51822 01351 3973 3 1822 01351 3973 c* DEDICATED tx> My er waes hearpan sweg, swutol sang scopes." . . . there was sound of harp. Loud the singing of the scop. 20 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 In addition to the scop, who was more or less permanently attached to the royal court or hall of noble, there was a craft of gleemen who roved from hall to hall. In the song of WidstiS we catch a glimpse of the life of a glee- man: ' Swa scriSende gesceapum hweorfaft gleomen gumena geond grunda fela." Thus roving, with shape'd songs there wander The gleemen of the people through many lands. The scop was an originator of poetry, the gleeman more often a mere repeater, although this distinction in the use of the terms was not observed in later times. The Songs of Scop and Gleeman. The subject matter of these songs was suggested by the most common experi- ences of the time. These were with war, the sea, and death. The oldest Anglo-Saxon song known is called WtdsiXfu/t the Far Traveler, and it has been preserved in the Exeter Book. This song was probably composed in the older Angle-land on the continent, and brought to England in the memories of the singers. The poem is an account of the wanderings of a gleeman over a great part of Europe. Such a song will mean little to us unless we can imagina- tively represent the circumstances under which it was sung, the long hall with its tables of feasting, drinking warriors, the firelight throwing weird shadows among the smoky rafters. The imagination of the warriors would be roused as similar experiences of their own were suggested by these lines in WidsiS's song : " Ful oft of Sam heape hwmende fleag giellende gar on grome tieode." Full oft from that host hissing flew The whistling spear on the fierce folk. THE SONGS OF SCOP AND GLEEMAN 21 The gleeman ends this song with two thoughts character- istic of the poets of the Saxon race. He shows his love for noble deeds, and he next thinks of the shortness of life, as he sings : " In mortal court his deeds are not unsung, Such as a noble man will show to men, Till all doth flit away, both life and light." A greater scop, looking at life through Saxon eyes, sings : " We are such stuff As dreams are made on ; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep." 1 Another old song, also found in the Exeter Book, is the Seafarer. We must imagine the scop recalling vivid expe- riences to our early ancestors with this song of the sea : " Hail flew in hard showers, And nothing I heard But the wrath of the waters, The icy-cold way ; At times the swan's song ; In the scream of the gannet I sought for my joy, In the moan of the sea whelp For laughter of men, In the song of the sea-mew For drinking of mead." 3 To show that love of the sea yet remains one of the characteristics of English poetry, we may quote by way of comparison a song sung more than a thousand years later, in Victoria's reign : 1 Shakespeare : The Tempest, Act IV., scene i . 2 Morley's translation, English Writers, Vol. II., p. 21. HAL. ENG. LIT. 2 22 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 " The wind is as iron that rings, The foam heads loosen and flee ; It swells and welters and swings, The pulse of the tide of the sea. " Let the wind shake our flag like a feather, Like the plumes of the foam of the sea ! In the teeth of the hard glad weather, In the blown wet face of the sea." 1 Another song from the Exeter Book is called The For- tunes of Men. It gives vivid pictures of certain phases of life among the Anglo-Saxons. The notes of the harp must have sounded sad, as the scop sang : " One shall sharp hunger slay ; One shall the storms beat down ; One be destroyed by darts, One die in war. One shall live losing The light of his eyes, Feel blindly with fingers ; And one lame of foot, With sinew-wound wearily Wasteth away, Musing and mourning, With death in his mind. One shall die by the dagger, In wrath, drenched with ale, Wild through wine, on the mead bench, Too swift with his words ; Too lightly his life Shall the wretched one lose. 1 ' 2 - The songs that we have noted are only a small fraction of scopic poetry, but they will, together with Beowulf, the greatest of them all, give a fair idea of this type of verse. 1 Swinburne's A Song in Time of Order. 8 Morley's English Writers, Vol. II., pp. 33, 34. THE SONGS OF SCOP AND GLEEMAN 23 BEOWULF Evolution of the Poem. The greatest monument of Anglo-Saxon poetry is called Beowulf, from the name of its hero. It is the oldest epic poem of the Teutonic race. Beowulf was probably a long time in process of evolution. Many different scops added new episodes to the song, altering it by expansion or contraction under the influence of the inspiration of the hour and the circum- stances of place and time. Finally, some monk or monks edited the poem, changing it in various ways, endeavoring especially to introduce into it Christian opinions. Time and Place of Composition. Critics are divided about the time and place of the composition of Beowulf. It is possible that some of the songs which enter into its framework were sung by the scop on the continent before any of our ancestors came to England ; that is, before 449 A.D. With regard to the form in which we now have the poem, Ten Brink is probably right in saying that it dates from about the beginning of the eighth century. The places mentioned in the poem seem to indicate the correctness of the following statement from Stopford Brooke : " The scenery then is laid on the coast of the North Sea and the Kattegat, the first act of the poem among the Danes in Seeland, the second among the Geats in South Sweden." The student who wishes to enter into the spirit of the poem will do well to familiarize himself with the position of these coasts, and with a description of their natural features in winter as well as in summer. Heine says of the sea which Beowulf sailed : " Before me rolleth a waste of water . . . and above me go rolling the storm clouds, the formless dark gray daughters of air, which from the 24 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 sea in cloudy buckets scoop up the water, ever wearied lifting and lift- ing, and then pour it again in the sea, a mournful, wearisome business. Over the sea, flat on his face, lies the monstrous, terrible North Wind, sighing and sinking his voice as in secret, like an old grumbler ; for once in good humor, unto the ocean he talks, and he tells her wonder- ful stories." The Subject Matter. This poem of 3 1 84 lines describes the deeds of the Teutonic hero Beowulf. Hrothgar, the King of the Danes, built a magnificent mead hall to which he gave the name of Heorot. 1 While the Danes were eat- ing and drinking their fill in this famous hall, Grendel, a monster half-human, came from the moor, burst in upon them, mangled thirty warriors, and then rushed off into the darkness. For twelve years this monster harried the warriors whenever they feasted in the hall, until the brav- est were afraid to enter it. When Beowulf heard of this, he sailed with his warriors to Heorot, and persuaded the Danes to feast with him in the hall. After they had fallen asleep there, Grendel burst in the door, seized a warrior, and devoured him in a few mouthfuls. Then he grasped Beowulf. The hero, disdaining to use a sword against the dire monster, grappled with him, and together they wrestled up and down the hall. In their mad contest they overturned the tables and made the vast hall tremble as if it were in the throes of an earthquake. Finally Beowulf, with a grip like that of thirty men, tore away the arm and shoulder of the monster, who rushed out to the marshes to die. The next night a banquet was given in fateful Heorot in honor of the hero. After the 1 The student will do well to note in his atlas the location which authorities have assigned to this hall. Thomas Arnold says : " The view of Sarrazin and Danish scholars that the site of Hrothgar's mansion must be placed in close proximity to that of Leire, near the head of the Roskilde Fiord in Zealand [Seeland] is now generally accepted." BEOWULF 25 feast, the warriors slept in the hall, but Beowulf went to the palace. He had been gone but a short time, when in rushed Grendel's mother to avenge the death of her son. She seized a warrior, the king's dearest friend, and carried him away. In the morning the king said to Beowulf : " My trusty friend yEschere is dead. . . . The cruel hag has wreaked on him her vengeance. The country folk said there were two of them, one the semblance of a woman ; the other, the specter of a man. Their haunt is in the remote land, in the crags of the wolf, the wind-beaten cliffs, and untrodden bogs, where the dismal stream plunges into the drear abyss of an awful lake, overhung with a dark and grizzly wood rooted down to the water's edge, where a lurid flame plays nightly on the surface of the flood and there lives not the man who knows its depth ! So dreadful is the place that the hunted stag, hard driven by the hounds, will rather die on the bank than find a shelter there. A place of terror ! When the wind rises, the waves mingle hurly-burly with the clouds, the air is stifling and rumbles with thunder. To thee alone we look for relisf." * This selection shows why the poetry of wild nature was largely a growth of later times. Ignorance peopled unknown places with monsters. Weird scenery, which might to-day move the pen of the poet, was then looked upon as the dwelling place of evil spirits. The very mists took the shape of a Grendel stalking over the moor. Beowulf followed the bloody trail of Grendel's mother to the terrible flood. Undaunted by the dragons and serpents that made their home within the depths, he grasped a sword and plunged beneath the waves. After sinking what seemed to him a day's space, he saw Grendel's mother, who came forward to meet him. She dragged him into her dwelling, where there was no water, and the fight began. The issue was for a time doubtful, 1 Earle's translation. 26 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 but at last Beowulf ran her through with a gigantic sword, and she fell dead upon the floor of her dwelling. A little distance away, he saw the dead body of Grendel. The hero cut off the heads of the monster and his mother and hastened away to Hrothgar's court. After receiving much praise and many presents, Beowulf sailed homeward with his warriors, where he ruled as king for fifty years. The closing part of the poem tells how one of Beowulf's subjects stole some of the treasure which a firedrake had for three hundred years been guarding in a cavern. The enraged monster with his fiery breath laid waste the land. Beowulf sought the dragon in his cavern and after a terri- ble fight slew the monster, but was himself mortally wounded, and died after seeing in the cavern the heaps of treasure which he had won for his people. So passed away the hero of the earliest epic poem of any branch of the Teutonic race. Beowulf affords valu- able insight into the characteristics of that age. We are given the events of an entire day in the life of our fore- fathers. In Beowulf 'we look upon the scenery with which they were familiar ; we are brought face to face with their hopes and fears, their ideas of duty, their manner of regarding life, and the way they took their exit from it. THE CEDMONIAN CYCLE Caedmon. In 597 A.D. St. Augustine began to teach the Christian religion to the Anglo-Saxons. The results of this teaching were shown in the subsequent literature. In what is known as Caedmon's Paraphrase, the next great Anglo-Saxon epic, there is no decrease in the warlike spirit. Instead of Grendel we have Satan as the arch- enemy against whom the battle rages. THE C^DMONIAN CYCLE Caedmon, who died in 680, was until middle life a lay- man attached to the monastery at Whitby, on the north- east coast of Yorkshire. Since the Paraphrase has been ROINS OF WHITBY ABBEY attributed to Caedmon on the authority of the Saxon his- torian Bede, born 673, we shall quote Bede himself on the subject, from his famous Ecclesiastical History : " Caedmon, having lived in a secular habit until he was well advanced in years, had never learned anything of versifying ; for which reason, being sometimes at entertainments, where it was agreed for the sake of mirth that all present should sing in their turns, when he saw the instrument come toward him, he rose up from table and returned home. ' Having done so at a certain time, and gone out of the house where the entertainment was, to the stable, where he had to take care of the horses that night, he there composed himself to rest at the proper time ; a person appeared to him in his sleep, and, saluting him by his name, said, 'Caedmon, sing some song to me. 1 He answered, 'I can- not sing ; for that was the reason why I left the entertainment, and retired to this place, because I could not sing. 1 The other who talked 28 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 to him replied, 'However, you shall sing. 1 'What shall I sing?' re- joined he. ' Sing the beginning of created beings, 1 said the other. Hereupon he presently began to sing verses to the praise of God." Caedmon remembered the poetry which he had com- posed in his dreams and he repeated it in the morning to the inmates of the monastery. They concluded that the gift of song was divinely given and had him enter the monastery and devote his time to poetry. Of Caedmon's work Bede says : " He sang the creation of the world, the origin of man, and all the history of Genesis : and made many verses on the departure of the children of Israel out of Egypt, and their entering into the land of promise, with many other histories from Holy Writ ; the incarnation, passion, resurrection of our Lord, and his ascension into heaven ; the coming of the Holy Ghost, and the preaching of the Apostles ; also the terror of future judgment, the horror of the pains of hell, and the delights of heaven." The Authorship and Subject Matter of the Caedmonian Cycle. The first edition of the Paraphrase was published in 1655 by Junius, an acquaintance of Milton. Junius attributed the entire Paraphrase to Caedmon, on the author- ity of the above quotations from Bede. The Paraphrase is really composed of three separate poems : the Genesis, the Exodus, and the Daniel ; and these are probably the works of different writers. Crit- ics are not agreed whether any of these poems in their present form can be ascribed to Caedmon. The Genesis shows too much difference in its parts to be produced by one author, but some portions of this poem may be Caedmon's own work. The Genesis, like Milton's Paradise Lost, has for its subject matter the fall of man and its con- sequences. The Exodus, the work of an unknown writer, is a poem of much originality on the escape of the Chil- THE OEDMONIAN CYCLE 2Q dren of Israel from Egypt, their passage through the Red Sea, and the destruction of Pharaoh's host. The Daniel, an uninteresting poem of 765 lines, paraphrases portions of the book of Daniel, relating to Nebuchadnezzar's dreams, the fiery furnace, and Belshazzar's feast. Characteristics of the Poetry. No matter who wrote the Paraphrase, we have the poetry, a fact which critics too often overlook. Though the narrative sometimes closely follows the Biblical account in Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, there are frequent unfettered outbursts of the imagination. The Exodus rings with the warlike notes of the victorious Teutonic race. The Genesis possesses special interest for the student, since many of its strong passages show a marked likeness to certain parts of Milton's Paradise Lost (p. 202). Some critics have concluded that Milton must have been familiar with the Caedmonian Genesis. It will be instructive to note the parallelism between the following passages from the two poems. The earlier poem pictures the home of the fallen angels as a place of "... eternal night and sulphur pains, Fulness of fire, dread cold, reek, and red flames." It is further described as a land " That was without light and full of flame." * With this description we may compare these lines from Milton : "A dungeon horrible, on all sides round, As one great furnace flamed ; yet from those flames No light ; but rather darkness visible. ... a fiery deluge, fed With ever burning sulphur unconsumed." 2 1 Morley's translation. 2 Paradise Lost, Book I., lines 61-69. 30 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 The older poet sings with forceful simplicity : "Then comes, at dawn, the east wind, keen with frost." Milton writes : " . . . the parching air Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire." 1 In the Genesis, Satan's description of his new home is as strong as in the Paradise Lost : "... Above, below, Here is vast fire, and never have I seen More loathly landscape ; never fade the flames, Hot over Hell." Here is the parallel passage from Milton : " Seest thou yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild, The seat of desolation, void of light, Save what the glimmering of these livid flames Casts pale and dreadful ? " 2 When Satan rises on his wings to cross the flaming vault, the Genesis gives in one line an idea which Milton expands into two and a half : " Swang Saet fyr on twa feondes crasfte/' Struck the fire asunder with fiendish craft. "... on each hand the flames, Driven backward, slope their pointing spires, and, roll'd In billows, leave i' th 1 midst a horrid vale." 8 It is not certain that Milton ever knew of the existence of the Caedmonian Genesis ; for he was blind three years before it was published. But whether he knew of it or not, it is a striking fact that the temper of the Teutonic mind during a thousand years should have changed so 1 Paradise Lost, II., 594. * Ibid., I., 180-183. 8 Ii>id -> ! 222-224. THE CYNEWULF CYCLE 31 little toward the choice and treatment of the subject of an epic, and that the first great poem known to have been written on English soil should in so many points have anticipated the greatest epic of the English race. THE CYNEWULF CYCLE Cynewulf 's Work. Cynewulf is the only great Anglo- Saxon poet who affixed his name to certain poems and thus settled their authorship. We know nothing of his life except what we infer from his poetry. He was born near the middle of the eighth century, and it is not unlikely that he passed part of his youth as a thane of some noble. It is improbable that he was a wandering gleeman. He became a man of wide learning, well skilled in "word- craft." Such learning could then hardly have been ac- quired outside of some monastery whither he may have retired. He shows a poet's love for the beauty of the sun and the moon (fieofon-condelle\ aethelings among the constellations, for the dew and the rain, for the strife of the waves (holm-Brace^ for the steeds of the sea (sund- hengestas), and for the " all-green " (eal-grene) earth. The Christ^ the Elene, the Juliana, and the Fates of the Apostles contain his runes, which prove that he is the au- thor of these poems. The Christ is a poem on the Savior's Nativity, Ascension, and Judgment of the world at the last day. No other Anglo-Saxon poet better represents the essence and spirit of Christianity. The description of the Last Judgment is specially powerful and dramatic : " Lo ! the fire blast, flaming far, fierce and hungry as a sword, Whelms the world withal ! " > * Brooke's translation. 32 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 Cynewulf closes the poem with a picture of a happy land. This conception would never have occurred to a poet of the warlike Saxon race before the introduction of Christianity. "... Hunger is not there nor thirst, Sleep nor heavy sickness, nor the scorching of the Sun, Neither cold nor care." Elene, the story of the finding of the Cross, is a strong dramatic poem. It tells how Constantine, frightened at the number of his foes, falls asleep and dreams of seeing the Cross with the inscription : " With this shalt thou conquer." He then has a cross made and borne at the head of his army, which is victorious. Seized by a desire to recover the true Cross, he sends his mother, Elene, with a large force to the Holy Land. The story pro- ceeds in a dramatic way to the finding of three crosses far beneath the surface of the earth. In order to ascertain which is the Holy Rood, a dead man is brought in contact with the first cross, but the watchers see no sign of its power. The second is tried with like result, but when he touches the third, he is immediately restored to life. The Juliana also has dramatic elements. Juliana is a beautiful maiden, whom her father tries to compel to marry a persecutor of the Christians. She refuses and is thrown into prison, where a being in the guise of an angel appears and bids her worship her lover's pagan gods. She prays, and her prayer compels her visitor to assume his proper fiendish shape and gives her complete power over him. The story of his discomfiture and the task to which she subjects him, introduces an element of humor. The action then proceeds to her martyrdom. Andreas and Phoenix. Cynewulf is probably the author of Andreas, an unsigned poem of special excellence and CHARACTERISTICS OF ANGLO-SAXON POETRY 33 dramatic power. The poem describes Andrew's voyage to Mermedonia to deliver St. Matthew. The Savior in disguise is the pilot. The dialogue between him and Andrew is specially fine. The saint has all the admira- tion of a Viking for his unknown Pilot, who stands at the helm in a gale and manages the vessel as he would a thought. Cynewulf is also the probable author of the Phoenix t which . is in part an adaptation of an old Latin poem. The Phoenix is the only Saxon poem which gives us the rich scenery of the South, in place of the stern northern landscape. He thus describes the land where this fabulous bird dwells : " Calm and fair this glorious field, flashes there the sunny grove ; Happy is the holt of trees, never withers fruitage there. Bright are there the blossoms. . . . In that home the hating foe houses not at all, Neither sleep nor sadness, nor the sick man's weary bed, Nor the winter-whirling snow. . . . . . . but the liquid streamlets, Wonderfully beautiful, from their wells upspringing, Softly lap the land with their lovely floods." 1 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ANGLO-SAXON POETRY Martial Spirit. The love of war is very marked in Anglo-Saxon poetry. This characteristic might have been expected in the songs of a race that had withstood the well-nigh all-conquering arm of the vast Roman Empire. Our study of Beowulf has already shown the intensity of the martial spirit in heathen times. These lines from 1 Brooke's translation. 34 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 the Fight at Finnsburg, dating from about the same time as Beowulf, have only the flash of the sword to lighten their gloom. They introduce the raven, for whom the Saxon felt it his duty to provide food on the battlefield : "... hraefen wandrode sweart and sealo-brun ; swurd-leoma stod swylce eal Finns-buruh fyrenu wasre." . . . the raven wandered Swart and sallow-brown ; the sword-flash stood As if all Finnsburg were afire. The love of war is almost as marked in the Christian poetry. There are vivid pictures of battle against the heathen and the enemies of God. A selection from one of the poems of the Caedmonian Cycle will show this : " Helmeted men went from the holy burgh, At the first reddening of dawn, to fight : Loud stormed the din of shields. For that rejoiced the lank wolf in the wood, And the black raven, slaughter-greedy bird." 1 The poems often describe battle as if it -was an enjoy- able game. They mention the " play of the spear " and speak of "putting to sleep with the sword," as if the din of war was in their ears a slumber melody. One of the latest of Anglo-Saxon poems, The Battle of Brunanburh, 937, is a famous example of war poetry. We quote a few lines from Tennyson's excellent translation : " Grimly with swords that were sharp from the grindstone, Fiercely we hack'd at the flyers before us. Five young kings put asleep by the sword-stroke. Seven strong earls of the army of Anlaf Fell on the war-field, numberless numbers. 1 Morley's translation. CHARACTERISTICS OF ANGLO-SAXON POETRY 35 " Slender reason had He to be glad of The clash of the war glaive, The wielding of weapons The play that they play'd with The children of Edward." Love of the Sea. The Anglo-Saxon fondness for the sea has been noted, together with the fact that this char- acteristic has been transmitted to more recent English poetry. Our forefathers rank among the best seamen that the world has ever known. Had they not loved to dare an unknown sea, English literature might not have existed, and the sun might never have risen on any English flag. The scop sings thus of Beowulf's adventure on the North Sea : "Swoln were the surges, of storms 'twas the coldest, Dark grew the night, and northern the wind, Rattling and roaring, rough were the billows." * In the Seafarer, the scop also sings : " My mind now is set, My heart's thought, on wide waters, The home of the whale ; It wanders away Beyond limits of land. And stirs the mind's longing To travel the way that is trackless." 2 In the Andreas, the poet speaks of the ship in one of the most charming of Saxon similes : "Foaming Ocean beats our steed : full of speed this boat is ; Fares along foam-throated, flieth on the wave, Likest to a bird." 8 1 Brooke's translation. 2 Morley's translation. 3 Brooke's translation. 36 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 Some of the most striking Saxon epithets are applied to the sea. We may instance such a compound as dr-ge-bland (dr, "oar"; blendan, "to blend"), which conveys the idea of the companionship of the oar with the sea. From this compound modern poets have borrowed their " oar-dis- turbed sea," "oard sea," "oar-blending sea," and "oar- wedded sea." The Anglo-Saxon poets call the sun rising or setting in the sea the mere-candel. In Beowulf, mere-strata, "sea-streets," are spoken of as if they were the easily traversed avenues of a town. Figures of Rhetoric. A special characteristic of Anglo- Saxon poetry is the rarity of similes. In Homer they are frequent, but Anglo-Saxon verse is too abrupt and rapid in the succession of images to employ the expanded simile. The long poem of Beowulf contains only five similes, and these are of the shorter kind. Two of them, the comparison of the light in Grendel's dwelling to the beams of the sun, and of a vessel to a flying bird, have been given in the original Anglo-Saxon on pp. 15, 17. Other similes compare the light from Grendel's eyes to a flame, and the nails on his fingers to steel, while the most complete simile says that the sword, when bathed in the monster's poisonous blood, melted like ice. On the other hand, this poetry uses many direct and forcible metaphors, such as " wave-ropes " for ice, the "whale-road" or "swan-road" for the sea, the "foamy- necked floater " for a ship, the " war-adder " for an arrow, the " bone-house " for body. The sword is said to sing a war song, the slain to be put to sleep with the sword, the sun to be a candle, the flood to boil. War is appropriately called the sword-game. Parallelisms. The repetition of the same ideas in slightly differing form, known as parallelism, is frequent. CHARACTERISTICS OF ANGLO-SAXON POETRY 37 The author wished to make certain ideas emphatic, and he repeated them with varying phraseology. The first sight of land is important to the sailor, and hence the poet used four different terms for the shore that met Beowulf's eyes on his voyage to Hrothgar : land, brimclifu, beorgas, s&- ncessas (land, sea-cliffs, mountains, promontories). This passage from the Phoenix shows how repetition emphasizes the absence of disagreeable things : "... there may neither snow nor rain, Nor the furious air of frost, nor the flare of fire, Nor the headlong squall of hail, nor the hoar frost's fall, Nor the burning of the sun, nor the bitter cold, Nor the weather over-warm, nor the winter shower, Do their wrong to any wight." 1 The general absence of cold is here made emphatic by mentioning special cold things: "snow," "frost," "hail," "hoar frost," "bitter cold," "winter shower." The ab- sence of heat is emphasized in the same way. Saxon contrasted with Celtic Imagery. A critic rightly says : " The gay wit of the Celt would pour into the song of a few minutes more phrases of ornament than are to be found in the whole poem of Beowulf." In three lines of an old Celtic death song, we find three similes : " Black as the raven was his brow ; Sharp as a razor was his spear ; White as lime was his skin." We look in Anglo-Saxon poetry in vain for a touch like this : " Sweetly a bird sang on a pear tree above the head of Guenn before they covered him with a turf." 2 1 Brooke's translation. 2 LlywarcKs Lament for his Son Gwenn. HAL. ENG. LIT. 3 38 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 If the Saxon repeats, the Celt exaggerates : u More yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain." 1 Sometimes, as in the foregoing passage, the Celtic exag- geration is pleasing, but it is often ridiculous, as in the account of the fight between the white-horned and brown bulls. We are told that the "sky was darkened by the turf thrown up by their feet and by the foam from their mouths. The province rang with their roar and the in- habitants hid in caves or climbed the hills." We might expect from this the story of the Kilkenny cats. In order to produce a poet able to write both A Mid- summer Night's Dream and Hamlet, the Celtic imagination must blend with the Anglo-Saxon seriousness. As we shall see, this was accomplished by the Norman conquest ANGLO-SAXON PROSE When and where written. We have seen that poetry normally precedes prose. The principal part of Anglo- Saxon poetry had been produced before much prose was written. The most productive poetic period was between 650 and 825. Near the close of the eighth century, the Danes began their plundering expeditions into England. By 800 they had destroyed the great northern monasteries, like the one at Whitby, where Caedmon is said to have composed the first religious song. The home of poetry was in the north of England, and these Danish inroads almost completely silenced the singers. What prose there 1 Guest's Mabinogion, p. 219. BEDE ALFRED 39 was in the north was principally in Latin. On the other hand, the Saxon prose was produced chiefly in the south of England. The most glorious period of Anglo-Saxon prose was during Alfred's reign, 871-901. Bede. This writer (673-735) has slight claims to be considered in a history of English literature, for all of his extant work is in Latin. He is said to have translated the Gospel of St. John into Saxon, but the translation is lost. He wrote in Latin on a vast range of subjects, from the Scriptures to natural science, and from grammar to history. He has given a list of thirty-seven works of which he is the author. His most important work is the Ecclesiastical History,, which is really a history of England from Julius Caesar's invasion to 731. The quotation from Bede's work relative to Caedmon (p. 27) shows that Bede could relate things simply and well. He passed a great part of his life at the monastery of Jarrow on the Tyne. Alfred. A king of England was its greatest Anglo- Saxon prose writer. Alfred, who reigned from 871 to 901, is rightly surnamed the Great from every point of view. Although the most of his works are called translations from the Latin, he has yet left the stamp of his own origi- nality and sterling sense upon them all. He desired to give his people text-books on all important subjects, and he shrank from no labor in accomplishing his purpose. He consulted all accessible authorities and made altera- tions and additions to suit his plan. He prepared a text-book of geography in this way. He found a Latin work by Orosius, who was a Spanish Chris- tian of the fifth century. Here was a mass of material, much of which was unsuited to Alfred's purposes, and so he omitted, changed, and added. He interviewed travelers from the far North and inserted some original matter. 40 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 These additions are the best material in the book, and they are not uninteresting reading now. The work is known as Alfred's Orosius. There was extreme necessity for these text-books, since none existed in the native tongue. He translated Pope Gregory's Pastoral Rule in order to show the clergy how to teach and care for their flocks. Alfred's own words at the beginning of the volume show how great was the need for such work as he was doing. Speaking of the clergy, he says : " There were very few on this side Hutnber who would know how to render their services in English, or so much as translate an epistle out of Latin into English ; and I ween that not many would be on the other side Humber. So few of them were there, that I cannot think of so much as a single one, south of Thames, when I took to the realm." 1 Alfred produced a work on moral philosophy by alter- ing and amending Boethius's De Consolation* Philosophies. Boethius was a Roman, who was thrown into prison and wrongfully executed about 525 A.D. This work teaches that a wise Power rules the world, that a fuller knowledge of untoward events would reveal their wisdom, and that temporal things are of slight worth in comparison with eternal welfare. A text-book of English history was made by translating portions of Bede's Ecclesiastical History from the original Latin. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This is the first history of any branch of the Teutonic people in their own tongue. The Chronicle has come down to us in several different texts, according as it was compiled or copied at differ- ent monasteries. The Chronicle was probably begun in 1 Earle's translation. THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE 41, Alfred's reign. The entries relating to earlier events were copied from Bede's Ecclesiastical History and from other Latin authorities. The Chronicle contains chiefly those events which each year impressed the clerical compilers as the most important in the history of the nation. This work is a fountain head to which writers of the history of those times must turn. A few extracts (translated) will show its character: A.D. 449. "This year . . . Hengist and Horsa, invited by Vorti- gern, King of Britons, landed in Britain, on the shore which is called Wappidsfleet ; at first in aid of the Britons, but afterwards they fought against them." 806. " This year the moon was eclipsed on the Kalends of Septem- ber; and Eardulf, King of the Northumbrians, was driven from his kingdom ; and Eanbert, Bishop of Hexham, died." Sometimes the narrative is extremely vivid. Those who know the difficulty of describing anything impressively in a few words will realize the excellence of this portraiture of William the Conqueror : 1087. " If any would know what manner of man King William was, the glory that he obtained, and of how many lands he was lord ; then will we describe him as we have known him. . . . He was mild to those good men who loved God, but severe beyond measure to those who withstood his will. ... So also was he a very stern and a wrath- ful man, so that none durst do anything against his will, and he kept in prison those earls who acted against his pleasure. He removed bishops from their sees, and abbots from their offices, and he imprisoned thanes, and at length he spared not his own brother, Odo. . . . Amongst other things, the good order that William established is not to be forgotten ; it was such that any man, who was himself aught, might travel over the kingdom with a bosom-full of gold, unmolested ; and no man durst kill another. . . . He made large forests for the deer, and enacted laws therewith, so that whoever killed a hart or a hind should be blinded . . . and he loved the tall stags as if he were their father." 42 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 The Chronicle continues until 1 1 54, when its last entry was made to record the death of King Stephen. The most flourishing period of Anglo-Saxon poetry was between 650 and 825 A.D. It was produced for the most part in the north of England, which was overrun by the Danes about 800. These marauders destroyed many of the monasteries and silenced the voices of the singers. Among the poems of this age, we may emphasize : (i) the shorter scopic pieces, of which the Far Traveler, The Seafarer, The Fortunes of Men, and The Battle of Brunanburh are important examples ; (2) Beowulf, the greatest Anglo-Saxon epic poem, which was probably composed on the continent and brought to England in the memories of the singers ; (3) the C&dmonian Cycle of scriptural paraphrases, some of which have Miltonic quali- ties ; and (4) the Cynewulf Cycle, which shows the most variety and lyrical excellence. The subject matter of the poetry is principally war, the sea, and religion. The martial spirit and love of the sea, thus early shown, are typical of the nation that has raised her flag in every clime. The chief qualities of the poetry are earnestness, somberness, the consciousness of the approach of the "inevitable hour," and strength rather than delicacy or melody. Parallelisms and strong metaphorical expressions abound. Anglo-Saxon prose was written chiefly in the southern part of England. The golden period of prose coincides with Alfred's reign, 871-901, and he is the greatest prose writer. His translations of Latin text-books for his peo- ple contain excellent additions by him. The Anglo-Saxon SUMMARY 43 Chronicle is an important record of contemporaneous events for the historian. There are also the Homilies and Colloquium of ^Ifric, a tenth century prose writer; but the prose as a whole is far inferior to the poetry. Anglo-Saxon should be studied not only because it is the foundation of the language in which Shakespeare wrote, but also for its own intrinsic merits. We can point to few other literatures which owe less to outside influences, or which at a like stage in the development of the race possessed as much power. A literature which could accomplish so much under such unfavorable conditions might justly have awakened great expectations. REQUIRED READINGS FOR CHAPTER I HISTORICAL In connection with the progress of literature, students should obtain for themselves a general idea of contemporary historical events from the pages specified in any of the following named works : Gardiner's Students History of England, pp. 1-96; Green's Short History of the English People, Chap. I. ; Underwood-Guest's A Hand- book of English History, pp. 35-129; Guerber's Story of the English, pp. 31-76; Robertson's Making of the English Nation, pp. 7-78 (Oxford Manuals of English History} ; Traill's Social England, Vol. I., pp. 116-230. LITERARY The student who is not familiar with the original Anglo-Saxon should read the translations specified below : Scopic Poetry. 1 Widsift or the Far Traveler, translated in Mor- ley's English Writers, Vol. II., pp. i-n. 1 In his Education of the Central Nervous System, Chaps. VII.-X., the author has endeavored to give 'some special directions for securing definite ideas in the study of poetry. 44 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 The Seafarer, translated in Morley, II., 21-26, or in Morley's Illus- trations of English Religion, pp. 13-15, or in Brooke's English Litera- ture from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest, pp. 311, 312, or in Brooke's History of Early English Literature, pp. 362, 363. The Fortunes of Men, translated in Morley's English Writers, II., pp. 32-37, or in Morley's Shorter English Poems, pp. 8-u. Battle of Brunanburh, Tennyson's translation. What light do these poems throw on (a) the life of the scop ? (b) the subject matter of his songs? (c) the life and ideals of the Anglo-Saxons? Beowulf. This important poem should be read entire in one of the following translations : Earle's The Deeds of Beowulf, Done into Modern Prose (Clarendon Press) ; Lumsden's Beowulf, an Old English Poem, Translated into Modern Rhymes ; Morris and Wyatt's The Tale of Beowulf', Hall's Beowulf, Translated into Modern Metres (Student's edition, paper, 30 cents). Morley's English Writers, I., 278-310, and Brooke's History of Early English Literature, pp. 26-73, contain trans- lations of many of the best parts of Beowulf. How does the sea figure in the action of the poem? Name as many spithets as possible applied to the sea. How does nature figure in the poem? What difference is there in the treatment of nature in the poetry of to-day? What glimpses are given of the life of women? Describe the three funerals in Beowulf. Is there any analogy between the conflict of natural forces in the Norseland and Beowulf's fight with Grendel ? In what ways does the poem show the ideals of our fore- fathers? Does the poem teach any ethical lesson? The Caedmonian Cycle. This has been translated by Thorpe, but the translation is out of print. The student. may find some of the strongest passages in Morley's English Writers, II., 81-101, or in Mor- ley's Illustrations of English Religion, pp. 5-9, or in Brooke's History of Early English Literature, pp. 290-340. Compare these selections with the first book of Paradise Lost, and note any likeness in imagery and thought. Did the introduction of Christianity alter the character of the Saxon mind, or merely change the direction of its energies? Quote passages from the Ccedmonian Cycle to prove your conclusion. Compare this Cycle with Beowulf. The Cynewulf Cycle. Many fine selections are translated in Mor- ley's English Writers, II., 206-241 ; in Brooke's History of Early English Literature, pp. 371-443 ; in Brooke's English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest, pp. 163-202 ; and in the Exeter Book, translated by Israel Gollancz for the Early English Text Society. READING REFERENCES 45 What new qualities are added to Anglo-Saxon poetry in this Cycle? What old qualities are retained? Does the poetry seem more modern in any respect? Why is the Phoenix (Brooke's History of Early Eng- lish Literature, pp. 428-430; Gollancz's Exeter Book, Part I., pp. 201- 241) remarkable? General Questions on Anglo-Saxon Poetry. What most striking passages (a) in Beowulf, (b) elsewhere, show the Saxon love of war and of the sea? Instance the most striking parallelisms found in your readings. Give a list of vivid metaphors. What conspicuous differences do you find between Anglo-Saxon and old Celtic literature? (Morley's English Writers, I., 165-239, gives a sufficient number of selections from old Celtic literature to enable the student to answer this question. See also this volume, p. 37.) What excellences and defects seem to you most pronounced in Anglo-Saxon verse? Prose. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bede's Ecclesiastical His- tory are both translated in one volume of Bohn's Antiquarian Library. The most interesting part of Bede for the student of literature is the chapter relating to Caedmon (Chap. XXIV., pp. 217-220). In the Chronicle, read the entries for the years 871, 878, 897, 975, 1087, and 1137. What is there of interest in these selections? Why is the Chronicle specially valuable for the historian ? The qualities of Alfred's prose maybe seen in the passages translated in Brooke's English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest, pp. 221-241, and in Earle's Anglo-Saxon Literature, pp. 186- 206. A translation of Alfred's Orosius entire is given in Pauli's Life of Alfred (Bohn's Antiquarian Library). The most interesting part of Orosius is the original matter describing the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, pp. 249-255. What guided all Alfred's efforts in literature? What qualities are most manifest in his prose ? Why is Anglo-Saxon poetry so vastly superior to the prose ? WORKS FOR CONSULTATION AND FURTHER STUDY (OPTIONAL) Ramsay 's.The Foundations of England. Freeman's Old English History. Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons. 46 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 Grant Allen's Anglo-Saxon England. Green's History of the English People. Green's Making of England. Green's Conquest of England. Ten Brink's Early English Literature, Vol. I., pp. 1-115. Brooke's History of Early English Literature to the Accession of King Alfred, 500 pp., contains many metrical translations of specimens of the best Anglo-Saxon poetry. Brooke's English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest, 338 pp. Earle's Anglo-Saxon Literature. Morley's English Writers, Vols. I. and II., contains translations of many fine passages in Anglo-Saxon literature. Azarias's The Development of English Literature. Taine's English Literature, Book I., Chap. I. Jusserand's Literary History of. the English People from the Origins to the Renaissance, pp. 3-93. Arnold's Notes on Beowulf. The Exeter Book, edited and translated by Gollancz. Gurteen's The Epic of the Fall of Man : A Comparative Study of Ccedmon, Dante, and Milton. Bosworth and Waring's Anglo-Saxon Gospels. Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England, and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, i vol., translated by Giles in Bonn's Antiquarian Library. Bohn's Six Old English Chronicles. Mabinogion (a collection of Welsh fairy tales and romances), trans- lated by Lady Charlotte Guest. Sidney Lanier's The Boy^s Mabinogion. Cook's 77/i? Christ of Cynewulf. (The introduction of 97 pages gives a valuable account of the life and writings of Cynewulf.) CHAPTER II FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066, TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 The Norman Conquest. The overthrow of the Saxon rule in England by William the Conqueror in 1066 was an event of vast importance to English literature. The Normans (Norsemen or Northmen), as they were called, a term which shows their northern extraction, were originally of the same blood as the English race. They settled in France in the ninth century, married French wives, and adopted the French language. In 1066 their leader, Duke William, crossed the English Channel with an army, won the battle of Hastings, and became King of England. Characteristics of the Normans. The intermixture of Teutonic and French blood had given to the Normans the best qualities of both races. The Norman was nimble-witted, highly imaginative, and full of northern energy. The Saxon possessed dogged perseverance, good common sense, if he had long enough to think, and but little imagination. Some one has well said that the union of Norman with Saxon was like joining the swift spirit of the eagle to the strong body of the ox, or, again, that the Saxon furnished the dough, and the Norman the yeast. Had it not been for the blending of these neces- sary qualities in one race, English literature could not have become the first in the world. We see the char- acteristics of both the Teuton and the Norman in Shake- 47 48 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 speare's greatest plays. A pure Saxon could not have turned from Hamlet's soliloquy to write: "Where the bee sucks, there suck I." 1 CHANGES WROUGHT IN THE LANGUAGE The Emergence of Modern English. The productions of English authors during the three centuries after the Norman Conquest are of more philological than literary interest. The student should note the principal changes in the language because the relation between literature and its medium of expression is specially intimate. A great literature demands a rich vocabulary capable of expressing delicate shades of difference in thought and feeling. A musician may possess the highest type of ability, but if he is compelled to perform on a defective instrument, his music will show the shortcomings of its vehicle of expression. The period of growth of a litera- ture and its language cannot be neglected by one who wishes a broad comprehension of the literary masterpieces alone. Modern English literature did not suddenly make its appearance like the fabled roses which sprang full-blown wherever the feet of Venus touched the soil. The lan- guage in which Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote was formed in a conflict in which no quarter was given or asked. Two great languages, the Saxon and the French, struggled for the mastery. The contest terminated with the survival of the fittest expressions from each. In the same ranks beside the Saxon words "mother" and "home," stand the French "duty" and "family." 1 The Tempest, V, I. CHANGES WROUGHT IN THE LANGUAGE 49 The student will the more intelligently comprehend the great change in his mother tongue if he looks at the transformation as an evolutionary process. Zoology shows that when animal organs become unnecessary, they tend to atrophy and to pass into the rudimentary stage or disappear entirely, and that those organs best adapted to further the welfare of the animal have de- veloped. The reason why other branches of the Teu- tonic language have not developed so far as English is because their environment was not so favorable, since both French and Latin exercised comparatively small influence in their growth. Three Languages used in England. For three hundred years after the Norman Conquest, three languages were widely used in England. The Normans introduced French, which was the language of the court and the aristocracy. William the Conqueror brought over many Norman priests, who used Latin almost exclusively in their serv- ice. The influence of this book Latin is generally under- estimated by those who do not appreciate the power of the church. The Domesday survey shows that in 1085 the church, with her dependents, held more than one third of some counties. In addition to the Latin and the French (which was it- self principally of Latin origin), there was, thirdly, the Anglo-Saxon, to which the middle and the lower classes of the English stubbornly adhered. The Loss of Inflections. Anglo-Saxon was a language with changing endings, like modern German. If a Saxon wished to say "good gifts," he had to have the proper case endings for both the adjective and the noun, and his expression would have been gode giefa. For "the good gifts," he would have inflected "the" and made the 50 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 case ending of " good " different from what it was when " good " was not preceded by an article, and he would have said, da godan giefa. The Norman Conquest helped to lop off these endings, which German has never entirely lost. We no longer decline articles or ordinary adjectives. Instead of hav- ing our attention taken up with thinking of the proper endings, the mental powers are left free to attend to the thought rather than to the vehicle of its expression. With the exception of a few nouns like ox, oxen, or mouse, mice, the sole inflection of nouns is the addition of 's, s, or es for the possessive and the plural. Our pronouns are still declined, and mistakes are frequent in their use. It should be emphasized that Anglo-Saxon had already begun to lose some of its inflections before the Conquest, and that the coming of the Normans merely hastened a development which would, to a considerable degree, have ultimately taken place without their influence. Even with this influence, the dropping of inflections was not the work of a year, but of several centuries. Change in Gender. Before any one could speak Anglo- Saxon correctly, he had first to learn the fanciful genders that were attached to nouns : " trousers " was feminine, "childhood" masculine, "child" neuter. The Norman Conquest helped to give the natural genders to objects. The German still retains these fanciful genders. A critic thus illustrates the use of genders in that language : " A German gentleman writes a masculine letter of feminine love to a neuter young lady with a feminine pen and feminine ink on masculine sheets of neuter paper, and incloses it in a masculine envelope with a feminine address to his darling, though neuter, Gretchen. He has a mas- culine head, a feminine hand, and a neuter heart." CHANGES WROUGHT IN THE LANGUAGE 51 Prefixes, Suffixes, and Self-explaining Compounds. The Norman Conquest was instrumental in causing the English tongue to lose much of its power of using pre- fixes. A prefix joined to a well-known word changes its meaning and renders the coining of a new term unneces- sary. The Anglo-Saxons, by the use of prefixes, formed ten compounds from their verb flowan, "to flow." Of these, only one survives in our " overflow." From sittati, "to sit," thirteen compounds were thus formed, but every one has perished. A larger percentage of suffixes was retained, and we still have many words like "wholesome- ness," "child-hood," "sing-er." The power of forming self-explaining compounds was largely lost. The Saxon compounded the words for " tree " and " worker," and said treow-zvyrhta, " tree- wright," but we now make use of the single word " carpenter." We have replaced the Saxon boc-craft, "book-art," by "literature"; Tzfen-gldm, "evening-gloom," by " twilight " ; mere-swln, " sea-swine," by " porpoise " ; eag-wrcec, " eye-rack," by " pain in the eye " ; leornung- cild, "learning-child," by "pupil." The title of an old work, Ayen-bite of In-wit, " Again-bite of In-wit," was translated into " Remorse of Conscience." Grund-weall and word-hord were displaced by "foundation" and "vo- cabulary." The German language still retains this power and calls a glove a " hand-shoe," a thimble a " finger- hat," and rolls up such clumsy compound expressions as Unabhangigkeitserklarung. We might lament this loss more if we did not remember that Shakespeare found our language ample for his needs, and that a considerable number of the old compounds still survive, as home-stead, man-hood, in-sight, break-fast, house-hold, horse-back, ship-man, and sea-shore. 