ON ENGLISH LITERATURE

Introductory Lecture given at Queen's College, London, 1848.

An introductory lecture must, I suppose, be considered as a sort of

art-exhibition, or advertisement of the wares hereafter to be

furnished by the lecturer. If these, on actual use, should prove to

fall far short of the promise conveyed in the programme, hearers must

remember that the lecturer is bound, even to his own shame, to set

forth in all commencements the most perfect method of teaching which

he can devise, in order that human frailty may have something at

which to aim; at the same time begging all to consider that in this

piecemeal world, it is sufficient not so much to have realised one's

ideal, as earnestly to have tried to realise it, according to the

measure of each man's gifts. Besides, what may not be fulfilled in a

first course, or in a first generation of teachers, may still be

effected by those who follow them. It is but fair to expect that if

this Institution shall prove, as I pray God it may, a centre of

female education worthy of the wants of the coming age, the method

and the practice of the College will be developing, as years bring

experience and wider eye-range, till we become truly able to teach

the English woman of the nineteenth century to bear her part in an

era, which, as I believe, more and more bids fair to eclipse, in

faith and in art, in science and in polity, any and every period of

glory which Christendom has yet beheld.

The first requisite, I think, for a modern course of English

Literature is, that it be a whole course or none. The literary

education of woman has too often fallen into the fault of our

"Elegant Extracts," and "Beauties of British Poetry." It has neither

begun at the beginning nor ended at the end. The young have been

taught to admire the laurels of Parnassus, but only after they have

been clipped and pollarded like a Dutch shrubbery. The roots which

connect them with mythic antiquity, and the fresh leaves and flowers

of the growing present, have been generally cut off with care, and

the middle part only has been allowed to be used--too often, of

course, a sufficiently tough and dry stem. This method is no doubt

easy, because it saves teachers the trouble of investigating

antiquity, and saves them too the still more delicate task of judging

contemporaneous authors--but like all half measures, it has bred less

good than evil. If we could silence a free press, and the very free

tongues of modern society; if we could clip the busy, imaginative,

craving mind of youth on the Procrustean bed of use and wont, the

method might succeed; but we can do neither--the young _will_ read

and _will_ hear; and the consequence is, a general complaint that the

minds of young women are outgrowing their mothers' guidance, that

they are reading books which their mothers never dreamt of reading,

of many of which they never heard, many at least whose good and evil

they have had no means of investigating; that the authors which

really interest and influence the minds of the young are just the

ones which have formed no part of their education, and therefore

those for judging of which they have received no adequate rules;

that, in short, in literature as in many things, education in England

is far behind the wants of the age.

Now this is all wrong and ruinous. The mother's mind should be the

lodestar of the daughter's. Anything which loosens the bond of

filial reverence, of filial resignation, is even more destructive, if

possible, to womanhood than to manhood--the certain bane of both.

And the evil fruits are evident enough--self-will and self-conceit in

the less gentle, restlessness and dissatisfaction in many of the

meekest and gentlest; talents seem with most a curse instead of a

blessing; clever and earnest young women, like young men, are

beginning to wander up and down in all sorts of eclecticisms and

dilettanteisms--one year they find out that the dark ages were not

altogether barbarous, and by a revulsion of feeling natural to youth,

they begin to adore them as a very galaxy of light, beauty, and

holiness. Then they begin to crave naturally enough for some real

understanding of this strange ever-developing nineteenth century,

some real sympathy with its new wonders, some real sphere of labour

in it; and this drives them to devour the very newest authors--any

book whatever which seems to open for them the riddle of the mighty

and mysterious present, which is forcing itself on their attention

through every sense. And so up and down, amid confusions and

oscillations from pole to pole, and equally eclectic at either pole,

from St. Augustin and Mr. Pugin to Goethe and George Sand, and all

intensified and coloured by that tender enthusiasm, that craving for

something to worship, which is a woman's highest grace, or her

bitterest curse--wander these poor Noah's doves, without either ark

of shelter or rest for the sole of their foot, sometimes, alas! over

strange ocean-wastes, into gulfs of error--too sad to speak of here--

and _will_ wander more and more till teachers begin boldly to face

reality, and interpret to them both the old and the new, lest they

misinterpret them for themselves. The educators of the present

generation must meet the cravings of the young spirit with the bread

of life, or they will gorge themselves with poison. Telling them

that they ought not to be hungry, will not stop their hunger;

shutting our eyes to facts, will only make us stumble over them the

sooner; hiding our eyes in the sand, like the hunted ostrich, will

not hide us from the iron necessity of circumstances, or from the

Almighty will of Him, who is saying in these days to society, in

language unmistakable: "Educate, or fall to pieces! Speak the

_whole_ truth to the young, or take the consequences of your

cowardice!"

