Halleck's New English Literature Part 57

In addition to the chief novelists,--d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and Kipling,--there were many other writers who produced one or more excellent works of fiction. In this cla.s.s are the Bronte sisters, especially Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) and Emily Bronte (1818-1848), the daughters of a clergyman, who lived in Haworth, Yorkshire. They had genius, but they were hampered by poverty, lack of sympathy, and peculiar environment.

Charlotte Bronte's _Jane Eyre_ (1847) is a thrilling story, which centers around the experiences of one of the great nineteenth-century heroines of fiction. This virile novel, an unusual compound of sensational romance and of intense realism, lives because the highly gifted author made it pulsate with her own life. Unlike _Jane Eyre_, Emily Bronte's powerful novel, _Wuthering Heights_ (1847) is not pleasant reading. This romantic novel is really her imaginative interpretation of the Yorkshire life that she knew. If she had humanized _Wuthering Heights_, it could have been cla.s.sed among the greatest novels of the Victorian age. She might have learned this art, had she not died at the age of thirty. "Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone," wrote Charlotte Bronte of her sister Emily.

Among the other authors who deserve mention for one or more works of fiction are: Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873), a versatile writer whose best-known work is _The Last Days of Pompeii_; Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), whose _Cranford_ (1853) is an inimitable picture of mid-nineteenth century life in a small Cheshire village; Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), whose _Barchester Towers_ is a realistic study of life in a cathedral town; Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), who stirs the blood in _Westward Ho!_ (1855), a tale of Elizabethan seamen; Charles Reade (1814-1884), author of _The Cloister and the Hearth_ (1861), a careful and fascinating study of fifteenth-century life; R.D. Blackmore (1825-1900), whose _Lorna Doone_ (1869) is a thrilling North Devonshire story of life and love in the latter part of the seventeenth century; J.M. Barrie (1860- ), whose _The Little Minister_ (1891) is a richly human, sympathetic, and humorous story, the scene of which is laid in Kirriemuir, a town about sixty miles north of Edinburgh. His _Sentimental Tommy_ (1896), although not so widely popular, is an unusually original, semi-autobiographical story of imaginative boyhood. This entire chapter could be filled with merely the t.i.tles of Victorian novels, many of which possess some distinctive merit.

The changed character of the reading public furnished one reason for the unprecedented growth of fiction. The spread of education through public schools, newspapers, cheap magazines, and books caused a widespread habit of reading, which before this time was not common among the large numbers of the uneducated and the poor. The ma.s.ses, however, did not care for uninteresting or abstruse works. The majority of books drawn from the circulating libraries were novels.

The scientific spirit of the age impelled the greatest novelists to try to paint actual life as it impressed them. d.i.c.kens chose the lower cla.s.ses in London; Thackeray, the clubs and fashionable world; George Eliot, the country life near her birthplace in Warwickshire; Hardy, the people of his Wess.e.x; Meredith, the cosmopolitan life of egotistical man; Kipling, the life of India both in jungle and camp, as well as the life of the great outer world. These writers of fiction all sought a realistic background, although some of them did not hesitate to use romantic touches to heighten the general effect.

Stevenson was the chief writer of romances.

The Trend of Poetry: Minor Poets.--The Victorian age was dominated by two great poets,--Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. Browning showed the influence of science in his tendency to a.n.a.lyze human motives and actions. In one line of _Fra Lippo Lippi_, he voices the new poetic att.i.tude toward the world:--

"To find its meaning is my meat and drink."

Browning advanced into new fields, while Tennyson was more content to make a beautiful poetic translation of much of the thought of the age.

In his youth he wrote:--

"Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time."

From merely reading Tennyson's verse, one could gauge quite accurately the trend of Victorian scientific thought.

The poetry of both Browning and Tennyson is so resonant with faith that they have been called great religious teachers. Rudyard Kipling, the poet of imperialistic England, of her "far-flung battle line,"

attributes her "dominion over palm and pine" to faith in the "Lord G.o.d of Hosts."

