English

Aristotle was born in 384 BC at Stagirus. His father Nichomachus was court physician to the Macedonian king, and from this began Aristotle’s long association with the Macedonian court, which considerably influenced his life. At the age of 17 he was sent to Athens, the intellectual centre of the world, to complete his education. He joined the Academy and studied under Plato, attending his lectures for a period of twenty years. In the later years of his association with Plato and the Academy he began to lecture on his own account, especially on the subject of rhetoric. At the death of Plato in 347, the pre-eminent ability of Aristotle would seem to have designated him to succeed to the leadership of the Academy. But his divergence from Plato’s teaching was too great to make this possible, and Plato’s nephew was chosen instead. Later, he became the tutor of his 13 year old Alexander (later world conqueror).

When Alexander succeeded to the kingship Aristotle returned to Athens, which he had not visited since the death of Plato. He found the Platonic school flourishing under Xenocrates, and Platonism the dominant philosophy of Athens. He thus set up his own school at a place called the Lyceum. When teaching at the Lyceum, Aristotle had a habit of walking about as he discoursed. It was in connection with this that his followers became known in later years as the peripatetics, meaning “to walk about.” He is said to have given two kinds of lectures: the more detailed discussions in the morning for an inner circle of advanced students, and the popular discourses in the evening for the general body of lovers of knowledge. At the sudden death of Alexander in 323 BC, the pro-Macedonian government in Athens was overthrown, and a general reaction occurred against anything Macedonian. To escape prosecution Aristotle fled to another city, Chalcis, so that, as Aristotle himself said, “The Athenians might not have another opportunity of sinning against philosophy as they had already done in the person of Socrates.” In the first year of his residence at Chalcis, in 322 BC, he died of a stomach illness.

The Poetics

Aristotle is the first scientific critic and his literary criticism is largely embodied in The Poetics.  The Poetics is a short treatise of 26 chapters, neither comprehensive nor exhaustive.  The Poetics can be divided into six parts:

1.      Chapters 1-5—introductory remarks on poetry, classification of poetry into different kinds.

2.      Chapters 6-19—discussion of Tragedy

3.      Chapters 20-22—discussion of poetic diction, style, vocabulary, etc.

4.      Chapter 23—discussion of Narrative Poetry and Tragedy

5.      Chapters 24 & 26—discussion of Epic and comparison with Tragedy

6.      Chapter 25—objections of critics against poetry and Aristotle’s reply.

John Dryden

            John Dryden (1631-1700) was a versatile and voluminous writer who left no branch of literature untouched and produced works of outstanding merit in each filed. Dr. Johnson called him, “the father of English criticism.” The only formal work of criticism that he has left behind him is his Essay on Dramatic Poesy.

            With the exception of the Essay on Dramatic Poesy, Dryden’s criticism is embodied in the innumerable prefaces, epilogues and letters of dedication which he prefixed to his poetic and dramatic works all through his long literary career. They are valuable pieces of practical criticism, for they contain extended analyses of the works which they introduce.

Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668)

            Dryden’s manifold critical gifts are fully brought out only by his Essay on Dramatic Poesy. In his address, “To the Reader” prefixed to the Essay, Dryden says that his aim was, “to vindicate the honour of our English writers, from the censure of those who unjustly prefer the French before them.” However, the real aims of Dryden are much wider. The essay is also an attempt to evolve the principles which ought to guide us in judging a play, as well as an effort to discover the rules which could help a dramatist in writing a good play. The play is also a contribution to two current controversies: (1) regarding the comparative superiority of the ancient and the moderns. Dryden demonstrates the superiority of the moderns over the ancients, as also the superiority of contemporary (Restoration) English dramatists over the dramatists of the last generation, i.e. the Elizabethans, and (2) the comparative merits and demerits of blank verse and rhyme for dramatic purposes. Dryden upholds the superiority of rhymed verse.

Its Plan

            Thus, in the main, five critical questions are handled in The Essay:

1. The relative merits of ancient and modern poets.
2. Whether the existing French school of drama is superior or inferior to the English.
3. Whether the Elizabethan dramatists were in all points superior to those of Dryden’s own time.
4. Whether plays are more perfect in proportion as they conform to the dramatic rules laid down by the ancients.
5. Whether the substitution of rhyme for blank verse in serious plays is an improvement.