On these grounds I should wish to see established in this College a

really entire course of English Literature, such as shall give

correct, reverent, and loving views of every period, from the

earliest legends and poetry of the Middle Age, up to the latest of

our modern authors, and in the case of the higher classes, if it

should hereafter be found practicable, lectures devoted to the

criticism of such authors as may be exercising any real influence

upon the minds of English women. This, I think, should be our ideal.

It must be attempted cautiously and step by step. It will not be

attained at the first trial, certainly not by the first lecturer.

Sufficient, if each succeeding teacher shall leave something more

taught, some fresh extension of the range of knowledge which is

thought fit for his scholars.

I said that the ages of history were analogous to the ages of man,

and that each age of literature was the truest picture of the history

of its day; and for this very reason English literature is the best

perhaps, the only teacher of English history, to women especially.

For it seems to me that it is principally by the help of such an

extended literary course, that we can cultivate a just and enlarged

taste, which will connect education with the deepest feelings of the

heart. It seems hardly fair, or reasonable either, to confine the

reading of the young to any certain fancied Augustan age of authors,

I mean those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; especially

when that age requires, in order to appreciate it, a far more

developed mind, a far greater experience of mankind and of the world,

than falls to the lot of one young woman out of a thousand. Strong

meat for men, and milk for babes. But why are we to force on any age

spiritual food unfitted for it? If we do we shall be likely only to

engender a lasting disgust for that by which our pupils might have

fully profited, had they only been introduced to it when they were

ready for it. And this actually happens with English literature: by

having the so-called standard works thrust upon them too early, and

then only in a fragmentary form, not fresh and whole, but cut up into

the very driest hay, the young too often neglect in after-life the

very books which then might become the guides of their taste. Hence

proceed in the minds of the young sudden and irregular revulsions of

affection for different schools of writing: and all revolutions in

the individual as well as in the nation are sure to be accompanied by

some dead loss of what has been already gained, some disruption of

feelings, some renunciation of principles, which ought to have been

preserved; something which might have borne fruit is sure to be

crushed in the earthquake. Many before me must surely have felt

this. Do none here remember how, when they first escaped from the

dry class-drudgery of Pope and Johnson, they snatched greedily at the

forbidden fruit of Byron, perhaps of Shelley, and sentimental novel-

writers innumerable? How when the luscious melancholy of their

morbid self-consciousness began to pall on the appetite, they fled

for refuge as suddenly to mere poetry of description and action, to

Southey, Scott, the ballad-literature of all ages? How when the

craving returned (perhaps unconsciously to themselves) to understand

the wondrous heart of man, they tried to satisfy it with deep

draughts of Wordsworth's celestial and pure simplicity? How again,

they tired of that too gentle and unworldly strain, and sought in

Shakespeare something more exciting, more genial, more rich in the

facts and passions of daily life? How even his all-embracing genius

failed to satisfy them, because he did not palpably connect for them

their fancy and their passions with their religious faith--and so

they wandered out again over the sea of literature, heaven only knows

whither, in search of a school of authors yet, alas! unborn. For the

true literature of the nineteenth century, the literature which shall

set forth in worthy strains the relation of the two greatest facts,

namely, of the universe and of Christ, which shall transfigure all

our enlarged knowledge of science and of society, of nature, of art,

and man, with the eternal truths of the gospel, that poetry of the

future is not yet here: but it is coming, ay even at the doors, when

this great era shall become conscious of its high vocation, and the

author too shall claim his priestly calling, and the poets of the

world, like the kingdoms of the world, shall become the poets of God

and of His Christ.

