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George Eliot, 1820-1881.

1820-1881) stands easily in the front rank of English novelists, and must, moreover, be recognized as one of the most representative and influential writers of the latter half of the century. She was born at Chilvers Coton Parish, in Warwickshire, the county of intermingled Celt and English that has given so much to literature. Her father, like the elder Carlyle, was a plain, capable, practical man; one of those who do the world's work faithfully and silently. His daughter has preserved for us some traits of his strong, simple nature in the character of Caleb Garth, in Middlemarch. Much of George Eliot's best work deals with those phases of English provincial life among which many of her early years were passed. With a broader scope, a freer and more masculine handling than that of any writer who had preceded her in the field, by such novels as Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Middlemarch (1871-1872), she is as emphatically the great painter of English country life as Dickens is of the slums and of the poor, or Thackeray of club life and of fashion. Romola, an historical novel of the Florence of Savonarola, is her one notable departure from her chosen sphere. George Eliot's work fills us with an intense sense of reality. Her characters are substantial, living people, drawn with a Shakesperean truth and insight. In order to interest us in them she is not forced, as Dickens was, to rely on outward eccentricities. In Tom and Maggie Tulliver, in Dorothea Brooke, in Tito Melema, or in Gwendolen Harleth, we enter into and identify ourselves with the inner experiences of a human soul. These and the other great creations of George Eliot's genius are not set characters; like ourselves, they are subject to change, acted upon by others, acting on others in their turn; molded by the daily pressure of things within and things without. We are made to understand the growth or the degener

ation of their souls; how Tito slips half consciously down the easy slopes of self-indulgence, or Romola learns through suffering to ascend the heights of self-renunciation. The novels of George Eliot move under a heavy weight of tragic earnestness; admirable as is their art, graphic and telling as is their humor, they are weighed down with a burden of philosophic teaching, which in the later books, especially Daniel Deronda, grows too heavy for the story, and injures the purely literary value. The duty of giving up personal enjoyment to forward the progress of the race is a doctrine often inculcated, and one in keeping with many modern aspirations. But quite aside from their teaching, it is the art of these great books, their poetic beauty of style, their subtle understanding of the lives of men and women, that places them with the great imaginative productions of the literature.

Recent Poetry.

While the life and aspirations of our age find their most popular and influential interpretation in the novel, the Victorian era has made some lasting additions to the great body of English poetry. Poetry has been studied and practiced as an art with a care which recalls the age of Anne, and even minor writers have acquired an extraordinary finish, and a mastery of novel poetic forms. This attention to form is commonly thought to have begun with Keats, and since 1830 Tennyson has proved himself one of the most versatile and consummate artists in the history of English verse. As is usual in periods of scrupulous and conscious art, this recent poetry has been graceful or meditative, rather than powerful and passionate. It excels in the lyric rather than in the dramatic form; it delights in expressing the poet's own shifting moods, and, as a rule, it leaves to the novel the vigorous objective portrayal of life. It finds a relief in escaping from the confined air of our

Evasion.

modern life into the freedom and simplicity of nature, and it has never lost that subtle and inspired feeling for the mystery of the visible world which came into poetry in the previous century. The supremacy of science and the advance of democracy, the two motive forces in English life and thought since 1830, have acted on modern poetry in different ways. There are poets who think themselves fallen on evil days; who, repelled by the sorThe Poetry of didness, ugliness, and materialism of a scientific and mercantile generation, seek to escape in poetry to a world less vulgar and more to their minds. Like Keats, they ignore the peculiar hopes and perplexities of their age, to wander after the all-sufficient spirit of beauty. This tendency is seen in the early classic poems of Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), in the Atalanta in Calydon of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–), or in the poems of those associated with the English Pre-Raphaclite brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) with his odor of Italy, and his rich and curious felicity of phrase. This poetry of evasion, as it may be called, is seen also in the early work of William Morris (1834–), in his classic study, The Life and Death of Jason (1867), and in his Earthly Paradise (1868-1870), a gathering of beautiful stories from the myths and legends of many lands.

The Poetry of Doubt.

Other poets, unsettled by doubts which have come. with modern science, and unable to reconcile faith to the new knowledge of their time, carry into their work that uncertainty and unbelief which is the moral disease of their generation. The most characteristic poetry of Matthew Arnold is the outcome of this mood. In his Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, Obermann, Heine's Grave, and many other poems, we see a man at odds with his time, unwilling to

doubt, yet unable to believe. Through his refined, scholarly, and well nigh faultless verse, there runs a forlorn and pathetic bravery sadder than open despair. Somewhat the same tone is present, but animated by a strain of greater faith and hope, in the poems of Arnold's friend, Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), a man of genius and of promise, while James Thomson's City of Dreadful Night (1874) is the poetry of despair.

The Poetry of

Happily the two greatest and most representative poets of our epoch, Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, belong to neither of these groups. Differing widely in manner and in their Faith and Hope. theory of art, they have at least one point in common. Both face frankly and boldly the many questions of their age; neither evading nor succumbing to its intellectual difficulties, they still find beauty and goodness in the life of the world about them; holding fast the "things which are not seen" as a present reality, they still cherish "the faith which looks through death."

Alfred Tennyson.

The slightest acquaintance with the poetry of Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), assures us that he is first of all the consummate artist. He has brought to the service of his art all that can be gathered by the life-long study of the great productions of the past, all that can be gained by the most patient and skillful cultivation of great natural gifts. He represents the best traditions of literature as truly as Browning represents a distinctly radical element, and in his work, as in that of Milton, the scholar is constantly delighted by reminiscences of his study of the great poets of antiquity. Tennyson's perfect mastery of his art is shown in the extraordinary scope and variety of his work, for few poets have won success in so many different fields.

As a Lyric Poet.

His lyrics, from the early metrical experiments of Claribel and Lilian to Crossing the Bar, or the songs in The Foresters (1892), make up a body of lyrical work unequaled in melody or beauty by any poet of our time. The songs scattered through The Princess are as faultless as they are famous.

"I have led her home, my love, my only friend,"

in Maud, is one of the noblest love-lyrics of the language, not inferior to the rapturous and familiar Garden Song in the same poem.

Classic Poems.

Mediævalism.

Like many poets of his time, Tennyson has dealt with classical themes; winning notable success in The LotosEaters with its contrast study, Ulysses, in Enone, Tithonus, Lucretius, and other poems of the same order. But even here Tennyson is modern rather than Greek, infusing into old-world myth or story the moods and aspirations peculiar to his time. He has shown us the narrow asceticism of the Middle Ages in St. Simon Stylites, its higher religious aspiration in St. Agnes's Eve, and his longest poem, The Idyls of the King, preserves at least the outward garb of medieval chivalry. The Recollections of the Arabian Nights is a dreamy revelation of the imagined splendors of the Orient, while The Gardener's Daughter, The Miller's Daughter, and Dora, are exquisite idyls of contemporary England. Only in the drama can Tennyson be said to have distinctly fallen below his high standard of excellence, yet even here his failure is only comparative and easily explained by many extenuating circumstances. Yet while Tennyson's subjects are thus drawn from many centuries and many lands, he is distinctly the spokesman of his time.

Locksley Hall (published in 1842) is aflame with those new hopes of progress which, at the beginning of our

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