Henry Coppée

“ In The Templar, we have a satire upon a certain class of lawyers. It is indicative of that classical age, that he understands Aristotle and Longinus better than Littleton and Coke, and is happy in anything but law—a briefless barrister, but a gentleman of consideration.
But the most charming, the most living portrait is that of Sir Roger de Coverley, an English country gentleman, as he ought to be, and as not a few really were. What a generous humanity for all wells forth from his simple and loving heart! He has such a mirthful cast in his behavior that he is rather loved than esteemed. ”

“ Ballads, more powerful than laws, shouted forth from a nation's heart, have been in part the achievers, and afterward the victorious hymns, of its new-born freedom, and have been also used in after ages to reinspire the people with the spirit of their ancestors. Immortal epics not only present magnificent displays of heroism for imitation, but, like the Iliad and Odyssey, still teach the theogony, national policy, and social history of a people, after the Bema has long been silent, the temples in ruin, and the groves prostrate under the axe of repeated conquests. ”

“ A novel may be defined as a fictitious story of modern life describing the management and mastery of the human passions, and especially the universal passion of love. Its power consists in the creation of ideal characters, which leave a real impress upon the reader's mind; it must be a prose epic in that there is always a hero, or, at least, a heroine, generally both, and a drama in its presentation of scenes and supplementary personages. Thackeray calls his Vanity Fair a novel without a hero: it is impossible to conceive a novel without a heroine. ”

“ Dickens is bold in the advocacy of truth and in denouncing error; he is the champion of honest poverty; he is the foe of class pretension and oppression; he is the friend of friendless children; the reformer of those whom society has made vagrants. Without many clear assertions of Christian doctrine, but with no negation of it, he believes in doing good for its own sake,—in self-denial, in the rewards which virtue gives herself. ”

“ Robinson Crusoe stands alone among English books, a perennial fountain of instruction and pleasure. It aids in educating each new generation: children read it for its incident; men to renew their youth; literary scholars to discover what it teaches of its time and of its author's genius. Its influence continues unabated; it incites boys to maritime adventure, and shows them how to use in emergency whatever they find at hand. It does more: it tends to reclaim the erring by its simple homilies ”

“ Both Sterne and Goldsmith were eminently subjective. They stand as a transparent medium between their works and the reader. The medium through which we see Tristram Shandy is a double lens,—one part of which is the distorted mind of the author, and the other the nondescript philosophy which he pilfered from Rabelais and Burton. The glass through which the Vicar of Wakefield is shown us is the good-nature and loving heart of Goldsmith, which brighten and gladden every creation of his pen. ”

“ How sleep the brave who sink to rest
By all their country's wishes blest!
His Oriental Eclogues please by the simplicity of the colloquies, the choice figures of speech, and the fine descriptions of nature. But of all his poems, the most finished and charming is the Ode to Evening. It contains thirteen four-lined stanzas of varied metre, and in blank verse so full of harmony that rhyme would spoil it. It presents a series of soft, dissolving views, and stands alone in English poetry, with claims sufficient to immortalize the poet, had he written nothing else. ”

“ The monarch who came to the throne in 1327, one year before the birth of Chaucer, was worthy to be the usher of this new era to England: a man of might, of judgment, and of forecast; the first truly English monarch in sympathy and purpose who had occupied the throne since the Conquest: liberal beyond all former precedent in religion, he sheltered Wiclif in his bold invectives, and paved the way for the later encroachments upon the papal supremacy. ”

“ And again, in this varied delineation of character, Shakspeare less than any other author either obtrudes or repeats himself. Unlike Byron, he is nowhere his own hero: unlike most modern novelists, he fashions men who, while they have the generic human resemblance, differ from each other like those of flesh and blood around us: he has presented a hundred phases of love, passion, ambition, jealousy, revenge, treachery, and cruelty, and each distinct from the others of its kind ”

“ In society, Macaulay was a great talker—he harangued his friends; and there was more than wit in the saying of Sidney Smith, that his conversation would have been improved by a few "brilliant flashes of silence."
But in spite of his faults, if we consider the profoundness of his learning, the industry of his studies, and the splendor of his style, we must acknowledge him as the most distinguished of English historians. No one has yet appeared who is worthy to complete the magnificent work which he left unfinished. ”

