THE PRESENT AGE
We have carried our study down to the death of Ruskin and included in it
authors like Swinburne and Meredith who survived till recently; and in
discussing the novel we have included men like Kipling and Hardy--living
authors. It would be possible and perhaps safer to stop there and make
no attempt to bring writers later than these into our survey. To do so
is to court an easily and quickly stated objection. One is anticipating
the verdict of posterity. How can we who are contemporaries tell whether
an author's work is permanent or no?
Of course, in a sense the point of view expressed by these questions is
true enough. It is always idle to anticipate the verdict of posterity.
Remember Matthew Arnold's prophecy that at the end of the nineteenth
century Wordsworth and Byron would be the two great names in Romantic
poetry. We are ten years and more past that date now, and so far as
Byron is concerned, at any rate, there is no sign that Arnold's
prediction has come true. But the obvious fact that we cannot do our
grandchildren's thinking for them, is no reason why we should refuse to
think for ourselves. No notion is so destructive to the formation of a
sound literary taste as the notion that books become literature only
when their authors are dead. Round us men and women are putting into
plays and poetry and novels the best that they can or know. They are
writing not for a dim and uncertain future but for us, and on our
recognition and welcome they depend, sometimes for their livelihood,
always for the courage which carries them on to fresh endeavour.
Literature is an ever-living and continuous thing, and we do it less
than its due service if we are so occupied reading Shakespeare and
Milton and Scott that we have no time to read Mr. Yeats, Mr. Shaw or Mr.
Wells. Students of literature must remember that classics are being
manufactured daily under their eyes, and that on their sympathy and
comprehension depends whether an author receives the success he merits
when he is alive to enjoy it.
The purpose of this chapter, then, is to draw a rough picture of some of
the lines or schools of contemporary writing--of the writing mainly,
though not altogether, of living authors. It is intended to indicate
some characteristics of the general trend or drift of literary effort as
a whole. The most remarkable feature of the age, as far as writing is
concerned, is without doubt its inattention to poetry. Tennyson was a
popular author; his books sold in thousands; his lines passed into that
common conversational currency of unconscious quotation which is the
surest testimony to the permeation of a poet's influence. Even Browning,
though his popularity came late, found himself carried into all the
nooks and corners of the reading public. His robust and masculine
morality, understood at last, or expounded by a semi-priestly class of
interpreters, made him popular with those readers--and they are the
majority--who love their reading to convey a moral lesson, just as
Tennyson's reflection of his time's distraction between science and
religion endeared them to those who found in him an answer or at least
an echo to their own perplexities. A work widely different from either
of these, Fitzgerald's _Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_, shared and has
probably exceeded their popularity for similar reasons. Its easy
pessimism and cult of pleasure, its delightful freedom from any demand
for continuous thought from its readers, its appeal to the indolence and
moral flaccidity which is implicit in all men, all contributed to its
immense vogue; and among people who perhaps did not fully understand it
but were merely lulled by its sonorousness, a knowledge of it has passed
for the insignia of a love of literature and the possession of literary
taste. But after Fitzgerald--who? What poet has commanded the ear of the
reading public or even a fraction of it? Not Swinburne certainly, partly
because of his undoubted difficulty, partly because of a suspicion held
of his moral and religious tenets, largely from material reasons quite
unconnected with the quality of his work; not Morris, nor his
followers; none of the so-called minor poets whom we shall notice
presently--poets who have drawn the moods that have nourished their work
from the decadents of France. Probably the only writer of verse who is
at the same time a poet and has acquired a large popularity and public
influence is Mr. Kipling. His work as a novelist we mentioned in the
last chapter. It remains to say something of his achievements in verse.
