An introduction to English literature

Book I _fi^ Copyright^? /*?

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.

WORKS WRITTEN OR EDITED BY

HENRY S. PANCOAST

AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH LITERA- TURE. Revised and Enlarged. Printed from new plates. With maps. i2mo. $1-35 net.

STUDY L.STS, CHRONOLOGICAL TABLES, AND MAPS — To accompany "An Introduction to English Literature." izmo. 50c.

In collaboration with Percy V. D. Shelly FIRST BOOK IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

REPRESENTATIVE ENGLISH LITERATURE 514 pp. Large i2mo. $1.60.

STANDARD ENGLISH POEMS

STANDARD ENGLISH PROSE

AN INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LITERA- TURE. Revised. With study lists of -works to be read, references, chronological tables, and portraits. 393 pp. i6mo. $ 1.24.

ENGLISH PROSE AND VERSE; From Beowulf to Stevenson. 816 pp. 8vo. $2.00.

In collaboration ivith Professor J. D. Spaeth EARLY ENGLISH POEMS.

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY New York Boston Chicago

AN INTRODUCTION

TO

BY

HENRY S. PANCOAST

n

FOURTH EDITION. ENLARGED

NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

^w

Copyright, 1894.

BY

HENRY HOLT & CO.

BY

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

Preface

TO THE THIRD EDITION.

Fifteen years ago, Mr. Henry Holt asked me to arrange a series of representative selections from English literature in chronological order, and to connect them with such biographical and historical matter as might be found necessary for an understanding of them, and of their relation to national and literary history. The result of this request was a book, Representative English Literature, which appeared in 1892. In this book, owing to the large proportion of space taken up by selections, the historical sketch was necessarily very brief, and a few years later, at Mr. Holt's suggestion, I prepared a second book, An Introduction to English Literature, based on the first, in which the selections were omitted and the historical outline revised and considerably expanded. Two years later this second book was enlarged by the addition of further biographical and other matter. In the present book the subject is treated with still greater fulness but upon the same general plan. The first half of the book has been practically re-written, and the chapters dealing with the Early and Middle English periods have been considerably

iii iv PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

enlarged. Greater space has also been given to the literature of the Queen Anne and Victorian periods, and separate lives of Bunyan, Dry den, Steele, Cowper, and others have been added.

No one who attempts to act as guide in this long journey from Beowulf to Kipling believes himself secure from error, unless he is very foolish or preternaturally learned. I can only say, for my own part, that I have tried faithfully to avoid mistakes, that I have, so far as possible, shunned controversy, and that in matters of opinion I have honestly set down the truth as it appeared to me. I am painfully conscious that, in spite of all the labours of others, it is a difficult, perhaps an impossible, thing to see the whole origin, growth, and development of English literature in a just proportion; to see the relation of each book, each man, each event, to the whole story, to interpret every great writer with equal sympathy and fairness, and to get at the heart of every great book. One's only comfort is, that the very vastness, the very impossibility of the undertaking can be urged in mitigation of one's inevitable shortcomings. Well may the author of even a short and unpretentious history of English literature say with Chaucer —

" I have, God woot, a large feeld to ere, And wayke been the oxen in my plough."

I have had more friendly help in the preparation of this book than I can suitably or specifically acknowledge. Dr. Arthur Adams, of Trinity College, read a great part of the manuscript and furnished me with much of the material for the bibliography. Mr. Keith Willoughby has given many hours of conscientious labour to the prep-

Preface To The Third Edition. V

aration of the chronological tables, and I am deeplyindebted in various ways to Professor Cecil F. Lavell, Professor Felix E. Schelling, Mr. W. C. Carle ton, the librarian of Trinity College, and Mr. George Dana Smith, the assistant librarian of the Watkinson Library, Hartford.

H. S. P.

Hartford, September 3, 1907.

NOTE TO THE FOURTH EDITION.

