Literature and History of English Literature

Literature in General
Introduction
Literature is one of Fine Arts, like Music, Dance, Painting, Sculpture, as it is meant
to give aesthetic pleasure rather than serve any utilitarian purpose. It consists of great
books which, whatever their subject, are notable for literary form or expression. It is the
aesthetic worth alone, or aesthetic worth combined with general intellectual excellence,
which entitles a book to be considered as literature.
In the realms of poetry, drama and fiction, the greatest works are selected on the basis
of aesthetic excellence or the beauty of expression. Books dealing with other subjects, as
History, Biography, Natural Science, Religion, Politics, etc. are considered as literature
for their reputation of intellectual eminence combined with aesthetic worth in the form
of style, composition and general force of presentation. This is a general definition of
literature. When we say that a book is not literature, we generally mean that it has no
aesthetic worth; while when we call a book on history, politics, religion etc., as literature,
we mean that it has got aesthetic value. This definition excludes from literature scientific
types of writing in which the writer uses language for a logical, purely intellectual
exposition of matters of fact and generalization from facts. It also excludes utilitarian
type of writing in which the writer uses language for furthering his own or other people’s
interests in the business of earning a living.
There are two types of literature—applied literature and pure literature. The two
terms can be properly explained by studying Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and
Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. The Origin of Species has certainly some literary merit in
the form of expressive power, as Darwin has communicated certain information to the
reader in an appropriate style. But in this case the expression is not so important as the
information. Darwin expressed himself for the purpose of putting his readers in
possession of a certain body of information, and thus persuading them of the cogency of
a certain line of argument. Even if the expression were clumsy, the information
nevertheless might be true and the argument reasonable. The literary quality of the book
has served a certain specific purpose, and there are two elements in the book—the merit
of Darwin’s purpose, and the merit of expressive power, which are easily
distinguishable. But these two elements cannot be distinguished in Keats’Ode on a
Grecian Urn. It gives us no information which may be true or false and no argument
which may or may not be cogent. In this case the expression satisfies us simply by
existing as expression, and not as a means to an end. Here art does take us beyond the
domain of art. This is what is called pure literature. In applied literature we have to
ignore the purpose of the writer in order to appreciate its literary value as in the case of
Darwin’s The Origin of Speciesand Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire. But in pure literature we need not exclude the author’s purpose, because here
the writer had no purpose except that the expression should exist for the mere sake of
existing itself. Ordinarily when we speak of literature, we refer to pureliterature.
 Expression thus is the fundamental thing in literature. But what does the author
express? It is his experience of life. Now as experience is the substance of literature,
everything that can be experienced by man in life for the sake of experience becomes the
subject-matter of literature. Thus the scope of literature is illimitable; and wherever
there is life, there is the possibility of pure experience, and so of literature. This
experience can be intellectual as well as emotional—the main criterion is that it must be
satisfying in itself, and not cater for something beyond and outside it. In applied
literature the experience of the author has to be excluded or transformed into something
pleasant, in order to enjoy it; in pure literature experience is expressed as enjoyable
merely by virtue of being expressed.
But the mere expression of experience is not enough; it has to be communicated to
the reader. Literature communicates experience. In other words, the experience which
lived in the author’s mind must live again in the reader’s mind. The writer has not
merely to give to the reader what he has experienced, or how the experience has been
taken, but he must give to the reader his own experience, and transplant it from his own
mind to the reader’s. In other words, the experience, whole and entire, must be
communicated to the reader. This is not easy to attain, as the writer’s experience is his
own—a part and parcel of his life. It is the very process of his own life, and by no
possibility can it be shared by another person. But the writer can do so by the power of
imagination. His experience may be actual or a sort of day-dreaming, but imagination
can transform it into something, as a whole, to the reader. By means of his imagination
the writer can continue the existence of his experience and communicate it to the reader
as if he has recently plucked it out of the flux of life.
In order to achieve this the writer must arouse the same imagination in his reader,
and control it in such a manner that the reader may also imitate that experience. This he
achieves by means of words which should act as symbols of his experience, so that it can
be properly represented to the reader. The writer must translate his experience in such
symbolic equivalence of language, that the symbol may be translated back again by the
reader’s imagination into a similar experience. It is here that the skill of the artist lies;
and his highest artistic power is called into play, because the medium of language at his
disposal is limited, while there is no limit to the possibility of imaginative experience.
His language must not only express his experience, but also represent the same
experience to the reader. The writer has to rely on his reader’s ability to respond to what
his language can only suggest, and for this he must have the sense of language. In fact, it
is this sense of language which distinguishes a literary artist from his fellows.

Relation of Literature to Life

There is an intimate connection between literature and life. It is, in fact, life which is
the subject matter of literature. Life provides the raw material on which literature
imposes an artistic form. Literature, as we defined in the previous section, is the
communication of the writer’s experience of life. But this connection between literature
and life is not so simple as it seems. This problem has been discussed by some of the
greatest literary critics of the world, and their conclusions have been sometimes
contradictory.
 Plato, the great Greek philosopher, was the first to give a serious thought to this
problem—the relation of literature to life. In his discussions he referred mainly to
poetry, but what he said about poetry can be equally applied to literature as a whole. He
regarded poetry as a mere ‘imitation’ of life, and thus he condemned the poets. His
opposition to poetry was based on his theory of knowledge. According to him, true
reality consists in the ideas of things, of which individual objects are but reflections or
imitations. For example, when we say a black dog, a good dog, a lame dog etc., we are
comparing the dog which we actually see with the ideal dog, our idea of the dog, which is
the true, unchanging reality, while the dogs which we name as black, good, lame etc. are
mere reflections and imitations of that reality. Thus the poet, who imitates those objects
which are themselves imitations of reality, is obviously producing something, which is
still further removed from ultimate reality. Plato developed this argument first with
reference to the painter. Painting is an imitation of a specific object or group of objects,
and if it is nothing but that, if reality lies not in apprehending reality, the painter is not
doing anything particularly valuable. Just as the painter only imitates what he sees and
does not know how to make or to use what he sees (he could paint a bed, but not make
it), so the poet imitates reality without necessarily understanding it. Poetry or literature
as a whole is an imitation of imitation and thus twice removed from truth.
There is an obvious error in Plato’s reasoning. Being too much of a philosopher and
moralist, he could not see clearly the relation between literature and life. He is right
when he says that the poet produces something which is less than reality it purports to
represent, but he does not perceive that he also creates something more than reality.
This error was corrected by Plato’s pupil, Aristotle. In Poetics he undertook to examine
the nature and qualities of imaginative literature with a view to demonstrating that it is
true, and not false as Plato had shown it. He agreed with Plato that poetry is an
imitation of reality, but according to him, this imitation is the objective representation
of life in literature or, in other words, the imaginative reconstruction of life. Poetry is
thus not connected with the outside world in the simple and direct fashion supposed by
Plato. The poet first derives an inspiration from the world by the power of his
imagination; the art of poetry then imitates this imaginative inspiration in language.
The art of poetry or literature as a whole exists to give shape and substance to a certain
kind of imaginative impulse; the existence of the art implies the existence of the
impulse. Now it is just possible to imagine life exactly as it is; but the exciting thing is to
imagine life as it might be, and it is then that imagination becomes an impulse capable
of inspiring poetry. This is true even in the case of what we call realism in literature; it is
true even when the life imagined was originally an actuality of some highly exciting
nature in itself. Imagination may no more than concentrate the actuality, by dropping
out all its insignificant passages. But that will be enough to make the resultant poetry, or
literature, something different from the copy of the world which Plato’s condemnation
assumed it to be. This was Aristotle’s reply to Plato. Art or literature is not a slavish
imitation of reality twice removed from truth. Presenting as it must do individual men
or women in the trappings and circumstances of life, it does not leave them there, but
pierces to what is significant in action and character, expressing through their words
and action that is true for all human nature—the poet’s truth, the universal truth. The
poet is concerned with truth—but not the truth of the annalist, the historian, or the
photographer. The poet’s business is not to write of events that have happened, but of
what may happen, of things that are possible in the light of probability or necessity. For
this reason poetry is a more philosophical, a more serious thing than history. For whilst
history deals with the particular only—this event or that event—poetry deals with the
universal. The poet selects from life according to the principle of poetic unity and poetic
truth. He seeks to draw out what is relevant and representative, and to present it
harmoniously, in a self-contained situation. The truth with which he deals is not that
which the anatomist may lay bare on the dissecting-table, but that which a poet divines
and translates.
Aristotle, thus, met Plato’s charge that poetry is imitation of an imitation by
showing that the poet, by concerning himself with fundamental probabilities rather
with casual actualities, reaches more deeply into reality than the annalist or historian.
Sir Philip Sidney, who next took up the question of the relation of literature to life also
refuted Plato’s contention that literature is a mere imitation of an imitation. According
to him, the poet does not imitate, but creates; it is the reader who imitates what the poet
creates. Taking his material from the actual world, the poet creates an ideal world by
means of his imagination. ForSidney the ideal world of the poet is of value because it is a
better world than the real world and it is presented in such a way that the reader is
stimulated to try and imitate it in his own practice.
The problem of literature’s relation to life was next taken up by Dryden who pointed
out that imaginative literature gives us a ‘just and lively’ image of human nature by
representing its ‘passions and humours’. This point was further developed by Dr.
Johnson who expressed the view that the poet ‘holds up a mirror to nature”. According
to him, “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representation of general
nature.” The way to please the greatest number over the longest period of time, which is
the duty of imaginative literature, is to provide accurate pictures of nature. Explaining
his view that the poet is the illuminator of human nature Dr. Johnson wrote:
“The business of the poet is to examine, not the individual, but the species… He
must exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features as recall the
original to every mind, and must neglect the minute discriminations, which one may
have remarked and another have neglected, for those characteristics which are alike
obvious to vigilance and carelessness.
“But the knowledge of nature is only half the task of a poet; he must be acquainted
likewise with all the modes of life. His character requires that he estimates the
happiness and misery of every condition, observe the power of all the passions in all
their combinations, and trace the changes of the human mind, as they are modified by
various institutions and accidental influences of climate or custom, from the
sprightliness of fancy to the despondence of decrepitude. He must divert himself of the
prejudices of his age or country; he must consider right and wrong in their abstracted
and variable state; he must regard present laws and their opinions and rise to general
and transcendental truths, which will always, be the same. He must, therefore, content
himself with the slow progress of his name, condemn the applause of his own time, and
commit his claims to the justice of posterity. He must write as the interpretator of
nature and the legislator of mankind and consider himself as presiding over the
thoughts and manners of future generations, as being superior to time and place.”
 According to Dr. Johnson, the poet must know the manners and customs of men of
all times and conditions, not because it is his duty to make vivid to the reader the
different ways in which men hove lived and behaved, but so that he is not taken in by
surface differences and is able to penetrate to the common humanity underlying there.
Walter Pater, a critic of the later nineteenth century, who discussed the relation of
literature and life in detail, remarked in his essay on “Style”: “Just as in proportion as
the writer’s aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the
world, not of mere fact, but his sense of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art; and
good art in proportion to the truth of his presentment of that sense.”
Thus, according to Pater, the literary artist does not give us a photographic
‘imitation’ of reality, but a transcription of his vision of it. It is from reality or life from
which the artist starts, but he tries to reconstruct it when he would ‘see it steadily and
see it whole’.
Taking into consideration the views of Plato, Aristotle, Sidney, Dryden, Johnson and
Pater, we conclude that the notion that literature is not concerned with real life is
wrong. All great pieces of literature are ‘true to life’. But the literary artist is not content
to ‘hold the mirror upto nature’, because his business, as Matthew Arnold has pointed
out, is a ‘criticism, of life’. He concentrates on those characteristics and aspects of life
which are permanent, but which might easily pass unobserved. He clutches at anything
which promises some permanence among what is always fleeting. That is why he gives
us a picture of reality which is more characteristic of life than anything which we
discover by our own day-to-day observation. The images which we are creating by our
own observation of life at every moment of our working experience are hazy, half-
finished and unrelated. It is the literary artist who finishes them, makes them clear and
puts them in their wider setting, and to that extent makes life less obscure, because he
knows more about life than anyone can know without regarding life with his eyes.

The Functions of Literature

Critics have been discussing from very early times about the function or functions of
literature. Though they differ among themselves regarding the other functions of
literature, they are all agreed on one point—that the main function of literature is to
entertain the readers, or, in other words, to give them pleasure. Longinus was the first
critic to lay down his thesis that loftiness or sublimity in literature has its end-ecstasy,
transport, ‘lifting out of onself”.

The value of a work of literature can be assessed, according to Longinus, by

introspection on the part of the reader or hearer: if he is carried away, transported,
moved to ecstasy by the grandeur and passion of the work, then the work is good. The
Greek word which it has become traditional to translate as sublime in English means
literally height or elevation, and Longinus, in his essay On The Sublime, refers to those
qualities in a work of literature which instantaneously create in the reader a sense of
being carried to new heights of passionate experience; sublimity is the greatest of all
literary virtues, the one which makes a work, whatever its minor defects, truly
impressive. The ultimate function of literature, and its ultimate justification, is to be
sublime, and to have on its readers the effect of ecstasy or transport that sublimity has.
The sublime effect of literature, for Longinus, is attained not by argument, but by
revelation, or illumination. Its appeal is not through the reason, but what we should call
imagination. Its effect upon the mind is immediate, like a flash of lightning upon the
eye.
Sidney voiced the opinion of Longinus when he said that the chief function of
literature is to “move” “I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas,” he declared,
“that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet”. Dryden was the next critic
who cleared away the ancient stumbling block of criticism—the doctrine that the aim of
the writer is to instruct or “make men better in some respect”. He asserted that the aim
of the writer is, not to teach, but to please, and he distinguished between literature
which is art and literature which is didactic. Instruction may result from the reading of
poetry, but it is not the end: for ‘poesy only instructs as it delights”. Referring to the
function of literature to delight and to move, De Quincey made the distinction between
the literature of knowledge, and the literature of power—“The function of the first is to
teach” the function of the second is to move.”
Besides giving pleasure or entertaining or moving the readers, literature is supposed
to have other functions as well. One important function is to heighten the awareness of
the reader to certain aspects of life. The dramatic poetry of the Greeks, the works of
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were created for festival and ceremonial occasions.
They reminded the great concourse of Athenian citizens of the traditional gods and
heroes of history. They were a civic drama expressive of the place and power of the
Greek City States and suggested that past history and the powers above them were with
them. In the original sense of the word they were ‘political’. The outcome was to
heighten the awareness of the Greek citizen to what were then regarded as significant
aspects of Greek city life. Again, if we look at the ballad writers and singers at a later
date, we see that in their own way and in their own times, in traditional fashion, each
celebrated events of social significance or the so-called ‘heroic’ exploits. They brought
news, recounted history, and reconstructed the past of which they had learnt by word of
mouth passed on from generation to generation. Their original purpose was to entertain
and to receive payment for it; but seen in retrospect their effect, their function was then
regarded as significant and of importance. The same is the case with all great works of
literature; they make us aware of the various aspects of life which lay hidden from us.
After reading Hamlet, Macbeth, King Learwe begin to understand more about life and
its intricate problems than we could do before.
Thus the main functions of literature are to entertain and give pleasure to the
reader, and to heighten his awareness of certain aspects of life. Besides these two
primary functions, literature also performs three subsidiary functions—‘propaganda,’
‘release’ and ‘escape.’ Propaganda literature’ must be distinguished from mere
propaganda in which there is nothing creative. The writer of mere propaganda is simply
concerned to popularize facts, ideas, and emotions with which he is familiar. But
propaganda that is literature is a creative influence irradiating and transforming the
writer’s experience. The idea to be propagated is still alive and growing in his mind. It is
this living and growing idea which the artist communicates to his reader and thereby
transforms his whole attitude to life. He can do so by the direct method of exposition
and exhortation, as Ruskin did, or the indirect method of fiction like Dickens’.
‘Release literature’ is that in which the dominant motive of the writer is simply the
assuagement of starved needs, the release of pent-up forces in the personality.
Romances, detective stories, thrillers, poems etc. which are written with such originality
of perception and expression that they have a quickening effect on the reader, belong to
this category. Literature of the higher sort which is dominated by ‘release’ may be
wholesome for the writer and the reader, as it effects purgation or purification.
Literature also provides ‘escape’ from the grim realities of life, and many people
read to escape boredom. The higher type of literature helps the reader to escape from
trivial reality into significant reality.
To sum up, the primary functions of literature are to delight the reader, and
heighten his awareness of life. The subsidiary functions are ‘propaganda’, ‘release’ and
‘escape’; but they are subordinated to the primary creative functions of literature.

Literature and Society

Literature is intimately related to society. Viewed as a whole, a body of literature is
part of the entire culture of a people. The characteristic qualities that distinguish the
literature of one group from that of another, derive from the characteristic qualities of
that group. Its themes and problems emerge from group activities and group situations,
and its significance lies in the extent to which it expresses and enriches the totality of
culture. It is an integral part of entire culture, tied by a tissue of connections with every
other element in the culture.

Society influences literature in many ways, and the connections of literature with
society are integral and pervasive. In fact, the range for social influences on literature is
as broad as the entire range of operative social forces: the prevailing system of social
organization—including the class structure, the economic system, the political
organization and the deeply rooted institutions; the dominant ideas; the characteristic
emotional tone; the sense of the past and then pattern of the contemporary realities.
There is nothing in the compass of social life that does not play its part—small or large,
directly or by deflection, giving literature the impress of its surroundings.
The relation between literature and society is highly complex, and it is very difficult
to determine which element of society has exerted what influence on literature. We
cannot, therefore, afford to isolate a single element in society—whether economic or
ideological—and assign to it a causal role in the final determination of literature. The
whole of the social process—including material, conceptual, emotional and institutional
elements—may be regarded as containing the potential influences determining the
direction and character of literature of a period. In each period in the history of a nation,
a certain social situation is brought into the area of operative influence, which is
different from any other social situation. The writer of that period selects those elements
of that social situation which have managed to produce an impact on him, and weaves
them into a pattern which is compatible with his own standards of art and his view of
human life.
A very fine example of the effect of social conditions on the literature of the period is
provided by the literature of Shakespeare’s time. The thing that strikes every reader to-
day, is the difference between the vivid Elizabethan drama—which, in its best examples,
stands still as nobly as on its first day, speaking directly to us, and appearing
imperishable on account of its psychological vitality and true representation of life—and
the poetic literature, or the narrative literature, of the same period, which in spite of the
poetic talent it reveals, seems to us centuries older, because it lives in a world of ideas
that no longer has anything in common with our own. The main reason for this is that
the determining sociological factors differ in two cases. Pure literature was dominated at
the time by the social group of the aristocracy. Any one who wished to get his works
printed had to seek the patronage of a great lord; anyone who wished to secure any
return from the printing secured it only in the form of the gracious presents made in
return for enthusiastic and fulsome dedications. The poets of that epoch largely
obtained their sustenance in their patron’s castles, where they did not occupy a place of
honour, and were considered among the servants.
Thus Spenser, the greatest poet of that age, says of his greatest work, The Faery
Queene, that its aim is “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle
discipline”. The didactic tendency aimed at by him has only an aristocratic world in
view. Quite different was the position of the theatre in that period. The Elizabethan
playwright was no longer dependent on the benevolence of a single patron. It is true that
the various companies of actors described themselves as in the service of great
aristocrats, but this was no more than a formality rendered necessary by certain
provisions of law.
The influence on literature of the social power of the aristocratic group, restricted to
some extent only in the theatre, continued plainly in English literature down to the
eighteenth century. Only then did a real reading public develop on a wider scale. In
place of patron came the publisher, who for a long time used to fleece the writer. It was
only in the nineteenth century that the writer could liberate himself from the oppressive
and humiliating dependence on the great, and win for him the dignity of independence.
Thus we see that the sociological conditions exert a great influence on the writer.
But the writer is not only influenced by society: he influences it also. Literature not
merely reproduces life, but also shapes it. People may model their lives upon the pattern
of fictional heroes and heroines. They have made love, committed crimes and suicide
according to great books like Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther and Dumas’The Three
Musketeers. Addison, by means of his satirical writings, changed, to some extent, the
manners of his society; and Dickens’ novels incited reforms of debtor’s prisons, boys’
schools, and poor houses.
Literature is a social activity. Every civilised society has its literature. Greek society
and Roman society left their distinctive imprint upon their literatures. Their pattern of
literary development was interwoven with the fabric of their societies. It was born with
them, reached its greatest height with them, and faded out with them on their collapse.
 When we study the modern writers, we find that it is correct that they are expressing
their own individual awareness to life through their work, and that naturally they are
applying their special technique to those things that seem vital to them. All this is the
case, but it is also true that they are producing a social document. They are not only
bringing to light the ideas, feelings, emotions and judgments of human beings they
describe, including themselves, but they are also exhibiting for future readers what
writers regarded as of vital importance in their own day.

Literature and Morality

There are two schools of thought holding opposite views about Literature or Art in
general. The view of the moralists, philosophers and Puritans is that the writer does, and
inevitably does, influence the lives and character of his readers; and therefore he should
try to be a good influence. The view of aesthetes, who believe in the theory of Art for
Art’s sake, is that, on the contrary, the writer cannot influence his readers; or,
alternatively, that he can, but must never try. For them literature is wine. Only its
pleasure-value matters.

The theory of Art for Art’s sake came into prominence in the nineteenth century
inFrance. Its important champion was Gautier who believed that Art is not merely
amoral, but anti-moral. Flaubert, a great novelist ofFrance, who also believed in this
theory, remarked: “No great poet has ever drawn conclusions”. Baudelaire, another
great writer, pronounced: “Poetry has no end beyond itself. If a poet has followed a
moral end, he has diminished his poetic force and the result is most likely to be bad.”
In England the theory of Art for Art’s sake did not move so fast or so far as inFrance,
though it went quite far enough. It was started by Swinburne, but the most important
figure was Walter Pater, who could claim to be the major prophet of English
Aestheticism. In his Studies in the History of the Renaissance, he made a significant
remark: “Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills
or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual
excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us—for that moment only. Not the fruit
of experience, but experience itself is the end”. Pater’s heir was Oscar Wilde, who went a
good deal further. He remarked: “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book.
Books are well written or badly written; that is all;” “No artist has ethical sympathies. An
ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism;” “All art is quite useless.”
On the other hand, the protagonists of the theory that Literature or Art has a moral
purpose are of a far larger number than those who believe in the Art for Art’s sake
theory, and in fact it is the former who at present hold the field. Plato and Aristotle both
lay emphasis on the moral value of literature. Sir Philip Sidney in his Apologie for
Poetrie argued that the value of creative literature lies in the fact that by adding
emotional appeal to the finer human qualities, it can do more to make men finer than
the philosophers can. Spenser wrote The Faery Queene in order to “fashion a gentleman
or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline”. Milton wrote Paradise Lost with a
view to “justifying the ways of God to man”. Dryden, a great poet and critic, expressed
his view of the moral value of literature. He remarked: “Delight is the chief, if not the
only end of poesy…The first rule for heroic or dramatic poet is to lay down to himself
what that precept of morality shall be which he would insinuate into the people.”
Dr. Johnson seems to fluctuate in his view about the moral value of literature. From
Shakespeare, he thought, one might collect ‘a system of civil and economical prudence”,
and yet, he feels, Shakespeare “seems to write without any moral purpose”. But one
sentence of Johnson summarises the truth admirably: “The only end of writing is to
enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” Endurance, of course,
involves qualities of characters.
In the Romantic period Shelley remarked: “Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton are
philosophers of the loftiest power”. Wordsworth emphasised the didactic element in
literature when he remarked: “I am nothing if not a teacher”. Keats also, who was a
worshipper of Beauty, wrote in Sleep and Poetry, that the great end of poesy is
that it should be a friend
To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of men.
And in Hyperion he said that only those can be true poets “to whom the miseries of
the world are miseries, and will not let them rest”.
In the Victorian period Matthew Arnold made a slight concession to the ethical
demands of his age by defining poetry as the “criticism of life”; but Ruskin was the most
emphatic in his view of the moral value of Art and Literature. According to him Art in
the higher sense is supremely useful, in that it enables man to fulfill his real function,
which is to be “the witness of the glory of God and to advance that glory by his
reasonable obedience and resultant happiness.”
Another great writer of the nineteenth century who laid great stress on the moral
aspect of Art and Literature was Tolstoy. According to him Art is “a means of union
among men, joining them together in the same feeling, and indispensable for the life
and progress towards well-being of individuals and humanity”. Some twentieth century
writers have followed Tolstoy’s views in a milder form. H. G. Wells remarked that the
writer should class himself “not with the artists, but with the teachers, the priests, and
the prophets”.

Bernard Shaw remarked: “Art for Art’s sake means merely success for Money’s
sake…Good art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the
effort.” Mr. Somerset Maugham is another modern writer who belongs to this group. He
remarked: “The value of art is not in beauty, but in good action…Little as I like the
deduction, I cannot but accept it; and this is that the work of art must be judged by its
fruits, and if these are not good, it is valueless.”
If we look at this problem dispassionately, and weigh the arguments on both sides,
we find that there is an element of exaggeration on both sides. The main purpose of
literature, as we have already pointed out, is to give aesthetic pleasure, but it is wrong to
say that literature should be amoral or anti-moral. On the other hand, the business of
the literary artist is not to teach, but to exhibit. “Life ought to be like that,” says the
moralist. “Life looks like that”, says the artist. Having had his intuition and being
satisfied with that, the artist has no other duty except that of expressing it as perfectly as
he can and communicating it to others. But we admit that moral considerations cannot
fail to enter into the subject-matter of every artist who is handling life and character. A
moral issue may characterise the theme which has been chosen—as it does in Hamlet,
in Macbeth, and in most of the great tragedies of the world. Characters will often be
lovable or the reverse according to the manner in which their moral attributes have been
sympathetically treated. Morality being one of the principal issues in life belongs to the
very fibre and texture of all literature. It cannot be otherwise, for life is its subject-
matter.

Literature and the Writers’ Personality

Every work of literature is intimately connected with the personality of the author
who produces it. There is always a man behind a book, and the judging of the quality of
literature becomes vital to us if we try to think of the author not as a mysterious
disembodied force but rather as a man who wrote to satisfy needs and to resolve
difficulties which are common to us. Literature does not grow by spontaneous
combustion; it is the product of men and women who wrote it out of their lives. They
were real persons of flesh and blood who loved and worked and agonized as men have
done in all ages.

Expressing the view that every book is a reflection of the personality of the author,
Matthew Arnold wrote: “What is really precious and inspiring in all that we get from
literature, except the sense of an immediate contact with genius itself? Objects could
never be described except for the purpose of describing the feelings which they arouse in
us, for language ought to represent at the same moment the thing and the author, the
subject and the thought. Everything that we say ought to be dyed with us. This process is
a long one, but it immortalizes us. For language is formed to convey not the object alone,
but likewise the character, mood and intentions of the person who is representing it.”
Goethe has also expressed at many places in his writings the danger of forsaking the
inner light, of relying on something external, something which is not the language of the
heart’s experience, the danger, or rather the impossibility, of severing expression from
personality. Thus he remarked: “The style of a writer is a true impression of his inner
self: If any one could write a clear style, let him first have clearness in his soul, and if
anyone would write a great style, let him see to it that he has a great character.” And
again, “It is the personal character of the writer that brings his meaning before his
readers, not the artifices of his talent.” And in another passage he says: “The artist must
work from within outwards, seeing that, make what contortions he will, he can only
bring to light his own individuality…Only in this way is it possible to be original.”
Expressing the same view that in every great work of literature there must be fidelity
to the personal vision of the artist, Pater wrote in his Essay on Style: “Truth—there can
be no merit, no craft at all without that. And further, all Beauty is in the long run
only fineness of truth, and what we call expression, the finer accommodation of truth to
that vision within.” And again, “To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural member,
the entire composition song or essay, a similar unit with the subject and with itself—
style is in the right way when it tends towards that. All depends on the original unity, the
vital wholeness and identity, of the initiatory apprehension or view.”
What Matthew Arnold, Goethe and Pater have expressed may be called the personal
or subjective view of literature, which lays emphasis on the personal factor in all
literature. But there are some critics who hold the opposite view—the impersonal or
objective view about literature i.e., the personality of the author should have nothing to
do with his writings; the author who like Shakespeare expresses the personality of
others is greater than the one like Byron who projects his own personality in his
writings. Flaubert, the great champion of this view, wrote in one of his letters: “There
are two kinds of poets. The greatest, the rare ones, the true masters, sum up humanity:
they are not preoccupied with themselves or their own passions, they put their own
personality into the background in order to absorb themselves in the personalities of
others; they reproduce the universe, which is reflected in their works with all its glitter
and variety and multiplicity…There are others who have only to create, and they achieve
harmony; to weep, and they move us; to think about themselves, and they are immortal.
Possibly if they were to do anything else they might not go quite so far; but while they
lack breadth, they have ardour and dash: in short, if they had been born with a different
temperament probably they would not have had genius at all. Byron was of this family,
Shakespeare of other: who can tell me what Shakespeare loved, betrayed, or felt.”
There is no doubt that Shakespeare hides his personality in his plays, but what
about his Sonnets which are by universal admission among the most intimate of
personal utterances? If we look at this problem of the relation of the personality of the
author to his works, we come to the conclusion that ultimately they must bear the
impress of his personality in some form or the other. Though Milton wrote Paradise
Lost with the purpose of subduing to the strict form of Epic, all things in heaven and
earth and hell, he could not rule out his own personality out of it. In fact it becomes a
reflection of his own personality. We find in this great poem Milton as Man, Milton as
Archangel, Milton as God—but the most characteristic voice of all is that of Milton as
Satan, truly a double personality.
‘Is this the region, this the soil, the clime’,
Said then the lost Archangel, ‘this the seat
That we must change for Heaven? This mournful gloom
For that celestial light?
Farewell, happy fields
Where joy forever dwells: hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor; one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’
Romanticism and Classicism
There are two distinctive tendencies in the history of literature—Classic and
Romantic. At some period in the history of Literature one tendency dominates, and then
it is followed by the predominance of the other tendency, and in this manner they
appear alternately, one following the other. In the history of English literature, the
Elizabethan period may be called the first Romantic period, dominated by Marlowe,
Shakespeare, Spenser and others. It was followed by the Classical period in the
eighteenth century whose important literary figures were Dryden, Pope, Addison, Swift
and Dr. Johnson.
The later part of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century,
whose prominent poets were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, was
dominated by the romantic tendency, and hence it is called the Romantic period. During
the Victorian period in English the romantic tendency continued to dominate literature,
but the twentieth century literature shows signs of the Classical tendency.
The distinctive symptoms of Classicism are: belief in reason: emphasis on the
civilized, modern and sophisticated modes of life; interest in urban society;
preoccupation with human nature; love for mundane actuality; satirical tendency;
expression of accepted moral truth; realistic recognition of things as they are; belief in
good and evil; acceptance of established religious and philosophic creeds; attachment to
normal, generic abstraction; impersonal objectivity; interest in public themes; emphasis
on formal correctness, and the ideal of order; popularity of poetry of prose statement;
use of formal poetic diction; self—conscious traditionalism; and rational sobriety of
Latin literature. On the other hand, the symptoms of Romanticism are: belief in
feelings, imagination and intuition; emphasis on the primitive, medieval and natural
modes of life; interest in rural solitude; pre-occupation with the aesthetic and spiritual
values of external nature; love for visions of the mysterious, the ideal and the infinite;
tendency of myth-making; discovery of the beauty that is truth; faith in progress; belief
in man and goodness and individual speculation and revelation; attachment to concrete
particulars; subjectivism; interest in private themes; emphasis on individual
expressiveness, and the ideal of intensity, popularity of image and symbol: use of
common language; self-conscious originality and romantic Hellenism.
But the terms Classical and Romantic are not so strictly opposed to each other as
has been pointed out; in fact, one grows out of the other and they overlap each other. In
reality both the tendencies are present in great works of literature, though in varying
proportions. In this connection Pater has observed in his book. Appreciations: “The
words, classical and romantic, although like many other critical expressions, sometimes
abused by those who have understood them too vaguely or too absolutely, yet define two
real tendencies in the history of art and literature. Used in an exaggerated sense, to
express a greater opposition between these tendencies than really exists, they have at
times tended to divide people of taste into opposite camps. The terms classical, fixed as
it is, to a well-defined literature is clear indeed; but then it has often been used in a hard,
and merely scholastic sense, by the praisers of what is old and accustomed, at the
expense of what is new, by critics who would never have discovered for themselves the
charm of any work, whether new or old, who value what is old, in art or literature, for its
accessories, and chiefly for the conventional authority that has gathered about it.
“And as the term classical has been used in a too absolute, and therefore, in a
misleading sense, so the term romantic has been used much too vaguely, in various
accidental senses. The sense in which Scott is called a romantic writer is chiefly this:
that in opposition to the literary tradition of the eighteenth century, he loved strange
adventure, and sought it in the Middle Ages…But the romantic spirit, is, in reality, ever
present, an enduring principle, in the artistic temperament; and the qualities of thought
and style which, that and other similar uses of the word romantic really indicate, are
indeed but symptoms of a very continuous and widely working influence…
“The charm of what is classical, in art or literature, is that of a well-known tale, to
which we can, nevertheless listen over and over again, because it is told so well. To the
absolute beauty of its artistic form, is added the accidental, tranquil charm of
familiarity…It is character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed element in every
artistic organization, it is the addition of curiosity to the desire of beauty, that
constitutes the romantic temper…The essential elements, then, of the romantic spirit are
curiosity and the love of beauty; and it is only as an illustration of these qualities that it
seeks the Middle Ages; because, in the overcharged atmosphere of Middle Ages, there
are unworked sources of romantic effect, to be won, by strong imagination, out of things
unlikely and remote…
“But however false these two tendencies may be opposed by critics, or
exaggerated by artists themselves, they are tendencies really at work at all
times in art, moulding it, with the balance sometimes a little on one side,
sometimes a little on the other, generating, respectively as the balance
inclines on this side or that, two principles, two traditions in art and
literature.”
Classical and Romantic tendencies, when carried to the extreme do much damage to
genuine literature. The former degenerates into rigid formalism and slavish obedience
to rules, which suppress and undermine all initiative and originality of the writer, as was
the case during the eighteenth century in England. The latter turns itself into license,
extravagance and lack of restraint, which lead to chaos, as it happened in the later
phases of Elizabethan romanticism. The best type of literature combines in equal
proportion both the Classical and Romantic elements. In it we find strength exercised
with restraint, disciplined imagination, perfect harmony, originality in conformity with
the highest standard of literary excellence and, above all, ‘nothing too much’. Great
writers like Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, exhibit in their work both the tendencies
harmoniously blended.
English Literature: Its Background and Development
Introduction
English Literature is one of richest literatures of the world. Being the literature of a
great nation which, though inhabiting a small island off the west coast of Europe, has
made its mark in the world on account of her spirit of adventure, perseverance and
tenacity, it reflects these characteristics of a great people.
It has vitality, rich variety and continuity. As literature is the reflection of society, the
various changes which have come about in English society, from the earliest to the
modern time, have left their stamp on English literature. Thus in order to appreciate
properly the various phases of English literature, knowledge of English Social and
Political History is essential. For example, we cannot form a just estimate of Chaucer
without taking into account the characteristics of the period in which he was living, or of
Shakespeare without taking proper notice of the great events which were taking place
during the reign of Elizabeth. The same is the case with other great figures and
important movements in English literature.
When we study the history of English literature from the earliest to modern times,
we find that it has passed through certain definite phases, each having marked
characteristics. These phases may be termed as ‘Ages’ or ‘Periods’, which are named
after the central literary figures or the important rulers of England. Thus we have the
‘Ages’ of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Johnson. Wordsworth,
Tennyson, Hardy; and, on the other hand, the Elizabethan Age, the Jacobean Period, the
Age of Queen Anne, the Victorian Age, the Georgian Period. Some of these phases are
named after certain literary movements, as the Classical Age, the Romantic Age; while
others after certain important historial eras, as the Medieval Period, Anglo-Saxon
Period, Anglo-Norman Period. These literary phases are also named by some literary
historians after the centuries, as the Seventeenth Century Literature, Eighteenth
Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Twentieth Century Literature.
These ‘Ages’ and ‘Periods’ naturally overlap each other, and they are not to be followed
strictly, but it is essential to keep them in mind in order to follow the growth of English
literature, and its salient and distinctive characteristics during the various periods of its
development.
Now let us have a critical survey of the background and development of English
literature from the earliest times upto the present age.

The Anglo-Saxon Or Old-English Period (670-1100)

The earliest phase of English literature started with Anglo-Saxon literature of the
Angles and Saxons (the ancestors of the English race) much before they occupied
Britain. English was the common name and tongue of these tribes. Before they occupied
Britain they lived along the coasts of Sweden and Denmark, and the land which they
occupied was called Engle-land. These tribes were fearless, adventurous and brave, and
during the later years of Roman occupation of Britain, they kept the British coast in
terror. Like other nations they sang at their feasts about battles, gods and their ancestral
heroes, and some of their chiefs were also bards. It was in these songs of religion, wars
and agriculture, that English poetry began in the ancient Engle-land while Britain was
still a Roman province.

Though much of this Anglo-Saxon poetry is lost, there are still some fragments left.
For example, Widsith describes continental courts visited in imagination by a far-
wandering poet; Waldhere tells how Walter of Aquitaine withstood a host of foes in the
passes of the Vosges; the splendid fragment called The Fight at Finnesburg deals with
the same favourite theme of battle against fearful odds; and Complaint of Deordescribes
the disappointment of a lover. The most important poem of this period is Beowulf. It is a
tale of adventures of Beowulf, the hero, who is an champion an slayer of monsters; the
incidents in it are such as may be found in hundreds of other stories, but what makes it
really interesting and different from later romances, is that is full of all sorts of
references and allusions to great events, to the fortunes of kings and nations. There is
thus an historical background.
After the Anglo-Saxons embraced Christianity, the poets took up religious themes as
the subject-matter of their poetry. In fact, a major portion of Anglo-Saxon poetry is
religious. The two important religious poets of the Anglo-Saxon period were Caedmon
and Cynewulf. Caedmon sang in series the whole story of the fate of man, from the
Creation and the Fall to the Redemption and the Last Judgment, and within this large
framework, the Scripture history. Cynewulf’s most important poem is the Crist, a
metrical narrative of leading events of Christ’s ministry upon earth, including his return
to judgment, which is treated with much grandeur.
Anglo-Saxon poetry is markedly different from the poetry of the next period—
Middle English or Anglo-Norman period—for it deals with the traditions of an older
world, and expresses another temperament and way of living; it breathes the influence
of the wind and storm. It is the poetry of a stern and passionate people, concerned with
the primal things of life, moody, melancholy and fierce, yet with great capacity for
endurance and fidelity.
The Anglo-Saxon period was also marked by the beginning of English prose.
Through the Chronicles, which probably began in King Alfred’s time, and through
Alfred’s translations from the Latin a common available prose was established, which
had all sorts of possibilities in it. In fact, unlike poetry, there was no break in prose of
Anglo-Saxon period and the Middle English period, and even the later prose in
England was continuation of Anglo-Saxon prose. The tendency of the Anglo-Saxon
prose is towards observance of the rules of ordinary speech, that is why, though one has
to make a considerable effort in order to read verse of the Anglo-Saxons, it is
comparatively easy to understand their prose. The great success of Anglo-Saxon prose is
in religious instructions, and the two great pioneers of English prose were Alfred the
Great, the glorious king of Wessex, who translated a number of Latin Chronicles in
English, and Aelfric, a priest, who wrote sermons in a sort of poetic prose.
 The Angles and Saxons first landed in England in the middle of the fifth century,
and by 670 A.D. they had occupied almost the whole of the country. Unlike the Romans
who came as conquerors, these tribes settled in England and made her their permanent
home. They became, therefore, the ancestors of the English race. The Anglo-Saxon
kings, of whom Alfred the Great was the most prominent, ruled till 1066, when Harold,
the last of Saxon kings, was defeated at the Battle of Hastings by William the Conqueror
of Normandy, France. The Anglo-Saxon or Old English Period in English literature,
therefore, extends roughly from 670 A.D. to 1100 A.D.
As it has been made clear in the First Part of this book that the literature of any
country in any period is the reflection of the life lived by the people of that country in
that particular period, we find that this applies to the literature of this period. The
Angles and Saxons combined in themselves opposing traits of character—savagery and
sentiment, rough living and deep feeling, splendid courage and deep melancholy
resulting from thinking about the unanswered problem of death. Thus they lived a rich
external as well as internal life, and it is especially the latter which is the basis of their
rich literature. To these brave and fearless fighters, love of untarnished glory, and happy
domestic life and virtues, made great appeal. They followed in their life five great
principles—love of personal freedom, responsiveness to nature, religion, love for
womanhood, and struggle for glory. All these principles are reflected in their literature.
They were full of emotions and aspirations, and loved music and songs. Thus we read
in Beowulf:
Music and song where the heroes sat—
The glee—wood rang, a song uprose
When Hrothgar’s scop gave the hall good cheer.
The Anglo Saxon language is only a branch of the great Aryan or Indo-European
family of languages. It has the same root words for father and mother, for God and man,
for the common needs and the common relations of life, as we find in Sanskrit, Iranian,
Greek and Latin. And it is this old vigorous Anglo-Saxon language which forms the basis
of modern English.

Middle-English Or Anglo-Norman Period (1100-1500)

The Normans, who were residing in Normandy (France) defeated the Anglo-Saxon
King at the Battle of Hastings (1066) and conquered England.
The Norman Conquest inaugurated a distinctly new epoch in the literary as well as
political history of England. The Anglo-Saxon authors were then as suddenly and
permanently displaced as the Anglo-Saxon king.
The literature afterwards read and written by Englishmen was thereby as completely
transformed as the sentiments and tastes of English rulers. The foreign types of
literature introduced after the Norman Conquest first found favour with the monarchs
and courtiers, and were deliberately fostered by them, to the disregard of native forms.
No effective protest was possible by the Anglo-Saxons, and English thought for centuries
to come was largely fashioned in the manner of the French. Throughout the whole
period, which we call the Middle English period (as belonging to the Middle Ages or
Medieval times in the History of Britain) or the Anglo-Norman period, in forms of
artistic expression as well as of religious service, the English openly acknowledged a
Latin control.
It is true that before the Norman Conquest the Anglo-Saxons had a body of native
literature distinctly superior to any European vernacular. But one cannot deny that
the Normans came to their land when they greatly needed an external stimulus. The
Conquest effected a wholesome awakening of national life. The people were suddenly
inspired by a new vision of a greater future. They became united in a common hope. In
course of time the Anglo-Saxons lost their initial hostility to the new comers, and all
became part and parcel of one nation. The Normans not only brought with them soldiers
and artisans and traders, they also imported scholars to revive knowledge, chroniclers to
record memorable events, minstrels to celebrate victories, or sing of adventure and love.
The great difference between the two periods—Anglo-Saxon period and Anglo-
Norman period, is marked by the disappearance of the old English poetry. There is
nothing during the Anglo-Norman period like Beowulf or Fall of the Angels. The later
religious poetry has little in it to recall the finished art of Cynewulf. Anglo-Saxon poetry,
whether derived from heathendom or from the Church, has ideas and manners of its
own; it comes to perfection, and then it dies away. It seems that Anglo-Saxon poetry
grows to rich maturity, and then disappears, as with the new forms of language and
under new influences, the poetical education started again, and so the poetry of the
Anglo-Norman period has nothing in common the Anglo-Saxon poetry.
The most obvious change in literary expression appears in the vehicle employed. For
centuries Latin had been more or less spoken or written by the clergy in England. The
Conquest which led to the reinvigoration of the monasteries and the tightening of the
ties with Rome, determined its more extensive use. Still more important, as a result of
foreign sentiment in court and castle, it caused writings in the English vernacular to be
disregarded, and established French as the natural speech of the cultivated and the
high-born. The clergy insisted on the use of Latin, the nobility on the use of French; no
one of influence saw the utility of English as a means of perpetuating thought, and for
nearly three centuries very few works appeared in the native tongue.
In spite of the English language having been thrown into the background, some
works were composed in it, though they echoed in the main the sentiments and tastes of
the French writers, as French then was the supreme arbiter of European literary style.
Another striking characteristic of medieval literature is its general anonymity. Of the
many who wrote the names of but few are recorded, and of the history of these few we
have only the most meagre details. It was because originality was deplored as a fault,
and independence of treatment was a heinous offence in their eyes.
(a) The Romances
The most popular form of literature during the Middle English period was the
romances. No literary productions of the Middle Ages are so characteristic, none so
perennially attractive as those that treat romantically of heroes and heroines of by-gone
days. These romances are notable for their stories rather than their poetry, and they, like
the drama afterwards, furnished the chief mental recreation of time for the great body of
the people. These romances were mostly borrowed from Latin and French sources. They
deal with the stories of King Arthur, The War of Troy, the mythical doings of
Charlemagne and of Alexander the Great.
(b) The Miracle and Morality Plays
In the Middle English period Miracle plays became very popular. From the growth
and development of the Bible story, scene by scene, carried to its logical conclusion, this
drama—developed to an enormous cycle of sacred history, beginning with the creation
of man, his fall and banishment from the Garden of Eden and extending through the
more important matters of the Old Testament and life of Christ in the New to the
summoning of the quick and the dead on the day of final judgment. This kind of drama
is called the miracle play—sometimes less correctly the mystery play—and it flourished
throughout England from the reign of Henry II to that of Elizabeth (1154-1603).
Another form of drama which flourished during the Middle Ages was the Morality
plays. In these plays the uniform theme is the struggle between the powers of good and
evil for the mastery of the soul of man. The personages were abstract virtues, or vices,
each acting and speaking in accordance with his name; and the plot was built upon their
contrasts and influences on human nature, with the intent to teach right living and
uphold religion. In a word, allegory is the distinguishing mark of the moral plays. In
these moral plays the protagonist is always an abstraction; he is Mankind, the Human
Race, the Pride of Life, and there is an attempt to compass the whole scope of man’s
experience and temptations in life, as there had been a corresponding effort in the
Miracle plays to embrace the complete range of sacred history, the life of Christ, and the
redemption of the world.
(c) William Langland (1332 ?...?)
One of the greatest poets of the Middle Ages was William Langland, and his poem, A
Vision of Piers the Plowman holds an important place in English literature. In spite of
its archaic style, it is a classic work in English literature. This poem, which is a satire on
the corrupt religious practices, throws light on the ethical problems of the day. The
character assumed by Langland is that of the prophet, denouncing the sins of society
and encouraging men to aspire to a higher life. He represents the dissatisfaction of the
lower and the more thinking classes of English society, as Chaucer represents the
content of the aristocracy and the prosperous middle class. Although Langland is
essentially a satiric poet, he has decided views on political and social questions. The
feudal system is his ideal; he desires no change in the institution of his days, and he
thinks that all would be well if the different orders of society would do their duty. Like
Dante and Bunyan, he ennobles his satire by arraying it in a garb of allegory; and he is
intensely real.
(d) John Gower (1325?—1408)
Gower occupies an important place in the development of English poetry. Though it
was Chaucer who played the most important role in this direction, Gower’s contribution
cannot be ignored. Gower represents the English culmination of that courtly medieval
poetry which had its rise in France two or three hundred years before. He is a great
stylist, and he proved that English might compete with the other languages which had
most distinguished themselves in poetry. Gower is mainly a narrative poet and his most
important work is Confession Amantis, which is in the form of conversation between the
poet and a divine interpreter. It is an encyclopaedia of the art of love, and satirises the
vanities of the current time. Throughout the collection of stories which forms the major
portion of Confession Amantis, Gower presents himself as a moralist. Though Gower
was inferior to Chaucer, it is sufficient that they were certainly fellow pioneers, fellow
schoolmasters, in the task of bringing England to literature. Up to their time, the literary
production of England had been exceedingly rudimentary and limited. Gower, like
Chaucer, performed the function of establishing the form of English as a thoroughly
equipped medium of literature.
(e) Chaucer (1340?...1400)
It was, in fact, Chaucer who was the real founder of English poetry, and he is rightly
called the ‘Father of English Poetry’. Unlike the poetry of his predecessors and
contemporaries, which is read by few except professed scholars, Chaucer’s poetry has
been read and enjoyed continuously from his own day to this, and the greatest of his
successors, from Spenser and Milton to Tennyson and William Morris, have joined in
praising it. Chaucer, in fact, made a fresh beginning in English literature. He
disregarded altogether the old English tradition. His education as a poet was two-fold.
Part of it came from French and Italian literatures, but part of it came from life. He was
not a mere bookman, nor was he in the least a visionary. Like Shakespeare and Milton,
he was, on the contrary, a man of the world and of affairs.
The most famous and characteristic work of Chaucer is the Canterbury Tales, which
is a collection of stories related by the pilgrims on their way to the shrine of Thomas
Becket at Canterbury. These pilgrims represent different sections of contemporary
English society, and in the description of the most prominent of these people in
the Prologue Chaucer’s powers are shown at their very highest. All these characters are
individualized, yet their thoroughly typical quality gives unique value to Chaucer’s
picture of men and manners in the England of his time.
The Canterbury Tales is a landmark in the history of English poetry because here
Chaucer enriched the English language and metre to such an extent, that now it could be
conveniently used for any purpose. Moreover, by introducing a variety of highly-finished
characters into a single action, and engaging them in an animated dialogue, Chaucer
fulfilled every requirement of the dramatist, short of bringing his plays on the stage.
Also, by drawing finished and various portraits in verse, he showed the way to the
novelists to portray characters.
Chaucer’s works fall into three periods. During the first period he imitated French
models, particularly the famous and very long poem Le Roman de la Rose of which he
made a translation—Romaunt of the Rose.This poem which gives an intimate
introduction to the medieval French romances and allegories of courtly love, is the
embryo out of which all Chaucer’s poetry grows. During this period he also wrote the
Book of the Duchess, an elegy, which in its form and nature is like the Romaunt of the
Rose; Complaint unto Pity, a shorter poem and ABC, a series of stanzas religious in
tone, in which each opens with a letter of the alphabet in order.
 The poems of the second period (1373-84) show the influence of Italian literature,
especially of Dante’s Divine Comedy and Boccaccio’s poems. In this period he wroteThe
Parliament of Fowls, which contains very dramatic and satiric dialogues between the
assembled birds; Troilus and Criseyde, which narrates the story of the Trojan prince
Troilus and his love for a damsel, Creseida;The Story of Griselda, in which is given a
pitiful picture of womanhood; and The House of Fame, which is a masterpiece of comic
fantasy, with a graver undertone of contemplation of human folly.
Chaucer’s third period (1384-90) may be called the English period, because in it he
threw off foreign influences and showed native originality. In the Legend of Good
Woman he employed for the first time the heroic couplet. It was during this period that
he wrote The Canterbury Tales, his greatest poetic achievement, which places us in the
heart of London. Here we find his gentle, kindly humour, which is Chaucer’s greatest
quality, at its very best.
Chaucer’s importance in the development of English literature is very great because
he removed poetry from the region of Metaphysics and Theology, and made it hold as
“twere the mirror up to nature”. He thus brought back the old classical principle of the
direct imitation of nature.
(f) Chaucer’s Successors
After Chaucer there was a decline in English poetry for about one hundred years.
The years from 1400 to the Renaissance were a period bereft of literature. There were
only a few minor poets, the imitators and successors of Chaucer, who are called the
English and Scottish Chaucerians who wrote during this period. The main cause of the
decline of literature during this period was that no writer of genius was born during
those long years. Chaucer’s successors were Occieeve, Lydgate, Hawes, Skelton
Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas. They all did little but copy him, and they represent on
era of mediocrity in English literature that continues up to the time of the Renaissance.

The Renaissance Period (1500-1600)

The Renaissance Period in English literature is also called the Elizabethan
Period or the Age of Shakespeare. The middle Ages in Europe were followed by the
Renaissance. Renaissance means the Revival of Learning, and it denotes in its broadest
sense the gradual enlightenment of the human mind after the darkness of the Middle
Ages.
With the fall of Constantinople in 1453 A.D. by the invasion of the Turks, the Greek
scholars who were residing there, spread all over Europe, and brought with them
invaluable Greek manuscripts. The discovery of these classical models resulted in the
Revival of Learning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The essence of this
movement was that “man discovered himself and the universe”, and that “man, so long
blinded had suddenly opened his eyes and seen”. The flood of Greek literature which the
new art of printing carried swiftly to every school in Europe revealed a new world of
poetry and philosophy. Along with the Revival of Learning, new discoveries took place in
several other fields. Vascoda Gama circumnavigated the earth; Columbus
discovered America; Copernicus discovered the Solar System and prepared the way for
Galileo. Books were printed, and philosophy, science, and art were systematised. The
Middle Ages were past, and the old world had become new. Scholars flocked to the
universities, as adventurers to the new world of America, and there the old authority
received a death blow. Truth only was authority; to search for truth everywhere, as men
sought for new lands and gold and the Fountain of Youth—that was the new spirit,
which awoke in Europe with the Revival of Learning.
The chief characteristic of the Renaissance was its emphasis on Humanism, which
means man’s concern with himself as an object of contemplation. This movement was
started in Italy by Dante, Petrarch and Baccaccio in the fourteenth century, and from
there it spread to other countries ofEurope. In England it became popular during the
Elizabethan period. This movement which focused its interest on ‘the proper study of
mankind’ had a number of subordinate trends. The first in importance was the
rediscovery of classical antiquity, and particularly of ancient Greece. During the
medieval period, the tradition-bound Europe had forgotten the liberal tone of old Greek
world and its spirit of democracy and human dignity. With the revival of interest in
Greek Classical Antiquity, the new spirit of Humanism made its impact on the Western
world. The first Englishman who wrote under the influence of Greek studies was Sir
Thomas More. His Utopia, written in Latin, was suggested by Plato’s Republic. Sir
Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesie accepted and advocated the critical rules of the
ancient Greeks.
The second important aspect of Humanism was the discovery of the external
universe, and its significance for man. But more important than this was that the writers
directed their gaze inward, and became deeply interested in the problems of human
personality. In the medieval morality plays, the characters are mostly personifications:
Friendship, Charity, Sloth, Wickedness and the like. But now during the Elizabethan
period, under the influence of Humanism, the emphasis was laid on the qualities which
distinguish one human being from another, and give an individuality and uniqueness.
Moreover, the revealing of the writer’s own mind became full of interest. This tendency
led to the rise of a new literary form—the Essay, which was used successfully by Bacon.
In drama Marlowe probed down into the deep recesses of the human passion. His
heroes, Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus and Barabas, the Jew of Malta, are possessed of
uncontrolled ambitions. Shakespeare, a more consummate artist, carried Humanism to
perfection. His genius, fed by the spirit of the Renaissance, enabled him to see life
whole, and to present it in all its aspects.
It was this new interest in human personality, the passion for life, which was
responsible for the exquisite lyrical poetry of the Elizabethan Age, dealing with the
problems of death, decay, transitoriness of life etc.
Another aspect of Humanism was the enhanced sensitiveness to formal beauty, and
the cultivation of the aesthetic sense. It showed itself in a new ideal of social conduct,
that of the courtier. An Italian diplomat and man of letters, Castiglione, wrote a treatise
entitled Il Cortigiano (The Courtier) where he sketched the pattern of gentlemanly
behaviour and manners upon which the conduct of such men as Sir Phillip Sidney and
Sir Walter Raleigh was modelled. This cult of elegance in prose writing produced the
ornate style called Euphuismby Lyly. Though it suffered from exaggeration and
pedantry, yet it introduced order and balance in English prose, and gave it pithiness and
harmony.
Another aspect of Humanism was that men came to be regarded as responsible for
their own actions, as Casius says to Brutus inJulius Caesar:
The Fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Instead of looking up to some higher authority, as was done in The Middle Ages,
during the Renaissance Period guidance was to be found from within. Lyly wrote his
romance of Euphues not merely as an exercise in a new kind of prose, but with the
serious purpose of inculcating righteousness of living, based on self-
control. Sidney wrote his Arcadia in the form of fiction in order to expound an ideal of
moral excellence. Spenser wrote his Faerie Queene, with a view “to fashion a gentleman
or noble person in virtuous and gentle disposition”. Though we do not look for direct
moral teaching in Shakespeare, nevertheless, we find underlying his work the same
profoundly moral attitude.
(a) Elizabethan Drama
During the Renaissance Period or the Elizabethan Period, as it is popularly called,
the most memorable achievement in literature was in the field of drama. One of the
results of the humanist teaching in the schools and universities had been a great
development of the study of Latin drama and the growth of the practice of acting Latin
plays by Terence, Plautus and Seneca, and also of contemporary works both in Latin and
in English. These performances were the work of amateur actors, school boys or
students of the Universities and the Inns of Court, and were often given in honour of the
visits of royal persons or ambassadors. Their significance lies in the fact that they
brought the educated classes into touch with a much more highly developed kind of
drama, than the older English play. About the middle of the sixteenth century some
academic writers made attempts to write original plays in English on the Latin model.
The three important plays of this type are Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister, John
Still’s Grummar Gurton’s Needle, and Thomas Sackville’s Gorbuduc or Ferrex and
Porrex—the first two are comedies and last one a tragedy. All these plays are
monotonous and do not possess much literary merit.
The second period of Elizabethan drama was dominated by the “University Wits”, a
professional set of literary men. Of this little constellations, Marlowe was the central
sun, and round him revolved as minor stars, Lyly, Greene, Peele, Lodge and Nash.
Lyly (1554-1606)
The author of Euphues, wrote a number of plays, the best known of them
areCompaspe (1581), Sapho and Phao (1584),Endymion (1591), and Midas (1592),
These plays are mythological and pastoral and are nearer to the Masque (court
spectacles intended to satisfy the love of glitter and novelty) rather than to the narrative
drama of Marlowe. They are written in prose intermingled with verse. Though the verse
is simple and charming prose is marred by exaggeration, a characteristic of Euphuism.
George Peele (1558-97?)
 Formed, along with Marlowe, Greene and Nash, one of that band of dissolute young
men endeavouring to earn a livelihood by literary work. He was an actor as well as
writer of plays. He wrote some half dozen plays, which are richer in beauty than any of
his group except Marlowe. His earnest work is The Arraignment of Paris,(1584); his
most famous is David and Bathsheba (1599). The Arraignment of Paris,which contains
an elaborate eulogy of Queen Elizabeth, is really a court play of the Masque order. David
and Bathsheba contains many beautiful lines. Like Marlowe, Peele was responsible for
giving the blank verse musical quality, which later attained perfection in the deft hands
of Shakespeare.
Thomas Kyd (1558-95)
Achieved great popularity with his first work, The Spanish Tragedy, which was
translated in many European languages. He introduced the ‘blood and thunder’ element
in drama, which proved one of the attractive features of the pre-Shakespearean drama.
Though he is always violent and extravagant, yet he was responsible for breaking away
from the lifeless monotony of Gorboduc.

Robert Greene (1560-1592)

He lived a most dissolute life, and died in distress and debt. His plays
compriseOrlando Furioso, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Alphonsus King of Aragon
and George a Greene. His most effective play isFriar Bacon and Friar Bungay, which
deals partly with the tricks of the Friar, and partly with a simple love story between two
men with one maid. Its variety of interest and comic, relief and to the entertainment of
the audience. But the chief merit of the play lies in the lively method of presenting the
story. Greene also achieves distinction by the vigorous humanity of his characterisation.
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
The dramatic work of Lodge and Nash is not of much importance. Of all the
members of the group Marlowe is the greatest. In 1587 his first play Tamburlaine was
produced and it took the public by storm on account of its impetuous force, its splendid
command of blank verse, and its sensitiveness to beauty, In this play Marlowe
dramatised the exploits of the Scythian shepherd who rose to be “the terror of the
world”, and “the scourge of God”. Tamburlain was succeeded by The Tragical History
of Doctor Faustus, in which Marlowe gave an old medieval legend a romantic setting.
The story of the scholar who sells his soul to the Devil for worldly enjoyment and
unlimited power, is presented in a most fascinating manner. Marlowe’s Faustus is the
genuine incarnation of the Renaissance spirit. The Jew of Malta, the third tragedy of
Marlowe, is not so fine as Doctor Faustus, though it has a glorious opening. His last
play, Edward II, is his best from the technical point of view. Though it lacks the force
and rhythmic beauty of the earlier plays, it is superior to them on account of its rare skill
of construction and admirable characterisation.
Marlowe’s contributions to the Elizabethan drama were great. He raised the subject-
matter of drama to a higher level. He introduced heroes who were men of great strength
and vitality, possessing the Renaissance characteristic of insatiable spirit of adventure.
He gave life and reality to the characters, and introduced passion on the stage. He made
the blank verse supple and flexible to suit the drama, and thus made the work of
Shakespeare in this respect easy. He gave coherence and unity to the drama, which it
was formerly lacking. He also gave beauty and dignity and poetic glow to the drama. In
fact, he did the pioneering work on which Shakespeare built the grand edifice. Thus he
has been rightly called “the Father of English Dramatic Poetry.”
Shakespeare (1564-1616)
The greatest of all Elizabethan dramatists was Shakespeare in whose hands the
Romantic drama reached its climax. As we do not know much about his life, and it is
certain that he did not have proper training and education as other dramatists of the
period had, his stupendous achievements are an enigma to all scholars up to the present
day. It is still a mystery how a country boy, poor and uneducated, who came to London
in search of odd jobs to scrape a living, could reach such heights in dramatic literature.
Endowed with a marvellous imaginative and creative mind, he could put new life into
old familiar stories and make them glow with deepest thoughts and tenderest feelings.
There is no doubt that Shakespeare was a highly gifted person, but without proper
training he could not have scaled such heights. In spite of the meagre material we have
got about his life, we can surmise that he must have undergone proper training first as
an actor, second as a reviser of old plays, and the last as an independent dramatist. He
worked with other dramatists and learned the secrets of their trade. He must have
studied deeply and observed minutely the people he came in contact with. His dramatic
output must, therefore, have been the result of his natural genius as well as of hard work
and industry.
Besides non—dramatic poetry consisting of two narrative poems, Venice and Adonis
and The Rape of Lucrece, and 154 sonnets, Shakespeare wrote 37 plays. His work as a
dramatist extended over some 24 years, beginning about 1588 and ending about 1612.
This work is generally divided into four periods.
(i) 1577-93
This was the period of early experimental work. To this period belong the revision of
old plays as the three parts ofHenry VI and Titus Andronicus; his first comedies—Love’s
Labour Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer
Night’s Dream; his first chronicle play—Richard III; a youthful tragedy—Romeo and
Juliet.
(ii) 1594-1600
To the second period belong Shakespeare’s great comedies and chronicle plays –
Richard II, King John, The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, Part I and II, Henry V, The
Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You
Like It and Twelfth Night. These plays reveal Shakespeare’s great development as a
thinker and technician. They show the maturity of his mind and art.
(iii) 1601-1608
 To the third period belong Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies and sombre or bitter
comedies. This is his peak period characterised by the highest development of his
thought and expression. He is more concerned with the darker side of human
experience and its destructive passions. Even in comedies, the tone is grave and there is
a greater emphasis on evil. The plays of this period are—Julius Caesar, Hamlet, All’s
Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure; Troilus and Cressida, Othello, King Lear,
Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens.
(iv) 1608-1612
To the fourth period belong the later comedies or dramatic romances. Here the
clouds seem to have been lifted and Shakespeare is in a changed mood. Though the
tragic passions still play their part as in the third period, the evil is now controlled and
conquered by good. The tone of the plays is gracious and tender, and there is a decline in
the power of expression and thought. The plays written during this period are—
Cymbeline, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, which were completely written in
collaboration with some other dramatist.
The plays of Shakespeare are so full of contradictory thoughts expressed so
convincingly in different contexts, that it is not possible to formulate a system of
philosophy out of them. Each of his characters—from the king to the clown, from the
most highly intellectual to the simpleton—judges life from his own angle, and utters
something which is so profound and appropriate, that one is astonished at the
playwrigt’s versatility of genius. His style and versification are of the highest order. He
was not only the greatest dramatist of the age, but also the first poet of the day, and one
of the greatest of all times. His plays are full of a large number of exquisite songs, and
his sonnets glowing with passion and sensitiveness to beauty reach the high water mark
of poetic excellence in English literature. In his plays there is a fine commingling of
dramatic and lyric elements. Words and images seem to flow from his brain
spontaneously and they are clothed in a style which can be called perfect.
Though Shakespeare belonged to the Elizabethan Age, on account of his universality
he belongs to all times. Even after the lapse of three centuries his importance, instead of
decreasing, has considerably increased. Every time we read him, we become more
conscious of his greatness, like the charm of Cleopatra,
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety.
the appeal of Shakespeare is perennial. His plays and poetry are like a great river of
life and beauty.
Ben Jonson (1573-1637)
Ben Jonson a contemporary of Shakespeare, and a prominent dramatist of his
times, was just the opposite of Shakespeare. Jonson was a classicist, a moralist, and a
reformer of drama. In his comedies he tried to present the true picture of the
contemporary society. He also made an attempt to have the ‘unities’ of time, place and
action in his plays. Unlike Shakespeare who remained hidden behind his works, Jonson
impressed upon the audience the excellence of his works and the object of his plays. He
also made his plays realistic rather than romantic, and introduced ‘humours’ which
mean some peculiar traits in character, which obsess an individual and govern all this
faculties.
Jonson was mainly a writer of comedies, and of these the four which attained
outstanding success are Volpone; The Silent Woman; The Alchemist; and Bartholomew
Fair. Two other important comedies of his, which illustrate his theory of ‘humour’ are—
Every Man in His Humour and Every Man Out of Humour. The Alchemist, which is the
most perfect in structure, is also the most brilliant realistic Elizabethan comedy.
Volpone is a satirical study of avarice on the heroic scale. Bartholomew Fair presents a
true picture of Elizabethan ‘low life’. The Silent Woman, which is written in a lighter
mood, approaches the comedy of manners. Ben Jonson wrote two tragic plays. Sejanus
and Cataline on the classical model, but they were not successful.
Ben Jonson was a profound classical scholar who wanted to reform the Elizabethan
drama, and introduce form and method in it. He resolved to fight against cheap
romantic effects, and limit his art within the bounds of reason and common sense. He
was an intellectual and satirical writer unlike Shakespeare who was imaginative and
sympathetic. His chief contribution to dramatic theory was his practice to construct
plays based on ‘humour’, or some master passion. In this way he created a new type of
comedy having its own methods, scope and purpose. Though he drew his principles
from the ancients, he depicted the contemporary life in his plays in a most realistic
manner. In this way Jonson broke from the Romantic tendency of Elizabethan drama.
(b) Elizabethan Poetry
Poetry in the Renaissance period took a new trend. It was the poetry of the new age
of discovery, enthusiasm and excitement. Under the impact of the Renaissance, the
people of England were infused with freshness and vigour, and these qualities are clearly
reflected in poetry of that age.
The poetry of the Elizabethan age opens with publications of a volume known
asTottel’s Miscellany (1577). This book which contained the verse of Sir Thomas Wyatt
(1503?-1542) and the Earl of Surrey, (1577?-1547) marks the first English poetry of the
Renaissance. Wyatt and Surrey wrote a number of songs, especially sonnets which
adhered to the Petrarcan model, and which was later adopted by Shakespeare. They also
attempted the blank verse which was improved upon by Marlowe and then perfected by
Shakespeare. They also experimented a great variety of metres which influenced
Spenser. Thus Wyatt andSurrey stand in the same relation to the glory of Elizabethan
poetry dominated by Spenser and Shakespeare, as Thomson and Collins do to Romantic
poetry dominated by Wordsworth and Shelley.
Another original writer belonging to the early Elizabethan group of poets who were
mostly courtiers, was Thomas Sackville (1536-1608). In his Mirror for Magistrates he
has given a powerful picture of the underworld where the poet describes his meetings
with some famous Englishmen who had been the victims of misfortunes. Sackville,
unlike Wyatt and Surrey, is not a cheerful writer, but he is superior to them in poetic
technique.
 The greatest of these early Elizabethan poets was Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586). He
was a many-sided person and a versatile genius—soldier, courtier and poet—and
distinguished himself in all these capacities. Like Dr. Johnson and Byron he stood in
symbolic relation to his times. He may be called the ideal Elizabethan, representing in
himself the great qualities of that great age in English history and literature. Queen
Elizabeth called him one of the jewels of her crown, and at the age of twenty-three he
was considered ‘one of the ripest statesmen of the age’.
As a literary figure, Sidney made his mark in prose as well as in poetry. His prose
works are Arcadia and the Apologie forPoetrie (1595). With Arcadia begins a new kind
of imaginative writing. Though written in prose it is strewn with love songs and sonnets.
The Apologie for Poetrie is first of the series of rare and very useful commentaries which
some English poets have written about their art. His greatest work, of course, is in
poetry—the sequence of sonnets entitled Astrophel and Stella, in which Sidney
celebrated the history of his love for Penelope Devereax, sister of the Earl of Essex,- a
love which came to a sad end through the intervention of Queen Elizabeth with whom
Sidney had quarrelled. As an example of lyrical poetry expressing directly in the most
sincere manner an intimate and personal experience of love in its deepest passion, this
sonnet sequence marks an epoch. Their greatest merit is their sincerity. The sequence of
the poet’s feelings is analysed with such vividness and minuteness that we are convinced
of their truth and sincerity. Here we find the fruit of experience, dearly bought:
Desire; desire; I have too dearly bought
With price of mangled mind. Thy worthless ware.
Too long, too long, asleep thou hast me brought,
Who should my mind to higher prepare.
Besides these personal and sincere touches, sometimes the poet gives a loose reign
to his imagination, and gives us fantastic imagery which was a characteristic of
Elizabethan poetry.
Spenser (1552-1599)
The greatest name in non-dramatic Elizabethan poetry is that of Spenser, who may
be called the poet of chivalry and Medieval allegory. The Elizabethan Age was the age of
transition, when the time-honoured institutions of chivalry, closely allied to Catholic
ritual were being attacked by the zeal of the Protestant reformer and the enthusiasm for
latters of the European humanists. As Spenser was in sympathy with both the old and
the new, he tried to reconcile these divergent elements in his greatest poetic work—The
Faerie Queene.Written in the form of an allegory, though on the surface it appears to be
dealing with the petty intrigues, corrupt dealings and clever manipulations of politicians
in the court of Elizabeth, yet when seen from a higher point of view, it brings before us
the glory of the medieval times clothed in an atmosphere of romance. We forget the
harsh realities of life, and lifted into a fairy land where we see the knights performing
chivalric deeds for the sake of the honour Queen Gloriana. We meet with shepherds,
sylvan nymphs and satyrs, and breathe the air of romance, phantasy and chivalry.
Though Spenser’s fame rests mainly onThe Faerie Queene, he also wrote some other
poems of great merit. His Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) is a pastoral poem written in an
artificial classical style which had become popular in Europe on account of the revival of
learning. Consisting of twelve parts, each devoted to a month of the year, here the poet
gives expression to his unfruitful love for a certain unknown Rosalind, through the
mouth of shepherds talking and singing. It also deals with various moral questions and
the contemporary religious issues. The same type of conventional pastoral imagery was
used by Spenser in Astrophel (1586), an elegy which he wrote on the death of Sidney to
whom he had dedicated the Calendar. Four Hymns which are characteried by
melodious verse were written by Spenser in honour of love and beauty.
His Amoretti, consisting of 88 sonnets, written in the Petrarcan manner which had
become very popular in those days under the influence of Italian literature, describes
beautifully the progress of his love for Elizabeth Boyle whom he married in 1594.
His Epithalamion is the most beautiful marriage hymn in the English language.
The greatness of Spenser as a poet rests on his artistic excellence. Though his poetry
is surcharged with noble ideas and lofty ideals, he occupies an honoured place in the
front rank of English poets as the poet of beauty, music and harmony, through which he
brought about a reconciliation between the medieval and the modern world. There is no
harsh note in all his poetry. He composed his poems in the spirit of a great painter, a
great musician. Above all, he was the poet of imagination, who, by means of his art, gave
an enduring to the offsprings of his imagination. As a metrist his greatest contribution
to English poetry is the Spenserian stanza which is admirably suited to descriptive or
reflective poetry. It is used by Thomson in The Castle of Indolence, by Keats in The Eve
of St. Agnes, by Shelley inThe Revolt of Islam and by Byron in Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage. On account of all these factors, Spenser has been a potent influence on the
English poets of all ages, and there is no exaggeration in the remark made by Charles
Lamb that “Spenser is the poets’ poet.”
(c) Elizabethan Prose
The Elizabethan period was also the period of the origin of modern English prose.
During the reign of Elizabeth prose began to be used as a vehicle of various forms of
amusement and information, and its popularity increased on account of the increased
facility provided by the printing press. Books on history, travel, adventures, and
translations of Italian stories appeared in a large number. Though there were a large
number of prose-writers, there were only two-Sidney and Lyly who were conscious of
their art, and who made solid contributions to the English prose style when it was in its
infancy. The Elizabethan people were intoxicated with the use of the English language
which was being enriched by borrowings from ancient authors. They took delight in the
use of flowery words and graceful ,grandiloquent phrases. With the new wave of
patriotism and national prestige the English language which had been previously
eclipsed by Latin, and relegated to a lower position, now came to its own, and it was
fully exploited. The Elizabethans loved decorative modes of expression and flowery
style.
John Lyly (1554-1606)
The first author who wrote prose in the manner that the Elizabethans wanted, was
Lyly, whose Euphues, popularized a highly artificial and decorative style. It was read and
copied by everybody. Its maxims and phrases were freely quoted in the court and the
market-place, and the word ‘Euphuism’ became a common description of an artificial
and flamboyant style.
The style of Euphues has three main characteristics. In the first place, the structure
of the sentence is based on antithesis and alliteration. In other words, it consists of two
equal parts which are similar in sound but with a different sense. For
example, Euphues is described as a young man “of more wit than wealth, yet of more
wealth than wisdom”. The second characteristic of this style is that no fact is stated
without reference to some classical authority. For example, when the author makes a
mention of friendship, he quotes the friendship that existed between David and
Jonathan. Besides these classical allusions, there is also an abundance of allusion to
natural history, mostly of a fabulous kind, which is its third characteristic. For example,
“The bull being tied to the fig tree loseth his tale; the whole herd of dear stand at gaze if
they smell sweet apple.”
The purpose of writing Euphues was to instruct the courtiers and gentlemen how to
live, and so it is full of grave reflections and weighty morals. In it there is also criticism
of contemporary society, especially its extravagant fashions. Though Puritanic in tone, it
inculcates, on the whole, a liberal and humane outlook.
Sidney’s Arcadia is the first English example of prose pastoral romance, which was
imitated by various English authors for about two hundred years. The story related
in Arcadia in the midst of pastoral surrounding where everything is possible, is long
enough to cover twenty modern novels, but its main attraction lies in its style which is
highly poetical and exhaustive. One word is used again and again in different senses
until its all meanings are exhausted. It is also full of pathetic fallacy which means
establishing the connection between the appearance of nature with the mood of the
artist. On the whole, Arcadia goes one degree beyond Euphues in the direction of
Sfreedom and poetry.
Two other important writers who, among others, influenced Elizabethan prose
were: Malory and Hakluyt. Malory wrote a great prose romance Morte de Arthurdealing
with the romantic treasures of the Middle Ages. It was by virtue of the simple directness
of the language, that it proved an admirable model to the prose story-tellers of the
Renaissance England. Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages and other such books describing sea
adventures were written in simple and unaffected directness. The writer was conscious
of only that he had something to tell that was worth telling.