Let us grant at once his faults. He can be violent, and over-rhetorical;
he belabours you with sense impressions, and with the polysyllabic
rhetoric he learned from Swinburne--and (though this is not the place
for a discussion of political ideas) he can offend by the sentimental
brutalism which too often passes for patriotism in his poetry. Not that
this last represents the total impression of his attitude as an
Englishman. His later work in poetry and prose, devoted to the
reconstruction of English history, is remarkable for the justness and
saneness of its temper. There are other faults--a lack of sureness in
taste is one--that could be mentioned but they do not affect the main
greatness of his work. He is great because he discovered a new
subject-matter, and because of the white heat of imagination which in
his best things he brought to bear on it and by which he transposed it
into poetry. It is Mr. Kipling's special distinction that the apparatus
of modern civilization--steam engines, and steamships, and telegraph
lines, and the art of flight--take on in his hands a poetic quality as
authentic and inspiring as any that ever was cast over the implements of
other and what the mass of men believe to have been more picturesque
days. Romance is in the present, so he teaches us, not in the past, and
we do it wrong to leave it only the territory we have ourselves
discarded in the advance of the race. That and the great discovery of
India--an India misunderstood for his own purposes no doubt, but still
the first presentiment of an essential fact in our modern history as a
people--give him the hold that he has, and rightly, over the minds of
his readers.
It is in a territory poles apart from Mr. Kipling's that the main stream
of romantic poetry flows. Apart from the gravely delicate and scholarly
work of Mr. Bridges, and the poetry of some others who work separately
away from their fellows, English romantic poetry has concentrated itself
into one chief school--the school of the "Celtic Revival" of which the
leader is Mr. W.B. Yeats. Two sources went to its making. In its
inception, it arose out of a group of young poets who worked in a
conscious imitation of the methods of the French decadents; chiefly of
Baudelaire and Verlaine. As a whole their work was merely imitative and
not very profound, but each of them--Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson,
who are both now dead, and others who are still living--produced enough
to show that they had at their command a vein of poetry that might have
deepened and proved more rich had they gone on working it. One of them,
Mr. W.B. Yeats, by his birth and his reading in Irish legend and
folklore, became possessed of a subject-matter denied to his fellows,
and it is from the combination of the mood of the decadents with the
dreaminess and mystery of Celtic tradition and romance--a combination
which came to pass in his poetry--that the Celtic school has sprung. In
a sense it has added to the territory explored by Coleridge and Scott
and Morris a new province. Only nothing could be further from the
objectivity of these men, than the way in which the Celtic school
approaches its material. Its stories are clear to itself, it may be, but
not to its readers. Deirdre and Conchubar, and Angus and Maeve and
Dectora and all the shadowy figures in them scarcely become embodied.
Their lives and deaths and loves and hates are only a scheme on which
they weave a delicate and dim embroidery of pure poetry--of love and
death and old age and the passing of beauty and all the sorrows that
have been since the world began and will be till the world ends. If Mr.
Kipling is of the earth earthy, if the clangour and rush of the world is
in everything he writes, Mr. Yeats and his school live consciously
sequestered and withdrawn, and the world never breaks in on their
ghostly troubles or their peace. Poetry never fails to relate itself to
its age; if it is not with it, it is against it; it is never merely
indifferent. The poetry of these men is the denial, passionately made,
of everything the world prizes. While such a denial is sincere, as in
the best of them, then the verses they make are true and fine. But when
it is assumed, as in some of their imitators, then the work they did is
not true poetry.
But the literary characteristic of the present age--the one which is
most likely to differentiate it from its predecessor, is the revival of
the drama. When we left it before the Commonwealth the great English
literary school of playwriting--the romantic drama--was already dead. It
has had since no second birth. There followed after it the heroic
tragedy of Dryden and Shadwell--a turgid, declamatory form of art
without importance--and two brilliant comic periods, the earlier and
greater that of Congreve and Wycherley, the later more sentimental with
less art and vivacity, that of Goldsmith and Sheridan. With Sheridan the
drama as a literary force died a second time. It has been born again
only in our own day. It is, of course, unnecessary to point out that the
writing of plays did not cease in the interval; it never does cease. The
production of dramatic journey-work has been continuous since the
re-opening of the theatres in 1660, and it is carried on as plentifully
as ever at this present time. Only side by side with it there has grown
up a new literary drama, and gradually the main stream of artistic
endeavour which for nearly a century has preoccupied itself with the
novel almost to the exclusion of other forms of art, has turned back to
the stage as its channel to articulation and an audience. An influence
from abroad set it in motion. The plays of Ibsen--produced, the best of
them, in the eighties of last century--came to England in the nineties.