A chapter has been added to the present edition, sketching some of the more important tendencies in English literary history, during the latter part of the Victorian Age and since its close. " To-day is a new day," and the object of this outline is to show the beginnings of the new era and its relation to its predecessors. Recent and living writers have, therefore, been treated only incidentally, as illustrations of the various literary changes and tendencies which mark the time, while many authors of distinction have been reluctantly omitted.

Chestnut Hill, June 18, 1917.

CHAPTER II. The Age of Pope 322 Augustan England 322

Alexander Pope 326

Some Minor Poets of Pope's Time 336

Authorship in the Augustan Age: The New Prose 340

Sir Richard Steele 344

Joseph Addison 351

The History of the Novel , 357

Daniel Defoe 363

Jonathan Swift . . . . . 372

Other Prose-Writers of the Eighteenth Century ..... . 380

Richardson and Fielding , 387

Vlll CONTEXTS.

PAGE

PART IV. THE .MODERN ENGLISH PERIOD, since cir. 1725

CHAPTER I. The Beginning of Modern Literature . . 393

Eighteenth-Century England: The Old Literature and the New 393

Oliver Goldsmith 422

Edmund Burke 429

William Cowper 436

Robert Burns 444

William Wordsworth 450

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 459

Sir Walter Scott 470

Charles Lamb 480

Thomas De Quincey .' 482

Later Poets of the Revolution: Byron and Shelley 489

John Keats 504

CHAPTER II. Victorian England,, cir. 1S32 — 1901 ... 516

Appendix

List to accompany Map showing Principal Religious Foundations, etc. ' 647

List of Authors to accompany Literary Map of England . . . 649

General Table of English Literature 653

MAPS.

Sketch Map of Elizabethan London 200

Map showing the principal Religious Foundations, Monastic

Schools, in England during the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries . 647

Literary Map of England 649

Map of English Lake Country 652

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

Introduction

English literature is the expression in memorable poetry and prose ot the life and character of the English people. In English history we see the character of the erature and people revealed through action. The English English people establish a great nation: the English nation founds a great colonial empire. The English extend their language to the ends of the earth: they build up one of the noblest and richest literatures known to history. How have they been able to produce this literature? Not because they were naturally fond of talking, like the Gauls; not because they had any peculiar talent for making verses, or any especial turn for saying graceful or pretty things. English literature, like English history, is memorable and inspiring because it is the genuine expression of a great race. / When a brave, earnest man, who has felt, and seen, and done much, tells you his innermost thoughts, he is worth listening to ; and when a nation like the English speaks to us out of its heart through its books, its books are worth reading.) For more than fourteen hundred years, generation after generation of Englishmen has tried to put something of its life into words. At first the attempts were crude and imperfect; the nation struggled to speak through the rough song of some heroic deed or the brief chronicle of historical events ; but as time went on, the soul of the people found a readier and fuller utterance in ballad and drama, and epic and novel, in books on religion, or history, or philosophy. So that at last in that long succession of books which make up English literature, we have the record of the inner life of the people, of the loves and hatreds, doubts and fears, hopes and beliefs of each succeeding generation; the story of the nation, told by the nation itself for those who can read and understand.

It is clear that English literature is thus a part of English history, and that any historical event which vitally changes the life and thought of the people changes their literature also. Thus, such important events as the introduction of Christianity into England, the triumph of King Alfred over the Danes, the conquest of England by the Normans, or the loss of Normandy by King John, are turning-points in the literature as well as in the history. The great divisions of English history and of English liticai divisions erature are therefore the same. The history of of English lit- the literature, reflecting the changes that have followed each other in the outward or inner life of the race, naturally divides itself into four main periods of development: •

I. The Period of Preparation.

* About 670 to about 1400.

II. The Period of Italian Influence.

About 1400 to about 1660.

III. The Period of French Influence.

About 1660 to about 1750.

IV. The Modern Period.

Since about 1725.

