Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

interest in the world about him." He died in the year 1870, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

16. Dickens's Style. His style is easy, flowing, vigorous, picturesque, and humorous; his power of language is very great; and, when he is writing under the influence of strong passion, it rises into a pure and noble eloquence. The scenery-the external circumstances of his characters, are steeped in the same colours as the characters themselves; everything he touches seems to be filled with life and to speak-to look happy or sorrowful,-to reflect the feelings of the persons. His comic and humorous powers are very great; but his tragic power is also enormouss—his power of depicting the fiercest passions that tear the human breast,—avarice, hate, fear, revenge, remorse. The great American statesman, Daniel Webster, Isaid that Dickens had done more to better the condition of the English poor than all the statesmen Great Britain had ever sent into the English Parliament.

17. JOHN RUSKIN, the greatest living master of English prose, an art-critic and thinker, was born in London in the year 1819. In his father's house he was accustomed "to no other prospect than that of the brick walls over the way; he had no brothers, nor sisters, nor companions." To his London birth he ascribes the great charm that the beauties of nature had for him from his boyhood: he felt the contrast between town and country, and saw what no country-bred child could have seen in sights that were usual to him from his infancy. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and gained the Newdigate prize for poetry in 1839. He at first devoted himself to painting; but his true and strongest genius lay in the direction of literature. In 1843 appeared the first volume of his Modern Painters, which is perhaps his greatest work; and the four other volumes were published between that date and the year 1860. In this work he discusses the qualities and the merits of the greatest painters of the English, the Italian, and other schools. In 1851 he produced a charming fairy tale, 'The King of the Golden River, or the Black Brothers.' He has written on architecture also, on political economy, and on many other social subjects. He is the founder of a society called "The St George's Guild," the purpose of which is to spread abroad sound notions of what true life and true art are, and especially to make the life of the poor more endurable and better worth living.

18. Ruskin's Style.-A glowing eloquence, a splendid and full

flowing music, wealth of phrase, aptness of epithet, opulence of ideas-all these qualities characterise the prose style of Mr Ruskin. His similes are daring, but always true. Speaking of the countless statues that fill the innumerable niches of the cathedral of Milan, he says that "it is as though a flight of angels had alighted there and been struck to marble." His writings are full of the wisest sayings put into the most musical and beautiful language. Here are a

few:

"Every act, every impulse, of virtue and vice, affects in any creature, face, voice, nervous power, and vigour and harmony of invention, at once. Perseverance in rightness of human conduct renders, after a certain number of generations, human art possible; every sin clouds it, be it ever so little a one; and persistent vicious living and following of pleasure render, after a certain number of generations, all art impossible."

"In mortals, there is a care for trifles, which proceeds from love and conscience, and is most holy; and a care for trifles, which comes of idleness and frivolity, and is most base. And so, also, there is a gravity proceeding from dulness and mere incapability of enjoyment, which is most base."

His power of painting in words is incomparably greater than that of any other English author: he almost infuses colour into his words and phrases, so full are they of pictorial power. It would be impossible to give any adequate idea of this power here; but a few lines may suffice for the present :

"The noonday sun came slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia, and its masses of enlarged and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with rain. I cannot call it colour; it was conflagration. Purple, and crimson, and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quivered with buoyant and burning life; each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald."

19. GEORGE ELIOT (the literary name for Marian Evans, 18191880), one of our greatest writers, was born in Warwickshire in the year 1819. She was well and carefully educated; and her own serious and studious character made her a careful thinker and a most diligent reader. For some time the famous Herbert Spencer was her tutor; and under his care her mind developed with surprising rapidity. She taught herself German, French, Italian-studied the best works in the literature of these languages; and she was also fairly mistress of Greek and Latin. Besides all these, she was an accomplished musician.-She was for some time assistant-editor of the 'Westminster Review.' The first of her works which called the

attention of the public to her astonishing skill and power as a novelist was her Scenes of Clerical Life. Her most popular novel, Adam Bede, appeared in 1859; Romola in 1863; and Middlemarch in 1872. She has also written a good deal of poetry, among other volumes that entitled The Legend of Jubal, and other Poems. One of her best poems is The Spanish Gypsy. She died in the year 1880.

20. George Eliot's Style.-Her style is everywhere pure and strong, of the best and most vigorous English, not only broad in its power, but often intense in its description of character and situation, and always singularly adequate to the thought. Probably no novelist knew the English character-especially in the Midlands-so well as she, or could analyse it with so much subtlety and truth. She is entirely mistress of the country dialects. In humour, pathos, knowledge of character, power of putting a portrait firmly upon the canvas, no writer surpasses her, and few come near her. Her power is sometimes almost Shakespearian. Like Shakespeare, she gives us a large number of wise sayings, expressed in the pithiest language. The following are a few :—

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."

"It is easy finding reasons why other people should be patient."

[ocr errors]

Genius, at first, is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline." "Things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." "Nature never makes men who are at once energetically sympathetic and minutely calculating."

"To the far woods he wandered, listening,

And heard the birds their little stories sing

In notes whose rise and fall seem melted speech-
Melted with tears, smiles, glances-that can reach
More quickly through our frame's deep-winding night,
And without thought raise thought's best fruit, delight."

[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

Beowulf (brought over by
Saxons and Angles from the
Continent).

Poems on the Creation and
other subjects taken from
the Old and the New Testa-
ment.

An Ecclesiastical History in
Latin. A translation of St
John's Gospel into English

(lost).

500

Edwin (of Deira), 600
King of the
Angles, baptis.
ed 627.

First landing of 700 the Danes, 787.

Translated into the English The University 800

of Wessex, Bede's Ecclesi-
astical History and other
Latin works. Is said to
have begun the Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 875-
1154.

of Oxford is
said to have
been founded
in this reign.

[blocks in formation]
« VorigeDoorgaan »