Overview of English Literature (Part-1)

Age of Chaucer

Introduction:

For a profound and comprehensive study of an author’s literary work is required, among other things, a thorough understanding of the age which produced and nurtured him. Without acquaintance with the historical context our evaluation and apprehension of literature is bound to be lop-sided, if not altogether warped and garbled. Every man is a child of his age. He is influenced by it though, if he is a great man, he may influence it also. A great writer like Shakespeare or Chaucer is generally said to be “not of an age, but of all ages.” But, in spite of his universal appeal, the fact remains that even he could not have escaped “the spirit of the age” in which he lived and moved and had his being.

So, for understanding him and his works in their fullness it is imperative to familiarize ourselves with the influential currents of thought and feeling and sensibility (not to speak of the socio-politico-economic conditions) obtaining in the times in which he flourished. Probably the Reverse of it is also true: we may acquire some understanding of these tendencies and currents, the ethos of the age, through the writer himself. Emphasizing this point, W. H. Hudson says: “Every man belongs to his race and age; no matter how marked his personality, the spirit of his race and age finds expression through him” The same critic cogently expresses the relationship between history and literature. “Ordinary English history’ he says, “is our nation’s biography, its literature is its autobiography; in the’one we read the story of its actions and practical achievements; in the other the story df its intellectual and moral development.” Though Chaucer transcends the limits of his generation and creates something which is of interest to the future generation too, yet he represents much of what his age stands for. And therein lies his greatness.

Chaucer’s Age-Both Medieval and Modern:

Chaucer’s age-like most historical ages-was an age of transition. This transition implies a shift from the medieval to the modern times, the emergence of the English nation from the “dark ages” to the age of enlightenment. Though some elements associated with modernity were coming into prominence,-yet mostly and essentially the age was medieval-unscientific, superstitious, chivalrous, religious-minded, and “backward” in most respects. The fourteenth century, as J. M. Manly puts it in The Cambridge History of English Literature, was “a dark epoch fn the history of England“. However, the silver lining of modernity did”succeed in piercing, here and there, the thick darkness of ignorance and superstition. In fact, the age of Chaucer was not stagnant: it was inching its way steadily and surely to the dawn of the Renaissance and the Reformation, which were yet a couple of centuries ahead. We cannot agree with Kitteredge who calls Chaucer’s age “a singularly modern time”. For that matter, not to speak of the fourteenth, even the eighteenth century was not “modern” in numerous respects. What we notice in the fourteenth century is the start of the movement towards the modern times, and not the accomplishment of that movement, which was going to be a march of marathon nature. Robert Dudely French observes: “It was an age of restlessness, amid the ferment “of new life, that Chaucer lived and wrote. Old things and new appear side by side upon his pages, and in his poetry we can study the essential spirit, both of the age that was passing and of the age that was to come.” What are these “old things and new:’ and what made the age restless? The answer will be provided if we discuss the chief events and features of the age.

“The Hundred Years’ War”:

The period between 1337 and 1453 is marked by a long succession of skirmishes between France and England, which are collectively known as the “Hundred Years War”. Under the able and warlike guidance of King Edward III (1327-1377) England won a number of glorious victories, particularly at Crecy, Poietiers, and Agincourt. The French might crumbled and Edward was once acknowledged even the king of France. But later, after his demise and with the succession of the incompetent Richard II, the English might waned and the French were able to secure tangible gains. The war influenced fie English character in the following two ways:

(i)         the fostering of nationalistic sentiment; and

(ii)        the demolition of some social barriers between different classes of society.

It was obviously natural for the conflict to have engendered among the English a strong feeling of national solidarity and patriotic fervour. But, as Compton-Rickett reminds us, “the fight is memorable not merely for stimulating the pride of English men.” It is important, too, for the second reason given above. It was not the aristocracy alone which secured the victory for England. The aristocracy was vitally supported by the lowly archers whose feats with the bow were a force to reckon with. Froissart, the French chronicler, referring to the English archers says: “They, let fly their arrows so wholly together and so thick that it seemed snow”. The recognition of the services of the humble archers brought in a note of democratization in the country, and the age-old “iron curtain” between the nobility and the proletariat developed a few chinks. This was an advance from medievalism to modernism.

The Age of Chivalry:

Nevertheless, the dawn of the modern era was yet far away. Compton-Rickett observes:”Chaucer’s England is ‘Still characteristically medieval, and nowhere is the conservative feeling more strongly marked than in the persistence of chivalry. This strange amalgam of love, war, and religion so far from exhibiting any signs of decay, reached perhaps its fullest development at this time. More than two centuries were to elapse before it was finally killed-by the satirical pen of Cervantes.” The Knight in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is typical of his kind. Even the tale he narrates concerns the adventures of two true knights-Arcite and Palamon.

The Black Death, Peasants’ Revolt, and Labour Unrest:

In the age of Chaucer most people were victims of poverty, squalor, and pestilence. Even well-educated nobles eyed soap with suspicion, and learned physicians often forbade bathing as harmful for health! That is why England was often visited by epidemics, especially plague. The severest attack of this dread epidemic came in 1348. It was called “the Black Death” because black, knotty boils appeared on the bodies of the hopeless victims. It is estimated that about a million human beings were swept away by this epidemic. That roughly makes one-third of the total population of England at that time.

One immediate consequence of this pestilence was the acute shortage of working hands. The socio-economic system of England lay hopelessly paralysed. Labourers and villains who happened to survive started demanding much higher wages. But neither their employers nor the king nor Parliament was ready to meet these demands. A number of severe regulations were passed asking workers to work at the old rates of payment. This occasioned a great deal of resentment which culminated in the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 duringthe reign of Richard II. The peasants groaning under the weight of injustice and undue official severity were led to London by the Kentish priest John Ball. He preached the dignity of labour and asked the nobles:

When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?

The king, overawed by the mass of peasantry armed with such weapons as hatchets, spades, and pitchforks, promised reform but later shelved his promise. The “Peasants’ Revolt” is, according to Compton-Rickett, “a dim foreshadowing of those industrial troubles that lay in the distant future.” Chaucer in his Nun’s Priest’s Tale refers in the following lines to Jack Straw who with Wat Tylar raised the banner of revolt:

Certes, he Jakke Straw and his meyne
Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille,
When that they wolden any Flemyng kille
As thilke day was mad upon the fox.

R. K. Root thus sums up the significance of this uprising: “This revolt, suppressed by the courage and good judgment of the boy King, Richard II, though barren of any direct and immediate result, exerted a lasting influence on the temper of the lower classes, fostering in them a spirit of independence which made them no longer a negligible quantity in the life of the nation”. This was another line of progress towards modernism.

The Church:

In the age of Chaucer, the Church became a hotbed of profligacy, corruption, and materialism. The overlord of the Church, namely, the Pope of Rome, himself had ambitions and aptitudes otherthan spiritual. W. H. Hudson maintains in this connection: “Of spiritual zeal and energy very little was now left in the country. The greater prelates heaped up wealth, and lived in a godless and worldly way; the rank and file of the clergy were ignorant and careless; the mendicant friars were notorious for their greed and profligacy.” John Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer, whom he calls “moral Gower” (on account of his didactic tendency) thus pictures the condition of the Church in his Prologue to Confessio Amantis:

Lo, thus ye-broke is cristes Folde:
Whereof the flock without guide
Devoured is on every side,
In lacks of hem that been urrware In chepherdes, which her wit beware
Upon the world in other halve.

Another contemporary has to say this about the priests  “Our priests are now become blind, dark and beclouded. There is neither shaven crown on their head, nor modesty in their words, nor temperance in their food, nor even chastity in their deeds.” If this was the condition of the ecclesiasts, we can easily imagine that of the laity. Well does Chaucer say in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales: “If gold rust, what shall iron do?” Chaucer himself was indifferent to any reform, but his character-sketches of the ecclesiastical figures in The Canterbury Tales leave no uncertainty regarding the corruption which had crept into the ecclesiastical rank and file. The round-bellied epicurean monk, the merry and devil-may-care friar, and the unscrupulous pardoner are fairly typical of his age.

This widespread and deep-rooted corruption had already begun to provoke the attention of some reformists the most prominent of whom was John Wyclif (13207-84) who has been called “the morning star of the Reformation.” He started what is called the Lollards’s Movement. His aim was to eradicate the evil and corruption which had become a part and parcel of the Church. He sent his “poor priests” to all parts of the country for spreading his message of simplicity, purity, and austerity. His self-appointed task was to take Christianity back to its original purity and spirituality. He exhorted people not to have anything to do with the corrupt ministers of the Pope and to have faith only in the Word of God as enshrined in the Bible, To make the teaching of the Bible accessible to the common masses he with the help of some of his disciples translated the Bible from Latin into the native tongue. He also wrote a number of tracts embodying his teaching. His translation of the Bible was, in the words of W. H. Hudson, “the first translation of the scriptures into any modern vernacular tongue.” That Chaucer was sympathetic to the Lollards’ Movement is evident from the element of idealization which characterizes his portrait of the “Poor Parson” in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. The movement launched by Wyclif and his followers in the age of Chaucer was an adumbration of the Reformation which was to come in the sixteenth century to wean England from the papal influence.

Literary and Intellectual Tendencies:

Latin and French were the dominant languages in fourteenth-century England. However, in the later half of the century English came to its own, thanks to the sterling work done by Chaucer and some others like Langland, Gower, and Waclif who wrote in English and wrote well. The English language itself was in a fluid state of being, and was divided into a number of dialects. The Universities of Cambridge and Oxford employed Latin as the medium of instruction. Latin was also the language of the fashionable who cultivated it as a social necessity. We recall here Chaucer’s Summoner who “wolde speke no word but Latyn” after having drunk “well”! The contribution of Chaucer towards the standardization and popularization of the English language cannot be over-estimated. As regards his contribution to English poetry, he has well been characterised as the father of English poetry. No doubt there were other poets contemporaneous with him Langland, Gower, and a few more, but Chaucer is as head and shoulders among them as Shakespeare is among the Elizabethan dramatists. He stands like a majestic oak in a shrubbery. The English prose, too, was coming to itself. Mandeville’s travelogues and Wyclif s reformative pamphlets give one a feeling that the English prose was on its way to standardization and popular acclamation. As E. Albert puts it, “Earlier specimens have been experimental or purely imitative; how, in the works of Mandeville and MaJo/y, we have prose that is both original and individual The English prose is now ripe for a prose style.”

In another way, too, the age of Chaucer stands between the medieval and the modern life. There was in this age some sort of a minor Renaissance. The dawn of the real Renaissance in England was yet about two centuries ahead, yet in the age of Chaucer there are signs of growing influence of the ancients on native literature. Chaucer1 own poetry was influenced by the Italian writer Boccaccio (1313-75) and to a lesser extent, Petrarch (1304-74). The frameworks of Boccaccio’s Decameron and of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales are almost similar. However, it is somewhat doubtful if Chaucer had read the Italian writer. It was through the work of the two above-named Italian writers that humanism made its way into-English intellectual culture. Well does Compton-Rickett observe: “Chaucer’s world is medieval; but beneath his medievalism the leaven of the Renaissance is already at work.”

Chaucer as the represent/chronicler of the society of his time

Introduction:

Well does Compton-Rickett observe: “Chaucer symbolises, as no other writer does, the Middle Ages. He stands in much the same relation to the life of his time as Pope does to the earlier phases of the eighteenth century, and Tennyson to the Victorian era; and his place in English literature is even more important than theirs….”

Now what is the character of the relation which Pope and Tennyson have with their respective ages? It is a truism of literary criticism that of all writers these two are the perfect exponents and representatives of their respective ages. Their importance is twofold:

(i)         Their views and “philosophy of life” are, more or less, characteristic of their respective ages.

(ii)        Their works build up a picture of their contemporary life.

These two points are more tenable in the case of Chaucer than either Pope or Tennyson.

Pope:                                                 

So far as religious belief is concerned, Pope was not a representative of his age. He was a Roman Catholic whereas the majority of Englishmen were Protestants, with a fair sprinkling of Puritans among them. However, Pope never asserts his religion anywhere in his work. His compositions among themselves build up a fairly authentic picture of the social, literary, and intellectual life of the early eighteenth century which he dominated so effectively. His chief works, namely, The Essay on Criticism, The Essay on Man, The Rape of the Lock, and The Dunciad are imbued with the spirit of the age. The Essay on Criticism is a body of critical principles borrowed from Horace and Boileau, which were recognized as infallible in his age, set forth in memorable verse. The Essay on Man is, likewise, an attempt to present the philosophical and intellectual principles of the times. Much of what Pope gives is borrowed from others, which makes his work all the more representative of the age. In The Rape of the Locfche satirically portrays the frivolous pursuits and affected life of the upper-class ladies of his age in the person and activities of Belinda. As a critic says, “the artificial tone of the age, the frivolous aspect of femininty is nowhere more exquisitely pictured than in The Rape of the Lock.”

Apart from Pope’s indulgence in personalities, The Dunciad, as John Butt emphasizes, is a satire on the falling standards of literature. It pictures how the literary scene in the age of Pope was crowded with hacks who were denizens of the ill-famed Grub Street.

Tennyson:

Lord Tennyson was as representative of the early Victorian era as Pope was of the early eighteenth century. It stands to reason (Compton-Rickett perhaps assumes it does not) whether Tennyson as a poet was greater than Browning and Matthew Arnold who were his well-known contemporaries. Modern critical opinion is inclined to place Browning and even Arnold above Tennyson. But whether or not Tennyson was greater than Browning and Arnold, it is indisputable that he was much more representative of his age than they. Let us quote a critic: “It is doubtful whether any other writer of that century [the nineteenth] has reflected so clearly and broadly in his verse or prose the characteristics of that period. The dreams and aspirations, the conflicts and disappointments, the aesthetic ideals and scientific discoveries, its doubts in religion and its dogmatism in private life, its social enthusiasm and zeal for education, its curious learning and its ethical earnestness, its enthusiasm for peace and commerce and its ardour for military conquests and imperialism-may all be found mirrored in Tennyson’s poetry.” Let us consider some of his major works as regards their representative value. In Locksley Hall of 1842 Tennyson effectively presents the optimistic belief of the age in the idea of progress and the potentiality of science in ushering in a brilliant future. In The Palace of Art he concerns himself with the burning question of the day whether art was for the sake of art or life. He rejected the philosophy of new aestheticism which glorified the worship of beauty at the cost of even morality. As for Maud, it gives, as a critic observes, “a dramatic rendering of the revolt of a cultured mind against the hypocrisy and corruption of a society degraded by the worship of Mammon”. In his Idylls of the King, as Sir Ifor Evans observes, “Tennyson has reduced the plan of the Arthurian stories to the necessities of Victorian morality.” InMemoriam, which is perhaps Tennyson’s noblest work, had for its overt purpose the lamentation of the early demise of his dear friend, Arthur Hailam; but there is more of Tennyson’s age than Hailam in the poem. As a poetic statement of the religious doubts of the time it exercised a powerful hold over Tennyson’s generation. In The Princess he associated himself with the suffragist movement of his time and made a plea for the education and better placement of women in society. All this shows, to quote G. H. Mair that “Tennyson represents more fully than any other poet this essential spirit of the age.”

Chaucer’s Importance:

What Pope and Tennyson were to do for their respective ages, Chaucer did for his own. Chaucer hated insularism. All his life he was in the thick of men and affairs. He lived in no ivory tower of his own. He saw much of life. He was well acquainted with all classes and conditions of men. He also travelled abroad. All this trained him for “a poet of man” as he appeared eventually in The Canterbury Tales. His earlier works are too bookish being modelled upon Italian and French works; but in The CanlerburyTales he fixed up the spirit of his age for future generations to observe and appreciate. He was as truly the unofficial chronicler of England in the fourteenth century as Froissart was the official French chronicler of the military events of the same time. Other poets of the same age reveal it in a few of its many aspects. It is the singular achievement of Chaucer that he captures his age almost in its totality, more effectively than even Pope and Tennyson did theirs. Comparing him with his contemporaries Legouis remarks:

“All the writers of this time reveal some aspect of contemporary life and of prevailing feeling and thought. The author of Pearl shows us the mysticism of refined minds, Langland the anger which was threatening the abuse of governments and the vices of the clergy, Wyclif the ardour for religious reform which already might amount to Protestantism, Gower the fear aroused in the wealthier class by the Peasant Rising. Barbour the break between the literature of Scotland and of England and the advent of patriotic Scottish poetry. Each had his own plan, his dominant and. on the whole, narrow passion, a character which was local and of his time         His [Chaucer’s] work reflects his century not in fragments, but completely.”

Two Limitations:

Chaucer’s work has almost a documentary value for whoever desires to reconstruct the actual life of fourteenth-century England. But there are two major “limitations” to Chaucer’s work as a delineator ofthe contemporary life and manners:

(I)        Chaucer is almost silent about the very stirring and historic events of his age such as:

(a)        The Anglo-French conflicts commonly known collectively as the Hundred Years War, which began in 1338.

(b)        The Black Death or the terrible plague of 1348-49.

(c)        The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

(d)        The Lollards’ Movement started by John Wyclif in 1377 for the reformation ofthe Church.

(e)        The struggle ofthe House of Lancaster against Richard II ending in his deposition and succession by Henry IV in 1399.

Chaucer does of course casually referto someofthese events, but there is no full-length treatment of any of them. The Peasants’ Revolt is referred to in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. The battles of Crecy and Poietiers are glanced at elsewhere. The allusion to the Black Death comes in Chaucer’s character-sketch ofthe Doctor of Physic in the Prologue to The Canterbwy Tales:

He kepte that he wan in pestilence.

There is then a latent reference to Lollardism in the delineation ofthe “Poor Parson” who like a Lollard (one of Wyclif s disciples) believed in simple living and high thinking. But all these references are inexpressive, being almost casual. All this makes William Vaughan Moody assert: “The peasant rebellion and the Lollard agitation give us glimpses of an England which Chaucer, in spite of the many-sidedness of his work, did not reveal. The Canterbury Tales contains few references to the plague, only one to the peasant uprising, and only one to Lollardy, and these references are casual or jesting. Chaucer wrote for the court and cultivated classes to whom the sufferings ofthe poor were a matter of utmost indifference.” It is indeed true that Chaucer like Shakespeare had a rather undemocratic distrust of the proletariat, and especially the mob. His avoidance ofthe treatment of the popular movements ofthe times has, however, another reason too. Let us quote here Muriel Bowden’s words: “The most important reason for Chaucer’s silence about political affairs-and national events undoubtedly lies in the very-mature of his genius : trie poet’s magnificent Human Comedy is the more hiiman-it is’drenched in life,’ as John Livingstone Lowes has said-in that it is without the immediate, and is concerned with the universal and the timeless.” Herein lies the crux of the matter. Before impeaching Chaucer for his neglect of the important events of his age we must understand the difference between the poet and the historian. Whereas the latter is concerned with the events and movements which can be dated, the former deals with the dateless and universal aspects of human nature wliich lie at the core of these events and movements. Chaucer was no topical versifier. If he were, like a chronicler, to versify the events and movements-however important—of his times he would better have been forgotten by us. What we read The Canterbury Tales for is the authentic and panoramic vision it gives us of the social life of the age of Chaucer, not for an account of the topical events which happened to befall in that age.

(II)       The second “limitation” of Chaucer in portraying his age is, if viewed differently, a positive asset. It is his avoidance of literalism (exact and unimaginative rendering of reality). Chaucer’s is no Kodak-camera realism. What he gives us in The Canterbury Tales is, of course, very much near reality though ‘it is not perfect reality. There is some exaggeration here and some extenuation there. For instance there is an obvious element of idealism in his characterization of the Knight, the Plowman, and the poor Parson. These characters are too good to be literally possible and, naturally enough, they are exeriipted from those naughty strokes of irony which we find levelled against all their fellow-pilgrims. They are, according to David Daiches, “nostalgic portraits” of the people who were non-existent, but who were desired by Chaucer to exist. For the rest, however. Chaucer records as he finds, not mechanically, however, but with the additional advantage of his fresh and sly commentary of which his irony is the soul and the spice. In a word, though Chaucer is a realist yet he is not a literal transcriber of reality.

Medieval Chivalry:

Chaucer’s England was predominantly medieval in spirit. And the most outstanding feature of the Middle Ages was chivalry. Chaucer’s Knight is a true representative of the spirit of medieval chivalry which was a blend of love, religion, and bravery. He has been a champion of not fewer than fifteen battles in the defence of Christianity. Even the tale that he tells is, like him, imbued with the spirit of medieval chivalry-though nominally it has the ancient Greece for its setting and has for its two important characters the two Greek heroes who’are said-to have flourished in an unspecified ” period of history. Chaucer almost completely medievalizes this story to enable us to have a taste of the chivalry of his age.

We must, however, point out here that the spirit of true chivalry was breathing its last in the age of Chaucer. The Knight, in fact, is a representative of an order which was losing its ground. The true representative of the new order is his young son, the Squire, who has as much taste for revelry as for chivalry. He is “a lover and a lusty bachelor.” He is singing and fluting all the day and love-struck as he is, he sleeps “no more than a nightingale.” However, we justly wonder if he could have proved himself another Arcite or another Palamon. At any rate, he truly represents the marked change in the world of chivalry which was fast coming over the age of Chaucer.

A Cross-section of Society:

The Canterbury Tales gives us a fairly authentic and equally extensive picture of the socio-political conditions prevailing in England in the age of Chaucer. Each of the thirty pilgrims hails from a different walk of life, and among themselves they build up an epitome of their age. Each of them is a representative of a section of society as well as an individual. Even though the chief events of the age are not dealt with exhaustively by Chaucer, the thirty pilgrims provide us with the taste of life in the England of Chaucer. Chaucer was not a reformer but a delineator of reality. Legouis remarks  “What he has given is a direct transcription of daily life, taken in the very act,” as it were, and in its most familiar aspects. Chaucer’s work is the most precious document for whoever wishes to evoke a picture of life as it then was….”

Trade, Commerce, and Craft:

For the first time in history the trading and artisan sections of society were coming to their own in the age of Chaucer. With the fast expansion in trade and commerce merchants had become prosperous and so had the craftsmen whose goods they traded in. We are told by Chaucer that the Haberdasher, the Carpenter, the Weaver, the Dyer, and the Tapicer were well clothed and equipped. Their weapons were not cheaply trimmed with brass, but all with silver. They were so respectable-looking that

Well seined each of them a fair burgeus
 To sitten in a yeldhalle, on a days.

They were no longer despised by the nobility. The Merchant is a typical representative of his class, and the forefather of Sir Andrew Freeport, the merchant who is a member of the Spectator Club as delineated by Addison and Steele in the eighteenth century. His character-sketch as done by Chaucer exudes prosperity. He is always talking about the increase in his income and knows well how to make money in the market place. The countrymen and merchants have always made the two most common objects of humour and satire. But Chaucer lets the Merchant go without much of satire, perhaps in recognition of the importance that his class had gained in his age.

Medicine:

Chaucer’s portrait of the Doctor of Physic is fairly representative of the theory and practice of medicine in his age. The knowledge of astronomy (rather astrology) was a must for a physician as all the physical ailments were supposed to be the consequences of the peculiar configurations of stars and planets. That is why the Doctor, too, was, “grounded in astronomy.” However, ”his study was but little on the Bible” perhaps because he had not much time to spare from his professional studies. He had amassed a fortune in the year of the great plague and was keen to keep it with him:

He fcepte that he wan in pestilence.
For gold in phisik is a cordial,
Therefore he lovede gold in special.

Gold in the form of a colloidal solution was administered as a tonic fay physicians. However, Chaucer has a sly dig at the Doctor in his reference to his gold-loving nature.

The Church:

Through the ecclesiastical characters in The Canterbury Tales Chaucer constructs a representative picture of the condition of the Church and her ministers in his age. The Church had then become a hotbed of profligacy, corruption, and rank materialism. The Monk, the Friar, the Summoner, the Pardoner, and the Prioress are all corrupt, pleasure-loving, and materialistic in outlook. They forget their primary duty of guiding and edifying the masses and shepherding them to the Promised Land. The Monk is a fat. sporting fellow averse to study and penance. The Friar is a jolly beggar who employs his tongue to carve out his living. The Prioress bothers more about modish etiquette than austerity. The Pardoner is a despicable parasite trading in letters of pardon with the sinners who could ensure a seat in heaven by paying hard cash. The Summoner is, likewise, a depraved fellow. These characters fully signify the decadence that had crept into the Church. The only exception is the “Poor Parson’ apparently a follower of Wyclif who revolted against the corruption of the Church.

The New Learning:

Though Chaucer’s age was essentially medieval, yet some sort of a minor Renaissance was evident. The French and Italian contemporary writers influenced considerably the course of English literature and thought. Petrarch arid Boccaccio, the two Italian writers, in particular, exerted this influence. The seeds of humanistic culture of the ancient Greeks, too, can be identified in this age. The “Clerk of Oxenford” represents the “new” intellectual culture which had percolated .into fourteenth-century England long before the Renaissance. He is an austere scholar who prefers twenty books of Aristotle’s philosophy on his bed’s head to gay clothes and musical instruments.

Introduction:

Legouis in his History of English Literature (written by him in collaboration with Cazamian) pays a high, but just, tribute to Chaucer’s realism and his self-effacement in his observation and recording of the life of his age. That he has effectively captured for us the body and soul of his age has been universally recognized. One reason why his work is so authentic and impressive is that he has a tendency to efface himself. Were he more obtrusive and more self-centred, or more didactic and reform-minded, his work would have been proportionally less realistic, less interesting, and less convincing.

Chaucer’s Chosen Field:

The vivid and authentic portrayal of the life and manners of his age was Chaucer’s chosen field for which nature and experience had equipped him so exquisitely. But Chaucer came to this field after a long journey in the dim valleys of allegory and dream poetry based on his contemporary French and Italian models. It was orily when he was about fifty that he realized that his real field lay elsewhere.

With The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s aim and practice as a poet underwent a sea change. He descended from the ethereal regions of romance and allegory and the dream-world of conventional literature, and planted his feet firmly on the ground. Here, to quote an opinion, “the fantastic world of romance and allegory melts away; Troy and Thebes, palaces made of glass and temples of brass,, allegorical gardens and marvellous fountains evaporate, and in their place we see the whole stream of English society in the fourteenth century.” In The Canterbury Tales Nature herself became Chaucer’s model. He saw what was, and painted that he saw.

No Complete Self-effacement:

Chaucer could have claimed like Fielding that he gave “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” He was decidedly the first realist in English literature. Much of his realism is indebted to his tendency towards self-effacement which is necessary for a dramatist and very desirable for a novelist. The dramatist himself does not appear on the stage. He reveals his characters through what they say and do and does not offer to interpret for the reader or the spectator their words and deeds. The novelist does likewise, though he is much freer than the dramatist. Chaucer has well been called the first novelist even before the appearance of the novel, as also the first dramatist before the appearance of the drama in England.

Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that so far as The Canterbury Tales is concerned, Chaucer does not efface himself completely, though he does see what is and does paint it as he sees it. It is particularly true of the Prologue where he himself seems to be very much present like the guide in a picture gallery, nudging the spectator with his elbow and directing his attention to this or that feature of one portrait or the other. In the tales proper, however, the writer disappears completely and presents himself only as a reporter of the words and -deeds of the pilgrims on the road, who go jostling and story-telling and raising a cloud of dust behind them. Thus, whereas in the Prologue Chaucer adopts the static mode of characterization, in the tales he adopts the dramatic mode. In the Prologue it is he who is supposed to be enlightening us about the dress, appearance, habits, and salient traits of the pilgrims; in the tales he lets them do it for themselves.

The Prologue:

Irrespective of the question whether Chaucer effaces himself for not the Prologue, it is commonly conceded tha| the characters he draws are thoroughly realistic. All of them seem to have been, drawn from life. His portraits show how penetratingly observant an eye he possessed. His record of the minutest details of the appearance,, dress, and behaviour of the pilgrims makes their portraits disarmingly convincing. Consider, for instance, the description of the Miller:

is herd as any sowe or fox was rede,
and thereto brode, as though it wer a spade.

“What makes these portraits all the more realistic is the seeming spontaneity with which Chaucer draws them. When Chaucer is telling us something about a pilgrim it seems that he or she is standing right before him and he is looking at what is and painting what he is looking at. Chaucer uses that greatest of arts which lies in concealing all semblance of art. “No small part of the realism of these portraits,” says W. H: Clawson, “is their informality, their lack of regular order.” The details about the pilgrims seem to be coming from him without any method or design, and that is exactly what induces in the reader a strong feeling of the actuality of the characters who are being so described.

Another relevant point to be kept in view is Chaucer’s broadmindedness, his lack of prejudice, and his real sympathy with all classes and conditions of people. Irrespective of the feet whether he is dealing with a rascal or a saint, an angel or a devil, he shows no trace of either anger and bitterness or excessive reverence. He rejects nothing but likes all. He leaves the task of improving the world to his contemporaries such as Langland, Wyclif, and the “moral Gower.” As for himself, he accepts the world as he finds it. He paints many rascals indeed .(most of the pilgrims are in fact rascals), without pillorying or strongly indicting any one of them. He is too indulgent and tolerant for that. His all-embracing human sympathy prevents him from standing between the portrait and the spectator. Let the spectator himself judge and arraign, if he likes, the characters whose portraits he has drawn; the painter’s work is over. We may also notice the happy absence of idealization from Chaucer’s character-portrayal. The characters of the Knight, the Plowman, and the poor Parson are the only exceptions.

On the whole, the characters are so lifelike that some critics have suggested that Chaucer might have painted from real life. J. M. Manly, for instance, opines that Chaucer had in mind some “definite persons” while portraying the pilgrims in the Prologue. It will be an ideal pastime to contest issues with this critic. We should not approach literature with the attitude of a detective to search into the raw material which a creative artist employs. It is enough for us to recognize the fact that Chaucer’s characters are very lifelike. His characters, in the words of Palgrave, are

Seen in his mind soyividly, that we
Know them, more’dearly than the men we see.

What we should insist on is not the “actuality” of a writer’s work, but its verisimilitude. What a writer gives may not (and should not) be a literal transcription of reality, but only a semblance of it. Aristotle considers poetry more philosophical and more real than history, and he is quite right. To say that Chaucer copied real characters from life will be underrating his literary genius. His is not a mechanic art. Well does A. C. Ward remark : “It would of course be foolish to suppose that everything in the Prologue is ‘from the life.’ Chaucer was too good an artist and had too lively an imagination to be a mere copyist, even of life itself. Life was only his raw material, to which he could on occasion give a more convincing and satisfying shape than Nature’s own. So we can only guess at how far Chaucer drew upon imparted information and how far upon his own sense of probability.”

The Tales:

Unlike in the Prologue, in the tales proper Chaucer effaces himself completely like a perfect dramatist. He is there, of course, and he is one of the pilgrims, too; but he is there as a spectator and an authentic reporter. In the tales the portraits walk out of their frames, as it were, and reveal themselves through the tales they narrate, the comments which they make on each other’s tales, and their mutual exchanges and even skirmishes. It is in the tales that the author disappears completely. Right in the beginning of the Prologue Chaucer takes pains to emphasize his role as a mere reporter. He feigns even to have reproduced the very words spoken by the pilgrims in the narration of their tales

For this ye knowen also wel as I,
Who-so shall tell a tale aftere a man,
He moot reherce, as ny as evere he can,
Everich a word, if it be in his charge,
Al speke he never so rudelie and large;
Or elles moot tells, his tale untrewe,
Orfeyne things orjynde -words newe.

So the author bows out of the scene and assumes the role of a spectator and reporter. Each story is intended to reveal its narrator. Legouis maintains: “It then behoves the author to conceal himself, to sacrifice his own literary talent and sense of proportion, and give place to another, who may be ignorant, garrulous, clumsy, foolish, or coarse, or moved by enthusiasms and prejudicesTinshared by his creator.” And what a sacrifice! Says the same critic: “The Canterbury Tales the element of the poet’s personality has been subdued, superseded, by pleasure in observing and understanding. Hitherto this degree of peaceful, impartial spectatorship had never been reached by poets.”

It is interesting to note how the tale of each pilgrim is in comformity with his or her character a glimpse of which is provided by the poet in the Prologue. In many a case the story gives finishing touches to the portrait of the. narrator as initially set forth in the Prologue. Chaucer here seems to have followed the classical principle of decorum without being aware of it. And it is not only the content of each story but also its diction which reveals its narrator. The Prioress, being an ecclesiastic, tells, appropriately enough, the story of a Christian saint murdered by the “cursed Jews”. The Knight comes out with a tale of chivalry. The merry, sporting Monk, on being exhorted by the Host to tell a “merry” tale, revengefully narrates a long melancholy tale of the fall of Lucifer, Adam, Samson, Hercules, and many more, but he is shut up mid way by the fervent words of the Host:

Sire Monk, no moore of this, so Godyow blesse!
Your tale anoyeth al this compaignye.

He asks the Monk to narrate instead a story of hunting, but the latter does not oblige, and retires sullenly. The tipsy Miller offers to tell a bawdy story of the seduction of a carpenter’s wife by a clerk. The Reeve (who does the work of a carpenter also) protests at the Miller’s “lewed dronken harlotrye”:

It is a synne and eek a greet folye
To apeyren any man, or hym defame,
And eek to bryngen wyves in swichfame
Thou maystynogh of other thynges seyn.

But the Miller ignores his protest and tells his ribald story. The Reeve in retaliation narrates trie story of the seduction of a miller’s wife and daughter by two Cambridge scholars. The Friar tells the story of a roguish summoner who is carried by the Devil to hell. The Summoner in reply comes out with the story of a greedy friar who is humbled on account of his greed. The Nun tells a story of miracles. Chaucer himself comes out with perhaps the dullest of talesT His boring narrative is cut short by the Host after he has proceeded to the extent of some thirty stanzas:

“Namoore of this, for Coddes dignitee,”
Quod owe Hooste, “for thou makest me
So wery of thy verray lewednesse
That, also wisly God my soule bless,
Myne eres aken of thy drasty speche… “

Chaucer’s choice of the dullest tale for himself is a refreshing example of self-directed irony. Only a great humorist can laugh at himself; and Chaucer is.certainly among the greatest humorists. He is really delightful in his laughter at his own expense. How can we believe that he was the least skilled of all the narrators?

As a man, Chaucer depicts himself, in the words of the Host, as ashy, unobtrusive, self-effacing, and shoe-contemplating person. This is the Host addresses him:

And sayde thus, “What man artow?” quod he:
“Thou lookest as thou woldestfynde an hare,
For ever upon the ground I se thee stare.”

On being asked to come out with a “tale of mirth” by the Host he pleads his ignorance very politely:

“Hoostee”, quod I, “ne beth natyvele apayd,
For other tale certes kan I noone.
But of a rhym I lerned long agoone. “

Conclusion:

Whether or not Chaucer was as unobtrusive a man as he presents himself in The Canterbury Tales, it is true that as an artist he followed the principle of least interference with his material. The degree of his self-effacement is really surprising. He does not project the tint of his likes and dislikes, fads and fetishes, views and prejudices on what he paints. He is no moralist either. “Like Shakespeare”, says Compton-Rickett, “he makes it his business, in The Canterbury Tales, to paint life as he sees it, and leaves others to draw the moral.” Thus, to conclude, “Chaucer sees what is and paints it as he sees it.” And what is more, “he effaces himself in order to look at it better.”

Chaucer and the common people

Introduction:

That Chaucer wrote for a coterie and not for the commonalty is essentially correct. He catered to the taste of the court and the aristocracy and not that of the common masses. He had only a selected circle of readers. Hudson observes: “He was a court poet who wrote for cultured readers and a refined society.”

All this is fairly true. It is also true that to his readers -“the court and cultivated classes” —”the sufferings of the poor were a matter of the utmost indifference.” But it would be extremely unfair to maintain that Chaucer himself remained indifferent to the sufferings of the poor. In fact, Chaucer’s human sympathy and cordiality are all-embracing. He is responsive with the same alacrity to the Knight as to the Plowman or the Parson. The one characteristic of Chaucer which endears him so readily to every reader is the extensive nature of his understanding and fellow-feeling in which he is seldom found wanting. Therein he comes close to Shakespeare himself. Chaucer is not, admittedly, “a poet of the masses” (which means, commonly, in modern parlance, an exponent of communism or some form of radica Fsocialism). But nor. is Shakespeare “a dramatist of the masses”. Each uses for his raw material life itself in all its manifestations. Chaucer is a poet of humanity though not a poet of the masses. He is not only of his age but of all ages. He is an exponent of not a narrow view of things, but of the permanent values of life. He makes a pleanot for the ascendency of one class of society over the others, but of truth and justice. He views life not in bitspbut as a whole, and he has abundant sympathy with all kinds and conditions ofhumanity.

 If Chaucer wrote for the elite, so did all his contemporaries. He wrote at a time when literacy was limited to a few. Even the art of printing in England was yet decades ahead. Books were all read and circulated as manuscripts. Necessarily enough, the circle of readers was very narrow. Why should then Chaucer alone be singled out as a writer who catered to the tastes of “the court and cultivated classes”?

Contemporary Upheavals:

Nevertheless, what strikes one so forcefully about Chaucer is his aloofness from.the popular movements and upheavals of his times. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 led by Jack Straw and Wat Tylar posed substantial danger to the English feudal system and terrified a number of people. The plague epidemic of 1348-49 (commonly known as “The Black Death”) wiped away almost one-third of the total population of the country. With the consequent decrease in. the number of working hands, the workers started a widespread agitation for an increase in their wages. The agitation was put down with a heavy hand by the authorities, but the resentment of the labourers could not be dispelled. At the same time John Wyclif, “the morning star of the Reformation”, and his followers, called the Lollards, raised a powerful voice against the corruptions of the Church officials, which incidentally implied a protest against the financial exploitation of the poor and superstitious masses by the hirelings of the Pope. It must be clear that Chaucer’s age. was an age of turrhoii and agitation. The common people. long exploited by feudal overlords and Popish agents, had reached the end of their patience and could not but let out their unrest through a chain of movements and agitations against the ruling and influential classes. Evidently enough all was not well with the world. It would have really been astonishing if a writer could have shut his eyes sojfirmly on the contemporary scene. But that is what Chaucer seems to have done~at least, to some critics. Let us quote Hudson again: “The great vital issues of the day never inspired his verse. He made his appeal to an audience composed of the favoured few, who wanted to be amused by comedy, or touched by pathos, or moved by romantic sentiment but who did not wish to be disturbed by painful reminders of plague, famines, and popular discontent. Thus, though he holds the mirror up to the life of his time, the dark underside of it is nowhere reflected by him”.

Comparison with Langland and Cower:

The comparison of Chaucer with his contemporaries in this connection will be substantially rewarding. Langland and Gower were the most eminent of the poets contemporaneous with Chaucer. Both of them exhibit in their important works much wider and intenser awareness of the burning questions of the day. Hudson calls William Langland (13307-1400) “essentially a poet of the people.” His most important work The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman (commonly known as Piers the Plowman) displays the poets’ wide and intimate contact with the people, their miseries, privations, their exploitation and tyrannization by the ruling classes, and their seething discontent with the feudal junta and even the royalty. Rather than their splendour and glamour, the enormous poem acquaints us with the seamy sides of medieval England-its “rents, rags and uncleanliness.” Whereas Chaucer represents in The Canterbury Tales the “merry England” of the fourteenth century, Langland’s scene is very melancholy, disturbed, and bedevilled by a thousand ailments. According to Kenneth Sisam, Piers Plowman “stands alone as a revelation of the ignorance and misery of the lower classes whose multiplied grievances cameto a head in the Peasants Revolt of 1381”. “It is’to this Vision”, points out Hudson, “that we have to turn if we would complete Chaucer’s picture of fourteenth century England by putting in the dark shadows.” And Legouis exclaims: “How national it is! How near the people! It must be borne in mind that Langland did not appeal to one particular class of people. He did not, for instance urge the masses to rise against the ruling class and the utterly depraved ecclesiastics. Even if he was a poet of the people, he appealed to all the classes of society alike and tried to take stock of the prevailing situation and to mend it.

Unlike Langland, John Gower (13257-1408) did not champion the cause of the people but, even then, he expressed a keen awareness of the popular feelings and their possible repercussions on the society of his time. One of his three most important poetical works Vox Clamantis-a Latin poem of some ten thousand lines-was most probably written immediately after the Peasants’ Revolt of 13 81 of which it gives a vivid account. In general the poem deals with the evils of entire society-the clergy, knighthood, and peasantry. Gower himself was a wealthy landlord and was terrified by the rising of the workers against their masters. He lived in Kent where the rebellion broke out. He is a conservative and supports “reform within the established order.” He is critical of even the Lollards’ Movement. He is didactic, too (he was addressed as “moral Gower” by his friend Chaucer in his dedication of Troilus and Cryseyde) in his other two important poems Mirowdel ‘Omme (French) and Confessio Amantis (English) though in these works there are not many direct references to contemporary events.

Chaucer’s “Indifference”:

In contrast to the practice of Langland and Gower, Chaucer leaves the agitating questions of the day untouched. He obviously lacks the scorching earnestness of Langland and the didactic tendency of Gower. In spite of his awareness of the distress and grinding poverty of the masses he seems to believe complacently that:

Gods’s in His Heaven— All’s right with the world!

He welcomes things as they are, and almost desires them to be no better. In Jhis works there are very few direct references to the contemporary upheavals and the deplorable plight of the commonalty. Says Moody:”The peasant rebellion and the Lollard agitation give us glimpses of an England which Chaucer, in spite of the many-sidedness of his work, does not reveal. The Canterbury Tales contains few references to the plague, only one to the peasant uprising, and only one to Lollardry, and these references are casual or jesting”. Moody continues with the words which form the body of the question we are endeavouring to answer at present. Chaucer’s only reference to the Peasants’ Revolt is in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale written perhaps about ten years after the rising. Chaucer makes a less than complimentary allusion to Jack Straw, one of the leaders of the Revolt:

Certes, he Jakkes Straw and his meynee
Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille
When that they wolden any Flemyng kille,
As thilke days was mad upon the fox.

In the Clerk’s Tale Chaucer indicts the unthinking mob:

O stormy people! unsad and even untrewe As undiscreet and changing as a vave.

Elsewhere, too, Chaucer expresses his anti-mob sentiment-not only through the mouths of the pilgrims, but personally and directly.

Chaucer’s Broad Human Sympathy:

But in his anti-rabble sentiments Chaucer is not being more undemocratic than Shakespeare. The fickle mob, the “unthinking Hydra”, has earned the wise contempt of most English writers. In spite of his too palpable indifference to the sufferings of the poor and the downtrodden, Chaucer is never-failing in showing sympathy for all human beings irrespective of their social standing. He recognizes few barriers in this respect. He has malice towards none. Among all the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales if some do escape his naughty irony, they are, along with the Knight, “the poor Parson” and the still poorer Plowman. In Piers the Plowman the poor Plowman is employed by Langland as a symbol of Christ himself. But then Chaucer’s Plowman, too, is Christ-like in his “poverty”, his honesty, and his fellow-feeling. This shepherd worries much about the sheep, and not at all about their “‘fleece”. Evidently enough, the Parson is a Wyclifite, and through him Chaucer indirectly expresses his sympathy for the Lollards’ Movement. In the Parson’s Tale Chaucer gives voice to almost egalitarianistic sentiments:

“Of swich seeds as cherles spryngen of swich seed spryngen lordes. As wel may the cherl be saved as the lordI rede thee, certes, that thou, lord werke in swich wise with thy cherles that they rather love thee than drede…”

Is it not startlingly radical to have suggested the demolition of the well-recognized medieval barrier between “churls” and “lords”? Further, we may refer to the well-known passage against tyrants inxthe preface to the Legend of Good Women in which the king is urged to be compassionate towards his poor subjects.

Why Indifference to Contemporary Events?:

After all is said and done, it remains to be explained as to why Chaucer remained indifferent to the upheavals of his age-at least in his literary works. A critic defends Chaucer quite trenchantly. According to him, “to be bold in one’s utterance in the Middle Ages was to gamble with death, and Chaucer’s temperament was not a martyr’s.” But we may relevantly ask: “What about Gower and Langland? Both of them were “bold” enough in their “utterances” though they championed mutually opposite sides. The reason lies else where Chaucer was not a journalist, a pamphleteer, or an occasional versifier.

He wrote not for his age, but for all ages. He was sure that the burning topics of his day would become the dead topics of the next. Had he busied himself with the topical and the ephemeral his poetry would have had little appeal for the succeeding generations. He delved deep from the topical to the universal. He gives us not the trappings but the body and soul of fourteenth-century England, superadded with universal connotations. We admire and appreciate Langland and Gower less partly because they are more concerned with the issues of their day. Muriel Bowden observes: “The most important reason for Chaucer’s silence about political affairs and national events undoubtedly lies in the very nature of his genius. The poet’s magnificent human comedy is the more human in that it is without the immediate, and is concerned with the universal and the timeless.”             

Chaucer’s Contribution to English Language and Literature

Introduction:

Father of verse! who m immortal song
First taught the Muse to speak the English tongue.

It is somewhat idle to talk of “fathers” in the history of literature, for it is questionable if a particular person can be wholly credited with in the founding of a new literary genre.

Literature is generally subject to the ‘law of evolutionary development. And though a man may do more than others by way of contributing to this development we should be chary of inferring upon him the medal of fatherhood. When it is said that Chaucer is the father of English poetry, and even the father of English literature we broadly mean that his contribution to the evolution of English poetry or literature is much more significant than that of his contemporaries and predecessors, and to be similarly rated is his introduction of so many novel features into it.

That Chaucer was a pioneer in many respects should be readily granted. “With him is born our real poetry,” says Matthew Arnojd. He has been acclaimed as the first realist, the first humorist, the first narrative artist the first great character-painter, and the first great metrical artist in English literature. Further, he has been credited not only with the “fatherhood” of English poetry but has also been hailed as the father of English drama before the drama was bom, and the father of English novel before the novel was born. And, what is more, his importance is not due to precedence alone, but due to excellence. He is not only the first English poet, but a great poet in his own right. Justly has he been called “the fountain-source of the vast stream of English literature.”

Contribution to Language:

Well does Lowell say that “Chaucer found his English a dialect and left it a language.” Borrowing Saintsbury’s words about the transformation which Dryden effected in English poetry, we may justly say that Chaucer found the English language brick and left it marble. When Chaucer started his literary career, the English speech, and still less, the English of writing was confusingly fluid and unsettled. The English language was divided into a number of dialects which were employed in different parts of the country. The four of them vastly more prominent than the others were:

(i)         The Southern

(ii)        The Midland

(iii)       The Northern or Northumbrian

(iv)       The Kentish

Out of these four, the Midland or the East Midland dialect, which was spoken in London and its surrounding area, was the simplest in grammar and syntax. Moreover, it was the one patronised by the aristocratic and literary circles of the country. Gower used this dialect for his poem Confessio Amantis and Wyclif for his translation of the Bible. But this dialect was not the vehicle of all literary work. Other dialects had their votaries too. Langland in his Piers Plowman, to quote an instance, used a mixture of the Southern and Midland dialects. Chaucer employed in his work the East midland dialect, and by casting the enormous weight of his genius balance decided once for all which dialect was going to be the standard literary language of the whole of the country for all times to come. None after him thought of using any dialect other than the East Midland for any literary work of consequence. It is certain that if Chaucer had adopted some other dialect the emergence of the standard language of literature would have been considerably delayed. All the great writers of England succeeding Chaucer are, in the words of John Speirs, “masters of the language of which Chaucer is, before them, the great master.”

Not only was Chaucer’s selection of one dialect out of the four a happy one, but so was his selection of one of the three languages which were reigning supreme in England at that time-Latin, French, and English. In fact. Latin and French were more fashionable than the poor “vernacular” English. Latin was considered “the universal language” and was patronised at the expense of English by the Church as well as the learned. Before Wyclif translated it into the “vulgar tongue”, the Bible was read in its Latin version called the Vulgate. French was the language of the court and was used for keeping the accounts of the royal household till as late as 1365. Perplexed by the variety of languages offering themselves for use, Chaucer’s friend and contemporary Gower could not decide which one of them to adopt. He wrote his Mirour del’Omme in French, Vox Clamantis in Latin, and Confessio Amantis in English, perhaps because he was not quite sure which of the three languages was going to survive. But Chaucer had few doubts abputthe issue. He chose English which was a despised language, and asjthe legendary king did to the beggar maid, raised her from the dust, draped her in royal robes, and conducted her coronation. That queen is ruling even now.

Contribution to Versification:

Chaucer’s contribution to English versification is no less striking than to the English language. Again, it is an instance of a happy choice. He sounded the death-knell of the old Saxon alliterative measure and firmly established the modern one. Even in the fourteenth century the old alliterative measure had been employed by such a considerable poet as Langland for his Piers khe Plowman, and the writer of Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight. Let us give the important features of the old measure which Chaucer so categorically disowned:

(i)         There is no regularity in the number of syllables in each line. One line may have as few as six syllables and another as many as fourteen.

(ii)        The use of alliteration as the chief ornamental device and as the lone structural principle. All the alliterative syllables are stressed.

(iii)       The absence 01 end-rimes; and

(iv)       Frequent repetition to express vehemence and intensity of emotion.

Chaucer had no patience with the “rum, ram, ruf’ of the alliterative measure. So does he maintain in the Parson’s Tale:

But trusteth wel, I am a southern man,
I cannot geste-rum, ram, ruf,-by lettere,
Ne, God wot, rym holde I but litel bettere.

For that old-fashioned measure he substituted the regular line with end-rime, which he borrowed from France. The new measure has the following characteristics:

(i)         All lines have the same number of syllables,

(ii)        End-rime,

(iii)       Absence of alliteration and frequent repetition.

After Chaucer, no important poet ever thought of reverting to the old measure. Thus, Chaucer may be designated “the father of modern English versification.” Chaucer employs three principal metres in his works. In The Canterbury Tales he mostly uses lines of ten syllables each (with generally five accents); and the lines run into couplets; that is, each couple of lines has its end-syllables rhyming with each other. For example:

His eyes twinkled in his heed aright
As doon the sterres in the frosty night.

In Troilus and Cryseyde he -uses the seven-line stanza of decasyllabic lines with five accents each having the rhyme-scheme a b abb c c. This measure was borrowed by him from the French and is called the rhyme-royal or Chaucerian stanza. The third principal metre employed by him is the octosyllabic couplet with four accents and end-rime. In The Book of the Duchesse this measure is used. The measures  thus adopted by Chaucer were seized upon by his successors. The decasyllabic couplet known as the heroic couplet, was to be chiselled and invigorated to perfection three centuries later by Dryden and Pope. Apart from those three principal measures Chaucer also employed for the first time a number of other stanzaic forms in his shorter poems.

Not only this, Chaucer seems to be the first Englishman who realised and brought out the latent music of his language. “To read Chaucer’s verse,” observes a critic, “is like listening to a clear stream, in a meadow full of sunshine, rippling over its bed of pebbles.” The following is the tribute of a worthy successor of his:

The morning star of song, who made
His music heard below,
Don Chaucer, the first -warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those melodious bursts thatfiU”,
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still

He made English a pliant and vigorous medium of poetic utterance. His astonishingly easy mastery of the language is indeed remarkable. With one step the writings of Chaucer carry us into a new era in which the language appears endowed with ease, dignity, and copiousness of expression and clothed in the hues of the imagination.

The Content of Poetry:

Chaucer was a pioneer not only in the linguistic and prosodic fields, but was one in the strictly poetic field also. Not only the form of poetry, but its content, too, is highly indebted to him. Not only did he give English poetry a new dress, but a new body and a new soul. His major contribution towards the content of poetry is in his advocacy of and strict adherence to realism. His Canterbury Tales embodies a new effort in the history of literature, as it strictly deals with real men, manners, and life. In the beginning of his literary career Chaucer followed his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, and wrote allegorical and dream poetry which in its content was as remote from life as a dream is from reality. But at the age of about fifty he realised that literature should deal first-hand with life and not look at it through the spectacles of books or the hazy hues of dreams and cumbersome allegory. He realised, to adopt Pope’s famous couplet (with a little change) :

Know then thyself: presume not dreams to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.

And the product of this realisation was The Canterbury Tales. This poem, as it were, holds a mirror to the life of Chaucer’s age and shows its manners and morals completely, “not in fragments.” Chaucer replaces effectively the shadowy delineations of the old romantic and allegorical school with the vivid and pulsating pictures of contemporary life.