Occasion

            The immediate occasion for the essay was provided by contemporary events. It so happened that in the year 1663 a Frenchman named Samuel Sorbiere visited England on some diplomatic mission and on returning to France did the undiplomatic thing of publishing an account of his Voyage in which he made some unfavourable remarks about English science and English stage. Sorbiere succeeded in provoking one reply, both on scientific and literary grounds, from the historian of the English Royal Society, Thomas Sprat. And it was not long after the incident that John Dryden, courtly poet and dramatist wrote the present Essay.

           

The Setting: Its Dramatic Nature

            There are four speakers or interlocutors and the setting is dramatic. Taking advantage of one of the most notable international relations of the day, the naval battle fought in the Channel between the British and the Dutch on June 3, 1665, Dryden imagines the four gentlemanly and witty interlocutors of his dialogue as drifting in a barge softly down the Thames. The literary discussion in which they are soon involved comes up through some chance remarks about certain extravagant poems which have recently appeared in celebration of public events.

The Four Characters: Their Views; Their Symbolic Significance

            The speaker who first develops his view at length, Crites (standing perhaps for Dryden’s brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard), expounds the extreme classical view, that the Greeks and Romans fully discovered and illustrated those reasonable and perennial rules to which the modern drama must conform. In the really minor issue between the “last age” and “the present” in England, he maintains the superiority of the “last age” in making plays. The second person to speak at length, Eugenius (perhaps Dryden’s friend Charles Sackville, Lord Buckburst), takes the negative position that the ancient poets failed badly in their illustration of the rules prescribed by their critics. The implication is that the moderns have actually best illustrated the rules. Then thirdly, Lisideius (or Sir Charles Sedley, a younger wit of the day), accepting the same premises as Crites and Eugenius, that the classical rules for the imitation of nature are indeed the fundamentals of correct dramatic creation, advances the argument that perfect realization of the rules is not to be found in the contemporary English drama, but in the French. Thus Dryden gives expression to three leading kinds of classicism through these characters, letting them talk themselves out, and it is not until this late point in the Essay that the main pivot of the argument occurs—with the entrance of Neander (the new man, Dryden himself). He upholds the superiority of the English drama over the French, and of rhyme over blank verse. The four speakers hardly agree to anything, and having reached their destination part with mutual courtesy. The readers are left to draw their own conclusions.

Wordsworth’s theory of poetry

            Wordsworth’s theory of poetry, if there is one—has to be extracted from three documents: 1)  the Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads 2) the preface to Lyrical Ballads and 3) the Appendix on poetic diction.  Wordsworth was not much of a deliberate theorist.  He was wretchedly ill-read on literary criticism as on all other subjects.  He was incapable of sustained cogitation.  He was blind to logical flaws and contradictions.

            Wordsworth holds that by the very act of writing a poet undertakes 1) to fulfill the expectations of his readers.  These expectations vary from age to age.  At times, as a result of conscious effort, it is possible for the poet to alter them.  This precisely is what he and Coleridge have attempted to do in Lyrical Ballads. 

            Lyrical Ballads attempts to bring about a revolution in the areas of both content and form.  The content of the poems in rooted in the everyday life of ordinary people. The form is a selection of the language of common social intercourse.  Wordsworth holds, and this conviction lies at the core of Wordsworthian poetic theory, that this is how it should be in the case of all true poetry.

But by just fulfilling these two conditions a piece of verse cannot become good poetry.  The Poet has to ensure that strong emotions are associated with the subjects of his poems and he can do that only through long habits of meditation.  At the same time the piece should not be artificially composed, it should be an inspired creation.  Thus poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings that take its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.  It evokes in the reader the original emotions of the poet.

            The use of metre distinguishes poetry from prose.  But beyond that Wordsworth is unable to identify any basic difference.  The objectives of verse and prose are identical; they use the very same medium; emotion and passion are the life-blood of both. 

            A poet, according to Wordsworth, is a man speaking to men.  He is very much a common man who thinks and feels like all other common men.  But he is endowed with a more than common power of imagination and articulation.  He speaks to other men and also for other men.  The language and situation of his poetry should go together.  The aim of poetry  is universal truth.  It should represent nature and man with the conviction of truth.  The poet must endeavour to give immediate pleasure to the reader by appealing to the humanity within him.  The poet’s obligation to give pleasure is an affirmation of the value and validity of human life      Wordsworth declares that genuine passion is always the ultimate source of true poetry.  In all cultures and languages classical poets worked under the influence of genuine passion generated by real life events.  Being stimulated by genuine passion their language was highly metaphorical and daringly innovative.  In succeeding ages even, when not genuinely moved, the same figurative language came to be employed.  Thus a poetic diction was produced which took the language of poetry away from the real language of men turning the poetry into life less verbiage.  At such points in history a special, conscious effort is required to take the language of poetry back to the people.  This is what Lyrical Ballads has attempted to do.

