and friend.

realists, Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim and Victory tapped the vein of romance which Englishmen have always connected with the sea.

With the growing interest in social problems which reached its highest point with the coming of the twentieth century, began a renewed development of the novel of social analysis not with the humor and satire of Dickens, but with the searching intensity of the realists. In The Man of Property John Galsworthy laid bare the materialism of the moneyed classes; in The Country House he probed the minds of the aristocracy; in Fraternity he showed the futility of the sentimental workers for social reform; and in The Patrician he pictured the English nobility imprisoned in their caste. H. G. Wells represents the effect of the new social sciences upon a man of scientific training. The muddle of English social, political, and economic life furnished the material for such novels as Tono Bungay and The New Macchiavelli, novels for which some day the student of social history will be grateful.

A new form of prose fiction was the short story. Short stories in rudimentary form have always existed, but it was only after 1880 that the short story was regarded consciously and critically. Professor Brander Matthews in 1885 used these words to characterize the short story:

"A true short-story differs from the novel chiefly in its essential unity of impression. . . . A short-story deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation. . Thus the short-story has, what the novel cannot have, the effect of 'totality,' as Poe called it, the unity of impression."

The short story became immensely popular, partly because the rapid multiplication of weekly and monthly magazines created a steady and ever-increasing demand

for it. Rudyard Kipling became the leading writer of short stories in English. His inexhaustible stock of fresh and interesting material, his romantic vigor, and his picturesque diction made him particularly fitted for short story writing.

Drama

After 1880 came a rebirth of interest in the drama. Dramatic literature had had merely a sporadic life since the middle of the eighteenth century. But now, under the influence of Continental playwrights, particularly of the Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), English dramatic literature came once more to a new and vigorous life. But the old forms were gone. Tragedy and comedy no longer had their old meanings. The conventional division into five acts was disregarded. The soliloquy, the aside, and the set scenes with long speeches disappeared. With them disappeared the conventional types of character and the conventional beginning and ending. The new drama was affected by the same realism which produced the new novel. It insisted upon a drama which should give an accurate picture of life in lifelike dialogue with a setting accurately reproducing the actual background of modern life.

In the new drama tragedy and comedy ceased to have their old meanings. A classification of drama into comedy and tragedy became impossible since playwrights were interested, not in types but in themes. There are plays dealing with problems of social organization like John Galsworthy's Justice; plays dealing with problems raised by social conventions like Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray; plays of the analysis of character like James Barrie's What Every Woman Knows or George Bernard Shaw's Candida; fantasies like Barrie's Peter Pan; and many

others. Real classification is impossible, since the new drama was frankly experimental. Definitions lost their validity; playwrights were interested in expressing their ideas of life or in holding the attention of the audience with an absorbing story, not in following exacting rules laid down by traditional criticism.

I. Poetry

a. Lyrical poetry

Swinburne

b. Narrative poetry

SUMMARY 1880-1914

Kipling, Masefield, Noyes, Gibson

II. Prose

Essay

Pater, Stevenson, Chesterton

III. Fiction

a. The novel

1. Realistic portrayal of common life
Hardy, Bennett

2. Romantic novel

Stevenson, Conrad

3. Novel of character analysis

Meredith

4. Novel of social analysis

Galsworthy, Wells

b. The short story Kipling, Stevenson

IV. The drama

a. Plays of social criticism

Galsworthy, Shaw

b. Plays dealing with problems of social conventions Pinero

c. Plays of character analysis

Barrie

d. Fantasies

Barrie

THE FORMS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE AT THE PRESENT TIME

It is clear that the forms of English literature have developed, grown, decayed, and vanished with the passage of years. The epic, the romance, the allegory, the pastoral, the elegy, the various types of Elizabethan drama, even the types of such a recently developed form as the novel have had their vogue and have passed away probably never to return. The nineteenth century seemed to have accelerated this natural development until, in our own day, there seems no possible classification of literary forms except the broadest ones. The novel and the short story remain, though almost every new novel is a form unto itself; the drama remains, though the influence of the motion-picture causes constant innovations in form; the essay remains, though it exists rather because of the interest and novelty of its material than because of its form. Of the types of lyrical poetry only the sonnet remains unchanged, and that is less and less cultivated. The very form of verse has undergone a revolution in the so-called "new poetry" which, after 1914, became the most interesting and startling development in English literature since the revival of drama about 1880.

The "new poetry" is frankly revolutionary. It scorns tradition, believing that adherence to tradition dulls the writer's sense of poetic truth. It despises conventionality. It wants to be fresh, spontaneous, individual, sincere.

The admirers of the "new poetry" claim for it the following characteristics:

1. The new poetry is free from poetic diction. The conventional and traditional language of poetry is discarded for natural speech of ordinary men. Moreover in the new poetry all language is regarded as fit for the uses of poetry. No distinction is made between "low" or "common" speech and "poetic" speech. The following lines from Carl