And Chaucer does not forget the universal beneath the particular, the dateless beneath the dated. The portraits of the pilgrims in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales constitute not only an epitome of the society of fourteenth-century England, but the epitome of human nature in all climes and all ages. Grierson and Smith observe about Chaucer’s pilgrims: “They are all with us today, though some of them have changed their names. The knight now commands a line regiment, the squire is in the guards, the shipman was a rum-runner while prohibition lasted and is active now in the black market, the friar is a jolly sporting publican, the pardoner vends quack medicines or holds seances, and the prioress is the headmistress of a fashionable girls’ school. Some of them have reappeared in a later literature. The poor parson was reincarnated in the Vicar of Wakefield, the knight in Colonel Newcome and the Monk nrArchdeacon Grantly.”

His Geniality, Tolerance, Humour, and Freshness:

Chaucer’s tone as a poet is wonderfully instinct with geniality, tolerance, humour, and freshness which are absent from that of his contemporaries and predecessors who are too dreamy or too serious to be interesting. In spite of his awareness of the corruption and unrest in the society of his age Chaucer is never upset or upsetting. He experiences what the French cally’oz’e de vivre, and communicates it to his is iders. No one can read Chaucer without feeling that it is good to be alive in this world however imperfect may it be in numerous respects. He is a chronic optimist. He is never harsh, rancorous, bitter, or indignant, and never falls out with his fellow men for their failings. He leaves didacticism to Langland and “moral Gower” and himself peacefully coexists with all human imperfections. It does not mean that he is not sarcastic or satirical, but his satire and sarcasm are always seasoned with lively humour. In fact his forte is irony rather than satire. Aldous Huxley observes: “Where Langland cries aloud in anger threatening the world with hell fire, Chaucer looks on and smiles.” The great English humorists like Shakespeare and Fielding share with Chaucer the same broad human sympathy which he first introduced into literature and which has bestowed upon his Canterbury Tales that character of perennial,-vernal freshness which appears so abundantly on its every page,

Contribution to the Novel:

The novel is one of the latest courses in the banquet of English literature. But in his narrative skill, his gift of vivid characterization, his aptitude for plot-construction, and his inventive skill Chaucer appears as a worthy precursor of the race of novelists who come centuries afterwards. If Chaucer is the father of English poetry he is certainly, to use G. K. Chesterton’s phrase, “the grandTafher of&ie English novel.” His Tales are replete with intense human interest, and though he borrows his materials from numerous sundry sources, his narrative skill is all his own. That could not have been borrowed. His narration is lively and direct, if we make exception for the numerous digressions and philosophical and pseudo-philosophical animadversions having little to do with the tales proper, introduced after the contemporary fashion. It is difficult to find him flagging or growing dull and monotonous. It is perhaps only Burns who in Tom O’ Shanter excels Chaucer in the telling of “merry tales.'”

Chaucer’s Prologue to The Canterbury Tales has been rightly called “the prologue to modern fiction.” It has characters if not plot, and vivid characterization is one of the primary jobs of a novelist. A novel, according to Meredith, should be “a summary of actual life.” So is, indeed, the Prologue. Several of the tales, too, are novels in miniature and hold the attention of the reader from the beginning to the end, which, alas! very few novels of today do.

As regards Chaucer’s Troilus and Cryseyde, it has been well called “a novel in verse.” And it has all the salient features of a novel. It has plot, character, unravelling action, conflict, rising action, and denouement-every thing. Though the background of the action is the legendary Trojan war, and though some elements have been borrowed from the Italian writer Boccaccio, yet it is all very modern and close to life. It is not devoid even of psychological interest which is a major characteristic of the modern novel. “Its heroine,” as a critic observes, “is the subtlest piece of psychological analysis in medieval fiction: and the shrewd and practical Pandarus is a character whose presence of itself brings the story down from the heights of romance to the plains of real life.” S. D. Neill opines that “had Chaucer written in prose, it is possible that his Troilus and Cryseyde and not Richardson’s Pamela would have been celebrated as the first English novel.” A. W. Pollard facetiously~observes that Chaucer was a compound of “thirty per cent of Goldsmith, fifty of Fielding, and twenty of Walter Scott.” This means, in other words, that as a story-teller Chaucer had some of the sweetness of Goldsmith, the genial ironic attitude and realism of Fielding, and the high chivalrous tone of Sir Walter Scott. But, after al 1 is said and done. Chaucer is Chaucer himself and himself alone.

Contribution to the Drama:

Chaucer wrote at a time when, like the novel, secular drama had not been born, and yet his works have some dramatic elements which are altogether missing in the poetry before him. His mode of characterisation in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales is, no doubt, static or descriptive, but in the tales proper it is dynamic or dramatic. There the characters reveal themselves, without the intervention of the. author, through what they say and what they do. Even the tales they narrate, in most cases, are in keeping with their respective characters, avocations, temperaments, etc. In this way Chaucer is clearly ahead of his “model” Boccaccjo, who in his Decameron allots various tales to his ladies and gentlemen indiscriminately, irrespective of their conformity or otherwise to their respective characters. The stories in The Decameron could without violence be re-distributed-among the characters. But not in The Canterbury Tales where they-serve as a dramatic device of characterisation: and in the drama, pace Aristotle, character is all-important. In their disputations and discussions and comments upon each other’s tales and their general behaviour, too, the pilgrims are^made by Chaucer to reveal themselves and to provide finishing touches to the character-portraits already statically (or non-dramatically) set forth in the Prologue. Chaucer is abundantly showing here the essential gift of a dramatist. A critic goes so far as to assert that Chaucer is “a dramatist in all but the fact”, and again : “If the drama had been known in Chaucer’s time as a branch of living literature, he might have attained as high an excellence in comedy as any English or Continental writer.”

Chaucer’s Limitations:

Let us round off our discussion by briefly referring to some of Chaucer’s limitations or what as “the father of English poetry” he could not give to it. Matthew Arnold feels in Chaucer’s work the absence of “high seriousness” which is the characteristic of all great poetry. Then, Chaucer has, unlike Dante, no burning message to give. Again as Hudson avers, he is not the poet of the people. Moody and Loyett maintain that “Chaucer wrote for the court and cultivated classes to whom the sufferings of the poor were a matter of the utmost indifference.” Still another critic finds missing from Chaucer’s poetry those “mysterious significances” which are characteristics of all great poetry. All this is, in a measure, true. But those who charge Chaucer with the absence of pathos may well read the following passage from The-Knight’s Tale in which ‘Arcite laments his separation, consequent upon his death, from his lady-love:

Alas the woe! alas the paines strong
That I for you have suffered, and so long!
Alas the death: alas, mine Emilie!
Alas, departing of our company!
Alas, mine hertes queen! alas my wife!
Mine hertes lady, ender of my life.
WJiat is this world? What asken men to have?
Now with his love; now in his colde grave,
Alone, withouten any company!
Farewell my sweet! farewell mine Emilie!
And softe take me in your armes rwey,
Fore love of God and heakeneth what I say.

Fifteenth-Century English Poetry

Introduction:

The fifteenth century was a period of singular barrenness as regards literary production, particularly poetry. No poet of the century comes anywhere near Chaucer who dominated the previous century like a colossus.

We have in the fifteenth century a number of “sons of Geoffrey”, or, what we call the Chaucerian who professedly frmlaietf the great master. Imitation in its broader implications is not .a bad or despicable activity; but we find that the Chaucerians of the fifteenth century imitated Chaucer too slavishly and mechanically so that their imitations could capture only the trappings and not the vigorous body or the subtle soul of Chaucer’s poetry. Moreover, very few of these Chaucerians thought of imitating the best work of Chaucer, namely The Canterbury Tales. They restricted their attention to his allegorical and dream poetry which is far below his best.

As regards “drama” and prose the age was not so unproductive, however. Sir Thomas Malory and Caxton, in particular, contributed not meanly to the development and fixation of English prose. A sense of style also came in. Caxton is an important figure in the history of English literature as it was he who initiated the art of printing in England. In his prefaces to his publications he wrote a refreshing, natural and personal style which has earned for him a secure place in the history of English prose. The introduction of the art of printing in England made books available at cheap prices to the commonalty. Literacy also increased considerably and literature, hitherto a privileged pursuit of the elite, became more “popular” in the true sense of the word. Let us discuss the salient features and trends of the poetry of the fifteenth century.

Allegorical and Dream Poetry:

As we have mentioned above, most of the imitators of Chaucer set their sights on imitating his minor work and not the neplus ultra of his poetic art, namely. The Canterbury Tales. The works of Chaucer which most readily came in for imitation were the following three:

(i)         The Parliament of Fowls;

(ii)        The Book of the Duchess; and

(iii)       The House of Fame.

All these works are but mediocre in quality and were written by Chaucer obviously in imitation of the well-known tradition of dream and allegory so popular with the medieval English poets. None of them displays any direct, first-hand contact with life or reality as The Canterbury Tales so abundantly and so superbly does. The work of Chaucer’s imitators is. naturally enough, remote from reality. The lesson of The Canterbury Tales and the “fresh woods and pastures new” opened up by Chaucer seem to have held no attraction for the Chaucerians. For the most part entrenched in the medieval tradition, they fail to capture the real-life freshness of Chaucer’s poetry. The poet usually found himself dreaming and taken to a garden, and there involved in some stock incidents in which figured such stock characters as the Goddess of Love and various Virtues and Vices in personified forms. William Dunbafs The Golden Targe and Lydgate’s Temple ofGlas are poems of this kind. In the former the poet falls asleep on a May morning in a garden and dreams of a ship full of a hundred allegorical ladies of King Cupid’s court. Reason with his golden targe (shield) tries unsuccessfully to protect the poet from the arrows of Love. Stephen Hawes in his Example of Virtue relates the-story of a youth who led by Reason succeeds finally in marrying Purity, the daughter of the King of Lpve. His Past time of Pleasure and Dunbar’s The Thistle and the Rose provide some more examples of the allegorical dream-poetry. Some of these poems might have provided Spenser with some germinal hints. It was only Hoccleve, perhaps, who to some extent continued the tradition of English city life as it was sketched in The Canterbury Tales. His picture of London in La Male Regie is not uninteresting.

Satire and Didacticism:

Fifteenth-century poets followed Langland and “moral Gower”, too, in their practice of satire and didacticism. Chaucer had nothing of the reformer or the preacher in him, and his forte was not satire but naughty irony. But Langland in Piers the Plowman and Gower in all his major works aimed at different effects. Their lead is more particularly accepted by John Skelton, the rugged satirist of the fifteenth century. He hits very crudely, indeed, though he hits very hard. He is well known for his satires on the clergy, but is best known for the boldness with which he attacked the all-powerful Wolsey. William Dunbar continued the satiric tradition in a major part of his poetic output. His satire is generally of the nature of jovial invective but sometimes takes up the colour of Rebelaisian grotesquery as. for instance, in his Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins.

The Eclogue:

The fifteenth century is known for the appearance of the Virgilian eclogue as a new genre in English literature. An eclogue is, generally, a short poem, especially a pastoral dialogue (generally between shepherds and shepherdesses), written in the manner of Virgil and Theocritus. The man who introduced the eclogue in England was Alexander Barclay, the translator of the famous work of the German poet Sebastian Brant, entitled by him The Ship of Fools. His eclogues ‘were mainly modelled upon tjiose of the Italian poet Mantuanus and have elements of satire which we find absent from those of Virgil. Barclay’s forte is his mastery of detail and his very effective handling of the dialogue between his shepherds. Further his work contains plentiful references to current English affairs.

Ballads:

The ballad is another gift of the fifteenth century to English literature. Ballads constituted a considerable parti of English folk literature. Thev were’transmitted orallv from one generation to the next. Most of the ballads in England remain anonymous, and according to the older critical opinion as represented by F. B. Gummere in The Beginnings ofPoetiy (1901) they had a communal origin: that is, they were authored not by individuals but by the community as a whole. Modern critical opinion, however, is inclined against the communal theory of the origin of the ballad.’

The ballad originally existed as some song accompanying a folk dance. But later it came to signify a short narrative poem told impersonally with some dramatic interest in more or less a traditional metrical form. Most-commonly, the stanza employed by it consists of four lines, the second and fourth rhyming together. The first and the third lines contain four stresses, and the other two, three each. See for instance, the opening verse of Sir Patric Spens.[1]

” The king sits in Dumferling toune,
Drinking the blude-red wine:
“O whar will I get a guid sailor,
To sail this ship of mine? “

The themes of most of the ballads are love, domestic tragedy, war, history, and the supernatural. The popular ballads (some thirty in number) concerning Robin Hood and his “merry men” are a class by themselves. Robin Hood is, in Albert C. Baugh’s words, “the people’s counterpart of aristocratic heroes like Sir Gawain”. He is honest and God-fearing but bosses over and robs the cruel rich to mitigate the penury of the poor. The most popular ballads dating from the fifteenth century are The Nutbrown Maid and Chevy Chase. The former is of the nature of a “true love” poem and the latter concerns itself with the heroic fight between the English Sir Percy and the Scottish Sir Douglas. Even in the “cultured” eighteenth century these ballads were acclaimed as wonderful literature. Prior based his Henry and Emma upon The Nut-brown Maid, and Addison in his Spectator brought out the beauties of Chevy Chase. Chevy Chase is couched in the traditional ballad metre referred to above, but The Nut-brown Maid is written in stanzas of twelve lines each. Along with the ballads in the fifteenth century there was a great outpouring of lyric verse dealing with both religious and secular themes.

Versification:

As regards versification, all the poets of the fifteenth century looked back to Chaucer for guidance. Very few new prosodic forms were adopted by them. In fact, instead of advancement, the prosodic part of English poetry showed signs of retrogression, if not outright decadence. Very few poets seem to have had an ear for music. Chaucer was perhaps the first English poet who instinctively grasped the hidden music of English words, but fifteenth-century Chaucerians did not benefit from the shining example before them. Much confusion and disharmony were created when the finale was dropped in the fifteenth century. That put before the poets a garbled version of Chaucer’s poetry, which, inaccurately read, started jarring upon the ear. His followers mis­read and mis-copied Chaucer. Their own poetry shows a lamentable neglect, if not ignorance, of all the basic laws of prosody. Lydgate was the most egregious offender in this respect, and was frank enough to admit: “I took none heed neither of short nor long.” Skelton and Hawes were other notable offenders. The former, indeed, admitted that his “rime” was “ragged” and “jagged”. In his contempt of all verbal music he might have given a cue to Donne and his fellow-metaphysicals. All the three principal metres employed by Chaucer, namely, the heroic couplet, the octosyllabic couplet with four stresses in each line, and the Chaucerian stanza were widely employed by the poets of the fifteenth century but none of them exhibited in his handling of these measures the easy facility and unforced mastery of Chaucer.

Let us now discuss briefly the work of the more important English and Scottish Chaucerians of the fifteenth century.

ENGLISH   CHAUCERIANS

(1)        Thomas Occleve or Hoccleve (1370-1450):

A consistent follower of Chaucer, he represented himself as “the stupid scholar of an excellent master.”

My’ dere maister-God his soule quyte— And fader Chaucer, fayne wold have me taught,
But I was dulle, and lerned lyte or naught.

Occleve was a satirist and moralist, but his most refreshing contribution to English poetry is the addition of the autobiographical touch. A. C. Ward calls him “one of England’s earliest biographers”. His main autobiographical work is La Male Regie de T. Occleve which is of the nature of a confession. The poet describes how debauched he was as a young man when he used to visit the taverns in Westminster. He gives some vivid pictures of the London of those times. His chief work as a poet, however, is his verse translation (in Chaucer’s rhyme-royal) of Aegidius’s De Regimine Principum (Regimen of Princes) written for the guidance of Prince Henry who later became King Henry V. In his tone of earnest didacticism Occleve is nearer “moral Gower” than his acknowledged master, Chaucer.

(2)        John Lydgate (1370-1449):

He is the dullest and the most voluminous of English Chaucerians. Compton-Rickett suggests that Occleve’s confessional -A-ords, “But I was dulle” could have been uttered by Lydgate also and, we may suggest, with greater appropriateness. He follows mostly the tradition of allegorical and dream poetry we have already referred to. His poetic work extant runs to more than 30,000 lines! We wonder %vhy he was not included by Pope among his dullards in The Dunciad! He has no ear for music and violates egregiously even the basic principles of prosody. Nor does he have the spirit or the magic touch which Chaucer brought to bear upon his work. However, in their heyday, his principal works, The Troy Book, The Story of Thebes, The Fall of Princes and The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man (something like The Pilgrim’s Progress) pleased numerous readers. His Complaint of the Black Knight was once ascribed to Chaucer. His most lively and the least dull work is his London Lackpenny which describes the woes of a poor man in the streets of London. Modern investigators have, however, come to the conclusion that this work was in fact written by some one else. Lydgate was a Benedictine monk of no mean learning; but learning is no substitute for real poetry. Legouis pertinently questions “whether this Benedictine ever had time to lift his eyes from his books and papers and look at nature.”

(3)        Stephen Hawes (1475-1525):

He belongs to a later generation than Lydgate and Occleve. A. C. Ward observes about him : “He looked upon himself as a follower of Chaucer, though he was in fact a belated medievalist using verse as a medium for sermonical allegories uneasily wedded to chivalrous romance.” He had a wonderful memory and could recite the works of many poets. He admired Lydgate, too, and referred to him as “my^ master’. His most important work was The Passtyme of Pleasure, or The History of Graunde Amoure and La Belle Pucel which appeared at the end of the fifteenth, or the beginning of the sixteenth, century. It is Chaucerian more in prosody than in spirit or content. Hawes uses, no doubt, rhyme royal and decasyllabic couplets, but his avowed intention is the training of a perfect knight and lover with the help of the narration of his allegorical struggles with giants and monsters. Spenser, as Ward avers, was definitely indebted to Stephen Hawes, “for it is evident that The Faerie Queene does perfectly what Hawes had tried but ponderously failed to do; on the other hand it is no longer seriously held that Hawes’ Passtyme of Pleasure was vitally influential in the making of Spenser’s masterpiece.”

(4)        Alexander Barclay/ (1474-1552):

He is best known for his translation of the work of the German poet Sebastian Brant, which he entitled The Ship of Fools. The translation was not direct, but through the medium of a Latin and a French translation. He describes the various personified vices which make voyage in a ship. He satirises the vices of the clergy and the layman alike, but his keenest satire is reserved for the vice of usury. Barclay’s name is also notable in the history of English literature for his introduction of a new genere-the eclogue. He wrote some five eclogues, but he followed not Virgil but Mantuanus. As Legouis observes, his eclogues “have nothing of the idyll, but are moral satires.”

(5)        John Skelton (14607-1529):

He is best known for his coarse and pungent satires which put one in mind more of Langland than Chaucer. His verses are rough, unchiselled, and unmusical. He himself wrote:

Though my rime be ragged,
Tatter’d and jagged,
Rudely rain-beaten,
Rusty and moth-eaten,
If ye taken wel therewith,
It hath in it some pith.

This “pith” is generally very lively and mordant satire which has for its target, very often, the clergy. He is perhaps the only Chaucerian who experimented with new prosodic measures. He was a great scholar but had, like Samuel Butler, a keen taste for grotesqueries. In Colin Clout he lashed the vices of the clergy. In Why come ye not to Court he displayed grit enough to attack the all-powerful Wolsey. The Bouge of Court is an allegorical satire of the kind of The Ship of Fools. It is couched in rhyme royal of Chaucer’s invention.

SCOTTISH   CHAUCERIANS

It is a pleasure passing from the English to the Scottish poetry of the fifteenth century. In fact, the fifteenth century is the most glorious period of old Scottish poetry. Scottish Chaucerians captured more effectively the spirit of Chaucer’s poetry than their English counterparts and what is still more creditable, they exhibited a keener sense of originality in their works. Their poetry is not retrogressive but progressive. Let us consider briefly the work of the most eminent Scottish Chaucerians.

(1)        James I of Scotland (1394-1437):

He is known for his Kings Quair (“King’s Book”) which he wrote while in the captivity of the English. It commemorates a romantic incident of his own life. It was at the age of eleven that the king was captured by the English to remain a prisoner in England for more than eighteen years. During his captivity he once happened to have through his window a glimpse of the stunning beauty of Joan Beaufort, daughter of the Earl of Somerset. On his release in 1424 he was married to her. In his poem he narrates the story of his love sincerely no doubt, but not with the dramatic realism of Chaucer. He mixes much allegory with reality. And then there is the dream (after Chaucer’s Hous of Fame) in which he is wafted to the palace of Venus and counselled by Minerva. James uses the pentameter stanza of seven lines with the rhyme-scheme a b abbe c which Chaucer first employed in his Troilus andCryseyde. As James I (a king) had also used it, it came to be known as “rhyme-royal”.

(2)        Robert Henryson (1425-1500):

He is best known for his Testament ofCresseid in which he recast the conclusion of Chaucer’s Troilus and Ciyseyde. In Chaucer’s poem Cresseid betrays Troilus for Diomede, and Troilus dies heart­broken. Henryson keeps Troilus alive and makes Diomede betray the inconstant Cresseid who is struck by leprosy and goes about begging. Troilus accidentally comes across her and without recognising her gives her alms. But Cresseid knows who he is, and after he is gone, falls to the ground, but before dying writes her will bequeathing a ring to Troilus who later erects a “tomb of marble grey” above her grave. Henryson’s poem is written in the same measure (rhyme-royal) as Chaucer’s and shows the same correctness and musical quality as Chaucer’s poem. His other important work comprises some thirteen Aesopean fables and a version of the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice.

(3)        William Dunbar (1465-1530):

He is a more arresting figure than even Henryson. He is sometimes called “the Chaucer of Scotland”, and not unjustly. He is the greatest British poet between Chaucer and Spenser. His poems are usually short. Many of them, as Legouis observes, are cast in medieval frames. He lacks the observation of Chaucer and Henryson. “But he has to a rare degree-one never reached before him and seldom since- virtuosity of style and versification…He dazzles the eyes and ravishes the ears.” Dunbar” s work falls into three categories as follows. 

(i)         formal allegorv;

(ii)        comic and satirical ver.se; and

(iii)       religious poetry.

The. Golden Targe is the best work of the first category and has been already referred to. Other such works are The Thrisseiandihe Rois celebrating the marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VII of England; and Bewty and the Prisoner. Among the poems’of the second category the most prominent and most characteristic of Dunbar is The Drfnce of the Seven Deidly Synns. The poem is more full of grotesquery and macabre buffoonery than religious edification. It is indeed a weird extravaganza Thirdly, there are many hymns written by him,

(4)        Gavin Douglas (1475?-1522?):

He is well known for his two allegorical poems The Police of Honour and King Hart and his verse translation of Virgil. The former is written in intricate nine-line stanzas and too obviously imitates Chaucer’s Hous of Fame. The latter uses the eight-line stanza of The Monk’s Tale. The only novelty of Douglas is his mixing of humour and pathos in his allegory. His translation of Virgil’sAeneid is in heroic couplets, but he is little worried about correctness or music. His verses jar upon the ear very rudely. His translation seems to be more of the nature of a parody than a translation.

The English Ballad

Introduction:

Strictly speaking, the ballad has no place in a history of English literature. To treat of it as one of the literary forms-such .as the epic, the ode, or the sonnet-is quite erroneous. The true ballad is “lore” rather than what is known as “literature”.

It had its origin and growth at a time before literature, or even the .alphabet, came to be written and read. To find the ballad by the side of such literary genres as the epic and the sonnet is as disturbing as finding the pre-historic ichthvosaur ifi the company of other animals in a.modern zoo. The ichthyosaur has had its y, and so has the ballad. The ballad dies when literature comes, just as the ichthyosaur was extinct before the more highly developed forms of life came to theif own. The ballad flourishes as long as the means of communication are wholly oral. The arrival of the alphabet and literature, written literature, is a herald of the death of the ballad-as of the rest of folk literature whose dissemination and preservation depend entirely on oral means. But what about the ballads “written'” by the poets such as Rossetti, Coleridge, and Scott? These ballads may be’caHed literary ballads but they are not ballads proper, because they do not have folk origin, which is synonymous with a peculiar kind of anonymity.

Origin:

We have emphasized above the folk origin of the true ballad. But when that is said, still there is need for clarification. In fact the origin of the true ballad is shrouded in a nebula, and is more a matter of conjecture than of scientific demonstration. If we examine the etymology of the word “ballad”, we may be helped a little in the job of ascertaining the origin of the ballad. Let us see how. The word “ballad” is derived from the word “bailer,” which means “to dance.” What is exactly the connexion between the ancient ballad and dancing? This question takes us further backwards, to the wider consideration of the origin of all folk literature.

One can easily recognize the universal human instinct for accompanying all regular bodily movements with vocal expressions. This instinct is more clearly marked when regular bodily movements are being made by a group of people, but is to be seen even when a lonely individual is involved. Thus a man singing in a bathroom, even as he is performing the job of cleaning his body with more or less regular movements, can be easily imagined. A group of men heaving at a log or reaping the harvest or of women weaving together break almost invariably and involuntarily into ejaculations with or without meaning. Dancing, as will be readily granted, involves more regular bodily movements than anything else. Group-dancing practised by ancient communities to celebrate this or that festival then must have come to be accompanied by vocal ejaculations, which later must have assumed a more coherent shape. This is how folk literature and the ballad must have originated. Thus the connexion between dancing and the ballad has to be considered in this perspectives.

Authorship:

So the ballad must be taken as a later, and more sophisticated, form of the primitive communal song sung to the accompaniment of ritual dancing in celebration of some occasions. But one important point-which has been controversial-needs elucidation still : the one concerning the authorship of the old ballads. The question is : are these ballads the product of collective effort or that of some particular individuals? It is even today a moot point. But there is another point-and one allied to this one-about which there is no controversy: that the ballad, as it has some sophistication about it which is not shared by the communal song, requires for its conception and writing a kind of artistry, individual or communal. What strikes one about an ancient ballad so abundantly is its downright “impersonality” or “anonymity.” Not that the authorship of these ballads, which have survived the mutations of taste for numerous centuries is indeterminable rather (it is so said by a school of critics) they did not have individual writers as their authors. The whole of the community is credited by these critics with the authorship of these ballads. They contend that a ballad, unlike a literary composition, is not written down by a writer once and for all; rather, on account of being transmitted down the generations by wholly oral means, it is modified by every new generation in accordance with its own predilections. Thus the latest version of a ballad, even though highly different from its original one, is to be considered as authentic as the original. Jeanroy, Abercrombie, and Child, for example, favour this view which emphasizes the impersonality of the ballad, ascribing to it communal rather than individual authorship.

But this view, quite sound fundamentally, yet errs to an extreme and has now been wholly discarded. Legouis points out: “It has even been supposed that a ballad is the spontaneous and joint composition of a group of people. Reflection shows, however, that this theory has little plausibility. There could be agreement forthe purposes of poetry among a number of people only in the sharing of a passion, and the work of an artist or several successive artists has to be recognized in a ballad of any length. It was artist, however primitive, who interpreted the multitude.” We may agree with F. J. Child that so far as a ballad is concerned, “the author counts for nothing” but we cannot say that a ballad has no definite author or authors. A barlad is impersonal in one sense only, namely, that the personality of its author or authors is of little importance in understanding and interpreting it. It expresses the personality not of an individual but of a community. The author never uses personal pronouns nor does he reveal”his personality by comments on the action or characters. Still he does count for something.

Stylistic and Other Conventions:

A ballad is always a narrative which is told in a particular way in accordance with some conventions. As a narrative it generally confines itself to a single episode. In this respect it is easily distinguished from an epic which covers a plethora of episodes spread over a number of years. A ballad, though narrative, is often dramatic in effect, for it has that condensation which is peculiar to drama, and not the sprawling diffuseness of the epic, whose material would, as Aristotle says, suffice for a number of tragedies. The ballad, to quote a critic, “sought to impress by the vivid representation of a single event. To bring home to the hearer its wonder, its pathos, its fatefulness or its horror.” As it was oral literature (something to be sung and heard rather than written and read) it depended for its emotional effect upon music. The refrain sung by the chorus was its peculiar feature. The singer after having sung a few lines was followed by the chorus singing the refrain. The refrain is of more frequent occurrence in the Continental ballads than the English, because the latter were generally of the chronicle type in which the narrative did not allow too frequent interruptions.

Apart from the regular refrain, frequent repetitions are also a common feature of the ancient ballad. Such repetitions, dexterously handled, make for a peculiar intensification of emotional effect rather than simple embellishment of style. Note the use of repetition in the following lines from Clerk Sounders:

“Is there any room at your head, Saunders?
Is there any room at your feet?
Or any room at your side, Saunders,
Where fain I would sleep? “
“There’s no room at my head,
Marg’ret. There’s no room at my feet;
My bed it is full lovely now,
Among the hungry worms I sleep. “

The pathos of these lines does not need any comment.

The style of the ancient ballads is altogether down-to-earth, absolutely free from literary ornament, attitudinization, or empty bow­wow. Its very simplicity and directness are its intrinsic strength. Even such a sophisticated man of letters of Renaissance England as Sir Philic Sidney was compelled to pay a special tribute to the rude strength and simple directness of old English ballads. Writing in his Apology for Poetry about the ballad of Chevy Chase he confided that his heart was moved by it “more than with a trumpet.” And Joseph Addison, the sophisticated “Mr Spectator” writing in the Augustan age, was also full of admiration for the same qualities of thisiballad.

As regards metre and versification also, the ballad has the qualities of simplicity and directness. A ballad follows one of the several traditional stanzaic patterns. The more usual ballad stanza consists of fourj-ines, of eight and six syllables alternately. The second and the fourth lines generally rhyme, and the lines usually follow the iambic movement, but variations are not infrequent

Themes:

Themes of most ballads are provided by the more usual human passions in their intense and unsophisticated form-such as love, lust, hate, and jealousy. As most ancient ballads are the product of a basically pagan, even though nominally Christian culture, very few of them (such as Dives and Lazarus) have religious or biblical themes. One-third of them are about love. Quite a few of them are frankly about the supernatural-such as evil spirits, mermaids, ghouls, and even the Devil himself.Thus in The Demon Lover we have the account of a beautiful woman betrayed by an evil spirit who comes to her in the shape of a handsome man. Some of the ballads indulging in the supernatural keep things shrouded in mystery but still strike the reader with a sense of wonder. Thus in James Harris we meet a woman who in the absence of her husband for seven years marries a carpenter but is lured by an evil spirit who appears to her in the guise of her (presumably) dead husband:

And so together away they went
From off the English shore.

Where they went and with what consequences, and even why, are questions left completely unanswered.

Love and strong but baser human passions provide the usual themes for most ballads. The proverbial jealousy of the stepmother, the cruelty of brothers-usually seven in number-of the woman who desires the love of a man against their wishes, the treachery of a confidant, etc. are to be met with quite often in the old ballads. In Clerk Saunders the lover is killed while asleep by the side of the heroine by her seven brothers. She finds him murdered only when she gets up next morning. In Young Hunting the strong-minded heroine kills her lover after becoming convinced of his infidelity, but he comes in the form of a bird to reveal the murder. In The Cruel Sister we have a sister who kills another out of sheer rivalry. Babylon is the story of an outlaw who tries to make love to two sisters and kills them both on being rejected. He learns that they are his own sisters and then kills himself. A number of ballads called the “Border Ballads” deal with the English-Scottish skirmishes on the border between England and Scotland, bringing out the bravery of the heroes on both sides.

Another group of ballads-some thirty in number-called “Robin Hood Ballads” deals with the exploits of the kind and generous outlaw named Robin Hood and his followers who believed in a kind of socialism. Robin Hood is presented as a friend of the poor and an enemy of the rich whom he robs for the sake of the former. He is a patriot but does not scruple to live on the king’s deer. He rescues women being married to the grooms they hate, to restore them tojheir sweethearts. He corrects the wrongs of justice by hanging the Sheriff and rescuing the men wrongly condemned. And so on.

Dryden as a Satirist

Introduction:

Dryden is one of the greatest English satirists. He is the first practitioner of classical satire which after him was to remain in vogue for about one hundred and fifty years. From the very beginning of his literary career Dryden evinced a sharp satiric bent. He translated some of the satires of the Roman writer Persius when he was only a pupil at Westminster. Further, in his comedies he produced numerous passages of sparkling satire. He keenly studied the satirical traditions of Rome and France and whatever satire England had to offer.

But it was not till he was about fifty that he came to write Absalom and Achitophel-fae, first of the four major satiric works on which his reputation as a poet is based. With his practice he gave a new form and direction to English satire and raised it to the level of French and Roman satire. He made satire not only a redoubtable weapon to chastise personal and public enemies but also an important, if not a very exalted, genre of literature which was later to attract such great writers as Pope, Swift, Addison, and Dr. Johnson. Dryden’s four important satires are:

(1)        Absalom and Acmtopliel.

(2)                 The second part of Absalom and Achitophel chiefly written by Nahum Tate and including about 200 lines by Dryden.

(3)                 The Medal.

(4)                 Mac Flecknoe.

Dryden’s Contribution and Place:

Dryden as a satirist does not fall in with native English tradition of Langland. Gascoigne, Donne, Lodge, Hall, Marston, Cleveland, etc. which was carried on by his contemporaries like Oldham and Samuel Butler. Just as in his non-satiric poetry he reacted against the “romanticism” of the Elizabethans and the confusion, grotesqueness, and formlessness of the imitators of Donne, similarly in his satire he broke away from the harshness, disrespect of form, and denunciatory tone of the English satirists before him. He seems to have looked for inspiration not towards them but-a neo-classicist as he was-towards the Roman satirists-Horace, Juvenal, and Persius-and their French followers, the most outstandina of whom was his adored Boileau.

Both as a critic and as a creative writer, Dryden emphasised and felt the need for artistic control and urbanity of manner. For all successful satire these qualities are of the nature of pre-requisites. It is most essential for a satirist to hide his disgust and moral animus behind a veil of equanimity and urbanity of manner. If he just loses his head at the sight of the object which is to be the target of his attack and comes out with open denunciation or direct name-calling he will not be a successful satirist. A satirist is a propagandist in so far as his effort is to direct the sympathies of the reader into harmoriy with his own and against the object sought to be satirised. Naturally enough, if he speaks too openly from the position of a partisan, he will cut little ice with the reader. So the satirist should not appear too serious-too serious to be taken seriously. Of course he should be very serious, but he should give the impression of being not very serious, or even neutral between the two opposite points of view, one of which his effort is to promote and the other to counteract. He should lessen, as far as possible, the intensity of self-involvement through the employment of some sly indirection of technique. Dryden himself was aware of it when he said that the satirist should make a man “die sweetly,” call him a fool or a rogue without using these “opprobrious terms.” He distinguished between the “slovenly butchering” done by a bad satirist and the dexterous stroke which severs the head but leaves it standing. Seldom does Dryden indulge in open denunciation or invective, but he often uses such indirect techniques as irony, sarcasm, and above all his exuberant wit. It is what primarily distinguishes him from his predecessors who were always open and direct in their attacks. His satire is indirect and, therefore, smooth, urbane, and without angularities or harshness. The same-is the case with his versification. He found a good satiric vehicle in the heroic couplet and chiselled and planed it to brilliance. His versification avoids the harshness deliberately cultivated by his young friend Oldham who also employed the heroic couplet. Observes Hugh Walker:  “It is this combination-smoothness of verse, lucidity of style, urbanity of manner-which makes Dryden’s satire so strikingly original. In English there had hitherto been nothing comparable to it.”

Controlled Contempt:

Dryden’s satire is remarkable-as an artistic expression of controlled contempt. Broadly speaking, the three great English satirists-Dryden, Pope, and Swjft-work through different channels Dryden is a master of scorn or contempt, Pope of rage, and Swift of disgust. Of course, all of them artistically control their respective presiding feeling, else they would not have been “great” satirists. Dryden who in T. S. Eliot’s phrase is “the great master of contempt, unlike his predecessors, does not take any moral airs. Donne, Hall, and Marston seem to be speaking from a moral elevation, as if they were saints whose moral sense has been outraged. Now, this takes for granted a kind of moral pose which debars satire from assuming an appearance of genuineness or sincerity. Once this moral pose has been seen through by the reader, he cannot accept to be dictated or “moved” by the satirist whom he knows to be an erring being like himself. Dryden speaks as one civilised being to others, without pretending to give them lessons in morality. For one thing he eschews all moral and religious issues. The issues he tackles concern politics, taste and good breeding and, only incidentally, morals or religion. Saintsbury observes: “It never does for the political satirist to lose his temper and to rave and rant and denounce with the airofan inspired prophet.” As a critic says, “Dryden assumes no moral airs, firmly controls his satirical spirit and skilfully selects the points and the manner of his attacks…The result is a humorous, disdainful, and yet incisive mockery.”

Dryden’s Elevating Style:

One of Dryden’s unique gifts is his capacity to ennoble and elevate the objects of his satire even when his motive is to demean or depress them. The buoyant vigour of his poetry does not let them touch the lowly ground. T. S. Eliot was the first to direct attention to this point when he wrote in his essay on Dryden: “Much of Dryden’s unique art consists in his ability to make the small into the great, prosaic into the poetic, the trivial into the magnificent.” Even when Dryden pours the vials of his scorn on such characters as Titus Gates, Slingsby Bethel, and Shadwell, he gives them something of heroicdignity. He extends the dimensions of their being (in the case of Shadwell, his physical being too!) and makes them “poetic”. His scorn diminishes and depresses them, but his poetry extends and exalts them. His personal animus is often lost in the energy of creation, so that a Mac Flecknoe becomes much more important than the real man called Shadwell, Corah than Titus Dates, and Shimetthan Slingsby Bethel.
Personal envy and malice shed their grossness and are burnished into real poetry. The end product has little resemblance with the material Dryden starts with. Bonamy Dobree observes: “We have only to think of Mac Fiecknoe to forget Shadwell; to think of Achitophel is to forgetShaftesbury; the persons are lost in history, the satires are  part of our
national consciousness. Everything is all the time compared not with something little but with something great.”‘ That way, Dryden’s modus operandi is much different from Pope’s. When Pope satirises, he diminishes; when Dryden satirises, he exalts.

By exalting arid enlarging the objects of his satire, Dryden also raised the lowly genre of satire to the level of epic. This was a no small achievement. His work Absalom and Achitophel which he gave the title “a Poem” and not “a Satire”-is the first instance in English of a heroic satire. As Ian Jack has pointed out in Augustan Satire, this poem consists of passages peculiar not only to one “kind” of poetry but to many kinds-epic, satire, panegyric, etc. The style seldom becomes low, the kind of which may be employed for an ordinary satire. Even in his mock-heroic satire Mac Flecknoe, which is conceived on a much lower plane than Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden does not use very low or vulgar imagery to punish Shadwell. The mock-heroic effect is created by the element of incongruity generated by the use of high idiom and imagery for such an allegedly “low” character as Shadwell. The use of contemporary locations, stress, etc., has a further ludicrous effect. In Absalom and Achitophel the use of biblical parallels has an exalting effect but in Mac Flecknoe the reference to concrete historical details has the effect of the mock heroic. Thus, in a word, whereas Absalom and Actitophel is a heroic satire, Mac Flecknoe is a mock-heroic satire. However, in both the satirist works through high, and not low or vulgar, imagery and idiom.

This “exalting ” effect on his satiric objects is made possible only by Dryden’s effective and masterful handling of the heroic couplet-a poetic measure which it was to his credit to perfect into an excellent vehicle of satire by giving to it neatness, epigrammatic cogency and smart and felicitous phrasing, and fully exploiting the scope it has for balance and antithesis. To a large extent he regularised the heroic couplet by discouraging the licence taken by the earlier practitioners of this measure. He gave each line five regular stresses and avoided, as far as possible, what is called enjambement or the trailing of sense from one couplet to the next. His couplets are generally end-stopped and after every line there is generally a natural stop. However, he himself took liberties with the location of the caesura and shifted it within the line or even dispensed with it altogether at times. His handling’of the heroic couplet is not as strict and Disciplined as Pope’s. For instance, he sometimes uses an alexandrine instead of a regular pentameter, and sometimes the couplet grows into a triplet. Pope was strict to avoid such licence, and he even took Dryden to task for it. Nevertheless, Dryden’s heroic couplets are more energetic, racy, and spontaneous-looking than Pope’s. As a master of contempt—sometimes expressed in ironical terms—Dryden finds the couplet a very handy medium. Many of Dryden’s couplets come out with sizzling and scarifying intensity, and the sound of some of them, as Saintsbury puts it, resembles the sound of a slap in the face.

Dryden’s Major Satires:

(1)                 Absalom and Achitophel is Dryden’s first and by far his best satire. It was perhaps written at the suggestion of Charles II and was out just a week before the trial of Shaftesbury for sedition. It was thus political in nature and was the representation of the Tory point of view. Its purpose was to malign Shaftesbury as an enemy of peace and the nation and a seducer of the Duke of Monmouth-the King’s illegitimate son. The “poem” is conceived on near-epic dimensions though it contains many elements below the dignity of an epic proper. There is much too little action though considerable tenseness. Much of the interest of this work lies in the satirical portraits of Shaftesbury, the Duke of Buckingham, slingsby Bethel, and Titus Gates veiled behind the biblical or pseudo-biblical figures of Achitophel, Zimri, Shimei, and Corah respectively. The poem, says Sir Edmund Gosse, “really consists of satirical portraits cut and polished like jewels and flashing malignant light from all their facets.” There are some portraits of the allies of the King, too, but they are not so effective. Indeed Dryden is a great master of the satiric portrait which was quite fashionable at that time. Unlike Pope he gives his portrait a typical and, often, universal character and significance, so that the historical character sought to be satirised is often lost in the finished poetic portrait. (Pope was muchtoo malignant ever to lose sight of his target). There is a sensitive variation of tone with which Dryden handles one character after
another, as there is in each case a varying degree of contempt and remorse at the sense of wasted or misdirected talent.

(2)                 The two hundred odd lines which Dryden contributed to the second part of Absalom and Achitophel authored by Nahum Tate constitute its best part. The rest of the poem is beneath criticism, and even contempt. In his contribution.-he satirised Shadwell and Elkanah Settle in the characters of Og and Doeg respectively.

(3)                 The Medal, subtitled A Satire Against Sedition, was again, topical in genesis. In spite of Absalom and Achitophel, Shaftesbury was released from captivity. To commemorate his release the Whigs struck a medal bearing the effigy of their hero. This stung Dryden into action and The Medal was the result. He calls Shaftesbury “the pander of the people’s heart” and takes him to task for his seditious activities which would, Dryden alleges, plunge the country into ruin. He vigorously upholds, as in Absalom and Achitophel, Hobbes’s theory of political covenant.

(4)        Mac Flecknoe is the only satire in which Dryden lashes a personal enemy even though his target-Shadwell-was a vigorous upholder of the Whig cause. The sub-title of the work is “A Satire on the True Blue Protestant Poet, T. S.” Of Course, “T. S.” is Thomas Shadwell. The Poem is of the nature of a lampoon. Dryden ridicules Shadwell by representing him as the fittest heir to Flecknoe-the king of the realm of dullness. Flecknoe was a very voluminous and terribly dull poet of Ireland. He is shown to single out Shadwell, one of his numerous progeny, as

Shadwell alone of all my sons is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity

Then is described the coronation of Shadwell in a mock-heroic style. The poem was to serve as a model for Pope’s Dunciad–one of the most powerful poems of the eighteenth century.

Dryden – The Father of English Criticism

Introduction:

It was no less exacting a critic than Dr. Johnson who decorated Dryden with the medal of the fatherhood of English criticism. “Dryden”, he wrote, “may be properly considered as the father of English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine upon principles the merit of composition.” Dr. Johnson’s tribute to Dryden should not be allowed to imply that no literary criticism existed in England before Dryden. Some literary criticism did exist before him, but much of it was not worth the name.

In general, English literary criticism before Dryden was patchy, ill-organised, cursory, perfunctory, ill-digested, and heavily leaning on ancient Greek and Roman, and more recent Italian and French, criticism. It had no identity or even life of its own. Moreover, an overwhelming proportion of it was criticism of the legislative, and little of it that of the descriptive, kind. Dryden evolved and articulated an impressive body of critical principles for practical literary appreciation and offered good examples of descriptive criticism himself. It was said of Augustus that he found Rome brick and left it marble. Saintsbury avers that Dryden’s contribution to English poetry was the same as Augustus’ contribution to Rome. With still more justice we could say that Dryden found English literary criticism “brick” and left it “marble.”

Dryden’s Critical Works:

Dryden was truly a versatile man of letters. He was a playwright (both tragic and comic), a vigorous and fluent prose writer (justifiably the father of modern English prose), a great poet (one of the best satiric poets of England so far), a verse translator, and, of course, a great literary critic. His literary criticism makes a pretty sizable volume. Much of it, however, is informal, occasional, self-vindicating, and, as F. R. Leavis terms it in his appreciation of Dr. Johnson as a critic in a Scrutiny number, “dated”. Dryden wrote only one formal critical work-the famous essay Of Dramatic Poesie. The rest of his critical work consists of three classical lives (Plutarch, Polybius, and Lucian), as many as twenty-five critical prefaces to his own works, and a few more prefaces to the works of his contemporaries. These critical prefaces are so many bills of fare as well as apologies for the writings to which they are prefixed. In his critical works Dryden deals, as the occasion arises, with most literary questions which were the burning issues of his day, as also some fundamental problems of literary creation, apprehension, and appreciation which are as important today as they were at the very inchoation of literature. He deals, satisfactorily or otherwise, with such issues as the process of literary creation, the permissibility or otherwise of tragi-comedy, the three unities the Daniel-Campion controversy over rhyme versus blank verse, the nature and function of comedy, tragedy, and poetry in general, the function and test of good satire, and many others. Here is, indeed, to steal a phrase from him, “God plenty”. No English literary critic before Dryden had been so vast in range or sterling in quality.

Dryden-the Father of English Descriptive Criticism:

Out of this “God’s plenty” of Dryden’s critical works perhaps the most valuable passages are those which .constitute descriptive criticism. George Watson in his excellent work The Literary Critics divides literary criticism into three broad categories listed below:

(i)         “Legislative criticism, including books-of rhetoric.” Such criticism claims to teach the poet how to write, or write better. Thus it is meant for the writer and not the reader of poetry. Such criticism flourished before Dryden who broke new ground.

(ii)        “Theoretical criticism or literary aesthetics.” Such criticism had also become almost a defunct force. Today it has come back with a vengeance in the shape of various literary theories.

(iii)       “Descriptive criticism or the analysis of existing literary works.” “This”, says Watson, “is the youngest of the three forms, by far the most voluminous and the only one which today possesses any life and vigour of its own.”

Whether or not Dryden is “the father of English criticism” it is fair enough to agree with Watson that “he is clearly the founder of descriptive criticism in English.” All English literary critics before him—such as Gascoigne, Puttenham, Sidney, and Ben Jonson-were critics of the legislative or theoretical kind. None of them concerned himself with given literary works for interpretation and appreciation. Of course, now and then, Dryden’s predecessors did say good or bad things about this or that writer, or this or that literary composition; for instance, Sidney praised Shakespeare and commented on his contemporaries. However, such stray comments were not grounded on any carefully formulated principles of appreciation. “Audiences”, says Dr. Johnson, “applauded by instinct, and poets perhaps often pleased by chance.” Dryden was to repeat Dr. Johnson’s words, “the writer who first taught us to determine upon principles the merit of composition.” Dryden “practised” what he “taught.” He was the first in England “to attempt extended descriptive criticism.” Thus he established a new tradition and did a signal service to literary criticism. Watson says : “The modern preoccupation with literary analysis emerges, patchily but unmistakably, in his prejudiced and partisan interest in his own plays and poems.”

It is to be noted that every one of Dryden’s prefaces to his own works is of the nature of an apologia meant to defend in advance the poet’s reputation by attempting to answer the possible objection likely to be raised. Such self-justification leads him often to the analysis of his creative works and the discussion of principles to determine “the merit of composition.”

Dryden’s Important Descriptive Criticism:

Dryden’s very first critical essay—the dedicatory letter to his first published play The Rival Ladies (1664)-contains the germ of-descriptive criticism. However, the first critical analysis of a literary work in English was the “examen”, of Ben Jonson’s comedy The silent woman embedded in Dryden’s only formal work of criticism- the essay of Dramatic Poesie. This “examen” in Watson’s words, “is the earliest substantial example of descriptive criticism in the language.” Dryden selects The Silent Woman as “the pattern of a perfect play.” Of this play, Dryden proposes to “make a short examen, according to those rules which the French observe.” The intrinsic merit of the “exmen”, unlike the historical, is very limited. It is not only crude, but imprecise; so much so that in Watson’s words “it would not be acceptable as pass-work in any modern school of English.” When facts do not suit his conclusions, Dryden has little scruple in misrepresenting them. For example, he says that the action of the play “lies all within the compass of two houses,” when the fact is that there are three houses and a lane. In spite of such patent inaccuracies, the “examen” is, in the words of David Daiches, “a technical achievement of a high order and probably the first of its kind in English.”

Dryden’s criticism of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Chaucer is much more substantial than this “examen”. His aggressive nationalism distorts to some extent his appreciation of English writers. However, he has quite a few illuminating remarks to make. As regards Shakespeare we find Dryden strangely cowed down by the worthless and vituperative criticism of his contemporary, Rhymer; but his appreciation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is superb and eminently readable even today. His very acute analysis of Chaucer’s characterisation in his Preface to the Fables remains, in the words of Atkin in English Literary Criticism: 17th and 18th Centuries, “something rare and of permanent value in English criticism.”

Dryden’s Liberalism, Scepticism, Dynamism, and Probabilism:

As a literary critic, Dryden was certainly influenced by ancient Greek and Roman critics (such as Aristotle, Longinus, and Horace) and later Italian and contemporary French critics (such as Rapin and Boileau). But this influence did not go beyond a limit. The age in which, he lived accepted this influence in all spheres of literature and Dryden was not isolationist enough to escape the spirit of the age. However, his fundamental liberalism, scepticism, dynamism, and probabilism—not to speak of his admirable sanity and common sense-­helped him to fight quite a few dogmas and conventions imported from abroad. The French neo-classjcists of his age stuck to their Aristotelian guns with tenacity. While paying due respect to Aristotle, Dryden refused to swear by his name. He demolished, for example, the formidable trinity of the so-called “three unities,” the prejudice against tragi-comedy, and the rigorous enforcement of the principle of decorum. He was not a hidebound neo-Aristotelian like his contemporary Rhymer who denounced Shakespeare for his refusal to fall in line with the principles of Aristotle. Dryden seems to have had belief, like Longinus and the romantics, in inspiration and the inborn creative power of the poet. He favoured the romantic extravagances of Shakespeare and candidly criticised ancient Roman and contemporary French drama which strictly followed all the “rules.” Of course, he favoured “regularity” and deference to some basic “rules” of composition, but, unlike, say, Rhymer, he refused to worship these rules and to consider them as substitutes for real inspiration and intensity of expression. The bit and the bridle are necessary, but there has to be a horse first. “Now what, I beseech thee,” asks he “is more easy than to write a regular French play, or more difficult than write an irregular English one, like those of Fletcher, or of Shakespeare?”

Dryden’s intellectual scepticism, which Louis I. Bredvold stresses in The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden, was greatly responsible for his liberal and unorthodox outlook. His probabilism as a literary critic is both his strength and weakness. While discussing an issue, he argues, very often, from both the sides and leaves the conclusion hanging in the air. In the essay Of Dramatic Poesie, for instance, he compares ancient and modern drama, Elizabethan playwrights of his country and French play wrights of his own age, and rhyme and blank verse; but these issues are discussed by four interlocutors, and Dryden (though very easily recognisable in Neander) is, apparently at least, non-committal. His somersault on the question of the relative merit of rhyme and blank verse may be variously quoted as a time-serving trick or as an example of his dynamism, but the undeniable fact remains that as a literary critic he is flexible enough to keep the issue open. Watson remarks : “Dryden’s whole career as a critic is permeated by what we might tactfully call his sense of occasion: Pyrrhonism, or philosophical scepticism, liberated him from the tyranny of truth.” And further : “Dyden is remarkable as a critic not only for the casual ease with which he contradicts himself, but for the care he takes in advance to ensure that there will not be much in future to contradict.”