No exact dates can be given for any of these periods. Changes in the mental life of a nation, and in the literature which reflects that life, come gradually, — so gradually that it is impossible to state the exact year in which such a change takes place. Yet each of these periods has a character of its own, each has certain traits that distinguish

PERIOD OF PREPARATION. 3

it from the rest. We all know that childhood differs from youth, and youth from manhood; although we cannot fix upon the precise minute when the individual passes from one of these stages of growth to another. In the same way these periods, or stages in the growth of the nation's literature, are no less real because their limits cannot be precisely defined. We must try to get some general idea of the nature of each of these four periods at the beginning, although their character and meaning will become clearer after we have studied them more fully.

I. The Period of Preparation.

From about 670 to about 1400.

During this long period of more than seven hundred years we find no poets worthy to be compared with Shakespeare, Milton, or Tennyson, no prose writers at all equal to Burke, or Ruskin, or Carlyle. Yet these seven centuries did much to prepare the way for them and for the other writers of the later time. This long preparatory period was a time of national growth and national discipline, in which England was made ready for the work of her maturity, and the foundations of her literature were laid. When it began, England was not one united nation. There was no king who ruled over all England, and the people in different parts of the island spoke different languages, or different dialects of the same tongue. The eastern part of the land was broken up into a number of small Anglo- Saxon kingdoms, often at war among themselves; the western part was held by the still unconquered Britons, the people whom the English called the Welsh. To the north of the English and the Britons lay the land of the Scot, a wild region, comparatively barren and mountainous, thinly inhabited by yet other tribes, bearing some resemblance to the Britons but differing from them, and differing still more from the English in manners and in speech. Small as it was, the island was thus broken up into separate and often hostile communities; on every side there was a conflict of authority, a confusion of race, of tribes, and of tongues.

As there was no nation, and no national language, there could be no truly national literature. Such literature as there was, was local; for, as each poet used the speech of the little community in which he lived, many of those who dwelt in other sections could not have understood his poems even if they had heard them. Now one great work of these preparatory centuries, was to make a single and united nation out of these separate or hostile races and tribes; another great work was to make a language capable of expressing the thoughts of a great nation, a language which should in turn become the mother-tongue of the whole people. By the end of the fourteenth century the hardest part of these two great tasks had been accomplished. Although Scotland was still an independent kingdom, England had become a strong and united nation; and. while Gaelic was still spoken in the Scotch Highlands, while Welsh still lingered in Wales, and many dialects were still used in England, the foundations of a national language had been securely laid. At one period in the history of these seven centuries, the Danes had poured into England, bringing with them their own speech; at another, the Normans had conquered the land, and they spoke Norman-French. But the English language, although it was modified by the influence first of the Danes, and then of the Norman-French, held its place against its foreign rivals. By 1400 one especial variety of this modified, or Frenchified, English, that spoken in and about London, was already in a fair way to become the national language. The fact that this was the form of English used at the Court, and employed by the Court poets and other writers of the capital, naturally

ITALIAN INFLUENCE 5

raised it to a position of importance; and it is from this particular dialect, that the English we speak to-day, however enlarged or modified, is directly derived.

In these centuries the way was further prepared for the triumphs of the later literature by the training, the civilising of the English race. The first great agency in this training was the Christian religion. The Christian Church was the earliest civiliser of these untamed English, and she labored faithfully to train and educate men's minds as well as to save their souls. The second great civilising agency was the influence of the Normans, who conquered England in 1066. The Norman was a hard master, but he brought with him from the Continent a higher scholarship and a more courtly and polished civilisation than was then known in England. The Norman brought also his chivalric and romantic literature, as well as his language.

Now the fourteenth century is the time when the mixture of all the various elements, separate and antagonistic at first, begins to be fairly complete. Then, as we shall see, many of these elements in life, literature, and language were combined in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer (about 1340-1400), the first great poet of this united England.

