THE AGE OF INTERROGATION & ANXIETY Or THE MODERN AGE

General Characteristics of the Age
The first half of the twentieth century is one of the most turbulent eras in the history of English literature. It marks a sharp and clear departure from the self-complacency, compromise and stability of the Victorian period. The transition from the old to the new, from blind faith to rational thinking is very interesting. The following traits distinguish the modern era:
(i) Anxiety and Interrogation: The twentieth century is called the Age of Interrogation and Anxiety because the scientific revolution and changing social, moral, political and economic conditions have shaken man's faith in the authority of Religion and Church and the established order. He does not accept anything unless it is tested on the touchstone of reason. The persistent mood of scepticism and interrogation has increased disproportionately in want of a new set of values. Moreover, modern industrial and technical progress has given birth to the spirit of competition. Everybody wants to come out successful in the rat race but only a few are crowned with laurels. This failure coupled with the complexities of modern life has resulted in frustration, anxiety and cynicism. These tendencies recur in the literature of this period.
(ii) Art For Life's Sake: At the turn of the new century came a number of writers who were sceptical in outlook and were not touched by reverence for custom and the established order. They rejected the doctrine of "art for art's sake". They evolved the new literary creed of "art for life's sake", or, at least, for the sake of the community. In the last decade of the nineteenth century a much stronger claim to be modern was made by Shaw with his socialism, H. G. Wells with his science fiction and Rudyard Kipling with his empire building and steam engines. The change of outlook in the beginning of the twentieth century was due to the growth of a restless desire to probe and question. Bernard Shaw, foremost among the heralds of the age, asserts that every dogma is superstition until it has been critically examined and consciously accepted, by the individual believer. He vigorously attacks the "old superstition of religion" and the "new superstition of science." The effect of his writing was to spread abroad for at least a generation "the interrogative habit of mind.”
(iii) Growing Interest in the Poor and the Working Classes: The year 1900 marks "the beginning of the end of the supremacy of the middle classes, and middle-class standards of thought and writing. The sorry condition of the poor living along with the affluent sections of society aroused the desire to take collective action to improve the living conditions of the poor working classes. The poor were no more helpless creatures. They had grown conscious of their sad predicament. They posed a great challenge to the social conscience. They became the raw material of realistic novel and drama with or without purpose. The mid-Victorian writers, Dickens, Thackeray, Kingsley, Reade, Mrs. Gaskell etc. were critical of the injustice done to the poor working classes. But they were not profoundly critical of the fundamental bases of human life and society as were Shaw, Galsworthy and H. G. Wells. They merely anticipated the spirit of interrogation and rational inquiry. But the early twentieth century writers "put everything in every sphere of life to the question, and secondly, in the light of this scepticism, to reform, to reconstruct—to accept the new age as new, and attempt to mould it by conscious, purposeful effort." Bernard Shaw, who questioned every custom, spread for at least a generation "the interrogative habit of mind."
(iv) Impact of Socioeconomic Conditions on Literature: The literature of the twentieth century has been greatly influenced by economic and social changes. The rapid industrial expansion during the later years of the nineteenth century led to the final disintegration of a pre-industrial way of life and economy and agricultural depression. The landed aristocracy and agricultural labourer were in great trouble. Young villagers began to migrate to industrial towns and there was complete breakup of rural way of life. The disintegration of the village community and its profound human implications have been mournfully expressed in the writings of Hardy, Jefferies, Edward Thomas and others.
In the new century emphasis was put on urbanization, which completely changed the pattern of social relationship. Materialism and competitive spirit began to encroach upon the placid tenor of village life. Money became the key factor in all human relationships. In such circumstances "the poor" was regarded not as a term descriptive of a condition of society but of the character of a group of pople. Society was deemed as a nexus of groups and the pattern of group behaviour determined man's actions.
The new economic theories of economists like Marshall and Keynes, who raised their voice against poverty, and the changed pattern of social behaviour influenced literature. Literature became urbane. Marxism was the most powerful influence. Various manifestations of socialism— Fabian socialism, Christian socialism, Marxist materialism etc.— came into existence and influenced the authors of this period.
(v) Psychology and Literature: New psychological researches influenced literature of the twentieth century. Freud put great emphasis on the power of the unconscious to affect conduct. Intellectual convictions appeared to be rationalizations of emotional needs. In his study of neurotic ailments he came to various conclusion as "relating to the normal mind, which are the basis of psychoanalysis, such as the existence of an unconscious element in the mind which influences consciousness, and conflicts in between various sets of forces (including repression); also the importance of a child's semi-consciousness of sex as a factor in mental development."
The growing interest in psychology exercised considerable influence on literature. The ordered emphasis on sex behaviour was completely changed and a rational view of sex relationship was evolved. The modern age may be termed as the age of rationalization in sexual behaviour. The rightness of sexual union outside the pale of marriage was accepted. The Victorian heroines keep their virtues, whereas those of H. G. Wells lose their virtues. Havelock Ellis' Studies in the Psychology of Sex banished sexual obscurantism and prudish barbarism of the Victorian age. The two World Wars virtually brushed aside all familiar notions of conduct and morality. Sex was considered to be amoral. Bertrand Russell said: "Sex is a natural human need like food and drink...... Love should be a tree whose roots are deep in the earth but whose branches extend in heaven." The invention of contraceptives encouraged extramarital relations among the young. G. B. Shaw in Man and Superman and Candida exposed the error in the conventional assessment of the relative role of the sexes. The new theories of psychology and sex gave us "the stream of consciousness novel". D. H. Lawrence, Virgina Woolf and many others were influenced by new researches in psychology and sex.
(vi) The Impact of the Two World Wars: The period was completely overshadowed by the two World Wars—the after-effects of the first and the forebodings of the second. The post first war period was an era of "depression" and of want and unemployment. After the holocaust of the first world war the League of Nations, an international organisation, was set up with a view to establishing world peace. But the ideals behind this organisation could not materialise. The second world war (1939-1945) broke out and it was far more catastrophic than the first world war, because in this conflict not only the military forces but the civilian population were intimately involved. By the end of the War in September 1945, England had suffered not only the loss of hundreds of thousands of young men but the devastation of wide areas in London and elsewhere and staggering blows to its economic system and its financial resources. Sir Winston Churchill described the great War and its effects on England in the six volumes of The Second World War between 1948-1953. A large number of anti-war books were written during and after the two World Wars. C. E. Montagu's Disenchantment (1922) and Fiery Particles (1923) and Rough Justice (1926), Richard Aldington's Death of A Hero (1929) and Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War (1928), and the poems of Wilfred Owen and Sassoon expose the futility and hollowness of war.
(vii) The Influence of Radio and Cinema: The development of radio, cinema and television had an enormous impact on literature. "In so far as the radio brought literature into the home, in the form of broadcast stories, plays and literary discussions and opened up an entirely new field for authors, its influence was for the good ..... At the same time it must be remembered that film techniques were the basis of a number of experiments in the novel." (Edward Albert)
(viii) Other Influences: The growth and development of literature is inevitably influenced and conditioned by the mental and moral climate of the period in which it is produced. The invention of locomotive and telegraph, rapid and cheap intercommunication resulted in an intellectual revolution. Printing was multiplied and cheapened. Literacy was no more confined to a cultured minority. It was an era of journalism which resulted in the deterioration of literary standards. The journalist searches for the vulgar, trivial and sensational in order to attract a large number of readers.
As a result of better printing facilities, cheap editions of both classics and modern books are easily available. The improved organization of public libraries, circulating libraries and book clubs has made literature accessible to the common public. The spread of literacy has done little in the direction of refining the taste of the masses who read books for the sake of cheap pleasures and not for the sake of aesthetic enjoyment. Moreover, the modern youth is preoccupied with sex. Hence, there has been a boom of pornographic literature, especially sex novels. I. A. Richards wrote as early as 1924 in his book The Principles of Literary Criticism: "At present bad literature, bad art, the cinema etc., are an influence of the first importance in fixing immature and equally inapplicable attitudes to most things. Even the decision to what consti­tutes a pretty girl or a handsome young man is largely determined by magazine covers and movie stars." This lowering of taste has had an adverse effect on art and literture.
(ix) Conclusion: This is the new milieu in which modern literature has been produced. It is the literature of challenge and of the reconstruction of new values. Scott James writes: "The writings, expressive of many temperaments, reveal the intellectual atmosphere in which G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, G. K. Chesterton, Harley Graville Barker and Graham Greene were to find their essential and necessary milieu. In one sense men were being made by their time, in another they were making it. Against this background, too, we must set quieter and more reflective spirits, like Henry James, Joseph Conrad, W. H. Hudson, Norman Douglas and a number of poets. It was an exciting age for writers— an age which marked a definite break with the past, a challenge to authority, an assertion of the right to be anarchistic in thought and in form—romantic, realistic, passionate— a self-conscious age when writers were intensely critical of the composition of society, and were beginning to be critical of the individual soul."
POETRY
General Characteristics of Poetry
In the first half of the twentieth century there was a change in English poetic outlook. The romantic tradition of the previous age was rejected. The poet was no longer a singer of beautiful dreams expressing himself in sweet words. The poet had to express the chaos and the changing scenario of life and society around him. T. S. Eliot's Wasteland was both "a demonstration and a. manifesto of what the new poetry wanted to do and could do." The modern poetry is conspicuous for the following characteristics:
(i) Tradition and Experiment in Modern Poetry: With the advent of the twentieth century existing poetic tradition did not change significantly. There was no great poet full of promise and greatness in the opening years of the twentieth century. The reaction against Victorianism had begun, yet "no strong new inspiration" was coming. The best poets of the period were seeking for models, either like Austin or Blunt, in the forcible careless romanticism of Byron, or, on the contrary, like Gosse, Bridges and Watson in a chastened purity of form, a delicate learned classicism, where the tradition of the preceding age mingled with the influence of French poetry.
The poetry of the first two decades of the twentieth century is the poetry of transition from Victorianism to modernism. Hardy, Edward Thomas and to some extent D. H. Lawrence used the traditional style and language. Gradually the traditional and rural poetry of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century began to decline. John Holloway writes in The Modern Age: "This new poetry looked not to the countryside but to the great city .....The new poetry was also a city poetry, however, rather in a special sense ...... It is written by, and for a metropolitan intelligentsia." Modern poetry is the poetry of experience. It is dominated by the image of a city. The sensibility of the modern poet has been greatly formed by urban and mechanical imagery. The city of London dominates Eliot's The Wasteland. The poet sees poetic quality even in the most prosaic and commonplace subjects. "The heavy thud of bus traffic, the creaking of tramcars, the rattling noise of railway trains, the drone of an aeroplane, all these find on echo in modern poetry."
(ii) Imagism: With the change in the subject matter, the change in poetic technique was inevitable. The new experience needed a new style and speech for its expression. The Imagists, under the influence of T. E. Hulme and G. M. Hopkins, brought about a revolution in poetic technique. They found the existing diction drab, outmoded, banal and inexpressive of the new experience. They chose to express the boredom, the horror and the agony of existence in a concentrated poetic diction. Imagists insisted on the use of hard, dry and precise visual images, the use of the exact word from the language of the common speech, and to produce poetry that is hard and clear.
(iii) The Pound-Eliot Tradition: The new poetic revolution, pioneered by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound was an "Anglo-American achievement". Eliot's Tradition and Individual Talent is a manifesto of the new poetic theory and practice. His Wasteland is the first major example of the New Poetry. Eliot and many others studied with renewed delight the closely packed texture of metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century. The conventional flowery diction was discarded. Ezra Pound, an American poet, was influenced by Provencal poetry, Greek and Latin lyric poetry, the classical poetry of China and Japan, and Huhne's neoclassicism. He took no interest in moral and religious problems. He was an aesthete, concerned with art and verbal precision. There is a touch of modernity in what he writes. Both Eliot and Pound learnt much from Imagists, but they could not confine themselves merely to their visual accuracy. The poets of the twentieth century inherited much from Eliot and Pound. The poetry of Dylan Thomas often conforms to Eliot's ideas and diction. Empson was greatly influenced by Eliot-Pound tradition. Commenting on their influence on modern poets John Holloway writes: "The impact of Eliot and Pound and all that they stood for has been profound...... But it remains true that Eliot and Pound now seem to have constituted a highly distinctive phase of poetic history, one which was at bottom a continental impact rather than the decisive restoration of a central English tradition, and recently the English traditions these writers displaced have been reasserting themselves."
1
THE TRANSITIONAL POETS
There was no poet of promise at the beginning of the twentieth century. The first twenty years of the present century may be treated as a transition period.
1. Alfred Austin (1835-1913)
Austin was a political journalist who aspired to be a philosophical poet but his poetry is sentimental and does not contain any quality of lasting importance.
2. W. E. Henley (1849-1903)
Henley too was an editor and critic. He was a voluminous poet whose poems were published in several volumes—A Book of Verse (1888), The Song of the Sword (1892), Hawthorn and Lavender (1899) and For England's Sake (1900). As a poet Henley chose to compose poems on the ugliness, the sickness, meanness and pain in modern existence. He was, perhaps, the first English poet who found satisfactory images to express the peculiar ugliness of modern life.
As with varnish red and glistening,
Dripped his hair, his feet looked rigid
Raised, he settled stiffly sideways
You could see his hurts were spinal.
He imparted realism to English poetry. His poetic style is evocative and suggestive. He is gifted with a sense of rhythm.
3. John Davidson (1857-1908)
He was a remarkable scholar, writer, journalist, and, above all, poet. As a journalist he contributed to The Speaker and The Yellow Book. He also scored a measure of theatrical success with his translation of Coppee's For the Crown and Victor Hugo's Ruy Bias, but he distinguished himself most as a fresh and vigorous verse writer. His two volumes of verse, Fleet Street Eclogues and Ballads and Songs exhibit him at his best as a literary artist. Although his work is varied — farce, satire, fantasy, romance, it is as a writer of ballads that he left his mark on literature. Davidson's work is remarkably forceful and has been considerably influenced by Shakespeare and Milton.
4. William Watson (1858-1935)
Watson's first volume of verse The Prince's Quest shows considerable affinities with the Romantics and the pre-Raphaelites, but his later work was modified by the realistic spirit of the age. His best work shows a balance between understanding and imagination. His epigrams are remarkable for wit and intellectual vigour. His verse is conspicuous for clear visioned outlook and rhythmic felicities which remind us of Milton and Wordsworth. His poetic output consists of Lachtymae Musarum, Lyric Love, The Father of the Forest, The Eloping Angels, Odes and Other Poems, The Year of Shame, Collected Poems and The Heralds of Dawn. His poems are remarkable for dignity, strength and lucidity. His verse is overburdened with thought.
5. Francis Thompson (1859-1907)
His poems were collected in The Hound of Heaven, Sister Songs and New Poems. He is mainly a transitional poet. He is the true child of his age through "the mysticism of his inspiration and the symbolism of his vision." He had a preference for the ardour and freedom of the Elizabethans, mysticism of the seventeenth century Metaphysical poets and Keatsian felicity of style and diction. His diction is often gorgeous, sonorous and cadenced. His Poems of Children is remarkable for simplicity of diction.
6. Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Kipling, one of the popular poets of the age, was born in India and his early years were spent in Bombay where his parents lived. His work, both in prose and verse, was greatly influenced by imperialism and the superiority of the British to "the darkly mysterious natives."
Kipling came into prominence as a poet with the publication of Departmental Ditties. His other works are the Barrack Room Ballads, The Seven Seas, The Five Nations and Inclusive Verse and Poems.
He was the singer of the glories of imperialism. It was his firm conviction that the Englishmen were born to enlighten the world's
………fluttered folk and wild
Your new caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
He was against granting freedom to slave nations. He called upon Englishmen "to take up the white man's burden" and "reap his own reward."
Kipling was a realist who wrote about everyday matters and familiar objects. He had the unique faculty of seeing the romance of modern life. He has got more poetry out of machinery than any other poet. He understood Indian life from the viewpoint of an Englishman. Shiva and Grasshopper and A Song of Kabir reveal his deep knowledge of the Hindu tradition.
In his earlier poems which are soldier and sailor rhymes he freely used the cockney dialect with its dropped consonants and distorted vowels, its sprinkling of foreign words and its technical jargon. C. M. Montague called him "a fifth form of genius whose equipment as a craftsman in verse was that of a master in embryo." Much of his verse is third-rate and does not rise above the level of doggerel. Those poems which express a quiet love of England and its byways have the evident marks of good poetry— restraint, fresh imagery, varied music.
7. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Hardy, who gave up novel writing in 1896 at the age of nearly sixty, resumed the practice of writing verse. Hardy's poems run into many volumes — Wessex Poems (1898), Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), The Dynasts (Parts Ito III 1903-1908), Time's Laughing Stocks (1909), Satires of Circumstance (1914), Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917), Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), Songs and Trifles (1925), Winter Words (1928) and Collected Poems, published posthumously in 1932. Scott James finds three main elements in his best work: "Nature in her sweeter or wilder moods; Humanity, breathing and passionate, and Destiny, presiding over all, cruel in its blindness."
Wessex forms the background both of his stories and poems. It is more than a scenic setting. It is the dominating "over character" which casts its changeless and brooding shadow upon the author as well as upon the characters in his novels and poems.
The Dynasts is the final expression of Hardy's interpretation of the universe. In it the problem of "individual suffering merges into the vision of a world in travail. His short lyrics rank with the finest in English poetry. He expresses common ideas in common words. When he writes under the impulse of strong feeling he conjures up an imaginative world of romance -and passion. Many of his lyrics are spontaneous and preserve felicity of diction. He could easily concentrate his feelings in as few words as possible, for example, Shelley's Skylark is remarkable for the precision of expression.
Lived its meek life, then, one day fell
A little ball of feather and bone.
8. Robert Bridges (1844-1930)
Robert Eridges suddenly blazed into popularity in 1913, when he was appointed Poet Laureate. His Shorter Poems appeared in 1873. He also published some longer poems Prometheus, The Firegiver (1884), Eros and Psyche (1894) and Demeter (1905). An edition of The Poetical Works of Robert Bridges (1898 and 1905) contained the sonnet sequence The Growth of Love, The Purcell Commemoration Ode, some reprints from magazines and his eight plays. His sonnets are a mixture of Shakespearean and Petrarchan forms but they are devoid of deep feelings and emotions. His other volumes of poetry are New Poems, Poems in Classical Prosody and Later Poems. His masterpiece, The Testament of Beauty appeared in 1929.
Bridges' poetry was influenced by his scholarship and his love for classicism. It is conspicuous for classical vigour, sweetness, elegance, spontaneity, faultless versification and scholarly simplicity. His similes are simple, apt and clear. Bridges is not a poet of unrestrained emotions. He keeps them in restraints.
As a poet of nature he describes the landscape of the South Country. His descriptions of nature are simple, direct and picturesque. His nature poetry is unaffected by any artificial glow of imagination. How naturally, and pictorially he describes the brief existence of flowers!
I have loved flowers that fade,
Within whose magic tents
Rich hues have marriage made
With sweet unmemoried scents.
Like Keats, Bridges loves the principle of the presence of beauty in all things. He writes in Gird on Thy Sword:
Thy work with beauty crown, thy life with love;
Thy mind with truth uplift to God above
For whom all is, from whom was all begun
In whom all Beauty, Truth and Love are one.
Robert Bridges is a superb poetic artist. He once said: "What led me to poetry was the inexhaustible satisfaction of form. ..... It was an art which I hoped to learn." His poetry reveals his profound scholarship, his excellent poetic craftsmanship and his enviable command over language. He imparted musical sweetness and verbal felicity of the Elizabethans to lyrical poetry. Poetry to him is sober ecstasy. His imagery is simple and clear. His outstanding contribution to poetry lies in metrical innovations.
9. A. E. Housman (1859-1936)
Housman's poetic output consists of three volumes: A Shropshire Lad (1896), Last Poems (1922) and More Poems (1936). He wrote much of his poetry about Shropshire, which like Hardy's Wessex is a part of Welsh countryside.
Love, solidership and gallows are the main themes of his poetry. A strong undercurrent of pessimism runs through his poetry. He was disgusted and disenchanted with the sordid materialism of the modern age.
Housman's poems are noticeable for polished ease and restraint. It is very difficult to find a weak or inartistic line in his poems. His diction is simple and musical.
2
THE WAR POETS
The First World War and its horror greatly influenced modern poetry. The war poetry developed into two phases; first, poets like Rupert Brooke who did not personally experience the horror of war and song of patriotism and nobility of sacrifice; secondly, those poets who like Wilfred Owen and Sassoon had actually been to the war front and had known immense human suffering and depravity.
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) glorified patriotism. His Collected Poems caught the mood of romantic patriotism of the early war years before it turned to disillusionment. His sonnets glorify war as a great adventure. He welcomed the call to action with great joy. The Soldier, his finest war sonnet, casts the halo of romance on the virtue of patriotism.
