A History Of English literature

History of English Literature Article From Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation

Compiled by:

Masoud Abadi [email protected] And

Iman Kiaee [email protected]

Table of Contents

I.

Introduction 8

II.

Old English or Anglo-Saxon Era 9 A. Poetry 11 B. Prose 19

III.

Middle English Period 20 A. Allegory 21 B. Tales of Chivalry and Adventure 22 C. Chaucer 25 D. Arthurian Legends 34

IV.

The Renaissance 39 A. Renaissance Poetry 45 B. Renaissance Drama and Prose 66 C. Shakespeare 71 D. Late Renaissance and 17th Century 82

V.

The Restoration Period and The 18th Century 83 A. Age of Dryden 90 B. Age of Pope 104 C. Age of Johnson 127

iii

VI.

The Romantic Age 147 A. The Romantic Poets 148 B. Romantic Prose 159

VII.

The Victorian Era 160 A. Nonfiction 161 B. Poetry 165 C. The Victorian Novel 182 D. 19th Century Drama 212

VIII. Literature of the 20th Century to the Present 214 → Prize Winner Tables 215 A. Post-World War I Fiction 227 B. Fiction After World War II

234

C. Modern Poetry 240 D. Modern Drama 251

IX.

Further Reading 253

X.

Web Links 255

XI.

Archives (from 1942 to 1999)

257

iv

v

vi

History Of English Literature Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

English Literature I

INTRODUCTION

English Literature, literature produced in England, from the introduction of Old English by the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century to the present. The works of those Irish and Scottish authors who are closely identified with English life and letters are also considered part of English literature. For other Irish and Scottish authors, see Irish Literature; Scottish Literature. For other literatures in English, see American Literature: Drama; American Literature: Poetry; American Literature: Prose; Australian Literature; Canadian Literature.

8

Old English Or Anglo-Saxon Era 9

II

OLD ENGLISH, OR ANGLO-SAXON, ERA

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Considered the primary source for English history between the 10th and 12th centuries, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also contains earlier examples of prose. This page depicts Charlemagne, king of the Franks in the late 8th century, killing the heathen Saxons. ERL/Sipa Press/Woodfin Camp and Associates, Inc.

This period extends from about 450 to 1066, the year of the Norman-French conquest of England. The Germanic tribes from Europe who overran England in the 5th century, after the Roman withdrawal, brought with them the Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, language, which is the basis of Modern English (see English Language). They brought also a specific poetic tradition, the formal character of which remained surprisingly constant until the termination of their rule by the Norman-French invaders six centuries later.

10

A

Poetry

Beowulf This excerpt from the medieval Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf introduces the poem‘s antagonist, Grendel. Half human and half monster, Grendel is described as a descendant of Cain. This biblical description reflects the assimilation of Christian themes in this work of pagan origin. Beowulf, the poem‘s hero, ultimately slays Grendel and Grendel‘s mother after a series of deadly forays by the two against the court of the Danish king Hrothgar. This excerpt is recited by an actor. © Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved./(p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Much of Old English poetry was probably intended to be chanted, with harp accompaniment, by the Anglo-Saxon scop, or bard. Often bold and strong, but also mournful and elegiac in spirit, this poetry emphasizes the sorrow and ultimate futility of life and the helplessness of humans before the power of fate. Almost all this poetry is composed without rhyme, in a characteristic line, or verse, of four stressed syllables alternating with an indeterminate number of unstressed ones (see Versification). This line strikes strangely on ears habituated to the usual modern pattern, in which the rhythmical unit, or foot, theoretically consists of a constant number (either one or two) of unaccented syllables that always precede or follow any stressed syllable. Another unfamiliar but equally striking feature in the formal character of Old English poetry is structural alliteration, or the use of syllables beginning with similar sounds in two or three of the stresses in each line. —————————————————————————————————————

From Beowulf Beowulf is an early Anglo-Saxon epic poem. In this excerpt, the hero Beowulf has been summoned by King Hrothgar to kill the monster Grendel, which has been savagely murdering his men. Originally written in Old English, the poem's short, alliterative phrases are still apparent in this modern English translation.

11

From Beowulf Then there were again as at first strong words spoken in the hall, the people in gladness, the sound of a victorious folk, until, in a little while, the son of Healfdene wished to seek his evening rest. He knew of the battle in the high hall that had been plotted by the monster, plotted from the time that they might see the light of the sun until the night, growing dark over all things, the shadowy shapes of darkness, should come gliding, black under the clouds. The company all arose. Then they saluted each other, Hrothgar and Beowulf, and Hrothgar wished him good luck, control of the wine-hall, and spoke these words: “Never before, since I could raise hand and shield, have I entrusted to any man the great hall of the Danes, except now to you. Hold now and guard the best of houses: remember your fame, show your great courage, keep watch against the fierce foe. You will not lack what you wish if you survive that deed of valor.” THE FIGHT WITH GRENDEL (X.) Then Hrothgar went out of the hall with his company of warriors, the protector of the Scyldings. The war-chief would seek the bed of Wealhtheow the queen. The King of Glory—as men had learned—had appointed a hall-guard against Grendel; he had a special mission to the prince of the Danes: he kept watch against monsters. And the man of the Geats had sure trust in his great might, the favor of the Ruler. Then he took off his shirt of armor, the helmet from his head, handed his embellished sword, best of irons, to an attendant, bade him keep guard over his war-gear. Then the good warrior spoke some boast-words before he went to his bed, Beowulf of the Geats: “I claim myself no poorer in war-strength, war works, than Grendel claims himself. Therefore I will not put him to sleep with a sword, so take away his life, though surely I might. He knows no good tools with which he might strike against me, cut my shield in pieces, though he is strong in fight. But we shall forgo the sword in the night—if he dare seek war without weapon—and then may wise God, Holy Lord, assign glory on whichever hand seems good to Him.” The battle-brave one laid himself down, the pillow received the earl's head, and about him many a brave seaman lay down to hall-rest. None of them thought that he would ever again seek from there his dear home, people or town where he had been brought up; for they knew that bloody death had carried off far too many men in the wine-hall, folk of the Danes. But the Lord granted to weave for them good fortune in war, for the folk of the Weather-Geats, comfort and help that they should quite overcome their foe through the might of one man, through his sole strength: the truth has been made known that mighty God has always ruled mankind. There came gliding in the black night the walker in darkness. The warriors slept who should hold the horned house—all but one. It was known to men that when the Ruler did not wish it the hostile creature might not drag them away beneath the shadows. But he, lying awake for the fierce foe, with heart swollen in anger awaited the outcome of the fight. (XI.) Then from the moor under the mist-hills Grendel came walking, wearing God's anger. The foul ravager thought to catch some one of mankind there in the high hall. Under the clouds he moved until he could see most clearly the wine-hall, treasure-house of men, shining with gold. That was not the first time that he had sought Hrothgar's home. Never before or since in his life-days did he find harder luck, hardier hall-thanes. The creature deprived of joy came walking to the hall. Quickly the door gave way, fastened with fire-forged bands, when he touched it with his hands. Driven by evil desire, swollen with rage, he tore it open, the hall's 12

mouth. After that the foe at once stepped onto the shining floor, advanced angrily. From his eyes came a light not fair, most like a flame. He saw many men in the hall, a band of kinsmen all asleep together, a company of war-men. Then his heart laughed: dreadful monster, he thought that before the day came he would divide the life from the body of every one of them, for there had come to him a hope of full-feasting. It was not his fate that when that night was over he should feast on more of mankind. The kinsman of Hygelac, mighty man, watched how the evildoer would make his quick onslaught. Nor did the monster mean to delay it, but, starting his work, he suddenly seized a sleeping man, tore at him ravenously, bit into his bone-locks, drank the blood from his veins, swallowed huge morsels; quickly he had eaten all of the lifeless one, feet and hands. He stepped closer, then felt with his arm for the brave-hearted man on the bed, reached out towards him, the foe with his hand; at once in fierce response Beowulf seized it and sat up, leaning on his own arm. Straightway the fosterer of crimes knew that he had not encountered on middleearth, anywhere in this world, a harder hand-grip from another man. In mind he became frightened, in his spirit: not for that might he escape the sooner. His heart was eager to get away, he would flee to his hiding-place, seek his rabble of devils. What he met there was not such as he had ever before met in the days of his life. Then the kinsman of Hygelac, the good man, thought of his evening's speech, stood upright and laid firm hold on him: his fingers cracked. The giant was pulling away, the earl stepped forward. The notorious one thought to move farther away, wherever he could, and flee his way from there to his fen-retreat; he knew his fingers' power to be in a hateful grip. That was a painful journey that the loathsome despoiler had made to Heorot. The retainers' hall rang with the noise—terrible drink for all the Danes, the house-dwellers, every brave man, the earls. Both were enraged, fury-filled, the two who meant to control the hall. The building resounded. Then was it much wonder that the wine-hall withstood them joined in fierce fight, that it did not fall to the ground, the fair earthdwelling; but it was so firmly made fast with iron bands, both inside and outside, joined by skillful smith-craft. There started from the floor—as I have heard say—many a mead-bench, goldadorned, when the furious ones fought. No wise men of the Scyldings ever before thought that any men in any manner might break it down, splendid with bright horns, have skill to destroy it, unless flame should embrace it, swallow it in fire. Noise rose up, sound strange enough. Horrible fear came upon the North-Danes, upon every one of those who heard the weeping from the wall, God's enemy sing his terrible song, song without triumph—the hellslave bewail his pain. There held him fast he who of men was strongest of might in the days of this life. (XII.) Not for anything would the protector of warriors let the murderous guest go off alive: he did not consider his life-days of use to any of the nations. There more than enough of Beowulf's earls drew swords, old heirlooms, wished to protect the life of their dear lord, famous prince, however they might. They did not know when they entered the fight, hardy-spirited warriors, and when they thought to hew him on every side, to seek his soul, that not any of the best of irons on earth, no warsword, would touch the evil-doer: for with a charm he had made victory-weapons useless, every sword-edge. His departure to death from the time of this life was to be wretched; and the alien spirit was to travel far off into the power of fiends. Then he who before had brought trouble of heart to mankind, committed many crimes—he was at war with God—found that his body would do him no good, for the great-hearted kinsman of Hygelac had him by the hand. Each was hateful to the other alive. The awful monster had lived to feel pain in his body, a huge wound in his shoulder was exposed, his sinews sprang apart, his bonelocks broke. Glory in battle was given to Beowulf. Grendel must flee from there, mortally sick, seek his joyless home in the fenslopes. He knew the more surely that his life's end had come, the full number of his days. For all the Danes was their wish fulfilled after the bloody fight. 13

Thus he who had lately come from far off, wise and stout-hearted, had purged Heorot, saved Hrothgar's house from affliction. He rejoiced in his night's work, a deed to make famous his courage. The man of the Geats had fulfilled his boast to the East-Danes; so too he had remedied all the grief, the malice-caused sorrow that they had endured before, and had had to suffer from harsh necessity, no small distress. That was clearly proved when the battle-brave man set the hand up under the curved roof—the arm and the shoulder: there all together was Grendel's grasp. Source: Beowulf. Tuso, Joseph F., ed. Translated by Donaldson, E. Talbot. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1974. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— All these qualities of form and spirit are exemplified in the epic poem Beowulf, written sometime between the 8th century and the late 10th century. Beginning and ending with the funeral of a great king, and composed against a background of impending disaster, it describes the exploits of a Scandinavian cultural hero, Beowulf, in destroying the monster Grendel, Grendel's mother, and a fire-breathing dragon. In these sequences Beowulf is shown not only as a glorious hero but as a savior of the people. The Old Germanic virtue of mutual loyalty between leader and followers is evoked effectively and touchingly in the aged Beowulf's sacrifice of his life and in the reproaches heaped on the retainers who desert him in this climactic battle. The extraordinary artistry with which fragments of other heroic tales are incorporated to illumine the main action, and with which the whole plot is reduced to symmetry, has only recently been fully recognized. —————————————————————————————————————

Anglo-Saxon Poetry Old English verse was originally delivered orally, a highly formalized method of transmitting cultural and political history in an illiterate society. The heavy alliteration of the verse, using words that begin with similar sounds, may have made it easier to remember. Heroic themes of honor, valor in battle, and fame among one‘s descendants are often featured in these poems, but there is also a sorrowful tradition that focuses on the concept of the exile. ―The Wanderer,‖ one of the most beautiful Old English poems, recalls a sense of the harshness of life and the sadness of the human experience.

14

Anglo-Saxon Poetry The Wanderer

He knows who makes trial How harsh and bitter is care for companion to him who hath few friends to shield him. Track ever taketh him, never the torqued gold, not earthly glory, but cold heart‟s cave. He minds him of hall-men, of treasure-giving, how in his youth his gold-friend gave him to feast. Fallen all this joy. He knows this who is forced to forgo his lord‟s, his friend‟s counsels, to lack them for long: oft sorrow and sleep, banded together, come to bind the lone outcast; he thinks in his heart then that he his lord claspeth and kisseth, and on knee layeth hand and head, as he had at otherwhiles in days now gone, when, he enjoyed the gift-stool. Awakeneth after this friendless man, seeth before him fallow waves, seabirds bathing, broading out feathers, snow and hail swirl, hoarfrost falling.

15

Then all the heavier his heart‟s wounds, sore for his loved lord. Sorrow freshens. Remembered kinsmen press through his mind; he singeth out gladly, scanneth eagerly men from the same hearth. They swim away. Sailors‟ ghosts bring not many known songs there. Care grows fresh in him who shall send forth too often over locked waves his weary spirit. Therefore I may not think, throughout this world, why cloud cometh not on my mind when I think over all the life of earls, how at a stroke they have given up hall, mood-proud thanes. So this middle earth each of all days ageth and falleth.

Source: The Earliest English Poems. Penguin Books, 1991. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— Another feature of Beowulf is the weakening of the sense of the ultimate power of arbitrary fate. The injection of the Christian idea of dependence on a just God is evident. That feature is typical of other Old English literature, for almost all of what survives was preserved by monastic copyists. Most of it was actually composed by religious writers after the early conversion of the people from their faith in the older Germanic divinities. —————————————————————————————————————

16

Bede's Account of the Story of Caedmon Saint Bede the Venerable was one of the greatest scholars of the early Middle Ages. He recorded the history of Anglo-Saxon England and the rise of Christianity in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which he wrote in Latin. It contains many stories of saints and miracles that testify to the glory of God. Caedmon, with his apparently miraculous gift of song, brought divine subject matter to the traditional forms of pagan oral poetry and founded a school of Christian poetry.

From An Ecclesiastical History of the English People By Saint Bede the Venerable

Heavenly grace had especially singled out a certain one of the brothers in the monastery ruled by this abbess, for he used to compose devout and religious songs. Whatever he learned of holy Scripture with the aid of interpreters, he quickly turned into the sweetest and most moving poetry in his own language, that is to say English. It often happened that his songs kindled a contempt for this world and a longing for the life of Heaven in the hearts of many men. Indeed, after him others among the English people tried to compose religious poetry, but no one could equal him because he was not taught the art of song by men or by human agency but received this gift through heavenly grace. Therefore, he was never able to compose any vain and idle songs but only such as dealt with religion and were proper for his religious tongue to utter. As a matter of fact, he had lived in the secular estate until he was well advanced in age without learning any songs. Therefore, at feasts, when it was decided to have a good time by taking turns singing, whenever he would see the harp getting close to his place, he got up in the middle of the meal and went home. Once when he left the feast like this, he went to the cattle shed, which he had been assigned the duty of guarding that night. And after he had stretched himself out and gone to sleep, he dreamed that someone was standing at his side and greeted him, calling out his name. “Caedmon,” he said, “sing me something”. And he replied, “I don‟t know how, to sing; that is why I left the feast to come here—because I cannot sing”. “All the same,” said the one who was speaking to him, “you have to sing for me”. “What must I sing?” he said. And he said, “Sing about the Creation”. At this, Caedmon immediately began to sing verses in praise of God the Creator, which he had never heard before and of which the sense is this: Now we must praise heaven-kingdom‟s Guardian, the Measurer‟s might and his mind-plans the work of the Glory-Father, when he of wonders of every one, eternal Lord, the beginning established. He first created for men‟s sons heaven as a roof, holy Creator; then middle-earth mankind‟s Guardian, eternal Lord, afterwards made— for men earth, Master almighty. This is the general sense but not the exact order of the words that he sang in his sleep; for it is impossible to make a literal translation, no matter how well-written, of poetry into another 17

language without losing some of the beauty and dignity. When he woke up, he remembered everything that he had sung in his sleep, and to this he soon added, in the same poetic measure, more verses praising God. The next morning he went to the reeve, who was his foreman, and told him about the gift he had received. He was taken to the abbess and ordered to tell his dream and to recite his song to an audience of the most learned men so that they might judge what the nature of that vision was and where it came from. It was evident to all of them that he had been granted the heavenly grace of God. Then they expounded some bit of sacred story or teaching to him, and instructed him to turn it into poetry if he could. He agreed and went away. And when he came back the next morning, he gave back what had been commissioned to him in the finest verse. Therefore, the abbess, who cherished the grace of God in this man, instructed him to give up secular life and to take monastic vows. And when she and all those subject to her had received him into the community of brothers, she gave orders that he be taught the whole sequence of sacred history. He remembered everything that he was able to learn by listening, and turning it over in his mind like a clean beast that chews the cud, he converted it into sweetest song, which sounded so delightful that he made his teachers, in their turn, his listeners. He sang about the creation of the world and the origin of the human race and all the history of Genesis; about the exodus of Israel out of Egypt and entrance into the promised land; and about many other stories of sacred Scripture, about the Lord‟s incarnation, and his passion, resurrection, and ascension into Heaven; about the advent of the Holy Spirit and the teachings of the apostles. He also made many songs about the terror of the coming judgement and the horror of the punishments of hell and the sweetness of the heavenly kingdom; and a great many others besides about divine grace and justice in all of which he sought to draw men away from the love of sin and to inspire them with delight in the practice of good works.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— Sacred legend and story were reduced to verse in poems resembling Beowulf in form. At first such verse was rendered in the somewhat simple, stark style of the poems of Caedmon, a humble man of the late 7th century who was described by the historian and theologian Saint Bede the Venerable as having received the gift of song from God. Later the same type of subject matter was treated in the more ornate language of the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf and his school. The best of their productions is probably the passionate “Dream of the Rood.” In addition to these religious compositions, Old English poets produced a number of more or less lyrical poems of shorter length, which do not contain specific Christian doctrine and which evoke the Anglo-Saxon sense of the harshness of circumstance and the sadness of the human lot. “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer” are among the most beautiful of this group of Old English poems.

18

B

Prose

Prose in Old English is represented by a large number of religious works. The imposing scholarship of monasteries in northern England in the late 7th century reached its peak in the Latin work Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 731) by Bede. The great educational effort of Alfred, king of the West Saxons, in the 9th century produced an Old English translation of this important historical work and of many others, including De Consolatione Philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), by Boethius. This was a significant work of largely Platonic philosophy easily adaptable to Christian thought, and it has had great influence on English literature.

19

Middle English Period

20

III

MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD

Extending from 1066 to 1485, this period is noted for the extensive influence of French literature on native English forms and themes. From the Norman-French conquest of England in 1066 until the 14th century, French largely replaced English in ordinary literary composition, and Latin maintained its role as the language of learned works. By the 14th century, when English again became the chosen language of the ruling classes, it had lost much of the Old English inflectional system, had undergone certain sound changes, and had acquired the characteristic it still possesses of freely taking into the native stock numbers of foreign words, in this case French and Latin ones. Thus, the various dialects of Middle English spoken in the 14th century were similar to Modern English and can be read without great difficulty today. The Middle English literature of the 14th and 15th centuries is much more diversified than the previous Old English literature. A variety of French and even Italian elements influenced Middle English literature, especially in southern England. In addition, different regional styles were maintained, in literature and learning had not yet been centralized. For these reasons, as well as because of the vigorous and uneven growth of national life, the Middle English period contains a wealth of literary monuments not easily classified.

A

Allegory

Piers Plowman The 14th-century poem The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman (1360?-1400?), better known as Piers Plowman, is generally attributed to William Langland. A religious allegory, the work is written as a dream vision, a popular medieval form in which a story is presented as if the author had dreamed it. Piers Plowman is also a famous example of alliterative verse. In such lines as this one, the repetition of certain sounds (in this case, s) helps create a mood. (Excerpt recited by an actor.) (p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved./© Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

In the north and west, poems continued to be written in forms very like the Old English alliterative, four-stress lines. Of these poems, The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, better known as Piers Plowman, is the most significant. Now thought to be by William Langland, it is a long, impassioned work in the form of dream visions (a favorite 21

literary device of the day), protesting the plight of the poor, the avarice of the powerful, and the sinfulness of all people. The emphasis, however, is placed on a Christian vision of the life of activity, of the life of unity with God, and of the synthesis of these two under the rule of a purified church. As such, despite various faults, it bears comparison with the other great Christian visionary poem, La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy), by Dante. For both, the watchwords are heavenly love and love operative in this world. A second and shorter alliterative vision poem, The Pearl, written in northwest England in about 1370, is similarly doctrinal, but its tone is ecstatic, and it is far more deliberately artistic. Apparently an elegy for the death of a small girl (although widely varying religious allegorical interpretations have been suggested for it), the poem describes the exalted state of childlike innocence in heaven and the need for all souls to become as children to enter the pearly gates of the New Jerusalem. The work ends with an impressive vision of heaven, from which the dreamer awakes. In general, poetry and prose expressing a mystical longing for, and union with, the deity is a common feature of the late Middle Ages, particularly in northern England.

B

Tales of Chivalry and Adventure

—————————————————————————————————————

From Sir Gawain and the Green Knight This excerpt from the famous Arthurian tale Sir Gawain and the Green Knight focuses on the flirtations of the lady of the castle and on Sir Gawain's resistance to her temptations. Gawain is careful to maintain a chaste relationship between himself and the lady, in keeping with the virtuous and dutiful conduct that befits a knight; yet he is equally careful not to offend her in his rejections. At the end of this excerpt, Sir Gawain accepts a gift from the lady, a sash, which is a protection from death. The irony is that though he was chivalrous in accepting something from her, he was also cowardly in not facing danger without the magical help of the sash. This poem was originally written in Old English and has since been translated into modern English.

From Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Part III, pp. 37-39 Anonymous Translated by Marie Borroff

…For that high-born beauty so hemmed him about, Made so plain her meaning, the man must needs Either take her tendered love or distastefully refuse. His courtesy concerned him, lest crass he appear, But more his soul's mischief, should he commit sin

22

And belie his loyal oath to the lord of the house. “God forbid!” said the bold knight, “That shall not befall!” With a little fond laughter he lightly let pass All the words of special weight that were sped his way; “I find you much at fault,” the fair one said, “Who can be cold toward a creature so close by your side, Of all women in this world most wounded in heart, Unless you have a sweetheart, one you hold dearer, And allegiance to that lady so loyally knit That you will never love another, as now I believe. And, sir, if it be so, then say it, I beg you; By all your heart holds dear, hide it no longer With guile.” ”Lady, by Saint John,” He answers with a smile, Lover have I none, Nor will have, yet awhile.” Those words,” said the woman, “are the worst of all, But I have had my answer, and hard do I find it! Kiss me now kindly; I can but go hence To lament my life long like a maid lovelorn.” She inclines her head quickly and kisses the knight, Then straightens with a sigh, and says as she stands, “Now, dear, ere I depart, do me this pleasure: Give me some little gift, your glove or the like, That I may think on you, man, and mourn the less.” ”Now by heaven,” said he, “I wish I had here My most precious possession, to put it in your hands, For your deeds, beyond doubt, have often deserved A repayment far passing my power to bestow. But a love-token, lady, were of little avail; It is not to your honor to have at this time A glove as a guerdon from Gawain's hand, And I am here on an errand in unknown realms And have no bearers with baggage with becoming gifts, With distresses me, madame, for your dear sake. A man must keep within his compass: account it neither grief Nor slight.” ”Nay, noblest knight alive,” Said that beauty of body white, “Though you be loath to give, Yet you shall take, by right.” She reached out a rich ring, wrought all of gold, With a splendid stone displayed on the band That flashed before his eyes like a fiery sun; It was worth a king's wealth, you may well believe. 23

But he waved it away with these ready words: “Before God, good lady, I forego all gifts; None have I to offer, nor any will I take.” And she urged it on him eagerly, and ever he refused, And vowed in very earnest, prevail she would not. And she sad to find it so, and said to him then, “If my ring is refused for its rich cost You would not be my debtor for so dear a thing— I shall give you my girdle; you gain less thereby.” She released a knot lightly, and loosened a belt That was caught about her kirtle, the bright cloak beneath, Of a gay green silk, with gold overwroght, And the borders all bound with embroidery fine, And this she presses upon him, and pleads with a smile, Unworthy though it were, that it would not be scorned. But the man still maintains that he means to accept Neither gold nor any gift, till by God's grace The fate that lay before him was fully achieved. “And be not offended, fair lady, I beg, And give over your offer, for ever I must Decline. I am grateful for favor shown Past all deserts of mine, And ever shall be your own True servant, rain or shine.” “Now does my present displease you,” she promptly inquired, “Because it seems in your sight so simple a thing? And belike, as it is little, it is less to praise, But if the virtue that invests it were verily known, It would be held, I hope, in higher esteem. For the man that possesses this piece of silk, If he bore it on his body, belted about, There is no hand under heaven that could hew him down, For he could not be killed by any craft on earth.” Then the man began to muse, and mainly he thought It was a pearl for his plight, the peril to come When he gains the Green Chapel to get his reward: Could he escape unscathed, the scheme were noble! Then he bore with her words and withstood them no more, And she repeated her petition and pleaded anew, And he granted it, and gladly she gave him the belt, And besought him for her sake to conceal it well, Lest the noble lord should know—and the knight agrees That not a soul save themselves shall see it thenceforth With sight. He thanked her with fervent heart, As often as ever he might; 24

Three times, before they part, She has kissed the stalwart knight. Source: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Translated by Borroff, Marie. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1967. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— A third alliterative poem, supposedly by the same anonymous author who wrote The Pearl, is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 1300s), a romance, or tale, of knightly adventure and love, of the general medieval type introduced by the French. Most English romances were drawn, as this one apparently was, from French sources. Most of these sources are concerned with the knights of King Arthur (see Arthurian Legend) and seem to go back in turn to Celtic tales of great antiquity. In Sir Gawain, against a background of chivalric gallantry, the tale is told of the knight's resistance to the blandishments of another man's beautiful wife.

C

Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer Fourteenth-century English poet and public servant Geoffrey Chaucer wrote verse renowned for its humor, understanding of human character, and innovations in poetic vocabulary and meter. His masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), tells the tale of English people on a pilgrimage to Saint Thomas à Becket‘s shrine at Canterbury. The pilgrims emerge as complex characters through the stories they tell and through their interactions, which serve as transitions between the different tales. This excerpt from the Tales (read by an actor) comes from ―The General Prologue,‖ in which Chaucer introduces the characters and establishes the framework of the poem. (p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved./Culver Pictures

25

Canterbury Pilgrims English writer Geoffrey Chaucer devised the framework of a pilgrimage to Canterbury to create the 12 narratives of differing literary styles that make up his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales. The Tales are a masterful combination of such medieval genres as courtly love, allegory, and exemplary story, and are related in a dramatic and vivid manner, using both prose and verse forms. This 15th-century illustration shows the pilgrims en route to Canterbury. Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Two other important, nonalliterative verse romances form part of the work of Geoffrey Chaucer. These are the psychologically penetrating Troilus and Criseyde (1385?), a tale of the fatal course of a noble love, laid in Homeric Troy and based on Il filostrato, a romance by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio; and The Knight's Tale (1382?; later included in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales), also based on Boccaccio. Immersed in court life and charged with various governmental duties that carried him as far as Italy, Chaucer yet found time to translate French and Latin works, to write under French influence several secular vision poems of a semiallegorical nature (The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls) and, above all, to compose The Canterbury Tales (probably after 1387). This latter work consists of 24 stories or parts of stories (mostly in verse in almost all the medieval genres) recounted by Chaucer through the mouths and in the several manners of a group of pilgrims bound for Canterbury Cathedral, who were representative of most of the classes of medieval England. Characterized by an extraordinary sense of life and fertility of invention, these narratives range from The Knight's Tale to sometimes indelicate but remarkable tales of low life, and they concern a host of subjects: religious innocence, married chastity, villainous hypocrisy, female volubility—all illumined by great humor. With extraordinary artistry the stories are made to characterize their tellers. —————————————————————————————————————

26

From The Canterbury Tales The writing of 14th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer combines influences from many European traditions: secular and religious, comic and philosophical. These elements are brought together in The Canterbury Tales (probably written after 1387) about a group of pilgrims from varied backgrounds who recount often lusty tales on their way to the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket. In this excerpt from the General Prologue, Chaucer introduces the pilgrims, including the courtly Knight and his party; the lady Prioress; the hunting Monk; and the flattering Friar.

From The Canterbury Tales By Geoffrey Chaucer

From the General Prologue Whan that April with his showres soote The droughte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veine in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flowr; Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne, And smale fowles maken melodye That sleepen al the night with open yë— (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages)— Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes; And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond to Canterbury they wende, The holy blisful martyr for to seeke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seke. Bifel that in that seson on a day, In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay, Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage To Canterbury with ful devout corage, At nyght was come into that hostelrye Wel nine and twenty in a compaignye Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle, That toward caunterbury wolden ride. The chambres and the stables weren wide, And wel we weren esed at the beste. And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste, 27

So hadde I spoken with hem everichoon That I was of hir felaweshipe anoon, And made forward erly for to rise, To take oure way ther as I you devise. But nathelees, whil I have tyme and space, Er that I ferther in this tale pace, Me thinketh it acordaunt to resoun To telle yoe al the condicioun Of eech of hem, so as it seemed me, And whiche they were, and of what degree, And eek in what array that they were inne: And at a knight thanne wol I first biginne. A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man, That fro the tyme that he first bigan To riden out, he loved chivalrye, Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye. Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre, And therto hadde he riden, no man ferre, As wel in Cristendom as in hethenesse, And evere honoured for his worthinesse. At Alisaundre he was whan it was wonne; Ful ofte tyme he hadde the boord bigonne Aboven alle nacions in Pruce; In Lettou hadde he reised, and in Ruce, No Cristen man so ofte of his degree; In Gernade at the sege eek hadde he be Of Algezir, and riden in Belmarye; At Lyes was he and at Satalye, Whan they were wonne; and in the Grete See At many a noble arivee hadde he be. At mortal batailes hadde he been fifteene, And foughten for oure feith at Tramissene In listes thries, and ay slayn his fo. This ilke worthy knyght hadde been also Sometime with the lord of Palatye Again another hethen in Turkye; And everemore he hadde a soverein pris. And though that he were worthy, he was wis, And of his port as meeke as is a maide. He nevere yet no vilainye ne saide In al his lif unto no manere wight. He was a verray, parfit, gentil knight. But, for to tellen yow of his array, His hors were goode, but he was nat gay. Of fustian he wered a gipoun 28

Al bismotered with his habergeoun, For he was late come from his viage, And wente for to doon his pilgrimage. With hym ther was his sone, a yong Squier, A lovere and a lusty bacheler, With lokkes crulle as they were led in presse. Of twenty yeer of age he was, I gesse. Of his stature he was of evene lengthe, And wonderly delivere, and of greet strengthe. And he hadde been som time in chivachye In Flaundres, in Artois, and Picardye, And born him wel, as of so litel space, In hope to stonden in his lady grace. Embrouded was he as it were a mede Al ful of fresshe flowres, white and rede. Singing he was, or floiting, al the day: He was as fressh as is the month of May. Short was his gowne, with sleves longe and wide. Wel coude he sitte on hors, and faire ride. He coude songes make, and wel endite, Juste and eek daunce, and wel portraye and write. So hote he loved that by nightertale He slepte namore than dooth a nightingale. Curteis he was, lowely, and servisable, And carf biforn his fader at the table. A Yeman hadde he and servants namo At that time, for him liste ride so; And he was clad in cote and hood of greene. A sheef of pecok arwes, bright and keene, Under his belt he bar ful thriftily; Wel coude he dresse his takel yemanly: His arwes drouped nought with fetheres lowe. And in his hand he bar a mighty bowe. A not-heed hadde he, with a brown visage. Of wodecraft wel coude he al the usage. Upon his arm he bar a gay bracer, And by his side a swerd and a bokeler, And on that oother syde a gay daggere, Harneised wel and sharp as point of spere; A Cristophre on his brest of silver sheene; An horn he bar, the bawdrik was of greene; A forster was he, soothly, as I gesse. Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse,

29

That of hir smiling was ful simple and coy; Hir gretteste ooth was but by Sainte Loy! And she was cleped Madame Eglentine. Ful wel she soong the service divine, Entuned in hir nose ful semely; And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly, After the scole of Stratford at the Bowe— For Frenssh of Paris was to hire unknowe. At mete wel ytaught was she withalle: She leet no morsel from hir lippes falle, Ne wette hir fingres in hir sauce deepe; Wel coude she carye a morsel, and wel keepe That no drope ne fille upon hir brest. In curteisye was set ful muchel hir lest. Hir over-lippe wiped she so clene That in hir coppe ther was no ferthing seene Of grece, whan she dronken hadde hir draughte; Ful semely after hir mete she raughte. And sikerly she was of greet disport, And ful plesant, and amiable of port, And pained hire to countrefete cheere Of court, and to been statlich of manere, And to been holden digne of reverence. But, for to speken of hir conscience, She was so charitable and so pitous She wolde weepe, if that she saw a mous Caught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde. Of smale houndes hadde she that she fedde With rosted flessh, or milk and wastelbreed. But soore wepte she if oon of hem were deed, Or if men smoot it with a yerde smerte; And al was conscience and tendre herte. Ful semyly hir wimpel pinched was, Hir nose tretis, hir yën greye as glas, Hir mouth ful smal, and therto softe and reed, But sikerly she hadde a fair forheed: It was almoost a spanne brood, I trowe; For, hardily, she was nat undergrowe. Ful fetis was hir cloke, as I was war; Of smal coral aboute hir arm she bar A paire of bedes, gauded al with greene, And theron heeng a brooch of gold ful sheene, On which ther was first writen a crowned A, And after, Amor vincit omnia. Another nonne with hire hadde she, That was hir chapelaine, and preestes three.

30

A Monk ther was, a fair for the maistrye, An outridere, that lovede venerye, A manly man, to been an abbot able. Ful many a daintee hors hadde he in stable, And whan he rood, men mighte his bridel heere Ginglen in a whistling wind as clere And eek as loude as dooth the chapel belle Ther as this lord was kepere of the celle, The rule of Saint Maure or of Saint Beneit, By cause that it was old and somdeel strait— This ilke Monk leet olde thinges pace, And heeld after the newe world the space. He yaf nought of that text a pulled hen, That saith that hunteres been nought holy men, Ne that a monk, whan he is recchelees, Is likned til a fissh that is waterlees— This is to sayn, a monk out of his cloistre; But thilke text heeld he nat worth an oystre. And I saide his opinion was good: What sholde he studye and make himselven wood, Upon a book in cloistre alway to poure, Or swinke with his handes, and laboure, As Austin bit? How shal the world be served? Lat Austin have his swink to him reserved! Therfore he was a prikasour aright. Grehoundes he hadde as swift as fowl in flight. Of priking and of hunting for the hare Was al his lust, for no cost wolde he spare. I saw his sleeves purfiled at the hand With gris, and that the fineste of a land; And for to festne his hood under his chin, He hadde of gold wrought a ful curious pin; A love-knotte in the grettere ende ther was. His heed was balled, that shoon as any glas, And eek his face, as he hadde been anoint: He was a lord ful fat and in good point; His yën steepe, and rolling in his heed, That stemed as a furnais of a leed, His bootes souple, his hors in greet estat— Now certainly he was a fair prelat. He was nat pale as a forpined gost: A fat swan loved he best of any rost. His palfrey was as brown as is a berye. A Frere ther was, a wantoune and a merye, A limitour, a ful solempne man. In alle the ordres foure is noon that can So muche of daliaunce and fair langage. 31

He hadde maad ful many a mariage Of yonge wommen at his owene cost; Unto his ordre he was a noble post. Ful wel biloved and familier was he With frankelains over al in his contree, And eek with worthy wommen of the town— For he hadde power of confessioun, As saide himself, more than a curat, For of his ordre he was licenciat. Ful swetely herde he confessioun, And plesant was his absolucioun: He was an esy man to yeve penaunce, Ther as he wiste to have a good pitaunce; For unto a poore ordre for to yive Is signe that a man is wel yshrive, For if he yaf, he dorste make avaunt He wiste that a man was repentaunt; For many a man so hard is of his herte, He may nat wepe, though hym sore smerte. Therfore, in stede of weeping and prayeres, Men mote yive silver to the poore freres. His tipet was ay farsed ful of knives And pinnes, for to yiven faire wives. And certainly he hadde a merye note; Wel coude he singe and playen on a rote; Of yeddinges he bar outrely the pris. His nekke whit was as the flowr-de-lis; Therto he strong was as a champioun. He knew the tavernes wel in every toun, And every hostiler and tappestere, Bet than a lazar or a beggestere. For unto swich a worthy man as he Acorded nat, as by his facultee, To have with sike lazars aquaintaunce: It is nat honeste, it may nought avaunce, For to delen with no swich poraile, But al with riche, and selleres of vitaile; And over al ther as profit sholde arise, Curteis he was and lowely of servise. Ther was no man nowher so vertuous: He was the beste beggere in his hous. And yaf a certaine ferme for the graunt: Noon of his bretheren cam ther in his haunt. For though a widwe hadde noght a sho, So plesant was his In principio Yet wolde he have a ferthing, er he wente; His purchas was wel bettre than his rente. 32

And rage he coude, as it were right a whelpe; In love-dayes ther coude he muchel helpe, For ther he was nat lik a cloisterer, With a thredbare cope, as is a poore scoler, But he was lik a maister or a pope. Of double worstede was his semicope, That rounded as a belle out of the presse. Somwhat he lipsed for his wantounesse To make his Englissh sweete upon his tonge; And in his harping, whan he hadde songe, His yën twinkled in his heed aright As doon the sterres in the frosty night. This worthy limitour was cleped Huberd. A Marchant was ther with a forked beerd, In motelee, and hye on hors he sat, Upon his heed a Flandrissh bevere hat, His bootes clasped faire and fetisly. His resons he spak ful solempnely, Sounyng alway th‟ encrees of his winning. He wolde the see were kept for any thing Bitwixen Middelburgh and Orewelle. Wel coude he in eschaunge sheeldes selle. This worthy man ful wel his wit bisette: Ther wiste no wight that he was in dette, So statly was he of his governaunce, With his bargaines, and with his chevissaunce. Forsoothe he was a worthy man withalle, But, sooth to sayn, I noot how men hym calle.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

33

D

Arthurian Legends

Sir Thomas Malory Fifteenth century Englishman Sir Thomas Malory authored Le Morte d’Arthur (1469-1470), a prose rendition of the King Arthur legends. Although Malory probably wrote the Arthurian saga as eight distinct romances, English printer William Caxton arranged Malory‘s work into a single narrative in 1485. An actor recites this selection, which foretells the return of the fallen king. © Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved./(p) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

In the 15th century a number of poets were obviously influenced by Chaucer but, in general, medieval literary themes and styles were exhausted during this period. Sir Thomas Malory stands out for his great work, Le morte d'Arthur (The Death of Arthur, 1469-1470), which carried on the tradition of Arthurian romance, from French sources, in English prose of remarkable vividness and vitality. He loosely tied together stories of various knights of the Round Table, but most memorably of Arthur himself, of Galahad, and of the guilty love of Lancelot and Arthur's queen, Guinevere. Despite the great variety of incident and the complications of plot in his work, the dominant theme is the need to sacrifice individual desire for the sake of national unity and religious salvation, the latter of which is envisioned in terms of the dreamlike but intense mystical symbolism of the Holy Grail. —————————————————————————————————————

From Le morte d'Arthur Little is known of English translator Sir Thomas Malory, and there is even some doubt as to whether Malory is in fact the author of Le morte d’Arthur (The Death of Arthur, 1469-1470). The book is a translation and retelling of a diverse collection of tales that developed in 13th-century France into a body of work known as Arthurian romance. The stories are about the semilegendary King Arthur and his knight-adventurers, who followed the chivalric code of idealized love and the violent enforcement of right against wrong. Foremost among these knights is Lancelot, whose allegiance to Arthur is compromised by his love for Queen Guinevere (also spelled Guenevere). When the malice of two jealous knights, Sir Mordred and Sir Agravain, brings the affair into the open, a catastrophic chain of events follows.

34

Excerpt from Le morte d’Arthur By Sir Thomas Malory

In May when every lusty heart flourisheth and burgeoneth, for as the season is lusty to behold and comfortable, so man and woman rejoiceth and gladdeth of summer coming with his fresh flowers, for winter with his rough winds and blasts causeth lusty men and women to cower and sit fast by the fire—so this season it befell in the month of May a great anger and unhap that stinted not till the flower of chivalry of all the world was destroyed and slain. And all was long upon two unhappy knights which were named Sir Agravain and Sir Mordred, that were brethren unto Sir Gawain. For this Sir Agravain and Sir Mordred had ever a privy hate unto the Queen, Dame Guinevere and to Sir Lancelot, and daily and nightly they ever watched upon Sir Lancelot. So it misfortuned Sir Gawain and all his brethren were in King Arthur‟s chamber, and then Sir Agravain said thus openly, and not in counsel, that many knights might hear: “I marvel that we all be not ashamed both to see and to know how Sir Lancelot lieth daily and nightly by the Queen. And all we know well that it is so, and it is shamefully suffered of us all that we should suffer so noble a king as King Arthur is so to be shamed.” Then spoke Sir Gawain, and said: “Brother, Sir Agravain, I pray you and charge you, move no such matters no more afore me, for wit you well, I will not be of your counsel.” “So God me help,” said Sir Gaheris and Sir Gareth, “we will not be known of [be party to] your deeds.” “Then will I!” said Sir Mordred. “I lieve you well,” said Sir Gawain, “for ever unto all unhappiness, sir, ye will grant. And I would that ye left all this and made you not so busy, for I know,” said Sir Gawain, “what will fall of it.” “Fall whatsoever fall may,” said Sir Agravain, “I will disclose it to the King.” “Not by my counsel,” said Sir Gawain, “for an [if] there rise war and wrack betwixt Sir Lancelot and us, wit you well, brother, there will many kings and great lords hold with Sir Lancelot. Also, brother, Sir Agravain,” said Sir Gawain, “ye must remember how often times Sir Lancelot hath rescued the King and the Queen. And the best of us all had been full cold at the heartroot had not Sir Lancelot been better than we, and that hath he proved himself full oft. And as for my part,” said Sir Gawain, “I will never be against Sir Lancelot for one day‟s deed, when he rescued me from King Carados of the Dolorous Tower, and slew him, and saved my life. Also, brother, Sir Agravain and Sir Mordred, in like wise Sir Lancelot rescued both you and threescore and two from Sir Tarquin. And therefore, brother, methinks such noble deeds and kindness should be remembered.” “Do as ye list,” said Sir Agravain, “for I will layne [conceal] it no longer.” So with these words came in Sir Arthur. “Now, brother,” said Sir Gawain, “stint your noise.” “That I will not,” said Sir Agravain and Sir Mordred. “Well, will ye so?” said Sir Gawain. “Then God speed you, for I will not hear your tales, neither be of your counsel.” “No more will I,” said Sir Gaheris. “Neither I,” said Sir Gareth, “for I will never say evil by that man that made me knight.” And therewithal they three departed, making great dole. “Alas!” said Sir Gawain and Sir Gareth, “now is this realm wholly destroyed and mischieved, and the noble fellowship of the Round Table shall be disparbeled.” 35

So they departed, and then Sir Arthur asked them what noise they made. “My lord,” said Sir Agravain, “I shall tell you, for I may keep it no longer. Here is I and my brother Sir Mordred broke unto my brother Sir Gawain, Sir Gaheris, and to Sir Gareth—for this is all, to make it short—how that we know all that Sir Lancelot holdeth your Queen, and hath done long; and we be your sister-sons, we may suffer it no longer. And all we woot that ye should be above Sir Lancelot, and ye are the king that made him knight, and therefore we will prove it that he is a traitor to your person.” “If it be so,” said the King, “wit you well, he is none other. But I would be loath to begin such a thing but I might have proofs of it, for Sir Lancelot is an hardy knight, and all ye know he is the best knight among us all. And but if he be taken with the deed, he will fight with him that bringeth up the noise, and I know no knight that is able to match him. Therefore an it be sooth as ye say, I would that he were taken with the deed.” For, as the French book saith, the King was full loath that such a noise should be upon Sir Lancelot and his queen. For the King had a deeming of it, but he would not hear of it, for Sir Lancelot had done so much for him and for the Queen so many times that, wit ye well, the king loved him passingly well. “My lord,” said Sir Agravain, “ye shall ride tomorn on hunting, and doubt ye not, Sir Lancelot will not go with you. And so when it draweth toward night, ye may send the Queen word that ye will lie out all that night, and so may ye send for your cooks. And then, upon pain of death, that night we shall take him with the queen, and we shall bring him to you, quick or dead.” “I will well,” said the King. “Then I counsel you to take with you sure fellowship.” “Sir,” said Sir Agravain, “my brother, Sir Mordred, and I will take with us twelve knights of the Round Table.” “Beware,” said King Arthur, “for I warn you, ye shall find him wight.” “Let us deal!” said Sir Agravain and Sir Mordred. So on the morn King Arthur rode on hunting, and sent word to the Queen that he would be out all that night. Then Sir Agravain and Sir Mordred got to them twelve knights, and hid themself in a chamber in the castle of Carlisle. And these were their names: Sir Colgrevance, Sir Mador de la Porte, Sir Guingalen, Sir Meliot de Logres, Sir Petipace of Winchelsea, Sir Galeron of Galway, Sir Melion de la Mountain, Sir Ascamore, Sir Gromore Somyr Jour, Sir Curselayne, Sir Florence, and Sir Lovell. So these twelve knights were with Sir Mordred and Sir Agravain, and all they were of Scotland, or else of Sir Gawain‟s kin, or well-willers to his brother. So when the night came, Sir Lancelot told Sir Bors how he would go that night and speak with the Queen. “Sir,” said Sir Bors, “ye shall not go this night by my counsel.” “Why?” said Sir Lancelot. “Sir,” said Sir Bors, “I dread me ever of Sir Agravain, that waiteth upon you daily to do you shame and us all; and never gave my heart against no going that ever ye went to the Queen so much as now, for I mistrust that the King is out this night from the Queen because peradventure he hath lain some watch for you and the Queen. Therefore I dread me sore of some treason.” “Have ye no dread,” said Sir Lancelot, “for I shall go and come again, and make no tarrying.” “Sir,” said Sir Bors, “that me repents, for I dread me sore that your going this night shall wrath us all.” “Fair nephew,” said Sir Lancelot, “I marvel me much why ye say thus, sithen the Queen hath sent for me. And wit ye well, I will not be so much a coward, but she shall understand I will see her good grace.” 36

“God speed you well,” said Sir Bors, “and send you sound and safe again.” So Sir Lancelot departed, and took his sword under his arm, and so he walked in his mantle, that noble knight, and put himself in great Jeopardy. And so he passed on till he came to the Queen‟s chamber, and so lightly he was had into the chamber. And then, as the French book saith, the Queen and Lancelot were together. And whether they were abed or at other manner of disports, me list not thereof make no mention, for love that time was not as love is nowadays. But thus as they were together, there came Sir Agravain and Sir Mordred with twelve knights with them of the Round Table, and they said with great crying and scaring voice: “Thou traitor, Sir Lancelot, now are thou taken!” And thus they cried with a loud voice that all the court might hear it. And these fourteen knights were armed at all points, as they should fight in a battle. “Alas!” said Queen Guinevere, “now are we mischieved both!” “Madam,” said Sir Lancelot, “is there here any armour within your chamber, that I might cover my poor body withal? And if there be any, give it me, and I shall soon stint their malice, by the grace of God!” “Now, truly,” said the Queen, “I have none armour, neither helm, shield, sword, neither spear, wherefore I dread me sore our long love is come to a mischievous end. For I hear by their noise there be many noble knights, and well I woot they be surely armed, and against them ye may make no resistance. Wherefore ye are likely to be slain, and then shall I be burned! For an ye might escape them,” said the Queen, “I would not doubt but that ye would rescue me in what danger that ever I stood in.” “Alas,” said Sir Lancelot, “in all my life thus was I never bestead that I should be thus shamefully slain for lack of mine armour.” But ever in one Sir Agravain and Sir Mordred cried: “Traitor knight, come out of the Queen‟s chamber! For wit thou well thou art so beset that thou shalt not escape.” “Ah, Jesu mercy!” said Sir Lancelot, “this shameful cry and noise I may not suffer, for better were death at once than thus to endure this pain.” Then he took the Queen in his arms, and kissed her, and said: “Most noble Christian queen, I beseech you, as ye have been ever my special good lady, and I at all times your poor knight and true unto my power, and as I never failed you in right nor in wrong sithen the first day King Arthur made me knight, that ye will pray for my soul if that I be slain. For well I am assured that Sir Bors, my nephew, and all the remnant of my kin, with Sir Lavaine and Sir Urry, that they will not fail you to rescue you from the fire. And therefore, mine own lady, recomfort yourself, whatsoever come of me, that ye go with Sir Bors, my nephew, and Sir Urry, and they all will do you all the pleasure that they may, and ye shall live like a queen upon my lands.” “Nay, Sir Lancelot, nay!” said the Queen. “Wit thou well that I will not live long after thy days. But an ye be slain I will take my death as meekly as ever did martyr take his death for Jesu Christ‟s sake.” “Well, Madam,” said Sir Lancelot, “sith it is so that the day is come that our love must depart, wit you well I shall sell my life as dear as I may. And a thousandfold,” said Sir Lancelot, “I am more heavier for you than for myself! And now I had liefer than to be lord of all Christendom, that I had sure armour upon me, that men might speak of my deeds ere ever I were slain.” “Truly,” said the Queen, “and it might please God, I would that they would take me and slay me and suffer you to escape.” “That shall never be,” said Sir Lancelot, “God defend me from such a shame! But Jesu Christ, be Thou my shield and mine armour!” And therewith Sir Lancelot wrapped his mantle about his arm well and surely; and by then they had gotten a great form out of the hall, and therewith 37

they all rushed at the door. “Now, fair lords,” said Sir Lancelot, “leave your noise and your rushing, and I shall set open this door, and then may ye do with me what it liketh you.” “Come off then,” said they all, “and do it, for it availeth thee not to strive against us all. And therefore let us into this chamber, and we shall save thy life until thou come to King Arthur.” Then Sir Lancelot unbarred the door, and with his left hand he held it open a little, that but one man might come in at once; and so there came striding a good knight, a much man and a large, and his name was called Colgrevance of Gore. And he with a sword struck at Sir Lancelot mightily. And he put aside the stroke, and gave him such a buffet upon the helmet that he fell grovelling dead within the chamber door. Then Sir Lancelot, with help of the Queen and her ladies, he was lightly armed in Colgrevance‟s armour. And ever stood Sir Agravain and Sir Mordred, crying: “Traitor knight! Come forth out of the Queen‟s chamber.” “Sirs, leave your noise,” said Sir Lancelot, “for wit you well, Sir Agravain, ye shall not prison me this night. And therefore an ye do by my counsel, go ye all from this chamber door, and make not such crying and such manner of slander as ye do. For I promise you by my knighthood, and ye will depart and make no more noise, I shall as tomorn appear afore you all and before the king, and then let it be seen which of you all, other else ye all, that will deprove me of treason; and there I shall answer you as a knight should, that hither I came to the Queen for no manner of mal engine, and that will I prove and make it good upon you with my hands.” “Fie upon thee, traitor,” said Sir Agravain and Sir Mordred, “for we will have thee malgre thine head and slay thee, if we list. For we let thee wit we have the choice of King Arthur to save thee or to slay thee.” “Ah sirs,” said Sir Lancelot, “is there none other grace with you? Then keep yourself!” And then Sir Lancelot set all open the chamber door, and mightily and knightly he strode in amongst them; and anon at the first stroke he slew Sir Agravain, and after, twelve of his fellows. Within a little while he laid them cold to the earth, for there was none of the twelve knights that might stand [from] Sir Lancelot one buffet. And also he wounded Sir Mordred, and therewithal [then] he fled with all his might. And then Sir Lancelot returned again unto the Queen, and said, “Madam, now wit you well all our true love is brought to an end, for now will King Arthur ever be my foe. And therefore, Madam, an it like you that I may have you with me, I shall save you from all manner adventurous dangers.” “Sir, that is not best,” said the Queen, “me seemeth, for now ye have done so much harm, it will be best that ye hold you still with this. And if ye see that as tomorn they will put me unto death, then may ye rescue me as ye think best.” “I will well,” said Sir Lancelot, “for have ye no doubt, while I am a man living I shall rescue you.” And then he kissed her, and either of them gave other a ring, and so there he left the Queen and went until his lodging.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

38

The Renaissance

39

IV

THE RENAISSANCE

—————————————————————————————————————

From Utopia English statesman and writer Sir Thomas More‘s Utopia (1516), a fictional account of an island nation with a perfect system of government, is one of the best-known works of satire and political thinking from Renaissance England. Writing in Latin, the scholarly language of the 16th century, More retold what he learned about Utopia from Raphael Hythloday, a fictitious Portuguese sailor. More contrasted elements of Utopia with England, using the fictional comparison to point out problems in English society and government. Utopia‘s influence is found in several important works of European literature, including Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift‘s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and French philosopher and author Voltaire‘s Candide (1759). These excerpts discuss Utopian society, the geography of Utopia, and Utopians‘ ideas about wealth and the value of money and gold.

From Utopia By Sir Thomas More

The Geography of Utopia The island of the Utopians is two hundred miles across in the middle part where it is widest, and is nowhere much narrower than this except toward the two ends. These ends, drawn toward one another as if in a five-hundred-mile circle, make the island crescent-shaped like a new moon. Between the horns of the crescent, which are about eleven miles apart, the sea enters and spreads into a broad bay. Being sheltered from the wind by the surrounding land, the bay is never rough, but quiet and smooth instead, like a big lake. Thus, nearly the whole inner coast is one great harbor, across which ships pass in every direction, to the great advantage of the people. What with shallows on one side, and rocks on the other, the entrance into the bay is very dangerous. Near the middle of the channel, there is one rock that rises above the water, and so presents no dangers in itself; on top of it a tower has been built, and there a garrison is kept. Since the other rocks lie under water, they are very dangerous to navigation. The channels are known only to the Utopians, so hardly any strangers enter the bay without one of their pilots; and even they themselves could not enter safely if they did not direct themselves by some landmarks on the coast. If they should shift these landmarks about, they could lure to destruction an enemy fleet coming against them, however big it was. On the outer side of the island there are likewise occasional harbors; but the coast is rugged by nature, and so well fortified that a few defenders could beat off the attack of a strong force. They say (and the appearance of the place confirms this) that their land was not always an island. But Utopus, who conquered the country and gave it his name (it had previously been called Abraxa), brought its rude and uncouth inhabitants to such a high level of culture and humanity that they now excel in that regard almost every other people. After subduing them at his first landing, he cut a channel fifteen miles wide where their land joined the continent, and caused the sea to flow around the country. He put not only the natives to work at this task, but all his own soldiers too, so that the vanquished would not think the labor a disgrace. With the 40

work divided among so many hands, the project was finished quickly, and the neighboring peoples, who at first had laughed at his folly, were struck with wonder and terror at his success. There are fifty-four cities on the island, all spacious and magnificent, identical in language, customs, institutions, and laws. So far as the location permits, all of them are built on the same plan, and have the same appearance. The nearest are at least twenty-four miles apart, and the farthest are not so remote that a man cannot go on foot from one to the other in a day. Once a year each city sends three of its old and experienced citizens to Amaurot to consider affairs of common interest to the island. Amaurot is the chief city, lies near the omphalos of the land, so to speak, and convenient to every other district, so it acts as a capital. Every city has enough ground assigned to it so that at least twelve miles of farm land are available in every direction, though where the cities are farther apart, they have much more land. No city wants to enlarge its boundaries, for the inhabitants consider themselves good tenants rather than landlords. At proper intervals all over the countryside they have built houses and furnished them with farm equipment. These houses are inhabited by citizens who come to the country by turns to occupy them. No rural house has fewer than forty men and women in it, besides two slaves. A master and mistress, serious and mature persons, are in charge of each household. Over every thirty households is placed a single phylarch. Each year twenty persons from each rural household move back to the city, after completing a two-year stint in the country. In their place, twenty others are sent out from town, to learn farm work from those who have already been in the country for a year, and who are better skilled in farming. They, in turn, will teach those who come the following year. If all were equally unskilled in farm work, and new to it, they might harm the crops out of ignorance. This custom of alternating farm workers is solemnly established so that no one will have to do such hard work against his will for more than two years; but many of them who take a natural pleasure in farm life ask to stay longer. The farm workers till the soil, raise cattle, hew wood, and take it to the city by land or water, as is most convenient. They breed an enormous number of chickens by a marvelous method. Men, not hens, hatch the eggs by keeping them in a warm place at an even temperature. As soon as they come out of the shell, the chicks recognize the men, follow them around, and are devoted to them instead of to their real mothers. They raise very few horses, and these full of mettle, which they keep only to exercise the young men in the art of horsemanship. For the heavy work of plowing and hauling they use oxen, which they agree are inferior to horses over the short haul, but which can hold out longer under heavy burdens, are less subject to disease (as they suppose), and so can be kept with less cost and trouble. Moreover, when oxen are too old for work, they can be used for meat. Grain they use only to make bread. They drink wine, apple or pear cider, or simple water, which they sometimes mix with honey or licorice, of which they have an abundance. Although they know very well, down to the last detail, how much grain each city and its surrounding district will consume, they produce much more grain and cattle than they need for themselves, and share the surplus with their neighbors. Whatever goods the folk in the country need which cannot be produced there, they request of the town magistrates, and since there is nothing to be paid or exchanged, they get what they want at once, without any haggling. They generally go to town once a month in any case, to observe the holy days. When harvest time approaches, the phylarchs in the country notify the town-magistrates how many hands will be needed. Crews of harvesters come just when they're wanted, and in one day of good weather they can usually get in the whole crop.

41

Their Cities, Especially Amaurot If you know one of their cities, you know them all, for they're exactly alike, except where geography itself makes a difference. So I'll describe one of them, and no matter which. But what one rather than Amaurot the most worthy of all?—since its eminence is acknowledged by the other cities which send representatives to the annual meeting there; besides which, I know it best because I lived there for five full years. Well, then, Amaurot lies up against a gently sloping hill; the town is almost square in shape. From a little below the crest of the hill, it runs down about two miles to the river Anyder, and then spreads out along the river bank for a somewhat greater distance. The Anyder rises from a small spring about eighty miles above Amaurot, but other streams flow into it, two of them being pretty big, so that, as it runs past Amaurot, the river has grown to a width of half a mile. It continues to grow even larger until at last, sixty miles farther along, it is lost in the ocean. In all this stretch between the sea and the city, and also for some miles above the city, the river is tidal, ebbing and flowing every six hours with a swift current. When the tide comes in, it fills the whole Anyder with salt water for about thirty miles, driving the fresh water back. Even above that for several miles farther, the water is brackish; but a little higher up, as it runs past the city, the water is always fresh, and when the tide ebbs, the water runs clean and sweet all the way to the sea.… The town is surrounded by a thick, high wall, with many towers and bastions. On three sides it is also surrounded by a dry ditch, broad and deep and filled with thorn hedges; on its fourth side the river itself serves as a moat. The streets are conveniently laid out for use by vehicles and for protection from the wind. Their buildings are by no means paltry; the unbroken rows of houses facing each other across the streets through the different wards make a fine sight. The streets are twenty feet wide. Behind each row of houses at the center of every block and extending the full length of the street, there are large gardens. Every house has a door to the street and another to the garden. The doors, which are made with two leaves, open easily and swing shut automatically, letting anyone enter who wants to— and so there is no private property. Every ten years, they change houses by lot. The Utopians are very fond of these gardens of theirs. They raise vines, fruits, herbs, and flowers, so thrifty and flourishing that I have never seen any gardens more productive or elegant than theirs. They keep interested in gardening, partly because they delight in it, and also because of the competition between different streets which challenge one another to produce the best gardens. Certainly you will find nothing else in the whole city more useful or more pleasant to the citizens. And this gives reason to think that the founder of the city paid particular attention to the siting of these gardens.… Once a year, every group of thirty households elects an official, formerly called the syphogrant, but now called the phylarch. Over every group of ten syphogrants with their households there is another official, once called the tranibor but now known as the head phylarch. All the syphogrants, two hundred in number, are brought together to elect the prince. They take an oath to choose the man they think best qualified; and then by secret ballot they elect the prince from among four men nominated by the people of the four sections of the city. The prince holds office for life, unless he is suspected of aiming at a tyranny. Though the tranibors are elected annually, they are not changed for light or casual reasons. All their other officials hold office for a single year only.…

42

Their Gold and Silver For these reasons, therefore, they have accumulated a vast treasure, but they do not keep it like a treasure. I'm really quite ashamed to tell you how they do keep it, because you probably won't believe me. I would not have believed it myself if someone had just told me about it; but I was there, and saw it with my own eyes. It is a general rule that the more different anything is from what people are used to, the harder it is to accept. But, considering that all their other customs are so unlike ours, a sensible man will not be surprised that they use gold and silver quite differently than we do. After all, they never do use money among themselves, but keep it only for a contingency which may or may not actually arise. So in the meanwhile they take care that no one shall overvalue gold and silver, of which money is made, beyond what the metals themselves deserve. Anyone can see, for example, that iron is far superior to either; men could not live without iron, by heaven, any more than without fire or water. But gold and silver have, by nature, no function that we cannot easily dispense with. Human folly has made them precious because they are rare. Like a most wise and generous mother, nature has placed the best things everywhere and in the open, like air, water, and the earth itself; but she has hidden away in remote places all vain and unprofitable things. If in Utopia gold and silver were kept locked up in some tower, foolish heads among the common people might well concoct a story that the prince and the senate were out to cheat ordinary folk and get some advantage for themselves. They might indeed put the gold and silver into beautiful plate-ware and rich handiwork, but then in case of necessity the people would not want to give up such articles, on which they had begun to fix their hearts, only to melt them down for soldiers' pay. To avoid all these inconveniences, they thought of a plan which conforms with their institutions as clearly as it contrasts with our own. Unless we've actually seen it working, their plan may seem ridiculous to us, because we prize gold so highly and are so careful about protecting it. With them it's just the other way. While they eat from pottery dishes and drink from glass cups, well made but inexpensive, their chamber pots and stools—all their humblest vessels, for use in the common halls and private homes—are made of gold and silver. The chains and heavy fetters of slaves are also made of these metals. Finally, criminals who are to bear through life the mark of some disgraceful act are forced to wear golden rings on their ears, golden bands on their fingers, golden chains around their necks, and even golden crowns on their heads. Thus they hold gold and silver up to scorn in every conceivable way. As a result, when they have to part with these metals, which other nations give up with as much agony as if they were being disemboweled, the Utopians feel it no more than the loss of a penny.… Their Moral Philosophy The Utopians marvel that any mortal can take pleasure in the weak sparkle of a little gem or bright pebble when he has a star, or the sun itself, to look at. They are amazed at the foolishness of any man who considers himself a nobler fellow because he wears clothing of specially fine wool. No matter how delicate the thread, they say, a sheep wore it once, and still was nothing but a sheep. They are surprised that gold, a useless commodity in itself, is everywhere valued so highly that man himself, who for his own purposes conferred this value on it, is far less valuable. They do not understand why a dunderhead with no more brains than a post, and who is about as depraved as he is foolish, should command a great many wise and good people, simply because he happens to have a great pile of gold. Yet if this booby should lose his money to the lowest rascal in his household (as can happen by chance, or through 43

some legal trick—for the law can produce reversals as violent as luck itself), he would promptly become one of the fellow's scullions, as if he were personally attached to the coin, and a mere appendage to it. Even more than this, the Utopians are appalled at those people who practically worship a rich man, though they neither owe him anything, nor are obligated to him in any way. What impresses them is simply that the man is rich. Yet all the while they know he is so mean and grasping that as long as he lives not a single penny out of that great mound of money will ever come their way. These and the like attitudes the Utopians have picked up partly from their upbringing, since the institutions of their society are completely opposed to such folly, and partly from instruction and their reading of good books. For though not many people in each city are excused from labor and assigned to scholarship full time (these are persons who from childhood have given evidence of unusual intelligence and devotion to learning), every child gets an introduction to good literature, and throughout their lives a large part of the people, men and women alike, spend their leisure time in reading…. In matters of moral philosophy, they carry on much the same arguments as we do. They inquire into the nature of the good, distinguishing goods of the body from goods of the mind and external gifts. They ask whether the name of 'good' may be applied to all three, or applies simply to goods of the mind. They discuss virtue and pleasure, but their chief concern is human happiness, and whether it consists of one thing or many. They seem overly inclined to the view of those who think that all or most human happiness consists of pleasure. And what is more surprising, they seek support for this hedonistic philosophy from their religion, which is serious and strict, indeed, almost stern and forbidding. For they never discuss happiness without joining to their philosophic rationalism the principles of religion. Without these religious principles, they think that philosophy is bound to prove weak and defective in its effort to investigate true happiness.…

Source: More, Sir Thomas. Utopia. Translated and edited by Adams, Robert M. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— A golden age of English literature commenced in 1485 and lasted until 1660. Malory's Le morte d'Arthur was among the first works to be printed by William Caxton, who introduced the printing press to England in 1476. From that time on, readership was vastly multiplied. The growth of the middle class, the continuing development of trade, the new character and thoroughness of education for laypeople and not only clergy, the centralization of power and of much intellectual life in the court of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs, and the widening horizons of exploration gave a fundamental new impetus and direction to literature. The new literature nevertheless did not fully flourish until the last 20 years of the 1500s, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Literary development in the earlier part of the 16th century was weakened by the diversion of intellectual energies to the polemics of the religious struggle between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England, a product of the Reformation.

44

The English part in the European movement known as humanism also belongs to this time. Humanism encouraged greater care in the study of the literature of classical antiquity and reformed education in such a way as to make literary expression of paramount importance for the cultured person. Literary style, in part modeled on that of the ancients, soon became a self-conscious preoccupation of English poets and prose writers. Thus, the richness and metaphorical profusion of style at the end of the century indirectly owed much to the educational force of this movement. The most immediate effect of humanism lay, however, in the dissemination of the cultivated, clear, and sensible attitude of its classically educated adherents, who rejected medieval theological misteaching and superstition. Of these writers, Sir Thomas More is the most remarkable. His Latin prose narrative Utopia (1516) satirizes the irrationality of inherited assumptions about private property and money and follows Plato in deploring the failure of kings to make use of the wisdom of philosophers. More's book describes a distant nation organized on purely reasonable principles and named Utopia (Greek for “nowhere”).

A

Renaissance Poetry

Edmund Spenser Best remembered for his epic poem The Faerie Queene (Books I-III published in 1590, Books IV-VI in 1596), 16th-century writer Edmund Spenser ranks as one of the most important English poets. Regarded as a masterpiece of English literature, The Faerie Queene contains a blend of chivalric romance and moral and historical allegory. Spenser invented a unique nine-line stanza, now known as the Spenserian stanza, for use in the poem. The New York Public Library

45

John Milton Seventeenth-century writer John Milton ranks as one of the greatest poets in the history of English literature. Milton‘s masterpiece, the epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), dramatizes the Biblical account of humanity‘s banishment from Paradise. Milton also wrote a sequel to Paradise Lost, called Paradise Regained (1671), in which Jesus triumphantly resists Satan and regains the Paradise lost by Adam and Eve. Culver Pictures

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

John Donne The first and greatest of the metaphysical poets of the early 17th century, Englishman John Donne wrote with an unsentimental, subtly intellectual style. Metaphysical poets addressed complex topics, avoided regular meter, and infused their works with unconventional imagery. In this selection from the collection, Holy Sonnets (1618), Donne boldly defies death itself (recited by an actor). (p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved./Culver Pictures

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

The poetry of the earlier part of the 16th century is generally less important, with the exception of the work of John Skelton, which exhibits a curious combination of medieval and Renaissance influences. The two greatest innovators of the new, rich style of Renaissance poetry in the last quarter of the 16th century were Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, both humanistically educated Elizabethan courtiers. —————————————————————————————————————

46

From Astrophel and Stella After the poetry of English courtier and soldier Sir Philip Sidney was published following his death in 1586 at the age of 32, Sidney was celebrated as the ideal courtly poet of the Elizabethan Age. His sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591) was the first cycle of sonnets in English literature and had a lasting influence on later poets. Reportedly sparked by his relationship with Penelope Devereux, a lady in waiting to Queen Elizabeth I, Astrophel and Stella tells the story of the poet Astrophel‘s unrequited love for Stella, a high-born and virtuous woman. The following five sonnets from the cycle convey the changing emotions of Astrophel, in whose voice the poems are written, toward Stella.

From Astrophel and Stella By Sir Philip Sidney

1 Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, That the dear She might take some pleasure of my pain: Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain; I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain: Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn't brain. But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay; Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows; And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way. Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating my self for spite, 'Fool,' said my Muse to me, 'look in thy heart and write.' 15 You that do search for every purling spring, Which from the ribs of old Parnassus flows; And every flower, not sweet perhaps, which grows Near thereabouts, into your Poesy wring; You that do dictionary's method bring Into your rhymes, running in rattling rows; You that poor Petrarch's long-deceased woes, With new-born sighs and denizened wit do sing; You take wrong ways, those far-fet helps be such As do bewray a want of inward touch: And sure at length stol'n goods do come to light. 47

But if (both for your love and skill) your name You seek to nurse at fullest breasts of Fame, Stella behold, and then begin to endite. 27 Because I oft, in dark abstracted guise, Seem most alone in greatest company, With dearth of words, or answers quite awry, To them that would make speech of speech arise, They deem, and of that doom the rumour flies, That poison foul of bubbling pride doth lie So in my dwelling breast, that only I Fawn on my self, and others do despise: Yet pride, I think, doth not my soul possess, Which looks too oft in his unflatt'ring glass: But one worse fault, Ambition, I confess, That makes me oft my best friends overpass, Unseen, unheard, while thought to highest place Bends all his powers, even unto Stella's grace. 31 With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies, How silently, and with how wan a face, What may it be, that even in heav'nly place That busie archer his sharp arrows tries? Sure, if that long with Love acquainted eyes Can judge of Love, thou feel'st a Lover's case; I read it in thy looks, thy languish'd grace To me that feel the like, thy state descries. Then ev'n of fellowship, O Moon, tell me Is constant Love deem'd there but want of wit? Are Beauties there as proud as here they be? Do they above love to be lov'd, and yet Those Lovers scorn whom that Love doth possess? Do they call Virtue there ungratefulness? 54 Because I breathe not love to ev'ry one, Nor do not use set colours for to wear, Nor nourish special locks of vowed hair, Nor give each speech a full point of a groan. The courtly Nymphs, acquainted with the moan, 48

Of them, who in their lips Love's standard bear; 'What he?' say they of me, 'now I dare swear, He cannot love: no, no, let him alone.' And think so still, so Stella know my mind, Profess in deed I do not Cupid's art; But you fair maid at length this true shall find, That his right badge is but worn in the heart: Dumb Swan, not chatt'ring Pies, do Lovers prove, They love indeed, who quake to say they love.

Source: The Columbia Anthology of British Poetry. Woodring, Carl and James Shapiro, eds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— Sidney, universally recognized as the model Renaissance nobleman, outwardly polished as well as inwardly conscientious, inaugurated the vogue of the sonnet cycle in his Astrophel and Stella (written 1582?; published 1591). In this work, in the elaborate and highly metaphorical style of the earlier Italian sonnet, he celebrated his idealized love for Penelope Devereux, the daughter of Walter Devereux, 1st earl of Essex. These lyrics profess to see in her an ideal of womanhood that in the Platonic manner leads to a perception of the good, the true, and the beautiful and consequently of the divine. This idealization of the beloved remained a favored motif in much of the poetry and drama of the late 16th century; it had its roots not only in Platonism but also in the Platonic speculations of humanism and in the chivalric idealization of love in medieval romance. —————————————————————————————————————

John Donne's Poetry English poet John Donne is known for both his sensitive portrayals of romantic love and his remarkable expressions of religious devotion. Critics place Donne, along with English poets George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Richard Crashaw, in the metaphysical school of poets. According to American-born English poet T. S. Eliot, these poets ―engaged in the tasks of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.‖ Donne applies this technique in ―A Valediction: Of Weeping‖ (1590?), which uses an irregular form and elaborate metaphors to express the strong emotions of the poem. ―Holy Sonnet #10‖ (1618) is one of Donne‘s most famous poems about death.

49

Poetry of John Donne

A Valediction: Of Weeping Let me pour forth My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here, For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear, And by this mintage they are something worth, For thus they be Pregnant of thee; Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more, When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore, So thou and I are nothing then, when on a diverse shore. On a round ball A workman that hath copies by, can lay An Europe, Afric, and an Asia, And quickly make that, which was nothing, All; So doth each tear Which thee doth wear, A globe, yea world, by that impression grow, Till thy tears mixed with mine do overflow This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so. O more than Moon, Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere, Weep me not dead, in thine arms, but forbear To teach the sea what it may do too soon; Let not the wind Example find To do me more harm than it purposeth; Since thou and I sigh one another's breath, Who'er sighs most its cruellest, and hastes the other's death.

From Holy Sonnets Holy Sonnet #10 Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me. From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, And soonest our best men with thee do go,

50

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery. Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell; And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well, And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then? One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Source: Donne, John. John Donne’s Poetry. Clements, Arthur L., ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— The greatest monument to that idealism, broadened to include all features of the moral life, is Spenser's uncompleted Faerie Queene (Books I-III, 1590; Books IV-VI, 1596), the most famous work of the period. In each of its completed six books it depicts the activities of a hero that point toward the ideal form of a particular virtue, and at the same time it looks forward to the marriage of Arthur, who is a combination of all the virtues, and Gloriana, who is the ideal form of womanhood and the embodiment of Queen Elizabeth. It is entirely typical of the impulse of the Renaissance in England that in this work Spenser tried to create out of the inherited English elements of Arthurian romance and an archaic, partly medieval style a noble epic that would make the national literature the equal of those of ancient Greece and Rome and of Renaissance Italy. His effort in this respect corresponded to the new demands expressed by Sidney in the critical essay The Defence of Poesie, originally Apologie for Poetrie (written 1583?; posthumously published 1595). Spenser's conception of his role no doubt conformed to Sidney's general description of the poet as the inspired voice of God revealing examples of morally perfect actions in an aesthetically ideal world such as mere reality can never provide, and with a graphic and concrete conviction that mere philosophy can never achieve. The poetic and narrative qualities of The Faerie Queene suffer to a degree from the various theoretical requirements that Spenser forced the work to meet. —————————————————————————————————————

The Faerie Queene The following selection from Edmund Spenser's poem The Faerie Queene is drawn from the beginning of the third canto in the first book and illustrates his nine-line verses, often referred to as Spenserian stanzas. Spenser originally planned the poem to consist of 12 books, each made up of 12 cantos; he completed only 6 books, however. In this canto, ―Forsaken Truth‖ is a woman who tames a lion with her beauty. This kind of tale, in which characters symbolize abstract human qualities, is called an allegory. Other books in The Faerie Queene tell stories of noble virtues such as chastity and justice.

51

The Faerie Queene, Canto III By Edmund Spenser

Forsaken Truth long seekes her love, And makes the Lyon mylde, Marres blind Devotions mart, and fals In hand of leachour vylde. 1 Nought is there under heav'ns wide hollownesse, That moves more deare compassion of mind, Then beautie brought t'unworthy wretchednesse Through envies snares or fortunes freakes unkind: I, whether lately through her brightnesse blind, Or through alleageance and fast fealtie, Which I do owe unto all woman kind, Feele my heart perst with so great agonie, When such I see, that all for pittie I could die. 2 And now it is empassionéd so deepe, For fairest Unaes sake, of whom I sing, That my fraile eyes these lines with teares do steepe, To thinke how she through guilefull handeling, Though true as touch, though daughter of a king, Though faire as ever living wight was faire, Though nor in word nor deede ill meriting, Is from her knight divorcéd in despaire And her due loves derived to that vile witches share. 3 Yet she most faithfull Ladie all this while Forsaken, wofull, solitarie mayd Farre from all peoples prease, as in exile, In wildernesse and wastfull deserts strayd, To seeke her knight; who subtilly betrayd Through that late vision, which th'Enchaunter wrought, Had her abandond. She of nought affrayd, Through woods and wastnesse wide him daily sought; Yet wishéd tydings none of him unto her brought. 4 One day nigh wearie of the yrkesome way, From her unhastie beast she did alight, And on the grasse her daintie limbes did lay In secret shadow, farre from all mens sight: From her faire head her fillet she undight, 52

And laid her stole aside. Her angels face As the great eye of heaven shynéd bright, And made a sunshine in the shadie place; Did never mortall eye behold such heavenly grace. 5 It fortunéd out of the thickest wood A ramping Lyon rushéd suddainly, Hunting full greedie after salvage blood; Soone as the royall virgin he did spy, With gaping mouth at her ran greedily, To have attonce devoured her tender corse: But to the pray when as he drew more ny, His bloudie rage asswagéd with remorse, And with the sight amazd, forgat his furious forse. 6 In stead thereof he kist her wearie feet, And lickt her lilly hands with fawning tong, As he her wrongéd innocence did weet. O how can beautie maister the most strong, And simple truth subdue avenging wrong? Whose yeelded pride and proud submission, Still dreading death, when she had markéd long, Her hart gan melt in great compassion, And drizling teares did shed for pure affection. 7 “The Lyon Lord of everie beast in field,” Quoth she, “his princely puissance doth abate, And mightie proud to humble weake does yield, Forgetfull of the hungry rage, which late Him prickt, in pittie of my sad estate: But he my Lyon, and my noble Lord, How does he find in cruell hart to hate Her that him loved, and ever most adord, As the God of my life? why hath he me abhord?” 8 Redounding teares did choke th'end of her plaint, Which softly ecchoed from the neighbour wood; And sad to see her sorrowfull constraint The kingly beast upon her gazing stood; With pittie calmd, downe fell his angry mood. At last in close hart shutting up her paine, Arose the virgin borne of heavenly brood, And to her snowy Palfrey got againe, To seeke her strayéd Champion, if she might attaine. 53

9 The Lyon would not leave her desolate, But with her went along, as a strong gard Of her chast person, and a faithfull mate Of her sad troubles and misfortunes hard: Still when she slept, he kept both watch and ward, And when she wakt, he waited diligent, With humble service to her will prepard: From her faire eyes he tooke commaundément, And ever by her lookes conceivéd her intent.

Source: Spenser, Edmund. Edmund Spenser's Poetry. Edited by Hugh Maclean and Anne Lake Prescott. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— In a number of other lyrical and narrative works Sidney and Spenser displayed the ornate, somewhat florid, highly figured style characteristic of a great deal of Elizabethan poetic expression; but two other poetic tendencies became visible toward the end of the 16th and in the early part of the 17th centuries. The first tendency is exemplified by the poetry of John Donne and the other so-called metaphysical poets, which carried the metaphorical style to heights of daring complexity and ingenuity. This often paradoxical style was used for a variety of poetic purposes, ranging from complex emotional attitudes to the simple inducement of admiration for its own virtuosity. Among the most important of Donne's followers, George Herbert is distinguished for his carefully constructed religious lyrics, which strive to express with personal humility the emotions appropriate to all true Christians. Other members of the metaphysical school are Henry Vaughan, a follower of Herbert, and Richard Crashaw, who was influenced by Continental Catholic mysticism. Andrew Marvell wrote metaphysical poetry of great power and fluency, but he also responded to other influences. The involved metaphysical style remained fashionable until late in the 17th century. —————————————————————————————————————

Poetry of Andrew Marvell Scholars consider 17th-century English poet Andrew Marvell a member of the ―metaphysical‖ school, along with poets John Donne, George Herbert, and others. Marvell‘s poetry covered many forms, ranging from sharp political satires to pastorals and love poems. In ―To His Coy Mistress‖ (1681), Marvell‘s most famous poem, the speaker uses gentle wit and thinly veiled innuendo to encourage his lover to seize the moment and act on their desires. ―The Garden‖ (1681), filled with images of nature, is an elaborate discussion of innocence, experience, and the complications of human relationships.

54

Poetry of Andrew Marvell To His Coy Mistress Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, Lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long Love‟s Day. Thou by the Indian Ganges side Should'st rubies find: I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the Flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster then empires, and more slow; An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze. Two hundred to adore each breast; But thirty thousand to the rest. An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. For Lady you deserve this state; Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Times wingèd chariot hurrying near: And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast Eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song: then worms shall try That long preserv'd virginity: And your quaint honour turn to dust; And into ashes all my lust. The grave's a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace. Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may; And now, like am'rous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour, Than languish in his slow-chapt pow'r. Let us roll all our strength, and all Our sweetness, up into one ball: 55

And tear our pleasures with rough strife, Through the iron gates of Life. Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run. The Garden How vainly men themselves amaze To win the palm, the Oak, or bays; And their uncessant labours see Crown'd from some single herb or tree, Whose short and narrow-vèrged shade Does prudently their toiles upbraid; While all Flow'rs and all Trees do close To weave the garlands of repose. Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, And Innocence thy sister dear! Mistaken long, I sought you then In busy companies of men. Your sacred plants, if here below, Only among the plants will grow. Society is all but rude, To this delicious Solitude. No white nor red was ever seen So am'rous as this lovely green. Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, Cut in these trees their mistress‟ name. Little, alas, they know, or heed, How far these beauties hers exceed! Fair trees! where s'eer your barks I wound, No name shall but your own be found. When we have run our passion‟s heat, Love hither makes his best retreat. The Gods, that mortal Beauty chase, Still in a tree did end their race: Apollo hunted Daphne so, Only that she might Laurel grow. And Pan did after Syrinx speed, Not as a nymph, but for a reed. What wond'rous life in this I lead! Ripe apples drop about my head; The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; 56

The nectaren, and curious peach, Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on melons, as I pass, Insnar'd with flow'rs, I fall on grass. Mean while the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness: The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade. Here at the fountain‟s sliding foot, Or at some fruit-tree‟s mossy root, Casting the body‟s vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide: There like a bird it sits, and sings, Then whets, and combs its silver wings; And, till prepar'd for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the various light. Such was that happy garden-state, While man there walk'd without a mate: After a place so pure, and sweet, What other help could yet be meet! But 'twas beyond a mortal's share To wander solitary there: Two paradises 'twere in one To live in paradise alone. How well the skilful gardener drew Of flow'rs and herbs this dial new; Where from above the milder sun Does through a fragrant Zodiac run; And, as it works, th' industrious bee Computes its time as well as we. How could such sweet and wholesome hours Be reckon'd but with herbs and flow'rs?

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

57

The second late Renaissance poetic tendency was in reaction to the sometimes flamboyant lushness of the Spenserians and to the sometimes tortuous verbal gymnastics of the metaphysical poets. Best represented by the accomplished poetry of Ben Jonson and his school, it reveals a classically pure and restrained style that had strong influence on late figures such as Robert Herrick and the other Cavalier poets and gave the direction for the poetic development of the succeeding neoclassical period. —————————————————————————————————————

From Paradise Lost, Book I Although his work was later criticized by such authors as English poet William Blake and Americanborn English poet T. S. Eliot, John Milton‘s Paradise Lost (1667) is still considered the greatest epic poem of early modern English literature. This excerpt is from Book I, which explains the origin of the conflict between God and Satan. Milton‘s portrayal of Satan is unique—a character with real motivations and desires, Satan is led astray by excessive pride and belief in his own power over God‘s power. In the first lines of the poem, Milton follows the convention in epic poems of invoking the Muses, the Greek goddesses that inspired poets, musicians, and philosophers, and he explains his purpose in writing the poem.

From Paradise Lost By John Milton

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed, In the beginning how the heav'ns and earth Rose out of chaos: or if Sion hill Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flowed Fast by the oracle of God; I thence Invoke thy aid to my advent'rous song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. And chiefly thou O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all temples th' upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for thou know'st; thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast abyss And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; 58

That to the highth of this great argument I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men. Say first, for heav'n hides nothing from thy view Nor the deep tract of hell, say first what cause Moved our grand parents in that happy state, Favored of Heav'n so highly, to fall off From their Creator, and transgress his will For one restraint, lords of the world besides? Who first seduced them to that foul revolt? Th' infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived The mother of mankind, what time his pride Had cast him out from heav'n, with all his host Of rebel angels, by whose aid aspiring To set himself in glory above his peers, He trusted to have equaled the Most High, If he opposed; and with ambitious aim Against the throne and monarchy of God Raised impious war in heav'n and battle proud With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire, Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms. Nine times the space that measures day and night To mortal men, he with his horrid crew Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf Confounded though immortal: but his doom Reserved him to more wrath; for now the thought Both of lost happiness and lasting pain Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes That witnessed huge affliction and dismay Mixed with obdúrate pride and steadfast hate: At once as far as angels ken he views The dismal situation waste and wild, A dungeon horrible, on all sides round As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible Served only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes That comes to all; but torture without end Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed: Such place Eternal Justice had prepared 59

For those rebellious, here their prison ordained In utter darkness, and their portion set As far removed from God and light of heav'n As from the center thrice to th' utmost pole. O how unlike the place from whence they fell! There the companions of his fall, o'erwhelmed With floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire, He soon discerns, and welt'ring by his side One next himself in power, and next in crime, Long after known in Palestine, and named Beëlzebub. To whom th' Arch-Enemy, And thence in heav'n called Satan, with bold words Breaking the horrid silence thus began. 'If thou beest he; but O how fall'n! how changed From him, who in the happy realms of light Clothed with transcendent brightness didst outshine Myriads though bright: if he whom mutual league, United thoughts and counsels, equal hope And hazard in the glorious enterprise, Joined with me once, now misery hath joined In equal ruin: into what pit thou seest From what highth fall'n, so much the stronger proved He with his thunder: and till then who knew The force of those dire arms? Yet not for those, Nor what the potent victor in his rage Can else inflict, do I repent or change, Though changed in outward luster, that fixed mind And high disdain, from sense of injured merit, That with the mightiest raised me to contend, And to the fierce contention brought along Innumerable force of Spirits armed That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring, His utmost power with adverse power opposed In dubious battle on the plains of heav'n, And shook his throne. What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield: And what is else not to be overcome? That glory never shall his wrath or might Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace With suppliant knee, and deify his power Who from the terror of this arm so late Doubted his empire, that were low indeed, That were an ignominy and shame beneath This downfall; since by fate the strength of gods And this empyreal substance cannot fail, 60

Since through experience of this great event In arms not worse, in foresight much advanced, We may with more successful hope resolve To wage by force or guile eternal war Irreconcilable, to our grand foe, Who now triúmphs, and in th' excess of joy Sole reigning holds the tyranny of heav'n.' So spake th' apostate angel, though in pain, Vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair: And him thus answered soon his bold compeer. 'O Prince, O Chief of many thronèd Powers, That led th' embattled Seraphim to war Under thy conduct, and in dreadful deeds Fearless, endangered heav'ns perpetual King; And put to proof his high supremacy, Whether upheld by strength, or chance, or fate; Too well I see and rue the dire event, That with sad overthrow and foul defeat Hath lost us heav'n, and all this mighty host In horrible destruction laid thus low, As far as gods and heav'nly essences Can perish: for the mind and spirit remains Invincible, and vigor soon returns, Though all our glory extinct, and happy state Here swallowed up in endless misery. But what if he our conqueror (whom I now Of force believe almighty, since no less Than such could have o'erpow'red such force as ours) Have left us this our spirit and strength entire Strongly to suffer and support our pains, That we may so suffice his vengeful ire, Or do him mightier service as his thralls By right of war, whate'er his business be Here in the heart of hell to work in fire, Or do his errands in the gloomy deep; What can it then avail though yet we feel Strength undiminished, or eternal being To undergo eternal punishment?' Whereto with speedy words th' Arch-Fiend replied. 'Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable Doing or suffering: but of this be sure, To do aught good never will be our task, But ever to do ill our sole delight, As being the contrary to his high will Whom we resist. If then his providence 61

Out of our evil seek to bring forth good, Our labor must be to pervert that end, And out of good still to find means of evil; Which ofttimes may succeed, so as perhaps Shall grieve him, if I fail not, and disturb His inmost counsels from their destined aim. But see the angry victor hath recalled His ministers of vengeance and pursuit Back to the gates of heav'n: the sulphurous hail Shot after us in storm, o'erblown hath laid The fiery surge, that from the precipice Of heav'n received us falling, and the thunder, Winged with red lightning and impetuous rage, Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now To bellow through the vast and boundless deep. Let us not slip th' occasion, whether scorn, Or satiate fury yield it from our foe. Seest thou yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild, The seat of desolation, void of light, Save what the glimmering of these livid flames Casts pale and dreadful? Thither let us tend From off the tossing of these fiery waves, There rest, if any rest can harbor there, And reassembling our afflicted powers, Consult how we may henceforth most offend Our enemy, our own loss how repair, How overcome this dire calamity, What reinforcement we may gain from hope, If not what resolution from despair.' Thus Satan talking to his nearest mate With head uplift above the wave, and eyes That sparkling blazed, his other parts besides Prone on the flood, extended long and large Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge As whom the fables name of monstrous size, Titanian, or Earth-born, that warred on Jove, Briareos or Typhon, whom the den By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea-beast Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that swim th' ocean stream: Him haply slumb'ring on the Norway foam The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff, Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell, With fixèd anchor in his scaly rind Moors by his side under the lee, while night Invests the sea, and wishèd morn delays: So stretched out huge in length the Arch-Fiend lay 62

Chained on the burning lake, nor ever thence Had ris'n or heaved his head, but that the will And high permission of all-ruling Heaven Left him at large to his own dark designs, That with reiterated crimes he might Heap on himself damnation, while he sought Evil to others, and enraged might see How all his malice served but to bring forth Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shown On man by him seduced, but on himself Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance poured. Forthwith upright he rears from off the pool His mighty stature; on each hand the flames Driv'n backward slope their pointing spires, and rolled In billows, leave i' th' midst a horrid vale. Then with expanded wings he steers his flight Aloft, incumbent on the dusky air That felt unusual weight, till on dry land He lights, if it were land that ever burned With solid, as the lake with liquid fire, And such appeared in hue; as when the force Of subterranean wind transports a hill Torn from Pelorus, or the shattered side Of thund'ring Etna, whose combustible And fueled entrails thence conceiving fire, Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds, And leave a singèd bottom all involved With stench and smoke: such resting found the sole Of unblest feet. Him followed his next mate, Both glorying to have scaped the Stygian flood As gods, and by their own recovered strength, Not by the sufferance of supernal power. 'Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,' Said then the lost Archangel, 'this the seat That we must change for heav'n, this mournful gloom For that celestial light? Be it so, since he Who now is sovran can dispose and bid What shall be right: farthest from him is best Whom reason hath equaled, force hath made supreme Above his equals. Farwell happy fields Where joy for ever dwells: hail horrors, hail Infernal world, and thou profoundest hell Receive thy new possessor: one who brings A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n. What matter where, if I be still the same, 63

And what I should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition though in hell: Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav'n. But wherefore let we then our faithful friends, Th' associates and copartners of our loss Lie thus astonished on th' oblivious pool, And call them not to share with us their part In this unhappy mansion, or once more With rallied arms to try what may be yet Regained in heav'n, or what more lost in hell?' So Satan spake, and him Beëlzebub Thus answered. 'Leader of those armies bright, Which but th' Omnipotent none could have foiled, If once they hear that voice, their liveliest pledge Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft In worst extremes, and on the perilous edge Of battle when it raged, in all assaults Their surest signal, they will soon resume New courage and revive, though now they lie Groveling and prostrate on yon lake of fire, As we erewhile, astounded and amazed, No wonder, fall'n such a pernicious highth.' He scarce had ceased when the superior Fiend Was moving toward the shore; his ponderous shield Ethereal temper, massy, large and round, Behind him cast; the broad circumference Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views At evening from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe. His spear, to equal which the tallest pine Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast Of some great ammiral, were but a wand, He walked with to support uneasy steps Over the burning marl, not like those steps On heaven's azure; and the torrid clime Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire; Nathless he so endured, till on the beach Of that inflamèd sea, he stood and called His legions, angel forms, who lay entranced Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks 64

In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades High overarched embow'r; or scattered sedge Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion armed Hath vexed the Red Sea coast, whose waves o'erthrew Busiris and his Memphian chivalry, While with perfidious hatred they pursued The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld From the safe shore their floating carcasses And broken chariot wheels. So thick bestrown Abject and lost lay these, covering the flood, Under amazement of their hideous change. He called so loud, that all the hollow deep Of hell resounded. 'Princes, Potentates, Warriors, the flow'r of heav'n, once yours, now lost, If such astonishment as this can seize Eternal Spirits: or have ye chos'n this place After the toil of battle to repose Your wearied virtue, for the ease you find To slumber here, as in the vales of heav'n? Or in this abject posture have ye sworn To adore the conqueror? who now beholds Cherub and Seraph rolling in the flood With scattered arms and ensigns, till anon His swift pursuers from heav'n gates discern Th' advantage, and descending tread us down Thus drooping, or with linkèd thunderbolts Transfix us to the bottom of this gulf. Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n.'

