CHAPTER X

: TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE

Interest in the Present.--One result of the growing scientific spirit has been an increasing interest in contemporary problems and literature. At the beginning of the Victorian age, the chief part of the literature studied in college was nearly two thousand years old. When English courses were finally added, they frequently ended with Milton. To-day, however, many colleges have courses in strictly contemporary literature. The scientific attitude toward life has caused a recognition of the fact that he who disregards current literature remains ignorant of a part of the life and thought of to-day and that he resembles the mathematician who neglects one factor in the solution of a problem.

It is true that the future may take a different view of all contemporary things, including literature; but this possibility does not justify neglect of the present. We should also remember that different stages in the growth of nations and individuals constantly necessitate changes in estimating the relative importance of the thought of former centuries.

The Trend of Contemporary Literature.--The diversity of taste in the wide circle of twentieth-century readers has encouraged authors of both the realistic and the romantic schools. The main tendency of scientific influence and of the new interest in racial welfare is toward realism. In his stories of the "Five Towns," Arnold Bennett shows how the dull industrial life affects the character of the individual. Much of the fiction of H.G. Wells presents matter of scientific or sociological interest. Poets like John Masefield and Wilfrid Gibson sing with an almost prosaic sincerity of the life of workmen and of the squalid city streets. The drama is frequently a study of the conditions affecting contemporary life.

Twentieth-century writers are not, however, neglecting the other great function of literature,--to charm life with romantic visions and to bring to it deliverance from care. The poetry of Noyes takes us back to the days of Drake and to the Mermaid Inn, where we listen to Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson. The Irish poets and dramatists disclose a world of the "Ever-Young," where there is:--

"A laughter in the diamond air, a music in the trembling grass."

The influence of the great German skeptic, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), appears in some of Shaw's dramas, as well as in the novels of Wells; but the poets of this age seem to have more faith than Swinburne or Matthew Arnold or some of the minor versifiers of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Two prominent essayists, Arthur Christopher Benson (1862- ) and Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874- ) are sincere optimists. Such volumes of Benson's essays as _From a College Window_ (1906), _Beside Still Waters_ (1907), and _Thy Rod and Thy Staff_ (1912) have strengthened faith and proved a tonic to many. Chesterton is a suggestive and stimulating essayist in spite of the fact that he often bombards his readers with too much paradox. Early in life he was an agnostic and a follower of Herbert Spencer, but he later became a champion of Christian faith. Sometimes Chesterton seems to be merely clever, but he is usually too thought-provoking to be read passively. His _Robert Browning_ (1903), _Varied Types_ (1903), _Heretics_ (1905), _George Bernard Shaw_ (1909), and _The Victorian Age in Literature_ (1913) keep most readers actively thinking.

THE NOVEL

Joseph Conrad.--This son of distinguished Polish exiles from Russia, Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski, as he was originally named, was born in the Ukraine, in 1857. Until his nineteenth year he was unfamiliar with the English language. Instead of following the literary or military traditions of his family, he joined the English merchant marine. Sailing the seas of the world, touching at strange tropical ports and uncharted islands, elbowing all the races of the globe, hearing all the languages spoken by man,--such were Conrad's activities between his twentieth and thirty-seventh years.

[Illustration: JOSEPH CONRAD.]

At thirty-seven, needing a little rest, he settled in England and began to write. Short stories, novels, and an interesting autobiographical volume, _A Personal Record_ (1912), represent Conrad's production. Among his ablest books are _Tales of Unrest_ (1898), a volume of sea stories, and _Lord Jim_ (1900), a novel full of the fascination of strange seas and shores, but still more remarkable for its searching analysis of a man's recovery of self-respect after a long period of remorse for failure to meet a momentary crisis. _Youth, A Narrative, and Two Other Tales_ (1902), contains one of Conrad's strongest stories, _The End of the Tether_. This is a tender story of an old sea captain, who for the sake of a cherished daughter holds his post against terrific odds, including blindness and disgrace. _Typhoon_ (1903) is an almost unrivaled account of a ship's fight against mad hurricanes and raging seas.

One of Conrad's prime distinctions is his power to visualize scenes. The terror, beauty, caprice, and mercilessness of the sea; the silence and strangeness of the impenetrable tropical forest; atmospheres tense with storm or brilliant with sunshine,--these he records with strong effect. But though he has gained his fame largely as a chronicler of remote seas and shores, his handling of the human element is but little less impressive.

Conrad's method is unusual. Though his sentences are sufficiently direct and terse, his general order of narration is not straightforward. He often seems to progress slowly at the start, but after the characters have been made familiar, the story proceeds to its powerful and logical conclusion.

Arnold Bennett.--Bennett was born in Hanley, North Staffordshire, in 1867. He studied law, but abandoned it to become for seven years an editor of _Woman_, a London periodical. In 1900 he resigned this position to devote himself entirely to literature. He went to France to live, and began to write novels under the influence of the French and Russian realistic novelists.

[Illustration: ARNOLD BENNETT.]

Bennett is the author of many works of uneven merit. Some of these were written merely to strike the popular taste and to sell. His serious, careful work is seen at its best in his stories of the _Five Towns_, so called from the small towns of his native Staffordshire. One of the best of these novels, _The Old Wives' Tale_ (1908), is a painstaking record of the different temperaments and experiences of two sisters, from their happy childhood to a pathetic, disillusioned old age. The intimate, homely revelations and the literal fidelity to life in _The Old Wives' Tale_ give it a high rank among twentieth-century English novels.

_Clayhanger_ (1910) is another strong story of life in the "Five Towns" pottery district of Staffordshire. Although the hero, Edwin Clayhanger, is not a strong personality, Bennett's art makes us keenly interested in Edwin's simple, impressionable nature, in his eagerness for life, and in his experiences as a young dreamer, lover, son, and brother. _Hilda Lessways_ (1911), a companion volume to _Clayhanger_, but a story of less power, continues the history of the same characters. Bennett reveals in these novels one of his prime gifts,--the skill to paint domestic pictures vividly and to invest them with a distinct local atmosphere. His art has won a signal triumph in arousing interest in simple scenes and average characters. He can present the romance of the commonplace,--of gray, dull monotonous, almost negative existence.

He has enlivened the contemporary stage with a few brisk comedies. _Milestones_ was written in collaboration with Edward Knoblauch, an American author. Its characters, representing three generations, illustrate humorously the truth that what is to-day's innovation becomes to-morrow's August convention. _The Honeymoon_ (1911) is a farce of misunderstandings adroitly handled.

Although Bennett has shown great versatility, yet his individual, strong, and vital work is found in the one field where he brings us face to face with the circumscribed, but appealing life of the "Five Towns" district of his youth.

