English Literature
for instance, do you think Lamb was so haunted by "Rose Aylmer"? Quote from
Landor's poems to illustrate his tenderness, his sensitiveness to beauty,
his power of awakening emotion, his delicacy of characterization. Do you
find the same qualities in his prose? Can you explain why much of his prose
seems like a translation from the Greek? Compare a passage from the
_Imaginary Conversations_ with a passage from Gibbon or Johnson, to show
the difference between the classic and the pseudo-classic style. Compare
one of Landor's characters, in _Imaginary Conversations_, with the same
character in history.
12. _Jane Austen_. How does Jane Austen show a reaction from Romanticism?
What important work did she do for the novel? To what kind of fiction was
her work opposed? In what does the charm of her novels consist? Make a
brief comparison between Jane Austen and Scott (as illustrated in _Pride
and Prejudice_ and _Ivanhoe_), having in mind the subject, the characters,
the manner of treatment, and the interest of both narratives. Do Jane
Austen's characters have to be explained by the author, or do they explain
themselves? Which method calls for the greater literary skill? What does
Jane Austen say about Mrs. Radcliffe, in _Northanger Abbey_? Does she make
any other observations on eighteenth-century novelists?
CHRONOLOGY
_End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth Century_
============================================================================
HISTORY | LITERATURE
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1760-1820. George III |
| 1770-1850. Wordsworth
| 1771-1832. Scott
1789-1799. French Revolution |
| 1796-1816. Jane Austen's novels
| 1798. Lyrical Balads of Wordsworth
| and Coleridge
1800. Union of Great Britain and |
Ireland |
1802. Colonization of Australia | 1802. Scotts Minstrelsy of the Scottish
| Border
1805. Battle of Trafalgar | 1805-1817. Scotts poems
| 1807. Wordsworth's Intimations of
1807. Abolition of slave trade | Immortality. Lamb's Tales
| from Shakespeare
1808-1814. Peninsular War |
| 1809-1818. Byron's Childe Harold
1812. Second war with United States | 1810-1813. Coleridge's Lectures on
| Shakespeare
1814. Congress of Vienna | 1814-1831. Waverley Novels
1815. Battle of Waterloo |
| 1816. Shelley's Alastor
| 1817. Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
| 1817-1820. Keats's poems
| 1818-1820. Shelley's Prometheus
1819. First Atlantic steamship |
1820. George IV (_d_. 1830) | 1820. Wordsworth's Duddon Sonnets
| 1820-1833. Lamb's Essays of Elia
| 1821. De Quincey's Confessions
| 1824-1846. Landor's Imaginary
| Conversations.
1826. First Temperance Society |
1829. Catholic Emancipation Bill |
1830. William IV (_d_. 1837) | 1830. Tennyson's first poems
First railway |
| 1831. Scott's last novel
1832. Reform Bill |
1833. Emancipation of slaves | 1833. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
| Browning's Pauline
1834. System of national education |
1837. Victoria (_d_. 1901) |
| 1853-1861. De Quincey's Collected
| Essays
============================================================================
* * * * *
CHAPTER XI
THE VICTORIAN AGE (1850-1900)
THE MODERN PERIOD OF PROGRESS AND UNREST
When Victoria became queen, in 1837, English literature seemed to have
entered upon a period of lean years, in marked contrast with the poetic
fruitfulness of the romantic age which we have just studied. Coleridge,
Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Scott had passed away, and it seemed as if there
were no writers in England to fill their places. Wordsworth had written, in
1835,
Like clouds that rake, the mountain summits,
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother,
From sunshine to the sunless land!
In these lines is reflected the sorrowful spirit of a literary man of the
early nineteenth century who remembered the glory that had passed away from
the earth. But the leanness of these first years is more apparent than
real. Keats and Shelley were dead, it is true, but already there had
appeared three disciples of these poets who were destined to be far more
widely, read than were their masters. Tennyson had been publishing poetry
since 1827, his first poems appearing almost simultaneously with the last
work of Byron, Shelley, and Keats; but it was not until 1842, with the
publication of his collected poems, in two volumes, that England recognized
in him one of her great literary leaders. So also Elizabeth Barrett had
been writing since 1820, but not till twenty years later did her poems
become deservedly popular; and Browning had published his _Pauline_ in
1833, but it was not until 1846, when he published the last of the series
called _Bells and Pomegranates_, that the reading public began to
appreciate his power and originality. Moreover, even as romanticism seemed
passing away, a group of great prose writers--Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle,
and Ruskin--had already begun to proclaim the literary glory of a new age,
which now seems to rank only just below the Elizabethan and the Romantic
periods.
