CHAPTER IV.

_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.]