# Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)/English Literature

It is not unfitting to compare English Literature to a great tree whose far spreading and ever fruitful branches have their roots deep down in the soil of the past. Over such a tree, since the small beginnings of its growth, many vicissitudes of climate have passed; periods of storm, of calm, of sunshine, and of rain; of bitter winds and of genial life-bearing breezes; each change leaving its trace behind in the growth and development of the living plant. It is obvious, then,, that to present the complete history of such an organism in a few pages is impossible; all that can be attempted in this article is to describe the main lines of its life.
It should not be forgotten, at the outset, that English literature has been no isolated growth. It has sprung from the common Aryan root, has branched off from the primal stem, and has received, and continues to receive, in the course of its growth, multitudinous influences from other literatures growing up around it, as well as from those of an earlier time. Yet, as Freeman said, "We are ourselves, and not somebody else", and one of the most remarkable things about English literature is its power of assimilation. Latin, French, Italian, Greek, Spanish literatures, to name only a few, have poured their influences upon us, not once only, but time after time leaving their trace, and yet our character, our language, our literature, remain unmistakably English. The ancestors of the English (the Teutonic tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and some Frisians) spent nearly one hundred and fifty years (455 to 600) in the conquest of the island from the British tribes who had been abandoned by the Roman colonizers nearly fifty years earlier, in 410. Little by little these fierce and hardy heathen tribes, after much fighting among themselves for the supremacy, settled down, and a slow process of civilization made itself felt among them. Christianity, preached by St. Augustine in 597, bringing in its train education, science, and the arts, was the main factor in this refining change. Such British tribes as had escaped the English destroyer remained for a time almost entirely apart, though they and their literature were afterwards to have no small influence upon the literary development of England.
It is not unlikely that the written literature may have begun as early as the sixth century, but at any rate, by the middle of the seventh century the traces of it are clear in the work of Cædmon, according to the testimony of Bede. Between this date and the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxon or Old English writers (recent scholars often prefer the latter term as preserving the idea of continuity) produce a body of literature in prose and verse such as was furnished by no other Teutonic nation either in amount or quality during the same centuries. There are extant at least 20,000 lines of verse, and of prose somewhat more. It is almost certain, too, that a good deal has been lost. The language in which we possess it is English of the oldest form, before any notable foreign admixture had taken place. The verse, with rare exceptions, is of the Teutonic alliterative type. Speaking generally, this body of literature may be classed under two great periods: the first, when the monasteries of Northumbria were the homes of learning, between about 670 and 800, when, according to the legend, Cædmon, a lay brother of Whitby, received the gift of poetry and passed it on to not unworthy followers; and the second, from the time of King Alfred (871), with some spaces of interruption, to the early part of the eleventh century, when literature, driven from the North by the Danes, came South and spoke in prose of the vernacular. In all this work, more particularly in the verse, there is great variety. Growth may be traced and changes of style.
Putting aside minor verse we come first upon the "Beowulf", a narrative poem which, together with a few other fragments, is all we have of the old English epic. It seems clear that the matter of it is much older than its present form. It is a storehouse of the thinking and feeling of the forefathers of the English people when they were still heathen and before they came to Britain, even though the poem may not have been actually put together in its present form until the ninth or tenth century. It gives a picture of very great interest of certain aspects of the actual life of the people. The English temper of mind at its best, enduring and heroic, pervades it throughout.
But this was before Christianity and the monasteries. After the introduction of the new religion the first important record of literature comes under the patriarchal name of Cædmon. It is clear from recent research that Cædmon himself only wrote a very small portion of the so-called Cædmonian poems, but the story of his vision, given by Bede, even if only legend, testifies clearly that the first poetry produced in England began among the people and in religion. The chief interest of the work lies, not in the actual subject-matter, Scriptural paraphrase, but in the way the matter is treated, a Teutonic aspect being frequently given to the narrative. The craving for freedom, the exultation in war, the longing for moral goodness, the respect for women, all these and many other things come out in the rendering of the "Fall of the Angels", the "Temptation of Man", and elsewhere. It is quite clear that several hands have worked at the Cædmonian poems, but in the next great group, a hundred years later, we come upon one individual poet who has signed at least four poems with his name, Cynewulf, and he insists upon our knowing him as the Ancient Mariner constrained the Wedding Guest. He reveals his personality, he becomes real to us. His poems are religious, and perhaps the finest is the "Christ". He is a poet of high order. Among the rest of Old English poetry the elegies and the war poems stand out as the most original.
Old English prose, if we except St. Bede's lost translation of St. John's Gospel, groups itself round two names, those of Alfred and Ælfric. Alfred (849-901) was eager for his people's education, and his literary work consists chiefly of translations of important books of his time: — Gregory the Great's "Pastoral Care", Orosius's "History of the World", Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy", and (probably done under his superintendence) Bede's "Ecclesiastical History" and Bishop Werfrith's "Dialogues". To some of these he added prefaces and notes in simple, unaffected English, which make us realize his remarkable and lovable character, both as man and king.
Many years after, Ælfric (c. 955-1025), Abbot of Eynsham, a much more cultivated scholar, and a more finished, though not more attractive, prose writer than Alfred, put forth volumes of homilies, saints' lives, translations of books of the Old Testament, and other works, which were greatly and justly prized by his hearers and readers.
The "Old English Chronicle", of which there are seven manuscripts, a record of events in England from the sixth century to 1154, was meanwhile being written in the monasteries, undisturbed by the many changes passing over England. It is almost certain that Alfred encouraged this work and set it on a surer foundation, perhaps himself adding portions of the record where it concerned his own reign. One other piece of prose literature must be mentioned. In Wulfstan's "Address to the English", with its vivid indignation at the sufferings of the people from the Danes, the author is often as impassioned as an English reformer might be over the abuses of present-day society. It brings us up in date to the last half-century before the Norman Conquest.
The Norman Conquest is as important in the history of English literature as in that of England's political and social life. It brought a new and invigorating influence to bear upon the English genius, though in the immediate present of the eleventh century it seemed a crushing disaster for the nation. For nearly one hundred and fifty years the race, the language, and the literature of the people were apparently stifled. It seemed as if everything became Norman-French. But as long as the down-trodden English kept life in them the springs of poetry and art could not dry up; and though Robert of Gloucester says that only "low men" held to English at this time, yet there were a good many of these "low men", and we have proof that the native population had still their songs and their wandering bards, while in certain of the monasteries the monks went on chronicling events in their mother tongue much as they had done when a Saxon king had ruled England. The continuity of native verse and prose was never really broken, and just as the English race was at last to absorb its foreign conquerors, and to gain infinitely more than it had suffered from them, so English language and literature were by the same means to be enriched and ennobled to an extent no one then looking on could have dreamed of.
Yet at first literature was apparently silenced, and until the beginning of the thirteenth century there is no writing of much importance except the "Old Fnglish Chronicle", which ends in 1154. There was, of course, writing in Latin and in French, and the French was even looked upon by some as likely to be more enduring than the Latin. But the Latin writing was in reality no enemy to English; it was the tongue, then as now, of the Church, and it was the medium for communication between scholars and the language of nearly all books of scholarship. The native work, however, never quite disappearing, revives unmistakably at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and between that date and the death of Chaucer in 1400 there is produced a great mass of literature of endless variety but of varying value.
