315. 
 
 Ga-elic League, The, of Ireland, 
 
 529- 
 
 Garnett, criticism on Niebuhr, 247. 
 
 Gaskell, Mrs.. 378. 
 
 Genung, Professor, says on para- 
 graph, 35. 
 
 German Historical Society, 197. 
 
 German Sources, b. 
 
 Germans, not remarkable for wit, 
 
 Germany, 550; morality plays, 436. 
 
 Gibbon, Edward, example of nar- 
 ration, 50; historian, 241, 255; 
 history, 236; History of Rome, 
 199; use of long words, 20. 
 
 Gigot, criticism on Book of Tobias, 
 
 Gilder, Richard Watson, sonnets of, 
 
 533- 
 
 Gladstone, William E.. 220. 223; 
 criticism on Homer, 487 ; his per- 
 sonality, 222. 
 
 Goethe, 448, 504; on ideals, 354; 
 platonic love, 70. 
 
 Golden Ass, The, 364. 
 
 Gospel, employs figures of speech, 
 
 44- 
 
 Gothic Cathedral Illustrates, 2. 
 
 Goths, invasion of, 58. 
 
 Gould, S. Baring, 211. 
 
 Grattan, sublime passages, 6a 
 
 Greek Democracy, oratory, 207- 
 
 Greek, drama. 70, 410. 
 
 Greek Element, names used in sci- 
 ence. 19; use in literature, 23. 
 
 Greek Essay, 158. 
 
570 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Greek Literature, fiction in, 359. 
 
 Greek Missals, 519. 
 
 Greek Tragedy, 429; characters of, 
 
 428. 
 
 Greeks, principles expressed, i. 
 Greeley, Horace, journalism, 177. 
 Greenough, on loose sentences, 27. 
 Guizot, 249; historian, 248. 
 
 Habrocomes, of Xenophon, 359. 
 Haggard, Rider, adventures of, 346. 
 Haigh, ^A. E., criticism on /Eschy- 
 
 lu 5,441. 
 
 Halifax, Lord, tracts, 170. 
 Hallam, Arthur, 71. 
 Hallam, Henry, historian, 256. 
 Hamlet, example of feeling, 70; 
 
 sublimity, 60. 
 
 Hamlet's Ghost, example of ob- 
 scurity, 55. 
 
 Handbook treats literature, a. 
 Hardwicke, Henry, criticism on 
 
 Demosthenes, 308. 
 Harmony, 68; of paragraph, 34; of 
 
 principles, I. 
 
 Harper's Weekly, letters in, 114. 
 Harris, Russell, letters of, 114. 
 Harrison, Frederic, criticism on 
 
 Macaulay, 254. 
 Harvard College, 258. 
 Havelock, romance, 338. 
 Hawthorne, 381. 
 Hay, 213. 
 
 Heber's, Bishop, hymn book, 523. 
 Hebrew Literature, story in, 356. 
 Hebrew People, 60. 
 Hebrews, oration, 295. 
 Heine, lyric poet, 540. 
 Helen, in Homer, 73. 
 Heloise, 72. 
 Henry, Patrick, example, forcible 
 
 style, 95 ; sincerity of, 46 ; speech, 
 
 1 02, 279. 
 Hereward, the Saxon romance, 
 
 333- 
 
 Herodotus, historian, 126. 
 
 Hesiod, eulogium, 162. 
 
 Hill, on abuse of particles, 38. 
 
 Historical Composition, literary 
 style in, 239. 
 
 Historical Facts, methods of inter- 
 preting, 233. 
 
 Historical Interpretation, methods 
 of, 235. 
 
 Historical Value of Letters, 109. 
 
 History, 108; art as a factor in, 226; 
 art-content of, 228; difficult spe- 
 cies, 231 ; factors in construction 
 of, 226 ; grouping of facts, 232 ; 
 kinds of, 230; meaning of word, 
 225; method of writing, 231; of 
 the letter, 121 ; relation to other 
 arts, 227. 
 
 Hogarth, definition, 63 ; on beauty, 
 63- 
 
 Holinshed, chronicles of, 202. 
 
 Holy City, 337. 
 
 Holy Writ, 70. 
 
 Homer, epic poet, 487 ; epics of, 5 ; 
 eulogium, 162; his own witness, 
 487; poetry of, 66; relation to 
 Greek poetry, 490; relation to his- 
 tory, 491 ; relation to oratory, 
 491 ; relation to philosophy, 491 ; 
 style, 489 ; sublime passages of, 
 56; view of, 488. 
 
 Homeric Morality, 494. 
 
 Homeric Theology, 493. 
 
 Hook, Walter Farquhar, 211. 
 
 Horace, lyric writer, 536; platonic 
 love, 70; theme, love, 73. 
 
