Halleck's New English Literature Part 67

Tennyson's extraordinary popularity in his own time was largely due to the fact that he voiced so clearly and attractively the thought of the age. As another epoch ushers in different interests, they will naturally be uppermost in the mind of the new generation. We no longer feel the intense interest of the Victorians in the supposed conflict between science and religion. Their theory of evolution has been modified and has lost the force of novelty. Theories of government and social ideals have also undergone a gradual change. For these reasons much of Tennyson's verse has ceased to have its former wide appeal.

Tennyson has, however, left sufficient work of abiding value, both for its exquisite form and for its thought, to ent.i.tle him to be ranked as a great poet. We cannot imagine a time when _Crossing the Bar_, _The Pa.s.sing of Arthur_, and the central thought of _In Memoriam_--

"'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all,"

will no longer interest readers. To Tennyson belong--

"Jewels five words long That on the stretch'd forefinger of all Time Sparkle forever."

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1837-1909

[Ill.u.s.tration: ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1837-1909. _From the painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti_.]

Life.--Swinburne was born in London in 1837. His father was an admiral in the English navy, and his mother, the daughter of an earl.

The boy pa.s.sed his summers in Northumberland and his winters in the Isle of Wight. He thus acquired that fondness for the sea, so noticeable in his poetry. His early experiences are traceable in lines like these:--

"Our bosom-belted billowy-blossoming hills, Whose hearts break out in laughter like the sea."

He went to Oxford for three years, but left without taking his degree.

The story is current that he knew more Greek than his teachers but that he failed in an examination on the _Scriptures_. He sought to complete his education by wide reading and by travel, especially in France and Italy.

When he was twenty-five, he went to live for a short time at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, in the western part of London, in the same house with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Meredith. Swinburne admired Rossetti's poetry and was much impressed with the Pre-Raphaelite virtues of simplicity and directness.

Swinburne never married. His deafness caused him to pa.s.s much of his long life in comparative retirement. His last thirty years were spent with his friend, the critic and poet, Theodore Watts-Dunton, at Putney on the Thames, a few miles southwest of London. Swinburne died in 1909 and was buried at Bonchurch in the Isle of Wight.

Works.--In 1864 England was enchanted with the melody of the choruses in his _Atalanta in Calydon_, a dramatic poem in the old Greek form. Lines like the following from the chorus, _The Youth of the Year_, show the quality for which his verse is most famous:--

"When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, The mother of months in meadow or plain Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain."

The first series of his _Poems and Ballads_ (1866) contains _The Garden of Proserpine_, one of his best known poems. Proserpine "forgets the earth her mother" and goes to her "bloomless" garden:--

"And spring and seed and swallow Take wing for her and follow Where summer song rings hollow And flowers are put to scorn."

Many volumes came in rapid succession from his pen. In 1904 his poems were collected in six octavo volumes containing 2357 pages. This collection includes the long narrative poems, _Tristram of Lyonesse_ and _The Tale of Balen_, a faithful retelling of famous medieval stories. He, however, had more ability as a writer of lyrics than of narrative verse.

His poetic dramas fill five additional volumes. _Chastelard_ (1865), one of the three dramas relating to Mary Queen of Scots, is the best of his plays. He had, however, neither the power to draw character nor the repression of speech necessary for a great dramatist. The best parts of his plays are really lyrical verse.

Many critics think that Swinburne's reputation would be as great as it now is, if he had ceased to write verse in 1866, at the age of twenty-nine, after producing _Atalanta in Calydon_ and the first series of his _Poems and Ballads_. Although his interests widened and his poetic range increased, much of his work during his last forty years is a repet.i.tion of earlier successes. His _Songs before Sunrise_, however (1871), and the next two volumes of _Poems and Ballads_ (1878 and 1889) contain some poems that rank among his best.

Later in life he wrote a large amount of prose criticism, much of which deals with the Elizabethan dramatists. His _A Study of Shakespeare_ (1880) and his shorter _Shakespeare_ (1905) are especially suggestive. In spite of the fact that the reader must make constant allowance for his habit of using superlatives, he was an able critic.

General Characteristics.--Swinburne's poetry suffers from his tendency to drown his ideas in a sea of words.

Sometimes we gain no more definite ideas from reading many lines of his verse than from hearing music without words. Much of his poetry was suggested by wide reading, not by close personal contact with life. His verse sometimes offends from disregarding moral proprieties and from so expressing his atheism as to wound the feelings of religious people. His idea of a Supreme Power was colored by the old Grecian belief in Fate. In exact opposition to Wordsworth, Swinburne's youthful poems show that he regarded Nature as the incarnation of a Power malevolent to man. He lacked the optimism of Browning and the faith of Tennyson. The mantle of Byron and Sh.e.l.ley fell on Swinburne as the poet of revolt against what seemed to be religious or political tyranny.

After Tennyson's death, in 1892, Swinburne was the greatest living English poet; but, even if his verse had not offended Queen Victoria for the foregoing reasons, she would not have appointed him poet-laureate after the misery of the Russians had moved him in 1890 to write, referring to the Czar:--

"Night hath naught but one red star--Tyrannicide.

"G.o.d or man, be swift; hope sickens with delay: Smite and send him howling down his father's way."

Swinburne's crowning glory is his unquestioned mastery, unsurpa.s.sed by any poet since Milton, of the technique of varied melodious verse.

