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Chesterton's Browning (E. M. L.); Gosse's Browning: Personalia;
Orr's Handbook to the Works of Browning; Harrington's Browning
Studies; Birrell's Obiter Dicta, First Series; Brooke's The Poetry
of Browning; More's Shelburne Essays, Third Series (Browning,
Swinburne); Morley's Studies in Literature (Ring and Book);
Church's Dante and Other Essays (Sordello); Pater's Essays from
the Guardian; Kenyon's Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning;
Ingraham's Mrs. Browning; Mitford's Recollections of a Literary
Life; James's W. W. Story and his Friends; Gosse's Critical Kit-
Kats; Whiting's Study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Benson's Rossetti (E. M. L.); Knight's Rossetti (G. W.); Sharp's Rossetti; Rossetti's Letters to William Allingham; W. M. Rossetti's Ruskin, Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelitism; Pater's Appreciations; Mabie's Essays in Literary Interpretation; Mackail's Life of Morris; Noyes's Morris (E. M. L.); Vallance's Morris: His Art, Writings, and Public Life; More's Shelburne Essays, Sixth Series; Saintsbury's Corrected Impressions; Brock's Morris: His Work and Influence; Wratislaw's Swinburne: A Study; Mackail's Swinburne; Woodberry's Swinburne; Walker's Literature of the Victorian Era; Watts-Dunton's Old Familiar Faces; Symons's Figures of Several Centuries.

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH

1. Difference between the spirit of Arnold's prose works and the spirit of his poetry. 2. Illustrations of the thought of the age in Arnold's poetry. 3. The interest in Clough as a man and as a poet.

4. Outline of Tennyson's life. 5. The growth of Tennyson as a poet from 1832 to 1842. 6. Study and discuss the English idyls, The Gardener's Daughter, Dora, etc. 7. A careful comparison of Locksley Hall with Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. 8. Did Tennyson create any impressive personages? 9. Evidences of Tennyson's devotion to England.

10. Effect of Browning's early education on his poetry. 11. Moral lessons of Rabbi Ben Ezra. 12. Show by selected poems the extent to which Browning used the dramatic element. 13. A study of Browning's humor. 14. Compare Browning's Prospice with Tennyson's Crossing the Bar. 15. Make a full interpretation of My Last Duchess. 16. Give the point and substance of Fra Lippo Lippi.

17. Make a study of Rossetti's paintings (reproductions) in connection with his poetry. 18. Special beauties of The Blessed Damozel. 19. Make a study of Morris's first volume of poems with reference to romanticism. 20. Summarize the qualities of Swinburne's poetry.

CHAPTER XXI

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

THE twentieth century has thus far brought forth no successors to the great authors of the last half of the nineteenth century. Swinburne, who died in 1909, was the last of the great Victorian poets. There are still many poets, but no great ones. There never were so many novelists, but none approaches the heights of Dickens and Thackeray. Literary There are writers of large merit, even of great disConditions tinction, in every department of literature-poets, of To-day novelists, essayists, dramatists-but no one has exhibited the high singularity of inspired genius. The journalistic habit of mind that demands an unceasing stream of fresh facts and fresh sensations is undoubtedly hostile to the interests of true literature. There is less concentration and devotion of genius. Poets do not, like Wordsworth and Tennyson, solemnly “dedicate" themselves to poetry. With remarkable versatility an author writes poems, essays, novels, or dramas, yielding to the temptation to dissipate his talents in work of mediocre merit in order to catch the popular ear and obtain quick returns of fame and profit.

With this tendency to drift with the current of popular desire for diversified entertainment, literature loses its serious purposes and its artistic principles. There is, for example, no longer any quarrel between romanticism and realism; an author uses both methods without prejudice or conviction. If there is any specially marked tendency in current literature, it is the

effort to awaken by means of poetry and fiction a deeper interest in the life of the lowest classes of society. This is an enlargement of the humanitarian element in the literature of the last century, a reassertion in varied form of the idealism and baffled hopes of Morris and Ruskin.

Among the poets, William Watson has preserved the spirit of Wordsworth and Arnold, in poems of fine artistic form and lofty sentiment. He is meditative and earnest in his thought, and is at his best in memorial poems like Wordsworth's Grave. "Full oft," he says, he has made other poets the subject of his verse:

William Watson, 1858Robert Bridges, 1844Stephen Phillips, 1864-1915

In singers' selves found me a theme of song,
Holding these also to be very part

Of Nature's greatness, and accounting not
Their descants least heroical of deeds.