Source: Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Elledge, Scott, ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— The last great poet of the English Renaissance was the Puritan writer John Milton, who, having at his command a thorough classical education and the benefit of the preceding half century of experimentation in the various schools of English poetry, approached with greater maturity than Spenser the task of writing a great English epic. Although he adhered to Sidney's and Spenser's notions of the inspired role of the poet as the lofty instructor of humanity, he rejected the fantastic and miscellaneous machinery, involving classical mythology and medieval knighthood, of The Faerie Queene in favor of the central Christian and biblical tradition. With grand simplicity and poetic power Milton narrated in Paradise Lost (1667) the machinations of Satan leading to the fall of Adam and Eve from the state of innocence; and he performed the task in such a way as to “justify the ways of God to man” and to express the central Christian truths of freedom, sin, and redemption as he conceived 65

them. His other poems, such as the elegy Lycidas (1637), Paradise Regained (1671), and the classically patterned tragedy Samson Agonistes (1671), similarly reveal astonishing poetic power and grace under the control of a profound mind.

B

Renaissance Drama and Prose

Christopher Marlowe Christopher Marlowe, considered the greatest English dramatist before William Shakespeare, greatly advanced tragedy as an English dramatic form. Marlowe was also the first English playwright to compose in blank verse. The New York Public Library

Thomas Middleton The Roaring Girle (1610) is a comedy by English playwrights Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker. The play‘s title page from a 1611 edition is shown here. Other notable works by Middleton include the tragedies The Changeling (1622), written with William Rowley, and Women Beware Women (1621?). Corbis

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

66

The poetry of the English Renaissance between 1580 and 1660 was the result of a remarkable outburst of energy. It is, however, the drama of roughly the same period that stands highest in popular estimation. The works of its greatest representative, William Shakespeare, have achieved worldwide renown. In the previous Middle English period there had been, within the church, a gradual broadening of dramatic representation of such doctrinally important events as the angel's announcement of the resurrection to the women at the tomb of Christ. Ultimately, performances of religious drama had become the province of the craft guilds, and the entire Christian story, from the creation of the world to the last judgment, had been reenacted for secular audiences. The Renaissance drama proper rose from this late medieval base by a number of transitional stages ending about 1580. A large number of comedies, tragedies, and examples of intermediate types were produced for London theaters between that year and 1642, when the London theaters were closed by order of the Puritan Parliament. Like so much nondramatic literature of the Renaissance, most of these plays were written in an elaborate verse style and under the influence of classical examples, but the popular taste, to which drama was especially susceptible, required a flamboyance and sensationalism largely alien to the spirit of Greek and Roman literature. Only the Roman tragedian Lucius Annaeus Seneca could provide a model for the earliest popular tragedy of blood and revenge, The Spanish Tragedy (1589?) of Thomas Kyd. Kyd's skillfully managed, complicated, but sensational plot influenced in turn later, psychologically more sophisticated revenge tragedies, among them Shakespeare's Hamlet. Christopher Marlowe began the tradition of the chronicle play, about the fatal deeds of kings and potentates, a few years later with the tragedies Tamburlaine the Great, Part I (1587), and Edward II (1592?). Marlowe's plays, such as The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (1588?) and The Jew of Malta (1589?), are remarkable primarily for their daring depictions of world-shattering characters who strive to go beyond the normal human limitations as the Christian medieval ethos had conceived them. These works are written in a poetic style worthy in many ways of comparison to Shakespeare's. —————————————————————————————————————

From The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus In The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1589?), scholar and magician Faustus sells his soul to the demon Mephistopheles in return for magical power and scientific knowledge. Although English dramatist Christopher Marlowe incorporated elements of the medieval morality play, in which good and evil vie for the human soul, Faustus‘s thirst for knowledge is more characteristic of Renaissance concerns. In the following scene, which contains one of the most famous questions in the history of theater (―Was this the face that launched a thousand ships…?‖), Faustus conjures the legendary beauty Helen of Troy. He seals his doom when he kisses Helen, actually a demon in human form.

67

From The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus By Christopher Marlowe

[5.1] Enter Wagner solus WAGNER I think my master means to die shortly, For he hath given to me all his goods. And yet methinks if that death were near He would not banquet and carouse and swill Amongst the students, as even now he doth, Who are at supper with such belly-cheer As Wagner ne'er beheld in all his life. See where they come. Belike the feast is ended. [Exit Wagner.] Enter Faustus with two or three Scholars [and Mephistopheles] FIRST SCHOLAR Master Doctor Faustus, since our conference about fair ladies—which was the beautifull'st in all the world—we have determined with ourselves that Helen of Greece was the admirablest lady that ever lived. Therefore, Master Doctor, if you will do us that favour as to let us see that peerless dame of Greece, whom all the world admires for majesty, we should think ourselves much beholding unto you. FAUSTUS Gentlemen, For that I know your friendship is unfeigned, And Faustus' custom is not to deny The just requests of those that wish him well, You shall behold that peerless dame of Greece, No otherways for pomp and majesty Than when Sir Paris crossed the seas with her And brought the spoils to rich Dardania. Be silent then, for danger is in words. Music sounds and Helen, [led in by Mephistopheles,] passeth over the stage SECOND SCHOLAR Too simple is my wit to tell her praise, Whom all the world admires for majesty. THIRD SCHOLAR No marvel though the angry Greeks pursued With ten years' war the rape of such a queen, Whose heavenly beauty passeth all compare. FIRST SCHOLAR Since we have seen the pride of nature's works And only paragon of excellence, Enter an Old Man Let us depart; and for this glorious deed Happy and blest be Faustus evermore. FAUSTUS Gentlemen, farewell. The same I wish to you. Exeunt Scholars OLD MAN Ah, Doctor Faustus, that I might prevail To guide thy steps unto the way of life, By which sweet path thou mayst attain the goal That shall conduct thee to celestial rest! Break heart, drop blood, and mingle it with tears— 68

Tears falling from repentant heaviness Of thy most vile and loathsome filthiness, The stench whereof corrupts the inward soul With such flagitious crimes of heinous sins As no commiseration may expel But mercy, Faustus, of thy Saviour sweet, Whose blood alone must wash away thy guilt. FAUSTUS Where art thou, Faustus? Wretch, what hast thou done? Damned art thou, Faustus, damned! Despair and die! Hell calls for right, and with a roaring voice Says, 'Faustus, come! Thine hour is come.' Mephistopheles gives him a dagger And Faustus will come to do thee right. [Faustus prepares to stab himself] OLD MAN Ah, stay, good Faustus, stay thy desperate steps! I see an angel hovers o'er thy head, And with a vial full of precious grace Offers to pour the same into thy soul. Then call for mercy and avoid despair. FAUSTUS Ah, my sweet friend, I feel thy words To comfort my distressèd soul. Leave me a while to ponder on my sins. OLD MAN I go, sweet Faustus, but with heavy cheer, Fearing the ruin of thy hopeless soul. [Exit the Old Man] FAUSTUS Accursèd Faustus, where is mercy now? I do repent, and yet I do despair. Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast. What shall I do to shun the snares of death? MEPHISTOPHELES Thou traitor, Faustus, I arrest thy soul For disobedience to my sovereign lord. Revolt, or I'll in piecemeal tear thy flesh. FAUSTUS Sweet Mephistopheles, entreat thy lord To pardon my unjust presumption, And with my blood again I will confirm My former vow I made to Lucifer. MEPHISTOPHELES Do it then quickly, with unfeignèd heart, Lest greater danger do attend thy drift. [Faustus cuts his arm and writes with his blood] FAUSTUS Torment, sweet friend, that base and crooked age That durst dissuade me from thy Lucifer, With greatest torments that our hell affords. MEPHISTOPHELES His faith is great. I cannot touch his soul. But what I may afflict his body with I will attempt, which is but little worth. FAUSTUS One thing, good servant, let me crave of thee To glut the longing of my heart's desire: That I might have unto my paramour 69

That heavenly Helen which I saw of late, Whose sweet embracings may extinguish clean These thoughts that do dissuade me from my vow, And keep mine oath I made to Lucifer. MEPHISTOPHELES Faustus, this, or what else thou shalt desire, Shall be performed in twinkling of an eye. Enter Helen [brought in by Mephistopheles] FAUSTUS Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. [They kiss] Her lips sucks forth my soul. See where it flies! Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. [They kiss again] Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena. Enter [the] Old Man I will be Paris, and for love of thee Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked, And I will combat with weak Menelaus, And wear thy colours on my plumèd crest. Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel And then return to Helen for a kiss. O, thou art fairer than the evening air, Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars. Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter When he appeared to hapless Semele, More lovely than the monarch of the sky In wanton Arethusa's azured arms; And none but thou shalt be my paramour. Exeunt [Faustus and Helen, with Mephistopheles] OLD MAN Accursèd Faustus, miserable man, That from thy soul exclud'st the grace of heaven And fliest the throne of His tribunal seat! Enter the Devils, [with Mephistopheles. They menace the Old Man] Satan begins to sift me with his pride. As in this furnace God shall try my faith, My faith, vile hell, shall triumph over thee. Ambitious fiends, see how the heavens smiles At your repulse and laughs your state to scorn! Hence, hell! For hence I fly unto my God. Exeunt

Source: Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus and Other Plays. © 1995. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

70

C

Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, Balcony Scene In the famous balcony scene from the tragedy Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, Juliet Capulet emerges from her bedroom to muse upon the young man she has just met and fallen in love with, Romeo Montague. He, much taken with her, overhears her thoughts with pleasure while hidden below. A long-standing feud between the Capulets and Montagues keeps the young lovers apart. Courtesy of BBC Worldwide Americas, Inc. All rights reserved.

Elizabethan tragedy and comedy alike reached their true flowering in Shakespeare's works. Beyond his art, his rich style, and his complex plots, all of which surpass by far the work of other Elizabethan dramatists in the same field, and beyond his unrivaled projection of character, Shakespeare's compassionate understanding of the human lot has perpetuated his greatness and made him the representative figure of English literature for the whole world. —————————————————————————————————————

From Hamlet Hamlet (1601?), by English playwright William Shakespeare, is one of the most famous tragedies in English literature. At the opening of the drama, Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, has returned home after the death of his father, the king. Shortly after the funeral, Hamlet‘s mother remarried Hamlet‘s uncle Claudius, who succeeded his father on the throne. In the following scenes from the first act, Hamlet is visited by his father‘s ghost, which tells Hamlet that he was murdered by Claudius. Hamlet then vows to avenge his father‘s death, and forces his friends Horatio and Marcellus to swear never to tell what they saw or heard that night.

71

From Hamlet By William Shakespeare

[I.iv] Enter HAMLET, HORATIO and MARCELLUS. HAM.

The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold.

HOR.

It is a nipping and an eager air.

HAM.

What hour now?

HOR.

I think it lacks of twelve.

MAR.

No, it is struck.

HOR.

Indeed? I heard it not. It then draws near the season Wherein the spirit held his wont to walk. A flourish of trumpets, and two pieces go off. What does this mean, my lord? HAM.

The king doth wake to-night and takes his rouse, Keeps wassail, and the swagg'ring up-spring reels, And as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down, The kettledrum and trumpet thus bray out The triumph of his pledge. HOR.

Is it a custom?

HAM.

Ay, marry, is't, But to my mind, though I am native here And to the manner born, it is a custom More honored in the breach than the observance. This heavy-headed revel east and west Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations. They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase Soil our addition, and indeed it takes From our achievements, though performed at height, The pith and marrow of our attribute So oft it chances in particular men, That for some vicious mole of nature in them, As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty (Since nature cannot choose his origin), By the o'ergrowth of some complexion, Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason, Or by some habit that too much o'er-leavens 72

The form of plausive manners—that these men, Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, Being nature's livery or fortune's star, His virtues else, be they as pure as grace, As infinite as man may undergo, Shall in the general censure take corruption From that particular fault. The dram of evil Doth all the noble substance often doubt To his own scandal. Enter GHOST. HOR.

Look, my lord, it comes.

HAM.

Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com'st in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee. I'll call thee Hamlet, King, father, royal Dane. O, answer me! Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell Why thy canonized bones, hearséd in death, Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre Wherein we saw thee quietly interred Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws To cast thee up again. What may this mean That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous, and we fools of nature So horridly to shake our disposition With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls? Say, why is this? wherefore? What should we do? [GHOST] beckons. HOR.

It beckons you to go away with it, As if it some impartment did desire To you alone. MAR.

Look with what courteous action It waves you to a more removéd ground. But do not go with it. HOR.

No, by no means.

HAM.

It will not speak; then I will follow it.

73

HOR.

Do not, my lord.

HAM.

Why, what should be the fear? I do not set my life at a pin's fee, And for my soul, what can it do to that, Being a thing immortal as itself? It waves me forth again. I'll follow it. HOR.

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff That beetles o'er his base into the sea, And there assume some other horrible form, Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason And draw you into madness? Think of it. The very place puts toys of desperation, Without more motive, into every brain That looks so many fathoms to the sea And hears it roar beneath. HAM.

It waves me still. Go on. I'll follow thee. MAR.

You shall not go, my lord.

HAM.

Hold off your hands.

HOR.

Be ruled, You shall not go.

My fate cries out And makes each petty artere in this body As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve. Still am I called. Unhand me, gentlemen. By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me. I say, away!—Go on. I'll follow thee HAM.

HOR.

He waxes desperate with imagination.

MAR.

Let's follow. 'Tis not fit thus to obey him.

HOR.

Have after. To what issue will this come?

MAR.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

HOR.

Heaven will direct it.

MAR.

Nay, let's follow him. Exeunt.

[I.v] 74

Enter GHOST and HAMLET. HAM.

Whither wilt thou lead me? Speak. I'll go no further.

GHOST. HAM.

Mark me.

I will.

GHOST.

My hour is almost come When I to sulph'rous and tormenting flames Must render up myself. HAM.

Alas, poor ghost!

GHOST.

Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing To what I shall unfold. HAM.

Speak. I am bound to hear.

GHOST. HAM.

So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.

What?

GHOST.

I am thy father's spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combinéd locks to part, And each particular hair to stand an end, Like quills upon the fretful porpentine. But this eternal blazon must not be To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list! If thou didst ever thy dear father love— HAM.

O God!

GHOST. HAM.

Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.

Murder!

GHOST.

Murder most foul, as in the best it is, But this most foul, strange, and unnatural. 75

HAM.

Haste me to know't, that I, with wings as swift As meditation or the thoughts of love, May sweep to my revenge. GHOST.

I find thee apt, And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf, Wouldst thou not stir in this. Now, Hamlet, hear. 'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark Is by a forgéd process of my death Rankly abused. But know, thou noble youth, The serpent that did sting thy father's life Now wears his crown. O my prophetic soul! My uncle! HAM.

GHOST.

Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, With witchcraft of his wits, with traitorous gifts— O wicked wit and gifts that have the power So to seduce!—won to his shameful lust The will of my most seeming virtuous queen. O Hamlet, what a falling off was there, From me, whose love was of that dignity That it went hand in hand even with the vow I made to her in marriage, and to decline Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor To those of mine! But virtue, as it never will be moved, Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, So lust, though to a radiant angel linked, Will sate itself in a celestial bed And prey on garbage. But soft, methinks I scent the morning air. Brief let me be. Sleeping within my orchard, My custom always of the afternoon, Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole, With juice of cursed hebona in a vial, And in the porches of my ears did pour The leperous distilment, whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That swift as quicksilver it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body, And with a sudden vigor it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood. So did it mine, 76

And a most instant tetter barked about Most lazar-like with vile and loathsome crust All my smooth body. Thus was I sleeping by a brother's hand Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched, Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled, No reck'ning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head. O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible! If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not. Let not the royal bed of Denmark be A couch for luxury and damnéd incest. But howsomever thou pursues this act, Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven, And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once. The glowworm shows the matin to be near, And gins to pale his uneffectual fire. Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me. [Exit.] HAM.

O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else? And shall I couple hell? O, fie! Hold, hold, my heart, And you, my sinews, grow not instant old, But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven! O most pernicious woman! O villain, villain, smiling, damnéd villain! My tables—meet it is I set it down That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain. At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark. [Writing.] So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word: It is 'Adieu, adieu. Remember me.' I have sworn't. Enter HORATIO and MARCELLUS. HOR.

My lord, my lord!

77

MAR.

Lord Hamlet!

HOR.

Heavens secure him!

HAM.

So be it!

MAR.

Illo, ho, ho, my lord!

HAM.

Hillo, ho, ho, boy! Come, bird, come.

MAR.

How is't, my noble lord?

HOR.

What news, my lord?

HAM.

O, wonderful!

HOR.

Good my lord, tell it.

HAM.

No, you will reveal it.

HOR.

Not I, my lord, by heaven.

MAR.

Nor I, my lord.

HAM.

How say you then, would heart of man once think it? But you'll be secret? BOTH.

Ay, by heaven, my lord.

HAM.

There's never a villain dwelling in all Denmark But he's an arrant knave. HOR.

There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave To tell us this. HAM.

Why, right, you are in the right, And so without more circumstance at all I hold it fit that we shake hands and part, You, as your business and desire shall point you, For every man hath business and desire Such as it is, and for my own poor part, I will go pray. HOR.

These are but wild and whirling words, my lord.

HAM.

I am sorry they offend you, heartily; Yes, faith, heartily.

78

HOR.

There's no offence, my lord.

HAM.

Yes, by Saint Patrick, but there is, Horatio, And much offence too. Touching this vision here, It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you. For your desire to know what is between us, O'ermaster't as you may. And now, good friends, As you are friends, scholars, and soldiers, Give me one poor request. HOR.

What is't, my lord? We will.

HAM.

Never make known what you have seen to-night.

BOTH. HAM.

My lord, we will not.

Nay, but swear't.

HOR.

In faith, My lord, not I. MAR.

Nor I, my lord, in faith.

HAM.

Upon my sword.

MAR.

We have sworn, my lord, already.

HAM.

Indeed, upon my sword, indeed.

Ghost cries under the stage. GHOST.

Swear.

Ha, ha, boy, say'st thou so? Art thou there, truepenny? Come on. You hear this fellow in the cellarage. Consent to swear. HAM.

HOR.

Propose the oath, my lord.

HAM.

Never to speak of this that you have seen, Swear by my sword. GHOST.

[Beneath.] Swear.

HAM.

Hic et ubique? Then we'll shift our ground. Come hither, gentlemen, And lay your hands again upon my sword. Swear by my sword 79

Never to speak of this that you have heard. GHOST.

[Beneath.] Swear by his sword.

HAM. Well said, old mole! Canst work i' th' earth so fast? A worthy pioneer! Once more remove, good friends. HOR.

O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

HAM.

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But come. Here as before, never, so help you mercy, How strange or odd some'er I bear myself (As I perchance hereafter shall think meet To put an antic disposition on), That you, at such times, seeing me, never shall, With arms encumbered thus, or this head-shake, Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase, As 'Well, well, we know', or 'We could, and if we would' Or 'If we list to speak', or 'There be, and if they might' Or such ambiguous giving out, to note That you know aught of me—this do swear, So grace and mercy at your most need help you. GHOST.

[Beneath.] Swear.

Rest, rest, perturbéd spirit! So, gentlemen, With all my love I do commend me to you, And what so poor a man as Hamlet is May do t'express his love and friending to you, God willing, shall not lack. Let us go in together, And still your fingers on your lips, I pray. The time is out of joint. O curséd spite That ever I was born to set it right! Nay, come, let's go together. Exeunt.

HAM.

Source: Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Hoy, Cyrus, ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

80

Shakespeare's comedies, of which perhaps the best are As You Like It (1599?) and Twelfth Night (1600?), depict the endearing as well as the ridiculous sides of human nature. His great tragedies—Hamlet (1601?), Othello (1604?), King Lear (1605?), Macbeth (1606?), and Antony and Cleopatra (1606?)—look deeply into the springs of action in the human soul. His earlier dark tragedies were imitated in style and feeling by the tragedian John Webster in The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1613-1614).

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare, who wrote during the late 1500s and early 1600s in England, is generally considered the greatest dramatist in human history and the supreme poet of the English language. His brilliant works are universally celebrated for their comprehensive understanding of the human condition. In this excerpt from William Shakespeare‘s play Macbeth (recited by an actor), Macbeth meditates on the futility of human endeavors. Macbeth‘s schemes for gaining power are falling apart, and he has just heard that Lady Macbeth is dead. (p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved./Culver Pictures

Hamlet’s Soliloquy, Act III In this excerpt from the tragic play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Hamlet reveals that his self-doubt and inability to avenge his father‘s death have led him to the brink of suicide. A British actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company recites the well-known soliloquy ―To Be or Not to Be.‖ "'To Be or Not To Be' from Hamlet" written by William Shakespeare, performed by Simon Russell Beale, from Great Speeches and Soliloquies (Cat.# Naxos NA201512) ©and(p)1994 Naxos Audiobooks Ltd. Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc. www.naxos.com. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

81

In Shakespeare's last plays, the so-called dramatic romances, including The Tempest (1611?), he sets a mood of quiet acceptance and ultimate reconciliation that was a fitting close for his literary career. These plays, by virtue of their mysterious, exotic atmosphere and their quick, surprising alternations of bad and good fortune, come close also to the tone of the drama of the succeeding age.

D

Late Renaissance and 17th Century

Ben Jonson Ben Jonson‘s fine education is evident in his brilliant drama and satire, and he often criticized other dramatists of his time, including his friend William Shakespeare, for errors and carelessness. Jonson worked to improve drama as a form of literature. Culver Pictures

The most influential figure in shaping the immediate future course of English drama was Ben Jonson. His carefully plotted comedies, satirizing with inimitable verve and imagination various departures from the norm of good sense and moderation, are written in a more sober and careful style than are those of most Elizabethan and early 17th-century dramatists. Those qualities, indeed, define the character of most later Restoration comedy. The best of Jonson's comedies are Volpone (1606) and The Alchemist (1610). Professing themselves his disciples, the dramatists Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher collaborated on a number of so-called tragicomedies (for example, Philaster, 1610?) in which morally dubious situations, surprising reversals of fortune, and sentimentality combine with hollow rhetoric. The outstanding prose works of the Renaissance are not so numerous as those of later ages, but the great translation of the Bible, called the King James Bible, or Authorized Version, published in 1611, is significant because it was the culmination of two centuries of effort to produce the best English translation of the original texts, and also because its vocabulary, imagery, and rhythms have influenced writers of English in all lands ever since. Similarly sonorous and stately is the prose of Sir Thomas Browne, the physician and semiscientific investigator. His reduction of worldly phenomena to symbols of mystical truth is best seen in Religio Medici (Religion of a Doctor), probably written in 1635.

82

The Restoration Period

And th The 18 Century

83

V

THE RESTORATION PERIOD AND THE 18TH CENTURY

—————————————————————————————————————

From An Essay Concerning Human Understanding English philosopher John Locke explained his theory of empiricism, a philosophical doctrine holding that all knowledge is based on experience, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke believed the human mind to be a blank slate at birth that gathered all its information from its surroundings—starting with simple ideas and combining these simple ideas into more complex ones. His theory greatly influenced education in Great Britain and the United States. Locke believed that education should begin in early childhood and should proceed gradually as the child learns increasingly complex ideas.

From An Essay Concerning Human Understanding BOOK II: OF IDEAS CHAPTER I Of Ideas in General, and Their Original By John Locke 1. Idea is the object of thinking.—Every man being conscious to himself that he thinks, and that which his mind is applied about whilst thinking being the ideas that are there, it is past doubt that men have in their mind several ideas, such as are those expressed by the words whiteness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness, and others: it is in the first place then to be inquired, How he comes by them? I know it is a received doctrine, that men have native ideas and original characters stamped upon their minds in their very first being. This opinion I have at large examined already; and, I suppose, what I have said in the foregoing book will be much more easily admitted, when I have shown whence the understanding may get all the ideas it has, and by what ways and degrees they may come into the mind; for which I shall appeal to everyone's own observation and experience. 2. All ideas come from sensation or reflection.—Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience. In that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation, employed either about external sensible objects, or about the

84

internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring. 3. The object of sensation one source of ideas.—First, our senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them; and thus we come by those ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities; which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions. This great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses, and derived by them to the understanding, I call sensation. 4. The operations of our minds the other source of them.—Secondly, the other fountain, from which experience furnisheth the understanding with ideas, is the perception of the operations of our own mind within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got; which operations when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas which could not be had from things without; and such are perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings of our own minds; which we, being conscious of, and observing in ourselves, do from these receive into our understandings as distinct ideas, as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense. But as I call the other sensation, so I call this reflection, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself. By reflection, then, in the following part of this discourse, I would be understood to mean that notice which the mind takes of its own operations, and the manner of them, by reason whereof there come to be ideas of these operations in the understanding. These two, I say, viz., external material things as the object of sensation, and the operations of our own minds within as the objects of reflection, are, to me, the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings. The term operations here, I use in a large sense, as comprehending not barely the actions of the mind about its ideas, but some sort of passions arising sometimes from them, such as is the satisfaction or uneasiness arising from any thought. 5. All our ideas are of the one or the other of these.—The understanding seems to me not to have the least glimmering of any ideas which it doth not receive from one of these two. External objects furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible qualities, which are all those different perceptions they produce in us; and the mind furnishes the understanding with ideas of its own operations. These, when we have taken a full survey of them, and their several modes, [combinations, and relations,] we shall find to contain all our whole stock of ideas; and that we have nothing in our minds which did not come in one of these two ways. Let anyone examine his own thoughts, and thoroughly search into his understanding, and then let him tell me, whether all the original ideas he has there, are any other than of the objects of his senses, or of the operations of his mind considered as objects of his reflection; and how great a mass of knowledge soever he imagines to be lodged there, he will, upon taking a strict view, see that he has not any idea in his mind but what one of these two have imprinted, though perhaps with infinite variety compounded and enlarged by the understanding, as we shall see hereafter. 6. Observable in children.—He that attentively considers the state of a child at his first coming into the world, will have little reason to think him stored with plenty of ideas that are to be the matter of his future knowledge. It is by degrees he comes to be furnished with them; and though the ideas of obvious and familiar qualities imprint themselves before the memory 85

begins to keep a register of time or order, yet it is often so late before some unusual qualities come in the way, that there are few men that cannot recollect the beginning of their acquaintance with them: and, if it were worth while, no doubt a child might be so ordered as to have but a very few even of the ordinary ideas till he were grown up to a man. But all that are born into the world being surrounded with bodies that perpetually and diversely affect them, variety of ideas, whether care be taken about it or not, are imprinted on the minds of children. Light and colors are busy at hand everywhere when the eye is but open; sounds and some tangible qualities fail not to solicit their proper senses, and force an entrance to the mind; but yet I think it will be granted easily, that if a child were kept in a place where he never saw any other but black and white till he were a man, he would have no more ideas of scarlet or green than he that from his childhood never tasted an oyster or a pineapple has of those particular relishes. 7. Men are differently furnished with these according to the different objects they converse with.—Men then come to be furnished with fewer or more simple ideas from without, according as the objects they converse with afford greater or less variety; and from the operations of their minds within, according as they more or less reflect on them. For, though he that contemplates the operations of his mind cannot but have plain and clear ideas of them; yet, unless he turn his thoughts that way, and considers them attentively, he will no more have clear and distinct ideas of all the operations of his mind, and all that may be observed therein, than he will have all the particular ideas of any landscape, or of the parts and motions of a clock, who will not turn his eyes to it, and with attention heed all the parts of it. The picture or clock may be so placed, that they may come in his way every day; but yet he will have but a confused idea of all the parts they are made of, till he applies himself with attention to consider them each in particular. 8. Ideas of reflection later, because they need attention.—And hence we see the reason why it is pretty late before most children get ideas of the operations of their own minds; and some have not any very clear or perfect ideas of the greatest part of them all their lives: because, though they pass there continually, yet like floating visions, they make not deep impressions enough to leave in the mind, clear, distinct, lasting ideas, till the understanding turns inwards upon itself, reflects on its own operations, and makes them the objects of its own contemplation. Children, when they come first into it, are surrounded with a world of new things, which, by a constant solicitation of their senses, draw the mind constantly to them, forward to take notice of new, and apt to be delighted with the variety of changing objects. Thus the first years are usually employed and diverted in looking abroad. Men's business in them is to acquaint themselves with what is to be found without; and so, growing up in a constant attention to outward sensations, seldom make any considerable reflection on what passes within them till they come to be of riper years; and some scarce ever at all. 9. The soul begins to have ideas when it begins to perceive.—To ask, at what time a man has first any ideas, is to ask when he begins to perceive; having ideas, and perception, being the same thing. I know it is an opinion, that the soul always thinks; and that it has the actual perception of ideas in itself constantly, as long as it exists; and that actual thinking is as inseparable from the soul, as actual extension is from the body: which if true, to inquire after the beginning of a man's ideas is the same as to inquire after the beginning of his soul. For by this account, soul and its ideas, as body and its extension, will begin to exist both at the same time. 10. The soul thinks not always; for this wants proofs.—But whether the soul be supposed to exist antecedent to, or coeval with, or some time after, the first rudiments or organization, or the beginnings of life in the body, I leave to be disputed by those who have better thought of that matter. I confess myself to have one of those dull souls that doth not perceive itself always to contemplate ideas; nor can conceive it any more necessary for the soul always to think, than for 86

the body always to move; the perception of ideas being, as I conceive, to the soul, what motion is to the body: not its essence, but one of its operations; and, therefore, though thinking be supposed never so much the proper action of the soul, yet it is not necessary to suppose that it should be always thinking, always in action. That, perhaps, is the privilege of the infinite Author and Preserver of all things, 'who never slumbers nor sleeps;' but it is not competent to any finite being, at least not to the soul of man. We know certainly, by experience, that we sometimes think; and thence draw this infallible consequence—that there is something in us that has a power to think. But whether that substance perpetually thinks, or no, we can be no farther assured than experience informs us. For to say that actual thinking is essential to the soul, and inseparable from it, is to beg what is in question, and not to prove it by reason; which is necessary to be done, if it be not a self-evident proposition. But whether this—that 'the soul always thinks,' be a self-evident proposition, that everybody assents to on first hearing, I appeal to mankind. [It is doubted whether I thought all last night, or no; the question being about a matter of fact, it is begging it to bring as a proof for it an hypothesis which is the very thing in dispute; by which way one may prove anything; and it is but supposing that all watches, whilst the balance beats, think, and it is sufficiently proved, and past doubt, that my watch thought all last night. But he that would not deceive himself ought to build his hypothesis on matter of fact, and make it out by sensible experience, and not presume on matter of fact because of his hypothesis; that is, because he supposes it to be so; which way of proving amounts to this,—that I must necessarily think all last night, because another supposes I always think, though I myself cannot perceive that I always do so. But men in love with their opinions may not only suppose what is in question, but allege wrong matter of fact. How else could anyone make it an inference of mine, that a thing is not, because we are not sensible of it in our sleep? I do not say, there is no soul in a man because he is not sensible of it in his sleep; but I do say, he cannot think at any time, waking or sleeping, without being sensible of it. Our being sensible of it is not necessary to anything but to our thoughts; and to them it is, and to them it will always be, necessary, till we can think without being conscious of it.] 11. It is not always conscious of it.—I grant that the soul in a waking man is never without thought, because it is the condition of being awake; but whether sleeping without dreaming be not an affection of the whole man, mind as well as body, may be worth a waking man's consideration; it being hard to conceive that anything should think and not be conscious of it. If the soul doth think in a sleeping man without being conscious of it, I ask, whether, during such thinking, it has any pleasure or pain, or be capable of happiness or misery? I am sure the man is not, no more than the bed or earth he lies on. For to be happy or miserable without being conscious of it, seems to me utterly inconsistent and impossible. Or if it be possible that the soul can, whilst the body is sleeping, have its thinking, enjoyments, and concerns, its pleasure or pain, apart, which the man is not conscious of, nor partakes in, it is certain that Socrates asleep and Socrates awake is not the same person; but his soul when he sleeps, and Socrates the man, consisting of body and soul, when he is waking, are two persons; since waking Socrates has no knowledge of, or concernment for that happiness or misery of his soul, which it enjoys alone by itself whilst he sleeps, without perceiving anything of it, no more than he has for the happiness or misery of a man in the Indies, whom he knows not. For if we take wholly away all consciousness of our actions and sensations, especially of pleasure and pain, and the concernment that accompanies it, it will be hard to know wherein to place personal identity.…

87

Chapter II Of Simple Ideas 1. Uncompounded appearances.—The better to understand the nature, manner, and extent of our knowledge, one thing is carefully to be observed concerning the ideas we have; and that is, that some of them are simple, and some complex. Though the qualities that affect our senses are, in the things themselves, so united and blended that there is no separation, no distance between them; yet it is plain the ideas they produce in the mind enter by the senses simple and unmixed. For though the sight and touch often take in from the same object, at the same time, different ideas—as a man sees at once motion and color, the hand feels softness and warmth in the same piece of wax —yet the simple ideas thus united in the same subject are as perfectly distinct as those that come in by different senses; the coldness and hardness which a man feels in a piece of ice being as distinct ideas in the mind as the smell and whiteness of a lily, or as the taste of sugar and smell of a rose: and there is nothing can be plainer to a man than the clear and distinct perception he has of those simple ideas; which, being each in itself uncompounded, contains in it nothing but one uniform appearance or conception in the mind, and is not distinguishable into different ideas. 2. The mind can neither make nor destroy them.—These simple ideas, the materials of all our knowledge, are suggested and furnished to the mind only by those two ways above mentioned, viz., sensation and reflection. When the understanding is once stored with these simple ideas, it has the power to repeat, compare, and unite them, even to an almost infinite variety, and so can make at pleasure new complex ideas. But it is not in the power of the most exalted wit or enlarged understanding, by any quickness or variety of thought, to invent or frame one new simple idea in the mind, not taken in by the ways before mentioned; nor can any force of the understanding destroy those that are there: the dominion of man in this little world of his own understanding, being much-what the same as it is in the great world of visible things; wherein his power, however managed by art and skill, reaches no farther than to compound and divide the materials that are made to his hand but can do nothing towards the making the least particle of new matter, or destroying one atom of what is already in being. The same inability will everyone find in himself, who shall go about to fashion in his understanding any simple idea not received in by his senses from external objects, or by reflection from the operations of his own mind about them. I would have anyone try to fancy any taste which had never affected his palate, or frame the idea of a scent he had never smelt; and when he can do this, I will also conclude that a blind man hath ideas of colors, and a deaf man true, distinct notions of sounds. 3. Only the qualities that affect the senses are imaginable.—This is the reason why, though we cannot believe it impossible to God to make a creature with other organs, and more ways to convey into the understanding the notice of corporeal things than those five as they are usually counted, which He has given to man; yet I think it is not possible for anyone to imagine any other qualities in bodies, howsoever constituted, whereby they can be taken notice of, besides sounds, tastes, smells, visible and tangible qualities. And had mankind been made with but four senses, the qualities then which are the objects of the fifth sense had been as far from our notice, imagination, and conception, as now any belonging to a sixth, seventh, or eighth sense can possibly be; which, whether yet some other creatures, in some other parts of this vast and stupendous universe, may not have, will be a great presumption to deny. He that will not set 88

himself proudly at the top of all things, but will consider the immensity of this fabric, and the great variety that is to be found in this little and inconsiderable part of it which he has to do with, may be apt to think, that in other mansions of it there may be other and different intelligible beings, of whose faculties he has as little knowledge or apprehension, as a worm shut up in one drawer of a cabinet hath of the senses or understanding of a man; such variety and excellency being suitable to the wisdom and power of the Maker. I have here followed the common opinion of man's having but five senses, though perhaps there may be justly counted more; but either supposition serves equally to my present purpose.

Source: The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill. Burtt, Edwin A., ed. New York: Random House, 1939. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— This period extends from 1660, the year Charles II was restored to the throne, until about 1789. The prevailing characteristic of the literature of the Renaissance had been its reliance on poetic inspiration or what today might be called imagination. The inspired conceptions of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton, the true originality of Spenser, and the daring poetic style of Donne all support this generalization. Furthermore, although nearly all these poets had been far more bound by formal and stylistic conventions than modern poets are, they had developed a large variety of forms and of rich or exuberant styles into which individual poetic expression might fit. In the succeeding period, however, writers reacted against both the imaginative flights and the ornate or startling styles and forms of the previous era. The quality of the later age is suggested by its writers' admiration for Ben Jonson and his disciples; the transparent and apparently effortless poetic medium of the “school of Ben,” along with its emphasis on good taste, moderation, and the Greek and Latin classics as models, appealed profoundly to the new generation. Thus, the restoration of Charles II ushered in a literature characterized by reason, moderation, good taste, deft management, and simplicity. The historical parallel between the early imperialism of Rome and the restored English monarchy, both of which had replaced republican institutions, was not lost on the ruling and learned classes. Their appreciation of the literature of the time of the Roman emperor Augustus led to a widespread acceptance of the new English literature and encouraged a grandeur of tone in the poetry of the period, the later phase of which is often referred to as Augustan. In addition, the ideals of impartial investigation and scientific experimentation promulgated by the newly founded Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (established in 1662) were influential in the development of clear and simple prose as an instrument of rational communication. Finally, the great philosophical and political treatises of the time emphasize rationalism. Even in the earlier 17th century, Francis Bacon had moved in this direction by advocating reasoning and scientific investigation in Advancement of Learning (1605) and The New Atlantis (1627). Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), by John Locke, is the product of a belief in experience as the exclusive basis of knowledge, a view pushed to its

89

logical extreme in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) by David Hume. Locke himself continued to profess faith in divine revelation, but this residual belief was weakened among the similarly rationalist Deists, who tended to base religion on what reason could find in the world God had created around humans. In political thought, the arbitrary acceptance of the monarch's divine right to rule (a conception popular in the Renaissance) had so nearly succumbed to skeptical criticism that Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan (1651) found it necessary to defend the idea of political absolutism with a rationally conceived sanction. According to him, the monarch should rule not by divine right but by an original and indissoluble social contract in order to secure universal peace and material gratification. Similarly rationalistic, but opposed to this rigorous subordination of all organs of the state to central control, were Locke's two Treatises on Government (1690), in which he stated that the authority of the governor is derived from the always revocable consent of the governed and that the people's welfare is the only proper object of that authority. Perhaps the greatest historical work in English is The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (6 volumes, 1776-1788), by Edward Gibbon. Notable for its stately, balanced style, it is permeated with rationalistic skepticism and distrust of emotion, particularly religious emotion. The successive stages of literary taste during the period of the Restoration and the 18th century are conveniently referred to as the ages of Dryden, Pope, and Johnson, after the three great literary figures who, one after another, carried on the so-called classical tradition in literature. The age as a whole is sometimes called the Augustan age, or the classical or neoclassical period.

A

Age of Dryden

John Dryden English poet John Dryden wrote poetry, prose, drama, and satire that influenced fellow writers in the latter part of the 17th century and well into the next. Dryden‘s achievements included refining the heroic couplet poetic form and establishing a clear, precise prose standard. Dryden wrote Mac Flecknoe (1682) to satirize Thomas Shadwell, a rival poet who sought to equal Dryden‘s preeminent stature (excerpt recited by an actor).

90

(p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved./Culver Pictures

The poetry of John Dryden possesses a grandeur, force, and fullness of tone that were eagerly received by readers still having something in common with the Elizabethans. At the same time, however, his poetry set the tone of the new age in achieving a new clarity and in establishing a self-limiting, somewhat impersonal canon of moderation and good taste. His polished heroic couplet (a unit of two rhyming lines of iambic pentameter, generally endstopped), which he inherited from less accomplished predecessors and then developed, became the dominant form in the composition of longer poems. —————————————————————————————————————

Poetry of John Dryden English poet John Dryden was among the most influential writers of the English Restoration period. ―A Song for Saint Cecilia‘s Day‖ (1687) was written in honor of the Christian martyr Saint Cecilia, known as the patron saint of music. ―To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs. Anne Killigrew‖ (1686) is a moving memorial to a woman who drowned in the Thames River and an expression of Dryden‘s own ideas about the condition of the arts at the time he wrote the poem.

Poetry of John Dryden “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” From harmony, from heav'nly harmony This universal frame began. When Nature underneath a heap Of jarring atoms lay, And could not heave her head, The tuneful voice was heard from high, “Arise ye more than dead.” Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, In order to their stations leap, And music's pow'r obey. From harmony, from heav'nly harmony This universal frame began: From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in man. What passion cannot music raise and quell! When Jubal struck the corded shell, His list'ning brethren stood around And wond'ring, on their faces fell To worship that celestial sound. 91

Less than a god they thought there could not dwell Within the hollow of that shell That spoke so sweetly and so well. What passion cannot music raise and quell! The trumpet's loud clangor Excites us to arms With shrill notes of anger And mortal alarms. The double double double beat Of the thund'ring drum Cries, “Hark, the foes come; Charge, charge, 'tis too late to retreat.” The soft complaining flute In dying notes discovers The woes of hopeless lovers, Whose dirge is whisper'd by the warbling lute. Sharp violins proclaim Their jealous pangs, and desperation, Fury, frantic indignation, Depth of pains and height of passion, For the fair, disdainful dame. But oh! what art can teach What human voice can reach The sacred organ's praise? Notes inspiring holy love, Notes that wing their Heav'nly ways To mend the choirs above. Orpheus could lead the savage race; And trees unrooted left their place; Sequacious of the lyre: But bright Cecilia rais'd the wonder high'r; When to her organ, vocal breath was giv'n, An angel heard, and straight appear'd Mistaking earth for Heav'n. Grand Chorus As from the pow'r of sacred lays The spheres began to move, And sung the great Creator's praise To all the bless'd above; So when the last and dreadful hour This crumbling pageant shall devour,

92

The trumpet shall be heard on high, The dead shall live, the living die, And music shall untune the sky. “To The Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs. Anne Killigrew” Excellent in the Two Sister Arts of Poesy and Painting AN ODE

Thou youngest virgin-daughter of the skies, Made in the last promotion of the Blest; Whose palms, new pluck'd from Paradise, In spreading branches more sublimely rise, Rich with immortal green above the rest: Whether, adopted to some neighbouring star, Thou roll'st above us, in thy wand'ring race, Or, in procession fix'd and regular, Mov'd with the Heavens' majestic pace: Or, call'd to more superior bliss, Thou tread'st, with seraphims, the vast abyss. What ever happy region is thy place, Cease thy celestial song a little space; (Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine, Since Heav'n's eternal year is thine.) Hear then a mortal muse thy praise rehearse, In no ignoble verse; But such as thy own voice did practise here, When thy first fruits of poesy were giv'n; To make thyself a welcome inmate there: While yet a young probationer, And candidate of Heav'n. If by traduction came thy mind, Our wonder is the less to find A soul so charming from a stock so good; Thy father was transfus'd into thy blood: So wert thou born into the tuneful strain, (An early, rich, and inexhausted vein.) But if thy preexisting soul Was form'd, at first, with myriads more, It did through all the mighty poets roll, Who Greek or Latin laurels wore, And was that Sappho last, which once it was before. If so, then cease thy flight, O Heav'n-born mind! Thou hast no dross to purge from thy rich ore: Nor can thy soul a fairer mansion find, Than was the beauteous frame she left behind: Return, to fill or mend the choir, of thy celestial kind.

93

May we presume to say, that at thy birth, New joy was sprung in Heav'n as well as here on Earth. For sure the milder planets did combine On thy auspicious horoscope to shine, And ev'n the most malicious were in trine. Thy brother-angels at thy birth Strung each his lyre, and tun'd it high, That all the people of the sky Might know a poetess was born on Earth; And then if ever, mortal ears Had heard the music of the spheres! And if no clust'ring swarm of bees On thy sweet mouth distill'd their golden dew, 'Twas that, such vulgar miracles, Heav'n had not leisure to renew: For all the blest fraternity of love Solemniz'd there thy birth, and kept thy holyday above. O Gracious God! How far have we Profan'd thy Heav'nly gift of poesy? Made prostitute and profligate the Muse, Debas'd to each obscene and impious use, Whose harmony was first ordain'd above For tongues of angels, and for hymns of love? O wretched we! why were we hurried down This lubrique and adult'rate age, (Nay added fat pollutions of our own) T'increase the steaming ordures of the stage? What can we say t'excuse our Second Fall? Let this thy vestal, Heav'n, atone for all! Her Arethusian stream remains unsoil'd, Unmix'd with foreign filth, and undefil'd, Her wit was more than man, her innocence a child! Art she had none, yet wanted none: For Nature did that want supply, So rich in treasures of her own, She might our boasted stores defy: Such noble vigour did her verse adorn, That it seem'd borrow'd, where 'twas only born. Her morals too were in her bosom bred By great examples daily fed, What in the best of books, her father's life, she read. And to be read her self she need not fear, Each test, and ev'ry light, her Muse will bear, Though Epictetus with his lamp were there. Ev'n love (for love sometimes her Muse express'd) Was but a lambent-flame which play'd about her breast: 94

Light as the vapours of a morning dream, So cold herself, whilst she such warmth express'd, 'Twas Cupid bathing in Diana's stream. Born to the spacious empire of the Nine, One would have thought, she should have been content To manage well that mighty government; But what can young ambitious souls confine? To the next realm she stretch'd her sway, For painture near adjoining lay, A plenteous province, and alluring prey. A chamber of dependences was fram'd, (As conquerors will never want pretence, When arm'd, to justify th'offence) And the whole fief, in right of poetry she claim'd. The country open lay without defence: For poets frequent inroads there had made, And perfectly could represent The shape, the face, with ev'ry lineament: And all the large domains which the Dumb-sister sway'd, All bow'd beneath her government, Receiv'd in triumph wheresoe'er she went, Her pencil drew, what e'er her soul design'd, And oft the happy draught surpass'd the image in her mind. The sylvan scenes of herds and flocks, And fruitful plains and barren rocks, Of shallow brooks that flow'd so clear, The bottom did the top appear; Of deeper too and ampler floods, Which as in mirrors, show'd the woods; Of lofty trees, with sacred shades, And perspectives of pleasant glades, Where nymphs of brightest form appear, And shaggy satyrs standing near, Which them at once admire and fear. The ruins too of some majestic piece, Boasting the pow'r of ancient Rome or Greece, Whose statues, friezes, columns broken lie, And tho' defac'd, the wonder of the eye, What Nature, art, bold fiction e'er durst frame, Her forming hand gave feature to the name. So strange a Concourse ne'er was seen before, But when the peopl'd Ark the whole creation bore. The scene then chang'd, with bold erected look Our martial king the sight with reverence strook: For not content t'express his outward part, Her hand call'd out the image of his heart, 95

His warlike mind, his soul devoid of fear, His high-designing thoughts, were figur'd there, As when, by magic, ghosts are made appear. Our phoenix queen was portray'd too so bright, Beauty alone could beauty take so right: Her dress, her shape, her matchless grace, Were all observ'd, as well as heav'nly face. With such a peerless majesty she stands, As in that day she took the crown from sacred hands: Before a train of heroines was seen, In beauty foremost, as in rank, the queen! Thus nothing to her genius was deny'd, But like a ball of fire the further thrown, Still with a greater blaze she shone, And her bright soul broke out on ev'ry side. What next she had design'd, Heaven only knows, To such immod'rate growth her conquest rose, That fate alone its progress could oppose. Now all those charms, that blooming grace, The well-proportion'd shape, and beauteous face, Shall never more be seen by mortal eyes; In earth the much lamented virgin lies! Not wit, not piety could fate prevent; Nor was the cruel destiny content To finish all the murder at a blow, To sweep at once her life, and beauty too; But, like a harden'd felon, took a pride To work more mischievously slow, And plunder'd first, and then destroy'd. O double sacrilege on things divine, To rob the relique, and deface the shrine! But thus Orinda died: Heav'n, by the same disease, did both translate, As equal were their souls, so equal was their fate. Meantime her warlike brother on the seas His waving streamers to the winds displays, And vows for his return, with vain devotion, pays. Ah, generous youth, that wish forbear, The winds too soon will waft thee here! Slack all thy sails, and fear to come, Alas, thou know'st not, thou art wreck'd at home! No more shalt thou behold thy sister's face, Thou hast already had her last embrace. But look aloft, and if thou ken'st from far, Among the Pleiad's, a new-kindl'd star, If any sparkles, than the rest, more bright, 96

'Tis she that shines in that propitious light. When in mid-air, the golden trump shall sound, To raise the nations under ground; When in the valley of Jehosophat, The Judging God shall close the Book of Fate; And there the last Assizes keep, For those who wake, and those who sleep; When rattling bones together fly, From the four corners of the sky, When sinews o'er the skeletons are spread, Those cloth'd with flesh, and life inspires the dead; The sacred poets first shall hear the sound, And foremost from the tomb shall bound: For they are cover'd with the lightest ground, And straight, with in-born vigour, on the wing, Like mounting larks, to the new morning sing. There thou, sweet saint, before the choir shall go, As harbinger of Heav'n, the way to show, The way which thou so well hast learn'd below.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— In a number of critical works Dryden defined the stylistic restraint, compression, clarity, and common sense that he exemplified in his own poetry and that he showed to be lacking in much of the poetry of the preceding age, particularly in the exuberant and mechanically complex metaphorical wit of the older metaphysical school. His reputation rests primarily on satire. This form became the dominant poetic genre of the age, both because of the religious and political factionalism of the times and because mocking denunciation of the ludicrousness or rascality of the opposition comes naturally to an age with so strong a public sense of norms of behavior. Absalom and Achitophel (1681-1682) and Mac Flecknoe (1682) are the most remarkable of Dryden's political satires. Among his other poetic works are noteworthy translations of Roman satirists and of the works of Virgil, and the Pindaric ode “Alexander's Feast,” a tour de force of varied cadences, which was published in 1697. —————————————————————————————————————

From The Way of the World Restoration-period English dramatist and poet William Congreve enjoyed phenomenal success when he first began writing. He honed a style known as a ―comedy of manners‖ to the height of brilliance. The Way of the World (1700) is now considered by many critics as one of the wittiest plays ever written, although it was not a success in its first production. The prologue is a tradition

97

in itself, quieting the audience and raising expectations for the intricate plots and razor-sharp humor to come. The opening scene between Mirabell, a reformed rake in love with coquettish Millamant, and Fainall, one of the villains of the piece, establishes the knotty ties of attractions and financial dependence with which the play is concerned.

From The Way of the World By William Congreve

Prologue Of those few fools who with ill stars are cursed, Sure scribbling fools, called poets, fare the worst: For they‟re a sort of fools which Fortune makes, And after she has made „em fools, forsakes. With Nature‟s oafs „tis quite a difference case, For Fortune favours all her idiot-race. In her own nest the cuckoo-eggs we find, O‟er which she broods to hatch the changeling-kind. No portion for her own she has to spare, So much she dotes on her adopted care. Poets are bubbles, by the town drawn in, Suffered at first some trifling stakes to win; But what unequal hazards do they run! Each time they write they venture all they‟ve won: The squire that‟s buttered [praised] still, is sure to be undone. This author heretofore has found your favour; But pleads no merit from his past behaviour. To build on that might prove a vain presumption, Should grants to poets made, admit resumption: 98

And in Parnassus he must lose his seat, If that be found a forfeited estate. He owns with toil he wrought the following scenes; But, if they‟re naught, ne‟er spare him for his pains: Damn him the more; have no commiseration For dullness on mature deliberation, He swears he‟ll not resent one hissed-off scene, Nor, like those peevish wits, his play maintain, Who, to assert their sense, your taste arraign. Some plot we think he has, and some new thought; Some humour too, no farce; but that‟s a fault. Satire, he thinks, you ought not to expect; For so reformed a town who dares correct? To please, this time, has been his sole pretence, He‟ll not instruct, lest it should give offence. Should he by chance a knave or fool expose, That hurts none here, sure here are none of those: In short, our play shall (with your leave to show it) Give you one instance of a passive poet, Who to your judgements yields all resignation; So save or damn, after your own discretion. Act 1—A chocolate house Scene 1 MIRABELL and FAINALL rising from cards, BETTY waiting. 99

MIRABELL: You are a fortunate man, Mr. FAINALL. FAINALL: Have we done? MIRABELL: What you please. I‟ll play on to entertain you. FAINALL: No, I‟ll give you your revenge another time, when you are not so indifferent. you are thinking of something else now, and play too negligently. The coldness of a losing gamester lessens the pleasure of the winner. I‟d no more play with a man that slighted his ill fortune than I‟d make love to a woman who undervalued the loss of her reputation. MIRABELL: You have a taste extremely delicate, and are for refining on your pleasures. FAINALL: Prithee, why so reserved? Something has put you out of humour. MIRABELL: Not at all. I happen to be grave today, and you are gay; that‟s all. FAINALL: Confess, Millamant and you quarrelled last night after I left you; my fair cousin has some humours that would tempt the patience of a stoic. What, some coxcomb came in, and was well received by her, while you were by? MIRABELL: Witwoud and Petulant; and what was worse, her aunt, your wife‟s mother, my evil genius; or to sum up all in her own name, my old Lady Wishfort came in. FAINALL: O, there it is then-she has a lasting passion for you, and with reason. What, then my wife was there? MIRABELL: Yes, and Mrs. Marwood and three or four more, whom I never saw before. Seeing me, they all put on their grave faces, whispered one another; then complained aloud of the vapours, and after fell into a profound silence. FAINALL: They had a mind to be rid of you. MIRABELL: For which good reason I resolved not to stir. At last the good old lady broke through her painful taciturnity, with an invective against long visits. I would not have understood her, but Millamant joining in the argument, I rose and with a constrained smile told her I thought nothing was so easy as to know when a visit began to be troublesome. She reddened and I withdrew, without expecting her reply. FAINALL: You were to blame to resent what she spoke only in compliance with her aunt. MIRABELL: She is more mistress of herself than to be under the necessity of such a resignation. FAINALL: What? though half her fortune depends upon her marrying with my lady‟s approbation? MIRABELL: I was then in such a humour that I should have been better pleased if she had been less discreet. FAINALL: Now I remember, I wonder not they were weary of you: last night was one of their cabal nights; they have „em three times a week, and meet by turns, at one another‟s apartments, where they come together like the coroner‟s inquest, to sit upon the murdered reputations of the week. You and I are excluded; and it was once proposed that all the male sex should be excepted; but somebody moved that to avoid scandal there might be one man of the community; upon which Witwoud and Petulant were enrolled members. MIRABELL: And who may have been the foundress of this sect? My Lady Wishfort, I warrant, who publishes her detestation of mankind, and full of the vigour of fifty-five, declares for a friend and ratafia; and let posterity shift for itself, she‟ll breed no more. FAINALL: The discovery of your sham addresses to her, to conceal Your love to her niece, has provoked this separation. Had you dissembled better, things might have continued in the state of nature. MIRABELL: I did as much as man could, with any reasonable conscience: proceeded to the very last act of flattery with her, and was guilty of a song in her commendation. Nay, I got a friend to put her into a lampoon and compliment her with the imputation of an affair with a young fellow, which I carried so far that I told her the malicious town took notice that she was grown 100

fat of a sudden; and when she lay in of a dropsy, persuaded her she was reported to be in labour. The devil‟s in‟t, if an old woman is to be flattered further, unless a man should endeavour downright personally to debauch her; and that my virtue forbade me. But for the discovery of this amour, I am indebted to your friend, or your wife‟s friend, Mrs. Marwood. FAINALL: What should provoke her to be your enemy, unless she has made you advances, which you have slighted? Women do not easily forgive omissions of that nature. MIRABELL: She was always civil to me, till of late. I confess I am not one of those coxcombs who are apt to interpret a woman‟s good manners to her prejudice, and think that she who does not refuse „em everything, can refuse „em nothing. FAINALL: You are a gallant man, Mirabell; and though you may have cruelty enough not to satisfy a lady‟s longing, you have too much generosity not to be tender of her honour. Yet you speak with an indifference which seems to be affected, and confesses you are conscious of a negligence. MIRABELL: You pursue the argument with a distrust that seems to be unaffected, and confesses you are conscious of a concern for which the lady is more indebted to you than is your wife. FAINALL: Fie, fie, friend, if you grow censorious I must leave you.—I‟ll look upon the gamesters in the next room. MIRABELL: Who are they? FAINALL: Petulant and Witwoud.—Bring me some chocolate. MIRABELL: Betty, what says your clock? BETTY: Turned of the last canonical hour, sir. MIRABELL: How pertinently the jade answers me! Ha? almost one a clock! [looking on his watch]— O, y‟are come—

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— The bulk of Dryden's work was in drama. By means of it, following the new mode of living of the professional literary man, he could derive his support from a large public rather than from private patrons. In his heroic tragedies The Conquest of Granada (1670) and All for Love; or, The World Well Lost (1678), a rewriting of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in the new taste, Dryden showed a different and not always satisfying side of his talent and exemplified the dominant quality of all Restoration tragedy. In order to achieve splendor and surprise on the stage, he sacrificed reality of characterization and consistency in motivation for sensual display in exotic locales and extravagance in plot and situation, presented in a style verging on the bombastic. The affinities of this kind of drama are with Beaumont and Fletcher rather than with the great Elizabethan age; and the indirect influence of Ben Jonson is apparent also, for these two men were Jonson's disciples. Probably the best example of this genre of tragedy was produced by Thomas Otway, whose Venice Preserved (1682) avoids the worst excesses to which this form is liable and also possesses considerable tenderness and sensibility. By this time, however, the vogue of heroic tragedy was coming to an end; the style already had been successfully parodied in The Rehearsal (1671), by George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, and his collaborators. —————————————————————————————————————

101

From The Pilgrim's Progress Written in a straightforward, biblical style and based on the simple metaphor of life as a journey, John Bunyan‘s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678 and 1684) became one of the most famous spiritual allegories in the English language. Bunyan, a poorly educated tinker‘s son who became an eloquent Puritan preacher, wrote the book while imprisoned in 1675 for his Nonconformist religious practices. The Pilgrim’s Progress has given the English language many popular phrases, among them ―Vanity Fair,‖ which the pilgrims encounter in this excerpt.

From The Pilgrim’s Progress By John Bunyan

Vanity Fair Then I saw in my dream, that when they were got out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town before them, and the name of that town is Vanity; and at the town there is a fair kept, called Vanity Fair; it is kept all the year long; it beareth the name of Vanity Fair because the town where it is kept is lighter than vanity; and also because all that is there sold, or that cometh thither, is vanity. As is the saying of the wise, “All that cometh is vanity” (Ecclesiastes i. 2, 14; ii. 11, 17; xi. 8; Isaiah xl. 17). This fair is no new-erected business, but a thing of ancient standing; I will show you the original of it. Almost five thousand years agone, there were pilgrims walking to the Celestial City, as these two honest persons are; and Beelzebub, Apollyon, and Legion, with their companions, perceiving by the path that the pilgrims made, that their way to the city lay through this town of Vanity, they contrived here to set tip a fair; a fair wherein should be sold all sorts of vanity, and that it should last all the year long. Therefore at this fair are all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not. And, moreover, at this fair there is at all times to be seen jugglings, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind. Here are to be seen, too, and that for nothing, thefts, murders, adulteries, false swearers, and that of a blood-red colour. And as in other fairs of less moment, there are the several rows and streets, under their proper names, where such and such wares are vended; so here likewise you have the proper places, rows, streets (viz., countries and kingdoms), where the wares of this fair are soonest to be found. Here is the Britain Row, the French Row, the Italian Row, the Spanish Row, the German Row, where several sorts of vanities are to be sold. But, as in other fairs, some one commodity is as the chief of all the fair, so the ware of Rome and her merchandise is greatly promoted in this fair; only our English nation, with some others, have taken a dislike thereat. Now, as I said, the way to the Celestial City lies just through this town where this lusty fair is kept; and he that will go to the City, and Yet not go through this town, must needs “go out of the world” (1 Corinthians v. 10). The Prince of princes himself, when here, went through this town to his own country, and that upon a fair-day too, yea, and as I think, it was Beelzebub, the chief lord of this fair, that invited him to buy of his vanities; yea, would have made him lord of 102

the fair, would he but have done him reverence as he went through the town. (Matthew iv. 8; Luke iv. 5-7.) Yea, because lie was such a person of honour, Beelzebub had him from street to street, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a little time, that he might, if possible, allure the Blessed One to cheapen and buy some of his vanities; but he had no mind to the merchandise, and therefore left the town, without laying out so much as one farthing upon these vanities. This fair, therefore, is an ancient thing, of long standing, and a very great fair. Now these pilgrims, as I said, must needs go through this fair. Well, so they did; but, behold, even as they entered into the fair, all the people in the fair were moved, and the town itself as it were in a hubbub about them; and that for several reasons: for First, The pilgrims were clothed with such kind of raiment as was diverse from the raiment of any that traded in that fair. The people, therefore, of the fair, made a great gazing upon them: some said they were fools, some they were bedlams, and some they are outlandish men. (I Corinthians ii.7, S.) Secondly, And as they wondered at their apparel, so they did likewise at their speech; for few could understand what they said; they naturally spoke the language of Canaan, but they that kept the fair were the men of this world; so that, from one end of the fair to the other, they seemed barbarians each to the other. Thirdly, But that which did not a little amuse the merchandisers was that these pilgrims set very light by all their wares; they cared not so much as to look upon them., and if they called upon them to buy, they would put their fingers in their ears, and cry, “Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity,” and look upwards, signifying that their trade and traffic was in heaven. (Psalms cxix. 37; Philippians iii. 19, 20.) One chanced mockingly, beholding the carriages of the men, to say unto them, What will ye buy? But they, looking gravely upon him, said, “We buy the truth” (Proverbs xxiii.23). At that there was an occasion taken to despise the men the more; some mocking, some taunting, some speaking reproachfully, and some calling upon others to smite them. At last things came to an hubbub and great stir in the fair, insomuch that all order was confounded. Now was word presently brought to the great one of the fair, who quickly came down, and deputed some of his most trusty friends to take these men into examination, about whom the fair was almost overturned. So the men were brought to examination; and they that sat upon them asked them whence they came, whither they went, and what they did there, in such an unusual garb? The men told them that they were pilgrims and strangers in the world, and that they were going to their own country, which was the Heavenly Jerusalem (Hebrews xi. 13-16); and that they had given no occasion to the men of the town, nor yet to the merchandisers, thus to abuse them, and to let them in their journey, except it was for that, when one asked them what they would buy, they said they would buy the truth. But they that were appointed to examine them did not believe them to be any other than bedlams and mad, or else such as came to put all things into a confusion in the fair. Therefore they took them and beat them, and besmeared them with dirt, and then put them into the cage, that they might be made a spectacle to all the men of the fair.

Source: Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim's Progress. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

103

The comedy of the time is much more successful than the tragedy. It is derived directly from the comedies of Ben Jonson but tries for more refinement while displaying less strength. In a cool, satiric spirit, it criticizes middle-class ambition and other variations from the courtly social norm, of which the canons are aristocratic good taste and good sense, rarely conventional morality. In the eyes of succeeding generations, the chief defects of Restoration comedy are its reduction of sentiment and emotion to silliness and its frequent amorality. Reaction against this type of comedy, known as the comedy of manners, already had developed by the time that its greatest practitioner, William Congreve, was displaying his subtle artistry in Love For Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700). Just as Dryden's poetry defined the tone of his time, so too did his easy, informal, clear prose style, notably in his Essay of Dramatic Poesie (1668) and in various prefaces to his plays and translations. Noteworthy prose of a rather different nature was produced by two other figures of the age, Samuel Pepys and John Bunyan. The appetite of the period for life at all levels, but particularly for the life of the senses, is suggested by the secret diary of Samuel Pepys, a high official of the Admiralty Office. This extraordinary work, valuable as it is as a document of contemporary taste, has much to say of the private, unheroic life and longings of people of all times. A figure in stronger contrast to Pepys could hardly be imagined than John Bunyan, a Puritan preacher, completely alien to the aristocratic and professional world of letters. Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come (1st part published in 1678; 2nd part, 1684) and The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), two rough-hewn, moving, allegorical narratives of the human journey at the level of the fundamental verities of life, death, and religion. The first of these is now a literary classic, but in spite of the penetrating characterization and vitality of both works, they initially attained popularity only among artisans, merchants, and the poor.

B

Age of Pope

Jonathan Swift Jonathan Swift aimed his witty, imaginative, and often bitter satire at such subjects as politics, literature, and human society. Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Swift‘s masterpiece, is commonly considered a children‘s story, but it was originally intended as a satire on humankind. Culver Pictures

104

Alexander Pope English poet Alexander Pope is known for the brilliant verse and stinging satire he wrote during the early and mid-18th century. Pope emulated the classical style of the poets of antiquity and further developed the poetic form known as the heroic couplet. He first earned fame with the work An Essay on Criticism (1711), in which he wrote the now famous line, ―To err is human, to forgive divine.‖ Culver Pictures

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe English author Daniel Defoe‘s most celebrated novel, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), was published late in the writer‘s life. A versatile journalist and social commentator, Defoe based the story of Crusoe on the actual adventures of a marooned sailor, Alexander Selkirk. (p)1998 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

In the age of Alexander Pope (dated from about the death of Dryden in 1700 to Pope's death in 1744), the classical spirit in English literature reached its highest point, and at the same time other forces became manifest. Dryden's poetry had achieved grandeur, amplitude, and sublimity within a particular definition of good taste and good sense and under the tutelage of the Roman and Greek classics. To the poetry of Pope this characterization applies even more stringently. More than any other English poet, he submitted himself to the requirement that the expressive force of poetic genius should issue forth only in a formulation as reasonable, lucid, balanced, compressed, final, and perfect as the power of human reason can make it. Pope did not have Dryden's majesty. Perhaps, given his predilection for correctness of detail, he could not have had it. Also, the readers of succeeding times have concluded that the dictates of reason do not all converge on only one poetic formula, just as the heroic couplet, which Pope brought to final perfection, is not necessarily the most generally suitable of 105

English poetic forms. Nevertheless, the ease, harmony, and grace of Pope's poetic line are still impressive, and his quality of precise but never labored expression of thought remains unequaled. —————————————————————————————————————

From The Rape of the Lock English poet Alexander Pope's mock epic The Rape of the Lock (1712; revised edition 1714) derives much of its humor from applying the grandeur of the epic form to a trivial (and true) incident, in which a feud developed between two rich families over a lock of hair. Pope revels in linking the serious with the banal as if they were of equal value, as in the formulation 'Does sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.' The humor is successful precisely because the reader knows that taking advice and drinking tea are not of comparable importance. Pope pokes gentle fun at aristocrats who, like Belinda (the woman whose lock of hair is taken), spend so much time on appearances.

From The Rape of the Lock By Alexander Pope

Canto First WHAT dire Offence from am'rous Causes springs, What mighty Contests rise from trivial Things, I sing—This Verse to CARYL, Muse! is due; This, ev'n Belinda may vouchfafe to view: Slight is the Subject, but not so the Praise, If She inspire, and He approve my Lays. Say what strange Motive, Goddess! cou'd compel A well-bred Lord t'assault a gentle Belle? Oh say what stranger Cause, yet unexplor'd, Cou'd make a gentle Belle reject a Lord? And dwells such Rage in softest Bosoms then? And lodge such daring Souls in Little Men? 106

Sol thro' white Curtains shot a tim'rous Ray, And op'd those Eyes that must eclipse the Day; Now Lapdogs give themselves the rowzing Shake, And sleepless Lovers, just at Twelve, awake: Thrice rung the Bell, the Slipper knock'd the Ground, And the press'd Watch return'd a silver Sound. Belinda still her downy Pillow prest, Her Guardian Sylph prolong'd the balmy Rest. 'Twas he had summon'd to her silent Bed The Morning-Dream that hover'd o'er her Head. A Youth more glitt'ring than a Birth-night Beau, (That ev'n in Slumber caus'd her Cheek to glow) Seem'd to her Ear his winning Lips to lay, And thus in Whispers said, or seem'd to say. Fairest of Mortals, thou distinguish'd Care Of thousand bright Inhabitants of Air! If e'er one Vision touch'd thy infant Thought, Of all the Nurse and all the Priest have taught, Of airy Elves by Moonlight Shadows seen, The silver Token, and the circled Green, Or Virgins visited by Angel-Pow'rs, With Golden Crowns and Wreaths of heav'nly Flowers, Hear and believe! thy own Importance know, Nor bound thy narrow Views to Things below. 107

Some secret Truths from Learned Pride conceal'd, To Maids alone and Children are reveal'd: What tho' no Credit doubting Wits may give? The Fair and Innocent shall still believe. Know then, unnumbered Spirits round thee fly, The light Militia of the lower Sky; These, tho' unseen, are ever on the Wing, Hang o'er the Box, and hover round the Ring. Think what an Equipage thou hast in Air, And view with scorn Two Pages and a Chair. As now your own, our Beings were of old, And once inclos'd in Woman's beauteous Mold; Thence, by a soft Transition, we repair From earthly Vehicles to these of Air. Think not, when Woman's transient Breath is fled, That all her Vanities at once are dead: Succeeding Vanities she still regards, And tho' she plays no more, o'erlooks the Cards. Her Joy in gilded Chariots, when alive, And Love of Ombre, after Death survive. For when the Fair in all their Pride expire, To their first Elements the Souls retire: The Sprights of fiery Termagants in Flame Mount up, and take a Salamander's Name. 108

Soft yielding Minds to Water glide away, And sip with Nymphs, their Elemental Tea. The graver Prude sinks downward to a Gnome, In search of Mischief still on Earth to roam. The light Coquettes in Sylphs aloft repair, And sport and flutter in the Fields of Air. Know farther yet; Whoever fair and chaste Rejects Mankind, is by some Sylph embrac'd: For Spirits, freed from mortal Laws, with ease Assume what Sexes and what Shapes they please. What guards the Purity of melting Maids, In Courtly Balls, and Midnight Masquerades, Safe from the treach'rous Friend, and daring Spark, The Glance by Day, the Whisper in the Dark; When kind Occasion prompts their warm Desires, When Musick softens, and when Dancing fires? 'Tis but their Sylph, the wise Celestials know, Tho' Honour is the Word with Men below. Some Nymphs there are, too conscious of their Face, For Life predestin'd to the Gnomes Embrace. These swell their Prospects and exalt their Pride, When Offers are disdain'd, and Love deny'd. Then gay Ideas crowd the vacant Brain; While Peers and Dukes, and all their sweeping Train, 109

And Garters, Stars, and Coronets appear, And in soft Sounds, Your Grace salutes their Ear. 'Tis these that early taint the Female Soul, Instruct the Eyes of young Coquettes to roll, Teach Infants Cheeks a bidden Blush to know, And little Hearts to flutter at a Beau. Oft when the World imagine Women stray, The Sylphs thro' mystick Mazes guide their Way, Thro' all the giddy Circle they pursue, And old Impertinence expel by new. What tender Maid but must a Victim fall To one Man's Treat, but for another's Ball? When Florio speaks, what Virgin could withstand, If gentle Damon did not squeeze her Hand? With varying Vanities, from ev'ry Part, They shift the moving Toyshop of their Heart; Where Wigs with Wigs, with Sword-knots Sword-knots strive, Beaus banish Beaus, and Coaches Coaches drive. This erring Mortals Levity may call, Oh blind to Truth! the Sylphs contrive it all. Of these am I, who thy Protection claim, A watchful Sprite, and Ariel is my Name. Late, as I rang'd the Crystal Wilds of Air, In the clear Mirror of thy ruling Star 110

I saw, alas! some dread Event impend, E're to the Main this Morning Sun descend. But Heav'n reveals not what, or how, or where: Warn'd by thy Sylph, oh Pious Maid beware! This to disclose is all thy Guardian can. Beware of all, but most beware of Man! He said; when Shock, who thought she slept too long, Leapt up, and wak'd his Mistress with his Tongue. 'Twas then Belinda, if Report say true, Thy Eyes first open'd on a Billet-doux. Wounds, Charms, and Ardors, were no sooner read, But all the Vision vanish'd from thy Head. And now, unveil'd, the Toilet stands display'd, Each Silver Vase in mystic Order laid. First, rob'd in White, the Nymph intent adores With Head uncover'd, the cosmetic Pow'rs. A heav'nly Image in the Glass appears, To that she bends, to that her Eyes she rears; Th' inferior Priestess, at her Altar's side, Trembling, begins the sacred Rites of Pride. Unnumber'd Treasures ope at once, and here The various Off'rings of the World appear; From each she nicely culls with curious Toil, And decks the Goddess with the glitt'ring Spoil. 111

This Casket India's glowing Gems unlocks, And all Arabia breathes from yonder Box. The Tortoise here and Elephant unite, Transform'd to Combs, the speckled and the white. Here Files of Pins extend their shining Rows, Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux. Now awful Beauty puts on all its Arms; The Fair each moment rises in her Charms, Repairs her Smiles, awakens ev'ry Grace, And calls forth all the Wonders of her Face; Sees by Degrees a purer Blush arise, And keener Lightnings quicken in her Eyes. The busy Sylphs surround their darling Care; These set the Head, and those divide the Hair, Some fold the Sleeve, while others plait the Gown; And Betty's prais'd for Labours not her own.

Source: Pope, Alexander. The Rape of the Lock. London: George Routledge and Sons Limited, 1894. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— Pope's reputation rests in large part on his satires, but his didactic bent led him to formulate in verse An Essay on Criticism (1711) and An Essay on Man (1732-1734). The former attempts to show that poetry must be modeled on nature; but his conception of nature, a traditional one shared by all his contemporaries, differs from that of succeeding generations. For Pope, nature meant the rules that right reason has discovered to be immanent in all things, so that what the experience of reasonable minds through the ages has shown to be the greatest

112

poetry—namely, that of classical antiquity—provides a perfect model for modern times. A similar conservatism reappears in An Essay on Man, which concludes with the much debated generalization that “Whatever is, is right.” —————————————————————————————————————

“A Modest Proposal” Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift's ―A Modest Proposal‖ (anonymously published in 1729) is a powerful political satire about the economic and social conditions of the poor in Ireland under British rule. Swift's speaker puts forth the tongue-in-cheek ―modest proposal‖ that Irish children born to poor families could be put to good use as meat and leather to be sold to the wealthy. The essay is rich with references to political events in England and Ireland in the 18th century.

“A Modest Proposal” FOR Preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland, from being a Burden to their Parents or Country; and for making them beneficial to the Publick By Jonathan Swift

IT is a melancholly Object to those, who walk through this great Town, or travel in the Country; when they see the Streets, the Roads, and Cabbin-doors crowded with Beggars of the Female Sex, followed by three, four, or six Children, all in Rags, and importuning every Passenger for an Alms. These Mothers, instead of being able to work for their honest Livelyhood, are forced to employ all their Time in stroling to beg Sustenance for their helpless Infants; who, as they grow up, either turn Thieves for want of Work; or leave their dear Native Country, to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbadoes. I THINK it is agreed by all Parties, that this prodigious Number of Children in the Arms, or on the Backs, or at the Heels of their Mothers, and frequently of their Fathers, is in the present deplorable State of the Kingdom, a very great additional Grievance; and therefore, whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy Method of making these Children sound and useful Members of the Commonwealth, would deserve so well of the Publick, as to have his Statue set up for a Preserver of the Nation. BUT my Intention is very far from being confined to provide only for the Children of professed Beggars: It is of a much greater Extent, and shall take in the whole Number of Infants at a certain Age, who are born of Parents, in effect as little able to support them, as those who demand our Charity in the Streets. AS to my own Part, having turned my Thoughts for many Years, upon this important Subject, and maturely weighed the several Schemes of other Projectors, I have always found them grosly mistaken in their Computation. It is true a Child, just dropt from its Dam, may be supported by her Milk, for a Solar Year with little other Nourishment; at most not above the Value of two Shillings; which the Mother may certainly get, or the Value in Scraps, by her lawful Occupation of Begging: And, it is exactly at one Year old, that I propose to provide for them in such a Manner, as, instead of being a Charge upon their Parents, or the Parish, or wanting Food and

113

Raiment for the rest of their Lives; they shall, on the contrary, contribute to the Feeding, and partly to the Cloathing, of many Thousands. THERE is likewise another great Advantage in my Scheme, that it will prevent those voluntary Abortions, and that horrid Practice of Women murdering their Bastard Children; alas! too frequent among us; sacrificing the poor innocent Babes, I doubt, more to avoid the Expence than the Shame; which would move Tears and Pity in the most Savage and inhuman Breast. THE Number of Souls in Ireland being usually reckoned one Million and a half; of these I calculate there may be about Two hundred Thousand Couple whose Wives are Breeders; from which Number I subtract thirty thousand Couples, who are able to maintain their own Children; although I apprehend there cannot be so many, under the present Distresses of the Kingdom; but this being granted, there will remain an Hundred and Seventy Thousand Breeders. I again subtract Fifty Thousand, for those Women who miscarry, or whose Children die by Accident, or Disease, within the Year. There only remain an Hundred and Twenty Thousand Children of poor Parents, annually born: The Question therefore is, How this Number shall be reared, and provided for? Which, as I have already said, under the present Situation of Affairs, is utterly impossible, by all the Methods hitherto proposed: For we can neither employ them in Handicraft or Agriculture; we neither build Houses, (I mean in the Country) nor cultivate Land: They can very seldom pick up a Livelyhood by Stealing until they arrive at six Years old; except where they are of towardly Parts; although, I confess, they learn the Rudiments much earlier; during which Time, they can, however, be properly looked upon only as Probationers; as I have been informed by a principal Gentleman in the County of Cavan, who protested to me, that he never knew above one or two Instances under the Age of six, even in a Part of the Kingdom so renowned for the quickest Proficiency in that Art. I AM assured by our Merchants, that a Boy or a Girl before twelve Years old, is no saleable Commodity; and even when they come to this Age, they will not yield above Three Pounds, or Three Pounds and half a Crown at most, on the Exchange; which cannot turn to Account either to the Parents or the Kingdom; the Charge of Nutriment and Rags, having been at least four Times that Value. I SHALL now therefore humbly propose my own Thoughts; which I hope will not be liable to the least Objection. I HAVE been assured by a very knowing American of my Acquaintance in London; that a young healthy Child, well nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boiled; and, I make no doubt, that it will equally serve in a Fricasie, or Ragoust. I DO therefore humbly offer it to publick Consideration, that of the Hundred and Twenty Thousand Children, already computed, Twenty thousand may be reserved for Breed; whereof only one Fourth Part to be Males; which is more than we allow to Sheep, black Cattle, or Swine; and my Reason is, that these Children are seldom the Fruits of Marriage, a Circumstance not much regarded by our Savages; therefore, one Male will be sufficient to serve four Females. That the remaining Hundred thousand, may, at a Year old, be offered in Sale to the Persons of Quality and Fortune, through the Kingdom; always advising the Mother to let them suck plentifully in the last Month, so as to render them plump, and fat for a good Table. A Child will make two Dishes at an Entertainment for Friends; and when the Family dines alone, the fore or hind Quarter will make a reasonable Dish; and seasoned with a little Pepper or Salt, will be very good Boiled on the fourth Day, especially in Winter. I HAVE reckoned upon a Medium, that a Child just born will weigh Twelve Pounds; and in a solar Year, if tolerably nursed, encreaseth to twenty eight Pounds.

114

I GRANT this Food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for Landlords; who, as they have already devoured most of the Parents, seem to have the best Title to the Children. INFANTS Flesh will be in Season throughout the Year; but more plentiful in March, and a little before and after: For we are told by a grave Author, an eminent French Physician, that Fish being a prolifick Dyet, there are more Children born in Roman Catholick Countries about Nine Months after Lent, than at any other Season: Therefore reckoning a Year after Lent, the Markets will be more glutted than usual; because the Number of Popish Infants, is, at least, three to one in this Kingdom; and therefore it will have one other Collateral Advantage, by lessening the Number of Papists among us. I HAVE already computed the Charge of nursing a Beggar's Child (in which List I reckon all Cottagers, Labourers, and Four fifths of the Farmers) to be about two Shillings per Annum, Rags included; and I believe, no Gentleman would repine to give Ten Shillings for the Carcase of a good fat Child; which, as I have said, will make four Dishes of excellent nutritive Meat, when he hath only some particular Friend, or his own Family, to dine with him. Thus the Squire will learn to be a good Landlord, and grow popular among his Tenants; the Mother will have Eight Shillings net Profit, and be fit for Work until she produceth another Child. THOSE who are more thrifty (as I must confess the Times require) may flay the Carcase; the Skin of which, artificially dressed, will make admirable Gloves for Ladies, and Summer Boots for fine Gentlemen. AS to our City of Dublin; Shambles may be appointed for this Purpose, in the most convenient Parts of it; and Butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the Children alive, and dressing them hot from the Knife, as we do roasting Pigs. A VERY worthy Person, a true Lover of his Country, and whose Virtues I highly esteem, was lately pleased, in discoursing on this Matter, to offer a Refinement upon my Scheme. He said, that many Gentlemen of this Kingdom, having of late destroyed their Deer; he conceived, that the Want of Venison might be well supplied by the Bodies of young Lads and Maidens, not exceeding fourteen Years of Age, nor under twelve; so great a Number of both Sexes in every County being now ready to starve, for Want of Work and Service: And these to be disposed of by their Parents, if alive, or otherwise by their nearest Relations. But with due Deference to so excellent a Friend, and so deserving a Patriot, I cannot be altogether in his Sentiments. For as to the Males, my American Acquaintance assured me from frequent Experience, that their Flesh was generally tough and lean, like that of our School-boys, by continual Exercise, and their Taste disagreeable; and to fatten them would not answer the Charge. Then, as to the Females, it would, I think, with humble Submission, be a Loss to the Publick, because they soon would become Breeders themselves: And besides it is not improbable, that some scrupulous People might be apt to censure such a Practice (although indeed very unjustly) as a little bordering upon Cruelty; which, I confess, hath always been with me the strongest Objection against any Project, how well soever intended. BUT in order to justify my Friend; he confessed, that this Expedient was put into his Head by the famous Salmanazor, a Native of the Island Formosa, who came from thence to London, above twenty Years ago, and in Conversation told my Friend, that in his Country, when any young Person happened to be put to Death, the Executioner sold the Carcase to Persons of Quality, as a prime Dainty; and that, in his Time, the Body of a plump Girl of fifteen, who was crucified for an Attempt to poison the Emperor, was sold to his Imperial Majesty's prime Minister of State, and other great Mandarins of the Court, in Joints from the Gibbet, at Four hundred Crowns. Neither indeed can I deny, that if the same Use were made of several plump young girls in this Town, who, without one single Groat to their Fortunes, cannot stir Abroad without a Chair, and

115

appear at the Play-house, and Assemblies in foreign Fineries, which they never will pay for; the Kingdom would not be the worse. SOME Persons of a desponding Spirit are in great Concern about that vast Number of poor People, who are Aged, Diseased, or Maimed; and I have been desired to employ my Thoughts what Course may be taken, to ease the Nation of so grievous an Incumbrance. But I am not in the least Pain upon that Matter; because it is very well known, that they are every Day dying, and rotting, by Cold and Famine, and Filth, and Vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected. And as to the younger Labourers, they are now in almost as hopeful a Condition: They cannot get Work, and consequently pine away for Want of Nourishment, to a Degree, that if at any Time they are accidentally hired to common Labour, they have not Strength to perform it; and thus the Country, and themselves, are in a fair Way of being soon delivered from the Evils to come. I HAVE too long digressed; and therefore shall return to my Subject. I think the Advantages by the Proposal which I have made, are obvious, and many, as well as of the highest Importance. FOR, First, as I have already observed, it would greatly lessen the Number of Papists, with whom we are yearly overrun; being the principal Breeders of the Nation, as well as our most dangerous Enemies; and who stay at home on Purpose, with a Design to deliver the Kingdom to the Pretender; hoping to take their Advantage by the Absence of so many good Protestants, who have chosen rather to leave their Country, than stay at home, and pay Tithes against their Conscience, to an idolatrous Episcopal Curate. SECONDLY, The poorer Tenants will have something valuable of their own, which, by Law, may be made liable to Distress, and help to pay their Landlord's Rent; their Corn and Cattle being already seized, and Money a Thing unknown. THIRDLY, Whereas the Maintenance of an Hundred Thousand Children, from two Years old, and upwards, cannot be computed at less than ten Shillings a Piece per Annum, the Nation's Stock will be thereby encreased Fifty Thousand Pounds per Annum; besides the Profit of a new Dish, introduced to the Tables of all Gentlemen of Fortune in the Kingdom, who have any Refinement in Taste; and the Money will circulate among ourselves, the Goods being entirely of our own Growth and Manufacture. FOURTHLY, The constant Breeders, besides the Gain of Eight Shillings Sterling per Annum, by the Sale of their Children, will be rid of the Charge of maintaining them after the first Year. FIFTHLY, This Food would likewise bring great Custom to Taverns, where the Vintners will certainly be so prudent, as to procure the best Receipts for dressing it to Perfection; and consequently, have their Houses frequented by all the fine Gentlemen, who justly value themselves upon their Knowledge in good Eating; and a skilful Cook, who understands how to oblige his Guests, will contrive to make it as expensive as they please. SIXTHLY, This would be a great Inducement to Marriage, which all wise Nations have either encouraged by Rewards, or enforced by Laws and Penalties. It would encrease the Care and Tenderness of Mothers towards their Children, when they were sure of a Settlement for Life, to the poor Babes, provided in some Sort by the Publick, to their annual Profit instead of Expence. We should soon see an honest Emulation among the married Women, which of them could bring the fattest Child to the Market. Men would become as fond of their Wives, during the Time of their Pregnancy, as they are now of their Mares in Foal, their Cows in Calf, or Sows when they are ready to farrow; nor offer to beat or kick them, (as it is too frequent a Practice) for fear of a Miscarriage. MANY other Advantages might be enumerated. For instance, the Addition of some Thousand Carcasses in our Exportation of barrelled Beef: The Propagation of Swines Flesh and

116

Improvement in the Art of making good Bacon; so much wanted among us by the great Destruction of Pigs, too frequent at our Tables, which are no way comparable in Taste, or Magnificence, to a well-grown fat yearling Child; which, roasted whole, will make a considerable Figure at a Lord Mayor's Feast, or any other publick Entertainment. But this, and many others, I omit; being studious of Brevity. SUPPOSING that one Thousand Families in this City, would be constant Customers for Infants Flesh; besides others who might have it at merry Meetings, particularly Weddings and Christenings; I compute that Dublin would take off, annually, about Twenty Thousand Carcasses; and the rest of the Kingdom (where probably they will be sold somewhat cheaper) the remaining Eighty Thousand. I CAN think of no one Objection, that will possibly be raised against this Proposal; unless it should be urged, that the Number of People will be thereby much lessened in the Kingdom. This I freely own; and it was indeed one principal Design in offering it to the World. I desire the Reader will observe, that I calculate my Remedy for this one individual Kingdom of Ireland, and for no other that ever was, is, or I think ever can be upon Earth. Therefore, let no man talk to me of other Expedients: Of taxing our Absentees at five Shillings a Pound: Of using neither Cloaths, nor Houshold Furniture except what is of our own Growth and Manufacture: Of utterly rejecting the Materials and Instruments that promote foreign Luxury: Of curing the Expensiveness of Pride, Vanity, Idleness, and Gaming in our Women: Of introducing a Vein of Parsimony, Prudence and Temperance: Of learning to love our Country, wherein we differ even from Laplanders, and the Inhabitants of Topinamboo: Of quitting our Animosities, and Factions; nor act any longer like the Jews, who were murdering one another at the very Moment their City was taken: Of being a little cautious not to sell our Country and Consciences for nothing: Of teaching Landlords to have, at least, one Degree of Mercy towards their Tenants. Lastly, Of putting a Spirit of Honesty, Industry, and Skill into our Shop-keepers; who, if a Resolution could now be taken to buy only our native Goods, would immediately unite to cheat and exact upon us in the Price, the Measure, and the Goodness; nor could ever yet be brought to make one fair Proposal of just Dealing, though often and earnestly invited to it. THEREFORE I repeat, let no Man talk to me of these and the like Expedients; till he hath, at least, a Glimpse of Hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere Attempt to put them in Practice. BUT, as to my self; having been wearied out for many Years with offering vain, idle, visionary Thoughts; and at length utterly despairing of Success, I fortunately fell upon this Proposal; which, as it is wholly new, so it hath something solid and real, of no Expence, and little Trouble, full in our own Power; and whereby we can incur no Danger in disobliging England: For, this Kind of Commodity will not bear Exportation; the Flesh being of too tender a Consistence, to admit a long Continuance in Salt; although, perhaps, I could name a Country, which would be glad to eat up our whole Nation without it. AFTER all, I am not so violently bent upon my own Opinion, as to reject any Offer proposed by wise Men, which shall be found equally innocent, cheap, easy, and effectual. But before something of that Kind shall be advanced, in Contradiction to my Scheme, and offering a better; I desire the Author, or Authors, will be pleased maturely to consider two Points. First, As Things now stand, how they will be able to find Food and Raiment, for a Hundred Thousand useless Mouths and Backs? And secondly, There being a round Million of Creatures in human Figure, throughout this Kingdom; whose whole Subsistence, put into a common Stock, would leave them in Debt two Millions of Pounds Sterling; adding those, who are Beggars by Profession, to the Bulk of Farmers, Cottagers, and Labourers, with their Wives and Children, who are Beggars in Effect; I desire those Politicians, who dislike my Overture, and

117

may perhaps be so bold to attempt an Answer, that they will first ask the Parents of these Mortals, Whether they would not, at this Day, think it a great Happiness to have been sold for Food at a Year old, in the Manner I prescribe; and thereby have avoided such a perpetual Scene of Misfortunes, as they have since gone through; by the Oppression of Landlords; the Impossibility of paying Rent, without Money or Trade; the Want of common Sustenance, with neither House nor Cloaths, to cover them from the Inclemencies of Weather, and the most inevitable Prospect of intailing the like, or greater Miseries upon their Breed for ever. I PROFESS, in the Sincerity of my Heart, that I have not the least personal Interest, in endeavouring to promote this necessary Work; having no other Motive than the publick Good of my Country, by advancing our Trade, providing for Infants, relieving the Poor, and giving some Pleasure to the Rich. I have no Children, by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine Years old, and my Wife past Child-bearing.

Source: Swift, Jonathan. The Writings of Jonathan Swift, Greenberg, Robert A. and William B. Piper, eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— Pope's brilliant satiric masterpiece, The Rape of the Lock (1712; revised edition 1714), makes an epic theme of a trifling drawing-room episode: the contention arising from a young lord's having covertly snipped a lock of hair from a young lady's head. His most sustained satire, The Dunciad (1728; final version 1743), follows Dryden's Mac Flecknoe in its elegantly pointed, often malicious but always high-spirited mockery of the literary dullards who were Pope's enemies. —————————————————————————————————————

From The Tatler and The Spectator Mixing politics, serious essays, and sly satire, the 18th-century periodicals The Tatler and The Spectator, founded by the statesmen and literary figures Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, were enormously popular and influential. The Tatler and The Spectator provide an entertaining and historically invaluable picture of 18th-century London life, both high and low. This first essay, ―Taking Snuff‖ (1709), which Steele wrote for The Tatler, is a short piece on the then-fashionable habit. The second extract is a fabricated reader‘s letter from The Spectator written by Addison in 1711. The letter pokes fun at the practice shopkeepers and traders had of loudly shouting out their wares and services in the street. The epigram at the head of this essay, taken from ancient Roman poet Virgil‘s Aeneid, reads: ‗Had I a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, and a voice of iron.‘

118

From The Tatler and The Spectator From The Tatler, No. 35 Tuesday, 28 June to Thursday, 30 June 1709 Taking snuff By Richard Steele Grecian Coffee-house, 28 June.