 Howells, William Dean, realistic 
 writer, 355 ; use of love letters, 
 
 120. 
 
 Hueffer, F., criticism on Boccaccio 
 366. 
 
 Hugo, Victor, French writer, 368; 
 sublime writer, 66. 
 
 Hume, David, 254 ; historian, 241 ; 
 History of Anglo-Saxons, 231 ; 
 stylist,. 253. 
 
 Humor, in art-content, 75; in fic- 
 tion, 78. 
 
 Hutton, Richard Holt, 141 ; criti- 
 cism on Arnold, 192; criticism on 
 George Eliot, 377; criticism of 
 Guizot, 249 ; criticism on Scott, 
 372. 
 
 Huxley, Life of, 214; monograph. 
 156. 
 
 Hymn Books, notable compilations, 
 522. 
 
 Ibsen, Henrik, 438, 452; realistic 
 
 writer, 355. 
 
 Idealism, indications of, 351. 
 Idealistic Novel, 350. 
 Idiomatic Style, 91. 
 Ignatius, letters of, 126. 
 Imitators, English, 210. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Impassioned Style, 101. 
 Imperial Academy of Vienna, 197. 
 Importance of the Letter, 109. 
 Infinity, as source of the sublime. 
 
 Influences, on oratory, 289. 
 
 Ingersoll, Colonel, oration, 291. 
 
 Institutional Life, basis of civiliza- 
 tion, 229; unity of, 230; value of. 
 229. 
 
 Intellectual Style, 98. 
 
 Intellectual Sublime, 58. 
 
 Irving, 383; elegant style, 98. 
 
 Isabella, history of, 258. 
 
 Italian, ballads of the, 529 ; romance. 
 333J use in literature, 23. 
 
 Italy, 383; morality plays, 436. 
 
 James, Henry, realistic writer, 355; 
 use of love letters, 120. 
 
 Janssen's History of the German 
 People, 109, 238, 247. 
 
 Jebb, Prof. R. C., criticism on Aris- 
 tophanes, 445 ; criticism on Euri- 
 pides, 444 ; criticism on Homer. 
 492; on Homer, 466. 
 
 Jeffrey, 175. 
 
 Jerusalem Delivered, epic, 513. 
 
 Jesuits, in North America, 261. 
 
 Job's Vision, example of obscurity. 
 
 55- 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 98; eulogy, 
 
 163; example of narration, 50; 
 
 imitator, 210; use of balanced 
 
 sentence, 28. 
 
 Jonathan, platonic love, 70. 
 Judicial Style, characteristics of, 
 
 292; in oration, 290. 
 Junius, 105; letters of, 144; satires 
 
 of, 205. 
 
 Kalevala, epic, 513. 
 
 Keats, 385. 
 
 Keble, letters of. no, 112. 
 
 Keble's Christian Year, 71. 
 
 Kinds of letters, no; of style, 88. 
 
 King Alfred, 59. 
 
 King Lear, 434; example of feel- 
 ing, 70; example of sublimity in 
 sound, 57. 
 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 347, 525; novel- 
 ist, 346. 
 
 Knight, chronicles of. 202. 
 
 Knowledge. 399. 
 
 Labored Style, 93. 
 
 Lacordaire, on oration, 274. 
 
 " Lalla Rookh," romance of, 334. 
 
 Lamb, 383; essays of, 100. 
 
 Language, described by Renan. y; 
 distinction of, 392; in poetry, 389. 
 
 Lanier, Sidney, remarked, a. 
 
 " Last Days of Pompeii," 353. 
 
 Latin Element, on English words, 
 18; value of, 19. 
 
 Latin language, an element in con- 
 struction, 15; names used in sci- 
 ence, 19; vehicle of civilization. 
 
 Latins, among the, 361 ; among the 
 
 drama, 446. 
 
 Lea, Charles Henry, historian, 23^. 
 Lead Kindly Light, example of 
 
 feeling, 74. 
 Leader, The, literary merit of. 175; 
 
 popularity of, 177; publication of, 
 
 175; subjects treated in, 176. 
 Lear, sublimity, 60. 
 Lessing, describes aesthetic sense, j ; 
 
 on drama, 404. 
 
 Letter in Hebrew literature, 121. 
 Letter of friendship, in. 
 Letters of the Church Fathers, 126 
 Lilly, dialogue-essay, 158. 
 Lincoln, memoirs, 209. 
 Lincoln, President, secretaries of, 
 
 109. 
 Lindemann, William, criticism on 
 
 Goethe, 448; criticism on Sudcr- 
 
 mann, 454. 
 Lines of beauty, 63. 
 Lingard, history, 237. 
 Literary Art and the aesthetic sense, 
 
 3; its widest appeal, 17; Latin 
 
 element in, 20; relationship to 
 
 science, 2, 3; words in relation 
 
 to, 7. 
 
