From Chaucer to Tennyson
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Chautauqua Reading Circle Literature
FROM
CHAUCER TO TENNYSON
WITH TWENTY-NINE PORTRAITS
AND
SELECTIONS FROM THIRTY AUTHORS.
BY
HENRY A. BEERS
_Professor of English Literature in Yale University_.
PREFACE.
In so brief a history of so rich a literature, the problem is how to get
room enough to give, not an adequate impression--that is impossible--but
any impression at all of the subject. To do this I have crowded out
every thing but _belles lettres_. Books in philosophy, history, science,
etc., however important in the history of English thought, receive the
merest incidental mention, or even no mention at all. Again, I have
omitted the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, which is written in a
language nearly as hard for a modern Englishman to read as German is, or
Dutch. Caedmon and Cynewulf are no more a part of English literature than
Vergil and Horace are of Italian. I have also left out the vernacular
literature of the Scotch before the time of Burns. Up to the date of the
union Scotland was a separate kingdom, and its literature had a
development independent of the English, though parallel with it.
In dividing the history into periods, I have followed, with some
modifications, the divisions made by Mr. Stopford Brooke in his
excellent little _Primer of English Literature_. A short reading course
is appended to each chapter.
HENRY A. BEERS.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 1066-1400
CHAPTER II.
FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER, 1400-1599
CHAPTER III.
THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE, 1564-1616
CHAPTER IV.
THE AGE OF MILTON, 1608-1674
CHAPTER V.
FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF POPE, 1660-1744
CHAPTER VI.
FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, 1744-1789
CHAPTER VII.
FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT, 1789-1832
CHAPTER VIII.
FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT TIME, 1832-1893
APPENDIX
LIST OF PORTRAITS.
WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, EDMUND SPENSER, FRANCIS BACON,
JOHN MILTON
JOHN DRYDEN, JOSEPH ADDISON, ALEXANDER POPE, JONATHAN
SWIFT
SAMUEL JOHNSON, OLIVER GOLDSMITH, WILLIAM COWPER,
ROBERT BURNS
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, GEORGE GORDON BYRON, PERCY
BYSSHE SHELLEY, JOHN KEATS
ROBERT SOUTHEY, SIR WALTER SCOTT, SAMUEL TAYLOR
COLERIDGE, THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
THOMAS CARLYLE, JOHN RUSKIN, WILLIAM MAKEPEACE
THACKERAY, CHARLES DICKENS
GEORGE ELIOT (MARY ANN EVANS), JAMES ANTHONY
FROUDE, ROBERT BROWNING, ALFRED TENNYSON
_The required books of the C.L.S.C. are recommended by a Council of
six. It must, however, be understood that recommendation does not
involve an approval by the Council, or by any member of it, of every
principle or doctrine contained in the book recommended._
CHAPTER I.
FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER.
1066-1400.
The Norman conquest of England, in the 11th century, made a break in the
natural growth of the English language and literature. The Old English
or Anglo-Saxon had been a purely Germanic speech, with a complicated
grammar and a full set of inflections. For three hundred years following
the battle of Hastings this native tongue was driven from the king's
court and the courts of law, from Parliament, school, and university.
During all this time there were two languages spoken in England. Norman
French was the birth-tongue of the upper classes and English of the
lower. When the latter got the better of the struggle, and became, about
the middle of the 14th century, the national speech of all England, it
was no longer the English of King Alfred. It was a new language, a
grammarless tongue, almost wholly stripped of its inflections. It had
lost half of its old words, and had filled their places with French
equivalents. The Norman lawyers had introduced legal terms; the ladies
and courtiers words of dress and courtesy. The knight had imported the
vocabulary of war and of the chase. The master-builders of the Norman
castles and cathedrals contributed technical expressions proper to the
architect and the mason. The art of cooking was French. The naming of
the living animals, _ox, swine, sheep, deer_, was left to the Saxon
churl who had the herding of them, while the dressed meats, _beef, pork,
mutton, venison_, received their baptism from the table-talk of his
Norman master. The four orders of begging friars, and especially the
Franciscans or Gray Friars, introduced into England in 1224, became
intermediaries between the high and the low. They went about preaching
to the poor, and in their sermons they intermingled French with English.
In their hands, too, was almost all the science of the day; their
_medicine, botany_, and _astronomy_ displaced the old nomenclature of
_leechdom, wort-cunning_ and _star-craft._ And, finally, the translators
of French poems often found it easier to transfer a foreign word bodily
than to seek out a native synonym, particularly when the former supplied
them with a rhyme. But the innovation reached even to the commonest
words in every-day use, so that _voice_ drove out _steven, poor_ drove
out _earm_, and _color, use_, and _place_ made good their footing beside
_hue, wont_, and _stead_. A great part of the English words that were
left were so changed in spelling and pronunciation as to be practically
new. Chaucer stands, in date, midway between King Alfred and Alfred
Tennyson, but his English differs vastly more from the former's than
from the latter's. To Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon was as much a dead language
as it is to us.
