THE SPLENDID YEARS OF MODERN LITERATURE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3029, 3 April 1912, Page 84

THE SPLENDID YEARS OF MODERN LITERATURE.

"What is the most important body of literature produced in modern throes ?" asks Charles Leonard Moore in the. Dial. "National prejudices, class feelings, the interests and passions of mankind, becloud sucth an inquiry. One can only offer an opinion and an argument. To me it seems that—setting aside Goethe, who was a- world in himself—the work done by the generation wnich gave the Romantic revival to England surpasses anything that has been done anywhere else during the last 2CO years. —A Senate of Intellect.— "Recent English literature seems to see life as through a telescope reversed ; evevrything is small car blurred. Tennyson is the idyiiist, a, maker of small, though perfect, things. Carlyle in the company of the great Georgians would almost show like Thersites in the Grecian camp, or like the lame Vulcan on Olympus. Altogether it is hard to see anywhere such a company of proud and peculiar presences, such a senate of intellect, as appeared in England about the beginning of the nineteenth century. "It really bsgan with Burns: for though ho belongs to the eighteenth century by his satire and didactic turn, he sounded pretty nearly all the notes of the new era—its rebellion, its romance, its personal passion. He is more like Goethe than any other modern, and as far as he gees be is quite as great. Goethe's most characteristic qualities—intense naturalness and undeviating truth—are more than matched by the author of the Scotch songs, 'Tain O'Shanter' and 'The Jolly Beggars.' —Kings of the Spiritual World.— ''Wordsworth is surely the modern king of the spiritual world. He dwelt in a region beyond the ken of most poets—a place of high tranquility where the bird of peace sits brooding on the calmed wave. The poet of Nature—yes, but his nature is not the catalogue of outward things which even great poets give; it is the verity to which man is only an incident; it is the melting-pot of generations; it is the very body of the Eternal himself. "Coleridge, though he gave a good part of his mind to the making of Wordsworth, is not spiritual. He is the lord of the supersensuous, of that unreal world of glamour and dream image which is the most real thing in existence for the finer sort of minds. It was his poetry and criticism that really broke the eighteenth century's cast-iron system of commonsense, made explicable the great poetry of the past, and gave the new men the keys to that domain. "There are two great divisions among writers —those who speak for them&elves, and those through whom others speak— in other words, the lyric and the drama-tic types. Largely this era was a lyric one, an era of great personalities who swept the world with their passion or their grief. lint it had its supreme creativeartist in Scott, who was objective even in his poetry. It is an Arab superstition that he who draws or paints the picture of a human being must on the Last Day furnish it with a soul to be condemned or rewarded. What an expense Scott would be in that case! And amid tho cohorts of the man-created, what a vast and predominant array would owe alle gianoe to him! "Byron was the dynamo of his generation—the most splendid figure, the greatest force, English literature has produced.

Shelley was the prophet of his time, a Memnon of to-morrow. It only needs a glance at contemporary literature and life to see how much his spirit is awake. The seed ideas that he flung about have taken root, are growing on every side. I*i a literary way, he brought into the world a haunting "strain of music, new and perfect, which must live on even if-his ideas aord policies wither away. —Keats as Literature Incarnate. — "All these men were something more than writers, but Keats was literature incarnate—the pure artist living for image and expression. Borrowing from the best of his predecessors, he attained such mastery of language that he set his stamp upon two generations of his followers, as Pope did on two generations of his. Perhaps such richly-floriated work has been overdone : there is need to recur to the granite foundation-stuff of thought and feeling. But in Keats's matirre work there is no weakness. Largeness and loveliness were never more perfectly welded together. "These were the stars of first magnitude in that English constellation. It speaks volumes for their brilliancy when an orb like Landor could roll by unattached, unnoticed; when the novel world of Miss Austen could spring into being in their midst without attracting attention. There is enough good reading in Landor to give us measureless content; Miss Austen is surely the equal of any English novelist, excepting Dickens, since her day; yet when we think of them in connection with the Georgian group, neither of them looms large. —Juliet for Ever. — "The Georgian era was an era of youth. Nearly all its writers did their great work early, and the majority of them died young. The personalities and actions of the young are certainly more attractive to mankind than those "that pertain to mature humanity. Balzac may discover the middle-aged' heroine, but she will never displace the Juliets and Gretchens in the affection of the world. "Again, the Georgians were a race of divine amateurs. Among the chiefs, Scott was the only professional author —the only one who deliberately wrote for money. Schopenhauer said that the ruin of literature came about when men found that they could make money by books. A great part of modern literature reads as if it was written to provide frocks for the authors' wives. Those who work with such ulterior motive must keep a wary eye on the market; they must cog and flatter and palter. The Georgians wrote in scorn of consecpience. They could play at piteh-and-toss with the universe, 'lhey could dare everything. "•All in all, then, I think it is tolerably certain that the Georgian outburst was the most important apparition of literary genius that the world has seen in modern times. No single figure of its group is equal to Shakespeare or Milton or Moliere or Goethe. But in the mass they surpass any but the greatest of those. Vast and various as the world's literature has become since, I doubt if, taken together, it is equal in value to the work of those few years in one country. —Modern Literature.— "For one thing, recent literature has taken a turn downward. It has largely exchanged verse for prose; it has mingled with the crowd on the levels, instead of staying with the shining ones on the hills; it has dealt very exclusively with the passive peculiarities of women, rather than with the active energies of men. If we are going to have a great literature again, it seems to me that we must think a great deal on the Georgian epoch."