

ENGLISH LITERATURE 



2935 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



the novelist who gives us no 

 heroes. Vanity Fair, Pendennis, 

 and The Newcomes are, with his 

 shorter sketches, the greatest of 

 his novels of contemporary life. 

 In Esmond, and in a lesser degree 

 in its sequel The Virginians, the 

 same delicacy of satirical and 

 sympathetic portraiture is given an 

 historical sotting of wonderful com- 

 prehensiveness and atmosphere. 

 The early sketches of provincial 

 life by George Eliot (Marian Evans), 

 Scenes from Clerical Life, Adam 

 Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas 

 Marner, and Felix Holt, have a 

 freshness and power that some- 

 what failed her in the later more 

 learned and philosophical works, 

 Romola, Daniel Deronda. 



The tendency to make of the 

 novel a political, social or ethical 

 and religious pamphlet, which is 

 obvious in Dickens' s works, though 

 constantly transcended by his 

 buoyant humour and creative 

 power, is dominant in the brilliant 

 political novels of Benjamin Dis- 

 raeli, Coningsby, Sybil, Tancred, 

 Lothair, and Endymion ; in the 

 ardent and vivid pictures of con- 

 temporary and past problems and 

 agitations of Charles Kingsley, Al- 

 ton Locke, Hypatia, Westward Ho, 

 and Hereward ; and in the stories 

 of Mrs. Gasket!. The Bronte sisters, 

 Charlotte and Emily, poured into 

 the same form, Jane Eyre, Villette, 

 Wuthering Heights, the lyrical re- 

 cord of their own lives and" passion- 

 ate thoughts. Anthony Trollope, 

 with his delightful sketches of cleri- 

 cal society, Barchester Towers, 

 Framley Parsonage ; Charles Reade, 

 ardent social reformer, It Is Never 

 Too Late to Mend, The Cloister and 

 the Hearth ; and Lord Lytton, ex- 

 perimenter in all kinds of novels, 

 The Caxtons, My Novel, The Last 

 Day? of Pompeii, A Strange Story, 

 are typical Victorian novelists. 



George Meredith and Thomas Hardy 



Of the later Victorian writers 

 and their followers four have been 

 most influential ; of the older men 

 George Meredith and Thomas 

 Hardy, novelists and poets, whose 

 influence to-day is greater than in 

 the heyday of their productivity ; 

 Robert Louis Stevenson, essayist, 

 novelist, and poet ; Rudyard Kip- 

 ling, story-teller and poet younger 

 men, whose influence was more 

 immediate, and probably more 

 ephemeral ; for the older men were 

 more prophetic of the main move- 

 ment of thought and literature. 

 They turned their back on the ro- 

 mantic reconstruction of earlier 

 ages, the self-conscious revival of 

 artistic fashions and forms. 



Their primary concern is with 

 nature and life seen through eyes 

 that are cleared of the beliefs and 



prejudices, religious and ethical, 

 which formed the background of 

 English literature from Chaucer to 

 Tennyson and Browning, but in 

 the course of the 19th century had 

 been in process of disintegration or 

 reconstruction. They re-interpret 

 life for themselves in the light of 

 Darwinian science. Meredith's 

 poems, Modern Love, A Reading of 

 Earth, and novels, The Egoist, 

 Richard Feverel, etc., preach a 

 stern, hijrh lesson of nature's 

 harsh, inevitable discipline, whose 

 finest flower is the intelligence of 

 man. In his style subtle analysis, 

 grotesque wit, and poetical meta- 

 phor combine and obscure by their 

 brilliance ; his verse is a blend 

 of wonderful felicities of phrase and 

 rhythm with painful obscurities, 

 incongruities, and harshness. 



Great Analysts of the Human Soul 



Thomas Hardy depicts in langu- 

 age of quiet clarity and beauty the 

 rural and urban life of " Wessex," 

 Dorsetshire and surrounding coun- 

 try, which had already found an 

 interpreter in the dialect poems of 

 William Barnes. His theme is, like 

 Meredith's, man and nature, their 

 mutual interaction, their signific- 

 ance as factors of one problem, but 

 Hardy dwells on failure rather than 

 on conflict, on the strange, ironic, 

 tragic circumstances of which men 

 and women are the helpless victims, 

 the sport of the Immortals with 

 Tess and Jude ; and the chorus to 

 his tragedy is the homely, re- 

 signed, quaintly humorous peasan- 

 try of his chosen district. 