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), the poet of the First War, describes the experience of war. His Collected Poems appeared posthumously in 1920. D. J. Enright says: "If Brooke has played the war poet for those who are fascinated by the idea of poetry, Wilfred Owen is the war poet for those who desire the reality." He was a gifted artist who had a fine feeling for words and a sudden rhythmic sense." He produced what are probably the greatest poems about war in our literature.
Siegfried Sassoon, who served as an officer in the early years of war, was a great war poet. His Counterattack (1918) exposes in embittered verse the horrors of life and death in the trenches and the hospitals. Frank and calculated realism gave to his work a vitality which was previously not found in English war poetry. D. N. Enright says that Sassoon's most interesting poetry "is composed of what have been called the negative emotions— horror, anger, disgust ..... "
Charles Sorley presents a conflict between soldiers and politicians in his poetry. In his famous poem Into Battle he captures the mood of transquillity amid the turmoil of war. Issac Rosenberg, who was killed in the war, at the age of twenty-seven, wrote some war poems, which, though immature, are impressive. Break of Day in the Trenches is his finest poem.
3
W. B. YEATS (1865-1939)
His Life and Works
W. B. Yeats was born near Dublin in 1865. He was educated in London but returned to Ireland in 1880 and soon began his literary career. In 1891 he became a member of Rhymers' Club, of which Ernest Dowsbn (1867-1900) and Lionel Johnson (1867-1902) were also members. After 1890 he began writing plays. As an ardent follower of Irish National Movement, he did much to assist in the creation of a national theatre. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in the South of France in 1939 and his body was reinterred in Ireland in 1948.
The works of Yeats' early period are Wanderings of Oisin (1889), Poems (1895), The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) and The Shadowy Water. His early lyrics are remarkable for simplicity of style and melodic beauty. The Lake Isle of Innisfree is one of the best known of his early lyrics. His early work was influenced by the pre-Raphaelites and Celtic legends. Tired of the sordid materialism of the age, Yeats sought to escape into the fairy land, and looked for his themes in Irish legend and the simple, elemental impulses of man's primitive nature.
Between 1900 and 1910 Yeats produced little poetry. During this period he was devoted to drama and philosphical and literary essays. The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) and Responsibilities are realistic. He shows a philosophical and mystical bent of mind. The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) shows definite signs of maturity. In The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933) he successfully writes on philo­sophical themes with a compact precision of style and a great command of rhythm and language. His last two collections are New Poems (1938) and Last Poems (1939). Yeats' later poetry is characterised by stark naked realism, even brutality and coarseness. In keeping with modern realistic trends, there is greater and greater approximation to speech rhythms and colloquial diction.
Characteristics of Yeats' Poetry
(i) Mysticism: Yeats was a mystic, a visionary and dreamer by temperament. He felt himself an alien in a world dominated by materialism, industrialisation, rationalism, science and technology. He resorted to "imaginative mysticism which is the essential attribute of Celticism.” Indian thought also influenced his mysticism. In a general introduction to his work, Yeats wrote: "A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of his tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness." In the words of Edward Albert: "Like so many of his contemporaries, Yeats was acutely conscious of the spiritual barrenness of his age, and his whole artistic career is best seen as an attempt, at first to escape from the sordid materialism which he found on every hand, and later to formulate a new positive ideal which would supply his spiritual needs." He discarded scientific reasoning and trusted imagination. He tried to revive the primitive impulses of human life. He believed in fairies, magic and superstitions. His later thought was much influenced by his study of mystical philosophies and the excursion into spiritualism. "Convinced of the immortality of the soul, he saw in man a dual personality, made up of 'Self' which is the product of man's social training, and "Anti-Self", which is constantly struggling against self to find freedom in the world of the spirit. Between the world of spirit and the world of reality he found a bridge in poetry."
(ii) Romanticism: Yeats has been called the "last of the Romantics." He admired imagination, individualism and the golden future as much as Blake did. He also wrote lyrics like romantics and his theme was love and loveliness. So far he was a romantic. But Yeats also evinced a strong sense of awareness that man's possibilities might not be limitless. This was the classical and Christian viewpoint. He insisted on stateliness, courtliness, orderliness and control as criteria for judging past, present and future. These were classical qualities. He was the last romantic who sang of "traditional sanctity and loveliness." Like Wordsworth he spoke of ordinary humanity. The element of song was also there. His images were illumined by his subject. He wove his symbols subtly and effectively. He was the poetic spokesman of modern sensibility.
Yeats' early poetry is romantic, escapist and heavily overhung with Pre-Raphaelite tapestry. It is a world of Celtic twilight, of vague uncertain lights, and the imagery used is equally vague and subdued in colour. His later poetry is realistic. It is the expression of modern sensibility and the style assumes terseness, precision and sublimity. Profundity of thought accompanies simplicity of form.
(iii) Symbolism: Yeats is regarded as one of the chief exponents of the Symbolist Movement in England. He employs simple and elementary symbols in his early poetry. The "rose" is a recurrent symbol in some of his early poems. The Rose of the World is a symbolical poem in which the `rose' symbol is brilliantly used. In it Yeats adroitly blends Classical and Celtic mythologies. The poems in The Wind Among The Reeds are tenuously symbolic and are very different from the lush romantic descriptions of his earliest poetry as well as from the tapestry quality of many of the poems of The Rose. In his later poetry his symbols became more complex, personal and individual. His well-known symbols are the moon, the swan, the tower, the winding stair, Byzantium etc. The use of the same symbol to denote a variety of things makes his poetry obscure to some extent; for example, the tower may represent An intellectual refuge, or the soul's yearning for the world of the spirit. Yeats expresses his sensations, his visions and mystic experiences through symbols. Edward Albert remarks about his symbolism: "Yeats' philosophy is often expressed through a carefully devised system of symbols, some purely. private, others drawn from his study of philosophy or his reading in the works of French symbolists, or of earlier symbolical poets, particularly Blake and Shelley. By means of them he succeeds in expressing those emotional experiences which he felt to be otherwise incapable of poetical communication, but sometimes they serve only to accentuate the obscurity of his poems."
(iv) His Artistry: Yeats was an accomplished poetic artist. His poetic art and his mastery of language and rhythm grew steadily throughout his career. His early style shows the influence of Pre-Raphaelite aestheticism, and it is sonorous, languid, sentimental and romantic. His early poetry has an exotic character. The imagery is arranged in pairs of contrast. Man and nature, the human world and the fairy world, the domestic and the adventurous, the transient and the eternal are paired against each other. As his poetic career advanced, his expression became more concentrated and his poetry combined magic and dignity, perfect command over rhythms and the assured use of imagery. It was the cultivation of a graceful yet muscular style, at once colloquial and formal, at once biosterous and serious, prophetic and worldly, that enabled him to write a poetry matching it in its impact on the reader of the rigorous humanity of its conception. Yeats skilfully used the traditional verse forms, modified sometimes to suit his own needs. His rhythms approximate the ordinary speech but the music of his verse is of the highest quality. His style is compact and closely woven. Each word is used with calculated effect.
As a metrical artist Yeats experimented with a variety of stanzas and verse forms, but he avoided the verse libre and other technical innovations of his day. He used traditional metres and stanza forms with consummate skill. Yeats had a Donne-like command over stanza structures and made his stanza patterns correspond with the movement of thought and emotion.
(v) Yeats' Place: Yeats may not be a Shakespeare or a Milton, but he must certainly rank with the greatest poets of all times. David Daiches writes about his place in English poetry: "Yeats was without doubt the most remarkable poetic genius in English of his time, and one of the great English poets. He absorbed all his age had to offer him. Yet he did so wholly in his own way. If his career illustrates the history of English poetry in his lifetime that is not because he is ever like any other poet of his day, for, except, in his earlier phase, he never is. His voice is always his own. It is haunting and magical and fascinating and sometimes terrible." Praising Eliot's poetic greatness Eliot writes that Yeats "was one of those few where history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them." This is a very high position to assign him.
4
THE GEORGIAN POETS
The Georgian poets reacted against the decadent transitional poetry. By 1912 Rupert Brooke was fully satisfied with the prevailing opinion that public neglect was a great hindrance in the development of modern poetry. He planned to write a volume of poems and to publish it "as the work of twelve different writers." Marsh suggested to publish an anthology by "flesh and blood" poets, and in September 1912 this suggestion was accepted by some outstanding poets— Rupert Brooke, John Drinkwater, W. W. Gibson, Harold Monro and Edward Marsh himself. The publication of this volume, entitled Georgian Poetry (1911-12) had the desired effeet orrtlre public who began to buy and read poetry. Five volumes of The Georgian Poetry appeared between 1912 and 1922. The Georgian Poetry flourished in the reign of George V. By 1922 the fervour of 1912 had died down in most of the poets and the reign of Georgians was over.
The Georgians aimed at putting English poetry "on a new strength and beauty." Commenting on the aims of the Georgians, A. S. Collins remarks: "The Georgians had, of course, a positive aim. It was to treat natural things in a clear, natural and beautiful way, neither too modern, nor too like Tennyson." They discarded "all formally religious, philosophic or improving themes" and all subjects that dealt with "sadness, wickedness and cafe table." They endeavoured to restore simplicity and naturalness to English poetry and avoided the use of archaic diction such as "thee" and "thou", grandiloquent expressions and all pomposities of thought and expression. They composed neat and melodious poems.
The Georgian poetry is escapist in the sense that it does not show any awareness of the industrial world around it. It has, often, an obvious "facility of technique and shallowness of feeling." In spite of these weaknesses, the Georgians have "contributed something to poetic heritage, and their regular appearance in anthologies suggests that the best of them may have established for themselves a permanent place in English poetic tradition."
Main Georgian poets are given ahead:
1. Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)
His place is very high as a Georgian poet. He is essentially a poet for children. The burning problems of modern life did not inspire him. He preferred from beginning to concentrate on romance and nature as his main themes. He is basically a poet of fairyland creating in his poetry a world of dreams, fantasies and imagination, a world which appeals to children as well as to grown up people. His published works are The Listeners and Other Poems (1912), Peacock Pie (1913), The Fleeting and Other Poems (1933), Bells and Grass (1941), Collected Poems (1942), The Burning Glass and Other Poems (1945) and The Traveller (1946).
As a poet of childhood, Walter de la Mare is unsurpassable. He has very successfully captured the joys and pleasures of childhood in his Songs of Childhood. No other poet has described the states of childhood with such vividness and insight as he has done. His poetry of childhood exhibits an astonishing variety. It includes nursery rhymes, stories and songs. He shows remarkable psychological insight in dealing with childhood.
Another distinguishing feature of his poetry is the note of fantasy. He is the creator of fairyland. Fairies, ghosts and phantoms haunt his poems. His is a world "pieced together by the imagination of childhood, made up of childhood memories, of fairy tales, ballads and nursery rhymes." Like Coleridge he deftly mingles the natural and the super­natural together.
Walter de la Mare was a great lyric poet. His lyrics have sweetness, harmonious melody, a note of wistful melancholy and sadness which is the natural outcome of the transience of beauty, love and life:
Beauty vanishes, beauty passes
However rare it be, rare it be.
2. W. H. Davies (1879-1940)
Davies writes in his autobiography, The Autobiography of A Super Tramp (1908) that it was after losing his right foot while jumping a railway train in Canada that he turned to poetry. His poems are contained in The Soul's Destroyer and Other Poems (1905), New Poems (1907), Collected Poems (1916, 1928, 1934) and Love Poems (1935). He composed beautiful lyrics on love and nature.
Davies was a poet of many moods but he never lost sight of nature and pastoral life. The sights and sounds of nature and the simple lives of the countryfolk appealed to his imagination and poetic sensibilities. He flew to nature "for solace and forgetfulness, pursuing joy, eschewing sadness." Davies had a sense of companionship with nature.
He was a lyric poet. His short lyrics are remarkable for easy and spontaneous expression. David Daiches writes that there are "some dozens of his lyrics so lively in music and feeling, so engaging to a sensitive Year, that their survival can hardly be in doubt."
3. John Masefield (1878-1967)
Masefield, the central figure in the Georgian poetry, became the Poet Laureate after the death of Bridges in 1930. A man of versatile genius and achievements, he was a poet, dramatist, novelist and essayist. He emerged as a prominent poet with the publication of The Salt Water Ballads (1902). These poems reveal the poet's own experiences of sea life. Ballads and Poems marked a remarkable advance in the development of his poetic art.
Masefield infused fresh vigour and vitality into English narrative poetry. He imparted to it realism which was hitherto lacking in Georgian poetry. The Everlasting Mercy, The Widow of the Bye Street, Dauber, The Daffodil Fields, Reynard, The Fox and Right Royal are his famous narrative poems. His later poetry appeared in Midsummer Night, Collected Poems, England Beginning and Wondering. His poetry is marked by a strong note of realism. In Consecration he wrote:
Others may sing of the wine and the
wealth and the mirth,
The portly presence of potentates goodly in mirth,
Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust
and the scum of earth.
Masefield beautifully combined romance with realism. Sea Fever, Cargoes, The Seekers and Sea Change bring out the romance and adventure of sea life. His love poetry has a note of melancholy and sadness. The beloved in coffin or grave is the theme of his love poems.
Masefield shows a power of intellectual concentration and of meditative harmonies.
4. James Elory Flecker (1884-1915)
Flecker published The Bridge of Fire, Forty-Two Poems, The Golden Journey to Samarkand and The Old Ships. He was captivated by the romance of the East and had the unique gift of portraying the exotic and the remote in vivid colours. He was the master of apt diction and jewelled phrases which communicate the very spirit of the romance of the East. He has full command over his language and versification.
5. Edward Thomas (1878.1917)
His poems appeared in a collection in 1917. He was a poet whose originality in the words of A. C. Ward "is strangely original, though there is nothing freakish, either in manner or in matter." The sense of newness given by his poetry came from a feeling that it was written by one whose vision and music were free from glints and echoes from the works of other poets.
6. Ralph Hodgson (1871-1962)
Hodgson's early poetry has emotional force and subtlety of music. He excelled in the art of compressing a wide range of pictorial and dramatic effects into minimum of words. His works include The Bull (1913), Eve and Other Poems (1913), The Song of Honour (1913) and Poems (1917). His poetry is characterised by his deep love and intense compassion for animals. His later poems were published after a long silence in The Skylark and Other Poems (1958) and Collected Poems (1961).
7. W. W. Gibson (1878-1962)
Gibson was a prolific poet whose poems were published in Collected Poems, The Golden Helm, The Note of Love, Stone Fields, Daily Bread, Fires, Thoroughfares, Borderland Battle, Likelihood Home and Neighbours, I Heard a Sailor, The Golden Broom and Hazards. Gibson's early poems are mostly imitative and reveal Tennyson's influence. It is romantic and supernatural. In his later poetry he deals with the sordid realities of industrial life. His poems are full of compassion for the underdog. His symbols are drawn from the crudest scenes of the life of the poor. He uses the language of common people with conversational ease and naturalness.
8. John Drinkwater (1882-1937)
Drinkwater's poetry is conspicuous for classical restraint and discipline. He was an intellectual poet who took interest in elegiac and meditative poetry and not in songs and lyrics. He published Collected Poems, Poems of Men and Hour and Poems of Love and Earth. Drinkwater is a deliberate and careful craftsman.
Drinkwater's nature poetry is memorable. Few modern poets equate Drinkwater in the appreciation of nature.
9. Harold Monro (1872-1932)
Monro's Collected Poems were published in 1933, with an Introduction by T. S. Eliot. His poetry is more urban and more realistic than that of other Georgians. He is chiefly remembered, not as a poet, but as the founder of Poetry Review in 1912 and the Poetry Bookshop, which he opened in London in 1913 and ran until his death in 1932.
10. Alfred Noyes (1880-1958)
Noyes, the Professor of Modern English Literature at Princeton University from 1914 to 1923, is remembered for Drake, a sea epic, Tales of Mermaid Tavern, Torchbearers and Collected Poems. His favourite topics were the sea and the fairyland. He was influenced by the Elizabethans.
11. G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
The poems of Chesterton are included in The Wild Knight and Other Poems, The Ballad of White Horse, Wine, Water and Song, Poems, The Ballad of St. Barbara and Collected Poems. He is more a versifier than poet. His verse lacks in depth and emotional intensity. He was a devout Catholic who brought the spirit of Catholicism to English poetry. He will be remembered in English poetry for his war poems—Lepanto, The Ballad of St. Barbara and The Ballad of the White Horse. Characters and incidents are dramatically drawn in these poems and the narrative is vigorous and effective.
12. Lascelles Abercrombie (1881-1938)
Abercrombic was one of the original contributors to Georgian Poetry Abercrombie was one of the original contributors to Georgian. He preferred the blend of the emotional and intellectual which he found in the poets of metaphysical school. He was a considerable metrical artist with a fine rhythmic sense. His images are striking. His poems are Included in Interludes and Poems and Collected Poems.
Other poets who contributed to Georgian poetry are Edmund Blunden, Gordon Bottomley, James Elory Flecker, John Freeman, Edward Shanks and Sir John Squire. Edward Albert writes: "....the Georgian poets have contributed something to our poetic heritage, and their regular appearance in anthologies suggests that the best of them may have established for themselves a permanent place in English poetic tradition."
5
REACTION AGAINST THE GEORGIANS: IMAGISM
The poetical movement, known as Imagism, was a reaction against Romanticism, especially Georgian poetry. The Georgians lived in a world of fantasy and discarded the sordid realities of contemporary life. They lacked modernism. The Imagists reacted against the hackneyed and fantastic approach of the Georgians.
T. E. Hulme (1883-1917), who published only five short poems, entitled The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme, is the chief protagonist of Imagism in England. Reacting sharply against the loose and facile texture of the Georgian poetry, Hulme advocated the importance of "hard, dry image" in poetry. He emphasised that "poetry should restrict itself to the world perceived by the senses and to the presentation of its theme in a succession of concise, clearly visualised, concrete images accurate in detail and precise in significance." The aim of the Imagists was to create "hard, brilliant, clear effects instead of the soft, dreamy vagueness or the hollow Miltonic rhetoric of the English nineteenth century tradition."
The Imagist Movement flourished from 1910 to 1918. Its first anthology, Des Imagists was published in 1914 with Ezra Pound, the distinguished American poet, as editor. It had eleven contributors, who belonged both to England and America. They were Richard Aldington, Hilda Doolittle, F. S. Flint, Amy Lowell, William Carols James, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Upward, John Cournos and Cannel. Amy Lowell's anthology Some Imagist Poets (1915) was the first great landmark in Imagism. The Imagists also published a magazine, The Egoist. Richard Aldington published several volumes of Imagist poetry known as Images Old and New (1915), Images of War (1919), Images of Desire (1914) and Collected Poems (1929, 1934). F. S. Flint's Cadences appeared in 1915. Pound's Personae (1926, enlarged 1952) and Selected Poems (1928) were remarkable contributions to Imagism.
The Imagists liberated poetry from the shackles of classical discipline and the waywardness of Romanticism. They experimented verse libre and believed in unlimited freedom of expression. They endeavoured to reveal the new consciousness in beautifully moulded images. The Imagists wished to produce poems "with the sharpness of outline and precision of form which belong to a perfectly proportioned satuette or other carved image." "An image," said Pound, "is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. Summarising the aims of Imagism, Pinto writes:
(i) "To use the language of common speech but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly exact, not the merely decorative word.
(ii) To produce poetry that is hard and clear .....:
(iii) To create new rhythms and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods...... They (the Imagists) aimed at the clarity and concentration of the classic Chinese lyric and the Greek epigram ..... "
Imagism could not become a popular poetic movement. It soon died out. The Imagists overemphasised the importance of technique and neglected the subject. The poets who stood for concise and concrete images fell into licence and obscurity. Despite its limitations and weaknesses the Imagists exercised noticeable influence on English poetry. They rendered unique service to poetry by purging it from un­necessary ornamentation, empty verbiage, and superfluous generalities. Hulme's conception of clearly visualised and concrete images left an indelible impact on T. S. Eliot and other poets of nineteen thirties.
6
GERALD MANLEY HOPKINS (1844-1899)
The work of Hopkins, written between 1860 and 1889, belongs to the nineteenth century and makes him a contemporary of Swinburne, but its posthumous publication in 1918 has made him a contemporary of T. S. Eliot. His Collected Poems (1918), remarks W. Hudson, "had so deep and wide an influence upon the younger generation that the aspect of modern poetry was changed right up to the present time, and his influence is still unexhausted."
Hopkins, who wrote about three hundred poems, was an original poet. His originality consists in the introduction of some revolutionary Innovations in the technique of poetry. He discarded the romantic style of verse. As regards metrical forms and verse technique Hopkins was indebted to Donne and other metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, but he was far more an innovator than a borrower. He stressed the importance of the interiorness of things, of the truth which lies at the heart of each and every object (inescape) and imparts to it its authenticity (instress). From this notion his imagery derived a special richness. Hopkins had that "acute and sharp sensuous awareness essential to all great poets. He was physically aware of textures, surfaces, colours, patterns of every kind, aware acutely of earth's diurnal course, of growth and decay, of animality in man and of vitality in all things. Everywhere there is passionate apprehension, passionate expression, and equally that passion for form without which these other passions are spendthrift. But the form is inherent in the passion.”
