The Development of Literary Style

1. Poetry. This period being instinct with the spirit of revolt, it may be taken for granted that in poetic style there is a great range of effort and experiment. The general tendency is toward simplicity of diction and away from the mannerisms of the eighteenth century. In the case of the major poets, the one who comes nearest in style to the eighteenth century is Byron; next to him, in spite of his theories of simplicity, comes Wordsworth, who has a curious inflation of style that is kept within bounds only by his intense imaginative power. The best work of Coleridge and Shelley is marked by the greatest simplicity; but, on the other hand, Keats is too fond of golden diction to resist the temptation to be ornate.

2. Prose. In this period we behold the dissolution of the more formal prose style of the previous century. With this process the journalists and miscellaneous prose-writers have much to do. In the place of the older type we see a general tendency toward a useful middle style, as in the books of Southey and Hazlitt. Outside this mass of middle prose we have a range from the greatest simplicity to the highest efforts of poetic prose. At one end of the scale we have the perfectly plain style of Cobbett. The passage we give (from the Rural Rides) could not be simpler, but it is energetic and expressive:

When I returned to England in 1800, after an absence from the country parts of it for sixteen years, the trees, the hedges, even the parks and woods, seemed so small! It made me laugh to hear little gutters, that I could jump over, called rivers. The Thames was but a ‘creek!’ But when in about a month after my arrival in London, I went to Farnham, the place of my birth, what was my surprise! Every thing was become so pitifully small! I had to cross in my postchaise the long and dreary heath of Bagshot. Then at the end of it, to mount a hill called Hungry Hill: and from that hill I knew that I should look down into the beautiful and fertile vale of Farnham. My heart fluttered with impatience, mixed with a sort of fear, to see all the scenes of my childhood; for I had learned before the death of my father and mother.

From Cobbett we range through a large number of writers, like Lockhart and Miss Austen, who write in the usual middle style to the more labored manner of Scott, who in his descriptive passages adopts a kind of Johnsonese. When he writes in the Scots dialect he writes simply and clearly, but in his heavier moods we have a style like that which follows. Note the long and complicated sentences, and the labored diction.

The brow of the hill, on which the Royal Life-Guards were now drawn up, sloped downwards (on the side opposite to that which they had ascended) with a gentle declivity for more than a quarter of a mile, and presented ground which, though unequal in some places, was not altogether unfavourable for the manœuvres of cavalry, until near the bottom, when the slope terminated in a marshy level, traversed through its whole length by what seemed either a natural gully or a deep artificial drain, the sides of which were broken by springs, trenches filled with water, out of which peats and turf had been dug, and here and there by some straggling thickets of alders, which loved the moistness so well that they continued to live as bushes, although too much dwarfed by the sour soil and the stagnant bog-water to ascend into trees. Beyond this ditch or gully the ground arose into a second heathy swell, or rather hill, near to the foot of which, and as if with the object of defending the broken ground and ditch that covered their front, the body of insurgents appeared to be drawn up with the purpose of abiding battle.

Old Mortality

From Scott the evolution of style can be traced through the mannered, half-humorous ornateness of Lamb to the florid poetic prose of Wilson and the dithyrambic periods of De Quincey. As a final specimen we give an extract from the Noctes Ambrosianæ. The style is fervidly exclamatory, but it lacks the depth of De Quincey’s at its best.

Shepherd. Oh that I had been a sailor! To hae circumnavigated the world! To hae pitched our tents, or built our bowers, on the shores o’ bays sae glittering wi’ league-long wreaths o’ shells, that the billows blushed crimson as they murmured! To hae seen our flags burning meteor-like, high up among the primeval woods, while birds, bright as bunting, sat trimming their plumage amang the cordage, sae tame in that island where ship had haply never touched before, nor ever might touch again, lying in a latitude by itself, and far out of the breath o’ the tradewinds! Or to hae landed with a’ the crew, marines and a’—except a guard on shipboard to keep aff the crowd o’ canoes—on some warlike isle, tossing wi’ the plumes on chieftain’s heads, and sound—sound—sounding wi’ gongs! What’s a man-o’-war’s barge, Mr Tickler, beautiful sight tho’ it be, to the hundred-oared canoe o’ some savage Island-king!

TABLE TO ILLUSTRATE THE DEVELOPMENT OF LITERARY FORMS

Date Poetry Drama Prose

Lyric Narrative-Descriptive Satirical
and
Didactic Comedy Tragedy Novel Essay Miscellaneous

Wordsworth| Southey J. Austen Coleridge

1800 Coleridge Landor M. Edgeworth Cobbett

Scott Jeffrey

Moore S. Smith

Campbell Wordsworth

1810 Southey

Byron J. and H. Smith

Byron Hogg

Hogg Shelley Scott

Moore Moore Byron Lockhart

Shelley Keats Shelley Hazlitt Coleridge

1820 Keats Byron Shelley

Galt DeQuincey Wilson

Lamb

Bulwer-Lytton

1830 Marryat

Elliott Elliott Disraeli Moore

Ainsworth

Lockhart

1840 Hood Wordsworth Lever