Dryden’s “Historic Sense”:

Dryden’s impatience with classical “rules” arose mainly from his abundant “historic sense.” He was the first critic who emphasized the dvnamic character of literature. Literature, according to him. is  expressive of the genius of a nation, and it necessarily keeps pace with the times. It is simply not possible to formulate a body of rules applicable to literatures of various nations in various ages. He affirmed that what was liked by ancient Greeks “would not satisfy an English audience.” He refused to believe that ancient Greeks and Romans “were models for all time and in all languages.” He was not, therefore, cowed down by the authority of Aristotle. He declared: “It is not enough that Aristotle had said so, for Aristotle drew his models of tragedy from Sophocles and Euripides: and, if he had seen ours, might have changed his mind”. This outspoken assertion comes partly from Dry den’s cultural patriotism” but partly from his keen historic sense.

Dryden-the Father of Comparative Criticism:

Commenting upon Dryden’s “examen” of The Silent Woman in the essay Of Dramatic Poesie, Watson says: “The chief triumph of the examen lies in its attempt at comparative criticism, in its balancing of the qualities of the English drama against those of the French. It is undeniably the first example of such criticism in English, and among the very earliest in any modern language. “Dryden, says Scott-James, “opens a new field of comparative criticism.” In the course of his critical works, Dryden critically compares Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Chaucer and Ovid, Chaucer and Boccaccio, Horace and Juvenal, ancient and modern drama, contemporary French and English drama, Elizabethan and Restoration drama, rhyme and blank verse as vehicles of drama, and so on. This method of comparative criticism is very rewarding and illuminating and a favourite instrument of modern ritics.

The Eighteenth Century—an Age of Prose and Reason

Introduction:

The eighteenth century, says Legouis in A Short History of English Literature, “viewed as a whole has a distinctive character.” It was “the classical age” in English literature, and, as such, held and practised some basic principles concerning life and literature. Even then one should avoid sweeping generalizations/The temptation to generalize-the eighteenth century particularly-is hard to overcome.

“Few centuries,” says George Sherburn in A Literary History of. England edited by Albert C. Baugh, “have with more facility been reduced to a formula tHan the eighteenth….Few centuries, to be sure, have demonstrated more unity of character than superficially considered the eighteenth seems to have possessed.” However, it is fallacious to believe that there is a clear cleavage between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth. Observes Sherburn: “The ideas of the later seventeenth century continue into the eighteenth.” At any rate, in the eighteenth century there was the completion of the reaction against Elizabethan romanticism. This reaction had started in the seventeenth century with Denham, Waller, and Dryden. Pope and his contemporaries stood on the other extreme to Elizabethan romanticists and ushered in “the age of prose and reason,” as Matthew Arnold characterises the eighteenth century. Now, let us see how and how far the eighteenth century was “an age of prose and reason.”

Dominance of Reason:

Pope and his followers give much importance to reason in their modes of thinking and expressing. Reason may variously manifest itself as good sense, rationalism, intellect, wit or just dry logicism, but it is definitely against all excessive emotionalism, sentimentalism, extravagance, eccentricity, lack of realism, escapism, and even imagination. It is easy to see that in the eighteenth century reason was exalted to a shibboleth. Cazamian maintains: “The true source and the real quality of English classicism are of a psychological nature. Its ideal, its characteristics, its method, all resolve themselves into a general searching after rationality.” This search which started in the age of Dryden culminated in the age of Pope. Cazamian maintains in this connexion: “One may say that the age of Pope lives more fully, more spontaneously, at the pitch of that dominant intellectuality, which during the preceding age was chiefly an irresistible impulse, a kind of contagious intoxication.” This reign of reason and common sense continued into the middle of the century when new ideas and voices appeared, and the precursors of the English romantics of the nineteenth century appeared on the scene. All the important writers of the age-­Swift, Pope, and Dr. Johnson—glorified reason both in their literary and critical work and, conversely, made unreason and bad sense the recurring targets of their satire. Swift in the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels, for example, chastises Yahoos for being creatures of impulse, without reason or common sense. On the other hand, Houyhnhnms are glorified as tenacious adherents of these qualities. The satire on Yahoos is. by implication, a satire on the human beings who resemble them so closely. Thus the fourth book is the most terrible satire on human lack of good sense and reason.

Imitation of the Ancients:

This glorification of reason also- manifests itself in the form of the stress laid on the imitation of the “ancients,” that is, the Greek and Roman writers of antiquity. It was thought contrary to reason to be led by. one’s own impulses and eccentricities and to devise one’s own idiom for expression. Too much of subjectivity was considered irrational. It was believed that a man should cultivate unrefined and “natural” taste by subjecting it to the influence of classical writers. Much stress was laid on controlling and disciplining one’s heady feelings and wild imagination and the personal way of expression with the help of the study of the classics. We find in this century many translations and adaptations of the classics as also their “imitations,” not to speak of their rich echoes in most works of the century. The eighteenth century-particularly its first half-is also called the classical age of English literature on account of two reasons which W. H. Hudson enumerates as follows:

(i)         “…the poets and critics of this age believed that the works of the writers of classical antiquity (really of the Latin writers), presented the best of models and the ultimate standards of literary taste.”

(ii)        “…like these Latin writers they had little faith in the promptings and guidance of individual genius, and much in laws and rules imposed by the authority of the past.”

In 1700 Walsh wrote to Pope: “The best of the modern poets in all languages are those that have nearest copied the ancients.” Swift in The Battle of the Books showed the supremacy of the ancients over all the succeeding writers. Walsh’s expression copied the ancients should not lead one to believe that eighteenth-century writers were no more than copyists and as such are open to the charge of plagiarism. What they copied was only the good taste and reason of the ancients. Well did Pope observe: “Those who say our thoughts are not our own because they resemble the Ancients’ may as well say our Faces are not our own because they are like our Fathers.” Thus the ancients were to be respected as guides and models, not as tyrants. Among the ancients the most respected were the Latin writers of the Age of Augustus and among them, too, particularly Virgil and Horace. The one reason why this age is called the Augustan age is this. However, the English “ancients” like Chaucer and Spenser were not respected. Addison in his critical poem Account of the Greatest English Poets observes about The Faerie Queene :

…. But now the mystic tale mat pleased of yore
Can charm an understanding age no more.

Chaucer is dismissed as a “rude barbarian” who tries in vain to make the readers laugh with his jests in “unpolished strain.” Thomas Rymer savagely criticised Shakespeare.

“First Follow Nature”:

A. R. Humphreys observes: “Basically, the critical injunction which gained the widest, indeed, almost universal, acceptance was the call to “follow Nature”. In the famous lines from Pope’s Essay oh Criticism advice is tendered to writers:        

First follow Nature, and your judgement frame
By her just standard, which is still the same :
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear unchanged, and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of Art.

Pope’s “Nature” was not the “Nature” of the romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Augustans were not much interested in forests, flowers, trees, birds, etc. which inspired poets like Wordsworth. Nor did Pope and his contemporaries mean by “Nature” that Nature which, td use the words of Louis I. Bredvold, “Sir Isaac Newton had recently interpreted in terms of mathematical physics, in his Principia Mathematica (1687); they could hardly have gone to physics for a literary standard, and they were moreover weH aware that their concept of Nature antedated Newtefffeyienturies.” For them Nature indicated, what Bredvohtxalls, “a rational and intelligible -moral order in theliniverse, according to which the various experiences of mankind could be confidently and properly vahled.” Nature to them meant, in the words of A. R. Humphreys, “the moral course of the world or as ideal truth by which art should be guided.” Man’s subjective feelings were thus discreditediand sacrificed to “tne laws of Nature.” As Basil Willey observes in The Nineteenth-­Century Background, “the individual mind was carefully ruled out of the whole scheme.” Even in the field of religion, reason and Nature ruled the roost. This was the age of the spread of natural religion or Deism which believed in the existence of God but disbelieved in any revealed religion, not excepting Christianity. People were also talking about,”natural morality.” The doctrines of the reason-loving Deists were repudiated by orthodox theologists, not passionately but with reason.

Rules:

This eighteenth-century emphasis on Nature often took the form of the emphasis on the “rules” formulated by the ancients. These rules were supposed to be of universal applicability. Nature was the criterion of propriety, and the rules of the ancients were to be respected as they, in the words of Pope, “are Nature still but Nature methodised.” And further,

Nature like liberty, is but restrained
By the same laws which first herself ordained.

The tendency to adhere to the rules went against the eccentricities and irrationalities of individual genius. The eighteenth century was. infact, an age of formalism in ai! spheres-literature architecture, gardening, and even social etiquette. A critic maintains: ‘Just as a gentleman might not act naturally (that is, in accordance with his impulses), but must follow exact rules in doffing his hat, or addressing a lady, or entering a room, or offering his snuff-box to a friend, so the writers of this age lost individuality and became formal and artificial.”

Against Enthusiasm and Imagination:

The adoration of reason naturally implied a keen distrust of enthusiasm and imagination which could lead a man to -ludicrous extremes. EighteeBtitcentufyliterature is, onsequently, devoid of the enthusiasm, elemental passion, mysterious suggestiveness, and heady imagination which characterize romantic literature. These romantic characteristics were discredited as they led one to violate Nature. If a writer abandoned himself to emotions or impulses, or let his imagination run away uncontrolled, the result could be disastrous for his writing. Sir Richard Blackmore observed in his “Essay on Epick Poetry” (in -Essays upon Various Subjects) that the writers of old romances “were seized with an irregular Poetic phrenzy, and having Decency and Probability in Contempt, fill’d the world with endless Absurdities.” Swift in “Letter to a Young Clergyman” expresses his distrust of the passionate eloquence of a particular preacher. “I do not see,” says he, “how this talent of moving the passions can be of any great use towards directing Ghristian men in the conduct of their lives.” In Section IX of Tale of a Tub he scarifies the Puritan enthusiasm by representing it as wind. Likewise the Earl of Shaftesbury in his Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708) lashes, religious enthusiasm and fanaticism.

Prose:

The eighteenth century was doubtlessly an age of great prose, but not of great poetry. When Matthew Arnold-calls it an age of prose, he suggests that even the poetry of the period was of the nature of prose, or versified prose. It:is he who observed that Dryden and Pope are the-classics not of our poetry but of prose. Among the greatest prose writers of the age are Addison, Steele, and Swift. They took English prose from the antiquity of Burton, Browne, and others to the balance, clarity, and simplicity of the modern times. They made prose functional, using it not for impressing but enlightening the reader. In the field of prose the reaction against romantic extravagance and involvedness, started by Dryden, was brought to a logical conclusion by the prose writers of the age of Queen Anne mentioned above.

In poetry, however, the age has not to show much excellence. Imagination and passion came to be^replaoed by the ideals of clearness, perspecuity, and beauty of expression. These ideals appear to some as the ideals of good prose, not good poetry. Regularity, order, and artistic control are certaintly desirable but no substitutes for poetic talent or inspiration. One may be tempted to ask with Roy Campbell: “They use snaffle and the curb, all right. But where’s the bloody horse?” Comparing the poetry and prose of the eighteenth century, Long observes: “Now for the first time we must chronicle the triumph of English prose. A multitude of practical interests arising from the new social and political conditions demanded expression not simply in books, but more especially in pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers. Poetry was inadequate for such a task: hence the development of prose, of the ‘unfettered word’ as Dante calls it-a development which astonishes us by its rapidity and excellence. The graceful elegance of Addison’s essays, the terse vigour of Swift’s satires, the artistic finish of Fielding’s novels, the sonorous eloquence of Gibbon’s history and of Burke’s orations-these have no parallel in the poetry of the age. Indeed, poetry itself became prosaic in this respect, and it was used not for the creative works of imagination but for essays, for satire, for criticism-for exactly the same practical ends as was prose. The poetry of the first half of the century, as typified by the work of Pope, is polished and witty enough, but artificial; it lacks fire, fine feeling, enthusiasm, the glow of the Elizabethan Age and the moral earnestness of Puritanism. In a word, it interests us as a study of life, rather than delights or inspires us by its appeal to the imagination. The variety and excellence of prose works, and the development of a serviceable prose style, which had been begun by Dryden, until it served to express clearly every human interest and emotion,-these are the chief literary glories of the eighteenth century.”

The Neo-Classical School of Poetry

‘Introduction:

Generally, the period between 1680 and 1750 is called the Augustan age in English literature, for frequent comparisons were made between the literary activity of the England of this period and that of the Rome of Emperor Augustus which produced such poetic geniuses as Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and many others. Dr. Johnson in his characteristic way said that Dryden did for English poetry what Augustus had done for the city of Rome—”he found it brick and left it marble.”

Dryden and Pope were the greatest poets of the Augustan age. They conscientiously looked to the writers of Greek and Roman antiquity for guidance and inspiration. However, most of all, they were influenced by the Roman poets of the age of Augustus. They discredited the tradition of the decadent metaphysicals and established a new school of poetry which has since come to be known as the neo­classical school of English poetry. Though something had already been done before Dryden by Denham and Waller yet much was left to be done by Dryden himself and, still later, by Pope. The neo-classicism of Dryden and Pope was representative of the spirit of the age. The Restoration age marked the close of the genuine “romanticism” of the Elizabethan period and also the decadent romanticism of the Jacobean and Caroline periods. The creative imagination, exuberant fancy, and extravagance of the past had no appeal for an age which saw the establishment of the Royal Society and the inauguration of a new era of experimental science. A critical spirit was aboard, and men stopped taking things for granted. The spirit of the age was analytic and inquisitive, not synthetic and naively credulous. It put a greater stress on reason and intellect than on passion and imagination. The neo­classical poetry of Dryden, Pope, and their contemporaries was a manifestation of this new spirit.

Respect for the Ancients:

Cazamian observes: “The literary transition–ffom the Renaissance to the Restoration is nothing more or less than the progressive movement of a spirit of liberty at once fanciful, brilliant, and adventurous towards a rule and discipline both in inspiration and in form.” The neo-classicists were champions of common sense and reason and were in favour of normal generalities against the whims and eccentricities of individual genius. These normal generalities went under the term “Nature.” Pope’s advice to writers was to “follow Nature.” Curiously enough, the slogan of Rousseau and the English romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge who reacted against the school of Pope, was also the same. But “Nature” for the romantics meant something entirely different-primitive simplicity and the world of forests, flowers, birds, streams, etc. Dryden and Pope laid special stress on the imitation of the ancients and the observance of the rules formulated or adhered to by them. For the rules of the ancients were, in the words of Pope, “Nature still, but Nature methodised.” Neo­classical poets abundantly translated and adapted classical works. Thus Dryden gave a verse translation of Virgil, and Pope of Homer. These.translations did not literally adhere to their originals. Thus, Bentley observed that Pope’s translation of Homer was a good poem but it was “not Homer”. What is more important than literal fidelity, however, is the attempt at capturing the spirit of the original. And this Dryden and Pope did pretty well. Even the original works of the English neo-classicists have rich echoes of classical writers.

Influence of the French Neo-classicists:

The neo-classical school of Dryden and Pope was much influenced by the neo-classical French school of the age of Louis XIV which goes down in history as the “golden” or “Augustan” age of French literature. According to W. H. Hudson vnAn Outline History of English Literature, “the contemporary l.iterature of France was characterised by lucidity, vivacity, and—by reason of the close attention given to form—correctness, elegance, and finish…It was moreover a literature in which intellect was in the ascendant and the critical faculty always in control.” It was a literature of good sense and regularity and order.

One of the important tenets of the French neo-classical criticism was the theory of kinds or genres. Traditional criticism in the age of Dryden and Pope also worked through a reverent attention to these genres which the French critics had derived from the classics. Aristotle, the godhead of alj criticism for the neo-classicists, had dealt with only two genres-epic and tragedy. But by the middle of the seventeenth century many more genres came to be recognized and fit styles for them came to be fixed. The appropriateness of the style to the genre-the principle of decorum-came to be exalted to a veritable shibboleth. A hierarchy of genres found its establishment/John Dennis in 1704 sooke for his aee when in “The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry” he divided all genres into high and low groups, the first group-comprising epic, tragedy, and “greater lyrical poetry”, (that is, the Pindaric ode) and the other, comedy and satire, the liftle ode, and elegiac and pastoral poems. It is of interest to note that the ancients had to offer no example of the genre of mock epic. The English poets adopted this important genre from the French neo-classicists. The most influential mock epic was Boileau’s Le Lutrin which provided a model for such excellent English mock epics as Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe, Garth’s The Dispensary, and Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and even The Dunciad.

Realism, Didacticism, and Satire:

Much of romantic poetry is marked by an egregious lack of realism amounting at times to sheer escapism. Classicism, on the other hand, puts special emphasis on concrete reality and aims pre­eminently at edification and improvement of the reader. That is why much of classical poetry is realistic, didactic, and satiric. Almost all classical poets were men of action very much in the thick of life and its pressing affairs. They wrote with a very clear and concrete purpose, not just for the fun of it or for fulfilling a pressing necessity of self-revelation. Political, religious, and even personal satire became in the Augustan era the vogue of the day. If the neo-classical poet was not satiric, he was, at least, sure to be didactic. It is very rarely that we come across in this age such a poem as Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, which is “a poem without a purpose” aiming neither at instruction nor at ridicule nor chastisement through satire. To quote some instances, Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel and The Medal are political satires, and his Mac Flecknoe a personal satire. Pope’s most important poems, like The Dunciad, The Rape of the Lock, and The Epistle to Afbuthnot, are all satires. Most of the rest of his poems, like his “Moral Essays”, are didactic in aim. A subject on which neo-classical poets showed much brilliance was dullness—the dullness of some specific rivals or the collective dullness of all of them put together. The Dunciad and Mac Flecknoe show how dullness can serve as a target of brilliant satire. Some of neo-classical poems are too much topical in nature, and all of them are full of contemporary references, and they need exhaustive annotation to become comprehensible to the reader of today who is unfamiliar with the atmosphere out of which these poems grew and which was very well known to the readers of that age. The poems of the romantics, on the other hand, are largely free from contemporary references, for the romantic poet, generally speaking, is not a man of action and affairs and scarcely lives on the common, humdrum earth. He lives, instead, in a world of his own fancy with

magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

“Vers de Societe”:

One explanation for the realism of neo-classical poetry is that the neo-classical poet wrote as a civilised man speaking to other civilised men, not, like a romantic poet, an eerie voice’ ‘speaking from the clouds.” The works of neo-classical poets were appraised not in literary journals but in drawing-rooms and coffee-houses. Neo­classical poetry, then, is what the French call vers de societe. The aim of the neo-classical poet was not only self-revelation but arguing and convincing with the help of either real logic or rhetoric (which has been called “specious logic”). Satire also came in handy for the purpose. Being in all respects a normal member of the community, the neo-classical poet made it a point to write poems on festive or important public occasions such as the coronation of a king, the recovery from illness of a dignitary, a national victory in a battle, and so on. Dryden’s Astraea Redux commemorated the coronation of Charles II, his Annus Mirabilis had for its theme the Great Fire of 1666 and the defeat of the Dutch Fleet in the same year, his Medal was occasioned as a reaction against the jubilance of the Whigs at the release of the Earl of Shaftesbury in 1681 and their striking a medal in his honour. Addison’s The Campaign was written to commemorate the Allies’ victory in the battle of Blenheim. Much of Swift’s poetry is also occasional in nature. Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and some other poems also got started off by one real happening or another.

Being vers de societe, it is natural for neo-classical poetry to be town poetry, or even “drawing-room poetry” having little contact with the “barbarous” world of nature which to some romantics appealed as a deity and to all as a source of inspiration and a perennial theme for poetry. About this aspect of neo-classical poetry W. H. Hudson observes : “It is almost exclusively a “town” poetry, made out of the interests of ‘society’ in the great centres of culture. The humbler aspects of life are neglected in it, and it shows no real love of nature, landscape, ortountry things and people.” The neo-classicists were averse to the description of natural beauty, however appealing. Pope in his maturity disapproved of his earlier poem Windsor Forest because in it, to quote himself, “mere description held the place of sense.”

No Imagination or Passionate Lyricism:

Being cultured men of society, neo-classical poets held all passion as suspect, as something primitive and uncultured. Lyricism therefore declined and very few good lyrics were produced in the age of Dryden and pope. Dryden did write a few good lyrics. “but they. too. are “classical” in spirit, for in them he was fully objective and rigorously correct. He never gave a free play to his emotions. In neo­classical poetry wit and intellect took the place of passion and imagination. It is only now and then that the neo-classical poet deals with human passion, as for instance Pope in his Eloisa to Abelard. Pope mostly dealt with poetry as if it were just an intellectual exercise to please himself and his friends and to frighten his enemies. He liked such poetic toys as acrostics, puzzles, puns, anagrams, and so on which showed his intellect and art rather than any deep poetic passion or inspiration. For instance, consider the following couplets by him which are expressive of wit rather than romantic poetic fury :

“Epigram engraved on the collar of a dog which I gave to His Royal Highness”

I am his Highness ‘dog at Kew,
Pray, tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

You Beat your Pate, and Fancy Wit will come;
Knock as you please, there’s nobody at home.

“Epitaph”

Here Francis Charters lies. Be civil;
The rest God knows—perhaps the Devil!

“The Balance of Europe” Now Europe‘s balanc’d, neither side prevails:
For nothing ‘d left in either of the Scales.

Expression-the Heroic Couplet:

The neo-classical poet put a special premium upon beautiful and effective expression. He did not mind even if the thought sought to be expressed was stale. As Pope puts it,

True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d,
What oft was thought but ne ‘er so well express ‘d.

The heroic couplet became with neo-classic poets the most favoured of verse measures. It was Dryden who took this measure from Waller and Denham and polished it into a very effective medium of narrative and satiric poetry. It was left for Pope to perfect the heroic couplet and to employ it as the effective expression for all kinds of poetry. R. P. C. Mutter and Kinkead-Weekes observe in Introduction to Selected Poems and Letters of Alexander Pope : “From Dryden’s extremely varied achievement in the heroic couplet Pope learnt how it could be made flowing and easy, or packed and concise, how it could be wittily antithetical or tenderlv elegiac.” Whereas neo-classica! poets expressed themselves mostly in thefieroic couplet or such “recognized” measures as the heroic stanza (making exception for the irregular and intricate measures of the so-called Pindaric ode), romantic poets revived a large number of stanzaic patterns and invented many on their own. In the age of Dryden and Pope much stress was laid on the “correctness” of sentiment and form, and the heroic couplet with all its neatness and precision embodied well the desired correctness of form.

The Heroic Couplet

What is the Heroic Couplet?

A heroic couplet is a group of two lines rhyming at the end, both the lines being iambic pentameters. Now, what is an iambic pentameter? A pentameter is a line consisting of five “feet”; and if every one of these five feet is an “iamb” or “iambic foot,” the line is an iambic pantameter. An iambic foot consists of two syllables, the first of which is unstressed and the second, stressed. For instance, the word divide makes an iambic foot in verse for its first syllable (di) is unstressed and the second (vide) is stressed. In the same way the words given below make one iambic foot each:

Belie, delay, remain, between, and delight.

Now let us give an example of an iambic pentameter. This line occurs in Pope’s Epistle to a Lady:

But what are these to great Atossa ‘s mind?

This line can be “scanned” (that is, analysed metrically) as follows:

But what / are these / to great /Ato / ssa ‘s mind

Each vertical line divides one foot (here, one iambic foot) from the other, each cross indicates an unstressed syllable, and each horizontal line, a stressed syllable. It is by reading the line aloud that we can judge which syllable is to be stressed and which not. The iambic pentameter given above is the first ofthetwo lines making up a heroic couplet. Let us now give the second line.

Scarce once herself, by turns all Womankind! It may be scanned as follows:

Scarce once   herself buy turns- all mankind

Both the lines together constitute a heroic couple, as either of them is an iambic pentameter, and they rhyme at the end.

But what are these to great Atossa’s mind?
Scarce once herself, by turns all Womankind!

Now this is a normal heroic couplet. But the heroic couplet does admit of occasional variations. All good wielders of thetiefoic couplet use these variations to counteract the possibility of monotony caused by its peculiar singsong. We will discuss these variations a little later, but let us here give a few more characteristics of a normal or regular heroic couplet. They are as follows:

(i)         The heroic couplet makes a self-contained unit, just as a stanza. It is, in fact, a stanza in its own right. Sometimes, however, the sense is allowed to overflow from one couplet to the next.

(ii)        Tn each of the two lines of a heroic couplet there are generally two pauses (or stops)—one at the end (end-stop) and the other somewhere in the middle (middle-stop or caesura), usually after the fourth of sixth syllable, and very often indicated by a punctuation mark such as a comma or a semicolon. In the first line of the heroic couplet quoted above, the caesura comes after the word these (fourth syllable) and in the second, afterjhe syllable self (again, the fourth syllable).

(iii)       The rhyme is limited to the ending syllables (mind and kind) both of which are accented.

Some Variations:

(1)        A heroic couplet may not always form a self-contained unit. The sense may be allowed to flow from one couplet to the next. In other words, the couplet may not be a closed one having a strong pause at the end. This overflowing of the sense from one couplet to the next is called enjambement. Almost all the wielders of the heroic couplet,including Dryden and Pope, allowed themselves consideable liberty for enjambement. Consider, for instance, how Keats uses the couplets at the beginning of Endymion:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness, but still keep
A bower quiet for us, and sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

In this case the sentence structure is independent of the metre. The lines are not end-stopped.

(2)                 Sometimes the two lines (or one of the two lines) of a heroic couplet may not be exact pentameters. Instead of some iambic feet the poet may use some other kind of feet. And sometimes even the number of syllables in each line may not be ten. Thus in Keats’s passage quoted above, the first two lines consist of eleven syllables each.

(3)                 Sometimes the caesura may not come at all. The absence of the caesura makes for speed.

(4)                 Sometimes the rhyme may not be limited to the ending syllables; it may extend to the two ending syllables of each line. Such a rhyme is called a double rhyme or feminine rhyme for example:

Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that dies in thinking. –from Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel

(5)        Sometimes (but seldom) the heroic couplet may give place to a triplet, that is, a set of three iambic pentameters all rhyming together or two iambic pentameters followed by a rhyming alexandrine (an iambic hexameter). Dryden was particularly devoted to the triplet-for which Pope took him to task.

Its Good Qualities and Defects:

Like all pther verse measure the heroic couplet has its good qualities as also’ efects. By its very nature the heroic couplet makes the fittest medium for certain kinds of poetry, but not for others. Its rapidity, balance, and epigrammatic flavour render it suitable particularly for satiric and narrative poetry, and the very same qualities make it unsuitable for elegiac, tender, passionate, or lyrical verse. But we cannot be too categorical in our statement, as in the hands of a master like Pope the heroic couplet can become a pliant medium for the expression of every mood and purpose. Pope’s Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, a wonderful elegy, is in heroic couplets. So is his passionate poem Eloisa to AbelardR. P. C. Mutter and M. Kinkead-Weekes observe in the Preface to the Selected Poems and Letters of Alexander Pope : “From Dryden’s extremely varied achievement in the heroic couplet Pope learnt how it could be made flowing and easy, or packed and concise, how it could spit like a firecracker or soar with eloquence, how it could be wittily antithetical or tenderly elegiac. The couplet may look monotonous as we see it on the page, but when we read it with attention as the poet’s art directs us, it is a highly flexible style. Pope used it for nearly all his poetry-for all his greatest-because he could do anything with it that he wanted”. The following may be considered the ‘good qualities” of the heroic couplet

(i)         As we have said, the heroic couplet makes for speed and brevity of expression. There is nothing languid or slumbrous about it as is the case with such verse-forms as the Spenserian stanza.

(ii)        The heroic couplet admits of balance and antithesis which lend rhetorical colour to verse and render it more forceful for the purpose of argument. Dryden was the greatest arguer in verse.

(iii)       Its brevity and balance give the heroic couplet an epigrammatic flavour. Pope is among all the English poets the most quotab’0 for he abounds in epigrams (short, witty, proverb-like sayings) which are evidently not possible with long stanzaic forms.

(iv)       All the qualities enumerated above make the heroic couplet the most eligible medium of satiric poetry. It is not an accident that the golden age of English satire was also the golden age of the heroic couplet. For one thing, the satirist can deliver in heroic couplets his appraisal of the satiric target in the form of short and pithy points which look like proverbs or axioms impossible to be controverted. Many of Dryden’s heroic couplets, according to George Saintsbury, have the sound of an actual slap in the face.

(v)        The use of the heroic couplet demands a peculiar discipline from the poet. The conformity of the sentence structure to the metre demands that he should think not in long sentences but couplets. Thus he cannot afford to be slack or flaccid.

Here are some of the “defects” of the heroic couplet;

(i)         The greatest “defect” of the heroic couplet is the possibility of its growing monotonous. In the hands of not so good a poet it runs the very serious danger of degenerating into mere singsong. However, a poet IjJsgLDryden or Pope knows how to vary his metre, and thus avoid monotony. This charge against the heroic couplet can, in fact, be adduced against any other measure too. Thus many critics have disapproved of the cloying monotony of such a complex form as the Spenserian stanza, and at least F. R. Leavis has criticised what he calls the ritualistic colour of Milton’s blank verse.

(ii)        Another “defect” is the incapability of the heroic couplet to serve as a fit measure for poetry other than satiric and narrative-specially, tender or passionate poetry. But here again the defect is not so much in the measure as in the poet. We have already cited the instance of Pope who could do anything with the heroic couplet. However, it has to be admitted that very few tender, elegiac, or passionate poems have been written in heroic couplets. Few lyricists have used this form.

(iii)       The rhetorical colour of the heroic couplet detracts from the sincerity of sentiment sought to be expressed by the poet. The poet using heroic couplets sounds like a public speaker and not a person giving sincere expression to sincere feelings. You can argue through heroic couplets, but you cannot move anybody with them.

The History of the Heroic Couplet and Some Poems Written in
it:

The heroic couplet was first used by Chaucer who adopted it perhaps from old French verse. Some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as also the Prologue are in couplets. At the end of the sixteenth century, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare made various uses of the heroic couplet. Spenser’s Mother Hubbard’s Tale (1597) is a satiric narrative in heroic couplets. In Michael Drayton’s England’s Heroical Epistles, again, we find the use of the couplet. The last two lines of every sonnet by Shakespeare constitute a heroic couplet. Some of these couplets look curiously like the couplets of Dryden and Pope. For instance, consider the following one;

For we. which now behold these present days,
Have eves to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

Edward Fairfax in his translation -of Tasso’s Godfrey of Bulloigne! (1600) used the same measure, and was riarned by Dryden himself as one of the earliest reformers of English prosody. The group of Elizabethan satirists including Donne, Lodge, Hall and Marston also had recourse to the couplet, but their couplets are uneven and rugged and flagrantly disdainful of its discipline. Sir John Beaumont wrote his Bosworth Field in couplets which are instinct with sweetness and have an even flow. Sir George Sandys used the heroic couplet in his Metamorphoses (1621—26); but his couplets were neither pithy nor uniform. Incidentally, Sandys was praised by Dryden as “the best versifier of the former age.” Milton used heroic couplets for four of his Cambridge poems, but in their freedom, they look more like rhymed blank verse. Edmund Waller was recognised by both Dryden and Pope as their master. Denham wrote his, Cooper’s Hill in couplets which resemble Waller’s. Cleveland’s political poems also used the heroic couplet. His couplets are not smooth, but they have the important quality of directness.

With Dryden and Pope we come to the real masters of the heroic couplet. They made the couplet regular and correct and at the same time a very flexible and polished medium of poetic expression. Dryden wrote no fewer than thirty thousand couplets. He used the couplet not only for his narrative and satiric poems like Absalom and Achitophel, The Medal, Mac Flecknoe, and The Hind and the Panther, but also for his “heroic tragedies” like Aureng-Zebe and The Conquest of Granada. Pope perfected the couplet. All his important poems, like The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, Essay oq Man, and Essay on Criticism, are in couplets. Pope’s contemporaries like Addison, Prior, Gay, Swift, and Ambrose Philips also employed the heroic couplet for their numerous works. After them the most important and the “weightiest” wielder of the heroic couplet is Dr. Johnson whose Vanity of Human Wishes is his greatest work. The vogue of the couplet declined after him as romanticism spread in the air and poets started gradually turning away from the conventions of the neo-classical school of Dryden and Pope. However, off and on, there did come poems in heroic couplets. Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) is the most notable example. Byron was indeed the most “classical” of all romantic poets.

Poetic Diction

What is Poetic Diction:

English neo-classical poets, like their French counterparts, were very particular about the division of poetry into various kinds of genres-such as the elegy, the heroic poem, the satire, the epic, and so on.

They upheld the principle of decorum which demands that for every kind a particular style is needed and that there should not be any confusion of styles. Further, they drove a wedge between the language of prose and the language of serious poetry. For lower genres like satire they did not mind using the language and idiom of prose, but for the elegy, the heroic poem, the epic, and such like genres, what they aimed at employing was a language as far removed from the lowly prose as possible. Obviously, in an epic such words as pot, broom, or even door could not be used, as their presence would create a bathetic effect. Consequently, a special language of poetry was devised, and later traditionalised, by the practice of poet after poet. This special language, somewhat stilted and artificial, ruled the roost for decades and was challenged only by Wordsworth at the end of the eighteenth century. In the Preface to -the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) Wordsworth vehemently protested against what he called “the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers”. He further protested “There will also be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction; as much pain has been taken to avoid it as is ordinarily taken to produce it.” Wordsworth was against the very principle of the divison of language into the language of prose and the language of poetry. He went so far as to assert that “there neither Js, nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition-Poetry sheds no tears ‘such as Angels weep’, but natural and human tears: she can boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the-veins of both.” Coleridge in Biographia Literaria controverted Wordsworth’s point of view. He maintained that there ought to be some difference between the language of poetry and that of prose, as there should be some difference between the language of prose and that of actual conversation. “I write,” said Coleridge, “in metre because I am about to use a language different from that of prose.” It may be pointed out here that Wordsworth did not only criticise the language (diction) used by many of his predecessors but also their frequent indulgence in archaisms (both of grammar and vocabulary) and various other “poetic licences” pressed into service for poetising their language and consequently removing it as far from the language of prose as possible. Robert Bridges in his essay “Poetic diction in English” in Collected Essays (1910) observes: “The revolt against the old diction is a reaction which in its general attitude is rational: and it is in line with the reaction of “The Lake School” of poetry, familiar to all students in Wordsworth’s statement, and Coleridge’s criticism and correction of that statement in his Biographia Literaria. Both .movements alike protest against all archaisms of vocabulary and grammar and what are called literary forms and plead for the simple terms and direct forms of common speech.”

Its History and Examples:

It is usual to blame Dryden and Pope—the protagonists of the neo-classical school of poetry-as the poets who established the so-called poetic diction in England. However, it is not Dryden and Pope but their imitators who ought to be blamed, for it was they who thought that poetic diction could be a substitute for poetic inspiration. But poetry is not diction alone. It is so many thing besides. “In all fields of Art,” observes Robert Bridges in the essay mentioned above, “the imitators are far more numerous than the artists and they will copy the externals in poetry, the Versification and the Diction which in their hands become futile”. Eighteenth-century poetic diction does not start with Pope. The vast fund of poetic diction could not be created overnight. It was rather the cumulative result of the efforts of a large number of poets spread over many years.

Nevertheless, broadly speaking, it is Joshua Sylvester who can be credited with the use for the first time of that peculiar phraseology which goes under the label of poetic diction. In his verse translation of the French poet Du Bartas’ epic La Semaine we come across numberless ‘”poetic ornaments” and extravagances.which are rather unimaginatively flung here, there, and everywhere. Both Du Bartas in his original French composition and Sylvester in his English translation employed a very large number of expressions derived from Latin instead of their native equivalents. Such expressions ultimately formed a fair’v lame proportion of poetic diction. The tendency of ‘Du Bartas and Sylvester to use Latinisms was chiefly dictated, apart from the consideration of ornamental value, by their search for compression. Verbs and participle adjectives derived from Latin were evidently more concise than their composite equivalents in French and English. For illustration see the following lines by Sylvester:

A novice Thief (that in a Closet spies
A heap of Gold, that on the Table lies)
Pale, fearful, shivering twice or thrice extends,
And twice or thrice retires his fingers’ ends.
……………………

The unpurgedAire to Water would resolve,
 And Water would the mountain tops involve.

Another method of compression employed by Sylvester and the later poets was of the “pictorial” kind. For instance, for the loadstone, “iron mistress”; for the sea, “watery camp”; for the fish, “scaly crew”; and so on. A very common procedure was to frame a two-worded phrase with “round” as the second word and some epithet as the first. All-these practices contributed towards the proliferation of eighteenth-century poetic diction.

Many poets of the seventeenth century accepted the lead of Sylvester. Among them may be mentioned Drayton, William Browne, Sandys, Benlowes, Milton, and Dryden. Sandys, the translator of Ovid, did the most, before Dryden, to popularise poetic diction through his own example. He had taken upon himself the task of translating Ovid into an almost equal number of lines in English. Moreover, he was to employ pentameters, not the hexameters of the original. This put him to the necessity of compression, more particularly because Latin itself is a much more concise language than English. Naturally enough, Sandys had to have a recourse to the methods of Sylvester and also to devise a number of formulas of his own. The result was that the language, of metrical composition moved farther and farther from the language of prose or the language of actual conversation which was to be advocated by Wordsworth for use in metrical composition.

The translations of Lucan rendered by Thomas May (1626-27) and Rowe (1718) show much indebtedness to Sylvester and Sandys. So do Milton’s minor and some of his major poems. In’Lycidas, for instance, Milton uses various phrases which have the ring of poetic diction and many more which are used for their poetic beauty and even “unnaturalness”. Dr. Johnson expressed his keen dislike ofLycidas or the ground that much in it was unnatural or away from commonexperience.’ After Milton it was Dryden, the founder  of the neo­ classical school of poetry, who really established poetic diction so firmly that it continued reigning uninterrupted for about a hundred years to follow. Specifically speaking, it was in his translation of Virgil that, to maintain the dignity of the original, he employed highstrung diction. In his satires, however, his diction and idiom are nearer the language of prose. Satire, as we have already pointed out, was considered by the neo-classicists a low genre, and, as such, was not deemed to require any specially wrought diction and idiom.

The Role of Pope:

In this respect Pope thought alike with Dryden. In his satires we have not much of the so-called poetic diction. They are couched in a conversational language unadorned with poetic gewgaws. Consider, for instance, the opening lines of his Epistle to Arbuthnot:

Shut, shut, the door, good John! fatigu’d I said,
Tie up the knocker, say I’m sick, I’m dead.

Pope was very much particular about the demands of decorum–the appropriateness of the style to the subject or the genre. As he says in the Essay on Criticism,’

Expression is the dress of thought, and still
Appears more decent, as more suitable:
For different styles with different subjects sort,
As several garbs with country, town and court.

In practice he was very particular even about the style of his letters. Spence reports these words of Pope: “It is idle to say that letters should be written in an easy familiar style: that, like most other general rules, will not hold. The style, in letters as in all other things, should be adapted to the subject”.

It is in his translation of Homer that Pope makes the maximum use of poetic diction. Pope felt that the sublimity and grandeur of the original were incapable of being conveyed in ordinary, familiar English phrases. So he had to coin new ones and had to borrow numerous others from his predecessors. His Homer has been almost universally and wholly held responsible for the creation of eighteenth-century poetic diction. To quote some opinions. Consider first Coleridge’s who called it “the main source of our pseudo poetic diction.” Southey asserted that it had “done more than any or all other books, towards the corruption of our poetry.” Whatever be the other faults of Pope’s Homer, it is evident that is was not the originator of poetic diction. Pope was merely following a tradition and passing it on to his successors. Geoffrey Tillotson observes in this connexion: “Pope’s Homer is certainly the greatest work which used this diction.‘ But Pope did not invent the diction. When he used it he was drawing from and adding to a fund which had been growing for more than a hundred years, a fund which has been argumented and improved by the ‘progressive’ poets of the seventeenth century that is, by those who stand in the direct line of development.”

Pope used poetic diction in his Homer with a definitely utilitarian purpose in view. The compression, sublimity, and archaic flavour of the original could be captured, he felt, only by the use of a peculiar diction. He did not use it, as many of his successors did, for the purpose of ornament or for camouflaging in attractive trappings the spells of poetic sterlity. He would, as he tells us,

Show no mercy to an empty line.

Pope is one of the most concise of English poets, though, to quote Tillotson again, he “makes no fuss about his conciseness as Browning does.” The only senselessly prolix lines in his poetry are those in which he parodies the senseless prolixity of others. This is how-.he satirises the emptiness of his rivals in pastoral poetry:

Of gentle Philips will I ever sing,
With gentle Philips shall the valleys ring.
My number too for ever will I vary,
With gentle Budgell and with gentle Carey.
Or if in ranging of the names i judge ill,
wih gentle carey and with gentle Budgell.

Pope, in fact, condemns the needless, unthinking use of poetic diction. In Peri bathous he lashes the foolish poets who, as he puts it, instead of writing the plain shut the door (as he himself wrote in the first line of the Epistle to Arbuthnot quoted above) write:

The wooden guardian of our privacy,
Quick on its axle turn.

After Pope:

After Pope poetic diction ruled supreme right till the end of the eighteenth century. The names of almost all the poets of the century are associated with its use. Dr. Johnson, Collins, Cowper-all made use of it and augmented and consolidated its fund, wordsworth in the Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads quotes verses from Dr. Johnson, Cowper, and Gray and points out how their diction differs from the words used in speech and in written prose. He calls them bad poetry for this reason. Those who really did the most mischief were not these poets, however, but the numberless imitators of Pope who made the language of Poetry altogether fantastic, and altogether lifelesws and conventional. Hence Wordsworth went to the opposite extreme. In the keen desire for fresh air a few windows are likely to get broken. In condemning the poetic diction of the eighteenth century, Wordsworth went to the extent of condemning all the poetry which employed this diction.Hence Tillotson’s complaint: ” The poetic diction of good eighteenth-century poetry has been much misunderstood, and denunciation of it has sometimes been taken as the automatic denunciation of the poetry as a whole”. We must allow eighteenth-century English poetry its due, in spite of our disapproval of its poetic diction.

English Verse Satire in the Eighteenth Century

Introduction:

The eighteenth century is remarkable as a period in which the satiric spirit reigned supreme. The names of all the important writers are associated with satire; in fact, their very greatness is due mainly to their greatness as satirists.

The three most important writers of the age were Pope, Swift, and Dr. Johnson.-Whereas Pope and Dr. Johnson gave the English language some of its best verse satires, the second named gave it its best prose satires. But apart from this redoubtable triumvirate, the names of a hundred other lesser satirists can be mentioned. In addition to the regular satires, the satiric spirit peeps through other modes of writing, too. The novel and the periodical -paper were the two important gifts of the eighteenth century to English literature. These new genres, too, are exhibitive of the impact of the satiric spirit which was ubiquitous in the age. Some of the most delightful satire of the age is provided by the periodical papers of Steele, Addison, an’d their followers and the novels of Fielding, Smollett, and Steme. As a genre satire ruled the roost till roughly the third quarter of the century, when new tendencies appeared, to the detriment of the satiric spirit. The precursors of Romanticism found satire incompatible with their new sensibility. Satire naturally declined and since then up to the present day very few satires have appeared which can show the same brilliance as characterised eighteenth-century satires.

Reasons for Dominance:

All satire arises from the sense of dissatisfaction, despair, amusement, anger, or disgust at the departure of things from their ideals. Satire aims at pointing out and chastising the falling short of things from their well-accepted standards of excellence. It is only when standards get fixed that any departure from them can be measured or appreciated. In the eighteenth century-particularly its first half-4he standards of human conduct were more or less well fixed. -This century has been variously called “the age of good sense,” “the age of good taste,” “the age of reason”, etc. Almost all the writers of the age harped upon common sense, good taste, and what they called “right reason.” Any departure from them, real or imaginary, put the whip of the satirist into action. Further the accentuation of the political division of Englishmen into Whigs and Tories also nurtured and provided much material for the satiric spirit. Nearly every important writer of the first half of the eighteenth century was “employed” by either the Tory or the Whig party to further its cause and to down its opponents. Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, Prior, Addison, Steele-all were actively aligned with one party or the other, even though they did not write many political satires of the nature of Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel and The Medal. Thirdly, we have to take into account the fierce personal animosities of the writers of the age. It was in the eighteenth century that, for the first time in the history of English literature, the vocation of a man of letters, like other professions, became a lucrative job. With the unprecedented increase in the number of readers (consequent mainly upon the expansion of trade and commerce and the resulting richness) the printed word could sell. Pope and some others depended for their livelihood entirely upon the patronage of their readers. With the phenomenal rise in the number of readers there was an equally phenomenal rise in the number of writers many of whom decorated the garrets of Grub Street. Each of them was necessarily jealous of all the rest as it involved his very livelihood. The whole air was thick witrHnutual animosities among writers and the personal satires which they gave rise to. Even Pope’s Dunciad-Jhe most powerful and the best satire of the eighteenth century^was expressly written to lash his literary rivals and critics. His translation of Homer and edition of Shakespeare had proved for him the most lucrative assets and when they were attacked, partly justly and partly unjustly, by critics like Bentley and Theobald it was reason enough for him to try to satirise them into silence.

Formative and Guiding Influences:

There were three formative and guiding influences on satire in the eighteenth century. They were : the tradition of the Roman Augustan satire of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius; the tradition of the French satire of the neo-classic school; and the neo-classical native tradition of Dryden. The French satirists like Boileau were themselves influenced by the Roman satirists and Dryden was influenced by both the Roman and the French. Let us now consider these three influences one by one.

(i)         As regards the influence of the Roman satirists, it is quite apparent in the work ofPope, Dr. Johnson, and others. Horace and Juvenal -the two greatest Roman satirists—did not write the same kind of satire. Horation satire is, generally speaking, of the comic, and Juvenalian satire, of the tragic, kind. Horace is polished, good-honoured, precise but sly, pretty tolerant and somewhat lenient, and always indirect. Juvenal, on the other hand, is mordant, direct, intolerant, stately, intense, and disdainful. Whereas Pope came mostly under Horace’s influence, Dr. Johnson was evidently influenced by Juvenal.

(ii)        Boileau was the most important of the neo-classical French satirists. Dryden himself came under his influence. Boileau’s Le Lutrin was presumably the first example of a mock-heroic poem in world literature. Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe was also a mock epic. In the eighteenth century we find Pope giving a mock-heroic framework to his famous satires-The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad. Swift, .likewise, followed the lead of Boileau in The Battle of the Books. Scarron, the French poet who parodied Virgil, had also some followers in eighteenth-century England.

(iii)       Last but not least is the bracing influence of Dryden who breaking away from the native satiric tradition of Hall, Marston, Donne, Cleveland, and Butler, had looked for guidance to the Roman satirists and their followers in France. Pope has well been designated “Dryden’s poetical son.” His satires provided so many models for numerous eighteenth-century satirists. The Dunciad followed Mac Flecknoe in being a satire on dunces. But what is more, Dryden’s popularisation and effective handling of the heroic couplet for the purpose of satire had a powerful effect on the eighteenth century. Almost all the good satires of this century were written in heroic couplets. Pope regularised the couplet and made it more precise, balanced, and artistic and, as such, provided a model for his successors. But Dryden’s freer use of the couplet had also its admirers and imitators among whom may be mentioned the name of Churchill.

After these preliminary considerations, let us examine briefly the satiric work of important individual writers.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744):

Pope, “the wasp of Twickenham”, was the greatest verse satirist of not only the eighteenth century but of all centuries. It is interesting to note that almost every discussion of his satire boils down to discussion of his personality. The hase of outright condemnation of Pope as a mischievous and malicious imp is now over. To quote Bredvold in A History of English Literature, edited by Hardin Craig, “recent scholarship has made important corrections of the traditional view of Pope and he is now receiving a more sympathetic hearing.” We no longer agree to such views as the one of Lytton Strachey which represents Pope as a malevolent monkey sitting in a window and pouring on the passers-by (for whom he has dislike) ladlefuls of boiling oil. Sometimes Pope did hit first, but more often he was hit first. Pope himself was designed by God to be a rich satiric target. He was short-statured, hunch-backed, and lame. And then he was a Roman Catholic. But, above all, he was a successful writer-tfie author of numerous best-sellers. Naturally enough, he excited the spleen of a host of pen-drivers whom at a place he compares to a swarm of gnats plaguing him. We have also to take into account his revengeful and somewhat malicious temperament. After getting hit he could not just connive at the attack. He rose from the depths of anger and disgust and made short work of most of his disparagers. None could match him in his most telling use of the heroic couplet. Well could he claim that he was “proud to see”

Men not afraid of God, afraid of me.

Happily did he keep politics and religion out of satire. With the exception of The Rape of the Lock, which is a general satire on female frivolities, all his major satires are characterised by indulgence in personalities. To name all the persons he attacked in his satires would require tens of pages. His greatest satire The Dunciad is, in its fundamentals, a satire on the contemporary dunces who had happened to offend him.

Pope’s Friends:

Pope’s companions-Arbuthnot, Swift, Prior, and Gay—who were, like him, members of the Tory “Scriblerus Club”—also distinguished themselves as satirists. But Arbuthnot wrote only in prose. Swift, as we have already said, was the greatest prose satirist of the age. But he also wrote some verse satires. He seldom used the heroic couplet and couched almost all his verse satires in the octosyllabic couplet of Butler’s Hudibras. Most of them do not rise above the level of the doggerel. “Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet”-this was the verdict of Dryden. And he was right. Much of Swift’s verse, as his prose, is besmirched in scatological grossness. Swift takes an almost morbid pleasure in dwelling on the filth of the human, particularly the female, body. His misogynistic poems like “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” are almost unreadable/Here is an example from one of his poems:

Had you but through a cranny syp ‘d
On house of ease your future bride,
In all the postures of her face,
Which nature gives in such a case;
Distortions, groanings, strainings, heavings,
‘Twere better you had licked her leavings
Than from experience find too late
 Your goddess grown a filthy mate.

It is nothing more than chamber-pot poetry. However, Swift is delightfully ironical in such poems as The Death of Dr. Swift and The Furniture of a Woman’s Mind which are happily free from the scatological taint.

Matthew Priori (1664-1721) contribution to satire is his parody of Dry den’s The Hind and the Panther entitled Story of the Country Mouse (1687), and his Hudibrastic satire on Philosophy, entitled Alma; or, The Progress of the Mind, in which he traces the advance of the soul from the ankles in childhood to the head in maturity. Prior is best known not for satire, however, but for his light, topical Anacreontic verse and his numerous poems for children;

John Gay (1685-1732) showed better talent for burlesque than Prior did. “Informality and burlesque,” says George Sherburn, “permeated most of Gay’s works.” His most important work The Beggar’s Opera also was a satire on and a parody of the Italian opera so popular then. Wine is again a burlesque-of Ambrose Phili’s Cyder Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets in London is a parody of the Georgics of Virgil. It was the most famous of the “town eclogues” written also by such writers as Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Mongtagu, and some others. Gay, at any rate, did not taint his page with bitter satire. His satire is mostly impersonal and essentially good-natured and gay. His tombstone carries the following inscription composed by himself:

Life is a jest, and all things show it,
I thought so once, but now I know it.

We may also refer here to the work of Edward Young (1683-1765) who was one of the first imitators of Horace in the eighteenth century. Sherburn observes: “The first Hdration satires to achieve real success were the seven that Edward Young published in 1725-28 as Love of Fame, the Universal Passion. Practically all of Pope’s satires post dated those of Young, which were highly praised.”

Dr. Johnson (1709-84):

Dr. Johnson as a satirist ranks next only to Pope among the verse satirists of the eighteenth century. In addition to being a satrisfhe was, to quote Legouis in A Short History of English Literature, a “translator, journalist, lexicographer, commentator, novelist, biographer and finally literary critic.” His two verse satires are London (1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1746)-4he latter of which is superior to the former. London is a satire on the great city which he loved so passionately. There is “the language of the heart” in his question: “when can starving merit find a home?” There is real pathos in the lines which describe the misfortunes of talented and enlightened men of letters who are rudely treated by rich fools. The Vanity of Human Wishes is, according to Edmund Gosse, “a much finer and more accomplished production.” Johnson based this weighty poem on the Tenth Satire of Juvenal whose manner he tried, fairly successfully, to imitate. Johnson’s style is heavy-handed and serious, and his attitude, too, is Juvenalian in its pessimism and noble disdain. He has often been charged with verbosity and prosaicness; and Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads gave him a rather undue meed of dispraise. However, modern critics, after the example of T. S. Eliot, have rehabilitated him as a poet. T. S. Eliot praises his poetry for, what he calls, its “minimal quality” that of direct, complete, and effective statement. Referring to a passage in The Vanity of Human Wishes he justly enquires if it is not poetry, what is it?

