Book: A History of English Literature

R >> Robert Huntington Fletcher >> A History of English Literature




JANE AUSTEN. Much the greatest of this trio of authoresses is the last,
Jane Austen, who perhaps belongs as much to the nineteenth century as the
eighteenth. The daughter of a clergyman, she past an absolutely uneventful
life of forty-two years (1775-1817) in various villages and towns in
Southern England. She had finished her masterpiece, 'Pride and Prejudice,'
at the age of twenty-two, but was unable for more than a dozen years to
find a publisher for this and her other earlier works. When at last they
were brought out she resumed her writing, but the total number of her
novels is only six. Her field, also, is more limited than that of any other
great English novelist; for she deliberately restricted herself, with
excellent judgment, to portraying what she knew at first-hand, namely the
life of the well-to-do classes of her own 'provincial' region. Moreover,
her theme is always love; desirable marriage for themselves or their
children seems to be the single object of almost all her characters; and
she always conducts her heroine successfully to this goal. Her artistic
achievement, like herself, is so well-bred and unobtrusive that a hasty
reader may easily fail to appreciate it. Her understanding of character is
almost perfect, her sense for structure and dramatic scenes (quiet ones)
equally good, and her quiet and delightful humor and irony all-pervasive.
Scott, with customary generosity, praised her 'power of rendering ordinary
things and characters interesting from the truth of her portrayal,' in
favorable contrast with his own facility in 'the Big Bow-Wow strain.'
Nevertheless the assertion of some present-day critics that she is the
greatest of all English authoresses is certainly extravagant. Her novels,
though masterly in their own field and style, do not have the fulness of
description or the elaboration of action which add beauty and power to most
later ones, and her lack of a sense for the greater issues of life denies
her legitimate comparison with such a writer as George Eliot.

SUMMARY. The variety of the literary influences in eighteenth century
England was so great that the century can scarcely be called a literary
unit; yet as a whole it contrasts clearly enough both with that which goes
before and with that which follows. Certainly its total contribution to
English literature was great and varied.




CHAPTER X

PERIOD VIII. THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798 TO ABOUT 1830


THE GREAT WRITERS OF 1798-1830. THE CRITICAL REVIEWS. As we look back
to-day over the literature of the last three quarters of the eighteenth
century, here just surveyed, the progress of the Romantic Movement seems
the most conspicuous general fact which it presents. But at the, death of
Cowper in 1800 the movement still remained tentative and incomplete, and it
was to arrive at full maturity only in the work of the great writers of the
following quarter century, who were to create the finest body of literature
which England had produced since the Elizabethan period. All the greatest
of these writers were poets, wholly or in part, and they fall roughly into
two groups: first, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert
Southey, and Walter Scott; and second, about twenty years younger, Lord
Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. This period of Romantic
Triumph, or of the lives of its authors, coincides in time, and not by mere
accident, with the period of the success of the French Revolution, the
prolonged struggle of England and all Europe against Napoleon (above, page
233), and the subsequent years when in Continental Europe despotic
government reasserted itself and sternly suppressed liberal hopes and
uprisings, while in England liberalism and democracy steadily and doggedly
gathered force until by the Reform Bill of 1832 political power was largely
transferred from the former small governing oligarchy to the middle class.
How all these events influenced literature we shall see as we proceed. The
beginning of the Romantic triumph is found, by general consent, in the
publication in 1798 of the little volume of 'Lyrical Ballads' which
contained the first significant poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Even during this its greatest period, however, Romanticism had for a time a
hard battle to fight, and a chief literary fact of the period was the
founding and continued success of the first two important English literary
and political quarterlies, 'The Edinburgh Review' and 'The Quarterly
Review,' which in general stood in literature for the conservative
eighteenth century tradition and violently attacked all, or almost all, the
Romantic poets. These quarterlies are sufficiently important to receive a
few words in passing. In the later eighteenth century there had been some
periodicals devoted to literary criticism, but they were mere
unauthoritative booksellers' organs, and it was left for the new reviews to
inaugurate literary journalism of the modern serious type. 'The Edinburgh
Review,' suggested and first conducted, in 1802, by the witty clergyman and
reformer Sydney Smith, passed at once to the hands of Francis (later Lord)
Jeffrey, a Scots lawyer who continued to edit it for nearly thirty years.
Its politics were strongly liberal, and to oppose it the Tory 'Quarterly
Review' was founded in 1808, under the editorship of the satirist William
Gifford and with the cooperation of Sir Walter Scott, who withdrew for the
purpose from his connection with the 'Edinburgh.' These reviews were
followed by other high-class periodicals, such as 'Blackwood's Magazine,'
and most of the group have maintained their importance to the present day.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. The poets Wordsworth and Coleridge are of special
interest not only from the primary fact that they are among the greatest of
English authors, but also secondarily because in spite of their close
personal association each expresses one of the two main contrasting or
complementary tendencies in the Romantic movement; Coleridge the delight in
wonder and mystery, which he has the power to express with marvelous poetic
suggestiveness, and Wordsworth, in an extreme degree, the belief in the
simple and quiet forces, both of human life and of Nature.