The Puritan Age (1600-1660)

The Literature of the Seventeenth Century may be divided into two periods—The
Puritan Age or the Age of Milton (1600-1660), which is further divided into the
Jacobean and Caroline periods after the names of the ruled James I and Charles I, who
rules from 1603 to 1625 and 1625 to 1649 respectively; and the Restoration Period or the
Age of Dryden (1660-1700).
The Seventeenth Century was marked by the decline of the Renaissance spirit, and the
writers either imitated the great masters of Elizabethan period or followed new paths.
We no longer find great imaginative writers of the stature of Shakespeare, Spenser and
Sidney. There is a marked change in temperament which may be called essentially
modern. Though during the Elizabethan period, the new spirit of the Renaissance had
broken away with the medieval times, and started a new modern development, in fact it
was in the seventeenth century that this task of breaking away with the past was
completely accomplished, and the modern spirit, in the fullest sense of the term, came
into being. This spirit may be defined as the spirit of observation and of preoccupation
with details, and a systematic analysis of facts, feelings and ideas. In other words, it was
the spirit of science popularized by such great men as Newton, Bacon and Descartes. In
the field of literature this spirit manifested itself in the form of criticism, which
in England is the creation of the Seventeenth Century. During the Sixteenth Century
England expanded in all directions; in the Seventeenth Century people took stock of
what had been acquired. They also analysed, classified and systematised it. For the first
time the writers began using the English language as a vehicle for storing and conveying
facts.
One very important and significant feature of this new spirit of observation and
analysis was the popularisation of the art of biography which was unknown during the
Sixteenth Century. Thus whereas we have no recorded information about the life of such
an eminent dramatist as Shakespeare, in the seventeenth century many authors like
Fuller and Aubrey laboriously collected and chronicled the smallest facts about the great
men of their own day, or of the immediate past. Autobiography also came in the wake of
biography, and later on keeping of diaries and writing of journals became popular, for
example Pepy’s Diary and Fox’s Journal. All these new literary developments were
meant to meet the growing demand for analysis of the feelings and the intimate
thoughts and sensations of real men and women. This newly awakened taste in realism
manifested itself also in the ‘Character’, which was a brief descriptive essay on a
contemporary type like a tobacco-seller, or an old shoe-maker. In drama the portrayal of
the foibles of the fashionable contemporary society took a prominent place. In satire, it
were not the common faults of the people which were ridiculed, but actual men
belonging to opposite political and religious groups. The readers who also had become
critical demanded facts from the authors, so that they might judge and take sides in
controversial matters.
The Seventeenth Century upto 1660 was dominated by Puritanism and it may be
called the Puritan Age or the Age of Milton who was the noblest representative of the
Puritan spirit. Broadly speaking, the Puritan movement in literature may be considered
as the second and greater Renaissance, marked by the rebirth of the moral nature of
man which followed the intellectual awakening of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. Though the Renaissance brought with it culture, it was mostly sensuous and
pagan, and it needed some sort of moral sobriety and profundity which were contributed
by the Puritan movement. Moreover, during the Renaissance period despotism was still
the order of the day, and in politics and religion unscrupulousness and fanaticism were
rampant. The Puritan movement stood for liberty of the people from the shackles of the
despotic ruler as well as the introduction of morality and high ideals in politics. Thus it
had two objects—personal righteousness and civil and religious liberty. In other words,
it aimed at making men honest and free.
Though during the Restoration period the Puritans began to be looked down upon
as narrow-minded, gloomy dogmatists, who were against all sorts of recreations and
amusements, in fact they were not so. Moreover, though they were profoundly religious,
they did not form a separate religious sect. It would be a grave travesty of facts if we call
Milton and Cromwell, who fought for liberty of the people against the tyrannical rule of
Charles I, as narrow-minded fanatics. They were the real champions of liberty and stood
for toleration.
The name Puritan was at first given to those who advocated certain changes in the
form of worship of the reformed EnglishChurch under Elizabeth. As King Charles I and
his councillors, as well as some of the clergymen with Bishop Laud as their leader, were
opposed to this movement, Puritanism in course of time became a national movement
against the tyrannical rule of the King, and stood for the liberty of the people. Of course
the extremists among Puritans were fanatics and stern, and the long, protracted struggle
against despotism made even the milder ones hard and narrow. So when Charles I was
defeated and beheaded in 1649 and Puritanism came out triumphant with the
establishment of the Commonwealth under Cromwell, severe laws passed. Many simple
modes of recreation and amusement were banned, and an austere standard of living was
imposed on an unwilling people. But when we criticize the Puritan for his restrictions on
simple and innocent pleasures of life, we should not forget that it was the same very
Puritan who fought for liberty and justice, and who through self-discipline and austere
way of living overthrew despotism and made the life and property of the people of
England safe from the tyranny of rulers.
In literature of the Puritan Age we find the same confusion as we find in religion and
politics. The medieval standards of chivalry, the impossible loves and romances which
we find in Spenser and Sidney, have completely disappeared. As there were no fixed
literary standards, imitations of older poets and exaggeration of the ‘metaphysical’ poets
replaced the original, dignified and highly imaginative compositions of the Elizabethan
writers. The literary achievements of this so-called gloomy age are not of a high order,
but it had the honour of producing one solitary master of verse whose work would shed
lustre on any age or people—John Milton, who was the noblest and indomitable
representative of the Puritan spirit to which he gave a most lofty and enduring
expression.
(a) Puritan Poetry
The Puritan poetry, also called the Jacobean and Caroline Poetry during the reigns
of James I and Charles I respectively, can be divided into three parts –(i) Poetry of the
School of Spenser; (ii) Poetry of the Metaphysical School; (iii) Poetry of the Cavalier
Poets.
(i) The School of Spenser
The Spenserians were the followers of Spenser. In spite of the changing conditions
and literary tastes which resulted in a reaction against the diffuse, flamboyant, Italianate
poetry which Spenser and Sidney had made fashionable during the sixteenth century,
they preferred to follow Spenser and considered him as their master.
The most thorough-going disciples of Spenser during the reign of James I were
Phineas Fletcher (1582-1648) and Giles Fletcher (1583-1623). They were both priests
and Fellows of Cambridge University. Phineas Fletcher wrote a number of Spenserian
pastorals and allegories. His most ambitious poem The Purple Island,portrays in a
minutely detailed allegory the physical and mental constitution of man, the struggle
between Temperance and his foes, the will of man and Satan. Though the poem follows
the allegorical pattern of the Faerie Queene, it does not lift us to the realm of pure
romance as does Spenser’s masterpiece, and at times the strain of the allegory becomes
to unbearable.
Giles Fletcher was more lyrical and mystical than his brother, and he also made a
happier choice of subjects. His Christ’s Victorie and Triumph in Heaven and Earth over
and after Death (1610), which is an allegorical narrative describing in a lyrical strain the
Atonement, Temptation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Christ, is a link between the
religious poetry of Spenser and Milton. It is written in a flamboyant, diffuse style of
Spenser, but its ethical aspect is in keeping with the seventeenth century theology which
considered man as a puny creature in the divine scheme of salvation.
Other poets who wrote under the influence of Spenser were William Browne (1590-
1645). George Wither (1588-1667) and William Drummond (1585-1649).
Browne’s important poetical work is Britannia’s Pastorals which shows all the
characteristics of Elizabethan pastoral poetry. It is obviously inspired by
Spenser’sFaerie Queene and Sidney’s Arcadia as it combines allegory with satire. It is a
story of wooing and adventure, of the nymphs who change into streams and flowers. It
also sings the praise of virtue and of poets and dead and living.
The same didactic tone and lyrical strain are noticed in the poetry of George Wither.
His best-known poems are The Shepherd’s Hunting a series of personal
eulogues;Fidella an heroic epistle of over twelve hundred lines; and Fair
Virtue, the Mistress of Philarete, a sustained and detailed lyrical eulogy of an ideal
woman. Most of Wither’s poetry is pastoral which is used by him to convey his personal
experience. He writes in an easy, and homely style free from conceits. He often dwells
on the charms of nature and consolation provided by songs. In his later years Wither
wrote didactic and satirical verse, which earned for him the title of “our English
Juvenal”.
Drummond who was a Scottish poet, wrote a number of pastorals, sonnets, songs,
elegies and religious poems. His poetry is the product of a scholar of refined nature, high
imaginative faculty, and musical ear. His indebtedness to Spenser, Sidney and
Shakespeare in the matter of fine phraseology is quite obvious. The greatest and original
quality of all his poetry is the sweetness and musical evolution in which he has few rivals
even among the Elizabethan lyricists. His well-known poems are Tears on the Death of
Maliades (an elegy),Sonnets, Flowers of Sion and Pastorals.
(ii) The Poets of the Metaphysical School
 The metaphysical poets were John Donne, Herrick, Thomas Carew, Richard
Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, George Herbet and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. The leader of
this school was Donne. They are called the metaphysical poets not because they are
highly philosophical, but because their poetry is full of conceits, exaggerations,
quibbling about the meanings of words, display of learning and far-fetched similes and
metaphors. It was Dr. Johnson who in his essay on Abraham Cowley in his Lives of the
Poets used the term ‘metaphysical’. There he wrote:
“About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers
that may be termed the metaphysical poets. The metaphysical poets were
men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour: but,
unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only
wrote verses and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better
than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect that they were only
found to be verses by counting the syllables.”
Though Dr. Johnson was prejudiced against the Metaphysical school of poets, and
the above statement is full of exaggeration, yet he pointed out the salient characteristics
of this school. One important feature of metaphysical school which Dr. Johnson
mentioned was their “discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.”
Moreover, he was absolutely right when he further remarked that the Metaphysical
poets were perversely strange and strained: ‘The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by
violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and
allusions… Their wish was only to say what had never been said before”.
Dr. Johnson, however, did not fail to notice that beneath the superficial novelty of
the metaphysical poets lay a fundamental originality:
“If they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise
sometimes struck out unexpected truth; if the conceits were far-fetched,
they were often worth the carriage. To write on their plan, it was at least
necessary to read and think, No man could be born a metaphysical poet, nor
assume to dignity of a writer, by descriptions copied from descriptions, by
imitations borrowed from imitations, by traditional imagery, and volubility
of syllables.”
The metaphysical poets were honest, original thinkers. They tried to analyse their
feelings and experience—even the experience of love. They were also aware of the life,
and were concerned with death, burial descent into hell etc. Though they hoped for
immortality, they were obsessed by the consciousness of mortality which was often
expressed in a mood of mawkish disgust.
John Donne (1537-1631), the leader of the Metaphysical school of poets, had a very
chequered career until be became the Dean of St. Paul. Though his main work was to
deliver religious sermons, he wrote poetry of a very high order. His best-known works
areThe Progress of the Soul; An Anatomy of the World, an elegy; and
Epithalamium. His poetry can be divided into three parts: (1) Amorous (2) Metaphysical
(3) Satirical. In his amorous lyrics which include his earliest work, he broke away from
the Petrarcan model so popular among the Elizabethan poets, and expressed the
experience of love in a realistic manner. His metaphysical and satirical works which
from a major portion of his poetry, were written in later years. The Progress of the
Soul and Metempsychosis, in which Donne pursues the passage of the soul through
various transmigrations, including those of a bird and fish, is a fine illustration of his
metaphysical poetry. A good illustration of his satire is his fourth satire describing the
character of a bore. They were written in rhymed couplet, and influenced both Dryden
and Pope.
Donne has often been compared to Browning on account of his metrical roughness,
obscurity, ardent imagination, taste for metaphysics and unexpected divergence into
sweet and delightful music. But there is one important difference between Donne and
Browning. Donne is a poet of wit while Browning is a poet of ardent passion. Donne
deliberately broke away from the Elizabethan tradition of smooth sweetness of verse,
and introduced a harsh and stuccato method. His influence on the contemporary poets
was far from being desirable, because whereas they imitated his harshness, they could
not come up to the level of his original thought and sharp wit. Like Browning, Donne
has no sympathy for the reader who cannot follow his keen and incisive thought, while
his poetry is most difficult to understand because of its careless versification and
excessive terseness.
Thus with Donne, the Elizabethan poetry with its mellifluousness, and richly
observant imagination, came to an end, and the Caroline poetry with its harshness and
deeply reflective imagination began. Though Shakespeare and Spenser still exerted
some influence on the poets, yet Donne’s influence was more dominant.
Robert Herrick (1591-1674) wrote amorous as well as religious verse, but it is on
account of the poems of the former type—love poems, for which he is famous. He has
much in common with the Elizabethan song writers, but on account of his pensive
fantasy, and a meditative strain especially in his religious verse, Herrick is included in
the metaphysical school of Donne.
Thomas Carew (1598-1639), on whom the influence of Donne was stronger, was the
finest lyric writer of his age. Though he lacks the spontaneity and freshness of Herrick,
he is superior to him in fine workmanship. Moreover, though possessing the strength
and vitality of Donne’s verse, Carew’s verse is neither rugged nor obscure as that of the
master. His Persuasions of Love is a fine piece of rhythmic cadence and harmony.
Richard Crashaw (1613?-1649) possessed a temperament different from that of
Herrick or Carew. He was a fundamentally religious poet, and his best work is The
Flaming Heart. Though less imaginative than Herrick, and intellectually inferior to
Carew, at times Crashaw reaches the heights of rare excellence in his poetry.
Henry Vaughan (1622-1695), though a mystic like Crashaw, was equally at home in
sacred as well as secular verse. Though lacking the vigour of Crashaw, Vaughan is more
uniform and clear, tranquil and deep.
George Herbert (1593-1633) is the most widely read of all the poets belonging to the
metaphysical school, except, of course, Donne. This is due to the clarity of his expression
and the transparency of his conceits. In his religious verse there is simplicity as well as
natural earnestness. Mixed with the didactic strain there is also a current of quaint
humour in his poetry.
 Lord Herbert of Cherbury is inferior as a verse writer to his brother George Herbert,
but he is best remembered as the author of an autobiography. Moreover, he was the first
poet to use the metre which was made famous by Tennyson in In Memoriam.
Other poets who are also included in the group of Metaphysicals are Abrahanm
Cowley (1618-1667), Andrew Marvel (1621-1672) and Edmund Waller (1606-1687).
Cowley is famous for his ‘Pindaric Odes’, which influenced English poetry throughout
the eighteenth century. Marvel is famous for his loyal friendship with Milton, and
because his poetry shows the conflict between the two schools of Spenser and Donne.
Waller was the first to use the ‘closed’ couplet which dominated English poetry for the
next century.
The Metaphysical poets show the spiritual and moral fervour of the Puritans as well
as the frank amorous tendency of the Elizabethans. Sometimes like the Elizabethans
they sing of making the best of life as it lasts—Gather ye Rosebuds while ye may; and at
other times they seek more permanent comfort in the delight of spiritual experience.
(iii) The Cavalier Poets
Whereas the metaphysical poets followed the lead of Donne, the cavalier poets
followed Ben Jonson. Jonson followed the classical method in his poetry as in his
drama. He imitated Horace by writing, like him, satires, elegies, epistles and
complimentary verses. But though his verse possess classical dignity and good sense, it
does not have its grace and ease. His lyrics and songs also differ from those of
Shakespeare. Whereas Shakespeare’s songs are pastoral, popular and ‘artless’, Jonson’s
are sophisticated, particularised, and have intellectual and emotional rationality.
Like the ‘metaphysical’, the label ‘Cavalier’ is not correct, because a ‘Cavalier’ means
a royalist—one who fought on the side of the king during the Civil War. The followers of
Ben Jonson were not all royalists, but this label once used has stuck to them. Moreover,
there is not much difference between the Cavalier and Metaphysical poets. Some
Cavalier poets like Carew, Suckling and Lovelace were also disciples of Donne. Even
some typical poems, of Donne and Ben Jonson are very much alike. These are, therefore,
not two distinct schools, but they represented two groups of poets who followed two
different masters—Donne and Ben Jonson. Poets of both the schools, of course, turned
away from the long, Old-fashioned works of the Spenserians, and concentrated their
efforts on short poems and lyrics dealing with the themes of love of woman and the love
or fear of God. The Cavalier poets normally wrote about trivial subjects, while the
Metaphysical poets wrote generally about serious subjects.
The important Cavalier poets were Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling and Carew. Though
they wrote generally in a lighter vein, yet they could not completely escape the
tremendous seriousness of Puritanism. We have already dealt with Carew and Herrick
among the metaphysical group of poets. Sir John Suckling (1609-1642), a courtier of
Charles I, wrote poetry because it was considered a gentleman’s accomplishment in
those days. Most of his poems are trivial; written in doggerel verse. Sir Richard Lovelace
(1618-1658) was another follower of King Charles I. His volume of love lyrics—Lucasta—
are on a higher plane than Suckling’s work, and some of his poems like “To Lucasta’, and
“To Althea, from Prison’, have won a secure place in English poetry.
(iv) John Milton (1608-1674)
Milton was the greatest poet of the Puritan age, and he stands head and shoulders
above all his contemporaries. Though he completely identified himself with Puritanism,
he possessed such a strong personality that he cannot be taken to represent any one but
himself. Paying a just tribute to the dominating personality ofMilton, Wordsworth wrote
the famous line:
They soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.
Though Milton praised Spenser, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson as poets, he was
different from them all. We do not find the exuberance of Spenser in his poetry. Unlike
Shakespeare Milton is superbly egoistic. In his verse, which is harmonious and musical,
we find no trace of the harshness of Ben Jonson. In all his poetry,Milton sings about
himself and his own lofty soul. Being a deeply religious man and also endowed with
artistic merit of a high degree, he combined in himself the spirits of the Renaissance and
the Reformation. In fact no other English poet was so profoundly religious and so much
an artist.
Milton was a great scholar of classical as well as Hebrew literature. He was also a
child of the Renaissance, and a great humanist. As an artist he may be called the last
Elizabethan. From his young days he began to look upon poetry as a serious business of
life; and he made up his mind to dedicate himself to it, and, in course of time, write a
poem “which the world would not let die.”
Milton’s early poetry is lyrical. The important poems of the early period are: The
Hymn on the Nativity (1629); L’Allegro, Il Penseroso (1632); Lycidas (1637);
and Comus(1934). The Hymn, written when Milton was only twenty-one, shows that his
lyrical genius was already highly developed. The complementary poems, L’Allego and Il
Penseroso, are full of very pleasing descriptions of rural scenes and recreations in
Spring and Autumn. L’Allegro represents the poet in a gay and merry mood and it
paints an idealised picture of rustic life from dawn to dusk. Il Penseroso is written in
serious and meditative strain. In it the poet praises the passive joys of the contemplative
life. The poet extols the pensive thoughts of a recluse who spends his days
contemplating the calmer beauties of nature. In these two poems, the lyrical genius
of Milton is at its best.
Lycidas is a pastoral elegy and it is the greatest of its type in English literature. It
was written to mourn the death of Milton’s friend, Edward King, but it is also contains
serious criticism of contemporary religion and politics.
Comus marks the development of the Milton’s mind from the merely pastoral and
idyllic to the more serious and purposive tendency. The Puritanic element antagonistic
to the prevailing looseness in religion and politics becomes more prominent. But in spite
of its serious and didactic strain, it retains the lyrical tone which is so characteristic
of Milton’s early poetry.
Besides these poems a few great sonnets such as When the Assault was intended to
the City, also belong to Milton’s early period. Full of deeply-felt emotions, these sonnets
are among the noblest in the English language, and they bridge the gulf between the
lyrical tone of Milton’s early poetry, and the deeply moral and didactic tone of his later
poetry.
When the Civil War broke out in 1642,Milton threw himself heart and soul into the
struggle against King Charles I. He devoted the best years of his life, when his poetical
powers were at their peak, to this national movement. Finding himself unfit to fight as a
soldier he became the Latin Secretary to Cromwell. This work he continued to do till
1649, when Charles I was defeated and Common wealth was proclaimed under
Cromwell. But when he returned to poetry to accomplish the ideal he had in his
mind,Milton found himself completely blind. Moreover, after the death of Cromwell and
the coming of Charles II to the throne, Miltonbecame friendless. His own wife and
daughters turned against him. But undaunted by all these misfortunes, Milton girded up
his loins and wrote his greatest poetical works—Paradise Lost, ParadiseRegained and
Samson Agonistes.
“The subject-matter of Paradise Lostconsists of the casting out from Heaven of the
fallen angels, their planning of revenge in Hell, Satan’s flight, Man’s temptation and fall
from grace, and the promise of redemption. Against this vast backgroundMilton projects
his own philosophy of the purposes of human existence, and attempts “to justify the
ways of God to men.” On account of the richness and profusion of its imagery,
descriptions of strange lands and seas, and the use of strange geographical,
names, Paradise Lost is called the last great Elizabethan poem. But its perfectly
organized design, its firm outlines and Latinised diction make it essentially a product of
the neo—classical or the Augustan period in English Literature. InParadise Lost the
most prominent is the figure of Satan who possesses the qualities of Milton himself, and
who represents the indomitable heroism of the Puritans against Charles I.
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield
And what is else, not to be overcome.
It is written in blank verse of the Elizabethan dramatist, but it is hardened and
strengthened to suit the requirements of an epic poet.
Paradise Regained which deals with subject of Temptation in the Wilderness is
written, unlike Paradise Lost, in the form of discussion and not action. Not so sublime
as Paradise Lost, It has a quieter atmosphere, but it does not betray a decline in poetic
power. The mood of the poet has become different. The central figure is Christ, having
the Puritanic austere and stoic qualities rather than the tenderness which is generally
associated with him.
In Samson Agonistes Milton deals with an ancient Hebrew legend of Samson, the
mighty champion of Israel, now blind and scorned, working as a slave among
Philistines. This tragedy, which is written on the Greek model, is charged with the
tremendous personality of Milton himself, who in the character of the blind giant,
Samson, surrounded by enemies, projects his own unfortunate experience in the reign of
Charles II.
 Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves.
The magnificent lyrics in this tragedy, which express the heroic faith of the long
suffering Puritans, represent the summit of technical excellence achieved by Milton.
(b) Jacobean and Caroline Drama
After Shakespeare the drama in England suffered and a decline during the reigns of
James I and Charles I. The heights reached by Shakespeare could not be kept by later
dramatists, and drama in the hands of Beaumont and Fletcher and others became, what
may be called, ‘decadent’. In other words, the real spirit of the Elizabethan drama
disappeared, and only the outward show and trappings remained. For example,
sentiment took the place of character; eloquent and moving speeches, instead of being
subservient to the revelation of the fine shades of character, became important in
themselves; dreadful deeds were described not with a view to throwing light on the
working of the human heart as was done by Shakespeare, but to produce rhetorical
effect on the audience. Moreover, instead of fortitude and courage, and sterner qualities,
which were held in high esteem by the Elizabethan dramatists, resignation to fate
expressed in the form of broken accents of pathos and woe, became the main
characteristics of the hero. Whereas Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists took
delight in action and the emotions associated with it, the Jacobean and Caroline
dramatists gave expression to passive suffering and lack of mental and physical vigour.
Moreover, whereas the Elizabethan dramatists were sometimes, coarse and showed bad
taste, these later dramatists were positively and deliberately indecent. Instead of
devoting all their capacity to fully illuminating the subject in hand, they made it as an
instrument of exercising their own power of rhetoric and pedantry. Thus in the hands of
these dramatists of the inferior type the romantic drama which had achieved great
heights during the Elizabethan period, suffered a terrible decline, and when the Puritans
closed the theatres in 1642, it died a natural death.
The greatest dramatist of the Jacobean period was Ben Jonson who has already
been dealt with in the Renaissance Period, as much of his work belongs to it. The other
dramatists of the Jacobean and Caroline periods are John Marston (1575-1634); Thomas
Dekker (1570-1632); Thomas Heywood (1575-1650); Thomas Middleton (1580-1627);
Cyril Tourneur (1575-1626); John Webster (1575-1625?); John Fletcher (1579-1625);
Francis Beaumont (1584-1616); Philip Massinger (1583-1640); John Ford (1586-1639);
and James Shirley (1596-1666).
John Marston wrote in a violent and extravagant style. His melodramas Antonia
and Mellida and Antonia’s Revenge are full of forceful and impressive passages. In The
Malcontent, The Dutch Courtezan, and Parasitaster, or Fawne, Marston criticised the
society in an ironic and lyrical manner. His best play is Eastward Hoe, an admirable
comedy of manners, which portrays realistically the life of a tradesman, the inner life of
a middle class household, the simple honesty of some and the vanity of others.
Thomas Dekker, unlike Marston, was gentle and free from coarseness and cynicism.
Some of his plays possess grace and freshness which are not to be found even in the
plays of Ben Jonson. He is more of a popular dramatist than any of his contemporaries,
and he is at his best when portraying scenes from life, and describing living people with
an irresistible touch of romanticism. The gayest of his comedies isThe Shoemaker’s
Holiday, in which the hero, Simon Eyre, a jovial London shoemaker, and his shrewish
wife are vividly described. InOld Fortunates Dekker’s poetical powers are seen at their
best. The scene in which the goddess Fortune appears with her train of crowned beggars
and kings in chains, is full of grandeur. His best-known work, however, is The Honest
Whore, in which the character of an honest courtesan is beautifully portrayed. The most
original character in the play is her old father, Orlando Friscoboldo, a rough diamond.
This play is characterised by liveliness, pure sentiments and poetry.
Thomas Heywood resembles very much Dekker in his gentleness and good temper.
He wrote a large number of plays—two hundred and twenty—of which only twenty-four
are extant. Most of his plays deal with the life of the cities. In The Foure Prentices
ofLondon, with the Conquest of Jerusalem, he flatters the citizens of London. The same
note appears in his Edward VI, The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth and The Fair Maid of
the Exchange. In the Fair Maid of the West,which is written in a patriotic vein, sea
adventures and the life of an English port are described in a lively fashion. His best
known play is A Woman Kilde with Kindness,a domestic tragedy written in a simple
form, in which he gives us a gentle picture of a happy home destroyed by the wife’s
treachery, the husband’s suffering and his banishment of his wife, her remose and
agony, and death at the moment when the husband has forgiven her. Instead of the
spirit of vengeance as generally prevails in such domestic plays, it is free from any
harshness and vindictiveness. In The English Traveller we find the same generosity and
kindliness. On account of his instinctive goodness and wide piety, Heywood was called
by Lamb as a “sort of prose Shakespeare.”
Thomas Middleton, like Dekker and Heywood, wrote about the city of London. But
instead flattering the citizens, he criticised and ridiculed their follies like Ben Jonson.
He is mainly the writer of comedies dealing the seamy side of London life, and the best-
known of them are: Michaelmas Terms; A Trick to Catch the Old One, A Mad World,
My Masters, Your Five Gallants, A Chaste Mayd in Cheapside. They are full of
swindlers and dupes. The dramatist shows a keen observation of real life and admirable
dexterity in presenting it. In his later years Middleton turned to tragedy. Women
beware Women deals with the scandalous crimes of the Italian courtesan Bianca
Capello. Some tragedies or romantic dramas as A Faire Quarrel, The Changeling and
The Spanish Gipsie, were written by Middleton in collaboration with the actor William
Rowley.
Cyril Tourneur wrote mostly melodramas full of crimes and torture. His two gloomy
dramas are: The Revenge Tragedies, and The Atheist’s Tragedie, which, written in a
clear and rapid style, have an intense dramatic effect.
John Webster wrote a number of plays, some in collaboration with others. His best-
known plays are The White Devil or Vittoria Corombona and the Duchess of
Malfi which are full of physical horrors. In the former play the crimes of the Italian
beauty Cittoria Accorambona are described in a most fascinating manner. The Duchess
of Malfi is the tragedy of the young widowed duchess who is driven to madness and
death by her two brothers because she has married her steward Antonio. The play is full
of pathos and touches of fine poetry. Though a melodrama full of horror and unbearable
suffering, it has been raised to a lofty plane by the truly poetic gift of the dramatist who
has a knack of coining unforgettable phrases.
 John Fletcher wrote a few plays which made him famous. He then exploited his
reputation to the fullest extent by organising a kind of workshop in which he wrote plays
more rapidly in collaboration with other dramatists in order to meet the growing
demand. The plays which he wrote in collaboration with Francis Beaumont are the
comedies such as The Scornful Ladie and The Knight of the Burning Pestle; tragi-
comedies like Philaster; pure tragedies such as The Maides Tragedy and A King and no
King. The Knight of the Burning Pestle is the gayest and liveliest comedy of that time
and it has such freshness that it seems to have been written only
yesterday. Philaster and The Maides Tragedy are written in Shakespearean style, but
they have more outward charm than real merit.
Fletcher alone wrote a number of plays of which the best known are The Tragedies
of Vanentinian, The Tragedie of Bonduca, The Loyal Subject, The Humorous
Lieutenant. His Monsieur Thomas and The Wild Goose Chase are fine comedies.
Philip Massinger wrote tragedies asThierry and Theodoret and The False
One;comedies as The Little French Lawyer, The Spanish Curate and The Beggar’s
Bush, in collaboration with Fletcher. Massinger combined his intellectualism with
Fletcher’s lively ease. It was Massinger who dominated the stage after Fletcher. He
wrote thirty seven plays of which eighteen are extant. In his comedies we find the
exaggerations or eccentricities which are the characteristics of Ben Jonson. In his
tragedies we notice the romanticism of Fletcher. But the most individual quality of
Massinger’s plays is that they are plays of ideas, and he loves to stage oratorical debates
and long pleadings before tribunals. His best comedies are A New Way to Pay Old
Debts, The City Madamand The Guardian; his important serious plays are The Fatal
Dowry, The Duke of Millaine, The Unnatural Combat. The Main of Honour, The Bond-
Man, The Renegado, The Roman Actor, and The Picture. Of all these A New Way to
Pay Old Debts is his most successful play, in which the chief character, the usurer, Sir
Charles Overreach reminds us of Ben Jonson’s Volpone. All the plays of Massinger show
careful workmanship, though a great deterioration had crept in the art of drama at the
time when he was writing. When not inspired he becomes monotonous, but he is always
a conscientious writer.
John Ford, who was the contemporary of Massinger, collaborated with various
dramatists. He was a true poet, but a fatalist, melancholy and gloomy person. Besides
the historical play, Perkin Warbeck, he wrote The Lover’s Melancholy, ‘Tis Pity Shee’s a
Whore, The Broken Heart and Love’s Sacrifice, all of which show a skilful handling of
emotions and grace of style. His decadent attitude is seen in the delight he takes in
depicting suffering, but he occupies a high place as an artist.
James Shirley, who as Lamb called him, ‘the last of a great race’, though a prolific
writer, shows no originality. His best comedies are The Traytor, The Cardinall, The
Wedding, Changes, Hyde Park, The Gamesterand The Lady of Pleasure, which
realistically represent the contemporary manners, modes and literary styles. He also
wrote tragi-comedies or romantic comedies, such as Young Admirall, The
Opportunitie, and The Imposture. In all these Shirley continued the tradition formed by
Fletcher, Tourneur and Webster, but he broke no new ground.
 Besides these there were a number of minor dramatists, but the drama suffered a
serious setback when the theatres were closed in 1642 by the order of the Parliament
controlled by the Puritans. They were opened only after eighteen years later at the
Restoration.
(c) Jacobean and Caroline Prose
This period was rich in prose. The great prose writers were Bacon, Burton, Milton,
Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Tayler and Clarendon. English prose which had been
formed into a harmonious and pliable instrument by the Elizabethans, began to be used
in various ways, as narrative as well as a vehicle for philosophical speculation and
scientific knowledge. For the first time the great scholars began to write in English
rather than Latin. The greatest single influence which enriched the English prose was
the Authorised Version of the Bible (English translation of the Bible), which was the
result of the efforts of scholars who wrote in a forceful, simple and pure Anglo-Saxon
tongue avoiding all that was rough, foreign and affected. So the Bible became the
supreme example of earlier English prose-style—simple, plain and natural. As it was
read by the people in general, its influence was all-pervasive.
Francis Bacon (1561-1628). Bacon belongs both to the Elizabethan and Jacobean
periods. He was a lawyer possessing great intellectual gifts. Ben Jonson wrote of him,
‘no man ever coughed or turned aside from him without a loss”. As a prose-writer he is
the master of the aphoristic style. He has the knack of compressing his wisdom in
epigrams which contain the quintessence of his rich experience of life in a most
concentrated form. His style is clear, lucid but terse and that is why one has to make an
effort to understand his meaning. It lacks spaciousness, ease and rhythm. The reader
has always to be alert because each sentence is packed with meaning.
Bacon is best-known for his Essays, in which he has given his views about the art of
managing men and getting on successfully in life. They may be considered as a kind of
manual for statesmen and princes. The tone of the essay is that of a worldly man who
wants to secure material success and prosperity. That is why their moral standard is not
high.
Besides the Essays, Bacon wrote Henry VII the first piece of scientific history in the
English language; and The Advancement of Learning which is a brilliant popular
exposition of the cause of scientific investigation. Though Bacon himself did not make
any great scientific discovery, he popularized science through his writings. On account
of his being the intellectual giant of his time, he is credited with the authorship of the
plays of Shakespeare.
Robert Burton (1577-1640) is known for his The Anatomy of Melancholy, which is a
book of its own type in the English language. In it he has analysed human melancholy,
described its effect and prescribed its cure. But more than that the book deals with all
the ills that flesh is heir to, and the author draws his material from writers, ancient as
well as modern. It is written in a straightforward, simple and vigorous style, which at
times is marked with rhythm and beauty.
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) belonged entirely to a different category. With him
the manner of writing is more important than the substance. He is, therefore, the first
deliberate stylist in the English language, the forerunner of Charles Lamb and
Stevenson. Being a physician with a flair for writing, he wrote Religio Medici in which
he set down his beliefs and thoughts, the religion of the medical man. In this book,
which is written in an amusing, personal style, the conflict between the author’s intellect
and his religious beliefs, gives it a peculiar charm. Every sentence has the stamp of
Browne’s individuality. His other important prose work is Hydriotaphia or The Urn
Burial, in which meditating on time and antiquity Browne reaches the heights of
rhetorical splendour. He is greater as an artist than a thinker, and his prose is highly
complex in its structure and almost poetic in richness of language.
Other writers of his period, who were, like Browne, the masters of rhetorical prose,
were Milton, Jeremy Taylor and Clarendon. Most of Milton’s prose writings are
concerned with the questions at issue between the Parliament and the King. Being the
champion of freedom in every form, he wrote a forceful tract On the Doctrine and
Discipline of Divorce, in which he strongly advocated the right to divorce. His most
famous prose work is Areopagitica which was occasioned by a parliamentary order for
submitting the press to censorship. Here Milton vehemently criticised the bureaucratic
control over genius. Though as a pamphleteer Milton at times indulges in downright
abuse, and he lacks humour and lightness of touch, yet there is that inherent sublimity
in his prose writings, which we associate with him as a poet and man. When he touches
a noble thought, the wings of his imagination lift him to majestic heights.
Opposed to Milton, the greatest writer in the parliamentary struggle was the Earl of
Clarendon (1609-1674). His prose is stately, and he always writes with a bias which is
rather offensive, as we find in his History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England.
Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), a bishop, made himself famous by his literary sermons.
On account of the gentle charm of his language, the richness of his images, and his
profoundly human imagination, Taylor is considered as one of the masters of English
eloquence. His best prose famous book of devotion among English men and women.
Thus during this period we find English prose developing into a grandiloquent and
rich instrument capable of expressing all types of ideas—scientific, religious,
philosophic, poetic, and personal.

The Restoration Period (1660-1700)

After the Restoration in 1660, when Charles II came to the throne, there was a
complete repudiation of the Puritan ideals and way of living. In English literature the
period from 1660 to 1700 is called the period of Restoration, because monarchy was
restored in England, and Charles II, the son of Charles I who had been defeated and
beheaded, came back to England from his exile in France and became the King.
It is called the Age of Dryden, because Dryden was the dominating and most
representative literary figure of the Age. As the Puritans who were previously controlling
the country, and were supervising her literary and moral and social standards, were
finally defeated, a reaction was launched against whatever they held sacred. All
restraints and discipline were thrown to the winds, and a wave of licentiousness and
frivolity swept the country. Charles II and his followers who had enjoyed a gay life
in France during their exile, did their best to introduce that type of foppery and
looseness in England also. They renounced old ideals and demanded that English poetry
and drama should follow the style to which they had become accustomed in the gaiety
of Paris. Instead of having Shakespeare and the Elizabethans as their models, the poets
and dramatists of the Restoration period began to imitate French writers and especially
their vices.
The result was that the old Elizabethan spirit with its patriotism, its love of
adventure and romance, its creative vigour, and the Puritan spirit with its moral
discipline and love of liberty, became things of the past. For a time in poetry, drama and
prose nothing was produced which could compare satisfactorily with the great
achievements of the Elizabethans, of Milton, and even of minor writers of the Puritan
age. But then the writers of the period began to evolve something that was characteristic
of the times and they made two important contributions to English literature in the form
of realism and a tendency to preciseness.
In the beginning realism took an ugly shape, because the writers painted the real
pictures of the corrupt society and court. They were more concerned with vices rather
than with virtues. The result was a coarse and inferior type of literature. Later this
tendency to realism became more wholesome, and the writers tried to portray
realistically human life as they found it—its good as well as bad side, its internal as well
as external shape.
The tendency to preciseness which ultimately became the chief characteristic of the
Restoration period, made a lasting contribution to English literature. It emphasised
directness and simplicity of expression, and counteracted the tendency of exaggeration
and extravagance which was encouraged during the Elizabethan and the Puritan ages.
Instead of using grandiloquent phrases, involved sentences full of Latin quotations and
classical allusions, the Restoration writers, under the influence of French writers, gave
emphasis to reasoning rather than romantic fancy, and evolved an exact, precise way of
writing, consisting of short, clear-cut sentences without any unnecessary word. The
Royal Society, which was established during this period enjoined on all its members to
use ‘a close, naked, natural way of speaking and writing, as near the mathematical
plainness as they can”. Dryden accepted this rule for his prose, and for his poetry
adopted the easiest type of verse-form—the heroic couplet. Under his guidance, the
English writers evolved a style—precise, formal and elegant—which is called the classical
style, and which dominated English literature for more than a century.
(a) Restoration Poetry
John Dryden (1631-1700). The Restoration poetry was mostly satirical, realistic and
written in the heroic couplet, of which Dryden was the supreme master. He was the
dominating figure of the Restoration period, and he made his mark in the fields of
poetry, drama and prose. In the field of poetry he was, in fact, the only poet worth
mentioning. In his youth he came under the influence of Cowley, and his early poetry
has the characteristic conceits and exaggerations of the metaphysical school. But in his
later years he emancipated himself from the false taste and artificial style of the
metaphysical writers, and wrote in a clear and forceful style which laid the foundation of
the classical school of poetry in England.
 The poetry of Dryden can be conveniently divided under three heads—Political
Satires, Doctrinal Poems and The Fables. Of his political satires, Absolem and
Achitophel and The Medal are well-known. InAbsolem and Achitophel, which is one of
the greatest political satires in the English language, Dryden defended the King against
the Earl of Shaftesbury who is represented as Achitophel. It contains powerful character
studies of Shaftesbury and of the Duke of Buckingham who is represented as Zimri.The
Medal is another satirical poem full of invective against Shaftesbury and MacFlecknoe.
It also contains a scathing personal attack on Thomas Shadwell who was once a friend of
Dryden.
The two great doctrinal poems of Dryden are Religio Laici and The Hind and the
Panther. These poems are neither religious nor devotional, but theological and
controversial. The first was written when Dryden was a Protestant, and it defends the
Anglican Church. The second written when Dryden had become a Catholic, vehemently
defends Catholicism. They, therefore, show Dryden’s power and skill of defending any
position he took up, and his mastery in presenting an argument in verse.
The Fables, which were written during the last years of Dryden’s life, show no
decrease in his poetic power. Written in the form of a narrative, they entitle Dryden to
rank among the best story-tellers in verse inEngland. The Palamon and Arcite, which is
based on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, gives us an opportunity of comparing the method and
art of a fourteenth century poet with one belonging to the seventeenth century. Of the
many miscellaneous poems of Dryden,Annus Mirabilis is a fine example of his sustained
narrative power. His Alexander’s Feast is one of the best odes in the English language.
The poetry of Dryden possess all the characteristics of the Restoration period and is
therefore thoroughly representative of that age. It does not have the poetic glow, the
spiritual fervour, the moral loftiness and philosophical depth which were sadly lacking
in the Restoration period. But it has the formalism, the intellectual precision, the
argumentative skill and realism which were the main characteristics of that age. Though
Dryden does not reach great poetic heights, yet here and there he gives us passages of
wonderful strength and eloquence. His reputation lies in his being great as a satirist and
reasoner in verse. In fact in these two capacities he is still the greatest master in English
literature. Dryden’s greatest contribution to English poetry was his skilful use of the
heroic couplet, which became the accepted measure of serious English poetry for many
years.
(b) Restoration Drama
In 1642 the theatres were closed by the authority of the parliament which was
dominated by Puritans and so no good plays were written from 1642 till the Restoration
(coming back of monarchy in England with the accession of Charles II to the throne) in
1660 when the theatres were re-opened. The drama in England after 1660, called the
Restoration drama, showed entirely new trends on account of the long break with the
past. Moreover, it was greatly affected by the spirit of the new age which was deficient in
poetic feeling, imagination and emotional approach to life, but laid emphasis on prose
as the medium of expression, and intellectual, realistic and critical approach to life and
its problems. As the common people still under the influence of Puritanism had no love
for the theatres, the dramatists had to cater to the taste of the aristocratic class which
was highly fashionable, frivolous, cynical and sophisticated. The result was that unlike
the Elizabethan drama which had a mass appeal, had its roots in the life of the common
people and could be legitimately called the national drama, the Restoration drama had
none of these characteristics. Its appeal was confined to the upper strata of society
whose taste was aristocratic, and among which the prevailing fashions and etiquettes
were foreign and extravagant.
As imagination and poetic feelings were regarded as ‘vulgar enthusiasm’ by the
dictators of the social life. But as ‘actual life’ meant the life of the aristocratic class only,
the plays of this period do not give us a picture of the whole nation. The most popular
form of drama was the Comedy of Manners which portrayed the sophisticated life of the
dominant class of society—its gaiety, foppery, insolence and intrigue. Thus the basis of
the Restoration drama was very narrow. The general tone of this drama was most aptly
described by Shelley:
Comedy loses its ideal universality: wit succeeds humour; we laugh from self-
complacency and triumph; instead of pleasure, malignity, sarcasm and contempt,
succeed to sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which is
ever blasphemy against the divine beauty of life, becomes, from the very veil which it
assumes, more active if less disgusting; it is a monster for which the corruption of
society for ever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.
These new trends in comedy are seen in Dryden’s Wild Gallant (1663), Etheredge’s
(1635-1691) The Comical Revenge or Love in a Tub (1664), Wycherley’s The Country
Wife and The Plain Dealer, and the plays of Vanbrugh and Farquhar. But the most gifted
among all the Restoration dramatist was William Congreve (1670-1720) who wrote all his
best plays he was thirty years of age. He well-known comedies are Love for Love(1695)
and The Way of the World (1700).
It is mainly on account of his remarkable style that Congreve is put at the head of
the Restoration drama. No English dramatist has even written such fine prose for the
stage as Congreve did. He balances, polishes and sharpens his sentences until they shine
like chiselled instruments for an electrical experiment, through which passes the current
in the shape of his incisive and scintillating wit. As the plays of Congreve reflect the
fashions and foibles of the upper classes whose moral standards had become lax, they do
not have a universal appeal, but as social documents their value is very great. Moreover,
though these comedies were subjected to a very severe criticism by the Romantics like
Shelley and Lamb, they are now again in great demand and there is a revival of interest
in Restoration comedy.
In tragedy, the Restoration period specialised in Heroic Tragedy, which dealt with
themes of epic magnitude. The heroes and heroines possessed superhuman qualities.
The purpose of this tragedy was didactic—to inculcate virtues in the shape of bravery
and conjugal love. It was written in the ‘heroic couplet’ in accordance with the heroic
convention derived from France that ‘heroic metre’ should be used in such plays. In it
declamation took the place of natural dialogue. Moreover, it was characterised by
bombast, exaggeration and sensational effects wherever possible. As it was not based on
the observations of life, there was no realistic characterisation, and it inevitably ended
happily, and virtue was always rewarded.
 The chief protagonist and writer of heroic tragedy was Dryden. Under his leadership
the heroic tragedy dominated the stage from 1660 to 1678. His first experiment in this
type of drama was his play Tyrannic love, and in The Conquest of Granada he brought
it to its culminating point. But then a severe condemnation of this grand manner of
writing tragedy was started by certain critics and playwrights, of which Dryden was the
main target. It has its effect on Dryden who in his next play Aurangzebexercised greater
restraint and decorum, and in the Prologue to this play he admitted the superiority of
Shakespeare’s method, and his own weariness of using the heroic couplet which is unfit
to describe human passions adequately: He confesses that he:
Grows weary of his long-loved mistress Rhyme,
Passions too fierce to be in fetters bound,
And Nature flies him like enchanted ground;
What verse can do, he has performed in this
Which he presumes the most correct of his;
But spite of all his pride, a secret shame
Invades his breast at Shakespeare’s sacred name.
Dryden’s altered attitude is seen more clearly in his next play All for Love (1678).
Thus he writes in the preface: “In my style I have professed to imitate Shakespeare;
which that I might perform more freely, I have disencumbered myself from rhyme.” He
shifts his ground from the typical heroic tragedy in this play, drops rhyme and questions
the validity of the unities of time, place and action in the conditions of the English stage.
He also gives up the literary rules observed by French dramatists and follows the laws of
drama formulated by the great dramatists of England. Another important way in which
Dryden turns himself away from the conventions of the heroic tragedy, is that he does
not give a happy ending to this play.
(c) Restoration Prose
The Restoration period was deficient in poetry and drama, but in prose it holds its
head much higher. Of course, it cannot be said that the Restoration prose enjoys
absolute supremacy in English literature, because on account of the fall of poetic power,
lack of inspiration, preference of the merely practical and prosaic subjects and approach
to life, it could not reach those heights which it attained in the preceding period in the
hands of Milton and Browne, or in the succeeding ages in the hands of Lamb, Hazlitt,
Ruskin and Carlyle. But it has to be admitted that it was during the Restoration period
that English prose was developed as a medium for expressing clearly and precisely
average ideas and feelings about miscellaneous matters for which prose is really meant.
For the first time a prose style was evolved which could be used for plain narrative,
argumentative exposition of intricate subjects, and the handling of practical business.
The elaborate Elizabethan prose was unsuited to telling a plain story. The epigrammatic
style of Bacon, the grandiloquent prose of Milton and the dreamy harmonies of Browne
could not be adapted to scientific, historical, political and philosophical writings, and,
above all, to novel-writing. Thus with the change in the temper of the people, a new type
of prose, as was developed in the Restoration period, was essential.
As in the fields of poetry and drama, Dryden was the chief leader and practitioner of
the new prose. In his greatest critical work Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Dryden presented
a model of the new prose, which was completely different from the prose of Bacon,
Milton and Browne. He wrote in a plain, simple and exact style, free from all
exaggerations. His Fables and the Preface to them are fine examples of the prose style
which Dryden was introducing. This style is, in fact, the most admirably suited to strictly
prosaic purposes—correct but not tame, easy but not slipshod, forcible but not
unnatural, eloquent but not declamatory, graceful but not lacking in vigour. Of course, it
does not have charm and an atmosphere which we associate with imaginative writing,
but Dryden never professed to provide that also. On the whole, for general purposes, for
which prose medium is required, the style of Dryden is the most suitable.
Other writers, of the period, who came under the influence of Dryden, and wrote in
a plain, simple but precise style, were Sir William Temple, John Tillotson and George
Saville better known as Viscount Halifax. Another famous writer of the period was
Thomas Sprat who is better known for the distinctness with which he put the demand
for new prose than for his own writings. Being a man of science himself he published
his History of the Royal Society (1667) in which he expressed the public demand for a
popularised style free from “this vicious abundance of phrase, this trick of metaphors,
this volubility of tongue.” The Society expected from all its members “a close, natural
way of speaking—positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness bringing all things
as near the mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the language of artisans,
country men and merchants before that of wits and scholars.”
Though these writers wrote under the influence of Dryden, they also, to a certain
extent, helped in the evolution of the new prose style by their own individual approach.
That is why the prose of the Restoration period is free from monotony.
John Bunyan (1628-1688). Next to Dryden, Bunyan was the greatest prose-writer of
the period. Like Milton, he was imbued with the spirit of Puritanism, and in fact,
if Milton is the greatest poet of Puritanism, Bunyan is its greatest story-teller. To him
also goes the credit of being the precursor of the English novel. His greatest work is The
Pilgrim’s Progress. Just as Milton wrote his Paradise Lost “to justify the ways to God to
men”, Bunyan’s aim inThe Pilgrim’s Progress was” “to lead men and women into God’s
way, the way of salvation, through a simple parable with homely characters and exciting
events”. Like Milton, Bunyan was endowed with a highly developed imaginative faculty
and artistic instinct. Both were deeply religious, and both, though they distrusted
fiction, were the masters of fiction. Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s Progress have still
survived among thousands of equally fervent religious works of the seventeenth century
because both of them are masterpieces of literary art, which instruct as well please even
those who have no faith in those instructions.
In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan has described the pilgrimage of the Christian to
the Heavenly City, the trials, tribulations and temptations which he meets in the way in
the form of events and characters, who abstract and help him, and his ultimately
reaching the goal. It is written in the form of allegory. The style is terse, simple and
vivid, and it appeals to the cultured as well as to the unlettered. As Dr. Johnson
remarked: “This is the great merit of the book, that the most cultivated man cannot find
anything to praise more highly, and the child knows nothing more amusing.” The
Pilgrim’s Progress has all the basic requirements of the traditional type of English
novel. It has a good story; the characters are interesting and possess individuality and
freshness; the conversation is arresting; the descriptions are vivid; the narrative
continuously moves towards a definite end, above all, it has a literary style through
which the writer’s personality clearly emanates. The Pilgrim’s Progress is a work of
superb literary genius, and it is unsurpassed as an example of plain English.
Bunyan’s other works are: Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), a kind of
spiritual autobiography; The Holy War, which like The Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory,
but the characters are less alive, and there is less variety; The Life and Death of Mr.
Badman (1680) written in the form of a realistic novel, gives a picture of low life, and it
is second in value and literary significance to The Pilgrim’s Progress.
The prose of Bunyan shows clearly the influence of the English translation of the
Bible (The Authorized Version). He was neither a scholar, nor did he belong to any
literary school; all that he knew and learned was derived straight from the English Bible.
He was an unlettered country tinker believing in righteousness and in disgust with the
corruption and degradation that prevailed all around him. What he wrote came straight
from his heart, and he wrote in the language which came natural to him. Thus his works
born of moral earnestness and extreme sincerity have acquired true literary significance
and wide and enduring popularity. It is quite true to call him the pioneer of the modern
novel, because he had the qualities of the great story-teller, deep insight into character,
humour, pathos, and the visualising imagination of a dramatic artist.

Eighteenth-Century Literature
The Eighteenth Century in England is called the Classical Age or the Augustan Age
in literature. It is also called the Age of Good Sense or the Age of Reason. Though
Dryden belonged to the seventeenth century, he is also included in the Classical or
Augustan Age, as during his time the characteristics of his age had manifested
themselves and he himself represented them to a great extent. Other great literary
figures who dominated this age successively were Pope and Dr. Johnson, and so the
Classical Age is divided into three distinct periods—the Ages of Dryden, Pope and Dr.
Johnson. In this chapter which is devoted to the eighteenth-century literature
in England, we will deal with the Ages of Pope and Johnson. The Age of Dryden has
already been dealt with in the preceding chapter, entitled “The Restoration Period.”

The Eighteenth Century is called the Classical Age in English literature on account
of three reasons. In the first place, the term ‘classic’, refers in general, applies to writers
of the highest rank in any nation. This term was first applied to the works of the great
Greek and Roman writers, like Homer and Virgil. As the writers of the eighteenth
century in England tried to follow the simple and noble methods of the great ancient
writers, they began to be called Classical writers. In the second place, in every national
literature there is a period when a large number of writers produce works of great merit;
such a period is often called the Classical Period or Age. For example, the reign of
Augustus is called the Classical Age of Rome; and the Age of Dante is called the Classical
Age of Italian literature. As during the eighteenth century in England there was an
abundance of literary productions, the critics named it the Classical Age in English
literature. In the third place, during this period the English writers rebelled against the
exaggerated and fantastic style of writing prevalent during the Elizabethan and Puritan
ages, and they demanded that poetry, drama and prose should follow exact rules. In this
they were influenced by French writers, especially by Boileau and Rapin, who insisted
on precise methods of writing poetry, and who professed to have discovered their rules
in the classics of Horace and Aristotle. The eighteenth century is called the Classical Age,
because the writers followed the ‘classicism’ of the ancient writers, which was taken in a
narrow sense to imply fine polish and external elegance. But as the eighteenth century
writers in England followed the ancient classical writers only in their external
performance, and lacked their sublimity and grandeur, their classicism is called pseudo-
classicism i.,e., a false or sham classicism.
As the term Classical Age is, therefore, too dignified for writers of the eighteenth
century in England, who imitated only the outward trapping of the ancient classical
writers, and could not get at their inner spirit, this age is preferably called the Augustan
Age. This term was chosen by the writers of the eighteenth century themselves, who saw
in Pope, Addison, Swift, Johnson and Burke the modern parallels to Horace, Virgil,
Cicero, and other brilliant writers who made Roman literature famous during the reign
of Emperor Augustus. Of course, to term this as the Augustan Age is also not justified
because the writers of this period could not compare favourable with those of the
Augustan Age in Latin literature. But these terms—the Classical Age and the Augustan
Age-have become current, and so this age is generally called by these terms.
The eighteenth century is also called the Age of Reason or the Age of Good Sense,
because the people thought that they could stand on their own legs and be guided in the
conduct of their affairs by the light of their own reason unclouded by respect for Ancient
precedent. They began to think that undue respect for authority of the Ancients was a
great source of error, and therefore in every matter man should apply his own reason
and commonsense. Even in literature where the prespect for classical art forms and the
rules for writing in those forms gave the defenders of the Ancients a decided advantages,
critics could declare that the validity of the rules of art was derived from Reason rather
than from Ancient Authority. Though in the seventeenth century Sir Thomas Browne
who stood against Ancient Authority in secular matters, declared that in religion
“haggard and unreclaimed Reason must stoop unto the lure of Faith”. John Locke, the
great philosopher, had opined that there was no war between Faith and Reason. He
declared in An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (1690), “Faith is nothing but
a firm assent of the mind; which if it be regulated as is our duty, cannot be afforded to
anything but upon good reason; and so cannot be opposite to it.”
It was widely assumed during the eighteenth century that since every man is
competent to decide, by reference to his own reason, on any point of natural or moral
philosophy, every man becomes his own philosopher. So the need of the expert or
specialist vanishes. Moreover, as all men were assumed to be equally endowed with the
power of reasoning, it followed that when they reasoned on any given premises they
must reach the same conclusion. That conclusion was believed to have universal value
and direct appeal to everyone belonging to any race or age. Moreover, it should be the
conclusion reached by earlier generation since reason must work the same way in every
period of history. When Pope said of wit that it is “Nature to advantage dress’d, what oft
was thought but n’er so well express’d,” and when Dr. Johnson remarked about
Gray’s Elegy that “it abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with
sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo”, they were simply giving the literary
application of this belief that the highest type of art is that which can be understood
immediately, which has the widest appeal, which is free from the expression of personal
idiosyncrasy, and which deals with what is general and universal rather than with what
is individual and particular.
This was the temper of the eighteenth century. If it is called The Age of Reason or
The Age of Good Sense, it is because in this age it was assumed that in reasoning power
all men are and have always been equal. It was an age which took a legitimate pride in
modern discoveries based upon observation and reason, and which delighted to reflect
that those discoveries had confirmed the ancient beliefs that there is an order and
harmony in the universe, that it is worked on rational principles, that each created thing
has its allowed position and moved in its appointed spheres. It was, in short, an age
which implicitly believed in the Biblical saying: “God saw everything that He had made,
and behold it was very good.”
Now let us consider the literary characteristics of this age. In the previous ages
which we have dealt with, it were the poetical works which were given prominence.
Now, for the first time in the history of English literature, prose occupies the front
position. As it was the age of social, political religious and literary controversies in which
the prominent writers took an active part, and a large number of pamphlets, journals
and magazines were brought out in order to cater to the growing need of the masses who
had begun to read and take interest in these controversial matters, poetry was
considered inadequate for such a task, and hence there was a rapid development of
prose. In fact the prose writers of this age excel the poets in every respect. The graceful
and elegant prose of Addison’s essays, the terse style of Swift’s satires, the artistic
perfection of Fielding’s novels, the sonorous eloquence of Gibbon’s history, and the
oratorical style of Burke, have no equal in the poetical works of the age. In fact, poetry
also had become prosaic, because it was no longer used for lofty and sublime purposes,
but, like prose, its subject-matter had become criticism, satire, controversy and it was
also written in the form of the essay which was the common literary from: Poetry
became polished, witty and artificial, but it lacked fire, fine feelings, enthusiasm, the
poetic glow of Elizabethan Age and the moral earnestness of Puritanism. In fact, it
became more interested in the portrayal of actual life, and distrusted inspiration and
imagination. The chief literary glory of the age was, therefore, not poetry, but prose
which in the hands of great writers developed into an excellent medium capable of
expressing clearly every human interest and emotion.
The two main characteristics of the Restoration period—Realism and Precision—
were carried to further perfection during the eighteenth century. They are found in their
excellent form in the poetry of Pope, who perfected the heroic couplet, and in the prose
of Addison who developed it into a clear, precise and elegant form of expression. The
third characteristic of this age was the development of satire as a form of literature,
which resulted from the unfortunate union of politics with literature. The wings and the
Tories—members of two important political parties which were constantly contending to
control the government of the country—used and rewarded the writers for satirising
their enemies and undermining their reputation. Moreover, as a satire is concerned
mainly with finding fault with the opponents, and is destructive in its intention, it
cannot reach the great literary heights. Thus the literature of the age, which is mainly
satirical cannot be favourably compared with great literature. One feels that these
writers could have done better if they had kept themselves clear of the topical
controversies, and had devoted their energies to matters of universal import.
Another important feature of this age was the origin and development of the novel.
This new literary form, which gained great popularity in the succeeding ages, and which
at present holds the prominent place, was fed and nourished by great masters like
Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollet and others who laid its secure foundations. The
realism of the age and the development of an excellent prose style greatly helped in the
evolution of the novel during the eighteenth century.
The eighteenth century was deficient in drama, because the old Puritanic prejudice
against the theatre continued, and the court also withdrew its patronage. Goldsmith and
Sheridan were the only writers who produced plays having literary merit.
Another important thing which is to be considered with regard to the eighteenth
century literature is that it was only during the early part of it—the Age of Pope, that the
classical rules and ideals reigned supreme. In the later part of it—the Age of Johnson—
cracks began to appear in the edifice of classicism, in the form of revolts against its
ideals, and a revival of the Romantic tendency which was characteristic of the
Elizabethan period.
As the eighteenth century is a long period, it will be dealt with in different chapters
entitled—The Age of Pope, The Age of Johnson, Eighteenth Century Novel and
Eighteenth Century Drama.

The Age of Pope (1700-1744)

The earlier part of the eighteenth century or the Augustan Age in English literature
is called the Age of Pope, because Pope was the dominating figure in that period.
Though there were a number of other important writers like Addison and Swift, but
Pope was the only one who devoted himself completely to literature. Moreover, he
represented in himself all the main characteristics of his age, and his poetry served as a
model to others.

