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History of Literature
A BRIEF HISTORY OF
WESTERN LITERATURE
Classicism and
Naturalism
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Classicism and Naturalism
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Soren Kierkegaard
Alphonse de Lamartine
Alfred de Vigny
Anthony Powell
George Sand
Alfred de Musset
Charles
Baudelaire
"The Flowers of Evil"
Arthur Rimbaud
"Poems"
Paul Verlaine
"Poems"
Stephane Mallarme
Washington Irving
"The Legend of
Sleepy Hollow"
"Rip Van Winkle"
Illustrations by Arthur Rackham
James Fenimore
Cooper
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The
Song of Hiawatha"
Edgar Allan Poe
1.
"Ligeia"
2.
"The Raven"
Illustrations by
Gustave Dore
3.
"The Fall of the
House of Usher"
4.
Illustrations from
Edgar Poe by Edmund Dulac
5.
Illustrations
from
Edgar Poe
by Harry Clarke
Walt Whitman
"Leaves of Grass"
Emily Dickinson
"Poems"
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
William Morris
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Robert
Browning
"Dramatic Romances"
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"Sonnets from the Portuguese"
Alfred Tennyson
"Idylls of the King"
PART I,
PART II
Illustrations by G. Dore
"Lady of Shalott", "Sir Galahad"
Pre-Raphaelite illustrations for Moxon's Tennyson
Heinrich Heine
"Poems and
Ballads"
Austrian Frans Grillparzer
Christian Friedrich
Hebbel
Georg
Buchner
Oscar Wilde
I.
"The Ballad of Reading
Gaol",
"The Paradox"
II.
"The Picture of
Dorian Gray"
III.
"Salome"
Illustrations by Beardsley
Walter Pater
Henrik Ibsen
August Strindberg
Anton Chekhov
"Uncle Vanya"
George Bernard Shaw
"Pygmalion"
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti
A Sea Spell
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CLASSICISM
AND
NATURALISM
The period corresponding
roughly to the Romantic movement was also a period of dramatic social
change, of transformation in the lives of many people and many parts of
the country by the Industrial Revolution, and of struggle and social
eruptions connected with the battle for reform. Naturally, these developments had profound effects on
literature and the arts.
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REVOLUTION AND REFORM
Romanticism is sometimes pictured as a reaction to the
Industrial Revolution, and, although that is too simple a
view as in most countries Romanticism predated factories,
the new industrial society certainly made an impression on
the later Romantics and on other aspects of 19th-century
literature. The social and economic changes produced a new,
prosperous middle class of factory owners and merchants,
self-made men often of little education - the Victorian
burst of public-school building only benefitted their sons -
and of even less taste. In so far as their aesthetic
considerations went, they tended to favour the Classical
rather than the Romantic tradition.
CLASSICISM
The stature of the great Romantic poets tends to conceal the
fact that, during the Romantic period, not all artists and
writers, not even all poets, were Romantics. George Crabbe,
admired more than
Wordsworth by
Shelley and
Byron, and
Jane
Austen's favourite poet, continued to write in the heroic
couplets of the classical tradition. But what exactly was
this tradition? The terms Classical, classic, and
Neo-Classical tend to be interchange, which can cause
confusion.
In a narrow sense, 'Classical' refers to the ideas and
criteria of ancient Greece and Rome and, by extension, to
the styles of later periods that largely follow from them.
These aesthetic styles and ideas are generally regarded as
embodying such qualities as simplicity, harmony, order and
reason, and general obedience to accepted rules. In one
sense or another, the Classical tradition has never been
completely abandoned, but it has been more prominent in some
periods than in others. The driving force of the European
Renaissance was the rediscovery and revival of Classical
(Greek and Roman) art and culture, with works such as
Aristotle's
"Poetics" and
Horace's
"Ars Poetica" being widely
studied. Literature was governed by rules derived from them
and defined in works such as Boileau's Art of Poetry (1674).
The revival of Classicism in the 18th century is often
referred to as Neo-Classical". It was largely a revival of
Renaissance Classicism rather than the genuinely Classical,
although the name 'Augustan' applied to English literature
in the late 17th-18th centuries signifies the impulse to
formal perfection inspired by Roman literature of the early
imperial period. The Enlightenment represented the peak of
intellectual Classicism and (as further evidence of the
misleading effects of creating categories) one of the
greatest figures of the Enlightenment,
Rousseau, was also
the pioneer of Romanticism.
The two strains, Classical and Romantic, can be
distinguished in a broad way in practically every
generation.
Shakespeare, it could be said, was a Romantic
writer, but not a Classical one, whereas
Racine and
Corneille (who, unlike
Shakespeare, followed the
Aristotelian rules) were Classical. However,
Shakespeare was
a classic writer. The Latin word classicus meant a citizen
of the highest rank, and 'classic' simply means, or should
mean, first-rate, the best of its kind.
REALISM AND NATURALISM
The term Realism in literature also has more than one
meaning. In general it means, simply, true to life, and can
therefore be applied to at least some of the literature of
practically any age or culture: the events narrated in an
epic such as the
Iliad, may not be realistic, but the
details are. More narrowly, it is the name given to the
movement, first evident in France before 1830, that
represented a reaction against Romanticism. It was chiefly
characteristic of the novel, where Realism is generally most
readily achieved. Romanticism offered an idealized version
of life, m which personal feelings figured prominently.
Realism was down-to-earth, presenting a more accurate
picture of life as it really is, with careful description of
the world based on close observation.
In the general sense, the terms Realism and Naturalism are
not clearly distinguishable. However, in the 19th century,
Naturalism was the movement that followed from Realism —
again, with France setting the pace. Realism was influenced
by developments in the social sciences, some Realist novels
resembling sociological tracts, and Naturalism was also
largely a product of contemporary scientific developments,
such as
Charles Darwin's explanation of evolution. Accuracy
of detail - truth to nature - was even more important, and
greater emphasis was placed on the effects of environment on
behaviour and the effects of heredity on the individual
character. While also a characteristic of much fiction,
Naturalism was of particular significance in drama too.
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Soren Kierkegaard
Danish philosopher
in full Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
born May 5, 1813, Copenhagen, Den.
died Nov. 11, 1855, Copenhagen
Main
Danish philosopher, theologian, and cultural critic who was a major
influence on existentialism and Protestant theology in the 20th century.
He attacked the literary, philosophical, and ecclesiastical
establishments of his day for misrepresenting the highest task of human
existence—namely, becoming oneself in an ethical and religious sense—as
something so easy that it could seem already accomplished even when it
had not even been undertaken. Positively, the heart of his work lay in
the infinite requirement and strenuous difficulty of religious existence
in general and Christian faith in particular.
A life of collisions
Kierkegaard’s life has been called uneventful, but it was hardly that.