Charles Churchill (1731-64) and Minor Satirists:

After Johnson we find in the rest of the century few satirists of his stature, not to speak of that of Pope. The most outstanding among the numerous minor satirists was Charles Churchill—a man of dissolute and ferocious character who died young of dissipation. He failed in the vocation of a clergyman, and in utter disgust of the world started writing extremely mordant satire against whosoever crossed his way. He was particularly severe on Dr. Johnson and the famous painter and engraver Hogarth. He keenly disliked Pope, and in the handling of the heroic couplet’ he followed the lead of Dryden who had handled it with much greater freedom than Pope. Much of his satire is of the personal kind and scarcely rises above coarse lampoonery. But there is always in it a devilish strength. Churchill was particularly good at the art of satiric portraiture and his portrait of Pomposo (Dr. Johnson) in The Ghost'(1762-63) is, quite remarkable. The Times (1764) was a general satire on the, vices of Londoners. The Duellist was a virulent attack on Warburton and Lord Sandwich, as they were against Churchill’s hero John Wilkies who had incurred the wrath of George III. The Rociad (1761) was a very vigorous satire on some famous actors of the day. Edmund Gosse observes about Churchill: “The happiness of others is a calamity to him; and his work would excite in us the extremity of aversion, if it were not that its very violence betrays the exasperation and wretchedness of its unfortunate author.”

William Cowper (1731 -1800) is much less known for his satiric than non-satiric verse. His Poems (1782) contains many satiric pieces on such subjects as The Progress of Error, Truth, Hope and Charity, Conversation and Retirement. William Blake (1757-1827) was apoet of his own kind. Some of his poems like London are satirical in temper. Among the little known poets may be mentioned John Wolcot, an opponent of George III (like Churchill) who wrote The Lousiad. William Giffbrd in The Baviad (1794) and The Maeviad (1795) satirised bad critics and poets now justly forgotten. Canning and Frere in Anti-Jacobian denounced the revolutionary zeal of poets like Southey and Coleridge. The last twenty years of the eighteenth century were a period of singular inactivity as regards not only satiric poetry but all poetry.

Eighteenth-Century Prose

Introduction:

The eighteenth century was a great period for English prose, though not for English poetry. Matthew Arnold called it an “age of prose and reason,” implying thereby that no good poetry was written in this century, and that,prose dominated the literary realm. Much of the poetry of the age is prosaic, if not altogether prose-rhymed prose. Verse was used by many poets of the age for purposes which could be realised, or realised better, through prose. Our view is that the eighteenth century was not altogether barren of real poetry.

Even then, it is better known for the galaxy of brilliant prose writers that it threw up. In this century there was a remarkable proliferation of practical interests which could best be expressed in a new kind of prose-pliant and of a work a day kind capable of rising to every occasion. This prose was simple and modern, having nothing of the baroque or Ciceronian colour of the prose of the seventeenth-century writers like Milton and Sir Thomas Browne. Practicality and reason ruled supreme xin prose and determined its style. It is really strange that in this period the language of*prose was becoming simpler and more easily comprehensible, but, on the other hand, the language of poetry was being conventionalised into that artificial “poetic diction” which at the end of the century was so severely condemned by Wordsworth as “gaudy and inane phraseology.”

The Contribution of the Age to Prose:

Much of eighteenth-century prose is taken up by topical journalistic issues-as indeed is the prose of any other age. However, in the eighteenth century we come across, for the first-time in the history of English literature, a really huge mass of pamphlets, journals, booklets, and magazines. The whole activity of life of the eighteenth century is embodied in the works of literary critics, economists, “letter-writers,” essayists, politicians, public speakers, divines, philosophers, historians, scientists, biographers, and public projectors. Moreover, a thing of particular importance is the introduction of two new prose genres in this century. The novel and the periodical paper are the two gifts of the century to English literature, and some of the best prose of the age is to be found in its novels and periodical essays. Summing up the importance of the century are these words of a critic: “The eighteenth century by itself had created the novel and practically created the literary history; it had put the essay into general circulation; it had hit off various forms and abundant supply of lighter verse; it had added largely to philosophy and literature. Above all, it had shaped the form of English prose-of-all-work, the one thing that remained to be done at its opening. When an age has done so much, it seems somewhat illiberal to reproach it with not doing more.” Even Matthew Arnold had to call the eighteenth century “our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century.”

After these preliminary considerations let us briefly discuss the important trends and writers of the age.

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731):

Defoe was perhaps the most copious writer of the eighteenth century. He is best known for his Robinson Crusoe and some other works of fiction like Moll Flanders and Roxana. His non-fictive prose consists of a large number of pamphlets (generally published anonymously) and a staggering bulk of miscellaneous writings mostly topical in nature. He started a tri-weekly periodical The Review in 1704, which continued up to 1713. In it he dealt with political, religious, and commercial matters. There is not much of the universal in his non-fictive prose to keep it alive, but one just wonders at the sheer number of his works which total above five hundred.

John Arbuthnot (1667-1735):

Arbuthnot was man estimable for his learning, amiable for his life, and venerable for his piety”-was a close associate of Swift and Pope and was by profession a physician. His History of John Bull (1712), an, allegorical satire, in the words of Legouis in A Short History of English Literature, “remains one of the most famous political satires England has produced”. Therein is described the legal battle between John Bull (England) and Nic Frog (Holland) ontne one side, and Lewis Baboon (France) and Lord Strutt (Spain) on the other. Arburthnot upholds evidently the Tory point of view favouring the termination of hostilities then raging between the countries mentioned above. He manifests an easy mastery of lucid and vivid style as also delightful strokes of irony, which made Swift “complain”:

Arbuthnot is no more my friend;
He dares to irony pretend;
Which I was born to introduce,
Refin ‘d it first and shew ‘d its use.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745):

Swift was the greatest prose satirist of England. He dominated the first half of the eighteenth century as Dr. Johnson did the second; and as an intellectual he was far superior to Johnson. Some of his satires are obscene, misanthropic, and cynical, but none can question his moral integrity and the unflinching earnestness with which he removes the externals of things to bring out the corruption which lies at their heart. Swift’s satire is all-embracing. Its rapier-like thrusts spare neither a fraudulent almanac-maker, nor a misguided zealot, nor an airy philosopher, nor a glib politician, nor a conceited fop, nor a pretentious scientist.This greatest of satirists once satirised even satire! The paltry Partridge (an almanac-maker) and the great Walpole (the Prime Minister of England) alike winced under his terrible “whip of scorpions”.

Swift’s sensitiveness to all corruption, the numerous frustrations which punctuated the entire span of his life and the egregious folly, corruption, and self-seeking which he found tainting “the age of reason and good sense” prompted him to take up his lash. The age deserved satire, and his personal disposition and disappointments made him keen enough to give it. Swift is perfectly right when he says in The Death of Dean Swift:

Perhaps I may allow the Dean
Had too much satire in his vein,
And seem’d determined not to starve it,
Because no age could more deserve it.

The greatness of Swift’s satire is, in the last analysis, a triumph of technique. His arsenal as a satirist is chock-full of weapons, of all descriptions. Wit, raillery, sarcasm, irony, allegory, and so many more weapons are used to perfection by him in his crusade against folly, injustice, and unreason. Whichever weapon may he be employing for attack, his satire is usually darker and more telling than that of most writers. He may sometimes touch lightly, but very often he pierces deep to the very heart of life. In any case, his satire is very disturbing as it presents things in a fairly unconventional perspective eminently calculated to shatter the complacency of the reader. When Swift points out the acquired follies, he is quite constructive, but when he satirises the very nature of man, he is nothing but destructive.

Of all the satiric techniques the one most effectively used by Swift is irony. With Swift irony is often much more than just a figure of speech; it is extended so that the entire range of thoughts and feelings presented in a satiric work seems to be coming not from Swift himself but from a fictive character (a persona) created for the purpose. The irony lies in the difference between the views expressed by the persona and the common sense views (the same as the views of Swift himself).

Swift wrote a very large number of satires of which the most important are The Battle of the Books, A Tale of a Tub, and Gulliver’s Travels. The first is just ajeu d’esprit and was meant to lampoon in mock-heroic terms the opponents of his patron Sir William Temple-­particularly Richard Bentley and William Wotton, both of whom had disputed the view of Temple granting supremacy to the ancients over the moderns. A Tale of a Tub was meant to be a satire “on the numerous and gross corruptions in religion and learning.”-It represented the Church of England as the best, of all Churches in “doctrine and discipline,” and also lashed the shallow writers and critics of the age. Gulliver’s Travels is the most famous of Swift’s works. In it he savagely indicted “that animal called man.” Though it has the externals of a travel romance yet in reality it is a terrible but well-calculated satire on all the activities of human life and allthe attributes of human nature not sparing even the human body. However, its irony is so deep that it has been a favourite gift-book for children. Kipling once said that Swift’ ‘ignited a volcano to light a child to bed.” In fact, the book is enjoyed by all children from nine to ninety!

Credit must be given to Swift for the clarity, precision, and what Herbert Davis calls the “conciseness” of his prose style. Swift despises all unnecessary ornament. His imagery, however, is prolific and concrete. At any rate he gives us the impression of an easy mastery of the language. Halliday in the introduction to his Selection from Swift observes: “…the various phases of scorn and satire, of appraisement and direct denunciation, the various moods and tempers of the writer are expressed with wonderful and subtle skill. The secret of his power over his readers is to be sought for here. He makes you responsive to every nuance of thought and emotion and draws you with the magic of his pipe into whatever region he desires.”

Addison, Steele, and the Periodical Essay:

From Swift to Addison is” like coming from a real to a paper tiger. Addison perfected the periodical essay which was “invented” by Steele with the Taller in 1709. Addison collaborated with Steele as Steele did with him in the Spectator which was launched by Addison in 1711 after the Taller had been wound-up. The periodical paper was extremely suited to the temper and conditions of the eighteenth century; and that explains its immense popularity. The genius of Addison was also quite happy with this”new literary genre. He wrote a few more works, but his popularity today is entirely due to his work as a periodical essayist,

The work of Addison and Steele as periodical essayists was actuated by a definite purpose–that of providing instructive amusement to their readers many of whom were women. “I must confess,” wrote Addison once, “were I left to myself, I would rather aim at instructing than diverting.” But instruction would not have been welcomed by the readers if it were without some diversion. As “instructors” Addison and Steele paid special attention to improving the morals and social manners of the people. As champions of good taste and reason they did their best to improve the tone of society. They also popularised “philosophy.” With his papers on Paradise Lost and the old ballad of Chevy Chase Addison did a signal service to literary, criticism. Steele and Addison were mostly retailers of other men’s opinions; they were not philosophers themselves but they did substantial workto make philosophy a subject of popular appreciation and discussion.

Addison’s prose style is as lucid and precise as Swift’s, but it has much more of polish, refinement, and studied ease. Dr. Johnson calls his style “the model of the middle style.” And this is his famous advice: “Whoever wishes to attain an English style familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.” Steele as a man and stylist was less refined and consistent than Addison. He is sometimes patently ungrammatical even. Even then, sometimes his style, in all its spontaneity and attending carelessness, speaks, as it were, from the core of his heart, as Addison’s never even seems to do. “I Iike7′ said Leigh Hunt, “Stede with all his faults better than Addison with all his

Philosophers and Theologians:

George Berkeley (1685-1753) and David Hume (1711-76) were the great philosophers of the eighteenth century as Hobbes and Locke had been of the seventeenth. Berkeley was an upholder of absolute idealism, and as such, went so far as to deny the very existence of matter. His deep religious convictions had the colour of mysticism. As regards the clarity of Berkeley’s prose style, Legouis observes: “Nothing could be more admirable than the lucid prose, perfectly simple and perfectly elegant, in which Berkeley expressed his profound and subtle views.”

Hume was by far the greatest philosopher of his age. His approach is marked by scepticism and utilitarianism. Regarding his style Legouis says: “Nothing could be more tranquil and assured than the march of his thought, nothing clearer than the prose in which he pursued his most subtle analyses in lucid and sober language.”

Adam Smith (1723-90) was the father of political economy which Ruskin and his ilk were to attack in the Victorian age. His Wealth of Nations (1776) enjoyed a long and undisputed reign as the Bible of political economists. His style is precise and unadorned to the extent of being altogether sapless:

The first half of the eighteenth century saw the furious raging of the Deistic controversy. The Deists including Charles Blqunt, John Tolant, Matthew Tindall, Anthony Collins and the Earl of Shaftesbury believed in what they called “Natural Religion,” that is, belief in God without corresponding belief in Christianity, or, as a matter of fact, any religion. Swift was one of those who controverted the Deistic heresy.

The rise of Methodism was another theological feature of the century. The two Wesley brothers-John and Charles-were the initiators of the new move towards importing the old enthusiasm, simplicity and sincerity into the religion of the day. John Wesley’s prose is characterised by directness, simplicity, and a rude, compelling force.

Dr. Johnson (1709-84):

As a prose writer Dr. Johnson is particularly known for his Dictionary, his periodical papers, his philosophical tale Rasselas, and his critical work Lives of the Poets. He was the cham of the realm of letters in his age and an accepted arbiter of taste. As a critic he made many egregious errors, but his infectious sanity cannot be ignored. Asa prose stylist he was a purist. However, his style though vigorous and direct is somewhat heavy-handed, and as such is sometimes derisively called “Johnsonese”, which Chambers’s Dictionary defines as “Johnsonian style, idiom, diction or an imitation of it—ponderous English, full of antitheses, balanced triads, and words of classical origin.” Goldsmith said jokingly about Johnson’s style that it may fit the mouths of whales but it certainly does not fit the mouths of little fish.

Biographers and Letter Writers:

The eighteenth century produced a number of biographers, autobiographers, and writers of semi-public letters. James Boswell (1740-95), the biographer of his idol Dr. Johnson, has the pride of place among them. His work is as massive as the great Johnson himself! Life of Johnson is a unique work of its kind. BoswelFs devotion to Dr. Johnson became the cause of his own fame. Among the autobiographers may be mentioned Gibbon, Lord Hervey, and John, Wesley.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Cowper, Chesterfield, Gilbert White, Gray, and Horace Waipole were some of the famous letter writers of the eighteenth century.

Periodical Papers and Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74):

After the Spectator there was a remarkable proliferation of periodical literature in England. To name all the periodical papers which appeared in the eighteenth century will be an uphill task as their number is legion. Most of them continued the traditions set by Addison and Steele. The name of Oliver Goldsmith is associated with numerous periodical papers. His cosmopolitan attitude, tolerance, delicacy, and sentiment are his hallmarks as an essayist. He expresses himself in a chaste and elegant style free from artificial devices.

Historians:

The eighteenth century saw the establishment of historiography as a respectable and highly developed branch of learned activity. Edward Gibbon (1737-94)-writer of the monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire-was the greatest of the historiographers of the age. His attitude is entirely rational and anti-mystical. His style is dignified and somewhat ponderous, but he can effectively combine harmony and majesty with logic and precision.

Edmund Burke (1729-97):                                                     

Burke was the greatest orator of the age. He dealt with the pressing political problems facing the British Empire. His works concerning Indian and American affairs and the French Revolution are couched in brilliant and rhetorical prose which cannot but impress the most indifferent reader or listener. He was an antitheorist who recommended action in keeping with the spirit and complexion of the times.

Reasons for the Popularity of the Periodical Essay in the Eighteenth Century

Introduction:

The periodical essay had its birth and death in the eighteenth century. It was born with The Tatler in the beginning of the century (1709) and breathed its last (about 1800) after remaining in the throes of death in the years following the French Revolution (1789). The reason for its popularity in the eighteenth century is to be sought in the rapport which it had with the genius of the century.

What Matthew Arnold describes as “our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century” added three new literary genres to the fund of English literature. These genres are the mock epic, the novel, and the: periodical essay. All of them enjoyed much popularity in the century and the mock epic and the novel, even beyond the termination of the century. However, the periodical essay was the most popular of all, even though it did not extend beyond the century. About the importance and phenomenal popularity of the periodical essay A. R. Humphreys observes: “If any literary form is the particular creation and the particular mirror of the Augustan age in England it is the periodical essay. The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature lists ninety periodicals founded between The Tatler in 1709 and 1720.” The Tatler and The Spectator, indeed unleashed a virtual deluge of periodicals which overran eighteenth century England. Mrs. Jane H. Jack refers to “the remarkable proliferation” of this type’of essay in the years following the first number of The Tatler. Throughout the eighteenth century, and especial ly the first half of it, the periodical essay was the most popular, if not the dominant, literary form. Men as different as Pope, Swift, Dr. Johnson, and Goldsmith found the periodical essay an eligible medium. As a matter of fact it was, unlike the novel for example, the only literary form which was patronised without exception by all the major writers of the century. It is hard to name a single first-rate, or even second-rate, writer who did not write something for a periodical paper. In the words of Mrs. Jane H. Jack, “from the days of Queen Anne-who had The Spectator taken in with her breakfast-to the time of the French Revolution and even beyond, periodical essays on the lines laid down by Steele and Addison flooded the country and met the eye in every bookseller’s shop and coffee-house.”

Now let us consider briefly the chief causes of the popularity of the periodical essay in the eighteenth century.

Suited the Genius of the People:

The first and foremost reason of the popularity of the periodical essay in the eighteenth century was its pre-eminent suitability to the genius of the people of that age. The eighteenth century, especially its earlier phase, is known in the social history of England for the rise of the middle classes. With the unprecedented rise in trade and commerce the English masses were becoming wealthy and many poor people finding themselves in the ranks of respectable burgesses. These nouveaux riches were, naturally enough, desirous of giving themselves an aristocratic touch by appearing to be learned and sophisticated like their traditional social superiors–the landed gentry and nobility. This class of readers had hitherto been neglected by highbrow writers. Literary productions before the eighteenth century were invariably meant for the higher strata of society. Only “popular literature”, such as the ballad, catered to the lower rungs. Literary works were very often published by raising subscription among the enlightened few, and men of letters were very often dependent upon their patrons who were rich and influential. There was little literature meant especially for the middle classes of society. Works like Browne’s Hydriotaphia or even Milton’s Paradise Lost were much above them, and those like ballads and roundelays much below them. These middle classes had now become a force to reckon with. Moreover, in the early eighteenth century, as Bonamy Dobree puts it, the two hitherto well-defined and well-divided groups of readers came to converge into each other. Consequently the writers of the age like Swift, Defoe, Addison, Pope, and Steele-addressed themselves not to a particular group of readers, but all society in general. However, they seem to have been particularly mindful of the middle classes who made up the bulk of readers and consequently but for whose appreciation and patronage they would have been denied all popularity and success. The periodical essay was particularly suited to the genius of these new patrons of literature. It was the literature of the bourgeoisie. It gave them what they wanted. It gave them pleasure as well as instruction, the age of parliamentary democracy had then recently dawned and the novel and the periodical essay became the literary embodiments of its spirit.

Not “Heavy” Literature:

The periodical essay was a delicate and sensitive synthesis of literature and journalism. It was neither too “literary” to be comprehended and appreciated by the common people nor too journalistic to meet the fate of ephemeral writings. It could be read, appreciated, and discussed at the tea-table or in the coffee-house. Its lightness and brevity were its two major popularising features. Accounting for the enthusiastic reception of the periodical essay, Mrs. Jane H. Jack observes in “The Periodical Essayists” in vol. 4 of The Pelican Guide to English Literature: “one principal reason for the success of Addison and Steele was the fact that they kept the tastes and requirements of their readers, male and female, constantly in mind. One of the attractions of their new form was its brevity. The seventeenth century had been the century of long books. A seventeenth-century reader seems to have been able to read anything. The only brief forms with any literary pretensions were stiff with ‘wit’. The increasing ‘reading public’ of the eighteenth century brought a demand for easier reading. It was a time when writers paid more attention to the human frailty of their readers and treated them with greater consideration.” A periodical essay, normally, covered not more than the two sides of a folio half-sheet; quite often it was even shorter.

Suited the Moral Temper of the Age:

But it was not mainly owing to its brevity or any other formal feature that the periodical essay became the darling of eighteenth century readers. The main reason lies in the fact that it suited their moral temper. The periodical essayists, particularly Steele and Addison struck a delicate and rational balance between the strait-jacketed morality of the Puritan and the reckless Bohemianism of the Cavalier. The average middle class man, with a hard core of common sense about him was sick of the profligacies and cynicism of the post-Restoration courtiers still surviving in the eighteenth century. Equally was he repelled by the immoderately self-righteous outlook of the pleasure-hating Puritans in whose eyes beauty was a snare and all pleasure a sin. The man in the street in the early eighteenth century spurned both the unthinking epicurism of the Cavalier and the rigid asceticism of the Puritan. Some via media, after the demand of common sense and reason, was being sought after. It was for the periodical essayists, particularly Addison and Steele, to effect a synthesis between these two mutually militating views of life. They were to show in their periodical essays that virtue and pleasure were not always incompatible with each other, that pleasure was not always irrational and necessarily irreligious. As A. R. Humphreys points out, “conventionally the code of pleasure was that of the rake; Steele and Addison wished to equate it with virtue, and virtue with religion.” They strove to emphasize that religion and virtue, far from being incompatible with good breeding, were the ‘most important signs of it. In the words of Taine theirs was “the difficult task of making morality fashionable.” But they did not flinch. They not only fulfilled their self-imposed task, but fulfilled it so well that they (especially Addison) became popular idols. As Addison put it, the task of Mr. Spectator was “to temper wit with morality and to enliven morality with wit.” The periodical essayist, then, worked as a popular moral mentor. But he was more : he enriched the life of the common man with general knowledge which was then called “philosophy” and was limited to the closet of the specialized scholar, “It was,” wrote Addison, “said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of the closets, and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee­houses.” The periodical essay was welcomed by the busy trader and men of affairs because it made accessible to them that knowledge which had till then been considered the monopoly of the chosen few.

Appeal to Women:

The doses of morality, philosophy, and religion administered by the periodical essayists to their readers were fairly dilute, in keeping with their constitution. They, especially Addison and Steele, taught their coarse age the lesson of refinement and elegance. They instinctively felt that women could do a lot in setting the tone of society. But before they were able to do so, women themselves had to learn a lot. They had, for instance, to give up French fopperies, coarse as well as frivolous behaviour, and to cultivate the virtues of domesticity and modesty. Most periodical essayists followed the lead of Addison and Steele in writing many of their essays about and for women. “It became,” says Mrs. Jane H. Jack, “an important part of the Tatler and Spectator ‘platform’ to stress that the authors were writing for women as well as men and to emphasize that women must play a large part in the civilizing which they were striving to promote. Attention to the interests of the fair sex became one of the invariable conventions of the periodical essay, and there can be little doubt that the essayists did much to improve the status and education! of women.” Addison was quite explicit in his intention : “But there are none to whom this paper will be more useful than to the female world.” He meant to offer women “an innocent if not an improving entertainment,” and urged them not to grudge “throwing away a quarter of an hour in a day on this paper.” Swift was indignant at Addison’s too frequent treatment of topics of female interest and wrote to Stella in a tantrum: “Let him fair sex it to the world’s end!” At any rate, by “fair sexing” it too much Addison and Steele became extremely popular with both the sexes, for they emerged as the first writers in the history of English literature to give adequate importance to specifically female interests.

Avoidance of Religious and Political Controversies:

One of the reasons for the general popularity of the periodical essays was that they (with the exception of party organs), shunned religious and political controversies and kept their attention focused only on topics of general interest. Steele and Addison were the writers who with their pose or poise of neutrality set an example for their successors. The eighteenth century was a period of fierce party strife between the Whigs and Tories, and though Steele and Addison were both uncompromising Whigs, yet in their periodical essays at least they maintained a neutral attitude. Mr. Spectator says in the very first issue of The Spectator: “I never espoused any party with violence, and am resolved to observe an exact neutrality between the Whigs and Tories, unless I shall be forced to declare myself by the hostilities of either side.” When in The Guardian Steele shed his neutral attitude and started espousing the Whig cause, his popularity declined.

The Interest in Trade:

We have already referred to the phenomenal rise of the trading community in early eighteenth-century England. One reason why the periodical essay (particularly The Spectator and The Taller) made a special appeal to this community was that it showed a healthy interest in trade. Most of the traders were Whigs and most of the landed gentry and nobility, Tories. The clash between the two parties was not only political but social too. In numerous Spectators Addison ladled glowing praise to th,e trading community much to their gratification. Up to that time the merchant in literary compositions had served only as an object of satire for his alleged dishonesty, meanness, and calculating nature. But in The Spectator Sir Andrew Freeport was given a place equal to the other respectable men who constituted “the Club.” The Spectator essay describing the mercantile activity at the Royal Exchange is quite sentimental in the expression of complacency at the tremendous prosperity of the rich merchants.

The Style:

Most of the periodical essayists used a simple and conversational style so as to be able to be understood and appreciated by their semi-educated or, at any rate, unscholarly readers. Mrs. Jane H. Jack observes: “The periodical writers prided themselves on being ‘nearer in our style to that of common talk than any other writers’ (Tatler, No. 204) and there can be little-dtmbt that the ubiquity of these essays had a good effect on the prose-styteof the century as a whole.” The periodical essayist could indulge in individual whimsies, conceits, witticisms, or even “hard words” only at his peril. Women, who made up a large proportion of the readers,–.could appreciate such things even less than their male counterpartsvThe stylejiad to be simple and clear. How disastrous an effect the use of a heavy style could have on the popularity of a periodical essayist is obvious from the case of Dr. Johnson’s Rambler which never circulated above five hundred copies. The Spectator, on the other hand, ran to no fewer than five thousand.

The Periodical Essay in the Eighteenth Century

Introduction:

The periodical essay and the novel are the two important gifts of “our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century” to English literature. The latter was destined to have a long and variegated career over the centuries, but the former was fated to be born with the eighteenth century and to die with it.

This shows how it was a true mirror of the age. A. R. Humphrey observes in this connection: “If any literary form is the particular creation and the particular mirror of the Augustan Age in England, it is the periodical essay.” Generally speaking, it is very difficult to date precisely the appearance of a new literary genre. For example, nobody can say with perfect certainty as to when the first novel, or the first comedy or the first short story came to be written in England or elsewhere. We often talk of “fathers” in literature: for instance, Fielding is called the father of English novel, Chaucer the father of English poetry, and so forth. But that is done, more often than not in a loose and very unprecise sense. This difficulty in dating a genre, however, does not arise in a few cases-that of the periodical essay included. The periodical essay was literally invented by Steele on April 12, 1709, the day he launched his Taller. Before The Taller there had been periodicals and there had been essays, but there had been no periodical essays. The example of The Taller was followed by a large number of writers of the eighteenth century till its very end, when with the change of sensibility, the periodical essay disappeared along with numerous other accompaniments of the age. Throughout the century there was a deluge of periodical essays. The periodical essay remained the most popular, if not the dominant, literary form. Men as different as Pope, Swift, Dr. Johnson, and Goldsmith found the periodical essay an eligible medium. As a matter of fact it was, unlike the novel for example, the only literary form which was patronised without exception by all the major writers of the century. It is hard to name a single first-rate writer of the century who did.not write something for a periodical paper. Mrs. Jane H. Jack says: “From the days of Queen Anne-who had The Spectator taken in with her breakfast-to the time of the French Revolution and even beyond, periodical essays on the lines laid down by Steele and Addison flooded the country and met the eye in every bookseller’s shop and coffee-house.” Before tracing the history of the periodical essay in the eighteenth century and assigning causes for its phenomenal popularity, let us consider what exactly a periodical essay is.

What is a Periodical Essay?

What is called the periodical essay was first of all given by Steele as The Taller. Nothing of this type had before him been attempted in England or even elsewhere. However, to attempt a definition of the periodical essay is neither easy nor helpful. George Sherburn in A Literary History of England, edited by Albert C. Baugh, avers in this connexion: “Rigorous definition of this peculiarly eighteenth century type of publication is not very heIpful…The periodical essay has been aptly described as dealing with morals and manners,1 but it might in fact deal with anything that pleased its author. It covered usually not more than the two sides (in two columns) of a folipjialf-sheet: normally it was shorter than that. It might be published independent of other material, as was The Spectator, except for advertising; or it might be the leading article in a newspaper.”

Reasons for the Popularity:

The periodical essay found a spectacular response in the eighteenth century on account of various reasons. Fundamentally this new genre was in perfect harmony with the spirit of the age. It sensitively combined the tastes of the different classes of readers with the result that it appealed to ail-though particularly to the resurgent middle classes. In the eighteenth century there was a phenomenal spurt in literacy, which expanded widely the circle of readers. They welcomed the periodical essay as it was “light” literature. The brevity of the periodical essay, its common sense approach, and its tendency to dilute morality and philosophy for popular consumption paid rich dividends. To a great extent, the periodical essayist assumed the office of the clergyman and taught the masses the lesson of elegance and refinement, though not of morality of the psalm-singing kind. The periodical paper was particularly welcome as it was not a dry, high-brown, or hoity-toity affair like the professional sermon, in spite of being highly instructive in nature. In most cases the periodical essayist did not “speak from the clouds” but communicated with the reader with an almost buttonholing familiarity. The avoidance of politics (though not by all the periodical essayists yet by a good many of them) also contributed towards their popularity. Again, the periodical essayists made it a point to cater for the female taste and give due consideration to the female point of view. That won for them many female readers too. All these factors were responsible for the universal acceptance of the periodical essay in eighteenth-century England:

The History of the Periodical Essay

“The Tatler”:

It was Steele’s Tatler which began the deluge of the periodical essays which followed. The first issue of The Tatler appeared on April 12,1709. At that time Addison. Steele’s bosom friend, was functioning as Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, in that country. Steele had not informed Addison of his design, but if he desired to write in secret he was not lucky; a single month detected him. and Addison‘s first contribution appeared on May 26. Though Addison contributed to The Tatler much less than Steele, yet he soon overshadowed his friend. Of the 271 numbers, 188 are Steele’s and 42 Addison’s; 36 of them were written by both jointly. The rest were penned by others like Tickell and Budgell. Steele spoke of himself as “a distressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid,” and added: “I was undone by my auxiliary [Addison]: when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without him”‘The Tatler appeared thrice a week-on Tuesdays. Thursdays, and Saturdays, that isythe days on which the post went to the country. As regards the aim of the paper, we may quote the words of Steele in the dedication to the first collected volume (1710): “The general purpose of this paper is to expose the false arts of life, to pull off the disguises of cunning, vanity, affectation, and recommend a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse and our behaviour.” All the material of The Taller was purported by Steele to be based upon discussions in the four famous coffee-houses, and was divided as follows:

(i)         “All accounts of gallantry, pleasure and entertainment”-White’s Chocolate-house.

(ii)        Poetry-Will’s Coffee-house.

(iii)       Learning-the Grecian.

(iv)       Foreign and domestic news-St. James’ Coffee-house.

(v)        “What else I shall on any other subject offer”-“My own apartment”

The chief importance of The Toiler lies in its social and moral criticism which had a tangibly salubrious effect on the times. Both Addison and Steele did good work each in his own way. Addison was a much more refined and correct writer than Steele whom Macaulay aptly calls “a scholar among rakes and a rake among scholars.” Addison’s prose is, according to Dr. Johnson, a model of “the middle style.” And this is his famous suggestion: “Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.” Steele, on the contrary, was a thing of moods and moments. His writing has a look of spontaneity and human warmth which Addison’s lacks. Comparing Steele and Addison, George Sherburn maintains “Steele’s prose never attained the elegant ease and correctness of Addison’s, and yet it is probable that his tendency to warm to a subject and to write intimately and personally, as the reader’s friend, contributed much to the success of the paper. Addison’s best essays are the result of his slightly chilly insight into the typical mental attitudes of his day.” Later critics are apt to place Steele higher than Addison. Thus Leigh-Hunt, for instance, affirms that he prefers “Steele with all his faults” to “Addison with all his essays.”

“The Spectator”:

Without any warning to his readers, Steele suddenly wound up The Taller on January 2, 1711. But two months later-on March 1,171 \-The Spectator began its memorable career of 555 numbers up to December 6,1712. Whereas The Tatler had appeared only three times a week. The Spectator appeared daily, excepting Sundays. The new paper became tremendously popular among English men and women belonging to all walks of life. The best of all the periodical essays, it is an important human document concerning the morals and manners, thoughts and ideas, of the English society of the age of Queen Anne. Addison’s fame chiefly rests on The Spectator papers. As A. R. Humphreys puts it: “Were it not for his essays, Addison’s literary reputation would be insignificant; into them, diluted and sweetened for popular consumption, went his classical and modern reading, his study of philosophy and natural science, reflections culled from French critics, and indeed] anything that might make learning “polite”‘. A particularly happy feature of The Spectator was its envisagement of a club consisting of representatives from diverse walks of life. Among them Sir Roger de Coverley, and eccentric but thoroughly lovable Tory baronet, is one of the immortal creations of English literature. The Spectator drew a large female readership as many of the papers were for and about women. Though both Addison and Steele were Whigs, yet in The Spectator they kept up a fairly neutral political poise and, in fact, did their best to expose the error of the political fanaticism of both the Tories and Whigs. Further, The Spectator evinced much interest in trade and, consequently, endeared itself to the up-and-coming trading community which had its representative in The Spectator Club-4he rich Sir Andrew Freeport. However, much of the charm of The Spectator lay in its style-­humorous, ironical, but elegant and polished. The chief importance of The Spectator for the modern reader lies in its humour. As A. R. Humphrey reminds us, The Spectator papers are important much more historically than aesthetically. The modern reader, “if led to expect more than a charming humour and vivacity, is likely to feel cheated.”

“The Guardian” and Other Papers before Dr. Johnson:

The tremendous popularity of The Toiler and The Spectator prompted many imitations. Among them may be mentioned The Tory Taller, The Female Tatler, Tit for Tatt, and The North Taller. The best of all was Steele’s own Guardian which had a run of 175 numbers, from March 12 to October 1,1713. It was, like The Spectator, a daily. “If,” says George Sherburn, “The Spectator had not existed, The Guardian might outrank all periodicals of this kind, but it is shaded by its predecessor, and the fact that Addison—busy with his tragedy Cato-had no part in the early numbers certainly diminished its interest.” Another factor which diminished its interest was its open indulgence in political affairs. Apart from Steele and Addison it included contributions from Berkeley and Gay. The Englishmen, the successor of The Guardian, was even more politically biased. Steele’s Lover (40 numbers) and Addison’s Freeholder (55 numbers) followed The Englishman. Even to name the works of other periodical essayists would be difficult, so large is their number. “None of them,” to quote Sherburn, “approached with any consistency the excellency of these (the periodical papers produced by Steele and Addison).”

Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, and Others:

In the second half of the eighteenth century the periodical essay showed a tendency to cease as an independent publication and to get incorporated into the newspaper as just another feature. The series of about a hundred papers of Dr. Johnson, called The Idler, for example, was contributed to newspaper, The Universal Chronicler, and appeared between April 15, 1758 and April 5, 1760. These papers are lighter and shorter than those published in the periodical paper The Rambler. The Rambler appeared twice a week, between March 20, 1750 and March 14,1752, and ran to 208 numbers. Dr. Johnson as a periodical essayist was much more serious in purpose than Steele and Addison had been. His lack of humour and unrelived gravity coupled with his ponderous English make his Rambler papers quite heavy reading. The lack of popularity of The Rambler can easily be ascribed to this very fact.

Among the papers that followed The Rambler may be mentioned Edward Moore’s World (209 numbers) and the novelist Henry Mackenzie’s Mirror and The Lounger. A significant development was the creation of the “magazine” or what we call “digest” today. It was an anthology of the interesting material which had already appeared in recent newspapers orpenodicals. The first magazine was Edward Cave‘s monthly, The Gentleman’s Magazine, founded i,. 1731. The vogue of the magazine caught on and many magazines including The magazines of Magazines (1750-51), appeared and disappeared. Along with the magazine may be mentioned the initiation of the critical review devoted to the criticism of books. The first such periodical was Ralph Griffith’s Monthly Review.

In the end, let us consider the work of Oliver Goldsmith who from 1757 to 1772 contributed to no fewer than ten periodicals, including The Monthly Review. His own Bee (1759) ran to only eight weekly numbers. The Citizen of the World (1762)—Goldsmith his best work—is a collection of essays which originally appeared in The Public Ledger as “Chinese Letters” (1760-61). Goldsmith’s essays are rich in human details, a quivering sentimentalism, and candidness of spirit. His prose style is, likewise, quite attractive; he avoids bitterness, coarseness, pedantry, and stiff wit. His style, in the words of George Sherburn, “lacks the boldness of the aristocratic manner, and it escapes the tendency of his generation to follow Johnson into excessive heaviness of diction and balanced formality of sentence structure…It is precisely for this lack of formality and for his graceful and sensitive ease, fluency, and vividness that we value his style.”

Comparison of Swift and Addison as Satirists

Introduction:

Swift and Addison are two of the greatest satirists of the age of satirists, namely, the age of Queen Anne. The whole of Addison’s satiric work is in prose but Swift used verse, along with prose, as medium of his satire, even though his verse satire is considerably inferior to his prose satire. Thus both Addison and Swift, pre­eminently, are prose satirists. Pope is in fact the greatest verse satirist, and Swift the greatest prose satirist, in the entire history of English literature. Addison comes much lower than either of them.

Of course, the Victorian critics such as Macaulay and Thackeray placed Addison much higher than Swift who was dismissed by them as a blustering maniac shouting imprecations against humanity. Addison, on the contrary, was praised to the skies as a perfect gentleman writer, mild and understanding, and genuinely and selflessly concerned with the moral regeneration of his age. The gigantic, troubling personality of Swift could not, understandably, be fitted into the Victorian critical frame. But, as Bonamy Dobree puts it, the age of “lachrymosic” praise of Addison “is now gone, and modern criticism, unhampered by sentimentalism and prejudice, has toppled the Victorian apple-cart and assigned Swift a much higher place than Addison in the hierarchy of English satirists. Indeed, as a satirist, Swift is far more searching and complex than Addison, the intellectual content of whose writings is thin like milk-and-water-gruel. Justifiably does C. S. Lewis complain that there is no “iron” in Addison.

The Genesis of Their Satire:

Why did Swift and Addison turn to satire? In both the cases there were both subjective and objective factors which seem to have operated. All satire is an expression, in one way or another, of Its writer’s sense of dissatisfaction with things as they actually are. Satire is the art of expressing creatively the sense of am userrtent, despair, or disgust-all arising from dissatisfaction at the departure of the real from the ideal. Apathy or contentment can never result in satire. Different things created the sense of dissatisfaction in Swift and Addison and consequently, different things engaged their satiric attention. Addison was dissatisfied with the departure of the people from common sense, reason, and refinement, as was apparent from their manners of dress and behaviour. Women were particularly prone to sartorial extravagances, fopperies and frivolities, mostly imported from France. As a man of culture, Addison was amused to find the state of affairs prevailing around him. He tried his best in The Taller and The Spectator to rid the country of, what may be called, “minor vices of dress and manners.” His intention, in his own words, was “to banish vice from the territories of Britain.” This reformative intention found a very eligible weapon in satire. But this satire was bound to be superficial. It was not intended to touch the inner and deep-seated springs of human action. Addison did not go beyond the dress and the skin.

Swift’s satire, on the other hand, could be far more searching, disillusioning, and consequently, troubling. Whereas Addison is amused at the difference between what things are and what they should be, Swift is disgusted. Of course, both of them are dissatisfied, but their dissatisfaction takes different shapes. Swift’s objective examination and analysis of the socio-political conditions obtaining around him did much to foment his wrath. Below the pretty-pretty surface of “the peace of the Augustans” his piercing Intellect could see disgusting corruption and unspeakable iniquities. Behind the imposing facade of Augustan “common sense and reason” he saw squalid vistas inhabited by monsters of folly and error. He had personally been (particularly during 1710-14) a witness to high society and the inner political life of the country. He had been in touch with political dignitaries such as Harley and Bolingbroke. He had been not only a spectator, but also a player; he had not only seen, but experienced. Moreover, he saw around himself a swarming mass of pedants, idiots, poetasters, witlings, shallow dilettantes, fervent dissenters, pimps, airy scientists, blue stockings, almanac-makers, and “corruptors of taste and lovers of passion.” He, in the words of Herbert Davis, received a “constant shock, as a moralist, at the insane pride of these miserable vermin [that is, men], crawling about the face of the earth…outraged by the brutalities and insensitiveness of eighteenth century manners.”

It was natural for such a pestiferous world as Swift saw to have set up a deep and vexatious reaction in his sensitive mind. His rough exterior was. in fact, a mask hiding a hypersensitive nature acutely alive to the deep corruption and perversion of human life. However, along with his objective observation of life his subjective experience was also, to some extent, responsible for provoking his satiric outbursts. Addison’s life was a bed of roses. He was a very successful man who with his rather modest talents Tose to high government offices, mostly due to the patronage of numerous grandees. The smugness and sense of complacency and good humour which characterise Addison‘s satire are partly due to his own successful personal career. Swift’s life was, on the other hand, a veritable jeremiad, one long concatenation of insufferable woes, ending for the last five years in a state of perfect idiocy. He desired and deserved to be a bishop but could not get beyond being a dean. After 1714, he felt crushed and humbled by the arrival of the era of Whig supremacy. Thwarted ambitions, neglected merit, physical ill-health, ungratified erotic appetite-he was not married in spite of three love-affairs—the state of servility in childhood and adolescense, everything contributed towards the making of the “prince of satirists.” The world did not seem to realise his merit, so he wanted to teach it a lesson. He hungered for position though not much for money. He once wrote to Bolingbroke: “All my endeavours to distinguish myself were only for want of a great title and fortune, that I might be used like a lord by those who have an opinion of my parts.”

The Targets of Their Satire:

The range of Swift’s satiric targets is much vaster than that of Addison’s. Most of Swift’s prose works can be called satires. On the other hand,’ satire is just an element in some of the periodical essays which Addison wrote for The Taller, The Spectator, and some other periodicals. Swift is nothing if not a satirist. His satire knows no barrier. Its rapier-like thrusts spare neither an almanac-maker, nor an airy philosopher, nor a glib politician, nor a conceited for, nor a pretentious scientist. He once satirised every satire! The paltry Parridge and the mighty Walpole alike winced under his terrible “whip of scorpions.” John Bullitt in Swift and the Anatomy of Satire remarks: “Few satirists have found such a plethora of objects for their contempt as did Swift.” Roughly speaking, there are three categories of objects that a satirist can attack. They are :

(i)         individuals.

(ii)        Groups, tendencies, institutions professions, ideologies, etc.

(iii)       Humanity in general.

Addison restricts Tlis attention as satirist to trie second category. His satire is neither too particular nor too general. He attacks neither individual men nor man but, to use his own expression, “multitudes.” He ridicules the groups of people who patronise numerous follies, fopperies, and frivolities which offend good taste. He lashes the vice but “spares the man”. He is basically critical not of people but the follies they patronise. It goes to the credit of Addison that as a satirist he never indulged in personalities. There were people like Pope who satirised him quite maliciously and unreasonably, but Addison never retaliated. Wit, according to him, should be employed for educating and reforming humanity rather than deriding one’s personal antagonists.

Swift’s satire, on the other hand, takes within its ambit all the three categories of targets listed above. Starting with individuals and progressing with groups, tendencies, and what he thought were erroneous ways of thinking and behaving, it ends in a terrible indictment of mankind in its entirety and all its attributes. Even the human body and life itself come within the reach of its lashes. While hating humanity Swift made some exception. He observes: “I have ever hated all nations, professions and communities: and all my love is towards individuals…But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years, but do not tell, and so I shall go on till I have done with them.” If Swift is a misanthrope, he is a misanthrope of his own kind.

A glance at the important satires of Swift will convince one of the tremendous variety of his targets. Generally he makes his satire operate on many planes simultaneously. Gulliver’s Travels is a satire on the pettiness of man, his pride, depravity, and corruption. At the same time there are veiled hits directed against parry struggle, silly scientists, mathematicians, etc. A Tale of a Tub, in his own words, was meant to be a satire on “the numerous and gross corruptions in religion and learning.” But once again the satire goes beyond its aim and attacks some individuals, particularly, “our great Dryden,” William Wotton, and Richard Bentley as also general human folly and unreason, critics, philosophers, and enthusiasts. The Battle of the Books is a satire on the pride and pettiness of modern writers, particularly Bentley and Wotton. The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit attacks the enthusiasm of the Puritans. Directions to Servants is a delightful satire on wily domestic servants. “Bickerstaff Papers” were written to expose the charlatanry of the almanac-writer Partidge. Drapier’s Letters and A Modest Proposal were written on behalf of the down-trodden Irish people who were being impoverished and tyrannised by their English overlords. To this list must be added several more works attacking several more targets. The extensive variety of his targets may make one question whether it was the world or the great dean himself who was out of step!

Technique:

All satire is, fundamentally, a triumpn of technique. It is the way in which a satirist puts his thoughts which ultimately and exclusively rates his satire. What Swift says in The Battle of the Books, for instance, could have been said simply in a few words. Not that Swift indulges in prolixity: there are very few writers as concise as he is. It is to couch his message in an effective way that he invents the interesting story of the battle of the ancients and the moderns fought “last Friday” in St. James’s Library. All effective satire eschews directness and works itself through some sly indirection of technique. Both Swift and Addison are good satirists on account of the effectiveness and artistry of their technique. Both are indirect and do not employ the sizzling and denunciatory style of Juvenal. The indirectness of their technique is mostly seen in their very frequent use of irony. According to T. H. Lobban, the two hallmarks of Addison’s satire are “irony and urbanity”. Pope in the Epistle to Arbuthnot represents Addison as Atticus, whose modus operandi is to

Damn with faint praise, assent -with civil leer,
and -without sneering, teach the rest to sneer.

That is, according to Lobban, “a brilliant definition of Addisonian irony as viewed by hostile eyes.” Most of Addison’s satiric essays are ironical in tone. He writes about the follies of the age either approvingly or, at least, relates them gravely and simply as if they were quite natural, if not positively admirable. Swift’s usual method is also similar. Dr. Johnson observes: “One slight lineament of his [Addison’s] character Swift has preserved. It was his practice, when he found any man invincibly wrong, to flatter his opinions by acquiescence and sink him yet deeper into absurdity.” But there is one difference. With Addison, irony, even though it is used very often, is just a momentary instrument to be used and then quickly laid down-sometimes just another figure of speech; with Swift irony is more extensive, almost a way of thinking. In many of his satires Swift seems to be wearing an ironic mask from the beginning to the end. He seems to be letting a well-defined fictive character express himself, mostly in obvious contradiction to the views of the writer. That makes for a kind of “dramatic irony.” He puts thus in action the very folly he intends attacking, and makes it damn itself, without the need of his active intrusion. In A Tale of a Tub, especially in the numerous digressions, it is a hack who is obviously speaking: it is Swift’s intention to satirise hacks. In A Modest Proposal it is an agricultural economist who is made to speak: it is Swift’s intention to satirise such people as this character represents. Some of Swift’s masks, for instance that of the Drapier, are, however, non-ironic. In the hands of Swift such “extended irony” became a highly refined and effective technique, and has since remained something unique in English literature. Swift, according to Charles Whibley, was “a great master of irony—the greatest that has ever been bom in these isles, great enough to teach a lesson to Voltaire himself and to inspire the author of‘Jonathan Wild.”

Their General Attitude and the Impression They Leave:

There is much difference between the general attitudes of Addison and Swift as satirists, and also the impressions that they leave on the reader. Addison is kindly and gentle and generally tolerant; on the other hand, Swift is fierce and indignant and often seems to be out to damn the world. Addison satirises because he loves humanity; Swift, because he hates it. Saeva indignatio (=savage anger) is the expression which is often used to characterise Swift’s satire. Addison is much more of a “gentleman” though much less of genius.

Swift shatters complacency as no other satirist does. He urges us to look at things anew and searchingly and not to be satisfied with “the superficies of things.” Thus, he is muph more incisive and compelling than Addison. But sometimes he is gross, and quite often, negative and destructive. Addison was a born optimist believing in basic human goodness and corrigibility. Swift, on the other hand, despaired and hoped by turns, and correspondingly his satire veered between the constructive and the destructive. “As long as,” says John Bullitt in the work quoted above, “Swift could find vices and follies which were not ingrained in man by nature and which could therefore possibly be shamed out of existence, his satire has a place.”

Reasons for the Rise of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century

Introduction:

The most important gifts of the eighteenth century to English literature are the periodical essay and the novel, neither of which had any classical precedent. Both of them were prose forms and eminently suited to the genius of eighteenth-century English men and women. The periodical essayist and the novelist were both exponents of the same sensibility and culture, and worked on the same intellectual, sentimental, and realistic plane, with the oft-avowed aim of instructing the readers and making them lead a more purposeful and virtuous life.

Of these two new literary genres the periodical essay was a peculiar product of the environment prevailing at that time. It was born with the eighteenth century and died with it after enjoying a career of phenomenal popularity. The novel, on the other hand, survived valiantly the turn of the century and has since then been not only managing to live, but has been growing from strength to strength and adding to its popularity. Even today, when the current of poetry has unhappily run into the arid vistas of cold intellectualism and clever phrase-mongering and the real drama has become as defunct as the dodo, the novel, which originated in the eighteenth century, is holding up its head as a dominant literary genre.

It was immediately after 1740 that the English novel suddenly arose from the lower forms and came to embody, as no other literary form did, the spirit of the age. The glorious work of Richardson and Fielding was followed by that of the two other major novelists of the eighteenth century, namely, Smollett and Sterne. Soon the whole English literary air was thick with a staggeringly vast number of novels produced by a host of writers. Let us consider the important reasons for the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, as also, by implication, for its spectacular popularity.

The Social Environment: The Rise of the Middle Classes:

According to David Daiches, the novel “was in a large measure the product of the middle class, appealing to middle-class ideals and sensibilities, a patterning of imagined events set against a clearly realized social background and taking its view of what was significant in human behaviour from agreed public attitudes.” In the words of Oliver Elton, “it came to express, far better than the poetry could do, the temper of the age and race.” The eighteenth century is known in the social history of England for the rise of the middle classes. With the unprecedented rise in trade and commerce the English masses were becoming increasingly wealthy and many hitherto poor people were finding themselves in the rank of respectable burgesses. These nouveaux riches were, naturally enough, desirous of giving themselves an aristocratic touch by appearing to be learned and sophisticated like their traditional social superiors-the landed gentry and nobility. This class of readers had hitherto been neglected by highbrow writers. The literary works previous to the eighteenth century were almost invariably meant to be the reading of the higher strata of society. Only “popular literature,” such as the ballad, catered for the lower rungs. The up-and-coming middle classes ,of the eighteenth century demanded some new kind of literature which should be in conformity with their temper and be designed as well to voice their aspirations as to cater for their tastes. England was then becoming a country of small and big traders and shop-keepers. And who has more common sense than a trader or a shop-keeper? These people, according to a critic “took little interest in the exaggerated romances of impossible heroes and the picaresque stories of intrigue and villainy which had interested the upper classes. Some new type of literature was demanded, and this new type must express the new ideal of the eighteenth century, the value and the importance of the individual life…To tell men, not about knights or kings but about themselves, about their own thoughts and motives and struggles and the results of action upon their own characters,-this was the purpose of our first novelists. The eagerness with which their chapters were read-in England, and the rapidity with which their work was copied abroad, show how powerfully the new discovery appealed to the readers everywhere.” Not only was the novel a product of the emphasis on the common man, it also was in rapport with the psyche of the middle classes. According to Cazamian “there is a deep affinity between the dominant instincts of the middle classes and this branch of literature, the possibilities of which have remained intact. It lends itself better than any other to morality and sentiment.”

Right from Richardson and Fielding to the very modern times the novel has kept up its explicit or implicit purpose of “teaching’ something to the reader. The moral and didactic aim of literature was taken for granted in the eighteenth century. The novel was yet another literary form-like the periodical essay, for example—to teach morality and good conduct to the common people. As regards Sentiment/again most novelists indulged’ in it. Richardson set the sentimental note so loved of the middle classes, and this note culminated in full orchestration in the highly sentimental novels of Henry Mackenzie (1743-1831).