52 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 Introduction of New Words and Loss of Old Ones. Since the Normans were for some time the governing race, while many of the Saxons occupied comparatively menial positions, numerous French words indicative of rank, power, science, luxury, and fashion were introduced. Many titles were derived from a French source. English thus obtained words like "sovereign," "royalty," "duke," " marquis," " mayor," and " clerk." Many terms of govern- ment are from the French, for instance, "parliament," "peers," "commons." The language of law abounds in French terms, like "damage," "trespass," "circuit," "judge," "jury," "verdict," "sentence," "counsel," "prisoner." Many words used in war, architecture, and medicine also have a French origin. Examples are "fort," "arch," "mason," "surgery." In fact, we find words from the French in almost every field. "Uncle" and "cousin," "rabbit" and "falcon," "trot" and "stable," "money" and "soldier," "reason" and "virtue," "Bible" and "preach," are instances in point. French words often displaced Saxon ones. Thus, the Saxon Hfelend, the Healer, gave way to the French Savior, wanhope and wonstead were displaced by despair and resi- dence. Sometimes the Saxon stubbornly kept its place be- side the French term. The English language is thus espe- cially rich in synonyms, or- rather in slightly differentiated forms of expression capable of denoting the exact shade of thought and feeling. The following words are instances : SAXON: FRENCH: SAXON: FRENCH: body, corpse, green, verdant, folk, people, food, nourishment, swine, pork, wrangle, contend, calf, veal, fatherly, paternal, worth, value, workman, laborer. CHANGES WROUGHT IN THE LANGUAGE 53 English was enriched not only by those expressions gained from the daily speech of the Normans, but also by words which were added from literary Latin. Thus, we have the Saxon "ask," the Norman-French "inquire" and "question," and the Latin "interrogate." "Bold," "impudent," "audacious;" "bright," "cheerful," "ani- mated;" "earnings," "wages," "remuneration ;" "short," "brief," "concise," are other examples of words, largely synonymous, from the Saxon, the Norman-French, and the Latin, respectively. The Changes Slowly Accomplished. For over a hun- dred years after the Conquest, but few French words found their way into current English use. This is shown by the fact that the Brut, a poem of 32,250 lines, translated from a French original into English about 1205, has not more than a hundred words of Norman-French origin. At first the Normans despised the tongue of the con- quered Saxons, but, as time progressed, the two races intermarried, and the children would be certain to learn some Saxon words from their mothers or nurses. On the other hand, many well-to-do Saxons, like parents in later times, would have their children taught French because it was considered aristocratic. Until 1204 the nobles were going back and forth to Normandy to estates held there, and it was necessary for the nobles to speak French. In 1204 King John lost Normandy, and in the next reign both English and French kings decreed that no subject of the one should hold land in the territory of the other. This narrowing of the attention of English subjects down to England, was a foundation stone in building up the supremacy of the English tongue. HAL. ENG. LIT. 4 54 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 In 1338 the Hundred Years' War between France and England began. In Edward the Third's reign (1327-1377), it was demonstrated that one Englishman could whip six Frenchmen, and the language of a hostile and partly conquered race naturally began to occupy a less high position. In 1362 Parliament enacted that English should thereafter be used in law-courts, " because the laws, customs, and statutes of this realm, be not commonly known in the same realm, for that they be pleaded, shewed, and judged in the French tongue, which is much unknown in the said realm." The Fallow Period. Sometimes a language increases its strength during a period of rest from literary produc- tion, just as land acquires new vigor from lying fallow. If the Norman Conquest reduced the Saxon language " almost to a peasant's dialect " and kept it for more than two centuries in that position, even this condition gave additional power to the resulting tongue. Like Antaeus, who gained sevenfold strength every time that he was thrown to the earth by his adversary, this " peasant's dialect " was strong because it developed in the soil of actual life. That tongue voiced no affecta- tions. It was the language of common sense and of the heart, and their vocabulary contained not a single insincere or high-flown expression. The qualities developed by contact with earnest life were necessary requisites in a language with which Shake- speare was to speak to the common heart of humanity, and with which Scotland's plowman poet was to charm the peasant's cot and the palace of the lord. In some of Shakespeare's greatest plays, we shall find that eighty- nine per cent of the words used are those which the Saxon found sufficient to voice his hopes, fears, loves, and woes. CHANGES WROUGHT IN THE LANGUAGE 55 The authorized translation of the Gospels employs over ninety per cent of words of Anglo-Saxon origin. The Superiority of the Composite Tongue. While we insist on the truth that Anglo-Saxon gained much of its wonderful directness and power from standing in such close relations to earnest life, it is necessary to remem- ber that many words of Latin origin did, by an ap- prenticeship at the fireside, in the field, the workshop, and the laboratory, equally fit themselves for taking their place in the language. Such words from Latin roots as "faith," "pray," "joke," "vein," "beast," "poor," "nurse," "flower," "taste," "state," and "fool" remain in our vocabulary because they were used in everyday life. Pure Anglo-Saxon was a forcible language, but it lacked the wealth of expression and the flexibility neces- sary to respond to the most delicate touches of the master musicians who were to come. When Shakespeare has Lear say of Cordelia : " Her voice was ever soft, Gentle, and low ; an excellent thing in woman," we find that ten of the thirteen words are Saxon, but the other three of Romance (French) origin are as neces- sary as is a small amount of tin added to copper to make bronze. Two of these three words express varying shades of quality. When Macbeth asks : " Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red," the Saxon again preponderates, but "multitudinous " seems in one sonorous word to include all the countless waves 56 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 of the seas of every clime, and "incarnadine" to intensify, far more than " redden," the idea of the penetration and the magnitude of the stain. This line as a whole, coming between two lines of pure Saxon, adds not only variety but also sublimity. Lounsbury well says: "There result, indeed, from the union of the foreign and native elements, a wealth of phraseology and a many-sidedness in English, which give it in these respects a superiority over any other modern cultivated tongue. German is strictly a pure Teutonic speech, but no native speaker of it claims for it any supe- riority over the English as an instrument of expression, while many are willing to concede its inferiority." It is true that the bone, sinew, and framework of this composite tongue remain Saxon, but it is also true that the English beloved by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton was something more than bone and sinew. That English was a creature of flesh and blood as well. With all her sinewy strength, she possessed rare beauty, grace, and perfection of rounded form. LITERATURE OF THE TRANSITION PERIOD, FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER'S DEATH A Literature of Dialects. During this period and even until printing had helped to render the language stable, not only was English undergoing a transition, but the language in one part of the country was often difficult to be understood by those living in another part. Even in the fifteenth century, Caxton, the first English printer, was sometimes puzzled to know which dialect to place in permanent type. In one of his Prefaces he says that a man went into a house at some distance from his native GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH 57 place and "axyd after eggys," but the good wife replied that she "coude speke no frenshe." She had mistaken his English dialect for French. He found an interpreter who told her that the man wanted "eyren." She then brought him eggs. All works of the period treated in this chapter were written in a dialect. In such a small country as England, this fact had the effect of lessening the circulation of books and the number of readers. There were three prin- cipal dialects : the Northern, spoken north of the river Humber; the Midland, from the Humber to the Thames; and the Southern from the Thames to the English Chan- nel. It was the Midland dialect which the genius of Chaucer helped to raise from its provincial rank to become the national language of England. A Latin Chronicler. - One chronicler, Geoffrey of Mon- mouth, although he wrote in Latin, must receive some attention because of his vast influence on English poetry. He probably acquired his last name from being arch- deacon of Monmouth. He was appointed Bishop of St. Asaph in 1152 and died about 1154. Unlike the majority of the monkish chroniclers, he possessed a vivid imagina- tion, which he used in his so-called History of the Kings of Britain. Geoffrey pretended to have found an old manuscript which related the deeds of all British kings from Brutus, the mythical founder of the kingdom of Britain, and the great-grandson of ^Eneas, to Caesar. Geoffrey wrote an account of all British kings down to Cadwallo in 689 with as much minuteness and gravity as Swift employed in the Voyage to Lilliput (p. 242). Other chroniclers declared that Geoffrey lied saucily and shamelessly, but his book became extremely popular. The monks could not then 58 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 comprehend that the world's greatest literary works were to be products of the imagination. In Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain we are given vivid pictures of King Lear and his daughters, of Cymbeline, of King Arthur and his Knights, of Guinevere and the rest of that company whom later poets have immortalized. It is probable that Geoffrey was not particular whether he obtained his materials from old chroniclers, Welsh bards, floating tradition, or from his own imagination. His book left its impress on the historical imagination of the Middle Ages. Had it not been for Geoffrey's History, the dramas of King Lear and Cymbeline might never have been suggested to Shakespeare. Layamon's Brut. About 1155 a Frenchman named Wace translated into his own language Geoffrey of Mon- mouth's work. This translation .fell into the hands of Layamon, a priest living in Worcestershire, and he pro- ceeded to render the poem, with additions of his own, into the Southern English dialect. Wace's Brut has 15,300 lines; Layamon's, 32,250. As the matter which Layamon added is the best in the poem, he is, in so far, an original author of much imaginative power. He is certainly the greatest poet between the Conquest and Chaucer's time. A selection from the Brut will give the student an opportunity of comparing this transition English with the language in its modern form : " And Ich wulle varan to Avalun : And I will fare to Avalon, To vairest alre maidene, To the fairest of all maidens, To Argante Sere quene, To Argante the queen, Alven swiSe sceone ; Elf surpassing fair ; And heo seal mine wunden And she shall my wounds Makien alle isunde, Make all sound, Al hal me makien All hale me make Mid halvveige drenchen. With healing draughts. LAYAMON ORM 59 And seoSe Ich cumen wulle And afterwards I will come To mine kineriche To my kingdom And wunien mid Brutten And dwell with Britons Mid muchelere wunne." With much joy. With this, compare the following lines from Tennyson's The Passing of Arthur : " . . .1 am going a long way To the island-valley of Avilion, Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly ; but it lies Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea, Where I will heal me of my grievous wound. He passes to be King among the dead, And after healing of his grievous wound He comes again." Layamoh employed less alliteration thaji is found in Anglo-Saxon poetry. He also used an occasional rhyme, but the accent and rhythm of his verse are more Saxon than modern. When reading Tennyson's Idylls of the King, we must not forget that Layamon was the first poet to celebrate in English King Arthur's deeds. The Brut shows little trace of French influences, and not more than a hundred French words can be found in it. Orm's Ormulum. A monk named Orm wrote in the Midland dialect a metrical paraphrase of those parts of the Gospels used in the church on each service day throughout the year. After the paraphrase comes his metrical explanation and application of the Scripture. He says : " Diss boc iss nemmnedd Orrmulum ForrSi "$att Ormm itt wrohhte." This book is named Ormulum For that Orm it wrote. 6O FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 There was no fixed spelling at this time. Orm generally doubled the consonant after a short vowel, and he insisted that any one who copied his work should be careful to do the same. We shall find on counting the syllables in the two lines quoted from him that the first line has eight; the second, seven. This scheme is followed with great preci- sion throughout the poem, which employs neither rhyme nor regular alliteration. Orm used even fewer French words than Layamon. The date of the Ormulum is prob- ably somewhere between 1200 and 1215. The Ancren Riwle. About 1225 appeared the most notable prose work in the native tongue since the time of Alfred, if we except the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Three young ladies had secluded themselves from the world in Dorsetshire, and they wished rules for guidance in their seclusion. An unknown author, to oblige them, wrote the Ancren Riwle (Rule of Anchoresses). This book lays down rules for their future conduct in all the affairs of life, and it also offers much religious consolation. The following selection shows some of the curious rules for the guidance of the nuns, and furnishes a specimen of the Southern dialect of transitional English prose in the early part of the thirteenth century : " 36, mine leoue sustren, Ye, my beloved sisters, ne schulen hahben no best shall have no beast bute kat one. . . . $e schulen but one cat. ... Ye shall beon i-tlodded four si Sen be cropped four times i5e 3ere, uorto lihten ower in the year for to lighten your hcaued. . . Of idelnesse awakeneS head. ... Of idleness ariseth muchel flesshes fondunge. . . . much temptation of the flesh. . . . Iren Set HS stille gedere Iron that lieth still soon gathereth sone rust." rust. The keynote of the work is the renunciation of self. Few productions of modern literature contain finer pictures THE ANCREN RIWLE 6l of the Divine love and sympathy. Across the fierce storm clouds of theology, which continued to sweep the heavens for hundreds of years, the pages of the Ancren Riwle re- flect the rainbow hues of the Galilean's compassion for laboring and heavy-laden humanity. The following simile affords an instance of this quality in the work : " De sixte kunfort is "Set ure Louerd, hwon he "Set we beo^S itented, he plaieft mid us, ase "Se moder mid hire junge -deorlinge; vlifrS from him, and hut hire, and let hit sitten one, and loken jeorne abuten, and cleo- pien Dame ! dame ! and weopen one hwule; and "Seonne mid i- spredde ermes leapeS lauhwinde voro", and cluppeS and cusseft and wipeiS his eien. Riht so ure Louerd let us one iwurfien ofter hwules, and wiSdraweS his grace and his kunfort, "Set we ne ivincleft swetnesse in none "Singe "Set we wel do 1 ??, ne savur ofheorte; and ftauh, iSet ilke point ne luve"S he us ure leove veder never fte lesce, auh he deft hit for muchel luve Set he haveS to us." The sixth comfort is that our Lord, when he suffers that we be tempted, he plays with us, as the mother with her young darling; she flees from it, and hides herself, and lets it sit alone and look anxiously about and cry "Dame! dame!" and weep awhile ; and then with out- spread arms leaps laughing forth and clasps and kisses it and wipes its eyes. Exactly so our Lord leaves us alone once in a while and withdraws his grace and his comfort, that we rind sweetness in nothing that we do well, no relish of heart; and notwithstanding, at the same time, he, our dear Father, loves us nevertheless, but he does it for the great love that he has for us. Professor Sweet calls the Ancren Riwle " one of the most perfect models of simple, natural, eloquent prose in our language." The work occupies a prominent place in the development of the English language. A philologist says : " If it be true, as some tell us, that the mingling of the Teutonic and Romance in our tongue makes a happy marriage, we see in the author of the Ancren Riwle the man that first gave out the bans." Among the words of French origin found in it, we may instance : 62 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 "dainty," "cruelty," "vestments," "comfort," "journey," " mercer." Lyrical Poetry. About the year 1250 an unknown author wrote in the Southern dialect a fine poem entitled The Oivl and the Nightingale. A nightingale is singing upon a blossoming bough, when she spies an owl sitting upon a dead tree, with ivy trailing around the trunk. The sight of the lugubrious bird stops the nightingale's song, and she calls to the owl to take her uncanny self away. The owl defends herself and points out her own excellent qualities. The nightingale then sings a beautiful song to put the hooting owl to shame. A debate on the respective merits of each bird follows. In the course of the poem, the nightingale gives her spring song, which shows that even then the poets were beginning to appreciate the beauties of nature. It should be noticed that the song employs the modern end rhyme : " De blostme ginneS springe and sprede Beofte ine treo and ek on mede ; De lilie mid hire faire wlite WelcumeS me, Sat Su hit wite, Bit me mid hire faire bleo Dat ich schulle to hire fleo; De rose also mid hire rude, Dat cumeS ut of fte iSorne wude, Bit me 'Sat ich shulle singe Vor hire luve one skentinge." A free translation of this would be : The blossom begins to spring and to spread Both in the tree and in the mead; The lily with her form so fair Doth welcome me, you are aware, With winsome face doth bid that I On airy wings should to her fly ; ROBERT MANNING OF BRUNNE 63 The rose also with the blush of morn, That cometh from a bush of thorn, Now asks of me that I shall sing For her own love one charming thing. Another lyric, of uncertain date, likewise shows a study of nature : " Sumer is i-cumen in Summer is a-coming in, Lhude sing cuccu Loud sing cuckoo, Groweth sed and bloweth med Groweth seed and bloometh mead, And springeth the wde nu. And springeth the wood now. Sing cuccu, cuccu." Sing cuckoo, cuckoo. Robert Manning of Brunne. We have now come to fourteenth century literature, which begins to wear a more modern aspect. Robert Manning, generally known as Robert of Brunne, because he was born at Brunne, now called Bourn, in Lincolnshire, adapted from a Norman- French original a work entitled Handlyng Synne (Man- ual of Sins). This book, written in the Midland dialect in 1303, discourses of the Seven Deadly Sins and the best ways of living a godly life. A careful inspection of the following selection from the Handlyng Synne will show that, aside from the spelling, the English is essentially modern. Most persons will be able to understand all but a few words. He was the first English writer to use the modern order of words. The end rhyme is also modern. A beggar, seeing a beast laden with bread at the house of a rich man, asks for food. The poem says of the rich man : " He stouped down to seke a stone, He stooped down to seek a stone, But, as hap was, than fonde he But, as chance was, then found he none. none. For the stone he toke a lofe, For the stone he took a loaf, And at the pore man hyt drofe. And at the poor man it drove. 64 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 The pore man hente hyt up belyue, The poor man caught it up quickly, And was thereof ful ferly blythe, And was thereof full strangely glad, To hys felaws fast he ran To his fellows fast he ran With the lofe, thys pore man." With the loaf, this poor man. Oliphant says : " Strange it is that Dante should have been compiling his Inferno, which settled the course of Italian literature forever, in the selfsame years that Robert of Brunne was compiling the earliest pattern of well-formed New English. . . . Almost every one of the Teutonic changes in idiom, distinguishing the New English from the Old, the speech of Queen Victoria from the speech of Hengist, is to be found in Manning's work. We have had few Teutonic changes since his day, a fact which marks the influence he has had upon our tongue. . . . Robert of Brunne, the Patriarch of the New English, fairly well foreshadowed the proportion of outlandish gear that was to be the common rule in our land after his time. He has six French words out of fifty ; a little later Chau- cer was to have eight French words out of fifty ; this is the proportion in Shakespeare's comic parts ; and it is also the proportion in the everyday talk of our own time." Mandeville's Travels. Sir John Mandeville, who is popularly considered the author of a very entertaining work of travels, states that he was born in St. Albans in 1300, that he left England in 1322, and traveled in the East for thirty-four years. His Travels relates what he saw and heard in his wanderings through Ethiopia, Persia, Tartary, India, and Cathay. What he tells on his own authority, he vouches for as true, but what he relates as hearsay, he leaves to the reader's judgment for belief. There is a difference of opinion among scholars in regard to whether any such traveler as Mandeville existed. Parts JOHN WYCLIFFE 6$ of the work attributed to him have been proved to be a compilation from the writings of other travelers. A French critic says wittily : " He first lost his character as a truthful writer; then out of the three versions of his book, French, English, and Latin, two were withdrawn from him, leaving him only the first. Existence has now been taken from him, and he is left with nothing .at all." But no matter who the author was, the book exists. More manuscripts of it survive than of any other work except the Scriptures. It is the most entertaining volume of English prose that we have before 1360. The sentences are simple and direct, and they describe things vividly : " In Ethiope ben many dyverse folk : and Ethiope is clept 1 Cusis. In that contree ben folk, that han but o foot : and thei gon so fast, that it is marvaylle : and the foot is so large, that it schadewethe alle the body a3en 2 the Sonne whanne thei wole 3 lye and reste hem." 4 Mandeville also tells of a bird that used to amuse itself by flying away with an elephant in its talons. In the land of Prester John was a valley where Mandeville says he saw devils jumping about as thick as grasshoppers. Stories like these make the work as interesting as Gulliver s Travels. The so-called Mandeville's Travels was one of the few works which the unlearned of that age could understand and enjoy. Its consequent popularity was so great as to bring a large number of French words into familiar use. The native " againbought " is, however, used instead of the foreign "redeemed." John Wycliffe. Wycliffe (1324-1384) was born at Hips- well, near Richmond, in the northern part of Yorkshire. He became a doctor of divinity and a master of one of the colleges at Oxford. Afterward he was installed vicar 1 called. 2 against. 3 will. 4 them. 66 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 JOHN WYCLIFFE of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, where he died. In his- tory he is principally known as the first great figure in the English Reformation, preceding the others by more than a century. In literature he is best known for the first complete translation of the Bible, a work that exerted great influence on English prose. All the translation was not made by him personally, but all was done under his direction. The translation of the most of the New Testa- ment is thought to be his own special work. He is the most important prose writer of the fourteenth century. His prose had an influence as wide as the circulation of the Bible. The fact that it was forced to circulate in PIERS PLOWMAN 67 manuscript, because printing had not then been invented, limited his readers, but his translation was, nevertheless, read by many. He wrote argumentative religious pam- phlets to help the cause of the Reformation, and they are excellent specimens of energetic fourteenth century prose. Of his place in literature, Ten Brink says : " Wycliffe's literary importance lies in the fact that he extended the domain of English prose and enhanced its powers of expression. He accustomed it to terse reasoning, and perfected it as an instrument for expressing rigorous logical thought and argument ; he brought it into the service of great ideas and questions of the day, and made it the medium of polemics and satire. And above all, he raised it to the dignity of the national language of the Bible." The following is a specimen verse of Wycliffe's transla- tion. We may note that the strong old English word "againrising" had not then been displaced by the Latin " resurrection." " Jhesu seith to hir, I am agenrisyng and lyf; he that bileueth in me, he, if he schal be deed, schall lyue." Piers Plowman. About 1 362 a poem was written by a man most commonly known as William Langland. He was probably born at Cleobury Mortimer in Shrop- shire about 1332, and was educated as a cleric, but he never became a fully ordained priest, although he seems to have performed certain offices in connection with the church, such as singing at funerals. We know scarcely anything of his life, except what we learn indirectly from his Piers Plowman. This poem opens on a pleasant May morning amid rural scenery. The poet falls asleep by the side of a brook and 68 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 dreams. In his dream he has a vision of the world pass- ing before his eyes, like a drama. The poem tells what he saw. Its opening lines are : " In a Corner .reson whan soft was the jonne I s/iope l me in .s^roudes 2 as I a j//epe 3 were, In 7/abite as an ^eremite 4 unholy of workes Went wyde in bis world wondres to here Ac on a May ;//ornynge on J/aluerne hulles 5 Me by/el a/erly 6 of /airy me thou^te I was wery forwandred 7 and went me to reste Under a rode ank b\ a ornes 8 side, And as I /ay and /ened 9 and /oked in he wateres I ^lombred in a .rlepyng it svtey ved 10 so merye." The language of Piers Plowman is a mixture of the Southern and the Midland dialects. It should be noticed that the poem employs the old Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter. There is no end rhyme. Piers Plowman is the last great poem written in this way. The actors in this poem are largely allegorical. Ab- stractions are personified. Prominent characters are Conscience, Lady Meed or Bribery, Reason, Truth, Gluttony, Hunger, and the Seven Deadly Sins. In some respects, the poem is not unlike the Pilgrim s Progress (p. 226), for the battle in passing from this life to the next is well described in both ; but there are more humor, satire, and descriptions of common life in Langland. Piers is at first a simple plowman, who offers to guide men to truth. He is finally identified with the Savior. Throughout the poem, the writer displays all the old Saxon earnestness. His hatred of hypocrisy is manifest on every page. His sadness, because what is, is not what 1 arrayed. 2 garments. 8 shepherd. * hermit. 6 hills. 6 wonder. 7 tired out with wandering. 8 brook. 9 reclined. 10 sounded. JOHN GOWER 69 ought to be, makes itself constantly felt. He cannot reconcile the contradiction between the real and the ideal. In attacking the hypocrisy of the clergy and preaching the excellency of a life of good deeds, in showing how men ought to progress in the sphere of action from doing well to doing better and doing best, " Do-well, Do-bet, Do- best,"- he was one of those who helped to lay the foun- dations of the Reformation. In order to have a well-rounded conception of the life of the fourteenth century, Langland must be read as well as Chaucer. Langland was the poet of the lower, Chaucer of the upper, classes. Langland's verse gives valuable pictures of the life of the common people and shows them working " To kepe kyne in J>e field, J?e corne fro f>e bestes, Diken * or deluen 2 or dyngen 3 vppon sheues, 4 Or helpe make mortar or here mukke a-felde." Although Langland was the poet of the common people, he used almost as many words of French derivation as the more aristocratic Chaucer. This fact shows how thoroughly the French element had become incorporated in the speech of all classes. Langland revised his great poem twice, and he has left three texts which differ con- siderably, although the general tenor of all is the same. John Gower. Gower, a very learned poet, was born about 1325 and died in 1408. He did not know that the Midland dialect would become the language of all England. Gower was, therefore, undecided in what language to write, and so he tried each of the three languages used in England. His first principal work, the Speculum Meditantis, was written in French ; his second, the Vox Clamant is, in Latin ; his third, the Confessio Amantis, in English. 1 to make dykes or ditches. 2 to dig. 8 to thrash (ding). 4 sheaves. HAL. ENG. LIT. 5 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 The Confessio Amantis (Confession of a Lover} is a long poem, in the nature of a dialogue between a lover and his confessor, wherein the things tending to further or hinder love are discussed. But the poem is principally a col- lection of tales about love. With the exception of a very few tales, the Confessio Amantis is rightly noted for its dullness. The Confessio Amantis con- tains one hundred and twelve short tales, of which not more than three are interesting. The story of KnigJit Florent is his best. The Knight has forfeited his life. He will not be spared unless he correctly answers the riddle : "What do women most desire?" He promises to marry any woman who will tell him. An ugly old hag gives him the right answer, " mastery in love." A knight must keep his word, and so he marries her. After the ceremony she becomes a young and beautiful woman. JOHN GOWER GEOFFREY CHAUCER, 13407-1400 Life. Chaucer was born in London about 1340. His father and grandfather were vintners, who belonged to the upper class of merchants. Our first knowledge of Geoffrey Chaucer is obtained from the household accounts of the Princess Elizabeth, daughter-in-law of Edward III. Chaucer, then in his teens, was a page in her family. An entry shows that she bought him a fine suit of clothes, including a pair of red and black breeches. Such evi- dence points to the fact that he was early accustomed to GEOFFREY CHAUCER GEOFFREY CHAUCER associating with the nobility, and enables us to understand why the subject matter of his poetry should differ from Langland's. In 1359 Chaucer accompanied the English army to France and was taken prisoner. Edward III. thought enough of the youth to pay for his ransom a sum equiva- lent to-day to about $1200. After his return he was made valet of the King's chamber. The duties of that office " consisted in making the royal bed, holding torches, and carrying messages." Later, Chaucer became a squire. In 1370 he was sent to the continent on a diplomatic mission. He seems to have succeeded so well that dur- /2 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 ing the next ten years he was repeatedly abroad in the royal service, and he visited Italy twice. He may thus have met the Italian poet Petrarch. These journeys inspired Chaucer with a desire to study Italian literature, a literature that had just been enriched by the pens of Dante and Boccaccio. We must next note that Chaucer's life was not that of a poetic dreamer, but of a stirring business man. For more than twelve years he was controller of customs for Lon- don. This office necessitated assessing duties on wools, skins, wines, candles, etc. Only a part of this work could be performed by deputy. He was later clerk of the King's works, and while on his way to oversee the repairs on a building, Chaucer was twice robbed. His repeated selec- tion for foreign and diplomatic business shows that he was considered sagacious as well as trustworthy. Had he not kept in close touch with life, he could never have become such a great poet. In this connection we may remark that England's second greatest writer, Milton, spent his prime in attending to affairs of state. Chaucer's busy life did not keep him from attaining third place on the list of England's poets. There are many passages of autobiographical interest in his poems. People noticed that he was a student of books as well as of men, as these lines from the Hous of Fame " For whan thy labour doom al is, And hast y-maad thy rekeninges, Instede of rest and newe thinges, Thou gost hoom to thy hous anoon, And, also domb as any stoon, Thou sittest at another boke, Til fully daswed l is thy loke, And livest thus as an hermyte." 9 1 dazed. 2 hermit. GEOFFREY CHAUCER 73 A passage from the Legende of Good Women emphasizes another side of his life. He had a sympathetic apprecia- tion for nature as well as for men and books : "... whan that the month of May Is comen, and that I here the foules l singe, And that the floures ginnen'- 2 for to springe Farwel my boke and my devocioun ! " Chaucer was pensioned by three kings : Edward III., Richard II., and Henry IV. Before the reign of Henry IV., Chaucer's pensions were either not always regularly paid, or they were insufficient for certain emergencies, for he complained of poverty in his old age. The pension of Henry IV. in 1399 was ample, and in that year Chaucer leased a house in the garden of a chapel at Westminster for as many of fifty-three years as he should live. He had occasion to use this house but ten months. One day, looking wistfully back upon the joys of youth, he wrote : "And on the ground, which is my modres 8 gate, I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late, And seye, 4 ' Leve 5 moder, leet me in!'" 6 In 1400 the mother heard his call, and he was laid at rest in the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer's Earlier Poems. Before Chaucer was forty, he had probably not written more than one seventh of the 35,000 lines which, in round numbers, he left at his death. Before forty he had not done his greatest work, for he was hampered by too close an adherence to Latin and French models. His Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse, the wife of Edward III.'s son, John of Gaunt, shows the influence of Ovid and of the French school. 1 birds. 2 begin. 8 mother's. * say. 6 dear. 6 Pardoner's Tale, 74 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 In his next period, Chaucer studied Italian models, and gradually acquired that skill which enabled him to produce the masterpieces of his third period. The influence of Boccaccio and, sometimes, of Dante is noticeable in the principal poems of the second period, the Troilus and Criseyde, Parlement of Forties, Hous of Fame, and Legende of Good Women. The Troilus and Criseyde is a tale of love that was not true. The Parlement of Foules is an allegorical poem, in which birds are represented as assem- bling to decide to which of three suitors shall be awarded a beautiful female eagle. This eagle represents Anne of Bohemia, and the successful suitor is typical of King Rich- ard II. Lines like the following from this poem show what a loving observer of nature Chaucer was : "The sparow, Venus sone, and the nightingale That clepeth x forth the fresshe leves newe ; The swalow mordrer of the flye's 2 smale, That maken hony of floures fresshe of hewe ; The wedded turtel, with his herte trewe, The pecok, with his aungels fethres brighte." The pleasing fancy of the song of the nightingale awaking the buds from their sleep has not been surpassed by later poets of nature. The Hous of Fame is an unfinished poem, descriptive of a vision of a vast palace of ice on which .the names of the famous are carved to await the melting rays of the sun. The Legende of Good Women is a series of stories of those who, like Alcestis, were willing to give up everything for love. In A Dream of Fair Women Tennyson says : "'The Legend of Good Women, 1 long ago Sung by the morning-star of song, who made His music heard below ; 1 calleth. 2 bees. GEOFFREY CHAUCER 75 Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath Preluded those melodious bursts that fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still." In this series of poems Chaucer learned how to rely less and less on an Italian crutch. He next took his immortal ride to Canterbury on an English Pegasus. CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL General Plan. The majority of the world has always been more interested in stories than in any other form of literature. Chaucer probably did not realize that he had such positive genius for telling tales in verse that the next five hundred years would fail to produce his superior in 76 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 that branch of English literature, but he knew that he enjoyed telling such tales. All that Chaucer needed was some framework into which he could fit the stories that occurred to him, and make them something more than mere stray tales, which might soon be forgotten. The great contemporary Italian story teller, Boccaccio, conceived the idea of representing some of the nobility of Florence as fleeing from the plague, and telling in their retirement the tales which he used in his Decameron. It is doubtful, however, if Chaucer ever knew of the existence of the Decameron. In 1170 Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered at the altar. He was considered both a martyr and a saint, and his body was placed in a splendid mausoleum at the Cathedral. It was said that miracles were worked at his tomb, that the sick were cured, and that the worldly affairs of those who knelt at his shrine prospered. It became the fashion for all sorts and con- ditions of men to go on pilgrimages to his tomb. As rob- bers infested the highways, the pilgrims usually waited at some inn until there was a sufficient band to resist attack. In time the journey came to be looked on as a holiday which relieved the monotony of everyday life. About 1385 Chaucer probably went on such a pilgrimage. To furnish amusement, as the pilgrims cantered along, some of them may have told stories. The idea occurred to Chaucer to write a collection of such tales as the various pilgrims might have been supposed to tell on their journey. The result was the Canterbury Talcs. Characters in the Tales. Chaucer's plan is superior to Boccaccio's, for only the nobility figure as story tellers in the Decameron. The Canterbury pilgrims represent all ranks of English life, from the knight to the sailor. GEOFFREY CHAUCER 77 The Prologue to the Tales places these characters before us almost as distinctly as they would appear in real life. At the Tabard Inn in Southwark, just across Front an TABARD INN the Thames from London, we see that merry band of pilgrims on a fragrant April day. We look first upon a manly figure who strikes us as being every inch a knight. His cassock shows the marks of his coat of mail. "At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene. And of his port as meke as is a mayde. He never yet no vileinye ne sayde In al his lyf, unto no maner wight. He was a verray parfit, gentil knyght." His son, the Squire, next catches our attention. We notice his curly locks, his garments embroidered with gay flowers, and the graceful way in which he rides his 78 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 horse. By his side is his servant the Yeoman, "clad in cote and hood of grene," with a sheaf of arrows at his belt. We may even note his cropped head and his horn suspended from a green belt. We next catch sight of a Nun's gracefully pleated wimple, shapely nose, small mouth, "eyen greye as glas," well-made cloak, coral beads, and brooch of gold. She is attended by a second Nun and three Priests. The Monk is a striking figure : "His heed was balled, that shoon as any glas, And eek his face as he hadde been anoint. He was a lord ful fat and in good point." There follow the Friar with twinkling eyes, "the beste beggere in his hous," the Merchant with his forked beard, the Clerk (scholar) of Oxford in his threadbare garments, the Sergeant-at-Law, the Franklyn (country gentleman), Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer, Tapycer (tapes- try maker), Cook, Ship man, Physician, Wife of Bath, Parish Priest, Plowman, Miller, Manciple (purchaser of provisions), Reeve (bailiff of a farm), Summoner (official of an ecclesiastical court), and Pardoner. These char- acters, exclusive of Baily (the host of the Tabard) and Chaucer himself, are alluded to in the Prologue to the Tales as "Wei nyne and twenty in a companye, Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle, That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde." The completeness of the picture of fourteenth century English life in the Canterbury Tales makes them abso- lutely necessary reading for the historian as well as for the student of literature. We have, for instance, a better idea of fourteenth century seamen after reading about GEOFFREY CHAUCER 79 Chaucer's Shipman, who knew all the havens on the western coast of the continent and every creek in Britain and Spain. We see him with his brown face as he steals wine from the casks in his cargo, and we again catch a glimpse of him as he turns pirate, when a good opportunity offers, and makes his captives walk the plank. We are given an interesting picture of a Pardoner pretending that pigs' bones are the bones of saints. The finest character in the company is that of the Parish Priest, who attends to his flock like a good Samaritan : " Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve, He taughte, but first he folwed it him-selve." Certainly no one who has ever read the Prologue to the Tales will question Chaucer's right to be considered a great original poet, no matter how much he may have owed to foreign teachers. The Tales. Harry Baily, the keeper of the Tabard Inn, accompanied the Pilgrims, and he proposed that each member of the party should tell four tales, two going and two returning. The one who told the best story was to have a supper at the expense of the rest. ' The plan thus outlined was not fully executed by Chaucer, for the collection contains but twenty-four tales, all but two of which are in verse. The Knightes Tale, which is the first, is also the best. It is a very interesting story of love and chivalry. Two young Theban noblemen, Palamon and Arcite, sworn friends, are prisoners of war at Athens. Looking through the windows of their dungeon, they see walking in the garden the beautiful sister of the Queen. Each one swears that he will have the Princess. Arcite is finally pardoned on condition that he will leave Athens and 80 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 never return, on penalty of death. He soon finds that he loves the Princess Emily so that he would prefer to be in the Athenian prison where he could see her. Reduced almost to a skeleton, he disguises himself, goes to Athens, and becomes a servant in the house of King Theseus. Finally Palamon escapes from prison, and by chance over- hears Arcite moaning half aloud his lover's woes. The two men promptly fight and are caught in the act by the King, who orders them killed. The Princess intercedes for them, and the King directs them to return in a year, each one with a hundred of the bravest knights that he can find. Each shall lead his forces in a mortal battle in the lists, and the Princess shall be awarded to the one who is the victor. On the morning of the fight, Palamon goes before dawn to the temple of Venus and prays that, since this is a case of love, she will hear his prayer, and grant him Emily. The goddess promises that his prayer shall be answered. Arcite at the same time steals to the temple of Mars and beseeches the god to grant him the victory, since this is a case of war. The martial deity promises the victory to Arcite. The descriptions of the temples, and the remainder of the story, should be read by the student in the original. Although Boccaccio's Teseide furnished the general plot for the Knightes Tale, Chaucer's story is, as Skeat says, "to all intents, a truly original poem." The other pilgrims tell stories in keeping with their pro- fessions and characters. Perhaps the next best tale is the merry story of Chanticleer and the Fox. This is related by the Nun's Priest. The Clerk of Oxford tells the pa- thetic tale of Patient Griselda, and the Nun relates a touching story of a little martyr. GEOFFREY CHAUCER 8 1 General Characteristics of Chaucer's Work and its Effect upon the Language Chief Qualities. I. His descriptions are unusually clear-cut and vivid. For instance, he says of the Friar : " His eyen twinkled in his heed aright, As doon the sterres in the frosty night." Our eyes and ears distinctly perceive the jolly Monk, as he canters along : " And, whan he rood, men might his brydel here Ginglen in a whistling wind as clere, And eek as loude as dooth the chapel-belle." II. Chaucer's kindly, sympathetic humor is especially characteristic. We can see him looking with twinkling eyes at the Miller, "tolling thrice"; at the Pardoner, show- ing a piece of the sail from St. Peter's ship, or the pigs' bones in place of those of a saint ; at the Squire, keeping the nightingale company ; at the Doctor, prescribing by the rules of astrology. The Nun feels a touch of his humor : " Ful wel she song the service divyne, Entuned in hir nose ful semely." Of the lawyer, he says : " No-wher so bisy a man as he ther nas, And yet he semed bisier than he was." Sometimes Chaucer's humor is so delicate as to be lost on those who are not quick-witted. Lowell instances the case of the Friar, who, " before setting himself softly down, drives away the cat," and adds what is true only of those who have acute understanding : " We know, without need of more words, that he has chosen the snuggest corner." 82 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 III. Although Chaucer's humor and excellence in lighter vein are such marked characteristics, we must not forget his serious qualities, for he has the Saxon seriousness as well as the Norman airiness. As he looked over the strug- gling world, he said with sympathetic heart: " Infinite been the sorwes and the teres Of olde folk, and folk of tendre yeres." 1 In like vein, we have : " This world nis but a thurghfare ful of wo, And we ben pilgrimes, passinge to and fro ; Deeth is an ende of every worldly sore." 1 "Her nis non hoom, her nis but wildernesse. Forthe, pylgrime, forthe! forthe, beste out of thi stall Knowe thi contree, look up, thank God of al! " 2 His humor is often a graceful cloak for his serious philos- ophy of existence. The humor in the Prologue does not impair its worth to the student of fourteenth century life. IV. The largeness of his view of human nature is re- markable. Some poets paint one type of men accurately and distort all the rest, either intentionally or unintention- ally. Chaucer impartially portrays the highest and the lowest, the honest man and the hypocrite. The pictures of the roguish Friar and the self-denying Parish Priest, the Ox- ford Scholar and the Miller, the Physician and the Ship- man, are painted with equal fidelity to life. In the breadth and kindliness of his view of life, Chaucer is a worthy predecessor of Shakespeare. Dryden's verdict on Chau- cer's poetry is: "Here is God's plenty." V. His love of nature is noteworthy for that early age. The quotations on pp. 73, 74, show this characteristic. Such 1 Knightes Tale. 2 Truth: Balade de ban Comeyl. GEOFFREY CHAUCER 83 lines as these manifest something more than a desire for rhetorical effect in speaking of nature's phenomena : " Now welcom somer, with thy sonne softe That hast this wintres weders over-shake, And driven awey the longe nightes blake x ! " 2 His affection for the daisy has for five hundred years caused many other people to look with fonder eyes upon that flower. VI. He stands in the front rank of those who have attempted to tell stories in melodious verse. Lowell justly says : " One of the world's three or four great story tellers, he was also one of the best versifiers that ever made English trip and sing with a gayety that seems care- less, but where every foot beats time to the tune of the thought." What Chaucer did for the English Language. Before Chaucer's works, English was, as we have seen, a language of dialects. He wrote in the Midland dialect, and aided in making that the language of England. Lounsbury says of Chaucer's influence : " No really national language could exist until a literature had been created which would be ad- mired and studied by all who could read, and taken as a model by all who could write. It was only a man of genius that could lift up one of these dialects into a preeminence over the rest, or could ever give to the scattered forces existing in any one of them the unity and vigor of life. This was the work that Chaucer did." For this reason he deserves to be called our first modern English poet. At first sight, his works look far harder to read than they really are, because the spelling has changed so much since Chaucer's day. 1 black. 2 The Parlcmcnt of Faults. 84 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 SUMMARY The period from the Norman Conquest to the death of Chaucer contains one, and only one, of the world's great authors, Geoffrey Chaucer. But the time is important be- cause it gave to England a new language of greater flexi- bility and power. The old inflections, formative prefixes, and capacity of making self-explaining compounds were for the most part lost. For more than two hundred years after the Norman Conquest, Saxon was the language of the hearth and the field, not of literature and amusement. No language was ever more closely linked to earnest life and feeling. No affectation of speech survived that period of trial, but the Saxon preserved for us those words which caused his heart to throb with warmest feeling, words like "mother," "home," ''hearth," "birth," "death," and "love." Such a genuine language of the heart enabled Shakespeare to speak more effectively to the ear of all time. To supply the places of lost words and to express those new ideas which came with the broader experiences of an emancipated, progressive nation, many new words were adopted from the French and the Latin. When the time for literature came, Chaucer found ready for his pen the strongest, sincerest, and most flexible language that ever expressed a poet's thought. In tracing the development of English literature, we have noted (i) Geoffrey of Monmouth's (Latin) History of the Kings of Britain, and Layamon's Brut, with their stories of Lear, Cymbeline, and King Arthur ; (2) the Ormulum, a metrical paraphrase of those parts of the Gospels used in church service; (3) the Ancren Riwle, remarkable for its natural eloquent prose and its noble ethics, as well as for showing the development of the language ; (4) the lyr- READING REFERENCES 85 ical poetry, beginning to be redolent of the odor of the blossom and resonant with the song of the bird; (5) the Handlyng Synne, in which we stand on the threshold of modern English ; (6) Mandeville's Travels, with its enter- taining stories; (7) Wycliffe's monumental translation of the Bible ; (8) Langland's Piers Plowman, with its pic- tures of homely life and its intense desire for higher ideals ; (9) Gower's Confessio Amantis, a dull collection of tales about love ; and (10) Chaucer's poetry, which stands in the front rank for the number of vivid pictures of contempo- rary life, for humor, love of nature, melody, and capacity for story telling. In brief, the 334 years following the Norman Conquest are remarkable (a) for the development of English into the greatest of the world's languages, (^) for the rising of the Reformation spirit and for the translation of the Bible, and (c) for the emergence of modern English in one of the world's poetic masterpieces, the Canterbury Tales of Chau- cer. His line, " The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne," * shows that English poetry could still look at life through Saxon eyes. REQUIRED READINGS FOR CHAPTER II HISTORICAL Gardiner, 2 pp. 89-288; Green, Ghaps. II., III., IV., V.; Under- wood-Guest, pp. 130-311; Guerber, pp. 76-173; Robertson, pp. 79- 108; yutton's King and Baronage, pp. 8-112 (Oxford Manuals of English History} ; Oman's England and the Hundred Years' War 1 The Parlement of Faults. 2 For full titles of histories see list at end of Chap. I. HAL. ENG. LIT. 6 86 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 (same series), pp. 7-96; Freeman's William the Conqueror (200 pp., 50 cents) ; Traill, I., 231-491, li., 1-276. LITERARY'I Lounsbury's History of the English Language, pp. 48-160, gives a good account of the linguistic changes following the Norman Conquest. Mandeville's Travels may be read in modernized form in Cassell's National Library, No. 10, edited by Morley (paper, 10 cents). Read the last page of the Prologue and pp. 168-177, r substitute the selec- tions to be found in Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. I., pp. 22-26. It will be instructive to compare as products of the story teller's art these Travels with Gullivers Travels. Selections from Wycliffe's Bible are given in No. 107 of Maynard, Merrill & Co.'s English Classics (12 cents). Compare the words and forms of expression in Wycliffe's translation with those of our Author- ized Version. Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English, Part II., gives in their original form, with notes and glossary, selections from Mandeville's Travels. Wycliffe's Translation of the Gospel of Mark, Langland's Piers the Plowman, Gower's Confessio Amantis. Good selections from Lang- land and Gower, with modernized spelling, may be found in Ward's English Poets, Vol. I., pp. 96-101 and 107-113. Chaucer. His finest production is the Prologue (Eclectic English Classics, American Book Co., Prologue and Knightes Tale, 25 cents ; Ward's English Poets, I., 46-56), which should be read and re-read. The student should be able to give a clear-cut description of each one of the leading pilgrims and to answer definitely the following questions : How has the Prologue added to our knowledge of life in the four- teenth century? Give examples of Chaucer's vivid pictures. What specimens of his humor does the Prologue contain? Do any of Chaucer's lines in the Prologue show that the Reformation spirit was in the air, or did Wycliffe and Langland alone among contemporary authors afford evidence of this spirit ? Compare the subject matter of Chaucer's verse with Langland's. What qualities in Chaucer save him from the charge of cynicism when he alludes to human faults? Does 1 Every school library should own Ward's English Poets, 4 vols., $4, and Craik's English Prose Selections, 5 vols., $5.50. READING REFERENCES 8/ the Prologue attempt to portray any of the nobler sides of human nature ? Is the Prologue mainly or entirely concerned with the person- ality of the pilgrims ? Has Chaucer any philosophy of life ? Are there any references to the delights of nature? Note any passages that show special powers of melody and mastery over verse. Does the poem reveal anything of Chaucer's personality? The student who has the time at this point should also read one or two of Chaucer's delightful tales, e.g., The Knightes Tale and The Nonne Preestes Tale. These two, together with the Prologue, may be found in Morris's Clarendon Press edition (70 cents) and in Corson's Selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (90 cents). Outside of the drama, does English literature contain any other story teller in verse who can be classed with Chaucer? WORKS FOR CONSULTATION AND FURTHER STUDY (OPTIONAL) Ramsay's The Foundations of England. Ten Brink's Early English Literature, Vol. I., pp. 1 19-367 ; Vol. II., pp. 3-206. Morley's English Writers, Vols. III., IV., V. Jusserand's Literary History of the English People, from the Origins to the Renaissance, pp. 97-438. Courthope's History of English Poetry, Vol. I. Lounsbury's History of the English Language. Champney's History of English. Morris's Specimens of Early English, Part I., contains selections from the Ormulum, Layamon's Brut, the Ancren Riwle, and The Owl and the Nightingale. Part II. contains specimens of the lyrics, the Handlyng Synne of Robert Manning of Brunne, Mandeville's Travels, Langland's Piers the Plowman, Wycliffe's Translation of St. Mark, Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with Notes and Glossary. Sweet's First Middle English Primer contains extracts from the Ancren Riwle and the Ormulum. Jusserand's Piers Plowman. Skeat's text of Piers the Plowman, with Glossary and Notes. Bosworth and Waring's edition of the Gospels contains the Gothic 88 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 and the Anglo-Saxon text, together with the translations by Wycliffe and Tyndale (p. 98). Skeat's Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 6 vols., is the best edition. Skeat's Student' 's Edition of same, i vol., has the same text. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales Annotated and Accented, with Illustra- tions of English Life in Chaucer's Time, by John Saunders. Pollard's Primer of Chaucer. Lounsbury's Studies in Chaucer, 3 vols. Ward's Life of Chaucer, in English Men of Letters Series. Lowell's My Study Windows contains one of the best essays ever written on Chaucer. Minto's Characteristics of English Poets, pp. 1-58 (Chaucer, Lang- land, Gower). Morley's Early English Romances. Ellis's Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances. Jusserand's English Wayfaring Life in the Fourteenth Century. Cutts's Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages. Jessop's The Coming of the Friars. Cutts's Parish Priests and their People in the Middle Ages in England. CHAPTER III FROM CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400, TO THE ACCESSION OF ELIZABETH, 1558 Reasons for Comparative Lack of Progress of Fifteenth Century Literature. It might be expected that the fif- teenth century would show the effect of Chaucer's quick- ening influence and produce a literature of surpassing interest. Let us inquire why the reverse is the case. I. No genius like Chaucer was born ; or, if there was such a potential genius, his talents were diverted into channels other than those of literature. II. There was not so much freedom of thought in the fifteenth as in the fourteenth century. Wycliffe could write his polemical tracts then, and translate and interpret the Bible, but his followers could not in the next century. In 1401 the first Englishman was burned at the stake because of individual opinions on religious matters. From this time the expenses of burning heretics are sometimes found in the regular accounts of cities and boroughs. Literature should be the full expression of a nation's thought and feeling, and such literature did not flourish again until Elizabethan days ushered in more freedom. III. Chivalry, the moving spirit of the preceding age, was changing. This fact necessitated the growth of some new ideal. The increasing use of gunpowder gradually put an end to the superiority of the knight. The great castles began to decline, and people mingled more famil- iarly with one another. There was no longer so vast a 89 90 FROM 1400 TO ELIZABETH'S ACCESSION, 1558 gulf between the rich and the poor. The poor man with his firearm was a match for a horse and a rider. The rise of the common people was soon to have a marked influ- ence on literature. From their ranks was to come an audience that would appreciate and support Shakespeare. IV. The studies of the Schoolmen had helped to un- dermine literature and make it repellent. " Schoolmen" is merely a term for those who pursued the studies of the schools or universities. Many of these studies finally be- came little more than juggling with words or forming smoke wreaths of abstractions. The scholars took noth- ing for their subject and talked about it at great length. Some of their subjects were : whether all children in a state of innocence are masculine ; whether God ever knows more things than he is aware of ; whether one angel can occupy at the same time precisely the same space as another angel ; whether God can make a yardstick without two ends. Science brings new facts into being, but these wordy gymnastics accomplished nothing. Taine says : " Three centuries of labor at the bottom of this black moat added not one idea to the human mind." V. The Wars of the Roses, or the struggle of the houses of Lancaster and York for the throne, broke out in 1455 and lasted for thirty years. During this time many of the nobles were killed. The effects of this civil war in depressing literature have been overestimated. The times of Richard II. were unsettled, and yet Chaucer wrote then. However, some who might have become writers may have had their energies diverted in another direction by the war. Malory's Morte d'Arthur. The greatest prose work of the fifteenth century was completed in 1470 by a man who styles himself Sir Thomas Malory, Knight. We MALORY'S MORTE D'ARTHUR 91 know nothing of the author's life, but he has left as a monument a great prose epic of the deeds of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. From the various French legends concerning King Arthur, Malory selected his materials and fashioned them into the completest Arthuriad that we possess. While his work cannot be called original, he displayed rare artistic power in arran- ging, abridging, and selecting the various parts from different French works. Malory's prose is remarkably simple and direct. Even in the impressive scene where Sir Bedivere throws the dying King Arthur's sword into the sea, the language tells the story simply and shows no straining after effect : "And then he threw the sword as far into the water as he might, and there came an arm and a hand above the water, and met it and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished. And then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water. ... ' Now put me into the barge,' said the King ; and so he did softly. And there received him three queens with great mourning, and so they set him down, and in one of their laps King Arthur laid his head, and then that queen said, ' Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me ? '" After the dusky barge has borne Arthur away from mortal sight, Malory writes : " Here in this world he changed his life." A century before, Chaucer had with equal simplic- ity voiced the Saxon faith : - " His spiryt chaungede hous." 1 Sometimes this prose narrative, in its condensation and expression of feeling, shows something of the poetic spirit. When the damsel on the white palfrey sees that her knightly lover has been killed, she cries : 1 Knightes Tale. 92 FROM 1400 TO ELIZABETH'S ACCESSION, 1558 " ' O Balin ! two bodies hast thou slain and one heart, and two hearts in one body, and two souls thou hast lost.' And therewith she took the sword from her love that lay dead, and as she took it, she fell to the ground in a swoon." Malory's work, rather than Layamon's Brut, has been the storehouse to which later poets have turned. Many nineteenth century poets are indebted to Malory. Tenny- son's Idylls of the King, Matthew Arnold's Death of Tris- tram, Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse, a,nd William Morris's Defence of Guinevere were inspired by the Morte cT Arthur. Few other English prose works have had more influence on the poetry of the Victorian age. Scottish Poetry. The best poetry of the fifteenth cen- tury was written in the Northern dialect, that spoken north of the river Humber. This language was just as much English as the Midland tongue in which Chaucer wrote. Not until the sixteenth century was this dialect called Scotch. This poetry is remarkable for showing in that early age a genuine love of nature. Changes are not rung on some typical landscape, copied from an Italian versifier. The northern poet had his eye fixed on the scenery and the sky of Scotland. About the middle of the century, Robert Henryson, a teacher in Dunfermline, wrote: " The northin wind had purifyit the air And sched the misty cloudis fra the sky." * This may lack the magic of Shelley's rhythm (p. 364), but the feeling for nature is as genuine as in the latter poet's lines : " For after the rain, when with never a stain The pavilion of heaven is bare." 2 1 Testament of Cresseid. 3 The Cloud. SCOTTISH POETRY 93 William Dunbar, the greatest poet of this group, who lived in the last half of the fifteenth century, was a loving student of the nature which greeted him in his northland. No Italian poet, as he wandered beside a brook, would have thought of a simile like this : " The stone's clear as stars in frosty night." l Dunbar takes us with him on a fresh spring morning, where " Enamelled was the field with all colours, The pearly dropped shook in silver showers," 1 where we can hear the matin song of the birds hopping among the buds, while " Up rose the lark, the heaven's minstrel fine." 1 Both Dunbar and Gawain Douglas (i474?-i522), the son of a Scotch nobleman, had keen eyes for all coloring in sky, leaf, and flower. In one line Dunbar calls our at- tention to these varied patches of color in a Scotch garden : "purple, azure, gold, and gules [red]." In the verses of Douglas we see the purple streaks of the morning, the bluish-gray, blood-red, fawn-yellow, golden, and freckled red and white flowers, and " Some watery-hued, as the blue wavy sea." 2 Outside the. pages of Shakespeare, we shall for the next two hundred years look in vain for such a genuine love of scenery and natural phenomena as we can find in fifteenth century Scottish poetry. These poets obtained many of their images of nature at first hand, a quality rare in any age. 1 The Golden Targe. * Prologue to JZneid, Book XII. 94 FROM 1400 TO ELIZABETH'S ACCESSION, 1558 "Songs for Man or Woman, of All Sizes." When Shakespeare shows us Autolycus offering such songs at a rustic festival, 1 the great poet emphasizes the fondness for the ballad which had for a long time been developing a taste for poetry. While it is difficult to assign exact dates to the composition of many ballads, we know that they flourished in the fifteenth century. They were then as much prized as the novel is now, and, like it, they had a story to tell. The verse was often halting, but it suc- ceeded in conveying to the hearer tales of love, adventure, and the supernatural. These ballads were sometimes tinged with pathos, but there was an energy in the rude lines which made the heart beat faster and often stirred the listeners to find in a dance an outlet for their emotions. Even now, with all the poetry of centuries from which to choose, it is refreshing to turn to a Robin Hood ballad and look upon the greensward, hear the rustle of the leaves in Nottingham forest, and follow the adventures of the hero. We read the opening lines : " There are twelve months in all the year, As I hear many say, But the merriest month in all the year Is the merry month of May. " Now Robin Hood is to Nottingham gone, With a link a down, and a day, And there he met a silly old woman Was weeping on the way." Of our own accord we finish the ballad to see if Robin Hood rescued her sons, who were condemned to death for shooting the fallow deer. The ballad of the Nut- Brown Maid has some touches which are almost Shakespearean. The Winter's Tale, IV., 4. BALLADS 95 Some of the carols of the fifteenth century give a fore- taste of Elizabethan song. One carol on the birth of the Christ-child, beginning : " I syng a of a mayden," contains stanzas like these, which show artistic workmanship, imaginative power, and, above all, rare lyrical beauty : " He cam also stylle to his moderes bowr, As dew in Aprille that fallyt on the flour. " He cam also stylle ther his moder lay, As dew in Aprille that fallyt on the spray." l We saw that the English tongue during its period of exclusion from the Norman court gained strength from coming in such close contact with life. Although the higher types of poetry were for the most part wanting during the fifteenth century, yet the ballads multiplied and sang their songs to the ear of life. Critics may say that the rude stanzas seldom soar far from the ground, but we are again reminded of the invincible strength of Antaeus so long as he kept close to his mother earth. English poetry is so great because it has not withdrawn from life, because it was nurtured in such a cradle. When Shakespeare wrote his plays, he found an audi- ence to understand and to appreciate them. Not only those who occupied the boxes, but also those who stood in the pit, listened intelligently to his dramatic stories. The ballad had played its part in teaching the humblest home to love poetry. These rude fireside songs were no mean factors in preparing the nation 'to welcome Shake- speare. 1 Wright's Songs and Carols of the Fifteenth Century, p. 30. 96 FROM 1400 TO ELIZABETH'S ACCESSION, 1558 The Renaissance. The causes leading to the revival of learning, usually called the Renaissance, constitute the chief glories of the fifteenth century and the first part of the sixteenth. We must remember that the Renais- sance was a necessary factor in giving us Shakespeare in the next century. Before the buds and the flowers start forth in the spring, the warm sun has shone and the showers have fallen for some time. . They apparently produce no result for a long while, but finally the soft green leaves will clothe the barren trees and the meadows be dotted with fragrant flowers. The revival of learning stands in the same relation to Elizabethan literature as the sun and showers to vegetation. There were several prominent causes helping to usher in the Renaissance : I. The art of printing multiplied books and made their wisdom accessible to a larger number. About 1477 William Caxton printed the first book in England. In the intellectual growth of a nation, it would be diffi- cult to overestimate the importance of printing. When the same forms of speech and idioms circulated among all, an important step was taken in permanently fixing the language. Among a large number of books, Caxton printed the Canterbury Tales, and thus gave Chaucer's genius and language wider influence. When we speak of English books before this time, it should be remem- bered that they were laboriously copied on parchment, and that the copies were consequently few and costly. II. The capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 was a factor in hastening the influence of Grecian literature on western Christendom. Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, was the head- quarters of Grecian learning. Because of the remoteness THE RENAISSANCE 97 of this capital, English literature had not been greatly influenced by Greece. When Constantinople fell, many of her scholars went to Italy, taking with them precious Grecian manuscripts. As Englishmen often visited Italy, they soon began to study Grecian masterpieces, and to fall under the spell of Homer and the Athenian dramatists. III. Science was gradually developing. Men were asking the why and the wherefore of all things, even of those beliefs grounded on faith. Copernicus was think- ing out the true movements of the solar system, and showing that the universe does not revolve around this world as a center. Men began to demonstrate that the world is round and can be circumnavigated. New colleges were established at both Cambridge and Oxford. IV. The discovery of the New World fired the imagi- nations of men and made the most wonderful dreams seem capable of realization. It is hard for us to-day, with little undiscovered territory except near the Poles, to ap- preciate the effect that the finding of a new world would have upon the imaginations and the ambitions of men. William Tyndale, I4go?-i536. The Reformation was another mighty influence, working side by side with all the other forces to effect a lasting change in English history and literature. In the early part of the sixteenth century, Martin Luther was electrifying Germany with his demands for church reformation. In order to decide which religious party was in the right, there arose a desire for more knowledge of the Scriptures. The language had changed much since Wycliffe's translation of the Bible, and, besides, that was accessible only in manuscript. William Tyndale was a clergyman who had been educated at both Oxford and Cambridge. He was an excellent linguist and he con- ceived the. idea of giving the English people the Bible in 98 FROM 1400 TO ELIZABETH'S ACCESSION, 1558 their own tongue. He found that he could not translate and print it with safety in England, and so he went to the continent, where with the help of friends he turned the Bible into English and had it printed. He was forced to move frequently from place to place, and he was finally betrayed in his hiding place near Brussels. After eighteen months' imprisonment without pen or books, he was stran- gled and his body was burned at the stake. Of his translation, Brooke says : " It was this Bible which, revised by Coverdale, and edited and re-edited as WILLIAM TYNDALE 99 Cromwell's Bible, 1539, and again as Cranmer's Bible, 1540, was set up in every parish church in England. It got north into Scotland and made the Lowland English more like the London English. It passed over into the Protes- tant settlements in Ireland. After its revival in 1611 it went with the Puritan Fathers to New England and fixed the standard of English in America. Many millions of people now speak the English of Tyndale's Bible, and there is no other book which has had, through the Author- ized Version, so great an influence on the style of English literature and the standard of English prose." The -following verses from Tyndale's version will show its simplicity and directness and how much the translation in present use owes to this : "Jesus sayde unto her, Thy brother shall ryse agayne. " Martha sayde unto hym, I knowe wele, he shall ryse agayne in the resurreccion att the last daye. " Jesus sayde unto her, I am the resurreccion and lyfe ; whosoever beleveth on me, ye, though he were deed, yet shall he lyve." Italian Influence : Wyatt and Surrey. During the reign of Henry VIII. (1509-1547), the influence of Italian poetry made itself distinctly felt. The roots of Eliza- bethan poetry were watered by many fountains, one of the chief of which flowed from Italian soil. To Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and to the Earl of Surrey (15171547) belongs the credit of introducing from Italian sources new influences which helped to remodel English poetry and give it a distinctly modern cast. These poets were the first to introduce the sonnet, which Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth employed with such power in after times. Blank verse was first used in Eng- land by the Earl of Surrey, who translated a portion of 100 FROM 1400 TO ELIZABETH'S ACCESSION, 1558 Virgil's jLneid into that measure. When Shakespeare took up his pen, he found that vehicle of poetic expression ready for his use. Wyatt and Surrey adopted Italian subject matter as well as form. They introduced the poetry of the amourists, that is, verse which tells of the woes and joys of a lover. We find Shakespeare in his Sonnets turning to this sub- ject, which he made as broad and deep as life. In 1557, the year before Elizabeth's accession, the poems of Wyatt and Surrey appeared in Tottel's Miscellany, one of the earliest printed collections of modern English poetry. SUMMARY While the period between the death of Chaucer and the accession of Elizabeth did not furnish to English literature a single great name, the nation was preparing for Eliza- bethan times. The influences of the Renaissance and the Reformation were at work. The invention of printing began to make it possible for the best literature to be given to the cottage and the palace. The passing of the knight and the rise of the common people helped to knit the entire nation together and to extend the influences of the revival of learning and the religious awakening. The most important prose works are Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d' Arthur, a masterly retelling of the Arthurian legends, and Tyndale's translation of the Bible. The best poetry was written in Scotland, and this poetry anticipates in some measure that love of nature which is a dominant characteristic of the last part of the eighteenth century. The age is noted for its ballads, which aided in developing among high and low a liking for poetry. At the close of the period, we find Italian influences at work. READING REFERENCES IOI REQUIRED READINGS FOR CHAPTER III HISTORICAL Gardiner, 1 pp. 289-427; Green, Chap. VI.; Underwood-Guest, pp. 312-426; Guerber, pp. 174-232; Oman's England and the Hundred Years 1 War, pp. 96-159; Powers's England and the Reformation, pp. 7-87; Traill, II., 276-574, III., 1-303. LITERARY Malory. Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. I., pp. 72-74, and the Camelot Series edition of Malory's History of King Arthur, pp. 311-313, contain the part relating to the death (or passing) of Arthur. This should be compared with Tennyson's 7~he Passing of Arthur. Are the finest thoughts in the poem original with Tennyson? Early Scottish Poetry. Selections from fifteenth century Scottish poetry, showing an early appreciation of the phenomena of nature, may be found in Ward's English Poets, Vol. I., pp. 139, 151, 152, 164, and 165, and in Fitzgibbon's Early English Poetry {Canterbury Poets Series, 40 cents), pp. 81-85, and 121. What shows that the references to nature are not merely conven- tional? The student should be on the alert to notice the next appear- ance of poetry which shows a genuine love for nature. Ballads. The student will find in Ward, I., p. 210, the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens; p. 224, The Twa Corbies; and, p. 239, Robin Hood Rescuing the Widow's Three Sons. The teacher should read to the class parts of The Nut-Brown Maid (Fitzgibbon's Early English Poetry, pp. 155-167). What qualities in the ballad caused it to take such a hold on the people? Did it have any educating power? Tyndale. The student who has access to Bos worth and Waring's Gospels, containing the Anglo-Saxon, WyclifFe, and Tyndale versions, will find it profitable to compare these with the version now in use, and to observe how much current English speech owes to these early trans- lations of the Gospels. A specimen of Tyndale's prose is given in Craik's English Prose Selections, I., 185-187. Wyatt and Surrey. A characteristic love sonnet by Wyatt may be 1 For complete titles see list at end of Chap. I. HAL. ENG. LIT. "] 102 FROM 1400 TO ELIZABETH'S ACCESSION, 1558 found on p. 251 of Vol. I. of Ward's English Poets, and two by Surrey on p. 257. A specimen of the first English blank verse, employed by Surrey in translating Virgil's dEneid, is given on pp. 233, 234, of Fitz- gibbon's Early English Poetry. Why are these poets called amourists? What contributions did they make to the form of English verse? What foreign influence did they help to usher in ? WORKS FOR CONSULTATION AND FURTHER STUDY (OPTIONAL) Morley's English Writers, Vols. VI. and VII. Ten Brink's English Literature, Vol. II., Wycliffe to Renaissance, pp. 209-234. Jusserand's Literary History of the English People from the Origins to the Renaissance, pp. 503-525. Gosse's History of Modern English Literature, pp. 33-72. Minto's Characteristics of English Poets, pp. 69-130. Saintsbury's Short History of English Literature, pp. 157-218. Fitzgibbon's Early English Poetry (Canterbury Poets Series) Intro- duction and pp. 30-234. Ward's English Poets, Vol. I., pp. 114-262. Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. I., pp. 50-234. Malory's Le Morte d"* Arthur, edited by Sommer, with Essay on Malory's Prose by Andrew Lang. Dictionary of National Biography, articles, Malory, Caxton, Henry - son, Gavuain Douglas, Dunbar, Tyndale, IVyatt, and Surrey. Veitch's The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry. McLaughlin's Mediceval Life and Literature. Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Gummere's Old English Ballads. Hazlitt's Early Popular Poetry of England. Songs and Carols of the Fifteenth Century, edited by Warton. Carols and Poems, edited by Bullen. The Paston Letters (1422-1509), 3 vols., edited by Gairdner. Denton's England in the Fifteenth Century (excellent). Green's Town Life in the Fifteenth Century. CHAPTER IV THE LITERATURE OF THE AGE OF ELIZABETH The High-water Mark of the World's Poetry. The poetry of the Elizabethan age has never been equaled at any other time in the history of the world. It has been well said that one might become a person of broad culture from the study of only two works: the one, the Bible ; the other, the writings of the greatest of the Elizabethans. Since Shakespeare's day, there have been many improve- ments in science, but no writer of later times has equaled him. The highest compliment that we can pay to the literature of any other age is to say that it has Elizabethan characteristics. Unlike other countries, England felt the strong in- fluences from the Renaissance and the Reformation at one and the same time. When the attractions of the sun and moon unite to draw the tides in one direction, they reach their highest point. At no other time have two forces like the Renaissance and the Reformation combined to stimulate the human mind. The Elizabethan imagina- tion took at the flood the tide raised by these mighty forces, and that tide bore the English drama on to a Shakespearean fortune. We must proceed to note specifically the causes which conspired to produce such a glorious literature in the reign of Elizabeth. We shall seek them in the expansion of both the New and the Old World, in the greater free- 103 104 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH dom of thought, in the democratic and patriotic spirit, in the desire born of fuller knowledge to live a life as varied and as complete as possible, and in the awakening of the imagination to grasp Ufa's newly suggested and un- fathomed possibilities, and to express them in poetry of sufficient fullness and depth to include all human aspira- tion. The Effect of the Exploration of the New World. A New World had been previously discovered, but many of its wonders had not been explored until Elizabethan times. In the wonderful land beyond the sea, there seemed to be everything necessary to usher in that Utopian age for which men had so long sighed. There were precious stones and gold in quantities that promised wealth and enjoyment for all. There was the fabled Fountain of Youth that would drive away the pains and decrepitude of old age and enable all again to enjoy the promised en- chantments of the new Utopia. At home things might be prosaic, slow of movement, and obtained only by such wearying toil as to preclude enjoyment of them when secured. But this would not be the case in the fairy- land of the New World. There was the absolute proof sufficient to satisfy the most skeptical that the New World was a wonderful land of plenty. When Shakespeare was in his teens, Sir Francis Drake, the first Englishman to circumnavigate the world, returned from his voyage. Besides what he kept for himself, he placed in the Tower for the use of the Queen twenty tons of silver bullion, huge blocks of gold, and many pearls, emeralds, and other precious stones. The New World was a land of sufficient promise to spur the ambition and quicken the imagination of the Eliza- bethans. Even their third-rate poets could write : EXPLORATION OF THE NEW WORLD 1 05 "Xanthus shall run liquid gold for thee to wash thy hands ; And if thou like to tend thy flock and not from them to fly, Their fleeces shall be curle'd gold to please their master's eye." 1 The Expansion of the Old World. When we emphasize the influence of the wonders of the New World upon the imagination, we are in danger of forgetting that the Old World was expanding more than the New. Never before had traveling been so popular. Englishmen went to Italy, felt the spell of her literature and art, and came home to spread Italian influence. A contemporary writer on education speaks of " the enchantments of Circe, brought out of Italy " to mold the thought and manners of English youth. Every time England felt a new stim- ulus from the literature of another great nation, she was receiving advantages from the expansion of the Old World. The powerful example of Queen Elizabeth aroused in the English people a desire to learn the best things from every nation. Although Italian influence was in the as- cendency during the sixteenth century, other literatures were studied. A quotation from Roger Ascham's Schole- master, a distinguished educational work (published in 1570), will show what languages were on the fashionable list. He had been the Queen's tutor, and he says : "Yea, I beleue, that beside her perfit readines, in Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish, she readeth here now at Windsore more Greeke euery day, than some Prebendarie of this Chirch doth read Latin in a whole weeke." We thus see that learning was no longer confined to the church, that even the laity might be more energetic stu- dents than churchmen, that the royal example welcomed learning from every land, and that Elizabethan England 1 Peele : The Arraignment of Paris, II., I. 106 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH anticipated the age of Victoria in teaching Greek to women. Nothing contributed to this expansion of the Old World more than the newly acquired freedom of thought, and we must now consider the influence of this factor. Freedom of Thought and its Results. In the reign of Elizabeth's father, Catholics and Protestants alike had been put to death for exercising freedom of thought. Under her immediate predecessor on the throne many fagot fires had been lighted in England to punish those whose opinions were considered heretical. In the next century the Puritan reformers would tolerate only that kind of thought pleasing to themselves. Although there was some persecution of Catholics and Dissenters in Elizabeth's time, yet she allowed comparatively great freedom of opinion and action, and English thought reaped a wonderful harvest during her reign. The Puritans were even then beginning to display their narrowness, but the Queen would not permit them to stifle thought. Had they been given the power to exercise the same censorship which was allowed them in the next cen- tury, the greatest of all dramas would have been throttled in its cradle. During the time of Puritan ascendency in the next century, the theaters were torn down. Thought that is not free is like a bird in a cage. There may be glorious meadows, leafy groves, and murmuring streams with flower-fringed banks, but the caged bird can- not gladden its eye with these, sing its song in the grove, or bathe in the stream. Once open the door of the cage, and the world seems a different one to the bird. Many causes, among which the Reformation was the chief one, had conspired to open the cage, and Elizabeth would not permit the door to be closed. RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES IO/ The Rise of the Middle Class and the Mingling of Differ- ent Elements. Improvement in seamanship, in the art of building vessels, and in the manner of life, which de- manded more comforts, caused a vast increase in com- merce and trade, and this naturally led to the rise of the middle class. The nobility were no longer the sole leaders in England's rapid progress. The men chosen by Eliza- beth to manage affairs of state were not selected merely on account of their titles. Many of her great ministers and councilors were said to have sprung from the earth, and no reign could boast of wiser ones. When any one moves in an exclusive set or coterie, his opinions are generally narrow. Such a one usually de- spises others because he does not understand them. Those who are careful not to mingle with others outside of what is termed " our set " are not leaders in human advancement. Different elements of society look at life from different points of view. Difference of opinion has always been a powerful spur to human progress. We can understand others only from sympathetic association with them. In speaking of the various elements of Elizabethan soci- ety, an English critic says : " But these materials, and to a very large extent the members of the upper classes already described, were intermingled and shaken together in a manner quite unknown to-day. At present, society moves in sharply separated groups, while even the indi- viduals of these groups keep very much to themselves. The same people meet each other at the same places and times ; and they do not, as a rule, meet other people of different classes. Then, life was led much more in com- mon and much more in the open air." When we study Shakespeare, we shall find that he paints 108 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH almost every phase of human nature with unerring touch. It is well that he was born in an age when the mingling of different classes was common, so that it was easier for him to become the poet of all humanity. The audience that stood in the pit or sat in the boxes to witness the performance of his plays, comprised not only lords and wealthy merchants, but also weavers, sailors, and country folk. The mingling of the different classes took place with less friction, because of the spirit of patriotism in the air. When Englishmen, high and low alike, aided in destroy- ing the Spanish Armada and in maintaining England's freedom, all felt that they had a common share in her greatness. This mingling was further aided by the attempts of the Elizabethans to try many different pursuits. Men thus escaped the social restrictions of modern over-specialized life. The Many-sidedness of Life. The revival of learning and the opportunity which the sea constantly afforded for making discoveries and gaining wealth, infused into almost all classes a desire for more knowledge, a long- ing to find out those secrets which had before been hidden. We may instance Sir Walter Raleigh to show how many sides to his nature an Elizabethan could develop. He was a courtier, a warden of the tin mines, a vice- admiral, a captain of the guard, a colonizer, a country gentleman managing a vast Irish estate, a pirate, and a writer. Sir Philip Sidney, who died at the age of thirty- two, was an envoy to a foreign court, a writer of romances, an officer in the army, a poet, and a courtier. Even such an idealist as the poet Edmund Spenser was an active THE MANY-SIDEDNESS OF LIFE 109 servant of the crown in Irish affairs. It became an ambi- tion to have as many different experiences as possible, to search for that variety which youth and a youthful age always crave. This characteristic enabled the Eliza- bethans to speak to all mankind out of the fullness of this varied experience, and proved an important factor in en- riching the literature of the age with such marvelous variety. The Fullness of Elizabethan Literature. For the first time in the world, nearly every type of humanity then found adequate recognition and expression. That age gave lasting utterance to almost every feeling which any human soul has ever known. Nothing was suppressed, neither the imaginative longing of youth nor the disappointment of old age. We see the white soul of a Cordelia and the black one of an lago, a man in the grasp of ambition, like Macbeth, and after it has passed, like Lear, the imagina- tive Hamlet and the dull gravediggers, the servant and the master, the beggar and the prince. We see how the same man behaves on the crest of Fortune's wave and when overwhelmed by adverse storms. For the first time the shepherd's crook was given an equal rank beside the scepter. No one has ever complained because his inmost thoughts could not find expression in Elizabethan literature. When we have feelings which we regard as peculiarly our own, we shall often be surprised, as we read the literature of the Elizabethans, to find that they have preceded us in travers- ing that land of feeling which we were on the point of claiming as the first discoverers. An Age of Imagination and Enthusiasm. The world in every direction seemed to offer untold possibilities. A nation which felt its youth in every vein was fired with IIO THE AGE OF ELIZABETH new hopes, new ambitions, new ideals. The imagination is the only power with which we can grasp the unseen and the ideal. There was never a time in the history of the world when the imagination was more exercised and stimulated. It grew by what it fed on until it attained first Spenserian and then Shakespearean greatness. The stage on which the Elizabethan imagination acted was built by the extension of two worlds, the physical and the mental, the land beyond the western wave and the empire of increasing knowledge, which promised to un- lock the secrets of wind and tide, of plant and metal, of disease and remedy, of sun and star and Milky Way, and finally, perhaps, of life and love, of death and the immor- tal spirit world. No literature demands sympathetic interpretation from the point of view of the spirit of the age more than the Elizabethan. When we read Marlowe's Tamburlaine, we may unsympathetically declare it a mass of exaggeration and bombast. If we can make our own the imagination and youthful feeling of that time, and remember that a world expanding in every direction promised almost everything, we shall catch something of young Marlowe's enthusiasm and modify our former judgment. If we can- not do this, there is much of Elizabethan literature that we can never read aright. We shall come later to an age of cold, juiceless reason, but now the imagination sat on the throne beside the reason. Imagination can tinge the leaden clouds of any age with all the colors of the dawn. Taine says : " I can well believe that things had no more beauty then than now ; but I am sure that men found them more beauti- ful." Let us remember that this added beauty was due to the working of the imagination. AN AGE OF IMAGINATION AND ENTHUSIASM III Even the poets who rank low in that age could write : "To joy her love, I'll build a kingly bower, Seated in hearing of a hundred streams," * and speak without effort " Of moss that sleeps with sound the waters make." 1 As indicative of the intensity of youthful feeling, an- other poet, meaning every syllable he uttered, says : "I live and love, what would you more? As never lover lived before." 2 A great Elizabethan, trying to define beauty, begins thus : " If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts." 8 The faults of Elizabethan literature sprang from this very exuberance of imagination and youthful feeling. In connection with the praiseworthy qualities of spontaneity and enthusiasm, manifested in connection with a vivid imagination, we find in much of the literature exaggera- tion, lack of pruning, and lack of artistic finish. Even Shakespeare has some of these faults, but in his case they are mostly concealed by the brilliancy of his genius. A Nest of Singing Birds. To make a careful study of Elizabethan literature would require more than a life- time. We must guard against thinking that, after we have studied Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Ben Jon- son, and Bacon, we have finished the greater part of Elizabethan literature. It has been aptly said that the 1 Peek: David and Bethsabe, I., I. a Gascoigne : A Strange Passion of a Lover. 3 Marlowe: Tamlurlaine, V., I. THE AGE OF ELIZABETH writers of the age were a nest of singing birds. Many of them occasionally burst into songs of marvelous sweetness. It is the purpose of this book to describe only the greatest works. To show that there were other singers, we need merely give a few stray snatches of song from some of the minor poets. " Love in my bosom, like a bee, Doth suck his sweet ; Now with his wings he plays with me, Now with his feet." LODGE. "Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee, When thou art old, there's grief enough for thee." GREENE. "There is One That wakes above, whose eye no sleep can bind." CHAPMAN. "I shall have one hand in heaven To write my happiness in leaves of stars." DEK.KER. "For see! the dapple gray coursers of the morn r ui sec: me udpjjie gi CLASS ROOM IN STRATFORD GRAMMAR SCHOOL 1 read in Latin, ysop's Fables and Ovid's Metamorphoses may be mentioned. In the fourth act of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare ridicules the current study of the schools. Mrs. Page there complains to the parson: "Sir Hugh, my husband says my son profits noth- ing in the world at his \ book." In the fifth act of Love's Labor s Lost, we are shown adults making a pedantic display of just such wordy learning as Shakespeare was forced to acquire at school. He has two of his characters thus criticise such " learning " : "Moth. (Aside to Costard?) They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps. " Costard. O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words." Study of Human Nature. In some way or other Shakespeare managed to learn more about human nature than any other mortal. He learned to watch human beings of every rank with the same sympathetic eyes with which he observed the daffodil and the wild bird. The hopes and fears of others appealed to him almost as strongly as his own. People like to talk with one 1 Tradition says that Shakespeare occupied the desk in the farthest corner. 152 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH who sympathizes with them. No author can become great unless he draws close to the universal heart of humanity, as well without, as within, his own set or coterie. To Shakespeare, the blacksmith was as human as the lord. An eminent critic says: "He could talk simply and naturally without a touch of patronage or condescension to a hodman on his ladder, a costermonger at his stall, the tailor on his board, the cobbler in his combe, the hen-wife in her poultry-yard, the plowman in his furrow, or the base mechanicals at the wayside country inn." If this had not been the case, the Eliza- bethan drama could not have sounded so many notes of hope, love, fear, ambition, and despair; in other words, the drama could not have been complete. Close observa- tion is the child of sympathy. Lines like these show his power in noting what to most would be trivial : - " I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus, The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool, With open mouth swallowing a tailor's news ; Who, with his shears and measure in his hand, Standing in slippers, which his nimble haste Had falsely thrust on contrary feet, Told of a many thousand warlike French, That were embattailed and rank'd in Kent." 1 Life in London. In 1582, at the age of eighteen, William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, a woman nearly eight years his senior. The next year his first child, Susanna, was born, and two years later Hamnet and Judith, twin children, were added to his family. He and his parents were poor, and he probably real- ized that Stratford was no place for him, if he was 1 King John, IV., 2. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 153 to provide properly for his wife and children, and re- gain the family estates which his father had lost a few years before. Accordingly, at about the age of twenty- one, he set out for London and attached himself to the theater. A tradition says that he not only shot some of the deer of Sir Thomas Lucy, but also lampooned him in cutting verses when that nobleman prosecuted him, and that, to escape being severely dealt with, Shakespeare fled to London. There is, however, no dispute about the fact that he went to London and that he became both an actor and a writer of plays. He is thought to have acted, for instance, the part of the Ghost in Hamlet, of Adam in As You Like It, and of Old Knowell in Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humor. By 1592 Shakespeare had become famous as a drama- tist. We know this from the attack of envious contem- poraries. He was honored by Queen Elizabeth, and he won the friendship of great men, like the Earl of South- ampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated two of his early poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. He became a shareholder in at least two theaters, the Blackfriars and the Globe. He grew wealthy and pur- chased for his family in Stratford larger estates than had been held before the days of misfortune. In 1597 he bought in Stratford a fine large house, known as New Place. A little later he bought one hundred and seven acres near his birthplace. He occasionally visited Strat- ford during these years, but the majority of his time was passed in London, where he probably wrote almost all his plays. Last Days at Stratford. Not far from 1613 he re- turned to Stratford, where he seems to have passed the remainder of his days in quiet with his family. We can '54 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH infer from his plays that he had for some time looked forward to such a quiet consummation of his labors. There was in Shakespeare's time more or less odium attached to the theatrical profession, to the playwright as well as to the actor. We cannot wonder that when he felt assured of his independence, he wished to go where he could live the life of a country gentleman. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 155 One of his Sonnets shows how he smarted under the dis- grace attaching to his profession : " O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means, which public manners breeds And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand." 1 It is probable that he wrote no more for the stage dur- ing these years of retirement. In 1616, at the age of fifty- two, this master singer of the world, who, in De Quincey's phrase, was " a little lower than the angels," died and was laid at rest in the parish church at Stratford. ' Shakespeare's Non-dramatic Work Narrative Poems and Sonnets. Not all of Shake- speare's work is dramatic. He would have stood among the first poets of his age, if he had not written a single drama. The best of his non-dramatic poems are Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and one hundred and fifty-four Son- nets. In the Venus and Adonis, possibly written before he left Stratford, we find frequent allusions to the natural phenomena with which he was familiar .in his Warwick- shire home : " Once more the ruby-color' d portal open'd. Which to his speech did honey passage yield ; Like a red morn, that ever yet betoken'd Wreck to the seaman, tempest to the field, Sorrow to shepherds, woe unto the birds, Gusts and foul flaws to herdsmen and to herds." i Sonnet CXI. 156 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH The comparison here indicated between the ruby lips of Adonis and a red morning is more in Lyly's vein and less inevitable than almost any of the similes in Shakespeare's maturer work. In these early non-dramatic poems he shows conscious effort to think of something to write, but before long his verse came to him as easily as song to the skylark. In his Sonnets, which are the productions of a more mature period, many of the references to nature are masterly. The following lines from Sonnets XXXIII. and XVIII. are illustrations in point: " Full many a glorious morning hav.e I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy." " Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date. 1 ' But the chief subject of the Sonnets is love, concerning which he speaks in such noble lines as these : " Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds." l Almost every phase of the emotion of love is expressed in these Sonnets. Saintsbury says : " From Sappho and Solomon to Shelley and Mr. Swinburne, many bards have spoken excellently of love : but what they said could be cut out of Shakespeare's Sonnets better said than they have said it, and yet enough remain to furnish forth the greatest of poets." 1 Sonnet CXVI. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 157 The Dramas Classification of the Plays. Shakespeare's chief work consisted in writing plays, which were acted in the theaters. His dramas may be divided into three classes : comedies, histories, and tragedies. We may indicate the following as some of the best in each class. They will be read by every cultivated person. Comedies : A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, As You Like It, The Mer- chant of Venice, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, Histories : Richard III., Henry IV., Henry V., Julius Casar. Tragedies : Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet. Counting plays which have two or more parts as one play, we find that the Globe edition of Shakespeare con- tains thirty-four different plays. We may make another classification from a different point of view, according to the time at which the plays were written. In order to trace the growth of Shake- speare's mind, it is necessary to study him chronologi- cally. By such study, says Furnivall, " Shakespeare's mind is shown to have run from the amorousness and fun of youth, through the strong patriotism of early manhood, to the wrestling with the dark problems that beset the man of middle age, to the time of gloom which weighed on Shakespeare, as on so many men, in later life, when, though outwardly successful, the world seemed all against him, and his mind dwelt with sympathy on scenes of faithless- ness of friends, treachery of relations and subjects, ingrati- tude of children, scorn of his kind, till at last in his Stratford home again, peace came to him, Miranda and Perdita, in their lovely freshness and charms, greeted him, and he was laid by his quiet Avon's side." 158 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH Four Periods of his Life. We may mark off four peri- ods in Shakespeare's life, corresponding, in the main, to the divisions indicated by Furnivall. (1) There was the sanguine period, showing the exuber- ance of youthful love and imagination. Among the plays which are typical of these years are The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II. , and Richard III. These were probably all composed before 1595. (2) The second period, from 1595 to 1601, shows prog- ress in dramatic art. There is less exaggeration, more real power, and a deeper insight into human nature. There appears in his philosophy a vein of sadness, such as we find in the sayings of Jaques in As You Like It, and more appreciation of the growth of character, typified by his treatment of Orlando and Adam in the same play. Among the plays of this period are The Merchant of Ven- ice, Henry IV., Henry V., and As You Like It. (3) We may characterize the third period, from 1601 to 1608, as one in which he felt that the time was out of joint, that life was a fitful fever. His father died in 1601, after great disappointments. His best friends suf- fered what he calls, in Hamlet, "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." In 1601 Elizabeth executed the Earl of Essex for treason and on the same charge threw the Earl of Southampton into the Tower. Even Shake- speare himself may have been suspected, and he had probably been deceived by some one whom he had trusted. The great plays of this period are tragedies, among which we may instance Julius Ccesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. (4) The plays of his fourth period, 1608-1613, are remarkable for calm strength and sweetness. The fierce- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 159 ness of Othello and Macbeth is left behind. In 1608 Shakespeare's mother died. Her death and the vivid recollection of her kindness and love may have been strong factors in causing him to look on life with kindlier eyes. The greatest plays of this period are Cymbeline, The Win- ter's Tale, and The Tempest. While the dates of the composition of these plays are not exactly known, the foregoing classification is probably approximately correct, and it should be followed in study- ing the development and the changing phases of Shake- speare's mind. Sources of the Plots. In almost all cases we can find the sources of the plots of Shakespeare's plays in some old chronicle, novel, biography, or older play. We can find in Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, published when Shakespeare was thirteen years old, the stories of Macbeth and Lear. But if Shakespeare's genius had not changed the old tales in vital points, we should not have had at the close of King Lear the stron- gest lines he ever penned. He read Plutarch's Lives for aid in writing Julius C&sar and Antony and Cleopatra, while an old Italian tale gave him the framework for part of The Merchant of Venice. Even Shakespeare could not make brick without straw. Here we have a fresh application of the psychological truth that the imagination is dependent for its materials on the stores of knowledge gleaned from the world by the exercise of our own senses, by learning from other people, and by thinking over what we have thus learned. When a comparison is made between these dramatic masterpieces and the old chronicles and tales, the student will often find that Shakespeare's plays are as different from their sources as the rose from the soil which nourished it. !