Hopkins developed fresh and individual vocabulary. He formed new combinations of existing words, as "fallowbootfellow", "breadbony ash”, windlaced” and so on. He was also a great metrical innovator. Some of his poems were written in "running rhythm" and some in "sprung rhythm”, and some in a mixture of the two. By "running rhythme" he means common rhythm used in English poetry. It had been in us from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In "sprung rhythm" a foot is reversed in nearly every line. He also revived the oldest English metre, alliterative. The Windhover is a fine example of his use of allerative metre. Hopkins eagerly used every device that helped him to increase the force of his rhythm and the richness of his phrasing.
Hopkins' poems "were recognised as the work of a spiritual explorer", writes W. H. Hudson, "whose vision had penetrated below life's surfaces and whose poetic craft was appropriate to the needs of the new generation. Here was a kind of poetry which did not act as a smoothing plane gliding over a surface of appearances but as a rock-drill driving into realities, and realities were the aim of the religious and irreligious alike. Hopkins, it seemed, had found and passed to them a poetic instrument which they could employ for their own purposes, whether or not their particular purposes were like his own."
7
T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965)
His Life and Works
T. S. Eliot is the greatest poet of the twentieth century. His influence has been immense on English poetry.
Born in America in 1888, T. S. Eliot came to England in 1914 at the age of twenty six. In 1927 he became a British citizen and a confirmed member of the Church of England. Although Eliot settled in England, yet the impressions of the natural surroundings of the New England and the South West he lived in as a child left an indelible mark on his formation as a poet. At Harrow from 1906-10, Eliot devoted himself to study of language and literature. He studied Dante and Donne who exercised great influence on his poetry. After graduating he spent a year at the Sorbonne University, Paris where he came under the influence of contemporary French writers like Bergson.
Eliot came back to Harvard in 1911 where he pursued a basic course in philosophy and also read Indian and Sanskrit literature. In 1934 he wrote in After Strange Gods that "a year in the mazes of Patanjali's metaphysics left me in a state of Enlightened Mystification". Eliot's meeting with Ezra Pound in 1914 was a remarkable literary event of the first half of the twentieth century.
After a brief experience of teaching at Highgate School, Eliot entered business in 1916 and spent eight years in Lloyd's Bank in the city. He was also the assistant editor of The Egoist (1917-19), and in 1923 began his career as editor of The Criterion. Later he became a director of Faber and Faber, the publishers. He won many literary_ honours and dis- tinctions. He was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Halard from 1932-33, and President, Classical Association (1944). He was awarded Nobel Prize for Literature and Order of Merit in 1948. He received honorary degrees from twelve universities in Europe and America. He died in 1965.
The first volume of Eliot's poetry Ptufrock and Other Observations was published in 1917. It portrays the boredom, emptiness and pessimism of the modern age in bitter, ironical and satirical verse. In it he emerge as an original and skilled poetic craftsman. Poems (1920) is in much the same mood. The monologue Gerontion in this volume shows Eliot's free adaptation of the blank verse of the later Elizabethan dramatists.
Eliot's famous poem The Waste Land (1922) is considered one of the most important poetic documents of the age. It made great impact on the post-war generation. The Waste Land is in many ways a compressed epic. It does for its period what Virgil and Milton did for theirs, though of course its scale is considerably smaller than that of Aeneid or Paradise Lost. It attempts to portray the state of civilization out of which it grows, combining essentially the history of that civilization, its present condition, and its understanding of life, especially its understanding of God. The Waste Land does this in a very limited way, but it stands nevertheless in that tradition." A. G. Fraser points out: "The Waste Land expresses poignantly a desperate sense of the poet, and the age's lack of positive spiritual faith." The waste is not the "devastation of the war but it is the post-war disruption of European civilization, the emotional and spiritual sterility of modern man." April, which is the month of fertility, breeds nothing but lilacs and stirs nothing but dull roots. Sex is sterile, breeding not life and fulfilment.
The Hollow Man (1925) is a terrifying exposure of the meaning­lessness of life without belief.
Eliot's overwhelming sense of the need for redemption transformed him into a religious poet. Ash Wednesday (1930) marks a new phase in the poet's development, in which he finds hope in the discipline of Christian religion. Four Quartets (1944) expresses Eliot's intense zeal for religious truth, which leads finally to a new hope in the Christian ideas of rebirth and renewal.
T. S. Eliot as a Poet
(i) Consistent Development as a Poet: T. S. Eliot began to compose poems in his late teens in the first decade of the twentieth century. He satirized the modern man in an idiom that was distinctly colloquial. But this genre could not hold for long. What distinguishes his career as a poet is the sustained power of development. In the second phase of his career he blossomed into a spiritualist and philosopher. His philosophy grew from his continuous meditation and invested an aura of placidity to his poetry. The time of irony and satire that tempered the nihilist moroseness of his early work with grim humour yielded place to soberiety and poise. In spite of his growth as a poet, there is hardly any breach in his creativity spanning a worthy long period of fifty years. Most of his work is characterised by continuity and coherence, the mark of a great poet.
(ii) Influences on His Poetry: T. S. Eliot, a profound scholar and thinker, is a product of diverse influences— literary, anthropological, philosophical impinging into one. The literary influences of Elizabethan dramatists, English metaphysicals, French symbolists and Imagists are Paramount on his poetry. He learnt from Dante how to polish and refine his language, how to enlarge his emotional range and how to bring his own poetry in line with the European tradition.
(iii) Classicism and the Spirit of Age: T. S. Eliot is a classicist. In sharp contrast to romantics, he lives in a world around him and shows his deep concern with contemporary society. The main impulse behind his poetry is to give a new and perfect expression to truths and commonplaces of man and his world. In his pursuit of giving a realistic representation to life around him, he many a time becomes critical of the spiritual degeneration of mind and expresses his despair over utter emptiness of the contemporary civilization. In The Waste Land and The Hollow Man he describes the spiritual degeneration of modern man.
(iv) Eliot's Style and Diction: T. S. Eliot stands high as a modern poet not only for his selection of subject and his theory of impersonality but also for his invention of a new poetic style. Bold innovation both in style and versification are his other hallmarks. Eliot's diction is unique and original. It comprehends paradox, irony and contrast. He makes excellent use of paradox in The Hollow Man when he describes modern man degenerating into sheer abstractions devoid even of their arid appearances:
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion.
The peace invoked in "Shantih, Shantih, Shantih" at the end of The Waste Land is a forced conclusion and a sudden breach in the sequence of the poem. It creates an effect of irony.
Eliot's vocabulary is apt and suggestive. He uses language effectively to communicate the predicament of modern world and modern man. His poetry is full of phrases that stick in one's memory — "Time for you and time for me", "I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker", "The burnt out ends of smoky days", "April is the cruellest month" etc. Indeed, Eliot enriched English language and transformed it into a suitable medium for the expression of the complexities and intricacies of contemporary urban life.
(v) Eliot's Metrical Art: Eliot was a great experimenter with verse forms and in his long poetic career he experimented with over forty metres. He forged new measures to express the complexity and intricacy of modern life. Eliot's form is different from verse litre and the irregular bland verse. It is what Salinger precisely called "poised measure". It consists of lines of varying lengths, commonly with four strong beats, pausing midway as if for deliberation. For example, mark the calm abstract statement in Four Quartets:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps in
time future,
And time future contained in
time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable
(vi) Eliot's Influence: Eliot has exercised a complex and continuing influence on modern English poetry. His memorable contribution lies in creating contemporary consciousness in modern poetry. He gave a new intellectual dignity, a new sincerity and a new spiritual depth to modern poetry. He gave a new direction to poetry, as Dryden had done after the Restoration and Wordsworth at the end of the eighteenth century. While his poetry, on the whole, has remained inimitable, he has shown a new direction in the spheres of versification and imagery. Eliot’s successors – Loius Macneice, Cecil day Lewis, Stephen Spender, Auden and many others – owe him a special gratitude; writes G.S. Frazer, “as a craftsman who has provided them with new, sharp tools, and as a teacher from whom they have learned how to use tools and how to use them." Frank Kermode rightly observes that English poetry would have had no future without the invaluable work done by T. S. Eliot.
8
THE FOLLOWERS OF T. S. ELIOT
Edith Sitwell's The Wooden Pegasus (1920) and Bucolic Comedies evince Eliot’s influence on her poetry. Like Eliot she exposes the futility and artificiality of modern life in hard, bright and coloured images. Her later poetry consisting of Street Songs (1943), Green Song (1944) and Song of the Gold (1945) have a graver tone. In the words of A. C. Ward her later poetry “shows her progress from the fantastical to the spiritual – a progress which, in the light of her poetry as a whole, can be seen as orderly and inevitable." Sir Osbert Sitwell reveals his scorn for spineless people who are afraid of reality and love motley too much in the Church Parade. Green Fly is a bitter satire against the silly sentimentalism of those who weep and lament over a hurt dog when millions of young people die in great agony in battlefield. Sacheverell Sitwell's selected poems first appeared in 1948. His poems composed on fishermen and ordinary workers have a lyrical strain. The Sitwells reacted sharply against romanticism and traditionalism. In the words of A. C. Ward: "They had wit, command of barbed vocabulary, and unbounded self-confidence." The Sitwells endeavoured their best to evolve an idiom and a form suitable for the expression of the predicament of modern man.
Richard Church's News From the Mountain and The Twentieth Psalter are his memorable works. Roy Campbell, who volunteered his service to the British Navy during the second world war is remembered for The Flying Terrapin and Adamastor. Herbert Reade, poet and critic, published Naked Warriors, Collected Poems (1926), Poems (1913-140 and Collected Poems (1946). His poetry is terse and highly intellectual. He Was influenced by Eliot and Imagism.
Robert Graves' early poetry consisting of Over the Brazier and Fairies and Fusiliers shows the influence of the Georgians, which he gave up in his later poetry. His later verse was written under Eliot's influence and is remarkable markable for "exceptional grace and intelligence”, and unique forcefulness. His famous poem Certain Mercies exposes the spiritlessness of modern man in terse and clear language. Like Eliot, Grave appeals to intellectuals.
9
THE OXFORD POETS
The poets, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice, are known as Oxford Poets. Michael Roberts (1902-48) for a while organised these poets, then, the leadership passed to W. H. Auden. These poets were entirely new men endowed with an entirely new outlook. Although these poets later on separated, they remain associated in the History of English Poetry as "the four Musketeers of the Oxford Movement", which has been variously called "the modern movement" and "the new country movement." These poets were Oxford graduates and had been great friends when they were undergraduates.
The Oxford poets "affirmed the value of being contemporary, of expressing the common experience, and the sensibility of the age It is preeminently the values of human personality which the social, political and economic trends of the twentieth century threaten to submerge." The new poets took interest in current political and economic affairs and thought that Marxism was the only panacea to end all the evils infecting mankind. They abominated bourgeois society, with all its creative comforts and materialism, and affirmed their faith in revolution that would bring about a new order and new values. The new world order would be communistic.
The following are the common characteristics which give these poets the identity of Oxford group:
(i) Their thematic content contained marks of innovation and experimental modernness.
(ii) They had more intellectual and less emotional appeal.
(iii) Their political involvement with communism was born of a sense of guilt and pity.
(iv) These poets also show the influence of Freud.
(v) Their common identity was reflected in their cynicism and satire. "They came to feel as if they belonged to nowhere. A sense of the loss of moorings, of rootlessness, and a quest for a new base characterised the early poetry of the group and gave them a common identity."
(vi) French symbolism and Hopkins-Eliot innovations.
The poetry of the Oxford Group is intellectual and unemotional. "The material of much contemporary poetry," writes A. C. Ward, “is barren and boring to those brought up in an earlier tradition: a thin whimper displaced both the song of joy over the strong cry of agony.
1. W. H. Auden (1907-73)
As the leader of Oxford poets Auden is of considerable importance. He was aware of the shallowness of the disintegrating post-war civilization. He found the solution of all social and political ills in left wing political ideologies. The main theme of his early poems is social criticism and protest. He was influenced by both Marx and Freud. He published Poems and The Orators. His poetry expresses contemporary political tensions, social and economic unrest infecting industrial cities. "Slums and slag heaps, Freudian phrases and Marxian metaphors —," writes Timothy Foote, "all found a place in Wystan Auden's writings. No poet more constantly and conscientiously tried to extend the domain of things poetical."
Auden's sympathy was with the underdog. He scorned shams and affectations. "In much of his work scorn is the predominant note —" says Scott James, "scorn of shallow emotion, philanthropic pretension, plutocratic display, sickness, trite phrases, borrowed metaphors, senti­mentality, secret vice—and these are things which distract his attention when pure beauty is ready to move him. He will not have his landscape blurred with old moonlight of romance." He sings of "human unsuccess in a rapture of distress." Auden did his best to prevent poetry from becoming exclusively high brow, and he found his subjects among the everyday, often sordid realities of a diseased social order."
The second phase of his poetry began in 1939 when he emigrated to U. S. A. The German-Soviet pact disillusioned him and shook his faith in communism. Consequently, Auden gave up communism and his poetry took a religious and metaphysical turn. His later poetry consists of The Shield of Achilles (1949), Homage to Clio (1960), and. 'bout the House (1966). Some of his later poems like In Memory of W. B. Yeats touch deeper springs of emotions and feelings.
Auden was a great poet, artist and experimenter in verse form. Stephen Spender once called him "the most accomplished technician now writing poetry in English." He learnt the symbolic method and the use of modern imagery and of abstract expressions from Eliot, and the use of assonance and internal rhyme from Hopkins. Auden's poetic style is precise and epigrammatic. The greatest achievement of W. H. Auden, writes A. C. Ward, was to find "a personal language in the modern idiom and to be capable of accepting its restrictive conventions without loss of poetic
Auden was a popular poet. Cyril Connolly wrote in 1966: "Auden was for many of us the last poet we learnt by heart." His work is, writes Timothy Foote, "fascinating because it traces the course of a notably determined and characteristically twentieth century quest."
2. Stephen Spender (1909)
Stephen spender, one of Britain’s most distinguished poets, exemplified a new range of writing poetry that took cognizance of existing social and political realities besides being deeply reflective and intellectual in content. In the beginning of his poetical career he too was attracted by left-wing politics. His early poems he described as “personal" but with the pressure of external events which not only Included the threat of fascism but the specters of poverty and unemployment in Britain, he moved to more political poetry. Many of his 'West poems show that he expressed more than mere politics in his work and what emerges is a deep empathy with the essential human condition. Perhaps this is what makes Spender more relevant as a poet.
Spender's poems were published in many volumes-Poems (1933, 38), Vienna (1934), The Still Centre (1939), Ruins and Visions (1942), Poems of Dedication (1946), The Edge of Being (1949), World Within a World (1951) etc. What distinguished Spender's poetry is the combination of his commitment to left wing political ideology with his own personal feelings and emotions. "Auden was the attacker of humanity," writes Scott James, "Spender its defender. He too has modernised his imagery, cultivated sharpness and hardened his metrical forms; but the romantic breaks through, the personal emotion is not concealed, gentleness and pity prevail. It is his pity for individuals rather an abstract conception of justice which makes him side with his fellow poets in their political views. He is drawn out of himself into the broad highway of humanity's affairs, but is always happy to retire within himself and express his more personal emotions."
Spender also composed some highly moving poems on war. He beautifully expressed his personal emotions in short lyrics and in those lyrics which are from his political views.
Spender was an accomplished poetic artist. He uses exact words. In his best poems every word has its value for sound as well as sense.
3. Cecil Day Lewis (1898-1963)
Cecil Day Lewis appeared as a brilliant critic in A Hope For Poetry (1934), Starting Point (1937) and The Poetic Image (1947), an inspired translator who translated Virgil's works, a writer of brilliant short stories, and a prose writer in his autobiography The Buried Day (1960). But it is as a poet that he is remembered most. His early poetry reflects his affiliation with the political poets of the thirties but in his later poetry he turned to personal and pastoral themes which show Hardy's influence. Lewis' poetry runs into several volurnes — From Feathers to Iron (1931), The Magnetic Mountain (1935), A Time For Dance (1935), Overtures to Death (1938), Word Over (1943), An Italian Visit (1953), Christian Eve (1954) and Pegasus (1957).
His poetry, whether whiten under the influence of Hopkins, Eliot and Auden or that of Hardy, is modern and has meaning for us. He himself pointed out: "Modern poetry is every poem whether written last year or five centuries ago, that has meaning for us still."
4. Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)
As a poet MacNeice was associated with Auden and Spender but he was more detached politically than they. His work (1941)includes Poems (1935), The Earth Compels (1939), Plant and Phantom , Collected Poems (1949), The Burnt Offerings (1952), Autumn Sequel (1954), The Other Wing (1954), Visitations (1957), Eighty Five Poems (1959), Solstices (1961) and The Burning Perch (1963).
MacNeice did not wholeheartedly embrace any political ideology. His opinions about communism were fluctuating. He vehemently expressed note of moral protest against the degenerating and corrupting influence of machines and industries on human life. He exposed, sometimes with a tang of satire, the shams and hypocrisies underlying the placid veneer of life. His poetry expresses the anguish of the Age of Machine.
He was a great and gifted poetic artist. He enlivened his poetry with lightness of touch, restraint and perfect finis He also made use of the musical potentialities of language.
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THE NEO- ROMANTICIS M
Two new poets Dylan Thomas and George Barker weaned poetry away from the political consciousness which characterised the poetry of the Oxford Poets, and gave prominence to religion and romanticism.
The poets of this period were also influenced by the Second World War. The notable poets who composed war poetry are Sidny Keyes, Alun Lewis, Alan Rock and Roy Fuller. Among the themes which recur in the work of war poets are the boredom and frustration of service life, the waste caused by war, appreciation of the friendship found in services, a deep enjoyment of nature and of the landscape of home, and, above all the courage facing up to the hardships of struggle and the possibilities of ultimate death. The predominant note is of sadness.
1. Dylan Thomas (1914-53)
He is the pioneer of neo-romantic poetry in the forties and the enemy of intellectualism in verse. His works include Eighteen Poems (1934), Twenty Five Poems (1936), Deaths and Entrances (1946), Collected Poems (1952) and Milk Wood (1953). Thomas' early poetry is deeply passionate and it often shows an uncontrolled use of the magic of language. His mature work is more controlled and more disciplined.
Thomas' verse has, writes A. C. Ward, "an exuberant poetic fervour and an abundant responsiveness to natural beauty." He is a difficult and obscure poet. Much of his imagery is drawn upon the human body, sex and Old Testament. His verse is splendidly colourful and musical. He was a skilled metrical artist. David Daiches writes: "His poems far from being random explosions, are tightly packed patterns of meaning—so tightly Packed that the expanding references in each image tend to get in the way of those of other images and clot the poem. But his best poems have a combination of concentration and violence, of rhetoric and suggestiveness, that is most impressive. It is difficult to see him as historically signi­ficant his influence was small and generally dubious.
2. George Barker (1913-)
Barker's wotks include Thirty Preliminary Poems (1933), Eros in Dogma (1944), News of the World (1950), The True Confession of George Barker (1950) and Collected Poems (1957). His poetry mainly deals with human suffering and guilt. A Vision of Beasts and Gods (1954) and The Golden Chains (1968) are characterised by stream of consciousness techniques which engender evocative but often over-complex imagery.
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THE APOCALYPTIC MOVEMENT
The poets of the Apocalyptic Movement centre on the individual and not the community. J. F. Hendry and Henry Treece, who edited The New Apocalypse (1940) and The White Horseman (1941), were the pioneers of this poetic movement. Nicholas Moore, G. S. Fraser, Tom Scott and Vernon Watkins were other prominent members of this group. This movement was immensely influenced by the Book of Revelation, Blake, Shakespeare, Kafka, Donne, Hopkins and Dylan Thomas. It was a natural development from the surrealism of the thirties and the mood of violence that began to creep into the fabric of poetry.
The Apocalyptic poetry is obscure. G. S. Fraser wrote in Apocalypse in Poetry: "The obscurity of our poetry, its air of something desperately snatched from dream or woven round a chime of words, are the result of disintegration, not in ourselves but in society." This movement was opposed to the political affinities of Auden and his group. It was declared "to be clearly anarchic and antidote to left-wing Audenism as well as to right-wing squirearchy." It expressed hatred of the Machine Age and proclaimed its faith in the individual as the hope for humanity.
The Apocalyptic Movement was shortlived and could not get much success. The members of this group were not men of genius, endowed with fine poetic sensibility. Only Vernon Watkins, who was influenced by Yeats, Eliot and Hopkins, was an original poet. His poetry consists of The Death Bell, Cypress and Acacia (1959), Affinities (1962), and The Lady with the Unicorn.