John Galsworthy.--John Galsworthy was born in Coombe, Surrey, in 1867. He was graduated from Oxford with an honor degree in law in 1889 and was called to the bar in 1890. He traveled for a large part of two years, visiting, among other places, Russia, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the Fiji Islands. On one of these trips he met Joseph Conrad, then a sailor, and they became warm friends. Galsworthy was twenty-eight when he began to write.

[Illustration: JOHN GALSWORTHY.]

Four of his novels deal with the upper classes of English society. _The Man of Property_ (1906) treats of the wealthy class, _The Country House_ (1907) presents the conservative country squire, _Fraternity_ (1909) portrays the intellectual class, and _The Patrician_ (1911) pictures the aristocrat. Galsworthy is the relentless analyist of well-to-do, conventional English society. As Frederic Taber Cooper well says, "British stolidity, British conservatism, the unvarying fixity of the social system, the sacrifice of individual needs and cravings to caste and precedent and public opinion,--these are the themes which Mr. Galsworthy never wearies of satirizing with a mordant irony."

Since his object is to present problems of life, many of his characters are but types. On the other hand, Soames Forsyte in _The Man of Property_, Lord Miltoun, Mrs. Noel, and Lady Casterley in _The Patrician_, are among the most brilliant and real characters in modern fiction. Galsworthy's style is clear, his plot construction is excellent, and his humor in caricaturing social types has many of the qualities of Dickens's.

Herbert George Wells.--Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1866. He expected to be a shopkeeper and was apprenticed in his fourteenth year to a chemist; but this did not satisfy his ambition. Later, however, he won scholarships that enabled him to take a degree in science. While preparing himself to graduate from the University of London, he worked in Huxley's laboratory. The experiments there inspired him to write stories based on scientific facts and hypotheses, such as _The Time Machine_ (1895) and _In the Days of the Comet_ (1906). Wells is also vitally interested in problems of sociology. The _Discovery of the Future_ (1902) and _The Future in America_ (1906) present possibilities of scientifically planning man's further development. _Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul_ (1905) and _Marriage_ (1912) are his best works, considered as actual novels of character. _Kipps_ is a bitter but strong portrayal of the pretense and hypocrisy of society and of its inertia in responding to human needs, and _Marriage_ is a subtle, psychological analysis of a conjugal misunderstanding and an attempted readjustment. Wells's study of man as a biological development and his preference of actual facts to sentimental conclusions are in accord with the trend of modern social science.

[Illustration: HERBERT GEORGE WELLS.]

The work of Wells covers a wide range of subjects. He has written scientific romances, blood-curdling tales, strange phantasies, prophetic Utopias, and sociological novels. He shows an increasing tendency to depict the human struggle with environment, heredity, and the manifold forces that affect the earning of a livelihood. His characters are more often remembered as specimens exhibiting some phase of life than as attractive or repellent personalities. Increasing power of portraying character, however, is evident in his later work. He has a daring imagination, a sense of humor, satiric power, and a capacity for expressing himself in vivid and picturesque English.

Eden Phillpotts was born in India in 1862. His novels, however, are as definitely associated with Devonshire as Hardy's are with Wessex, and Bennett's with North Staffordshire. Phillpotts is noted for his power to paint "landscapes with figures." The "figures" are the farmers, villagers, and shepherds of that part of Devon, known as Dartmoor; and the landscapes are the granite crags, the moors; and farmlands of "good red earth." _Widecombe Fair_ (1913) is the twentieth volume that he has published as a result of twenty years' work among these children of Devon. Sometimes the roughness and untutored emotions of the Dartmoor characters repel the readers; but these characters form strong, picturesque groups of human beings, and their dialect adds a pleasant flavor to the novels. Phillpotts's frequent use of coincidences weakens the effect and mars the naturalness of the plot, since their recurrence comes to be anticipated. _Children of the Mist_ (1898) and _Demeter's Daughter_ (1911) are among his ablest novels.

Maurice Hewlett was born in Kent in 1861, of an old Somerset family. He began writing in his boyhood, giving proof even then of his skill in catching the manner of other writers. His style to-day reëchoes his reading of many authors in Latin, French, Italian, and English.

_The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay_ (1900) shows Hewlett's romantic fancy and love for historical characters and pageants. While this novel is full of life, color, and movement, it displays his proneness to allow the romantic vein to run to the fantastic in both episode and style. _The Stooping Lady_ (1907) deals with the love of a lady of high degree for a humble youth whom her devotion ennobles.

Hewlett's style is finished and richly poetical, but often too ornate and too encrusted with archaic terms and other artificial forms.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, born in Cornwall in 1863, is a fiction writer, critic, poet, and anthologist. Having much of Stevenson's love for romantic adventure, he was chosen to finish _St. Ives_, left incomplete by Stevenson. _The Splendid Spur_ (1889), a spirited tale of romance and war in the perturbed time of Charles I., is one of his best stories of adventure.

Among his books on simple Cornish life may be mentioned _The Delectable Duchy_ (1893). It is a collection of short stories and sketches. Quiller-Couch sees life without a touch of morbid somberness and he commands a vivacious, highly-trained style.

William Frend De Morgan was born in London, in 1839. He published his first novel, _Joseph Vance_ (1906), at the age of sixty-seven. This plain, straightforward story of a little boy befriended by a generous-hearted London doctor won for De Morgan wide and hearty applause. While some contemporary writers fashion their style and select their material on the models of French or Russian realists, De Morgan goes to the great English masters, Thackeray and Dickens. Like them, De Morgan writes copiously and leisurely.

_Alice-for-Short_ (1907) and _Somehow Good_ (1908) are strong novels, but _Joseph Vance_, with its carelessly constructed plot and power to awaken tears and smiles, remains De Morgan's best piece of fiction.

William John Locke was born in the Barbados in 1863. He gained much of his reputation from his tenth book, _The Beloved Vagabond_ (1906). The book takes its charm from the whimsical and quixotic temperament of the hero. He is typical of Locke's other leading characters, who, like Hamlet's friend, Horatio, take "fortune's buffets and rewards with equal thanks." Like other novels by the same author, this story is pervaded by a distinctly Bohemian atmosphere, wherein the ordinary conventions of society are disregarded.

Locke's humor, his deft characterization, his toleration of human failings, largely compensate for his lack of significant plots. He is sometimes whimsical to the point of eccentricity, and his high spirits often verge on extravagance; but at his best he has the power of refreshing the reader with gentle irony, genial laughter, and love for human kind.

Israel Zangwill, the Jewish writer, was born in London in 1864. He first won fame by interpreting the Jewish temperament as he saw it manifested in London's dingy, pitiful Ghetto quarter. "This Ghetto London of ours," he says, "is a region where, amid uncleanness and squalor, the rose of romance blows yet a little longer in the raw air of English reality, a world of dreams as fantastic and poetic as the mirage of the Orient where they were woven."