There is an Habit or Custom which I have put my Patience to the utmost Stretch to have suffered so long, because several of my intimate Friends are in the Guilt; and that is, the Humour of taking snuff, and looking Dirty about the Mouth by Way of Ornament. My Method is to dive to the Bottom of a Sore before I pretend to apply a Remedy. For this Reason, I sat by an eminent Storyteller and Politician who takes half an Ounce in five Seconds, and has mortgaged a pretty Tenement near the Town, meerly to improve and dung his Brains with this prolifick Powder. I observed this Gentleman t'other Day in the midst of a Story diverted from it by looking at something at a Distance, and I softly hid his Box. But he returns to his Tale, and looking for his Box, he cries, And so Sir—Then when he should have taken a Pinch; As I was saying, says he,—Has no Body seen my Box? His Friend beseeches him to finish his Narration. Then he proceeds; And so Sir—Where can my Box be? Then turning to me; Pray Sir, Did you see my Box? Yes Sir, said I, I took it to see how long you could live without it. He resumes his Tale; and I took Notice, that his Dulness was much more regular and fluent than before. A Pinch supplied the Place of, As I was saying, And so Sir; and he went on currently enough in that Style which the Learned call the Insipid. This Observation easily led me into a Philosophick Reason for taking snuff, which is done only to supply with Sensations the Want of Reflection. This I take to be an …, a ∘nostrum; upon which I hope to receive the Thanks of this Board. For as it is natural to lift a Man's Hand to a Sore, when you fear any Thing coming at you; so when a Person feels his Thoughts are run out, and has no more to say, it is as natural to supply his weak Brain with Powder at the nearest Place of Access, viz. the Nostrils. This is so evident, that Nature suggests the Use according to the Indigence of the Persons who use this Medicine, without being prepossessed with the Force of Fashion or Custom. For Example; the Native Hibernians, who are reckoned not much unlike the ancient ∘Bœotians, take this Specifick for Emptiness in the Head, in greater Abundance than any other Nation under the Sun. The learned Sotus, as sparing as he is in his Words, would be still more silent if it were not for this Powder. However low and poor the taking Snuff argues a Man to be in his own Stock of Thought, or Means to employ his Brains and his Fingers, yet there is a poorer Creature in the World than He, and this is a Borrower of Snuff; a Fellow that keeps no Box of his own, but is always asking others for a Pinch. Such poor Rogues put me always in Mind of a common Phrase among School-Boys when they are composing their ∘Exercise, who run to an upper Scholar, and cry, Pray give me a little Sense. But of all Things, commend me to the Ladies who are got into this pretty Help to Discourse. I have been this three Years perswading Sagissa to leave it off, but she talks so much, and is so Learned, that she is above Contradiction. However, an Accident t'other Day brought that about, which my Eloquence never could accomplish: She had a very

119

Pretty Fellow in her Closet, who ran thither to avoid some Company that came to visit her. She made an Excuse to go in to him for some Implement they were talking of. Her eager Gallant snatched a Kiss; but being unused to Snuff, some Grains from off her upper Lip made him sneeze aloud, which alarmed the Visitants, and has made a Discovery, that profound Reading, very much Intelligence, and a general Knowledge of who and who's together, cannot fill up her vacant Hours so much, but that she is sometimes obliged to descend to Entertainments less intellectual. From The Spectator, No. 251 The cries of London By Joseph Addison Tuesday, 18 December 1711

—Lingua centum sunt, oraque centum, Ferrea vox—

There is nothing which more astonishes a Foreigner, and frights a Country Squire than the Cries of London. My good Friend Sir ROGER often declares, that he cannot get them out of his Head, or go to sleep for them the first Week that he is in Town. On the contrary, WILL HONEYCOMBE calls them the ∘Ramage de la Ville, and prefers them to the Sounds of Larks and Nightingales, with all the Musick of the Fields and Woods. I have lately received a Letter from some very odd Fellow upon this Subject, which I shall leave with my Reader, without saying any thing further of it. SIR, 'I am a Man out of all Business, and would willingly turn my Head to any thing for an honest Livelihood. I have invented several Projects for raising many Millions of Money without burthening the Subject, but I cannot get the Parliament to listen to me, who look upon me, forsooth, as a [∘Crack and a] ∘Projector so that despairing to enrich either myself or my Country by this Publick-spiritedness, I would make some Proposals to you relating to a Design which I have very much at Heart, and which may procure me an handsome Subsistance, if you will be pleased to recommend it to the Cities of London and Westminster. 'The Post I would aim at is to be Comptroller general of the London Cries, which are at present under no manner of Rules or Discipline. I think I am pretty well qualified for this Place, as being a Man of very strong Lungs, of great Insight into all the Branches of our British Trades and Manufactures, and of a competent Skill in Musick. 'The Cries of London may be divided into Vocal and Instrumental. As for the latter, they are at present under a very great Disorder. A Freeman of London has the Privilege of disturbing a whole Street for an Hour together, with the Twancking of a brass Kettle or a Frying-pan. The Watch-man's Thump at Midnight startles us in our Beds, as much as the breaking in of a Thief. The Sow-gelder's Horn has indeed something musical in it, but this is seldom heard within the Liberties. I would therefore propose, that no Instrument of this Nature should be made use of, which I have not tuned and licensed, after having carefully examined in what manner it may affect the Ears of her Majesty‟s liege Subjects. 120

'Vocal Cries are of much larger Extent, and indeed so full of Incongruities and Barbarisms, that we appear a distracted City to Foreigners, who do not comprehend the Meaning of such ∘enormous Outcries. Milk is generally sold in a Note above ∘Elah, and in Sounds so exceeding shrill, that it often sets our Teeth an edge. The Chimney-sweeper is confined to no certain Pitch; he sometimes utters himself in the deepest Base, and sometimes in the sharpest Treble; sometimes in the highest, and sometimes in the lowest Note of the Gamut. The same Observation might be made on the Retailers of Small-coal, not to mention broken Glasses or Brickdust. In these, therefore, and the like Cases, it should be my Care to sweeten and mellow the Voices of these itinerant Tradesmen, before they make their Appearance in our Streets; as also to accommodate their Cries to their respective Wares; and to take Care in particular that those may not make the most Noise, who have the least to sell, which is very observable in the Venders of Card-matches to whom I cannot but apply that old Proverb of Much Cry but little Wool. 'Some of these last-mentioned Musicians are so very loud in the Sale of these trifling Manufactures, that an honest splenetick Gentleman of my Acquaintance bargained with one of them never to come into the Street where he lived: But what was the Effect of this Contract? why, the whole Tribe of Cardmatch-makers which frequent that Quarter, passed by his Door the very next Day, in hopes of being bought off after the same manner. 'It is another great Imperfection in our London Cries, that there is no just Time nor Measure observed in them. Our News should indeed be published in a very quick Time, because it is a Commodity that will not keep cold. It should not however be cried with the same Precipitation as Fire: Yet this is generally the Case: A bloody Battel alarms the Town from one End to another in an Instant. Every Motion of the French is published in so great an Hurry, that one would think the Enemy were at our Gates. This likewise I would take upon me to regulate in such a manner, that there should be some Distinction made between the spreading of a Victory, a March, or an Incampment, a Dutch, a Portugal or a Spanish Mail. Nor must I omit under this Head, those excessive Alarms with which several boisterous Rusticks infest our Streets in Turnip Season; and which are more inexcusable, because these are Wares which are in no Danger of Cooling upon their Hands. 'There are others who affect a very slow Time, and are in my Opinion much more tuneable than the former; the Cooper in particular swells his last Note in an hollow Voice, that is not without its Harmony; nor can I forbear being inspired with a most agreeable Melancholy, when I hear that sad and solemn Air with which the Publick is very often asked, if they have any Chairs to mend. Your own Memory may suggest to you many other lamentable Ditties of the same Nature, in which the Musick is wonderfully languishing and melodious. 'I am always pleased with that particular Time of the Year which is proper for the pickling of Dill and Cucumbers; but alas this Cry, like the Song of the Nightingales, is not heard above two Months. It would therefore be worth while to consider whether the same Air might not in some Cases be adapted to other Words. 'It might likewise deserve our most serious Consideration, how far, in a well-regulated city, those Humourists are to be tolerated, who not contented with the traditional Cries of their Fore-fathers, have invented particular Songs and Tunes of their own: Such as was, not many Years since, the Pastry-man, commonly known by the Name of the Colly-Molly-Puff; and such as is at this Day the Vender of Powder and ∘Washballs, who, if I am rightly informed, goes under the Name of Powder-Watt. 'I must not here omit one particular Absurdity which runs thro' this whole vociferous Generation, and which renders their Cries very often not only incommodious, but altogether useless to the Publick. I mean that idle Accomplishment which they all of them aim at, of 121

Crying so not to be understood. Whether or no they have learned this from several of our affected Singers, I will not take upon me to say; but most certain it is, that People know the Wares they deal in rather by their Tunes than by their Words; insomuch that I have sometimes seen a Country Boy run out to buy Apples of a Bellows-mender, and Gingerbread from a Grinder of Knives and Scissars. Nay, so strangely infatuated are some very eminent Artists of this particular Grace in a Cry, that none but their Acquaintance are able to guess at their Profession; for who else can know, that Work if I had it, should be the Signification of a CornCutter. 'Forasmuch therefore as Persons of this Rank are seldom Men of Genius or Capacity, I think it would be very proper that some Man of good Sense and sound Judgment should preside over these publick Cries, who should permit none to lift up their Voices in our Streets, that have not tuneable Throats, and are not only able to overcome the Noise of the Croud, and the rattling of Coaches, but also to vend their respective Merchandizes in apt Phrases, and in the most distinct and agreeable Sounds. I do therefore humbly recommend my self as a Person rightly qualified for this Post, and if I meet with fitting Encouragements, shall communicate some other Projects which I have by me, that may no less conduce to the Emolument of the Publick. I am, SIR, &c. Ralph Crotchett.

Source: Steele, Richard and Joseph Addison. Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator. Ross, Angus, ed. Penguin Books. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— Like Dryden, Pope made translations of classical works, notably of the Iliad, which was a great popular and financial success. His edition of Shakespeare's works bears witness to a range of taste not usually ascribed to him. —————————————————————————————————————

From Robinson Crusoe Like many literary works that are adapted into children's literature, English novelist Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (1719) combines fanciful, far-fetched events with real issues about everyday life. One of those issues is the hero's conversion to Christianity while he is marooned on an uninhabited island, the only survivor of a disastrous shipwreck. After he discovers a footprint on the beach—a sign that he may not be alone—Crusoe contemplates how his character has changed since he was stranded on the island.

122

From Robinson Crusoe By Daniel Defoe

It happen'd one Day about Noon going towards my Boat, I was exceedingly surpriz'd with the Print of a Man's naked Foot on the Shore, which was very plain to be seen in the Sand: I stood like one Thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an Apparition; I listen'd, I look'd round me, I could hear nothing, nor see any Thing; I went up to a rising Ground to look farther; I went up the Shore and down the Shore, but it was all one, I could see no other Impression but that one, I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might not be my Fancy; but there was no Room for that, for there was exactly the very Print of a Foot, Toes, Heel, and every Part of a Foot; how it came thither, I knew not, nor could in the least imagine. But after innumerable fluttering Thoughts, like a Man perfectly confus'd and out of my self, I came Home to my Fortification, not feeling, as we say, the Ground I went on, but terrify'd to the last Degree, looking behind me at every two or three Steps, mistaking every Bush and Tree, and fancying every Stump at a Distance to be a Man; nor is it possible to describe how many various Shapes affrighted Imagination represented Things to me in, how many wild Ideas were found every Moment in my Fancy, and what strange unaccountable Whimsies came into my Thoughts by the Way. When I came to my Castle, for so I think I call'd it ever after this, I fled into it like one pursued; whether I went over by the Ladder as first contriv'd, or went in at the Hole in the Rock, which I call'd a Door, I cannot remember; no, nor could I remember the next Morning, for never frighted Hare fled to Cover, or Fox to Earth, with more Terror of Mind than I to this Retreat. I slept none that Night; the farther I was from the Occasion of my Fright, the greater my Apprehensions were, which is something contrary to the Nature of such Things, and especially to the usual Practice of all Creatures in Fear: But I was so embarrass'd with my own frightful Ideas of the Thing, that I form'd nothing but dismal Imaginations to my self, even tho' I was now a great way off of it. Sometimes I fancy'd it must be the Devil; and Reason joyn'd in with me upon this Supposition: For how should any other Thing in human Shape come into the Place? Where was the Vessel that brought them? What Marks was there of any other Footsteps! And how was it possible a Man should come there? But then to think that Satan should take human Shape upon him in such a Place where there could be no manner of Occasion for it, but to leave the Print of his Foot behind him, and that even for no Purpose too, for he could not be sure I should see it; this was an Amusement the other Way; I consider'd that the Devil might have found out abundance of other Ways to have terrify'd me than this of the single Print of a Foot. That as I liv'd quite on the other Side of the Island, he would never have been so simple to leave a Mark in a Place where 'twas Ten Thousand to one whether I should ever see it or not, and in the Sand too, which the first Surge of the Sea upon a high Wind would have defac'd entirely: All this seem'd inconsistent with the Thing it self, and with all the Notions we usually entertain of the Subtilty of the Devil. Abundance of such Things as these assisted to argue me out of all Apprehensions of its being the Devil: And I presently concluded then, that it must be some more dangerous Creature. (viz.) That it must be some of the Savages of the main Land over-against me, who had wander'd out to Sea in their Canoes; and either driven by the Currents, or by contrary Winds had made the Island; and had been on Shore, but were gone away again to Sea, being as loth, perhaps, to have stay'd in this desolate Island, as I would have been to have had them.

123

While these Reflections were rowling upon my Mind, I was very thankful in my Thoughts, that I was so happy as not to be thereabouts at that Time, or that they did not see my Boat, by which they would have concluded that some Inhabitants had been in the Place, and perhaps have search'd farther for me: Then terrible Thoughts rack'd my Imagination about their having found my Boat, and that there were People here; and that if so, I should certainly have them come again in greater Numbers, and devour me: that if it should happen so that they should not find me, yet they would find my Enclosure, destroy all my Corn, carry away all my Flock of tame Goats, and I should perish at last for meer Want. Thus my Fear banish'd all my religious Hope; all that former Confidence in God which was founded upon such wonderful Experience as I had had of his Goodness, now vanished, as if he that had fed me by Miracle hitherto, could not preserve by his Power the Provision which he had made for me by his Goodness: I reproach'd my self with my Easiness, that would not sow any more Corn one Year than would just serve me till the next Season as if no Accident could intervene to prevent my enjoying the Crop that was upon the Ground; and this I thought so just a Reproof, that I resolv'd for the future to have two or three Years Corn beforehand, so that whatever might come, I might not perish for want of Bread. How strange a Chequer-Work of Providence is the Life of Man! and by what secret differing Springs are the Affections hurry'd about as differing Circumstances present! To Day we love what to Morrow we hate; to Day we seek what to Morrow we shun; to Day we desire what to Morrow we fear; nay even tremble at the Apprehensions of; this was exemplify'd in me at this Time in the most lively Manner imaginable; for I whose only Affliction was, that I seem'd banished from human Society, that I was alone, circumscrib'd by the boundless Ocean, cut off from Mankind, and condemn'd to what I call'd silent Life; that I was as one who Heaven thought not worthy to be number'd among the Living, or to appear among the rest of his Creatures; that to have seen one of my own Species, would have seem'd to me a Raising me from Death to Life, and the greatest Blessing that Heaven it self, next to the supreme Blessing of Salvation, could bestow; I say, that I should now tremble at the very Apprehensions of seeing a Man, and was ready to sink into the Ground at but the Shadow or silent Appearance of a Man's having set his Foot in the Island. Such is the uneven State of human Life: And it afforded me a great many curious Speculations afterwards, when I had a little recover'd my first Surprize; I consider'd that this was the Station of Life the infinitely wise and good Providence of God had determin'd for me, that as I could not foresee what the Ends of Divine Wisdom might be in all this, so I was not to dispute his Sovereignty, who, as I was his Creature, had an undoubted Right by Creation to govern and dispose of me absolutely as he thought fit; and who, as I was a Creature who had offended him, had likewise a judicial Right to condemn me to what Punishment he thought fit: and that it was my Part to submit to bear his Indignation, because I had sinn'd against him. I then reflected that God, who was not only Righteous but Omnipotent, as he had thought fit thus to punish and afflict me, so he was able to deliver me; that if he did not think fit to do it, 'twas my unquestion'd Duty to resign my self absolutely and entirely to his Will: and on the other Hand, it was my Duty also to hope in him, pray to him, and quitely to attend the Dictates and Directions of his daily Providence. These Thoughts took me up many Hours, Days; nay, I may say, Weeks and Months; and one particular Effect of my Cogitations on this Occasion, I cannot omit, viz. One Morning early, lying in my Bed, and fill'd with Thought about my Danger from the Appearance of Savages, I found it discompos'd me very much, upon which those Words of the Scripture came into my Thoughts, Call upon me in the Day of Trouble, and I will deliver, and thou shalt glorify me

124

Upon this, rising chearfully out of my Bed, my Heart was not only comforted, but I was guided and encourag'd to pray earnestly to God for Deliverance: When I had done praying, I took up my Bible, and opening it to read, the first Words that presented to me, were Wait on the Lord, and be of good Cheer, and he shall strengthen thy Heart; wait, I say, on the Lord: It is impossible to express the Comfort this gave me. In Answer, I thankfully laid down the Book, and was no more sad, at least, not on that Occasion. In the middle of these Cogitations, Apprehensions and Reflections, it came into my Thought one Day, that all this might be a meer Chimera of my own; and that this Foot might be the Print of my own Foot, when I came on Shore from my Boat: This chear'd me up a little too, and I began to perswade my self it was all a Delusion; that it was nothing else but my own Foot, and why might not I come that way from the Boat, as well as I was going that way to the Boat; again, I consider'd also that I could by no Means tell for certain where I had trod, and where I had not; and that if at last this was only the Print of my own Foot, I had play'd the Part of those Fools, who strive to make stories of Spectres, and Apparitions; and then are frighted at them more than any body. Now I began to take Courage, and to peep abroad again; for I had not stirr'd out of my Castle for three Days and Nights; so that I began to starve for Provision; for I had little or nothing within Doors, but some Barley Cakes and Water. Then I knew that my Goats wanted to be milk'd too, which usually was my Evening Diversion; and the poor Creatures were in great Pain and Inconvenience for want of it; and indeed, it almost spoil'd some of them, and almost dry'd up their Milk. Heartning my self therefore with the Belief that this was nothing but the Print of one of my own Feet, and so I might be truly said to start at my own Shadow, I began to go abroad again, and went to my Country House, to milk my Flock; but to see with what Fear I went forward, how often I look'd behind me, how I was ready every now and then to lay down my Basket, and run for my Life, it would have made any one have thought I was haunted with an evil Conscience, or that I had been lately most terribly frighted, and so indeed I had. However, as I went down thus two or three Days, and having seen nothing, I began to be a little bolder; and to think there was really nothing in it, but my own Imagination: But I cou'd not perswade my self fully of this, till I should go down to the Shore again, and see this Print of a Foot, and measure it by my own, and see if there was any Similitude or Fitness, that I might be assur'd it was my own Foot: But when I came to the Place, First, It appear'd evidently to me, that when I laid up my Boat, I could not possibly be on Shore any where there about. Secondly, When I came to measure the Mark with my own Foot, I found my Foot not so large by a great deal; both these Things fill'd my Head with new Imaginations, and gave me the Vapours again, to the highest Degree; so that I shook with cold, like one in an Ague: And I went Home again, fill'd with the Belief that some Man or Men had been on Shore there; or in short, that the Island was inhabited, and I might be surpriz'd before I was aware; and what course to take for my Security I knew not.

Source: Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe, Shinagel, Michael, ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1994. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

125

It is only natural that the 18th-century preoccupation with the power of reason and good sense should have produced a large number of works in the more sober medium of prose. Jonathan Swift, who was, like Pope, a Tory conservative for the latter half of his life and a satirist, wrote a number of mordantly satirical prose narratives in which a profound and despairing perception of human stupidities and evil are in contrast with the social criticism of his great contemporaries. Swift's Tale of a Tub (1704) reduces the quarrels among three important religious divisions of his day to an allegory of three disreputable brothers. His generous anger on behalf of the poor of Ireland produced “A Modest Proposal” (1729), in which, with horrifying mock seriousness, he proposed that the children of the poor should be raised for slaughter as food for the rich. His best-known work, Gulliver's Travels (1726), purports to be a ship doctor's account of his voyages into strange places, but in reality it is a castigation of the human race. The accounts of Gulliver's first two voyages are often read as a children's book. The last part abandons, however, delicate fancy and unmasks the selfish and sick bestiality of humanity in the guise of the so-called Yahoos, who are the savage and improvident servants of a race of apparently reasonable and noble horses, called Houyhnhnms. This work, like all of Swift's, is written in a prose of unrivaled lucidity, energy, and polemical skill. Similarly noteworthy for the quality of their prose are the Spectator papers (1711-1712; 1714), written mainly by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Published daily, these essays, like many others, corresponded to the newly felt need of the day for popular journalism, but their enlightened comment and their criticism of contemporary society separate them from the mass of similar publications. The main intent of Addison and Steele may be defined in their own words: “To enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality.” In a series of informal, conversational essays describing the activities of various ideal representatives of social groups, such as the Tory country squire Sir Roger de Coverley and the Whig merchant Sir Andrew Freeport, Addison and Steele salvaged and united some of the best sides of the contemporary English character. The lightly borne, free-and-easy manners of the court and the older landed classes should, according to these papers, exist side by side with the industry, uprightness, and deeply felt morality of the newly rich city merchants. The amorality associated with the one and the stubborn narrowness of the other should disappear. The emphasis on public decorum and individual rectitude and on sympathy with one's fellow beings in the Spectator papers is a measure of their distance from the cool indifference and frequent licentiousness of much Restoration literature, particularly comedy, although the purpose of both was to represent reason, moderation, and common sense. A quite different kind of journalism is represented by the work of the middle-class adventurer, hack writer, and political agent Daniel Defoe. Separated from the life of the upper classes and their erudite writers, as Bunyan had been before him, he produced, among many pieces of commissioned writing, a series of purportedly true but actually fictitious memoirs and confessions. The first of these, and the greatest, is Robinson Crusoe (1719), which reports the life and adventures of a shipwrecked sailor.

126

C

Age of Johnson

Samuel Johnson English lexicographer and writer Samuel Johnson ranked as one of the most important literary figures of the 18th century. Nicknamed both Dictionary Johnson and the Great Cham of Literature (Cham is an archaic word meaning Khan), Johnson compiled and wrote the Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755. Johnson later served as the subject of one of the greatest biographies ever written, James Boswell‘s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). The New York Public Library

The age of Samuel Johnson, from 1744 to about 1784, was a time of changing literary ideals. The developed classicism and literary conservatism associated with Johnson fought a rearguard action against the cult of sentiment and feeling associated in various ways with the harbingers of the coming age of romanticism. Johnson composed poetry that continued the traditions and forms of Pope, but he is best known as a prose writer and as an extraordinarily gifted conversationalist and literary arbiter in the cultivated urban life of his time. His conservatism and sturdy common sense are what might be expected given his intellectual tradition, but his individual quality has little to do with literary tendencies. His curiously lovable and upright personality, along with his intellectual preeminence and idiosyncrasies, have been preserved in the most famous of English biographies, the Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), by James Boswell, a Scottish writer with an appetite for literary celebrities. —————————————————————————————————————

From Life of Samuel Johnson Scottish writer James Boswell‘s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) is one of the most famous literary biographies ever written. Boswell was a close friend of Johnson until the latter died in 1784. Over the years Boswell recorded in detail Johnson‘s activities, conversations, and views. In many ways Boswell himself was an unprepossessing and mediocre man and writer, yet his obsessive devotion to his more talented subject makes the Life a fascinating, often amusing, and unusually detailed account. In this extract Boswell refers to the gloom under which Johnson finished his famous Dictionary of the English Language (1755).

127

From Life of Samuel Johnson By James Boswell

It must undoubtedly seem strange, that the conclusion of his Preface should be expressed in terms so desponding, when it is considered that the author was then only in his forty-sixth year. But we must ascribe its gloom to that miserable dejection of spirits to which he was constitutionally subject, and which was aggravated by the death of his wife two years before. I have heard it ingeniously observed by a lady of rank and elegance, that 'his melancholy was then at its meridian.' It pleased God to grant him almost thirty years of life after this time; and once when he was in a placid frame of mind, he was obliged to own to me that he had enjoyed happier days, and had many more friends, since that gloomy hour, than before. It is a sad saying, that 'most of those whom he wished to please had sunk into the grave;' and his case at forty-five was singularly unhappy, unless the circle of his friends was very narrow. I have often thought, that as longevity is generally desired, and I believe, generally expected, it would be wise to be continually adding to the number of our friends, that the loss of some may be supplied by others. Friendship, 'the wine of life,' should, like a well-stocked cellar, be thus continually renewed; and it is consolatory to think, that although we can seldom add what will equal the generous first growths of our youth, yet friendship becomes insensibly old in much less time than is commonly imagined, and not many years are required to make it very mellow and pleasant. Warmth will, no doubt, make a considerable difference. Men of affectionate temper and bright fancy will coalesce a great deal sooner than those who are cold and dull. The proposition which I have now endeavoured to illustrate was, at a subsequent period of his life, the opinion of Johnson himself. He said to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.' The celebrated Mr. Wilkes, whose notions and habits of life were very opposite to his, but who was ever eminent for literature and vivacity, sallied forth with a little jeu d‟esprit upon the following passage in his Grammar of the English Tongue, prefixed to the Dictionary:-'H seldom, perhaps never, begins any but the first syllable.' In an essay printed in 'the Public Advertiser,' this lively writer enumerated many instances in opposition to this remark; for example, 'The author of this observation must be a man of a quick appre-hension, and of a most compre-hensive genius.' The position is undoubtedly expressed with too much latitude. This light sally, we may suppose, made no great impression on our lexicographer; for we find that he did not alter the passage till many years afterwards. He had the pleasure of being treated in a very different manner by his old pupil Mr. Garrick, in the following complimentary Epigram:'ON JOHNSON’S DICTIONARY. 'Talk of war with a Briton, he‟ll boldly advance, That one English soldier will beat ten of France; Would we alter the boast from the sword to the pen, Our odds are still greater, still greater our men;

128

In the deep mines of science though Frenchmen may toil, Can their strength be compared to Locke, Newton, and Boyle? Let them rally their heroes, send forth all their pow‟rs, Their verse-men and prose-men, then match them with ours! First Shakspeare and Milton, like Gods in the fight, Have put their whole drama and epic to flight; In satires, epistles, and odes, would they cope, Their numbers retreat before Dryden and Pope; And Johnson, well-arm‟d like a hero of yore, Has beat forty French, and will beat forty more!' Johnson this year gave at once a proof of his benevolence, quickness of apprehension, and admirable art of composition, in the assistance which he gave to Mr. Zachariah Williams, father of the blind lady whom he had humanely received under his roof. Mr. Williams had followed the profession of physic in Wales; but having a very strong propensity to the study of natural philosophy, had made many ingenious advances towards a discovery of the longitude, and repaired to London in hopes of obtaining the great parliamentary reward. He failed of success; but Johnson having made himself master of his principles and experiments, wrote for him a pamphlet, published in quarto, with the following title: 'An Account of an Attempt to ascertain the Longitude at Sea, by an exact Theory of the Variation of the Magnetical Needle; with a Table of the Variations at the most remarkable Cities in Europe, from the year 1660 to 1680.' To diffuse it more extensively, it was accompanied with an Italian translation on the opposite page, which it is supposed was the work of Signor Baretti, an Italian of considerable literature, who having come to England a few years before, had been employed in the capacity both of a language master and an author, and formed an intimacy with Dr. Johnson. This pamphlet Johnson presented to the Bodleian Library. On a blank leaf of it is pasted a paragraph cut out of a newspaper, containing an account of the death and character of Williams, plainly written by Johnson. In July this year he had formed some scheme of mental improvement, the particular purpose of which does not appear. But we find in his 'Prayers and Meditations,' p. 25, a prayer entitled, 'On the Study of Philosophy, as an instrument of living;' and after it follows a note, 'This study was not pursued.' On the 13th of the same month he wrote in his Journal the following scheme of life, for Sunday: 'Having lived' (as he with tenderness of conscience expresses himself) 'not without an habitual reverence for the Sabbath, yet without that attention to its religious duties which Christianity requires; '1. To rise early, and in order to it, to go to sleep early on Saturday. '2. To use some extraordinary devotion in the morning. '3. To examine the tenor of my life, and particularly the 129

last week; and to mark my advances in religion, or recession from it. '4. To read the Scripture methodically with such helps as are at hand. '5. To go to church twice. '6. To read books of Divinity, either speculative or practical. '7. To instruct my family. '8. To wear off by meditation any worldly soil contracted in the week.' Chapter IX.—1756-1758 In 1756 Johnson found that the great fame of his Dictionary had not set him above the necessity of 'making provision for the day that was passing over him.' No royal or noble patron extended a munificent hand to give independence to the man who had conferred stability on the language of his country. We may feel indignant that there should have been such unworthy neglect; but we must, at the same time, congratulate ourselves, when we consider, that to this very neglect, operating to rouse the natural indolence of his constitution, we owe many valuable productions, which otherwise, perhaps, might never have appeared. He had spent, during the progress of the work, the money for which he had contracted to write his Dictionary. We have seen that the reward of his labour was only fifteen hundred and seventy-five pounds; and when the expense of amanuenses and paper, and other articles, are deducted, his clear profit was very inconsiderable. I once said to him, 'I am sorry, Sir, you did not get more for your Dictionary.' His answer was, 'I am sorry too. But it was very well. The booksellers are generous liberal-minded men.' He, upon all occasions, did ample justice to their character in this respect. He considered them as the patrons of literature; and, indeed, although they have eventually been considerable gainers by his Dictionary, it is to them that we owe its having been undertaken and carried through at the risk of great expense, for they were not absolutely sure of being indemnified.

Source: Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1891. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Johnson worked his way up from poverty by honest literary labors, among which was his Dictionary of the English Language (1755). A great success, it was the first such work prepared according to modern standards of lexicography. Like Addison and Steele, Johnson produced a series of journalistic essays, The Rambler (1750-1752), but because of their somewhat pedantic style and Latinate vocabulary, they lack the easy informality of the Spectator papers and serve to accentuate the opposition between his neoclassical formality and the succeeding romantic ideal of heart-to-heart communication. Johnson's philosophical tale Rasselas (1759), of which the moral is that “human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed,” is reminiscent of Swift (as well as of his contemporary the French writer Voltaire in his tale Candide) in its perception of the vanity of human wishes. For all his pessimism, however, the amazing detail, independence, and intellectual facility of Johnson's critical biographies of English poets since 1600 (Lives of the Poets, 1779-1781), written in his old age, show what critical discrimination and intellectual integrity can accomplish. —————————————————————————————————————

130

From The School for Scandal British dramatist and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan‘s comedy The School for Scandal (1777), with its witty repartee and social intrigues, renewed the traditions of the great British comedies of the 17th century. The play opens in the ―school‖ itself—the house of scheming Lady Sneerwell, who is speaking with her colleague, Snake. She is soon joined by her partner in mischief, Joseph Surface, as well as fatuous rumormonger Mrs. Candour and goodhearted Maria, whom Joseph Surface is pursuing.

From The School for Scandal By Richard Brinsley Sheridan

1.1 Lady Sneerwell's house. Lady Sneerwell at the dressing-table, Snake drinking chocolate LADY SNEERWELL The paragraphs, you say, Mr Snake, were all inserted? SNAKE They were, madam; and as I copied them myself in a feigned hand, there can be no suspicion whence they came. LADY SNEERWELL Did you circulate the report of Lady Brittle's intrigue with Captain Boastall? SNAKE That is in as fine a train as your ladyship could wish. In the common course of things, I think it must reach Mrs Clackit's ears within four-and-twenty hours, and then you know the business is as good as done. LADY SNEERWELL Why, truly, Mrs Clackit has a very pretty talent and a great deal of industry. SNAKE True, madam, and has been tolerably successful in her day. To my knowledge, she has been the cause of six matches being broken off and three sons being disinherited, of four forced elopements, as many close confinements, nine separate maintenances, and two divorces. Nay, I have more than once traced her causing a tête-à-tête in the Town and Country Magazine, when the parties perhaps have never seen each other's faces before in the course of their lives. LADY SNEERWELL She certainly has talents, but her manner is gross. SNAKE 'Tis very true; she generally designs well, has a free tongue and a bold invention, but her colouring is too dark and her outline often extravagant. She wants that delicacy of hint and mellowness of sneer which distinguish your ladyship's scandal. LADY SNEERWELL Ah, you are partial, Snake. SNAKE Not in the least. Everybody allows that Lady Sneerwell can do more with a word or a look than many can with the most laboured detail, even when they happen to have a little truth on their side to support it. LADY SNEERWELL Yes, my dear Snake, and I am no hypocrite to deny the satisfaction I reap from the success of my efforts. Wounded myself in the early part of my life by the envenomed tongue of slander, I confess I have since known no pleasure equal to the reducing others to the level of my own injured reputation. SNAKE Nothing can be more natural. But, Lady Sneerwell, there is one affair in which you have lately employed me, wherein I confess I am at a loss to guess your motives. LADY SNEERWELL I conceive you mean with respect to my neighbour Sir Peter Teazle and his family?

131

I do. Here are two young men, to whom Sir Peter has acted as a kind of guardian since their father's death, the elder possessing the most amiable character and universally well spoken of, the other the most dissipated and extravagant young fellow in the kingdom, without friends or character—the former an avowed admirer of your ladyship, and apparently your favourite; the latter attached to Maria, Sir Peter's ward, and confessedly beloved by her. Now, on the face of these circumstances, it is utterly unaccountable to me why you, the widow of a city knight with a good jointure, should not close with the passion of a man of such character and expectations as Mr Surface—and more so why you should be so uncommonly earnest to destroy the mutual attachment subsisting between his brother Charles and Maria. LADY SNEERWELL Then, at once to unravel this mystery, I must inform you that love has no share whatever in the intercourse between Mr Surface and me. SNAKE No! LADY SNEERWELL His real attachment is to Maria or her fortune; but, finding in his brother a favoured rival, he has been obliged to mask his pretensions and profit by my assistance. SNAKE Yet still I am more puzzled why you should interest yourself in his success. LADY SNEERWELL Heavens, how dull you are! Cannot you surmise the weakness which I hitherto through shame have concealed even from you? Must I confess that Charles—that libertine, that extravagant, that bankrupt in fortune and reputation—that he it is for whom I am thus anxious and malicious and to gain whom I would sacrifice everything? SNAKE Now indeed your conduct appears consistent. But how came you and Mr Surface so confidential? LADY SNEERWELL For our mutual interest. I have found him out a long time since. I know him to be artful, selfish and malicious—in short, a sentimental knave. SNAKE Yet Sir Peter vows he has not his equal in England; and, above all, he praises him as a man of sentiment. LADY SNEERWELL True, and with the assistance of his sentiments and hypocrisy he has brought him entirely into his interest with regard to Maria. Enter Servant SERVANT Mr Surface. LADY SNEERWELL Show him up. Exit Servant He generally calls about this time; I don't wonder at people's giving him to me for a lover. Enter Joseph Surface JOSEPH SURFACE My dear Lady Sneerwell, how do you do today?—Mr Snake, your most obedient. LADY SNEERWELL Snake has just been arraigning me on our mutual attachment; but I have informed him of our real views. You know how useful he has been to us; and, believe me, the confidence is not ill-placed. JOSEPH SURFACE Madam, it is impossible for me to suspect a man of Mr Snake's sensibility and discernment. LADY SNEERWELL Well, well, no compliments now; but tell me when you saw your mistress Maria, or—what is more material to me—your brother? JOSEPH SURFACE I have not seen either since I left you; but I can inform you that they never meet. Some of your stories have taken a good effect on Maria. LADY SNEERWELL Ah, my dear Snake, the merit of this belongs to you.—But do your brother's distresses increase? JOSEPH SURFACE Every hour. I am told he has had another execution in the house yesterday. In short, his dissipation and extravagance exceed anything I ever heard of. LADY SNEERWELL Poor Charles! SNAKE

132

True, madam; notwithstanding his vices, one can't help feeling for him. Ay, poor Charles! I'm sure I wish it was in my power to be of any essential service to him, for the man who does not share in the distresses of a brother, even though merited by his own misconduct, deserves— LADY SNEERWELL O lud, you are going to be moral and forget that you are among friends. JOSEPH SURFACE Egad, that's true. I'll keep that sentiment till I see Sir Peter. However, it is certainly a charity to rescue Maria from such a libertine, who, if he is to be reclaimed, can be so only by a person of your ladyship's superior accomplishments and understanding. SNAKE I believe, Lady Sneerwell, here's company coming. I'll go and copy the letter I mentioned to you.—Mr Surface, your most obedient. JOSEPH SURFACE Sir, your very devoted. Exit Snake Lady Sneerwell, I am very sorry you have put any further confidence in that fellow. LADY SNEERWELL Why so? JOSEPH SURFACE I have lately detected him in frequent conference with old Rowley, who was formerly my father's steward, and has never, you know, been a friend of mine. LADY SNEERWELL And do you think he would betray us? JOSEPH SURFACE Nothing more likely. Take my word for't, Lady Sneerwell. That fellow hasn't virtue enough to be faithful even to his own villainy. Ha! Maria! Enter Maria LADY SNEERWELL Maria, my dear, how do you do? What's the matter? MARIA O, there is that disagreeable lover of mine, Sir Benjamin Backbite, has just called at my guardian's with his odious uncle, Crabtree; so I slipped out and run hither to avoid them. LADY SNEERWELL Is that all? JOSEPH SURFACE If my brother Charles had been of the party, ma'am, perhaps you would not have been so much alarmed. LADY SNEERWELL Nay, now you are severe, for I dare swear the truth of the matter is Maria heard you were here.—But, my dear, what has Sir Benjamin done that you should avoid him so? MARIA O, he has done nothing; but 'tis for what he has said. His conversation is a perpetual libel on all his acquaintance. JOSEPH SURFACE Ay, and the worst of it is there is no advantage in not knowing him; for he'll abuse a stranger just as soon as his best friend—and his uncle's as bad. LADY SNEERWELL Nay, but we should make allowance. Sir Benjamin is a wit and a poet. MARIA For my part, I own, madam, wit loses its respect with me when I see it in company with malice. What do you think, Mr Surface? JOSEPH SURFACE Certainly, madam, to smile at the jest which plants a thorn in another's breast is to become a principal in the mischief. LADY SNEERWELL Pshaw! There's no possibility of being witty without a little ill nature. The malice of a good thing is the barb that makes it stick. What's your opinion, Mr Surface? JOSEPH SURFACE To be sure, madam, that conversation where the spirit of raillery is suppressed will ever appear tedious and insipid. LADY SNEERWELL Well, I'll not debate how far scandal may be allowable; but in a man I am sure it is always contemptible. We have pride, envy, rivalship, and a thousand motives to depreciate each other; but the male slanderer must have the cowardice of a woman before he can traduce one. Enter Servant SERVANT Madam, Mrs Candour is below, and, if your ladyship's at leisure, will leave her carriage. LADY SNEERWELL Beg her to walk in. JOSEPH SURFACE

133

[Exit Servant] Now, Maria, however, here is a character to your taste, for though Mrs Candour is a little talkative, everybody allows her to be the best-natured and best sort of woman. MARIA Yes; with a very gross affectation of good nature and benevolence she does more mischief than the direct malice of old Crabtree. JOSEPH SURFACE I'faith, 'tis very true, Lady Sneerwell. Whenever I hear the current running against the characters of my friends, I never think them in such danger as when Candour undertakes their defence. LADY SNEERWELL Hush, here she is. Enter Mrs Candour MRS CANDOUR My dear Lady Sneerwell, how have you been this century?—Mr Surface, what news do you hear? Though, indeed, it is no matter, for I think one hears nothing else but scandal. JOSEPH SURFACE Just so, indeed, madam. MRS CANDOUR Ah, Maria, child, what, is the whole affair off between you and Charles? His extravagance, I presume. The town talks of nothing else. MARIA I am very sorry, ma'am, the town has so little to do. MRS CANDOUR True, true, child; but there is no stopping people's tongues. I own I was hurt to hear it—as indeed I was to learn from the same quarter that your guardian Sir Peter and Lady Teazle have not agreed lately so well as could be wished. MARIA 'Tis strangely impertinent for people to busy themselves so. MRS CANDOUR Very true, child; but what's to be done? People will talk; there's no preventing it. Why, it was but yesterday I was told that Miss Gadabout had eloped with Sir Filigree Flirt; but, lord, there is no minding what one hears—though to be sure I had this from very good authority. MARIA Such reports are highly scandalous. MRS CANDOUR So they are, child. Shameful! Shameful! But the world is so censorious, no character escapes. Lud now, who would have suspected your friend Miss Prim of an indiscretion! Yet such is the ill nature of people that they say her uncle stopped her last week just as she was stepping into the York diligence with her dancing-master. MARIA I'll answer for't there are no grounds for the report. MRS CANDOUR O, no foundation in the world, I dare swear. No more probably than for the story circulated last month of Mrs Festino's affair with Colonel Casino, though to be sure that matter was never rightly cleared up. JOSEPH SURFACE The licence of invention some people take is monstrous indeed. MARIA 'Tis so; but in my opinion those who report such things are equally culpable. MRS CANDOUR To be sure they are. Tale-bearers are as bad as the tale-makers. 'Tis an old observation and a very true one; but what's to be done, as I said before? How will you prevent people from talking? Today Mrs Clackit assured me Mr and Mrs Honeymoon were at last become mere man and wife like the rest of their acquaintances. She likewise hinted that a certain widow in the next street had got rid of her dropsy and recovered her shape in a most surprising manner; and at the same time Miss Tattle who was by affirmed that Lord Buffalo had discovered his lady at a house of no extraordinary fame, and that Sir Harry Bouquet and Tom Saunter were to measure swords on a similar provocation. But, lord, do you think I would report these things? No, no; tale-bearers, as I said before, are just as bad as talemakers. JOSEPH SURFACE Ah, Mrs Candour, if everybody had your forbearance and good nature! MRS CANDOUR I confess, Mr Surface, I cannot bear to hear people attacked behind their backs; and when ugly circumstances come out against one's acquaintances, I own I always love to think the best. By the bye, I hope 'tis not true that your brother is absolutely ruined. 134

JOSEPH SURFACE I am afraid his circumstances are very bad indeed, ma'am. MRS CANDOUR Ah, I heard so. But you must tell him to keep up his spirits; everybody

almost is in the same way. Lord Spindle, Sir Thomas Splint, Captain Quinze, and Mr Nickit—all up, I hear, within this week! So, if Charles is undone, he'll find half his acquaintances ruined too; and that, you know, is a consolation. JOSEPH SURFACE Doubtless, ma'am, a very great one.

Source: Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. The School for Scandal and Other Plays. © 1998. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— Johnson's friend Oliver Goldsmith was a curious mixture of the old and the new. His novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) begins with dry humor but passes quickly into tearful calamity. His poem The Deserted Village (1770) is in form reminiscent of Pope, but in the tenderness of its sympathy for the lower classes it foreshadows the romantic age. In such plays as She Stoops to Conquer (1773) Goldsmith, like the younger Richard Sheridan in his School for Scandal (1777), demonstrated an older tradition of satirical quality and artistic adroitness that was to be anathema to a younger generation. —————————————————————————————————————

From Songs of Innocence and Experience English poet and artist William Blake‘s Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) are his best-known works of poetry and have had a lasting influence on children‘s literature. Some Songs, such as the ―Introduction‖ and ―The Lamb,‖ explore the innocence of children‘s understanding of God and the natural world. Others, such as ―The Chimney Sweeper‖ and ―The Garden of Love,‖ reveal the hardships both children and adults must confront in the unsheltered world of ―experience.‖ American-born English poet and critic T. S. Eliot wrote that Blake‘s poetry in Songs of Experience and other writings contained ―an honesty against which the whole world conspires because it is unpleasant.‖

From Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul By William Blake

Introduction Piping down the valleys wild Piping songs of pleasant glee On a cloud I saw a child, 135

And he laughing said to me: 'Pipe a song about a Lamb.' So I piped with merry chear. 'Piper pipe that song again—' So I piped, he wept to hear. 'Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe, Sing thy songs of happy chear.' So I sung the same again While he wept with joy to hear. 'Piper sit thee down and write In a book that all may read—' So he vanish'd from my sight. And I pluck'd a hollow reed, And I made a rural pen, And I stain'd the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear.

The Lamb Little Lamb who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Gave thee life & bid thee feed By the stream & o'er the mead; Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing wooly bright; Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice: Little Lamb who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Little Lamb I'll tell thee, Little Lamb I'll tell thee: He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb: He is meek & he is mild, He became a little child: I a child & thou a lamb, We are called by his name. Little Lamb God bless thee. Little Lamb God bless thee.

136

The Chimney Sweeper When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep. So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

The Tyger Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare sieze the fire? And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

The Garden of Love I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen: A Chapel was built in the midst, 137

Where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And Thou shalt not writ over the door; So I turn'd to the Garden of Love, That so many sweet flowers bore, And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be: And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

A Poison Tree I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow. And I waterd it in fears, Night & morning with my tears: And I sunned it with smiles, And with soft deceitful wiles. And it grew both day and night. Till it bore an apple bright. And my foe beheld it shine, And he knew that it was mine. And into my garden stole. When the night had veild the pole; In the morning glad I see My foe outstretchd beneath the tree. Source: Blake, William. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— The signs of this newer feeling, which resulted in romanticism, can be traced in the poetry of William Cowper and of Thomas Gray. The cultivation of a pensive and melancholy sensibility and the interruption of the rule of the heroic couplet, as in Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), hint at the period to come, as does Gray's interest in medieval, nonclassical literature. New interests are even more obvious in the highly original 138

poetry of the self-educated artist and engraver William Blake. His work consists in part of simple, almost childlike lyrics (Songs of Innocence, 1789), as well as of powerful but lengthy and obscure declarations of a new mythological vision of life (The Book of Thel, 1789). All Blake's poetry expresses a revolt against the ideal of reason (which he considered destructive to life) and advocates the life of feeling—but in a more vital and assertive sense than is the case with the other previously mentioned preromantics. Similarly robust and passionate are the lyrics of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, which are characterized by his use of regional Scottish vernacular. The simplicity, forcefulness, and powerful emotion of the ancient ballads of the Scottish-English border region, as revealed in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), by Bishop Thomas Percy, were likewise influential in the development of romanticism. —————————————————————————————————————

Richardson: From Pamela Eighteenth-century English writer Samuel Richardson, author of one of the first classic English novels, was an unusual novelist for his time. He was largely self-educated and obliged to work for a living, and therefore was not considered a gentleman. The heroine in his novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) was a servant girl who rejected the advances of her master. The novel was written as a series of letters exchanged by the characters. In the following excerpt, Pamela writes to her parents about the situation with Mr. B., the master of the house. Mrs. Jervis is the housekeeper.

From Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded By Samuel Richardson

Letter XXI Now I will tell you what passed between Mrs Jervis and me. She hoped, she said, seeing me in a little hurry, on her coming in, that she was not unwelcome. She could not endure that I should be so much by myself. 'I always,' said I,' rejoice to see my dear Mrs Jervis.' 'I have had,‟ said she, „a world of talk with my master about you.' 'I am sorry,' said I, 'that I am made of so much consequence as to be talked of by him.' 'O,' replied she, 'I must not tell you all; but you are of more consequence to him than you think for—' 'Or wish for,' said I; 'for the fruits of being of consequence to him, might be to make me of none to myself, or any body else. 'But I suppose,' proceeded I, 'that I am of so much consequence to him as to vex him, if it be but to think, he can't make a fool of such a one as I; and that is a rebuke to the pride of his high condition, which he did not expect, and knows not how to put up with.' 'There may be something in that,' said she; 'but indeed, Pamela, he is very angry with you too; and calls you perverse; wonders at his own folly for having taken so much notice of you! He was willing to shew you the more favour, he says, because of his mother's love for you, and

139

recommendation; and he had thoughts of continuing it to you for your own sake, could you have known how to comport yourself as you ought to do. But he saw that too much notice—' 'Too much notice, indeed, Mrs Jervis,' said. I. 'Do you think I should ever have forgot my duty as a servant, if he had not forgot his as a master?' 'He says you shall go,' replied she; 'for he thinks it won't be for his reputation to keep you: but he wished (don't speak of it for the world, Pamela) that he knew a lady of birth, just such another as yourself, and he would marry her to-morrow.' I coloured as red as the very scarlet, I believe; but said, 'Yet if I were the lady of birth, and he would offer to be rude first, as he has twice done to me, I don't know whether I would have him: for she that can bear an insult of that kind, I should think not worthy to be a gentleman's wife; any more than I should look upon him as a gentleman, that could offer it. But, dear Mrs Jervis,' added I, very seriously, 'let me say, that I am now more full of fears than ever. Never, for the future, I beseech you, think of putting me upon asking to stay. To tell me that my master likes me, when I know what end he aims at, is abomination to my ears; and I shan't think myself safe, till I am at my poor father's and mother's.' She was a little angry with me, 'till I assured her, that I had not the least uneasiness on her account, but thought myself safe in her protection and friendship. And so we dropped the discourse for that time. I hope to have finished this waistcoat in two days; after which, I have only some fine linen to get up, and shall then let you know how I contrive as to my passage; for the heavy rains will make it sad travelling on foot: but, perhaps, I shall be able for a small matter to procure a place in Farmer Nichols's one-horse-chaise, which goes to—market twice a week with his wife or daughter: and that you know, is upwards of ten miles on the way. But I hope to let you know more. P. A. Letter XXII All my fellow-servants have now some notion, that I am to go away; but can't imagine for what. Mrs Jervis tells them, that my father and mother, growing in years, cannot live without me; and so I go home to them, to help to comfort their old age; but they seem not to believe that to be the reason: because the butler heard my master ask me very roughly, as I passed by him in the entry leading to the hall, how long I was to stay here; and tell me, calling me idle girl, that I minded my pen more than my needle. Little things for such a gentleman as he is to say, and to ask, had there not been a reason. He seemed startled, when he saw the butler, as he entered the hall, where Mr Jonathan stood. 'What do you here?' said he. The butler was confounded; and so was I; for, never having been taxed so roughly, I could not help crying; and got out of both their ways to Mrs Jervis, and made my complaint. 'This love,' said she, 'is the deuce! in how many strange shapes does it make people shew themselves! And in some the farthest from their hearts.' So one, and then another, has been since whispering, 'Pray, Mrs Jervis, are we to lose Mrs Pamela?' as they always call me. 'What has she done?' And then she tells them as above, about going home to you. My master came in, just now, to speak to Mrs Jervis about household matters, having some company to dine with him tomorrow; and I stood up, and having been crying, at his roughness in the entry, I turned away my face. 'You may well,' said he, 'turn away your cursed face. Mrs Jervis, how long is she to be about this waistcoat?' Cursed face! What words were these! 140

'Sir,' said I, 'if your honour had pleased, I would have taken the waistcoat with me; and though it may be now finished in a few hours, I will do so still, and remove out of your house and sight for ever so hated a creature.' 'Mrs Jervis,' said he, (not speaking to me) 'I believe this little villain of a girl has the power of witchcraft; for she bewitches all that come near her. She makes even you, who should know better what the world is, think her an angel of light.' I offered to go away; for I believed he wanted me to ask to stay in my place, for all this his great wrath and hard words; and he said, 'Stay here! stay here when I bid you!' and snatched my hand. I trembled, and said, 'I will, I will' for he hurt my fingers. He seemed to have a mind to say something to me; but broke off abruptly, and said, 'Begone!' And away I hurried; and he and Mrs Jervis had a deal of talk, as she told me; and in it he expressed himself vexed to have spoken in Mr Jonathan's hearing. Now you must know, that Mr Jonathan, our butler, is a very grave good sort of old man, with his hair as white as silver; and an honest worthy man he is. Hurrying down stairs from my master and Mrs Jervis, as I told you, into the parlour, there was he. He took my hand, but in a gentler manner than my master did, with both his; and he said, 'Ah, sweet, sweet Mrs Pamela! what is it I heard but just now! I am sorry at my heart; but I am sure I will sooner believe any body in fault than you.' 'Thank you, Mr Jonathan,' said I; 'but as you value your place, don't be seen speaking to such an one as me.' I cried too; and slipt away as fast as I could from him, for his own sake, lest he should be seen to pity me. And now I will give you an instance how much I am also in the favour of Mr Longman, our steward. I had lost my pen some-how; and my paper being written out, I stepped to Mr Longman's office, and begged him to give me a pen or two, and two or three sheets of paper. 'Ay, that I will, my sweet maiden!' said he; and gave me three pens, some wafers, a stick of wax, and twelve sheets of paper; and coming from his desk, where he was writing, he said, 'Let me have a word or two with you, my sweet little mistress' (for so these two good old men often call me; for I believe they love me dearly): 'I hear bad news: that we are going to lose you: I hope it is not true?' 'Yes, it is, sir, said I; 'but I was in hopes it would not be known till I went away.' 'What a dickens,' said he, 'ails our master of late! I never saw such an alteration in any man in my life. He is pleased with nobody, as I see; and by what Jonathan tells me just now, he was quite out of the way with you. What could you have done to him, trow? Only Mrs Jervis is a very good woman, or I should have feared she had been your enemy.' 'Mrs Jervis,' said I, 'is a just good woman, and, next to my father and mother, the best friend I have in the world.' 'Well then,' said he, 'it must be worse. Shall I guess? You are too pretty, my sweet mistress, and it may be, too virtuous. Ah! have I not hit it?' 'No, good Mr Longman,' said I, 'don't think any thing amiss of my master; he is cross and angry with me, that's true; but possibly I may have given occasion for it; and because I chuse to go to my father and mother rather than stay here, he may perhaps think me ungrateful. But you know, sir, that a father and mother's comfort is the dearest thing of all others to a good child.' ' Sweet excellence!' said he, 'this becomes you; but I know the world and mankind too well; though I must hear, and see, and say nothing! And so a blessing attend my little sweeting, wherever you go!' And away went I, with a court'sy and thanks. Now it pleases one, my dear father and mother, you must think, to be so beloved. How much better, by good fame and integrity, it is to get every one's good word but one, than by pleasing that one, to make every one else one's enemy, and be a wicked creature besides! I am, &c.

141

Letter XXIII We had a great many neighbouring gentlemen, and their ladies, this day at dinner; and my master made a fine entertainment for them. And Isaac and Mr Jonathan, and Benjamin waited at table. And Isaac tells Mrs Jervis, that the ladies will by and by come to see the house, and have the curiosity to see me; for, it seems, they said to my master, when the jokes flew about, 'Well, Mr B—, we understand, you have a servant-maid, who is the greatest beauty in the county; and we promise ourselves to see her before we go.' 'You will do her too much honour, ladies,' said he. 'The wench is well enough; but no such beauty as you talk of. She was my mother's waiting-maid, as you know; and her friends being low in the world, my mother on her death-bed recommended her to my compassion. She is young, and every thing is pretty that is young.' 'Ay, ay,' said one of the ladies, 'that's true; but if your mother had not recommended her so kindly, there is so much merit in beauty, that I make no doubt, but such a fine gentleman as somebody is thought to be, would have wanted no inducement to be generous to it.' They all laughed at my master: and he, it seems, laughed for company; but said, 'I don't know how it is, but I see with different eyes from other people; for I have heard much more talk of her prettiness, than I think it deserves: She is well enough, as I said; but her greatest excellence is, that she is humble, courteous, and faithful and makes all her fellow-servants love her: My house-keeper, in particular, doats upon her; and you know, ladies, that Mrs Jervis is a woman of discernment: And as for Jonathan here, and my good old steward Longman, if they were younger men, I am told, they would fight for her. Is it not true, Jonathan?' 'By my troth' sir,' answered Jonathan, 'I never knew her peer; and all your honour's family are of the same mind as to her.' 'Do you hear, ladies?' said my master. 'Well,' said the ladies, 'we will make a visit to Mrs Jervis by and by, and hope to see this paragon.' I believe they are coming; and will tell you the rest by and by. I wish they had come, and were gone. Why should they make me the subject of their diversion? Well, these fine ladies however made their visit to Mrs Jervis in her office, that was the pretence. I would have been absent, if I could; and did step into the closet; so they saw me not when they came in. There were four of them, Mrs Arthur at the great white house on the hill, Mrs Brooks, Miss Towers, (Miss she is called, being a single lady, and yet cannot be less than thirty years of age) and the other, it seems, a countess, of some hard name, I forget what. Now, if I shall not tire you, I will give you some little account of the characters and persons of these four ladies; for when I was hardly twelve years old, you used not to dislike my descriptions. You must know, then, that Mrs Arthur is a comely person, inclinable to be fat; but very easy with it, and has pretty good features, though a little too masculine, in my opinion. She has the air of a person of birth, and seems by it to shew, that she expects to be treated as such; and has a freedom and presence of mind in all she says or does, that sets her above being in the least conscious of imperfection in either. It is said, she is pretty passionate in her family on small occasions, and reminds her husband, now and then, that he is not of birth equal to her own; though he is of a good gentleman's family too: and yet her ancestor was ennobled, it seems, but two reigns ago. On the whole, however, she bears no bad character, when her passion is over; and will be sometimes very familiar with her inferiors: yet, Mrs Jervis says Lady Davers is more passionate a great deal; but has better qualities, and is more bountiful. Mr Arthur has the character of a worthy gentleman, as gentlemen go; for he drinks hard, it seems; so indeed all the gentlemen around us do, except my master, who has not that vice to answer for. I am sure, I 142

have a double reason to wish—for his sake as well as my own—he had no worse! But let that pass, at present. Mrs Brooks is well descended, though not of quality. And has as much pride as if she was, if I can guess by her scornful looks: For being a tall thin lady, and of a forbidding kind of aspect, she looks down upon one, as it were, with so much disdain! Yet she has no bad character in her family; she does not talk much, but affects to be thought a lady of great discernment. Her spouse bears a pretty good character; but he gives himself great airs of jesting and rallying upon serious things; and particularly on matrimony, which is his standing jest, whenever his lady is not by. And some people impute this to him as wit: but I remember a saying of my good lady's, 'That any body might have a character for wit, who could give themselves the liberty to say what would shock others to think.' The countess is not only noble by marriage, but by birth: But don't you wonder to find me scribble so much about family and birth? When, had I reason to boast of it, I should, if I know my own mind, very little value myself upon it; but, contrarily, think with the poet I have heard quoted, That VIRTUE is the only nobility. But, indeed, even we inferiors, when we get into genteel families, are infected with this vanity; and though we cannot brag of our own, we will sometimes pride ourselves in that of our principals. But, for my part, I cannot forbear smiling at the absurdity of persons even of the first quality, who value themselves upon their ancestors merits, rather than their own. For is it not as much as to say, they are conscious they have no other?…

Source: Richardson, Samuel. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. Penguin Books. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— Among writers of the novel—a newly popular form in this period—an advocate of sentiment and simple, innocent feelings had already appeared in the person of Samuel Richardson. In his sentimental novel Clarissa (1747-1748), the plight of an innocent girl, seduced and destroyed by her suitor, is represented through lengthy letters interchanged among the characters. This device permits an unprecedented revelation of motives and feelings. Richardson's contemporary Henry Fielding evinced his connection with the earlier satirical spirit in his novel Joseph Andrews (1742), which parodies Richardson's other novel of virtue besieged, Pamela (1740). Fielding's greatest novel, Tom Jones (1749), reveals a robust and healthy spirit of good sense and comedy, in which well-intentioned vigor wins out over excessive hypocrisy. Fielding's contemporary, the Scottish-born Tobias Smollett, wrote a number of novels of picaresque adventure, the last and probably best of which is Humphry Clinker (1771). The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767), the masterpiece of another great British novelist of the century, Laurence Sterne, indulges in the new cult of sentiment, but by reason of its cast of eccentric characters and the skilled weaving of the most extraordinary behavior into the depiction of their personalities, this novel lies outside the usual historical categories. —————————————————————————————————————

143

From Tom Jones Originally entitled The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, this comic epic by English author Henry Fielding became an instant success upon publication in 1749. Fielding considered himself a historian of human nature, recognizing elements of good in a bad person as well as failings in a virtuous person. Fielding believed that a person could still have worth in spite of these failings, as Tom Jones, the main character of his book. In the following selection, Tom, pursued by his true love Sophia, hears the screams of a woman whom he discovers to be the wife of the well-known officer Captain Waters. After saving Mrs. Waters, he takes her to an inn, where they flirt with each other over a hearty meal. They retire to a single room, giving rise to gossip among the lodgers who mistake her for Tom‘s unknown mother. When Sophia catches up with Tom and learns of his improprieties, she flees and Tom follows after her.

From Tom Jones By Henry Fielding

An Apology for all Heroes who have good Stomachs, with a Description of a Battle of the amorous Kind. Heroes, notwithstanding the high Ideas, which by the Means of Flatterers they may entertain of themselves, or the World may conceive of them, have certainly more of Mortal than Divine about them. However elevated their Minds may be, their Bodies at least (which is much the major Part of most) are liable to the worst Infirmities, and subject to the vilest Offices of human Nature. Among these latter the Act of Eating, which hath by several wise Men been considered as extremely mean and derogatory from the Philosophic Dignity, must be in some Measure performed by the greatest Prince, Heroe, or Philosopher upon Earth; nay, sometimes Nature hath been so frolicksome as to exact of these dignified Characters, a much more exorbitant Share of this Office, than she hath obliged those of the lowest Order to perform. To say the Truth, as no known Inhabitant of this Globe is really more than Man, so none need be ashamed of submitting to what the Necessities of Man demand; but when those great Personages I have just mentioned, condescend to aim at confining such low Offices to themselves; as when by hoarding or destroying, they seem desirous to prevent any others from eating, they then surely become very low and despicable. Now after this short Preface, we think it no Disparagement to our Heroe to mention the immoderate Ardour with which he laid about him at this Season. Indeed it may be doubted, whether Ulysses, who by the Way seems to have had the best Stomach of all the Heroes in that eating Poem of the Odyssey, ever made a better Meal. Three Pounds at least of that Flesh which formerly had contributed to the Composition of an Ox, was now honoured with becoming Part of the individual Mr. Jones. This Particular we thought ourselves obliged to mention, as it may account for our Heroe's temporary Neglect of his fair Companion; who eat but very little, and was indeed employed in Considerations of a very different Nature, which passed unobserved by Jones, till he had entirely satisfied that Appetite which a Fast of twenty-four Hours had procured him; but his Dinner was no sooner ended, than his Attention to other Matters revived; with these Matters therefore we shall now proceed to acquaint the Reader.

144

Mr. Jones, of whose personal Accomplishments we have hitherto said very little, was in reality, one of the handsomest young Fellows in the World. His Face, besides being the Picture of Health, had in it the most apparent Marks of Sweetness and Good-Nature. These Qualities were indeed so characteristical in his Countenance, that while the Spirit and Sensibility in his Eyes, tho' they must have been perceived by an accurate Observer, might have escaped the Notice of the less discerning, so strongly was this Good-nature painted in his Look, that it was remarked by almost every one who saw him. It was, perhaps, as much owing to this, as to a very fine Complexion, that his Face had a Delicacy in it almost inexpressible, and which might have given him an Air rather too effeminate, had it not been joined to a most masculine Person and Mein; which latter had as much in them of the Hercules, as the former had of the Adonis. He was besides active, genteel, gay and good-humoured, and had a Flow of Animal Spirits, which enlivened every Conversation where he was present. When the Reader hath duly reflected on these many Charms which all centered in our Heroe, and considers at the same Time the fresh Obligations which Mrs. Waters had to him, it will be a Mark more of Prudery than Candour to entertain a bad Opinion of her, because she conceived a very good Opinion of him. But whatever Censures may be passed upon her, it is my Business to relate Matters of Fact with Veracity. Mrs. Waters had, in Truth, not only a good Opinion of our Heroe, but a very great Affection for him. To speak out boldly at once, she was in Love, according to the present universally received Sense of that Phrase, by which Love is applied indiscriminately to the desirable Objects of all our Passions, Appetites, and Senses, and is understood to be that Preference which we give to one Kind of Food rather than to another. But tho' the Love to these several Objects may possibly be one and the same in all Cases, its Operations however must be allowed to be different; for how much soever we may be in Love with an excellent Surloin of Beef, or Bottle of Burgundy; with a Damask Rose, or Cremona Fiddle; yet do we never smile, nor ogle, nor dress, nor flatter, nor endeavour by any other Arts or Tricks to gain the Affection of the said Beef, &c. Sigh indeed we sometimes may; but it is generally in the Absence, not in the Presence of the beloved Object. For otherwise we might possibly complain of their Ingratitude and Deafness, with the same Reason as Pasiphae doth of her Bull, whom she endeavoured to engage by all the Coquetry practiced with good Success in the Drawing Room, on the much more sensible, as well as tender, Hearts of the fine Gentlemen there. The contrary happens, in that Love which operates between Persons of the same Species, but of different Sexes. Here we are no sooner in Love, than it becomes our principal Care to engage the Affection of the Object beloved. For what other Purpose indeed are our Youth instructed in all the Arts of rendering themselves agreeable? If it was not with a View to this Love, I question whether any of those Trades which deal in setting off and adorning the human Person would procure a Livelihood. Nay, those great Polishers of our Manners, who are by some thought to teach what principally distinguishes us from the Brute Creation, even Dancing-Masters themselves, might possibly find no Place in Society. In short, all the Graces which young Ladies and young Gentlemen too learn from others; and the many Improvements which, by the Help of a Looking-glass, they add of their own, are in Reality those very Spicula & Faces Amoris, so often mentioned by Ovid; or, as they are sometimes called in our own Language, The whole Artillery of Love. Now Mrs. Waters and our Heroe had no sooner sat down together, than the former began to play this Artillery upon the latter. But here, as we are about to attempt a Description hitherto

145

unessayed either in Prose or Verse, we think proper to invoke the Assistance of certain Aerial Beings, who will, we doubt not, come kindly to our Aid on this Occasion. 'Say then, ye Graces, you that inhabit the heavenly Mansions of Seraphina's Countenance; for you are truly Divine, are always in her Presence, and well know all the Arts of charming; say, what were the Weapons now used to captivate the Heart of Mr. Jones. 'First, from two lovely blue Eyes, whose bright Orbs flashed Lightning at their Discharge, flew forth two pointed Ogles. But happily for our Heroe, hit only a vast Piece of Beef which he was then conveying into his Plate, and harmless spent their Force. The fair Warrior perceived their Miscarriage, and immediately from her fair Bosom drew forth a deadly Sigh. A Sigh, which none could have heard unmoved, and which was sufficient at once to have swept off a dozen Beaus; so soft, so sweet, so tender, that the insinuating Air must have found its subtle Way to the Heart of our Heroe, had it not luckily been driven from his Ears by the coarse Bubbling of some bottled Ale, which at that Time he was pouring forth. Many other Weapons did she assay; but the God of Eating (if there be any such Deity; for I do not confidently assert it) preserved his Votary; or perhaps it may not be Dignus Vindice nodus, and the present Security of Jones may be accounted for by natural Means: For as Love frequently preserves from the Attacks of Hunger, so may Hunger possibly, in some Cases, defend us against Love. 'The Fair One, enraged at her frequent Disappointments, determined on a short Cessation of Arms. Which Interval she employed in making ready every Engine of amorous Warfare for the renewing of the Attack, when Dinner should be over. 'No sooner then was the Cloth removed, than she again began her Operations. First, having planted her Right Eye side-ways against Mr. Jones, she shot from its Corner a most penetrating Glance; which, tho' great Part of its Force was spent before it reached our Heroe, did not vent itself absolutely without Effect. This the Fair One perceiving, hastily withdrew her Eyes, and leveled them downwards as if she was concerned for what she had done: Tho' by this Means she designed only to draw him from his Guard, and indeed to open his Eyes, through which she intended to surprize his Heart. And now, gently lifting up those two bright Orbs which had already begun to make an Impression on poor Jones, she discharged a Volley of small Charms at once from her whole Countenance in a Smile. Not a Smile of Mirth, nor of Joy; but a Smile of Affection, which most Ladies have always ready at their Command, and which serves them to shew at once their Good-Humour, their pretty Dimples, and their white Teeth. 'This Smile our Heroe received full in his Eyes, and was immediately staggered with its Force. He then began to see the Designs of the Enemy, and indeed to feel their Success. A Parley now was set on Foot between the Parties; during which the artful Fair so slily and imperceptibly carried on her Attack, that she had almost subdued the Heart of our Heroe, before she again repaired to Acts of Hostility. To confess the Truth, I am afraid Mr. Jones maintained a Kind of Dutch Defense, and treacherously delivered up the Garrison, without duly weighing his Allegiance to the fair Sophia. In short, no sooner had the amorous Parley ended, and the Lady had unmasked the Royal Battery, by carelessly letting her Handkerchief drop from her Neck, than the Heart of Mr. Jones was entirely taken, and the fair Conqueror enjoyed the usual Fruits of her Victory.' Here the Graces think proper to end their Description, and here we think proper to end the Chapter.

Source: Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones. Baker, Sheridan ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

146

The Romantic Age 147

VI

THE ROMANTIC AGE

Extending from about 1789 until 1837, the romantic age stressed emotion over reason. One objective of the French Revolution (1789-1799) was to destroy an older tradition that had come to seem artificial, and to assert the liberty, spirit, and heartfelt unity of the human race. To many writers of the romantic age this objective seemed equally appropriate in the field of English letters. In addition, the romantic age in English literature was characterized by the subordination of reason to intuition and passion, the cult of nature much as the word is now understood and not as Pope understood it, the primacy of the individual will over social norms of behavior, the preference for the illusion of immediate experience as opposed to generalized and typical experience, and the interest in what is distant in time and place.

A

The Romantic Poets

William Wordsworth William Wordsworth, considered one of the foremost English romantic poets, composed flowing blank verse on the spirituality of nature and the wonders of human imagination. In ―Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood‖ (1807), Wordsworth considers the Platonic notion that humans forget all their knowledge at birth and spend the remainder of their lives recollecting, rather than learning. Wordsworth celebrates the child, who can enjoy an ecstatic communion with nature, and hopes that in adulthood people can eventually recover this ecstasy by heeding intuition. This excerpt is recited by an actor. (p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved./Culver Pictures

148

Lord Byron The most colorful of the English romantic poets, Lord Byron embodied the romantic hero in his own quixotic lifestyle. Byron modeled the recurring hero in his poetry—the defiant young man dwelling upon a mysterious past—after himself. Byron died in 1824, soon after becoming commander in chief of the Greek forces during the struggle against the Ottoman Empire for independence. Byron‘s epic masterpiece, Don Juan (1819-1824), satirizes English society in 16,000 lines. This excerpt is recited by an actor. (p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved./Bettmann/Corbis

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” The final lines of John Keats‘s 1820 poem, ―Ode on a Grecian Urn‖ (recited by an actor), describe the highest form of meaning as pure beauty. The poem considers an urn, unchanged through the centuries, that retains a moment of eternal beauty. According to Keats, because the urn‘s beauty remains frozen in time, the object has more significance for humanity than does individual happiness, which is more of a fleeting concern. Generally considered one of the most important poets in English literature, Keats wrote during the early 19th century before dying of tuberculosis in 1821 at the early age of 25. (p) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved./© Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

The first important expression of romanticism was in the Lyrical Ballads (1798) of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, young men who were aroused to creative activity by the French Revolution; later they became disillusioned with what followed it. The poems of Wordsworth in this volume treat ordinary subjects with a new freshness that imparts a certain radiance to them. On the other hand, Coleridge's main contribution, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” masterfully creates an illusion of reality in relating strange, exotic, or obviously unreal events. These two directions characterize most of the later works of the two poets. 149

From The Prelude In The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850), English poet William Wordsworth explored his childhood and his development as a poet. The posthumously published work asserts the importance of the individual poet‘s imagination in creating poetry and art. Wordsworth began the poem in 1799, completed a major revision in 1805, and continued revising and adding material to a final version that was published by his wife after his death in 1850. The following lines, from the first book of the 1850 version, are examples of the idyllic recollections of Wordsworth‘s childhood that appear throughout the poem.

From The Prelude By William Wordsworth

Oh, many a time have I, a five years' child, In a small mill-race severed from his stream, Made one long bathing of a summer's day; Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again Alternate, all a summer's day, or scoured The sandy fields, leaping through flowery groves Of yellow ragwort; or when rock and hill, The woods, and distant Skiddaw's lofty height, Were bronzed with deepest radiance, stood alone Beneath the sky, as if I had been born On Indian plains, and from my mother's hut Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport A naked savage, in the thunder shower. Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear: Much favoured in my birth-place, and no less In that beloved Vale to which erelong We were transplanted—there were we let loose For sports of wider range. Ere I had told Ten birth-days, when among the mountain slopes Frost, and the breath of frosty wind, had snapped The last autumnal crocus, 'twas my joy With store of springes o'er my shoulder hung To range the open heights where woodcocks ran Along the smooth green turf. Through half the night, Scudding away from snare to snare, I plied That anxious visitation;—moon and stars Were shining o'er my head. I was alone, And seemed to be a trouble to the peace That dwelt among them. Sometimes it befel In these night wanderings, that a strong desire O'erpowered my better reason, and the bird 150

Which was the captive of another's toil Became my prey; and when the deed was done I heard among the solitary hills Low breathings coming after me, and sounds Of undistinguishable motion, steps Almost as silent as the turf they trod. Nor less when spring had warmed the cultured Vale, Roved we as plunderers where the mother-bird Had in high places built her lodge; though mean Our object and inglorious, yet the end Was not ignoble. Oh! when I have hung Above the raven's nest, by knots of grass And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock But ill-sustained, and almost (so it seemed) Suspended by the blast that blew amain, Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time While on the perilous ridge I hung alone, With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind Blow through my ear! the sky seemed not a sky Of earth—and with what motion moved the clouds! Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows Like harmony in music; there is a dark Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, makes them cling together In one society. How strange that all The terrors, pains, and early miseries, Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused Within my mind, should e'er have borne a part, And that a needful part, in making up The calm existence that is mine when I Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end! Thanks to the means which Nature deigned to employ; Whether her fearless visitings, or those That came with soft alarm, like hurtless light Opening the peaceful clouds; or she may use Severer interventions, ministry More palpable, as best might suit her aim. One summer evening (led by her) I found A little boat tied to a willow tree Within a rocky cove, its usual home. Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on; Leaving behind her still, on either side, 151

Small circles glittering idly in the moon, Until they melted all into one track Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows, Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point With an unswerving line, I fixed my view Upon the summit of a craggy ridge, The horizon's utmost boundary; for above Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky. She was an elfin pinnace; lustily I dipped my oars into the silent lake, And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat Went heaving through the water like a swan; When, from behind that craggy steep till then The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, And growing still in stature the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned, And through the silent water stole my way Back to the covert of the willow tree; There in her mooring-place I left my bark,— And through the meadows homeward went, in grave And serious mood; but after I had seen That spectacle, for many days, my brain Worked with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts There hung a darkness, call it solitude Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes Remained, no pleasant images of trees, Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; But huge and mighty forms, that do not live Like living men, moved slowly through the mind By day, and were a trouble to my dreams. Wisdom and Spirit of the universe! Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought, That givest to forms and images a breath And everlasting motion, not in vain By day or star-light thus from my first dawn Of childhood didst thou intwine for me The passions that build up our human soul; Not with the mean and vulgar works of man, But with high objects, with enduring things— With life and nature, purifying thus The elements of feeling and of thought, 152

And sanctifying, by such discipline, Both pain and fear, until we recognise A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

Source: Wordsworth,William. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850. Wordsworth, Jonathan and M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill, eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— For Wordsworth the great theme remained the world of simple, natural things, in the countryside or among people. He reproduced this world with so close and understanding an eye as to add a hitherto unperceived glory to it. His representation of human nature is similarly simple but revealing. It is at its best, as in “Tintern Abbey” or “Ode on Intimations of Immortality,” when he speaks of the mystical kinship between quiet nature and the human soul and of the spiritual refreshment yielded by humanity's sympathetic contact with the rest of God's creation. Not only is the immediacy of experience in the poetry of Wordsworth opposed to neoclassical notions, but also his poetic style constitutes a rejection of the immediate poetic past. Wordsworth condemned the idea of a specifically poetic language, such as that of neoclassical poetry, and he strove instead for what he considered the more powerful effects of ordinary, everyday language. Coleridge's natural bent, on the other hand, was toward the strange, the exotic, and the mysterious. Unlike Wordsworth, he wrote few poems, and these during a very brief period. In such poems as “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel,” the beauties and horrors of the far distant in time or place are evoked in a style that is neither neoclassical nor simple in Wordsworth's fashion, but that, instead, recalls the splendor and extravagance of the Elizabethans. At the same time Coleridge achieved an immediacy of sensation that suggests the natural although hidden affinity between him and Wordsworth, and their common rejection of the 18thcentury spirit in poetry. Another poet who found delight in the far distant in time was Sir Walter Scott, who, after evincing an early interest in the ancient ballads of his native Scotland, wrote a series of narrative poems glorifying the active virtues of the simple, vigorous life and culture of his land in the Middle Ages, before it had been affected by modern civilization. In such of these poems as The Lady of the Lake (1810) he employed a style of little originality. His work, however, was the more popular among his immediate contemporaries for that very reason, long before the full stature of Wordsworth's more impressive poetry was recognized. Some of Scott's Waverley novels, a series of historical works, have given him a more permanent reputation as a writer of prose. —————————————————————————————————————

153

Byron: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Soon after writing an angry response to critics who had maligned a satire he had published in 1809, 19th-century English romantic poet Lord Byron left England for Albania, where he began work on the poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The first two cantos, whose publication made Byron an overnight literary success, describe Childe Harold‘s travels through Spain, Portugal, Albania, and Greece as he reflects on himself and his surroundings. Written six years later, in 1818, the third canto follows the pilgrim through Belgium, the Rhine, the Alps, and the Jura. Here, Childe Harold ponders the events and people associated with the places he visits. The following selections from the third canto begin with the self-reflections of Childe Harold who exemplifies Byron‘s bestknown character type, the ‗Byronic hero‘.

From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage By Lord Byron

Canto the Third I Is thy face like thy mother's, my fair child! ADA! sole daughter of my house and heart? When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled, And when we parted,—not as now we part, But with a hope.— Awaking with a start, The waters heave around me; and on high The winds lift up their voices: I depart, Whither I know not; but the hour's gone by, When Albion's lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye. II Once more upon the waters! yet once more! And the waves bound beneath me as a steed That knows his rider. Welcome to their roar! Swift be their guidance, wheresoe'er it lead! Though the strained mast should quiver as a reed, And the rent canvass fluttering strew the gale, Still must I on; for I am as a weed, Flung from the rock, on Ocean's foam, to sail Where'er the surge may sweep, the tempest's breath prevail. III In my youth's summer I did sing of One, The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind; Again I seize the theme, then but begun, And bear it with me, as the rushing wind Bears the cloud onwards: in that Tale I find 154

The furrows of long thought, and dried-up tears, Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind, O'er which all heavily the journeying years Plod the last sands of life,—where not a flower appears. IV Since my young days of passion—joy, or pain— Perchance my heart and harp have lost a string— And both may jar: it may be, that in vain I would essay as I have sung to sing; Yet, though a dreary strain, to this I cling; So that it wean me from the weary dream Of selfish grief or gladness—so it fling Forgetfulness around me—it shall seem To me, though to none else, a not ungrateful theme. V He, who grown agèd in this world of woe, In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life, So that no wonder waits him—nor below Can Love or Sorrow, Fame, Ambition, Strife, Cut to his heart again with the keen knife Of silent, sharp endurance—he can tell Why Thought seeks refuge in lone caves, yet rife With airy images, and shapes which dwell Still unimpaired, though old, in the Soul's haunted cell. VI 'Tis to create, and in creating live A being more intense that we endow With form our fancy, gaining as we give The life we image, even as I do now— What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou, Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth, Invisible but gazing, as I glow Mixed with thy spirit, blended with thy birth, And feeling still with thee in my crushed feelings' dearth. VII Yet must I think less wildly:—I have thought Too long and darkly, till my brain became, In its own eddy boiling and o'erwrought, A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame: And thus, untaught in youth my heart to tame, My springs of life were poisoned. 'Tis too late! Yet am I changed; though still enough the same In strength to bear what Time can not abate, And feed on bitter fruits without accusing Fate. 155

XLI If, like a tower upon a headlong rock, Thou hadst been made to stand or fall alone, Such scorn of man had helped to brave the shock; But men's thoughts were the steps which paved thy throne, Their admiration thy best weapon shone; The part of Philip's son was thine—not then (Unless aside thy Purple had been thrown) Like stern Diogenes to mock at men: For sceptred Cynics Earth were far too wide a den. XLII But Quiet to quick bosoms is a Hell, And there hath been thy bane; there is a fire And motion of the Soul which will not dwell In its own narrow being, but aspire Beyond the fitting medium of desire; And, but once kindled, quenchless evermore, Preys upon high adventure, nor can tire Of aught but rest; a fever at the core, Fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore. XLIII This makes the madmen who have made men mad By their contagion; Conquerors and Kings, Founders of sects and systems, to whom add Sophists, Bards, Statesmen, all unquiet things Which stir too strongly the soul's secret springs, And are themselves the fools to those they fool; Envied, yet how unenviable! what stings Are theirs! One breast laid open were a school Which would unteach Mankind the lust to shine or rule: XLIV Their breath is agitation, and their life A storm whereon they ride, to sink at last, And yet so nursed and bigoted to strife, That should their days, surviving perils past, Melt to calm twilight, they feel overcast With sorrow and supineness, and so die; Even as a flame unfed, which runs to waste With its own flickering, or a sword laid by, Which eats into itself, and rusts ingloriously. XLV He who ascends to mountain-tops, shall find The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow; 156

He who surpasses or subdues mankind, Must look down on the hate of those below. Though high above the Sun of Glory glow, And far beneath the Earth and Ocean spread, Round him are icy rocks, and loudly blow Contending tempests on his naked head, And thus reward the toils which to those summits led.

Source: Lord Byron, George Gordon. Byron’s Poetry. McConnell, Frank D. ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— A second generation of romantic poets remained revolutionary in some sense throughout their poetic careers, unlike Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Scott. George Gordon, Lord Byron, is one of the exemplars of a personality in tragic revolt against society. As in his stormy personal life, so also in such poems as Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812) and Don Juan (1819-1824), this generous but egotistical aristocrat revealed with uneven pathos or with striking irony and cynicism the vagrant feelings and actions of great souls caught in a petty world. Byron's satirical spirit and strong sense of social realism kept him apart from other English romantics; unlike the rest, he proclaimed, for example, a high regard for Pope, whom he sometimes imitated. The other great poet-revolutionary of the time, Percy Bysshe Shelley, seems much closer to the grandly serious spirit of the other romantics. His most thoughtful poetry expresses his two main ideas, that the external tyranny of rulers, customs, or superstitions is the main enemy, and that inherent human goodness will, sooner or later, eliminate evil from the world and usher in an eternal reign of transcendent love. It is, perhaps, in Prometheus Unbound (1820) that these ideas are most completely expressed, although Shelley's more obvious poetic qualities—the natural correspondence of metrical structure to mood, the power of shaping effective abstractions, and his ethereal idealism—can be studied in a whole range of poems, from “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark” to the elegy “Adonais,” written for John Keats, the youngest of the great romantics.

157

Samuel Taylor Coleridge A leader of the romantic movement, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote poetry, essays, and criticism during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. As a poet, Coleridge crafted lyric verse with dreamlike imagery and deep symbolism. Coleridge‘s criticism, most notably his Biographia Literaria (1817), had a profound influence upon 19th- and early 20th-century schools of critical thought. Culver Pictures ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed to have written ―Kubla Khan‖ in a single burst of inspiration. But his writings reveal that he made a careful study of vowel sounds for the poem. Note the many long vowels in this passage and how they contribute to the mood Coleridge creates. (p)1998 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. ——————————————————————————————————————————————————

Percy Bysshe Shelley Influenced by the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley championed liberal thought and rebelled against the restrictions of English politics and religion. Shelley wrote enthusiastic, impulsive poems noted for their lyricism and romanticism. Critics consider Shelley one of the greatest poets of the English language. THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

158

More than that of any of the other romantics, Keats's poetry is a response to sensuous impressions. He found neither the time nor the inclination to elaborate a complete moral or social philosophy in his poetry. In such poems as “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “Ode to a Nightingale,” all written about 1819, he showed an unrivaled awareness of immediate sensation and an unequaled ability to reproduce it. Between 1818 and 1821, during the last few years of his short life, this spiritually robust, active, and wonderfully receptive writer produced all his poetry. His work had a more profound influence than that of any other romantic in widening the sensuous realm of poetry for the Victorians later in the century.

B

Romantic Prose

Certain romantic prose parallels the poetry of the period in a number of ways. The evolution of fundamentally new critical principles in literature is the main achievement of Coleridge's Biographia literaria (1817), but like Charles Lamb (Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, 1808) and William Hazlitt (Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, 1817), Coleridge also wrote a large amount of practical criticism, much of which helped to elevate the reputations of Renaissance dramatists and poets neglected in the 18th century. Lamb is famous also for his occasional essays, the Essays of Elia (1823, 1833). An influential romantic experiment in the achievement of a rich poetic quality in prose is the phantasmagoric, impassioned autobiography of Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821).

159

The Victorian Era 160

VII

THE VICTORIAN ERA

Queen Victoria Queen Victoria reigned for 63 years, the longest reign in the history of England. Those years, from 1837 to 1901, became known as the Victorian era and were marked by a deeply conservative morality and the rise of the middle class. Hulton Deutsch

The Victorian era, from the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837 until her death in 1901, was an era of several unsettling social developments that forced writers more than ever before to take positions on the immediate issues animating the rest of society. Thus, although romantic forms of expression in poetry and prose continued to dominate English literature throughout much of the century, the attention of many writers was directed, sometimes passionately, to such issues as the growth of English democracy, the education of the masses, the progress of industrial enterprise and the consequent rise of a materialistic philosophy, and the plight of the newly industrialized worker. In addition, the unsettling of religious belief by new advances in science, particularly the theory of evolution and the historical study of the Bible, drew other writers away from the immemorial subjects of literature into considerations of problems of faith and truth.

A

Nonfiction

Robert Browning English poet Robert Browning is considered one of the most important poets of the Victorian era (1837–1901). Part of the romantic movement in literature, his usually optimistic poems praise action and condemn passivity. In Browning‘s characteristic writing style, known as dramatic monologue, he assumed the voice of historical or imaginary characters, usually at some crucial moment in their lives. THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE

161

The historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his History of England (5 volumes, 18481861) and even more in his Critical and Historical Essays (1843), expressed the complacency of the English middle classes over their new prosperity and growing political power. The clarity and balance of Macaulay's style, which reflects his practical familiarity with parliamentary debate, stands in contrast to the sensitivity and beauty of the prose of John Henry Newman. Newman's main effort, unlike Macaulay's, was to draw people away from the materialism and skepticism of the age back to a purified Christian faith. His most famous work, Apologia pro vita sua (Apology for His Life, 1864), describes with psychological subtlety and charm the basis of his religious opinions and the reasons for his change from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic church. —————————————————————————————————————

Carlyle: On Meeting Wordsworth One of the most influential social critics of the Victorian age, Thomas Carlyle wrote with a distinctive, energetic voice. The style that fuelled his political and historical writings is perhaps best exemplified in his portraits of his contemporaries. The following account of the poet William Wordsworth embodies Carlyle‘s character in its vitality.

From On Meeting Wordsworth By Thomas Carlyle

William Wordsworth in His Seventies On a summer morning (let us call it 1840 then) I was apprised by Taylor that Wordsworth had come to town, and would meet a small party of us at a certain tavern in St. James‟s Street, at breakfast, to which I was invited for the given day and hour. We had a pretty little room, quiet though looking streetward (tavern‟s name is quite lost to me); the morning sun was pleasantly tinting the opposite houses, a balmy, calm and sunlight morning. Wordsworth, I think arrived just along with me; we had still five minutes of sauntering and miscellaneous talking before the whole were assembled. I do not positively remember any of them, except that James Spedding was there, and that the others, not above five or six in whole, were polite intelligent quiet persons, and, except Taylor and Wordsworth, not of any special distinction in the world. Breakfast was pleasant, fairly beyond the common of such things. Wordsworth seemed in good tone, and, much to Taylor‟s satisfaction, talked a great deal; about “poetic” correspondents of his own (i.e. correspondents for the sake of his poetry; especially one such who had sent him, from Canton, an excellent chest of tea; correspondent grinningly applauded by us all); then about ruralties and miscellanies… These were the first topics. Then finally about literature, literary laws, practices, observances, at considerable length, and turning wholly on the mechanical part, including even a good deal of shallow enough etymology, from me and others, which was well received. On all this Wordsworth enlarged with evident satisfaction, and was joyfully reverent of the “wells of English undefiled”; though stone dumb as to the deeper rules and wells of Eternal Truth and Harmony, which you were to try and set forth by said undefiled wells of English or what other speech you had! To me a little disappointing, but not much;

162

though it would have given me pleasure had the robust veteran man emerged a little out of vocables into things, now and then, as he never once chanced to do. For the rest, he talked well in his way; with veracity, easy brevity and force, as a wise tradesman would of his tools and workshop—and as no unwise one could. His voice was good, frank and sonorous, though practically clear distinct and forcible rather than melodious; the tone of him businesslike, sedately confident; no discourtesy, yet no anxiety about being courteous. A fine wholesome rusticity, fresh as his mountain breezes, sat well on the stalwart veteran, and on all he said and did. You would have said he was a usually taciturn man; glad to unlock himself to audience sympathetic and intelligent, when such offered itself. His face bore marks of much, not always peaceful, meditation; the look of it not bland or benevolent so much as close impregnable and hard: a man multa tacere loquive paratus, in a world where he had experienced no lack of contradictions as he strode along! The eyes were not very brilliant, but they had a quiet clearness; there was enough of brow and well shaped; rather too much of cheek (“horse face” I have heard satirists say); face of squarish shape and decidedly longish, as I think the head itself was (its “length” going horizontal); he was large-boned, lean, but still firm-knit tall and stronglooking when he stood, a right good old steel-grey figure, with rustic simplicity and dignity about him, and a vivacious strength looking through him which might have suited one of those old steel-grey markgrafs whom Henry the Fowler set up to ward the “marches” and do battle with the intrusive heathen in a stalwart and judicious manner. On this and other occasional visits of his, I saw Wordsworth a number of times, at dinner, in evening parties; and we grew a little more familiar, but without much increase of real intimacy or affection springing up between us. He was willing to talk with me in a corner, in noisy extensive circles, having weak eyes, and little loving the general babble current in such places. One evening, probably about this time, I got him upon the subject of great poets, who I thought might be admirable equally to us both; but was rather mistaken, as I gradually found. Pope‟s partial failure I was prepared for; less for the narrowish limits visible in Milton and others. I tried him with Burns, of whom he had sung tender recognition; but Burns also turned out to be a limited inferior creature, any genius he had a theme for one‟s pathos rather; even Shakespeare himself had his blind sides, his limitations; gradually it became apparent to me that of transcendent unlimited there was, to this critic, probably but one specimen known, Wordsworth himself! He by no means said so, or hinted so, in words; but on the whole it was all I gathered from him in this considerable tête-à-tête of ours; and it was not an agreeable conquest. New notion as to poetry or poet I had not in the smallest degree got; but my insight into the depths of Wordsworth‟s pride in himself had considerably augmented; and it did not increase my love of him; though I did not in the least hate it either, so quiet was it, so fixed, unappealing, like a dim old lichened crag on the wayside, the private meaning of which, in contrast with any public meaning it had, you recognised with a kind of not wholly melancholy grin. …During the last seven or ten years of his life, Wordsworth felt himself to be a recognised lion, in certain considerable London circles, and was in the habit of coming up to town with his wife for a month or two every season, to enjoy his quiet triumph and collect his bits of tribute tales quales… Wordsworth took his bit of lionism very quietly, with a smile sardonic rather than triumphant, and certainly got no harm by it, if he got or expected little good. His wife, a small, withered, puckered, winking lady, who never spoke, seemed to be more in earnest about the affair, and was visibly and sometimes ridiculously assiduous to secure her proper place of precedence at table… The light was always afflictive to his eyes; he carried in his pocket something like a skeleton brass candlestick, in which, setting it on the dinner-table, between him and the most afflictive or nearest of the chief lights, he touched a little spring, and there 163

flirted out, at the top of his brass implement, a small vertical green circle which prettily enough threw his eyes into shade, and screened him from that sorrow. In proof of his equanimity as lion I remember, in connection with this green shade, one little glimpse… Dinner was large, luminous, sumptuous; I sat a long way from Wordsworth; dessert I think had come in, and certainly there reigned in all quarters a cackle as of Babel (only politer perhaps), which far up in Wordsworth‟s quarter (who was leftward on my side of the table) seemed to have taken a sententious, rather louder, logical and quasi-scientific turn, heartily unimportant to gods and men, so far as I could judge of it and of the other babble reigning. I looked upwards, leftwards, the coast being luckily for a moment clear; there, far off, beautifully screened in the shadow of his vertical green circle, which was on the farther side of him, sate Wordsworth, silent, slowly but steadily gnawing some portion of what I judged to be raisins, with his eye and attention placidly fixed on these and these alone. The sight of whom, and of his rock-like indifference to the babble, quasi-scientific and other, with attention turned on the small practical alone, was comfortable and amusing to me, who felt like him but could not eat raisins. This little glimpse I could still paint, so clear and bright is it, and this shall be symbolical of all. In a few years, I forget in how many and when, these Wordsworth appearances in London ceased; we heard, not of ill-health perhaps, but of increasing love of rest; at length of the long sleep‟s coming; and never saw Wordsworth more. One felt his death as the extinction of a public light, but not otherwise.

