The Committee on Publications of the Grolier Club
certifies that this copy of "One Hundred Books
Famous in English Literature" is one of three
hundred and five copies printed on hand-made
paper, and that all were printed during the year
nineteen hundred and two.
ONE HUNDRED BOOKS
FAMOUS IN
ENGLISH LITERATURE
ONE HUNDRED BOOKS
FAMOUS IN
ENGLISH LITERATURE
WITH FACSIMILES OF
THE TITLE-PAGES
AND AN INTRODUCTION BY
GEORGE E. WOODBERRY
THE GROLIER CLUB
OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
M CM II
Copyright, 1902, by
THE GROLIER CLUB OF THE
CITY OF NEW YORK
FACSIMILE TITLES
TITLE AUTHOR DATE PAGE
First Page of the Canterbury Tales Chaucer 1478 3
First Page of the Confessio Amantis Gower 1483 5
First Page of the Morte Arthure Malory 1485 7
The Booke of Common Praier 1549 9
The Vision of Pierce Plowman Langland 1550 11
Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and
Ireland Holinshed 1577 13
A Myrrour for Magistrates 1563 15
Songes and Sonettes Surrey 1567 17
The Tragidie of Ferrex and Porrex Sackville 1570 19
Euphues. The Anatomy of Wit Lylie 1579 21
The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia Sidney 1590 23
The Faerie Queene Spenser 1590 25
Essaies Bacon 1598 27
The Principal Navigations, Voiages,
Traffiques and Discoveries of the
English Nation Hakluyt 1598 29
The Whole Works of Homer Chapman 1611 31
The Holy Bible King James's 1611 33
Version
The Workes of Benjamin Jonson Jonson 1616 35
The Anatomy of Melancholy Burton 1621 37
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies,
Histories, & Tragedies Shakespeare 1623 39
The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy Webster 1623 41
A New Way to Pay Old Debts Massinger 1633 43
The Broken Heart Ford 1633 45
The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of
Malta Marlowe 1633 47
The Temple Herbert 1633 49
Poems Donne 1633 51
Religio Medici Browne 1642 53
The Workes of Edmond Waller Esquire 1645 55
Comedies and Tragedies Beaumont 1647 57
and Fletcher
Hesperides Herrick 1648 59
The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living Taylor 1650 61
The Compleat Angler Walton 1653 63
Hudibras Butler 1663 65
Paradise Lost Milton 1667 67
The Pilgrims Progress Bunyan 1678 69
Absalom and Achitophel Dryden 1681 71
An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding Locke 1690 73
The Way of the World Congreve 1700 75
The History of the Rebellion and Civil
Wars in England Clarendon 1702 77
The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff Steele 1710 79
Esq.
The Spectator Addison 1711 81
The Life and Strange Surprizing
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Defoe 1719 83
Travels into Several Remote Nations of
the World Swift 1726 85
An Essay on Man Pope 1733 87
The Analogy of Religion Butler 1736 89
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry Percy 1765 91
Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric
Subjects Collins 1747 93
Clarissa Richardson 1748 95
The History of Tom Jones Fielding 1749 97
An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard Gray 1751 99
A Dictionary of the English Language Johnson 1755 101
Poor Richard's Almanack Franklin 1758 103
Commentaries on the Laws of England Blackstone 1765 105
The Vicar of Wakefield Goldsmith 1766 107
A Sentimental Journey Sterne 1768 109
The Federalist 1788 111
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker Smollett 16[7]71 113
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations Smith 1776 115
The History of the Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire Gibbon 1776 117
The School for Scandal Sheridan 1777 119
The Task Cowper 1785 121
Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect Burns 1786 123
The Natural History and Antiquities of
Selborne White 1789 125
Reflections on the Revolution in France Burke 1790 127
Rights of Man Paine 1791 129
The Life of Samuel Johnson Boswell 1791 131
Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth 1798 133
A History of New York, from the Beginning
of the World to the End of the
Dutch Dynasty Irving 1809 135
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Byron 1812 137
Pride and Prejudice Austen 1813 139
Christabel Coleridge 1816 141
Ivanhoe Scott 1820 143
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes,
and Other Poems Keats 1820 145
Adonais Shelley 1821 147
Elia Lamb 1823 149
Memoirs of Samuel Pepys, Esq. F.R.S. Pepys 1825 151
The Last of the Mohicans Cooper 1826 153
Pericles and Aspasia Landor 1836 155
The Pickwick Papers Dickens 1837 157
Sartor Resartus Carlyle 1834 159
Nature Emerson 1836 161
History of the Conquest of Peru Prescott 1847 163
The Raven and Other Poems Poe 1845 165
Jane Eyre Brontë 1847 167
Evangeline Longfellow 1847 169
Sonnets Mrs. Browning 1847 171
The Biglow Papers Lowell 1848 173
Vanity Fair Thackeray 1848 175
The History of England Macaulay 1849 177
In Memoriam Tennyson 1850 179
The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne 1850 181
Uncle Tom's Cabin Mrs. Stowe 1852 183
The Stones of Venice Ruskin 1851 185
Men and Women Browning 1855 187
The Rise of the Dutch Republic Motley 1856 189
Adam Bede George Eliot 1859 191
On the Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection Darwin 1859 193
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám Fitzgerald 1859 195
Apologia pro Vita Sua Newman 1864 197
Essays in Criticism Arnold 1865 199
Snow-Bound Whittier 1866 201
* * * * *
Except where noted, all facsimiles of title-pages
are of the size of those in the original editions.
