When he is intellectual, and a poet or a philosopher, he carries the same hard truth and the same keen machinery into the mental sphere. His mind must stand on a fact.* He will not be baffled, or catch at clouds, but the mind must have a symbol palpable and resisting. What he relishes in Dante* is the vice-like tenacity with which he holds a mental image before the eyes, as if it were a scutcheon painted on a shield.* Byron “liked something craggy to break his mind upon”.*
A taste for plain strong speech, what is called a biblical style, marks the English. It is in Alfred,* and the Saxon Chronicle,* and in the Sagas of the Northmen.* Latimer* was homely. Hobbes* was perfect in the “noble vulgar speech.” Donne, Bunyan, Milton, Taylor, Evelyn, Pepys, Hooker, Cotton,* and the translators wrote it.* How realistic or materialistic in treatment of his subject is Swift.* He describes his fictitious persons, as if for the police. Defoe* has no insecurity or choice. Hudibras* has the same hard mentality, — keeping the truth at once to the senses, and to the intellect.
It is not less seen in poetry. Chaucer’s hard painting of his Canterbury pilgrims satisfies the senses. Shakespeare, Spenser,* and Milton,* in their loftiest ascents, have this national grip and exactitude of mind. This mental materialism makes the value of English trancendental genius; in these writers, and in Herbert, Henry More, Donne, and Sir Thomas Browne.* The Saxon materialism and narowness, exalted into the sphere of intellect, makes the very genius of Shakspeare and Milton. When it reaches the pure element, it treads the clouds as securely as the adamant. Even in its elevations, materialistic, its poetry is common-sense inspired; or iron raised to white heat.
* See Emerson on The Fact-Lovers.
* Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), an Italian poet admired for his Divine Comedy.
* Strictly speaking, a scutcheon or escutcheon is a shield (or shield-shape) painted with a heraldic device.
* George, Lord Byron (1788-1824) was an English poet. In a letter dated December 5th, 1816, he mentioned wanting ‘something craggy’ as his reason for trying to learn Armenian. “I found that my mind wanted something craggy to break upon; and this — as the most difficult thing I could discover here for an amusement — I have chosen, to torture me into attention.”
* That is, The Life of King Alfred by Welsh monk Asser, dating from 893.
* More usually called the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a year-by-year history of England from the 5th to the 11th centuries, first compiled by monks in the 9th century. See posts tagged The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
* Many of these sagas involved stories about England, which was closely bound up with Scandinavia in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries. See posts tagged Snorro Sturluson.
* Hugh Latimer (?1485-1555), Protestant bishop, preacher and martyr.
* Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), philosopher.
* These names are: poets John Donne (?1571-1631), John Milton (1608-1674) and Charles Cotton (1630-1687), theologians Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667) and Richard Hooker (?1554-1600), diarists John Evelyn (1620-1706) and Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), and John Bunyan (1628-88), author of Pilgrim’s Progress.
* ‘The translators’ could be the translators of the Authorized Version of the Bible, published in 1611, or they could be the translators of the Greek and Latin classics, such as John Dryden (1631-1700), Alexander Pope (1688-1744) and William Cowper (1731-1800).
* Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), author of Gulliver’s Travels and other tales.
* Daniel Defoe (?1661-1731), author of Robinson Crusoe and other stories.
* Hudibras is a poem by Samuel Butler (1613-1680). The title character, a kind of anti-Quixote, is a colonel in the army of Oliver Cromwell who together with his squire Ralpho experiences a series of comic misadventures.
* Geoffrey Chaucer (?1340-1400) wrote The Canterbury Tales. An instant best-seller, thanks in no small measure to being one of the first books printed by Caxton’s press, it helped to establish the English of the south-eastern lowlands as the language of good literature in this country, an honour hitherto reserved to Latin and French.
* William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is England’s best known playwright and poet. Edmund Spenser (?1552-1599) was another dramatist and poet, remembered for The Faerie Queen.
* George Herbert (1593-1633) was a Christian poet. Henry More (1614-87) was a poet, philosopher and essayist. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) was a man of many talents in literature and the sciences.