A history of English literature

by Edward Albert

With such an amount of writing as characterizes this age it is quite certain that both in prose and poetry a wide range of style will be observable.

1. Poetry. In the case of poetry the more ornate style was represented in Tennyson, who developed artistic schemes of vowel-music, alliteration, and other devices in a manner quite unprecedented. The Pre-Raphaelites carried the method still further. In diction they were simpler than Tennyson, but their vocabulary was more archaic and their mass of detail more highly colored. The style of Browning was to a certain extent a protest against this aureate diction. He substituted for it simplicity and a heady speed, especially in his earlier lyrics; his more mature obscurity was merely an effect of his eager imagination and reckless impetuosity. Matthew Arnold, in addition, was too classical in style to care for over-developed picturesqueness, and wrote with a studied simplicity. On the whole, however, we can say that the average poetical style of this period, as a natural reaction against the simpler methods of the period immediately preceding, was ornate rather than simple.

2. Prose. With regard to prose, the greater proportion by far is written in the middle style, the established medium in journalism, in all manner of miscellaneous work, and in the majority of the novels. Outside this mass of middle prose, the style of Ruskin stands highest in the scale of ornateness; of a like kind are the scholarly elegance of Pater and the mannered dictions of Meredith and Stevenson. The style of Carlyle and that of Macaulay are each a peculiar brand of the middle style, Macaulay’s being hard, clear, and racy, and Carlyle’s gruff and tempestuous, with an occasional passage of soothing beauty.

Of the simpler writers there is a large number, among whom many novelists find a place. We have space here to refer only to the easygoing journalistic manner of Dickens and to the sub-acid flavor of the prose of Thackeray.

We add a specimen of Stevenson’s prose style. This style, which in its mannered precision is typical of many modern prose styles, is noteworthy on account of its careful selection of epithet, its clear-cut expressiveness, and its delicate rhythm.

But Hermiston was not all of one piece. He was, besides, a mighty toper; he could sit at wine until the day dawned, and pass directly from the table to the Bench with a steady hand and a clear head. Beyond the third bottle, he showed the plebeian in a larger print; the low, gross accent, the low, foul mirth, grew broader and commoner; he became less formidable, and infinitely more disgusting. Now, the boy had inherited from Jean Rutherford a shivering delicacy, unequally mated with potential violence. In the playing-fields, and amongst his own companions, he repaid a coarse expression with a blow; at his father’s table (when the time came for him to join these revels) he turned pale and sickened in silence. Of all the guests whom he there encountered, he had toleration for only one: David Keith Carnegie, Lord Glenalmond. Lord Glenalmond was tall and emaciated, with long features and long delicate hands. He was often compared with the statue of Forbes of Culloden in the Parliament House; and his blue eye, at more than sixty, preserved some of the fire of youth. His exquisite disparity with any of his fellow-guests, his appearance, as of an artist and an aristocrat stranded in rude company, rivetted the boy’s attention; and as curiosity and interest are the things in the world that are the most immediately and certainly rewarded, Lord Glenalmond was attracted to the boy.

Weir of Hermiston

TABLE TO ILLUSTRATE THE DEVELOPMENT OF LITERARY FORMS

Date	Poetry		Drama		Prose
	Lyrical	Narrative-Descriptive	Tragedy	Comedy	Novel	Essay	Miscellaneous
						Carlyle	Macaulay
	Tennyson[225]
		Tennyson[226]					Carlyle[227]
		Browning[228]
					Dickens[229]	Macaulay
1840	E.B. Browning	E.B. Browning
	Browning[230]				Thackeray[231]		Ruskin[232]
			Browning[233]				Borrow
		Clough
	M. Arnold	M. Arnold			C. Brontë
1850					Kingsley
					Borrow
				C. Reade
					C. Reade
					Trollope
					Collins
	W. Morris	W. Morris			G. Eliot
1860		Fitzgerald			Meredith[234]
	C. G. Rossetti					Thackeray
		Swinburne	Swinburne[235]
						Froude	Froude
1870					Besant
	D. G. Rossetti	D. G. Rossetti
					Butler
						Symonds
			Tennyson[236]				Symonds
1880						Stevenson
					Stevenson
1890

EXERCISES