_LANDMARKS IN MODERN LITERATURE._
Most people read in such a desultory way that they never know whether
they are really familiar with standard literature or not. All the books
of one author are read because they are liked; and none of the books of
another are known because the reader never managed to get interested,
or never happened to have his or her attention called to that author’s
books. A very simple working system is needed, with landmarks, as it
were, set up here and there to guide the choice of books at all times
and make it intelligent and just.
SHAKSPERE--1600.
English literature practically begins with Shakspere, who did his best
work about 1600 A. D., three hundred years ago. Two important poets
come before him--Spenser, who was still living when he began to be
known as a successful dramatist, and Chaucer, who was a contemporary
of Boccaccio and the first noteworthy writer in the then new English
tongue, that tongue in which Norman-French had mingled with Anglo-Saxon
in the common patois of the people, though pure French and Latin
remained the languages of the court and of scholarship.
The language in which Chaucer wrote is now so antiquated that it is
not easy for the ordinary person to read it. His “Canterbury Tales”
are pleasant and cheerful, for he was an eminently sane man; but what
he wrote has been often rewritten since his time till we are quite
familiar with most of his stories and ideas through other channels.
Spenser, whose best work is the Faerie Queen, though he wrote so
near the time of Shakspere, seems decidedly more antiquated; yet, as
compared with Chaucer, he is easy reading. The Faerie Queen is one long
series of beautiful and sensuous images, a mingling of fair women,
brave knights, and ugly dragons which in his hands attain a dreamy
charm. Says Taine, “He was pre-eminently a creator and a dreamer, and
that most naturally, instinctively, and unceasingly. We might go on
forever describing this inward condition of all great artists.... A
character appears to them, then an action, then a landscape, then a
succession of actions, characters, landscapes, producing, completing,
arranging themselves before our eyes. This fount of living and changing
forms is inexhaustible in Spenser. He has but to close his eyes and
apparitions arise; they abound in him, crowd, overflow; in vain he
pours them forth; they continually float up, more copious and more
dense.” And we may add that the language in which he describes these
dreams is as musical as the fancy of his imagery is rich. If one
likes that sort of thing one can soon learn to read Spenser with ease
and enjoyment, and in the whole range of English literature we shall
find nothing so sensuously sweet as his poetry, in his own musical
“Spenserian” stanza.
As we have said, for the ordinary reader English literature begins
with Shakspere. He was the central figure of the brilliant era of
Queen Elizabeth; but none of his fellow dramatists, not even “rare Ben
Jonson” or Marlowe, are read today. For us they are dead, and Shakspere
alone remains as the representative of the “Golden Age,” though perhaps
we must include in it Bacon and Milton, writers who stand somewhat
apart.
ROBINSON CRUSOE--1719.
The next principal epoch is just one hundred years later, when the
reign of Queen Anne was adorned by the essayists, headed by Addison;
by the “classic” poets, foremost among whom are Dryden and Pope; and
by the first of the novel-writers, Defoe, the author of Robinson
Crusoe. Here we find three different kinds of authors equally eminent.
This “age” continued for seventy-five years,--indeed, we may say a
hundred, expiring on the appearance of the poets Burns, Wordsworth, and
Coleridge. It is called the “Classic Age,” because the leading writers,
especially the poets (Dryden, Pope, etc.), tried to follow the classic
models of Greece and Rome, and so produced work most highly polished
and theoretically correct; but of course it was artificial and wanting
in the instinctive and spontaneous elements of poetry as we know it
in the nineteenth century poets. The term “classic,” however, does
not apply to the novelists--Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett,
and Goldsmith following Defoe and Bunyan. These novel writers were
looked on as too low for critical attention; but the prose of Addison,
Steel, Swift Johnson, and Goldsmith[2] was admired as prose had never
been admired before, and our later age has accepted this prose as the
greatest literary achievement of the eighteenth century.
The modern reader will find his chief interest in the literature of
the nineteenth century. And now there are a few dates that we should
remember.
BURNS--1786.
Burns prepared the way for the new poetry--a poetry simple,
spontaneous, tender, and true, as the poetry of Pope was artificial,
clever, and “elegant.” The Kilmarnock edition of Burns’s poems appeared
in 1786. It was a country print of the immortal work of a rude country
poet.
LYRICAL BALLADS--1798.
The “romantic movement” in poetry, as it was called, was really
inaugurated in 1798--a date always to be remembered--by the little
volume of Lyrical Ballads published jointly by Wordsworth and
Coleridge. This volume contained “The Rime of the Ancient Marinere”
(Coleridge’s best poem) and “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey” (the
best work of Wordsworth). No one paid much attention to the book, and
but a limited number of copies were sold or given away. A few poets,
however, read it and felt its spirit.
The first of these to take up the new poetic movement was Scott, in
his Lay of the Last Minstrel, which at once became popular. For ten
years Scott was the popular poet, but then he was succeeded by Byron,
the poet of the dark and cynical. Close on the heels of Byron came
Shelley and Keats. Last of all came Tennyson and Browning. Tennyson’s
reputation was made by his two volumes of poems published in 1842; and
Browning published some of his best work in the same year, though his
fame did not come to him till many years later.
LAMB--1825.
So much for poetry. The prose essay lay dormant from the time of
Goldsmith until Charles Lamb and De Quincey appeared. Lamb’s Essays
of Elia began in the London Magazine in 1825; and that is a good date
to remember as the beginning of the revival of the essay. At almost
the same time we have De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater, with
brilliant, impassioned prose; and during the next twenty-five years
came Macaulay, the writer of oratorical prose, the splendid rhetorician
and rhetorical painter of word pictures, and Carlyle, the apostle of
work, the philosopher, the lecturer through the printed page, and last
of all, Matthew Arnold and Ruskin, both critics--Ruskin by far the
more brilliant and varied.