[Illustration]
INTRODUCTION
A BOOK is judged by its peers. In the presence of the greater works of
authors there is no room for personal criticism; they constitute in
themselves the perpetual mind of the race, and dispense with any private
view. The eye rests on these hundred titles of books famous in English
literature, as it reads a physical map by peak, river and coast, and
sees in miniature the intellectual conformation of a nation. A different
selection would only mean another point of view; some minor features
might be replaced by others of similar subordination; but the mass of
imagination and learning, the mind-achievement of the English race, is
as unchangeable as a mountain landscape. Perspective thrusts its
unconscious judgment upon the organs of sight, also; if Gower is thin
with distance and the clump of the Elizabethans shows crowded with low
spurs, the eye is not therefore deceived by the large pettiness of the
foreground with its more numerous and distinct details. The mass
governs. Darwin appeals to Milton; Shelley is judged by Pope, and
Hawthorne by Congreve.
These books must of necessity be national books; for fame, which is
essentially the highest gift of which man has the giving, cannot be
conferred except by a public voice. Fame dwells upon the lips of men. It
is not that memorable books must all be people's books, though the
greatest are such--the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible, Shakespeare;
but those which embody some rare intellectual power, or illuminate some
seldom visited tract of the spirit, or merely display some peculiar
taste in learning or pastime, must yet have something racial in them,
something public, to secure their hold against the detaching power of
time; they must be English books, not in tongue only, but body and soul.
They are not less the books of a nation because they are remote,
superfine, uncommon. Such are the books of the poets--the Faërie Queene;
books of the nobles--Arcadia; books of the scholar--the Anatomy of
Melancholy. These books open the national genius as truly, kind by kind,
as books of knowledge exhibit the nation's advancement in learning,
stage by stage, when new sciences are brought to the birth. The Wealth
of Nations, Locke's Essay, Blackstone's Commentaries, are not merely the
product of private minds. They are landmarks of English intellect; and
more, since they pass insensibly into the power of civilization in the
land, feeding the general mind. The limited appeal that many classics
made in their age, and still make, indicates lack of development in
particular persons; but however numerous such individuals may be, in
whatever majorities they may mass, the mind of the race, once having
flowered, has flowered with the vigor of the stock. The Compleat Angler
finds a rustic breast under much staid cloth; Pepys was never at a loss
for a gossip since his seals were broken, and Donne evokes his
fellow-eccentric whose hermitage is the scholar's bosom; but whether the
charm work on few or on many is indifferent, for whom they affect, they
affect through consanguinity. The books of a nation are those which are
appropriate to its genius and embody its variations amid the changes of
time; even its sports, like Euphues, are itself; and the works which
denote the evolution of its civilized life in fructifying progress,
whose increasing diversities are yet held in the higher harmony of one
race, one temperament, one destiny, are without metaphor its Sibylline
books, and true oracles of empire.
It is a sign of race in literature that a book can spare what is private
to its author, and comes at last to forgo his earth-life altogether.
