the individual for what is more distinctly his private gain, in the
enlargement of his life, the direction of his thoughts, and bringing him
into harmony with the world. As, in regard to civilization, the emphasis
lay rather on the literature of knowledge, here it lies on the
literature of power,--on imaginative and reflective works. Its initial
office is educative; it feeds the imagination and the powers of
sympathy, and trains not only the affections but all feeling; and in
these fields it is the only instrument of education outside of real
experience. It is this that gives it such primacy as to make
acquaintance with humane letters almost synonymous with culture. No
actual world is large enough for a man to live in; at the lowest, there
is some tradition of the past, some expectation of the future; and,
though training in the senses is an important part of early life, yet
the greater part of education consists in putting the young in
possession of an unseen world. The biograph is a marvellous toy of the
time, but literature in its lower forms of information, of history,
travel and description, has been a biograph for the mind's eye from the
beginning; and in its higher forms of art it performs a greater service
by bringing into mental vision what it is above the power of nature to
produce. To expand the mind to the compass of space and time, and to
people these with the thoughts of mankind, to revive the past and
penetrate the reality of the present, is the joint work of all
literature; and as a preparation for individual life, in unfolding the
faculties and the feelings, humane letters achieve their most essential
task. Literature furnishes the gymnasia for all youth, in that part of
their nature in which the highest power of humanity lies. But this is
only, as was said, its initial office. Throughout life it acts in the
same way on old and young alike. The dependence of all men on thought,
and of thought on speech, is a profound matter, though as little
considered as gravitation that keeps the world entire; and the speech on
which such a strain of life lies is the speech of books. How has
Longfellow consoled middle life in its human trials, how has Carlyle
roused manhood, and Emerson illumined life for his readers at every
stage! Scott is a benefactor of millions by virtue of the entertainment
he has given to English homes and the lonely hours of his fellow-men,
now for three generations, to an extent hardly measurable in thought;
and so in hardly a less degree is Dickens, and, though diminishing in
inclusive power, are Thackeray, Austen, Brontë, Cooper, Hawthorne,
George Eliot, to name only novelists. Each century has had its own
story-telling from Chaucer down, though masked in the Elizabethan period
as drama, and in each much hearty and refined pleasure has been afforded
by the spectacle of life in books; but in the last age the benefit so
conferred is to be reckoned among the greater blessings of civilization.
It is singular that humor, so prime and constant a factor in English,
should have so few books altogether its own, and these not of the
greater class; but the spirit which yields burlesque in Butler and
Irving, and comedy in Massinger, Congreve and Sheridan, pervades the
body of English literature and characterizes it among national
literatures. The highest mind is incomplete without humor, for a perfect
idealism includes laughter at the real; and it is natural, for, the
principle of humor being incongruity to the intellect, it is properly
most keen in those in whom the idea of order, which is the mother-idea
of the intellect, is most omnipresent and controlling; but as humor is
thus auxiliary in character, it is found to be subordinate also in
English literature as a whole. The constancy of its presence, however,
is a sign of the general health of the English genius, which has turned
to morbidity far less than that of other nations ancient or modern. It
is a cognate fact, here, that great books are never frivolous; they
leave the reader wiser and better, as well through laughter as through
tears, or they sustain imaginative and sympathetic power already
acquired. They open the world of humanity to the heart, and they open
the heart to itself. In another region, not primarily of entertainment,
the value of literature lies in its function to inspire. In individual
life, each finer spirit of the past touches with an electric force those
of his own kindred as they are born into the world of letters, and often
for life. The later poets have most personal power in this way. Burns,
Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley have been the inspiration of lives, like
Carlyle and Emerson in prose. The most intense example of national
inspiration in a book is Uncle Tom's Cabin; but in quieter ways Scotland
feels the pulse of Burns, and England the many-mingled throbbing of the
poets in her blood.
On the large scale, in the impact of literature on the individual soul
and through that on the national belief, aspiration and resolve, the
great sphere of influence lies necessarily in the religious life,
because that is universal and constant from birth to death and spreads
among the secret springs and sources of man's essential nature. It is a
commonplace, it has sometimes been made a reproach, that English
literature is predominantly moral and religious, and the fact is plainly
so. The strain that began with Piers Plowman flourished more mightily in
the Pilgrim's Progress. The psalm-note that was a tone of character in
Surrey, Wyatt and Sidney gave perfect song in Milton, both poet and man.