(5o THE AGE OF ELIZABETH General Characteristics of his Dramas The Comic and the Tragic Spirit. Shakespeare is equally successful in depicting humor and pathos, comedy and tragedy. The next greatest English writer is lacking in the sense of humor. John Milton could write the trag- edies of a Paradise Lost and a Samson Agonistes, but he could not give us the humor of A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Comedy of Errors, or As You Like It. We have seen that the next greatest dramatic genius, Mar- lowe, has little sense of humor. Mrs. Browning correctly describes the plays of Shakespeare as filled " With tears and laughters for all time." * Mastery of his Mother Tongue. His wealth of expres- sion is another striking characteristic. In a poem on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson wrote: "Thou had'st small Latin and less Greek." Shakespeare is, however, the mightiest master of the Eng- lish tongue. He uses 15,000 different words, while the second greatest writer in our language employs 7000. A great novelist like Thackeray has a vocabulary of about 5000 words, while many uneducated laborers do not use over 600. The combinations which Shakespeare has made with these 15,000 words are far more striking than their mere number. Variety of Style. Shakespeare's style is remarkable. When we speak of the style of Milton, Addison, or Macaulay, we have some definite peculiarities which we can easily classify, but Shakespeare, in holding the mirror 1 A Vision of Poets. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE l6l up to nature, has different styles for his sailors, soldiers, courtiers, merchants, kings, shepherds, for the ale wife Mistress Quickly, and for Lady Macbeth, for Hamlet the philosopher, and for Bottom the weaver. To employ so many varied styles requires genius of the highest kind. In the case of the most of us, our style would soon betray our individuality. When Dr. Samuel Johnson tried to write a drama, he made all his little fishes talk like whales, as Goldsmith wittily says. Breadth of Sympathy. The most pronounced character- istic in his plays is the extent of his sympathy with human kind. There are few intelligent people who do not build a barrier between the larger part of humanity and them- selves. When the glass vessel breaks or the reed fails to sustain the weight, the most feel contempt for the frailty and the weakness. To Shakespeare, frailty and weakness were as absolute facts as strength. The ivy, the myrtle, and the floating water lily met his gaze, as well as the oak. A carpenter might have noticed only the oak, but Shake- speare's sympathy enabled him to see more, to understand more, and to interpret more. Those err who look for Shakespeare's most striking quality in the myriad directions of his intellectual action. He studied people because he found himself entering into their joy and sorrow, because he sympathized with them. It was his sympathy that gave wings to his intellect and rendered its flight easy. Many Elizabethans thought that Ben Jonson had more cold intellect than Shakespeare, and their judgment in this respect was probably right. Sym- pathy puts sun and moon and stars in the sky of knowl- edge. Sympathy may create no new objects, but it throws a matchless light on what was previously dark. By look- ing at a world thus illumined, Shakespeare was able to 1 62 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH read those secrets of the soul which are never revealed to an unsympathetic eye. In one of his great tragedies he wrote : " Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel." l The centuries have been strewn with the failures of writers who have not heeded this adage. In his dramas, Shakespeare enters into the lives of such different characters as Hamlet and Juliet, Lear and Fal- staff, Dame Quickly and Perdita, Henry the Fourth and the old servant Adam. Shakespeare identifies himself with the philosophic Hamlet as he voices his dissatisfac- tion with the world : " O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter ! O God ! O God ! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world ! " Shakespeare looks at the world with the hopeful eyes of a lover, as he hears Juliet say : "This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath, May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet." When Lear's daughters have driven him out into the storm, the great dramatist takes us with the helpless old King. We can hear him call to the elements : "... here I stand, your slave. A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man : But yet I call you servile ministers, That have with two pernicious daughters joinM Your high engendered battles 'gainst a head So old and white as this." 1 Romeo and Juliet, III., 3. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 163 We descend very far in the social scale when we enter the tavern at Eastcheap and listen to the conversation of the hostess, Dame Quickly, with Falstaff : " Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednes- day in Wheeson week, when the prince broke thy head for likening his father to a singing-man of Windsor, thou didst swear to me then as I was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife, come in then and call me gossip Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar ; telling us she had a good dish of prawns ; whereby thou didst desire to eat some ; whereby I told thee they were ill for a green wound ? " 1 No psychologist has ever given a more lifelike illustration of the working of an uncultivated mind. All things that arrested her attention are dragged into the story, in the order in which they happened, although they have no log- ical relation to the progress of events. Shakespeare has the same sympathetic insight into her character as into that of Hamlet and of Juliet. From Dame Quickly we may turn to Perdita, the princess of young womanhood. We can almost see Shakespeare's brown eyes glisten as he tells us that "... nothing she does or seems But smacks of something greater than herself." a His portraiture of women of varied types is well-nigh marvelous. Giles says : " The fidelity of Shakespeare to the innermost feelings of woman is one of the wonders of his genius to women themselves. Mrs. Siddons marveled at it. Feminine secrecies, which she thought no mascu- line imagination could divine, she found that Shakespeare 1 King Henry IV., Part /., Act. II. 2 The Winter's Tale, IV., 4. 1 64 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH had discovered ; and this not alone in the maternal anguish of Constance, or the queenly grief of Katharine, but even in the stony dungeons of Lady Macbeth's bosom." No class is untouched by the great dramatist's sympa- thy. The old servant in As You Like It is drawn with as kindly a pen as King Henry IV. and Prince Hal. Shakespeare made this rare discovery : "There is some soul of goodness in things evil, Would men observingly distil it out." x When a character like Shylock is presented by a great actor, like Sir Henry Irving, the audience feels flashes of sympathy for the Jew. True disciples of Shakespeare constantly feel those touches of nature which make the whole world seem more closely kin. Universality. Other writers may have equaled Shake- speare on some one side, but he has as many sides as life has changes, and he is great in them all. He penetrates almost every sea, harbor, creek, and rivulet of human emotion. He identifies himself with the joys and sor- rows of the king and of the shepherd, of youth and of age. Of him Ben Jonson truly says : " He was not of an age, but for all time." Shakespeare does not exhibit some popular conceit, folly, or phase of thought which was merely the fashion of the hour and for which succeeding generations would care nothing. He voices those truths which appeal to the universal heart of humanity. The grief of Lear over the 1 Henry V., IV., I. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 165 dead Cordelia, the ambition of Lady Macbeth, the loves of Rosalind and Juliet, the questionings of Hamlet, interest us as much to-day as they did the people three hundred years ago. Fashions in literature may come and go, but Shakespeare's work remains. Comparative Rank of his Work. Shakespeare is the greatest writer of the ages. Goethe says : "I do not remember that any book, or person, or event in my life ever produced so great an effect upon me as Shakespeare's plays. They seem to be the work of some- heavenly genius." A cautious critic like Hallam writes: "The name of Shakespeare is the greatest in all literature. No man. ever came near to him in the creative powers of the mind ; no man ever had such strength at once and such variety of imagination." True as these criticisms are, we must avoid inferring that Shakespeare has no faults. Some of his earlier work is marred by the shortcomings of the age : exaggeration, lack of pruning, and lack of repression. There are also euphuistic conceits scattered through his work. His Influence on Thought. If a person should master Shakespeare and the Bible, he would find all that is greatest in human thought. With the exception of the Scriptures, Shakespeare's dramas have surpassed all other works in molding modern English thought. Even when we do not read him, we cannot escape the influence of others who have been swayed by him. For generations, certain modes of thought have crystallized about his phrases. We may instance such expressions as these : " Brevity is the soul of wit." " What's in a name ? " " The wish was father to the thought." ''The time is out of joint." "There's the rub." "There's a divinity that shapes our ends." " Comparisons are odorous." It would, HAL. ENG. LIT. II 1 66 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH perhaps, not be too much to say that the play of Hamlet has affected the thought of the majority of the English- speaking race. Shakespeare's influence on the thought of any individual has only two circumscribihg factors, the extent of Shake- spearean study and the capacity for interpreting the facts of life. No intelligent person can study Shakespeare without becoming a deeper and more varied thinker, with- out securing a broader comprehension of human existence, its struggles, failures, 'and successes. If we have before viewed humanity through a glass darkly, he will gradually lead us where we can see face to face the beauty and the grandeur of the mystery of existence. He will also give us an added something difficult of definition ; he will alche- mize the" leaden facts of life. After intimate companion- ship with him, there will be, in the words of Ariel, hardly any common thing in life " But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange." 1 BEN JONSON, 15737-1637 Life. About nine years after the birth of Shakespeare, his greatest successor in the English drama was born in London. Jonson outlived Shakespeare twenty-one years, and helped to usher in the decline of the drama. The son of a clergyman and the stepson of a master bricklayer, Ben Jonson received a good education at West- minster School, and, unlike Shakespeare, learned much Latin and Greek. In one respect Jonson's training here was unfortunate for a poet. He was taught to write prose 1 The Tempest, I., 2. BEN JONSON 167 exercises first and then to turn them into poetry. In this way he acquired the habit of trying to express unpoetical ideas in verse. Art could change the prose into metrical, rhyming lines, but art could not breathe into them the liv- ing soul of poetry. In after times Jonson said that Shake- speare lacked art, but Jonson recognized that the author of Hamlet had the magic touch of nature. Jonson's pen rarely felt her all-embracing touch. If Jonson served an apprenticeship as a bricklayer, as 1 68 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH his enemies afterward said, he did not continue long at such work. He crossed the Channel and enlisted for a brief time as a soldier in the Netherlands. He soon re- turned to London and became a writer for the theater, and thenceforth lived the life of a writer and a student. He loved to study and translate the classics. In fact, what a novice might think original in Jonson's plays was often borrowed from the classics. Of his relations to the clas- sical writers, Dryden says : " You track him everywhere in their snow." Jonson was known as the most learned poet of the age, because, if his plays demanded any special knowledge, no subject was too hard, dry, or remote from common life for him to attempt to master. He knew the boundaries of Bohemia, and he took pleasure in saying to a friend : " Shakespeare in a play brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where is no sea near, by some hundred miles." Jonson's personal characteristics partly explain why he placed himself in opposition to the spirit of the age. He was extremely combative. It was almost a necessity for him to quarrel with some person or with some opinion. He killed two men in duels, and he would probably have been hanged, if he had not pleaded benefit of clergy. For the greater part of his life, he was often occupied with pen and ink quarrels. When James I. ascended the throne in 1603, Jonson soon became a royal favorite, and was often employed to write masques, a peculiar species of drama which called for magnificent scenery and dress, and gave the nobility the opportunity of acting the part of some distinguished or supernatural character. Such work brought Jonson into intimate association with the leading men of the day. In 1616, the year in which Shakespeare died, Jonson BEN JONSON 169 was made poet laureate. When he died in 1637, he was buried in an upright position in Westminster Abbey. A plain stone with the unique inscription, "O Rare Ben Jonson," marks his grave. Plays. Ben Jonson's comedies are his best dramatic work. From all his plays we may select three which will best repay reading : Volpone, The Alchemist, and The Silent Woman. Volpone is the story of an old childless Venetian nobleman whose ruling passion is avarice. Everything else in the play is made tributary to this passion. The first three lines in the first act strike the keynote of the entire play. Volpone says: u Good morning to the day ; and next, my gold ! Open the shrine, that I may see my saint. Hail the world's soul and mine ! " The Alchemist makes a strong presentation, not of the "eternal gullible" in human nature, but of certain forms of gullibility and of the special tricks which the alchemists and impostors of that day adopted. One character wants to buy the secret of the helpful influence of the stars; another parts with his wealth to learn the alchemist's secret of turning everything into gold and jewels. The way in which these characters are deceived is very amus- ing. A study of this play adds to our knowledge of a cer- tain phase of the times. In point of artistic construction of plot, The Alchemist is nowhere excelled in the English drama, but the intrusion of Jonson's learning often makes the play tedious reading. He must, for instance, by intro- ducing the technical terms of the so-called science of alchemy, show that he has studied it thoroughly. One character speaks to the alchemist of " Your lato, azoch, zernich, chibrit, heautarit," THE AGE OF ELIZABETH and another asks : "Can you sublime and dulcify? calcine? Know you the sapor pontic ? sapor stiptic, Or what is homogene, or heterogene?" Lines like the following show that Jonson's acute mind had grasped something of the principle of evolution : "... 'twere absurd To think that nature in the earth bred gold Perfect in the instant : something went before. There must be remote matter." The Silent Woman is in lighter vein than either of the plays just mentioned. The leading character is called Morose, and his special whim or " humor " is a horror of noise. His home is on a street " so narrow at both ends that it will receive no coaches nor carts, nor any of these common noises." He has mattresses on the stairs, and he dismisses the footman for wearing squeaking shoes. For a long time Morose does not marry, fearing the noise of a wife's tongue. Finally he commissions his nephew to find him a silent woman for a wife, and the author uses to good advantage the opportunity for comic situations which this turn in the action affords. Dryden preferred The Silent Woman to any of the other plays. Besides the plays mentioned in this section, Jonson wrote during his long life many other comedies and masques, as well as some tragedies. Marks of Decline. In Jonson's plays we may study the decline of the drama, and in doing this we shall the better appreciate the genius of Shakespeare. We may change Jonson's line (see p. 164) so that it will state one reason for his not maintaining Shakespearean excellence: He was not for all time, but of an age. BEN JONSON I/I His first play, Every Man in His Humor, paints, not the universal emotions of men, but some especial humor. He thus defines the sense in which he uses humor : " When some peculiar quality Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw All his effects, his spirits and his powers, In their confluctions, all to run one way, This may be truly said to be a Humor." Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson gives a distorted or incom- plete picture of life. In Volpone everything is subsidiary to the humor of avarice, which receives unnatural em- phasis^ In The Alchemist there is little to relieve the picture of credibility and hypocrisy, while The Silent Woman has for its leading character a man whose princi- pal " humor " or aim in life is to avoid noise. No drama which fails to paint the nobler side of womanhood can be called complete. In Jonson's plays we do not find a single woman worthy to come near the Shakespearean characters, Cordelia, Imogen, and Desde- mona. His limitations are nowhere more marked than in his inability to portray a noble woman. Another reason why he fails to present life completely is shown in these lines, in which he defines his mission : a My strict hand Was made to seize on vice, and with a gripe Squeeze out the humor of such spongy souls As lick up every idle vanity." Since the world needs building up rather than tearing down, a remedy for an ailment rather than fault-finding, the greatest of men cannot be mere satirists. Shake- speare displays some fellow feeling for the object of his satire, but Jonson's satire is cold and devoid of sympathy. 1/2 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH Jonson deliberately took his stand in opposition to the romantic spirit of the age. Marlowe and Shakespeare had disregarded the classical unities (see p. 143) and had developed the drama on romantic lines. Jonson resolved to follow classical traditions and to adhere to unity of time and place in the construction of his plots. The action in the play of The Silent Woman, for instance, occupies only twelve hours. Miscellaneous Work. Jonson also wrote some lyrics, exquisite as well for their delicacy of expression as for the character of the thought. A few lin.es from one of his songs will show both these qualities : " Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine ; Or leave a kiss but in the cup, And I'll not look for wine. The thirst that from the soul doth rise Doth ask a drink divine." 1 No one should form an estimate of Ben Jonson without reading the pithy prose known as his Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter. His critical power, as well as his large, ungainly frame, reminds one of Dr. Samuel Johnson. In the Discoveries we meet with thoughts as vigorous and as tersely expressed as we find in the conversations of the Doctor (see pp. 296, 297). The following from the Dis- coveries may be compared with the Doctor's way of stating whatever occurred to him on various subjects, or with the best pedagogic thought of to-day : " A youth should not be made to hate study before he know the causes to love it, or taste the bitterness before the sweet ; but called on and allured, entreated and praised." i To Celia. BEN JONSON 173 The Discoveries contains Jonson's famous criticism on Shakespeare, in which occurs this statement, noteworthy because it shows how a great contemporary regarded him : " I loved the man and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any." General Characteristics. Jonson's plays show the touch of a conscientious artist with great intellectual ability. His vast erudition is constantly apparent. He is the satiric historian of his time, and he exhibits the follies and the humors of the age under a powerful lens. He is also the author of dainty lyrics and forcible prose criticism. Among the shortcomings of his plays, we may specially note lack of feeling and of universality. He fails to com- prehend the nature of woman. He is not a sympathetic observer of manifold life, but he presents only what is perceived through the frosted glass of intellect. His art is self-conscious. He defiantly opposed the romantic spirit of the age and he weakened the drama by making" it bear the burden of the classical unities. THE PRESENTATION OF ELIZABETHAN PLAYS Theaters and Actors. The first building in England for the public presentation of plays was known as The Theater, and it was built in London in 1576. . The Globe Theater, with which Shakespeare's name is so closely identified, was erected across the Thames at Southwark in 1593. The public theaters, with the exception of the stage, were roof- less. The pit corresponded to the first floor of our modern theaters, but it had neither chairs nor covering. The great bulk of the audience, all the common people, stood and jostled one another in the pit. There was no floor, and hence the frequenters of the pit were sometimes called the 174 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH " groundlings." Occasionally an overviolent storm would drive them out of the theater to seek shelter. Around the sides of the theaters were boxes for those who could afford them. Admission to the pit was often not more than a penny, but the price for the best or the most fashionable seats was sometimes as much as two shillings. The aristocratic young gal- lants, who went to the theater as much to be seen as to see, paid an extra price for stools on the outer edges of the stage. The play usually began at three o'clock in the afternoon. There was scarcely any scenery. The stage had the same setting for the Forest of CONTEMPORARY DRAWING OF THE INTERIOR OF AN ELIZABETHAN THEATER 1 1 "A rude sketch of the interior of the Swan Theater, London, as it was about the year 1596, was not long since brought to light in the University Library, Utrecht. It is from the hand of a learned Dutchman, Johannes de Witt, who visited England toward the close of the reign of Elizabeth. The stage, strongly supported on timber bulks, is occupied by three actors, and has for all its furniture a bench on which a female figure is seated. Neither curtains nor traverses appear. At the back of the stage, which is open to the weather, is the tiring-room, to which two doors give entrance, and above this rises a covered balcony or row of boxes occupied by spectators, but available at need for the actors. The trumpeter is seen at the door of a covered chamber near the gallery-roof, and from its summit floats a flag, having upon it the figure of a swan. The form of the building is oval. No other drawing of the interior of an Elizabethan theater is known to exist." EDWARD DOWDEN. THE PRESENTATION OF ELIZABETHAN PLAYS 175 Arden as for the Danish castle of Elsinore. A board marked "Rome," "Venice," "Athens," or whatever place it might be, announced a change of scene. Active imagina- tion on the part of the spec- tator was needed to supply the place of elaborate scenery. The plays as a rule were prob- ably well acted, and such acting would in a measure make amends for lack of scenery. The actors also endeavored to produce some scenic effect by elaborate and costly costumes. The occupants of the pit would occa- sionally throw apples or worse mis- siles at an unsatisfactory actor. Sometimes the disgusted spec- tators would rush on the stage THE FOOL OF THE OLD PLAY to beat all the actors. If the fault lay with the playwright, the angry audience might cowhide him or toss him in a blanket. Excellence in the presentation of plays may seem strange when we know that, prior to the Restoration in 1660, the women's parts were taken by boys. . Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, and Desdemona were acted by boys. We know that Shakespeare complained of this and other limi- tations of the stage. He makes Cleopatra resent the way the stage of future times will deal with her, when she says : " The quick comedians Extemporally will stage us, and present Our Alexandrian revels, Antony Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness." 176 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH These limitations were not without compensation, for they forced the dramatist to do his utmost to produce plays which could hold the attention under the most dis- advantageous circumstances. The spectators were also compelled to cultivate their imaginative power by using it. Modern stage settings often leave little for the imagination to supply. No mental power can grow without exercise. GENERAL SUMMARY England was vivified by the combined influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Knowledge was ex- panding in every direction and promising to crown human effort with universal mastery. The Reformation removed artificial restraint from the workings of the human mind. To seek for knowledge in every direction was no longer considered impious. The wonders of the New World, the increase of com- merce, the rise of the middle classes, and the spirit of patriotism aroused in England by her enemies and her victories, made the nation feel like a youth capable of all things. The poets caught and reflected the spirit in the air. All forces seemed to work together to inspire the Elizabethans to produce the greatest literature in the world. In reaching this position, they owed much to the literature of Italy, but the English pupils were soon in a position to instruct their Italian teachers. The prose of the age is far inferior to the poetry. The prose of Lyly is overwrought with conceits, and much of Sidney's is too poetical. Hooker shows advance, but a comparison of his heavy religious prose with the prayer of the King in Hamlet or with Portia's words about mercy in' The Merchant of Venice will show the vast superiority GENERAL SUMMARY 177 of the poetry in dealing with the same ideas. Bacon's Essays are the only prose that has stood the test of time well enough to claim many readers to-day. Although the poetry covers a wide range, Edmund Spenser is the only great non-dramatic poet. In England the drama underwent a slow growth for centuries, through the Miracle plays, Moralities, and Interludes, to the plays of Shakespeare. Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson are the three greatest Elizabethan dramatists, but they are only the central figures of a group of singers. The English drama in the hands of Sackville imitated Seneca and followed the rules of the classic stage. Mar- lowe and Shakespeare threw off the restraints of the classical unities, and the romantic drama, rejoicing in its freedom, speedily told the story of all life. No human being was too high or too low to receive sympathetic attention. This drama was spun out of the very web and woof of life. The master singer of the age set the soul of life to music. Later poetry considers theories and justifications of life. The Shakespearean drama is neither theories nor justifications of life ; it is life itself. The chief excellences of the age consist in the freshness, spontaneity, and universality or sympathetic grasp of all life. An imagination of wonderful activity gave varied concrete interpretation to the manifold facts of life. Such an interpretation was necessary for the drama to gain the ascendency and represent life on an actual stage. Ben Jonson shows a decline in dramatic power because he lacks Shakespeare's universality. The faults of the age sprang naturally from unbridled youthful imagination and the belief that the new forces acting in life would make all things possible. Exaggeration and lack of repression are manifest not only in Marlowe and the minor writers, but 178 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH sometimes even in Shakespeare. In the majority of the minor poets there are exquisite jewels, little known because of the crude accretions which surround them. Gardiner, 1 pp. 428-480 ; Underwood-Guest, pp. 427-441 ; Green, Chap. VII.; Guerber, pp. 233-252; Powers's England and the Refor- mation, pp. 88-136; Traill, III., 304-579. LITERARY Sackville. The best parts of Sackville's Induction are given in Ward's English Poets, Vol. I., pp. 271-274, and also in Fitzgibbon's Early English Poetry, pp. 317-326. For Sackville's dramatic work see p. 1 80, under Gorboduc. What is there remarkable about Sackville's verse? Lyly, Sidney, Hooker, and Bacon. A selection from Lyly's Euphues is given in Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. I., pp. 379-384. A complete edition is edited by Arber in his English Reprints, 478 pp. Craik also gives in Vol. I. (pp. 409-422) selections from Sidney's Arcadia and Apologie for Poetrie, and (pp. 473-478) from Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and in Vol. II., pp. 14-27, from Bacon's Essays, Craik's selections from Lyly, Sidney, Hooker, and Bacon will enable the student to compare the structure of sentence, general style, and worth of the subject matter of these four authors. Whose prose style shows most improvement over Mandeville and Malory? In what respects ? Edmund Spenser. The Faerie Queene, Book I., Canto I., should be read. Maynard, Merrill, & Go's English Classic Series, No. 27 (12 cents), contains this canto. Kitchin's edition of Book I. (Clarendon Press, 60 cents) is an excellent volume. Ward's English Poets, Vol. I., pp. 284-340, contains representative selections from all of Spenser's great poems. 1 For full titles, see list at end of Chap. 1. READING REFERENCES The student should select passages that show (a) Spenser's melody, () love of the beautiful, (c) nobility of ideals, and (d) subjective cast of mind. Instance stanzas that justify calling him the poets' poet. Does he, as the only great non-dramatic poet of the age, show any- thing of its spirit? The Drama 1 Miracle Plays. Pollard's English. Miracle Plays, Moralities, and Interludes, 250 pp. (Clarendon Press, $1.90, the best single volume on the subject), gives the two Miracle plays : the Chester Play of Noafts Flood (pp. 8-20), and the Towneley Play of the Shepherds (pp. 31-43), which best show the germs of English comedy. Manly's Specimens of the Pre-Shakspearean Drama, Vol. I., pp. 94-119, also gives this Towneley play. Selections from these two may be found in Morley's English Writers, Vol. IV., pp. 71-73 and 95-99. The Play of the Shepherds is given almost entire in Morley's English Plays, pp. 3-1 1 . Show how these plays differ from a bald narrative of scriptural facts. Does the Play of the Shepherds show constructive plot, apart from mere incident? Give some reasons for calling Miracle plays like these the foundation of our drama. What general purpose did they serve in their time ? Moralities. The best Morality is that known as Everyman (Pol- lard, pp. 77-96). If Everyman is not accessible, Hycke-Scorner may be substituted (Morley's English Plays, pp. 12-18; Manly's Specimens of the Pre-Shakspearean Drama, Vol. I., pp. 386-420). Does the Morality show a forward step in the evolution of the drama ? What were the favorite characters represented? Is the ethical spirit as prominent in the modern novel as in the early drama? Interludes. The best Interlude is John Heywood's The Four Ps. Morley's English Plays, pp. 18-20, and Symonds's Shakspere^s Prede- cessors in the English Drama, pp. 188-201, give as much of this Inter- lude as is necessary for the student to read. What were some of the purposes for which Interludes were written? How did they aid in the development of the drama? 1 All the plays mentioned for study in this section, with the exception of those by Shakespeare and Jonson, may be found in Cassell's Library of English Literature, Vol. III., English Plays, edited by Henry Morley and published by Cassell & Co., London, at eleven and one half shillings. THE AGE OF ELIZABETH Ralph Royster Doyster and Gorboduc. Ralph Royster Doyster may be found in Arber's Reprints (40 cents), in Morley's English Plays, pp. 22-46, and in Manly's Specimens, Vol. II., pp. 5-92. Gorboduc is given in Morley's English Plays, pp. 51-64, and, under the title of Ferrex and Porrex, in Dodsley's Old Plays, Vol. I. In what different poetic forms are these two plays written? In what does Gorboduc resemble classical models? Why would Shakespeare's plays have been impossible if the evolution of the drama had stopped with Gorboduc? Marlowe. Read Dr. Faustus, edited by Gollancz in The Temple Dramatists. This play may also be found in Morley's English Plays, pp. 116-128, or in Morley's Universal Library. Does this drama observe the classical unities? In what way does it show the spirit of the Elizabethan age? Was the poetic form of the play the regular vehicle of dramatic expression? In what does the greatness of the play consist ? What are its defects ? Why do young people sometimes think Marlowe the greatest of all the Elizabethan dramatists ? Shakespeare. Students who at this point in their course have sufficient time to read three of Shakespeare's plays should choose one tragedy, either Hamlet or Macbeth, one historical play, Julius Caesar, and one comedy, The Merchant of Venice. These plays, with good explanatory notes, may be found in the Eclectic English Classics Series or the Rolfe Series (American Book Co.). Among other good annotated editions of separate plays are those of Clark and Wright, Verity, and Arden. Furness's Variorum Shakespeare is the best for exhaustive study. The student cannot do better than follow the advice of Dr. Johnson : " Let him who is unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play, from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators. . . . Let him read on through brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption ; let him preserve his com- prehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness and read the commentators." For effective study, the student must bring to Shakespeare wide sympathy with life, keen observing powers, and the capacity for reflect- ing on what he sees and reads. To such a student, Shakespeare will speak with myriad tongues. Let the student frequently apply to himself these two lines from Coleridge : READING REFERENCES l8l " O Lady ! we receive but what we give, And in our life does nature live." What in these plays specially shows Shakespeare's (#) variety of style, (<) power over laughter and tears, (c) strength of imagination, (d) breadth of sympathy, (e) depth of feeling, and (/") universality or myriad-mindedness ? Is there anything in Marlowe worthy of Shakespeare ? In what special points does Marlowe fail to rank with Shakespeare? Take a certain play and show how Shakespeare treated the classical unities. What did he gain by this treatment? Ben Jonson. The Alchemist may be found in the Canterbury Poets edition of his Dramatic Works and Lyrics, edited by Symonds (40 cents) ; also, with Volpone and The Silent Woman, in Morley's Universal Library, No. 20 (40 cents). Why is the plot of The Alchemist called unusually fine ? How does Shakespeare's humor differ from Jonson's ? Compare Marlowe, Shake- speare, and Jonson in their power of portraying women. How did Jonson regard the classical unities? In what ways does he show a decline in the drama? Why is he called a great dramatist? Jonson's Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter (Cassell's National Library, No. 169, 10 cents) contains his striking thoughts on educa- tion (pp. 98-101), the oft-quoted criticism of Shakespeare (pp. 47, 48, 169-172), and a number of fine lyrics (pp. 161-192), such as " Drink to me only with thine eyes." WORKS FOR CONSULTATION AND FURTHER STUDY (OPTIONAL) HISTORICAL Creigh ton's The Age of Elizabeth. HalFs Society in the Elizabethan Age. Warner's The People for Whom Shakespeare Wrote. Goadby's The England of Shakespeare. Beesley's Life of Elizabeth. ' Rye's England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth anct James I. Froude's History of England. HAL. ENG. LIT. 12 1 82 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH GENERAL LITERATURE Saintsbury's A History of Elizabethan Literature. Morley's English Writers, Vols. IX., X., XI. Taine's English Literature, Book II., Chaps. II., III., IV. Whipple's The Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. Minto's Characteristics of English Poets, pp. 163-367. Minto's English Prose Writers, pp. 197-251. Gosse's A Short History of Modern English Literature, pp. 73-128. Phillips's Popular Manual of English Literature, Vol. I., pp. 103-284. Courthope's History of English Poetry, Vol. II. Ward's English Poets, Vol. I., pp. 275-566. Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. I., pp. 267-598. Schelling's Elizabethan Lyrics. SPECIAL AUTHORS Lyly, in Dictionary of National Biography. Symonds's Life of Sidney. Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie (Arber Reprints). Walton's Life of Hooker. Hooker, in Dictionary of National Biography. Church's Life of Bacon. Church's Life of Spenser. Dowden's Transcripts and Studies (pp. 269-337) contains Spenser the Poet and Teacher, and The Heroines of Spenser. THE DRAMA Pollard's English Miracle Plays, Moralities, and Interludes ; Sped' mens of the Pre-Elizabethan Drama, with an introduction, Notes, and Glossary. Smith's York Plays (Clarendon Press). Symonds's Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama. Bates's The English Religious Drama. Manly's Specimens of the Pre-Shakspearean Drama, 3 vols. Dodsley's Old Plays, Vols. I. and II. Gayley's Representative English Comedies. Collier's History of English Dramatic Poetry, 3 vols. READING REFERENCES 183 Ward's A History of English Dramatic Literature, 3 vols. Lowell's The Old English Dramatists. Marlowe in Encyclopedia Britannica and Dictionary of National Biography. Symonds's Introduction to Marlowe in Mermaid Series of Dramatists. Christopher Marlowe in Dowden's Transcripts and Studies, pp. 431-453- Symonds's Ben Jonson. Swinburne's A Study of Ben Jonson. Symonds's Selections from Ben Jonson in Canterbury Poets Series. SHAKESPEARE Sidney Lee's A Life of William Shakespeare. Halliwell-Phillips's Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare. Wilder's The Life of Shakespeare. Fleay's A Chronicle History of the Life and Work of Shakespeare. Williams's Homes and Haunts of Shakespeare. Hudson's Life, Art, and Characters of Shakespeare. Baynes's Shakespeare Studies and Other Essays. How Shakespeare^s Senses were Trained, Chap. X., in Halleck's Education of the Central Nervous System. Harting's The Ornithology of Shakespeare (excellent for young students). Rolfe's Shakespeare the Boy. Dowden's Shakspere Primer. Dovvden's Shakspere : A Critical Study of his Mind and Art. Coleridge's Notes and Lectures on the Plays of Shakespeare. Brandes's William Shakespeare : A Critical Study, 2 vols. Ten Brink's Five Lectures on Shakespeare. Mrs. Jameson's Characteristics of Women. Weiss's Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. Gervinus's Shakespeare Commentaries. Dyer's Folk-Lore of Shakespeare. Madden's The Diary of Master William Silence: A Study of Shake- speare and of Elizabethan Sport. Boswell-Stone's Shakespeare^s Holinshed. Abbott's Shakespearian Grammar. Bartlett's Shakespeare Concordance. CHAPTER V THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 Why Termed "Puritan Age." We call the era fol- lowing the death of Elizabeth the age of Puritan in- fluence for two reasons: (i) The Puritan standard of morals and of government became triumphant during this period and affected the character of the literature. (2) The greatest writer of the age, the second greatest in English literature, is the Puritan, John Milton. We must remember that different periods of English literature overlap each other to a considerable extent. To aid the memory, we make classifications which are only roughly true. We have seen that the Elizabethans, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Bacon, lived for a con- siderable time after the death of Elizabeth. Indeed, some apply the term " Elizabethan " to all the literature written between 1558 and 1660, because some of the influences of the age of Elizabeth are shown in Milton and in the minor poetry of the period here called the Puritan age. An Age of Controversy. There are some characteris- tics which sharply differentiate this age from the pre- ceding one. It was an age of controversy in literature and politics. The pen and the bullet were both used to advance party interests. Milton's Paradise Lost is an epic of conflict to the bitter end, an epic which embodies something of the spirit of the times through which he had passed in his manhood. 184 CHANGE OF IDEAL 185 The Elizabethans did not allow questions of politics and religion to plunge them in civil war. Theirs was a time of intense patriotism, when Englishmen were united to resist the power of Spain. In fifty-four years after the defeat of the Armada, Englishmen were engaged in a war between King and Parliament. Why the Age was One of Conflict. Elizabeth with all her faults had the qualities that enabled her to rule well and to keep the affection of her subjects. James I. (1603- 1625), the son of Mary Queen of Scots, was the first of the Stuart line to rule in England. He was contemptible and ridiculous in appearance, a coward, and a vain and conceited pedant. He believed that kings governed by divine right, and received from the Deity a title of which no one could lawfully deprive them, no matter how out- rageously they ruled. His son and successor, Charles I. (1625-1649), tena- ciously adhered to this view, and tried to govern as he pleased. The resulting struggle between Royalists and Puritans finally led to civil war (1642-1648), in which the Puritans under the leadership of the great Oliver Cromwell were victorious. Charles I. was tried on the charge of being a traitor to the nation, convicted, and beheaded. Oliver Cromwell then ruled as Protector, and the Puri- tans were in the ascendency until 1660, when the Stuart line of kings was restored in the person of Charles II. All these events left their mark on our literature, but there was another still more potent factor affecting both the poetry and the prose. Change of Ideal. Men took a view of life different from the one held when the New World and the New Learning promised everything that heart could wish. When Raleigh and Drake were sailing on their voyages 1 86 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 of discovery, and English vessels were returning with tons of silver from the mines across the sea, almost everything seemed possible. The revival of learning also promised to enable man to unravel the secrets of Nature and com- mand her to serve him as he pleased. These expectations had not been fulfilled. There were still poverty, disease, and a longing for something that earth had not given. The English, naturally a religious race, reflected much on this. Those who concluded that life could never yield the pleasure which man anticipates, who determined by purity of living to win a perfect land beyond the shores of mortality, who made the New World of earlier dreams a term synonymous with the New Jeru- salem, were called Puritans. Their guide to this land was the Bible. Our Authorized Version, the one which is in most common use to-day, was made in the reign of James I. From this time it became much easier to get a copy of the Scriptures, and their influence was now more potent than ever to shape the ideals of the Puritans. In fat, it is impossible to esti- mate the influence which this Authorized Version has had on the language and the literature of the English race. An Imitative Age. John Milton had the creative capac- ity of the Elizabethans, but the majority of the literature of this age is imitative. Strange to say, Shakespeare had fewer imitators than John Donne, Ben Jonson, or Edmund Spenser. The foreign models were chiefly Italian, but their influence was not paramount John Donne (1573-1631) is of interest to the student of literature chiefly because of the influence which he exerted on the poetry of the age. His verse teems with forced comparisons and analogies between things remark- able for their dissimilarity. An obscure likeness and a PROSE 187 worthless conceit were as important to him as was the problem of existence to Hamlet. He acquired the name of "metaphysical" poet because he loved to look at the common things of life through a glass darkened with metaphysical smoke. He wrote some good poetry, but that found fewer imitators. The lyrics of Ben Jonson were imitated by the minor poets, some of whom claimed the distinction of belonging to the "tribe of Ben." Edmund Spenser exerted an influ- ence for good over the best poetry. Milton called him " our sage and serious Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." I. THE PROSE OF THE PURITAN AGE Variety of Subject. Prose showed development in sev- eral directions during this Puritan age : I. The use of prose in argument and controversy was largely extended. Questions of government and of reli- gion were the living issues of the time. Innumerable pam- phlets and many larger books were written to present different views. We may instance as types of this class almost all the prose writings of John Milton (1608-1674). II. English prose dealt with a greater variety of philosophical subjects. Shakespeare had voiced the deepest philosophy in poetry, but up to this time such subjects had found scant expression in prose. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is the great philosophical writer of the age. In his greatest work, Leviathan ; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, he considers questions of metaphysical philosophy and of government, in a way that places him on the- roll of famous English philosophers. 1 88 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 III. History had an increasing fascination for prose writers. Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World (1614) and Lord Clarendon's History of the Great Rebellion, begun in 1646, are specially worthy of mention. IV. Prose was developing its capacity for expressing delicate shades of humor. In Chaucer and in Shake- speare, poetry had already excelled in this respect. Thomas Fuller (1608- 1661), an Episcopal clergyman, dis- plays an almost inexhaustible fund of humor in his History of the Worthies of England. We find scattered through his works pas- sages like these: " A father that whipped his son for swearing, and swore at him while he whipped him, did more harm by his example than good by his correction." Speaking of a pious short person, Fuller says : " His soul had but a short diocese to visit, and therefore might the better attend the effectual informing thereof." Of the lark, he writes : "A harmless bird while living, not trespassing on grain, and whole- some when dead, then filling the stomach with meat, as formerly the ear with music." Before Fuller, humor was rare in English prose writers, and it was not common until the first quarter of the next century. V. Izaak Walton's Complete Angler (1653) is so filled with sweetness and calm . delight in nature and life, that one does not wonder that the book has passed through THOMAS FULLER PROSE 189 about two hundred editions. It manifests a genuine love of nature, of the brooks, meadows, flow- ers. In his pages we catch the odor from the hedges gay with wild flowers and hear the rain falling softly on the green leaves : " But turn out of the way a little, good scholar, towards yonder high honeysuckle hedge ; there we 1 !! sit and sing, whilst this shower falls so gently on the teeming earth, and gives a yet sweeter smell to the lovely flowers that adorn those lovely meadows." IZAAK WALTON VI. Of the many authors busily writing on theology, Jeremy Taylor (1613-1 667), an Episcopal clergyman, holds the chief place. His imagination was so wide and his pen so facile that he has been called a seventeenth century prose Shake- speare. Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying used to be read in al- most every cottage. This passage shows his powers of imagery as well as the Teutonic inclination to consider the final goal of youth and beauty: " Reckon but from the sprightfulness of youth, and the fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood, from the vigorous- ness and strong texture of the joints of five-and-twenty, to the hollowness and dead paleness, to the loathsome- ness and horror of a three days' burial, and we shall perceive the dis- tance to be very great and very strange. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as JEREMY TAYLOR IQO THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece . . . and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces." II. THE POETRY OF THE PURITAN AGE The Drama. A number of dramatists who, by some Elizabethan characteristics, partly compensate for much inferior work, wrote plays during the reigns of the first two Stuarts (1603-1649). In so far as strict chronology is concerned, we must remember that Shakespeare . pro- duced some of his greatest plays in the reign of James I., and that Ben Jonson did not die until 1637. We shall here consider the most notable of those minor dramatists of the Puritan age, who, showing the decline of the drama, may yet claim some kinship with their greatest predecessors. The one among this group of dramatists who stands nearest to Shakespeare is John Webster. His greatest play, The Duchess of Malfi, was acted in 1616. This and The White Devil, which ranks second, in their own limited sphere show the working of a master hand. Webster's genius comes to a focus only in depicting the horrible. He found a congenial task in weaving the web of crime and retribution that entangled the Italian Duke Ferdinand, who hired assassins to mur- der his sister, the Duchess of Malfi, and her children. Just before one of the most terrible scenes in the English drama, a troop of madmen, loosed from the common asylum, bursts in upon the Duchess, and the foremost sings : " O, let me howl some heavy note, Some deadly dogge'd howl, Sounding as from the threatening throat Of beast and fatal fowl." THE DRAMA 19! As the assassins tie the cord around her neck, the Duchess says : " Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength Must pull down heaven upon me. Yet stay ; heaven-gates are not so highly arch'd As princes' palaces ; they that enter there Must go upon their knees [Kneels~] . Come, violent death, Serve for mandragora to make me sleep ! Go tell my brothers when I am laid out, They then may feed in quiet. [They strangle her." When we feel Webster's power in representing the summit of human anguish, we are even then aware of a decline in the drama. We miss Shakespeare's univer- sality, for he has taught us that the world is one of laughter as well as of tears, and that the buds of May are as real as the brown leaves of October. John Ford (i586?-i639) had Webster's fondness for ghastly subjects. Ford achieved the distinction of writ- ing Perkin Warbeck, which is worthy of being placed in a class second only to Shakespeare's historical plays. Francis Beaumont (1584-161 6) and John Fletcher (1579- 1625) were collaborators in dramatic work. In their verse we may often find rare flowers of poetry growing out of mire. Lines like these in Philaster, one of Beaumont and Fletcher's best plays, might have been uttered by Hamlet : " Philaster. O, but thou dost not know what 'tis to die. Bellario. Yes, I do know, my lord. 'Tis less than to be born ; a lasting sleep, A quiet resting from all jealousy ; A thing we all pursue ; I know besides It is but giving over of a game That must be lost." 192 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 On the whole, the drama during this age steadily pur sued a downward course. We miss the earlier creative power and grasp of all life. The plays frequently do not follow the lines of orderly growth in their development. They often seem to be constructed from the outside, and sensational scenes are too frequently intro- duced abruptly to stimulate tem- porary interest. The greatest blemish on the drama of the first two Stu- arts is the FRANCIS BEAUMONT JOHN FLETCHER prevailing lack of refinement in thought and language and the frequent neglect of the proper moral se- quence to acts, - - a sequence which should be as inevitable as any effect, when the efficient cause is operative. Shakespeare shows the moral result indissolu- bly linked to the deed itself. In Macbeth, to name one of many instances, he makes us feel that "We still have judgment here; that we but teach Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice To our own lips." Beaumont and Fletcher, on the other hand, repeatedly neglect the fundamental laws of moral results. THE CAROLINE POETS 193 In 1642 the Puritans closed the theaters, and the course of the drama for this age was run. Although the indecent plays of the Restoration flourished for a while, a considera- tion of the drama hereafter forms but a minor part of the history of the best English literature. The Caroline Poets. Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, and Herrick, all adherents of Charles I. (Latin, Carolus, hence the adjective Caroline}, are the best of the Caroline school of poets. They are often called Cavalier poets, because they sympathized with the Cavaliers or Royalists. The lyric, Disdain Rettirned, of Thomas Carew (1598 ?- 1639?) shows both the customary type of subject and the serious application sometimes given : " He that loves a rosy cheek, Or a coral lip admires, Or from starlike eyes doth seek Fuel to maintain his fires, As old time makes these decay, So his flames must waste away." Sir John Suckling (1609?- 1642) is a perfect specimen of the Cavalier type. His poem Constancy begins : " Out upon it, I have loved Three whole days together; And am like to love three more, If it prove fair weather." From Richard Lovelace (1618-1658) we have this ex- quisite stanza, written in prison : " Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage ; Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage ; 194 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free, Angels alone, that soar above, Enjoy such liberty." 1 By far the greatest of this school is Robert Herrick (1591-1674), a clergyman of the Church of England. He left nearly thirteen hundred poems. He occupies the very front rank of the second class of lyrical poets. The two collections of his poems are entitled Hesperidcs and Noble Numbers, the latter a volume of religious poems. His work is uneven, and much of it is unworthy to be read. There is, however, sufficient to merit attention. His Corinna's Going a- Maying- gives the full freshness of the meadow. His lyric To the Vir- R08ERT HERRICK gtHS IS Often qUOted \ " Gather ye rose-buds while ye may : Old Time is still a-flying ; And this same flower that smiles to-day, To-morrow will be dying." A stanza like this from his religious poem The Litany shows his power over melody : "When the passing-bell doth toll And the furies in a shoal Come to fright a parting soul, Sweet Spirit, comfort me." Characteristics of the School. The designation "Caro- line school " is applied to a group of imitative poets who 1 To Althea from Prison. THE CAROLINE POETS 195 flourished chiefly during the reign of Charles I. (1625- 1649). The lyrical poems of Ben Jonson and the poetry of John Donne were their chief models. The greatest of the school, Robert Herrick, thus addresses Ben Jonson : " Candles I'll give to thee, And a new altar ; And thou, Saint Ben, shall be Writ in my psalter." x To characterize the Caroline school by one phrase, we might call them lyrical poets in lighter vein. They usually wrote on such subjects as the color in a maiden's cheek and lips, blossoms, meadows, May days, bridal cakes, the paleness of a lover, and "... wassail bowls to drink, Spiced to the brink," * but sometimes religious subjects were chosen, when these lighter things failed to satisfy. Among the special defects of this school may be mentioned overwrought conceits, strained metaphors and similes, and occasional attempts at obscure philosophical hairsplitting. These conceits and the misuse of figures are seen at their very worst in these two lines from Richard Crashaw (:6i3?-i649?), in which he calls the weeping eyes of Mary Magdalene "Two walking baths, two weeping motions, Portable and compendious oceans." But we find occasional stanzas of such rare sweetness that they are worthy to linger in our memory. 1 Prayer to Ben Jonson. 2 Herrick : A Thanksgiving to God. 196 THE PURITAN AGE. 1603-1660 JOHN MILTON, 1608-1674 His Youth. The second greatest English poet was born in London, eight years before the death of Shake- speare. John Milton's father followed the business of a scrivener and so drew wills and deeds and also invested money for clients. He prospered at this calling, and his family did not suffer for want of money. He was a man of much culture and a musical composer of con- siderable note. In 1608 the poet was born and named after his father. The child seems to have given early promise of future JOHN MILTON 197 greatness. His parents had rare judgment ; they believed in the boy, and, seeing that he acted as if guided by a high ideal, they generally allowed him to do whatever he chose. They had the painter to the court execute a por- trait of the child at the age of ten. The painting still exists, and shows him to have been "a sweet, serious, round-headed boy." They employed the best of teachers for him at home, and at the age of sixteen he was ready for Cambridge University, where he took both the B.A. and M.A. degrees. His Early Manhood and Life at Horton. In 1632 Milton left Cambridge and went to live with his father in a country home at Horton, about twenty miles west of London. Milton had been intended for the church, but he felt that he could not subscribe to its intolerance, and that he had another mission to perform. His father ac- cordingly provided sufficient funds for maintaining him at Horton in a life of studious leisure for over five years. The poet's greatest biographer, David Masson, says: " Until Milton was thirty-two years of age, if even then, he did not earn a penny for himself." Such a course would ruin ninety-nine out of every hundred talented young men, but it was the making of Milton. He spent those years in careful study and in writing his immortal early poems. In 1638, when he was in his thirtieth year, he deter- mined to broaden his views by travel. He went to Italy, which the Englishman of his day still regarded as the HAL. ENG. LIT. 13 JOHN MILTON, AET. 1O 198 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 home of art, culture, and song. After about fifteen months abroad, he heard that his countrymen were on the verge of civil war, and he returned home to play his part in the mighty tragedy of the times. Milton's "Left Hand." In 1642 the Civil War broke out between the Royalists and the Puritans. He took sides in the struggle for liberty, not with his sword, but with his pen. During this time he wrote little but prose. In doing this, Milton himself says : " I have the use, as I may account it, but of my left hand." With that " left hand " he wrote much prose. There is one common quality running through all his prose works, although they treat of the most varied subjects. Every one of these works strikes a blow for fuller liberty in some direction ; for more liberty in church, in state, and in home relations, for the freedom of expressing opinions, and for a system of education which should break away from the leading strings of the inferior methods of the past. His greatest prose work is the Areopagitica : a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. Much of his prose is poetic and adorned with grand fig- ures of rhetoric. He frequently follows the Latin order, and inverts his sentences, which are often unreasonably long. Sometimes his "left hand" astonishes us by slinging mud at his opponents, and we eagerly await the loosing of the right hand which was to give us the Paradise Lost. His Blindness. The English government from 1649 to 1660 is known as the Commonwealth. The two most striking figures of the time were Oliver Cromwell, who in 1653 was styled the Lord Protector, and John Milton, who was the Secretary for Foreign Tongues. All his letters to the various foreign powers were written in Latin. One of the greatest of European scholars, a professor at JOHN MILTON 199 Leyden, named Salmasius, had written a book attacking the Commonwealth and upholding the late King. The Council requested Milton to write a fitting answer. His eyes were already failing him, and he had been warned to rest them. He refused to do this, saying that he would will- ingly sacrifice his eyesight on the altar of liberty. He ac- cordingly wrote in reply his Pro Populo Anglicano Defen- siOy a Latin work, which was published in 1651. This effort cost him his eyesight. In 1652, at the age of forty- three, he was totally blind. In his Paradise Lost, he thus alludes to his affliction : " Thus with the year Seasons return ; but not to me returns Day, o'r the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine ; But clouds instead and ever-during dark Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men Cut off." Life after the Restoration. In 1660, Charles II. was made king. The leaders of the Commonwealth had to flee for their lives. Some went to America for safety and some were caught and executed. The body of Cromwell was taken from its grave in Westminster Abbey, sus- pended from the gallows, and left to dangle there. Milton was concealed by a friend until the worst of the storm had blown over. Some influential friends interceded for him, and his blindness probably won him sympathy. During his old age he was largely dependent on the kindness of friends to read to him, and to act as his aman- uenses whenever he wished to write anything. Unfortu- nately he had formed his ideas of woman in the light of the old dispensation. He had not educated his three 200 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 daughters sufficiently for them to take a sympathetic in- terest in his work, and they resented his calling on them to help him. During this period of his life, when he was totally blind, he wrote Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonist es. He died in 1674, and was buried beside his father in the chancel of St. Giles, Cripplegate, London. Minor Poems. In 1629, while Milton was a student at Cambridge, and only twenty-one years old, he wrote a fine lyrical poem, entitled On the Morning of Clirist 's Nativity. These 244 lines of verse show that he did not need to be taught the melody of song any more than a young night- ingale. Four remarkable poems were written during his years of studious leisure at Horton, L Allegro, II Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas. L* Allegro describes the charms of a merry social life, and // Penseroso voices the quiet but deep en- joyment of the scholar in retirement. These two poems have been universal favorites. Comus is a species of dramatic composition known as a Masque, and it is the greatest of its class. Some critics, like Taine and Saintsbury, consider this the finest of Milton's productions. The 1023 lines in Comus can soon be read, and there are few poems of equal length that will better repay careful reading. Comns is an immortal apotheosis of virtue, While in Geneva in 1639, Milton was asked for his autograph and an expression of sentiment. He chose the closing lines of Comus : "... if Virtue feeble were, Heaven itself would stoop to her." Lycidas, one of the world's great elegies, was written on the death of Milton's classmate, Edward King. Mark JOHN MILTON 2OI Pattison, one of Milton's biographers, says : " In Lycidas we have reached the high-water mark of English poesy and of Milton's own production." The 193 lines in this poem are not to be read lightly, but to be studied. The more one studies them, the more will their greatness become evident. That person is to be pitied who has no sympathetic appreciation for a passage like this : " Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks, On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks, Throw hither all your quaint enamelled eyes, That on the green turf suck the honeyed showers, And purple all the ground with vernal flowers. Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine, The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet, The glowing violet, The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears ; Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffadillies fill their cups with tears, To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies." Paradise Lost ; Its Inception and Dramatic Plan. Cam- bridge University has a list, written by Milton before he was thirty-five, of about one hundred possible subjects for the great poem which he felt it was his life's mission to give to the world. He once thought of selecting Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, but his final choice was Paradise Lost, which stands first on this special list. There are in addition four separate drafts of the way in which he thought this subject should be treated. This proves that the great work of a man like Milton was planned while he was young. 2O2 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 All four drafts show that his early intention was to make the poem a drama, a gigantic Miracle play. The closing of the theaters and the prejudice felt against them during the days of Puritan ascendency may have influenced Milton to forsake the dramatic for the epic form, but he seems never to have shared the common prejudice against the drama and the stage. His sonnet on Shakespeare shows in what estimation he held that dramatist. Subject Matter and Form. About 1658, when Milton was a widower, living alone with his three daughters, he began, in total blindness, to dictate his Paradise Lost, Painting by Munkacsy. MILTON DICTATING PARADISE LOST TO HIS DAUGHTERS sometimes relying on them but more often on any kind friend who might assist him. The manuscript accordingly shows a variety of handwriting. The work was published JOHN MILTON 2O3 in 1667, after some trouble with a narrow-minded censor who had doubts about granting a license. The subject matter can best be given in Milton's own lines at the beginning of the poem : " Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing, Heavenly Muse." The poem treats of Satan's revolt in heaven, of his conflict with the Almighty, and banishment with all the rebellious angels. Their new home in the land of fire and endless pain is described with such a gigantic grasp of the imagination, that the conception has colored all succeeding theology. The action proceeds with a council of the fallen angels to devise means for alleviating their condition and annoy- ing the Almighty. They decide to strike him through his child, and they plot the fall of man. In short, Paradise Lost is an intensely dramatic story of the loss of Eden. The greatest actors that ever sprang from a poet's brain appear before us on the stage, which is at one time the sulphurous pit of hell, at another the bright plains of heaven, and at another the Elysium of our first parents. In form the poem is an epic in twelve books, contain- ing a total of 10,565 lines. It is written in blank verse of wonderful melody and variety. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. After finish- ing Paradise Lost, Milton wrote two more poems, which he published in 1671. Paradise Regained is in great part a paraphrase of the first eleven verses of the fourth chap- ter of St. Matthew. The poem is in four books of blank 204 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 verse and contains 2070 lines. Although it is written with great art and finish, Paradise Regained shows a falling off in Milton's genius. There is less ornament and less to arouse human interest. Samson Agonistes (Samson the Struggler) is a tragedy containing 1758 lines, based on the sixteenth chapter of Judges. This poem, modeled after the Greek drama, is hampered by a strict observance of the dramatic unities. It is vastly inferior to the Paradise Lost. Samson Ago- nistes contains scarcely any of the glorious imagery of Milton's earlier poems. It has been called " the most unadorned poem that can be found." Characteristics of Milton s Poetry Variety in his Early Work. A line in Lycidas says : - " He touched the tender stops of various quills," and this may be said of Milton. His early poems show great variety. We have not only the soul-stirring dirge notes in Lycidas, but we also find the lines of the most of his minor poems fresh with the sights, sounds, and odors of the country. We have our own perception of the beauties of nature quickened, as we catch sight in L Allegro of "... beds of violets blue And fresh-blown roses washed in dew," as we inhale the matchless odors from " The frolic wind that breathes the spring," and as we find ourselves listening " While the plowman near at hand Whistles o'er the furrow'd land, And the milkmaid singeth blithe, And the mower whets his scythe." JOHN MILTON 2O5 Although Milton is noted for his seriousness and sub- limity, we must not be blind to the fact that his minor poems show great delicacy of touch. The epilogue of the Spirit at the end of Comus is an instance of exquisite airy fancy passing into noble imagination at the close. In 1638 Sir Henry Wotton wrote this intelligent criticism of Comus to its author : "I should much commend the trag- ical part, if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Doric delicacy in your Songs and Odes, whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our language : Ipsa mollifies" Limitations. In giving attention to Milton's variety, we should not forget that his limitations are apparent when we judge him by Elizabethan standards. As varied as his excellences are, his range is far narrower than Shakespeare's. Milton has little sense of humor. All sorts and conditions of men, with the ruddy glow of life, do not throng his pages. We feel that he is farther from human life than either Shakespeare or Burns. We find that Milton, unlike those poets, became acquainted with flowers through the medium of a book before he noticed them in the fields. In speaking of flowers and birds, he sometimes makes those mistakes to which the bookish man is more prone than the child who first hears the story of Nature from her own lips. Unlike Shakespeare and Burns, Milton had the misfortune to spend his child- hood in a large city. Again, while increasing age seemed to impose no limitations on Shakespeare's genius, since his touch is as delicate in The Tempest as in his first plays, Milton's style, on the other hand, grew frigid and devoid of imagery toward the end of his life. Sublimity. The most striking characteristic of Milton's poetry is sublimity, and this consists, first, in the subject 206 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 matter. In the opening lines of Paradise Lost he speaks of his " adventrous song " " That with no middle flight intends to soar Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." Milton succeeded in his intention. The English language has not another epic poem, or a poem of any other kind, which approaches Paradise Lost in sustained sublimity. In the second place, we must note the sublimity of treat- ment. Milton's own mind was cast in a sublime mold. His very figures of rhetoric frequently throb with sub- limity. Thus, the Milky Way is spoken of as the royal highway to heaven : "A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold, And pavement stars." When Death and Satan meet, Milton wishes the horror of the scene to manifest something of the sublime. What other poet could, in fewer words, have conveyed a stronger impression of the effect of the frown of those terrible powers? " So frowned the mighty combatants, that Hell Grew darker at their frown." The pictures painted by Milton show strength and mag- nificence of touch, as well when the canvas discloses a lurid sea of flame that gives " No light ; but rather darkness visible," as when Eden with its atmosphere of a spring dawn pre- sents her " Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose." JOHN MILTON 2O/ In the first part of Paradise Lost, Satan is not the crawling fiend that he becomes later: " His form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than Archangel ruined." Harmony. A pronounced characteristic of Milton's verse is harmony. Any one can detect the exquisite harmony of such lines as these by reading them aloud : " It was the winter wild, While the heaven-born child All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies. u The winds, with wonder whist, Smoothly the waters kissed, " The oracles are dumb ; No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving." 1 His blank verse has never been surpassed in harmonious rhythm. Lines like these show the melody of which this verse is capable : " Heaven opened wide Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound On golden hinges moving." 2 How the Paradise Lost has affected Thought. Few persons realize how profoundly this poem has influenced men's ideas of the hereafter. The conception of hell for a long time current was influenced by those pictures which Milton painted with darkness for his canvas and the light- ning for his brush. Our pictures of Eden and of heaven have also felt his touch. Theology has often looked through Milton's imagination at the fall of the rebel angels and of 1 Hymn on the Nativity. a Paradise Lost, Book VII., lines 207-9. 208 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 man. Huxley says that the cosmogony which stubbornly resists the conclusions of science, is due rather to the account in Paradise Lost than to Genesis. Many of Milton's expressions have become crystallized in modern thought. Among such we may mention : "The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven, What matter where, if I be still the same?" 1 "To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven." 2 "... Who overcomes By force hath overcome but half his foe." 8 "... Abashed the Devil stood And felt how awful goodness is, and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely." * The Embodiment of High Ideals. No other poet has embodied in his verse higher ideals than Milton. He thought that he owed the world something which he was determined to repay. When twenty-three, he wrote that he intended to use his talents " As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye." 6 Milton's poetry is not universally popular. He delib- erately selected his audience. These lines from Comus show to whom he would speak : " Yet some there be that by due steps aspire To lay their just hands on that golden key That opes the palace of eternity. To such my errand is." 1 Paradise Lost, Book I., line 254. 8 Ibid., 1. 649. 2 Ibid., 1. 262. * Ibid., Book IV., 1. 846. 6 Sonnet : On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-three. SUMMARY 209 He kept his promise of writing something which the world would not willingly let die. That something still speaks for liberty and for nobility of soul. No man with his thoughts on the ground can appreciate Milton. His ideals react on us and raise us higher than we were. To him we may say with Wordsworth : " Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart ; Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea, Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free." l SUMMARY The Puritan age was one of conflict in religious and polit- ical ideals. The color of the Elizabethan dawn had faded into leaden skies. Men realized that neither lands beyond the sea nor the New Learning could fill the aspirations of the soul. The Puritans turned their attention to the life beyond. They felt that their ideals of this life should be such as their great Taskmaster would approve. Life became a ceaseless battle of the right against the wrong. Hence much of the literature in both poetry and prose is polemical. Milton's Paradise Lost is an epic of war between good and evil. The prose deals with a variety of subjects. There are argumentative, philosophical, historical, biographical, and theological prose works, but only the fine presentation of nature and life in The Complete Angler interests the general reader of to-day, although the grandeur of Milton's Areopa- gitica, the humor of Thomas Fuller, and the imagery and variety of Jeremy Taylor deserve more readers. The drama shows a steady decline from the summit of Elizabethan greatness. Webster and Ford manifest great 1 Milton : A Sonnet. 2IO THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 power in dealing with horrible subjects, and the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are sprinkled with beautiful pas- sages, but the dramatists of this age lack universality. Their plays are often coarse, and fail to show orderly development and the natural unfolding of moral law. John Milton is the only great poet of this period. In sublimity of subject matter and cast of mind, in nobility of ideals, in expressing the conflict between good and evil, he is the fittest representative of the Puritan spirit in literature. Even in his minor poems, we see the young Puritan pointing to "... the crown that Virtue gives After this mortal change, to her true servants." 1 In order to appreciate the difference in ideals between this and the preceding age, it is instructive to compare the aim of the heroes of Marlowe's Faustus and Tambur- laine with that which animates Milton's Comus. While Milton manifests much of the greatness of the Elizabethan age, he lacks its universality and close association with life. With the exception of Milton, the poets display little creative originality. They are mainly imitators of John Donne, Ben Jonson, and Edmund Spenser. The minor poets of this period exhibit few traces of Shakespearean influence. Gardiner, 2 pp. 481-577; Green, Chap. VIII.; Underwood-Guest, pp. 442-476 ; Guerber, pp. 252-275 ; Wakeling's King and Parliament (Oxford Manuals), pp. 1-68; Frederic Harrison's Oliver Cromwell (228 pp., 50 cents) ; Traill, IV., 1-345. 1 Comus, 1. 9. * For full titles, see list at end of Chap. I. READING REFERENCES 211 LITERARY Prose. The student will obtain a fair idea of the prose of this age by reading Milton's Areopagitica (Morley's National Library, No. 123, 10 cents ; Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. II., pp. 471-475) ; the selections from Thomas Hobbes, in Craik, II., 214-221 ; from Thomas Fuller, in Craik, II., 377-387; from Jeremy Taylor, in Craik, II., 529- 542 ; and from Izaak Walton, in Craik, II., 343-349. The student who has the time will wish to read The Complete Angler entire (Cassell's National Library, No. 4, 10 cents). Compare (a) the sentences, (b) general style, and (c) worth of the subject matter of these authors ; then, to note the development of Eng- lish prose, in treatment of subject as well as in form, compare these works with those of (i) Wycliffe and Mandeville in the fourteenth century, (2) of Malory in the fifteenth, and (3) of Tyndale, Lyly, Sidney, Hooker, and Bacon (e.g. essay Of Study, 1597), in the sixteenth. The Caroline Poets. Specimens of the best work 'of Carew, Suck- ling, Lovelace, and Herrick may be found in Ward's English Poets, Vol. II., pp. 115-187, also in Cavalier Poets (Maynard, Merrill, & Co.'s English Classics, 12 cents). The influence of John Donne, Ward, I., 558-566, and of Ben Jonson, Ward, II., 8-23, should be noted. John Milton. L ''Allegro, II Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas (American Book Co.'s Eclectic English Classics, 20 cents), and Paradise Lost, Books I. and II. (same series) should be read. Which is the greatest of his minor poems? Why? Is the keynote of Comus in accord with Puritan ideals? Are there qualities in Lycidas which justify calling it " the high-water mark " of English lyrical poetry? Which poem has most powerfully affected theological thought? Which do you think is oftenest read to-day? Why? What is the most strik- ing characteristic of his poetry? Contrast Milton's greatness, limita- tions, and ideals of life, with Shakespeare's. WORKS FOR CONSULTATION AND FURTHER STUDY (OPTIONAL) Gardiner's The First Two Stuarts and the Puritan Revolution. Masson's The Life of John Milton, Narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time (6 vols.). 212 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 Chapter VI. of Vol. I. gives a valuable survey of British literature when Milton was a young man. Masterman's The Age of Milton gives in 254 pages a survey of all the literature of the age. General work's on literature by Taine, Gosse, Saintsbury, and Phil- lips. Saintsbury's A History of Elizabethan Literature comes down to 1660. Ward's English Poets, Vol. II., pp. 24-379. Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. II. Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature, pp. 261-295. Pattison's Life of Milton. Garnett's Life of Milton. Stopford Brooke's Milton. Masson's Poetical Works of John Milton, 3 vols., contains excellent introductions and notes, and is the standard edition. Addison's criticisms on Milton, beginning in number 267 of The. Spectator, are suggestive. Macaulay's Essay on Milton. The Idealism of Milton, pp. 454-473, in Dowden's Transcripts and Studies. . Scherer's Milton and Paradise Lost, in Essays on English Literature. Arnold's Essays in Criticism, Second Series. For accounts of life and works of minor authors, consult Dictionary of National Biography. CHAPTER VI THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 Change in Morals. With the Restoration, a tremendous reaction against the Puritanic view of life set in. Reaction always results when excessive restraint in any direction is removed. The. court of Charles II. was the vilest ever known in England. Any one who insisted on purity of life was mocked and called a hypocrite. The Puritan virtues were laughed to scorn by the ribald courtiers who attended Charles II. In 1663 Samuel Butler published a famous satire, entitled Hudibras. Its object was to ridicule every- thing that savored of Puritanism. This satire became extremely pop- ular in court circles, and it was the favorite reading of Charles II. The change in morals is re- flected in no branch of literature more than in the drama of this age. The popular plays show almost no respect for the great ethical laws of life. The dramatists seemed unable to grasp the truth presented with such emphasis in Shake- speare's plays, that human society rests on moral founda- tions, on the virtues of the home, on fidelity, kindness, sympathy. The indecent drama of the Restoration, in endeavoring to paint life out of harmony with these con- SAMUEL BUTLER HAL. ENG. LIT. 14 213 214 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 ditions, has fortunately paid the penalty by remaining for the most part unread to-day. Change in the Subject Matter of Literature. The Elizabethan age impartially held the mirror up to every type of human emotion. The writers of the Restoration, as a class, avoided any subject which demanded a por- trayal of deep and noble feeling. In this age, we catch no glimpse of a Lear bending over a dead Cordelia, or of the heroic characters of a Paradise Lost. The popular subjects were those which appealed to cold intellect, and these were, for the most part, satirical, didac- tic, and argumentative. John Dryden, the ruling poet of the Restoration, affords a typical instance of one who usually chose such subjects. John Locke (1632-1704), a great prose writer of this age, shows in the very title of his most famous work, The Conduct of t)ie Understanding, what he preferred to discuss. That book opens with the statement : " The last resort a man has recourse to in the conduct of himself is his understanding." This declara- tion embodies a pronounced tendency of the age. It could not realize that the world of feeling is no less real than that of the understanding. Neglect of Nature. A striking way in which the change of subject matter manifested itself was hi the neglect of references to nature. Shakespeare says : " I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows." 1 In his pages we catch the gleam of the glowworm's eyes, we see the summer's velvet buds, we inhale the odor of the musk rose and the eglantine. " Everything that pretty is " in the world of nature greets our senses 1 A Midsummer Night's Dream, II., I. CHANGE IN FOREIGN INFLUENCE 215 in his plays. With all his bookishness, Milton takes us out of doors "... early, ere the odorous breath of morn Awakes the slumbering leaves," * to visit inspiring scenery. The poets of the Restoration, on the other hand, pay but little attention to the charms of nature. Words- worth says of Dryden : " There is not a single image from nature in the whole of his works." Poetry which affects a contempt for nature is lacking in an important element of greatness. The Study of Science. One of the best characteristics of the period was its love of scientific investigation. An age devoted to intellectual activity must seek various out- lets. Some of the most important of these were found in scientific fields. The Royal Society was founded in 1662 to investigate natural phenomena and to penetrate into the hidden mysteries of philosophy and life. When we remember that Locke was paid for his essay, TJie Conduct of tJie Understanding, a volume of only about a hundred pages, three times as much as Milton received for the Paradise Lost, we may realize that the taste of the age preferred the productions of cold intellect to the noble creations of thought and imagination, in con- junction with feeling. Change in Foreign Influence. Of all foreign influences from the beginning of the Renaissance to the Restora- tion, the literature of Italy had been the most important. French influence now gained the ascendency. There were several reasons for this change, (i) France under the great Louis XIV. was increasing her polit- ical importance. (2) She now had among her writers 1 Arcades. 2l6 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 men who were by force of genius fitted to exert wide influence. Among such, we may instance Moliere (1622- 1673), who stands next to Shakespeare in dramatic power. (3) Charles II. and many Cavaliers had passed the time of their exile in France. They became familiar with French literature, and when they returned to England in 1660, their taste had been influenced by French models. More Attention paid to Form of Expression. A great genius like Shakespeare, by the worth of what he says, more than atones for any deficiencies of form. In the Puritan age the metaphysical poets had nothing original to utter, but even what they copied often lacks correctness of form. Their shallow thoughts are frequently stated obscurely ; their figurative language is often extravagant or absurd. The readers of the Restoration demanded that if a writer had nothing original to offer, his second-hand thoughts should at least be presented in artistic form, and that obscurity should no longer be employed as a cloak to cover shallowness. It is well for the student to be reminded frequently that influences are often operative for a long while before their results are widely felt. In the early part of the century, Edmund Waller (1606-1687), a P oet very popular after the Restoration, but little read to-day, had put in practice the French idea that too much attention cannot be paid to the formal excellence of poetry. Before 1630 he had used the same French rhyming couplets which Dryden, and especially Pope (see p. 234), brought to a high degree of formal perfection in English verse. The following couplet, the best that Waller ever wrote, will show its form : " The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, Lets in new light through chinks that time hath made." 1 1 Old Age and Death, from Divine Poems, JOHN DRYDEN 2I 7 Waller, however, found few pupils until the Restoration opened wide the door to French influence, which in this age and the next was potent in causing writers to pay more attention to polished forms of expression. French critics did not object to a commonplace thought, if the style was clear, incisive, and attractive. JOHN DRYDEN, 1631-1700 Life. John Dry den was born in 1631 in the small vil- lage of Aldwinkle, in the northern part of Northampton- shire. Few interesting facts concerning his life have come down to us. His father was a baronet; his mother, the daughter of a rector. Young Dryden graduated from Cambridge in 1654. From a print. BIRTHPLACE OF DRYDEN During his entire life, Dryden was a professional liter- ary man, and with his pen he made the principal part of his living. This necessity often forced him against his own 218 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 better judgment to cater to the perverted taste of the Res- toration. The theaters were opened soon after the return of Charles II., and Dry den found that plays had more market value than any other kind of literature. He agreed to furnish three plays a year for the King's actors, but was unable to produce that number. For fifteen years in the prime of his life, Dryden did little but write plays, the majority of which are seldom read to-day. At the age of fifty, he showed the world where his genius lay, by writing the greatest political satire in the language. During the last twenty years of his life, he produced but few plays. His greatest satires, didactic poems, and lyrics belong to this period. In his last years he wrote a spirited translation of Virgil, and retold in his own inimitable way various stories from Chaucer and Boc- caccio. Dryden died in 1 700 and was buried in Westmin- ster Abbey beside Chaucer. It is difficult to speak positively of Dryden's character. He wrote a poem in honor of the memory of Cromwell, and a little later another welcoming Charles II. He ar- gued in stirring verse in favor of the Episcopal religion, when that was the faith of the court. James II. was a Roman Catholic, and, after his accession, Dryden wrote another poem to prove the Catholic Church the only true one. He had been appointed poet laureate in 1670, but the Revolution of 1688, which drove James from the throne, caused Dryden to lose the laureateship. He would neither take the oath of fealty to the new government nor change his religion. In spite of adversity and the loss of an in- come almost sufficient to support him, he remained a Cath- olic for the rest of his life and reared his sons in that faith. He seems to have been of a forgiving disposition, and ready to acknowledge his own faults. He admitted that JOHN DRYDEN 219 his plays were disfigured with coarseness. He was very kind to young writers and willing to help them with their work. In his chair at Will's Coffee House, discoursing to the wits of the Restoration about matters of literary art, he was one of the most prominent figures of the age. His Prose. Although to the majority of people Dryden is known only as a poet, his influence on prose has been so far-reaching as to entitle him to be called one of the founders of modern prose style. The shortening of sentences has been a striking feature in the development of modern English prose. Edmund 220 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 Spenser averages about fifty words to each of his prose sentences ; Richard Hooker, about forty-one. One of the most striking sentences in Milton's Areopagitica contains ninety-five words, although he crowds over three hundred words into some of his long sentences. The sentences in some of Dryden's pages average only twenty-five words in length. We turn to Macaulay, one of the most finished masters of modern prose, and find that his sentences average twenty-two words. Dryden also helped to free English prose from the inversions, involutions, and paren- thetical intricacies of earlier times. Dryden's prose deals chiefly with literary criticism. The most of his prose is to be found in the prefaces to his plays and poems. His most important separate prose composition is his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, a work which should be read by all who wish to know some of the foundation principles of criticism. Satiric Poetry. No English writer has surpassed Dryden in satiric verse. His greatest satire is Absalom and Achitophel, in which, under the guise of Old Testa- ment characters, he satirizes the leading spirits of the Prot- estant opposition to the succession of James, the brother of Charles II., to the English throne. Dryden thus satirizes Achitophel, the Earl of Shaftesbury : " Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide, Else, why should he, with wealth and honor blest, Refuse his age the needful hours of rest? Punish a body which he could not please, Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease? And all to leave what with his toil he won To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son. In friendship false, implacable in hate, Resolved to ruin or to rule the state." JOHN DRYDEN 221 Zimri, the Duke of Buckingham, is immortalized thus : " Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts, and nothing long." Mac Flecknoe is another satire of almost as great merit, directed against a certain Whig poet by the name of Shad- well. He would have been seldom mentioned in later times, had it not been for two of Dryden's lines : " The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, But Shadwell never deviates into sense." All for Love, one of Dryden's greatest plays, shows the delicate keenness of his satire in characterizing the cold- blooded Augustus Caesar, or Octavius, as he is there called. Antony has sent a challenge to Octavius, who replies that he has more ways than one to die. Antony rejoins : " He has more ways than one ; But he would choose them all before that one. Ventidius. He first would choose an ague or a fever. Antony. No ; it must be an ague, not a fever; He has not warmth enough to die by that." Dryden could make his satire as direct and blasting as a thunderbolt. He thus describes his publisher: " With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair, With two left legs, and Judas-colored hair, And frowsy pores that taint the ambient air." Argumentative or Didactic Verse. Dryden is a master in arguing in poetry. He was not a whit hampered by the restrictions of verse. They were rather an advantage to him, for in poetry he could make more telling arguments in briefer compass than in prose. The best two examples of his power of arguing in verse are Religio Laid, written 222 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 in 1682, to uphold the Episcopal religion, and The Hind and the Panther, composed in 1687, to vindicate the Catho- lic Church. Verse of this order is called didactic, because it endeavors to teach or to explain something. The age of the Restoration delighted in such exercises of the intel- lect vastly more than in flights of fancy or imagination. Lyrical Verse. While the most of Dryden's best poetry is either satiric or didactic, he wrote three fine lyrical poems: Alexander's Feast, A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, and An Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew. All are distinguished by remarkable beauty and energy of expression. Alexan- der's Feast is the most widely read of Dryden's poems. The opening lines of the Ode to Mrs. Killigrew seem almost Miltonic in their conception, and they show his power in the field of lyrical poetry. Mistress Killigrew was a young lady of rare accomplishments in both poetry and painting. She died at the age of twenty-five, and Dryden thus begins her memorial ode : " Thou youngest virgin daughter of the skies, Made in the last promotion of the blest ; Whose palms, new plucked from Paradise, In spreading branches more sublimely rise, Rich with immortal green above the rest : Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine, Since Heaven's eternal year is thine." Some of his plays have songs and speeches instinct with lyrical force. The following famous lines on the worth of existence are taken from his tragedy of Aurengzebe : " When I consider'd life, 'tis all a cheat, Yet, fool'd with hope, men favor the deceit, Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay : To-morrow's falser than the former day, JOHN BUN VAN 223 Lies worse ; and while it says, we shall be blest, With some new joys, cuts off what we possest. Strange cozenage ! none would live past years again ; Yet all hope pleasure in what remain. And, from the dregs of life, think to receive What the first sprightly running could not give. I'm tir'd with waiting for this chemic gold, Which fools us young and beggars us when old." General Characteristics. In point of time, Dry den is the first great poet of the school of literary artists. His verse does not tolerate the un primed irregularities and exaggera- tions of many former English poets. His command over language is remarkable. He uses words almost as he chooses, but he does not invest them with the warm glow of feeling. He is, however, something more than a great word artist. Many of his ideas bear the stamp of marked originality. In the field of satiric and didactic poetry, he is a master. The intellectual, not the emotional, side of man's nature appeals strongly to him. He heeds not the song of the bird, the color of the rose, or the clouds of evening. Although more celebrated for his poetry than for his prose, he is the earliest of the great modern prose stylists and he displays high critical ability. JOHN BUNYAN, 1628-1688 Life. The Bedfordshire village of Elstow saw in 1628 the birth of one who in his own peculiar field of literature was to lead the world. The father, Thomas Bunyan, was a brazier, a mender of pots and pans, and he reared his son John to the same trade. In his autobiography, John Bunyan says that his father's house was of "that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land." 224 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 The boy went to school for only a short time and soon forgot what little he had learned. The father, by marry- ing a second time within a year after his wife's death, wounded the feelings of his sixteen year old son sufficiently to cause him to enlist as a soldier in the civil war. At about the age of twenty, he married, when neither he nor his wife had so much as a dish or a spoon. Bunyan tells us that in his youth he was very wicked, and he would probably have been so regarded from the point of view of a strict Puritan. His worst offenses seem JOHN BUNYAN 22$ to have been dancing on the village green, playing hockey on Sundays, ringing bells to rouse the neighborhood, and swearing. When he repented, his vivid imagination made him think that he had committed the unpardonable sin. In the terror which he felt at the prospect of the loss of his soul, he passed through much of the experience which enabled him to write the Pilgrim's Progress. Bunyan became a preacher of God's word. Under trees, in barns, on the village green, wherever people resorted, he told them the story of salvation. Within six months after the Restoration, he was arrested for preaching with- out Episcopal sanction. The officers took him away from his little blind daughter. The roisterers of the Restoration thought a brazier was too coarse to have feelings, but he dropped tears on the paper when he wrote of " the many hardships, miseries, and wants that my poor family were like to meet with, should I be taken from them, especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer to my heart than all besides. Oh, the thoughts of the hardship my poor blind one might undergo, would break my heart to pieces." In spite of his dependent family and the natural right of the freedom of speech, Bunyan was thrust into Bedford jail and kept a prisoner for nearly twelve years. Had it not been for his imprisonment in this "squalid J r U' 1- 1- BEDFORD BRIDGE, SHOWING den, of which he GATES AND JA1L speaks in the Pilgrim's Progress, we should probably be without that famous work. Part of it, at least, was written in the jail. 226 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 In 1672, as a step toward restoring the Catholic reli- gion, Charles II. suspended all penal statutes against the dissenting clergy, and Bunyan was released from jail. After his release, he settled down to his life's work of spreading the Gospel by both pen and tongue. He some- times visited London to preach, and it was not uncommon for twelve hundred persons to come to hear him at seven o'clock in the morning of a week day in winter. The immediate cause of his death was a cold caught by riding in the rain, on his way to try to reconcile a father and son. In 1688 Bunyan died as he uttered these words : " Take me, for I come to Thee." His life and works are a necessary supplement to an account of the Restoration period, for they show how one- sided an opinion of English life and literature might be formed from a study of the dissolute court alone. All the moral greatness of the Commonwealth period was not obliterated in a day. Men like John Bunyan still lived to exert a powerful influence over English life and thought. His Work. Bunyan achieved the distinction of writing the greatest of all allegories, the Pilgrim's Progress. This is the story of Christian's journey through this life, the story of meeting Mr. Worldly Wiseman, of the straight gate and the narrow path, of the Delectable Mountains of Youth, of the valley of Humiliation, of the encounter with Apollyon, of the wares of Vanity Fair, " kept all the year long," of my lord Time-server, of Mr. Anything, of im- prisonment in Doubting Castle by Giant Despair, of the flowery land of Beulah, lying beyond the valley of the Shadow of Death, through which a deep, cold river runs, and of the city of All Delight on the other side. This story still has absorbing interest for human beings, for the child and the old man, the learned and the ignorant. JOHN BUNYAN 227 Bunyan wrote many other works, but none of them equals the Pilgrim's Progress. His Holy War is a power- ful allegory, and it has been called a prose Paradise Lost. Bunyan produced a strong piece of realistic fiction, the Life and Death of Mr. B adman. This shows the de- scent of a soul along the broad road. The story is the counterpart of his great masterpiece, and ranks second to it in point of merit. From an old print. BUNYAN'S BIRTHPLACE General Characteristics. Since the Pilgrim's Progress has been more widely read in England than any other book except the Bible, it is well to investigate the secret of Bun- yan's power. In the first place, his style is simple. Secondly, rare earnestness is coupled with this simplicity. He had some- thing to say, and in his inmost soul he felt that this some- thing was of supreme importance for all time. Only a 228 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 great man can tell such truths without a flourish of lan- guage, or without straining after effect. At the most critical part of the journey of the Pilgrims, when they ap- proach the river of death, note that Bunyan avoids the tendency to indulge in fine writing, that he is content to rely on the power of the subject matter, simply presented, to make us feel the terrible ordeal : "Now I further saw that between them and the gate was a river; but there was no bridge to go over, and the river was very deep. . . . The pilgrims then, especially Christian, began to despond in their mind, and looked this way and that, but no way could be found by them by which they might escape the river. . . . They then addressed them- selve.s to the water, and entering, Christian began to sink. . . . And with that, a great darkness and horror fell upon Christian, so that he could not see before him. . . . " Now, upon the bank of the river, on the other side, they saw the two shining men again, who there waited for them. . . . Now you must note, that the city stood upon a mighty hill ; but the pilgrims went up that hill with ease, because they had these two men to lead them up by the arms ; they had likewise left their mortal garments behind them in the river; for though they went in with them, they came out without them." Of all the words in the above selection, eighty per cent, are monosyllables. Few authors could have resisted the tendency to try to be impressive at such a climax. One has more respect for this world, on learning that it has set the seal of its approval on such earnest simplicity and neg- lected works that strive wi'th every art to attract attention. Thirdly, Bunyan has a rare combination of imagination and dramatic power. His abstractions become living per- sons. They have warmer blood coursing in their veins than many of the men and women in modern fiction. Giant Despair is a living giant. We can hear the clanking of the chains and the groans of the captives in his dungeon. We SUMMARY 229 are not surprised to learn that Bunyan imagined that he saw and conversed with these characters. The Pilgrim s Progress is a prose drama. Note the vivid dramatic pres- entation of the tendency to evil, which we all have at some time felt threatening to wreck our nobler selves : " Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said, ( I am void of fear in this matter ; prepare thyself to die ; for I swear by my infernal den that thou shalt go no further ; here will I spill thy soul.' " It would be difficult to find English prose more simple, earnest, strong, imaginative, and dramatic than this. Bunyan's style felt the shaping influence of the Bible more than of all other works combined. He knew the Scriptures almost by heart SUMMARY The Restoration introduced a change in both the sub- ject matter and the form of literature. With the Eliza- bethans and their successors, intellectual action was but the prelude to a richness of emotional life. They regarded man as a being who could love and feel joy and grief. The Restoration, on the other hand, looked at man chiefly from the coldly intellectual side. The masterpieces are for the most part couched in a satiric and a didactic vein. The finest work of Dryden, the great representative of the age, is his satiric and didactic verse. To the voice of nature speaking through the buds of spring, the russet leaves of autumn, or the song of bird, the poetry of the Restora- tion turns a deaf ear. France exerted the predominating foreign literary influ- ence. Increasing attention was paid to the manner of HAL. ENG. LIT. 15 230 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 expressing thought. Literature began its long period of worship at the shrine of formal excellence. In prose there was a decided advance. Dryden's prose might have been written by a modern hand. Few modern writers have surpassed Bunyan in simplicity, energy, and imaginative power. REQUIRED READINGS FOR CHAPTER VI HISTORICAL Gardiner, 1 pp. 578-671 ; Green, pp. 616-700; Underwood-Guest, pp. 477-507; Guerber, pp. 275-290; Wakeling's King and Parliament, pp. 69-115; Traill, IV., 346-511. LITERARY Prose. An idea of the best prose of the age may be gained from the following works : Bunyan's Pilgrini's Progress (Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. III., pp. 84-96), Dryden's critical Essays (Craik, III., 148-166, or No. 161 in Cassell's National Library, 10 cents), Locke's Conduct of the Understanding (Craik, III., 180-183). In what does the secret of Bunyan's popularity consist in his style, or in his subject matter, or in both ? What is specially noteworthy about his style? In what respect was his style appreciably affected by his familiarity with any other work? Select and comment on some of Dryden's best critical dicta. Why is Locke's work considered a classic? How does it indicate the spirit of the age? In what respects does the prose of this age show advance ? Poetry. Read the selections from Butler's Hudibras, in Ward's English Poets, Vol. II., pp. 400-408; from Dryden's Alexanders Feast (Ward. II., 478) ; from Absalom and Achitophel (Ward, II.. 454). As a specimen of Dryden's argumentative or didactic verse, read the opening lines of Religio Laid (Cassell's National Library, No. 98), or the selections in Ward, II., 463-468. 