But to return. Should we not rather in education follow that method

which Providence has already mapped out for us? If we are bound, as

of course we are, to teach our pupils to breathe freely on the

highest mountain-peaks of Shakespeare's art, how can we more

certainly train them to do so, than by leading them along the same

upward path by which Shakespeare himself rose--through the various

changes of taste, the gradual developments of literature, through

which the English mind had been passing before Shakespeare's time?

For there was a literature before Shakespeare. Had there not been,

neither would there have been a Shakespeare. Critics are now

beginning to see that the old fancy which made Shakespeare spring up

at once, a self-perfected poet, like Minerva full-armed from the head

of Jove, was a superstition of pedants, who neither knew the ages

before the great poet, nor the man himself, except that little of him

which seemed to square with their shallow mechanical taste. The old

fairy superstition, the old legends and ballads, the old chronicles

of feudal war and chivalry, the earlier moralities and mysteries, and

tragi-comic attempts--these were the roots of his poetic tree--they

must be the roots of any literary education which can teach us to

appreciate him. These fed Shakespeare's youth; why should they not

feed our children's? Why indeed? That inborn delight of the young

in all that is marvellous and fantastic--has that a merely evil root?

No surely! It is a most pure part of their spiritual nature; a part

of "the heaven which lies about us in our infancy;" angel-wings with

which the free child leaps the prison-walls of sense and custom, and

the drudgery of earthly life--like the wild dreams of childhood, it

is a God-appointed means for keeping alive what noble Wordsworth

calls

those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,

Fallings from us, vanishings;

Blank misgivings of a creature

Moving about in worlds not realised;

*****

by which

Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither:

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the children sporting on the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

And those old dreams of our ancestors in the childhood of England,

they are fantastic enough, no doubt, and unreal, but yet they are

most true and most practical, if we but use them as parables and

symbols of human feeling and everlasting truth. What, after all, is

any event of earth, palpable as it may seem, but, like them, a shadow

and a ghostly dream, till it has touched our _hearts_, till we have

found out and obeyed its spiritual lesson? Be sure that one really

pure legend or ballad may bring God's truth and heaven's beauty more

directly home to the young spirit than whole volumes of dry abstract

didactic morality. Outward things, beauty, action, nature, are the

great problems for the young. God has put them in a visible world,

that by what they _see_ they may learn to know the _unseen_; and we

must begin to feed their minds with that literature which deals most

with visible things, with passion manifested in action, which we

shall find in the early writing of our Middle Ages; for then the

collective mind of our nation was passing through its natural stages

of childhood and budding youth, as every nation and every single

individual must at some time or other do; a true "young England,"

always significant and precious to the young. I said there was a

literary art before Shakespeare--an art more simple, more childlike,

more girlish as it were, and therefore all the more adapted for young

minds. But also an art most vigorous and pure in point of style:

thoroughly fitted to give its readers the first elements of taste,

which must lie at the root of even the most complex aesthetics. I

know no higher specimens of poetic style, considering the subject,

and the belief of the time about them, than may be found in many of

our old ballads. How many poets are there in England now, who could

have written "The Twa Bairns," or "Sir Patrick Spens?" How many such

histories as old William of Malmesbury, in spite of all his foolish

monk miracles? As few now as there were then; and as for lying

legends--they had their superstitions, and we have ours; and the next

generation will stare at our strange doings as much as we stare at

our forefathers. For our forefathers they were; we owe them filial

reverence, thoughtful attention, and more--we must know them ere we

can know ourselves. The only key to the present is the _past_.

But I must go farther still, and after premising that the English

classics, so called, of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries will

of course form the bulk of the lectures, I must plead for some

instruction in the works of recent and living authors. I cannot see

why we are to teach the young about the past and not about the

present. After all, they have to live now, and at no other time; in

this same nineteenth century lies their work: it may be unfortunate,

but we cannot help it. I do not see why we should wish to help it.

I know no century which the world has yet seen so well worth living

in. Let us thank God that we are here now, and joyfully try to

understand _where_ we are, and what our work is _here_. As for all

superstitions about "the good old times," and fancies that _they_

belonged to God, while this age belongs only to man, blind chance,

and the Evil One, let us cast them from us as the suggestions of an

evil lying spirit, as the natural parents of laziness, pedantry,

popery, and unbelief. And therefore let us not fear to tell our

children the meaning of this present day, and of all its different

voices. Let us not be content to say to them, as we have been doing:

"We will see you well instructed in the past, but you must make out

the present for yourselves." Why, if the past is worth explaining,

far more is the present--the pressing, noisy, complex present, where

our work-field lies, the most intricate of all states of society, and

of all schools of literature yet known, and therefore the very one

requiring most explanation.