 Literary examples, 74. 
 Literary Form of Job, 440. 
 Literary Style. 100. 
 Literary use of love letters, 120. 
 Literary value of news-letters, lift. 
 Literature as a fine art, I ; of the 
 
 sublime, 60. 
 Livy, historian, 126; oration, 295: 
 
 style, 244 
 Locke, definition of wit. 75: essay. 
 
 '51 
 Logic, 276. 
 
572 
 
 INDEX 
 
 London Quarterly Review, criticism 
 oh Morley, 220. 
 
 London Times, editorials in, 176; 
 letters in, 114. 
 
 Longfellow, 545; lyric poet, 544; 
 preference of Saxon, 17; sonnets 
 of, 533- 
 
 Longinns, on sublimity, 52. 
 
 " Looking Backward," romance, 
 347- 
 
 Lord, Angel of the, 67. 
 
 Lord, John, 211. 
 .Love, source of literature, 72. 
 
 Love Letters, 119. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell, 97 ; criticism 
 on Carlyle, 190; criticism on 
 Shakespeare, 459 ; obscure liter- 
 ary allusions, 43. 
 
 Lucian, dialogue-essay, 159. 
 
 Luther, Martin, 247, 521 ; letters of, 
 no. 
 
 Luxuriant Style, 94. 
 
 Lydgate, translator, 336. 
 
 Lyric, in Christian Era, 519; marks 
 of, 515; meaning and scope of, 
 514; meter and style, 516; rela- 
 tion to prose, 518; suggestive- 
 ness, 517; the heroic, 526. 
 
 Lyric Growth, causes of, 518. 
 
 Lyric Poets, miscellaneous, 525. 
 
 Lyric and Epic, comparison of, 467. 
 
 Lytton, Bulwer, 350, 352; historical 
 romance, 343. 
 
 Mabie, Hamilton Wright, general 
 criticism, 385. 
 
 Macaulay, Lord, 32, 97, 255; criti- 
 cism on Hallam, 256; criticism on 
 Milton, 510; essay, 175; essayist, 
 186 ; eulogy, 163 ; example of nar- 
 ration, 50; history, 237; melody, 
 83 ; model on paragraph, 39 ; 
 stylist, 254 ; use of balanced sen- 
 tence, 28 ; use of long words, 20. 
 
 Macbeth, 416, 418; "Knocking at 
 the Gate," example of sublimity 
 in sound, 57; sublimity, 60. 
 
 Maha-bharata, epic, 513. 
 
 Mahaffy, Professor, criticism on 
 Sophocles, 443, 
 
 Mallock, dialogue-essay, 158. 
 
 Malory, Sir Thomas, romance, 331. 
 
 Man, in relation to society, 70. 
 
 Manning, Cardinal, Life of, 292. 
 
 "Mar-Prelate Tracts," 169. 
 
 Marsh, explanation of use of 
 French words, 21 ; observations 
 on oldest Latin, 19; words de- 
 scribed by, 7. 
 
 Marshall, memoirs, 209. 
 
 Material, for mystery plays, 435. 
 
 Mathews, William, criticism on 
 Bossuet, 315; criticism on Web- 
 ster, 321 ; on oratory, 289. 
 
 Mead, Professor, 25; on adjectives, 
 13. 
 
 Melody, in art-content, 80; in para- 
 graph, 82; in thought, 82. 
 
 Memoir, 155; as an essay, .165; 
 basis of, 166; definition of, 165. 
 
 Memoirs, 253; literary value, 167; 
 of Gibbon, 165. 
 
 Memorabilia, of Xenophon, 165. 
 
 Messiad, epic, 513. 
 
 Meter and Imagery, of ballad, 528. 
 
 Method, of paragraph arrangement, 
 35. 
 
 Michelet, Jules, historian, 249. 
 
 Middle Ages, 257, 337. 
 
 Muller, Prof. Max, b. 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, observations on 
 apt words and phrases, 10. 
 
 Milman, Dean, criticism on Ma- 
 caulay, 188. 
 
 Milton, John, 253, 511, 506; epics of, 
 5; essays of, 170; Paradise Re- 
 gained, 72 ; preference of Saxon, 
 17; sublime passages, 56, 60. 
 
 Minto, on length of sentence, 25. 
 
 Mirabeau, orations, 266. 
 
 " Mr. Dooley," wit and humor, 79. 
 
 Mivart, dialogue-essay, 158; mono- 
 graph, 156. 
 
 Moliere, 456. 
 
 Monograph, 155; modern use of, 
 156. 
 
 Monologues, 409, 410. 
 