The story of his life is a drama in four overlapping acts, each with its
own distinctive crisis or “collision,” as he often referred to these
events. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was a prosperous but
retired businessman who devoted the later years of his life to raising
his children. He was a man of deep but gloomy and guilt-ridden piety who
was haunted by the memory of having once cursed God as a boy and of
having begun his family by getting his maid pregnant—and then marrying
her—shortly after the death of his first wife. His domineering presence
stimulated young Søren’s imaginative and intellectual gifts but, as his
son would later bear witness, made a normal childhood impossible.
Kierkegaard enrolled at the University of Copenhagen in 1830 but did
not complete his studies until 1841. Like the German philosopher Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), whose system he would severely
criticize, Kierkegaard entered university in order to study theology but
devoted himself to literature and philosophy instead. His thinking
during this period is revealed in an 1835 journal entry, which is often
cited as containing the germ of his later work:
The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea
for which I can live and die.…What is truth but to live for an idea?
While a student at the university, Kierkegaard explored the literary
figures of Don Juan, the wandering Jew, and especially Faust, looking
for existential models for his own life.
The first collision occurred during his student days: he became
estranged both from his father and from the faith in which he had been
brought up, and he moved out of the family home. But by 1838, just
before his father’s death, he was reconciled both to his father and to
the Christian faith; the latter became the idea for which he would live
and die. Despite his reference to an experience of “indescribable joy”
in May of that year, it should not be assumed that his conversion was
instantaneous. On the one hand, he often seemed to be moving away from
the faith of his father and back toward it at virtually the same time.
On the other hand, he often stressed that conversion is a long process.
He saw becoming a Christian as the task of a lifetime. Accordingly, he
decided to publish Sygdommen til døden (1849; Sickness unto Death) under
a pseudonym (as he had done with several previous works), lest anyone
think he lived up to the ideal he there presented; likewise, the
pseudonymous authors of his other works often denied that they possessed
the faith they talked about. Although in the last year of his life he
wrote, “I dare not call myself a Christian,” throughout his career it
was Christianity that he sought to defend by rescuing it from cultural
captivity, and it was a Christian person that he sought to become.
After his father’s death, Kierkegaard became serious about finishing
his formal education. He took his doctoral exams and wrote his
dissertation, Om begrebet ironi med stadigt hensyn til Socrates (On the
Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates), completing it in
June of 1841 and defending it in September. In between, he broke his
engagement with Regine Olsen, thus initiating the second major collision
of his life. They had met in 1837, when she was only 15 years old, and
had become engaged in 1840. Now, less than one year later, he returned
her ring, saying he “could not make a girl happy.” The reasons for this
action are far from clear.
What is clear is that this relationship haunted him for the rest of
his life. Saying in his will that he considered engagement as binding as
marriage, he left all his possessions to Regine (she did not accept
them, however, since she had married long before Kierkegaard died). It
is also clear that this crisis triggered a period of astonishing
literary productivity, during which Kierkegaard published many of the
works for which he is best known: Enten-Eller: et livs-fragment (1843;
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life), Gjentagelsen (1843; Repetition), Frygt
og baeven (1843; Fear and Trembling), Philosophiske smuler (1844;
Philosophical Fragments), Begrebet angest (1844; The Concept of
Anxiety), Stadier paa livets vei (1845; Stages on Life’s Way), and
Afsluttende uvidenskabelig efterskrift (1846; Concluding Unscientific
Postscript). Even after acknowledging that he had written these works,
however, Kierkegaard insisted that they continue to be attributed to
their pseudonymous authors. The pseudonyms are best understood by
analogy with characters in a novel, created by the actual author to
embody distinctive worldviews; it is left to the reader to decide what
to make of each one.
Kierkegaard had intended to cease writing at this point and become a
country pastor. But it was not to be. The first period of literary
activity (1843–46) was followed by a second (1847–55). Instead of
retiring, he picked a quarrel with The Corsair, a newspaper known for
its liberal political sympathies but more famous as a scandal sheet that
used satire to skewer the establishment. Although The Corsair had
praised some of the pseudonymous works, Kierkegaard did not wish to see
his own project confused with that of the newspaper, so he turned his
satirical skills against it. The Corsair took the bait, and for months
Kierkegaard was the target of raucous ridicule, the greatest butt of
jokes in Copenhagen. Better at giving than at taking, he was deeply
wounded, and indeed he never fully recovered. If the broken engagement
was the cloud that hung over the first literary period, the Corsair
debacle was the ghost that haunted the second.
The final collision was with the Church of Denmark (Lutheran) and its
leaders, the bishops J.P. Mynster and H.L. Martensen. In his journals
Kierkegaard called Sickness unto Death an “attack upon Christendom.” In
a similar vein, Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Indøvelse i
Christendom (1850; Training in Christianity), declared the need “again
to introduce Christianity into Christendom.” This theme became more and
more explicit as Kierkegaard resumed his writing career. As long as
Mynster, the family pastor from his childhood, was alive, Kierkegaard
refrained from personal attacks. But at Mynster’s funeral Martensen, who
had succeeded to the leadership of the Danish church, eulogized his
predecessor as a “witness to the truth,” linking him to the martyrs of
the faith; after this Kierkegaard could no longer keep silent. In
December 1854 he began to publish dozens of short, shrill pieces
insisting that what passed as Christianity in Denmark was counterfeit
and making clear that Mynster and Martensen were responsible for
reducing the religion to “leniency.” The last of these pieces was found
on Kierkegaard’s desk after he collapsed in the street in October 1855.
Stages on life’s way
In the pseudonymous works of Kierkegaard’s first literary period, three
stages on life’s way, or three spheres of existence, are distinguished:
the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. These are not
developmental stages in a biological or psychological sense—a natural
and all-but-automatic unfolding according to some DNA of the spirit. It
is all too possible to live one’s life below the ethical and the
religious levels. But there is a directionality in the sense that the
earlier stages have the later ones as their telos, or goal, while the
later stages both presuppose and include the earlier ones as important
but subordinate moments. Kierkegaard’s writings taken as a whole,
whether pseudonymous or not, focus overwhelmingly on the religious
stage, giving credence to his own retrospective judgment that the entire
corpus is ultimately about the religious life.
The personages Kierkegaard creates to embody the aesthetic stage have
two preoccupations, the arts and the erotic. It is tempting to see the
aesthete as a cultured hedonist—a fairly obvious offshoot of the
Romantic movement—who accepts the distinction made by Immanuel Kant
(1724–1804) between artistic and sensuous pleasure while combining them
in a single existential project. But in one of the essays of Either/Or,
the aesthete sees boredom as the root of all evil and is preoccupied
with making life interesting; and the famous seducer in the same volume
seems less concerned with sex than with the fascinating spectacle of
watching himself seduce his victim.
This clue helps one both to define the aesthetic stage and to see
what a stage or sphere of existence in general is. What the various
goals of aesthetic existence have in common is that they have nothing to
do with right and wrong. The criteria by which the good life is defined
are premoral, unconcerned with good and evil. A stage or sphere of
existence, then, is a fundamental project, a form of life, a mode of
being-in-the-world that defines success in life by its own distinctive
criteria.