How rich in strange and touching utterances have been the last fifty

years of English literature. Do you think that God has been teaching

us nothing in them? Will He not _make_ our children listen to that

teaching, whether we like or not? And suppose our most modern

writers _had_ added nothing to the stock of national knowledge, which

I most fervently deny, yet are they not actually influencing the

minds of the young? and can we prevent their doing so either directly

or indirectly? If we do not find them right teaching about their own

day, will they not be sure to find self-chosen teachers about it

themselves, who will be almost certainly the first who may come to

hand, and therefore as likely as not to be _bad_ teachers? And do we

not see every day that it is just the most tender, the most

enthusiastic, the most precious spirits, who are most likely to be

misled, because their honest disgust at the follies of the day has

most utterly outgrown their critical training? And that lazy

wholesale disapprobation of living writers, so common and convenient,

what does it do but injure all reverence for parents and teachers,

when the young find out that the poet, who, as they were told, was a

bungler and a charlatan, somehow continues to touch the purest and

noblest nerves of their souls, and that the author who was said to be

dangerous and unchristian, somehow makes them more dutiful, more

earnest, more industrious, more loving to the poor? I speak of

actual cases. Would to God they were not daily ones!

Is it not then the wiser, because the more simple and trustful

method, both to God and our children, to say: "You shall read living

authors, and we will teach you how to read them; you, like every

child that is born into the world, must eat the fruit of the tree of

knowledge of good and evil; we will see that you have your senses

exercised to discern between that good and that evil. You shall have

the writers for whom you long, as far as consists with common

prudence and morality, and more, you shall be taught them: all we

ask of you is to be patient and humble; believe us, you will never

really appreciate these writers, you will not even rationally enjoy

their beauties, unless you submit to a course of intellectual

training like that through which most of them have passed, and

through which certainly this nation which produced them has passed,

in the successive stages of its growth."

The best method, I think, of working out these principles would be to

devote a few lectures in the last term of every complete course, to

the examination of some select works of recent writers, chosen under

the sanction of the Educational Committee. But I must plead for

_whole_ works. "Extracts" and "Select Beauties" are about as

practical as the worthy in the old story, who, wishing to sell his

house, brought one of the bricks to market as a specimen. It is

equally unfair on the author and on the pupil; for it is impossible

to show the merits or demerits of a work of art, even to explain the

truth or falsehood of any particular passage, except by viewing the

book as an organic whole. And as for the fear of raising a desire to

read more of an author than may be proper--when a work has once been

pointed out as really hurtful, the rest must be left to the best

safeguard which I have yet discovered, in man or woman--the pupil's

own honour.

Such a knowledge of English literature would tend no less, I think,

to the spread of healthy historic views among us. The literature of

every nation is its autobiography. Even in its most complex and

artistic forms, it is still a wonderfully artless and unconscious

record of its doubts and its faith, its sorrows and its triumphs, at

each era of its existence. Wonderfully artless and correct--because

all utterances which were not faithful to their time, which did not

touch some sympathetic chord in their heart's souls, are pretty sure

to have been swept out into wholesome oblivion, and only the most

genuine and earnest left behind for posterity. The history of

England indeed is the literature of England--but one very different

from any school history or other now in vogue. You will find it

neither a mere list of acts of parliament and record-office, like

some; nor yet an antiquarian gallery of costumes and armour, like

others; nor a mere war-gazette and report of killed and wounded from

time to time; least of all not a "Debrett's Peerage," and catalogue

of kings and queens (whose names are given, while their souls are

ignored), but a true spiritual history of England--a picture of the

spirits of our old forefathers, who worked, and fought, and sorrowed,

and died for us; on whose accumulated labours we now here stand.

