Literary movement

“ Authors and even books, rather than groups and kinds, demand principal attention.
The result of this revolution is naturally most remarkable in the belles-lettres and the kindred department of history. Poetry, not dramatic, has been revived; prose romance and literary criticism have been brought to a perfection previously unknown; and history has produced works more various, if not more remarkable, than at any previous stage of the language. ”

“ The art of literature which weaves these living threads into its fabric lies closer to the common life and rises higher into the ideal life than any other art. In the lyric, the drama, the epic, the romance, the fable, the conte, the essay, the history, the biography, it not only speaks to the present hour, but also leaves its record for the future. ”

“ In the book, you have claimed culture, but when your readers come to this verse, they will say that no one with the culture of a longshoreman would try to pass off such stuff as verse even in fun, and that if you had the slightest tincture of literary taste, you would realize this. You will go down to posterity in ridicule, and destroy all the good your books might otherwise do. ”

“ Poetry, then, the modern poetry of action, being essentially related to politics and social life, the poet's themes are in the stir and passion of contemporary events or in national history. What field for literature like the mighty, moving pageant of the democratic world? To watch God's hand guiding the nations to their destinies, to probe the eager ferment of a modern society, to interpret all the dim, half-conscious yearning of the masses,—what inspiration for the poet here! "Popular poetry has invaded everything, the poetry whose epic is revolution, whose satire is revolt." ”

“ A literature nursed in so poisonous an atmosphere, necessarily progressed to a sickly maturity. Effects frequently become causal; and long after the nation had changed, the old manners exercised a traditionary influence on the stage, and literary aspirants continued to model their conceptions by established precedents. ”

“ A certain degree of mental development and simplicity, a certain community of ideas and habits between the different classes of society, greater ardor than fixity of imagination, greater movement of soul than of existence, a strongly-excited moral activity destitute of any imperious and determined object, liberty of thought and repose of life—these are the circumstances of which dramatic poetry has need, in order to shine with its full splendor. ”

“ A book exhibits not only the attainments, culture, and literary art of the writer but also his intellectual force, emotional nature, and moral character. Wide attainments are revealed in breadth of view and in mastery of large resources. Culture is exhibited in a general delicacy of thought, feeling, and expression. Literary art is shown in the choice of words and in their arrangement in sentences and paragraphs. The artistic sense, without which a finished excellence is not attainable, reveals itself in the proportion, symmetry, and completeness of a work. ”

“ Criticism fell into the prevailing theory: so did history, and even romance. Philosophy and Science are not the best foster-mothers of Poetry and Romance. Philosophy and Science grew more solemn than ever; and Poetry and Romance lost something of their wilder fancy and their light heart. Literature grew less spontaneous, more correct, more learned, and, it may be, more absorbed in its practical purpose of modifying social life. ”

“ The life of the ode is ideal, that of the epic grandiose, that of the drama real. In fine, this triple poetry springs from three grand sources—the Bible, Homer, Shakspere. Such are the diverse aspects of thought at different eras of man and society. Here are its three faces—youth, manhood, old age. Examine a single literature by itself or all literatures en masse, and you will always reach the same fact—the lyric poets before the epic, the epic before the dramatic. ”

“ So the novel was born, expressing, though in a different way, exactly the same ideals of personality and of the dignity of common life which were later proclaimed in the American and in the French Revolution, and were welcomed with rejoicing by the poets of the romantic revival. To tell men, not about knights or kings or types of heroes, but about themselves in the guise of plain men and women, about their own thoughts and motives and struggles, and the results of actions upon their own characters,--this was the purpose of our first novelists. ”

“ Days without writing when poetic guilds were the great conservators of human tradition—days of courtly imitators crowning their brows with the withered roses of buried poets—days of democratic art when he who has the living spirit is free to choose its proper embodiment—so various are the epochs of social life and literature to which "poetic diction" may belong, so different are the facts and the ideas which it may express. ”

“ But the awakened interest in classical literature while it coloured the character and stimulated the growth of the movement, supplying new ideals and suggesting new points of view, was only the form in which the change of spirit began to express itself in the fourteenth century. ”

“ Literary societies or puys1 were instituted, which maintained the rules of art, and awarded crowns to successful competitors in poetry; a formal ingenuity replaced lyrical inspiration; poetry accepted proudly the name of "rhetoric." At the same time there is gain in one respect—the poets no longer conceal their own personality behind their work: they instruct, edify, moralise, express their real or simulated passions in their own persons; if their art is mechanical, yet through it we make some acquaintance with the men and manners of the age. ”

“ History must supply the writer with the rudiments of narration, which he must improve and exalt by a nobler art, must animate by dramatic energy, and diversify by retrospection and anticipation; morality must teach him the exact bounds, and different shades, of vice and virtue; from policy, and the practice of life, he has to learn the discriminations of character, and the tendency of the passions, either single or combined; and physiology must supply him with illustrations and images. ”

“ When the impetus of a profound and powerful emotion, the mighty will of a great event finds expression in literature,—or at least in letters,—the writer’s mind speeds like a greyhound along the track of public sentiment. ”

“ Poetry other than dramatic grew in the eighteenth century upon a shallow soil. The more serious and the more ardent mind of the time was occupied with science, the study of nature, the study of society, philosophical speculation, the criticism of religion, of government, and of social arrangements. The old basis of belief upon which reposed the great art of the preceding century had given way. The analytic intellect distrusted the imagination. The conventions of a brilliant society were unfavourable to the contemplative mood of high poetry. ”