 Montagu, Lady Mary, letter writer, 
 148. 
 
 Montague, letters of, 112. 
 
 Montaigne, essayist, 180. 
 
 Montcalm, history, 261. 
 
 Moore, Thomas, lyrics of, 524. 
 
 Moralia, opera, 179. 
 
 Morality in Drama, basis of, 433. 
 
 More, Sir Thomas, pamphlets, 168. 
 
 Morley, John, 211, 212, 213, 220; 
 criticism on Burke, 316; says, 
 117; Life of Gladstone, no; on 
 Montaigne, 181. 
 
INDEX 
 
 573 
 
 Morris, William, novelist, 346. 
 
 Morse, John T., 212. 
 
 Moses, orations by, 296. 
 
 Moulton, Professor Richard, criti- 
 cism by, 440; criticism on Book 
 of Ruth, 357; on essay, 153; on 
 the letter, 121. 
 
 Movement, narrative style, 241 ; 
 source of beauty, 63, 68. 
 
 Napoleon, documents, 196. 
 
 Narration, 485; definition of, 49. 
 
 Narrative composition, 47; style, 
 240. 
 
 Nation, five-fold life of a, 228. 
 
 National Biography, 201. 
 
 National Lyric, 525. 
 
 Native English Words, 16. 
 
 Naturalness, of style, 88. 
 
 Nature, animated source of sub- 
 lime, 57. 
 
 Nelson, Lord, memoirs, 209. 
 
 Nepos, essayist, 179, 180. 
 
 " New Antigone," 351. 
 
 Newman, Cardinal, 32, 145, 345; 
 criticism by, 105, 126 ; dialogue- 
 essay, 159; essay, 151; letters of, 
 no; model on paragraph, 39; on 
 oration, 274; outlines work, 41; 
 platonic love, 70; says of Cicero, 
 129; sublimity, 60; tracts of, 
 168. 
 
 Niagara, 68. 
 
 Nibelungenlied, epic, 513; romance, 
 
 337- 
 
 Nicolay, 213. 
 
 Niebuhr, history, 245; influence of, 
 246. 
 
 Nightingale, Florence, 59. 
 
 Norman Conquest, 22. 
 
 Norman trouveres, 435. 
 
 Notre Dame, 369. 
 
 Nouns, selection of, IT. 
 
 Novel, meaning of the, 348; realis- 
 tic, 353 ; relation to romance, 349. 
 
 Nye, William, wit and humor, 79. 
 
 O'Connell, Daniel, wit, 76. 
 
 O'Connor, F., criticism on Bossuet, 
 316. 
 
 O'Conor, Rev. J., criticism on Cic- 
 ero, 310. 
 
 Obituary, 201. 
 
 Obscurity, as source of the sub- 
 lime, 55. 
 
 Occasion for open letter, 118. 
 
 Onias, letter to, 121. 
 
 Open letter, 118. 
 
 Oration, 263; estimates of, 322; 
 
 history of, 295; in England, .303; 
 
 plan of, 208; style in, 282. 
 Orator, qualities required for, 266. 
 Oratorical Growth, 303. 
 Orators, representative, 306. 
 Oratory, compared with essay, 264; 
 
 future of, 304; modern, 301. 
 Origin, of ballad, 528. 
 Othello, sublimity, 60. 
 Outlaw, The, romance, 333. 
 Outline, method of, 41. 
 Outlook, The, in drama, 438. 
 Ovid, theme, love, 73. 
 Oxford Movement, 173; letters on, 
 
 no. 
 
 Pagan Standard, low, 434. 
 
 Paine, Tom, 173. 
 
 Painted Picture, relation to scene, 
 
 412. 
 
 " Pamela," 385. 
 
 Pamphlet, a special pleader. 167. 
 Pamphlets, of i8th century, 171. 
 Paradise Lost, 508. 
 Paragraph, 33 ; connection of sen- 
 tences in. 33; divisions of, 35; 
 
 linking of, 36; prevised, 35: 
 Parkman, Francis, historian. 202, 
 
 261. 
 Parliamentary Style, in oration, 
 
 289. 
 
 Parthenon, 299. 
 Particles, 14. 
 Pascal, letters of, 143. 
 Passion, treatment of, 331. 
 passions, appeal to, 268; exciting 
 
 of, 269. 
 
 Pasteur's Monograph, 156. 
 Pastor, historian, 238. 
 Pater, describes humor, 75; essays 
 
 on style, 104; on biography. 195; 
 
 on individuality, 103; on method 
 
 of study. 39. 
 Pattison. Mark, criticism on Ma- 
 
 caulay. 187; criticism on Milton. 
 