We come then to the Middle Ages, called "of Faith"; the age of the Crusades, "of cathedrals, tournaments, old coloured glass, and other splendid things" the age to which, in times of dryness, artists, lovers of romance, as well as pious souls of all kinds, have often looked back and have drawn from it fresh inspiration. It has stimulated in modern times new and noble movements in art and in poetry, and its power of inspiration is not yet exhausted. It was an age of contrasts, of faith and of unbelief, of extraordinary saintliness and of strange wickedness, of reverence and of ribaldry. It was the great Catholic age, when the sacred robe of the Church, spotted though it might be in places through human frailty, was still unrent, whole, and she herself was everywhere acknowledged in Europe as the Divinely appointed mother of men. The history of English literature from the beginning of its revival in the thirteenth century is first that of transition (up to about 1250), then of development for about eighty years, in which the work is largely anonymous, finally, a period of achievement, the second half of the fourteenth century, in which individual writers of power begin to emerge, and among them one supreme artist, Geoffrey Chaucer. We trace, too, during these ages the rise of the drama in the miracle- and morality-plays.
On the threshold of the revival stand two works: "The Brut" (1205), a poem of 30,000 lines concerning the history of Britain, written by Layamon, a patriotic English priest of Worcester; full of more or less historical stories, partly translated from French sources and written in an alliterative metre; and it gives us the first account in English of King Arthur, the British hero. The second, a religious work, "The Ormulum", a series of metrical homilies upon the daily Gospels of the Church, was written by Ormin, an Augustinian canon. After this the stream of English literature is continued in poems of great variety, of which many are lyrics. In "The Owl and the Nightingale", a delightful poem standing at the end of this "transition period", we have a happy combination of old and new elements which have already begun to form a fresh native poetry. Nor had prose been idle; one of the most interesting books of the time is the "Ancren Riwle" (q.v.), a series of exhortations on their rule for a community of Dorsetshire nuns.
Passing on over these fifty years we are met by a further outpouring of literary work, abundant and various, if not remarkably original, poetry always taking the chief place. The main kinds of literature in this period of quick development are romances; tales; religious works (legends of saints, treatises and homilies on morality and religion); the great book called Cursor Mundi"; historical writings; lyrics of love and religion, and songs of political and social life. In all this, French influence is very strong, but there gradually appear among it English elements which are now beginning to hold their own. The romances concerned with the adventures of well-known heroes are the most prominent among all this literature, and these in some cases are translated directly from the French, though never without English touches. The religious work of this time is edifying, but the prose homilies and treatises are sometimes very long and commonplace. Yet a simple faith and tender piety, together with a most sane sense of humour and some imagination, make the religious writings not unfrequently attractive, even from the literary point of view. But regarded as literature, the lyrics of the thirteenth century are perhaps the most remarkable. They are native, and though they bear the marks of artistic culture in their matter, they remind us more of the country than the town. There is a real though un-self-conscious love of nature in them, and the promise of that peculiar and fine quality of the later English lyric which is one of the glories of our literature. Nature, love, and religion are the inspiration of these little medieval poems.
This multitudinous work formed a discipline and preparation, and resulted in the achievements of the latter half of the century. The period 1360 to 1400 is marked by a strong reassertion of the national spirit, and in literature there is a curious reappearance of the Old English alliterative verse after 300 years of apparent neglect. Amongst other poems in this metre there are four by an anonymous writer of high poetic power, one of them, "The Pearl", of great beauty and of deep religious feeling. To this alliterative class belongs too the well-known "Piers the Plowman". Chaucer's work, coming almost at the same time, has to some extent overshadowed this poem, but as a picture of the society and ideals of the time it forms a complement to Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales". In "Piers the Plowman" we have that grave outlook upon life which marks the English character at its best, carried almost to excess. The author (or authors, we ought now to say, for it has been recently proved that at least three writers must have had a hand in its making) looks upon the society of his time as a realist". He describes the world almost entirely on its dark side, and though the remedies he offers are good (" Love is the physician of Life"), and though he never altogether loses his belief in a Divine over-ruling order, yet there is an accent of uncertainty and sometimes of despair in his voice.
Chaucer (1340-1400), on the other hand, does not care for problems of life or dark thinking. His picture of society is, on the whole, from its bright side, when men are out on holiday, and when over-seriousness would seem out of place. Poetically, and in its structure, "Piers the Plowman" is much below Chaucer's work, but its forcefulness, its pathos, its sincerity, its grim humour, its realistic descriptiveness, and its dramatic moments make it a great poem. Chaucer's work marks the full flowering of English literature in the Middle Ages, and it was he who first raised English poetry to a European position. It is the custom of historians of literature to divide the literary life of Chaucer into a French, an Italian, and an English period, according as his work was influenced by the manner of each national literature. This division represents a fact if it be remembered that he carried on, all through his career, certain of the lessons he had learned from the foreign source in the earlier time. There is little doubt that the impulse to write verse came to Chaucer from France. Old English literature was practically unknown to him, but he was saturated with French poetry, for the literature of France was then, outside the classics, the most influential in Europe. Among many shorter poems of this early time, the very first of which is a hymn to the Blessed Virgin, the translation (in part) of the long French allegorical poem of the "Romance of the Rose", and his original and most interesting elegy on the "Death of Blanche the Duchess", are the most important. It is, however, after he has come upon the literature of Italy — Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio — that his true genius begins to show itself. "Troilus and Cressida", "The Parlement of Foules", "The House of Fame", and "The Legend of Good Women" (the two last unfinished), as well as some of the "Canterbury Tales", belong to this time. They show him as a true artist, feeling his way through experiment to greater perfection of work and developing his unique sense of humour. Then, in the later years of his life, he strikes upon the fruitful idea of the Canterbury pilgrimage as a framework in which to show the full power of his art in his picture of the life of his own, and, to some extent of all, time; and into this frame he fitted tales he had already written, as well as new ones. But, of it all, nothing exceeds the power and truth of the "Prologue" to the "Tales". His picture of life and the commentary upon it comes straight out of his own observation and character. As he saw men so he fearlessly portrays them, the good, the bad, the indifferent. A few of his tales reflect the coarseness of the time, and it is just possible that the apology placed at the end of the manuscript of "The Parson's Tale" was written by himself at the close of his life. But, however that may be, over all he writes he throws his own sunny humour and wide charity, and in this as in the width of his sympathies he is not unworthy to be named with Shakespeare. He is the one supreme literary artist before Spenser, and the best brief summary of him" and his work is given in that proverb quoted by Dryden in his criticism of Chaucer, "Here is God's plenty". The name of John Gower (1330-1408) is linked by custom with that of Chaucer, but we recognize now what his contemporaries did not, that Gower's lengthy books in verse are the work rather of an expert journeyman than of a genius. But we may legitimately class together the two writers in their influence on the language. Both being widely read, they helped to make the East Midland dialect in which they wrote the literary language of England, and by their choice or rejection of French words welded the language into greater stability and unity. The English language, at the end of the fourteenth century, had begun to assume nearly that modern form we know. People, language, and literature had now become wholly English.
After reviewing this brilliant half century of poetry, the prose of the same time seems a poor matter. There is no great progress to record, nothing really original of importance was written, and the style follows Latin models rather than the simpler natural manner of the Old English prose. Chaucer wrote prose which in its mediocrity is a curious contrast to his poetry. Sir John Mandeville's "Travels" was a translation of an amusing book, and Wyclif's translation or paraphrase of the Vulgate (in which, however, several other hands than his own had a share), together with his vigorous but heretical tracts and sermons form the chief prose work of this time.