1 For full titles, see list at end of Chap. I. READING REFERENCES 231 What characteristic of the age is reflected in Hudibras ? What are the qualities of this new school of poetry, of which Dryden is the most famous exponent? What are his special excellences and defects? Compare him with Shakespeare and Milton. (OPTIONAL) Sydney's Social Life in England from the Restoration to the Revolu- tion. Macaulay's History of England. Taine's History of English Literature, Book III., Chaps. I., II., III. Gosse's History of Eighteenth Century Literature begins with 1660. Garnett's The Age of Dryden. Phillips's Popular Manual of English Literature, Vol. I., pp. 375- 434- Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature, pp. 312-341. Saintsbury's Life of Dryden. Macaulay's Essay on Dryden. Lowell's Essay on Dryden, in Among My Books. Dryden's Essays on the Drama, edited by Strunk. Fowler's Life of Locke. Ward's English Poets, Vol. II., pp. 396-496. Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. III., pp. 1-229. Froude's Life of Butiyan. Venable's Life of Bunyan. Macaulay's Essay on Southey^s Edition of the Pilgrim >s Progress. CHAPTER VII THE FIRST FORTY YEARS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 1700-1740 Ideals of the Age. The greater part of the eighteenth century in England was marked by the existence of a low moral standard. It was an age of double dealing and corruption. The political situation was partly responsible for this. In 1688 James II. was driven from England because of his tyrannical and lawless methods. His son-in-law and daughter, William and Mary, succeeded him. For more than fifty years after James had been dethroned, he, and after him his son and grandson, made repeated efforts to return. Many of the leading men of the nation tried to keep the favor of the exiled princes as well as of the actual rulers. It was at times impossible to tell in which direction the balance would turn, hence double dealing was resorted to by many whose example had wide influence because of their prominent position. The age was dull, unimaginative, and brutal. Drunk- enness was extremely common. Not only the lower classes, but also ministers of state and women of fashion drank to excess. Bribery was the rule. The greatest prime minister of the age had for a motto : " Every man has his price." Although hanging was the penalty for stealing a few shillings and for numerous other offenses, this punishment 332 LITERARY FORM PREFERRED TO MATTER 233 seemed to have little restraining power. Men and women of fashion would go out in parties to see droves of poor wretches hanged. For minor offenses, the culprits were tied fast in the pillory and often maimed for life with stones, bricks, and other missiles. All ranks of society felt the degrading influence of such brutality. In this soil nobility of soul and sympathy with one's kind did not thrive. The eighteenth century furnished Swift sufficient suggestions for his pictures of the Yahoos. Those who object to such pictures are merely resenting the fact that the ideals of the age left their mark on the literature. There was not a single writer with Bunyan's moral power, no Milton calling through a silver trumpet : " Mortals, that would follow me, Love Virtue ; she alone is free." * Literary Form preferred to Matter. The desire for polish and veneer, which had become marked during the age of the Restoration, now attained the greatest intensity. There was no poetic masterpiece of true creative imagi- nation. The age was in one sense a critical one ; that is, it was very particular about the way in which a thing was said. The matter was considered of far less importance. The age lacked enthusiasm and moral earnestness ; it lacked imaginative comprehension of higher realities. In poetry there was nothing to correspond to the Shake- spearean conception as embodied in the following lines : " The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven ; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name " '-' 1 Comus, line 1018. 2 A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, V., I. 234 FROM 1700 TO 1740 Pope struck the keynote of the age when he said : " True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd." l A new thought was not so much desired as an excellent dress for an old one. The Rhyming Couplet. Almost all of the best poetry of the age was written in lines of five iambic feet. The two adjacent lines rhyme, and they are called a couplet. There is generally a pause at the end of each line, and each couplet, when detached from the context, will usually make complete sense. Such lines catch the ear and they are easily retained in the memory. The following couplet from Pope is an example : " A little learning is a dang'rous thing ; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring." 2 A strict adherence to the rules of the couplet cramps both the reason and the imagination. Such leading strings narrow freedom of movement. The greatest passages in Shakespeare and Milton do not rhyme, and there is fre- quently no pause in the sense at the end of a line. These lines from Macbeth show how the ending of a line is not allowed to interfere with the sense : "... Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against The deep damnation of his taking-off." It is, however, easier for a small mind to catch the running sense in Pope than in Shakespeare. 1 Essay on Criticism, line 297. 2 Ibid, line 215. THE CLASSIC SCHOOL 235 The influence of French writers was still in the ascend- ency. Boileau (1636-1711), a French critic and poet, whom Voltaire called the Legislator of Parnassus, advised poets to compose the second line of the couplet first. No better rule could have been given for dwarfing poetic power and for making poetry artificial. The Classic School. The literary lawgivers of the first part of the eighteenth century held that a rigid adherence to certain narrow rules was the prime condition of produ- cing a masterpiece. Indeed, the belief was common that a knowledge of rules was more important than genius. The men of this school are called classicists because they held that a study of the best works of the ancients would disclose the necessary guiding rules. No style which did not closely follow these rules was considered good. Horace was the one classical author most copied by this school. His Epistles and Satires were considered models. The writers of this age were not the first class- icists. In the days of Elizabeth, a determined effort was made to have the English drama develop on classic lines (p. 143). The classicists then tried to laugh down any play that did not observe the rules of Seneca and regard the classical unities of time and place. The Elizabethans turned away from the laughers to listen to Shakespeare. The first part of the eighteenth century had no such genius, and all writers in order to be popular followed the classical rules. The motto of this school, of which Pope was the chief, was polished regularity. The classicists cared little for the fields, the flowers, and the birds. The writers closed their ears to the great symphony of nature. They despised en- thusiasm and the fire of passion. They disliked anything that was romantic, irregular, or improbable. We find them 236 FROM 1700 TO 1740 condemning the Arabian Nights on the score of improb- ability. Voltaire, a French classicist, says : " I do not like the monstrous irregularities of Shakespeare." An eigh- teenth century classicist endeavored to improve Hamlet's soliloquy by putting it in rhyming couplets. These lines show his attempt at improvement : " My anxious soul is tore with doubtful strife, And hangs suspended betwixt death and life ; Life ! death ! dread objects of mankind's debate I Whether superior to the shocks of fate, To bear its fiercest ills with steadfast mind, To Nature's order piously resigned," etc. 1 Pope was appealed to by an Episcopal bishop to polish some of Milton's poetry. Such views could not remain in the ascendency very long, if imagination and fancy were to make their existence felt. In 1730 James Thomson (1700-1748) published a romantic poem entitled The Seasons. This deals with the fields, flowers, woods, and streams. It takes us where " The hawthorn whitens ; and the juicy groves Put forth their buds." 2 This poem shows the revolt against the narrowness of the classical school. In the next chapter we can trace the progress of the revolt. The Prevalence of Satire. The satirist is a critic who searches for defects in order to ridicule them. Criticism that concerns itself exclusively with faults is a mark of deterioration in an age or in an individual. The highest criticism is constructive, not destructive ; that is, it shows the way to better achievements, instead of contenting itself with merely holding existing things up to scorn. 1 William Hamilton of Bangour : Poems and Songs, p. 65. 2 Spring, from The Seasons. AN AGE OF PROSE 237 The greatest writers of this age, in both poetry and prose, were satirists. Dean Swift, Joseph Addison, and Alexander Pope excelled in satirizing the existing order of things. Much of their work is of the very highest order of excellence as satire, but the point to be remembered is that satire can never be the highest type of literature. The intense party strife between Whigs and Tories in- creased the tendency toward satire, for the leaders of each party were eager to get the services of the greatest writers to satirize the opposition. Men of the rank of Swift and Defoe employed their pens in political satire. An Age of Prose. In each preceding age, if we except the work of Bunyan, the masterpieces were poetry, but the prose of the first half of the eighteenth century far surpasses the poetry. Daniel Defoe (pp. 277-279), the author of Robinson Crusoe, Dean Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels, Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, the great essayists, are the principal prose writers of the period. The question has been often discussed whether Alexander Pope, the greatest writer in verse, is a true poet. Matthew Arnold says : " The glory of English literature is in poetry, and in poetry the strength of the eighteenth century does not lie. Nevertheless the eighteenth cen- tury accomplished for us an immense literary progress, and its very shortcomings in poetry were an instrument to that progress, and served it. The example of Ger- many may show us what a nation loses from having no prose style. . . . French prose is marked in the highest degree by the qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. . . . The French made their poetry also conform to the law which was molding their prose. . . . This may have been bad for French poetry, but it was good for French prose." It is unques- 238 FROM 1700 TO 1740 tionably true that French writers exerted a powerful influence in changing the cumbersome style of Mil- ton's prose to the polished, neatly turned sentences of Addison. The same influence which gave vigor, point, and definiteness to the prose, necessary for the business of the world, helped to dwarf the poetry. If both could not advance together, we may be thankful that the eigh- teenth century gave us a varied prose of such high excellence. JONATHAN SWIFT, 1667-1745 Life. Swift, one of the greatest prose writers of the eighteenth century, was born of English parents in Dublin in 1667. It is absolutely necessary to know something of his life in order to pass proper judgment on his writings. A cursory examination of his life will show that heredity and environment were responsible for many of his pe- culiarities. Swift's father died a few months before the birth of his son, and the boy saw but little of his mother. Swift's school and college life were passed at Kilkenny School and Trinity College, Dublin. For his education he seems to have been dependent on the charity of an uncle, who made the boy feel the bitterness of receiving something at another's hand. In after times he said that his uncle treated him like a dog. Swift's early experience seems to have made him misanthropic and hardened to consequences, for he neglected certain studies and came near failing to take his A. B. degree. After his graduation in 1688, he spent almost ten years as the private secretary of Sir William Temple, at Moor Park in Surrey, about forty miles southwest of London. Temple had been asked to furnish some JONATHAN SWIFT 239 employment for the young graduate because Lady Temple was related to Swift's mother. Here, Swift was probably treated as a dependent, and he had to eat at the second table. Finally, this life became so intoler- able that he took holy orders and went to a little parish in Ireland, a country that he hated. After a stay of eighteen months there, he returned to Moor Park, where he remained until Temple's death in 1699. Swift then went to another little country parish in Ireland. From MOOR PARK From a print. there he went to London on a mission in behalf of the Episcopal church in Ireland. He quar- reled with the Whigs, became a Tory, and assisted that party by writing many political pamphlets. The Tory ministry soon felt that it could scarcely do without him. He dined with ministers of state, and was one of the most important men in London. He advanced the interests of his friends much better than his own, for he got little from the government except the hope of becoming a bishop. In 1713 he was made dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, 240 FROM 1700 TO 1740 Dublin. In 1714 Queen Anne died, the Tories went out of power, and Swift returned to Ireland a disappointed man. He passed the rest of his life there, with the excep- tion of a few visits to England. Swift championed the Irish cause when English poli- ticians endeavored to oppress Ireland with unjust laws. A man who knew him well, says : " I never saw the poor so carefully and conscientiously attended to as those of his cathedral." He gave up a large part of his income every year for the poor. In Dublin he was looked upon as a hero. When a certain person tried to be revenged on Swift for a satire, a deputation of Swift's neighbors proposed to thrash the man. Swift sent them home, but they boycotted the man and lowered his income ,1200 a year. During the last years of his life, Swift was hopelessly insane. He died in 1745, leaving his property for an asylum for lunatics and incurables. There are unsolved mysteries in Swift's life. He suffered from an unknown brain disease for the principal part of his existence. This affection, the galling treat- ment received in his early years, and the disappointments of his prime, largely account for his misanthropy, for his coldness, and for the almost brutal treatment of the women who loved him treatment against which Thack- eray inveighs powerfully. Swift's attachment to the beautiful Hester Johnson, known in literature as Stella, led him to write to her that famous series of letters known as the Journal to Stella, in which he gives much of his personal history during the three sunniest years of his life, from 1710 to 1713, when he was a lion in London. Thackeray says : " I know of nothing more manly, more tender, more exquisitely touch- JONATHAN SWIFT 241 ing, than some of these brief notes, written in what Swift calls his 'little language' in his Journal to Stella." A Tale of a Tub. Swift's greatest satiric allegory is known as A Tale of a Tub: The purpose of the work is to satirize Romanists and Calvinists, and to uphold the Episcopalians. For those not interested in theological arguments, there is much entertaining philosophy, as the following quotation will show : " If we take an examination of what is generally understood by hap- piness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short defi- 242 FROM 1700 TO 1740 nition, that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived. And first, with relation to the mind or understanding, it is manifest what mighty advantages fiction has over truth ; and the reason is just at our elbow, because imagination can build nobler scenes and produce more wonderful revolutions than fortune or nature will be at expense to. furnish." Swift's satiric definition of happiness as the art " of being well deceived " is a characteristic instance of a combina- tion of his humor and pessimistic philosophy. Gulliver's Travels. The world is always ready to lis- ten to any one who has a good story to tell. Neither children nor philosophers have yet wearied of reading the adventures of Captain Lemuel Gulliver in Lilliput and Brobdingnag. Gulliver's Travels is Swift's most famous work. In Lilliput we are introduced to a race of men about six inches high. Everything is on a corresponding scale. Gulliver eats a whole herd of cattle for breakfast and drinks several hogsheads of liquor. He captures an entire fleet of war ships. A rival race of pygmies endeavors to secure his services so as to obtain the balance of power. The quarrels between those little people seem ridiculous, and so petty as to be almost beneath contempt. The voyage to Brobdingnag shows all this to be changed. Men are there sixty feet tall, and the affairs of an ordinary human being appear petty and insignifi- cant. The cats are as large as three oxen, and the dogs attain the size of four elephants. Gulliver eats on a table thirty feet high, and he trembles lest he may fall and break his neck. The baby seizes Gulliver and tries to swallow his head. Afterward the hero fights a desperate battle with two rats. A monkey catches him and carries him to the almost infinite height of the house top. Cer- JONATHAN SWIFT 243 tainly the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag merit Leslie Stephen's criticism of being " almost the most de- lightful children's book ever written." The voyage to Laputa satirizes the philosophers. We are taken through the academy at Lagado and are shown a typical philosopher : "He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials, hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers. He told me he did not doubt that in eight years more he should be able to supply the governor's gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate." In this voyage the Struldbrugs are described. They are a race of men who, after the loss of every faculty and of every tie that binds them to earth, are doomed to con- tinue living. Dante never painted a stronger or a ghastlier picture. The voyage to the country of the Houyhnhnms describes the Yahoos, who are the embodiment of all the detestable qualities of human beings. The last two voy- ages are not pleasant reading, and one might wish that the author of two such inimitable tales as the adventures in Lilliput and Brobdingnag had stopped with these. Children read Gulliver's Travels for the story, but there is more than a story in the work. In its pages the historian finds allusions and side lights that reveal the age more distinctly. Among the Lilliputians, there is one party, known as the Bigendians, which insists that all eggs shall be broken open at the big end, while another party, called the Littleendians, contends that eggs shall be opened only at the little end. These differences typify the quarrels of the age concerning religion and politics. The Travels also contains much human philosophy. The lover of satire is constantly delighted with the keenness of the thrusts. 244 FROM 1700 TO 1740 General Characteristics. Swift is one of the greatest of English prose humorists. He is also noted for wit of that satiric kind which enjoys the discomfiture of the victim. A typical instance is shown in the way in which he, under the assumed name of Isaac Bickerstaff, dealt with an astrologer and maker of prophetic almanacs, whose name was Partridge. Bickerstaff claimed to be an infalli- ble astrologer, and he predicted that Partridge would die March 29, 1708, at 11 P.M. When that day had passed, Bickerstaff issued a pamphlet giving a circumstantial ac- count of Partridge's death. Partridge, finding that his customers began to decrease, protested that he was alive. Bickerstaff promptly replied that Partridge was dead by his own infallible rules of astrology, and that the man now claiming to be Partridge was a vile impostor. Swift's wit frequently left its imprint on the thought of the time. The results of this special prank with the astrologer were : first, to cause the wits of the town to join in the hue and cry that Partridge was dead ; second, to increase the contempt for astrologers ; and, third, in the words of Scott : " The most remarkable consequence of Swift's frolic was the establishment of the Tatler" Richard Steele, its founder, adopted the popular name of Isaac Bickerstaff (p. 248). Taine says of Swift : " He is the inventor of irony, as Shakespeare of poetry." The most powerful instance of Swift's irony is shown in his attempt to make the Irish understand the brutality of rearing large families in igno- rance, rags, hunger, and crime. His Modest Proposal for relieving such distress is to have the children at the age of one year served as a new dish on the tables of the great. So apt is irony to be misunderstood and to fail of its mark, that the Irish thought that Swift was brutal, JOSEPH ADDISON 245 instead of themselves. His ironical remarks on The Abol- ishing of Christianity were also misunderstood. We shall search Swift's work in vain for examples of pathos or sublimity. We shall find his pages caustic with wit, satire, and irony, and often disfigured with coarseness. One of the great pessimists of all time, he is yet tremen- dously in earnest in whatever he says, from his Drapier's Letters, written to protect Ireland from the schemes of English politicians, to his Gulliver's Travels, where he describes the court of Lilliput. This earnestness and circumstantial minuteness throw an air of reality around his most grotesque creations. Although sublimity and pathos are outside of his range, his style is remarkably well adapted to the special sub- ject matter that he chose. While reading his works, one scarcely ever thinks of his style, unless the attention is specially directed to it. Only a great artist can thus con- ceal his art. A style so natural as this has especial merits which will repay study. Three of its chief characteristics are simplicity, flexibility, and energetic directness. JOSEPH ADDISON, 1672-1719 Life. Joseph Addison was born in the paternal rectory at Milston, a small village in the eastern part of Wiltshire. .He was educated at Oxford, and he intended to be- come a clergy- man, but he had attracted attention HAL. ENG. LIT. 1 6 .' From an old print. ADDISON'S BIRTHPLACE 246 FROM 1700 TO 1740 by his graceful Latin poetry, and he was dissuaded by influential court friends from entering the service of the church. They persuaded him to fit himself for the diplo- matic service, and they secured for him a yearly pension of ^300. He then went to France, studied the language of that country, and traveled extensively, so as to gain a knowledge of foreign courts. The death of King William in 1702 stopped the pension, and Addison was forced to return to England and seek employment as a tutor. The great battle of Blenheim was won by Marlborough in 1 704. As Macaulay says, the ministry was mortified to JOSEPH ADDISON 247 see such a victory celebrated by so much bad poetry, and he instances these lines from one of the poems : " Think of two thousand gentlemen at least, And each man mounted on his capering beast ; Into the Danube they were pushed by shoals." The Chancellor of the Exchequer went to Addison's humble lodgings and asked him to write a poem in honor of the battle. Addison took the town by storm with a simile in which the great general was likened to the calm angel of the whirlwind. When people reflected how calmly Marlborough had directed the whirlwind of war, they thought that no comparison could be more felici- tous. From that time Addison's fortunes rose. Since his day no other man relying on literary talents alone has risen so high in state affairs. He was made assistant Secretary of State, Secretary for Ireland, and finally chief Secretary of State. Though Addison was a prominent figure in the political world, his literary life most concerns us. In his prime he wrote for The Tatler and The Spectator, famous news- papers of Queen Anne's day, many inimitable essays on contemporary life and manners. Most newspaper work is forgotten with the setting sun, but these essays are eagerly read by the most cultivated people of to-day. His own age thought his tragedy of Cato, a drama observ- ing the classical unities, his most famous production. This fact shows how unreliable contemporary opinion may be concerning the merit of an author's works, for Cato is now little read. Some of his Hymns are much finer. Lines like these, written of the stars, linger in our memories : " Forever singing as they shine, The hand that made us is divine." 248 FROM 1700 TO 1740 Addison had a singularly pleasing personality. Though he was a Whig, the Tories admired and applauded him. He was a good illustration of the truth that if one smiles in the mirror of the world, it will answer him with a smile. Swift said he believed the English would have made Ad- dison king, if they had been '- ~---^^fcB^n^Mtt%>lB/^UWU^h.* '* _ ** . - rr.'T-fw ' ' ' -' to place him on the throne. Pope's jealous nature strove to quarrel with Addison, but the quarrel was chiefly on one side. Men like Macaulay and Thackeray have exerted their powers to do justice to the kindliness and integrity of Addison. Addison died at the age of forty-seven, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Collaborates with Steele. Under the pen name of Isaac Bickerstaff, Richard Steele (1672-1729), a former schoolmate and friend of Addison, started in 1709 The Tatler, a periodical published three times a week. This discussed matters of interest in society and politics, and occasionally published an essay on morals and manners. Steele was a good-natured, careless individual, who had had experience as a soldier, playwright, moralist, keeper of the official gazette, and pensioner. He says that he From an old print. ADDISON'S HOME AT BILTON, WARWICKSHIRE JOSEPH ADDISON 249 RICHARD STEELE always " preferred the state of his mind to that of his fortune," but his mental state was often fickle, and too much dependent on bodily luxuries, though he was pa- triotic enough to sacrifice his personal fortune for what he considered his country's interest. We find Addison a frequent con- tributor to The Tatler after its seven- teenth number. Steele says : " I fared like a distressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbor to his aid ; I was undone by my auxiliary ; when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without depend- ence on him." The Tatler was discontinued in 1711, and the more fa- mous Spectator was begun two months later. Addison wrote the first number, but the second issue, which came from Steele's pen, contains sketches of those characters which have become famous in the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers. While Steele should have full credit for the first bold sketches, the finished portraits in the de Coverley gallery are due to Addison. In many respects, each seemed to be the complement of the other. Steele's writings have not the polish or delicate humor of Addison's, but they have more strength and pathos. From the neglect of Steele and the enduring interest in Addison, the student should learn the valuable lesson that artistic finish, as well as ex- cellence of subject matter, has become almost a necessity for a prose writer who would not be soon neglected. Addison, however, needed as a starting point the sug- gestive originality of Steele. Of Addison, Steele says : " I claim to myself the merit of having extorted excellent 2 $O FROM 1700 TO 1740 productions from a person of the greatest abilities, who would not have let them appear by any other means." If it is true that the majority of readers to-day neglect Steele's work, it is also true that but for him they would not have Addison's best essays with which to charm many an idle hour. Addison's Essays. The greatest of Addison's Essays appeared in The Spectator, which was published every week day for 555 issues. The subject matter of these Essays is extremely varied. On one day there is a pleasant paper on witches ; on another, a chat about the new woman ; on another, a discourse on clubs. Addison is properly a moral satirist, and his pen did much more than the pulpit to civilize the age and make virtue the fashion. In The Spectator, he says : " If I meet with anything in city, court, or country, that shocks modesty or good manners, I shall use my utmost endeavors to make an example of it." He accomplished his purpose, not by heated denun- ciations of vice, but by holding it up to kindly ridicule. He remembered the fable of the different methods em- ployed by the north wind and the sun to make a man lay aside an ugly cloak. Addison also stated that one of his objects was to bring " philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and col- leges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea tables and coffeehouses." His papers on Milton did much to dimin- ish that great poet's, unpopularity in an age that loved form rather than matter, art rather than natural strength. The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers. The most famous of Addison's productions are his papers which appeared in The Spectator, describing a typical country gentleman, Sir Roger de Coverley, and his friends and servants. Taine says that Addison here invented the novel without sus- JOSEPH ADDISON 251 pecting it. This is an overstatement, but these papers certainly have the interest of a novel from the moment Sir Roger appears until his death, and the delineation of character is far in advance of what the majority of modern novels can show. We find ourselves rereading the de Coverley papers more than once, a statement that can be made of but few novels. General Characteristics. Before we have read many of Addison's essays, we shall discover that he is a humorist of high rank. His humor is of the kind that makes one smile, rather than laugh aloud. We are amused, for in- stance, by this sentence from Spectator No. 112 : " As Sir Roger is landlord to the whole congregation, he keeps them in very good order, and will suffer nobody to sleep in it besides himself; for. if by chance he has been surprised into a short nap at sermon, upon recovering out of it, he stands up and looks about him, and, if he sees anybody else nodding, either wakes them up himself, or sends his servants to them." The paper, Of Clttbs in General, is highly entertaining because of its humor : "When a set of men find themselves agree in any particular, though never so trivial, they establish themselves into a kind of fraternity, and meet once or twice a week upon the account of such a fantastic resem- blance. I know a considerable market town, in which there was a club of fat men. . . . The room where the club met was something of the largest, and had two entrances, the one by a door of a moderate size, and the other by a pair of folding doors. If a candidate for this cor- pulent club could make his entrance through the first, he was looked upon as unqualified ; but if he stuck in the passage, and could not force his way through it, the folding doors were immediately thrown open for his reception, and he was saluted as a brother. . . . "In opposition to this society, there sprang up another, composed of scarecrows and skeletons, who, being very meager and envious, did all they could to thwart the designs of their bulky brethren." 1 1 The Spectator, No. 9. 252 FROM 1700 TO 1740 Some of the Rules for the Twopenny Club show Addi- son's humor at its best : " If any member absents himself, he shall forfeit a penny for the use of the club, unless in case of sickness or imprisonment. " If any member brings his wife into the club, he shall pay for what- ever she drinks or smokes. "If any member's wife comes to fetch him home from the club, she shall speak to him without the door. "None shall be admitted into the club that is of the same trade with any member of it." It is well to notice in the preceding quotations the pecul- iarity of Addison's humor, for to this quality chiefly he owes his legions of readers. His wit is never used against morality. He is a satirist, but his satire is not personal, like Pope's, or misanthropical, like Swift's. Of his style, Dr. Samuel Johnson says : " Whosoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the study of Addison." This is stronger praise than the present century would accord. His sentences are smooth and elegant, but they need the additional qualities of variety, incisiveness, energy, and, occasionally, of pre- cision, to perfect them. ALEXANDER POPE, 1688-1744 Life. Alexander Pope was born in London in 1688. His father was a merchant and a devout believer in the Roman Catholic religion. The future poet was not allowed to go either to a public school or to a university. He picked up almost all of his education in a haphazard way, reading those authors that pleased his fancy. ALEXANDER POPE 253 In his childhood, his parents removed from London to Binfield, a village in Berkshire, nine miles from Windsor. When nearly thirty, he went to Twickenham, a rural place on the Thames, near London. Here he indulged his fancy for landscape gardening and lived in quiet for the chief part of the rest of his life. He was a very precocious child. At the age of twelve he was writing an Ode on Solitude. He chose his voca- tion early, for writing poetry was the business of his life. On the basis of what he wrote, we may divide his life into three periods. During his first thirty years, he pro- 254 FROM 1700 TO 1740 duced various kinds of verse, like the Essay on Criticism and The Rape of tJie Lock. The middle period of his life was marked by his translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. In his third period, he wrote moral and didactic poems, like the Essay on Man, and satires, like the Dnnciad. By nature he was secretive and given to double dealing. It was said that he could hardly drink tea without stratagem. His vanity prompted him to take steps to have published a volume of his letters to various friends. Fearing that he would be criticised if he gave these letters to the public himself, he arranged to have them stolen and published apparently against his will. While accomplishing this, he became involved in a network of falsehoods. Leslie Stephen says of him : " He would instinctively snatch at a lie even when a moment's reflection would have shown that the plain truth would be more convenient, and there- fore he had to accumulate lie upon lie, each intended to patch up the other." In spite of such failings, Pope had some admirable traits. He showed the world what careful workmanship and an indomitable will could accomplish. His devotion to his aged mother also deserves special mention. Some Poems of the First Period : Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock. In 1711 Pope gave to the world a poem entitled Essay on Criticism. This is merely an exquisite setting of a number of gems of criticism which had for a long time been current. Pope's intention in writing this poem may be seen from what he himself says : " It seems not so much the perfection of sense to say things that have never been said before, as to express those best that have been said oftenest." From this point of view, the poem is a remarkable one. No other writer, save Shakespeare, has in an equal num- ALEXANDER POPE 255 From an old print. POPE'S HOME AT BINFIELD ber of lines said so many things which have passed into current quotation. Rare perfection in the form of state- ment accounts for this. The poem abounds in such lines as these : " For fools rush in where angels fear to tread." "To err is human, to forgive divine." "All seems infected that th' infected spy, As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye." " In words, as fashi'ons, the same rule will hold, Alike fantastic, if too new, or old : Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside." The Rape of the Lock is Pope's masterpiece. It was a favorite with Oliver Goldsmith, and Lowell rightly says: " The whole poem more truly deserves the name of a crea- 356 FROM 1700 TO 1740 tion than anything Pope ever wrote." The poem is a mock epic, and it has the supernatural machinery which was supposed to be absolutely necessary for an epic. In place of the gods and goddesses of the great epics, the fairylike sylphs help to guide the action of this mock epic. The poem describes a young lord's theft of a lock of hair from the head of a court beauty. Such an incident actually happened, and Pope composed The Rape of t/te Lock to soothe her indignation and to effect a reconcilia- tion. This poem, which should now be read entire by the student, is a vivid satiric picture of fashionable life in Queen Anne's reign. Translation of Homer. Pope's chief work during the middle period of his life was his translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer. From a financial point of view, these were the most successful of his labors. They brought him in nearly ^"9000, and made him independ- ent of bookseller or of nobleman. The remarkable success of these translations is strange when we remember that Pope's knowledge of Greek was very imperfect, and that he was obliged to consult transla- tions before attempting any passage. The Greek scholar Bentley, a contemporary of Pope, delivered a just verdict on the translation : " A pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer." The historian Gibbon said that the poem had every merit except faithfulness to the original. Homer is simple and direct. He abounds in concrete terms. Pope dislikes a simple term and loves a circum- locution and an abstraction. We have the concrete " herd of swine" translated into "a bristly care," "skins," into "furry spoils." The concrete was considered common and undignified. Homer says in simple language : " His ALEXANDER POPE 257 father wept with him," but Pope translates this: "The father poured a social flood." Pope used to translate thirty or forty verses of the Iliad before rising, and then to spend a considerable time in polishing them. But half of the translation of the Odyssey is his own work. He employed assistants to finish the other half. It is by no means easy to distin- guish his work from theirs. To imitate the work of a genius is not so easy. Some Poems of his Third Period : Essay on Man, and Satires. The Essay on Man is a philosophical poem with the avowed object of vindicating the ways of God to man. The entire poem is an amplification of the idea contained in these lines : " All nature is but art unknown to thee ; All chance, direction which thou canst not see ; All discord, harmony not understood ; All partial evil, universal good. And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. 11 The chief merit of the poem consists in throwing into polished form many of the views current at the time, so that they may be easily understood. Before we read very far we come across such old acquaintances as "The proper study of mankind is man." "An honest man's the noblest work of God." " Vice is a monster of so frightful mien As, to be hated, needs but to be seen ; Yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace." The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot and the Dunciad are Pope's greatest satires. In the Dunciad, an epic of the 258 FROM 1700 TO 1740 dunces, he holds up to ridicule every person and writer who had offended him. These were in many cases scrib- blers who had no business with a pen. In a few instances they were the best scholars of that day. A great deal of the poem is now very tiresome reading. Much of it is brutal. Pope was a powerful agent, as Thackeray says, in rousing much of that obloquy which has ever since pursued a struggling author. General Characteristics. For a long time there was considerable dispute in regard to whether Pope's verse is genuine poetry. He has not strong imagination, a keen feeling for nature, or wide sympathy with man. Leslie Stephen correctly says : " Pope never crosses the unde- finable, but yet ineffaceable line, which separates true poetry from rhetoric." No student can ever be a good critic of poetry until he can both understand arid feel the force of this remark. Many readers are to-day more pleased with rhetoric than with true poetry. He is the poet who best expresses the classical spirit of the eighteenth century. His works show the preference of his age for subjects and form of treatment. He excels in satiric and didactic verse, expresses in as perfect a form as possible his ideas, which are frequently not original, and embodies them in classical couplets, sometimes styled "rocking-horse meter," but he shows no power of fathom- ing the emotional depths of the soul. In the history of literature, he holds an important place because, more than any other writer, he calls attention to the importance of correctness of form, and of avoiding slovenliness of expression. He is the prince of artificial poets. Though he erred in exalting form above matter, the lesson of careful workmanship which he taught his age, was a needed one. SUMMARY 259 SUMMARY The first part of the eighteenth century was marked by a low moral standard in both church and state. This standard had its effect on literature. We find no such sublime outbursts of song as characterize the Elizabethan and Puritan ages. The writers chose satiric or didactic subjects, and avoided pathos, deep feeling, and sublimity. The age was molded by classical influence. Horace in his Epistles and Satires was the patron saint of criti- cism. The classical school loved polished regularity. An old idea, dressed in exquisite form, was as welcome as a new one. Anything strange, irregular, romantic, full of feeling, highly imaginative, or improbable to the intellect, was unpopular. Even in Gulliver's Travels, Swift endeavored to be as realistic as if he were demon- strating a geometrical proposition. Pope is the great poetic exponent of this school. The age is far more remarkable for its prose than for its poetry. French influence helped to develop a concise, flexible, energetic prose style. The deterioration in poetry was partly compensated for by the rapid advances in prose, which needed the influences working toward artistic finish. Of all the prose writers since Swift's time, few have equaled him and still fewer surpassed him in simplicity, flexibility, directness, and lack of affectation. In grace of style, delicate humor, and the power of awak- ening and retaining interest, Addison's Essays have no superiors. The influence of this age was sufficient to raise perma- nently the standard level of artistic literary expression. The unpruned, shapeless, and extravagant forms of earlier times will no longer be tolerated. 260 FROM 1700 TO 1740 REQUIRED READINGS FOR CHAPTER VII HISTORICAL Gardiner, 1 pp. 671-729; Green, pp. 701-734; Underwood-Guest, pp. 508-523 ; Guerber, pp. 291-303 ; Wakeling's King and Parliament, pp. 115-128; and HassalPs Making of the British Empire, pp. 7-30 (Oxford Manuals); Traill, IV., 511-622, V, 1-171; John Morley's Walpole (251 pp.. 50 cents). LITERARY Swift. Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. III., pp. 391-424, contains representative selections from Swift's prose. The best of these are The Philosophy of Clothes, from A Tale of a Tub (Craik, III., 398) ; A Digression concerning Critics, from the same (Craik, III., 400) ; The Emperor of Lillipnt (Craik, III., 417), and The King of Brobdingnqg (Craik, III., 419), from Gullivers Travels. Is Swift's a good prose style? Does he use ornament? Can you find a passage where he strives after effect? In what respects do the subjects which he chooses and his manner of treating them show the spirit of the age? Why is Gulliver 's Travels so popular? What are the most important lessons which a young writer may learn from Swift? In what is he specially lacking? Addison. From the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers the student should not fail to read Spectator No. 112, A Country Sunday. He may then read Spectator No. 2, by Steele, which sketches the de Cov- erley characters, and compare the style and characteristics of the two authors. The student who has the time at this point should read all the de Coverley Papers {Eclectic English Classics, American Book Co.). What are the excellences and defects of Addison's style ? Why may his Essays be called a prelude to the novel of life and manners? What qualities draw so many readers to the de Coverley Papers? Select passages which will serve to bring into sharp contrast the style and humor of Swift and of Addison. Pope. Read The Rape of the Lock (printed with the Essay on Man in Eclectic English Classics, American Book Co., 20 cents). Selections from this are given in Ward's English Poets, Vol. III., pp. 73-82. 1 For full titles, see list at end of Chap. I. READING REFERENCES 26 1 The Essay on Man, Book I. (Ward, III., 85-91) will serve as a specimen of his didactic verse. The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (Ward, III., 103-105) will illustrate his satire, and the lines from the Iliad in Ward, III., 82, will show the characteristics of his translation. How does Pope show the spirit of the classical school ? What are his special merits and defects? Does an examination of his poetry convince you that Leslie Stephen's criticism (p. 258) is right ? Select specimens of true poetry from as many of Pope's predecessors as possi- ble. Place beside these selections some of Pope's best lines, and see if you have a clearer idea of the difference between rhetoric and true poetry. WORKS FOR CONSULTATION AND FURTHER STUDY (OPTIONAL) Ashton's Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne. Sydney's England and the English in the Eighteenth Century. Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Centtiry. Stephen's History of Thought in the Eighteenth Century. Thackeray's Henry Esmond. Taine's History of English Literature, Book III., Chaps. IV. and V. Gosse's History of English Literature in the Eighteenth Century. Perry's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century. Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature, pp. 342-408. Clarke's Study of English Prose Writers, pp. 82-198. Dennis's The Age of Pope. Phillips's Popular Mamial of English Literature, Vol. I., pp. 437-564- Ward's English Poets, Vol. III., pp. 1-182. Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. III., pp. 355-595. Thackeray's English Humorists. Stephen's Life of Swift. Craik's Life of Swift. Courthope's Life of Addison. Macaulay's Essay on Addison. Stephen's Life of Pope. De Quincey's Essay on Pope, and On the Poetry of Pope. Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Gosse's From Shakespeare to Pope. HAL. ENG. LIT. 1"J CHAPTER VIII THE SECOND FORTY YEARS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 1740-1780 An Age of Changing Standards. The second forty years of the eighteenth century are more remarkable for the foundations which they laid for future changes than for original literary productions. Moral, religious, political, and literary standards began to change. There was more diversity of opinion in regard to all these subjects. These years were a flight of stairs leading up to the romantic age, and to the entire nineteenth century. In 1742 Robert Walpole's long term as prime minister came to a close. His political code contained two rules of action: (i) to secure by bribery, whenever necessary, the adoption of his measures, and (2) never to attempt to remedy abuses or to change any existing state of affairs, unless the demand for such change was too strong to be resisted. In 1757 William Pitt became, in effect, prime minister (though not so in name). Walpole had tried to bribe him in various ways and had utterly failed. In politics, Pitt was in a certain sense the counterpart of Wesley in religious life. Pitt appealed to the patriotism and to the sense of honor of his countrymen, and many heard his appeal. Under Walpole, Great Britain was a third-rate insular power; under Pitt, she became one of the foremost powers of the world. Between 1750 and 1760, Clive was making Great Britain mistress of the vast empire of India, and in 1759 Wolfe shattered the power 262 CHANGE IN RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE 263 of France in Canada. England was expanding to the eastward and the westward and taking her literature with her. As Wolfe advanced on Quebec, he was reading Gray's Elegy. Change in Religious Influence. The church had become too lukewarm and respectable to endeavor to bring in the masses, and they saw nothing in the church to attract them to it. When religious influence was at the lowest ebb, two eloquent preachers, John Wesley and George Whitefield, started a movement which is still gathering force. Although anything like enthusiasm or appeal to the emotions from the pulpit had for some time been considered in bad taste, Wesley did not ask his audience to listen to a sermon on the favorite bloodless abstractions of the eighteenth cen- tury pulpit, such as Charity, Faith, Duty, Holiness, abstrac- tions which never moved a human being an inch heaven- ward. His sermons were emotional. They dealt largely with the emotion of love, God's love for man. He did not ask his listeners to engage in intellectual disquisitions about the aspects of infinity. He did not talk free-will metaphysics or trouble his hearers with a satisfactory philosophical account of the origin of evil. He spoke about things which reached not only the understanding but also the feelings of plain men. About the same time, Whitefield was preaching to the miners near Bristol. Tears streamed down the cheeks of these rude men as he eloquently told them the story of salvation, and made many resolve to lead better lives. This religious awakening may have been accompanied with too much appeal to the feelings and some unhealthy emotional excitement, but some vigorous movement was absolutely necessary to quicken the spiritual life of such an age. 264 FROM 1740 TO 1780 CHANGE IN LITERARY STANDARDS : ROMANTICISM What is Romanticism ? It is important to understand the meaning of the romantic movement in order to com- prehend the dominating spirit of the next age. The years from 1740 to 1780 nowhere show romantic literature at the height of its excellence, but they indicate how the foundations of the movement were laid. The best short definition of romanticism is that of Victor Hugo, who called it " liberalism in literature." Although this definition is incomplete, it has the merit of cover- ing all kinds of romantic movements. In this period and the far more glorious one that followed, romanticism made its influence felt for the better in four different ways. An understanding of each of these will make us more intelli- gent critics. In the first .place, the romantic spirit is opposed to the prosaic. The romantic yearns for the light that never was on sea or land and longs to attain the unfulfilled ambitions of the soul, even when these in full measure are not possible. Sometimes these ambitions are so unrelated to the possible that .the romantic has in certain usage become synonymous with the impractical or the absurd, but this is not its mean- ing in literature^ The romantic may not always be " of imagination all compact," but it has a tendency in that direction. A reality of the imagination is as satisfying to romanticists as a reality of the prosaic reason, hence they, unlike the classicists, can enjoy The Tempest and A Mid- summer Night's Dream. The events in these plays could not have been objective realities in an actual world, but they have the necessary element of subjective truth. The imagination is the only power that can grasp the unseen. Any movements which stimulate imaginative activity must WHAT IS ROMANTICISM? 