In a way, perhaps, they were misunderstood by their worshippers hardly
less than by their enemies, but all excrescences of enthusiasm apart
they taught men a new and freer approach to moral questions, and a new
and freer dramatic technique. Where plays had been constructed on a
journeyman plan evolved by Labiche and Sardou--mid-nineteenth century
writers in France--a plan delighting in symmetry, close-jointedness,
false correspondences, an impossible use of coincidence, and a quite
unreal complexity and elaboration, they become bolder and less
artificial, more close to the likelihoods of real life. The gravity of
the problems with which they set themselves to deal heightened their
influence. In England men began to ask themselves whether the theatre
here too could not be made an avenue towards the discussion of living
difficulties, and then arose the new school of dramatists--of whom the
first and most remarkable is Mr. George Bernard Shaw. In his earlier
plays he set himself boldly to attack established conventions, and to
ask his audiences to think for themselves. _Arms and the Man_ dealt a
blow at the cheap romanticism with which a peace-living public invests
the profession of arms; _The Devil's Disciple_ was a shrewd criticism of
the preposterous self-sacrifice on which melodrama, which is the most
popular non-literary form of play-writing, is commonly based; _Mrs.
Warren's Profession_ made a brave and plain-spoken attempt to drag the
public face to face with the nauseous realities of prostitution;
_Widowers' Houses_ laid bare the sordidness of a Society which bases
itself on the exploitation of the poor for the luxuries of the rich. It
took Mr. Shaw close on ten years to persuade even the moderate number of
men and women who make up a theatre audience that his plays were worth
listening to. But before his final success came he had attained a
substantial popularity with the public which reads. Possibly his early
failure on the stage--mainly due to the obstinacy of playgoers immersed
in a stock tradition--was partly due also to his failure in constructive
power. He is an adept at tying knots and impatient of unravelling them;
his third acts are apt either to evaporate in talk or to find some
unreal and unsatisfactory solution for the complexity he has created.
But constructive weakness apart, his amazing brilliance and fecundity of
dialogue ought to have given him an immediate and lasting grip of the
stage. There has probably never been a dramatist who could invest
conversation with the same vivacity and point, the same combination of
surprise and inevitableness that distinguishes his best work.
Alongside of Mr. Shaw more immediately successful, and not traceable to
any obvious influence, English or foreign, came the comedies of Oscar
Wilde. For a parallel to their pure delight and high spirits, and to the
exquisite wit and artifice with which they were constructed, one would
have to go back to the dramatists of the Restoration. To Congreve and
his school, indeed, Wilde belongs rather than to any later period. With
his own age he had little in common; he was without interest in its
social and moral problems; when he approved of socialism it was because
in a socialist state the artist might be absolved from the necessity of
carrying a living, and be free to follow his art undisturbed. He loved
to think of himself as symbolic, but all he symbolized was a fantasy of
his own creating; his attitude to his age was decorative and withdrawn
rather than representative. He was the licensed jester to society, and
in that capacity he gave us his plays. Mr. Shaw may be said to have
founded a school; at any rate he gave the start to Mr. Galsworthy and
some lesser dramatists. Wilde founded nothing, and his works remain as
complete and separate as those of the earlier artificial dramatists of
two centuries before.
Another school of drama, homogeneous and quite apart from the rest,
remains. We have seen how the "Celtic Revival," as the Irish literary
movement has been called by its admirers, gave us a new kind of romantic
poetry. As an offshoot from it there came into being some ten years ago
an Irish school of drama, drawing its inspiration from two sources--the
body of the old Irish legends and the highly individualized and
richly-coloured life of the Irish peasants in the mountains of Wicklow
and of the West, a life, so the dramatists believed, still unspoiled by
the deepening influences of a false system of education and the wear
and tear of a civilization whose values are commercial and not spiritual
or artistic. The school founded its own theatre, trained its own actors,
fashioned its own modes of speech (the chief of which was a frank
restoration of rhythm in the speaking of verse and of cadence in prose),
and having all these things it produced a series of plays all directed
to its special ends, and all composed and written with a special
fidelity to country life as it has been preserved, or to what it
conceived to be the spirit of Irish folk-legend. It reached its zenith
quickly, and as far as the production of plays is concerned, it would
seem to be already in its decline. That is to say, what in the beginning
was a fresh and vivid inspiration caught direct from life has become a
pattern whose colours and shape can be repeated or varied by lesser
writers who take their teaching from the original discoverers. But in
the course of its brief and striking course it produced one great
dramatist--a writer whom already not three years after his death, men
instinctively class with the masters of his art.
