Various

“ It is poetry for repetition rather than for close meditation or contemplation, and resembles a military band more than a full orchestra. Nor will his prose bear careful analysis. It is a good servant, no more. When we consider, however, not the intensity but the vast extent, range and versatility of Scott’s powers, we are constrained to assign him the first place in his own age, if not that in the next seat to Shakespeare in the whole of the English literary Pantheon. Like Shakespeare, he made humour and a knowledge of human nature his first instruments in depicting the past. ”

“ Much of the new poetry moved, like that of France, among the conventionalities and artificialities of an unreal world of romance, but it was of wider range, of fuller tone, of far greater emotional intensity, and, at its best, was the fabric, not of elegant ingenuity, but of creative human passion,—in Dante, indeed, a wonderful visionary structure in which love and hate, and pity and terror, and the forms and countenances of men were more vivid and real than in the world of real men and real passions. ”

“ If Dickens may be described as the eye of Victorian literature, Tennyson the ear attuned to the subtlest melodies, Swinburne the reed to which everything blew to music, Thackeray the velvet pulpit-cushion, Eliot the impending brow, and Meredith the cerebral dome, then Browning might well be described as the active brain itself eternally expounding some point of view remote in time and place from its own. ”

“ We must, in short, resign ourselves to whatever fate and fortune bring to us, believing, as the first article of our creed, that there is a god, whose thought directs the universe, and that not merely in our acts, but even in our thoughts and plans, we cannot escape his eye. In the world the true position of man is that of member of a great system, which comprehends God and men. Each human being is in the first instance a citizen of his own nation or commonwealth; but he is also a member of the great city of gods and men, whereof the city political is only a copy in miniature. ”

“ Letters became the pastime, and therefore one of the more serious pursuits, of men of quality, who soon excelled in song and light scarifying verse and comedy, and took their own tragedies and criticisms gravely. Poetry under such auspices became gallant and social, and also personal and partisan; and satire was soon its most vital form, with the accessories of compliment, rhymed popular argumentation and elegy. The social and conversational instinct was the master-influence in prose. ”

“ Shakespeare owed something to Lodge, and Drayton to Marlowe. All these points describe a love-situation at length, and save in one instance they describe it from without. The exception is Marlowe, who achieves a more than Sicilian perfection; he says everything, and is equal to everything that he has to say. In Venus and Adonis the poet is enamoured less of love than of the tones and poses of lovers and of the beauty and gallant motion of animals, while in The Rape of Lucrece he is intent on the gradations of lust, shame and indignation, in which he has a spectator’s interest. ”

“ But in more than compensation there is a company of prose masters, from Florio and Hooker to Milton and Clarendon, not one of whom clearly or fully anticipates the modern style, and who claim all the closer study that their special virtues have been for ever lost. They seem farther away from us than the poets around them. The verse of Shakespeare is near to us, for its tradition has persisted; his prose, the most natural and noble of his age, is far away, for its tradition has not persisted. One reason of this difference is that English prose tried to do more work than that of France and Italy ”

“ The great champion of the Augustan masters was himself the architect of revolution. First the idol and then the outcast of respectable society, Lord Byron sought relief in new cadences and new themes for his poetic talent. Byron. He was, however, essentially a history painter or a satirist in verse. He had none of the sensitive aesthetic taste of a Keats, none of the spiritual ardour of a Shelley, or of the elemental beauty or artistry of Wordsworth or Coleridge. He manages the pen (said Scott) with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality. ”

“ Good and bad had to make up the tale against time, and revelling in the very exuberance and excess of their humour, the novelists invariably triumphed. It was incumbent on the new school of novelists to economize their work with more skill, to relieve their composition of irrelevancies, to keep the writing in one key, and to direct it consistently to one end—in brief, to unify the novel as a work of art and to simplify its ordonnance. ”

“ Its faults only exaggerate those of Sidney, Greville and Shakespeare, who often misuse homely or technical metaphor; and English verse shared, by coincidence not by borrowing, and with variations of its own, in the general strain and torture of style that was besetting so many poets of the Latin countries. Yet these poets well earn the name of metaphysical, not for their philosophic phrasing, but for the shuttle-flight of their fancy to and fro between the things of earth and the realities of spirit that lie beyond the screen of the flesh. ”