However, as Coleridge points out in Biographia Literaria, some of Wordsworth’s pieces are those which speak of uncommon experiences in a language far more subtle and sophisticated than that used by common men.  A good example is “Tintern Abbey” generally accepted as one of Wordsworth’s masterpieces.  Neither its mystic philosophy nor its highly inspired language as anything everyday about it.

Matthew Arnold

Introduction

Matthew Arnold, the Victorian poet and critic, was the first modern critic [1], and could be called the critics critic, being a champion not only of great poetry, but of literary criticism itself. The purpose of literary criticism, in his view, was to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas, and he has influenced a whole school of critics including new critics such as T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, and Allen Tate. He was the founder of the sociological school of criticism, and through his touchstone method introduced scientific objectivity to critical evaluation by providing comparison and analysis as the two primary tools of criticism.  Arnold’s evaluations of the Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats are landmarks in descriptive criticism, and as a poet-critic he occupies an eminent position in the rich galaxy of poet-critics of English literature.

T. S. Eliot praised Arnold’s objective approach to critical evaluation, particularly his tools of comparison and analysis, and Allen Tate in his essay Tension in Poetry imitates Arnold’s touchstone method to discover tension, or the proper balance between connotation and denotation, in poetry. These new critics have come a long way from the Romantic approach to poetry, and this change in attitude could be attributed to Arnold, who comes midway between the two schools.

The social role of poetry and criticism

To Arnold a critic is a social benefactor. In his view the creative artist, no matter how much of a genius, would cut a sorry figure without the critic to come to his aid. Before Arnold a literary critic cared only for the beauties and defects of works of art, but Arnold the critic chose to be the educator and guardian of public opinion and propagator of the best ideas.

Cultural and critical values seem to be synonymous for Arnold. Scott James, comparing him to Aristotle, says that where Aristotle analyses the work of art, Arnold analyses the role of the critic. The one gives us the principles which govern the making of a poem, the other the principles by which the best poems should be selected and made known. Aristotle’s critic owes allegiance to the artist, but Arnold’s critic has a duty to society.

To Arnold poetry itself was the criticism of life: The criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty, and in his seminal essay The Study of Poetry 1888) he says that poetry alone can be our sustenance and stay in an era where religious beliefs are fast losing their hold. He claims that poetry is superior to philosophy, science, and religion. Religion attaches its emotion to supposed facts, and the supposed facts are failing it, but poetry attaches its emotion to ideas and ideas are infallible. And science, in his view is incomplete without poetry. He endorses Wordsworth’s view that poetry is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science, adding What is a countenance without its expression? and calls poetry the breath and finer spirit of knowledge.

A moralist

As a critic Arnold is essentially a moralist, and has very definite ideas about what poetry should and should not be. A poetry of revolt against moral ideas, he says, is a poetry of revolt against life, and a poetry of indifference to moral ideas is a poetry of indifference to life.

Arnold even censored his own collection on moral grounds. He omitted the poem Empedocles on Etna from his volume of 1853, whereas he had included it in his collection of 1852. The reason he advances, in the Preface to his Poems of 1853 is not that the poem is too subjective, with its Hamlet-like introspection, or that it was a deviation from his classical ideals, but that the poem is too depressing in its subject matter, and would leave the reader hopeless and crushed. There is nothing in it in the way of hope or optimism, and such a poem could prove to be neither instructive nor of any delight to the reader.

Aristotle says that poetry is superior to History since it bears the stamp of high seriousness and truth. If truth and seriousness are wanting in the subject matter of a poem, so will the true poetic stamp of diction and movement be found wanting in its style and manner. Hence the two, the nobility of subject matter, and the superiority of style and manner, are proportional and cannot occur independently.
Arnold took up Aristotle’s view, asserting that true greatness in poetry is given by the truth and seriousness of its subject matter, and by the high diction and movement in its style and manner, and although indebted to Joshua Reynolds for the expression grand style, Arnold gave it a new meaning when he used it in his lecture On Translating Homer (1861):

I think it will be found that that the grand style arises in poetry when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with a severity a serious subject.

According to Arnold, Homer is the best model of a simple grand style, while Milton is the best model of severe grand style. Dante, however, is an example of both.