J.M. Synge, in the earlier years of his manhood, lived entirely abroad,
leading the life of a wandering scholar from city to city and country to
country till he was persuaded to give up the Continent and the criticism
and imitation of French literature, to return to England, and to go and
live on the Aran Islands. From that time till his death--some ten
years--he spent a large part of each year amongst the peasantry of the
desolate Atlantic coast and wrote the plays by which his name is known.
His literary output was not large, but he supplied the Irish dramatic
movement with exactly what it needed--a vivid contact with the realities
of life. Not that he was a mere student or transcriber of manners. His
wandering life among many peoples and his study of classical French and
German literature had equipped him as perhaps no other modern dramatist
has been equipped with an imaginative insight and a reach of perception
which enabled him to give universality and depth to his pourtrayal of
the peasant types around him. He got down to the great elemental forces
which throb and pulse beneath the common crises of everyday life and
laid them bare, not as ugly and horrible, but with a sense of their
terror, their beauty and their strength. His earliest play, _The Well of
the Saints_, treats of a sorrow that is as old as Helen of the vanishing
of beauty and the irony of fulfilled desire. The great realities of
death pass through the _Riders to the Sea_, till the language takes on a
kind of simplicity as of written words shrivelling up in a flame. _The
Playboy of the Western World_ is a study of character, terrible in its
clarity, but never losing the savour of imagination and of the
astringency and saltness that was characteristic of his temper. He had
at his command an instrument of incomparable fineness and range in the
language which he fashioned out the speech of the common people amongst
whom he lived. In his dramatic writings this language took on a kind of
rhythm which had the effect of producing a certain remoteness of the
highest possible artistic value. The people of his imagination appear a
little disembodied. They talk with that straightforward and simple kind
of innocency which makes strange and impressive the dialogue of
Maeterlinck's earlier plays. Through it, as Mr. Yeats has said, he saw
the subject-matter of his art "with wise, clear-seeing, unreflecting
eyes--and he preserved the innocence of good art in an age of reasons
and purposes." He had no theory except of his art; no "ideas" and no
"problems"; he did not wish to change anything or to reform anything;
but he saw all his people pass by as before a window, and he heard their
words. This resolute refusal to be interested in or to take account of
current modes of thought has been considered by some to detract from his
eminence. Certainly if by "ideas" we mean current views on society or
morality, he is deficient in them; only his very deficiency brings him
nearer to the great masters of drama--to Ben Johnson, to Cervantes, to
Molière--even to Shakespeare himself. Probably in no single case amongst
our contemporaries could a high and permanent place in literature be
prophesied with more confidence than in his.
In the past it has seemed impossible for fiction and the drama, i.e.
serious drama of high literary quality, to flourish, side by side. It
seems as though the best creative minds in any age could find strength
for any one of these two great outlets for the activity of the creative
imagination. In the reign of Elizabeth the drama outshone fiction; in
the reign of Victoria the novel crowded out the drama. There are signs
that a literary era is commencing, in which the drama will again regain
to the full its position as a literature. More and more the bigger
creative artists will turn to a form which by its economy of means to
ends, and the chance it gives not merely of observing but of creating
and displaying character in action, has a more vigorous principle of
life in it than its rival.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
It is best to study English literature one period, or, even in the case
of the greatest, one author at a time. In every case the student should
see to it that he knows the _text_ of his authors; a knowledge of what
critics have said about our poets is a poor substitute for a knowledge
of what they have said themselves. Poetry ought to be read slowly and
carefully, and the reader ought to pay his author the compliment of
crediting him with ideas as important and, on occasion, as abstruse as
any in a work of philosophy or abstract science. When the meaning is
mastered, the poem ought to be read a second time aloud to catch the
magic of the language and the verse. The reading of prose presents less
difficulty, but there again the rule is, never allow yourself to be
lulled by sound. Reading is an intellectual and not an hypnotic
exercise.
The following short bibliography is divided to correspond with the
chapters in this book. Prices and publishers are mentioned only when
there is no more than one cheap edition of a book known to the author.
For the subject as a whole, Chamber's _Cyclopaedia of English
Literature_ (3 vols., 10s. 6d. net each), which contains biographical
and critical articles on all authors, arranged chronologically and
furnished very copiously with specimen passages, may be consulted at any
library.
