Another essential quality of the critical mind that Arnold possessed is "sweet reasonableness." His judgments of men are marked by a moderation of tune. His strong predilections are sometimes shown, but they are more often restrained by a clear, honest intellect. Arnold's calm, measured criticisms are not marred by such stout partisanship as Macaulay shows for the Whigs, by the hero worship that Carlyle expresses, or by the exaggerated praise and blame that Ruskin sometimes bestows. On the other hand, Arnold loses what these men gain; for while his intellect is less biased than theirs, it is also less colored and less warmed by the glow of feeling.

The analytical quality of Arnold's mind shows the spirit of the age. His subjects are minutely classified and defined. Facts seem to divide naturally into brigades, regiments, and battalions of marching order. His literary criticisms note subtleties of style, delicate shadings in expression, and many technical excellences and errors that Carlyle would have passed over unheeded. In addition to the Essays in Criticism, the other works of Arnold that possess his fine critical dualities in highest degree are On Translating Homer (1861) and The Study of Celtic Literature (1867).

General Characteristics.—The impression that Arnold has left upon literature is mainly that of a keen, brilliant intellect. In his poetry there is more emotion than in his prose; but even in his poetry there is no passion or fire. The sadness, the loneliness, the unrest of life, and the irreconcilable conflict between faith and doubt are most often the subjects of his verse. His range is narrow, but within it he attains a pure, noble beauty. His introspective, analytical poetry is distinguished by a "majesty of grief," depth of thought, calm, classic repose, and a dignified simplicity.

In prose, Arnold attains highest rank as a critic of literature. His culture, the breadth of his literary sympathies, his scientific analyses, and his lucid literary style make his critical works the greatest of his age. He has a light, rather fanciful, humor, which gives snap and spice to his style. He is also a master of irony, which is galling to an opponent. He himself never loses his suavity or good breeding. Arnold's prose style is as far removed from Carlyle's as the calm simplicity of the Greeks is from the powerful passion of the Vikings. The ornament and poetic richness of Ruskin's style are also missing in Arnold's. His style has a classic purity and refinement. He has a terseness, a crystalline clearness, and a precision that have been excelled in the works of few even of the greatest masters of English prose.

ROBERT BROWNING, 1812-1889



Life.—The long and peaceful lives of Browning and Tennyson, the two most eminent poets of the Victorian age, are in marked contrast to the short and troubled careers of Byron, Shelley, and Keats.

Robert Browning's life was uneventful but happy. He inherited a magnificent physique and constitution from his father, who never knew a day's illness. With such health, Robert Browning felt a keen relish for physical existence and a robust joyousness in all kinds of activity. Late in life he wrote, in the poem At the Mermaid:—

"Have you found your life distasteful? My life did, and does, smack sweet. * * * * * I find earth not gray but rosy, Heaven not grim but fair of hue. Do I stoop? I pluck a posy. Do I stand and stare? All's blue."

Again, in Saul, he burst forth with the lines:—

"How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy?"

These lines, vibrant with life and joy, could not have been written by a man of failing vitality or physical weakness.

Robert Browning was born in 1812 at Camberwell, whose slopes overlook the smoky chimneys of London. In this beautiful suburb he spent his early years in the companionship of a brother and a sister. A highly gifted father and a musical mother assisted intelligently in the development of their children. Browning's education was conducted mainly under his father's eye. The boy attended neither a large school nor a college. After he had passed from the hands of tutors, he spent some time in travel, and was wont to call Italy his university. Although his training was received in an irregular way, his scholarship cannot be doubted by the student of his poetry.

He early determined to devote his life to poetry, and his father wisely refrained from interfering with his son's ambitions.



Romantic Marriage with Elizabeth Barrett Barrett,—Her Poetry.—In 1845, after Browning had published some ten volumes of verse, among which were Paracelsus (1835), Pippa Passes (1841), and Dramatic Lyrics (1842), he met Miss Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (1806-1861), whose poetic reputation was then greater than his own. The publication in 1898 of The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett disclosed an unusual romance. When he first met her, she was an invalid in her father's London house, passing a large part of her time on the couch, scarcely able to see all the members of her own family at the same time. His magnetic influence helped her to make more frequent journeys from the sofa to an armchair, then to walk across the room, and soon to take drives.

Her father, who might have sat for the original of Meredith's "Egoist," had decided that his daughter should be an invalid and remain with him for life. When Browning proposed to Miss Barrett that he should ask her father for her hand, she replied that such a step would only make matters worse. "He would rather see me dead at his feet than yield the point," she said. In 1846 Miss Barrett, accompanied by her faithful maid, drove to a church and was married to Browning. The bride returned home; but Browning did not see her for a week because he would not indulge in the deception of asking for "Miss Barrett." Seven days after the marriage, they quietly left for Italy, where Mrs. Browning passed nearly all her remaining years. She repeatedly wrote to her father, telling him of her transformed health and happy marriage, but he never answered her.

Before Miss Barrett met Browning, the woes of the factory children had moved her to write The Cry of the Children. After Edgar Allan Poe had read its closing lines:—

"...the child's sob in the silence curses deeper Than the strong man in his wrath,"

he said that she had depicted "a horror, sublime in its simplicity, of which Dante himself might have been proud."

Her best work, Sonnets from the Portuguese, written after Browning had won her affection, is a series of love lyrics, strong, tender, unaffected, true, from the depth of a woman's heart. Sympathetic readers, who know the story of her early life and love, are every year realizing that there is nothing else in English literature that could exactly fill their place. Browning called them "the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's." Those who like the simple music of the heart strings will find it in lines like these:—

"I love thee to the level of every day's Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight, I love thee freely, as men strive for right; I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints—I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death."

After fifteen years of happy married life, she died in 1861, and was buried in Florence. When thinking of her, Browning wrote his poem Prospice (1861) welcoming death as—

"...a peace out of pain, Then a light, then thy breast, O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again, And with God be the rest."

His Later Years.—Soon after his wife's death, he began his long poem of over twenty thousand lines, The Ring and the Book. He continued to write verse to the year of his death.

In 1881 the Browning Society was founded for the study and discussion of his works,—a most unusual honor for a poet during his lifetime. The leading universities gave him honorary degrees, he was elected life-governor of London University, and was tendered the rectorship of the Universities of Glasgow and St. Andrew's and the presidency of the Wordsworth Society.

During the latter part of his life, he divided most of his time between London and Italy. When he died, in 1889, he was living with his son, Robert Barrett Browning, in the Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice. Over his grave in Westminster Abbey was chanted Mrs. Browning's touching lyric:—

"He giveth his beloved, sleep."

Dramatic Monologues.—Browning was a poet of great productivity. From the publication of Pauline in 1833 to Asolando in 1889, there were only short pauses between the appearances of his works. Unlike Tennyson, Browning could not stop to revise and recast; but he constantly sought expression, in narratives, dramas, lyrics, and monologues, for new thoughts and feelings.

The study of the human soul held an unfailing charm for Browning. He analyzes with marked keenness and subtlety the experiences of the soul, its sickening failures, and its eager strivings amid complex, puzzling conditions. In nearly all his poems, whether narrative, lyric, or dramatic, the chief interest centers about some "incidents in the development of a soul."

The poetic form that he found best adapted to "the development of a soul" was the dramatic monologue, of which he is one of the greatest masters. Requiring but one speaker, this form narrows the interest either to the speaker or to the one described by him. Most of his best monologues are to be found in the volumes known as Dramatic Lyrics (1842), Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), Men and Women (1855), Dramatis Personae (1864).

My Last Duchess, Andrea del Sarto, Saul, Abt Vogler, and The Last Ride Together are a few of his strong representative monologues. The speaker in My Last Duchess is the widowed duke, who is describing the portrait of his lost wife. In his blind conceit, he is utterly unconscious that he is exhibiting clearly his own coldly selfish nature and his wife's sweet, sunny disposition. The chief power of the poem lies in the astonishing ease with which he is made to reveal his own character.

The interest in Andrea del Sarto is in the mental conflict of this "faultless painter." He wishes, on the one hand, to please his wife with popular pictures, and yet he yearns for higher ideals of his art. He says:—

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"

As he sits in the twilight, holding his wife's hand, and talking in a half-musing way, it is readily seen that his love for this beautiful but soulless woman has caused many of his failures and sorrows in the past, and will continue to arouse conflicts of soul in the future.

Abt Vogler, one of Browning's noblest and most melodious poems, voices the exquisite raptures of a musician's soul:—

"But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear; The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know."