HISTORICAL SUMMARY. Amid the multitude of social and political forces of
this great age, four things stand out clearly. First, the long struggle of
the Anglo-Saxons for personal liberty is definitely settled, and democracy
becomes the established order of the day. The king, who appeared in an age
of popular weakness and ignorance, and the peers, who came with the Normans
in triumph, are both stripped of their power and left as figureheads of a
past civilization. The last vestige of personal government and of the
divine right of rulers disappears; the House of Commons becomes the ruling
power in England; and a series of new reform bills rapidly extend the
suffrage, until the whole body of English people choose for themselves the
men who shall represent them.
Second, because it is an age of democracy, it is an age of popular
education, of religious tolerance, of growing brotherhood, and of profound
social unrest. The slaves had been freed in 1833; but in the middle of the
century England awoke to the fact that slaves are not necessarily negroes,
stolen in Africa to be sold like cattle in the market place, but that
multitudes of men, women, and little children in the mines and factories
were victims of a more terrible industrial and social slavery. To free
these slaves also, the unwilling victims of our unnatural competitive
methods, has been the growing purpose of the Victorian Age until the
present day.
Third, because it is an age of democracy and education, it is an age of
comparative peace. England begins to think less of the pomp and false
glitter of fighting, and more of its moral evils, as the nation realizes
that it is the common people who bear the burden and the sorrow and the
poverty of war, while the privileged classes reap most of the financial and
political rewards. Moreover, with the growth of trade and of friendly
foreign relations, it becomes evident that the social equality for which
England was contending at home belongs to the whole race of men; that
brotherhood is universal, not insular; that a question of justice is never
settled by fighting; and that war is generally unmitigated horror and
barbarism. Tennyson, who came of age when the great Reform Bill occupied
attention, expresses the ideals of the Liberals of his day who proposed to
spread the gospel of peace,
Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furled
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the world.
Fourth, the Victorian Age is especially remarkable because of its rapid
progress in all the arts and sciences and in mechanical inventions. A
glance at any record of the industrial achievements of the nineteenth
century will show how vast they are, and it is unnecessary to repeat here
the list of the inventions, from spinning looms to steamboats, and from
matches to electric lights. All these material things, as well as the
growth of education, have their influence upon the life of a people, and it
is inevitable that they should react upon its prose and poetry; though as
yet we are too much absorbed in our sciences and mechanics to determine
accurately their influence upon literature. When these new things shall by
long use have became familiar as country roads, or have been replaced by
newer and better things, then they also will have their associations and
memories, and a poem on the railroads may be as suggestive as Wordsworth's
sonnet on Westminster Bridge; and the busy, practical workingmen who to-day
throng our streets and factories may seem, to a future and greater age, as
quaint and poetical as to us seem the slow toilers of the Middle Ages.
LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS. When one is interested enough to trace the
genealogy of Victoria he finds, to his surprise, that in her veins flowed
the blood both of William the Conqueror and of Cerdic, the first Saxon king
of England; and this seems to be symbolic of the literature of her age,
which embraces the whole realm of Saxon and Norman life,--the strength and
ideals of the one, and the culture and refinement of the other. The
romantic revival had done its work, and England entered upon a new free
period, in which every form of literature, from pure romance to gross
realism, struggled for expression. At this day it is obviously impossible
to judge the age as a whole; but we are getting far enough away from the
early half of it to notice certain definite characteristics. First, though
the age produced many poets, and two who deserve to rank among the
greatest, nevertheless this is emphatically an age of prose. And since the
number of readers has increased a thousandfold with the spread of popular
education, it is the age of the newspaper, the magazine, and the modern
novel,--the first two being the story of the world's daily life, and the
last our pleasantest form of literary entertainment, as well as our most
successful method of presenting modern problems and modern ideals. The
novel in this age fills a place which the drama held in the days of
Elizabeth; and never before, in any age or language, has the novel appeared
in such numbers and in such perfection.
[Moral Purpose] The second marked characteristic of the age is that
literature, both in prose and in poetry, seems to depart from the purely
artistic standard, of art for art's sake, and to be actuated by a definite
moral purpose Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin,--who and what were these
men if not the teachers of England, not vaguely but definitely, with superb
faith in their message, and with the conscious moral purpose to uplift and