The Democratic Movement:

The eighteenth century sounded the death-knell of old English feudalism and, conversely, broke down numerous barriers standing between various social classes. With the Glorious Revolution of 1689 started the era of the ascendency of Parliament and the forging of the democratic spirit. This process of democratisation reached a high water-mark in the eighteenth century-the century of the coffee-houses which were helping the process by nurturing and encouraging the spirit of free and frank discussion. Moreover, in the early years of the century, as has been pointed out by Bonamy Dobree in The Literature of the Early Eighteenth Century (Oxford History of English Literature), there occurred an increasing amalgamation of the two well-defined classes of readers-the rich and sophisticated class and the common masses. The democratic movement emphasized the importance of the life and activities of the common people. The need was being felt for a new literary form which unlike the romance and tragedy, for instance should hold a mirror to the life of the common people, concern itself with their problems, and tell them how to live or live better. The new form was of course, the novel-a kind of “democratic epic.” Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and their teeming followers dealt chiefly with the life of commoners. The heroine of Richardson’s first novel Pamela is the maidservant of that name. If it was not the first novel in the history of English literature it was at least first to represent sympathetically the ethos and traditions of low and middle classes. As Lord Morley says, it was landmark of a great social no less than a great literary transition, when all England went mad with enthusiasm over the trials, the virtues, and the triumphs of a rustic lady’s maid. Incidentally it may be pointed out that in eighteenth-century drama too the democratic spirit was predominant. In George Lillo’s tragedies-77ze London Merchant or the History of George Barn-well (1731) and Fatal Curiosity: A True Tragedy (1736)-for example, the protagonists are not princes or nobles but very ordinary people.

The Ascendency of Realism:

The eighteenth century was imbued with the spirit of realism, and the literature of the age is, to a great extent, devoid of the enthusiasm, elemental passion, mysterious suggestiveness, and heady imaeination which characterised romantic literature. The man of letters in the eighteenth century, whether he was a poet, a periodical essayist, or even a dramatist, believed that for the success of his art a rational appraisal of reality was an essential prerequisite. The novel was another instrument for the exploration and representation of social reality. All the novelists of the eighteenth century-and most of their “followers” in the subsequent centuries-were stark realists and social critics. David Daiches observes in this connexion: “Like the medieval fabliau, also a product of the urban imagination, the novel tended to realism and contemporaneity in the sense that it dealt with people living in the social world known to the writer.” Cazamian avers about the novel: “After having formerly represented allegorical or ideal visions it tends more and more tcTbecome a picture of life. The middle-class mind would have this picture real, because it has a firm hold upon reality, and cannot break itself away from it. Thus realism will come to find its most favourable fields in the novel:”

The Decline of Drama:                                            

The decline of drama also contributed to the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century. Drama in the eighteenth century was no longer a social force as it had been in the age of Elizabeth or even that of Charles II. The Licensing Act of 1737, which was meant to curb such scurrilous political satire as Fielding had levelled in his comedies against Sir Robert Wolpole, in the words of Ifor Evans, “cut the very heart of drama”. It did not remain an influential literary form. The reading public desired a new form to satisfy its craving for story and social pictures. This craving had its fulfilment with the rise of the novel in the years following 1740.

Much Had Already Been Done:

We certainly agree with Oliver Elton that after 1740 the English novel “quickened.” However, we have to bear in mind that the growth of the novel was not “sudden” or unrelated to what had already been done by numerous writers. In fact, before Richardson and Fielding started, the soil had already been laid and manured, and even sown. These pioneers of the novel had only to take the last step in the process of its growth. Moreover the climate of their times was the most suitable for this purpose. Among their immediate predecessors must be mentioned the names of Addison, Steele, Defoe, and Swift. Addison and Steele in the Spectator papers concerning Sir Roger de Coverley had provided almost a skeleton novel of the social and domestic kind. Some of the Coverley papers read like so many pages from a novel. But it is questionable whether Addison and Steele had the real temperament of the novelist. They seem to have been incapable of any sustained effort and introspective analysis which are the basic requirements for any novelist. However, it can be said to their credit, that they did provide some material to work upon for Richardson-atid Fielding—particularly the latter. Their good-humoured social satire, their lucid style, their basic human sympathy, their intense observation of their environment, and their sense of episode-all were to be the assets of the future novelists. Defoe’s deftness at the art of the narrative, his gift of circumstantial detail, and his unflinching examination of low life had also their,admirers among the novelists to come. Defoe himself is not a “true” novelist as his characters are psychologically too simple and seldom get involved in complex .psychological problems. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels had an interesting narrative and some well-attempted verisimilitude—features which were to be the basic requirements of every novel. Thus, in a word, both the material and the method of the novelist were waiting for adoption by a talented writer when Richardson and Fielding appeared on the scene.

The Novel Gave More Freedom to the Writer Than the Drama:

The rise of the novel was also due to the fact that this new literary form gave more freedom (than, say, the drama) to the writer for the performance of the task which the temper of the age imposed upon him. Without question, the drama imposes many stringent curbs upon the writer. He himself has to remain in the background and limit the whole thing within the performing time of about three hours. The novelist, on the other hand, can pretend to omniscience, and can also intrude upon the scene at any time when he finds the need for it. Further, there is no curb on length. Again, in the eighteenth century, with a remarkable spurt in the mass of the reading public which no longer remained confined to London, it became impossible for the theatre to cater for the entire public. Hence the novel came as a welcome substitute of the drama.

The Freedom of the Novel from Classical Restraints:

As we have said in the beginning, the novel had no classical precedents. In this respect it was quite “different from most poetic and dramatic forms popular in the eighteenth century. For instance, if a writer had to write an epic, a pastoral, an ode, or an elegy, he had to look to the classical models of antiquity and, belong as he did to a neo­classical age, to respect and follow them. The novel could ignore authority, for no authority existed. Fielding did, in the intercalary chapters of his novels, talk rather pedantically about the ancients and their works, but that was just to placate the hostile opinion which an altogether new literaryibrm was likely to provoke in that ase. The novelist had not to follow but set a tradition. Thus whereas poetry, in the words of Cazamian, “is the slave of an ancient forth, which classicism has carried to a high degree of perfection,” the novel is untrammelled and hence a more eligible medium for such free geniuses as Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne.

The Rise of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century

Introduction:

In the eighteenth century the years after the forties witnessed a wonderful efflorescence of a new literary genre which was soon to establish itself for all times to come as the dominant literary form. Of course, we are referring here to the English novel which was born with Richardson’s Pamela and has been thriving since then.

When Matthew Arnold used the epithets “excellent” and “indispensable” for the eighteenth century which had little of good poetry or drama to boast of, he was probably paying it due homage for its gift of the novel. The eighteenth century was the age in which the novel was established as the most outstanding and enduring form of literature. The periodical essay, which was another gift of this century to English literature, was born and died in the century, but the novel was to enjoy an enduring career. It is to the credit of the major eighteenth-century novelists that they freed the novel from the influence and elements of high flown romance and fantasy, and used it to interpret the everyday social and psychological problems of the common man. Thus they introduced realism, democratic spirit, and psychological interest into the novel— the qualities which have since then been recognized as the essential prerequisites of-every good novel and which distinguish it from the romance and other impossible stories.

Reasons for the Rise and Popularity:

Various reasons can be adduced for the rise and popularity of the novel in the eighteenth century. The most important of them is that this new literary form suited the genius and temper of the times. The eighteenth century is known in English social history for the rise of the middle classes consequent upon an unprecedented increase in the volume of trade and commerce. Many people emerged from the limbo of society to occupy a respectable status as wealthy burgesses. The novel, with its realism, its democratic spirit, and its concern with the everyday psychological problems of the common people especially appealed to these nouveaia riches and provided them with respectable reading material. The novel thus appears to have been specially designed both to voice the aspirations of the middle and low classes and to meet their taste. Moreover, it gave the writer much scope for what Cazamian calls “morality and sentiment”-the two elements which make literature “popular.” The decline of drama in the eighteenth century was also partly responsible for the rise and -ascendency of the novel. After the Licensing Act of 1737, the drama lay moribund. The poetry of the age too-except for the brilliant example of Pope’s work—was in a stage of decadence. It was then natural that from the ashes of the drama (and, to some extent, of poetry, too) should rise the phoenix-like shape of a new literary genre. This new genre was, of course, the novel.

Before the Masters:

Before Richardson and Fielding gave shape to the new form some work had already been done by numerous other writers, which helped the pioneers to some extent. Mention must here be made of Swift, Defoe, Addison, and Steele. Swift in Gulliver’s Travels gave an interesting narrative, and, in spite of the obvious impossibility of the “action” and incidents, created an effect of verisimilitude which was to be an important characteristic of the novel. The Coverley papers of Addison and Steele were in themselves a kind of rudimentary novel, and some of them actually read like so many pages from a social and domestic novel. Their good-humoured social satire, their eye for the oddities of individuals, their basic human sympathy, their lucid style, and their sense of episode-all were to be aspired after by the future novelists. Defoe with his numerous stories like Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana showed his uncanny gift of the circumstantial detail and racy, gripping narrative combined with an unflinching realism generally concerned with the seamy and sordid aspects of life (commonly, low life). His lead was to be followed by ‘ numerous novelists. Defoe’s limitation lies in the fact that his protagonists are psychologically too simple and that he makes nobody laugh and nobody weep. But his didacticism was to find favour with all the novelists of the eighteenth, and even many of the nineteenth, century. Some call Defoe the first English novelist. But as David Daiches puts it in A Critical History of English Literature, Vol. II, whether Defoe was “properly” a novelist “is a matter of definition of terms.”

The Masters:

Between 1740 and 1800 hundreds of novels of all kinds were written. However, the real “masters” of the novel in the eighteenth century were four-Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. The rest of them are extremely inferior to them. Oliver Elton maintains: “The work of the four masters stands high, but the foothills are low.” The case was different in, say, the mid-nineteenth century when so many equally great novelists were at work. Fielding was the greatest of the foursome. Sir Edmund Gosse calls Richardson “the first great English novelist” and Fielding, “the greatest of English novelists.” Fielding may not be the greatest of all, but he was certainly one of the greatest English novelists and the greatest novelist of the eighteenth century.

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761):

He was the father of the English novel. He set the vogue of the novel with his Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1741). It was in the epistolary manner. It took England by storm. In it Richardson narrated the career of a rustic lady’s maid who guards her honour against the advances of her dissolute master who in the end marries her and is reformed. Pamela was followed by Clarissa ffarlowe (1747-48), in eight volumes. It was, again, of the epistolary kind, Richardson’s third and last novel was Sir Charles Grandison (1754). The hero is a model Christian gentleman very scrupulous in his love-affair.

Among Richardson’s good qualities must be mentioned his knowledge of human, particularly female psychology and his awareness of the emotional problems of common people. He completely, and for good, liberated the novel from the extravagance and lack of realism of romance to concentrate on social reality. The note of morality and sentimentality made him a popular idol not only in England but also abroad. Thus Didoret in France could compare him to Homer and Moses! However, his morality with its twang of smugness and prudery did not go unattacked even in his own age. Fielding was the most important of those who reacted against Richardsonian sentimentalism and prudish moralism. One great defect of Richardson’s novels, which is especially noticeable today, is their enormous length. The epistolary technique which he adopted in all his three novels is essentially dilatory and repetitive, and therefore makes for bulkiness. He is at any rate a very good psychologist and as one he is particularly admirable for, what a critic calls, “the delineation of the delicate shades of sentiment as they shift and change and the cross-purposes which the troubled mind envisages when in the grip of passion.”

Henry Fielding (1707-54):

Fielding in the words of Hudson, “was a man of very different type. His was a virile, vigorous, and somewhat coarse nature, and his knowledge of life as wide as Richardson’s was narrow, including in particular many aspects of it from which the prim little printer would have recoiled shocked. There was thus a strength and breadth in his work for which we look in vain in that of his elder contemporary. Richardson’s judgment of Fielding-that his writings were ‘wretchedly low and dirty’-clearly suggests the fundamental contrast between the two men.” His very first novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), was intended to be a parody of Pamela, particularly of its priggish morality and lachrymosic sentimentalism. According to Wilbur L. Cross, Richardson “was a sentimentalist, creating pathetic scenes for their own sake and degrading tears and hysterics into a manner.” In Joseph Andrews Fielding light-heartedly titled against morbid sentimentalism and sham morality. After the ninth chapter of the book, however, he seems to have outgrown his initial intention of parody. Parson Adams, one of the immortal creations of English fiction, appears and runs away with the rest of the novel. Joseph Andrews was followed by Tom Jones (1749) and Amelia (1751). We may add to the list of his fictional works Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), a cynically ironical novel which, as Legouis says, must have been written “after a fit of gloom.”

Fielding’s novels are characterised by a fresh and realistic moral approach which admits occasionally of animalism and ribaldry, a searching realism, good-humoured social satire, and healthy sentiment In his abundant and coarse vigour, his common sense and unflinching realism, and his delight in physical beauty (especially female) he is essentially a masculine writer. He does not have the delicacy of Richardson. It may be said that it is not Richardson who is the “father of the English novel; it is in fact, Fielding. As for Richardson, he is only the “mother” of the English novel!

It is to the credit of ‘Fielding that unlike Richardson and most of his own successors, at least in Tom Jones (if not the other novels, too), he provided a glowing model of a well-constructed plot. According to Coleridge, Jones (with Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist) is one of the three works in world literature which have perfectly constructed plots.

Tobias Smollett (1721-71):

Along with Richardson and Fielding, Smollett is generally included among the masters of eighteenth-century novel; but, as Hudson points out, “it must be distinctly understood that his work is on a much lower level than theirs.” His novels are of the picaresque kind, and include Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle (1751), and Humphrey Clinker (1771). Smollett was a realist and had his own art of racy narrative and eye-catching description. He was a keen observer of the coarser facts of life, particularly naval life. He exulted in coarseness and brutality. He never bothered about the construction of a plot. Nor did he bother about morality, Richardsonian or “Fieldingian.” His humour, in keeping with his nature, is coarse rather than subtle or ironical and arises mostly out of caricature. Hazlitt observes: “It is not a very difficult undertaking to class Fielding or Smollett-the one as an observer of the character of human life, the other as a describer of its various eccentricities.” Smollett’s characterisation is necessarily poor. His heroes are mechanical puppets rather than living personalities. They are meant only for the bringing in of new.situations. As a critic puts it, “Roderick Random’s career is such as would be enough to kill three heroes and yet the fellow lives just to introduce us to new characters and situations.”

Laurence Sterne (1713-68):

His only novel is Tristram Shandy which appeared from 1759 to 1767 in nine volumes and which is described by Hudson as “the strange work of a very strange man.” If this work can be called a novel, it is one of its own kind, without predecessors and without successors. Hudson observes: “It is rather a medley of unconnected incidents, scraps of out-of-the-way learning, whimsical fancies, humour, pathos, reflection, impertinence, and indecency.” The plot is of the barest minimum: we have to wait till the third book for the birth of the hero! And he is put into breeches only in the sixth! What a pace of development! It was, says Cross, “a sad day for English fiction when a writer of genius came to look upon the novel as the repository for the crotchets of a lifetime.”

Sterne’s sentimentalism was to leave a lasting trace on the English novels which followed. What is quite remarkable in Tris&am Shandy is the wonderfully living characters of Uncle Toby, the elder Shandy, his wife, and Corporal Trim.

The Novel after Sterne:

After Tristram Shandy we find in the eighteenth century a remarkable proliferation of novels. But none of the later novelists comes anywhere near Richardson and Fielding. We find the novel developing in many directions. Four major kinds of the novel may be recognized:

(i)         The novel of sentiment.

(ii)        The so-called Gothic novel.

(iii)       The novel of doctrine and didacticism.

(iv)       The novel of manners,

Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) is prominent among the novels of sentiment. According to Cross, “written in a style alternating between the whims of Sterne and a winning plaintiveness, [it] enjoys the distinction of being the most sentimental of all English novels.” The Gothic novel, which appeared towards the end of the eighteenth century, indulged in morbid sensationalism with impossible stories of supernatural monsters and blood-curdling incidents. Horace Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, “Monk” Lewis, and William Beckford were the most important writers of this kind of novel. The novel of doctrine and didacticism includes such works as Mrs. Inchbad’s Nature and Art (1796) and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794). These works used the form of the novel just for propagating a specific point of view. The novel of manners was mostly patronised by fairly intelligent female writers such as Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth who aimed at a light transcription of contemporary manners.

Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744), Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefleld (1766) also deserve a special mention in an account of eighteenth-century novel. Sarah Fielding’s work was inspired by the success of Pamela. It abounds in faithfully rendered scenes of London life. Dr. Johnson’s work is hjighly didactic. It emphasized “the vanity of human wishes” in the form of an allegorical tale which he wrote in a very despondent mood induced by the death of his mother. Goldsmith’s work is, in the words of Cross, “of all eighteenth-century novels, the one that many readers would the least willingly lose.” This novel is admirable, among other things, for the sensitive characterisation of Dr. Primrose and the general sanity of the “philosophy of life” which peeps through, it.

Henry Fielding’s Work and Contribution

Introduction:

The eighteenth century–“our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century”-is known in the history of English literature particularly for the birth and development of the novel. In this century the novel threw into insignificance all other literary forms and became the dominant form to continue as such for hundreds of years.

The pioneers of the novel were Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. The work of this foursome is of monumental significance, particularly because they were not only our first novelists but some of our best. No doubt the seeds of the novel were already there in the English literary soil but they burgeoned only with the arrival of these masters. Addison and Steele (Coverley papers’), Defoe, and Swift {Gulliver’s Travels) had already provided the raw material for them to work upon. It is debatable whether Defoe be denied the title of “the father of the English novel”, as many of his stories like Moll Flanders, Roxana, and Robinson Crusoe are very close to being novels, if at all they are considered not to be genuine novels. “Whether Defoe was”, observes David Daiches rightly, “properly a novelist is a matter of definition of terms, but however we define our terms we must concede that there is an important difference between Defoe’s journalistic deadpan and the bold attempt to create a group of people faced with psychological problems.” Defoe was a realist in his own right, but his “interest in character was minimal.” Critical opinion, therefore, is not inclined to accept Defoe as the first true English novelist or even as one of the pioneers of the novel.

Fielding’s Greatness:

Of the four pioneers of the English novel named above, the first two were considerably superior to the rest. Of the two—Richardson and Fielding-Fielding has been recognized to be the greater. Edmund Gosse in A History of Eighteenth Century Literature (1902) characteristically refers to Richardson as “the first great English novelist” and to Fielding as “the greatest of English novelists.” Though it stands to reason if Fielding was the greatest of all English novelists, yet two things cannot be denied-first that he was one of the greatest, and secondly that he was greater than Richardson. Among his contemporaries, no doubt, there raged an interminable debate as to the comparative merits of the two. It is also on record that Richardson enjoyed much the greater popularity and praise in the Continent. Modern critical opinion is, however, in favour of placing Fielding higher—considerably higher-than Richardson in the hierarchy of English novelists. The lachrymosic sentimentalism, prudish morality, and the sprawling epistolary manner Richardson adopted in all his three novels along with his smugness and conspicuous want of the sense of humour and comedy-all go against him today. Fielding’s lively realism, his sunny humour and satire, his insistent sanity and fundamental tolerance of human frailty, his keen eye for the comic, his racy narrative, his giftof plot-construction displayed in Tom Jones if not elsewhere too-all contribute towards his excellence as a novelist. Louis I. Bredvold refers to the contrast between Richardson and Fielding in these words: “From the first appearance of their earliest novels a literary feud has persisted in regard to the relative merits of the novels of Richardson and Fielding. In personality, artistic method and ethical outlook the two men are as far apart as the poles.” This “literary feud” has by now been resolved, and the palm has been awarded to Fielding whose work and contribution to the English novel we are now set to examine.

FIELDING’S WORK

“Joseph Andrews” (1742):

It is Fielding’s first novel. It is a classical example of a literary work which started as a parody and ended as an excellent work of art in its own right. The work Fielding intended to parody was Richardson’s first novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded which had taken England by storm in the years following 1740 when it was first published. Richardson‘s smug and prudential morality and his niminy-piminy sentimentalism were Fielding’s target Richardson in his novel had shown how a rustic lady’s maid (Pamela) wins a dissolute noble for her husband by her rather calculated and discreet virtue. In his novel Fielding intended in the beginning to show how Lady Boody (aunt of “Lord B.” in Richardson’s novel) attempts the virginity of Joseph Andrews, described as the virtuous Pamela’s brother but in the end discovered to be different. The whole intention was comic. But after Chapter IX Joseph Andrews seems to break away completely from the original intention. Parson Adams, who has no counterpart in Pamela, runs away with the novel. He, according’to Louis I. Bredvold, “is one of the most living, lovable, comical bundles of wisdom and simplicity in all literature.” In the words of Edmund Gosse, “Parson Abraham Adams, alone, would be a contribution to English letters.” He indeed is the hero of the novel, and not Joseph Andrews. Fielding was aware of giving a new literary form with Joseph Andrews which he called “a comic epic in prose.”

“Jonathan Wild” (1748):

Fielding’s next novel was a loose narrative suggested by the notorious gallows-bird Jonathan Wild who was hanged in 1725. It is a deep, cynical and sarcastic satire on “greatness” in general and the “great” Walpole in particular, as also on the many biographers of the age who indulged in exaggerated eulogy of the persons whose lives they handled. It is so different from Fielding’s subsequent, works, namely, Tom Jones and Amelia, that Austin Dobson suggests that it must have been written earlier than Joseph Andrews even though it was published a year later. Throughout the work Fielding keeps up a sustained ironical pose reminiscent of the favourite method of Swift. Walter Allen observes about Jonathan Wild: “Some pages of Swift apart, it is the grimmest and most brilliant prose satire that We have; and perhaps it is even more effective than Swift’s because it is not the work of a misanthrope.”

“Tom Jones” (1749):

Tom Jones, indeed, is Fielding’s magnum opus. It is, according to Hudson, “the greatest novel of the,eighteenth century.” Moody and Lovett observe: “In structure, in richness of characterization, Jn’sanity and wisdom of point of view, Tom Jones stands unrivalled in the history of English fiction.” In Tom Jones Fielding has a very vast canvas on which he paints with appreciable authority a representative cross-section of the society of his age. The swarming multiplicity and variety of characters make one feel that here is “God’s plenty”~the same that Dryden found in Chaucer’s Prologue to his Canterbury Tales. A ve$ remarkable merit of the novel is its excellent structure. Fielding is a master of that architectonic ability which we find so lamentably lacking in the works of most novelists. In Tom Jones, unlike in Joseph Andrews, Fielding does not pay any attention to Richardson and tries to represent his own view of English manners and morals and life in general. What he particularly excels in is his sense of comedy in which he, according to Louis I. Bredvold, can be placed beside Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote.

“Amelia” (1751):

Amelia is the last of Fielding’s novels In tone and execution it is markedly different from all the rest. It is the pathetic story of a patient and virtuous wife who suffers much and suffers long. Fielding here works on a much smaller canvas and his vigorous joviality and sense of comedy are conspicuous by their absence. His fast deteriorating health and the maturity of his years seem, at least partly, to be responsible for this cataclysmic change. Amelia is the only full-length female character drawn by Fielding. She is described by Walter Allen as “a character whose quiet radiance illuminates and softens a world of viciousness and deceit. Amelia is the rarest of successful characters in literature, the absolutely good person who is credible.” Amelia is a domestic novel, not “a comic epic in prose” like Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones.

FIELDING’S CONTRIBUTION

Introduction:

Both in his technique and “the philosophy of life” Fielding set glowing examples for all novelists to follow. Major novelists such as Jane Austen, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and Meredith as well as the minor ones like Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth accepted his influence in varying degrees and ways. Even Lessing and Goethe paid Fielding some very glowing tributes. The English novel, in various respects, is considerably indebted to him. Fielding might have been less popular with his contemporaries than Richardson, yet on the development of the English novel he exerted a much greater influence.

Reaiism:

Fielding was the pioneer of realism in English fiction. Both Richardson and Fielding were, broadly speaking, realists, and both reacted against the French romance so popular in their age, as also the effete taste of their predecessors like Aphra Behn. Fielding also reacted against Richardson’s sentimentalism as a.falsifying influence on the study of reality. Fielding does not reject sentimentalism altogether-his Amelia is-rich in pathos and sentiment. “His desire”, says Cazamian, “is to give sentiment its right place; but also to integrate it in an organic series of tendencies where each contributes to maintain a mutual balance.”

Fielding is one of the few writers who, despite the wideness of their scope are capable of observing the demands of reality with perpetual ease. He works on a crowded canVas but, as has been said, “all his characters inhabit the same plane of reality.” His novels hold up to view a representative picture of his age. He is as authentic a chronicler of his day as Chaucer was of the later fourteenth century. Fielding’s truth is not the crude and bitter truth of Smollett’s. A. R. Humphreys observes : “Fielding’s is the higher and more philosophical truth which epitomizes the spirit, the ethos, as well as the body, of the time which deals primarily not in externals but in the nature of man and in an intellectual and moral code.”

Humour, Satire, and Sharp Sense of Comedy:

Fielding is one of the greatest humorists in English literature. The same comic spirit which permeates his plays is also evident in his novels. As he informs us, the author upon whom he modelled himself was Cervantes; it is not surprising, therefore, that comedy should be his method. Fielding’s humour is wide in range. It rises from the coarsest farce to the astonishing heights of the subtlest irony. On one side is his zestful description of various fights and, on the other, the grim irony of Jonathan Wild. Higher! than both is that ineffable, pleasant, and ironic humour that may be found everywhere in Tom Jones but is at its best in Joseph Andrews where it plays like summer lightning around the figure of Parson Adams-an English cousin of Don Quixote. Fielding’s very definition of the novel as “a comic epic in prose” is indicative of the place of humour and comedy in his novels and, later, those of many of his followers. It may be pointed our here that Richardson had no sense of humour; he was an unsmiling moralist and sentimentalist. Comparing the two, Coleridge says : “There is a cheerful, sunshiny, breezy spirit that prevails everywhere strongly contrasted with the close, hot, tfay-dreamy continuity of Richardson.” Fielding’s humour is sometimes of the satiric kind, but he is never harsh or excessively cynical as Smollett and Swift usually are.

Healthy Morality and Philosophy of Life:

No reason proves so compulsive with Fielding in prompting him to parody Richardson’s Pamela as Richardson’s hoity-toity moralism added to a somewhat mawkish sentimental ism. Fielding must have heartily laughed at Pamela’s self-regarding virtue. In his own novels he appealed to motives higher than prudery and commercialism while dealing with matters moral and ethical. He endeavoured to show the dignity of the natural and inherent human values. Thus Fielding preached a morality of his own which, in the words of David Daiches, is “goodness of heart rather than technical virtue with sins of the flesh regarded much more lightly than sins against generosity of feeling.” Whether a man is virtuous or not is decided, with Fielding, not by his external and self-regarding conduct but by the presence or absence of inner goodness which generally means generosity of feeling. “This,” says Cross, “is a complete repudiation of Richardson, if not of Addison: the point of view has shifted from the objective to the subjective, from doing to being, and the shifting means war against formalism.” Virtue is, according to Fielding, its own reward and vice a punishment in itself. In the dedication to Tom Jones he says: “I have shown that no acquisitions of guilt can compensate the loss of that solid inward comfort of mind, which Js-the sure companion to innocence and virtue; nor can in the least balance the evil of that horror and anxiety, which in their room, guilt introduces into our bosoms.” Even when Fielding insisted that nothing in Tom Jones “can offend even the chastest eye on perusal,” he was charged by many with grossness and ribaldry Richardon says Edmund Gosse, “bitterly resented allthis rude instrusion into his moral garden, and never ceased to regard Fielding with open aversion.” Richardson was really mortified, but, in the words of Oliver Elton, he only “shook his throat like a respectable turkey-cock.”

Plot-construction:

Fielding was not only a great novelist but a great master of plot-construction also From Chaucer down to the modern times English writers have mostly ignored the architectonic part of their compositions. Fielding came to the novel from the drama, and though his plays are ill-constructed, yet his experience as a dramatist served him in good stead. Tom Jones is, according to Elizabeth Jenkins, an “amazing tour de force of plot-construction.” Coleridge placed it among the three best constructed masterpieces of world literature-the other two being Sophocle’s Oedipus Tyrannus and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist. Fielding defined the novel as “a comic epic in prose.” But, as Oliver Elton points out, in Fielding’s novels there is more of the dramatic than epic quality. The last scenes of his novels, particularly, resemble the last scenes of a well-knit comedy, such as one by Ben Jonson. “Fielding was,” according to Hudson, “much concerned about the structural principles of prose fiction a matter to which neither Defoe nor Richardson had given much attention. To him the novel was quite as much a form of art as the epic or the drama”. Unfortunately, Fielding’s successors did not learn much from his example, and offended in respect of plot-construction as his predecessors-Defoe and Richardson-had done before him.

Characterisation:

Fielding is a great master of the art of characterisation also. His characters are very lifelike—excepting few caricatures like Beau Diddaper. They are not only individuals but also representative figures. He himself remarks : “1 describe not men but manners, not an individual but the species.” His broad sweep as a master of character is quite remarkable. A critic avers : “Since Chaucer was alive and hale, no such company of pilgrims—poachers, Molly Seagrims, adventures and Parson Supples-had appeared on the English roads.” Fielding’s broad human sympathy coupled with his keen observation of even the faintest element of hypocrisy in a person is his basic asset as a master of characterisation. He laughs and makes us laugh at many of his characters, but he is never cynical or misanthropic. He is a pleasant satirist, sans malice, sans harshness. He gives no evidence of being angry at the foibles of his characters or of holding a lash in readiness. His comic creations resemble those of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Parson Trulliber and Falstaff, if they were to meet, would have immediately recognised each other!

Dr. Johnson as a Critic

Introduction:

‘Johnson’s critical writings are living literature as Dryden’s for instance, are not. Johnson’s criticism, most of it, belongs with the living classics; it can be read afresh every year with unaffected pleasure and new stimulus. It is alive and life-giving”.

                                 –Dr. Leavis in Scrutiny, Vol. XII.

Dr. Johnson was the grand cham of the realm of letters of his day. A critic observes. There are four great dictatorial figures in English literature, each of whom seems to have been recognised in his age as the supreme authority in the realm of letters. In the time of James I there was Ben Jonson reigning at the Mermaid Tavern; after the Restoration came Dryden to give his views in the coffee-house, then followed Pope and after him arose Dr. Johnson to utter his downright judgments in tavern and drawing-room and book-shops4and at the Literary Club.” As is clear from BosweH’s inimitable biography ”Life of Johnson), Dr. Johnson was particularly good at purposeful and witty conversation. Indeed the last thirty years of his life he spent talking and, by talking, and by overwhelming his friends and foes alike: He gathered around himself a galaxy of the most important literary figures of the age. The Club was organised in 1764 and from hen till his death in 1784 Dr. Johnson completely dominated it. Moody and Lovett maintain that Johnson’s so-called dictatorship of English letters was largely the result of his conversational supremacy in the Literary Club which included nearly all the famous writers of the time. Among these “famous writers” were Sir Joshua Reynold the famous painter, Garrick the actor, Malone the Shakespearean scholar, Bishop Percy the collector of ballads, Adam Smith the political economist, Gibbon the historian, Boswell, Fox, Burke the orator, and Oliver Goldsmith. “They met,” Boswell tells us, “at the Turk’s Head in Gerrard street, Soho, one evening in every week at seven, and generally continued their conversation till a pretty late hour.” Dr. Johnson was the soul of his learned assembly and acted visibly as the dictator thereof.

His Equipment as a Critic:

As critic of literature Dr. Johnson was well equipped. About his classical reading there cannot be any doubt. He had an amazingly retentive memory and could cite passage after passage from English and classical poetry without having to look at the text. He had tremendous mental vigour as well as clarity of perception. His acuteness of observation was combined with a wonderful candour of judgment and expression. Of all the English critics Johnson is the last to mince matters. He is very forthright, even downright. He has some central points of view which he defends with all his bullish strength. Last but not least is his delightful style.

But he has many limitations too. He is a man of very strong likes and dislikes-the dislikes being much stronger than the likes. He has pet prejudices which impair some of his criticism. Many have questioned his ear, and some have attacked his dogmatism and his incapacity to appreciate what is, dubiously, called “pure poetry.”

“Preface to Shakespeare”:

The two important works of Jonson as a critic are:-

(i)                 Preface to Shakespeare; and

(ii)               (ii) Lives of the Poets.

Let us consider the first of the two and see what idea of Johnson as a critic it gives.

Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare appended to his edition of Shakespeare is, in the words of David Daiches, “one of the noblest monuments of English neoclassic criticism…and an exposure of some of the weaknesses, contradictions, and unnecessary rigidities of some widely accepted neoclassic principles…Its pungent style, emphatic clarity, and tendency to epigrammatic summing up of each argument carried its ideas home with enormous force.” No modern editor of Shakespeare can ignore what Johnson has to say about Shakespeare–his comments on characters, his quite illuminating notes on the meanings of words, and his general assessment of Shakespeare as a poet and dramatist. The Preface represents effectively all the good and bad qualities of Johnson as a critic. It is, according to a critic, “certaiftly the most masterly piece of literary criticism. All Johnson’s gifts are seen at their best in it: the lucidity, the virile energy, the individuality of his style, the unique power of first placing himself on the level of the plain man and then lifting the plain man to his, the resolute insistence on life and reason, not learning or ingenuity, as the standard by which books are to be judged.”

Johnson neglects the merits of other Elizabethans and pays this glowing tribute to Shakespeare: “The stream of time which is continually washing dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare. Poetic reputations blaze up and dwindle and the fire which heartened one generation will be but cold ashes to the next. Yet for three centuries Shakespeare’s fame has giowed so steadily that he has come to be looked on as the supreme expression not only of the English race but of the whole world.” The basis of Johnson’s exaltation of Shakespeare is essentially neoclassic. He does not passively accept the decision of generation after generation. According to him “nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature”. This is the neoclassic expression of Aristotle’s conception of imitation. Shakespeare is great because he is a poet not of freaks and whims but of general human nature which “is still the same.” Shakespeare’s “persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion.” The emphasis on general truths rather than on the investigation of details is a basic tenet of the neoclassic school. “To generalise is to be an idiot,” said Blake; but the neoclassicists did not count the streaks of a tulip.

Johnson is, however, not a strait-jacketed neoclassicist. He admits of an occasional departure even from his pet principles. As he puts it, “there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature.” The imitation of general nature which he insists on should, in his opinion, be subjected to moral and didactic considerations. “The end of writing,” Johnson says, “is to instruct: the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.” And this is Shakespeare’s “fault” : “He sacrificed virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose.” Thus, one of the reasons we praise Shakespeare for is treated by Johnson as his “defect.” This also explains Johnson’s plea for poetic justice. He supports the happy ending of King Lear as manoeuvred by Nahum Tate and others. He admits that a play in which the virtuous suffer and the wicked prosper “is a just representation of the common events of human life.” But even then the playwright should preferably show “the final triumph of persecuted virtue,” as that will please the audiences more.

Johnson does not show evidence of any real grasp of Shakespeare’s-poetic powers. He feels that Shakespeare was better at comedy than tragedy. Nor is he aware of the psychological subtleties of his characterisation. His criticism of Shakespeare’s verbal quibbling is also indicative of his deficiency of perception. Shakespeare’s puns, truly speaking, are not always senseless. When Margaret in Richard III says :

And turns the sun to shade; alas! alas!
Witness my son, now in the shade of death,

she is not just playing on the words “sun,” “son”, and “shade.” She is in fact fulfilling a deeply compulsive psychological necessity. Her wordplay is, in the words of Oliver Elton, “in the nature of a safety valve, with a grim kind of hiss in it, for the escape of passion.”

“The Lives of the Poets”:

Johnson’s most mature and sustained critical work is The Lives of the Poets originally published as Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, between 1779 and 1781. It was intended to be a series of introductions to the works of the English poets from Cowley and Milton down to Johnson’s contemporaries like Akenside and Gray. As many as fifty-two poets are dealt with. It is characteristic of the work that it deals with only the poets of the neoclassical tradition. As David Daiches says, “for the most part Johnson is dealing with men writing in a tradition he understood and employing the kind of verse for which he had an extremely accurate ear.” Many of the poets dealt with are read by nobody nowadays-­Thomas Yalden, Edmund Smith, William King, James Hammond, and Gillbert West. Only six of the rest-Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Collins, and Gray—are of real significance today.

In each of the LivesJohnson gives the biographical facts about the poet, his observations on his character, and then a critical asessment of his poetry. Except in the case of the minor poets he makes little contribution to biographical facts. Anyway, his style is attractive throughout. We may not accept The Lives of the Poets as a guide, but, certainly, it is a good companion. Johnson’s criticism is of the “judicial” kind. He passes a clear verdict on every poet. He defined, in his Dictionary, a critic as “a man skilled in the art of judging literature; a man able to distinguish the faults and beauties of writing.” Obviously, the emphasis is on judgment and discrimination. His method and conception of the function of a critic were later to be opposed by the poets and critics of the romantic school, who put emphasis not on judicial verdict but on the “imaginative interpretation of literature.”

Dr. Johnson’s premises as a critic in this work are as essentially neoclassic as in his criticism of Shakespeare. Again, his insistence on the function of poetry-“to instruct by pleasing”-is ubiquitous. All poetry is the work of genius, and genius is “that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates.” Invention, imagination, and judgment are included in genius. What is a poet, according to Johnson? The answer as interpreted by David Daiches is as follows: “The poet is a man seeking to give pleasure by conveying general truths about experience with freshness and skill, the questions to be asked of a given poet are: what kind of a man, living in what age and circumstances, was he, and being that sort of a man, with what degree of success did he produce works capable of giving pleasure by their truth and liveliness?” The emphasis is again on “just representations of general nature.” Any departure from this basic neoclassic prerequisite is stoutly opposed by Dr. Johnson. Of course, some strong personal prejudices also have a free play in his criticism. Thus Milton is partly attacked on political grounds: “Milton’s republicanism was, I am afraid, founded in an envious hatred of greatness, and a sullen desire of independence; in petulance impatient of control, and pride disdainful of superiority.” Johnson’s contempt for Milton’s sonnets is due to his dislike of the sonnet as a poetic form. He is harsh to Swift as he somewhat suspects his religious sincerity. Such instances of prejudiced views can easily be multiplied. We certainly agree with George Sherburn that Johnson’s “errors are gross, open and palpable.”

However, most of Johnson’s adverse opinions spring not from his literary and non-literary prejudices but his central point of view regarding the purpose and function of literature. This point of view is built mainly on the neoclassical premises, though with some very vital differences. Take, for instance, his condemnation of Cowley and the entire line of metaphysical poets. His views are in strict accordance with the spirit of his age. The chief fault of the metaphysicals, in the eyes of Johnson, is their sacrifice of the general for the particular and their excessive love of heavy learning. He observes : “The fault of Cowley, and perhaps all the writers of the metaphysical race, is that of pursuing his thoughts to their last ramifications, by which he loses the grandeur of generality.” This is what he has to say about metaphysical wit: “The most heterogenous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs and their subtlety surprises…”

Dr. Johnson has been frequently pilloried for his condemnation of Milton’s Lycidas. His condemnation was not, however, the unthinking stricture of a fanatic, but a natural product of his fundamental attitude. The poet, as we have already pointed out, must, according to Johnson, give representations of general nature with, to use Daiches’ words again, “truth” and “liveliness” (that is, novelty). He should maintain a delicate balance between the two. If he adheres to truth too strictly at the cost of liveliness, the odds are that his “representation” will become mechanical as he will usually employ highly traditional diction, idiom, and imagery. On the contrary, if he strives too much for novelty, it is likely that he will depart considerably from truth and get bogged down in his own whimsies. The first is the fault of Milton (in Lycidas) and the second that of the metaphysicals. Both are faults, but the latter is somewhat less serious than the former. David Daiches observes that “in the last analysis, Johnson held that exhibitionist novelty was better than the mechanical repetition of hereditary similes.” In condemning Lycidas, Johnson still shows his sense of the beautiful poetry which Milton has been able to create even with his “schoolboy” similes and images.

This deficiency in appreciating the strictly aesthetic merits of poetry leads Johnson to unfair criticism of Gray and Collins who are often called the precursors of Romanticism. His disapproval of Gray is not really due to his disapproval of all romantic tendencies, but due to his disapproval of all artificial and extravagant language, the same for which he takes Lycidas to task. Basically, Johnson was against the use of classical mythology in modern English poetry. He maintained a vigorous independence from most neoclassical dogmas. His leniency about the three dramatic unities and his disregard of the rigid conception of “kinds” and the rules of decorum are instances in pojnt. Further we must remember that he made important concessions. He helped Percy over the Reliques; he appreciated // Penseroso and Grongar Hill; he praised the Castle of Indolence; and he got over his dislike of blank verse while dealing with Milton, Thomson, and Akenside. His objection against blank verse was not that it was not good but that good blank verse was seldom written. His aesthetic capacity might be questioned but not his liberalism as a critic. He was not at all deaf to the newer and richer poetry which had begun to be written in his age. However, he is at his best when dealing with the poets who write that kind of poetry with which he is effortlessly in rapport. His criticism of Dryden and Pope is really remarkable. The famous passage in which he compares the two poets, in the words of David Daiches, “has had a permanent effect on the history of the reputation of those two poets…”

The business of criticism, in Johnson’s own words, is to free literary judgment from “the anarchy of ignorance, the caprices of fancy and the tyranny of prescription, and to assign values on rational grounds.” In his practice, Johnson was true to his conception. He may be charged with neoclassic bias; but M. H. Abrams meets this charge well : “If Johnson read Milton and Donne through the spectacles of Pope, Wordsworth and Coleridge read Pope through the spectacles of Milton, while more recent critics have read Wordsworth and Coleridge and Milton through the spectacles of Donne.” It may be more difficult to absolve Johnson of his prejudices, but the normal sanity of his judgment, his abundant gusto, and pointed expression cannot be over­looked. He can yet delight, if not guide, us.

The Precursors of the Romantic Revival or the Transitional Poets

Introduction:

The eighteenth century is usually known as the century of “prose and reason,” the age in which neoclassicism reigned supreme and in which all romantic tendencies lay dormant, if not extinct. But that is a verdict too sweeping to be true.

In this century-especially the later part of it-we can see numerous cracks in the classical edifice through which seems to be peeping the multicoloured light of romanticism. In the later years of this century a large number of new influences were at work on English sensibility and temper. The change signalized a change in the ethos of poetry and, in fact, literature as a whole. The younger poets started breaking away from the “school” of Dryden and Pope, even though some poets, like Churchill and Dr. Johnson, still elected to remain in the old groove. There were very few poets, indeed, who set themselves completely free from the old traditional influences. Most of them are, as it were, like Mr. Facing both ways, looking simultaneously at the neoclassical past and the romantic future. They seem to be

Plac ‘d on this isthmus of a middle state.

In the selection of subjects for poetic treatment, in the choice of verse patterns, and in the manner of treatment we meet with perceptible changes from the conventions of the Popean school. Those eighteenth century poets who show some elements associated with romanticism, while not altogether ignoring the old conventions, are called transitional poets or the precursors of the Romantic Revival.

Let us sum up the romantic qualities of the poetry of these transitional poets.

(i)         These poets believe in what Victor Hugo describes as “liberalism in literature”. Not much worried about rules and conventions, they believe in individual poetic inspiration.

(ii)        Their poetry is not altogether intellectual in content and treatment. Passion, emotion, and the imagination are valued by them above the cold light of intellectuality. They naturally return to the lyric.

(iii)       They have, to quote Hudson, “a love of the wild, fantastic, abnormal, and supernatural.”

 (iv)      They show a new appreciation of the world of Nature which the neoclassical poetry had mostly neglected. Their poetry is no longer “drawing-room poetry.” They do not limit their attention to urban life and manners only, as Pope almost always did.

(v)        They place more importance on the individual than on society. In them, therefore, is to be seen at work a stronger democratic spirit, a greater concern for the oppressed and the poor, and a greater emphasis on individualism in poetry, in society, everywhere. Their poetry becomes much more subjective.

 (vi)      They show a much greater interest in the Middle Ages which Dryden and Pope had neglected on account on their alleged barbarousness. Dryden and Pope admired the Renaissancermuch more and had many a spiritual link with it.

(vii)      Lastly, there is a strong reaction against the heroic couplet as the only eligible verse unit. They make experiments with new measures and stanzaic forms. It is said that every hero ends as a bore. The same was the case with the heroic couplet.

While exhibiting all these above-listed tendencies in their poetic works, the transitional poets are not, however, altogether free from Popean influences. That is exactly why they are not full-fledged romantics but only “transitional” poets. Nevertheless, their work proves: “The eighteenth century was an age of reason but the channels of Romanticism were never dry.”

Let us now consider the work of the most important of the transitional poets of the eighteenth century.

James Thomson (1700-48):

He is a typical transitional poet, though he chronologically belongs to the first half of the eighteenth century. Though he was contemporaneous with Pope yet he broke away from the traditions of his school to explore “fresh woods and pastures new.” He bade good­bye to the heroic couplet and expressed himself in other verse-Tieasures—blank verse and the Spenserian stanza. He would have acknowledged Spenser and Milton as his guides rather than Dryden and Pope. His Seasons (1726-30) is important for accurate and sympathetic descriptions of natural scenes. It is entirely different from such poems as Pope’s Windsor Forest on account of the poet’s first­hand knowledge of what he is describing and his intimate rapport with it. The poem is in blank verse written obviously after the manner of Milton’, but sometimes it seems to be over-strained, “always labouring uphill,” in the words of Hazlitt. Thomson’s Liberty is a very long poem. In it Liberty herself is made to narrate her chequered career through the ages in Greece, Rome, and England. The theme is dull and abstract, the narration uninteresting, and the blank verse ponderous. His Castle of Indolence (1748) is in Spenserian stanzas, and it captures much of the luxuriant, imaginative colour of the Elizabethan poet. As a critic puts it, for languid suggestiveness, in dulcet and harmonious versification, and “for subtly woven vowel music it need not shirk comparison with the best of Spenser himself.” Thomson looks forward to the romantics in his interest in nature, in treating of new subjects, his strong imagination, and his giving up of the heroic couplet. But he is capable of some very egregious examples of poetic diction. Even Dr. Johnson was constrained to observe: “His diction is in the highest degree florid and luxuriant. It is too exuberant and sometimes may be charged with filling the ear more than the mind.”

Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74):

Goldsmith was as friendly with Dr. Johnson had been with Pope, but that did not curb the individual genius of either. Goldsmith was as essentially a conservative in literary theory as Dr. Johnson of whose “Club” he was an eminent member. Both of his important poems, The Traveller (1764) and The Deserted Village (1770) are in heroic couplets. The first poem is, didactic (after Johnson’s visual practice) and is concerned with the description and criticism of the places and people in Europe which Goldsmith had visited as a tramp. The second poem is rich in natural descriptions and is vibrant with a peculiar note of sentiment and melancholy which foreshadows nineteenth-century romantics. As in the first poem, Goldsmith exhibits the tenderness of his feelings for poor villagers.

Thomas Percy (1728-1811):

Percy is known in the history of English literature not for original poetry but for his compilation of ballads, sonnets, historical songs, and metrical romances which he published in 1765 under the title Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The work .did a lot to revive public interest in that kind of poetry which had gone out of vogue in the age of Dryden and Pope. The book contained poetry from different ages-from the Middle Ages to the reign of Charles. The work had a tremendous and lasting popularity. About its influence on the poets who were to come, we may quote Wordsworth: “I do not think that there is an able writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligation to the Reliques.” Even Dr. Johnson favoured Percy’s venture and earned his thanks by lending him a hand in the compilation.

Thomas Chatterton (1752-70):

Chatterton is referred to by Wordsworth in his poem Resolution and Independence as

The marvellous boy
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride.

Chatterton, indeed, was a “marvellous boy” who shot into fame, and then, before he was eighteen, poisoned himself with arsenic getting sick of his poverty. Some of his poems are quite Augustan in their matter and from but the most characteristic poems are the ones he published as the work of Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century monk who lived in Bristol, Chattertdn’s native place. Chatterton gave out that he had discovered them in a box lying in a Bristol church. His hoax was soon seen through, but that does not detract from the merit of the Rowley poems. The poems like Aella and the Ballad of Charity are, according to Hudson, quite remarkable for two reasons-‘because they are probably the most wonderful things ever written by a boy of Chatterton’s age, and because they are another clear indication of the fast growing curiosity of critics and the public regarding everything belonging to the middle ages.” Chatterton’s work considerably influenced the romantic poets-who were intensely interested in everything medieval.

James Macpherson (1736-96):

He was another forgerer like Chatterton, though his work was not altogether baseless. He first achieved fame with Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language which were given out to be “genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry.” Later he produced Fingal, an Epic Poem in six books (1762), and then Temora, an Epic Poem in eight books (1763). Macpherson asserted ttyat these two poems were the genuine work of a Gaelic bard of the third century, names Ossian and that he had given their literal translation in prose. His claims.provoked an acrimonious controversy as to their genuineness. “Fortunately,” says Hudson, “we need not enter ihto the discussion in order to appreciate the epoch-making character of Macpherson’s work. In the loosely rhythmical prose which he adopted for his so-called translations he carried to an extreme the formal reaction of the time against the classic couplet. In matter and spirit he is wildly romantic.” His poems transport the reader to a new world of heroism and super-naturalism tinged with melancholy, a world which is altogether different from the spruce and reasonable world of Pope.

Thomas Gray (1716-71):

Gray was one of the most learned men of the Europe of his day. He was also a genuine poet but his poetic production is lamentably small-just a few odes, some miscellaneous poems, and the Elegy. He started his career as a strait-jacketted classicist and ended as a genuine romantic. His work, according to Hudson, is “a kind of epitome of the changes which were coming over the literature of his time.” His first attempts, The Alliance of Education and Government and the ode On a Distant Prospect of Eton College were classical in spirit, and the first mentioned, even in its use of the heroic couplet. ElegyWritten in a Country Churchyard is Gray’s finest poem which earned him the praise of even Johnson who condemned most of Gray’s poetry. Hudson observes about this poem: “There is, first, the use of nature, which though employed only as a background, is still handled with fidelity and sympathy i There is, next, the churchyard scene, the twilight atmosphere, and the brooding melancholy of the poem, which at once connect it…with one side of the romantic movement-the development of the distinctive romantic mood. The contrast drawn between the country and the town the peasant’s simple life and ‘the madding crowd’s ignoble strife’-is a third particular which will be noted. Finally, in the tender feeling shown for ‘the rude forefathers of the hamlet’ and the sense of the human value of the little things that are written ‘in the short and simple annals of the poor’, we see poetry, under the influence of the spreading democratic spirit reaching out to include humble aspects of life hitherto ignored.” Gray’s next poems, The Progress of Poesy and The Bard, present a new conception of the poet not as a clever versifier but a genuinely inspired and prophetic genius. His last poems like The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin are romantic fragments with which we step out of the eighteenth century and find ourselves in the full stream of romanticism.

William Collins (1721-59):

Collin’s work is as thin in bulk as Gray’s-it does not extend to much more than 1500 lines. He combines in himself the neoclassic and romantic elements, though he is not without a specific manner which is all his own. On the one hand, he provides numerous examples of poetic diction at its worst, and, on the other, he delights in the highly romantic world of shadows and the supernatural. His Ode on the Popular Superstions of the Highlands foreshadows the world in which Coleridge delighted. He is chiefly known for his odes. To Liberty and the one mentioned above are the lengthiest of Collins’ odes, but he is at his best in shorter flights. He is exquisite when he eschews poetic diction without losing his delightful singing quality. Referring to Collins, Swinburne maintains that in “purity of music” and “clarity of style” there is “no parallel in English verse from the death of Marvell to the birth of William Blake.” n

William Cowper (1731-1800):

“He”, says Compton-Rickett, “is a blend of the old and the new, with much of the form of the old and something of the spirit of the new. In his satires he imitated the manner of Pope, but his greatest poem The Task is all his own. It is written in blank verse and contains the famous line:

God made the country and man made the town

which indicates his love of Nature and simplicity. However, the classical element in him is more predominant than the romantic. Compton-Rickett maintains: “We shall find in his work neither the passion nor the strangeness of the Romantic school. Much in his nature disposed to shape him as a poet of Classicism, and with occasional reserves he is far more of a classical poet than a romantic. Yet throughout Cowper’s work we feel from time to time a note of something that is certainly not the note of Pope or Dryden, something deeper in feeling that meets us even in Thomson, Collins, or Gray. There is a tenderness in poems like My Mother’s Picture, that not even Goldsmith in his verse can quite equal; while his fresh and intimate nature pictures point to a stage in the development of poetic naturalism, more considerable than we find in Thomson and his immediate succesors.”

George Crabbe (1754-1832):

He mostly continued the neoclassic tradition and was derisively dubbed as “a Pope in worsted stockings.” In his poetry, which is mostly descriptive of the miseries of poor villagers, he was an uncompromising unromantic realist. He asserted

I paint the Cot
As Truth will paint it, and as Bards will not.