In the minor poets, there is often a different strain. Arnold is beset with doubt, and hears no "clear call," such as Tennyson voices in _Crossing the Bar_. Swinburne, seeing the pessimistic side of the shield of evolution, exclaims:--

"Thou hast fed one rose with dust of many men."

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), Oxford tutor, traveler, and educational examiner, was a poet who struggled with the doubt of the age. He loved--

"To finger idly some old Gordian knot, Unskilled to sunder, and too weak to cleave, And with much toil attain to half-believe."

His verse would be forgotten if it expressed only such an uncertain note; but his greatest poem thus records his belief in the value of life's struggle and gives a hint of final victory:--

"Say not the struggle naught availeth, The labor and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been they remain.

"If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It maybe, in yon smoke concealed, Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers, And, but for you, possess the field."

Although he paid too little attention to the form of his verse, some of his poems have the vitality of an earnest, thoughtful sincerity.

Two poets, W. E. Henley (1849-1903) and Robert Bridges (1844- ), although they do not possess Robert Browning's genius, yet have much of his capacity to inspire others with joy in "the mere living."

Henley, a cripple and a great sufferer, was a poet, critic, and London editor. His message is "the joy of life ":--

"...the blackbird sings but a box-wood flute, But I lose him best of all For his song is all of the joy of life."

His verse, which is elemental, full of enthusiasm and beauty, often reminds us of the work of the thirteenth-century lyrists.

Robert Bridges, an Oxford graduate, physician, critic, and poet, also had for his creed: "Life and joy are one." His universe, like Sh.e.l.ley's, is an incarnation of the spirit of love:--

"Love can tell, and love alone, Whence the million stars were strewn, Why each atom knows its own, How, in spite of woe and death, Gay is life, and sweet is breath."

He wishes for no happier day than the present one. Bridges has been called a cla.s.sical poet because he often selects Greek and Roman subjects for his verse, and because he writes with a formality, purity, and precision of style. He is, however, most delightful in such volumes as _Shorter Poems_ and _New Poems_.[3] wherein he describes in a simple, artless manner English rural scenes and fireside joys. In 1913 he was appointed poet laureate, to succeed Alfred Austin.

John Davidson (1857-1909), a Scotch poet, who came to London and wrestled with poverty, produced much uneven work. In his best verse, there is often a pleasing combination of poetic beauty and vigorous movement. Lines like these from his _Ballad of a Nun_ have been much admired:--

"On many a mountain's happy head Dawn lightly laid her rosy hand.

The adventurous son took heaven by storm, Clouds scattered largesses of rain."

Davidson later became an offensively shrill preacher of materialism and lost his early charm. Some of the best of his poetry may be found in _Fleet Street Ecologues_.

Francis Thompson (1860-1907), a Catholic poet, who has been called a nineteenth-century Crashaw, pa.s.sed much of his short life of suffering in London, where he was once reduced to selling matches on a street corner. His greatest poem, _The Hound of Heaven_ (1893), is an impa.s.sioned lyrical rendering of the pa.s.sage in the _Psalms_ beginning: "Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?" While fleeing down "the long savannahs of the blue," the poet hears a Voice say:--

"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."

William Watson (1858- ), a London poet, looked to Milton, Wordsworth, and Arnold as his masters. Some of Watson's best verse, such as _Wordsworth's Grave_, is written in praise of dead poets. His early volume _Epigrams_ (1884), containing one hundred poems of four lines each, shows his power of conveying poetic thought in brief s.p.a.ce. One of these poems is called _Sh.e.l.ley and Harriet Westbrook_:--

"A star looked down from heaven and loved a flower, Grown in earth's garden--loved it for an hour: Let eyes that trace his...o...b..t in the spheres Refuse not, to a ruin'd rosebud, tears."[4]

Many expected to see Watson appointed poet-laureate to succeed Tennyson. Possibly mental trouble, which had temporarily affected him, influenced the choice; for Alfred Austin (1835-1913) received the laureateship in 1896. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, Watson disliked those whom he called a "phrase-tormenting fantastic chorus of poets." His best verse shows depth of poetic thought, directness of expression, and a strong sense of moral values.