“ Don Juan is illustrative not only of the poet, but of the age; there was a generation of such men and women. But quite apart from its moral, or rather immoral, character, the poem is one of the finest in our literature: it is full of wonderful descriptions, and exhibits a splendid mastery of language, rhythm, and rhyme: a glorious epic with an inglorious hero, and that hero Byron himself. ”

“ Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore, deserves particular notice in a sketch of English Literature not so much for his own works,—although he was a poet,—as for his collection of ballads, made with great research and care, and published in 1765. By bringing before the world these remains of English songs and idyls, which lay scattered through the ages from the birth of the language, he showed England the true wealth of her romantic history, and influenced the writers of the day to abandon the artificial and reproduce the natural, the simple, and the romantic. ”

“ In an historic view of English Literature, the works of Moore, touching almost every subject, must always be of great value to the student of his period: there he will always have his prominent place. But he is already losing his niche in public favor as a poet proper; better taste, purer morals, truer heart-songs, and more practical views will steadily supplant him, until, with no power to influence the present, he shall stand only as a charming relic of the past. ”

“ In the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Dryden, and Addison, are to be found the men and women, kings, nobles, and commons, descriptions of English nature, hints of the progress of science and advancement in art; the conduct of government, the force of prevailing fashions—in a word, the moving life of the time, and not its dry historic record.
"Authors," says the elder D'Israeli, "are the creators or creatures of opinion: the great form the epoch; the many reflect the age." ”

“ It is, therefore, not astonishing that in this period Literature should begin to arrange itself into its present great divisions. As in an earlier age the drama had been born to cater to a popular taste, so in this, to satisfy the public demand, arose English prose fiction in its peculiar and enduring form. There had been grand and desultory works preceding this, such as Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim's Progress, and Swift's inimitable story of Gulliver; but the modern novel, unlike these, owes its origin to a general desire for delineations of private life and manners. "Show us ourselves!" ”

“ Its Value.—The value of the Chronicle as a statistic record of English history cannot be over-estimated; it moves before the student of English literature like a diorama, picturing the events in succession, not without glimpses of their attendant philosophy. We learn much of the nation's thoughts, troubles, mental, moral, and physical conditions, social laws, and manners. As illustrations we may refer to the romantic adventures of King Alfred; and to the conquest of Saxon England by William of Normandy—"all as God granted them," says the pious chronicler, "for the people's sins." ”

“ To say that he is the most popular writer in the whole course of English Literature thus far, is hardly to overstate his claims; and the principal reason is that, with a blundering and improvident nature, a want of dignity, a lack of coherence, he had a great heart, alive to human suffering; he was generous to a fault, true to the right, and ever seeking, if constantly failing, to direct and improve his own life, and these good characteristics are everywhere manifest in his works. ”

“ Upon an island discovered by a companion of Vespuccius, he established an imaginary commonwealth, in which everybody was good and everybody happy. Purely fanciful as is his Utopia, and impossible of realization as he knew it to be while men are what they are, and not what they ought to be, it is manifestly a satire on that age, for his republic shunned English errors, and practised social virtues which were not the rule in England. ”

“ The works of Fielding may be justly accused of describing immoral scenes and using lewd language; but even in this they are delineative of the manners and conversation of an age in which such men lived, such scenes occurred, such language was used. I liken the great realm of English prose fiction to some famous museum of art. The instructor of the young may carefully select what pictures to show them; but the student of English literature moves through the rooms and galleries, gazing, judging, approving, condemning, comparing. Genius may have soiled its canvas with what is prurient and vile ”

“ Thus, distrusting their religious teachers, thoughtful men began to long for an English version of that Holy Book which contains all the words of eternal life. And thus, while the people were becoming more clamorous for instruction, and while Wiclif was meditating the great boon of a translated Bible, which, like a noonday sun, should irradiate the dark places and disclose the loathsome groups and filthy manifestations of cell and cloister, Chaucer was administering the wholesome medicine of satire and contempt. ”

“ It is the man who is presented to us in his works, and who can no more be disjoined from them than the light from the vase, the beauties of which it discloses. As an essayist, he was of the school of Addison and Steele; but he has more ease of style and more humor than his teachers. As a dramatist, he had many and superior competitors in his own vein; and yet his plays still occupy the stage. As an historian, he was fluent but superficial; and yet the charm of his style and the easy flow of his narrative, have given his books currency as manuals of instruction. ”