“ In Tennyson’s poetry we are always discovering new beauties. In Browning’s we are finding new blemishes. Why he chose rhythm and metre for seven-eighths of his purpose is somewhat of a mystery. His protest against the materialistic view of life is, perhaps, a more valid one than Tennyson’s; he is at pains to show us the noble elements valuable in spite of failure to achieve tangible success. He realizes that the greater the man, the greater is the failure, yet protests unfailingly against the despondent or materialist view of life. ”

“ Literature was the one form of art which the English understood, in which they had always excelled since 1579, and in which their originality was supreme. To the native genius for poetry was now added the advantage of materials for a prose which in lucidity and versatility should surpass even that of Goldsmith and Hazlitt. The diversity of form and content of this great literature was commensurate with the development of human knowledge and power which marked its age. ”

“ One can hardly look through a collection of English epitaphs without being struck with the fact that these represent a greater variety of intellectual and emotional states than those of any other nation, ranging through every style of thought from the sublime to the commonplace, every mood of feeling from the most delicate and touching to the coarse and even brutal. ”

“ Prose, in fact, could never be sure of doing the day’s work in the right fashion. The cross-currents of pedantry in the midst of simplicity, the distrust of clear plain brevity, which was apt to be affected when it came, the mimicries of foreign fashions, and the quaintness and cumbrousness of so much average writing, make it easier to classify Renaissance prose by its interests than by its styles.
The Elizabethan novel was always unhappily mannered, and is therefore dead. It fed the drama, which devoured it. The tales of Boccaccio, Bandello, Cinthio, Margaret of The novel. ”

“ Shakespeare is the greatest in this province also; but the power of infallible and unforgettable song is often granted to slighter, gentler playwrights like Greene and Dekker, while it is denied to men of weightier build and sterner purpose like Chapman and Jonson. The songs of Jonson are indeed at their best of absolute and antique finish; but the irrevocable dew of night or dawn seldom lies upon them as it lies on the songs of Webster or of Fletcher. The best lyrics in the plays are dramatic; they must be read in their own setting. ”

“ She combines self-knowledge and artistic reticence with a complete tact and an absolute lucidity of vision within the area prescribed. Within the limits of a park wall in a country parish, absolutely oblivious of Europe and the universe, her art is among the finest and most finished that our literature has to offer. In irony she had no rival at that period. But the trimness of her plots and the delicacy of her miniature work have affinities in Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Martineau and Mary Russell Mitford, three excellent writers of pure English prose. ”

“ Nothing external, neither death nor exile nor pain nor any such thing, can ever force us to act against our will; if we are conquered, it is because we have willed to be conquered. And thus, although we are not responsible for the ideas that present themselves to our consciousness, we are absolutely and without any modification responsible for the way in which we use them. Nothing is ours besides our will. The divine law which bids us keep fast what is our own forbids us to make any claim to what is not ours ”

“ Long after the new learning and culture of the Renaissance had been introduced there, long after classical and Italian models were eagerly chosen and followed, the epic and lyric models of the middle ages were admired and imitated, and the ancient forms of the drama lived side by side with the new until the time of Shakespeare himself. ”

“ At certain points, notably in the regulation of the blood-feud and the construction of a tariff of atonements, the law of one rude folk will always be somewhat like the law of another; but the existing remains of old Welsh and old Irish law stand far remoter from the dooms of Æthelberht and Ine than stand the edicts of Rothari and Liutprand, kings of the Lombards. Indeed, it is very dubious whether distinctively Celtic customs play any considerable part in the evolution of that system of rules of Anglian, Scandinavian and Frankish origin which becomes the law of Scotland. ”

“ The greatest champion, however, of continuity and conservation both in church and state, against the new schools of latitudinarians and radicals, the great eulogist of the unwritten constitution, and the most perfect master of emotional prose in this period, prose in which the harmony of sense and sound is attained to an extent hardly ever seen outside supreme poetry, was Edmund Burke, one of the most commanding intellects in the whole range of political letters—a striking contrast in this respect to Junius, whose mechanical and journalistic talent for invective has a quite ephemeral value. ”