In his volume, _The Children of the Ghetto_ (1892), Zangwill admirably chronicles the lives of these people and the sharp contrasts between their quaint traditions and a great modern commercial city's customs.

POETRY

The Celtic Renaissance.--Some of the best recent English verse has been written by poets of Irish birth or sympathies. Because of the distinctive quality of both the poetry and prose of these Celtic writers, the term "Celtic Renaissance" has been applied to their work, which glows with spiritual emotion and discloses a world of dreams, fairies, and romantic aspiration. As Richard Wagner received from the Scandinavian folk-lore the inspiration for his great music, as Tennyson found the incentive for _The Idylls of the Kings_ in Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, so the modern Celtic poets turned back to the primitive legends of their country for tales of Cuchulain who fought the sea, Caolte who besieged the castle of the gods, Oisin, who wandered three hundred years in the land of the immortals, and Deirdre who stands in the same relation to Celtic literature as Helen to Greek and Brunnhilde to German literature. Some of the fascination that the past and its fairy kingdom exerted over these poets may be found in this stanza from Russell's _The Gates of Dreamland_:--

"Oh, the gates of the mountain have opened once again And the sound of song and dancing falls upon the ears of men, And the Land of Youth lies gleaming, flushed with rainbow light and mirth. And the old enchantment lingers in the honey-heart of earth."[1]

William Butler Yeats.--One of the most talented and active workers in this Celtic Renaissance is William Butler Yeats, born in 1865 in Dublin, Ireland. He came from an artistic family, his father, brother, and sisters being either artists or identified with the arts and crafts movement. Yeats himself studied art in Dublin, but poetry was more attractive to him than painting.

He was greatly influenced by spending his youthful days with his grandparents in County Sligo, where he heard the old Irish legends told by the peasants, who still believed them. He translated these stories from Irish into English and wrote poems and essays relating to them. After reaching the age of thirty-four, he became engaged in writing dramas and in assisting to establish the Irish National Theater in Dublin. In thus reviving Ireland's heroic history, Yeats has served his country and his art.

[Illustration: WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.]

_The Wanderings of Oisin_ (1889) is his best narrative poem. Oisin, one of the ancient Celtic heroes, returns, after three hundred years of adventure, to find Ireland Christianized. St. Patrick hears him relate that he had been carried by his immortal wife, Niamh, to the land of the Ever-Young,--

"Where broken faith has never been known, And the blushes of first love never have flown,"[2]

that he had battled for a hundred years with an undying foe, and that his strength had not waned during his stay on those immortal shores, although he had felt the effect of age when his foot again touched his native land. The days of "gods and fighting" men are brought back in this romantic poem. The battles, however, are not such gory conflicts as Scott and Kipling can paint. Yeats's contemplative genius presents bloodless battles, symbolic of life's continued fight, and accentuates the eternal hope and peace in the land of immortal youth.

Among his shorter narrative poems, which show some of the power of _The Wanderings of Oisin_, are _The Death of Cuchulain_, _The Old Age of Queen Maeve_, and _Baile and Aillinn_. Baille and Aillinn are the Irish Romeo and Juliet, each of whom hears from the baleful Aengus the false report that the other is dead. Each lover unhesitatingly seeks death in order to meet the other at once beyond these mortal shores. Yeats has also told simple stories in simple verse, as may be seen in _The Ballad of Father Gilligan_ or _The Fiddler of Dooney_.

The most striking characteristic of Yeats's work is the pensive yearning for a spiritual love, for an unchecked joy, and an unchanging peace beyond what mortal life can give. These qualities are strikingly illustrated by such poems as _Into the Twilight_, _The Everlasting Voices_, _The Hosting of the Sidhe_ (Fairies), _The Stolen Child_. The very spirit of Celtic poetry is seen in these lines from _The Lake Isle of Innisfree_:--

"And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings."[3]

Yeats's verse has been called "dream-drenched poems." The term is admirably descriptive of his romantic, lyrical verse.

George W. Russell.--Among the most prominent of these Celtic imaginative writers is George W. Russell (1867- ), "the Irish Emerson," popularly known as "A.E." He is a poet, a painter, a mystic, and a dramatist. With Lady Gregory and Yeats, he has been one of the most active workers for the Irish National Theater. He is an efficient member of those coöperative societies which are trying to improve Ireland's industrial and agricultural conditions.

Russell's poetry is highly spiritual. Sometimes it is so mystical that like Prospero's messenger, Ariel, it vanishes into thin air. His shadowy pictures of nature and his lyrical beauty and tenderness are evident in two little volumes of his verse, _Homeward Songs by the Way_ (1894) and _The Divine Vision_ (1904). This Stanza from _Beauty_, in _The Divine Vision_, shows his spiritual longing for quiet, peace, and beauty, in which to worship his Creator:--

"Oh, twilight, fill in pearl dew, each healing drop may bring Some image of the song the Quiet seems to sing.

My spirit would have beauty to offer at the shrine, And turn dull earth to gold and water into wine, And burn in fiery dreams each thought till thence refined It may have power to mirror the mighty Master's mind."[4]

Fiona Macleod.--All the work of William Sharp that he published under the pseudonym of "Fiona Macleod" belongs to this Celtic Renaissance. Born in 1856 at Paisley, Scotland, he settled in London in 1878, and became widely known as William Sharp, the critic. When he turned to his boyhood's home, the West Highlands of Scotland, for inspiration, he wrote, under the pen-name of Fiona Macleod, poetic prose stories and many poems about these Scotch Celts. He kept the secret of his identity so well that not until his death in 1905 was it known that Fiona Macleod, the mystic, was William Sharp, the critic.

_Mountain Lovers_ (1895), a romantic novel of primitive people who live with nature in her loneliness, mystery, and terror, and who possess an instinctive, speechless, and poetic knowledge of her moods, is one of the earliest and most interesting of his long novels. He excels in the short story. Some of his finest work in this field is in _The Sin Eater_ (1895), which contains uncanny tales of quaint, strongly-marked highland characters with their weird traditions.

_From the Hills of Dream_ (1901) and _The Hour of Beauty_ (1907) are two small volumes of short poems full of the witchery of dreams, of death, of youth, and of lonely scenes. These poems come from a land far off from our common world. Delicacy of fancy, a freedom from any touch of impurity, a beauty as of "dew-sweet moon-flowers glimmering white through the mirk of a dust laden with sea-mist," are the qualities of Fiona Macleod's best verse.