Even Chaucer, in Arnold’s view, in spite of his virtues such as benignity, largeness, and spontaneity, lacks seriousness. Burns too lacks sufficient seriousness, because he was hypocritical in that while he adopted a moral stance in some of his poems, in his private life he flouted morality.

Return to Classical values

Arnold believed that a modern writer should be aware that contemporary literature is built on the foundations of the past, and should contribute to the future by continuing a firm tradition. Quoting Goethe and Niebuhr in support of his view, he asserts that his age suffers from spiritual weakness because it thrives on self-interest and scientific materialism, and therefore cannot provide noble characters such as those found in Classical literature.

He urged modern poets to look to the ancients and their great characters and themes for guidance and inspiration. Classical literature, in his view, possess pathos, moral profundity and noble simplicity, while modern themes, arising from an age of spiritual weakness, are suitable for only comic and lighter kinds of poetry, and dont possess the loftiness to support epic or heroic poetry. 

Arnold turns his back on the prevailing Romantic view of poetry and seeks to revive the Classical values of objectivity, urbanity, and architectonics. He denounces the Romantics for ignoring the Classical writers for the sake of novelty, and for their allusive (Arnold uses the word suggestive) writing which defies easy comprehension.

                       period between the Middle Ages and Modern Era was studded with important landmarks.  (1) Literature, esp. poetry, changed over from the oral to the written – literature was now a matter of books and readers.  (2) With the advent of printing, anonymity was succeeded by authorship – till then a piece of writing had stood for itself; now it claimed attention as the work of a particular author.  The age of invention, of originality, of individual self-expression had begun. (3) Though French and Latin were sill popular among the nobility and the clergy, English had established itself as the literary language.  This encouraged translations, adaptations and imitations.  (4) The age of chivalry and feudalism was in its decline.  (5) Constitutional liberty has been asserted; the king was no longer the unquestioned authority.

            When Chaucer was young, England was at the height of glory. (victories at war, patriotic national poetry).  But the glory was soon to disappear.  Between 1348 and 1376 Black Death visited the country several times and half the population disappeared.  Economic troubles followed; serfdom changed to wage system.  There was social unrest and the royal house became increasingly unpopular.  The Seven Years’ War with France went disastrously, a new poll-tax was imposed in 1380 and the next year, the peasants rose in revolt which was ultimately suppressed.

            Chaucer gave little heed to these disturbing events.  He lived the inner life of a man of letters, detached from the storms of the world, studying and adapting to his own uses French and Italian poetry, and finally, in The Canterbury Tales, making his mature art the obedient instrument of his native genius.  His contemporary Langland was very different from him in spirit – Langland’s was the voice of the poor, the voice of revolution, and he was a chastiser of the vices of his age.  Gower too denounced the follies of his contemporaries though not as sharply as Langland.

            Another voice of spiritual protest in this age was that of John Wyclif, the leader of the Lollard Movement that prophesied the Reformation.  Supported by his patron, John of Gaunt, Wycliff attacked the corrupt clergy in strong persuasive English prose that breathed a fervent moral and religious spirit.  Untiringly he led a crusade against papal demands and for church reform.  Wyclifism was finally suppressed and this in turn extinguished not only religious freedom but also all intellectual life at the University until the Renaissance.

            The literary outburst in the 14^th century produced one of the greatest of all English poets—Geoffrey Chaucer—and several lesser ones, the result of which was to fix the English language.  In spite of their antiquity Chaucer’s works are still read with the sense that their vocabulary and the style are Modern English.

EARLY TUDOR POETRY

            The reign of Henry VIII was rocked by momentous events in the political, religious and domestic spheres.  Partly owing to the national preoccupation with the national affairs, partly due to the reluctance of noble men to come forward as professed authors, most courtly verse written during Henry VIII’s time was published only after his death.

            In 1557 Richard Tottel published Songs and Sonnets, written by the right honourable Lord Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and others.  Surrey, who was then no more, was singled out for mention because of his exalted rank.  The other important contributors of the Tottel’s Miscellany were Sir Thomas Wyatt, Nicholas Grimald, and Lord Thomas Vaux.

            Sir Thomas Wyatt, English nobleman and diplomat, was an important literary figure of 16^th century England.  He is believed to have come under the spell of Anne Boleyn for a time, for which he won the displeasure of the king later, though temporarily.  Though, like Surrey, Wyatt had been considerably influenced by foreign masters, he was an enthusiastic reader of Chaucer and borrowed many stylistic and formal features from him.

