Chapter IX · : THE VICTORIAN AGE, 1837-1900 (continued 2)

The art of describing the pathetic is unfailing in Thackeray. He never jars upon the most sensitive feelings nor wearies them by too long a treatment. With a few simple but powerful expressions he succeeds in arousing intense emotions of pity or sorrow. He has been wrongly called a cynic; for no man can be a cynic who shows Thackeray's tenderness in the treatment of pathos.

Thackeray is master of a graceful, simple prose style. In its ease and purity, it most resembles that of Swift, Addison, or Goldsmith. Thackeray writes as a cultured, ideal, old gentleman may be imagined to talk to the young people, while he sits in his comfortable armchair in a corner by the fireplace. The charm of freshness, quaintness, and colloquial familiarity is seldom absent from the delightfully natural pages of Thackeray.

GEORGE ELIOT, 1819-1880

[Illustration: GEORGE ELIOT. From a drawing by Sir E.W. Burton, National Portrait Gallery.]

Life.—Mary Ann Evans, known to her family as Marian and to her readers as George Eliot, was born in 1819, at South Farm, in Arbury, Warwickshire, about twenty-two miles north of Stratford-on-Avon. A few months later, the family moved to a spacious ivy-covered farmhouse at Griff, some two miles east, where the future novelist lived until she was twenty-two.

She was a thoughtful, precocious child. She lived largely within herself, passed much time in reverie, and pondered upon deep problems. She easily outstripped her schoolmates in all mental accomplishments, and, from the first, gave evidence of a clear, strong intellect.

The death of her mother and the marriage of a sister left the entire care of the house and dairy to Marian before she was seventeen years old. Her labors were quite heavy for the neat six years. At the end of that time, she and her father moved to Foleshill, near Coventry, where she had ample leisure to pursue her studies and music. At Foleshill, she came under the influence of free-thinking friends and became an agnostic, which she remained through the rest of her life. This home was again broken up in 1849 by the death of her father. Through the advice of friends she sought comfort in travel on the continent.

Upon her return, she settled in London as assistant editor of the Westminster Review. By this time she had become familiar with five languages, had translated abstruse metaphysical books from the German into English, and had so thoroughly equipped her naturally strong intellect that she was sought after in London by such men as Herbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes. A deep attachment sprang up between Mr. Lewes and Miss Evans, and they formed an alliance that lasted until his death.

George Eliot's early literary labors were mainly critical and scientific, being governed by the circle in which she moved. When she came under the influence of Mr. Lewes, she was induced to attempt creative work. Her novels, published under the pen name of George Eliot, quickly became popular. Despite this success, it is doubtful whether she would have possessed sufficient self-reliance to continue her work without Mr. Lewes's encouragement and protecting love, which shielded her from contact with publishers and from a knowledge of harsh criticisms.

Their companionship was so congenial that her friends were astonished when she formed another attachment after his death in 1878, and married Mr. Cross. Her husband said that her affectionate nature required some deep love to which to cling. She had never been very robust, and, during her later years, she was extremely frail. She died in 1880.

[Illustration: GEORGE ELIOT'S BIRTHPLACE.]

Works.—George Eliot was fast approaching forty when she found the branch of literature in which she was to achieve fame. Her first volume of stories, Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), showed decisively that she was master of fiction writing. Three novels followed rapidly, Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Silas Marner (1861). Her mind was stored with memories of the Midland counties, where her young life was spent; and these four books present with a powerful realism this rich rural district and its quaint inhabitants, who seem flushed with the warmth of real life.

Adam Bede is the freshest, healthiest, and most delightful of her books. This story leaves upon the memory a charming picture of peace and contentment, with its clearly drawn and interesting characters, its ideal dairy, the fertile stretches of meadow lands, the squire's birthday party, the harvest supper, and the sweet Methodist woman preaching on the green.

The Mill on the Floss also gives a fine picture of village life. This novel is one of George Eliot's most earnest productions. She exhibits one side of her own intense, brooding girlhood, in the passionate heroine, Maggie Tulliver. There is in this tragic story a wonderfully subtle revelation of a young nature, which is morbid, ambitious, quick of intellect, and strong of will, and which has no hand firm enough to serve as guide at the critical period of her life.

Silas Marner, artistically considered, is George Eliot's masterpiece. In addition to the ruddy glow of life in the characters, there is an idyllic beauty about the pastoral setting, and a poetic, half mystic charm about the weaver's manner of connecting his gold with his bright-haired Eppie. The slight plot is well planned and rounded, and the narrative is remarkable for ease and simplicity.

Romola (1863) is a much bolder flight. It is an attempt to present Florence of the fifteenth century, to contrast Savonarola's ardent Christianity with the Greek aestheticism of the Medicis, and to show the influence of the time upon two widely different characters, Romola and Tito Melema. This novel is the greatest intellectual achievement of its author; but it has neither the warmth of life, nor the vigor of her English stories. Though no pains is spared to delineate Romola, Tito, and the inspiring monk, Savonarola, yet they do not possess the genuineness and reality that are felt in her Warwickshire characters.

Middlemarch (1871-1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876) marked the decline of George Eliot's powers. Although she still possessed the ability to handle dialogue, to analyze subtle complex characters, and to attain a philosophical grasp of the problems of existence, yet her weakening powers were shown in the length of tedious passages, in an undue prominence of ethical purpose, in the more studied and, on the whole, duller characters, and in the prolixity of style.

George Eliot's poetry does not bear comparison with her prose. The Spanish Gypsy (1868) is her most ambitious poem, and it contains some fine dramatic passages. Her most beautiful poem is the hymn beginning:—

"Oh, may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence!"

There is a strain of noble thought and lofty feeling in her poems, and she rises easily to the necessary passion and fervor of verse; but her expression is hampered by the metrical form.

General Characteristics.—George Eliot is more strictly modern in spirit than either of the other two great contemporary novelists. This spirit is exhibited chiefly in her ethical purpose, her scientific sympathies, and her minute dissection of character.

Her writings manifest her desire to benefit human beings by convincing them that nature's laws are inexorable, and that an infraction of the moral law will be punished as surely as disobedience to physical laws. She strives to arouse people to a knowledge of hereditary influences, and to show how every deed brings its own results, and works, directly or indirectly, toward the salvation or ruin of the doer. She throws her whole strength into an attempt to prove that joy is to be found only in strict attendance upon duty and in self-renunciation. In order to carry home these serious lessons of life, she deals with powerful human tragedies, which impart a somberness of tone to all her novels. In her early works she treats these problems with artistic beauty; but in her later books she often forgets the artist in the moralist, and uses a character to preach a sermon.

The analytical tendency is pronounced in George Eliot's works, which exhibit an exhaustive study of the feelings, the thoughts, the dreams, and purposes of the characters. They become known more through description than through action.

A striking characteristic of her men and women is their power to grow. They do not appear ready-made and finished at the beginning of a story, but, like real human beings amid the struggles of life, they change for the better or the worse. Tito Melema in Romola is an example of her skill in evolving character. At the outset, he is a beautiful Greek boy with a keen zest for pleasure. His selfishness, however, which betrays itself first in ingratitude to his benefactor, leads step by step to his complete moral degradation. The consequences of his deeds entangle him finally in such a network of lies that he is forced to betray "every trust that was reposed in him, that he might keep himself safe."

George Eliot occasionally brightens the seriousness of her works with humor. Her stories are not permeated with joyousness, like those of Dickens, nor do they ripple with quiet amusement, like the novels of Thackeray; but she puts witty and aphoristic sayings into the conversations of the characters. The scene at the "Rainbow" inn is bristling with mother wit. Mr. Macey observes:—

"'There's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell if the bell could hear itself.'"[11]

Great precision and scholarlike correctness mark the style of George Eliot. Her vocabulary, though large, is too full of abstract and scientific terms to permit of great flexibility and idiomatic purity of English. She is master of powerful figures of speech, original, epigrammatic turns of expression, and, sometimes, of a stirring eloquence.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, 1850-1894

[Illustration: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. From a photograph.]

Life.—By preferring romantic incident to the portrayal of character, Stevenson differed from his great Victorian predecessors in the field of fiction. He was born in 1850 in the romantic city of Edinburgh, which he has described so well in his Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. Being an invalid from early childhood, he was not sent regularly to school; yet he was ready at the age of seventeen to enter Edinburgh University. He says of himself that in college he neglected all the studies that did not appeal to him, to read with avidity English poetry and fiction, Scottish legend and history. During his summer vacations he worked at lighthouse engineering. The out-of-door life was just what he liked; but the office work was irksome to him. When finally he made his dislike known, his father, although bitterly disappointed at his son's aversion to the calling followed by two generations of Stevensons, nevertheless consented to a change; and they compromised on the law. In 1875 Stevenson succeeded in gaining admission to the bar; but he soon realized that he would never feel at home in this profession. Moreover, he had always wanted to be a writer. He says:—

"All through my boyhood and youth… I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words. …Thus I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use; it was written consciously for practice."

[Illustration: STEVENSON AS A BOY.]

The next year, therefore, he decided to devote himself entirely to literature.

He was by heredity predisposed to weak lungs. For the greater part of his life he moved from place to place, searching for some location that would improve his health and allow him to write. He lived for a while in Switzerland, in the south of France, in the south of England, in the Adirondack Mountains, and in California. In 1880 he married in California, Mrs. Fanny Osbourne, of whom he wrote:—

"Steel-true and blade-straight, The great artificer made my mate."