John Masefield.--Instead of looking to the land of dreams and the misty past, like the Celtic writers, Masefield and Gibson, two younger English poets, have found in the everyday life of the present time the themes for their verse. Masefield was born in 1875 in Shropshire. He was a seafarer in his youth, and later, a traveler by land and sea. These varied experiences contributed color and vividness to his narrative verse.

[Illustration: JOHN MASEFIELD.]

He has written several long narrative poems on unromantic subjects. _Dauber_ (1912) contains some of his best lines and its story is the most poetic. This poem follows the fortunes of a poor youth who, wishing to be a painter of ships, went to sea to study his mode at first hand. Masefield describes, with much power, the young artist's ambition, his rough handling by the uncouth sailors, and his perilous experiences while rounding Cape Horn. _Dauber_ exhibits the poet's power of vividly picturing human figures and landscapes. This poem, like most of Masefield's long narrative poems, is a story of human failure,--a dull prosaic failure, such as prose fiction presents in its pessimistic moods.

A strong and cheerful note is struck in some of Masefield's short lyrics, notably in _Laugh and be Merry_, _Roadways_, _The Seekers_, and _Being Her Friend_. In _Laugh and be Merry_, the song is almost triumphant:--

"Laugh and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man. * * * * * Laugh and battle, and work, and drink of the wine outpoured In the dear green earth, the sign of the joy of the Lord."[5]

Masefield's fancy does not busy itself with dreams and impossible visions. He paints life in its grayness and sordidness and dull mediocrity. Sometimes his verse is merely plain rimed prose, but again it becomes vigorous, picturesque, and vivid in description, as in the following lines from _Dauber_:--

"...then the snow Whirled all about, dense, multitudinous cold, Mixed with the wind's one devilish thrust and shriek Which whiffled out men's tears, deafened, took hold, Flattening the flying drift against the cheek."[6]

Wilfred W. Gibson.--Gibson, who was born in Hexham in 1878, sings of the struggling oppressed work-a-day people:--

"Crouched in the dripping dark With steaming shoulders stark The man who hews the coal to feed the fires."[7]

His poem, _The Machine_, awakens sympathy for the printer of Christmas story books and reveals Gibson as the twentieth-century Thomas Hood of _The Song of the Shirt_. One of the most richly human of his poems is _The Crane_, the story of the seamstress mother and her lame boy. His realistic volume of verse bearing the significant title, _Daily Bread_ (1910), contains a number of narrative poems, which endeavor to set to music the "one measure" to which all life moves,--the earning of daily bread.

Gibson owes much of his popularity to his spirit of democracy and to the story form of his verse. Like Masefield, he sacrifices beauty to dull realism. Gibson manifests less range, less dramatic feeling, than Masefield, but avoids Masefield's uncouthness and repellent dramatic episodes.

These two poets illustrate a tendency to introduce a new realistic poetry. Wordsworth wrote of Michael and the Westmoreland peasantry, but Masefield and Gibson have taken as subjects of verse the toilers of factory, foundry, and forecastle. Closeness to life and simplicity of narration characterize these authors. They approximate the subject matter and technique of realistic fiction.

Alfred Noyes.--Alfred Noyes was born in 1880 in Wolverhampton Staffordshire. He wrote verse while an Oxford undergraduate and he has since become one of the leading poets of the twentieth century. He has traveled in England and in America, reading his poems and lecturing on literary subjects.

[Illustration: ALFRED NOYES.]

_The Flower of Old Japan_ (1903) is a fairy tale of children who dream of the pictures on blue china plates and Japanese fans. The poem is symbolic. The children are ourselves; and Japan is but the "kingdom of those dreams which ...are the sole reality worth living and dying for."

The poet says of this kingdom:--

"Deep in every heart it lies With its untranscended skies; For what heaven should bend above Hearts that own the heaven of love?"[8]

_The Forest of Wild Thyme_ (1905) affords another

"Hour to hunt the fairy gleam That flutters through this childish dream."[9]

There is also a deeper meaning to be read into this poem. The mystery of life, small as well as great, is found simply told in these lines:--

"What does it take to make a rose, Mother-mine? The God that died to make it knows It takes the world's eternal wars, It takes the moon and all the stars, It takes the might of heaven and hell And the everlasting Love as well, Little child."[10]

Noyes has published several volumes of lyrical verse. Some of it possesses the lightness of these elfish tales. _The Barrel Organ_, _The Song of Re-Birth_, and _Forty Singing Seamen_ are among his finest lyrics. They display much rhythmic beauty and variety. He strikes a deeply sorrowful and passionate note in _The Haunted Palace_ and _De Profundis_. A line like this in _The Haunted Palace_--

"...I saw the tears Bleed through her eyes with the slow pain of years,"[11]

indicates the strong emotional metaphor that occasionally deepens the passion of his verse.

England's sea power, immortalized in song from Beowulf to Swinburne, often inspires Noyes. His finest long poem is _Drake: An English Epic_ (1908), which relates the adventures of this Elizabethan sea-captain and his victory over the Armada. The spirit of a daring romantic age of discovery is shown in these lines that tell how Drake and his men--

"...went out To danger as to a sweetheart far away, Who even now was drawing the western clouds Like a cymar of silk and snow-white furs Close to her, till her body's beauty seemed Clad in a mist of kisses."[12]

Another volume of poems, _Tales of the Mermaid Tavern_ (1913), brings us into the company of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spencer, Jonson, Raleigh, and others of the great Elizabethan group that made the Mermaid Tavern their chosen resort. Greene's farewell to Shakespeare,--

"You took my clay and made it live,"[13]

shows that Noyes has caught something of the spirit that animated Elizabethan England.

Noyes is one of the most spontaneous and fluent writers of modern English poetry. Whether he is mystical, dramatic, playful, or marching along the course of a long narrative poem, he handles his verse with ease and facility. His language, his rhythm, and his thought are most happily blended in his graceful singing lyrics. The work of Noyes is inspired by the desire to show that all things and all souls are--

"One with the dream that triumphs beyond the light of the spheres, We come from the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years."[14]

THE MODERN DRAMA

The revival of the drama is a characteristic feature of the latter part of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The plays of the Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), affected England profoundly in the last decade of the nineteenth century and proved an impetus to a new dramatic movement, seen in the work of men like Shaw.

The great literary school of dramatists passed away soon after the death of Shakespeare. While it is true that the writing of plays has been practically continuous since the time of the Restoration, yet for more than two hundred years after that event, the history of the drama has had little memorable work to record. There were two brief interesting comic periods: (1) the period of Congreve at the close of the seventeenth century, and (2) of Goldsmith and Sheridan nearly a hundred years later. The literary plays of the Victorians,--Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne,--were lacking in dramatic essentials.