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THE MOVEMENT
D. J. Enright's anthology Poets of the Fifties (1950) and Robert Conquest's Anthology (1956) brought nine new poets to notice. They were John Wain, Kingsley Amis, John Holloway, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, Philip Larkin, Thomas Gunn, Robert Conquest and Elizabeth Jennings. The majority of these young poets belonged to working class or lower middle class and all of them were educated in Oxford or Cambridge University. They were classified as University Wits or New Empsonians but later on the critics called the new poets as belonging to the movement. These poets "sought rather to construct than to pour themelves out in lamentations, and also that, whatever might be their facility of expression, they attached no inherent value to linguistic or metrical innovations."
Elizabeth Jennings in her Poems (1953) and A Way of Looking (1955) showed departure from the poetry of bygone years. Her later poetry, published in A Sense of the World (1958), and Song for a Birth or a Death (1962) expresses impressions of things physical and their impact on emotions. Her poetry is correct, formal, tightly controlled and expresses emotions in a restrained manner. Philip Larkin whose The Less Deceived appeared in 1955 was influenced by the eighteenth century neoclassicists. Some of his poems like Deceptions and At Grass show real, promise and fine poetical accomplishment. He disliked the use of tradition in poetry. Kingsley Amis who published A Frame of Mind (1953) also expressed his strong dislike for tradition. Donald Davie who published Bridges of Reason (1955) and New and Selected Poems followed a style closer to that of symbolists. Thomas Gunn, who published Fighting, Terms (1954) was a poet of violence and "Hemingway-like muscularity.”
His later poetry in The Sense of Movement (1957) and My Sad Captains (1961) shows Byronic influence. D. J. Enright's poetry appeared in The Laughing Hyena (1953).
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OTHER POETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Roy Campbell (1901-57) denounced Auden and other Oxford poets. His poetry runs into many volumes— The Flaming Thrapin (1924), Adamostor (1930), Flowering Rifle (1939), Nativity (1954) and Collected Poems, published posthumously in 1960. His poetry is characterised by flamboyant imagery, and, often, by an energy which reminds us of Byron or Dryden. His poems are vigorous and often aggressively satiric as well as lyrical.
William Empson, who published only two voumes of poetry Poems (1935) and The Gathering Storm (1940), exercised great influence on modern poetry. His poetry is marked by severe intellectuality, anti-romanticism and the exclusion of the commonplace or the facile. He had consummate command over diction. His style is precise and concen­trated. There is no superfluous word in what he has written and often one word fulfils the function of many words. This meticulous precision and concentration of several meanings in one word have made his poetry obscure. His habit of using modern mathematics and physics has made his poetry more difficult and obscure than that of Browning. Empson influenced modern poets. Legouis and Cazamian remark: "Empson's influence upon so many distinguished minds of our age is in every respect remarkable evidence of the favour shown towards a form of poetry that is extremely compact and inaccessible to verbosity."
Ruth Pitter, who published A Mad Lady's Garland (1934), A Trophy of Arms (1936), The Spirit Watches (1939), The Rude Potato (1941) and The Bridge Poems (1939-44), shows remarkable range and vision. She is a lyric poet, who has written some lovely poetry, authentic, unmistakable. She expressed her visions and experiences in language fashioned with fine tact and metrical skill. She shows love of nature inn her poetry.
Deserted Shore (1973). She believes in ideals of past culture, and her verse is founded on traditional culture. Her poems are enlivened by a lively (1946), Collected Poems (1956), The Hollow Hill (1964) and On A tact and metrical skill. She shows love of nature in her poetry.
Kathleen Raine's works include Stone Flower (1943), Living in Time (1946), Collected Poems (1956), The Hollow Hill (1964) and On A deserted Shore (1973). She believes inn ideals of past culture, and her verse is founded in traditional culture. Her poems are enlivened by a lively intelligence fascinating symbols and “evocative rhythms enriched with sumptuous imagery.”
Edwin Muir was a novelist, poet and critic. His poetry includes First Poems (1925), The Chorus of the Newly Dead (1926), The Voyage (1946) and Collected Poems (1952). His poetry is steeped in the emotional and intellectual issues of the contemporary world. His poetry lacks linguistic vigour without which true poetry cannot exist.
Alum Lewis published Raider's Dawn (1942), and In The Green Tree (1948). He is a war who exposed the horrors of war and the anguish of soldiers who had to face countless difficulties in the trenches. Sidney Keyes (1922-44) whose poetry was contained in The Iron Laurel (1942) and Cruel Solstice (1944), died in the Second World War. He expressed the attitudes of his generation. The quality of his poetry is uneven and his symbolism is oppressive. Alan William Rook made a considerable impression with Soldiers, This Solitude (1942) and These Are My Comrades (1943).
Roy Broadbent Fuller published Throe Le Middle of A War (1942), A Lost Season (1944), Counterparts (1949), Brus Orchard (1957) and Collected Poems (1962). His first volume The Middle of A War contains war poems. He countered the neo-romantic poetry inspired by Dylan Thomas. He was a great experimenter in poetic form and concerned himself with the state of people in the contemporary politico-economic climate.
Laurence Durrell's poetry consists of Private Country (1943), Cities, Plains and People (1946), On Seeming to Presume (1948), The Tree of Idleness (1955) and Selected Poems (1956). He is a fine artist in verse. His verse has original accents and lively imagination. It is erudite, cosmopolitan and sensual.
Alan Ross served with the navy. The Derelict Day (1947) expresses the grimness of life around him. His delight in gaiety and colour transcended the darkness he encountered. Later collections of his poems are Something of the Sea (1952) and African Negatives (1961).
Sir John Betjeman has won great popularity for his lively satires on the welfare state and contemporary scene. His published work includes Mount Zion (1933), Continual Dew (1937), Old Light For New ChancelA (1940), New Bats in Old Belfries (1944), A Few Late Chrysanthemums (1954), Collected Poems (1958) and his poetical autobiography Summoned by Bells (1960). Edward Albert writes: "Betjeman has a flair for selective and cogent detail; the skilled craftsmanship of the numerous verse forms is concealed under the garb of simplicity, and this keeps his ironical wit under restraint. In a language which is easily appreciated, he offers to the older generation the happiness of the past and an escape from the harsh present."
Vernon Scannell published A Sense of Ranger (1962), Epithets of War (1969), Company of Women (1971) and The Apple Raid (1974). He writes on violence and insecurity by selecting everyday incidents. His economical language and simple metres are enriched with metaphor from present -day life.
John Silkin emerges as one of the most perceptive and compassionate writers of the present generation in The Reordering of the Stones (1961), Nature With Man (1963) and Anana Grass (1971). Ted Hughes' important works are The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Woodwo (1967), Crow (1970), Crow Wakes (1971) and Eat Crow (1972). He is one of the most interesting poets of the modern age. His poetry deals with "the failure of God to create a satisfactory universe, the ever present strength of evil and personal survival as the only goal to achieve. Yet under the harsh pessimistic exterior and the gruesome humour there lies great tenderness." He was not concerned only with the urban and sophisticated life of London as some of his contemporaries were; he had a wider comprehension of English life. He was a nature poet too.
F. T. Prince in Soldier's Bathing and Patrick Kavangh in The Great, Hunger display very fragile poetic talent. R. S. Thomas, who published Poems (1955), Poetry For Supper (1958) and Fares (1961), shows honesty of mind without overwhelming talent.
J. P. Fletcher is specially remembered for Tally 300 (1956), an exceptionally moving elegy dedicated to the men who toil underground in darkness. J. H. Stubbs published Beauty of the Beast (1943), The Swarming of Bees (1950), The Triumph of the Muse (1958) and The Blue Fly in,His Head. His early poetry is excessively academic. His entire poetic output is characterised by high spiritedness, earnestness and the Christian fear of damnation. The poetry of James Kirkup which appeared in The Descent into the Cave (1957) and The Prodigal Son (1959) is marked by fluidity and spontaneity. Edward Milne, an Irishman, was influenced by W. B. Yeats. He became considerably popular after the publication of Life Aboreal (1953). Kathleen Nott's Poems from the North (1956) is noted for landscape painting. Anne Riddler whose A Matter of Life and .Death appeared in 1959 was a poet of exceptional talent. Randolph Stowe's Act One, Poems (1957) contains romantic poems.
As the twentieth century is coming nearer to its close, more and more poets are contributing to the development of poetry in their own individual manners. The rapid survey of modern poetry would not be complete without reference to George Mann Macbeth (1932 b.) who always has intellectual approach and yet aims to make an immediate appeal. His published works include A Form of Words (1954), The Broken Places (1963), The Colour of Blood (1967) and Shrapnel (1973). His subject matter ranges from the elegiac to the macabre, and also varies according to the subject. He was a skilled and careful poetic artist. He can use any style he considers appropriate, from the most traditional to the almost shocking outre. He deals with violence and cruelty in modern existence but he shows pity and sympathy for the downcast. T. S. Eliot still continues to be considered as the greatest poet of the twentieth century. Up to 1994 England has not produced any poet who can rank with T. S. Eliot.
PROSE
Prose has remarkably developed in the twentieth century. The modern writer aims at achieving simplicity and clarity of expression and carefully avoids all literary artifices impeding his flow of thoughts. The written language of to-day is much nearer the spoken language than it ever was before.
1
ESSAY
Besides journalism, novel writing and miscellaneous prose, the essay continues to live and grow. The modern essayist deals with all types of topics under the sun. He has imparted new dimensions to the development of prose style. The number of the essayists in the twentieth century is very large; hence we deal only with eminent essayists who have made lasting contribution in this field.
1. G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
Chesterton, a writer of versatile genius and achievements, was essayist, novelist, critic, biographer, poet and dramatist. Of his fiction we may mention The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), The Club of Queer Trades (1905), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), Manalive (1912) and the Foother Brown series of detective short stories. As a critic he is remembered for The Victorian Age in Literature and Charles Dickens.
Chesterton ranks very high among modern essayists. His reputation as an essayist rests securely on Heretics (1905), All Things Considered (1908) and Tremendous Trifles (1909). Chesterton's essays reveal "an extraordinary range of mind; there was no subject on which he could not have fund something original, and if possible challenging, to say, from the fundamental basis of morals to the proper way of eating cheese." His style eloquent, provocative, graphic and humorous. As an essayist, his strength lies not in any profundity of thought but in his remarkable way of saying things. He has distinguished himself as a writer of much ingenuity, a curious sort of humour and a robust style that is full of paradoxes and epigrams. He has a knack of making trifling things appear of greet significance. His works include Selected Essays, The Pleasure of Ignorance and The Little Angel.
2. Hilire Belloc (1870-1953)
Belloc is a versatile prose writer who has written essays, novels, verse, travels, history, biography and criticism. His Path to Rome is a travelogue. Marie Antoinette and History of England are books of history. His reputation as an essayist rests on On Nothing, On Something and On Everyfiting. As an essayist, his range is very wide. He is intimate and frank. Belloc himself observes and makes his readers observe novelty in familiar and common objects. He can be playful as in his essay On Cheese, and he can be tender, emotional and lyrical as in The Good Woman. He has a clear, incisive style in which humour, never really removed from satire, plays .on important part.
3. E. V. Lucas (1868-1938)
V. Lucas is one of the most prolific essayists of the present century. Among his numerous works are a standard life of Charles Lamb and an edition of the works and letters of Charles and Mary Lamb. He also wrote travel books, essays and what he called "entertainments", a kind of blend of the novel and essay. Among the best of these discursive "entertainments" are Over Bemerton's and Listener's Lure. He was also the author of an immense number of essays notable for their lightness of touch, their ease and naturalness. Some of his finest essays are found in Character and Comedy (1907), Old Lamps for New (1911), Loiterer's Harvest (1913) and Cloud and Silver (1916). As an essayist, Lucas wears the mantle of Elia, for he has considerable charm. He can be quaint, witty, whimsical and enticing. His essays and "entertainments" are characterised by fancy, literary artifice, common sense, humour and charm. His humour too, kindly in general, can sometimes assume an almost savage quality. He is intimate and frank with the readers. His prose is pure lucid, chaste and clear. His style is notable for effortless ease, spontaneity, and compactness and precision. As an essayist, Lucas has fully exploited the poetic possibilities of English prose to describe the beauty and glory of the familiar and the common.
4. A. G. Gardiner (1865-1946)
A. G. Gardiner, known as the Alpha of the Plough, was an essayist of the school of Montaigne and Lamb. His best known collections of essays are Pebbles on the Shore (1917) and Leaves in the Wind (1920). Gardiner is a personal essayist of great charm. His essays reveal a delightful and charming personality, a man with broad sympathies, enlightened mind and genial humour. He writes on such trivial and insignificant things as umbrella, a distant view of a pig, beer and porcelain, short legs and long legs, pockets and things, the philosophy of hats, on catching the train etc. These essays contain far deeper things and meanings than their titles would warrant us to expect. Gardiner has much of Elia's charm and something of his gentleness. What distinguishes his essays is the knack of showing knowledge and wisdom, moral and reason in the most trivial things in an entirely informal, modest, intimate and delightful manner. Gardiner's style is marked by a perfect clearness of expression, happy choice of words, lively and genial humour and a wealth of literary and historical allusions. Flexibility is an outstanding characteristic of his prose style. His vocabulary is drawn from common, everyday speech, but when "he has to render his impressions of the beauty, mystery and sublimity of nature his words are clothed with beauty, colour and picturesqueness, the sentences have amplitude and rhythm and the images become more frequent, vivid and of refreshing charm and grace."
5. Robert Lynd (1879-1949)
Robert Lynd was a delightful essayist who followed in the footsteps of Lamb and Stevenson. He wrote charming and delightful essays on a wide variety of moods and emotions. Lynd could easily write on any subject. His essays reveal his personality, his humour, his light­heartedness, his philosophical, reflective and retrospective moods. He is personal and autobiographical. Lynd's style is easy, graceful and lively. His language is equally beautiful and dignified throughout; it has no purple patches, no heightening of colour.
6. Max Beerbohm (1872-1956)
Beerbohm's essays appeared in The Works of Max Beerbohm (1896), More (1899), Yet Again (1909), And Even Now (1920), and his broadcast talks, published as Mainly on the Air (1946). A. C. Ward writes about his achievements as an essayist: "Max Beerbohm brushes lightly, delicately, wittily over the surface of life, with great tenderness for all that he has enjoyed, and unfailing humour. In his observations and in his style, there is 'nothing too much, but there is always just enough."
WRITERS OF MISCELLANEOUS PROSE
W. H. Hudson (1841-1922) was a romancer, critic and essayist. His two romances are The Purple Land That England Lost (1885) and A Crystal Age (1887), which could not be successful. The Naturalist in La Plata (1892) and Idle Days in Pantagonia (1893) are his two collections of essays. In them he writes about his own experiences. Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life (1918) and El Ombu (1902), a collection of short stories, are his popular works. His affection for countryside is revealed in Nature in Downland (1900), Hampshire Days (1903), Afoot in England (1909) and A Shepherd's Life (1910). As a literary critic he is remembered for his outstanding books Introduction to the Study of Literature and An Outline History of English Literature.
C. M. Doughty (1843-1926), who wrote Arabia Deserta, was a foremost travel writer of the age. Other travel writers who deserve passing reference were R. B. C. Graham (1852-1936), M. W. Pickthall (1875­1936), Norman Douglas (1868-1953), H. M. Tomlinson (1873- 1958) and Edward Whymper (1840-1911).
Lord Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was an outstanding thinker and philosopher of the twentieth century, whose works have great literary worth. His chief books are The Philosophy of Leibnitz (1900), Principles of Social Reconstruction (1917), Mysticism and Logic (1918), The Analysis of Mind (1921), An Outline of Philosophy, Marriage and Morals (1929). The Conquest of Happiness (1930), The Scientific Outlook (1931), History of Western Philosophy (1946) and Authority and the Individual (1949). His style is eloquent, clear and scholarly.
Among the literary critics A. C. Bradley, Sir Walter Raleigh, W. P. Ker, George Saintsbury, Edmund Gosse, Edward Dowden, Sir Arthur (I:wilier-Couch and John Dover Wilson occupy an important place.
T. S. Eliot stands apart among the literary critics of the age. The greatest English critic since Matthew Arnold, Eliot may claim to rank among the greatest in English. His prose style is remarkable for its compact lucidity and precision. As a critic he is remembered for Selected Essays (1917-32), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Elizabethan Essays (1934), After Strange Gods (1934), Points of View (1941), What is a Classic? (1945). The Sacred Wood, which appeared in 1920, is a collection of criticial essays.
Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), a member of the Bloomsbury Group, critic and writer, made remarkable contribution to the art of biography writing. His reputation, writes Edward Albert, "was made by Eminent Victorians (1918), a number of short portraits in which, with telling irony, an irreverent and malicious insight, and a keen eye for human failings, he established the style of modern biography and of debunking the Victorians." His other works are Queen Victoria (1921), Elizabeth and Essex (1928) and Portraits in Miniature (1931).
T. E. Lawrence (1988-1935) wrote The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926) which gave him the rank of a great writer. Sir Winston Churchill stands supreme among the writers of the Second World War. His speeches beginning with Into the Battle (1941) and The Second World War (1948-54) combine the breadth and grasp of a great mind with literary gifts rare in a politician.
In the field of literary criticism I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, E. K. Chambers, G. B. Harrison, Wilson Knight, H. B. Charlton, Sir Maurice Boura, J. B. Priestley, F. L. Lucas, Wilson Knight and William Empson made memorable contribution.
Some writers who achieved fame in other media also wrote essays. Some of the essayists and their works are listed below: J. B. Priestley's I for One (1923), Open House (1927), Apes and Angels (1928), The Balconinny and Other Essays (1929) and Self Selected Essays (1937); Virginia Woolf s The Death of the Moth (1942), and The Moment (1947); Aldous Huxley's A long the Road (1925), Essays New and Old (1926), Holy Face and other Essays (1929), and Music At Night (1931).
2
FICTION
Characteristics of Modern Novel
Novel became immensely popular at the turn of the nineteenth century. It even surpassed poetry and drama and became the only form which attracted readers of varied tastes and temperaments. The following causes contributed to the exceptional popularity of fiction in the twentieth century:
1. Variety and Complexity of Themes: Novels have been written practically on all possible themes and subjects which appeal to modern readers. H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and Galsworthy continued the old tradition of the Victorian novel. Their novels were pictures of middle class society and they wrote with a purpose. Howevr, H. G. Wells was influenced by new scientific developments and in his famous novel The Invisible Man he anticipates the modern science fiction. But after 1914 a change crept into English novel. "The uncertainty of the war and post-war years is reflected in the concern of many novelists about the disintegration of society and the lack of positive optimism, while the frequency with which violence and sadism appear as themes is not surprising a world grown accustomed to the thought of genocide, glob, and nuclear destruction." (Edward Albert) The post-war writers retreated into private worlds of their own. Lawrence put emphasis on the impulses and instincts of man. Aldous Huxley, who dismissed emotions, believed that man's desires and sensations were the only real things. James Joyce, Miss Richardson and Virginia Woolf developed the psychological novel. Besides the psychological novel, new genres of novel — biographical novel, regional novel, satirical novel, sea novel, war novel, novel of humour, novel of hunting etc. were written.
Because of technological and scientific advances, space exploration, and the threat of nuclear and germ warfare, there has been a tremendous increase in science fiction — novels about the future of other planets, or on an earth catastrophically altered. John Wyndham, Brian W. Aldiss, Fred Hoyle, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke etc. are some of the prominent science fiction writers.
2. Realism: In modern novel all the facets of contemporary life, pleasant and unpleasant, beautiful and ugly, have been realistically presented with detailed accuracy. Realism is the central point in the romantic tales of Conrad. The modern novel presents the doubts, uncertainties, frustrations and anxieties of the modern man. It is, therefore, pessimistic in tone. The modern novel contains a large-scale criticism and condemnation of contemporary values and of civilisation.
E. M. Forster frankly attacks the business mind and the worship of bigness in industrialised England. Somerset Maugham writes about the bitter cynicism and frustration of the post-war generation. Aldous Huxley analyses the disease of modern civilisation and searches for a cure.
3. Treatment of Sex: There is a frank treatment of love, sex and marriage in modern novel. The psychology of sex and psychological theories of Freud and Havelock Ellis, new biological theories and methods of birth control influenced the treatment of sex in modern novel. "The preoccupation with sexual origin of action," writes Edward Albert, "has developed into an overriding interest in sexuality, and the use of language which once would have been considered too offensive to print. The permissive attitude to novel writing has been challenged on a number of occasions, but it has been largely accepted since the failure, in 1960, of a prosecution against the issuer of an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence."