After the death of Chaucer, poetry declined in quality with strange swiftness. For the next one hundred and fifty years there is no great poet; the art of poetry, chiefly owing to the scarcity of native poetical genius, but also partly to the swift changes the language was undergoing and to the carelessness of those who attempted verse, ceased to be finely exercised. The tradition of Chaucer almost disappeared. In the earlier part of the fifteenth century Lydgate (1370?-1451?) and Hoccleve (1370-1450?) tried to follow in the footsteps of the master they revered, but frankly recognized their own failure. Their voluminous and mediocre work, especially Lydgate's, is not without interest to the student, but certain anonymous poets, such as the authors of "The Flower and the Leaf" and "London Lickpenny" (formerly given to Lydgate), succeeded better than they, and the latter poem shows that Chaucer's power of social satire had not disappeared. Satire, as always in the decline after a rich imaginative period of verse, came to the front as subject-matter for verse, and later in the century the scathing verse of John Skelton (1460?-1529), though poor as art, is of interest in the light it throws upon the social life of the times. This poet and Stephen Hawes (d. 1523?), who tried in the "Pastime of Pleasure" to revive the old allegorical style, are the only English names of any note in verse in the latter part of the century. In Scotland, however, the followers of Chaucer, of whom the chief were King James I, Dunbar Henryson, and Gawain Douglas, were producing and continued to produce poetry worthy of immortality.
Fifteenth-century prose was less barren than the poetry of the age. Since the Conquest nearly all serious subject-matter, with few exceptions, had been written of in Latin, but with the invention of printing, and as the power to read and write spread downwards, English prose became more widely recognized as a medium for the treatment of many varied as well as more popular kinds of matter. Four names — Pecock, Fortescue, Caxton, Malory — are recognized as leaders of this movement, but out of their work only Sir Thomas Malory's has become classic. His "Morte D'Arthur", which draws together as many stories and series of stories about King Arthur as he could lay hands upon, is a work of genius, and remains a living book. Its matter is of great intrinsic value and interest, but it is the beauty of its strange child like style, its un-self-conscious appreciation of lovely and noble things in man and nature, and its underlying religious mysticism, which make it a book of the first order.
The medieval drama, which grew up during these centuries, was, with one or two exceptions, not the work of poets or literary artists, yet it was one of the most educative influences of the time. Beginning in connection with the liturgy of the Church, there gradually developed; a whole cycle of religious plays, showing forth the history of the world from the Creation to the Last Judgment. These, acted in a series, in public places of the towns, at certain great church festivals, provided as much instruction as amusement. There is no doubt that, in spite of passages in them which may now seem to us materialistic or irreverent, these simple and rude dramatic representations, both miracle-plays and the later developed moralities, pressed home great religious truths upon the people. From the point of view of the development of drama, we may say that English tragedy and comedy have, at least to some extent, their roots in these crude plays in doggerel verse.
Leaving the Middle Ages behind us, we come now to the threshold of the most fateful epoch in the history of the English people — the disruption of the Church, or the so-called "Reformation". This was preceded and accompanied by the earlier movement called the "Renaissance", which, having opened up fresh branches of classical learning, more especially that of Greek poetry and philosophy, awakened and stimulated the human mind both to good and to evil. In England the "New Learning" movement, in the hands of men like More and Colet tended to enlightenment and true learning. The "Utopia" of Sir Thomas More, a book of the noblest ideals, represents its spirit at the best. But the effect of the Renaissance on the manners and morals of those Englishmen who came back imbued with its intoxication from Italy, was much lamented by contemporary writers, as we find in Ascham's "Schoolmaster". Yet it is to this acquaintance with Italy and its literature that we owe the revival of English poetry after its long relapse since the death of Chaucer. In the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt and of the Earl of Surrey, young men who had studied and felt the beauty and power of the great Italian poets, we discover a new beginning, a new poetic art. It was yet uncertain of itself, experimental, hesitating, and not engaged with deep or very noble subject-matter, but, while observing certain common laws of scansion and diction which the last one hundred years had ignored, attempted new and better melodies.
The publication of Tottel's "Miscellany" in 1557, which contains the work of these two poets, marks an epoch in literature; It set up a standard of poetic art below which no future work could sink. The literary world of that age grew full of expectation looking for a new poet who should embody still more fully the poetic ideals of the time.
The new poet came in Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). Seldom has a young writer been so immediately recognized and acclaimed by the accredited literary judges of his own time as Spenser was. And posterity has agreed with their judgment. He forms the second great landmark in English poetry after Chaucer, from whom he received inspiration. He had been bred in the stimulating atmosphere of the new learning and was greatly influenced by classic and Italian literature, but he also appreciated earlier English literature, and the only master he openly acknowledged was Chaucer. Spenser's poetry throughout is of wonderful beauty in its art, and is marked by nobility of aim, purity of spirit, and reverence for religion. His "minor poems" are many, and as Professor Saintsbury remarks, would be "major poems" for any smaller poet. He was, for example, a satirist of no mean order and a sonneteer, but in the general judgment, and rightly, Spenser is the poet of the "Faerie Queene". All his special powers are shown there, and all his character, one might almost say all his history. The large allegorical ground-plan of the "Faerie Queene", not half completed, interesting as it is, does not form the great attraction of the poem. That lies in the pure and appealing beauty of the versification, in the varied and glorious description, often minutely detailed, in the wealth of imagination, and in the impassioned love of everything beautiful which enthrals the reader as it did the poet. That there are flaws in the poem goes without saying, more especially as Spenser died leaving it half finished.
The complete plan of the work cannot be gathered from the poem itself. Spenser's letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, prefixed to all editions, is necessary to make it clear. "The centre falls outside the circle." For Catholics, too, the historical allegory is seriously marred by the anti-Catholic bias of the poet's time. In places, the Church is bitterly assailed, though in other passages Spencer clearly deprecates the desecration of monasteries, churches, altars, and images as the work of the "Blatant Beast of Calumny". Nor does he give by any means undiluted approval to the Anglican Church or the Puritans. Modern criticism, however, places little emphasis upon any portion of the historical allegory, regarding it as an antiquated hindrance rather than a living help to the true appreciation of the poem. The more purely spiritual elements of the allegory, such as the struggles of the human will against evil, aided by Divine power, are those which are valued by discerning readers. Considered in its essential aspect, the Faerie Queene" is "the poem of the noble powers of the human soul struggling towards union with God". Spencer holds the supreme place among a multitude of other poets of as real though of less genius than his in the sixteenth century, and the work of these, outside the drama, is perhaps seen at its best in the song and the sonnet, two forms which had now an extraordinary vogue. Nearly a dozen anthologies of Elizabethan lyrics, of which the finest is England's "Helicon" (1600), remain to show us the sweetness, beauty, and rarity of these songs. The sonnets, one of the new Italian poetic forms, introduced by Surrey and Wyatt, are less original, and many of them are translations from foreign sources, but those of Sidney and Shakespeare, at least, stand out by their exceptional force and beauty.
Among the many lesser poets of the time Michael Drayton (1563-1631) has been singled out as especially representative of the general character of Elizabethan poetical genius. He wrote every sort of poetry that was the fashion except moral allegory. His work deserves more notice than is often given to it, and his name is sometimes only associated with his long historical poem of the "Polyolbion". This type of poetry reflects the patriotism of the age, and Samuel Daniel and William Warner, both poets of some genius, also worked at it; The huge "Mirror for Magistrates", begun in 1555, and not in its final edition until James I's reign, had encouraged this kind of verse. Poetry of an argumentative and philosophic type was produced towards the end of the century, but very little of value that was religious, except the work of Robert Southwell. This heroic young Jesuit and martyr wrote with a high object: to show to the brilliant young poets of his time, whose love poems often expressed unworthy passion, "how well verse and virtue sort together". And he did this by using the literary manner of the age, "weaving", as he himself says, "a new web in their old loom". His book had a distinct influence on contemporary and later poetry, touching even Ben Jonson and perhaps Milton himself. Its quaintness of wit (allying it somewhat to the "metaphysical" school of the next generation) are shot through with warm human feeling which makes its direct appeal to the reader. And sincerity is the very note of it all.
