LITMIR.BIZ

      Published by Good Press, 2021

       [email protected]

      EAN 4057664622556

Table of Contents

       INTRODUCTORY

       CHAPTER I

       CHAPTER II

       CHAPTER III

       CHAPTER IV

       INDEX

INTRODUCTORY

       Table of Contents

      Asked by a kindly publisher to add one more to the Jubilee volumes which commemorate the sixtieth year of the Queen's reign, I am pleased at the opportunity thus afforded me of gathering up a few impressions of pleasant reading hours. "Every age," says Emerson, "must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this." It is true, of course, and as a result the popular favourite of to-day is well-nigh forgotten to-morrow. In reading the critical journals of thirty years ago it is made quite clear that they contain few judgments which would be sustained by a consensus of critical opinion to-day. Whether time will deal as hardly with the critical judgments of to-day we may not live to see. I have no ambition to put this book to a personal test. So far as it has any worth at all it is meant to be bibliographical and not critical. It aspires to furnish the young student, in handy form, with as large a number of facts about books as can be concentrated in so small a volume. That this has been done under the guise of a consecutive narrative, and not in the form of a dictionary, is merely for the convenience of the writer.

      I have endeavoured to say as little as possible about living poets and novelists. With the historians and critics the matter is of less importance. To say that Mr Samuel Rawson Gardiner has written a useful history, or that Professor David Masson's "Life of Milton" is a valuable contribution to biographical literature, will excite no antagonism. But to attempt to assign Mr W. B. Yeats a place among the poets, or "Mark Rutherford" a position among the prose writers of the day, is to trespass upon ground which it is wiser to leave to the critics who write in the literary journals from week to week. It was not possible to ignore all living writers. I have ignored as many as I dared.

      It was my intention at first to devote a chapter to Sixty Years of American Literature. But for that task an Englishman who has paid but one short visit to the United States has no qualification. He can write of American literature only as seen through English eyes. That is to see much of it, it is true. Few Americans realise the enormous influence which the literature of their own land has had upon this country. Probably the most read poet in England during the sixty years has been Longfellow. Probably the most read novel has been "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Among people who claim to be distinctly literary Hawthorne has been all but the favourite novelist, Washington Irving not the least popular of essayists, and Emerson the most invigorating moral influence. In my youth "The Wide, Wide World" and "Queechy" were in everybody's hands; as the stories of Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Frank Stockton, Henry James, and Mary Wilkins are to-day. Apart from Dickens, nearly all our laughter has come from Mark Twain and Artemus Ward.

      In history, we in England have read Prescott and Motley; in poetry we have read Walt Whitman, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, and, above all, James Russell Lowell, who endeared himself to us alike as a poet, a critic, and in his own person when he represented the United States at the Court of St James's. Lastly I recall the delight with which as a boy I read the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," and the joy with which as a man I visited the author, Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his pleasant study in Beacon Street, Boston. These and many other writers have made America and the Americans very dear to Englishmen, and this in spite of much wild and foolish talk in the journals of the two countries.

      I have to thank Mr William Mackenzie, the well-known publisher of Glasgow, for kindly letting me draw upon some articles which I wrote for his "National Cyclopædia" ten years ago, and upon the literary section, which he and his editor, Mr John Brabner, permitted me to contribute at that time to a book entitled "The Victorian Empire." I have also to thank my friends, Dr Robertson Nicoll and Mr L. F. Austin, for kindly reading my proof-sheets, Mr Edward Clodd for valuable suggestions, and Mr Sydney Webb, a friend of old student days, for reading the chapter which treats briefly of sociology and economics.

      A compilation of this kind can scarcely hope to escape the defects of most such enterprises—errors both of date and of fact. I shall be glad to receive corrections for the next edition.

      Clement K. Shorter.

      September 27, 1897.

CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

      The Poets

      When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, most of the great poets who had been inspired by the French Revolutionary epoch were dead. Keats had died in Rome in 1821, Shelley was drowned in the Gulf of Spezzia in 1822, Byron died at Missolonghi in 1824, Scott at Abbotsford in 1832, and Coleridge at Highgate in 1834. Southey was Poet Laureate, although Wordsworth held a paramount place, recognised on all hands as the greatest poet of the day.

      The gulf which separates the Southey 1774-1843 of the laureateship from the Southey who presents himself to our judgment to-day is almost impossible to bridge over. Southey, as the average bookman thinks of him now, is the author of a "Life of Nelson" and of one or two lyrics and ballads.[1] The "Life of Nelson" is constantly republished for an age keenly bent on Nelson worship, but for the exacting it has been superseded by at least two biographies from living authors.[2] That Southey should live mainly by a book which was merely a publisher's commission, and not by the works which he and his contemporaries deemed immortal, is one of the ironies of literature. Southey's "Cowper" is a much better biography than his "Nelson," but in Cowper the world has almost ceased to be interested. It does not now read "Table Talk" and "The Task" any more than it reads "Thalaba" and "Madoc," although every cultivated household of sixty years ago could talk freely of these poems. There will probably be a revival of interest in Cowper. It is safe to assume that there will never be a revival of interest in Southey, and that his very lengthy poems are doomed to oblivion.

      And yet it is interesting to note where Southey's contemporaries placed him. Shelley thought "Thalaba" magnificent, and its influence was marked in "Queen Mab." Coleridge spoke of its "pastoral charm." Landor found "Madoc" superb. Scott said that he had read it three or four times with ever-increasing admiration. It kept Charles James Fox out of bed till the small hours! But inexorable time has declared that these poems have no permanent place in literature. Time, however, has left us a kindly memory of Southey the man. Sara Coleridge's assertion that he was "on the whole the best man she had ever known," tallies with the judgment of many others of his contemporaries—who did not come into collision with his relentless prejudices.

      Relentless prejudice

Скачать книгу