English Literature in the Nineteenth Century: An Essay in Criticism (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from English Literature in the Nineteenth Century: An Essay in Criticism

Minds. Each means something beyond the name. Each suggests an atmosphere and a point Of view, and a canon by which to pronounce judgment. From the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, our mood changes with the scene. We fare with the company of pilgrims on the April morning which was Chaucer. We thread with Sidney and Spenser the last enchant ments of the Middle Ages. We thrill with Shakespeare and Bacon to the glory of a receding horizon, and Of virgin territories unexplored. We stiflen our conscience with Milton, and stifle our consciousness with Pope, who found, successively, In the Puritan and in the neo-augustan ideals, compensation for the lost gardens in which so much had run to seed; and, finally, we acclaim as a romantic revival' or a renascence of wonder the reaction towards the end of the eighteenth century from the exclusive standards of that epoch. There, commonly, pliability stops. The swift shifting Of the moods, responsive through five hundred years Of history to. The impressions which that history conveys, begins to slacken at the last. The record, as Sir John Seeley said of English history as a whole, 'leaves off in such a gradual manner, growing feebler and feebler, duller and duller towards the close, that one might suppose that England, instead of steadily gaining in strength, had been for a century or two dying of mere Old age.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.