To Coleridge, who was slightly the younger of the two, attaches the further
pathetic interest of high genius largely thwarted by circumstances and
weakness of will. Born in Devonshire in 1772, the youngest of the many
children of a self-made clergyman and schoolmaster, he was a precocious and
abnormal child, then as always a fantastic dreamer, despised by other boys
and unable to mingle with them. After the death of his father he was sent
to Christ's Hospital, the 'Blue-Coat' charity school in London, where he
spent nine lonely years in the manner briefly described in an essay of
Charles Lamb, where Coleridge appears under a thin disguise. The very
strict discipline was no doubt of much value in giving firmness and
definite direction to his irregular nature, and the range of his studies,
both in literature and in other fields, was very wide. Through the aid of
scholarships and of contributions from his brothers he entered Cambridge in
1791, just after Wordsworth had left the University; but here his most
striking exploit was a brief escapade of running away and enlisting in a
cavalry troop. Meeting Southey, then a student at Oxford, he drew him into
a plan for a 'Pantisocracy' (a society where all should be equal), a
community of twelve young couples to be founded in some 'delightful part of
the new back settlements' of America on the principles of communistic
cooperation in all lines, broad mental culture, and complete freedom of
opinion. Naturally, this plan never past beyond the dream stage.

Coleridge left the University in 1794 without a degree, tormented by a
disappointment in love. He had already begun to publish poetry and
newspaper prose, and he now attempted lecturing. He and Southey married two
sisters, whom Byron in a later attack on Southey somewhat inaccurately
described as 'milliners of Bath'; and Coleridge settled near Bristol. After
characteristically varied and unsuccessful efforts at conducting a
periodical, newspaper writing, and preaching as a Unitarian (a creed which
was then considered by most Englishmen disreputable and which Coleridge
later abandoned), he moved with his wife in 1797 to Nether Stowey in
Somersetshire. Expressly in order to be near him, Wordsworth and his sister
Dorothy soon leased the neighboring manor-house of Alfoxden, and there
followed the memorable year of intellectual and emotional stimulus when
Coleridge's genius suddenly expanded into short-lived but wonderful
activity and he wrote most of his few great poems, 'The Ancient Mariner,'
'Kubla Khan,' and the First Part of 'Christabel.' 'The Ancient Mariner' was
planned by Coleridge and Wordsworth on one of their frequent rambles, and
was to have been written in collaboration; but as it proceeded, Wordsworth
found his manner so different from that of Coleridge that he withdrew
altogether from the undertaking. The final result of the incident, however,
was the publication in 1798 of 'Lyrical Ballads,' which included of
Coleridge's work only this one poem, but of Wordsworth's several of his
most characteristic ones. Coleridge afterwards explained that the plan of
the volume contemplated two complementary sorts of poems. He was to present
supernatural or romantic characters, yet investing them with human interest
and semblance of truth; while Wordsworth was to add the charm of novelty to
everyday things and to suggest their kinship to the supernatural, arousing
readers from their accustomed blindness to the loveliness and wonders of
the world around us. No better description could be given of the poetic
spirit and the whole poetic work of the two men. Like some other
epoch-marking books, 'Lyrical Ballads' attracted little attention. Shortly
after its publication Coleridge and the Wordsworths sailed for Germany,
where for the greater part of a year Coleridge worked hard, if irregularly,
at the language, literature, and philosophy.