(a) Poetry
It was the Classical school of poetry which dominated the poetry of the Age of Pope.
During this age the people were disgusted with the profligacy and frivolity of the
Restoration period, and they insisted upon those elementary decencies of life and
conduct which were looked at with contempt by the preceding generation. Moreover,
they had no sympathy for the fanaticism and religious zeal of the Puritans who were out
to ban even the most innocent means of recreation. So they wanted to follow the middle
path in everything and steer clear of the emotional as well as moral excesses. They
insisted on the role of intelligence in everything. The poets of this period are deficient on
the side of emotion and imagination. Dominated by intellect, poetry of this age is
commonly didactic and satirical, a poetry of argument and criticism, of politics and
personalities.
In the second place, the poets of this age are more interested in the town, and the
‘cultural’ society. They have no sympathy for the humbler aspects of life—the life of the
villagers, the shepherds; and no love for nature, the beautiful flowers, the songs of birds,
and landscape as we find in the poets of the Romantic period. Though they preached a
virtuous life, they would not display any feeling which smacked of enthusiasm and
earnestness. Naturally they had no regard for the great poets of the human heart—
Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. They had no attachment for the Middle Ages and
their tales of chivalry, adventure and visionary idealism. Spenser, therefore, did not find
favour with them.
In the poetry of this age, form became more important than substance. This love of
superficial polish led to the establishment of a highly artificial and conventional style.
The closed couplet became the only possible form for serious work in verse. Naturally
poetry became monotonous, because the couplet was too narrow and inflexible to be
made the vehicle of high passion and strong imagination. Moreover, as great emphasis
was laid on the imitation of ancient writers, originality was discouraged, and poetry lost
touch with the real life of the people.
Prose being the prominent medium of expression, the rules of exactness, precision
and clarity, which were insisted in the writing of prose, also began to be applied to
poetry. It was demanded of the poet to say all that he had to say in a plain simple and
clear language. The result was that the quality of suggestiveness which adds so much to
the beauty and worth of poetry was sadly lacking in the poetry of this age. The meaning
of poetry was all on the surface, and there was nothing which required deep study and
varied interpretation.
Alexandar Pope (1688-1744). Pope is considered as the greatest poet of the Classical
period. He is ‘prince of classicism’ as Prof. Etton calls him. He was an invalid, of small
sature and delicate constitution, whose bad nerves and cruel headaches made his life, in
his own phrase, a ‘long disease’. Moreover, being a Catholic he had to labour under
various restrictions. But the wonder is that in spite of his manifold handicaps, this
small, ugly man has left a permanent mark on the literature of his age. He was highly
intellectual, extremely ambitious and capable of tremendous industry. These qualities
brought him to the front rank of men of letters, and during his lifetime he was looked
upon as a model poet.
The main quality of Pope’s poetry is its correctness. It was at the age of twenty-three
that he published his Essay on Criticism(1711) and since then till the end of his life he
enjoyed progidious reputation. In this essay Pope insists on following the rules
discovered by the Ancients, because they are in harmony with Nature:
Those rules of old discovered, not devised
Are Nature still, but Nature methodised.
 Pope’s next work, The Rape of the Lock, is in some ways his masterpiece. It is ‘mock
heroic’ poem in which he celebrated the theme of the stealth, by Lord Petre of lock of
hair from the head of Miss Arabella. Though the poem is written in a jest and deals with
a very insignificant event, it is given the form of an epic, investing this frivolous event
with mock seriousness and dignity.
By this time Pope had perfected the heroic couplet, and he made use of his technical
skill in translating Homer’s Illiadand Odyssey which meant eleven years’ very hard
work. The reputation which Pope now enjoyed created a host of jealous rivals whom he
severely criticised and ridiculed inThe Dunciad. This is Pope’s greatest satire in which
he attacked all sorts of literary incompetence. It is full of cruel and insulting couplets on
his enemies. His next great poem was The Essay on Man (1732-34), which is full of
brilliant oft-quoted passages and lines. His later works—Imitations of Horace and
Epistle—are also satires and contain biting attacks on his enemies.
Though Pope enjoyed a tremendous reputation during his lifetime and for some
decades after his death, he was so bitterly attacked during the nineteenth century that it
was doubted whether Pope was a poet at all. But in the twentieth century this reaction
subsided, and now it is admitted by great critics that though much that Pope wrote is
prosaic, not of a very high order, yet a part of his poetry is undoubtedly indestructible.
He is the supreme master of the epigrammatic style, of condensing an idea into a line or
couplet. Of course, the thoughts in his poetry are commonplace, but they are given the
most appropriate and perfect expression. The result is that many of them have become
proverbial sayings in the English language. For example:
Who shall decide when doctors disagree?
Thou wert my guide, philosopher, and friend.
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be, blest.
Minor Poets of the Age of Pope. During his age Pope was by far the greatest of all
poets. There were a few minor poets—Matthew Prior, John Gay, Edward Young,
Thomas Pernell and Lady Winchelsea.
Matthew Prior (1664-1721), who was a diplomat and active politician wrote two long
poems: Solomon on the Vanity of The World and Alma or the Progress of the
Mind.These are serious poems, but the reputation of Prior rests on ‘light verse’ dealing
with trifling matters. He is not merely a light-hearted jester, but a true humanist, with
sense of tears as well as laughter as is seen in the “Lines written in the beginning of
Mezeraly’s History of France’.
John Gay (1685-1732) is the master of vivid description or rural scenes as well of the
delights of the town. Like Prior he is full of humour and good temper. As a writer of
lyrics, and in the handling of the couplet, he shows considerable technical skill. His best-
known works are: --Rural Sports; Trivia, orthe Art of Walking the Streets of London;
Black-Eyed Susan and some Fables.
 Prior and Gay were the followers of Pope, and after Pope, they are the two excellent
guides to the life of eighteenth century London. The other minor poets, Edward Young,
Thomas Parnell and Lady Winchelsea, belonged more to the new Romantic spirit than
to the classical spirit in their treatment of external nature, though they were
unconscious of it.
Edward Young (1683-1765) is hisUniversal Passions showed himself as skilful a
satirist as Pope. His best-known work isThe Night Thoughts which, written in blank
verse, shows considerable technical skill and deep thought.
Thomas Parnell (1679-1718) excelled in translations. His best known works are
theThe Night-Piece on Death and Hymn to Contentment, which have a freshness of
outlook and metrical skill.
Lady Winchelsea (1660-1725), though a follower of Pope, showed more sincerity
and genuine feeling for nature than any other poet of that age. Her Nocturnal
Reverie may be considered as the pioneer of the nature poetry of the new Romantic age.
To sum up, the poetry of the age of Pope is not of a high order, but it has distinct
merits—the finished art of its satires; the creation of a technically beautiful verse; and
the clarity and succinctness of its expression.
(b) Prose of the Age of Pope
The great prose writers of the Age of Pope were Defoe, Addison, Steele and Swift.
The prose of this period exhibits the Classical qualities—clearness, vigour and direct
statement.
Daniel Defoe (1661-1731) is the earliest literary journalist in the English language.
He wrote on all sorts of subjects—social, political, literary, and brought out about 250
publications. He owes his importance, in literature, however, mainly to his works of
fiction which were simply the offshoots of his general journalistic enterprises. As a
journalist he was fond of writing about the lives of famous people who had just died, and
of notorious adventurers and criminals. At the age of sixty he turned his attention to the
writing of prose fiction, and published his first novel—Robinson Cruso—the book by
which he is universally known. It was followed by other works of fiction—The Memoirs
of a Cavalier, Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, Roxana andJournal of
the Plague Year.
In these works of fiction Defoe gave his stories an air of reality and convinced his
readers of their authenticity. That is why they are appropriately called by Sir Leslie
Stephen as ‘Fictitious biographies’ or “History minus the Facts’. All Defoe's fictions are
written in the biographical form. They follow no system and are narrated in a haphazard
manner which give them a semblance of reality and truth. His stories, told in the plain,
matter-of-fact, business-like way, appropriate to stories of actual life, hence they possess
extraordinary minute realism which is their distinct feature. Here his homely and
colloquial style came to his help. On account of all these qualities Defoe is credited with
being the originator of the English novel. As a writer of prose his gift of narrative and
description is masterly. As he never wrote with any deliberate artistic intention, he
developed a natural style which made him one of the masters of English prose.
 Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was the most powerful and original genius of his age.
He was highly intellectual but on account of some radical disorder in his system and the
repeated failures which he had to face in the realisation of his ambition to rise in public
life, made him a bitter, melancholy and sardonic figure. He took delight in flouting
conventions, and undermining the reputation of his apponents. His best-known
work, Gulliver’s Travels, which is a very popular children’s book, is also a bitter attack
on contemporary political and social life in particular, and on the meanness and
littleness of man in general. The Tale of a Tubwhich, like Gulliver’s Travels, is written in
the form of an allegory, and exposes the weakness of the main religious beliefs opposed
to Protestant religion, is also a satire upon all science and philosophy. HisJournal to
Stella which was written to Esther Johnson whom Swift loved, is not only an excellent
commentary on contemporary characters and political events, by one of the most
powerful and original minds of the age, but in love passages, and purely personal
descriptions, it reveals the real tenderness which lay concealed in the depths of his fierce
and domineering nature.
Swift was a profound pessimist. He was essentially a man of his time in his want of
spiritual quality, in his distrust of the visionary and the extravagant, and in his
thoroughly materialistic view of life. As a master of prose-style, which is simple, direct
and colloquial, and free from the ornate and rhetorical elements, Swift has few rivals in
the whole range of English literature. As a satirist his greatest and most effective weapon
is irony. Though apparently supporting a cause which he is really apposing, he pours
ridicule upon ridicule on it until its very foundations are shaken. The finest example, of
irony is to be found in his pamphlet—The Battle of Books, in which he championed the
cause of the Ancients against the Moderns. The mock heroic description of the great
battle in the King’s Library between the rival hosts is a masterpiece of its kind.
Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729) who worked in
collaboration, were the originators of the periodical essay. Steele who was more original
led the way by founding The Tatler,the first of the long line of eighteenth century
periodical essays. This was followed by the most famous of them The Spectator, is which
Addison, who had formerly contributed to Steele’s Tatler, now became the chief partner.
It began on March 1, 1711, and ran till December 20, 1714 with a break of about eighteen
months. In its complete form it contains 635 essays. Of these Addisonwrote 274 and
Steele 240; the remaining 121 were contributed by various friends.
The Characters of Steele and Addison were curiously contrasted. Steele was an
emotional, full-blooded kind of man, reckless and dissipated but fundamentally honest
and good-hearted. What there is of pathos and sentiment, and most of what there is of
humour in the Tatler and theSpectator are his. Addison, on the other hand, was an
urbane, polished gentleman of exquisite refinement of taste. He was shy, austere, pious
and righteous. He was a quiet and accurate observer of manners of fashions in life and
conversation.
The purpose of the writings of Steele and Addison was ethical. They tried to reform
society through the medium of the periodical essay. They set themselves as moralistic to
break down two opposed influences—that of the profligate Restoration tradition of loose
living and loose thinking on the one hand, and that of Puritan fanaticism and bigotry on
the other. They performed this work in a gentle, good-humoured manner, and not by
bitter invective. They made the people laugh at their own follies and thus get rid of
them. So they were, to a great extent, responsible for reforming the conduct of their
contemporaries in social and domestic fields. Their aim was moral as well as
educational. Thus they discussed in a light-hearted and attractive manner art,
philosophy, drama, poetry, and in so doing guided and developed the taste of the people.
For example, it was by his series of eighteen articles on Paradise Lost, that Addison
helped the English readers have a better appreciation of Milton and his work.
In another direction the work of Addison and Steele proved of much use. Their
character studies in the shape of the members of the Spectator Club—Sir Roger de
Coverley and others—presented actual men moving amid real scenes and taking part in
various incidents and this helped in the development of genuine novel.
Both Steele and Addison were great masters of prose. Their essays are remarkable
as showing the growing perfection of the English language. Of the two, Addison was a
greater master of the language. He cultivated a highly cultured and graceful style—a
style which can serve as a model. Dr. Johnson very aptly remarked: “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.” And again he said: “Give nights and
days, Sir, to the study of Addison if you mean to be a good writer, or what is more worth,
an honest man.”

The Age of Johnson (1744-1784)

The later half of the eighteenth century, which was dominated by Dr. Samuel
Johnson, is called the Age of Johnson.Johnson died in 1784, and from that time the
Classical spirit in English literature began to give place to the Romantic spirit, though
officially the Romantic Age started from the year 1798 when Wordsworth and Coleridge
published the famous Lyrical Ballads. Even during the Age of Johnson, which was
predominantly classical, cracks had begun to appear in the solid wall of classicism and
there were clear signs of revolt in favour of the Romantic spirit. This was specially
noticeable in the field of poetry. Most of the poets belonging to the Age of Johnson may
be termed as the precursors of the Romantic Revival. That is why the Age of Johnson is
also called the Age of Transition in English literature.

(a) Poets of the Age of Johnson

As has already been pointed out, the Age of Johnson in English poetry is an age of
transition and experiment which ultimately led to the Romantic Revival. Its history is
the history of the struggle between the old and the new, and of the gradual triumph of
the new. The greatest protagonist of classicism during this period was Dr. Johnson
himself, and he was supported by Goldsmith. In the midst of change these two held fast
to the classical ideals, and the creative work of both of them in the field of poetry was
imbued with the classical spirit. As Macaulay said, “Dr. Johnson took it for granted that
the kind of poetry which flourished in his own time and which he had been accustomed
to hear praised from his childhood, was the best kind of poetry, and he not only upheld
its claims by direct advocacy of its canons, but also consistently opposed every
experiment in which, as in the ballad revival, he detected signs of revolt against it.”
Johnson’s two chief poems, London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, are classical on
account of their didacticism, their formal, rhetorical style, and their adherence to the
closed couplet.
Goldsmith was equally convinced that the classical standards of writing poetry were
the best and that they had attained perfection during the Augustan Age. All that was
required of the poets was to imitate those standards. According to him “Pope was the
limit of classical literature.” In his opposition to the blank verse, Goldsmith showed
himself fundamentally hostile to change. His two important poems, The Traveller and
The Deserted Village, which are versified pamphlets on political economy, are classical
in spirit and form. They are written in the closed couplet, are didactic, and have
pompous phraseology. These poems may be described as the last great work of the
outgoing, artificial eighteenth century school, though even in them, if we study them
minutely, we perceive the subtle touches of the new age of Romanticism especially in
their treatment of nature and rural life.
Before we consider the poets of the Age of Johnson, who broke from the classical
tradition and followed the new Romantic trends, let us first examine what Romanticism
stood for. Romanticism was opposed to Classicism on all vital points. For instance, the
main characteristics of classical poetry were: (i) it was mainly the product of intelligence
and was especially deficient in emotion and imagination; (ii) it was chiefly the town
poetry; (iii) it had no love for the mysterious, the supernatural, or what belonged to the
dim past; (iv) its style was formal and artificial; (v) it was written in the closed couplet;
(vi) it was fundamentally didactic; (vii) it insisted on the writer to follow the prescribed
rules and imitate the standard models of good writing. The new poetry which showed
romantic leanings was opposed to all these points. For instance, its chief characteristics
were: (i) it encouraged emotion, passion and imagination in place of dry intellectuality;
(ii) it was more interested in nature and rustic life rather than in town life; (iii) it revived
the romantic spirit—love of the mysterious, the supernatural, the dim past; (iv) it
opposed the artificial and formal style, and insisted on simple and natural forms of
expression; (v) it attacked the supremacy of the closed couplet and encouraged all sorts
of metrical experiments; (vi) its object was not didactic but the expression of the writer’s
experience for its own sake; (vii) it believed in the liberty of the poet to choose the theme
and the manner of his writing.
The poets who showed romantic leanings, during the Age of Johnson, and who may
be described as the precursors or harbingers of the Romantic Revival were James
Thomson, Thomas Gray, William Collins, James Macpherson, William Blake, Robert
Burns, William Cowper and George Crabbe.
James Thomson (1700-1748) was the earliest eighteenth century poet who showed
romantic tendency in his work. The main romantic characteristic in his poetry is his
minute observation of nature. In The Seasons he gives fine sympathetic descriptions of
the fields, the woods, the streams, the shy and wild creatures. Instead of the closed
couplet, he follows the Miltonic tradition of using the blank verse. In The Castle of
Indolence, which is written in form of dream allegory so popular in medieval literature,
Thomson uses the Spenserian stanza. Unlike the didactic poetry of the Augustans, this
poem is full of dim suggestions.
 Thomas Gray (1716-1771) is famous as the author of Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard, “the best-known in the English language.” Unlike classical poetry which
was characterised by restraint on personal feelings and emotions, this poem is the
manifestation of deep feelings of the poet. It is suffused with the melancholy spirit
which is a characteristic romantic trait. It contains deep reflections of the poet on the
universal theme of death which spare no one. Other important poems of Gray are The
Progress of Poesy and The Bard. Of these The Bard is more original and romantic. It
emphasises the independence of the poet, which became the chief characteristic of
romantic poetry. All these poems of Gray follow the classical model so far as form is
concerned, but in spirit they are romantic.
William Collins (1721-1759). Like the poetry of Gray, Collin’s poetry exhibits deep
feelings of melancholy. His first poem,Oriental Eclogues is romantic in feeling, but is
written in the closed couplet. His best-known poems are the odes To Simplicity, To
Fear, To the Passions, the small lyric How Sleep The Brave, and the beautiful “Ode to
Evening”. In all these poems the poet values the solitude and quietude because they
afford opportunity for contemplative life. Collins in his poetry advocates return to
nature and simple and unsophisticated life, which became the fundamental creeds of the
Romantic Revival.
James Macpherson (1736-1796) became the most famous poet during his time by
the publication of Ossianic poems, called the Works of Ossian, which were translations
of Gaelic folk literature, though the originals were never produced, and so he was
considered by some critics as a forger. In spite of this Macpherson exerted a
considerable influence on contemporary poets like Blake and Burns by his poetry which
was impregnated with moonlight melancholy and ghostly romantic suggestions.
William Blake (1757-1827). In the poetry of Blake we find a complete break from
classical poetry. In some of his works as Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
which contain the famous poems—Little Lamb who made thee? and Tiger, Tiger
burning bright, we are impressed by their lyrical quality. In other poems such as The
Book of Thel, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, it is the prophetic voice of Blake which
appeals to the reader. In the words of Swinburne, Blake was the only poet of “supreme
and simple poetic genius” of the eighteenth century, “the one man of that age fit, on all
accounts, to rank with the old great masters”. Some of his lyrics are, no doubt, the most
perfect and the most original songs in the English language.
Robert Burns (1759-96), who is the greatest song writer in the English language, had
great love for nature, and a firm belief in human dignity and quality, both of which are
characteristic of romanticism. He has summed up his poetic creed in the following
stanza:
Give me a spark of Nature’s fire,
That is all the learning I desire;
Then, though I trudge through dub and mire
At plough or cart,
My Muse, though homely in attire,
May touch the heart.
 The fresh, inspired songs of Burns as The Cotter’s Saturday Night, To a Mouse, To
a Mountain Daisy, Man was Made to Mournewent straight to the heart, and they
seemed to be the songs of the birds in spring time after the cold and formal poetry for
about a century. Most of his songs have the Elizabethan touch about them.
William Cowper (1731-1800), who lived a tortured life and was driven to the verge of
madness, had a genial and kind soul. His poetry, much of which is of autobiographical
interest, describes the homely scenes and pleasures and pains of simple humanity—the
two important characteristics of romanticism. His longest poem, The Task,written in
blank verse, comes as a relief after reading the rhymed essays and the artificial couplets
of the Age of Johnson. It is replete with description of homely scenes, of woods and
brooks of ploughmen and shepherds. Cowper’s most laborious work is the translation of
Homer in blank verse, but he is better known for his small, lovely lyrics like On the
Receipt of My Mother’s Picture,beginning with the famous line, Oh, that those lips had
language’, and Alexander Selkirk, beginning with the oft-quoted line, ‘I am monarch of
all I survey’.
George Crabbe (1754-1832) stood midway between the Augustans and the
Romantics. In form he was classical, but in the temper of his mind he was romantic.
Most of his poems are written in the heroic couplet, but they depict an attitude to nature
which is Wordsworthian. To him nature is a “presence, a motion and a spirit,” and he
realizes the intimate union of nature with man. His well-known poem. The Village, is
without a rival as a picture of the working men of his age. He shows that the lives of the
common villager and labourers are full of romantic interest. His later poems, The Parish
Register, The Borough, Tales in Verse, and Tales of the Hall are all written in the same
strain.
Another poet who may also be considered as the precursor of the Romantic Revival
was Thomas Chatterton (1752-70), the Bristol boy, whose The Rowley Poems,written in
pseudo-Chaucerian English made a strong appeal of medievalism. The publication of
Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry in 1765 also made great contribution to the
romantic mood reviving interest in ballad literature.
(b) Prose of the Age of Johnson
In the Age of Johnson the tradition established by prose writers of the earlier part of
the eighteenth century—Addison, Steele and Swift—was carried further. The eighteenth
century is called the age of aristocracy. This aristocracy was no less in the sphere of the
intellect than in that of politics and society. The intellectual and literary class formed
itself into a group, which observed certain rules of behaviour, speech and writing. In the
field of prose the leaders of this group established a literary style which was founded on
the principles of logical and lucid thought. It was opposed to what was slipshod,
inaccurate, and trivial. It avoided all impetuous enthusiasm and maintained an attitude
of aloofness and detachment that contributed much to its mood of cynical humour. The
great prose writers, the pillars of the Age of Johnson, who represented in themselves,
the highest achievements of English prose, were Johnson, Burke and Gibbon.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was the literary dictator of his age, though he was not
its greatest writer. He was a man who struggled heroically against poverty and ill-health;
who was ready to take up cudgels against anyone however high he might be placed, but
who was very kind and helpful to the poor and the wretched. He was an intellectual
giant, and a man of sterling character, on account of all these qualities he was honoured
and loved by all, and in his poor house gathered the foremost artists, scholars, actors,
and literary men of London, who looked upon him as their leader.
Johnson’s best-known works are his Dictionary and Lives of Poets. He contributed
a number of articles in the periodicals, The Rambler, The Idler and Rasselas. In them
his style is ponderous and verbose, but in Lives of Poets, which are very readable critical
biographies of English poets, his style is simple and at time charming. Though in the
preceding generations Dryden, Addison, Steele and Swift wrote elegant, lucid and
effective prose, none of them set up any definite standard to be followed by others. What
was necessary in the generation when Johnson wrote, was some commanding authority
that might set standard of prose style, lay down definite rules and compel others to
follow them. This is what was actually done by Johnson. He set a model of prose style
which had rhythm, balance and lucidity, and which could be imitiated with profit. In
doing so he preserved the English prose style from degenerating into triviality and
feebleness, which would have been the inevitable result of slavishly imitating the prose
style of great writers like Addison by ordinary writers who had not the secret
ofAddison’s genius. The model was set by Johnson.
Though Johnson’s own style is often condemned as ponderous and verbose, he
could write in an easy and direct style when he chose. This is clear from Lives of
Poetswhere the formal dignity of his manner and the ceremonial stateliness of his
phraseology are mixed with touches of playful humour and stinging sarcasm couched in
very simple and lucid prose. The chief characteristic of Johnson’s prose-style is that it
grew out of his conversational habit, and therefore it is always clear, forceful and frank.
We may not some time agree to the views he expresses in the Lives, but we cannot but
be impressed by his boldness, his wit, wide range and brilliancy of his style.
Burke (1729-1797) was the most important member of Johnson’s circle. He was a
member of the Parliament for thirty years and as such he made his mark as the most
forceful and effective orator of his times. A man of vast knowledge, he was the greatest
political philosopher that ever spoke in the English Parliament.
Burke’s chief contributions to literature are the speeches and writings of his public
career. The earliest of them were Thoughts on the Present Discontent (1770). In this
work Burke advocated the principle of limited monarchy which had been established in
England since the Glorious Revolution in 1688, when James II was made to quit the
throne, and William of Orange was invited by the Parliament to become the king of
England with limited powers. When the American colonies revolted against England,
and the English government was trying to suppress that revolt, Burke vehemently
advocated the cause of American independence. In that connection he delivered two
famous speeches in Parliament. On American Taxation (1774) and on Conciliation with
America, in which are embodied true statesmanship and political wisdom. The greatest
speeches of Burke were, however, delivered in connection with the French Revolution,
which were published as The Reflections on the French Revolution (1790). Here Burke
shows himself as prejudiced against the ideals of the Revolution, and at time he
becomes immoderate and indulges in exaggerations. But from the point of view of style
and literary merit the Reflections stand higher, because they brought out the poetry of
Burke’s nature. His last speeches delivered in connection with the impeachment of
Warren Hastings for the atrocities he committed in India, show Burke as the champion
of justice and a determined foe of corruption, high-handedness and cruelty.
The political speeches and writings of Burke belong to the sphere of literature of a
high order because of their universality. Though he dealt in them with events which
happened during his day, he gave expression to ideas and impulses which were true not
for one age but for all times. In the second place they occupy an honourable place in
English literature on account of excellence of their style. The prose of Burke is full of fire
and enthusiasm, yet supremely logical; eloquent and yet restrained; fearless and yet
orderly; steered by every popular movement and yet dealing with fundamental
principles of politics and philosophy. Burke’s style, in short, is restrained, philosophical,
dignified, obedient to law and order, free from exaggeration and pedantry as well as
from vulgarity and superficiality.
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) was the first historian of England who wrote in a
literary manner. His greatest historical work—The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, which is an authoritative and well-documented history, can pass successfully
the test of modern research and scholarship. But its importance in literature is on
account of its prose style which is the very climax of classicism. It is finished, elegant,
elaborate and exhaustive. Though his style is sometimes marred by affectations and
undue elaboration, yet on account of his massive intellect, and unfailing sense of literary
proportion, he towers above all competitors as the model historian.

The Eighteenth Century Novel

The chief literary contribution of the eighteenth century was the discovery of the
modern novel, which at present is the most widely read and influential type of literature.
The novel in its elementary form as a work of fiction written in prose was at first
established in England by two authors—Bunyan and Defoe, who took advantage of the
public interest in autobiography. The books of Bunyan, whether they are told in the first
person or not, were meant to be autobiographical and their interest is subjective.
Bunyan endeavours to interest his readers not in the character of some other person he
had imagined or observed, but in himself, and his treatment of it is characteristic of the
awakening talent for fiction in his time. The Pilgrim’s Progress is begun as an allegory,
but in course of time the author is so much taken up with the telling of the story, that he
forgets about the allegory, and it is this fact which makes Bunyan the pioneer of the
modern novel.

But it was Defoe who was the real creator of autobiographical fiction as a work of
art. He was the first to create psychological interest in the character of the narrator.
Moreover, he was the first to introduce realism or verisimilitude by observing in his
writing a scrupulous and realistic fidelity and appropriateness to the conditions in which
the story was told. For example, the reader is told about Cruso’s island as gradually as
Cruso himself comes to know of it. Besides introducing the elements of autobiography
and realism, Defoe also fixed the peculiar form of the historical novel—the narrative of
an imaginary person in a historical setting as in his Memories of a Cavalier. On account
of all these reasons Defoe is rightly termed the originator of the modern novel.
In spite of this, it can be safely said that until the publication
of Richardson’s Pamelain 1740, no true novel had appeared in English literature. By a
true novel we mean simply a work of fictions which relates the story of a plain human
life, under stress of emotions, and the interest of which does not depend on incident or
adventure, but on its truth to nature. During the eighteenth century a number of English
novelists—Goldsmith, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne—all developed
simultaneously the form of the novel as presenting life, as it really is, in the form of a
story. The new middle class which was rising and getting into power demanded a new
type of literature, which must express the new ideal of the eighteenth century, that is,
the value and the importance of individual life. Moreover, on account of the spread of
education and the appearance of newspapers and magazines there was an immense
increase in the reading public to whom the novelist could directly appeal without caring
for the patronage of the aristocratic class which was losing power. It was under these
circumstances that the novel was born in the eighteenth century expressing the same
ideals of personality and of the dignity of command life which became the chief themes
of the poets of the Romantic Revival, and which were proclaimed later by the American
and French Revolutions. The novelists of the eighteenth century told the common
people not about the grand lives of knights, princes and heroes, but about their own
plain and simple lives, their ordinary thoughts and feelings, and their day-to-day actions
and their effects on them and others. The result was that such works were eagerly read
by the common people, and the novel became a popular form of literature appealing to
the masses, because it belonged to them and reflected their lives.
Daniel Defoe (1661-1731) was, as has already been pointed out, the originator of the
novel, though none of his works can be placed under the category of novel in the modern
sense of the term. In Robinson Cruso, Defoe, has described the experiences of Alexander
Selkirk who spent five years in solitude in the island of Juan Fernandez. Though the
whole story is fictitious, it has been described most realistically with the minute
accuracy of an eyewitness. From that point of view we can say that in Robinson
Cruso Defoe brought the realistic adventure story to a very high stage of its
development, better than in his other works of fiction Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders
and Roxana which are just like picaresque stories (current at that time, about the
adventures of rogues) to which were added unnatural moralising and repentance. But
we cannot call Robinson Cruso, strictly speaking, a novel, because here the author has
not produced the effect of subordinating incident to the faithful portrayal of human life
and character, which is the criterion of the real novel.
Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) is credited with the writing of the first modern
novel—Pamela or Virtue Rewarded. It tells the trials, tribulations and the final happy
marriage of a young girl. Written in the form of ‘Familiar Letters, on how to think and
act justly and prudently, in the common concerns of Human Life’, it is sentimental and
boring on account of its wearisome details. But the merit of it lies in the fact that it was
the first book which told in a realistic manner the inner life of a young girl. Its
psychological approach made it the first modern novel in England. Richardson here
gave too much importance to physical chastity, and ‘prudence’ which was the key to the
middle class way of life during the eighteenth century. It enjoyed tremendous popularity
on account of being in tune with the contemporary standards of morality.
Richardson’s second novel, Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady, is also written
in the form of letters and is as sentimental as Pamela. In the heroine of this novel,
Clarissa,Richardson has painted a real woman, portraying truthfully her doubts,
scruples, griefs and humiliations. In his next novel, Sir Charles Grandison, which is also
written in the form of letters, Richardson told the story of an aristocrat of ideal manners
and virtues.
In all his novels Richardson’s purpose was didactic, but he achieved something
more. He probed into the inner working of the human mind. It was this achievement
that made Dr. Johnson say of Richardson that he “enlarged the knowledge of human
nature, and taught the passions to move at the command of virtue”. Of Clarissa he said
that “it was the first book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart.”
Richardson’s main contribution to the English novel was that for the first time he told
stories of human life from within, depending for their interest not on incidents or
adventures but on their truth to human nature.
Henry Fielding (1707-1754) was the greatest of the eighteenth century novelists. He
wrote his first great novel Joseph Andrews in order to satirise and parody the false
sentimentality and conventional virtues of Richardson’s heroine, Pamela. The hero of
this novel is a supposed brother of Pamela, a domestic servant, who has vowed to follow
the example of his sister. He is also exposed to the same kinds of temptations, but
instead of being rewarded for his virtues, he is dismissed from service by his mistress.
The satiric purpose of Fielding ends here, because then he describes the adventures of
Joseph with his companion Parson Adams, and tells the story of a vagabond life, with a
view “to laugh men out of their follies”. Instead of the sentimentality and feminine
niceties of Richardson, in Fielding’s novel we find a coarse, vigorous, hilarious and even
vulgar approach to life. The result is broad realism not in the portrayal of inner life but
of outer behaviour and manners. The characters in the novels are drawn from all classes
of society, and they throb with life.
Fielding’s next novel, Jonathan Wild, is a typical picaresque novel, narrating the
story of a rogue. His greatest novel, The History of Tom Jones, a Founding (1746-1749),
has epic as well as dramatic qualities. It consists of a large number of involved
adventures, which are very skillfully brought towards their climax by the hand of a
dramatist. Behind all chance happenings, improbabilities and incogruities there exists a
definite pattern which gives the complicated plot of Tom Jones a unity which we find
nowhere in English novel or drama except in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemists. Without
making a deliberate effort at moralising like Richardson Fielding suggests a deeper
moral lesson that one should do good not for reward but for the satisfaction of doing so.
It is the generous impulses, rooted in unselfishness and respect for others, which are the
best guarantee of virtue.
Fieldings’ last novel, Amelia (1751), which is the story of a good wife in contrast with
an unworthy husband, is written in a milder tone. Here instead of showing a detached
and coarse attitude to life, Fielding becomes soft-hearted and champions the cause of
the innocent and the helpless. It is also written in a homely and simple narrative.
 Fielding’s great contribution to the English novel is that he put it on a stable footing.
It became free from its slavery to fact, conscious of its power and possibilities, and
firmly established as an independent literary form. He is called the Father of the English
novel, because he was the first to give genuine pictures of men and women of his age,
without moralising over their vices and virtues. It was through his efforts that the novel
became immensely popular with the reading public, and a large number of novels
poured from the press.
Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) followed the example of Fielding in writing picaresque
novels, which are full of intrigue and adventure. But he lacks the genius of Fielding, for
his novels are just a jumble of adventures and incidents without any artistic unity.
Instead of Fielding’s broad humour and his inherent kindness, we find horrors and
brutalities in the novels of Smollett, which are mistaken for realism.
Smollett’s best-known novels are Roderick Random (1748) in which the hero relates
a series of adventures: Peregrine Pickle (1751) in which are related the worst
experiences at sea; and Humphrey Clinker(1771) in which is related the journey of a
Welsh family through England and Scotland. In all these novels Smollet excites
continuous laughter by farcical situations and exaggeration in portraying human
eccentricities. Unlike the realistic and pure comedy which Fielding presents in his
novels, Smollet is the originator of the funny novel, which was brought to a climax by
Dickens in his satirical and hearty caricatures.
Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768) was the opposite of Smollet in the sense that whereas
we find horrors and brutalities in the novels of Smollett, in Sterne’s we find whims,
vagaries and sentimental tears. His best-known novels are Tristram Shandy and A
Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. The former was started in 1760; its
nineth volume appeared in 1767, but the book was never finished. In it are recorded in a
most digressive and aimless manner the experiences of the eccentric Shandy family. The
main achievements of this book lie in the brilliancy of its style and the creation of
eccentric characters like Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. The Sentimental
Journey,which is a strange mixture of fiction, descriptions of travel, and a number of
essays on all sorts of subjects, is also written in a brilliant style, and is stamped with
Sterne’s false and sentimental attitude to life.
These novels are written in the first person, and while Sterne speaks of one thing, it
reminds him of another, with which it has no apparent, logical connection. So he is
forced into digression, and in this manner he follows the wayward movements of his
mind. This method is very much like that of the Stream of Consciousness novelists,
though there is a difference, because the hero in Sterne’s novels is Sterne himself.
Another peculiarity of Sterne is his power of sentimentality, which along with his
humour and indecency, is part and parcel of his way of interpreting life. Whenever he
makes us smile, he hopes that there will be a suspicion of a tear as well. In fact the main
contribution of Sterne to the English novel was his discovery of the delights of
sensibility, the pleasures of the feeling heart, which opened up a vast field of experience,
and which was followed by many eighteenth century writers.
Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) wrote only one novel—The Vicar of Wakefield. This is
the best novel in the English language, in which domestic life has been given an
enduring romantic interest. It is free from that vulgarity and coarseness which we find
in the novels of Smollett and Sterne. In it domestic virtues and purity of character are
elevated. It is the story of Dr. Primrose, a simple English clergyman, who passes through
various misfortunes, but ultimately comes out triumphant, with his faith in God and
man reaffirmed. Without introducing romantic passion, intrigue and adventure which
were freely used by other novelists, Goldsmith by relating a simple story in a simple
manner has presented in The Vicar of Wakefield the best example of the novel, the new
literary form which was becoming immensely popular.
Summing up the development of the English novel during the eighteenth century,
we can say that the novel from a humble beginning evolved into a fully developed form.
Defoe gave it the realistic touch; Richardson introduced analysis of the human heart;
Fielding made it full of vitality and animal vigour; Smollett introduced exaggerated and
eccentric characters; Sterne contributed sentimentality and brilliancy of style; and
Goldsmith emphasised high principles and purity of domestic life. In the hands of these
early masters the novel took a definite shape and came to be recognised as an important
literary form with vast possibilities of further development.

The Eighteenth Century Drama

The dramatic literature of the eighteenth century was not of a high order. In fact
there was a gradual deterioration and during the last quarter of the century drama was
moving towards its lowest ebb. One of the reasons of the decline of drama during the
eighteenth century was the Licensing Act of 1737 which curtailed the freedom of
expression of dramatists. The result was that a number of writers like Fielding, who
could make their marks as dramatists, left the theatre and turned towards the novel.
Moreover, the new commercial middle classes which were coming into prominence
imposed their own dull and stupid views on the themes that would be acceptable to the
theatre. Naturally this was not liked by first-rate writers who wanted to write
independently.

In the field of tragedy two opposing traditions—Romantic and Classical—exercised

their influence on the dramatists. The Romantic tradition was the Elizabethan way of
writing tragedy. Those who followed this tradition made use of intricate plots and
admitted horror and violence on the open stage. The Classical tradition which was
mainly the French tradition of writing tragedy was characterised by the unfolding of a
single action without any sub-plot, and long declamatory speeches delivered by the
actors. The traditional English pattern of drama was exemplified by Otway’s Venice
Preserved, while the Classical tradition was strictly upheld in Addison’s Cato (1713),
which is written in an unemotional but correct style, and has a pronounced moralising
tone. Other tragedies which were written according to the Classical pattern were James
Thomson’s Sophonisba (1729) and Dr. Johnson’s Irene (1749). But none of these
tragedies, whether following the Romantic or the Classical tradition came up to a
respectable dramatic standard, because the creative impulse seems to have spent itself.
Though a very large number of tragedies were written during the eighteenth century,
they had literary, but no dramatic value. Mostly there were revivals of old plays, which
were adapted by writers who were not dramatists in the real sense of the term.
In the field of comedy, the same process of disintegration was noticeable. Comedy
was deteriorating into farce. Moreover, sentimentality which was opposed to the
authority of reason, came to occupy an important place in comedy. This ‘sentimental’
comedy which gained in popularity was criticised by Goldsmith thus:
“A new species of dramatic composition has been introduced under the
name of sentimental comedy, in which the virtues of private life are
exhibited, rather than the vices exposed; and the distresses rather than the
faults of mankind make our interest in the pieces. These comedies have had
of late great success, perhaps from their novelty, and also from their
flattering every man in his favourite foible. In these plays almost all the
characters are good and exceedingly generous; they are lavish enough of
their tin money on the stage; and though they want humour, have
abundance of sentiment and feeling. If they happen to have faults or
foibles, the spectator is taught, not only to pardon, but to applaud them, in
consideration of the goodness of their hearts; so that folly, instead of being
ridiculed, is commended, and the comedy aims at touching our passions
without the power of being truly pathetic.
Steele was the first exponent of the sentimental comedy in the eighteenth century.
In his plays, such as The Funeral, The Lying Lover, The Tender Husband, The
Conscious Lovers, Steele extolled the domestic virtues. His object was didactic, and he
tried to prove that morality and sharpness of intelligence can go together. In his plays in
which tears of pity and emotion flowed profusely, Steele held that Simplicity of mind,
Good nature, Friendship and Honour were the guiding principles of conduct.
Other dramatists who wrote sentimental comedies were Colley Cibber, Hugh Kelley
and Richard Cumberland. In their hands comedy was so much drenched in emotions
and sentiments that the genuine human issues were completely submerged in them.
Thus there was a need to rescue the drama from such depths to which it had fallen.
The two great dramatists of the eighteenth century, who led the revolt against
sentimental comedy were Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74) and Richard Sheridan (1751-
1861). Though in his novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, and in his poem, The Deserted
Village, Goldsmith showed clear marks of a sentimental attitude to life, in his Good-
Natured Man he covers it with ridicule by portraying the character of Honey wood as
unadulterated ‘good-nature’. Though the play is a feeble one, his intentions of mocking
the excess of false charity are obvious. His next play, She Stoops to Conquer(1773),
which is his masterpiece, was an immediate success. It has always remained one of the
half-dozen most popular comedies in the English language. In spite of the obvious
improbabilities of the plot, the play moves naturally in a homely atmosphere, full of
genuine humour which provokes unrestrained laughter. Here there is no artificiality of
sentimental comedy. The main characters—Hardcastle and Tony Lumpkin are very
clearly delineated. They are at once types and individuals. They are the images of their
age, and yet recognizable as human figures. She Stoops to Conquer went a long way in
restoring comedy to its own province of mirth and laughter and rescuing it from too
much sentimentality.
Richard Brinsely Sheridan is best known for his two comedies—The Rivals (1775)
and The School for Scandal (1777). Sheridan brought back the brilliance of the witty and
elegant Restoration comedy, purged of its impurities and narrowness. He created,
instead, a more genial and romantic atmosphere associated with the comedies of
Shakespeare. His characters are as clearly drawn as those of Ben Jonson, but they move
in a gayer atmosphere. The only defect that we find in these comedies of Sheridan is that
there is all gaiety, but no depth, no new interpretation of human nature.
The intrigue in The Rivals, though not original, is skilfully conducted. The audience
heartily laugh at humours of Mrs. Malaprop, Sir Anthony, and Bab Acres. In The School
for Scandal Sheridan showed himself as a mature dramatist. Here the dialogue has the
exquisite Congreve-like precision, and wit reigns supreme. Even the stupid characters,
the servants, are witty. Though the main characters, the quarrelsome couple and the
plotting brothers; the ‘scandal-club’ of Lady Sneerwell; and the intrigue leading
inevitably to the thrilling resolution in the famous screen scene, are all familiar, and can
be found in many other plays, yet they are invested with novelty. In both these
plays Sheridan reversed the trend of sentimentalism by introducing realism tinged with
the geniality of romance. He had no message to convey, except that the most admirable
way of living is to be generous and open-hearted.

The Romantic Age (1798-1824)

The Romantic period is the most fruitful period in the history of English literature.
The revolt against the Classical school which had been started by writers like Chatterton,
Collins, Gray, Burne, Cowper etc. reached its climax during this period, and some of the
greatest and most popular English poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and
Keats belong to this period.
This period starts from 1798 with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth
and Coleridge, and the famous Preface which Wordsworth wrote as a manifesto of the
new form of poetry which he and Coleridge introduced in opposition to the poetry of the
Classical school. In the Preface to the First Edition Wordsworth did not touch upon any
other characteristic of Romantic poetry except the simplicity and naturalness of its
diction. “The majority of the following poems”, he writes “are to be considered as
experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertaining how far the language
of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adopted to the purposes of
poetic pleasure.” In the longer preface to the second edition of the Lyrical
Ballads, where Wordsworth explains his theories of poetic imagination, he again returns
to the problem of the proper language of poetry. “The language too, of these men (that is
those in humble and rustic life) has been adopted because from their intercourse, being
less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in
simple, unelaborated expression.”
Wordsworth chose the language of the common people as the vehicle of his poetry,
because it is the most sincere expression of the deepest and rarest passions and feelings.
This was the first point of attack of the artificial and formal style of Classical school of
poetry. The other point at which Wordsworth attacked the old school was its insistence
on the town and the artificial way of life which prevailed there. He wanted the poet to
breathe fresh air of the hills and beautiful natural scenes and become interested in rural
life and the simple folk living in the lap of nature. A longing to be rid of the precision
and order of everyday life drove him to the mountains, where, as he describes in
his Lines written above Tintern Abbey.
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite.
By attacking the supremacy of the heroic couplet as the only form of writing poetry,
and substituting it by simple and natural diction; by diverting the attention of the poet
from the artificial town life to the life in the woods, mountains and villages inhabited by
simple folk; and by asserting the inevitable role of imagination and emotions in poetry
as against dry intellectualism which was the chief characteristic of the Classical school,
Wordsworth not only emancipated the poet from the tyranny of literary rules and
conventions which circumscribed his freedom of expression, but he also opened up
before him vast regions of experience which in the eighteenth century had been closed
to him. His revolt against the Classical school was in keeping with the political and
social revolutions of the time as the French Revolution and the American War of
Independence which broke away with the tyranny of social and political domination,
and which proclaimed the liberty of the individual or nation to be the master of its own
destiny. Just as liberty of the individual was the watchword of the French Revolution,
liberty of a nation from foreign domination was the watchword of the American War of
Independence; in the same manner liberty of the poet from the tyranny of the literary
rules and conventions was the watchword of the new literary movement which we call
by the name of Romantic movement. It is also termed as the Romantic Revival, because
all these characteristics—the liberty of the writer to choose the theme and form of his
literary production, the importance given to imagination and human emotions, and a
broad and catholic outlook on life in all its manifestations in towns, villages, mountains,
rivers etc. belonged to the literature of the Elizabethan Age which can be called as the
first Romantic age in English literature. But there was a difference between the
Elizabethan Age and the Romantic Age, because in the latter the Romantic spirit was
considered as discovery of something which once was, but had been lost. The poets of
the Romantic periods, therefore, always looked back to the Elizabethan masters—
Shakespeare, Spenser and other —and got inspiration from them. They were under the
haunting influence of feelings which had already been experienced, and a certain type of
free moral life which had already been lived, and so they wanted to recapture the
memory and rescue it from fading away completely.
In the poems which were contributed in the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth dealt with
events of everyday life, by preference in its humblest form. He tried to prove that the
commonplace things of life, the simple and insignificant aspects of nature, if treated in
the right manner, could be as interesting and absorbing as the grand and imposing
aspects of life and nature. To the share of Coleridge fell such subjects as were
supernatural, which he was “to inform with that semblance of truth sufficient to procure
for those shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment
which constitutes poetic faith.” Wordsworth’s naturalism and
Coleridge’ssupernaturalism thus became the two important spearheads of the Romantic
Movement.
Wordsworth’s naturalism included love for nature as well for man living in simple
and natural surroundings. Thus he speaks for the love that is in homes where poor men
live, the daily teaching that is in:
Woods and rills;
The silence that is in the starry sky;
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
Coleridge’s supernaturalism, on the other hand, established the connection between
the visible world and the other world which is unseen. He treated the supernatural in his
masterly poem, The Ancient Mariner, in such a manner that it looked quite natural.
Associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge in the exploration of the less known
aspects of humanity was Southey who makes up with them the trail of the so-
called Lake Poets. He devoted himself to the exhibition of “all the more prominent and
poetical forms of mythology which have at any time obtained among mankind.” Walter
Scott, though he was not intimately associated with the Lake poets, contributed his love
for the past which also became one of the important characteristics of the Romantic
Revival.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Scott belong to the first romantic generation.
Though they were in their youth filled with great enthusiasm by the outburst of the
French Revolution which held high hope for mankind, they became conservatives and
gave up their juvenile ideas when theFrench Republic converted itself into a military
empire resulting in Napoleonic wars against England and other European countries.
The revolutionary ardour, therefore, faded away, and these poets instead of
championing the cause of the oppressed section of mankind, turned to mysticism, the
glory of the past, love of natural phenomena, and the noble simplicity of the peasant
race attached to the soil and still sticking to traditional virtues and values. Thus these
poets of the first romantic generation were not in conflict with the society of which they
were a part. They sang about the feelings and emotions which were shared by a majority
of their countrymen.
The second generation of Romantic writers—Byron, Shelley, Keats, Leigh Hunt,
Hazlitt and others—who came to the forefront after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo
in 1815, revolted from the reactionary spirit which was prevailing at that time in
England against the ideals of the French Revolution. The result was that the second
generation came in conflict with the social environment with which their predecessors
were in moral harmony. Moreover, the victorious struggle with the French empire had
left Englandimpoverished, and the political and social agitations which had subsided on
account of foreign danger, again raised their head. The result was that there was a lot of
turmoil and perturbation among the rank and file, which was being suppressed by those
who were in power. In such an atmosphere the younger romantic generation renewed
the revolutionary ardour and attacked the established social order. Thus Romanticism
in the second stage became a literature of social conflict. Both Byron and Shelley
rebelled against society and had to leaveEngland.
But basically the poets of the two generations of Romanticism shared the same
literary beliefs and ideals. They were all innovators in the forms well as in the substance
of their poetry. All, except, Byron, turned in disgust from the pseudo-classical models
and condemned in theory and practice the “poetical diction” prevalent throughout the
eighteenth century. They rebelled against the tyranny of the couplet, which they only
used with Elizabethan freedom, without caring for the mechanical way in which it was
used by Pope. To it they usually preferred either blank verse or stanzas, or a variety of
shorter lyrical measures inspired by popular poetry are truly original.
The prose-writers of the Romantic Revival also broke with their immediate
predecessors, and discarded the shorter and lighter style of the eighteenth century. They
reverted to the ponderous, flowery and poetical prose of the Renaissance and of Sir
Thomas Browne, as we find in the works of Lamb, and De Quincey. Much of the prose of
the Romantic period was devoted to the critical study of literature, its theory and
practice. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Lamb, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt and De Quincey
opened up new avenues in the study of literature, and gradually prepared the way for
the understanding of the new type of literature which was being produced.
As the Romantic Age was characterised by excess of emotions, it produced a new
type of novel, which seems rather hysterical, now, but which was immensely popular
among the multitude of readers, whose nerves were somewhat excited, and who revelled
in extravagant stories of supernatural terror. Mrs. Anne Radcliffe was one of the most
successful writers of the school of exaggerated romances. Sir Walter Scott regaled the
readers by his historical romances. Jane Austen, however, presents a marked contrast to
these extravagant stories by her enduring work in which we find charming descriptions
of everyday life as in the poetry of Wordsworth.
Whereas the Classical age was the age of prose, the Romantic age was the age of
poetry, which was the proper medium for the expression of emotions and imaginative
sensibility of the artist. The mind of the artist came in contact with the sensuous world
and the world of thought at countless points, as it had become more alert and alive. The
human spirit began to derive new richness from outward objects and philosophical
ideas. The poets began to draw inspiration from several sources—mountains and lakes,
the dignity of the peasant, the terror of the supernatural, medieval chivalry and
literature, the arts and mythology of Greece, the prophecy of the golden age. All these
produced a sense of wonder which had the be properly conveyed in literary form. That is
why some critics call the Romantic Revival as the Renaissance of Wonder. Instead of
living a dull, routine life in the town, and spending all his time and energy in to midst of
artificiality and complexity of the cities, the poets called upon man to adopt a healthier
way of living in the natural world in which providence has planted him of old, and which
is full of significance for his soul. The greatest poets of the romantic revival strove to
capture and convey the influence of nature on the mind and of the mind on nature
interpenetrating one another.
 The essence of Romanticism was that literature must reflect all that is spontaneous
and unaffected in nature and in man, and be free to follow its own fancy in its own way.
They result was that during the Romantic period the young enthusiasts turned as
naturally to poetry as a happy man to singing. The glory of the age is the poetry of
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley and Keats. In fact, poetry was so popular
that Southey had to write in verse in order to earn money, what he otherwise would have
written in prose.
Summing up the chief characteristics of Romanticism as opposed to Classicism, we
can say that Classicism laid stress upon the impersonal aspects of the life of the mind;
the new literature, on the other hand, openly shifts the centre of art, bringing it back
towards what is most proper and particular in each individual. It is the product of the
fusion of two faculties of the artist—his sensibility and imagination. The Romantic spirit
can be defined as an accentuated predominance of emotional life, and Romantic
literature was fed by intense emotion coupled with the intense desire to display that
emotion through appropriate imagery. Thus Romantic literature is a genuinely creative
literature calling into play the highest creative faculty of man.
Romantic Poetry
Romantic poetry which was the antithesis of Classical poetry had many
complexities. Unlike Classical poets who agreed on the nature and form of poetry, and
the role that the poet is called upon to play, the Romantic poets held different views on
all these subjects. The artistic and philosophic principles of neo-classical poetry were
completely summarised by Pope, and they could be applied to the whole of Augustan
poetry. But it is difficult to find a common denominator which links such poets as
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. The reason of this was that
there was abundance and variety of genius. No age in English literature produced such
great giants in the field of poetry. Moreover, it was the age of revolutionary change, not
only in the view of the character and function of poetry but in the whole conception of
the nature of man and of the world in which he found himself. The evenness, equanimity
and uniformity of the Classical age was broken, and it was replaced by strong currents of
change flowing in various directions. One poet reacted to a particular current more
strongly or sympathetically than the other poet. Thus each poet of the Romantic period
stands for himself, and has his own well-defined individuality. The only common
characteristic that we find in them is their intense faith in imagination, which could not
be controlled by any rules and regulations.
In fact the most distinctive mark which distinguished the Romantic poets from the
Classical poets was the emphasis which the former laid on imagination. In the
eighteenth century imagination was not a cardinal point in poetical theory. For Pope,
Johnson and Dryden the poet was more an interpreter than a creator, more concerned
with showing the attractions of what we already know than with expeditions into the
unfamiliar and the unseen. They were less interested in the mysteries of life than in its
familiar appearances, and they thought that their task was to display this with as much
charm and truth as they could command. But for the Romantics imagination was
fundamental, because they thought that without that poetry was impossible. They were
conscious of a wonderful capacity to create imaginary worlds, and they could not believe
that this was idle or false. On the contrary, they thought that to curb it was to deny
something vitally necessary to the whole being.
Whereas the Classical poets were more interested in the visible world, the Romantic
poets obeyed an inner call to explore more fully the world of the spirit. They
endeavoured to explore the mysteries of life, and thus understand it better. It was this
search for the unseen world that awoke the inspiration of the Romantics and made poets
of them. They appealed not to the logical mind, but to the complete self, in the whole
range of intellectual faculties, senses and emotions.
Though all the Romantic poets believed in an ulterior reality and based their poetry
on it, they founded it in different ways and made different uses of it. They varied in the
degree of importance which they attached to the visible world and in their interpretation
of it. Coleridge conceived of the world of facts as an “inanimate cold world”, in which
“object, as objects, are essentially fixed and dead”. It was the task of the poet to
transform it by his power of imagination, to bring the dead world back to life. When we
turn to The Ancient Mariner and Christable it seems clear that Coleridge thought that
the task of poetry is to convey the mystery of life by the power of imagination. He was
fascinated by the notion of unearthly powers at work in the world, and it was this
influence which he sought to catch. The imagination of the poet is his creative, shaping
spirit, and it resembles the creative power of God. Just as God creates this universe, the
poet also creates a universe of his own by his imagination.
Wordsworth also thought with Coleridge that the imagination was the most
important gift that the poet can have. He agreed with Coleridge that this activity
resembles that of God. But according to Wordsworth imagination is a comprehensive
faculty comprising many faculties. So he explains that the imagination:
Is but another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind
And Reason in her most exalted mood.
Wordsworth differs from Coleridge in his conception of the external world. For him
the world is not dead but living and has its own soul. Man’s task is to enter into
communion with this soul. Nature was the source of his inspiration, and he could not
deny to it an existence at least as powerful as man’s. But since nature lifted him out of
himself, he sought for a higher state in which the soul of nature and the soul of man
could be united in a single harmony.
Shelley was no less attached to the imagination and gave it no less a place in his
theory of poetry. He saw that the task of reason is simply to analyse a given thing and to
act as an instrument of the imagination, which uses its conclusions to create a synthetic
and harmonious whole. He called poetry “the Expression of the Imagination”, because
in it diverse things are brought together in harmony instead of being separated through
analysis. Shelley tried to grasp the whole of things in its essential unity, to show is real
and what is merely phenomenal, and by doing this to display how the phenomenal
depends on the real. For him the ultimate reality is the eternal mind, and this holds the
universe together. In thought and feeling, in consciousness and spirit, Shelley found
reality. He believed that the task of the imagination is to create shapes by which this
reality can be revealed.
 Keats had passionate love for the visible world and at times his approach was highly
sensuous. But he had a conviction that the ultimate reality is to be found only in the
imagination. What is meant to him can be seen from some lines in Sleep and Poetry, in
which he asks why imagination has lost its power and scope:
Is there so small a range
In the present strength of manhood, that the high
Imagination cannot freely fly
As she was wont of old? prepare her steeds
Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds
Upon the clouds? Has she not shown us all?
From the clear space of ether, to the small
Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning
Of Jove’s eyebrow, to the tender greening
Of April meadows.
Through the imagination Keats sought an ultimate reality to which a door was
opened by his appreciation of beauty through the senses. For him imagination is that
absorbing and exalting faculty which opens the way to an unseen spiritual order.
Thus the great Romantic poets agreed that their task was to find through the
imagination some transcendental order, some inner and ultimate reality which explains
the outward appearance of things in the visible world and the effect which they produce
on us. Each one gave his own interpretation of the universe, the relation of God, the
connection between the visible and the invisible, nature and man, as he saw it through
the power of his imagination. Each set forth his own vision through the power of his
imagination. Each set forth his own vision through the richness of his poetry, and gave it
a concrete individual shape. They refused to accept the ideas of other men on trust or to
sacrifice imagination to argument. By means of their creative art they tried to awaken
the imagination of the reader to the reality that lies behind and in familiar things, to
rouse him from the dead and dull routine of custom, and make him conscious of the
unfathomable mysteries of life. They tried to show that mere reason is not sufficient to
understand the fundamental problems of life; what is required is inspired intuition.
Thus their view of life and poetry was much wider and deeper than that of their
predecessors in the eighteenth century, because they appealed to the whole spiritual
nature of man and not merely to his reason and common sense whose scope is limited.

Poets of the Romantic Age

The poets of the Romantic age can be classified into three groups— (i) The Lake
School, consisting of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey; (ii) The Scott group including
Campbell and Moore; and (iii) The group comprising Byron, Shelley, and Keats. The
first two groups were distinctly earlier than the third, so we have two eight years flood
periods of supremely great poetry, namely 1798-1806 and 1816-1824, separated by a
middle period when by comparison creative energy had ebbed.

(a) The Lake Poets

The Lake Poets formed a ‘school’ in the sense that they worked in close cooperation,
and their lives were spent partly in the Lake district. Only Wordsworth was born there,
but all the three lived there for a shorter or longer period. Linked together by friendship,
they were still further united by the mutual ardour of their revolutionary ideas in youth,
and by the common reaction which followed in their riper years. They held many of the
poetic beliefs in common. Wordsworth and Coleridge lived together for a long time and
produced the Lyrical Ballads by joint effort in 1798. They had original genius and what
they achieved in the realm of poetry was supported by Southey who himself did not
possess much creative imagination. The literary revolution which is associated with
their name was accomplished in 1800, when in the second edition of the Lyrical
Ballads,Wordsworth and Coleridge explained further their critical doctrines.
Describing the genesis of the poems contained the Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge wrote
later in his greatest critical work—Biographia Literaria (1817):
During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our
conversation turned frequently on two cardinal points of poetry, the power
of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of
nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying
colours of imagination…The thought suggested itself that a series of poems
may be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to
be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist
in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as
would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real…For the
second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters
and incidents, were to be such as will be found in every village and its
vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or
to notice them, when they present themselves. In this idea originated the
plan ofLyrical Ballads, in which it was agreed that my endeavour should be
directed to persons and characters supernatural…Mr. Wordsworth, on the
other hand, was to give charm of novelty to things of every day.
This was the framework of the Lyrical Ballads. Regarding the style, Wordsworth
explained in the famous preface:
The poems were published which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain
how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement, a selection of the real language
of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity
of pleasure may be imparted, which a poet may rationally endeavour to
impart…Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition
the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain
 their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more
emphatic language.
Wordsworth thus registered a protest against the artificial ‘poetic diction’ of the
classical school, which was separated from common speech. He declared emphatically:
“There is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and
metrical composition.” Thus it was in the spirit of a crusader that Wordsworth entered
upon his poetic career. His aim was to lift poetry from its depraved state and restore to it
its rightful position.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was the greatest poet of the Romantic period. The
credit of originating the Romantic movement goes to him. He refused to abide by any
poetic convention and rules, and forged his own way in the realm of poetry. He stood
against many generations of great poets and critics, like Dryden, Pope and Johnson, and
made way for a new type of poetry. He declared: “A poet is a man endowed with more
lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of
human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common
among mankind.” The truth of this statement struck down the ideal of literary
conventions based on reason and rationality, which had been blindly worshipped for so
long. By defining poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” he revolted
against the dry intellectuality of his predecessors. By giving his ideas about the poetic
language as simple and natural, he opposed the “gaudiness and inane phraseology” of
the affected classical style.
Wordsworth wrote a large number and variety of lyrics, in which he can stir the
deepest emotions by the simplest means. There we find the aptness of phrase and an
absolute naturalness which make a poem once read as a familiar friend. Language can
scarcely be at once more simple and more full of feeling than in the following stanza
from one of the ‘Lucy poems’:
Thus Nature spoke—The work was done,
How soon my Lucy’s race was run.
She died, and left to me
This health, this calm, and quiet scene,
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be.
Besides lyrics Wordsworth wrote a number of sonnets of rare merit
like ToMilton, Westminster Bridge, The World is too much with us, in which there is a
fine combination of the dignity of thought and language. In his odes, as Ode to Duty and
Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, he gives expression to his high ideals and
philosophy of life. In the Immortality Ode, Wordsworth celebrates one of his most
cherished beliefs that our earliest intuitions are the truest, and that those are really
happy who even in their mature years keep themselves in touch with their childhood:
Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither.
Can in a moment travel thither,
 And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling ever more.
But Wordsworth was not merely a lyrical poet; he justly claims to be the poet of Man
of Nature, and of Human Life. Though in his youth he came under the influence of the
ideals of the French Revolution, he was soon disillusioned on account of its excesses,
and came to the conclusion that the emancipation of man cannot be effected by poetical
upheavals, but by his living a simple, natural life. In the simple pieties of rustic life he
began to find a surer foundation for faith in mankind than in the dazzling hopes created
by the French Revolution. Moreover, he discovered that there is an innate harmony
between Nature and Man. It is when man lives in the lap of nature that he lives the right
type of life. She has an ennobling effect on him, and even the simplest things in nature
can touch a responsive cord in man’s heart:
To me the meanest flower that blooms can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
According to Wordsworth man is a part of Nature. In his poem Resolution and
Independence the old man and the surroundings make a single picture:
Himself he propped, limbs, body, and pale face,
Upon a long grey staff of shaven wood;
And, still as I drew near with gentle pace
Upon the margin of that moorish flood,
Motionless like a cloud the old man stood
That heareth not the loud winds when they call;
And moveth all together, if it move at all.
Besides the harmony between Man and Nature, the harmony of Wordsworth’s own
spirit with the universe is the theme of Wordsworth’s greatest Nature poems: Lines
composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, Yew Trees and The Simplton Pass.
Wordsworth is famous for his lyrics, sonnets, odes and short descriptive poems. His
longer poems contain much that is prosy and uninteresting. The greater part of his
work, including The Prelude and The Excursion was intended for a place in a single
great poem, to be called The Recluse,which should treat of nature, man and society. The
Prelude, treating of the growth of poets’ mind, was to introduce this work. The
Excursion (1814) is the second book of The Recluse; and the third was never completed.
In his later years, Wordsworth wrote much poetry which is dull and unimaginative. But
there is not a single line in his poetry which has not got the dignity and high moral value
which we associate with Wordsworth who, according to Tennyson, “uttered nothing
base.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). The genius of Coleridge was complementary
to that of Wordsworth. While Wordsworth dealt with naturalism which was an
important aspect of the Romantic movement, Coleridge made the supernatural his
special domain, which was an equally important aspect. In his youth Coleridge came
under the spell of French Revolution and the high hope which it held out for the
emancipation of the oppressed section of mankind. He gave poetic expression to his
political aspiration in Religious Musings, Destiny of Nations and Ode to the Departing
Year (1796). But like Wordsworth, he also began to think differently after the excesses of
the Revolution. This change of thought is shown in his beautiful poem France: an
Ode(1798) which he himself called his ‘recantation’. After that he, like Wordsworth,
began to support the conservative cause.
Coleridge was a man of gigantic genius, but his lack of will power and addiction to
opium prevented him from occomplishing much in the realm of poetry. Whatever he has
written, though of high quality, is fragmentary. It was, however, in the fields of theology,
philosophy and literary criticism that he exercised a tremendous and lasting influence.
His two best-known poems areThe Ancient Mariner and Christabel, which represent the
high watermark of supernaturalism as some of the best poems of Wordsworth represent
the triumph of naturalism, in English poetry. In these two poems Coleridge saved
supernaturalism from the coarse sensationalism then in vogue by linking it with
psychological truth. He had absorbed the spells of medievalism within himself and in
these poems they appeared rarely distilled and inextricably blinded with poets’ exquisite
perception of the mysteries that surround the commonplace things of everyday life.
In the Ancient Mariner, which is a poetic masterpiece, Coleridge introduced the
reader to a supernatural realm, with a phantom ship, a crew of dead men, the
overwhelming curse of the albatross, the polar spirit, the magic breeze, and a number of
other supernatural things and happenings, but he manages to create a sense of absolute
reality concerning these manifest absurdities. With that supreme art which ever seems
artless, Coleridge gives us glimpses from time to time of the wedding feast to which the
mariner has been invited. The whole poem is wrought with the colour and glamour of
the Middle Ages and yet Coleridge makes no slavish attempt to reproduce the past in a
mechanical manner. The whole poem is the baseless fabric of a vision; a fine product of
the ethereal and subtle fancy of a great poet. But in spite of its wildness, its medieval
superstitions and irresponsible happening, The Ancient Mariner is made actual and
vital to our imagination by its faithful pictures of Nature, its psychological insight and
simple humanity. In it the poet deals in a superb manner with the primal emotions of
love, hate, pain, remorse and hope. He prayeth best who loveth best is not an artificial
ending of the poem in the form of a popular saying, but it is a fine summing up in a few
lines of the spirit which underlies the entire poem. Its simple, ballad form, its exquisite
imagery, the sweet harmony of its verse, and the aptness of its phraseology, all woven
together in an artistic whole, make this poem the most representative of the romantic
school of poetry.
Christabel, which is a fragment, seems to have been planned as the story of a pure
young girl who fell under the spell of a sorcer in the shape of the woman Gerldine.
Though it has strange melody and many passages of exquisite poetry, and in sheer
artistic power it is scarcely inferior to The Ancient Mariner, it has supernatural terrors
of the popular hysterical novels. The whole poem is suffused in medieval atmosphere
and everything is vague and indefinite. LikeThe Ancient Mariner it is written in a
homely and simple diction and in a style which is spontaneous and effortless.
Kubla Khan is another fragment in which the poet has painted a gorgeous Oriental
dream picture. The whole poem came to Coleridge in a dream one morning when he had
fallen asleep, and upon awakening he began to write hastily, but he was interrupted
after fifty-four lines were written, and it was never finished.
 Though Coleridge wrote a number of other poems—Love, The Dark Ladie, Youth
and Age, Dejection: an Ode, which have grace, tenderness and touches of personal
emotion, and a number of poems full of very minute description of natural scenes, yet
his strength lay in his marvellous dream faculty, and his reputation as a poet rest on The
Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khanwhere he touched the heights of romantic
poetry.
Robert Southey (1774-1843) was the third poet of the group of Lake Poets. Unlike
Wordsworth and Coleridge he lacked higher qualities of poetry, and his achievement as
a poet is not much. He was a voracious reader and voluminous writer. His most
ambitious poems Thalaba, The Curse of Kehama, Madoc and Roderick are based on
mythology of different nations. He also wrote a number of ballads and short poems, of
which the best known is about his love for books (My days among the Dead are
past.) But he wrote far better prose than poetry, and his admirableLife of
Nelson remains a classic. He was made the Poet Laureate in 1813, and after his death in
1843 Wordsworth held this title.
(b) The Scott Group
The romantic poets belonging to the Scott group are Sir Walter Scott,
Campbelland Thomas Moore. They bridged the years which preceded the second
outburst of high creative activity in the Romantic period.
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was the first to make romantic poetry popular among
the masses. His Marmion and Lady of the Lakegained greater popularity than the
poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge which were read by a select few. But in his poetry
we do not find the deeply imaginative and suggestive quality which is at the root of
poetic excellence. It is the story element, the narrative power, which absorbs the reader’s
attention. That is why they are more popular with young readers. Moreover, Scott’s
poetry appeals on account of its vigour, youthful abandon, vivid pictures, heroic
characters, rapid action and succession of adventures. His best known poems are The
Lady of the Last Ministrel, Marmion, The Lady of theLake, Rokeby, The Lord of the
Isles. All of them recapture the atmosphere of the Middle Ages, and breathe an air of
supernaturalism and superstitions. After 1815 Scott wrote little poetry and turned to
prose romance in the form of the historical novel in which field he earned great and
enduring fame.
Thomas Campbell (1774-1844) and Thomas Moore (1779-1852) were prominent
among a host of minor poets who following the vogue of Scott wrote versified romance.
Campbell wrote Gertrude of Wyoming (1809) in the Spenserian stanza, which does not
hold so much interest today as his patriotic war songs—Ye Mariners of England,
Hohenlinden, The Battle of the Baltic, and ballads such as Lord Ullin’s Daughter. The
poems of Moore are now old-fashioned and have little interest for the modern reader.
He wrote a long series of Irish Melodies, which are musical poems, vivacious and
sentimental. His Lalla Rookh is a collection of Oriental tales in which he employs
lucious imagery. Though Moore enjoyed immense popularity during his time, he is now
considered as a minor poet of the Romantic Age.
(c) The Younger Group
 To the younger group of romantic poets belong Byron, Shelley and Keats. They
represent the second Flowering of English Romanticism, the first being represented by
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. Though the younger group was in many ways
indebted to the older group and was in many ways akin to it, yet the poets of the younger
group show some sharp differences with the poets of older group, it was because the
revolutionary ideals which at first attracted Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey and
then repelled them, had passed into the blood of Byron and Shelley. They were the
children of the revolution and their humanitarian ardour affected even Keats who was
more of an artist. Moreover, compared to the poets of the older group, the poets of the
younger group were not only less national, but they were also against the historic and
social traditions of England. It is not without significance that Byron and Shelley lived
their best years, and produced their best poetry in Italy; and Keats was more interested
in Greek mythology than in the life around him. Incidentally, these three poets of second
generation of Romanticism died young—Byron at the age of thirty-six, Shelley thirty,
and Keats twenty-five. So the spirit of youthful freshness is associated with their poetry.
(i) Lord George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)
During his time Byron was the most popular of all Romantic poets, and he was the
only one who made an impact on the continent both in his own day and for a long time
afterwards. This was mainly due to the force of his personality and the glamour of his
career, but as his poetry does not possess the high excellence that we find in Shelley’s
and Keats’, now he is accorded a lower positions in the hierarchy of Romantic poets. He
is the only Romantic poet who showed regard for the poets of the eighteenth century,
and ridiculed his own contemporaries in his early satirical poem,English Bards and
Scottish Reviewers (1809). That is why, he is called the ‘Romantic Paradox’.
Byron who had travelled widely captured the imagination of his readers by the
publications of the first two Cantos ofChilde Harold Pilgrimage (1812). This work made
him instantly famous. As he said himself, “I woke one morning and found myself
famous.” In it he described the adventures of a glamorous but sinister hero through
strange lands. He also gave an air of authenticity to these adventures and a suggestion
that he himself had indulged in such exploits. Such a hero, called the Byronic hero,
became very popular among the readers and there was greater and greater demand for
such romances dealing with his exploits. Under the pressure of the popular demand
Byron wrote a number of romances which began with The Giaor (1813), and in all of
them he dealt with the exploits of the Byronic hero. But whereas these romances made
his reputation not in England alone but throughout Europe, the pruder section of the
English society began to look upon him with suspicion, and considered him a
dangerous, sinister man. The result was that when his wife left him in 1816, a year after
his marriage, there was such a turn in the tide of public opinion against him that he
left England under a cloud of distrust and disappointment and never returned.
It was during the years of his exile inItaly that the best part of his poetry was written
by him. The third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold (1816-1818) have more sincerity,
and are in every way better expressions of Byron’s genius. He also wrote two sombre and
self-conscious tragedies—Manfred and Cain. But the greatness of Byron as a poet lies,
however, not in these poems and tragedies, but in the satires which begin
with Beppo (1818) and include The Vision of Judgment (1822) and Don Juan (1819-24).
Of these Don Juan, which is a scathing criticism of the contemporary European society,
is one of the greatest poems in the English language. In it humour, sentiment, adventure
and pathos are thrown together in a haphazard manner as in real life. It is written in a
conversational style which subtly produces comic as well as satirical effect.
Of all the romantic poets Byron was the most egoistical. In all his poems his
personality obtrudes itself, and he attaches the greatest importance to it. Of the
romantic traits, he represents the revolutionary iconoclasm at its worst, and that is why
he came in open conflict with the world around him. His last great act, dying on his way
to take part in the Greek War of Independence, was a truly heroic act; and it vindicated
his position for all times and made him a martyr in the cause of freedom.
Byron does not enjoy a high reputation as a poet because of his slipshod and
careless style. He was too much in a hurry to revise what he had written, and so there is
much in his poetry which is artistically imperfect. Moreover his rhetorical style, which
was admirably suited to convey the force and fire of his personality, often becomes dull
and boring.
(ii) Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Whereas Byron was the greatest interpreter of revolutionary iconoclasm, Shelley
was the revolutionary idealist, a prophet of hope and faith. He was a visionary who
dreamed of the Golden Age. Unlike Byron’s genius which was destructive, Shelley’s was
constructive and he incarnated that aspect of the French Revolution which aimed at
building up a new and beautiful edifice on the ruins of the old and the ugly. Whereas
Byron’s motive impulse was pride, Shelley’s was love.
In his early days Shelley came under the influence of William Godwin’s Political
Justice. He saw that all established institutions, kings and priests were diverse forms of
evil and obstacles to happiness and progress. So he began to imagine the new world
which would come into existence when all these forms of error and hatred had
disappeared. The essence of all his poetical works is his prophecy of the new-born age.
In his first long poem, Queen Mab,which he wrote when he was eighteen, he condemns
kings, governments, church, property, marriage and Christianity. The Revolt of
Islam which followed in 1817, and is a sort of transfigured picture of the French
Revolution is charged with the young poet’s hopes for the future regeneration of the
world. In 1820 appeared Prometheus Unbound, the hymn of human revolt triumphing
over the oppression of false gods. In this superb lyrical drama we find the fullest and
finest expression of Shelley’s faith and hope. Here Prometheus stands forth as the
prototype of mankind in its long struggle against the forces of despotism, symbolised by
love. At last Prometheus is united to Asia, the spirit of love and goodness in nature, and
everything gives promise that they shall live together happy ever afterwards.
Shelley’s other great poems are Alastor(1816), in which he describes his pursuit of
an unattainable ideal of beauty; Julian and Meddalo (1818) in which he draws his own
portrait contrasted with last of Byron; The Cenci, a poetic drama which deals with the
terrible story of Beatrice who, the victim of father’s lust, takes his life in revenge; the
lyrical drama Hallas in which he sings of the rise of Greece against the Ottoman
yoke;Epipsychidion in which he celebrates his Platonic love for a beautiful young Italian
girl: Adonais, the best-known of Shelley’s longer poems, which is an elegy dedicated to
the poet Keats, and holds its place with Milton’s Lycidas and Tennyson’s In
Memoriam as one of the three greatest elegies in the English language; and the
unfinished masterpiece, The Triumph of Life.
Shelley’s reputation as a poet lies mainly in his lyrical power. He is in fact the
greatest lyrical poet of England. In all these poems mentioned above, it is their lyrical
rapture which in unique. In the whole of English poetry there is no utterance as
spontaneous as Shelley’s and nowhere does the thought flow with such irresistable
melody. Besides these longer poems Shelley wrote a number of small lyrics of exquisite
beauty, such as “To Constantia Singing’, the ‘Ozymandias’ sonnet, the “Lines written
among the Euganean Hills’, the ‘Stanzas written in Dejection’, the ‘Ode to the West
Wind’, ‘Cloud’, ‘Skylark’; ‘O World! O life! O time’. It is in fact on the foundation of these
beautiful lyrics, which are absolutely consummate and unsurpassed the whole range of
English lyrical poetry, that Shelley’s real reputation as a poet lies.
As the poet of Nature, Shelley was inspired by the spirit of love which was not
limited to mankind but extended to every living creature—to animals and flowers, to
elements, to the whole Nature. He is not content, like Wordsworth, merely to love and
revere Nature; his very being is fused and blended with her. He, therefore, holds
passionate communion with the universe, and becomes one with the lark (To a
Skylark), with the cloud (The Cloud), and west wind (Ode to the West Wind) to which
he utters forth this passionate, lyrical appeal:
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is;
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one.
(iii) John Keats (1795-21)
Of all the romantic poets, Keats was the pure poet. He was not only the last but the
most perfect of the Romanticists. He was devoted to poetry and had no other interest.
Unlike Wordsworth who was interested in reforming poetry and upholding the moral
law; unlike Shelley who advocated impossible reforms and phrophesied about the
golden age; and unlike Byron who made his poetry a vehicle of his strongly egoistical
nature and political discontents of the time; unlike Coleridge who was a metaphysician,
and Scott who relished in story-telling, Keats did not take much notice of the social,
political and literary turmoils, but devoted himself entirely to the worship of beauty, and
writing poetry as it suited his temperament. He was, about all things, a poet, and
nothing else. His nature was entirely and essentially poetical and the whole of his vital
energy went into art.
Unlike Byron who was a lord, and Shelley who belonged to an aristocratic family,
Keats came of a poor family, and at an early age he had to work as a doctor’s assistant.
But his medical studies did not stand in the way of his passion for writing poetry which
was roused by his reading of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which revealed to him the
vast world of poetry. He also became interested in the beauty of nature. His first volume
of poems appeared in 1817 and his first long poem Endymion in 1818, which opened
with the following memorable lines:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us; and sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and healthy, and quiet breathing.
This poem was severely criticised by contemporary critics, which must have shocked
Keats. Besides this a number of other calamities engulfed him. He had lost his father
when he was only nine; his mother and brother died of tuberculosis, and he himself was
suffering from this deadly disease. All these misfortunes were intensified by his
disappointment in love for Fanny Brawne whom Keats loved passionately. But he
remained undaunted, and under the shadow of death and in midst of most excruciating
sufferings Keats brought out his last volume of poems in the year 1820 (which is called
the ‘Living Year’ in his life.) The Poems of 1820 are Keats’ enduring monument. They
include the three narratives, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes andLamia: the unfinished
epic Hyperion; the Odes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and a few sonnets.
In Isabella Keats made an attempt to turn a somewhat repellent and tragic love
story of Isabella and Lorenzo, who was murdered by Isabella’s brothers, into a thing of
beauty by means of fine narrative skill and beautiful phraseology. In Lamia Keats
narrated the story of a beautiful enchantress, who turns from a serpent into a glorious
woman and fills every human sense with delight, until as the result of the foolish
philosophy of old Apollonius, she vanishes for ever from her lover’s sight. The Eve of St.
Agnes, which is the most perfect of Keat’s medieval poems, is surpassingly beautiful in
its descriptions. Hyperion which is a magnificent fragment deals with the overthrow of
the Titans by the young sun-god Apollo. This poem shows the influence
of Milton as Endymion of Spenser. La Belle Dame Sans Merci, which captures the spirit
of the Middle Ages, has a haunting melody. Though small, it is a most perfect work of
art.
Of the odes, those To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn and To Autumn stand out
above the rest, and are among the masterpieces of poetic art. In Ode to a Nightingale we
find a love of sensuous beauty, and a touch of pessimism. In Ode on a Grecian Urn we
see Keats’s love for Greek mythology and art. It is this Ode which ends with the
following most memorable lines in the whole of Keats’s poetry.
‘Beauty is Truth, and Truth Beauty’,--that is all
Yea know on earth, and all ye need to know.
The Ode to Autumn, in which Keats has glorified Nature, is a poem which for
richness and colour has never been surpassed. Though Keats died young, when he had
attained barely the age of twenty-five, and had only a few years in which he could
effectively write poetry, his achievement in the field of poetry is so great, that we wonder
what he might have accomplished if he had lived longer. For a long time his poetry was
considered merely as sensuous having no depth of thought. But with the help of his
letters critics have reinterpreted his poems, and now it has been discovered that they are
based on mature thinking, and that there is a regular line of development from the point
of thought and art. He was not an escapist who tried to run away from the stark realities
of life, but he faced life bravely, and came to the conclusion that sufferings play an
important part in the development of the human personality. As a worshipper of beauty,
though his first approach was sensuous, his attitude suddenly became philosophic, and
he discovered that there is beauty in everything, and that Beauty and Truth are one. As
an artist there are few English poets who come near him. As a poet he had very high
ideals before him. He wanted to become the poet of the human heart, one with
Shakespeare. For him the proper role of poetry is ‘to be a friend to sooth the cares, and
lift the thoughts of men”, and the real poet is that “to whom the miseries of the world are
misery, and will not let him rest.”
And Keats sincerely and persistently lived up to these high ideals. Taking into
account all these factors and the very short span of life that was given to him by the
Providence, it is no exaggeration to say that of all the English poets he comes nearest to
Shakespeare.