265 give the individual more points of contact with that part of the world that does not obtrude itself on the physical senses, and especially with many facts of existence which cold intellectual activity can never comprehend. Hence, romanticism leads to greater breadth of view. In the second place, the romantic is the opposite of the hackneyed. Hence, too much repetition may take a necessary quality away from what was once considered romantic. The epithets "ivory" and "raven," when applied to "brow" and to "tresses," respectively, were at first romantic, but much repetition has deprived them of this quality. If an age is to be considered romantic, it must look at things from a point of view somewhat differ- ent from that of the age immediately preceding. This change may be either in the character of the thought or in the manner of its presentation, or in both. An example of the formal element of change which appeared, consists in the substitution of blank verse and the Spenserian stanza for the classical couplets of the French school. In the next age, we shall find that the subject matter is no longer chiefly of the satiric or the didactic type. In the third place, the highest type of romanticism must contain something of the subjective element (see p. 130) peculiar to the individual. This often appears in the ideals that we fashion and in our characteristic con- ceptions of the spiritual significance of the world and its deepest realities. Two writers of this period by invest- ing nature with a spirit of melancholy (see p. 270) illus- trate one of the many phases which this subjective element can assume. In the fourth place, we shall see that the romantic movement tended toward deeper feeling. Sometimes the movement was injured and subjected to caricature by 266 FROM 1740 TO 1780 exhibitions of unbridled and ridiculous passion. Of course, the best romantic works are not mere seas of rippling sensibility or stormy passion, but the great romanticists never avoid expressions of profound feeling, like the love of Juliet or the jealousy of Othello. The classic school shunned as vulgar all exhibitions of en- thusiasm and strong emotion. The Influence of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. The classicists had turned away from the great English authors and had gone to French models for instruction in polish and form. Spenser exerted a powerful influence on the romanticists, for he is to the core a romantic poet. His far-off forest world with its enchantment of bowers, streams, glorious maidens, and heroic knights, is the very fairyland of romance. Before 1750 there was only one eighteenth century edition of Spenser's work pub- lished in England. In 1758, three editions of the Faerie Queene appeared. Spenser's readers and imitators were becoming very numerous. Much of the mid-eighteenth century influence of Shakespeare came from the masterly performance of his plays on the stage. In 1741 the great actor David Garrick captivated London audiences by his presentation of Shakespeare's dramas. Before Garrick retired in 1 776, he had produced twenty-four of these plays, and so he brought some of the influences of the romantic Eliza- bethan age to bear on the taste of eighteenth century England. The presentation of Shakespeare by a master like Garrick affected the imaginations of the people far more vividly than a mere reading of the plays. We have seen that the classicists did not like the " monstrous irregularities of Shakespeare," but, later in the century, he found a larger and more delighted audience. No age OSSIAN 267 with its eye on Shakespeare can tolerate a literature without romance and spirituality. Milton's influence for romanticism was also strong. At first thought, it may seem strange that a poet saturated as he was with the study of Greek and Latin literature, should have such influence, but his Paradise Lost is a work of the creative imagination, and the subject matter satisfies the romantic requirement in being strange and instinct with strong feeling. His minor poetry, especially his // Penseroso, was most important in the new move- ment, although the blank verse of Paradise Lost was often adopted as a welcome relief from "the rocking- horse " verse of the rhyming couplet. Ossian. Between 1760 and 1764 James Macpherson, a Highland schoolmaster, published a series of poems, which he claimed to have translated from an old manu- script, the work of Ossian, a Gaelic poet of the third century. These may have been forged in whole or in part, but the question of their genuineness does not alter the fact that they powerfully affected the romantic move- ment. The so-called translation of the poems is in prose, and it won for Macpherson a grave in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. The qualities in Ossian which appealed to the age were its wildness, its vague suggestions to the imagina- tion, its disregard of conventional forms, the profusion of its rhetorical figures, and the deep feeling of melan- choly. Gray was profoundly impressed with the strange work. He praised highly the following quotation from it: " Ghosts ride on the tempest to-night ; Sweet is their voice between the gusts of wind ; Their songs are of other worlds." 268 FROM 1740 TO 1780 Ossian also influenced Byron. Professor W. L. Phelps found Byron's copy of Ossian with notes and comments in Byron's own handwriting. In some respects Byron con- sidered Ossian equal to Homer. But the Ossianic poems have not stood the test of time. They are mentioned here only because they were so pronounced a factor in ushering in the romantic movement. Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto. " The great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life," said Horace Walpole (1717-1797), one of the leaders of the fashionable world. He gave an impulse to romanticism in both architecture and literature. There had been as much classi- cism in the one as in the other. Even fine residences were built after Grecian models. The term HORACE WALPOLE " Gothic " was contemptuously ap- plied to whatever was mediaeval or out of date, whether in art, philosophy, or general litera- ture. About 1750 he erected a Gothic residence, which became the talk of fashionable England and soon found many imitators. People began to study mediaeval architec- ture and to turn their attention to other things that were old as well as good. In 1764 a book was published, entitled The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Romance. This professed to be a translation from an old black-letter volume. The scene of the story is laid in a Gothic castle, in whose mysteri- ous labyrinths and trap doors the strangest adventures occur. The weirdness and improbabilities of the romance were welcomed by readers weary of the prosaic works THOMAS PERCY 269 that had been so unsparingly produced. No name was placed on the title page of the first edition. Walpole was afraid of being sneered at for breaking the classical rules prescribing conventional regularity and probability. The pronounced success of the story soon led him to acknowledge the authorship, not, however, before some had ascribed it to Thomas Gray, the poet. This work gave a pronounced impetus to ultra-romantic tales. Its influence was felt across the Atlantic, by an early Ameri- can novelist, Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810). Percy's Reliques and Translation of Mallet's Northern Antiquities. In 1765 Thomas Percy (1729-1811) pub- lished The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, an epoch- making work in the history of the romantic movement. The Reliques is a collection of old English ballads and songs, many of which have a story to tell, and a very romantic one, too. Scott drew inspiration from them, and Wordsworth acknowledged his indebtedness to their influ- ence. So important was this collection that it has been called "the Bible of the Romantic Reformation." In 1770 Percy's translation of Mallet's Northern An- tiquities appeared. For the first time the English world was given an easily accessible volume which disclosed the Norse mythology in all its strength and weirdness. Clas- sical mythology had become hackneyed, and poets like Gray rejoiced that there was a new fountain to which they could turn. Thor and his invincible hammer, the Frost Giants, Bifrost or the Rainbow Bridge, Odin, th ' ' ' *! -^i"'l From an old print. RICHARDSON'S HOME AT NORTH END, HAMMERSMITH The First Great English Novelist. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) was born in Derbyshire. When he was only thirteen years old some of the young women of the neigh- borhood unconsciously began to train him for a novelist. They employed him to conduct their love correspondence, and they were well satisfied with his success. This early training partly accounts for the fact that every one of SAMUEL RICHARDSON 28l his novels is merely a collection of letters written by the chief characters to each other and to their friends to narrate the progress of events. At the age of fifteen he went to London and learned the printer's trade, which he followed for the rest of his life. When he was about fifty years old, some publishers asked him to prepare a letter writer which would be useful to country people and others who could not think how to express themselves with a pen. The idea of making these letters tell a connected story occurred to him. The result was the first modern novel, Pamela, published in four vol- 282 FROM 1740 TO 1780 umes in 1740. This was followed by Clarissa Harlowe, in seven volumes, in 1 748, and this by Sir Charles Grandison, in seven volumes, in 1753. The affairs in the lives of the leading characters are so minutely dissected, the plot is evolved so slowly and in a way so unlike the astonishing bounds of the old romance, that one is tempted to say, before starting the seventh vol- ume of Clarissa Harlowe, that Richardson's novels pro- gress more slowly than events in life. One 'secret of his success depends on the fact that we feel that he is deeply interested in all his characters. He is as much inter- ested in the heroine of his masterpiece, Clarissa Harlowe, as if she were his own daughter. He has the remarkable power of so thoroughly identifying himself with his vari- ous characters that, after we are thoroughly introduced to them, we can name them when we hear selections read from their letters. The length and slow development of his novels repel modern readers, but there was so little genuinely interesting matter in the middle of the eighteenth century that many were sorry his novels were no longer. The novelty of pro- ductions of this type also added to their interest. His many faults are largely those of his age. He wearies his readers with his didactic aims. He is narrow and prosy. He poses as a great moralist, but he teaches the morality of direct utility. Richardson may be called the inventor of the modern novel in the same way that a man is said to be the inventor of a new machine. The inventor does not discover the prin- ciples of leverage. He is not the original finder of the metals necessary for construction. He merely takes, com- bines, and applies in a new way certain things which others have discovered. Such a man is rightly called an inventor. HENRY FIELDING 283 He introduces the world to something new. Some one else may immediately improve his invention. This was the case with the novel, but this improvement could not have been made unless some one had taken the first step, and furnished something for improvement. Henry Fielding, 1707-1754. The greatest novelist of the eighteenth century, and one of the greatest that England ever produced, was born in Sharpham Park, Som- 284 FROM 1740 TO 1780 ersetshire. After graduating at the University of Leyden, he became a play writer, a lawyer, a judge of a police court, and, most important of all, a novelist, or an historian of society, as he preferred to style himself. When Richardson's Pamela appeared, Fielding deter- mined to write a story caricaturing its morality and senti- ment, which seemed hypocritical to him. Before he had gone very far he discovered where his abilities lay, and, abandoning his narrow, satiric aims, he wrote Joseph Andrews (1742), a novel far more interesting than Pamela. In 1749 he published his masterpiece, Tom Jones, and in 1751 his third and last novel, Amelia. Fielding's novels show several points of improvement over Richardson's. In the first place, every one of Field- ing's novels displays a remarkable sense of humor. Richardson has no humor, and no man can enter the very first rank of novelists without this quality. In the second place, Fielding is a master of plot. From all literature Coleridge selected for perfection of plot, The Alchemist, CEdipus Tyrannus, and Tom Jones. In the third place, Fielding writes with his eye sharply fixed on the world. The most of his characters seem alive and vigorous. Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison is an impossible conglomeration of abstract virtues. Richardson is more subjective and his own personality is much in evidence in most of his characters. Except in the cases of Tom Jones and Captain Booth, who are Fielding him- self, Fielding appears to be listening with considerable curiosity to the conversations of his characters, and won- dering what they will do next. Fielding shows the eighteenth century love of satire. He hates that hypocrisy which tries to conceal itself under a mask of morality. In the evolution of the plots of his STERNE AND SMOLLETT 285 novels, he invariably puts such characters in positions which tear away their mask. He displays almost savage pleasure in making them ridiculous. Perhaps the lack of spiritual- ity of the age finds the most ample expression in his pages, but the finest creations of both Chaucer and Fielding, the Parish Priest of the Prologue (p. 79) and Parson Adams of Joseph Andrews, are typical of those persisting moral forces which have bequeathed a heritage of power to England. Sterne and Smollett. With Richardson and Fielding it is customary to associate two other mid-eighteenth cen- tury novelists, Laurence Sterne (1713- 1768) and Tobias Smollett (1721- 1771). Between 1759 and 1767 Sterne wrote his first novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which pre- sents the delightfully comic and eccentric members of the Shandy family, among whom Uncle Toby is the masterpiece. In 1768 Sterne gave to the world LAURENCE STERNE that compound of fiction, essays, and sketches of travel known as A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. The adjective " sentimental " in the title should be specially noted, for it defines Sterne's attitude toward everything in life. He is habitually sen- timental in treating not only those things fitted to awaken deep emotion, but also those trivial incidents which ordinarily cause scarcely a ripple of feeling. Although he is sometimes a master of pathos, he frequently gives an exhibition of weak and forced sentimentalism. He more uniformly excels in subtle humor, which is his next most conspicuous characteristic. 286 FROM 1740 TO 1780 Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle (1751), and The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771) are Smollett's best novels. They are composed mainly of a succession of stirring or humorous incidents. In relying for interest more on adventure than on the drawing of character, he reverts to the pic- aresque (see p. 277) type of story. The Relation of Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett to Subsequent Fiction. Although the modern reader frequently com- TOBIAS SMOLLETT ? plains that these older novelists often seem heavy, slow in movement, unrefined, and too ready to draw a moral or preach a sermon, yet these four men hold an important place in the history of fiction. With varying degrees of excellence, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne all have the rare power of portraying character from within, of interpreting real life. Some novelists resort to the far easier task of painting merely external characteristics and mannerisms. Smollett belongs to the latter class. He is so effective at focusing external pecul- iarities and caricaturing exceptional individuals, that his influence has been far-reaching. It may be traced in the work of so great a novelist as Charles Dickens. On the other hand, Thackeray learned much from Fielding, and this great Victorian novelist has recorded in The English Humorists his admiration for his earlier fellow- craftsman. Although subsequent English fiction has invaded many new fields, although it has entered the domain of history and of sociology, it is not too much to say that later novel- ists have advanced on the general lines marked out by THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD 287 these four mid-eighteenth century pioneers. We may even affirm with Gosse that "the type of novel invented in 'England about 1740-50 continued for sixty or sev- enty years to be the only model for Continental fiction; and criticism has traced on every French novelist, in par- ticular, the stamp of Richardson, if not of Sterne and Fielding." The Vicar of Wakefield. In 1766, there was published a delightful romantic novel, of which Oliver Goldsmith, its author, said : " There are an hundred faults in this thing, and an hundred things might be said to prove them beau- ties. But it is needless. A book may be amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity." This is sound criticism. The Vicar of Wake- field has faults, but it is amusing enough to be immortal in spite of them. The plot shows that Goldsmith did not have Fielding's constructive genius. In fact, the plot is so poorly constructed that the novel would have been almost a failure, had other qualities not insured success. But the story is such a compound of sweet human emotion and rare humor that we overlook some defects in the framework. The Vicar, who is the hero of the story, is a country clergyman. We have delightfully entertaining pictures of his virtues and failings. We are interested in his domestic life, in his wife, his credulous son Moses, his good but somewhat aspiring daughters, and his happy little ones. It would be difficult to enumerate all the reasons which have made the tale such a favorite, but the chief are its inimitable humor, the grace and ease of the style, the ex- cellent way in which some of the characters draw their own portraits, and the air of naturalness and good nature diffused throughout the work. 288 FROM 1740 TO 1780 PHILOSOPHICAL, HISTORICAL, AND POLITICAL PROSE Philosophy. Although the majority of eighteenth cen- tury writers disliked speculative thought and resolutely turned away from it, yet the age produced some remark- able philosophical works, which are still discussed, and which have powerfully affected nineteenth century thought. David Hume (1711-1776) is the greatest metaphysician of the century. He took for his starting point the con- clusions of a contemporary philosopher, George Berkeley (1685-1753)- Berkeley had said that ideas are the only real existing entities, that matter is merely another term for the ideas in the Mind of the Infinite, and that matter has no exist- ence outside of mind. He maintained that if every quality should be taken away from matter, no matter would remain ; e.g., if color, sweetness, sourness, form, and all other quali- ties, should be taken away from an apple, there would be no apple. Now, a quality is a mental representation based on a sensation, and this quality varies as the sensation varies ; in other words, the object is not a stable immutable something. It is only a something as I perceive it. Berkeley's idealistic position was taken to crush atheistic materialism. Hume took Berkeley's position and attempted to rear on it an impregnable citadel of skepticism. He accepted Berkeley's conclusion that we know nothing of matter, and then attempted to show that inferences based on ideas might be equally illusory. Hume attacked the validity of the reasoning process itself. He endeavored to show that there is no such thing as cause and effect in either the mental or the material world. Hume's Treatise of Hitman Nature ( 1 739- 1 740) , in which PHILOSOPHICAL AND HISTORICAL PROSE 289 these views are stated, is one of the world's epoch-making works in philosophy. Its conclusion startled the great German metaphysician Kant and roused him to action. The questions thus raised by Hume have never been answered to the satisfaction of all philosophers. Hume's skepticism is the most thoroughgoing that the world has ever seen, for he attacks the certainty of our knowledge of both mind and matter. But he dryly re- marks that his own doubts disappear when he leaves his study. He avoids a runaway horse and inquires of a friend the way to a certain house in Edinburgh, relying as much on the evidence of his eyes and on the directions of his friend, as if these philosophic doubts had never been raised. Historical Prose. In carefully elaborated and highly finished works of history, the eighteenth century surpasses its predecessors. The History of England^ David Hume, the philosopher, is the first work of the kind to add to the history of politics and the affairs of state an account of the people and their manners. His History is distinguished for its polished ease and clearness. Unfortunately, his work is written from a partisan point of view. Hume was a Tory, and took the side of the Stuarts against the Puri- tans. He sometimes misrepresents facts if they do not uphold his views. His History is consequently read more to-day as a literary classic than as an authority. Edward Gibbon (1/37-1794) is the greatest historian of the century. His monumental work, The -History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in six volumes, be- gins with the reign of Trajan, A.D. 98, and closes with the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople in 1453. Gibbon constructed a " Roman road " through nearly fourteen centuries of history, and he built it so well that another on the same plan has not yet been found FROM 1740 TO 1780 necessary. E. A. Freeman says: " He remains the one his- torian of the eighteenth century whom modern research has neither set aside nor threatened to set aside." In pre- paring his History, Gibbon spent fifteen years. Every chapter was the subject of long-continued study and care- ful original research. From the chaotic materials which he found, he constructed a history remarkable as well for scholarly precision as for the vastness of the field covered. His sentences follow one another in magnificent proces- POLITICAL PROSE 291 sion. One feels that they are the work of an artist. They are thickly sprinkled with fine-sounding words derived from the Latin. The 1611 version of the first four chap- ters of the Gospel of John averages 96 per cent of Anglo- Saxon words, and Shakespeare 89 per cent, while Gibbon's average of 70 per cent is the lowest of any great writer. He has all the coldness of the classical school, and he shows but little sympathy with the great human struggles described in his pages. He has been well styled " a skill- ful anatomical demonstrator of the dead framework of society." With all its excellences, his work has, therefore, those faults which are typical of the eighteenth century. Political Prose. Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was a dis- tinguished statesman and member of the House of Com- mons in an important era of English history a time when the question of the independence of the American colonies was paramount, and when the spirit of revolt against established forms was in the air. He is the greatest political writer of the eighteenth century. Burke's best productions are SpeecJi on American Taxa- tion (1774) and Speech on Conciliation witJi America (I'jj^). His Reflections on the Revolution in France is also note- worthy. His prose marks a great advance in the follow- ing directions: (i) He is one of the greatest masters of metaphor and imagery in English prose. Only Carlyle (p. 415) surpasses him in the use of metaphorical language. (2) Burke's breadth of thought and wealth of expression enable him to present an idea from many different points of view, so that if his readers do not comprehend his expo- sition from one side, they may from another. He endeavors to attach what he says to something in the experience of his hearers or readers ; and he remembers that the experience of all is not the same. (3) As a corollary of 292 FROM 1740 TO 1780 the preceding, it follows that his imagery and figures lay all kinds of knowledge under contribution. At one time he draws an illustration from manufacturing ; at another, from history ; at another, from the butcher shop. (4) His work displays intense earnestness, love of truth, strength of logical reasoning, vividness of imagination, and breadth of view, all of which are necessary qualities in prose which is to mold the opinions of men. It is well to note that Burke's careful study of English literature contributed largely to his success as a writer. SAMUEL JOHNSON 293 His use of Bible phraseology and his familiarity with poetry led a critic to say that any one " neglects the most valuable repository of rhetoric in the English language, who has not well studied the English Bible. . . . The cadence of Burke's sentences always reminds us that prose writing is only to be perfected by a thorough study of the poetry of the language." SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1709-1784 Early Struggles. Michael Johnson, an intelligent book- seller in Lichfield, Staffordshire, was in 1 709 blessed with a son who was to occupy a unique position in literature, a position gained not so much by his written as by his spoken words and great personality. Samuel was prepared for Oxford at various schools and in the paternal bookstore, where he read widely and voraciously, but without much system. He said that at the age of eighteen, the year before he entered Oxford, he knew almost as much as at fifty-three. Poverty kept him from remaining at Oxford long enough to take a degree. He left the university, and, for more than a quar- ter of a century, he struggled doggedly against poverty. When he was twenty-five, he married a widow of forty- eight. With the money which she brought him, he opened a private school, but failed. He never had more than eight pupils, one of whom was David Garrick (p. 266). In 1737 Johnson went to London and sought employ- ment as a hack writer. Sometimes he had no money with which to hire a lodging, and was compelled to walk the streets all night to keep warm. Johnson reached London in the very darkest days for struggling authors. They often slept on ash heaps, and begged something for a HAL. ENG. LIT. 19 294 FROM 1740 TO 1780 meal. They were the objects of a general contempt, to which Pope's Dunciad had largely contributed. During this period Johnson did much hack work for the Gentleman s Magazine. He was also the author of two satirical poems, London (1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), "which won much praise. Later Years. By the time he had been for ten years in London, his abilities were sufficiently well known to the leading booksellers for them to hire him to compile a Dictionary of the English Language for i$?S- He was seven years at this work, finishing it in 1755. SAMUEL JOHNSON 295 Between 1750 and 1760 he wrote the matter for two periodicals, The Rambler (1750-1752) and The Idler (\"j^- 1760), which contain papers on manners and morals. He intended to model these papers on the lines of The Tatler and The Spectator, but his essays are for the most part ponderously dull and uninteresting. In 1762, for the first time, he was really an independent man, for then George III. gave him a life pension of ^300 a year. Even as late as 1759, in order to pay his mother's funeral expenses, Johnson had been obliged to dash off the romance of Rasselas in a week, but from the time he re- ceived his pension, he had leisure "to cross his legs and have his talk out " in some of the most distinguished gatherings of the eighteenth century. During the rest of his life he produced little besides The Lives of the Poets, which is his most, important contribution to literature. In 1784 he died, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, among the poets whose lives he had written. A Man of Character. Any one who will read Macau- lay's Life of Johnson 1 may become acquainted with some of Johnson's most striking peculiarities, but these do not constitute his claims to greatness. He had qualities that made him great in spite of his peculiarities. He knocked down a publisher who insulted him, and he would never take insolence from a superior, but there is no case on record of his ever having been unkind to an inferior. Goldsmith said : " Johnson has nothing of a bear but the skin." When some one manifested surprise that Johnson should have assisted a worthless character, Goldsmith promptly replied : " He has now become miserable, and that insures the protection of Johnson." 1 To be found in Encyclopedia Briiannica, Vol. XIII., or in Macaulay's collected Essays. 296 FROM 1740 TO 1780 When Johnson came home late at night, he would some- times see homeless street Arabs asleep on a doorstep. In order that they might find something for breakfast when they awoke, he would frequent- ly slip a coin into their hands. He spent the greater part of his pension on the helpless, sev- eral of whom he received into his own house. There have been many broader and more scholarly Englishmen, but there never walked the streets of London a man who battled more courageously for what he thought was right. The more we know of him, the more certain are we to agree with this closing sentence from Macaulay's Life of Johnson: " And it is but just to say that our intimate acquaintance with what he would himself have called the anfractuosities of his intellect and of his temper serves only to strengthen our conviction that he was both a great and a good man." A Great Converser and Literary Lawgiver. By nature Johnson was fitted to be a talker. He was happiest when he had intelligent listeners. Accordingly, he and Sir From an old print. SAMUEL JOHNSON'S BIRTHPLACE SAMUEL JOHNSON 297 Joshua Reynolds, the artist, founded the famous Literary Club in 1764. During Johnson's lifetime this had for members such men as Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, Charles James Fox, James Boswell, Edward Gibbon, and David Garrick. Macaulay says : " The verdicts pro- nounced by this conclave on new books were speedily known all over London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole edition in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the trunk maker and the pastry cook. ... To predominate over such a society was not easy ; yet even over such a society Johnson predominated." He was consulted as an oracle on all kinds of subjects, and his replies were generally the pith of common sense. So famous had Johnson become for his con- versations, that George III. met him on purpose to hear him talk. A committee from forty of the leading London booksellers waited on Johnson to ask him to write the Lives of the Poets. There was then in England no other man with so much influ- ence in the world of literature. Bos well's Life of Johnson. - In 1763 James Boswell ( 1740- T 795)> a Scotchman, met Johnson and devoted much time to copying the words that fell from the great Doctor's lips and to noting his individual traits. We must go to Boswell's Life of Johnson, the greatest of all biog- raphies, to read of Johnson as he lived and talked ; in short, to learn those facts which render him far more famous than his written works. JAMES BOSWELL 298 FROM 1740 TO 1780 Leslie Stephen says : " I would still hope that to many * readers Boswell has been what he has certainly been to some, the first writer who gave them a love of English literature, and the most charming of all companions long after the bloom of novelty has departed. I subscribe most cheerfully to Mr. Lewes's statement that he estimates his acquaintances according to their estimate of Boswell." A Champion of the Classical School. Johnson was a powerful adherent of classicism, and he did much to defer the coming of romanticism. His poetry is formal, and it shows the classical fondness for satire and aversion to sentiment. The first two lines of his greatest poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, . " Let observation with extensive view Survey mankind from China to Peru," show the classical couplet, which he employs, and they afford an example of poetry produced by a sonorous com- bination of words. " Observation," " view," and " survey " are nearly synonymous terms. Such conscious effort centered on word building subtracts something from poetic feeling. His critical opinions of literature manifest his prefer- ence for classical themes and formal modes of treatment. He says of Shakespeare : " It is incident to him to be now and then entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express . . . the equality of words to things is very often neglected." In The Lives of the Poets, Johnson writes thus of Milton's great elegy : " One of the poems on which much praise has been bestowed is Lycidas ; of which the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and numbers unpleasing. ... Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and there- SAMUEL JOHNSON 299 fore disgusting." Johnson felt positive repugnance to Milton's flocks and shepherds going forth " Under the opening eyelids of the Morn," amid the cowslips wan, the primroses dying forsaken, and the daffodils with tear-filled cups. Johnson preferred the streets of London to the finest spring landscape. General Characteristics. While he is best known in literary history as the great converser whose full-length portrait is drawn by Boswell, Johnson left the marks of his influence on much of the prose written within nearly a hundred years after his death. On the whole, this in- fluence has, for the following reasons, been bad. First, he loved a ponderous style in which there was an excess of the Latin element. He liked to have his statements sound well. He once said in forcible Saxon : " The Rehearsal has not wit enough to keep it sweet," but a moment later he translated this into : " It has not sufficient vitality to preserve it from putrefaction." In his Dictionary he defined " network " as " anything re- ticulated or decussated at equal distances with interstices between the intersections." Some wits of the day said that he used long words to make his Dictionary a neces- sity. If we read much of Johnson, we are in danger of imitating him unconsciously. A critic in the latter part of the nineteenth century, describing Johnson's style, says : " He delivers himself with severe majestical dignity and vigorous authoritative brevity." This critic was un- consciously writing Johnsonese. In the second place, Johnson loved formal balance so much that he used too many antitheses. Many of his balancing clauses are out of place or add nothing to the sense. The following shows excess of antithesis : 300 FROM 1740 TO 1780 " If the flights of Dryden, therefore, are higher, Pope continues longer on the wing. If of Dryden's fire the blaze is brighter, of Pope's the heat is more regular and constant. Dryden often surpasses expec- tation, and Pope never falls below it. Dryden is read with frequent astonishment, and Pope with perpetual delight." 1 As a rule, Johnson's prose is too abstract and general, and it awakens too few images. This is a characteristic failing of his essays in The Rambler and The Idler. Even in Rasselas, his great work of fiction, he speaks of passing through the fields and seeing the animals around him, but he does not mention definite trees, flowers, or animals. Shakespeare's wounded stag or " winking Mary-buds " would have given a touch of life to the whole scene. Johnson's latest and greatest work, The Lives of the Poets, is comparatively free from most of these faults. The sentences are energetic and full of meaning. Al- though we may not agree with much of the criticism, we shall find it stimulating and suggestive.. Before he gave these critical essays to the world, he had been doing little for years except talking in a straightforward manner. His constant practice in speaking English reacted on his later written work. Unfortunately this work has been the least imitated. SUMMARY The second part of the eighteenth century was a time of changing standards in church, state, and literature. The downfall of Walpole, the religious revivals of Wes- ley, the victories of Clive in India and of Wolfe in Canada, show the progress that England was making at home and abroad. 1 Lives of the PocU. SUMMARY 301 There began to be a revolt against the narrow classical standards in literature. A longing gradually manifested itself for more freedom of imagination, such as we find in Ossian, The Castle of Otranto, Percy's Reliques, and translations of the Norse mythology. There was a de- parture from the hackneyed forms and subjects of the preceding age and an introduction of more of the sub- jective and ideal element, such as can be found in Gray's Elegy and Collins's Ode to Evening. The progress toward romanticism was neither uniform nor constant. Dr. Johnson threw his powerful influence against the movement, and curbed somewhat the romantic tendencies in Goldsmith, who, nevertheless, gave fine romantic touches to The Deserted Village and to much of his other work. This period was one of preparation for the glorious romantic outburst at the end of the century. In prose, the most important achievement of the age was the creation of the modern novel. In addition to Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, Fielding's Tom Jones, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Smollett's Hnm- plirey Clinker, and Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, there were noted prose works in philosophy and history by Hume and Gibbon, in politics by Burke, and in criticism by Johnson! REQUIRED READINGS FOR CHAPTER VIII HISTORICAL Gardiner, 1 pp. 730-792 ; Green, pp. 735-786; Underwood-Guest, pp. 523-535 ; Guerber, pp. 303-308 ; HassalPs Making of the British Em- pire, pp. 30-82; Traill, V., 172-365. 1 For full titles, see list at end of Chap. I. 3O2 FROM 1740 TO 1780 LITERARY The Romantic Movement. In order to note the difference in feel- ing, imagery, and ideals, between the romantic and the classic schools, it will be advisable for the student to make a special comparison of Dryden's and Pope's satiric and didactic verse with Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's // Penseroso. What is the difference in the gen- eral atmosphere of these poems? See if the influence of // Penseroso is noticeable in Collins's Ode to Evening (Ward's English Poets, Vol. III., p. 287), and in Gray's Elegy (Ward, III., 331). What element foreign to Dryden and Pope appears in Thomson's Seasons (Ward, III., 173)? What signs of a struggle between the romantic and the classic are noticeable in Goldsmith's Deserted Village (Ward, III., 373-379)? Pick out the three finest passages in the poem, and give the reasons for the choice. Read pp. 173-176 of Ossian (Canterbury Poets series, 40 cents), and show why it appealed to the spirit of romanticism. Read the opening of Walpole's Castle of Otranto (Cassell's National Library, No. 9, 10 cents), and explain why the time welcomed a romance of that order. In Percy's Reliques, read the first ballad, that of Chevy Chase, and explain how the age could turn from Pope to read such rude verse. The Novel. Guy, Earl of Warwick is given in Morley's Early Prose Romances (pp. 331-408). An easily accessible Elizabethan novel is Greene's Pandosto, which may be found at the end of the Cassell National Library edition of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale (No. 101, 10 cents). Selections from Lodge's Rosalind are given in Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. I., pp. 544-549. These should be com- pared with the parallel parts of As You Like It. {Rosalind may be found complete in No. 62 of Cassell's National Library.) Selections from Nash's The Unfortunate Traveller are given in Craik, I., 573- 576, and selections from Sidney's Arcadia in the same volume, pp. 409-419- For the preliminary sketching of characters that might serve as types in fiction, read The Spectators Club by Steele (Cassell's National Library, No. 28, pp. 21-29, IO cents). Defoe's Robinson Crusoe will be read entire by almost every one. In Craik, IV., read the following selections from these four great novelists of the middle of the eighteenth century : from Richard- READING REFERENCES 303 son, pp. 59-66; from Fielding, pp. 118-125 i fr m Sterne, pp. 213-219; and from Smollett, pp. 261-264 and 269-272. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield should be read entire by the student (Eclectic English Classics, American Book Co.). Selections may be found in Craik, IV., 365-370. Sketch the general lines of development in fiction, from the early romance to Fielding. What type of fiction did Don Quixote ridicule ? Compare Greene's Pandosto with Shakespeare's Winters Tale, and Lodge's Rosalind with As You Like It. In what relation do Steele and Addison stand to the novel? Why is the modern novel said to begin with Richardson? Why is the novel a dangerous rival of the drama ? Philosophy. Two selections from Berkeley in Craik, IV., 34- 39, give some of that philosopher's subtle metaphysics. The same volume, pp. 189-195, gives a selection from Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. Can the subject matter in these be readily comprehended, or is the style involved and metaphysical ? Gibbon. Read Aurelian's campaign against Zenobia, which con- stitutes the last third of Chap. XI. of the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Other selections may be found in Craik, IV., 460-472. What is the special merit of Gibbon's work ? Compare his style, either in description or in narration, with Bunyan's. Burke. Let the student who has not the time to read all the speech on Conciliation with America (Eclectic English Classics, 20 cents) read the selection in Craik, IV., 379-385, and also the selection referring to the decline of chivalry, from Reflections on the Revolution in France (Craik, IV., 402). Point out in Burke's writings the four characteristics mentioned on pp. 291, 292. Compare his style with Bacon's, Swift's, Addison's, and Gibbon's. Johnson. Representative selections are given in Craik, IV., 141- 185. Those from The Lives of the Poets (Craik, IV., 175-182) will best repay study. Let the student who has the time read Dryden's Life entire (Cassell's National Library, No. 36, 10 cents). As much as possible of Boswell's Life of Johnson should be read (Craik, IV., 482-495). Compare the style of Johnson with that of Gibbon and Burke. For what reasons does Johnson hold a high position in literature ? 304 FROM 1740 TO. 1780 WORKS FOR CONSULTATION AND FURTHER STUDY (OPTIONAL) Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century. Thackeray's The Four Georges. Taine's History of English Literature. Book III., Chap. VI. Phillips's Popular Manual of English Literature, Vol. II., pp. 3-84. Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature, pp. 409-486. Baldwin's Introduction to the Study of English Literature, Vol. II., pp. 134-258. Clark's Study of English Prose Writers, pp. 199-322. Gosse's History of English Literature in the Eighteenth Century. Perry's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 282-419. Saintsbury's A Short History of English Literature, pp. 567-636. Stephen's History of Thought in the Eighteenth Century. Jusserand's The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare. Cross's The Development of the English Novel. Raleigh's The English Novel; Lanier's The English Novel. Dunlop's History of Fiction. Beers's English Romanticism, XVIII. Century. Phelps's Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement. Ward's English Poets, Vol. III., pp. 245-381. Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. IV., pp. 25-421. Stephen's Hours in a Library. Vol. I. contains an excellent essay on Samuel Richardson, and Vol. II. one on Henry Fielding. Traill's The New Fiction and Other Essays contains Samuel Richardson (pp. 104-136), and The Novel of Manners (pp. 137-169). Dobson's Life of Fielding. Thackeray's English Humorists. Huxley's Life of Hume. M orison's Life of Gibbon. Forster's, Dobson's, or Black's Life of Goldsmith. Stephen's Life of Johnson] Grant's Life of Johnson. Dr. Johnson 's Writings in Vol. II. of Stephen's Hours in a Library. Bos well's Life of Johnson. Macaulay's Essay on Croker^s Edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson. Fitzgerald's Life of Bosivell. Gosse's Life of Gray. Morley's Life of Edmund Burke, CHAPTER IX THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 The Victory of Romanticism. We have traced in the preceding age the beginnings of the romantic move- ment. Its ascendency over classical rules was com- plete in the period between 1780 and the Victorian age. The romantic victory brought to literature more individual- ity, deeper feeling, a less artificial form of expression, and an added sense for the appreciation of the beauties of nature and their spiritual significance. Swinburne says that the new poetic school, "usually registered as Wordsworthian," was " actually founded at midnight by William Blake [1757-1827] and fortified at sunrise by William Wordsworth." These lines from Blake's To the Evening Star (1783) may be given to sup- port this statement : " Thou fair-haired Angel of the Evening, Smile on our loves ; and while thou drawest the Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes In timely sleep. Let thy West Wind sleep on The lake." If any one wishes to become a critic sufficiently intelli- gent to appreciate the differences in the work of English poets, it will be an excellent step for him to compare the poetry of this romantic school beginning with the above lines, for instance with the verse of Pope. 305 306 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 If we except the verse of Milton, we may say that the poetry of this age is more genuine and unaffected than any other produced in England since the time of Eliza- beth. The eyes of honest Cowper looked face to face on nature and on rural life. To express strong feeling was unfashionable in the time of Pope, but in the romantic age there was no more hesitancy than in Elizabethan days in voicing the deepest and most varied emotions of the soul. Wordsworth, the greatest representative of the ro- mantic age, boldly said : "All good poetry is the sponta- neous overflow of powerful feelings." We hear from the lips of Burns immortal songs of intense love, which make all seasons seem like spring. Increased Range of Literary Activity. Because of its lack of polish and of conventionality, the classicists had looked upon England's past as a rude age, worthy of con- tempt. Writers now began to regard that past as the parent of the present and to enrich literature with pictures of bygone times. At his magic bidding, Scott made the knightly past don the garb of life for the entertainment of the world. Charles Lamb (p. 312) increased the influence of the Elizabethan age by an excellent volume of selections from the half-for- gotten dramatists of that time. The union of strong imagination with intellect gave more variety to literature than resulted in the first part of the eighteenth century from CHARLES LAMB tne union f intellect with weak or repressed imagination. We conse- quently find a greater variety in the song notes of the poets, from George Crabbe (1754-1832), who sings of the INCREASED RANGE OF LITERARY ACTIVITY 307 miseries of the poor, to Shelley and Byron, who at one moment voice intense desire for individual liberty and at another paint the delicate traceries of cloud or the ocean mirror " . . . where the Almighty's form Glasses itself in tempests." 1 Such was the power of imagination that a new world then burst from the chrysalis of the old. Wordsworth heard from the common flowers, the pansy at his feet, the prim- rose by a river's brim, truths newer and more weighty than fell from the lips of any lord or lady mentioned in Pope's verses. Keats could utter with new meaning : u The poetry of earth is never dead." 2 We may say of the poetry of this age what Coleridge's Ancient Mariner said of the music that filled the sea and air around him : " And now 'twas like all instruments, Now like a lonely flute ; And now it is an angel's song, That makes the heavens be mute." After a thorough study of the romantic age, each one may ' truthfully apply to himself this line from Keats : "Much have I travel'd in the realms of gold." 8 As varied as was the imaginative activity of the poets, it was for the most part confined to regarding Nature and Man from a new point of view. Let us next try to note more specifically in what this change consists. 1 Byron : Childe Harold, Canto IV. 2 To a Grasshopper, 8 On First Looking into Chapman 1 s Homer. 308 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 Growth of Appreciation of Nature. In the appreciation of Nature and in sympathetic interpretation of her various moods, every preceding age, even the Elizabethan, is sur- passed. For more than a century after Milton, the majority of references to nature were made in general terms and were borrowed from the stock illustrations of older poets, like Virgil. We find the conventional lark, nightingale, and turtledove. Nothing new or definite is said of them. In many cases the poets had probably neither heard nor seen them. Increasing comforts and safety in travel now took more people where they could see for themselves the beauties of nature. Gradually, observation became more exact, after the most obvious aspects of natural objects had been commonly noted. In the new poetry of nature we find more definiteness. We can hear the whir of the par- tridge, the chatter of magpies, the caw of the rook, the whistling of the quail. Poets speak not only in general terms of a tree, but they also note the differences in the shade of the green of the leaves and the peculiarities of the bark. Previous to this time, poets borrowed from Theocritus and Virgil piping shepherds reclining in the shade, whom no Englishman had ever seen. Wordsworth pictures a genuine English shepherd in Michael. The love for mountains and wild nature is of recent growth. One writer in the seventeenth century considered the Alps as so much rubbish swept together by the broom of nature to clear the plains of Italy. A seven- teenth century traveler thought the Welsh mountains better than the Alps because the former would pasture goats. Dr. Johnson asked : " Who can like the High- lands ? " The influence of the romantic movement de- veloped the love for wild scenery, which is so conspicuous in Wordsworth and Byron. The poetry of wonder and INFLUENCE OF THE DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT 309 mystery naturally followed this sympathetic feeling for wild and solitary nature. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner is a roman- tic masterpiece, filled with the mystery of the lonely sea. The eighteenth century classicists loved the town and despised the country, but the spread of romanticism changed this feeling. Burns could say : " The Muse, na Poet ever fand her Till by himsel he leaned to wander Adown some trottin burn's 1 meander." 2 As the eighteenth century closed, we may notice that Nature was loved more and more for herself, and not merely because she was useful to man or appeared to flatter him by reflecting his emotions. To William Words- worth, the greatest romantic poet, nature seemed to possess a conscious soul, which expressed itself in the primrose, the rippling lake, or the cuckoo's song, with as much intelligence as human lips ever displayed in whispering a secret to the ear of love. Influence of the Democratic Spirit on the Poetry of Man. In the age of Pope, the only type of man con- sidered worthy of a place in literature was the aristocratic, cultured class. The ordinary laborer was an object too contemptible even for satire. The democratic movement had for some time been gathering force. In 1789 this movement culminated in the French Revolution against the tyranny of the nobility. The youth of all Europe responded to the cry of the French people for Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, and looked forward rapturously to the time when mankind should be united under the uni- versal democracy of Man, without regard to nationality, birth, or religion. 1 stream. 2 7!? William Simpson. HAL. ENG. LIT. 2O 310 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 Such feelings completely changed the way of looking at the begrimed, hard-handed laborer. He was no longer simply a burden bearer or a machine, but a friend and a brother. In 1795 Burns could proclaim thoughts which would have been laughed to scorn early in the cen- tury : " Is there, for honest poverty, That hangs his head and a' that? The coward slave, we pass him by, We dare be poor for a' that ! The rank is but the guinea's stamp ; The man's the gowd 1 for a' that." 2 To the ardent young spirits of the time, this French Revolution meant the downfall of the old dynasty of tyranny, and the birth of a new dynasty of world-wide liberty. The English poets struck on their lyres notes of hope, of promise, of boundless possibilities, not heard since the days of the Elizabethans. Like the Eliza- bethans, the poets of the Revolution saw the rising of a new sun and dreamed of what would be when it reached its glorious meridian, and liberty was at every hearth. The very buoyancy of youth was in the earth, and her poets caught the new spirit. " Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven! "* cried the usually sober-minded Wordsworth. Shelley's poetry is colored with rosy dreams of an enfranchised humanity. All the influences exerted by statesmen, poets, and phi- lanthropists gradually brought fuller freedom to Great Britain. Before Victoria ascended the throne, the House 1 gold. *For a' That and a' That. The Prelude, Book XI. PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT 311 of Lords had been forced to withdraw its opposition to the passage of the Reform Bill, which gave to the middle classes more voice in the government ; negro slavery had been abolished ; and even the unfortunate and the criminal classes had found their champions. Philosophical Thought. While the French revolution- ists were proclaiming the equal rights of all men, and the British Parliament was gradually realizing the force of this view, the philosophers were not confining their attention entirely to metaphysics, as had been the cus- tom too often in the past, but they were laying the foundations for the new science of political economy and endeavoring to ascertain how the condition of the masses could be improved. While investigating this subject, Malthus (1766-1834) announced his famous proposition, since -known as the Malthusian theorem, that population tends to increase faster than the means of subsistence. In moral philosophy, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) laid down the principle that happiness is the prime ob- ject of existence. He shocked the upper classes of society generally by announcing the revolutionary prin- ciple that the happiness of any one person, whether lord or bishop, is no more important than the happiness of any other individual, although he may be a factory hand. Bentham insisted that the basis of legislation should be the greatest happiness to the greatest number, instead of to the privileged few. He measured the morality of actions by their efficiency in securing this happiness, and he said that pushpin is as good as poetry, if it gives as much pleasure. Such novel statements set men to thinking. He was followed by James Mill (1773- 1836), who maintained that the morality of actions is measured by their utility. 