The remaining thirty-five years of his life are a record of ambitious
projects and fitful efforts, for the most part turned by ill-health and
lack of steady purpose into melancholy failure, but with a few fragmentary
results standing out brilliantly. At times Coleridge did newspaper work, at
which he might have succeeded; in 1800, in a burst of energy, he translated
Schiller's tragedy 'Wallenstein' into English blank verse, a translation
which in the opinion of most critics surpasses the original; and down to
1802, and occasionally later, he wrote a few more poems of a high order.
For a few years from 1800 on he lived at Greta Hall in the village of
Keswick (pronounced Kesick), in the northern end of the Lake Region
(Westmoreland), fifteen miles from Wordsworth; but his marriage was
incompatible (with the fault on his side), and he finally left his wife and
children, who were thenceforward supported largely by Southey, his
successor at Greta Hall. Coleridge himself was maintained chiefly by the
generosity of friends; later, in part, by public pensions. It was
apparently about 1800, to alleviate mental distress and great physical
suffering from neuralgia, that he began the excessive use of opium
(laudanum) which for many years had a large share in paralyzing his will.
For a year, in 1804-5, he displayed decided diplomatic talent as secretary
to the Governor of Malta. At several different times, also, he gave
courses, of lectures on Shakspere and Milton; as a speaker he was always
eloquent; and the fragmentary notes of the lectures which have been
preserved rank very high in Shaksperean criticism. His main interest,
however, was now in philosophy; perhaps no Englishman has ever had a more
profoundly philosophical mind; and through scattered writings and through
his stimulating though prolix talks to friends and disciples he performed a
very great service to English thought by introducing the viewpoint and
ideas of the German transcendentalists, such as Kant, Schelling, and
Fichte. During his last eighteen years he lived mostly in sad acceptance of
defeat, though still much honored, in the house of a London physician. He
died in 1834.

As a poet Coleridge's first great distinction is that which we have already
pointed out, namely that he gives wonderfully subtile and appealing
expression to the Romantic sense for the strange and the supernatural, and
indeed for all that the word 'Romance' connotes at the present day. He
accomplishes this result partly through his power of suggesting the real
unity of the inner and outer worlds, partly through his skill, resting in a
large degree on vivid impressionistic description, in making strange scenes
appear actual, in securing from the reader what he himself called 'that
willing suspension of disbelief which constitutes poetic faith.' Almost
every one has felt the weird charm of 'The Ancient Mariner,' where all the
unearthly story centers about a moral and religious idea, and where we are
dazzled by a constant succession of such pictures as these:


And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.

We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
The western wave was all aflame:
The day was well nigh done:
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad, bright sun;
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the sun.

'Christabel' achieves what Coleridge himself described as the very
difficult task of creating witchery by daylight; and 'Kubla Khan,' worthy,
though a brief fragment, to rank with these two, is a marvelous glimpse of
fairyland.

In the second place, Coleridge is one of the greatest English masters of
exquisite verbal melody, with its tributary devices of alliteration and
haunting onomatopoeia. In this respect especially his influence on
subsequent English poetry has been incalculable. The details of his method
students should observe for themselves in their study of the poems, but one
particular matter should be mentioned. In 'Christabel' and to a somewhat
less degree in 'The Ancient Mariner' Coleridge departed as far as possible
from eighteenth century tradition by greatly varying the number of
syllables in the lines, while keeping a regular number of stresses. Though
this practice, as we have seen, was customary in Old English poetry and in
the popular ballads, it was supposed by Coleridge and his contemporaries to
be a new discovery, and it proved highly suggestive to other romantic
poets. From hearing 'Christabel' read (from manuscript) Scott caught the
idea for the free-and-easy meter of his poetical romances.

With a better body and will Coleridge might have been one of the supreme
English poets; as it is, he has left a small number of very great poems and
has proved one of the most powerful influences on later English poetry.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1770-1850. William Wordsworth [Footnote: The first
syllable is pronounced like the common noun 'words'] was born in 1770 in
Cumberland, in the 'Lake Region,' which, with its bold and varied mountains
as well as its group of charming lakes, is the most picturesque part of
England proper. He had the benefit of all the available formal education,
partly at home, partly at a 'grammar' school a few miles away, but his
genius was formed chiefly by the influence of Nature, and, in a qualified
degree, by that of the simple peasant people of the region. Already as a
boy, though normal and active, he began to be sensitive to the Divine Power
in Nature which in his mature years he was to express with deeper sympathy
than any poet before him. Early left an orphan, at seventeen he was sent by
his uncles to Cambridge University. Here also the things which most
appealed to him were rather the new revelations of men and life than the
formal studies, and indeed the torpid instruction of the time offered
little to any thoughtful student. On leaving Cambridge he was uncertain as
to his life-work. He said that he did not feel himself 'good enough' for
the Church, he was not drawn toward law, and though he fancied that he had
capacity for a military career, he felt that 'if he were ordered to the
West Indies his talents would not save him from the yellow fever.' At
first, therefore, he spent nearly a year in London in apparent idleness, an
intensely interested though detached spectator of the city life, but more
especially absorbed in his mystical consciousness of its underlying current
of spiritual being. After this he crossed to France to learn the language.
The Revolution was then (1792) in its early stages, and in his 'Prelude'
Wordsworth has left the finest existing statement of the exultant
anticipations of a new world of social justice which the movement aroused
in himself and other young English liberals. When the Revolution past into
the period of violent bloodshed he determined, with more enthusiasm than
judgment, to put himself forward as a leader of the moderate Girondins.
From the wholesale slaughter of this party a few months later he was saved
through the stopping of his allowance by his more cautious uncles, which
compelled him, after a year's absence, to return to England.

For several years longer Wordsworth lived uncertainly. When, soon after his
return, England, in horror at the execution of the French king, joined the
coalition of European powers against France, Wordsworth experienced a great
shock--the first, he tells us, that his moral nature had ever suffered--at
seeing his own country arrayed with corrupt despotisms against what seemed
to him the cause of humanity. The complete degeneration of the Revolution
into anarchy and tyranny further served to plunge him into a chaos of moral
bewilderment, from which he was gradually rescued partly by renewed
communion with Nature and partly by the influence of his sister Dorothy, a
woman of the most sensitive nature but of strong character and admirable
good sense. From this time for the rest of her life she continued to live
with him, and by her unstinted and unselfish devotion contributed very
largely to his poetic success. He had now begun to write poetry (though
thus far rather stiffly and in the rimed couplet), and the receipt of a
small legacy from a friend enabled him to devote his life to the art. Six
or seven years later his resources were several times multiplied by an
honorable act of the new Lord Lonsdale, who voluntarily repaid a sum of
money owed by his predecessor to Wordsworth's father.

In 1795 Wordsworth and his sister moved from the Lake Region to
Dorsetshire, at the other end of England, likewise a country of great
natural beauty. Two years later came their change (of a few miles) to
Alfoxden, the association with Coleridge, and 'Lyrical Ballads,' containing
nineteen of Wordsworth's poems (above, page 267). After their winter in
Germany the Wordsworths settled permanently in their native Lake Region, at
first in 'Dove Cottage,' in the village of Grasmere. This simple little
stone house, buried, like all the others in the Lake Region, in brilliant
flowers, and opening from its second story onto the hillside garden where
Wordsworth composed much of his greatest poetry, is now the annual center
of pilgrimage for thousands of visitors, one of the chief literary shrines
of England and the world. Here Wordsworth lived frugally for several years;
then after intermediate changes he took up his final residence in a larger
house, Rydal Mount, a few miles away. In 1802 he married Mary Hutchinson,
who had been one of his childish schoolmates, a woman of a spirit as fine
as that of his sister, whom she now joined without a thought of jealousy in
a life of self-effacing devotion to the poet.

Wordsworth's poetic inspiration, less fickle than that of Coleridge,
continued with little abatement for a dozen years; but about 1815, as he
himself states in his fine but pathetic poem 'Composed upon an Evening of
Extraordinary Splendour,' it for the most part abandoned him. He continued,
however, to produce a great deal of verse, most of which his admirers would
much prefer to have had unwritten. The plain Anglo-Saxon yeoman strain
which was really the basis of his nature now asserted itself in the growing
conservatism of ideas which marked the last forty years of his life. His
early love of simplicity hardened into a rigid opposition not only to the
materialistic modern industrial system but to all change--the Reform Bill,
the reform of education, and in general all progressive political and
social movements. It was on this abandonment of his early liberal
principles that Browning based his spirited lyric 'The Lost Leader.'