The modern drama has accomplished certain definite results. Pinero's work is typical of vast improvement in technique. Shaw is noted for his power of "investing modern conversation with vivacity and point." J.M. Synge has won distinction for presenting the great elemental forces that underlie the actions of primitive human beings. The playwrights are making the drama perform some of the functions that have been filled by the novel. The modern drama is also wrestling with the problem of combining literary form, poetic spirit, and good dramatic action. Some of the modern plays deal with unpleasant subjects, and some of the least worthy are immoral in their tendencies. Such plays will be forgotten, for the Anglo-Saxon race has never yet immortalized an unwholesome drama. Fortunately, however, the influence of a large proportion of the plays is pure and wholesome. In this class may be included the dramas of the Irish school and of Barrie, the majority by Galsworthy, and a number by Phillips and Shaw.

Jones and Pinero.--The work of Henry Arthur Jones and Sir Arthur Wing Pinero marks the advance of the English drama from artificiality and narrowness of scope toward a wider, closer relation to life. Henry Arthur Jones, both a playwright and a critic, was born in Grandborough, Buckinghamshire, in 1851. Contemporary English life is the subject of his numerous plays. _The Manoeuvers of Jane_ (1898) and _Mrs. Dane's Defence (1900), are among his best works.

[Illustration: HENRY ARTHUR JONES.]

Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, born in 1855 in London, began his career as an actor.

[Illustration: ARTHUR WING PINERO.]

His real ambition, however, was to write for the stage. More than forty works, including farces, comedies of sentiment, and serious dramas of English life, attest his zeal as a dramatist. Among his most successful farces are _The Magistrate_ (1885), _The School Mistress_ (1886), and _The Amazons_ (1893). Clever invention of absurd situations and success in starting infectious laughter are the prime qualities of these plays.

_The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ (1893) is by most critics considered Pinero's masterpiece. The failure of a character to regain respectability once forfeited supplies the nucleus for the dramatic situations. Excellent in craftsmanship as it is disagreeable in theme, this play contains no superfluous word to retard the action or mar the technical economy. Adolphus William Ward says: "With _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ the English acted drama ceased to be a merely insular product, and took rank in the literature of Europe. Here was a play which, whatever its faults, was ...an epoch-marking play."

One great service of Pinero and Jones to the twentieth-century drama has been excellent craftsmanship. Their technical skill may be specifically noted in the naturalness of the dialogues, in the movement of the characters about the stage, in the performance of some acts apparently trivial but really significant, and in the substitution of devices to take the place of the old soliloquies and "asides." Of the two, Pinero is the better craftsman, since Jones, in his endeavor to paint a moral, sometimes weakens his dramatic effect.

George Bernard Shaw.--Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1856. He was willful and took "refuge in idleness" at school. His education consisted mainly in studying music with his talented mother, in haunting picture galleries, and in wide reading. At the age of twenty, he went to London and began his literary career. He was at various times a journalist, a critic of art, music, and the drama, a lecturer, a novelist, and a playwright. Shaw describes himself as a man "up to the chin in the life of his times." He is a vegetarian, an anti-vivisectionist, an advocate for woman's suffrage, and a socialist.

[Illustration: GEORGE BERNARD SHAW.]

_Arms and the Man, Candida, You Never Can Tell_, and _The Man of Destiny_, published (1898) in the second volume of _Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_; and _The Devil's Disciple_, published (1900) in _Three Plays for Puritans_, are among his best dramas. With their stage directions and descriptions, they are as delightful to read as novels. Of these plays, _Candida_ is first in character drawing and human interest. The dramatic action is wholly within the mental states of the three chief actors, but the situations are made intense through a succession of unique, absorbing, entertaining, and well-developed conversations.

Shaw is more destructive than constructive in his philosophy as expressed in his plays; and he criticizes so many of the institutions held sacred by society that people have refused to accept him seriously, even when he has written expository prefaces to his dramas. In _Arms and the Man_, he satirizes the romantic admiration for the soldier's calling; in _The Doctor's Dilemma_ (1906), he attacks the professional man; in _Widowers' Houses_ (1898), he assails the rich property holder with his high rents on poor people's houses: and in _Man and Superman_ (1903), he dissects love and home until the sentiment is entirely taken out of them.

Shaw's chief object is to place before his audience facts, reasons, and logical conclusions. He will not tolerate romantic emotions or sentimentalism, which he ridicules with a reckless audacity, a literal incisiveness, and a satiric wit that none of his contemporaries can excel. His chief claim to his present important position among playwrights is based on his originality and fearlessness of thought, the unfailing sprightliness of his conversation, the infectious spirit of raillery in his comedies, and his mastery of the requirements of the modern stage.

J.M. Barrie.--With the successful stage production of _The Little Minister_ (1897), Barrie passed from novelist to playwright. The qualities of humor, fancy, and quaint characterization, which were such a charm in his novels, reappear in his plays.

[Illustration: JAMES MATTHEW BARRIE.]

_The Admirable Crichton_, produced in 1903, is one of Barrie's most successful comedies. He displays skill and humor in handling the absurd situation of a peer's family wrecked on a desert island, where the butler, as the most resourceful member of the party, takes command. In _Peter Pan_ (1904), the dramatization of the novel, _The Little White Bird_, care-free, prankish Peter Pan visits three children in their sleep and teaches them to fly away with him. He carries them to the little people of the fairy world, to the pirate ship, to other scenes dear to children's hearts, and finally to his home in the tree tops. The play is a mixture of fancy, symbolism, and realism. These are woven into a bright phantasy by an imagination that is near to childhood and has not lost its morning's brightness.

_What Every Woman Knows_ (produced in 1908) shows Barrie's dramatic art at its height. He knows how to introduce variety and to give his characters an opportunity to reveal themselves. Every word, every movement of the heroine, Maggie Shand, adds to the unfolding of a fascinating personality. A period of intensely dramatic action may be followed by a comparative pause, such as occurs when the audience sees Maggie's husband slowly realize her cleverness and helpfulness, --qualities that had been long apparent to every one else.

Barrie shows the ability to present dramatically situations that are emotionally appealing or delightfully humorous. His plays exhibit admirably the deep feelings, the momentary moods, the resourcefulness, or the peculiar whimsicalities of men and women.

John Galsworthy.--As a means of presenting social problems, Galsworthy utilizes the drama even more than the novel. Faulty prison systems, discords between labor and capital, discrepancies between law and justice, are some of the themes he chooses to dramatize. _The Silver Box_ (1906) ironically interprets Justice as blind rather than impartial. The poor man is often punished while the more fortunate man goes free. _Strife_ (1909), in some respects the most powerful of his plays, illustrates the clash between capital and labor. In _The Eldest Son_ (1912), the conflict is between two social orders. _Justice_ (1910), which secured reforms in the English prison system, shows how a young man is affected by an inflexible but legal punishment; and how such a method fails to assist him humanely to a better manhood, but drives him to lower and lower depths.

