Part 20 (1/2)
”Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken.”
”Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn.”
22. +Prose-Writers.+-- We have now to consider the greatest prose-writers of the first half of the nineteenth century. First comes +Walter Scott+, one of the greatest novelists that ever lived, and who won the name of ”The Wizard of the North” from the marvellous power he possessed of enchaining the attention and fascinating the minds of his readers. Two other great writers of prose were +Charles Lamb+ and +Walter Savage Landor+, each in styles essentially different. +Jane Austen+, a young English lady, has become a cla.s.sic in prose, because her work is true and perfect within its own sphere. +De Quincey+ is perhaps the writer of the most ornate and elaborate English prose of this period. +Thomas Carlyle+, a great Scotsman, with a style of overwhelming power, but of occasional grotesqueness, like a great prophet and teacher of the nation, compelled statesmen and philanthropists to think, while he also gained for himself a high place in the rank of historians. +Macaulay+, also of Scottish descent, was one of the greatest essayists and ablest writers on history that Great Britain has produced. A short survey of each of these great men may be useful. Scott has been already treated of.
23. CHARLES LAMB (+1775-1834+), a perfect English essayist, was born in the Inner Temple, in London, in the year 1775. His father was clerk to a barrister of that Inn of Court. Charles was educated at Christ's Hospital, where his most famous schoolfellow was S. T. Coleridge.
Brought up in the very heart of London, he had always a strong feeling for the greatness of the metropolis of the world. ”I often shed tears,”
he said, ”in the motley Strand, for fulness of joy at so much life.” He was, indeed, a thorough c.o.c.kney and lover of London, as were also Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Lamb's friend Leigh Hunt. Entering the India House as a clerk in the year 1792, he remained there thirty-three years; and it was one of his odd sayings that, if any one wanted to see his ”works,” he would find them on the shelves of the India House. --He is greatest as a writer of prose; and his prose is, in its way, unequalled for sweetness, grace, humour, and quaint terms, among the writings of this century. His best prose work is the +Essays of Elia+, which show on every page the most whimsical and humorous subtleties, a quick play of intellect, and a deep sympathy with the sorrows and the joys of men. Very little verse came from his pen. ”Charles Lamb's nosegay of verse,” says Professor Dowden, ”may be held by the small hand of a maiden, and there is not in it one flaunting flower.” Perhaps the best of his poems are the short pieces ent.i.tled +Hester+ and +The Old Familiar Faces+. --He retired from the India House, on a pension, in 1825, and died at Edmonton, near London, in 1834. His character was as sweet and refined as his style; Wordsworth spoke of him as ”Lamb the frolic and the gentle;” and these and other fine qualities endeared him to a large circle of friends.
24. WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (+1775-1864+), the greatest prose-writer in his own style of the nineteenth century, was born at Ipsley Court, in Warwicks.h.i.+re, on the 30th of January 1775-- the anniversary of the execution of Charles I. He was educated at Rugby School and at Oxford; but his fierce and insubordinate temper-- which remained with him, and injured him all his life-- procured his expulsion from both of these places. As heir to a large estate, he resolved to give himself up entirely to literature; and he accordingly declined to adopt any profession. Living an almost purely intellectual life, he wrote a great deal of prose and some poetry; and his first volume of poems appeared before the close of the eighteenth century. His life, which began in the reign of George III., stretched through the reigns of George IV. and William IV., into the twenty-seventh year of Queen Victoria; and, in the course of this long life, he had manifold experiences, many loves and hates, friends.h.i.+ps and acquaintances.h.i.+ps, with persons of every sort and rank. He joined the Spanish army to fight Napoleon, and presented the Spanish Government with large sums of money. He spent about thirty years of his life in Florence, where he wrote many of his works. He died at Florence in the year 1864. His greatest prose work is the +Imaginary Conversations+; his best poem is +Count Julian+; and the character of Count Julian has been ranked by De Quincey with the Satan of Milton.
Some of his smaller poetic pieces are perfect; and there is one, +Rose Aylmer+, written about a dear young friend, that Lamb was never tired of repeating:--
”Ah! what avails the sceptred race!
Ah! what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine!
”Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes Shall weep, but never see!
A night of memories and sighs I consecrate to thee.”
25. JANE AUSTEN (+1775-1817+), the most delicate and faithful painter of English social life, was born at Steventon, in Hamps.h.i.+re, in 1775-- in the same year as Landor and Lamb. She wrote a small number of novels, most of which are almost perfect in their minute and true painting of character. Sir Walter Scott, Macaulay, and other great writers, are among her fervent admirers. Scott says of her writing: ”The big bow-wow strain I can do myself, like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me.”
She works out her characters by making them reveal themselves in their talk, and by an infinite series of minute touches. Her two best novels are +Emma+ and +Pride and Prejudice+. The interest of them depends on the truth of the painting; and many thoughtful persons read through the whole of her novels every year.
