ENGLISH LITERATURE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1321, 24 June 1897, Page 38

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

Though the Victorian era has not been as brilliant in English literature as some previous periods in history, yet its record under this heading is in many respects memorable. There have been remarkable men of letters, within the past sixty years. When Queen Victoria ascended the throne, Macaulay was in the heyday of his reputation, and was busy with the fascinating Essays which from the beauty of style, their vigour and incisiveness, and their breadth and variety of knowledge, are the delight of countless thousands of readers at tho present day ; the graceful Wordsworth was filling the Government post of Distributor of Stamps, with the opportunity of devoting much leisure to the writing of verse, whilst his illustrious friend Robert Southey was adorning the Poet Laureateship, which he had accepted in 1813; Charles Dickens was but a young man of about 26, who in that very year began the Pickwick Papers; Thackeray's works were yet to be written ; the genuine humorist Tom Hood, capable as he was of shining in the paths, of the imaginative, the serious, and the romantic, had, to quote his own words, become " a lively Hood for a livelihood;" Charles Lamb had passed away, but the other brilliant talker, Sydney Smith, was " growing old merrily ;" Theodore Hook lived, still the gayest of the social wits of the period ; Captain Marryat was writing his sturdy stories, the best painter of sea characters since Smollett; and only Madame D'Arblay remained to remind the new school of writers of that old school they were supplanting, last as she was of the brilliant coterie of art and literary notables who had gathered in London at the house of her father, Dr Burney, when the timid Fanny was a girl in her teens, in the days when that confirmed teadrinker, Dr Jphjjasm, was having his everyday gossi*'' tfjp uSficled by Boswell, and George his snuff-box and his everTHE NEW SCHOOL. The earliest exponents of the new Romantic school which dates from the first twenty years of the century were the Lake poets, Wordsworth, Southey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The two or three years spent at Stowey, in Somersetshire, seem to have been at once the most felicitous and the most illustrious of Coleridge's literary life. About two miles away, at Allfoxden there lived Wordsworth and his devoted sister Dorothy, and naturally the kindred feelings and pursuits of the two poets bound them in the closest friendship. The rich and musical language of tho two writers, the vivid and original imagination of Coleridge especially, bequeathed to the nineteenth, century, lofty poetry. Wordsworth entered upon an experiment which has had important influence upon the new school. He held that the humblest subjects were fit for tho poetic-muse, and that the language employed should be that " really used by men." The language of humble and rustic life, the expression of actual experience, was, he argued, more permanent and far more philosophical than that frequently substituted for it by poets. This theory accordingly was the basis of a great deal of his work, and though the critics and the public of his own day did not take kindly to the innovation, it has had a marked influence upon literature throughout the present century. THE ERA OF TENNYSON.

But though Coleridge, and Southey, and Wordsworth wrote poetry of a high class, the standard they attained has in many respects been excelled by Alfred Tennyson. He was undoubtedly the master poet of the