Source: Carlyle, Thomas. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed., vol. 2. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— Similarly alienated by the materialism and commercialism of the period, Thomas Carlyle, another of the great Victorians, advanced a heroic philosophy of work, courage, and the cultivation of the godlike in human beings, by means of which life might recover its true worth and nobility. This view, borrowed in part from German idealist philosophy, Carlyle expressed in a vehement, idiosyncratic style in such works as Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored, 1833-1834) and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841). Other answers to social problems were presented by two fine Victorian prose writers of a different stamp. The social criticism of the art critic John Ruskin looked to the curing of the ills of industrial society and capitalism as the only path to beauty and vitality in the national life. The escape from social problems into aesthetic hedonism was the contribution of the Oxford scholar Walter Pater.

164

B

Poetry

Alfred, Lord Tennyson Excerpt English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote verse highly representative of the Victorian era of 19th-century England. A great fan of the changes brought about by the early industrial revolution in England, Tennyson celebrated the era‘s innovations and political stability. (p) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved./Culver Pictures

The three notable poets of the Victorian Age became similarly absorbed in social issues. Beginning as a poet of pure romantic escapism, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, soon moved on to problems of religious faith, social change, and political power, as in “Locksley Hall,” the elegy In Memoriam (1850), and Idylls of the King (1859-1885). All the characteristic moods of his poetry, from brooding splendor to lyrical sweetness, are expressed with smooth technical mastery. His style, as well as his peculiarly English conservatism, stands in some contrast to the intellectuality and bracing harshness of the poetry of Robert Browning. Browning's most important short poems are collected in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1841-1846) and Men and Women (1855). Matthew Arnold, the third of these mid-Victorian poets, stands apart from them as a more subtle and balanced thinker; his literary criticism (Essays in Criticism, 1865, 1888) is the most remarkable written in Victorian times. His poetry displays a sorrowful, disillusioned pessimism over the human plight in rapidly changing times (for example, “Dover Beach,” 1867), a pessimism countered, however, by a strong sense of duty. Among a number of lesser poets, Algernon Charles Swinburne showed an escapist aestheticism, somewhat similar to Pater's, in sensuous verse rich in verbal music but somewhat diffuse and pallid in its expression of emotion. The poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the poet, artist, and socialist reformer William Morris were associated with the PreRaphaelite movement, the adherents of which hoped to inaugurate a new period of honest craft and spiritual truth in property and painting. Despite the otherworldly or archaic character of their romantic poetry, Morris, at least, found a social purpose in his designs for household objects, which profoundly influenced contemporary taste. —————————————————————————————————————

165

“Ulysses” (poem) After a decade in which he vowed not to publish, English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson published Poems (1842), a volume that would establish him as the leading poet of his time. ―Ulysses,‖ a dramatic monologue spoken by the hero of The Iliad and The Odyssey, was among those poems. The technical brilliance of ―Ulysses,‖ with a strong meter and well-placed consonance and assonance, is characteristic of Tennyson‘s poems.

“Ulysses” By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel; I will drink Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy'd Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea. I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known,—cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honor'd of them all,— And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use! As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains; but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. This is my son, mine own Telemachus, To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,— Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil 166

This labor, by slow prudence to make mild A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees Subdue them to the useful and the good. Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to my household gods, When I am gone. He works his work, I mine. There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail; There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me,— That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads,—you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. Death closes all; but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks; The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends. 'T is not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,— One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Source: Tennyson’s Poetry. Hill, Robert W. Jr., ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

167

Poetry of Matthew Arnold English poet Matthew Arnold was one of the most influential literary figures and educators in Victorian Britain. Arnold believed that Britain suffered from a lack of openness toward culture and the arts, a problem he attributed to what he considered the provincial tastes of the aristocracy and the middle class. These two poems by Arnold, ―Dover Beach‖ (1867) and ―Shakespeare‖ (1849), are contemplative poems. Rather than tell a story or relate a single incident to the reader, this type of poem conveys the author‘s meditations on an idea or a person.

Poetry of Matthew Arnold Dover Beach The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, 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. Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea. The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. Ah, love, let us be true To one another! For the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, 168

So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Shakespeare Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill, Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty, Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea, Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place, Spares but the cloudy border of his base To the foiled searching of mortality; And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-schooled, self-scanned, self-honoured, self-secure, Didst tread on earth unguessed at.—Better so! All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

"The Defence of Guenevere" English poet and artist William Morris often chose medieval themes. In his poetry he adopted an appropriately old-fashioned diction. ―The Defence of Guenevere‖ (1858) recounts an episode from the Arthurian romances in which Guenevere, King Arthur‘s queen, defends her adulterous affair with Sir Lancelot, the foremost knight in King Arthur‘s court. Morris‘s poem is unusual in that it is told from the point of view of Guenevere. In most accounts she is seen as a faithless woman who was responsible for the downfall of Camelot.

169

“The Defence of Guenevere” By William Morris

But, knowing now that they would have her speak, She threw her wet hair backward from her brow, Her hand close to her mouth touching her cheek, As though she had had there a shameful blow, And feeling it shameful to feel aught but shame All through her heart, yet felt her cheek burned so, She must a little touch it; like one lame She walked away from Gauwaine, with her head Still lifted up; and on her cheek of flame The tears dried quick; she stopped at last and said: “O knights and lords, it seems but little skill To talk of well-known things past now and dead. “God wot I ought to say, I have done ill, And pray you all forgiveness heartily! Because you must be right such great lords—still “Listen, suppose your time were come to die, And you were quite alone and very weak; Yea, laid a dying while very mightily “The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak Of river through your broad lands running well: Suppose a hush should come, then someone speak: “„One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell, Now choose one cloth for ever; which they be, I will not tell you, you must somehow tell “„Of your own strength and mightiness; here, see!‟ Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes, At foot of your familiar bed to see “A great God‟s angel standing, with such dyes, Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands, Held out two ways, light from the inner skies “Showing him well, and making his commands Seem to be God‟s commands, moreover, too, Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;

170

“And one of these strange choosing cloths was blue, Wavy and long, and one cut short and red; No man could tell the better of the two. “After a shivering half-hour you said: „God help! heaven‟s colour, the blue;‟ and he said, „hell.‟ Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed, “And cry to all good men that loved you well, „Ah Christ! if only I had known, known, known;‟ Launcelot went away, then I could tell, “Like wisest man how all things would be, moan, And roll and hurt myself, and long to die, And yet fear much to die for what was sown. “Nevertheless you, O Sir Gauwaine, lie, Whatever may have happened through these years, God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie.” Her voice was low at first, being full of tears, But as it cleared, it grew full loud and shrill, Growing a windy shriek in all men‟s ears, A ringing in their startled brains, until She said that Gauwaine lied, then her voice sunk, And her great eyes began again to fill, Though still she stood right up, and never shrunk, But spoke on bravely, glorious lady fair! Whatever tears her full lips may have drunk, She stood, and seemed to think, and wrung her hair, Spoke out at last with no more trace of shame, With passionate twisting of her body there: “It chanced upon a day that Launcelot came To dwell at Arthur‟s court: at Christmas-time This happened; when the heralds sung his name, “Son of King Ban of Benwick, seemed to chime Along with all the bells that rang that day, O‟er the white roofs, with little change of rhyme. “Christmas and whitened winter passed away, And over me the April sunshine came, Made very awful with black hail-clouds, yea.

171

“And in the Summer I grew white with flame, And bowed my head down—Autumn, and the sick Sure knowledge things would never be the same, “However often Spring might be most thick Of blossoms and buds, smote on me, and I grew Careless of most things, let the clock tick, tick, “To my unhappy pulse, that beat right through My eager body; while I laughed out loud, And let my lips curl up at false or true, “Seemed cold and shallow without any cloud. Behold my judges, then the cloths were brought; While I was dizzied thus, old thoughts would crowd, “Belonging to the time ere I was bought By Arthur‟s great name and his little love; Must I give up for ever then, I thought, “That which I deemed would ever round me move Glorifying all things; for a little word, Scarce ever meant at all, must I now prove “Stone-cold for ever? Pray you, does the Lord Will that all folks should be quite happy and good? I love God now a little, if this cord “Were broken, once for all what striving could Make me love anything in earth or heaven? So day by day it grew, as if one should “Slip slowly down some path worn smooth and even, Down to a cool sea on a summer day; Yet still in slipping there was some small leaven “Of stretched hands catching small stones by the way, Until one surely reached the sea at last, And felt strange new joy as the worn head lay “Back, with the hair like sea-weed; yea all past Sweat of the forehead, dryness of the lips, Washed utterly out by the dear waves o‟ercast, “In the lone sea, far off from any ships! Do I not know now of a day in Spring? No minute of the wild day ever slips

172

“From out my memory; I hear thrushes sing, And wheresoever I may be, straightway Thoughts of it all come up with most fresh sting: “I was half mad with beauty on that day, And went without my ladies all alone, In a quiet garden walled round every way; “I was right joyful of that wall of stone, That shut the flowers and trees up with the sky, And trebled all the beauty: to the bone, “Yea right through to my heart, grown very shy With weary thoughts, it pierced, and made me glad; Exceedingly glad, and I knew verily, “A little thing just then had made me mad; I dared not think, as I was wont to do, Sometimes, upon my beauty; if I had “Held out my long hand up against the blue, And, looking on the tenderly darkened fingers, Thought that by rights one ought to see quite through, “There, see you, where the soft still light yet lingers, Round by the edges; what should I have done, If this had joined with yellow spotted singers, “And startling green drawn upward by the sun? But shouting, loosed out, see now! all my hair, And trancedly stood watching the west wind run “With faintest half-heard breathing sound—why there I lose my head e‟en now in doing this; But shortly listen—In that garden fair “Came Launcelot walking; this is true, the kiss Wherewith we kissed in meeting that spring day, I scarce dare talk of the remembered bliss, “When both our mouths went wandering in one way, And aching sorely, met among the leaves; Our hands being left behind strained far away. “Never within a yard of my bright sleeves Had Launcelot come before—and now so nigh! After that day why is it Guenevere grieves?

173

“Nevertheless you, O Sir Gauwaine, lie, Whatever happened on through all those years, God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie. “Being such a lady could I weep these tears If this were true? A great queen such as I Having sinned this way, straight her conscience sears; “And afterwards she liveth hatefully, Slaying and poisoning, certes never weeps— Gauwaine be friends now, speak me lovingly. “Do I not see how God‟s dear pity creeps All through your frame, and trembles in your mouth? Remember in what grave your mother sleeps, “Buried in some place far down in the south, Men are forgetting as I speak to you; By her head severed in that awful drouth “Of pity that drew Agravaine‟s fell blow, I pray you pity! let me not scream out Forever after, when the shrill winds blow “Through half your castle-locks! let me not shout Forever after in the winter night When you ride out alone! in battle-rout “Let not my rusting tears make your sword light! Ah! God of mercy how he turns away! So, ever must I dress me to the fight, “So—let God‟s justice work! Gauwaine, I say, See me hew down your proofs: yea all men know Even as you said how Mellyagraunce one day, “One bitter day in la Fausse Garde, for so All good knights held it after, saw— Yea, sirs, by cursed unknightly outrage; though “You, Gauwaine, held his word without a flaw, This Mellyagraunce saw blood upon my bed: Whose blood then pray you? is there any law “To make a queen say why some spots of red Lie on her coverlet? or will you say: „Your hands are white, lady, as when you wed,

174

“„Where did you bleed?‟ and must I stammer out, „Nay, I blush indeed, fair lord, only to rend My sleeve up to my shoulder, where there lay “„A knife-point last night‟: so must I defend The honour of the Lady Guenevere? Not so, fair lords, even if the world should end “This very day, and you were judges here Instead of God. Did you see Mellyagraunce When Launcelot stood by him? what white fear “Curdled his blood, and how his teeth did dance, His side sink in? as my knight cried and said: „Slayer of unarm‟d men, here is a chance! “„Setter of traps, I pray you guard your head, By God I am so glad to fight with you, Stripper of ladies, that my hand feels lead “„For driving weight; hurrah now! draw and do, For all my wounds are moving in my breast, And I am getting mad with waiting so.‟ “He struck his hands together o‟er the beast, Who fell down flat, and grovelled at his feet, And groaned at being slain so young—‟At least,‟ “My knight said, „rise you, sir, who are so fleet At catching ladies, half-arm‟d will I fight, My left side all uncovered!‟ then I weet, “Up sprang Sir Mellyagraunce with great delight Upon his knave‟s face; not until just then Did I quite hate him, as I saw my knight “Along the lists look to my stake and pen With such a joyous smile, it made me sigh From agony beneath my waist-chain, when “The fight began, and to me they drew nigh; Ever Sir Launcelot kept him on the right, And traversed warily, and ever high “And fast leapt caitiff‟s sword, until my knight Sudden threw up his sword to his left hand, Caught it, and swung it; that was all the fight,

175

“Except a spout of blood on the hot land; For it was hottest summer; and I know I wondered how the fire, while I should stand, “And burn, against the heat, would quiver so, Yards above my head; thus these matters went; Which things were only warnings of the woe “That fell on me. Yet Mellyagraunce was shent, For Mellyagraunce had fought against the Lord; Therefore, my lords, take heed lest you be blent “With all this wickedness; say no rash word Against me, being so beautiful; my eyes, Wept all away to grey, may bring some sword “To drown you in your blood; see my breast rise, Like waves of purple sea, as here I stand; And how my arms are moved in wonderful wise, “Yea also at my full heart‟s strong command, See through my long throat how the words go up In ripples to my mouth; how in my hand “The shadow lies like wine within a cup Of marvellously coloured gold; yea now This little wind is rising, look you up, “And wonder how the light is falling so Within my moving tresses: will you dare, When you have looked a little on my brow, “To say this thing is vile? or will you care For any plausible lies of cunning woof, When you can see my face with no lie there “Forever? am I not a gracious proof„But in your chamber Launcelot was found‟Is there a good knight then would stand aloof, “When a queen says with gentle queenly sound: „O true as steel come now and talk with me, I love to see your step upon the ground “„Unwavering, also well I love to see That gracious smile light up your face, and hear Your wonderful words, that all mean verily

176

“„The thing they seem to mean: good friend, so dear To me in everything, come here tonight, Or else the hours will pass most dull and drear; “„If you come not, I fear this time I might Get thinking over much of times gone by, When I was young, and green hope was in sight: “„For no man cares now to know why I sigh; And no man comes to sing me pleasant songs, Nor any brings me the sweet flowers that lie “„So thick in the gardens; therefore one so longs To see you, Launcelot; that we may be Like children once again, free from all wrongs “„Just for one night.‟ Did he not come to me? What thing could keep true Launcelot away If I said, „Come‟? there was one less than three “In my quiet room that night, and we were gay; Till sudden I rose up, weak, pale, and sick, Because a bawling broke our dream up, yea “I looked at Launcelot‟s face and could not speak, For he looked helpless too, for a little while; Then I remember how I tried to shriek, “And could not, but fell down; from tile to tile The stones they threw up rattled o‟er my head And made me dizzier; till within a while “My maids were all about me, and my head On Launcelot‟s breast was being soothed away From its white chattering, until Launcelot said: “By God! I will not tell you more today, Judge any way you will—what matters it? You know quite well the story of that fray, “How Launcelot stilled their bawling, the mad fit That caught up Gauwaine—all, all, verily, But just that which would save me; these things flit. “Nevertheless you, O Sir Gauwaine, lie, Whatever may have happen‟d these long years, God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie!

177

“All I have said is truth, by Christ‟s dear tears.” She would not speak another word, but stood Turn‟d sideways; listening, like a man who hears His brother‟s trumpet sounding through the wood Of his foes‟ lances. She leaned eagerly, And gave a slight spring sometimes, as she could At last hear something really; joyfully Her cheek grew crimson, as the headlong speed Of the roan charger drew all men to see, The knight who came was Launcelot at good need.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

Aurora Leigh Warmly received upon publication in 1856, English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning‘s Aurora Leigh inspired many women. Browning‘s semi-autobiographical poem concerns a female poet, Aurora Leigh, and her struggle to gain a place within society as an artist. Although Browning‘s popularity waned during much of the 20th century, Aurora Leigh found new appreciation with feminist thinkers beginning in the 1960s. In the following passage, Aurora defends her independence and her work as a writer to her persistent suitor, Romney.

From Aurora Leigh By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

'What help?' I asked. 'You'd scorn my help,—as Nature's self, you say, Has scorned to put her music in my mouth Because a woman's. Do you now turn round And ask for what a woman cannot give?' 'For what she only can, I turn and ask,' He answered, catching up my hands in his, And dropping on me from his high-eaved brow The full weight of his soul,—'I ask for love, And that, she can; for life in fellowship Through bitter duties—that, I know she can; For wifehood—will she?' 'Now,' I said, 'may god 178

Be witness 'twixt us two!' and with the word, Meseemed I floated into a sudden light Above his stature,—'am I proved too weak To stand alone, yet strong enough to bear Such leaners on my shoulder? poor to think, Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought? Incompetent to sing, as blackbirds can, Yet competent to love, like HIM?' I paused; Perhaps I darkened, as the light-house will That turns upon the sea. 'It's always so. Anything does for a wife.' 'Aurora, dear, And dearly honoured,'—he pressed in at once With eager utterance,—'you translate me ill. I do not contradict my thought of you Which is most reverent, with another thought Found less so. If your sex is weak for art, (And I who said so, did but honour you By using truth in courtship) it is strong For life and duty. Place your fecund heart In mine, and let us blossom for the world That wants love's colour in the grey of time. My talk, meanwhile, is arid to you, ay, Since all my talk can only set you where You look down coldly on the arena—heaps Of headless bodies, shapeless, indistinct! The Judgment-Angel scarce would find his way Through such a heap of generalised distress To the individual man with lips and eyes, Much less Aurora. Ah my sweet, come down, And hand in hand we'll go where yours shall touch These victims, one by one! till, one by one, The formless, nameless trunk of every man Shall seem to wear a head with hair you know, And every woman catch your mother's face To melt you into passion.' 'I am a girl,' I answered slowly; 'you do well to name My mother's face. Though far too early, alas, God's hand did interpose 'twixt it and me, I know so much of love as used to shine In that face and another. Just so much; No more indeed at all. I have not seen So much love since, I pray you pardon me, As answers even to make a marriage with 179

In this cold land of England. What you love, Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause: You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir, A wife to help your ends,—in her no end! Your cause is noble, your ends excellent, But I, being most unworthy of these and that, Do otherwise conceive of love. Farewell.' 'Farewell, Aurora? you reject me thus?' He said. 'Sir, you were married long ago. You have a wife already whom you love, Your social theory. Bless you both, I say. For my part, I am scarcely meek enough To be the handmaid of a lawful spouse. Do I look a Hagar think you?' 'So you jest.' 'Nay, so I speak in earnest,' I replied. 'You treat of marriage too much like, at least, A chief apostle: you would bear with you A wife . . a sister . . shall we speak it out? A sister of charity.' 'Then, must it be Indeed farewell? And was I so far wrong In hope and in illusion, when I took The woman to be nobler than the man, Yourself the noblest woman, in the use And comprehension of what love is,—love, That generates the likeness of itself Through all heroic duties? so far wrong, In saying bluntly, venturing truth on love, 'Come, human creature, love and work with me,'— Instead of, 'Lady, thou art wondrous fair, 'And, where the Graces walk before, the Muse 'Will follow at the lighting of their eyes, 'And where the Muse walks, lovers need to creep: 'Turn round and love me, or I die of love.' With quiet indignation I broke in. 'You misconceive the question like a man, Who sees a woman as the complement Of his sex merely. You forget too much That every creature, female as the male, Stands single in responsible act and thought 180

As also in birth and death. Whoever says To a loyal woman, 'Love and work with me,' Will get fair answers if the work and love, Being good themselves, are good for her—the best She was born for. Women of a softer mood, Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life, Will sometimes only hear the first word, love, And catch up with it any kind of work, Indifferent, so that dear love go with it. I do not blame such women, though, for love, They pick much oakum; earth's fanatics make Too frequently heaven's saints. But me your work Is not the best for,—nor your love the best, Nor able to commend the kind of work For love's sake merely. Ah, you force me, sir, To be over-bold in speaking of myself: I too have my vocation,—work to do, The heavens and earth have set me since I changed My father's face for theirs, and, though your world Were twice as wretched as you represent, Most serious work, most necessary work As any of the economists'. Reform, Make trade a Christian possibility. And individual right no general wrong; Wipe out earth's furrows of the Thine and Mine, And leave one green for men to play at bowls, With innings for them all! . . what than, indeed, If mortals are not greater by the head Than any of their prosperities? what then, Unless the artist keep up open roads Betwixt the seen and unseen,—bursting through The best of your conventions with his best. The speakable, imaginable best God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond Both speech and imagination? A starved man Exceeds a fat beast: we'll not barter, sir, The beautiful for barley.—And, even so, I hold you will not compass your poor ends Of barley-feeding and material ease, Without a poet's individualism To work your universal. It takes a soul, To move a body: it takes a high-souled man, To move the masses, even to a cleaner stye: It takes the ideal, to blow a hair's-breadth off The dust of the actual.—Ah, your Fouriers failed, Because not poets enough to understand That life develops from within.—For me, Perhaps I am not worthy, as you say, 181

Of work like this: perhaps a woman's soul Aspires, and not creates: yet we aspire, And yet I'll try out your perhapses, sir, And if I fail . . why, burn me up my straw Like other false works—I'll not ask for grace; Your scorn is better, cousin Romney. I Who love my art, would never wish it lower To suit my stature. I may love my art. You'll grant that even a woman may love art, Seeing that to waste true love on anything Is womanly, past question.'

Source: Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh. Reynolds, Margaret, ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

C

The Victorian Novel

Charles Dickens English author Charles Dickens ranks as one of the most popular writers in the history of world literature. Although Dickens typically weaved social criticism, strong character development, and powerful detail into novels about contemporary 19th-century Victorian society, the same revealing qualities go into A Tale of Two Cities (1859), one of his infrequent ventures into historical fiction. A Tale of Two Cities takes place during the French Revolution. The book‘s opening lines, recited by an actor, set a tone of ambiguity for the story of a man‘s discovery of his own conscience in the midst of tumultuous historical forces. Archive Photos/(p) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

182

Jane Austen English author Jane Austen crafted satirical romances set within the confines of upper-middle-class English society. Novels such as Pride and Prejudice (1813) demonstrate the keen attention to detail with which she illuminated the everyday lives of her characters. Austen is renowned for her emotional understanding, brilliant wit, and clear, descriptive writing style. (p) 1995 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved./The New York Public Library/(p) 1995 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Conrad's Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad's famous novella Heart of Darkness (1902) explores the terrifying depths of human corruptibility. This passage (recited by an actor) describes the dying words of the story's main character, Kurtz, who is an English ivory trader living in Africa. Throughout the story, Kurtz's descent into cruelty and violence as a result of greed is shown to be, on an individual scale, what the imperialism of nations can be on a large scale. © Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

183

Eliot’s Middlemarch In the novel Middlemarch English writer George Eliot describes the book‘s heroine, newlywed Dorothea Brooke, weeping with unhappiness at her marriage. Eliot suggests that although such unhappiness is common in the world, none of us can fully share in the misery of another person, or we would be overwhelmed by the experience. The affectionate but unsentimental scrutiny to which Eliot subjects the actions and motives of her characters is one of the hallmarks of her work. (p) 1997 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

The novel gradually became the dominant form in literature during the Victorian Age. A fairly constant accompaniment of this development was the yielding of romanticism to literary realism, the accurate observation of individual problems and social relationships. The close observation of a restricted social milieu in the novels of Jane Austen early in the century (Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Emma, 1816) had been a harbinger of what was to come. The romantic historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, about the same time (Ivanhoe, 1819), typified, however, the spirit against which the realists later were to react. It was only in the Victorian novelists Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray that the new spirit of realism came to the fore. Dickens's novels of contemporary life (Oliver Twist, 1838; David Copperfield, 1849-1850; Great Expectations, 1861; Our Mutual Friend, 1865) exhibit an astonishing ability to create living characters; his graphic exposures of social evils and his powers of caricature and humor have won him a vast readership. Thackeray, on the other hand, indulged less in the sentimentality sometimes found in Dickens's works. He was also capable of greater subtlety of characterization, as his Vanity Fair (1847-1848) shows. Nevertheless, the restriction of concern in Thackeray's novels to middle- and upper-class life, and his lesser creative power, render him second to Dickens in many readers' minds. —————————————————————————————————————

From Pride and Prejudice English novelist Jane Austen‘s Pride and Prejudice (1813) satirized the attitudes of the rural middle and upper-middle classes. Austen centered her story on the Bennett daughters: Elizabeth, Jane, and Lydia. Elizabeth, a spirited girl, is ―prejudiced‖ against the wealthy landowner Fitzwilliam Darcy, scorning his lofty attitudes and ―pride.‖ In the first excerpt, Darcy calls on Elizabeth and her friend Charlotte in the mistaken belief that all the ladies of the house are in. In the second excerpt, Elizabeth, after accusing Darcy of ruining the engagement between her sister Jane and Jane‘s

184

fiancé, Bingley, receives a letter of explanation from Darcy. Elizabeth then recognizes the error in her judgment and also discovers some faults in her own nature.

From Pride and Prejudice By Jane Austen

From Volume II, Chapter IX „It is a proof of your own attachment to Hertfordshire. Any thing beyond the very neighbourhood of Longbourn, I suppose, would appear far.‟ As he spoke there was a sort of smile, which Elizabeth fancied she understood; he must he supposing her to be thinking of Jane and Netherfield, and she blushed as she answered, 'I do not mean to say that a woman may not be settled too near her family. The far and the near must be relative, and depend on many varying circumstances. Where there is fortune to make the expence of travelling unimportant, distance becomes no evil. But that is not the case here. Mr and Mrs Collins have a comfortable income, but not such a one as will allow of frequent journeys—and I am persuaded my friend would not call herself near her family under less than half the present distance.' Mr Darcy drew his chair a little towards her, and said, 'You cannot have a right to such very strong local attachment. You cannot have been always at Longbourn.' Elizabeth looked surprised. The gentleman experienced some change of feeling; he drew back his chair, took a newspaper from the table, and, glancing over it, said, in a colder voice, 'Are you pleased with Kent?' A short dialogue on the subject of the country ensued, on either side calm and concise—and soon put an end to by the entrance of Charlotte and her sister, just returned from their walk. The tête a tête surprised them. Mr Darcy related the mistake which had occasioned his intruding on Miss Bennet, and after sitting a few minutes longer without saying much to any body, went away. 'What can be the meaning of this!‟ said Charlotte, as soon as he was gone. 'My dear Eliza he must be in love with you, or he would never have called on us in this familiar way.' But when Elizabeth told of his silence, it did not seem very likely, even to Charlotte's wishes, to be the case; and after various conjectures, they could at last only suppose his visit to proceed from the difficulty of finding any thing to do, which was the more probable from the time of year. All field sports were over. Within doors there was Lady Catherine, books, and a billiard table, but gentlemen cannot be always within doors; and in the nearness of the Parsonage, or the pleasantness of the walk to it, or of the people who lived in it, the two cousins found a temptation from this period of walking thither almost every day. They called at various times of the morning, sometimes separately, sometimes together, and now and then accompanied by their aunt. It was plain to them all that Colonel Fitzwilliam came because he had pleasure in their society, a persuasion which of course recommended him still more; and Elizabeth was reminded by her own satisfaction in being with him, as well as by his evident admiration of her, of her former favourite George Wickham; and though, in comparing them, she saw there was less captivating softness in Colonel Fitzwilliam's manners, she believed he might have the best informed mind. But why Mr Darcy same so often to the Parsonage, it was more difficult to understand. It could not be for society, as he frequently sat there ten minutes together without opening his lips; and when he did speak, it seemed the effect of necessity rather than of choice—a sacrifice to 185

propriety, not a pleasure to himself. He seldom appeared really animated. Mrs Collins knew not what to make of him. Colonel Fitzwilliam's occasionally laughing at his stupidity, proved that he was generally different, which her own knowledge of him could not have told her; and as she would have liked to believe this change the effect of love, and the object of that love, her friend Eliza, she sat herself seriously to work to find it out.—She watched him whenever they were at Rosings, and whenever he came to Hunsford; but without much success. He certainly looked at her friend a great deal, but the expression of that look was disputable. It was an earnest, steadfast gaze, but she often doubted whether there were much admiration in it, and sometimes it seemed nothing but absence of mind. She had once or twice suggested to Elizabeth the possibility of his being partial to her, but Elizabeth always laughed at the idea; and Mrs Collins did not think it right to press the subject, from the danger of raising expectations which might only end in disappointment; for in her opinion it admitted not of a doubt, that all her friend's dislike would vanish, if she could suppose him to be in her power. In her kind schemes for Elizabeth, she sometimes planned her marrying Colonel Fitzwilliam. He was beyond comparison the pleasantest man; he certainly admired her, and his situation in life was most eligible; but, to counterbalance these advantages, Mr Darcy had considerable patronage in the church, and his cousin could have none at all.

Source: Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Tanner, Tony, ed. Penguin Books, 1973. Chapter XII Elizabeth awoke the next morning to the same thoughts and meditations which had at length closed her eyes. She could not yet recover from the surprise of what had happened; it was impossible to think of any thing else, and totally indisposed for employment, she resolved soon after breakfast to indulge herself in air and exercise. She was proceeding directly to her favourite walk, when the recollection of Mr. Darcy's sometimes coming there stopped her, and instead of entering the park, she turned up the lane, which led her farther from the turnpike road. The park paling was still the boundary on one side, and she soon passed one of the gates into the ground. After walking two or three times along that part of the lane, she was tempted, by the pleasantness of the morning, to stop at the gates and look into the park. The five weeks which she had now passed in Kent, had made a great difference in the country, and every day was adding to the verdure of the early trees. She was on the point of continuing her walk, when she caught a glimpse of a gentleman within the sort of grove which edged the park; he was moving that way; and fearful of its being Mr. Darcy, she was directly retreating. But the person who advanced, was now near enough to see her, and stepping forward with eagerness, pronounced her name. She had turned away, but on hearing herself called, though in a voice which proved it to be Mr. Darcy, she moved again towards the gate. He had by that time reached it also, and holding out a letter, which she instinctively took, said with a look of haughty composure, 'I have been walking in the grove some time in the hope of meeting you. Will you do me the honour of reading that letter?'—And then, with a slight bow, turned again into the plantation, and was soon out of sight. With no expectation of pleasure, but with the strongest curiosity, Elizabeth opened the letter, and to her still increasing wonder, perceived an envelope containing two sheets of letter paper,

186

written quite through, in a very close hand.—The envelope itself was likewise full.—Pursuing her way along the lane, she then began it. It was dated from Rosings, at eight o'clock in the morning, and was as follows:— 'Be not alarmed, Madam, on receiving this letter, by the apprehension of its containing any repetition of those sentiments, or renewal of those offers, which were last night so disgusting to you. I write without any intention of paining you, or humbling myself, by dwelling on wishes, which, for the happiness of both, cannot be too soon forgotten; and the effort which the formation, and the perusal of this letter must occasion, should have been spared, had not my character required it to be written and read. You must, therefore, pardon the freedom with which I demand your attention; your feelings, I know, will bestow it unwillingly, but I demand it of your justice. 'Two offences of a very different nature, and by no means of equal magnitude, you last night laid to my charge. The first mentioned was, that, regardless of the sentiments of either, I had detached Mr. Bingley from your sister,—and the other, that I had, in defiance of various claims, in defiance of honour and humanity, ruined the immediate prosperity, and blasted the prospects of Mr. Wickham.—Wilfully and wantonly to have thrown off the companion of my youth, the acknowledged favourite of my father, a young man who had scarcely any other dependence than on our patronage, and who had been brought up to expect its exertion, would be a depravity, to which the separation of two young persons, whose affection could be the growth of only a few weeks, could bear no comparison.—But from the severity of that blame which was last night so liberally bestowed, respecting each circumstance, I shall hope to be in future secured, when the following account of my actions and their motives has been read.—If, in the explanation of them which is due to myself, I am under the necessity of relating feelings which may be offensive to your's, I can only say that I am sorry.—The necessity must be obeyed— and farther apology would be absurd.—I had not been long in Hertfordshire, before I saw, in common with others, that Bingley preferred your eldest sister, to any other young woman in the country.—But it was not till the evening of the dance at Netherfield that I had any apprehension of his feeling a serious attachment.—I had often seen him in love before.—At that ball, while I had the honour of dancing with you, I was first made acquainted, by Sir William Lucas's accidental information, that Bingley's attentions to your sister had given rise to a general expectation of their marriage. He spoke of it as a certain event, of which the time alone could be undecided. From that moment I observed my friend's behaviour attentively; and I could then perceive that his partiality for Miss Bennet was beyond what I had ever witnessed in him. Your sister I also watched.—Her look and manners were open, cheerful and engaging as ever, but without any symptom of peculiar regard, and I remained convinced from the evening's scrutiny, that though she received his attentions with pleasure, she did not invite them by any participation of sentiment.—If you have not been mistaken here, I must have been in an error. Your superior knowledge of your sister must make the latter probable.—If it be so, if I have been misled by such error, to inflict pain on her, your resentment has not been unreasonable. But I shall not scruple to assert, that the serenity of your sister's countenance and air was such, as might have given the most acute observer, a conviction that, however amiable her temper, her heart was not likely to be easily touched.—That I was desirous of believing her indifferent is certain,—but I will venture to say that my investigations and decisions are not usually influenced by my hopes or fears.—I did not believe her to be indifferent because I wished it;—I believed it on impartial conviction, as truly as I wished it in reason.—My objections to the marriage were not merely those, which I last night acknowledged to have required the utmost force of passion to put aside, in my own case; the want of connection could not be so great an evil to my friend as to me.—But there were other causes of 187

repugnance;—causes which, though still existing, and existing to an equal degree in both instances, I had myself endeavoured to forget, because they were not immediately before me.— These causes must be stated, though briefly.—The situation of your mother's family, though objectionable, was nothing in comparison of that total want of propriety so frequently, so almost uniformly betrayed by herself, by your three younger sisters, and occasionally even by your father.—Pardon me.—It pains me to offend you. But amidst your concern for the defects of your nearest relations, and your displeasure at this representation of them, let it give you consolation to consider that, to have conducted yourselves so as to avoid any share of the like censure, is praise no less generally bestowed on you and your eldest sister, than it is honourable to the sense and disposition of both.—I will only say farther, that from what passed that evening, my opinion of all parties was confirmed, and every inducement heightened, which could have led me before, to preserve my friend from what I esteemed a most unhappy connection.—He left Netherfield for London, on the day following, as you, I am certain, remember, with the design of soon returning.—The part which I acted, is now to be explained.— His sisters' uneasiness had been equally excited with my own; our coincidence of feeling was soon discovered; and, alike sensible that no time was to be lost in detaching their brother, we shortly resolved on joining him directly in London.—We accordingly went—and there I readily engaged in the office of pointing out to my friend, the certain evils of such a choice.—I described, and enforced them earnestly.—But, however this remonstrance might have staggered or delayed his determination, I do not suppose that it would ultimately have prevented the marriage, had it not been seconded by the assurance which I hesitated not in giving, of your sister's indifference. He had before believed her to return his affection with sincere, if not with equal regard.—But Bingley has great natural modesty, with a stronger dependence on my judgment than on his own.—To convince him, therefore, that he had deceived himself, was no very difficult point. To persuade him against returning into Hertfordshire, when that conviction had been given, was scarcely the work of a moment.—I cannot blame myself for having done thus much. There is but one part of my conduct in the whole affair, on which I do not reflect with satisfaction; it is that I condescended to adopt the measures of art so far as to conceal from him your sister's being in town. I knew it myself, as it was known to Miss Bingley, but her brother is even yet ignorant of it.—That they might have met without ill consequence, is perhaps probable;—but his regard did not appear to me enough extinguished for him to see her without some danger.—Perhaps this concealment, this disguise, was beneath me.—It is done, however, and it was done for the best.—On this subject I have nothing more to say, no other apology to offer. If I have wounded your sister's feelings, it was unknowingly done; and though the motives which governed me may to you very naturally appear insufficient, I have not yet learnt to condemn them.—With respect to that other, more weighty accusation, of having injured Mr. Wickham, I can only refute it by laying before you the whole of his connection with my family. Of what he has particularly accused me I am ignorant; but of the truth of what I shall relate, I can summon more than one witness of undoubted veracity. Mr. Wickham is the son of a very respectable man, who had for many years the management of all the Pemberley estates; and whose good conduct in the discharge of his trust, naturally inclined my father to be of service to him, and on George Wickham, who was his god-son, his kindness was therefore liberally bestowed. My father supported him at school, and afterwards at Cambridge;—most important assistance, as his own father, always poor from the extravagance of his wife, would have been unable to give him a gentleman's education. My father was not only fond of this young man's society, whose manners were always engaging; he had also the highest opinion of him, and hoping the church would be his profession, intended to provide for him in it. As for myself, it is many, many years since I first began to think of him in a very different manner. 188

The vicious propensities—the want of principle which he was careful to guard from the knowledge of his best friend, could not escape the observation of a young man of nearly the same age with himself, and who had opportunities of seeing him in unguarded moments, which Mr. Darcy could not have. Here again I shall give you pain—to what degree you only can tell. But whatever may be the sentiments which Mr. Wickham has created, a suspicion of their nature shall not prevent me from unfolding his real character. It adds even another motive. My excellent father died about five years ago; and his attachment to Mr. Wickham was to the last so steady, that in his will he particularly recommended it to me, to promote his advancement in the best manner that his profession might allow, and if he took orders, desired that a valuable family living might be his as soon as it became vacant. There was also a legacy of one thousand pounds. His own father did not long survive mine, and within half a year from these events, Mr. Wickham wrote to inform me that, having finally resolved against taking orders, he hoped I should not think it unreasonable for him to expect some more immediate pecuniary advantage, in lieu of the preferment, by which he could not be benefited. He had some intention, he added, of studying the law, and I must be aware that the interest of one thousand pounds would be a very insufficient support therein. I rather wished, than believed him to be sincere; but at any rate, was perfectly ready to accede to his proposal. I knew that Mr. Wickham ought not to be a clergyman. The business was therefore soon settled. He resigned all claim to assistance in the church, were it possible that he could ever be in a situation to receive it, and accepted in return three thousand pounds. All connection between us seemed now dissolved. I thought too ill of him, to invite him to Pemberley, or admit his society in town. In town I believe he chiefly lived, but his studying the law was a mere pretence, and being now free from all restraint, his life was a life of idleness and dissipation. For about three years I heard little of him; but on the decease of the incumbent of the living which had been designed for him, he applied to me again by letter for the presentation. His circumstances, he assured me, and I had no difficulty in believing it, were exceedingly bad. He had found the law a most unprofitable study, and was now absolutely resolved on being ordained, if I would present him to the living in question—of which he trusted there could be little doubt, as he was well assured that I had no other person to provide for, and I could not have forgotten my revered father's intentions. You will hardly blame me for refusing to comply with this entreaty, or for resisting every repetition of it. His resentment was in proportion to the distress of his circumstances—and he was doubtless as violent in his abuse of me to others, as in his reproaches to myself. After this period, every appearance of acquaintance was dropt. How he lived I know not. But last summer he was again most painfully obtruded on my notice. I must now mention a circumstance which I would wish to forget myself, and which no obligation less than the present should induce me to unfold to any human being. Having said thus much, I feel no doubt of your secrecy. My sister, who is more than ten years my junior, was left to the guardianship of my mother's nephew, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and myself. About a year ago, she was taken from school, and an establishment formed for her in London; and last summer she went with the lady who presided over it, to Ramsgate; and thither also went Mr. Wickham, undoubtedly by design; for there proved to have been a prior acquaintance between him and Mrs. Younge, in whose character we were most unhappily deceived; and by her connivance and aid, he so far recommended himself to Georgiana, whose affectionate heart retained a strong impression of his kindness to her as a child, that she was persuaded to believe herself in love, and to consent to an elopement. She was then but fifteen, which must be her excuse; and after stating her imprudence, I am happy to add, that I owed the knowledge of it to herself. I joined them unexpectedly a day or two before the intended elopement, and then Georgiana, unable to support the idea of grieving and offending a brother whom she almost looked up to as a father, 189

acknowledged the whole to me. You may imagine what I felt and how I acted. Regard for my sister's credit and feelings prevented any public exposure, but I wrote to Mr. Wickham, who left the place immediately, and Mrs. Younge was of course removed from her charge. Mr. Wickham's chief object was unquestionably my sister's fortune, which is thirty thousand pounds; but I cannot help supposing that the hope of revenging himself on me, was a strong inducement. His revenge would have been complete indeed. This, madam, is a faithful narrative of every event in which we have been concerned together; and if you do not absolutely reject it as false, you will, I hope, acquit me henceforth of cruelty towards Mr. Wickham. I know not in what manner, under what form of falsehood he has imposed on you; but his success is not perhaps to be wondered at. Ignorant as you previously were of every thing concerning either detection could not be in your power, and suspicion certainly not in your inclination. You may possibly wonder why all this was not told you last night. But I was not then master enough of myself to know what could or ought to be revealed. For the truth of every thing here related, I can appeal more particularly to the testimony of Colonel Fitzwilliam, who from our near relationship and constant intimacy, and still more as one of the executors of my father's will, has been unavoidably acquainted with every particular of these transactions. If your abhorrence of me should make my assertions valueless, you cannot be prevented by the same cause from confiding in my cousin; and that there may be the possibility of consulting him, I shall endeavour to find some opportunity of putting this letter in your hands in the course of the morning. I will only add, God bless you. 'FITZWILLIAM DARCY' Chapter XIII If Elizabeth, when Mr. Darcy gave her the letter, did not expect it to contain a renewal of his offers, she had formed no expectation at all of its contents. But such as they were, it may well be supposed how eagerly she went through them, and what a contrariety of emotion they excited. Her feelings as she read were scarcely to be defined. With amazement did she first understand that he believed any apology to be in his power; and stedfastly was she persuaded that he could have no explanation to give, which a just sense of shame would not conceal. With a strong prejudice against every thing he might say, she began his account of what had happened at Netherfield. She read, with an eagerness which hardly left her power of comprehension, and from impatience of knowing what the next sentence might bring, was incapable of attending to the sense of the one before her eyes. His belief of her sister's insensibility, she instantly resolved to be false, and his account of the real, the worst objections to the match, made her too angry to have any wish of doing him justice. He expressed no regret for what he had done which satisfied her; his style was not penitent, but haughty. It was all pride and insolence. But when this subject was succeeded by his account of Mr. Wickham, when she read with somewhat clearer attention, a relation of events, which, if true, must overthrow every cherished opinion of his worth, and which bore so alarming an affinity to his own history of himself, her feelings were yet more acutely painful and more difficult of definition. Astonishment, apprehension, and even horror, oppressed her. She wished to discredit it entirely, repeatedly exclaiming, 'This must be false! This cannot be! This must be the grossest falsehood!'—and when she had gone through the whole letter, though scarcely knowing any thing of the last page or two, put it hastily away, protesting that she would not regard it, that she would never look in it again.

190

In this perturbed state of mind, with thoughts that could rest on nothing, she walked on; but it would not do; in half a minute the letter was unfolded again, and collecting herself as well as she could, she again began the mortifying perusal of all that related to Wickham, and commanded herself so far as to examine the meaning of every sentence. The account of his connection with the Pemberley family, was exactly what he had related himself; and the kindness of the late Mr. Darcy, though she had not before known its extent, agreed equally well with his own words. So far each recital confirmed the other: but when she came to the will, the difference was great. What Wickham had said of the living was fresh in her memory, and as she recalled his very words, it was impossible not to feel that there was gross duplicity on one side or the other; and, for a few moments, she flattered herself that her wishes did not err. But when she read, and re-read with the closest attention, the particulars immediately following of Wickham's resigning all pretensions to the living, of his receiving in lieu, so considerable a sum as three thousand pounds, again was she forced to hesitate. She put down the letter, weighed every circumstance with what she meant to be impartiality—deliberated on the probability of each statement—but with little success. On both sides it was only assertion. Again she read on. But every line proved more clearly that the affair, which she had believed it impossible that any contrivance could so represent, as to render Mr. Darcy's conduct in it less than infamous, was capable of a turn which must make him entirely blameless throughout the whole. The extravagance and general profligacy which he scrupled not to lay to Mr. Wickham's charge, exceedingly shocked her; the more so, as she could bring no proof of its injustice. She had never heard of him before his entrance into the ——shire Militia, in which he had engaged at the persuasion of the young man, who, on meeting him accidentally in town, had there renewed a slight acquaintance. Of his former way of life, nothing had been known in Hertfordshire but what he told himself. As to his real character, had information been in her power, she had never felt a wish of enquiring. His countenance, voice, and manner, had established him at once in the possession of every virtue. She tried to recollect some instance of goodness, some distinguished trait of integrity or benevolence, that might rescue him from the attacks of Mr. Darcy; or at least, by the predominance of virtue, atone for those casual errors, under which she would endeavour to class, what Mr. Darcy had described as the idleness and vice of many years continuance. But no such recollection befriended her. She could see him instantly before her, in every charm of air and address; but she could remember no more substantial good than the general approbation of the neighbourhood, and the regard which his social powers had gained him in the mess. After pausing on this point a considerable while, she once more continued to read. But, alas! the story which followed of his designs on Miss Darcy, received some confirmation from what had passed between Colonel Fitzwilliam and herself only the morning before; and at last she was referred for the truth of every particular to Colonel Fitzwilliam himself—from whom she had previously received the information of his near concern in all his cousin's affairs, and whose character she had no reason to question. At one time she had almost resolved on applying to him, but the idea was checked by the awkwardness of the application, and at length wholly banished by the conviction that Mr. Darcy would never have hazarded such a proposal, if he had not been well assured of his cousin's corroboration. She perfectly remembered every thing that had passed in conversation between Wickham and herself, in their first evening at Mr. Philips's. Many of his expressions were still fresh in her memory. She was now struck with the impropriety of such communications to a stranger, and wondered it had escaped her before. She saw the indelicacy of putting himself forward as he had done, and the inconsistency of his professions with his conduct. She remembered that he had boasted of having no fear of seeing Mr. Darcy—that Mr. Darcy might leave the country, but 191

that he should stand his ground; yet he had avoided the Netherfield ball the very next week. She remembered also, that till the Netherfield family had quitted the country, he had told his story to no one but herself; but that after their removal, it had been every where discussed; that he had then no reserves, no scruples in sinking Mr. Darcy's character, though he had assured her that respect for the father, would always prevent his exposing the son. How differently did every thing now appear in which he was concerned! His attentions to Miss King were now the consequence of views solely and hatefully mercenary; and the mediocrity of her fortune proved no longer the moderation of his wishes, but his eagerness to grasp at any thing. His behaviour to herself could now have had no tolerable motive; he had either been deceived with regard to her fortune, or had been gratifying his vanity by encouraging the preference which she believed she had most incautiously shewn. Every lingering struggle in his favour grew fainter and fainter; and in farther justification of Mr. Darcy, she could not but allow that Mr. Bingley, when questioned by Jane, had long ago asserted his blamelessness in the affair; that proud and repulsive as were his manners, she had never, in the whole course of their acquaintance, an acquaintance which had latterly brought them much together, and given her a sort of intimacy with his ways, seen any thing that betrayed him to be unprincipled or unjust—any thing that spoke him of irreligious or immoral habits. That among his own connections he was esteemed and valued—that even Wickham had allowed him merit as a brother, and that she had often heard him speak so affectionately of his sister as to prove him capable of some amiable feeling. That had his actions been what Wickham represented them, so gross a violation of every thing right could hardly have been concealed from the world; and that friendship between a person capable of it, and such an amiable man as Mr. Bingley, was incomprehensible. She grew absolutely ashamed of herself.—Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd. 'How despicably have I acted!' she cried.—'I, who have prided myself on my discernment!—I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust.—How humiliating is this discovery!—Yet, how just a humiliation!—Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.—Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.' From herself to Jane—from Jane to Bingley, her thoughts were in a line which soon brought to her recollection that Mr. Darcy's explanation there, had appeared very insufficient; and she read it again. Widely different was the effect of a second perusal.—How could she deny that credit to his assertions, in one instance, which she had been obliged to give in the other?—He declared himself to have been totally unsuspicious of her sister's attachment;—and she could not help remembering what Charlotte's opinion had always been.—Neither could she deny the justice of his description of Jane.—She felt that Jane's feelings, though fervent, were little displayed, and that there was a constant complacency in her air and manner, not often united with great sensibility. When she came to that part of the letter in which her family were mentioned, in terms of such mortifying, yet merited reproach, her sense of shame was severe. The justice of the charge struck her too forcibly for denial, and the circumstances to which he particularly alluded, as having passed at the Netherfield ball, and as confirming all his first disapprobation, could not have made a stronger impression on his mind than on hers.

192

The compliment to herself and her sister, was not unfelt. It soothed, but it could not console her for the contempt which had been thus self-attracted by the rest of her family;—and as she considered that Jane's disappointment had in fact been the work of her nearest relations, and reflected how materially the credit of both must be hurt by such impropriety of conduct, she felt depressed beyond any thing she had ever known before. After wandering along the lane for two hours, giving way to every variety of thought; reconsidering events, determining probabilities, and reconciling herself as well as she could, to a change so sudden and so important, fatigue, and a recollection of her long absence, made her at length return home; and she entered the house with the wish of appearing cheerful as usual, and the resolution of repressing such reflections as must make her unfit for conversation. She was immediately told, that the two gentlemen from Rosings had each called during her absence; Mr. Darcy, only for a few minutes to take leave, but that Colonel Fitzwilliam had been sitting with them at least an hour, hoping for her return, and almost resolving to walk after her till she could be found.—Elizabeth could but just affect concern in missing him; she really rejoiced at it. Colonel Fitzwilliam was no longer an object. She could think only of her letter.

Source: Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Gray, Donald, ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— Other important figures in the mainstream of the Victorian novel were notable for a variety of reasons. Anthony Trollope was distinguished for his gently ironic surveys of English ecclesiastical and political circles; Emily Brontë, for her penetrating study of passionate character; George Eliot, for her responsible idealism; George Meredith, for a sophisticated, detached, and ironical view of human nature; and Thomas Hardy, for a profoundly pessimistic sense of human subjection to fate and circumstance. —————————————————————————————————————

"Still Knitting" A Tale of Two Cities (1859) by English novelist Charles Dickens is noted for its vivid portrayal of Paris at the time of the French Revolution (1789-1799). The following excerpt shows two wine shop owners, the Defarges, in their destitute neighborhood. Dickens depicts the two as nursing a seething anger and revolutionary sentiments. The Defarges use surreptitious means to gather information on a spy searching for insurrectionist activity, and to warn others that the spy has appeared in their shop.

From A Tale of Two Cities By Charles Dickens

193

Still Knitting The Defarges, husband and wife, came lumbering under the starlight, in their public vehicle, to that gate of Paris whereunto their journey naturally tended. There was the usual stoppage at the barrier guardhouse, and the usual lanterns came glancing forth for the usual examination and inquiry. Monsieur Defarge alighted: knowing one or two of the soldiery there, and one of the police. The latter he was intimate with, and affectionately embraced. When Saint Antoine had again enfolded the Defarges in his dusky wings, and they, having finally alighted near the Saint's boundaries, were picking their way on foot through the black mud and offal of his streets, Madame Defarge spoke to her husband: 'Say then, my friend; what did Jacques of the police tell thee?' 'Very little to-night, but all he knows. There is another spy commissioned for our quarter. There may be many more, for all that he can say, but he knows of one.' 'Eh well!' said Madame Defarge, raising her eyebrows with a cool business air. 'It is necessary to register him. How do they call that man?' 'He is English.' 'So much the better. His name?' 'Barsad,' said Defarge, making it French by pronunciation. But, he had been so careful to get it accurately, that he then spelt it with perfect correctness. 'Barsad,' repeated madame. 'Good. Christian name?' 'John.' 'John Barsad,' repeated madame, after murmuring it once to herself. 'Good. His appearance; is it known?' 'Age, about forty years; height, about five feet nine; black hair; complexion dark; generally, rather handsome visage; eyes dark, face thin, long, and sallow; nose aquiline, but not straight, having a peculiar inclination towards the left cheek; expression, therefore, sinister.' 'Eh my faith. It is a portrait!' said madame, laughing. 'He shall be registered to-morrow.' They turned into the wine-shop, which was closed (for it was midnight) and where Madame Defarge immediately took her post at her desk, counted the small moneys that had been taken during her absence, examined the stock, went through the entries in the book, made other entries of her own, checked the serving man in every possible way, and finally dismissed him to bed. Then she turned out the contents of the bowl of money for the second time, and began knotting them up in her handkerchief, in a chain of separate knots, for safe keeping through the night. All this while, Defarge, with his pipe in his mouth, walked up and down, complacently admiring, but never interfering; in which condition, indeed, as to the business and his domestic affairs, he walked up and down through life. The night was hot, and the shop, close shut and surrounded by so foul a neighbourhood, was ill-smelling. Monsieur Defarge's olfactory sense was by no means delicate, but the stock of wine smelt much stronger than it ever tasted, and so did the stock of rum and brandy and aniseed. He whiffed the compound of scents away, as he put down his smoked-out pipe. 'You are fatigued,' said madame, raising her glance as she knotted the money. 'There are only the usual odours.' 'I am a little tired,' her husband acknowledged. 'You are a little depressed, too,' said madame, whose quick eyes had never been so intent on the accounts, but they had had a ray or two for him. 'Oh, the men, the men!' 'But my dear!' began Defarge. 'But my dear!' repeated madame, nodding firmly; 'but my dear! You are faint of heart to-night, my dear!' 194

'Well, then,' said Defarge, as if a thought were wrung out of his breast, 'it is a long time.' 'It is a long time,' repeated his wife; 'and when is it not a long time? Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.' 'It does not take a long time to strike a man with Lightning,' said Defarge. 'How long,' demanded madame, composedly,' does it take to make and store the lightning? Tell me.' Defarge raised his head thoughtfully, as if there were something in that too. 'It does not take a long time,' said madame, 'for an earthquake to swallow a town. Eh well! Tell me how long it takes to prepare the earthquake?' 'A long time, I suppose,' said Defarge. 'But when it is ready, it takes place, and grinds to pieces everything before it. In the meantime, it is always preparing, though it is not seen or heard. That is your consolation. Keep it.' She tied a knot with flashing eyes, as if it throttled a foe. 'I tell thee,' said madame, extending her right hand, for emphasis, 'that although it is a long time on the road, it is on the road and coming. I tell thee it never retreats, and never stops. I tell thee it is always advancing. Look around and consider the lives of all the world that we know, consider the faces of all the world that we know, consider the rage and discontent to which the Jacquerie addresses itself with more and more of certainty every hour. Can such things last? Bah! I mock you.' 'My brave wife,' returned Defarge, standing before her with his head a little bent, and his hands clasped at his back, like a docile and attentive pupil before his catechist, 'I do not question all this. But it has lasted a long time, and it is possible—you know well, my wife, it is possible—that it may not come, during our lives.' 'Eh well! How then?' demanded madame, tying another knot, as if there were another enemy strangled. 'Well!' said Defarge, with a half-complaining and half-apologetic shrug. 'We shall not see the triumph.' 'We shall have helped it,' returned madame, with her extended hand in strong action. 'Nothing that we do, is done in vain. I believe, with all my soul, that we shall see the triumph. But even if not, even if I knew certainly not, show me the neck of an aristocrat and tyrant, and still I would—' Then madame, with her teeth set, tied a very terrible knot indeed. 'Hold!' cried Defarge, reddening a little as if he felt charged with cowardice; 'I too, my dear, will stop at nothing.' 'Yes! But it is your weakness that you sometimes need to see your victim and your opportunity, to sustain you. Sustain yourself without that. When the time comes, let loose a tiger and a devil; but wait for the time with the tiger and the devil chained—not shown—yet always ready.' Madame enforced the conclusion of this piece of advice by striking her little counter with her chain of money as if she knocked its brains out, and then gathering the heavy handkerchief under her arm in a serene manner, and observing that it was time to go to bed. Next noontide saw the admirable woman in her usual place in the wine-shop, knitting away assiduously. A rose lay beside her, and if she now and then glanced at the flower, it was with no infraction of her usual preoccupied air. There were a few customers, drinking or not drinking, standing or seated, sprinkled about. The day was very hot, and heaps of flies, who were extending their inquisitive and adventurous perquisitions into all the glutinous little glasses near madame, fell dead at the bottom. Their decease made no impression on the other flies out promenading, who looked at them in the coolest manner (as if they themselves were elephants,

195

or something as far removed), until they met the same fate. Curious to consider how heedless flies are!—perhaps they thought as much at Court that sunny summer day. A figure entering at the door threw a shadow on Madame Defarge which she felt to be a new one. She laid down her knitting, and began to pin her rose in her head-dress, before she looked at the figure. It was curious. The moment Madame Defarge took up the rose, the customers ceased talking, and began gradually to drop out of the wine-shop. 'Good day, madame,' said the new comer. 'Good day, monsieur.' She said it aloud, but added to herself, as she resumed her knitting: 'Hah! Good day, age about forty, height about five feet nine, black hair, generally rather handsome visage, complexion dark, eyes dark, thin long and sallow face, aquiline nose but not straight, having a peculiar inclination towards the left cheek which imparts a sinister expression! Good day, one and all!' 'Have the goodness to give me a little glass of old cognac, and a mouthful of cool fresh water, madame.' Madame complied with a polite air. 'Marvellous cognac this, madame!' It was the first time it had ever been so complimented, and Madame Defarge knew enough of its antecedents to know better. She said, however, that the cognac was flattered, and took up her knitting. The visitor watched her fingers for a few moments, and took the opportunity of observing the place in general. 'You knit with great skill, madame.' 'I am accustomed to it.' 'A pretty pattern too!' 'You think so?' said madame, looking at him with a smile. 'Decidedly. May one ask what it is for?' 'Pastime,' said madame, still looking at him with a smile, while her fingers moved nimbly. 'Not for use?' 'That depends. I may find a use for it one day. If I do—well,' said madame, drawing a breath and nodding her head with a stern kind of coquetry, 'I'll use it!' It was remarkable; but the taste of Saint Antoine seemed to be decidedly opposed to a rose on the headdress of Madame Defarge. Two men had entered separately, and had been about to order drink, when, catching sight of that novelty, they faltered, made a pretence of looking about as if for some friend who was not there, and went away. Nor, of those who had been there when this visitor entered, was there one left. They had all dropped off. The spy had kept his eyes open, but had been able to detect no sign. They had lounged away in a povertystricken, purposeless, accidental manner, quite natural and unimpeachable. 'JOHN,' thought madame, checking off her work as her fingers knitted, and her eyes looked at the stranger. 'Stay long enough, and I shall knit 'BARSAD' before you go.' 'You have a husband, madame?' 'I have.' 'Children?' 'No children.' 'Business seems bad?' 'Business is very bad; the people are so poor.' 'Ah, the unfortunate, miserable people! So oppressed, too—as you say.' 'As you say,' madame retorted, correcting him, and deftly knitting an extra something into his name that boded him no good. 196

'Pardon me; certainly it was I who said so, but you naturally think so. Of course.' 'I think?' returned madame, in a high voice. 'I and my husband have enough to do to keep this wine-shop open, without thinking. All we think, here, is how to live. That is the subject we think of, and it gives us, from morning to night, enough to think about, without embarrassing our heads concerning others. I think for others? No, no.' The spy, who was there to pick up any crumbs he could find or make, did not allow his baffled state to express itself in his sinister face; but, stood with an air of gossiping gallantry, leaning his elbow on Madame Defarge's little counter, and occasionally sipping his cognac. 'A bad business this, madame, of Gaspard's execution. Ah! the poor Gaspard!' With a sigh of great compassion. 'My faith!' returned madame, coolly and lightly, 'if people use knives for such purposes, they have to pay for it. He knew beforehand what the price of his luxury was; he has paid the price.' 'I believe,' said the spy, dropping his soft voice to a tone that invited confidence, and expressing an injured revolutionary susceptibility in every muscle of his wicked face: 'I believe there is much compassion and anger in this neighbourhood, touching the poor fellow? Between ourselves.' 'Is there?' asked madame, vacantly. 'Is there not?' '—Here is my husband!' said Madame Defarge. As the keeper of the wine-shop entered at the door, the spy saluted him by touching his hat, and saying, with an engaging smile, 'Good day, Jacques!' Defarge stopped short, and stared at him. 'Good day, Jacques!' the spy repeated; with not quite so much confidence, or quite so easy a smile under the stare. 'You deceive yourself, monsieur,' returned the keeper of the wine-shop. 'You mistake me for another. That is not my name. I am Ernest Defarge.' 'It is all the same,' said the spy, airily, but discomfited too: 'good day!' 'Good day!' answered Defarge, drily. 'I was saying to madame, with whom I had the pleasure of chatting when you entered, that they tell me there is—and no wonder!—much sympathy and anger in Saint Antoine, touching the unhappy fate of poor Gaspard.' 'No one has told me so,' said Defarge, shaking his head. 'I know nothing of it.' Having said it, he passed behind the little counter, and stood with his hand on the back of his wife's chair, looking over that barrier at the person to whom they were both opposed, and whom either of them would have shot with the greatest satisfaction. The spy, well used to his business, did not change his unconscious attitude, but drained his little glass of cognac, took a sip of fresh water, and asked for another glass of cognac. Madame Defarge poured it out for him, took to her knitting again, and hummed a little song over it. 'You seem to know this quarter well; that is to say, better than I do?' observed Defarge. 'Not at all, but I hope to know it better, I am so profoundly interested in its miserable inhabitants.' 'Hah!' muttered Defarge.

Source: Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. New York: Random House, 1996. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

197

A second and younger group of novelists, many of whom continued their important work into the 20th century, displayed two new tendencies. Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad tried in various ways to restore the spirit of romance to the novel, in part by a choice of exotic locale, in part by articulating their themes through plots of adventure and action. Kipling attained fame also for his verse and for his mastery of the single, concentrated effect in the short story. Another tendency, in a sense an intensification of realism, was common to Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells. These novelists attempted to represent the life of their time with great accuracy and in a critical, partly propagandistic spirit. Wells's novels, for example, often seem to be sociological investigations of the ills of modern civilization rather than self-contained stories. —————————————————————————————————————

From Wuthering Heights Laurence Olivier, right, plays Heathcliff, opposite Merle Oberon's Cathy, in a scene from the 1939 film version of Wuthering Heights. Archive Photos

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

From Wuthering Heights English novelist Emily Brontë had to pay the costs of printing Wuthering Heights (1847) after her publisher refused to pay the initial expenses, unsure that the novel would sell enough copies. The story of Heathcliff and Catherine‘s passionate and at times destructive love for one another has a dark, brooding atmosphere that disturbed its Victorian audience. At the opening of the book, Mr.

198

Lockwood, Heathcliff‘s tenant on another farm, recounts a visit to the Wuthering Heights estate and his encounters with Heathcliff and the other members of the household. Heathcliff provided no hospitality to his guest when a snowstorm struck. Zillah, the servant, offered to let Lockwood sleep in an unoccupied room in the house.

From Wuthering Heights By Emily Brontë

While leading the way upstairs, she recommended that I should hide the candle, and not make a noise, for her master had an odd notion about the chamber she would put me in, and never let anybody lodge there willingly. I asked the reason. She did not know, she answered; she had only lived there a year or two; and they had so many queer goings on, she could not begin to be curious. Too stupified to be curious myself, I fastened my door and glanced round for the bed. The whole furniture consisted of a chair, a clothes-press, and a large oak case, with squares cut out near the top, resembling coach windows. Having approached this structure, I looked inside, and perceived it to be a singular sort of oldfashioned couch, very conveniently designed to obviate the necessity for every member of the family having a room to himself. In fact, it formed a little closet, and the ledge of a window, which it enclosed, served as a table. I slid back the panelled sides, got in with my light, pulled them together again, and felt secure against the vigilance of Heathcliff, and every one else. The ledge, where I placed my candle, had a few mildewed books piled up in one corner; and it was covered with writing scratched on the paint. This writing, however, was nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small—Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton. In vapid listlessness I leant my head against the window, and continued spelling over Catherine Earnshaw—Heathcliff—Linton, till my eyes closed; but they had not rested five minutes when a glare of white letters started from the dark, as vivid as spectres—the air swarmed with Catherines; and rousing myself to dispel the obtrusive name, I discovered my candle wick reclining on one of the antique volumes, and perfuming the place with an odour of roasted calf-skin. I snuffed it off, and, very ill at ease under the influence of cold and lingering nausea, sat up, and spread open the injured tome on my knee. It was a Testament, in lean type, and smelling dreadfully musty: a fly-leaf bore the inscription—'Catherine Earnshaw, her book,' and a date some quarter of a century back. I shut it, and took up another, and another, till I had examined all. Catherine's library was select, and its state of dilapidation proved it to have been well used, though not altogether for a legitimate purpose; scarcely one chapter had escaped a pen and ink commentary—at least, the appearance of one—covering every morsel of blank that the printer had left. Some were detached sentences; other parts took the form of a regular diary, scrawled in an unformed, childish hand. At the top of an extra page, quite a treasure probably when first lighted on, I was greatly amused to behold an excellent caricature of my friend Joseph, rudely yet powerfully sketched. An immediate interest kindled within me for the unknown Catherine, and I began, forthwith, to decypher her faded hieroglyphics. 199

'An awful Sunday!' commenced the paragraph beneath. 'I wish my father were back again. Hindley is a detestable substitute—his conduct to Heathcliff is atrocious—H. and I are going to rebel—we took our initiatory step this evening. 'All day had been flooding with rain; we could not go to church, so Joseph must needs get up a congregation in the garret; and, while Hindley and his wife basked downstairs before a comfortable fire—doing anything but reading their Bibles, I'll answer for it—Heathcliff, myself, and the unhappy ploughboy were commanded to take our Prayer-books, and mount. We were ranged in a row, on a sack of corn, groaning and shivering, and hoping that Joseph would shiver too, so that he might give us a short homily for his own sake. A vain idea! The service lasted precisely three hours; and yet my brother had the face to exclaim, when he saw us descending— ' 'What, done already?' 'On Sunday evenings we used to be permitted to play, if we did not make much noise; now a mere titter is sufficient to send us into corners! ' 'You forget you have a master here,' says the tyrant. 'I'll demolish the first who puts me out of temper! I insist on perfect sobriety and silence. Oh, boy! was that you? Frances, darling, pull his hair as you go by; I heard him snap his fingers.' 'Frances pulled his hair heartily; and then went and seated herself on her husband's knee, and there they were, like two babies, kissing and talking nonsense by the hour—foolish palaver that we should be ashamed of. 'We made ourselves as snug as our means allowed in the arch of the dresser. I had just fastened our pinafores together, and hung them up for a curtain, when in comes Joseph, on an errand from the stables. He tears down my handywork, boxes my ears, and croaks— ' 'T' maister nobbut just buried, and Sabbath nut oe'red, und t'sahnd uh't gospel still i' yer lugs, and yah darr be laiking! shame on ye! sit ye dahn, ill childer! they's good books eneugh if ye'll read 'em; sit ye dahn, and think uh yer sowls!' 'Saying this, he compelled us so to square our positions that we might receive, from the far-off fire, a dull ray to show us the text of the lumber he thrust upon us. 'I could not bear the employment. I took my dingy volume by the scroop, and hurled it into the dog-kennel, vowing I hated a good book. 'Heathcliff kicked his to the same place. 'Then there was a hubbub! ' 'Maister Hindley!' shouted our chaplain. 'Maister, coom hither! Miss Cathy's riven th' back off 'Th' Helmet uh Salvation,' un' Heathcliff's pawsed his fit intuh t' first part uh 'T' Brooad Way to Destruction!' It's fair flaysome ut yah let 'em goa on this gait. Ech! th' owd man ud uh laced 'em properly—bud he's goan!' 'Hindley hurried up from his paradise on the hearth, and seizing one of us by the collar, and the other by the arm, hurled both into the back-kitchen, where, Joseph asseverated, 'owd Nick' would fetch us as sure as we were living; and, so comforted, we each sought a separate nook to await his advent. 'I reached this book, and a pot of ink from a shelf, and pushed the house-door ajar to give me light, and I have got the time on with writing for twenty minutes; but my companion is impatient and proposes that we should appropriate the dairy woman's cloak, and have a scamper on the moors, under its shelter. A pleasant suggestion—and then, if the surly old man come in, he may believe his prophesy verified—we cannot be damper, or colder, in the rain than we are here.' I suppose Catherine fulfilled her project, for the next sentence took up another subject; she waxed lachrymose. 200

'How little did I dream that Hindley would ever make me cry so!' she wrote. 'My head aches, till I cannot keep it on the pillow; and still I can't give over. Poor Heathcliff! Hindley calls him a vagabond, and won't let him sit with us, nor eat with us any more; and, he says, he and I must not play together, and threatens to turn him out of the house if we break his orders. 'He has been blaming our father (how dared he?) for treating H. too liberally; and swears he will reduce him to his right place—' I began to nod drowsily over the dim page; my eye wandered from manuscript to print. I saw a red ornamented title—'Seventy Times Seven, and the First of the Seventy-First. A Pious Discourse delivered by the Reverend Jabes Branderham, in the Chapel of Gimmerden Sough.' And while I was, half consciously, worrying my brain to guess what Jabes Branderham would make of his subject, I sank back in bed, and fell asleep. Alas, for the effects of bad tea and bad temper! what else could it be that made me pass such a terrible night? I don't remember another that I can at all compare with it since I was capable of suffering. I began to dream, almost before I ceased to be sensible of my locality.… I listened doubtingly an instant; detected the disturber, then turned and dozed, and dreamt again; if possible, still more disagreeably than before. This time, I remembered I was lying in the oak closet, and I heard distinctly the gusty wind, and the driving of the snow; I heard, also, the fir-bough repeat its teasing sound, and ascribed it to the right cause; but it annoyed me so much, that I resolved to silence it, if possible; and, I thought, I rose and endeavoured to unhasp the casement. The hook was soldered into the staple, a circumstance observed by me when awake, but forgotten. 'I must stop it, nevertheless!' I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch: instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand! The intense horror of nightmare came over me; I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed— 'Let me in—let me in!' 'Who are you?' I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. 'Catherine Linton,' it replied, shiveringly (why did I think of Linton? I had read Earnshaw twenty times for Linton). 'I'm come home, I'd lost my way on the moor!' As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes: still it wailed, 'Let me in!' and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear. 'How can I?' I said at length. 'Let me go, if you want me to let you in!' The fingers relaxed, I snatched mine through the hole, hurriedly piled the books up in a pyramid against it, and stopped my ears to exclude the lamentable prayer. I seemed to keep them closed above a quarter of an hour, yet, the instant I listened again, there was the doleful cry moaning on! 'Begone!' I shouted, 'I'll never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years!' 'It's twenty years,' mourned the voice, 'twenty years, I've been a waif for twenty years!' Thereat began a feeble scratching outside, and the pile of books moved as if thrust forward. I tried to jump up, but could not stir a limb; and so yelled aloud, in a frenzy of fright. To my confusion, I discovered the yell was not ideal. Hasty footsteps approached my chamber door; somebody pushed it open, with a vigorous hand, and a light glimmered through the squares at the top of the bed. I sat shuddering yet, and wiping the perspiration from my forehead: the intruder appeared to hesitate, and muttered to himself. 201

At last, he said in a half-whisper, plainly not expecting an answer— 'Is any one here?' I considered it best to confess my presence, for I knew Heathcliff's accents, and feared he might search further, if I kept quiet. With this intention, I turned and opened the panels. I shall not soon forget the effect my action produced. Heathcliff stood near the entrance, in his shirt and trousers, with a candle dripping over his fingers, and his face as white as the wall behind him. The first creak of the oak startled him like an electric shock: the light leaped from his hold to a distance of some feet, and his agitation was so extreme that he could hardly pick it up. 'It is only your guest, sir,' I called out, desirous to spare him the humiliation of exposing his cowardice further. 'I had the misfortune to scream in my sleep, owing to a frightful nightmare. I'm sorry I disturbed you.' 'Oh, God confound you, Mr. Lockwood! I wish you were at the—' commenced my host, setting the candle on a chair, because he found it impossible to hold it steady. 'And who showed you up to this room?' he continued, crushing his nails into his palms, and grinding his teeth to subdue the maxillary convulsions. 'Who was it? I've a good mind to turn them out of the house this moment!' 'It was your servant, Zillah,' I replied, flinging myself on to the floor, and rapidly resuming my garments. 'I should not care if you did, Mr. Heathcliff; she richly deserves it. I suppose that she wanted to get another proof that the place was haunted, at my expense. Well, it is—swarming with ghosts and goblins! You have reason in shutting it up, I assure you. No one will thank you for a doze in such a den!' 'What do you mean?' asked Heathcliff, 'and what are you doing? Lie down and finish out the night, since you are here; but, for heaven's sake! don't repeat that horrid noise. Nothing could excuse it, unless you were having your throat cut!' 'If the little fiend had got in at the window, she probably would have strangled me!' I returned. 'I'm not going to endure the persecutions of your hospitable ancestors again. Was not the Reverend Jabes Branderham akin to you on the mother's side? And that minx, Catherine Linton, or Earnshaw, or however she was called—she must have been a changeling—wicked little soul! She told me she had been walking the earth these twenty years: a just punishment for her mortal transgressions, I've no doubt!' Scarcely were these words uttered, when I recollected the association of Heathcliff's with Catherine's name in the book, which had completely slipped from my memory till thus awakened. I blushed at my inconsideration; but, without showing further consciousness of the offence, I hastened to add— 'The truth is, sir, I passed the first part of the night in—' here, I stopped afresh—I was about to say 'perusing those old volumes;' then it would have revealed my knowledge of their written, as well as their printed contents; so, correcting myself, I went on—'in spelling over the name scratched on that window-ledge. A monotonous occupation, calculated to set me asleep, like counting, or—' 'What can you mean by talking in this way to me!' thundered Heathcliff with savage vehemence. 'How—how dare you, under my roof—God! he's mad to speak so!' And he struck his forehead with rage. I did not know whether to resent this language, or pursue my explanation; but he seemed so powerfully affected that I took pity and proceeded with my dreams, affirming I had never heard the appellation of 'Catherine Linton' before, but reading it often over produced an impression which personified itself when I had no longer my imagination under control. 202

Heathcliff gradually fell back into the shelter of the bed as I spoke, finally sitting down almost concealed behind it. I guessed, however, by his irregular and intercepted breathing, that he struggled to vanquish an access of violent emotion. Not liking to show him that I heard the conflict, I continued my toilette rather noisily, looked at my watch, and soliloquized on the length of the night— 'Not three o'clock yet! I could have taken oath it had been six. Time stagnates here—we must surely have retired to rest at eight!' 'Always at nine in winter, and always rise at four,' said my host, suppressing a groan, and, as I fancied, by the motion of his shadow's arm, dashing a tear from his eyes. 'Mr. Lockwood,' he added, 'you may go into my room; you'll only be in the way, coming downstairs so early; and your childish outcry has sent sleep to the devil for me.' 'And for me, too,' I replied. 'I'll walk in the yard till daylight, and then I'll be off; and you need not dread a repetition of my intrusion. I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.' 'Delightful company!' muttered Heathcliff. 'Take the candle, and go where you please. I shall join you directly. Keep out of the yard, though; the dogs are unchained, and the house—Juno mounts sentinel there, and—nay, you can only ramble about the steps and passages. But, away with you! I'll come in two minutes.' I obeyed, so far as to quit the chamber; when, ignorant where the narrow lobbies led, I stood still, and was witness, involuntarily, to a piece of superstition on the part of my landlord, which belied, oddly, his apparent sense. He got on to the bed and wrenched open the lattice, bursting, as he pulled at it, into an uncontrollable passion of tears. 'Come in! come in!' he sobbed. 'Cathy, do come. Oh, do—once more! Oh! my heart's darling, hear me this time—Catherine, at last!' The spectre showed a spectre's ordinary caprice; it gave no sign of being; but the snow and wind whirled wildly through, even reaching my station, and blowing out the light. There was such anguish in the gush of grief that accompanied this raving, that my compassion made me overlook its folly, and I drew off, half angry to have listened at all, and vexed at having related my ridiculous nightmare, since it produced that agony, though why, was beyond my comprehension. I descended cautiously to the lower regions and landed in the back-kitchen, where a gleam of fire, raked compactly together, enabled me to rekindle my candle. Nothing was stirring except a brindled, grey cat, which crept from the ashes and saluted me with a querulous mew. Two benches, shaped in sections of a circle, nearly enclosed the hearth; on one of these I stretched myself, and Grimalkin mounted the other. We were both of us nodding, ere any one invaded our retreat; and then it was Joseph shuffling down a wooden ladder that vanished in the roof, through a trap: the ascent to his garret, I suppose. He cast a sinister look at the little flame which I had enticed to play between the ribs, swept the cat from its elevation, and bestowing himself in the vacancy, commenced the operation of stuffing a three-inch pipe with tobacco; my presence in his sanctum was evidently esteemed a piece of impudence too shameful for remark. He silently applied the tube to his lips, folded his arms, and puffed away. I let him enjoy the luxury, unannoyed; and after sucking out the last wreath, and heaving a profound sigh, he got up, and departed as solemnly as he came. A more elastic footstep entered next, and now I opened my mouth for a 'good morning,' but closed it again, the salutation unachieved; for Hareton Earnshaw was performing his orisons, 203

sotto voce, in a series of curses directed against every object he touched, while he rummaged a corner for a spade or shovel to dig through the drifts. He glanced over the back of the bench, dilating his nostrils, and thought as little of exchanging civilities with me as with my companion, the cat. I guessed by his preparations that egress was allowed, and leaving my hard couch, made a movement to follow him. He noticed this, and thrust at an inner door with the end of his spade, intimating by an inarticulate sound, that there was the place where I must go, if I changed my locality. It opened into the house, where the females were already astir, Zillah, urging flakes of flame up the chimney with a colossal bellows, and Mrs. Heathcliff, kneeling on the hearth, reading a book by the aid of the blaze. She held her hand interposed between the furnace-heat and her eyes, and seemed absorbed in her occupation; desisting from it only to chide the servant for covering her with sparks, or to push away a dog, now and then, that snoozled its nose over-forwardly into her face. I was surprised to see Heathcliff there also. He stood by the fire, his back towards me, just finishing a stormy scene to poor Zillah, who ever and anon interrupted her labour to pluck up the corner of her apron, and heave an indignant groan. 'And you, you worthless—' he broke out as I entered, turning to his daughter-in-law, and employing an epithet as harmless as duck, or sheep, but generally represented by a dash—'there you are at your idle tricks again! The rest of them do earn their bread—you live on my charity! Put your trash away, and find something to do. You shall pay me for the plague of having you eternally in my sight—do you hear, damnable jade?' 'I'll put my trash away, because you can make me, if I refuse,' answered the young lady, closing her book, and throwing it on a chair. 'But I'll not do anything, though you should swear your tongue out, except what I please!' Heathcliff lifted his hand, and the speaker sprang to a safer distance, obviously acquainted with its weight. Having no desire to be entertained by a cat and dog combat, I stepped forward briskly, as if eager to partake the warmth of the hearth, and innocent of any knowledge of the interrupted dispute. Each had enough decorum to suspend further hostilities: Heathcliff placed his fists, out of temptation, in his pockets; Mrs. Heathcliff curled her lip and walked to a seat far off, where she kept her word by playing the part of a statue during the remainder of my stay. That was not long. I declined joining their breakfast, and, at the first gleam of dawn, took an opportunity of escaping into the free air, now clear and still, and cold as impalpable ice.

Source: Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Sale, William, Jr. and Richard J. Dunn, eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

204

From Middlemarch Published eight years before George Eliot‘s death in 1880, Middlemarch enchanted her public with a penetrating, psychological novel set in rural England during the early 19th century. Eliot carefully researched and meticulously detailed the social climate of the time, making the town of Middlemarch and its inhabitants seem true to life. In the following selection from Book 1, Dorothea Brooke and her uncle visit the estate of her fiancé, the clergyman Edward Casaubon. Here, Dorothea meets Casaubon‘s second cousin, the young and liberal Will Ladislaw, who opposes the marriage and later falls in love with Dorothea.

From Middlemarch By George Eliot

'He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed.'—Fuller. Young Ladislaw did not pay that visit to which Mr Brooke had invited him, and only six days afterwards Mr Casaubon mentioned that his young relative had started for the Continent, seeming by this cold vagueness to waive inquiry. Indeed, Will had declined to fix on any more precise destination than the entire area of Europe. Genius, he held, is necessarily intolerant of fetters : on the one hand it must have the utmost play for its spontaneity ; on the other, it may confidently await those messages from the universe which summon it to its peculiar work, only placing itself in an attitude of receptivity towards all sublime chances. The attitudes of receptivity are various, and Will had sincerely tried many of them. He was not excessively fond of wine, but he had several times taken too much, simply as an experiment in that form of ecstasy ; he had fasted till he was faint, and then supped on lobster ; he had made himself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly original had resulted from these measures ; and the effects of the opium had convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity between his constitution and De Quincey's. The superadded circumstance which would evolve the genius had not yet come ; the universe had not yet beckoned. Even Cæsar's fortune at one time was but a grand presentiment. We know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos.—In fact, the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities. Will saw clearly enough the pitiable instances of long incubation producing no chick, and but for gratitude would have laughed at Casaubon, whose plodding application, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world, seemed to enforce a moral entirely encouraging to Will's generous reliance on the intentions of the universe with regard to himself. He held that reliance to be a mark of genius ; and certainly it is no mark to the contrary ; genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humility, but in a power to make or do, not anything in general, but something in particular. Let him start for the Continent, then, without our pronouncing on his future. Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous. But at present this caution against a too hasty judgment interests me more in relation to Mr Casaubon than to his young cousin. If to Dorothea Mr Casaubon had been the mere occasion which had set alight the fine inflammable material of her youthful illusions, does it follow that he was fairly represented in the minds of those less impassioned personages who have hitherto delivered their judgments concerning him ? I protest against any absolute conclusion, any prejudice derived from Mrs Cadwallader's contempt for a neighbouring clergyman's alleged 205

greatness of soul, or Sir James Chettam's poor opinion of his rival's legs,—from Mr Brooke's failure to elicit a companion's ideas, or from Celia's criticism of a middle-aged scholar's personal appearance. I am not sure that the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary superlative existed, could escape these unfavourable reflections of himself in various small mirrors ; and even Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin. Moreover, if Mr Casaubon, speaking for himself, has rather a chilling rhetoric, it is not therefore certain that there is no good work or fine feeling in him. Did not an immortal physicist and interpreter of hieroglyphs write detestable verses ? Has the theory of the solar system been advanced by graceful manners and conversational tact ? Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity : with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labours ; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him ; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause. Doubtless his lot is important in his own eyes ; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large a place in our consideration must be our want of room for him, since we refer him to the Divine regard with perfect confidence ; nay, it is even held sublime for our neighbour to expect the utmost there, however little he may have got from us. Mr Casaubon, too, was the centre of his own world ; if he was liable to think that others were providentially made for him, and especially to consider them in the light of their fitness for the author of a 'Key to all Mythologies,' this trait is not quite alien to us, and, like the other mendicant hopes of mortals, claims some of our pity.

Source: Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Horback, Bert G., ed. W. W. Norton & Company, 1977. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

From Jude the Obscure English writer Thomas Hardy‘s pessimistic novel Jude the Obscure (1895) drew fierce criticism from late-19th-century readers, but in the 20th century the novel was recognized as one of Hardy‘s finest works. It is the story of Jude Fawley, a man who since childhood longed to become a religious scholar, but could not escape the problems caused by his own sexual desires and heavy drinking. This scene, in which Jude and his first wife, Arabella, kill a pig on their farm, shows how far removed Jude‘s life has become from that of a scholar.

From Jude the Obscure By Thomas Hardy

The time arrived for killing the pig which Jude and his wife had fattened in their sty during the autumn months, and the butchering was timed to take place as soon as it was light in the morning, so that Jude might get to Alfredston without losing more than a quarter of a day.

206

The night had seemed strangely silent. Jude looked out of the window long before dawn, and perceived that the ground was covered with snow—snow rather deep for the season, it seemed, a few flakes still falling. 'I'm afraid the pig-killer won't be able to come,' he said to Arabella. 'O, he'll come. You must get up and make the water hot, if you want Challow to scald him. Though I like singeing best.' 'I'll get up,' said Jude. 'I like the way of my own county.' He went downstairs, lit the fire under the copper, and began feeding it with bean-stalks, all the time without a candle, the blaze flinging a cheerful shine into the room; though for him the sense of cheerfulness was lessened by thoughts on the reason of that blaze—to heat water to scald the bristles from the body of an animal that as yet lived, and whose voice could be continually heard from a corner of the garden. At half-past six, the time of appointment with the butcher, the water boiled, and Jude's wife came downstairs. 'Is Challow come?' she asked. 'No.' They waited, and it grew lighter, with the dreary light of a snowy dawn. She went out, gazed along the road, and returning said, 'He's not coming. Drunk last night, I expect. The snow is not enough to hinder him, surely!' 'Then we must put it off. It is only the water boiled for nothing. The snow may be deep in the valley.' 'Can't be put off. There's no more victuals for the pig. He ate the last mixing o' barleymeal yesterday morning.' 'Yesterday morning? What has he lived on since?' 'Nothing.' 'What—he has been starving?' 'Yes. We always do it the last day or two, to save bother with the innerds. What ignorance, not to know that!' 'That accounts for his crying so. Poor creature!' 'Well—you must do the sticking—there's no help for it. I'll show you how. Or I'll do it myself—I think I could. Though as it is such a big pig I had rather Challow had done it. However, his basket o' knives and things have been already sent on here, and we can use 'em.' 'Of course you shan't do it,' said Jude. 'I'll do it, since it must be done.' He went out to the sty, shovelled away the snow for the space of a couple of yards or more, and placed the stool in front, with the knives and ropes at hand. A robin peered down at the preparations from the nearest tree, and, not liking the sinister look of the scene, flew away, though hungry. By this time Arabella had joined her husband, and Jude, rope in hand, got into the sty, and noosed the affrighted animal, who, beginning with a squeak of surprise, rose to repeated cries of rage. Arabella opened the sty-door, and together they hoisted the victim on to the stool, legs upward, and while Jude held him Arabella bound him down, looping the cord over his legs to keep him from struggling. The animal's note changed its quality. It was not now rage, but the cry of despair; long-drawn, slow and hopeless. 'Upon my soul I would sooner have gone without the pig than have had this to do!' said Jude. 'A creature I have fed with my own hands.' 'Don't be such a tender-hearted fool! There's the sticking-knife—the one with the point. Now whatever you do, don't stick un too deep.' 'I'll stick him effectually, so as to make short work of it. That's the chief thing.'

207

'You must not!' she cried. 'The meat must be well bled, and to do that he must die slow. We shall lose a shilling a score if the meat is red and bloody! Just touch the vein, that's all. I was brought up to it, and I know. Every good butcher keeps un bleeding long. He ought to be eight or ten minutes dying, at least.' 'He shall not be half a minute if I can help it, however the meat may look,' said Jude determinedly. Scraping the bristles from the pig's upturned throat, as he had seen the butchers do, he slit the fat; then plunged in the knife with all his might. ' 'O damn it all!' she cried, 'that ever I should say it! You've over-stuck un! And I telling you all the time—' 'Do be quiet, Arabella, and have a little pity on the creature!' 'Hold up the pail to catch the blood, and don't talk!' However unworkmanlike the deed, it had been mercifully done. The blood flowed out in a torrent instead of in the trickling stream she had desired. The dying animal's cry assumed its third and final tone, the shriek of agony; his glazing eyes riveting themselves on Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends. 'Make un stop that!' said Arabella. 'Such a noise will bring somebody or other up here, and I don't want people to know we are doing it ourselves.' Picking up the knife from the ground whereon Jude had flung it, she slipped it into the gash, and slit the windpipe. The pig was instantly silent, his dying breath coming through the hole. 'That's better,' she said. 'It is a hateful business!' said he. 'Pigs must be killed.' The animal heaved in a final convulsion, and, despite the rope, kicked out with all his last strength. A tablespoonful of black clot came forth, the trickling of red blood having ceased for some seconds. 'That's it; now he'll go,' said she. 'Artful creatures—they always keep back a drop like that as long as they can!' The last plunge had come so unexpectedly as to make Jude stagger, and in recovering himself he kicked over the vessel in which the blood had been caught. 'There!' she cried, thoroughly in a passion. 'Now I can't make any blackpot. There's a waste, all through you!' Jude put the pail upright, but only about a third of the whole steaming liquid was left in it, the main part being splashed over the snow, and forming a dismal, sordid, ugly spectacle—to those who saw it as other than an ordinary obtaining of meat. The lips and nostrils of the animal turned livid, then white, and the muscles of his limbs relaxed. 'Thank God!' Jude said. 'He's dead.' 'What's God got to do with such a messy job as a pig-killing, I should like to know!' she said scornfully. 'Poor folks must live.' 'I know, I know,' said he. 'I don't scold you.' Suddenly they became aware of a voice at hand. 'Well done, young married volk! I couldn't have carried it out much better myself, cuss me if I could!' The voice, which was husky, came from the garden-gate, and looking up from the scene of slaughter they saw the burly form of Mr. Challow leaning over the gate, critically surveying their performance. ' 'Tis well for 'ee to stand there and glane!' said Arabella. 'Owing to your being late the meat is blooded and half spoiled! 'Twon't fetch so much by a shilling a score!'

208

Challow expressed his contrition. 'You should have waited a bit,' he said, shaking his head, 'and not have done this—in the delicate state, too, that you be in at present, ma'am. 'Tis risking yourself too much.' 'You needn't be concerned about that,' said Arabella, laughing. Jude too laughed, but there was a strong flavour of bitterness in his amusement. Challow made up for his neglect of the killing by zeal in the scalding and scraping. Jude felt dissatisfied with himself as a man at what he had done, though aware of his lack of common sense, and that the deed would have amounted to the same thing if carried out by deputy. The white snow, stained with the blood of his fellow-mortal, wore an illogical look to him as a lover of justice, not to say a Christian; but he could not see how the matter was to be mended. No doubt he was, as his wife had called him, a tenderhearted fool. He did not like the road to Alfredston now. It stared him cynically in the face. The wayside objects reminded him so much of his courtship of his wife that, to keep them out of his eyes, he read whenever he could as he walked to and from his work. Yet he sometimes felt that by caring for books he was not escaping commonplace nor gaining rare ideas, every working-man being of that taste now. When passing near the spot by the stream on which he had first made her acquaintance he one day heard voices just as he had done at that earlier time. One of the girls who had been Arabella's companions was talking to a friend in a shed, himself being the subject of discourse, possibly because they had seen him in the distance. They were quite unaware that the shed-walls were so thin that he could hear their words as he passed. 'Howsomever, 'twas I put her up to it! 'Nothing venture nothing have,' I said. If I hadn't she'd no more have been his mis'ess than I.' ' 'Tis my belief she knew there was nothing the matter when she told him she was …' What had Arabella been put up to by this woman, so that he should make her his 'mis'ess,' otherwise wife? The suggestion was horridly unpleasant, and it rankled in his mind so much that instead of entering his own cottage when he reached it he flung his basket inside the garden-gate and passed on, determined to go and see his old aunt and get some supper there. This made his arrival home rather late. Arabella, however, was busy melting down lard from fat of the deceased pig, for she had been out on a jaunt all day, and so delayed her work. Dreading lest what he had heard should lead him to say something regrettable to her he spoke little. But Arabella was very talkative, and said among other things that she wanted some money. Seeing the book sticking out of his pocket she added that he ought to earn more. 'An apprentice's wages are not meant to be enough to keep a wife on, as a rule, my dear.' 'Then you shouldn't have had one.' 'Come, Arabella! That's too bad, when you know how it came about.' 'I'll declare afore Heaven that I thought what I told you was true. Doctor Vilbert thought so. It was a good job for you that it wasn't so!' 'I don't mean that,' he said hastily. 'I mean before that time. I know it was not your fault; but those women friends of yours gave you bad advice. If they hadn't, or you hadn't taken it, we should at this moment have been free from a bond which, not to mince matters, galls both of us devilishly. It may be very sad, but it is true.' 'Who's been telling you about my friends? What advice? I insist upon your telling me.' 'Pooh—I'd rather not.' 'But you shall—you ought to. It is mean of 'ee not to!' 'Very well.' And he hinted gently what had been revealed to him. 'But I don't wish to dwell upon it. Let us say no more about it.' Her defensive manner collapsed. 'That was nothing,' she said, laughing coldly. 'Every woman has a right to do such as that. The risk is hers.' 209

'I quite deny it, Bella. She might if no life-long penalty attached to it for the man, or, in his default, for herself; if the weakness of the moment could end with the moment, or even with the year. But when effects stretch so far she should not go and do that which entraps a man if he is honest, or herself if he is otherwise.' 'What ought I to have done?' 'Given me time.… Why do you fuss yourself about melting down that pig's fat to-night? Please put it away!' 'Then I must do it to-morrow morning. It won't keep.' 'Very well—do.'