Prose-Writers of the Romantic Age

Though the Romantic period specialised in poetry, there also appeared a few prose-
writers-Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey who rank very high. There was no revolt of the
prose-writers against the eighteenth century comparable to that of the poets, but a
change had taken place in the prose-style also.
Whereas many eighteenth century prose-writers depended on assumptions about the
suitability of various prose styles for various purposes which they shared with their
relatively small but sophisticated public; writers in the Romantic period were rather
more concerned with subject matter and emotional expression than with appropriate
style. They wrote for an ever-increasing audience which was less homogeneous in its
interest and education than that of their predecessors. There was also an indication of a
growing distrust of the sharp distinction between matter and manner which was made
in the eighteenth century, and of a Romantic preference for spontaneity rather than
formality and contrivance. There was a decline of the ‘grand’ style and of most forms of
contrived architectural prose written for what may be called public or didactic purposes.
Though some Romantic poets—Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron—wrote excellent prose
in their critical writings, letters and journals, and some of the novelists like Scott and
Jane Austen were masters of prose-style, those who wrote prose for its own sake in the
form of the essays and attained excellence in the art of prose-writing were Lamb, Hazlitt
and De Quincey.
(i) Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
Charles Lamb is one of the most lovable personalities in English literature. He lived
a very humble, honest, and most self-sacrificing life. He never married, but devoted
himself to the care of his sister Mary, ten years his senior, who was subject to mental
fits, in one of which she had fatally wounded her mother. In his Essays of Elia(1823)
and Last Essays (1833), in which is revealed his own personality, he talks intimately to
the readers about himself, his quaint whims and experiences, and the cheerful and
heroic struggle which he made against misfortunes. Unlike Wordsworth who was
interested in natural surroundings and shunned society, Lamb who was born and lived
in the midst of London street, was deeply interested in the city crowd, its pleasures and
occupations, its endless comedies and tragedies, and in his essays he interpreted with
great insight and human sympathy that crowded human life of joys and sorrows.
Lamb belongs to the category of intimate and self-revealing essayists, of whom
Montaigne is the original, and Cowley the first exponent in England. To the informality
of Cowley he adds the solemn confessional manner of Sir Thomas Browne. He writes
always in a gentle, humorous way about the sentiments and trifles of everyday. The
sentimental, smiling figure of ‘Elia’ in his essays is only a cloak with which Lamb hides
himself from the world. Though in his essays he plays with trivialities, as Walter Pater
has said, “We know that beneath this blithe surface there is something of the domestic
horror, of the beautiful heroism, and devotedness too, of the old Greek tragedy.”
The style of Lamb is described as ‘quaint’, because it has the strangeness which we
associate with something old-fashioned. One can easily trace in his English the
imitations of the 16th and 17th century writers he most loved—Milton, Sir Thomas
Browne, Fuller, Burton, Issac Walton. According to the subject he is treating, he makes
use of the rhythms and vocabularies of these writers. That is why, in every essay Lamb’s
style changes. This is the secret of the charm of his style and it also prevents him from
ever becoming monotonous or tiresome. His style is also full of surprises because his
mood continually varies, creating or suggesting its own style, and calling into play some
recollection of this or that writer of the older world.
Lamb is the most lovable of all English essayists, and in his hand the Essay reached
its perfection. His essays are true to Johnson’s definition; ‘a loose sally of the mind.’
Though his essays are all criticisms or appreciations of the life of his age and literature,
they are all intensely personal. They, therefore, give us an excellent picture of Lamb and
of humanity. Though he often starts with some purely personal mood or experience he
gently leads the reader to see life as he saw it, without ever being vain or self-assertive. It
is this wonderful combination of personal and universal interest together with his rare
old style and quaint humour, which have given his essays his perennial charm, and
earned for him the covetable title of “The Prince among English Essayists”.
(ii) William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
As a personality Hazlitt was just the opposite of Lamb. He was a man of violent
temper, with strong likes and dislikes. In his judgment of others he was always
downright and frank, and never cared for its effect on them. During the time
when England was engaged in a bitter struggle against Napoleon, Hazlitt worshipped
him as a hero, and so he came in conflict with the government. His friends left him one
by one on account of his aggressive nature, and at the time of his death only Lamb stood
by him.
Hazlitt wrote many volumes of essays, of which the most effective is The Spirit of
the Age (1825) in which he gives critical portraits of a number of his famous
contemporaries. This was a work which only Hazlitt could undertake because he was
outspoken and fearless in the expression of his opinion. Though at times he is misled by
his prejudices, yet taking his criticism of art and literature as a whole there is not the
least doubt that there is great merit in it. He has the capacity to see the whole of his
author most clearly, and he can place him most exactly in relation to other authors. In
his interpretation of life in the general and proper sense, he shows an acute and accurate
power of observation and often goes to the very foundation of things. Underneath his
light and easy style there always flows an undercurrent of deep thought and feeling.
The style of Hazlitt has force, brightness and individuality. Here and there we find
passages of solemn and stately music. It is the reflection of Hazlitt’s personality—
outspoken, straightforward and frank. As he had read widely, and his mind was filled
with great store of learning, his writings are interspersed with sentences and phrases
from other writers and there are also echoes of their style. Above all, it vibrates with the
vitality and force of his personality, and so never lapses into dullness.
(iii) Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859)
De Quincey is famous as the writer of ‘impassioned prose’. He shared the reaction of
his day against the severer classicism of the eighteenth century, preferring rather the
ornate manner of Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne and their contemporaries. The
specialty of his style consists in describing incidents of purely personal interest in
language suited to their magnitude as they appear in the eyes of the writer. The reader is
irresistibly attracted by the splendour of his style which combines the best elements of
prose and poetry. In fact his prose works are more imaginative and melodious than
many poetical works. There is revealed in them the beauty of the English language. The
defects of his style are that he digresses too much, and often stops in the midst of the
fine paragraph to talk about some trivial thing by way of jest. But in spite of these
defects his prose is still among the few supreme examples of style in the English
language.
De Quincey was a highly intellectual writer and his interests were very wide. Mostly
he wrote in the form of articles for journals and he dealt with all sorts of subjects—about
himself and his friends, life in general, art, literature, philosophy and religion. Of his
autobiographical sketches the best-known is his Confessions of an English Opium-
Eater, in which he has given us, in a most interesting manner, glimpses of his own life
under the influence of opium. He wrote fine biographies of a number of classical,
historical and literary personages, of which the most ambitious attempt is The
Caerars. His most perfect historical essay is on Joan of Arc. His essays on principle of
literature are original and penetrating. The best of this type is the one where he gives the
distinction between the literature of knowledge and of power. On the Knocking at the
Gate in Macbeth is the most brilliant. He also wrote very scholarly articles on Goethe,
Pope, Schiller and Shakespeare. Besides these he wrote a number of essays on science
and theology.
In all his writings De Quincey asserts his personal point of view, and as he is a man
of strong prejudices, likes and dislikes, he often gives undue emphasis on certain points.
The result is that we cannot rely on his judgment entirely. But there is no doubt that his
approach is always original and brilliant which straightway captures the attention of the
reader. Moreover, the splendour of his ‘poetic prose’ which is elaborate and sonorous in
its effects, casts its own special spell. The result is that De Quincey is still one of the
most fascinating prose-writers of England.
Novelists of The Romantic Age
The great novelists of the Romantic period are Jane Austen and Scott, but before them
there appeared some novelists who came under the spell of medievalism and wrote novels
of ‘terror’ or the ‘Gothic novels’. The origin of this type of fiction can be ascribed to Horace
Walpole’s (1717-97)The Castle of Otranto (1746). Here the story in set in
medieval Italy and it includes a gigantic helmet that can strike dead its victims, tyrants,
supernatural intrusions, mysteries and secrets. There were a number of imitators of such
a type of novel during the eighteenth century as well as in the Romantic period.

(i) The Gothic Novel

The most popular of the writers of the ‘terror’ or ‘Gothic’ novel during the Romantic
age was Mrs. Ann Radciffe (1764-1823), of whose five novels the best-known are The
Mysteries of Udolpho and the Italian.She initiated the mechanism of the ‘terror’ tale as
practiced by Horace Walpole and his followers, but combined it with sentimental but
effective description of scenery. The Mysteries of Udolpho relates the story of an
innocent and sensitive girl who falls in the hands of a heartless villain named Montoni.
He keeps her in a grim and isolated castle full of mystery and terror. The novels of Mrs.
Radcliffe became very popular, and they influenced some of the great writers like Byron
and Shelley. Later they influenced the Bronte sisters whose imagination was stimulated
by these strange stories.
Though Mrs. Radcliffe was the prominent writer of ‘Gothic’ novels, there were a few
other novelists who earned popularity by writing such novels. They were Mathew
Gregory (‘Monk’) Lewis (1775-1818). Who wrote The Monk, Tales of Terror and Tales of
Wonder; and Charles Robert Maturin whose Melmoth the Wanderer exerted great
influence in France. But the most popular of all ‘terror’ tales was Frankestein (1817)
written by Mrs. Shelley. It is the story of a mechanical monster with human powers
capable of performing terrifying deeds. Of all the ‘Gothic’ novels it is the only one which
is popular even today.
(ii) Jane Austen (1775-1817)
Jane Austen brought good sense and balance to the English novel which during the
Romantic age had become too emotional and undisciplined. Giving a loose rein to their
imagination the novelist of the period carried themselves away from the world around
them into a romantic past or into a romantic future. The novel, which in the hands of
Richardson and Fielding had been a faithful record of real life and of the working of
heart and imagination, became in the closing years of the eighteenth century the
literature of crime, insanity and terror. It, therefore, needed castigation and reform
which were provided by Jane Austen. Living a quiet life she published her six novels
anonymously, which have now placed her among the front rank of English novelists. She
did for the English novel precisely what the Lake poets did for English poetry—she
refined and simplified it, making it a true reflection of English life. As Wordsworth made
a deliberate effort to make poetry natural and truthful, Jane Austen also from the time
she started writing her first novel—Pride and Prejudice,had in her mind the idea of
presenting English country society exactly as it was, in opposition to the romantic
extravagance of Mrs. Radcliffe and her school. During the time of great turmoil and
revolution in various fields, she quietly went on with her work, making no great effort to
get a publisher, and, when a publisher was got, contenting herself with meagre
remuneration and never permitting her name to appear on a title page. She is one of the
sincerest examples in English literature of art for art’s sake.
In all Jane Austen wrote six novels—Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility,
Emma, Mansefield Park, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Of these Pride and
Prejudiceis the best and most widely read of her novels. Sense and Sensibility,
Emma andMansefield are now placed among the front rank of English novels. From
purely literary point of view Northanger Abbey gets the first place on account of the
subtle humour and delicate satire it contains against the grotesque but popular ‘Gothic’
novels.
As a novelist Jane Austen worked in a narrow field. She was the daughter of a
humble clergyman living in a little village. Except for short visits to neighbouring places,
she lived a static life but she had such a keen power of observation that the simple
country people became the characters of her novels. The chief duties of these people
were of the household, their chief pleasures were in country gatherings and their chief
interest was in matrimony. It is the small, quiet world of these people, free from the
mighty interests, passions, ambitious and tragic struggles of life, that Jane Austin
depicts in her novels. But in spite of these limitations she has achieved wonderful
perfection in that narrow field on account of her acute power of observation, her fine
impartiality and self-detachment, and her quiet, delicate and ironical humour. Her
circumstances helped her to give that finish and delicacy to her work, which have made
them artistically prefect. Novel-writing was a part of her everyday life, to be placed aside
should a visitor come, to be resumed when he left, to be purused unostentatiously and
tranquilly in the midst of the family circle. She knew precisely what she wanted to do,
and she did it in the way that suited her best. Though in her day she did not receive the
appreciation she deserved, posterity has given her reward by placing this modest,
unassuming woman who died in her forties, as one of the greatest of English novelists.
Among her contemporaries only Scott, realised the greatness and permanent worth
of her work, and most aptly remarked: “That young lady has a talent for describing the
involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most
wonderful I ever met with. The big bowbow strain I can do myself, like any now going,
but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters
interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me, What a
pity such a gifted creature died so early!”
(iii) Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
Walter Scott’s qualities as a novelist were vastly different form those of Jane Austen.
Whereas she painted domestic miniatures, Scott depicted pageantry of history on
broader canvases. Jane Austen is precise and exact in whatever she writes; Scott is
diffusive and digressive. Jane Austen deals with the quiet intimacies of English rural life
free from high passions, struggles and great actions; Scott, on the other hand, deals with
the chivalric, exciting, romantic and adventurous life of the Highlanders—people living
on the border of England and Scotland, among whom he spent much of his youth, or
with glorious scenes of past history.
During his first five or six years of novel-writing Scott confined himself to familiar
scenes and characters. The novels which have a local colour and are based on personal
observations are Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Old Mortality and The Heart
of Midlothian. His first attempt at a historical novel was Ivanhoe (1819) followed by
Kenilworth (1821), Quentin Durward (1823), and The Talisman (1825). He returned to
Scottish antiquity from time to time as in The Monastery (1820) and St. Ronan’s
Well (1823).
In all these novels Scott reveals himself as a consummate storyteller. His leisurely
unfolding of the story allows of digression particularly in the descriptions of natural
scenes or of interiors. Without being historical in the strict sense he conveys a sense of
the past age by means of a wealth of colourful descriptions, boundless vitality and with
much humour and sympathy. The historical characters which he has so beautifully
portrayed that they challenge comparison with the characters of Shakespeare, include
Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scott. Besides these he has given us a number of
imperishable portraits of the creatures of his imagination. He is a superb master of the
dialogue which is invariably true to character.
The novels of Scott betray the same imaginative joy in the recreation of the past as
his poetry, but the novel offered him a more adaptable and wider field than the narrative
poem. It gave him a better opportunity for the display of his varied gifts, his antiquarian
knowledge, his observation of life and character, his delight in popular as well as courtly
scenes, and his rich humour.
Scott is the first English writer of the historical novel, and he made very enduring
contributions to its development in England as well as in Europe. He was by
temperament and training perfectly suited to the accomplishment of this task. In the
first place he had acquired a profound knowledge of history by his copious reading since
his earliest youth. He had the zest of the story-teller, and a natural heartiness which
made him love life in all its manifestations. He had an innate sense of the picturesque,
developed by his passion for antiquarianism. His conservative temper which turned him
away from the contemporary revolutionary enthusiasm, gave him a natural sympathy
for the days of chivalry. In the Romantic age, Scott was romantic only in his love of the
picturesque and his interest in the Middle Ages.
Scott was the first novelist in Europe who made the scene an essential element in
action. He knew Scotland, and loved it, and there is hardly an event in any of his
Scottish novels in which we do not breathe the very atmosphere of the place, and feel the
presence of its moors and mountains. He chooses the place so well and describes it so
perfectly, that the action seems almost to be result of natural environment.
Though the style of Scott is often inartistic, heavy and dragging; the love interest in
his novels is apt to be insipid and monotonous; he often sketches a character roughly
and plunges him into the midst of stirring incidents; and he has no inclinations for
tracing the logical consequences of human action—all these objections and criticisms are
swept away in the end by the broad, powerful current of his narrative genius. Moreover,
Scott’s chief claim to greatness lies in the fact that he was the first novelist to recreate
the past in such a manner that the men and women of the bygone ages, and the old
scenes became actually living, and throbbing with life. Carlyle very pertinently remarked
about Scott’s novels: “These historical novels have taught this truth unknown to the
writers of history, that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men,
not by protocols, state papers, controversies, and abstractions of men.”

The Victorian Age (1832-1900)

The Victorian Age in English literature began in second quarter of the nineteenth
century and ended by 1900. Though strictly speaking, the Victorian age ought to
correspond with the reign of Queen Victoria, which extended from 1837 to 1901, yet
literary movements rarely coincide with the exact year of royal accession or death. From
the year 1798 with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads till the year 1820 there was the
heyday of Romanticism in England, but after that year there was a sudden decline.
Wordsworth who after his early effusion of revolutionary principles had relapsed into
conservatism and positive opposition to social and political reforms, produced nothing
of importance after the publication of his White Doe of Rylstone in 1815, though he lived
till 1850. Coleridge wrote no poem of merit after 1817. Scott was still writing after 1820,
but his work lacked the fire and originality of his early years. The Romantic poets of the
younger generation unfortunately all died young—Keats in 1820, Shelley in 1822, and
Byron in 1824.
Though the Romantic Age in the real sense of the term ended in 1820, the Victorian
Age started from 1832 with the passing of the first Reform Act, 1832. The years 1820-
1832 were the years of suspended animation in politics. It was a fact that England was
fast turning from an agricultural into a manufacturing country, but it was only after the
reform of the Constitution which gave right of vote to the new manufacturing centres,
and gave power to the middle classes, that the way was opened for new experiments in
constructive politics. The first Reform Act of 1832 was followed by the Repeal of the
Corn Laws in 1846 which gave an immense advantage to the manufacturing interests,
and the Second Reform Act of 1867. In the field of literature also the years 1820-1832
were singularly barren. As has already been pointed out, there was sudden decline of
Romantic literature from the year 1820, but the new literature of England, called the
Victorian literature, started from 1832 when Tennyson’s first important
volume, Poems,appeared. The following year saw Carlyle’sSartor Resartus, and
Dickens’ earliest work,Sketches by Boz. The literary career of Thackeray began about
1837, and Browning published his Dramatic Lyrics in 1842. Thus the Victorian period
in literature officially starts from 1832, though the Romantic period ended in 1820, and
Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837.
The Victorian Age is so long and complicated and the great writers who flourished in
it are so many, that for the sake of convenience it is often divided into two periods—
Early Victorian Period and Later Victorian Period. The earlier period which was the
period of middle class supremacy, the age of ‘laissez-faire’ or free trade, and of
unrestricted competition, extended from 1832 to 1870. The great writers of this period
were Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens and Thackeray.
All these poets, novelists and prose-writers form, a certain homogenous group, because
in spite of individual differences they exhibit the same approach to the contemporary
problems and the same literary, moral and social values. But the later Victorian writers
who came into prominence after 1870—Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, George Eliot,
Meredith, Hardy, Newman and Pater seem to belong to a different age. In poetry
Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris were the protagonists of new movement called the Pre-
Raphaelite Movement, which was followed by the Aesthetic Movement. In the field of
novel, George Eliot is the pioneer of what is called the modern psychological novel,
followed by Meredith and Hardy. In prose Newman tried to revolutionise Victorian
thought by turning it back to Catholicism, and Pater came out with his purely aesthetic
doctrine of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’, which was directly opposed to the fundamentally moral
approach of the prose-writers of the earlier period—Carlyle Arnold and Ruskin. Thus we
see a clear demarcation between the two periods of Victorian literature—the early
Victorian period (1832-1870) and the later Victorian period (1870-1900).
But the difference between the writers of the two periods is more apparent than real.
Fundamentally they belong to one group. They were all the children of the new age of
democracy, of individualism, of rapid industrial development and material expansion,
the age of doubt and pessimism, following the new conceptions of man which was
formulated by science under the name of Evolution. All of them were men and women of
marked originality in outlook and character or style. All of them were the critics of their
age, and instead of being in sympathy with its spirit, were its very severe critics. All of
them were in search of some sort of balance, stability, a rational understanding, in the
midst of the rapidly changing times. Most of them favoured the return to precision in
form, to beauty within the limits of reason, and to values which had received the stamp
of universal approval. It was in fact their insistence on the rational elements of thought,
which gave a distinctive character to the writings of the great Victorians, and which
made them akin, to a certain extent, to the great writers of the neo-Classical school. All
the great writers of the Victorian Age were actuated by a definite moral purpose.
Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold wrote with a superb faith in their message,
and with the conscious moral purpose to uplift and to instruct. Even the novel broke
away from Scott’s romantic influence. Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot wrote with a
definite purpose to sweep away error and reveal the underlying truth of humanity. For
this reason the Victorian Age was fundamentally an age of realism rather than of
romance.
But from another point of view, the Victorian Age in English literature was a
continuation of the Romantic Age, because the Romantic Age came to a sudden and
unnatural and mainly on account of the premature deaths of Byron, Shelley and Keats.
If they had lived longer, the Age of Romanticism would have extended further. But after
their death the coherent inspiration of romanticism disintegrated into separate lines of
development, just as in the seventeenth century the single inspiration of the
Renaissance broke into different schools. The result was that the spirit of Romanticism
continued to influence the innermost consciousness of Victorian Age. Its influence is
clearly visible on Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Dickens, Thackeray, Ruskin, Meredith,
Swinburne, Rossetti and others. Even its adversaries, and those who would escape its
spell, were impregnated with it. While denouncing it, Carlyle does so in a style which is
intensely charged with emotional fire and visionary colouring. In fact after 1870 we find
that the romantic inspiration was again in the ascendent in the shape of the Pre-
Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements.
There was also another reason of the continuation of Romanticism in the Victorian
Age. There is no doubt that the Reform Act set at rest the political disturbances by
satisfying the impatient demand of the middle classes, and seemed to inaugurate an age
of stability. After the crisis which followed the struggle against the French Revolution
and Napoleon, England set about organizing herself with a view to internal prosperity
and progress. Moreover, with the advent to power of a middle class largely imbued with
the spirit of Puritanism, and the accession of a queen to the throne, an era of self-
restraint and discipline started. The English society accepted as its standard a stricter
conventional morality which was voiced by writers like Carlyle. But no sooner had the
political disturbances subsided and a certain measure of stability and balance had been
achieved then there was fresh and serious outbreak in the economic world. The result
was that the Victorian period, quiet as it was, began to throb with the feverish tremors of
anxiety and trouble, and the whole order of the nation was threatened with an upheaval.
From 1840 to 1850 in particular, England seemed to be on the verge of a social
revolution, and its disturbed spirit was reflected, especially in the novel with a purpose.
This special form of Romanticism which was fed by the emotional unrest in the social
sphere, therefore, derived a renewed vitality from these sources. The combined effect of
all these causes was the survival and prolongation of Romanticism in the Victorian Age
which was otherwise opposed to it.
Moreover, Romanticism not only continued during the Victorian Age, but it
appeared in new forms. The very exercise of reason and the pursuit of scientific studies
which promoted the spirit of classicism, stirred up a desire for compensation and led to
a reassertion of the imagination and the heart. The representatives of the growing
civilization of the day—economists, masters of industry, businessmen—were considered
as the enemies of nobility and beauty and the artisans of hopeless and joyless
materialism. This fear obsessed the minds of those writers of the Victorian Age, to
whom feelings and imagination were essentials of life itself. Thus the rationalistic age
was rudely shaken by impassioned protestations of writers like Newman, Carlyle and
Ruskin who were in conflict with the spirit of their time.
The Victorian Age, therefore, exhibits a very interesting and complex mixture of two
opposing elements—Classicism and Romanticism. Basically it was inclined towards
classicism on account of its rational approach to the problems of life, a search for
balance and stability, and a deeply moral attitude; but on account of its close proximity
to the Romantic Revival which had not completely exhausted itself, but had come to a
sudden end on account of the premature deaths of Byron, Shelley and Keats, the social
and economic unrest, the disillusionment caused by industrialization and material
prosperity, the spirit of Romanticism also survived and produced counter currents.
Poets of the Early Victorian Period
The most important poets during the early Victorian period were Tennyson and
Browning, with Arnold occupying a somewhat lower position. After the passing away of
Keats, Shelley and Byron in the early eighteen twenties, for about fifteen years the fine
frenzy of the high romantics subsided and a quieter mood ensued. With the abatement
of the revolutionary fervour, Wordsworth’s inspiration had deserted him and all that he
wrote in his later years was dull and insipid.

There appeared a host of writers of moderate talent like John Clare, Thomas Love
Peacock, Walter Savage Landor and Thomas Hood. The result was that from 1820 till
the publication of Tennyson’s first important work in 1833 English poetry had fallen
into the hands of mediocrities. It was in fact by the publication of his two volumes in
1842 that Tennyson’s position was assured as, in Wordsworth’s language, “decidedly the
greatest of our living poets.” Browning’s recognition by the public came about the same
time, with the appearance of Dramatic Lyrics (1842), although Paracelsus and
Sordello had already been published. The early Victorian poetry which started in 1833,
therefore, came to its own, in the year 1842.
The early poetry of both Tennyson and Browning was imbued with the spirit of
romanticism, but it was romanticism with a difference. Tennyson recognised an affinity
with Byron and Keats; Browning with Shelley, but their romanticism no longer implied
an attitude of revolt against conventional modes. It had itself become a convention. The
revolutionary fervour which inspired the poetry of the great Romantic poets had now
given place to an evolutionary conception of progress propagated by the writings of
Darwin, Bentham and their followers. Though the writers of the new age still persisted
in deriving inspiration from the past ages, yet under the spell of the marvels of science,
they looked forward rather than backward. The dominant note of the early Victorian
period was therefore, contained in Browning’s memorable lines: “The best is yet to be.”
Tennyson found spiritual consolation in contemplating the
One far off divine event
To which the whole creation moves.
Faith in the reality of progress was thus the main characteristic of the early
Victorian Age. Doubt, scepticism and questioning became the main characteristic of the
later Victorian Age.
(a) Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
Tennyson is the most representative poet of the Victorian Age. His poetry is a record
of the intellectual and spiritual life of the time. Being a careful student of science and
philosophy he was deeply impressed by the new discoveries and speculations which
were undermining the orthodox religion and giving rise to all sorts of doubts and
difficulties. Darwin’s theory of Evolution which believed in the “struggle for existence”
and “the survival of the fittest” specially upset and shook the foundations of religious
faith. Thus there was a conflict between science and religion, doubt and faith,
materialism and spirituality. These two voices of the Victorian age are perpetually heard
in Tennyson’s work. In In Memoriam,more than in any other contemporary literary
work, we read of the great conflict between faith and doubt. Though he is greatly
disturbed by the constant struggle going on in Nature which is “red in tooth and claw”,
his belief in evolution steadies and encourages him, and helps him to look beyond the
struggle towards the “one far off divine event to which the whole creation moves.”
Tennyson’s poetry is so much representative of his age that a chronological study of
it can help us to write its history. Thus his Lockslay Hall of 1842 reflects the restless
spirit of ‘young England’ and its faith in science, commerce and the progress of
mankind. In Lockslay Hall Sixty Years After (1866) the poet gives expression to the
feeling of revulsion aroused against the new scientific discoveries which threatened the
very foundations of religion, and against commerce and industry which had given rise of
some very ugly problems as a result of the sordid greed of gain. In The
Princess, Tennyson dealt with an important problem of the day—that of the higher
education of women and their place in the fast changing conditions of modern society.
In Maud, he gave expression to the patriotic passion aroused on account of the Crimean
War. In Idylls of Kings, in spite of its medieval machinery, contemporary problems were
dealt with by the poet. Thus in all these poems the changing moods of the Victorian Age
are successively represented—doubts, misgivings, hopefulness etc.
Taking Tennyson’s poetry as a whole, we find that in spite of varieties of moods, it is
an exposition of the cautions spirit of Victorian liberalism. He was essentially the poet of
law and order as well as of progress. He was a great admirer of English traditions, and
though he believed in divine evolution of things:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfills himself in many ways
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world,
he was, like a true Englishman, against anything that smacked of revolution.
But the real greatness of Tennyson as a poet lies in his being a supreme artist. The
ideas contained in his poems are often condemned by his critics as commonplace, and
he is berated as a shallow thinker. But no one can deny his greatness as an artist. He is,
perhaps, after Milton, the most conscientious and accomplished poetic artist in English
literature. He is noteworthy for the even perfection of his style and his wonderful
mastery of language which is at once simple and ornate. Moreover, there is an exquisite
and varied music in his verse. In poetic style he has shown a uniform mastery which is
not surpassed by any other English poet except Shakespeare. As an artist, Tennyson has
an imagination less dramatic than lyrical, and he is usually at his best when he is
kindled by personal emotion, personal experience. It is his fine talent for lyric which
gives him a high place among the masters of English verse. Some of his shorter pieces,
such as Break, break, break; Tear, idle tears; Crossing the Bar are among the finest
English songs on account of their distinction of music and imagery.
Tennyson is a master of imaginative description, which is seen at its best in The
Lotos Eaters. Words can hardly be more beautiful or more expressive than in such a
stanza as this:
A land of stream! some, like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping, veils of thinnest lawn did go;
 And some thro’ wavering lights and shadows broke,
Rolling a slumberous sheet of foam below.
They saw the gleaming river seaward flow
From the inner land; for off, three mountain tops,
Three silent pinnacles of aged snow,
Stood sunset flush’d and dew’d with showery drops.
Up clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse.
During his lifetime Tennyson was considered as the greatest poet of his age, but
after his death a reaction started against him, and he was given a much lower rank
among the English poets. But with the passage of time Tennyson’s poetry regained its
lost position, and at present his place as one of the greatest poets of England is secure
mainly on account of the artistic perfection of his verse.
(b) Robert Browning (1812-1889)
During his lifetime Browning was not considered as great a poet as Tennyson, but
after that the opinion of the critics has changed in favour of Browning, who, on account
of his depth and originality of thoughts, is ranked superior to Tennyson. Browning and
Tennyson were contemporaries and their poetic careers ran almost parallel to each
other, but as poets they presented a glaring contrast. Whereas Tennyson is first the
artist and then the teacher, with Browning the message is always the important thing,
and he is very careless of the form in which it is expressed. Tennyson always writes
about subjects which are dainty and comely; Browning, on the other hand, deals with
subjects which are rough and ugly, and he aims to show that truth lies hidden in both
the evil and the good. In their respective messages the two poets differed widely.
Tennyson’s message reflects the growing order of the age, and is summed up in the word
‘law’. He believes in disciplining the individual will and subordinating it to the universal
law. There is a note of resignation struck in his poetry, which amounts to fatalism.
Browning, on the other hand, advocates the triumph of the individual will over the
obstacles. In his opinion self is not subordinate but supreme. There is a robust optimism
reflected in all his poetry. It is in fact because of his invincible will and optimism that
Browning is given preference over Tennyson whose poetry betrays weakness and
helpless pessimism. Browning’s boundless energy, his cheerful courage, his faith in life
and in the development that awaits beyond the portals of death, give a strange vitality to
his poetry. It is his firm belief in the immortality of the soul which forms the basis of his
generous optimism, beautifully expressed in the following lines of Pippa Passes:
The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill side’s dew pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snails on the thorn,
God’s in his heaven—
All’s right with the world.
Thus is an age when the minds of men were assailed by doubt, Browning spoke the
strongest words of hope and faith:
 Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be.
The last of life, for which the first was made.
(Rabbi Ben Ezra)
In another way also Browning presents a contrast to Tennyson. Whereas Tennyson’s
genius is mainly lyrical. Browning’s is predominantly dramatic, and his greatest poems
are written in the form of the dramatic monologue. Being chiefly interested in the study
of the human soul, he discusses in poem after poem, in the form of monologue or
dialogue, the problems of life and conscience. And in all of them Browning himself is the
central character, and he uses the hero as his own mouthpiece. His first
poem Pauline (1833) which is a monologue addressed to Pauline, on “the incidents in
the development of a soul’, is autobiographical—a fragment of personal confession
under a thin dramatic disguise. His Paracelsus (1835) which is in form a drama with
four characters, is also a story of ‘incidents in the development of a soul’, of a
Renaissance physician in whom true science and charlatanism’ were combined.
Paracelsus has the ambition of attaining truth and transforming the life of man. For this
purpose he discards emotion and love, and fails on account of this mistake. Browning in
this poem also uses the hero as a mouthpiece of his own ideas and
aspiration. Paracelsus was followed bySordello, (1840) which is again ‘the study of a
soul’. It narrates in heroic verse the life of a little-known Italian poet. On account of its
involved expression its obscurity has become proverbial. In Pipa Passes (1841)
Browning produced a drama partly lyrical and consisting of isolated scenes. Here he
imagined the effect of the songs of a little working girl, strolling about during a holiday,
on the destiny of the very different persons who hear them in turn.
It was with the publication of a series of collections of disconnected studies, chiefly
monologues, that Browning’s reputation as a great poet was firmly established. These
volumes were—Dramatic Lyrics (1842),Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), Men
and Women (1855), Dramatis Personae(1864), Dramatic Idylls (1879-80). The
dramatic lyrics in these collections were a poetry of a new kind in England. In them
Browning brings the most varied personages to make their confessions to us. Some of
them are historical, while others are the product of Browning’s imagination, but all of
them while unravelling the tangled web of their emotions and thoughts give expression
to the optimistic philosophy of the poet. Some of the important dramatic lyrics are
Bishop Blougram’s Apology, Two in a Gondola, Porphyria’s Lover, Fra Lippo Lippi,
The last Ride Together, Childe Roland to a Dark Tower Came, A Grammarian’s
Funeral, Rabbi Ben Ezra, Prospice and My Last Duchess. All of them have won for
Browning the applause of readers who value “thought” in poetry. In (1868-69) Browning
brought out four successive volumes of The Ring and the Book, which is his
masterpiece. Here different persons concerned in a peculiarly brutal set of murders, and
many witnesses give their own versions of the same events, varying them according to
their different interests and prejudices. The lawyers also have their say, and at the end
the Pope sums up the case. The ten long successive monologues contain the finest
psychological studies of characters ever attempted by a poet.
During the last twenty years of his life Browning wrote a number of poems. Though
they do not have much poetic merit, yet they all give expression to his resolute courage
and faith. In fact Browning is mainly remembered for the astonishing vigour and hope
that characterise all his work. He is the poet of love, of life, and of the will to live, here
and beyond the grave, as he says in the song of David in his poem Soul:
How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy.
The chief fault of Browning’s poetry is obscurity. This is mainly due to the fact that
his thought is often so obscure or subtle that language cannot express it perfectly. Being
interested in the study of the individual soul, never exactly alike in any two men, he
seeks to express the hidden motives and principles which govern individual action. Thus
in order to understand his poems, the reader has always to be mentally alret; otherwise
he fails to understand his fine shades of psychological study. To a certain extent,
Browning himself is to be blamed for his obscurity, because he is careless as an artist.
But in spite of his obscurity, Browning is the most stimulating poet, in the English
language. His influence on the reader who is prepared to sit up, and think and remain
alert when he reads his poetry, is positive and tremendous. His strength, his joy of life,
his robust faith and his invincible optimism enter into the life of a serious reader of his
poetry, and make him a different man. That is why, after thirty years of continuous
work, his merit was finally recognised, and he was placed beside Tennyson and even
considered greater. In the opinion of some critics he is the greatest poet in English
literature since Shakespeare.
(c) Matthew Arnold (1822-88)
Another great poet of the early Victorian period is Matthew Arnold, though he is not
so great as Tennyson and Browning. Unlike Tennyson and Browning who came under
the influence of Romantic poets, Arnold, though a great admirer of Wordsworth, reacted
against the ornate and fluent Romanticism of Shelley and Keats. He strove to set up a
neo-classical ideal as against the Romantic. He gave emphasis on ‘correctness’ in poetry,
which meant a scheme of literature which picks and chooses according to standards,
precedents and systems, as against one which gives preference to an abundant stream of
original music and representation. Besides being a poet, Arnold was a great critic of
poetry, perhaps the greatest critics during the Victorian period, and he belongs to that
rare category of the critic who is a poet also.
Though Arnold’s poetry does not possess the merit of the poetry of Tennyson and
Browning, when it is at its best, it has wonderful charm. This is especially the case with
his early poetry when his thought and style had not become stereotyped. Among his
early poems the sonnet on Shakespeare deserves the highest place. It is the most
magnificent epigraph and introduction to the works of Shakespeare. Another poem of
great charm and beauty is Requiescat, which is an exquisite dirge. In his longer poems—
Strayed Reveller, Empedocles on Etna, Sohrab and Rustum, The Scholar Gipsy,
Thyrsis (an elegy on Clough, which is considered of the same rank
as Milton’s Lycidas and Shelley’sAdonais)—it is the lyrical strain into which the poet
breaks now and then, which gives them a peculiar charm. It is the same lyrical note in
the poems—The Forsaken Morman,which is a piece of exquisite and restrained but
melodious passionate music; Dover Beach which gives expression to Arnold’s peculiar
religious attitude in an age of doubt; the fine Summer Night, the Memorial
Verses which immediately appeals to the reader.
Most of the poetry of Arnold gives expression to the conflict of the age—between
spontaneity and discipline, emotion and reason, faith and scepticism. Being distressed
by the unfaith, disintegration, complexity and melancholy of his times,Arnold longed for
primitive faith, wholeness, simplicity, and happiness. This melancholy note is present
throughout his poetry. Even in his nature poems, though he was influenced by the
‘healing power’ of Wordsworth, in his sterner moods he looks upon Nature as a cosmic
force indifferent to, or as a lawless and insidious foe of man’s integrity. In his most
characteristic poemEmpedocles on Etna Arnold deals with the life of a philosopher who
is driven to suicide because he cannot achieve unity and wholeness; his sceptical
intellect has dried up the springs of simple, natural feeling. His attitude to life is very
much in contrast with the positive optimism of Browning whose Ben Ezra grows old on
the belief that “The best is yet to be!”
As a critic Arnold wants poetry to be plain, and severe. Though poetry is an art
which must give aesthetic pleasure, according to Arnold, it is also a criticism of life. He
looks for ‘high seriousness’ in poetry, which means the combination of the finest art
with the fullest and deepest insight, such as is found in the poetry of Homer, Dante and
Shakespeare. Arnold’s own poetry was greatly affected by his critical theories, and we
find that whereas Tennyson’s poetry is ornate and Browning’s grotesque, Arnold’s
poetry on the whole is plain and prosaic. In setting forth his spiritual
troubles Arnoldseeks first of all to achieve a true and adequate statement, devoid of all
non-essential decorations. The reader gets the impression that the writing is neither
inspired nor spontaneous. It is the result of intellectual effort and hard labour. But there
are occasions in the course of his otherwise prosaic poems, when Arnold suddenly rises
from the ground of analysis and diagnosis into sensuous emotion and intuitions, and
then language, imagery, and rhythm fuse into something which has an incomparable
charm and beauty.
(d) Some Minor Poets
Besides Tennyson, Browning and Arnold there were a number of minor poets
during the early Victorian period. Of these Mrs. Browning and Clough are well-known.
Elizabeth Berrett (1806-61) became Mrs. Browning in 1846. Before her marriage she
had won fame by writing poems about the Middle Ages in imitation of Coleridge. She
also gave voice to sensitive pity in Cowper’s Grave and to passionate indignation in The
Cry of Children which is an eloquent protest against the employment of children in
factories. But she produced her best work after she came in contact with Browning.
Her Sonnets from the Portuguese, which were written before her marriage with
Browning, tell in a most delicate and tender manner her deep love for, and passionate
gratitude to Browning who brought her, who was sick and lonely, back to health of life.
The rigid limit of the sonnet form helped her to keep the exuberance of her passion
under the discipline of art. Her other great work,Aurora Leigh (1857), is written in the
form of an epic on a romantic theme. Written in blank verse which is of unequal quality,
the poem is full of long stretches of dry, uninteresting verse, but here and there it
contains passages of rare beauty, where sentiment and style are alike admirable.
 Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), a friend of Arnold, came under the influence of
Wordsworth in his early years, but later he cut himself off from Wordsworthian narrow
piety, and moved towards a religious faith free from all dogma. He searched for a moral
law which was in consonance with the intellectual development of the age. In
his Dipsychus, ‘the double-sould’ (1850), he attempted to reconcile the special and the
idealistic tendencies of the soul. His best known work, however, is The Bothie of
Toberna Vuolich, in which he has given a lively account of an excursion of Oxford
students in the Highlands. Here he, like Wordsworth, emphasises the spiritualising and
purifying power of Nature. The importance of Clough as a poet lies mainly in the quality
of his thought and the frank nobility of his character which is beautifully expressed in
the following memorable lines:
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll:
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul!

Novelists of the Early Victorian Period

In the early Victorian period the novel made a rapid progress. Novel-reading was one
of the chief occupations of the educated public, and material had to be found for every
taste. The result was that the scope of the novel, which during the eighteenth century dealt
mainly with contemporary life and manners, was considerably enlarged. A number of
brilliant novelists showed that it was possible to adapt the novel to almost all purposes of
literature whatsoever. In fact, if we want to understand this intellectual life of the period.

We need hardly go outside the sphere of fiction. The novels produced during the period
took various shapes—sermons, political pamphlets, philosophical discourses, social
essays, autobiographies and poems in prose. The theatre which could rival fiction had
fallen on evil days, and it did not revive till the later half of the nineteenth century. So
the early Victorian period saw the heyday of the English novel.
The two most outstanding novelists of the period were Dickens and Thackeray.
Besides them there were a number of minor novelists, among whom the important ones
were Disraeli, Bronte Sisters, Mrs. Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, Charles Reade, Wilkie
Collins and Trollope. All these novelists had a number of points of similarity. In the first
place, they identified themselves with their age, and were its spokesmen, whereas the
novelists of the latter Victorian period were critical, and even hostile to its dominant
assumptions. This sense of identity with their time is of cardinal importance in any
consideration of the early Victorian novelists. It was the source alike of their strengths
and their weaknesses, and it distinguished them from their successors. It is not that
these novelists were uncritical of their country and age, but their criticisms are much
less radical than those of Meredith and Hardy. They accepted the society in which they
criticised it as many of their readers were doing in a light hearted manner. They voiced
the doubts and fears of the public, but they also shared their general assumptions.
 Now let us examine these general assumptions of the early Victorians which these
novelists shared. In the first place, in spite of the fact that they were conscious of the
havoc caused by the industrial revolution, the presence of mass poverty, and
accumulation of riches in a few hands, yet they believed like the common Victorians that
these evils would prove to be temporary, that on the whole England was growing
prosperous, which was evident from the enormous increase in material wealth and the
physical amenities of civilization, and that there was no reason why this progress should
not continue indefinitely.
Another important view which these novelists shared with the public was the
acceptance of the idea of respectability, which attached great importance to superficial
morality in business as well as in domestic and sexual relations. ‘Honesty is the best
policy’, ‘Nothing for nothing’ were the dictums which the Victorians honoured in their
business relations. Their attitude to sex had undergone a great change. Frank
recognition and expression of sex had become tabooed. Fielding’s Tom Jones was kept
out of way of women and children, and in 1818 Thomas Bowlder published hisFamily
Shakespeare which contained the original text of Shakespeare’s plays from which were
omitted those expression which could not be with propriety read aloud in a family. The
novelists were not far behind in propagating the Victorian ideal. Trollop wrote in
his Autobiography:
The writer of stories must please, or he will he nothing. And he must teach whether
he wish to teach or not. How shall he teach lessons of virtue and at the same time make
himself a delight to his readers? But the novelist, if he have a conscience, must preach
his sermons with the same purpose as the clergymen, and must have his own system of
ethics. If he can do this efficiently, if he can do this efficiently, if he can make virtue
alluring and vice ugly, while he charms his readers instead of wearying them, then I
think Mr. Carlyle need not call him distressed…
I think that many have done so; so many that we English novelists may boast as a
class that such has been the general result of our own work…I find such to have been the
teaching of Thackeray, of Dickens and of George Eliot. Can anyone by search through
the works of the great English novelists I have named, find a scene, a passage or a word
that would teach a girl to be immodest, or a man to be dishonest? When men in their
pages have been described as dishonest and women as immodest, have they not ever
been punished?
The reading public of the early Victorian period was composed of ‘respectable’
people, and it was for them that the novelists wrote. As the novelist themselves shared
the same views of ‘respectability’ with the public, it gave them great strength and
confidence. As they were artists as well as public entertainers, they enjoyed great power
and authority. Moreover, as they shared the pre-occupations and obsessions of their
time, they produced literature which may be termed as truly national.
(a) Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Dickens is the chief among the early Victorian novelists and is in fact the most
popular of all English novelists so far. It was at the age of twenty-five with the
publication of Pickwick Papers that Dickens suddenly sprang into fame, and came to be
regarded as the most popular of English novelists. In his early novels, Pickwick (1837)
andNickolas Nickleby for instance, Dickens followed the tradition of Smollett. Like
Smollett’s novels they are mere bundles of adventure connected by means of character
who figure in them. In his Martin Chuzzlewit(1843), Domby and Son (1846-48),
and David Copperfield (1849-50) he made some effort towards unifications but even
here the plots are loose. It was in Bleak House (1852-53) that he succeeded in gathering
up all the diverse threads of the story in a systematic and coherent plot. His later
novels—Dorrit(1855-57), A Tale of Two Cities (1864-65), and the unfinished Edwin
Drood—were also likeBleak House systematically planned. But, on the whole Dickens
was not every successful in building up his plots, and there is in all of them a great deal
of mere episodical material.
During the early Victorian period there was a swing from romance or a coldly
picturesque treatment of life to depicting the heart had the affections. The novels which
during the Romantic period and passed through a phase of adventure, reverted in the
hands of Dickens to the literature of feeling. Too much emphasis on feelings often led
Dickens to sentimentalism as it happened in the case of Richardson. His novels are full
of pathos, and there are many passages of studied and extravagant sentiment. But
Dicken’s sentimentalism, for which he is often blamed, is a phase of his idealism. Like a
true idealist Dickens seeks to embody in his art the inner life of man with a direct or
implied moral purpose. His theme is the worth of man’s thought, imaginings, affections,
and religious instincts, the need of a trust in his fellowmen, a faith in the final outcome
of human endeavour and a belief in immortality. He values qualities like honour,
fidelity, courage magnanimity. The best example of Dickens’s idealism is found in A Tale
of Two Cities, where he preaches a sermon on the sublime text: “Greater love path no
man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
Another phase of Dickens’s idealism was his implicit belief that this is the best of all
possible worlds. In spite of pain, dirt and sin with which his novels are full, they leave an
impression on the reader of the unwavering optimism and buoyant temper of Dickens.
He shared to the full, the sanguine spirit of his age, and despite the hardness of heart
and the selfishness of those in high places, their greed and hypocrisy, and the class
prejudices which had divided man from man, Dickens believed that the world was still a
very good world to live in. He had faith in the better element of human beings who live
and struggle for a period, and then fall unremembered to give place to other. All his
characters come out of the pit of suffering and distress as better men, uncontaminated
and purer than before.
But the most delightful manifestation of the idealism of Dickens is his humour,
which is almost irresistible. It is clearly manifest in his first novel, Pickwick, and in the
succeeding novels it broadened and deepended. Dickens has the knack of uniting
humour with pathos in a sort of tragic-comedy, which is especially noticeable in certain
sections of Old curiosity shop andMartin Chuzzlewit. The best examples of Dickens
pure comedy are the Peggotty and Barkis episodes in David Copperfield.
It is especially in the delineations of characters that the humour of Dickens is
supreme. Like Smollett he was on the lookout for some oddity which for his purpose he
made more odd than it was. All his characters are humours highly idealised and yet
retaining so much of the real that we recognise in them some disposition of ourselves
and of the men and women we met. The number of these humorous types that Dickens
contributed to fiction runs into thousands. In fact there is no other writer in English
literature, except only Shakespeare, who has created so many characters that have
become permanent elements of the humorous tradition of the English race.
Besides being an idealist, Dickens was also a realist. He began his literary career as a
reporter, and his short Sketches by Bozhave the air of the eighteenth century quiet
observer and news writer. This same reportorial air is about his long novels, which are
groups of incidents. The main difference is that, while in his sketches he writes down his
observation fresh from experience, in his novels he draws upon his memory. It is his
personal experiences which underlie the novels of Dickens, not only novels like David
Copperfield where it is so obvious, but also Hard Times where one would least expect to
find them. One very important aspect of Dickens’s realism is this richness of descriptive
detail, based upon what Dickens had actually seen.
It was Dickens’s realism which came as a check to medievalism which was very
popular during the Romantic period. He awakened the interest of the public in the social
conditions of England. The novels of Dickens were full of personal experiences,
anecdotes, stories from friends, and statistics to show that they were founded upon
facts. The result was that after Dickens began writing, knights and ladies and
tournaments became rarer in the English novel. They were replaced by agricultural
labourers, miners, tailors and paupers.
The novels of Dickens were also the most important product and expression in
fiction of the humanitarian movement of the Victorian era. From first to last he was a
novelist with a purpose. He was a staunch champion of the weak, the outcast and the
oppressed, and in almost all his novels he attacked one abuse or the other in the existing
system of things. It is, therefore, no exaggeration to say that humanitarianism is the key-
note of his work, and on account of the tremendous popularity that he enjoyed as a
novelist, Dickens may justly be regarded as one of the foremost reformers of his age.
(b) William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)
Thackeray who was Dickens’s contemporary and great rival for popular favour,
lacked his weaknesses and his genius. He was more interested in the manners and
morals of the aristocracy than in the great upheavals of the age. Unlike Dickens who
came of a poor family and had to struggle hard in his boyhood, Thackeray was born of
rich parents, inherited a comfortable fortune, and spent his young days in comfort. But
whereas Dickens, in spite of his bitter experiences retained a buoyant temperament and
a cheerful outlook on life, Thackeray, in spite of his comfortable and easy life, turned
cynical towards the world which used him so well, and found shames, deceptions,
vanities everywhere because he looked for them. Dickens was more interested in plain,
common people; Thackeray, on the other hand, was more concerned with high society.
The main reason of this fundamental difference between the two was not, however, of
environment, but of temperament. Whereas Dickens was romantic and emotional and
interpreted the world largely through his imagination; Thackeray was the realist and
moralist and judged solely by observation and reflection. Thus if we take the novels of
both together, they give us a true picture of all classes of English society in the early
Victorian period.
 Thackeray is, first of all, a realist, who paints life as he sees it. As he says of himself,
“I have no brains above my eyes; I describe what I see.” He gives in his novels accurate
and true picture especially of the vicious elements of society. As he possesses an
excessive sensibility, and a capacity for fine feelings and emotions like Dickens, he is
readily offended by shams, falsehood and hypocrisy in society. The result is that he
satirises them. But his satire is always tempered by kindness and humour. Moreover,
besides being a realist and satirist, Thackeray is also a moralist. In all his novels he
definitely aims at creating a moral impression and he often behaves in an inartistic
manner by explaining and emphasising the moral significance of his work. The beauty of
virtue and the ugliness of vice in his character is so obvious on every page that we do not
have to consult our conscience over their actions. As a writer of pure, simple and
charming prose Thackeray the reader by his natural, easy and refined style. But the
quality of which Thackeray is most remembered as a novelist is the creation of living
characters. In this respect he stands supreme among English novelists. It is not merely
that he holds up the mirror to life, he presents life itself.
It was with the publication of Vanity Fairin 1846 that the English reading public
began to understand what a star had risen in English letters. Vanity Fair was succeeded
in 1849 by Pendennis which, as an autobiography, holds the same place among his
works as David Copperfield does among those of Dickens. In 1852 appeared the
marvellous historical novel of Henry Esmondwhich is the greatest novel in its own
special kind ever written. In it Thackeray depicted the true picture of the Queen Anne
period and showed his remarkable grasp of character and story. In his next
novelNewcomes (1853-8) he returned to modern times, and displayed his great skill in
painting contemporary manners. By some critics Newcomes is considered to be his best
novel. His next novel, The Virginians, which is a sequal of Esmond, deals with the third
quarter of the eighteenth century. In all these novels Thackeray has presented life in a
most realistic manner. Every act, every scene, every person in his novels is real with a
reality which has been idealised up to, and not beyond, the necessities of literature.
Whatever the acts, the scenes and the personages may be in his novels, we are always
face to face with real life, and it is there that the greatness of Thackeray as a novelist lies.
(c) Minor Novelists
Among the minor novelists of the early Victorian period, Benjamin Disraeli, the
Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, Charles Reede, Wilkie Collins and Trollope are
well known.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) wrote his first novel Vivian Grey (1826-27), in which
he gave the portrait of a dandy, a young, intelligent adventurer without scruples. In the
succeeding novels Coningsby (1844), Sybil(1845) and Tancred (1847) Disraeli was
among the first to point out that the amelioration of the wretched lot of the working
class was a social duty of the aristocracy. Being a politician who became the Prime
Minister of England, he has given us the finest study of the movements of English
politics under Queen Victoria. All his novels are written with a purpose, and as the
characters in them are created with a view to the thesis, they retain a certain air of
unreality.
 The Bronte Sisters who made their mark as novelists were Charlotte Bronte (1816-
55) and Emily Bronte (1818-48). Charlotte Bronte depicted in her novels those strong
romantic passions which were generally avoided by Dickens and Thackeray. She brought
lyrical warmth and the play of strong feeling into the novel. In her masterpiece, Jane
Eyre(1847), her dreams and resentments kindle every page. Her other novels are The
Professor, Villette and Shirley. In all of them we find her as a mistress of wit, irony,
accurate observation, and a style full of impassioned eloquence.
Emily Bronte was more original than her sister. Though she died at the age of thirty,
she wrote a strange novel, WutheringHeights, which contains so many of the troubled,
tumultuous and rebellious elements of romanticism. It is a tragedy of love at once
fantastic and powerful, savage and moving, which is considered now as one of the
masterpieces of world fiction.
Mrs. Gaskell (1810-65) as a novelist dealt with social problems. She had first-hand
knowledge of the evils of industrialisation, having lived in Manchester for many years.
Her novels Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855) give us concrete details of
the miserable plight of the working class. InRuth (1853) Mrs. Gaskell shows the same
sympathy for unfortunate girls. In Cranford(1853) she gave a delicate picture of the
society of a small provincial town, which reminds us of Jane Austen.
Charles Kingsley (1819-75) who was the founder of the Christian Socialists, and
actively interested in the co-operative movement, embodied his generous ideas of
reform in the novels Yeast (1848) and Alton Locke (1850). As a historical novelist he
returned to the earliest days of Christianity in Hypatia (1853). In Westward Ho! (1855)
he commemorated the adventurous spirit of the Elizabethan navigators, and
in Hereward the Wake (1865) of the descendants of the Vikings.
Charles Reade (1814-84) wrote novels with a social purpose. It is Never too Late to
Mend (1853) is a picture of the horrors of prison life; Hard Cash (1863) depicts the
abuses to which lunatic, asylums gave rise;Put Yourself in his place is directed against
trade unions. His A Terrible Temptation is a famous historical novel. His The Cloister
and the Hearth (1867) shows the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
Wilkie Collins (1824-89) excelled in arousing the sense of terror and in keeping in
suspense the explanation of a mystery of the revelation of crime. His best-known novels
are The Woman in White and The Moonstone in which he shows his great mastery in
the mechanical art of plot construction.
Anthony Trollope (1815-88) wrote a number of novels, in which he presented real
life without distorting or idealising it. His important novels are The
Warden (1855),Barchester Towers (1857) and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) in
which he has given many truthful scenes of provincial life, without poetical feeling, but
not without humour. Trollope has great skill as a story-teller and his characters are
lifelike and shrewdly drawn. His novels present a true picture of middle class life, and
there is neither heroism nor villainy there. His style is easy, regular, uniform and almost
impersonal.
Prose-Writers of the Early Victorian Period
The early Victorian prose is in keeping with the energetic temperament of the time.
An expansive energy seems to be characteristic of the whole period, displaying itself as
freely in literature as in the development of science, geographical exploration and the
rapidity of economic change.
This energetic mood prescribes the inventiveness and fertility of the prose-writers of the
period and explains the vitality of so many of their works. Carlyle’sThe French
Revolution, Ruskin’s Modern Painters and Arnold’s Essays in Criticism are not modest
and light-hearted compositions, but they represent the aesthetic equivalent of self-
assertion and an urgent ‘will to survive’ which was characteristic of the early Victorians.
Their prose is not, as a rule, flawless in diction and rhythm, or easily related to a central
standard of correctness or polished to a uniform high finish, but it is a prose which is
vigorous, intricate and ample, and is more conscious of vocabulary and imagery than of
balance and rhythm. The dominant impression of zestful and workmanlike prose.
As the number of prose-writers during the period is quite large, there is a greater
variety of style among them than to be found in any other period. In the absence any
well-defined tradition of prose-writing, each writer cherishes his oddities and
idiosyncrasies and is not prepared to sacrifice his peculiarities in deference to a received
tradition. Victorian individualism, the ‘Doing As One Likes’, censured by Matthew
Arnold, reverberates in prose style.
Taking the Victorian prose as a whole, we can say that it is Romantic prose. Though
Romanticism gave a new direction to English poetry between 1780 and 1830, its full
effects on prose were delayed until the eighteen-thirties when all the major Romantic
poets were either dead or moribund. That is why, early Victorian prose is, properly
speaking, Romantic prose, and Carlyle is the best example of a Romantic prose-artist. In
fact it were the romantic elements—unevenness, seriousness of tone, concreteness and
particularity—which constitute the underlying unity of the prose of the early Victorian
period. All the great prose writers of period—Carlyle, Ruskin, Macaulay and Matthew
Arnold have these qualities in common.
(a) Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
Carlyle was the dominant figure of the Victorian period. He made his influence felt
in every department of Victorian life. In the general prose literature of his age he was
incomparably the greatest figure, and one of the greatest moral forces. In his youth he
suffered from doubts which assailed him during the many dark years in which he
wandered in the ‘howling wilderness of infidelity,’ striving vainly to recover his lost
belief in God. Then suddenly there came a moment of mystical illumination, or ‘spiritual
new birth’, which brought him back to the mood of courage and faith. The history of
these years of struggle and conflict and the ultimate triumph of his spirit is written with
great power in the second book of Sartor Restartus which is his most characteristic
literary production, and one of the most remarkable and vital books in the English
language. His other works are:French Revolution (1837); his lectures onHeroes and
Hero-Worship; Past and Present(1843); the Letters and Speeches of Oliver
Cromwell (1845); Latter-day Pamphlets(1850); the Life of John Sterling (1851);
theHistory of Frederick the Great (1858-65).
 Basically Carlyle was a Puritan, and in him the strenuous and uncompromising
spirit of the seventeenth century Puritanism found its last great exponent. Always
passionately in earnest and unyielding in temper, he could not tolerate any moral
weakness or social evil. He wanted people to be sincere and he hated conventions and
unrealities. In the spheres of religion, society and politics he sought reality and criticised
all sham and falsehood. To him history was the revelation of God’s righteous dealings
with men and he applied the lessons derived from the past to the present. He had no
faith in democracy. He believed in the ‘hero’ under whose guidance and leadership the
masses can march to glory. This is the theme of his lectures on Heroes and Hero-
Worship.He proclaimed a spiritual standard of life to a generation which had started
worshipping the ‘mud-gods of modern civilisation’. He denounced scientific materialism
and utilitarianism in Past and Present. He preached to his contemporaries in a most
forceful manner that spiritual freedom was the only life-giving truth. Carlyle could not
turn back the currents of his age, but he exerted a tremendous influence.
Carlyle’s style is the reflection of his personality. In fact in hardly any English writer
are personal and literary characters more closely and strongly blended. He twists the
language to suit his needs. In order to achieve this he makes use of strange ‘tricks’—the
use of capital initials, the dropping of conjunctions, pronouns, verbs, the quaint
conversion of any noun into a verb, free use of foreign words or literal English
translations of foreign words. Thus his language is like a mercenary army formed of all
sorts of incongruous and exotic elements. His personifications and abstractions
sometimes become irritating and even tiresome. At times he deliberately avoids
simplicity, directness, proportion and form. He is in fact the most irregular and erratic
of English writers. But in spite of all these faults, it is impossible to read him at his best
without the sentiment of enthusiasm. In his mastery of vivid and telling phraseology he
is unrivalled and his powers of description and characterisation are remarkable. His
style with its enormous wealth of vocabulary, its strangely constructed sentences, its
breaks, abrupt turns, apostrophes and exclamations, is unique in English prose
literature, and there is no doubt that he is one of the greatest literary artists in the
English language.
(b) John Ruskin (1819-1900)
In the general prose literature of the early Victorian period Ruskin is ranked next to
Carlyle. Of all the Victorian writers who were conscious of the defeats in contemporary
life, he expressed himself most voluminously. Being one of the greatest masters of
English he became interested in art and wrote Modern Painters (1843-1860) in five
volumes in order to vindicate the position of Turner as a great artist. Being a man of
deeply religious and pious nature he could not separate Beauty from Religion, and he
endeavoured to prove that ‘all great art is praise’. Examination of the principles of art
gradually led Ruskin to the study of social ethics. He found that architecture, even more
than painting, indicated the state of a nation’s health. In his The Seven Lamps of
Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice(1851-53) he tried to prove that the best
type of architecture can be produced only in those ages which are morally superior.
The year 1860 when Ruskin publishedUnto this Last marks a great change in him.
From this time onward he wrote little on art and devoted himself to the discussing of the
ills of society. In this book he attacked the prevalent system of political economy, and
protested against unrestricted competition, the law of ‘Devil-take-the-hindmost’, as
Ruskin called it. In his later books—Sesame and Lilies (1865) and The Crown of Wild
Olive(1866), Ruskin showed himself as a popular educator, clear in argument and skilful
in illustration. His last work, an autobiography called Praterita, is full of interesting
reminiscences.
Ruskin was a great and good man who himself is more inspiring than any of his
books. In the face of drudgery and poverty of the competitive system he wrote: “I will
endure it no longer quietly; but henceforward, with any few or many who will help, do
my best to abate this misery.” It was with this object that leaving the field of art
criticism, where he was the acknowledged leader, he began to write of labour and
justice. Though as a stylist he is one of the masters of English prose, he is generally
studied not as a literary man but as an ethical teacher, and every line that he wrote,
bears the stamp of his sincerity. He is both a great artist as well as a great ethical
teacher. We admire him for his richly ornate style, and for his message to humanity.
The prose of Ruskin has a rhythmic, melodious quality which makes it almost equal
to poetry. Being highly sensitive to beauty in every form, he helps the reader to see and
appreciate the beauty of the world around us. In his economic essays he tried to mitigate
the evils of the competitive system; to bring the employer and the employed together in
mutual trust and helpfulness; to seek beauty, truth, goodness as the chief ends of life.
There is no doubt that he was the prophet in an age of rank materialism, utilitarianism
and competition, and pointed out the solution to the grave problems which were
confronting his age.
(c) Thomas Babington Lord Macaulay (1800-59)
Though Carlyle and Ruskin are now considered to be the great prose-writers of the
Victorian period, contemporary opinion gave the first place to Macaulay, who in
popularity far exceeded both of them. He was a voracious reader, and he remembered
everything he read. He could repeat from memory all the twelve books
of ParadiseLost. At the age of twenty-five he wrote his essay on poetry in general and
on Milton as poet, man and politician in particular, which brought him immediate
popularity as Byron’s Childe Harold had done. Besides biographical and critical essays
which won for him great fame and popularity, Macaulay, like Carlyle; wrote historical
essays as well as History of England. As early as 1828, he wrote, ‘a perfect historian
must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and
picturesque.” That power of imagination he possessed and exercised so delightfully that
his History was at once purchased more eagerly than a poem of romance.
Macaulay was the representative of the popular sentiments and prejudices of the
common English man of the first half of the nineteenth century. But his popularity was
based mainly on the energy and capacity of his mind, and the eloquence with which he
enlivened whatever he wrote. By the resources and the quickness of his memory, by his
wide learning which was always at his command, he rose to the high rank as the
exponent of the matter of history, and as a critic of opinions.
The chief quality which makes Macaulay distinct from the other prose writers of the
period is the variety and brilliance of details in his writings. There is a fondness for
particulars in his descriptions which distinguished the poems and novels of the new age
from the more generalised and abstract compositions of the old school. Though he may
be more extravagant and profuse in his variety of details than is consistent with the
‘dignity’ of history, this variety is always supported by a structure of great plainness. The
only fault of his style is that at times it becomes too rhetorical and so the continuity of
the narrative is sacrificed. His short sentences, and his description of particular
interference with the flow of the narrative, and so the cumulative effect of the story is
not always secured. Besides this weakness of style, Macaulay is now given a rank lower
than that of Carlyle, Ruskin and Arnold on account of his lack of originality and depth as
a thinker. But on the whole he still remains as one of the most enjoyable of all Victorian
prose-writers.
(d) Matthew Arnold (1822-88)
Besides being a poet, Matthew Arnold was a prose-writer of a high order. He was
also a great literary as well as social critic. Like Carlyle and Ruskin, he was vehement
critic of his age. According to him, the Englishmen needed classical qualities in order to
attain harmonious perfection in morals and in literature. It was not to the Hebrews or
the Germans (as suggested by Carlyle), or to the men of the Middle Age (as suggested by
Ruskin) that England could with advantage look for teaching, but to the Greeks or to
that people which among the moderns had imbibed most of Hellenic culture, the
French.
In literature Arnold strove to rehabilitate and to propagate the classical spirit in his
country. England had reason to be proud of the literary splendour of the Elizabethan
period, or of the glories of her Romantic movement, but according to Arnold, she had to
long condemned or disdained the “indispensable eighteenth century.” From 1855
onwards Arnold wrote incessantly in order to raise the intellectual and cultural level of
his countrymen. All his prose works are directed to this end: On Translating
Homer (1861), The Study of Celtic Literature(1867), Essays in Criticism (1865 and
1888) and Culture and Anarchy (1869) in which he declared that “culture is the
minister of the sweetness and light essential to the perfect character”. Being a poet
himself, he looked upon poetry as “a criticism of life”, and laid great emphasis on the
part it played in the formation of character and the guidance of conduct. He always
attacked “the Philistines”, by whom he meant the middle class indifferent to the
disinterested joys of pure intelligence. Arnold also attempted to eliminate the dogmatic
element from Christianity in order to preserve its true spirit and bring it into the line
with the discoveries of science and the progress of liberal thought.
Unlike the teachings of Carlyle and Ruskin, which appealed to the masses,Arnold’s
teaching appealed mainly to the educated classes. As a writer of prose he is simply
superb. His style is brilliant and polished to a nicety, possessing’ the virtues of quietness
and proportion which we associate with no other English writer except Dryden. As his
object was to bring home to his countrymen certain fundamental principles of cultured
and intellectual life, he has the habit of repeating the same word and phrase with a sort
of refrain effect. It was no wonder that critics first and the public afterwards, were
attracted, irritated, amused or charmed by his writings. His loud praise of ‘sweetness’
and ‘culture’, his denunciation of the ‘Philistine’, the ‘Barbarian’, and so forth, were
ridiculed by some unkind critics. But rightly considered we find that there is something
of justice in all that he wrote, and on every line there is the stamp of his sincerity.
 When Arnold returned from religion and politics to his natural sphere of literature,
then the substance of his criticism is admirably sound and its expression always
delightful and distinguished. In spite of its extreme mannerism and the apparently
obvious tricks by which that mannerism is reached, the style of Arnold is not easy to
imitate. It is almost perfectly clear with a clearness rather French than English. It
sparkles with wit which seldom diverts or distracts the attention. Such a style was
eminently fitted for the purposes of criticism. As a writer of essays he had no superior
among the writers of his time, and he can probably never be surpassed by any one in a
certain mild ironic handling of a subject which he disapproves. He may not be
considered as one of the strongest writers of English prose, but he must always hold a
high rank in it for grace, for elegance, and for an elaborate and calculated charm.