“ It seems strange that he should have thus regretted what to us seems a noble and original opportunity of double creation—poem and language. What Dante thus bewailed was his real warrant for immortality. Had he written his great work in Latin, it would have been consigned, with the Italian latinity of the middle ages, to oblivion; while his Tuscan still delights the ear of princes and lazzaroni. Professorships of the Divina Commedia are instituted in Italian universities, and men are considered accomplished when they know it by heart. ”

“ Although More wrote against Luther, and opposed Henry's Church innovations, we are struck with his Utopian claim for great freedom of inquiry on all subjects, even religion; and the bold assertion that no man should be punished for his religion, because "a man cannot make himself believe anything he pleases," as Henry's six bloody articles so fearfully asserted he must. The Utopia was written in Latin, but soon translated into English. We use the adjective utopian as meaning wildly fanciful and impossible: its true meaning is of high excellence, to be striven for—in a word, human perfection. ”

“ Captain Sentry, the nephew of Sir Roger, is, it may be supposed, the essayist's ideal of what an English officer should be—a courageous soldier and a modest gentleman.
Sir Andrew Freeport is the retired merchant, drawn to the life. He is moderate in politics, as expediency in that age would suggest. Thoroughly satisfied of the naval supremacy of England, he calls the sea, "the British Common." He is the founder of his own fortune, and is satisfied to transmit to posterity an unsullied name, a goodly store of wealth, and the title he has so honorably won. ”

“ The domain of tragedy, although perhaps not so attractive to the English people as comedy, was still sufficiently so to invite the attention of the literati. The excitement which is produced by exaggerated scenes of distress and death has always had a charm for the multitude; and although the principal tragedies of this period are based upon heroic stories, many of them of classic origin, the genius of the writer displayed itself in applying these to his own times, and in introducing that "touch of nature" which "makes the whole world kin." ”

“ Before settling in London, he had, as we have seen, travelled fifteen months on the Continent, and had been particularly interested by his residence in Italy, where he visited the blind Galileo. The poems which most clearly show the still powerful influence of Italy in all European literature, and upon him especially, are the Arcades, Comus, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Lycidas, each beautiful and finished, and although Italian in their taste, yet full of true philosophy couched in charming verse. ”

“ It is said that Addison, warned by the fate of Cervantes,—whose noble hero, Don Quixote, was killed by another pen,—determined to conduct Sir Roger to the tomb himself; and the knight makes a fitting end. He congratulates his nephew, Captain Sentry, upon his succession to the inheritance; he is thoughtful of old friends and old servants. In a word, so excellent was his life, and so touching the story of his death, that we feel like mourners at a real grave. Indeed he did live, and still lives,—one type of the English country gentleman one hundred and fifty years ago. ”

“ They present homely English life and people,—Partridge, barber, schoolmaster, and coward; Mrs. Honor, the type of maid-servants, devoted to her mistress, and yet artful; Squire Western, the foul and drunken country gentleman; Squire Allworthy, a noble specimen of human nature; Parson Adams, who is regarded by the critics as the best portrait among all his characters.
And even if we can neither commend nor recommend heroes like Tom Jones, such young men really existed, and the likeness is speakingly drawn: we bear with his faults because of his reality. ”

“ As a writer of contemporary history, Clarendon has given us the form and color of the time. The book is in title and handling a Royalist history. Its faults are manifest: first those of partisanship; and secondly, those which spring from his absence, so that much of the work was written without an observant knowledge. His delineation of character is wonderful: the men of the times are more pictorially displayed than in the portraits of Van Dyk. The style is somewhat too pompous, being more that of the orator than of the historian, and containing long and parenthetic periods. ”

“ This great wealth of learning would have still remained a dead letter to the multitude, and, in the main, a useless treasure even to scholars, had it not been for a simple yet marvellous invention of the same period. In Germany, some obscure mechanics, at Harlem, at Mayence, and at Strasbourg, were at work upon a machine which, if perfected, should at once extend letters a hundred-fold, and by that process revolutionize literature. ”

“ Coleridge once asked Charles Lamb if he had ever heard him preach, referring to the early days when he was a Unitarian preacher. "I never heard you do anything else," was the answer he received. He was the prince of talkers, and talked more coherently and connectedly than he wrote: drawing with ease from the vast stores of his learning, he delighted men of every degree. While of the Lake school of poetry, and while in some sort the creature of his age and his surroundings, his eccentricities gave him a rare independence and individuality. A giant in conception, he was a dwarf in execution ”