“ For man, though a member in the system of the world, has also within him a principle which can guide and understand the movement of all the members; he can enter into the method of divine administration, and thus can learn—and it is the acme of his learning—the will of God, which is the will of nature. Man, said the Stoic, is a rational animal; and in virtue of that rationality he is neither less nor worse than the gods, for the magnitude of reason is estimated not by length nor by height but by its judgments. Each man has within him a guardian spirit, a god within him, who never sleeps ”

“ Shakespeare’s throne rests on the foundation of three equal and master faculties. One is that of expression and versification; the next is the invention and presentation of human character in action; the third is the theatrical faculty. The writing of Dante may seem to us more steadily great and perfect, when we remember Shakespeare’s conceits, his experiments, his haste and impatience in his long wrestle with tragic language, his not infrequent sheer infelicities. But Dante is always himself, he had not to find words for hundreds of imaginary persons. ”

“ With allusion to a remote stage in the history of Roman law, a stage of which Henry’s advisers can have known little or nothing, we may say that a “formulary system” is established which will preside over English law until modern times. Certain actions, each with a name of its own, are open to litigants. Each has its own formula set forth in its original (or, as we might say, originating) writ; each has its own procedure and its appropriate mode of trial. The litigant chooses his writ, his action, and must stand or fall by his choice. ”

“ There is plenty of satiric anger and raillery in the spirit of the time, but the most genuine part of it is drawn off into drama. Except for stray passages in Spenser, Drayton and others, formal satire, though profuse, was a literary unreal thing, a pose in the manner of Persius or Juvenal, and tiresome in expression. In this kind only Donne triumphed. The attempts of Lodge and Hall and Marston and John Davies of Hereford and Guilpin and Wither are for the most part simply weariful in different ways, and satire waited for Dryden and his age. ”

“ Moral keeping and constructive mastery are rarer still; and too seldom through a whole drama do we see human life and hear its voices, arranged and orchestrated by the artist. But it can be truly said in defence that while structure without poetry is void (as it tended at times to be in Ben Jonson) , poetry without structure is still poetry, and that the romantic drama is like nothing else in this world for variety of accent and unexpectedness of beauty. We must read it through, as Charles Lamb did, to do it justice. The diffusion of its characteristic excellences is surprising. ”

“ The work of Drayton that is least read and most often mentioned is his Poly-Olbion (1612-1622) , a vast and pious effort, now and then nobly repaid, to versify the scenery, legend, customs and particularities of every English county. The more recluse and pensive habit of Samuel Daniel chills his long chronicle poems; but with Chapman he is the clearest voice of Stoicism in Elizabethan letters; and his harmonious nature is perfectly expressed in a style of happy, even excellence, free alike from “fine madness” and from strain. ”

“ Carrying on the work of Fisher and Cranmer, the new church became the nursing mother of English prose, and trained it more than any single influence,—trained it so well, for the purposes of sacred learning, translation and oratory, and also as a medium of poetic feeling, that in these activities England came to rival France. How late any religious writer of true rank arose may be seen by the lapse of over half a century between Henry VIII.’s Act of Supremacy and Hooker’s treatise. But after Hooker the chain of eloquent divines was unbroken for a hundred years. ”

“ It is, to be sure, the one book of permanent literary significance produced in England in the 15th century; it glows with the warmth and beauty of the old knight’s conception of chivalry and his love for the great deeds and great men of the visionary past, and it continually allures the reader by its fresh and vivid diction and by a syntax which, though sometimes faulty, has almost always a certain naïve charm ”

“ Here the most indigenous form of art invented by the English Renaissance reaches its climax. The Histories are peopled chiefly by men and warriors, of whom Hotspur, “dying in his excellence and flower,” is perhaps more attractive than Henry of Agincourt. But in the “middle comedies,” As You Like It, Much Ado, and Twelfth Night, the warriors are home at court, where women rule the scene and deserve to rule it; for their wit now gives the note; and Shakespeare’s prose, the medium of their talk, has a finer grace and humour than ever before, euphuism lying well in subjection behind it. ”