THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: ENGLAND
Poets of the Eighteenth Century: Pope, Young, MacPherson, etc.: Prose
Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Daniel Defoe, Richardson, Fielding,
Swift, Sterne, David Hume. Poets of the Nineteenth Century: Byron,
Shelley, the Lake Poets: Prose Writers of the Nineteenth Century: Walter
Scott, Macaulay, Dickens, Carlyle.
THE REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE: POETS.--As in France, the eighteenth century
(the age of Queen Anne) was in England richer in prose than in poetry. As
poets, however, must be indicated Thomson, descriptive and dramatic,
whose profound feeling for nature was not without influence over French
writers of the same century; Pope, descriptive writer, translator,
moralist, elegiast, very intelligent and highly polished, whose _Essay on
Criticism_ and _Essay on Man_ were remarkably utilised by Voltaire;
Edward Young, whose _Night Thoughts_ enjoyed the same prodigious
success in France as in England, and who contributed in no small measure
to darken and render gloomy both literatures; MacPherson, who invented
_Ossian_, that is, pretended poems of the Middle Ages, a magnificent
genius, be it said, who exercised considerable influence over the
romanticism of both lands; Chatterton, who trod the same road, but with
less success, yet was valued almost equally by the French romantic poets,
and to them he has owed at least the consolidation of his immortality;
Cowper, elegiac and fantastic, with a highly humorous vein; Crabbe, a
very close observer of popular customs and an ingenious novelist in
verse, quite analogous to the Dutch painters; Burns, a peasant-poet,
sensitive and impassioned, yet at the same time a careful artist
moved by local customs, the manifestations of which he saw displayed
before his eyes.
PROSE WRITERS.--The masters of prose (some being also true poets) were
innumerable. Daniel Defoe, journalist, satirist, pamphleteer, was the
author of the immortal _Robinson Crusoe_; Addison, justly adored by
Voltaire, author of a sound tragedy, _Cato_, is supremely a scholar, the
acute, sensible, and extremely thoughtful editor of _The Spectator_;
Richardson, the idol of Diderot and of Jean Jacques Rousseau, enjoyed a
European success with his sentimental and virtuous novels, _Pamela_,
_Clarissa Harlowe_, and _Sir Charles Grandison_. As a critic and as a
personality, Dr. Johnson has no parallel in any age or land. His
_Dictionary_ is famous despite its faults, and _Rasselas_, which he
wrote to pay for his mother's funeral, can still be read.
Fielding, who began by being only the parodist of Richardson, in
_Joseph Andrews_, ended by becoming an astounding realistic novelist, the
worthy predecessor of Thackeray and Dickens in his extraordinary _Tom
Jones_. The amiable Goldsmith, more akin to Richardson, wrote that
idyllic novel _The Vicar of Wakefield_, the charm of which was still felt
throughout Europe only fifty years ago. Laurence Sterne, the most
accurate representative of English _humour_, capable of emotion more
especially ironical, jester, mystificator, has both amused and disquieted
several generations with his _Sentimental Journey_ and his fantastical,
disconcerting and enchanting _Tristram Shandy_. Swift, horribly bitter, a
corrosive and cruel satirist, sadly scoffed at all the society of his
time in _Gulliver's Travels_, in _Drapier's Letters_, in his _Proposal to
Prevent the Children of the Poor Being a Burden_, in a mass of other
small works wherein the most infuriated wrath is sustained under the form
of calm and glacial irony.
HISTORY.--History was expressed in England in the eighteenth century by
David Hume, who chronicled the progress of the English race from the
Middle Ages until the eighteenth century; by Robertson, who similarly
handled the Scotch and who narrated the reign of Charles V; and by
Gibbon, so habitually familiar with the French society of his time, who
followed the Romans from the first Cæsars to Marcus Aurelius, then more
closely from Marcus Aurelius to the epoch of Constantine, and finally
the Byzantine Empire up to the period of the Renaissance. The imposing
erudition, the rather pompous but highly distinguished style of the
author, without counting his animosity to Christianity, caused him to
enjoy a great success, especially in France. The work of Gibbon is
regarded as the finest example of history written by an Englishman.
THE STAGE.--The stage in England in the eighteenth century sank far below
its importance in the seventeenth century; yet who does not know _She
Stoops to Conquer_ of Goldsmith, and that sparkling and lively comedy,
_The School for Scandal_, by Sheridan? Note, as an incomparable
journalist, the famous and mysterious Junius, who, from 1769 to 1772,
waged such terrible war on the minister Grafton.
THE LAKE POETS.--In the nineteenth century appeared those poets so
familiar to the French romanticists, or else the latter pretended
they were, who were termed the lake poets, because they were lovers of
the countryside; these were Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Southey
was an epic and elegiac poet, whilst he was also descriptive; Coleridge,
philosopher, metaphysician, a little nebulous and disordered, had very
fine outbursts and some lamentable falls. Wordsworth was a most
distinguished lyricist. Lord Byron did not acquire honour by so roughly
handling Southey and Wordsworth.
THE ROMANTIC EPOCH.--The two greatest English poets of the romantic
period were Lord Byron and Shelley; the former the admirable poet of
disenchantment and of despair, gifted with a noble epic genius, creating
and vitalising characters which, it must be confessed, differed very
little from one another, but an exalted figure with a grand manner and,
except Shakespeare, the only English poet who exercised genuine influence
over French literature; the latter an idealistic poet of the most suave
delicacy, aërial and heavenly, despite a private life of the utmost
disorder and even guilt, he is one of the most perfect poets that ever
lived; a great tragedian, too, in his _Cenci_, quite unknown in France
until the middle of the nineteenth century, but since then the object of
a sort of adoration among the larger number of Gallic poets and lovers
of poetry.
