English Literature: Its History and Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World - William J. Long (book club books .TXT) 📗

219. Mrs. Radcliffe's best work is the Mysteries of Udolpho. This is the story of a tender heroine shut up in a gloomy castle. Over her broods the terrible shadow of an ancestor's crime. There are the usual "goose-flesh" accompaniments of haunted rooms, secret doors, sliding panels, mysterious figures behind old pictures, and a subterranean passage leading to a vault, dark and creepy as a tomb. Here the heroine finds a chest with blood-stained papers. By the light of a flickering candle she reads, with chills and shivering, the record of long-buried crimes. At the psychologic moment the little candle suddenly goes out. Then out of the darkness a cold, clammy hand--ugh! Foolish as such stories seem to us now, they show, first, a wild reaction from the skepticism of the preceding age; and second, a development of the mediæval romance of adventure; only the adventure is here inward rather than outward. It faces a ghost instead of a dragon; and for this work a nun with her beads is better than a knight in armor. So heroines abound, instead of heroes. The age was too educated for medieval monsters and magic, but not educated enough to reject ghosts and other bogeys.

220. The Lyrical Ballads were better appreciated in America than in England. The first edition was printed here in 1802.

221. The Prelude was not published till after Wordsworth's death, nearly half a century later.

222. The Prelude, Book IV.

223. Dowden's Selections from Wordsworth is the best of many such collections. See Selections for Reading, and Bibliography, at the end of this chapter.

224. See "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," in Essays of Elia.

225. See Scott's criticism of his own work, in comparison with Jane Austen's, p. 439.

226. Scott's novels were not the first to have an historical basis. For thirty years preceding the appearance of Waverley, historical romances were popular; but it was due to Scott's genius that the historical novel became a permanent type of literature. See Cross, The Development of the English Novel.

227. See Selections for Reading, and Bibliography, at the end of this chapter.

228. Shelley undoubtedly took his idea from a lost drama of Aeschylus, a sequel to Prometheus Bound, in which the great friend of mankind was unchained from a precipice, where he had been placed by the tyrant Zeus.

229. This idea is suppported by Shelley's poem Adonais, and by Byron's parody against the reviewers, beginning, "Who killed John Keats? I, says the Quarterly."

230. See "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," in Essays of Elia.

231. See Essays of Elia, "The Superannuated Man."

232. In the first essay, "The South Sea House," Lamb assumed as a joke the name of a former clerk, Elia. Other essays followed, and the name was retained when several successful essays were published in book form, in 1823. In these essays "Elia" is Lamb himself, and "Cousin Bridget" is his sister Mary.

233. See histories for the Congress of Vienna (1814) and the Holy Alliance (1815).

234. For full titles and publishers of general reference books, see General Bibliography at end of this book.

235. An excellent little volume for the beginner is Van Dyke's "Poems by Tennyson," which shows the entire range of the poet's work from his earliest to his latest years. (See Selections for Reading, at the end of this chapter.)

236. Tennyson made a distinction in spelling between the Idylls of the King, and the English Idyls, like "Dora."

237. An excellent little book for the beginner is Lovett's Selections from Browning. (See Selections for Reading, at the end of this chapter.)

238. This term, which means simply Italian painters before Raphael, is generally applied to an artistic movement in the middle of the nineteenth century. The term was first used by a brotherhood of German artists who worked together in the convent of San Isodoro, in Rome, with the idea of restoring art to its mediæval purity and simplicity. The term now generally refers to a company of seven young men,--Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his brother William, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, James Collinson, Frederick George Stevens, and Thomas Woolner,--who formed the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in England in 1848. Their official literary organ was called The Germ, in which much of the early work of Morris and Rossetti appeared. They took for their models the early Italian painters who, they declared, were "simple, sincere, and religious." Their purpose was to encourage simplicity and naturalness in art and literature; and one of their chief objects, in the face of doubt and materialism, was to express the "wonder, reverence, and awe" which characterizes mediæval art. In its return to the mysticism and symbolism of the mediæval age, this Pre-Raphaelitism suggests the contemporary Oxford or Tractarian movement in religion. (See footnote, p. 554).

239. Arnold was one of the best known poets of the age, but because he has exerted a deeper influence on our literature as a critic, we have reserved him for special study among the essayists. (See p. xxx)

240. It should be pointed out that the English Humorists is somewhat too highly colored to be strictly accurate. In certain cases also, notably that of Steele, the reader may well object to Thackeray's patronizing attitude toward his subject.

241. See pp. 260-261.

242. Emily Brontë (1818-1848) was only a little less gifted than her famous sister. Her best known work is Wuthering Heights (1847), a strong but morbid novel of love and suffering. Matthew Arnold said of her that, "for the portrayal of passion, vehemence, and grief," Emily Brontë had no equal save Byron. An exquisite picture of Emily is given in Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley.

243. Essays, Riverside edition, I, 318.

244. The student should remember that Carlyle's literary opinions, though very positive, are to be received with caution. Sometimes, indeed, they are so one-sided and prejudiced that they are more valuable as a revelation of Carlyle himself than as a study of the author he is considering.

245. The Oxford movement in religion has many points of resemblance to the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art. Both protested against the materialism of the age, and both went back for their models to the Middle Ages. Originally the movement was intended to bring new life to the Anglican church by a revival of the doctrine and practices of an earlier period. Recognizing the power of the press, the leaders chose literature for their instrument of reform, and by their Tracts for the Times they became known as Tractarians. To oppose liberalism and to restore the doctrine and authority of the early Church was the center of their teaching. Their belief might be summed up in one great article of the Creed, with all that it implies,--"I believe in one Catholic and Apostolic Church." The movement began at Oxford with Keble's famous sermon on "National Apostasy," in 1833; but Newman was the real leader of the movement, which practically ended when he entered the Catholic church in 1845.