By a former marriage she had a son, who, at the age of thirteen, inspired Stevenson to write that exciting romance of adventure, Treasure Island, published in book form in 1883. This and the remarkable story, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), made him so famous that when he visited New York in 1887, a newspaper there offered him $10,000 for a weekly article during the year.

He preferred to accept an offer of $3500 for twelve monthly articles for a magazine.

The most romantic part of his life began in 1888, when he chartered a yacht in San Francisco for a cruise among the South Sea Islands. He had the enthusiasm of a boy for this trip, which was planned to benefit his health. Almost as many adventures befell him as Robinson Crusoe. At one time Stevenson became so ill that he was left with his wife on one of the Society Islands while the yacht sailed away for repairs. Before the boat returned, both his food and money were exhausted, and he and Mrs. Stevenson were forced to live on the bounty of the natives, who adopted him into one of their tribes and gave him the name of Tusitala.

He wandered for three and a half years among the islands of the Southern Pacific, visiting Australia twice. On one trip he called at thirty-three small coral islands, and wrote, "Hackney cabs have more variety than atolls."

He finally selected for his residence the island of Samoa, where he spent the last three and a half years of his life. He died suddenly in his forty-fifth year, and was buried on the summit of a Samoan mountain near his home.

In 1893 he wrote to George Meredith:—

"In fourteen years I have not had a day's real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness…"

Many have found in Stevenson's life an inspiration to overcome obstacles, to cease complaining, and to bear a message of good cheer. These lines from his volume of poems called Underwoods (1887), are especially characteristic:—

"If I have faltered more or less In my great task of happiness; If I have moved among my race And shown no glorious morning face; If beams from happy human eyes Have moved me not; if morning skies, Books, and my food, and summer rain Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:— Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take And stab my spirit broad awake."

Works.—Stevenson wrote entertaining travels, such as An Inland Voyage (1878), the record of a canoe journey from Antwerp to Pontoise, Travels with a Donkey through the Cévennes (1879), and In the South Seas (published in book form in 1896). Early in life he wrote many essays, the best of which are included in the volumes, Virginibus Puerisque (To Girls and Boys, 1881) and Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882). Valuable papers presenting his views of the technique of writing may be found in the volumes called Memories and Portraits (1887) and Essays in the Art of Writing (collected after his death). There is a happy blending of style, humor, and thought in many of these essays. Perhaps the most unusual and original of all is Child's Play (Virginibus Puerisque). This is a psychological study, which reveals one of his strongest characteristics, the power of vividly recalling the events and feelings of childhood.

"When my cousin and I took our porridge of a morning, we had a device to enliven the course of the meal. He ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a country continually buried under snow. I took mine with milk, and explained it to be a country suffering gradual inundation. You can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an island still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; …and how, in fine, the food was of altogether secondary importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with these dreams."

The simplicity and apparent artlessness of his A Child's Garden of Verse (1885) have caused many critics to neglect these poems; but the verdict of young children is almost unanimous against such neglect. These songs

"Lead onward into fairy land, Where all the children dine at five, And all the playthings come alive."

It is quite possible that the verses in this little volume may in the coming years appeal to more human beings than all the remainder of Stevenson's work. He and his American contemporary, Eugene Field (1850-1895), had the peculiar genius to delight children with a type of verse in which only a very few poets have excelled.

Boys and young men love Stevenson best for his short stories and romances. After a careful study of Poe and Hawthorne, the American short story masters, Stevenson made the English impressionistic short story a more artistic creation. Some of the best of his short stories are Will o' the Mill (1878), The Sire de Malétroit's Door (1878), and Markheim (1885). His best-known single production, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is really a short story that presents a remarkable psychological study of dual personality.

The short stories served as an apprenticeship for the longer romances, of which Treasure Island is the best constructed and the most interesting. Among a number of other romances, the four which deal with eighteenth-century Scottish history are the best: Kidnapped (1886), The Master of Ballantrae (1889), David Balfour (Catriona, 1893), and the unfinished Weir of Hermiston, published two years after his death.

[Illustration: EDINBURGH MEMORIAL OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. By Augustus St. Candeus.]

General Characteristics.—Unlike the majority of the Victorian writers of fiction, Stevenson preferred the field of romance and adventure. It is natural to compare him with Scott, who showed a far wider range, both in subject matter and in the portrayal of human beings. Stevenson, however, surpassed Scott in swift delineation of incident, in pictorial vividness, and in literary form. Scott dashed off some of his long romances in six weeks; while Stevenson said that his printer's copy was sometimes the result of ten times that amount of writing. The year before he died, he spent three weeks in writing twenty-four pages.

Stevenson's romances are remarkable for artistic style, clearness of visual image, and boyish love of adventure. He made little attempt to portray more than the masculine half of the human race. His simple verses possess rare power to charm children. The most evident quality of all his prose is its artistic finish.

GEORGE MEREDITH, 1828-1909

[Illustration: GEORGE MEREDITH. From the painting by G.F. Watts, National Portrait Gallery.]

Life.—George Meredith was the only child of a Welsh father and an Irish mother. He was born in 1828 over his grandfather's tailor shop in Portsmouth, Hampshire. The father proved incompetent in handling the excellent tailoring business to which he fell heir; and he soon abandoned his son. The mother died when the boy was five years old, and he was then cared for by relatives. When he was fourteen, he was sent to school in Germany for two years; but he did not consider his schooling of much benefit to him and he was forced to educate himself for his life's work.

On his return to England, he was articled to a London solicitor; but by the age of twenty-one, Meredith had abandoned the law and had begun the literary life which was to receive his undivided attention for nearly sixty years. The struggle was at first extremely hard. Some days, indeed, he is said to have lived on a single bowl of porridge.

While following his work as a novelist, he tried writing for periodicals, served as a newspaper correspondent, and later became a literary adviser for a large London publishing firm. In this capacity, he proved a sympathetic friend to many a struggling young author. Thomas Hardy says that he received from Meredith's praise sufficient encouragement to persevere in the field of literature.

Meredith's marriage in 1849 was unhappy and resulted in a separation. Three years after his wife's death, which occurred in 1861, he married a congenial helpmate and went to live in Flint Cottage, near Burford Bridge, Surrey, where most of his remaining years were spent.

Not until late in life were the returns from his writings sufficient to relieve him from unceasing daily toil at his desk. He was widely hailed as a literary master and recognized as a force in fiction before he attained financial independence. After the death of Tennyson, Meredith was elected president of the Society of British Authors. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, his reply to the Who's Who query about his recreations was, "a great reader, especially of French literature; has in his time been a great walker." During his last sixteen years of life, he suffered from partial paralysis and was compelled to abandon these long walks, which had been a source both of recreation and of health.

He died in 1909 at the age of eighty-one and was laid beside his wife in the Dorking cemetery. The following words from his novel, Vittoria, are on his tombstone: "Life is but a little holding, lent to do a mighty labor."

Poetry.—During his long career, Meredith wrote much verse, which was collected in 1912 in a volume of 578 pages.

The quality of his poetry is very uneven. In such exquisite poems as Love in the Valley, The Lark Ascending, and Melanthus, the fancy and melody are artistically intertwined. Many have admired the felicity of the description and the romance of the sentiment in this stanza from Love in the Valley:—

"Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow, Swift as the swallow along the river's light Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets, Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight. Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops, Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun, She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer, Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won!"

Some of his songs are pure music, and an occasional descriptive passage in his verse shows the deftness of touch of a skilled lyrical poet. Such poems as Jump-to-Glory Jane, Juggling Jerry, The Beggar's Soliloquy, and The Old Chartist, are character sketches of humble folk and show genuine pathos and humor. In his poetry, Meredith is, however, more often the moralist and philosopher than the singer and simple narrator. He treats of love, life, and death as metaphysical problems. He ponders over the duties of mankind and the greatest sources of human strength and courage. He roams through a region that seems timeless and spaceless. He "neighbors the invisible." The obscurities in many of these poems are due to the abstract nature of the subject matter, to excessive condensation of thought, to frequent omission of connecting words, and to an abundance of figurative language.

Novels.—Meredith's novels comprise the largest and most noteworthy part of his writings. His most important works of fiction are The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), The Egoist (1879), and Diana of the Crossways (1885). The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is the story of a beautiful first love. The courtship of Richard and Lucy, amid scenes that inspire poetic descriptions, is in itself a true prose lyric. Their parting interview is one of the most powerfully handled chapters to be found in English novels. It is heart-rending in its emotional intensity and almost faultless in expression. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, like most of Meredith's works, contains more than a love story. Many chapters of high-class comedy and epigrammatical wit serve to explode a fallacious educational theory.

The Egoist has for its special aim the portrayal and exposure of masculine egotism. This was a favorite subject with Meredith and it recurs frequently in his novels. The plot of The Egoist is slight. The interest is centered on the awakening of Clara Middleton and Laetitia Dale to the superlative selfishness of Sir Willoughby's egotism.

Scintillating repartee, covert side-thrusts, shrewd observations, subtle innuendoes, are all used to assist in the revelation of this egotism. One fair April morning, after his return to England from a three years' absence, Sir Willoughby met Laetitia Dale, an early sweetheart whom he no longer loved.