In _Joy_ (1907), a delightful play, Galsworthy momentarily relinquishes social problems for a drama of more personal emotion. In the mystical, poetical composition, _The Little Dream_ (1911), he presents an allegory of the maiden in the Alps, dreaming first of the simple mountain life and then of the life in cities. With its spiritual note and delicate fancy, _The Little Dream_ turns a golden key on the ideal world beyond the strife and gloom dramatized in the sociological plays.

Galsworthy has good stagecraft. His characterization is distinct and consistent. His plays are simple in construction and direct in movement. He strictly avoids rhetorical and theatrical effects, but his dramatic economies often sacrifice all charm and aesthetic appeal. His gray world leaves no hope save the desperate one that conditions so grim may shame and spur society to reform.

Stephen Phillips.--This dramatist and poet was born at Somerton, near Oxford, in 1864. The boy was sent to Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-on-Avon, to attend school. He entered Cambridge, but at the end of his first term he left the university to join a company of Shakespearean players. His six years with them initiated him into the technique of stagecraft, which he later applied in the writing of his poetic dramas.

[Illustration: STEPHEN PHILLIPS.]

Before producing the plays for which he is known, he wrote some narrative and lyric verse. _Marpessa_ (1890), a blank verse poem, is a beautiful treatment of the old Greek myth, in which Apollo, the god, and Idas, the mortal, woo Marpessa. Marlowe might have written the lines in which Apollo promises to take her to a home above the world, where movement is ecstasy and repose is thrilling. In some of his non-dramatic poems, _Christ in Hades_ (1896), _Cities of Hell_ (1907), and _The New Inferno_ (1896), Phillips shows how the subject of life and punishment after death attracts him.

With the appearance of his _Paolo and Francesca_ in 1899, the poetic drama seemed phoenix-like to arise from its ashes. Tennyson and Browning had failed to write successful plays. In fact, since the death of Dryden, poetry and drama had seemed to be afraid to approach each other. Phillips effected at least a temporary union. His several plays have distinctly dramatic qualities and many passages of poetic beauty. From both a dramatic and a poetic point of view, _Paolo and Francesca_ is Phillips's best play. Its dramatic values lie chiefly in its power to create and sustain a sense of something definitely progressing toward a certain point. The poetic elements of the play consist in the beauty of atmosphere and the charm of the lines. Giovanni Malatesta, the ugly tyrant of Rimini, being at war when his marriage draws near, sends his young brother Paolo to escort Francesca to Rimini. On the journey Paolo and Francesca fall in love with each other. When Giovanni discovers this, his jealous hand slays them. To such a tragic climax, Phillips drives steadily onward from the first scene, thus focusing the interest on a concrete dramatic situation.

_Herod_ (1900) is a drama of ambition versus love. Herod, the great historic king of the Jews, though passionately in love with his wife Mariamne, sacrifices her brother Aristobulus to his suspicions, fearing that this young prince, the last of the Maccabees, may supplant him on the throne. This sacrifice, prompted by evil counselors, results in a train of tragic episodes, including Mariamne's death and Herod's madness. The lines in which Herod speaks of thinking in gold and dreaming in silver call to mind the hyperbole and music of Marlowe's mighty line.

_Ulysses_ (1902), more of a panorama than a play, is founded on the Homeric story. Its scenes are laid in Olympus, in Hades, on Calypso's isle, and finally in Ithaca. Calypso tries to retain Ulysses upon her isle, beautiful--

"With sward of parsley and of violet And poplars shimmering in a silvery dream."[15]

He struggles against her enchantment, returns home, finds his wife surrounded by her suitors, joins in their bow-drawing contest, and, in a most exciting and dramatic scene, surpasses all rivals and claims his faithful, beautiful Penelope.

The plays of Phillips not infrequently lack that clinching power that stretches the interest taut. Many scenes are admirably spectacular, suggestive of richly decorated tapestries, which hang separately in spacious rooms; but the plays need more forceful dramatic action, moving through changes to a climax. Phillips's diction, though sometimes rhetorical, is also often ornately beautiful and highly poetical. We feel that even in his plays, he is greater as a poet than as a dramatist.

CELTIC DRAMATISTS

Strong national feeling, interest in the folklore and peasant life of Ireland, and ambition to establish a national theater, have led to a distinct and original Irish drama. In 1899, with a fund of two hundred and fifty dollars, Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats, G.W. Russell, and other playwrights and patrons succeeded in establishing in Dublin the Irish Literary Theater now known as the Irish National Theater.

The object of this theater is twofold. In the first place, it aims to produce "literary" plays, not the vapid, panoramic kind that merely pass away the time. In the second place, the Irish plays present fabled and historical Irish heroes and the humble Irish peasant.

Patriotism inspired many writers to assist in this national movement. Some gathered stories from the lips of living Irish-speaking peasants; others collected and translated into English the old legends of heroes. Dr. Douglas Hyde's translations of _The Five Songs of Connacht_ (1894) and _The Religious Songs of Connacht_ (1906) are valuable works and have greatly influenced the Irish writers.

Lady Augusta Gregory.--Lady Gregory, born in 1852, in Roxborough, County Galway, has made some of the best of these translations in her works, _Cuchulain of Muirthemma_, and _Gods and Fighting Men_. "These two books have come to many as a first revelation of the treasures buried in Gaelic literature, and they are destined to do much for the floating of old Irish story upon the world. They aim to do for the great cycles of Irish romance what Malory did for the Arthurian stories."[16]

[Illustration: LADY GREGORY.]

Lady Gregory wrote also for the Irish Theater plays that have been acted successfully not only in Ireland but in England and in America. Among her best serious plays are _The Gaol Gate_ (1906), a present-day play, the hero of which dies to save a neighbor, _The Rising of the Moon_ (1907), and _Grania_ (1912). _McDonough's Wife_ (1913) is an excellent brief piece with an almost heroic note at the close. The great vagabond piper, McDonough, master of wonderful music, returns from wandering, to find his wife dead, and, because of his thriftlessness, about to be denied honorable burial. McDonough steps to the door, pipes his marvelous tunes, and immediately the village flocks to do homage to his wife.

Lady Gregory's farces have primarily made her fame. _Spreading the News_ (1904), _Hyacinth Halvey_ (1906), _The Image_ (1910), and _The Bogie Men_ (1913) are representative of her vigorous and well-constructed farces. They are varied in subject, the incidents are well developed, the characters are genuine Irish peasants and villagers, and the humor is infectious. It is interesting to note that Lady Gregory has continued to write farces because of the demand for them in the Irish National Theater, in order to offset the large number of tragedies by other authors.