This is obvious of works of knowledge, since positive truth gains
nothing from personality, but feels it as an alloy; and a wise analysis
will affirm the same of all long-lived books. Works of science are
charters of nature, and submit to no human caprice; and, in a similar
way, works of imagination, which are to the inward world of the spirit
what works of science are to the natural universe, are charters of the
soul, and borrow nothing from the hand that wrote them. How deciduous
such books are of the private life needs only to be stated to be
allowed. They cast biography from them like the cloak of the ascending
prophet. An author is not rightly to be reckoned among immortals until
he has been forgotten as a man, and become a shade in human memory, the
myth of his own work. The anecdote lingering in the Mermaid Tavern is
cocoon-stuff, and left for waste; time spiritualizes the soul it
released in Shakespeare, and the speedier the change, so much the purer
is the warrant of a life above death in the minds of men. The loneliness
of antique names is the austerity of fame, and only therewith do Milton,
Spenser, Chaucer, seem nobly clad and among equals; the nude figure of
Shelley at Oxford is symbolical and prophetic of this disencumberment of
mortality, the freed soul of the poet,--like Bion, a divine form. Not to
speak of those greatest works, the Prayer Book, the Bible, which seem so
impersonal in origin as to be the creation of the English tongue itself
and the genius of language adoring God; nor of Hakluyt or Clarendon,
whose books are all men's actions; how little do the most isolated and
seclusive authors, Surrey, Collins, Keats, perpetuate except the pure
poet! In these hundred famous books there are few valued for aught more
than they contain in themselves, or which require any other light to
read them by than what they bring with them; they are rather hampered
than helped by the recollection of their authors' careers. Sidney adds
lustre to the Arcadia; an exception among men, in this as in all other
ways, by virtue of that something supereminent in him which dazzled his
own age. But who else of famous authors is greater in his life than in
his book? It is the book that gives significance to the man, not the man
to the book. These authors would gain by oblivion of themselves, and
that in proportion to their greatness, thereby being at once removed
into the impersonal region of man's permanent spirit and of art. The
exceptions are only seemingly such; it is Johnson's thought and the
style of a great mind that preserve Boswell, not his human grossness;
and in Pepys it is the mundane and every-day immortality of human
nature, this permanently curious and impertinent world, not his own
scandal and peepings, that yield him allowance in libraries. In all
books to which a nation stands heir, it is man that survives,--the
aspect of an epoch, the phase of a religion, the mood of a generation,
the taste, sentiment, thought, pursuit, entertainment, of a historic and
diversified people. There is nothing accidental in the fact that of
these hundred books forty-six bear no author's name upon the title-page;
nor is this due merely to the eldest style of printing, as with Chaucer,
Gower, Malory, Langland; nor to the inclusion of works by several
hands--the Book of Common Prayer, the Mirror for Magistrates, the
Tatler, the Spectator, the Reliques, the Federalist; nor to the use of
initials, as in the case of Donne and Mrs. Browning. The characteristic
is constant. It is interesting to note the names thus self-suppressed:
Sackville, Spenser, Bacon, Burton, Browne, Walton, Butler, Dryden,
Locke, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Gray, Franklin, Goldsmith,
Sterne, Smollett, Sheridan, White, Wordsworth, Irving, Austen, Scott,
Lamb, Cooper, Carlyle, Emerson, Brontë, Lowell, Tennyson, George Eliot,
Fitzgerald.
The broad and various nationality of English literature is a condition
precedent to greatness, and underlies its mighty fortune. Its chief
glory is its continuity, by which it exceeds the moderns, and must, with
ages, surpass antiquity. Literary genius has been so unfailing in the
English race that men of this blood live in the error that literature,
like light and air, is a common element in the life of populations.
Literature is really the work of selected nations, and with them is not
a constant product. Many nations have no literature, and in fertile
nations there are barren centuries. The splendid perpetuity of Greek
literature, which covered two thousand years, was yet broken by lean
ages, by periods of desert dearth. In the English, beginning from
Chaucer (as is just, since he is our Homer, whatever ages went before
Troy or Canterbury), there have been reigns without a poet; and Greek
example might prepare the mind for Alexandrian and Byzantine periods in
the future, were it not for the grand combinations of world-colonies and
world-contacts which open new perspectives of time for which the mind,
as part of its faith in life, requires destinies as large. The gaps,
however, were greatest at the beginning, and grow less. One soil, one
government, one evenly unfolded civilization--long life in the settled
and peaceful land--contribute to this continuity of literature in the
English; but its explanation lies in the integrity of English nurture,
and this is essentially the same in all persons of English blood. Homer
was not more truly the school of Greece than the Bible has been the
school of the English. It has overcome all external change in form, rule
and institution, fused conventicle and cathedral, and in dissolving
separate and narrow bonds of union has proved the greatest bond of all,
and become like a tie of blood. English piety is of one stock, and
through every book of holy living where its treasures are laid up, there
blows the breath of one Spirit. Herbert and Bunyan are peers of a faith
undivided in the hearts of their countrymen. It does not change, but is
the same yesterday, to-day and forever. On the secular side, also,
English nurture has been of the like simple strain. The instinct of
adventure, English derring-do, has never failed. Holinshed and Hakluyt
were its chroniclers of old; and from the Morte d'Arthur to Sidney, from
the Red-Cross Knight to Ivanhoe, from Shakespeare's Henry to Tennyson's
Grenville, genius has not ceased to stream upon it, a broad river of
light. The Word of God fed English piety; English daring was fed upon
the deeds of men. Hear Shakespeare's Henry: "Plutarch always delights me
with a fresh novelty. To love him is to love me; for he has been long
time the instructor of my youth. My good mother, to whom I owe all, and
who would not wish, she said, to see her son an illustrious dunce, put
this book into my hands almost when I was a child at the breast. It has
been like my conscience, and has whispered in my ear many good
suggestions and maxims for my conduct and the government of my affairs."
