III. The novel a. The novel of character analysis Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot b. The novel of large groups Thackeray, Dickens c. The novel of adventure Marryatt, Dickens d. The novel of purpose Dickens e. The novel of manners Thackeray, Dickens f. The historical novel Dickens, Thackeray, Kingsley, George Eliot, Bulwer Lytton g. The novel of setting Disraeli, Emily Brontë THE DEVELOPMENT OF FORMS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM 1880-1914 About 1880 a period of great literary activity came to an end. For a hundred years great writers of prose and poetry had been widening and deepening the channels of English literature enriching particularly lyrical poetry and the essay and making the novel the chief modern vehicle for imaginative expression. With the new generation, however, came a period of unrest, criticism, and experiment in literature. Old traditional literary influences lost their power, and young men and women turned for intellectual stimulus toward the physical and social sciences and toward business which was just beginning its immense modern expansion. Under such circumstances it was natural that literary forms after 1880 should have been few and should have been meagerly cultivated. Poetry Interest in poetry after 1880 declines almost to the vanishing point. Lyrical poetry in the traditional forms had little vogue. In the nineties a brief interest in old French forms, ballade, rondeau, and triolet, flared into momentary popularity. For a time the varied and daring experiments of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) with every type of lyrical poetry and with every form of metrical pattern captured the imaginations of young men and women. Rudyard Kipling continued the literary ballad and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) wrote his delightful Child's Garden of Verses. After the beginning of the twentieth century three poets, John Masefield, W. W. Gibson, and Alfred Noyes wrote poems which indicated a rebirth of poetic interest. Masefield's lyrics of the sea gave promise of new vigor and his verse tales The Everlasting Mercy and The Widow in the Bye Street pointed the way to the revival of the form with some of the freedom and directness of the Chaucerian tale. Gibson explored new material in the lives of English workingmen and country laborers in Daily Bread and Fires and Noyes, working in the tradition of Keats and Tennyson, discovered new sources of romance in The Flower of Old Japan and The Forest of Wild Thyme. Prose Essay and miscellaneous prose continued the wide activity which they had acquired during the nineteenth century. A wider interest in style characterized all writing in prose, so that the line between literature and mere presentation of facts became more and more hazy. Renewed interest in the essay came from Walter Pater (1839-1894) and from Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). Pater's fastidiousness, taste, and nice appreciation of the beauty of prose made writers more acutely conscious of the element of style in prose. In Marius the Epicurean he portrayed with calm and dignified beauty the thoughts of a young man in the days of the declining Roman Empire; in The Renaissance he analyzed the charm of the Italian masters of art at the height of their power. Stevenson's buoyancy, optimism, and eager interest in life humanized and broadened the scope of subject matter of the essay. The matured sweetness of Virginibus Puerisque, the gayety of Travels with a Donkey, and the ardor and validity of Familiar Studies of Men and Books made these volumes classics almost as soon as they were written. The more journalistic style of post-victorian prose appears in the writing of G. K. Chesterton who, in such books as Orthodoxy and Heretics tilted valiantly with brilliant epigram and paradox at the windmills of popular opinion. The novel With the death of the great Victorian novelists Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, the novel underwent a change. Under the influence of French writers a new movement, "realism," entered prose fiction. The realists urged a more accurate record of actual life than the older novelists had given; they urged that less attention be paid to sentiment, to happy endings, to beautiful setting. They urged that the ugly facts of life be faced more fearlessly and that analysis of character be given more importance than presentation of incident. Novels became shorter and more highly condensed. The author spent less time on descriptions of setting and on stating his own ideas. Soon the novels began to assume new groupings: (1) the realistic novel, which tried honestly and faithfully to depict commonplace everyday life; (2) the romantic novel, which, in violent revolt from realism, tried to recapture a world of adventure, dreams, and chivalry; (3) the novel of character analysis, which aimed at a minute and penetrating analysis of subtle motives and characteristics; (4) the novel of purpose, which, like the earlier novel of purpose, made problems its chief interest; and (5) the historical novel, which was influenced by the four preceding types. The most important of the older novelists of the period were Thomas Hardy and George Meredith (1828-1909). Hardy's point of view was frankly pessimistic. He adopted the technique of the realists; first, to present faithful pictures of peasant life in southwestern England, as in The Woodlanders and Far from the Madding Crowd; and second, to develop his thesis of the insignificance of human suffering in the face of an unconcerned Destiny and an unmoved Nature, as in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and The Return of the Native. Meredith, on the other hand, though he faced the facts of life, believed in the power of individuals to shape their own destiny. To his faith in individual effort, he added an intense interest in psychological analysis, both of which placed his The Egoist and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel among the most interesting and powerful modern novels. Among the younger novelists the most representative was Arnold Bennett. He followed the theories of the new realism to the end and produced in The Old Wives' Tale a novel which succeeds by a multitude of seemingly unimportant facts in making its story intensely real and intensely vital. But the realists were not to have the novel entirely at their mercy. Robert Louis Stevenson revolted violently from their theories, and with Treasure Island and Kidnapped started a trend toward romantic tales which made an instant appeal to lovers of excitement and adventure. Following in his footsteps, but using the resources developed by the |