William Butler Yeats.--In addition to delightful poetic fancy, Yeats possesses considerable dramatic ability and stagecraft. In _The Countess Cathleen_ (rewritten in 1912), the poor peasants are driven by a famine to the verge of starvation. Many die; but some are fed by the Countess Cathleen, while others sell their souls for the price of food to demons disguised as merchants. When these demons steal Countess Cathleen's stores in order to stop her charities, with instant Irish quickness and generosity, she sells her soul for a great price to the demons, in order to save her people here and hereafter. Such a tremendous sacrifice, however, is not permitted. Because of the purity of her motive, armed angels save her soul in the last impressive act. Supernatural powers, both pagan and Christian,

## participate in the play. Spirits haunt the woods, enter the peasants'

cottages, and cast spells on the inhabitants. The play is Irish in story, in symbolism, and in the fancifulness of the conception.

_The Land of Heart's Desire_ is another drama that has sprung from the soil and folklore of Ireland. This play was one of the first Celtic dramas to be produced, and in its present revised form (1912) it is one of the most engaging of the Irish plays. Partly in prose and

## partly in verse, it is the story of a young bride who tires of her

monotonous life and calls upon the fairies to release her. The old parents tell her that duty comes before love of the fairies.

The good priest begs her not to forsake her faithful young husband; but the fairy wins, and, leaving a dead bride in the cottage, bears away the living bride to a land where--

"The fairies dance in a place apart, Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring, Tossing their milk-white arms in the air; For they have heard the wind laugh and murmur and sing Of a land where even the old are fair, And even the wise are merry of tongue."[17]

Patriotic love for Ireland is the very breath of _Cathleen ni Hoolihan_ (1902), a one-act prose play in which Cathleen symbolizes Ireland. _The Shadowy Waters_ (1900) and _Deirdre_ (1907) are more poetic than dramatic. The first of these with the mysterious harper, the far-sailing into unknown seas, the parting with everything but the loved one, shows Yeats in his deeply mystical mood. In _Deirdre_ is dramatized part of a popular legend of the great queen by that name, who was too beautiful for happiness. She has seven long years of joy and then accepts her fate in the calm, triumphant way of the old heroic times.

Yeats's plays reflect the childlike superstitions and lively imagination of his country. He loves the fairies, the dreams of eternal youth, the symbolizing of things of the spirit by lovely things of earth. His plays are poetical, fanciful, and romantic.

John Millington Synge.--One of the most notable of the Irish writers, J.M. Synge, was born near Dublin in 1871 and died in that city in 1909. His brief span of life has yielded only scanty biographical data. He came of an old Wicklow family; he was graduated from Trinity College, Dublin; afterwards he wandered through much of Europe, finally settling in France.

[Illustration: JOHN SYNGE.]

In 1899, William Butler Yeats discovered him in Paris, a "man all folded up in brooding intellect," writing essays on French authors,--on Molière, for example, from whom he learned the trick of characterization; on Racine, who taught him concentration; on Rabelais, who infected him with love of deep laughter. Yeats, suspecting that Synge could be an original writer as well as an interpreter of others, persuaded him to go back to Ireland, to the Aran Islands, off Galway. Synge discovered there a lost kingdom of the imagination, a place where spontaneous feeling and primitive imagination had not been repressed by the outside world's customs and discipline, and where the constant voice of the ocean, the touch of the mysterious, all-embracing mist, and the gleam of the star through a rift in the clouds banished all sense of difference between the natural and the supernatural.

When Synge died in his thirty-eighth year, he had written only six short plays, all between 1903 and 1909. Two of these, _In the Shadow of the Glen_ and _Riders to the Sea_, contain only one act. _The Tinker's Wedding_ has two acts, and the rest are three-act plays.

_In the Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea_, and _The Well of the Saints_, produced respectively in 1903, 1904, and 1905, show that Synge came at once into full possession of his dramatic power. Even in his earliest written play, _The Well of The Saints_, we find a style stripped of superfluous verbiage and vibrant with emotion. _In the Shadow of the Glen_, his first staged play, consumes only a half hour. The scene is laid in a cabin far off in a lonely glen, and the four actors,--a woman oppressed by loneliness, an unfeeling husband who feigns death, and two visitors,--make a singularly well-knit impressive drama.

_Riders to the Sea_ has been pronounced the greatest drama of the modern Celtic school. Some critics consider this the most significant tragedy produced in English since Shakespeare. Simple and impressive as a Greek tragedy, it has for its central figure an old mother whose husband and five sons have been lost at sea. The simple but poignant feeling of the drama focuses on the death of Maurya's sixth and last son, Bartley. This tragic episode, simply presented, touches the depths of human sympathy. In old Maurya, Synge created an impressive figure of what Macbeth calls "rooted sorrow."

_The Playboy of the Western World_, produced first in 1907, is a three-act play. It is as fantastically humorous as the _Riders to the Sea_ is tragical. Dread of his father ties this peasant to his stupid toil. A fearful deed frees the youth and throws him into the company of the lovely maiden, Pegeen, and admiring friends. The latent poetry and wild joy of living awake in him, and, under the spur of praise, he performs great feats. He who had never before dared to face girls, makes such love to Pegeen that poesy itself seems to be talking. The Playboy is one of the wildest conceptions of character in modern drama. His very extravagance compels interest. Pegeen is a fitting sweetheart for him. Her father is a stalwart figure, possessing a shrewd philosophy and rare strength of speech, as "fully flavored as nut or apple." Some critics object to such a boisterous play, but they should remember that it is intended to be an extravagant peasant fantasia.

_Deirdre of the Sorrows_, another three-act play, produced first in 1910, tells the story of the beautiful princess Deirdre, of her isolated young life, and her seven years of perfect union with her lover Naisi. When her lover is slain, this true and tender queen of the North loosens the knot of life to accompany him.

Synge belongs in the first rank of modern dramatists. The forty Irish characters that he has created reveal the basal elements of universal human nature. His purpose is like Shakespeare's,--to reveal throbbing life, not to talk in his own person, nor to discuss problems. Synge has dramatized the primal hope, fear, sorrow, and loneliness of life. Although his plays are written in prose and have the distinctive flavor of his lowly characters, yet a recent critic justly says that Synge "for the first time sets English dramatic prose to a rhythm as noble as the rhythms of blank verse."

SUMMARY

The twentieth century shows two main lines of development,--the realistic and the romantic. The two leading essayists of the period, A.C. Benson and G.K. Chesterton, are both idealists and champions of religious faith.

Among the novelists, Conrad tells impressive stories of distant seas and shores; Bennett's strongest fiction gives realistic pictures of life in English industrial towns; Galsworthy's novels present the problems that affect the upper class of Englishmen; Wells writes scientific romances and sociological novels.