What might motivate an aesthete to choose the ethical? The mere
presence of guardians of the good, who are willing to scold the
aesthete’s amorality as immorality, is too external, too easily
dismissed as bourgeois phariseeism. Judge William, the representative of
the ethical in Either/Or, tries another tack. The aesthete, he argues,
fails to become a self at all but becomes, by choice, what David Hume
(1711–76) said the self inevitably is: a bundle of events without an
inner core to constitute identity or cohesion over time. Moreover, the
aesthete fails to see that in the ethical the aesthetic is not abolished
but ennobled. Judge William presents marriage as the scene of this
transformation, in which, through commitment, the self acquires temporal
continuity and, following Hegel, the sensuous is raised to the level of
spirit.
In Fear and Trembling this ethical stage is teleologically suspended
in the religious, which means not that it is abolished but that it is
reduced to relative validity in relation to something absolute, which is
its proper goal. For Plato (c. 428–c. 348 bc) and Kant, ethics is a
matter of pure reason gaining pure insight into eternal truth. But Hegel
argued that human beings are too deeply embedded in history to attain
such purity and that their grasp of the right and the good is mediated
by the laws and customs of the societies in which they live. It is this
Hegelian ethics of socialization that preoccupies Judge William and that
gets relativized in Fear and Trembling. By retelling the story of
Abraham, it presents the religious stage as the choice not to allow the
laws and customs of one’s people to be one’s highest norm—not to equate
socialization with sanctity and salvation but to be open to a voice of
greater authority, namely God.
This higher normativity does not arise from reason, as Plato and Kant
would have it, but is, from reason’s point of view, absurd, paradoxical,
even mad. These labels do not bother Kierkegaard, because he interprets
reason as human, all too human—as the rationale of the current social
order, which knows nothing higher than itself. In the language of Karl
Marx (1818–83), what presents itself as reason is in fact ideology.
Kierkegaard interprets Abrahamic faith as agreeing with Hegel and Marx
about this historical finitude of reason, and, precisely because of
this, he insists that the voice of God is an authority that is higher
than the rationality of either the current establishment (Hegel) or the
revolution (Marx). Against both Hegel and Marx, Kierkegaard holds that
history is not the scene in which human reason overcomes this finitude
and becomes the ultimate standard of truth.
Three dimensions of the religious life
The simple scheme of the three stages becomes more complex in Concluding
Unscientific Postscript. The fundamental distinction is now between
objectivity and subjectivity, with two examples of each. Objectivity is
the name for occupying oneself with what is “out there” in such a way as
to exempt oneself from the strenuous inward task of becoming a self in
the ethico-religious sense. One example is the aesthetic posture,
presented in earlier work; the other is the project of speculative
philosophy, to which this text devotes major attention. The target is
Hegelian philosophy, which takes the achievement of comprehensive,
absolute knowledge to be the highest human task.
But, it is argued in the first place, speculative philosophy cannot
even keep its own promises. It purports to begin without presuppositions
and to conclude with a final, all-encompassing system. The very idea
that thought should be without presuppositions, however, is itself a
presupposition, and thus the system is never quite able to complete
itself. The goal of objective knowledge is legitimate, but it can never
be more than approximately accomplished. Reality may well be a system
for God, but not for any human knower.
Secondly, even if speculative philosophy could deliver what it
promises, it would have forgotten that the highest human task is not
cognition but rather the personal appropriation or embodiment of
whatever insights into the good and the right one is able to achieve.
Becoming a self in this way is called existence, inwardness, and
subjectivity. This use of existence as a technical term for the finite,
human self that is always in the process of becoming can be seen as the
birth of existentialism.
The two modes of subjectivity are not, as one might expect, the
ethical and the religious stages. One does not become a self simply
through successful socialization. Besides, in the Concluding
Unscientific Postscript, ethics is treated as already recontextualized
in a religious rather than merely a social context. So the two modes of
ethico-religious subjectivity are “Religiousness A” and “Religiousness
B.” The fact that the latter turns out to be Christianity should not
lead one to think that the former is some other world religion. It is
rather the generic necessary condition for any particular religion and,
as such, is available apart from dependence on the revelation to be
found in any particular religion’s sacred scriptures. Socrates (c.
470–399 bc), here distinguished from the speculative Plato, is the
paradigm of Religiousness A.
Religiousness A is defined not in terms of beliefs about what is “out
there,” such as God or the soul, but rather in terms of the complex
tasks of becoming a self, summarized as the task of being simultaneously
related “relatively” to relative goods and “absolutely” to the absolute
good. Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms refer to the absolute good
variously as the Idea, the Eternal, or God. As the generic form of the
religious stage, Religiousness A abstracts from the “what” of belief to
focus on the “how” that must accompany any “what.” The Hegelian system
purports to be the highest form of the highest religion, namely
Christianity, but in fact, by virtue of its merely objective “how,” it
belongs to a completely different genus. It could not be the highest
form of Christianity, no more than a dog could be the world’s prettiest
cat.
There is something paradoxical about Religiousness A. Socratic
ignorance—the claim of Socrates that he is the wisest of men because,
while others think that they know, he knows that he does not—reflects
the realization that the relation of the existing, and thus temporal,
individual to the eternal does not fit neatly into human conceptual
frameworks. But Christianity, as Religiousness B, is more radically
paradoxical, for the eternal itself has become paradoxical as the
insertion of God in time. In this way the task of relating absolutely to
the absolute becomes even more strenuous, for human reason is
overwhelmed, even offended, by the claim that Jesus is fully human and
fully divine. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript there is an echo
of Kant’s admission, “I have therefore found it necessary to deny
knowledge in order to make room for faith”—though Kantian faith has a
very different “what.”
Some writings of Kierkegaard’s second literary period extend the
analyses of the first. For example, the two halves of Sickness unto
Death can be read as reprising Religiousness A and B, respectively, in a
different voice. But several texts, most notably Kjerlighedens
gjerninger (1847; Works of Love), Training in Christianity, Til
selvprøvelse (1851; For Self-Examination), and Dømmer selv! (1851; Judge
for Yourselves!), go beyond Religiousness B to what might be called
“Religiousness C.” The focus is still on Christianity, but now Christ is
no longer just the paradox to be believed but also the paradigm or
prototype to be imitated.
These works present the second, specifically Christian, ethics that
had been promised as far back as The Concept of Anxiety. They go beyond
Hegelian ethics, which only asks one to conform to the laws and customs
of one’s society. They also go beyond the religion of hidden inwardness,
whether A or B, in which the relation between God and the soul takes
place out of public view. They are Kierkegaard’s answer to the charge
that religion according to his view is so personal and so private as to
be socially irresponsible. Faith, the inward God-relation, must show
itself outwardly in works of love.