Poets of the Later Victorian Period

(a) Pre-Raphaelite Poets
In the later Victorian period a movement took place in English poetry, which
resembled something like a new Romantic Revival. It was called the Pre-Raphaelite
Movement and was dominated by a new set of poets-Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris,
who were interested simply in beauty. They were quite satisfied with the beauty of
diction, beauty of rhythm, and the beauty of imagery in poetry.
They were not interested in the contemporary movements of thought which formed the
substance of Arnold’s poetry, and had influenced Tennyson a good deal. They made use
of the legends of the Middle Ages not as a vehicle for moral teaching or as allegories of
modern life, as Tennyson had done, but simply as stories, the intrinsic beauty of which
was their sufficient justification. There was no conscious theory underlying their work as
there was in the case of Arnold’s poetry.
It was in 1847 that a young artist named Holman Hunt came under the influence of
Ruskin’s first volume of Modern Painters. He along with his friends, Millais and D.G.
Rossetti, who were also painters, determined to find a club or brotherhood which should
be styled Pre-Raphaelite, and whose members should bind themselves to study Nature
attentively with the object of expressing genuine ideas in an unconventional manner, in
sympathy with what was ‘direct and serious and heart-felt’ in early Italian painting
before the artificial style of Raphael. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood lasted for a very
short time, but its effect upon the plastic arts was far-reaching and revolutionary. D.G.
Rossetti who was a painter as well as poet, introduced these principles in the field of
poetry also. As early as 1848, in his twentieth year, Rossetti began to write the sonnets
long afterwards collected as The House of Life, in the opening of which he urges the
poets not to be satisfied with a repetition of the worn-out forms of current literature, but
to turn back to the earliest masters:
Unto the lights of the great-past, new-lit
Fair for the Future’s track.
Rossetti displayed in those earliest pieces the passion for material beauty, and the
love of rich language, magnificent even in simplicity, which were always to characterise
his poetry. He also showed a complete detachment from ethical curiosity, from that
desire to mend the world, which occupied almost all his Victorian contemporaries, and
was to obsess his successors. Being a painter he was able to express his poetic genius
more exclusively concentrated on the hues and forms of phenomena, than any other
English poet. He withdrew poetry from its wide field, and concentrated it on the
intensity of passion, and the richness of light on an isolated object. His earliest volume
of Poems (1870), which spread thrills of aesthetic excitement far and wide, attracted a
number of young enthusiasts, in spite of some faint protests by the older generation
against the ‘Fleshly School’ of English poetry. Other poets who followed him and belong
to the Pre-Raphaelite group of poets are—Christiana Rossetti, William Morris, and
Swinburne.
The Pre-Raphaelite school of poetry did not regard poetry as being prophetic, or as
being mainly philosophical. Their poetry did not concern itself with intellectual
complications after the manner of Browning, nor with social conditions. Thus it divided
itself sharply from the great writers of the time—Tennyson, Browning and Arnold. It was
not an intellectual movement at all, but it brought back the idea that poetry deals with
modes of thought and feeling that cannot be expressed in prose. Moreover, it gave
greater importance to personal feeling over thought. It also introduced symbolism which
was so far rare in English poetry, and insisted on simplicity of expression and directness
of sensation. The fleshly images used by the Pre-Raphaelite poets were full of mysticism,
but the Victorians who considered them as merely sensuous were shocked by them.
(i) Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
Rossetti was the chief force behind the Pre-Raphaelite movement. He was the son of
Gabriel Rossetti, an Italian refugee, who was a poet himself and a man of sterling
character. D.G. Rossetti studied drawing, and as a young man became one of the most
enthusiastic members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which was at the middle of
the century to convert England from conventional art. His own form of painting never
admitted reconciliation with convention, and possessed far greater charm than that of
the other members of pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—Millais and Holman Hunt. Though
his drawings were severely criticised, no one with eyes could doubt the magnificence of
his colour. The same pictorial quality became the chief characteristic of his poetry,
which lies apart from the main current of contemporary verse, both in its highly
specialised quality of thought and language and in the condition and circumstances of
its production, Rossetti openly followed the profession of a painter, pursuing poetry, for
the most past, as a recreative rather than a principal study.
In his poetry Rossetti assumes for ever the reality and immanence of spiritual and
moral world. But he is not a consciously didactic poet. On the other hand, the form and
substance of his utterance are so perfected in truth and virility of thought, in majesty
and grace of speech, that the reader is unconsciously affected by them. Rossetti’s poetry
can be roughly divided into two groups—the personal and the impersonal poems. In
the House of Life sonnets, Dante atVerona, The Streams Secret, The Portrait, and many
of the shorter lyrics, the personal note of love or grief, of memory or hope, is wholly
dominant. The poet’s soul is absorbed with its individual being, and sees in all the life
around him the illustration and interpretation of his own. In the second group, in the
great romantic ballads, in Rose Mary, and The Blessed Damozel, in The White
Ship and The King’s Tragedy, in The Bride’s Pleasure and Sister Helen, the imagination
takes a higher and larger range. Here the art becomes impersonal in this sense only that
the thought of self is merged in the full and immense life of humanity laying hold of the
universal consciousness through its own experience.
Rossetti was a supreme master of rhythm and music. He cast his great historical
lyrics in the highest narrative—that is to say, the ballad from; and chose the sonnet—the
most chastened and exclusive vehicle for the meditative and yet sensuous, self-
delineative love poetry. But whether written in the form of ballad or sonnet, Rossetti’s
verse remains fully charged with the very essence of romance. As a poet, he is neither
less nor more pre-Raphaelite than as painter. The vivid and intense simplicity of his
diction, the verbal flashes of his ballad style, seem to correspond with the tone and
method of his water-colour painting, and the more laboured splendour of the sonnets
with the qualities of his oil paintings.
(ii) Christiana Rossetti
Though Christiana Rossetti naturally displayed a temperament akin to her brother’s
and sometimes undoubtedly wrote to some extent under his inspiration, large parts, and
some of the best parts, of her poetical accomplishments, are quite distinct from anything
of his. Her sonnet sequences have the same Italian form and the same characteristics of
colour, music, and meditation, as those of Rossetti, because the sonnet form exercised
its strong restraint. But her a lyrics have lighter, more bird-like movement and voice
than the stately lyrics of Rossetti. Her range was distinctly wide. She had, unlike Mrs.
Browning, and perhaps unlike the majority of her sex, a very distinct sense of humour.
Moreover, her pathos has never been surpassed except in the great single strokes of
Shakespeare. But her most characteristic strain is where this pathos blends with or
passes into, the utterance of religious awe, unstained and un-weakened by any fear. The
great devotional poets of the seventeenth century, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert are more
artificial than she is in their expression of this.
Christiana Rossetti began with Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1861, followed it
with another volume, The Prince’s Progressin 1866 and after a much longer interval
with A Pageant and Other Poems in 1881. Later her verse was collected more than once,
and it was supplemented by a posthumous volume after her death. But a good deal of it
remains in two books of devotion, entitled Time Flies (1885) and The Face of the
Deep (1892).
(iii) William Morris (1834-96)
William Morris who was an eminent designer and decorator besides being a poet,
was chiefly interested in the Middle Ages. His first volume of poems—The Defence of
Guenevere and Other Poems (1858)—gives expression to his enthusiasm for the Middle
Ages. His object of writing poetry was to revive the true Gothic spirit, and these poems
interpreted ardours and mysteries of the Middle Ages which the Victorians had
forgotten. Though Tennyson also drew inspiration for his ‘Idylls’ from medieval sources,
he used medieval stories as a vehicle for contemporary moralising. Morris, on the other
hand tried to bring back to life the true spirit of the Middle Ages.
For nine years after The Defence of Guenevere, Morris did not write anything, as
Rossetti under whose influence he had come, wanted him to be a painter. When he did
resume his literary work, his style had entirely changed. The Life and Death of Jasonis
the first of a long series of narrative poems which forms the bulk of his contribution to
literature. In it he followed Chaucer whom he knew and loved best. In 1868-1870 were
published the greatest collection of his stories in Earthly Paradise.These stories which
are in Medieval setting, are written in an easy and simple style, and their diction is
always graceful and suited to the subject.
In the later parts of Earthly Paradise there is an indication of a change in Morris’s
interests and methods. Tales such as the ‘Lover of Gudrun’ which are derived from the
mythologies of northern Europe are treated in a different manner. This new interest was
intensified by his visits to Iceland in 1871 and 1873, and the greater part of Morris’s
subsequent work is based on the study of the sagas, and has a spirit of Epic poetry. He
translated the ‘Grettis and Volsunga’ Sagas; but the new spirit is found at its best in the
poems Sigured the Volsung.
Morris is a pre-Raphaelite in the sense that he wrote poetry mainly with the object
of creating beauty. He is a past master in producing languorous effects bathed in an
atmosphere of serenity and majesty. He, therefore, belongs to the lineage of Spenser in
combining virile strength with the greatest refinement of touch. His poems have a
harmonious and musical flow, the variety and suppleness of which recall at once the
styles of Chaucer and Spenser. In whatever form he writes—blank verse, rhymed verse,
the complicated or the simple stanza—he can produce exquisite music which casts its
fascinating spell on the readers. In all his poetry the love of adventure, the attraction of
an imaginary world, where beautiful human lives bloom out in open nature and
unrestricted liberty, where unhappiness, suffering and death have themselves a dignity
unknown in the real world made ugly by industrialisation, inspired Morris. The charm
of his poems lies mainly in their indefiniteness and their remote atmosphere which
soothe the aching of a mind disturbed and tortured by the tyranny of a vulgar present.
His poetry is the result of the reaction of a wounded sensibility against the sordidness
and ugliness of the real world.
(iv) Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)
Besides Rossetti and Morris, Swinburne was another Victorian poet who is reckoned
with the pre-Raphaelites, though his association with them was personal rather than
literary, and he belonged to the later styles of the movement. Unlike the other members
of the group, Swinburne was a musician rather than a painter. The poetry of Rossetti
and Morris, however musical it may be, is primarily pictorial. Swinburne’s poetry lacks
the firms contours and sure outlines of the poetry of Rossetti and Morris, but it has the
sonority of the rhymes which links the verses together. From his youth Swinburne
displayed an extraordinary skill in versification and a gift of imitating widely different
rhythms, not only those of English poets, but also those of the Latin, the Greeks, and the
French. It is in fact in the music of verse that Swinburne is pre-eminent. When once
asked at an Oxford gathering, which English poet had the best ear, he answered,
“Shakespeare, without doubt; then Milton;’ then Shelley; then, I do not know what other
people would do, but ‘I should put myself.” This claim, though made in all simplicity, is
quite justified, and there is no doubt that Swinburne is one of the great masters in
metrical technique. He handled the familiar forms, of verse with such freedom that he
revealed their latent melody for the first time.
 Swinburne’s poetry deals with great romantic themes—like Shelley’s revolt against
society, the hatred of kings and priests and the struggle against conventional morality.
He was also inspired by the French romantics, Victor Hugo and Baudelaire. The
appearance of his Poems and Ballads in 1866 created great excitement. The Victorians
who had accepted Tennyson as the great poet of the age, resented the audacity of this
upstart who, though possessing high technical skill, cared nothing for restraint and
dignity. Arnold found many of his lines meaningless, and called him “a young pseudo-
Shelly”. Serious persons were perturbed by his downright heterodoxy. His violent
paganism was the first far-heard signal of revolt that was to become general till a
generation later. The young, however, were carried away by the passion of his verse, his
intoxicating rhythms, and the new prospects of beauty which seemed to be opening in
English poetry.
Swinburne first became known by his Atalanta in Calydon (1865), a poetic drama,
distinguished by some great choruses, especially the one that opens, ‘Before the
beginning of the years’. Swinburne was essentially lyrical even when he attempted
drama, and the success of Atalanta in Calydon was due to the choral passages
possessing great lyrical quality. Dramatic movement and the creation of characters were
outside Swinburne’s range. He wrote other dramas—Bothwell (1874), and Mary
Stuart (1881) both on a period of history in which he was passionately interested. But,
above all, Swinburne is a lyrical poet and he never surpassed or equalled the Poems and
Ballads, (1886). In his later poems—Laus Veneris, The Garden of Proserpine, The
Tymn to Proserpine, The Triumph of Time, Ltylus and Dolores, there is a repetition of
images and ideas already familiar. These songs of love were succeeded by poems
dedicated to national liberty, especially that of Italy, for Swinburne was an ardent
admirer of Mazzini. In A Song of Italy (1867) and Songs before Sunrise (1871) he gave
lyrical expression to his passion for freedom. Two other volumes of Poems and
Balladsappeared in 1878 and 1889. His later poems—Studies in Song (1880). A Century
of Roundels (1883) and Tristram of Lyonesse(1882) show more of metrical skill than
lyrical power.
Though much of Swinburne’s poetry, especially that of his later years, seems
unsubstantial and almost empty of meaning, he is not merely a technician in verse. His
love of liberty, hatred of tyranny in all forms and voluptuous paganism were quite
genuine impulses which inspired much of his poetry. At his best, when he sings
inHertha of the birth and destiny of man, no one can deny him the title of a great-poet.
(b) The Decadent or Aesthetic Movement
The Pre-Raphaelite Movement in English poetry was followed by Decadent or
Aesthetic Movement, though it is not so well defined. In the later part of the nineteenth
century (1890-1900) there was a tendency among the literary artists to lay greater
emphasis on the idea of Art for Art’s sake. They were obviously influenced by Walter
Pater and the French authors like Baudelaire and Verlaine, who tried to break with
conventional values. They believed that all themes must be excluded from poetry except
the record of the few deeply moving movements of passion or sadness of emotional
exaltation or distress. They sought themes from pleasures which the virtuous forbid, and
inflicted agonies upon themselves to achieve perfection of form. These they conveyed for
their own sake with exquisite brevity. They found this conception not only in the study
of French models but in the critical work of Walter Pater, and their adherence to these
self-imposed limitations separates them from earlier English romanticism and from
pre-Raphaelite verse. Swinburne had already been subjected to similar influence, but he
had wider interests—enthusiasm for medieval legends, for Elizabethan drama and his
love of liberty and hatred for tyranny. The Decadents, on the other hand, were not
interested in any great subject, theme or idea. They showed anxiety about the right word
and were fussy about vowel and consonant patterns. Moreover, they emphasised the
passion rather than the intellect. Pater, in his essay on the pre-Raphaelites, and above
all in hisConclusions to Studies in the Renaissance,had given a double suggestion which
greatly affected this group of poets. First, there accompanies life an inevitable mortality,
“the undefinable taint of death is upon all things”; and, secondly, “out of life may be
seized some few moments of deep passion or high intellectual endeavour.” The poets
belonging to the Aesthetic Movement attempted to express in a most beautiful manner
such evanescent moods of pleasure and pain for their own sake without any extraneous
motive of conveying any moral. In fact they were pitted against all conventional morality
and rebelled against established social and moral laws. They knew neither philosophy
nor religion but were the worshippers of Beauty for its own sake. Their object was to
afford the readers merely aesthetic pleasure.
(i) Oscar Wilde (1856-1900)
Oscar Wilde was the first to come under the influence of Walter Pater. Though in his
early poems he had dealt with religious and spiritual experiences, in New Helen he
declared himself as the votary of Beauty.
Of heaven or hell I have no thought or fear
Seeing I know no other god but thee.
In The Garden of Eros he reaffirmed his belief that the pursuit of beauty is the only
desirable form of human activity. Like the pre-Raphaelites he also pointed out that
modern civilisation opposes this ideal:
Spirit of beauty, tarry yet awhile
Although the cheating merchants of the mart
With iron rods profane our lovely isle,
And break on whirling wheels the limbs of art.
In the short poem, Panthea, Wilde almost gives a paraphrase of Pater’s aesthetic
creed:
Nay, let us walk from fire to fire,
From passionate pain to deadlier delight.
I am too young to live without desire,
Too young art thou to waste this summer night
Asking those idle questions which of old
Man sought to see and oracle made no reply.
(ii) Ernest Dowson (1867-1900)
Ernest Dowson symbolises in his work the Aesthetic Movement of the eighteen
nineties. He came under the influence of Rossetti, Swinburne and the French
romanticists who believed in the doctrine of Art for Art’s sake. Following Pater’s artistic
principles the recorded in his poetry moments of sensations to the utter exclusion of all
moral and philosophical comment. He dealt mainly with the theme of the brevity of life
and the fading of things that once were beautiful:
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think they have no portions in us after we pass the gate.
Dowson possessed a love of words for their very shape and appearance on the page,
apart from their values of sound and association. He also possessed an unusual prosodic
skill. His Cynara holds a pre-eminent place in his work mainly on account of the sweet
melody of its verse. His central poetic theme is most profoundly treated in Nuns of the
Perpetual Adoration knowing that the ‘world is wild and passionate; and that the rose of
the world would fade’, the poet views with sad admiration those whose ascetism allows
them to stand aside and make their nights and days, ‘Into a long returning rosary’:
Calm, sad, secure; behind high convent walls,
These watch the sacred lamp, these watch and pray;
And it is one with them when evening falls,
And one with them the cold return of day.
(iii) Lionel Pigot Johnson (1867-1902)
Lionel Johnson was an associate of Oscar Wilde and Dowson who created the
aesthetic poetry of the eighteen nineties. Though he was greatly influenced by old
Christianity and wrote a good deal of religious verse, yet along with passages of religious
enthusiasm can be found paragraphs marked by aestheticism.
(iv) Arthur Symons
Next to Dowson the most consistent follower of the Aesthetic Movement was Arthur
Symons. Though he did not possess the unfaltering artistic perfection of Dowson’s
poetry where the images burn clearly and steadily, yet his poetic range was wider, and
he was a great critic.
(c) Other Important Poets
Other important poets of the Later Victorian Period were Patmore, Meredith and
Hardy, though the last two are better known as novelists. Coventry Patmore was a pre-
Raphaelite in the sense that he believed in ‘the simplicity of art’ theory, but much of his
poetry expresses his own individuality rather than any literary or aesthetic doctrine. His
most popular poem is The Angel in the House which contains some very fine things. His
great Odes covered by the title The Unknown Eros convey in beautiful, controlled free
verse, the mysticism of love combined with an intense religious feeling as no other
poems in the English language do.
Though Geroge Meredith was associated with Rossetti and Swinburne, as a poet he
had nothing in common with the pre-Raphaelite group except his belief that art should
not be the handmaid of morality. He looked upon life as glorious, increasingly exciting
and always worth while. The tremendous vigour and metrical skill of his long lyrics—The
Lark Ascending and Love in the Valley remind one of Swinburne. His greatest poetical
work, Modern Love written in sonnets of sixteen lines, is a novel in verse, and is of its
own kind in English literature. It is no doubt the most successful long poem written
during the later Victorian period.
Thomas Hardy, though a novelist, expressed himself, like Meredith, in verse also.
His greatest work, The Dynasts, is written in the form of an epic in which the immense
Napoleonic struggle unrolls itself as drama, novel, tragedy, and comedy. In his verse
sometimes he is as prosaic as Wordsworth in his later poetry, but at times his poems like
‘Only a man harrowing clods’ he gives expression to his pessimistic philosophy, but in
others he gives a true picture of human experience with a queer sense of super
reality. Moments of Vision, the title of one of his volume, in an apt description of his
poems as a whole, because most of them give us visions of emotional moments charged
with the inheritance of past ages of emotions, combined with irrational half-conscious
feelings which are recognized by the contemplative mind as being part of every-day
experience.

Novelists of the Later Victorian Period

The novel in the later Victorian period took a new trend, and the novels written
during this period may be called ‘modern’ novels. George Eliot was the first to write
novels in the modern style. Other important novelists of the period were Meredith and
Hardy. The year 1859 saw the publication not only of George Eliot’s Adam Bede but also
of Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feveral.Though they are vastly different from each
other, they stand in sharp contrast to the works of established novelists that appeared
the same year—as Dickens’s A Tale of TwoCities and Thackeray’s Virginians.
The novelists of the early Victorian period—Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and
others—had followed the tradition of English novel established by Defoe, Richardson
and Fielding. Their conception of themselves was modest, and their conscious aim
nothing much more elevated than Wilkie Collins’s “make them laugh, make them cry,
make them wait.” Set against this innocent notion of the novelist’s function, the new
novelists of England as well of other countries of Europe, began to have high ambitions
of making the novel as serious as poetry. The Russian novelists—Turgenev, Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky and the French novelists like Flaubert, all began to look upon the novel as a
medium of conveying profound thoughts. Flaubert especially arrogated to himself the
rights and privileges of the poet, and he talked about his talent and medium as seriously
as poets do theirs. He stated his ambition as a novelist thus: “To desire to give verse
rhythm to prose, yet to leave it prose and very much prose, and to write about ordinary
life as histories and epics are written, yet without falsifying the subject. It is perhaps an
absurd idea. But it may also be a great experiment and very original”. These words of
Flaubert show that the European novelists in the middle of the nineteenth century were
making the same claims about their vocation as the Romantic poets inEngland did in
the beginning of the century. The seriousness of these European novelists was both
moral and aesthetic, and it came to English fiction with George Eliot and Meredith. Both
of them were intellectuals and philosophers and had associates among such class of
people. On the other hand, their predecessors, Dickens and Thackeray, had association
with journalists, artists and actors, and they themselves belonged to their group. George
Eliot lived in a much larger world of ideas. These ideas conditioned her views of fiction,
determined the shape of her novels and the imagery of her prose. Meredith who was
partly educated in Germany and was influenced by French writers, developed a highly
critical view of England and its literature. Thus specially equipped, these two novelists—
George Eliot and Meredith—gave a new trend to the English novel, and made it
‘modern’. They were followed by Hardy who extended the scope of the novel still further.
(a) George Eliot (1819-1880)
The real name of George Eliot was Mary Ann Evans. For a long time her writings
was exclusively critical and philosophic in character, and it was when she was thirty-
eight that her first work of fiction Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) appeared. It was
followed by Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss(1860), Silas
Marner (1861), Romola (1863), and Middlemarch (1871-72).
George Eliot was born in Warwickshire, where she lived till her father’s death in
1849. It was her Warwickshire experience—the life of an English village before the
railway came to disturb it, which provided the substance of most of her novels. Gifted
with a wonderful faculty of observation, she could reproduce faithfully the mannerism of
rustic habit and speech. Having a thorough knowledge of the countryside and the
country people, their hierarchies and standards of value, she could give a complete
picture of their life. Moreover, she could beautifully portray the humour and pathos of
these simple folk as no English novelist had done before. Just as we look to Dickens for
pictures of the city streets and to Thackeray for the vanities of society, we look to George
Eliot for the reflection of the country life in England.
In George Eliot the novel took its modern form. Every story derives its unity from its
plot. The different episodes are all related to one another and subordinated to the main
story. The chief appeal to the emotions of the reader is made by the inevitable
catastrophe towards which the whole action moves. This unity of plot construction was
lacking in the English novel before George Eliot appeared on the scene. This was a
singular contribution of hers to the development of the English novel. Another
important feature of George Eliot’s novels is that they reflect more clearly than any other
Victorian novels the movement of contemporary thought. They specially appeal to the
mind which is troubled by religious and ethical difficulties. The mood of much of her
work is like that of Matthew Arnold’s poems. She shares also with him his melancholy
and depressing mood.
In her novels George Eliot takes upon herself the role of a preacher and moraliser.
Though profoundly religious at heart, she was greatly affected by the scientific spirit of
the age; and finding no religious creed or political system satisfactory, she fell back upon
duty as the supreme law of life. In all her novels she shows in individuals the play of
universal moral forces, and establishes the moral law as the basis of human society. The
principle of law which was in the air during the Victorian era and which deeply
influenced Tennyson, is with George Eliot like fate. It is to her as inevitable and
automatic as gravitation and it overwhelms personal freedom and inclination.
All the novels of George Eliot are examples of psychological realism. She represents
in them, like Browning in his poetry, the inner struggle of a soul, and reveals the
motives, impulses and hereditary influences which govern human action. But unlike
Browning who generally stops short when he tells a story, and either lets the reader
draw his own conclusion or gives his in a few striking lines, George Eliot is not content
until she has minutely explained the motives of her characters and the moral lessons to
be learned from them. Moreover, the characters in her novels, unlike in the novels of
Dickens, develop gradually as we came to know them. They go from weakness to
strength, or from strength to weakness, according to the works that they do and the
thoughts that they cherish. For instance, inRomola we find that Tito degenerates
steadily because he follows selfish impulses, while Romola grows into beauty and
strength with every act of self-renunciation.
(b) George Meredith (1829-1909)
Another great figure not only in fiction, but in the general field of literature during
the later Victorian period, was Meredith who, though a poet at heart expressed himself
in the medium of the novel, which was becoming more and more popular. The work of
Meredith as a novelist stands apart from fiction of the century. He did not follow any
established tradition, nor did he found a school. In fact he was more of a poet and
philosopher than a novelist. He confined himself principally to the upper classes of
society, and his attitude to life is that of the thinker and poet. In his novels, he cared
little for incident or plot on their account, but used them principally to illustrate the
activity of the ‘Comic Spirit’. Comedy he conceives of as a Muse watching the actions of
men and women, detecting and pointing out their inconsistencies with a view to their
moral improvement. She never laughs loud, she only smiles at most; and the smile is of
the intellect, for she is the handmaid of philosophy. Meredith loves to trace the
calamities which befall those who provoke Nature by obstinately running counter to her
laws. A certain balance and sanity, a fine health of body and soul are, in his view, the
means prescribed by Nature for the happiness of man.
The Ordeal of Richard Feveral, which is one of the earliest of Meredith’s novels, is
also one of his best. Its theme is the ill-advised bringing up of an only son, Richard
Feveral, by his well-meaning and officious father, Sir Austen Feveral. In spite of his best
intentions, the father adopts such methods as are unsuited to the nature of the boy, with
the result that he himself becomes the worst enemy of his son, and thus an object of
ridicule by the Comic Spirit. Besides containing Meredith’s philosophy of natural and
healthy development of the human personality the novel also has some fines passages of
great poetic beauty. Evan Harrington (1861) is full of humorous situations which arise
out of the social snobbery of the Harrington family. Rhoda Fleming (1865), Sandra
Belloni (1864), Harry Richmond (1871) and Beauchamp’s Career(1876) all contain the
best qualities of Meredith’s art—intellectual brilliance, a ruthless exposure of social
weaknesses, and an occasional poetic intensity of style. In all of them Meredith shows
himself as the enemy of sentimentality. In The Egoistswhich is the most perfect
illustration of what he meant by ‘comedy’, Meredith reached the climax of his art. The
complete discomfiture of Sir Willoughby Patterne, the egoist, is one of the neatest things
in English literature. This novel also contains Meredith’s some of the best drawn
characters—the Egoist himself, Clara Middleton, Laetitia Dale, and Crossjay Patterne.
Like George Eliot, Meredith is a psychologist. He tries to unravel the mystery of the
human personality and probe the hidden springs there. Being at heart a poet, he
introduced in his earlier novels passages of unsurpassable poetic beauty. A master of
colour and melody when he wills, Meredith belongs to the company of Sterne, Carlyle
and Browning who have whimsically used the English language. He seldom speaks
directly, frequently uses maxims and aphorisms in which are concentrated his criticism
of contemporary life. Like Browning, Meredith preaches an optimistic and positive
attitude to life. Influenced by the theory of Evolution, he believes that the human race is
evolving towards perfection. This process can be accelerated by individual men and
women by living a sane balanced and healthy life. They should follow the golden mean
and steer clear of ‘the ascetic rocks and sensual whirlpools’. On account of this bracing
and refreshing philosophy, the novels of Meredith, though written in a difficult style,
have a special message for the modern man who finds himself enveloped in a depressing
atmosphere.
(c) Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
The greatest novelist of the later Victorian period was Thomas Hardy. Like
Meredith, he was at heart a poet, and expressed himself also in verse. But unlike
Meredith whose attitude to life is optimistic, and who has written comedies, Hardy’s
attitude to life is rather pessimistic and he has written tragedies. Hardy thinks that there
is some malignant power which controls this universe, and which is out to thwart and
defeat man in all his plans. It is especially hostile to those who try to assert themselves
and have their own way. Thus his novels and poems are, throughout, the work of a man
painfully dissatisfied with the age in which he lived. He yearned forEngland’s past, and
he distrusted modern civilisation because he suspected that its effect was frequently to
decivilise and weaken those to whom Nature and old custom had given stout hearts,
clear heads and an enduring spirit. In his books, ancient and modern are constantly at
war, and none is happy who has been touched by ‘modern’ education and culture. Hardy
also resists the infiltration of aggressive modernity in the quiet village surroundings.
Hardy passed the major portion of his life near Dorchester, and his personal
experiences were bound up with the people and customs, the monuments and
institutions of Dorest and the contiguous countries of south-western England, which he
placed permanently on the literary map by the ancient name “Wessex’. Thus Hardy has
left a body of fiction unique in its uniformity. No other novelist in England has
celebrated a region so comprehensively as Hardy has done. Though he has dealt with a
limited world, he has created hundreds of characters, many of whom are mere choral
voices as in Greek drama.
On account of Hardy’s philosophy of a malignant power ruling the universe which
thwarts and defeats man at every step, his novels are full of coincidences. In fact, chance
plays too large a part in them. For this Hardy has been blamed by some critics who
believe that he deliberately introduces coincidences which always upset the plans of his
characters. In real life chance sometimes helps a man also, but in Hardy’s novel chance
always comes as an upsetting force.
The great novels of Hardy are The Woodlanders, The Return of the Native, Far From
the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the
Obscure. Though most of Hardy’s novels are tragedies, yet the role of tragedy becomes
intensified in The Return of the Native, Tess and Jude. The last chapter of Tess outraged
the religious conscience of 1891; to-day it offends the aesthetic conscience by its violation
of our critical sense of order and imaginative sufficiency. Hardy had said enough in Tess
before the beginning of the last chapter. As it stands, the novel is a masterpiece, but it is
scarred by an unhappy final stroke, the novel is a masterpiece, but it is scarred by an
unhappy final stroke. Jude the Obscure, though a very powerful novel is spoiled by
Hardy’s ruthlessness. At no time are Sue and Jude permitted to escape the shadowing
hand of malignant destiny. They are completely defeated and broken.
As a writer of tragedies Hardy can stand comparison with the great figures in world
literature, but he falls short of their stature because he is inclined to pursue his afflicted
characters beyond the limits of both art and nature. In the use of pathos Hardy is a past
master. As for Hardy’s style, his prose is that of a poet in close contact with things. In his
evocation of scenes and persons, his senses bring into play a verbal incantation that
relates him to the pre-Raphaelites. He describes characters and scenes in such a manner
that they get imprinted on the memory.
The main contribution of Hardy to the history of the English novel was that he made
it as serious a medium as poetry, which could deal with the fundamental problems of
life. His novels can be favourably compared to great poetic tragedies, and the characters
therein rise to great tragic heights. His greatest quality as a writer is his sincerity and his
innate sympathy for the poor and the down-trodden. If at times he transgressed the
limits of art, it was mainly on account of his deep compassion for mankind, especially
those belonging to the lower stratum.
(d) Some Other Novelists
Besides George Eliot, Meredith and Hardy there were a number of other Victorian
novelists during the later Victorian period. Of these Stevenson and Gissing are quite
well-known.
(i) Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94)
Stevenson was a great story-teller and romancer. He took advantage of the reader’s
demand for shorter novels. His first romance entitled Treasure Island became very
popular. It was followed by New Arabian Nights, Kidnapped, The Black Arrow,which
contain romances and mystery stories. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde he departed from his
usual manner to write a modern allegory of the good and evil in the human personality.
In The Master of Ballantre Stevenson described the story of a soul condemned to evil.
At his death he was working on unfinished novel, Weir of Hermiston, which is
considered by some critics as the most finished product of his whole work. In it he
dramatised the conflict between father and son—the Lord Justice-Clerk, the hanging
judge, and his son Archie who has the courage to face him.
The contribution of Stevenson to the English novel is that he introduced into it
romantic adventure. His rediscovery of the art of narrative, of conscious and clever
calculation in telling a story so that the maximum effect of clarity and suspense is
achieved, meant the birth of the novel of action. He gave a wholly new literary dignity
and impetus to light fiction whose main aim is entertainment.
(ii) George Gissing (1857-1903)
 Gissing has never been a popular novelist, yet no one in English fiction faced the
defects of his times with such a frank realism. Like Dickens he paints generally the
sordid side of life, but he lacks Dickens’s gusto and humour and Dickens’s belief that evil
can be conquered. Working under the influence of French realists and Schopenhauer’s
philosophy, he sees the world full of ignoble and foolish creatures. He considers the
problem of poverty as insoluble; the oppressed lower classes cannot revolt successfully
and the rich will not voluntarily surrender their power. Under such circumstances it is
the intellectuals who suffer the most, because they are more conscious of the misery
around them. This is the moral of all Gissing’s novels, chief among which areWorker in
the Dawn (1880), The Unclassed(1884), Domes (1886), The Emancipated(1889), New
Grub Street (1891), Born in Exile(1892). One can guess the subjects treated in them
from their titles.
All Gissing’s novels bear unmistakable traces of his many years of struggle against
poverty, obstruction and depreciation. He drew his inspiration from Dickens, but he
made the mistake of omitting altogether that which is present in Dickens even to excess-
the romance and poetry of poverty. He saw the privations of the poor, but unlike
Dickens, he was blind and deaf to their joyousness. In his later years he discovered his
mistake, and in 1903 he brought out The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, a great
autobiographic fiction, which is written in a most delightful manner revealing his inner
life.
Prose-Writers of the Later Victorian Period
In the later Victorian period there were two great prose-writers—Newman and
Pater. Newman was the central figure of the Oxford Movement, while Pater was an
aesthete, who inspired the leaders of the Aesthetic Movement in English poetry.
(a) Newman and the Oxford Movement

The Oxford Movement was an attempt to recover a lost tradition. England had
become a Protestant country in the 16th century under the reign of Elizabeth, and had
her own Church, called the Anglican Church, which became independent of the control
of the Pope at Rome. Before that England was a Catholic country. The Anglican Church
insisted on simplicity, and did not encourage elaborate ceremonies. In fact it became too
much rational having no faith in rituals and old traditions. Especially in the eighteenth
century in England religion began to be ruthlessly attacked by philosophers as well as
scientists. The protagonists of the Oxford Movement tried to show that the Middle Ages
had qualities and capacities which the moderns lacked. They wished to recover the
connection with the continent and with its own past which the English Church had lost
at the Reformation in the sixteenth century. They recognised in the medieval and early
Church a habit of piety and genius of public worship which had both disappeared. They,
therefore, made an attempt to restore those virtues by turning the attention of the
people to the history of the Middle Ages, and by trying to recover the rituals and art of
the medieval Church.
From another point of view the Oxford Movement was an attempt to meet the
rationalist attack by emphasising the importance of tradition, authority, and the
emotional element in religion. It sought to revive the ancient rites, with all their pomp
and symbolism. It exalted the principle of authority the hierarchy and dogmatic
teaching. Instead of being inspired by the doctrines of liberalism which were being
preached in the Victorian period, it resumed its connection with the medieval tradition.
It was favourable to mystery and miracles and appealed to the sensibility and
imagination which during the eighteenth century had been crushed by the supremacy of
intellect.
The aesthetic aspect of the Oxford Movement, or the Catholic Reaction, had a much
wider appeal. Even those who were not convinced by the arguments advanced by the
supporters of the Movement, were in sympathy with its aesthetic side. The lofty
cathedrals aglow with the colours of painting, stately processions in gorgeous robes ,
and all the pomp and circumstance of a ceremonial religion, attract even such puritanic
minds as Milton’s and are almost the only attraction to the multitudes whose God must
take a visible shape and be not too far removed from humanity. Thus many who were
only alienated by the arguments in favour of the Catholic Reaction, were in sympathy
with this aspect of the reaction, with the bringing back of colour and beauty into
religious life, with the appeal to the imagination and the feelings.
The germ of the Oxford Movement is to be found in 1822 in
Wordsworth’sEcclesiastical Sketches. Although Wordsworth here showed himself a
follower Catholic past which survived there. He regretted the suppressions of the ritual,
lamented the dissolution of the monasteries, the end of the worship of saints and the
virgin, the disappearance of the ancient abbeys, and admired the splendours of the old
Cathedrals. It was one of Wordsworth’s disciples, John Kelile, professor of poetry
atOxford, who some years later started the Oxford Movement. The first impulse towards
reaction was given by his sermon on ‘national apostasy’ in 1833. In this movement
which Keble heralded there were two phases. The first was the High Churchrevival
within the framework of the Anglican Church. The second was reverting to Roman
Catholicism. But both laid emphasis on ceremonies, dogmatism and attachment to the
past.
Others who took up this movement were E. B. Pusey and John Henry Newman, both
belonging to Oxford. (In fact this movement was called the Oxford Movement, because
its main supports came from Oxford.) To explain their point of view they wrote
pamphlets called Tracts for the Times (1833-41) whence the movement got its name the
‘Tractarian Movement’ E.B. Pusey (1800-82) who was a colleague of Keble originated
‘Puseyism’, the form of Anglicanism which came nearest to Rome without being merged
into Romanism.
John Henry Newman (1801-90) who joined later, became soon the moving force in
the movement. He was, in fact, the once great man, the one genius, of Oxford
Movement. Froude calls him the ‘indicating number’, all the rest but as ciphers. This
judgment is quite sound. It was he who went to the length of breaking completely with
Protestantism and returning to the bosom of the Roman Church. Newman, the most
important personality of the movement, is also its most conspicuous writer. He dreamt
of a free and powerful Church, and aspired to a return to the spirit of the Middle Ages.
At first he believed that this reform could be accomplished by Anglicanism, but he was
distressed to find lack of catholicity in the Anglican Church. Universality and the
principle of authority he could find only inRome. So after a period of hesitation he was
converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845. In 1879 he was made a Cardinal.
Newman was great writer of prose and verse. His greatest contribution to English
prose is his Apologia, in which he set forth the reasons for his conversion. This
fascinating book is the great prose document of the Oxford Movement, and it is
eminently and emphatically literature. From first to last it is written in pure, flawless
and refined prose. His style is a clear reflection of his character. Refinement, severity,
strength, sweetness, all of these words are truly descriptive of the style as well as of the
character of Newman. Another special characteristic of Newman’s style is its wide range.
He can express himself in any manner he pleases, and that most naturally and almost
unconsciously. In his writings sarcasm, biting irony glowing passion are seen side by
side, and he can change from one to the other without effort. His art of prose writing is,
therefore, most natural and perfectly concealed.
(b) Walter Pater (1839 – 1894)
Pater belongs to the group of great Victorian critics like Ruskin and Arnold, though
he followed a new line of criticism, and was more akin to Ruskin than to Arnold. He was
also the leader of the Aesthetes and Decadents of the later part of the nineteenth
century. Like Ruskin, Pater was an Epicurean, a worshipper of beauty, but he did not
attach much importance to the moral and ethical side of it as Ruskin did. He was
curiously interested in the phases of history; and chiefly in those, like the Renaissance
and the beginnings of Christianity, in which men’s minds were driven by a powerful
eagerness, or stirred by proud conflicts. He thus tried to trace the history of man
through picturesque surroundings as his life developed, and he laid great stress on
artistic value. From these studies – Studies in the History of the
Renaissance (1873), Greek Studies and others – it becomes clear that Pater considered
that the secret principle of existence that actually possesses and rules itself is to gather
as many occasions of psychial intensity which life offers to the knowing, and to taste
them all at their highest pitch, so that the flame of consciousness should burn with its
full ardour. Far from giving itself away, it shall suck in the whole world and absorb it for
its own good. Pater’s most ambitious and, on the whole, his greatest work, Marius the
Epicurean, the novel in which most of his philosophy is to be found also spiritualises the
search for pleasure. Pater’s aestheticism was thus spent in tasting and intensifying the
joys to be reaped from the knowledge of the past and the understanding of the human
soul.
As a critic Pater stands eminent. His method is that impressionism which Hazlitt
and Lamb had brilliantly illustrated. His approach is always intuitional and personal,
and, therefore, in his case one has to make a liberal allowance for the ‘personal
equation’. His studies are short ‘appreciations’ rather than judgments. But few writers
have written more wisely upon style, and the sentence in which he concentrates the
essence of his doctrine is unimpeachable: “Say what you have to say, what you have a
will to say, in the simplest, the most direct and exact manner possible, and with no
surplusage; there is the justification of the sentence so fortunately born, entire, smooth
and round, that it needs no punctuation, and also (that is the point) of the most
elaborate period, if it be right in its elaboration.” Few again have more wisely
discriminated between the romantic and classical elements in literature. According to
him the essential elements of the romantic spirit are “curiosity and the love of beauty,”
that of the classical spirit – “a comely order”. He believes that “all good art was romantic
in its day”, and his love for and affinity to the romantic spirit is obvious. But he attempts
to make romantic more classical, to superimpose the “comely order” upon beauty, so
that its strangeness may be reduced. His point of view, therefore, is similar to that
of Arnold, but he lacks Arnold’s breadth of outlook, and his attitude is more of a recluse
who has no part to play in the world.
As a writer of prose, Pater is of the first rank, but he does not belong to the category
of the greatest, because there is such an excess of refinement in his style that the
creative strength is impoverished. Moreover, he does not possess the capacity of
producing the impression of wholeness in his work. His chief merit, however, lies in
details, in the perfection of single pages, though occasionally some chapters or essays
are throughout remarkable for the robustness of ideas. Like a true romanticist Pater
gives flexibility to his prose which beautifully corresponds to his keen sensitive
perception and vivid imagination. He is capable of producing more intense and acute
effects in his poetic prose than other great masters of this art – Sir Thomas Browne, De
Quincey and Ruskin. And more than any other prose-writer he brushed aside the
superficial barrier between prose and poetical effects and he clothed his ideas in the
richly significant garb of the most harmonious and many-hued language.
Modern Literature (1900-1961)
The Modern Age in English Literature started from the beginning of the twentieth
century, and it followed the Victorian Age. The most important characteristic of Modern
Literature is that it is opposed to the general attitude to life and its problems adopted by
the Victorian writers and the public, which may be termed ‘Victorian’. The young people
during the fist decade of the present century regarded the Victorian age as hypocritical,
and the Victorian ideals as mean, superficial and stupid.

This rebellious mood affected modern literature, which was directed by mental attitudes
moral ideals and spiritual values diametrically opposed to those of the Victorians.
Nothing was considered as certain; everything was questioned. In the field of literary
technique also some fundamental changes took place. Standards of artistic
workmanship and of aesthetic appreciations also underwent radical changes.
What the Victorians had considered as honourable and beautiful, their children and
grandchildren considered as mean and ugly. The Victorians accepted the Voice of
Authority, and acknowledged the rule of the Expert in religion, in politics, in literature
and family life. They had the innate desire to affirm and confirm rather than to reject or
question the opinions of the experts in their respective fields. They showed readiness to
accept their words at face value without critical examinations. This was their attitude to
religion and science. They believed in the truths revealed in the Bible, and accepted the
new scientific theories as propounded by Darwin and others. On the other hand, the
twentieth century minds did not take anything for granted; they questioned everything.
Another characteristic of Victorianism was an implicit faith in the permanence of
nineteenth century institutions, both secular and spiritual. The Victorians believed that
their family life, their Constitution, theBritish Empire and the Christian religion were
based on sound footings, and that they would last for ever. This Victorian idea of the
Permanence of Institutions was replaced among the early twentieth century writers by
the sense that nothing is fixed and final in this world. H. G. Wells spoke of the flow of
things and of “all this world of ours being no more than the prelude to the real
civilisation”. The simple faith of the Victorians was replaced by the modern man’s desire
to prob and question, Bernard Shaw, foremost among the rebels, attacked not only the
‘old’ superstitions of religion, but also the ‘new’ superstitions of science. The
watchwords of his creed were: Question! Examine! Test! He challenged the Voice of
Authority and the rule of the Expert. He was responsible for producing the interrogative
habit of the mind in all spheres of life. He made the people question the basic
conceptions of religion and morality. Andrew Undershift declares in Bernard
Shaw’s Major Barbara: “That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its
obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it won’t scrap its old prejudices and its old
moralities and its old religions and its old political institutions”. Such a radical
proclamation invigorated some whereas others were completely shaken, as Barbara
herself: “I stood on the rock I thought eternal; and without a word it reeled and
crumbled under me.”
The modern mind was outraged by the Victorian self-complacency. The social and
religious reformers at first raised this complaint, and they were followed by men of
letters, because they echo the voice around them. Of course, the accusation of self-
complacency cannot be rightly levelled against many of the Victorian writers, especially
the authors of Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, Maud, Past and Present, Bishop
Blouhram, Culture and Anarchy, Richard Feveral and Tess. But there was felt the need
of a change in the sphere of literature also because the idiom, the manner of
presentment, the play of imagination, and the rhythm and structure of the verse, of the
Victorian writers were becoming stale, and seemed gradually to be losing the old magic.
Their words failed to evoke the spirit.
Thus a reaction was even otherwise overdue in the field of literature, because art has
to be renewed in order to revitalise it. The Victorian literature had lost its freshness and
it lacked in the element of surprise which is its very soul. It had relapsed into life of the
common day, and could not give the reader a shock of novelty. At the end of the
Victorian era it was felt that the ideas, experiences, moods and attitudes had changed,
and so the freshness which was lacking in literature had to be supplied on another level.
Besides the modern reaction against the attitude of self-complacency of the
Victorians, there was also failure or disintegration of values in the twentieth century.
The young men who were being taught by their elders to prize ‘the things of the spirit’
above worldly prosperity, found in actual experience that nothing could be attained
without money. Material prosperity had become the basis of social standing. Whereas in
1777 Dr. Johnson affirmed that ‘opulence excludes but one evil Poverty’, in 1863, Samuel
Butler who was much ahead of his time, voiced the experience of the twentieth century,
when he wrote: “Money is like antennae; without it the human insect loses touch with its
environment. He who would acquire scholarship or gentility must first acquire cash. In
order to make the best of himself, the average youth must first make money. He would
have to sacrifice to possessiveness the qualities which should render possession
worthwhile.”
 Besides the immense importance which began to be attached to money in the
twentieth century, there was also a more acute and pressing consciousness of the social
life. Whereas some of the Victorians could satisfy themselves with the contemplation of
cosmic order, identification with some Divine Intelligence or Superhuman plan which
absorbs and purifies our petty egoisms, and with the merging of our will in a higher will,
their successors in the twentieth century could not do so. They realised every day that
man was more of a social being than a spiritual being, and that industrial problems were
already menacing the peace of Europe. Instead of believing in the cult of self-perfection
as the Victorians did, they were ready to accept the duty of working for others. A
number of twentieth century writers began to study and ponder seriously over the
writings of Karl Marx, Engels, Ruskin, Morris, and some of them like Henry James,
discussed practical suggestions for the reconstruction of society.
The Victorians believed in the sanctity of home life, but in the twentieth century the
sentiments for the family circle declined. Young men and women who realised the
prospect of financial independence refused to submit to parental authority, and
considered domestic life as too narrow. Moreover, young people who began early to earn
their living got greater opportunity of mixing with each other, and to them sex no longer
remained a mystery. So love became much less of a romance and much more of an
experience.
These are some of the examples of the disintegration of values in the twentieth
century. The result was that the modern writers could no longer write in the old manner.
If they played on such sentiments as the contempt for money, divine love, natural
beauty, the sentiments of home and life, classical scholarship, and communication with
the spirit of the past, they were running the risk of striking a false note. Even if they
treated the same themes, they had to do it in a different manner, and evoke different
thoughts and emotions from what were normally associated with them. The modern
writer had, therefore, to cultivate a fresh point of view, and also a fresh technique.
The impact of scientific thought was mainly responsible for this attitude of
interrogations and disintegration of old values. The scientific truths which were
previously the proud possessions of the privileged few, were now equally intelligible to
all. In an age of mass education, they began to appeal to the masses. The physical and
biological conclusions of great scientists like Darwin, Lyell and Huxley, created the
impression on the new generation that the universe looks like a colossal blunder, that
human life on our inhospitable globe is an accident due to unknown causes, and that
this accident had led to untold misery. They began to look upon Nature not as a system
planned by Divine Architect, but as a powerful, but blind, pitiless and wasteful force.
These impressions filled the people of the twentieth century with overwhelming pity,
despair or stoicism. A number of writers bred and brought up in such an atmosphere
began to voice these ideas in their writings.
The twentieth century has become the age of machine. Machinery has, no doubt,
dominated every aspect of modern life, and it has produced mixed response from the
readers and writers. Some of them have been alarmed at the materialism which
machinery has brought in its wake, and they seek consolation and self-expression in the
bygone unmechanised and pre-mechanical ages. Others, however, being impressed by
the spectacle of mechanical power producing a sense of mathematical adjustment and
simplicity of design, and conferring untold blessings on mankind, find a certain rhythm
and beauty in it. But there is no doubt, that whereas machinery has reduced drudgery,
accelerated production and raised the standard of living, it has given rise to several
distressing complications. The various scientific appliances confer freedom and
enslavement, efficiency and embarrassment. The modern man has now to live by the
clock applying his energies not according to mood and impulse, but according to the
time scheme. All these ideas are found expressed in modern literature, because the
twentieth century author has to reflect this atmosphere, and he finds little help from the
nineteenth century.
Another important factor which influenced modern literature was the large number
of people of the poor classes who were educated by the State. In order to meet their
demand for reading the publishers of the early twentieth century began whole series of
cheaply reprinted classics. This was supplemented by the issue of anthologies of
Victorian literature, which illustrated a stable society fit for a governing class which had
established itself on the economic laws of wealth, the truth of Christianity and the
legality of the English Constitution. But these failed to appeal to the new cheaply
educated reading public who had no share in the inheritance of those ideals, who
wanted redistribution of wealth, and had their own peculiar codes of moral and sexual
freedom. Even those who were impressed by the wit and wisdom of the past could not
shut their eyes to the change that had come about on account of the use of machinery,
scientific development, and the general atmosphere of instability and flux in which they
lived. So they demanded a literature which suited the new atmosphere. The modern
writers found in these readers a source of power and income, if they could only appeal to
them, and give them what they wanted. The temptation to do so was great and it was
fraught with great dangers, because the new reading public were uncertain of their
ideologies, detached from their background, but desperately anxious to be impressed.
They wanted to be led and shown the way. The result was that some of the twentieth
century authors exploited their enthusiasm and tried to lead their innocent readers in
the quickest, easiest way, by playing on their susceptibilities. In some cases the clever
writer might end as a prophet of a school in which he did not believe. Such was the
power wielded by the reading public.
One great disadvantage under which the modern writers labour is that there is no
common ground on which they and their readers meet. This was not so during the
Victorian period, where the authors and the reading public understood each other, and
had the common outlook on and attitude to life and its problems. In the atmosphere of
disillusionment, discontent and doubt, different authors show different approaches to
life. Some lament the passing of old values, and express a sense of nostalgia. Some show
an utter despair of the future; while others recommend reverting to an artificial
primitivism. Some concentrate on sentiment, style or diction in order to recover what
has been lost. Thus among the twentieth century writers are sometimes found
aggressive attempts to retain or revitalise old values in a new setting or, if it is not
possible, to create new values to take their place.
The twentieth century literature which is the product of this tension is, therefore,
unique. It is extremely fascinating and, at the same time, very difficult to evaluate,
because, to a certain extent, it is a record of uncoordinated efforts. It is not easy to
divide it into school and types. It is full of adventures and experiments peculiar to the
modern age which is an age of transition and discovery. But there is an undercurrent in
it which runs parallel to the turbulent current of ideas which flows with great
impetuosity. Though it started as a reaction against ‘Victorianism’ in the beginning of
the twentieth century, it is closely bound up with the new ideas which are agitating the
mind of the modern man.

Modern Poetry
Modern poetry, of which T. S. Eliot is the chief representative, has followed entirely
a different tradition from the Romantic and Victorian tradition of poetry. Every age has
certain ideas about poetry, especially regarding the essentially poetical subjects, the
poetical materials and the poetical modes.
These preconceptions about poetry during the nineteenth century were mainly those
which were established by great Romantic poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron,
Shelley and Keats. According to them the sublime and the pathetic were the two chief
nerves of all genuine poetry. That is why Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton were given a
higher place as poets than Dryden and Pope, who were merely men of wit and good
sense, and had nothing of the transcendentally sublime or pathetic in them. During the
Victorian Age, Matthew Arnold, summing up these very assumptions about poetry
stated:
Though they may write in verse, though they may in a certain sense be masters of
the art of versification, Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics
of our prose.
The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden and Pope and all
their school is briefly this; their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits; genuine
poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
Arnold shared with the age the prejudice in favour of poetry which in Milton’s
phrase was “simple, sensuous and passionate.” It was generally assumed that poetry
must be the direct expression of the simple, tender, exalted, poignant and sympathetic
emotions. Wit, play of intellect and verbal jugglery were considered as hinderances
which prevented the readers from being “moved”.
Besides these preconceptions, a study of the nineteenth century poetry reveals the
fact that its main characteristic was preoccupation with a dream world, as we find in
Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci,Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott and Rossetti’sThe
Blessed Damozel. O’ Shaughnessy’s following lines express the popular conception of
the poet during the nineteenth century:
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers
On whom the pale moon shines.
 Such conceptions of the poet and his art prevailed during the Victorian period not
because they were right, but because they suited the age, and moreover they had the
prestige of the Romantic achievement behind them. But they could not find favour with
the poets and critics of the twentieth century on account of the radical changes that had
taken place. Under the stress and strain of new conditions they could not take the dream
habit seriously. Though during the Victorian period Tennyson was aware of the new
problems which were creeping in on account of scientific and technical discoveries, yet
under the impact of the popular conception of poetry, and also because of his own lack
of intellectual vigour, he expressed in his poems more of a spirit of withdrawal and
escape, rather than of facing squarely the problems confronting his age. This is
illustrated by his The Palaceof Art. The explicit moral of the poem is that an escape from
worldly problem is of no avail; but instead of effectively conveying this moral, the poem
stands for withdrawal and escape. In the songs of Swinburne aboutLiberty and
Revolution we do not find the preciseness and genuineness of Shelley’s ideals.
The Victorian poetry was obviously other-worldly. Its cause was stated
by Arnoldwhen he referred to:
………this strange disease of modern life
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o’ertaxed, its palsied hearts……
(A Summer Night)
But in spite of the fact that Arnoldamong all the Victorian poets was the most frank
in his expression of the ‘disease’ of his age, his response to it was not fundamentally
unlike that of the other poets of his age. For him the past was out of date, the future was
not yet born, and not much could be done. He studied Wordsworth and the Greek poets
mainly with the purpose of escaping to the freshness of the early world. In his own
poems like A Summer Night,where he refers to the disease of modern life, he slips away
from ‘this uncongenial place, this human life’ into the beautiful moon-lit region, and
forgets the iron time in the midst of melodious sentiments.
Arnold, therefore, was not qualified to give a new direction to poetry. Browning on
the other hand, though a greater poet, was unaware of the disharmonies of his time. He
was too optimistic to face the realities of life and new problems which had crept in. He
was a poet of simple emotions and sentiments, and though he could understand
psychologically the past ages, he had no aptitude to understand the complexities of
modern life. He was also, therefore, not in a position to provide the impulse to bring
back poetry to the proper and adequate grappling with the new problems which had
arisen.
William Morris, though a practical socialist, reserved poetry for his day-dreams.
Moreover, some of the distinguished authors like Meredith and Hardy turned to the
novel, and during the early part of the twentieth century it was left to the minor poets
like Houseman and Rupert Brooke to write in the poetic medium. Thus there was the
greatest need for some great poets to make poetry adequate to modern life, and escape
from the atmosphere which the established habits had created. For generations owing to
the reaction of aesthetes against the new scientific, industrial and largely materialistic
world, the people in England had become accustomed to the idea that certain things are
‘not poetical,’ that a poet can mention a rose and not the steam engine, that poetry is an
escape from life and not an attack on life, and that a poet is sensitive to only certain
beautiful aspects of life, and not the whole life. So the twentieth century needed poets
who were fully alive to what was happening around them, and who had the courage and
technique to express it.
The great poetical problem in the beginning of the twentieth century was, therefore,
to invent technique that would be adequate to the ways of feeling, or modes of
experience of the modern adult sensitive mind. The importance of T. S. Eliot lies in the
fact that, gifted with a mind of rare distinction, he has solved his own problem as a poet.
Moreover, being a poet as well as a critic his poetical theories are re-inforced by his own
poetry, and thus he has exerted a tremendous influence on modern poetry. It is mainly
due to him that all serious modern poets and critics have realised that English poetry
must develop along some other line than that running from the Romantics to Tennyson,
Swinburne and Rupert Brooke.
Of the other important poets of the twentieth century Robert Bridges belonged to
the transitional period. He was an expert literary technician, and it was his
“inexhaustible satisfaction of form” which led him to poetry. His metrical innovations
were directed to the breaking down of the domination of the syllabic system of
versification, overruling it by a stress prosody wherein natural speech rhythms should
find their proper values. He was convinced that it was only through the revival of the
principle of quantitative stress that any advances in English versification could be
expected. A. E. Houseman a classical scholar like Robert Bridges, rejected the ecstasles
of romantic poetry, and in his expression of the mood of philosophic despair, used a
style characterised by Purity, Simplicity, restraint and absence of all ornamentation. W.
B. Yeats, the founder of the Celtic movement in poetry and drama, a phase of
romanticism which had not been much exploited hitherto, gave expression to the
intellectual mood of his age.
The twentieth century poets who were in revolt against Victorianism and especially
against the didactic tendency of poets like Tennyson, Browning, Arnold and even
Swinburne and Meredith, felt that the poet’s business was to be uniquely himself, and to
project his personality through the medium of his art. Poetry to them was not a medium
for philosophy and other extraneous matters; nor was it singing for its own sake. It was
a method first of discovering one’s self, and then a means of projecting this discovery.
Thus the problem before each of them was how to arrive at a completely individual
expression of oneself in poetry. Naturally it could not be solved by using the common or
universally accepted language of poetry. On account of the change in the conceptions of
the function of poetry, it was essential that a new technique of communicating meaning
be discovered. It was this necessity which brought about the movements known as
imagism and symbolism in modern poetry.
Symbolism was first started in France in the nineteenth century. The business of the
symbolist poet is to express his individual sensations and perceptions in language which
seems best adapted to convey his essential quality without caring for the conventional
metres and sentence structures. He aims at inducing certain states of mind in the reader
rather than communicating logical meaning. The imagists, on the other hand, aim at
clarity of expression through hard, accurate, and definite images. They believe that it is
not the elaborate similes of Milton or extended metaphors of Shakespeare which can
express the soul of poetry. This purpose of poetry can be best served by images which by
their rapid impingement on the consciousness, set up in the mind fleeting complexes of
thought and feeling. In poetry which is capable of capturing such instantaneous state of
mind, there is no scope for Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. In it
suggestion plays the paramount part and there is no room for patient, objective
descriptions.
The symbolist poetry in England came into prominence with the appearance of T. S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land. But it had actually started right during the Victorian Age, which
is evident from the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), a Jesuit priest whose
poems were published thirty years after his death. It was the poetry of Hopkins and T. S.
Eliot which exerted the greatest influence on English poetry between the two wars.
The technique of the symbolist is impressionistic and not representational. In order
to prevent any obstruction in the way of emotive suggestion by any direct statement of
experience, he gives a covering of obscurity to his meaning. There is also in symbolist
poetry a strong element of charm or incantation woven by the music of words.
Repetition is often resorted to by the symbolist poets as we find in Tennyson’s The
Marriage of Geraint:
Forgetful of his promise to the king
Forgetful of the falcon and the hunt,
Forgetful of the tilt and tournament,
Forgetful of his glory and his name
Forgetful of the princedom and its cares.
But the repetitive rhythms which the symbolists use have in them a hypnotic
quality. They also recall the texture of dreams of the subconscious states of mind, and
because of absence of punctuation they can express the continuous “stream of
consciousness”.
The symbolists also give more importance to the subjective vision of an object or
situation rather than the object or the situation itself. Moreover, unlike the Romantics
who create beauty out of things which are conventionally beautiful, like natural objects,
works of art etc., the symbolists find beauty in every detail of normal day-to-day life.
Naturally to accomplish that and create beauty out of such prosaic material requires a
higher quality of art and a more sensitive approach to life. Moreover, besides including
all sorts of objects and situations in the poetical fold, the symbolist has broken fresh
grounds in language also. He considers that every word in the language has a
potentiality for being used in poetry as well in prose. For him the language of poetry is
not different from that of prose. As he uses all sorts of words which were never used in
poetry by the Romantics, the symbolist has to invent a new prosody to accommodate
such words as were banned previously from the domain of poetry. Thus the symbolist
does not consider any particular topic, diction or rhythm specially privileged to be used
in poetry.
Modern Poets
1. Robert Bridges (1840-1930)
 Robert Bridges, though a twentieth century poet, may be considered as the last of
the Great Victorians as he carried on the Victorian tradition. He is not a poet of the
modern crisis except for his metrical innovations. Belonging to the aristocracy his work
is also concerned with the leisured and highly cultivated aristocratic class of society.