From Butler to Newman the intellect, applied to religion, did not fail
in strenuous power. Taylor's Holy Living is a saint's book. If religious
poets, of one pure strain of Sabbath melody, have been rare, yet
Herbert, Vaughan, Cowper, Keble, Whittier are to the memory Christian
names, with the humility and breathing peace of sacred song. The portion
of English literature expressly religious is enlarged by the works of
authors, both in prose and verse, in which religion was an occasional
theme and often greatly dealt with; and the religious and moral
influence of the body of literature as a whole on the English race is
immensely increased by those writers into whom the Christian spirit
entered as a master-light of reason and imagination, such as Spenser in
the Faërie Queene and Wordsworth in his works generally, or Gray in the
solemn thought of the Elegy. To particularize is an endless task; for
the sense of duty toward man and God is of the bone and flesh of English
books in every age, being planted in the English nature. This vast mass
of experience and counsel, of praise and prayer, of insight and leading,
variously responding to every phase of the religious consciousness of
the historic people, has been, like the general harvest, the daily food
of the nation in its spiritual life. If Shakespeare is the greatest of
our writers, the English Bible is the greatest of our books; and the
whole matter is summarized in saying that the Bible, together with the
Book of Common Prayer, is the most widely distributed, the most
universally influential, the most generally valued and best-read book of
the English people, and this has been true since the diffusion of
printing. It may seem only the felicity of time that the English
language best adorns its best book; but it is by a higher blessing that
English character centres in this Book, that English thinkers see by it,
that English poets feel by it, that the English people live by it; for
it has passed into the blood of all English veins.
It is natural to inquire, after dwelling so much on the practical power
of English literature in society and life, what is its value in the
world of art, in that sphere where questions of perfection in the form,
of permanence in the matter, and the like, arise. If the standards of an
academic classicism be applied, English literature will fall below both
Latin and Greek, and the Italian and French, and take a lower place with
German and Spanish, to which it is most akin. But such standards are
pseudo-classical at best, and under modern criticism find less ground in
the ancients. The genius of the English is romantic, and originated
romantic forms proper to itself, and by these it should be judged. The
time is, perhaps, not wholly gone by when the formlessness of
Shakespeare may be found spoken of as a matter of course, as the
formlessness of Shelley is still generally alleged; but if neither of
these has form in the pseudo-classic, the Italian and French, sense of
convention, decorum and limit, they were creators of that romantic form
in which English, together with Spanish, marks the furthest original
modern advance. The subject is too large, and too much a matter of
detail, for this place; but it is the less necessary to expand it, for
it is as superfluous to establish the right of Shakespeare in the realm
of the most perfect art as to examine the title-deeds of Alexander's
conquests. He condensed romanticism in character, as was said above;
and in the power with which he did this, in the wisdom, beauty and
splendor of his achievement, excelled all others, both for substance and
art. The instinct of fame may be safely followed in assigning a like
primacy to Milton. The moment which Milton occupied, in the climax of a
literary movement, is, perhaps, not commonly observed with accuracy. The
drama developed out of allegorical and abstract, and through historical,
into entirely human and ideal forms; and in Shakespeare this process is
completed. The same movement, on the religious as opposed to the secular
line, took place more slowly. Spenser, like Sackville, works by
impersonation of moral qualities, viewed abstractly; the Fletchers, who
carried on his tradition, employ the same method, which gives a remote
and often fantastic character to their work; nor was moral and religious
poetic narrative truly humanized, and given ideal power in character and
event, until Milton carried it to its proper artistic culmination in
Paradise Lost. Milton stands to the evolution of this branch of poetic
literature, springing from the miracle-plays, precisely as Shakespeare
does to the branch of ideal drama; and thus, although he fell outside of
the great age, and was sixty years later than Shakespeare in completing
the work, the singularity of his literary greatness, his loneliness as a
lofty genius in his time, becomes somewhat less inexplicable. The
Paradise Lost occupies this moment of climax, to repeat the phrase, in
literary history, and, like nearly all works in such circumstances, it
has a greatness all its own. But, beyond that, it lies in a region of
art where no other English work companions it, as an epic of the
romantic spirit such as Italy most boasts of, but superior in breadth,
in ethical power, in human interest, to Ariosto or Tasso, and comparing
with them as Pindar with the Alexandrians; it realized Hell and Eden,
and the world of heavenly war and the temptation, to the vision of men,
with tremendous imaginative power, stamping them into the race-mind as
permanent imagery; and the literary kinship which the workmanship bears
to what is most excellent and shining in the great works of Greece, Rome
and Italy, as well as to Hebraic grandeur, helps to place the poem in
that remoter air which is an association of the mind with all art. No
other English poem has a similar brilliancy, aloofness and perfection,
as of something existing in another element, except the Adonais. In it
personal lyricism achieved the most impersonal of elegies, and mingled