The beautiful song of David in the poem entitled Saul shows a wonderful sympathy with the old Hebrew prophecies. Cleon expresses the views of an early Greek upon the teachings of Christ and St. Paul. The Soliloquy of a Spanish Cloister describes the development of a coarse, jealous nature in monastic life. The Last Ride Together is one of Browning's many passionate poems on the ennobling power of love. That remarkable, grotesque poem, Caliban upon Setebos, transcends human fields altogether, and displays the brutelike theology of a fiend.

In these monologues, Browning interprets characters of varying faiths, nationalities, stations, and historic periods. He shows a wide range of knowledge and sympathy. One type, however, which he rarely presents, is the simple, commonplace man or woman. Browning excels in the portrayal of unusual, intricate, and difficult characters that have complicated problems to face, weaknesses to overcome, or lofty ambitions to attain.

The Ring and the Book.—When Browning was asked what he would advise a student of his poetry to read first, he replied: "The Ring and the Book, of course." He worked on this masterly study of human souls for many years in the decade in which his wife died. This poem (1868), which has been facetiously called "a Roman murder story," was suggested to him by a "square old yellow book," which he purchased for a few cents at Florence in 1860. This manuscript, dated 1698, gives an account of the trial of Guido Franceschini for the murder of his wife. Out of this "mere ring metal," Browning fashioned his "Ring," a poem twice the length of Paradise Lost.

The subject of the story is an innocent girl, Pompilia, who, under the protection of a noble priest, flees from her brutal husband and seeks the home of her foster parents. Her husband wrathfully pursues her and kills both her and her parents. While this is but the barest outline, yet the story in its complete form is very simple. As is usual with Browning, the chief stress is laid upon the character portrayal.

He adopted the bold and unique plan of having different classes of people in Rome and the various actors in the tragedy tell the story from their own point of view and thus reveal their own bias and characteristics. Each relation makes the story seem largely new. Browning shows that all this testimony is necessary to establish a complete circle of evidence in regard to the central truth of the tragedy. The poem thus becomes a remarkable analytic study of the psychology of human minds.

The four important characters,—Guido, the husband; Caponsacchi, the priest; Pompilia, the girl-wife; and the Pope,—stand out in strong relief. The greatest development of character is seen in Guido, who starts with a defiant spirit of certain victory, but gradually becomes more subdued and abject, when he finds that he is to be killed, and finally shrieks in agony for the help of his victim, Pompilia. In Caponsacchi there is the inward questioning of the right and the wrong. He is a strongly-drawn character, full of passion and noble desires. Pompilia, who has an intuitive knowledge of the right, is one of Browning's sweetest and purest women. From descriptions of Mrs. Browning, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne gave, we may conclude that she furnished the suggestion for many of Pompilia's characteristics. The Pope, with his calm, wise judgment and his lofty philosophy, is probably the greatest product of Browning's intellect.

The books containing the monologues of these characters take first place among Browning's writings and occupy a high position in the century's work. They have a striking originality, intensity, vigor, and imaginative richness. The remaining books are incomparably inferior, and are marked at times by mere acuteness of reason and thoroughness of legal knowledge.

A Dramatic Poet.—Although Browning's genius is strongly dramatic, his best work is not found in the field of the drama. Strafford (1837), A Blot in the 'Scutcheon (1843), and Colombe's Birthday (1844) have been staged successfully, but they cannot be called great acting plays. The action is slight, the characters are complex, the soliloquies are lengthy, and the climaxes are too often wholly dependent upon emotional intensity rather than upon great or exciting deeds. The strongest interest of these dramas lies in their psychological subtlety, which is more enjoyable in the study than in the theater.

Browning's dramatic power is well exhibited in poems like In a Balcony or Pippa Passes, in which powerful individual scenes are presented without all the accompanying details of a complete drama. The great force of such scenes lies in his manner of treating moments of severe trial. He selects such a moment, focuses his whole attention upon it, and makes the deed committed stand forth as an explanation of all the past emotions and as a prophecy of all future acts. In a Balcony shows the lives of three characters converging toward a crisis. The hero of this drama thus expresses his theory of life's struggles in the development of the soul:—

"...I count life just stuff To try the soul's strength on, educe the man."

Pippa Passes is one of Browning's most artistic presentations of such dramatic scenes. The little silk weaver, Pippa, rises on the morning of her one holiday in the year, with the intention of enjoying in fancy the pleasures "of the Happiest Four in our Asolo," not knowing, in her innocence, of their misery and guilt. She wanders from house to house, singing her pure, significant refrains, and, in each case, her songs arrest the attention of the hearer at a critical moment. She thus becomes unconsciously a means of salvation. The first scene is the most intense. She approaches the home of the lovers, Sebald and Ottima, after the murder of Ottima's husband. As Sebald begins to reflect on the murder, there comes this song of Pippa's, like the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, to loose the floodgates of remorse:—



His Optimistic Philosophy.—It has been seen that the Victorian age, as presented by Matthew Arnold, was a period of doubt and negation. Browning, however, was not overcome by this wave of doubt. Although he recognized fully the difficulties of religious faith in an age just awakening to scientific inquiry, yet he retained a strong, fearless trust in God and in immortality.

Browning's reason demanded this belief. In this earthly life he saw the evil overcome the good, and beheld injustice, defeat, and despair follow the noblest efforts. If there exists no compensation for these things, he says that life is a cheat, the moral nature a lie, and God a fiend. In Asolando, Browning thus presents his attitude toward life:—

"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, tho' right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake."

There is no hesitancy in this philosophy of Browning's. With it, he does not fear to face all the problems and mysteries of existence. No other poet strikes such a resonant, hopeful note as he. His Rabbi Ben Ezra is more a song of triumphant faith than anything written since the Puritan days:—

"Our times are in His hand Who saith, 'A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!' * * * * * "Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: What entered into thee, That was, is, and shall be: Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure."

General Characteristics.—Browning is a poet of striking originality and impelling force. His writings are the spontaneous outpourings of a rich, full nature, whose main fabric is intellect, but intellect illumined with the glittering light of spiritual hopefulness and flushed with the glow of deep human passion.

The subject of his greatest poetry is the human soul. While he possesses a large portion of dramatic suggestiveness, he nevertheless does not excel in setting off character against character in movement and speech, but rather in a minute, penetrating analysis, by which he insinuates himself into the thoughts and sensations of his characters, and views life through their eyes.

He is a pronounced realist. His verse deals not only with the beautiful and the romantic, but also with the prosaic and the ugly, if they furnish true pictures for the panorama of real life. The unconventionality and realism of his poetic art will be made manifest by merely reading through the titles of his numerous works.

Browning did not write to amuse and entertain, but to stimulate thought and to "sting" the conscience to activity. The meaning of his verse is, therefore, the matter of paramount importance, far overshadowing the form of expression. In the haste and carelessness with which he wrote many of his difficult abstruse poems, he laid himself open to the charge of obscurity.

His style has a strikingly individual stamp, which is marked far more by strength than by beauty. The bare and rugged style of his verse is often made profoundly impressive by its strenuous earnestness, its burning intensity, which seems to necessitate the broken lines and halting, interrupted rhythm. The following utterance of Caponsacchi, as he stands before his judges, will show the intensity and ruggedness of Browning's blank verse:—

"Sirs, how should I lie quiet in my grave Unless you suffer me wring, drop by drop, My brain dry, make a riddance of the drench Of minutes with a memory in each?"

His lines are often harsh and dissonant. Even in the noble poem Rabbi Ben Ezra, this jolting line appears:—

"Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"

and in Sordello, Browning writes:—

"The Troubadour who sung Hundreds of songs, forgot, its trick his tongue, Its craft his brain."

No careful artist tolerates such ugly, rasping inversions.

In spite of these inharmonious tendencies in Browning, his poetry at times shows a lyric lightness, such as is heard in these lines:—

"Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England—now!"[15]

His verse often swells and falls with a wavelike rhythm as in Saul or in these lines in Abt Vogler:—

"There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; On the earth the broken arc; in the heaven, a perfect round."

While, therefore, Browning's poetry is sometimes harsh, faulty, and obscure, at times his melodies can be rhythmically simple and beautiful. He is one of the subtlest analysts of the human mind, the most original and impassioned poet of his age, and one of the most hopeful, inspiring, and uplifting teachers of modern times.

ALFRED TENNYSON, 1809-1892



Life.—Alfred Tennyson, one of the twelve children of the rector of Somersby, Lincolnshire, was born in that hamlet in 1809, a year memorable, both in England and America for the birth of such men as Charles Darwin, William E. Gladstone, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln.