He showed much concern for villagers, but he left for Wordsworth to glorify their simplicity and, even, penury. Crabbe’s excessive, boldness as a realist alienates him from the polish.of the neoclassic school. However, he tenaciously adhered to the heroic couplet, even when he was a contemporary of Blake and the romantic poets.

Robert Burns (1759-95):

He was a Scottish peasant who took to poetry and became the truly national poet of Scotland. His work Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) sky-rocketed him to fame. All these poems are imbued with the spirit of romantic lyricism in its untutored spontaneity, humour, pathos and sympathy wjth nature and her lowly creatures including the sons of the soil. Sometimes indeed Bums tries to write in the “correct” manner of the Popean school but then he becomes unimpressive and insipid. A critic observes : “Burns was a real peasant who drove the plough as he hummed his songs, and who knew all the wretchedness and joys and sorrows of the countryman’s life. Sincerity and passion are the chief keys of his verse. Burns can utter a piercing lyric cry as in A Fond Kiss and then we Sever, can be gracefully sentimental as in My love is like a Red, Red Rose, can be coarsely witty as in The Jolly Beggars, but he is always sincere and passionate, and that is why his words go straight into the heart.” Bums was influenced a great deal by the spirit of the French Revolution. His fellow-feeling extended even to the lower animals whom he studied minutely and treated sympathetically.

William Blake (1757-1827):

Blake was an out and out rebel against all the social, political, and literary conventions of the eighteenth century. It is with considerable inaccuracy that he can be included among the transitional poets or the precursors of the Romantic Revival, as in many ways he is even more romantic than the romantic poets! The most undisciplined and the most lonely of all poets, he lived in his own world peopled by phantoms and spectres whom he treated as more real than the humdrum realities of the physical world. His glorification of childhood and feeling for nature make him akin to the romantic poets. He is best known for his three thin volumes-Poetical Sketches (1783), Songs of Innocence (1789), and Songs of Experience (1794), which contain some of the most orient gems of English lyricism. A critic observes: “His passion for freedom was, also, akin to that which moved Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey in their earlier years, though in its later form, it came nearer to Shelley’s revolt against convention. There is, indeed, an unusual degree of fellowship between these two : the imagery and symbolism, as well as the underlying spirit, of The Revolt of Islam, Alastor and Prometheus Unbound find their nearest parallel in Blake’s prophetic books. Both had visions of a world regenerated by a gospel of universal brotherhood, transcending law.”

Gothic Novel or The Novel of Terror

Introduction:

Broadly speaking, the first half of the eighteenth century was a period of realism and didacticism in literature. The two new genres created in this period-the periodical essay and the novel-are particularly steeped in the realistic and didactic spirit.

The note of realism in fiction which started with Daniel Defoe continued even in the second half of the century. It was carried forward by Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. The novel all along was essentially concerned with life and society as they were, and often with the exploration of the ways and means to make them better. In addition to didacticism and realism, a note of sentimentalism can also be discerned in later fiction under the influence of Richardson. But sentimentalism was only a secondary characteristic; the primary and essential characteristics of the novej from Defoe to Fanny Burney are realism and didacticism.

But after Fanny Burney, and even some time before her, the English novel seems to have grown out of the grooves of conventional realism and didacticism. The last years of the eighteenth century are often dubbed as the age of transition—transition from the neoclassicism of the school of Pope to the romanticism of the early nineteenth century. In these years we find a shift of emphasis in the novel too. Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765) was the first work of fiction which broke away completely from the traditions of the realistic and didactic (and often, sentimental) novel and started the vogue of what is called “the Gothic romance” or “the novel of terror.” Walpole and his followers created in their novels a blood-curdling and hair-raising world of haunted castles, eerie ruins, macabre ghosts, harrowing spectacles of murder, and a hundred other elements calculated to strike terror in the reader and to make him perspire all over. Mostly, the “terror novelists” were crude sensationalists whose works were mere schoolboy exercises devoid of any artistry. Most of them transported themselves to the medieval Europe supposedly full of the spirit of chivalry, romance, and mystery. As most of them turned to the Middle Ages for their material, they are called “Gothic” novelists (Some of them, like William Beckford, however, looked to the Orient for their material). Very few of these novelists showed any appreciable knowledge of human psychology, perhaps because no such knowledge was at all required for the kind of work they were up to. Most of them turned to the supernatural to add to the atmosphere of awe and terror. All this goes to show that the terror novelists were of the nature of crude and thrill-hungry romantics who came before the true efforescence of romanticism in the early years of the nineteenth century. But some of them like Horace Walpole were in fact hard-boiled intellectuals who indulged in Gothic romance as an escape from the oppressive boredom of the world of reality. Their medievalism was, thus, a sham, a mode of escape. For the true romanticists like Coleridge and Keats the hazy and romance-bathed Europe of the Middle Ages was a real world: they lived and breathed in it; they did not escape into it, as they were always there. But the terror novelists like Walpole were dilettantes and pseudo-medievalists who did not believe a word of all that they wrote. Their world was a make-believe world created just to kill a few idle hours which happened to be free from any intellectual activity.

After these preliminary remarks let us consider individually the work of the more important of terror novelists.

Horace Walpole (1717-97):

Horace Walpole was the pioneer of the Gothic novel in England. Just as Percy with his Reliques and Macpherson with his Ossianic poems heralded the romantic movement in English poetry, Horace Walpole with his novel The Castle ofOtranto (1764) heralded the romantic movement in English fiction. He reacted against the realism, didacticism, and sentimentalism of the followers of Richardson and Fielding. He did not think higly of even Richardson and Fielding themselves. After reading the fourth volume of Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison he set it aside saying :”I was so tired of sets of people getting together, and saying, ‘Pray, Miss, with whom are you in love?’ His desire was to shake arid shock such niminy-priminv sentimentalism and to give a story altogether chilling and thrilling. He said good-bye to his own age and chose for the scene of his novel Italy of the twelfth or thirteenth century, full of the spirit of mystery, supernatural ism, and crime. It is of interest to note that he was something of an antiquarian very much interested in the art of the Middle Ages, particularly Gothic architecture. Ifor Evans in A Short History of English Literature observes; “Walpole carried out the medieval cult more completely than most of his contemporaries, and at Strawberry Hill he constructed a Gothic house, where he could dream himself back into the days of chivalry and monastic life.” Horace Walpole was the son of Sir Robert Walpole, the famous Prime Minister of England. He was a witness to the boredom of higher political life, and his medievalism was perhaps an escape from this oppressive boredom.

The Castle of Otranto was first published in 1764 and was given out to be the English translation of an old Italian manuscript. In the second edition, however, Walpole admitted that it was all his own work. The events narrated are supposed to belong to Italy of the twelfth or thirteenth century. The scene of action is the castle situated at Otranto. Manfred, the villain-hero, is the grandson of the usurper of the kingdom. He intends marrying his son to the beautiful Isabella; but on the day of the marriage his son is mysteriously killed, and he himself decides to marry Isabella after divorcing his wife. But Isabella escapes with Theodore, a young peasant. Manfred decides to kill Isabella, but mistakenly kills his own daughter who loves Theodore and is at that instant accompanying him. The castle is thrown down by the spirit of the true ruler who had been killed by Manfred’s grandfather. Theodore is revealed to be the son of that ruler. He marries Isabella and establishes himself as the ruler of the realm in place of Manfred.

The story is puerile in the extreme. Its Gothicism and supernaturalism are also crude and unconvincing. Even the most naive reader will fail to believe such events as the walking of a picture, coming out of three drops of blood from the nose of a statue, and the descent of a huge helmet apparenly from nowhere—not to speak of the account of ghosts and the mysterious fulfilment of a prohecy. Walpole’s supernaturalism is not at all psychologically convincing like Coleridge’s for example, or Shakespeare’s. It is strange to find Walpole comparing himself to Shakespeare in his use of the supernatural. He wrote: “That great master of nature, Shakespeare, was the model I copied.” Ifor Evans observes about this claim: “It is as if all the poetry and character had been removed from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, only to leave the raw mechanism of melodrama and the supernatural.” What in reality Walpole sincerely tried to copy from Shakespeare was the mixing of the tragic and comic elements by punctuating the very sombre narrative with instances of the naivete of domestic servants. But Walpole does not succeed here either. As George Sherburn points out, Walpole draws the domestic servants “so feebly that they fail almost totally in comic power.”

Walpole’s medievalism is also sham.He never shows any real knowledge of the times and places which he handles in the story. As a historical novel The Castle of Otranto is, thus, worthless. His “medieval escape,” as George Sherburn puts it, “simply provided a no man’s land where startling, thrilling, sensational happenings might be frequent.” Everything, however incredible, passes muster in a Gothic setting. No explanation of the supernatural incidents is considered desirable by Walpole at all, and none is offered.

The Castle of Otranto became, in spite of all its absurdities, quite popular, and was imitated by a large number of writers including Clara Reeve and Ann Radcliffe. Walpole with his own example set the tradition of Gothic romance which was obliged to him for numerous “conventions.^’ According to Moody and Lovett, these conventional elements are:-

(i)                 “a hero sullied by unmentionable crimes”;

(ii)               “several persecuted heroines”;

(iii)             “a castle with secret passages and haunted rooms”;

(iv)              (iv) “a plentiful sprinkling of supernatural terrors.”

Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823):

Though Mrs. Radcliffe was an imitator of Walpole yet her attempts at the Gothic romance were much more successful and artistic than Walpole’s. She was in fact the ablest and the best of all the practitioners of this kind of writing. She was the loving wife of a journalist, and wrote five romances just to while away her leisurer-The most famous among them are The Mysteries ofUdolpho (1764) and The Italian (1797). The scene in both of them is the mysterious land of Italy: in the former Italy of the sixteenth century, and in the latter that of the eighteenth. Mrs. Radcliffe almost always wrote to a formula. A beautiful young woman is kept imprisoned by a hardened, sadistic villain, in a lonely castle, and is ultimately rescued by a somewhat colourless hero. These heroes and heroines are all modelled after the same pattern. The only variety the heroines admit of is of their complexion. Otherwise, all are sentimental, and, in Compton-Rickett’s words, “ar»true sisters of Clarissa, both in emotional expression and in moral impeccability.” Add to all that the usual paraphernalia of terror elements. “She”, observes L*ouis I. Bredvold, “availed herself to the fullest of loathsome dungeons, secret vaults and corridors, all essential features of the castles of Gothic romance.” Let us consider the main points of her work, in most of which she differs from Walpole

(a)        She is quite timid in her use of the supernatural. Just before the end of a novel she tries to explain away all the supernatural incidents as misunderstood versions of quite natural phenomena She works very well through subtle suggestion, especially through the description of eerie sounds.

(b)        She introduces in her novels the element of scenic description which was altogether neglected by Walpole. She is perhaps the first of English novelists in her interest in the scenery for its own sake. She never visited the countries she dealt with in her novels, but her descriptions are vivid and entirely credible.

(c)                 Her grasp of real history is as poor as Walpole’s. On the very first page of The Mysteries ofUdolpho she expressly tells us that the incidents of the story belong to the year 1584. However, this year could easily be substituted by another without any difference.

(d)                 In her novels she reconciles didacticism and sentimentalism with romance, whereas Walpole had entirely forsaken the realistic, didactic, and sentimental tradition of eighteenth-century novel.

Matthew Lewis or “Monk” Lewis (1775-1818):

Matthew Lewis, nicknamed “Monk” Lewis on account of his Gothic romance of that title, seems to have completely neglected the lesson of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe. The Monk is a blood-curdling nightmare of macabresque ghosts, rotten corpses, weird magic and witchcraft, and a thousand other horrifying elements. According to Samuel C. Chew, “in The Monk (1797), a nightmare of fiendish wickedness, ghostly supernaturalism and sadistic sensuality, there is almost indubitably something else than mere literary sensationalism: it gives evidence of a psychopathic condition perhaps inherent in the extremes of the romantic temperament.” He further observes that “The Monk may be considered the dream of an ‘oversexed’ adolescent, for Lewis was only twenty when he wrote it.” Lewis never made any attempt like Mrs. Ann Radcliffe to rationalise his supernatural. He was out for the crudest sensationalism, and therefore he cannot be ranked high among the terror novelists, in spite of being the most terrifying of all.

Miss Clara Reeve (1729-1807), Charles Robert Matnrin (1782-1824), and Mrs. Shelley (1797-1851):

They were the most important of the rest of Gothic novelists. Miss Clara Reeve’s Champion of Virtue, afterwards entitled The Old English Baron, was obviously inspired by Walpole. She laid the scene in England of Henry VI, but, like Walpole, she did not show much genuine knowledge of the age she handled. Compton-Rickett observes : “Miss Reeve thought to improve upon the original and economised with her supernatural effects; but she only succeeded in exceeding Walpole’s tale in its tedium, repeating most of his absurdities and showing even less acquaintance with medieval life.”

Maturin wrote his romance The Fatal Revenge (1807) as a follower of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe. However, his masterpiece is Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) which, according to Samuel C. Chew, is “the greatest novel of the school of terror.” It differs from most novels of this type in its well-patterned structure and its attempt at the analysis of motive.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817) is, in the words of Samuel C. Chew, “the only novel of terror that is still famous.” It is the story of the ravages of a man-made monster equivalent to the modern “robot”. Decidedly, Mrs. Shelley’s work gave many hints to the future writers of science fiction such as H. G. Wells. She may with equal justice be considered the first of the writers of science fiction as the last of the novelists of the terror school.

William Beckford (1760-1844) the Oriental Romance:

Beckford, in Compton-Rickett’s words, “was certainly a man of considerable force of intellect and brilliant though hectic imagination.” Though he was a novelist of the terror school yet we cannot include him among the Gothic romancers, as his novel Vathek (1786) had for its background not a European country of the Middle Agess but the Arabia of yore. He was probably influenced by the Mass of translated versions of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Chinese tales which were flooding the England of his times. In Vathek there is, to be sure, the usual presence of a good quantity of the terror apparatus. Vathek is a caliph, a kind of Moslem Faustus, who sells his soul to Eblis (the Devil). The description of his end and the fiery hell is, indeed, the most terrifying. In league with Eblis Vathek commits the most blood­curdling crimes, and his end is as horrifying as his deeds. Beckford succeeds in conveying a rich impression of Oriental magnificence and splendour combined with unchecked sensuality. Vathek was immensely popular for the exotic thrills offered by it.

The Romantic Age (1798-1832)

Introduction:

It must be pointed out at the very outset that “romanticism” is a thoroughly controversial term, and to define it is as hopeless a task as ever. F. L. Lucas in The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1948) counted as many as 11,396 definitions of romanticism. And none of them is completely off the target A few of the most important definitions may be glanced at here.

According to Theodore Watts-Dunton, the’ Romantic Revival was equivalent to the “Renascence of Wonder.” According to Walter Pater, romanticism means the addition of strangeness to beauty (whereas classicism is order in beauty). Herford points out that the Romantic Movement was primarily “an extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility. Cazamian observes:” The Romantic spirit can be defined as an accentuated predominance of emotional life, provoked or directed by the exercise of imaginative vision, and in its turn stimulating or directing such exercise.” The bewildering mass of such definitions has led some critics to recommend the very abolition of terms like “romanticism” and “classicism” altogether. Let us quote one of such critics : “I ask you to distrust the familiar labels,-‘classical,’ ‘neo-classical,’ ‘pseudo classical’, ‘pre-romantic’ and all the others. I sometimes doubt if we shall ever understand the poetry of this century [the eighteenth] till we get rid of the terms ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ in one and all of their forms. Johnson, Coleridge, and Hazlitt- perhaps our three greatest critics-did not find the need of them; nor should we.” Likewise, F. L. Lucas finds romanticism a wholly wooly term fit only for slaughter. Nevertheless, these terms have been retained in criticism because they are useful, even if not very accurately definable.

A Reaction:

The Romantic Movement was a European, not only an English, phenomenon. Its repercussions were felt towards the end of the eighteenth century, but its efflorescence came at different times in different countries and in different ways. Germany was perhaps the first country to manifest a marked change in its sensibility which affected its philosophical thought more than literature. England turned romantic about the beginning of the nineteenth century, and France, the witness to the famous French Revolution (1789), manifested the influence of romanticism around 1830, when the Romantic Movement was already starting to decline in England. Romanticism meant different things in different countries, and even in the same country it implied different things with different writers. Thus in England it is customary to herd Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, and Byron all as romantics. But how different, say, Byron and Wordsworth are! A critic recommends the use of the term “romanticisms. “rather than “romanticism” in consideration of the variety of its fundamental features. Whatever be the interpretation of the term “romanticism,” it is clear that it was essentially of the nature of a reaction. In England the Romantic Movement implies a reaction against the school of Dryden, Pope, and Dr. Johnson. However greatly may Wordsworth and Byron differ in their conception and practice of poetry, it is indisputable that both of them reacted against the set conventions and rules of poetry formulated and traditionalised over the decades by the poets of the neoclassic school. The Romantic Movement was thus a revolt against literary tradition. But it was more; it was also a revolt against social authority. It was perhaps Schlegel who first defined romanticism as “liberalism in literature.” Most of the romantic poets were for the liberation of the individual spirit from the shackles of social authority as well as literary tradition. This emphasis on individual predilection, which in philosophical terms approaches subjectivism, renders the romantic output somewhat chaotic. When there is no tradition or uniting authority, it is not surprising that the romantic poets take widely divergent paths. Thus, even if we may accept that there was a classical or neoclassical school of poetry, it is difficult to conceive of the existence of a romantic “school”.

The Nature of the Revolt:

“The romantic movement” says William J. Long, “was marked, and is always marked, by a strong reaction and protest against .the bondage of rule and custom which in science and theology as well as literature, generally tend to fetter the free human spirit.” It is of interest to note that just as the romantics revolted against the literary traditions of the eighteenth century, Dryden and Pope themselves had revolted in their turn against the tradition of the previous age. The romantics looked for inspiration and guidance to Spenser and Milton, whereas Dryden and Pope had looked to the roman poets of antiquity. Thus both the neoclassicists and romantics, while breaking away from the traditions existing immediately before them, respected a more ancient tradition. Let us consider in what respects the romantics parted with the neoclassic tradition.

Reaction against Reason:

Cazamian observes: “The literary transition from the Renascence to the Restoration is nothing more or less than the progress of a spirit of liberty, at once fanciful, brilliant, and adventurous, towards a rule and discipline both in inspiration and in form.”The transition from neo-classicism to romanticism is just the reverse of this. The neoclassicists were champions of common sense and reason, and were in favour of normal generalities against the whims and eccentricities of individual genius. “Nature” and reason were glorified. Much of the satire of the eighteenth century was directed against fancy and un-reason. Swift in the fourth book of Gulliver Travels, to consider an example, chastises Yahoos for being creatures of impulse and devoid of reason or common sense. On the other hand, Houyhnhnms are glorified for being endowed with “right reason.” The romantics starting with Blake rebelled against the curbing influence of reason which could variously manifest itself as good sense, intellect, or just dry logic-chopping. Most of the romantic poets believed in a kind of transcendentalism, intuition, or mysticism, and none believed in the dictum that poetry is an intellectual exercise whose worth is entirely dependent on effective expression. Pope said:

True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d,
What oft was thought but ne ‘er so well express ‘d.

The romantics discredited wit as against real poetic inspiration. Poetry to them did not mean just a set of smart gnomes but something inner and spiritually enlightening. “Poetry”, wrote Wordsworth in the Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, “is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge: it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science.” He advised the student of Chemistry to lay aside his books and turn to poetry for true learning. The romantic conception of a poet and poetry was thus entirely different from the classical one. Dryden and Pope had believed that a poet was a “civilised” man of the world but much wittier and more talented than other civilised men. To the romantics a poet became a seer, a clairvoyant, a philosopher, and, in the words of Shelley, an unacknowledged legislator of mankind. Neoclassic poetry was mainly a product of intellect, and it was to intellect that it chiefly appealed. The attitude of most romantics was, however, keenly anti-intellectual. Thus, Wordsworth strongly denounced “that false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions”. Blake represented reason as clipping the wings of love, and Keats declared that “Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.” Thus anti-intellectualism”, avers Samuel C. Chew, “was no sudden manifestation of a spirit of revolt; it had been swelling in volume for many years. In the thought of the predecessors of the great romantic poets there had been a tendency to view learning with suspicion as allied to vice and to commend ignorance as concomitant with virtue.”

Imagination, Feeling, and Emotion:

The romantics revolted against the neoclassical exaltation of wit. They gave the place of wit to imagination and that of intellect to feeling and emotion. Wordsworth emphasised the role of feeling and emotion in all poetry. These are his famous words: “I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species, ofreaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.” Cazamian observes: “Intense emotion coupled with an intense display of imagery, such is the frame of mind which supports and feeds the new literature.” Feeling and imagination came to have a supreme importance with the romantics. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth wrote: “…each of these poems has a purpose: the feeling therein developed gives importance to action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling.” The neoclassicists had held imagination suspect. They had admitted fancy now and then but the true imagination of Coleridge’s conception was almost non-existing. They had neglected love as a theme of poetry; their poetry was mostly didactic, and this didacticism quite often took the shape of satire. Even when some romantics now and then become didactic, they are not just being intellectual or rhetorical; they rather appeal primarily to our emotions and take a generous help from imagination. Consider, in this context, Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias or Wordsworth’s Ode to Duty.

This special stress on imagination sometimes led the romantics away from the humdrum world of actuality and its pressing problems to make them citizens of their own respective worlds of imagination and to gloat in imaginary

Casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

The exaltation of imagination sometimes almost took the form of a revolt against realism, amounting to escapism. All neo-classical poets were hard-boiled realists, men of the world, and sometimes men of affairs. Blake is the most notorious example of a romantic moving in the world of visions. He went so far as to assert that the “vegetable world of phenomena” is only a shadow of “the real world which is the Imagination.” Swift, from what we gather from Section IX of The Tale of a Tub, would have certainly put such a man as Blake behind the bars of a bedlam! “The romanticist”, according to Samuel C. Chew, “is amorous of the far’. He seeks to escape from familiar experience and from the limitations of ‘that shadow-show called reality’ which is presented to him by his intelligence. He delights in the marvellous and abnormal”. This escape from actuality assumes many forms. In Coleridge it takes the form of love of the supernatural; in Shelley, of that of the dream of a golden age to come; in Keats, a striving after ideal beauty and the effort to recall the ancient Hellenic glory; in Scott it is manifested by his escape to the hoary Middle Ages; in Byron it takes the form of a haughty disdain of all humanity and absorption in his own self, amounting almost to a kind of egotheism, and, lastly, in Wordsworth it appears in his insistence on giving up the mechanical and spirit-throttling civilization and escaping into the untainted company of nature.

This condemnation of civilization is incidentally a basic tenet of European romanticism. Walter Jackson Bate observes: “It also encouraged the common romantic emphasis on the virtues of simple and rural life and in its extremer form…found outlet in continuing the cult of the ‘noble savage’ who is unspoiled by contact with civilization. It lent a kind of sanction to the vogue of the untutored and ‘original genius, and the frequent dilating on the natural innocence and goodness of childhood is an equally common expression of it.” The neoclassicists had expected a child to be a little gentleman, but most romantics, like Blake and Wordsworth, gave him a spiritual importance for being full of the “intimations of immortality.” Rousseau, the French thinker, was chiefly responsible for this vital change of conception.

Diction and Metre:

The Romantic Movement was a revolt not only against the concept of poetry held by the neoclassicists, it was also a revolt against traditional poetic measures and diction. About this part of the romantic revolt, Legouis observes: “To express their fervent passions they sought a more supple and more lyrical form than that of Pope, a language less dulled by convention, metres unlike the prevailing couplet. They renounced the poetical associations of words, and drew upon unusual images and varied verse forms for which they found models in the Renaissance and the old English poetry.” Some of these verse forms were personal inventions of the new poets. They sounded the death-knell of the heroic couplet which had reigned supreme upwards of a century.

Revolt against Social Authority:

The romantic revolt against social authority took as many shapes as the one against literary tradition. Most of the romantics were radical in their political views and crusaders for the emancipation of the individual. The French Revolution affected all the romantic poets, though in different ways. The young Wordsworth and Coleridge were thrilled with joy at the fall of the Bastille, which signified for them the cracking of the tyrannic chains which had kept in bondage the human spirit for so long. Later, however, with the Reign of Terror, the Lake Poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey) turned conservative, and Wordsworth earned the censure of Browning as “the lost leader.” The later romantics-Shelley, Keats, and Byron-were stronger and more consistent radicals than the earlier ones. All of them devoted themselves to the cause of freedom in all lands. Byron upheld the cause of Greek freedom in his poetry and his person-not only financially and morally. But to conclude, the Romantic Movement was much less a political than a poetic movement.

The revolt against social authority did not only mean condemnation of political tyranny and support for democracy; it also meant, sometimes, an open rebellion against long-standing social taboos on free love and even incest. Shelley was an arch rebel against all such curbs. Incest provides the theme of his play The Cenci. The Revolt of Islam is, likewise, a call for rebellion against tyranny and social authority alike. Shelley revolted against even God and earned his dismissal from Oxford with his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. His too insistent and serious belief in free love compelled his first wife to take her own life. On account of their rebellious notions, most romantics proved misfits in society and some were dubbed insane by it. Samuel C. Chew observes: “Emphasising the abnormal element, some scholars have singled out the morbidly erotic and deranged as distinguishing marks of romanticism, interpreting this as evidence of the part played by the less conscious impulses of the mind and nothing that a large number of English whters of the period approached the borders of insanity or went beyond, than can be accounted for on the ground of mere coincidence.” This aspect of romanticism is what exactly prompted T. E. Hulme to observe that classicism is “healthy” and romanticism “sickly”.

The Romantic Movement as the "Renaissance of Wonder"

Introduction:

Various definitions of romanticism and various interpretations of the Romantic Movement in England and the Continent have been given. F. L. Lucas in The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1948) lists as many as 11,396 such definitions! Bewildered by the enormous number of such attempts to define romanticism, some critics have counselled that such terms as “romanticism”and “classicism” should be given up altogether F.L. Lucas calf “romanticism” a “wholly woolly term fit only for slaughter.”

But we should not accept this counsel of despair as, in spite of their vagueness, most modem critics have accepted these terms on the strength of their utility to criticism.

The Romantic Movement in England was directed against the traditions of the neoclassical poetry of the school of Dryden, Pope, and Dr. Johnson. There was politics, too, which was involved, but essentially, this Movement was not political but poetic. Neoclassical poetry was intellectual, correct, reasonable, and traditional in its selection of themes and metre-which was invariably the heroic couplet. At the end of the eighteenth century (more specifically, with the rublication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798) the coup de grace was given to the already decadent poetry which had followed from the footsteps of Pope. In the later part of the eighteenth century could already be felt a kind of reaction against the Popean school of poetry. Poets like Thomson, Gray, Cowper, Collins, Burns, and Blake had iready broken away at various points from the time-honoured traditions rf the Augustan or neoclassical school. But it was Wordsworth and Coleridge who in their joint work, the Lyrical Ballads, produced, as ~. were, the Magna Carta of English poetry. According to a critic, r-:atterton and Gray had been the early birds, Cowper was the dawn, and Wordsworth the broad day-light of Romanticism.

Wonder and Intellectual Curiosity:

All poetic works of all the romantic poets do not follow the s-e pattern. Romanticism emphasized the liberty of the individual genius from the deadening weight of tradition and rules, thereby encouraging a kind of chaotic tendency. The only bond of union among the romantic poets was their impatience of tradition and their craving for novelty. They looked at everything anew and were struck by the spirit of wonder while exploring the new Americas of feeling, emotion, and spirit, and many of them built their spiritual homes in the imaginary worlds of their own making. According to Pater, classicism signifies “order in beauty”, whereas romanticism stands for the addition of “strangeness to beauty.” Pater was the reluctant leader of the Aesthetic Movement. He stressed beauty as the end of all art. Classicism and romanticism, to him, differed in that whereas the former stood for tradition, sameness, and well-defined patterns, the latter put a special premium on intellectual curiosity and departure from the ordinary and the normal. Theodore Watts-Dunton, likewise, interpreted the Romantic Movement as the “Renascence of Wonder.” He meant that in their perception of life and people the neoclassicists, being devotees of set patterns and traditions, had been covered by the dulling film of familiarity which they never tried to see through. The romantics scraped this film and draped the world in the light of their own imagination; and therefore, everything struck them with iridescent, prismatic effects. They were struck with the newness of things, which bred the sense of wonder. The neoclassicists projected only the cold light of reason on every object, but the romantics looked at everything with the eyes of the imagination. Consequently the classicists were more realistic than the romantics, in the ordinary sense. But the romantic poets lived in the world of

Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.

The Role of Imagination:

According to Herford. romanticism was primarily “an extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility.” This imaginative sensibility opened up new vistas which were to be the wonder of both the poet and the reader alike. Samuel C. Chew observes: “The romanticist is ‘amorous of the far’. He seeks to escape from familiar experience and from the limitation of ‘that shadow-show called reality’ which is presented to him by his intelligence. He delights in the marvellous and abnormal. To be sure, loving realistic detail and associating the remote with the familiar, he is often ‘true to the kindred points of heaven and home.’ But he is urged on by an instinct to escape from actuality: and in this escape he may range from the most trivial literary fantasy to the most exalted mysticism. His effort is to live constantly in the world of the imagination above and beyond the sensuous, phenomenal world. For him the creations of the imaginations are ‘forms more real than living man.’ He practises willingly, that ‘suspension of disbelief which ‘constitutes poetic faith.’ In its most uncompromising form this dominance of the intuitive and the irrational over sense experience becomes mysticism- ‘the life which professes direct intuition of the pure truth of being, wholly independent of the faculties by which it takes hold of the illusory contaminations of this present world.’ Wordsworth described this experience as, ‘that serene and blessed mood in which the burden of the mystery’ being lighted, he sees into ‘the life of things’. Blake, who seems to have lived almost continuously in this visionary ecstasy, affirmed that the ‘vegetable universe’ of phenomena is but a shadow of that real world which is the Imagination.”

This “escape from actuality” was attempted by different romantic poets in different ways. Each invented an interesting and wondrous world of his own. Coleridge escaped to the world of the supernatural which was to him curiously exciting as well as satisfying. Scott threw a romantic veil over the Middle Ages in which he found his spiritual home. Keats was lost in the world of ancient Hellenic beauty. Byron twitched his nose at the whole world and lived in the make-believe world of his own egocentric creation. Moore was interested in the world of Oriental splendour and gorgeousness. The contemplation of all these “worlds” was productive of the feelings of wonder as they were all imaginary worlds having little to do with the world of gnawing, humdrum reality. Of all the important romantic poets it was only Wordsworth who kept his feet firmly planted on the real world. But even he looked at this world through the spectacles of romance, with the result that it excited his wonder in the same measure as the various imaginary worlds did that of the other romantic poets.

Coleridge and the Supernatural:

Coleridge, perhaps the most romantic of all the romantic poets, always lived in the wonderful world of his dreams and imagination. Though Keats, Scott, and Coleridge were all fascinated by the world of the supernatural, yet for the last named it meant something like a natural habitat. Coleridge’s most outstanding poems, namely, The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and Christabel have all a strong tincture of the supernatural. In dealing with the supernatural in his works Coleridge was by no means the pioneer. Not to speak of Shakespeare, even in the eighteenth century many writers had taken up the supernatural as almost their cult. The spate of “Gothic” novels was an outcome of this cult. To name only a few, Horace Walpole, Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, “Monk” Lewis, and William Beckford had introduced a lot of supernatural characters and incidents in their novels. However, their work is singularly free from any artistic merit. They only catered for the ordinary people who had long been bored by the literature of reason and common sense and were then craving for cheap thrills. They candidly and crudely produced blood-curdling and spine-curling concoctions emanating from a ghoulish fancy. There is something morbid in their works which are so abundantly peopled with “death-pale spectres and clanking chains.” To naive readers, they cause terror; to the knowing they cause disgust; but they cause wonder to none. The supernaturalism of the writers of the novel of terror is as counterfeit as their Gothicism.

Coleridge’s supernaturalism, however, is neither shocking nor disgusting. It excited his wonder, and he conveyed this feeling of wonder to his readers. His treatment of supernaturalism is suggestive, delicate, refined, elegant, and eminently psychological. He altogether differed from the sensation-mongering of the exponents of Gothicism. As he himself pointed out in Biographia Liter aria, his subject and approach in the Lyrical Ballads were to be different from those of Wordsworth. His own endeavours were to be directed to persons and incidents supernatural, yet was he to make them look natural and credible by dint of his subtle, psychological approach. The supernatural is, generally, terrifying; but “naturalised supernatural” is not terrifying but conducive to the feeling of wonder. Even when Coleridge is describing something ordinary, he makes it suggestive of the supernatural. Lines like the following represent Coleridge at his best and are perhaps unrivalled for their suggestiveness in the whole range of English poetry:

A savage place; as holy and enchanted
As ever beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.

A critic asserts that this is magic pure and simple; the rest is poetry.

Scott’s treatment of the supernatural is somewhat crude, but Keats gives a good account of himself in his ballad La Belle Dame Sans Merci which is delicately tinctured with the supernatural.

Medievalism and Hellenism:

Many romantic poets, while they did not feed their curiosity on the world of the supernatural, yet transported themselves to the remote in time and space to create a similar effect of wonder. Almost all of them looked at the Middle Ages as the period of chivalry, adventure, action, and art. In doing so, however, they conveniently forgot the seamy facets ofthat period-squalor, pestilence, superstition, and fanaticism. Keats viewed ancient Greece as the abode of art and unexampled beauty, so much so that Shelley said that Keats was “a Greek.” With the exception of Wordsworth and Shelley-who was always lost in the world of his own vision and dreams of the golden age to come-all the romantic poets.loved the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages, according to Walter Pater, “are unworked sources ofTomantic: efter, of a strange beauty to be won by strong imagination out of hings unlikely or remote.” The enthusiasm for the Middle Ages satisfied the emotional sense of wonder as also the intellectual sense of curiosity.

Nature-Wordsworth and Others:

Wordsworth, who is generally recognised to be the greatest of all the romantic poets, has not much to do with supernaturalism, medievalism, or Hellenism. Nor is he ensconced in the world of his own imagination. Nevertheless, he shows a strong tendency towards wonder and curiosity even while keeping his gaze fixed on the ordinary world. He was the greatest poet of Nature, as also her greatest priest. He brings a fresh curiosity and wonder to bear upon his study of Nature. His creed is strongly pantheistic, as Nature for him becomes something like a ubiquitous goddess. In the writing of the Lyrical Ballads it was mutually agreed upon by Coleridge and him that the endeavours of the former would be directed to persons and characters supernatural or at least “romantic,” whereas he himself was to propose to himself as his subjects familiar, everyday things, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind’s attention from the “lethargy” of custom and directing it to the loveliness and wonder of the world before us-an inexhaustible treasure which because of its film of familiarity we have eyes but see not, ears but hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

So when Wordsworth is dealing with familiar objects his intention is not to present them photographically-as, for as instance, Crabbe does. Crabbe, an uncompromising realist and a kind of “Pope in worsted stockings”, had nothing of the romantic in him. He looked at the miseries of rural life without batting his eyelids. His claim was:

I paint the Cot
As Truth would paint it, and as Bards will not.

We read his descriptions of people, natural phenomena, and the sights and sounds of Nature with the boredom of recognition rather than the wonder of strangeness. When we read about the grave of a child:

I have measured it from side to side;
It is three feet long and two feet wide

It does not excite wonder or curiosity. There is indeed no romance in giving the exact measurement of a meadow or the exact height of an oak. Wordsworth, it must be admitted, does also sometimes succumb to such prosaic realism; however, it is his definite aim to sketch objects not as they are, but after removing from their surfaces the dull Film of familiarity and then projecting over them a certain colouring of-the imagination. Coleridge, by virtue of his subtle imagination, gives realistic touches to things otherwise strange; Wordsworth, on the other hand, gives subtle, exalting touches to things otherwise real and common. Coleridge naturalises the supernatural and Wordsworth “supernaturalises” the natural. Thus both meet at the same via media of romance which is realistic as well as wonderful. Such common objects as a leech-gatherer, a solitary reaper, and a cuckoo become in Wordsworth poetry objects of wonder and curiosity. It is easy to excite wonder in strange or supernatural things, but to do so in ordinary objects requires the artistic imagination of a real poet. Wordsworth transforms plain reality into beautiful romance. Led by Wordsworth almost all the romantic poets took interest in Nature and loved to dwell on her multifarious moods and aspects. Shelley looked at the West Wind, the skylark, and the clouds not as dull and never-changing objects of never-changing Nature, but as objects of wonderful freshness and perennial interest. Keats, Coleridge, and Byron had each his own conception of Nature, but all of them evinced much interest in the world of Nature and studied and described her with infectious wonder and curiosity, as if she by herself were an unexplored world waiting to be discovered and studied with fresh attention and virgin wonder.

The Romantic Movement as a "Return to Nature"

What is “Nature”?

First follow Nature, and your judgment frame
By her just standard which is still the same:
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear unchang ‘d and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty must to all impart.
At once the source, and end, and test of Art.

This is the famous counsel which Pope in his Essay on Criticism gave to writers. In fact, Dryden, Pope, and all therr followers reverenced “Nature” alike, but their Nature was not the same as the Nature of the romantics, the Romantic Movement in English poetry is generally described as a “Return to Nature.” Nature for Pope stood for normal reality’or something like the universal laws of reason. It was something internal Sftd”moral. Dr. Johnson characteristically asserted: “Nothing can please many, and-please long, but just representations of general nature. Trie AugUstans”were against indulgence in personal whims, eccentricities, and abnormalities because’ they were “unnatural”. Thus, their slogan, “First follow Nature,” has to be interpreted in this light. When the romantics shouted “Return to Nature”, they meant that the people should return to the external world of sights and sounds, such as trees, mountains, peasants, and the sounds of storms, birds, animals etc., as also to primitive simplicity untainted by the fingers of refinement, or even “civilisation.” Lovejoy in “Nature as Aesthetic Norm”, in Essays in the History of Ideas (1948), dwells upon the complexity of the interpretation of the very inclusive term “Nature” and discusses a galaxy of meanings which have been attached to the word from time to time. But ignoring all semantic subtleties we may say that the slogan “Return to Nature” in relation to and as an important aspect of the Romantic Movement in English poetry has mainly two facets. It implies:

(i)         Something like a political and philosophical primitivism, a general love of simplicity and corresponding             distrust of sophistication.

(ii)        Return to the sights and sounds of external Nature-the world of the sun, stars, trees, plants, flowers, birds, meadows, forests, etc.

Eighteenth-century poetry was urban or “drawing-room” poetry as it did not concern itself with the beauties of Nature. The romantics, without any important exception, stood for love of the sights and sounds of Nature, and some even went to the extent of finding a bond of kinship between Nature and man. To Wordsworth Nature became a guide, teacher, and friend. To others also Nature came to have a deeper than physical significance.

“Return to Nature” as Glorification of Primitivism:

The second point does not need much clarification as it is quite obvious. But we may discuss at some length the first one. “Return to Nature” in this sense meant a return to natural simplicity. Reason, common sense, and good breeding were the qualities commended and recommended in the eighteenth century. The weight of etiquette and superficial gentility appeared to the romantics to be curbing the spirit of natural goodness in man. Man had, as it were, willingly accepted to -A’ear chains of his own making. The first man to react against the curbing influences of the so-called civilisation and to give a clarion call for “‘iteration of the inner natural man was the French philosopher Rousseau who played an important part in bringing in the French Revolution. He galvanised Europe by announcing: ‘Man is .born free, and everywhere he is in chains”, and “God made all things good: man meddles with them and they become evil.” Rousseau’s slogan ”Return to Nature” was necessarily a political and philosophical dictum intended to revive the concept of the “noble-savage” and to glorify primitivism in living and behaving. His teaching found a ready acceptance in England as in most other countries of Europe. The romantic poets can often be seen glorifying in their work Rousseauistic simplicity. Their idealisation of peasantry, childhood, and the residents of moors and heaths, for instance, is a logical ramification of the Rousseauistic creed. Their reaction against the dominance of intellect and “philosophy” (used mostly in the sense of physical science) is also to be studied in this light. Wordsworth strongly denounced “that false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions.” Blake represented Reason as clipping the wings of Love, and Keats declared that “Philosophy will clip an angels wings.” This anti-intellectualism, avers Samuel Chew, “was no sudden manifestation of a spirit of revolt; it had been swelling in volume for many years. In the thought of the predecessors of the, great romantic poets there had been a tendency to view learning with suspicion as allied to vice and to commend ignorance as concomitant with virtue.” While not overlooking the historical background of the romantic anti-intellectual revolt, we must give due importance to the impact of Rousseau. In his Descriptive Sketches (mostly written on the banks of the Loire in 1791 -92) Wordsworth gives a faithful, albeit a little rhetorical, utterance to Rousseau’s idea of the innate goodness of man:

Once Man entirely free, alone and wild,
Was bless ‘d as free, for he was Nature’s child;
He, all superior but his God disdain d
Walk’d none restraining, and by none restrain ‘d;
Confessed no law but by reason taught,
Did all he wish ‘d and wish ‘d but what he ought.

Blake also found man in “chains”, as for instance in London,

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg ‘d manacles I hear.

“Return to Nature” thus signified a return to natural liberty by snapping these “mind-forged manacles” or “man-made chains.” Wordsworth hailed the French Revolution as it was for him a step forward towards Nature. Later, however, when he realised that the Revolution was not Nature-made but man-made, he turned against it to seek comfort in the lap of real Nature.

 Now let us consider the place of Nature in the works of different romantic poets.

Wordsworth:

It is extremely appropriate to begin with Wordsworth both because he is the “seniormost” of all romantics and is also the “high priest of Nature” to whom Nature means more than she does to any other English poet. Nature to Wordsworth was everything. After his disillusionment with the French Revolution, he sought the “healing power” of Nature. His increased interest in Nature was thus partly caused by his political frustration. The Reign of Terror in France sent him reeling into the lap of Nature. His desire to seek comfort in Nature was not something unprecedented; it was unique, however, in its intensity and sincerity. Basil Willey observes in this connexion: “There was nothing new, it may be remarked, nothing very startling in the discovery that one can find peace and contentment in rural retirement; from Horace to Cowper (to go no further afield) there had seldom lacked poets, satirists, and moralists to recommend plain living and high thinking. But the ‘Nature’ of Wordsworth and Coleridge was apprehended with a new kind of intensity.” He further maintains that their passion to mingle themselves with landscape arose “primarily from the deflection into imaginative channels of their thwarted political ardours.”

Wordsworth’s attitude to Nature continued changing throughout his life. It started with animal and sensuous pleasures and ended on a mystic note. God and Nature became one for him. Nature became the Universal Spirit ready for guiding anyone who would care to be guided by Her. Most of the rural characters he paints in his poetry are shown to be simple and uncorrupted mainly because of their close communion with Nature. We are told about Michael that

When others heeded not, he heard the South
Make subterraneous music.

Michael’s son Luke becomes dissolute when he starts living in a city-away from Nature. The reason Peter Bell was monstrous was that

At noon, when by the forest’s edge
He lay beneath the branches high,
The soft blue sky did never melt
Into his heart; he never felt
The witchery of the soft blue sky!

We are unhappy in spite of all material advancement because “the world is too much with us” and the objects of Nature do not touch our heart. Nature should be accepted as a guide and teacher because

One impulse from the vernal wood
Can teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can.    

And

…she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
 Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e ‘er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.

Wordsworth believes that

Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her.

His advice to his sister is:

Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain winds be free
To blow against thee.

Lucy grew for three years “in sun and shower” and became (for Wordsworth) a model child. The highest joy offered by Nature to the minds in perfect communion with her is of a mystic nature. It comes only rarely and lasts just a few moments. During such moments of supreme bliss

The breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

From what has been said it is clear that so far as Nature is concerned Wordsworth, to quote an opinion, “was concerned far less with the sensuous manifestations that delight most of our Nature poets than with the spiritual that he finds underlying these manifestations.”

Coleridge:

Coleridge’s attitude to Nature, more particularly in the early phase of his poetic career, was similar to Wordsworth’s. Very like Wordsworth he felt disillusioned at the consequences of the French Revolution and sought solace in Nature. He wrote to his brother from Alfoxden that he had “snapped his squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition” and had broken all ties with not only the slogans of the French Revolution, but everything French- “French metaphysics, French politics, French ethics, and French theology”-in order to meditate upon the causae causarum” At what Basil Willey calls “his most Wordsworthian stage,” Coleridge felt Nature to be a guiding spirit and teacher. In Frost at Midnight he expresses his desire to entrust the instruction of his infant son to Nature.

But thou, my babe! shall wander like a breeze

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountains, and clouds,
…so shall thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.

In The Nightingale he describes how he once made his weeping infant smile by treating him to the beauty of the moon:

Once, when he awoke
In most distressful mood,
I hurried with him to our orchard-plot
And he beheld the moon, and hushed at once,
Suspends, and laughs most silently,
While his fair eyes, swam with undropped tears,
Did glitter in the yellow moon beam!

In the beginning Coleridge believed with Wordsworth that Nature leads one “from joy to joy” and that she never betrays the heart that loves her. Later, however, he became more “realistic” and came to realise that joy came from within, not from external Nature. This view he voiced in Dejection, an Ode:

I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
O Lady we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live!
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!

This was a significant departure from the Wordsworthian concept of Nature.

Shelley:

Nature occupies a place of distinction in Shelley’s poetry, too. .But as a poet of Nature-he is a class by himself. It is his deeply philosophical bent of mind, perhaps, which does not let him give clearcut pictures of landscape. Seldom does he portray a landscape with recognisable details. The whole thing is so misty and illusive. Most of his Nature pictures are idealised groups of scattered fragments flowing from his memory rather than portraits of what he has actually seen and enjoyed.

Shelley, like Wordsworth, believed that Nature was a living being. He, however, did not think of Nature as the Supreme Spirit meant to delight and teach human beings, but as a spirit full of the principle of love to which he did not assign any particular function.

Again, sometimes, like Wordsworth, Shelley stressed the presence of a mystic bond of union between Nature and man. In Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples, for example, he makes Nature reflect his own mood. But at other times, as in The Cloud, he drives a sharp wedge between Nature and the world of man.

An important feature of Shelley’s Nature poetry is the persistent mythopoeic element. He often suggests that the various aspects and objects of Nature are not just different parts of the One Being (as Wordsworth believed), but are separate entities each one independent of the rest. The West Wind becomes with Shelley a mighty destroyer and preserver; the cloud becomes the daughter of earth and water; the Mediterranean, a king; Night becomes the sister of Death and the mother of the “filmy-eyed” Sleep; and so forth. Shelley’s myth-making power is at its luxuriant best in Hyperion.

Shelley, like Wordsworth, found “healing power” in Nature. It is a different thing that sometimes he found himself too sad to be consoled even by her. But she is always happy and lovable. Even when she is turbulent and wild at times, she is not treated by Shelley as an alien force, but something amiable and glorious even in her tantrums.

Keats:

Keats was also a great lover of Nature. He loved Nature not for her spiritual significance or deep messages conveyed by her, but for the sensuous pleasures which she offered. Compton-Rickett observes: “Whereas Wordsworth spiritualises and Shelley intellectualises Nature, Keats is content to express her through the senses: the colour, the scent, the touch, the pulsating music; these are the things that stir him to his depths; there is not a mood of Earth he does not love, not a season that will not cheer and inspire him.” Another critic observes: “Keats seeks to know Nature perfectly and to enjoy her fully, with no ulterior thought than to give her complete expression. With him no considerations of theology, humanity or metaphysics mingle with Nature”

Keats’s odes about Autumn and the Nightingale are very rich in sensuous appeal. They show Keats as a delicate and thorough observer of Nature. Like Wordsworth (who complained that “we murder to dissect”) he protests against the interference of scientific studies in the sensuous wealth of Nature. He wails:

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven,
We know her woof and texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things

Byron:

Byron was different in most respects from the rest of the romantic poets. He shared their love of Nature, though his love is of its own kind. “In this love”, says a critic, “he has his own particular way, there is no meditative musing, little sense of mystery, but a very lively sense of wonder and delight in the energising glories of Nature.” Byron’s love of Nature was partly a by-product of his contempt of man. He took a particular delight in envisioning and describing wild and terrifying objects and aspects of Nature which seem to be mocking, as it were, the insignificance of man. He did not deny, however, the healing power of Nature.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods;
There is a rapture on the lonely shore;
There is a society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea and music in its roar

He realised the companionableness of Nature, as the following autobiographic lines show:

Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends:
Where rolled the ocean, thereon was his home;
Where a blue sky and glowing clime extends,
He had the passion and the power to roam.

Romantic Melancholy

Introduction:

Ay, in the very temple of delight
Veil’d melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him -whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might.
And be among her cloudy trophies hung. – Keats

Melancholy is one of the inevitable products of the typical romantic temper. Apart from such personal factors as ill-health, an unhappy marriage or social ostracisation, most romantic poets were led to ‘occasional fits of melancholia by the inherent quality of their creed. Their romantic approach to life shuttlecocke them between hope and despair. All of them, fundamentally considered, were optimists; and like all optimists they fell into moments of despair. Romantic melancholy (or what Mario Praz terms “romantic agony”) is essentially different from other kinds of melancholy we associate with Hardy or the melancholy of Sir Thomas Browne. Hardy’s melancholy is the natural product of his profound pessimism which hinges mainly on his deterministic conception of the universe. Browne’s melancholy has an essentially subjective origin; it arises from his persistent interest in the themes of decay and fatality and their appurtenances. His is a macabre imagination exulting m the contemplation of these themes which always inspire him to give his best. The eighteenth-century poetry of the “graveyard school” is also instinct with the same kind of melancholy.

Romantic melancholy, however, is of its own kind. It is the product of moments of depression inherent in almost every optimistic philosophy or attitude towards life. Few poets can remain always balanced on the crest of a euphoric certainty that

God is in his Heaven:
All is light with the world.

A man like Hardy can be a firm pessimist, but few can be firm optimists. Almost all the romantic poets were, essentially speaking, optimists. Their fits of melancholy were due mainly to two factors:

(i)         Their occasional (and very painful) awareness of the unbridgeable gulf between the world of reality and the world of their imagination.

(ii)        Their recognition of the impossibility of the materialisation of their visionary projects. Melancholy is natural during moments when the infeasibility of pet imaginations comes to be realised.

Thus romantic melancholy is, pre-eminently, the outcome of a basic dichotomy which at times gives rise to the feelings of disillusionment. Samuel C. Chew observes in this very context: “The attempt to find some correspondence between actuality and desire results in joy when for fleeting moments the vision is approximated but in despondency of despair the realization comes that such reconciliations are impossible. Thus Byron’s Lucifer tempts Cain to revolt by forcing upon him an awareness of the inadequacy of his state to his conceptions.’ A sense of this contrast is expressed by Shelley in those poems in which there is a sudden fall from ecstasy into disillusionment. The same sense adds a new poignancy to the melancholy strain inherited by the romantic poets from their predecessors.”

Disillusionment resulting in melancholy is also evident in the political belief of some romantic poets. Further, as most romantic poets were turbulent characters unable to adjust themselves in society they ventilated melancholy feeling. They thought the world to be out of step, but the world threw the opposite charge into their teeth. The feeling of being solitary, especially in the case of Shelley, found melancholy expression.

After these general observations let us consider individually the most important romantic poets with respect to the question in hand.

Wordsworth:

Wordsworth was the least melancholy of all the romantic poets. It was mainly due to the fact that he seldom felt himself to be in a state of utter solitariness. There was his sister and there was the ever-consoling Nature always at his elbow. He believed, and actually felt, that Nature leads one from joy to joy. He was an incorrigible optimist though he was aware, like Crabbe, of the miseries of villagers who lived, unlike townsmen, right in the heart of Nature. When Michael finds his son tost in the ignominious ways of the town, he is shocked. Wordsworth points out that love sustained Michael, for

There is a comfort in the strength of love
Which makes a thing endurable, which else
Will overset the brain or break the heart.

Wordsworth’s optimism finds its way even in the midst of elegiac sentiments. Consider, for instance, the last of his Elegiac Stanzas (Suggested by a picture of Peele Castle, in a storm, painted by Sir George Beaumont):

But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
And frequent sights, of what is to be borne!
Such sights or worse, as are before me here,
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

In spite of his normal optimism Wordsworth often expresses himself on the misfortunes inevitable to the human predicament. In his years of maturity he was particularly aware of them. For example, he says in Tintern Abbey:

For I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing often times
The still, sad music of humanity.