The first half of Works of Love is a sustained reflection on the
biblical commandment “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”
(Matthew 22:36). This commanded love is contrasted with erotic love and
friendship. Through its poets, society celebrates these two forms of
love, but only God dares to command the love of neighbours. The
celebrated loves are spontaneous: they come naturally, by inclination,
and thus not by duty. Children do not have to be taught to seek friends;
nor, at puberty, do they need to be commanded to fall in love. The
celebrated loves are also preferential: one is drawn to this person but
not to that one as friend or lover; something in the other is attractive
or would satisfy one’s desire if the relation could be established.
Because they are spontaneous and preferential, Kierkegaard calls the
celebrated loves forms of “self-love.”
This is not to say that every friend or lover is selfish. But, by
their exclusionary nature, such relations are the self-love of the “We,”
even when the “I” is not selfish in the relation. Here one sees the
political ramifications of commanded love, for an ethics that restricts
benevolence to one’s own family, tribe, nation, race, or class expresses
only the self-love of the We.
By contrast, commanded love is not spontaneous, and it needs to be
commanded precisely because it is not preferential. Another person need
not be attractive or belong to the same We to be one’s neighbour, whom
one is to love. Even one’s enemy can be one’s neighbour, which is a
reason why society never dares to require that people love their
neighbours as they do themselves. For the Christian, this command comes
from Christ, who is himself its embodiment to be imitated.
One could hardly expect the literary and philosophical elite to focus
on the strenuousness of faith as a personal relation to God unsupported
by reason, or on the strenuousness of love as responsibility to and for
one’s neighbour unsupported by society’s ethos. That task was the
responsibility of the church—a responsibility that, in Kierkegaard’s
view, the church had spectacularly failed to fulfill. As these themes
came more clearly into focus in his writings, the attack upon
Christendom with which his life ended became inevitable.
Kierkegaard says that his writings as a whole are religious. They are
best seen as belonging to the prophetic traditions, in which religious
beliefs become the basis for a critique of the religious communities
that profess them. The 20th-century theologies that were influenced by
Kierkegaard go beyond the tasks of metaphysical affirmation and ethical
instruction to a critique of complacent piety. In existential
philosophies—which are often less overtly theological and sometimes
entirely secular—this element of critique is retained but is directed
against forms of personal and social life that do not take the tasks of
human existence seriously enough. Thus, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
complains that his secular contemporaries do not take the death of God
seriously enough, just as Kierkegaard complains that his Christian
contemporaries do not take God seriously enough. Likewise, the German
existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) describes how
people make life too easy for themselves by thinking and doing just what
“they” think and do. And Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), the leading
representative of atheistic existentialism in France, calls attention to
the ways in which people indulge in self-deceiving “bad faith” in order
to think more highly of themselves than the facts warrant.
Merold Westphal
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FRENCH POETRY
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Partly as result of the upheavals of
the French Revolution, and partly because Classicism was
more strongly entrenched, the Romantic movement arrived
later in France. It was influenced by England and Germany,
although its father figure was
Francois-Rene de
Chateaubriand (1768-1848), whose Genius of Christianity
(1802) was a major influence in the revival of religion in
post-revolutionary France, and its most provocative leader
was the novelist
Victor Hugo.
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ROMANTIC POETS
The outstanding poets in France were less central to the
Romantic movement than their equivalents in England.
Alphonse de Lamartine (1790—1869) established his reputation
with his lyrical and deeply personal Meditations poetiquc
(1820). The most popular of the French Romantic poets, he
not only wrote poetry, but also extensively on history,
politics (he was a leading political figure), biography,
travel and memoirs. Like
Vigny, he had an English wife,
wrote a poetic tribute to
Byron, and was widely translated
into English from the 1820s.
The best poems of
Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863) were published
after his death.
Vigny's Romanticism is pessimistic and
stoical: he described his work as an 'epic of
disillusionment', but retained his faith in the
'unconquerable' human mind. Unusually for a Romantic poet,
he was a professional soldier for over a decade and his
Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835) still finds a place
in the knapsack of intellectually inclined soldiers (Vigny's
reflections on the military life are wittily discussed in
Anthony Powell's novel The Valley of Bones, 1964).
The lover of
George Sand before her liaison with Chopin,
Alfred de Musset (1810-57) made his mark with a translation
of
De Quincey's
Confessions. His most famous poems, 'Les
Nuits' (1835-37) and 'Le Souvenir' (1841) deal with the
familiar Romantic theme of love denied. He is probably best
known for his plays, in which humour and parody are more
evident; in general, his work is suffused with that
contemporary melancholy called mal du siecle.
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BAUDELAIRE
Charles
Baudelaire
"The Flowers of Evil"
One of the most significant influences on modern poetry,
Charles
Baudelaire (1821-67) was associated with the
Parnassians, a group of poets in reaction against
Romanticism, whose aims were formal perfection, restraint
('Classical' virtues), and objectivity. His great work is
Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Ewil, 1857), a collection
of a hundred poems in various different metres, technically
brilliant, in which the poet seeks to find beauty and order
in a world that is often hideous, cruel — and boring.
Baudelaire was arrested and six of the poems were banned as
offensive to public morals, but the last edition, published
just after his death, contains about fifty more poems, and
the work is regarded as one of the greatest treasures of
French literature. Today
Baudelaire is rated highly as a
critic, notably on art (painting and poetry were often
closely linked in France). His prose includes commentary on
De Quincey and descriptions of his own experiences with
opium and hashish, and he was the French translator of
Edgar
Allan Poe.
|
RIMBAUD AND
VERLAINE
Around the spectacularly intense revolutionary
Arthur
Rimbaud (1854-91), forerunner of Symbolism and
Surrealism, legends cluster like flies around a carcass.
From an early age he-was in full revolt against every
orthodox authority. His most famous poem, 'Le Bateau ivre'
(The Drunken Boat), which exalts the quest for some unknown
reality (the key to
Rimbaud's alienated existence), was
written aged 17 and he abandoned poetry altogether at 19.
His finest works are the prose poems of Illuminations
(1886) and A Season in Hell (1873), experimental
products of his efforts to acquire the wisdom of a seer
through 'disorientation of the senses'.
For a troubled
period in the early 1870s, he was the lover of
Paul Verlaine
(1844-96). He became a wanderer and spent his latter years
as a trader deep in Africa.
Verlaine was a tormented,
unstable character, one of the Parnassians and generally
regarded as a Symbolist (though he rejected the label), who
served a prison term (1873—74) for shooting and wounding
Rimbaud in a quarrel. Reconverted to Catholicism, he wrote
some of the finest religious poetry of any age, as well as
some of the most musical and original lyrics of the century
— especially in the early Fetes galantes (1869) and Romances
sans paroles (1874). He was a popular lecturer in England in
1875.
