In my third train of thought, I shall attempt to show that the increase of personalities thus going on has brought about such complexities of relation that the older forms of expression were inadequate to them; and that the resulting necessity has developed the wonderfully free and elastic form of the modern novel out of the more rigid Greek drama, through the transition form of the Elizabethan drama.
And, fourthly, I shall offer copious readings from some of the most characteristic modern novels, in illustration of the general principles thus brought forward.
Here,--as the old preacher Hugh Latimer grimly said in closing one of his powerful descriptions of future punishment,--you see your fare.
Permit me, then, to begin the execution of this plan by bringing before you two matters which will be conveniently disposed of in the outset, because they affect all these four lines of thought in general, and because I find the very vaguest ideas prevailing about them among those whose special attention happens not to have been called this way.
As to the first point; permit me to remind you how lately these prose forms have been developed in our literature as compared with the forms of verse. Indeed, abandoning the thought of any particular forms of prose, consider for how long a time good English poetry was written before any good English prose appears. It is historical that as far back as the seventh century Cædmon is writing a strong English poem in an elaborate form of verse. Well-founded conjecture carries us back much farther than this; but without relying upon that, we have clear knowledge that all along the time when _Beowulf_ and _The Wanderer_--to me one of the most artistic and affecting of English poems--and _The Battle of Maldon_ are being written, all along the time when Cædmon and Aldhelm and the somewhat mythical Cynewulf are singing, formal poetry or verse has reached a high stage of artistic development. But not only so; after the Norman change is consummated, and our language has fairly assimilated that tributary stock of words and ideas and influences; the _poetic_ advance, the development of verse, goes steadily on.
If you examine the remains of our lyric poetry written along in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--short and unstudied little songs as many of them are, songs which come upon us out of that obscure period like brief little bird-calls from a thick-leaved wood--if, I say, we examine these songs, written as many of them are by nobody in particular, it is impossible not to believe that a great mass of poetry, some of which must have been very beautiful, was written in the two hundred years just before Chaucer, and that an extremely small proportion of it can have come down to us.