            As was fashionable in Henry VIII’s Court, Wyatt wrote lyrics that could be set to music.  One such song beginning “A Robyn / Joly Robyn” was immortalized by the fool in Twelfth Night.  Some of Wyatt’s lyrics show French influence, especially his rondeaux, but it cannot be clearly distinguished from his Italian influence.  It was as a student of Petrarch, Serafino, Alamanni and Aretino that Wyatt opened a new era in English poetry and introduced the sonnet, the epigram and the terza rima to his fellow poets.

            Thoughout of a total 31, 20 of his sonnets have been traced to Italian originals (mainly Petrarch), Wyatt was no slavish follower of his master.  In the sestet he deviates from the Petrarchan rhyme scheme and rhymes cdd cee.  Thus he introduces a final couplet to which the Elizabethan sonnet has clung in all its variations.  Wyatt’s sonnets exhibited a robust and defiant spirit and adapted Petrarchan lines to his own English circumstances.

            Wyatt showed greater mastery over a simpler verse form, ottawa rima, in which most of his epigrams are written, in which he borrows chiefly from Serafino.

            Wyatt also wrote 3 satires, one of which he dedicated to Sir Francis Brian and the other two to John Poynz.  These are written in terza rima, the metre used by Alamanni in his Satires.

            The moral fervour of the Satires turns to the pleading of a penitent heart in the Penitential Psalms, of which Aretino’s Psalms are the source.

            In his verse Wyatt is present throughout as a man of affairs and a moralist.  His interests were not insular but European and he brought English poetry into the great tradition of Greece and Rome, of Italy, France and Spain.

            Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey mourned Wyatt’s death in a fine elegy.  Like Wyatt he seems to have had a mistress—“Geraldine”.  In career and fortune both poets were akin to each other.

            As a lyricist Surrey surpasses Wyatt in his sensitivity to natural beauty and his instinct for melodious rhythm.  Though his direct borrowings from Italian are fewer than Wyatt’s, he was more deeply affected by the tearful sentimentality of the Petrarchan school.  But in technique Surrey broke away from the Italian models.  He introduced the Elizabethan model with 3 quatrains and a couplet, thus forsaking the structural balance and intricate rhyme-scheme of the original.  Though Surrey’s sonnets had a stateliness of their own, it was only in Shakespeare’s hands that the English sonnet achieved full grace and charm.

            Another of Surrey’s favourite metres was an Alexandrine (12 syllabled line) followed by a “fourteener”, called a ‘Poulter’s measure’.  This was quite popular in Surrey’s time but died out in later ages.

            In his translation of Aeneid, Surrey abandoned rhyme altogether and stumbled inadvertently upon a revolutionary metre – the blank verse.  This translation was first published by John Day.  Though in his translation Surrey borrowed freely from Gawain Douglas’s earlier rhymed version, his translation had an individual stamp and a remarkable quality.  Surrey’s innate sense of rhythm and sensibility to suffering equipped him to interpret Virgil.

            It is interesting to note that in Tottel’s Miscellany itself there are 2 short blank-verse translations by another hand – Nicholas Grimald.  But Grimald’s blank verse lacks the sweetness of Surrey’s and the constant alliteration is monotonous, but there is skilful use of run on lines.

            A Mirror for Magistrates is one of the important books of the early Tudor period.  It was a work planned by George Ferrers and William Baldwin. In it various men and women, most of them drawn from English history, recount their down fall in verse.  It was begun as a continuation of Lydgate’s The Falls of Princes.  Apart from Ferrers and Baldwin, Thomas Churchyard and Thomas Sackville were also associated with the writing of this work.  Sackville wrote in rhyme–royal the Induction to this work and contributed 2 poems including ‘The Complaint of Buckingham’.  As a poet Sackville had vision, instinct and a true mastery over his craft; and in essence, he belonged to the Renaissance.  In the field of drama he collaborated with Norton in writing Gorboduc.  Thereafter he retired from literary activity and Spenser lamented the silence of his learned Muse”.

            Edmund Spenser was the greatest literary influence of this period.  His major works are The Shepheardes Calender, The Faerie Queene, Dapnaida, an Elegy, Astrophel, a Pastoral Elegy, Amoretti, Epithalamion, Four Hymns and Prothalamion.

            In The Shepheardes Calender, the author, veiling himself under the modest title of ‘Immerito,’ steps aside for ‘E.K.’ (believed to be Edward Kirke) who introduces the poem to Gabriel Harvey.  The work is dedicated to Sidney and it consists of 12 eclogues, one for every month of the year.  They take the form of dialogues among shepherds, except the first and last, which are complaints by Colin Clout, who is Spenser  himself.  The eclogues are modelled on those by Theocritus, Virgil, Mantuan and Marot.