Thus even his mysticism is not without a chastening element of melancholy.

Wordsworth’s political disillusionment was also responsible for some utterances of melancholy. The French Revolution (1789) fired him as it did a large number of young hearts throughout Europe, with new hopes of the deliverance of humanity from the shackles of age-old tyranny. The fall of the Bastille was for them an incident to rave over. Recalling the days of the Revolution, Wordsworth writes:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

Later on, however, with the Reign of Terror and the rise of Napoleon, his enthusiasm for the slogan “liberty, fraternity, and equality” declined steeply. He felt that the Revolution was not Nature-but man-made. The ensuing melancholy feelings drove him straight away to the lap of Nature who nursed his wounds and healed them up. Momentary moods of depression, however, continued visiting him as ever. In Resolution and Independence he describes one such moment in the following lines where he represents himself as absorbed in “untoward thoughts”:

We poets in our youth begin in gladness:
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

This mood does not, however, continue for long, for study of the fortitude of an extremely old leech-gatherer comes to him with the message of a new hope.

Wordsworth’s emotional career was calculated to arouse melancholy feelings. His ill-fated alliance with a French girl sent him brooding; but his poetry is surprisingly free from the expression of melancholy bred purely by subjective causes.

Coleridge:

Coleridge went through the same vicissitudes of political feelings as Wordsworth. He and his poetry are, however, much more melancholy than Wordsworth and his poetry because he could not find the same “healing power” in Nature as Wordsworth did. No doubt, to start with, Coleridge felt identically with Wordsworth that “Nature did never betray the heart that loved her.” But later on, this Wordsworthian panacea stopped working for Coleridge’s peculiar ailment. In the Ode to Dejection Coleridge sets forth his contradictory view of Nature which he regards not as a spirit capable of leading even the most cheerless man to a heaven of joy, but as something essentially external, which only mirrors a man’s mood, be it of joy or sorrow. Says he:

0 Lady! -we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live;
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud.

What makes Nature look cheerful is the inner joy peculiar to every man, present in some, absent in most. He says, accordingly:

I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life whose fountains are within.

This “passion and the life” are internal, having nothing to do with Nature or anything external

We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that charms our ear or sight;
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colours a suffusion from mat Light.

Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge was a victim of protracted spells? the darkest melancholy arising from a feeling of guilt and from the gnawing consciousness of the approaching demise of his always certain poetic inspiration. Coleridge was an opium addict living alternately in the Arabian Nights world of utter despair fast approaching with its monstrous jaws wide open. His Ode to Dejection is a soul-rending dirge on the death of his poetic talent. What distinguishes it as a poem of melancholy is its overwhelming sincerity. With this ode the Coleridge of KublaKhan, Chrislabel, and The Ancient Mariner was dead and only a mental wreck remained behind.

“Shelley:

Shelley was, essentially, an optimistic dreamer. He was used to visualising and giving expression to the golden age which he believed was always round the corner. All of his long poems, like Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound and The Revolt of Islam, are permeated with a remarkable spirit of optimism which makes light of all conceivable hurdles. Nowhere in them does he strike a note of pessimism, melancholy, or disillusioning scepticism. However, his lyrics are almbst invariably melancholy in their predominant tone. Therein we find him always lamenting and complaining,

0 world! O life! O time!
On whose last steps I climb.
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more—Oh, never morel

And listen to the “lyric cry” in the following lines from Ode to the West Wind:

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d-
One too like thee:
tameless, and swift, and proud.

According to Ian Jack “Shelley’s lyrics are the utterance of a solitary.” They, he further says, “are soliloquies, not dramatic monologues.” The longer poerns and lyrics are reflections of the two opposite moods-the moods, respectively, of optimism and pessimism. According to Ian Jack, there is no basic contradiction between these two moods. “Shelley, ” says this critic, “was optimistic about the future of the human race, pessimistic (almost always) about his own future as an individual.” Being the most directly personal of all his poems, his short lyrics are naturally the most melancholy. Religion has been described as what man makes of his solitude: the same description might he applied to Shelley’s lyrics. As Mary Shelley pointed out, “It is the nature of that poetry…which overflows from the soul oftener to express sorrow, and regret than joy; for it is when oppressed by the weight of life, and away from those he loves that the poet has recourse to the solace of expression in verse.”

At times Shelley’s melancholy arises from objective observation rather than personal feelings. A good example is to be found in To a Skylark:

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not.
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Keats:

Without mincing matters it may be said that more than any other romantic, Keats was an escapist. He built up his spiritual home in the romance-draped Middle Ages and the Greece of yore which he considered to be a land of ideal beauty. Any intimate contact with the harsh world of reality was abhorrent to him. He was a patient of tuberculosis which ultimately cut him down in the flower of youth. By turns he feared and courted death. His sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be” is quite typical of him. In the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ he gives vent to really poignant feelings. He is in love with “easeful Death.” He desires

To cease upon the midnight with no pain.

The nightingale is a denizen of some other immortal and romantic world, unaware of the misery of this world in which human beings are destined to live.

The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other goan,
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

Byron:

Byron shared very little of the true romantic melancholy. However, he was the most cynical and  misanthropic of all the major romantic poets. He was a megalomaniac who regarded himself to be superior to the entire world which he openly and persistently despised. What we are aware of in him are not exactly spells of melancholy but of withering scorn and scarifying contempt which often lead him to a end of all-denying cynicism not free from depression. Well does Joseph warren Beach describe Byron as “the elevated soul tortured by his own perversities and doomed by his superiority to a life of lonely pride.” But whereas Shelley’s loneliness led him to melancholy, Byron’s led him to spells of gross ill-temper.

Medievalism in Romantic Poetry

Introduction:

The generation of a new interest in the Middle Ages was one of the hallmarks of the Romantic Movement in England, as in the rest of Europe. Heine went so far as to define romanticism as the reawakening of the Middle Ages. H. A. Beers in A History of English Romanticism (1902) was also mainly concerned with the revival of medievalism. It is, however, too lop-sided an interpretation of romanticism which was, in fact, a very complex and composite phenomenon.

Why were most romantic poets interested in the Middle Ages? The answer to this question is not far to seek. The romantics were, essentially, critical of intellectualism, sophisticated civilisation, and harsh humdrum reality. The desire to get rid of them made them “amorous of the far.” They sought an escape into regions and states of beings as far removed in time and space as possible. It is this love of the remote, the strange, and the mysterious which induced in them an interest in the Middle Ages. The romantic poet is impatient of the real and the earth-bound. He is often discontented with the state of things as they are. Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, and Scott are notably so. Being dissatisfied with oppressive reality they either sing of the glorious past or project their imagination into the womb of futurity to raise a shape that answers their own desire. Thus Keats sings of the glory that was Greece; Scott endeavours to recapture the splendour of the past ages, particularly, the Middle Ages; Shelley sings of the golden age to come; and Coleridge is lost in a world of his own making. Says Shelley:

We look before and after
And pine for what is not.

Samuel C. Chew observes about the romantics’ interest in the Middle Ages: “With such currents of thought and feeling flowing, it was natural that the Middle Ages were regarded with a fresh sympathy, though not, be it said, with accurate understanding. It is true that there were those who, like Shelley, seeking to reshape the present in accordance with desire, did not revert to the past but pursued their ideal into a Utopian future. But to others the Middle Ages offered a spiritual home, remote and vague and mysterious. The typical romanticist does not ‘reconstruct’ the past from the substantial evidence provided by research, but fashions it a new, not as it was but as it ought to have been. The more the writer insists upon the historical accuracy of his reconstruction the less romantic is he.” Thus some romantics who love the Middle Ages not only try to escape from the real and present world but from the real medieval world too; they fashion it a new as it ought to have been, ignoring its unpalatable features known to all historians. They glorify its splendour and chivalry and forget its dirt, disease, squalor, superstition, and social oppression.

Pater’s Explanation:

As to what led most romantic poets to make their spiritual home in the Middle Ages is explained by Walter Pater in the following words: “The essential elements of the romantic spirit are curiosity and the love of beauty, and it is as the accidental effect of these qualities only, that it seeks the Middle Ages, because in the overcharged atmosphere of the Middle Ages there are unworked sources of romantic effect, of a strange beauty to be won by strong imagination out of things unlikely or remote.” Romanticism is interpreted by Pater as the addition of the sense of strangeness to beauty. “Strangeness” implies the combination of the emotional sense of wonder and the intellectual sense of curiosity. Both these senses are gratified by the romance-clad, remote, and mysterious Middle Ages.

Not All Romantic Poets Are Medievalists:

In spite of the views of Heine and Beers already referred to, medievalism is not an essential feature of all romantic poetry, even though it be one of the hallmarks of the Romantic Movement in England. Many important poets did not, for different reasons, evince much interest in the Middle Ages; but they were “romantics” all the same. Among such poets must be mentioned the names of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron. Wordsworth found a constant spiritual anchor in Nature. He was as keenly dissatisfied with the world of humdrum reality as any other romantic poet. But whereas others escaped to the remote in time and space, Wordsworth found in the healing power of Nature a balm for all his pains and frustrations. Why should he have looked to the Middle Ages when the panacea for all his ills was present right in front of him? There is not any strong element of romantic agony and earning in Wordsworth’s poetry as Nature led him “from joy to joy.” Medievalism for Wordsworth, then, was an utter irrelevancy. As regards Shelley, the absence of interest in the Middle Ages may be explained by his persistent “futurism.” He found his spiritual home not in the supposedly near-ideal bygone ages but in the golden age to come. He looked “after” rather than “before”; the unborn tomorrow appealed to him as more real than the dead yesterday. He, however, did love to dwell upon mystery, spirit foreign lands, and remote times. At any rate, the love of the Middle Ages does not manifest itself as a specific and noteworthy element in his poetry. Byron’s temper and approach were in many respects quite different from those of most romantic poets. But the love of the remote was equally shared by him with others. However, he was much more interested in the Orient than in medieval Europe. His “Oriental Tales”-77ze Giaour, The Bride ofAbydos (both 1813) and The Corsair (1817) have for their background the world of Oriental romance; however, their interest resides not in the romantic atmosphere but the personality of the hero in each case. Only in Lara (1814) do we find Byron employing, to quote-Samuel C. Chew, “the Gothic mode for the delineation of the Byronic hero.” Thus, on the whole, Byron manifests little interest in medievalism.

Difference from the Gothic Romancers:

The medievalism of romantic poets was quite different from that of the Gothic romancers who had earlier shown in their crude Gothic stories new interest in the Middle Ages. Horace Walpole and Mrs. Ann Radcliffe were the most important among them. Walpole, like some other dilettanti of the second half of the eighteenth century, did something practically Gothic by erecting an actual castle (not one in the air) after the Gothic style-at least, what he thought was the Gothic style. Critics are forward enough to dub his Gothicism-both that of his architecture and his Castle of Otranto-as, sham. These Gothic novelists had little real knowledge of the Middle Ages. They were crude sensation-mongers who found the Middle Ages a convenient repository in which all supernatural and blood-curdling events and characters could be dumped with impunity. Their approach to the Middle Ages was neither sincere nor psychological, nor artistic. For one thing, none of them really believed in all that he wrote about. Walpole was an enervated intellectual who cultivated the creed of Gothicism just to kill boredom. Mrs. Radcliffe, wife of a journalist, wrote her stories just to keep herself occupied during the frequent hours of leisure. None of the Gothicists made the Middle Ages his or her spiritual home. Coleridge, Scott, and Keats on the other hand, dealt with the Middle Ages with extreme sensitiveness and psychological integrity. Coleridge and Keats, at least, believed in their own “romanticised” versions of the Middle Ages. They breathed the very air of the period and made themselves quite at home in that atmosphere. Their approach to the Middle Ages was not the approach of a painstaking historian or cold dilettante. They transported themselves into the spirit of those times though without bothering about fidelity to historical details. Their interest lay in living rather than describing the Middle Ages.

Coleridge:

Coleridge was the pioneer in the psychological and artistic handling of the Middle Ages. His medievalism and supernaturalism go hand in hand. The Middle Ages for him provide a very appropriate period for his poems which contain supernatural and mysterious events rich in romance. His greatest poems-Christabel and The Ancient Mariner-have both for their backdrop the England of the Middle Ages. In the former we have the usual medieval accoutrements-such as an old-fashioned castle, a feudal lord, mystery, superstition, magic, and terror. The castle is surrounded by a moat and is “ironed within and without/’ There is the witch woman Geraldine who casts her evil spell on the chaste Christabel who is every inch the beautiful and young heroine of a typical medieval romance. The medieval atmosphere, along with Coleridge’s subtle and imaginative handling of his subject, gives the poem a colour of credibility. It also enables him to dispense with any elaborate machinery for the generation of eerie and remote terror. As is usual with him, Coleridge works in Christabel through subtle suggestion rather than explicit description. It must be noted that Coleridge values the Middle Ages not for their own sake but for their capacity to provide a suitable setting for the supernatural which it is his purpose to hint at or to display openly. Only once does he go beyond this-while describing the shadowy picture in Christabel of

The charm carved so curiously
Carved with figures strange and sweet
For the Lady’s chamber meet.

Otherwise, the medieval atmosphere is kept vague rather than concretely depicted, though it permeates everything. Even when he alludes to the trials by combat in Part II of Christabel he does not give precise details. Contrast his approach with Keats’s description of Madeline’s chamber in The Eve of St. Agnes and we will find the difference between Coleridge and other romantic poets in this particular.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is, likewise, provided by Coleridge with a medieval setting. The references to the crossbow, the vesper bell, the shriving hermit, the prayer to Mary-all point to the medieval setting of the poem. The deliberate archaisms Iike eftsoons”, “countree,” and “swound” serve the same purpose. The supernatural events in the poem find a befitting backdrop in this medieval setting.

Scott:

In his medievalism and supernaturalism Scott followed in the footsteps of Coleridge and found atumultuous response from the reading public. Scott was a very copious and versatile writer, better known as a novelist than a poet. As a historical novelist he covered in his novels the history of England and Scotland from the Dark Ages to the then recent eighteenth century. He was at home in the past, particularly the Middle Ages in which he created an unprecedented interest and even enthusiasm.

The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Scott’s first important original work, has for its setting the England-Scotland border of the mid-sixteenth century with all its feuds and suggestions of magic and mystery. A Tale of Flodden Field Marmion (1808) is, likewise, set in the year 1513 and is based on some historical incidents generously peppered with many others of the poet’s own creation. The Lady of the Lake (1810), which like the two above-mentioned works is a poem in six cantos, also like them transports the reader to England and Scotland of the Middle Ages and has for characters chivalrous knights who participate in numerous feuds for the hand of a beautiful maiden. Scott’s treatment of the Middle Ages is somewhat less artistic and delicate than Coleridge’s. He is much more interested in action and vigorous narration than in subtle and psychological suggestions.

Keats:

Keats, like most romantic poets, revelled in the past. He was most pleased with the Middle Ages and the ancient Greece with all its glory, splendour, and beauty. His most important poems conceived in the medieval setting are the incomparable The Eve of St. Agnes and the ballad La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The former is based on the medieval legend of St. Agnes. “The Eve of St. Agnes, “says a critic, “is a glorious record of the fondness of Keats for all that is understood by the phrase ‘medieval accessories.” There are very obvious “medieval accessories” such as an old castle, an adventurous, love-struck knight, a young lady who looks like the typical heroine of amedieval romance, the beadsman, and family feuds and enmity. All this is certainly medieval. “But,” observes a critic, “it is medievalism seen through the magical mist of the imagination of Keats.” Keats’ s approach to the Middle Ages is conditioned by his sensuous temper. He loves this period for its romance and mystery, no doubt, but also for its picturesqueness and its appeal to the senses. His treatment lacks the subtlety and psychological veracity of Coleridge’s. “The reliance,” says Samuel C. Chew, “upon elaborate and vivid presentation rather than upon suggestion differentiates the quality of Keats’ s romanticism from Coleridge’s.”

The setting of La Belle Dame Sans Merci is also medieval and is equally charged with the spirit of chivalry and the supernatural. The love-lorn knight-at-arms who is smitten by the sight of the femme fatale-“a faery’s child”-the “elfin grot”, and the mysterious incidents are all abundantly suggestive of the Middle Ages. The whole poem has, unlike The Eve of St. Agnes, the naivete of a medieval lay.

The Influence of the French Revolution on English Literature

Introduction:

It would be peremptory to treat the French Revolution as just another historical incident having political significance alone. The French Revolution exerted a profound influence not only on the political destiny of a European nation but also impinged forcefully on the intellectual, literary, and political fields throughout Europe. It signalised the arrival of a new era of fresh thinking and introspection.

The conditions prevailing in England at that time made her particularly receptive to the new ideas generated by the Revolution. In literature the French Revolution was instrumental in the creation of anew interest in nature and the elemental simplicities of life. It accelerated the approach of the romantic era and the close of the Augustan school of poetry which was already moribund in the age of Wordsworth.

Poetry and Politics:

The age of Wordsworth was an age of revolution in the field of poetry as well as of politics. In both these fields the age had started expressing its impatience of set formulas and traditions, the tyranny of rules and the bondage of convention. From the French Revolution the age imbibed a spirit of revolt asserting the dignity of the individual spirit and hollowness of the time-honoured conventions which kept it in check. Thus both in the political and the poetic fields the age learnt from the Revolution the necessity of emancipation-in the political field, from tyranny and social oppression; and in the poetic, from the bondage of rules and authority. The French Revolution, in a word, exerted a democratising influence,both on politics and poetry. Inspired by the French Revolution, poets and politicians alike were poised for an onslaught on old, time-rusted values. It was only here and there that some conservative critics stuck to their guns and eyed all zeal for change and liberation with suspicion and distrust. (Thus, for instance, Lord Jeffrey wrote in the Edinburgh Review that poetry had something common with religion in that its standards had been fixed long ago by certain inspired writers whose authority it would be ever unlawful to question.) But such views did not represent the spirit of the age which had come under the liberating influence of the French Revolution.

It is perhaps quite relevant to point out here the folly of the belief that the new literary and political tendencies, which had a common origin and were almost contemporaneous with each other, always influenced a given person equally strongly, that a person could not be a revolutionary in politics without being a revolutionary in literature, and vice versa. Scott, for example, was a romantic, but a Tory. Hazlitt, on the contrary, was a chartist in politics but was pleased to call himself an “aristocrat” in literature. Keats did not bother about the French Revolution, or even politics, at all. Wordsworth and Coleridge, the two real pioneers of the Romantic Movement in England, started as radicals and ended as tenacious Tories.

The Three Phases of the French Revolution:

It is wrong to think of the French Revolution as a sudden coup unrelated to what had gone before it. In fact, the seeds of the Revolution had been sown long before they sprouted in 1789. We can distinguish three clear phases of the French Revolution, which according to Compton-Rickett, are as follows:

“(1)       The Doctrinaire phase-the age of Rousseau;

(2)                 the Political phase-the age of Robespierre and Danton;

(3)                 the Military phase-the age of Napoleon.”

All these three phases considerably influenced the Romantic Movement in England.

The Influence of the Doctrinaire Phase:

The doctrinaire phase of the French Revolution was dominated by the each thinker Rousseau. His teachings and philosophic doctrines were the germs that brought about an intellectual and literary revolution all over England. He was, fundamentally considered, a naturalist who gave the slogan “Return to Nature.” He expressed his faith in the elemental simplicities of life and his distrust of the sophistication of civilisation which, according to him, had been curbing the natural (and good) man. He revived the cult of the “noble savage” untainted by the so-called culture. Social institutions were all condemned by him as so many chains. He raised his powerful voice against social and political tyranny and exhorted the downtrodden people to rise for emancipation from virtual slavery and almost hereditary poverty imposed upon them by an unnatural political system which benefitted only a few. Rousseau’s primitivism, sentimentalism, and individualism had their influence on English thought and literature. In France they prepared the climate for the Revolution.

 Rousseau’s sentimental belief in the essential goodness of natural man and the excellence of simplicity and even ignorance found a ready echo in Blake and, later, Wordsworth and Coleridge. The love of nature and the simplicities of village life and unsophisticated folk found ample expression in their poetic works. Wordsworth’s love of nature was partly due to Rousseau’s influence. Rousseau’s intellectual influence touched first Godwin and, through him, Shelley. Godwin in Political Justice embodied a considerable part of Rousseauistic thought. Like him he raised his voice for justice and equality and expressed his belief in the essential goodness of man. Referring reverently to Political Justice Shelley wrote that he had learnt “all that was valuable in knowledge and virtue from that book.”

The Influence of the Political Phase and the Military Phase:

The political phase of the Revolution, which started with the fall of the Bastille, sent a wave of thrill to every young heart in Europe. Wordsworth became crazy for joy, and along with him, Southey and Coleridge caught the general contagion. All of them expressed themselves in pulsating words. But such enthusiasm and rapture were not destined to continue for long. The Reign of Terror and the emergence of Napoleon as an undisputed tyrant dashed the enthusiasm of romantic poets to pieces. The beginning of the war between France and England completed their disillusionment, and Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, who had started as wild radicals, ended as well-domesticated Tories. The latter romantics dubbed them as renegades who had let down the cause of the Revolution. Wordsworth, in particular, had to suffer much criticism down to the days of Robert Browning who wrote a pejorative poem on him describing him as “the lost leader.”

Let us now consider briefly the influence of the French Revolution on the important romantic poets one by one.

Wordsworth:

As we have already said, Wordsworth’s theory and work as a poet were much influenced by the teachings of Rousseau. It was under this powerful influence that he came out with his epoch-making work (in collaboration with Coleridge), the Lyrical Ballads (1978), which, in the words of Palgrave, “was a trumpet that heralded the dawn of a new era by making the prophecy that poetry, an unlimited and unlimitable art of expressing man’s inner and deep-seated joys and sorrows, would not be fettered by the narrow and rigid bonds of artificial conventions and make-believe formalism.” The Lyrical Ballads led a revolt against the artificial sentiment and equally artificial and mechanical poetic style of the eighteenth century, as also established he truth that poetry, if at all it is to remain poetry, must express the feelings and joys and fears of common men and women close to the soil, and interpret their day-to-day activities of life. Thus the sense of mystery which led many persons to a remote past was believed by Wordsworth to be capable of satisfaction closer at hand. Wordsworth found it-instead of the Middle Ages and Greek art-in the simplicities of everyday life-an ordinary sunset, the fleecy clouds, a morning walk over the hills, a cottage girl, the song of the nightingale and so forth. He turned for the subjects of his poetry to the life of the unsophisticated village folk who lived away from the recognised centres of culture.

At the time of the Revolution (1789) Wordsworth was a young man of only nineteen. In The Prelude he describes how thrilled he was by the occasion. He felt that Europe itself

was thrilled with joy, France standing at the top of golden hours,
And human nature seeming born again.

And further:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.

He believed that in front of the Frenchmen

shone a glorious world,
Fresh as a banner bright unfurled    
To music suddenly.

He visited the land of his dreams twice-in 1790 and 1791. But his youthful rapture came to an end with the Reign of Terror and the emergence of Napoleon. This rude blow sent him reeling into the arms of his first love-Nature. Thus Wordsworth passed through a mental and spiritual crisis, and though he recovered himself finally yet the influence of the Revolution remained as vital impression on his mind. Though he ultimately became a Tory yet he continues believing in the dignity of man, and consequently, applying his poetic faculty to the commonest objects and the lowest people. It is a noteworthy point that the best poetic work of Wordsworth was done during the period of his revolutionary fervour.

Coleridge and Southey:

The impact of the French Revolution on Coleridge and Southey was of the same pattern as in the case of Wordsworth-youthful exuberance at the rising of the masses ending in despair and disillusionment with the Reign of Terror. But after this disillusionment Wordsworth and Coleridge followed different paths in search of an anodyne. Whereas Wordsworth found consolation in Nature, Coleridge sought to burke his discontent with abstract philosophy and intellectual idealism. Coleridge failed to receive from Nature the joy which he was wont to. Metaphysics interested him and claimed his almost full attention. His poetic spirit also declined with the decline of his revolutionary fervour. By 1811 he had become not only an “anti-revolution” Tory but also an incorrigible “antiGallican.”

Byron:

On Byron the French Revolution exerted no direct influence. But he was a revolutionary in his own right. He was against almost all social conventions and institutions, and felt an almost morbid pleasure in violating and condemning them with the greatest abandon. In his poetry he most vigorously championed the cause of social and political liberty and died almost as a martyr in the cause of Greek independence. A critic observes: “Byron excelled most other poets of England in his being one of the supreme poets »f Revolution and Liberty. His poetry voices the many moods of the spirit of Revolution which captured the imagination of Europe in the early years of the last century. A rebel against society but also against the very conditions of human life, Byron is our one supreme exponent of some distinctive forces of the Revolution. Of its constructive energy, its social ardour, its utopianism, there is no trace in his work.” Byron was excited by the imposing personality of Napoleon who appealed to him as a “Byronic” hero.

Shelley:

When Shelley started writing, the French Revolution had already become, as a historical incident, a thing of the past However, the spirit of the Revolution breaths vigorously in his poetry. After his characteristic way he overlooked physical realities, and was attracted by abstractions only. Says Compton-Rickert: “Ideas inspired him, not episodes; so he drank in the doctrines of Godwin, and ignored the tragic perplexities of the actual situation.” To Shelley the Revolution, to quote the same critic, appealed “as an idea, not as a concrete historical fact.” In all his important poems, such as The Revolt of Islam, Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, and the incomparable Ode to the West Wind, breathes a revolutionary spirit impatient of all curbs and keenly desirous of the emancipation of man from all kinds of shackles-political, social, and even moral. Love and liberty are the two ruling deities in Shelley’s hierarchy of values, and in his exaltation of them both he comes very near the Rousseauistic creed. The French Revolution had failed miserably in the implementation of its three slogans “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” But Shelley always envisioned ahead a real Revolution which would rectify all wrongs once and for all. This hope for the millenium is the central theme of much\df his poetry.

Keats:

Keats was almost entirely untouched by the French Revolution, as by everything earthly. A critic observes : “In the judgment of Keats, philosophy, politics and ethics were not suitable subjects for verse. While, therefore, Wordsworth and Coleridge were reflecting upon the moral law of the universe, while Byron was voicing the political ideas of Europe in the poetry of revolt, and Shelley was writing of an enfranchised humanity, the music of Keats luxuriated in classical myths and medieval legends, and was inspired by an insatiable love of Beauty.” From a study of Keats’s poetry it is hard to believe that such an incident as the French Revolution ever took/place at all!

Conclusion:

From what has gone before it is clear how powerful an influence the French Revolution exerted on English literature. The ideas that awoke the youthful passion of Wordsworth and Coleridge, that stirred the wrath of Scott, that worked like leaven on Byron and brought forth new matter, that Shelley reclothed and made into a prophecy of the future, the excitement, the turmoil, and the life-and-death struggle which gathered round the Revolution were ignored by few poets of England. Henceforth their poetry spoke of man, of his destiny, and his wrongs, his rights, duties, and hopes, and particularly, the gyved and fettered humanity. One is tempted to endorse G. K. Chesterton’s paradoxical remark that the greatest event of English history occurred outside England!

Coleridge as the “Most Complete Representative” of English Romantic Poetry

Introduction:

If not the greatest, Coleridge is at least the most representative of all English romantic poets. He represents in his work almost all the triumphs and perils of the romantic spirit. He is the “most complete representative” of the English romantic poetry of the early nineteenth century as he captures, unlike any other romantic poet, almost all the salient traits of romanticism. A teeming imagination, love of the Middle Ages, supernaturalism, humanitarianism, love of nature, metrical artistry, and a peculiar agony and melancholy-all these romantic features find ample expression in his work.

His really good poetry does not extent beyond twenty pages, but in them breathes the romantic spirit in all its fullness. He wrote very little, but whatever he wrote well should be engraved in letters of gold and bound in titles of silver. The least prolific of the English romantic poets, he was the most representative of all. According to Bowra, Coleridge’s poems “of all English Romantic masterpieces are the most unusual and the most Romantic.” Says Vaughan: “Of all that is the purest and most ethereal in the romantic spirit, his poetry is the most finished, the supreme embodiment.” No doubt, there are a few (but very few) elements in the romantic spirit which appear in his work rather faintly yet considered as a whole his works are the most exquisite products and representatives of the spirit of the age. Well does Saintsbury call him “the high priest of Romanticism.”

Coleridge’s Imagination:

The Romantic Movement can be correctly interpreted as the revolt of imagination against reason, intellect, and prosaic realism. The romantics believed, as Bowra puts it, that the creative imagination should be closely connected with a peculiar insight into an unseen order behind visible things. Their effort was, in Samuel C. Chew’s words, “to live constantly in the world of the imagination above and beyond the sensuous, phenomenal world.” For them the creations of imagination were “forms more real than living men.” The part that imagination plays in the poetry of Coleridge is too obvious to need any elaboration. The writer of Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner, and Christabel answered well his own description of the ideal poet:

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Shelley himself would have been envious of such a romantic poet! Dorothy Wordsworth wrote about Coleridge: “He has more of the poetic eye in fine frenzy rolling than I ever witnessed.” Swinburne compared him to those “footless birds of paradise” which spend all their lives in perpetual flight and subsist only on falling dew.

While in his creative work Coleridge worked with his teeming but delicate imagination tempered by an unerring artistic sense, in his criticism he made a strong plea for the imaginative freedom of the poet. In his Biographia Literaria he gave an authoritative definition of the nature and function of imagination. In putting a special stress on imagination as against dry rationalism, Coleridge emerged as a true representative of the Romantic Movement in England.

Love of the Far:

The poet who lives constantly in a world of pure imagination naturally becomes amorous of the far, both in point of time and space. He seeks an escape from the humdrum realities of familiar experience and from the limitations of “that shadow-show called reality.” Coleridge, too, more than most romantic poets, loves to treat of the unreal or the unusual. The unreal (which is generally the highly imaginative, or the supernatural) is what is never experienced, and the unusual is that which is not often experienced. According to a critic, the most characteristic feature of romantic poetry is, its description or suggestion of the unreal-“the light that never was on sea or land.” It will be admitted that in such descriptions and suggestions Coleridge particularly excels. How extraordinary and extraordinarily well-wrought the picture of Kubla Khan’s “pleasure dome” is !

It was a miracle of strange device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

How unusual the scenes at the Pole and the Equator are in The Ancient Mariner! This is the picture of the Pole:

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noise in a swound!

And this of a terrific tempest:

Like waters shot from some high crag
The lightning fell with never a jag,   
A river steep and wide.

In Kubla Khan Coleridge makes mention of an Abyssinian maid and Mount Abora, etc. Thus Coleridge is a very representative romantic poet in that he loves the remote, the strange, and the mysterious, rather than the immediate, the commonplace, and the probable. A critic observes in this connexion: “His peculiar quality as a poet lay in his power of visualising scenes of which neither he nor another had actual experience”.” As such, Coleridge’s poetry fits well Pater’s interpretation of romanticism as the “addition of strangeness to beauty” and Theodore Watts Dution’s interpretation of the same as the “Renascence of Wonder.”

Supernaturalism:

The love of the unreal and the remote takes Coleridge too often in the faery realm of the supernatural. He too often sings of the

Magic casement opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn. 

His contribution to the “Renascence of Wonder” is the most substantial of all the English romantic poets. In his company we visit the enchanted palace of Kubla Khan, the vampire-haunted castle of Christabel, and the demon-infested seas of The Ancient Mariner. His supernatural, however, is not the crude “Gothicism” of some of his predecessors, which was nothing more than the product of a ghoulish fancy. His treatment of the supernatural is all his own-delicate, refined, suggestive, and psychologically convincing. Wordsworth sought to save nature from the crudity and insipidity of Crabbe by touching reality with imagination; Coleridge redeemed romance from the crudity of Gothic sensationalists by linking it with reality. Whereas Wordsworth tried to “supernaturalise” naturalism. Coleridge endeavoured quite admirably to “naturalise” supernaturalism. Such lines as the following are unmatched in the whole range of English literature for their richly “romantic” connotations:

A savage place, as holy and enchanted
As ever beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.

Truly does a critic say about these lines that they are magic pure and simple; the rest is poetry. The romantic poets like Scott and Keats also dealt with the supernatural, but the supernatural is according to a critic, “the main region of his [Coleridge’s] song.” Moreover, his delicate, psychological, and artistic treatment also distinguishes him from other romantic poets. His aim was always to produce “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.” In The Ancient Mariner he achieved this aim quite creditably by focusing the attention of the reader on the shifting states of the mariner’s psyche, rather than any supernatural claptrap of the Gothic kind. The theme in Christabelis of the same nature as in The Ancient Mariner, but it is handled with more artistry. Here the touches of the supernatural are more subtle and less explicit. The indirectness with which these touches are made to work their cumulative effect may be contrasted with the directness of the method employed by Keats in his treatment of a like theme – the transformation of a serpent into a woman (in Lamia).

Medievalism:

Coleridge’s love of the remote, the mysterious, the strange, and the supernatural induced in him an interest in the Middle Ages. The romantic poet, as we have already said, is impatient of the real and the earth-bound. He is very often dissatisfied with the present set-up of things. Shellej7, Keats, and Scott are notably so. The romantic poet either sings of the glorious past or projects his imagination into the womb of futurity to raise a shape that answers his own desire. Thus Keats sings of the glory that was Greece, Scott endeavours to recapture the splendour of the Middle Ages, and Shelley sings of the golden age to come. Indeed the romantic poets

look before and after
And pine for what is not.

Thus to some romantics the Middle Ages provide a comfortable spiritual home-remote and vague and mysterious. They glorify their splendour and chivalry but forget their dirt, disease, ignorance, and social repression. They escape not only from the real world but also from the real Middle Ages.

The Middle Ages do not provide a spiritual home for Coleridge as they do for Scott. He values them not because of themselves but because of the excellent setting they provide for his supernatural poems. He keeps the medieval atmosphere quite vague and, unlike Keats, does not come down to the description of details. He recreates not indeed the body but the authentic spirit of the Middle Ages.

Anti-intellectualism and Love of Nature:

Coleridge, like most other romantics, was influenced by the Rousseauistic creed embodied hi the slogan “Return to Nature.” He was also appreciably influenced by Wordsworth, the high priest of nature. Early eighteenth-century poetry had been “drawing-room poetry” having little to do with the sights and sounds of nature. Wordsworth and Coleridge demolished this age-old prejudice and brought nature to the fore. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge had a keen eye and a clear ear for the sights and sounds of nature. He brought to his study of nature that minuteness of analysis which is surpassed in English literature only by Keats. As Vaughan points out, “Coleridge had the faculty of minute and subtle observation, which he may have learned, in the first instance from Wordsworth but which he fostered to a degree of delicacy to which neither Wordsworth himself nor perhaps any other ‘worshipper of Nature’, Keats excepted, ever quite attained. This faculty, however, did not bar the way to an equal mastery of broad, general effects.”

In his early poems, such as Frost at Midnight. Coleridge shared Wordsworth’s attitude to nature. He regarded nature as a sentient spirit and believed in its moral and educative influence on man. But later he modified this attitude and came to believe that we interpret the moods of nature according to our own moods (the “pathetic fallacy” of Ruskin). Nature, he came to hold, has no intrinsic moods or life of her own. She only gives us back what we give her in the first instance.

O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live:
Our is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!

Humanitarianism:

Like Wordsworth, again, Coleridge came under the influence of the French Revolution. Like him he went wild over the fall of the Bastille, which signalised for him the ushering in of a new era of emancipation from all political tyranny and the establishment of social justice. However, the Reign of Terror and the emergence of Napoleon after the political phase of the Revolution filled both Wordsworth and Coleridge with despair and disillusionment and brought them reeling into the fold of Toryism. Whereas Wordsworth sought refuge and consolation in nature, Coleridge went to abstruse philosophy. Nevertheless, the note of the love of humanity sounds as clearly in Coleridge’s poetry as it does in Wordsworth’s. In this humanitariamsm and enthusiasm (though temporary) for the spirit of the French Revolution Coleridge is a pretty representative poet of the romantic age.

His Metrical Art:

In his rejection of the heroic couplet also Coleridge represents the body of the romantic poets all of whom reverted to the verse measures before Dryden as also invented some of their own. The Ancient Mariner is couched in ballad stanzas. In Christabelhe felt he had used an entirely “new principle” of prosody. The metre in this poem, according to him, “is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle : namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables.” What is true of Christabel is also true of Kubla Khan. The “principle” was definitely not new. However, Coleridge’s masterful employment of it is very striking.

Mention must also be made of Coleridge’s skill at creating exquisite music. “He”, says a critic, “is a singer always, as Wordsworth is not always, and Byron never almost.” He has been rightly called an “epicure in sound.” Symons says : “Coleridge shows a greater sensitiveness to music than any other English poet except Milton…Shelley, you feel, sings like a bird, Blake, like a child or an angel, but Coleridge certainly writes music.” Romantic poetry has an edge over neoclassical poetry in its creation of variegated musical effects. It did not content itself with the singsong of the heroic couplet. Thus Coleridge is here, too, a representative romantic poet.

The Defects of Romanticism:

Coleridge represents not only all the excellent features of romanticism, but also its perils, which are chiefly three. First, he runs the constant danger of losing contact with life and reality and getting lost in the pretty-pretty world of his own making. Thus his poetry does not always remain a serious “criticism of life.” Secondly, eschewing all tradition, he, like Wordsworth, saw a decline in his poetic faculty after he had written his masterpieces. The romantic poet depends entirely on his own inspiration-which is notoriously untrustworthy. When that goes, he cannot borrow strength from the established tradition which he has disowned. This happened with Coleridge. Thirdly, he often incurs the charge of vagueness. He is too fond of colour and sweet sound and sometimes sacrifices sense to them. Words like dulcimer, honey-dew, and Abyssinian maidhave musical or exotic sounds, but their real meaning is not so pleasant.

The Historical Novel

Introduction:

Considered analytically, the term “historical fiction” is altogether anamolous for whereas history deals with facts, fiction deals with imaginary persons and incidents. Fact and fiction are considered to be normal antonyms. Trying to combine them is apparently like trying to yoke the ox and the unicorn together.

A historical work can be changed into a novel only by making it depart from facts, and a novel can be changed into history retrenching all fiction. Today fact and fiction are looked upon as altogether irreconcilable, but the setting up of a rigid distinction between the two is a comparable modern procedure. The ancient Greece and Rome and the medieval Europe recognised no such distinction. What they gave as literature was often a homogeneous and irresoluble mixture of truth and fiction. Ulysses, Helen of Troy, and King Arthur and his Round Table, for instance, are semi-historical and semi-legendary or even mythical figures, and so are their adventures. It was left for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to give history its true shape and function. Camden, Clarendon, Hume, Gibbon, and others progressively established a distinct line of demarcation separating the regions of history and fiction (including myth, hearsay, and all rationally indefensible particulars). Henceforward the mixing of the two was not to go unindicted.

Historical Novelists before Scott:

But a new species of fiction was destined to become popular even after this rigid demarcation had been effected, apparently for good. Scott was the greatest of all those who attempted this genre known as the historical novel. Far from distorting or wantonly tinkering with the historical truth, he vitalised the past by breathing into its dry bones a new spirit. We will consider the method and achievement of Scott at some length a little later; first, let us have a look at the writers who attempted the historical novel before Scott.

In general, the historical novelists before Scott were thoroughly unequipped and uninspired for their peculiar art. What they offered was not historical fiction but fictitious history. Their novels were, in many a case, hysterical rather than historical. Crudity, lack of knowledge and inspiration, and deficient artistry were their chief drawbacks. In fact, none of them was fit for the task. As Raleigh observes, the novels produced by them constitute the silliest, feeblest body of work to be found in the annals of prose fiction. Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe had aimed at the illusion of antiquity with fair success, but had avoided explicit historical allusions and refrained from introducing well-known historical personages or, in fact any personages known to history at all. Some others who did so violated all sense of history. To take some instances. Miss Sophia Lee’s Recess and Harriet and Sophia Lee’s Canterbury Tales outraged history by introducing fantastic concoctions in the garb of true historical events. In the first-named novel, for example, there is celebrated a secret marriages- altogether unknown to and unsuspected by historians between Mary Queen of Scots and the Duke of Norfolk. In the same novel, even Queen Elizabeth is hauled on to the stage and is made to show herself as a typical eighteenth-century dowager with all her manneristic bow-wow and copia verborum (=excessive talking). This vandalistic perversion of history comes nowhere near the true genius of a historical novelist, who may, indeed, change some minor details, select and reject, compress or dilate events, but can by no means be granted the licence to strike at the very foundations of history. Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs cannot be indicted in a like manner, as it was a genuine historical novel in most respects. Even then, it did not approach the novels of Scott, mainly because it failed to catch the genuine spirit of the past, not to speak of vitalising it. Now, to fail in recapturing the spirit of the past is a serious defect in a historical novel, for that is its very raison d’etre. Witness E. A. Baker’s statement that “to summon up a past epoch, to show men and women alive in it and behaving as they must have behaved in the circumstances is the labour and joy of the genuine historical novelist.”

There are two prequisites of a historical novelist:

(i)         sound academic knowledge of the period of history sought to be treated by him; and    

(ii)        In ntuition into the manners and morals prevalent in that period.

A mere smattering of the historical primer will not do; nor will even an erudite study, if the historical imagination and intuition are lacking. Hilare Belloc. however, discounts all learning and puts his faith on “some strange process of intuition.” But we cannot reasonably despise all learning and research. We would rather agree with Arthur Clarke who says: “It is not the question of research or no research but of managing the products of research.” As to how mere learning and perfect historical accuracy are not enough for a historical novel is apparent from the failure of Queenhoo Hall (1808) written by Joseph Strutt, which, after the author’s death, Scott was to complete. This novel has the first of the two pre requisites listed above, but completely “acks the second, with obvious results. Persons such as Sophia Lee and the Gothic romancers of the eighteenth century completely conformed to it, but none of them wrote a genuine historical novel.

Sir Walter Scott:

Scott was the first and last great historical novelist, of England. He avoided the pitfalls of his predecessors and set about the all-important task of actualising the past so as to show its manners and morals in a proper perspective to his contemporaries. He had both the qualities of a good historical novelist-deep study and an amazing intuition. Compton-Rickett observes in A History of English Literature: “He compels our interest by no literary trick, but by making us feel that men and women of a past age were real live human beings.” With his historical novels Scott proved, to quote Carlyle. “that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by state papers, controversies, and abstractions of men…It is a great service, fertile in consequence, this that Scott has done; a great truth laid open by him.” Scott vitalised the past and converted the monstrosities of his predecessors into the pure gold of creative imagination. Diana Neill observes in this connexion : “What Richardson, Fielding and Smollett had done in holding a mirror up to the eighteenth-century way of life, Scott did for the remote centuries of which his contemporaries knew nothing.” He took names and dates from the history primer and transformed them into imaginative literature. He assembled the dry bones of the past and quickened them with a vigorous life. History, like the picture in Walpole‘s Castle of Otranto. steps out of its moveless frame and talks. He walked through the tombs of time and, like an enchanter, brought to life their ghostly denizens. In calling forward the past, he resembles Prospero who controlled many spirits :

Spirits which by mine art
I have from their confines call’d to enact
My present fancies.

Scott was the first novelist who was really qualified for his peculiar job. He was a historical novelist not by mere endeavour but by his very temperament Charles Reade reconstructed the past with the art of a brilliant journalist; Thackeray refashioned it as a sympathetic critic; George Eliot treated it as a scholar; Scott simply breathed the past as a part and parcel of his thinking life. According to Baker, he was “a born romancer.” As a boy he had been “a glutton of books.” In his maturity he diligently applied himself to the study of old romances, chronicles, and histories concerning, particularly, the Scotland of yore. He was indeed quite confident of possessing a wide and intimate grasp of that knowledge which is the important qualification of a historical novelist. Added to this was a wonderful intuition which enabled him to evoke lifelike pictures of the past with a remarkable accuracy and an engaging fidelity.

Scott avoided the pitfall of his predecessors who either altogether excluded important historical events and persons, or else gave them a central importance. Scott did admit them but gave them, unlike the historian, a subordinate or. sometimes, a peripheral importance. For Scott their main importance lay in their capacity to influence the minor characters whom he gave a conspicuous position. His heroes and heroines are, with a few exceptions, historically unknown nonentities. More often it is a historical period (not a person or some persons) which occupies his central interest. A critic observes: “We see Papists and Puritans. Cavaliers and Roundheads Jews Jacobites and freebooters, all living the sort of life which the reader feels that in their circumstances and under the same conditions of time and place he might have lived too.”

Scott’s range as a historical novelist is really amazing. Not only does he deal with different countries but also with different centuries. We never find him at the same point more than once. Some of his novels like Guy Mannering (1815), Old Mortality (1816), and The Heart of Midlothian (1818) deal with Scotland; there are others, like Ivanhoe (1819), Kenilworth (1821), and The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), which are concerned with English history; still some others, like Ouentin Durward (1823) and The Talisman (1825), take us out of England to the Continent. Everywhere there is the same fidelity to essential historical facts and an imaginative and lively recreation of the spirit of the past. No other English novelists has a broader canvas or a surer brush. And there is the same fidelity in his representation of the bygone ages as there is in Dickens’ or Fielding’s representation of his own.

Some “limitations” of Scott as a novelist may here be taken cognizance of. The most important of them is his deficiency as a psychologist. He cannot, or at least does not, bring out shades and grades of passions. His characters are devoid of psychological subtleties. If they are they are virtuous virtuous through-and-through; if they are villains, their villainy is unconcealed and incorrigible. What Goethe said of Byron can be said of Scott-“the moment he reflects he is a child.” He thought of life not as a problem but as a colourful pageant. Here is Carlyle’s gibe at his characterisation : “Your Shakespeare fashions his characters from the heart outwards; your Scott fashions them from skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them.” His heroes are sticks and his heroines walking gowns. They merely respond to situations and do not create them. Scott himself admitted his contempt for some of his own heroes. He said of Edward Waverley, for instance, that he was a “sneaking piece of imbecility.”

Along with his deficient psychological equipment may be mentioned his lack of the architectonic skill. He did not give plot-construction much importance. He was given to saying: “It is no use having a plot; you cannot keep to it.” His plots resemble a sprawling Gothic cathedral without any symmetry. He followed and quoted Dryden’s remark too often : “What the devil does the plot signify, except to bring in good things?” What he aimed at was telling a good, interesting story. And he succeeded pretty well. “Scott”, observes Leslie Stephen, “is the most perfectly delightful story-teller natural by the fire-side.”

After Scott:

Scott began the vogue of the historical novel not only in England but other countries like Germany and France. In England Mrs. Anna Eliza Bray was the first of his successors to come into prominence. Her important work is The Protestant (1828) which deals with the persecution of the Protestants under Queen Mary Tudor. G. P. R. James wrote about a hundred historical novels between 1825 and 1850. They were popular, but without much merit. William Harrison Ainsworth also enjoyed much popularity for twenty years beginning with Rockwood (1834). Of the five historical romances by Bulwer Lytton the most popular is The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). He gave importance to didacticism and historical fidelity even in minor details. “Countless details”, says Cross, “which Scott would have cast aside, Bulwer put bodily into narrative. The result was more history, less imagination, and a slower movement.” Some Victorian writers used the historical novel for sectarian propaganda. Consider, for instance, Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia (1853) with the subtitle New Foes with an Old Face in which he attacked the Roman Catholics, and Newman’s counterblast Callista: A Sketch of the Tliird Century. Thackeray’s Henry Esmond (1852) sought to recreate the life of eighteenth-century England, and did so indeed with much plausibility. Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Bambaby Rudge may also be considered as historical novels. George Eliot’s Romola aimed at representing the life of Italy during the period of the Renaissance. Among twentieth-century historical novelists may be mentioned Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (Hetty Wesley and The Splendid Spur, Jacob Wassermann (The Triumph of Youth), Ford Madox Hueffer (The Fifth Queen), Miss Phoebe Gay (Vivandiere), and quite a few more. Indeed, it seems that the historical novel, a comparatively late dish in the banquet of literature, has come to please the palate for all times to come.

Jane Austen’s Achievement as a novelist

Introduction:

The correct evaluation of Jane Austen as a novelist has come only recently. Her genius was not recognised by her contemporaries or even her successors. None of her books saw a second edition in her lifetime. The collected edition of her works which was brought out in 1833 could not be sold for about half a century.

Her first biographer humbly wished her to be placed beside such novelists as Fanny Burney and Maria Edgewerth and no more. But about 1890 the tide of appreciation and popularity markedly turned in her favour and, correspondingly, against her contemporary, Sir Walter Scott. Today she needs no advocate as she has made a secure niche in the temple of fame from where she cannot possibly be dislodged-at least for many years to come. In the twentieth century she has been made the object of numerous biographies and appreciations. Almost every piece of her writing has been carefully and lovingly edited and commented upon; almost every aspect of her singularly uneventful life has been brought out and sympathetically examined. Her works in their entirety have been vastly read and extolled, and she has been characterised as the greatest female novelist of England and one of the best of all novelists. F. R. Leavis gives her a sort of five-star rating by including her in the “Great Tradition.” Let us quote here a modern representative opinion-that of David Daiches: “The greatests of all the novelists of manners of this orany other period and one who raised the whole genre to a new level of art was Jane Austen (1775-1817). With no exhibitionist critical apparatus, such as Fielding’s theory of the comic epic, no pretentiously moral purpose such as Richardson kept repeating, and indeed with no apparent awareness that she was doing more than essaying some novels in an established social mode, this unpretentious daughter of a Hampshire rector, with her quietly penetrating vision of man as a social animal, her ironic awareness of the tensions between spontaneity and convention and between the claims of personal morality and those of social and economic propriety, her polished and controlled wit. and beneath all her steady moral apprehension of the human relationships, produced some of the greatest novels in English.” Jane Austen wrote no more than six novels, but each of them is a masterpiece in its own right.

Artistic Concern:

Considered strictly as an artist, Jane Austen is superior to most of her predecessors as also successors. Most English novelists have had the fault of carelessness. Scott, for example, never revised a line of his own, simply because he had no time for it. In the novels of Dickens also we come across passages which could have been easily improved with a little care. Jane Austen was, by contrast, extremely careful and painstaking. For months together, after finishing a novel, she would go on revising it till she found it incapable of further improvement. Her meticulous artistic concern for form, presentation, and style cannot be exaggerated. “It is”, observes Diana Neill, “not, therefore, surprising that the final versions of her novels had a formal perfection-no loose ends, no padding, no characterization for its own sake, and a flawlessly consistent idiom suited to the person who used it.” What is remarkable about Jane Austen, therefore, is the flawlessness of her art. Everything in her novels is carefully conceived and exquisitely executed.

Her Range and Themes:

Jane Austen’s art as a novelist has stringently set limits which she seldom oversteps. She was amazingly aware which side her genius lay and she exploited it accordingly without any false notions of her capabilities or limitations. As Lord David Cecil points out, she very wisely stayed “within the range of her imaginative inspiration.” Her “imaginative inspiration” was as severely limited as, for example, Hardy’s or Arnold Bennett’s. Her themes, her characters, her moral vision, her observation-everything has a well-etched range within which she works, and works most exquisitely. Let us now glance at the territories of her art and achievement.

(i)         All her novels have for their scene of action South England where she lived and which she knew so well. However, her novels cannot be called “regional novels” in a category with, say, Hardy’s Wessex novels, because she does not particularly concern herself with the landscape and other peculiar features of the region she deals with. She is, as has been said by Robert Liddell, a “pure novelist” whose concern and study are “human beings and their mutual relations.” Regionalism as such is unknown to her.

(ii)        She deals only with one peculiar mode of existence. Her novels are all about the upper middle classes and their (mostly trivial) activities. Moody and Lovett observe: “The chief business of these people, as Miss Austen saw them, was attention to social duties; their chief interest was matrimony. This world Miss Austen represents in her novels; outside of which she never steps.” The same critics observe: “Unlike Maria Edgeworth, whose novels represented a considerable range of social experience, Miss Austen exploited with unrivalled expertness the potentialities of a seemingly narrow mode of existence.”

(iii)       Jane Austen had an eye for the minutiae of life. Theatricals, tea parties, and balls were the most important events in the placid life of her own family and her neighbourhood. These very things are given the pride of place in her novels. The most “thrilling” events are nothing more than an elopement or a runaway marriage. In her novels there are no storms-except those in tea cups.