In his poetry we find beautiful descriptions of English landscapes, clear streams,

gardens, songs of birds. The world that he depicts is haunted by memories of the
classics, of music and poetry and decorous love making. He carries on the tradition of
Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson, against which the young men of his times were in
open revolt. We do not find in his poetry any bold attempt to face the critical problems
facing his generation. Even his greatest poem, The Testament of Beauty, does not
contain any consistent treatment of deep philosophy. That is why Yeats remarked that
there is emptiness everywhere in the poetry of Bridges.
The importance of Bridges in modern poetry, however, is in his metrical
innovations. He was lover of old English music and many of his early lyrics are obviously
influenced by the Elizabethan lyricists, especially Thomas Campion. He was a
remarkable prosodist, the first English poet who had a grasp of phonetic theory. He was
tireless experimenter in verse form. He himself admitted: “What led me to poetry was
the inexhaustible satisfaction of form, the magic of speech, lying as it seemed to be in
the masterly control of the material.” Working under the influence of his friend,
Hopkins, to whom he dedicated the second book of shorter poems, Bridges wrote his
poems following the rules of new prosody. The best of Bridges’ metrical experiment is
the sprung rhythm, a kind of versification which is not, as usual, based on speech
rhythm, but on “the hidden emotional pattern that makes poetry.” And it was a definite
contribution to the development of English verse.
The lyrics of Bridges like A Passer-By,London Snow, The Downs, are marked by an
Elizabethan simplicity. In the sonnets of The Growth of Love, we find the calm, the
mediative strain of Victorian love poetry. A believer in Platonic love, he exalts the ethical
and intellectual principle of beauty. In his greatest poem, The Testament of Beauty, he
has given beautiful expression to his love for ‘the mighty abstract idea of beauty in all
things’ which he received from Keats. Here he has also sought to ‘reconcile Passion with
peace and show desire at rest.’ In his poetry Bridges thus transcended rather than solved
the modern problems by his faith in idealism and the evolutionary spirit. He has no
sympathy for the down-trodden and less fortunate members of humanity, and so
whenever he deals with a simple human theme, as in the poem The Villager, he reflects
the mind of the upper class which has lost touch with common humanity. Bridges is,
therefore, rightly called the last Great Victorian, and his greatest poem, The Testament
of Beauty, the final flower of the Victorian Spirit.
2. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
Hopkins who died in 1889, but whose poems were not issued during his lifetime,
and who only became widely known after his friend Robert Bridges edited the collection
in 1918, exerted a great influence on modern English poetry. The poems ofHopkins were
so eccentric in style that Bridges dared not publish them till thirty years after his
death. Hopkins had tried to revive the ‘sprung rhythm’, the accentual and alliterative
measure of Langland and Skelton, which had dropped out of use since the sixteenth
century. In this rhythm there are two currents, the undercurrent and the overcurrent,
which are intertwined. This effect is produced by inducing the metre to run back on
itself, sometimes making a second line reverse the movement of one before; sometimes
in the same line confronting a metric foot by its opposite, for instance, an iambic
followed by a trochee. As these variations produce the momentary effect of a break or
split, Hopkins called this device sprung rhythm. This rhythm follows the system of
beats and stresses unlike the quantitive metres where every syllable is counted. As in
conversation we stress significant words and syllables with so much emphasis that
accompanying syllables and words are left to take care of themselves, the ‘sprung’
rhythm is nearer to natural speech. That is why it has appealed to the modern poets who
in their poetry attempt to convey the everyday experience of modern life and its
multifarious problem in a most natural manner. The ‘sprung’ rhythm of Hopkins,
therefore, is his greatest contribution to modern poetry. Of course he was not the first to
invent it; there are examples of it in the poetry of all great poets, especially Milton.
But Hopkins revived it and laid special emphasis on it, and exerted a great influence
because the twentieth century needed it.
Hopkins, like Keats, was endowed with a highly sensuous temperament, but being a
deeply religious man having an abiding faith in God, he refined his faculty and offered it
to God. He avoided all outward and sensuous experiences, but enjoyed them in a deeply
religious mood as intimations of the Divine Presence. He could perceive God in every
object, and tried to find its distinctive virtue of design of pattern the inner kernel of its
being, or its very soul which was expressed by its outer form. This peculiarity or the
immanent quality in each thing which is the manifestation of Beauty was called
byHopkins as inscape’, a term which he borrowed from Don Scotus. For example, the
inscape of the flower called ‘blue bell’, according to Hopkins, is mixed strength and
grace. Thus to him not only trees, grass, flower, but each human spirit had its personal
inscape, a mystic, creative force which shapes the mind. This ‘inscape Hopkisn
expressed in a style also which was peculiar to himself, because he could not be satisfied
with the conventional rhythms and metres which were incapable of conveying what
came straight from his heart.
The poems of Hopkins are about God, Nature and Man, and all of them are
pervaded with the immanence of God. His greatest poem is The Wreck of
Deutschland,which is full of storm and agony revealing the mystery of God’s way to
men. All his poetry is symbolic, and he means more than he says. Some of his lyrics are
sublime, but the majority of his poems are obscure. It is mainly on account of his
theory—sprung rhythm, and inscape, that he has exerted such a tremendous influence
on modern poets.
3. A. E. Houseman (1859-1936)
Alfred Edward Houseman was a great classical scholar. He wrote much of his poetry
about Shorpshrie, which like Hardy’sWessex, is a part of England, full of historic
memories and still comparatively free from the taint of materialism. Out of his
memories of this place, Houseman created a dream world, a type of arcadia. His most
celebrated poem, Shorpshire Lad, which is a pseudo-pastoral fancy, deals with the life of
the Shorpshire lad who lives a vigorous, care-fee life.
 Housemen was disgusted with the dismal picture which the modern world
presented to him, but he did not possess a sufficiently acute intellect to solve its
problems. However, in some of his poems he gives an effective and powerful expression
to the division in the modern consciousness caused by the contrast between the
development of the moral sense and the dehumanised world picture provided by
scientific discoveries. In one of his poems based on his memories of Shorpshrie, he has
achieved tragic dignity:
Men loved unkindness then, but lightless in the quarry
I slept and saw not; tears fell down, I did not mourn;
Sweat ran and blood sprang and I was never sorry;
Then it was well with me, in days ere I was born
Housemen also wrote a few poems expressing the horrible destruction caused by
modern wars, and their utter futility and inhumanity. But he was on the whole a minor
poet who could not attain the stature of T. S. Eliot or W. B. Yeats.
4. The “Georgian” Poets
Besides Bridges and Houseman, who did not belong to any group, there was in the
first quarter of the twentieth century a group of poets called the “George Group:” These
poets flourished in the reign of George V (1911-1936). They possessed various
characteristics and were not conscious of belonging to a particular group. In reality they
were imitators of the parts, who shut their eyes against the contemporary problems. But
they were presumptuous enough to think of themselves as the heralds of a new age.
Robert Graves who first claimed to belong to this group, and subsequently broke away
with it, wrote about the Georgian poets. “The Georgians’ general recommendations were
the discarding of archaistic diction such as ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and ‘flower’d’ and ‘when’er’,
and of poetical construction such as ‘winter clear’ and ‘host on armed host’ and of
pomposities generally… In reaction to Victorianism their verse should avoid all formally
religious, philosophic or improving themes; and all sad, wrecked cafe-table themes in
reaction to the ninetees. Georgian poets were to be English but not aggressively
imperialistic, pantheistic rather than atheistic; and as simple as a child’s reading book.
Their subjects were to be Nature, love, leisure, old age, childhood, animals, sleep…
unemotional subject.”
This is rather a severe account of the Georgian poets but it is not wholly unjustified.
Though the quantity of work produced by the Georgian poets is great, the quality is not
of a high order. The poets generally attributed to this group are roughly those whose
work was published in the five volumes of Georgian Poetry, dated respectively 1911-12,
1913-15, 1916-17, 1918-19 and 1920-22. The important poets who contributed to these
volumes were Lascelles Aberchrombie, Gordon Bottomley, Rupert Brooke, G. K.
Chesterton, W. H. Davis; Walter De La Mare, John Masefield, J. E. Flecker, W. W.
Gibson; D. H. Lawrence, John Drinkwater, Sturge Moore, Laurence Binyon, Siegfried
Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
Among these the poets whose work has some lasting value are Walter De la Mare,
W. H. Davis, Laurence Binyon and John Masefield. The greatest of them is Walter De La
Mare (1873-1957) who writes in a simple, pure, lyrical style about beautiful sights and
sounds of the country, about children and old people but there is always in his poetry a
strange enchantment produced by the apprehension of another world existing side by
with the everyday world. His poetry has the atmosphere of dreamland, as he himself
says in his introduction to Behold, This Dreamer: “Every imaginative poem resembles
in its onset and its effect the experience of dreaming.” He has the faculty of bridging the
gulf between waking and dreaming, between reality and fantasy. Besides this he has
great skill in the management of metre, and successfully welding the grotesque with the
profoundly pathetic.
William Henry Davies (1871-1940) is one of the natural singers in the English
language. Being immensely interested in Nature, the experiences which he describes
about natural objects and scenes are authentic. His lyrics remind us of the melodies of
Herrick and Blake. Though living in the twentieth century, he remained wholly
unsophisticated, and composing his poems without much conscious effort, he could not
give them polish and finish. But inspite of this he has left quite a number of lyrics which
on account of their lively music have an enduring appeal to sensitive ears.
Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), a scholar and poet who translated Dante into English
had a sense of just word and its sound. Generally he wrote about classical themes. The
most notable of such poems is his Attila,a dramatic poem which is a well-constructed
play. Its vehement blank verse and speed of action remind the readers of Shakespeare.
The First World War stirred him to profound feelings and he wrote some very moving
poems, for example, the one beginning with the unforgettable line—
They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old.
The Second World War had a great saddening effect on him, and in his last years he
wrote poems in which he contrasted old pleasures and dreams with the horrible war
oppressed present. They were posthumously published in 1944 under the title The
Burning of the Leaves and other Poems. Though these poems were written under the
shadow of war and they deal with the transient nature of things and their tendency to
decay, yet they express the hope, like Browning’s poetry, that nothing that is past is
ultimately gone.
John Masefield (born 1878) who has been Poet Laureate since 1930, has been
composing poems for the last forty years, but he has not attained real greatness as a
poet. As a young man he was a sailor, and so most of his early poetry deals with life at
sea and the various adventures that one meets there. The poems which give expression
to this experience are contained in the volumesSalt Water Ballads (1902)
and Ballads (1906). In 1909 he produced his best poetic tragedy—The Tragedy
of Nan. After that he gave up writing on imaginative themes, and produced poems
dealing with the graver aspects of modern life in a realistic manner, e.g. The Everlasting
Mercy (1911), The Widow in the Bye-Street Dauber (1913), The Daffodil Fields (1913).
All these poems narrate a stirring story with an excellent moral. Now he is looked upon
as one of the ‘prophets’ of modern England.
5. The Imagists
The first revolt against the Victorian Romantic poetic tradition came from a group
of poets called the Imagists. Their activities extended for about ten years—from 1912 to
1922. They realized that the poetry of the Georgians did not introduce any new vitality in
English poetry. At its best it displayed both power and individuality, but it did not alter
the fact that each of the Georgian poets was content to delimit or modify the poetic
inheritance of the nineteenth century rather than abandon it in favour of a radically
different approach. Neither Masefield, whose poetry is realistic in subject and
vocabulary, no De la Mare, who is the last of the true romantic poets ofEngland, pointed
to the new paths in English poetry.
The poetic revolution engineered by the Imagists, which began in the years
immediately preceding the First World War, and which was both produced and further
encouraged by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,preferred the older tradition in English
poetry to the Victorian Romantic tradition. The Romantic and the Victorian poets tried
to express their personalities in their poems. For them poetry was a means of self-
expression and they appealed to the cultivated sensibility of their reader. They treated of
themes dealing with their personal hopes and fears and often indulged in the emotions
of nostalgia and self-pity. That is why the Victorian poetry especially had a tendency of
running to elegy. The Imagists believed that the function of poetry is not self-expression,
but the proper fusion of meaning in language. According to them poems are works of art
and not pieces of emotional autobiography or rhetorical prophecy. As the purpose of
poetry is the exploration of experience, the poet must strive after a kind of poetic
statement, which is both precise and passionate, profoundly felt and desperately
accurate, even if it means the twisting of the language into a new shape. There must be
the fusion of thought and emotion which is found among the Metaphysical poets of the
seventeenth century. The Imagists did not look upon the poet as the sweet singer whose
function was to render in sweet verse and conventional imagery some personal
emotions, but he was the explorer of experience. Therefore, he must use the language in
order to build up rich patterns of meaning which required very close attention before
they were communicated. The rebels were conscious of the fact that the poetry of their
own time represented the final ebb of the Victorian Romantic tradition, and that the
time was ripe to give a new direction to English poetry.
The new movement began with a revolt against every kind of sweet verbal
impression and romantic egotism which persisted throughout the nineteenth century.
Its originator, T. E. Hulme, who was killed in war in 1917, in an article which he wrote in
1909, declared his preference for precise and disciplined classicism to sloppy
romanticism. He advocated hardness and precision of imagery “in order to get the exact
curve of the thing” together with subtler and more flexible rhythms. He with the help of
Ezra Pound, who had come from America, founded the movement called Imagism.
Defining the Imagists, Pound wrote in 1912: “They are in opposition to the numerous
and unassembled writers who busy themselves with dull and interminable effusions,
and who seem to think that a man can write a good long poem before he learns to write a
good short one, or even before he learns to produce a good single line.” Giving a fuller
statement of the aims of the Imagist movement, F. S. Flint pointed out in 1913 that three
rules the Imagists observed were—(a) “direct treatment of the “thing”, (b) “to use
absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation”, and (c) “to compose in
sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” Pound emphasised
that the Imagists should “use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal
something”, and that they should avoid abstraction. The Imagist movement spread
in England and America, and it was helped by the seventeenth century metaphysical
poetry and the nineteenth century symbolists, who contributed their techniques and
attitudes to the revolution.
The leader of the Imagists was Ezra Pound. Other poets who were included in this
group were F. S. Flint, Richard Aldington, F. M. Hueffer, James Joyce, Allan Upward, H.
D. (Hilda Doolittle), Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Instead of imitating the
English romantics like the Georgians, the Imagists attempted to reproduce the qualities
of Ancient Greek and Chinese poetry. They aimed at hard, clear, brilliant effects instead
of the soft, dreamy vagueness of the English nineteenth century. Their aims which were
expressed in the introduction toSome Imagist Poets (1915), can be summarised as
follows:
(1) To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact
word, not the nearly exact, nor the merely decorative word.
(2) To produce poetry that is hard and clear, and not deal in vague
generalities, however, magnificent and sonorous.
(3) To create new rhythms and not to copy old rhythms which merely echo
old ones.
The Imagists were greatly influenced by the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins,
which appeared in 1918, thirty years after the death of the poet. It was the complete
absence of any sign of laxness in Hopkins’ poetry, the clear signs of words and rhythms
which were perfectly controlled by the poet to produce the desired effect, with no
dependence at all on the general poetic feeling, which made an immediate appeal to the
new poets.
Regarding the subject matter of poetry, the Imagists, believing that there was no
longer a general public of poetry lovers, concentrated on expressing the modern
consciousness for their own satisfaction and that of their friends. They gave up the old
pretence that humanity was steadily progressing towards a millennium. Instead they
recognised that in the new dark age of barbarism and vulgarity, it is the duty of the
enlightened few to protect culture and escape the spiritual degradation of a
commercialised world. This attitude seems to be similar to that of the aesthetes of the
last decade of the nineteenth century, but it is not so. Whereas the aesthetes hating the
vulgarity of the contemporary world tried to lose themselves among beautiful fantasies
by withdrawing into an ivory tower, the Imagists, on the contrary, faced the new
problems and tried to create a very precise and concentrated expression, a new sort of
consciousness because the traditional poetic techniques were inadequate for that
purpose. Opposed to the romantic view of man as “an infinite reservoir of possibilities”,
they looked upon him as a very imperfect creature “intrinsically limited but disciplined
by order.” Unlike the romantics who regarded the world as a glorious place with which
man was naturally in harmony, the Imagists regarded it “as landscape with occasional
oasis…But mainly deserts of dirt, ash-pits of cosmos, grass on ashpits”. They did believe
in the words of Hulme, in “no universal ego, but a few definite persons gradually built
up”. In his essay on Romanticism and Classicism, he predicted that “a period of dry,
hard, classical verse is coming” and expressed the opinion that “there is an increasing
proportion of people who simply can’t stand Swinburne.”
 The Imagists could not adequately tackle the contemporary problems, because they
lived too much among books, were rather irresponsible in their conduct, did not possess
sharp intellect, and were not in close contact with actualities. The result is that their
poetry is as nerveless and artificial as the neo-romantic poetry of the Georgians. But
they certainly deserve the credit of showing that English poetry needed a new technique,
and that unnecessary rules and a burdensome mass of dead associations must be
removed.
The poets belonging to the Imagist group did not produce great poetry on account of
the reasons stated above. Ezra Pound is a poet of real originality, but his too much and
rather undigested learning which he tries to introduce in his poems, makes them
difficult to understand, and also gives them an air of pedantry. His greatest contribution
to modern poetry is his development of an unrhymed ‘free verse’, and other metrical
experiments which influenced T. S. Eliot.
The most important writer, who in spite of his being not a regular member of their
group, was directly connected with the Imagists, was David Herbert Lawrence (1885-
1930). He contributed both to Georgian poetry and the Imagist anthologies. Most of his
mature poetry deals with the theme of duel of sex, a conflict of love and hate between
man and wife, and expresses an annihilation of the ego and a sort of mystical rebirth or
regeneration. His most remarkable poem Manifesto ends with a beautiful description of
universe where all human beings have completely realised their individualities, where
All men detach themselves and become unique;
Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled,
Every movement will be direct
Only to be will be such delight, we cover our faces when we think of it,
Lest our faces betray us to some untimely end.
The poems which he wrote in the last year of his life when he was dying of
consumption, deal with the themes of death and eternity. Lawrence did a lot in
rebuilding English poetry, and as a critic he set before the English poets the following
ideal, which has greatly influenced the modern English poets.
“The essence of poetry with us in this age of stark unlovely actualities is a stark
directness, without a shadow of a lie, or a shadow of deflection anywhere. Everything
can go, but this stark, bare, rocky directness of statement, this alone makes poetry to-
day.”
6. Trench Poets
The First World War (1914-18) gave rise to war poetry, and the poets who wrote
about the war and its horrors especially in the trenches are called the War Poets, or the
“Trench Poets.” The war poetry was in continuation of Georgian poetry, and displayed
its major characteristics, namely, an escape from actuality. For example, E. W. Tennant
describes the soldiers in Home Thoughts in Laventie, as
Dancing with a measured step from wrecked and shattered town.
Away upon the Downs.
 Instead of facing squarely the horrors of war, these poets looked upon the terrible
present as a mere dream and the world of imagination the only reality. Following the
Georgian tradition with its fanciful revolution from the drabness of urban life and its
impressionistic description of the commonplace in a low emotional tone, a number of
poets who wrote about the war, described incidents of war and the ardours and pathos
of simple men caught in the catastrophe. Their method was descriptive and
impressionistic, and on account of lack of any intense, sincere and realistic approach,
they failed to arouse the desired emotions in the readers.
Out of a number of these war poets, only two—Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen
– attained some poetic standard. Though Sassoon in his early period belonged to the
Georgian group, his predominant mood was not lyrical but satiric, not ‘escapist’ but
rebellious, because he felt that the soldier was being sacrificed for a false idealism. He
looked upon him as
a decent chap
Who did his work and hadn’t much to say
(A Working Party)
In his Suicide in Trenches he described the horrors of trench warfare. In Song
Books of the War he dwelt on the short memory of the public who forget those who
suffered and died for them during the war. Sassoon, who is still living, wrote some
poems between the two great wars, in which he attacked the shallow complacency of his
contemporaries, and gave voice to the disillusionment.
Wilfred Owen wrote war poems under the influence of Sassoon. He admired
Sassoon because the latter expressed in a harsh manner the truth about war. Speaking
about his own poetry he remarked, “Above all, I am not concerned with poetry. My
subject is War and the poetry of War. The poetry is in the pity … all a poet can do today
is to warn. That is why the true poets must be truthful.” Though in his poems we find the
mood of disillusioned irony, yet, unlike Sassoon, he does not completely lose his hope
for man. His poems are free from bitterness and he rejoices in the exultation of battle as
well as in the fellowship of comrades. Whereas in Sassoon’s poetry we find a mood of
indignation and satire, in Owen’s poetry the mood is of reconciliation and elegy. The
following remarkable lines in his poem Strange Meeting reveal Owen’s typical approach
to War.
I am the enemy you killed, my fried…
Let us sleep now.
As an experimenter in metre Owen’s contribution to modern English poetry is great.
Against the Georgian laxity, he introduced accumulative use of balance and parallelism.
And above all, he brought a new dignity to war poetry.
7. W. B. Yeats (1865 – 1939)
William Butler Yeats was one of the most important of modern poets, who exerted a
great influence on his contemporaries as well as successors. He was an Irish, and could
never reconcile himself to the English habits and way of thinking. By temperament he
was a dreamer, a visionary, who fell under the spell of the folk-lore and the superstitions
of the Irish peasantry. Like them he believed in fairies, gnomes, and demons, in the
truth of dreams, and in personal immortality. Naturally with such a type of
temperament, Yeats felt himself a stranger in the world dominated by science,
technology and rationalism.
Being convinced that modern civilisation effaces our fundamental consciousness of
ourselves, Yeats trusted in the faculty of imagination, and admired those ages when
imagination reigned supreme. Thus he went deeper and farther in the range of folk-lore
and mythology. He discovered the primitive and perennial throb of life in passions and
beliefs of ancient times, and he wanted to revive it, because he felt that modern
civilisation has tamed it by its insistence on dry logic and cold reason.
Yeats was anti-rationalist. He believed in magic, occult influences and hypnotism.
He thus led the ‘revolt of the soul against the intellect’, in the hope to acquire ‘a more
conscious exercise of the human faculties’. He also believed in the magic of words, the
phrases and terms which appeal to common humanity. Therefore, he tried to rediscover
those symbols which had a popular appeal in ancient days, and which can even now
touch man’s hidden selves and awaken in him his deepest and oldest consciousness of
love and death, or his impulse towards adventure and self-fulfillment. Being
disillusioned by lack of harmony and strength in modern culture, he tried to revive the
ancient spells and incantations to bring about unity and a spirit of integration in modern
civilisation which was torn by conflicts and dissensions.
All these factors inclined Yeats towards symbolism. Believing in the existence of a
universal ‘great mind’, and a ‘great memory’ which could be ‘evoked by symbols’, he
came to regard that both imagery and rhythm can work as incantations to rouse
universal emotions. He liked Shelley’s poetry because of the symbolism inherent in the
recurrent images of leaves, boats, stars, caves, the moon. He found that Blake invented
his own symbols, but his own task was easier because he could draw freely on Irish
mythology for the symbols he required. Coming under the influence of French
Symbolists like Verlaine, Macterlinck, he tried to substitute the wavering, meditative
and organic rhythms, which are the embodiment of imagination, for those energetic
rhythms as of a running man which are not suited to serious poetry.
As a symbolist poet Yeats’ aim was to evoke a complex of emotions not by a direct
statement but by a multitude of indirect strokes. The result is that sometimes the
symbols used by him are not clear as they have been derived from certain obscure
sources. For example, the symbols used in the following lines from The Poet Pleads with
the Elemental powers demand a commentary:
Do you not hear me calling white deer with no horns?
I have been changed to a hound with one red ear!
I would that the Boar without bristles had come from the west
And had rooted the sun and moon and stars out of the sky
And lay in the darkness, grunting, and turning to his rest.
In most of his poems, however, the symbols used by Yeats are obvious. One very
common symbol in his poetry is ‘the moon’, which stands for life’s mystery.
 Yeats, therefore, tried to reform poetry not by breaking with the Past, but with the
Present. According to him, the true poet is he who tells the most ancient story in a
manner which applies to the people today. His early poems, like The Wanderings of
Oisin (1889), express Yeats’ deepest idealism in the simple outlines of primitive tales.
The same attempt, though more effective and mature, was made in The Wind Among
the Reeds (1899) and The Shadowy Waters(1900). But up to this time Yeats had not
found himself; he was groping in the dreamland for wisdom and illumination.
The First World War (1914-18) and the Irish disturbances during those eventful
years gave to Yeats a more realistic direction. These conflicts, of course, did not
completely efface his dreams, but they turned his eyes from mythology to his own soul
which was divided between earthly passions and unearthly visions. Yeats realised that
the highest type of poetry is produced by the fusion of both—“the synthesis of the Self
and Anti-self” as he called It. The Anti-self is our soaring spirit which tries to rise above
the bondage of our mental habits and associations. Yeats’ lyrics which give the most
effective expression to these views are The Wild Swan at Coole(1917), The Tower (1928)
and The Winding Stair (1929). Here he gave a very satisfying presentation of the
wholeness of man—hisSelf and Anti-self.
In his later poetry Yeats reached a maturity of vision and style which may be
described as hard, athletic and having a metallic glint. Instead of serving as symbols and
having certain indefinite associations, his last poems expressed ‘Cold passion’ in images
which are chastened and well-defined. That is why, it is no exaggeration to say that
Yeats was influenced by the Imagists, and influenced them in return. A Thought from
Propertius is in every respect an Imagist poem.
In his last years Yeats retired to the solitude of his own mind, and he wrote poems
dealing with his early interests—love of dreams (Presences), admiration of simple joy of
youth and old civilisations, but the disintegration of modern civilisation under the
impact of war pained Yeats, and he believed that a revolutionary change is in the offing.
In Second Coming he describes what lies at the root of the malady;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
For about half a century Yeats exerted a tremendous influence on modern poetry on
account of his utter sincerity and extraordinary personality and genius. He recognised
no external law, but like a true and great artist, he was a law unto himself.
8. T. S. Eliot (1888)
Thomas Stearns Eliot is the greatest among the modern English poets, and he has
influenced modern poetry more than any other poet of the twentieth century. He
combines in himself strange and opposing characteristics. He is a great poet as well a
great critic; he is a traditionalist rooted in classicism as well as an innovator of a new
style of poetry; he is a stern realist acutely conscious of modern civilisation with its
manifold problems as well as a visionary who looks at life beyond the limits of time and
space.
 T. S. Eliot was born in 1888 in the U.S.A.He was educated at Harvard University.
After that he received education at Paris andOxford, and settled in England which he
has made his literary home. He came into prominence as a poet in the decade following
the First World War i.e., between 1920 and 1930, during which period he wrote the
poems for which he is best known. There was at that time in England a tendency in
favour of classicism which directly influenced Eliot. Being himself a great classical
scholar, and finding around him petty poets of the Georgian group, he set himself to
establish principles of a sound classicism. To him classicism stands for order. It is a
tradition not established by the authority of Aristotle or any other ancient critic, but by
the whole body of great writers who have contributed to it in the course of centuries. He
conceives of literature as a continuous process in which the present contains the past.
The modern poet, according to Eliot, should carry on that process, follow the permanent
spirit of that tradition, and thus create fresh literature by expressing the present on a
new and modified manner. Thus Eliot is different from the neo-classicists of the
eighteenth century who insisted on implicitly following the narrowly defined rules of
writing. To him classicism means a sort of training for order, poise and right reason. In
order to achieve that the modern writer should not defy the permanent spirit of
tradition, and must have “a framework of accepted and traditional ideas.”
But the surprising thing about Eliot is that in spite of his being a professed classicist
and an uncompromising upholder of tradition, he was the man who led the attack on the
writing of “traditional’ poetry, and come out as the foremost innovator of modern times.
He thought that the literary language which had served its purpose in the past was not
suited for modern use. So he rejected it outright. According to him, the modern writer
while carrying on the literary tradition of ‘poise, order and right reason’ need not follow
the old and obsolete idiom of his predecessors, but should invent entirely a new medium
which is capable of digesting and expressing new objects and new feelings, new ideas,
and new aspects of modern life. The language used by the modern poet must be
different from the language of the past because modern life dominated by science and
technology is radically different from the life of the past ages characterised by slow and
steady development.
In his attempt to find a new medium for poetry Eliot became interested in the
experiments of Ezra Pound, the leader of the Imagists. Like Pound, Eliot also sought to
extend the range of poetic language by introducing words used in common speech but
commonly regarded as inappropriate in literature. But Eliot is different from Pound in
this respect that having a profound knowledge of classical literature he can, whenever he
likes, borrow phrases from well-known poets and thus create an astonishing effect. Thus
in his poem one find colloquial words expressing precisely and exactly the meaning
which he wants to convey, along with archaic and foreign words used by ancient poets,
philosophers and prophets, which sound like voice far away beyond a mountain.
Eliot is acutely aware of the present and the baffling problems which face mankind
in the modern times. The poems of his early period as The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock(1917) express the disillusion, irony and disgust at the contemplation of the
modern world which is trivial, sordid and empty. In his greatest poem, The Waste
Land, the poet surveys the desolate scene of the world with a searching gaze. He
relentlessly uncovers its baffling contrasts and looks in vain for a meaning where there
is only
A heap of broken images, where the sun heats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
The same attitude is expressed in the Hollow Men (1925):
We are the hollow men,
We are stuffed men,
Leaning together,
He Headpiece filled with straw.
But it is not merely the present with which Eliot is preoccupied. He is a mystic who
has a profound sense of the past and he looks into the future. His aim is to look beyond
the instant, pressing moment, and think of himself as belonging to what was best in the
past and may be prolonged into the future. For him the spirit exists in one eternal Now,
in which Past, Present and Future are blended. In order to experience it one should
surrender one’s ego and relax in a mood of humble receptivity. Only then one can
absorb the fleeting moment in such a way that the scheme of existence purged of all
one’s personal prejudices, narrowness and resentment is felt all around one’s self. It is in
this mood that his later poems published together in Four Quartets,consisting of Burnt
Norton (1936), East Coker(1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), and Little Gidding (1942)
are written. In the last mentioned poem the poet lets his thoughts go free amid the
ruined chapel at Little Gidding from which all recollection of conflict and effort has
vanished, but where the intensity of spiritual prayer can still be left.
Burnt Norton begins with the significant lines
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
Thus T. S. Eliot who is a force in modern English literature, is a many-sided
personality. He is a classicist, innovator, critic, poet, social philosopher and mystic—all
combined into one. He makes the reader aware not merely of the problems of modern
life but also of mankind as a whole. The soul of man finds itself in horror and loneliness
in the Waste Land unless it is redeemed by courage and faith. Though a great and acute
thinker, he has a spiritual approach to life, which is rare in the twentieth century
dominated by science and materialism. And he has expressed his ideas and feelings in a
language which is devoid of all superfluous ornamentation and is capable of conveying
the bewildering and terrifying aspects of modern life. Of all the living English poets he
has done most to make his age conscious of itself, and aware of the dangers inherent in
modern civilisation.
9. Poets after T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot dominated the English poetic scene till 1930; after that a
new school ofEnglish poets came to the forefront. It is headed by W. H. Auden, and the
other leading poets of this group are Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis. They follow
the example of Hopkins and make use of the technical achievements of T. S. Eliot and
Ezra Pound. These poets are conscious of the bareness of modern civilisation and strive
to find a way out of the Waste Land. Their ideal is the creation of a society in which the
real and living contact between man and man may again become possible.
The most original and the most poetically exciting among the modern poets is W. H.
Auden who settled in Americashortly before the Second World War. He also considers
the Waste Land as symbolic of modern civilisation, but whereas to T. S. Eliot it is a
symbol of a state of spiritual dryness, to Auden it is a symbol of the depressing physical
and psychological condition in the English social life. He is greatly distressed by the
upper and lower classes. It is the sense of imminent crisis which pervades his early
poetry.
In his later poetry Auden has given up the psychological-economic diagnosis of the
troubles of the times, and developed a more sober, contemplative and religious
approach to life. But he is also capable of writing light verse full of puns and ironic
overtone. But whatever he writes is full of symbols and images derived not from
mythology as in the case of Yeats and Eliot, but from the multifarious of everyday life.
Stephen Spender who began writing under the influence of Auden composed lyrics
in which he expressed sympathy for the working classes:
Oh young men, oh young comrades,
It is too late now to stay in those houses
Your fathers built where they built you to breed money on money.
But in his later poetry he has developed his own quiet, autobiographical style, which
is unlike the style of any modern poet.
What I expected was
Thunder, fighting.
Long struggle with men
And climbing,
After continual straining
I should grow strong;
Then the rocks would shake
And I should rest long.
What I had not foreseen
Was the gradual day
Weakening the will
Leaking the brightness away,
The lack of good to touch
The fading of body and soul
Like smoke before wind
Corrupt, unsubstantial.
Cecil Day Lewis also wrote his early poetry under the influence of Auden. But his
later poetry has become more and more reflective and reminiscent. Moreover, he has
adopted the Victorian diction. On account of his profound knowledge of technique he
may be called the academic poet of the present age. In his poems the imagery is
primarily rural and his tone is elegiac. These characteristics associate him with the
Georgians.
Other important English poets of the present age are Louis Mac Niece, Edith Sitwell,
Robert Graves, Roy Campbell, Geoffrey Grigson, George Barker and Dylan Thomas.
Though they do not form any definite group, yet there is a tendency among them to
Romanticism in English poetry which had become metaphysical and classical under the
influence of Hopkins, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and the Auden group of poets. They do not
give so much importance to ‘dry, hard’ images, and being visionary rather than
speculative, their presiding genius is Blake rather than Donne. Dylan Thomas who is the
most popular of the young poets finds unity of man with nature, of the generations with
each other, of the divine with the human, of life with death. Death does not mean
destruction, but a guarantee of immortality, of perpetual life in cosmic eternity:
And death shall have no dominion
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not,
And death shall have no dominion.
But in spite of this tendency towards Romanticism in the poetry of the present age
in England, Eliot, and his school of poetry which is akin to classicism, still hold the field.
All modern poetry possesses intellectual toughness and there is no attempt to return to
the melodious diction of Tennyson and Swinburne or to the imaginative flights of
Shelley. Of course, the tension that we find in Eliot’s poetry has ceased and the trend is
towards Wordsworthian quietness.

Modern Drama

After the death of Shakespeare and his contemporaries drama in England suffered a
decline for about two centuries. Even Congreve in the seventeenth, and Sheridan and
Goldsmith in the eighteenth, could not restore drama to the position it held during the
Elizabethan Age. It was revived, however, in the last decade of the nineteenth century,
and then there appeared dramatists who have now given it a respectable place in
English literature.
 Two important factors were responsible for the revival of drama in 1890’s. One was
the influence of Ibsen, the great Norwegian dramatist, under which the English
dramatists like Bernard Shaw claimed the right to discuss serious social and moral
problems in a calm, sensible way. The second was the cynical atmosphere prevailing at
that time, which allowed men like Oscar Wilde to treat the moral assumptions of the
great Victorian age with frivolity and make polite fun of their conventionality,
prudishness or smugness. The first factor gave rise to the Comedy of Ideas or Purpose,
while the second revived the Comedy of Manners or the Artificial Comedy.
Under the influence of Ibsen the serious drama in England from 1890 onward
ceased to deal with themes remote in time and place. He had taught men that the real
drama must deal with human emotions, with things which are near and dear to ordinary
men and women. The new dramatists thus gave up the melodramatic romanticism and
pseudo-classical remoteness of their predecessors, and began to treat in their plays the
actual English life, first of the aristocratic class, then of the middle class and finally of
the labouring class. This treatment of actual life made the drama more and more a
drama of ideas, which were for the most part, revolutionary, directed against past
literary models, current social conventions and the prevailing morality of Victorian
England. The new dramatists dealt mainly with the problems of sex, of labour and of
youth, fighting against romantic love, capitalism and parental authority which were the
characteristic features of Victorianism. The characters in their plays are constantly
questioning, restless and dissatisfied. Youngmen struggle to throw off the trammels of
Victorian prejudice. Following the example of Nora, the heroine in Ibsen’s A Doll’s
House, who leaves her dull domineering husband who seeks to crush her personality
and keep her permanently in a childlike, irresponsible state, the young women in these
plays join eagerly the Feminist movement and glory in a new-found liberty. Influenced
by the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the psychological investigations of Freud, the
new dramatists no longer held love or the relation between the sexes as something
sacred or romantic as their forefathers did. They looked upon it as a biological
phenomenon directed by Nature, or the ‘life force’ as Bernard Shaw calls it. Thus these
dramatists introduced Nature and Life in drama, and loved to make them play their
great parts on the stage.
In the new drama of ideas, where a number of theories had to be propounded and
explained, action became slow and frequently interrupted. Moreover, inner conflict was
substituted for outer conflict, with the result that drama became quieter than the
romantic drama of the previous years. The new researches in the field of psychology
helped the dramatist in the study of the ‘soul’, for the expression of which they had to
resort to symbols. By means of symbolism the dramatist could raise the dark and even
sordid themes to artistic levels. The emphasis on the inner conflict led some of the
modern dramatists to make their protagonists not men but unseen forces, thereby
making wider and larger the sphere of drama.
In the field of non-serious comedy there was a revival, in the twentieth century, of
the Comedy of Manners. The modern period, to a great extent, is like the Augustan
period, because of the return of the witty, satirical comedy which reached its climax in
the hands of Congreve in 1700. Though this new comedy of manners is often purely
fanciful and dependent for its effect upon pure wit, at times it becomes cynical and bitter
when dealing with social problems. Mainly it is satirical because with the advancement
of civilisation modern life has become artificial, and satire flourishes in a society which
becomes over-civilised and loses touch with elemental conditions and primitive
impulses.
The two important dramatists who took a predominant part in the revival of drama
in the last decade of the nineteenth century were Geroge Bernard Shaw, and Oscar
Wilde, both Irishmen. Shaw was the greatest practitioner of the Comedy of Idea, while
Wilde that of the new Comedy of Manners. Shaw, who was a great thinker, represented
the Puritan side of the Anglo-Irish tradition. Wilde, on the other hand, lived a life of
luxury and frivolity, was not a deep thinker as Shaw was; and his attitude to life was
essentially a playful one.
The success of Oscar Wilde as a writer of artificial comedy or the comedy of
manners was mainly due to his being a social entertainer, and it is mainly as
‘entertainments’ that his plays have survived. Wilde may be considered, therefore, as the
father of the comedy of pure entertainment as Shaw is the father of the Comedy of
Ideas. Other modern writers who have followed Wilde directly are Somerset Maugham
and Noel Coward. But the artificial comedy of the last fifty years in England does not
compare well with the artificial comedy of the Restoration. The reason is that in the
twentieth century there is a lot of confusion and scepticism about social values, and for
the production of a really successful artificial comedy the recognition and establishment
of some high and genuine code of behaviour, which most people find it too hard to live
up to, is essential. Moreover, social manners change so rapidly in the modern time, that
the comedy of manners grows out of date more rapidly than any other type of drama.
The same is the case with the modes of speech and attitudes to life which also undergo
change in a decade. The result is that the appeal of such plays is not lasting, and many of
them are no longer appreciated now though in their own day they were immensely
successful and powerful.
This is not the case with the comedy of ideas or social comedy. George Bernard
Shaw, the father of the comedy of ideas, was a genius. His intellectual equipment was far
greater than that of any of his contemporaries. He alone had understood the greatness
of Ibsen, and he decided that like Ibsen’s his plays would also be the vehicles of ideas.
But unlike Ibsen’s grim and serious temperament, Shaw’s was characterised by jest and
verbal wit. He also had a genuine artistic gift for form, and he could not tolerate any
clumsiness in construction. For this purpose he had studied every detail of theatrical
workmanship. In each of his plays he presented a certain problem connected with
modern life, and his characters discuss it thoroughly. In order to make his ideas still
more explicit he added prefaces to his plays, in which he explored the theme more fully.
The main burden of his plays is that the civilised man must either develop or perish. If
he goes on with his cruelty, corruption and ineffectuality, ‘The Life Force’ or God would
wipe him out of existence. Shaw laughed at and ridiculed even things which others
respected or held sacred. What saved him from persecution as a rebel was his innate
sense of humour which helped him to give a frivolous cover to whatever he said or
wrote. Other modern dramatists who following the example of Bernard Shaw wrote
comedies of ideas were Granville Barker, Galsworthy, James Birdie, Priestley, Sir James
Barrie and John Masefield, but none of them attained the standard reached by Shaw.
 Besides the artificial comedy and the comedy of ideas, another type of drama was
developed in England under the influence of the Irish Dramatic Movement whose
originators were Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats. The two important dramatists belonging
to this movement are J. M. Synge and Sean O’Casey. There has been the revival of the
Poetic Drama in the Twentieth century, whose most important practitioner is T. S. Eliot.
Other modern dramatists who have also written poetic plays are Christopher Fry,
Stephen Philips and Stephen Spender. Most of the poetic plays written in modern times
have a religious theme, and they attempt to preach the doctrines of Christianity.

Modern Dramatists
1. George Bernard Shaw (1856—1950)
The greatest among the modern dramatists was George Bernard Shaw. He was born
and brought up in Ireland, but at the age of twenty in 1876 he left Ireland for good, and
went to London to make his fortune. At first he tried his hand at the novel, but he did
not get any encouragement. Then he began to take part in debates of all sorts, and made
his name as the greatest debator in England. He read Karl Marx, became a Socialist, and
in 1884 joined the Fabian Society which was responsible for creating the British Labour
Party.
He was also a voracious reader, and came under the influence of Samuel Butler whom
he described as the greatest writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Shaw was
specially impressed by Butler’s dissatisfaction with the Darwinian Theory of Natural
Selection. According to Butler,Darwin had banished mind from the universe by
banishing purpose from natural history. Shaw came to believe in the Force
which Butler had described as ‘the mysterious drive towards greater power over our
circumstances and deeper understanding of Nature.’ Shakespeare had described it as
‘divinity that shapes our ends’. Shaw termed it the Life Force.
Two other writers who provoked the critical mind of Shaw during his formative
period were Ibsen, a Norwegian dramatist; and Friedrish Nietzche, a German
philosopher. From Nietzche Shaw took his admiration for the intellectually strong, the
aristocrats of the human species, the supermen who know their own minds, pursue their
own purpose, win the battle of life and extract from it what is worth having. Ibsen whose
doctrine, ‘Be Thyself,’ which was very much like Nietzche’s theory of the Superman who
says ‘Yea to Life’, gave a dramatic presentation of it by picturing in his plays the life of
the middle class people with relentless realism. In his plays Ibsen had exposed
sentimentality, romanticism and hypocrisy. He showed men and women in society as
they really are, and evoked the tragedy that may be inherent in ordinary, humdrum life.
Working under the influence of Butler, Nietzche and Ibsen, Shaw who up to the age
of forty was mainly concerned in learning, in propagating ideas, in debating, and
persuading people to accept his views about society and morals decided to bring the
world round to his opinion through the medium of the theatre. With that end in view he
studied the stage through and through, and came out with his plays which were
theatrically perfect and bubbling with his irrepressible wit. The result was that he
immediately attracted attention and became the most popular and influential dramatist
of his time.
Shaw wrote his plays with the deliberate purpose of propaganda. He himself said,
“My reputation has been gained by my persistent struggle to force the public to
reconsider its morals.” He prepared the minds of the audience by written prefaces to his
plays which are far more convincing than the plays themselves. That is why plays were
more successful when they were produced a second or third time when the audience had
read them in their published forms.
In most of his plays, Shaw himself is the chief character appearing in different
disguises. Other characters represent types which Shaw had studied thoroughly. The
only exceptions are Candida, Saint Joan and Captain Shotover in Heartbreak
House. But mostly the characters in his plays are mere puppets in his hands taking part
in the conflict of ideas. In all his plays he is a propagandist or prophet. He criticises
mental servitude, moral slavery, superstition, sentimentalism, selfishness and all rotten
and irrational ideas. As his plays are concerned with ideas, and he is a staunch enemy of
sentimentalism, he passes by the subtler, finer elements in the individual, and fails to
arouse emotions. But in spite of his being the severest critic of contemporary society, his
inherent sense of humour, joviality and generous temperament produced no bitterness.
His frankness and sincerity compelled the people to listen to him even when he
provoked, exasperated and shocked many of them.
All the plays of Shaw deal with some problem concerning modern society. In Mrs.
Warren’s Profession Shaw showed that for the evils of prostitution the society, and not
the procuress, was the blame. In Widower’s House he again put the blame on society,
and not on the individual landlord for creating abuses of the right to property. In Man
and Superman Shaw dealt with his favourtie theme that it is the Life Force which
compels woman to hunt out man, capture and marry him for the continuation of the
race. InGetting Married he showed the unnaturalness of the home-life as at present
constituted. In The Doctor’s Dilemma he exposed the superstition that doctors are
infalliable. In John Bull’s other Island, the hero talks exactly like Shaw, and the
Englishman represents the worst traits in English character. Caesar and Cleopatra has
no particular theme, and that is why it comes nearer to being a play than most of Shaw’s
works. In The Apple Cart Shaw ridiculed the working of democratic form of government
and hinted that it needed a superman to set things right. In Back to Methuselah he goes
to the very beginning of things and forward as far as thought can reach in order to show
the nature of the Life Force and its effect on the destiny of Man. It was in St. Joan that
Shaw reached the highest level of his dramatic art by dealing in a tragic manner a
universal theme involving grand emotions.

2. Oscar Wilde (1856-1900)

Another dramatist who took an important part in the revival of drama in the later
part of the nineteenth century was Oscar Wilde. It was only during the last five years of
his life that he turned his attention to writing for the stage. During his lifetime his plays
became very popular, and they were thought to represent a high mark in English drama.
But their important was exaggerated, because they are merely the work of a skilled
craftsman. It was mainly on account of their style—epigramtic, graceful, polished and
full of wit—that they appealed to the audience. Oscar Wilde had the tact of discovering
the passing mood of the time and expressing it gracefully. Otherwise, his plays are all
superficial, and none of them adds to our knowledge or understanding of life. The
situations he presents in his plays are hackneyed, and borrowed from French plays of
intrigue.
Lady Windermer’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal
Husband(1895) and The Importance of Being Earnestare the four important comedies
o Wilde. The first three plays are built on the model of the conventional social
melodramas of the time. They are given sparkle and literary interest by the flashing wit
of the dialogue.The Importance of Being Earnest, on the other hand, is built on the
model of the popular farce of the time. Wilde calls this a trival comdedy for serious
people. It is successful because of its detachment from all meaning ad models. In fact
this play proved to Wilde that the graceful foolery of farce was the from which was best
suited to the expression of his dramatic genius. The playfulness of the farce helped
Wilde to comment admirably on frivolous society. Encouraged by the success of The
Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde would have written more such plays and perfected
this form of artificial comedy, but for the premature closing of his literary career by his
imprisonment in 1895.
3. John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
Galsworthy was a great dramatist of modern times, who besides being a novelist of
the first rank, made his mark also in the field of drama. He believed in the naturalistic
technique both in the novel and drama. According to him, “Naturalistic art is like a
steady lamp, held up from time to time, in whose light things will be seen for a space
clearly in due proportion, freed from the mists of prejudice and partisanship.”
Galsworthy desired to reproduce, both upon the stage and in his books, the natural
spectacle of life, presented with detachment. Of course his delicate sympathies for the
poor and unprivileged classes make his heart melt for them, and he takes sides with
them.
The important plays of Galsworthy areStrife (1909), Justice (1910). The Skin
Game(1920), and The Silver Box. All these plays deal with social and ethical
problems. Strifedeals with the problem of strikes, which are not only futile but do
immense harm to both the parties. The Skin Game presents the conflict between the
old-established landed aristocracy and the ambitious noisy, new rich manufacturing
class. Justice is a severe criticism of the prison administration of that period. The Silver
Box deals with the old proverb that there is one law for the rich and another for the
poor.
Though the plays of Galsworthy are important on account of the ideas which they
convey, they are no less remarkable for their technical efficiency. He effects in all of
them a strict economy of style and characterisation and they are denuded of all
superfluity. But sometimes he carries simplicity of aim and singleness of purpose too far
and the result is that his plays lack human warmth and richness which are essential
elements in literature.
4. Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946)
Granville-Barker belonged to that group of dramatists like Galsworthy who dealt
with Domestic Tragedy and Problem Plays. Though he wrote a number of plays of
different sorts in collaboration with other playwrights, he occupies his place in modern
drama mainly as a writer of four “realistic’ plays—The Marrying of Anne
Leete (1899),The Voysey Inheritance (1905), Waste (1907) and The Madras
House (1910). Each of these plays deals with a dominant problem of social life.
The Marrying of Anne deals with the Life Force, and attacks the convention and
hypocrisy surrounding the social culture of the time The Voysey Inheritance deals, like
Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, with the problem of prostitution. In Waste, Granville-
Barker again deals with the problem of sex. It is the tragedy of a woman with no
motherly instinct. The hero, Trebell, who suffers on account of his wife’s misdoings,
possesses tragic majesty of Shakespeare’s heroes. The Madras House deals with social
forces which play havoc in the lives of individuals who try to oppose them.
The importance of Granville-Barker in the twentieth century drama lies in his fine
delineation of character and realistic style. His plays seem to be excerpt of real life to a
greater extent than even those of Galsworthy. The dialogue is very natural and near to
ordinary conversation. The life presented in these plays is the narrow and petty life lived
by the upper-middle class inEngland in his days.
5. John Masefield (1878-1967)
Another dramatist belonging to the same school as Galsworthy and Granville-
Barker is Masefield. He passionate enthusiasm and cold logic, fantasy and realism.
Though he clings to the natural world and is a confirmed realist, he is wrapped in the
spirit of mysticism. All these conflicting qualities are seen in his greatest play—The
Tragedy of Nan, which is the best modern example of the form of domestic tragedy. The
social forces do not play any significant part in it. The sufferings of Nan who becomes a
veritable outcast on account of her father having been hanged for stealing a sheep, and
her connection with the half-mad old Gaffer, have been raised to tragic heights by the
playwright’s imaginative passion which is given an appropriate poetic expression. But in
spite of the supernatural and imaginative cast of the play, the story is one of unflinching
realism.
Other plays of Masefield are the The Daffodil Fields, Reynard the Fox, Melloney
Holtspur, Esther and Berenice, The Campden Wonder and Mrs. Harrison. In Melloney
Holtspur Masefield has introduced spirit forces, but not quite successfully. The Campden
Wonder and Mrs. Harrison, are also domestic tragedies, but they do not come to the high
standard of The Tragedy of Nan, which is undoubtedly Masefield’s masterpiece.
6. J. M. Barrie (1860-1937)
J. M. Barrie did not belong to any school of dramatists. The best of his work is
marked by imaginative fantasy, humour and tender pathos. His most characteristic and
original play is The Admirable Crichton (1902), a drawing-room comedy in which the
family butler is the hero. As Barrie did not find himself at peace with himself and the
society, he was fond of capturing and treasuring a child’s dream of what life ought to be.
This is exactly what we find in this play. From day-to-day life of London we are wafted
to a world of romance, of innocence, which is a so refreshing after the sordid picture of
real life. Three other plays Peter Pan, The Golden Bird and The Golden Agehave the
children story-book characters in them, who are brought to life by the writer’s skill.
Barrie also wrote A Kiss for Cinderella, a fantasy; Dear Brutus which tries to prove
that character is destiny. In all these playsBarrie shows himself as a pastmaster in
prolonging our sense of expectancy till the end of the last act. Moreover, no one since
the Elizabethan era, has so effectively suggested the close proximity of the fairyland with
the visible world.
Barrie’s last and most ambitious drama was The Boy David (1936) in which he has
given a fine picture of the candid soul of boyhood. As the play deals with a story from the
Bible, which is well-known, Barrie could not here effectively make use of the element of
surprise, which is his strongest point in other plays.
On the whole, Barrie is a skilled technician. The episodes in his plays grow out of
each other with refreshing unexpectedness, giving rise to crisp dialogue and contrast of
character. He discovered that in an age of affectations and pretensions, the theatre-
goers needed the sincerity and innocence of childhood, and he earned his popularity by
giving them what they needed.
7. The Irish Dramatic Revival
One of the important dramatic movement of modern times was the Irish Dramatic
Revival. This was a reaction against the new realistic drama of Shaw and Wilde. The
protagonists of this new movement—Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats, and J. M. Synge, were
all Irish dramatists who wanted to introduce flavour richness and poetry into drama.
Being dissatisfied with the intellectual drama where everything proceeded logically, they
thought that especially in Ireland where the people were highly imaginative and the
language was rich and living, it was possible to produce plays rich and copious in words
and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a
comprehensive and natural form. According to them, such plays dealing with the
profound and common interests of life and full of poetic speeches would be different
from the intellectual plays of Ibsen and Shaw, which dealt with the realities of life, only
of the urban population, in a dry and joyless manner. They tried to exploit in their plays
the richness of peasant culture of Ireland and appeal to the popular imagination of their
countrymen as against the intellectual plays of Shaw and others, which, they thought,
had failed on account of their being too rational and dealing with urban complexities.
The leader of the new movement was William Butler Yeats. He was born in Dublin,
and in his youth he became interested in the Gaelic League which had been formed to
revive popular interest in the old fairy stories and folk-lore of the Irish people. Under
the inspiration of the Gaelic movement, Yeats was convinced that through a wide
dissemination of these Celtic myths, not alone Ireland but the whole world might be
stimulated. As at that time drama was the most popular literary medium for moving a
large number of audience, Yeats, who was primarily a lyrical poet, turned to drama. But
as commercial theatre with its elaborately decorated stage and other technical devices
was unsuited to his simple, poetical and symbolical plays, he, with the help of Lady
Gregory, established the Irish Literary Theatre. This theatre gave performances of Yeats
plays, and in course of time it became so important that out of it grew the Irish National
Theatre Society, which constructed the famous Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Here the play
was the main thing, and the stage setting comparatively unimportant.
Though Yeats wrote about thirty plays, the most important and widely known ones
are The Countess Cathleen (1892) and The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894). But the
popularity of these plays depended more upon poetic charm and strangeness than upon
dramatic power. Yeats’ plays are defective in their organic constructions, and they do
not maintain the proper balance between poetry, action and characterisation. The poetic
element obtrudes too much and prevents the creation of the illusion of possible people
behaving credibly and using an appropriate speech medium. As the characters have to
speak long passages in verse, they look artificial, arrogating to themselves an
exaggerated importance. The fact is that Yeats was essentially as romantic lyric poet
and, therefore he did not handle the dramatic form with ease.
Lady Gregory (1852-1932) made several experiments in her dramatic work. Like
Yeats she drew much of her material from the folk-lore of her country, and also wrote
Irish historical plays. Her best known pieces are the Seven Short Plays (1909). The
characters in her plays, who are mostly peasants, are more human than in the plays of
Yeats or Synge, and the audience get a thrill of joy on account of the sweet savour of the
dialogue.
John Millington Synge (1871-1909), who graduated from Dublin, spent a number of
years among the peasants of Ireland. With them he lived like a peasant, using their
language, learning their tales, and observing closely their customs and characters, until
he started writing his plays which, in the opinion of some critics, are second only to
Shakespeare’s.
Synge exercises strictest economy in his plays, and he rarely admits a superfluous
word. The result is that sometimes his humour becomes too grim and his tragedy
bitterly painful. He has not got the generous superfluity of Shakespeare which gives us
an impression of the superabundance of life. His Riders to the Sea (1909), which is one
of the greatest tragedies written in the twentieth century, is considered by some critics
as too harrowing and ruthless. His comedy, The Shadow of the Glen, aroused much
protest because in it the heroine, an Irish woman, is shown as proving unfaithful to her
husband. The people of Ireland could not tolerate this as they thought that Irish women
were more virtuous than English women. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, in
which he gave an impression that Irishmen were capable of glorifying as murderers,
provoked riots. But it proved to be very popular because it gives an impressive
representation of Irish peasant phrases which the author had heard on the roads, or
among beggar women and ballad-singers around Dublin.
Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory were the leading figures of the older generation of
dramatists in the modern Irish theatre. In the younger generation the most prominent
dramatist is Sean O’Casey. It was his playJuno and the Paycock (1925) which placed
him, along with Synge, at the head of the Abbey Theatre dramatists. Mostly he draws
material for his plays, in which there is a mixture of tragedy and comedy, from the grim
slum-dwellings and the recent history of Ireland. The reason why he mixes tragedy and
comedy in plays as in The Plough and the Stars, is that they are symbolic of the
condition of Ireland, where virtue and vice, heroism and cowardice, beauty and
foulness, poetry and profanity, were inextricably mingled. These plays are written in the
language of the slums, but it is full of beauty. The only faults of O’Casey are those of
indisciplined power and exhuberance. He is at his best in the portrayal of women. His
later plays The Silver Tassie (1928) and Within the Gates(1933) are full of satire on
modern society, especially its injustice to the under-privileged.
8. Poetic Drama
In the twentieth century there has been a revival of the poetic drama, and some of
the great poets as Yeats and Eliot have written poetic plays. This was a reaction against
the prose plays of Shaw and others, which showed a certain loss of emotional touch with
the moral issues of the age. Yeats did not like the harsh criticism of the liberal ideas of
the nineteenth century at the hands of revolutionary dramatists like Shaw. He felt that
in the past people had a higher tradition of civilisation than in our own time. The drama
of ideas was thus failing to grasp the realities of the age. On the other hand, the drama of
entertainment, or the artificial comedy, was becoming dry and uninteresting. Thus the
tradition of realistic drama needed an injection of fresh blood.
It was under these circumstances that some modern writers who had made
reputation as poets made the attempt in the 1930’s and 1940’s to revive the tradition of
the poetic drama which had been dead since the Restorations. This revival of the poetic
drama took various forms, and it is significant that the new attempts at poetic drama
had a much closer connection with the deeper religious beliefs or social attitudes of their
authors than had most of the prose drama of the time.
T. S. Eliot commenced his career as a practical dramatist by writing a pageant play
called, The Rock, to encourage the collection of funds for the building of new London
churches. His second play, Murder in the Cathedral, however, is a proper play. It was
written to be performed in Canterbury Cathedral at the yearly Canterbury Festival,
commemorating the death of St. Thomas Backet, Canterbury’s famous martyr, who had
been murdered in the very Cathedral where Eliot’s play was first performed. Obviously
the impulse behind this play was also religious rather than a properly theatrical one, as
in the case of The Rock. ButMurder in the Cathedral is closer to being a drama than The
Rock is. Here T. S. Eliot has made a very effective use of the chorus which is made up of
the women ofCanterbury, who are presented very realistically. St. Thomas, though a
dignified and impressive character, is more of a symbol than a person. Other characters
in the play are also personifications of various simple, abstract attitudes. The most
important ‘action’ in the play is St. Thomas’ triumphing over various temptations, which
takes place in his mind. Thus Murder in the Cathedral is strictly ‘interior’, and the
outward value of the play is rather that of a spectacle and a commemorative ritual.
Whereas The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral belong to the special religious
occasions rather than to the wider world of the theatre, and one has to approach them in
a religious frame of mind, T. S. Eliot’s next play, The Family Reunion, is not a religious
play. Its primary aim is not edification or commemoration. It deals with the return of a
young nobleman, Harry, Lord Monchensey to his ancestral home, where his widowed
mother, Amy, wants him to settle as the head of the aristocratic country-house. But
Harry feels restless as he is obsessed with the ideas of having killed his wife, and on
account of that he is pestered by Furies. This is nothing but hallucination produced from
the inherited, unconscious memory of his father’s desire to kill his mother, because he
(the father) was in love with his wife’s (Amy’s) sister Agatha. This fact is revealed to
Harry by his aunt Agatha. Herry believes that the Furies are not instruments of blind
revenge, but rather of purification, and so he decides to leave his ancestral home, and
sets out again on his travels. His mother is so much shocked by Harry’s decision that she
dies.
The Family Reunion does not contain so many memorable and eloquent passages
asMurder in the Cathedral, because here T. S. Eliot tried to catch the tones, idioms, and
rhythms of contemporary speech. But on account of this The Family Reunion conveys
the illusion of reality. There are also more minor characters in this play than in the
previous plays. Moreover, T. S. Eliot has deliberately written it in a plain manner in
order to convince his audience of the reality of what they are listening to.
T. S. Eliot’s latest play, The Cocktail Party,deals with a more profound and serious
theme, that of the various kind of self-deceptions in which even cultivated and pleasant
and well-meaning people tend to indulge. The play begins with a cocktail party which
has been arranged by the wife, and the husband does not know all the guests. The
disappearance of the wife adds to the embarrassment of the husband. When the party is
over, one of the guests, who is psychiatrist, stays behind. He knows the secret. The
husband does not love his wife, and has a mistress. The wife, on the other hand, has
been having her own love affair with a youngman, who is secretly in love with her
husband’s mistress. The psychiatrist solves the tangle by advising the husband and wife
that they should not expect too much from each other. Instead of yearning for a
romantic drama, they should honestly realise their limitations, and accept a moral basis
for successful marriage. So they are reconciled to each other. The husband’s mistress
becomes a missionary and after a short time becomes a martyr in a primitive country.
The yongman who has been in love with her as well as with the wife joins film industry
in Hollywood.
In The Cocktail Party, T. S. Eliot has dealt with a typical problem of ordinary
behaviour in modern time. Moreover, he has managed to write a play which at once
keeps us continually amused and expectant. Of course, it does not have the poetic
richness of Murder in The Cathedral, though it does have a few eloquent passages. On
the whole,The Cocktail Party is the most successful of T. S. Eliot’s plays from the
theatrical point of view.
Another great modern poet who has written poetic plays is Stephen Spender. His
most important play is The Trail of a Judge.The judge, the hero of the play, tries to
administer justice impartially between the Fascists and Communists. But the Fascists
who are in power, charge him with Communistic leanings, and he is disgraced,
imprisoned and killed. The judge who stands for abstract justice is a dignified figure. He
embodies in himself permanent human values. The rhetorical tendency of Spender’s
poetry helps him in conveying the emotional tone of the character speaking under stress
of strong feeling. On account of these reasonThe Trial of a Judge is one of the most
effective pieces of poetic drama in the modern age.
 W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood have also written verse and prose plays—
Auden contributing the verse chorus and Isherwood crisp and neat prose dialogue. One
of their important plays is The Dog Beneath the Skin—a gay, satirical farce. On the other
hand, The Ascent of F6 and Across the Frontier are serious plays dealing with modern
problems through symbolism.
Besides these, another poet who has written poetic plays is Christopher Fry. He has
mainly written verse comedies, e.g., APhoenix too Frequent, The Lady’s Not for Burning
and Venus Observed. In his plays there is a fantastic wealth of language which reminds
us of young Shakespeare of Love’s Labour’s Lost. But he does not have a coherent
conception of his play as a whole, and therefore his plays often betray an air of
wonderfully clever improvisations.
9. Historical and Imaginative Plays.
The latest movement in drama inEngland is the rapid development of the historical
play. The exploitation of historical themes is the result of a deliberate endeavour to
escape from the trammels of naturalism and to bring back something of the poetic
expression to the theatre. The close association between the poetic school and historical
school is well exemplified by John Drinkwater and Clifford Bax. Drinkwater’s Abraham
Lincoln (1918) was such a great success that it made the author internationally famous.
He wrote several other historical plays, as Mary Stuart (1921)Oliver Cromwell (1922)
and Robert E. Lee(1923). In all these plays Drinkwater has built the action round a
particular theme.Lincoln pursues war against the Southern States resolutely but not
vindictively. His aim is not the crushing of the enemy, but the raising of a new
understanding born out of the turmoil of the conflict. In Oliver Cromwell and Robert E.
Lee the author gives greater importance to the political and social problems than to the
presentation of history. In Mary Stuart, he gives us a subtle study of a woman who
cannot find any one man great enough to satisfy her soul’s love.
Clifford Bax has written several poetic plays, of which the important ones are
Socrates (1930), The Venetian (1932). The Immortal Lady (1931), and The Rose
Without the Thorn (1932). They are all lyrical and philosophical plays, and the
characters in them are developed within a pattern, based on historic facts, but shaped by
his imagination.
Besides Drinkwater and Bax, other dramatists who have written historical and
imaginative plays, are Ashley Dukes and Rudolf Besier. The most popular plays of
Ashley Duke are The Man with a Load of Mischief (1924), The Fountain Head (1928)
and Tyle Ulenspiegel (1930), Rudolf Besier’sThe Barretts of Wimpole Street in which he
deals with the courtship of Browning and Miss Elizabeth Barrett (Mrs. Browning), their
elopement and marriage, is the most successful of all the historical plays produced in
the twentieth century.
The modern drama in England is in a transitional stage, and it is difficult to
understood where it stands. The naturalistic method of Shaw still makes an appeal;
there are dramatists like Somerset Maugham who have written very successful comedies
of manners; and at the same time the new experiments in non-realistic and imaginative
drama also excite the audience. In fact all these tendencies are found in modern drama,
and no one in particular holds the predominant place at present.
The Modern Novel
This is the most important and popular literary medium in the modern times. It is
the only literary form which can compete for popularity with the film and the radio, and
it is in this form that a great deal of distinguished work is being produced. The
publication of a new novel by a great novelist is received now with the same enthusiastic
response as a new comedy by Dryden or Congreve was received in the Restoration
period, and a new volume of poems by Tennyson during the Victorian period. Poetry
which had for many centuries held the supreme place in the realm of literature, has lost
that position. Its appeal to the general public is now negligible, and it has been obviously
superseded by fiction.

The main reason for this change is that the novel is the only literary form which
meets the needs of the modern world. The great merit of poetry is that it has the
capacity to convey more than one meaning at a time. It provides compression of
meaning through metaphorical expression. It manages to distil into a brief expression a
whole range of meanings, appealing to both intellect and emotion. But this compression
of metaphor is dependent upon a certain compression in the society. In other words, the
metaphor used in poetry must be based on certain assumptions or public truths held in
common by both the poet and the audience. For example the word ‘home’ stood for a
settled peaceful life with wife and children, during the Victorian home. So if this word
was used as a metaphor in poetry its meaning to the poet as well to the audience was the
same. But in the twentieth century when on account of so many divorces and domestic
disturbances, home has lost its sanctity, in English society, the word ‘home’ cannot be
used by the poet in that sense because it will convey to different readers different
meanings according to their individual experiences.
For poetry to be popular with the public there must exist a basis in the individuals of
some common pattern of psychological reaction which has been set up by a consistency
in the childhood environment. The metaphors or ‘ambiguities’ which lend subtlety to
poetic expression, are dependent on a basis of common stimulus and response which
are definite and consistent. This is possible only in a society which in spite of its eternal
disorder on the surface, is dynamically functioning on the basis of certain fundamentally
accepted value.
The modern period in England is obviously not such a period when society is
functioning on the basis of certain fundamental values. This is the age of disintegration
and interrogations. Old values have been discarded and they have not been replaced by
new values. What Arnold said of the Victorian period applies more truly to the modern
period—‘Caught between two worlds, one dying, the other seeking to be born’. It is the
conflict between the two that the common basis of poetry has disappeared.
In England of today the society is no longer homogenous; it is divided in different
groups who speak different languages. Meanings that are taken for granted in one group
are not understood in another. The western man is swayed by conflicting intentions, and
is therefore erratic and inconsistent in his behaviour. It is difficult for him to choose
between communism and capitalism, between belief in God and scepticism, confidence
in science and fear of the atomic bomb, because every belief is riddled with doubts. In no
department of life do we find postulates which can be accepted at their face values. In
the absence of any common values compression of meaning is impossible. The poets of
today find themselves isolated from society, and so they write in a language which
cannot be understood by all. Sometimes the isolation of the poet is so extreme that his
writing cannot be understood by anyone but himself. That is why poetry has lost its
popularity in the modern time. But the very reasons which make the writing of poetry
difficult have offered opportunity to fiction to flourish. In prose the ambiguity can be
clarified. Those things which are no longer assumed can be easily explained in a novel.
But it is not merely on account of the loss of common pattern of psychological
response, and the absence of common basis of values, that the novel has come into
ascendancy. Science, which is playing a predominant role today, and which insists on
the analytical approach, has also helped the novel to gain more popularity, because the
method of the novel is also analytical as opposed to the synthetical. The modern man
also under the influence of science, is not particularly interested in metaphorical
expression which is characteristic of poetry. He prefers the novel form because here the
things are properly explained and clarified. Moreover the development of psychology in
the twentieth century has made men so curious about the motivation of their conduct,
that they feel intellectually fascinated when a writer exposes the inner working of the
mind of a character. This is possible only in the novel form.
After discussing the various reasons which have made the novel the most popular
literary form today, let us consider the main characteristics of the modern novel. In the
first place, we can say that it isrealistic as opposed to idealistic. The ‘realistic’ writer is
one who thinks that truth to observed facts—facts about the outer world, or facts about
his own feelings—is the great thing, while the ‘idealistic’ writer wants rather to create a
pleasant and edifying picture. The modern novelist is ‘realistic’ in this sense and not in
the sense of an elaborate documentation of fact, dealing often with the rather more
sordid side of contemporary life, as we find in the novels of Zola. He is ‘realistic’ in the
wider sense, and tries to include within the limits of the novel almost everything—the
mixed, average human nature—and not merely one-sided view of it. Tolstoy’s War and
Peaceand George Eliot’s Middle March had proved that the texture of the novel can be
made as supple and various as life itself. The modern novelists have continued this
experiment still further, and are trying to make the novel more elegant and flexible.
Under the influence of Flaubert and Turgeniev, some modern novelists like Henry
James have taken great interest in refining the construction of the novel so that there
will be nothing superfluous, no phrase, paragraph, or sentence which will not contribute
to the total effect. They have also tried to avoid all that militates against plausibility, as
Thackeray’s unwise technique of addressing in his own person, and confessing that it is
all a story. They have introduced into the novel subtle points of view, reserved and
refined characters, and intangible delicacies, of motive which had never been attempted
before by any English novelist.
In the second place, the modern novel ispsychological. The psychological problem
concerns the nature of consciousness and its relation to time. Modern psychology has
made it very difficult for the novelist to think of consciousness, as moving in a straight
chronological line from one point to the next. He tends rather to see it as altogether
fluid, existing simultaneously at several different levels. To the modern novelists and
readers who look at consciousness in this way, the presentation of a story in a straight
chronological line becomes unsatisfactory and unreal. People are what they are because
of what they have been. We are memories, and to describe as truthfully at any given
moment means to say everything about our past. This method to describe this
consciousness in operation is called the ‘stream of consciousness’ method. The novelist
claims complete omniscience and moves at once right inside the characters’ minds. In
this kind of a novel a character’s change in mood, marked externally by a sigh or a
flicker of an eyelid, or perhaps not perceived at all, may mean more than his outward
acts, like his decision to marry or the loss of a fortune. Moreover, in such a novel the
main characters are not brought through a series of testing circumstances in order to
reveal their potentialities. Everything about the character is always there, at some level
of his consciousness, and it can be revealed by the author by probing depthwise rather
than proceeding lengthwise.
Since the ‘stream of consciousness’ novelists, like Virginia Woolf, believe that the
individual’s reaction to any given situation is determined by the sum of his past
experience, it follows that everyone is in some sense a prisoner of his own individuality.
It therefore means that ‘reality’ itself is a matter of personal impression rather than
public systematisation, and thus real communication between individuals is impossible.
In such a world of loneliness, there is no scope for love, because each personality, being
determined by past history, is unique. This idea is further strengthened on account of
disintegration of modern society in which there is no common basis of values. That is
why the modern novelist regards love as a form of selfishness or at least as something
much more complicated and problematical than simple affection between two persons.
D. H. Lawrence believes that true love begins with the lover’s recognition of each others’
true separateness. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway rejected Peter Welsh, the man she
really loved, because of the fear that his possessive love would destroy her own
personality.
It is in the technique of characterisation that the ‘stream of consciousness’ novelist
is responsible for an important development. Previously two different methods were
adopted by the novelists in the delineation of character. Either the personalities of
characters in fiction emerge from a chronological account of a group of events and the
character’s reaction to it; or we are given a descriptive portrait of the character first, so
that we know what to expect, and the resulting actions and reactions of characters fill in
and elaborate that picture. The first method we see in Hardy’s The Mayor of
Casterbridge, where in the beginning there is no hint of Michael’s real nature or
personality. That emerges from the story itself. The second method is seen in
Trollope’s Barchester Towers, where in the early chapter we get general sketches of the
characters of Dr. Proudie and Mrs. Proudie,and in the later chapter we see the
application to particular events of the general principle already enunciated. Some time
both these methods are adopted as in the case of Emma Woodhouse by Jane Austen.
Though the methods adopted in all these cases are different, we find that consistent
character-portrait emerges. The ‘stream of consciousness’ novelist, on the other hand, is
dissatisfied with these traditional methods. He has realised that it is impossible to give a
psychologically accurate account of what a man is at any given moment, either by static
description of his character, or by describing a group of chronologically arranged
reactions to a series of circumstances. He is interested in those aspects of consciousness
which are essentially dynamic rather than static in nature and are independent of the
given moment. For him the present moment is sufficiently specious, because it denotes
the ever fluid passing of the ‘already’ into the ‘not yet’. It not merely gives him the
reaction of the person to a particular experience at the moment, but also his previous as
well as future reactions. His technique, therefore, is a means of escape from the tyranny
of the time dimension. By it the author is able to kill two birds with one stone; he can
indicate the precise nature of the present experience of his character, and give,
incidentally, facts about the character’s life previous to this moment, and thus in a
limited time, one day for example, he gives us a complete picture of the character both
historically and psychologically.
This ‘stream of consciousness’ technique not only helps to reveal the character
completely, historically as well as psychologically, it also presents development in
character, which is in itself very difficult. Thus James Joyce in Ulysses is not only able,
while confining his chronological framework to the events of a single day, to relate so
much more than merely the events of that single day, and to make his hero a complete
and rounded character, but by the time the book closes, he had made the reader see the
germ of the future in the present without looking beyond the present. Similarly Virginia
Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway by relating the story of one day in the life of a middle-aged
woman, and following her ‘stream of consciousness’ up and down in the past and the
present, has not only given complete picture of Mrs. Dalloway’s character, but also she
has made the reader feel by the end of the book that he knows not only what Mrs.
Dalloway is, and has been, but what she might have been—he knows all the unfulfilled
possibilities in her character. Thus what the traditional method achieves by extension,
the ‘stream of consciousness’ method achieves by depth. It is a method by which a
character can be presented outside time and place. It first separates the presentation of
consciousness from the chronological sequence of events, and then investigates a given
state of mind so completely, by pursuing to their end the remote mental associations
and suggestions, that there is no need to wait for time in order to make the potential
qualities in the character take the form of activity.
Besides being psychological and realistic, the novelist is also frank especially about
sexual matters. This was rather an inevitable result of the acceptance of the ‘stream of
consciousness’ technique. Some time a striking sexual frankness is used by writers like
D. H. Lawrence to evade social and moral problems. An elaborate technique for catching
the flavour of every moment helps to avoid coming into grips with acute problems facing
the society.
Moreover, on account of the disintegration of society, and an absence of a common
basis of values, the modern novelist cannot believe that his impressions hold good for
others. The result is that whereas the earlier English novel generally dealt with the
theme of relation between gentility and morality, the modern novel deals with the
relation between loneliness and love. So whereas Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray wrote for
the general public, the modern novelist considers it as an enemy, and writes for a small
group of people who share his individual sensibilities and are opposed to the society at
large. E. M. Forster calls it the ‘little society’ as opposed to the ‘great society’. D. H.
Lawrence was concerned with how individuals could fully realise themselves as
individuals as a preliminary to making true contact with the ‘otherness of other
individuals’. He deals with social problems as individual problems. Virginia Woolf, who
was particularly sensitive to the disintegration of the public background of belief, was
concerned with rendering experience in terms of private sensibility. Thus the novel in
the hands of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson or
Katherine Mansfield, borrowed some of the technique of lyrical poetry on account of
emphasis on personal experience. There are such fine delicacies of description and
narrative in modern novels, that they remind us of the works of great English poets.