"He sprang out of the carriage and seized her hand. 'Laetitia Dale!' he said. He panted. 'Your name is sweet English music! And you are well?' The anxious question permitted him to read deep in her eyes. He found the man he sought there, squeezed him passionately, and let her go."

The delicate irony of this passage is a mild example of the rich vein of humor running through this work. The Egoist is the most Meredithian of the author's novels, and it displays most exuberantly his comic spirit, intent upon photographing mankind's follies. This book has been called "a comedy in narrative."

Diana, the heroine of _Diana of the Crossways, is the queen of Meredith's heroines. She is intellectual, warm-hearted, and courageous. She thinks and talks brilliantly; but when she acts, she is often carried away by the momentary impulse. She therefore keeps the reader alternately scolding and forgiving her. Her betrayal of a state secret, which cannot be condoned, remains the one flaw in the plot. With this exception, the story is absorbing. The men and women belong to the world of culture. Among them are some of Meredith's most interesting characters, notably Redworth, the noblest man in any of the novels. The scene of the story is in London's highest political circle and the discussions sparkle with cleverness.

Evan Harrington (1861), the story of a young tailor, is one of the lightest and brightest of Meredith's novels. It presents in the author's most inimitable manner a comic picture of the struggle for social position. In two of the characters, Great Mel and Mrs. Mel, are found the pen portraits of Meredith's grandparents. Rhoda Fleming (1865) is in its style the simplest of his novels. The humble tragedy is related in the plain speech of the people, without the Gaelic wit usually characteristic of Meredith.

The first half of The Adventures of Harry Richmond has been called by some critics Meredith's best piece of writing, but the last half shows less power.

Meredith grew more introspective in his later years, as is shown in such long, analytical novels as, One of Our Conquerors (1891), Lord Ormont and His Aminta (1894), and The Amazing Marriage (1895).

General Characteristics.-Meredith's novels afford him various opportunities for an exposition of his views on education, divorce, personal liberty, conventional narrow-mindedness, egotism, sentimentalism, and obedience to law. His own personality creeps into the stories when he has some favorite sermon to preach; and he sometimes taxes the reader's patience by unduly delaying the narrative or even directing its course in order to accentuate the moral issue.

The chief excellences of his novels lie in the strong and subtle character portrayal, in the brilliant conversations, in the power with which intense scenes are presented, and in the well-nigh omnipresent humor.

Meredith's humor frequently arises from his keen intellectual perception of the paradoxes in life. One of his egotistical lovers, talking to the object of his undying affections, "could pledge himself to eternity, but shrank from being bound to eleven o'clock on the morrow morning." Meredith does not fly into a passion, like Carlyle, because society is sentimental and shallow and loves to pose. He proceeds in the coolest manner to draw with unusual distinctness the shallow dilettante, the sentimentalist, the egotist, and the hypocrite. By placing these characters in the midst of men and women actuated by simple and genuine motives, he develops situations that seem especially humorous to readers who are alert to detect incongruity. This veiled humor, which has been aptly styled "the laughter of the mind," gives to Meredith's works their most distinctive flavor.

His prose style is epigrammatic, rich in figures, subtle, sometimes tortuous and even obscure. He abhors the trite and obvious, and, in escaping them to indulge in witty riddles, fanciful expressions, and difficult allusions, he imperils his clearness. In the presence of genuine emotion, he is always as simple in style as he is serious in attitude; but there are times when he seems to revel in the extravagant and grotesque.

Meredith is the novelist of men and women in the world of learning, of letters, and of politics; he is the satirist of social shams; and he is the sparkling epigrammatist; but he is also the optimist with the sane and vigorous message for his generation, and the realist who keeps a genuine rainbow of idealism in his sky.

THOMAS HARDY, 1840-

[Illustration: THOMAS HARDY. From the painting by Winifred Thompson.]

Life.—The subtle, comic aspects of cosmopolitan life, which were such a fascination to Meredith, did not appeal to that somber realist, Thomas Hardy, whose genius enabled him to paint impressive pictures of the retired elemental life of Wessex. Hardy was born in 1840 in the little village of Bockhampton, Dorsetshire, a few miles out of Dorchester. He received his early education at the local schools, attended evening classes at King's College, London, and studied Gothic architecture under Sir Arthur Blomfield. The boy was articled at the early age of sixteen to an ecclesiastical architect and, like the hero in his novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, made drawings and measurements of old churches in rural England and planned their remodeling. He won medals and prizes in this profession before he turned from it to authorship. His first published work, How I Built Myself a House, was an outgrowth of some early experiences as an architect.

Hardy married Miss Emma Lavinia Gifford in 1874 and went to live at Sturminster Newton. Later he spent some time in London; but he returned finally to his birthplace, the land of his novels, and built himself a home at Max Gate, Dorchester, in 1885. His life has been a retired one. He always shunned publicity, but he was happy to receive in 1910 the freedom of his native town, an honor bestowed upon him as a mark of love and pride.

Works.—Thomas Hardy is one of the greatest realists in modern England, and also one of the most uncompromising pessimists. His characters are developed with consummate skill, but usually their progression is toward failure or death. These men and women are largely rustics who subsist by means of humble toil, such as tending sheep or cutting furze. The orbit of their lives is narrow. The people are simple, primitive, superstitious. They are only half articulate in the expression of their emotions. In Far From the Madding Crowd, for example, Gabriel Oak wished to have Bathsheba know "his impressions; but he would as soon have thought of carrying an odor in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feelings in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent." On the other hand, the speech is sometimes racy, witty, and flavored by the daily occupation of the speaker.

The scenes usually selected for Hardy's stories are from his own county and those immediately adjacent, to which section of country he has given the name of Wessex. He knows it so intimately and paints it so vividly that its moors, barrows, and villages are as much a part of the stories as the people dwelling there. In fact, Egdon Heath has been called the principal character in the novel, The Return of the Native (1878). The upland with its shepherd's hut, the sheep-shearing barn, the harvest storm, the hollow of ferns, and the churchyard with its dripping water spout are part of the wonderful landscape in Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) This is the finest artistic product of Hardy's genius. It contains strongly-drawn characters, dramatic incidents, a most interesting story, and some homely native humor. The heroine, Bathsheba, is one of the brainiest and most independent of all Hardy's women. She has grave faults; but the tragic experiences through which she passes soften her and finally mold her into a lovable woman. Steady, resourceful, dumb Gabriel Oak and clever, fencing Sergeant Troy are delightful foils to each other, and are every inch human.

[Illustration: MAX GATE. The Home of Hardy near Dorchester (the Casterbridge of the Novels).]

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and The Woodlanders (1886-1887) deserve mention with Far from the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native as comprising the best four novels of the so-called Wessex stories.

Hardy's later works exhibit an increasing absorption in ethical and religious problems. Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1892) is one of Hardy's most powerful novels. It has for its heroine a strong, sweet, appealing woman, whose loving character and tragic fate are presented with fearless vigor and deep sympathetic insight. The personal intensity of the author, which is felt to pervade this book, is present again in Jude the Obscure (1895), that record of an aspiring soul, struggling against hopeless odds, heavy incumbrances, and sordid realities.

General Characteristics.—Hardy's novels leave a sense of gloom upon the reader. He explains his view of modern life "as a thing to be put up with, replacing the zest for existence which was so intense in early civilization." His pessimistic philosophy strikes at the core of life and human endeavor. Sorrow appears in his work, not as a punishment for crime, but as an unavoidable result of human life and its inevitable mistakes. Events, sometimes comic but generally tragic, play upon the weaknesses of his characters and bring about entanglements, misunderstandings, and suffering far in excess of the deserts of these well-intentioned people. No escape is suggested. Resignation to misfits, mistakes, and misfortune is what remains.

Hardy is one of the great Victorian story-tellers. His personality is never obtruded on his readers. His humor is not grafted on his scenes, but is a natural outgrowth of his rustic gatherings and conversations. He relates a straightforward tale, and makes his characters act and speak for themselves. He selects the human nature, the rural scene, and the moral issue upon which his whole being can be centered. The result is a certainty of design, a somberness of atmosphere, and an intensity of feeling, such as are found in elegiac poetry. Natural laws, physical nature, and human life are engaged in an uneven struggle, and the result is usually unsatisfactory for human life. The novels are pitilessly sad, but they are nevertheless products of a genuine artist in temperament and technique. His novels show almost as much unity of plot and mood as many of the greatest short stories.

MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1822-1888

[Illustration: MATTHEW ARNOLD. From the painting of G.F. Watts, National Portrait Gallery.]

Life.—Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, A.C. Swinburne, and the much younger Rudyard Kipling are the most noted among a large number of Victorian poets. All of these, with the exception of the two greatest, Browning and Tennyson, also wrote prose.

Matthew Arnold was born in 1822, at Laleham, Middlesex. His father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, was the eminent head master of Rugby School, and the author of History of Rome, Lectures on Modern History, and Sermons. Under the guidance of such a father, Matthew Arnold enjoyed unusual educational advantages. In 1837 he entered Rugby, and from there went to Baliol College, Oxford. He was so ambitious and studious that he won two prizes at Oxford, was graduated with honors, and, a year later, was elected fellow of Oriel College. Arnold's name, like Thomas Gray's, is associated with university life.