Visitors to the Somersby rectory, in which Tennyson was born, note that it fits the description of the home in his fine lyric, The Palace of Art:—

"...an English home,—gray twilight pour'd On dewy pastures, dewy trees, Softer than sleep—all things in order stored, A haunt of ancient peace."

His mother, one of the beauties of Lincolnshire, had twenty-five offers of marriage. Of her Tennyson said in The Princess:—

"Happy he With such a mother! faith in womankind Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high Comes easy to him, and tho' he trip and fall, He shall not blind his soul with clay."

It is probable that Tennyson holds the record among English poets of his class for the quantity of youthful verse produced. At the age of eight, he was writing blank verse in praise of flowers; at twelve, he began an epic which extended to six thousand lines.

In 1828 he entered Cambridge University; but in 1831 his father's sickness and death made it impossible for him to return to take his degree. Before leaving Cambridge, Tennyson had found a firm friend in a young college mate of great promise, Arthur Henry Hallam, who became engaged to the poet's sister, Emily Tennyson. Hallam's sudden death in 1832 was a profound shock to Tennyson and had far-reaching effects on his poetic development. For a long time he lived in comparative retirement, endeavoring to perfect himself in the poetic art.

His golden year was 1850, the year of the publication of In Memoriam, of his selection as poet laureate, to succeed Wordsworth, and of his marriage to Emily Sellwood. He had been in love with her for fourteen years, but insufficient income had hitherto prevented marriage.



In 1855 Oxford honored him by bestowing on him the degree of D.C.L. The students gave him an ovation and they properly honored his greatest poem, In Memoriam by mentioning it first in their loud calls; but they also paid their respects to his May Queen, asking in chorus: "Did they wake and call you early, call you early, Alfred dear?"

The rest of his life was outwardly uneventful. He became the most popular poet of his age. Schools and colleges had pupils translate his poems into Latin and Greek verse. Of Enoch Arden (1864), at that time his most popular narrative poem, sixty thousand copies were sold almost as as soon as it was printed. He made sufficient money to be able to maintain two beautiful residences, a winter home at Farringford on the Isle of Wight, and a summer residence at Aldworth in Sussex. In 1884 he was raised to the peerage, with the title of Baron of Aldworth and Farringford. He died in 1892, at the age of eighty-three, and was buried beside Robert Browning in Westminster Abbey.

Early Verse.—Tennyson published a small volume of poems in 1830, the year before he left college, and another volume in 1832. Although these contained some good poems, he was too often content to toy with verse that had exquisite melody and but little meaning. The "Airy, fairy Lilian" and "Sweet, pale Margaret" type of verse had charmed him overmuch. The volumes of 1830 and 1832 were severely criticized. Blackwood's Magazine called same of the lyrics "drivel," and Carlyle characterized the aesthetic verse as "lollipops." This adverse criticism and the shock from Hallam's death caused him to remain silent for nearly ten years. His son and biographer says that his father during this period "profited by friendly and unfriendly criticism, and in silence, obscurity, and solitude, perfected his art."

In his thirty-third year (1842), Tennyson broke his long silence by publishing two volumes of verse, containing such favorites as The Poet, The Lady of Shalott, The Palace of Art, The Lotos Eaters, A Dream of Fair Women, Morte d'Arthur, Oenone, The Miller's Daughter, The Gardener's Daughter, Dora, Ulysses, Locksley Hall, The Two Voices, and Sir Galahad.

Unsparing revision of numbers of these poems that had been published before, entitles them to be classed as new work. Some critics think that Tennyson never surpassed these 1842 volumes. His verse shows the influence of Keats, of whom Tennyson said: "There is something of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything that he wrote."

One of Tennyson's most distinctive qualities, his art in painting beautiful word-pictures, is seen at its best in stanzas from The Palace of Art. His mastery over melody and the technique of verse is evident in such lyrics as Sir Galahad, and The Lotos Eaters. When the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, read from Ulysses the passage beginning:—

"I am a part of all that I have met,"

he gave Tennyson a much-needed annual pension of L200.

These volumes show that he was coming into touch with the thought of the age. Locksley Hall communicates the thrill which he felt from the new possibilities of science:—

"For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be. * * * * * I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time."

Hallam's death had also developed in him the human note, resonant in the lyric, Break, break, break:—

"But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand, And the sound of a voice that is still."

The Princess, In Memoriam, and Maud.—Tennyson had produced only short poems in his 1842 volumes, but his next three efforts, The Princess (1847), In Memoriam (1850), and Maud (1855), are of considerable length.

The Princess: A Medley, as Tennyson rightly called it, contains 3223 lines of blank verse. This poem, which is really a discussion of the woman question, relates in a half humorous way the story of a princess who broke off her engagement to a prince, founded a college for women, and determined to elevate her life to making them equal to men. The poem abounds in beautiful imagery and exquisite melody; but the solution of the question by the marriage of the princess has not completely satisfied modern thought. The finest parts of the poem are its artistic songs.

In Memoriam, an elegy in memory of Arthur Henry Hallam, was begun at Somersby in 1833, the year of Hallam's death, and added to at intervals for nearly sixteen years. When Tennyson first began the short lyrics to express his grief, he did not intend to publish them; but in 1850 he gave them to the world as one long poem of 725 four-line stanzas.

In Memoriam was directly responsible for Tennyson's appointment as poet-laureate. Queen Victoria declared that she received more comfort from it than from any other book except the Bible. The first stanza of the poem (quoted on page 9) has proved as much of a moral stimulus as any single utterance of Carlyle or of Browning.

This work is one of the three great elegies of a literature that stands first in elegiac poetry. Milton's Lycidas has more of a massive commanding power, and Shelley's Adonais rises at times to poetic heights that Tennyson did not reach; but neither Lycidas nor Adonais equals In Memoriam in tracing every shadow of bereavement, from the first feeling of despair until the mourner can realize that—

"...the song of woe Is after all an earthly song,"

and can express his unassailable faith in—

"One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves."

With this hopeful assurance closes Tennyson's most noble and beautiful poem.

Maud, a lyrical melodrama, paints the changing emotions of a lover who passes from morbid gloom to ecstasy. Then, in a moment of anger, he murders Maud's brother. Despair, insanity, and recovery follow, but he sees Maud's face no more. While the poem as a whole is not a masterpiece, it contains some of Tennyson's finest lyrics. The eleven stanzas of the lover's song to Maud, the—

"Queen Rose of the rosebud garden of girls,"

are such an exquisite blending of woodbine spice and musk of rose, of star and daffodil sky, of music of flute and song of bird, of the soul of the rose with the passion of the lover, of meadows and violets,—that we easily understand why Tennyson loved to read these lines.

The Idylls of the King.—In 1859 Tennyson published Lancelot and Elaine, one of a series of twelve Idylls, the last of which appeared in 1855. Together these form an epic on the subject of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Tennyson relied mainly on Malory's Morte d'Arthur for the characters and the stories.

These Idylls show the struggle to maintain noble ideals. Arthur relates how he collected—

"In that fair order of my Table Round, A glorious company, the flower of men, To serve as model for the mighty world, And be the fair beginning of a time."

He made his knights swear to uphold the ideals of his court—

"To ride abroad redressing human wrongs, To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it, To honor his own word as if his God's, To lead sweet lives in purest chastity, To love one maiden only, cleave to her, And warship her by years of noble deeds Until they won her."

The twelve Idylls have as a background those different seasons of the year that accord with the special mood of the story. In Gareth and Lynette, the most interesting of the Idylls, the young hero leaves his home in spring, when the earth is joyous with birds and flowers. In the last and most nobly poetic of the series, The Passing of Arthur, the time is winter, when the knights seem to be clothed with their own frosty breath.

Sin creeps into King Arthur's realm and disrupts the order of the "Table Round." He receives his mortal wound, and passes to rule in a kindlier realm that welcomed him as "a king returning from the wars."

Although the Idylls of the King are uneven in quality and sometimes marred by overprofusion of ornament and by deficiency of dramatic skill, their limpid style, many fine passages of poetry, appealing stories, and high ideals have exerted a wider influence than any other of Tennyson's poems.

Later Poetry.—Tennyson continued to write poetry until almost the time of his death; but with the exception of his short swan song, Crossing the Bar, he did not surpass his earlier efforts. His Locksley Hall Sixty Year After (1886) voices the disappointments of the Victorian age and presents vigorous social philosophy. Some of his later verse, like The Northern Farmer and The Children's Hospital, are in closer touch with life than many of his earlier poems.