* The books with an asterisk are suggested as those on which reading
should be begun. The reader can then proceed to the others and after
them to the many authors--great authors--who are not included in this
short list.
Chapter I.--*More's _Utopia_; _Haklyut's Voyages_ (Ed. J. Masefield,
Everyman's Library, 8 vols., 1s. net each). North's _Translation of
Plutarch's Lives_ (Temple Classics).
Chapter II.--Surrey's and Wyatt's Poems (Aldine Edition. G. Bells &
Sons); *Spenser's Works, Sidney's Poems. A good idea of the atmosphere
in which poetry was written is to be obtained from Scott's _Kenilworth_.
It is full of inaccuracy in detail.
Chapter III.--*The dramatists in the Mermaid Series (T. Fisher Unwin);
*_Everyman and other Plays_; ed. by A.W. Pollard (Everyman's Library).
Chapter IV.--*Bacon's Essays; Sir Thomas Browne's Works; *Milton's
Works; *Poems of John Donne (Muses Library, Routledge); Poems of Robert
Herrick.
Chapter V.--*Poems of Dryden; *Poems of Pope; Poems of Thomson; *_The
Spectator_ (Routledge's Universal Library or Everyman's); *Swift's
_Gulliver's Travels_; Defoe's Novels.
Chapter VI.--*Boswell's _Life of Johnson_; *Burke (in selections);
Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_ (Temple Classics); *Burns' Poetical
Works; *Poems of Blake (Clarendon Press).
Chapter VII.--*Wordsworth (Golden Treasury Series); *Wordsworth's
Prelude (Temple Classics); Coleridge's Poems; *Keats's Poems; *Shelley's
Poems; *Byron (Golden Treasury Series); *Lamb, _Essays of Elia_; Hazlitt
(volumes of Essays in World's Classics Series).
Chapter VIII.--*Tennyson's Works; *Browning's Works; Rossetti's Works;
*Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus, Past and Present_, and _French Revolution_;
Ruskin's _Unto this Last, Seven Lamps of Architecture_; Arnold's Poems;
Swinburne (Selections).
Chapter IX.--*Fielding's _Tom Jones_; Smollett, _Roderick Random_;
*Jane Austen's _Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice,_ and _Northanger Abbey_
(as a parody of the Radcliffe School); *Scott's _Waverley, Antiquary,
Ivanhoe, Old Mortality, Bride of Lammermoor_. It seems hardly necessary
to give a selection of later novels.
Chapter X.--W.B. Yeats' Poems; Wilde, _Importance of Being Earnest_;
*Synge, Dramatic Works.
And every new work of the best contemporary authors.
G.H.M.
LIST OF THE CHIEF WORKS AND AUTHORS MENTIONED
The dates attached to the authors are those of birth and death; those
with the books, of publication.
CHAPTER I
Sir Thomas More, 1480-1535.
_Utopia_. 1516 (in Latin).
William Tindall, 1484-1536.
_Translation of the New Testament_, 1526.
Sir John Cheke, 1514-1557.
Roger Ascham, 1515-1568.
_Toxophilus_, 1545.
_Schoolmaster_, 1570.
Richard Hakluyt, 1553-1616.
His _Voyages_, 1598.
CHAPTER II
Sir Thomas Wyatt, 1503-1542.
The Earl of Surrey, 1517-1547.
_Tottel's Miscellany_ (containing their poems), 1557.
Sir Philip Sidney. 1554-1586.
_Arcadia_, 1590.
_Astrophel and Stella_, 1591.
Edmund Spenser, 1552-1599.
_Shepherd's Calendar_, 1579.
_Fairy Queen_, 1589, 1596.
John Lyly, 1554-1606.
_Euphues_, 1579.
_Euphues and his England_, 1580.
Richard Hooker, 1553-1600.
_Ecclesiastical Polity_, 1594.
CHAPTER III
Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593.
_Tamburlaine_, 1587 (date of performance).
_Dr. Faustus_, 1588 (date of performance).
_Edward II._, 1593.
Thomas Kyd, 1557(?)-1595(?).
_The Spanish Tragedy_, 1594 (published).
John Webster, 1580(?)-1625(?).
_The White Devil_, 1608 (date of performance).