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MALLARME
Edouard Manet
Portrait of Stephane Mallarme
Stephane Mallarme (1842-98), another of the
founders of modern European poetry, was the outstanding
master of Symbolism, the movement which, reacting against
the objectivity of Realism and Naturalism, stressed the
importance of suggestion and reverie and found subtle
relations between sound, sense and colour. Alallarme's 'L'Aprecs-midi
d'un faune' (1876) is a key Symbolist work. The
preoccupations of the Symbolists led to obscurity, and
Mallarme's 'Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard'
(1897), which employed ingenious typographical devices to
suggest music, has been called the most difficult poem in
the French language.
|
LONGFELLOW AND HIS SUCCESSORS
|
After independence, there was a conscious attempt in
the U.S.A. to forge a national literature, but in spite of
the popularity of the tales of
Washington Irving and
James
Fenimore Cooper, there were few poets who achieved
international stature, excepting
William Cullen Bryant,
whose Thanatopsis (1817) showed the influence of the
Graveyard poets and early English Romanticism.
|
IRVING and
COOPER
|
|
LONGFELLOW
William de Leftwich Dodge
Death-Of-Minnehaha (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The
Song of Hiawatha")
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807—82), however, became the
most popular poet in the English-speaking world after
Tennyson. A genius of narrative verse,
Longfellow spent some
years in England before taking up a professorship aged 29 at
Harvard, where he remained the rest of his working life. His
first major work was basically a prose romance, Hyperion
(1839). Ballads and Other Poems, containing such sentimental favourites as 'The Wreck of the Hesperus' and 'The Village
Blacksmith' appeared in 1841. He was already immensely
popular long before publication of his best-known work. (1858), with its hypnotic, unrhymed metre,
and in the same year, The Courtship of Miles Standish, based
on a New England legend. The Chaucerian Tales of a Wayside
Inn (1863) contained the lively 'Paul Revere's Ride',
commemorating a famous incident at the beginning of the
American Revolution. The death of his second wife in a fire
and advancing age lent a more sombre tone to
Longfellow's
later work.
EDGAR POE
The enigmatic
Edgar Allan Рое (1809-49) was a very different
kind of poet, uninterested in 'national' literature and, as
master of the macabre, representing the darker side of the
Romantic movement. After a disastrous spell in the military
(dishonourably discharged from West Point) he became a
journalist and a fierce critic of what he considered
second-rate American writing. His early poetry, technically
complex and tinged with mysticism, was published at his own
expense. His most famous poem, 'The Raven', appeared in a
newspaper in 1845.
Meanwhile,
Poe's private life became
increasingly disastrous, owing to illness, poverty, drink
and mental instability, but he achieved some success, if not
wealth, with his short stories, such as 'The Gold-Bug' and
'The Fall of the House of Usher', which appeared with other
extraordinary Gothic horror stories in Tales of the
Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). An early death prevented his
enjoyment of international fame. Admirers included
Baudelaire,
Swinburne,
Wilde and
Yeats, and psychologists, including
Freud, have
long been fascinated by the disquieting themes in
Poe's
work. He has been called the first detective-story writer
and claimed as a pioneer by the existentialists, among
others.
|
WHITMAN
Walt Whitman
"Leaves of Grass"
Leaves of Grass (1855), the first collection of
Walt Whitman
(1819-92), was dedicated to Emerson and generally adhered to
Transcendentalist doctrines, celebrating communion with
nature. The sensual overtones provoked disapproval and lost
him a good job in government, but more controversial was
Whitman's style. In following
Emerson's call for a genuinely
American literature,
Whitman adopted a loose, 'unbuttoned'
style, employing colloquial language and specifically
American idioms, which contemporary readers found coarse.
In general, apart from one favourable anonymous review (by
himself),
Whitman, previously known as a journalist and
author of short stories, received little critical attention.
This changed after the second (1860) edition of Leaves of
Grass, containing many new poems, and still more after the
Civil War, which cast some shadows over his vision of
America. As a volunteer nurse, he experienced its horrors at
first hand and led to some of his most famous poems,
including his elegy for Abraham Lincoln, and 'O Captain! My
Captain!'. After the war he worked in Washington D.C., and
wrote, in prose, his vigorous defence of democracy,
Democratic Vistas (1871). New editions of Leaves of Grass
continued to appear, the last in the year of his death, when
the original twelve poems had increased to over three
hundred.
The image - rough, tough, old Walt, the prophet of American
democracy and friend of the common man — was phoney, and
some of
Whitman's verse is as poor as people initially said
it was. On the other hand, he was the first great American
poet, a genuine original.
'I think I could turn, and live with animals, they are
so placid and self-contairTd,
1 stand and. look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the
mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived
thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth'
Whitman, 'Song of Myself'
|
DICKINSON
Emily Dickinson
"Poems"
|
In common with many poets of the time,
Emily
Dickinson (1830—86) came from New-England. A lively and amusing young woman,
she became a recluse in her mid-twenties, communicating only through
letters. Her poetry was almost entirely unknown until after her death.
Publication in 1890 created no immediate sensation, and her reputation as a
major poet of arresting originality was only established recently. Her
character, in spite of much research and speculation, remains mysterious.
Her poetry is peppered with allusions to violence, human and natural, and
she is preoccupied with death, immortality and, above all, poetic vocation.
She seems to have felt isolated, while simultaneously belonging to an
exalted elite. She wrote in a unique style: 'sharp, staccato, often
awkward, never far from thoughts of death, but when successful . . .
wonderfully bold and concentrated . . . making the men of her time seem
timid and long-winded.'
|
|
THE PRE-RAPHAELITES
|
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848 by
Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, the
Rossetti brothers and
others, a group of painters. They were in revolt against
contemporary artistic standards as typified by the Royal
Academy, and determined to revert to the principles
prevailing before the High Renaissance, as represented by
Raphael. Encouraged by Ruskin, the Brotherhood existed as a
close-knit group only for a few years. Broadly,
Pre-Raphaelitism carried on the Romantic tradition. Its
preoccupations included the study of nature in close detail,
sound technique, and an inclination towards mystical (often
medieval) subjects, influencing a number of later artists
and writers.
|
ROSSETTI
The
Rossettis' father was a political refugee from Naples,
and
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(1828-82), though born in
London, grew up in an Italian household. Famous in his own
day as a painter, he is the author of some of the most
musical sonnets in English. As a student he knew Holman Hunt
and Millais, and was one of the founders and leading
representatives of the P.R.B. Like his painting, his early
poetry was closely detailed, symbolic, concerned with remote
subjects and often included archaic usage. Eroticism was
another Pre-Raphaelite characteristic, and Rossetti married
what the Pre-Raphaelites called a 'stunner', Elizabeth
Siddal, in 1860. She died of an overdose of laudanum two
years later, possibly encouraging the morbid strain in
Rossetti's later work. His Poems of 1870 included
works he had buried with Elizabeth, but later recovered.
Some of his most attractive work, besides his translations
of
Dante and other Italian poets, appeared a year later in
Ballads and Sonnets, but by that time he was in
terminal decline due to drugs and incipient paranoia.
His younger brother William was another founder member of
the PRB and editor of their journal, The Gem. He
wrote profusely on literary subjects and worked for nearly
fifty years for the Internal Revenue service.