            In a shorter poem, Mother Hubbard’s Tale, Spenser’s discipleship to Chaucer is evident.  Here he turns a beast-fable to political and social satire.  The bare, forthright diction and the strong, rapid swing of the decasyllabic couplet have the Chaucerian stamp.

            Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Againe is an allegorical pastoral dedicated to Walter Ralegh.  The poem ends with a tribute to Colin’s mistress Rosalind.

            The greatest work of Spenser is The Faerie Queene, the 1^st 3 books of which were published in 1590 and the next 3 in 1596.  The general scheme of the work is elaborated on in the author’s introductory letter to Walter Ralegh.  By The Faerie Queene the poet signifies glory in the abstract and Elizabeth I in particular, who also figures under the names Britomart, Belphoebe, Mercilla and Gloriana.  Twelve of her knights – examples of twelve virtues – each undertake an adventure.  Prince Arthur, symbolising ‘magnificence’ has a vision of the Faerie Queene, and determined to seek her out, is brought into the adventures of the Knights.  The book however does not present Arthur but starts at once with the adventures of the knights.

They are:

I.             The adventures of the Redcrosse Knight of Holiness (The Anglican Church);

II.            The adventures of Sir Guyon, the Knight of temperance;

III.           The legend of chastity, exemplified by Britomart and Beplhoebe;

IV.           The legend of Triamond and Campbell exemplifying Friendship;

V.            The adventures of Artegall, the Knight of Justice;

VI.           The adventures of Sir Calidore, exemplifying Courtesy.

There is also a fragment on Mutabilitie, which was to have formed the 7^th book.  The book is modelled to some extent on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.  The work is written in the Spenserian stanza.

            The Faerie Queene is an allegory on multiple levels.  It is the moral allegory of Glory, the political one of Queen Elizabeth and the religious allegory of the Anglican Church.  There is also a historical level and at times Arthur is to be identified with Leicester, Artegall with Lord Grey of Wilton and Duessa with Mary, Queen of Scots.  In fact Spenser’s genius and imagination were too fertile to move at ease within the limits of allegory.  He had a vast framework to fill, and he crowded into it the most diverse materials.

            But, even though there is no structural unity, there is an inner spiritual one.  It is the epic of the militant spiritual life, ever battling with evil in its many forms, unwearied in the quest for Honour.  However, in spite of his strict moral sense, Spenser had a keen sensibility for Beauty which is very much part of his work.

            Perfectly matching the rich complexity of The Faerie Queene is the nine – lined Spenserian stanza ending with the Alexandrine and rhyming ababbcbcc.

            The Faerie Queene does indeed foretell a golden age of English literature, being a poetic masterpiece worthy to be set beside the plays of Shakespeare, the prose of the Authorized Version and the prophetic vision of the Baconian philosophy.

JOURNALISM AND THE ESSAY (18^th Century)

            The essay (meaning, according to Montaigne, ‘an attempt’) originated as a repository of casual ideas on men and matters.  To Montaigne it was more a means of thinking aloud, than a literary type.  In England it was cultivated by Bacon and the humanists.  But as literature became more formalized and academic in the latter half of the 17^th century, its practice gradually passed out of fashion.  Later, a combination of circumstances peculiar to England gave a group of humanists the opportunity of creating it anew.  Their work appeared in a detached, fragmentary form like the essays of Montaigne, Bacon or Cowley.  But in method and scope it was an achievement of marked originality, and exercised a profound influence of the prose style, and indeed on the civilization of their epoch.

            In origin, the 18^th century Addisonian essay had little in common with the Renaissance essay, but belongs to the history of the daily press.  Since the beginning of the Civil War, England had been the home of diurnals and news-sheets.  But, thanks to the Licensing Act of 1662, the 17^th century produced no serious attempts at journalism.  From the time of William’s accession, news–sheets and Mercuries began to multiply.  In 1690 John Dunton hit on the ingenious idea of publishing the Athenian Gazette, afterwards changed to the Athenian Mercury, a periodical to answer questions; in 1702 the Daily Courant began its long Career till 1735; and in 1704, Daniel Defoe started the publication of The Review.

