English Literature
Samuel Johnson. Boswell's "Life of Johnson." Later Augustan Writers. Edmund
Burke. Edward Gibbon. The Revival of Romantic Poetry. Thomas Gray. Oliver
Goldsmith. William Cowper. Robert Burns. William Blake. The Minor Poets of
the Romantic Revival. James Thomson. William Collins. George Crabbe. James
Macpherson. Thomas Chatterton. Thomas Percy. The First English Novelists.
Meaning of the Novel. Precursors of the Novel. Discovery of the Modern
Novel. Daniel Defoe. Samuel Richardson. Henry Fielding. Smollett and
Sterne. Summary. Bibliography. Questions. Chronology.
CHAPTER X. THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM
Historical Summary. Literary Characteristics of the Age. The Poets of
Romanticism. William Wordsworth. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Robert Southey.
Walter Scott. Byron. Percy Bysshe Shelley. John Keats. Prose Writers of the
Romantic Period. Charles Lamb. Thomas De Quincey. Jane Austen. Walter
Savage Landor. Summary. Bibliography. Questions. Chronology.
CHAPTER XI. THE VICTORIAN AGE
Historical Summary. Literary Characteristics. Poets of the Victorian Age.
Alfred Tennyson. Robert Browning. Minor Poets of the Victorian Age.
Elizabeth Barrett. Rossetti. Morris. Swinburne. Novelists of the Victorian
Age. Charles Dickens. William Makepeace Thackeray. George Eliot. Minor
Novelists of the Victorian Age. Charles Reade. Anthony Trollope. Charlotte
Brontë. Bulwer Lytton. Charles Kingsley. Mrs. Gaskell. Blackmore. Meredith.
Hardy. Stevenson. Essayists of the Victorian Age. Macaulay. Carlyle.
Ruskin. Matthew Arnold. Newman. The Spirit of Modern Literature. Summary.
Bibliography. Questions. Chronology.
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
* * * * *
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION--THE MEANING OF LITERATURE
Hold the hye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede.
Chaucer's _Truth_
On, on, you noblest English, ...
Follow your spirit.
Shakespeare's _Henry V_
THE SHELL AND THE BOOK. A child and a man were one day walking on the
seashore when the child found a little shell and held it to his ear.
Suddenly he heard sounds,--strange, low, melodious sounds, as if the shell
were remembering and repeating to itself the murmurs of its ocean home. The
child's face filled with wonder as he listened. Here in the little shell,
apparently, was a voice from another world, and he listened with delight to
its mystery and music. Then came the man, explaining that the child heard
nothing strange; that the pearly curves of the shell simply caught a
multitude of sounds too faint for human ears, and filled the glimmering
hollows with the murmur of innumerable echoes. It was not a new world, but
only the unnoticed harmony of the old that had aroused the child's wonder.
Some such experience as this awaits us when we begin the study of
literature, which has always two aspects, one of simple enjoyment and
appreciation, the other of analysis and exact description. Let a little
song appeal to the ear, or a noble book to the heart, and for the moment,
at least, we discover a new world, a world so different from our own that
it seems a place of dreams and magic. To enter and enjoy this new world, to
love good books for their own sake, is the chief thing; to analyze and
explain them is a less joyous but still an important matter. Behind every
book is a man; behind the man is the race; and behind the race are the
natural and social environments whose influence is unconsciously reflected.
These also we must know, if the book is to speak its whole message. In a
word, we have now reached a point where we wish to understand as well as to
enjoy literature; and the first step, since exact definition is impossible,
is to determine some of its essential qualities.
QUALITIES OF LITERATURE. The first significant thing is the essentially
artistic quality of all literature. All art is the expression of life in
forms of truth and beauty; or rather, it is the reflection of some truth
and beauty which are in the world, but which remain unnoticed until brought
to our attention by some sensitive human soul, just as the delicate curves
of the shell reflect sounds and harmonies too faint to be otherwise
noticed. A hundred men may pass a hayfield and see only the sweaty toil and
the windrows of dried grass; but here is one who pauses by a Roumanian
meadow, where girls are making hay and singing as they work. He looks
deeper, sees truth and beauty where we see only dead grass, and he reflects
what he sees in a little poem in which the hay tells its own story:
Yesterday's flowers am I,
And I have drunk my last sweet draught of dew.
Young maidens came and sang me to my death;
The moon looks down and sees me in my shroud,
The shroud of my last dew.
Yesterday's flowers that are yet in me
Must needs make way for all to-morrow's flowers.
The maidens, too, that sang me to my death
Must even so make way for all the maids
That are to come.
And as my soul, so too their soul will be
Laden with fragrance of the days gone by.
The maidens that to-morrow come this way
Will not remember that I once did bloom,
For they will only see the new-born flowers.
Yet will my perfume-laden soul bring back,
As a sweet memory, to women's hearts
Their days of maidenhood.
And then they will be sorry that they came
To sing me to my death;
And all the butterflies will mourn for me.