_That_ I call a history--not of one class of offices or events, but

of the living human souls of English men and English women. And

therefore one most adapted to the mind of woman; one which will call

into fullest exercise her blessed faculty of sympathy, that pure and

tender heart of flesh, which teaches her always to find her highest

interest in mankind, simply as mankind; to see the Divine most

completely in the human; to prefer the incarnate to the disembodied,

the personal to the abstract, the pathetic to the intellectual; to

see, and truly, in the most common tale of village love or sorrow, a

mystery deeper and more divine than lies in all the theories of

politicians or the fixed ideas of the sage.

Such a course of history would quicken women's inborn _personal

interest_ in the actors of this life-drama, and be quickened by it in

return, as indeed it ought: for it is thus that God intended woman

to look instinctively at the world. Would to God that she would

teach us men to look at it thus likewise! Would to God that she

would in these days claim and fulfil to the uttermost her vocation as

the priestess of charity!--that woman's heart would help to deliver

man from bondage to his own tyrannous and all-too-exclusive brain--

from our idolatry of mere dead laws and printed books--from our daily

sin of looking at men, not as our struggling and suffering brothers,

but as mere symbols of certain formulae), incarnations of sets of

opinions, wheels in some iron liberty-grinding or Christianity-

spinning machine, which we miscall society, or civilisation, or,

worst misnomer of all, the Church!

This I take to be one of the highest aims of woman--to preach

charity, love, and brotherhood: but in this nineteenth century,

hunting everywhere for law and organisation, refusing loyalty to

anything which cannot range itself under its theories, she will never

get a hearing, till her knowledge of the past becomes more organised

and methodic. As it is now, for want of large many-sided views of

the past, her admiration is too apt to attach itself to some two or

three characters only in the hero-list of all the ages. Then comes

the temptation to thrust aside all which interferes with her

favourite idols, and so the very heart given her for universal

sympathy becomes the organ of an exclusive bigotry, and she who

should have taught man to love, too often only embitters his hate. I

claim, therefore, as necessary for the education of the future, that

woman should be initiated into the thoughts and feelings of her

countrymen in every age, from the wildest legends of the past to the

most palpable naturalism of the present; and that not merely in a

chronological order, sometimes not in chronological order at all; but

in a true spiritual sequence; that knowing the hearts of many, she

may in after life be able to comfort the hearts of all.

But there is yet another advantage in an extended study of English

literature--I mean the more national tone which it ought to give the

thoughts of the rising generation. Of course to repress the reading

of foreign books, to strive after any national exclusiveness, or mere

John-Bullism of mind, in an age of railroads and free press, would be

simply absurd--and more, it would be fighting against the will of God

revealed in events. He has put the literary treasures of the

Continent into our hands; we must joyfully accept them, and earnestly

exhaust them. This age is craving for what it calls catholicity; for

more complete interchange and brotherhood of thought between all the

nations of the earth. This spirit is stirring in the young

especially, and I believe that God Himself has inspired it, because I

see that He has first revealed the means of gratifying the desire, at

that very time in which it has arisen.

But every observant person must be aware that this tendency has

produced its evils as well as its good. There is a general complaint

that the minds of young women are becoming un-English; that their

foreign reading does not merely supply the deficiencies of their

English studies, but too often completely supersedes them; that the

whole tone of their thoughts is too often taken from French or German

writings; that by some means or other, the standard works of English

literature are becoming very much undervalued and neglected by the

young people of this day; and that self-will and irregular

eclecticism are the natural results.

I must say that I consider the greater part of these evils as the

natural consequence of past mis-education; as the just punishment of

the old system, which attached the most disproportionate importance

to mere acquirements, and those mostly of foreign languages, foreign

music, and so forth, while the "well of English undefiled," and not

only that, but English literature, history, patriotism, too often

English religion, have been made quite minor considerations.

Therefore so few of the young have any healthy and firm English

standard whereby to try and judge foreign thought. Therefore they

fancy, when they meet with anything deep and attractive in foreign

works, that because they have no such thoughts put before them in

English authors, no such thoughts exist in them.