From 1847 to 1851, Arnold was private secretary to Lord Lansdowne. In 1851 he married the daughter of Justice Wightman. After relinquishing his secretaryship, Arnold accepted a position that took him again into educational fields. He was made lay inspector of schools, a position which he held to within two years of his death. This office called for much study in methods of education, and he visited the continent three times to investigate the systems in use there. In addition, he held the chair of poetry at Oxford for ten years, between 1857 and 1867. One of the most scholarly courses of lectures that he delivered there was On Translating Homer. From this time until his death, in 1888, he was a distinguished figure in English educational and literary circles.

Poetical Works.—Matthew Arnold's poetry belongs to the middle of the century, that season of doubt, perplexity, and unrest, when the strife between the church and science was bitterest and each threatened to overthrow the other. In his home, Arnold was taught a devout faith in revealed religion, and at college he was thrown upon a world of inquiring doubt. Both influences were strong. His feelings yearned after the early faith, and his intellect sternly demanded scientific proof and explanation. He was, therefore, torn by a conflict between his emotions and reason, and he was thus eminently fitted to be the poetic exponent of what he calls—

"…this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts."[12]

Arnold felt that there were too much hurry and excitement in the age. In the midst of opposing factions, theories, and beliefs, he cries out for rest and peace. We rush from shadow to shadow—

"And never once possess our soul Before we die."[13]

Again, in the Stanzas in Memory of the Author of "Obermann", he voices the unrest of the age—

"What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise? Like children bathing on the shore, Buried a wave beneath, The second wave succeeds, before We have had time to breathe."

But Arnold is not the seer to tell us how to enter the vale of rest, how to answer the voice of doubt. He passes through life a lonely figure—

"Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born." [14]

The only creed that he offers humanity is one born of the scientific temper, a creed of stoical endurance and unswerving allegiance to the voice of duty. Many readers miss in Arnold the solace that they find in Wordsworth and the tonic faith that is omnipresent in Browning. Arnold himself was not wholly satisfied with his creed; but his cool reason refused him the solace of an unquestioning faith. Arnold has been called "the poet of the Universities," because of the reflective scholarly thought in his verse. It breathes the atmosphere of books and of the study. Such poetry cannot appeal to the masses. It is for the thinker.

The style of verse that lends itself best to Arnold's genius is the elegiac lyric. The Scholar Gypsy and its companion piece Thyrsis, Memorial Verses, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, and Stanzas in Memory of the Author of "Obermann" are some of his best elegies.

Sohrab and Rustam and Balder Dead are Arnold's finest narrative poems. They are stately, dignified recitals of the deeds of heroes and gods. The series of poems entitled Switzerland and Dover Beach are among Arnold's most beautiful lyrics. A fine description of the surf is contained in the last-named poem:—

"Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in."

Neither the movement of the narrative nor the lightness of the lyric is wholly congenial to Arnold's introspective melancholy muse.

Prose Works.—Although Arnold's first works were in poetry, he won recognition as a prose writer before he was widely known as a poet. His works in prose comprise such subjects as literary criticism, education, theology, and social ethics. As a critic of literature, he surpasses all his great contemporaries. Neither Macaulay nor Carlyle possessed the critical acumen, the taste, ana the cultivated judgment of literary works, in such fullness as Matthew Arnold.

His greatest contributions to critical literature are the various magazine articles that were collected in the two volumes entitled Essays in Criticism (1865-1888). In these essays Arnold displays great breadth of culture and fairness of mind. He rises superior to the narrow provincialism and racial prejudices that he deprecates in other criticisms of literature. He gives the same sympathetic consideration to the German Heine and the Frenchman Joubert as to Wordsworth. Arnold further insists that Frenchmen should study English literature for its serious ethical spirit, and that Englishmen would be benefited by a study of the lightness, precision, and polished form of French literature.

Arnold's object in all his criticism is to discover the best in both prose and poetry, and his method of attaining this object is another illustration of his scholarship and mental reach. He says in his Introduction to Ward's English Poets:—

"Indeed, there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry."

When Arnold seeks to determine an author's true place in literature, his keen critical eye seems to see at a glance all the world's great writers, and to compare them with the man under discussion. In order to ascertain Wordsworth's literary stature, for example, Arnold measures the height of Wordsworth by that of Homer, of Dante, of Shakespeare, and of Milton.

Another essential quality of the critical mind that Arnold possessed is "sweet reasonableness." His judgments of men are marked by a moderation of tune. His strong predilections are sometimes shown, but they are more often restrained by a clear, honest intellect. Arnold's calm, measured criticisms are not marred by such stout partisanship as Macaulay shows for the Whigs, by the hero worship that Carlyle expresses, or by the exaggerated praise and blame that Ruskin sometimes bestows. On the other hand, Arnold loses what these men gain; for while his intellect is less biased than theirs, it is also less colored and less warmed by the glow of feeling.

The analytical quality of Arnold's mind shows the spirit of the age. His subjects are minutely classified and defined. Facts seem to divide naturally into brigades, regiments, and battalions of marching order. His literary criticisms note subtleties of style, delicate shadings in expression, and many technical excellences and errors that Carlyle would have passed over unheeded. In addition to the Essays in Criticism, the other works of Arnold that possess his fine critical dualities in highest degree are On Translating Homer (1861) and The Study of Celtic Literature (1867).

General Characteristics.—The impression that Arnold has left upon literature is mainly that of a keen, brilliant intellect. In his poetry there is more emotion than in his prose; but even in his poetry there is no passion or fire. The sadness, the loneliness, the unrest of life, and the irreconcilable conflict between faith and doubt are most often the subjects of his verse. His range is narrow, but within it he attains a pure, noble beauty. His introspective, analytical poetry is distinguished by a "majesty of grief," depth of thought, calm, classic repose, and a dignified simplicity.

In prose, Arnold attains highest rank as a critic of literature. His culture, the breadth of his literary sympathies, his scientific analyses, and his lucid literary style make his critical works the greatest of his age. He has a light, rather fanciful, humor, which gives snap and spice to his style. He is also a master of irony, which is galling to an opponent. He himself never loses his suavity or good breeding. Arnold's prose style is as far removed from Carlyle's as the calm simplicity of the Greeks is from the powerful passion of the Vikings. The ornament and poetic richness of Ruskin's style are also missing in Arnold's. His style has a classic purity and refinement. He has a terseness, a crystalline clearness, and a precision that have been excelled in the works of few even of the greatest masters of English prose.

ROBERT BROWNING, 1812-1889

[Illustration: ROBERT BROWNING. From the painting by G. F. Watts, National Portrait Gallery.]

Life.—The long and peaceful lives of Browning and Tennyson, the two most eminent poets of the Victorian age, are in marked contrast to the short and troubled careers of Byron, Shelley, and Keats.

Robert Browning's life was uneventful but happy. He inherited a magnificent physique and constitution from his father, who never knew a day's illness. With such health, Robert Browning felt a keen relish for physical existence and a robust joyousness in all kinds of activity. Late in life he wrote, in the poem At the Mermaid:—

"Have you found your life distasteful? My life did, and does, smack sweet. * * * * * I find earth not gray but rosy, Heaven not grim but fair of hue. Do I stoop? I pluck a posy. Do I stand and stare? All's blue."

Again, in Saul, he burst forth with the lines:—

"How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy?"

These lines, vibrant with life and joy, could not have been written by a man of failing vitality or physical weakness.

Robert Browning was born in 1812 at Camberwell, whose slopes overlook the smoky chimneys of London. In this beautiful suburb he spent his early years in the companionship of a brother and a sister. A highly gifted father and a musical mother assisted intelligently in the development of their children. Browning's education was conducted mainly under his father's eye. The boy attended neither a large school nor a college. After he had passed from the hands of tutors, he spent some time in travel, and was wont to call Italy his university. Although his training was received in an irregular way, his scholarship cannot be doubted by the student of his poetry.

He early determined to devote his life to poetry, and his father wisely refrained from interfering with his son's ambitions.

[Illustration: ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. From the painting by Field Talfourd, National Portrait Gallery._]

Romantic Marriage with Elizabeth Barrett Barrett,—Her Poetry.—In 1845, after Browning had published some ten volumes of verse, among which were Paracelsus (1835), Pippa Passes (1841), and Dramatic Lyrics (1842), he met Miss Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (1806-1861), whose poetic reputation was then greater than his own. The publication in 1898 of The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett disclosed an unusual romance. When he first met her, she was an invalid in her father's London house, passing a large part of her time on the couch, scarcely able to see all the members of her own family at the same time. His magnetic influence helped her to make more frequent journeys from the sofa to an armchair, then to walk across the room, and soon to take drives.

Her father, who might have sat for the original of Meredith's "Egoist," had decided that his daughter should be an invalid and remain with him for life. When Browning proposed to Miss Barrett that he should ask her father for her hand, she replied that such a step would only make matters worse. "He would rather see me dead at his feet than yield the point," she said. In 1846 Miss Barrett, accompanied by her faithful maid, drove to a church and was married to Browning. The bride returned home; but Browning did not see her for a week because he would not indulge in the deception of asking for "Miss Barrett." Seven days after the marriage, they quietly left for Italy, where Mrs. Browning passed nearly all her remaining years. She repeatedly wrote to her father, telling him of her transformed health and happy marriage, but he never answered her.

