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Search - Seventeenth Century Studies - Collected Essays of Edmund Gosse

Seventeenth Century Studies Collected Essays of Edmund Gosse
Author: Edmund Gosse

COLLECTED ESSAYS OF EDMUND GOSSE VOL. I SEVENTEENTH CENTURY STUDIES SEVENTEENTH CENTURY STUDIES BY EDMUND GOSSE, C. B. WILLIAM HEINEMANN 19 3 First Published 1883 New Impressions 1885, 1897 Fourth Edition 1913 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 1883 IN writing this book my object has been to do for some of the rank and file of seventeenth century lite... more »rature what modern criticism has done, on a much larger scale, for Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. Those great figures have been taken out of their surroundings, and have been discussed upon their own merits, biographically, aesthetically, histori cally. But in scarcely any instances, and in these on no consistent plan, has this been done for the smaller writers. Yet it is in these less monumental figures that the progress of literary history is most clearly to be marked, and it has seemed to me not undesirable that the truth which we try to tell definitely and exhaustively in a set of volumes about Milton or Dryden, should be told as definitely in a single chapter about Cowley or Otway. I have therefore tried to make each of the ensuing studies an exhaus tive critical biography in miniatwre, yet each in some V I vi Preface to the First Edition way connected with that which precedes it, and all treated on the same relative scale. It was necessary, in order to do this, to take more pains than is at first sight apparent in the choice of names, some which presented themselves seeming to be too full of in dividuality, and very many more to be not full enough. The volume was begun in 1872, and, with neces sary intervals, has occupied me ever since. The first list of contents upon which I decided, ran thus Lodge, Webster, Dekker, Donne, Randolph, Herrick, Cowley, Orinda, Etheredge, Otway. In the second half of this list it has not seemed necessary to make any modification in the first half three names occur which will not be found represented in this book. Perhaps I may be allowed to mention the reason of this alteration, as it helps me to explain the scope of my inquiry. Whether Dekker or a somewhat earlier name would best fit my purpose was still undecided when the Council of the Hunterian Club asked me to introduce to their subscribers their magnificent reprint of Samuel Rowlands. I was obliged, for this purpose, again to read through the entire works of that author, and I then saw that he was even a more typical figure than Dekker, his immediate successor. It was with reluctance that I resigned Donne and Randolph, and from opposite reasons, It seemed that Preface to the First Edition vii the one was too small and the other 1 too large for the species of portraiture which I had chosen. Upon reflection I decided that, in spite of his promise and his virile grace, the author of The Jealous Lovers was too vague a figure to be painted at full length in a gallery of portraits. In the study on the Cotswold Games he is introduced, not too inadequately, I hope, in the centre of the manly school of Ben Jonson. Again, as I read more and more deeply in the litera ture of the seventeenth century, I became convinced that I could not adequately deal with Donne within such narrow limits. That extraordinary writer casts his shadow over the vault of the century from its beginning to its close, like one of those ancient Carthaginian statues, the hands and feet of which supported opposite extremities of the arch they occu pied. Donne is himself the paradox of which he sings he is a seeming absurdity in literature. To be so great and yet so mean, to have phrases like Shakespeare and tricks like Gongora, to combine within one brain all the virtues and all the vices of the imaginative intellect, this has been given to only one man, and that the inscrutable Dean of St. Pauls. To write fully of his work would be to write the history of the decline of English poetry, to account for the Augustan renascence, to trace the history of the national mind for a period of at least a century...

ISBN-13: 9781406769500
ISBN-10: 1406769509
Publication Date: 3/15/2007
Pages: 364
Rating:

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Publisher: Scott Press
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
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