This quality is evident, no matter whether he is describing the laughter of a child:--

"Sweeter far than all things heard, Hand of harper, tone of bird, Sound of woods at sundawn stirr'd, Welling water's winsome ward, Wind in warm wan weather,"

or expressing his fierce hatred for any condition or place where--

"...a curse was or a chain A throne for torment or a crown for bane Rose, moulded out of poor men's molten pain,"

or singing the song of a lover--

"If love were what the rose is, And I were like the leaf, Our lives would grow together In sad or singing weather, Blown fields or flowerful closes, Green pleasure or grey grief; If love were what the rose is, And I were like the leaf;"

or voicing his early creed--

"That no life lives forever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea,"

or chanting in far n.o.bler strains the Anglo-Saxon belief in the molding power of an infinite presence--

"I am in thee to save thee, As my soul in thee saith, Give thou as I gave thee, Thy life-blood and breath, Green leaves of thy labor, white flowers of thy thought, and red fruit of thy death."

RUDYARD KIPLING, 1865-

[Ill.u.s.tration: RUDYARD KIPLING. _From the painting by John Collier_.]

Life.--Rudyard Kipling, the youngest of the great Victorians, was born in Bombay, India, in 1865. His parents were people of culture and artistic training, the father, John Lockwood Kipling, being a recognized authority on Indian art. Like most English children born in India, Kipling, when very small, was sent to England to escape the fatal Indian heat. Afterwards in the story _Baa, Baa, Black Sheep_, Kipling told the tragic experience of two Anglo-Indian children when separated from their parents. If it is true that this story is largely autobiographical, the separation must have been a trying ordeal in Kipling's childhood. Later he spent several years at Westward Ho, Devonshire, in a school conducted mainly for the sons of Indian officials. _Stalky and Co._, a broadly humorous book of schoolboy life, gives the Kipling of this period, in the character of the "egregious Beetle."

When only seventeen, he returned to India and immediately began journalistic work. For seven years, first at Lah.o.r.e and later at Allahabad, he was busy with the usual hackwork of a small newspaper.

During these impressionable years, from seventeen to twenty-four, he gained his intimate knowledge of the strangely-colored, many-sided Indian life. His first stories and poems, often written in hot haste, to fill the urgent need of more copy, appeared as waifs and strays in the papers for which he wrote. A collection of verse, _Departmental Ditties_, published at Lah.o.r.e in 1886, was well received; and it was quickly followed by several volumes of short stories. His ability thus gained early recognition in India.

At the age of twenty-four, he left India for London. Here his books found a publisher almost at once, and he was hailed as a new literary genius. His work became so popular that he was able to devote his whole time to writing. It is doubtful whether any writer since d.i.c.kens has received such quick and enthusiastic recognition from all cla.s.ses of the English-speaking race. Even the street-car conductors were heard quoting him.

In 1892 he married Miss Caroline Balestier, an American, and afterwards lived for four years at Brattleboro, Vermont. Later he settled in Suss.e.x, England, whence he has made long journeys to South Africa, Canada, and Egypt, ama.s.sing more knowledge of the English "around the Seven Seas."

Probably the most remarkable feature of Kipling's career is the early age at which his genius developed. Before he left India he had published one book of verse and seven prose collections. By the time he was thirty, he had written _The Jungle Books_, most of his best short stories, and some of his finest verse.

Prose.--As a master of the modern short story, Kipling stands unsurpa.s.sed. His journalistic work helped him to acquire a direct, concentrated style of narrative, to find interest in an astonishing variety of subjects, and to seize on the right details for vivid presentation. He was fortunate in discovering in India a new literary field, in which his genius appears at its best. Some of his early tales of Indian life are marred by crudeness and by lack of feeling; but these faults decreased as he matured.

Kipling's stories depend for their interest on incident, not on a.n.a.lysis. He embodies romantic adventure and action in masterpieces as different as the terrible tragedy of _The Man Who would be King_ (1888), the tender love story of _Without Benefit of Clergy_ (1890), and the mystic dream-land of _The Brushwood Boy_ (1895). He specially enjoyed portraying the English soldier. Perhaps his best-known characters are the privates Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, whom we meet in such tales of mingled comedy and tragedy as _With the Main Guard_ (1888), _On Greenhow Hill_ (1891), _The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney_ (1891), _The Courting of Dinah Shadd_ (1981).

When Kipling traveled to new lands, he wrote stories of America, Africa, and the deep sea; but his later tales show an unfortunate increase in the use of technical terms and a lessening of his former dash and spontaneity. There are, however, readers who prefer such a delicate, subtle, story as _They_ (1905), to his earlier masterpieces of strenuous action.

In _The Jungle Book_ (1894) and _The Second Jungle Book_ (1895), Kipling has accomplished the greatest of feats,--an original creation.

From the moment the little brown baby, Mowgli, crawls into Mother Wolf's cave away from Shere Khan, the tiger, until the time for him to graduate from the jungle, we follow him under the spell of a fascination different from any that we have known before. The animals of the jungle have real personalities, from the chattering Bandar-log to the lumbering kindly Baloo. With all their intense individuality, they remain animals, each one true to his kind, hating or loving men, thinking mainly through their instincts, and surpa.s.sing human schoolmasters in teaching Mowgli the great laws of the jungle,--that obedience is "the head and the hoof of the Law," that nothing was ever yet lost by silence, that, in the jungle, life and food depend on keeping one's temper, that no one shall kill for the pleasure of killing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MOWGLI AND HIS BROTHERS. _By permission of Century Company._]