Before Miss Barrett met Browning, the woes of the factory children had moved her to write The Cry of the Children. After Edgar Allan Poe had read its closing lines:—

"…the child's sob in the silence curses deeper Than the strong man in his wrath,"

he said that she had depicted "a horror, sublime in its simplicity, of which Dante himself might have been proud."

Her best work, Sonnets from the Portuguese, written after Browning had won her affection, is a series of love lyrics, strong, tender, unaffected, true, from the depth of a woman's heart. Sympathetic readers, who know the story of her early life and love, are every year realizing that there is nothing else in English literature that could exactly fill their place. Browning called them "the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's." Those who like the simple music of the heart strings will find it in lines like these:—

"I love thee to the level of every day's Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight, I love thee freely, as men strive for right; I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints—I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death."

After fifteen years of happy married life, she died in 1861, and was buried in Florence. When thinking of her, Browning wrote his poem Prospice (1861) welcoming death as—

"…a peace out of pain, Then a light, then thy breast, O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again, And with God be the rest."

His Later Years.—Soon after his wife's death, he began his long poem of over twenty thousand lines, The Ring and the Book. He continued to write verse to the year of his death.

In 1881 the Browning Society was founded for the study and discussion of his works,—a most unusual honor for a poet during his lifetime. The leading universities gave him honorary degrees, he was elected life-governor of London University, and was tendered the rectorship of the Universities of Glasgow and St. Andrew's and the presidency of the Wordsworth Society.

During the latter part of his life, he divided most of his time between London and Italy. When he died, in 1889, he was living with his son, Robert Barrett Browning, in the Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice. Over his grave in Westminster Abbey was chanted Mrs. Browning's touching lyric:—

"He giveth his belovèd, sleep."

Dramatic Monologues.—Browning was a poet of great productivity. From the publication of Pauline in 1833 to Asolando in 1889, there were only short pauses between the appearances of his works. Unlike Tennyson, Browning could not stop to revise and recast; but he constantly sought expression, in narratives, dramas, lyrics, and monologues, for new thoughts and feelings.

The study of the human soul held an unfailing charm for Browning. He analyzes with marked keenness and subtlety the experiences of the soul, its sickening failures, and its eager strivings amid complex, puzzling conditions. In nearly all his poems, whether narrative, lyric, or dramatic, the chief interest centers about some "incidents in the development of a soul."

The poetic form that he found best adapted to "the development of a soul" was the dramatic monologue, of which he is one of the greatest masters. Requiring but one speaker, this form narrows the interest either to the speaker or to the one described by him. Most of his best monologues are to be found in the volumes known as Dramatic Lyrics (1842), Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), Men and Women (1855), Dramatis Personae (1864).

My Last Duchess, Andrea del Sarto, Saul, Abt Vogler, and The Last Ride Together are a few of his strong representative monologues. The speaker in My Last Duchess is the widowed duke, who is describing the portrait of his lost wife. In his blind conceit, he is utterly unconscious that he is exhibiting clearly his own coldly selfish nature and his wife's sweet, sunny disposition. The chief power of the poem lies in the astonishing ease with which he is made to reveal his own character.

The interest in Andrea del Sarto is in the mental conflict of this "faultless painter." He wishes, on the one hand, to please his wife with popular pictures, and yet he yearns for higher ideals of his art. He says:—

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"

As he sits in the twilight, holding his wife's hand, and talking in a half-musing way, it is readily seen that his love for this beautiful but soulless woman has caused many of his failures and sorrows in the past, and will continue to arouse conflicts of soul in the future.

Abt Vogler, one of Browning's noblest and most melodious poems, voices the exquisite raptures of a musician's soul:—

"But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear; The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know."

The beautiful song of David in the poem entitled Saul shows a wonderful sympathy with the old Hebrew prophecies. Cleon expresses the views of an early Greek upon the teachings of Christ and St. Paul. The Soliloquy of a Spanish Cloister describes the development of a coarse, jealous nature in monastic life. The Last Ride Together is one of Browning's many passionate poems on the ennobling power of love. That remarkable, grotesque poem, Caliban upon Setebos, transcends human fields altogether, and displays the brutelike theology of a fiend.

In these monologues, Browning interprets characters of varying faiths, nationalities, stations, and historic periods. He shows a wide range of knowledge and sympathy. One type, however, which he rarely presents, is the simple, commonplace man or woman. Browning excels in the portrayal of unusual, intricate, and difficult characters that have complicated problems to face, weaknesses to overcome, or lofty ambitions to attain.

The Ring and the Book.—When Browning was asked what he would advise a student of his poetry to read first, he replied: "The Ring and the Book, of course." He worked on this masterly study of human souls for many years in the decade in which his wife died. This poem (1868), which has been facetiously called "a Roman murder story," was suggested to him by a "square old yellow book," which he purchased for a few cents at Florence in 1860. This manuscript, dated 1698, gives an account of the trial of Guido Franceschini for the murder of his wife. Out of this "mere ring metal," Browning fashioned his "Ring," a poem twice the length of Paradise Lost.

The subject of the story is an innocent girl, Pompilia, who, under the protection of a noble priest, flees from her brutal husband and seeks the home of her foster parents. Her husband wrathfully pursues her and kills both her and her parents. While this is but the barest outline, yet the story in its complete form is very simple. As is usual with Browning, the chief stress is laid upon the character portrayal.

He adopted the bold and unique plan of having different classes of people in Rome and the various actors in the tragedy tell the story from their own point of view and thus reveal their own bias and characteristics. Each relation makes the story seem largely new. Browning shows that all this testimony is necessary to establish a complete circle of evidence in regard to the central truth of the tragedy. The poem thus becomes a remarkable analytic study of the psychology of human minds.

The four important characters,—Guido, the husband; Caponsacchi, the priest; Pompilia, the girl-wife; and the Pope,—stand out in strong relief. The greatest development of character is seen in Guido, who starts with a defiant spirit of certain victory, but gradually becomes more subdued and abject, when he finds that he is to be killed, and finally shrieks in agony for the help of his victim, Pompilia. In Caponsacchi there is the inward questioning of the right and the wrong. He is a strongly-drawn character, full of passion and noble desires. Pompilia, who has an intuitive knowledge of the right, is one of Browning's sweetest and purest women. From descriptions of Mrs. Browning, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne gave, we may conclude that she furnished the suggestion for many of Pompilia's characteristics. The Pope, with his calm, wise judgment and his lofty philosophy, is probably the greatest product of Browning's intellect.

The books containing the monologues of these characters take first place among Browning's writings and occupy a high position in the century's work. They have a striking originality, intensity, vigor, and imaginative richness. The remaining books are incomparably inferior, and are marked at times by mere acuteness of reason and thoroughness of legal knowledge.

A Dramatic Poet.—Although Browning's genius is strongly dramatic, his best work is not found in the field of the drama. Strafford (1837), A Blot in the 'Scutcheon (1843), and Colombe's Birthday (1844) have been staged successfully, but they cannot be called great acting plays. The action is slight, the characters are complex, the soliloquies are lengthy, and the climaxes are too often wholly dependent upon emotional intensity rather than upon great or exciting deeds. The strongest interest of these dramas lies in their psychological subtlety, which is more enjoyable in the study than in the theater.

Browning's dramatic power is well exhibited in poems like In a Balcony or Pippa Passes, in which powerful individual scenes are presented without all the accompanying details of a complete drama. The great force of such scenes lies in his manner of treating moments of severe trial. He selects such a moment, focuses his whole attention upon it, and makes the deed committed stand forth as an explanation of all the past emotions and as a prophecy of all future acts. In a Balcony shows the lives of three characters converging toward a crisis. The hero of this drama thus expresses his theory of life's struggles in the development of the soul:—

"…I count life just stuff To try the soul's strength on, educe the man."

Pippa Passes is one of Browning's most artistic presentations of such dramatic scenes. The little silk weaver, Pippa, rises on the morning of her one holiday in the year, with the intention of enjoying in fancy the pleasures "of the Happiest Four in our Asolo," not knowing, in her innocence, of their misery and guilt. She wanders from house to house, singing her pure, significant refrains, and, in each case, her songs arrest the attention of the hearer at a critical moment. She thus becomes unconsciously a means of salvation. The first scene is the most intense. She approaches the home of the lovers, Sebald and Ottima, after the murder of Ottima's husband. As Sebald begins to reflect on the murder, there comes this song of Pippa's, like the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, to loose the floodgates of remorse:—

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF MS. FROM PIPPA PASSES.]

His Optimistic Philosophy.—It has been seen that the Victorian age, as presented by Matthew Arnold, was a period of doubt and negation. Browning, however, was not overcome by this wave of doubt. Although he recognized fully the difficulties of religious faith in an age just awakening to scientific inquiry, yet he retained a strong, fearless trust in God and in immortality.

Browning's reason demanded this belief. In this earthly life he saw the evil overcome the good, and beheld injustice, defeat, and despair follow the noblest efforts. If there exists no compensation for these things, he says that life is a cheat, the moral nature a lie, and God a fiend. In Asolando, Browning thus presents his attitude toward life:—

"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, tho' right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake."