 506; criticism on Renan. 251. 
 Pauses, in drama. 410. 
 " Payn Peverel," romance, 333. 
 Penry, tracts, 170. 
 Percentages at present of foreign 
 
 words, 22. 
 
574 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Pericles, 108; orator, 299. 
 
 Period of Criticism, 154. 
 
 Perry, Thomas, criticism by, 359; 
 criticism on Aristophanes, 446; 
 criticism on Sophocles, 443. 
 
 Personality in Literary Art, 84, 
 103. 
 
 Petrarch, 73; an author, 531; lyric 
 poet, 537- 
 
 Phzedo, 158. 
 
 Pharisees, 45. 
 
 Philippic, 204. 
 
 Phillips, Wendell, orations, 266; 
 sublime passages, 60. 
 
 Philosophic Style, 243. 
 
 Pickwick, comic character, 79. 
 
 Pindar, lyric poet, 534. 
 
 Pioneer Press, The, editorials in, 
 176. 
 
 Plaintive Lyric, 526. 
 
 Plan, evolution of, 40 ; for composi- 
 tion, 40. 
 
 Plato, .dialogues of, 158; says, 3; 
 symposium, 160; words described 
 by, 7- 
 
 Platonic love, 70. 
 
 Plautus, 446. 
 
 Pliny, 142; author, 125. 
 
 Plot, idealization of, 352 ; in ro- 
 mance, 329. 
 
 Plowden, James A., criticism on 
 Sappho, 535. 
 
 Plutarch, essayist, 178; historian, 
 126. 
 
 Poe's " The Bells," example of sub- 
 limity in sound, 57. 
 
 Poet, 390; qualities of, 401. 
 
 Poetic Faculty, functions of, 398. 
 
 Poetry, 399 ; in pictorial work, 
 272 ; materials of, 396 ; origin of, 
 
 395- 
 
 Poetry and Logic, 402. 
 
 Poets and Prose Writers, 397. 
 
 Politeness, quality of orator, 267. 
 
 Pompous Style, 97. 
 
 Pope, Alexander, 344; errors in wit, 
 76; letters of, 146. 
 
 Popes, Lives of the, 211. 
 
 Popular Style, 102. 
 
 Power, as source of the sublime, 
 55; maleficent source of sublime, 
 58; national and religious, 236. 
 
 Prejudice, of historian, 235; re- 
 moval of party, 237. 
 
 Preliminary Study, a. 
 
 Prescott, William, historian, 241, 
 
 258. 
 Principle, A Second, in drama, 413; 
 
 of selection, 389. 
 Principles Applied, in paragraph, 
 
 34; underlying of drama, 419. 
 Private Journal, 207. 
 Private Papers, 206. 
 Prometheus, 429. 
 Propertius, theme, love, 73. 
 Proportion, 68; law of art, 241. 
 Prose-forms, a. 
 Protestant Historians, 236. 
 Providence, 422. 
 Publication of love letters, 120. 
 Publicity of open letters, 118. 
 Punic Faith, illustrated by, 10. 
 Purcell, 207. 
 Puritanism, history, 261. 
 Purpose, of ballad, 528. 
 Pusey, tracts of, 168, 174. 
 
 Quackenbos, on loose sentence, 27 ; 
 on sublimity, 53. 
 
 Qualities of Style, 85. 
 
 Quintilian, eulogy, 162 ; history. 
 239 ; on conclusion of sentence, 
 31 ; on history, 245 ; on oration, 
 266, 269, 273; studies of, 301. 
 
 Rabelais, errors in wit, 76. 
 
 Radot, Rene Vallery, 224. 
 
 Raleigh, 253. 
 
 Rank of letters among prose forms, 
 109. 
 
 Reade, Charles, 386. 
 
 Realism, revolt against, 346. 
 
 Recitations, 425. 
 
 Record of the Best Minds, 400. 
 
 Redeemer, example of moral sub- 
 lime, 58. 
 
 Relation of Lyric to Epic and . 
 Drama, 517. 
 
 Religious Feeling, 71. 
 
 Renan, Ernest, 197; description of 
 language, 9 ; historian, 250. 
 
 Republic of Letters, The, 108. 
 
 " Resurrection, The," by Tolstoi, 
 43.8. 
 
 Review, North American, sympo- 
 sium, 162. 
 
 Revolution, French, 172. 
 
 Richelieu, 406. 
 
 " Robin Hood," romance, 333. 
 
 " Robinson Crusoe," romance, 369, 
 341- 
 
Roman, oration, 300. 
 
 Roman Catholic Church, precepts 
 conveyed by native language, 15. 
 
 Roman Missals, 519. 
 
 Roman Republic, The, oratory dur- 
 ing, 300. 
 
 Romance, characters of, 330; 
 growth of, 339; historical, 342; of 
 travel, 341: origin of name, 328; 
 relation to drama, 342; structure 
 of, 329. 
 