Source: Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Page, Norman, ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

From Conrad's Heart of Darkness On the basis of the novella Heart of Darkness (1902) and other works, Polish-born English novelist Joseph Conrad gained a reputation as a master stylist of the English language. The question of racism, however, has raised controversy about his works. Some authors, such as Nigerian novelist and poet Chinua Achebe, have accused Conrad of racist views toward Africans in Heart of Darkness and allege that he portrayed Africa as a continent devoid of civilization. Others contend that Heart of Darkness shows Conrad's objections to European colonial practices in Africa. In this selection, Marlow, the narrator, describes the scene at a European trading post at the mouth of the Congo River.

From Heart of Darkness By Joseph Conrad

“A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope, each had an iron collar on his neck and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking. Another report from the cliff made me think suddenly of that ship of war I had seen firing into a continent. It was the same kind of ominous voice; but these men could by no stretch of imagination be called enemies. They were called criminals and the outraged law like the bursting shells had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea. All their meagre breasts panted together, the violently dilated nostrils quivered, the eyes stared stonily uphill. They passed me within six inches, without a glance, with that complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages. Behind this raw matter one of the reclaimed, the product of the new forces at work, strolled despondently carrying a rifle by its middle. He had a uniform jacket with one button off and seeing a white

210

man on the path hoisted his weapon to his shoulder with alacrity. This was simple prudence, white men being so much alike at a distance that he could not tell who I might be. He was speedily reassured and with a large, white, rascally grin, and a glance at his charge, seemed to take me into partnership in his exalted trust. After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings. “Instead of going up I turned and descended to the left. My idea was to let that chain-gang get out of sight before I climbed the hill. You know I am not particularly tender; I've had to strike and to fend off. I've had to resist and to attack sometimes—that's only one way of resisting— without counting the exact cost—according to the demands of such sort of life as I had blundered into. I've seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but by all the stars these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils that swayed and drove men— men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weakeyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be too I was only to find out several months later and a thousand miles farther. For a moment I stood appalled, as though by a warning. Finally I descended the hill, obliquely, towards the trees I had seen. “I avoided a vast, artificial hole somebody had been digging on the slope, the purpose of which I found it impossible to divine. It wasn't a quarry or a sandpit, anyhow. It was just a hole. It might have been connected with the philanthropic desire of giving the criminals something to do. I don't know. Then I nearly fell into a very narrow ravine, almost no more than a scar in the hillside. I discovered that a lot of important drainage-pipes for the settlement had been tumbled in there. There wasn't one that was not broken. It was a wanton smash-up. At last I got under the trees. My purpose was to stroll into the shade for a moment, but no sooner within than it seemed to me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno. The rapids were near and an uninterrupted, uniform, headlong rushing noise filled the mournful stillness of the grove where not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved, with a mysterious sound, as though the tearing pace of the launched earth had suddenly become audible. “Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die. “They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air—and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees. Then glancing down I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs which died out slowly. The man seemed young—almost a boy—but you know with them it's hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him one of my good Swede's ship's biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it and held—there was no other movement and no other glance. He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck—Why? Where did he get it. Was it a badge— an ornament—a charm—a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it. It looked startling round his black neck this bit of white thread from beyond the seas.

211

“Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing in an intolerable and appalling manner. His brother phantom rested its forehead as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence. While I stood horror-struck one of these creatures rose to his hands and knees and went off on all-fours towards the river to drink. He lapped out of his hand, then sat up in the sunlight crossing his shins in front of him, and after a time let his woolly head fall on his breastbone. “I didn't want any more loitering in the shade and I made haste towards the station. When near the buildings I met a white man in such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I saw a high, starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing and had a penholder behind his ear. “I shook hands with this miracle and I learned he was the Company's chief accountant and that all the book-keeping was done at this station. He had come out for a moment, he said, 'to get a breath of fresh air.' The expression sounded wonderfully odd with its suggestion of sedentary desk-life. I wouldn't have mentioned the fellow to you at all only it was from his lips that I first heard the name of the man who is so indissolubly connected with the memories of that time. Moreover I respected the fellow. Yes. I respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His appearance was certainly that of a hairdresser's dummy, but in the great demoralisation of the land he kept up his appearance. That's backbone. His starched collars and got-up shirt-fronts were achievements of character. He had been out nearly three years and, later on, I could not help asking him how he managed to sport such linen. He had just the faintest blush and said modestly, 'I've been teaching one of the native women about the station. It was difficult. She had a distaste for the work.' Thus this man had verily accomplished something. And he was devoted to his books, which were in apple-pie order. “Everything else in the Station was in a muddle—heads, things, buildings. Caravans. Strings of dusty niggers with splay feet arrived and departed; a stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire set into the depths of darkness and in return came a precious trickle of ivory.”

Source: Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Kimbrough, Robert, ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

D

19th-Century Drama

The same spirit of social criticism inspired the plays of the Irish-born George Bernard Shaw, who did more than anyone else to awaken the drama from its 19th-century somnolence. In a series of powerful plays that made use of the latest economic and sociological theories, he exposed with enormous satirical skill the sickness and fatuities of individuals and societies in England and the rest of the modern world. Man and Superman (1903), Androcles and the

212

Lion (1913), Heartbreak House (1919), and Back to Methuselah (1921) are notable among his works. His final prescription for a cure, a philosophy of creative evolution by which human beings should in time surpass the biological limit of species, showed him going beyond the limits of sociological realism into visionary writing.

213

Literature Of The th 20 Century To The Present 214

VIII

LITERATURE OF THE 20TH-CENTURY TO THE PRESENT

Booker Prize Winners Year 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

Author P. H. Newby Bernice Rubens V. S. Naipaul John Berger J. G. Farrell Nadine Gordimer Stanley Middleton Ruth Prawer Jhabvala David Storey Paul Scott Iris Murdoch Penelope Fitzgerald William Golding Salman Rushdie Thomas Keneally J. M. Coetzee Anita Brookner Keri Hulme Kingsley Amis Penelope Lively Peter Carey Kazuo Ishiguro A. S. Byatt Ben Okri Michael Ondaatje Barry Unsworth Roddy Doyle James Kelman Pat Barker Graham Swift Arundhati Roy Ian McEwan J. M. Coetzee Margaret Atwood Peter Carey Yann Martel DBC Pierre Alan Hollinghurst John Banville Kiran Desai

Title Something to Answer For The Elected Member In a Free State G The Siege of Krishnapur The Conservationist Holiday Heat and Dust Saville Staying On The Sea, The Sea Offshore Rites of Passage Midnight's Children Schindler's Ark Life and Times of Michael K Hotel du Lac The Bone People The Old Devils Moon Tiger Oscar and Lucinda The Remains of the Day Possession The Famished Road The English Patient Sacred Hunger Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha How Late It Was, How Late Ghost Road Last Orders The God of Small Things Amsterdam Disgrace The Blind Assassin True History of the Kelly Gang Life of Pi Vernon God Little The Line of Beauty The Sea The Inheritance of Loss

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. 215

Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize This United Kingdom literary prize was inaugurated in memory of writer John Llewellyn Rhys. It is awarded for the most promising literary work of the previous year by a citizen of the Commonwealth younger than age 35 at the time the work was published. The award is administered by the Book Trust, an independent educational charity. The winner receives a cash prize of £5,000 (equivalent to about $8,200). Year 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 (joint winners) 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 (joint winners)

Winner Michael Richey Morwenna Donelly Alun Lewis James Aldridge Oriel Malet Anne-Marie Walters Richard Mason Emma Smith Kenneth Allsop Elizabeth Jane Howard No award this year Rachel Trickett Tom Stacey John Wiles John Hearne Ruskin Bond V. S. Naipaul Dan Jacobson David Caute David Storey Robert Rhodes James Edward Lucie-Smith Peter Marshall Nell Dunn Julian Mitchell Margaret Drabble Anthony Masters Angela Carter Melvyn Bragg Angus Calder Shiva Naipaul Susan Hill Peter Smalley Hugh Fleetwood David Hare Tim Jeal

Awarded for Sunk by a Mine Beauty for Ashes The Last Inspection The Sea Eagle My Bird Sings Moondrop to Gascony The Wind Cannot Read Maiden's Trip Adventure Lit Their Star The Beautiful Visit The Return Home The Hostile Sun The Moon to Play With Voices Under the Window The Room on the Roof The Mystic Masseur A Long Way from London At Fever Pitch Flight into Camden An Introduction into the House of Commons A Tropical Childhood and Other Poems Two Lives Up the Junction The White Father The Millstone The Seahorse The Magic Toyshop Without a City Wall The People's War Fireflies The Albatross A Warm Gun The Girl Who Passed for Normal Knuckle Cushing's Crusade 216

1976 1977

No award this year Richard Cork

Vorticism & Abstract Art in the First Machine Age A. N. Wilson The Sweets of Pimlico 1978 Peter Boardman The Shining Mountain 1979 Desmond Hogan The Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea 1980 A. N. Wilson The Laird of Abbotsford 1981 William Boyd An Ice-Cream War 1982 Lisa St. Aubin de Teran The Slow Train to Milan 1983 Andrew Motion Dangerous Play 1984 John Milne Out of the Blue 1985 Tim Parks Loving Roger 1986 Jeanette Winterson The Passion 1987 Matthew Yorke The March Fence 1988 Claire Harman Sylvia Townsend Warner 1989 Ray Monk Ludwig Wittgenstein:The Duty of Genius 1990 A. L. Kennedy Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains 1991 Matthew Kneale Sweet Thames 1992 Jason Goodwin On Foot to the Golden Horn: A Walk to 1993 Istanbul Jonathan Coe What a Carve Up! 1994 Melanie McGrath Motel Nirvana 1995 Nicola Barker Heading Inland 1996 Phil Whitaker Eclipse of the Sun 1997 Peter Ho Davies The Ugliest House in the World 1998 David Mitchell Ghostwritten 1999 Edward Platt Leadville 2000 Susanna Jones The Earthquake Bird 2001 * Hari Kunzru The Impressionist 2002 * Mary Laven Virgins of Venice 2002 Charlotte Mendelson Daughters of Jerusalem 2003 Jonathan Trigell Boy A 2004 Uzodinma Iweala Beasts of No Nation 2005 * Hari Kunzru declined the award; later it was given to alternative winner Mary Laven. Source: Book Trust. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

217

Guardian First Book Award Year 1980 1981 1982 1983 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999

Winner J. L. Carr John Banville Glyn Hughes J. G. Ballard Peter Ackroyd Jim Crace Peter Benson Lucy Ellman Carol Lake Pauline Melville Alan Judd Alasdair Gray Pat Barker Candia McWilliam James Buchan Seamus Deane Anne Michaels Jackie Kay Philip Gourevitch

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004

Zadie Smith Chris Ware Jonathan Safran Foer Robert Macfarlane Armand Marie Leroi

2005 Alexander Masters 2006 Yiyun Li Source: The Guardian.

Awarded for A Month in the Country Kepler: A Novel Where I Used to Play on the Green Empire of the Sun Hawksmoor Continent The Levels Sweet Desserts Rosehill: Portrait from a Midlands City Shape-Shifter The Devil's Own Work Poor Things The Eye in the Door Debatable Land Heart's Journey in Winter Reading in the Dark Fugitive Pieces Trumpet We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families White Teeth Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth Everything Is Illuminated Mountains of the Mind Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of the Human Body Stuart: A Life Backwards A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

218

Costa Book Awards: Book of the Year

Year Winner Awarded for 1985 Douglas Dunn Elegies An Artist of the Floating World 1986 Kazuo Ishiguro Under the Eye of the Clock 1987 Christopher Nolan The Comforts of Madness 1988 Paul Sayer Richard Holmes Coleridge: Early Visions 1989 Hopeful Monsters 1990 Nicholas Mosley A Life of Picasso 1991 John Richardson Swing Hammer Swing! 1992 Jeff Torrington Theory of War 1993 Joan Brady Felicia's Journey 1994 William Trevor Behind the Scenes at the Museum 1995 Kate Atkinson The Spirit Level 1996 Seamus Heaney Tales of Ovid 1997 Ted Hughes Birthday Letters 1998 Ted Hughes Beowulf 1999 Seamus Heaney English Passengers 2000 Matthew Kneale The Amber Spyglass 2001 Philip Pullman Claire Tomalin Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self 2002 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 2003 Mark Haddon Small Island 2004 Andrea Levy Matisse the Master 2005 Hilary Spurling Stef Penney The Tenderness of Wolves 2006 Note: Through 2005 known as the Whitbread Book Awards: Book of the Year. Source: Costa Coffee. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

219

Orange Prize for Fiction Year Winner Awarded for 1996 Helen Dunmore A Spell of Winter Fugitive Pieces 1997 Anne Michaels Larry's Party 1998 Carol Shields A Crime in the Neighbourhood 1999 Suzanne Berne Linda Grant When I Lived in Modern Times 2000 The Idea of Perfection 2001 Kate Grenville Bel Canto 2002 Ann Patchett Property 2003 Valerie Martin Small Island 2004 Andrea Levy We Need to Talk About Kevin 2005 Lionel Shriver On Beauty 2006 Zadie Smith Source: Orange Personal Communications Services Limited. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————

James Tait Black Memorial Prize The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes for biography and fiction were established in 1918 and are awarded by the Department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. These literary awards are presented in January or February for works published the previous year, with each award having a cash prize of £1,500 (equivalent to about $2,600). Fiction Prize Awarded for

Biography Prize Awarded for

Year

Winner

1919

Hugh Walpole

The Secret City

H. Festing Jones

1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926

D. H. Lawrence Walter de la Mare David Garnett Arnold Bennett E. M. Forster Liam O'Flaherty Radclyffe Hall

The Lost Girl Memoirs Of A Midget Lady Into Fox Riceyman Steps A Passage To India The Informer Adam's Breed

G. M. Trevelyan Lytton Strachey Percy Lubbock Sir Ronald Ross William Wilson Geoffrey Scott H. B. Workman

1927

Francis Brett Young

Portrait Of Clare

H. A. L. Fisher

1928

Siegfried Sassoon

John Buchan

1929

J. B. Priestley

Memoirs Of A FoxHunting Man The Good Companions

1930

E. H. Young

Miss Mole

1931 1932

Kate O'Brien Helen Simpson

Without My Cloak Boomerang

Francis Yeats Brown J. Y. R. Greig Stephen Gwynn

Winner

220

Lord David Cecil

Samuel Butler, Author Of Erewhon (1835-1902) - A Memoir Lord Grey Of The Reform Bill Queen Victoria Earlham Memoirs, Etc. The House Of Airlie The Portrait Of Zelide John Wyclif: A Study Of The English Medieval Church James Bryce, Viscount Bryce Of Dechmont, O.M. Montrose The Stricken Deer: Or The Life Of Cowper Lives Of A Bengal Lancer David Hume The Life Of Mary Kingsley

1933 1934

A. G. Macdonell Robert Graves

1935

L. H. Myers

1936

Winifred Holtby

1937 1938

Neil M. Gunn C. S. Forester

1939

Aldous Huxley

1940 1941 1942

Charles Morgan Hilda Joyce Cary Arthur Whaley

1943

Mary Lavin

1944 1945 1946 1947

Forrest Reid L. A. G. Strong G. Oliver Onions L. P. Hartley

Highland River A Ship Of The Line and Flying Colours After Many A Summer Dies The Swan The Voyage A House Of Children Monkey By Wu Ch'engen Tales From Bectine Bridge Young Tom Travellers Poor Man's Tapestry Eustace And Hilda

1948 1949 1950

Graham Greene Emma Smith Robert Henriquez

The Heart Of The Matter The Far Cry Along The Valley

1951

Father Goose

1952 1953 1954

W. C. ChapmanMortimer Evelyn Waugh Margaret Kennedy C. P. Snow

1955

Ivy Compton-Burnett

1956

Rose Macauley

1957 1958

Anthony Powell Angus Wilson

1959 1960 1961 1962

Morris West Rex Warner Canon Jennifer Dawson Ronald Hardy

The Towers Of Trebizond At Lady Molly's The Middle Age Of Mrs Eliot The Devil's Advocate Imperial Caesar The Ha-Ha Act Of Destruction

1963

Gerda Charles

A Slanting Light

1964 1965

Frank Tuohy Muriel Spark

The Ice Saints The Mandelbaum Gate

Georgina Battiscome Elizabeth Longford Mary Moorman

1966

Christine BrookeRose Aidan Higgins

Langrishe

Geoffrey Keynes

Margaret Drabble

Jerusalem The Golden

(Joint Award) 1967

England, Their England I, Claudius and Claudius The God The Root And The Flower South Riding

Men At Arms Troy Chimneys The New Men and The Masters in sequence Mother And Son

Violet Clifton J. E. Neale

The Book Of Talbot Queen Elizabeth

R. W. Chambers

Thomas More

Edward Sackville West Lord Eustace Percy Sir Edmund Chambers David C. Douglas

A Flame In Sunlight: The Life And Work Of Thomas de Quincey John Knox Samuel Taylor Coleridge

F. M. Prescott John Gore Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede G. G. Coulton

Spanish Tudor King George V Henry Ponsonby: Queen Victoria's Private Secretary Fourscore Years

C. V. Wedgwood D. S. MacColl R. Aldington Rev. C. C. E. Raven

William The Silent Philip Wilson Steer Wellington English Naturalists From Neckham To Ray The Great Dr Burney W. E. Henley Florence Nightingale

Percy A. Scholes John Connell Mrs Cecil Woodham-Smith Noel G. Annan

English Scholars

Leslie Stephen

G. M. Young Carola Oman Keith Feiling

Stanley Baldwin Sir John Moore Warren Hastings

R. W. KettonCremer St John Greer Ervine Maurice Cranston Joyce Hemlow

Thomas Gray

Christopher Hassall Adam Fox M. K. Ashby Meriol Trevor

Edward Marsh The Life Of Dean Inge Joseph Ashby Of Tysoe Newman: The Pillar And The Cloud and Newman: Light In Winter John Keble: A Study In Limitations

George Bernard Shaw Life Of John Locke The History Of Fanny Burney

Victoria R.I. William Wordsworth, The Later Years 1803-1850 The Life Of William Harvey Such

Go Down

221

Winifred Gérin

Charlotte Brontë, The Evolution Of Genius

1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974

Maggie Ross Elizabeth Bowen Lily Powell Nadine Gordimer John Berger Iris Murdoch Lawrence Durrell

The Gasteropod Eva Trout The Bird Of Paradise A Guest Of Honour G The Black Prince Monsieur, Or The Prince Of Darkness The Great Victorian Collection Doctor Copernicus The Honourable Schoolboy Plumb Darkness Visible

Gordon S. Haight Antonia Fraser Jasper Ridley Julia Namier Quentin Bell Robin Lane Fox John Wain

George Eliot Mary, Queen Of Scots Lord Palmerston Lewis Namier Virginia Woolf Alexander The Great Samuel Johnson

1975

Brian Moore

Karl Miller

Cockburn's Millennium

1976 1977

John Banville John Le Carré

Ronald Hingley George Painter

Robert B. Martin

Salman Rushdie

Waiting For The Barbarians Midnight's Children

A New Life Of Chekhov Chateaubriand, Vol.1: The Longed-For Tempests The Older Hardy Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Biography Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart

1978 1979

Maurice Gee William Golding

1980

J. M. Coetzee

1981 (Joint Award) 1982 1983 1984 (Joint Award) 1985

Paul Theroux

The Mosquito Coast

Bruce Chatwin Jonathan Keates J. G. Ballard Angela Carter

1986 1987

Robert Gittings Brian Finney

Victoria Glendinning

Edith Sitwell: Unicorn Among Lions

On The Black Hill Allegro Postillions Empire Of The Sun Nights At The Circus

Richard Ellmann Alan Walker Lyndall Gordon

James Joyce Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life

Robert Edric

Winter Garden

David Nokes

1988

Jenny Joseph George Mackay Brown Piers Paul Read

Persephone The Golden Bird: Two Orkney Stories A Season In The West

D. Felicitas Corrigan Ruth Dudley Edwards, Brian McGuinness

Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed Helen Waddell Victor Gollancz: A Biography

1989 1990

James Kelman William Boyd

A Disaffection Brazzaville Beach

Ian Gibson Claire Tomalin

1991

Iain Sinclair

Downriver

1992

Rose Tremain

Sacred Country

Adrian Desmond and James Moore Charles Nicoll

1993 1994 1995

Caryl Phillips Alan Hollinghurst Christopher Priest

Crossing The River The Folding Star The Prestige

Richard Holmes Doris Lessing Gitta Sereny

1996

Graham Swift

Last Orders

Diarmaid MacCulloch

(Joint Award) 1997

Alice Thompson

Justine

Andrew Miller

Ingenious Pain

R.F. Foster

1998 1999 2000 2001

Beryl Bainbridge Timothy Mo Zadie Smith Sid Smith

Master Georgie Renegade or Halo2 White Teeth Something Like a House

Peter Ackroyd Kathryn Hughes Martin Amis Robert Skidelsky

222

Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig (1889-1921) Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life The Invisible Woman: The Story Of Nelly Ternan And Charles Dickens Darwin The Reckoning: The Murder Of Christopher Marlowe (Jonathan Cape) Dr Johnson And Mr Savage Under My Skin Albert Speer: His Battle with the Truth Thomas Cranmer: A Life

W.B. Yeats: A Life Volume1 - The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914 The Life of Thomas More George Eliot: The Last Victorian Experience John Maynard Keynes: Volume 3 -

2002

Jonathan Franzen

The Corrections

Jenny Uglow

2003

Andrew O'Hagan

Personality

Janet Browne

2004 David Peace GB84 Jonathan Bate Source: Department of English Literature, University of Edinburgh.

Fighting For Britain 1937-1946 The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future 1730-1810 Charles Darwin: Volume 2 - The Power of Place John Clare: A Biography

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. —————————————————————————————————————

Impac Prize Founded in 1996, this cash award of £103,000 is the world's most valuable book prize for a single work of fiction. The selection process is unique among literary awards in that the winner is chosen from nominations sent in by municipal libraries around the world. The inaugural ceremony took place in Dublin, Ireland, in May 1996.

Year Winner Awarded for 1996 David Malouf Remembering Babylon A Heart So White 1997 Javier Marias The Land of Green Plums 1998 Herta Müller Ingenious Pain 1999 Andrew Miller Wide Open 2000 Nicola Barker No Great Mischief 2001 Alistair MacLeod 2002 Michel Houellebecq Atomised My Name is Red 2003 Orhan Pamuk This Blinding Absence of Light 2004 Tahar Ben Jelloun The Known World 2005 Edward P. Jones The Master 2006 Colm Toibin Source: Dublin City Public Libraries. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

223

Somerset Maugham Award

This literary award in the United Kingdom was created by W. Somerset Maugham in 1947 for young British writers (under the age of 35) to spend on foreign travel. The prize (£3,500 to each winner, equivalent to about $5,700) is awarded annually in May by the Society of Authors. Year 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971

1972 1973

Winner A. L. Barker P. H. Newby Hamish Henderson Nigel Kneale Roland Camberton Francis King Emyr Humphreys Doris Lessing Kingsley Amis Elizabeth Jennings George Lamming John Wain Thom Gunn Ted Hughes V. S. Naipaul Hugh Thomas David Storey Dan Jacobson John Le Carré Peter Everett Michael Frayn Julian Mitchell B. S. Johnson Andrew Sinclair Paul Bailey Seamus Heaney Angela Carter Jane Gaskell Piers Paul Read Susan Hill Richard Barber Michael Hastings Douglas Dunn Gillian Tindall Peter Prince Paul Strathern

Awarded for Innocents Journey to the Interior Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica Tomato Cain & Other Stories Scamp The Dividing Stream Hear and Forgive Five Short Novels Lucky Jim A Way of Looking In the Castle of My Skin Preliminary Essays A Sense Of Movement The Hawk in the Rain Miguel Street The Spanish Civil War Flight Into Camden Time of Arrival The Spy Who Came In From the Cold Negatives The Tin Men The White Father Trawl The Better Half At The Jerusalem Death of a Naturalist Several Perceptions A Sweet Sweet Summer Monk Dawson I'm the King of the Castle The Knight and Chivalry Tussy Is Me Terry Street Fly Away Home Play Things A Season in Abyssinia

224

Jonathan Street 1974 Martin Amis 1975 No Award 1976 Dominic Cooper Ian McEwan 1977 Richard Holmes 1978 Tom Paulin Nigel Williams 1979 Helen Hodgman Sara Maitland 1980 Max Hastings Christopher Reid Humphrey Carpenter 1981 Julian Barnes Clive Sinclair A. N. Wilson 1982 William Boyd Adam MarsJones 1983 Lisa St Aubin de Teran 1984 Peter Ackroyd Timothy Garton Ash Sean O'Brien 1985 Blake Morrison Jeremy Reed Jane Rogers 1986 Patricia Ferguson Adam Nicolson Tim Parks 1987 Stephen Gregory Janni Howker Andrew Motion 1988 Jimmy Burns Carol Ann Duffy Matthew Kneale 1989 Rupert Christiansen Alan Hollingshurst Deirdre Madden 1990 Mark Hudson Sam North Nicholas Shakespeare 1991 Peter Benson Lesley Glaister Helen Simpson 1992 Geoff Dyer Lawrence Norfolk Gerard Woodward

Prudence Dictates The Rachel Papers No Award The Dead of Winter First Love, Last Rites Shelley: The Pursuit A State of Justice My Life Closed Twice Jack & Jill Daughter of Jerusalem Bomber Command Arcadia The Inklings Metroland Hearts of Gold The Healing Art A Good Man In Africa Lantern Lecture Keepers of the House The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde The Polish Revolution: Solidarity The Indoor Park Dark Glasses By the Fisheries Her Living Image Family Myths and Legends Frontiers Tongues of Flame The Cormorant Isaac Campion The Lamberts The Land That Lost Its Heroes Selling Manhattan Whore Banquets Romantic Affinities The Swimming Pool Library The Birds of the Innocent Wood Our Grandmothers' Drums The Automatic Man The Vision of Elena Silves The Other Occupant Honour Thy Father Four Bare Legs in a Bed But Beautiful Lempriere's Dictionary Householder

225

1993 Dea Birkett Duncan McLean Glyn Maxwell 1994 Jackie Kay A. L. Kennedy Philip Marsden 1995 Patrick French Simon Garfield Kathleen Jamie Laura Thompson 1996 Katherine Pierpoint Alan Warner 1997 Rhidian Brook Kate Clanchy Philip Hensher Francis Spufford 1998 Rachel Cusk Jonathan Rendall Kate Summerscale Robert Twigger 1999 Andrea Ashworth Paul Farley Giles Foden Jonathan Freedland 2000 Bella Bathurst Sarah Waters 2001 Edward Platt Ben Rice 2002 Charlotte Hobson Marcel Theroux 2003 William Fiennes Hari Kunzru Jon McGregor 2004 Charlotte Mendelson Mark Blayney Robert Macfarlane 2005 Justin Hill Maggie O'Farrell Source: Society of Authors.

Jella Bucket of Tongues Out of the Rain Other Lovers Looking For the Possible Dance Crossing Place Younghusband The End of Innocence The Queen of Sheba The Dogs Truffle Beds Morvern Callar The Testimony of Taliesin Jones Slattern Kitchen Venom I May Be Some Time The Country Life This Bloody Mary Is the Last Thing I Own The Queen of Whale Cay Angry White Pyjamas Once in a House on Fire The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You The Last King of Scotland Bring Home the Revolution The Lighthouse Stevensons Affinity Leadville-A Biography of the A40 Pobby And Dingan Black Earth City The Paperchase The Snow Geese The Impressionist If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things Daughters of Jerusalem Two Kinds of Silence Mountains of the Mind Passing Under Heaven The Distance Between Us

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. —————————————————————————————————————

226

Forster’s Howards End Howards End (1910) by English novelist E. M. Forster tells the story of two families, the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, whose perspectives on life are diametrically opposed. The Schlegels believe in the mind and are idealistic about the world around them, whereas the Wilcoxes are practical business people. A key theme of the novel is how people from such different backgrounds struggle to connect with one another, as is illustrated by this passage from the book. Courtesy of Blackstone Recordings. All rights reserved.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Two world wars, an intervening economic depression of great severity, and the austerity of life in Britain following the second of these wars help to explain the quality and direction of English literature in the 20th century. The traditional values of Western civilization, which the Victorians had only begun to question, came to be questioned seriously by a number of new writers, who saw society breaking down around them. Traditional literary forms were often discarded, and new ones succeeded one another with bewildering rapidity, as writers sought fresher ways of expressing what they took to be new kinds of experience, or experience seen in new ways.

A

Post-World War I Fiction

Virginia Woolf English writer Virginia Woolf contributed a great deal to modern literature during the early and mid-20th century by abandoning traditional narrative style and pioneering the use of stream of consciousness. A fervent supporter of women‘s rights, Woolf considers the difficulties of the woman artist in A Room Of One’s Own (1929). Here, an actor reads a passage from the essay. Culver Pictures/(p) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

227

James Joyce The works of Irish writer James Joyce are distinguished by their keen psychological insight and use of various literary techniques, most notably stream of consciousness, which is an attempt to write in the manner in which thoughts and memory actually work in our inner minds. This is the end of the ―Molly Bloom‖ soliloquy at the end of Joyce‘s novel Ulysses (1922). Molly is lying beside her sleeping husband and roaming through her thoughts and memories. Recited by an actor. Culver Pictures, Inc./(p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved./(p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Among novelists and short-story writers, Aldous Huxley best expressed the sense of disillusionment and hopelessness in the period after World War I (1914-1918) in his Point Counter Point (1928). This novel is composed in such a way that the events of the plot form a contrapuntal pattern that is a departure from the straightforward storytelling technique of the realistic novel. —————————————————————————————————————

Review of Ulysses Although it is regarded as one of the literary masterpieces of the 20th century, the novel Ulysses by Irish writer James Joyce was banned in the United States for indecency after its publication in 1922. The novel, based on the themes of the epic Greek poem the Odyssey, describes a single day in the lives of two men, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Shortly after the novel was published, literary and film critic Gilbert Seldes reviewed it for the magazine The Nation.

Review of Ulysses By Gilbert Seldes

Ulysses. By James Joyce. Paris: Shakespeare and Company. 150 francs. 'Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.… Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.' With this invocation ended James Joyce's first novel, 'A 228

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.' It has stood for eight years as the pledge of Joyce's further achievement; today he has brought forth 'Ulysses,' a monstrous and magnificent travesty, which makes him possibly the most interesting and the most formidable writer of our time. James Joyce is forty years old and these two novels represent his major work; there are in addition 'Chamber Music,' a book of exquisite lyrics; 'Exiles,' a play; and 'Dubliners,' a collection of eighteen superb short stories. As some of these antedate the 'Portrait' it is fair to say that Joyce has devoted eighteen years of his life to composing the two novels. Except that he is Irish, was educated at a Jesuit school, studied medicine, scholastic philosophy, and mathematics on the Continent, where he has lived for many years, nothing else in his biography need be mentioned. Among the very great writers of novels only two can be named with him for the long devotion to their work and for the triumphant conclusion—Flaubert and Henry James. It is the novel as they created it which Joyce has brought to its culmination; he has, it seems likely, indicated the turn the novel will take into a new form. 'Ulysses' is at the same time the culmination of many other things: of an epoch in the life of Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of the 'Portrait'; of an epoch in the artistic life of Joyce himself; and, if I am not mistaken, of a period in the intellectual life of our generation. 'A Portrait of the Artist' is the story of the interior life of Stephen Dedalus, from his earliest memories to the time of his leaving home with the invocation quoted above. It is easy to distinguish it from contemporary autobiographical novels, for they resemble it only in what they have borrowed from it. It is a work of the creative imagination more than of the memory; it is marked by a dignity and a lyric beauty almost without equal in prose fiction; the concern is the soul of a young man destined by circumstances to be a priest and by his nature to be a poet. He struggles against the forces which urge him to repair the family fortunes, to be loyal to the faith, to fight for Ireland. 'He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld.' Against the sense of sin excited at the school was his ecstasy: 'He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor.' And his joy: 'A girl stood before him in midstream; alone and still, gazing out to sea.… Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of white down.… Her bosom was soft as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish; and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.' There was also his clear proud mind. 'Ulysses' is, among other things, a day in the life of this same Stephen Dedalus, an average day after his return to Dublin from Paris. As an average day it marks the defeat of the poet; he has encountered and been overcome by the reality of experience; the ecstasy and lyric beauty are no more; instead of it we have a gigantic travesty. That is, as I see it, the spiritual plot of 'Ulysses.' And as Stephen, in addition to being a created character, is both 'the artist' generically and specifically James Joyce, 'Ulysses' naturally takes on the proportions of a burlesque epic of this same defeat. It is not surprising that, built on the framework of the 'Odyssey,' [the epic poem that recounts the adventures of the Greek hero Odysseus] it burlesques the structure of the original as a satyr-play burlesqued the tragic cycle to which it was appended; nor that a travesty of the whole of English prose should form part of the method of its presentation. Whether a masterpiece can be written in caricature has ceased to be an academic question. 229

The narrative of 'Ulysses' is simple. The portions corresponding to the story of Telemachus [the son of Odysseus] tell of a few hours spent by Stephen Dedalus on the morning of June 16, 1904: he visits the Nestorian head of the school where he teaches, goes to the modern cave of the winds in a newspaper office, tests the 'ineluctable modality of the visible.' It is in the newspaper office that he first sees one Leopold Bloom, né Virag, an advertising solicitor whose early day has already been recounted. Him we see in all the small details of his morning, preparing his wife's breakfast, going to a funeral, trying to get a reading notice for an advertiser, gazing a bit wistfully at the intellectual life of Dublin, under the name of Flower carrying on amorous correspondence with young girls, to the first climax of his day when he gets into a quarrel in a public house and is stoned as he drives off because he reminded a Cyclopean citizen there that Christ was a Jew. From this he goes to his second climax, an erotic one caused by observing a young girl on the rocks near Sandymount—an episode which officially corresponds to that of Nausicaa [a princess who aided Odysseus when he was shipwrecked on the Phaeacian coast], but more interestingly to the scene in the 'Portrait' I have quoted. Bloom sees Stephen a second time at a lying-in hospital where he goes to inquire the issue of an accouchement. Much later that evening Stephen and Bloom encounter each other in a brothel in the nighttown of Dublin. Bloom protects Stephen from an assault by a drunken soldier and takes him to his home where they talk until nearly daybreak. After Stephen leaves, Bloom goes to bed, and the catamenial night thoughts of his wife, thoughts of her first lovers and of her adulteries, complete the book. Bloom being Ulysses, his wife is Penelope. The authoritative version makes her also Gea, the earth-mother. This is what is technically known as a slender plot for a book which is the length of five ordinary novels. But the narrative is only the thread in the labyrinth. Around and about it is the real material of the psychological story, presented largely in the form of interior monologues—the unspoken thoughts of the three principal characters and at times of some of the others, separately or, in one case, simultaneously. In a few words, at most a few pages, the essential setting is objectively presented; thereafter we are actually in the consciousness of a specified or suggested individual, and the stream of consciousness, the rendered thoughts and feelings of that individual, are actually the subject matter of the book. There is no 'telling about' things by an outsider, nor even the looking over the hero's shoulder which Henry James so beautifully managed; there is virtually complete identification. The links in the chain of association are tempered by the nature and circumstances of the individual; there is no mistaking the meditations of Stephen for those of Bloom, those of either for the dark flood of Marion's consciousness. I quote a specimen moment from this specimen day: 'Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No one saw: tell no one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once.…' The swift destructive parody in the last sentence is a foretaste of what arrives later in the book. In the episode at the Freeman's Journal Joyce has sown headlines through the narrative, the headlines themselves being a history by implication of the vulgarization of the press. In the public house a variety of bombastic styles sets off the flatness of the actual conversation; on the beach the greater part of the episode is conveyed through a merciless parody of the sentimental serial story: 'Strength of character had never been Reggy Wylie's strong point and he who 230

would woo and win Gerty MacDowell must be a man among men' and so on. Here the parody creates itself not in the mind of Bloom, but in that of the object in his mind, and renders the young-girlish sentimentality of Gerty with exceptional immediacy and directness. The burlesque of English prose, historically given, against which great complaint has been made, is actually only some sixty pages long; the parodies themselves I find brilliant, but their function is more important than their merit. They create with rapidity and as rapidly destroy the whole series of noble aspirations, hopes, and illusions of which the centuries have left their record in prose. And they lead naturally, therefore, to the scene in the brothel where hell opens. This is the scene which, by common consent, is called a masterpiece. The method is a variation from that of the preceding; the apparent form is that of a play with spoken dialogue and italicized stage directions. The characters at the beginning are the inhabitants of nighttown; they and the soldiers and Bloom and Stephen have this real existence. But the play is populated by the phantasms and nightmares of their brains. Bloom's dead parents appear and converse with him; later his inflamed imagination projects him successively in all the roles he has played or dreamed of playing, from seducer of serving wenches to Lord Mayor of Dublin; he is accused of his actual or potential perversions; the furies descend upon him; he is changed into a woman, into a pig. Stephen's mother, at whose death-bed he refused to pray and who literally haunts his conscious thought, appears to him. In the Witches' Sabbath brute creation and inanimate things give voice; the End of the World appears and dances on an invisible tightrope; and the Walpurgisnacht ends in a hanging of totally unnamable horror. It is here that Bloom recognizes Stephen as his spiritual kin. The galvanic fury in which this episode is played is, one feels certain, not equalled in literature; it is a transcription of drunken delirium, with all the elements of thought and imagination broken, spasmodic, tortured out of shape, twitching with electric energy. The soft catlike languor of the whores, the foulness of the soldiers, the whole revel of drink and lust, are only reliefs to the implacable terrors in the subconscious minds of Stephen and Bloom. At the end of it Bloom accepts Stephen as the man his own son, and so himself, might have been; Stephen, more vaguely, seems to see in Bloom the man he himself may become. The orgy dies out in a cabman's shelter, in dreary listlessness, and after a description of their affinities and differences, given in the form of an examination paper, the two men part. The poet defeated by his self-scorn and introspection, the sensualist, with his endless curiosity, defeated by weakness, disappear; and in the thoughts of Mrs. Bloom something coarse and healthy and coarsely beautiful and healthily foul asserts itself. Like the Wife of Bath, she can thank God that she has had her world, as in her time. Although her last words are an affirmation that her body is a flower, although she morally rejects her brutal lovers in favor of Stephen and ends with a memory of her first surrender to Bloom, there is no moral triumph here. For Mrs. Bloom there can be no defeat similar to that of the others, since there has been no struggle. Their impotence is contrasted with her wanton fornication; she occurs, a mockery of the faithful Penelope, to mark their frustration. In their several ways Bloom and Stephen have been seekers, one for experience and the other for the reality of experience; and finding it they have been crushed and made sterile by it. If it is true, as Mr. Yeats has said, that the poet creates the mask of his opposite, we have in 'Ulysses' the dual mask—Bloom and Stephen—of James Joyce, and in it we have, if I am not mistaken, the mask of a generation, the broken poet turning to sympathy with the outwardgoing scientific mind. (Bloom is completely rendered by Joyce, with infinite humor and kindness and irony, to give point to this turning.) Conscious despair turns to unconscious futility; in the end, to be sure, Stephen leaves the house of Bloom, to be homeless the last few hours of the night. And this homelessness, beside which is the homelessness of Joyce himself, 231

strikes us as a joyful tragedy in Stephen's freedom and solitude and exaltation. The one thing one does not find in 'Ulysses' is dismal pessimism; there is no 'down' on humanity. Lust and superstition, Mr. [George] Santayana [American poet, philosopher, and novelist] has told us, are canceled by the high breathlessness of beauty; in this book love and hate seem equally forgotten in an enormous absorption in things, by an enormous relish and savoring of palpable actuality. I think that [Friedrich] Nietzsche [German philosopher and poet] would have cared for the tragic gaiety of 'Ulysses.' I have not the space to discuss the aesthetic questions which the book brings up nor to indicate what its effect upon the novel may be. I have called Joyce formidable because it is already clear that the innovations in method and the developments in structure which he has used with a skill approaching perfection are going to have an incalculable effect upon the writers of the future; he is formidable because his imitators will make use of his freedom without imposing upon themselves the duties and disciplines he has suffered; I cannot see how any novelist will be able (nor why he should altogether want) entirely to escape his influence. The book has literally hundreds of points of interest not even suggested here. One must take for granted the ordinary equipment of the novelist; one must assume also that there are faults, idiosyncrasies, difficulties. More important still are the interests associated with 'the uncreated conscience of my race'—the Catholic and Irish. I have written this analysis of 'Ulysses' as one not too familiar with either—as an indication that the book can have absolute validity and interest, in the sense that all which is local and private in the 'Divine Comedy' does not detract from its interest and validity. But these and other points have been made in the brilliant reviews which 'Ulysses' has already evoked. One cannot leave it without noting again that in the change of Stephen Dedalus from his affinity with the old artificer to his kinship with Ulysses-Bloom, Joyce has created an image of contemporary life; nor without testifying that this epic of defeat, in which there is not a scamped page nor a moment of weakness, in which whole chapters are monuments to the power and the glory of the written word, is in itself a victory of the creative intelligence over the chaos of uncreated things and a triumph of devotion, to my mind one of the most significant and beautiful of our time.

Source: Seldes, Gilbert. Ulysses [book review]. The Nation, August 30, 1922. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— Before Huxley, and indeed before the war, the sensitively written novels of E. M. Forster (A Room with a View, 1908; Howards End, 1910) had exposed the hollowness and deadness of both abstract intellectuality and upper-class social life. Forster had called for a return to a simple, intuitive reliance on the senses and for a satisfaction of the needs of one's physical being. His most famous novel, A Passage to India (1924), combines these themes with an examination of the social distance separating the English ruling classes from the native inhabitants of India and shows the impossibility of continued British rule there. D. H. Lawrence similarly related his sense of the need for a return from the complexities, overintellectualism, and cold materialism of modern life to the primitive, unconscious springs of vitality of the race. His numerous novels and short stories, among which some of the best known are Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1921), The Plumed Serpent (1926), and 232

Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), are for the most part more clearly experimental than Forster's. The obvious symbolism of Lawrence's plots and the forceful, straightforward preaching of his message broke the bonds of realism and replaced them with the direct projection of the author's own dynamically creative spirit. His distinguished but uneven poetry similarly deserted the fixed forms of the past to achieve a freer, more natural, and more direct expression of the perceptions of the writer. Even more experimental and unorthodox than Lawrence's novels were those of the Irish writer James Joyce. In his novel Ulysses (1922) he focused on the events of a single day and related them to one another in thematic patterns based on Greek mythology. In Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce went beyond this to create a whole new vocabulary of puns and portmanteau (merged) words from the elements of many languages and to devise a simple domestic narrative from the interwoven parts of many myths and traditions. In some of these experiments his novels were paralleled by those of Virginia Woolf, whose Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) skillfully imitated, by the so-called stream-ofconsciousness technique, the complexity of immediate, evanescent life experienced from moment to moment. Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett appeals to a small but discerning readership with her idiosyncratic dissections of family relationships, told almost entirely in sparse dialogue; her novels include Brothers and Sisters (1929), Men and Wives (1931), and Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949).

From Lawrence’s Women in Love English writer D. H. Lawrence wrote Women in Love (1921) as the sequel to his earlier novel The Rainbow (1915). In these works he explored the sexual and psychological relationships of men and women with a frankness unusual for the time. (p) 2000 Microsoft Corp. All Rights Reserved

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

233

Greene’s The Quiet American The Quiet American (1955) by English novelist Graham Greene takes place during the early stages of American involvement in Vietnam during the period of French colonial rule. An Englishman and an American, who hold opposing views on the war, also are rivals in love. The novel is at once a thriller, a romance, and a political novel. (p) 2000 Microsoft Corp. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Among young novelists, Evelyn Waugh, like Aldous Huxley, satirized the foibles of society in the 1920s in Decline and Fall (1928). His later novels, similarly satirical and extravagant, showed a deepening moral tone, as in The Loved One (1948) and Brideshead Revisited (1945). Graham Greene, like Waugh a convert to Roman Catholicism, investigated in his more serious novels the problem of evil in human life (The Heart of the Matter, 1948; A Burnt-Out Case, 1961; The Comedians, 1966). Much of the reputation of George Orwell rests on two works of fiction, one an allegory (Animal Farm, 1945), the other a mordant satire (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949)—both directed against the dangers of totalitarianism. The same anguished concern about the fate of society is at the heart of his nonfiction, especially in such vivid reporting as The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), an account of life in the coal-mining regions of northern England during the Great Depression, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), about the Spanish Civil War.

B

Fiction after World War II

Kingsley Amis English writer Kingsley Amis came to prominence with his first published work, the satirical novel Lucky Jim, in 1954. He went on to publish many more well-received novels over a 40-year writing career. Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

234

Doris Lessing British novelist Doris Lessing became known as a perceptive explorer of the self and of feminine identity. Her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook is considered a classic of feminist literature. Camera Press, London/Globe Photos, Inc.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

No clearly definable trends have appeared in English fiction since the time of the post-World War II school of writers, the so-called angry young men of the 1950s and 1960s. This group, which included the novelists Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and John Braine, attacked outmoded social values left over from the prewar world. Although Amis continued to write into the 1990s, his satirical novel Lucky Jim (1954) remains his most popular work. The workingclass or lower-middle class realism in the work of the angry young men gave way in the 1960s and 1970s to a less provincial emphasis in English fiction. Anthony Powell, a friend and Oxford classmate of Evelyn Waugh, also wrote wittily about the higher echelons of English society, but with more affection and on a broader canvas. His 12-volume series of novels, grouped under the title A Dance to the Music of Time (19511975), is a highly readable account of the intertwined lives and careers of people in the arts and politics from before World War II to many years afterward. His four-volume autobiography, To Keep the Ball Rolling (1977-1983), complements the fictionalized details that form the basis of his novels.

A.S. Byatt A. S. Byatt, an English scholar and novelist, won Britain‘s prestigious Booker Prize in 1990 for her novel Possession, a story that intertwines two love stories taking place in different centuries. Jerry Bauer/CSU Archives/The Everett Collection, Inc.

235

In the 1970s interest focused on writers as disparate in their concerns and styles as V. S. Pritchett and Doris Lessing. Pritchett, considered a master of the short story (Complete Stories, 1990), is also noted as a literary critic of remarkable erudition. His easy but elegant, supple style illuminated both forms of writing. Lessing moved from the early short stories collected as African Stories (1965) to novels increasingly experimental in form and concerned with the role of women in contemporary society. Notable among these is The Golden Notebook (1962), about a woman writer coming to grips with life through her art. In 1983 she completed a series of five science-fiction novels under the collective title Canopus in Argus: Archives.

Anita Brookner English author Anita Brookner had already established a reputation as an art historian and academic when she launched a successful career as a novelist. She won the Booker Prize with her 1984 novel Hotel du Lac. Jane Bown/Globe Photos, Inc.

Iris Murdoch, who was a teacher of philosophy as well as a writer, is esteemed for slyly comic analyses of contemporary lives in her many novels beginning with Under the Net (1954) and continuing with A Severed Head (1961), The Black Prince (1973), Nuns and Soldiers (1980), and The Good Apprentice (1986). Her effects are made by the contrast between her eccentric characters and the underlying seriousness of her ideas. Other writers noted for novels of ideas are Margaret Drabble and her sister, A. S. Byatt. Drabble has explored the predicament of contemporary educated women in such novels as The Realms of Gold (1975) and The Gates of Ivory (1991). She investigated the dilemmas faced by intelligent women entering late middle age alone in The Seven Sisters (2002) and other recent novels. Byatt won the Booker Prize, England’s highest literary award, for Possession (1990), about a romantic involvement between two academics. She completed an ambitious quartet of novels tracing changing patterns of family life in England from the 1950s to the 1970s with A Whistling Woman (2002). Art historian Anita Brookner writes of women in search of human connection and established her reputation with Hotel du Lac (1984), which won the Booker Prize.

236

John Le Carré British author David Cornwell, writing under the name John Le Carré, gained popularity through the publication of a series of spy novels about the British secret service. He taught and worked for the British foreign service before the success of his novel The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963) encouraged him to write full-time. Snowden/Camera Press/Globe Photos, Inc.

Other distinctive talents of the second half of the 20th century include Anthony Burgess, novelist and man of letters, most popular for his mordant novel of teenage violence, A Clockwork Orange (1962), which was made into a successful motion picture in 1971; and John Le Carré (pseudonym of David Cornwell), who won popularity for ingeniously complex espionage tales, loosely based on his own experience in the British foreign service. Burgess’s prolific output ended with A Dead Man in Deptford (1993), which vividly recreates the life and times of 16th-century playwright Christopher Marlowe. Le Carré’s novels include The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Russia House (1989), and The Constant Gardener (2001). William Golding displayed a wide inventive range in fiction that explores human evil: the allegorical Lord of the Flies (1954); The Inheritors (1955), about Neandertal life; The Spire (1964); and The Paper Men (1984), about an English novelist's cruel behavior to an American scholar. Golding won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1983.

Excerpt from The Lord of the Flies The Lord of the Flies (1954), the first and most successful novel by British writer William Golding, deals with the rapid breakdown of civilization when a group of boys are marooned on a deserted island. (p) 2000 Microsoft Corp. All Rights Reserved

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

237

John Fowles produced several highly experimental novels, including The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), in which he brings the fictional nature of the novel to the foreground, and A Maggot (1985), a mystery set in the 18th century. Julian Barnes established his reputation with Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), which is about scholarship and obsession, and followed it with other experimental and satiric works, including England, England (1999).

Muriel Spark Scottish-born author Muriel Spark is best known for her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), which was successfully adapted as a play and motion picture. Set in an Edinburgh girls‘ school, the novel is about the relationship between a teacher and six of her students. Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

Dark humor permeates the novels of Muriel Spark, who is best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), about a schoolteacher who turns out not to be what she seems. It was successfully adapted for stage and screen, with actress Maggie Smith in the role of Brodie. Darkness was the dominant mode of much of the fiction of the 1980s and 1990s. Martin Amis, son of Kingsley Amis, produced ferocious satires of modern society in such works as Money: A Suicide Note (1984) and The Information (1995). Short stories and novels by Ian McEwan have dealt with moments of extreme crisis, as when his characters face their own mortality in Amsterdam (1998), which won the Booker Prize. In Atonement (2002), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, McEwan deals with a child’s lies and her later attempts to come to terms with them by writing fiction. Another comic novelist, William Boyd, had an immediate success with A Good Man in Africa (1981), about a British diplomat who uses sex and alcohol to counteract boredom with humorous results. Boyd’s Any Human Heart (2002) chronicled in a tongue-in-cheek manner the decline of the British way of life during the 20th century.

238

Martin Amis British writer Martin Amis is renowned for his sharp wit in such books as The Rachel Papers (1973), Dead Babies (1976), and Night Train (1998). Hulton Getty Picture Collection

Rose Tremain visited overlooked areas of the past for her quirky historical novels, such as Music and Silence (1999), set in the 17th-century court of the king of Denmark, Christian IV, and The Colour (2003), set in New Zealand during the 19th-century gold rush. Beryl Bainbridge also mined the past, but from unusual viewpoints, in Every Man for Himself (1996) and According to Queeney (2001). Every Man for Himself, which takes place during the voyage and sinking of the Titanic in 1912, is narrated by an assistant to the doomed ship’s designer. According to Queeney portrays British lexicographer Samuel Johnson as observed by his friends the Thrales and their daughter Queeney. Michael Faber produced a contemporary novel of Victorian England, The Crimson Petal and the Rose (2002). The novels of Penelope Fitzgerald reflected a biographer's skill of creating an extremely vivid picture of her subjects' lives and included The Bookshop (1978), Offshore (1979, winner of the Booker Prize), and The Blue Flower (1995).

Kazuo Ishiguro British writer Kazuo Ishiguro began publishing short stories and magazine articles in the early 1980s. He won the prestigious Booker Award in 1990 for his novel The Remains of the Day. Actor Anthony Hopkins starred in a 1993 film adaptation of the novel. Richard Open/Camera Press/Globe Photos, Inc.

Other perspectives reinvigorating English fiction in the late 20th century came from novelists born outside England; some of these novels looked at colonialism or its aftereffects. V. S. Naipaul produced the semiautobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987), about a writer’s migration from the British colony of Trinidad to the English countryside. South

239

African Nadine Gordimer, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize, wrote of conflict in a society divided by race. English-educated Ruth Prawer Jhabvala based many of her comedies of manners on her observations as a European living in India. Indian-born Salman Rushdie satirized society in such novels as Midnight’s Children (1981) and drew the condemnation of Islamic fundamentalists for Satanic Verses (1988). British-born Kazuo Ishiguro, of Japanese ancestry, elegantly portrayed upper-class English society of the 1930s through the eyes of a butler in his best-known novel, The Remains of the Day (1989). Anita Desai, who chronicles Indian society, counterpoints Indian and American culture in Fasting, Feasting (1999). Zadie Smith, though British born, looked at the lives of immigrant and mixed race families in contemporary London in her dazzling first novel, White Teeth (2000). She continued to explore ethnicity in her second novel, The Autograph Man (2002).

C

Modern Poetry

T. S. Eliot These lines begin the famous poem ―The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock‖ (1915), by English poet T. S. Eliot. Prufrock, the poem‘s narrator, feels split between his sensitive, poetic feelings and his outer behavior, which is frozen with inaction. In this poem Eliot ponders the spiritual vacuum of contemporary society, describing what he sees as a spiritual death among the living. For this and other works, such as his long poem in five parts The Waste Land (1922), Eliot is considered one of the most important poets and literary critics of the 1900s. Culver Pictures

240

The Poetry of Philip Larkin One of the most popular English poets of the 1950s, Philip Larkin wrote poems that appeal to a modern reader‘s sense of despair. Often characterized as sad or depressing, his poems reveal a vision of life that is free of romantic or sentimental illusions. Larkin viewed life as a constant struggle between desire and ―The unbeatable slow machine/ That brings what you'll get.‖ These lines from ―Dockery and Son‖ are typical in their nihilistic confrontation with death. (p) 1996 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

William Butler Yeats Irish writer William Butler Yeats, winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize for literature, composed some of the most respected poetry of the 20th century. The themes of art, Irish nationalism, and occult studies all serve as central ideas in Yeats‘s works. Here, an actor recites a portion of Yeats‘s poem ―Second Coming‖ (1920-1921), which prophesies an imminent Armageddon. (p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved./Culver Pictures

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

241

Gerard Manley Hopkins British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was best known for his use of new poetic techniques, including rhyme internal to a single line of poetry, alliteration, compound metaphor, and rhythm resembling that of everyday speech. His experiments in technique were an attempt to capture the beauty and uniqueness of natural objects. Hulton Archive/Stringer/Getty Images

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Hopkins’s “No Worst, There Is None” Gerard Manley Hopkins‘s 1885 poem ―No Worst, There Is None‖ describes the depths of human despair. The final lines of this excerpt are an appeal to God, whose apparent absence has made Hopkins‘s desolation even more unbearable. Recited by an actor. (p) 1996 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

242

Two of the most remarkable poets of the modern period combined tradition and experiment in their work. The Irish writer William Butler Yeats was the more traditional. In his romantic poetry, written before the turn of the century, he exploited ancient Irish traditions and then gradually developed a powerfully honest, profound, and rich poetic idiom, at its maturity in The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933). The younger poet, T. S. Eliot, born in the United States, achieved more immediate acclaim with The Waste Land (1922), the most famous poem of the early part of the century. Through a mass of symbolic associations with legendary and historical events, Eliot expresses his despair over the sterility of modern life. His movement toward religious faith displayed itself in Four Quartets (1943). His surprising combination of colloquial and literary diction, his fusing of antithetical moods, and his startling, complex metaphorical juxtapositions relate him, among English poets, to John Donne. Eliot's style was intimately influenced by his study of such French poets as Jules Laforgue and Saint-John Perse. Eliot's essays, promulgating a style of poetry in which sound and sense are associated, were probably the most influential work in literary criticism in the first half of the century. —————————————————————————————————————

"Long-Legged Fly" by W. B. Yeats Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats explored many themes, including Irish folklore, spirituality, unrequited love, and Ireland‘s struggle for independence. Yeats helped lead the Irish Renaissance, a movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that sought to restore the influence of Gaelic language and culture on Irish literature. ―Long-Legged Fly,‖ which appeared in The Nation almost three months after the poet died in 1939, is included in Yeats‘s Last Poems and Two Plays (1939).

Long-Legged Fly By William Butler Yeats

That civilization may not sink Its great battle lost, Quiet the dog, tether the pony To a distant post. Our master Caesar is in the tent Where the maps are spread, His eyes fixed upon nothing, A hand under his head. Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence. That the topless towers be burnt And men recall that face, Move most gently if move you must

243

In this lonely place. She thinks, part woman, three parts a child, That nobody looks; her feet Practice a tinker shuffle Picked up on the street. Like a long-legged fly upon the stream Her mind moves upon silence. That girls at puberty may find The first Adam in their thought, Shut the door of the Pope's Chapel, Keep those children out. There on that scaffolding reclines Michael Angelo. With no more sound than the mice make His hand moves to and fro. Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence.

Source: Yeats, William Butler. “Long-Legged Fly.” The Nation, April 15, 1939. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— Both Yeats and Eliot exercised enormous influence on modern poets. A third influence was that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Victorian poet whose work was not introduced to the world until 1918. The conflict between his Roman Catholicism and his sense of the beauty of this world, and his complicated experiments in metrics and vocabulary have attracted much attention. —————————————————————————————————————

Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins Nineteenth-century English poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins is admired for the highly original use of rhythm in his poetry, a quality that can be seen in the following poems, ―The Windhover,‖ ―Pied Beauty,‖ and ―Hurrahing in Harvest.‖ A windhover, also known as a kestrel, is a small type of falcon. These three poems express Hopkins‘s devotion to the Catholic faith, as well as his fascination with the natural world. Like most of Hopkins‘s poetry, the poems were first published in 1918, nearly 20 years after his death.

244

Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Windhover To Christ our Lord I caught this morning morning‟s minion, kingdom of daylight‟s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate‟s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous. O my chevalier! No wonder of it: sheer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Pied Beauty Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles in all stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches‟ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

Hurrahing in Harvest Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies? I walk, I lift up, I life up heart, eyes,

245

Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour; And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a Rapturous love‟s greeting of realer, of rounder replies? And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!— These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting; which two when they once meet, The heart réars wíngs bold and bolder And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

Source: Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Poems and Prose. Edited by Gardner, W. H. Penguin Books. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— Of the many poets stimulated to indignant verse by World War I, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves rank among the most lastingly important. Graves's ability to produce pure and classically perfect poetry kept his reputation strong long after World War II. His historical novels, such as I, Claudius and Claudius the God (both 1934), also helped to maintain his popularity. The verse of Dame Edith Sitwell, who communicated her disdain of commonplace propriety as much by the aristocratic individualism of her personal attitudes as by her poetry, was first published during World War I; her experimentalism had little directly to do, however, with social problems. Extravagantly imaginative metaphors after the manner of the metaphysical poets, and conscious distortion of sense impressions, somewhat as in modern painting, were among her poetic devices. After World War II she wrote more compassionate and moving poetry, as in The Canticle of the Sun (1949) and The Outcasts (1962). —————————————————————————————————————

“Adlestrop” American poet Robert Frost encouraged the British writer Edward Thomas, a gifted literary critic who was the first to celebrate some of the new talent of his time, to try his own hand at poetry. Frost‘s encouragement and the stress of deciding whether to enlist for military service in World War I (1914-1918) triggered the start of Thomas‘s poetic career in late 1914. Thomas became part of the group known as the Georgian poets, which included Frost and British poets Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen. Thomas‘s poems center on the violence done to the natural order by the war, which eventually claimed his life. Adlestrop is the name of a small town in Gloucestershire.

246

“Adlestrop” by Edward Thomas Yes, I remember Adlestrop— The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June. The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. No one left and no one came On the bare platform. What I saw Was Adlestrop—only the name. And willows, willow-herb, and grass, And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, No whit less still and lonely fair Than the high cloudlets in the sky. And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Source: Thomas, Edward. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed., vol. 2. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. ————————————————————————————————————— The succeeding generation of poets, identified in the popular consciousness with the depression and social upheaval of the 1930s, made use at first of so much private or esoteric symbolism as to render the poetry barely intelligible to any but a small coterie of readers. The best known of these—W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis—filled their earlier poetry with political and ideological discussion and with expressions of horror at bourgeois society and nascent totalitarianism. After such verse plays as The Ascent of F-6, written in 1936 in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood, Auden's poetry became more reflective in The Double Man (1941) and, later, City Without Walls (1969). So, too, Day Lewis moved from The Magnetic Mountain (1935) to a more personal lyricism in World Above All (1943). His Poetic Image (1947) was a prose exposition of the modern poetic ideal. The position of poet laureate, held by Day Lewis from 1968 to 1972, subsequently passed to Sir John Betjeman, popular for his nostalgic humor. —————————————————————————————————————

247

"Matthew Arnold" by W. H. Auden One of the most important poets of the 20th century, W. H. Auden established himself in the 1930s as a leader of a new generation of poets. Auden‘s influence was extended through his poetry readings, teaching in colleges in England and the United States, and editing the work of other poets. His poem on English poet Matthew Arnold was published in the magazine The Nation in 1939, the same year Auden moved from England to the United States.

Matthew Arnold By W. H. Auden

His gift knew what he was—a dark disordered city; Doubt hid it from the father's fond chastising sky, Where once the mother-farms had glowed protectively Spread the haphazard alleys of the neighbors' pity. Yet would have gladly lived in him and learned his ways, And grown observant like a beggar, and become Familiar with each square and boulevard and slum, And found in the disorder a whole world to praise. But all his homeless reverence, revolted, cried: 'I am my father's forum, and he shall be heard; Nothing shall contradict his holy final word, Nothing.' And thrust his gift in prison till it died. And left him nothing but a jailor's voice and face, And all rang hollow but the clear denunciation Of a gregarious optimistic generation That saw itself already in a father's place.

Source: Auden, W. H. “Matthew Arnold.” The Nation, September 30, 1939. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— Experimentalism continued in the exuberantly metaphorical poetry of the Welsh writer Dylan Thomas, whose almost mystical love of life and understanding of death were expressed in some of the most beautiful verse of the middle of the century. After Thomas's death in 1953, a new generation of British poets emerged, some influenced by him and some reacting against his influence. Among the leading poets of that generation were D. J. Enright, Philip Larkin, John Wain, Thom Gunn, and Ted Hughes. Although they had different styles, these poets constituted what became known as The Movement and sought to appeal to the common reader with a nonsentimental poetry of the everyday, written in colloquial language. Larkin

248

(Collected Poems, 1988) often wrote of deprivation and absence. Hughes, whose poetry is noted for its depiction of the savagery of life, became one of England’s most significant poets and was made poet laureate in 1984 after the death of Betjeman. Poet and critic Andrew Motion was named poet laureate in 1999, following Hughes’s death.

W. H. Auden British-born poet, playwright, and literary critic W. H. Auden won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for The Age of Ignorance (1947). Auden mixed a mastery of verse with a concern about social issues. Archive Photos

Siegfried Sassoon’s “The General” British poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote deeply moving verse about the horrors of World War I (1914-1918). While some of his poems confront the war directly, others attack the delusions that were fostered in society about the war. ―The General‖ (1918), quoted here in full and read by an actor, contrasts the cheeriness of a general with the reality of the men he is sending off to die. (p) Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

249

Dylan Thomas Dylan Thomas wrote ―Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night‖ on the occasion of the death of his father. While Thomas‘s own life paralleled the energy and humor of his works, his last years were overcome with despair. When the poet died of alcoholism in 1953, the world regarded his death as a symbol of the tragic life of the modern artist. A 20th century Welsh writer, Thomas‘s passionate poetry resounds with innovative verbal imagery and surreal beauty. Hackett Collection/Archive Photos

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Hughes’s “Hawk Roosting” British writer Ted Hughes used vivid and violent imagery to describe the natural world. These lines, read by an actor, are from ―Hawk Roosting‖ (1957). The lines are written from the point of view of the hawk. (p) 1996 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Prominent British poets of the late 20th century included Craig Raine, Wendy Cope, James Fenton, and Seamus Heaney. Raine’s early collection, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), brings a fresh viewpoint to many topics. Wendy Cope’s witty insights appear in Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986). Fenton’s collection Out of Danger (1994) covers love, war, and the political violence he encountered as a war correspondent in southeast Asia. Heaney, from Northern Ireland, won the 1995 Nobel Prize in literature. Although his poetry appears simple in its language and flow, its structure and references are often complex.

250

D

Modern Drama

From Beckett’s Waiting for Godot Many critics regard Waiting for Godot as the masterpiece of Irish-born writer Samuel Beckett. The play, which premiered in 1953, established Beckett‘s reputation as a major figure in the theater of the absurd. (p) 2000 Microsoft Corp. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Aside from the later plays of George Bernard Shaw, the most important drama produced in English in the first quarter of the 20th century came from another Irish writer, Sean O'Casey, who continued the movement known as the Irish Renaissance. Other playwrights of the period were James Matthew Barrie, John Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, and Sir Noel Coward. Beginning in the 1950s the so-called angry young men became a new, salient force in English drama. The dramatists John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Shelagh Delaney, and John Arden focused their attention on the working classes, portraying the drabness, mediocrity, and injustice in the lives of these people. Although Harold Pinter and the Irish writer Brendan Behan also wrote plays set in a workingclass environment, they stand apart from the angry young men. In such works as The Birthday Party (1957) and Betrayal (1979) Pinter seems to offer reasonable interpretations of his characters' behavior, only to withdraw the interpretations or set them slightly askew in an effort to keep the audience intent on every least hint in the action on stage. Outside the literary mainstream was the Irish-born novelist-dramatist Samuel Beckett, recipient in 1969 of the Nobel Prize in literature. Long a resident in France, he wrote his laconic, ambiguously symbolic works in French and translated them himself into English (Waiting for Godot, play, 1953; How It Is, novel, 1964).

251

Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves British playwright Alan Ayckbourn is known for his comedies about suburban middle-class life in England. His plays reveal a disconcerting darkness beneath otherwise conventional farcical and comic situations. This extract, from How the Other Half Loves (1969), suggests the petty snobberies and pretensions typical of some of Ayckbourn‘s characters. (p) 1995 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Both English and American audiences have enthusiastically received the plays of Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard. Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1964), Loot (1967), and What the Butler Saw (1969) are farces dealing with the perverseness of modern morality; dazzling verbal ingenuity distinguishes Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Travesties (1974), and The Real Thing (1982). Stoppard’s inventiveness continued in his later plays that explore such nonliterary ideas as quantum mechanics (Hapgood, 1988) and entropy—nature’s tendency toward disorder—(Arcadia, 1993). Stoppard’s trilogy, The Coast of Utopia (2002), chronicled conflicting views among radicals in 19th-century tsarist Russia. Michael Frayn, best-known for his comedy Noises Off (1981) about the theater, based the play Copenhagen (1998) on a 1941 meeting between two physicists involved in atom-bomb research on opposite sides during World War II. Other important British dramatists of the late century included Alan Ayckbourn, Caryl Churchill, and David Hare. Ayckbourn wrote farcical dramas about middle-class anxieties, including Absurd Person Singular (1973) and Communicating Doors (1995). Churchill focused on gender and economics in provocative plays such as Cloud 9 (1979) and Serious Money (1987) and presented a bleak future of barbarism in Far Away (2000). Hare’s politically engaged plays include Plenty (1978), a satire about postwar Britain, and The Judas Kiss (1998), about the downfall of playwright Oscar Wilde. See also Drama and Dramatic Arts; separate articles on literary forms and movements. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

252

Further Reading 253

IX. Further Reading: Abrams, Meyer Howard, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th ed. Norton, 2001. A classic anthology in several volumes. Alexander, Michael. A History of English Literature. St. Martin's, 2000. A survey of one of the richest and oldest literatures in the world. Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British Novel. Viking Penguin, 1995, 2001. The history of the British novel from 1876. Braunmuller, A. R., ed. Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama. Cambridge University Press, 1995. Introduction to the plays, playwrights, and theaters of the English Renaissance. Corns, Thomas. The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry Donne to Marvell. Cambridge University Press, 1993. Essays about 17th-century poets. Drabble, Margaret. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 5th ed. Oxford University Press, 1998. Comprehensive, informative reference. Evans, Ifor. Short history of English Literature. 4th ed. Penguin, 2001. A classic work of literary criticism, reliable and readable. Hughes, Derek. English Drama, 1660-1700. Oxford University Press, 1996. Careful, readable analysis of Restoration comedy and tragedy. Richetti, John, and Michael Seider, eds. Columbia History of the British Novel. Columbia University Press, 1994. Comprehensive history of the British novel from the 18th to the 20th century. Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford University Press, 1996. Introduction providing analyses and historical context. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton University Press, 1977. Expanded ed. 1999. A pioneering work in feminist literary studies. Styan, J. L. The English Stage: A History of Drama and Performance. Cambridge University Press, 1996. The theatrical tradition in England. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. —————————————————————————————————————

254

Web Links 255

X. Web Links: Web English Teacher This commercial site for English teachers offers lesson plans; links to e-texts, biographies, and literary criticism; jokes and puzzles; classroom activities; and other resources. http://www.webenglishteacher.com/ British Poetry 1780-1910 The University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center provides HTML versions of the works of a number of British poets. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/britpo.html Middle English Collection The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia provides an archive of Middle English literature. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/collections/languages/english/mideng.browse.html Victorian Women Writers Project The Victorian Women Writers Project provides an online collection of works by notable British authors. http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/index.html BartlebyVerse: American & English Poetry, 1250-1920 The Bartleby Library offers a selection of classic anthologies of American and English poetry; poems are indexed by date, author, title, and first line. http://www.bartleby.com/verse/ Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse The University of Michigan offers a collection of more than 50 Middle English texts; it includes classics such as The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), Everyman (late 15th century), and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 1300s). http://www.hti.umich.edu/english/mideng/ Readings of Old English Poetry This site contains the text of selected Old English poems, with audio versions in the original language and translations in modern English. http://www.kami.demon.co.uk/gesithas/readings/readings.html

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. —————————————————————————————————————

256

Archives

257

XI. Archives:

1942: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1942: Literature, English The crucial fact to be borne in mind in reviewing books published in Britain in 1941-42 is that in this period 20,000,000 books were destroyed by enemy action, over 5,000,000 in a single night in the burning of Paternoster Row. This was followed by an unprecedented paper shortage, and by an even greater scarcity of all binding materials and of labor for this purpose. All this was in the face of tremendously increased demand and need for books, due to destruction not only of publishers' stocks and great public collections, but of thousands of cherished home libraries, to calls for shelter-reading, and to the creation of countless new readers by the strong interest taken by every class of society in war aims and plans for the future. For a book to survive such pressure and win through into print in England, the definition of a 'good book' had to take on the new meaning of a book provably 'good for' something so needed that for its sake readers would gladly forego amenities of production and put up, under Authorized Economy Standards, with narrow margins, poor grayish paper, and a typographic scheme whose one concern was legibility. These conditions of publication are described in what may rank as a historical document, John Brophy's Britain Needs Books (National Book Council). Not until these conditions are realized in America will the appearance here of books printed in Britain in 1941-42 arouse the sense of glory to which they are entitled, for each line, page and picture means difficulties apparently insurmountable, and devotion by which they were surmounted. In normal times it was possible for an American in his own country to inspect all the more important British books of the year with no more trouble than finding a large modern bookstore. He could be fairly certain of obtaining the best of these books in American editions, whether or not the author had an established reputation; and in the section of the shop devoted to imported books he could himself decide on the merits of new works that had made some impression in England without finding a large American market. To-day the situation has been radically changed. British authors whose works sold well in America before 1939 are still sure of their American market; but a new writer, especially one who has something new to say in a new literary genre, may remain completely unknown on this side — not in the relative sense that his or her book had failed to find an American publisher and so missed the chance of being reviewed, but in the absolute and literal sense of the word 'unknown,' which can be used only when the most diligent search fails to bring a single imported copy to light. Thus Inez Holden, creating almost a new technique of narrative in her Night Shift (John Lane, 1942), to record a psychological situation with which men of letters have never before had to deal, could remain so unknown on this side that the very title of her book could be unconsciously appropriated by an American best-seller. Gwynne-Browne's F. S.

258

P. (Chatto, 1942) has significance in the history of English prose style; if conventional English cannot put the reader through the experience of waiting on Dunkerque's beaches, it is all to the good to find a non-professional doing the job effectively under the stylistic influence of Gertrude Stein. But F. S. P. remains unknown in America. British writers of light verse have been placing major lyric poets in the embarrassing position of seeming to write 'heavy' verse — too heavy to rise to the obvious emotional challenge of the blitz; the woman whose pen name is 'Sagittarius' presented the most vivid account in literature of the hair-breadth saving of St. Paul's, with all the emotional condensation of rhymed verse, yet her London Watches is unobtainable in America and already out of print — due to instant demand — in Britain. Fiction. Fiction by established authors naturally and largely appeared in American editions. Thus we had Frank Swinnerton's Thankless Child, a study in family relations; G. B. Stern's Rakonitz continuation, The Young Matriarch; Sheila Kaye-Smith's The Secret Son; H. G. Wells's satiric You Can't Be Too Careful; Phyllis Bottome's picture of courage in London Pride and Margery Allingham's in The Oaken Heart; Margaret Kennedy's intimate record of British spirit in Where Stands a Winged Sentry, we had Somerset Maugham's Hour before Dawn, V. Sackville West's Grand Canyon; Humphrey Pakington's Our Aunt Auda; Storm Jameson's Then We Shall Hear Singing; J. B. Priestley's Blackout in Gretly; Ann Bridge's Frontier Passage, which came to audiences ready prepared. Eric Knight's Sam Small Flies Again carried along a popular figure to readers of The Flying Yorkshireman — to whom his death early in 1943, in a plane on duty, came as a personal blow. Doris Leslie's House in the Dust had an American edition, bringing us the story of a mansion bombed in the blitz; so did Edith Pargeter's People of My Own, a family between the two great wars; Anne Meredith's House of the Heart, with a family living in this house for nine generations; and England past and present in Norman Collins's The Quiet Lady. Ernest Raymond's The Last to Rest is a quiet, convincing study of the transformation of simple citizens into heroes, and Elizabeth Goudge's Castle on the Hill dealing with a group of uprooted Britons demonstrated British values that stand firm. The invincible gayety of Angela Thirkell's Northbridge Rectory and Merling Hall heightened the stoic attitude of her country gentry to air attacks; Nevil Shute's Pied Piper dealt delicately with refugee children; Seven for Cornelia, by Catherine MacDonald MacLean, with children evacuated to the Scottish Highlands; and James Ronalds's Old Soldiers Never Die with the situation of the over-age military man. A first novel, James Aldridge's Signed with Their Honour, flashed out of an airman's experience, and from an airman came the fine Falling through Space, by Richard Hillary, whose death on duty ended a promising career. History and Biography. Historical novels reached us from England in the usual proportion, the leader being Margaret Irwin's Bothwell romance, The Gay Galliard. Biography included Philip Guedalla's Mr. Churchill, Grant Richards's Housman, Hilaire Belloc's Elizabeth, A. E. W. Mason's Francis Drake, Patricia Strauss's Cripps, Hesketh Pearson's G. B. S., Mrs. Belloc Lowndes's memoir of her mother which was also a historic document of the Franco-Prussian War, I Too Have Lived in Arcadia, and a composite biography by William Gaunt, The Preraphaelite Tragedy. The posthumous essays of Virginia Woolf, Death of the Moth thus reached us, and G. N. M. Trevelyan's English Social History made history of its own in America. 259

Books Across the Sea. There remained, however, highly important books that would under peacetime conditions have been imported to meet demands that though relatively smaller, were strong, continued and coming from readers of keen intelligence. These, due to currency restrictions and other conditions prohibitory to importing booksellers, seemed lost altogether to all American readers save such as kept standing accounts with booksellers overseas. This situation was met in 194142 by a society unique among organizations for international goodwill: 'Books Across the Sea,' with headquarters in America at the English Speaking Union, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, and in England at Aldwych House, London. By sending to the America Reading Room of this society in London, as individual gifts, 'ambassador books' about America published since war began and deemed by a jury of selection to be worth precious cargo space in interpreting American conditions, ideals and background to an eager British audience, this circle established a collection, widely used throughout England, numbering 1,000 volumes by the close of 1942 and reinforced by a large collection of government publications given by the Library of Congress. A reciprocal gift of books similarly interpreting present-day England, chosen by distinguished authorities, is now housed at the New York reading room of 'Books Across the Sea.' Through this exchange, many Americans have thus been able to examine, in single copies otherwise inaccessible in this country, books of the highest value to all who belong, as readers, to the common realm of the English language. Poetry. It answers the question 'Is any poetry coming now from Britain?' with the rush of verse, keeping a surprisingly high level, from the armed forces, especially the R.A.F., in such volumes as Poems from the Forces (Routledge), Dispersal Point, by John Pudney (Bodley Head), the anthology Poems of This War, and Alun Lewis's Raider's Dawn, the last two later brought out in the United States. Wilfred Gibson's Challenge represented older poets, with John Masefield's Land Workers. The younger generation gave us the fervor and fire of Rostrevor Hamilton's Apollyon (Heinemann), and the rural gayety of Ruth Pitter's The Rude Potato, while Gordon Boshell's My Pen My Sword represented the influence on morale of honest newspaper verse. Personal Tales. Among personal experiences preserved in this collection are Basil Woon's Hell Came to London (Davies), Reginald Foster's Dover Front (Secker), H. A. Wilson's Death Over Haggerston (Mowbray), Hilda Marchant's Women and Children Last (Gollancz), Michael Wassey's Ordeal by Fire (Secker), George Sava's They Stayed in London (Faber), The Bells Go Down, diary of an Auxiliary Fire Service man (Methuen), and Peter de Polnay's Death and Tomorrow (Secker), most vivid report yet given of France under German occupation. Among the novels are John Brown's Body, Gordon Boshell's study of an average Englishman in war (Secker), Mrs. Morel, by Marjorie Hessell Tiltman (Hodder), showing the new England being shaped on the anvil of war; Ramping Cat, by Christopher Mawson an experiment in historical fiction placing, as it were, Henry VIII and Katherine Howard in modern dress; and two war novels by Robert Graves, The Avengers and The Thin Blue Line (Hutchinson). History Under Fire (Batsford) preserved a noble record, in photographs and text by James Pope-Hennessey, of architectural beauty destroyed by the blitz, a record continued by The Bombed Buildings of Britain (Architectural Press), also available here.

260

Post-War Problems. A new literature is rising from an equalitarian England; it appears in such soldier stories as those of Gerald Kersh, They Die with Their Boots Clean and Nine Lives of Bill Nelson (Heinemann); in sea stories such as My Name Is Frank and Log Book by the merchant seaman Frank Laskier, and by the most moving of all, Went the Day Well (Harrap), in which 28 famous writers speak for 28 men and women of all ranks and classes, known to them, who held in common an eagerness to live and a gladness to die for the new world in process of becoming. A feature of British war books always to be considered is the stress placed upon postwar planning of all kinds, from Conditions of Peace, by Edward Hallett Carr, first Ambassador Book to cross for 'Books Across the Sea' and later published here, to the report of the Archbishop of Canterbury (Penguin Books), the Beveridge Report, the symposium When we Build Again (Allen), and the beautifully illustrated triumph of cheap production, Living in Cities, by Ralph Tubbs (Penguin Books), whose first edition was made possible by using the central core of a charred block of plate paper that had gone through the Great Fire of London. In general, the pamphlet has in England come into its own, and is regarded with the respect due to its contents, even if they are not between board covers. It should be added to this brief summary that in the literature of a land at war the humor, pictorial and otherwise, of Fougasse, Osbert Lancaster, Pomt, Sillice, and the never-failing Low, remains in testimony to the spirit that made the common people mighty to endure. This courage was immortalized in the best-selling book in England reaching indeed astronomical figures — the magnificently illustrated publication Front Line, telling what went on in the Battle of Britain when the front line reached the back yard.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

261

1943: Literature, English 1943: Literature, English War conditions had little effect on the number of books printed in England's fourth year of war, but much to do with the dizzying rapidity with which they were sold out of print. 'But it's only just published!' became the most familiar heart-cry of bookshop customers. Publishers had been forced to manage with but 40 per cent — for much of the year only 37½ per cent — of their prewar paper, and to try with this to meet the tremendously increased demand for books of all kinds. All kinds, for in this present reading public are many 'new readers' and a large proportion of readers old or new who take a strong interest in 'serious' books. This general interest is reflected in the year's display, though of those also published in the United States, fiction, more often by authors with a well-established public, is as usual in the lead. Fiction. The war continues to inspire much of it. The High Courts of Heaven, by J. V. Hewes, story of an R.A.F. squadron during the Battle of Britain; and There's Something in the Air, by 'Flying Officer X' (H. E. Bates), studies of men who fly the R.A.F. planes, lead in the realm of the air. John Stuart Arey's Night Duty, round the clock in a blitzed London hospital, Robert Greenwood's Bermondsey ambulance story, The Squad Goes Out, and Susan Ertz's Anger in the Sky, spoke for the spirit that withstood the air raids. Two other novels of distinction dealt with the home front, Phyllis Bottome's Survival and Ernest Raymond's Corporal of the Guard, while J. B. Priestley's strong novel of munitions workers, Daylight on Saturdays, indicated changes rapidly taking place in the social structure. Lt. John Fernald's Destroyer from America put into fictionalized form the career of one of the first of these; John Brophy's Spearhead and Robert Henriques' Voice of the Trumpet were based on commando raids. There was, however, no failure in the supply of those light novels of distinction of style and serenity of spirit by which Britain sustains the amenities. Angela Thirkell's continuation of the humors of Barsetshire in Growing Up; Late and Soon, by E. M. Delafield, the Provincial Lady whose death during the year was felt as a personal loss in the United States; Dorothy Stevenson's Celia's House; Kate O'Brien's Last of Summer; Joyce Horner's sensitive The Wind and the Rain; Hilda Vaughan's Welsh characters in Pardon and Peace; Margery Allingham's Dance of the Years, represented a type of fiction welcome in wartime and particularly hard to produce in time of war. Allied to these novels were quiet tributes to village character such as Walled Garden, by Eileen Marsh, and Fay Inchfawn's wartime Salute to the Village. E. Arnot Robertson's sympathetic presentation of life in an Irish village as shared by two English visitors for the space of a soldier's leave, went deep into the charm and contradictions of Irish character. Richard Llewellyn moved from Wales to London in his brilliant None but the Lonely Heart, and Storm Jameson's Cloudless May pictured France in evil days. Historical novels included a posthumous addition to Hugh Walpole's Rogue Herries romances, Katherine Christie, which runs from the death of Queen Elizabeth to the Civil War; Norah Lofts' Brittle Glass and Daphne Du Maurier's feud of a century in Hungry Hill. Airing in a Closed Carriage, having for basis the Maybrick case, might be called historical fiction, but its sensation was made by the revelation on its appearance that its author 'Joseph Shearing' was Gabrielle M. V. C. Long, known also to literature as 'Marjorie Bowen' and 'George Preedy.'