DANIEL DEFOE

            As a pamphleteer Defoe showed great grasp of details and an intuitive foreknowledge of events that characterize great journalists and social writers.  Towards the end of the 17^th century he published An Essay Upon Projects, proposing various social and economic improvements in England, as well as displaying an insight into the manners and morals of his contemporaries—one of the chief qualifications of an essayist.  In his writings Defoe kept harking upon politics and public controversy.  Though Defoe’s prose is vigorous, fluent and homely, he had not cultivated the subtle persuasiveness of style without which the public does not care to read about its own manners and mannerisms.  The same is true of his Review.  This remarkable venture into journalism is an admirable attempt to estimate the forces of international politics and to weigh the merits of commercial and ecclesiastical questions at home.  But when he turned to the culture and conduct of his age, he created nothing great.  The Review is by no means Defoe’s only contribution to the progress of social journalism.  Some ten years later he was to return to the investigation of city morals and manners, and was then to find highly developed organs of expression and a large appreciative public of readers.

NOVELISTS OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

            Though Fielding established the ‘dramatic’ structure of the novel in Tom Jones, it was only in mid–19^th century that the novelists began a deeper reading of life that marked the transition into the modern.  Jane Austen adopted Fielding’s dramatic structure and comic treatment, and after her first attempts at fiction, achieved a high form of intellectual realism.  Scott too adopted Fielding’s dramatic scheme, though not his intellectual interpretation.  Scott simply enjoyed life and portrayed without criticism its picturesqueness, humours and idiosyncrasies.

            Maria Edgeworth’s first stories might be grouped with the didactic fiction of an earlier age.  Her children’s stories are richer in human interest than any other productions of this school.  She was also a novelist of local colour, especially in her Irish novels.  Her first long story Castle Rackrent has been a major influence on later novelists.  Two later Irish novels The Absentee and Ormond combined the dramatic plot of the novel of manners with the rich comedy of national characteristics.  The success of these Irish novels, as declared in the general preface to the Waverley novels, induced Scott to do for his country what Miss. Edgeworth had achieved for Ireland.  Belinda, the first of Edgeworth’s novels of fashionable life, is a good example of her didactic method.  Belinda is the ideal of womanhood and feminine good sense; the novel is a general statement of the novelist’s views on women’s sphere and duties.  In the Tales of Fashionable Life, every story illustrates a clear-cut precept.  Everything is clearly defined, to every person is allotted a definite portion of goodness and badness.  Edgeworth was a gifted novelist with a fine sense of humour but was handicapped by the rigid framework prescribed by her pedagogic mission.

            Jane Austen was the daughter of a clergyman and was educated at home.  Her worldly experience was limited and as a novelist of manners she kept within rigid boundaries.  But as a novelist of character she ranged widely though she rarely penetrated below the prose world of comedy.  Jane Austen’s humour has been compared to that of Shakespeare, but she had none of his poetry and in her there are only faint glimpses of the deeper pathos and tragedy of life.

            Austen’s novels are intellectual but not very philosophic.  She stood aloof from the story, never commented on the action or the characters directly, always preferring subtle hints to blatant moralizing.  Austen’s first novel Sense and Sensibility, at first called ‘Elinor and Marianne’, displays her impatience with sentimentality.  The protagonists provide a symmetrical contrast – Elinor is commonsense and self-control, Marianne luxuriates in romantic emotion.  As expected, the former has little to complain but the latter meets with nothing but trouble.  What is unexpected is Marianne’s reformation – though she once believed that no one can fall in love twice, after being jilted once she marries sensibly and unromantically, a middle-aged gentleman, who like her had undergone the chastening experience of a prior attachment.

            Pride and Prejudice, originally entitled ‘First Impressions’, is Austen’s masterpiece.  It tells how a young lady (Elizabeth) of thoughtful and critical disposition encounters the haughtiness of a gentleman (Darcy) who finally falls in love with her.  Incidents occur which deepen her prejudice and intensify his pride, but finally disillusionment sets in, true character is revealed, and the lovers are united.  The unbalanced father Mr. Bennett, his silly wife, the absurd cleric Mr. Collins and the magnificent snob Catherine de Bourgh furnish the story with delicious comedy.

            Mansfield Park elaborates the same kind of comparisons and contrasts in the complete history of the different marriage unions of three sisters.  The eldest, Fanny Price is one of the most memorable of Austen’s characters with her strength and earnestness.  Emma, in the novel of the same name, too was one of Austen’s favourites—a pretty, wilful young lady whose rage for match-making and aptitude for mistakes get herself and her friends into endless scrapes, for which she had to suffer.  These two novels make a comprehensive and mature study of the domestic and social scenes which Austen painted with the dual colours of comedy and pathos.