era we are celebrating. Tennyson's noble verse has established a reputation [of its own in English literature. In the wide variety of his subjects, and in some instances in his higher poetic fancy and imagery, he excels his great British predecessors Scott, Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley and Wordsworth. "He is decidedly the first of our living poets," wrote Wordsworth in 1845, " and I hope will give the world still better things." As for the fulfilment of this hope, Tennyson, before he passed to his grave in Westminster Abbey five years ago, left the world richer for some of the finest lyrics in the English tongue. But Tennyson and the Lake poets were not the only song-makers to great purpose during the past sixty years. At the outset of the Queen's reign Campbell had already established his fame, and it was not many years later when his coffin was in its place in Westminster Abbey, a Polish nobleman scattering dust over it from the grave of Kosciusko. Many, in fact nearly all, of the lovely ballads of Tom Moore had been given to the world, while the Irish poet, heart-broken from the loss of almost all of his children by death, was in his declining years, patiently awaiting his own final summons, Rogers was living his bachelor life in St. James's Place, giving breakfists which were a pattern for entertainers, and secure in the possepsion of an income, his condition in sharp contrast to that of other men of letters of the period, and in sharper contrast still to that of Dr Johnson when he, but a span of years earlier, before literature became fashionable, was compelled to walk the streets of London all night because he had not the two or three pence to pay for a bed. Rogers, who was richer than any poet before him or many after him, did not make his money from letters, let it be noted, but as a sleeping partner in a bank, for financial operations, then as now, were paid for in better measure and demanded far less sustained anxiety than the pursuits of literatuie. Sixty years ago, also, on the threshold of her success stood Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the most distinguished of modern poetesses. It is a beautiful picture which is drawn of the life of this great woman and her splendid husband Robert Browning, one of the greatest of contemporary poets, in their fifteen years' residence in Florence, where they were the bright gems in a literary circle which has added interest for Englishmen in the fact that it included tho utterly impracticable Walter Savage Landor, as well as the popular American Nathaniel Hawthorne, most original of authors. While the happiness of the Brownings was complete in their delightful home, Landor, on the other hand, had no home—not till late in life, anyway, for his repeated quarrels with his wife (a woman whose fitness to be the life-com panion of a poet may be judged from tho fact that she one day interrupted him while he was reading a poem to her to rush to the window and gape at a Punch and Judy show), his imperious will, and his irrational conduct and entire want of judgment in the every-day affairs of life, made anything like a home really impossible. The sonorous poet Swinburne "was in Florence later on, in 1864, in the course of his tour of the Continent after he had completed his course at Eton and Balliol. When he went back to London and became closely associated with Dante Rossetti, a new type of poetry was produced which it will be remembered became the subject of a fierce attack by Mr Robert Buchanan in 1871. The interesting circle of English poets in these latter days who have contributed rich flowers of song to our national literature has included also the Socialist William Morris, a genius who was untimely cut off, and includes now the copious writer Lewis Morris and the youthful William Watson a,s worthy of the popularity they have attained. THE MASTERS OP PROSE. The incomparable Dickons, and the equally incomparable Thackeray, masters both in their study of human character ; the forceful George Eliot, the great Thomas Carlyle, the renowned Ruskin, Matthew Arnold; the historians Macaulay, Freemam, Hallam, Stubbs, Ling-ard, Froude, Brewer, Gardiner, Green, Milman, Buckie, Lecky, Grote, Thirlwall, Merivale; the representatives of all tendencies of religious thought—Maurico, Dean Stanley, Cardinal Newman, Whately, Keble, Dr j Arnold, Pusey, Canon Liddon, Dr Martineau —the dramatists, Sheridan and Jerrold, and the others,- the hosts of magazine writers since the day when George Henry Lewes founded the Fortnightly Review in 1805 ; the humorist Mark Twain, who is the fast friend of us all; the "Kailyard crew" and the score of latter-day writers, Robert Louis Stevenson, Blackmore, Robert Buchanan, Haggard, and Kipling, and Barrie, and Andrew Lang, and Jerome—all these have contributed in magnificont degree to the prose works of the nation. If it bo urgod, as it is frequently, that there has been a decadence in literature and art since the closing days of tho 18th century, when the reigning King took up literature and the public followed him, and Avhen Sir Joshua Reynolds received liberal commissions from Court for his paintings, wo may point with pride to what our own giants of prose have done for us. Have Dickens and Thackeray not touched tho heart-strings of the nation as the master-singer touches the strings of his beloved harp till it speaks back to him in passionate song ? Has tho work of tho other great prosewriters been of no value in shaping tho human feeling of half a century ? We admit that there has been tho fin de siecle novel. Its unhealthy breath, its sickly pallor, havo stamped it for what it is, despite the impudent pretence with which it has sought to explain its presence namely, that it has come " for a purpose." But the novel " with a purpose," or tho drama " with a purpose," must not be taken as tho tcue criterion of the tastes of the people. That feeble trash of such a kind, though written in scholarly English,

should have had even the ephemeral popularity of a day, whilst a matter for wonder, may be explained by the newness of the new novel and the problem play. The world likes novelty and sensationalism, however much we may lecture it on the fact. But, notwithstanding' this, there is deeply rooted in the hearts of the English people that great and lasting love for the gems of English literature which is the sure guarantee that the masterpieces of the standard writers will continue to live and nourish and influence for good long after the fungoid growth of the last five or ten years shall have been blotted out of existence. THE KIN ACROSS THE SEA. The scope of this article embraces English literature only. But we claim to be English literature of the best kind that which has been given to the world from America. Emerson, and Thoreau, and Edgar Allan Poe, and Longfellow, and Joseph Story the jurist, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Hawthorne, and James Russell Lowell these are a few of the names cherished wherever the English tongue is spoken. And in the young lands on this side of the globe there is growing up a distinct literature of a high class, the first garlands of which have been woven by Marcus Clark and Henry Kendall, and Patterson " The Banjo") and the unfortunate Dennehy, and poor Adam Lindsay Gordon, and Henry Lawson, and Gay, and "The Vagabond." In New Zealand the pioneers of song, Domett and Tom Bracken, have in the works which have come from their pens reached the loftiest heights of the true poet. In W. P. Reeves this land can claim a worthy song-writer, and only a year or two ago we had cause to lament the loss of O'Regan, whose life was cut short just when his youthful fire promised great things for New Zealand literature. The youngest as well as one of the best of New

Zealand writers is Mr Arthur 11. Adams, who, in the verse he has already given us, shows that he has the true poetic spirit. The foundations in these lands have been well and truly laid; it will be the glorious task of the twentieth century to raise the superstructure.