262

Biography. Biography, especially literary biography, was rich and varied. David Cecil's Hardy the Novelist, an outstanding work, combined biography with exposition. Edmund Blunden's Thomas Hardy was an addition to the new English Men of Letters series. W. B. Yeats, by J. B. Hone, embodies thirty years' acquaintance. In Talking of Jane, by Sheila Kaye-Smith and G. B. Stern, two of her devotees discuss Jane Austin through her characters. M. P. Willcocks, distinguished as novelist and historian, evoked the times of Pilgrim's Progress in Bunyan Calling. Carlyle, Prophet of Today, by Frank Lea; Catherine Maclean's Born Under Saturn, the life of Hazlitt; Sheila Birkenhead's portrait of the painter Severn, in Against Oblivion, enriched this department, while Georgina Battiscombe's definitive biography, Charlotte Mary Yonge: the Story of an Uneventful Life, bids fair to start off a revival of interest in the works of one by whom so many young people on both sides of the sea were once introduced to fiction. V. Sackville-West in The Eagle and the Dove compared the lives of St. Teresa of Avila and Ste. Thérèse of Lisieux; Simon Harcourt Smith's Alberon, of the Spanish Conspiracy was a biography of the 18th Century Spanish dictator, and F. C. C. Egerton's Salazar, a portrait of the present director of the destinies of Portugal. Hesketh Pearson's Conan Doyle: His Life and Art made use of new biographical material, and the experiences of the founder of the famous Papworth Village settlement for after-treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis, Sir Pendrill Varrier-Jones, were recorded in Papers of a Pioneer. History in the Making. Two breath-taking accounts of crucial events in the war, Front Line, which described and illustrated the home front's ordeal in the blitz, and the exciting Combined Operations, were also published in the United States, but two books of the same general nature, even more distinguished as literature, have not yet crossed the ocean save in single copies: Jim Braidy (the collective name of the London fireman as Tommy Atkins is of the soldier-of-the-line), illustrated the history of the National Fire Service with reproductions of paintings by members of this unique organization, and Fire and Water, an anthology of firsthand reports of experience by writer members of the force — one of whom is Stephen Spender — contained a strikingly large proportion of prose of power and distinction. Maintaining Cultural Relations. Since 1940 it has been more difficult than ever before since cultural relations between England and the United States were established, to make a report of this kind in the latter country, on books coming out during the year in England. For the ocean has been closed to all but military traffic; importation of books has been arrested, cargo space has become a matter to be reckoned in terms of munitions or butter, and the breakdown of cultural relations between the English-speaking nations, with one striking exception, has been complete. This exception has been the two-way effort of 'Books Across the Sea,' by which circles of book-lovers in New York and in London have sent to each other, as individual gifts, single copies of books on their own countries published since the war, and received from the other side reciprocal gifts of books about the other country. In this way fifteen hundred copies, unique in England, of books about America, have reached the America Reading Room of Books Across the Sea in Aldwych House, London, for the use of librarians, teachers, broadcasters and the general public, while over a thousand corresponding English books have come to the similarly used collection of the

263

New York circle at the English-Speaking Union. Some of the novels already noted are obtainable in America only through this collection, but it is in the department of non-fiction that its usefulness has been greatest for keeping progressive elements in each country informed about the other's. Postwar Planning. Planning for the future, constructive and definite rather than purely theoretical, runs through all British reading today, the subject concerning 'new readers' as closely as it does those who have guided their destinies. The County of London Plan — now published in the United States — a magnificent piece of bookmaking as well as a monument to national resilience, was naturally one of the most widely discussed publications of the year, but book after book dealt with some aspect of reconstruction, whether material or in the field of social organization — for townplanners were not the only forward-looking Britons to recognize the opportunity of building on a cleared site, and the responsibility of not making the same old mistakes in re-building. Books in which education looks ahead ranged from the broad lines of Sir Richard Livingstone's Education for a World Adrift, to Bruce Truscot's Red Brick University, practical problems of the new type of higher education. Perhaps the most vivid and varied of English planning books are those reporting on changes in methods of agriculture and the social structure of farm life already taking place, or in hand for future development. Thus in Green Hands, by Barbara Whitton, two young women make their first acquaintance with the home life and ideals of agricultural England through work in the Woman's Land Army; other examples of an extremely interesting group of books of the same general nature, witnessing to a significant movement, are Professor Gangulee's account of the food production campaign in The Battle of the Land; The Living Soil, by E. B. Balfour, evidence of the importance of soil vitality to human health, with special application to postwar planning; and Alternative to Death, by the Earl of Portsmouth, on the relationship of soil, family and community. The movement is now not back to the land, but forward to it. A popular illustrated series of books provides material for eager discussion of the future: called Targets for ToMorrow, they include Food and the People, by Sir John Boyd Orr, and Industry After the War: Who Is Going to Run It? with a foreword by Sir William Beveridge, whose famous report on Social Insurance and Allied Service aroused keen interest not only in England but upon its publication in the United States. Pamphlets and Poetry. Another significant feature of the year has been the emergence of the pamphlet into prominence, and signs of revival of the art of pamphleteering. Not only are some of the most important contributions to discussion appearing in paper covers, but short books also challenge reply or provoke contradiction in the most stimulating manner. Two of these have attracted wide attention: The Trial of Mussolini by a journalist who prefers to be called 'Cassius,' and another glance into a possible future, Tomorrow Always Comes, by Vernon Bartlett, M.P., both of which reached the United States through 'Books Across the Sea.' According to the critic Ivor Brown, the former 'brings into the witness box all the British politicians who blessed or pardoned Mussolini' with a mixture of moral indignation and first-rate prose that is the way to save politics from seeming to the millions a matter dull and academic. Poetry in Britain in 1943 was nearer to pamphleteering than usual; not only because so much of it came out in paper covers, but because so much was by men with strong opinions and an experience with life and death that gave them claims upon public attention. The highly popular 264

collection of Poems from the Forces was followed by More Poems from the Forces; the rising genius of John Pudney was shown in another group of wartime poems, South of Forty; the brilliant satirist who writes as 'Sagittarius' had a collected volume, Targets, and two volumes appeared by an Englishman killed in action at twenty-one, Laughing Blood and Parachute Battalion, by Richard Spender. These were but a few of the writers of the new generation; of the older, John Masefield's Wonderings and Wilfred Gibson's The Searchlights were the most distinguished representatives.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

265

1944: Literature, English 1944: Literature, English Publishing in Peace and War, by Stanley Unwin, Past President of the Publishers' Association of Great Britain and of the International Publishers' Congress, contains in its excellent summing up of the matter the statement that 'the war has turned publishing completely topsy-turvy.' To appreciate what has been this year published in Great Britain this truth must be borne in mind, and that the continuity of British publishing, which staunchly withstood bombing and for a good part of this year buzz-bombing, still stands up against shortage of paper with which to meet demands almost insatiable. Just before the year closed it was announced that allocation of paper to book publishers would be raised from 40 per cent to 42½ per cent of prewar usage, an increase of about 1,400 tons. Out of this, by rigid economy, perhaps 4,500,000 books can be made — and public libraries of but six provincial cities: Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Bristol — are called on yearly for 28,000,000 books. This year the National Book Council organized 19 years ago to promote the wider distribution of books, became the National Book League and adopted a new constitution taking in not only those with commercial or professional interest in books, but people at large who use them: this has a three-year program for their informed and resourceful use, in line with the general democratization of reading. Another instance of this is the incorporation of built-in bookshelves in the 'Portal House' whose mass production meets building necessities of working men's districts badly bombed. Fiction. During the year two famous firms celebrated centenaries with commemorative volumes. A Batsford Century and The House of Macmillan. Fiction published in America was chiefly by authors with established clientele, but there were distinguished exceptions. Celia Dales first novel, The Least of These, best novel of the first London blitz, was a faithful, robust and poignant record of family solidarity. Eiluned Lewis, known in America for her evocation of childhood in Dew on the Grass showed in The Captain's Wife the romance possible to a happy family; Elizabeth Meyers' striking first novel, A Well Full of Leaves, showed an original mind, and one by Monica Dickens, The Fancy (American title Edward's Fancy), more than a trace of her distinguished literary ancestry. W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge stood high on best-seller lists, and though Elizabeth Goudge's Green Dolphin Country (American title Green Dolphin Street) reached the top largely through winning an imposing prize as moving-picture material, her popularity has steadily gained since her first Island Magic. There were two of Angela Thirkell's little masterpieces of light fiction, Growing Up and The Headmistress, and two other examples of this delicately civilized satire, Margery Sharp's Cluny Brown and The Bachelor by Stella Gibbons. The philosophical novel of the year was Aldous Huxley's Time Must Have a Stop; the merriest fantasy Eric Linklater's The Wind on the Moon. Howard Spring in Hard Facts returned to the last century and its journalism, and Nora Lofts to 1817 for The Golden Fleece. The scene of Storm Jameson's Cloudless May was France before resistance set in; of H. E. Bates's Fair Stood the Wind for France, countryside peasant protection of a crashed British aviator; of Lord Dunsany's brilliant Guerilla, a symbolic country invaded. E. Arnot Robertson made an illuminating study

266

of contemporary Irish psychology in The Sign Post, and Nevil Shute's Pastoral — following on the cinema success of his Pied Piper — showed there can be love without safety. The value of Laura Thompson's faithful reports of Victorian village life was recognized by a new illustrated omnibus edition, Lark Rise to Candleford. Non-Fiction. The sensation created on both sides of the Atlantic by C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Papers, a witty, demonic presentation of basic Christian teachings, was one of the signs of general interest in religious subjects; during the year the hero of his earlier Out of the Silent Planet took another interstellar trip in Perelandia. George Bernard Shaw was in the same mind but a mellower mood in Everybody's Political What's What. A posthumous collection of Eric Gill's essays and speeches, It All Goes Together, showed the joy in creative expression that unified his life and work. The third of G. B. Stern's rich contributions to autobiography appeared in Trumpet Voluntary, and she took part with Sheila Kaye-Smith in one of the most serene and entertaining of the books about an author, Talking of Jane Austen, the word used in the American title was 'Speaking.' Dover Wilson added to his distinctive Shakespearean criticism with The Fortunes of Falstaff which takes in the Henry plays, and Horace Walpole's correspondence with Mary and Agnes Berry was published in the United States in two volumes. The most striking non-fiction of the year, sold out on day of publication, was Full Employment in a Free Society, a report by William H. Beveridge written with simplicity and grace for ordinary intelligent people. Its official predecessor, the celebrated Beveridge Report, had a program to abolish want; this unofficial report, a policy to abolish idleness; the forthcoming third of the trilogy, of which the first draft has been made, will be The Price of Peace. The Chinese artist Chiang Yee, known as 'The Silent Traveller,' whose books about England revealed new beauty to Britons and established his following on both sides of the ocean, produced The Silent Traveller in Oxford. Two important works by Sir Richard Livingstone on larger responsibilities of education, The Future of Education and Education for a World Adrift, created strong interest in educational circles on publication in America; the second of these had been judged the most valuable book of the year by the American circle of Books Across the Sea, to whom it had been sent on its publication in England. The American Problem by D. W. Brogan (in the United States its title was The American Character) is one of the most sound, spirited and sympathetic estimates of one country by a writer in another, and Esther Meynell's The Young Lincoln a work for the thoughtful teens comparable with that of Lord Charnwood for their elders. Poetry and Pamphlets. Poetry, holding its own against all difficulties of publication, was well represented. Offerings of elder writers were in general less significant than those of the newer school: the most promising of many young poets among airmen, Alun Lewis, was killed just before publication of his Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets. Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot, led among works by those of firmly established reputation; the Collected Poems of V. Sackville West appeared as well as the only dramatic poem by C. Day Lewis, Noah and the Waters, and Wilfrid Gibson's The Searchlights. Robert Bridges: 1844-1930, by Edward Thompson, was a study of one poet by another, his friend. From the novelist Francis Brett Young came The Island, poems of English history from its beginnings to the Battle of Britain. Claims on the future were evident in Ruth Pitter's The 267

Bridge, Clifford Dyment's The Axe in the Wood, Laurie Lee's The Sun My Monument, Herbert Read's A World Within a War, John Lehmann's The Sphere of Glass, his first volume since Forty Poems, and John Arlott's Of Period and Place. A striking feature of this war — in which the pamphlet in general has come into its own in England as a vehicle for serious literature — has been and continues to be there the appearance of poetry of extraordinary vigor and intensity written by men in the armed forces, especially airmen. Relatively few of their names stand out as they did in World War I, because some of the most vital of these verses have been single pieces in little poetry magazines scarcely more than leaflets, physically of the most ephemeral character. These fragile leaves often carry the one poem or group of poems an impassioned singer can leave as testament to intense convictions. The collection and preservation of such precious ephemera has been one of the functions of the American circle of Books Across the Sea, and its special care the reading of them aloud at its headquarters at Columbia University. Another type of physically fragile publication carrying important work is the cheap mass-production literary review such as the ninepenny Modern Reading or Penguin New Writing. Carrying short fiction, verse and criticism by newer writers both British and American, these pocket-sized publications on rough gray paper have served an admirable literary purpose. The quarterly New Writing and Daylight preserves its excellent contents in more expensive form. The noteworthy talents among blitz-fighting volunteer firemen of London, first shown in their anthology Fire and Water, appeared again this year in another Jim Braidy, illustrated with paintings by artists in their number — among whom is Stephen Spender the poet. Another, William Sansome, this year published Fireman Flower. Anglo-American Exchange. The exchange of books between England and America, conducted by Books Across the Sea since the war's stoppage of importation cut normal cultural relations, reached during the year on each side its two thousandth book sent and received, the two thousandth American 'Ambassador book' being Dixon Wector's study of postwar treatment of veterans, When Johnny Comes Marching Home, and the English a lively report of personal rehabilitation after serious war injury, The Way of Recovery, by the undaunted Squadron Leader William Simpson. During the year this exchange of books has brought to America British publications as important as John Pudney's Who Only England Know; The Golden Carpet, by Somerset de Chair; Very Ordinary Seaman, by J. P. W. Mallalieu; J. B. Priestley's British Women go to War; War Factory and other examples of Mass Observation, the British method of reaching results like those of the Gallup Poll; Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady, by Edith Olivier; Pioneers! O Pioneers, by Hilary St. John Saunders, American travels later published in the United States; J. F. Horrabin's Atlas of Postwar Problems; H. C. Dent's Education in Transition, a stirring account of reconstruction brought about by blitz evacuations; A Little Place in the Country, by Marjorie Hessell Tiltman; Britain's Brain Trust, a history of this vastly popular radio feature; and Advance Australia — Where? by Brian Penton.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

268

1960: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1960: Literature, English Over 1959 and 1960 there were no very startlingly new developments in English literature, but in a good many of the most successful books published — from John Betjeman's Collected Poems to James Pope-Hennessy's life of Queen Mary—there could be noted a growing English tendency to retreat nostalgically into the past— a trend which was countered, however, by the fiction and drama of young radical and working-class writers like Arnold Wesker and Alan Sillitoe. The most exciting literary event of the two years was the prosecution of Penguin Books for publishing a cheap paperback unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover. The failure of the prosecution was generally welcomed in intellectual circles as being a blow for liberty and a tribute to the growing maturity of the English people. The Mood of Nostalgia. 1959 was a year particularly rich in biographies, including James Pope-Hennessy's life of Queen Mary, Christopher Hassall's life of Sir Edward Marsh, and Evelyn Waugh's life of Father Ronald Knox. Of these three books, possibly the last will become a biographical classic, written as it is in a very different fashion from the other two. With her dignified carriage and unchanging fashions, Queen Mary became, in her latter years, a symbol for many English people of the older generation, with its greater moral stability. The Queen was an admirably conscientious woman, one who sacrificed both a taste for sociability and a considerable range of intellectual curiosity to making herself a support and strength to her equally admirable, but rather more simple and stolid, husband, King George V. Moreover, royal personages have, in our day, little chance to develop complex or interesting private personalities, so that the main fascination of Mr. Pope-Hennessy's book was that it provided a rich pageant of English court life over a period of about 60 years. Sir Edward Marsh was similarly a rather charming but lightweight character, and the interest of Mr. Hassall's book centered on the extraordinary range of his contacts and friendships: Winston Churchill, Rupert Brooke, D. H. Lawrence, Mark Gertler. Mr. Waugh's book, in comparison, concentrated austerely on the fascinating character of Ronald Knox, a great wit and charmer who was essentially a shy and solitary man, a writer of great prose who squandered part of his talent on detective stories and essays in light humor, a humble man who could appear snobbishly fastidious, a saintly man who, like that other great convert to Roman Catholicism, Newman, could yet feel ambition and disappointment. Mr. Waugh's spare, incisive prose etches this most English of Romanists unforgettably on the mind. If these three biographies appealed to a mood of nostalgia for a more gracious and hierarchical past, so did John Betjeman's Collected Poems (1959) and his verse-autobiography, Summoned by Bells (1960); the first sold over 80,000 copies. Critics argue whether Mr. Betjeman is a poet at all, or only a very skillful parodist, but it is certain that his peculiar combination of facetiousness, mild satire, gentle and sad piety, nostalgic recollection, self-mockery, topography, 269

and Victorian antiquarianism appeals to a certain widespread current English mood. The appeal of a much tarter writer, Anthony Powell— who in 1960 published Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, the latest installment of his continuing novel, The Music of Time — the appeal of Mr. Powell also is perhaps to the sense of the past. His writing evokes English high-bohemian social life, in London pubs and drawing rooms, with a detail and precision that make some of his scenes resemble something one personally remembers. And, as his long novel develops, it becomes more and more an inclusive picture of at least intellectual and upper-middle-class English life, taking in writers, painters, musicians, fashionable hostesses, stockbrokers, politicians, school and university and London life. It has the fascination of gossip, and indeed to those in the know, the originals, or partoriginals, of some of the portraits are very recognizable. But in general its appeal, like the appeal of many of the books mentioned above, is a peculiarly insular one. Novels. The one prominent English novelist who is deliberately anti-insular, and who indeed enjoys a greater critical vogue in France and Germany than in England, is Lawrence Durrell. With Clea he has completed his group of four novels about Alexandria, the others being Justine, Balthazar, and Mountolive. In style and matter these novels have a deliberate opulence, and are full of bravura effects ranging from poetic evocation of landscape to passages of usually slightly grim comedy. There is an Ouida-esque taste, in Mr. Durrell, for characters slightly larger and stranger than life, for shocking and fantastic episodes, and for purple patches. English readers enjoy Mr. Durrell a little guiltily, and feel that he is outside the tradition of Jane Austen and George Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, the 'moral' tradition. But he is certainly compulsively readable. At exactly the opposite pole from Mr. Durrell is C. P. Snow, who in The New Men took up the subject of atomic research and added to his growingly comprehensive picture of how, at the upper levels, the levels where decisions are made, modern Britain works. For a picture of how modern Britain works at the lower levels, where few decisions except personal ones are made, readers might be recommended to Alan Sillitoe's short story collection, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and his novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The latter gives a vivid and oddly sympathetic picture of a well-paid young Nottingham artisan for whom the world comes to life only at week ends, with their leisure for beer and fornication. He is essentially a lone wolf, and his profoundest instinct, in all human relationships, is mistrust. For the middle levels of English behavior, Kingsley Amis' Take a Girl Like You shows a school teacher and other London intellectuals preoccupied, in a slightly more subtle way, with the same obsessions as Mr. Sillitoe's hero: wine instead of beer, polite seductions at parties instead of quick pickups in pubs. The over-all picture of English life given by recent English novels is depressing. Lady Chatterley and the English Malaise. Richard Hoggart, E. M. Forster. and many other distinguished witnesses, including clergymen and teachers, spoke up for Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover at the Old Bailey, convinced the jury, and the book is now freely on sale. Read carefully today, it seems less important for its honest and touching sexual passages than for its social probing into a kind of death in the English heart, a death which writers like Amis and Sillitoe reflect bitterly, while writers like Betjeman escape from it into nostalgia. A mood of revolt against this death in the heart is reflected in The Wesker Trilogy, Arnold Wesker's three plays about the Kahn family, London 270

East End Jewish socialists who, in the teeth of what look like inescapable facts and arguments, go on fighting for their beliefs. Wesker has nothing like Lawrence's stature (he is more like a working-class Galsworthy), but does have something of Lawrence's spirit of protest on behalf of life. Another working-class dramatist, Harold Pinter, in The Caretaker gave a much gloomier, but perhaps artistically more piercing, picture of modern life as involving a growing failure in communication, even at the simplest level. Pinter owes something to Samuel Beckett. Taken as a whole, the picture of English literary achievement over the past two years seems to reflect deep gulfs in communication in society itself. What would Mr. Betjeman have to say to Mr. Wesker, if they met, or Mr. Evelyn Waugh to Mr. Sillitoe? But, at many levels also, the awareness that such social noncommunication is an evil is being vividly expressed.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

271

1961: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1961: Literature, English Outside poetry, the writers who attracted public attention last year in England were the solidly professional ones in their fifties. Angus Wilson, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh all wrote novels that had a quality of, at least, thorough competence. Younger writers, once thought of as angry critics of the Establishment, like Iris Murdoch, seemed to be moving up, or down, into the same reliably successful class. Novels. Angus Wilson first became known about fifteen years ago as a writer of brilliantly satirical short stories. He worked for a long time as one of the keepers of the Reading Room in the British Museum, a vantage point which gave him a wonderful view both of English scholarship and of English eccentricity and sheer craziness. Apart from scholars and pedants, he has a wonderfully acute feeling for the spurious, the tedious, and various kinds of low life (usually sexually odd). Many critics feel he does not like people enough or understand them well enough from the inside, to write a satisfactory novel. His gift, they feel, is rather for short spurts of literary mayhem and for caricature and fantasy. The Old Men at the Zoo, which starts as a realistic novel about the administration of the zoo in Regent's Park and ends as a rather horrid fantasy about the slaughter of some of the animals and the general beastliness following the conquest of Great Britain by West European fascists, got a mixed reception. But Evelyn Waugh, a good judge, praised Wilson's gift for keeping an elaborate plot moving and suggested the story was based on what might have happened if Hitler had conquered England in 1940 or 1941. Waugh's own novel, Unconditional Surrender, was the unexpected completion of a trilogy of war novels, drawn partially from his own personal experience. The hero, Guy Crouchback, an innocent and chivalrous Roman Catholic of old family who went into the war with a gay heart in 1939, is gloomy in 1943 because he feels that the alliance with Russia is an alliance against all he values in European tradition. The strength of his faith and of his sense of honor emerges, however, in his remarrying his former wife, who is about to have an illegitimate child, and in his abortive attempt to help a group of persecuted Jews in Yugoslavia (which merely leads to the woman among them who has aroused his moral admiration being condemned for collaboration with capitalist agents). Critics both of the left and right have found in this novel a bleak honesty and a wider humanity than they had given Waugh credit for. Graham Greene's A Burnt-Out Case, about a weary man who vainly seeks escape from fame and love in an African leper colony, was, some critics thought, a variation on the old Greene melody: am-I-saved, am-I-damned, have-I-lost-my-faith-or-found-it? There was excellent African local color, reminiscent of Joseph Conrad, but there were two very implausible 'bad' characters—a spiritual exhibitionist who shoots the hero, ostensibly from jealousy but really out of snubbed vanity; and a journalist, allegedly world-famous, but too illiterate and inept to hold down a cub reporter's job on a small-town paper. 272

Iris Murdoch, of the more elderly younger generation, wrote in A Severed Head a modern Restoration comedy, a change-partners dance of six characters, spiced with incest and given depth by some D. H. Lawrence 'dark gods' stuff and a lot of heavily underlined Freudian rather than Jungian symbolism. Most critics felt that this book was, for all the liveliness of the writing, pretty disappointing after the humanity and scope of Miss Murdoch's previous novel, The Bell. Drama. The new working-class drama, or drama of social protest, seems to have ground to a stop. John Osborne, whose Look Back in Anger six years ago started the new trend, switched ambitiously to historical drama, suggestive of Bertolt Brecht's work, with his Luther, in which the young actor Albert Finney scored a brilliant success. The play is modeled very closely on the pattern of Brecht's Galileo and shows Luther as a psychotic tormented by constipation, moving psychologically in rhythms of agonizingly suspicious retention and equally painful emotional release, dodging as far as possible an examination of the logical coherence of his ideas or recognition of the social consequences of his acts. The play rather peters out, but some early scenes are powerful. It seemed impossible, however, to pretend that this often vivid and powerful projection of the irrational agonies of an unlovable and unloving man had much contemporary social relevance. History, in fact, seems to be back in the English theater. One of the most successful historical plays in the last year or two, as clear and sweet in flavor as Osborne's Luther was acrid, was Robert Bolt's play on Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons. Christopher Fry, silent for a very long time, has published a new verse play on the apparently inexhaustible subject of Henry II and Thomas á Becket, entitled Curtmantle. Criticism and Sociology. A few years ago Raymond Williams published a book called Culture and Society in which, after examining the growth of English ideas of culture over the last 150 years, he concluded that a working-class cultural ideal of solidarity was due to take over from a middle-class ideal of individuality and independent social service. In the sequel to this book, The Long Revolution, he attempts to trace a development in English literature and sensibility from an aristocratic through a growingly middle-class to a popular culture. The truth is, however, that most English writers still belong either by birth or education to what may be called the minor gentry. The mass of the English people, though growingly literate over the last hundred years or so, have, probably sensibly, never respected either education or literary culture as much as they have respected money, rank, and political or economic power. England is a cohesive country because, through all classes, it is a solidly philistine country. Williams' new book, therefore, was found unpersuasive, and reviewers noted that it was written in a tediously verbose style, lending a false portentousness to commonplace ideas. The only other critical book of the year that aroused much general interest was William Empson's Milton's God, which, under the guise of a defense of Milton, was a funny and sincere caricature of what Empson sees as the cruel craziness of average Christians. The most entertaining critical event of the year, however, was the reception of The Modern Age, the last volume of the paper-back series, the Penguin Guide to English Literature, edited by Professor Boris Ford. The contributors to this series have been disciples of a very influential teacher and, at his best, a great critic, Dr. F. R. Leavis of Cambridge. Many of Leavis' closest disciples seem to have learned little from him but a manner of authoritarian righteousness, an extraordinary touchiness when they are criticized, and an extremely narrow canon of books and 273

authors one is permitted to admire. They have made enemies. And the clumsy writing, the ineptness, the gross and numerous inaccuracies committed by them in The Modern Age enabled these enemies to move in, with a howl, for the kill. The slaughter has not affected the reputation of Dr. Leavis himself, who has been sensible enough never to give any public approval to the Penguin Guide's echoing of his opinions, mimicry of his tone, and mediocre copying of his methods. Poems. Poetry still seems to be in the hands of the young. One important new volume this year was Thom Gunn's My Sad Captains, a book digesting lessons Gunn has learned in Cambridge, England, Rome, Europe, and California. Its air was a brisk metaphysical nihilism touched with gaiety and unwilling hope. Two other youthful volumes worth mentioning are Peter Porter's Once Bitten, Twice Bitten, a tough, humorous record of a young Australian's adventures among Chelsea subdebutantes and mock-Establishment copywriters, and Edward Lucie-Smith's A Tropical Childhood, a book which has been attacked by a number of reviewers for the queer reason that, for a first volume, it is altogether too well ordered and well written. It is in poetry, more than in any other literary medium, that the younger mind of England still can display powers of apprehension and growth.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

274

1962: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1962: Literature, English Although the past year in English literature did not produce any really exciting work by newer or younger writers, there was a respectable output of novels, memoirs, plays, poems, essays, and criticism by writers of reasonably established reputation. Perhaps the great literary sensation of the year was a blistering attack, delivered, on the eve of his retirement from teaching literature at Cambridge, by Dr. F. R. Leavis against C. P. Snow as a novelist and thinker. Its intemperance distressed many admirers of Leavis as much as it upset friends and cheered enemies of Snow. Novels. Like its 1961 predecessor, A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch's newest novel, An Unofficial Rose, disturbed those readers who had been backing Miss Murdoch as the most solid and penetrating talent among the younger English novelists. Set in what might be called the Angela ThirkellNancy Mitford country, among rich and idle English country gentry, it worked out a scheme of permutations and combinations in illicit and often unrequited passion. The emphasis on the expensiveness of interiors was oppressive. However, there was a good portrait of a drunken and savage husband with a passion for roses, and of a saintly and patient wife whose gift for exasperating her husband was made very clear. Angus Wilson, reviewing this novel, suggested that Miss Murdoch is beginning to write about people just a little above her own social level and is doing so a little swoonily. An older novelist, Anthony Powell, produced in The Kindly Ones the sixth volume of his series of novels, The Music of Time, thought by many critics to be the most important and ambitious work of fiction that any English writer has produced since the war. The Kindly Ones brings the characters, including the always politely surprised narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, up to the outbreak of war in 1939. The comedy is grim, with the moral decay in many of the main characters symbolized by an episode at a weekend party where they enact a charade representing the Seven Deadly Sins. Nicholas, the narrator, enacts the part of Sloth. Critics who dislike Powell have suggested that Nicholas' failure to make judgments, his lack of any response but curiosity, mild liking, and tepid and amused dislike toward the other characters, creates a moral vacuum at the center of this series. In The Kindly Ones it may for the first time be felt that the presentation of a morally vacuous universe is deliberate and that Nicholas' reticence masks horror and disgust, not bland or blind indifference. Other novels worth noticing include two by Rayner Heppen-stall, The Woodshed and The Connecting Door, both with an autobiographical flavor and the second owing something to the new French 'anti-novel.' Two volumes of short stories deserve mention—Kingsley Amis' My Enemy's Enemy, in which a glumly realistic view of life is more in evidence than Amis' celebrated gift as a funny man; and Christopher Isherwood's Down Here on a Visit, a set of four long short stories told by the 'I' of Prater Violet and Good-Bye to Berlin. Isherwood's elegance of form and 275

economical chastity of style, as evident as ever, could not reconcile some critics to the shockingness of some of the sexual episodes and to the apparent detachment of the narrator's (not necessarily of Isherwood's) attitude toward human self-destructiveness. Stuart Hampshire, the philosopher, in the best review which the book received, pointed out that the 'here' of the title is earth seen as a kind of hell and that the narrator, who never gets implicated in hell, is a sort of aesthetic rather than moral recording angel. Drama. Arnold Wesker is a young dramatist whose plays have sharply divided critics, some of whom see him as a pioneer for militant social realism in the English theater, others as a sentimental idealist somewhat resembling Gals-worthy. There was the usual division of opinion about his new play on the breaking in of trainees in the Royal Air Force, Chips With Everything, but the verdict was much more generally favorable than before. The play is about how the officer-type recruit who wants to pal around and side with the men, to become their leader against the contemptuous attitudes of authority, is subtly groomed for the officer role in spite of himself. A very great contrast was Samuel Beckett's newest offering, Happy Days, in which there are only two characters, a husband and a wife, the wife buried first up to her waist, and then up to her neck, in a mound of sand. She perseveres, however, in a way that should be an example to all of us, looking on the cheerful side of things and remembering happy days. Critics felt that Beckett was perhaps not being ironical but really asserting, as in his earlier one-act play, Krapp's Last Tape, a sort of dotty optimism born on the far side of despair. Christopher Fry's verse play, Curtmantle, on the endlessly popular theme of Archbishop Thomas à Becket and Henry II, showed a bare and forceful use of language compared to Fry's earlier plays but was rather tepidly received— perhaps because many British drama critics seem, since Eliot stopped writing for the stage and the new wave of prose drama began with Osborne, to dislike verse drama in principle. F. R. Leavis and C. P. Snow. Early this year Dr. F. R. Leavis, probably the most influential teaching critic in England, gave an annual public lecture, the Richmond lecture, at Cambridge and devoted it to attacking the novelist-scientist C. P. Snow. Leavis has always insisted that English literature has a centrally important moral place in the modern English university. He also dislikes very much anything in imaginative literature that strikes him as near-good rather than good, pretend-serious rather than really serious, and he has no respect for Snow as either a commentator or a novelist. The entire lecture was published in The Spectator and led to a long and lively correspondence. Leavis' tone recalled the brisk Augustan days of John Dennis and Alexander Pope rather than the comparative civility of modern times. Snow, a sick man at the time of the attack (he has since had a couple of operations for a detached retina), thought it beneath his dignity to reply but perhaps did so indirectly a little later when he chose for the theme of his inaugural address as lord rector at St. Andrews' University in Scotland the topic 'Magnanimity.' Leavis' own lecture was a striking piece of rhetoric, but not of reasoned argument or illustrated criticism. Many of his admirers felt sad that a great teacher like Dr. Leavis should devote so much of his final public address at Cambridge to what looked like an exhibition of spleen, if not of spite. Critical and General Works.

276

Prof. G. Wilson Knight of Leeds is one of the world's pioneers in the criticism of Shakespeare — not in terms of plot, character, or detail of language, but through analysis of recurrent symbols, like storms and music. In 1962 he published a lively book The Golden Labyrinth, covering the whole of English drama. Wilson Knight is not a good close critic, but he can be exciting when working on patterns. The Philosophical Papers of the late Prof. J. L. Austin of Oxford attracted wide attention, both because Austin wrote remarkably clear and witty prose and because his common-sense approach to language and his feeling for the niceties of idiom have much in them to attract men of letters. In poetry, perhaps the most distinguished volume of the year was Robert Graves' New Poems: 1962; but the lively and ranging Collected Poems of Roy Fuller, perhaps the last wholehearted disciple of Auden left in England, were also widely praised. Two books of literary memoirs, J. B. Priestley's Margin Released and John Wain's Sprightly Running, contained a readable mixture of reminiscence, opinion, and polemic.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

277

1963: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1963: Literature, English The year 1963 in the English literary world was rather poor in new novels, but quite rich in volumes of poetry, critical and biographical works, and new plays and theatrical enterprises. A saddening event was the death of one of the finest and most famous of the English 'poets of the 1930's,' Louis MacNeice, just after his most recent volume had been made the choice of the English Poetry Book Society. A still young-looking and vigorous man of 56, he was the first to die of the 'Big Four' poets of the 1930's—including besides himself W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender. The approach of the fourth centenary, in 1964, of Shakespeare's birth led to the production of a number of new studies of the Bard, one of them, by the historian A. L. Rowse, highly controversial and hotly attacked. A reissue of the complete run of the famous critical magazine Scrutiny, with a new index and a new retrospect by Scrutiny's famous editor, F. R. Leavis, led to a widespread sympathetic reappraisal of the magazine's contribution to critical stringency and alertness in England. Novels. Iris Murdoch has for some years been thought of as the most intelligent and original of the newer novelists, but since her fourth-from-the-last novel, The Bell, which was almost universally recognized as having at least near-greatness, critics have been expressing increasing reservations. They have begun to worry about her complicated and artificial plot structures, about a use of symbolism that sometimes seems both opaque and pretentious, about a rather breathily upperclass atmosphere involving a great deal of description of clothes and furniture, and about an occasionally crude and obvious quality in the writing. The Unicorn, Miss Murdoch's offering in 1963, was set in a lonely and romantic Irish background, and critics found in its tone an uncomfortable similarity to popular best sellers like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Another woman novelist who has been much praised for her witty fictional studies of specialized groups of people—old people, bachelors, schoolmistresses in their relations with adolescent schoolgirls—is Muriel Spark. Her most recent novel, The Girls of Slender Means, received less praise than usual from reviewers, who for the first time began to scent the exploitation of a formula. Miss Spark was separately in the news as the author of a letter of protest to the Times Literary Supplement against the publication of a biographical-critical study of her by a former close literary associate, and continuing friend, the poet Derek Stanford. She made the case that a living writer, whose work may still change and develop, is bound to consider such a study an invasion not only of his personal, but of his creative, privacy. Mr. Stanford made the obvious retort that what has been published is in the public domain. A work of fiction that attracted favorable attention in a thin year was Alan Sillitoe's The Ragman's Daughter, a set of stories in Sillitoe's excellent, plain, Defoe-like prose about workingclass life in the English Midlands. But books by foreign writers, such as Vladimir Nabokov,

278

Henry Miller, Mary McCarthy, and Günter Grass, attracted much more eager critical attention than the native product. Criticism and Biography. In a series of preview articles in the London Times, the Oxford historian of the Tudor period, A. L. Rowse, claimed by the use of historical methods to have solved a number of problems about Shakespeare, including the identity of the fair young gentleman in the sonnets, the different identity of Mr. W. H., and the dating of the sonnets, which had previously baffled merely literary scholars because of their lack of solid historical background. Reviewers seemed to feel that Rowse's approach was arrogant and that most of his solutions had in fact been outlined by previous biographers of Shakespeare, notably E. K. Chambers. Martin SeymourSmith's new edition of the sonnets, in a popular series, coincided with Rowse's book in accepting the Earl of Southampton as the fair gentleman, but was especially useful for its detailed exposition of the often rather improper puns and double meanings in these beautiful and difficult poems. Peter Quennell also published a richly appreciative book about Shakespeare, on the popular level, Shakespeare: The Poet and His Background. Critics seemed to be turning back from the modern scene to the great English classics, for perhaps the most widely praised critical book of the year was Christopher Ricks' Milton's Grand Style, a defense of Milton's suppleness and subtlety in Paradise Lost against the strictures of Leavis. Critically, nevertheless, it was Leavis' year, for the reissue (at a very high price) of a complete series of bound volumes of Scrutiny made clear not only his greatness as a critic but his range and insight as an editor. The series is beyond the scope of most private incomes, but should enrich schools and universities. Poetry. Two fine English poets, both in their fifties, died in the past year. Louis MacNeice was famous; Bernard Spencer, who spent most of his life outside England, teaching for the British Council, was much admired by a small but distinguished circle. Both were in a way typical of the 1930's in their often brittle gaiety, their powers of observation, their strong but often ironically curbed emotions, and their gift for sharp and scathing social comment. MacNeice had also rich and various powers of invention which Spencer, an elegant, sparse, occasional poet, did not share. Another poet of the 1930's, but more famous as the editor of New Verse and as an anthologist, Geoffrey Grigson, published his Collected Poems. These again had the vividness and sharpness typical of the 1930's, and reviewers felt that Grigson had perhaps been underestimated as a poet because of his greater fame as an always witty, and often cruel, literary journalist. John Lehmann, also famous as an editor, brought out his Collected Poems; critics found them elegant but rather remote and literary. In an anthology, New Lines II, Robert Conquest much expanded his original team of 'Movement' poets—poets notable for regular, subdued rhythms and a cool, detached tone. Conquest also started off, in The London Magazine, a lively but inconclusive controversy about the reputation of Ezra Pound. No new young poet made any particular mark, though Martin Seymour-Smith's Tea with Miss Stockport combined satirical and macabre or fantastic elements in a strikingly original way.

279

Drama and Theater. There was nothing new from John Osborne or Arnold Wesker, but Harold Pinter had two new plays, The Collection and The Lover, both moving into a polite middle-class milieu that is new to him, but keeping the accent on oddity and neurosis. John Arden's The Workhouse Donkey, put on at the new Chichester apron-stage theater, run by Sir Laurence Olivier, had some of the qualities of ballad opera, in the tradition of Gay's Beggar's Opera. Perhaps influenced by Edward Albee, Alun Owen, better known as a television dramatist, used a Welsh university college and its professors for his tragicomedy, A Little Winter Love. One might have the impression from these offerings that the kitchen-sink fashion in recent British drama was wearing itself out and that the middle class was again being thought of as having some dramatic interest. John Whiting, a fine dramatist who had never had the recognition he deserved, died during the year. Whiting had been writing prose plays with a hidden poetic content in the 1940's, when critics were betting on a revival of verse drama through Fry and Eliot, and he went on writing such plays, with highly literate dialogue, through the mid-1950's, when the fashions were changing to 'method' acting and proletarian speech. His two most famous plays were Marching Song and an adaptation from Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

280

1964: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1964: Literature, English A number of senior novelists produced interesting new works of fiction in 1964, and some younger novelists, notably Christine Brooke-Rose, added to their reputations. In the theater, John Osborne's most recent play struck many critics as his most brilliant and original. There was wide discussion about a new vogue for rewriting and amending Shakespeare. There was also much discussion about the 'theater of cruelty,' largely sparked off by a London production of a play by Peter Weiss whose title describes the action: The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Discussions about censorship were kept going by a court case about Fanny Hill and by two first English publications, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch and a full translation of the first version of De Sade's Justine. It was a good year for biography, general literature, and criticism; there were more interesting volumes of verse than usual; and F. R. Leavis set off a controversy on the place of English literature in university education. Novels. Perhaps the most distinguished novel of the year was Angus Wilson's Late Call. It has a setting comparatively new in British fiction, though not in British sociological writing: one of the 'new towns' built since 1945, uncrowded, free of slums, but also depressingly free of atmosphere and a sense of history. The heroine, Sylvia Calvert, is a retired hotel manager with a difficult but engaging husband, a World War I veteran fond of drink and tall stories. They come to live with Sylvia's son, the progressive, rather priggish headmaster of a secondary modern school. Sylvia, a typical Angus Wilson heroine, is no intellectual but has a good heart and head; her impact on a self-conscious, self-righteous society provides plenty of opportunities for shrewd social criticism and for Dickensian comedy and pathos. Anthony Powell's The Valley of Bones carries Nicholas Jenkins, the protagonist in Powell's sequence-in-progress, The Music of Time, into the early days of World War II and continues what is now being recognized as Powell's leading theme, the impact of the romantic will against ironically complex realities, and its defeat. Iris Murdoch's The Italian Girl got a slightly cool reception. Many critics felt that she had become overobsessed with working out all the possible sexual permutations within a given cast of slightly stylized characters, and with working through a single metaphor or idea in each book, in this case that of 'healing.' Edna O'Brien's Girls in Their Married Bliss is the third novel about two Irish country girls who move first to Dublin, then marry and come to London, and critics agreed that this particular installment is a wonderfully vivid picture of London life seen through alien eyes, and also of the peculiar mixture of puritan strictness and wildness or raffishness in the Irish character. Perhaps the most interesting experimental novel of the year was Christine Brooke-Rose's Out. Miss Brooke-Rose had been previously known for a scholarly but abstruse book about poetry, 281

The Grammar of Metaphor, and for rather frothy novels about sexual highjinks among Chelsea and Bloomsbury intellectuals. Out is a much more ambitious work, set in an imagined future in which the European peoples have been conquered and reduced to a semiservile condition by the Africans and Asians. Her hero is a former white professor, one of the 'colourless,' who has lost his sense of memory and identity but through psychiatric help and that of a few kind people among the ruling 'coloureds' partly regains it. The technique is that of the French antiroman. Critics disagreed about how successful her experiment is, but agreed that it is original and courageous. Drama. There was great activity in the theater in 1964, as well as argument about it. Perhaps the most interesting new play was John Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence. Osborne's first successful play, Look Back in Anger, was a protest on behalf of the young against smug and successful middle age, but even more profoundly it was a statement of the rights of failure and suffering. The hero of Inadmissible Evidence is a middle-aged solicitor, a failure in his profession, in his family life, and in his amorous life, who has hallucinations that he is being hailed to the Judgment Seat for condemnation. He tries vainly to defend himself, is conscious only of the shabbiness and collapse of his life, but a series of flashbacks reveals him as a character with a capacity for almost Christlike self-giving whose life has been made miserable partly by his own diffidence and hesitation, partly by the hardness and shallowness of those whom he has tried to love and help. It is the young, with their shallowness and callowness and brash self-assurance, who are now the targets of Osborne's diatribes and satire. The theatrical year was much taken up by arguments about the 'theater of cruelty' and 'black farce' and about rewriting or reshaping Shakespeare. It is fairly easy to imitate Shakespeare's earlier end-stopped blank verse; in John Barton's rearranging of the three parts of Henry VI into two, with liberal additions, there is introduced, for instance, a scene in which Jack Cade castrates a military messenger, on stage, with a reaping hook, comparing his action to the pruning of trees. The scene is unpleasant but effective; it is not in Shakespeare. Robert Graves, perhaps more justifiably, modernized about 300 short passages of the dialogue in Much Ado About Nothing, changing the word 'misprision' to 'misapprehension,' for example, and the phrase 'lie in woollen' to 'sleep under rough blankets.' There has not been such a cavalier attitude toward Shakespeare in England since the early 18th century. General Literature. Evelyn Waugh's first volume of autobiography, A Little Learning, covers his childhood, his school and university days, and the early experience of schoolmastering in Wales, which gave him the material for his first novel, Decline and Fall. It has the same clarity of line, dry and disabused charity, and sharp sense of character in outline that made his life of Father Ronald Knox one of the masterpieces of modern biography. He attributes the spare excellence of his prose to his prep school grounding in Latin syntax. The publication in an unexpurgated edition of Frank Harris' My Life and Loves, a vigorous if mendacious chronicle, revived the current English interest in the 1890's and the Edwardian age, and gave reviewers a peg for lofty moralizing. Lytton Strachey's Spectatorial Essays demonstrates that this writer even in his youth had the elegance and urbanity of style that was to flower in Eminent Victorians, but the essays are rather shallow and superficial as literary

282

criticism. David Holbrook a well-known defender of Lawrentian attitudes, surprised reviewers by producing The Quest for Love, a book severely critical of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Lord David Cecil's Max is a bulky and rich biography of a writer and artist, Max Beerbohm, who farmed a tiny but original talent with exquisite tact. The book was generally admired, but some critics felt that Lord David gave too profuse an account of a life singularly lacking, especially in its later years, in deep human contacts and dramatic outward incident. Robert Rhodes James, a clerk to the House of Commons, wrote an almost perfect short biography of the Fifth Earl of Rosebery, the Hamlet of British Liberal politics: a politician with the temperament of an artist, the touchiness of a woman, and an extraordinary gift for withdrawing from public affairs into press notoriety. Roy Jenkins' life of Henry Herbert Asquith deals with a more solid and successful, but less intrinsically interesting, character; neither Asquith's fondness for the bottle nor his delight in sentimental friendships with women much younger than himself is dealt with in quite sufficient detail. Controversies. F. R. Leavis' resignation from his honorary fellowship at Downing College, in protest against the college's ignoring his recommendations for the appointment of a permanent tutor in English, was part of a debate now going on in England about the usefulness and the methodology of teaching English at English universities. From some official points of view, English is both a 'soft' and a backward-looking subject. For Leavis, English literature is the central humane and moral study of an English university, and attempts to diminish its importance or to make it a merely intellectual, rather than a spiritual, discipline are a betrayal of the best traditions of English culture. The decision of the new Labour government to halt the building of new universities, which often do center on literary studies, and to encourage the expansion of older universities, particularly on the scientific and technical sides, suggests that authority in England at the moment is rather suspicious of the claims of literary culture as such. Death. Dame Edith Sitwell, ranked among the best English poets of the 20th century by some critics, died in London on December 9 at the age of 77.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

283

1965: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1965: Literature, English The year 1965 was memorable in English literature for the death, early in the year, of T. S. Eliot. Eliot, who was well into his seventies, was outstandingly successful in poetry, drama, and criticism. The death of this great man was the end of an era. He stood for standards of stringency in thought and criticism, of laborious range in culture, of difficult invention in poetry, which few writers of a younger generation try to live up to or are even aware of. At the memorial service in Westminster Abbey were gathered the most eminent critics and poets of England, including Eliot's old friend Ezra Pound, who had come from Rome. The year of Eliot's death was also Yeats's centenary year and the seventieth birthday (he produced Collected Poems, 1965 to celebrate it) of Robert Graves, now the most distinguished living English poet. Also noteworthy in the area of poetry was the stringent but charitable The Life of Dylan Thomas by the novelist Constantine FitzGibbon. Women novelists, such as Iris Murdoch, Olivia Manning, Muriel Spark, and Pamela Hansford Johnson, were prominent (it was a rather thin year for the men), and the theater still provided sensations. Harold Pinter's Homecoming, John Osborne's A Patriot for Me, and, even more, Edward Bond's Saved struck many tolerant critics as going beyond some sort of moral or sensational limit. The matter of frankness in literature was much discussed. George Steiner, in an article in Encounter, suggested that the time had come for self-censorship by authors, since pornography was becoming 'an intrusion into privacy.' Kenneth Tynan used a four-letter word to illustrate a point in a BBC television discussion program and aroused a greater passing furor than the political crisis in Rhodesia. Anniversaries and Reputations. Eliot and Yeats, the Yankee and the Irishman, were the two most distinguished English poets of this century; and the coincidence of Eliot's death with Yeats's centenary led to an implicit confrontation of their reputations. On the whole, in the last ten years or so, Yeats's more abundant and vital, if more fantastic and eccentric, gift had been gaining ground on Eliot's deep but not wide insights and his masterly but economic use of them. The centenary year produced too many symposia on Yeats, often very uneven. An essay by Conor Cruise O'Brien on what he saw as fascist, or semi-fascist, elements in Yeats's thinking, aroused much lively critical discussion in the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. Kipling's centenary, which coincided with Yeats's, was comparatively neglected, although an edition of his correspondence with H. Rider Haggard and a book on his children's stories by Roger Lancelyn Green attracted some attention. Robert Graves's Collected Poems, 1965 was generally welcomed but reviewed in detail only in the Times Literary Supplement, which suggested that the last third of the book, comprising poems written in the last five years or so, was a little thin and mannered, that some good early poems had been sacrificed, and that Collected Poems, 1959 is better. Constantine FitzGibbon's The Life of Dylan Thomas gave a picture of a poet whose deep instincts were for domesticity and quietness and the protective surroundings of his happy 284

childhood, but who was dragged into a life of wildness and dissipation which ran counter to the real grain of his character—a new Keats who expected to die very young and uncomfortably went on living. Based, as it had to be, very largely on gossip and personal recollection, it has been attacked by Geoffrey Grigson in particular both for rashness in rejecting some stories about Thomas and carelessness in accepting others. It led to no new solid discussion of Thomas' reputation. Edith Sitwell's posthumous and scrappy memoirs, Taken Care Of, seemed to some critics a wonderfully gay and scatty deathbed gesture and to others distressing in the way it carried on old vendettas to the last. Kathleen Raine, another fine poet, was honored by the Poetry Book Society for The Hollow Hill. Since she has devoted most of her time to scholarly work on Blake, this was her first volume of poems in many years. Novels. It was very much a woman's year in the novel. Edna O'Brien has been winning a growing reputation over the past five years or so for her novels, obviously partly autobiographical, about young Irishwomen brought up with Roman Catholic puritan strictness but, especially after they come to neutral, permissive England, kicking over the traces in a wild way. August is a Wicked Month shocked even some of the neutral, permissive English critics; Paul Johnson, in the New Statesman, suggested that men reviewers are being taken aback by the growing evidence in women's novels that women can be as randy and rakish in their sexual appetites as men. Iris Murdoch's The Red and the Green was about the Easter Rebellion, 1916, and also about the sexual relations, some of them incestuous, that have recently seemed to obsess Miss Murdoch in an almost mathematical way. There was a magnificent review by Christopher Ricks, in the New Statesman, in which he suggested that Miss Murdoch's insistence in critical writings on the fundamental 'mysteriousness' of human character and her obsessive use of words like 'mystery' in her novels does not prevent her from moving her characters about like chessmen. There is a good (but, as Mr. Ricks suggests, too 'deferential') recent book about Miss Murdoch, Degrees of Freedom, by A. S. Byatt. Olivia Manning's Friends and Heroes (the last of a trilogy about British consular life in the Balkans before, during, and after World War II) and Muriel Spark's The Mandelbaum Gate were also highly praised. Drama. On Jan Kott's advice, David Warner (the perfect Henry VI of 1964's Henry VI and Edward IV) acted Hamlet at Stratford-on-Avon as a gangling, slow-witted, neurotic undergraduate. John Osborne's A Patriot for Me is concerned with the decline of a homosexual army officer in the Austro-Hungarian empire at the turn of the century. A long, episodic play, it features an onstage transvestite ballroom scene. In Pinter's Homecoming, a university wife decides it is easier to become a prostitute; and in Edward Bond's Saved, a baby is stoned to death on the stage. Even the toughest critics are getting a bit worried, and possibly 'sick,' or 'black,' theater is working itself to an unbearable end.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

285

1966: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1966: Literature, English The year was a fairly rich one in English literature, with good biographies, memoirs, and critical works, as well as novels. Most of the books that received notice were by writers of firmly established reputation. Two of these died during the year: Evelyn Waugh, perhaps the most professional novelist of his generation, and Arthur Waley, one of the greatest translators of his time, whose versions of Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji and of the Chinese collection of Buddhist folktales, Monkey, have become English classics in their own right. Waugh was only 60, but increasing deafness and a preference for the company of his old friends and his family made him appear a rather remote figure in his later years. The obituary notices paid proper tribute to his talent but dwelt rather too heavily on his testiness of manner and his irascible prejudices. The obituary in the Times of London, however, written by Waugh's friend Christopher Hollis, brought out the kind and sensitive spirit that was concealed from a younger generation by a crustiness assumed partly as a shy man's comic mask. Waley was one of the last survivors of the Bloomsbury group but was equally at home, in later years, in the Hampstead circle of William Empson. Both Waugh and Waley were perfectionists, of rich but not carelessly copious talent, and their passing reminds one that the craftsman's scrupulousness is a quality much less common in the work of the younger writers. Biography. Though this year was a good one for novels, it will perhaps be more vividly remembered for history, biography, memoirs, and letters. The first volume of Randolph Churchill's biography of his father, covering Winston Churchill's not too happy childhood and his early years as a soldier, writer, and journalist, was fully documented and solidly arranged, and the author's own personality, often combative and ebullient, was properly subdued to his great subject. A. J. P. Taylor's English History 1914-1945, in which Winston Churchill and Lloyd George are the two great heroes, aroused some controversy, as has every work by this brilliant and accurate, but never unprejudiced, historian. It was felt that Taylor was unfair to Asquith and almost too fair to the 'appeasers' of the late 1930's. Some critics held that he showed a rather meager grasp of the social and economic background but that nevertheless he had written a masterpiece of political history. Harold Nicolson's Diaries and Letters 1903-1939 threw a great deal of light on both the literary and the political scene of the years before World War II. The Letters of Dylan Thomas, edited by Constantine FitzGibbon, disappointed many of the poet's admirers. Too often they were begging letters or letters written to placate or cajole possible patrons, who would be referred to bitterly in letters to more intimate friends. Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid (pseudonym of Christopher Grieve), the two most distinguished Scottish poets of this century, were the subjects of new biographies. Peter Butter's Edwin Muir was a sensitive, well-documented biography of a fine poet and critic, who shrank 286

from the limelight as instinctively as Thomas sought it. MacDiarmid's scrappy and opinionated autobiography, The Company I've Kept, failed to reveal the poet's soul or to hold together as a work of art in the way Butter's biography of Muir does. Finally, one should mention a biography of a man who was both artist and politician and in both roles a mixture of the genius and the charlatan. Robert Blake's Disraeli was generally admitted to be the definitive book on its fascinating subject. Novels. A new novel by Graham Greene is always a literary event, but critics felt that The Comedians, Greene's first novel in several years, was, though thrilling to read, too much a redeployment of some of his old devices: tropical heat and violence, the juxtaposition of the comic and the macabre, uncomfortable lovemaking in a motorcar, the hero bitterly aware of his inability to commit himself to love or to political or religious belief. Despite this shortcoming, however, Greene remains a master of local color and of narrative suspense. Equally colorful was a novel by the young historian David Caute, Decline of the West, based partly on the recent history of the Congo and partly on that of Algeria. Though written by a Marxist, this novel gave, as its title suggests, a Spenglerian picture of our age as essentially one of callousness and violence. Critics felt that the excellently detailed documentation was spoiled by a doctrinaire attitude and a turgid style. Caute, it was thought, might have done better to write a straight history. Other novels which attracted attention were Kingsley Amis' The Anti-death League, a variation on the theme of Orwell's 1984, Olivia Manning's Friends and Heroes, the last novel in her Balkan trilogy, and Edna O'Brien's Casualties of Peace, another of her sprightly variations on the theme of sex and the single girl. Christine Brooke-Rose's Such, an experimental novel somewhat in the vein of the French nouveau roman, was generally judged an honorable failure. Muriel Spark's The Mandelbaum Gate, a novel set in Israel, was the recipient of the James Tait Memorial Prize. Poetry. Aside from the widely acclaimed Death of a Naturalist, by Sean Heaney, the year was rather thin in new volumes of poetry. It saw, however, the first complete publication of the poetical works of Keith Douglas, generally judged to be one of the best poets of World War II (the other is Alun Lewis). There has been a great revival of interest in that war, instanced by the publication of at least three anthologies of poetry and one of selected poetry and prose and by Ian Hamilton's edition of selected works of Alun Lewis. Criticism. For criticism this was a good year. Two of the best-reviewed critical works were John Bayley's Tolstoy and the Novel and N. P. Furbank's study of Italo Svevo. W. W. Robson's Critical Essays was a volume of thoughtful pieces, requiring slow and careful reading, in which severity was tempered with urbanity.

287

Plays. A chorus of nays greeted John Osborne's A Bond Honoured. The drama, very freely adapted from Lope de Vega, was almost universally damned. The Royal Shakespeare Company rescued from oblivion a genuine Renaissance tragedy of blood, Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy. It proved to be a gripping thriller in its first major airing in more than 300 years.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

288

1967: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1967: Literature, English The year might be described as a better than average one for English writing. A number of established novelists of both the older and younger generations — including Angus Wilson, Graham Greene, Olive Manning, and J. B. Priestley among the older writers and John Wain, William Golding, and Alan Sillitoe among the younger — produced new novels or short stories, all interesting and competent but none marking a real advance in the writers' developments. Two bits of news enlivened the literary scene. The first and more serious was the disclosure that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had subsidized the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which in turn had, for a time, supported the important magazine Encounter. Frank Kermode, a coeditor, and Stephen Spender, an assistant editor, resigned from the journal because they had not, until then, been informed of the link. They plan to start a rival publication. The second incident consisted of an attack on Malcolm Muggeridge by Professor Donald Davie and by an (unsigned) article in the Times Literary Supplement. Muggeridge, they said, was a totally unsuitable person to act as compère for an international poetry festival to be given at the Royal Festival Hall. Davie noted that Muggeridge had described the late T. S. Eliot as a 'phony' and as a 'deathrattle in the throat of a dying civilization.' Muggeridge had also displayed his ignorance of the history of English poetry when, in a broadcast interview, he spoke of his fondness for 'the metaphysical poets of the 18th century'; these poets flourished in the 17th century. Biographies, Diaries, Memoirs. This year, like the last, biographies and memoirs proved more interesting than fiction. The first volume of Michael Holroyd's projected two-volume biography of critic and essayist Lytton Strachey showed the young Strachey to be a perverse, querulous, and pitiable young man. Although it is common knowledge that Strachey and many other Cambridge intellectuals of his day had at some time indulged in homosexual practices, the extent of such activities was not known until the appearance of Holroyd's work. This and the fact that Strachey took his homosexual involvements with a seriousness verging on hysteria dismayed many critics. A study in contrasts was provided by the letters and diaries of Sir Harold Nicolson (second volume) and of Sir Henry ('Chips') Channon, the former an aristocratic and fastidious liberal and the latter a friend of Ribbentrop's, a snob, a glutton, and a lecher. Considered together, the volumes present an extraordinary diptych of Establishment English society as it was before and during World War II. Each diarist mentions the other; oddly, Channon likes and respects Nicolson, and Nicolson, though despising Channon's attitudes, does not wholly detest the man. Nicolson's refinement and responsibility aroused less interest than the vulgarity of Channon, whose frankness about his own vices and follies endeared him to some critics— notably Muggeridge. A biography of considerable psychological interest is that of T. H. White by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Although the two never met, they shared a genius for fantasy, and Miss Warner 289

depicts with great skill the loneliness and unhappiness that lay behind White's bluff comic facade. Fiction. Perhaps the most substantial of the year's novels by an established writer was Angus Wilson's No Laughing Matter, a family chronicle stretching from Edwardian days to the present. The book, set in London's world of publishing, journalism, and theater, explores the theme of the ties of love and hate remembered that bind the younger members of a family together. They mimic and parody their elders, particularly their father, a pretentious literary failure. His failure remains more real to them than their own partial successes. In a sense, Wilson is tracing the change in English life over the past 60 years, from a claustrophobic intimacy of family and social life to a fragmented individualism in which modern publicity, fashion, and permissiveness make the newly acquired freedom seem hollow and unreal. Critics admired the technical brilliance of the novel and its use of mimicry and parody but felt that the book reflected the difficulty that Wilson, a natural short-story writer, finds in giving unity to a larger form. Two sisters, A. S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble, consolidated their growing reputations with The Game and Jerusalem the Golden, respectively. Miss Byatt, also the author of a fine study of Iris Murdoch, is the drier, more analytical writer; Miss Drabble's style is fresh, graphic, and spontaneous. Reviewers have compared the sisters to the Brontës, but this is an exaggeration of their present achievement. Incidentally, there is a certain piquancy in the fact that Miss Byatt's novel is about a female don who is driven to suicide by a shallow and foolish sister who writes novels into which she puts all her friends, relations, and love affairs. Several other works deserve mention. Graham Greene's collection of stories May We Borrow Your Husband? is a set of exercises in that vein of dry sexual comedy in which he occasionally escapes from the high melodrama of religion, politics, and the hunted soul. John Wain's The Smaller Sky, about a scientist disillusioned with his work, friends, and family who decides to live a life of anonymity, struck critics as good in conception but not careful in execution. A rather uncertain reception greeted William Golding's The Pyramid, a study of social hierarchy in an English village. It is less of a myth or fable than his previous books and more of a true novel. Alan Sillitoe, like Wilson a master of the short story, failed to provide sufficient drive and form in A Tree on Fire; this portrait of postwar working-class life is, however, full of solid observation. A posthumous work that received universal praise is Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, a tragicomic fantasia on the themes of Irish guilt, loquacity, and evasion. Poetry. Vernon Watkins, a fine Welsh poet of religious vision in the tradition of Henry Vaughan, died of a heart attack in America. He was probably the closest and most understanding of Dylan Thomas' friends. Thomas' relations with his friends were clarified by a new edition of selected letters, by Constantine FitzGibbon. Thomas, it seems, would beg for money or help from one friend and then run that person down in letters to other friends. There was a sad shortage of new young poets, but an older poet, Basil Bunting, a friend of Yeats and Pound, achieved belated recognition with the publication of his collected poems, under the title Loquitur, and a recent long poem set in his native Northumbria, Briggflatts. Two other important volumes of collected poetry appeared, one by W. H. Auden and the other by the late Louis MacNeice. 290

Robert Graves, with the help of a Persian Sufi scholar, produced a new translation of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat. Although more accurate than the Victorian rendering by Edward Fitzgerald, it is marred by the flatness of excessive literalism and seems unlikely to replace its great predecessor. The Liverpool Scene, a paperback edited by Edward Lucie-Smith, put the British equivalent of the San Francisco poets on the literary map. Kathleen Raine's Defending Ancient Springs, the year's outstanding volume of criticism, was a fine plea for the Romantic and Neoplatonic traditions in European poetry. Plays. Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a great success at the Edinburgh Festival, was performed in a revised and expanded version at the National Theatre in London. It uses part of the text of Hamlet but is mainly concerned with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, halfexisting characters in the wings, uncertain of their pasts or their identities, troubled by a vague premonition of death, waiting anxiously for their cues but in the dark about the meaning of the play in which they find themselves caught up. It might be called a dark existential comedy. It is remarkable for the richness of its language, which is juxtaposed with the fragments of Shakespeare's actual text without incongruity. The only other play of note was A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, by Peter Nichols, who tackled without sentimentality and with a kind of grim, though not brutal, humor the problems of the young parents of a Mongoloid child.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

291

1968: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1968: Literature, English This has been on the whole a quiet and unexciting year in English literature, though a quite respectable one. The angry young men of the 1950's — Kingsley Amis, John Braine, and John Osborne—remain productive but in a vein which, in their middle age, becomes less a radical rebellion and more a reluctantly nostalgic Toryism. Fiction. In their new novels Amis and Braine are fascinated by the worlds of instant, glossy, and perishable mass communication, advertising copywriting, and the television interview. Amis' I Want It Now and Braine's The Crying Game are both about the London publicity game and communications racket; both explore a post-Scott Fitzgerald, nonromantic obsession with the rich; and in both, the heroes, little greedy, climbing cads, suddenly rediscover love and morality toward the end of the story. Both novels are skillful but rather thin, as are Stanley Barstow's A Raging Calm and Allan Sillitoe's Guzman Go Home. Iris Murdoch's The Nice and the Good, with its Jane Austen-like title—sexually attractive people are nice, socially responsible people are good—has her usual combination of neatness of arrangement and ability to surprise but also the suggestion, which is in many other of her recent novels, of a tendency toward contrivance. C. P. Snow's The Sleep of Reason deals in his usual slightly flat, heavy, unresonant, but also honest way with the clash in contemporary English society between a rational and humane authoritarianism and what Snow seems to feel is an increasingly dangerous cult of emotional freedom. Muriel Spark's The Public Image is, at a different level, about the strain between having a public role to perform and needing a private life. Lawrence Durrell's new novel, Tunc, a kind of allegorical fantasy in which characters rather similar to those in The Alexandria Quartet reappear flattened out and simplified to masks in a morality play, was greeted on the whole with howls of execration. The novels of two other writers more or less of Durrell's generation, Anthony Powell and L. P. Hartley, were more civilly received. However, Hartley's very skillful and subtle short novel Poor Clare, about a man who tries to break apart from friends who have begun to bore him by giving them expensive and carefully chosen gifts, was felt by many reviewers to be an overworking of a donnée that would suit a long short story. Powell's The Military Philosophers, the latest installment in his long serial novel The Music of Time, brings his chronicle up to the end of World War II. Though Powell may have written an installment of a great novel, nothing that could properly be called a great novel has been published this year. And the tone and manner of the old hands become increasingly predictable.

292

Drama. John Osborne had two new plays on in the London West End. One of them, Time Present, was a vehicle for his new wife, the actress Jill Bennett. Like so many of his most successful plays, from Look Back in Anger to Inadmissible Evidence, it was essentially a magnificent aggressive monologue, and for the first time, he allowed a woman, instead of a man, to be aggressive. In his other play, The Hotel in Amsterdam, he managed, for the first time, to deploy several pairs of characters of more or less equal weight. Poetry. Reviewers and publishers have been showing less and less interest in new poetry, but the canvassing at Oxford for a new professor of poetry, after the premature resignation of Edmund Blunden because of ill health, aroused a great deal of attention. A surprise candidate was the fine Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who was denounced as a 'hack propagandist' by some segments of the press. The chair went to lawyer-poet Roy Fuller. Another striking literary event was the scoop of the Times Literary Supplement in publishing, in facsimile, portions of The Waste Land that T. S. Eliot had junked on the advice of Ezra Pound. From the dreary account of a round of pubs and brothels that was published on the front page, it would seem that Pound's advice was not all bad, though critical questions might be asked about Pound's decision to cut down the introductory passage, with its very vivid cold sea imagery, of the section of The Waste Land called 'Death by Water.' The death of Herbert Read, a poet and critic of very great integrity, though of copious and uneven achievement, broke one of the last links with the great modernist movement of the 1910's and 1920's, the age of the young Pound and Eliot. Three new volumes of poetry deserve some mention: Edward Lucie Smith's Towards Silence, Elizabeth Jennings' Collected Poems, and Geoffrey Hill's King Log. Lucie Smith is an art critic, interested in writing poems that are pictorial and about painting, neat and decorous in his handling of verse, at once humane and sad. His poems are never violently exciting, but they always demand respect for their skill and honesty. Miss Jennings was one of the original members of the 'movement' poets, first brought to general attention by Robert Conquest in his mid-1950's anthology New Lines. She shares with the other members of the 'movement' a taste for clarity and simplicity and a hatred of splashiness and messiness, but she has a religious feeling—an intense and controlled awareness of the sadness and limitation of life, of the beauty of our glimpses of that which transcends life—that makes her individual. Geoffrey Hill, a lecturer in English at the University of Leeds, is a very difficult, muscular, contorted, selftormenting poet, whose work recalls the metaphysical poets. All three are perhaps handicapped in that they lack the sense of an assured audience and therefore either do not try for resonance or strain too hard after it. Criticism. There were no major new works of criticism, but James Kinsley's Oxford edition of the poems of Robert Burns, the third volume devoted to a magisterially detailed commentary, was a major work of scholarship. So, too, though more vulnerable at some points, was A. Norman Jeffares' A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending, a book about the connection between the religious sense of apocalypse and the literary sense of climax, and Continuities, a collection of his essays, 293

display his great scholarship and mental agility, their effect hampered a little by his reluctance to reduce the speculative to the practical, to write in plain man's prose. A collection of essays and reviews by A. Alvarez, Beyond All This Fiddle, was fairly well received; Alvarez, however, who started off as a very good technical and scholarly critic of poetry, has now become mainly a passionate and committed ideologist. Bernard Bergonzi, another good critic of the same generation, has edited an anthology called Innovations—McLuhan and so on—which reflects the need of a basically conservative critic to keep up with the times. Innovations is, however, a scholarly compilation. Nonfiction. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, including diary entries and transcripts of broadcasts, was evocative of the extraordinary rough vigor of the best literarypolitical journalism of the 1930's and 1940's. This rasping, vital quality seems now, in England, to be quite lost. Of biographies and autobiographies, the most notable this year were Michael Meyer's masterly Ibsen: The Making of a Dramatist, the condensed fruit of years of research; Lady Cynthia Asquith's Diaries 1915-1918, wonderful in its glimpses of D. H. Lawrence; and J. R. Ackerley's My Father and Myself, an exact, painful, and comic account of the making of a homosexual. Sir Oswald Mosley's autobiography was serialized in the London Times before publication and got a surprisingly respectful critical reception. Here was a man who could have been a Labour or Tory prime minister but madly squandered his energies by starting a Fascist movement in the 1930's.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

294

1969: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1969: Literature, English This has been a full rather than an exciting year in English literature, in keeping with the tempo of life in Britain generally. There has been much good work, but there have been no great discoveries in poetry or in fiction and only one major breakthrough in literary criticism. The year has been richest in the fields of history and biography. Biographical debunking is very much a pursuit of the past. Today an erudite, ironic scholarship that conceals a prevailing nostalgia is much the mode and continues to pay high dividends. Fiction. Some of our best-known imaginations have continued to consolidate their achievements; others have assumed new masks of disconcerting entertainment; and still others have reverted to their comic selves. The most distinguished of this third group, Graham Greene, delighted his readers toward the end of the year with his Travels With My Aunt, in which an unimaginative bachelor, a retired banker, takes to globe-trotting with a newly found and astonishing relative. Greeneland, as his readers know, is not altogether a bleak and Jansenist terrain; his genius has its comic plateaus, and this extravaganza was among the best of them. By contrast, The Green Man, outwardly an earthy and entertaining ghost story with a difference, revealed Kingsley Amis, beneath his accustomed gifts and mannerisms (no one describes the comedy of sex or flattens the pomposities of current pseudoculture as brilliantly as he does), to be preoccupied with a genuine theological issue of his own contriving. His view of death and the end of human appetite recalled the Aldous Huxley of Time Must Have a Stop in a genial, more human mood. In The Four-gated City, the final novel in Doris Lessing's Children of Violence sequence, the writer succeeded in taking the life of her heroine, Martha Quest, out of her detailed, ironically described framework and extending the frontiers of her experience as far as extrasensory perception. This concluding volume was acclaimed for its ambitious strength and design, though with some respectful dissent. Margaret Drabble's The Waterfall, a miniature of human relationships by comparison, was acclaimed by almost all the critics as yet another triumph of sensitive awareness. Olivia Manning's The Play Room, a study in adolescent tragedy, disappointed many of her admirers who thought it better suited to a long short story. This was also true of L. P. Hartley's The Love-adept and Robert Liddell's The Stepsons—both genre exercises of skill and virtuosity in excess of substance—too much manner for too little matter. The solider virtues were better represented by Janice Elliott's Angels Falling, a vivid and almost documentary study of three generations of a Bloomsbury family from the death of Queen Victoria to the world of pop and pot. In the absence of a new novel by Angus Wilson, this seemed an effective stand-in. John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman was both solid and stylish, a Victorian highbrow romance remarkable for its blending of nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychology and values. 295

The fictional surprise of the year was Colin MacInnes' Westward to Laughter (reminiscent of R. L. Stevenson), an account of a young Highlander hauled off to the West Indies aboard a slave ship. This riotous, grisly study in period sadism left its readers baffled about whether they were enjoying a grim 'rattling good yarn' or being subjected to an atavistic but contemporary allegory. Rayner Heppenstall's The Shearers, a telling enactment of a nineteenth-century murder trial, raised equal difficulties—in this case over the narrative rather than the moral. The strangest novel of 1969, Frank Sargeson's Joy of the Worm, set in the New Zealand backblocks, was a father-and-son enigma told in the original form of a family correspondence. Drama. The great success of Forty Years On, Alan Bennett's Aristophanic cavalcade of England rendered in a public school microcosm, continued, with Emlyn Williams replacing Sir John Gielgud as the hypernostalgic headmaster. Murderous Angels, Conor Cruise O'Brien's excitingly dramatized version of recent Congolese events, seemed to many of its readers to achieve a successful portrayal of contemporary history in a way that Rolf Hochhuth's Soldiers and The Representative had failed to do. John Arden's play about Admiral Horatio Nelson and Lady Hamilton, The Hero Rises Up, though apparently a lampoon of the official cult, was in fact a brave attempt to substitute one Nelson legend for another. Poetry. In a thin year the appearance of City Without Walls, a new volume of W. H. Auden's poems, seemed to dwarf almost everything in sight, although Elizabeth Jennings' The Animals' Arrival displayed all this fine poet's unusual qualities—personal relationships subtly allegorized and plain statements of feeling so surprisingly turned. Douglas Dunn's Terry Street, a first book of poems by a young man of 27, showed a circumstantial, deceptively simple ability to render and at the same time transcend the urban humdrum. In a different fashion, Seamus Heaney's Door into the Dark evoked rural Ireland beautifully and did so with original intimations. James Michie's translation of Catullus, a miracle of lucidity and cunning, was a genuine poetic feat. The poetic publishing event of the year was undoubtedly Christopher Ricks' monumentally annotated edition of Tennyson. Criticism. Among few works of importance Kathleen Raine's Blake and Tradition stood out as a major study, the product of years of scholarship and meditation, triumphantly resolved. By concentrating on William Blake the mystic, by tracing his debt to occult and remote influences and systems, she left the old-fashioned view of the poet's humanely energetic and sexual cosmos in a state of fine upheaval. Among many other things, her book appeared a warm indictment of latter-day materialism and of the 1930's Socialists who found an ally in Blake. Her contention that sexual love held only 'a modest place' in the poet's order of things demands, and will certainly receive, an answer. In The Decline and Fall of the Man of Letters, John Gross presented a lively panoramic history of the type from Thomas Carlyle to Dr. F. R. Leavis and his disciples. Geoffrey Grigson's Poets and Poems, a collection of essays on Wordsworth, Herrick, Hopkins, Landor, Crabbe, Dylan Thomas, and many others fizzed with critical insights and acerbities. The death of Ivy

296

Compton-Burnett occasioned an extraordinary volume of tribute to her work and personality. It was left to Anthony Powell, in a striking article in the Spectator, to correct the false idea that Miss Compton-Burnett's fiction was primarily—or, indeed, at all—concerned with class, that bane of English sensibilities. Nonfiction. The year saw two fine and full-length types of 'heroic' biography: In the first volume of Pitt the Younger, John Ehrman, a Cambridge historian, carried the story of Britain's youngest prime minister (he took office at 24) to within a few months of the outbreak of the French Revolution; in less academic fashion but buttressed by wide and scholarly reading, Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser made a new and striking case for the ruler herself. John Marlowe retold the story of General Charles George 'Chinese' Gordon in a masterly and most unStracheyan fashion in Mission to Khartum and Brian Roberts threw unexpected light on a champion of empire in his Cecil Rhodes and the Princess. Kenneth Rose's excellent Superior Person, for all its wit and knowledge of the period, did little to make Lord Curzon a likable human being, and the exhaustive study Baldwin, a biography of Stanley Baldwin, the British prime minister, by Keith Middlemas and John Barnes did not go far to rehabilitate its hero. Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, an account of his arrival in London and adventures in Spain as a youth in the 1930's, won the palm for autobiography—even though at least one reader, like one of Lee's reviewers, was left asking himself whether Lee was really the innocent he appears.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

297

1970: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1970: Literature, English This was a lively and interesting but an ill-proportioned year in English letters, strong in fiction and general literature, especially history, and almost negative in poetry and drama. The death of E. M. Forster in June at the age of 91 occasioned a volley of salutation to his genius and the special qualities of his humanism — his positive belief in 'an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky,' and the knowledge that 'the heart signs no documents.' V. S. Pritchett's tribute was perhaps the most acute of all. While declaring that 'the strength of Forster lay in this startling power of speaking in a natural private voice in public places,' he remarked that 'the modern reader should make the experiment of seeing some Shaw first or reading some Kipling, to see what Forster was reacting against.' Fiction. The most important event of the year in fiction was undoubtedly C. P. Snow's Last Things, the 11th and final novel in his Strangers and Brothers sequence. Countless readers who had followed the life and fortunes of Lewis Eliot—barrister, don, novelist, and scientific civil servant—from the age of nine in 1914 onward, now had the chance to view the whole cycle anew and in depth. Many critics previously allergic to Snow's work confessed to finding the end result an impressive and remarkable achievement. In particular, his interest in and attitude toward the 'corridors of power' were discovered in this last analysis to be far more ambiguous and disillusioned than had previously been realized. Other highlights this year included a fine seriocomic extravaganza by John Wain, A Winter in the Hills, by far the most ambitious work of fiction this writer has yet attempted. Based on the highly original theme of Welsh nationalism and Cymric cultural aspirations, its abundance of subplot, varied humors, and shrewd characterization suggested the influence (perhaps unconscious) of J. B. Priestley. As the most stylish novel of the year in terms of sheer craftsmanship and an uncommon theme perfectly handled, Pamela Hansford Johnson's The Honours Board, set in an English preparatory school, won hands down. In Three Years to Play, Colin MacInnes continued his line in historical entertainments. This time the Elizabethan theater and underworld formed the background to a brilliant and ingenious diversion. Robin Cook's hair-raising and all too credible picture of a totalitarian Britain made A State of Denmark chillingly effective. By general consensus the best first novel of the year was Shiva Naipaul's Trinidadian family chronicle, Fireflies. Distinguished disappointments included John Braine's Stay With Me Till Morning, a blunt, insensitive, although occasionally powerful regression into the materialistic and adulterous world of Yorkshire commuters, and Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat, in which all the writer's glittering and terrifying qualities seemed to be expended on a highly expendable heroine. By contrast, Melvyn Bragg's Cumberland saga of the Tallentire family broke new ground in A Place

298

in England, and Christine Brooke-Rose advanced her curious technique of verbal fantasy in a notable collection of short stories, Go When You See the Green Man Walking. Where the author of The Last of the Wine is concerned, the reader has come to expect near perfection; hence, Mary Renault's reconstruction of Alexander the Great's childhood and youth in Fire from Heaven received less recognition than it deserved. For the historical novel, Jeremy Potter's study in Tudor detection, A Trail of Blood, was an admirable runner-up. Poetry. Introducing his Poems, 1968-1970, Robert Graves declared that 'having more to say, no continued need to earn my living by writing historical novels ... has for some years swelled the yearly number of poems I write.' He added that 'in one's seventy-fifth year it is easy to plagiarize oneself, but I have done my best to weed such plagiarisms out.' This splendid volume of vintage Graves — it includes some dozen songs and several variations on his metaphysic of love— certainly contains no self-plagiarisms. Instead, it had to do duty for English poetry in an outstandingly bleak year in which even Elizabeth Jennings (Lucidities) disappointed. The trouble with English poetry at present is that it tends to vary between the minutely but ineffectively observant (Glyn Hughes' Neighbours: Poems, 1965-1969) and the nakedly confessional. As Yeats puts it in 'The Second Coming,' 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.' Drama. In the year of Oh! Calcutta!, the continued success of Hair, and a good deal of shoddy and pretentious experimentalism, last season's prize well-made play, Conduct Unbecoming, a clever melodrama set in late Victorian military India, still rejoices the heart of the untrendy playgoer in search of intelligent entertainment. To this play may be added Terence Rattigan's A Bequest to the Nation, a brilliant evocation of Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton (and of that neglected figure, Lady Nelson) on the eve of Trafalgar. This superb achievement not only proves Rattigan once again to be the best practicing playwright in England but also testifies—and again, not for the first time — to his gift of historical imagination. For the nostalgic armchair playgoer, Last Theatres: 1904-1910, the final volume of Sir Max Beerbohm's collected dramatic criticism, recreated the drama of Count Maurice Maeterlinck and Sir Arthur Wing Pinero. Criticism. The Dickens centenary brought a spate of volumes, excellent to middling, of which G. L. Brook's The Language of Dickens was the most erudite and Kellow Chesney's The Victorian Underworld the most absorbing. Angus Wilson's critical biography, The World of Charles Dickens, was the most admirable study of them all, a work of genuine creative scholarship and imagination. Dickens: The Novelist, by F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis, in spite of its many genuine insights (most of them from Q. D. rather than F. R.), seemed a bizarre and uneven volume in view of what F. R. Leavis had previously written about the master. In what appeared to the plain reader an uncommon about-face, he went so far as to discuss the 'inexhaustibly subtle relatedness' of Dickens to William Blake.

299

For the rest, V. S. Pritchett's scintillating Clark lectures, George Meredith and English Comedy, J. B. Priestley's brief but brilliant profile, Anton Chekhov, and A. W. Raitt's scholarly full-length study, Prosper Mérimée, represented a year rich in literary criticism of a high order. History. In the area of history books, quantity and quality were of such richness as to allow the surveyor little scope beyond the bare mention of author and title. At the strictly academic level, Charles Wilson's Ford lectures, Queen Elizabeth and the Revolt of the Netherlands, offered the reader a new view of the queen herself, of Baron Burghley, her chief adviser, and of many Tudor matters. Christopher Hill's excellent God's Englishman was less a biography of Oliver Cromwell than a study of the English Civil War as expressed through the personality of the lord protector. Robert Blake took off, as it were, from his enthralling life of Disraeli to trace the history of his party in The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill, and H. T. Dickinson, while taking much of the shine off Disraeli's hero Bolingbroke, made Queen Anne's statesman a far more credible if less satisfactory human being. In a more popular key, Nancy Mitford's Frederick the Great proved well up to her The Sun King, and John Julius Cooper Norwich's The Kingdom in the Sun made an admirable end to his history of the Normans in Sicily. The ancient world was finely represented by Peter Green's The Year of Salamis 480-479 BC. General. The year produced a fine crop of autobiographies, memoirs, and letters of every kind. Harold Acton's More Memoirs of an Aesthete, although it chronicled the writer's wartime and postwar years, was like a voice from another world, Firbankian in its wit and originality and Sitwellian in the way it conjured up great hostesses and exotic eccentrics of long ago. By contrast, Laurens van der Post's memoirs of his experiences in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Java, The Night of the New Moon, was an agonizing and moving human document, nobly, even generously told. Its contention that only the horror of the atomic bomb could have saved Japanese face and hence the nation's soul has been much argued for and against by the book's admirers. A novel by E. M. Forster, Maurice, written around 1914 and withheld at his request until after his death because of its homosexual theme, is scheduled to be published in the fall of 1971. It is expected that the novel will shed light on Forster's own homosexuality. In Full Score, Sir Neville Cardus, at 81 the doyen of British music critics and the prince of cricket writers, indulged both his enthusiasms, remembering great concert and opera performers and notable cricket matches and personalities. The prose was as vivid and descriptive as any he has written in the last half century. R. Angus Downie's excellent memoirappraisal of Sir James George Frazer, Frazer and the 'Golden Bough,' gave a striking portrait of the absentminded, henpecked scholar ('Sir James is not henpecked,' the redoubtable Lady Frazer asserted, 'he is hen-protected'). In the realm of pure scholarship, the great literary event of the year was the publication of the first three volumes of a new and complete transcription of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

300

1971: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1971: Literature, English This has been a strangely interim and introspective year in English letters, certainly not a year for the muses. The large volume of published poetry failed to yield much of permanent value, and the drama, though the experimental impetus continues in full spate, hardly achieved anything of merit. (John Osborne's long-awaited West of Suez, an elaborate conversation piece about a grand old man of English literature verbosely shored up on the strand of an ex-British colony, was 1971's gravest theatrical disappointment.) Generally, it was a year of marking time, of reassessments and postmortems, historical, cultural, and political with the last (in terms of political autobiography and apologia) especially and embarrassingly conspicuous. Paradoxically, the task of getting Britain into Europe—an effort increasingly seen as being made against the wishes of the majority of the population—had the effect of unleashing a spate of high-grade antiEuropean literary journalism of exceptional venom and liveliness, allied to a general questioning of Britain's own values and establishments. If Paul Johnson's brilliant collection of essays, Statesmen and Nations, was the most symptomatic and representative volume of the latter trend in book form and between hard covers, Peregrine Worsthorne's The Socialist Myth provided an eloquent, forthright, and provocative exposé of the deficiencies endemic in all Socialist leadership, written from the high Tory right-of-center standpoint. It was in this kind of polemicist and controversial literature, rather than in the fields of creative letters, that literary energy, in this year of grace, seemed mainly to reside and be concentrated. Fiction. Books Do Furnish a Room, the tenth volume of Anthony Powell's 'The Music of Time' sequence and the first section of the concluding trilogy, was the earliest literary event of the season. After the almost unanimous chorus of praise that has accompanied this series from the beginning (A Question of Upbringing, 1952), for the first time, there were critical murmurs. Auberon Waugh, the sharpest, most spirited, and quite the most destructive reviewer of current fiction and no respecter of persons, asked in the Spectator whether in fact this interminable chronicle had not long overspent its original impetus. Only time will show whether the eminent novelist will manage to retrieve his ironic magic in the two volumes that remain. The real fictional event of the year was the posthumous publication of E. M. Forster's Maurice, the novel about homosexuality originally written before 1914 but tinkered with and touched up from time to time until as late as 1960. Much to everyone's relief, the book turned out to be a triumph in more ways than one. Forster's delineation of class, especially the 'middle middle classes' that he knew so well and to which his originally suburban hyperconformist Maurice belongs, was as vibrant as ever. The whole style of the writing was 'sharper, bolder, more belligerent, more indignant,' as Nigel Dennis pointed out, than in Forster's other fiction. Kingsley Amis' Girl, 20, the tale of a distinguished conductor and musical progressive with a passion for bedding young girls—as his wife puts it, 'they're getting younger at something like 301

half the rate he gets older'—is an inspired squib, pungent, witty, full of gay prejudice, crammed with the writer's acidulous guying of current poses and attitudes. As grim fun, it succeeds magnificently; it also succeeds in making a point about the practice of fiction—namely, that a novelist of great fertility and imagination, such as Amis, must be allowed his occasional fling. For the rest, this year's fiction included John Le Carré's The Naive and Sentimental Lover, a selfindulgent fantasy of great readability and expertise, V. S. Naipaul's excellent tale of adventure in ex-colonial Central Africa (In a Free State), and Peter Forster's poignant and highly professional The Disinherited, the final volume of the trilogy begun in Play the Ball. Also there were Paul Scott's continuation of his chronicle of the British raj, this time on the eve of World War I (The Towers of Silence), and Mervyn Bragg's The Nerve, the study of an insecure provincial semi-intellectual, for once sympathetically envisaged, a fine novel in the line of Gissing in its truth-telling and deceptively simple integrity. Literary criticism. A revived interest in Hardy, both as poet and novelist, was a marked feature of this year's criticism. The best of several studies was undoubtedly J. I. M. Stewart's Thomas Hardy, a brilliant 'attempted rescue operation' in the face of T. S. Eliot's still standing indictment and a general refutation of Hardy's supposed morbidity. Helen Gardner's Religion and Literature brought a hard intelligence to bear on 'changes in literary and religious sensibility and their interaction.' Admirers of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison found their favorite superbly documented and discussed in a vast study, Samuel Richardson, by T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel. The excellent 'Critical Heritage' series, which devotes one volume to a major writer and explores his critical reputation during his lifetime, added Swinburne, Meredith, Dryden, Johnson, and Carlyle to its repertoire during 1971, though the outstanding newcomer was Kipling, brilliantly edited by Roger Lancelyn Green. In Henrik Ibsen, Volume III, subtitled The Top of a Cold Mountain, Michael Meyer rounded off his definitive and absorbing study of the dramatist. With Flaubert: The Master, the late Enid Starkie's critical and biographical study, the first volume of which appeared four years ago, was likewise concluded. Toward the end of the year came The World of George Orwell, edited by Miriam Gross and consisting partly of reminiscences by old friends (William Empson, Malcolm Muggeridge, T. R. Fyvel, etc.), partly of criticism by younger writers. The total effect was wry but fascinating. Biography and autobiography. Autobiographies have been almost as important as biographies this year—quite apart, that is, from Graham Greene's wonderfully haunting account of his childhood, youth, and early years as a novelist in A Sort of Life. One reason is that with the change of government in 1970 a number of prominent politicians fell prey to scribblomania. First to appear was George Brown's In My Way, a hectoring, blustering apologia, admired by few except the ex-foreign secretary's friends and supporters. Harold Wilson's personal record, The Labour Government 1964-1970, was far more readable, a racy odyssey of crisis and resource, shot through with phrases like 'we had to live dangerously and that meant we had to act responsibly.' Many disagreed with the author's hindsights, but almost all the book's readers agreed that it was most lively and readable. Meanwhile Harold Macmillan had published the fourth volume of his memoirs, and although he told us no more about Suez than we knew already, the attractive personality, that

302

of the deceptively Edwardian 'gownsman,' persisted. Finally, there was R. A. Butler's The Art of the Possible, with its wonderful stories of Churchill and its evocative picture of the author's childhood in India, a wise, blandly subtle account and a genuine work of art in its own right. After Greene's book, it vied with the poet Vernon Scannell's annals of private life (The Tiger and the Rose) as the best exercise in this genre in 1971. In the field of biography proper, Christopher Hibbert's The Personal History of Samuel Johnson was outstanding, with some gratifyingly novel perceptions. Maurice Ashley, now the doyen of seventeenth-century historical studies, likewise found new facets to the life of Charles II, in a historical biography of considerable originality and charm, and Allen Andrews' study of Charles' mistress, Barbara Villiers, countess of Castlemaine (The Royal Whore), won acclaim as one of the best accounts of an English royal favorite that has yet been written. A notable and personal record was Julia Namier's fine biography of her husband, Lewis Namier, the great historian whose death in 1960 caused him to figure in The Dictionary of National Biography 19511960, edited by E. T. Williams and Helen M. Palmer. As absorbing a volume as any of its predecessors, its contents ranged from Brendan Bracken, whose hitherto hidden early life was brilliantly uncovered by Douglas Woodruff, to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Queen Mary, Max Beerbohm, and Rosa Lewis, the legendary hostess of the Cavendish Hotel. Finally, one must salute Henry Maas' superb editing of The Letters of A. E. Housman, a literary occasion that produced a set of extraordinarily different opinions about the poet's personality. History. The death of Sir Maurice Bowra, Britain's most effectual don for three generations, was posthumously commemorated by Periclean Athens, a short and pithy study of his best-loved period, brimful of deep and concealed scholarship, that appeared a few weeks after his death. Harold Hutchison's Edward II made a persuasive and judicious plea for our partly revising history's general verdict on that unhappy monarch, and David Underdown's Pride's Purge proved that an admirable study of 'politics in the Puritan revolution' could be conducted on the same principles as Namier applied to the eighteenth-century political scene. P. D. G. Thomas' The House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century was an excellent contribution to that scenic survey. It swept away many misconceptions about the century's legislators, as did Sir Herbert Butterfield about one of the most famous of them in his 1971 British Academy Lecture on Charles James Fox. As for popular history at a high level, the tradition was well continued in such books as Michael Grant's Herod the Great, Edward Crankshaw's The Habsburgs, and Harold Kurtz' brief but penetrating study Wilhelmian Germany, The Second Reich. For the student of near-contemporary politics, Maurice Cowling's The Impact of Labour 19201924 proved as invaluable as it was caustically amusing. For the Londoner, resident or visitor, George Rudé's Hanoverian London 1714-1808 was a treasure house of period information. General. The vast range of topics covered in Anthony Sampson's The New Anatomy of Britain, five-sixths of it rewritten since the first edition of 1962 and the revised version of 1965, makes it essential reading for journalists, businessmen, politicians, and anyone else anxious to understand the British scene. There is hardly an aspect of Britain today that is not covered in this volume, and the chapter on Edward Heath is a masterly piece of political character analysis. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

303

1972: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1972: Literature, English This was a more positive year than last, and one in which almost all branches of literature reflected the country's major preoccupations—Britain's entry into Europe, events in Northern Ireland, and the assorted tensions of society: racialism, overcrowding, pollution, unemployment, the women's liberation movement, and a maximum surrender to the gadarene onrush of materialistic values in this tight island of 55 million people. Some of this (among the popular historians especially) was oddly reflected in the continuing fascination with Britain's vanished empire and its ideals and failures, reassessed in terms of bittersweet nostalgia or acute analysis. (Edward Grierson's The Imperial Dream was an excellent example of the latter.) The anguish of public and private conscience was not far to seek; a mood of sharp, bleak irony prevailed, taking many forms, including poetry. In Derek Mahon's Lives, for example, the poetic image was rusty iron among the hollyhocks — the defunct machinery of a society at odds with itself in terms of aims, values, class, and generation. Fiction. The clash of values and generations was the theme of C. P. Snow's The Malcontents—a novel remarkable in its own right and in the moral problems it raised, faced, and partially answered. The malcontents (they call themselves 'the Core') are a group of seven clever, idealistic young people who have discovered something very nasty in the cathedral town they live in. If this wrong is righted, the balloon goes up and a well-deserved national scandal follows. Their motives are impeccable, their means debatable — in fact, illegal. What happens is the exciting narrative peg on which Snow hangs the deeper purposes of his haunting and disturbing novel. Margaret Drabble's The Needle's Eye pleased not just her band of committed admirers but also many of those who have hitherto found themselves allergic to her fiction. This study of a oncerich woman's private conscience explores a heap of issues—exploitation, acquisition, parentage, the social falsities to which we all subscribe—with an unusual depth of mind and feeling. True, the rough, uncertain, would-be sophisticated edges are still there—the lobster thermidor, the Hampstead parties, the theatrical small talk; true, the critic who compared her to George Eliot was well off his compass bearings; but it remained a remarkable book. For the light fantastic, there was Auberon Waugh's A Bed of Flowers, or As You Like It, a blend of fantasy and goodish social satire: only 'goodish' because too many targets were the writer's particular and specialized prejudices. A tonic, high-spirited affair, nevertheless—which, considering that Waugh is now the most readable and ferocious reviewer of current fiction, was, for him, just as well. In Murgatreud's Empire, Bamber Gascoigne achieved a similar blending of farce and morality, though here the scene was set among the pygmies of New Guinea and the morality centered around the West's lust for gold. Necessarily, it was a blacker affair altogether. On the Icarus front — the year's consolation prize for aiming higher than most— John Berger's G won wide 304

acclaim for its daring attempt to reenact the pre-1914 romantic world of D'Annunzio and the early aviators. G, an Edwardian Casanova turned Don Juan, left the critics agog with the weight of his (and his author's) historical, sexual, artistic, and dialectical assertions. James Hanley, veteran of technique, reastonished his admirers with Another World, the haunting study of a group of human beings precariously held together in a set of relationships that collapses into general insanity. Here again near-farce—or black comedy—was a motif throughout. Partisans of Nicholas Freeling's Maigret-type detective, Van der Valk, cursed his creator for killing off their hero at the climax of A Long Silence. Others who have enjoyed the Van der Valk saga but believe Freeling to be one of the most important novelists that the thriller market has produced in the past ten years were left to speculate on his development. Meanwhile, the historical novel produced its usual quota of tushery but little distinction, with the exception of Jill Paton Walsh's Farewell, Great King and George Garrett's Death of the Fox. The first is a finely sustained self-portrait of the Athenian leader Themistocles. (As the title suggests, the book takes the form of a letter addressed to the king of Persia by the statesman about to die.) The second is an imaginative evocation of the life of Sir Walter Raleigh. The short story, for so long a relatively underrated form of fiction, took a splendid upward turn in 1972. This may be partly due to the expertise of William Trever's The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories and partly to William Sanson's brilliantly self-investigatory The Birth of a Story, in which he discussed the germ, development, and final manuscript of his famous 'No Smoking on the Apron.' Elizabeth Taylor's The Devastating Boys and Other Stories was the real triumph of this revival, splendiferous in its wit, range of character, and deployment of situation. Poetry. The appearance of Scorpion made a fitting and unforgettable epitaph to the memory of Stevie Smith, who died in 1971. Death confronts the reader in almost all these posthumously published poems—an antithesis to the gay loquacity of the writer's fiction. William Plomer's personal, clubbable Celebrations kept the mandarin flag flying; Molly Holden, a permanent invalid whose poems have been described as 'tall drinks for grown-ups,' revealed her fine sense of nature in Air and Chill Earth; Mervyn Peake's Selected Poems afforded a powerful sidelight on the world of Gormenghast. Influences abounded: Harold Massingham submerged his originality in the ethos—and prosody—of Anglo-Saxondom (Frost-Gods); D. J. Hall (Journey Into Morning) was inspired by the wine-dark seas of Homer. Letters and criticism. Women on women has been a remarkable feature of the year's successes in letters. Most notably, Jane Aiken Hodge's The Double Life of Jane Austen broke new ground in what had seemed to be completely developed territory. Marilyn Butler's fine study of Maria Edgeworth did break quite new ground—especially in her acute analysis of the Irish novels and of the lessons that Jane Austen and Scott learned from them. (Sir Walter himself towered majestically in W. E. K. Anderson's The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, the most distinguished job of editing to be performed in 1972.) The first two volumes of the Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, edited by Joyce Hemlow and Althea Douglas, brought that lively gusher into fresh repute as a social chronicler of her age. The first volume of Quentin Bell's beautifully skillful and candid biography, Virginia Woolf, accompanies Virginia Stephen down to her marriage in 1912-'the wisest decision of her life,' as

305

he describes it. Meanwhile, in his study of Aldous Huxley (Dawn and the Darkest Hour), George Woodcock contrasted the 'intellectual clarity' of Huxley's early novels with Mrs. Woolf's 'manifold obscurities.' In A Peep Into the Past, Rupert Hart-Davis resurrected a sheaf of forgotten sketches and essays to grace Max Beerbohm's hundredth birthday. In Jean Racine: Dramatist, Martin Turnell achieved a feat of literary analysis. History and biography. To take popular history first, the success of the year was undoubtedly Paul Johnson's The Offshore Islanders, a brilliant and racy survey of the island story from the Roman occupation to Britain's entry into Europe. Not only popular but also patriotic and spiritedly polemical, the book sets out the historical case for an England free of continental entanglements and international ideologies. Johnson's enthusiasms are for Elizabeth I and Cromwell, his sympathies Pelagian and indigenous, his unsympathetic treatment reserved for renegade Englishmen such as St. Thomas ... Becket ('a man of concentrated energy, with second-class brains and no sense of proportion'). His lively layman's erudition left the dons a trifle winded— and for once appreciative. Other popular histories included J. B. Priestley's witty and perceptive survey of the 1850's (Victoria's Heyday) and Robert Kee's vivid and exhaustive history of Irish nationalism, The Green Flag. As for the dons, Christopher Hill explored the erratic seventeenth-century sects (the Levelers, Fifth Monarchy Men, Muggletonians, and so on) in The World Turned Upside Down, and Richard Cobb continued his learned typology of the tumbril with Reactions to the French Revolution. Two great nineteenth-century prime ministers were well served, John Prest's Lord John Russell acting as a complement to the concluding volume of Norman Gash's Sir Robert Peel. It was a vintage year for biographies of British sovereigns, the most notable being John Brooke's George III and Philip Ziegler's King William IV. A. J. P. Taylor's vast—and vastly readable—life, Beaverbrook, and Christopher Sykes' chivalrous but perceptive study, Nancy Aster, helped to put much near-contemporary history in a new perspective. Poet laureate. On October 10, Sir John Betjeman was named as the new poet laureate, succeeding Cecil Day Lewis, who died in May. Sir John has achieved great popularity not only for his straightforward verse but also for his many television appearances and his efforts to preserve England from socalled progress.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

306

1973: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1973: Literature, English English letters had, on balance, a fruitful year. One sad note was the death of W. H. Auden at the age of 66. Of all the eloquent tributes to Auden, perhaps Philip Larkin's essay in the New Statesman came nearest to a summation of the man's artistic contribution. The poet's life, Larkin wrote, fell decisively into two parts. First came the English Auden of the 1930's, whose art lay so largely in 'blaming and warning,' whose poetry voiced the fear that '... something was going to fall like rain, on the other side of which, if we were lucky, we might build the Just City.' In this sense Auden was the magnetic, many-sided, ultimately beneficent poet of catharsis. There followed the American, international Auden, whose themes were '... our civilization, the Christian story, the relation of life and art.' It was the theme of the relation of life and art that pervaded Auden's final volume of collected essays, Forewords & Afterwords. The studies in this book—of Valéry, Kierkegaard, Kipling, Cavafy, Chesterton, Beerbohm, and many others—easily made it the year's finest and amplest volume of literary criticism. Fiction. The best novel of the year—and a good one it was—came from Graham Greene. The Honorary Consul is about Eduardo Plarr, a half-English doctor in his thirties with a practice in a backwater township on the Argentine-Paraguayan border, and the tale seems to contain all the best elements of Greene's fiction: pathos and comedy, irony and cruel incident, paradoxes of Christian heroism and rich subtleties of characterization, the whole set in a typical 'Abandon all hope ye who enter here' Greeneland of the mind. As If by Magic, Angus Wilson's first novel in six years, was a tour de force of the experimental, a wonderful blending of opposites—serious, passionate, concerned, yet hilarious, witty, and Rabelaisian in the same context. The book is a long dual saga of a committed young hippie named Alexandra and a middle-aged plant geneticist of genius named Hamo Langmuir. Langmuir is a practicing homosexual who is nonetheless an upper-middle-class conformist who detests homosexual mores and society. Alexandra finds apparent fulfillment as a mother, while Langmuir's work and his life take him from Tokyo to Goa to catastrophe. Temporary Kings is the 11th and penultimate volume of Anthony Powell's Music of Time chronicle. Powell's writing is as rich as ever in comic incident and character; the long arm of coincidence, which once seemed the besetting sin of Powell's narrative technique, has been mercifully shortened in the present installment. The writer estimates that he has already created nearly 300 characters, almost a third of whom make some kind of appearance (if only in the form of parenthetic reference) in the present volume. Among the major characters, Pamela Flitton, that original period siren, is dead; but Kenneth Widmerpool, Powell's powerintoxicated man and his greatest comic creation, lives on for the finale. 307

Kingsley Amis scored brilliantly with The Riverside Villas Murder—a thriller set in the 1930's in a suburb some 12 miles outside of London. Bamber Gascoigne plowed even deeper into the field of nostalgia with The Heyday, a genre portrait of the Edwardian provincial theater; and L. P. Hartley's posthumously published novel, The Will and the Way, appeared to have gone as far back as Trollope for its basic plot and situation. Such remembrances of things past were offset by Terence de Vere White's The Distance and the Dark and Walter Hegarty's The Price of Chips, both inspired by the troubles in Ireland. Two collections proved that, despite some obituary notices, the short story is not dead as a literary form. Alan Sillitoe's Men, Women, and Children again drew on his regional (Nottinghamshire) experience, and Iain Crichton Smith explored the Scots dichotomy—the hard cleverness of Glasgow versus the innocence of the Western Isles—in The Black and the Red. Poetry. Two anthologies—Helen Gardner's The New Oxford Book of English Verse and Philip Larkin's The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse—perhaps did more to set the year's poetic stance than did any original work, but certainly the volumes published by Robert Graves (Timeless Meeting), George MacBeth (A Poet's Year), and Dannie Abse (Funland and Other Poems) deserve mention. Drama. It was a pale year for the English theater. John Mortimer's Collaborators was a grave disappointment, altogether too easily and cosily an English joke (even with Glenda Jackson at her acid best) to be worth much attention, except as an evening's entertainment. William Douglas-Home's My Father Knew Lloyd George was another and much duller kind of English joke. On the other hand, Christopher Fry, whose poetic drama seems no longer popular with the new kind of literary theatergoer, scored a notable triumph with his fine television serial, The Brontës of Haworth. This four-part play—magnificently cast and performed—for once laid proper stress on Branwell and the enigmatic (and here sympathetic) father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë. Letters and criticism. V. S. Pritchett's Balzac was a revealing study of the drives and influences that went into the making of the novelist's genius. Although not specifically a study of Balzac's fiction, Pritchett's work is in fact a perfect introduction to the Comédie humaine. Robert Speaight did as much for a great but lesser-known French writer in his study Georges Bernanos. Virginia Llewellyn Smith made the feminist case against Chekhov with stimulating bias in Anton Chekhov and the Lady With the Dog. Cyril Connolly marked his 70th birthday with The Evening Colonnade, a scintillating and lapidary collection. Biography and history. The publication in a Sunday newspaper early in the year of Evelyn Waugh's diaries—maladroitly edited and presented with no regard for personalities still living or only recently deceased—

308

triggered a storm of protest. The controversy was admirably summed up later in the year by Anne Scott-James, who asked in the Times of London just where the line of reticence should be drawn. In the case of Nigel Nicolson's Portrait of a Marriage (that of his mother and father, Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, who went their own bisexual ways while remaining happily married) the question hardly arose, because Nigel Nicolson's mother had wished her fragment of autobiography to be published one day. Among biographies of literary figures, Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie relate the tumultuous life of H. G. Wells, 'the man who invented tomorrow,' in The Time Traveller. Robert Lucas recreated a famous literary marriage in his study Frieda Lawrence, and Monica Blackett remembered her friend Helen Waddell in a moving personal memoir, The Mark of the Maker. Among the lives of political figures, Antonia Fraser's 700-page Cromwell: Our Chief of Men achieved a best-seller success equal to that of her previous study, Mary, Queen of Scots. Reginald Pound took a new look at the Prince Consort in Albert, and Edgar Holt told the bizarre story of the enfant terrible of the Second Empire in his Plon-Plon: The Life of Prince Napoleon. Two neglected prime ministers found excellent biographers. John Wilson's CB triumphantly rescued Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman from near oblivion. Wendy Hinde brought a fine sense of character analysis to her biography George Canning. Bernard Donoughue and G. M. Jones did an admirable job with Herbert Morrison, the biography of an architect of the modern Labor Party who never became prime minister. Christopher Hibbert completed his soberly sparkling life of 'the first gentleman of Europe' with the publication of the second volume of George IV, subtitled Regent and King. Among the notable autobiographies of the year were Louis Heren's account of his childhood in the East End (Growing Up Poor in London), Emlyn Williams' frank and readable volume (Emlyn), and the second volume of Malcolm Muggeridge's misanthropic Chronicles of Wasted Time, this volume being subtitled The Infernal Grove. Two distinguished works of history—James Joll's Europe Since 1870: An International History and the first volume of Theodore Zeldin's France 1848-1945 (subtitled Ambition, Love and Politics)— upheld the importance of historical study, both as a scholarly discipline and as an intellectual entertainment. On the specialized front, there were Joel Hurstfield's Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England and Sir John Glubb's Soldiers of Fortune, the story of the Mamelukes.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

309

1974: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1974: Literature, English Fiction. Women novelists were responsible for some of the year's most distinguished fiction. In its intricate pattern of amorous misadventures—tangled motive and thwarted intention, ambiguity and accident—The Sacred and Profane Love Machine displayed Iris Murdoch's witty ingenuity at its most brilliant. The Rain Forest was Olivia Manning's first novel in five years. Its charged, sultry setting—a fictional island in the Indian Ocean seething with political intrigue—was skillfully employed to heighten the novel's emotional tensions. A. L. Barker is another intelligent and sophisticated writer who publishes too seldom. Her odd, offbeat tale, A Source of Embarrassment, employed most effectively the talents that Anthony Thwaite likened to those of 'a 1970's Jane Austen ... stylish and oblique.' Penelope Mortimer's latest battered heroine fought back at the ferocities of fate with a desperate but saving humor. Long Distance, with its complex, rambling monologue of confidences, memory, and stocktaking of past disasters, was stylistically more experimental than its predecessors. Two younger women authors published impressive novels. Susan Hill's In the Springtime of the Year was an elegiac story of a young widow's grief and painful readjustment, set against an intensely realized rural background that contributed to the protagonist's renewal of hope. The countryside, of Ireland and of Flanders, was also vividly observed in Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon?, which evoked with haunting poetic precision the friendship of two young soldiers during the First World War. Old age was the subject of Ending Up, probably the best thing Kingsley Amis has yet done. His five main characters sharing a cottage have nothing else in common but their loneliness, their unspoken dread of death, and an exacerbated dislike of one another. The indignities of their condition are unflinchingly anatomized in an economically written black comedy at once grimly funny and acutely sad. Anthony Burgess's The Clockwork Testament likewise depicted the infirmities of growing old, but with an elaborate verbosity and with rancor rather than compassion. Biblical myth was the imaginative springboard for two unusual novels. Claud Cockburn's Jericho Road took a cool, disenchanted look at the story of the Good Samaritan and the penalties of disinterestedness, from the viewpoint of an observer conditioned by the moral and political skepticism of the 1970's. Out of the Garden, Colin MacInnes's sardonic modern allegory of man's expulsion from Eden and the Adams family's road to ruin, shared with Cockburn's effort a keen inventive intelligence in updating its original.