He wrote also several historical dramas, the best of which is Becket (1884); but his genius was essentially lyrical, not dramatic. Crossing the Bar, written in his eighty-first year, is not only the finest product of his later years, but also one of the very best of Victorian lyrics.



General Characteristics.—Tennyson is a poetic interpreter of the thought of the Victorian age. Huxley called him "the first poet since Lucretius who understood the drift of science." In these four lines from The Princess, Tennyson gives the evolutionary history of the world, from nebula to man:—

"This world was once a fluid haze of light. Till toward the center set the starry tides, And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast The planets: then the monster, then the man."

Tennyson's poetry of nature is based on almost scientific observation of natural phenomena. Unlike Wordsworth, Tennyson does not regard nature as a manifestation of the divine spirit of love. He sees her more from the new scientific point of view, as "red in tooth and claw with rapine." The hero of Maud says:—

"For nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal; The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear'd by the shrike. And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey."

The constant warfare implied in the evolutionary theory of the survival of the fittest did not keep Tennyson from also presenting nature in her gentler aspects. In Maud, the lover sings—

"...whenever a March-wind sighs, He sets the jewel-print of your feet In violets blue as your eyes,"

and he tells how "the soul of the rose" passed into his blood, and how the sympathetic passion-flower dropped "a splendid tear." As beautiful as is much of Tennyson's nature poetry, he has not Wordsworth's power to invest it with "the light of setting suns," or to cause it to awaken "thoughts that do lie too deep for tears."

The conflict between science and religion, the doubts and the sense of world-pain are mirrored in Tennyson's verse. The Two Voices begins:—

"A still small voice spoke unto me, Thou art so full of misery Were it not better not to be?"

His poetry is, however, a great tonic to religious faith. The closing lines of In Memoriam and Crossing the Bar show how triumphantly he met all the doubts and the skepticism of the age.

Like Milton, Tennyson received much of his inspiration from books, especially from the classical writers; but this characteristic was more than counterbalanced by his acute observation and responsiveness to the thought of the age. Locksley Hall Sixty Years After shows that he was keenly alive to the social movements of the time.

Tennyson said that the scenes in his poems were so vividly conceived that he could have drawn them if he had been an artist. A twentieth century critic[16] says that Tennyson is almost the inventor of such pictorial lyrics as A Dream of Fair Women and The Palace of Art.

The artistic finish of Tennyson's verse is one of its great charms. He said to a friend: "It matters little what we say; it is how we say it—though the fools don't knew it." His poetry has, however, often been criticized for lack of depth. The variety in his subject matter, mode of expression, and rhythm renders his verse far more enjoyable than that of the formal age of Pope.

Tennyson's extraordinary popularity in his own time was largely due to the fact that he voiced so clearly and attractively the thought of the age. As another epoch ushers in different interests, they will naturally be uppermost in the mind of the new generation. We no longer feel the intense interest of the Victorians in the supposed conflict between science and religion. Their theory of evolution has been modified and has lost the force of novelty. Theories of government and social ideals have also undergone a gradual change. For these reasons much of Tennyson's verse has ceased to have its former wide appeal.

Tennyson has, however, left sufficient work of abiding value, both for its exquisite form and for its thought, to entitle him to be ranked as a great poet. We cannot imagine a time when Crossing the Bar, The Passing of Arthur, and the central thought of In Memoriam—

"'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all,"

will no longer interest readers. To Tennyson belong—

"Jewels five words long That on the stretch'd forefinger of all Time Sparkle forever."

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1837-1909



Life.—Swinburne was born in London in 1837. His father was an admiral in the English navy, and his mother, the daughter of an earl. The boy passed his summers in Northumberland and his winters in the Isle of Wight. He thus acquired that fondness for the sea, so noticeable in his poetry. His early experiences are traceable in lines like these:—

"Our bosom-belted billowy-blossoming hills, Whose hearts break out in laughter like the sea."

He went to Oxford for three years, but left without taking his degree. The story is current that he knew more Greek than his teachers but that he failed in an examination on the Scriptures. He sought to complete his education by wide reading and by travel, especially in France and Italy.

When he was twenty-five, he went to live for a short time at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, in the western part of London, in the same house with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Meredith. Swinburne admired Rossetti's poetry and was much impressed with the Pre-Raphaelite virtues of simplicity and directness.

Swinburne never married. His deafness caused him to pass much of his long life in comparative retirement. His last thirty years were spent with his friend, the critic and poet, Theodore Watts-Dunton, at Putney on the Thames, a few miles southwest of London. Swinburne died in 1909 and was buried at Bonchurch in the Isle of Wight.

Works.—In 1864 England was enchanted with the melody of the choruses in his Atalanta in Calydon, a dramatic poem in the old Greek form. Lines like the following from the chorus, The Youth of the Year, show the quality for which his verse is most famous:—

"When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, The mother of months in meadow or plain Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain."

The first series of his Poems and Ballads (1866) contains The Garden of Proserpine, one of his best known poems. Proserpine "forgets the earth her mother" and goes to her "bloomless" garden:—

"And spring and seed and swallow Take wing for her and follow Where summer song rings hollow And flowers are put to scorn."

Many volumes came in rapid succession from his pen. In 1904 his poems were collected in six octavo volumes containing 2357 pages. This collection includes the long narrative poems, Tristram of Lyonesse and The Tale of Balen, a faithful retelling of famous medieval stories. He, however, had more ability as a writer of lyrics than of narrative verse.

His poetic dramas fill five additional volumes. Chastelard (1865), one of the three dramas relating to Mary Queen of Scots, is the best of his plays. He had, however, neither the power to draw character nor the repression of speech necessary for a great dramatist. The best parts of his plays are really lyrical verse.

Many critics think that Swinburne's reputation would be as great as it now is, if he had ceased to write verse in 1866, at the age of twenty-nine, after producing Atalanta in Calydon and the first series of his Poems and Ballads. Although his interests widened and his poetic range increased, much of his work during his last forty years is a repetition of earlier successes. His Songs before Sunrise, however (1871), and the next two volumes of Poems and Ballads (1878 and 1889) contain some poems that rank among his best.

Later in life he wrote a large amount of prose criticism, much of which deals with the Elizabethan dramatists. His A Study of Shakespeare (1880) and his shorter Shakespeare (1905) are especially suggestive. In spite of the fact that the reader must make constant allowance for his habit of using superlatives, he was an able critic.

General Characteristics.—Swinburne's poetry suffers from his tendency to drown his ideas in a sea of words.

Sometimes we gain no more definite ideas from reading many lines of his verse than from hearing music without words. Much of his poetry was suggested by wide reading, not by close personal contact with life. His verse sometimes offends from disregarding moral proprieties and from so expressing his atheism as to wound the feelings of religious people. His idea of a Supreme Power was colored by the old Grecian belief in Fate. In exact opposition to Wordsworth, Swinburne's youthful poems show that he regarded Nature as the incarnation of a Power malevolent to man. He lacked the optimism of Browning and the faith of Tennyson. The mantle of Byron and Shelley fell on Swinburne as the poet of revolt against what seemed to be religious or political tyranny.

After Tennyson's death, in 1892, Swinburne was the greatest living English poet; but, even if his verse had not offended Queen Victoria for the foregoing reasons, she would not have appointed him poet-laureate after the misery of the Russians had moved him in 1890 to write, referring to the Czar:—

"Night hath naught but one red star—Tyrannicide.

"God or man, be swift; hope sickens with delay: Smite and send him howling down his father's way."

Swinburne's crowning glory is his unquestioned mastery, unsurpassed by any poet since Milton, of the technique of varied melodious verse. This quality is evident, no matter whether he is describing the laughter of a child:—

"Sweeter far than all things heard, Hand of harper, tone of bird, Sound of woods at sundawn stirr'd, Welling water's winsome ward, Wind in warm wan weather,"

or expressing his fierce hatred for any condition or place where—

"...a curse was or a chain A throne for torment or a crown for bane Rose, moulded out of poor men's molten pain,"

or singing the song of a lover—

"If love were what the rose is, And I were like the leaf, Our lives would grow together In sad or singing weather, Blown fields or flowerful closes, Green pleasure or grey grief; If love were what the rose is, And I were like the leaf;"

or voicing his early creed—

"That no life lives forever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea,"

or chanting in far nobler strains the Anglo-Saxon belief in the molding power of an infinite presence—

"I am in thee to save thee, As my soul in thee saith, Give thou as I gave thee, Thy life-blood and breath, Green leaves of thy labor, white flowers of thy thought, and red fruit of thy death."