I bear away with me
The sunshine's dear remembrance, and the low
Soft murmurs of the spring.
My breath is sweet as children's prattle is;
I drank in all the whole earth's fruitfulness,
To make of it the fragrance of my soul
That shall outlive my death.[1]
One who reads only that first exquisite line, "Yesterday's flowers am I,"
can never again see hay without recalling the beauty that was hidden from
his eyes until the poet found it.
In the same pleasing, surprising way, all artistic work must be a kind of
revelation. Thus architecture is probably the oldest of the arts; yet we
still have many builders but few architects, that is, men whose work in
wood or stone suggests some hidden truth and beauty to the human senses. So
in literature, which is the art that expresses life in words that appeal to
our own sense of the beautiful, we have many writers but few artists. In
the broadest sense, perhaps, literature means simply the written records of
the race, including all its history and sciences, as well as its poems and
novels; in the narrower sense literature is the artistic record of life,
and most of our writing is excluded from it, just as the mass of our
buildings, mere shelters from storm and from cold, are excluded from
architecture. A history or a work of science may be and sometimes is
literature, but only as we forget the subject-matter and the presentation
of facts in the simple beauty of its expression.
The second quality of literature is its suggestiveness, its appeal to our
emotions and imagination rather than to our intellect. It is not so much
what it says as what it awakens in us that constitutes its charm. When
Milton makes Satan say, "Myself am Hell," he does not state any fact, but
rather opens up in these three tremendous words a whole world of
speculation and imagination. When Faustus in the presence of Helen asks,
"Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?" he does not state a
fact or expect an answer. He opens a door through which our imagination
enters a new world, a world of music, love, beauty, heroism,--the whole
splendid world of Greek literature. Such magic is in words. When
Shakespeare describes the young Biron as speaking
In such apt and gracious words
That aged ears play truant at his tales,
he has unconsciously given not only an excellent description of himself,
but the measure of all literature, which makes us play truant with the
present world and run away to live awhile in the pleasant realm of fancy.
The province of all art is not to instruct but to delight; and only as
literature delights us, causing each reader to build in his own soul that
"lordly pleasure house" of which Tennyson dreamed in his "Palace of Art,"
is it worthy of its name.
The third characteristic of literature, arising directly from the other
two, is its permanence. The world does not live by bread alone.
Notwithstanding its hurry and bustle and apparent absorption in material
things, it does not willingly let any beautiful thing perish. This is even
more true of its songs than of its painting and sculpture; though
permanence is a quality we should hardly expect in the present deluge of
books and magazines pouring day and night from our presses in the name of
literature. But this problem of too many books is not modern, as we
suppose. It has been a problem ever since Caxton brought the first printing
press from Flanders, four hundred years ago, and in the shadow of
Westminster Abbey opened his little shop and advertised his wares as "good
and chepe." Even earlier, a thousand years before Caxton and his printing
press, the busy scholars of the great library of Alexandria found that the
number of parchments was much too great for them to handle; and now, when
we print more in a week than all the Alexandrian scholars could copy in a
century, it would seem impossible that any production could be permanent;
that any song or story could live to give delight in future ages. But
literature is like a river in flood, which gradually purifies itself in two
ways,--the mud settles to the bottom, and the scum rises to the top. When
we examine the writings that by common consent constitute our literature,
the clear stream purified of its dross, we find at least two more
qualities, which we call the tests of literature, and which determine its
permanence.
TESTS OF LITERATURE. The first of these is universality, that is, the
appeal to the widest human interests and the simplest human emotions.
Though we speak of national and race literatures, like the Greek or
Teutonic, and though each has certain superficial marks arising out of the
peculiarities of its own people, it is nevertheless true that good
literature knows no nationality, nor any bounds save those of humanity. It
is occupied chiefly with elementary passions and emotions,--love and hate,
joy and sorrow, fear and faith,--which are an essential part of our human
nature; and the more it reflects these emotions the more surely does it
awaken a response in men of every race. Every father must respond to the
parable of the prodigal son; wherever men are heroic, they will acknowledge
the mastery of Homer; wherever a man thinks on the strange phenomenon of
evil in the world, he will find his own thoughts in the Book of Job; in
whatever place men love their children, their hearts must be stirred by the
tragic sorrow of _Oedipus_ and _King Lear_. All these are but shining
examples of the law that only as a book or a little song appeals to
universal human interest does it become permanent.
The second test is a purely personal one, and may be expressed in the
indefinite word "style." It is only in a mechanical sense that style is
"the adequate expression of thought," or "the peculiar manner of expressing
thought," or any other of the definitions that are found in the rhetorics.
In a deeper sense, style is the man, that is, the unconscious expression of
the writer's own personality. It is the very soul of one man reflecting, as
in a glass, the thoughts and feelings of humanity. As no glass is
colorless, but tinges more or less deeply the reflections from its surface,
so no author can interpret human life without unconsciously giving to it
the native hue of his own soul. It is this intensely personal element that