310

Drama. New work came from many of the more lively and original playwrights. In his exuberant Travesties, Tom Stoppard used fact as the basis of a fertile fantasia set in Zurich during the First World War. Involving such disparate personalities as Lenin and James Joyce, it afforded full scope to the dramatist's flair for punning, pastiche, and dexterous intellectual agility in argument. In Life Class, David Storey's loquacious hero became the vehicle for Storey's own aphoristic philosophizing about life and art. The characters in David Mercer's Duck Song, a death-obsessed diatribe on the destruction of the bourgeoisie, were also little more than mouthpieces for the author's dialectic. Another drama, The Bewitched, the first full-length play by Peter Barnes since The Ruling Class, was an ambitious historical piece about the seventeenth-century Spanish Hapsburgs that also managed to challenge various assumptions and attitudes of Britain in the 1970's. Knuckle was a tense political thriller in which David Hare viewed corruption in suburban England with a dry, deflating irony. A satire of British marital strife set in a French farmhouse, Chez Nous, was the latest comedy by Peter Nichols, author of Joe Egg, The National Health, and Forget-Me-Not Lane. It proved less satisfying than its predecessors, largely because of the artificial improbability of the amorous situations. By contrast, a painful realism pervaded John Hopkins' Next of Kin, which depicted love-hate conflicts within the close confines of a Sunday afternoon family reunion. Bloomsbury, Peter Luke's first play since Hadrian VII, depicted the Bloomsbury set with scant regard for chronology but was, nevertheless, a vivid evocation of character and atmosphere. Poetry. High Windows was Philip Larkin's first collection of poems in ten years. Sadly ironical as ever, he penetrated with bleak precision to the realities of loneliness, change, age, and death underlying many apparently trivial scenes or incidents. R. S. Thomas, in Selected Poems 19461968, wrote with spare austerity about the poor hill farmers of Wales. David Jones published The Sleeping Lord, a collection of verse-and-prose meditations about Roman soldiers on Hadrian's Wall and in Jerusalem at the time of Christ's crucifixion. Biography. It was a fruitful year for biography, both literary and historical. Philip Henderson's Swinburne was a very satisfying account, which illuminated the poet's whole milieu as well as his life and poetry. Douglas Day's Malcolm Lowry drew a scrupulous picture of another flamboyant romantic who fell victim to alcoholism and to a flawed, unhappy temperament that finally destroyed him. Keith Douglas, Desmond Graham's portrait of the most gifted poet to die in the Second World War, showed how the talent of this arrogant solitary matured under the impact of hostilities. There were two outstanding biographies of women writers. Hilary Spurling's Ivy When Young traced the career of Ivy Compton-Burnett between 1884 and 1919. It is a tale as melodramatically compelling—tensions within the family circle, parental tyranny, triple suicide—as Compton-Burnett's own plots. In Waiting for the Party, Ann Thwaite made a

311

conscientious study of Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of Little Lord Fauntleroy and other books that won her international celebrity and wealth but not personal happiness. There were several sound historical biographies. Elizabeth I, by Paul Johnson, dwelt less upon the political aspects of Elizabeth's reign than on her personal qualities and relationships. Hester Chapman's Anne Boleyn was a scholarly, sympathetic account, and Anthony Martienssen incorporated meticulous research in his Queen Katherine Parr. A. L. Rowse based his Simon Forman, a portrait of another personality of that period of English history on autobiographical papers left by the shrewd, unscrupulous astrologer and medical practitioner. Mark Bence-Jones' Clive of India was a balanced, informative book on that elusive figure, and William Wilberforce, by Robin Furneaux, explored its subject's career and complex, often contradictory character. The Sovereign Lady, Sonia Keppel's portrait of Elizabeth, Lady Holland, evoked in entertaining social detail the life and times of a famous nineteenth-century hostess. A. O. J. Cockshut, in Truth to Life, examined the art of biography in the same century with reference to five major 'lives'—those of Arnold, Macaulay, Gladstone, Newman, and Carlyle. Criticism. Various special occasions were celebrated in the year's criticism. The Pattern of Maugham, by Anthony Curtis, commemorated the centenary of Somerset Maugham's birth with a judicious analysis of 'the greatest all-rounder of the modern period.' The publication of G. K. Chesterton, a collection of essays edited by John Sullivan, marked the centenary of Chesterton's birth. William Empson: The Man and His Work, edited by Roma Gill, was a retirement tribute of poems, reminiscences, and articles on characteristically Empsonian subjects. In Keats and Embarrassment, Christopher Ricks made a subtle and persuasive argument, based on the poet's sensuous excesses, that sought to demonstrate close affinities between embarrassment and creativity. Alan Sandison's The Last Man in Europe considered the tension in George Orwell's work between a passionate individualism and an impulse to merge his identity within a larger consciousness. In a perceptive monograph, D. J. Enright, William Walsh saw 'extremes of flippancy' combine with 'a shuddering sense of suffering' in Enright's poetry. Cyrena Pondrom's The Road From Paris traced French influence on English poetry between 1900 and 1920; and Stephen Spender's Love-Hate Relations outlined with admirable impartiality the cultural interchange between literary Europe and America over the past century. John Fraser's Violence in the Arts made a provocative survey of this trend in contemporary fiction, cinema, and television.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

312

1975: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1975: Literature, English Fiction. Women again produced some of the year's most notable fiction. One example is Iris Murdoch's latest novel, A Word Child. Its narrator, a civil servant, is psychologically crippled by a bitter childhood and a catastrophic love affair. Fleeing the painful disorder of everyday life, he inhabits a Dantean underworld of willful self-punishment. Unlike the inhabitants of Dante's underworld, though, Hilary has a hope of redemption, according to this comic yet compassionate portrait of defensive misanthropy. In The Good Listener, by Pamela Hansford Johnson, charming, sympathetic Toby, just down from Cambridge, is equally adroit in his avoidance of human commitment. This tale of missed opportunities and ultimate emotional sterility scrutinizes with shrewd penetration the perils of subduing feeling to expediency. A third accomplished novel by a woman explores experience from a male viewpoint. Gillian Tindall's The Traveller and His Child perceptively probes the thwarted paternal instinct that impels a film cameraman to abduct a seven-year-old boy for a stolen holiday in France. In Sun Child, by Angela Huth, an intelligent small girl is the bewildered, unhappy spectator of her parents' estrangement. The touching alternation of knowingness and innocence in her conflicting responses to adult incalculability is conveyed with precise, unsentimental discernment. The complexity of the closest human relationship is Gillian Freeman's theme in The Marriage Machine, whose heroine surveys the vicissitudes of a disastrous Anglo-American partnership with a sardonic eye and salutary lack of self-pity. In her wryly titled Heaven on Earth, Janice Elliott investigates the disenchantments of middle age: another disintegrating marriage, the blemished social ideals of the past, and the pressures of present political problems. This is the final volume—sad, dry, and oblique—of an impressive topical trilogy. Maurice Edelman's Disraeli Rising is also part of a trilogy on a broad historical canvas. This second volume portrays Queen Victoria's flamboyant prime minister, in both his private and his public lives, with a sympathy bred of the author's inside knowledge of political life. A Division of the Spoils, by Paul Scott, is the concluding volume of an ambitious quartet depicting the last years of British rule in India and showing certain key events from conflicting British and Indian standpoints. David Lodge's Changing Places describes the experiences of two hapless English professors on exchange between a drably provincial British and a high-powered American university. Its devastating precision and wit make this possibly the funniest book about the academic world since Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim.

313

In the autumn Dame Agatha Christie's Curtain was published, her 37th—and final—book featuring Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Curtain describes the last days of the aging, but still egotistical sleuth, who in the course of his career solved the murder on the Orient Express and numerous other crimes. Drama. Two noted playwrights produced characteristic works. The scene of the new, chillingly effective Harold Pinter play, No Man's Land, is the London home of a rich, successful writer. Symbolically, the title crystallizes the inner desolation that imprisons the writer and his guest, a seedy minor poet, each intimidated by two sinister servants. Cross-purposes, unanswered questions, and nameless threats of noncommunication pervade the familiar atmosphere of mystery and menace. Equally typical is John Osborne's The End of Me Old Cigar, set in a stately English drawing room. This opulent, sick world, swarming with celebrated habitués, is also a brothel, preparing for a final orgy before its destruction. Osborne's vision of the promiscuity and corruption of modern society is scathing—yet, in the end, not entirely without saving hints of hope. The music hall emerges as an image of the human condition in Trevor Griffiths' Comedians. Through a group of aspirants to stardom taking lessons from a veteran music-hall entertainer, Griffiths astringently anatomizes contemporary attitudes toward race, religion, sex, and the whole nature and purpose of comedy. The talking points in Caryl Churchill's conversation piece, Objections to Sex and Violence, are explored through sharply diversified characters on a summer beach. As the didactic title suggests, the characters are all too often highly articulate mouthpieces for opposing arguments. A more realistic work, Michael Frayn's acute and witty Alphabetical Order, depicts a confrontation between cozy lethargy and brisk, bleak efficiency in the cuttings library of a provincial daily newspaper. Biography. A number of noteworthy literary biographies and autobiographies appeared. In Kipling: The Glass, the Shadow, and the Fire, Philip Mason sets out to relate the writer's inner self to his outer life, principally through his fiction. Disliking many aspects of the middle-aged Rudyard Kipling's political views, Mason concentrates on his more reflective last stories dealing with supernatural, mystical, and prophetic themes. The Young Thomas Hardy, by Robert Gittings, offers a scrupulous, penetrating study of that reticent figure who deliberately concealed details of his humble origins and early life. Patiently unearthing the facts and always judicious in his speculation, Gittings reveals how the background, events, and personalities of Hardy's formative years shaped his art. Another novelist's early years is the subject of Philip Callow's Son and Lover. This portrait of D. H. Lawrence, up to the time he left England in 1919, brings sympathetic insights to the predicament of a young, highly original writer struggling against the hostile prejudices of a provincial society. Helen Corke, an important figure in Lawrence's development as a novelist, describes in her autobiography, In Our Infancy, her meeting, as a fellow teacher, with the young man who based his second novel, The Trespasser, on her diary account of a recent tragic love affair. In Our

314

Infancy includes many letters, published for the first time, revealing aspects of her relationship with Lawrence. Another independent, spirited personality, Naomi Mitchison, continues the story of her life in All Change Here, recounting the experiences of a young socialist intellectual at Oxford during the First World War. Those years are also well documented in A Little Love and Good Company, the reminiscences of the actress Cathleen Nesbitt, whom Rupert Brooke hoped to marry. A third unusual woman, Dorothy L. Sayers, translator of Dante and creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, is brought vividly to life in Such a Strange Lady, by Janet Hitchman. In Journey to the Trenches, Joseph Cohen charts the career of Isaac Rosenberg, who died in the First World War: the squalid poverty of his childhood in a Jewish emigré family in London's East End and the struggles of this inarticulate, vulnerable being to break free of his background and find an individual poetic voice. One Hand Clapping (published as I at the Keyhole in the United States), Colin Middleton Murry's recollections of a cruelly deprived childhood, draws a sad, affectionate picture of his father, John, distinguished literary critic and husband of Katherine Mansfield. Another revealing portrait of an eminent man of the period is provided by The Tamarisk Tree, the autobiography of Bertrand Russell's generous, energetic second wife, Dora. In W. H. Auden, editor Stephen Spender brings together 36 warmly appreciative contributions from people whose recollections of the poet range over half a century, from his schooldays to his death. Auden's 1963 memorial address for his contemporary Louis MacNeice is included in Time Was Away, a collection of essays, edited by Alec Reid and Terence Brown, on MacNeice's life and work. Brown also published a critical estimate of the poetry, Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision. MacNeice is among the friends celebrated by Dan Davin in his elegiac, yet candid, composite memoir Closing Times. The book portrays seven very diverse writers—J. Maclaren-Ross, Enid Starkie, Joyce Cary, Dylan Thomas, the Yiddish poet Itzik Manger, W. R. Rodgers, and MacNeice. Oliver Goldsmith is the subject of a scholarly biography by A. Lytton-Sells.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

315

1976: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1976: Literature, English Fiction. Two women writers of widely different talents and achievements died this year: Agatha Christie, at age 85, and Elizabeth Taylor, at 63. Agatha Christie's enormously popular detective stories sold hundreds of millions of copies around the world and made the names of Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple household words. Elizabeth Taylor, whose shrewd, delicate ironies had the flavor of a 20th-century Jane Austen, attracted a relatively small but discriminating circle of readers. Among the prominent works this year was Muriel Spark's new novel, The Takeover, set in Italy in the 1970's but rooted in classical mythology. The ancient cult and characters surrounding the goddess Diana at Nemi were ingeniously related to modern parallels, in a witty, sardonic satire of excessive wealth, bogus religion, and their exploitation-the author's longest tale in some time. In The Realms of Gold, Margaret Drabble similarly abandoned her usual taut construction for a richly extended range of character and scene. Drabble's exuberant heroine, a celebrated archaeologist questioning the validity of her success, returned to her childhood roots and her rejected relationships. Elaine Feinstein's The Ecstasy of Dr. Miriam Garner, also based on the experience of a woman scholar, was a 'metaphysical thriller,' hauntingly evoking a timejourney from modern Cambridge back to medieval Toledo. The stark realities of the modern Arab-Jewish conflict were depicted by David Benedictus in The Rabbi's Wife. This compassionate novel of human and ideological paradox resolutely refused to assign final blame to either side. Meanwhile, M. K. Joseph explored another aspect of warfare in A Soldier's Tale. Set in Normandy in 1944, the story traced with sympathetic perception the developing relationship between a British corporal and a French girl who was destined to die for having betrayed the Resistance forces to the Gestapo. Three impressive first novels were written by women. Rose Tremain's Sadler's Birthday portrayed with humor and poignancy the feelings of lonely old age. In The Story of the Weasel, by Carolyn Slaughter, the narrator attempted to exorcise the memory of her brother through an intensely realized recreation of their secret childhood passion for each other. And in Caroline Blackwood's furious and funny work The Stepdaughter, the heroine raged against an errant husband's desertion, and her present trials, in undispatched letters composed for an imaginary audience. A diary was the vehicle for William Cooper's ironic comedy You're Not Alone, in which an elderly doctor, adept at purveying advice on sex problems, found breezy common sense unavailing when he himself fell haplessly in love with a friend's 20-year-old daughter. In another comedy, Found, Lost, Found, about a civil servant driven to drink by his work, the veteran J. B. Priestley took some telling critical shots at various aspects of the social scene. Three excellent recent novels shared a common contemporary target—the distorting eye of the film camera. Roger Longrigg's The Babe in the Wood focused on an ingenuous scriptwriter, led 316

into ludicrous adaptations of his scenario by the vanities of an egotistical gaggle of film-makers in the middle of an African forest. Treatment, by A. C. H. Smith, described with deft accuracy the methods employed by top-flight television interviewers and surveyed the impact upon two young actors of appearing in a documentary film about their marriage. The Burning Men, the final volume of a historical trilogy by Stuart Jackman, reenacted with compelling urgency the events of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, in the context of a high-powered television program. Two readable collections of short stories by established writers revealed distinctive brands of Celtic imagination. The backgrounds in Sean O'Faolain's caustic, yet tolerant, Foreign Affairs ranged from Ireland to Italy. The Sun's Net, by the Scotsman George Mackay Brown, concentrated on the lore and landscape of his native Orkney. Drama. John Osborne's latest play, Watch It Come Down, was another angry outburst against the miscellaneous irritants of modern society. His characters in a converted railway-station commune presumably represented custodians of civilized values, pitted against a hostile surrounding world. Their cantankerous rantings, however, made them scarcely more attractive than their targets. Other dramas were more successful. Tom Stoppard displayed a splendid verbal virtuosity in Dirty Linen, a high-spirited frolic about the sexual indiscretions of a parliamentary committee investigating promiscuity. And David Rudkin's incantatory use of language enhanced his Sons of Light, an ambitious allegory charged with primitive mystery and menace, concerning the advent of a new pastor and his sons among an oppressed, suspicious island population. A pastor—the long-suffering host to a paranoiac writer who wrought havoc in his household and parish—was also one of the main characters in Lenz, a powerful study of personality conflicts in 18thcentury Germany; the play was by Mike Stott. Teeth 'n' Smiles, by David Hare, contained witty, incisive dialogue and well-observed detail on the life-style of a disintegrating pop group in Cambridge, but the characters' attitudes remained elusively ambivalent. Also disappointing was the superficial handling of relationships in Christopher Hampton's new comedy Treats, about a young woman who must choose between two equally unsatisfactory lovers. Biography. Edmund Kean: Fire from Heaven, by Raymund Fitzsimons, vividly recreated the flamboyant character, career, and performances of a great actor. New material from the diaries of Kean's theater manager provided much of the interesting background information. There were also several good literary biographies this year. Margaret Lane's Samuel Johnson and His World presented a satisfying portrait of the contradictions in Johnson's bewilderingly complex personality, and of his strange relationship with Hester Thrale. C. P. Snow's Trollope, a concise but penetrating study, offered many illuminating insights, and an interesting discussion of the Victorian novelist's platonic relationship, in later life, with the young American feminist Kate Field. Ruby V. Redinger's substantial George Eliot: The Emergent Self discerningly investigated the disabling family, social, and psychological pressures which for so long hindered Eliot's creative development.

317

In Oscar Wilde, a familiar story derived fresh interest from H. Montgomery Hyde's lifelong absorption in his subject and his personal contacts with Wilde's acquaintances and environment. Another judicious biographer not blinded by his sympathies was Christopher Sykes, who in Evelyn Waugh drew an affectionate but realistic picture, colored with entertaining anecdotes, of his ferociously irascible friend. Three British prime ministers were subjects for notable political biographies. Stanley Ayling's solid study The Elder Pitt detected the vulnerable individual beneath the extravagant posturing. Peter D. G. Thomas, in Lord North, vigorously defended the abilities of the unpopular British statesman who was blamed for the loss of the 13 American colonies in the Revolutionary War. And Peter Dixon's workmanlike Canning examined another politician whose gifts failed to win adequate recognition. Finally, in Albert Schweitzer, James Brabazon offered the most revealing and comprehensive available study of the personality and the achievements of this controversial figure. Criticism. John Bayley's provocative The Uses of Division, a collection of essays covering literary figures from Shakespeare to D. H. Lawrence and Philip Larkin, contended that great literature springs not from imaginative coherence but from basic 'involuntary divisions' within the writer, 'amounting to total disunity.' A contrasting view was taken in Explorations 3, by L. C. Knights, who perceived an underlying order in major writers from George Herbert to Henry James. There were two interesting books on Thomas Hardy this year. The Genius of Thomas Hardy, edited by Margaret Drabble, offered worthwhile discussions by 16 distinguished contributors on topics ranging from his philosophy and historical sense to the topography of his fiction. And in Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception, Tom Paulin presented an acute, original analysis of Hardy's own language and personal habits of vision, and of his interest in current theories of perception. In contemporary criticism, a survey by A. T. Tolley, The Poetry of the Thirties, effectively pinpointed the decade's central paradox; the members of the Auden group, who set out so earnestly to denounce social abuses in their writings, were evidently ill-equipped by their own insulated middle-class backgrounds to speak either about or for the common man. In Not Without Glory, Vernon Scannell, claiming that the poets of World War II have been unduly neglected, challenged the accepted estimates of their predecessors before reviewing in detail the careers of Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Sidney Keyes, as well as several others.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

318

1977: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1977: Literature, English Fiction. It was an outstanding year for fiction, with the publication of a fine posthumous novel by Elizabeth Taylor and of a number of new works by veteran authors on a variety of themes. In Blaming, Elizabeth Taylor's posthumous novel about widowhood, the author explored one woman's response to death. Bored, self-absorbed, and exasperated by well-meaning intruders on her privacy, Amy, the heroine, finally gained some uncomfortable self-knowledge through the experience of bereavement. The author's ironic, disconcertingly shrewd eye for human foibles was, as always, tempered by humor and compassion. Afternoon of a Good Woman, by Nina Bawden, was another novel whose heroine, in this case a middle-aged magistrate, found herself impelled to make a searching examination of her own life and shortcomings. The conflict between parents and children formed the backdrop for two other absorbing novels. The title of the first, Beryl Bainbridge's A Quiet Life, was grimly ironic. Its eruptive family tensions—likened by one character to 'walking through a minefield'—were conveyed with controlled but corrosive intensity through the tensely heightened sensibilities of a timid, anxious son. William Trevor's The Children of Dynmouth, set in a seaside town, depicted violence seething just beneath everyday surfaces. Here the main character, a boy rendered vicious as well as pathetic by rejection, became a malevolent agent of destruction in the lives of his neighbors. The Alteration, the latest novel by the unpredictable Kingsley Amis, envisaged a contemporary world in which the Reformation had never taken place. Its essentially serious theme was the emasculation of art, science, and the whole quality of life. In a lighter vein, Iris Murdoch's latest witty exercise in metaphysical speculation, Henry and Cato, portrayed inexplicable forces intervening to frustrate human intentions. 'The gods,' observed one character, 'grab [us] by the hair and tell [us] what to do'; and a complex plot, involving foiled resentment and revenge, abounded in images and ideas from classical mythology. Shakespeare and Elizabethan England provided the themes for two historical novels. In Falstaff (this year's Hawthornden Prize—winner), Robert Nye's hero reveled in a riotous conjunction of Shakespearean and modern wordplay, as he dictated the story of his life. With equal panache, if less verbal audacity, John Mortimer's Will Shakespeare employed the same device of recollections in old age. The result was an irreverent portrait vigorously recreating the atmosphere and personalities of Elizabethan London. More historical characters sprang to life in Abba Abba, by Anthony Burgess. This cunning fusion of fiction with fact, set in Rome during the winter of 1820-1821, imagined a meeting between two sharply contrasting yet equally tormented poets: the scurrilous Roman sonneteer Giuseppe Belli and the dying romantic poet John Keats. Burgess' robust Joycean relish for puns and polyglot associations reappeared in his other novel this year, Beard's Roman Women. Its disturbing idea of long-distance calls from a dead wife was echoed in Fay Weldon's ferociously

319

funny Remember Me, in which a discarded woman's ghost returned to haunt her former husband by telephone. More traditional in technique, David Storey's solidly satisfying Booker prize—winner, Saville, charted with quiet but powerful authenticity the progress of a boy's maturing in a northern mining village. Against a similar background, The Widower's Son, by Alan Sillitoe, equated social success with emotional disaster for its soldier hero, who won final fulfillment by returning to his roots. In a modern story set in Northern Ireland, Jennifer Johnston's Shadows on our Skin portrayed a dreamy schoolboy pressed into reluctant contact with political reality, and lyrically evoked a wider landscape untouched by manmade conflicts. A much different setting figured in Paul Scott's Staying On, which depicted two battered survivors of the Raj in a dilapidated hill station, grumbling about the present, fearing the future, and remembering past imperial greatness. Scott's familiarity with his background and his sharp eye for comedies of character matched a moving awareness of the realities of exile, change, and decay. Also set in his favorite territory, war-time Egypt, P. H. Newby's Kith recalled with humor and poignancy the amorous mishaps and agonies of the narrator's youth. Among newly published anthologies, Francis King's distinguished collection of short stories, Hard Feelings, anatomized the painful ambiguities of human interaction with clinical yet compassionate accuracy. The 16 astringent tales in Sleep It Off Lady, by Jean Rhys, focused on a long-ago Caribbean childhood, on Paris in the 1920's, on London during World War II, and on the vicissitudes of reclusive old age. Drama. English playwrights drew upon widely varied sources of inspiration, from Soviet history to suburban mores to poetry. State of Revolution, by Robert Bolt, explored with intelligence but a certain documentary dullness the clash of conflicting personalities during the power struggle of 1910 and 1924 that gave birth to the modern Soviet state. Another play, Arnold Wesker's The Wedding Feast, updated a famous Russian short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky to depict present industrial and class discord. The gulf between philanthropy and its recipients was compellingly demonstrated when a paternalistic employer gate-crashed his workers' party, precipitating a climax of revenge. Unwelcome guests also figured in Alan Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce, in which three luckless host-couples were relentlessly harassed by the nerve-racking attentions of a fourth. In his other new drama of the season, Just Between Ourselves, this prolific playwright again displayed his scenic inventiveness and his keen insight into the realities of suburban boredom, disenchantment, and misunderstanding between husbands and wives. Peter Nichols, in Privates on Parade, extended the autobiographical excursions of Forget-Me-Not Lane to his experiences as a troop entertainer in Malaya just after World War II. An exuberant, cynically ribald with went far to redeem the play's slightness of plot. David Storey's Mother's Way was conspicuously less successful than his contribution to the year's fiction. Excesses of sex, violence, and black farce, in this typical piece about an improbable working-class family, were too grotesque to make effective dramatic comment on the moral anarchy they were meant to portray. Hugh Whitemore, in Stevie, skillfully interwove the life and work of the highly individual poet Stevie Smith, to capture the flavor of her childlike yet caustic candor, her wry, derisive disdain for convention, and her obsession with loneliness and mortality.

320

Biography. The year's most rewarding literary biography, Winifred Gérin's Elizabeth Gaskell, perceptively examined the busy life of a minister's wife and devoted mother who won renown as a humane chronicler of 19th-century working-class struggles and as a biographer of novelist Charlotte Brontë. Another familiar literary personality received attention in two new biographies. The chief interest of Charles Higham's The Adventures of Conan Doyle lay in tracing plots and characters to their real-life origins in the Victorian underworld and among Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's medical colleagues. Ronald Pearsall in Conan Doyle: A Biographical Solution was especially revealing about Doyle's spiritualist activities. Several noteworthy biographies of modern poets made their appearance. In Gerard Manley Hopkins, Bernard Bergonzi examined afresh the causes of the poet's unhappiness—repeated rejection of his poems, his sense of failure as a teacher, the conflict in him between priest and poet—and ranked the literary criticism in his letters with that of Keats, Henry James, and D. H. Lawrence. Frank Tuohy's well-researched Yeats provided a compatriot's picture of the Irish political background, with vivid portraits of personalities like Yeats' painter father and the poet's lifelong love, the beloved revolutionary, Maud Gonne. One of Yeats' absorbing interests was enlighteningly explored in 16 essays entitled Yeats and the Occult, edited by George Mills Harper. And in Eliot's Early Years, by Lyndall Gordon, the less picturesque life of the century's other great poet was illuminated by much painstaking research into archive material. Two very different biographies of Dylan Thomas appeared almost simultaneously. My Friend Dylan Thomas, by the composer Daniel Jones, was an affectionate tribute to a relationship dating from shared Swansea schooldays. Dylan Thomas, by Paul Ferris, was more substantial and more dispassionate. Bent on separating solid fact from lurid legend and raffish persona, this scrupulously just piece of demythologizing contained abundant detail about Thomas' family background, which is depicted as largely responsible for the deep-rooted insecurities of his later life. Three witty, disenchanted writers of an earlier generation were the subject of readable biographies. In Norman Douglas, Mark Holloway portrayed the career and outrageous personality of another reprobate disciple of hedonism. Frederick Raphael's, Somerset Maugham and His World was a liberally illustrated and crisply informative account of Maugham's long, varied life and his literary achievements. And The Life of Noel Coward, by his friend Cole Lesley, abounded in piquant epigrams and anecdotes, in an entertaining portrait of a memorable period. J. B. Priestley, surviving into robust and battling old age, published a third chapter of autobiography, Instead of the Trees; the disgruntlement with present-day ills did not preclude a continuing, generous relish for a diversity of enjoyments. Finally, in The Marble Foot, by Peter Quennell, and Infants of the Spring, by Anthony Powell, two gifted writers who were together at Oxford in the 1920's, offered revealing pictures of their middle-class boyhoods and of distinguished literary contemporaries like George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene. Criticism. Two interesting critical works pursued the literary roots of two distinguished authors. Coleridge's Poetic Intelligence, by John Beer, concentrated on the interplay between scientific and

321

philosophical ideas in the period from 1793 to 1804 and on the formation of the young Coleridge's thought and poetic practice. The Raven and the Writing Desk, by Francis Huxley, assiduously pursued puns, anagrams, and other intricate verbal games to their putative sources in the background and personal idiosyncrasies of the ingenious Lewis Carroll. Unburied treasure. A literary event of major importance was the discovery, in December 1976, of a number of hitherto unknown autograph poems and letters by Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The treasure trove was found in a trunk that Byron's close friend, Scrope Berdmore Davies, had left with his bank before hurriedly fleeing London in 1820 to escape creditors. It remained in the bank's vaults for over 150 years, until one of the bank's local directors, himself a descendant of William Makepeace Thackeray, decided to open it. Among the papers found in the chest were an original manuscript of the third canto of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, an early manuscript of Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, an early version of his Mont Blanc, two possibly unpublished poems of Shelley, several newly discovered letters from Byron, and some from other literary figures of the time.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

322

1978: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1978: Literature, English A series of fine new works appeared in British bookshops during the year, suggesting that, whatever problems the nation might be encountering, literature, especially fiction, was alive and healthy. Fiction. Among those adding to the year's fiction list was veteran novelist Graham Greene, who, in The Human Factor, produced a compelling study of treason. The protagonist's motive was neither ideological conviction nor financial gain but payment of a personal debt of gratitude, after a Communist friend helped smuggle his black wife—also an agent—out of South Africa. Greene's compassionate insight into the man's conflicting loyalties was matched by an acute eye for background detail. The similarity of setting in John le Carr‚'s The Honorable Schoolboy inevitably invited comparisons. But whereas Greene used the secret service as a meticulously observed framework for scrutiny of the complex 'human factor,' the intricacies of international intrigue in Le Carr‚'s tense, accomplished spy thriller were the mainspring of action and reason for his characters' existence. By contrast, Barbara Pym's might have seemed a small world. But in Quartet in Autumn the predicament of her characters was desperate in a more universal way, as four office colleagues on the brink of retirement faced old age, loneliness, and death. This undervalued writer has been enjoying a well-deserved comeback after praise by critics like Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin; and her second novel within the year, The Sweet Dove Died, also set in London, was closer to the cool, astringent humor of her earlier vein. In The Danger Tree another established woman novelist, Olivia Manning, vividly evoked the atmosphere of wartime Egypt in further adventures of Guy and Harriet Pringle, protagonists of her justly admired Balkan trilogy. Margaret Drabble's disenchanted anatomy of a decade, The Ice Age, portrayed the present; and the misfortunes of her characters — including a disillusioned television producer turned failed property speculator and a big-businessman imprisoned for fraud—typified the malaise of our time. Richard Adams, in The Plague Dogs, focused with crusading indignation on the sacrifice of animals in the alleged interests of humanity, as he chronicled the struggle for survival of two canine escapees from a research center, pursued through wild countryside as possible carriers of bubonic plague. As implied by its title, the suburban characters in Beryl Bainbridge's sardonic Injury Time were also victims: of domestic claustrophobia, of the bored discontent of middle age, and, more directly, of a gang of bank robbers bursting in to seize hostages and raise a siege against the pursuing police. Martin Amis in Success—described by Anthony Thwaite in The Observer as a 'painfully funny Swiftian exercise in moral disgust'—traced, through skillfully contrasted diary entries, a gradual reversal in the roles of success and failure of two foster brothers sharing a London flat. 323

Meanwhile, Brigid Brophy's exuberant, allegorical 'baroque' novel, Palace Without Chairs, used an imaginary kingdom in mid-Europe, and the antics and mishaps of its steadily depleted royal family, to lampoon bureaucracy, trade unions, the media, and other contemporary institutions. Another fable for the times, Fay Weldon's Little Sisters, ingeniously blended modern characters and setting with archetypal fairy-tale elements in a cautionary warning to wantons. Also concerned with the penalties of promiscuity, Stanley Middleton's Ends and Means observed, with dry, laconic realism, the amorous entanglements of middle-class professional people. His hero remained as detached from surrounding miseries as the rich, grudging title character of Caroline Blackwood's Great Granny Webster, who alone stayed formidably sane in this original black comedy about three generations of family madness. Biography. The year's most solidly authoritative critical biography was Walter Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson, which investigated the paradoxical contrast between Johnson's public and private lives with both penetration and humanity. The Older Hardy, by Robert Gittings, was a careful, candid portrait of a great writer who in his relationships with women remained a perpetual adolescent. John Bayley's lucid and urbane Essay on Hardy confined itself to incisive critical revaluation and analysis of the novels, approached by way of the poems. Angus Wilson, in The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, used Kipling's literary pilgrimage to India and Vermont, as well as much new material, for a revealing re-creation of the writer's family circle and social surroundings. In his admirable two-volume biography E. M. Forster, P. N. Furbank combined tact with shrewd wit and personal affection and absorbingly identified in the novels many originals of people and places Forster knew. Several biographies were devoted to Forster's contemporaries. In A Marriage of True Minds, George Spater and Ian Parsons drew an intimate domestic portrait of Virginia and Leonard Woolf. The life and work of Virginia's friend and fellow-novelist Elizabeth Bowen were the subject of a perceptive critical study by Victoria Glendinning. In Life and Letters, by John Carswell, Katherine Mansfield was the dominant figure among five subjects closely associated with A. R. Orage's journal, The New Age, while another contributor to the journal was affectionately reanimated by his friend Frank Swinnerton in Arnold Bennett: A Last Word. Like Bennett, Somerset Maugham sought refuge in his writing from the social embarrassments of a crippling stammer, which, said his nephew, Robin Maugham, in his moving Conversations with Willie, 'tormented him and cut him off . . . from all natural human communication.' Anthony Curtis, in Somerset Maugham, provided further psychological insights, and some excellent photographs. Peter Ustinov's autobiography, Dear Me, gave an entertaining account of the actor-dramatist's eventful career. Another notable autobiography was continued in Anthony Powell's Messengers of Day, which recalled the literary world of London in the 1920's and such personalities as George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and Dame Edith Sitwell. Criticism. There were two important studies of John Milton. In a persuasive relation of his writing to his life, Milton and Sex, Edward le Comte effectively exploded the myth of the poet's Puritanism and his misogyny. Milton and the English Revolution, by Christopher Hill, employed a wide

324

knowledge of the period to illuminate the divided allegiances of the political and theological controversialist. John Carey's crisp and lively Thackeray: Prodigal Genius approached its subject mainly through aspects the writer plainly relished, such as food and drink, clothes, and the theater. In her masterly analysis of The Composition of Four Quartets, Helen Gardner offered fresh insights into the poems, as objectifying T. S. Eliot's private distress over a failed marriage and the wartime air raids on London. Drama. Alan Bennett's The Old Country probed the psychology of a defector from the West living in exile near Moscow, still incorrigibly English in his idiom and inclinations, but reluctant to return home when opportunity offered. An equally topical issue—the individual's 'right to die'— was eloquently examined in Brian Clark's Whose Life Is It Anyway?, a powerful confrontation between a sculptor incurably paralyzed after an accident and the consulting physician in charge of his case. In Edward Bond's thought-provoking drama The Bundle, a 17th-century Japanese poet seeking self-centered enlightenment inhumanly abandoned a baby, who subsequently avenged himself by becoming a political revolutionary and the poet's chief opponent. Also preoccupied with the nature and motivations of cruelty, Simon Gray, in The Rear Column, perceptively charted the erosion of civilized values under the pressures of tropical heat and frustration. C. P. Taylor's Withdrawal Symptoms made guilt over her family's colonial exploitation in Africa largely responsible for the predicament of the heroine, a university lecturer imprisoned on drug charges. Plenty, by David Hare, interwove personal history with public events between 1943 and 1962, in portraying the protest of another intransigent young woman in rebellion against her background. Alan Ayckbourn's Ten Times Table afforded satirical wit and high farce untinged by any hint of bitterness. A shrewd comedy of local politics, it depicted the self-important deliberations of a committee organizing a pageant to commemorate the heroes of a massacre two centuries earlier. 'New' Austen play. The manuscript of a previously unknown comedy by Jane Austen, written around 1800 and consisting of 53 pages, was discovered late in 1977. Entitled Sir Charles Grandison, or The Happy Man, the play is based on an epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson and tells the story of love victorious. Probably intended for family theatricals, it evokes, in the manner of Austen's other works, the tranquillity and gentility of English country life. The manuscript was auctioned for £ 17,000 in December 1977. Deaths. Three writers prominent in different fields of English literature were among those who recently died. Terence Rattigan was the leading modern exponent of the 'well-made' play; and his skillful exploration of personal relationships in The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea, and Separate Tables as well as his last play, Cause Cé‚lèbre, demonstrated an overriding concern for individuals rather than politics or abstract ideas. The novelist Paul Scott, who in the acclaimed

325

Raj Quartet tellingly delineated the final years of the British rule in India, was awarded the Booker Prize for his last novel, Staying On, only a few months before his death. F. R. Leavis, the distinguished unregenerate rebel of 20th-century criticism, was well-known for his dogmatic, often controversial views, expressed in books like The Great Tradition and in his influential journal Scrutiny.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

326

1979: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1979: Literature, English Fiction. Prominent among new novels was Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea, which was published in November 1978 and received that year's Booker Prize for fiction. Murdoch's customary male central character is an egotistical retired theatrical producer, who plans an escape from hedonism into solitude by the sea, only to be invaded by personalities and events from his past. The familiar Murdoch ingredients of enchantment and enslavement, permutations of the love game, and the ambiguities of freedom and possession are beguilingly combined through the mystery and magic of a Prospero theme. Old ghosts were also resurrected in Muriel Spark's Territorial Rights, in which characters in pursuit of different purposes converge on Venice to stake out their territories. The mingled violence, cynicism, and beauty of Italy stimulated the author's imagination in this shrewd, entertaining comedy of manners, which is full of unexpected disclosures and bizarre intrigue. In her mocking novel Young Adolf, Beryl Bainbridge reconstructed a visit said to have been made by Hitler in 1912 to his half-brother in Liverpool. Her invention of various fantastic and farcical indignities to affront the self-esteem of this clumsy, bewildered fictional blunderer plausibly foreshadowed the paranoid resentments and rages of the monster known to history. Another writer commanding a quality of controlled ferocity was Fay Weldon, who in Praxis allowed her heroine to sum up her theme: 'Wherever she went, she saw women betrayed, exploited, and oppressed.' The conflicts, confusions, and outrageous events of Praxis' life are intensified by Weldon's use of ironic understatement and sardonic humor, which lifted the novel far above the level of a feminist tract. Male arrogance was embodied by the hero of Kingsley Amis' latest novel, Jake's Thing. The disenchanting experiences of an irascible classics don, who is sufficiently disturbed by the disappearance of his former impulses to undergo group sexual therapy, gives full rein to the author's individual brand of savage satirical wit and allows for the creation of a gallery of delectable minor comic characters. The theme of The Pardoner's Tale, by John Wain, was likewise amorous despair in middle age, although both of the disappointed heroes finally find consolation in new affairs with adventurous young women. The parallel and interacting fortunes of a provincial writer and the central character are traced in alternating chapters, in a vein of sober realism. Aspects of love were further analyzed by Pamela Hansford Johnson in The Good Husband. Here the charming Toby of The Good Listener, adept as ever in self-advancement, has become a thriving merchant banker married to a beauty ten years his senior. Both the social detail of their plush life-style and the decline of a relationship through a complacent lack of commitment are chronicled with cool and deadly precision. In The Battle Lost and Won, Olivia Manning also continued the story of earlier characters, Guy and Harriet Pringle, and explored a deteriorating marriage. This second volume of her 'Levant 327

trilogy,' set in wartime Egypt, centered on El Alamein, which is brilliantly reconstructed through the eyes of a young combatant officer. With caustically witty observation of the British civilian population in Cairo, Manning vividly evokes the atmosphere of the city and the surrounding desert. Biography. Three major English novelists were subjects of memorable biographies. In Henry Fielding, Pat Rogers presents a lively, enlightening picture of the life and times of the great novelist, satirical dramatist, humane magistrate, and wise and compassionate man. David Cecil's A Portrait of Jane Austen surveys the novelist's 'robust and sparkling wit' and her 'sharp, subtle, ... amused, perhaps formidable' personality in the social context of her age. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, in Dickens, draw widely upon recently published letters and their own knowledge of the Victorian social and political scene to provide an informed, comprehensive, and highly readable biography. Other literary figures were also the focus of biographies. In The Tell-Tale Heart, Julian Symons graphically traces the tempestuous, self-destructive career of Edgar Allan Poe, and in The Second Mrs. Hardy, Robert Gittings, with the aid of his wife, Jo Manton, pursues his earlier research on Thomas Hardy with his customary diligence and sympathetic insight. Among the most noteworthy biographies of 20th-century writers were Constance BabingtonSmith's solid and sober John Masefield: A Life; John Pearson's Façades (published in the United States as The Sitwells), an energetic, entertaining portrait of the three Sitwells; Paddy Kitchen's Gerard Manley Hopkins, a scrupulous study of the conflicts in the poet's life and art; Roger Poole's The Unknown Virginia Woolf, an exploration of the major influences on her; and Paul Delany's D. H. Lawrence's Nightmare, a conscientiously documented examination of the novelist and his circle during the First World War. Great Friends, the literary memoirs of the octogenarian David Garnett, recalls with vividness and affection Woolf and Lawrence, along with Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Henry James, George Moore, John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, W. H. Hudson, Edward Thomas, and W. H. Davies. Criticism. John Beer's two important studies, Wordsworth in Time and Wordsworth and the Human Heart, were complementary in their patient, perceptive, and precise investigation of the poet's moments of vision of the unity of all life, his symbolic use of specific images, and his interpretation of human nature and relationships. In The Thirties and After, Stephen Spender—like David Garnett the survivor of a legendary epoch—presents an illuminating documentary view of his own and his contemporaries' political and literary hopes, dilemmas, and follies. A companion volume by a younger writer, Bernard Bergonzi's Reading the Thirties, ranges over the whole field of interests (including motion pictures) shared by young writers from W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood to Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. Drama. New plays appeared by most of the leading figures in the contemporary English theater. Both Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn chose topically foreign settings. Stoppard's Night and Day is

328

his most naturalistic play to date. With his characteristic verbal agility and provocative argument, he surveys aspects of freedom of the press, through a tense situation between three journalists sent to an African state on the brink of insurrection against despotic rule. Frayn's Clouds also has a revolutionary background and rival journalists as its central characters, but the author uses the farms and factories of the new Cuba as the scene for a witty and acute exploration of the subjectivity, shifting and mutable as cloud formations, of an individual's perceptions. Harold Pinter, in Betrayal, begins with the end of an adulterous affair and traces the affair back through the years to reveal faces of deception more subtly varied than the usual. The play abounds in obliquities, cryptic evasions, and unanswered questions, in the familiar Pinter idiom. Family Circles by Alan Ayckbourn also depicts changes of sexual partnerships, with three daughters sharing their respective men at a wedding anniversary celebration for parents apparently contemplating mutual murder—a cynically chilling theme even for this devastating delineator of domestic desperation. In a second new play, Joking Apart, Ayckbourn set forth some uncomfortable truths in a painfully funny study of middle-class suburban envy, charting the growth of corrosive resentments against a generous, insensitive couple among less fortunate friends and neighbors feeling mocked and belittled by the couple's charmed existence. Scarcely more heartening, for all its mordant wit, was the latest offering from another talented playwright, Simon Gray. In his bleak Close of Play, the accent is on death, crystallized in the hypnotically recurring image of an open door. The central character is a detached father-figure sitting eloquently silent from first almost to last—the mute, remote recipient of the recriminations, squalid confessions, and general despair of his self-destructive family. Jean Rhys. Veteran writer Jean Rhys, author of the brilliant Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), about the first wife of Rochester in Jane Eyre, died on May 14 at the age of 84. She had been rediscovered after a prolonged period of obscurity that followed publication of her first novels, which in reprint seem as modern in their cool, spare feminist disenchantment as anything written today.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

329

1980: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1980: Literature, English Fiction. Notable new works of fiction included the last book by novelist, scientist, and former government official C. P. Snow, who died this year. Titled A Coat of Varnish, the book contained all the ingredients of a classic detective novel—suspense, precise detail about police procedures, and a challenge to the reader's ingenuity, to solve the murderer's identity. Characteristically, however, the work's principal concern was not so much with plot as with the complexities of motive (in both suspects and investigating detectives) and with the dark impulses lurking beneath the most apparently civilized surface. Another master of psychological tension in the context of violence, John le Carré, produced Smiley's People. Le Carré again evoked, through his intricate plot and ironically introspective hero, the loneliness and moral squalor of the world of modern espionage. In Kingsley Amis' inventive Russian Hide and Seek, the traditional enemy appeared not as spy but as occupier, in a Britain 50 years hence resigned to Soviet rule. Graham Greene's chilling 'black entertainment,' Dr. Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party, also had an unusual subject: the ingeniously sadistic party games devised for his sycophants by a cynical, power-drunk millionaire, who plays God to test the limits of their self-abasement for gain and prove his contention that 'the rich are the greediest. . . . They have no pride except in their possessions.' Greene's disgust with human avarice was matched by the ferocious moral intensity of Darkness Visible, William Golding's first novel in 12 years. This stark vision of the nihilistic anarchy of 20th-century society powerfully juxtaposed two contrasting figures: a mutilated London blitz victim, scoured by the fire into a state of primitive innocence, and a beautiful, merciless woman of the next generation. Golding also published Rites of Passage, a novel set on a British ship in the early 19th century. Angus Wilson's unusually brief but dramatically effective fable for the times, Setting the World on Fire, was also preoccupied with evil through violence. It employed the incendiary image as both life-giver and destroyer; the plot included a major terrorist incident. The extravagant symbolic setting was a stately London home, its part-classical, part-baroque architecture corresponding to the temperaments of the book's brother-heroes. The Middle Ground by Margaret Drabble showed another aspect of the contemporary scene, through the eyes of a trendy woman journalist tiring in middle age of the feminist struggle and relapsing into the compromises of those she has criticized for so long. Present-day life and manners are documented with sharp-eyed precision in a chattily confidential style, with asides by the author. Fay Weldon's heroine in her bizarre yet compelling novel Puffball is a modern city wife who agrees to have a child if she can move to the country. Caught between her husband's marital infidelity and sinister forces in a rural retreat where she spends her pregnancy, she finally 330

triumphs over the ignorance and superstition that threaten her and her unborn child's existence. Female characters in Other People's Worlds, by William Trevor, also discovered new areas of experience and understanding, through the mutual misfortune of their connection with a plausible rogue. Biography. Three 19th-century writers were the subjects of rewarding biographies. In Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in His Context, Marilyn Butler presented a well-informed portrait of Thomas Love Peacock, a robust skeptical humanist and wit, whose satirical targets ranged from spiritualism to the Gothic horror novel. Joan Abse's psychologically penetrating study John Ruskin, aptly subtitled The Passionate Moralist, contained much enlightening discussion of Ruskin's ideas. In Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study, Jenni Calder did full justice to the life and work of another undervalued Victorian, exploring with sympathetic insight the shaping impact of Stevenson's chronic ill-health upon his personality, his relationships, and the recurring themes in his writing. A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet, by Richard Perceval Graves, analyzed the inner divisions of this reclusive, sorrowful figure, in an attempt to reconcile the romantic poet of A Shropshire Lad with the classicist and editor of the works of the Roman poet Marcus Manilius. Graves' biography provided a balanced reassessment of Housman's life, philosophy, and reputation. John Lehmann's biography Rupert Brooke judiciously reexamined the life, legend, and poetry of the golden youth who dazzled his contemporaries—and won with his war sonnets an immense public that romanticized in him the heroic image of his doomed generation. Antony Alpers, in The Life of Katherine Mansfield, considerably enlarged his earlier biography with new detail made available by the passage of time. Also a New Zealander, he wrote vividly about Mansfield's New Zealand background and captured the essence of her elusive, difficult, gifted personality. Her relationship with the Lawrences also figured in Keith Sagar's crisply readable The Life of D. H. Lawrence, published to mark the 50th anniversary of his death and containing many interesting photographs of the writer and his circle. Another bitterly unhappy man, despite his attainment of eminence and riches, was depicted in depth by Ted Morgan in his solid and scrupulously researched study of Somerset Maugham, titled Maugham: A Biography. Jean Rhys' Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography won critical praise; the highly regarded novelist died in 1979. Two major biographies of leading poets of the 1930's afforded illuminating insights into the literary and political life of their time. W. H. Auden: The Life of a Poet, by Charles Osborne, was a satisfyingly comprehensive portrait, rich in lively anecdote, of a forcefully original figure. A parallel passage from youthful rebellion to comparative conformity was traced by Sean DayLewis in his affectionate yet candid study of his father, C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life. Drama. Among established writers of sophisticated comedy who produced new plays was Alan Ayckbourn. His Suburban Strains was yet another disenchanted dissection of the tensions of marriage, this time seen from the viewpoint of an engaging but hapless young schoolteacher hoping always for the best from life and love but foredoomed to recurring disappointment. Sisterly Feelings, a second play by this prolific dramatist, was centered on a family picnic and was

331

his most cunningly contrived domestic black comedy to date; it offered alternative versions of the action, determined by the toss of a coin, which nevertheless led to an identical outcome of sibling amorous rivalry. Family relationships were also anatomized with witty shrewdness by Peter Nichols in Born in the Gardens, which concerned the vain attempts of two worldlings to uproot and rescue their aging bookseller brother and eccentric old mother from contented rustication and force them to face the challenge of the present. One victim of their good intentions observes, 'We don't all want freedom'—a pointed implicit comment on contemporary Britain and those stubbornly entrenched in the complacency of a comfortable past. In Liberty Hall, Michael Frayn also considered the state of the nation. He based his entertaining extravaganza on the assumption that the 1917 Revolution occurred not in Russia but in a Britain pictured 20 years after the event. He envisaged royal Balmoral Castle converted into a holiday home for state-approved writers, and inhabited by four actual figures who afforded full scope for comic invention and satirical wit. David Storey's Early Days presented a subtle study of the disintegration of personality. Storey powerfully communicated the inner desolation underlying the outrageous antics of an expolitician and ravaged father-figure irredeemably alienated in old age from his roots, his family, and himself. In Amadeus, Peter Shaffer explored malice of a different kind, arising from the corrosive envy of an embittered minor musician, Antonio Salieri, for the genius of his mighty rival, Mozart. Shaffer's speculatively sensational version of Salieri's plot to destroy the prospects, reputation, and finally the life of Mozart was more notable for theatrical panache than for historical accuracy or biographical plausibility. Obituaries. Three distinguished novelists died during the year. Olivia Manning (b. 1915) had completed, only a few weeks before her death on July 23, the second of the wartime trilogies that won her recognition for their keen and vivid observation of character, the political scene, and foreign settings. Barbara Pym, whose delineations of English parochial life enjoyed a striking comeback during the past decade after an earlier period of neglect, died January 11 at the age of 66. Lord Snow, who died July 1 at the age of 74, was perhaps best known for his Strangers and Brothers series, 11 related novels based on Snow's own wide-ranging experience of men and affairs. Every aspect of the competitive struggle for power was shrewdly scrutinized through the conflicts and moral dilemmas of academics, scientists, civil servants, and politicians, against backgrounds ranging from a Cambridge college to a nuclear physics research station to the lobbies of Westminster. Only a few months after the publication of his Show People, witty essays on leading entertainment personalities, influential critic and writer Kenneth Tynan, 53, died on July 26. George Eliot memorial. One hundred years after her death, novelist George Eliot was honored this year with a tablet in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. Eliot, whose real name was Mary Anne or Marian Evans, had requested burial in the Abbey, but the request was refused because she was not an orthodox Christian and because she had lived for many years with a man who was legally unable to marry her. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

332

1981: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1981: Literature, English Fiction. The Booker Prize for fiction was awarded to William Golding's Rites of Passage, published in 1980. A close runner-up, Earthly Powers, by Anthony Burgess, presented a disenchanted portrait of the 20th century through the sardonic eyes of its octogenarian antihero Toomey, an expatriate writer haplessly doomed to bungle his performance in every great event. Olivia Manning's posthumous novel, appropriately entitled The Sum of Things, also dealt with the history of our time. This final volume of her 'Levant trilogy' chronicled the further adventures of the young Pringles in the Middle East during World War II, with ironic yet compassionate insight into its characters' capacity for self-deception. In her last novel, A Bonfire, Pamela Hansford Johnson also powerfully evoked the atmosphere of a particular period and place. London between the world wars was the scene for the experiences of her heroine, whose three marriages—all ending in disaster—and relationship with her mother were shrewdly and sympathetically observed. Another novel set in the first half of this century, Secret Places, by Janice Elliott, was a subtle and sensitive study of adolescent relationships in a girls' school. In Nuns and Soldiers, Iris Murdoch once more searchingly explored the nature and condition of love through a complex interplay of character and situation. The theme of this long, compelling novel was the quest for fulfillment that eluded her eponymous solitaries, committed to concepts beyond the personal, but was attained by those who recognized 'love as their meaning' in human terms. Beryl Bainbridge's compact and cryptic Winter Garden concerned the vicissitudes of love in a cold climate, and the unsuspected powers of perception these released in its naive, primly philistine hero. It was a bleakly funny account of an uncomfortable, enigmatic, and increasingly sinister visit to Moscow by a group of English guests of the Soviet Artists' Union. Wit and pain were also the main constituents of Fay Weldon's short story collection, Watching Me, Watching You. Her target continues to be the stupidity and selfishness of men and the exploitation and frustration of their wives, a resolute singleness of aim redeemed from tedium by the variety of treatment. Muriel Spark's latest novel, Loitering with Intent, was set in London just after the second world war. Its heroine was a struggling author, and the composition of her first novel was skillfully interwoven with her experiences in the employ of a society of bizarre pseudo-writers, whose absurd vanities, hypocrisies, and intrigues pointed the confusions between life and art. Nina Bawden's Walking Naked was likewise concerned with the morality of fiction and its relation to reality. Her heroine, a writer in retreat into a world of imagination from the disorder and distress of her own life, was depicted achieving a painful self-knowledge within a

333

single day. A third book with a novelist narrator, John Braine's One and Last Love, charted the progress of the love affair of a successful middle-aged writer. One of the most talented among recent new woman writers, Penelope Lively, re-explored in Judgment Day a favorite theme: the comedies and discords of modern living—in this case in an English village organizing a fund-raising pageant—in the perspective of a continuing past. Biography. There were two solid biographies of 17th-century writers. John Carey's stimulating John Donne: Life, Mind and Art stressed the relation of his subject's secular ambition, religious beliefs, and sense of spiritual guilt to the imaginative intensity of his work. A more temperate personality was ably presented in John Evelyn and His World, by John Bowle. In A Passion for the Particular, Elizabeth Gunn provided a sympathetic reassessment of Dorothy Wordsworth and the practical value of her selfless devotion to her brother's poetry and that of their friend Coleridge. The late Winifred Gérin's solid biography of Thackeray's favorite daughter, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, also showed a woman's strong influence on the emotional and professional life of a 19th-century man of letters, as well as her importance as a source of information about the Victorian literary scene. Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life, by Georgina Battiscombe, afforded a third rewarding feminine portrait. Robert Bernard Martin's substantial Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart perceived, in the tensions of the poet's troubled family background and relationships, the roots of the profound melancholy underlying his revered public image and the deceptive serenity of his work. In her penetrating study of Edith Sitwell, A Unicorn Among the Lions, Victoria Glendinning likewise traced the loneliness and insecurities of a writer's later life, and the vulnerability beneath the facade of a formidable eccentric, to their source in an unhappy childhood. Humphrey Carter based his life of W. H. Auden on the contention that 'the two dominant aspects of his personality were the dogmatic schoolmaster and the would-be healer.' Candid yet compassionate, Carter's interpretation succeeded in salvaging the integrity of this ironic, selftormenting aspirant to sanctity from the wreckage of emotional humiliation and frequent physical squalor that formed the pattern of his life. Bernard Crick's George Orwell was a sound account, scrupulously researched from personal records, of the career and philosophical and political attitudes of the most powerful satirist of the century. Drama. The brutality and sexual explicitness of Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain shocked critics and public alike and stirred up the theatrical controversy of the year. Brenton's purpose was to demonstrate recurring patterns of human ruthlessness by juxtaposing events as far apart in time as the Roman occupation of Britain and the current Irish 'troubles.' The Worlds, by Edward Bond, was also preoccupied with violence, in this case the terrorist kidnapping of a wealthy industrialist and its effect upon his character. One of Bond's main themes, hatred of hypocrisy, also characterized Passion Play, by Peter Nichols, which depicted an adulterous affair that pointed ironic parallels and contrasts between two kinds of love. These double meanings were effectively reinforced by providing each character with an alter ego, representing the inner self concealed behind the glib mask of duplicity.

334

Alan Ayckbourn, in Taking Steps, employed an equally ingenious dramatic device. Punning on the play's title, he had his characters symbolize their states of mind by miming ascent and descent between different levels of the stage. Season's Greetings, this prolific dramatist's second new play of the year, probed the underlying frustrations of cozy suburban domesticity with his customary disenchanted wit. In Alan Bennett's Enjoy, the indifference to human feelings of an institutionalized society was epitomized by an official conscientiously annotating the responses of a middle-aged couple unaware of their role as anthropological specimens, or of plans to turn their home into a museum of working-class history. Quartermaine's Turns, by Simon Gray, took place in the staff-room of a school of English for foreigners. Its key theme was loneliness, and the dramatist's delineation of his characters' private despairs and their inability to communicate them was at once witty and moving. No End of Blame, by Howard Barker, concerned the problems of a rebellious Hungarian cartoonist, unable to reconcile the practice of his profession with the political requirements of his masters in Moscow or later in London. In his last play, No Limits to Love, the late David Mercer forsook his usual preoccupation with politics for a ferociously funny satirical view of tangled amorous relationships in present-day London. Obituaries. Three writers distinguished in different literary genres died during the year. Pamela Hansford Johnson, who died June 18 at the age of 69, was an accomplished novelist of versatile talent, ranging from a rich comic vein to a profound concern with dilemmas of moral choice. She was the widow of the novelist C. P. Snow, who died in 1980. Winifred Gérin, best known as the foremost modern biographer of the Brontës, died June 27 at the age of 81. Philip Toynbee, son of historian Arnold Toynbee, grandson of classical scholar Gilbert Murray, and contemporary of the Auden group of the 1930's, was a liberal humanist whose writings combined wit with an acutely modern critical insight and sensibility. He died June 15 at the age of 64.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

335

1982: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1982: Literature, English Fiction. Perhaps the year's finest historical novel was Robert Nye's The Voyage of the Destiny, which was framed as a first-person account by Sir Walter Raleigh of his failed colonial expedition of 1617. His log of exploration, alternating with memories of past triumphs and with philosophical speculation, formed a narrative exuberantly rich in detail of scene and character. The memorable novel The Christmas Tree, by the distinguished Irish writer Jennifer Johnston, presented a heroine desperately beset. Her going home to Dublin to die involved not only regret for past failures but also final recovery of the identity so often challenged by her disapproving family. In A Field Full of Folk, Iain Crichton Smith explored the elegiac experience of impending death, in the character of a disillusioned clergyman painfully regaining his lost faith through the vividly delineated personalities and landscape of a Scottish village. Janice Elliott's ambitious political novel, The Country of Her Dreams, also evoked a powerful sense of place. At a European congress discussing plans to save the world's art treasures from nuclear war, the eruption of terrorism and seizure of hostages revealed unsuspected depths in the principal characters, a children's-book writer and her husband. A different kind of innocent was the central character of Elizabeth Jane Howard's Getting It Right—a delectable comedy of manners about the sentimental education of a shy, solemnly literary young man. The pretensions of culture were satirized by two other accomplished woman writers. Penelope Lively's Next to Nature, Art was set in an adult residential arts center; the author's relish for pompous absurdity found ample scope in the earnest talk and amorous antics of students and staff alike. At Freddie's, by Penelope Fitzgerald, made an equally acute and amusing scrutiny of the posturings of artistic egotism, this time in the atmosphere of 'artfully faded charm' in a London theater school. Rejected some twenty years ago by shortsighted publishers, Barbara Pym's An Unsuitable Attachment portrayed a prim but pretty London librarian whose marital intentions horrified her rich, snobbish relatives. The values of Pym's familiar world of genteel ladies, hearty clergy, and parish tea parties were surveyed with her usual wry, shrewd precision. The unhappiness of another unsuitable attachment was examined against an academic background in Anita Brookner's Providence. The sad ironies implicit in the situation of a clever, charming young lecturer who knows more about Romantic literature than about real life and love were tellingly developed in this deft, elegant novel. Marina Warner's The Skating Party was another skillfully constructed story, set on a single winter's day, about the tense relationships of university people. The significant place of art in academic lives was a theme echoed in A Prodigal Child, by David Storey. The shaping of a future

336

sculptor was traced, with sober, meticulous realism, through the awakening perceptions of a working-class boy at odds with his uncomprehending family. The Booker McConnell Prize for fiction was awarded to Thomas Keneally for Schindler's Ark (published in the United States as Schindler's List). The book was a novelistic treatment of the life of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved hundreds of Polish Jews during World War II. Biography. Most of the year's notable biographies were devoted to modern writers, still active in the 20th century. A prominent exception, John Dixon Hunt's The Wider Sea, was a satisfyingly substantial life of John Ruskin—a writer who eminently embodied the Victorian age yet was one of its sternest critics. Joseph Conrad, by Roger Tennant, offered a fresh and readable account of the writer's Polish childhood, his adventurous years before the mast, and his later staid life as an English gentleman. George Jefferson's Edward Garnett: A Life in Literature reanimated the rather shadowy figure of Conrad's early editor and literary father-confessor in his role as valued adviser to writers as diverse as Arnold Bennett, E. M. Forster, W. Somerset Maugham, and D. H. Lawrence. In John Buchan: A Memoir, the popular novelist's son William drew an affectionate and informative portrait, without pretending fully to understand the contradictions in this 'lovable, fascinating, mysterious man' who rose from a middle-class Scots background to become governor-general of Canada. Thomas Hardy continued to engage the attention of biographers and critics. Penny Boumelha's scrupulously researched survey Thomas Hardy and Women showed how Hardy's feminine portraits were much subtler than many crude contemporary stereotypes of the 'new woman.' In The Neglected Hardy, Richard H. Taylor was similarly perceptive about Hardy's heroines, and Thomas Hardy: The Writer and His Background, edited by Norman Page, contained a variety of enlightening essays—for example, on Hardy's readership and his use of language. Undoubtedly the most outstanding contribution, however, was Michael Millgate's full-scale biography Thomas Hardy. This richly documented, balanced, and scholarly study drew extensively on new material and was as rewarding about Hardy's personal relationships as about his novels. In Robert Graves: His Life and Work, Martin Seymour-Smith presented a comprehensive picture of one of Hardy's lifelong admirers. Graves emerged here as a man of unusual learning, difficult in human relationships and willfully erratic in critical judgment, and as a dedicated and fastidious poetic craftsman. Peter Alexander's Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography afforded a vivid portrait of a combative, controversial eccentric who was also a fine lyric poet. With full access to Campbell's papers, the biographer explored with equal penetration the riddling contradictions of Campbell's personality and the merits of his verse. The fourth and final volume of Anthony Powell's memoirs, The Strangers All Are Gone, contained tributes to friends and fellow writers, theater talk, and travel reminiscences; Powell again afforded the pleasure of identifying the originals of characters in his novels. John Osborne's autobiography, A Better Class of Person, covered his first 27 years, preceding the triumphant success of Look Back in Anger, and described with verve and humor the events and personalities of his lower-middle-class childhood and of his early struggles in the theater.

337

Drama. Several plays this year revived the period of World War II. The scene of Edward Bond's Summer was a European Communist country once occupied by the Germans. Bond's continuing concern with problems of social inequality and class conflict was played out through a meeting after 40 years between two women, mistress and servant, and their sense of mutual betrayal. Summit Conference, by Robert David Macdonald, was another political play with female protagonists. Set in Berlin in 1941, it envisaged an increasingly acrimonious conversation between the mistresses of Hitler and Mussolini, whose respective identities the two women gradually assumed. The late C. P. Taylor's penultimate play, Good, offered an altogether more credible and theatrically effective treatment of a similar subject. This was a toughly ironic portrait of a Nazi SS officer plausibly justifying atrocity in the name of social and cultural 'good.' The gifted dramatist's last play, Bring Me Sunshine, Bring Me Smiles, reexamined in a domestic context, with trenchant yet tolerant humor, the psychology and practical impact of the character who misguidedly 'means well.' Michael Frayn's Noises Off portrayed the misadventures of a theatrical touring company. In this skillful and witty entertainment, the actors' tangled amorous affairs began to resemble those of the characters they played. The Understanding, by novelist Angela Huth, about an elderly man's love for his wife's sister, was a poignant study in the nuances of human relationships. An acute anatomy of English public-school manners and morals, Julian Mitchell's Another Country traced the shaping of a future spy out of an ambitious but rebellious misfit. Colin Welland in Roll On Four O'Clock again depicted the humors and rigors of school life—this time in the state educational system—with shrewdly observant precision. In Caritas, Arnold Wesker seemed to desert the contemporary scene to recreate the career of a young medieval anchoress at the time of Wat Tyler's Peasants' Revolt. Clearly, however, her situation was intended to reflect our own, six centuries later: the protagonist, walled up in retreat from a changing world, was shown as refusing to confront the realities and accept the challenges of the human struggle.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

338

1983: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1983: Literature, English Several of Britain's most eminent writers, including Anthony Powell, Graham Greene, and Iris Murdoch, made literary news with new novels. William Golding, however, captured the headlines by winning the Nobel Prize for literature. The theater was dominated by probing dramas, many of them with political themes, that raised more questions than they answered. One of the major English literary figures of the century, Rebecca West, died at the age of 90. Fiction. Astutely updating Cervantes, Graham Greene, in Monsignor Quixote, followed the picaresque adventures of a Spanish village priest tilting at modern windmills with hapless and disarming innocence. His travels in an ancient car called Rocinante with his Sancho, a Communist exmayor, were entertainingly alternated with the friends' lively discussion of their faiths and doubts. Another veteran novelist, Anthony Powell, likewise deflated various contemporary attitudes with wicked acuteness in O, How the Wheel Becomes It! The story explored one of his favorite themes: the staid apparent safety of maturity unexpectedly invaded and plagued by embarrassing reminders of youthful indiscretion. The Philosopher's Pupil, by Iris Murdoch, combined witty ironies of incident and relationship with the interplay of serious ideas. In portraying a crisis between the pupil, George, and his teacher, Rozanov, Murdoch probed with inventiveness and penetration her central question— the permissible limits of personal freedom. Malcolm Bradbury's brilliant satire Rates of Exchange depicted the social, political, and economic confusions of an imaginary East European state, seen through the eyes of a mild English linguist bored by yet another cultural lecture tour. Farcical comedies of harassment and mishap were enacted in a bleak terrain of ubiquitous spying, with citizens so warily adept at deception that role-playing had grown indistinguishable from reality. The Little Drummer Girl, by John Le Carré, made similar explicit associations between acting and espionage. This tensely gripping narrative surveyed conflicts of loyalty in a young actress of radical sympathies who was kidnapped by an Israeli intelligence unit and planted as an agent among Palestinian terrorists. Fay Weldon's The President's Child also concerned itself with sinister political intrigues. In this case, these surrounded a young boy, the product of a love affair between a liberated London woman and an American presidential candidate whose powerful backers regarded the scandal as a threat to his political success. In The Handyman, the seasoned feminist novelist Penelope Mortimer portrayed the problems of a timid widow—a misanthropic neighbor and unwelcome attentions from her odd-job man—in a rural retreat sadly different from her anticipated village idyll.

339

Another accomplished woman novelist, Anita Brookner, again surveyed the plight of the woman alone in Look at Me. The sadness of solitude and pain of rejection were poignantly communicated through the experiences of a reclusive London librarian, initially dazzled and then disillusioned by her relationship with a charming but unprincipled couple. There were two notable novels about the troubles of modern Ireland. William Trevor's Fools of Fortune, an elegiac chronicle of unfulfilled love, stemmed from the brutal destruction of a boy's home and family by British soldiers in 1918. Cal, a powerful second novel by Bernard Mac Laverty, depicted contemporary Ulster—both its fear and violence and the serenity of its farms and fields—with vivid, sensuous immediacy. In Wise Virgin, A. N. Wilson savored the ironic situation of a middle-aged scholar, once promiscuous and now blind, at work on a medieval tract on virginity with the help of two young women. The novel combined cool, laconic wit with compassionate insights into the nature of love and affliction. Biography. In The Life of John Milton, A. N. Wilson also provided the most provocative biography of the year. It was widely attacked as a partial and speculative portrait that attempted to refurbish the image of Milton the man at the expense of historical accuracy. David Cecil's perceptive A Portrait of Charles Lamb appreciatively examined the life and work of this gentle, ironic man—his many literary friendships, the intimate quality of his essays, and the quiet stoicism with which he confronted the recurring specter of family madness. In Robert Browning: A Life Within Life, Donald Thomas provided a solidly informative study of his subject's energetic personality, relations with his contemporaries, and poetic originality. The immense popularity of the contemporary poet John Betjeman was attributed by Patrick TaylorMartin, in his comprehensive appraisal John Betjeman: His Life and Work, less to the poet's elements of 'irony and subtle self-mockery' than to the sincerity of his expression of common emotions. In Clinging to the Wreckage, the contemporary playwright John Mortimer drew a witty and memorable self-portrait. An Orderly Man, the third installment of Dirk Bogarde's memoirs, recorded his withdrawal in middle age from a successful acting career to rural seclusion as a writer in the south of France. A third lively theatrical autobiography was Laurence Olivier's candid and zestful Confessions of an Actor. Drama. Two new plays by leading British dramatists contained striking similarities of theme and structure. The double setting of David Hare's A Map of the World was a Bombay conference on world poverty and a film studio where the event and its participants were re-created as a movie—with sharp shifts of emphasis. This thought-provoking play, with its dramatic clash of personalities and attitudes, was pervaded by the author's awareness of issues clouded and principles flawed by human fallibility. Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing likewise presented the challenge of unresolved questions and recognized how often, and how far, private motives may prompt an apparently impersonal public commitment. Stoppard's ironic juxtaposition of the stage fictions of his playwright hero with the realities of the character's domestic life lent his verbal dexterity a new dimension of emotional truth.

340

There were two new plays by Caryl Churchill, one of the most vigorous and interesting of recent women writers for the British stage. Top Girls employed the device of an all-female dinner party (with guests ranging through fiction and history from Chaucer's patient Griselda to the apocryphal Pope Joan and a Victorian lady traveler), given by a tough, successful businesswoman who is sharply contrasted with her meekly struggling sister. The play questioned the worth of feminine freedom that sacrifices the weak or stupid to the clever and aggressive. Churchill's other play, Fen, set among farm workers, explored kindred feminist dilemmas: women struggling for liberation yet emotionally unable to break the traditional bonds that finally destroy them. Another politically combative dramatist, Howard Barker, offered in Victory a sardonic period piece about Restoration England that the Observer critic aptly described as 'a state-of-the-nation play in wigs.' A 'history play' in a different vein, Peter Ustinov's wittily ingenious Beethoven's Tenth, envisaged the return of the master to contemporary London and his impact upon the household of an embittered music critic, his composer son, and his ex-singer wife. The contemporary threat of nuclear war was the subject of two arresting new plays. Raymond Briggs, in When the Wind Blows, starkly depicted the uncomprehending yet stoical response of an unimaginative English couple confronted by the reality of holocaust. Peter Whelan's subtly disturbing Clay more obliquely concerned the overshadowed future hopes and plans of four middle-aged childhood friends and their families. Way Upstream, by Alan Ayckbourn, also featured a foursome—two business partners and their wives claustrophobically closeted together on a boating holiday. The nautical situation provided full scope for comic incident and for Ayckbourn's characteristically wry, sly observation of the frustrations of suburban marriage. Harold Pinter's Other Places was equally typical of its author's insidiously disquieting view of life. The longest and best of these three short pieces, A Kind of Alaska, movingly depicted the predicament of a sleeping-sickness victim, waking after nearly 30 years to the poignant realization of youth slipped away unspent. Nobel laureate. William Golding, who in 1954 achieved fame with Lord of the Flies, a novel that plumbs the mystery of human evil, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy praised Golding's novels for their 'realistic narrative art' and 'universality of myth.' The choice of Golding — who has written short stories, plays, and a book of criticism in addition to his novels, among them Darkness Visible (1979) and Rites of Passage (1980)—came as a surprise to many, who had expected that a more prominent British writer would be singled out. One academy member, breaking a tradition of silence, openly disagreed with the decision. Obituary. Rebecca West, who died March 15, was a shrewdly observant commentator on the contemporary scene—whether reporting the Nuremberg trials or analyzing the psychology of treason. But she will best be remembered for two books: The Fountain Overflows, a classic novel of childhood, and her epic celebration of Serbian nationalism, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

341

1984: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1984: Literature, English Fiction. Inevitably, much was expected this year from 1983 Nobel Prize-winner William Golding. But critics were puzzled and disconcerted by his new novel, The Paper Men, a fairly damning comment on the literary life. In this pessimistic, black-comic saga of flight and pursuit through half of Europe, the protagonists were an aging English literary lion and an obnoxious American academic determined to become the other's authorized biographer; the characters seemed to be two sides of one unwholesome personality and were locked in a conflict for dominance. The theme of Kingsley Amis's first novel in four years, Stanley and the Women, made the book an entertainingly provocative companion piece for his earlier misogynistic comedy, Jake's Thing. Man-as-victim-of-woman was embodied in the new novel by the hapless advertising manager of a daily tabloid. Also uncompromising in dealing with the war between the sexes was Fay Weldon's Gothic fable The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, which charted the remorseless course of a plain wife's monstrously efficient revenge. Relief from rancor was provided by the exhilarating satirical comedy of Small World, by David Lodge. This was a witty, wickedly observant campus novel immensely inventive in the permutations of its complicated plot. Two haunting short novels memorably evoked some of the 'horrors of our time,' in a phrase from Elaine Feinstein's The Border. The struggles of her Jewish intellectuals, Austrian refugees in Paris in the late 1930s, to come to terms with their heritage, their times, and their relationships were vividly recreated in diary extracts, letters, and a handful of poems. In The Pork Butcher, David Hughes depicted an elderly German compulsively driven by memories of an episode in wartime France to return to the scene of his guilt. Other ghosts beckoned disturbingly from the past in Desmond Hogan's A Curious Street. Ancestral images from Irish history haunted its Anglo-Irish hero, a soldier in Belfast struggling to reconcile his dual heritage. Belfast was also the setting for Bernard Mac Laverty's Secrets, a volume of evocative short stories by one of Northern Ireland's best younger writers. The Last Romantic out of Belfast, by Sam Keery, was a promising, rather Joycean first novel of an Irish boyhood. Cold Heaven, by the veteran Irish novelist Brian Moore, portrayed with atmospheric brilliance the workings of supernatural influences on the life of a woman who continues to rebel against God though her husband has apparently risen from the dead. There was solid new work from established English novelists. Against a background of the woolen trade in the north of England in the late 1960's, John Braine's The Two of Us followed the vicissitudes of a family business at odds with the new technology. Present Times, by David Storey, was set in Yorkshire in the 1980's; its central character was a middle-aged ex-rugby star reduced to writing sports reports for the local paper, eventually laid off, and victimized by everyone around him. Equally patient and put-upon, the headmaster-hero of Stanley

342

Middleton's excellent The Daysman proved somewhat more successful at coping with contemporary pressures and problems. The protagonist of Muriel Spark's The Only Problem was a scholar writing about the Book of Job and attempting to live a secluded, quiet life. But he must deal with his own suffering, the increasing messiness of his life, and all the comforters and persecutors who come to talk about his wife-turned-terrorist. Biography. In A Cup of News, by Charles Nicholl, the 16th-century satirist Thomas Nashe sprang to exuberant life as poet, playwright, novelist, anti-Puritan pamphleteer, and lively chronicler of the seamy side of Elizabethan London. Brian Fothergill's The Strawberry Hill Set was a well-documented study of Horace Walpole and the writers, artists, politicians, men-about-town, and society women who surrounded this most elegant, witty, and prolific letter writer and keen observer of the 18th century. Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, by David Bromwich, gave comprehensive account of the influential essayist's philosophical ideas and fierce radicalism, as well as his relationships with his contemporaries, including the Romantic poets. In Thomas Carlyle, Fred Kaplan portrayed a 19th-century crusading moralist of much more conservative beliefs. This authoritative biography of the cantankerous sage of Chelsea concentrated on his life and character rather than on his work. The relationship of Thomas and Jane Carlyle was one of five Victorian marriages under scrutiny by Phyllis Rose in Parallel Lives, a judicious and psychologically acute survey of domestic struggles for power. The other partnerships were those of George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin. Norman Page's A. E. Housman examined in detail the undergraduate relationship that charged Housman's verse with such emotional intensity. Page stressed Housman's intellectual integrity and achievements in classical studies but sadly undervalued his powers as a poet. Edmund Gosse, by Ann Thwaite, drew upon new material to supplement Gosse's own classic self-portrait in Father and Son. Thwaite's conscientious, informative study continued the story from boyhood through a career indefatigable in pursuit of worldly success that culminated in a venerated old age. Anthony West's vigorous and unusual biography of his father H. G. Wells, in which West seemed bent on rehabilitating his father's public image, was perhaps flawed by pervasive rancor against his mother, Rebecca West; nevertheless, it presented a vivid and intimate picture of a major literary figure. A. N. Wilson's Hilaire Belloc provided an appropriately energetic and entertaining account of the colorful career of a combative, many-faceted personality, in his varied roles as satirist, journalist, Catholic apologist, insatiable traveler, and family man. The publication of Hilary Spurling's impressive Secrets of a Woman's Heart coincided with the centenary of the birth of her subject, the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett. This concluding installment of a two-volume biography chronicled the events and friendships of the writer's comparatively placid later years and perceptively explored her inner life. Barbara Pym, whose novels have received wide and much-deserved acclaim since their rediscovery in the late 1970's, told her own story with wit and grace in A Very Private View: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters.

343

Drama.

Hugh Whitemore's Pack of Lies was the year's most successful straight play. Based on the story of a London couple discovered to be Soviet spies, it compassionately portrayed their agonized conflicts of loyalty, in the choice between betrayal of friendship and patriotic duty. Tom and Viv, by Michael Hastings, likewise perceptively probed the painful ambivalences of human relationships. It depicted the gradual disintegration of T. S. Eliot's first marriage and implicitly linked the poet's private grief with his religious faith and with the despair voiced in his poetry. Several plays by established dramatists shared a common theme: the discrepancy between human aspiration and its fulfillment. True purpose eluded the weary hero of television writer Dennis Potter's first play for the stage, Sufficient Carbohydrate, amid the drunken and amorous antics of two business executives and their wives on holiday on a Greek island. The Common Pursuit, by Simon Gray, wryly followed the failure over 15 years of five Cambridge schoolmates to fulfill early promise and scholarly aims. The disappointed protagonist of Michael Frayn's ironically titled Benefactors was an architect whose idealistic liberal intentions were constantly thwarted. And Brian Thompson's Turning Over juxtaposed a London cutting room where a film was being edited with an India very different from the novice scriptwriter's naive imaginings. The indefatigable Alan Ayckbourn, in Intimate Exchanges, offered no less than eight full-length alternative versions of the unpredictable adventures of a regal but sprightly headmaster's wife. This prolific dramatist's other new play, A Chorus of Disapproval, concerned the disillusioning education of a stage-struck innocent enmeshed in the devious schemes of an amateur dramatic society rehearsing The Beggar's Opera. David Pownall's portrait of Stalin in Master Class, set in the Kremlin during the cultural crackdown of 1948, explored the psychology of dictatorship and the repression of artistic freedom in a Communist state. Terry Johnson, in his bizarre and chilling Cries From the Mammal House, used allegory to convey his cynical view of Britain today. In a run-down zoo of dying animals, the sole hope for survival is a conservationist's rediscovery of the proverbially extinct dodo.