Hardy's poems, and the Dynasts, 

 are instinct with the same spirit.the 

 same sensitive appreciation of the 

 tears in human things, be it an in- 

 dividual life or the destinies of na- 

 tions. Far from the Madding 

 Crowd, The Woodlanders, The 

 Return of the Native, Tess of the 

 D'Urbervilles, and Jude the 

 Obscure, are representative of his 

 spirit and style as a novelist. 



The influence of one or other of 

 these great analysts of man's soul 

 is traceable in "all that is most 

 " modern " in recent literature, all 

 that has endeavoured strenuously 

 to fulfil the high task of literature 

 and reveal man to himself, A. E. 

 Housman's Shropshire Lad, the 

 more realistic and dramatic part of 

 H. G. Wells's work, the novels of 

 Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, 

 the poetry of Masefield, Gibson, 

 Lascelles, Abercrombie, and others. 



But a more widely diffused 

 influence was that of Stevenson and 

 Kipling. Robert Louis Stevenson 

 poured the keen, hectic joy of a 

 short, consumptive life, full of 

 travel, adventure, experiment, and 

 achievement, into essays, Virgini- 

 bus Puerisque. poems, English and 



Scottish short stories, New Ara- 

 bian Nights, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 

 Hyde, and novels, Treasure Island, 

 Kidnapped, The Master of Ballan- 

 trae, Weir of Hermiston, all with a 

 buoyant, courageous philosophy of 

 their own and a studiously elabor- 

 ated beauty of style. 



His essays continued the tradi- 

 tion of Montaigne,Cowley, Addison, 

 Lamb, and Hazlitt ; to Ha/.litt and 

 to Sir Thomas Browne his style 

 owes a debt of influence. His novels 

 blend the historic, adventurous ro- 

 mance of Scott with a dramatic 

 curiosity as to psychological and 

 moral subtleties which is partly 

 French in origin, and with a strain 

 of the fantastic humour of Poe and 

 De Quincey. He taught the Eng- 

 lish novelists a regard for form ; 

 and even the popular novel of later 

 19th century writers, the work of 

 writers like Anthony Hope, Stan- 

 ley Weyman, and others, is superior 

 to its diffuse Victorian predecessor, 

 not in character and humour, but 

 in technique, style,and the wxrking 

 out of the story. 



In Rudyard Kipling's work the 

 spirit of modern journalism passed 

 into fiction and poetry. Descrip- 

 tive journalism as distinct from 

 the periodical essay had attained 

 to the rank of literature in the re- 

 ports of the Crimean War written 

 for the press by William Russell, 

 and of the Franco-Prussian War by 

 Russell and Archibald Forbes. 

 Trained to journalism in India, at 

 the same time a lover of the rich 

 colours and varied rhythms of the 

 school of Rossetti and Swinburne, 

 Rudyard Kipling, after some ex- 

 periments in verse and story con- 

 cerned with Anglo-Indian life, 

 came to his own in short tales of 

 Indian life proper, of the soldier of 

 the old regular army serving in 

 India, and in verses, Barrack Room 

 Ballads, on the latter theme. 

 Rudyard Kipling's Popularity 



Clever journalism and imagina- 

 tive interpretation are inextricably 

 interwoven in his work, which 

 touches its highest level in stories 

 of Indian life like Kim and The 

 Conversion of Purun Dass, animal 

 stories as The Jungle Book, sket- 

 ches of Sussex life and character, 

 poems as Recessional, Kabul Town, 

 A Ballad of East and West. For 

 good and for ill no writer has 

 enjoyed so wide a popularity since 

 Dickens. The twang of his banjo 

 is audible in much English and 

 Colonial verse ; his peculiar blend 

 of realism and romance has been 

 reproduced in the work of almost 

 every writer who has touched on 

 the life of Englishmen and others 

 on the outskirts of civilization. 



In the 'nineties of the 19th cen- 

 tury the influence of contemporary 