Keats was as romantic as Shelley and Byron, both in spite of and because
of his desperate efforts to assimilate the Grecian spirit. He dreamt of
its heroes and its ancient myths, but there is in him little that is
Grecian except the choice of subjects, and it is not in his grand poem,
_Endymion_, nor even in that fine fragment, _Hyperion_, that can be found
the real melancholy, sensitive, and modern poet, but in his last short
poems, _The Skylark_, _On a Greek Vase_, _Autumn_, which, by the
exquisite perfection of their form and the harmonious richness of the
style, take rank among the most beautiful songs of English lyrism.
Nearer to us came Tennyson, possessing varied inspiration, epical,
lyrical, elegiac poet, always exalted and pure, approaching the
classical, and himself already a classic.
Swinburne, almost exclusively lyrical, a dexterous and enchanting
versifier, inspired by the ancient Greeks, generally evinced a highly
original poetic temperament, and Dante Rossetti, imbued with mediaeval
inspiration, possessed a powerful and slightly giddy imagination. Far
less known on the Continent, where critics may feel surprise at her
necessary inclusion here, is his sister, Christina Rossetti. Her
qualities as a poet are a touching and individual grace, much delicate
spontaneity, a pure and often profound emotion, and an instinct as a
stylist which is almost infallible. The Brownings form a celebrated
couple, and about them Carlyle, on hearing of their marriage, observed
that he hoped they would understand each other. Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, translator of Aeschylus of Theocritus, gave proof in her
original poetry of a vigour, of a vividness, and of a vigorous exuberance
of similes that often recalled the Elizabethans, but marred her work by
declamatory rhetoric and by a tormented and often obscure style. Robert
Browning was yet more difficult, owing to his overpowering taste for
subtlety and the bizarre--nay, even the grotesque. Almost ignored, or at
least unappreciated by his contemporaries, he has since taken an exalted
place in English admiration, which he owes to the depth, originality, and
extreme richness of his ideas, all the more, perhaps, because they lend
themselves to a number of differing interpretations.
THE NOVELISTS.--In prose the century began with the historical novelist,
Sir Walter Scott, full of lore and knowledge, reconstructor and
astonishing _reviver_ of past times, more especially the Middle Ages,
imbuing all his characters with life, and even in some measure vitalising
the objects he evoked. None more than he, not even Byron, has enjoyed
such continuous appreciation with both French romantic poets and also the
French reading public. The English novel, recreated by this great master,
was worthily continued by Dickens, both sentimentalist and humourist, a
jesting, though genial, delineator of the English middle class, and an
accurate and sympathetic portrayer of the poor; by Thackeray, supreme
railer and satirist, terrible to egoists, hypocrites, and snobs; by the
prolific and entertaining Bulwer-Lytton, by the grave, philosophical,
and sensible George Eliot, by Charlotte Brontë, author of the affecting
_Jane Eyre_, etc., and her sister Emily, whose _Wuthering Heights_ has
been almost extravagantly admired.
Four other great prose writers presenting startling divergences from one
another cannot be omitted. Belonging to the first half of the nineteenth
century, Charles Lamb earned wide popularity by his _Tales from
Shakespeare_ and _Poetry for Children_, written in collaboration with his
sister Mary; but he was specially remarkable for his famed _Essays of
Elia_, wherein he affords evidence of possessing an almost paradoxical
mixture of delicate sensibility and humour, as well as of accurate and
also fantastic observation. Newman, at first an English clergyman but
subsequently a cardinal, after conversion to the Catholic Church, appears
to me hardly eligible in a history of literature in which Lamennais has
no place. As a literary man, his famous sermons at Oxford and the Tracts
exercised much influence, and provoked such impassioned and prodigious
revival of old doctrines and of an antiquated spirit in religion; then
the _Apologia Pro Vita Sua_, _Callista_, and the _History of Arianism_,
revealed him as a master of eloquence.
Ruskin, as art critic, in his bold volumes illumined with remarkable
beauty of styles, _Modern Painters_, _The Seven Lamps of
Architecture_, and _The Stones of Venice_, formulated the creed and the
school of pre-Raphaelitism. At the time of the religious revival at
Oxford, he preached a servile imitation of antiquity by the path of the
Renaissance, appealing to national and mediæval inspiration, not without
_naïveté_ and archaism, none the less evident because he was sincere and
mordant. George Meredith, who died only in 1910, was a prolific and often
involved novelist (the Browning of prose), with a passion for metaphors
and a too freely expressed eclectic scorn for the multitude. Withal, he
had a profound knowledge of life and of the human soul; impregnated with
humour, he was creator of unforgettable types of character, and no
pre-occupation of his epoch was foreign to his mind, whilst his vigorous
realism always obstinately refused to turn from contemporaneous themes,
or to gratify the needs and aspirations which it was possible to satisfy.
His epitaph might well be that he understood the women of his time, a
rare phenomenon.
HISTORY.--History could show two writers of absolute
superiority--Macaulay (_History of England since James II_), an
omnivorous reader and very brilliant writer, and Carlyle, the English
Michelet, feverish, passionate, incongruous, and disconcerting, who dealt
with history as might a very powerful lyrical poet.