RUDYARD KIPLING, 1865-



Life.—Rudyard Kipling, the youngest of the great Victorians, was born in Bombay, India, in 1865. His parents were people of culture and artistic training, the father, John Lockwood Kipling, being a recognized authority on Indian art. Like most English children born in India, Kipling, when very small, was sent to England to escape the fatal Indian heat. Afterwards in the story Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, Kipling told the tragic experience of two Anglo-Indian children when separated from their parents. If it is true that this story is largely autobiographical, the separation must have been a trying ordeal in Kipling's childhood. Later he spent several years at Westward Ho, Devonshire, in a school conducted mainly for the sons of Indian officials. Stalky and Co., a broadly humorous book of schoolboy life, gives the Kipling of this period, in the character of the "egregious Beetle."

When only seventeen, he returned to India and immediately began journalistic work. For seven years, first at Lahore and later at Allahabad, he was busy with the usual hackwork of a small newspaper. During these impressionable years, from seventeen to twenty-four, he gained his intimate knowledge of the strangely-colored, many-sided Indian life. His first stories and poems, often written in hot haste, to fill the urgent need of more copy, appeared as waifs and strays in the papers for which he wrote. A collection of verse, Departmental Ditties, published at Lahore in 1886, was well received; and it was quickly followed by several volumes of short stories. His ability thus gained early recognition in India.

At the age of twenty-four, he left India for London. Here his books found a publisher almost at once, and he was hailed as a new literary genius. His work became so popular that he was able to devote his whole time to writing. It is doubtful whether any writer since Dickens has received such quick and enthusiastic recognition from all classes of the English-speaking race. Even the street-car conductors were heard quoting him.

In 1892 he married Miss Caroline Balestier, an American, and afterwards lived for four years at Brattleboro, Vermont. Later he settled in Sussex, England, whence he has made long journeys to South Africa, Canada, and Egypt, amassing more knowledge of the English "around the Seven Seas."

Probably the most remarkable feature of Kipling's career is the early age at which his genius developed. Before he left India he had published one book of verse and seven prose collections. By the time he was thirty, he had written The Jungle Books, most of his best short stories, and some of his finest verse.

Prose.—As a master of the modern short story, Kipling stands unsurpassed. His journalistic work helped him to acquire a direct, concentrated style of narrative, to find interest in an astonishing variety of subjects, and to seize on the right details for vivid presentation. He was fortunate in discovering in India a new literary field, in which his genius appears at its best. Some of his early tales of Indian life are marred by crudeness and by lack of feeling; but these faults decreased as he matured.

Kipling's stories depend for their interest on incident, not on analysis. He embodies romantic adventure and action in masterpieces as different as the terrible tragedy of The Man Who would be King (1888), the tender love story of Without Benefit of Clergy (1890), and the mystic dream-land of The Brushwood Boy (1895). He specially enjoyed portraying the English soldier. Perhaps his best-known characters are the privates Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, whom we meet in such tales of mingled comedy and tragedy as With the Main Guard (1888), On Greenhow Hill (1891), The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney (1891), The Courting of Dinah Shadd (1981).

When Kipling traveled to new lands, he wrote stories of America, Africa, and the deep sea; but his later tales show an unfortunate increase in the use of technical terms and a lessening of his former dash and spontaneity. There are, however, readers who prefer such a delicate, subtle, story as They (1905), to his earlier masterpieces of strenuous action.

In The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895), Kipling has accomplished the greatest of feats,—an original creation. From the moment the little brown baby, Mowgli, crawls into Mother Wolf's cave away from Shere Khan, the tiger, until the time for him to graduate from the jungle, we follow him under the spell of a fascination different from any that we have known before. The animals of the jungle have real personalities, from the chattering Bandar-log to the lumbering kindly Baloo. With all their intense individuality, they remain animals, each one true to his kind, hating or loving men, thinking mainly through their instincts, and surpassing human schoolmasters in teaching Mowgli the great laws of the jungle,—that obedience is "the head and the hoof of the Law," that nothing was ever yet lost by silence, that, in the jungle, life and food depend on keeping one's temper, that no one shall kill for the pleasure of killing.



Above all stands the character of Mowgli, the wolf-adopted man-cub, human and yet brother to the animals. With a touch of genius, Kipling revealed the kinship between Mowgli and the denizens of the jungle. Kipling's eyes could see both the harsh realism of animal existence and the genuine idealism of Mother Wolf and the Pack and the Jungle-law.

Just So Stories (1902), written primarily for children, but entertaining to all, is a collection of romantic stories, mostly of animals, illustrated by Kipling himself. One of the best of these tales is The Cat that Walked by Himself, which has distinct ethical value in showing how the cat through service won his place by the fireside.

Though Kipling has written four novels, only two, The Light that Failed (1891) and Kim (1901), can compare with his best short stories. The Light that Failed, the tragedy of an artist who becomes blind, proves that Kipling was able to handle a long plot sufficiently well to sustain interest. Kim is an attempt to present as a more completed whole that India of which the stories give only glimpses. On the slenderest thread of plot is strung a bewildering array of scenes, characters, and incidents. His intimate knowledge of India and his photographic power of description are here used with remarkable picturesque effect.



Verse.—Kipling's poetry has many of the same qualities as his prose,—originality, force, love of action. In Barrack Room Ballads (1892), the soldier is again celebrated in vigorous songs with swinging choruses. Mandalay, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, Danny Deever, show what spirited verse can be fashioned from a common ballad meter and a bold use of dialect.

"So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan; You're a pore benighted 'eathen, but a first class fightin' man; An' 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your 'ayrick 'ead of 'air— You big black boundin' beggar—for you broke a British square!"

Much of his verse is political. His opinion of questions at issue is sometimes given with much heat, but always with sincerity and true patriotism. The best known of his patriotic songs, and perhaps his noblest poetic effort, The Recessional (1897), was inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of Victoria's reign. The Truce of the Bear (1898) is a warning against Russia. The Native-Born is a toast to the colonies in every clime.

Kipling's verse breaks with many of the accepted standards of English verse. He does not aim at such pure beauty of form as we find in Tennyson. He can handle skillfully many kinds of meter, as is shown in The Song of the English, The Ballad of East and West, The Song of the Banjo, and many sea lyrics. Yet he uses mostly the common measures, attaining with these a free swing, a fitting of sound to sense, that are irresistible to the many—

"Common tunes that make you choke and blow your nose, Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan— I can rip your very heart-strings out with those."[17]

Some of his later work shows increasing seriousness of tone. The Recessional and the Hymn before Action are elevated in thought and expression. The bigness of L'Envoi shows poetic power capable of higher flights:—

"And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame; And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame; But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star, Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They Are!"[18]

General Characteristics.—Kipling has carried to their highest development the principles of the Bret Harte School of short story writers. His style possesses those qualities necessary for telling a short tale,—directness, force, suggestiveness. Rarely has any writer so mastered the technique, the craftsmanship of this particular literary form. He has the gift of force and dramatic power, rather than of beauty and delicacy.

He excels in suggestive vivid description, and he draws wonderful pictures of all out-of-doors, especially of the sea; but nature remains merely the background for the human figures. Much of his vividness lies in the use of specific words. If he should employ the phraseology of his jungle laws to frame the first commandment for writers, it would be: "Seven times never be vague." Few authors have at the very beginning of their career more implicitly heeded such a commandment, obedience to which is evident in the following description from The Courting of Dinah Shadd:—

"Over our heads burned the wonderful Indian stars, which are not all pricked in on one plane, but preserving an orderly perspective, draw the eye through the velvet darkness of the void up to the barred doors of heaven itself. The earth was a grey shadow more unreal than the sky. We could hear her breathing lightly in the pauses between the howling of the jackals, the movement of the wind in the tamarisks, and the fitful mutter of musketry-fire leagues away to the left. A native woman from some unseen hut began to sing, the mail train thundered past on its way to Delhi, and a roosting crow cawed drowsily."

Abundant and vivid use of metaphors serves to render his concreteness more varied and impressive. We find these in such expressions as "the velvet darkness," "the kiss of the rain," "the tree-road." His celestial artists splash at a ten-league canvas "with brushes of comet's hair." Five words from Mulvaney explain why he does not wish to leave his tent: "'Tis rainin' intrenchin' tools outside."

Kipling's spirit is essentially masculine. He prefers to write of men, work, and battle, rather than of women and love. Since his interest is mainly in action, he shows small ability in character drawing. His people are clear-cut and alive, but we do not see them grow and develop as do George Eliot's characters.

Above all, he stands as the interpreter of the ideals and the interests of the Anglo-Saxons of his time. Those tendencies of the age, which seem to others so dangerously materialistic, are the very causes of his zest in life. In an age of machinery, he writes of the romance of steam, the soul of an engine, the flight of an airship.