There is no hesitancy in this philosophy of Browning's. With it, he does not fear to face all the problems and mysteries of existence. No other poet strikes such a resonant, hopeful note as he. His Rabbi Ben Ezra is more a song of triumphant faith than anything written since the Puritan days:—

"Our times are in His hand Who saith, 'A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!' * * * * * "Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: What entered into thee, That was, is, and shall be: Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure."

General Characteristics.—Browning is a poet of striking originality and impelling force. His writings are the spontaneous outpourings of a rich, full nature, whose main fabric is intellect, but intellect illumined with the glittering light of spiritual hopefulness and flushed with the glow of deep human passion.

The subject of his greatest poetry is the human soul. While he possesses a large portion of dramatic suggestiveness, he nevertheless does not excel in setting off character against character in movement and speech, but rather in a minute, penetrating analysis, by which he insinuates himself into the thoughts and sensations of his characters, and views life through their eyes.

He is a pronounced realist. His verse deals not only with the beautiful and the romantic, but also with the prosaic and the ugly, if they furnish true pictures for the panorama of real life. The unconventionality and realism of his poetic art will be made manifest by merely reading through the titles of his numerous works.

Browning did not write to amuse and entertain, but to stimulate thought and to "sting" the conscience to activity. The meaning of his verse is, therefore, the matter of paramount importance, far overshadowing the form of expression. In the haste and carelessness with which he wrote many of his difficult abstruse poems, he laid himself open to the charge of obscurity.

His style has a strikingly individual stamp, which is marked far more by strength than by beauty. The bare and rugged style of his verse is often made profoundly impressive by its strenuous earnestness, its burning intensity, which seems to necessitate the broken lines and halting, interrupted rhythm. The following utterance of Caponsacchi, as he stands before his judges, will show the intensity and ruggedness of Browning's blank verse:—

"Sirs, how should I lie quiet in my grave Unless you suffer me wring, drop by drop, My brain dry, make a riddance of the drench Of minutes with a memory in each?"

His lines are often harsh and dissonant. Even in the noble poem Rabbi Ben Ezra, this jolting line appears:—

"Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"

and in Sordello, Browning writes:—

"The Troubadour who sung Hundreds of songs, forgot, its trick his tongue, Its craft his brain."

No careful artist tolerates such ugly, rasping inversions.

In spite of these inharmonious tendencies in Browning, his poetry at times shows a lyric lightness, such as is heard in these lines:—

"Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England—now!"[15]

His verse often swells and falls with a wavelike rhythm as in Saul or in these lines in Abt Vogler:—

"There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; On the earth the broken arc; in the heaven, a perfect round."

While, therefore, Browning's poetry is sometimes harsh, faulty, and obscure, at times his melodies can be rhythmically simple and beautiful. He is one of the subtlest analysts of the human mind, the most original and impassioned poet of his age, and one of the most hopeful, inspiring, and uplifting teachers of modern times.

ALFRED TENNYSON, 1809-1892

[Illustration: ALFRED TENNYSON. From a photograph by Mayall.]

Life.—Alfred Tennyson, one of the twelve children of the rector of Somersby, Lincolnshire, was born in that hamlet in 1809, a year memorable, both in England and America for the birth of such men as Charles Darwin, William E. Gladstone, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln.

Visitors to the Somersby rectory, in which Tennyson was born, note that it fits the description of the home in his fine lyric, The Palace of Art:—

"…an English home,—gray twilight pour'd On dewy pastures, dewy trees, Softer than sleep—all things in order stored, A haunt of ancient peace."

His mother, one of the beauties of Lincolnshire, had twenty-five offers of marriage. Of her Tennyson said in The Princess:—

"Happy he With such a mother! faith in womankind Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high Comes easy to him, and tho' he trip and fall, He shall not blind his soul with clay."

It is probable that Tennyson holds the record among English poets of his class for the quantity of youthful verse produced. At the age of eight, he was writing blank verse in praise of flowers; at twelve, he began an epic which extended to six thousand lines.

In 1828 he entered Cambridge University; but in 1831 his father's sickness and death made it impossible for him to return to take his degree. Before leaving Cambridge, Tennyson had found a firm friend in a young college mate of great promise, Arthur Henry Hallam, who became engaged to the poet's sister, Emily Tennyson. Hallam's sudden death in 1832 was a profound shock to Tennyson and had far-reaching effects on his poetic development. For a long time he lived in comparative retirement, endeavoring to perfect himself in the poetic art.

His golden year was 1850, the year of the publication of In Memoriam, of his selection as poet laureate, to succeed Wordsworth, and of his marriage to Emily Sellwood. He had been in love with her for fourteen years, but insufficient income had hitherto prevented marriage.

[Illustration: FARRINGFORD.]

In 1855 Oxford honored him by bestowing on him the degree of D.C.L. The students gave him an ovation and they properly honored his greatest poem, In Memoriam by mentioning it first in their loud calls; but they also paid their respects to his May Queen, asking in chorus: "Did they wake and call you early, call you early, Alfred dear?"

The rest of his life was outwardly uneventful. He became the most popular poet of his age. Schools and colleges had pupils translate his poems into Latin and Greek verse. Of Enoch Arden (1864), at that time his most popular narrative poem, sixty thousand copies were sold almost as as soon as it was printed. He made sufficient money to be able to maintain two beautiful residences, a winter home at Farringford on the Isle of Wight, and a summer residence at Aldworth in Sussex. In 1884 he was raised to the peerage, with the title of Baron of Aldworth and Farringford. He died in 1892, at the age of eighty-three, and was buried beside Robert Browning in Westminster Abbey.

Early Verse.—Tennyson published a small volume of poems in 1830, the year before he left college, and another volume in 1832. Although these contained some good poems, he was too often content to toy with verse that had exquisite melody and but little meaning. The "Airy, fairy Lilian" and "Sweet, pale Margaret" type of verse had charmed him overmuch. The volumes of 1830 and 1832 were severely criticized. Blackwood's Magazine called same of the lyrics "drivel," and Carlyle characterized the aesthetic verse as "lollipops." This adverse criticism and the shock from Hallam's death caused him to remain silent for nearly ten years. His son and biographer says that his father during this period "profited by friendly and unfriendly criticism, and in silence, obscurity, and solitude, perfected his art."

In his thirty-third year (1842), Tennyson broke his long silence by publishing two volumes of verse, containing such favorites as The Poet, The Lady of Shalott, The Palace of Art, The Lotos Eaters, A Dream of Fair Women, Morte d'Arthur, Oenone, The Miller's Daughter, The Gardener's Daughter, Dora, Ulysses, Locksley Hall, The Two Voices, and Sir Galahad.

Unsparing revision of numbers of these poems that had been published before, entitles them to be classed as new work. Some critics think that Tennyson never surpassed these 1842 volumes. His verse shows the influence of Keats, of whom Tennyson said: "There is something of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything that he wrote."

One of Tennyson's most distinctive qualities, his art in painting beautiful word-pictures, is seen at its best in stanzas from The Palace of Art. His mastery over melody and the technique of verse is evident in such lyrics as Sir Galahad, and The Lotos Eaters. When the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, read from Ulysses the passage beginning:—

"I am a part of all that I have met,"

he gave Tennyson a much-needed annual pension of £200.

These volumes show that he was coming into touch with the thought of the age. Locksley Hall communicates the thrill which he felt from the new possibilities of science:—

"For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be. * * * * * I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time."

Hallam's death had also developed in him the human note, resonant in the lyric, Break, break, break:—

"But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand, And the sound of a voice that is still."

The Princess, In Memoriam, and Maud.—Tennyson had produced only short poems in his 1842 volumes, but his next three efforts, The Princess (1847), In Memoriam (1850), and Maud (1855), are of considerable length.

The Princess: A Medley, as Tennyson rightly called it, contains 3223 lines of blank verse. This poem, which is really a discussion of the woman question, relates in a half humorous way the story of a princess who broke off her engagement to a prince, founded a college for women, and determined to elevate her life to making them equal to men. The poem abounds in beautiful imagery and exquisite melody; but the solution of the question by the marriage of the princess has not completely satisfied modern thought. The finest parts of the poem are its artistic songs.

In Memoriam, an elegy in memory of Arthur Henry Hallam, was begun at Somersby in 1833, the year of Hallam's death, and added to at intervals for nearly sixteen years. When Tennyson first began the short lyrics to express his grief, he did not intend to publish them; but in 1850 he gave them to the world as one long poem of 725 four-line stanzas.

In Memoriam was directly responsible for Tennyson's appointment as poet-laureate. Queen Victoria declared that she received more comfort from it than from any other book except the Bible. The first stanza of the poem (quoted on page 9) has proved as much of a moral stimulus as any single utterance of Carlyle or of Browning.

This work is one of the three great elegies of a literature that stands first in elegiac poetry. Milton's Lycidas has more of a massive commanding power, and Shelley's Adonais rises at times to poetic heights that Tennyson did not reach; but neither Lycidas nor Adonais equals In Memoriam in tracing every shadow of bereavement, from the first feeling of despair until the mourner can realize that—

"…the song of woe Is after all an earthly song,"

and can express his unassailable faith in—

"One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves."

With this hopeful assurance closes Tennyson's most noble and beautiful poem.