Some of the best poetry, full of the fascination of a dreamy far-off world, has been written by the Celtic poets, Yeats, Russell, and Fiona Macleod. Masefield and Gibson have produced much realistic verse about the life of the common toiler. Noyes has written _Drake_, a romantic epic, and a large amount of graceful lyrical verse, in some of which there is much poetic beauty.

The most distinctive work of recent times has been in the field of the drama. Pinero has improved its technique; Shaw has given it remarkable conversational brilliancy; Barrie has brought to it fancy and humor and sweetness; Galsworthy has used it to present social problems; Phillips has tried to restore to it the Elizabethan poetic spirit. The Celtic dramatists form a separate school. Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Synge have all written plays based on Irish life, folklore, or mythology. The plays of Synge, the greatest member of the group, reveal the universal primitive emotions of human beings.

CONCLUSION

Three distinctive moral influences in English literature specially impress us,--the call to strenuous manhood:--

"...this thing is God, To be man with thy might,"

the increasing sympathy with all earth's children:--

"Ye blessed creatures, I have heard the call, Ye to each other make,"

and the persistent expression of Anglo-Saxon faith. As we pause in our study, we may hear in the twentieth-century song of Alfred Noyes, the echo of the music from the loom of the Infinite Weaver:--

"Under the breath of laughter, deep in the tide of tears, I hear the loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years."[18]

REFERENCE FOR FURTHER STUDY

Kennedy's _English Literature_, 1880-1895 (Shaw, Wells, Fiona Macleod, Yeats).

Kelman's _Mr. Chesterton's Point of View_ (in _Among Famous Books_).

Cooper's _Some English Story Tellers_.

Conrad's _A Personal Record_.

Phelps's _Essays on Modern Novelists_ (De Morgan).

Yeats's _Celtic Twilight_.

Figgis's _Studies and Appreciations_ (_Mr. W.B. Yeats's Poetry_. _The Art of J.M. Synge_.)

More's _Drift of Romanticism_ (Fiona Macleod).

Borsa's _The English Stage of To-day_.

Jones's (Henry Arthur) _The Foundation of a National Drama: A Collection of Essays, Lectures, and Speeches, Delivered and Written in the Years 1896-1912_.

Hamilton's _The Theory of the Theater_.

Hunt's _The Play of To-day_.

Hale's _Dramatists of To-day_.

Henderson's _George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Works_, 2 vols.

Chesterton's _George Bernard Shaw_.

Weygandt's _Irish Plays and Playwrights_ (excellent).

Krans's _William Butler Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival_.

Howe's _J.M. Synge: A Critical Study_.

Yeats's _J.M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time_ (in _The Cutting of an Agate_, 1912).

Bickley's _J.M. Synge and the Irish Dramatic Movement_.

Elton's _Living Irish Literature_ (in _Modern Studies_).

SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

Essays.--From A.C. Benson, read one of these collections of essays: _The Altar Fire, Beside Still Waters, Thy Rod and Thy Staff_, and one or more of these biographies: _Tennyson, John Ruskin, Rossetti_ (E.M.L.), _Walter Pater_ (E.M.L.); from Chesterton, one of these collections of essays: _Varied Types, Heretics, Orthodoxy_, and one or more of these biographies: _George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning_ (E.M.L.). For other twentieth-century essays, see the preceding bibliography and the paragraph following this.

The Novel.--From Conrad, read _Youth, Typhoon, Lord Jim_; from Bennett, _The Old Wives' Tale, Clayhanger_; from Galsworthy, _The Man of Property, The Patrician_; from Wells, _The Time Machine, Kipps, The Future in America_ (essay); from Phillpotts, _Children of the Mist, Demeter's Daughter_; from Hewlett, _Life and Death of Richard Yea and Nay, The Stooping Lady_; from Quiller-Couch, _The Splendid Spur, The Delectable Duchy_; from De Morgan, _Joseph Vance, Somehow Good_; from Locke, _The Beloved Vagabond, The Adventures of Aristide Pujol_; from Zangwill, _The Children of the Ghetto, The Melting Pot_ (play).

Poetry.--From _The Poetical Works of William B. Yeats_ (Macmillan), read _The Wanderings of Oisin, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Hosting of the Sidhe, The Voice of the Waters_; from Fiona Macleod's _Poems and Dramas_ (Duffield), _The Vision, The Lonely Hunter, The Rose of Flame_; from Masefield, the part of _Dauber_ describing the rounding of Cape Horn, beginning p. 119, in _The Story of a Round-House_ (Macmillan); from Gibson's _Fires_ (Macmillan), _The Crane, The Machine_; from Noyes's _Poems_ (Macmillan, 1906), _The Song of Re-Birth, The Barrel Organ, Forty Singing Seamen, The Highwayman_;

## Book II from his _Drake: An English Epic_ (Stokes).

The Drama.--From Jones, read _The Manoeuvers of Jane, Mrs. Dane's Defence_ (Samuel French); from Pinero, _The Amazons, The School Mistress_, or _Sweet Lavender_ (W.H. Baker); from Shaw's _Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant_ (Brentano), _Candida, You Never Can Tell, Arms and the Man_ from Barrie, _Peter Pan, What Every Woman Knows_; from Galsworthy, _Strife, Joy, The Little Dream_; from Phillips, _Marpessa_ (poem), _Ulysses_ (Macmillan), _Herod_; from Lady Gregory's, _Seven Short Plays_ (Putnam), _The Gaol Gate, Spreading the News_; from her _New Comedies_ (Putnam, 1913), _McDonough's Wife, The Bogie Men_; from Yeats's _Poetical Works_, Vol. II. (Macmillan), _The Land of Heart's Desire, Countess Cathleen_; from Synge, _Riders to the Sea, The Playboy of the Western World, Deirdre of the Sorrows_ (John W. Luce).

Questions and Suggestions.--Stevenson's _The Home Book of Verse_ and _The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse_ contain selections from a number of the poets. McCarthy's _Irish Literature_, 10 vols., gives selections from work written prior to 1904. The majority of the indicated readings can be found only in the original works of the authors.

Give an outline of the most important thoughts from one essay and one biography, by both Benson and Chesterton.

What distinctive subject matter do you find in each of the novelists? How do same reflect the spirit of the age?

What are the chief characteristics of each of the poets? What does the phrase "Celtic Renaissance" signify?

In brief, what had the drama accomplished from the time of the closing of the theaters in 1642 to 1890? What distinctive contributions to the modern drama have Pinero, Shaw, and Barrie made? Describe the work of Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Synge. In what does Synge's special power consist?

FOOTNOTES TO