The English Plutarch is written on the earth's face. Its battles have
named the lands and seas of all the world; but, as was said of English
piety, from Harold to Cromwell, from the first Conqueror to Wellington,
from the Black Prince to Gordon, English daring--the strength of the
yeoman, the breath of the noble--is of one stock. Race lasts; those who
are born in the eyrie find eagles' food. This has planted iron
resolution and all-hazarding courage in epic-drama and battle-ode, and,
as in the old riddle, feeds on what it fed. English literature is brave,
martial, and brings forth men-children. It has the clarion strength of
empire; like Taillefer at Hastings, Drayton and Tennyson still lead the
charge at Agincourt and Balaclava. As Shakespeare's Henry was nourished,
so was the English spirit in all ages bred. This integrity of English
nurture, seen in these two great modes of life turned toward God in the
soul and toward the world in action, is as plainly to be discerned in
details as in these generalities; and to state only one other broad
aspect of the facts governing the continuity of literary genius in the
English, but one that goes to the foundations, the condition that both
vivifies and controls that genius in law, metaphysics, science, in all
political writing, whether history, theory, or discussion, as well as in
the creative and artistic modes of its development, is freedom. The
freedom of England, which is the parent of its greatness in all ways, is
as old in the race as fear of God and love of peril; and, through its
manifold and primary operation in English nurture, is the true continuer
of its literature.
A second grand trait of English literature that is writ large on these
title-pages, is its enormous assimilative power. So great is this that
he who would know English must be a scholar in all literatures, and that
with no shallow learning. The old figure of the torch handed down from
nation to nation, as the type of man's higher life, gives up its full
meaning only to the student, and to him it may come to seem that the
torch is all and the hand that bears it dust and ashes; often he finds
in its light only the color of his own studies, and names it Greek,
Semitic, Hindu, and looks on English, French and Latin as mere carriers
of the flame. In so old a symbol there must be profound truth, and it
conveys the sense of antiquity in life, of the deathlessness of
civilization, and something also of its superhuman origin--the divine
gift of fire transmitted from above; but civilization is more than an
inheritance, it is a power; and truth is always more than it was; and
wherever the torch is lit, its light is the burning of a living race of
men. The dependence of the present on the past, of a younger on an older
people, of one nation on another, is often misinterpreted and misleads;
life cannot be given, but only knowledge, example, direction--influence,
but not essence; and the impact of one literature upon another, or of an
old historic culture upon a new and ungrown people, is more external
than is commonly represented. The genius of a nation born to greatness
is irresistible, it remains itself, it does not become another. The
Greeks conquered Rome, men say, through the mind; and Rome conquered the
barbarians through the mind; but in Gibbon who finds Greece? and the
mind of Europe does not bear the ruling stamp of either Byzantine or
Italian Rome. In the narrowly temporal and personal view, even under the
overwhelming might of Greece, Virgil remained, what Tennyson calls him,
"Roman Virgil"; and in the other capital instance of apparently
all-conquering literary power, under the truth that went forth from
Judea into all lands, Dante remained Italian and Milton English. Yet in
these three poets, whose names are synonyms of their countries, the
assimilated element is so great that their minds might be said to have
been educated abroad.
What is true of Milton is true of the young English mind, from Chaucer
and earlier. In the beginning English literature was a part of European
literature, and held a position in it analogous to that which the
literature of America occupies in all English speech; it was not so much
colonial as a part of the same world. The first works were European
books written on English soil; Chaucer, Gower and Malory used the matter
of Europe, but they retained the tang of English, as Emerson keeps the
tang of America. The name applied to Gower, "the moral Gower," speaks
him English; and Arthur, "the flower of kings," remains forever Arthur
of Britain; and the Canterbury pilgrimage, whatever the source of the
world-wandering tales, gives the first crowded scene of English life. In
Langland, whose form was mediæval, lay as in the seed the religious and
social history of a protestant, democratic, and labor-honoring nation.