Their sister Christina (1830-94) was a poet who is now
widely regarded as being more gifted than her brothers. She
was deeply religious and physically frail, an invalid in her
later years. Probably her most famous work is Goblin
Market (1862), a vigorous, enigmatically symbolic fairy
tale, highly original in technique. A love of verbal and
metrical experiment is characteristic of her work, which
included many religious poems. Of these the most admired is
the sonnet sequence "Monna Innominata" (1881), which dwells
on the superiority of divine love over human love, a
conviction which seems to have influenced her private life.
MORRIS
Of all the people associated with the Pre-Raphaelites,
William Morris (1834-96) was the greatest. However, he
is remembered primarily in politics as a profound influence
on British socialism, and in design as the leading light of
the Arts and Crafts movement. His abilities were prodigious,
his influence was - still is -enormous. His doctor explained
his death as the result of being
William Morris, having done
more work than ten normal men. He was a copious writer, but
his poetry, highly regarded in his day, is now seldom read.
Probably his most famous literary work is his novel News
from Nowhere (1890), a critique of contemporary society
subsumed in a portrait of a communist, non-materialist
Utopia.
SWINBURNE
When
D. G. Rossetti was viciously attacked by Robert
Buchanan in 'The Fleshly School of Poetry', he was defended
by
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), always ready for
a literary fight.
Swinburne was a prolific poet, immensely
gifted, but often criticized for lack of depth - a safe
judgment on someone who published so much. He first hit the
headlines with his Poems and Ballads (1866), which,
rebellious and perverse, might have been designed to
irritate the bourgeoisie ('libidinous laureate of a pack of
satyrs' fumed the critic John Morley).
Swinburne, a
'Decadent' before his time, was certainly a shock after
Tennyson. By 1879 he was a serious alcoholic, but was taken
over by Theodore Watts-Dunton, who installed him in his
house in Putney and reformed him. Surprisingly,
Swinburne's
muse survived this new regime, and he continued to publish
his flamboyant poetry and criticism for another thirty
years. He was a splendid scourge of prudes and pedants, and
an invigorating influence on literature with his outspoken,
if often wrong-headed, criticism.
|
THE BROWNINGS AND TENNYSON
|
The two giants of the later 19th century were
Browning
and, especially,
Tennyson. In spite of periods of fierce
critical antagonism, their reputation remains high today.
The Romantics were either dead or poetically played out by
the 1830s, and
Browning and
Tennyson represented a change,
though not a particularly sudden or dramatic one. Romantics
such as Byron were essentially popular poets, whose poetry
was 'easy'. Although
Tennyson, the only poet to become a
peer, was hugely popular, both he and
Browning moved on a
somewhat higher plane. They nevertheless succeeded in
maintaining a large audience for poetry in an age in which
the novel had become the most popular form of literature.
|
BROWNING
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and
Robert Browning
Robert
Browning
"Dramatic Romances"
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"Sonnets from the Portuguese"
Robert Browning (1812-89) is almost equally famous
for his partnership with
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(1806—61), who was initially the more popular poet. Although
she had published previous collections,
Elizabeth became
famous with her Poems of 1844. At that time, illness,
neurosis and a dominant father had reduced her to housebound
hypochondria, but her work attracted
Browning, who made
contact. Romance followed and they eloped in 1846, settling
in Italy. The 1850 edition of her Poems included 'Sonnets
from the Portuguese', love poems written to her husband
before their marriage. They have proved her most enduring
work.
Although both were abundantly blessed with the gift of
poetic imagination, the Brownings were otherwise dissimilar
poets.
Browning came to poetry very early, rejecting any
other occupation, but his early work, some of it almost
impenetrable, attracted little and generally unfavourable
notice. He only became famous after his wife's death with
The Ring and the Book (1863), 21,000 lines of narrative
blank verse about a terrible crime in 17th-century Rome. At
a stroke, he became England's most celebrated poet after
Tennyson, and his previously published work, notably Men
and Women (1855), became immensely popular. In fact,
nearly all Robert's best work was done during the course of
his fifteen years of marriage, not the least of Elizabeth's
contributions to English literature. Technical gifts apart,
his greatest gift, in the opinion of many critics, was his
intense curiosity. He enjoyed probing a problem, however
complex, which largely explains a degree of obscurity in his
work. He was also typically Victorian in the massive volume
of his output, much of which seems today to be unduly
verbose, but few writers excel him in capturing - often in
dialogue - the atmosphere of an earlier age.
TENNYSON
Alfred Tennyson
"Idylls of the King"
PART I,
PART II
Illustrations by G. Dore
"Lady of Shalott", "Sir Galahad"
Pre-Raphaelite
illustrations for Moxon's Tennyson
|
What Gladstone was to Victorian politics, the tall and
handsome, in later life shaggy-bearded
Alfred Tennyson
(1809-92) was to Victorian letters — the 'Grand Old Man',
Poet Laureate for nearly half a century. He came from the
large and doom-laden family of a Lincolnshire rector. It was
something of a relief to escape to Cambridge University,
where he became a devoted friend of an able contemporary,
Arthur Hallam, and published two volumes of poetry that
included 'The Lotos-Eaters' and 'The Lady of Shalott'.
Hallam's death in 1833 was a terrible blow, which eventually
produced In Memoriam (1850), perhaps the poet's most studied
work and an extraordinary tribute which immortalized its
subject.
Meanwhile, Tennyson's poems had made him famous, but not
content. Twice during the 1840s he suffered near breakdowns,
but his marriage to a devoted wife in 1850 brought him
comparative peace and happiness. It also, coin-cidentally or
not, marked the end of his period of creative genius. He was
never to lose his almost unparalleled verbal artistry, and
some of his most popular poems were written late in life,
but his passion and originality faded after Maud, published
in 1855, which he regarded as his greatest work, 'a little
Hamlet, the history of a morbid, poetic soul, under the
blighting influence of a recklessly speculative age'. In
suiting the metre to the hero's mood, it is a fine example
of Tennyson's extraordinary virtuosity, though it is not
always readily comprehensible.
Poet Laureate from 1850, and one of the best in what tends
to be a poetically uninspiring office, Tennyson, by nature
extremely shy, became increasingly a public man. Popular
fame accrued through poems such as his 'Ode on the Death of
the Duke of Wellington', 'Charge of the Light Brigade' — one
of the most famous in the language — and, more
substantially, The Idylls of the King (1859-69), his most
ambitious work, a retelling of Arthurian legend which he had
started in 1833, returning to it in 1855. The first four (of
twelve) books sold 10,000 copies within six weeks of
publication in 1859.
It is Tennyson's earlier work, his more melancholy,
pessimistic phase, that is most highly regarded by the
majority of modern critics. 'His imagination responded most
deeply to the doubtful and dismaying' (Christopher Ricks',
but one of the great rewards of reading Tennyson is his
visually perceptive descriptions of the world, especially
the world of nature, which raise the question whether
Tennyson was not a kind of Romantic after all.
|
With blackest moss the flower-pots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange;
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange . . .
Tennyson, 'Mariana' (1830).
|
THE LEGACY OF
GOETHE
|
As in England, so in Germany the 1830s represented a
literary watershed. After the Romantic Golden Age, the
Biedemeier poets retreated to domesticity. The careers of
more progressive writers were hindered by the repressive
censorship of conservative governments, led by Metternich's
government in Vienna, and interrupted by the Revolution of
1848, when many sought refuge abroad.
Throughout the 19th century, the forms introduced by
Goethe
and Schiller, continued, such as the Lied in poetry derived
from the folksong and the historical tragedy in drama from
blank verse continued. In general, and in terms of their
wider influence, the most significant literary figures in
later 19th-century Germany were philosophers (Hegel,
Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer), historians (Ranke, Lamprecht) and
dramatists, rather than poets. Though literary Romanticism
was in decline, Romantic ideas were influential in other
spheres, notably in politics, where they merged with the
advance of German nationalism. The death of Goethe marked
the end of the German classical tradition, yet among writers
his influence was greater than that of the Romantics, though
sometimes this was manifest as a rebellion against his
predominance.
|
HEINE
Heinrich Heine
"Poems and
Ballads"
One of Germany's greatest poets,
Hemneh Heine (1797—1856)
preferred the more liberating atmosphere of Paris, where he
lived from 1831, writing in both German and French. He
called himself the last Romantic, but the Romanticism of his
ever-popular Book of Songs (1827) is well laced with irony,
and his critical works, which included ruthless attacks on
Romanticism, arc notable for savage and witty satire. Some
of his best, and most sombre, poetry was written during his
last eight years, when he was bedridden.
GRILLPARZER
The greatest Germanic playwright of the early 19th century
was the
Austrian Frans Grillparzer (1791 —1872). His poetic
tragedies were written m the Classical tradition, but lack
its strength and confidence, his heroes and heroines
generally coming to grief because of the feebleness of the
individual will against the force of circumstances.
Ambition, for
Grillparzer's characters, is folly, or worse:
the individual's only hope of happiness is to turn inwards,
seeking spiritual peace through cultivating inner
resources. In his earlier plays, there is a suggestion of
the hostile Fates of Greek tragedy, but in his Medea (1822),
a marriage leads to disaster when the two partners are so
overburdened with guilt that they cannot take positive
action: weakness of will, rather than the ineluctability of
fate, is the fundamental cause of catastrophe. As his work
suggests,
Grillparzer was himself a gloomy character, beset
by personal difficulties and self-doubt. In 1838, a
particularly hostile reception for his latest play,
surprisingly a comedy, caused him to withdraw permanently
from the theatre, leaving several dramas unperformed (they
were published after his death).
The sombre mood of
Grillparzer's plays was characteristic of
most contemporary German drama, even comedy. Neither
Romanticism nor the Classical tradition appeared to have
anything more to offer, but nothing had yet appeared to
replace them. There were some signs of future developments,
however, for example in the plays of
Christian Friedrich
Hebbel (1813—63), whose greatest work was the trilogy Die Nibelungen, based on the 12th-century epic which was
exploited more famously later in the century by Wagner.
Hebbel shared the common pessimistic outlook, but his work
looked forward to realism and the psychological depth of the
founders of modern drama.
BUCHNER
A far more significant figure - to us though not to his
contemporaries, who had never heard of him - is
Georg
Buchner (1813—37). Biichner was trained as a medical
research scientist, and died, probably of typhoid, as he was about to
take up a post at the University of Zurich. Although he was only 23, and
never had a play performed in his lifetime, he was the author of an
influential, prophetic and startling body of dramatic work. A
revolutionary, he was forced to flee Germany as a result of his
pamphlet, The Hessian Courier (1834), which anticipated Marx's Communist
Manifesto, and wrote his first play, Danton's Death (1835) while in
hiding. Though it celebrated the eponymous French
Revolution hero, Biichner's pessimism later led him to
conclude that revolution was pointless and freedom a pipe
dream. Leonce and Lena (1836) satirizes the Romantic
tradition, and Dantons Tod (1835; is a tragedy of hopeless
heroism. But it is Biichner's last play, the stark drama
W'ozzeck, or Woyzeck (183"*), about an ill-used barber who
stands for the insignificance and vulnerability of
individuals in a hostile and vicious universe, which, far
ahead of its time, chiefly accounts for his reputation as
the forerunner of many movements in modern drama
-Expressionism, Naturalism, Absurdism, etc. The play was the
basis for Alban Berg's scarcely manageable - and therefore
seldom staged — but powerful opera. Wozzeck (1925).
|
OSCAR WILDE
AND THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT
|
The last decade of the 19th century, when the great
Victorian poets had passed from the scene, was a period not
of great literature but of great literary interest. In
English poetry, the dominant influences were French -
Rimbaud and
Verlaine - and there was a prevailing
preoccupation with the notion of end-of-the-century
decadence, with the poet as a doomed figure ('decadent'
poets and artists certainly tended to die young: Ernest
Dowson at 33, Lionel Johnson at 35, the illustrator Aubrey
Beardsley at 26,
Oscar Wilde at 46).
|
|
THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT
The aesthetic movement derived largely from the Pre-Raphaehtes,
and aroused some mockery in less refined circles for its
exaggerated preference for antique ideals of beauty and
affectations of speech and dress, which were motivated to
some extent by the now customary desire to shake up the
bourgeoisie. On a more serious level, as explained by one of
its progenitors, the much-renowned critic
Walter Pater
(1839-94), it was concerned with 'not the fruit of
experience, but experience itself . . . for ever curiously
testing new opinions and courting impressions, and never
acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy'. Among artists, the
current phrase, again originating with
Pater though current
earlier in France, was 'art for art's sake' (l'art pour
l'art), the idea that art was not and should not be in any
way 'useful' and, as
Wilde put it, 'never expresses anything
but itself. As with the Pre-Raphaelities, there were strong
bonds between artists and writers, who co-operated in the
pages of The Yelloiv Book and the Savoy magazine,
while
Wilde and Whistler famously exchanged quips in the
Cafe Royal.
WILDE
A few years before his death
Oscar Wilde
(1854-1900)
told the young
Andre Gide that he-had put his talent into
his works and his genius into his life. No one would
question his genius, and his literary reputation is now
higher than it was once, but the impression remains that his
cherished memory is due more to his persona than his
writing. Born in Dublin (like Shaw), he was the son of a
prominent physician and an egotistical poet who called
herself Speranza. After Trinity College, he went to Oxford,
where he won the Newdigate Prize for English verse. His
journalism and his flamboyant espousal of the aesthetic
movement and 'art for art's sake' made him a public figure.
He shocked the Americans too, on a lecture tour, with his
velvet breeches and silk stockings, not to mention his
statement to the New York Customs, that he had 'nothing to
declare except my genius'. He was satisfyingly guyed by
Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience, and got married in 1884 to
a pretty and tolerant young woman who gave him two sons.
Their London home became a social centre of the avant-garde.