But it is, of course, in the drama that we find all the well-known poets — with the one exception of Spenser — putting forth their greatest force. The sudden rise of the drama in the latter half of the sixteenth century is the most remarkable phenomenon of this supremely remarkable literary age. It has never been fully accounted for. Many of the contemporary records concerning plays and the theatre have undoubtedly been lost, so that we have to form our own judgment of Elizabethan dramatic literature and its causes upon, comparatively speaking, insufficient grounds. Out of some 2000 plays known to have been acted, only about 500 exist, as far as we know, and discoveries of new contemporary testimony or work might revolutionize our judgment on the history of Elizabethan drama. However that may be, the facts, as we have them, are that in the earlier half of the sixteenth century we find scarcely any dramatic work that would enable us to foresee the rise of the great romantic drama. Miracle-plays were acted up to 1579, but clearly no great development could come from these, and still less, perhaps, from the scholarly movement towards a so-called classical drama, imitations of the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence, such as "Ralph Roister Doister", named the "first English comedy", or of the dramas of Seneca, as in "Gorboduc", the "first English tragedy". There was also a popular tragi-comic drama of a somewhat rude kind (such as Shakespeare travestied in the play of "Pyramus and Thisbe" in the "Midsummer Night's Dream"), but this was no more prophetic than the others. Then suddenly there appear between 1580 and 1590 plays with life, invention, and imagination in them, often faulty enough, but living. The predecessors of Shakespeare, Peele, Greene, Kyd, and others, but most of all that wild and poetic genius, Marlowe, "whose raptures were all air and fire", and who practically created our dramatic blank verse, prepare the way for Shakespeare. Rejecting, gradually, by a sort of instinct, those elements in the drama of the past that were alien to the English genius, they struck out, little by little, the now well-known type of Elizabethan romantic drama which in Shakespeare's hands was to attain its highest. And Shakespeare's genius made of it not only a vehicle for the expression of Elizabethan ideals of drama and of life, but a mouthpiece of humanity itself.
Shakespeare belongs not to England but to the whole world, and most modern nations have vied with each other in acute and wondering appreciation of his genius. A mass of critical literature has grown up round his name, discussing problems literary, artistic, personal, of every kind, and continues to grow. Shakespeare and his work furnish inexhaustible matter for meditation upon almost every human interest and problem. After his time there are some fine dramatists, but none can approach him in completeness and height of genius. Ben Jonson, Chapman, Webster, Ford, Massinger, and Shirley — the two last Catholic converts — with others, carry on the line of dramatic writing with genius, skill, and energy, but the glory gradually departs until one is led to think that if the theatres had not been closed in 1640 on account of the civil war they would have ceased of themselves for want of good plays. Not only had the technical skill in versification, dialogue, and plot decayed, but the moral tone had so much degenerated that most of the hard charges brought against the drama by the Puritans at this time seem well justified.
When we turn to Elizabethan prose we find it a much inferior and less practised form of art than verse. No standard of good prose towards which writers might aim was recognized, and the masterpieces of the Elizabethan age are few. Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity" has rightly, by its weighty argument and its grave eloquence, won a place among classics. Lyly in his two volumes of "Euphues" was the first, perhaps, to treat prose as equally worthy with poetry of artistic elaboration, and his book, a medley of story-telling and moralizing, often most excellent as well as interesting in its ethical musing, instituted a fashion of speech and writing from which for some years few writers stood aloof. Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia", a long pastoral romance of sentiment, however, broke the spell and in its turn created a vogue. The novels of this time follow the "Euphues" or the "Arcadia" in most examples, but there is also a third type in the work of Nash, the novel of wild and reckless adventure, which was afterwards to become famous in the greater work of Smollet. Criticism of poetry, history, often in the form of chronicles, geography, and adventure, such as in Hakluyt's collection of "Voyages", together with innumerable translations from classical and modern authors, were some of the matters treated in prose. In the novel, as in the drama, the foreign influences, especially those of Spain and Italy, are easy to trace. Though not of the first order of art, the Elizabethan prose is yet most attractive, for it reflects the varied interests and the complex character of the strange and wonderful time of the sixteenth century, and it exhibits in their early stages certain forms of literature, such as criticism and the novel, which were afterwards to develop into orders of the first importance. It is scarcely needful to say that Catholics, of necessity, in this epoch, for them, of disaster and persecution, took little part in the great output of literature.
From one point of view the history of English poetry would seem to be a record of action and reaction, of a struggle between one type of poetry and another, between that in which the matter delivered is all important, and that where correctness of form is the chief end at which the poets aim — between, in fact, the romantic and the classical schools. This general trend may be most clearly seen in the work of the crowd of secondary poets in any age, but the few who excel will be found to combine and reconcile in themselves, more or less, the opposing elements, though, naturally, both small and great poets will exhibit some individual bias, however slight, towards one type of work or another. This statement is practically true of the seventeenth century. In the very heart of the romantic poetry of the immediate successors of the Elizabethans, there arose, in the early years of the century, a few young men who began to write verse of another kind altogether, whose work was not developed to its full meaning, however, until Dryden took it up. Meanwhile, one matchless poet, John Milton, living through the greater part of the century, went his own way ("his soul was like a star and dwelt apart"), taking little notice of prevailing types or subject-matter, fusing romantic and classical elements into one superb kind of work that we can find no name for but "Miltonic".
Before looking in any detail at seventeenth-century verse, it is well to glance at the general character of the age. it is a contrast to that which had preceded it. The Elizabethan time had been exuberant almost to intoxication, rejoicing in the great range of possibilities for human life that new knowledge, exploration, and learning seemed to open out before it. But over this mood at the end of the century there passed a change. Questioning succeeded the brilliant joy in things as they had appeared; self-consciousness followed the almost impersonal delight in life; the very foundations of religion, politics, and social life were called up for investigation. There had in reality always been a good deal of unrest beneath the surface, even after the settlement of these matters attempted and apparently in part accomplished by Elizabeth. Now the unrest increased, and a sceptical spirit, light or sad, according to the author's temperament, pervades much of the most capable writing. At the same time there are religious writers who express both in prose and verse the best spirit of the Anglican Church when under the sway of Archbishop Laud, and now there rises also to its full height the great Puritan movement (already, however, split up into a growing number of sects), strongly and narrowly affirmative of certain views concerning Divine and human things, passing oftener than not into intolerance and wild fanaticism. Milton, on the whole, represents this movement at its best, though its weaknesses may be discovered, especially in his prose work, even in him.