In the next age, with the intellectual sovereignty of humanism, Surrey,
Sackville, Lyly, Sidney and Spenser put all the new realms of letters
under tribute, and made capture with a royal hand of whatever they would
have for their own of the world's finer wealth; the dramatists gathered
again the tales of all nations; and, period following period, Italy,
Spain and France in turn, and the Hebrew, Greek and Latin unceasingly,
brought their treasures, light or precious, to each generation of
authors, until the last great burst of the age now closing, itself
indebted most universally to all the past and all the world. Yet each
new wave that washed empire to the land retreated, leaving the genius of
English unimpaired and richer only in its own strength. Notwithstanding
the _concettisti_, the heroic drama, the Celtic mist, which passed like
shadows from the kingdom, the instinct of the authors held to the
massive sense of Latin and the pure form of Greek and Italian, and
constituted these the enduring humane culture of English letters and
their academic tradition. The permanence of this tradition in literary
education has been of vast importance, and is to the literary class, in
so far as they are separate by training, what the integrity of English
nurture at large has been to the nation. The poets, especially, have
been learned in this culture; and, so far from being self-sprung from
the soil, were moulded into power by every finer touch of time. Chaucer,
Spenser, Milton, Gray, Shelley, Tennyson are the capital names that
illustrate the toil of the scholar, and approve the mastery of that
classical culture which has ever been the most fruitful in the choicest
minds. As on the broad scale English literature is distinguished by its
general assimilative power, being hospitable to all knowledge, it is
most deeply and intimately, because continuously, indebted to humane
studies, in the strictest sense, and has derived from them not, as in
many other cases, transitory matter and the fashion of an hour, but the
form and discipline of art itself. In assimilating this to English
nature, literary genius incurred its greatest obligation, and in thereby
discovering artistic freedom found its greatest good. This academic
tradition has created English culture, which is perhaps best described
as an instinctive standard of judgment, and is the necessary complement
to that openness of mind that has characterized English literature from
the first. Nor is this last word a paradox, but the simple truth, as is
plain from the assimilative power here dwelt upon. The English genius is
always itself; no element of greatness could inhere in it otherwise;
but, in literature, it has had the most open mind of any nation.
A third trait of high distinction in English literature, of which this
list is a reminder, and one not unconnected with its continuity and
receptivity, is its copiousness. This is not a matter of mere number,
of voluminousness; there is an abundance of kinds. In the literature
of knowledge, what branch is unfruitful, and in the literature of
power, what fountainhead is unstruck by the rod? Only the Italian
genius in its prime shows such supreme equality in diversity. How many
human interests are exemplified, and how many amply illustrated,
exhibiting in a true sense and not by hyperbole myriad-minded man! In
the English genius there seems something correspondent to this
marvellous efficacy of faculty and expression; it has largeness of
power. The trait most commonly thought of in connection with Aristotle
as an individual--"master of those who know"--and in connection with
mediæval schoolmen as a class, is not less characteristic of the
English, though it appears less. The voracity of Chaucer for all
literary knowledge, which makes him encyclopædic of a period, is matched
at the end of these centuries by Newman, whose capaciousness of
intellect was inclusive of all he cared to know. Bacon, in saying, "I
take all knowledge to be my province," did not so much make a personal
boast as utter a national motto. The great example is, of course,
Shakespeare, on whose universality later genius has exhausted metaphor;
but for everything that he knew in little, English can show a large
literature, and exceeds his comprehensiveness. The fact is best
illustrated by adverting to what this list spares. English is rich in
translations, and in this sort of exchange the balance of trade is
always in favor of the importer. Homer alone is included here,--to
except the Bible, which has been so inbred in England as to have become
an English book to an eye that clings to the truth through all
appearances; but how rich in great national books is a literature that
can omit so noble a work, though translated, and one so historic in
English, as North's Plutarch! In the literature of knowledge, Greek
could hardly have passed over Euclid; but Newton's Principia is here not
required. Sir Thomas More is one of the noblest English names, and his
Utopia is a memorable book; but it drops from the list. Nor is it names
and books only that disappear; but, as these last instances suggest,
kinds of literature go out with them. Platonism falls into silence with
the pure tones of Vaughan, in whom light seems almost audible; and the
mystic Italian fervor of the passional spirit fades with Crashaw. The
books of politeness, though descended from Castiglione, depart with
Chesterfield, perhaps from some pettiness that had turned courtesy into
etiquette; and parody retires with Buckingham. Latin literature was
almost rewritten in English during the eighteenth century; but the
traces of it here are few. Of inadequate representation, how slight is
burlesque in Butler, and the presence of Chevy Chase hardly compensates
for the absence of the war-ballad in Drayton and Campbell. So it is with
a hundred instances. In another way of illustration, it is to be borne
in mind that each author appears by only one title; and while it may be
true that commonly each finer spirit stores up his immortality in some
one book that is a more perfect vessel of time, yet fecundity is rightly
reckoned as a sign of greatness and measure of it in the most, and the
production of many books makes a name bulk larger. Mass counts, when in
addition to quality; and the greatest have been plentiful writers. No
praise can make Gray seem more than a remnant of genius, and no
qualification of the verdict can deprive Dryden and Jonson of largeness.