But happily we may do much towards mending this state of things, by

making our pupils thoroughly conversant with the aesthetic treasures

of English literature. From them I firmly believe they may derive

sufficient rules whereby to separate in foreign books the true from

the false, the necessary from the accidental, the eternal truth from

its peculiar national vesture. Above all, we shall give them a

better chance of seeing things from that side from which God intended

English women to see them: for as surely as there is an English view

of everything, so surely God intends us to take that view; and He who

gave us our English character intends us to develop its

peculiarities, as He intends the French woman to develop hers, that

so each nation by learning to understand itself, may learn to

understand, and therefore to profit, by its neighbour. He who has

not cultivated his own plot of ground will hardly know much about the

tillage of his neighbour's land. And she who does not appreciate the

mind of her own countrymen will never form any true judgment of the

mind of foreigners. Let English women be sure that the best way to

understand the heroines of the Continent is not by mimicking them,

however noble they may be, not by trying to become a sham Rahel, or a

sham De Sevigne, but a real Elizabeth Fry, Felicia Hemans, or Hannah

More. What indeed entitles either Madame de Sevigne or Rahel to

fame, but their very nationality--that intensely local style of

language and feeling which clothes their genius with a living body

instead of leaving it in the abstractions of a dreary cosmopolitism?

The one I suppose would be called the very beau-ideal, not of woman,

but of the French woman--the other the ideal, not even of the Jewess,

but of the German Jewess. We may admire wherever we find worth; but

if we try to imitate, we only caricature. Excellence grows in all

climes, transplants to none: the palm luxuriates only in the

tropics, the Alp-rose only beside eternal snows. Only by standing on

our own native earth can we enjoy or even see aright the distant

stars: if we try to reach them, we shall at once lose sight of them,

and drop helpless in a new element, unfitted for our limbs.

Teach, then, the young, by an extended knowledge of English

literature, thoroughly to comprehend the English spirit, thoroughly

to see that the English mind has its peculiar calling on God's earth,

which alone, and no other, it can fulfil. Teach them thoroughly to

appreciate the artistic and intellectual excellences of their own

country; but by no means in a spirit of narrow bigotry: tell them

fairly our national faults--teach them to unravel those faults from

our national virtues; and then there will be no danger of the

prejudiced English woman becoming by a sudden revulsion an equally

prejudiced cosmopolite and eclectic, as soon as she discovers that

her own nation does not monopolise all human perfections; and so

trying to become German, Italian, French woman, all at once--a

heterogeneous chaos of imitations, very probably with the faults of

all three characters, and the graces of none. God has given us our

own prophets, our own heroines. To recognise those prophets, to

imitate those heroines, is the duty which lies nearest to the English

woman, and therefore the duty which God intends her to fulfil.

I should wish therefore in the first few lectures on English

literature to glance at the character of our old Saxon ancestors, and

the legends connected with their first invasion of the country; and

above all at the magnificent fables of King Arthur and his times

which exercised so great an influence on the English mind, and were

in fact, although originally Celtic, so thoroughly adopted and

naturalised by the Saxon, as to reappear under different forms in

every age, and form the keynote of most of our fictions, from

Geoffrey of Monmouth and the medieval ballads, up to Chaucer,

Spenser, Shakespeare, and at last Milton and Blackmore. This series

of legends will, I think, as we trace its development, bring us in

contact one by one with the corresponding developments of the English

character; and, unless I am much mistaken, enable us to explain many

of its peculiarities.

Of course nothing more than sketches can be given; but I think

nothing more is required for any one but the professed historian.

For young people especially, it is sufficient to understand the tone

of human feeling expressed by legends, rather than to enter into any

critical dissertations on their historic truth. They need, after

all, principles rather than facts. To educate them truly we must

give them inductive habits of thought, and teach them to deduce from

a few facts a law which makes plain all similar ones, and so acquire

the habit of extracting from every story somewhat of its kernel of

spiritual meaning. But again, to educate them truly we must

ourselves have faith; we must believe that in every one there is a

spiritual eye which can perceive those great principles when they are

once fairly presented to it, that in all there are some noble

instincts, some pure yearnings after wisdom, and taste, and

usefulness, which, if we only appeal to them trustfully through the

examples of the past, and the excitements of the present, will wake

into conscious life. Above all, both pupils and teachers must never

forget that all these things were written for their examples; that

though circumstances and creeds, schools and tastes, may alter, yet

the heart of man, and the duty of man, remain unchanged; and that

while

The old order changes, giving place to the new,

And God fulfils himself in many ways--

yet again