The Victorian age has provided poetry to suit almost all tastes. In striking contrast with those who wrestled with the eternal verities are such poets and essayists as Austin Dobson (1840- ), long a clerk of the London Board of Trade, and Arthur Symons (1865- ), a poet and discriminating prose critic. Austin Dobson, who is fond of eighteenth-century subjects, is at his best in graceful society verse.

His poems show the touch of a highly skilled metrical artist who has been a careful student of French poetry. His ease of expression, freshness, and humor charm readers of his verse without making serious demands on their attention. His best poems are found in _Vignettes in Rhyme_ (1873), _At the Sign of the Lyre_ (1885), and _Collected Poems_ (1913).

In choice of subject matter, Arthur Symons sometimes suggests the Cavalier poets. He has often squandered his powers in acting on his theory that it is one of the provinces of verse to record any momentary mood, irrespective of its value. His deftness of touch and acute poetic sensibility are evident in such short poems as _Rain on the Down, Credo, A Roundel of Rest_ and _The Last Memory_.[5]

[Ill.u.s.tration: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. _From the drawing by himself, National Portrait Gallery_.]

The Pre-Raphaelite Movement.--In 1848 three artists, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), William Holman-Hunt (1827-1910), and John Everett Millais (1829-1896), formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Others soon joined the movement which was primarily artistic, not literary. Painting had become imitative. The uppermost question in the artist's mind was, "How would Raphael or some other authority have painted this picture?" The new school determined to paint things from a direct study of nature, without a thought of the way in which any one else would have painted them. They decided to a.s.sume the same independence as the Pre-Raphaelite artists, who expressed their individuality in their own way. Keats was the favorite author of the new school. The artists painted subjects suggested by his poems, and Rossetti thought him "the one true heir of Shakespeare."

When the Pre-Raphaelite paintings were violently attacked, Ruskin examined them and decided that they conformed to the principles which he had already laid down in the first two volumes of _Modern Painters_ (1843, 1846), so he wrote _Pre-Raphaelitism_ (1851) as the champion of the new school. It has been humorously said that some of the painters of this school, before beginning a new picture, took an oath "to paint the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

The new movement in poetry followed this revolt in art. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the head of the literary Pre-Raphaelites, though born in London, was of Italian parentage in which there was a strain of English blood. His poem, _The Blessed Damozel_ (first published in 1850), has had the greatest influence of any Pre-Raphaelite literary production. This poem was suggested by _The Raven_ (1845), the work of the American, Edgar Allan Poe. Rossetti said:--

"I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover an earth, and I determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearnings of the loved one in heaven."

His Blessed Damozel, wearing a white rose, "Mary's gift," leaning out from the gold bar of heaven, watching with sad eyes, "deeper than the depth of waters stilled at even," for the coming of her lover, has left a lasting impression on many readers. Simplicity, beauty, and pathos are the chief characteristics of this poem, which, like Bryant's _Thanatopsis_, was written by a youth of eighteen.

Painting was the chief work of Rossetti's life, but he wrote many other poems. Some of the most characteristic of these are the two semi-ballads, _Sister Helen_ and _The King's Tragedy, Rose Mary, Love's Nocturn_, and _Sonnets_.

One of the earliest of these Sonnets, _Mary's Girlhood_, describes the child as:--

"An angel-watered lily, that near G.o.d Grows and is quiet."

His sister, Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), the author of much religious verse, shows the unaffected naturalness of the new movement.

This stanza from her _Amor Mundi_ (_Love of the World_) is characteristic:--

"So they two went together in glowing August weather, The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right; And dear she was to doat on, her swift feet seemed to float on The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight."