Halleck's New English Literature Part 72

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 sh.o.r.es, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 k.n.o.blauch, an American author. Its characters, representing three generations, ill.u.s.trate 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 circ.u.mscribed, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN GALSWORTHY.]

Four of his novels deal with the upper cla.s.ses of English society.

_The Man of Property_ (1906) treats of the wealthy cla.s.s, _The Country House_ (1907) presents the conservative country squire, _Fraternity_ (1909) portrays the intellectual cla.s.s, and _The Patrician_ (1911) pictures the aristocrat. Galsworthy is the relentless a.n.a.lyist 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 d.i.c.kens'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 a.n.a.lysis 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 a.s.sociated with Devonshire as Hardy's are with Wess.e.x, 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 antic.i.p.ated. _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 reechoes 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 p.r.o.neness 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 enn.o.bles.

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 d.i.c.kens. 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 G.o.ds, 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 a.s.sisting to establish the Irish National Theater in Dublin. In thus reviving Ireland's heroic history, Yeats has served his country and his art.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 sh.o.r.es, although he had felt the effect of age when his foot again touched his native land. The days of "G.o.ds 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 sh.o.r.es.

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 ill.u.s.trated 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 cooperative 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.