His is a work-a-day world; but in work well done, in obedience to the established law, and in courage, he sees the proving of manhood, the test of the true gentleman—

"Who had done his work and held his peace and had no fear to die."

Underlying all his thought is a deep belief in the "God of our fathers," a God just to punish or reward, whom the English have reverenced through all their history. Linked with this faith is an intense feeling of patriotism toward that larger England of his imperialistic vision.

These qualities justly brought Kipling the 1907 Nobel prize for idealism in literature. He is truly the idealist of a practical age, teaching the romance, the joy, the vision in the common facts and virtues of present-day life.

SUMMARY

The history and literature of the Victorian age show the influence of science. Darwin's conception of evolution affected all fields of thought. The tendency toward analysis and dissection is a result of scientific influence.

In describing the prose of the Victorian age, we have considered the work of thirteen writers; namely, Macaulay, the brilliant essayist and historian of the material advancement of England; Newman, essayist and theologian, who is noted for clear style, acute thought, and argumentative power; Carlyle, who awoke in his generation a desire for greater achievement, and who championed the spiritual interpretation of life in philosophy and history; Ruskin, the apostle of the beautiful and of more ideal relations in social life; the essayist Pater, whose prose is tinged with poetic color and mystic thought; Arnold, the great analytical critic; Dickens, educational and social reformer, whose novels deal chiefly with the lower classes; Thackeray, whose fiction is not surpassed in keen, satiric analysis of the upper classes of society; George Eliot, whose realistic stories of middle-class life show the influence of science in her conception of character as an orderly ethical growth; Stevenson, an artist in style, writer of romances, essays, and poems for children; Meredith, subtle novelist, distinguished for his comic spirit and portrayal of male egotism; Hardy, realistic novelist of the lowly life of Wessex; Kipling, whose Jungle Books are an original creation, and whose short stories surpass those of all other contemporaries.

In poetry, the age is best represented by five men; namely, Arnold, who voices the feeling of doubt and unrest; Browning, who, by his optimistic philosophy, leads to impregnable heights of faith, who analyzes emotions and notes the development of souls as they struggle against opposition from within and without, until they reach moments of supreme victory or defeat; Tennyson, whose careful art mirrors in beautiful verse much of the thought of the age, the influence of science, the unrest, the desire to know the problems of the future, as well as to steal occasional glances at beauty for its own sake; Swinburne, the greatest artist since Milton in the technique of verse; and Kipling, the poet of imperialistic England, whose ballads sing of her soldiers and sailors, and whose lyrics proclaim the Anglo-Saxon faith and joy in working.

REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY

HISTORICAL

Walker's Essentials in English History, Cheney's A Short History of England, McCarthy's History of Our Own Times, Cheney's Industrial and Social History of England, Traill's Social England, VI.

LITERARY

The Cambridge History of English Literature.

Walker's The Literature of the Victorian Era.

Magnus's English Literature in the Nineteenth Century.

Saintsbury's A History of English Literature in the Nineteenth Century.

Kennedy's English Literature, 1880-1905.

Walker's Greater Victorian Poets.

Brownell's Victorian Prose Masters.

Payne's The Greater English Poets of the Nineteenth Century.

Brooke's Four Victorian Poets (Rossetti, Arnold, Morris).

Perry's A Study of Prose Fiction.

Benson's Rossetti. (E.M.L.)

Noyes's William Morris. (E.M.L.)

Trevelyan's Life and Letters of Macaulay. Morrison's Macaulay. (E.M.L.)

Minto's English Prose Literature (Macaulay and Carlyle).

Barry's Newman.

Ward's The Life of John Henry, Cardinal Newman, 2 vols.

Newman's Letters and Correspondence, with a Brief Autobiography.

Carlyle's Reminiscences.

Froude's Thomas Carlyle, 2 vols. Nichol's Carlyle. (E.M.L.)

Garnett's Thomas Carlyle. (G.W.)

Froude's Jane Welsh Carlyle, 2 vols.

T. and A. Carlyle's New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle.

Cook's The Life of John Ruskin, 2 vols.

Ruskin's Praeterita, Scenes and Thoughts of My Past Life.

Benson's Ruskin: A Study in Personality.

Earland's Ruskin and his Circle.

Harrison's John Ruskin. (E.M.L.)

Birrell's Life of Charlotte Bronte.

Foster's Life of Dickens (abridged and revised by Gissing).

Kitton's Dickens, his Life, Writings, and Personality.

Gissing's Charles Dickens: A Critical Study.

Chesterton's Charles Dickens. Hughes's Dickens as an Educator.

Philip's A Dickens Dictionary.

Melville's William Makepeace Thackeray, 2 vols.

Trollope's Thackeray. (E.M.L.)

Merivale and Marzials's Life of Thackeray. (G.W.)

Mudge and Sears's A Thackeray Dictionary.

Cross's George Eliot's Life as Related in her Letters and Journals.

Browning's Life of George Eliot. (G.W.) Stephens's George Eliot. (E.M.L.)

Cook's George Eliot: A Critical Study of her Life, Writings, and Philosophy.

Olcott's George Eliot: Scenes and People in Her Novels.

Hamilton's Robert Louis Stevenson.

Balfour's The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, 2 vols.

The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Sidney Colvin.

Raleigh's Robert Louis Stevenson. Hamerton's Stevensoniana.

Japp's Robert Louis Stevenson.

Hamerton's George Meredith: His Life and Art in Anecdote and Criticism.

Letters of George Meredith, 2 vols.

Sturge Henderson's George Meredith.

Bailey's The Novels of George Meredith: A Study.

Trevelyan's The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith.

Beach's The Comic Spirit in George Meredith.

Lionel Johnson's The Art of Thomas Hardy.

Macdonell's Thomas Hardy.

Abercrombie's Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study.

Saxelby's Thomas Hardy Dictionary.

Phelps's Essays on Modern Novelists (Hardy, Kipling, Stevenson).

Benson's Walter Pater. (E.M.L.)

Paul's Matthew Arnold. (E.M.L.)

Saintsbury's Matthew Arnold.

Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett.

Griffin and Minchin's The Life of Robert Browning.

Chesterton's Robert Browning. (E.M.L.)

Sharp's Life of Browning. (G.W.)

Symons's An Introduction to the Study of Browning.

Foster's The Message of Robert Browning.

Orr's A Handbook to the works of Robert Browning.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, A Memoir, by his son.

Benson's Alfred Tennyson (the best brief work).

Lyall's Tennyson. (E.M.L.)

Brooke's Tennyson: His Art and Relation to Modern Life.

Van Dyke's The Poetry of Tennyson.

Gordon's The Social Ideals of Alfred Tennyson.

Lackyer's Tennyson as a Student and Poet of Nature.

Luce's Handbook to the Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Woodberry's Swinburne.

Thomas's Algernon Charles Swinburne: A Critical Study.

Knowles's Kipling Primer.

Le Galliene's Rudyard Kipling, A Criticism.

Clemens's A Ken of Kipling.

Young's Dictionary of the Characters and Scenes in the Stories and Poems of Rudyard Kipling.

Canby's The Short Story in English (Kipling).

Cooper's Some English Story Tellers (Kipling).

Leeb-Lundberg's Word Formation in Kipling (excellent).

SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

The Pre-Raphaelites.—Read Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel, Sister Helen, The King's Tragedy, Love's Nocturne, and Mary's Girlhood. All of these are given in Page's British Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Selections may be found in Bronson,[19] IV., Century, Oxford Book of Victorian verse, and Manly, I. Selections from Christina Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelite verse are given in all except Page.

From William Morris, read Two Red Roses Across the Moon, The Defence of Guenevere (Page's British Poets), and the selections from The Earthly Paradise in either Page, Century, Bronson, IV., or Manly, I.

What part did Ruskin play in this new movement? Point out the simplest, the most affecting, and the most pleasing stanza in The Blessed Damozel. What Pre-Raphaelite qualities in this poem have made it such a favorite? What are the chief characteristics of Rossetti's other verse? Note specially Miss Rossetti's religious verse.

What Pre-Raphaelite qualities do Morris's Two Red Roses across the Moon (1858) and The Defence of Guenevere (1858) show? Compare this early verse with the selections from The Earthly Paradise (1868-1870).

Macaulay.—Read either the Essay on Milton or the Essay on Addison (Eclectic English Classics or Gateway Series) or the selections in Craik, V., Manly, II., Century, or Dickinson and Roe's Nineteenth Century Prose.