II. The Period of Italian Influence From about 1400 to about 1660.

In this period the thought and imagination of England were wonderfully broadened and quickened by a new spirit that was changing the civilisation of Europe. The great change that took place in the life of Europe during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, is known as the Renaissance, or re-birth, because in many ways European civilisation seemed at that time to be born again. It was a stirring and adventurous time, when men were full of energy and enthusiasm, and when they claimed a greater freedom of thought and action. Europe was passing out of the narrower and more restricted life of the Middle Ages ; Greek and Latin art and literature, long neglected and forgotten, were studied with delight; and the finer minds responded to the influence of new feelings and ideas. Italy, the first European nation to resume the study of Greek, was the leader in this "revival" of the old learning, and she became the teacher and inspirer of Europe. It was not long before the passion for the "Greek learning" crossed the Alps. Nation after nation learned the new love of letters, the new delight in life and in beauty, and France, Germany, and England came under the power of this new spirit.

The effect of this influence of Italy is deeply impressed upon the literature of England. At first it made itself felt chiefly at the universities. At Oxford and Cambridge, the two great centres of learning, it gave a fresh impulse to education, it introduced new subjects of study, and it produced scholars of a new type. As we should expect, the effect of these changes in education and scholarship was soon apparent in literature, and books were published which spread the new ideas still more widely. But the influence of Italian style and culture was not a purely literary or educational influence. While it began at the colleges, with the learned men, the teachers, and the writers, it soon extended far beyond this comparatively small field and entered into the life of the nation at large. If we study the state of England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558- 1603), we shall find traces of the popularity of Italian fashions, Italian tastes, and Italian literature, on almost every side. Architecture, dress, and landscape gardening, showed the fascination which Italy then exercised over the English mind. Italy, in fact, had poured into England a new life as well as a new learning; and this new life was quickened by the many great things which were then taking place in

FRENCH INFLUENCE. 7

Europe and America. During the reigns of Elizabeth and James I, this Renaissance spirit found its supreme literary expression in Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, and their great contemporaries.

During the seventeenth century the influence of Italy upon England began to decline. A change came over the spirit of the people, and the time and energy of the nation were largely taken up with grave problems in government and religion. Yet these troubled years, when the Puritan fought with the Cavalier, left their mark upon literature likewise. This is the age of Cromwell, the man who worked the will of England with his sword, but it is also the age of Milton, the man who expressed the noblest spirit of England with his pen, and Cromwell and Milton stand side by side.

III. The Period of French Influence.

From 1660 to about 1750.

After the new thoughts and mighty passions that came with the Renaissance had spent their force, England seemed for the time to have grown tired of great feelings either in poetry or in religion. She became scientific, intellectual, cold, and inclined to attach great importance to the style, or manner, of writing, thinking that great works were produced by study and art rather than by the inspiration of genius. This tendency was encouraged, perhaps originated, by the example and influence of the French. This was during the brilliant reign of Louis XIV, when such writers as Moliere, Racine, Corneille, and Boileau, were making French literature and literary standards fashionable in Europe. Charles II ascended the throne in 1660, after his youth of exile on the Continent, bringing with him a liking for things French; and for a time there was a tendency on the part of some writers to turn to France for their models, and to adopt the French theories of the art of writing. France, however, exerted no such profound influence as Italy had exercised during the preceding period. It is true that a marked change took place in both the form and spirit of English literature at this time; but this seems to have been due far more to an altered condition of affairs at home, than to the influence from abroad. After the Restoration, John Dryden became the leading man of letters in England, and early in the eighteenth century we reach the so-called " Augustan Age," when Queen Anne was on the throne, and Pope and. Swift, Steele and Addison, lived and wrote.

IV. The Modern English Period.

From about 1725 to the present day.