 Romantic Movement, 343 ; growth 
 of the, 345. 
 
 Romantic Novel, 349. 
 
 Rome, history, 237. 
 
 Roosevelt, President, biography, 
 224. 
 
 " Root and Branch Pamphlets," 
 169. 
 
 Rosse,tti, sonnets of, 533. 
 
 Round Table, Knights of, 334. 
 
 Rule, general, for choosing sen- 
 tence, 29. 
 
 Ruskin, John, 32; life of, 224: 
 model on paragraph, 39; outlines 
 work, 41; sublimity, 60; use of 
 cumulative conjunction, 38. 
 
 Russell, news-letters of, 114. 
 
 Russians, not remarkable for wit, 
 
 77- 
 Ruth, story of, 73. 
 
 Saint Paul, letters of, 124, 130; rep- 
 resentative Hebrew author of let- 
 ters, 122. 
 
 Saint Peter, epistle of, 122. 
 
 Sacred Lyric, 518. 
 
 Saintsbury, George, criticism on 
 Montaigne, 181 ; criticism on 
 Michelet, 250; criticism on Pas- 
 cal, 143- 
 
 Sappho, lyric poetess, 535. 
 
 Satanic School, 172. 
 
 Savonarola, 352. 
 
 Saxon-English, lack of expressive 
 words in, 22. 
 
 Saxon Words, brevity of, 16: con- 
 creteness of, 17; sound and sense. 
 17; special value to literary artist. 
 16; syntactic structure, 18; tend- 
 ency to compound, 18 : the sig- 
 nificance of, 17: their appeal 17. 
 
 Scene, dialogue in, 408: episode in. 
 411; groups in, 411; requirements 
 for, 408. 
 
 575 
 
 Scenery, 412. 
 
 Schaefer, Prof. F. J., b. 
 
 Schiller, lyric poet, 539; platonic 
 love, 70. 
 
 Schlegel, Frederick, criticism on 
 Homer, 494; criticism on Pe- 
 trarch, 537; criticism on Schiller, 
 539; on dialogue, 412; on drama, 
 404; words likened by, 7. 
 
 Schoolmen, 169. 
 
 Schwabe, 180. 
 
 Science, 226; influence of, 353; re- 
 lationship to literary art, 2, 3. 
 
 Scientific Method, modern history, 
 
 245- 
 
 Scientist, 390. 
 Scope, in oration, 270; of romance. 
 
 328. 
 Scott, Walter, 242; environment of. 
 
 344; "Heart of Midlothian." 
 ' 101 ; novelist. 370: romance. 343: 
 
 treatment of mediaeval history, 
 
 116. 
 
 Scribes, 45. 
 Scripture, Holy, figures of speech, 
 
 45- 
 
 Seeley, History of Earth, 225. 
 
 Sellar, Professor W., criticism on 
 Virgil, 496- 
 
 Sentence, balanced, 28; coherence 
 of, 29; harmony of, 30; linking, 
 in paragraph, 37; use of long, 
 25 ; loose, 27 ; use of short. 24. 
 
 Sentences in connection with mel- 
 ody, 81 ; number of, in para- 
 graph, 35; periodic, 26. 
 
 Seriousness, quality of orator, 267. 
 
 Shakespeare, William. 420. 458: 
 dramas of, 5 ; epochs of, 551 : 
 model in wit and humor, 76; no 
 letters of, 112; preference of 
 Saxon, 17; sonnets, 120; wit of, 
 
 Shaw, Thomas B.. criticism of let- 
 ters, 148; criticism on Bacon. 183: 
 criticism on Gibbon. 255; criti- 
 cism on Shakespeare. 461: criti- 
 cism on Thackeray, 381. 
 
 Shelley, criticism on poetry, 394 : 
 lament over Keats, 527; lyric 
 poet, 542. 
 
 Sheran, William Henry, criticism 
 on Arnold, 191 ; criticism on Car- 
 lyle, 189: criticism on Ibsen, 452: 
 criticism on Scott, 370; criticism 
 
576 
 
 INDEX 
 
 on Stevenson, 384; criticism on 
 
 Tennyson, 543. 
 
 Siegfried, Teutonic romance, 337. 
 Sievers, Professor, criticism on 
 
 Schiller, 539. 
 " Sigurd, the Volsung," romance. 
 
 346. 
 Silence, as source of the sublime, 
 
 55- 
 
 Smith, Professor Alexander, criti- 
 cism on Horace, 536; criticism 
 on Terentius, 447. 
 
 Smith, Captain John, travels of, 
 
 34 1 - 
 
 Smith, Professor, criticism on Te- 
 rentius, 447. 
 