Modern Novelists
1. The Ancestors
The immediate ancestors of the modern English novel, who dominated the earlier
part of the twentieth century, were Wells, Bennet, Conard, Kipling and Forster.
(i) H. G. Wells (1866-1946)
Among the writers of twentieth century Herbert George Wells was the greatest
revolutionary, and like Barnard Shaw, he exerted a tremendous influence on the minds
of his contemporaries. Wells was the first English novelist who had a predominantly
scientific training, and who was profoundly antagonistic to the classics. He insisted that
classical humanism should be discarded in favour of science, and that Biology and
World History should take the place of Latin and Greek.

Moreover, he had no respect for accepted conventions which he criticised most

ruthlessly. He was untouched by sentiment and had no loyalty to the past, with the
result that he rejected what was hitherto considered sacred and part of the English
cultural inheritance.
The novels of Wells fall into three divisions. First he wrote the scientific romances;
next he tried his hand on the domestic novel, with its emphasis on character and
humour; and then when he had gained sufficient fame as a writer, he wrote a series of
sociological novels in which he showed his concern with the fate of humanity as a whole.
As a writer of scientific romances, Wells stands unrivalled; they are masterpieces of
imaginative power. He looks at life on earth from a higher level by projecting himself to
a distant standpoint, to the moon, the future, the air, or another planet. In these
romances Wells has shown an extraordinary ability to took into the future, and many of
his predictions have proved to be true. His first scientific romance was The Time
Machine(1895), in which the hero invents a ‘time machine’, which enables him to
accelerate the time consciousness and project himself into the future. Here is also
described in a most vivid manner the grim picture of the earth divided between a master
race and their resentful serfs, the Marlocks, belonging the sub-race. His next work, The
War of the Worlds (1898), deals with the theme of the invasion of the earth by the
people living on the planet Mars. They spread destruction by the use of a death-ray, but
they are ultimately defeated on account of their lack of immunity from bacteria. In this
way the earth is saved. The other scientific romances written by Wells were The Island
of Dr. Moreau (1896), When the Sleeper Wakes(1899), The First Man in the
Moon (1901) andThe Food of the Gods (1904). These were the most exciting scientific
thrillers which ever appeared in English fiction, and in them Wells anticipated various
forms of warfare including the atom bomb.
From fantastic romances, Wells then turned to domestic fiction. He was thoroughly
familiar with the life in London suburbs, which he described with enthusiasm
in Kipps (1905), a comedy of class instincts. The hero Kipps, rises from the position of a
draper’s assistant to a man of fortune. The high society accepts him and trains him in its
culture, but Kipps feels relived only when he loses his fortune, and relapses to the lower
class from where he rose. This novel is full of satire and humour typical of Wells.
In Tono Bungay (1909), Wells gives a most remarkable picture of the disintegration of
English society in the later nineteenth century and the advent of the new rich class. In
Anna Veronica (1909) which is the full-length study of a modern young woman. There is
the first attempt in English fiction at a frank and open treatment of sex relationship.
In Love and Mrs. Lewisham (1910), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910), Wells gives us
realistic, humorous and sympathetic studies of the lower middle class life, with which he
was quite familiar.
By this time Wells had gained great reputation as a writer. He then started a series
of novels dealing with great social problems confronting the men of his time. This series
includes The New Machiavelli(1911), which is a study of political and sociological creeds
in the guise of a biography; Mr. Britling sees it Through(1916), a study of the reaction of
the people to the First World War; The Undying Fire(1919) which is a religious and
satiric fantasy; Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island(1928) and The Autocracy of Mr.
Parham(1930), an attack on capitalism.
Wells believed that human civilisation can survive only if people discipline their
instincts by means of reason. He also visualised a Words State to which nations must
owe allegiance. He was looked upon by the post-war world as teacher, prophet and
guide. His greatest weakness was that being too much scientific minded, he lacked
spiritual wisdom. He was undoubtedly the most intellectual of the ancestors of the
modern novel.

(ii) Arnold Bennett (1867-1931)

Unlike Wells, Bennett was more concerned with the craft of fiction and was not
disposed to preach in his novels. That is why, during his time he was the most popular
novelist. He looked at the world as a spectacle and recorded in his novels his
impressions with complete detachment. Following the example of French novelists,
Maupassant, Flaubert and Balzac, he aimed at recording life—its delights, indignities
and distresses—without conscious intrusion of his own personality between the record
and the reader. He was a copyist of life, and only indirectly did he play the role of a
commentator, an interpreter, or an apologist. On account of these qualities, Bennett
may be called the ‘naturalistic’ novelist, though this term can be applied to him only
partially. The reason is that the purpose of a purely ‘naturalistic’ novelist is to be as
dispassionate and detached as a camera, but Bennet even while desisting from utilizing
his novels as an instrument of moral and social reforms was compelled to select certain
things as relevant and significant, and reject certain others as irrelevant and
insignificant, in order to determine the nature of his picture of life. Moreover, though
intellectually he was ‘naturalistic’ temperamentally he was not so. No doubt, he looked
at life as a spectacle, but sometimes that spectacle became for him so wonderful thrilling
and awesome that he could no longer remain detached as a mere spectator.
The spectacle of life, which Bennett presents in his novels, is not drab or diseased.
On the other hand he interprets it romantically as ‘sweet, exquisite, blissful, melancholy.
He never regrets that life has lost its glamour and pines for the past glory
of Greece and Rome. On the contrary, he finds sufficient grandeur in the modern
everyday life of the Five Towns, his native district, which he has made as famous in
English fiction as Hardy’s Wessex.
Bennett wrote three most popular novels—The Old Wives
Tale (1908), Clayhanger(1910) and Riceyman Steps (1923) which place him high
among English novelists. His other novels are Buried Alive (1908), and The Card (1911),
which are first-rate humorous character novels; and The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902),
which provides good entertainment. In all these novels, the characters spend most of
their time in the small area of the Five Towns—the Stafordshire pottery towns. The
readers become familiar not only with the principal streets and buildings and
landmarks, but also with the men and women who walked the streets. By an
accumulation of carefully chosen details, Bennett gives a life-like quality to his novels.
Though ugliness and coarseness are also presented in that otherwise pleasant picture,
they, however make it more true to real life.
Though Bennett confines himself to a small area—The Five Towns, he sketches in
these novels the social and historical background with considerable skill. Moreover, he
illumines his books with a sense of beauty and universal sympathy which are
indispensable to creative artist. Above all, he writes in a style which is simply delightful.
No doubt, Bennett won the hearts of his readers and became the most popular novelist
of his time.
(iii) Henry James (1843-1916)
Henry James, one of the important of elder novelists, was an American naturalised
in England. It was, perhaps, because of his foreign origin, that Henry James was
untouched by the pessimism of the age, whereas almost all his contemporaries who tried
to investigate the human mind showed unmistakable signs of depression. Moreover, his
characters have no background, and they move from country to country. The emphasis
is more on their mental and emotional reactions.
In his earlier novels such as The Europeans (1879), Henry James is chiefly
concerned with the clash between the American and European mind. In his next
important novel, What Masie Knew (1897), he gives us an exquisitely delightful picture
of the young American girls brought up in the sentimental Victorian surroundings, and
introduced to a modern society entirely devoid of sentiment. His later novels also deal
with similar simple situations, pregnant with the most complex psychological
effects.The Golden Bowl (1905) for instance, deals with the interactions of five
characters—the American millionaire and his daughter, the Italian noble whom she
marries, her penniless friend who has a love-affair with the Italian, and an elderly friend
of both girls. It is the psychological complications both before and after the wedding, of
the friends and the father, which provide the whole material of the story. Everything is
narrated in a quiet undertone, and it is the nobility and decency which all the characters
preserve in their behaviour, which gives a unity to the novel. The love for antique,
beautiful things which the American millionaire exhibits in his character, is the theme of
Henry James, two other novels—The Spoils of Poynton and The Sense of the Past.
The main contribution of Henry James to the technique of the novel is his use of
narrative at second hand. Through this method the story unfolds itself completely in the
mental plane. The reader is permitted only vague glimpses even of what the character
thinks. Thus James transferred to the psychological novel the methods of the detective
novel. As a stylist, James aims at expressing the exact shade of emotion or apprehension
which he wishes to convey. The later psychological novelists like Virginia Woolf, James
Joyce, were greatly influenced by Henry James’ style as well as the indirect technique of
narration.
(iv) Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
Chief among those who used the technique of Henry James was Conrad, a Pole, who
wrote exquisite English. He was gifted with great love for his fellow creatures, and
through it he acquired an unusual insight in all that was going on around him. Being a
sailor he spent twenty years of strenuous life in the ship or the port. All this experience
revealed to him one central problem of human nature, that is, the tension between our
higher and lower selves. As his own sailor’s life provided him with the memory of
mistakes, humiliations and corrections under authority, he took a sort of morbid
interest in people whose souls are harassed and tormented by other. Moreover, as a
sailor learns the histories of people at second hand, in hotels, clubs etc. Conrad
developed the plots of his novels through a third person as if in conversation, in which
the voice and personality of the narrator becomes extremely suggestive quite apart from
the story he is telling.
Conrad was influenced by Henry James’ artistic rectitude and psychological
subtlety. He learned the attitude of detachment and an acute observation of
environment from the French novelists, Flaubert and Maupassant. From Turgenev and
Dostoevsky, Conrad imbided a cosmopolitan outlook, and also a love for portraying
characters who are in conflict with themselves, who are frustrated by their own passions
and impulses, and who on account of having missed their life purpose become introverts
and find their only outlet in crime. But unlike these great novelists, Conrad had neither
the experience nor the opportunity to examine such characters as social types or
psychological puzzles. His imagination thrived on glimpses which suggested a mystery.
For example, Lord Jim, hero of the novel of same name, seems to feel himself always
under a cloud.
The themes of Conrad’s novels transcend temporary and material interests. Unlike
some of the contemporary novelists he scorned to expose social abuses, or laugh at
social prejudices. He lived on his past, which on account of the lapse of years invoked in
him nobler qualities, especially his capacity for intellectual sympathy and single-
heartedness. He was thus always true to himself and to the characters he created.
The masterpieces of Conrad are The Nigger of the Narcissus (1898), Lord
Jim(1900), Typhoon (1902), Nostromo (1904). These series cover an immense range of
human activity. We have in them man’s conflict with the internal sea, his avarice for
fabulous wealth in a mine, and the tribal wars between savages. The characters in them
are not refined or fashionable people; they become slaves to their peculiar
idiosyncrasies. They have tormented souls, and often border on tragedy. Conrad’s
greatest merit in these novels lies in his descriptive power by which he, like Milton, can
make us see the unseen as he can see it. The result is that the readers get an impression
that the seenes are described by one who knows how things happen in the modern
world, and this gives a touch of realism to the stories. Moreover, Conrad in all his novels
exhibits the great ideals of impartiality, practical wisdom, sense of fitness and freedom
sentimentality, which earned for him the admiration of his English readers.
(v) Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Kipling’s view of life and his range of subjects were rather similar to Conrad’s. Like
Conrad, he very much admired the strong, brave, silent man, but unlike Conrad’s his is
the slightly wistful admiration of the intellectual, who has wanted very much to be a
man of action, and never succeeded in becoming one. He was born in India and after
being educated in England he returned to India at the age of seventeen and became the
editor of an Anglo-Indian paper. He derived the material for his early stories—Plain
Tales from the Hills, Under the Deodars. Soldiers Three from his experiences in India.
Of his novels, the important are The Light that Failed (1890),The
Naulakha (1892), Captain Courageous(1897), and Kim (1901). The Light that Failedis
supposed to be the story of an artist who goes blind and loses his love. The
Naulakhadeals with the life of a medical missionary inIndia, and its moral is that
woman’s place is in the home. Captain Courageous relates the story of a miserable dull
boy who is swept overboard a ship, and is then picked by a fishing schooner and
restored to his parents.Kim is a long story in which a well-defined central character
travels through circumstances towards a goal.
Though Kipling wrote about India in his tales and novels, yet he never got very deep
into India. His knowledge is very superficial and he looks at everything from the point of
the view of British rulers. His main importance as a writer lies in his rich vocabulary and
technical excellence. Like Defoe, he borrowed from all great writers, and his opening
sentences are the most wonderful in literature.
(vi) John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
Besides being a dramatist, Galsworthy belonged to the front rank of the novelists of
his time. He was exactly the contemporary of Arnold Bennet, but unlike him Galsworthy
belonged to the upper class, and was most at his ease describing the life of the country
gentry or people of inherited wealth living inLondon. Moreover, unlike Bennet
Galsworthy always wrote with a purpose and the reformer in him sometimes got the
better of the artist.
 Galsworthy found in English society that majority of people clung to old established
traditions, while a small minority wanted change. In his novels he tried to hold the
balance between opposed ideas or between characters with opposite tendencies. In his
preface to The Island Pharisees, Galsworthy contrasts these opposite elements in
society. His novels which are collectively called The Forsyte Saga, all deal with the same
theme. In the first novel of this group, The Man of Property (1906), he holds the balance
between the mechanical mind of Soames Forsyte and the impulsive Irene; in The
Country House (1907), which is the most attractive of all his novels, between the
unimaginative Squire and his perceptive, compassionate wife; in Fraternity (1909) and
in The Patrician (1919) between the tolerant and the advocates of ‘an eye for an eye’. In
these early novels, Galsworthy stands on the ‘middle line’, but he enlists the sympathy of
the readers for the young in mind, the generous, the rash and the wilful, and on the
other hand, he exposes those who are tradition-ridden, and survivors of an old and
outworn order.
But the First World War effected a change in the attitude of Galsworthy. He began
to regard with respect and even tenderness those elder men who having formed habits
stuck to them rigidly. On the other hand, he lost sympathy with the young, restless
troublous spirits in whose life he found no aim. This changed attitude is reflected in his
later novels—In Chancery(1920), To Let (1921), The White Monkey(1924), The Silver
Spoon (1930). In these novels it appears that Galsworthy the pioneer and humanist has
been replaced by Galsworthy the moralist and disciplinarian. He himself became a pillar
of the institutions he himself criticised in his earlier days. But in spite of this change in
his attitude, he gets the credit of awakening the Edwardian England from intellectual
lethargy. Moreover, he was a true artist, and a man of generous impulses, who believed
that literature has also a social function to fulfil, that is, to reform society.
(vii) E. M. Forster (1879-1970)
Forster belonged to the group of elder novelists of the twentieth century and
occupied an exceptional place in the history of the modern novel. Unlike his
contemporaries, Forster had never tried to impose on his readers a new creed or
astonish him by some technical novelty. Though he was the most popular of all living
novelists, yet his production had been small. His last novel—A Passage to India, was
published in 1924, and after that he did not write any new novel except a few volumes of
short stories.
Forster’s earliest novel Where Angles Feared to Tread appeared in 1905. It was
followed by The Longest Journey in 1907, andA Room with a View in (1908). By this
time Forster’s reputation had been firmly established. In 1910 appeared Howards End,a
novel of great power and beauty, which attracted great attention. His last great novel, A
Passage to India, appeared in 1924.
Forster belonged to the tradition of cultural liberalism at its best. In his early years
he admired the liberal tradition of Western civilisation, which had given opportunities
for leisure and personal relations. But as time passed, he became more and more aware
of the darker side of the picture, and his attitude became gravely reflective. When after
the First World War, Fascism and Communism came to the forefront in many European
countries, he saw that the way of life which he had favoured might be an oasis rather
than an enduring possibility. So he put his weight on the side of Parliamentary
democracy, which seemed to him to be the only hope in the modern world of stress and
strain.
In all Forster’s novels there is a conflict between good and evil, between what is
cruel, philistine and unperceiving, and the good which is lively, entertaining and
sensitive. He wants a harmonious development of man in which there is combination of
body and spirit, reason and emotion, work and play, architecture and scenery, laughter
and seriousness. He believes that the aim of the civilised life is to enhance the quality of
personal relation. This can be achieved not by pomp and power and aggressiveness in
the personality, but by gentle and quiescent qualities. Feeling that Europe was
degenerating to barbarism. Forster became attracted to the Eastern and especially
Indian conception of personality, which is free from aggressive possessiveness.
In all the novels of Forster we find an extraordinary lightness of touch, and a
sensitive spirit, but he is never weak or sentimental. Death comes suddenly and
unexpectedly to the characters of Forster, because his philosophy is that the
contemplation of the idea of death is necessary to the good life. Death destroys a man;
the idea of Death saves him. Thus Forster, in spite of his great brilliance of incident and
dialogue, basically remains a moralist. But his morality is individual, and his philosophy
has a mystical background. He insists on the distinction between the civilised and the
barbarous, between those ‘who have a room with a view and those who have not.’
Forster possessed gift of rhythmic prose, rarely possessed by a novelist and an ironic
spirit which he exercised with the skill of Meredith. As a story-teller he was very
powerful. This became clear from his first novel—Where Angels Fear to Tread. Here his
theme is the contrast of two cultures—the English and the Italian, with further
complications dealing with the contrast of two Italian cultures—idealistic and
practical.In The Longest Journey (1907) contrast appears again. It is the novel of
friendship, and of a bitterly unhappy marriage, of falsehood and shams, and of the good
life. InA Room with a View (1908) Forster reached his full maturity. It was written in
the form of a morality play, and deals with the theme of contrast between those who
understand themselves and those who are caught in self-deception. In Howard’s
End (1910) Forster reached his highest achievement as a novelist. It shows the contrast
between those who live in a civilised world and those who do not. This novel, which has
a great variety in incident and character, is made by Forster as symbol of his plea that it
is the people gifted with insight and understanding on whom civilisation really depends.
His last great novel—A Passage to India (1924) is not technically superior to Howard’s
End, but here Forster has appealed to a very much larger audience, and has given a
genuine picture of Indians and of the English during the British rule. Here he
emphasised on personal relations, which had been his theme in all his previous novels.
The atmosphere of the story is highly fascinating, and here Forster had presented a fine
study of those who seek the good life by removing the barriers of civilisation, of race
creed and caste.
In all his novels Forster had expressed and strongly affirmed his faith in the
individual, and it is this fundamental element in his philosophy which has given him a
place of exceptional honour among the modern English novelists.
2. The Transitionalists
From the beginning of the First Word War new experiments were made in the field
of literature on account of the new forces which resulted from the war, and which broke
the old tradition. In fiction James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Adlous Huxley and Somerset
Maugham played the prominent part.
(i) James Joyce (1822-1941)
James Joyce was a novelist of unique and extraordinary genius. He was born
inDublin, but he left Ireland in 1904 to become a European cosmopolitan. Most of his
life was spent in retirement in Paris. He was a highly gifted man and was acutely
responsive to observed details. By temperament he was an artist and symbolist. He
found around him an atmosphere of frustration, aimlessness and disintegration, and
thus in order to express himself as a novelist he had to create for himself a different
medium. He leant from the psychologists and biologists of his day that our speech
occupies the dominant ‘association area’ in the brain. It is like a telegraph exchange
which verbalise what we experience and hope or fear to experience. Himself a born
linguist, Joyce looked upon language as a sixth sense, that machinery through which the
human organism reveals its inner processes, an instinctive and therefore truthful
comment on experience. He, therefore, thought that to explore the unconscious record
of our psychic and psychological adjustments, would be a fascinating study if taken up
by a novelist. As it was an unexplored field, and offered a new world for the artist to
conquer, Joyce who was in search of a new medium, took it up, and did the pioneering
work in the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique.
The important novels of Joyce are The Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man (1916), Exiles (1918) and Ulysses.Of these Ulysses is his masterpiece. In all
these novels, Joyce makes a study of the artist who frees himself from various shackles
and ultimately comes to the realisation of his own true personality. InUlysses the artist
is shown at one with humanity through insight into the psychology of speech, our most
intimate faculty, in which all men share and have shared. This book is presented as an
epic, the counterpart of Homer’s Odyssey. But whereas Homer dwells on the
adventures, and has very little to say about reactions of the adventurer, Joyce lays
emphasis on the speeches of the hero, because according to him, speech, not action, is
the token of humanity. Our nature reveals itself through our speech, and in order to
demonstrate it fully twenty-four hourse are quite sufficient, and there is no need of any
change of scene.
Unlike great novels, Ulysses does not present truth to life. In that way it may be
considered as a failure, though a magnificent one, because Joyce here has introduced a
new technique, which exercises great intellectual appeal to the thoughtful readers. His is
a pioneering work, because here he showed to the novelists to explore a new field—‘the
stream of consciousness’, which was so far hidden from their view. Thus Ulysses holds
an important place in the history of modern novel.
(ii) Virgina Woolf (1882-1941)
Virginia Woolf, who was the most distinguished woman writer of her generation,
made a far more exciting use of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique than James
Joyce. She was greatly impressed by Ulysses, in which Joyce had found an alternative to
the well-made plot and external characterisation. She found that this conception of the
inner drama of the mind was fraught with tremendous possibilities, and she decided to
exploit it to the fullest extent. This method suited her admirably because having a purely
literary background, much of her experience had come from books rather than from
actual life. Moreover, like Joyce, she had a fine sense of language, and was gifted with a
poetic temperament.
Working under the influence of Joyce, and of the French novelist, Proust, who
conceived personality as a continued process of decantation from state to state, Virginia
Woolf ignored the outer personality regarding it simply as the ‘semi-transparent
envelope’, through which she could study the ‘reality’, namely, the thoughts, feelings and
impressions as they quickened into life. She herself pointed out, “It’s life that matters,
nothing but life, the process of discovering the everlasting and perpetual process.” She
depicts in her novels the stuff of life—the thought, feelings, impressions—steeped in the
richest dyes of her imagination and turned into images by her poetic sensibility.
In her first novel—The Voyage Out(1913), Virginia Woolf followed the traditional
pattern of story—telling. Here she relates the story of a young and inexperienced girl
who comes to learn something of life and the relations between the sexes, falls in love
and dies of tropical fever before she can realise herself. But the real interest in the novel
centres on a vogue awareness that there is a meaning in life. Her second novel, Night
and Day (1919), offers an elaborate long drawn-out study of Katherine Hilberry, an
intelligent young woman of the middle class and her relation with her mother and four
friends. But the main interest lies not on the theme of love, but on the conversations and
introspections in which the chief characters are engaged and which gradually reveal
their doubts and hesitations as they face the reality of experience.
Her next novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), represents her first serious experiment in the
stream of consciousness’ technique. Here she makes an attempt to construct pictorially
the personality of a young Englishman from his infancy to the age of twenty-six, when
he is killed in the war. Here the sunlit streams of youth are overshadowed by time.
Frustration and death, and fires of love are quenched by human faithlessness. In this
novel, Virginia Woolf’s quest for the meaning of human experience goes on but the
mystery is not yet solved. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925) she explores and recreates the
personality of a middle-aged woman, Mrs. Dalloway. Here she sets down the incidents
of a day in her life accompanied by visual, mental and emotional impressions. The day
in her life is expressed in terms of a long interior monologue, the smooth flowing of the
stream of consciousness, which is interrupted by the striking hours of the clock.
Virginia Woolf’s most successful novel in the new ‘stream of consciousness’ method
isTo the Lighthouse (1927). Here the scene is set on an unnamed island, and the
Lighthouse symbolize in some queer way the ‘reality’ which is never experienced. Her
next novel. Orlando, which is liveliest of all, relates in a series of vivid scenes and
dramatic climaxes the mental experiences of a poet while writing a prize poem. In The
Years (1937) Virginia Woolf returned to a much simpler form of fiction. It is the novel of
the generations in which the fortunes of a middle-class family from 1880 to the present
time are rather sketchily represented. Her last novel Between the Acts (1941), is filled
with a sense of her personal failure to wrest meaning from experiences, and the
spectacle of the world at war deepens the despair.
(iii) Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
As a novelist Aldous Huxley is concerned with the search for a workable faith in the
bewildering world of today, and being pre-eminently an intellectual, whatever faith he
finally accepts must be one justifiable by logical argument, not merely by appeals to
feeling or tradition. In order to understand the generation that came to maturity
between the First and Second World Wars, the writings of Huxley are the best guide.
Though he lacks the imaginative power of Lawrence, and the poetic sensitivity of
Virginia Woolf, he is better intellectually equipped than either. He represents the small
percentage of the people of his generation who have ideas.
In his early novels Crome Yellow (1921),Antic Hay (1923) and Those Barren
Leaves(1925), Huxley presented the dangerously attractive doctrine of hedonism, that
is, pleasure is the greatest thing in life. The style of these novels has a seductive charm,
and here the author fully exploits his scientific and literary vocabulary. The characters in
these novels include middle-aged cultured voluptuaries who ask little more of life than
readable books, amusing conversation, art and quiet comfortable life. Of these three
novels, Crome Yellow, which is touched with lyricism possesses the greatest
charm. Antic Hay which is the liveliest of the three, is a rollicking satire on the life-
worshippers. Those Barren Leaves has a number of finely-drawn characters, who are
easy-going pagans. They take it for granted that the universe has no meaning and
therefore the only thing to do is to enjoy oneself and take no thought for the marrow.
But there is one exception—Calamy, who takes a serious view of life and believes that
there is an inner life within him which should be properly understood.
In his next novel, Point Counter Point,Huxley studies the frustration brought about
by the conflict between passion and reason. Here he shows that man’s foolish attempt to
deny the validity of the sense and pretend that he is a spiritual being, has condemned
him to wretchedness and self-destruction. There is thus a self-division in human
personality. The romantics find that passion divorced from reason makes life a mockery.
The rational intellectual with his analytic reason destroys spontaneity and the power to
feel and sympathise. Thus there is no escape. The total effect of Point Counter Pointis
one of bitter disillusionment with society.
In Brave New World (1923) Huxley accomplishes the combination of scientific
materialism and hedonism. Here he searches for a new faith in spiritualism and Eastern
philosophy. After presenting a future state dominated by science which has discovered
how to produce life in the laboratory, Huxley points out that from such a life emotion
has been eliminated, and there is no art, culture, religion, love, ideals, loyalty or
personality. Into such a world Huxley introduces the Savage John, who represents the
old world of religion and cultural values. He asks the people to revolt against spiritual
slavery, but they do not understand him, and he is driven to suicide.
In Brave New World, Huxley is clearly on the side of the angels of death so long as
he can have the assurance of the reality of the spirit. This respect for the spirit is further
developed in his next novel—Eyless in Gaza(1939). Here he reveals a deeper concern for
the quality of human personality. In the latter part of this book there is a long sermon on
non-attachment and the oneness of life. Huxley derived these mainly from Hindu
philosophy with its emphasis on non-attachment and universal pity.
This new philosophy is further developed in Huxley’s succeeding novels—Ends and
Means (1938) and Grey Eminence(1940). Here he accepts the existence of
supramundane reality. He also believes that we are bound to this world of illusion
through desire, which springs from self-hood. These ideas are very much akin to the
philosophy of the Bhagwad Gita. Huxley’s last novel—After Many a Summer, deals
with the contrast between two conceptions of time, that of the mystic and that of the
scientist. The biologist believes that eternity is a mere extension of physical life. The
mystic, on the other hand, believes that it is through expansion and intensification of
consciousness which is a spiritual activity, that mystic eternity can be experienced here
and now.
Huxley did not make any notable contribution to the technique of the novel. His
novels in fact are essays and conversations strung together on a slender thread of a plot.
But he did for the novel what Shaw did for the drama; that is, he made the novel a form
capable of propagating great ideas and thus making an appeal to the intellect rather
than the emotions of the reader. He turned fiction into an image of the dynamic world of
ideas that underlies the changing outward society.
(iv) D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
Lawrence was a great and original writer who brought a new kind of poetic
imagination to English fiction. To the man in the street Lawrence is still a great ‘sex
novelist’. But he himself said, “I, who loathe sexuality so deeply am considered a lurid
sexuality specialist’ Lawrence was a passionate Puritan, and his sexual idea was high
and lofty. He believed that there can be no satisfying union on the physical plane alone.
“Once a man establishes a full dynamic communication at the deeper and the higher
centres, with a woman, this can never by broken…very often not even death can break
it.” “If man makes sex itself his goal, he drives on towards anarchy and despair, and his
living purpose collapses. Sex is the door. Beyond lies an ultimate, impersonal
relationship, free of all emotional complications. Beyond lies the service of God.”
If we study the novels of D. H. Lawrence from this point of view, our attitude
towards them would be different. His first novel, The White Peacock (1911) struck the
lyrical note of much of his best work; his second The Trespasser (1912), was more
melodramatic. With Sons and Lovers Lawrence came to his own. In this novel, in which
he describes the boy’s life in the miner’s househood and his wonderful relationship with
his mother, has been recognised as one of the great pieces of English autobiographical
fiction. His next novel The Rainbow (1915) starts in much the same way, but there is far
more poetry and beauty in it than in Sons and Lovers. His next novel, Woman in
Love (1921), is rather obscene. In The Lost Girl (1920) Lawrence’s feeling for nature
appears at its best. InAeron’s Rod (1922) he discusses the theme of male comradeship
and leadership, which is continued in the Australian novels,Kangaroo (1923) and The
Bay in the Bush(1924). In Plumed Serpent (1926) Lawrence turns his back on
everything that man has achieved since he began his long climb out of dust. In his last
great novel. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Lawrence returned to the sex theme.
 Regarding the relation between the sexes, Lawrence resents man’s subjection to
woman, not woman’s subjection to man. He believes that it is the modern woman’s
rebellion against man which lies at the heart of the disease that is killing civilisation.
Unless man is supreme, the relation that he develops with the woman is a filial relation,
which amounts to incest.
Regarding the modern civilisation,Lawrence believes that man has cut himself off
from the living cosmos, which is God. Without the restoration of that contact society will
perish. But this cannot be brought about by the mind, which is at the centre of all this
mischief. We should have more trust in our flesh and blood rather than in intellect. Man
must “let his will lapse back into his unconscious self”, and arrive at “mindlessness”
which is akin to the state ofSmadhi as explained in Hindu scriptures.
Lawrence was a rebel, and he continued, and perhaps, won the fight for freedom
which began with Hardy.
3. The Moderns
Among the moderns the most important novelist is Somerset Maugham (1874), who
is equally famous as a dramatist and short story writer. He believes in working in a
narrow life and his method is ‘naturalistic’ as that of Maupassant. His important novels
are Liza of Lambath (1897), Of Human Bondage (1915), Cakes and Ale (1930) and The
Rozor’s Edge. Liza of Lambath is the completest specimen of Naturalistic novel in
English. Here he gives us a picture of life which has long ceased to be, but in spite of this
the novel remains remarkably fresh. In Of Human Bondage, Maugham plays the role of
the impartial spectator as a boy and Youngman. Though the views expressed by him in it
are outdated, yet it has got its value because here the author expressed his honest,
unflinching acceptance of his belief in the meaninglessness of life. It is an
autobiographical novel, and contains one of the most moving accounts of loneliness in
English fiction. Cakes and Ale which is a witty, malicious, satirical comedy, is highly
entertaining. In The Razor’s Edge, Maugham seeks the meaning of life, like Aldous
Huxley, in Hindu philosophy with its emphasis on detachment and renunciation.
J. B. Priestley (1894) is another important novelist, who revived the sane and vital
telling of a story in The Good Companions,which in spite of its having the defect of
being too sentimental, is a great novel in the English tradition. His other novels are Let
the People Sing, Daylight on Saturday and Bright Day.
Though there are a large number of minor modern novelists, the well-known among
them are the followings;
(a) Charles Morgan, who is philosophical in his approach. His important novels
are Portrait in Mirror, The Fountain, Sparkenbroke, The Vayage, The Judge’s
Story;
(b) Clive Staples Lewis, who presents in his novels his ethical and philosophical
views. Chief among his books are Problem of Pain, The Screwtapa Letters, The
Great Divorce and Miracles;
(c) Herbert Ernest Bates, who has evolved a use of English which will be effective
in the development of prose style. His important novels are A House of Women,
 Spella Ho, Fair Stood the Wind for France, The Cruise of the Bread Winner,
The Purple Plain;
(d) Frederick Lawrence Greene who shows in his novels the inevitability of the
power of human emotions which twist men round the designs they play for
their own lives. Behind this is a pattern of life on a structure of religion against
which human life is thrown in relief. All Greene’s important novels are related
to a life after death, and his views about both the worlds are firm. His well-
known novels are On the Night of the Fire, The Sound of Winter, a Fragment
of Glass, Mist on the Waters;
(e) In Graham Greene’s novels ‘culture’ is a living force. He believes that man is
essentially good, but flamed by evil. His important novels are The Man
Within, Stamboul Train, England Made Me, Brighton Rock, The Power and
the Glory and The Heart of the Matter;
(f) Frank Swinnerton, who gives in his novels a detached but amiable appreciation
of people, and whose treatment of life and its significance are quite satisfying.
His well-known novels are Nocturne, The Georgian House and The Doctor’s
Wife Comes to Stay;
(g) Richard Church, who has been mainly concerned with contemporary life. His
important novels are High Summer, The Porch, The Room Within, The
Sampler and The Other Side.

Post-Modern Literature
Understanding Post-modernism
Until the 1920’s, the term “modern” used to mean new or contemporary, but
thereafter it came to be used for a particular period, the one between the two World Wars
(1914-1945). Then came up after about half a century the, magic term, “post-modern,”
meaning the period after the modern.
Now, this sort of naming is certainly problematic. For how many “post” will have to be
used for the further periods of literary history to follow? Since our purpose here is
limited to writing the “history” of literature, we shall not go on with the issue, leaving
the matter for the more qualified critics to give it a thought. Even as it is, there is a
problem about the naming of the period between 1945 to 1965, during which period
there was no consciousness of what is now called “post-modern”. The period of the
“post-modern” is said to date from the mid-sixties - some critics push it even further to
the nineteen eighties. Dealing with the contemporary is always, of course, a little
ticklish, because closer we stand to an object, more details we see of the picture. Once
removed by some distance, the outline comes out clearly. As of today, critics have seen
historical changes in literary styles from decade to decade, from even author to author.
Perhaps we shall have to wait another half a century or so to be able to make greater
generalizations about the later half of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, let us accept
what has become almost conventional in the historical writing of English literature.
 In his essay “The Post-Modern Condition,” Krishan Kumar has clarified some
confusion about the meaning of post-modernism:
Most theories claim that contemporary societies show a new or heightened
degree of fragmentation, pluralism, and individualism.... It can also be linked
to the decline of the nation-state and dominant national cultures. Political,
economic, and cultural life is now strongly influenced by developments at the
global level. This has as one of its effects, unexpectedly, the renewed
importance of the local, and a tendency to stimulate sub-national and
regional cultures....
Post-modernism proclaims multi-cultural and multi-ethnic societies. It
promotes the politics of difference! Identity is not unitary or essential, it is
fluid and shifting, fed by multiple sources and taking multiple forms (there is
no such thing as ‘woman’ or ‘black’).’
The debate about contemporary society being “post-industrial,” “post-modern,”
“post-structuralist,” “post-colonial,” “pluralistic,” “multi-cultural,” “fragmented,” etc.,
goes on, with select pieces of literature used for illustration. The fact of the matter is that
the theoretical discussion of the subject has been self-generative, proliferating all over the
space, pushing literature to the periphery, leaving not much space for actual human
narratives in the privileged domain. As such, it has not proved of much help to the
historian of literature who would much rather record the literary happenings than discuss
literary theories (unless, of course, the latter has been an integral part of the former).
Until the time of the Modernists like Pound and Eliot, literary theory came from the
leading literary writers. During the Post-modern period, however, it has come from the
non-literary thinkers. Hence the problem of its meaningful application to literary works.
One quickly turns to Frederic Jameson, who seems to have aptly articulated the
reader’s dilemma about “post-modernism”:
I occasionally get just as tired of the slogan ‘post-modern’ as anyone else, but
when I am tempted to regret my complicity with it, to deplore its misuses and
its notoriety, and to conclude with some reluctance that it raises more
problems than it solves, I find myself pausing to wonder whether any other
concept can dramatize the issues in quite so effective and economical a
fashion.
In the absence of a more useful concept, therefore, as also because now the concept
of post-modernism has come to stay, we have no choice but to go on with it, leaving the
problems it has raised to time for whatever solution will become possible tomorrow. But
we must know at the same time how and why the term ‘postmodernism’ has come about
and what it has accumulated around itself as a description of certain distinctive
characteristics of the post-War period, which is still going on.
The growth of post-modernism, in the words of Charles Jencks, a major theorist of
architecture and the originator of the term, has been “a sinuous, even tortuous, path.
Twisting to the left and then to the right, branching down the middle, it resembles the
natural form of a spreading root, or a meandering river that divides, changes course,
doubles back on itself and takes off in a new direction.” (What is Post-
Modernism? London: Academy Editions, 1986, p.2). We may cite and examine any
number of definitions (out of the innumerable available to us), post-modernism proves
slippery like a snake whose twists and twirls are impossible to pin down. From the very
inception of the term in Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History(1947), the term has
accumulated a lot of meanings many of which are mutually contradictory. How then do
we go about understanding the term, making sense of all that it has accumulated? As Tim
Woods has rightly observed:
The prefix ‘post’ suggests that any post-modernism is inextricably bound up
with modernism, either as a replacement of modernism or as chronologically
after modernism. Indeed with post-modernism,post-feminism, post-
colonialism and post-industrialism, that ‘post’ can be seen to suggest a
critical engagement with modernism, rather than claiming the end of
modernism to survive, or it can be seen that modernism has been overturned,
superseded or replaced. The relationship is something more akin to a
continuous engagement, which implies that post-modernism needs
modernism to survive, so that they exist in something more like a host-
parasite relationship. Therefore, it is quite crucial to realize that any
definition of post-modernism will depend upon one’s prior definition
of modernism. (Beginning post-modernism.Manchester University Press,
1999, p.6)
Seen from the viewpoint suggested above, one can see how post-modernism is a sort
of knowing modernism, or a self-reflective modernism. In one sense, post-modernism is
a modernism which does not agonise itself; it, in fact, does all that modernism does, but
only in a mood of celebration, not in a mood of repentance. Rather than lament the loss
of the past, the fragmentation of life, and the collapse of civilization as well as selfhood,
postmodernism embraces these phenomena as a new form of social existence and
behaviour. Thus, the difference between the two is best understood as difference
in moodor attitude, rather than a chronological difference or as different institutions of
aesthetic practices.
One core issue of this debate between postmodernism and modernism is the extent
to which the Enlightenment values are still valuable. The Romantic philosophers, such as
Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, had placed great faith in man’s ability to reason as a means of
securing our freedom. The modernist philosophers later raised doubts about man’s ability
to do so. This questioning of the Romantic philosopher’s faith is mainly associated with
the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, for whom postmodernism is best understood as an
attack on reason. As Sabina Lovibond has observed:
The Enlightenment pictured the human race as engaged in an effort towards
universal moral and intellectual self-realization, and so as the subject of a
universal historical experience; it also postulated a universal
human reason in terms of which social and political tendencies could be
assessed as ‘progressive’ or otherwise.... Postmodernism rejects this picture:
that is to say, it rejects the doctrine of the unity of reason. It refuses to
conceive of humanity as a unitary subject striving towards the goal of perfect
coherence (in its common stock of beliefs) or of perfect cohesion and stability
 (in its political practice). (“Feminism and Postmodernism”, New Left
Review, 178 (1989):6)
As against the universality of modernism and the long-standing conception of the
human self as a subject with a single, unified reason. Postmodernism has
pitted reasons in the plural, that is fragmented and incommensurable. Post-modern
theory is suspicious of the notion that man possesses an undivided and coherent self
which acts as the standard of rationality. It no longer believes that reasoning subjects can
act as vehicles for historically progressive change. Here, we must also understand the
difference between post-modernism andpost-modernity. Post-modernity is used to
describe the socio-economic, political and cultural condition of the present-day West;
where people are living in post-industrial, ‘service-oriented’ economies; where human
dealings like shopping are mediated through the computer interface, where
communication is done through e-mail, voice-mail, fax, teleconference on video-link;
where the wider world is accessed via the net; where the choice of entertainment falls on
high-speed image bombardment of the pop video, etc. Such conditions of living are often
described as “post-modernity”.Postmodernism on the other hand describes only the
aesthetic and intellectual beliefs and attitudes often presented in the form of theory.
The term postmodernism, in use roughly since the 1960’s, designates cultural forms
that display certain characteristics, which include (i) the denial of an all-encompassing
rationality; (ii) the distrust of meta-narratives; (iii) challenge to totalizing discourses; in
other words, suspicion of discursive attempts to offer a universal account of existence;
(iv) a rejection of modernism. Thus, rejecting belief in the infinite progress of knowledge;
in infinite moral and social advancement; in rigorous definition of the standards of
intelligibility, coherence and legitimacy; postmodernism seeks local or provisional, rather
than universal and absolute, forms of legitimation.
INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND
Jean-Francois Lyotard (1724-98)
Extensive and varied debates aboutpostmodernism in philosophy and cultural theory
notwithstanding, we can concentrate upon the key theorists whose ideas have shaped
these debates about the philosophical effects and theoretical impact of the movement
after modernism. The philosopher who is said to have put the first post-modern cat
among the modernist pigeons was Jean-Francois Lyotard, whoseThe Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) occupies a special place among a set of books
which launched an attack on modernity. His argument is for a rejection of the search for
logically consistent, self-evidently “true” grounds for philosophical discourse. Instead, he
would wish to substitute ad hoc tactical manoeuvres as justification for what are generally
considered eccentricities. Ultimately, he is suspicious of all claims to proof or truth. As he
puts it, “Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to
augment power,”(Postmodern Condition, p.46). In his considered view, beneath the
facade of objectivity there always is a hidden and dominant discourse of realpolitik: “The
exercise of terror” (p.64). Thus, any kind of legitimation is nothing but an issue of power.
He believes that there is a connection, an intimate one, between power and the rhetoric
of truth or value.
 Lyotard identifies “an equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth,” and contends
that it continually remains a question of: “No money, no proof—and that means no
verification of statements and no truth. The games of scientific language become the
games of the rich, in which whoever is wealthiest has the best chance of being
right” (Postmodern Condition, p.45). He also demonstrates how utilatarianism is
predominant in institutions:
The question (overt or implied) now asked by the professionalist student, the
State, or institutions of higher education is no longer ‘Is it true?’ but ‘What
use is it?’ In the context of the mercantilization of knowledge, more often than
not this question is equivalent to: ‘Is it saleable?’
And in the context of power-growth: ‘Is it efficient?’... What ho longer makes
the grade is competence as defined by other criteria true/false, just/unjust,
etc.(Postmodern Condition, p.51).
From these ideas Lyotard develops a narrative of the difference between modernist
and postmodernist aesthetics which does not conform to an historical period. In his
argument, Modernism is:
an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the
unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form,
because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or
viewer matter for solace or pleasure....
The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the
unpresentable in presentation itself, that which denies itself the solace of
good forms...that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy
them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.
Thus, to sum up Lyotard’s view of Postmodernism, it is, first of all, a distrust of all
metanarratives; it is also anti-foundational. Secondly, when it presents the unpresentable,
it does not do so with a sense of nostalgia, nor does it offer any solace in so doing. Thirdly,
it does not seek to present reality but to invent illusions to the conceivable which cannot
be presented. Fourthly, it actively seeks heterogeneity, pluralism, and constant
innovation. Lastly, it challenges the legitimation of positivist science.
Jean Baudrillard (1929—)
Next to Lyotard, the founder of Postmodernism, comes Jean Baudrillard, another
French intellectual who can be called the high priest of Postmodernism. According to
Baudrillard, postmodernity is also characterized by “simulations” and new forms of
technology of communication. His argument is that whereas earlier cultures depended on
either face-to-face communication or, later, print, contemporary culture is dominated by
images from the electronic mass media. Our lives today are increasingly being shaped by
simulated events and opportunities on television, computer shopping at “virtual stores,”
etc. Simulation is in which the images or ‘manufactured’ reality become more real than
the real. In his view, the demarcation between simulation and reality implodes; and along
with this collapse of distinction between image and reality, the very experience of the real
world is lost. Hyper-reality, according to Baudrillard, is the state where distinctions
between objects and their representations are dissolved. In that case, we are left with only
simulacra. Media messages are prime examples that illustrate this phenomenon. In these
messages, self-referential signs lose contact with the things they signify, leaving us
witness to an unprecedented destruction of meaning. Advertisements present
manipulated images to float a dream world only to trap the viewer for the sale of consumer
goods. The manipulated simulation, manufacturing motivated reality, ignores or
overlooks the harsh or unpleasant aspects associated with an image—say New
York or New Delhi. Consequently, the images of sparkle and light casually erase the
urgent socio-economic problems. His conclusion is that TV is the principal embodiment
of these aesthetic transformations, where the implosion of meaning and the media result
in “the dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution of life into TV” (Simulations, New York,
1983, p.55). Baudrillard was the one who contributed to the Guardian of 11 January, 1991,
the well-known article “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.”
Jacquis Derrida (1930-2004)
Perhaps the most influential person among the Postmodernist intellectuals has been
Jacquis Derrida, who remains the principal theorist of Deconstruction. The publication
of the three of his books in 1967, namely Writing and Difference, Of
Grammatology, and Of Speech and Phenomena, laid the foundation of the theory of
Deconstruction. Derrida has his precursors in Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1939), Martin
Heidegger (1889-1976), and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who questioned the
fundamental philosophical concepts such as “knowledge”, “truth”, and “identity” as well
as the traditional concepts of a coherent individual consciousness and a unitary self.
Although notoriously difficult and elusive, Derrida’s views can be summarised as under:
He insists that all Western philosophies and theories of knowledge, of language and
its uses, of culture, are LOGOCENTRIC. What he means is that they are centred or
grounded on a “logo” (which in Greek signified both “word” and “rationality.”). Using a
phrase from Heidegger, he says that they rely on “the metaphysics of presence.” According
to him, these philosophies and theories are logocentric in part because they are
PHONOCENTRIC; that they, in other words, grant, implicitly or explicitly, logical
“priority”, or “privilege”, to speech over writing as the model for analysing all discourse.
Derrida’s explanation for “logo” or “presence” is that it is an “ultimate referent”, a
self-certifying and self-sufficient ground, or foundation, which is available to us totally
outside the play of language itself. In other words, it is directly present to our awareness
and serves to “centre” (that is to anchor, organise and guarantee) the structure of the
linguistic system. As a result, it suffices to fix the bounds, coherence, and determinate
meanings of any spoken or written utterance within the foundation in God as the
guarantor of its validity. Another is Platonic form of the true reference of a general term.
Still another is Hegelian “telos” or goal toward which all process strives. Intention, too, is
an instance, which signifies something determinate that is directly present to the
awareness of the person who initiates an utterance. Derrida questions these philosophies
and shows how untenable these premises are. His alternative conception is that the play
of linguistic meanings is “undecidable” in terms derived from Saussure’s view that in a
sign-system (which is language), both the “signifiers” and the “signifides” owe their
seeming identities, not to their own inherent or “positive” features, but to their differences
from other speech sounds, written marks, or conceptual significations.
 Derrida’s most influential concept has been that of DIFFERANCE. His explanation
for substituting ‘a’ for ‘e’ is that he has done it to indicate a fusion of two senses of the
French verb “differer,” which are (I) to be different, and to defer. Thus, meanings of words
are relational (in relation to other words). They are also contextual. In any case, there are
no absolute meanings, nor are the meanings of words stable, as words always defer their
meanings. Any utterance, therefore, oral or written, can be subjected to any number of
interpretations, depending upon the reader’s ability to “play” with the various possible
meanings each word is capable of yielding. This view of language and meaning has had
great impact on both literary criticism as well as literary writing. Postmodernist texts as
well as interpretations decentre and subvert the conventional or settled meanings and
values of any given story or situation, concept or construction, system or structure.
Some of Derrida’s sceptical procedures have been quite influential in deconstructive
literary criticism as well as in feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist creative
compositions. One of these is to subvert the innumerable binary oppositions—such as
man/woman, soul/body, right/wrong, white/black, culture/nature, etc.—which are
essential structural elements in logocentric language. In Derrida’s view, as he shows,
there is a tacit hierarchy implied in these binaries, in which the term that comes first is
privileged and superior, while the one that comes second is derivative and inferior. What
Derrida does is to invert the hierarchy, by showing that the secondary term can be made
out to be derivitative from, or a special case of the primary term. He does not, however,
stop at that; rather, he goes on to destablise both hierarchies, leaving them in a state of
undecidability.
Derrida had not thought of Deconstruction as a mode of literary criticism. He had
only suggested a way of reading all kinds of utterances so as to reveal and subvert the
presuppositions of Western Metaphysics. But more than any other discipline of
knowledge it is literary criticism which has adopted his theory of Deconstruction as a
critical tool of literary analysis. His most ardent followers have, however, been
in America, not in England. The most influential of these has been Paul de Man
whose Allegories of Reading (1979) was the earliest application of Derrida’s concepts and
procedures. Then came Barbara Johnson, a student of de Man, whose work, The Critical
Difference (1980), carried the task of appropriating Derrida to literary criticism still
further. Later, J. Hillis Miller, once a leading American critic of the Geneva School,
converted to Deconstruction and contributed to the theory’s practical application
his Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (1982), The Linguistic Movement:
From Wordsworth to Stevens(1985), and Theory Then and Now (199l).
Michael Foucault (1926-84)
As he himself described, Foucault was a “specialist in history of systems of thought”,
although we often call him a French philosopher and historian. Even though he wrote on
a variety of subjects ranging from science to literature, his works that have influenced the
course of Postmodern literature and literary criticism include The Archaeology of
Knowledge (1969), The Order of Things (1966), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison (1975), History of Sexuality(1976), Power/Knowledge (1980), “What is an
Author?” (1977), and Madness and Civilization (1961). In the book listed last, Foucault
explores how madness is socially constructed by a wide variety of DISCOURSES that give
rise to collective attitudes or mentalities defining insanity. Its basic thesis is that, like the
lepers of the Middle Ages, the mad are excluded in a gesture that helps to construct
modern society and its image of reason. Foucault’s major works examine the question
why, in any given period, it is necessary to think in certain terms about madness, illness,
sexuality or prisons. By clear implication he seems to ask if it is possible to think about
those topics in different ways. The effect of Foucault has been to view with distrust all that
has been passing in the name of essentials, universals, or natural, and take all these as
social constructs reflecting the values of different cultures and societies.
In the history of philosophy, Foucault’s work falls within the tradition established by
Nietzsche, from whom he adopts the technique of “Genealogy” and the insight that the
search for knowledge is also an expression of a will to power over others. For Foucault
knowledge is always a form of power. He takes even psychiatry and mental health as new
technologies that categorize certain forms of social and sexual behaviour as deviant in
order to control them. The modern psychiatrist assumes the role of medieval priest,
seeking confessions, imposing the values of the empowered. His thesis is that power is
not something that one seizes, holds, or loses, but a network of forces in which power
always meets with resistance. These views have led to the challenging of all sorts of
political, social, and gender constructs, taken as networks of power to repress the weak,
the individual, the disadvantaged, the female, etc. Although Foucault’s name was
associated with structuralism and the controversial theme of Barthe’s catchy title, DEATH
OF THE AUTHOR (1968) and DEATH OF MAN (1966), his true concern remained with
the formation and limitations of systems of thought. Although made an icon of QUEER
THEORY, Foucault’s contribution has been valuable to all the Postmodern critical
approaches including the Feminist, Postcolonial, Poststructuralist, etc.
Roland Barthes (1915-80)
A French literary critic and theorist Barthes has been quite influential among the
Postmodernist writers and critics. His principal concern, despite his varied writings,
remains with the relationship between language and society, and with the literary forms
that mediate between the two. The idea is that no literary composition can be studied in
isolation, being one of the practices of a culture, an expression of society’s ruling
discourse. Hence, study of a text will be useful if it is done in relation to other
contemporary practices of the same culture—even fashions of dress, cigarette smoking,
or styles of wrestling. Cultural Studies, one of the aspects of Postmodernist critical theory,
although founded by Richard Hoggart (The Uses of Literary, 1957) and Raymond
Williams (Culture and Society 1780-1950, 1958), owes a good deal to the writings of
Barthes as well.
Barthes’s famous work Mythologies(1957), as well as his very first essay on writing in
1953, demonstrates that no form or style of writing is a free expression of an author’s
subjectivity, that writing is always marked by social and ideological values, that language
is never innocent. A sense of the need for a critique of forms of writing that mask the
historical-political features of the social world by making it appear ‘natural’, or inevitable,
provides the impulse behind the analysis of Mythologies. Barthes’s other books
include Elements of Semiology (1964),Writing Degree Zero (1953), The Pleasure of the
Text (1975), and “The Death of the Author” (1968), later included in Image-Music-
Text (1977) ed. By Stephen Heath. In his essay mentioned last, Barthes pleads for
abandoning the conventional author-and-works approach in favour of an anthropological
and psycho-analytical reading of canonical texts. His insistence is that literature as well
as literary criticism, as well as language itself, is never neutral, and that the specificity of
literature can be examined only within the context of a semiology or a general theory of
signs. His ideas about language and author and their relation with social world promoted
cultural studies as well as reader-response theory.
Jacques Lacan (1901-81)
A French psychoanalyst, also most controversial since Freud, Lacan has had an
immense influence on the literary theory of our time, as well as on philosophy, feminism
and psychoanalysis. Most of his important writings are included in his Ecrils (1966). His
writings, full of allusion to Surrealism, contend that the unconscious is structured like a
language. His notion of the Fragmented Body clearly shows his debt to surrealism. He
elaborates an immensely broad synthetic vision in which psychoanalysis appropriates the
findings of philosophy, the structural anthropology of Levistrauss, and the linguistics of
Saussure. He also heavily relies on Jackbson’s work of Phoneme analysis and
Metaphor/Metonymy. He defines language as a synchronic system of signs which
generates meaning through their interaction. In other words, meaning insists in and
through a chain of signifiers, and does not reside in any one element. For him there is
never any direct correspondence between signifier and signified, and meaning is therefore
always in danger of sliding or slipping out of control.

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)

A Russian literary theorist, Bakhtin has been a great influence on the contemporary
theory of Discourse analysis. He is best known by his works named The Dialogic
Imagination (1981), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1986), Rabelais and his
World(1968), and Problems of Dostoevski’s Poetics(1984). In these studies, there is a
critique of Russian Formalism and an outline of his characteristic theme of “dialogism.”
He criticizes Formalism for its abstraction, for its failure to analyse the content of literary
works, and for the difficulty it finds in analysing linguistic and ideological changes. This
critique is then extended to linguistics, especially the Saussurean. In his view, the purely
linguistic approach to both language and literature is highly limited in scope. It tends to
isolate linguistic units or literary texts from their social context, having no analysis to offer
of the relations that exist between both individual speakers and texts.
Bakhtin’s proposal is for a historical poetics or a “translinguistics” which can show
how all social intercourse is generated from verbal communication and interaction, and
that linguistic signs are conditioned by the social organization of the participants. In his
later work, Bakhtin develops his historical poetics into a theory of “speech genres” or
“typical forms of utterances.” He claims that the weakness of Saussure’s linguistics is that
it focuses solely on individual utterances and is unable to analyse how they are combined
into relatively stable types of utterance. Although his speech theory remains incomplete,
Bakhtin was ambitious to apply it to everything from proverbs to long novels by analysing
their common verbal nature.
With these major intellectual influences in the background, the Postmodern literature
in the second half of the twentieth century grew to show greater impact of the new ideas
on the continent and in America, with comparatively much less impact on the literature
of the British islands. Mostly used as a periodising concept to mark literature in the later
half of the twentieth century, Postmodernism is also used, as we have earlier discussed,
as a description of literary and formal characteristics such as linguistic play, new modes
of narrational self-reflexivity, and referential frames within frames. Going chronologically
and genrewise, we shall try to explore the nature and extent of Postmodernism the
literature in Britain absorbed and reflected during the period beginning with the 1950’s.
Post-War Novel
After Hitler’s devastation of Britain, the country was literally in ruins, torn apart by
years of bombardment. “The landscape of ruins must also be recognized as forming an
integral part of much of the literature of the late 1940’s and the early 1950’s. It was a
landscape which provided a metaphor for broken lives and spirits.” One of the best
expressions in fiction of this ruin and its implications is a novel, The World My
Wilderness (1950), by a female novelist of the post-War period, named Rose Macaulay
(1881-1958). The novel’s London is not only post-War but also post-Eliotic: “Here you
belong; you cannot get away, you do not wish to get away, for this the maquis that lies
about the margins of the wrecked world, and here your feet are set... ‘Where are the roots
that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say, or
guess....’ But you can say, you can guess, that it is you yourself, your own roots, that clutch
the stony rubbish, the branches of your own being that grow from it and nowhere else.”
Macaulay was, of course, not the only one to view the post-War period as one requiring
the reassemblage of fragments of life and meaning. Another female novelist of the period,
Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), also gave powerful expression to the post-War experience
in her The Death of the Heart (1938), Look at all those Roses (1941),The Demon
Lover (1945), The Heat of the Day(1949), and The Little Girls (1964). Equally important
among the post-War novelists was another female writer, Rebecca West (the pen name of
Cecily Isabel Fairfield, 1892-1983), whose The Fountain Overflows (1956) and The Birds
Fall Down (1966) depict the same devastated world. With her pen-name derived from an
Ibsen play, and actively involved in the feminist cause, West wrote on political climate of
the cold-war era.
Graham Greene
A major novelist of the postmodern or contemporary period was Graham Greene
(1904-1991), who frequently gave direct expression to his pessimism, such as “For a
writer, success is always temporary,” or “Success is only a delayed failure,” which he made
in his autobiographical memoir A Sort of Life (1977). He emerged a popular writer with
his very first novel, The Comedians(1965). He was a staunch anti-imperialist who
resented the rising imperialism ofAmerica and despised the crumbling empire of Britain.
He remained a Roman Catholic since 1926 when he was admitted to the Roman Church.
Almost all of his work is haunted by the themes of a wounded world of the European
colonies in Africa or the American imperialism in Latin America, a gloomy sense of sin
and moral failure, and a commitment to “others” and rebels. Although Greene produced
as many as twenty six novels, those necessary to know are The Power and the
Glory (1940), focused on the character of a Whisky-priest in anti-clerical Mexico; The
Ministry of Fear (1943) and The End of the Affair (1951) both of which are located in the
twilit, blitzed London; The Heart of the Matter (1948), focused on the flyblown, rat-
infested, and war-blitzed West-African colony; The Quiet American (1955), set in
Vietnam, and Our Man in Havana (1955), set in Cuba, both expose the American
imperialism. All of these novels present a grim picture of the world that emerged in the
post-War period.
Anthony Powell
Another notable novelist of the period was Anthony Powell, whose sequence of 12
novels collectively named A Dance to the Music of Time “is neither a fictionalized war
memoir, nor a prose elegy for the decline and fall of a ruling class. However, as a chronicle
of British upper-middle-class life, set between the 1920’s and 1950’s, it necessarily takes
the disasters, disillusions, inconveniences, and changes of a society and its war in its
leisurely and measured stride.”

NOVELISTS OF THE 1950’S

Samuel Beckett
The most important writer who emerged in mid-50’s was Samuel Beckett (1906-
1989), who was an Irish by birth but remained in Paris and wrote in French much of his
dramatic and fictional work. Although better known as dramatist, because of his radical
innovations, his contribution to the English novel is no less significant.
His famous trilogy was published in Londonin 1959, whose English titles are Molloy,
Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. The trilogy proved to be the most innovative fiction
of the fifties. Another, and early, notable work of Beckett was a volume of
interconnected short stories put together under the title More Pricks than Kicks (1934),
in which he had already presented the typical, unconventional, absurdist hero. His
novels, as well as plays, have been described by several readers of repute as illustrations
of Sartre’s Existentialism. For a summing up of Beckett’s concerns in his work, an
excerpt from Martin Esslin would do more justice to the novelist than any fresh attempt:
The search for man’s own identity—not the finding of the true nature of self which for
Beckett will remain ever elusive, but the raising of the problem of identity itself, the
confrontation of the audience with the existence of its own problematical and mysterious
condition; this fundamentally is the theme of Beckett’s plays, novels, prose, sketches, and
poems.
Such a quest, despairing and nihilistic as it may appear (for at the center of being
there is a void, nothingness) is nevertheless a very lofty enterprise — for it is totally
fearless, dedicated and uncompromising; it is, in the last resort, a religious quest in that
it seeks to confront the ultimate reality.
Hawrence Durrell
True to the spirit of Postmodernism, Beckett’s novels could not be interpreted as
‘representations’ of real life’. In his work the text is maintained as an object of questioning,
the working of codes, rather than a series of situations and allusions to a subtext which
the reader or audience ought to feel. One can feel an infinite openness (about his texts) to
significance and a space for perpetual deferment of any conclusive meaning. Beckett’s
experiments with the technique of the novel, and with the dis-integration of its
conventions, were followed, though not as ruthlessly, by some of the writers of popular
fiction, such as Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990). Durrell, incidentally, was born in India of
families who had been on the subcontinent for several generations. He is best known by
what is called “Alexandria Quartet”
- Justine(1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960).
William Golding
A novelist better known than Durrell was William Golding (1911-1993), who came into
prominence with the publication of hisLord of the Flies (1954). Deriving his title indirectly
from Milton (Beelzibub, one of the fallen angels in Paradise Lost, is called the lord of the
flies), Golding sets his novel on a desert island. Here lands on the island a marooned party
of boys from an English cathedral choir-school. They gradually deteriorate from their
genteel tradition which shaped them into barbarism ending with murder. The novel is
actually a moral allegory, making a systematic undoing of R.M. Ballantyne’s adventure
story, The Coral Island (1857). Golding reverses the Victorian tale of optimism into a
post-Darwinian pessimism. In a sort of deconstruction of the Victorian novel, an
interrogation of the conventional values and attitudes, Golding’s novel reflects the spirit
and mood of Postmodernism. It measures up to John Barth’s conception of the
contemporary ‘literature of exhaustion’. Golding’s other novels include The
Inheritors (1964), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), The Spire(1964), and The
Pyramid (1967) His Darkness Visible (1979) is once again dependent for its title on
Milton’s Paradise Lost, where the blind epic poet uses the expression for Hell. The novels
that followed in Golding’s later life include Rites of Passage (1980), Close
Quarters (1987), Fire Down Below (1989), andThe Paper Men (1984). Of these Rights of
Passage has been most successful. Its hero, Edmund Talbot, faces the problems of “too
much understanding” and tries to comprehend “all that is monstrous under the sun.” In
a sense, the central concern in Golding’s fiction remains what T.S. Eliot puts down in
his Gerontion: “After such knowledge what forgiveness.” There is, thus, in the post-War
novel an exploration of the darker regions of human psyche and the nothingness of
human existence, pessimism being the keynote in the fiction of the fifties.
Angus Wilson
While there has been a continuation of modernist experimentation with the narrative
technique and novel’s form among the writers of the fifties, there has also been a reaction,
rather strong, against experimentalism. A leading practitioner of this reaction was Angus
Wilson (1913-1991), who deliberately tried to restore the traditional Victorian narrative
style. Adopting the realism of Zola and comic sense of Dickens, he produced a large body
of fiction, including The Wrong Set (1949), which is a collection of short stories, andSuch
Darling Dodos (1950), yet another volume of stories. Among his novels, the better-known
are Hemlock and After (1952),Setting the World on Fire (1980), The Middle Age of Mrs.
Eliot (1958), Last Call (1964), Old Men at the Zoo (1961) and As If By Magic(1973). His
best-known novels, however, remain Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) and No Laughing
Matter (1967). Anglo-Saxon Attitudes has become a sort of classic. Panoramic like a
Victorian novel, it is focused on an archaeological fraud whose ramifications ruin the
ageing historian, Gerald Middleton.
 WOMEN NOVELISTS
Iris Murdoch
The most philosophic among the novelists of the fifties was, of course, Iris Murdoch
(1919-1999), although she followed the conventional novel form. Starting with her study
of Sartre, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953), she produced a large number of novels,
which clearly reflect her stance of anti-empirical view of mankind. Her moral philosophy
is best illustrated by her The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and Metaphysics as a Guide to
Morals (1992). Samuel Beckett’s Murphy has been one of the influences on her, to which
she pays homage in her own early novels Under the Net (1954) and Bruno’s
Dream (1969). Her other novels include They Flight from the Enchanter(1955), The
Sea (1978), The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), The Bell (1958), A Fairly Honourable
Defeat (1970), The Black Prince(1973), The Time of the Angels (1966), The Sand
Castle (1957), A Severed Head (1961), An Unofficial Rose (1962), The Unicom (1963),The
Italian Girl (1964), The Red and The Green (1965), The Nice and The Good (1968),An
Accidental Man (1971).
Murdoch’s article, “Against Dryness,” argues that we are living in an age (the post-
modern) in which “we are left with far too shallow and flimsy an idea of human
personality,” in which the relation between art and morality has dwindled “because we
are losing our sense of form and structure in the moral world itself.” Like the modernists,
she seems firmly to believe in the salvaging power of art. As she argues in The Sovereignty
of Good,
Good art, unlike bad art, unlike ‘happenings,’ is something pre-eminently
outside us and resistant to our consciousness. We surrender ourselves to
itsauthority with a love which is unpossessive and unselfish. Art shows us the
only sense in which the permanent and incorruptible is compatible with the
transient; and whether representational or not it reveals to us aspects of our
world which our ordinary dull dream—consciousness is unable to see. Art
pierces the veil and gives sense to the notion of a reality which lies beyond
appearance; it exhibits virtue in its true guise in the context of death and
chance.
This view of art and life, of man and age, is reflected in all her fictional work, although
not equally powerfully in each. HerThe Time of the Angels is still rated by some as her
best, although there is no critical unanimity in her case.
Muril Spark
Another female novelist of the fifties, this prolific decade, was Muriel Spark (b. 1918),
who also shares with Murdoch and Golding, a firm commitment to moral issues in
relation to fictional form. One of her early novels is The Comforters (1957), which focuses
on the life of a neurotic woman writer, who is working on a project, Form in the Modern
Novel, having difficulty with her chapter on realism. This writer, Caroline Rose, is
determined to write a novel about writing a novel. Spark also did her biography
entitled Curriculum Vitae (1992). She not only made a critical study of Mary Shelly (Child
of Light), but also wrote some novels in the Gothic style, namely Memento
Mori (1959), The Ballad of Lekham Rye(1960), and The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie(1961). However, the novel that made her famous is The Driver’s Seat (1970),
which deals with the first-person account of a woman with a death-wish, who goes to the
extreme of plotting circumstances of her own violent murder. Among her later novels
figure Not To Disturb (1971), which has its opening quotation from The Duchess of
Malfi, and The Abbess of Crewe (1974), making an investigative study of a convent, but
avoiding all Gotihc temptations. All in all, the focus in her novels, too, remains, just as in
the novels of her many a contemporary, on the irrational and darker side of human
nature, reflecting the mood and spirit of postmodernism.
A not-so-well-known novelist of the 1950’s was Leslie Poles Hartley (1895-1972).
Besides a trilogy called Eustace and Hilda(1944-1947), she has left behind some novels
with catchy titles, such as The Hireling(1957), focused on class conflict, and The Go-
Between (1953), where the novelist’s discomforting feeling about contemporary society
becomes manifest.
ANGRY YOUNG MEN
The novelists of the 1950’s that we have discussed so far did not constitute any group
or movement. They might have had broad similarities among them shared by most post-
War or post-modern writers, but they did not have any common manifesto or ideology to
bind them into a homogeneous group. There was, however, during the same prolific
fifties, a definite group of writers who consciously and deliberately followed an agenda in
their novels (in some cases, also plays). This group got the brand-name of Angry Young
Men of the 50’s. It was John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger(performed in 1956,
published in 1957) which supplied the tone and title for the movement. This group of
writers, mostly novelists, represented the typical mood and flavour of the decade. These
“angry young men” belonged to the middle or lower-middle sections of society, educated
not inOxford or Cambridge, but in what are called Red-brick universities. They had not
experienced the War, and were not bitten by the bug of absurdism. Their anger was
directed against the old establishment, the liberal-human, largely upper-middle
class,Bloomsbury intelligentia (Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey)
symbolized byHorizen. The movement was part social, part cultural. However, the anger
they displayed in their novels (and plays) was not of a very serious order. It was not the
kind of anger we associate with D.H. Lawrence or Wyndhan Lewis, which emanated from
a firm commitment to an ideology or morality. The anger or protest of these young men
of the 50’s was rather of a lower order, closer to an ordinary disgruntlement. Actually,
what they demanded was social and cultural accommodation among the privileged, an
extension of upper-class comforts in privileged jobs, etc. Once that was extended to them,
the anger was soon subsided. No wonder the movement did not last beyond the decade of
the 1950’s.
Kingsley Amis
Among these “angries” Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) is considered the leading novelist.
His Lucky Jim (1954) provides not only a catchy title but also an effective metaphor for
the protesting young men. It is also a campus novel, which exposes the academic racket
in the British universities, their social pretentions and pseudoculture that so often
accompany it. Amis went on exploring further the various dimensions of the aesthetic
cant and snobbery in his subsequent novels, such as I Like It Here(1958) and The
Uncertain Feeling (1955), One Fat Englishman (1963). Jim Dixon, the hero ofLucky
Jim, remains a representative angry young man of the 1950’s.