Read History of England, Chap. IX., or the selections in Craik V., or Century, or Manly, II.

What are some of the qualities that cause Macaulay's writings to outstrip in popularity other works of a similar nature? What qualities in his style may be commended to young writers? What are his special defects? Contrast his narrative style in Chap. IX. of the History with Carlyle's in The French Revolution, Vol. I., Book V., Chap. VI.

Newman.—The best volume of selections is edited by Lewis E. Gates (228 pages, 75 cents). Dickinson and Roe's Nineteenth Century English Prose contains Newman's essay on Literature. Selections are given in Craik V., Century, and Manly, II.

Compare his style with Macaulay's and note the resemblance and the difference. Why did Newman call himself a rhetorician? What qualities does he add to those of a rhetorician? Select passages that show his special clearness, concreteness, also his rhetorical and argumentative power.

Carlyle.—Read the Essay on Robert Burns (Eclectic English Classics or Gateway Series); Sartor Resartus, Book III., Chap. VI. (Everyman's Library); The French Revolution, Vol. I., Book V., Chap. VI. (Everyman's Library). Selections may be found in Craik, V., Century, Manly, II., and Evans's Carlyle (Masters of Literature).

What marked difference in manner of treatment is shown in Macaulay's Milton or Addison and Carlyle's Burns? What was Carlyle's message in Sartor Resartus? What did Huxley and Tyndale say of his influence? What are the most noteworthy qualities of The French Revolution? What are the chief characteristics of Carlyle's style?

Ruskin.—In Vol. I., Part II., of Modern Painters, read the first part of Chap. I. of Sec. III., Chap. I. of Sec. IV., and Chap. I. of Sec. V., and note Ruskin's surprising accuracy of knowledge in dealing with aspects of the natural world. The Stones of Venice, Vol. III., Chap. IV., states Ruskin's theory of art and its close relation to morality. Excellent selections from the various works of Ruskin will be found in An Introduction to the Writings of John Ruskin, by Vida D. Scudder. Selections are also given in Century, Manly, II., Riverside Literature Series, and Bronson's English Essays (Modern Painters and Fors Clavigera). Sesame and lilies, The King of the Golden River, and The Stones of Venice are published in Everyman's Library.

What was the message of Modern Painters? of The Stones of Venice? of Fors Clavigera? Why is Ruskin called a disciple of Carlyle? Select a passage from Ruskin's descriptive prose and indicate its chief qualities.

Bronte, Bulwer Lytton, Gaskell, Trollope, Kingsley, Reade, Blackmore, and Barrie.—Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte), Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte), Last Days of Pompeii (Lytton), Cranford (Gaskell), Barchester Towers (Trollope), Westward Ho! (Kingsley), The Cloister and the Hearth (Reade), and Lorna Doone (Blackmore) are all published in Everyman's Library. Barrie's The Little Minister is included in Burt's Home Library. The works of the Bronte sisters will be much more appreciated if Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte (Everyman's Library) is read first. The novels by the Bronte sisters, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope, and Barrie record their impressions of contemporary life. The other novels are historical. Lytton gives a vivid account of the last days of Pompeii. Kingsley thrills with his story of the sailors of Elizabeth's time. Reade, who studied libraries to insure the accuracy of The Cloister and the Hearth, portrays vividly the oncoming of the Renaissance in he fifteenth century. Blackmore's great story, which records some incidents of the Monmouth rebellion (1685), is written more to interest than to throw light on history.

Dickens.—The first works of Dickens to be read are Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol, and David Copperfield. These are all published in Everyman's Library. Craik, V., gives "Mr. Pickwick on the Ice," "Christmas at the Cratchit's," and two scenes from David Copperfield.

Select passages that show (a) humor, (b) pathos, (c) sympathy with children, (d) optimism. Describe some one of the characters. Can you instance a case here a mannerism is made to take the place of other characterization? Is Dickens a master of plot? of style?

Thackeray.—Read Henry Esmond (Eclectic English Classics) and The English Humorists of the Fifteenth Century (Macmillan's Pocket Classics). Craik, V., and Manly, II. give selections.

Contrast the manner of treatment in Thackeray's historical novel, Henry Esmond, and in Scott's historical romance, Ivanhoe. Thackeray says: "The best humor is that which contains most humanity—that which is flavored throughout with tenderness and kindness." Would this serve as a definition of Thackeray's own style of humor? State definitely how he differs from Dickens in portraying character. Compare Thackeray's English Humorists with Macaulay's Milton and Carlyle's Burns. Which essay leaves the most definite ideas? Which is the most interesting? Which has the most atmosphere? How should you characterize Thackeray's style?

George Eliot.—Read Silas Marner (Eclectic English Classics or Gateway Series), or selections in Craik, V., or Manly, II. In what does the chief strength of Silas Marner consist,—in the plot, the characters, or the description? Does the ethical purpose of this novel grow naturally out of the story? Is the inner life or only the outward appearance of the characters revealed? Wherein do they show growth?

Stevenson.—Read Treasure Island (Eclectic English Classics or Gateway Series), Inland Voyage, and Travels with a Donkey (Gateway Series). From the essays read Child's Play, Aes Triplex (both in Virginibus Puerisque). Some of the essays and best short stories (including Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) are given in Canby and Pierce's Selections from Robert Louis Stevenson. From the volume of poems called Underwoods, read The Celestial Surgeon and Requiem. A Child's Garden of Verse may be read entire in an hour.

Compare Treasure Island with Robinson Crusoe. What are the chief characteristics of An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey? Why is he called a romantic writer? As an essayist, compare him with Thackeray. What are the special qualities of his style?

George Meredith.—The Egoist is Meredith's most representative novel. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and Diana of the Crossways are also masterpieces. From the Poems read Love in the Valley, The Lark Ascending, Melanthus, Jump-to-Glory Jane.

What is the central purpose of The Egoist? Select specially Meredithian passages which show his general characteristics. Can you find any other author whose humor resembles Meredith's? Would he naturally be more popular with men or with women?

Hardy.—Hardy's most enjoyable novel is Far from the Madding Crowd. The Return of the Native is one of his strongest works.

What are some of the most striking differences between him and Meredith? Which one is naturally the better story-teller? Where are the scenes of most of Hardy's novels laid? What is his theory of life?

Arnold.—Read Dover Beach, Memorial Verses, Stanzas in Memory of the Author of "Obermann" and Sohrab and Rustum (Page's British Poets of the Nineteenth Century, Bronson, IV., Manly, I.).

Is Arnold the poet of fancy or of reflection? How does his poetry show one phase of nineteenth-century thought?

Arnold's Essays, Literary and Critical are published in Everyman's Library. The best volume of selections from the prose writings of Arnold is the one edited by Lewis E. Gates (348 pages, 75 cents). Good selections are given in Craik, V., Manly, I. (Sweetness and light), Century (The Study of Poetry). Arnold's Introduction to Ward, I., is well worth reading.

What quality specially marks Arnold's criticism? Compare him as a critic with Coleridge, Macaulay, Carlyle, and Thackeray. What are the advantages and disadvantages of a style like Arnold's?

Pater.—Read the essay, Leonardo da Vinci (Dickinson and Roe's Nineteenth Century Prose, pp. 338-368), from Pater's "golden book," The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Literature. E.E. Hale's Selections from Walter Pater (268 pages, 75 cents) gives representative selections. Manly, II., and Century give the essay on Style.

What are the chief characteristics of Pater's style? Compare it with Macaulay's, Newman's, Ruskin's, and Matthew Arnold's. Has Pater a message? Does he show the spirit of the time?

The Brownings.—From Elizabeth Barrett Browning, read Cowper's Grave, the Cry of the Children, and from her Sonnets from the Portuguese, Nos. I., III., VI., X., XVIII., XX., XXVI., XXVIII., XLI., XLIII.

Mrs. Browning's verse comes from the heart and should be felt rather than criticized. Fresh interest may, however, by given to a study of her Sonnets from the Portuguese, by comparing them with any other series of love sonnets, excepting Shakespeare's.

Robert Browning's shorter poems are best for the beginner, who should read Rabbi Ben Ezra, Abt Vogler, Home Thoughts from Abroad, Prospice, Saul, The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Baker's Browning's Shorter Poems (Macmillan's Pocket Classics) contains a very good collection of his shorter poems. Representative selections from Browning's poems are given in Page's British Poets of the Nineteenth Century, Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, Bronson, IV., Manly, I., and Century.

Browning's masterpiece, The Ring and the Book (Oxford Edition, Oxford University Press) would be apt to repel beginners. This should be studied only after a previous acquaintance with his shorter poems.

