The English Novel and the Principle of its Development

by Sidney Lanier

'Tis hard to tell:
I have heard those more skill'd in spirits say,
The bubbles, which th' enchantment of the sun
Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave
The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools,
Are the pavilions where such dwell and float
Under the green and golden atmosphere
Which noontide kindles through the woven leaves;
And when these burst, and the thin fiery air,
The which they breathed within those lucent domes,
Ascends to flow like meteors through the night,
They ride in them, and rein their headlong speed,
And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire
Under the waters of the earth again."

Here again, in my third extract, we have poetry which is as strong as the other is dainty, and which is as modern as geology. Asia is describing a vision in which the successive deposits in the crust of the earth are revealed to her. The whole treatment is detailed, modern, vivid, powerful.

"... The beams flash on
And make appear the melancholy ruins
Of cancell'd cycles: anchors, beaks of ships;
Planks turn'd to marble; quivers, helms, and spears;
And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels
Of scythed chariots, and the emblazonry
Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts,
Round which death laugh'd, sepulchred emblems
Of dread destruction, ruin within ruin!
Whose population which the earth grew over
Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie,
Their monstrous works and uncouth skeletons,
Their statues, domes, and fanes, prodigious shapes
Huddled in gray annihilation, split,
Jamm'd in the hard, black deep; and over these
The anatomies of unknown winged things,
And fishes which were isles of living scale,
And serpents, bony chains, twisted around
The iron crags, or within heaps of dust
To which the torturous strength of their last pangs
Had crushed the iron crags; and over these
The jagged alligator, and the might
Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once
Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores,
And weed-overgrown continents of earth,
Increased and multiplied like summer worms
On an abandoned corpse till the blue globe
Wrapt deluge round it like a cloak, and they
Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God,
Whose throne was in a comet, past, and cried
Be not! And like my words they were no more."

Shelley appears not to have been completely satisfied with the Prometheus story. This dissatisfaction displays itself in a characteristic passage of his preface to the Prometheus, which happens very felicitously to introduce the only other set of antique considerations I shall offer you on this subject. "Let this opportunity," (he says in one place) "be conceded to me of acknowledging that I have what a Scotch philosopher characteristically terms 'a passion for reforming the world'.... But it is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life....

... Should I live to accomplish what I purpose, that is, produce a systematical history of what appear to me to be the genuine elements of human society, let not the advocates of injustice and superstition flatter themselves that I should take Æschylus rather than Plato as my model."

In Shelley's poem we have found much of the modernness between the lines, or appearing as the result, merely, of that spirit of the time which every writer must share to a greater or less extent with his fellow-beings of the same period. But as we proceed now to examine Bayard Taylor's poem, Prince Deukalion, we find a man not only possessed with modernness, but consciously possessed; so that what was implicit in Shelley—and a great deal more—here becomes explicit and formulated.

As one opens the book, a powerful note of modernness in the drama, as opposed to the drama of Æschylus, strikes us at the outset in the number of the actors. One may imagine the amazement of old Æschylus as he read down this truly prodigious array of dramatos prosopa:

Eos, Goddess of the Dawn: Gæa, Goddess of the Earth; Eros; Prometheus; Epimetheus; Pandora; Prince Deukalion; Pyrrha; Agathon; Medusa; Calchas; Buddha; Spirits of Dawn; Nymphs; Chorus of Ghosts; Charon; Angels; Spirits; The Nine Muses; Urania; Spirit of the Wind; Spirit of the Snow; Spirit of the Stream; Echoes; the Youth; the Artist; the Poet; the Shepherd; the Shepherdess; the Mediæval Chorus; Mediæval Anti-Chorus; Chorus of Builders; Four Messengers. With these materials Mr. Taylor's aim is to array before us the whole panorama of time, painted in symbols of the great creeds which have characterized each epoch. These epochs are four; and one act is devoted to each. In the first act we have the passing away of nymph and satyr and the whole antique Greek mythos; and we are shown the coming man and woman in the persons of Prince Deukalion and Pyrrha, his wife-to-be, whose figures, however, are as yet merely etched upon a mist of prophecy.

In Act II, we have the reign and fall of the mediæval faith, all of which is mysteriously beheld by these same shadowy personalities, Deukalion and Pyrrha. In Act III. the faith of the present is similarly treated. In Act IV. we have at last the coming man, or developed personality fairly installed as ruler of himself and of the world, and Prince Deukalion and Pyrrha, the ideal man and the ideal woman, now for the first time united in deed as well as in inspiration, pace forth into the world to learn it and to enjoy it. Mr. Taylor, as I said, is so explicit upon the points of personality and modernness as compared with the Æschylean play, that few quotations would be needed from his work, and I will not attempt even such a sketch of it as that of Shelley's. For example, in Scene 1, Act I, of Prince Deukalion, Scene I being given in the stage direction as

"A plain sloping from high mountains towards the sea; at the base of the mountains lofty, vaulted entrances of caverns; a ruined temple on a rocky height; a shepherd asleep in the shadow of a clump of laurels; the flock scattered over the plain,"—a shepherd awakes and wonderingly describes his astonishment at certain changes which have occurred during his sleep. This shepherd, throughout the book, is a symbol of the mass of the common people, the great herd of men. Voices from various directions interrupt his ejaculations: and amongst other utterances of this sort, we have presently one from the nymphs—as representative of the Greek nature—myths—which is quite to our present purpose.