It belongs to genius to tire not in creation, thereby imitating the
excess of nature flowing from unhusbanded sources. Yet among these
hundred books, as in scientific classification, one example must stand
for all, except when some folio, like an ark, comes to the rescue of a
Beaumont and Fletcher. This is cutting the diamond with itself. But
within these limits, narrowing circle within circle, what a universe of
man remains! Culture after culture, epoch by epoch, are laid bare as in
geologic strata,--mediæval tale and history, humanistic form, the
Shakespearian age, Puritan, Cavalier, man scientific, reforming, reborn
into a new natural, political, artistic world, man modern; and in every
layer of imagination and learning lies, whole and entire, a buried
English age. It is by virtue of its copiousness that English literature
is so representative, both of man's individual spirit in its restless
forms of apprehension and embodiment, and of its historic formulation in
English progress as national power.
The realization of this long-lived, far-gathering, abounding English
literature, in these external phases, leaves untouched its original
force. Whence is its germinating power,--what is this genius of the
English? It is the same in literature as in all its other manifold
manifestations, for man is forever unitary and of one piece. Curiosity,
which is the distinction of progressive peoples, is perhaps its initial
and moving source. The trait which has sent the English broadcast over
the world and mingled their history with the annals of all nations is
the same that has so blended their literature with the history of all
tongues. The acquisitive power which has created the empire of the
English, with dominion on dominion, is parallel with the faculty that
assimilates past literatures with the body of their literary speech. But
curiosity is only half the word. It is singular that the first quality
which occurs to the mind in connection with the English is, almost
universally and often exclusively, their practicality. They are really
the most romantic of all nations; romanticism is the other half of their
genius, and supplements that positive element of knowledge-hunting or
truth-seeking which is indicated by their endless curiosity. Possibly
the Elizabethan age is generally thought of as a romantic period, as if
it were exceptional; and the romantic vigor of the late Georgian period,
though everywhere acknowledged, is primarily regarded as more strictly a
literary and not a national characteristic in its time; but, like all
interesting history, English history was continuously romantic. The days
of the crusaders, the Wars of the Roses and the French wars were of the
same strain in action and character, in adventurous travel, in personal
fate, in contacts, as were the times of Shakespeare's world or of the
world of Waterloo. What a reinforcement of character in the English has
India been, how restorative of greatness in the blood! It must be that
romanticism should characterize a great race, and, when appealing to a
positive genius, the greatest race; for in it are all the invitations of
destiny. Futurity broods and brings forth in its nest. Romanticism is
the lift of life in a people that does not merely continue, but grows,
spreads and overcomes. The sphere of the word is not to be too narrowly
confined, as only a bookish phrase of polite letters.
In the world of knowledge the pursuit of truth is romantic. The
scientific inquirer lives in a realm of strangeness and in the presence
of the unknown, in a place so haunted with profound feeling, so electric
with the emotions that feed great minds, that whether awe of the
unsolved or of the solved be the stronger sentiment he cannot tell; and
the appeal made to him--to the explorer in every bodily peril, to the
experimenter in the den of untamed forces, to the thinker in his
solitude--is often a romantic appeal. The moments of great discoveries
are romantic moments, as is seen in Keats's sonnet, lifting Cortez and
the star-gazer on equal heights with the reader of the Iliad. The epic
of science is a Columbiad without end. Nor is this less true of those
branches of knowledge esteemed most dry and prosaic. Locke, Adam Smith,
Darwin were all similarly placed with Pythagoras, Aristotle and
Copernicus; the mind, society and nature, severally, were their
Americas. Even in this age of the mechanical application of forces,
which by virtue of the large part of these inventions in daily and
world-wide life seems superficially, and is called, a materialistic age,
romanticism is paramount and will finally be seen so. Are not these
things in our time what Drake and Spanish gold and Virginia, what Clive
and the Indies, were to other centuries? It is true that the element of
commercial gain blends with other phases of our inventions, and seems a
debasement, an avarice; but so it was in all ages. Nor are the
applications of scientific discovery for the material ends of wealth
other or relatively greater now than the applications of geographical
discovery, for example, to the same ends were in Elizabeth's reign and
later. In the first ages commercial gain was in league with the waves
from which rose the Odyssey,--a part of that early trading, coasting