312 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 Coleridge abhorred the destructive doctrine of Hume and the utilitarian dogmas of Bentham and Mill. To Coleridge, only the modern teachings of German philoso- phers, like Kant and Schelling, were congenial, and he propounded an idealistic philosophy and urged upon his common-sense generation that mind alone is the force in the world and that God reveals himself to every mind directly. To Coleridge is largely due the introduction of German influence on English philosophic thought. We find in Shelley striking poetic expression of the be- lief in the immanence of the Divine Spirit in everything, from the flower to the storm. Such lines as these on the death of Keats express a philosophy almost pan- theistic : " He is made one with Nature : there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird. Dust to the dust ! but the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal." 1 The Position of Prose. The eighteenth century until near its close was, broadly speaking, an age of prose. In excellence and variety, the prose surpassed the poetry, but in this age (1780-1837) their position was reversed, and poetry regained almost an Elizabethan ascendency. Toward the close of this era, the Victorian giants of prose, Carlyle and Macaulay, began their work, but the chief prose writers belonging to this age are Scott, Lamb, Southey, Coleridge, De Quincey, and Landor. The works of Scott alone, among this group, are widely read to-day, although the delicate humor and unique liter- ary flavor of Charles Lamb's (1775-1834) Essays of Elia 1 Adonais. WILLIAM COWPER 313 still charm many devotees. Coleridge has, perhaps, a thou- sand readers for his Ancient Mariner to one for his prose. Southey (1774-1843), usually classed with Wordsworth and Coleridge as one of the three so-called Lake Poets, wrote much better prose than poetry. His Life of Nelson ranks better as prose than his Curse of Kehama as poetry. It is probable that, had he lived in an age of prose ascendency, he would have written little poetry, for he distinctly says that the desire of making money "has already led me to write sometimes in poetry what would perhaps otherwise have been better ROBERT SOUTHEY written in prose." This statement shows in a striking way the spirit of those times. To-day one who wishes to make money avoids writing poetry. The prose of the age is often the vehicle of romantic adventure, as in Scott, and of romantic humor, as in Lamb's Dissertation on Roast Pig and De Quincey's Mur- der considered as one of the Fine Arts. The prose of one writer, Walter Savage Landor, is the embodiment of con- scious style and classical polish. These qualities are conspicuous in his Imaginary Conversations. Some of the critical prose is well worth study, especially Wordsworth's Prefaces and parts of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, which expound the literary philosophy of the new school of poetry. WILLIAM COWPER, 1731-1800 Life. It is usual to associate the idea of overpowering enthusiasm or of intrepid fearlessness with the leaders of all new movements. But with the name of Cowper, one 314 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 of the earliest among the romantic poets, neither charac- teristic can be coupled. He was one of the shyest and most shrinking of men. He had none of the aggressive traits that make a reformer, and the thought of inaugura- ting a revolt from the standard subjects of verse would have frightened him into silence. He was merely a child of nature who passed his life among rural scenes and wrote of what he knew best. His life is a tale of almost continual sadness, caused by his morbid timidity. He was born at Great Berkhamp- WILLIAM COWPER 315 stead, Hertfordshire, in 1731. At the age of six, he lost his mother and was placed in a boarding school". Here his sufferings began. The child was so especially terrified by one rough boy that he could never raise his eyes to the bully's face, but knew him unmistakably by his shoe buckles. There was some happiness for Cowper at his next school, the Westminster School, and also during the twelve succeeding years, when he studied law; but the short res- pite was followed by the gloom of madness. Owing to his ungovernable fear of a public examination, which was necessary to secure the position offered by an uncle, Cowper underwent days and nights of agony, when he tried in many ways to end his miserable life. The fright- ful ordeal unsettled his reason, and he spent . eighteen months in an insane asylum. Upon his recovery, he was taken into the house of a Rev. Mr. Unwin, whose wife tended Cowper as an own son during the rest of her life. He was never supremely happy, and he was sometimes again thrown into madness by the terrible thought of God's wrath, but his life was passed in a quiet manner in the villages of Weston and Olney, where he was loved by every one. The simple pursuits of gardening, carpentering, visiting the sick, caring for his numerous pets, rambling through the lanes, and studying nature, occupied his sane moments when he was not at prayer. Works. Cowper's first works were the Olney Hymns. His religious nature is manifest again in the volume which consists of didactic poems upon such subjects as The Progress of Error, Truth, Charity, Table Talk, and Conversation. These are in the spirit of the formal clas- sical poets, and contain sententious couplets such as, 316 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 " An idler is a watch that wants both hands, As useless when it goes as when it stands." 1 "Vociferated logic kills me quite ; A noisy man is always in the right." 2 The bare didacticism of these poems is softened and sweetened by the gentle, devout nature of the poet, and is enlivened by a vein of pure humor. He is one of England's most delightful letter writers because of his humor, which ripples occasionally over the stream of his constitutional melancholy. The Diverting History of John Gilpin is extremely humorous. The poet seems to have forgotten himself in this ballad and to have given full expression to his sense of the ludicrous. The work which has made his name famous is The Task. He gave it this title half humorously because his friend, Lady Austen, had bidden him write a poem in blank verse upon some subject or other, the sofa, for instance; and he called the first book of the poem The Sofa. The 7^ask is chiefly remarkable because it turns from the artificial and conventional subjects which had been popular, and describes simple beauties of nature and the joys of country life. Cowper says: "God made the country, and man made the town." To a public acquainted with the nature poetry of Burns, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, Cowper's poem does not seem a wonderful production. Appearing as it did, how- ever, during the ascendency of Pope's influence, when aristocratic city life was the only theme for verse, The Task is a strikingly original work. It marks a change from the artificial style of eighteenth century poetry and 1 Retirement. 2 Conversation. ROBERT BURNS 317 proclaims the dawn of the natural style of the new school. He who could write of " . . . rills that slip Through the cleft rock, and chiming as they fall Upon loose pebbles, lose themselves at length In matted grass, that with a livelier green Betrays the secret of their silent course," was a worthy forerunner of Shelley and Keats. General Characteristics. Cowper's religious fervor was the strongest element in both his life and his writings. Perhaps that which next appealed to his nature was the pathetic. He had considerable mastery of pathos, as may be seen in the drawing of "crazed Kate " in The Task, in the lines To Mary, and in the touchingly beautiful poem On the Receipt of My Mothers Picture out of Nor- folk, beginning with that well-known line : " Oh that those lips had language ! " The two most attractive characteristics of his works are refined, gentle humor and a simple and true manner of picturing rural scenes .and incidents. He says that he described no spot which he had not seen, and expressed no emotion which he had not felt. In this way, he re- stricted the range of his subjects and displayed a some- what literal mind, but, what he had seen and felt, he touched with a light fancy and with considerable imagi- native power. ROBERT BURNS, 1759-1796 Life. The greatest of Scottish poets was born in a peasant's clay-built cottage, a mile and a half south of Ayr. His father was a man whose morality, industry, and zeal for education made him an admirable parent. For THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 a picture of the father and the home influences under which the boy was reared, The Cotter s Saturday Night should be read. The poet had little formal schooling, but under paternal influence he learned how to teach himself. Until his twenty-eighth year, Robert Burns was an ordi- nary laborer on one or another of the Ayrshire tenant farms which his father or brothers leased. At the age of BIRTHPLACE OF ROBERT BURNS fifteen, the future poet was worked beyond his strength in doing a man's full labor. He called his life on the Ayr- shire farms "the unceasing toil of a galley slave." All his life he fought a hand-to-hand fight with poverty. In 1786, when he was twenty-seven years old, he re- solved to abandon the struggle and seek a position in the far-off island of Jamaica. In order to secure money for his passage, he published some poems which he had ROBERT BURNS 319 thought out while following the plow or resting after the day's toil. Six hundred copies were printed at three shil- lings each. All were sold in a little over a month. At the end of the nineteenth century a copy of this edition was. sold in Edinburgh for ^572. His fame from that little volume has grown as much as its monetary value. Some Edinburgh critics praised the poems very highly and suggested a second edition. He abandoned the idea of going to Jamaica and went to Edinburgh to arrange for a new edition. Here he was entertained by the foremost men of the town, some of whom wished to see how a plowman would behave in polite society, while others desired to gaze on what they regarded as a freak of nature. The new volume appeared in 1/87, and con- tained but few poems which had not been published the previous year. The following winter he again went to Edinburgh, but he was almost totally neglected by the leaders in literature and society. In 1788 Burns married Jean Armour and took her to a farm which he leased in Dumfriesshire. The first part of this new period was the happiest in his life. She has been immortalized in his songs : " I see her in the dewy flowers, I see her sweet and fair : I hear her in the tunefu' birds, I hear her charm the air : There's not a bonie flower that springs By fountain, shaw, or green ; There's not a bonie bird that sings, But minds me o' my Jean." 1 This farm proved unprofitable. He appealed to influen- tial persons for some position that would enable him to 1 / Love My Jean. 320 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 178O-1837 support his family and write poetry. This was an age of pensions, but not a farthing of pension did he ever get. He was made an exciseman or gauger, at a salary of $o a year, and he followed that occupation for the few remain- ing years of his life. Robert Burns wrote much and did much unworthy of a great poet ; but when Scotland thinks of him, she quotes the lines which he wrote for Tarn Samson s Elegy: " Heav'n rest his saul, whare'er he be ! Is tlf wish o' mony mae than me : ROBERT BURNS 321 He had twa faults, or maybe three, Yet what remead ? 1 Ae social, honest man want we." Burns's Poetic Creed. We can understand and enjoy Burns much better if we know his object in writing poetry and the point of view from which he regarded life. It would be hard to fancy the intensity of the shock which the school of Pope would have felt on reading this state- ment of the poor plowman's poetic creed : " Give me ae spark o 1 Nature's fire, That's a' the learning I desire ; Then tho' 1 drudge thro' dub an' mire At pleugh or cart, My Muse, though hamely in attire, May touch the heart." 2 Burns's heart had been touched with the loves and sor- rows of life, and it was his ambition to sing so naturally of these as to touch the hearts of others. With such an object in view, he did not disdain to use in his best productions much of the Scottish dialect, the vernacular of the plowman and the shepherd. The lit- erary men of Edinburgh, who would rather have been convicted of a breach of etiquette than of a Scotticism, tried to induce him to write pure English, but the Scotch words which he first heard from his mother's lips se.emed to possess more "o' Nature's fire." He ended by touch- ing the heart of Scotland and making her feel more proud of this dialect, of him, and of herself. Union of the Elizabethan with the Revolutionary Spirit. In no respect does the poetry of Burns more completely part company with the productions of the classical school 1 remedy. 2 Epistle to John Lapraik. 322 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 than in the expression of feeling. The emotional fire of Elizabethan times was restored to literature. No other poet except Shakespeare has ever written more nobly im- passioned love songs. Burns's song beginning : "Ae fond kiss and then we sever" seemed to both Byron and Scott to contain the essence of a thousand love tales. This unaffected, passionate treat- ment of love had long been absent from our literature, but intensity of genuine feeling reappeared in Burns's Highland Mary, I Love My Jean, Farewell to Nancy, To Mary in Heaven, and O Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast, which last Mendelssohn thought exquisite enough to set to music. The poetry of Burns throbs with varying emo- tions. It has been well said that the essence of the lyric is "to describe the passion of the moment. Burns is a master in this field. The spirit of revolution against the bondage and cold formalism of the past made the poor man feel that his place in the world was as dignified, his happiness as im- portant, as that of the rich. A feeling of sympathy for the oppressed and the helpless also reached beyond man to animals. Burns wrote touching lines about a mouse whose nest was, one cold November day, destroyed by his plow. When the wild eddying swirl of the snow beat around his cot, his heart went out to the poor sheep, cattle, and birds. Burns can, therefore, claim kinship with the Eliza- bethans because of his love songs, which in depth of feeling and beauty of natural utterance show something of Shakespeare's magic. In addition to this, the poetry of Burns voices the democratic spirit of the Revolution. Treatment of Nature. In his verses, the autumn winds ROBERT BURNS 323 blow over yellow corn ; the fogs melt in limpid air ; the birches extend their fragrant arms dressed in woodbine ; the lovers are coming through the rye ; the daisy spreads her snowy bosom to the sun; the "westlin" winds, blow fragrant with dewy flowers and musical with the melody of birds; the brook flows past the lovers' Eden, where summer first unfolds her robes and tarries longest, because of the rarest bewitching enchantment of the poet's tale told there. In his poetry those conventional birds, the lark and the nightingale, do not hold the chief place. His verses show that the source of his knowledge of birds is not to be sought in books. We catch glimpses of grouse cropping heather buds, of whirring flocks of partridges, of the sooty coot and the speckled teal, of the fisher herons, of the green-crested lapwing, of clamoring craiks among fields of flowering clover, of robins cheering the pensive autumn, of lintwhites chanting among the buds, of the mavis singing drowsy day to rest. It is true that on the poetic stage of Burns, man always stands in the foreground. Nature is employed in order to give human emotion a proper background. He chose those aspects of nature which harmonized with his present mood, but the natural objects in his pages are none the less enjoyable for fhat reason. Sometimes his songs complain if nature seems gay when he is sad, but this contrast is employed to throw a stronger light on his woes. General Characteristics. It is said that the birthplace of Burns is visited each year by more people than go to see Shakespeare's House. What qualities has Burns sufficient to account for this ? The fact that the Scotch are an unusually patriotic people and make many pilgrimages to the land of Burns 324 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 is only a partial answer to this question. The complete answer is to be found in a study of his characteristics. In the first place, with his "spark o' Nature's fire," he has touched the hearts of more of the rank and file of human- ity than even Shakespeare himself. The songs of Burns minister in the simplest and most direct way to every one of the common feelings of the human heart. Shakespeare surpasses all others in painting universal human nature, but he is not always simple. Sometimes his audience con- sists of only the cultured few. Especially enjoyable is the humor of Burns, which usually displays a kindly and intuitive sympathy with human weaknesses. Tarn o> Shanter, his greatest poem, keeps the reader smiling or laughing from beginning to end. When the Scottish Muse, proudly placed on his brow the holly wreath, she happily emphasized two of his conspicuous qualities, his love and mirth, when she said : " I saw thee eye the general mirth With boundless love." l Burns is one of the great masters of lyrical verse. He preferred that form. He wrote neither epic nor dramatic poetry. He excels in "short swallow flights of song." There are not many ways in which a poet can keep larger audiences or come nearer to them than by writing verses which naturally lend themselves to daily song. There are few persons, from the peasant to the lord, who have not sung some of Burns's songs, such as^ An/d Lang Syne, Coming through the Rye, John Anderson my Jo, or Scots Wha hae wi Wallace Bled. Since the day of his death, the audiences of Robert Burns have for these reasons continually grown larger. 1 Tht Vision. SIR WALTER SCOTT 325 SIR WALTER SCOTT, 1771-1832 Life. Walter Scott, the son of a solicitor, was born in Edinburgh in 1771. He was such an invalid in childhood that he was illowed to follow his own bent without much attempt at fmal education. He was taken to the coun- try, where ne acquired a lasting fondness for animals and wild scenery. With his first few shillings he bought the collection of early ballads and songs known as Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Of this he says : " I do not beiiey,e I ever read a book half so frequently, or 326 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 with half the enthusiasm." His grandmother used to delight him with tales of adventure on the Scottish border. Later, Scott went to the Edinburgh High School and to the University. At the High School he showed wonder- ful genius for telling stories to the boys. " I made a brighter figure in the yards than in the class" he says of himself at this time. This early practice in relating tales and noting what held the attention of his classmates was excellent training for the future Wizard of the North. After an apprenticeship to his father, the son was called to the bar and began the practice of law. He often left his office to travel over the Scottish counties in search of legendary ballads, songs, and traditions, a collection of which he published under the title of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border- In 1799 he married a Miss Char- lotte Carpenter, who had an income of $00 a year. He was shortly after appointed sheriff of Selkirkshire at an annual salary of ^300, and he found himself able to neglect the law for literature. His early freedom from poverty is in striking contrast to the condition of his fellow-Scotsman, Robert Burns. During the period between thirty and forty, he wrote his best poems. Not until he was nearly forty-three did he dis- cover where his greatest powers lay. He then published Waverley, the first of a series of novels known by that general name. During the remaining eighteen years of his life, he wrote twenty-nine novels, besides many other works, such as the Life of Napoleon, in nine volumes, and an entertaining work on Scottish history, under the title of Talcs of a Grandfather. The crisis which showed Scott's sterling character came in the winter of 1825-1826, when an Edinburgh publishing firm in which he was interested failed and SIR WALTER SCOT!' 327 left on his shoulders a debt of ; 117,000. Had he been a man of less honor, he might have taken advantage of the bankrupt law, and then his future earnings would have been free from past claims. He refused to take any step which would remove his obligation to pay the debt. At the age of fifty-four, he abandoned his happy dream of founding the house of Scott of Abbotsford and sat ABBOTSFORD, HOME OF SIR WALTER SCOTT . * down to pay off the debt with his pen. The example of such a life is better than the finest sermon on honor. He wrote with almost inconceivable rapidity. His novel Woodstock, the product of three months' work, brought ^8228. In four years he paid ,70,000 to his creditors. One day the tears rolled down his cheeks because he could no longer force his fingers to grasp the pen. The King offered him a man of war in which to make a voyage 328 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 to the Mediterranean. Hoping to regain his health, Scott made the trip, but the rest came too late. He returned to Abbotsford in a sinking condition, and died in 1832, at the age of sixty-one. Poetry. Scott's three greatest poems are The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810). They belong to the distinct class of story-telling poetry. Like many of the ballads in Percy's collection, these poems are stories of old feuds between the Highlander and the Lowlander, and between the border lords of England and Scotland. These ro- mantic tales of heroic battles, thrilling incidents some- times supernatural, and love adventures, are told in fresh, vigorous verse, which breathes the free air of wild nature and moves with the prance of a war horse. Outside of Homer, we can nowhere find a better description of a battle than in the sixth canto of Marmion : A Tale of Flodden Field: " They close, in clouds of smoke and dust, With sword sway and with lance's thrust ; And such a yell was there, Of sudden and portentous birth, As if men fought upon the earth, And fiends in upper air, And in the smoke the pennons flew, As in the storm the white sea mew." The Lady of the Lake, an extremely interesting story of romantic love and adventure, has been the most popu- lar of Scott's poems. Loch Katrine and the Trossachs, where the scene of the opening cantos is laid, have since his day been thronged with tourists. The most prominent characteristic of Scott's poetry is its energetic movement. Many schoolboys know by heart SIR WALTER SCOTT 329 those dramatic lines which express Marmion's defiance of Douglas, and the ballad of Lochinvar, which is alive with the movements of tireless youth. These poems have an interesting story to tell, not of the thoughts, but of the deeds, of the characters. Scott is strangely free from nineteenth century introspection. He delights in wild outdoor life and in observing na- ture. In his verses we find that his eye has rested lov- ingly on the gray birch, the mountain ash with its narrow leaves and red berries, the dew on the heath flower, and the speckled thrush singing a good morning to the water lily and to the green leaves just stirring from their breezeless sleep in the gray mist. He does not implant his emo- tions in nature, like Burns, or put there a nature spirit, like Wordsworth. We feel that Scott lacks the penetration and the spiritu- ality of Wordsworth. We can hardly imagine Scott say- ing with Wordsworth : " To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 1 Like Burns, Scott appeals to the simpler feelings, but Burns's plummet fathoms far deeper recesses of the hu- man heart. Nevertheless, Scott's poems are specially well adapted to develop an appreciation for poetry that probes deeper into life. He holds the attention of the young at a time when a study of more philosophical poetry might awaken a lasting distaste for all verse. Historical Fiction. Scott began in verse his story tell- ing, which he continued more effectively in prose. He stopped writing poetry not only because he saw that Byron was surpassing him in this field. Scott had also discov- 1 Ode on Intimations of Immortality. 33O THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 ered that his own great power lay in writing prose tales which no living competitor could equal. In 1814 he pub- lished Waverley, a story of the attempt of the Jacobite Pretender to recover the English throne in 1745. Seven- teen of Scott's works of fiction are historical. When the young wish a vivid picture of the time of Richard Cceur de Lion, of the knight and the castle, of the Saxon swineherd Gurth and of the Norman master who ate the pork, they may read Ivan/toe. If one desires some reading which will make the Crusaders live again, one finds it in the pages of The Talisman. When we wish an entertaining story of the brilliant days of Elizabeth, we turn to Kenilivorth. If we are moved by admiration for the Scotch Convenanters to seek a story of their times, we have Scott's finest historical tale, Old Mortality. Shortly after this story appeared, Lord Hol- land was asked his opinion of it. " Opinion ! " he ex- claimed ; "we did not one of us go to bed last night nothing slept but my gout." The man who could thus charm his readers was called the Wizard of the North. Scott is the creator of the historical novel, which has advanced on the general lines marked out by him. Car- lyle tersely says : " These historical novels have taught all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others till so taught : that the by-gone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state papers, con- troversies, and abstractions of men." The history in Scott's novels is not always absolutely accurate. To meet the exigencies of his plot, he some- times takes liberties with the events of history, and there are occasional anachronisms in his work. Readers may rest assured, however, that the most prominent strokes of SIR WALTER SCOTT 331 his brush will convey a sufficiently accurate idea of certain phases of history. Although the hair lines in his pictures may be neglected, most persons can learn more truth from studying his gallery of historic scenes than from poring over volumes of documents and state papers. Scott does not look at life from every point of view. The reader of IvanJioe, for instance, should be cautioned against thinking that Scott presents a complete picture of the Middle Ages. He shows the bright, the noble side of chivalry, but not all the brutality, ignorance, and misery of the times. Novels which are not Historical. Twelve of Scott's novels contain but few attempts to represent historic events. The greatest of these novels are Guy Mannering, The Heart of Midlothian, The Antiquary, and The Bride of Lammermoor. Scott said that his most rapid work was his best. The finest product of his pen, Guy Mannering, was written in six weeks. It is an admirable picture of Scottish life and manners. Many of its characters, like Dominie Sampson, the pedagogue, Meg Merrilies, the gypsy, and Dick Hat- teraick, the smuggler, have more life than half the people we meet. A century before, Pope said that most women had no characters at all. His writings tend to show that this was his real conviction, as it was that of many others during the time when Shakespeare was little read. The Heart of Midlothian presents in Jeanie Deans a woman whose character and feminine qualities have won the admiration of the world. Scott could not paint women in the higher walks of life. He was so chivalrous that he was prone to make such women too perfect, but his humble Scotch lass Jeanie Deans is one of his greatest creations. When we note the vast number of characters drawn by his pen, we are astonished to find that he repeats so little. 332 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 Many novelists write only one original novel. Their suc- ceeding works are merely repetitions of the first. The hero may have put on a new suit of clothes and the heroine may wear a new style of bonnet, or each may be given a new mannerism, or a peculiar form of expression, but there is nothing really new in character or in incident. For year after year, Scott wrote with wonderful rapidity, without repeating his characters or his plots. General Characteristics. All critics are impressed with the healthiness of Scott's work, with its freedom from what is morbid or debasing. His stories display marked energy and movement. There is little subtle analysis of feelings and motives. He aimed at broad and striking effects. We do not find much development of character in his pages. " His characters have the brilliance and the fixity of portraits." Scott does not particularly care to delineate the intense passion of love. Only one of his novels, The Bride of Lammermoor, is aflame with this overmastering emotion. He delights in adventure. He places his characters in unusual and dangerous situations, and he has succeeded in making us feel his own interest in the outcome. He has on a larger scale many of the qualities which we may note in the American novelist Cooper, whose best stories are tales of adventure in the forest or on the sea. Like him, Scott shows lack of care in the construction of sentences. Few of the most cultured people of to-day could, however, write at Scott's breakneck speed and make as few slips. Scott has far more humor and variety than Cooper. Scott's romanticism is seen in his love for supernatural agencies, which figure in many of his stories. His fond- ness for adventure, for mystery, for the rush of battle, for color and sharp contrast, and his love for the past are also JANE AUSTEN 333 romantic traits. He, however, sometimes falls into the classical fault of over-description and of leaving too little to the imagination. In the variety of his creations, he is surpassed by no other novelist. He did more than any other pioneer to aid fiction in dethroning the drama. His influence can be seen in the historical novels of almost every nation. JANE AUSTEN, 1775-1817 Life and Works. While Sir Walter Scott was laying the foundations of his large family estates and recounting the story of battles, chivalry, royalty, and brigandage, a quiet, sunny little woman, almost unmindful of the great world, was enlivening her father's parsonage and writing about the clergy, the old maids, the short-sighted mothers, the marriageable daughters, and other people that figure in village life. This cheery, sprightly young woman, whom her acquaintances never once suspected of the guilt of authorship, was Jane Austen, a daughter of the rector of Steventon, Hampshire-. The life of Jane Austen was simple, wholesome, unpre- tending, and happy. She possessed both wit and beauty, and was ready to enjoy any festivities which her small world afforded. She was clever in turning out tales for her nephews and nieces and quick to seize upon the lead- ing points in character. She studied carefully the folk about her, and she was one of the first of novelists to chronicle the lives of homely, commonplace people. Pride and Prejudice is generally considered her best novel, though Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Mansfield Park all have their ardent admirers. The scenes of these stories are laid in small English towns, with which 334 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 the author was thoroughly familiar, and the characters are taken from the middle class and the gentry. There are no startling discoveries and mysterious secrets in her works. Simple domestic episodes and ordinary people, living somewhat monotonous and narrow lives, satisfy her, and she exhibits wonderful skill in fashioning these into slight but entertaining narratives. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, she creates some refreshing situa- tions by opposing Philip. Darcy's pride to Elizabeth Ben- net's prejudice, and manages the long-delayed reconciliation WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 335 between these two lovers with a tact which shows true genius and a knowledge of the human heart. A strong feature of Jane Austen's novels is her subtle, careful manner of drawing character. She perceives with an intuitive refinement the delicate shadings of emotion, and describes them with the utmost care and detail. Her heroines are especially fine, each one having an interesting individuality, thoroughly natural and womanly. The minor characters in Miss Austen's works are usually quaint and original. She sees the oddities and foibles of people with the insight of the true humorist, and paints them with most dexterous cunning. Walter Scott sums up Jane Austen's chief characteristics when he says in his big-hearted way : " That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements of feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most won- derful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain T can do myself, like any one going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and charac- ters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early ! " WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1770-1850 Early Education. William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in 1770. He came from a North of England family, sound and healthy in its moral tone, and vigorous physically. Losing his parents early in life, he was left to the care of uncles who discharged their trust in a praiseworthy manner. He went to school in his ninth year at Hawkshead, a village on the banks of Esthwaite Water. These school 336 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 days were happy ones. He boarded m the village with a kindly old dame, whom he has fondly described in his Prelude, and, out of school hours, he was free from the supervision of tutors. He writes : " I was left at liberty then, and in the vacation, to read whatever books I liked." He was free also to go about as he pleased, and he roamed early and late over the mountains. The healthy out of door life hardened the fibers of his sturdy frame and kept him vigorous, and the constant sight of nature in the wondrous beauty of the Lake District awoke love and reverence in him. He enjoyed WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 337 the sports of hunting, skating, and rowing, but he says, in the Prelude : " Not seldom from the uproar I retired Into a silent bay, or sportively Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng, To cut across the reflex of a star That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed Upon the glassy plain." At such a moment, almost as a revelation to his throbbing heart, the "... common face of nature spake to him Rememberable things." He says that in one of these moments of solitude "... the calm And dead still water lay upon my mind Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, Never before so beautiful, sank down Into my heart, and held me like a dream." Little by little, the glories of Nature grew upon him, until his soul seemed flooded with unutterable delight when in her presence. This profound passion was fostered by his life in these early years, and grew steadily with his youth. At seventeen, he went to Cambridge and, for a time, was dazzled by the intercourse with town-bred men, but the infatuation was of short duration, and his four years at college were the least congenial of his life. Influence of the French Revolution. His travels on the continent in his last vacation and after his graduation brought him in contact with the French Revolution, and he came under its spell, as did most of the young, enthu- siastic men of the time. His hopes were stirred and his imagination fired with dreams of an ideal republic, which he fancied would arise from the Revolution. He says: 338 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 " I gradually withdrew Into a noisier world, and thus ere long Became a patriot ; and my heart was all Given to the people, -and my love was theirs." : He was prepared to throw himself personally into the struggle, when his relatives recalled him to England to face the ugly specter of poverty. The rude shock came too suddenly upon his ardent aspirations, and, following closely upon it, came the failure of the revolutionists, the period of anarchy and imperialism in France. He sank into a dejection as deep as his hopes had been high, and, as he slowly recovered from his disappointment, he became more and more conservative in his politics, and less in sympathy with any violent reactions. For this he was censured by Byron, Shelley, and other strong adherents of liberty, but such moderation was more natural to Words- worth than the excitement of his early years. To the end of his days, he never failed to utter for genuine liberty a hopeful, though calm and tempered note. Maturity and Declining Years. He returned from France in 1792. In 1795 a bequest of .900 relieved the financial strain which had caused him anxiety, and secured for him and his sister Dorothy a modest main- tenance. They went back to the Lake District, in which, save for an occasional tour, they passed the rest of their lives. The two places most associated with the poet are Grasmere, where he wrote the best of his poetry between the years 1798 and 1808, and Rydal Mount, where he lived in his later years. Dorothy was his lifelong com- panion. She won him back from his hopelessness over the Revolution and urged upon him the duty of devoting himself to poetry. Their favorite pastime .was walking. 1 The Prelude, Book IX. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 339 De Quincey estimates that Wordsworth, during the course of his life, must have walked as many as 175,000 miles. 1 I HP V* ^i -. -^:-^v' : _ BV WORDSWORTH S HOME AT GRASMERE - DOVE COTTAGE In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson. With her income, the payment of a debt with its long accruing interest, and the salary from the office of Distributor of Stamps for the counties of Cumberland and Westmore- land, Wordsworth was insured against annoyance from debt, and given the leisure to devote his whole time to the production of poetry. This peaceful, retired life, away from the passionate contests of men in crowded towns, prevented Words- worth from gaining an accurate knowledge of his fellow- men. His absorbing concentration of mind upon poetry made him self-centered, and caused him to disparage all 340 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 views and ideals of life which differed from his own. His temper remained " stiff," but his earnestness and purity of life made him, as his mother had prophesied, "remarkable for good." His poetry was too far removed from the formal classical style to be at once popular with the public. The critics ridiculed him harshly. He lived, however, to see his work appreciated and to be rewarded with the laureateship by the nation. He died six years later, in 1850, and was buried in the Grasmere churchyard. A Poet of Nature. Wordsworth is one of the world's most loving, penetrative, and thoughtful poets of Nature. He found much of his greatest joy in the presence of her calm, her beauty, her external revelations of a divine hand. For him, Nature possessed a soul, a conscious existence, an ability to feel joy and love. In these Lines Written in Early Spring, he expresses his faith in her power to be happy : " And 'tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes." Again, he says in The Leech-Gatherer: " All things that love the sun are out of doors ; The sky rejoices in the morning's birth." The Intimations of Immortality also incorporates this belief in the conscious soul of nature : " The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare." This manner of investing nature with sentiency is peculiarly characteristic of Wordsworth. He was not content to experience only that childlike joy which sat- isfied Cowper and Burns, or, like Keats and Tennyson, to WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 341 paint only the external features of nature. With rare skill Wordsworth looked beyond the color of the flower, the outline of the hills, the beauty of the clouds, to the spirit which breathed through them, and he communed with "Nature's self which is the breath of God." Nature, therefore, did more than please his senses ; she appealed to his heart ; she aroused his noblest feelings and filled him with a worship that was a part of his religion. In his close study of her secrets, he learned her outward appearances, and he wrote some beautiful descriptions, such as the following upon a dandelion seed: "Suddenly halting now, a lifeless stand! And starting off again with freak as sudden ; In all its sportive wanderings, all the while Making report of an invisible breeze, That was its wings, its chariot, and its horse, Its very playmate and its moving soul." But Wordsworth is not preeminently the purely descrip- tive poet, as Tennyson is. Wordsworth was too much engrossed with the feeling inspired by the scene, and with its imaginative interpretation, to attend strictly to sketching the outlines. Note these lines from one of his sonnets : "The gentleness of Heaven is on the sea: Listen! the mighty Being is awake And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder everlastingly." 1 There is not here a vivid picture of the sea, such as Tennyson would have given, but there is the impression, the feeling, the thought inspired in an imaginative mind by the sea. Wordsworth is unrivaled in his capacity to 1 Sonnet : " It is a beauteous evening, calm and free." HAL. ENG. LIT. 22 342 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 present the inherent atmosphere and spirit of a scene. In the lines " With heart as calm as lakes that sleep, In frosty moonlight glistening; Or mountain rivers, where they creep Along a channel smooth and deep, To their own far-off murmurs listening," 1 he suggests the very soul of solitude. Nothing else could have done this so ideally as the streams that hear no sound but the echo of their own lonely murmurings. It is in this contemplative and imaginative interpretation of nature that Wordsworth is a master poet. Narrative Poems: Poetry of Man. Wordsworth is a poet of man as well as of nature. The love for nature came to him first, but out of it grew his regard for the people who lived near to nature. He traces the growth of these feelings in The Prelude (1850), an autobiographical poem, unrivaled in its class. Wordsworth also tells in this poem how the French Revolution roused him to the worth of each individual soul and to a sense of the equality of all humanity at the bar of character and conscience. As his lyrics show the sympathy which he had for the outside world, so his narrative poems illustrate the second dominant characteristic of the age, the strong sense of the brotherhood of man. Michael, one of the very greatest of his productions, displays a tender and living sympathy with the humble shepherd. The simple dignity of Michael's character, his frugal and honorable life, his affection for his son, for his sheep, and for his forefathers' old home, appealed to the heart of the poet. He loved his subject and wrote the poem with that indescribable simplicity which makes 1 Memory. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 343 the tale, the verse, and the tone of thought and feeling form together one perfect and indissoluble whole. The Leech-Gatherer and the story of " Margaret " in the Excursion also deal with lowly characters and exhibit Wordsworth's power of pathos and simple earnestness. He could not present complex personalities, but these characters, which belonged to the landscapes of the Lake District and partook of its calm and its simplicity, he drew with a sure hand. His longest narrative poem is the Excursion (1814), which is in nine books. It contains fine passages of verse and some of his sanest and maturest philosophy, but the work is not the masterpiece which he hoped to make. It is tedious, prosy, and without action of any kind. The style is heavy, for the most part, and becomes pure and easy only in some description of a mountain peak or in the recital of a tale, like that of " Margaret." General Characteristics. " Meditation and sympathy, not action and passion, were the two main strings of his serene and stormless lyre. On these no hand ever held more gentle yet sovereign rule than Wordsworth's," says Swinburne. Wordsworth possessed no dramatic power, no ability to enter into another's personality. His genius was introspective. Moreover, he seemed a stranger to tem- pestuous passions and fierce burning love. His nature was strong, restrained, and calm. The joys of nature, the ele- mental emotions of humanity, and the necessity of obey- ing the moral law, are his subjects. This last subject is treated with wonderful elevation of language in his Ode to Duty and Character of the Happy Warrior, Wordsworth's compass is limited, but within that com- pass he is surpassed by no poet since Milton. On the other hand, no great poet ever wrote more that is worth- 344 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 less. Matthew Arnold did much for Wordsworth's renown by collecting his priceless poems and publishing them apart from the mediocre work. Among the fine productions, his sonnets occupy a high place. Only Shakespeare and Milton in our language excel him in this form of verse. The most pronounced characteristic of Wordsworth's style is its austere simplicity. When he was most truly great, he seemed to write as he breathed, not only naturally but involuntarily. He was unconscious of the power which he wielded. When he attempted to command it at will, he failed, as in the dull, lifeless lines of the Excursion. On the contrary, of such a work as Michael, The Solitary Reaper, or The Fountain, we may say with Matthew Arnold : " It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him." We may take this line from Wordsworth : - "This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon," 1 and compare it with Tennyson's line in The Princess: "A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight." Tennyson's is harmonious and the imagery is exceptionally true and beautiful, but the line seems to have been elabo- rated and polished in the study, while Wordsworth's artless figure has the breath of inspiration about it. An excellent craftsman might have produced Tennyson's line, but only a genius could have displayed Wordsworth's frequent natural directness and ease. He ranks among the great- est poets of English literature ; only the very mightiest tower above him. If Shakespeare occupies the first place, Milton the next, and Chaucer the third, Wordsworth is entitled to follow closely after them. 1 Sonnet : "The World is too much with us." SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 1772-1834 Life. The troubled career of Coleridge is in striking contrast to the peaceful life of Wordsworth. Coleridge, the thirteenth child of a clergyman, was born in the year 1772, in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire. Early in his life, the future poet became a dreamer. Before he was five years old, he had read the Arabian Nights. A few years later, the boy's appetite for books was so voracious that he is said to have devoured an average of two volumes a day. So omnivorous was his reading and so broad the 346 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 fields which his studies finally covered, that a recent biog- rapher is led to say that Coleridge's education " outstrides the intellectual equipment of every Englishman since Bacon." In this opinion contemporaries concurred. Coleridge went to Cambridge, but he did not remain to graduate. From this time he seldom completed anything that he undertook. It was characteristic of him, stimulated by the spirit of the French Revolution, to dream of found- ing with Southey a Pantisocracy on the banks of the Sus- quehanna. In this ideal village across the sea, the dreamers were to work only two hours a day and to have all goods in common. The demand for poetry was at this time suffi- ciently great for a bookseller to offer Coleridge, although he was as yet comparatively unknown, thirty guineas for a volume of poems and a guinea and a half for each hundred lines after finishing that volume. With such wealth in view, Coleridge married a Miss Fricker of Bristol, because no single people could join the new ideal commonwealth. Southey married her sister, but the young enthusiasts were forced to abandon the project because they did not have sufficient money to procure passage across the ocean. But the tendency to dream never forsook Coleridge. One of his favorite poems begins with this line : " My eyes make pictures when they are shut." 1 He recognized his disinclination to remain long at work on prearranged lines, when he said : " I think that my soul must have preexisted in the body of a chamois chaser." In 1797-1798 Coleridge lived with his young wife at Nether-Stowey in Somerset. Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to a house in the neighborhood in order to 1 A Day-Dream. 347 be near Coleridge. The two young men and Dorothy Wordsworth seemed to be exactly fitted to stimulate one another. Together they roamed over the Quantock Hills, gazed upon the sea, and planned The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which is one of the' few things that Cole- ridge ever finished. In not much more than a year he wrote nearly all the poetry which has made him famous. Had he died when he was twenty-five, like Keats, the world would probably be won- dering what heights of poetic fame Coleridge might have reached. He became addicted to the use of opium and passed a wretched existence of thirty-six years longer, partly in the Lake District, but chiefly in London, without adding to his poetic fame. During his later years in London, he did hack work for papers, gave occasional lectures, wrote critical and philosophical prose, and became a talker almost as noted as Dr. Johnson. Poetry. The Ancient Mariner (1798) is Coleridge's poetical masterpiece. It is also one of the world's master- pieces. The supernatural sphere into which it introduces the reader is a remarkable creation, with its curse, its polar spirit, the phantom ship, the seraph band, and the magic breeze. The mechanism of the poem is almost COLERIDGE'S COTTAGE AT NETHER-STOWEY 348 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 flawless. The meter, the rhythm, and the music are superb. Almost every stanza shows not only exquisite harmony, but also the easy mastery of genius in dealing with those weird scenes which romanticists love. This poem should by all means be read entire by the student. His next greatest poem is the unfinished Christabel, which in parts surpasses The Ancient Mariner. The lovely maiden Christabel falls under the enchantments of a mysterious Lady Geraldine : " And Geraldine in maiden wise, Casting down her large bright eyes, With blushing cheek and courtesy fine She turn'd her from Sir Leoline ; And looked askance at Christabel Jesu, Maria, shield her well ! A snake's small eye blinks dull and shy, And the lady's eyes they shrunk in her head, Each shrunk up to a serpent's eye." Even so did Coleridge's poetical powers shrink up in what should have been his prime. The fragment ends with Christabel under the spell of Geraldine's enchantments. We miss the interest of a fin- ished story, which draws so many readers to The Ancient Mariner, but Christabel is thickly sown with gems. Lines like these are filled with the airiness of nature : " There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky." In all literature there has been no finer passage written on the wounds caused by broken friendship than the lines in Christabel relating to the estrangement of Roland and Sir SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 349 Leoline. After reading this poem and Kubla Khan, an unfinished dream fragment of fifty-four lines, we feel that the closing lines of Kubla Khan are peculiarly applicable to Coleridge : " For he on honey dew hath fed And drunk the milk of Paradise." Swinburne says of Christabel and Kubla Khan : " When it has been said that such melodies were never heard, such dreams never dreamed, such speech never spoken, the chief things remain unsaid, unspeakable. There is a charm upon these poems which can only be felt in silent submission and wonder." General Characteristics of his Poetry. Unlike Words- worth, Coleridge is not the poet of the earth and the com- mon things of life. He is the poet of air, of the regions beyond the earth, and of dreams. The supernatural has never been invested with more charm. He has rare feeling for the beautiful, whether in the world of morals, or of nature, or of the harmonies of sound. The motherless Christabel in her time of danger dreams a beautiful truth of this divinely governed world :