            Northanger Abbey, a satire on the Radcliffian school of Gothic Romance, is the story of a young girl whose mind has been fed on the groans and tears of The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian.  The narrative moves with delicate humour through the history of her entry into life and the passing away of her illusions about untold horrors and crimes at an abbey where she stays for a while.

            Persuasion was published along with Northanger Abbey and is a tender love story touched by pathos.  Ann Eliot parts from her lover but after several years, misunderstandings are cleared and the old love reasserted.  The novel differs from the rest in one point – the climax of the story is a scene in which reconciliation is brought about in a room full of people without a word passing between the long-estranged lovers.  In its delicate intensity, this chapter reaches the supreme perfection of high comedy and reveal a power which is visible in no other of Austen’s works.

MODERNIST FICTION

Early modernist literature belongs to a separate phase as distinct from what followed as from what preceded it.  This was the age of James, Wilde and Yeats.  Their writing was characterized by formal compression, radical criticism of society and a comprehensive address to tradition. 

Thomas Hardy, although a very great novelist, had little to do with avant-garde movements, and was content to use traditional genres without obvious change.  But his novels make at least two fresh departures.  First, they set rural values against newer developments, chronicling changes with an evident sympathy for the passing order.  They express a deep sense of loss set in a tragic mode to a quite un-Victorian extent.  Nature in them is a relentlessly determining order, which is trifled with at the risk of man’s peril.

In Tess, for instance, Hardy offers a realization of rural Wessex (Dorset), but without the moral analysis of character.  His people have few choices in their helpless struggles with a tragic destiny.  Nature, here, is a powerful presence manifested by the strong physicality of fertile meadows and summer fogs as well as by the minutely detailed seasonal round of labours like milking.  Hardy’s imagination, as illustrated in Tess, is strongly visual.

Hardy’s novels are poetic—and this is his second departure from the Victorian norm—to the extent that they incorporate description into their thematic structures.  Their details are seldom merely realistic, but perform other functions simultaneously.  Hardy’s method—simultaneity through concentration—in which everything seems to be multiply connected and contribute at the same time to a single aesthetic effect, was to become highly characteristic of modernism.

In turning to the expatriate American Henry James, we approach a commanding figure capable of anticipating much of modernist art.  In the course of a long and fascinating development, he mastered the portrayal of a vast gallery of characters.  He learned to subdue plot to a secret design and became adept at realizing place—an element in his work that miraculously grew more convincing.  It depended, like all his masterly description, on the precise observation of a visual artist.  James’s style is effortless, lucid, exact and inexhaustibly varied.  Its concentrated simultaneity makes it unquestionably modernist, yet it may also be considered a lyric transformation.

Mimetic efforts of syntax, such as Thackeray occasionally hazarded and Meredith strained for, are unparalleled in James.  From The Spoils of Poynton onwards, he moulds his syntax so that what it signifies grammatically is expressed also by its shape. [To take a simpler instance, in “Everything in Poynton was in the style of Poynton,” repetition simulates formally the extreme uniformity being described semantically.]  Much of the pleasure of James’s style arises from the aptness of this extraordinary accompaniment of meaning.  Yet, mimetic syntax counts as only one device.  In imagery, texture and proportion, the style is almost equally formidable.

Later in his career James radically altered his fictive method in such a way as to exclude authorial intervention.  In fact he introduced two new methods with common results.  One is the celebrated method of his greatest novels—The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl—where he presents the entire action from the point of view of characters, especially a sympathetic main character, whose sensibilities filter and colour it.  The second method James introduced, at first in The Other House and The Awkward Age, was the dramatic.  This gave dialogue in full but no further narrator or author comment.  Both methods had the momentous effect of eliminating the authorial role.  This role had been growing more difficult and burdensome as psychoanalysis began to complicate the understanding of motive, and as gaps widened between official morality and aesthetic interests.  Both methods, however, increased the appearance at least of ambiguity.  James’s tones of life, however easily they may escape moral categorization, remain intensely moral.  But when the reliability of the narrator is suspect, as in The Turn of the Screw, for example, intractable ambiguity can result.

Ambiguity also arises in James’s fiction from its extreme selectivity.  He selects ‘inwardness’ rather than external detail, especially in his later novels.  By a device learnt from Hawthorne, he avoids telling his story directly.  Instead, he suggests it, and it is the reader’s task to piece together a story that squares with the characters’ states of consciousness.  The gradual apprehension of it is the sense of life itself.  James never altogether abandons omniscient narration but he avoids using it to make things unnaturally easy for readers.