Define Browning's creed as found in Rabbi Ben Ezra. Is he an ethical teacher? Is there any similarity between his teaching and Carlyle's? What most interests Browning,—word-painting, narration, action, psychological analysis, or technique of verse? See whether a comparison of his Prospice with Tennyson's Crossing the Bar does not help you to understand Browning's peculiar cast of mind. What qualities in Browning entitle him to be ranked as a great poet?

Tennyson.—From his 1842 volume, read the poems mentioned on page 556. From The Princess, read the lyrical songs; from In Memoriam, the parts numbered XLI., LIV., LVII., and CXXXI.; from Maud, the eleven stanzas beginning: "Come into the garden, Maud"; from The Idylls of the King, read Gareth and Lynette, Lancelot and Elaine, The Passing of Arthur (Van Dyke's edition in Gateway Series); from his later poems, The Higher Pantheism, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, and Crossing the Bar.

The best single volume edition of Tennyson's works is published in Macmillan's Globe Poets. Selections are given in Page's British Poets of the Nineteenth Century, Bronson, IV., Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, Manly, I., and Century.

In The Palace of Art, study carefully the stanzas from XIV. to XXIII., which are illustrative of Tennyson's characteristic style of description. Compare Locksley Hall with Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, and note the difference in thought and metrical form. Does the later poem show a gain over the earlier? Compare Tennyson's nature poetry with that of Keats and Wordsworth. To what is chiefly due the pleasure in reading Tennyson's poetry: to the imagery, form, thought? What idea of his faith do you gain from In Memoriam and The Passing of Arthur? In what is Tennyson the poetic exponent of the age? Is it probable that Tennyson's popularity will increase or wane? Select some of his verse that you think will be as popular a hundred years hence as now.

Swinburne.—Read A Song in Time of Order, The Youth of the Year (Atlanta in Calydon), A Match, The Garden of Proserpine, Hertha, By the North Sea, The Hymn of Man, The Roundel, A Child's Laughter.

The most of the above are given in Page's British Poets of the Nineteenth Century, Bronson, IV., Manly, I., Century, Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.

Compare both the metrical skill and poetic ideas of Swinburne and Tennyson. Can you find any poet who surpasses Swinburne in the technique of verse? What are his chief excellencies and faults?

Kipling.—Read The Jungle Books. The following are among the best of his short stories: The Man Who Would be King, The Brushwood Boy, The Courting of Dinah Shadd, Drums of the Fore and Aft, Without Benefit of Clergy, On Greenhow Hill.

From his poems read Mandalay, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, Danny Deever, The 'Eathen, Ballad of East and West, Recessional, The White Man's Burden; also Song of the Banjo, and L'Envoi from Seven Seas, published by Doubleday, Page and Company.

Why is The Jungle Book called an original creation? What are the most distinctive dualities of Kipling's short stories? Point out in what respects they show the methods of the journalist. How does Kipling sustain the interest? What limitations do you notice? What is specially remarkable about his style? What are the principal characteristics of his verse? What subjects appeal to him? Why is his verse so popular?

Minor Poets.—Read the selections from Clough, Henley, Bridges, Davidson, Thompson, Watson, Dobson and Symons in either The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse or Stevenson's The Home Book of Verse. The Poetical Works of Robert Bridges is inexpensively published by the Oxford University Press. Dobson's verse has been gathered into the single volume Collected Poems (1913).

What are the chief characteristics of each of the above authors? Do these minor versifiers fill a want not fully supplied by the great poets?

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER IX:

[Footnote 1: A Liberal Education and Where to Find It (Lay Sermons).]

[Footnote 2: For suggested readings in Pater, see p. 584.]

[Footnote 3: Pp. 225-364 of the Oxford University Press edition of his Poetical Works.]

[Footnote 4: Printed by permission of The Macmillan Company.]

[Footnote 5: Given in Stevenson's Home Book of Verse and The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.]

[Footnote 6: History of England, Vol. III, Chap. XI.]

[Footnote 7: Morison's Life of Macaulay, p. 139.]

[Footnote 8: The Idea of a University (Literature: A Lecture).]

[Footnote 9: For Claviers, Letter I.]

[Footnote 10: Praeterita, Vol. II., Chap. V.]

[Footnote 11: Silas Marner, Chap. VI.]

[Footnote 12: The Scholar Gypsy.]

[Footnote 13: A Southern Light.]

[Footnote 14: The Grande Chartreuse.]

[Footnote 15: Home Thoughts from Abroad.]

[Footnote 16: A.C. Benson's Alfred Tennyson, p. 157.]

[Footnote 17 & 18: Printed by permission of Rudyard Kipling and Doubleday, Page and Company.]

[Footnote 19: For full titles, see p. 6.]

CHAPTER X: TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE

Interest in the Present.—One result of the growing scientific spirit has been an increasing interest in contemporary problems and literature. At the beginning of the Victorian age, the chief part of the literature studied in college was nearly two thousand years old. When English courses were finally added, they frequently ended with Milton. To-day, however, many colleges have courses in strictly contemporary literature. The scientific attitude toward life has caused a recognition of the fact that he who disregards current literature remains ignorant of a part of the life and thought of to-day and that he resembles the mathematician who neglects one factor in the solution of a problem.

It is true that the future may take a different view of all contemporary things, including literature; but this possibility does not justify neglect of the present. We should also remember that different stages in the growth of nations and individuals constantly necessitate changes in estimating the relative importance of the thought of former centuries.

The Trend of Contemporary Literature.—The diversity of taste in the wide circle of twentieth-century readers has encouraged authors of both the realistic and the romantic schools. The main tendency of scientific influence and of the new interest in racial welfare is toward realism. In his stories of the "Five Towns," Arnold Bennett shows how the dull industrial life affects the character of the individual. Much of the fiction of H.G. Wells presents matter of scientific or sociological interest. Poets like John Masefield and Wilfrid Gibson sing with an almost prosaic sincerity of the life of workmen and of the squalid city streets. The drama is frequently a study of the conditions affecting contemporary life.

Twentieth-century writers are not, however, neglecting the other great function of literature,—to charm life with romantic visions and to bring to it deliverance from care. The poetry of Noyes takes us back to the days of Drake and to the Mermaid Inn, where we listen to Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson. The Irish poets and dramatists disclose a world of the "Ever-Young," where there is:—

"A laughter in the diamond air, a music in the trembling grass."

The influence of the great German skeptic, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), appears in some of Shaw's dramas, as well as in the novels of Wells; but the poets of this age seem to have more faith than Swinburne or Matthew Arnold or some of the minor versifiers of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Two prominent essayists, Arthur Christopher Benson (1862- ) and Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874- ) are sincere optimists. Such volumes of Benson's essays as From a College Window (1906), Beside Still Waters (1907), and Thy Rod and Thy Staff (1912) have strengthened faith and proved a tonic to many. Chesterton is a suggestive and stimulating essayist in spite of the fact that he often bombards his readers with too much paradox. Early in life he was an agnostic and a follower of Herbert Spencer, but he later became a champion of Christian faith. Sometimes Chesterton seems to be merely clever, but he is usually too thought-provoking to be read passively. His Robert Browning (1903), Varied Types (1903), Heretics (1905), George Bernard Shaw (1909), and The Victorian Age in Literature (1913) keep most readers actively thinking.

THE NOVEL

Joseph Conrad.—This son of distinguished Polish exiles from Russia, Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski, as he was originally named, was born in the Ukraine, in 1857. Until his nineteenth year he was unfamiliar with the English language. Instead of following the literary or military traditions of his family, he joined the English merchant marine. Sailing the seas of the world, touching at strange tropical ports and uncharted islands, elbowing all the races of the globe, hearing all the languages spoken by man,—such were Conrad's activities between his twentieth and thirty-seventh years.



At thirty-seven, needing a little rest, he settled in England and began to write. Short stories, novels, and an interesting autobiographical volume, A Personal Record (1912), represent Conrad's production. Among his ablest books are Tales of Unrest (1898), a volume of sea stories, and Lord Jim (1900), a novel full of the fascination of strange seas and shores, but still more remarkable for its searching analysis of a man's recovery of self-respect after a long period of remorse for failure to meet a momentary crisis. Youth, A Narrative, and Two Other Tales (1902), contains one of Conrad's strongest stories, The End of the Tether. This is a tender story of an old sea captain, who for the sake of a cherished daughter holds his post against terrific odds, including blindness and disgrace. Typhoon (1903) is an almost unrivaled account of a ship's fight against mad hurricanes and raging seas.