world, as it was always a part of the artistic world of Athens. Gain in
any of its material forms, whether wealth, power or rank, does not
debase the knowledge, the courage of heart, the skill of hand and brain,
from which it flows, for it is their natural and proper fruit; nor does
it by itself materialize either the man or the nation, else civilization
were doomed from the start, and the pursuit of truth would end in
humiliation and ignominy. It is rather the attitude of mind toward this
new world of knowledge and this spectacle of man now imperializing
through nature's forces, as formerly through discovery of the earth's
lands and seas, that makes the character of our age. Romanticism, being
the enveloping mood in whose atmosphere the spirit of man beholds life,
and, as it were, the light on things, changes its aspect in the process
of the ages with the emergence of each new world of man's era; and as it
once inhered in English loyalty and the piety of Christ's sepulchre, and
in English voyaging over-seas and colonizing of the lands, it now
inheres in the conquest of natural force for the arts of peace. The
present age exceeds its predecessors in marvel in proportion as the
victories of the intellect are in a world of finer secrecy than any
horizon veils, and build an empire of greater breadth and endurance than
any monarch or sovereign people or domineering race selfishly achieves;
its victories are in the unseen of force and thought, and it brings
among men the undecaying empire of knowledge, as inexpugnable as the
mind in man and as inappropriable as light and air. Here, as elsewhere,
it is the sensual eye that sees the sensual thing, but the spiritual eye
spiritually discerns. It is romance that adds this "precious seeing" to
the eye. Openness to the call, capability of the passion, and character,
so sensitized and moulded in individuals and made hereditary in a
civilization and a race and idealized in conscience, constitute the
motor-genius of a nation, which is its finding faculty; and the
appreciation of results and putting them to the use of men make its
conserving and positive power. These two, indistinguishably married and
blended, are the English genius. A positive genius following a romantic
lead, a romantic genius yielding a positive good, equally describe it
from opposed points of view; yet in the finer spirits and in the long
age the romantic temperament is felt to be the fertilizing element, to
be character as opposed to performance. Greatness lies always in the
unaccomplished deed, as in the lonely anecdote of Newton: "I do not know
what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only
like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then
finding a smoother pebble, or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the
great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." So Tennyson with
his "wages of going on," and Sir John Franklin and Gordon in their
lives. This spiritual breath of the nation in all its activities through
centuries is the breath of its literature, there embodied in its finer
being and applied to the highest uses for the civilization and culture
of the nation by truth and art. In English literary history, and in its
men of genius taken individually, the positive or the romantic may
predominate, each in its own moment; but the conspectus of the whole
assigns to each its true levels. Romanticism condensed in character,
which is the creation of the highest poetic genius, the rarest work of
man, has its illustrative example in Shakespeare, the first of all
writers; he followed it through all its modes, and perhaps its simplest
types are Henry IV for action, Romeo for passion, and Hamlet, which is
the romance of thought. Before Shakespeare, Spenser closed the earliest
age, which had been shaped by a diffused romantic tradition, inherited
from mediævalism, though in its later career masked under Renaissance
forms; and since Shakespeare, a similar diffused romantic prescience, in
the region of the common life and of revolutionary causes most
significantly, brought in our age that has now passed its first flower,
but has yet long to run. These are the three great ages of English
poetry. In the interval between the second and the third, the
magnificently accomplished school of the eighteenth century gave to
English an age of cultivated repose, in which Pope, its best example,
lived on the incomes of the past, and, together with the younger and the
elder men he knew, exhibited in literature that conserving and positive
power which is the economy of national genius; but even in that great
century, wherever the future woke, there was a budding romanticism, in
Collins, Gray, Walpole, Thomson, Cowper, Blake. Such was the history of
English poetry, and the same general statement will be found applicable
to English prose, though in a lower tone, due to the nature of prose.
Taken in the large, important as the positive element in it is, the
English literary genius is, like the race, temperamentally romantic, to
the nerve and bone.
This view becomes increasingly apparent on examination of the service of
this literature to civilization and the individual soul of man, which is
the great function of literature, and of its place in the world of art.