The classical Anglo-Saxon, moreover, had been the Wessex dialect, spoken
and written at Alfred's capital, Winchester. When the French had
displaced this as the language of culture, there was no longer a "king's
English" or any literary standard. The sources of modern standard
English are to be found in the East Midland, spoken in Lincoln, Norfolk,
Suffolk, Cambridge, and neighboring shires. Here the old Anglian had
been corrupted by the Danish settlers, and rapidly threw off its
inflections when it became a spoken and no longer a written language,
after the Conquest. The West Saxon, clinging more tenaciously to ancient
forms, sank into the position of a local dialect; while the East
Midland, spreading to London, Oxford, and Cambridge, became the literary
English in which Chaucer wrote.
The Normans brought in also new intellectual influences and new forms of
literature. They were a cosmopolitan people, and they connected England
with the Continent. Lanfranc and Anselm, the first two Norman
archbishops of Canterbury, were learned and splendid prelates of a type
quite unknown to the Anglo-Saxons. They introduced the scholastic
philosophy taught at the University of Paris, and the reformed
discipline of the Norman abbeys. They bound the English Church more
closely to Rome, and officered it with Normans. English bishops were
deprived of their sees for illiteracy, and French abbots were set over
monasteries of Saxon monks. Down to the middle of the 14th century the
learned literature of England was mostly in Latin, and the polite
literature in French. English did not at any time altogether cease to be
a written language, but the extant remains of the period from 1066 to
1200 are few and, with one exception, unimportant. After 1200 English
came more and more into written use, but mainly in translations,
paraphrases, and imitations of French works. The native genius was at
school, and followed awkwardly the copy set by its master.
The Anglo-Saxon poetry, for example, had been rhythmical and
alliterative. It was commonly written in lines containing four
rhythmical accents and with three of the accented syllables
alliterating.
_R_este hine tha _r_um-heort; _r_eced hlifade
_G_eap and _g_old-fah, _g_aest inne swaef.
Rested him then the great-hearted; the hall towered
Roomy and gold-bright, the guest slept within.
This rude, energetic verse the Saxon _scop_ had sung to his harp or
_glee-beam_, dwelling on the emphatic syllables, passing swiftly over
the others, which were of undetermined number and position in the line.
It was now displaced by the smooth metrical verse with rhymed endings,
which the French introduced and which our modern poets use, a verse
fitted to be recited rather than sung. The old English alliterative
verse continued, indeed, in occasional use to the 16th century. But it
was linked to a forgotten literature and an obsolete dialect, and was
doomed to give way. Chaucer lent his great authority to the more modern
verse system, and his own literary models and inspirers were all
foreign, French or Italian. Literature in England began to be once more
English and truly national in the hands of Chaucer and his
contemporaries, but it was the literature of a nation cut off from its
own past by three centuries of foreign rule.
The most noteworthy English document of the 11th and 12th centuries was
the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. Copies of these annals,
differing somewhat among themselves, had been kept at the monasteries in
Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere. The yearly entries are
mostly brief, dry records of passing events, though occasionally they
become full and animated. The fen country of Cambridge and Lincolnshire
was a region of monasteries. Here were the great abbeys of Peterborough
and Croyland and Ely minster. One of the earliest English songs tells
how the savage heart of the Danish king Cnut was softened by the singing
of the monks in Ely.
Merie sungen muneches binnen Ely
Tha Cnut chyning reu ther by;
Roweth, cnihtes, noer the land.
And here we thes muneches sang.
Merrily sung the monks in Ely
When King Canute rowed by.
'Row boys, nearer the land,
And let us hear these monks' song.'
It was among the dikes and marshes of this fen country that the bold
outlaw Hereward, "the last of the English," held out for some years
against the conqueror. And it was here, in the rich abbey of Burgh or
Peterborough, the ancient Medeshamstede (meadow-homestead), that the
chronicle was continued nearly a century after the Conquest, breaking
off abruptly in 1154, the date of King Stephen's death. Peterborough had
received a new Norman abbot, Turold, "a very stern man," and the entry
in the chronicle for 1070 tells how Hereward and his gang, with his
Danish backers, thereupon plundered the abbey of its treasures, which
were first removed to Ely, and then carried off by the Danish fleet and
sunk, lost, or squandered. The English in the later portions of this
Peterborough chronicle becomes gradually more modern, and falls away
more and more from the strict grammatical standards of the classical
Anglo-Saxon. It is a most valuable historical monument, and some
passages of it are written with great vividness, notably the sketch of
William the Conquerer put down in the year of his death (1086) by one
who had "looked upon him and at another time dwelt in his court." "He
who was before a rich king, and lord of many a land, he had not then of
all his land but a piece of seven feet....Likewise he was a very stark
man and a terrible, so that one durst do nothing against his will....
Among other things is not to be forgotten the good peace that he made in
this land, so that a man might fare over his kingdom with his bosom full
of gold unhurt. He set up a great deer preserve, and he laid laws
therewith that whoso should slay hart or hind, he should be blinded. As
greatly did he love the tall deer as if he were their father."
With the discontinuance of the Peterborough annals, English history
written in English prose ceased for three hundred years. The thread of
the nation's story was kept up in Latin chronicles, compiled by writers
partly of English and partly of Norman descent. The earliest of these,