In the course of this eventful period, great changes have taken place both in the social and political condition of England and in her place among the other nations of the earth. Old customs and ideas, old ways of living and methods of government, have been greatly altered or altogether given up", and Modern England has come into existence, the familiar England of to-day. While these changes have been at work at home, the change in England's relations to the world without has been correspondingly great and important. She has made her power felt far beyond the limits of Europe : she has built up a vast colonial empire, planting new Englands in the Far East and the Far West. Countless -ships carry her manufactures over almost every sea; her sons go out to live among strange people; and her civilisation, her language, and her literature, have become known in the farthest parts of the earth.

As England has changed, her literature has changed likewise, and her new experiences at home and abroad have found a voice in her poetry and her prose. It is true that she has shown from time to time the passing influence of some foreign literature; but, on the whole, her inspiration

MODERN ENGLISH PERIOD. 9

during this period has come from within rather than from without. It is, above all, the life of modern England that has produced the literature of modern England.

Only a few general features of the literary history of this period need be mentioned here. As the eighteenth century advanced, the scoffing, sceptical, and trifling spirit that had been apparent in the literature of Queen Anne's time, began to give place to a greater depth and seriousness. Tastes, ideas, and habits were changing, and literature both promoted and expressed the changes. A succession of poets taught men to find pleasure in the country, and taught them a deeper love and respect for mankind. Other poets awakened men's interest in the life of the past, and especially in the Middle Ages, the golden time of chivalry and romance. The Scotch poet Robert Burns (1759-1796) was among those who sang of freedom and human brotherhood; William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was one of the greatest and most original of the interpreters of nature; and Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) did more than any other writer to create a popular enthusiasm for the Middle Ages and to give the romantic past a place in the popular imagination. Throughout the whole of this period we can see the effects on English literature of the more general diffusion of knowledge, and of that rapid advance of democratic institutions and ideas which is a leading feature in the history of the times. In Europe, as well as in England, the old order of society was being transformed by these new ideas, and the French Revolution (1789-1815), the most startling and dramatic outcome of this change, profoundly stirred some of the greatest English writers. This new passion for liberty and equality animates the earlier verse of Wordsworth, and makes itself felt a little later in the poetry of Byron (1788-1824) and Shelley (1792-1822).

The England of Victoria (1837-1901), the England of science and of steam, of social discontent and social reform, of new theories of the universe, and of anxious questionings of the old faith, records in its literature the doubts and conflicts of an era full of momentous change. Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) stands out as the most comprehensive and melodious interpreter of this age in poetry: it can boast of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), in science and philosophy : while in literary prose, it can show such illustrious men as Macaulay, Newman, Dickens, Thackeray, Ruskin, and Carlyle.

From the latter part of the nineteenth century still other changes begin to be apparent in the life and literature of England. There is a wide-spread tendency to abandon the methods and ideals of the Victorian Age, and explore new paths. Through the works of Rudyard Kipling and others, the life of the Colonies and of the world beyond the British Isles begins to take a larger place in English literature. The drama, long over-shadowed by the novel, attains a new importance in the plays of such writers as Bernard Shaw, and the genius of Ireland asserts itself more strongly in a national literary revival, known as the " Celtic Renaissance."

Having gained some preliminary notion of the general trend of literary history in England and of some of the great stages of growth through which the nation has passed, we may now take up these periods at greater length.

Part I. The Period Of Preparation

(About 670 to about 1400).

Chapter I. From The Beginning To The Norman Conquest

The great work of this long preparatory period, which stretches from the dim beginning of English literature _ . £ a . e to the work of Chaucer in the latter half of

Union of dif- , . ,

ferent races, the fourteenth century, was the uniting of languages, and j. ne various elements which are combined in

literatures.

