One speaks the glory of the British Queen, To-day it is hard to realize that from 1660 to 1740 satire and versified essay in the heroic couplet held the field as the supreme achievement in poetry. To-day we look upon other forms as more interesting, but for an age when "reason" and "good sense" were deemed the highest intellectual achievement of civilization, didactic poetry which best exemplified these qualities was naturally the most popular poetic form. The chief forms of literature developed from 1660 to 1740 may be summarized as follows: Defoe: A Review of the Affairs of France b. Miscellaneous prose 1. Criticism Dryden: Essay of Dramatic Poesy 2. Prose allegory Bunyan: Pilgrim's Progress Swift: Gulliver's Travels 3. Prose tales Defoe: Robinson Crusoe III. Drama a. Comedy of manners Congreve: The Way of the World b. Heroic play Dryden: The Conquest of Grenada THE DEVELOPMENT OF FORMS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM 1740-1798 The "age of prose and reason" held its own until the very end of the eighteenth century. After 1740 the writers of the age of Queen Anne one by one laid down their pens. Literature was continued in the spirit of their work, however, by a group of writers chief of whom was Samuel Johnson (17071784). Johnson gathered about him a famous group of men who represented the best in English intellectual life such men as Sir Joshua Reynolds, the painter; David Garrick, the actor; and Edmund Burke, the statesman. Poetry Didactic poetry together with satire continued to be written, especially by Samuel Johnson whose London and Vanity of Human Wishes were widely read. Descriptive poetry also held the field, though its themes were made more interesting by a new sympathy with the lives of common men. Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) in The Deserted Village idealized with tender understanding life in an Irish village; and William Cowper (1731-1800) described in The Task the familiar scenes of the English countryside. With a savage impatience at such sentimental writing, George Crabbe (17541832) in The Village stripped romance from pictures of rural life and established a new type of descriptive poetry which for stark honesty is unmatched in English literature. Besides these survivals of the past there developed a new interest in lyrical poetry. Men began to feel the charm of the literature of the old days of Elizabeth and to stress emotional expression. William Blake (1757-1827) wrote his Songs of Innocence and his Songs of Experience with the verse of the Elizabethans singing in his heart; and Robert Burns (1759-1796) fitted immortal lyrics to old Scotch tunes. The sonnet, which had been neglected since Milton's time, reappeared as a kind of experiment, and such "elegiac poetry" as the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray (1716-1771) and the Ode to Evening by William Collins (1721-1759), half lyric and half descriptive poetry, won a permanent place for itself by its solemn and melancholy sweetness. The ode also flourished anew with Thomas Gray (17161771) who abandoned the Cowleyan form of irregular ode and drew fresh inspiration from a direct study of classical odes. His odes are in a regular, almost mechanical form consisting of three "sets," each set consisting of three carefully matched stanzas called "strophe," antistrophe," "and 'epode" from the Greek names applied to the march of the chorus in the Greek dramas about the great stage in the Greek theater "turn," "counterturn," and "stand." After 1740 the term ode was also applied to poems on serious themes with no special form such as Collins's Ode: How Sleep the Brave. Narrative poetry continued, but epic, allegory, and pastoral became forms of a bygone day. A new type, the literary ballad, the result of the rediscovery of the old popular ballads, came into prominence after the publication in 1765 of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, a three volume collection of ballads and songs. Prose After 1740 the essay continued to maintain its hold with such periodical publications as Johnson's The Rambler. But prose as a vehicle for literary expression was outrunning the field of the essay. Johnson's best work is not in The Rambler, but in his critical essays on English writers, The Lives of the Poets. Edmund Burke's (1729-1797) famous Speech for Conciliation with the Colonies remains to-day among the few really great political orations of the world. Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire produced a masterpiece of historical writing which still stands almost unchallenged in its field. James Boswell (1740-1795) in his Life of Johnson produced a biography which is now as full of life and interest as it was when the memory of the great Dr. Johnson was fresh in the minds of his friends. But of supreme importance in the prose literature of the period was the novel. The novel, which was to become for the nineteenth century what the drama was for the sixteenth and seventeenth, was a new form, a native product of England, destined in a few generations to make its way into the literature of every land, and finally to become the leading form in modern literature. The modern novel, the imaginative presentation of character as it unfolds itself in a story, is impossible to define. It is not an epic because it has not the epic's stateliness of style, preoccupation with heroic events, and interest in a nation rather than in an individual; it is not a romance, because it has not the childish delight in marvels and exaggerated adventure of the old romances. It has more definite structure of plot than the old prose tale, more interest also in the unfolding of character and the portrayal of setting. It has not the machinery of the epic. It is far more highly developed than the "character" or the essay. Yet it derives from all of these forms certain elements, fusing them, however, into a new, flexible, and absorbing form of creative literature. The novel begins in 1740 with Samuel Richardson's (1689-1761) Pamela. Immediately the form became highly popular and by the early nineteenth century the following types of the novel had become pretty firmly established: (1) the novel of character analysis, first written in letters and later in connected narrative, confining itself to the presentation of the motives, ideals, thoughts, and feelings of a hero or heroine, e. g., Richardson's Clarissa; (2) the novel which gives a cross-section of society and aims to present a complete picture of a large group of people in their relations to each other, e. g., Henry Fielding's (1707-1754) Tom Jones; (3) the novel of adventure, carrying on the traditions of the prose tale and aiming to present a series of interesting events in the life of a single person without attempt at a coherent plot, e.g., Tobias Smollett's (1721-1771) Roderick Random; (4) the novel of purpose, aiming at the criticism of some social custom or institution, e. g., Godwin's (1756–1836) Caleb Williams; (5) the novel of manners, aiming to present the life of persons in Society, e. g., Fanny Burney's (1752-1840) Evelina; (6) the historical novel, aiming to present a picture of social conditions in some historical period either by fictitious characters or fictitious events, e. g., Horace Walpole's (17171797) Castle of Otranto; and (7) the fantastic novel which hooks upon a slender story the thoughts, dreams, or imaginative wanderings of the author, e. g., Lawrence Sterne's (1713-1768) Tristram Shandy. These seven types of the novel, all well developed by the first third of the nineteenth century, have with variations in material and in emphasis |