At the beginning of the reign of James I we find the group of poets whose inspiration was Spenser, amongst whom the chief are the two Fletchers, William Browne, and George Wither. All have a sweetness and fullness in their work which links them to the Elizabethans. Passing on to the reign of Charles I, we are struck by a more widely spread order of poets, men who, at their best, are all more or less touched by the desire to find behind material objects an imaginative idea, "the search for the after-sense", and who in trying to express that which they thought they found used an over-abundance of imagery, sometimes beautiful, but often pedantic and fantastic to the point of absurdity. To these Dr. Johnson gave the name of "metaphysical", and to see them at their worst one should look at his quotations from them in his "Life of Cowley". The movement was not confined to England; Italy, France, and Spain had felt it earlier. John Donne (whose verse belongs in date to the reign of Elizabeth) is reckoned as the founder of this school in England. Herrick and the amourists known as "Cavalier Lyrists" form one group in it, and Crashaw, Herbert, and Vaughan, religious poets, together with Herrick, are the only ones whose work has secured immortality. Crashaw, a fervent Catholic convert, whose religious verses are often very beautiful, shows in a marked degree the great strength and the great weakness of this school. Professor Saintsbury, the most discerning critic of this poetical group, has said that if Crashaw "could but have kept himself at his best he would have been the greatest of English poets". Of another Catholic poet, William Habington, Crashaw's contemporary, but less than he, though occasionally writing fine passages, the same critic remarks that he is "creditably distinguished" from too many others "by a very strict and remarkable decency of thought and language".
But this was poetry which could not develop; it was a kind of second crop from the Elizabethan field, and it gradually withered away. Some time before its end, certain young poets, several of whom had been in France, exiled with the Queen, Henrietta Maria, and had caught a new spirit, turned to fresh ways of verse. Edmund Waller (1605-1687) led the way as early as 1620. Denham, Cowley, and Davenant (a Catholic and romantic, brought up in the house of Lord Brooke, Sir Philip Sidney's friend) followed him in varying degrees. These young poets initiated a change of far-reaching effect. In their hands poetry took on another aspect. It discarded nearly all forms of metre except the heroic couplet, refused to use any but rather commonplace imagery, and turning away from all passionate emotion, tended to treat of subjects which belonged to the intellect rather than to imagination or feeling. Satire or didactic poetry gradually usurped almost the whole field. But this was not accomplished in full until Dryden came. It was he who stamped this school with its leading marks, and gave the heroic couplet its "long resounding march and energy divine". Yet the restricted and prosaic subject-matter of this verse — satiric, didactic, and argumentative work on religion ("The Hind and the Panther" Was written in the cause of the Church) and politics — has made some critics deny to it, unjustly, the name of poetry. it is poetry of a certain restricted kind.
John Dryden (1631-1700), had he lived in a time more favourable to imaginative work, would have written verse more purely poetic. He had about him something of the amplitude, inventiveness, and freedom of the Elizabethans, and the history of his poetic development shows him passing from stage to stage of excellence. Though he was the crown and chief of the so-called "classical school", he was indeed deeply tinged with romantic feeling, and he himself knew and acknowledged that poetry was capable of a higher flight and wider range than it had ever taken in his own day. He was, moreover, a man of many powers. He was a prolific dramatist, and his critical writings have made an epoch in the history of English prose. In the course of his life he changed his politics and his religion; and though doubts have been cast upon his good faith in this respect, the most recent criticism is of opinion that he had nothing but spiritual ends to gain by his conversion to Catholicism. It is unfortunate that we cannot exonerate him as an author from the charge of that sensuality which mars a good deal of his dramatic writing — it is no better and sometimes worse than the immoral thought brilliantly witty drama of his time. He himself at the close of his life wrote a full apology for this trait in his work.
Dryden's lines on Milton show the exalted estimate he had formed of his greater and earlier contemporary, and time has proved the general truth of it. The poetry of Milton (1608-1674) has become an English classic, and "Paradise Lost" has been translated into many tongues. It is regarded as the one great epic in English, and its fame has somewhat overshadowed that of Milton's earlier work — "L'Allegro", "Il Penseroso", "Comus", and "Lycidas" — poems within their own limits as perfect as anything he ever did. It is when we turn to his prose that we realize, from the immeasurable difference between it and his verse, how comparatively low the received standard of prose must have been. "Milton, the great architect of the paragraph and the sentence in verse, seems to be utterly ignorant of the laws of both in prose, or at least utterly incapable or careless of obeying those laws." Yet it contains some splendid passages more like poetry than prose, but the controversial matter which is the subject of most of it — to say nothing of its often violent manner — is scarcely interesting to the present generation. Prose in the seventeenth century had an eventful history, and in spite of the lack of a high common standard, produced some masterpieces. At the beginning of it there is the weighty work of Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), embracing in many volumes matters of natural science, philosophy , history, ethics, worldly wisdom, even fiction, and in the "Essays" and the "Advancement of Learning" especially, adding to English classics. Lord Clarendon's "History" presents a noble gallery of portraits; there is Sir Thomas Browne (accounted by his enthusiastic admirers one of the greatest prose writers in all the range of English) is the finest of the rhetorical, fantastic, and wholly delightful set of writers who arose at this time, treating in a semi-speculative fashion a wide, various range of subject-matter. A number of religious and devotional works appear, among which the sermons of Jeremy Taylor stand high, and John Bunyan in "The Pilgrim's Progress" produced a masterpiece of English. Nor must we forget the Authorized Version of the Bible, in 1611 — a work of a wonderful prose style, eclectic, drawn from many sources, and yet having the appearance of absolute naturalness and simplicity. Preaching was a notable feature of the time, and the very long sermons of Tillotson, Barrow, Stillingfleet, and others make good literature. Dryden claimed Archbishop Tillotson as his master in prose, and it is when we come to Dryden's own work in the latter half of the century that we find prose beginning to take its place as "the other harmony" of verbal artistic expression. On the whole, it is the mark of Restoration prose to become conversational, and we may say that modern prose, easy, flexible, and fitted for general use, arose in Dryden's critical prefaces.
Dryden died in 1700, and with the opening of the eighteenth century we pass into an age of strongly marked characteristics. The Revolution by which the Stuart dynasty was displaced had been accomplished, involving, naturally, great changes in the fortunes of religious and political life, particularly disastrous to the Catholic Faith in England. In its earlier stages the century is filled by the party strife of Whigs and Tories, and by the religious movements known as Methodism and Deism — two strange opposites. In the upper classes there was a general lowering of spiritual and emotional temperature — to be enthusiastic was "bad form" — and religion and literature equally suffered. The growing middle class seems to some extent to have escaped this tepidity, and the preaching of Methodism touched their hearts. The "Church of England", now the State "established" Church, was, however, in a state of spiritual poverty — many of her best clergy having left her for conscience' sake at the time of the Act of Uniformity. As far as the current stream of poetry was concerned, it had become an affair of a circle of leisured and fashionable people. A great admiration prevailed for the classics and classical principles, seen generally through the eyes of French critics.
The century opened badly for literature. For years there had not been such a barren literary time. Dryden had just died, and though much verse was being written, it was mostly poor. In prose, there were few men of any mark. The only work showing power was the drama, in the brilliant and immoral comedies of Congreve, Vanburgh, and Farquhar. But within ten years there was a remarkable change. Pope came to the front in verse, and for many years poetry was to be almost synonymous with his name. In prose there was a galaxy of genius, Swift (1667-1746), Addison (1672-1719), Steele (1671-1726), Berkeley (1685-1753), to mention only a few, in whose hands modern prose — mature, varied, capable, combining, when at its best, strength, sweetness, grace, and magnificence — becomes henceforth a secure possession of English literature. But this was not all at once. Prose had first to go through a discipline from the hands not only of writers just mentioned, together with the great novelists in the first half of the century, but from Dr. Johnson and those who followed him, especially the historians Gibbon and Robertson. It thus took on a certain formality and stateliness not known before.