John Wain
Another “angry” novelist of the decade was John (Barrington) Wain (1925--),
whoseHurry On Down (1953) constructs a more careful portrait of the Angry Young Man.
Like other protagonists of the 1950’s, this one is actually an anti-hero, who wishes to opt
out of the society he despises and yet stays in it without any commitments. In the
categorization made by Raymond Williams (in his The Long Revolution; 1961) of the
forms of protest, the Angry Young Man is a tramp who only wishes his individual rights
and freedom without responsibilities. As Charles Lumbey, the protagonist of Hurry on
Down, reflects at the end of the novel, “Neutrality; he had found it at last. The running
fight between himself and society had ended in a draw.” The novels by Wain include The
Contenders (1952), A Travelling Woman (1959), Strike the Father Dead(1962),and the
short stories Nuncle (1960) - the Fool in King Lear calls Lear ‘nuncle’.
John Braine
Still another “angry” novelist of the group is John Braine (b. 1922), who produced, in
the most productive decade, his popular Room at the Top (1957), with Joe Lampton as its
hero, and Life at the Top(1962), both of which expose the emptiness of upper-class life.
Depicting the no-holds-bar race for material prosperity and social status, these novels
show that when one has made it to the top, he only finds himself trapped and lonely,
conscious of the social contempt he has earned. The same theme is elaborated in his Stay
With Me Till Morning(1970), depicting again the desperate quest of the rich for
excitement in sensuous pleasures of sex and social gatherings or business deals. Similarly,
the need of such a lot for pretending eternal youth and reassure oneself by promiscuity is
at the heart of his The Crying Game (1968), The Queen of a Distant Country (1972),
andWaiting for Sheila (1976).
Alan Sillitoe
Another significant novelist of the period is Alan Sillitoe (b. 1928), whose plots are
generally placed in Nottingham. He depicts the working-class characters, still haunted by
the Great Depression of the 1930’s. He is best known by his Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning (1958), The Loneliness of the Long-Distant Runner (1959), The Death of
William Posters (1966), A Start in Life (1970), and The Widower’s Son (1976).
Anthony Burgess
Yet another notable writer of this terrific decade - perhaps, no other decade in the
history of the English novel can claim such a huge crop of fiction - was Anthony Burgess
(1917-1993). Making use of his long stay inMalaysia, he produced his Malayan
Triology(1956-1959), which, like A Passage to India orThe Raj Quartet, depicts life in
that country at the end of the colonial regime with emphasis on relationships between
different races. What made him famous, however, were his later novels, namely A
Clockwork Orange (1962), The Wanting Seed (1962), andThe Clock-work
Testament (1974). His novels are full of teenage violence and horror, with farcical humour
- an example of dark comedy. There is in all the narratives a hovering sense of doom and
nothingness(nadsat). Thus, this group of writers, though not quite homogeneous, shared
some of their antipathies and a few of their sympathies with each other; they certainly
shared a common sensibility which established itself as a new voice of the post-war
literary world. Their little narratives and dark humour reflect the typical mood and spirit
of Postmodernism.

WOMEN NOVELISTS IN LATER DECADES

Doris Lessing
The broadening of opportunities for women paved way for some of the radical social
changes in the later decades of the twentieth century. A “New Morality” emerged to
challenge the established values and perceptions of gender, sexuality, marriage, etc. “New
patterns of women employment, especially in the professional sector, made a rapid stride
after the War was over in 1945. One of the most inspiring books in the feminist movement
came from Germaine Creer (b. 1939), namely The Female Eunuch (1970), which is, in her
own words, a part of the second wave in which “ungenteel middle-class women are calling
for revolution.” One of the male characters in Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden
Notebook(1962) echoes the phrase Creer has used here: “The Russian revolution, the
Chinese Revolution - they’re nothing at all. The real revolution is women against men.”
For both of these women writers that revolution was to be perceived in the female
sensitivity to the unfair or highly limited roles of women, to their restricted representation
in society and its literature.
Lessing’s career as writer had begun inEast Africa with the novels she had written
about the growth of political awareness among black people and the white settlers. She
had experienced the colonial situation in that part of Africa. Her monumental work in five
volumes, Children of Violence (1952-69), focuses on the growing political involvement,
and the subsequent disillusion, of Martha Quest. This English woman in East Africa is
shown growing from childhood to youth to age, experiencing the acute and complex
problems of race and class. It is an epic sequence covering, in a sense, the entire history
of the twentieth-century world. Lessing calls her fiction, and its type, “inner space fiction,”
by which she means a fiction that has methodically moved in a different direction from
conventional realism. TheFour-Gated City (1969), the last of the sequence, is an
illustration of the type. The significance of her central work, The Golden Notebook, lies in
relating her concept of mental fragmentation to the disintegration of fictional form. Here
woman’s creativity is to act as instrument of freedom for the fair sex. As the novel’s
heroine, Anna Wulf, reflects, “women’s emotions are all still fitted for a kind of society
that no longer exists.”
Angela Carter
 Another notable woman novelist of the period was Angela Carter (1940-1992), whose
unconventional essay on pornography, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural
History (1979), pleads that even pornographic fantasy could be legitimized in literature if
it could be pressed into the service of women and if women could cease to be considered
as mere commodities. She is best known by her novel The Passion of New Eve (1977) and
the two volumes of Gothic tales, Fireworks (1974) and The Bloody Chamber (1979). Her
novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman(1972), as the title itself suggests,
has a male protagonist. Her later work includes two major theatrical novels, Nights at the
Circus(1984) and Wise Children (1991).
Margaret Drabble
Perhaps the most representative of the later twentieth century novelists in Englandis
Margaret Drabble (b. 1939), whose very first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage (1963)
registered a new presence. It deals with two sisters of the “new” consciousness, who are
gossipy, sexually emancipated, university educated, fond of parties. Still better than her
first novel is Jerusalem the Golden (1967), which, too, focuses on the same themes, but
comes out more assured and less jerky. Her most artful novel of the 1970’s is, however,The
Ice Age (1977), which brings out a sharper picture of contemporary English society. Her
favourite themes include corruption, IRA bombs, broken marriages, alienations of
upward social mobility, etc. The feminist crusade of these women writers is in tune with
the theory of Postmodernism.
OTHER NOVELISTS IN LATER DECADES
John Fowles
Perhaps the last of the well-known novelists of the twentieth century is John Fowles
(1917-1993), who made a mark with his first novel, The Collector (1963), which is a sort
of post-Freudian fantasy. The narrator, protagonist is a rather repressed, butterfly
collecting clerk, an anti-hero. His kidnapping an art-student expresses his repression,
making the release of sexual energy as a form of liberation. A similar theme of psychic
and sexual liberation is also dealt with in his next novel, Mantissa (1982).
The Magus (1966, revised in 1977) is also on the same theme. His most popular novel,
and most admired, has been The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), where again
juxtaposition of repression and release is set up. The pair of central characters defy all
taboos and conventions of social morality. We can see reflected in his work the influence
of Lacanian psychology, which is post-Freudian.
Fraser And Farrell
There are some novelists whose work is of special interest to the Indian readers,
because it relates the Indian situation during the British Raj. George Macdonald Fraser
(b. 1925) and James Gordon Farrell (1935-1979) are among these writers. The Victorian
India has been of great interest to many of these English novelists who had the
opportunity to experience life on the Indian sub-continent. Fraser has to his credit ten
volumes of the so-called “Flashman Paper,” dealing with the imagined career of the ex-
villain of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. These volumes appeared between 1969 and 1994.
The various themes in these volumes concern the Afgan war of 1842, the British
acquisition of Punjab, and the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Less provocative than Fraser’s
work is Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), which deals with the Indian Mutiny or
Sepoy Rebellion, as the British named it from their side. On our side, the event is called
the first War of Independence. The perspective brought upon the events is, of course,
that of the colonial outfit. If does, however raise questions about the British imperial
mission in the colonies. Fraser and Farrell do not compare, in terms of art, with E.M.
Forster, whose novel on India is not impaired by any narrow outlook. Here, there is lack
of depth of understanding of characters as well as the situation. FarreU’s unfinished
novel about Shimla, The Hill Station (1981), is the poorest of his work.
Paul Scott
Of all the British novelists who wrote about India, Paul Scott’s “Raj Quartet” offers
the most comprehensive treatment of the subject. Paul Scott (1920-1978) wrote his
quartet (a sequence of four novels) between 1966 and 1975. Collectively called the Raj
Quartet, the sequence consists of The Jewel in the Crown (1966), A Day of the
Scorpion(1968), The Towers of Silence (1971), and A Division of the Spoils (1975). The
period the quartet covers relates to World War II years and the subsequent phase
leading to India’sIndependence. Scott’s last novel, Staying On(1977), also deals
with India, covering the post-Independence period. It shows how those who chose to
stay on found themselves misfits in the changed scenario. Scott may not be as great as
Forster, but he is decidedly superior to Fraser and Farrell. As a consequence of the
Postcolonial critical theory, the work of these novelists, along with the work of similar
writers, such as Forster and Kipling, has now been interpreted from the Postmodernist
perspective.

POST-WAR POETRY
Surrealism
Between the Auden group of poets of the 1930’s and the Movement poets of the
1950’s, there are some poets of the forties who do not constitute any group or
movement. One thing common between them is that they do not continue with the
experimental poetry of the 1920’s, nor the Poetry of Commitment of the 1930’s, the
decade of Depression. In the later years of 1930’s there emerged the movement of
Surrealism in Europe,—including England. Primarily related to painting, Surrealism
influenced the art of poetry also. One way of defining Surrealism is to see it in relation to
Romanticism. One can say that Romanticism intensified becomes Surrealism. Another
way to define it is to relate it to Realism. In that case Surrealism is seen as Super-
Realism. For, after all, dreams, nightmares, daydreams, emotionalism, irrationalism are
also a part of “real” life that we live, and it is these very aspects of life that constitute the
stuff of Surrealism. In England, it was introduced in poetry by David Gascoyne (b. 1916),
who also wrote A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935).
Dylan Thomas
A prominent poet associated with Surrealism was the Anglo-Welsh Dylan Thoman
(1914-1953), although some decline to do that. Andrew Sanders is one such critic. His
contention is: “As his ambitious and uneven first volume, Poems (1934), suggests,
Thoma had begun to mould an extravagant and pulsatingly rhetorical style before he
became aware of the imported innovations of international Surrealist writing. He was,
however, decidedly a poet who thought in images. If there is a kinship evident in
Thomas’s verse it is with the ‘difficulty,’ the emotionalism, the lyric intensity, and the
metaphysical speculation (though not the intellectual vigour) of the school of Donne.”
One of the popularly known poems of Thomas is “The Force that through the Green
Fuse drives the Flower,” considered an example of his pantheism and mysticism; also an
example of Blakean symbolism, such as the following:
And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

Another well-known poem of his is “Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines,” which is
typical of his “obscurity” because his symbolism tends to be personal and private, such
as the following:
Light breakes on secret lots,
On time of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

Thomas and other poets of the forties are called neo-romantics, having greater
affinity with Blake, Yeats, Lawrence, etc., than with Eliot or Auden. Some other poems
of Thomas to remember are “The Hunchback in the Park,” “After the Funeral,” “Over Sir
John’s Hill,” “Fern Hill,” and “Do not go gentle into that good night.”
As Karl Shapiro has said, “Thomas is in somewhat the same relation to modern
poetry that Hopkins was to Tennyson and the Victorians; this is a relation of anti-
magnetism. Thomas resisted the literary traditionalism of the Eliot school; he wanted no
part of it. Poetry to him was not a civilizing manoeuvre, a replanting of the gardens; it
was a holocaust, a sowing of the wind.” Thomas is also known for his catchy, parodic,
title Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), his book of autobiographical short
stories. Unfortunately, he had died of drinking, just as Marlowe died in a drunken brawl.
His best known volume of poems remains Deaths and Entrances (1946). In its
Surrealistic revolt against all restraints on free creativity, including logical reason,
standard morality, social norms, Thomas’s work reflects one facet of Postmodernism
which finds more mature expression later in the literature of the 1960’s.
The Movement Poets
 A parallel crusade in poetry to the effort of Angry Young Men in fiction during the
decade of the 1950’s was that of the Movement Poets. This, too, was conscious and
deliberate just as its counterpart movement was in fiction. In 1955, a number of verse
manifestoes found publication from the members of the group known as the Movement.
These manifestoes were published in D.J. Enright’s anthology, Poets of the 1950’s, which
included Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Robert Conquest, etc. Amis made the following
announcement:
Nobody wants any more poems about philosophers or paintings or novelists
or art galleries or mythology or foreign cities or other poems. At least I hope
nobody wants them. Larkin’s reaction to “Modernism” is no less violent: I
have no belief in “tradition” or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in
poems to other poems or poets.... To me the whole of the ancient world, the
whole of classical and biblical mythology meant very little, and I think that
using them today not only fills poems full of dead spots but dodges the
writer’s duty to be original.
As Robert Conquest contended, the Movement was “empirical in its attitude to all
the cosmos.” On the one hand, it was a reaction against the mythical new classicism of
the 1920’s, on the other, it was opposed to the neo-romanticism of the 1940’s. It was,
one could surmise, a sort of realism, which aimed at consciously narrow concerns of
here and now, addressing the world of everyday engagements, closing all windows on
the outside world both in time and space. The Movement poets shut their eyes to
whatever lurked beyond the tangible present and the mundane multitude. The very dull
and drab, morbid and monotonous life of the uneventful men and matters were chosen
as the subject-matter of poetry. After the War, which was between the European nations
primarily, the reaction to Continentalism of the Modernists sounded perhaps
unpatriotic. So, there is, for sure, this nationalist aspect also to the Movement
philosophy of new aesthetics. As Calvin Bedient puts it, “The English poetic ‘Movement’
of the Fifties (the very name suggesting an excess of dull plainness) did much to fix the
image of contemporary British poetry as deliberately deficient, moderate with a will.
This image is gradually frayed and will probably give way altogether, for the truth is
that, however deliberate — and after a faltering start — postwar poetry in Britain and
Ireland has proved increasingly robust, varied, responsive to the times, felicitous,
enjoyable.” Thus, the anti-modernism of Larkin and his fellow poets reflected the
Postmodernist spirit of problematizing Modernism. Their postmodernism involves a
going beyond modernism.

Philip Larkin
The poet chosen by common consent as the most significant of the Movement poets
is Philip Larkin (1922-1985). He still remains the best known of the group. His poetic
works include The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun
Weddings(1964), and High Windows (1974). It has been rightly remarked that “English
poetry has never been so persistently out of the cold as it is with Philip Larkin.” The
following extract from his “Wild Oats” will illustrate the remark at once:
About twenty years ago
Two girls came in where I worked -
A bosomy English rose
And her friend in specs I could talk to.
Faces in those days sparked
The whole shooting-match off, and 1 doubt
If ever one had like her:
But it was the friend I took out,

This shows a good deal of Larkin—plain and bare as wood, matter-of-fact, not
entirely a mind of winter, with a slight sense of homour. Larkin represents the post-War
mood of depression. As he says in his novelJill (1946), “events cut us ruthlessly down to
size.” His other novel is A Girl in Winter(1947).
Larkin has something of both Frost and Hardy in him, writing small poems on small
affairs of life, sharing their scepticism, even nihilism at times, but always reassuring in
his love for the very ordinary things of life. Note, for instance, the following:
‘This was Mr. Bleaney’s room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.’ Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,

Such small things, studded with care on the small canvas, came out with a certain
care for the small and the underdog. His lyricism and lucidity are never lost in the dense
detail of his little descriptions. These two qualities always come out:
I was sleeping, and you woke me
To walk on the chilled shore
Of a night with no memory
Till your voice forsook my ear
Till your two hands withdrew
And I was empty of tears,
On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea
And a cold bill of stars.

Thus, Larkin served his generation of the post-War with the soothing balm of little
concerns, focusing on the immediate so that the disturbing outside world could be kept
subsided at the back of one’s mind. His poetry, no wonder, became the truly
representative of the post-War outlook on life and cosmos. Larkin’s tirade against the
metanarratives of modernism is one form of Postmodernism that emerged in the 1950’s.
Donald Davie
Another “Movement” poet, Donald Davie (b. 1922), came out with his own brand of
“commonality” (if realism has historically an old ring), quite different from Larkin’s. He
lays a good deal of emphasis on “unbanity,” which Larkin rather repudiated. Daviewants
reality to appear in his work, not “in some new form,” but in its most familiar form, its
morally guaranteed form—in fact, as “moral commonplace.” However, as Calvin
Bendient has observed, “But the truth is that reality does not appear in his work at all.
Seen from ‘the center,’ reality falls into the blind spot in the middle of the eye. No longer
Appearance, it becomes a storehouse of signs, of which the meanings are moral
abstractions.” Davie has a very pronounced, as well as announced, polemical “urbane”
poetic programme, very much like (his most admired) the Augustans. As he argues,
linguistic urbanity lies in “the perfection of a common language.” Using Arnold’s
phrase,Davie insists, that the object of urbanity is to voice “the tone and spirit of the
center.” No wonder that he wrote his critical book Purity of Diction in English
Verse (1952).
Davie’s attempt, therefore, is to have a style as transparent as water, but also as
pure. Decidedly, to achieve that goal a lot of “ore” of reality will have to be removed from
the pure metal, and so Davie does. Note, for instance, the following, from
“TunstallForest”:
...the tense
Stillness did not come,
The deer did not, although they fed
Perhaps nearby that day,
The liquid eye and elegant head
No more than a mile away.

Some other notable poems of Davieinclude “The Cypress Avenue,” “After an

Accident.” A critical book, Articulate Energy,pleads for a “story sense” in poetry, which
again is an Arnoldian emphasis. An interesting poem of Davie (recalling Joyce and
Thomas) is “Portrait of the Artist as a Farmyard Fowl,” where the monologue proceeds
on such a pace as the following:
A conscious carriage must become a strut;
Fastidiousness can only stalk
And seem at last not even tasteful but
A ruffled hen too apt to squawk.

Davie’s notable works include Six Epistles to Eva Hesse (1970), The Forests of
Lithuania (1959), A Winter Talent (1957) andEvents and Wisdoms (1964): while some
more notable poems include “Creon Mouse,” “North Dublin,” “Cherry Ripe,” “A Meeting
of Cultures,” “New York in August,” “In California,” “The Prolific Spell,” “Viper Man,”
etc. His attempt always remained to sing and to keep his song lean, devoid of all history
and mythology because that was the “character” of the post-War era. But there is, for
sure, an integrity in his leanness which, the more one reads his poetry, the more one
learns to admire. His work finally, slowly and steadily, that is, has become broader, but
without sacrificing its innate purity.
Robert Conquest and D.J. Enright
Still another of the group of poets covered under the term “Movement” is Robert
Conquest (b. 1917), whose poetry is largely devoted to the depiction of landscape; of
course, with man, as in Wordsworth, as an integral part of nature. The subject-matter,
in the true spirit of the “Movement,” remains reality, that is, the commonplace, but his
approach is rather intellectual. Some of his notable verse appears in his volumes
entitled Poems(1955), Between Mars and Venus (1962), andArias for a Love
Opera (1969). One more of the core group, so to say, of the “Movement,” is J.D. Enright
(b. 1920), who is known, not so much by his own poems as by his edited work, Poets of
the 50‘s (1955). His own poems are included in his Language Hyena(1953), Some Men
are Brothers (1960), andThe Old Adam (1965). His poetry has for its subject the
individual man, just as in Larkin, in all his conditions, treating his suffering with
sympathy, also with indignation. But he always upholds individual dignity, reiterates
strong faith in it. His language, also like Larkin’s, is derived from colloquial speech,
stripped of all elaborations. His is a style marked by ironical disgust of hypocrisy and
cruelty.
Charles Tomlinson
A notable poet of the post-War period, perhaps the most considerable British poet,
is Charles Tomlinson (b. 1927). Like the other poets of the period he, too, is committed
to some sort of realism, the world of empirical realities. However, each of these poets
have their individual versions of reality. In Tomlinson’s case, he can be called a poet of
exteriority and its human correspondences. His outwardness, however, need not be
confused with superficiality. His principal theme, in his own words, is “the fineness of
relationships.” One can see something of Wordsworth in him, his wise passivity, his
reflections within the bounds of reality. The power of message and healing of his poetry
remains central in most of his compositions. Note, for instance, the following from “The
Gossamers”:
Autumn. A haze is gold
By definition. This one lit
The thread of gossamers
That webbed across it
Out of shadow and again
Through rocking spaces which the sun
Claimed in the leafage. Now
I saw for what they were
These glitterings in grass, on air,
Of certainties that ride and plot
The currents in their tenuous stride
And, as they flow, must touch
Each blade and, touching, know
Its green resistance. Undefined
The haze of autumn in the mind
Is gold, is glaze.

Clearly, mind is light, and like the light it is a wealth, but also like the wealth, it
makes wealth of objects that it reflects upon. His poetry consists of several volumes that
came out at different dates, namely, Relations and Contraries (1951), The
Necklace (1955), Seeing is Believing (1958), A Peopled Landscape(1962), American
Scenes (1966), The Way of the World (1969), Written on Water (1972),The Way In and
Other Poems (1974), The Flood (1981), The Return (1987), The Door m the Wall (1992)
and Jubilation (1995). In Tomlinson’s case, contemplation seems to be the fulfilment of
being, just as it does in the case of Wallace Stevens. Like the other poets of the
Movement Group, he, too, recalls us to the life of the moment conceived as an end in
itself. Here, the Movement gains the meaning of flux, reality that is marked by
movement, by change.
R.S. Thomas
A notable Welsh poet after Dylan Thomas is Ronald Stuart Thomas (b. 1913),
although not as well-known and established as his senior compatriot. His poetry is both
sensual as well as sensitive, which quickly engages both eye and emotion equally
intensely. Note, for instance, the following from “Ninetieth Birthday”:
And there at the top that old woman,
Born almost a century back
In that stone farm, awaits your coming;
Waits for the news of the lost village.
She thinks she knows, a place that exists
In her memory only.

One feels tempted to cite Calvin Bendient’s comment on the poem, which has a
charm of its own: “How direct, naked, human, and sociable this is. Has Thomas not
heard of ‘modern’ poetry and its difficulty? Has he no embarrassment before the
primary emotions? Never mind; nothing vital is missing from such a poem. Reading
Thomas one learns to endure the glare of emotion; one learns again a kind of
innocence.” Thomas, evidently, shares with the poets of the 1950’s their key emphases
on simple, clean, and clear diction; direct and straight syntax; no use of mythology or
tradition; no reliance on ambiguity or paradox.
Thomas has to his credit several volumes of poems, including The Stones of the
Field(1946), Not That He Brought Flowers (1969),Song at the Year’s
Turning (1955), The Bread of Truth, and Pieta (1966), Laboratories of the
Spirit (1975), The Echoes Return Show (1988),Counterpoint (1990) and Mass for Hard
Times(1992). His poetry is strongly marked as much by moral quality as by aesthetic.
The theme may be love or anger, his poem is invariably directed at an entire people.
There is, in that sense, something of Whitman in Thomas, without, of course, the
former’s bombastic optimism. He is rather hardened and narrowed Whitman, although
not without broad sympathy, especially for the peasants. Note, for instance, the
following:
I am the farmer, stripped of love
And thought and grace by the land’s hardness;
But what I am saying over the fields’
Desolate acres, rough with dew,
Is, Listen, listen, I am a man like you...

Some of the memorable poems of Thomas include “Green Categories,” “The Gap in
the Hedge,” “A Peasant,” “The Airy Tomb,” “Death of a Peasant,” “Portrait,”
“Absolution,” and “Walter Llywarch.” Writing about the repressed and marginalized
(peasants have been one such class) is in keeping with the philosophy of
Postmodernism.
THE NON-MOVEMENT POETS
Ted Hughes
Famous for his animal poetry, Ted Hughes (1930-1998) earned the reputation of
being the first English poet of the “will to live.” His choice of animals as the themes of
his poems is, of course, not without the reverse side of his choice. The reverse side is as
much of a disenchantment with the world of mankind as there is an enchantment with
the world of animal kind. He was highly influenced by the German philosopher,
Schopenhauer, the only one, he says, he “ever really read.” The philosopher in question
believed, “the whole and every individual bears the stamp of a forced condition.”
Ted Hughes can be appropriately said to be the poet of that condition, and in that role,
he is rather a hangman than a priest. Hughes once revealed, “My interest in animals
began when I began. My memory goes back pretty clearly to my third year, and by then I
had so many of the toy lead animals you could buy in shops that they went right round
our flat-topped fireplace fender, nose to tail....” Later, he had live experience with them
in the fields, feeling them crawling under the lining of his coat.
In his poetry, animals are presented, not as playthings, but as lords of life and death.
They assume the status of mythical gods. They are presented superior to men, with their
lack of self-consciousness, and sickness of the mind. They are found free from
inhibitions, hesitations, fears; and full of courage and concentration. With their focused
life, with all the innocence of man’s corruptions, they emerge, like Adam and Eve
in Paradise, in a state before the Fall. His very first volume of poems, The Hawk in the
Rain (1957), illustrated all these ideas, and made him famous as a poet. Note, how man
is placed below the animal in the hierarchy Hughes builds up in his poems:
I drown in the drumming ploughland. I drag up Heel after heel from the
swallowing of the earth’s mouth, From clay that clutches my each step to the
ankle With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk Effortlessly at height
hangs his still eye...
His other volumes of poems includeWodwo (1967), Crow (1970), Crow
Wakes(1971), Eat Crow (1972), Cave Birds (1975),Season
Songs (1976), Moortowm (1979), Wolf-watching (1989), Shakespeare and the Goddess
of Being (1992) - a prose work, Tales from Ovid (1997), and Birthday Letters(1998).
The last, published just a short while before his death, is a sequence of poems about his
bitter-sweet relations with his wife, Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963.
Although composed much earlier, he chose to make them public near his own end.
Tom Gunn
Although he had been included in the Movement authologies along with Larkin,
Tom Gunn (b. 1929) sharply departed from the group and took his individual course. He
had resolved rather early in his career to seek out the heroic in the experience of
nihilism. He writes about various forms of driving power which characterize our cities,
as also about self-destructive violence. No doubt, he views human existence as full of
pain and suffering, lovelessness and meaninglessness, but he still finds solace in the
tenderness of man’s essentially animal nature. His very first volume of poems,Fighting
Terms (1954), startled the readers. One notices in these poems his love and admiration
for a certain masculinity, a type of manly energy, which is rather aggressive. His
situations measure up to the existentialist or Sartrean dimensions. His other volumes of
poetry include The Sense of Movement (1957), My Sad
Captains (1961),Touch (1967), Moly (1971), Jack Straw’s Castle(1976), The Passages of
Joy (1982) and The Man With Night Sweats (1992). Those more sympathetic to him
have compared him, because of his logical and economical style, studded with startling
imagery, with John Donne. But there are others less sympathetic who find him often
committed to a kind of nihilistic glamour for which, it is alleged, he is not able to
convincingly apologise. The most unsympathetic of the better known critics is Vyor
Winters who observes that “as a rule, he has a dead ear, and the fact makes much of his
work either mechanical or lax in its movement.” Both Ted Hughes and Tom Gunn, by
glorifying animals or animal-energy in man, with sardonic humour spared for mankind,
reflect the Postmodernist inglorious conception of human nature.
Seamus Heaney
An Irish by birth, and acutely conscious of his country’s long history of hostility
towards England, Seamus Heaney (1939-2000) counted himself among the “colonials.”
But he was fully conscious of his divided inheritance: “I speak and write in English,” he
writes in an article (dated 1972), “but do no altogether share the preoccupations and
perspectives of an Englishman...and the English tradition is not ultimately home. I live
off another hump as well.” That other “hump,” we know, is no other but Ireland, or more
precisely the rural Ulster, which, like the Wessex of Thomas Hardy, occupies a central
place in his poetry. Heaney’s poetic volumes includeDeath of a Naturalist (1966), Door
into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), North(1975), Field
Work (1979), Preoccupations(1980), Station Island (I984), The Haw
Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991),Sweeney’s Flight (1992) and The Spirit
Level(1996). Heaney has been known as a peasant as well as a patriotic poet of Ireland.
He depicts both farm activities as well as the colonial imperial effects on his
countrymen. In a poem called “At a Potato Digging,” for instance, he writes:
Flint-white, purple, they lie scattered
like inflated pebbles. Native
to the black hutch of clay
where the halved seed hot and clothed
these knobbled and slit-eyed tubers seem
the petrified hearts of drills. Split
by the spade, they show white as cream.

Similarly, in “North,” he depicts, with a backward glance, the buried sorrows and
treasures of the Irish people as well as of their language, concluding with an advice:
‘Lie down
in the word-board, burrow
in the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.
Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.
Keep your eye clear
As the bleb of the icicle,
Trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.

Thus, poetry of the post-War, post-modern, or contemporary period, born out of the
aftermath of the war devastation caused to cities and psychies alike, remained rather
tame, compared to the highbrow modernist poetry. It deliberately chose to remain level,
everyday, matter of fact, narrow, and, like the poetry of Hardy and Frost, solid and
specific, serious and cynical. It contented itself with the micro rather than macro
narratives, minute rather than meta concerns, national rather than international scenes,
simple rather than difficult style, direct rather than indirect address.

Postmodern Drama (The New Theatre)

Drama of the post-war period shares, in some ways, the dominant spirit of the age we
have witnessed in novel and poetry from the 1950’s onward. One thing that seems
common to all the three is their concern with life at the elemental level—with life bare
and bony, wholly demystified and demythologized, and with questions raised at the
existential plane, and without any attempt to seek soothing escape or magic solution to
the problems of existence.
The central stance in all the literary forms seems to be to face the stark realities of
life, to take suffering as it comes, and to learn to accept the unheroic status man
seems to have been assigned in the absurd universe in which he is condemned to live.
Drama of the post-modern period brings a still sharper focus on all these aspects than
do its counterpart forms of poetry and novel. And to do that, drama of this period has
been more daring than the other two; it has been more innovative in technique, more
shocking in defying social and moral conventions.
John Osborne
 When John Osborne’s (1929-94) Look Back in Anger was opened at
the Royal CourtTheatre on May 8, 1956, it at once made an impression that a dramatic
revolution was afoot in England. The play was published in 1957. The early audiences
did, however, feel shocked, as well as its more sensitive critics, into deeper response.
The play shook the middle-class values of the “well-made play” founded by Ibsen and
practiced in Englandby Shaw and Galsworthy. The audiences saw in Osborne’s play a
new kind of drama which addressed “the issues of the day.” What was new about this
drama was neither its politics, nor its technique so much as its alarm in rancour,
language, and setting. The New Theatre ended the reign of country drawing-room
setting with its moral cant and its sherry. It introduced instead the provincial bed-sitter
with its abusive noises and its ironing-board. The conventional theatrical illusion of neat
and stratified society was replaced by dramatic scenes of untidy and antagonistic social
groups, grating upon one another’s nerves. There may not have been any change in the
social class of these characters, but there had, decidedly, come about a change in their
assumptions and conversations. Other plays by Osborne include Epitaph for George
Dillon(1957; pub. 1958), The Entertainer (1957),Luther (1961), Inadmissible
Evidence (1964),A Party for Me (1965), West of Suez (1971), A Sense of
Detachment (1972) and Watch It Come Down (1976). His autobiographies A Better
Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991), and a miscellany of reviews and
letters, Damn You, England(1994), too, make interesting reading.
Samuel Beckett
Although considered a foreign influence (because Waiting for
Godot reached Englandvia France), Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was, in fact, the real
pioneer of the New Theatre in Europe, including England. His much more radical drama
than Osborne’s had been launched quite a few years earlier than Osborne’s. His Waiting
for Godot was staged in Paris in 1953, and then in London (at the small Arts Theatre) in
1955, and had created sensations all over Europe, which must have influenced the
composition of Osborne’s play as weli. Beckett was an Irish by birth, but from 1937
onward permanently resided inParis, wrote his drama as well as fiction in French, only
later to be translated in English. Earlier, he had worked with his fellow Irish writer
James Joyce and his Parisian circle, becoming a part of the polyglot and polyphonic
world of literary innovation. Beckett’s plays include, besides Waiting for
Godot (1955), Endgame (1957), Krapp’s Last Tape (1960), and Happy days (1962).
HisCome and Go (1967) is a stark ‘dramaticale’ with three female characters and a text
of 121 words. Then there is the even more minimal Breath (1969), a 30 second play
consisting only of a pile of rubbish, a breath, and a cry. There is also a play called Not
I(1973), a brief, fragmented, disembodied monologue by an actor of indeterminate sex
of whom only the ‘Mouth’ is illuminated. All these plays are revolutionary in different
ways.
Beckett’s interest in the functioning and malfunctioning of the human mind,
reflected by gaps, jumps, and lurches, remains at the centre of his fiction as well as
drama. We see in his plays an overlapping of minds, ideas, images and phrases. We see
voices both interrupting and inheriting trains of thought begun elsewhere or nowhere.
We also see separated consciousnesses both impeding and impressing themselves on
one another. Beckett’s dialogue, for which his Waiting for Godot is especially
remarkable, remains the most energetic. It is densely woven but equally supple. His
settings are bare, just as his language is bald. In Waiting for Godot,for instance, there is
only a country road and a tree, both, in fact, incomplete even as road and tree. The tree
gets only four leaves in the second act. In the first, it remains without leaves. As for
characters, there are only two pairs who occupy the stage by turns all through the play.
The dialogue also runs into repetitive phrases and sentences and subjects leading to no
conclusions or results. Beckett uses blindness and other disadvantages, as he does in
both Endgameand Waiting for Godot, suggesting that one kind of deprivation may
sharpen the other organs of perception in a character.
Beckett’s concept of time in his plays is the most radical of his innovations. He
presents the time present as broken, inconsistent and inconsequential. He also allows
within that time present the intrusion of time past. It is, of course, never a flashback.
Rather, it is oppressively enriching in the private histories of characters as well as in the
general perception of life. He also shares with his mentor, Proust, an antipathy to
literature that describes. Hence there are no descriptions in his plays. As Beckett
affirms, again echoing the mentor, “there is no escape from yesterday because yesterday
has deformed us, or been deformed by us.” As Sanders remarks, Beckett’s “dramatic
repetitions and iterations, his persistent echoes and footfalls, emerge not from a
negative view of human existence, but from an acceptance of ’dull inviolability’ as a
positive, if minimally progressive, force. As his inviolable and unsentimental Krapp also
seems to have discovered, a path forward lay in exploring the resonances of the
circumambient darkness.” Thus, Beckett remains the most radical among the
Postmodernist playwrights in England, in fact, in the entire Europe.
While Beckett remained in popular perception a ‘foreign’ influence, Osborne
emerged as a rebel within Britain’s own established tradition. Also, while Beckett
remained a representative of French symbolic and philosophically-based drama.
Osborne responded to the native social and moral issues of his time, and without the
burden of philosophy and symbolism. HisLook Back in Anger came to be considered an
epoch-making play. It became the launcher of the movement called “Angry Young Men.”
The play, of course, presented the noisiest of the lot of “angries.” Jimmy Porter, the
play’s hero, is a young man of 25, presented as “a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and
cheerful malice, of tenderness and freebooting; restless, importunate, full of pride, a
combination which alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike.” Porter is not an
idealist. He is said to be “born out of his time.” He is described as a revolutionary
without a revolution, or a rebel without a cause. He loudly and bitterly protests against
the establishment values, against his wife’s middle-class ex-Indian army parents;
against his Member of Parliament brother-in-law; against bishops and church bells;
against Sunday newspapers, English music, and English literature including
Shakespeare, Eliot, and “Auntie Wordsworth.” He is a new type of protagonist, classless,
aimless, restless, although placed in a conventional social context.
Osborne’s Luther (1961), which too has for its title character an “angry young man,”
who makes a strong assertion of his identity when he says, “Here I stand; God help me; I
can do no more. Amen”; Inadmissible Evidence (1964), in which Osborne provides for a
location “where a dream takes place, a site of helplessness, of oppression and polemic.”
Osborne also wrote his autobiography, A Better Class of Person(1981), which is both
pungently observant and spiteful. His characters and their anger and rebellion seem to
have been an extension of his perception of himself. Thus, in a way, Beckett and
Osborne complemented each other: while the former innovated new technique, the
latter exploded conventional social norms.

POST-50’s PLAYWRIGHTS
John Arden
Among the post-50’s playwrights, John Arden (b. 1930) emerged in the 60’s as a
representative of the new generation of writers who were provocative, argumentative
and Anglo-Brechtian. These dramatists, namely Arden, Wesker, Pinter, Orton, and
Stoppard, were launched by theRoyal Court theatre in London.
Arden’s first play, Live Like Pigs (1958), presents the plight of gypsies, explores their
anti-social behaviour, and seems to suggest that “respectability” and its guardians, the
police, ultimately prove far more damaging to a society’s health than the unconventional
style of living of the gypsies. His most popular and punchy play, Serjeant Musgrave’s
Dance (1959) deals with an anti-militaristic theme, using a dramatic combination of
Brechtian exposition and music-hall routines of dance, song, and monologue. His other
plays include Left-Handed Liberty (1965), The Hero Rises Up(1968), and The Island of
the Mighty (1972). In his later plays, Arden’s rigorous scepticism seems to have
mellowed.
Arnold Wesker
Another playwright of the period is Arnold Wesker (b. 1932), whose first play,Chips
with Everything, was acted at the Royal Court in 1962. It is largely based on the
playwright’s own experience in Royal Airforce Service. His other plays include The
Kitchen (1959), in which both camp and kitchen are used as metaphors for an unfair and
stratified society (class-based), in which the disadvantaged, like drop-outs, have to fend
for themselves. And when it comes to doing that, they have nothing to fall back upon but
their proletarian vigour and innate emotional richness; and his famous trilogy—Chicken
Soup and Barley (1958), Roots (1959),I’m Talking About Jerusalem (1960), which
brings to fore his sympathy for the working-class, his socialism, his inclination for the
Jewish cause, etc. His effort to combine art with socialist agenda in setting up “Centre
42” did not succeed, leaving him rather disheartented.
Harold Pinter
A more popular dramatist who emerged during the period was Harold Pinter (b.
1930), who shared with Wesker his Jewish background, but who was an actor by
profession rather than an activist like Wesker. Unlike Wesker, he does not directly
address the political issues of the time in his plays. “They open up instead,” as Sanders
remarks, “a world of seeming inconsequentiality, tangential communication, dislocated
relationships, and undefined threats.” Pinter started as dramatist with a bang,
producing three plays in the same year - The Room, The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday
Party - in 1957. The last of these three has been a favourite of the readers. Then came
out in 1959 his The Caretaker, which was performed the following year. His plays show
an influence of Beckett as well as Kafka. They also show, in their dialogue, the influence
of Eliot. The Birthday Party remains his most polyphonic, in which incongruous cliches
intrude quite often.
One notices a definite change in Pinter’s art with the performance of his The
Homecoming (1964) at the Royal Shakespeare company. It is generally taken as a
turning point in his career. Rather indefinite and unspecific in situations and characters,
it dramatizes several sides of social tensions woven in the lives of a large family
(presumably Jewish). The play leaves behind an impression of sourness and negativity.
It was followed by Old Times(1971), No Man’s Land (1975), and Betrayal(1978), all
marking an extension in themes handled in The Homecoming. As John Russell Brown
sums up, “the new playwright is then the portrayer of character, new in the shortness of
his plays, their small casts and the replacement of conventional plot development by
strange and often menacing events. His plays are half character studies and half fantasy
or imitation of parts of an early Hitchcock film.”
Joe Orton
Another dramatist of the post-War era, less known in India than Pinter, or Osborne,
or Beckett, was Joe Orton (1933-1967), whose dramatized protest against state
oppression is more direct and powerful than in Pinter. A character in his
play Loot (1966), named Inspector Truscott, underlines the dramatist’s attitude to the
subject of state repression of common citizens: “If I ever hear you accuse the police of
using violence on a prisoner in custody again, I’ll take you down to the station and beat
the eyes out of your head.” Orton earned notoriety because of his active and
promiscuous homosexuality (his predecessor, we know, was Oscar Wilde) at a time
when it was still a criminal offence in England. Orton wrote four major comedies,
besides Loot, namely,Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1964), The Ruffian on the
Stair (1967), The Erpingham Camp(1967), and What the Butler Saw (1969), all
calculated to outrage. His comedies attempted to expose the folly of the fool, the
hypocrisy of the hypocrite, the incoherence of the incoherents. They also attempted
beyond this task to upset the status-quo. As for the form of comedy, he does not just
exploit the traditional forms, but also transforms them into something dangerously
different.
Tom Stoppard
In comparison to Orton’s explosive and untidy comedy, the comedy of Tom
Stoppard (b. 1937), a Czechoslovakian by birth, is implosive and tidy. His plays are
meticulously designed, which logically find their endings in their beginnings. The play
that has made him famous (partly because of the title derived from
Shakespeare’s Hamlet)is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead(1967). According to
the play’s stage direction, the play opens with “two ELIZABETHANS passing the time in
a place without any visible character.” The play, as a matter of fact, is a re-reading
of Hamlet from the viewpoints of Einsteinian laws, Eliotic negatives, and Beckettian
principles. Everything is presented relatively. Perspective changes, time is fragmented,
the Prince is marginalized, or decentred. The two coin-spinning attendant lords are
made to take on the weight of a tragedy which is both beyond their comprehension as
well as above their status. Although on surface it is a farcical comedy, it carries beneath
the surface a lurking sense of doom or death, which the audiences are never allowed to
forget. The play’s contemporary relevance lies in the present-day consciousness of the
two leading characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who in their Elizabethan
costumes, language, and setting, feel out of place, with their twentieth-century
awareness of convergence, concurrence, and consequence: “Wheels have been set in
motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is
dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary
it’ll just be a shambles.” The message is that life may look arbitrary, there is logic in life
which is inescapable, just as the pattern of Shakespeare’s play determines that
Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s strutting and fretting must come to an end with death,
just as human life on earth does.
Stoppard’s other plays include The Real Inspector Hound (1968), which is a parody
of an English detective story; Jumpers (1972), which ridicules intellectual gymnastics, in
which intellectuals do jumping exercises, raising unstable philosophic
structures;Travesties (1974), which is considered his most witty and inventive play, and
includes the cast of historical figures such as Joyce, Lenin, Tristan, Tzara, etc.; Every
Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), which is on a direct political theme;
and Arcadia (1994), in which locations alternate between Byron’s England and
Stoppard’s England, attempting a fusion of complementary oppositions. This is
considered Stoppard’s most allusive and subtle play.
Edward Bond
Still another notable playwright of the period is Edward Bond (b. 1934), who has
faithfully followed the didactic German tradition, although he later disclaimed that he
was working as a sort of disciple of Brecht. His point of departure, in his view, was to
necessarily “disturb an audience emotionally” through various means to make what he
called the “aggro-effect” more complete. His early plays include The Pope’s
Wedding (1962) and Saved (1965), both of which deal with the inherited lexical and
emotional deficiencies of the working class life. This life, he believes, perforce finds
expression in violence. His analysis is that violence is a logical consequence of the
brutalization of the working class. And brutalization, in his view, results from the
uncaring treatment meted out to them by the stratified, industrial society. In his
subsequent plays, Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968), Lear (1971), Bingo (1974),
andThe Fool (1976), he presents anger and violence not merely as means of self-
expression but also as instruments of social change. In his Lear, he drastically changes
the story of Shakespeare’s play, making it a twentieth century tale of violence and
repression, where love always remains something that might-have-been.

Caryl Churchill
Very much like Bond, Caryl Churchill (b. 1938) has been greatly opposed to a social
system based on exploitation. She, however, relates exploitation and repression to the
subjection of women. In her view, there is a direct correspondence between the
traditional power of the capitalists and the subjection of women. She always presents
her women characters as victims of a culture which regards them as mere commodities,
or which has imposed conditions of inequality on them, brought up to subject to the
masculine social conventions. Her plays include Owners (1972), which draws parallel
between colonial and sexual oppression;Cloud Nine (1979), which creates farce through
the shifts of gender and racial roles;Top Girls (1982), which exposes the superficial
nature of women’s liberation (so-called) in the 1980’s. Her later work includesSerious
Money (1987), which is topical and apocalyptic presenting the effects of stock-market
deregulation in the city of London;Mad Forest: A Play from Romania (1990), which
makes a searching study of competing truths and half truths; and the two inter-related
short plays, Blue Heart (1997), the first of which carries the title of Heart’s Desire, the
second of Blue Kettle, which focus on lexical problems and failure of communication.
We need to include here, as a sort of late entry, Robert Oxton Bolt (b. 1924) whose A
Man For All Seasons (1960), based on Thomas More’s life, deals with power politics and
the clash of ambitions. His first play, Flowering Cherry (1957), deals with self-deception
striving to disguise failure.

POST-MODERN CRITICISM

Until the time of the modernist period of English literature, literary criticism was a
“literary” activity, with leading (call them policy) documents written by the leaders of
the literary movements. We know how from Dryden and Pope and Johnson to
Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats to Arnold and Rossetti and Swinburne to Eliot
and Auden and Spender, English poetics was theorised by the leading English poets.
But in the post-modern period there is no such thing as literary theory, nor any of the
dominant theoretic documents of today’s activity of criticism has come from any man-
of-letters. It is mostly the philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists,
linguists, etc., who have propounded all kinds of dismantling orders, which are being
applied, by their followers, in the field of literature. Today, the activity called “theory,” is
related to, not any particular subject, but to all subjects. No wonder the literary criticism
today has become cultural studies, feminism, postcolonialism, etc., which use literary
texts for making political, sociological, or psychological case studies. As Jonathan Culler
has attempted to explain the nature of THEORY:

Theory in literary studies is not an account of the nature of literature or

methods for its study.... It is a body of thinking and writing whose limits are
exceedingly hard to define....a new kind of writing has developed which is
neither the evaluation of the relative merits of literary productions, nor
intellectual history, nor moral philosophy, nor social prophesy, but all of
these mingled together in a new genre. The most convenient designation of
this miscellaneous genre is simply the nickname theory, which has come to
 designate works that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in
fields other than those to which they apparently belong. This is the simplest
explanation of what makes something count as theory. Works regarded as
theory have effects beyond their original field.
Thus, the main effect of theory is disputing all that we have been considering
“common sense.” It questions all the concepts and beliefs we have held about literature,
author, reader, text, meaning, etc. It questions as well the non-literary concepts of
philosophy, sociology, linguistics, etc. Theory challenges the conception of the author’s
intention, that the meaning of work or speaker is what he “had in mind.” It also
challenges that literature is a representation of “life”, whose truth is outside of itself, in
history, or biography, etc. It further challenges the very notion of reality as something
present at a given moment. In this all-round critique of common sense, theory insists
that all that passes in the name of natural or essential or universal is nothing but a
construction of social practices, a production of a certain discourse. Broadly, Culler
makes the following four points to sum up the activity called theory:
a. It is interdisciplinary, always deriving ideas or leaving effects outside an original
discipline.
b. It is analytical and speculative, always working out what is involved or implied in
a text, or language, or meaning, or subject, etc.
c. It is a critique of common sense, always questioning whatever is considered a
given or natural or essential or universal.
d. It is thinking about thought, always enquiring into categories and concepts we
use in making sense of things, such as what is woman or man or meaning or text,
etc. (Culler, p. 15)
Critics like Terry Eagleton (a well known British Marxist critic) may find in theory
an expression of democratic impulse, and a liberation “from the stranglehold of a
civilized sensibility,” the fact of the matter is that it has seriously subverted the value of
literature in various ways, such as the following:
1. It has made criticism a jargon-ridden writing, inaccessible to the common
reader. As such, it is anti-democratic.
2. It has reduced literature to the status of a speech, any speech, political,
pornographic, stray writing, etc. As such, it deprives art and literature of their
humane and ennobling effect.
3. It has reduced literary criticism to dividing people into regions, races,
tribes, cultures, colonizers, colonized, etc. As such, it is divisive, not unifying.
4. It has also made criticism a negative activity, which is meant to trace
faultlines, lapses, absences, what the text does not say or has failed to say.
Thus, theory has given birth to a set of approaches in criticism, which transforms
the activity of understanding, appreciating, and evaluating a literary work into (largely)
an activity of self-reflection. It tends to marginalize artists and their art-works.
 THEORY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

Reading through the vast variety of contemporary critical theories and textual
interpretations under the various brand names, such as structuralism and post-
structuralism, deconstruction and new historicism, cultural studies and feminism,
minority discourse and post-colonialism, one is left wondering where the discipline of
literary criticism has arrived in our time. The alien idioms one encounters, the gigantic
critical apparatuses one confronts, the mind-boggling systems one has to comprehend,
all quickly combine to create a climate utterly discomforting, making one unstable even
for a ‘temporary stay against confusion.’
Terrorized by the teasing games of the dreadful discourses, the common reader
instinctively terminates his journey through the dense forestry and returns to his own
common-sense reading of the literary works. Of course, after his abortive journey
through the verbal forest he does not return the same man; he comes back sadder’ but
not wiser. What leaves him completely nonplussed are the oracular declarations, such as
the ‘death of God’, the ‘death of the author’, the ‘death of the subject’, etc. Mortally
afraid of encountering more of such declarations, he decides never to seek any critical
company for his future journeys into the ‘cities of words.’

In such a situation it has become imperative for all those who value literature and
literary criticism as instruments of education, essential for preserving and promoting
the humanity of human societies, to understand and analyse the factors responsible for
effecting this unprecedented change in the nature of literary criticism in our time. Until
the end of the nineteenth century literary criticism had remained committed to
elucidating for the common reader the social and moral significance of literary works,
and was always written in a literary style as readable as literature itself. Note, for
example, the following from S.T. Coleridge:
The characters of the dramatis personae, like those in real life, are to be
inferred by the reader—they are not told to him. And it is well worth
remarking that Shakespeare’s characters, like those in real life, are very
commonly misunderstood, and almost always understood by different
persons in different ways. The causes are the same in either case. If you take
only what the friends of the character say, you may be deceived, and still
more so, if that which his enemies say; nay, even the character himself sees
himself through the medium of his character, and not exactly as he is. Take
all together, not omitting a shrewd hint from the clown or the fool, and
perhaps your impression will be right; and you may know whether you have
in fact discovered the poet’s own idea, by all the speeches receiving light
from it, and attesting its reality by reflecting it.
The very first thing one notices here is the use of an idiom readily available to the
common reader. One also notices that the analogy used for explaining the critical
method is taken from everyday human dealings, which implies that literature is a
representation of life. One notices, too, how in a very simple manner the issue of the
author’s intention has been explained, which makes clear that it is available within the
text itself, and that one does not need to look for it anywhere else, including the author
as a historical personage.
A drastic change in the nature of criticism began to become noticeable in the early
years of the twentieth century. Those who brought about this change include I.A.
Richards, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and the New Critics. With them literary criticism
changed from art to science. Perhaps it had to change with the increasing influence of
science in the modern age. As W.T. Stace has observed, ‘The positive stage is the stage of
science which, when fully attained, abolishes both metaphysics and theology. In the
golden age of the future which the triumph of science is to usher in, nothing will be
considered knowledge unless it is science.’ Read, for example, the following from Ezra
Pound: ‘The Proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of
contemporary biologists, that is, careful first-hand examination of the matter, and
continual COMPARISON of one “slide” or specimen with another.” Thus was adopted by
Pound, as well as by those ‘new’ poets and critics who faithfully followed the dictates of
this poet’s poet and the critic’s critic, the method of science in poetry and criticism. A
similar thrust in the direction of science was given by I.A. Richards, who in his Science
and Poetry pleaded, once again, for the scientific method of analyzing the working of
the poem as well as the poet’s mind. Note, for example, the following:
To understand what an interest is we should picture the mind as a system of
very delicately poised balances, a system which so long as we are in health is
constantly growing. Every situation we come into disturbs some of these
balances to some degree. The ways in which they swing back to a new
equipoise are the impulses with which we respond to the situation. And the
chief balances in the system are our chief interests. Suppose that we carry a
magnetic compass about in the neighbourhood of power magnets....
Suppose that instead of a single compass we carry an arrangement of many
magnetic needles, large and small, swing so that they influence one
another...
The mind is not unlike such a system if we imagine it to be incredibly
complex. The needles are our interests....
Thus, from Pound’s scientific ‘method’ we move to Richard’s scientific ‘system.’ In
the convention of criticism from Aristotle toArnold, there used to be approaches to
literature based on the social and ethical goals of human society. They considered
literature as an instrument of education. Now with the High Modernists it got reduced
to the status of the material productions of science and industry. The most influential of
these high priests of scientism, T.S. Eliot, carried this task with greater force than even
Pound and Richards. Note, for instance, the following:
There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to
the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to
approach the condition of science. I shall, therefore, invite you to consider,
as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely
filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and
sulphur dioxide.
 Here the poet’s mind becomes the gas chamber in which various
experiences combine like different chemicals to form a new compound. The
chemical reaction is used to explain the process of composition of a poem or
any other literary text. No doubt, this conversion of literary criticism into a
study of systems and structures, principles and processes, involved in the
making of literature, is effected under the express influence of science. In
the same vein, the New Critics, namely John Crowe
Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, W.K. Wimsatt, Monroe Beardsley, and William
Emerson, viewed a poem as a structure of words, reducing the function of
criticism to explicating the functioning of various verbal devices such as
metaphor, ambiguity, paradox, irony, image, etc., in the working of the
structure called poem. In this New Critical effort, while literature changed
from being one of the beautiful arts into one of the functional sciences,
literary criticism changed from being an educational source into a scientific
method.
In its attempt to introduce scientism in literature and literary criticism, the
modernist criticism in the early twentieth century also made the author invisible, for
like the filament of platinum he does not go into the compound called poem; he just
stays behind. It also made the business of criticism a specialist’s job. It became
inaccessible to the common reader who would not have the benefit of knowing various
sciences and their principles and processes, systems and structures. The very language
of literary criticism acquired a special ring, becoming far removed from the language of
everyday conversation. The macro commentaries of earlier criticism were replaced by
the micro explications of verbal devices used in the making of a poem. The writing called
criticism became arduous. W.B. Yeats, who called himself one ‘the last romantics’, soon
realized this arduousness of modern poetry and of modern criticism. In a letter to
Dorothy Wellesley, he separated himself from the high modernists:
The difficult work which is being written everywhere now has the substance
of philosophy and is a delight to the poet with his professional pattern; but
it is not your road or mine & ours is the main road, the road of naturalness
and swiftness and we have thirty centuries upon our side. We alone can
think like a wise man, yet express ourselves like the common people. These
new men are goldsmiths working with a glass screwed into one eye, whereas
we stride ahead of the crowd, its swordsmen, its jugglers, looking to right
and left. ‘To right and left’ by which I mean what we need like Milton,
Shakespeare, Shelley, vast sentiments, generalizations supported by
tradition.
Yeats is obviously drawing a contrast between the popular literary writers and the
writers as specialist. We know how the writings of Eliot and Pound, Joyce and Woolf,
became special readings, based as they were on philosophies and theories drawn from
extra-literary sources. We also know how the critical writings of the New Critics
acquired the nature of scientific investigations, seeking relations between the parts and
the whole, the components and the structure, modelled on the functioning of a chemical
process or biological system. Thus, literary criticism became one of the specialities in the
corporation of knowledge disciplines.
 The New Critics also changed the nature of literary criticism from a moral source of
life to an amoral tool of investigation. Wimsatt and Beardsley came out with their
famous (or notorious?) articles on ‘intentional fallacy’ and ‘affective fallacy’, with explicit
implication of disinfecting literary criticism of moral as well as social significance. Like
any physical or biological phenomenon, like any chemical or industrial process, a
literary work came to be viewed as only a product of words. Naturally, then, the nature
of literary criticism also became amoral, like any discipline of science, having nothing to
do beyond the functions of various parts, or the workings of various structures or
systems. While the ‘intentional fallacy’ took away the living voice of the author, the
‘affective fallacy’ took away the living response of the reader. Both reiterated the
scientific study of literature, restricting its activity to the explication of verbal devices,
their interrelational functions, and their functions in relation to the working of the
structure of which they are internal components.
The Modernists paved the way for the Post-Modernists, who carried further the
activity of making literary criticism a super-speciality, subjecting it to scientific
empiricism. While ‘invisibility’ of the author was pushed further to declare the ‘death of
the author’, the ‘intentional fallacy’ gave way to the ‘reader-oriented theories’. The
language of the super-speciality made literary criticism far, far removed from the access
of the common reader. Even those in the business of teaching literature were forced to
choose their micro areas of specialization, for it was impossible for any individual
scholar to keep pace with the fast developing specialities in all the areas. In an era of
mass production ushered in by multinationals, literary theories could not have remained
otherwise. There came in the literary market numerous brand products of the Post-
Modern multinationals. Read, for example, the following from Roland Barthes to have a
feel of the special language evolved by one such brand:
In an author’s lexicon, will there not always be a word-as-mana, a word
whose ardent, complex, ineffable, a somehow sacred signification gives the
illusion that by this word one might answer for everything? Such a word is
neither eccentric nor central; it is motionless and carried, floating,
neverpigeonholed, always atopic (escaping any topic), at once remainder
and supplement, a signifier taking up the place of every signified. The word
has gradually appeared in his work; at first it was masked by the instance of
Truth (that of history), then by that of validity (that of systems and
structures); now it blossoms, it flourishes, this word-as-mana is the work
‘body.’
One can add to this sample a small list of words to show how incomprehensible the
language of criticism has become in our time. We frequently come across today in the
writings of the Post-Modernist critics words such as dialogic, discourse, enthymeme,
exotopy, heteroglossia; agonaporia, difference, deconstruction, grammatology, logo-
centrism, phallogocentrism; genotext, phenotext, multivalent, slippage, dispositif,
episteme; androcentric, androgyny, biocriticism, biologism, gynocritic, pornoglossia,
sexism; actualization, cratylism, idiolect, lang, parole, paradigm, diaspora; fetishism,
flaneur, homology, ideologeme, etc., etc. Specialism forces the scholars to evolve their
special languages known only to those who have acquired the required efficiency in the
super speciality. The special voices cannot co-exist in any common space. They must
perforce remain alien to each other, each becoming a code communication, leaving no
scope for general conversation.
Another bane of scientific spirit, notwithstanding its various virtues, is that,
ultimately, it leads to the dehumanization of the human material. One could trace the
course of scientific spirit from its early demystification of the universe to later
despiritualization of society to further mechanization of human life to, finally,
dehumanization of mankind. Literature and literary criticism have always opposed
science on this very ground, fighting all along the fast increasing forces of science and
technology, industry and commerce. They have always stood for the preservation and
promotion of humanism across national boundaries, racial reservations, or cultural
constraints. It is a sad phenomenon today that the Post-Modernist critical approaches
have adopted the scientific spirit of enquiry, making a casualty of the human concerns to
which literature and literary criticism have always been closely related. The manner in
which some of the brand products of Post-Modernism have chosen to champion the
cultural, ethnic, or genderic causes, has in fact made the remedy worse than the disease.
In the name of voicing the concerns of the hitherto repressed, colonized, marginalized,
etc., discourses have been developed based solely on the differentiating features of
‘cultural’, ‘ethnic’ or ‘genderic’ life, promoting a new form of tribalism. In these
discourses, mankind is viewed as an aggregation of cultural islands, suspicious of each
other, clashing on the ‘darkling plain’, accusing each other of having encroached upon
their special rights. One is reminded of Plato’s caves inhabited by tribes with horizons of
the mind measuring the narrow holes of their respective caves, utterly unable to
comprehend the open universe.
If literature and literary criticism are to perform their destined and true function,
then they will have to return to the original path of the humanities, leaving the adopted
path of sciences (including social sciences) which have deflected them from their prime
duty to mankind. Today, what have become more important for criticism are, not the
human concerns, but the purely non-human enquiries into the nature of things—a study
of principles and processes, systems and structures. As for human concerns, they are
conceived, if at all, only in terms of narrow, sectarian rights of groups divided by all
sorts of ‘spaces.’ If we look at the titles of leading books and articles in the field of
criticism today, the nature it has acquired, adopted, and imbibed becomes quite clear.
The direction of its drift with the dominant current of science and technology becomes
quite apparent. Here is a sample list of some of the titles from the vast verbal forest that
has grown over the years. The Semiotic Challenge (Roland Barthes), Of
Grammatology (Jacques Derrida), Writing and Difference (Derrida), The Theory of
Semiotics (Umberto Eco), The Archaeology of Knowledge (Michael Foucault), What is
an Author? (Foucault), Logic and Conversation(H.P. Grice), Closing Statement:
Linguistics and Poetics (Roman Jakobson), A Theory of Literary Production (Pierre
Macherey), The System and the Speaking Subject (Julia Kristeva), The Theory
of Reading (David Morse), Objectivity, Relativism and Truth(Richard Rorty), The
Theory of Reading(Frank Gloversmity), Meaning and Truth in the Arts (John Harpers),
etc., etc. This list shows how criticism in our time has turned heavily theoretical and,
finally, philosophical, focusing on either theorizing about how meaning is produced, or
enquiring into the meaning of meaning, working of language, or the behaviour of words.
In sum, the nature of criticism has acquired the character of science in all respects,
turning away from the humanities, and has become a philosophico-scientific discipline
called theory, which mixes literature with non-literary writings and the pseudo-literary
films or journalism, and confines itself to the study of sociological behaviour of literary
texts, their political overtones, their psychological suggestions, their anthropological
patterns, their historical narrations, their linguistic structures, etc. The Post-Modernist
criticism has done to literature what science had done to life; it has demystified its
creation, despiritualized its contents, and dehumanized its interpretation.
Criticism today has been taken over by the disciplines of philosophy and psychology,
sociology and anthropology, entirely changing the parameters of reading literary works.
We no longer look for aesthetic or moral grounds for the appreciation of an art work. We
look for the sub-texts and sub-structures, for faultlines and fictographs, using the
apparatus borrowed from one of the disciplines just mentioned. The reason why this has
happened is convincingly stated by Northrop Frye in the following:
It is clear that the absence of systematic criticism has created a power
vacuum, and all the neighbouring disciplines have moved in hence the
prominence of Archimedes fallacy...the notion that if we plant our feet
solidly enough in Christian or democratic or Marxist values we shall be able
to lift the whole of criticism at once with a dialectic crowbar. But if the
varied interests of critics could be related to a central expanding pattern of
systematic comprehension, this undertow would disappear, and they would
be seen as converging on criticism instead of running away from it.
Since Frye made this observation in 1957 much water has flown through
the Thames. The critical activity has changed beyond recognition. All aspects of a
literary work are talked about in the name of criticism except the aspect of its humanity.
What we have, in fact, is not literary criticism but only critical attitude drawn from
various disciplines that have claimed the vacancy the failure of criticism has created.
No doubt, the discussion of art, particularly literature, cannot confine itself to the
formal aspect of art considered in utter isolation. It must consider as well the
participation of the literary work in the human vision of the goal of social effort, “the
idea of complete and classless civilization. This idea of complete civilization is also the
implicit moral standard to which ethical criticism always refers, something very
different from any system of morals.’ Unfortunately, the current craze in criticism for
the idea of ‘pluralism’ and ‘amoralism’ has left the critical effort devoid of all moral and
humane concerns. Its ‘grand flourish of negativised rhetoric’, comprising such
impressive keywords as ‘discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentring,
indeterminacy, and antitotalization’, does hypnotise some intellectuals, but it leaves
highly dissatisfied the steady explorer of ultimate meanings in literature as well as life. If
pluralism means an assembly of mass individual or group opinions, if questioning
means challenging one and all who have attained any respectability in society, then one
might compare the Post-Modernist critical effort to a jungle of high-pitched voices
raised in closed corridors. The goal of criticism must remain, as Frye insists: ‘...the
ability to look at contemporary social values with the detachment of one who is able to
compare them in some degree with the infinite vision of possibilities presented by
culture. One who possesses such a standard of transvaluation is in a state of intellectual
freedom.’’
 The current critical effort refuses to decide upon any goal of literature or literary
criticism beyond the contingent. It is high time that resistance was put up to the
confusing critical cries of our time, paving the way for the restoration of the every-
abiding goal of literature and literary criticism.