4. Art and Technique: The modern novel has evolved a serious art form, which is compact and integrated. Everything superfluous is carefully avoided. There is no place for moralising or didactic note in modern novel. Henry James and Conrad evolved techniques which revolutinised the form of the novel. The direct and loose biographical method of narration was abandoned in favour of an indirect and oblique narration. A new conception of characterisation was built upon the study of the inner consciousness. The psychological probing into the depths of human nature has been the death of both the hero and the villain.
5. Foreign Influences: The American novelists, who have been widely read in England, have left indelible influence on modern English novel. Many of the American novels are characterised by detailed realism, lack of reticence, brutality and violence, disillusion, frustration, criticism of the national and the international scene. They have also dealt in a penetrating manner with the frustrations and emotional storms largely caused by urban-commercial life. Novels translated from foreign languages have influenced contemporary fiction. The effect of Kafka, Mann and Gide has continued over many years. The influence of Gunter Grass, Heinrich Boll, Alberto Moravia, and the Russians Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, and French existentialists Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beanvoil exercised great influence on contemporary English novel.
6. Great Demand of Novel: The publication of paperback volumes, which dates from the issue of ten sixpenny books by Penguin in 1935, increased the demand of novels. The advent of television had also stimulated interest in novel. "The non-stop demand of T. V. material has resulted in dramatised versions of novels and short stories, and the resurgence or even creation of interest in the original books." "Prestige serials," writes Edward Albert, "too have brought to the general public many novels of which they would otherwise never have heard. The reverse process is also true. Series and serials written for television have become so popular that they have been rewritten as novels; though usually of ephemeral interest and showing few signs of literary merit, they have provided entertainment for millions."
EMINENT NOVELISTS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
1. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
Conrad is regarded as "the most artistic of modern novelists". His work is a triumph of impressionistic art. In his technical experiments he departed from the old form built by Fielding and Jane Austen. Conrad, together with Henry James, the celebrated American novelist, and D. H. Lawrence represents the revolt against the formalism of traditional novelists.
Conrad's first two novels Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands (1896) are full of the promise of greatness. They reveal his own experiences of Malaya. The Nigger of Narcissus (1897), one of his finest novels, is a moving story of life on board ship. It is remarkable for its powerful atmosphere, its impressionistic descriptions of sea-scape and its character study. In this novel Conrad tried two technical experiments, the break-up of the narrative into small scenes and to give many and varied pictures of the same scene from diverse angles. The sailors of the ship "are shown as they seemed to themselves in their own thoughts; as they seemed to one another, or as they would seem to an imaginary observer, the men as they appeared to the officers and the officers as they appeared to the men." His next novel Lord Jim: A Tale (1900), the greatest of his early novels, introduces for the first time Conrad's technique of oblique narrative, the story being told through the ironical Marlow, who reappears so frequently in later novels. Lord Jim is the first novel of the twentieth century written in "a new form: a form bent on involving and implicating the reader in psychomoral drama which has no easy solution, and bent on engaging his sensibilities more strenuously and even more strenuously and even uncomfortably than before." In it Conrad used many impressionistic devices. Chance (1914) is one of the finest examples of the oblique method of story telling. Conrad wrote The Shadow Line —A Confession (1917), a short novel in which the suggestion of the supernatural is masterly. The Rescue —A Romance of the Shallows (1920) is a study of primitive man. He also wrote three historical novels The Arrow of Gold (1919) and The Rover (1923) in a background of European history; and Suspense — A Napoleonic Novel (1925).
Conrad also published a few collections of short stories, Youth — A Narrative and Two Other Stories (1902), Typhoon and Other Stories, A Set of Six (1908), Twixt Land and Sea-Tales (1912) and Tales of Hearsay (1925). His series of essays were published in The Mirror of the Sea-Memoirs and Impressions (1906) and Last Essays (1926).
Conrad's romantic imagination found best expression in themes which were capable of adventure in an unusual or exotic setting. His own experience of the sea and, in particular, of Malayan waters, was of Immense value to him as a writer. The settings of his novels are romantic but they are described with meticulous accuracy. His own observations and experiences in those adventurous settings impart actuality to his descriptions. So, romantic realism is the keynote of his work.
Conrad was a skilled story teller who introduced the technique of oblique narration. He was an adept in the art of character delineation.
His prime interest is in character, in the tracing of the life of a man in such a way as to illuminate the inmost recesses of his soul.
Conrad's prose style is one of the most individual and readily recognisable in English.
Conrad, writes Hudson, "was the first novelist who attempted with success in English to make the novel a work of art in the full and exact sense, following the example of the Anglicised American Henry James, whose manner was, however, less robust and vigorous. In cultivating the literary art Conrad did not abate the tremendous living intensity and spiritual depth which make his novels unique."
2. George Moore (1852-1933)
Moore, an Irishman, was much influenced by Zola's naturalistic technique. He is a pioneer of realistic novel in modern age. Moore believed that "the novel if it be anything is contemporary history, an exact and complete reproduction of the social surroundings of the age in which we live". His first novel A Modern Lover (1883) was described by Arnold Bennett as "the first realistic novel in English." His best novel Esther Waters (1894) is a successful experiment in naturalistic fiction. His other novels are A Mummer's Wife (1884), Evelyn Inns (1888), Sister Teresa (1901) and The Brook Kerith (1916).
3. H. G. Wells (1886-1946)
H. G. Wells was a prolific novelist and writer. He had his own ideas about the nature and function of novel. According to Wells the novel is not a mere medium of relaxation and entertainment. It is a powerful instrument of moral and social suggestion and propaganda. He made novel an instrument of social, political and educational discussion, criticism and reform.
H. G. Wells was the pioneer of science fiction in the twentieth century. His famous scientific romances are The Time Machine (1895), The Stolen Bacillus and Other Stories (1895), The Wonderful Visit (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Man in the Moon (1901), and The Food of the Gods (1904). In these works, which are full of romantic incidents and ready inventions, Wells adroitly used contemporary interest in science. He packed these stories with accurate scientific details.
The true greatness of Wells lies in his sociological novels— Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909), The History of Mr. Polly (1910), The New Machiavelli (1911) and The World of Mr. Clissold (1926). These novels are noticeable for the presentation of vivid realistic pictures of contemporary society, especially of the lower middle classes with which Wells was well acquainted.
Marriage (1912) and The Passionate Friends (1913) begin a series of novels in which Wells' interest in social problems outweighs considerations of story and character.
He also wrote a number of pamphlets and treatises. His The Outline of History (1920), A Short History of the World (1922) and Experiments in Autobiography deserve mention.
The novels of his maturity are The Autocracy of Mr. Parham (1930), Brynhild (1937). Apropos of Dolores (1938) and The Holy Terror (1939).
His novels present a serious view of life. Wells often used novel for didactic purposes. He has presented a wide range of characters in his novels. His finest characters are drawn from lower middle class, which he studied with sympathy and humour. His great novels "have a spontaneous vitality and unfailing good humour, a warmth of human understanding and a natural style which entitle them to a high place in twentieth century fiction."
4. John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
Galsworthy is a novelist with a purpose. The publication of The Man of Property (1906) raised him to the front rank of living novelists. It has the elements, writes D. H. Lawrence, "of a very great novel, a very great satire. It sets out to reveal the social being (as distinguished from the human being) in all his strength and inferiority ......The greatness of the book rests in its new and sincere and amazingly profound satire. It is the ultimate satire on modern humanity, and done from the inside, with really consummate skill and sincere creative passion, something quite new. It seems to be a real effort to show up the social being in all his weirdness." In Chancery (1920) he takes up the story of the Forsyte family, which he began with the Man of Property. To Let (1921) is the drama of their children. Galsworthy also told of other Forsyte generations, and collected them all in The Forsyte Saga (1922). The best single selection from his thirty volumes of fiction may be Indian Summer of a Forsyte, which is commonly regarded as his masterpiece.
Galsworthy's art as a novelist suffers from too much consciousness of purpose. He had set principles, and he wrote novels to embody his social philosophy. His characters represent or illustrate an idea, and, hence, they are not full-blooded creations. Galsworthy's greatness lies in portraying social life realistically. His descriptions of shareholders, meetings and solicitors offices are real enough, and yet it has an idea of illusive dream of beauty that puzzles all men.
5. Arnold Bennett (1867-1931)
Arnold Bennett, a prolific writer, was the author of about eighty volumes of novels, short stories, essays, articles and plays. His reputation as a novelist rests on The Old Wives Tales (1908), Clayhanger (1910), Hilda Lessways (1911) and These Twain (1916). Bennett was a realist and regionalist who presented vivid and real pictures of the pottery districts of England, known as the Black Country. He "is to the Black country what Hardy is to Wessex." He has no doctrine or purpose to preach like Wells and Galsworthy. Bennett was a close and detached observer of life. He was thrilled by "the miraculousness of life", and presented it with all its wonder and warmth in his novels.
Bennett's Old Wives' Tales is one the finest novels in the twentieth century. He was a realist who well portrayed the life of materialism in his novels. A. S. Collins writes: "Their internal economy of houses and hotels down to their plumbing, food as bought, prepared and eaten, clothes and fashions, means of transport, indeed, all the machinery, equipment and paraphernalia of living claimed Bennett's interest." Bennett's presentation of contemporary life and manners is characterised by impartiality and detachment. His characters are well portrayed. His sympathy is for the poor. What distinguishes Bennett as a novelist is his ability of "evoking the beauty and romance of the ordinary lives of ordinary folk."
6. Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Kipling's Kim (1901) is considered one of the finest novels of the present century. He was a short story writer of the traditional type. Hudson writes: "In that form he was the master of many moods, passing with ease and assurance from brutality to fantasy, from folklore to farce—performing brilliantly in each. He widened the range of fiction with his stories of machinery and of animals, his gift of efficiency and conviction going far forward persuading readers that machines as well as animals must surely have minds and souls, of which Kipling appeared to know from A to Z the nature and intimate workings. Kim is the only novel comparable in merit with his short stories. It does magnificently for the Tibetan borderland what Pickwick did for England, though Kim is less boisterously comic."
7. E. M. Forster (1879-1970)
E. M. Forster is a great but not a popular novelist. He has written only five novels. His first novel Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) is a fine comedy with well-drawn characters and it presents the conflict between two different cultures. The Longest Journey (1907) is remarkable for characterisation. A Room With A View (1908) is set in Italy and is an excellent comedy. Howard's End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924) deal with the misunderstandings which arise in relationships between individuals and between races. A Passage to India, according to Edward Albert, "is unrivalled in English fiction in its presentation of the complex problems which were to be found in the relationships between English and native people in India, and in its portrayal of the Indian scene in all its magic and all its wretchedness." Forster also published three collections of short stories, The Celestial Omnibus (1911), The Story of the Siren (1920, and The Eternal Moment (1928), and two critical works, The Aspects of the Novel (1927) and Abinger Harvest.
E. M. Forster, who was a liberal humanist, gave a new direction to the development of English novel. The following features distinguish his novels:
(i) Move Against Realism: The post-first world war novelists deviated from realism. They were aware of the limitations of realism because it, write Moody and Lovett, "seems to exclude elements in human nature which art could not afford to ignore and to discourage the use of technical forms and styles necessary for the expression of such elements." Virginia Woolf in an important essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924) vigorously attacked the realism of Galsworthy, H. G. Wells and Bennett. E. M. Forster too was aware of the limitations of realism. "The surface manner of his novels is realistic, but his impatience with realism is apparent in his introduction into his plots of sudden acts of violence or accidents, and in his wilful juxtaposition of a romantic figure and a realistic environment, as in The Longest Journey, or a realistic figure in a romantic environment, as in A Room with a View."
(ii) His Themes: Forster's favourite theme is the conflict between a sensitive unconventional character and the world of insensitive unimaginative convention. In this theme he could freely express liberal imagination, his delicate perceptions and his taste for cruel ironies. In Where Angels Fear to Tread Forster shows how people brought up in selfishness, hypocrisy and coolness can hardly reflect man's divinity. "English conventionality, respectability and a loveless sense of honour and loyalty are defeated by Gino, the Italian, who represents a kind of pagan masculine integration, who acts from conviction, not convention, from desire, not duty." In A Room With A View and Howard's End he brilliantly develops the theme of a clash between those who are bounded by propriety and good form and those who possess love and sympathy. In his finest novel A Passage to England Forster endeavours to present Western civilization in conflict with eastern, imperial with colonial, the human heart pitted against the machinery of government, class and race. This conflict can cease by the application of wisdom, understanding and intelligence. "Basically a moralist, concerned with the importance of the individual personality, the adjustments it makes and the problems it must solve," writes Edward Albert, "when it comes into contact with a set of values different from its own, he is the advocate of culture, tolerance and civilization against barbarity and provincialism." In the words of Diana Neill he was a votary of "the wisdom of heart".
(iii) Symbolism: E. M. Forster was a symbolist. What he could not adequately express through words is suggested through symbols. In The Longest Journey the train symbol represents salvation and the passing away of evil and wickedness. In Howard's End motor car is the symbol of the rush and recklessness of modern fast moving civilization. In A Passage to India symbolism is more subtly and artistically employed. The title-word "Passage" is symbolic of "link" or "connection" between the peoples of England and India. Glen O'Allen very brilliantly analyses symbolism in A Passage to India. The three sections of the book "Mosque", "Caves" and 'Temple" are related respectively to the seasons of spring, summer and wet monsoon autumn of India. The characters are also symbolic. Dr. Aziz represents emotions, Fielding and Adela Quested stand for intellect, and Prof. Godbole represents love. Mrs. Moore, in whom both emotion and intellect are well harmonised, is at home everywhere. The threefold division of the novel symbolises three attitudes towards life—the path of activity, the path of knowledge and the path of devotion.
(iv) His Technique: Forster was a gifted craftsman. He possessed a deep knowledge of English and Indian life, and his characters are full of life and vitality. "He studies the complexities of character with a subtlety of insight and an appreciation of the significance of the uncon­scious which mark him as a modern. His characters are rounded and vital. He has great gifts for telling a story, but he disregards conventional plot construction and frequently introduces startling, unexpected incidents.
His craftsmanship is of the highest order. With a cool and ironic detach­ment he presents the problems arising from his imagined situation with fairness and breadth of outlook, though he is to some extent lacking in emotional fire and human warmth." (Edward Albert) His best novels often touch tragedy, but his true field is comedy. His humour gives point to his seriousness. His style is easy, vigorous, and precise. Forster was aware of contemporary social and political currents but he was not a propagandist. His novels radiate "sweetness and light" with an intensity seldom found among modern novelists.
Forster's work proved stimulating to a number of younger novelists who were to go far beyond him in their assault upon the ascendancy of realism in English fiction.
8. William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
Maugham was a celebrated novelist, short story writer and critic. As a novelist he began his career with a realistic novel Liza of Lambeth (1897) which was not a famous work. He stormed into popularity as a novelist with the publication of his autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage (1915). His other novels are The Moon and Sixpence (1919), The Painted Veil (1925), Cakes and Ale (1930) and The Razor's Edge (1944).
Maugham was a realist who described in an ironically detached manner the contradictions and frustrations of life. His finest work Of Human Bondage is a study of frustration. It depicts with remarkable sensitiveness the fumbling attempts of his physically handicapped hero to find himself, emotionally and professionally. The Razor's Edge deals with the moral vacuity of affluent America. Maugham was a poised, finished artist, who wrote in a prose that was clear, precise and simple.
9. Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963)
Huxley was a great intellectual and thinker whose novels present satirically the disillusionment and frustration with contemporary social life. His first novel Chrome Yellow (1921) is a fine study of contemporary study. Antic Hay (1923) presents a realistic picture of post-war disillusionment. Huxley earnestly discusses moral problems in Those Barren Leaves (1925). Point Counter Point (1928) is a frank and straight­forward picture of a disillusioned, frustrated society, in which the healthy life of the senses has been paralysed by the bonds of an inhibiting ethical code." This novel is remarkable for a special technique which may be called "the musicalization of fiction". In The Brave New World (1932) Huxley satirises a scientific utopia where there shall be no disease, no pain but, at the same time, no emotion and no spirituality. In Eyeless in Gaza (1936) Huxley expresses his faith in the life of the spirit. His other novels are After Many a Summer (1939) and Time Must Have a Stop (1944). As a novelist Huxley reflects the feelings of his age. His characterisation is sketchy and his plots are slight. His novels provide an opportunity for conversation and discussion. Huxley, writes Edward Albert, "is, above all things, a satirist, whose tone can vary from jovial irony to biting malice, and the striking incisiveness of his satire springs from an easy, polished style, a great gift for epigram, a ready wit and an alert mind.
10. Hugh Walpole (1884-1941)
Walpole was one of the most popular novelists of his generation. His famous novels are Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill, Rogue Herries, and Sinister Street. Walpole is a traditional novelist who follows the manner of Galsworthy, Wells and Bennett.
11. D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
D. H. Lawrence was the most outstanding literary figure between the two world wars. He had to face tough opposition and persecution due to his marriage with Frieda Weekly, a German, and the charge of obscenity against his novel The Rainbow (1915). The exhibition of his painting was banned by the police. So, circumstances forced him to leave England in 1919. He went to many parts of the world, Italy, Malta, Ceylon, United States, Mexico and many other places, in search of a society which could suit his unconventional ideals. In 1929 he returned to Europe and died of tuberculosis at Vence in France.
Lawrence was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century. In his nineteen years' literary career he produced over forty volumes of fiction (novels and short stories), poetry, plays, treatises and essays. We are mainly concerned here with Lawrence as a novelist.
His very first novel The White Peacock (1911) introduces Lawrence's main theme, the unhappy human relationship, especially between man and woman. The Trespassers (1912) is an insignificant work. Sons and Lovers (1913) is a highly powerful and moving novel which deals with penetrating insight with the relationship between son and mother. It is an autobiographical novel of great artistic merit. The Rainbow (1915) was banned as obscene and it deals with man-woman relationship. Women in Love (1921) reveals Lawrence's views upon life. In it he carried even further his searching revelation of the complex relationships between men's and women', conscious and unconscious minds. Aaron's Rod (1922) is a mature work noted for its artistic excellence. Kangaroo 1923, The Boy in the Bush (1924) and Plumed Serpent (1926) deal respectively with his experiences in Australia and Mexico. Finally, his finest work Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) is an artistic revelation of "the deep need of modern men and women to face all the elements in their natures if they were not to live frustrated and incomplete lives. The novel 2nds itself easily to gross misinterpretation, but Lawrence's unusual explicitness is only a means of expressing his basically mystical view of relations between the sexes."
Lawrence is an original novelist. He made remarkable contribution to the development of English novel. He altered the dimensions of English novel and revealed its hidden possibilities. His novels are Conspicuous for the following characteristics:
(i) Departure from Realism: To D. H. Lawrence realism was Primarily objectionable because of the support it gave to the sterility of contemporary materialism, commercialism and nationalism. According to David Daiches, Lawrence is not a social reformer, though he felt "the deadness of modern industrial civilization, with the mechanizing of Personality, the corruption of the will, and the dominance of sterile intellect over the authentic inward passions of men, which he saw as the inevitable accompaniment of modern life. But he has no patience with political or social panaceas." Lawrence wanted to change the sterility of modern life. He believed that it could be accomplished if man experienced a conversion which should lead him to spiritual rebirth and harmony. So he zealously attacked those forces of modern existence, which he believed were destroying and corrupting man. Lawrence advocated the return to the primitive and the natural, he trusted in the experiences of the sense. Man's primitive instincts and impulses which spring from his unconscious mind are his safest guides in life —"All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or more, or what not." He has powerfully expressed the primitive and sensational experiences in his novels. The most important of these experiences is the sexual relationship, which is portrayed as a sacred thing, spiritual, not animal. This is what he naturally and powerfully expresses in The Lady Chatterley's Lover. Edward Albert remarks: "Lawrence is then the prophet of the primitive instincts and passions, his own appeal is to the heart rather than to the head. He seeks to persuade, not by the reasoning faculty, but by the emotional impact of his writing."
(ii) Psycho-Analytical Note: Lawrence felt that the mode of realistic fiction was entirely inadequate for the effective expression of his interpretation of life. Realism, he thought, dealt with only the periphery of man's experience. Moody and Lovett remark: "He felt himself driven, accordingly, to experiment with means to bring to light those unconscious elements in man's nature which were far more influential agents than superficial consciousness. The task that faced him was that of devising a language in which the unconscious could be expressed. This language he found in metaphor and symbol, and, although, his way to success was not without misadventures, he succeeded beyond any writer of his time in giving the unconscious adequate and powerful voice."
(iii) Autobiographical Element: Lawrence's novels have an abiding autobiographical interest. He projects his novels "from the very centre of his own passionate experience so that they act out, sometimes tentatively, sometimes fiercely, sometimes desperately, his own deepest insights and forms of awareness, and the lyric and dramatic modes interpenetrate each other." Sons and Lovers is autobiographical from start to finish.