(iv)       There is thus no adventure, no passion, and no “romance” in her novels. There are no deeply stirring tempests either literal or psychic, such as we find, for example, in the novels of the Bronte sisters. Charlotte Bronte herself was constrained to observe about Jane Austen: “She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her : she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood.”

(v)        She was not a romantic novelist of the kind of either the Brontes or Scott. Temperamentally she belonged more to the eighteenth century than her own age which was then being swept over by a strong current of the Romantic Revival. Once when she was invited to write a romance of the kind of Scott’s novels, her reply was perfectly clear: “I am fully sensible that [such a romance] might be more to the purpose, profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem…No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way: and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.”

(vi)       Jane Austen limits herself strictly to the depiction of personal relations. Now a man can be considered with reference to several kinds of relations such as :

(a)                 His relation to himself.                                      

(b)                 His relation to other men and to his social environment.

(c)                 His relation to his country.

(d)                 His relation to Nature.

(e)                 His relation to God.

Except the second listed, Jane Austen neglects all other kinds of relations. David Cecil observes in this connection: “Man in relation to God, to politics, to abstract ideas, passed by her: it was only when she saw him with his family and his neighbours that her creative impulse began to stir to activity.”

(vii)      Jane Austen refuses to deal with the seamy aspects of life. There are no murders or gory crimes in her novels. She shuts her eye even on financial matters, which are a major driving force in real life. Samuel C. Chew rightly complains that she knew nothing about finance.

Her Realism and Depiction of Social Manners:

These limitations of range should not be treated as so many imperfections. On the contrary, her awareness of these limitations is what exactly makes her a great novelist. Within her voluntarily demarcated range she never bungles. Her essentially anti-romantic temper made her a realist. She did what Scott did not. Cross observes: “She was a realist. She gave anew to the novel an art and a style, which it once had, particularly in Fielding, but which it had since lost.” She did not have Fielding’s range, and she also eschewed his masculine coarseness. She feminized Fielding. Even Scott admitted Jane Austen’s excellence-in her own field- He wrote in his diary about her: “That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements, feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I have ever met with. The big bow-wow I can do myself sets any one going, but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of description and the sentiments is denied me.” Whether you consider Fanny’s visit to her parents’ home after an absence of more than ten years, or Darcy’s proposal to Elizabeth and its rejection, or the union of Emma with her lover after many many years, or such trivial incidents as a tea party, an evening-walk, a ball or a theatrical you are always struck by Jane Austen’s fidelity to life. For a novelist to be realistic what is required is not only a sense of intuition but also a very minute and searching observation. And this Jane Austen has as her forte. It is not surprising that her favourite poet happened to be Crabbe-that unswerving realist. Her range is limited, but within that she never fails. From a study of her novels, we can easily buil up an authentic picture of the life of middle classes of South England in the early nineteenth century.

Her Characterisation and Plot-construction:

Jane Austen is one of those novelists in whose works characters cannot be considered apart from plot. Characterisation and the building of plot go hand in hand in them, and quite often the two are interchangeable too. Her psychological insight into her characters, like her minute observation, needs no elaboration. Most of them are “round” characters and have an organic development in most cases, from self-deception to self-knowledge and self-realisation. Her female characters are certainly more complex and engaging than her men who have a certain softness about them. Her characters are all highly individualized  and yet they have something of the universal about them. They reveal themselves not in moments of crisis but during their engagement in the trivial activities of social life. Jane Austen herself was so convinced of the reality of her fictive characters that, as Chew puts it, “she would narrate to her family incidents in their lives which do not occur in the book.”

One of Jane Austen’s achievements and merits is her excellence at plot-construction. Very few English novelists have given as well integrated plots as she has. All the characters in a Jane Austen novel are essential to its plot; even the very minor ones cannot be justifiably separated from it on the ground of being superfluous or supernumerary. She has something like the architectonic ability of a dramatist. Numerous of her novels have been split by critics into so many acts of a drama. About the structure of Pride and Prejudice Cross observes: “The marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy is not merely a possible solution of the plot, it is as inevitable as the conclusion of a properly contructed syllogism or geometrical demonstration. For a parallel to workmanship of this high order one can only look to Shakespeare, to such a comedy as ‘Much Ado about Nothing.’ Mostly, Jane Austen keeps herself, like a dramatist, behind the stage, and lets her characters unfold themselves through their own action and dialogue. She rarely introduces them like Fielding, Meredith, or Thackeray, or offers to comment upon what they are doing. Her own impressions and opinions are delivered not as regular interpolations but in the record of action and dialogue.

Humour, Satire, and Irony:

This detachment from her characters is, mostly, ironic in nature. Her irony, like her humour and comedy, is of the quiet, unobtrusive kind. As Cecil puts it, “humour was an integral part of her creative process.” She laughs at the social aberrations and irrationalities of her characters. She is a satirist but shows no evidence of holding a lash in readiness. She paints more the follies of manners than morals. “Her province,” says Samuel C.Chew, “is not that of sombre delinquency but of venial error. The faults in her characters are mostly due to bad training or want of training in youth. In older people these are often beyond repair; but in young, especially the young lovers, they are purged and done away through tribulations which are nonetheless poignant for being generally misunderstandings. Each book is thus a history of self-education and self-correction.” “Jane Austen”, observes Compton-Rickett, “never lashed our follies, she faintly arched her eyebrows and passed on.” She constantly considered decorum, grace, tolerance, sympathy and self-respect with their opposites like ill-breeding, coarseness, intolerance, selfishness, and self-humiliation. However, she is never harsh, and she never arrogates to herself any pontifical dignity. She is convinced of the ordinariness of life and all its appurtenances. Her tolerance as a moralist places her beside Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Fielding.

Her Style:

A word now about her style which is a monument of grace, lucidity, intelligence, perception and a kind of “feminine” charm. “There are,” says Samuel C. Chew, “qualities of Miss Austen’s style-the delicate precision, the nice balance, the seeming simplicity-which remind many readers of Congreve’s comedies.” As examples of her typical ironic wit consider the following sentences:

(a)        It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

                                                      Pride and Prejudice

(b)        Her father was a clergyman without being neglected or poor, and a very respectable man though his name was Richard and he had never been handsome.

                                                                    Northanger Abbey

(c)        When Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice laments that after her husband’s death she will become destitute, he consoles her:

“My dear,” [says her husband] “do not give way to such gloomy thoughts. Let us hope for better things. Let us flatter ourselves that I may be the survivor.”

The Essay from Bacon to Lamb

What is an Essay?

Essays have Protean shapes and, therefore, it is understandable that though numerous attempts have been made to give a definition of the essay yet none has met with complete success. Most of such attempts succeed in covering only a part of the compositions which commonly go under the label of essays. A comprehensive definition which would over essays as different as those of Bacon, Addison, Lamb, Macaulay and E. V. Lucas is yet to come.

Here is Dr. Johnson’s famous definition: “The essay is a loose sally of the mind, an irregular, indigested piece, not a regular and orderly composition.” This description or definition touches upon only one aspect-though a very important aspectof the essay. J. B. Priestly, himself a noted essayist, defines the essay as “a genuine expression of an original personality-an artful and enduring kind of talk.” In A. C. Benson’s words, the essay is “a reverie, the frame of mind in which a man says in the words of an old song ‘says I to myself says I.J.H. Lobban defines the essay as “a short…. discursive article on any literary, philosophical, or social subject, viewed from a personal or historical standpoint.” Murray’s Dictionary defines the essay as “a composition of moderate length on any particular subject…originally implying want of finish, but now said of a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.”

This plethora of definitions does not contain one which may be called omnibus. A working definition of the essay may, however, be given as follows: An essay is a short, incomplete, informal, light, subjective literary composition in prose. This definition is not rigid but pragmatic and has the advantage of being applicable to a vast proportion of essays.

Bacon:

The essay was, in the words of Douglas Bush, “one of the late courses in the banquet of literature.” Bacon was undoubtedly the father of the essay in England. A glance, however, may be cast at the rudiments of the essay which may be found in the works of some prose writers before Bacon. Philip Sidney’s Defence ofPoesie anticipates the regular critical essay. Caxton’s prefaces are also more or less of the nature of essays. Gascoigne’s Making of Verse consists of critical essays. Gosson’s School of Abuse is remarkably likewise.

However, the first real essayist who employed the term “essay” for his compositions and who had more or less a clear conception of what he was about, was Francis Bacon. He published a collection of ten essays in 1597 which he enlarged and revised in the subsequent editions of 1612 and 1625. Bacon borrowed the general conception of the essay from the French writer Montaigne whose Essais had appeared in 1580, seventeen years before the first of his own. Bacon must have perceived that the new genre was a fit vehicle for the expression of many ideas of his own. The word “essay”, etymologically speaking, means a trial or an attempt-something tentative, unorganised, lacking thoroughness. Bacon called his own essays “dispersed meditations,” indicating thereby their lack of method and organisation. They are, according to him, “certain brief notes set down rather significantly than curiously.” With the publication of these “notes” Bacon emerged as the first of English essayists and in the words of Hugh Walker, he remains, “for sheer mass and weight of genius the greatest.” Bacon followed by succeeding essayists is compared by Douglas Bush to “a whale followed by a school of porpoises.” In a word, Bacon’s greatness as an essayist is due not only to his precedence, but also excellence.

Some peculiar features of Bacon’s essays may now be referred to. One of their distinct features is their “impersonalness.” We do not find in them the same warmth of personality and subjectivity as we find in the essays of, say, Lamb-the essayist par excellence. Bacon is always stately and magnificent and disdains to mix with his readers or to talk familiarly to them. He is a teacher rather than a companion. Well did he call his essays “Counsels Civil and Moral.” His constant effort is to train the reader in the ways of the world. He was himself an out-and-out careerist, and his approach to the affairs of the world as well as in the bulk of his “counsels” is that of a careerist. He keeps himself aloof from moral and emotional considerations, and often looks like an English cousin of Machiavelli.

A word about his style. As regards his use of language, Bacon is an anti-Ciceronian. He excels in giving short, pregnant, and pithy aphorisms packed with the worldly wisdom and experience of a lifetime. His English achieves a high degree of compression, thanks to

(1)                 the use of the weightiest and simplest words and

(2)                 a persistent avoidance of superfluous words and, very often, ven connectives.

As Will Durant puts it in The Story of Philosophy, “Bacon abhors padding, and disdains to waste a word; he offers us infinite riches in a little phrase.” The laconic quality of Bacon’s style suffers a little in the second and third editions of his essays, when he adds a little colour and mellowness to his English. Even then, he remains a stringent adherent of brevity and a sworn enemy of all woolliness of expression. His importance in the history of English prose lies not only in his naturalisation of the essay in England but also in the evolution of a pliant model of English prose. His immediate predecessors and contemporaries like Ascham, Hooker, Sidney, Lyly, and Raleigh wrote a prolix, involved, highly Latinised, excessively decorated, and unwieldly prose which could never become a model of utilitarian, work a day prose suited to topics both high and low. As Hugh Walker observes, in his Essays Bacon provided such a model-for all his successors to follow, though, of course, with a few changes.

The Characters Writers:

If Bacon was the father of the English essay, he had few real “sons” as none of his followers resembled him. Among his successors may be mentioned Ben Jonson and a comparatively unknown writer Sir William Cornwallis who, in his own way, set the tone of honest self-examination and unassuming communication. Ben Jonson’s forceful personality continually breaks through his Discoveries, a collection of notes on contemporary men of letters and affairs.

In the first half of the seventeenth century the essay took the form of what is called the “character.” The most important character writers were Joseph Hall, Sir Thomas Overbury, and John Earste. All of them modelled their characters on the first character writer-the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus. A character generally speaking is a formalised character-sketch of a typical figure such as a merchant, a fanatic Puritan, a milkmaid, or a drunkard. The characterisation was often touched with satire and a didactic tendency. Some of the characters drawn by seventeenth-century character writers are just wooden types but a few are alive and somewhat individualised. The character by its nature did not lend itself to self-portrayal. Nor did it resemble Baconian essay-on account of its humour and witty and satiric touches making for social criticism. Towards the Restoration the character died, having outlived its utility.

Other Essayists of the Seventeenth Century:

Among the essayists of the seventeenth century other than the character writers may be mentioned Sir Thomas Browne, Abraham Cowley, Halifax, Sir William Temple, and John Dryden.

Browne did not write an essay in a strict sense, but his most famous work Religio Medici can be treated as a personal essay, provided we overlook its length. Browne was a delightful egotist and, as has been said, it is the perfect egotist who is the perfect essayist. Montaigne, the first essayist in world literature, had said about his collection of essays: “I myself am the subject of my book.” That is the approach of a typical essayist; but Bacon in his performance had struck a sharp note of contrast with his model. Browne, however, in words reminiscent of Montaigne, observed: “The world that I regard is myself. It is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on.” His rambling, informal, and highly personal approach give him the true temper of a genuine essayist such as Lamb or Hazlitt.

Abraham Cowley wrote a charmingly fresh prose and revealed himself in quite a few intimately: personal essays such as “Of Myself.” “I confess,” writes he, “I love littleness almost in all things. A little convenient estate, a little cheerful house, a little company and very little feast; and if I were ever to fall in love again (which is a great passion, and therefore I hope I have done with it) it would be, I think, with prettiness rather than with majestical beauty.” Though in some of his essays he assumes a markedly didactic tone, yet we can justly treat him as a connecting link between Bacon and the romantic essayists.

Halifax wrote a few essays which are discursive but couched in a pleasant style. Sir William Temple also wrote some good essays but he treated his topics rather academically, so that his essays come close to being “popular lectures.”

Dryden was a versatile man of letters, being essayist, poet, critic and dramatist. In every department of literature he has much to his credit. Modern prose, it is said, begins with Dryden. Many of his prose writings are of the nature of critical essays, but his most ambitious work, the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, is in dialogue form and looks more like a treatise than an essay.

The Essay in the Eighteenth Century:

The eighteenth century is known in the history of English literature for its creation and development of the periodical essay which was “invented” by Steele in the beginning of the century and which expired near its end. Defoe was a busy journalist and some of his prose writings came very near the essay form. However, it is Steele who has the pride of place as the originator of the periodical essay. His periodical paper The Taller first appeared in 1709. It was taken out thrice weekly and every issue contained an essay, mostly on “the various flaws of dress and morals:” Steele was first assisted and then overshadowed by his friend Addison. The Taller ran to 271 numbers most of which came from the pen of Steele himself. After The Taller, The Spectator started its memorable career of 555 numbers, most of which were written by Addison. As Addison put it, the aim of The Spectator was to attack those vices which were “too trivial for the chastisement of the law and too fantastical for the cognizance of the pulpit.” Steele and Addison gave particular attention to women, especially their tendency to indulge in French fopperies, follies, and frivolities. Their head-dresses, “partly patches”, hooped petticoats, and other sartorial extravagances found in Steele and Addison enthusiastic critics, who recommended the virtues of chastity, domesticity, and modesty, and also, what may seem a little prudish, “discretion.” Addison and Steele became also the moral censors of the age, and did some really good work with their satire and sense of comedy wedded to a very serious aim. Their papers reconstruct before us England of the age of Queen Anne with its coffee-houses, theatres, stock-exchange, merchants, and commercial activity, street cries, and the ships and traffic of the Thames. They also did well in giving a pretty vast, if not Muntimate, glimpse of the rural life and manners. The peculiar nature of the periodical essays as practised by Addison and Steele was accepted with very few modifications, by all the subsequent periodical essayists.

Some differentiation between Steele and Addison may here be made. They were quite different in nature and this difference percolated down to their style. Steele was warm-hearted, lazy, careless and rambling. Macaulay calls him “a scholar among rakes and a rake among scholars.” Addison, on the other hand, was very “correct,” well-mannered, very calculating, and exact. Dr. Johnson’s famous tribute to Addison’s prose style is worth quoting: “Whosoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.” However, many modern critics have turned their approval to Steele, at the cost of Addison. Even in the nineteenth century, Leigh Hunt could write: “I prefer Steele with all his faults to Addison with all his essays.”

Pope and Swift also wrote some periodical essays. Pope was the greatest poet and Swift, the greatest prose writer, of the first half of the eighteenth century. But the most important name after Addison, in the list of periodical essayists, is that of Dr. Johnson whose essays appeared twice a week in The Rambler and also every Saturday in a newspaper. The latter group goes under the title of the Idler essays. In both of them Dr. Johnson showed himself in the mantle of a very serious moralist without the humour and sense of comedy which characterised Steele and Addison. His style, too, lacked the sprightliness and lucidity of that of his predecessors.

Oliver Goldsmith contributed to many periodicals. His own periodical The Bee ran to only eight weekly numbers. The Citizen of the World, Goldsmith’s best work, is a collection of essays which originally appeared in The Public Ledger as “Chinese Letters.” Goldsmith’s essays are rich in human details, a quivering sent! mental ism, and candidness of spirit. His prose style is, likewise, quite attractive. He avoids bitterness, coarseness, pedantry, and stiff wit His style, in the words of George Sherburn, “lacks the coldness of the aristocratic manner, and it escapes the tendency of his generation to follow Johnson into excessive heaviness of diction and balanced formality of sentence structure…It is precisely for this lack of formality and for his graceful and sensitive ease, fluency, and vividness that we value his style.”

The Romantic Essayists-Leigh Hunt, Haziitt, De Quincey, and Lamb:

The early nineteenth century saw in England the emergence of the romantic spirit both in verse and prose. The romantic essayists, like Leigh Hunt, Haziitt, De Quincey, and Charles Lamb, had many traits in common; for instance, their tendency of self-revelation, their subjective approach, their button holding familiarity, their congenial and tolerant humour, their occasional pathos, their inspiration as stylists from the writers of the past, and their visionary and somewhat .extravagant nature.Of course, it is wrong to assume that all of them wrote according to a formula. All had their own individual views and predilections though the conception of the essay was the same in each case. Their essays entirely agree with the tentative definition of the essay we have given at the outset. Lamb has well been called “the prince of the English essayists” and “the essayist par excellence.” Haziitt and Lamb, with Coleridge, are the most eminent of all the romantic literary critics. As a critic, Haziitt is sometimes equal to Lamb but as an essayist, he yields the palm to Lamb.

Charles Lamb as an Essayist

Introduction:

Montaigne, a French writer, was the father of the essay, and it was Francis Bacon who naturalised the new form in English. However, there is much difference between his essays and the essays of his model. Montaigne’s essays are marked by his tendency towards self-revelation, a light-hearted sense of humour, and tolerance. But Bacon in his essay is more an adviser than a companion: he is serious, objective, and didactic.

It has well been said that the essay took a wrong turn in the hands of Bacon. For two centuries after Bacon the essay in England went on gravitating towards the original conception held by Montaigne, but it was only in the hands of the romantic essayists of the early nineteenth century that it became wholly personal, light, and lyrical in nature. From then onwards it has seen no essential change. The position of Lamb among these romantic essayists is the most eminent. In fact, he has often been called the prince of all the essayists England has so far produced. Hugh Walker calls him the essayist par excellence who should be taken as a model. It is from the essays of Lamb that we often derive our very definition of the essay, and it is with reference to his essays as a criterion of excellence that we evaluate the achievement and merit of a given essayist. Familiarity with Lamb as a man enhances for a reader the charm of his essays. And he is certainly the most charming of all English essay. We may not find in him the massive genius of Bacon, or the ethereal flights (O altitude) of Thomas Browne, or the brilliant lucidity of Addison, or the ponderous energy of Dr. Johnson, but none excels him in the ability to charm the reader or to catch him in the plexus of his own personality.

His Self-revelation:

What strikes one particularly about Lamb as an essayist is his persistent readiness to reveal his everything to the reader. The evolution of the essay from Bacon to Lamb lies primarily in its shift from

(i)                 objectivity to subjectivity, and

(ii)               (ii) from formality to familiarity.

Of all the essayists it is perhaps Lamb who is the most autobiographic. His own life is for him “such stuff as essays are made on.” He could easily say what Montaigne had said before him-“I myself am the subject of my book.” The change from objectivity to subjectivity in the English essay was, by and large, initiated by Abraham Cowley who wrote such essays as the one entitled. “Of Myself.” Lamb with other romantic essayists completed this change. Walter Pater observes in Appreciations; “With him, as with Montaigne, the desire of self-portraiture is below all mere superficial tendencies, the real motive in ‘writing at all, desire closely connected with intimacy, that modern subjectivity which may be called the Montaignesque element in literature. In his each and every essay we feel the vein of his subjectivity.” His essays are, as it were, so many bits of autobiography by piecing which together we can arrive at a pretty authentic picture of his life, both external and internal. It is really impossible to think of an essayist who is more personal than Lamb. His essays reveal him fully-in all his whims, prejudices, past associations, and experiences. “Night Fears” shows us Lamb as a timid, superstitious boy. “Christ’s Hospital” reveals his unpalatable experiences as a schoolboy. We are introduced to the various members of his family in numerous essays like “My Relations’ “The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple,” and “Poor Relations.” We read of the days of his adolescence in “Mackery End in Hertfordshire.” His tenderness towards his sister Mary is revealed by “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist.” His professional life is recalled in “The South-Sea House” and “The, Superannuated Man.” His sentimental memories full of pathos find expression in “Dream Children.” His prejudices come to the fore in “Imperfect Sympathies” and “The Confessions of a Drunkard.” His gourmandise finds a humours utterence in “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” “Grace before Meat,” and elsewhere. What else is left then? Very little, except an indulgence in self-pity at the stark tragedy of his life. Nowhere does he seem to be shedding tears at the fits of madness to which his siter Mary Bridget of the essays) was often subject and in one of which she knifed his mother to death. The frustration of his erotic career (Lamb remained in a state of lifelong bachelorhood imposed by himself.to enable him to nurse his demented sister), however, is touched upon here and there. In “Dream Children,” for instance, his unfruitful attachment with Ann Simmons is referred to. She got married and her children had to “call Bartrum father.” Lamb is engaged in a reverie about “his children” who would have possibly been born had he been married to Alice W-n (Ann Simmons). When the reverie is gone this is what he finds: “…and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget [his sister Mary] unchanged by my side…but John L (his brother John Lamb) was gone for ever.” How touching!

Lamb’s excessive occupation with himself may lead one to assume that he is too selfish or. egocentric, or that he is vulgar or inartistic. Far from that, Egotism with Lamb sheds its usual offensive accoutrements. The following specific points may be noted in this connexion:

(i)         His egotism is free from vulgarity. Well does Compton-Rickett observe: “There is no touch of vulgarity in these intimacies; for all their frank unreserve we feel the delicate refinement of the man’s spiritual nature. Lamb omits no essential, he does not sentimentalise, and does not brutalise his memories. He poetises them, preserving them for us in art that can differentiate between genuine reality and crude realism.”

(ii)        His artistic sense of discrimination-selection and rejection-has also to be taken into account.David Daiches maintains: “The writer’s own character is always there, flaunted before the reader, but it is carefully prepared and controlled before it is exhibited.”

(iii)       Though Lamb is an egotist yet he is not self-assertive. He talks about himself not because he thinks himself to be             important but because he thinks himself to be the only object he knows intimately. Thus his egotism is born of a sense of humility rather than hauteur. Samuel C. Chew observes: “Like all the romantics he is self-revelatory, but there is nothing in him of the ‘egotistical-sublime.’ Experience had made him too clear-sighted to take any individual, least of all himself, too seriously. The admissions of his own weaknesses, follies, and prejudices are so many humorous warnings to his readers.”

The Note of Familiarity:

Lamb’s contribution to the English essay also lies in his changing the general tone from formality to familiarity. This change was to be accepted by all the essayists to follow. “Never”, says Compton-Rickett, “was any man more intimate in print than he. He has made of chatter a fine art.” Lamb disarms the reader at once with his buttonholding familiarity. He plays with him in a puckish manner, no doubt, but he is always ready to take him into confidence and to exchange heart-beats with him. In the essays of the writers before him we are aware of a well-marked distance between the writer and ourselves. Bacon and Addison perch themselves, as it were, on a pedestal, and cast pearls before the readers standing below. In Cowley, the distance between the reader and writer narrows down-but it is there still. It was left for Lamb to abolish this distance altogether. He often addresses the reader (“dear reader”) as if he were addressing a bosom friend. He makes nonsense of the proverbial English insularity and “talks” to the readers as “a friend and man” (as Thackeray said he did in his novels). This note of intimacy is quite pleasing, for Lamb is the best of friends.

No Didacticism:

He is a friend, and not a teacher. Lamb shed once and for all the didactic approach which characterises the work of most essayists before him. Bacon called his essays “counsels civil and moral.” His didacticism is too palpable to need a comment. Cowley was somewhat less didactic, but early in the eighteenth century Steele and Addison-the founders of the periodical essay-set in their papers the moralistic, mentor-like tone for all the periodical essayists to come. Even such “a rake among scholars and a scholar among rakes” as Steele arrogated to himself the air of a teacher and reformer. This didactic tendency reached almost its culmination in Dr. Johnson who in the Idler and Rambler papers gave ponderous sermons rather than what may be called essays. Lamb is too modest to pretend to proffer moral counsels. He never argues, dictates, or coerces. We do not find any “philosophy of life” in his essays, though there are some personal views and opinions flung about here and there not for examination and adoption, but just to serve as so many ventilators to let us have a peep into his mind. “Lamb”, says Cazamian, “is not a moralist nor a psychologist, his object is not research, analysis, or confession; he is, above all, an artist. He has no aim save the reader’s pleasure, and his own.” But though Lamb is not a downright pedagogue, he is yet full of sound wisdom which he hides under a cloak of frivolity and tolerant good nature. He sometimes looks like the Fool in King Lear whose weird and funny words are impregnated with a hard core of surprising sanity. As a critic avers, “though Lamb frequently donned the cap and bells, he was more than ajester; even his jokes had kernels of wisdom.” In his “Character of the Late Elia” in which he himself gives a character-sketch of the supposedly dead Elia, he truly observes : “He would interrupt the gravest discussion with some light jest; and yet, perhaps not quite irrelevant in ears that could understand it.”

The Rambling Nature of His Essays and His Lightness of Touch:

The rambling nature of his essays and his lightness of touch are some other distinguishing features of Lamb as an essayist. He never bothers about keeping to the point. Too often do we find him flying off at a tangent and ending at a point which we could never have foreseen. Every road with him seems to lead to the world’s end. We often reproach Bacon for the “dispersed” nature of his “meditations”, but Lamb beats everybody in his monstrous discursiveness. To consider some examples, first take up his essay “The Old and the New School-master.” In this essay which apparently is written for comparing the old and new schoolmaster, the first two pages or thereabouts contain a very humorous and exaggerated description of the author’s own ignorance. Now, we may ask, what has Lamb’s ignorance to do with the subject in hand? Then, the greater part of the essay “Oxford in the Vacation” is devoted to the description of his friend Dyer. Lamb’s essays are seldom artistic, well-patterned wholes. They have no beginning, middle and end. Lamb himself described his essays as “a sort of unlicked incondite things.” However, what these essays lose in artistic design they gain in the touch of spontaneity. This is what lends them what is called “the lyrical quality.”

Lamb’s Humour, Pathos, and Humanity:

Lamb’s humour, humanity, and the sense of pathos are all his own; and it is mainly these qualities which differentiate his essays from those of his contemporaries. His essays are rich alike in wit, humour, and fun. Hallward and Hill observe in the Introduction to their edition of the Essavs of Elia : “The terms Wit. Humour and Fun are often confused but they are really different in meaning. The first is based on intellect, the second on insight and sympathy, the third on vigour and freshness of mind and body. Lamb’s writings show all the three qualities, but what most distinguishes him is Humour, for his sympathy is ever strong and active.” Humour in Lamb’s essays constitutes very like an atmosphere “with linked sweetness long drawn out.” Its Protean shapes range from frivolous puns, impish attempts at mystification, grotesque buffoonery, and Rabelaisian verbosity (see, for example, the description of a “poor relation”) to the subtlest ironical stroke which pierces down to the very heart of life. J. B. Priestley observes in English Humour: “English humour at its deepest and tenderest seems in him [Lamb] incarnate. He did not merely create it, he lived in it. His humour is not an idle thing, but the white flower, plucked from a most dangerous nettle.” What particularly distinguishes Lamb’s humour is its close alliance with pathos. While laughing he is always aware of the tragedy of life-not only his life, but life in general. That is why he often laughs through his tears. Witness his treatment of the hard life of chimney sweepers and Christ’s Hospital boys. The descriptions are touching enough, but Lamb’s treatment provides us with a humorous medium of perception rich in prismatic effects, which bathes the tragedy of actual life in the iridescence of mellow comedy. The total effect is very complex, and strikes our sensibility in a bizarre way, puzzling us as to what is comic and what is tragic.

Style:

A word, lastly, about Lamb’s peculiar style which is all his own and yet not his, as he is a tremendous borrower. He was extremely influenced by some “old-world” writers like Fuller and Sir Thomas Browne. It is natural, then, that his style is archaic. His sentences are long and rambling, after the seventeenth-century fashion. He uses words many of which are obsolescent, if not obsolete. But though he “struts in borrowed plumes”, these “borrowed plumes” seem to be all his own. Well does a critic say: “The blossoms are culled from other men’s gardens, but their blending is all Lamb’s own.” Passing through Lamb’s imagination they become something fresh and individual. His style is a mixture certainly of many styles, but a chemical not a mechanical mixture.” His inspiration from old writers gives his style a romantic colouring which is certainly intensified by his vigorous imagination. Very like Wordsworth he throws a fanciful veil on the common objects of life and converts them into interesting and “romantic” shapes. His peculiar style is thus an asset in the process of “romanticising” everyday affairs and objects which otherwise would strike one with a strong feeling of ennui. He is certainly a romantic essayist. What is more, he is a poet.

Hazlitt as an Essayist

Introduction:

“Though we are mighty fine fellows now-a-days we cannot write like Hazlitt,” thus spoke R. L. Stevenson who himself aped Hazlitt most sedulously…with advantage to himself. Hazlitt’s place among English essayists is very high, though few critics have placed him above Lamb. In some respect in fact, Hazlitt easily beats Lamb into the second place. His catholicity, zest for life, and vivid and copious expression full of glowing images are his assets.

Whereas Lamb has certainly a more romantic imagination, Hazlitt combines his imagination with a searching intellect. As Hugh Walker points out, “for wealth of intellect and imagination and for nervous English he [Hazlitt] is the rival of the greatest.”

The Variety of His Interests:

However hard may we avoid it, a comparison between Lamb and Hazlitt becomes inevitable on numerous occasions. Take the variety of their interests. David Daiches observes in this context: “The range of subjects in Hazlitt’s essays is greater than in Lamb’s: he could write on painting as well as literature, on a prize fight, on natural landscape, on going a journey, on ‘coffee-house politician’ as well as on more formal topics such as Milton’s sonnets, Sir Joshua Reynold’s Discourses, and the fear of death.” Like a bee he sucks playfully the nectar of all the flowers that nature proffers him. He is full of gusto and thejoie de vivre as no other writer is. Books, nature, society and the affairs of men-all enchant him. Lamb also loves to live and be merry (in spite of the stark tragedy of his life), but Hazlitt, like Chaucer’s Franklin, is “Epicurus’ own son.” He loves books as a connoisseur, but he refuses to pour all his love and attention upon them. Towards his last years he, in fact, grew extremely critical of all books and the bookish attitude which they often give rise to. At a place he remarks that “he must be a poor creature indeed whose practical convictions do not in almost all cases outrun his deliberate understanding.”

Though Hazlitt has an abundant zest for life and what it has to offer him yet by no means can he be considered as devoid of a keen sense of discrimination. He has no patience with the mediocre and the middling but has an almost instinctive judgment to choose the best from the second-best. His literary criticism is nothing but the product of the practical application of this sense of judgment to the field of literature. He has strong likes and dislikes, and though he often offends against taste and is swayed by prejudices and personal convictions yet, on the whole, his basic sanity and perception as a critic of life and literature cannot be gainsaid. For once he showed bad taste-when he fell in love with a travern jilt whose trickery led him to pour out his heart in Liber Amoris, which was rightly condemned by his contemporaries as “kitchen stuff.” Well did he sum up the activity of his life and the variety of his interests in these words: “So have I loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to play, hearing thinking, or writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy; but wanting that have wanted everything.”

Hazlitt’s Philosopbic Bent:

The inclusion of “thinking” among the activities ofhis life by Hazlitt, as we find in the words just quoted, is quite apt He was a thinker as Lamb was not. Lamb made essays mostly out of his own reminiscences, of “emotions recollected in tranquility.” But Hazlitt, in spite of his occasional extravagant verbal sprees, thought hard like a philosopher. He himself once observed: “I endeavour to recollect all I have ever observed or thought upon a subject and to express it as nearly as I can.” If not a philosopher, Lamb at least was not a fool, though often he pretended to be one. “But,” as a critic puts it, “though Lamb frequently donned the cap and the bells, he was more than a jester; even his jokes had kernels of wisdom.” Embedded in Lamb’s whim-whams and capricious buffoonery lay a very sound core of wisdom. Even then, Lamb was not given to philosophical speculation. On the other hand,Hazlitt’s essays, to quote Ian Jack, “are the work of a man trained in philosophical speculation.” Hazlitt was well read in all 1he important philosophers such as Bacon, Locke and Hume, all of whom influenced his thought quite considerably. Ian Jack maintains: “He moves among abstract ideas with an ease and familiarity that contrast oddly with Lamb. Lamb wrote on chimney-sweepers, the South Sea House, weddings, and whist: Hazlitt wrote ‘On Reason and Imagination, ‘On Egotism,’ ‘On the Past and Future.’ His essays are more serious than Lamb’s or serious in a different sense. Interested as he is in the essay as a form he is more interested in the truth which he is pursuing. He was a man of letters in the comprehensive sense in which Johnson and Coleridge were men of letters.” With his philosophical bent of mind Hazlitt is to Lamb as Shelley is to Keats.

Self-revelation:

As an essayist Hazlitt is not of the school of Addison or Dr. Johnson but of such writers as Montaigne (“the father of the essay”) and his own contemporary Lamb who used the essay as a vehicle for self-revelation. It is said that the perfect egotist is the perfect essayist. After reading an essay our knowledge about the life and personality of the writer is expected to increase. What Montaigne said about the collection of his essays could be justly said by Lamb or Hazlitt about his-“I myself am the subject of my book.” In the history of English literature the strongly personal note was struck by Wordsworth whose magnum opus, The Prelude, offered to the reader the story of the development of his own mind. It can be said that Wordsworth made himself the hero of his epic-like poem. Hazlitt indeed learnt a lot from Wordsworth and his French idol Rousseau who in his Confessions came out with the story of his own life with rank sentimentalism combined with aggressive garrulousness of self assertiveness. It is really paradoxical that a peremptory egotist like Hazlitt should criticise Wordsworth and Byron for their egotism! His own Liber Amoris is a tasteless record of his erotomania, something worse than is conceivable.

But in his essay his indulgence in autobiography is always for the better, as it adds to them an intimate colour. “His habit,” says a critic, “of introducing personal matter into his essays gives frequently a pleasant and intimate flavour to his writing, and the reader’s interest in the written matter is nonetheless because of the interesting glimpses afforded of the writer’s personality.” Many of Hazlitt’s essays-like Lamb’s-are so many bits of autobiography by piecing which together we can arrive at a fairly authentic and fairly complete picture of his life and personality. Even as a literary critic he reveals himself. Such essays as “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” “On the Pleasures of Painting,” “On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth,” “On a Sun Dial”, “Of Persons One would Wish to have Seen,” and “Farewell to Essay-Writing” are like so many chapters from his unwritten autobiography. He stands fully revealed in his essays. He tells us frankly about his father, his love of painting, his enjoyment of walking, his literary taste, his appreciation of nature, his political affiliations, and his epicureanism. No facet of his personality remains obscure. He does not mystify the reader like Lamb nor does he wear any impenetrable mask. What he puts forward in his essays is his real self, for whatever it is worth.

Quite a few of his essays are built around reminiscences not, however, without the mortar of hard philosophic thinking. As a typical romantic he casts a wistful glance on the realm of the past and illuminates many of its demesnes with the glow of his restrospective imagination. “Like Lamb”, maintains Samuel C. Chew, “he relied upon the impressions of former years. Passionate retrospection is prevalent note in his essays.” Hazlitt himself observes in his essay “On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth ” that he has “turned for consolation to the past, gathering up the fragments of my early recollections and putting them into a form that might live.”

It is interesting to see how Hazlitt makes every subject a peg to hang his personality on. Consider his essay “Indian Jugglers.” He starts, as expected, with a vivid description of some of the juggler’s usual feats, such as swallowing a sword and keeping six wooden balls in the air at the same time. But that is all. After it Hazlitt himself occupies the stage, shoving the juggler aside. He compares his own intellectual dexterity with the juggler’s physical one and awards him the palm. It is all self-examination. We do not find the juggler anywhere near the conclusion which is smothered in self-pity and despair.

Self-pity and Bitterness:

This recurrent note of self-pity is a feature which distinguishes Lamb from Hazlitt. Lamb’s life was as pathetic jeremiad as Hazlitt’s. Frustrated ambitions and an unenviable emotional career marked Lamb’s life as they did Hazlitt’s. But Hazlitt grew coarse, peevish, and bitter, as Lamb never did. Hazlitt is, according to Moody and Lovett, “indeed in many ways quite the opposite of Charles Lamb, being somewhat coarse and boisterous where Lamb is refined and subtle : often harsh and repellent where Lamb is gentle and winning.” One after another Hazlitt quarrelled and broke with all his intimates including Lamb himself. In his essay “Pleasure of Hating” he truly remarks : “I have quarrelled with almost all of my old friends.” Presumably owing to his suspicious and touchy temperament he could not get along with either of the women he married. His last words are, however, quite unlike him-“Well, I’ve had a happy life.” He was not a Spartan or a Stoic, nor like Lamb did he smile away his blues. He was quite often in tantrums. Comparing Lamb and Hazlitt in this respect, Joseph Warren Beach observes in A History of English Literature edited by Hardin Craig: “Lamb is a writer for old and young; Hazlitt for those whom life has saddened, and sobered, and who do not mind a touch of cynicism.”

Style:

In considering the style of Hazlitt’s essays, once again a reference to Lamb will be_rewarding. Whereas Lamb’s style is individual, Hazlitt’s is representative. Hazlitt has a manner but no mannerisms. Lamb, on the other hand, had his idiosyncrasies the chief of which was to mystify the reader. Lamb wrote a deliberately archaic English reminiscent of the seventeenth-century prose writers like Fuller and Sir Thomas Browne. We, of course, agree with Compton-Rickettthat Lamb’s style was not a physical but a chemical mixture, and that though he took the elements of his style from others yet the “blending” was his own. Even then it has to be admitted that Lamb as a stylist is no model. His English falls outside the natural tradition of English prose. Lamb, as Ian Jack puts it, “is the worst of models,” whereas Hazlitt “is an admirable model.” Hazlitt himself was critical of Lamb’s archaisms and frequent lack of lucidity. Of all the essays of Lamb he quite characteristically singled out “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist” as the best, because, as he, put it, it was “the most free from obsolete allusions and turns of expression.” His own style is a real model of what is often called the “familiar style.” He is seldom sublime or high-strung, but he is as seldom vulgar or commonplace. Naturalness, gusto, vividness, and a certain copiousness are the hallmarks of his style. He hates padding and circumlocution, but quite often in his characteristic way he indulges in repeating over and over again the same idea by constantly varying the figure. All the blows strike the same spot, but the last blow goes home. Describing this tendency a critic says: “for a time the thought seems not to move. It is thrown into the air like balls by a juggler, and we watch reflections of it, and are thrilled and excited to pleasure in watching.”

According to Samuel C. Chew, Hazlitt stands between the eighteenth century (for “terse clarity”) and Macaulay (for “force and conciseness”). “Yet,” says the same critic, “as a stylist he commands a wider range. My First Acquaintance with Poets is as lyrically reminiscent as anything of Lamb’s; On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth is imposingly ornate without dependence upon archaisms; On Going to a Fight, a theme which invited the use of slang, is loyal .to pure English, yet nonetheless virile for its purity, the Farewell to Essay Writing is charged with romantic emotionality Whatever the style or subject, it is Hazlitt’s own. Like his favourite Montaigne he could assure the reader that his was un livre de bonne foi.” Ian Jack also points out that Hazlitt “varied his style (like any writer worth his salt) according to the demands of the subject and the occasion.” The same critic observes: “Sometimes he reminds us of the ‘character writers’ of the seventeenth century, sometimes of Locke, sometimes of Burke. Even within a single essay there may be a marked contrast of style as there is between the matter-of-fact opening and the lyrical climax of ‘On My First Acquaintance with Poets.”

A word in the end about Hazlitt’s plethoric use of quotations. Lamb is also very fond of quoting snatches from writers (mostly poets), but Hazlitt outdoes Lamb many times over. We cannot say that he was in the habit of “thinking within inverted commas,” but certainly his over use of quotations cannot be defended. For one tiling, most of his quotations are misquotations. He quotes generally from memory, and quite often wrenches what he quotes off its context. Some of these quotations are happy no doubt, but as many or even more, strike one as standing out too much. We may conclude with a quotation ourselves-the last sentence of Ian Jack’s very admirable discussion of Hazlitt in English Literature 1815-1832 (Oxford History of English Literature) -“One of his few faults is that he makes rather too much use of quotation.”

Critics of the Romantic Age

Introduction:

The romantic age in England was not only an age of glorious poetry but also of glorious literary criticism. In fact, most of the eminent men of letters of the age were critics as well as creative writers. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron, Hazlitt, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and De Quincey all contributed to critical literature. But the main critics who gave a direction to the current of literary criticism were Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey, and it will be with them that we will concern ourselves here.

All of them together have often been categorised as “Romantic critics”; but there are easily discernible in them some very important mutual differences of approach as well as opinion, though they share some important features, too. All of them reacted sharply against the neoclassic tradition of Dr. Johnson, the cham of the realm of letters. Further, unlike him, they do not indulge in what is called judicial or legislative criticism, the like of which is embodied in his rather pontificial pronouncements. Their criticism is, with some exceptions, interpretative or appreciative. They get into the mind of the writer whose work they are examining and thus grasp psychologically the nature of his creative activity which gets ultimately crystallised into his work. None of the romantic critics harp-upon the mechanical and time honoured rules and regulations which the neo-Aristotelian critics of yore from the reign of Elizabeth to the eighteenth century had exalted into a fetish. And lastly, most of the romantic critics pafticularly Hazlitt, give critical judgments which are eminently of, what may be called, the “impressionistic” kind: in other words, while dealing with works of literature, they depend on their personal impressions rather than a persistent reference to any well-evolved or well-set body of rules or criteria of judgment. It is these common features which justify their classification into a group, in spite of some important, and many peripheral, heterogenities.

Wordsworth and Coleridge:

Wordsworth and Coleridge pioneered the Romantic Movement in England with their joint work Lyrical Ballads (1798) which has justly been called the Magna Carta of Romanticism. Wordsworth thought it appropriate to append to the first edition of the work an “Advertisement” embodying his radical views regarding the nature and function of poetry. These views were elaborated and some observations added in the “Preface” to the 1800 edition of the work. Wordsworth said some nice things about poetry and poets, but his observations on “poetic diction” met with little approval and were contradicted by none other than his best friend Coleridge himself.

It was to a large extent, under the wave of democratic enthusiasm generated by the then recent French Revolution that Wordsworth recommended as subjects of poetry incidents and characters from humble and rustic life. He insisted that poetry was in the “countenance of all science.” He gave the poet a high and important office. And here is his well-known description of poetry: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.”

So much, so well. But when Wordsworth goes forward with his theory of poetic diction he is on a really treacherous ground. He writes in the “Preface”: “The principal object then proposed in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men.” And further: “It may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.” There was a point in Wordsworth’s condemnation of the “gaudy and inane phraseology” of many of his predecessors and even contemporaries; but he broke too many windows in his desire for fresh air. That Wordsworth’s conception about the language of poetry was unsound is best exemplified by his own practice. Some of his best poetry uses a language far removed from the language of ordinary people.

Wordsworth’s status in the history of English criticism is, then, not exceedingly high. Coleridge as we have said, took upon himself to expose the hollowness of Wordsworth’s notions. In Chapters 17-20 of his Biographia Literaria he pursues to the end the critical hares started by Wordsworth’s “Preface.”

That Coleridge was a great critic has been acknowledged by almost everybody who has written about his criticism. In fact most critics give him the first Fank among the hierarchy of English critics. As Symons observes in The Romantic Movement in English Poetry, Coleridge had “imagination, insight, logic, learning, almost every critical quality united in one; and he was a poet who allowed himself to .be a critic.” As a critic, Coleridge was a pioneer in many respects. For instance, he gave a new conception of the very function of a critic which according to him should be to appreciate and interpret and not to judge. He condemned the contemporary “reviews” “because they teach people rather to judge than to consider, to decide than to reflect.” According to George Watson, “his own method presupposed a delicate and enquiring reverence for all of man’s creation, and a passionate curiosity to explore its depth.”

Coleridge’s conception of the poetic process needs some elucidation. He believes that for the existence of truth there must be a knower and a known, a subject and an object, or the Self and Nature. Out of the interaction and fusion of the two arises a creative work. This work is neither Self nor Nature but a different entity altogether-tertium quid- having laws of its own. Poetry, thus, is a “counter-action” offerees and has “a logic of its own as severe as that of science and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes.”

Coleridge’s Shakespearean criticism should be studied in the light of his conception of the creative process. The neoclassical critics like Dr. Johnson considered Shakespeare to be a great dramatist on the ground that “Shakespeare is, above all writers…the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.” To mirror nature is, according to Coleridge, none of the functions of a poet. Poetry is neither Nature nor Self but the outcome of the counteraction of the two, and, therefore, an independent entity with laws which it is the function of a true critic to explore and explain. A genius works organically, not mechanically. A poem is not just created by a poet; it grows within him like a plant from a seed. “Shakespeare”, observes Coleridge, “goes on creating and evolving B out of A and C out of B and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body and seems for ever twisting and untwisting its own strength.”

Coleridge’s distinction between fancy and imagination may also be here referred to as an example of his critical profundity. Fancy, says he, “has no other counters to play with but fixities and defmites” and is only a “mode of memory.” But the true imagination is esemplastic and given to “re-create, idealize, unify.”

Coleridge’s literary criticism seems to be part of a comprehensive system of aesthetics which he might have contemplated to proffer at some later stage of his life. It is also near enough the metaphysics of the German Philosophers like Lessing, Schlegel and Kant who seem to have influenced Coleridge quite considerably. A point of interest to note is that though Coleridge was a really great critic-and was acknowledged as one by most of his contemporaries-he did not create a “school” of criticism. He was revered by a large number of poets and scholars. “The young men,” says George Watson “who crowded to his house in Highgate in the last years of his life, among whom (according to Carlyle) he enjoyed the reputation of a sage, sought wisdom of a kind too generalized and too occult to turn them into good critics-indeed, into any kind of critic.”

Charles Lamb:

Lamb had neither the profundity nor the philosophic training of Coleridge-his friend since their schooldays at Christ’s Hospital. His approach to criticism in particular and literature in general was amateurish, not professional like Hazlitt’s. The bulk of his total critical work is very slight-about fifty thousand words, but it includes some of the most perceptive criticisms ever made by an English writer. Lamb did not have any elaborate critical theories to guide him, nor did he ever turn to “authorities” whom he could have invoked to his aid. He depended on his own taste, which, for all that we know was quite selective and quite sound in its essentials. He did not, unlike Coleridge, bring to bear a system of aesthetics on the study of literature. Almost the whole of his critical work is descriptive and may be termed “applied criticism.” Tillyard observes in Introduction to Lamb’s Criticism: “Of English masters of theoretical criticism Coleridge is the greatest, of applied, in a sense, Lamb.”

Lamb was a great revivalist. His anthological work, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, with his critical comments, helped much to revive contemporary interest in the then forgotten dramatists of yore. His enthusiasm and genuine enjoyment of the works of the cluster of lesser dramatists contemporaneous with Shakespeare and Jacobean dramatists did not go ineffective. “The book,” say Moody and Lovett, “did much to revive the almost extinguished fame of the lesser dramatists grouped about Shakespeare. It is one of the earliest as well as the most significant products of the new romantic criticism.” Apart from these dramatists, Lamb was interested in such out-of-the-way writers as Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Fuller, and Walton. He read and reread their works, and while he did not read he brooded over what he had read. In his own words, he extremely enjoyed “hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange contemporaries.” One of the.results of the persistent “hanging over” was, of course, the archaisation of his own prose style.

Lamb’s criticism of Shakespeare has the strength and weakness of his own taste. His remarks on Lear (as also on Webster’s Duchess of Malfi) have rightly become an indispensable part of the English critical heritage. To quote Tillyard, “he succeeded in penetrating so near the truth.” His contention about the lack of stage-worthiness of Lear and other Shakespeare tragedies is, of course, not to be accepted today. His defence of the comedy of manners is interesting even now. Like Dr. Johnson he is swayed by moral considerations (even of the Victorian type) though he can make bold to give them an occasional holiday. He admits that this kind of comedy is morally unsound. “The business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test.” Even then: “I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of strict conscience-I come back to my cage and restraint, the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom.”

William Hazlitt:

Right up to the modern times Hazlitt as a critic has been placed by most writers not only beside Lamb but also Coleridge. Witness, for instance, the words of Compton-Rickett: “With a large measure of Dryden’s freshness and acumen he combines the romantic fervour of Coleridge.” And: “As a critic of Elizabethan literature he is more reliable but less eclectic than Lamb.” And so forth. But George Watson in his recent book The Literary Critics has toppled his position— presumably for good. Hazlitt’s critical work was of the nature of a pot-boiler. In his own words his self-appointed task as a critic was “to feel what is good and give reasons for the faith that is in me.” On this George Watson comments : “To feel well, however, implies a wide and delicate sensitivity, and to give reasons that matter, calls for analytic gifts, Hazlitt’s criticism has enjoyed a sizeable reputation for more than a century but it is doubtful if it will bear examination on either count. For sensitivity, he possesses only a familiar clutch of a priori notions of a romantic radical born a little too late; and since he never pursues analysis beyond a few phrases, we are not entitled to suppose that he was capable of it.”

Watson points to Hazlitt’s deficiency of reading which he himself admitted and which earned him the rebuke of Leslie Stephen: “To claim to have learnt nothing from 1792 to 1830 is almost to write yourself down as hopelessly impenetrable.” Much is made of Hazlitt’s criticism of Shakespeare (particularly his characters); but, as Watson says, “he commits the elementary offence of detaching figures from their contexts, as Schlegel and Coleridge rarely do.” Much is also made of Hazlitt’s so-called “gusto” and his “nervous,” “vivid”, and “copious” style. But this is what Watson has to say : “And yet, when all is said, what are the merits of it all beyond a few telling phrases? Hazlitt’s language has at times a certain splendour, but a splendour flyblown and empty of significance, like a schoolboy in a hurry with his homework anxious to impress a master with a taste for rhetoric. His language abuses meaning…Hazlitt, as usual, is not saying anything, he is simply making a noise to suggest to us that he is, or has been, excited about something…He is the father of our Sunday journalism…His criticism is void of scholarship even in the most elementary sense…Unless one looks to criticism for a few portable phrases-such phrases as those concerning Dryden’s ‘magnanimity of abuse,’ or- Scott’s ‘pleasing superficiality’ as a poet-Hazlitt is not even of pass quality as a critic of English.”

De Quincey:

De Quincey’s criticism is more perceptive and much less “airy” than Hazlitt’s. In spite of its sporadic and fragmentary nature it is interesting as the embodiment of the reactions of a sensitive and responsive mind. He has his faults. Watson observes: “His faults are not the faults of the doctrinaire, but simply those of a good man in a hurry, anxious to be fair, remarkably judicious, but too eager for his monthly cheque to be careful of fact and detail.” De Quincey excels in the analysis of his own emotional reactions, but unlike Hazlitt’s his reactions grow out of a depth of reading. “On the knocking of the Gate in Macbeth” is the most penetrating attempt of its kind.

De Quincey’S’perverse criticism of Keats, however, is in rank bad taste. Let us conclude with Watson’s words : “There is an underlying austerity in De Quincey’s criticism (notwithstanding the gorgeous exuberance of his prose), a faculty for reasoning at length of which Wordsworth and Hazlitt were utterly innocent, and a conscientious determination to get the right answer which Hazlitt did not share at all.”