Pope and Johnson are the two names that dominate almost tyrannically the first and second half respectively of the eighteenth century. Most of the elements of his age are more or less represented in the work of Alexander Pope (1688-1744), though, as a Catholic, his religious sympathies lay in another direction than those of his day. His first important poem, the "Essay on Criticism", hays down rules for the guidance of critics according to the prevalent classical ideals; his "Rape of the Lock", perhaps his best poem, gives a brilliant and witty picture of the high society of his time; his translation of Homer is a Greek story told in an eighteenth-century manner; his "Essay on Man" is a versifying of Shaftesbury's philosophy; and the "Essays and Epistles" and the "Dunciad" are didactic and satiric. Dryden and Pope share between them the chief honours of English satire. Pope's picture of Atticus (Addison) and Dryden's of Zimri (Buckingham) have no equals in our satiric literature. The subject-matter of Pope's poetry may sometimes fail to interest us, but the versification always claims attention. Pope refined and polished and super-refined the heroic couplet until it became the most perfect instrument for satiric verse; It has not the original vigour and variety of Dryden's couplet, but it has a finer finish and a more subtle thrust.
The greatest strength of literature, however, at this time went into prose, and the prose writers contemporary with Pope are men of genius, with Swift by far the greatest of them. His "Tale of a Tub" and "Gulliver's Travels" — to mention only the two greatest of his writings — show a power of intellect and imagination worthy to be employed upon much finer subject matter. The first part of "Gulliver's Travels" finds him, perhaps, at his happiest, and is less marred by the bitter rage against men and life, and the touches of foulness, which spoil so much of his work. He is, too, one of the great humourists, and his style is marked by sincerity, clearness, force, flexibility, and sometimes grace.
But the greatest work in prose, on the whole, was done by Addison and Steele in the essays of "The Tatler" and "The Spectator". They were men of less genius than Swift, but who looked at life humanly and wished to add to men's peace and happiness. They expressed with wit, kindliness, and literary skill their views and their intentions. Their definite aim was to bring together the opposing parties in politics and religion by showing them how much of life and interests they possessed in common, and by gentle raillery and wellbred exhortation, to "rub off their corners". They did accomplish much of this; everybody, regardless of politics, read the Essays, which came out several times a week, or daily, and everyone enjoyed and talked them over. Polite literature by this means permeated and helped to refine the great and growing middle class.
Another form of prose which arises now, and was destined to even a much greater future than the essay, was the novel. The modern novel is born with the work of Richardson and Fielding — the work of the one viewing things from an emotional standpoint, that of the other giving a more comprehensive and objective picture of life. Richardson wrote out of his own native feeling and somewhat restricted experience; Fielding, equally original, was largely and beneficially influenced by Cervantes and the novel of Spain. Both are men of genius, whose work grips the reader, but their offences against good taste and morality will always prevent their becoming household companions as Scott and Dickens have become. Smollett and Sterne continue the life of the novel, and Goldsmith, in his masterpiece, "The Vicar of Wakefield", has earned the gratitude of all readers. Biography, philosophy, and history have a large and distinguished place in the prose of this time. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) accomplished many kinds of literature. His earliest attempt as well as his latest is biography; of essays he wrote many, but his genius is not best suited to that form, and the work is too often ponderous and mannered; novel and ethical treatise are combined in the delightful pages of "Rasselas". His great dictionary is philology with an autobiographical flavour; his lives of the poets are partly biographical, but mainly critical, while criticism fills a good space in his edition of Shakespeare. But it is not only the range and value of all this work which makes it so attractive, but — in spite of its limitations — the sincere, strong, kindly character that animates every line of it.
"That fellow calls forth all my powers", said Johnson of Burke. Edmund Burke (1729-1797) is now looked upon as England's greatest political philosopher, and his writings belong in subject-matter to history and politics, rather than to literature. Their style, however, rich, imaginative, full of energy, varied to suit its theme, moving among worlds of knowledge, and selecting just the right word and illustration in each place, puts him among the great literary writers of the century. Both Johnson and Burke are touched with the romantic spirit, but Johnson would have vigorously repudiated any charge of romanticism in his work, and indeed he stood as a great bulwark against the flood of new thought and feeling which, becoming apparent after the death of Pope, had been rising little by little, especially in poetry, ever since the twenties. The great romantic movement, so difficult to define, and yet so easy to trace, becomes the supreme point of interest for the literary historian in the later eighteenth century. There is no class of poetry written during this time but stands in some relation to it, and its influence, as we have said, may be seen, though less clearly, in many of the prose writings.
This movement was for the widening and deepening of literature. New fields of subject-matter were taken in hand, and the treatment of these gradually became more imaginative and emotional than it had been since the Elizabethan age. Nature and human life, after suffering from somewhat frigid treatment at the hands of the classical school, seemed to unstiffen and to become warm, living, and natural with the romantic writers. But this was a very gradual process, and began in the very heart of the classical movement; we may even see traces of it in the unrealized longings of Pope himself, who loved Spenser, and who wished he could write a fairy tale. We see the change coining in the gradual rise of fresh metres, and especially of blank verse, in opposition to the heroic couplet; in fact the struggle of romantic against classic centred to some extent round these two forms.
But just as marked is the choice of new subject-matter. "Nature for her own sake" — natural description imbedded in other matter, or even forming the sole subject of poems — now occupy the writer. Human life, in aspects neglected by the school of Pope, begins to assert itself. And all this new matter, treated first in a melancholy moralizing spirit, gradually grows in imaginative strength, simplicity, and naturalness, until we reach the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in which the movement is brought to its height and at the same time takes on a new freshness and impetus. James Thomson (1700-1748) published his blank-verse poem of "The Seasons" in 1726-30, and, even though there are many traces in it of the school of Pope, it sounds the first clear note of revolt. It is the first blank-verse poem of importance in the century, and the first important poem devoted to natural description. Many new elements are found in it, too, such as the interest in the poor and the labouring class, and in lands beyond England, as well as a new feeling and affection for animals. In 1748, the year of his death, Thomson published his "Castle of Indolence", the best imitation of Spenser's verse and manner that exists, and this was another sign of change. There were many poems written in blank verse or in Spenserian stanza between this poet and the work of Gray, whose contribution to the romantic movement is seen perhaps most clearly in his translations from the Icelandic and Gaelic, where he opened up a new field of subject-matter for the interest of readers and the use of poets. And Gray's poems, small in quantity, but exquisitely finished, were not his only work; as a prose writer he gives us in his letters and journals firsthand and beautiful descriptions of nature in unaffected English. But his poetry is less simple, and, with its restraint of manner, might in some aspects be claimed by the classical school. It is in the decade after his death that we find the movement towards the more natural style expressing itself unmistakably in the half-mournful glamour of Macpherson's rhythmical prose "translations" of the Celtic poetry of Ossian, in the poems of the unhappy boy-genius Chatterton, and in the collection of "Percy Ballads".
Following on these, however, there is a strong attempt at reaction in the poetry of Dr. Johnson, Churchill, and Goldsmith — though Goldsmith's charming poems are more romantic than he knew. But in the next few years the battle is quickly won for romance by four poets: Burns, Cowper, Crabbe, and Blake, whose significance in the movement is more fully recognized now than it was then. Burns, who wrote the best of his poetry in a mixed Scottish dialect, had been nourished on the best English poets of the past, and the clearness and precision of his verse as well as its satirical and didactic subject-matter belongs to the school of Pope at its best. But, on the other hand, the essential spirit of his satire, in contrast with the detached coldness of Pope's, is a consuming fire, as Swinburne has pointed out, while his songs, full of melody and passionate feeling, though all in the line of previous Scottish poetry, were new as regards England, and were truly romantic in tone and manner. There are poems and passages of verse that we wish Burns had never written, but the largest part of his work belongs to our great literary store of things noble and humane.