(iv) Sex, Love, Man-Woman Relationship: Sex occupies an important place in Lawrence's novels. He comprehensively deals with its biological, psychological and metaphysical aspects. He discards Victorian prudery and inhibitions in the treatment of sex and presents an original, imaginative and modern view of love and sex. In The Rainbow, Women In Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover he deals with conflicts and soul-storms of sex "on an almost epic scale." His treatment of sex is so free, frank and straightforward that The Rainbow and Lady Chattarley's Lover were banned in England. Lawrence was not a sensualist, as he was often considered. He treated sex with honesty and frankness, without concealing any of its aspects. He examined both the biological and spiritual aspects of sex, but people could not understand the spiritual significance of love. He insisted on the sacred nature of sex, on the religious element in its consummation.
Lawrence treats sex and love psychologically and imparts mystical and imaginative touch to the treatment of this theme. J. W. Beach rightly remarks: "The addition of mystical poetry to the psychology of love is his distinctive contribution to the English novel." He does not deal with love in traditional manner. In Lawrence's novels love is conceived of "in terms suggesting chemical affinities, the attraction and repulsion of forces not definable in moral-sentimental — social terms." The lovers love each other but they do not know why. They are simply "two life forces" seeking nothing more precise or definite than vital fulfilment. In this respect Lawrence is unsurpassable in English novel. He sought to achieve "a new synthesis between mind and matter, flesh and spirit, and male and female."
(v) Plot and Character: Lawrence did not follow the technique of the well-made novel. His novels have no plot and character in the conventional sense. Beach writes: "Plot appears not in the form of intrigues or mysteries to be solved, misunderstandings to be ironed out, conflicts of interests to be settled, moral issues to be brought out to a conclusion.” His plot is simply the line of movement of the elemental de-force — a sinuous, rapid, shifting, wave-like movement. Lawrence is deeply involved in his themes and pays little attention to artistic qualities, so there is a sameness about many of his novels. He has little sense of humour.
Lawrence's characters bear strong resemblance to their creator. Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers, R. L. Semers in Kangaroo, and Birkin in Women in Love are clearly projections of himself. Lawrence's characters, writes Edward Albert, "share his bitterness and darkness of spirit, and like him they live passionately and fully. They are creatures of strong impulse and primitive emotions, and they are studied with a remarkable depth of understanding and keenness of insight. Lawrence is particularly successful in his analysis of the unconscious."
(vi) His Style: Lawrence's style is poetical and symbolical. He abundantly uses similes and metaphors. His symbols are highly suggestive and are "rich with overtones of feeling and hidden correspondence of thought.” His style attains rare spontaneity, lyrical intensity and vividness when he expresses profound feelings. His descriptions of natural scenery are picturesque and poetic.
Lawrence was a great force in modern novel. He will survive as an artist and original thinker. Moody and Lovett remark: "Lawrence's artistry is profoundly romantic; it is spontaneous, uncalculated and experimental. Such art has obvious defects of form and style. But no other contemporary novelist was Lawrence’s equal in communicating an extraordinary vivid sense of living things and beings. Huxley described Lawrence himself as "an upspringing fountain of vitality" and his works living water from such a fountain."
12. The Stream of Consciousness Novel
One of the most important developments in the technique of the modern novel is the stream of consciousness. The phrase "stream of consciousness" was first used by William James in Principles of Psychology to denote the chaotic flow of impressions and sensations through the human consciousness. This particular kind of novel is also called the subjective novel or the psychological novel. The purpose of this type of novel is, according to Katherine Gerould, "to portray life and character by setting down everything that goes on in the hero's mind, notably all those unimportant and chaotic thought sequences which occupy our idle and somnolent moments and to which, in real life, we pay ourselves, little attention."
The stream of consciousness technique was influenced by the symbolism of the French poets and the novelist, Marcel Proust, by the new researches in psychology by Freud, and by the writings of William James and Henry Bergson. The psychological novelists aimed at not presenting human character in the traditional sense. They realized that a psychologically accurate account of what a man is at any given moment can be given neither in terms of a static description of his character nor in terms of a group of chronologically arranged reactions to a series of circumstances. They became deeply interested in those aspects of consciousness which cannot be viewed as a progression of individual and self-existing moments, but which are basically dynamic rather than static in nature and are independent of chronological sequence in a way that events are not. Defining consciousness William James writes: "Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. The significance, the value of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it. Consciousness does not appear to itself chopped in wits ...... It is nothing jointed, it flows..... Let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life."
The theory of the continuity of consciousness corresponded with Bergson's theory of time. Leon Edel writes in The Psychological Novel: "Like William James, Bergson taught we are remoulded constantly by experience; that consciousness is a process of endless accretion, so long as mind and sense are functioning, that it is the continuation of an indefinite past in a living present. And out of this comes also the preoccupation with time which is central to the psychological novel. The watch measures off the hours with continuing regularity, but consciousness sometimes makes an hour seem like a day or a day like an hour. In the mind past and present merge ..... So, in setting down in the novel the thoughts as they are passing through the mind of the character', the novelist is catching and recording the present moment and no other.
In the early twentieth century people were disgusted with Victorian superficiality and were turning inward. In England Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf wrote "interior" novels.
Lionel Edel elaborately writes about various aspects of the new technique which may be summed up as the conscious observance of point of view, the internal monologue, the symbolic representation of life, the control of the readers vision, the use of the 'arbitrary dial', the subjective and autobiographical tendency, the desire to make the novel a poem, and to present blocks of consciousness like images in a mirror.
We should consider the contribution of Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to the development of the stream of consciousness technique.
1. Dorothy Miller Richardson (1873-1957)
Dorothy Richardson's first novel Painted Roofs (1915) was the first novel written in the stream of consciousness technique. In it she endeavoured to present both the subjective and objective biography of a character, a woman named Miriam Henderson. Miriam's consciousness is the stage on which the drama of her life is enacted. We follow the flow of her thoughts and there are many moments of illumination of her character and situation. It is the stream of Miriam's consciousness that the novelist reproduces without any interference on her part. Richardson's novel "is, indeed, built round a series of luminous points—what the poet described as "intensities" — and Miriam Henderson remains most of the time the central core." Pointed Roofs is an excellent study of feminine psychology.
2. James Joyce (1882-1941)
James Joyce is one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. He is one of the chief exponents of the stream of consciousness technique in English novel. In Joyce "the twentieth century passion for experiment in literary form reached its climax." Joyce's first work The Dubliners (1914), a collection of short stories, is based on the slum life of the Dubliners. These stories are written in a simple prose which has a distinct individual flavour. A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (1916) has Dublin as its setting. It is an autobiographical novel in which the novelist projects himself in the character of Stephen Dedalus. Joyce analyses with great subtlety and cool detachment the spiritual life of the hero. His handling of the sexual problems involved us forthright. In it Joyce reveals his unassailable power to explore the psychology of his own nature with detachment and scientific curiosity. Ulysses (1922) is Joyce's masterpiece. It is a remarkable psychological study of the life and mind of Leopold and Mrs. Bloom during a single day. Stephen Dedalus appears again in it. In it the stream of consciousness technique finds its best exposition. Joyce seems to represent and reconstruct Dublin life in all its sordid realism. Ulysses has been called "comic epic in which the novelist went deeper and farther than any other novelist in his handling of the interior monologue and the stream of consciousness technique. Ulysses, according to Hudson, "has been singled out as the greatest noval of the century and one of the greatest novels of all time. Joyce was an experimenter with language; his originality lay partly in that, partly in his exceptional erudition, and partly in his endeavour to put the whole of life, including its obscenities, into his novels. His most experimental novel, Finnegans Wake (1939), resembles a vast musical composition in which words are used as a composer uses notes, sense gives way to sound, words are broken up, verbal funs abound, and the whole work belongs to a dream world. It is, indeed, a night in the dream world of a certain H. C. Earwaker." It is concerned with the psychological adjustments of the hero to the external elements in the family constellation.
As a novelist Joyce is mainly concerned with human relationship —man in relation to himself, to society and to the whole race. He had an intimate and minute knowledge of the pettiness and meanness of modern society and of the evils which issue from it. His knowledge of the seamy side of life was exceptional and he presents it with remarkable frankness and straightforwardness. What distinguishes his work is the subtle analysis of man's inner consciousness, and like other psychoanalysts of his day he was much preoccupied with sex. Edward Albert remarks: "....in his use of the stream of consciousness technique, and in his handling of the internal monologue, he went further and deeper than any other. His sensitiveness, his depth of penetration into the human consciousness, give to his character-study a subtlety unparalleled in his day, and if, in his attempts to catch delicate and elusive shades of feeling and fix them in words, he has frequently become incomprehensible, the fact remains that a character like Leopold Bloom is a unique and fascinating creation."
Joyce's linguistic experiments are superb. His was a comic genius and his humour is mainly sardonic in tone.
3. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Virginia Woolf was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, a renowned man of letters. Her father created the library atmosphere in which learning and free thinking were commingled. Her imagination and literary sensibilities were nurtured in this academic atmosphere. Her marriage with Leonard Woolf, another author, strengthened her literary worth.
Virginia Woolf's first two novels The Voyage Out and Night and Day are largely traditional. But soon she realised the inadequacy of the traditional novel, and adopted the stream of consciousness technique in Jacob's Room (1922). She deftly uses the device of internal monologue to reveal the consciousness and psychic conditions of Jacob. This technique was handled with greater firmness in Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Like Joyce's Ulysses, this novel is confined to twenty-four hours' time and to one city. In Ulysses it is Dublin, in Mrs. Dalloway it is London. She describes the stream of consciousness of two or three characters. David Daiches writes about the structure of Mrs. Dalloway: "The whole novel is constructed in terms of the two dimensions of space and time. We either stand still in time and are led to contemplate diverse but contemporaneous events in space or we stand still in space and are allowed to move up and down temporarily in the consciousness of one individual ..... At one point we are halted at London street to take a peep into the consciousness of a variety of people who are all on the spot at the same moment and in the same place, and at another we are halted within the consciousness of one individual moving up and down in time within the limits of one individual's memory." To The Lighthouse (1927) shows a greater mastery of the stream of consciousness technique. It studies the relationships of the members of the Romney family with great artistic unity than is found in her previous novels. The Waves (1931) is a significant development in the stream of consciousness technique. It is a highly symbolic and poetic work in which the consciousness of six characters is studied in a series of internal monologues. Flush (1933), The Years (1937) and the unfinished Between the Acts (1941) are experiments in the stream of consciousness technique. Her Orland, a Biography (1928) was a popular work.
HER CHARACTERISTICS AS NOVELIST
(i) The Stream of Consciousness and Interior Monologue: Mrs. Woolf is not the founder of the stream of consciousness techrique, but it is in her novels that this technique has been perfected. She has succeeded in imposing form and order on the chaos inherent in the novel of subjectivity. She rejected the conventional technique of 'fiction and brought to artistic excellence the stream of consciousness technique. In it she found greater scope for the analysis of mental states... "Virginia Woolf uses this technique," writes Edwar Albert, "with ever growing sureness of purpose; her keen mind and artistic sense enabled her to weld the parts into a unified artistic whole of sensitive, subtle portriture. Her studies of mood and impulse are handled with an almost scientific precision and detachment, and yet she has a great gift for lyrical exposition."
(ii) Reaction Against Realism: Mrs. Woolf reacted against the novel of realism and manners, which was written by Wells, Alsworthy, Arnold Bennett and others. She was not concerned with the /realities of life, which were outward and material to her. She concentrated her entire attention on the rendering of spiritual and inner reality. The novel in her hands is a voyage of exploration to find out how life is lived. By showing men and women in all sorts of combinations, she explores the tic- uth about life. She reveals the very springs of action, the hidden motives and impulses which impel men and women to act in a particular way. This is done by the skilful use of "the interior monologue". Mrs. Woolf takes us directly into the inner consciousness of her characters, and shows us the chaotic flow of ideas, sensations and impressions, and so she brings us closer to their psyche. She does not describe the externals of human character, but presents the very souls and minds of her characters with intensity and immediacy.
(iii) Her Style: Mrs. Woolf was a gifted prose writer. Her prose style is scholarly, poetic, artistic and richly figurative and symbolic. It has all the poise and charm of the cultured woman and conscious artist. Her Words are well chosen, suggestive and artistic. Her precise images are in keeping with the accuracy and delicacy of her character analysis.
(iv) Her Place and Influence: Virginia Woolf broke free from traditional novel and gave a new direction, a new form and new psychological awareness to English novel. She was one of the most forceful and original theorists of the "stream of consciousness novel" and by writing some finest novels in this technique she proved its superiority to the conventional novel. Her influence has been profound and all-pervasive. R. A. Scott James writes: "After she in her own country the serious novel could never again be just what it had been before."
4. Other Psychological Novelists
Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) was a close follower of the technique of Virginia Woolf in The Hotel (1927), The House in Paris (1935) and The Death of the Heart (1938). She studies life around her with an artistic detachment, and presents her impressions of life in a delicate, subtle style, characterised by feminine sensitivity. Ivy Compton Burnett (1892-1969) in her novels-Brothers and Sisters (1929), Men and Wives (1931), Daughters and Sons (1937), Parents and Children (1941) and Elders and Betters (1944) writes about crimes in domestic background. She portrays her characters with great psychological insight and subtlety. Wyndham Lewis (1884-1957), a gifted artist, believed that intellect was of greater importance than emotion or imagination. This attitude was the basis of his novels, Tarr (1912), The Childermass (1928) and The Apes of God (1930). Other works which were influenced by modern psychology are Rebeca West's The Return of the Soldier and The Judge, T. F. Powys' (1875-1953) The Tasker's God (1925) and Mr. Weston's Good Wine (1929) and J. C. Powys' (1872-1963) Wolf Solent (1925) and A Glastonbury Romance (1933).
Reaction Against the Psychological Novel: The stream of conscious­ness technique flourished for about twenty-five years, from 1915 to 1939. A reaction against this method set in. Wyndham Lewis (1884-1957), painter, novelist and critic, reacted against this technique. He was the leader of the Vorticist movement in painting, which demanded clear analysis of pictorial form. He insisted on the same visual clarity in literature. In the changing socioeconomic scenario after the Second World War social and economic problems demanded great attention. External action was demanded and admired. So the novel once again became a large picture of society.
5. Other Novelists Before 1950
J. B. Priestley's (1874-) name as a novelist was established by the popular The Good Companions (1929). He excels as the portrayer of everyday life of the everyday person. His other novels are Angel Pavement (1930), Let the People Sing (1939), Daylight on Saturday (1943), Bright Day (1946) and Festival at Farbridge (1951). Sir Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972) wrote some novels in the established tradition. Carnival (1912), Sinister Street (1913-14), The Altar Steps (1922), The Parson's Progress (1923) and The Heavenly Ladder (1924) are his famous novels. In later life he wrote some pleasantly light novels - The Monarch of the Glen (1941), Whisky Galore (1947) and Rockets Galore (1957) which show him as an excellent humorist.
Robert Graves is remembered for his historical novels-I, Claudius (1934), Count Belisarius (1938), Wife to Mr. Milton (1943) and The Golden Fleece (1944).
Some escapist novels revealing great emotional and moral tension were written during this period. Such works are Garnett's Lady into Fox (1922) and A Man in the Zoo (1924), Walter De La Mare's Memoirs of the Midget and Norman Douglas's South Wind.
Christopher Isherwood, the poet-playwright, wrote Mr. Norris Changes Train (1935), and Goodbye to Berlin (1939) in a comic vein. Richard Hughes commanded great reputation for his three well-spaced novels -A High Wind in Jamaica (1929) which contains some of the finest portraits of children, The Fox in the Attic (1961), which deals with the chaos in Germany after the First World War, and The Wooden Shepherdess (1973).
Sir A. C. Doyle, the immortal creator of Sherlock Holmes series, G. K. Chesterton's Father Browne series and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot series are memorable contribution to the development of detective novel.
NOVEL AFTER 1950
In English novel after 1950 we come across a remarkable change in the thematic content. The writers of the new generation deal "with the new psychological problems arising from the bizarre and contradictory nature of an affluent society which is discontented with itself, and yet is interested chiefly in retaining or acquiring material comforts." The novelists use a mixture of realism, cynicism, dark comedy, shrewd comment and satire to express their search for stability and basic values. Some novelists strike a highly individualistic note.
Graham Greene is one of the most outstanding novelists after the Second World War. His remarkable novels are It's a Battlefield (1934), England Made Me (1935), Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The End of the Affair (1951), The Quiet American (1955), A Burnt-Out Case (1961), The Comedians (1966), Travels With My Aunt (1969) and Shades of Green (1976). Greene is mainly concerned with evil and its endless conflict with righteousness. In Brighton Rock he suggests the possibility of the extension of grace to even a vicious believer. In Power and Glory, a Mexican priest, who falls far short of being an ideal character, is a force for good by reason of his unwavering faith. The Heart of the Matter studied the effect of a conscience-ridden Englishman of an adulterous affair into which he drifts largely out of pity and of his final attempt to escape from his unbearable, spiritual dilemma by the theologically dubious method of suicide. In The End of the Affair he attempted to show the conversion of an adulterous woman as the result of her lover's apparently miraculous restoration to life. Greene's main theme is his Catholic concern with sin and damnation and restoration in contemporary society. "Greene's Roman Catholicism has encouraged him," writes Edward Albert, "to see action as a series of moral dilemmas; he depicts not right and wrong but fundamental good and fundamental evil; his characters seek after evil sometimes on principle and sometimes from lack of initiative to do otherwise, and in doing so they acknowledge the reverse of evil."
Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) was an outstanding satirist who castigated a world which had no values except the need to make money and have fun. His early novels are remarkable for hilarious incidents and vigorous dialogues. Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), A Black Mischief (1932), Scoop (1938) and Put Out More Flags (1942) are his famous and vigorous satires. The Loved One (1948) is a bitter farcical satire on American funeral customs and the double facedness of affluent American society. His later novels, Brideshead Revisited (1945), Sword of Honour Triology - Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961) show signs of maturity. The general note is still of sardonic satire but there is a feeling of seriousness for the loss of ideals and values in the post-war world. Waugh, like Graham Greene, was a Roman Catholic, and his novels, too, have religious implications.
Henry Green (1905-69) had the rare talent of building his novels chiefly out of the conversation of his characters. He could capture authentic speech rhythms in a language rich with imagery. He tended to restrict his novels to a relatively limited milieu, and turns into high comedy the situations that less witty writers might find tragic. In Living (1929) Green writes about his life-long experience in industry. It is a richly informed and human story of working-class life. Caught (1943) deals with his own and his countrymen's experiences in war time civilian defence. Concluding (1948) is a sardonic satire upon the intrusion of totalitarian personalities upon personal liberty. In Doting (1952) Green comically deals with shabby subterfuges of middle-aged dalliance. His knowledge of human nature, his limitless wit, and his great technical skill give his novels rare distinction.
George Orwell (1903-50): Orwell believed in socialism, and his novels show his discontent with contemporary society, and his depression at the horrid visions of the future. He was a typical product of inter-war years. His early novels are Burmese Days (1934) and The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell became widely known for his short political satire on a totalitarian state, Animal Farm (1945), in which "all animals are equal but some are more equal than others." It is written in an incisive, witty style. Nineteen-Eighty Four (1949) is "a terrifying prognostication of the hatred, cruelty, fear, loss of individuality, and lack of love that the future would bring."
Sir Charles Percy Snow (1905—) followed the tradition of the novel as a social history. Trained as a physicist and experienced as an influ­ential civil servant during the Second World War, Snow had access to material denied to many novelists. He took full advantage of this material. He presents a vivid picture of English society from the 1920s onward through his hero, Lewis Eliot, the narrator of a whole series of novels. In Strangers and Brothers (1940), Time of Hope (1950) and Home Coming (1956) he recounts the personal and professional history of Eliot, who is also utilized as the observer-narrator in these novels. From Eliot's observations of Cambridge University, three novels derive their materials- The Light and the Dark (1947), The Masters (1951) and The Affair (1960). The New Man (1954) deals with the new world of the atomic scientist and the ethical conflicts the destructive power of science aroused in Eliot's younger brother, Martin. The Conscience of the Rich (1958) deals with the rebellion of son against father before the Second World War. His last novel The Corridors of Power (1964) related the novelist's rich experiences of men and affairs. The recurrent theme in Snow's novels is the conflict between personal ambition and the individual conscience and the temptations that power, personal and professional brought with it. He was an excellent observer of men and society. He had greater knowledge of men in their professional and political relations than in their more personal and intimate concerns. Snow writes with cool detachment and aloofness, but there is a sameness of style and approach in his novels.
William Golding "belonged to the genre of the philosophical apologue rather than the novel as social history." The central theme of his novels is the problem of evil and its threats to individual and social existence. His best and most popular novel Lord of the Flies (1954) traces with horrifying persuasiveness the emergence of destructiveness in a group of well-bred English boys marooned on a tropical island during the atomic war The Inheritors (1955) shows how a few survivors of a primitive race are destroyed by a more civilized but more successfully destructive people. Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959) and The Scorpion God (1971) are studies of individuals who deliberately choose evil and fall into the hell. Golding's tone and manner were classical.