_Duchess of Malfi_, 1616 (date of performance).
Ben Jonson, 1573-1637.
_Every Man in his Humour_, 1598.
_Volpone_, 1605.
_Poems_, 1616.
CHAPTER IV
John Donne, 1573-1631.
_Poems_, 1633 (first published, but known, like those of all
Elizabethan poets, in manuscript long before).
William Browne, 1591-1643.
George Herbert, 1593-1633.
Robert Herrick, 1593-1674.
Richard Crashaw, 1613-1649.
Francis Bacon, 1561-1626.
_Advancement of Learning_, 1605.
_Essays_, 1625.
The Bible, _Authorised Version_, 1611.
Robert Burton, 1577-1640.
_Anatomy of Melancholy_, 1621.
Sir Thomas Browne, 1605-1682.
_Religio Medici_, 1642.
John Bunyan, 1628-1688.
_Pilgrim's Progress_, 1678.
John Milton, 1608-1674.
_Paradise Lost_, 1667.
_Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_, 1671.
CHAPTER V
John Dryden, 1631-1700.
_Absalom and Achitophel_ and _Religio Laici_, 1682.
_The Hind and the Panther_, 1687.
Alexander Pope, 1688-1744.
_Essay on Criticism_, 1711.
_Rape of the Lock_, 1714.
James Thomson, 1700-1748.
_The Seasons_, 1730.
Daniel Defoe, 1661-1731.
_Robinson Crusoe_, 1719.
Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745.
_The Tale of a Tub_, 1704.
_Gulliver's Travels_, 1726.
Joseph Addison, 1672-1719.
Richard Steele, 1675-1729.
_The Tatler_, 1709-1711.
_The Spectator_, 1711-1712.
CHAPTER VI
Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784.
Edmund Burke, 1728-1797.
Oliver Goldsmith, 1728-1774.
Thomas Gray, 1716-1771.
William Collins, 1721-1759.
Robert Burns, 1759-1796.
_Poems_, 1786.
William Blake, 1757-1827.
_Songs of Innocence_, 1789.
CHAPTER VII
William Wordsworth, 1770-1850.
_Lyrical Ballads_, 1798.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 1772-1834.
Sir Walter Scott, 1771-1832.
Lord Byron, 1788-1824.
_Child Harold's Pilgrimage_, 1812-1817.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822.
John Keats, 1796-1821.
Charles Lamb, 1775-1884.
_Essays of Elia_, 1823.
William Hazlitt, 1778-1830.
Thomas de Quincey, 1785-1859.
CHAPTER VIII
Lord Tennyson, 1809-1892.
_Poems_, 1842.
_Idylls of the King_, 1859.
Robert Browning, 1812-1889.
_Men and Women_, 1855.
_The Ring and the Book_, 1868.
D. G. Rossetti, 1828-1882.
William Morris, 1834-1896.
A. C. Swinburne, 1836-1909.
Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1880.
John Ruskin, 1819-1900.
CHAPTER IX
Samuel Richardson, 1689-1761.
_Pamela_, 1740.
_Clarissa Harlowe_, 1750.
Henry Fielding, 1707-1754.
_Joseph Andrews_, 1742.
_Tom Jones_, 1749.
Jane Austen, 1775-1817.
William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-1863.
Charles Dickens, 1812-1870.
George Meredith, 1832-1909.