Maud, a lyrical melodrama, paints the changing emotions of a lover who passes from morbid gloom to ecstasy. Then, in a moment of anger, he murders Maud's brother. Despair, insanity, and recovery follow, but he sees Maud's face no more. While the poem as a whole is not a masterpiece, it contains some of Tennyson's finest lyrics. The eleven stanzas of the lover's song to Maud, the—

"Queen Rose of the rosebud garden of girls,"

are such an exquisite blending of woodbine spice and musk of rose, of star and daffodil sky, of music of flute and song of bird, of the soul of the rose with the passion of the lover, of meadows and violets,—that we easily understand why Tennyson loved to read these lines.

The Idylls of the King.—In 1859 Tennyson published Lancelot and Elaine, one of a series of twelve Idylls, the last of which appeared in 1855. Together these form an epic on the subject of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Tennyson relied mainly on Malory's Morte d'Arthur for the characters and the stories.

These Idylls show the struggle to maintain noble ideals. Arthur relates how he collected—

"In that fair order of my Table Round, A glorious company, the flower of men, To serve as model for the mighty world, And be the fair beginning of a time."

He made his knights swear to uphold the ideals of his court—

"To ride abroad redressing human wrongs, To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it, To honor his own word as if his God's, To lead sweet lives in purest chastity, To love one maiden only, cleave to her, And warship her by years of noble deeds Until they won her."

The twelve Idylls have as a background those different seasons of the year that accord with the special mood of the story. In Gareth and Lynette, the most interesting of the Idylls, the young hero leaves his home in spring, when the earth is joyous with birds and flowers. In the last and most nobly poetic of the series, The Passing of Arthur, the time is winter, when the knights seem to be clothed with their own frosty breath.

Sin creeps into King Arthur's realm and disrupts the order of the "Table Round." He receives his mortal wound, and passes to rule in a kindlier realm that welcomed him as "a king returning from the wars."

Although the Idylls of the King are uneven in quality and sometimes marred by overprofusion of ornament and by deficiency of dramatic skill, their limpid style, many fine passages of poetry, appealing stories, and high ideals have exerted a wider influence than any other of Tennyson's poems.

Later Poetry.—Tennyson continued to write poetry until almost the time of his death; but with the exception of his short swan song, Crossing the Bar, he did not surpass his earlier efforts. His Locksley Hall Sixty Year After (1886) voices the disappointments of the Victorian age and presents vigorous social philosophy. Some of his later verse, like The Northern Farmer and The Children's Hospital, are in closer touch with life than many of his earlier poems.

He wrote also several historical dramas, the best of which is Becket (1884); but his genius was essentially lyrical, not dramatic. Crossing the Bar, written in his eighty-first year, is not only the finest product of his later years, but also one of the very best of Victorian lyrics.

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF MS. OF CROSSING THE BAR.]

General Characteristics.—Tennyson is a poetic interpreter of the thought of the Victorian age. Huxley called him "the first poet since Lucretius who understood the drift of science." In these four lines from The Princess, Tennyson gives the evolutionary history of the world, from nebula to man:—

"This world was once a fluid haze of light. Till toward the center set the starry tides, And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast The planets: then the monster, then the man."

Tennyson's poetry of nature is based on almost scientific observation of natural phenomena. Unlike Wordsworth, Tennyson does not regard nature as a manifestation of the divine spirit of love. He sees her more from the new scientific point of view, as "red in tooth and claw with rapine." The hero of Maud says:—

"For nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal; The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear'd by the shrike. And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey."

The constant warfare implied in the evolutionary theory of the survival of the fittest did not keep Tennyson from also presenting nature in her gentler aspects. In Maud, the lover sings—

"…whenever a March-wind sighs, He sets the jewel-print of your feet In violets blue as your eyes,"

and he tells how "the soul of the rose" passed into his blood, and how the sympathetic passion-flower dropped "a splendid tear." As beautiful as is much of Tennyson's nature poetry, he has not Wordsworth's power to invest it with "the light of setting suns," or to cause it to awaken "thoughts that do lie too deep for tears."

The conflict between science and religion, the doubts and the sense of world-pain are mirrored in Tennyson's verse. The Two Voices begins:—

"A still small voice spoke unto me, Thou art so full of misery Were it not better not to be?"

His poetry is, however, a great tonic to religious faith. The closing lines of In Memoriam and Crossing the Bar show how triumphantly he met all the doubts and the skepticism of the age.

Like Milton, Tennyson received much of his inspiration from books, especially from the classical writers; but this characteristic was more than counterbalanced by his acute observation and responsiveness to the thought of the age. Locksley Hall Sixty Years After shows that he was keenly alive to the social movements of the time.

Tennyson said that the scenes in his poems were so vividly conceived that he could have drawn them if he had been an artist. A twentieth century critic[16] says that Tennyson is almost the inventor of such pictorial lyrics as A Dream of Fair Women and The Palace of Art.

The artistic finish of Tennyson's verse is one of its great charms. He said to a friend: "It matters little what we say; it is how we say it—though the fools don't knew it." His poetry has, however, often been criticized for lack of depth. The variety in his subject matter, mode of expression, and rhythm renders his verse far more enjoyable than that of the formal age of Pope.

Tennyson's extraordinary popularity in his own time was largely due to the fact that he voiced so clearly and attractively the thought of the age. As another epoch ushers in different interests, they will naturally be uppermost in the mind of the new generation. We no longer feel the intense interest of the Victorians in the supposed conflict between science and religion. Their theory of evolution has been modified and has lost the force of novelty. Theories of government and social ideals have also undergone a gradual change. For these reasons much of Tennyson's verse has ceased to have its former wide appeal.

Tennyson has, however, left sufficient work of abiding value, both for its exquisite form and for its thought, to entitle him to be ranked as a great poet. We cannot imagine a time when Crossing the Bar, The Passing of Arthur, and the central thought of In Memoriam—

"'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all,"

will no longer interest readers. To Tennyson belong—

"Jewels five words long That on the stretch'd forefinger of all Time Sparkle forever."

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1837-1909

[Illustration: ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1837-1909. From the painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.]

Life.—Swinburne was born in London in 1837. His father was an admiral in the English navy, and his mother, the daughter of an earl. The boy passed his summers in Northumberland and his winters in the Isle of Wight. He thus acquired that fondness for the sea, so noticeable in his poetry. His early experiences are traceable in lines like these:—

"Our bosom-belted billowy-blossoming hills, Whose hearts break out in laughter like the sea."

He went to Oxford for three years, but left without taking his degree. The story is current that he knew more Greek than his teachers but that he failed in an examination on the Scriptures. He sought to complete his education by wide reading and by travel, especially in France and Italy.

When he was twenty-five, he went to live for a short time at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, in the western part of London, in the same house with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Meredith. Swinburne admired Rossetti's poetry and was much impressed with the Pre-Raphaelite virtues of simplicity and directness.

Swinburne never married. His deafness caused him to pass much of his long life in comparative retirement. His last thirty years were spent with his friend, the critic and poet, Theodore Watts-Dunton, at Putney on the Thames, a few miles southwest of London. Swinburne died in 1909 and was buried at Bonchurch in the Isle of Wight.

Works.—In 1864 England was enchanted with the melody of the choruses in his Atalanta in Calydon, a dramatic poem in the old Greek form. Lines like the following from the chorus, The Youth of the Year, show the quality for which his verse is most famous:—

"When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, The mother of months in meadow or plain Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain."

The first series of his Poems and Ballads (1866) contains The Garden of Proserpine, one of his best known poems. Proserpine "forgets the earth her mother" and goes to her "bloomless" garden:—

"And spring and seed and swallow Take wing for her and follow Where summer song rings hollow And flowers are put to scorn."

Many volumes came in rapid succession from his pen. In 1904 his poems were collected in six octavo volumes containing 2357 pages. This collection includes the long narrative poems, Tristram of Lyonesse and The Tale of Balen, a faithful retelling of famous medieval stories. He, however, had more ability as a writer of lyrics than of narrative verse.

His poetic dramas fill five additional volumes. Chastelard (1865), one of the three dramas relating to Mary Queen of Scots, is the best of his plays. He had, however, neither the power to draw character nor the repression of speech necessary for a great dramatist. The best parts of his plays are really lyrical verse.

Many critics think that Swinburne's reputation would be as great as it now is, if he had ceased to write verse in 1866, at the age of twenty-nine, after producing Atalanta in Calydon and the first series of his Poems and Ballads. Although his interests widened and his poetic range increased, much of his work during his last forty years is a repetition of earlier successes. His Songs before Sunrise, however (1871), and the next two volumes of Poems and Ballads (1878 and 1889) contain some poems that rank among his best.

Later in life he wrote a large amount of prose criticism, much of which deals with the Elizabethan dramatists. His A Study of Shakespeare (1880) and his shorter Shakespeare (1905) are especially suggestive. In spite of the fact that the reader must make constant allowance for his habit of using superlatives, he was an able critic.

General Characteristics.—Swinburne's poetry suffers from his tendency to drown his ideas in a sea of words.

Sometimes we gain no more definite ideas from reading many lines of his verse than from hearing music without words. Much of his poetry was suggested by wide reading, not by close personal contact with life. His verse sometimes offends from disregarding moral proprieties and from so expressing his atheism as to wound the feelings of religious people. His idea of a Supreme Power was colored by the old Grecian belief in Fate. In exact opposition to Wordsworth, Swinburne's youthful poems show that he regarded Nature as the incarnation of a Power malevolent to man. He lacked the optimism of Browning and the faith of Tennyson. The mantle of Byron and Shelley fell on Swinburne as the poet of revolt against what seemed to be religious or political tyranny.