In William Cowper (1731-1800) we come to a poet whose influence is more and more recognized as of first importance in the romantic trend of eighteenth-century poetry. Living the most retired of lives, and not writing much until over fifty years of age, he has left a body of poetry marked with his own gentle, affectionate, humorous, and sometimes tragic genius, much of which has become classic in English. His best long poem, "The Task", in blank verse, contains his most original work in the clear and simple descriptions of natural scenery. He also, like Gray, was one of the best of our letter-writers. George Crabbe (1754-1832) wrote nearly all his poetry in the heroic couplet, but used that form with more freedom than his contemporaries. Much of his work is of the story kind, and some of his poems are like novels in verse. Though he chose a hackneyed form for his work, and though all his sketches and stories tend to edification in a didactic way, he is never dull, and his analysis of motive and temperament and his realism are strangely modern in the antiquated setting of the heroic couplet. His work deserves more notice than English readers as a rule give to it. William Blake (1757-1827), the fourth of these poets, is one of those geniuses who belong to no one time or place. Some of the simple and charming poems in his two best known little volumes, "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience", might have been written by an Elizabethan, while his long mystical works in verse, not truly poetical, show him in the light of a dreamer whose dreams are rooted in some spiritual reality which only a very few readers can discern with him. But his poetry, as a whole, though scarcely heeded at all by the public of his own day, has been found, as it has received more attention recently, to contain within itself the germs of many later developments of thought and feeling in society and literature. He was an engraver and painter as well as a poet, and his work in these capacities cannot be neglected if one wishes to understand the character of his genius.
Crabbe and Blake carry us on into the nineteenth century, but before their death Wordsworth and Coleridge accomplished the first of their epoch-making work. With these two poets we enter upon the story of our modern literature. Wordsworth and Coleridge are still in some sense with us, as their predecessors of the seventeenth and eighteenth century are not. All English modern poets are directly or indirectly influenced by them. They deliberately determined to be missionaries in poetry, and they accomplished a mission in the face of great discouragement and opposition. The small volume of "Lyrical Ballads" published in 1798, when they were young men together under thirty, made a revolution in poetry and was the fulfilment of nearly all that the romantic writers had been trying half unconsciously to bring about. The "Ancient Mariner", which opened the book, and the "Tintern Abbey Lines", which closed it, to say nothing of the many successes and few failures which fill up the space between, were alone enough to set up a poetic standard of high and peculiar significance. In these poems there was accurate nature-description of the best kind, shot through with the poet's own imagination and feeling; there was love of, and interest in vivid human life, regardless of class or country; there was weighty ethical matter without dullness. It is perhaps in this seriousness with which life is viewed that we find one of the key-notes of the poetical literature of the later Victorian age. It has been said of William Wordsworth (1770-1850) that he wrote of "what is in all men", and the leading ideas of his poetry are indeed those in which all natural and sane human beings can join. The healing and joy-giving power of nature, the strength, beauty, and pathos of the simplest human affections, more especially as seen in the less sophisticated men and women of the poorer classes in the country, may be realized by all. But Wordsworth had also a philosophy of nature and her relationship to human beings which was the foundation of all his teaching, and which he expounded in poem after poem, in passages often of very great beauty, and in much variety of style. It may be here noticed that Wordsworth's style varies more than the ordinary judgment gives him credit for. In his eagerness for freedom from conventional phrasing, he strove, as he himself tells us in his prose critical prefaces to the poems, for utter simplicity of language which to us at times seems bare and even puerile in its effect; but he is capable more than most of a richness of style and diction, especially in his blank verse, that is the very opposite of his own theory. He has many styles, and no critical summing up of his manner is ever quite satisfactory to the Wordsworthian who realizes this.
The poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) does not represent the poet with anything like the same fullness as does that of Wordsworth. Those of Coleridge's poems which are of the first order of poetry are few, but they are inimitable and perfect of their kind, and have a melody of peculiar witchery. Coleridge was a greater, wider genius than Wordsworth, and his deepest thoughts went into pedestrian prose. He has left only fragmentary work on philosophy and criticism behind him, but even that has affected and still affects the thought of our own time. Had Coleridge possessed the will-power and endurance of Wordsworth in addition to his own genius, no one can tell to what heights he might have attained. His career is a tragedy of character.
On these two poets when young men, as well as on Southey and others, the altruistic philosophy of the French revolutionary movement had a profound effect, and in Wordsworth's "Prelude" we may see to some extent the extraordinary and stimulating influence of these ideas upon some of the young and generous English minds. But in spite of much that was true in it, the elements of error, inadequacy, and crudeness in this philosophy became apparent, especially in the course of the French Revolution and a revulsion from it fell upon both Coleridge and Wordsworth. Wordsworth alone of the two emerged from the trial unembittered — thanks to nature and to his sister Dorothy — though how crucial to his life this crisis was he has himself told us. No one can properly understand the poetry of this time, nor of the following age of Shelley, Byron, and Keats, if he does not to some extent realize the high and generous hopes raised by the ideas of the Revolution in certain ardent minds in England. They saw countless evils and oppression in the social life of the time, and here, in the working out of the ideas of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, seemed a full remedy. The three poets just mentioned lived in the reaction from these hopes. Byron was embittered, partly from personal causes, and partly because of the state of the society in which he lived. He saw no redemption at hand. Shelley was fired by the revolutionary principles as he found them interpreted by the rationalism of Godwin, even while he shared, too, in the reaction caused by the excesses of France. Keats never entered into them at all, but turned by a sort of instinct away from the dreariness of life, as he saw it around hum, to nature and beauty.
But there is one great writer who was untouched either by the action or reaction of the revolutionary ferment. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) loved the past and believed in it and to the end of his life he was conservative in religion and politics. In his novels and in much of his poetry he made popular those romantic elements in the life of the past which are more particularly associated with the Ages of Faith. His close and affectionate description of the Scottish scenery he loved so much was a strong influence in developing the care for natural scenery which has become one of the leading marks of the nineteenth century. His poetry at its very best is found in many of his short songs and ballads, and in detached passages of his longer poems, and it is verse not unworthy to be placed beside the finest romantic work of the time. But his best-known narrative poems — "The Lay of the Last Minstrel", "Marmion", and "The Lady of the Lake" — have all through a great and special charm, and their style, clear, rapid, full of energy, together with their almost faultless diction, make them worthy of their place among our classics. The popularity of Scott's narrative poetry was overshadowed, however, by the narrative work of Lord Byron, but to our gain, since this led Scott to turn to another form of art and to produce "The Waverley Novels".
Of the three young poets of genius whose short lives accomplished such remarkable poetic work, Lord Byron (1788-1824) is now perhaps the least influential, though at the time his fame overshadowed every other writer of verse. His extraordinarily vigorous satires, marked by his study of Pope, whose poetry he championed in a literary controversy of the time, are unique in the energy of their style and the strength and sting of their wit. It is unfortunate that a large part of them are marred, for the ordinary reader, by their extreme voluptuousness. His verse tales of romantic adventure are imaginative, but pail upon us by their tendency to sentimentality. His songs and occasional pieces, together with "Childe Harold" — parts of which have fine nature-description — show him in a more agreeable poetic light. His many dramas are not truly dramatic, but are rather the outpouring of his own powerful mind seeking an outlet. If we are inclined to take an anti-Byronic attitude, it is well to remember, first, that his brilliant, undisciplined, passionate work, though it never reached the height of the noblest art, yet taught a lesson of force, vitality, and sincerity to an age which, in spite of its good, was marked by much artificiality, callousness, and insincerity in both life and literature. He did this in a rude and melodramatic way, but he did it. And secondly, let those who judge Byron's wild private career not forget to read the last poem that he wrote, and realize that a change of temper, aspiration towards nobler things, was awakening in him before he died.