26. THOMAS DE QUINCEY (+1785-1859+), one of our most brilliant essayists, was born at Greenhays, Manchester, in the year 1785. He was educated at the Manchester grammar-school and at Worcester College, Oxford. While at Oxford he took little share in the regular studies of his college, but read enormous numbers of Greek, Latin, and English books, as his taste or whim suggested. He knew no one; he hardly knew his own tutor. ”For the first two years of my residence in Oxford,” he says, ”I compute that I did not utter one hundred words.” After leaving Oxford, he lived for about twenty years in the Lake country; and there he became acquainted with Wordsworth, Hartley Coleridge (the son of S. T. Coleridge), and John Wilson (afterwards known as Professor Wilson, and also as the ”Christopher North” of 'Blackwood's Magazine').
Suffering from repeated attacks of neuralgia, he gradually formed the habit of taking laudanum; and by the time he had reached the age of thirty, he drank about 8000 drops a-day. This unfortunate habit injured his powers of work and weakened his will. In spite of it, however, he wrote many hundreds of essays and articles in reviews and magazines. In the latter part of his life, he lived either near or in Edinburgh, and was always employed in dreaming (the opium increased his power both of dreaming and of musing), or in studying or writing. He died in Edinburgh in the year 1859. --Many of his essays were written under the signature of ”The English Opium-Eater.” Probably his best works are +The Confessions of an Opium-Eater+ and +The Vision of Sudden Death+. The chief characteristics of his style are majestic rhythm and elaborate eloquence. Some of his sentences are almost as long and as sustained as those of Jeremy Taylor; while, in many pa.s.sages of reasoning that glows and brightens with strong pa.s.sion and emotion, he is not inferior to Burke. He possessed an enormous vocabulary-- in wealth of words and phrases he surpa.s.ses both Macaulay and Carlyle; and he makes a very large-- perhaps even an excessive-- use of Latin words. He is also very fond of using metaphors, personifications, and other figures of speech.
It may be said without exaggeration that, next to Carlyle's, De Quincey's style is the most stimulating and inspiriting that a young reader can find among modern writers.
27. THOMAS CARLYLE (+1795-1881+), a great thinker, essayist, and historian, was born at Ecclefechan, in Dumfriess.h.i.+re, in the year 1795.
He was educated at the burgh school of Annan, and afterwards at the University of Edinburgh. Cla.s.sics and the higher mathematics were his favourite studies; and he was more especially fond of astronomy. He was a teacher for some years after leaving the University. For a few years after this he was engaged in minor literary work; and translating from the German occupied a good deal of his time. In 1826 he married Jane Welsh, a woman of abilities only inferior to his own. His first original work was +Sartor Resartus+ (”The Tailor Repatched”), which appeared in 1834, and excited a great deal of attention-- a book which has proved to many the electric spark which first woke into life their powers of thought and reflection. From 1837 to 1840 he gave courses of lectures in London; and these lectures were listened to by the best and most thoughtful of the London people. The most striking series afterwards appeared in the form of a book, under the t.i.tle of +Heroes and Hero-Wors.h.i.+p+. Perhaps his most remarkable book-- a book that is unique in all English literature-- is +The French Revolution+, which appeared in 1837. In the year 1845, his +Cromwell's Letters and Speeches+ were published, and drew after them a large number of eager readers. In 1865 he completed the hardest piece of work he had ever undertaken, his +History of Frederick II., commonly called the Great+. This work is so highly regarded in Germany as a truthful and painstaking history that officers in the Prussian army are obliged to study it, as containing the best account of the great battles of the Continent, the fields on which they were fought, and the strategy that went to win them. One of the crowning external honours of Carlyle's life was his appointment as Lord Rector of the University of Edinburgh in 1866; but at the very time that he was delivering his famous and remarkable Installation Address, his wife lay dying in London. This stroke brought terrible sorrow on the old man; he never ceased to mourn for his loss, and to recall the virtues and the beauties of character in his dead wife; ”the light of his life,”
he said, ”was quite gone out;” and he wrote very little after her death.
He himself died in London on the 5th of February 1881.
28. +Carlyle's Style.+-- Carlyle was an author by profession, a teacher of and prophet to his countrymen by his mission, and a student of history by the deep interest he took in the life of man. He was always more or less severe in his judgments-- he has been called ”The Censor of the Age,”-- because of the high ideal which he set up for his own conduct and the conduct of others. --He shows in his historic writings a splendour of imagery and a power of dramatic grouping second only to Shakespeare's. In command of words he is second to no modern English writer. His style has been highly praised and also energetically blamed.
It is rugged, gnarled, disjointed, full of irregular force-- shot across by sudden lurid lights of imagination-- full of the most striking and indeed astonis.h.i.+ng epithets, and inspired by a certain grim t.i.tanic force. His sentences are often clumsily built. He himself said of them: ”Perhaps not more than nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular att.i.tudes; a few even sprawl out helplessly on all sides, quite broken-backed and dismembered.” There is no modern writer who possesses so large a profusion of figurative language. His works are also full of the pithiest and most memorable sayings, such as the following:--
”Genius is an immense capacity for taking pains.”
”Do the duty which lies nearest thee! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.”
”History is a mighty drama, enacted upon the theatre of time, with suns for lamps, and eternity for a background.”