"How shall the world be served?" was Chaucer's question; and it has
never been absent from any great mind of the English stock. The
literature of a nation, however, including, as here, books of knowledge,
is so nearly synonymous with the mind in all its operations in the
national life, as to be coextensive with civilization, and hardly
separable from it. Civilization is cast in the mould of thought, and
retains the brute necessity of nature only as mass, but not as surface;
it is the flowering of human forces in the formal aspect of life, and of
these literature is one mode, reflecting in its many phases all the rest
in their manifestations, and inwardly feeding them in their vital
principle. The universality of its touch on life is indicated by the
fact that it has made the English a lettered people, the alphabet as
common as numbers, and the ability to read almost as wide-spread in the
race as the ability to count. Its service, therefore, cannot be
summarized any more than the dictionary of its words. It is possible to
bring within the compass of a paragraph only hints and guide-marks of
its work; and naturally these would be gathered from its most
comprehensive influences in the higher spheres of intellect and morals,
in the world of ideas, and in the person of those writers who were
either the founders or restorers of knowledge. Such a cardinal service
was the Baconian method, to take a single great instance, which may
almost be said to have reversed the logical habit of the mind of Europe,
and to have summoned nature to a new bar. It is enough to name this. Of
books powerful in intellectual results, Locke's Essay is, perhaps,
thought of as metaphysical and remote, yet it was of immeasurable
influence at home and abroad, so subtly penetrating as to resemble in
scale and intimacy the silent forces of nature. It was great as a
representative of the spirit of rationalism, which it supported and
spread with incalculable results on the temper of educated Europe; and
great also as a product and embodiment of that cold, intellectual habit,
distinctive of a certain kind of English mind, and usually regarded as
radical in the race. It was great by the variety as well as the range of
its influence, and was felt in all regions of abstract thought and those
practical arts, education, government and the like, then most affected
by such thought; it permanently modified the cast of men's minds. In
opposition to it new philosophical movements found their mainspring. A
similar honor belongs to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in another
century. It is customary to eulogize the pioneer, and to credit the
first openers of Californias with the wealth of all the mines worked by
later comers; and, in this sense, the words of Buckle, that have been
placed opposite the title-page, are, perhaps, to be taken: "Adam Smith
contributed more, by the publication of this single work, towards the
happiness of men than has been effected by the united abilities of all
the statesmen and legislators of whom history has preserved an authentic
account." But the excess of the statement is a proof of the largeness of
the truth it contains, and like-minded praise is not from Buckle alone,
but may be found in half a score of thoughtful and temperate authors. In
the last age, Darwin, by his Origin of Species, most arrested the
attention of the scientific mind, and stimulated the highly educated
world with surprise. He was classed with Copernicus, as having brought
man's pretension to be the first of created things, and their lord from
the beginning, under the destroying criticism of scientific time and its
order, in the same way that Copernicus brought the pretension of the
earth to be the centre of the universe under a like criticism of
scientific space and its order; and in these proud statements there is
some measure of truth. The ideas of Darwin compel a readjustment of
man's thoughts with regard to his temporal and natural relation to the
universe in which he finds himself; and the vast generalities of all
evolutionary thought received from Darwin immense stimulus, its method
greater scope, and its results a firmer hold on the general mind, with
an influence still unfathomable upon man's highest beliefs with regard
to his origin and destiny. There are epochs in the intellectual history
of the race as marked as those of the globe; and such works as these, in
the literature of knowledge, show the times of the opening of the seals.
In addition to the service so done in the advancement of civilization by
the discovery of new truth, as great benefaction is accomplished by the
continual agitation and exercise of men's minds in the ideas that are
not new but the ever-living inheritance from the past, whose permanence
through all epochs shows their deep grounding in the race they nourish.
In English such ideas are, especially, in the view of the whole world,
ideas of civil and religious liberty in the widest sense and
particularly as worked out in legal and political history. The common
law of England in Blackstone is a mighty legacy. On the large public
scale, and as involved in the constitutional making of a great nation,
the Federalist is a document invaluable as setting forth essentials of
free government under a particular application; and for comment on
social liberty, Burke, on the conservative, and Paine, on the radical
side, exhibit the scope, the weight and fire of English thought. Of
still greater significance, for the mass and variety of teaching, is
that commentary on man's freedom which is contained in the operation of
liberty and its increase as presented in the long story of England's
greatness recorded in the works of her historians from Holinshed to
Macaulay, with what the last prolific generation has added. They are
exceeded in the dignity of their labors by Gibbon, whose work on Rome,
which Mommsen called the greatest of all histories and is often likened
to a mighty bridge spanning the gulf between the ancient and the modern
world, was a contribution to European learning; but the historians of
English liberty have more profitably served mankind. At yet another
remove, the ideas of liberty--and the mind acquainted with English books
is dazzled by the vast comprehensiveness of such a phrase--are again
poured through the nation's life-blood by all her poets, and well-nigh
all her writers in prose, in one or another mode of the Promethean fire.
These ideas are never silent, never quiescent; they work in the
substance, they shape the form and feature, of English thought; they are
the necessary element of its being; they constitute the race of freemen,
and are known in every language as English ideas. They give sublimity to
the figure of Milton; they are the feeding flame of Shelley's mind; they
alone lift Tennyson to an eagle-flight of song. In the unceasing
celebration of ideal liberty, and its practical life in English
character and events, the literature of England has, perhaps, done a
greater service than in the positive advancement of knowledge, for it is
more fundamental in the national life. Touching the subject almost at
random, such are a few of the points of contact between English books
and the civilization of men.