Chaucer and in the literature of England since his time. These elements were at first quite separate, or, in some cases, actually antagonistic. They mixed slowly and reluctantly; but the pressure of circumstances, the course of events, steadily forced them together, and in time each was compelled to contribute its share to the life and the literature of a composite but united nation. Thus we saw, in the brief survey of this period, that during these centuries one race was made by the mixture of many ; one language by the mixture, for the most part, of English and French; one literature from the literatures of the English, the Celt, and the Norman, enriched and developed by Christianity, and by the learning and culture of Rome. The enforced mingling of such varied elements introduced, for a time, a great confusion and disorder. There were rival races, rival languages, each with a literature of its own; but all this struggle, hard as it may have seemed at the time, was not without meaning and purpose, for the variety of the elements thus brought together gave extraordinary richness to the language and greater breadth and fulness to the national literature and life. This mixture of elements is now so complete that many of us never realise that the books we read and the words we use every day are silent witnesses to the composite character of our English literature and our English speech. A single illustration will help to make this clear. Let us take the following lines from the song to the water-nymph Sabrina, in Milton's poem of Comus, and try to find out some of the elements which have contributed to the making of this one passage.

" Sabrina fair,

Listen where thou art sitting Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,

In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair Listen for dear honour's sake, Goddess of the silver lake, Listen and save ! " 1

Now there is probably not a word in this passage that seems to you foreign, or unfamiliar; it is simply our well-known English from first to last. Yet if we were to examine it more closely, if we should look up the history of each of these words in some good dictionary, we should find that some of them were originally not English words at all, but Latin or French. Thus, honour is the Old French word honur, which is derived in its turn from the Latin honor, and which survives in the modern French honneur. Now this word is one of the living witnesses to the composite character of our English speech. It reminds us that England was once conquered and ruled by a French-speak-

1 Comus, 1. 859. The words printed here in italics are those which have come in from the Latin or the Norman-French. The French language grew out of the Latin, hence the origin of these French words is Latin. Nevertheless they did not come into the English directly from the Latin, but through the medium of the French.

ENGLISH LITERATURE COMPOSITE. 13

ing people, for it is one of the thousands of words that contact with the Norman brought into the English speech. Honour is a word which has come into our language from the Latin through the French. Translucent (Latin translucens; trans, through, and lucere, to shine) has been brought in directly from the Latin with only a trifling change. As such words as honour, train, and save, carry us back to the Norman Conquest, and show us that what we know as the English language is in reality partly French, so Sabrina takes us back to the Roman occupation of Britain at a much earlier time, for Sabrina was the name given by the Romans to the river Severn. 1 By far the larger number of words in the passage, however, are pure English; that is, they are the modern representatives of words in use among the English, or Anglo-Saxons, from a very early time. Thus, listen is the modern form of the Anglo-Saxon hlystan; under is the Anglo-Saxon under, and so on. Yet there are enough French and Latin words mixed with those of pure English origin to suggest to us that our daily speech is a composite language, compounded of English and French.

But as the language of this passage is essentially English, so its poetic form is essentially un-English, essentially different from the characteristic Anglo-Saxon verse. The early English made alliteration the basis of their verse; that is, they systematically introduced into it words beginning with the same letter or sound. With them alliteration was not an ornament, or an accident; it was an absolutely necessary feature of their verse. Now English poets have long since given up the Anglo-Saxon method of writing poetry and adopted another. It is true that they still use alliteration, but they no longer make it an essential part of their

1 Some suppose Sabrina to be the Roman form of a Celtic name of the river, and that it means a boundary; but, in any case, the name is a relic of the Roman rule. See Severn in Names and their Histories by Isaac Taylor.

verse ; they employ it as a mere ornamental addition, that they can introduce or leave out as they please. After the Norman Conquest, the form of verse natural to the English was gradually abandoned in favor of a foreign method of writing poetry, an important feature of which was the use of rhyme. This new method was brought in by the Normans. This little poem of Sabrina, based as it is on rhyme and metre and not on alliteration, bears witness, in its form as well as in its language, to the influence of the Norman; it leads us to think of the extent of that influence upon the great body of English verse.