Keats and Shelley invite comparison; their difference and their likeness are equally striking. They lived the same length of time, did all their work before thirty, dying young and with tragedy. They left behind them poetry of the highest order — their lyrics are masterpieces — containing the promise of still finer work. They were the devoted lovers of beauty, believing in it as the supreme reality, and were in earnest over their art, both of them leaving behind grave poems expressing their unfinished, and therefore often unsatisfactory and misleading, philosophy of life. Each poet also has written remarkable prose. It is a great mistake to consider Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) as the "ineffectual angel" sketched by Matthew Arnold. He was quite half human, and not at all ineffectual. His most ethereal lyrics will be found to possess a basis of logical thought, while his prose writings show him as a thinker quite capable of keeping the imagination in her place. There are signs, too, in the development of his work that he was growing more and more capable of preserving the balance of the intellect and the imagination. The work that he accomplished in his short life is much and varied. Putting aside his early poems, there is the almost perfect "Adonais", the grave and beautiful lyrical drama of "Prometheus Unbound", in which he states his hopes (not always well grounded and apparently anti-Christian, though he reverenced certain elements in Christianity) for the future of the world; there is a crowd of short and exquisite lyrics — the highest watermark of English poetry of this kind — as well as the fateful and mystic "Triumph of Life", to say nothing of many others, and amongst them some fine dramatic work in blank verse. And he was only twenty-eight when he was drowned. Upon his errors of thought and of conduct we need not dwell. They are plain before us in his life. Outside his literary work, and, now and then intruding into it, a certain crudity of youth appears. But all he does and says is in good faith, and for his errors he suffered bitterly during his short life. One of the noblest and most discerning of tributes ever paid to his genius has been lately published from the pen of the now well-known Catholic poet, Francis Thompson. John Keats (1795-1821) accomplished less actual work, but had in him, it is generally allowed, greater potentiality of genius. He started life handicapped in circumstance and physical health, while he had no influence or following in his own short lifetime, and "it is the copious perfection of work accomplished so early and under so many disadvantages which is the wonder of biographers". His odes on "The Nightingale", "A Grecian Urn", and "Autumn" are supreme art. Some of his narrative poems are among the best of their kind and his fragment of "Hyperion" shows what he might have accomplished had he lived to practise this graver type of poetry. His fame, however, is now established, and his poetic influence has been one of the strongest in the nineteenth century.
After the death of Keats poetry seems for a time to have exhausted itself. There is little to chronicle except the chirpings of small poets until the great age of Victorian poetry opens with Tennyson and Browning. But, to fill up the early years of the century, there is fine work in prose. The great series of Sir Walter Scott's novels extend from 1814 to 1831, and many smaller efficient writers are ranged round this central figure. The wild enthusiasm with which the Waverley novels were received can perhaps never be renewed. A multitude of causes have tended to divert and disturb the public taste for these great books, and it now fluctuates sometimes farther from, sometimes nearer to, them. But such work as his is immortal, and regardless of human fluctuations, it will, and does, appeal always to a multitude of readers — learned or unlearned — whose mind and imagination are open to receive the gifts of genius apart from the trend of fashion. Scott's novels are full of kindly humanity, of close and accurate drawing of many types of character, only to be equalled by Shakespeare or Chaucer, of wide and detailed historical knowledge, though, to Catholic regret, he never understood or adequately represented the Church, handled magnificently with equal imagination and sanity, so that age after age lives again, not only as the dry facts of history which have been brought laboriously together "bone to his bone", but as a living human world whose dwellers have been raised out of silence to their feet by the creative voice — "an exceeding great army". Of Scott's work even more than of Chaucer's, we may say, with Dryden, "Here is God's plenty".
Scott died in 1832, and the Victorian age opened in literary faintness. Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning were on the verge of the horizon, but it was not until 1840 or so that there came that dazzling revival of literature such as had not been seen since the Elizabethan age, and which in extent and swiftness of production eclipsed that age. Into the causes of this it is impossible here to enter. Tennyson and Browning are leaders among the poets far into the century, while Elizabeth Barrett Browning makes a distant third. Tennyson and Browning are representative of the most important phases of the Victorian age, universally acknowledged, though general opinion is still divided as to their relative merits. Both are artists of a high order, but Tennyson is the greater and more consistent. Both feel the importance, gravity, and interest of life. Both take a religious view of life and have that spirit of reverence which is lacking in many of their followers. Both believe in their mission to call men to forsake materialism, and each, in his own particular way, is a lover of natural beauty. Browning's sympathies are, in a sense, wider than Tennyson's, but Tennyson's feeling goes deeper, perhaps, on the great religious and moral questions than Browning's.
If we are still too near Tennyson and Browning to be able to form a true estimate of them, we are even less able to judge the writers of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The numerous streams of literature become bewildering to follow. We distinguish before the end of the career of the two greatest poets the fine but smaller figures of Rossetti, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, and others, doing work of true genius though not all of equal power. None of them, however, have the vivid inspirations of great, impelling, impersonal ideas such as filled Wordsworth and Shelley. The note of melancholy and uncertainty concerning life and its meaning and the future beyond this life, is always more or less there in undertone. The optimism of Browning and the faith of Tennyson are not to be found, but their love of beauty is fervent and stimulating.
In the last quarter of the century poetry has taken on many strange and sometimes beautiful forms. A high level of excellence has prevailed on the whole. Poets of remarkable promise and achievement have appeared. Amongst these , Francis Thompson (1859-1907), in the opinion of most, takes the commanding place. The appreciation of him by well-known and most able critics has been extraordinarily unamimous and unstinted. He seems "to have reached the peaks of Parnassus at a bound". He has been compared with almost every great previous English poet, and whatever may be the more balanced verdict of the future, his poetic immortality is assured. And his Catholic religion was his deepest inspiration.
The prose which grew up around the greatest Victorian poetry was worthy of its company. A brilliant group of writers as well as of thinkers in many spheres of knowledge and art appeared, and in this respect the age has surpassed the Elizabethan. The development of the novel is the most distinguishing mark of Victorian prose literature. Dickens and Thackeray follow upon Scott, with a host of other novelists, men and women, of varying grades of power, who come up to our own day. Graver forms of literature also have been many and splendid. There are the essayists, with Lamb and Hazlitt as the chief; the historians with Macaulay and Carlyle, Froude, Freeman, and Green; Ruskin, with his immense and varied work upon art, economics, and the conduct of life, and whose influence, all for good, in spite of the vagaries of literary taste, is still strong and growing. The enormous extent and range of theological literature is a remarkable feature of the last fifty years, and here the writings of John Henry Newman stand out as a supreme "literary glory". Newman touched poetry with imagination, grace, and skill, but it is by his prose that he is recognized as a great master of English style. While all critics agree that the "Apologia" is a masterpiece, and that "nothing he wrote in prose or verse is superfluous", there is some difference of opinion as to the respective literary values of his earlier and later work. R.H. Hutton, however, one of his acutest non-Catholic critics, considers that "in irony, in humour, in imaginative force, the writings of the later portions of his career far surpass those of his theological apprenticeship".
Catholic writers are now many. After long years of repression they have their full freedom in the arena of literature, and there is more than a promise that when the history of the twentieth century comes to be written many Catholic names will be found in the highest places on the roll of honour.
K.M. WARREN