After Tennyson's death, in 1892, Swinburne was the greatest living English poet; but, even if his verse had not offended Queen Victoria for the foregoing reasons, she would not have appointed him poet-laureate after the misery of the Russians had moved him in 1890 to write, referring to the Czar:—

"Night hath naught but one red star—Tyrannicide.

"God or man, be swift; hope sickens with delay: Smite and send him howling down his father's way."

Swinburne's crowning glory is his unquestioned mastery, unsurpassed by any poet since Milton, of the technique of varied melodious verse. This quality is evident, no matter whether he is describing the laughter of a child:—

"Sweeter far than all things heard, Hand of harper, tone of bird, Sound of woods at sundawn stirr'd, Welling water's winsome ward, Wind in warm wan weather,"

or expressing his fierce hatred for any condition or place where—

"…a curse was or a chain A throne for torment or a crown for bane Rose, moulded out of poor men's molten pain,"

or singing the song of a lover—

"If love were what the rose is, And I were like the leaf, Our lives would grow together In sad or singing weather, Blown fields or flowerful closes, Green pleasure or grey grief; If love were what the rose is, And I were like the leaf;"

or voicing his early creed—

"That no life lives forever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea,"

or chanting in far nobler strains the Anglo-Saxon belief in the molding power of an infinite presence—

"I am in thee to save thee, As my soul in thee saith, Give thou as I gave thee, Thy life-blood and breath, Green leaves of thy labor, white flowers of thy thought, and red fruit of thy death."

RUDYARD KIPLING, 1865-

[Illustration: RUDYARD KIPLING. From the painting by John Collier.]

Life.—Rudyard Kipling, the youngest of the great Victorians, was born in Bombay, India, in 1865. His parents were people of culture and artistic training, the father, John Lockwood Kipling, being a recognized authority on Indian art. Like most English children born in India, Kipling, when very small, was sent to England to escape the fatal Indian heat. Afterwards in the story Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, Kipling told the tragic experience of two Anglo-Indian children when separated from their parents. If it is true that this story is largely autobiographical, the separation must have been a trying ordeal in Kipling's childhood. Later he spent several years at Westward Ho, Devonshire, in a school conducted mainly for the sons of Indian officials. Stalky and Co., a broadly humorous book of schoolboy life, gives the Kipling of this period, in the character of the "egregious Beetle."

When only seventeen, he returned to India and immediately began journalistic work. For seven years, first at Lahore and later at Allahabad, he was busy with the usual hackwork of a small newspaper. During these impressionable years, from seventeen to twenty-four, he gained his intimate knowledge of the strangely-colored, many-sided Indian life. His first stories and poems, often written in hot haste, to fill the urgent need of more copy, appeared as waifs and strays in the papers for which he wrote. A collection of verse, Departmental Ditties, published at Lahore in 1886, was well received; and it was quickly followed by several volumes of short stories. His ability thus gained early recognition in India.

At the age of twenty-four, he left India for London. Here his books found a publisher almost at once, and he was hailed as a new literary genius. His work became so popular that he was able to devote his whole time to writing. It is doubtful whether any writer since Dickens has received such quick and enthusiastic recognition from all classes of the English-speaking race. Even the street-car conductors were heard quoting him.

In 1892 he married Miss Caroline Balestier, an American, and afterwards lived for four years at Brattleboro, Vermont. Later he settled in Sussex, England, whence he has made long journeys to South Africa, Canada, and Egypt, amassing more knowledge of the English "around the Seven Seas."

Probably the most remarkable feature of Kipling's career is the early age at which his genius developed. Before he left India he had published one book of verse and seven prose collections. By the time he was thirty, he had written The Jungle Books, most of his best short stories, and some of his finest verse.

Prose.—As a master of the modern short story, Kipling stands unsurpassed. His journalistic work helped him to acquire a direct, concentrated style of narrative, to find interest in an astonishing variety of subjects, and to seize on the right details for vivid presentation. He was fortunate in discovering in India a new literary field, in which his genius appears at its best. Some of his early tales of Indian life are marred by crudeness and by lack of feeling; but these faults decreased as he matured.

Kipling's stories depend for their interest on incident, not on analysis. He embodies romantic adventure and action in masterpieces as different as the terrible tragedy of The Man Who would be King (1888), the tender love story of Without Benefit of Clergy (1890), and the mystic dream-land of The Brushwood Boy (1895). He specially enjoyed portraying the English soldier. Perhaps his best-known characters are the privates Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, whom we meet in such tales of mingled comedy and tragedy as With the Main Guard (1888), On Greenhow Hill (1891), The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney (1891), The Courting of Dinah Shadd (1981).

When Kipling traveled to new lands, he wrote stories of America, Africa, and the deep sea; but his later tales show an unfortunate increase in the use of technical terms and a lessening of his former dash and spontaneity. There are, however, readers who prefer such a delicate, subtle, story as They (1905), to his earlier masterpieces of strenuous action.

In The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895), Kipling has accomplished the greatest of feats,—an original creation. From the moment the little brown baby, Mowgli, crawls into Mother Wolf's cave away from Shere Khan, the tiger, until the time for him to graduate from the jungle, we follow him under the spell of a fascination different from any that we have known before. The animals of the jungle have real personalities, from the chattering Bandar-log to the lumbering kindly Baloo. With all their intense individuality, they remain animals, each one true to his kind, hating or loving men, thinking mainly through their instincts, and surpassing human schoolmasters in teaching Mowgli the great laws of the jungle,—that obedience is "the head and the hoof of the Law," that nothing was ever yet lost by silence, that, in the jungle, life and food depend on keeping one's temper, that no one shall kill for the pleasure of killing.

[Illustration: MOWGLI AND HIS BROTHERS. By permission of Century Company.]

Above all stands the character of Mowgli, the wolf-adopted man-cub, human and yet brother to the animals. With a touch of genius, Kipling revealed the kinship between Mowgli and the denizens of the jungle. Kipling's eyes could see both the harsh realism of animal existence and the genuine idealism of Mother Wolf and the Pack and the Jungle-law.

Just So Stories (1902), written primarily for children, but entertaining to all, is a collection of romantic stories, mostly of animals, illustrated by Kipling himself. One of the best of these tales is The Cat that Walked by Himself, which has distinct ethical value in showing how the cat through service won his place by the fireside.

Though Kipling has written four novels, only two, The Light that Failed (1891) and Kim (1901), can compare with his best short stories. The Light that Failed, the tragedy of an artist who becomes blind, proves that Kipling was able to handle a long plot sufficiently well to sustain interest. Kim is an attempt to present as a more completed whole that India of which the stories give only glimpses. On the slenderest thread of plot is strung a bewildering array of scenes, characters, and incidents. His intimate knowledge of India and his photographic power of description are here used with remarkable picturesque effect.

[Illustration: THE CAT THAT WALKED. Copyright, 1902, by Rudyard Kipling.]

Verse.—Kipling's poetry has many of the same qualities as his prose,—originality, force, love of action. In Barrack Room Ballads (1892), the soldier is again celebrated in vigorous songs with swinging choruses. Mandalay, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, Danny Deever, show what spirited verse can be fashioned from a common ballad meter and a bold use of dialect.

"So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan; You're a pore benighted 'eathen, but a first class fightin' man; An' 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your 'ayrick 'ead of 'air— You big black boundin' beggar—for you broke a British square!"

Much of his verse is political. His opinion of questions at issue is sometimes given with much heat, but always with sincerity and true patriotism. The best known of his patriotic songs, and perhaps his noblest poetic effort, The Recessional (1897), was inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of Victoria's reign. The Truce of the Bear (1898) is a warning against Russia. The Native-Born is a toast to the colonies in every clime.

Kipling's verse breaks with many of the accepted standards of English verse. He does not aim at such pure beauty of form as we find in Tennyson. He can handle skillfully many kinds of meter, as is shown in The Song of the English, The Ballad of East and West, The Song of the Banjo, and many sea lyrics. Yet he uses mostly the common measures, attaining with these a free swing, a fitting of sound to sense, that are irresistible to the many—

"Common tunes that make you choke and blow your nose, Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan— I can rip your very heart-strings out with those."[17]

Some of his later work shows increasing seriousness of tone. The Recessional and the Hymn before Action are elevated in thought and expression. The bigness of L'Envoi shows poetic power capable of higher flights:—

"And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame; And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame; But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star, Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They Are!"[18]

General Characteristics.—Kipling has carried to their highest development the principles of the Bret Harte School of short story writers. His style possesses those qualities necessary for telling a short tale,—directness, force, suggestiveness. Rarely has any writer so mastered the technique, the craftsmanship of this particular literary form. He has the gift of force and dramatic power, rather than of beauty and delicacy.

He excels in suggestive vivid description, and he draws wonderful pictures of all out-of-doors, especially of the sea; but nature remains merely the background for the human figures. Much of his vividness lies in the use of specific words. If he should employ the phraseology of his jungle laws to frame the first commandment for writers, it would be: "Seven times never be vague." Few authors have at the very beginning of their career more implicitly heeded such a commandment, obedience to which is evident in the following description from The Courting of Dinah Shadd:—