In 1892, none too soon,
Wilde finally achieved popular fame
with his play Lady Windermere's ban, a witty and edgy
social comedy. He followed it with A Woman of No
Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
Wilde's
reputation depends largely on his last play, one of the most
brilliant comedies in the British theatre, a cornucopia of
briskly witty dialogue enhanced by brilliant
characterization, especially of the minor characters - Lady
Bracknell, Miss Prism, Canon Chasuble — and a deft if
superficial plot.
At the height of his success,
Wilde became
involved in a sexual scandal as a result of his association
with Lord Alfred Douglas, son of the crude and reactionary
Marquess of Queensberry. Convicted of homosexual practices,
he was sentenced to two years in prison. Afterwards, ruined
in every sense, he went to Paris, wrote 'The Ballad of
Reading Gaol' (1898) and died two years later. 'Neither in
literature nor in life was tragedy his natural element',
wrote Peter Quennell. 'His role was not to plumb the depths
of feeling, but to flicker delicately across the surface.'
Besides Salome, the basis of Richard Strauss's opera,
and other plays, his writings included a novel, The
Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), The Happy Prince
(1888), fairy stories for his children, and The Soul of
Man Under Socialism, a plea for artistic and individual
freedom, provoked by a lecture by
G. B. Shaw.
FARCE
The 1890s was also the decade in which French farce reached
its peak, in the concoctions of Georges Feydeau (1862-1921).
Unlike the stock characters and improvisation of the
commedia dell'arte tradition, the type of farce of which
Feydeau was the supreme exponent (in Hotel Paradiso,
The Lady From Maxim's and others) depended on careful
plotting and elaborate, precise staging, with minimal
characterization (since it would hold up the breakneck
action). The subject matter was invariably domestic life and
extramarital escapades, with misunderstandings, mistaken
identities, etc., all resolved with remarkable ingenuity.
Duchess of Berwick:
Do you know,
Mr Hopper, dear Agatha and I are so
much interested in Australia. It must
be so pretty with all the dear little
kangaroos flying about.
Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan, Acts II, III.
|
THE BIRTH OF
MODERN DRAMA
|
In general, 19th-century European drama was
undistinguished. It was artificial and out of touch with
changing times. Theatre-going was increasingly popular, but
more for the Italian opera, for the crude melodrama that
represented a hangover from Romanticism, and for early
forms of 'variety'. The productive Anglo-Irishman Dion
Boucicault was responsible for about 200 plays, including
adaptations, but is chiefly remembered for establishing
playwrights' copyright in America. In France,
Eugene Scribe
pioneered the genre of the 'well-made play',
well-constructed, but not much else. The most popular
playwright in the later 19th century was probably Victorien
Sardou, with his intense, but phoney, emotionalism lavishly
staged. The theatre awaited a genius, and he arrived, like
Father Christmas, from the north.
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Henrik Ibsen,
August Strindberg,
Anton
Chekhov,
Bernard Shaw
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IBSEN AND
STRINDBERG
No one disputes the status of the Norwegian
Henrik Ibsen
(1828-1906) as the founder of modern dramatic realism. He was the first
to find the material of great tragedy in the lives of ordinary people.
His literary career began in the 1840s, but it was the poetical plays,
Brand (1866), originally a poem, and Peer Gynt (1867) that established
his reputation in Norway. His genius was not widely recognized abroad
until later — in Britain through partisans such as the critic William
Archer and, subsequently, George Bernard Shaw. A single London
performance of Ghosts (1881), which concerns adultery and mentions
syphilis, caused an outcry and made him famous, if controversial.
Ibsen learned stagecraft as a theatre director in Bergen and
Christiana, later Oslo, in 1851 — 62, and he was influenced by the
dramatic theories of Hermann Hettner, who emphasized the importance of
psychological truth in tragedy, and the middle-class tragedies of
Hebbel. Cramped in Norway, from 1864 to 1891 he and his wife lived
abroad. His literary career, which lasted half a century and produced
twenty-five plays as well as some poetry, can be roughly divided between
a Romantic phase, up to 1875, when he wrote mainly dramatic verse, and
the remaining period when he employed everyday language in the interests
of greater realism.
In plays up to An Enemy of the People (1882), he was chiefly
concerned with moral, social and political themes, but in his last
plays, including Kosmersholm (1886) and The Master Builder (1896), he
sought to penetrate the unconscious (earning the approval of Freud).
Besides those mentioned, the plays most often performed today are A
Doll's House (1879), The Wild Duck (1884) and Hedda Gabler (1890).
The neurotic Swedish writer
August Strindberg (1849-1912)
was almost as influential in modern drama as Ibsen. He was eonstantly at
odds with convention - social, moral and sexual. He was once tried (but
acquitted) for blasphemy and was three times married and divorced,
though the charge of misogyny often made against him seems rather
simplistic. Inferno (1898), written in French, is an extraordinary
account of his mental crisis in Paris in which he came near to madness.
Sexual conflict and psychological anguish are frequent themes, notably
in Miss Julie (1888), his most often performed play today, which is
also concerned with another of Strindbcrg's obsessions, social class.
Besides Miss Julie, his best plays in his aggressive and unusual brand
of Naturalism, are Master Olof (1881), The Father (1887) and Creditors
(1889). Later plays — intense, symbolic, psychological dramas, notably
the trilogy To Damascus (1898-1901), and The Dance of Death (1901) -are
suffused with religious longing.
CHEKHOV
Anton Chekhov
"Uncle Vanya"
The subtle, humane, and perceptive Russian writer
Anton
Chekhov (1860—1904) was possibly more influential in
Britain than either Ibsen or Strindberg. Equally admired for
his short stories,
Chekhov wrote, late in his career, four
great plays: The Seagull (1895),
"Uncle Vanya" (1900), Three
Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904). In conjunction
with Stanislavsky's productions, the plays made the
reputation of the Moscow Art Theatre, though Stanislavsky's
Naturalism was probably not the best style for
Chekhov
(opinions on what that best style is are still in question),
in whom Naturalism is blended with Symbolism.
SHAW
George Bernard Shaw
"Pygmalion"
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) remarked that seeing
Chekov
made him want to tear up his own plays. Not the least of
Shaw's virtues was his powerful advocacy on behalf of the
great European originals, Ibsen,
Strindberg and
Chekhov.
Enormously intelligent, wonderfully witty (there is
something in the criticism that what he said was less
original than the way he said it), a propagandist for every
good cause from vegetarianism to women's rights,
Shaw
bestrode his age in an almost Johnsonian fashion, and the
dip in his reputation since his death is no doubt temporary.
That he was not a truly great playwright is due to the fact
that he was primarily interested in ideas, not in people.
Nevertheless, his plays have a unique and enjoyable Shavian
flavour. Comedies such as Arms and the Man (1894) and
"Pygmalion" (1913) still sparkle, Saint Joan (1923) is a fine
historical drama, Heartbreak House (1919) a lesson in how to
construct a play out of a debate.
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