During the first half or more of his mature life, until long after he had
ceased to be a significant creative force, Wordsworth's poetry, for reasons
which will shortly appear, had been met chiefly with ridicule or
indifference, and he had been obliged to wait in patience while the
slighter work first of Scott and then of Byron took the public by storm.
Little by little, however, he came to his own, and by about 1830 he enjoyed
with discerning readers that enthusiastic appreciation of which he is
certain for all the future. The crowning mark of recognition came in 1843
when on the death of his friend Southey he was made Poet Laureate. The
honor, however, had been so long delayed that it was largely barren. Ten
years earlier his life had been darkened by the mental decay of his sister
and the death of Coleridge; and other personal sorrows now came upon him.
He died in 1850 at the age of eighty.

Wordsworth, as we have said, is the chief representative of some
(especially one) of the most important principles in the Romantic Movement;
but he is far more than a member of any movement; through his supreme
poetic expression of some of the greatest spiritual ideals he belongs among
the five or six greatest English poets. First, he is the profoundest
interpreter of Nature in all poetry. His feeling for Nature has two
aspects. He is keenly sensitive, and in a more delicately discriminating
way than any of his predecessors, to all the external beauty and glory of
Nature, especially inanimate Nature--of mountains, woods and fields,
streams and flowers, in all their infinitely varied aspects. A wonderfully
joyous and intimate sympathy with them is one of his controlling impulses.
But his feeling goes beyond the mere physical and emotional delight of
Chaucer and the Elizabethans; for him Nature is a direct manifestation of
the Divine Power, which seems to him to be everywhere immanent in her; and
communion with her, the communion into which he enters as he walks and
meditates among the mountains and moors, is to him communion with God. He
is literally in earnest even in his repeated assertion that from
observation of Nature man may learn (doubtless by the proper attuning of
his spirit) more of moral truth than from all the books and sages. To
Wordsworth Nature is man's one great and sufficient teacher. It is for this
reason that, unlike such poets as Keats and Tennyson, he so often views
Nature in the large, giving us broad landscapes and sublime aspects. Of
this mystical semi-pantheistic Nature-religion his 'Lines composed above
Tintern Abbey' are the noblest expression in literature. All this explains
why Wordsworth considered his function as a poet a sacred thing and how his
intensely moral temperament found complete satisfaction in his art. It
explains also, in part, the limitation of his poetic genius. Nature indeed
did not continue to be to him, as he himself says that it was in his
boyhood, absolutely 'all in all'; but he always remained largely absorbed
in the contemplation and interpretation of it and never manifested, except
in a few comparatively short and exceptional poems, real narrative or
dramatic power (in works dealing with human characters or human life).

In the second place, Wordsworth is the most consistent of all the great
English poets of democracy, though here as elsewhere his interest is mainly
not in the external but in the spiritual aspect of things. From his
insistence that the meaning of the world for man lies not in the external
events but in the development of character results his central doctrine of
the simple life. Real character, he holds, the chief proper object of man's
effort, is formed by quietly living, as did he and the dalesmen around him,
in contact with Nature and communion with God rather than by participation
in the feverish and sensational struggles of the great world. Simple
country people, therefore, are nearer to the ideal than are most persons
who fill a larger place in the activities of the world. This doctrine
expresses itself in a striking though one-sided fashion in his famous
theory of poetry--its proper subjects, characters, and diction. He stated
his theory definitely and at length in a preface to the second edition of
'Lyrical Ballads,' published in 1800, a discussion which includes
incidentally some of the finest general critical interpretation ever made
of the nature and meaning of poetry. Wordsworth declared: 1. Since the
purpose of poetry is to present the essential emotions of men, persons in
humble and rustic life are generally the fittest subjects for treatment in
it, because their natures and manners are simple and more genuine than
those of other men, and are kept so by constant contact with the beauty and
serenity of Nature. 2. Not only should artificial poetic diction (like that
of the eighteenth century) be rejected, but the language of poetry should
be a selection from that of ordinary people in real life, only purified of
its vulgarities and heightened so as to appeal to the imagination. (In this
last modification lies the justification of rime.) There neither is nor can
be any _essential_ difference between the language of prose and that
of poetry.

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.