Robert Bridges was made laureate in 1913, to succeed Alfred
Austin. He is a classicist in his poetic tastes, and
cultivates in his poetry a classic simplicity and pre-
cision that amount almost to severity. There is
a lack of warmth and color in his verse; his emo-
tions never become ecstasies. He loves nature,
but with a reserved, unimpassioned love. And
yet his art, though a conscious restraint upon his
pen, is often very beautiful. High hopes were
raised by Stephen Phillips in his poetic dramas,
Herod, Ulysses, Nero, and especially Paolo and Francesca. The
last is a beautiful dramatic poem, in which the tragic story,
first made famous by Dante, is elaborated in graceful verse and
strong dramatic action. Phillips attempted to bring the
drama back to its original union with poetry, as in the Eliza-
bethan age.
But his plays are too poetical for the present con-
ditions of the stage. In his richly colored diction, he often
recalls the exultant young Marlowe.

Phillips used remote themes, strong in poetic and historic association, and worked them out with a careful art. Very

unlike him in these respects is John Masefield, a poet who has won a wide popularity with his facile rhymes. He writes of prosaic, every-day life, and with careless art. Much of his youth was spent on the sea, and he describes the rough life of sailors, as in Dauber, in vivid pictures. His most characteristic

John Masefield, 1875

Wilfred W. Gibson, 1878

work is in such poems as The Daffodil Fields and The Everlasting Mercy, in which he paints, in the spirit of Hardy's pessimism, the passion and the tragedy of life that is lived near the soil. He is a narrative poet and his stories run on so glibly as frequently to lose their connection with poetic art. But in the volume, Good Friday and Other Poems, sensational realism gives place to impressions of true poetic beauty, especially in a series of sonnets, subtle in thought and refined in expression. In truth, Masefield's best poetry is in a few breezy lyrics, inspired by love of the open fields and dashing ocean spray. The yearning in Sea Fever links his spirit with that of the Anglo-Saxon poet of The Seafarer:

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.

Another poet of the people is Wilfred Wilson Gibson, who sings the "life-song of humanity" in Daily Bread, Fires, and Womenkind. He writes in the dramatic form with a bald and vivid realism, and pictures with deep human sympathy the dull, monotonous life of the day laborer, a world of poverty and pain in which he finds

All life moving to one measure-
Daily bread, daily bread.

In strong contrast with the depressing realism of these poets is the romanticism of Alfred Noyes, the most prolific poet of the day. In 1903 he published The Flower of Old Japan, a fairy-tale for children with a symbolic meaning for older folk. In The Forests of Wild Thyme he again employed the "fairy

Alfred Noyes, 1880

gleam" of the child's imagination to symbolize the mystery of life. In 1908 appeared the long epic poem, Drake, which revives the adventurous life of the great Elizabethan sea-rovers. The poem is too long and too gorgeous and excessive in its descriptions, but its spirit is the flaming spirit of the young Elizabethans, with whom Noyes proves his kinship. In the Tales of the Mermaid Tavern, his most original production, he brings to life in vivid dramatic scenes Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Raleigh, and the others who engaged in the grand frolics of wit and wine at the Mermaid Inn.

A great part of Noyes's poetry is only balladry. He writes with a fluent, diffuse, and unrestrained expression. His repetitions are tedious; one wishes his favorite character, the Spanish galleon, would burn or sink. His work needs the pruning-knife of a rigid self-criticism. As Emerson said of Thoreau: "His thyme and marjoram are not yet converted into honey."

To three older poets, Austin Dobson, Edmund Gosse, and Andrew Lang, we are indebted for charming poetry of the vers de société type. If there is not exaltation for the spirit, there is delightful recreation for the mind in this graceful

Austin Dobson, 1840Edmond Gosse, 1849

verse. Especially charming are their revivals of the old Troubadour lyric forms,-ballade, rondeau, triolet, and villanelle. Such poems are trifles light as air, but like floating bubbles they catch their bright colors from the sunshine of life. Gosse's On Viol and Flute, Dobson's Proverbs in Porcelain, and Lang's Rhymes à la Mode are representative collections of this poetry. Gosse's Firdusi in Exile is a long poem from the same Persian source as Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum. Both Dobson and Gosse have written much excellent literary criticism and biography.

Andrew Lang, 1844-1912

English literature suffered a grievous loss in the death of Rupert Brooke, a young poet of extraordinary promise, who

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