“ If things led on from logical step to step, what simple stories would crowd the world. Then indeed the epic and the lyrical, which we perpetually seek in fiction, would divert us in the common affairs of our own lives. ”

“ Then come the thousands who read the best magazines, and whatever else is for the moment popular in novels and poetry—the last dialect story, the fashionable poem, the questionable but talked-of novel. Let a violent attack be made on the decency of a new story, and instantly, if only it is clever, its author becomes famous. ”

“ She goes below the outer shell, and unearths the inner meaning of the work, the causes which produced it, and the effect of its existence. She is now preparing a course of ten lectures on "The Novel and Life," which will follow the parallel development of civilization and the English novel. ”

“ All modern literature—philosophical, political, and artistic—is striking in this respect. What wealth of idea, of form, of color, what erudition, what art, but what a lack of serious matter, what dread of any exactitude of thought or expression! ”

“ Let the modern story be the central figure against the universal background of truth—a background which will soften its sharper outlines, and mellow its cruder tones. Preserve in the classic the classical spirit, as well as the classical form—that classical spirit which kindles the fancy and stirs the imagination. Let the hearers see their heroes through the vista of vanishing years.
Technique is a necessary part of any artistic production. Note how carefully the artist selects his brushes and prepares his palette. The story-teller should do no less. ”

“ Not slowly to build up a grand poem of continuous ideal action, not quietly and at leisure to weave forth tissues of fantastic imagery, not perseveringly and laboriously to prosecute one track of speculation and bring it to a close, not earnestly and courageously to throw one’s whole soul into a work of moral agitation and reform, was now what was regarded as natural in literature. ”

“ ONE must ascend into poetry from prose, and also descend into prose from poetry. There are few who have not felt this; and, perhaps, to ascend and descend gracefully is the art of living—in an aesthetic sense. ”

“ In this sense, the historical novel may become what epic poetry was in the time of the blooming youth of the nations,--a piece of national history, in the conception of the artist, who within a certain space, shows us a series of distinctly-drawn, clearly coloured figures, in whose individual lives, strivings and sufferings, the life and substance of the time in which they lived, is reflected as in a mirror. ”

“ Why is this revolution in public taste? Because those master-spirits which guide the present age, have given birth to a species of poetry more legitimate and useful in its design, and more valuable in its tendencies and characteristics. ”

“ Revolution in Poetry.—The strict limit which the French dramatists marked out with regard to unity of action, time and place, construction of style, verse and sentence, selection of words and ideas, was a school as important as that of counterpoint and fugue in the development of modern music or that of the Gorgianic figures in Greek oratory. ”

“ It underlies nearly all the lyric expressions in art; furnishes almost the only theme for that delineation of modern life which we call the novel; and is a main support for music, painting, statuary and belles-lettres. ”

“ Finally, we should learn that, at the very time when great revolutions in politics and philosophy were being inaugurated, a new spirit thus began to manifest itself in our literature,—a spirit of revolt against artificial restrictions and traditional methods,—which produced a glorious revival in English poetic composition and ushered in a third great school of poetry, distinguished for its breadth and freedom, as that which it superseded had been known for its elegance and precision. ”

“ Let any novel be finished, let all the resources of the mind be conscientiously expended on it, let it become a thorough intellectual creation, and, instead of remaining a novel, it would assume the dignity of an epic, lyric, drama, philosophy, or history. ”

“ Behold then three great successive orders of things in civilization, from its origin down to our days. Now, as poetry is always superposed upon society, we propose to try to demonstrate, from the form of its society, what the character of the poetry must have been in those three great ages of the world—primitive times, ancient times, modern times. ”

“ And this is that I would say, at present, of these two requisites of universal poetry, namely, that licence of expression, which we call the style of poetry, and that licence of representation, 11 which we call fiction. The style is, as it were, the body of poetry; fiction, is its soul. Having, thus, taken the privilege of a poet to create a Muse, we have only now to give her a voice, or more properly to tune it, and then she will be in a condition, as one of her favourites speaks, to ravish all the Gods. ”

“ Your chairman has admirably said, in one of his charming essays, that ‘History may be abstract, science may be frankly inhuman, even art may be purely formal; but poetry must be full of human life’. This consideration, I think, may make us feel perfectly secure as to the ultimate maintenance of poetic expression. ”

“ But the case is entirely different with those arts—such as history, romance, epic poetry, or the drama—which do not at once produce a visible object to the mind, but give descriptions or dialogues by which the reader or spectator is required to form a mental object or awaken a mental interest of his own creation, though from the materials furnished, and under the guidance of the genius of the artist. ”

“ And it is possible, as we have seen, that modern fiction should be at once epic and novelistic in content and in mood,—epic in resuming all aspects of a certain phase of life and in exhibiting a social struggle, and novelistic in casting emphasis upon personal details of character and in depicting intimate emotions. ”

“ Let the realists, if they like, go on proclaiming that all is prose, and the idealists that all is poesy. The last will have their rainy days, the first their days of sunshine. In all arts the victory remains with a privileged few, who go their own ways ”

“ The turn for style is perceptible all through English poetry, proving, to my mind, the genuine poetical gift of the race; this turn imparts to our poetry a stamp of high distinction, and sometimes it doubles the force of a poet not by nature of the very highest order, such as Gray, and raises him to a rank beyond what his natural richness and power seem to promise. ”