 Smith, Sydney, on humor, 77. 
 
 Smyth, Albert, criticism on Burke, 
 3i8. 
 
 Solitude, as source of the sublime, 
 
 55- 
 
 Solon, 59, 297. 
 
 Some features of style, TOO. 
 
 Sonnet, The, 530; classic writers of 
 the, 532; origin of the, 531. 
 
 Sophocles, 158, 297, 425, 442; char- 
 acters, 428; dramas of. 5. 
 
 Sound, as source of the sublime, 
 
 Source, subjective of force, 45. 
 
 Sources of principles, I. 
 
 Southey, Robert, translations by, 
 33.2. 
 
 Spain, 435 ; morality plays, 436. 
 
 Spaniard, ballads of the, 529. 
 
 Spanish Cycle, romance, 332. 
 
 Spalding, Bishop John Lancaster, 
 criticism on Goethe, 450; on ora- 
 to<r, 325, 
 
 Special literary merit, of letters, 
 123. 
 
 Spectator, 171. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, describes perfect 
 artist, 29 ; model on paragraph, 
 39; on brevity of words, 16 ; on 
 oration, 284 ; on the perfect artist, 
 105; philosophy of style, 20, 90; 
 translation of his definition of 
 evolution, 19 ; use of cumulative 
 conjunction, 38. 
 
 Spenser, Edmund, epithalamium, 120. 
 
 Stanley, Dean, biographer, 214. 
 
 Stedman, elements of poetry, 83; 
 on the ballad, 527. 
 
 Sieele, 155. 
 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis, novelist, 
 
 346, 384- 
 
 Stewart, Dugald, criticism on Ba- 
 con, 183. , 
 
 Story of Ruth, Hebrew literature, 
 356. 
 
 Story of Tobias, Hebrew litera- 
 ture, 356, 358. 
 
 Style, deliberate, 287 ; demonstra- 
 tive, 285 ; in literature, 84 ; in his- 
 tory, kinds of, 239; is made vivid, 
 286; of love-letters, 120; of news- 
 letters, 113, 117; of open letter, 
 119; variations of, 284. 
 
 Stylists in History, 243. 
 
 Subject-matter of letters of friend- 
 ship, in; of news-letter, 114; of 
 romance, 328. 
 
 Subjectivity, of lyric, 515. 
 
 Sublimity, depends upon, 56; mean- 
 ing of, 52; sources of, 53. 
 
 Sudermann, Hermann, 454, 455. 
 
 *' Suicide Club, The," 385. 
 
 Swift, Dean, 108, 170, 172; errors 
 in wit, 76; letters of, 146; pam- 
 phlet, 171; satires of, 205; tale of 
 the tub, 340; wit of, 76. 
 
 Swinburne, prose and verse, 82. 
 
 Switzerland, history, 233. 
 
 Syle, in oration, 282. 
 
 Syllogism, in argument, 276. 
 
 Symonds, J. A., criticism on 
 Petrarch, 538; on history, 227. 
 
 Symposium, 155; Greek, 161 ; mod- 
 ern, 161. 
 
 Tallyrand, 117; correspondence of, 
 116. 
 
 Tartars, invasion of, 58. 
 
 Tasso, 401. 
 
 Tennyson, 525 ; lyric poet, 542 ; 
 platonic love, 70; preference of 
 Saxon, 17; sonnets of, 533; use 
 of foreign words, 23. 
 
 Terence, language employed by lit- 
 erary art, 3. 
 
 Terentius, Publius, 447. 
 
 Teutonic Language, an element 
 in construction, 15. 
 
 Thackeray, 381 ; author, 376. 
 
 " The Ancient Mariner," rorm"c^. 
 342- 
 
 The Essay, 108; a standard prose 
 form, 150; a. work of art, 152. 
 
INDEX 
 
 577 
 
 The Holy City, example of feeling, 
 
 74- 
 
 " The House of the Seven Gables," 
 382. 
 
 The Letter, 108; among the Greeks 
 and Latins, 125 ; in relation to 
 other literary forms, no. 
 
 "The Mill on the Floss," 351. 
 
 The News-Letter, definition of, 
 113; in relation to literary criti- 
 cism, 115. 
 
 The Official Letter, 115. 
 
 The Oration, 108. 
 
 " The Scarlet Letter," 382. 
 
 The Sermon, 108. 
 
 "The Shipwreck of John Daniel,' 
 romance, 342. 
 
 " The Tales of a Wayside Inn," 339. 
 
 "The Travels of Gulliver," ro- 
 mance, 342. 
 
 "The Voyage of Wilkins," ro- 
 mance, 342. 
 
 Theories regarding words, 9. 
 
 Thespis, 426. 
 