Lionel Poles Hartley (1895-1972) was a fine craftsman, who wrote of "denaturized humanity" characterised by a sense of loneliness. His famous novels are The Go-Between (1953), The Hireling (1957), The Betrayed (1966) and The Harness Room (1971).
Anthony Powell wrote A Question of Upbringing (1951), A Buyer's Market (1952), The Acceptance World (1955) and The Kindly Ones (1962). Powell writes in a witty and epigrammatic style about the peculiarities and snobbery of the upper middle classes.
H. E. Bates (1905-74) was a novelist and short story writer who wrote of country folk. His rural settings are authentic and are fully integrated with the mood of his characters. His famous works are How Sleep the Brave (1941), The Wedding Party (1965), The Four Beauties, The Darling Buds of May (1958), and When the Green Woods Laugh (1960).
John Masters came of a family that had always served in India with the army. After a distinguished military career he wrote numerous novels dealing with different moments in India's history. His famous novels are the Nightrnnners of Bengal (1951), Bhowani Junction (1954) and Fandango Rock (1959). His sympathetic understanding of the professional soldier is expressed in The Field Marshal's Memoirs (1975).
Lawrence Durrell was sophisticatedly romantic. His three novels Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958) and Moantolive (1958) are known as the Alexandrian Quartet. These novels contain scenes of great beauty and imagination described in rich, sensuous, evocative and baroque style. His characters and plots do not reveal conspicuously his announced intention of conducting "an investigation of modern love".
Joyce Cary (1888-1957) brilliantly combined comedy, even farce, with the pathetic and the movingly beautiful in his novels Mister Johnson (1939), The Horse's Mouth (1944), Prisoner of Grace (1952), Except the Lord (1953) and Not Honour More (1955).
Angus Frank Johnstone Wilson was a satirist. His early novels and short stories deal with the misfits and neurotics of middle classes. His main works are The Wrong Set (1949), Such Darling Dodos (1950), Hemlock and After (1952), The Old Man at the Zoo (1961), and The Late Cell (1964).
William Cowper may be considered as the originator of the Angry Young Man who revolts against the system which has nurtured him in Scenes from Provincial Life (1950) and Scenes from Married Life (1961). Progress and tradition in the bourgeois world are the theme of The Ever-Interesting Topic (1953), Memoirs of A New Man (1966), Love on the Coast (1973) and You're Not Alone (1976). J. B. Wain drew a more carefully considered portrait of the Angry Young Man in Hurry on Down (1953). His other novels are The Contenders (1958), A Travelling Woman (1959) and Strike the Father Dead.
Kingsley Amis (1922—) wrote with extravagant humour rather than indignation about the frustrations of the overeducated but socially underprivileged. His famous novels are Lucky Jim (1954), The Uncertain Feeling (1955) and Take A Girl Like You (1960). He was the foremost comic novelist of his generation.
Miss Murdoch's novels are curious but at their best effective blends of wit, eroticism, fantasy and symbolism. Under the Net (1954) gives an interesting picture of the Angry Young Man rushing after affluence and seeking truth where no truth exists. The Sandcastle (1957) and The Bell (1958) are tightly constructed studies of human relationships. A Severed Head (1961) seems to be a modern comedy of erotic manners. Sex and sexual symbolism are freely used in An Unofficial Rose (1962), The Unicorn (1963), An Accidental Man (1971) and The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974).
Alan Silbitoe (1920—) is an eloquent spokesman of the contempo­rary English working class. The working class people, who are the victims of a repressive system see lift' as a means of retaliation against authority. Their world is a chaos of insecurity, violence, undeserved suffering, selfishness and crude humour. In his novels Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959), The Death of William Posters (1966), A Start in Life (1970) and The Widower's Son (1976) reveal that the working class is always victimized, and "those with the money" are always tyrants.
Some of the memorable novels of the twentieth century are Alan Sterwart Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country (1948), Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962), The Wanting Seed (1962) and The Clockwise Testament (1974); Doris May Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962), The Story of a Non-Marrying Man (1972) and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975); Edna O' Brien's The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964), and Nigel Dennis' Cards of Identity (1965).
DRAMA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
General Characteristics
The Renaissance of drama which began in the nineties of the nineteenth century reached its peak in the early decades of the twentieth century due to the following reasons:
(i) The Development of Theatres: The works of the nineteenth century dramatists never saw the stage. The professional theatre of the period was in a low state. T. W. Robertson, A. W. Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones rendered great service to the realistic drama, which flourished in the twentieth century. Many theatres came into existence, which gave a new direction to the evolution of drama in the twentieth century. In the present century theatre became a commercial adventure, and as an answer to commercialism developed the Repertory Theatre, notably the Abbey Theatre in Dublin (1903) and the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester (1907). The Manchester Theatre Company encouraged the writing of realistic problem plays in the new tradition. St. John Irvine, W. Stanley Houghton and Allan Monkhouse were the realistic dramatists who wrote for this theatre.
The most important of the theatrical developments was the creation of the Irish National Theatre in Dublin. W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge contributed much to the development of Irish theatrical movement. Yeats and Synge reacted against stark realism in drama. Emotions, legends, folklore and peasantry of Ireland became the themes of modern drama. Drama became popular due to the establishment of amateur companies, which were a corollary of the Repertory Movement. The Abbey Theatre of Ireland of which Yeats and Synge were directors attempted to revive poetic drama on the stage.
(ii) Foreign Influences: Foreign dramatists— Ibsen, Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gorky, Brecht and others—influenced the development of modern drama. The development of science, technology, industry and commerce also moulded the modern drama to a great extent. The experimental drama in the continent also influenced British drama in the twentieth century. Important foreign dramatists of the new movement were Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), Karel Capex (1980-1938), George Kaiser and Ernest Toiler.
"Expressionism" was the boldest experiment in drama. The "Expressionist" drama was not concerned with society but with man. According to Edward Albert: "It aimed to offer a deep, subjective, psychological analysis, not so much of an individual as of a type, but it made much of the subconscious." The expressionists used symbols and symbolic figures embodying sect impulses, and gave up the traditional structural pattern. This drama was difficult and obscure, and it could not be popular in England. In England the influence of expressionism is seen in O'Casey's The Silver Fassie and J. B. Priestley's Johnson over Jordan.
The influence of Samuel Beckett was important on drama after the fifties. It was under his influence that the Absurd Drama came into being.
(iii) The Influence of Cinema, Radio and Television on Drama: The arrival of cinema constituted a new threat to the theatre. It became the main source of entertainment. Theatre declined. The cinema could create sensation, thrill and cheapness which could not be achieved in theatrical performances and which appealed to the taste of the common masses. The lesser dramatists tried to cope with the cinema and produced more lavish spectacles and a whole stream of thriller plays. Edgar Wallace's Rope (1926), Patrick Hamilton's The Fourth Well (1928), A. A. Milne's The Fourth Wall (1928) and Frank Vosper's Murder on the Second Floor (1929) are thrillers which show the influence of cinematographic technique. The development of the broadcasting also influenced the commercial theatre. The audiences preferred to remain at home to enjoy drama.
A revolutionary change came in playwriting when television appeared in every home. A number of writers such as Alun Owen, Clive Exton and John Mortimer wrote for the small screen rather than for the public stage. The talkies and the television have superseded the theatre. The quality of entertainment has declined. The theatre is still fighting a losing battle.
THE REALISTIC DRAMA
The realistic drama, also known as the naturalistic drama or the problem play, presents a real picture of life. J. M. Barrie, John Galsworthy, G. B. Shaw, James Birdie and many others contributed to the development of the realistic drama in the twentieth century.
1. Henry Arthur James (1851-1929)
James promoted the new drama of ideas and social purpose. He achieved great success with the Silver King and insisted that drama should provide a criticism of manners and institutions. His famous comedy Liars, which is full of wit, is the forerunner of the new comedy of manners.
2. Sir A. W. Pinero (1851-1929)
Pinero was highly influenced by Ibsen. He gave well-constructed plays and life-like characters. The Weaker Sex is a biting social satire. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray and The Notorious Mrs. Abbsmith are his famous social problem plays. His plots are well constructed and have a tragic cast. His other plays are The Magistrate, The Fantastics, Iris and Midchannel.
Both Jones and Pinero paved the way for twentieth century problem and well-made plays, which found their greatest exponent in Galsworthy and Shaw.
3. John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
Galsworthy belongs to the realist tradition of Jones and Pinero. His first play The Silver Box (1906) exposes the pernicious distinction which exists between the rich and the poor. Strife (1909) deals with the struggle between Capital and Labour, Justice (1910) brought to light the evils in the administration of justice, mismanagement in the prisons of England and the cruelty of solitary confinement. The Skin Game (1920) deals with the different values of the old aristocracy and the newly rich businessman; Loyalties (1922) "deals with anti-Jewish feeling, discrimination against racial minority. His minor plays too deal with real social problems. A Family Man illustrates that too much authority in domestic life spells disaster. Window deals with the problem of illegitimate children. The Eldest Son expresses class prejudices and The Pigeon deals with the problem of reclaiming the outcastes. The Mob depicts the tragedy of idealism. Foundation teaches that a religion of kindness is the only corrective to caste feeling. The Forest presents a picture of modern financiers whose unscrupulous and speculative dealings have caused havoc in the economy.
Characteristics of Galsworthy as a Dramatist
Galsworthy was a "dominant force in the theatre of his day." He was fundamentally modern in his outlook. His plays are conspicuous for the following characteristics:
(i) Realism and Social Problems: We have already seen that all plays of Galsworthy deal with real social problems. He himself writes about the technique of realistic or naturalistic drama: "The question of naturalistic technique will bear much more study than has yet been given to it. The aim of the dramatist employing it is to create such an illusion of actual life passing on the stage as to compel the spectator to pass through an experience of his own, to think and talk, and move with the people he sees thinking, talking, moving in front of him. A false phrase, a single word out of tune or time will destroy that illusion and spoil the surface as surely as a stone heaved into a still pool shelters the image see here." The conception of society, dominating over and dictating the life attern of the individual, forms the basic ideas in his plays. Coats emarks: "Galsworthy in his plays aims almost exclusively at the representation of contemporary life, in its familiar everyday aspect. He does not like Shaw to take us back to Methuselah in the remote past, or as far as thought can reach" into the distant fulure......To Galsworthy such romantic flights are quite unnecessary; the humdrum world around us, with all its welter of conflicting forces, provides just as it is, quite sufficient dramatic material for artists purpose." About ten of his plays are in some way concerned with justice and six of them with criminal case with its essential thrills and pursuits of the law."
(ii) Sincerity and Impartiality: Galsworthy maintains complete sincerity and impartiality in the presentation of social reality. He sees life steadily and sees it whole, avoiding all artifice, sentimentality and straining after effect. When dealing with real problems, Galsworthy clearly manages to keep himself in the background and does not allow the personality to intrude into his plays. He himself writes: "Let me eliminate any bias, and see the whole thing as an umpire—one of those pure beings in, white coats, purged of all prejudices, passions and predilections of mankind. Let me have the temperament for the time being ..... only from the impersonal point of view, if there be such a thing, I am going to get even approximately at the truth."
Galsworthy is impartial in the selection of both characters and situations. According to Coats: "This quality of impartiality is particularly required in a dramatist, who has to deal in his plays with mutually opposed and perhaps violently conflicting forces. If he shows undue partiality to the one or the other so that the case for either of them is understated, the dramatic interest is bound to suffer." It was due to impartiality that his plays could make a great appeal in England and through them he could accomplish his purpose of social reformation. Galsworthy recorded in his notebook the great appeal Justice made in England: "Justice made a great sensation, especially in parliamentary and Official circles. Winston Churchill, the new home secretary, and Ruggles-Brise, head of the prison commission, both witnessed it, the first with sympathy, the second with a sinking sensation. Reinforcing previous efforts, the net result was that solitary confinement was reduced for three months for recidivists, and to one month for intermediates and star class."
(iii) Sympathy: In spite of his detachment and impartiality, Galsworthy obviously feels a warm sympathy for the victims of social injustice, and especially for the poor and the downtrodden. Galsworthy thinks that the cruelty we inflict upon harmless creatures arises from nothing but lack of sympathy, the sluggish laziness of unimaginative minds, our inability to put ourselves in the place of those we torture.
(iv) Irony: Irony, deep and poignant, is an all-pervading force in Galsworthy's plays. Explaining the underlying spirit of irony in his plays, Nicoll writes: "The class war which faced man was not the creation of capitalist or communist, it was the creation of twentieth century social conditions. The power of law, which at times seemed to crush down the unfortunate and innocent as well as the guilty was not the work of one man or even the body of men; it had an existence and independence all its own. The irony is hidden in apparent pugnacity." Through irony Galsworthy comments on the follies of the human spirit. Through irony he reveals that though things are actually what they are, they need not be so. Through irony he throws light on his attitude to things. All are well meaning and well intentioned. Irony issues from our lack of sympathy and understanding. Edgar in Strife points out: "There's nothing wrong with humanity. It's our imaginations, Mr. Scantlebury."
(v) Dramatic Technique and Craftsmanship: Galsworthy is a master of dramatic technique. His plots do not unfold complicated happenings and situations for their own sake. They unfold a situation with its effect on character and corresponding reactions the other way. All this is done within "the atmosphere of an idea". Each play of Galsworthy is based on a theme which is calculated to give some social message, and every scene, every word contributes something to the exposition of that theme as integral parts of an organic artistic unity. In the construction of his plays he shows a sense of form, and the best of them are excellent stage pieces.
His characters are not individuals but types. Falder represents the modern ordinary class young man, romantic by nature but suffering from want of money. Dancy represents the whimsical but adventurous militaryman. Harold Wilson writes about his characters: "Mr. Galsworthy transfers his people from the office, the home, the street to the stage, modifying nothing save to compress and arrange, in order clearly to direct the attention of his audience to that question of the day which is the business of the play." All his characters are well studied and his psychological insight is well seen in his studies of internal conflict.
Galsworthy successfully creates an atmosphere which is harmonious and likeable. His dialogues and situations are natural and he never lapses into sentimentality or melodramatic distortion. His style is remarkable for simplicity, ease, vividness, economy and precision. It is conversational and idiomatic.
(vi) His Place in British Drama: Galsworthy enjoys a permanent place in British Drama. His name will endure in future for a rare and great contribution—the picture of social life in the upper middle classes of England. Coats comments on his place in British Drama: "In the drama of today Galsworthy occupies an important and distinctive place. He has his affinities, it is true, with other playwrights of the past and the present. His naturalism is akin to that of Ibsen; he shares the moral earnestness of Shaw, in his preoccupation with the sores and diseases of society he resembles Brieux. Yet the essential qualities of his art not borrowed when we see his plays on the stage, or read them in the quietness of study, we are impressed by a psychological insight, a social passion, an artistic economy and restraint which are manifestly the author's own."
4. G. B. Shaw (1856-1950)
Shaw, a prolific dramatist, came to the theatre with a moral purpose, and commanded attention by his inimitable wit and humour. Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898) contained seven plays, three "unpleasant" and four "pleasant". The "unpleasant" plays are The Widower's Houses (1892), Mrs. Warren's Profession (1894) which deal respectively with the problems of slum landlordism and organized prostitution, and The Philanderer (1893) which is a satire on the pseudo-Ibsenites and their attitude to woman. The "pleasant" plays are Arms and the Man (1894), an excellent and amusing stage piece which pokes fun at the romantic conception of the soldier; Candida (1895), a study of the "eternal triangle" of a person, his wife and a poet; The Man of Destiny (1895) and You Never Can Tell (1897), The Devil's Disciple (1897), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), were collected in Three Plays for Puritans (1901). Man and Superman (1903), one of his finest plays, deals with woman's pursuits of her mate. In it he presents his philosophy of Life Force.
Major Barbara (1905) deals with religious and social problems. The Doctor's Dilemma (1906) is a biting satire on the medical profession. Getting Married (1908) is a satire on the marriage conventions. In Androcles and the Lion he combines an attack on religion and relations between parents and children. Pygmalion (1912) is a witty and satirical study of class distinctions.
Back to Methuselah (1921) and St. Joan (1923) are studies of religion. The Apple Cart (1929), a political extravaganza, is a satire on the democratic form of government. None of his plays written after The Apple Cart is comparable to his best work. His later plays are Too True to be Good (1932), The Millionairess (1936), Geneva (1938), and Buoyant Billions (1949).
Characteristics of Shavian Drama
(i) Plays of Ideas and Problems: Shaw used drama for the purpose of bettering the lot of humanity. He discarded the romantic view of life and examined man, society and social institutions with intellectual Courage and honesty, and shrewd, irreverent insight. He took to account the outstanding problems—religion, housing conditions, finance, prostitution, marriage conventions, social prejudices, the romanticised soldier, the medical profession, religion, glamorous historical figure. His earliest period was emphatically socialist, and socialism, later in a more moderate form, remained his hope for humanity. Hudson remarks: "The stage by Shaw's contrivance became the ventilating shaft of modern civilization; and what splendid exhilarating fun the ventilating process became ! Shaw quickly learned how to organise for stage the living material he had collected." Shaw's dramatic art is closely related with life and it puts forth fresh and unconventional ideas for the betterment of human life and society.
(ii) Wit: Shaw's plays sparkle with his brilliant wit. "Wit," writes Edward Albert, "is the very essence of Shavian Comedy, in which the dramatist, standing outside the world he creates, sees it with an impish detachment. His sense of fun is undying, and there is in his drama an endless stream of exuberant vitality and gaiety of spirit. Sometimes his sense of humour is uncontrolled and the result is disturbing, but generally it can be said that there is a serious purpose underlying his fun." Shaw's humour is dry and intellectual. There is no emotion in it. It is due to the lack of emotion that Shaw rarely touches the depths of tragedy.
(iii) Characterisation: Nicoll writes: "We may agree that in the whole range of Shavian drama there are no characters who assume such breathing vitality as we find in the persons of Sophocles or of Shakespeare, but that is because Shaw's approach to his characters is of a different kind. His theatre might well be described as theatre of ideas ...... His characters are the embodiments of intellectual concepts; his dismal are ceaseless dances of thought." Shaw's characters are the products, good or bad, of social forces, or as embodiments of ideas. Some are mere mouthpieces of his theories, while others are projections of his own personality. Shaw is particularly successful in the creation of women characters, and it is interesting to note that he has no real heroes and no villains.
(iv) His Dramatic Technique: Although Shaw was the greatest exponent of the drama of ideas, he rarely neglected the art of the theatre and his best plays have been excellent on the boards. He was a skilled dramatic craftsman. In the beginning of his dramatic career he followed the conventional dramatic technique, and it was when his reputation was established that he began such experiments as the epilogue to Man and Superman and the gigantic cycle of Back to Methuselah. The introduction of the long stage directions is his remarkable contribution to the technique of drama. They are written with all the care and artistry of his dialogues and prefaces.
Shaw's brilliant dialogue is an important aspect of his dramatic technique. He was a brilliant talker and used this gift to great advantage in his plays. Edwart Albert remarks: "He excels in brief, witty exchanges and, above all, in the handling of extremely long speeches when his characters put forward their carefully reasoned arguments. He had the art of making the long discourse as interesting and as dramatic as action, and this was something new to the stage. His brilliance in this has never been surpassed.
5. Harley Granville Barker (1877-1946)
Barker, a renowned Shakespeare critic and scholar, wrote a number of realistic and naturalistic plays. He deals with main social problems as marriage, sex, inheritance and position of women. He discards emotions and his approach is purely intellectual. His plays are remarkable for vivid characterisation and natural dialogue. His memorable plays are The Moving of Ann Leete (1899), The Voysey Inheritance (1905), Waste (1907), The Madras House (1910) and The Secret Life (1923).
6. William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
Maugham continued to write realistic drama. His earlier plays had been delightful examples of the comedy of manners but they had little substance and less bite. The Circle (1921) is a true comedy of manners. It is his finest play. It is a worldwide demonstration of the eternal appeal of love outside the bonds of matrimony. Our Betters (1917) is a virulent attack on aristocratic English decadence and on socially climbing Americans. For Services Rendered (1932) is a bitter play on the theme of the futile sacrifices of the war heroes. His plays reflect his shrewd observations of human nature and manners. There is hardly any trace of sentimentality in his plays. His approach is purely intellectual and rational. Maugham's best plays are "the ironical comment of a cynically humorous observer, aiming to present life as it really is." All his plays are well constructed. A Man of Honour is a realistic tragedy.
Other Dramatists up to the Fifties of the Twentieth Century
Sir J. M. Barrie (1860-1937), the Scottish novelist and playwright, was inimical to the intellectualism and realism prevalent in the drama of the period. He cultivated the vein of sophisticated sentimentalism in which he had been conspicuously successful in What Every Woman Knows and earlier plays. His sentimental romances like The Professor's Love Story (1894), Quality Street (1902), Mary Rose (1920) and A Kiss For Cinderella (1916) have been popular. His later plays combine fantasy and realism. His well-known plays are The Admirable Crichton (1902), What Every Woman Knows (1908), The Will (1913), Dear Brutus (1917), Marie Rose (1920) and The Boy David (1936). Barrie appears to be a good craftsman in his plays. His plays have well-constructed plots, slight but charming characters, and crisp dialogue.