Obituaries. John Betjeman, Britain's poet laureate since 1972, died on May 19 at the age of 77. Betjeman's melodious expression of common experience made his work accessible and popular. All he wrote bore the hallmark of his quizzical, gently ironic personality, whether he was recalling lost childhood, celebrating Victorian architecture, or observing with shrewd, affectionate amusement English suburban and country-house society. Born in 1906, the same year as Betjeman, William Empson studied under I. A. Richards at Cambridge and became one of the most influential literary critics and important poets of his generation. He died on April 15. Empson's ideas in seminal works like Seven Types of Ambiguity and The Structure of Complex Words shaped the course of critical thinking far beyond the 1930's, and his poems are considered classics. Welsh playwright and author Richard Llewellyn, who died at the age of 76 on November 30, 1983, was best known for his novel How Green Was My Valley. J. B. Priestley, the outspoken

344

and prolific playwright and novelist, gained recognition for the novels The Good Companions and Angel Pavement and the plays Dangerous Corner and An Inspector Calls. He died on August 14 at 89. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

345

1985: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1985: Literature, English Historical works that evoked ancient Rome, wilderness Canada, and the horrors of World War II were prominent among new British novels. Biographies provided fascinating new insights into the lives of leading literary figures. Fiction. The Kingdom of the Wicked, by Anthony Burgess, was an ebulliently energetic historical chronicle on an epic scale. Its title refers to ancient Rome, and the vigorous narrative, peopled with many familiar biblical figures and related by a disinterested but tolerant witness, reinterpreted the beginnings of Christianity at war with Jewish tradition, imperial corruption, and its own doubts. Brian Moore in Black Robe, set in 17th-century Canada, also depicted conflict between sharply opposed beliefs and customs. His central characters were Jesuit priests on a perilous mission into the territory of Indian tribal chiefs. The novel's strength lay in its ability to identify with both attitudes of mind. J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, published late in 1984, was based on the author's youthful experience during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. The indignities of war, the impotence of its victims, and the ruthlessness of the human instinct for survival, as observed by an alert and resourceful boy, were documented with telling precision and authority. Another wartime drama, Graham Greene's The Tenth Man, was originally written as a film script in 1944, then forgotten until its recent publication. This taut, compelling tale, about French prisoners drawing lots to decide which should face a German firing squad, explored the later attempted expiation of the guilt-stricken lawyer who had bought himself off. Quinx, by Lawrence Durrell, was the fifth and final volume of the 'Avignon Quintet,' which had occupied the author for the past decade. A. S. Byatt's Still Life was likewise part of a larger contemporary canvas with an author-figure as protagonist. This second installment of her ambitious trilogy, which began with The Virgin in the Garden, surveyed varied social worlds with witty acuteness and an abundance of literary allusion. The difficulty of goodness had been the central theme of two major woman novelists. In Iris Murdoch's The Good Apprentice—a novel of characteristically intricate interrelationships—the struggle in our nature between the virtue we naturally aspire to and the evil which so often defeats it, was exemplified in the characters and situations of two student half-brothers. Meanwhile, the title character in Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist was a hapless revolutionary whose political ideals incongruously conflicted with feminine domestic instinct and inclination, incurring the recurrent wrath of her more dedicated comrades. The book was a wry comedy of her desperate efforts to reconcile these opposing sides of her nature. Family and Friends, by Anita Brookner, traced the fortunes of a worldly yet vulnerable East European family settled in England. Like her late 1984 novel Hotel du Lac, this book— 346

Brookner's fifth—possessed her customary combination of poise and disciplined elegance with a sensibility often painfully intense. Several novels by distinguished women writers vividly evoked foreign backgrounds. Janice Elliott's deftly organized The Italian Lesson contained pervasive echoes of E. M. Forster, updated to include such topicalities as terrorist bombs, and showed the clarifying magic of Tuscany at work upon the problems of a diverse group of holidaymakers. The scene of The Swimming Pool Season, by Rose Tremain, alternated between Oxford and a sleepy French village. Its mood was one of elegiac melancholy; its middle-aged heroine finds late fulfillment as a painter. In According to Mark, published late in 1984, Penelope Lively portrayed with humorous shrewdness the experience of a biographer writing the life of a secretive Edwardian man of letters. Mark's researches yielded unexpected revelations and chastening lessons in selfknowledge, as he found his imagination increasingly obsessed by his subject. Concerned with less bizarre events, Valley of Decision, by Stanley Middleton, was a quiet, laconic story of crisis in the marriage of two talented amateur musicians, involving a painful choice between personal and professional fulfillment. Biography. The Life of Jane Austen, by John Halperin, concentrated on the sharper aspects of Austen's personality: the tartness in her wit, a detected dislike of her hypochondriac mother, and the politics of money and marriage as a dominant theme in her life as well as her novels. The substantial study was a salutary corrective to the idealized view of unruffled domestic benevolence encouraged by members of Jane's family and by other biographers. In Dorothy Wordsworth, Robert Gittings and Jo Manton provided a more comprehensive picture than Ernest de Selincourt's over half a century earlier. With sympathetic insight they traced the evolution of the spirited author of the Journals, who supported her brother William through the scandal of his love affair with Annette Vallon and defended his early republicanism and anticlericalism, but later became conventionally religious and politically reactionary. In Immortal Boy: A Portrait of Leigh Hunt, Ann Blainey provided the first biography of its subject in more than 50 years. The emphasis was less on political than on domestic detail, including Hunt's touching love for an ailing wife and a horde of unruly children who provoked Byron's wrathful ridicule. In his study of Edward Fitzgerald, With Friends Possessed, Robert Bernard Martin drew a satisfying portrait of this paradoxical figure from the Victorian Age. Idle yet industrious, rich in friendship yet prey to melancholic loneliness, Fitzgerald was a mediocre poet who, as translator of Omar Khayyām, produced one of the most popular works in the language. In John Ruskin: The Early Years, 1819-1859, Tim Hilton offers a vigorous, conscientiously researched portrayal of another eminent Victorian, focusing on Ruskin's religious beliefs and early politics, the fiasco of his marriage, and his dealings with the painter Joseph Turner. Among several enjoyable biographies of 20th-century writers, Michael Parnell's Eric Linklater, published late in 1984, was the first serious attempt to do full justice to the versatile talent of this undervalued Scottish author. Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life, by Lyndall Gordon, also published in late 1984, explored the tensions rooted in Woolf's unhappy early years, which pursued her through the rest of her career. In Peter Ackroyd's T. S. Eliot, another work from late 1984, the influence of Eliot's family background, of his unhappy first marriage, and of the

347

recurring pattern of hard work and ill health in his life, were scrupulously and skillfully related to his writings. A less private poetic personality was depicted by Dorothy J. Farnan in Auden in Love. The author herself first met Auden and Chester Kallman at Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1941 and later married Kallman's father. Her candid account, drawing on previously unpublished correspondence and verse, was the fullest yet of the long, devoted relationship between Auden and Kallman. Among notable biographies of theater people, Stanley Ayling's A Portrait of Sheridan charted the meteoric rise and fall of the picturesque 18th-century personality Richard Sheridan from his early fame as a playwright to a squalid old age dogged by drink and debt. In Lady Gregory: The Woman Behind the Irish Renaissance, Mary Lou Kohfeldt paid a lively and well-informed tribute to the cofounder of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, utilizing diaries that recorded nearly 50 years of literary, political, and social endeavor. Drama. The punning title of Howard Brenton's Bloody Poetry, produced late in 1984, crystallized its theme: poetry's dual potential, as either the coward's wordy refuge from decisive action or the weapon of revolution and instrument of society's destruction and renewal. Against a background of early 19th-century Switzerland and Italy, Shelley, Byron, and their attendant women move about, haunted by ghosts of those destroyed by the poets' self-centered pursuit of freedom. The prolific Brenton was also coauthor, with David Hare, of another of the year's most provocative plays. Pravda anatomized the exercise and abuse of editorial power in the press, as exemplified by a predatory tycoon who swallows up tabloid and 'quality' newspapers alike, trampling underfoot the feeblest sign of independence or opposition. For all its exuberant humor, this tract for the times was a scathing indictment of moral apathy both in journalism and in a readership that acquiesces in its own manipulation. Deadlines, by Stephen Wakelam, took another disenchanted look at the media. Depicting an unemployed teenager's suicide in a strikebound mining town, and its progressive glib distortion in radio and television reports, this hard-hitting play carried the conviction of documentary truth. Unemployment was also featured in Stanley Price's Why Me?, which observed the effects of economic recession on a middle-class marriage. The wry comedy of a redundant husband's rebellious humiliation at his wife's newfound financial success sounded bleak undertones of frustration and despair. Another topical theme was investigated by Louis Page in Golden Girls, which portrayed the experiences of a group of women relay runners gathered in Greece for a race being sponsored by a big shampoo company. The team doctor's nostalgic lament for vanished Olympic ideals was sharply contrasted with contemporary realities: the exploitation of sport by big business, personal tensions generated in competitors by publicity, and an insidious overall corruption of values. My Brother's Keeper, by Nigel Williams, focused on a family reunion at the deathbed of a retired actor, with his children invoking the past in a powerful litany of alternating accusation and forgiveness. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

348

1986: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1986: Literature, English The historical novel continued to flourish as British writers applied to it a refreshing variety of tone and treatment. At the beginning of the year the literary world noted the passing of three men long prominent. Fiction. Bamber Gascoigne's Cod Streuth, a witty, urbane parody of a journal purporting to be written on tobacco leaves, concerned the experiences of a prim 16th-century French Calvinist captured by Brazilian cannibals — who, mistaking the tattered remains of his Rabelais for holy writ, elected him their priest-king. In The Seven Ages, Eva Figes took a more earnest approach to history. Her view of England since the Middle Ages from the standpoint of woman, perennial victim of the plundering, predatory male, necessarily subordinated characterization and story line to its feminist message. Timothy Mo's An Insular Possession was a substantial, meticulously documented chronicle of the mid-19th-century Opium Wars between Britain and China, seen mainly through the eyes of an Irish painter and two American newspaper editors opposed to the squalid politics of the drug trade. The Fisher King, Anthony Powell's first full-length novel in 11 years, had its roots in Arthurian legend but was set in the present, tracing parallels between the personalities of the Grail legend and a group of modern passengers on a cruise to the Orkneys. The scene of Fay Weldon's wittily ferocious fable for the times, The Shrapnel Academy, was a military training establishment. A weekend dinner party, with a horde of Third World refugees swarming below stairs, ended appropriately in annihilation for the quarrelsome assembled representatives of modern society. Hilary Mantel in Vacant Possession also offered a sharp-edged contemporary satire, which combined acute observation of current welfare-state ironies with an ingenious, chilling black comedy about an ex-mental patient's sinister revenges. The Innocents, by Carolyn Slaughter, was a compassionate anatomy of another urgently topical problem. Private pressures upon a white woman farmer, her lawyer brother, their black childhood friend, and a bewildered adolescent ward agonizing over her racial identity were made to reflect with painful immediacy the public situation in South Africa today. The hero of Stanley Middleton's 25th novel, An After-Dinner's Sleep, was a retired educator, prompted by the unexpected renewal of a past love relationship to reassess his outwardly successful career with profound dissatisfaction. Three accomplished novels by women also had domestic backgrounds and concerned the relationship between parents and children. Margaret Forster's Private Papers depicted the conflict between a mother and the daughter who discovered her hidden memoir, and cleverly communicated their antagonism by interspersing pages from the journal with the daughter's caustically contradictory version of events. Patricia Barrie's moving first novel Devotions also 349

employed the device of alternating narrators effectively, in a quiet, restrained portrayal of a daughter nursing without rancor a fiercely embittered widowed father crippled by a stroke. Last Dance With You, by Grace Ingoldby, likewise perceptively observed the plight of the parentdominated, in this case a son who returns home after his father's suicide to become remorsefully imprisoned by the past. The heroine of Barbara Pym's final posthumous novel An Academic Question, the wife of an unengaging historian, observed with candor and wry wit the humors and unrest of life at a provincial university. Biography. Richard Mabey's well-informed portrait, Gilbert White, depicted a robust, convivial character, worldlier than the familiar rustic-recluse figure, and appreciatively assessed, in the context of his time, the merits of the man who 'studied the natural world like a scientist but was involved with it like a romantic.' In The Bondage of Love: The Life of Mrs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Molly Lefebure also presented her subject in an unaccustomed light, setting out successfully to rescue the reputation of one she considered 'the most maligned of great men's wives.' Two poets killed in World War I were the subjects of biographies published late in 1985. The short life of Charles Hamilton Sorley was ably reconstructed by Jean Moorcroft Wilson, with generous reference to the letters of this modest, admirable young man whose attitude to war was closer to Wilfred Owen's than to Rupert Brooke's. In Edward Thomas: A Portrait, R. George Thomas included much hitherto unpublished material in reminiscences from relatives and friends. One of these friends, the lively though perennially immature Eleanor Farjeon, was in turn vigorously delineated by her niece Annabel Farjeon in Morning Has Broken. Michael Ffinch, in his substantial, diligently researched biography G. K. Chesterton, celebrated an engagingly ebullient personality, his many-sided literary achievement, and his invigorating ability to sustain entertaining public debate on such serious subjects as politics, morals, and religion. Two eminent woman novelists were commemorated in Robert Liddell's double portrait Elizabeth and Ivy. The liveliest glimpses of Ivy Compton-Burnett came from her friend and admirer, Elizabeth Taylor, who emerged as vividly as her subject in her anecdotes of visits and conversations. In Helen Waddell, by Dame Felicitas Corrigan, another notable modern woman of letters was the subject of a solid and illuminating biography. The author of such classics as The Wandering Scholars and Peter Abelard was revealed as a character as memorable as her work: exuberantly generous and unspoiled by success, with a warmth, wit, and capacity for affection matching immense but lightly worn medieval learning. Outstanding among theatrical 'lives' was Alec Guinness's Blessings in Disguise, published late in 1985. Preferring with disarming modesty to write about friends rather than about himself, he included many amusing, incisive cameos of — among others — Edith Sitwell, Edith Evans, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Tyrone Guthrie. In Agate James Harding reanimated with deftness and verve the life, times, and extravagant, irascible personality of critic James Agate, a legendary figure in modern British theater.

350

Drama. Over the past year the more important British playwrights were noticeably preoccupied with the past, and with relating historical backgrounds and events to our own time. The sardonic commentator in Peter Shaffer's Yonadab, which appeared at the end of 1985, shifted continually between the play's Old Testament action and present-day references; his character, caught between skepticism and belief, was as identifiably 'modern' as that of the ruthlessly manhating feminist Tamar. Parallels between the present situation in Northern Ireland and that of Saxon farmers in Roman Britain were implicit in a strange, dark allegory, The Saxon Shore, by David Rudkin, himself an Ulsterman. The scene and themes of John Clifford's Lucy's Play, set in Sicily, again evoked familiar echoes. In The Castles, the best of three challenging new plays from the prolific Howard Barker late in 1985, battle-weary warriors returned home from the Crusades to find their English village taken over by women and turned into a utopia of peace and equality. Inevitably the unneeded males regained dominance and transformed the village into a huge fortress, with war imminent and jets screaming overhead. In the wake of Amadeus came two more plays about composers. Julian Mitchell's After Aida concentrated on the end of Verdi's unproductive nine-year exile on his farm following the opera's opening, and on the strenuous efforts of family and friends to lure the morose master back to the theater. Café Puccini, by Robin Ray, depicted another gloomy musical hero, reciting the woes of his professional vicissitudes and the deterioration of his love affair. Anthony Minghella's Made in Bangkok skillfully assembled an assorted group of tourists on a package holiday to show the impact on their lives, characters, and hidden desires of a distant country exploited by tourism and so poor that 'everyone is for sale.' Deaths. Philip Larkin died on December 2, 1985, at the age of 63. Although he wrote two accomplished early novels, he was most keenly missed as a poet portraying recognizable preoccupations: work, love, failure, and fear of age and death. Larkin's distinctive contribution lay not in quantity of output (he published only four volumes of verse), but in a quality of vision reflecting the mood of our time — sad, skeptical, ironic, and relentlessly honest. Robert Graves died on December 7, 1985, at the age of 90 at his home in Deyá, Majorca, where he had lived since 1929. He succeeded W. H. Auden as professor of poetry at Oxford in 1961, and was often regarded as the finest of modern love poets. His versatility was demonstrated by an arresting memoir of the First World War, Goodbye to All That, formidable classical and biblical scholarship, provocative (sometimes prejudiced) literary criticism, and the historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God. Novelist and playwright John Braine died on October 28 at age 64. He was a leading figure among the 'Angry Young Men' of the 1950's, who were disenchanted with the class system. Although for over four decades an American citizen, Christopher Isherwood claims a place among English authors for his prewar work, including Journey to a War, a collaboration with his friend Auden (as were three verse plays during the 1930's), and his early novels Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood died in January at the age of 81.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

————————————————————————————————————— 351

1987: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1987: Literature, English Fiction. In Close Quarters, Nobel Prize-winner William Golding provided a sequel to his Rites of Passage (awarded the prestigious Booker McConnell Prize for 1980). This second volume of a seafaring trilogy set during the Napoleonic War, with a keen sense of period atmosphere and vividly precise naval detail, continued the journal kept by a young prospective colonial administrator, sailing among a shipload of emigrants on a voyage to Australia. Another distinguished veteran novelist, Kingsley Amis, portrayed in The Old Devils the bibulous decrepitude of a group of cronies in a Wales woefully changed from the country of their youth. At once sad and grimly comic, its relentless honesty concerning the indignities of old age was tempered by compassion. The book garnered Amis the 1986 Booker award. Also published late in 1986, and equally characteristic, Anita Brookner's stylish, melancholy A Misalliance was full of sadly ironic self-perception about the inner desolation of a fastidious, elegant divorcée who 'occupied her time most usefully in keeping feelings at bay' with cultural visits and good works. The Radiant Way, by Margaret Drabble, presented an ambitious but pessimistic view of Britain in the 1980's, seen through the eyes and lives of three woman friends — a psychotherapist, a teacher, and an art historian — from very different social backgrounds, who set out in their varying ways to understand, interpret, or change the unsatisfactory shape of things. The heroine of Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger, old and near death, also strove to make sense of our century, through reliving her past experiences as a war correspondent in the African desert, bereft lover of an officer killed in action, unmarried mother, and distinguished popular historian; Moon Tiger won the 1987 Booker prize. Another novel of fine sensibility was Jennifer Johnston's Fool's Sanctuary, which explored facets of the situation of her native Ireland. Against a 1920's background in an old country house, she sympathetically delineated the tormenting dilemma of an ardent young Republican fatally torn between political ideals and loyalty to the Anglo-Irish family of the girl he loved. Also acutely attuned to the problems of pain, Circles of Deceit, by Nina Bawden, showed emotional deception echoing artistic. Her painter-hero, faking reality as a successful copyist of old masters, was in his turn deceived by both his wives and agonizingly unable to communicate with a loved schizophrenic son. The twin themes of The Heart of the Country, Fay Weldon's latest tract for the times, were the now familiar 'wickedness of men and the wretchedness of women,' and the ills of our society. With lively inventive wit she charted the difficult progress of a helpless young woman, abandoned by her husband and then befriended by an aggressively cynical single mother, who learns to cope in the cold hard world of predatory men and the welfare state. Crusading feminism recurred in an unusual guise in The Book of Mrs. Noah, by Michèle Roberts. Her eponymous librarian-heroine, an archetypal everywoman obsessed with the wrongs of her sex, conjured up an ark and peopled it with female discontents endlessly 352

debating their grievances as writers, wives, mothers, and social outcasts. Another original fantasy, Witchcraft, by Nigel Williams, concerned the inexplicable haunting of a hack screenwriter by the nagging ghost of a Puritan witch-hunter. This accusing revenant preyed on the unfortunate hero's girlfriend as well as his wife, finally driving the writer into mental breakdown. Malcolm Bradbury's hero in Cuts pursued a dual career as don and media man. The interplay of financial cuts at the university, editorial cuts in his TV script, and topical news bulletins, formed a caustic commentary on the state of Britain in the mid-1980s. The central character of Stanley Middleton's 26th novel, After a Fashion, was also a lecturer disenchanted with the academic scene. Here, campus situations and personalities again provided ample scope for dry, ironic observation of the complex human comedy. Two accomplished novelists published readable volumes of short stories. The recurring theme of those in Sugar, by A. S. Byatt, was the pervasiveness of the past — family patterns repeated, Jamesian sinister presences, old books reenacted in their readers' experience. The nine stories in Rose Tremain's The Garden of the Villa Mollini subtly explored various aspects of man as gardener attempting to civilize unregenerate nature. Biography. Several substantial biographies were published in late 1986. In a vigorous study of Ben Jonson, by Rosalind Miles, its rumbustious subject — 'passionately kind and angry,' as a contemporary called him — sprang vividly to life in the context of his time. Arthur H. Cash's Laurence Sterne: The Later Years, covering the period between 1760 and 1768, formed the second volume of a biography notable for its energy, diligent research, and meticulous detail. Another 18th-century literary clergyman was the subject of Poet of the Night Thoughts: Edward Young, 1683-1765, in which Harold Forster traced various contradictions in the life, character, and subsequent reputation of a writer whose best-known work achieved immense popularity in its day. Two modern authors were celebrated in first volumes of longer biographies that appeared late in 1986. Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895-1926, by his nephew, Richard Perceval Graves, drew upon diaries, letters, and memoirs by the poet's mother and brothers. Martin Stannard's well-documented Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years, 1903-39 offered interesting new perspectives based on interviews, fresh archive sources, and other previously unpublished material. By contrast, 1987 was less fruitful for biography. Thackeray's Universe, by Catherine Peters, assembled many of her subject's caricatures, family sketches, and illustrations to his own work. These shed new light on Thackeray's writing and perceptively related the women in the life of this 'big, fierce, weeping, hungry man, not a strong one' — as described by Carlyle — to characters in the novels. In her candid, sympathetic, and often witty biography, Rebecca West: A Life, Victoria Glendinning examined some striking inconsistencies in the career, personality, and relationships of this radical political journalist and battling feminist who, in spite of herself, still yearned for the security of dependence on men. Andro Linklater's entertaining biography Compton Mackenzie chronicled the events of a long and crowded life, ranging from intelligence work in Greece during World War I and involvement with the Scottish Nationalists to the writing of novels that increasingly exploited his natural gift for comedy. Another ebullient personality was portrayed in Little Wilson and Big God, the first part of the self-styled 'confessions' of the novelist Anthony Burgess (born Jack Wilson). Backgrounds ranging from Manchester in the 1920s to Malaya in the 1950s, the

353

activities of writing and musical composition, and bibulous and amorous adventures, were recorded with an equally exuberant zest for experience. Drama. Hugh Whitemore's tense and psychologically powerful Breaking the Code, which appeared in late 1986, dramatized the true-life story of the scientist Alan Turing, pioneer of the digital computer, whose cracking of the German Enigma code caused Churchill to declare that no single individual had done more to win Britain's war. Also toward the end of 1986, Alan Ayckbourn's sad yet funny Woman in Mind entered with imaginative sympathy the fantasy world of a provincial vicar's wife, creating for herself an ideal family to compensate for the unhappy inadequacy of her real one. In 1987 this prolific playwright's A Small Family Business depicted the plight of an honest, hapless innocent unexpectedly plunged into the entanglements of fraud and corruption, instigated by most of his relatives in the family furniture firm. In Melon — described by its author as 'the most naked play about emotion I've ever written,' and one of his best — Simon Gray presented a painful and penetrating study of middle-aged marital jealousy, in a self-contained, successful publisher happy enough with his 'open' marriage until discovering himself cuckolded by one of his best friends. Caryl Churchill's Serious Money was aptly prefaced by an extract from 17th-century Thomas Shadwell's The Volunteers, or The Stockjobbers. The target of her combative, hard-hitting play was the tricky, ruthless world of London financial speculation, illegal takeover bids and other dubious deals successfully evading detection, and political chicanery of all kinds. Equally topical and provocative, Fashion, by Doug Lucie, was an astringent satire on another unpalatable aspect of the times: electioneering by commercial sales techniques, with its recognizable cast of predatory prospective candidates and smooth interviewers, high-powered adman profitability into the racket, and former M.P. turned television pundit. In her unusual The Sleep, Claire MacDonald found a modern parallel for the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. A psychiatrist, awakening a woman from 40 years' sleeping sickness, recognized the cruelty of survival for one now aged 60 but believing herself 20. He mercifully allowed his victim to relapse back into the consolations of dream. Portraits, by the veteran dramatist William Douglas Home, and based on the life of Augustus John, began in 1944 and ended with the despair and diminishing talent of the artist's last years. The other central characters were three of his most famous sitters — General Montgomery, fellow painter Matthew Smith, and fashionable photographer Cecil Beaton.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

354

1988: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1988: Literature, English Fiction. Oxford was the setting of John Wain's Where the Rivers Meet. This first volume of a projected trilogy, narrated by a man looking back on his past, charted the difficulties, social antagonisms, and rival claims of sex and study for a working-class scholar with a promising future. In The Silence in the Garden, William Trevor returned to the troubles of his native Ireland, using the background of a handsome but steadily decaying mansion with 'the past clinging like lichen to its walls.' Exploring themes of loneliness, division, and the cruelties sanctioned by religious bigotry, the author traced the political repercussions of the past upon the present through the bleak life stories of one family and its servants. The protagonists of Graham Swift's equally topical Out of This World, whose central character had been a renowned photojournalist, represented three generations painfully caught up in the century's violence, from terrorist assassination to wars the world over. Its skillful interweaving of personal histories with public events and deep concern with some of the main moral dilemmas of our time made this one of the year's most challenging novels. No less disturbing in the impact of its nightmare intensity, Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child depicted a domestic tragedy. Havoc was wrought within a hitherto happy, united family by the advent of a monster in its midst: a dark, troll-like sibling resembling a visitant from another planet, who expressed his nature through chilling savageries and wanton destruction. Several well-known satirical wits provided a welcome relief from gloom. John Mortimer's Summer's Lease had a disarmingly irrepressible septuagenarian grandfather as its hero. It recounted the sleuthing adventures of an English family on holiday in a rented villa in Tuscany, depicting the family members' increasing absorption in the lives and identities of the villa's absent owners. As did some of her earlier novels, Muriel Spark's A Far Cry From Kensington brilliantly recaptured London in the 1950s. Her attractive but corpulent heroine, a war widow and publisher's reader, is portrayed dispensing astringent advice and observing both colleagues and fellow inmates of her seedy rooming house with the author's customary deft and elegant malice. Equally characteristic, Kingsley Amis's Difficulties With Girls was also set in London, but a decade later. It entertainingly traced the further fortunes that befell the hero and heroine (now married) of his earlier novel, Take a Girl Like You. Fay Weldon's latest black comedy, Leader of the Band, concerned the exploits of a glamorous television astronomer in flight from her lurid past. Its grim constituents—a half-mad gypsy mother, a Nazi scientist father, and a heroine who is a product of genetic experiment in a concentration camp—consorted oddly with the brash, determined flippancy of the narrator's style. Two noteworthy novels were published late in 1987. Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton, a dexterous blend of past with present and illusion with reality, was an ebulliently inventive tour de force. 355

It explored the life and literary forgeries of the gifted plagiarist and poet Thomas Chatterton, whom Wordsworth termed a marvelous boy, but who committed suicide in 1770 before the age of 18. Iris Murdoch's 23rd novel, The Book and the Brotherhood, examined the complex relationships and aspirations of a closely knit group of Oxford contemporaries as they approached their middle years. While at university they had subsidized the writing of a 'book the age requires.' The work was still in progress, but its financers no longer shared the ideals of the charismatic author, who proved to be the most destructive element in all their lives. Biography. A volume commemorating the centenary of its subject's death, That Singular Person Called Lear, by Susan Chitty, drew upon Edward Lear's voluminous journals and letters to provide a wellresearched portrait of the artist who gave drawing lessons to Queen Victoria. Though he was a gifted landscape painter, Lear has remained best known for his surrealist nonsense rhymes. Paradoxically, they were created by a lonely, melancholy man during a life full of physical and emotional suffering, spent mainly in exile from England. In her judicious study Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Margaret Forster depicted the poet as a victim of her time and environment, retreating into an imaginary invalidism as a talented woman's protest against Victorian sex discrimination in education. Forster was more sympathetic than others toward the tyrannical paterfamilias, discerning explanations for behavior she did not attempt to excuse; she also shed some illuminating sidelights on Elizabeth's treatment of her maid, Wilson, after the Brownings' elopement. Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom, by Brenda Maddox, charted the progress of an unlikely but deeply rewarding life-partnership. Rich in anecdotal detail gathered from family and friends, this was an impressive full-scale study of the garrulous and gallant hotel chambermaid from Galway, Ireland, first encountered by James Joyce in a Dublin street, who came to be as important to his fiction as in his life. Bevis Hillier's Young Betjeman afforded an affectionate but balanced and immensely detailed picture of Sir John Betjeman, the best-selling English poet since Byron. Betjeman was adept all his life at putting on an act, often caricaturing himself. His biographer succeeded admirably in presenting this histrionic personality in its many apparently conflicting aspects, from benevolent teddy bear to waspish mimic of his critics, from determined enfant terrible to assiduous social climber and conventional churchman. Betjeman's childhood, schooldays, and time at Oxford were vividly recreated. E. Nesbit, once described by Shaw as 'an audaciously unconventional lady,' was the subject of A Woman of Passion, by Julia Briggs. A solid, well-documented biography that appeared at the end of 1987, it effectively linked the life and the works of this spirited fighter for feminine freedom, who was also the author of such well-loved juvenile classics as The Railway Children. Also published late in 1987, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, by Claire Tomalin, celebrated the centenary of the writer's birth in a scholarly, sympathetic reappraisal that afforded fresh insights into the contradictions and conflicts of a woman singularly unfortunate in her relationships. Drama. The eponymous heroine of Hapgood, by Tom Stoppard, was a British intelligence agent working alongside a Soviet-born physicist. He had been her lover and was the unacknowledged father of her adored young son, whom the Soviets were threatening to kidnap. This intricate metaphysical thriller, quickened by the author's familiar verbal and intellectual ingenuity, 356

traced the interplay between appearance and reality in the world of espionage through the imagery of a physics laboratory. Howard Barker's characteristically abrasive The Last Supper, set during the Russian Revolution, envisaged a Christlike prophet summoning his 12 surviving disciples (5 men and 7 women) to share and celebrate his approaching death. Equally typical of this provocative dramatist and his belief that 'life and pain are inextricable' was The Possibilities (published in 1987), a series of ten short one-act war plays depicting different individuals at moments of choice between moral integrity and self-betrayal. Greenland was the final work in Howard Brenton's trilogy of plays, which he described as portraying 'people moving towards a transformation into a utopian state of mind.' In despair over the 1987 British general election result, four widely assorted characters jump into the river Thames. They awaken 700 years later to a brave new world of goodwill, with no competition, profit motive, or punishment. This turns out to be an unsatisfyingly flat and unreal no-man'sland. Based on an actual correspondence extending over many years, The Best of Friends, by Hugh Whitemore, offered an agreeably civilized dramatization of a cherished relationship among three very different public personalities: George Bernard Shaw; Sir Sydney Cockerell, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge; and the Benedictine abbess Dame Laurentia McLachlan. William Humble's Façades afforded another memorable portrait, this one of a single literary figure. It captured with honesty and compassion both the essence of Edith Sitwell's character and the causes of her inner desolation. Set in London during the 1950s, Exceptions, by Geraldine Sherman, explored the uneasy relationship between a disconsolate teenage girl, educated at an English boarding school, and her Viennese Jewish refugee parents, a chef and a waitress. The girl's increasing tolerance and humanity, the product of her unexpected friendship with a retired, unmarried schoolmistress, was portrayed with moving perception. Simon Gray's The Common Pursuit concerned the fluctuating fortunes of an academic journal and its founder's literary friends. It was a substantially rewritten and revitalized version of a less successful earlier play. The new version offered deeper and more universal insights into themes of ambition, compromise, and friendship betrayed. Two interesting plays by leading dramatists appeared late in 1987. Ronald Harwood's eloquent and thought-provoking J. J. Farr concerned a lapsed priest's recovery of his lost faith and his discoveries about the true nature of freedom and imprisonment in the wake of a harrowing experience as a hostage in the Middle East. Lettice and Lovage, by Peter Shaffer, was a shrewdly observed study, both funny and painful, of a bizarre relationship between two characters sharply opposed in their attitudes toward historical accuracy. Sitwell Death. Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, the poet and critic who was the last surviving sibling of Sir Osbert and Dame Edith Sitwell, died in October at the age of 90. For nearly 50 years the eccentric Sitwells were regarded as the first family of English literature.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

357

1989: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1989: Literature, English Fiction. The Booker Prize for the best novel published during the year in Britain went to Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, a by turns humorous and heart-breaking account of an English butler who pondered his life during a vacation in the countryside in 1956. The novel was the third by the Japanese-born Ishiguro, who moved to England with his parents in 1960, when he was five years old. In his energetic 30th novel, Any Old Iron, Anthony Burgess presented main events of the first half of the century through the experiences of a Manchester Jewish narrator and various members of a Welsh-Russian family. From the sinking of the Titanic to the birth of Israel, the scenes showed a keen sense of period and place, with King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, as a ubiquitous symbol of human discord, aggression, and violence. Another vigorous historical imagination animated First Light, by Peter Ackroyd. Focusing on the excavation of a neolithic tomb and simultaneous activity at a nearby astronomical observatory, it illustrated the continuous convergence of past and present, with characters pursuing their individual concerns against cosmic immensities of time and space. In Fire Down Below, the final volume of a trilogy set in Napoleonic times and vivid with nautical detail, William Golding concluded the story of Edmund Talbot's yearlong voyage to Australia to take up a government post there. In a journey of self-discovery, the hero gradually matured from arrogant complacency to greater perception. Likewise the last in a trilogy, Alan Sillitoe's largely autobiographical The Open Door concluded his saga of the Seaton family of Nottingham. This portrayed another young man in the process of change and growth, from a rawly aggressive character returned from war service as a wireless operator with the Royal Air Force to a patient in a TB hospital, avid for self-improvement and determined to become a writer. Vacant Places, by the prolific Stanley Middleton, was also set in the English Midlands. This story of two brothers, a teacher and an accountant, and the vicissitudes of their marriages was recounted with quiet verisimilitude. In Punishments, Francis King explored the painful predicament of a bewildered undergraduate innocent abroad in shattered postwar Germany. Michael's principal punishment was enforced confrontation with his as yet unacknowledged homosexuality. Another was his calculated rejection by the object of his desire, bent upon avenging both English victory and German guilt. One of the central characters in Penelope Lively's Passing On was also homosexual. He and the sister he lived with, both timid and middle-aged, were dominated by the posthumous influence of their mother. The manipulation of the living by the dead and the passing of older ways of life were among the main themes of this lucid, accomplished novel.

358

Have the Men Had Enough?, by Margaret Forster, also depicted the impact of a mother on her family. But this one was disconcertingly alive in her steady decline into senility. The problem of coping with old age when it outlives its faculties was compassionately yet courageously tackled, with honesty and even humor. Gillian Tindall, in Give Them All My Love, painted a searching portrait of a father investigating and seeking to avenge the death of his daughter years earlier. Telling his own story as a quiet, ostensibly rational individual, this former headmaster and magistrate revealed himself as an obsessive, censorious bigot. A first novel by the distinguished biographer Victoria Glendinning, The Grown-Ups, contained a lighter but still masterly delineation of an unsympathetic male protagonist. Leo, a ruthless philanderer of apparently irresistible charm, received his just deserts in this elegant, entertaining tale. As irreverent as ever, Fay Weldon turned her satirical attention to the theme of genetic interference with human identity in The Cloning of Joanna May. The title character discovered at the age of 60 that, thanks to her ex-husband's trickery, there now existed somewhere in the world four unknown versions of herself. Life on the Nile, by Janice Elliott, painted a vivid picture of Egypt as seen through the eyes of her heroine. The action moved between past and present, as Charlotte attempted to unravel the mystery of an aunt's murder there in the 1920s, while her amateur-archaeologist husband pursued his own adventures into the country's remoter history. John le Carré, in The Russia House, pitted a wildly eccentric failed publisher against the cold world of professional intelligence. Set in the era of glasnost, this novel served as an instructive political parable, more comic than its predecessors, even if much of the comedy was black. Rushdie Controversy. Fiction made headlines with the 'sentence of death' passed in February by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini on British novelist Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses (which had been published in Britain in September 1988). According to Khomeini — and many Muslims around the world — the book blasphemed Islam. Rushdie went into hiding under police protection after the 'sentence' was announced. Biography. Among the year's main literary biographies, William Wordsworth: A Life, by Stephen Gill, was the first substantial biography of the poet to appear in 30 years. Making full use of new material, as well as of established sources such as Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, this scholarly study concentrated primarily on the poetry, including much interesting detail about the practical process of its creation. A. Norman Jeffares, in W. B. Yeats: A New Biography, offered a crisp yet comprehensive updated record of the poet's life and work. The book contained hitherto unpublished letters, poetry, and photographs (some taken by George Bernard Shaw at Coole). In Gilbert: The Man Who Was G. K. Chesterton, Michael Coren perceptively explored some of the contradictions in the writings and complex personality of one of the most exuberant figures in modern English literature. Especially rewarding was the full picture of Chesterton's childhood and youth. 'Boldly speculative' was how Martin Seymour-Smith in Rudyard Kipling described his own deductive method. This consisted of interpreting the facts of Kipling's life through the 359

characters and themes of his work as if the two were synonymous, while spicing his narrative with much unsupported conjecture about Kipling's alleged homosexual inclinations. No such ambiguities were to be found in Robert Calder's Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham. Calder judiciously weighed the effect of Maugham's homosexuality on his life and work, finding in neither much evidence of a capacity for passion, but always emphasizing Maugham's generosity above his more usually stressed misanthropy. The Life of Graham Greene, Volume I: 1904-39, by Norman Sherry, was indefatigable in detailing every aspect of Greene's early years. To show the impact of his experience on his fiction, Sherry carefully researched the backgrounds of the novels and ingeniously tracked down originals of Greene's characters. Several well-researched and solidly satisfying biographies were published late in 1988. These included Fred Kaplan's Dickens, Rebecca Fraser's Charlotte Brontë, and The Search for Love, the first volume of Michael Holroyd's monumental three-volume biography of George Bernard Shaw, covering the years 1856-1898. The second volume, The Pursuit of Power, was published in 1989 and covered the period 1898-1918. Noteworthy among 20th-century titles from late 1988 were J. B. Priestley, by Vincent Brome; Gentleman Rider: A Biography of Joyce Cary, by Alan Bishop; and Lyndall Gordon's Eliot's New Life, a further chapter of the T. S. Eliot biography, which covered his later years. Drama It was a disappointing year for new drama. Like David Hare's fine play The Secret Rapture, which appeared late in 1988, The March on Russia, by David Storey, scrutinized the social and political climate of present-day Britain through family relationships and divisions. Family influence and pressures were also at the core of Michael Wall's prizewinning play Among Barbarians, in which two sharply differentiated young Englishmen were sentenced to death for drug-trafficking in Malaysia. It was not their captors but their visiting families who proved the real barbarians. Valued Friends, by Stephen Jeffrey, was set during the London property boom of recent years. A wry indictment of modern avarice, it anatomized the corruption of friendship among four apartment mates tempted by the prospect of speculative profit. Some stage adaptations from other media were notable. Thomas Hardy's vast dramatic poem The Dynasts (1904-1908) was freely adapted by Patrick Garland under the title of Victory!, while Iris Murdoch effectively dramatized her novel The Black Prince (1973), a witty, disturbing comedy of an elderly writer's passion for a young girl. Two pieces by established playwrights were too brief to be satisfying. Caryl Churchill's Icecream concerned two couples, English and American, in search of their conventional, cliché-ridden concepts of each other's countries and finding the reality not at all as they had expected. Still shorter, Howard Brenton's and Tariq Ali's Iranian Nights was a savage satirical squib provoked by the Salman Rushdie affair.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

360

1990: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1990: Literature, English The year saw new English fiction by authors ranging from A. S. Byatt to Kingsley Amis. There was a good crop of literary biographies and dramas, and detective fans marked the centennial of Agatha Christie's birth. Novels. A. S. Byatt's new novel, Possession: A Romance, which won the Booker Prize for the best novel published during the year in Britain, explored the imagination of two modern research scholars obsessed by the work, personalities, and lives (especially a hitherto unsuspected love affair) of two fictitious Victorian poets. Past and present were pervasively interwoven in the book to stress connections and continuities. Possession—in the sense of ruthless domination—was also the theme of Lady's Maid; here, Margaret Forster followed her recent biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning with a novel set in the same household, taking the viewpoint of the devoted maid Wilson, in her conscious and sometimes rebellious servitude to an exacting mistress. Brian Moore's tense and telling Lies of Silence recounted the ordeal, in his native Belfast, of a former poet turned hotel manager, who, along with his wife, was held captive at gunpoint by masked nocturnal intruders. The Innocent, by Ian McEwan, depicted the experience of a naive young technician sent to postwar Berlin to help in the secret installation of espionage equipment. Sardonically subtitled A Yarn of the Nineties, Alan Brownjohn's cautionary fable The Way You Tell Them featured a sold-out satirist as its central character and prophesied a bleak decade ahead for Britain, including a proliferation of secret police and a political assassination in the Channel Tunnel. Burlesque of a lighter kind occupied Francis King in Visiting Cards, a hilarious takeoff on international literary conferences, with its hapless protagonist falling victim to various ludicrous, humiliating mischances. An Awfully Big Adventure, by Beryl Bainbridge, wryly followed the fortunes of an assistant stage manager aspiring to become an actress and making her hopeful way through the seedy society of a 1950s provincial theater company. Kingsley Amis's latest irascible, misogynistic comedy of social and sexual manners, The Folks That Live on the Hills, was set in a London suburb. It had for its hero a retired but harassed librarian and epicure distracted from his accustomed pleasures by the inconvenient demands of family responsibilities. Titmuss Regained, by John Mortimer, formed a wittily acerbic sequel to the topical ironies of his Paradise Postponed. There the underprivileged Titmuss was seen clawing his way relentlessly up the political ladder. The present satire showed him safely ensconced at the top as a secretary of state in the Tory government, complete with upper-class wife and imposing country mansion. Keith Waterhouse's Bimbo was an equally trenchant comedy of our time. It revealed a wickedly accurate ear for the argot of the tabloid press, as a curvaceous, dumb, but cunning model unfolded her life story to a Sunday newspaper.

361

Iris Murdoch's 24th novel, The Message to the Planet, appeared late in 1989. Its central figure was an enigmatic sage surrounded by disciples, including a historian, a poet, a painter, and a lapsed priest. Through his quest for a universal language whose 'great new meaning' would save humanity, Murdoch ingeniously pursued her characteristic preoccupations with the interplay of love and power, religion and sorcery, and the conflict between good and evil. Biography. Among literary biographies, Henry Fielding: A Life, by Martin C. and Ruthe R. Battestin, published in late 1989, painted a vigorous, meticulously detailed picture of the 18th-century writer's work, his life-loving personality, and the robustly Hogarthian London of his day. Another formidable man of letters emerged from Stanley Jones's Hazlitt: A Life, which set the essayist, literary critic, and radical polemicist firmly in the cultural and political context of the early 19th century. Coleridge: Early Visions, by Richard Holmes, was a justly praised, awardwinning study that vividly examined the work and aspirations of this mercurial poet up to the age of 30. In George Eliot: An Intellectual Life, Valerie A. Dodd affirmed her subject's belief that fiction combines philosophy with experience in a uniquely valuable way and traced the development of Eliot's thought through the novelist's reading of contemporary 19th-century philosophers. Richard Mullen's solid, scholarly Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in His World afforded a manysided portrait of this immensely industrious novelist, post office surveyor, churchman, sportsman, and unsuccessful parliamentary candidate. Two writers reflecting the spirit of the 1920s, who were much admired by eminent contemporaries but are less read today, were the subjects of substantial biographies. In William Gerhardie, Dido Davies brilliantly delineated the heyday and decline of a fashionable, witty amorist from phenomenal literary and social success to impoverished obscurity. Ford Madox Ford, by Alan Judd, presented another picture of failed promise, but conveyed Ford's importance as editor of influential literary journals who encouraged writers like Conrad, Joyce, and Hemingway. In Robert Graves: The Years With Laura, 1926-40, R. P. Graves chronicled the progress of his uncle's love affair with the American poet Laura Riding, which both enslaved and liberated his personality and had a profound impact upon his work. Herbert Read was the discontented protagonist of a sympathetic biography by James King. The Last Modern attempted to reconcile baffling inconsistencies in the character and career of this dedicated apostle of modernism in art, bitterly frustrated in his wish to be regarded as creator rather than critic. 'The chilly figure behind the cozy world of Winnie-the-Pooh' was how one reviewer aptly described the hero of Ann Thwaite's A. A. Milne: His Life. Her judicious, minutely documented account portrayed a would-be rebel who was actually a primly conventional, withdrawn man, unable to communicate with the son who inspired the Christopher Robin character in his stories and verses for children. A. N. Wilson's perceptive, compassionate study C. S. Lewis: A Biography abounded in acute psychological insights into the somewhat circumscribed life of the medieval-literature scholar, popular theologian, and storyteller who created both Screwtape and the increasingly popular Narnia books.

362

Drama.

Racing Demon, by David Hare, focused on the contrasting characters and conflicts of a group of clergymen in a London parish afflicted by dwindling congregations. It was a serious play, spiced with humor, about the role of religion and the proper function of the priesthood in society today. Authors figured largely among the characters in four new plays. Michael Frayn's Look Look depicted first a dramatist eavesdropping on the reactions of an audience to his own play, then the responses of its actors to that audience. Too ingenious for clarity, the idea yielded a disappointing companion piece to Frayn's earlier, successful backstage farce Noises Off. A first stage play by the novelist David Lodge, The Writing Game, surveyed other aspects of the literary profession, through the sharply observed characters and intellectual and amorous antics of a trio of novelist-tutors, conducting a creative writing course. Battle for control in the ruthless world of television was the satirical target of Paula Milne's Earwig. Its astute heroine, a serious writer driven by financial pressures into concocting a soap opera, managed adroitly to outwit her opponents and preserve her professional integrity. Another woman writer was a protagonist in Hidden Laughter, by Simon Gray. The play charted the gradual disintegration of family happiness over a decade that brought success to the novelist but disaster to those around her. Pain and loss also underlay the black humors of Alan Ayckbourn's two new comedies. In Man of the Moment, set beside the swimming pool of a Spanish villa, a brashly successful former bank robber and the mild hero who had foiled him 17 years earlier confronted each other to recall the past in a shrewdly satirical TV interview. Ayckbourn's 39th play, Body Language, concerned a macabre mistake at an expensive clinic, where a surgeon's confusion of identities between two decapitated accident victims produced some unforeseen and bizarre consequences. In Seven Lears, Howard Barker's provocative play about political and paternal cruelty, the author answered the recurring question of what happened to King Lear's wife. Left out of Shakespeare, she was reinstated here as a shining symbol of goodness and truth, and as her husband's sternest critic. In The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, Tony Harrison, another toughly original playwright, lamented the passing of a vigorous popular culture in the lost satyr plays of the Greek dramatists and audaciously transposed into a modern context characters from a fragment of Sophocles that was rediscovered in Egypt not long ago.

Christie Centennial.

The 100th anniversary of the birth of famed British mystery writer Dame Agatha Christie was observed in 1990 by publishers and devoted readers alike. In Britain, Collins put out special hardcover editions of some of her books; in the United States, Putnam Berkley offered commemorative softcover editions. Also, HarperCollins planned to release a collection of writings by friends, colleagues, and relatives of the mystery author. On September 15, the birthday anniversary, the Venice-Simplon-Orient Express train took a nostalgic trip to Torquay, Devon, Christie's birthplace, for a banquet and fireworks; among those participating were the actor David Suchet, who has played Christie detective Hercule Poirot, and actress Joan 363

Hickson, who has portrayed Christie's Miss Marple. Murder on the Orient Express, one of Christie's 78 crime novels, was among the most popular. Christie began writing detective fiction while working in a hospital during World War I; 14 years after her death in 1976, over 1 billion copies of her books had been sold in English, and another billion in more than 40 languages worldwide.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

364

1991: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1991: Literature, English In 1991, Great Britain's most prestigious fiction award, the Booker Prize, went to the Nigerianborn Ben Okri for his novel The Famished Road, about a spirit child amid a world where vision and reality are indistinct. Among the other final nominees for the Booker were Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, Roddy Doyle's The Van, and Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey. In addition to these and other significant works of fiction published recently, several noteworthy literary biographies appeared in 1991 and late 1990, as well as some remarkable first plays. Novels. Stylish, cool, and clever, Julian Barnes in Talking It Over unfolded his tale of amorous betrayal between friends through the medium of three ironically self-justifying monologues. In its stark portrayal of the brutal realities of war in the Far East, Timothy Mo's The Redundancy of Courage (another of the final nominees for the Booker Prize) also employed a three-section structure, effectively communicating the contrasted experience of invaders, conquered, and guerrillas. In her powerfully moving novel Regeneration Pat Barker, too, unflinchingly confronted the horrors of modern warfare. Set in 1917 and based on a real encounter in a war hospital near Edinburgh, it explored the developing relationship between the protesting officer-poet Siegfried Sassoon and W. H. R. Rivers, a psychiatrist who treated him, became his friend, and finally developed into a convert to his patient's convictions. A number of accomplished woman novelists published work in 1991. Penelope Lively in City of the Mind and Maggie Gee in Where Are the Snows shared a common interest in the time theme. But whereas Lively alternated her central, contemporary narrative with excursions back into the past — from the experiences of an Elizabethan seaman to those of an air-raid warden in the London blitz — Gee moved as far forward into the future as the year 2007 and the destruction of the ozone layer in the atmosphere. As from the attitudes and life-style of Gee's squalidly corrupt protagonists, in Muriel Spark's satirical but sinister Symposium a chilling presence of evil pervaded the atmosphere of a smart London dinner party. A similar sense of spiritual unease afflicted the characters in Alice Thomas Ellis's The Inn at the Edge of the World, who were gathered together on a remote northern island in a desperate bid to escape Christmas. Both these novels were published late in 1990. Anita Brookner's Brief Lives, which also appeared in late 1990, was followed in 1991 by A Closed Eye: a novel equally perspicacious and stylistically elegant, yet bleak in vision, as it probed the sensibility, relationships, and ironies of existence for Harriet, Brookner's shrinking, immature heroine. Fay Weldon's provocative Darcy's Utopia (1990) concerned an embattled young woman with disconcertingly decided ideas about her ideal modern society. Weldon's 1991 collection of

365

short stories Moon Over Minneapolis was yet again obsessed with the sex war and abounded in oppressed wives suffering from brutal, unfaithful, or otherwise unsatisfactory partners. In Angela Huth's Invitation to the Married Life various contrasted marriages were anatomized with acerbic ironical wit. Also humorously shrewd, Nina Bawden in Family Money portrayed a spirited elderly widow inconveniently resisting filial persuasion or pressure to sell her desirable Regency residence and distribute the proceeds. Her first novel in seven years, Angela Carter's Wise Children moved away from her past realm of mystery and magic into theaterland — from music-hall song and dance to productions of Shakespeare. The picturesque narrative, entrusted in her old age to one of the twin sister 'wise children' of the title, flowed with a racy verve. Susan Hill published a novel after a still longer silence. Air and Angels was placidly set in the deceptive calm of the Edwardian era, but it erupted into a painfully disturbing emotional turmoil when a respected, elderly Cambridge cleric fell passionately in love with a young girl on vacation from India. Related by a disdainfully snobbish narrator, Margaret Forster's challenging The Battle for Christabel introduced issues of class and color in determining the hotly contested future of an orphan child. The impressionistic style of Jennifer Johnston's The Invisible Worm cleverly conveyed the schizophrenic dislocation of the heroine's mind, ceaselessly revolving between the present and a past that contained the terrible source of her inner conflict and sickness. Another distinguished Irish writer, William Trevor, depicted self-delusion as the common failing of a pair of lonely heroines in his Two Lives. The subtly explored theme was each woman's flight from arid reality into the comforting safety of a fantasy world of naive romanticism. Trevor's Reading Turgenev, taken from Two Lives, was a final nominee for the Booker Prize. In the sharp-edged wit of William Cooper's Immortality at Any Price, the satirical targets included his fellow writers and their lives and loves, wordy academics, publishers, literary agents, and young men fighting their way ruthlessly to the top. Set in Florence over 40 years ago, Francis King's The Ant Colony cast a coolly disenchanted eye over its Anglo-American expatriate community. Depicted with particular vividness were the misadventures and resultant disillusion of two inexperienced young English lecturers sent out to teach at an institution closely resembling the British Council, the independent nonpolitical organization that promotes the English language and British culture in dozens of countries. Biography. A number of varied, well-documented biographies appeared late in 1990. Outstanding among these were Peter Ackroyd's characteristic treatment of Dickens, while The Invisible Woman, Claire Tomalin's vivid interpretation of 'The Story of Nelly Ternan,' made a fitting companion volume. In Paul Scott: A Life Hilary Spurling most satisfyingly explored her subject's personality and relationship with India; another, less striking study of the novelist appeared in Paul Scott's Raj, by Robin Moore. Lives of four very diverse woman writers were also published in late 1990. Katherine Frank's Emily Brontë: A Chainless Soul embarked upon a zealous but misguided attempt, teeming with bizarre 'imaginative reconstructions,' to reduce Emily's mysticism to a mundane, explicable level. John Sutherland's Mrs. Humphrey Ward provided a conscientious account of the life and thought of the Victorian novelist and later antisuffragist. In A Very Close Conspiracy Jane Dunn

366

made a searching scrutiny of the relationship — in which rivalry was a strong element — between Virginia Woolf and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. In Jean Rhys Carol Angier perceptively portrayed a combative, self-tormenting figure, showing how closely personal facts fed the novelist's depiction 'of the painful deprivations of the outcast.' Quite the liveliest, most entertaining autobiography of 1990 was You've Had Your Time: Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess. This chronicled, with an unflagging appetite for experience, the author's prolific writing career, his other interests such as music and languages, and curious adventures in many countries. Modern literary women were again subjects for biographers in 1991. In Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life, Richard Garnett offered a warmly affectionate portrait of his grandmother. Small, shy, and unobtrusive, she was also redoubtable in the sheer magnitude of her achievement as the translator who introduced great Russian literature to the English reading public. Equally satisfying in detail, Jane Emery's Rose Macaulay: A Writer's Life acutely penetrated to the fears, guilt, and grief of the vulnerable girl and woman hidden behind Macaulay's flippant or sometimes formidable facade. Two biographies appeared of one of Britain's best-selling novelists: Daphne: A Portrait of Daphne du Maurier, by Judith Cook, and The Private World of Daphne du Maurier, by Martyn Shallcross. Disappointingly, neither yielded many rewarding insights into the 'private world' or complex personality of this rather intimidating eccentric. Samuel Butler was a substantial and stimulating biography by Peter Raby. Butler was at war not only in his continuing conflict with his father, but also with authority and Victorian values in general. The shaping influence on modern consciousness of this irreverent, versatile man — talented musician and painter as well as novelist — was saluted by writers as diverse as Shaw, Yeats, and E. M. Forster. Robert Bernard Martin's Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life was arguably the outstanding literary biography of the year. It offered a shrewd yet compassionate reappraisal of the conflicts and tormenting duality of this Jesuit priest for whom — as one reviewer put it — 'the lure of earth always threatened to match the appeal of heaven.' Martin was the first to have had full access to Hopkins's surviving private papers, which lent added authority to this most illuminating study. Compared to the cheerful exuberance of Anthony Burgess's autobiography, the irascible Memoirs of Kingsley Amis proved an embarrassment: full of sourness and spleen, their rancorous acrimony extended to include those the author named as friends as well as his many acknowledged foes. Drama. A powerful first play by the finest living Irish poet, Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy was a free rendering of the Philoctetes of Sophocles and an imaginative blend of Greek myth with Irish history. The images invoked near the end by the Chorus — the grief of the hunger striker's father, of the police widow — looked ahead to a final vision of hope, 'a great sea change/On the far side of revenge.' In another distinguished first play, The Winter Wife, Claire Tomalin based her story on part of the material — a single summer in France — from her recent life of Katherine Mansfield. The play acutely explored the complex relationship between the contrasted characters of the writer and her pathetically adoring companion Ida Baker (whom Mansfield sometimes called her 'wife').

367

A practiced playwright, Christopher Hampton in White Chameleon became the middle-aged narrator recalling, without nostalgia but with a sharp child's-eye precision, memories of his boyhood in Alexandria. Especially memorable was the portrait, at once touching and funny, of the Egyptian servant Ibrahim.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

368

1992: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1992: Literature, English The Booker Prize, Great Britain's most prestigious fiction award, was shared by two novels in 1992. One was The English Patient, by the Sri Lankan-born Canadian author Michael Ondaatje. (See also CANADIAN LITERATURE.) The other cowinner was Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, which was set in the late 18th century and generated a powerful indignation against the greed, corruption, and cruelty of the African slave trade. Runners-up included Christopher Hope's Serenity House, Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, and Daughters of the House, by Michele Roberts. Several strong literary biographies and plays appeared during 1992. Notable plays tended to emphasize contemporary political issues, but historical themes and topics abounded among the year's novels. Novels. Indigo, by Marina Warner, inhabited two worlds widely separated in time and place. A Caribbean island in the early 17th century and 20th-century London were linked by the characters of a colonialist buccaneer and his modern descendants, with Shakespeare's The Tempest as the genesis of this unusual tale. Patricia Finney's Firedrake's Eye was set in the 1580s. Narrated by a character recently released from Bedlam, this story of fanaticism, intrigue, and espionage vividly evoked the squalor and violence of Elizabethan London. In her ambitious reconstruction of the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel presented intimate portraits of the personalities and home lives of three young political idealists, Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins. This domestication tended to diminish the ferocious impact of later public events. Gifted with psychic powers, the hero of Peter Ackroyd's English Music celebrated the continuity of culture by making visionary excursions back to the past to commune with the spirits of longdead English musicians, painters, and writers from Byrd to Blake, Defoe to Hogarth and Dickens. The theme of time recurred in Graham Swift's Ever After. Dazed by the grief of multiple bereavement, a present-day don editing his Victorian ancestor's journals found solace for melancholy in past echoes of his own loss and mourning. In Ulverton, by Adam Thorpe, the chronicle of an English village community was charted through a series of masterly monologues depicting the varied experience of different characters down the centuries, ranging from a 17th-century cleric fuming from his pulpit to a Victorian lady photographer concealing a camera in her crinoline. Black Dogs, by Ian McEwan, was another final nominee for the Booker Prize. The canine visitants of McEwan's title, savagely erupting into the summer sun of rural France, represented

369

the forces of darkness rampant in this century. Yet the author concluded the novel with a moving affirmation of the power of human love in the perennial conflict between good and evil. The heroine of Rose Tremain's Sacred Country longed from childhood to have been born a boy, and felt locked within the prison of her female identity in a body and life she disowned. The course of her sex transformation was sympathetically traced, along with the changes in the fortunes of her farming family in rural England. The title of the elegant but melancholy Fraud, by Anita Brookner, crystallized life's frustrations for its middle-aged unmarried heroine caring for a fractious invalid mother. Opening with her mysterious disappearance, the story proceeded via flashback to relate the dismal circumstances leading up to that event. Equally characteristic, Alice Thomas Ellis's Pillars of Gold slyly but acutely analyzed the disenchantment of a London housewife who is harassed by cares, fears, and responsibilities. John Mortimer's witty and topical Dunster depicted a central confrontation between two old friends and rivals: the crusading political journalist of the title, working on an exposé of war criminals, and his friend Progmire, whose television-company boss turned out to be uncomfortably prominent in Dunster's investigations. In Growing Rich, with its trio of soap opera heroines, and another novel, Life Force, the indefatigable Fay Weldon continued to explore satirical territory. Her targets included temptation by the devil in disguise as a millionaire and marital exploitation, betrayal, and even murder. Kingsley Amis in The Russian Girl depicted amorous complications dangerously multiplying for his hapless hero, victim of the descent upon London of a seductive woman poet from Moscow. Biography. Chronologically the earliest among the year's biographies, Katherine Duncan-Jones's impeccably researched Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet was the first major study of her charismatic subject since 1915. Aiming to 'summon him to life, spots and all,' she perceptively explored the virtues and shortcomings of a man at once charming and violent, generous and devious. Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys were the subject of an illuminating biography by Robert Gittings and Jo Manton. Investigating Claire from a fresh angle, they drew extensively upon her letters written after Shelley's death, when she went to work as a governess and teacher in tsarist Russia. She emerged as a positive personality in her own right rather than a poet's plaything: an adventurously reforming educator, a women's liberationist, and a passionate radical. Despite the recent appearance of several Trollope biographies, Victoria Glendinning in her well-documented Trollope declared the subject 'inexhaustible.' Her own contribution was notable less for any new psychological insights than for its penetrating views of individual works. In Hopkins: A Literary Biography Norman White examined Gerard Manley Hopkins's development of his innovatory 'sprung rhythm,' the possible influence of the Welsh language on his work, and the wretched last years of his life, which he spent in Dublin. Unexpectedly presented as a fourth volume of Michael Holroyd's officially three-volume life of George Bernard Shaw, The Last Laugh was a brief epilogue chronicling the course of Shaw's reputation in the 40 years since his death.

370

The early life of a fellow Irishman was exhaustively explored by Peter Costello in James Joyce: The Years of Growth, 1882-1915, which traced the relation of many details in the author's work — especially in Ulysses — to his youthful experiences in Dublin. Auberon Waugh's memoirs, Will This Do?, described the disabling effects upon a son of growing up browbeaten by an overbearing irascible father. The second volume of Martin Stannard's biography of that father, Evelyn Waugh: No Abiding City, 1939-1966, incisively probed the conflicts and insecurities underlying the snobbish arrogance of Waugh's self-protective public persona. Waugh was a powerful patron of his fellow Catholic Muriel Spark, whose autobiography Curriculum Vitae attracted much attention in 1992. In this unadorned account of her life up to 1957, some of the most memorable pages were those evoking her Edinburgh childhood and schooldays. It was also interesting to identify various factual originals of people and places in Spark's fiction. Drama. Many of the more socially and politically motivated British playwrights were active during the year. Dé jàvu, John Osborne's long-awaited sequel to Look Back in Anger, depicted the embattled young Jimmy Porter dwindled into a muted middle age — though still able to inveigh against objects of his derisive scorn. David Hare's critically acclaimed Murmuring Judges caustically dissected judicial inequities in the British legal system. Among plays by leading left-wing dramatists, Howard Barker's A Hard Heart concerned a European city under siege by an unnamed enemy, with its central characters a practical queen and a visionary woman architect in charge of defensive operations. Howard Brenton's Berlin Bertie was a bleak lament for the demise of the Communist empire, leaving a vacuum in the lives of both the author and his characters. Confusingly enigmatic, The Gulf Between Us, by Trevor Griffiths, was set somewhere in the Middle East and was the first British play to deal with the Persian Gulf War. At once painful and funny, Ronald Harwood's Reflected Glory portrayed the jealous resentment of an elder brother at having to live in the shadow of his sibling's success as a playwright and screenwriter who used his family as material for his plays. There were strong echoes of Harwood's earlier The Dresser in another new play about the theater. King Lear in New York, by Melvyn Bragg, depicted an elderly, alcoholic, amnesiac actor in unfamiliar territory but rashly tackling the most demanding ofShakespearean roles. Carter. Angela Carter, who died in February, will be remembered as a writer whose style and spirit were uniquely her own. Elements of fantasy brilliantly combined with shrewd, irreverent humor and inventive energy to produce novels from her early The Magic Toyshop to her last, Wise Children, published in 1991.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

371

1993: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1993: Literature, English The Booker Prize, Great Britain's most prestigious fiction award, went to Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, a novel written in the voice of a ten-year-old Dublin boy witnessing his parents' marital trouble. Runners-up were Carol Shields for The Stone Diaries, Michael Ignatieff for Scar Tissue, Caryl Phillips for Crossing the River, Tibor Fischer for Under the Frog, and David Malouf for Remembering Babylon. Earlier, Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children, which received the 1981 Booker Prize, was honored by being named the best novel to win that award in 25 years. Historical subjects featured prominently in the year's fiction, while English literary figures from Christopher Marlowe to D. H. Lawrence were portrayed in new biographies. Tom Stoppard's Arcadia was one of several new plays. Fiction. Allan Massie's strongly characterized and politically acute Caesar, chronologically first, and the latest in his series of novels about Roman emperors, presented Julius Caesar through the memoirs of a favorite general who was also one of his assassins. In I, Elizabeth: The Word of a Queen, Rosalind Miles offered a full-length self-portrait of her subject's trials and triumphs from the age of ten, attending her father's sixth marriage, to her final years. Elizabeth I was also a central figure, with the poet John Donne, in Campion's Ghost, by Garry O'Connor. Another feminine first-person narrative from the same era, Robert Nye's Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works, was a racy, often ribald account by the former Anne Hathaway of a memorable visit to London to confront her errant actor-husband there. Peter Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee concerned the influential Elizabethan astronomer, astrologist, and alchemist. Interwoven in the plot line were the experiences of a 20th-century researcher living in the London house once owned by John Dee and still haunted by his presence. The 400th anniversary of the death of Christopher Marlowe, allegedly in a tavern brawl at the age of 29, prompted three novels probing the various aspects of his ambiguous personality and activities, as well as the mystery surrounding his murder. In the strongest of these novels, A Dead Man in Deptford, Anthony Burgess (who himself died later in the year) animated his narrative with characteristic zest and verbal dexterity. Christoferus, by Robin Chapman, recounted by Marlowe's fellow playwright Thomas Kyd, also vigorously re-created the teeming life of Elizabethan London. Judith Cook's dramatically titled The Slicing Edge of Death: Who Killed Christopher Marlowe? was less successful in evoking the flavor of the period. Set during World War I, Helen Dunmore's Zennor in Darkness effectively contrasted the sensuous beauty of the Cornish summer landscape with the narrow conformity of local inhabitants, convinced that D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda were German spies. The

372

aftermath of that war was powerfully portrayed by Pat Barker in The Eye in the Door, a worthy sequel to her highly acclaimed Regeneration, published in 1991. As in the earlier novel, such real-life characters as the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the psychiatrist Dr. W. H. R. Rivers mingled with fictional figures like the shell-shocked protagonist, Major Prior, reliving under hypnosis his nightmare experience in the trenches. Biblical myths and fairy tales translated into the terms of present-day characters, situations, and settings formed the substance of Marina Warner's often ironic The Mermaids in the Basement. Iris Murdoch's The Green Knight, her first novel in four years, was as intricately plotted and exuberantly characterized as her previous work. Title and theme referred to the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and reflected the author's concern with questions of faith and doubt and dilemmas of moral choice. Among other 1993 novels was Anita Brookner's A Family Romance, set in middle-class London during the 1960s and 1970s. This story of a girl growing up focused on the ambivalence of her relationship — a self-revealing mixture of fascination and repugnance — with her outrageous Aunt Dolly. In Cleopatra's Sister, Penelope Lively reexplored time-and-space themes and the random interaction of choice with chance in the lives of her protagonists, held hostage in a fictitious country once ruled by Cleopatra's sister and now a dictatorship. The narrator of Brian Moore's No Other Life, a white missionary in the Caribbean, watched with dismay as the black boy he had educated for the priesthood grew up to become the charismatic president of his island, inciting its poverty-stricken people to violent rebellion. Biography. Many of the year's literary biographers occupied themselves with figures from the 19th and 20th centuries. In Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, Jenny Uglow gave a satisfying account of this radical novelist's achievements, generously illustrated by quotations from her ebullient letters. The life, personality, and work of another eminent Victorian were sympathetically discussed by Peter Levi in Tennyson. This insightful biography presented a character less gloomy than often portrayed and was especially illuminating in its assessment of his poetry. In his well-documented Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, Frank McLynn paid a fitting tribute to the resilience, optimism, and creative energy of the man he regarded as Scotland's greatest writer of English prose. Places of the Mind: The Life and Work of James Thomson ('B.V.'), by Tom Leonard, charted the dark world of the disillusioned Victorian author of The City of Dreadful Night. Admired by Herman Melville, George Meredith, and George Eliot, Thomson was shown to have reflected the state of his England more truly than did many of his contemporaries. Other books about famous literary figures included Lawrence's Women: The Intimate Life of D. H. Lawrence, in which Elaine Feinstein considered the writer's relationships with his many women friends — from his first love, Jessie Chambers, to Katherine Mansfield and Lady Ottoline Morrell — to whom he caused pain by his conscious exploitation of them for fictional purposes. Morgan: A Biography of E. M. Forster, by Nicola Beauman, was an industrious but illproportioned and often gushing study. Speculation and surmise abounded, with Beauman's 'intuitions' too often replacing probability or plain fact. In Sacheverell Sitwell: Splendours and Miseries, Sarah Bradford contrasted her subject's life of social privilege with his sense of deprivation. Despite richly detailed family background and copious selections from the subject's poetry and prose, Bradford failed to justify her claims for Sitwell's literary importance. Imagination of the Heart, Theresa Whistler's appreciative life of Walter de la Mare, showed a

373

sensitive response to the poet's understanding of childhood, his pervasive awareness of transience and loss, and his distinctive lyrical gifts. There were discerning studies of two best-selling women novelists. Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul, by Barbara Reynolds, offered a scrupulous survey of the writer's detective fiction, religious plays, and translations from Dante, and a sympathetic look at the various disasters in Sayers's private life. In Daphne du Maurier, Margaret Forster perceptively portrayed an unhappy recluse inhabited by a male spirit clamoring for release, a struggle expressed both in Du Maurier's attitudes toward men in her romantic novels and in her amorous entanglements with women. A biography closer to our time, Andrew Motion's Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, was perhaps the most eagerly awaited literary portrait of the year. Diligent, compassionate yet acute, Motion stresses the essential link between the personality and poems of this self-tormented man whom Anthony Burgess aptly described as 'the lyricist of wretchedness.'

Drama.

Past and present ingeniously interacted in Tom Stoppard's verbally dazzling but often perplexing Arcadia. Set in a contemporary English country house, with flashbacks to the early 19th century, this play offered a typical Stoppard mix of literary speculation, scientific investigation, and intellectual acrobatics. In The Gift of the Gorgon by Peter Shaffer, the past again impinged upon the present. Echoes of Greek myth sounded throughout this modern story of a playwright paranoid in his self-appointed — and ultimately self-destructive — role as successor to the Greeks and Shakespeare. Christopher Marlowe reappeared in Peter Whelan's School of Night as atheist, homosexual, and leading dissident writer of his day, who met his end through his 'Faustian demand' for the new learning. Ronald Harwood's Poison Pen opened with a music critic being pestered by death threats from an enraged composer whom he had accused of plagiarizing from the English composer Frederick Delius. The story was suggested by an actual case history. Here, by Michael Frayn, was a wry conversation piece about inarticulateness and boredom, played out between a glum couple exchanging inconsequential nothings in their studio apartment. Still gloomier was Alan Ayckbourn's caustically titled Time of My Life. The occasion was a birthday celebration presided over by a formidable matriarch dispensing doom among her cringing sons and their women. In Harold Pinter's melancholy short play Moonlight, the family tyrant was a dying father, rejecting his absent son but craving the company of his daughter and grandchildren.

Obituaries. William Golding, 81, died in June. Winner of the 1983 Nobel Prize for literature and the 1980 Booker Prize (for his novel Rites of Passage), Golding was best known for his first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), a chilling fable about the descent into barbarism of a group of schoolboys marooned on a desert island.

374

In November, Anthony Burgess died at 76. The most famous work of this erudite, prolific, much-admired novelist, essayist, semanticist, translator, librettist, and musical composer was the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). Set in the near future, it told the story of a murderous, raping, Beethoven-loving gang leader and the ultimately unsuccessful attempts by society to rehabilitate him.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

375

1994: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1994: Literature, English Readers of English literature had plenty of meaty material to keep them busy in 1994. Scotsman James Kelman was the controversial winner of the 1994 Booker Prize for his novel How Late It Was, How Late. This black comedy used strong language—one critic counted 4,000 expletives—and a heavy Glasgow accent to follow an ex-convict on a two-day drunk. Fiction. A notable trend in 1994 was the preoccupation of British novelists with a wide variety of foreign settings. The Sahara was the scene of Paul Bowles's Too Far From Home, which portrayed the fraught relationship between an artist and his discontented sister. Lionel Davidson's Kolymsky Heights was a swiftly paced story of action and adventure set mainly in the Siberian Arctic. Victorian Hong Kong offered an unusual location for The Mountain of Immoderate Desires, by Leslie Wilson. The background of Desperadoes by Joseph O'Connor was 1983 Nicaragua during the civil war, and the book portrayed a couple's desperate quest for their missing son. Michael Dibdin's Dead Lagoon offered an unexpectedly disenchanted portrait of present-day Venice. Possibly the most widely acclaimed novel of the year was A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel. This ranged in time and space between South Africa in the 1950s and rural England 30 years later; the lives and moral dilemmas of the married protagonists were explored with keen but compassionate insight. In a bleak yet deeply moving novel, Felicia's Journeys, William Trevor followed the misfortunes of a young Irish girl wandering through the industrial wastelands of England in vain search of the errant father of her unborn child. David Caute's ingenious Dr. Orwell and Mr. Blair, a novel in which George Orwell was a central character, skillfully juxtaposed the opposite aspects of his subject's personality—the patrician with the down-and-out plebeian. Other striking fiction from well-known novelists included Mothers' Boys by Margaret Forster and Lost Children by Maggie Gee. Both movingly depicted some of the painful intricacies of family relationships. The central figure in Anita Brookner's A Private View was a man on the verge of retirement. Brookner surveyed with sympathetic shrewdness her hero's gradual relinquishment of his soberly ordered existence to embark upon the heady delights of a dangerous unknown. A. S. Byatt's The Matisse Stories illustrated the impact upon her characters of the artist's sensuous use of color. The events in The House of Splendid Isolation by Edna O'Brien took place in her native Ireland, whose comedies and troubles she portrayed here with characteristic vigor. In Affliction, Fay Weldon predictably re-explored her favorite topic, the hapless role of women in marriage, where they are foredoomed to exploitation, deceit, and final abandonment.

376

Biography.

Lyndall Gordon's Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life offered a substantial and thought-provoking study. The book persuasively replaced the popular image of a gauche, shrinking spinster with a more robust interpretation of a rebel in her own time. In piquant contrast was the heroine of Mother of Oscar: The Life of Jane Francesca Wilde by Joy Melville. In her own day and way, as a self-appointed romantic and patriotic poetess, Jane Wilde was as flamboyant and eccentric as her more famous son. Her loyalty to him in his disgrace was unswerving. Hardy, a self-styled 'definitive' biography of Thomas Hardy by Martin Seymour-Smith, contained various acrimonious attacks on past fellow-biographers, and truculence abounded. But there was a generous defense of Hardy's first wife, Emma (though at the expense of his second), and a rewarding survey of his poems. In Kenneth Grahame: An Innocent in the Wild Wood Alison Prince perceptively related characters and events from The Wind in the Willows to various conflicts in the author's own life and personality. Prince made effective use of letters—as, for instance, that describing Grahame's enchanted discovery of the 'water-world' during his Oxford school days, or the discomfiting baby talk that revealed the immaturity of his marriage. There were two new books about Graham Greene. Norman Sherry's The Life of Graham Greene, 1939-1955 was the second volume of his projected three-volume authorized biography. Surveying such aspects as Greene's compulsive travels, his rashly precipitate pursuit of women, and his addiction to drink and drugs, this portrait took a far more sympathetic view of its subject than did the implacable hostility of Michael Shelden in Graham Greene: The Man Within. Novelist Penelope Lively in Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived recaptured with sensuous immediacy the sights, scents, and sounds of her early years. Set in Egypt before and during World War II, this memoir vividly portrayed the social life of the expatriate British community.

Drama. Many of the year's significant productions were not of new plays, but revivals and translations. Among the new dramas was David Edgar's Citizen Locke, about the personality and trials of the 17th-century philosopher John Locke as he returned from political exile to pursue his pioneering radical activities at home. Another historical play, Hated Nightfall by Howard Barker, was a complex reenactment of the circumstances surrounding the murder of the Romanov royal family in 1918. The play's chief protagonist was Dancer, the family tutor, a volatile, enigmatic character who may have been the family's executioner. The basis for Barker's conjecture was the discovery of two unidentified bodies in the communal grave. Another chilling but arrestingly original play was The Skriker by Caryl Churchill (who recently made a vigorous translation of Seneca's Thyestes). The Skriker of her title was a malign embodiment of evil—an ancient crone who could change shape at will in order to wreak mischief upon her unwary victims and lure them to doom in the underworld, with the help of her attendant ghosts, hags, and black dogs. The mythological idea in this cleverly inventive and imaginative play effectively framed the modern urban characters and their setting.

377

The achievements of three eminent men of the theater—actors John Gielgud and Alec Guinness and playwright Harold Pinter—were celebrated during 1994 in composite tributes from their friends and admirers. The tributes were entitled Notes From the Gods and Sir John: The Many Faces of Gielgud; Alec: A Birthday Present for Alec Guinness; and Conversations With Pinter.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

378

1995: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1995: Literature, English It is worth beginning an assessment of 1995's literary events in Great Britain by noting a conundrum: the winning of the Nobel Prize for literature by the poet Seamus Heaney. Heaney, whose grounded, incisive verse has won him many accolades, including the post of Oxford professor of poetry, was born in British Northern Ireland, and his poetic roots are British as much as Irish. But it must also be said that he explicitly rejected the former when in 1982 he was included in The Penguin Anthology of British Poetry. 'Be advised my passport's green,' he wrote in verse to the anthology's editors, 'No glass of ours was ever raised to toast the Queen.' Poetry. Heaney's prize aside, the year produced a new volume from his sometime collaborator and the current British poet laureate, Ted Hughes. New Selected Poems, 1957-1994 contains many hitherto uncollected poems and reveals that Hughes's work is still greatly affected by his first marriage to Sylvia Plath. What is significant is his acknowledgment of her as a poet, and not as the literary martyr that, in some circles, she has become. There was also another long-awaited volume from Martin Seymour-Smith, Wilderness: 36 Poems 1972-1993. Seymour-Smith's reticence has ensured that he is better known as a biographer (of Hardy and Graves) and critic, but, as C. H. Sisson once wrote of the poet, this work shows the slow-burning brilliance of 'the common speech of a highly sophisticated mind.' Fiction. In fiction, as ever, the end of the year was dominated by the Booker Prize. Unusually, only five novels, rather than six, made the shortlist, and one of those was from the beginning the oddson favorite. Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh was almost universally praised as a triumph of this remarkable novelist's talent over his situation. Written while still in hiding following the 1989 Iranian fatwa calling for his death, Rushdie's first full-length novel since The Satanic Verses 'springs to life with comic energy and allegorical power,' wrote Malcolm Bradbury. Set in India, the novel's publication there was delayed because elements of the book were viewed as offensive to Hindus; the federal government subsequently bowed to Hindu pressure and banned further imports of the novel after the first delivery of 4,000 copies. But Rushdie, who had already won the Booker and even the 'Booker of Bookers,' was not to have the prize again. It went in 1995 to Pat Barker, whose novel The Ghost Road completed her trilogy on World War I. Barker has entirely shattered the folk wisdom that women cannot write about war; her sensitive portrayal of men damaged by the horrors of the Somme was particularly poignant in 1995, the 50th anniversary of the ending of World War II. Martin Amis's novel The Information was not on the Booker shortlist but caused a stir nonetheless, initially because of the size of the advance he received from his publisher, 379

HarperCollins, and his assertion that he needed the £500,000(about $760,000) for dental work. But the novel, about the rivalry and friendship between two writers — one successful, one failed — was able to overcome the hype. Like his father, Kingsley Amis, who died in October, Amis is a virtuoso of the English language, and The Information is further proof of his skill. Worth noting too were two novels published posthumously: The Double Tongue by William Golding and Byrne by Anthony Burgess. Posthumous publication can be a tricky business — one is never sure that what emerges is exactly what the writer would have wished — but both of these are intriguing works. Golding's, actually unfinished, is set in the first century BC, and the writer's portrait of an independent woman of the times shows he had lost none of his power. Burgess's is striking for being entirely in verse, its complex rhymes a framework for the themes of faith, death, and renewal that so haunted Burgess at the end of his life.

Biography. If the choice of the Nobel judges proved that it was a good year for poets, the number of biographies devoted to masters of that art supports that notion staunchly. One of the best was Peter Ackroyd's biography of William Blake, who, at first glance, might seem an unlikely subject for a modern biographer: his life was not marked by striking events, he loved his wife all the 50 years of their marriage, he was poor and, in his day, insignificant. It is Ackroyd's ability to bring to life Blake's astonishing interior life that makes this such an important book — to let the reader into the mind of one who 'saw what he imagined, but, perhaps more importantly, his consciousness was such a powerful force, so naked and susceptible that all the repressed or unacknowledged erotic potentialities of the period seemed to gather there.' Strong too was Richard Davenport-Hines's life of W. H. Auden, which was described as an 'alert and convincing' portrait of one of the giants of 20th-century literature. Published at the same time was Wystan and Chester by Thekla Clark — a memoir of the poet's relationship with the American Chester Kallman. The two provide a rounded portrait of a writer who managed to eclipse nearly all of his contemporaries with his blazing talent. Two political works stood out. The first, The Path to Power by Margaret Thatcher, presented the reader with the background to her earlier volume, The Downing Street Years, which recounted her time in office from 1979 to 1990. The Path to Power is in a sense the more intriguing of the two volumes, for in it we meet not the 'Iron Lady' but 'a vulnerable woman striving for mastery in a male world, and only slowly acquiring, with much help, the clarity and firmness of resolve to make her revolution,' as Lord Skidelsky wrote. It is fascinating to contrast Thatcher's life with that of a figure who towered equally over the political scene in an earlier age: William Ewart Gladstone. Gladstone by Roy Jenkins (an exchancellor of the exchequer himself) is a perceptive and sympathetic work that deals astutely with the great man's political life and candidly with his emotional life — particularly with his somewhat mysterious attempts to 'save' London's 'fallen women.'

Book-pricing Agreement Ended. The collapse in September of the Net Book Agreement — which for some 40 years allowed publishers to fix the minimum prices of books for all retailers — surely heralded a new era, if not in writing then certainly in publishing. The system fell apart when most of Britain's largest book publishers, dismayed at falling sales, said they were pulling out of the voluntary pact. 380

Britain's largest bookseller chains reacted by immediately cutting prices up to 50 percent on their most popular current titles, resulting in skyrocketing sales for a few of the titles. Depending on whom one listened to, writers will feel either the shock waves or the benefits of this change. The literary world could only wait and see.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

381

1996: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1996: Literature, English In 1996, English literature was graced by the appearance of a new volume of Seamus Heaney's poetry. The mammoth Dictionary of National Biography finally reached its conclusion, and controversy greeted the new Orange Prize, for women writers only. Poetry. In 1995, Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for literature — a deserved reward for a poet who, while he has rejected his British nationality, was born in British Northern Ireland and has done much to shape modern British poetry. His long-awaited new volume of poetry, The Spirit Level, was published in 1996. The poet Michael Hofmann hailed it as a 'summation of everything he has written, but vividly in touch with every point of his oeuvre to date.' Heaney's style, which draws on influences as various as Robert Lowell and Dante, Mandelstam and Virgil, is deceptively simple, flowing gently and purposefully forward but unafraid of complex structures and references. Heaney has been chastised in some circles for not confronting the difficult politics of Ireland in his work; nevertheless, The Spirit Level was seen to confirm his station as one of the best poets working in the language. But in 1996 the poetic establishment was riven by a fuss over a deceased American poet — albeit one who has become part of the English canon. Late in 1995, Anthony Julius (also known for being the lawyer who shepherded Diana, Princess of Wales, through her divorce) published T. S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, a critical reading of the poet's anti-Semitic work. In the spring of 1996, following a review of the book by Louis Menand in the New York Review of Books, British poets and critics, led by Tom Paulin and James Fenton, took up the cause of those, like Julius, who see the poet's work as forever diminished by the charge. Meanwhile Craig Raine (whose own new volume Clay: Whereabouts Unknown was also published in 1996) wrote in his defense. Much of Eliot's juvenilia also saw the light of day in 1996, in Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917, meticulously edited by Professor Christopher Ricks. Previously, scholars had been able to see these poems but not quote from them; the press made much of some of the bawdier lines. In his lifetime Eliot had wished this early work to be suppressed, and the general consensus was that he was a fine judge of his own writing. But causing a stir in the poetic world isn't always so easy. The poet and critic Michael Horovitz staged a 'Poetry Olympics' at the Royal Albert Hall in July, attempting to follow on from his hugely successful gathering of Beat Poets there in 1965. In an effort to bridge the gap between pop and poetry, artists as varied as Ray Davies (of the Kinks) and the poet Heathcote Williams performed, but audiences were disappointingly small. Nevertheless the poet Simon Armitage commented, 'I'm not convinced that popularity should be taken as a measure of poetry's wellbeing.'

382

Biography. British establishment figures had more than their fair share of the biographical limelight in 1996 — not always a welcome illumination. Robert Runcie: The Reluctant Archbishop, Humphrey Carpenter's biography of the former archbishop of Canterbury, was accompanied by a note from Runcie saying that he had hoped to die before it was published. Runcie had been frank with Carpenter about his views on homosexuality and the clergy and about his early apprehensions for the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, honesty he later seemed to regret. Two biographies of the queen were published in 1996 — Her Majesty turned 70 in April. One, Elizabeth: A Biography of Her Majesty the Queen by Sarah Bradford, was written, wrote historian Andrew Roberts, by 'a fervent monarchist.' The fine picture of the monarch that emerged from the book stood in contrast to the goings-on of much of her family throughout the year. Historian Ben Pimlott's account, The Queen, was far more favorable than many expected from a writer who is a self-confessed Fabian, or moderate socialist. Bradford drew attention to the queen's successful and happy marriage to the Duke of Edinburgh; another famous marital partnership was investigated in Below the Parapet, a biography of Denis Thatcher, Lady Thatcher's stalwart mate, by their daughter, Carol. 'There is something touching,' wrote Michael Gove, 'about his silent support, doing the washing-up while advisers worked on speeches with the party leader.' In His Father's Son: The Life of Randolph Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, grandson of Winston Churchill, ventured to write a biography of his father, whose life as a journalist and unsuccessful politician was lived in the immense shadow of his own father, who called him 'idle and lazy.' 'Whatever criticism can be made of this memorial to his father,' wrote Enoch Powell, 'Winston Churchill MP has produced an unvarnished picture.' Finally, that great Victorian monument to British lives, the Dictionary of National Biography, drew to a close with the publication of its final volume, covering the last three generations of British worthies (the New Dictionary of National Biography will appear early in the next millennium). Its entries run the gamut of the national life and are not only informative but entertaining: 'Some of Roald Dahl's stories about himself were as tall as he was,' the author's entry runs. Fiction. Graham Swift won the 1996 Booker Prize with his novel Last Orders; the prize is always the highlight of the British literary year and is never complete without some kind of outcry. The one for 1996, sparked by chair of the Booker judges Carmen Callil's robust defense of English fiction, was comparatively mild. Much more drama was provided by the awarding of the first Orange Prize for fiction, to British novelist Helen Dunmore for her fine book A Spell of Winter. The prize, its core funding an anonymous donation, is worth £30,000 ($45,000) — that is, £10,000 ($15,000) more than the prestigious Booker. What seemed to shock the literary world was that this vast sum would be available only to women. Not just British women, but all women writing in English: Indeed, four of the short-listed authors, Amy Tan, Pagan Kennedy, Anne Tyler, and Marianne Wiggins, were American. The judges squabbled among themselves; Anita Brookner would not allow her book to be considered because of what she saw as the sexist nature of the prize; A. S. Byatt was quoted as saying: 'I am against anything which ghettoizes women. That is my deepest feminist emotion.' 383

Why, it was asked, did women need their own prize when Pat Barker had won the Booker only last year? The storm over the Orange Prize revealed that literature and equality do not necessarily go hand in hand; as one of the judges, Lorna Sage, wrote when the prize had been awarded, 'The reason this prize stirred up so much animosity was because it was really and secretly part of the great demystification of what has traditionally been men's work, men's prestige, men's preserve.'

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

384

1997: Literature, English Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1997: Literature, English Censorship was an issue much in the press in Britain in 1997. The publication of a novel narrated by a pedophile — The End of Alice by A. M. Homes — resulted in a call for its banning by the head of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. And Kitty Kelley's book about the British royal family, The Royals, while not banned, was unable to find a British publisher, because of fears of the country's stringent libel laws. Poetry. Oscar Wilde escaped active censorship, but not censure, in his day; 1997 saw the 100th anniversary of his release from Reading Gaol, and a publishing flurry of 'Oscariana,' as well as the release of a film, Wilde, starring Stephen Fry. An edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol was published by Duck-worth to mark the occasion, with fine woodcuts by Brian Lalor. It was a strong year for Britain's poet laureate, Ted Hughes. His collection Tales From Ovid — a very loose translation, or adaptation, of the Metamorphoses — was hailed as 'a breathtaking piece of work' in the Sunday Times: 'To compare his versions with the Latin is to be awestruck again and again by the range and ingenuity of his poetic intelligence.' Tales From Ovid was short-listed for the Forward Prize for poetry, but the £10,000 prize went to Jamie McKendrick's The Marble Fly, praised in the Times as a 'consistently excellent' collection. Hughes collaborated with Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney on The School Bag, a fine, fat anthology offering an idiosyncratic selection of poetry (including translations from Gaelic). Hughes also edited By Heart, a collection of 101 poems, most of them well-known, selected with the express purpose of memorization in mind. The slim book came complete with instructions for the poet laureate's own method of memorization. Versifier Murray Lachlan Young, 28, was signed up by EMI for £1.1 million for his Vice and Verse CD: his poetry slots neatly into the breaks on MTV. While this may have given some hope to those who fear that poetry is a poverty-stricken genre, not all are convinced of Young's talent. Poet Tobias Hill called his work 'B-movie performance poetry ... camp and irredeemably awful.' Biography. In a year when many fine biographies were published in Britain, one not available there topped the headlines because of its timing and subject matter. Kitty Kelley's The Royals, a muckraking exposé of the home life of Queen Elizabeth II and her troubled family, was released abroad in the wake of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and that fact, added to its not being available in Britain, brought it more attention than it might otherwise have garnered. Sources

385

for the book were revealed not to have been consulted directly, and the reputation of the monarchy, although not at its highest, did not appear to be actively damaged by the book. Two biographies of living politicians caused some ripples. Jonathan Dimbleby's The Last Governor, a life of Chris Patten, appeared just after Patten left his post as governor of Hong Kong following the handover to China. Debate centered on whether Patten was supported by the government at home in his efforts to safeguard the freedoms of the Hong Kong people. Geoffrey Howe, British foreign secretary from 1983 to 1989 and therefore involved in the development of the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 that provided the formal basis for the handover, lambasted the book 'with its surreal and unjust accusations of treachery and foul play by senior government ministers.' In John Major: A Political Life, Anthony Seldon looked at the life of the prime minister whose Conservative Party suffered so badly at the polls in the May general election. One commentator found that Seldon's book revealed 'a premiership of fits and starts, with one damn thing going wrong after another.' That was certainly the case where the election was concerned; the Labor Party won by an enormous majority. It was a good year for literary biography. The Apprentice Mage, the first volume of Professor R. F. Foster's long-awaited authorized biography of William Butler Yeats, W. B. Yeats: A Life, appeared. It takes the poet into his middle age, to 1914. All things Irish being fashionable at the moment, the 18th-century playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan also came under the biographer's gaze with two accounts of his life — one, Sheridan: A Life, by Linda Kelly and the other by Irish journalist Finran O'Toole (A Traitor's Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan), the latter closely intertwining his career in the theater with his life in politics. Clutches of biographies, like the two of Sheridan, can be irritating for their writers: Claire Tomalin (Jane Austen: A Life) and David Nokes (Jane Austen) also found themselves in competition with their books on Jane Austen, whose popularity, following various film and TV adaptations, remains undimmed. 'Nokes is copious, Tomalin more controlled,' wrote Peter Ackroyd in the Times; he felt that Tomalin's was the better book. 'But why speak of competition,' he closed, 'when Austen herself found all the ways of the world highly comical?'

Fiction. It was a thin year for British fiction. The issue was first raised when the second shortlist of the Orange Prize for Fiction (open to all women writing in English, and, at £30,000, the richest British fiction prize) was released in May. Only two of the six short-listed authors — Manda Scott for Hen's Teeth and Deirdre Madden for One by One in the Darkness — were British. In 1996 the fuss about the Orange Prize, then brand new, was over whether there should be an all-women prize in the first place; in 1997 the debate focused on the state of British fiction. The eventual winner, Anne Michaels, for her novel Fugitive Pieces, is a Canadian. Sixty percent of the year's submissions were by North American authors. The specter of a nation in literary decline raised its head again when the shortlist for the prestigious Booker Prize, worth £20,000 and open to only British and Commonwealth writers, was announced in September. The eventual winner was Arundhati Roy, whose first novel, The God of Small Things, had been in the news since her agent, David Godwin, first flew to India to seek her out and then sold her manuscript to publisher HarperCollins for six figures.

386

The grand young man of British letters, Martin Amis, took a critical pasting for his latest novel, a police procedural set in the United States and entitled Night Train. John Updike, in the Sunday Times, 'wound up hating it.' In early November it was revealed that a long-lost unpublished story by Mary Shelley, the 19thcentury author of Frankenstein, had been discovered in the private archives of an Italian family in their Tuscan palazzo. 'Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot,' had lain unread for 150 years.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

387

1999: Booker Prize: South African J. M. Coetzee Wins Literary Award Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1999: Booker Prize: South African J. M. Coetzee Wins Literary Award Disgrace, a novel by South African writer J. M. Coetzee, was named the winner of the Booker Prize on October 25, 1999. Coetzee became the first author to capture the prestigious award twice—he was also awarded the prize in 1983 for The Life and Times of Michael K. Most critics hailed the choice of Coetzee and Disgrace, the story of a South African literature professor who is caught having an affair with a student. The professor resigns and goes to live on his daughter's farm. After he and his daughter are the victims of a brutal attack, their relationship with each other and with their changing world is tested. Coetzee, himself a professor of general literature at the University of Cape Town, writes powerful novels that often deal directly or indirectly with the extreme racial tension in South African society. In a written statement, Coetzee called the Booker Prize “the ultimate prize to win in the English-speaking world.” The award, which includes a monetary prize of about $35,000, has been given annually since 1969 to the best novel written by a citizen of the United Kingdom or a British Commonwealth country. The judges made the unusual announcement of the book that was second in their voting, Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting, which contrasts the life of a family in India with that of a family in the United States. The other four finalists for 1999 were Michael Frayn's Headlong, the story of one man's quest to prove that he has found a long-lost art masterpiece on a neighbor's wall; Andrew O'Hagan's Our Fathers, about a grandson who reflects on his family history while at his grandfather's deathbed; Ahdaf Soueif's Map of Love, the tale of two generations of love affairs between Westerners and Egyptians; and Colm Tóibín's Blackwater Lightship, in which a young woman struggles with her family relationships after her brother dies. The official Web site of the Booker Prize features information about the prize and the six finalists, with audio selections from all six novels.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

388

1999: Poetry: Andrew Motion Becomes Britain's New Poet Laureate Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.

1999: Poetry: Andrew Motion Becomes Britain's New Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, a 47-year-old poet, biographer, and professor of creative writing, was named Britain's poet laureate on May 19, 1999. Motion succeeds English poet Ted Hughes, who died in October 1998. The appointment of Motion put to rest rumors that British prime minister Tony Blair would appoint a “people's poet,” such as pop music star Paul McCartney. The laureate is officially selected by the English monarch on the recommendation of the prime minister. The job is a largely ceremonial one, with the laureate expected to write poems commemorating important national events and royal occasions, such as weddings. The post, which officially dates from 1668, was formerly a lifetime appointment paying a small sum and a case of wine each year. Motion, however, was given a ten-year appointment with an annual honorarium of £5,000 (equivalent to approximately $8,400). Motion was born in London, England, in 1952 and studied English at the University of Oxford. He began publishing poetry when he was in his mid-20s, but his greatest acclaim has come from literary biographies of English poets John Keats and Philip Larkin. Motion's book Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (1993) won the Whitbread Award for biography. In 1995 Motion became a professor at University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. A collection of his poems, Salt Water, was published in 1997. A compilation of his poetry from the previous two decades, Selected Poems 1976-1997, was published in paperback in early 1999. The Web site of the Poetry Society contains information about British poets, poetry news, and selected poems. The Internet Poetry Archive features the text of selected poems by contemporary poets and audio clips of selected poems and poets.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

—————————————————————————————————————

389

390

391

392

393

394

395

396

397

History of English Literature Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation May 28, 2010

Compiled by:

Masoud Abadi [email protected]

And

Iman Kiaee [email protected]