WAVERLEY--1814.
In the novel the first great date to remember in the nineteenth century
is 1814--the year of the publication of Waverley. Between the Vicar of
Wakefield and Waverley no great work of fiction appeared, though Jane
Austen was writing her artistic little stories. But when Waverley was
published every one felt that a new era was at hand. The book at once
became immensely popular. It did for the novel what the Lay of the Last
Minstrel and Marmion had done for poetry--it introduced the romantic
era in fiction.
HUGO, DUMAS, BALZAC--1830.
Scott held the field almost entirely to himself until 1830. In that
year Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, and Balzac, all three acknowledging
the genius and power of Scott, appeared in France. Hugo and Dumas were
professed romanticists; but Balzac was a realist, and advocated ideas
that were not generally accepted by the critics till many years later,
though the common people bought his books freely.
It was Dickens who really made the realistic novel popular. The date
to remember is 1835, the year in which Sketches by Boz appeared and
Pickwick was begun. Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s first masterpiece, was
published in 1848, and in 1858 George Eliot’s Adam Bede.
Since 1860 the forward movement in English literature seems to have
stopped, and such writers as George Meredith and Thomas Hardy appear
rather as belated members of the older group than representatives of
any new type. With these we must include Tolstoi, Turgenev, and Ibsen.
In Stevenson, Kipling, and Barrie we undoubtedly have the beginning of
a new literary movement, the importance of which it is impossible yet
to estimate.
AMERICAN LITERATURE.
We have purposely omitted mention of the American authors, since they
do not seem to fit into the movement of literary ideas in England. They
are more simply and obviously artists, giving to the people what they
can that they think the people will like, and each in his own way.
IRVING--1820.
Our first writer of importance was Irving, whose Sketchbook was
published in 1820. Irving has been called the “American Addison.” He
might almost as well be called the American Lamb, though Lamb’s essays
did not begin to appear till five years later: and he was more of a
story-teller than Lamb.
James Fenimore Cooper began his literary career as a professed imitator
of Scott in 1820; but he soon developed a purely American romantic
novel, the novel of the Indian. He is no very great novelist; but his
books are still popular.
The first American poet was William Cullen Bryant, whose best poem,
Thanatopsis, was written when he was eighteen, in 1812.
Between 1830 and 1840 appeared some of the best work of Poe,
Longfellow, and Emerson; but they were as utterly distinct in their
spirit and purposes as if they had belonged to different ages. Poe was
the poetic inventor, the discoverer of the dramatic principles of plot
in story-writing, and the original literary critic; Longfellow was
the sweet singer of the people, the home poet, unoriginal but beloved
by all; Emerson was the philosopher and man of letters combined,
the serious essay writer and interpreter to the people of the new
discoveries of the great students of philosophy.
Following Longfellow were the poets Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes, all
of whose best work just preceded or just followed the Civil War.
SCARLET LETTER--1851.
The one great American novelist is Hawthorne, whose Scarlet Letter
appeared in 1851--his first great novel--and whose best work was all
completed prior to 1861, the year of his return from his consulship at
Liverpool.
Many of our political leaders have been great writers, too. The first
was Benjamin Franklin, whose Poor Richard’s Almanac and Autobiography
must certainly be included among the great works of American letters.
Then Daniel Webster, who stands among the first of great orators in the
English language, was the author (between 1830 and 1860) of a series of
speeches, many of which have been accepted as an important part of our
literature. And among short masterpieces there is none greater than the
Gettysburg speech of Abraham Lincoln, though it would not be proper to
speak of him as a man of letters.
It will be seen that practically all of our great American literature
appeared between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. Since the Civil War
there has been a new era; but it is not our present purpose to estimate
current writers.
SUMMARY.
To summarize the whole field, English and American, we may say that the
literature that we call standard began with Shakspere, three hundred
years ago. The first work in that period was Spenser’s Faerie Queen,
the second Shakspere’s plays. Chaucer, who wrote two hundred years
earlier, we may look on as the forerunner, who prepared the way for the
epoch which opened so brilliantly with Spenser and Shakspere. Passing
over the names of Bacon and Milton, who belong to the seventeenth
century, but stand apart from the literary movement or merely suggested
what was to come long after, we find the Queen Anne essayists as the
characteristic literary workers at the beginning of the eighteenth
century; and on either side of them the poets of the Classic Age, of
whom Pope was high priest, and the author of Robinson Crusoe, the
despised teller of tales who was to be the forerunner of a literary
movement greater than any we have yet seen. The Classic Age ended with
Goldsmith, and the Romantic movement, first perceived in Burns, really
took definite form as a movement in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. Scott
was the popularizer of the Romantic movement in both verse and prose.
That movement reached its climax in 1830 in Hugo and Dumas. In that
year Balzac inaugurated the realistic movement, whose forerunner was
Jane Austen; but it is Dickens who, beginning in 1835, really made it
as popular as Scott had made the Romantic movement by the Waverley
novels. And while the Romantic movement was aristocratic, the Realistic
movement, going back to the despised Robinson Crusoe, was highly
democratic.
In Tennyson we find a poet who made the romantic thought into works of
art that the people could appreciate; and in Longfellow we see much the
same thing done for the realistic poetry, though Walt Whitman, a very
imperfect artist, is the high priest of the democratic idea in poetry.
If we can only fix these dates and periods and dominant eras of thought
in our minds, we shall have a framework in which we can fit all the
varying phases of modern English literature.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: Goldsmith is a sort of link between the essayist and the
novelist. He was almost equally eminent as novelist, essayist, and
poet.]