J. M. Synge (1871-1909) was the greatest dramatist in the rebirth of the Irish Theatre. He wrote both comedies and highly moving comedies. The Shadow of Glen (1903), a comedy based on an old folktale, presents a romantic picture of Irish peasant life. The Well of Saints (1905) and The Tinker's Wedding (1907) are fine comedies. His finest comedy is The Playboy of the Western World (1907). It is also based on an old legend and presents an excellent but ironical picture of Irish character. Riders to the Sea (1904) is a powerful, deeply moving tragedy in one Act. Deirdre of Sorrow (1910) is based on a legend and in it the themes of love and death are tragically interwoven. Synge reacted sharply against the popular reverted to drama which he felt, missed the poetry and joy of life. So, he
Sean O'Casey (1884-1964), an Irish playwright, is one of the greatest figures in modern drama. He is known for his naturalistic tragicomedies on the swarming life of the Dublin tenements in which he had been brought up. His famous plays are The Shadow of A Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), The Plough and the Stars (1926), Within the Gates, The Stars Turn Red (1940), Purple Dust (1941), Red Roses For Me (1946), Oak Leaves and Lavender (1946) and Cockadoodle Dandy (1949). The background of O'Casey's plays was provided by the slums of Dublin, crowded, noisy tenements where women quarrelled and loafers drank, and the tragic violence of civil war was at hand. In his plays comedy and tragedy often commingle. Comedy is seldom long absent, yet one can never forget the grim, underlying sadness. "He draws what he sees with a ruthless objectivity and an impressionistic vividness of detail." Casey's prose is rhythmical and imaginative and his dialogue is vivid, racy and packed with metaphor.
James Bridie (1888-1951) is regarded to some extent as a disciple of Shaw. Like Shaw his plays are conspicuous for wit and humour and power of entertaining by dramatic discussion and argument. But his range was wider and he was more restlessly experimental. His best known plays are The Anatomist (1931), Jonah and the Whale (1932), A Sleeping Clergyman (1933), Mr. Bolfry (1943), Dr. Angelus (1947) and Daphne Laureola (1949). He is less interested in ideas and more interested in characters. His plays, writes Edward Albert, "are a peculiar mixture of argument, philosophy, violent incident, wit, and whimsical fancy."
J. B. Priestley turned to playwriting after his great success as a novelist with The Good Companions. His range is very wide. It consists of comedy, farce, morality, social comment. He combines the common sense of a plain man with the zeal of a reformer. His characters are well drawn, his dialogue is sharply vivid, but his plays lack poetic insight which is essential for a good dramatic work. His well-made conventional comedies are Laburnum Grove (1933), Eden End (1934), and When We Are Married. Priestley's remarkable contribution to theatre lies "with plays dealing with the new theories of time evolved by certain philosophers- chiefly the theory that clock-time associated with the notion of the past, present and future is an illusion and that time consists in reality of a continuous present ..... " The plays dealing with this theme are Time and the Con ways, I Have Been Before and Johnson Over Jordan.
Sir Noel Coward (1899-1973) made his mark just after the First World War with a tense and emotionally strained play The Vortex (1924). His other plays are Easy Virtue (1926), This Year of Grace (1928), Bitter Sweet (1929), Private Lives (1930), Design For Living (1933), To-night at Eight Thirty (1936), Blithe Spirit (1941), Present Laughter (1943) and This Happy Breed (1943). Coward's IAD, Fever is a brilliant comedy. His popularity rested "on the brilliance of a sophisticated but rather shallow wit, blase and cynical, which produced a dialogue of scintillating epi­grams; the appeal to sentiment popular at the moment; the effervescent excitement which was the dominant mood of many of his later plays, and above all his superb theatrical technique.
Mention must be made of excellent short plays of Laurence Housman (1865-1959) whose Little Plays of St. Francis (1922) and Glorious, a series of episodes in the life of Queen Victoria, are memorable.
Sir Terence Rattingan (1911-77) has been called "the most consistently successful of modern English playwrights." In his prefaces to his Collected Plays (1953) he expressed his outspoken hostility to the use of the drama as a means of disseminating ideas. His aim is to provide entertainment, light or serious, and his goal is the creation of the "well made play" with the modifications inevitably induced by the contem­porary taste. He believes that the most powerful effects can be secured by means of understatement and suggestion. His early comedies - Trench Without Tears (1936) and O Mistress Mine (1944) are delightfully fresh pictures of the vagaries of young love against a foreign setting. His other popular plays are Flare Path (1942), The Winslow Boy (1946), The Browning Version (1948), Separate Tables (1954), Ross (1960) and Cause Celebre (1977).
Denis Johnston wrote plays like Storm Song in the technique of realistic drama but his most significant work was expressionistic. Moody and Lovett remark: "Attempting no direct realistic representation of life, his plays use whatever means - poetic, colloquial, stylized, symbolical, allegorical-that will communicate most tellingly what he thinks important to Fay." Some of his famous plays are The Old Lady Says 'No' (1929), The Moon in the Yellow River (1931), A Bride For the Unicorn (1933) and Storm Song (1934). Johnston skilfully employed all the technical resources of an experimental theatre.
Some historical plays of note were written during this period. John Drinkwater (1882-1937) was the pioneer in this respect. He contributed four plays Abraham Lincoln (1918), Mary Stuart (1921-22), Oliver Cromwell (1922) and Robert E. Lee (1923). These plays are not merely chronicle plays focussing attention on events and external happenings, taken from history, but the plays of ideas, discussing problems of human life in a dramatic form. Clifford Bax wrote several historical plays such as Mr. Pepys (1926), Socrates (1930), The Venetian (1931), The Immortal Lady (1931) and The Rose Without A Thorn. Nicoll writes: "Mr. Bax is one of those dramatists of this generation whose plays will live. His effective treatment of character, his skilful wielding of material, and his delicate sense of style give prime distinction to his work." Other historical plays are Ashley Duke's The Man With A Load of Mischief (1924), Reginald Berkley's The Lady With the Lamp, Alfred Sangster's The Baronets (1933) and Norman Ginsbury's The First Gentleman (1940).
British Drama after Nineteen Fifty
During the middle of the twentieth century anti-conventional drama developed. Peter Levin Shaffer (1926- ), who wrote Five Finger Exercise (1958), The Royal Hunt of the Sun, The Battle of the Shrivings (1970) and Equus (1973), pioneered the anti-conventional drama. John Whiting (1915-63) skilfully utilized the new stage theories in Marching Song (1954) and The Devils (1960). Robert Oxton Bolt (1924-) wrote for films, but later he wrote on the theme of power politics and clash of ambitions in Vivat ! Vivat, Regina (1970).
The establishment of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956 gave a new direction to the development of English drama. It aimed at presenting "the best foreign plays and to encourage new native writers, its private productions without decor gave inestimable help to young actors and writers, and helped to disseminate new ideas." John James Osborne (1929- ), the outstanding product of the English Stage Company, attracted the widest attention during this period. Jimmy Porter, the vituperative anti-hero in his finest play Look Back in Anger (1956), came to serve as the archetype of the Angry Young Man. "This portrait of a completely disillusioned young intellectual, subtly destroying his most significant human relationship with his wife and a close friend, was stylistically eloquent but nihilistically rebellious." The Entertainer (1957) relates the contrast of three generations associated with show business. His finest work Luther (1961) portrays the sixteenth century man of religion as an AYM. Osborne's other plays are Inadmissible Evidence (1964), A Patriot For Me (1965), The West of Suez (1971) and Watch It Caine Down (1976).
Arnold Wesker (1932- ) was a social realist with a sense of commitment that gave his plays a more positive quality than those of Osborne. In his famous trilogy Chicken Soup With Barley (1958), Roots (1959) and I'm Talking About Jerusalem (1960), he traced the impact of leftist political ideology on a Jewish working class family and their progressive disillusionment with it. In Chips With Everything (1962) he showed the persistence and triumph of class distinctions in a public school youth who had attempted to escape from them. It is part comedy, part satire, part a tragic allegory heavily coloured with mysticism. His other plays are Their Very Own and Golden City (1965) and The Friends (1970).
There was another type of revolt against the limitations of drawing room drama which denominated the Drama of Absurd. The term "Absurd" was used by French Existential writers as Sartre and Camn to denote the essential meaninglessness of life and the burden on the individual of creating his own values in the midst of cosmic meaning­lessness. Samuel Beckett (1906- ), the Irish writer, was the most out­standing practitioner of the Drama of Absurd in English. His most famous play Waiting for the Godot (1953) depicts disturbingly and evocatively the almost futile quest for the discovery of some meaning in life. Endgame (1957) was even more completely negative and nihilistic. In 1957 Beckett wrote a radio play All That Fall for B. B. C. "Here he appeared to counterbalance a quietly horrifying revelation of the contagiousness of evil with a compensating element of compassion not immediately evident in his earlier plays."
Harold Pinter (1930- ) was the most gifted disciple of Beckett. According to Edward Albert: "He conveys the rambling ambiguities and silences of everyday conversation with an amazing authenticity that is obviously much influenced by Beckett, and uses them to build up the sense of menace and scarcely built violence which characterise The Birthday Party (1958), The Dumb Waiter (1960) and The Caretaker (1960). The plays are quite short and set in an enclosed, claustrophobic space, the characters are always in doubt of their function, and in fear of someone or something "outside". His other plays are A Night Out (1961), The Homecoming (1965), Silence (1969) and Old Times (1971). Pinter seemed equally at home in the media of radio, television, and drama, and The Collection was presented in all three media.
Henry Livings (1929-) followed the theatre of the Absurd in some of his plays such as Big Soft Neslie (1961), Nil Carborundum (1962), and Kelly's Eye (1963). His later works were wirtten in the conventional framework. They are Honour and Offer (1968), The Finest Family in the Land (1970) and Pongo Plays (1971).
John Arden wrote some experimental plays. They are Live Like Pigs (1958), The Happy Heaven (1960) and Left Handed Liberty (1965). Allan Jellicoe's plays, The Sport of My Mad Mother (1956) and The Knack (1961) present the violent, unorganized, insecure, meaningless and frivolous world of the teenager. David Mercer gives pictures of people violated in their environment and finding in madness or eccentricity the only relief from tension. His plays are Ride A Cock Horse (1965), A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) and Duck Song (1974).
Edward Bond (1935-) presents world as a place of despair, in which man has no freedom. He is in social, political and mental chains everywhere. His plays include Saved (1965), Lear (1971), Bingo (1974) and The Fool (1975). Bond uses violent imagery and terse, unambiguous language for the exposition of his themes.
Christopher Hampton (1946-) wrote a number of plays on a variety of themes. He ranges from clever middle class comedy to historico-social document in When Did You Last See My Mother? (1971), The Philanthropist (1970) and Habeas Corpus (1973).
THE REVIVAL OF THE POETIC DRAMA IN THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY
Background
The Victorian poets attempted the poetic drama but they could not impart to it real dramatic excellence. Mention must be made of Tennyson's Queen Mary, Harold (1877) and Becket (1884) and of Browning's Strafford (1837), King Victor and King Charles (1842), The Return of the Druses (1843), Colombe's Birthday (1884) and A Soul's Tragedy (1846). But the conditions of the stage were not favourable for poetic drama. Thus the nineteenth century contributed little to the development of poetic drama. It could not be produced either in the eighteenth century, which was an age of great prose writers, or in the nineteenth which was an age of great poets. Thus, there was no tradition of poetic drama at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Its Beginning
There were signs of its rebirth by 1920, but the atmosphere in which realistic and naturalistic drama prospered was not congenial to the growth and development of poetic drama. At the Abbey Theatre Yeats endeavoured to revive poetic drama, but he was not endowed with the essential qualities of a dramatist. It was T. S. Eliot who firmly established the tradition of poetic drama in the twentieth century. The revival of poetic drama took various forms. It must be noted that the new attempts at poetic drama had a much closer connection with the deeper religious beliefs or social attitudes of their authors than had most of the prose drama of the time.
Stephen Philis (1864-1915) wrote poetic plays including Paolo and Francesca (1900), Herod (1901), Ulysses (1902), The Son of David (1904) and Nero (1906). His poetic plays had little popular appeal. John Masefield (1878-1967) experimented in poetic drama. His plays include The Tragedy of Man (1909), his finest play, The Tragedy of Pompey, The Great (1910), Good Friday (1917), The Trial of Jesus (1925) and The Coming of Christ (1928). His plays were written mainly on religious themes. Gordon Bottomley (1874-1948) wrote a number of powerful poetic plays, which consist of The Crier by Night (1902), Midsummer Eve (1905), King Lear's Wife (1915), Grauch (1921) and Culbin Sands (1932). James Elory Flecker (1884-1915) wrote Hassan (1922), which occupies an immortal place in the history of poetic drama. It is a highly coloured, oriental play. It is rich in imagery, music and poetic quality but it lacks in characterisation and dramatic appeal. Lascelles Abercrombie (1881-1938) was an experimenter in poetic drama. His plays include Deborah (1913), The Adder (1913), The End of the World (1914), The Staircase (1922), The Derter (1922), Phoenix (1923) and The Sale of St. Thomas (1930). He attempted to adapt the rhythms of blank verse to the requirements of modern poetic drama. His plays contain fine poetry but lack in dramatic appeal which issues from action and character study. John Drinkwater (1882-1937) began his career with poetic dramas—Rebellion (1914), The Storm (1515), The God of Quiet (1916) and X = 0: A Night of the Trojan War (1917).
In the disintegration of social life before and after World War I and in the general mood of anxiety and despair, these dramatists strengthened faith in the permanence of life, art and beauty, and created a taste for poetic drama which helped T. S. Eliot in making his valuable experiments in poetic drama.
W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)
Yeats was opposed to realistic drama with a problem. He did not consider drama to be "a representational art". In his essay The Tragic Theatre he wrote: "Our movement is a return to the people ......The play that is to give them a quite natural pleasure, should tell them either of their own life, or of that life of poetry where every man can see his own image, because there alone does human nature escape from arbitrary conditions." He was prompted to reconstruct contemporary life through the symbols of ancient folklore and the mythology of Ireland. In order to make the audience concentrate on poetry Yeats went back to the simplicity of Greek theatre and Shakespearean theatre.
According to Raymond Williams, Yeats opposed "the artificial narrowness of theme which the practices of naturalism seemed to predicate; he wished the drama once again to rest on human integrity, and in particular to attend to those deeper levels of personality which it has been the traditional interest of literature to explore". In his two earliest plays The Countess Cathleen (1892) and The Land of Heart's Desire (1894) he attempted "the realization of the spiritual theme." In his most successful play On Baile's Strand (1904) Yeats "achieves an end for which all important drama in this century has sought the interpenetration of different levels of reality in an integral and controlled structure." Yeats' other plays are The Shadowy Waters (1900), The King's Threshold (1904), The Hour Glass (1904), Deridre (1907), The Resurrection (1913), At the Hawk's Well (1917), Calvary (1921) and The Cat and the Moon (1926). Yeats' plays are rich in poetical intensity. He makes little or no attempt at character study, and his figures are mere mouthpieces for his ideas, which find expression in poetic speeches. Commenting on Yeats' contribution to poetic drama Eliot remarks: "He started writing plays at a time when the prose play of contemporary life seemed triumphant..... We can begin to see now that even the early imperfect attempts he made are probably more permanent literature than the plays of Shaw."
T. S. Eliot (1885-1965)
T. S. Eliot propounded the theory of the poetic drama in his essay Rhetoric and Poetic Drama (1919). He pointed out that "a speech in a play should never appear to be intended to move us as it might conceivably move other characters in the play, for it is essential that we should preserve our position of spectators, and observe always from the outside though with complete understanding." In 1920 he wrote about the Possibility of A Poetic Drama that "the essential is to get upon the stage this precise statement of life, which is at the same time a point of view, a world — a world which the author's mind has subjected to a complete process of simplification."
Drama, according to Eliot, expresses the depth of human soul. Eliot says: "The human soul, in intense emotion, strives to express itself in verse." He asserts that "the greatest drama is poetic drama, and dramatic defects can be compensated by poetic excellence." Eliot holds that the craving for poetic drama is permanent in human nature, and that "we must find a new form of verse which shall be as satisfactory a vehicle for us as blank verse for the Elizabethans."
T. S. Eliot has been a conspicuous leader in a movement to revive the poetic drama. The Murder in the Cathedral (1935) is his first full length poetic play, "which blends curiously but rather effectively a mediaeval saint's legend and comic relief that takes the form of contemporary satire, treats of the conflict between the claims of the world and the claims of the soul." The central figure, Thomas a Becket, is impressively delineated. Eliot makes extensive use of chorus, and of prose. He realised that if poetic drama was to enter into overt competition with realistic drama, it must choose its subjects from contemporary life, and make verse flexible enough to eschew the use of prose altogether. Rayond Williams points out that Eliot's language "reasserts control in performance…….This is his most important general achievement ..... There is the same control over character. The persons are individualized so far as is necessary, but they are contained by the total pattern." The Murder in the Cathedral is the best example of the discovery of an adequate form for serious drama.
The Family Reunion (1939), one of Eliot's most powerful plays, "is a drama of contemporary people speaking contemporary language." In it Eliot skilfully modernized the old Greek theme of Orestes pursued by the furies. The stylistic complexity makes effective performance difficult. Eliot successfully created "a type of poetry that would at once serve the purposes of modern drama and at the same time give the drama, on occasion, an elevation of which even the best prose was incapable."
In The Cocktail Party (1950) Eliot gave up "even those rituals which had been retained in The Family Reunion; the use of an occasional chorus, of interspersed lyrics ..... of ruine recital." In it the characters are modern upper-class Londoners, and the dominant tone is worldly and sophisticated. This play lacks some of the poetic richness of The Family Reunion but it has greater humanity. The verse is flexible and is capable of expressing all kinds of feelings. It is a verse of statement, with the mini­mum of imagery and evocation.
The Confidential Clerk (1953) "is a thought-provoking play which contains, under its surface wit and comedy, serious consideration of such questions as the nature of identity and effects of heredity, and which underlies the importance of coming to grips with one's true self." In it the style has been diluted and it does not disturb an audience habituated to prose.
The Elder Statesman (1958) treated Eliot's familiar theme of an old sin brought to light and acknowledged the consequent spiritual release. It has an increased warmth of feeling, but the characters are anaemic. It was less impressive than the earlier works.
T. S. Eliot evolved a befitting poetic mode of expression for the poetic drama. He discarded the use of traditional blank verse, which owing to its use of non-dramatic poetry, had grown too rigid for dramatic purposes. He carefully avoided any echo of Shakespeare. He evolved a new mode of poetic expression which comes close to modern idiom. He explored the dramatic possibility of verse. In his essay Poetry and Drama (1950) he said: "It (poetry) must justify itself dramatically, and not merely be fine poetry shaped into a dramatic form. From this it follows that no play should be written in verse for which prose is dramatically adequate....In verse drama prose should be used very sparingly indeed.....We should aim at a form of verse in which everything can be said that has to be said, and that when we find some situation which is intractable in verse, it is merely because our form of verse is inelastic..... But if our verse is to have so wide a range that it can say anything that has to be said, it follows that it will not be `poetry' all the time. It will only be `poetry' when the dramatic situation has reached such a point of intensity that poetry becomes the natural utterance, because then it is the only language in which emotions can be expressed at all." T. S. Eliot extended the scope of poetic drama. Highest drama is born out of the fusion of poetry and drama. Eliot's greatest contribution lies in producing a dramatic verse which has grown from the contemporary idiom. D. E. Jones remarks: "His plays are great literature, and Eliot's work is assured of a permanent place in dramatic literature. There can be no denying the fact that Eliot's plays are important steps towards the revival of poetic drama."
Poetic Drama After T. S. Eliot
The poetic dramatists who followed T. S. Eliot justify his obser­vation that the craving for the poetic drama is permanent in human nature. Christopher Isherwood (1904-) wrote the Ascent of F6 (1936) and Across the Frontiers (1938). His plays deal with symbolic situations and simplified cartoon characters. Christopher Fry's The Lady Is Not For Burning (1948) is an important experiment in verse and technique. It is an excellent comedy which "dazzled its audiences with an exuberance of language suggestive of the less restrained Elizabethans." In Venus Observed (1950), a modern comedy, Fry uses simple poetic language. The Dark Is Light Enough (1954) is also a famous comedy of Fry. His Curtmantle (1962) is a historical play of the reign of Henry II. It stands comparison with Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. Other poetic drama­tists who followed in the footsteps of Eliot are Stephen Spender, Louis Macneice, Ronald Duncan, Norman Nicholson, Anne Ridler and W. H. Auden.