INDEX
ADDISON, JOSEPH,
_Advancement of Learning, The_,
_Anatomy of Melancholy, The_,
_Antonio and Mellida_,
_Arcadia_, the Countess of Pembroke's,
Arnold, Matthew,
Ascham, Roger,
_Astrophel and Stella_,
_Atheist's Tragedy, The_,
Augustan Age,
Austen, Jane,
Autobiography,
Bacon, Francis,
Ballad, the,
Beaumont and Fletcher,
Bennett, Arnold,
Bible, the,
Biography,
Blake, William,
Blank Verse,
Boswell, James,
Brontës, the,
Browne, Sir Thomas,
Browne, William,
Browning, Robert,
Bunyan, John,
Burke, Edmund,
Burns, Robert,
Burton, Robert,
Byron, Lord,
Carew, Thomas,
Carlyle, Thomas,
Celtic Revival,
Character-writing,
Chatterton, Thomas,
Cheke, Sir John,
_Christ's Victory and Death_,
Classicism,
Clough, Thomas,
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor,
Collins, William,
Conrad, Joseph,
Cowley, Abraham,
Cowper, William,
Crabbe, George,
Crashaw, Richard,
Criticism,
Decadence,
Defoe, Daniel,
De Quincey, Thomas,
Dekker, Thomas,
Dickens, Charles,
Discovery, Voyages of,
Disraeli, Benjamin,
_Dr. Faustus_,
Donne, John,
Drama, the,
Dryden, John,
_Duchess of Malfi, The_,
Earle, John,
_Edward II._,
_Elia, Essays of_,
Elizabethan Poetry,
Elizabethan Prose,
_Essays, Civil and Moral_,
_Euphues_,
_Everyman_,
_Fairy Queen, The_,
Fantastics, the,
Fielding, Henry,
Fitzgerald, Edward,
Fletcher, Giles,
Fletcher, Phineas,
Ford, John,
French Revolution, the,
Gaskell, Mrs.,
George Eliot,
Gibbon, Edward,
Gissing, George,
Goldsmith, Oliver,
_Gorboduc_,
Gray, Thomas,
Greene, Robert,
Greville, Sir Fulke,
_Gulliver's Travels_,
_Hakluyt's Voyages_,
Hardy, Thomas,
Hazlitt, William,
Hawthorne, Nathaniel,
_Henry VII., History of_,
Herbert, George,
Herrick, Robert,
Hobbes, Thomas,
Hooper, Richard,
Italy, influence of,
_Jew of Malta_,
Johnson, Samuel,
Jonson, Ben,
Keats, John,
Kipling, Rudyard,
Kyd, Thomas,
Lamb, Charles,
Locke, John,
Lodge, Thomas,
Lyly, John,
Lyric, the,
Lyrical Ballads,
Marlowe, Christopher,
Marston, John,
Massinger, Philip,
Meredith, George,
Middleton, Thomas,
Milton, John,
Miracle Play, the,
Moore, George,
Morality, the,
More, Sir Thomas,
Morris, William,
_New Atlantis, The_,
Novel, the,
Obscurity in Poetry,
_Omar Khayyam_,
_Ossian_,
Oxford Movement, the,
_Paradise Lost_,
Pastoral Prose and Poetry,
Peele, George,
Percy, William,
_Pilgrim's Progress_,
Platonism,
Poetic Diction,
Pope, Alexander,
Puritanism,
_Purple Island, The_,
Raleigh, Sir Walter,
_Rape of the Lock_,
Realism,
_Religio Medici_,
Renaissance, the,
Reynolds, Sir Joshua,
Rhetoric, study of,
Richardson, Samuel,
_Robinson Crusoe_,
Romanticism,
Romantic Revival, the,
Rossetti, D. G.,
Ruskin, John,
Sackville, Thomas,
Satire,
Scott, Sir Walter,
Senecan Tragedy,
Seventeenth Century, the,
Shaw, G. Bernard,
Shelley, P. B.,
Shenstone, Thomas,
Sheridan, R. B.,
Shirley, John,
Sidney, Sir Philip,
Smollett, T.,
Sonnet, the,
Sonneteers, the,
_Spanish Tragedy, The_,
_Spectator, The_,
Spenser, Edmund,
Spenserians, the,
Steele, Richard,
Sterne, Lawrence,
Stevenson, R. L.,
Supernatural, the,
Surrey, the Earl of,
Swift, Jonathan,
Swinburne, A. C.,
Synge, J. M.,
_Tale of a Tub, The_,
_Tamburlaine_,
_Tatler, The_,
_Temple, Sir William_,
Tennyson, Alfred,
Thackeray, W. M.,
Theatre, the Elizabethan,
Thomson, James,
_Tottel's Miscellany_,
_Utopia_,
_Vaughan, Henry_,
Victorian Age, the,
_View of the State of Ireland_,
Waller, Edmund,
Walton, Isaac,
Webster, John,
Wells, H. G.,
_White Devil, The_,
Wilde, Oscar,
Wilson, Thomas,
Wither, George,
Wordsworth, William,
Wyatt, Thomas,
Yeats, W. B.,
End of Project Gutenberg's English Literature: Modern, by G. H. Mair