 Thompson's, Denman, " Old Home- 
 stead," 411. 
 
 Thucydides, oration, 295; style, 244. 
 
 Throgmartin, tracts, 170. 
 
 Tasso, 73. 
 
 Tolstoi, 387, 438; realistic writer, 
 
 Tracts, 167; history of, 168; of I9th 
 century, 173; Puritan, 169. 
 
 Tragedy, aim of, 424. 
 
 Trajan, Emperor, letters to, 142. 
 
 Travel, Fictitious, in romance, 342. 
 
 "Treasure Island," 385. 
 
 Treatment of Love, ancient and 
 modern, 73. 
 
 Treatment of Romance, 328. 
 
 Trelingham Court, in " New An- 
 tigone," 351. 
 
 Trench, observation on words, 10; 
 theories on the origin of words 
 (two), 8; words described by, 8. 
 
 Trollope, Mr., 378. 
 
 Troubadours, in France, 73. 
 
 Trial by Jury, oration, 291. 
 
 Tuckerman, Henry, criticism on 
 Bancroft, 259; criticism on Haw- 
 thorne, 382; criticism on Park- 
 man, 261. 
 
 Thucydides, historian, 126. 
 
 Turks, invasion of, 58. 
 
 Twain, Mark, wit and humor, 79. 
 
 Tyndall's monograph, 156. 
 
 Udal, tracts, 170. 
 
 United States, colonial history, 231. 
 Unity, 68; basis of, 230; in para- 
 graph, 34; of principles, i. 
 Universal Toleration, history, 238. 
 Universality of Appeal, 119. 
 University of Chicago, history, 237. 
 Utility of letters, 112. 
 
 Value of humor, 78; of Junius let- 
 ters, 144; of pictorial work, 271; 
 of wit, 77. 
 
 Variation, how secured, 24. 
 
 Vatican Library, 196. 
 
 Verbs, 12. 
 
 Verse- forms, a. 
 
 Vesuvius, eruption of, 350. 
 
 Virgil, 496; epics of, 5; poetry of, 
 66; platonic love, 70. 
 
 Virchow's monograph, 156. 
 
 " Vision of Piers Plowman," ro- 
 mance, 340. 
 
 Vividness, of style, 86. 
 
 Vocabulary of Sublime, 59. 
 
 Voorhees, Senator, oration, 291. 
 
 Wace, Robert, criticism on Pres- 
 cott. 258. 
 
 Wagner, music of, 5. 
 
 Waller, biography, 224. 
 
 Walpole, letters of, 112; memoirs 
 of, 147. 
 
 Walton, Isaac, imitator, 210. 
 
 Ward, dialogue-essay, 158. 
 
 Ward, Adolphus, criticism on Dick- 
 ens, 374. 
 
 Ward. Mrs. Humphrey. 208. 
 
 Ward's " Marcella," romance, 347. 
 
 Ward, Wilfred, dialogue-essay, 158. 
 
 Ward, William, criticism on 
 ^schylus, 441. 
 
 Warner, Charles Dudley, 211. 
 
 Washington, George, 203. 
 
 Watts, Henry, criticism on Cervan- 
 tes, 365. 
 
 Webster, Daniel, melody, 83 ; model 
 of argument, 51 ; oration by, 271 ; 
 orator, 319; result of theory, 8; 
 sincerity of, 46. 
 
 Welsh, Alfred, criticism on Macau- 
 lay. 187; criticism on Scott, 371. 
 
 Wendel, Barrett, says of para- 
 graphs, 35. 
 
578 
 
 Wesley, John, 525. 
 
 Whately, on force. 43. 
 
 Whittier, 525. 
 
 Williston, Martin, criticism on 
 Longfellow, 544. 
 
 Wilson, General James Grant, 212. 
 
 Wit, in art-content, 75 ; of different 
 peoples, 77. 
 
 Wolfe, history, 261. 
 
 Word-painting, 242. 
 
 Words, combinations, 24 ; in rela- 
 tion to literary art, 7 ; law of se- 
 lection, 23; multiplied, 9; new, 9; 
 origin of, 8; partial agreement of 
 theories, 9; particles, 14; selec- 
 tion of adjectives, 13; selection 
 
 INDEX 
 
 of nouns, n; selection of verbs, 
 12; two-fold function, n; va- 
 rious definitions of, 7. 
 
 Wordsworth, William, criticism on 
 poetry, 388. 
 
 Work of Poets, 396. 
 
 Works on letter criticism, 149. 
 
 Xavier, Francis, 59, 208. 
 Xenophon, 155; essayist, 154, 1/9; 
 
 eulogy, 162. 
 Xenophon, symposium, 160. 
 
 Zola, realistic novelist, 354; realistic 
 writer, 355. 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
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