Category: Classics of Literature
The epoch of literature which opened about the year 1830 is perhaps best described, in the first place, by negatives. It is distinguished from the previous period, when the spirit which gave rise to the French Revolution was dominant, by the absence of certain characteristics...
The epoch of literature which opened about the year 1830 is perhaps best described, in the first place, by negatives. It is distinguished from the previous period, when the spir...
6. CHAPTER I.Poetry is so clearly the head and front of literature that in most periods the first and chief attention must be paid to the poets. The Victorian age is an exception, at least a...
7. CHAPTER II.While it is in the prose of Thomas Carlyle that we first find a key to the ultimate and deeper tendencies of literature, it is in verse that we see most clearly its characterist...
8. CHAPTER III.The view presented in the last chapter is that even Tennyson in his early works displays the qualities to be expected in a time of lowered energy, and gradually, by native force...
9. CHAPTER IV.The characteristic literary form of the last two generations has been the novel. After a certain interval Scott was followed zealously, and by constantly increasing numbers; so...
10. CHAPTER V.Where dates so overlap it is impossible to find, and therefore misleading to seek for, absolute divisions. Some of the writers to be treated in this chapter began to publish onl...
11. CHAPTER VI.Carlyle was so much besides being a historian, and seems, when we look back from a distance of sixty years, so clearly the leader of thought in the early part of this period, th...
12. CHAPTER VII.The early part of the nineteenth century was not very prolific in the department of speculative thought, but signs of movement may be detected in the third decade. Each of the E...
13. CHAPTER VIII.The achievements of science as a rule hardly come within the purview of the critic of literature, for language is commonly used by science for a purpose other than that of liter...
14. CHAPTER IX.It was a maxim of Matthew Arnold's that the main effort of the mind of Europe in our time was a critical one. By this he meant something more than merely literary criticism; but...
15. CHAPTER X.We have already seen that traces of change in the spirit of poetry manifest themselves soon after the opening of the present period. They appear in the works of men like Bailey...
16. CHAPTER XI.Contemporary with the great poets, who seem to feel first of all the imperative necessity of understanding and interpreting the intellectual movement of the age, were others, so...
17. CHAPTER XII.After the turn of the century fiction passes through a change similar to that of which we have seen evidence in poetry. The increased tendency to analysis, the greater frequency...