the fairest dreams of changeful imaginative grief with the soul's
intellectual passion for immortality full-voiced. It is detached from
time and place; the hunger of the soul for eternity, which is its
substance, human nature can never lay off; its literary kinship is with
what is most lovely in the idyllic melody of the antique; and, owing to
its small scale and the simple unity of its mood, it gives forth the
perpetual charm of literary form in great purity. These two poems stand
alone with Shakespeare's plays, and are for epic and lyric what his work
is for drama, the height of English performance in the cultivation of
romance. Other poets must be judged to have attained excellence in
romantic art in proportion as they reveal the qualities of Shakespeare,
Milton and Shelley; for these three are the masters of romantic form,
which, being the spirit of life proceeding from within outward, is the
vital structure of English poetic genius. This internal power is also a
principle of classic art in its antique examples; but academic criticism
developed from them a hardened formalism to which romantic art is
related as the spirit of life to the death-mask of the past. Such pallor
has from time to time crossed the features of English letters in a man
or an age, and has brought a marble dignity, as to Landor, or the shadow
of an Augustan elegance, as in the era of Pope; but it has faded and
passed away under the flush of new life. Even in prose, in which
so-called classic qualities are still sought by academic taste, the
genius of English has shown a native obstinacy. The novel is so Protean
in form as to seem amorphous, but essentially repeats the drama, and
submits in its masters to Shakespearian parallelism; in substance and
manner it has been overwhelmingly of a romantic cast; and in the other
forms of prose, style, though of all varieties, has, perhaps, proved
most preservative when highly colored, individualized, and touched with
imaginative greatness, as in Browne, Taylor, Milton, Bunyan, Burke,
Carlyle, Macaulay; but the inferiority of their matter, it should be
observed, affects the endurance of the eighteenth-century prose
masters--Steele, Addison, Swift and Johnson, to name the foremost.
Commonly, it must be allowed, English, both prose and poetry,
notwithstanding its triumphs, is valued for substance and not for form,
whether this be due to a natural incapacity, or to a retardation in
development which may hereafter be overcome, or to the fact that the
richness of the substance renders the fineness of the form less eminent.
In conclusion, the thought rises of itself, will this continuity,
assimilative power, and copiousness, this original genius, this
serviceableness to civilization and the private life, this supreme
romantic art, be maintained, now that the English and their speech are
spread through the world, or is the history of the intellectual
expansion of Athens and Rome, the moral expansion of Jerusalem, to be
repeated? The saying of Shelley, "The mind in creation is a fading
coal," seems to be true of nations. Great literatures, or periods in
them, have usually marked the culmination of national power; and if they
"look before and after," as Virgil in the Æneid, they gather their
wisdom, as he too did, by a gaze reverted to the past. The paradox of
progress, in that the _laudator temporis acti_ is always found among the
best and noblest of the elders, while yet the whole world of man ever
moves on to greater knowledge, power and good, continues like the riddle
of the Sphinx; but time seems unalterably in favor of mankind through
all dark prophecies. The mystery of genius is unsolved; and the
Messianic hope that a child may be born unto the people always remains;
but the greatness of a nation dies only with that genius which is not a
form of human greatness in individuals, but is shared by all of the
blood, and constitutes them fellow-countrymen. The genius of the English
shows no sign of decay; age has followed age, each more gloriously, and
whether the period that is now closing be really an end or only the
initial movement of a vaster arc of time, corresponding to the greater
English destiny, world-wide, world-peopling, world-freeing, the arc of
the movement of democracy through the next ages,--is immaterial; so long
as the genius of the people, its piety and daring, its finding faculty
for truth, its creative shaping in art, be still integral and vital, so
long as its spiritual passion be fed from those human and divine ideas
whose abundance is not lessened, and on those heroic tasks which a world
still half discovered and partially subdued opens through the whole
range of action and of the intellectual and moral life,--so long as
these things endure, English speech must still be fruitful in great ages
of literature, as in the past these have been its fountainheads. But if
no more were to be written on the page of English, yet what is written
there, contained and handed down in famous books and made the spiritual
food of the vast multitude whose children's children shall use and read
the English tongue through coming centuries under every sky, will
constitute a moral dominion to which Virgil's line may proudly apply--
His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono:
Imperium sine fine dedi.
One Hundred Books
Famous in English Literature
Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those melodious bursts that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still.
TENNYSON
Whan that Apprill with his shouris sote
And the droughte of marche hath pa'd [.y] rote
And badid euery veyne in suche licour
Of whiche vertu engendrid is the flour
Whanne zepherus eke with his sote breth
Enspirid hath in euery holte and heth
The tendir croppis and the yong sonne
Hath in the ram half his cours y conne
And smale foulis make melodie
That slepyn al nyght with opyn ye
So prikith hem nature in her corage
Than longyng folk to gon on pilgremage
And palmers to seche straunge londis
To serue halowis couthe in sondry londis
And specially fro euery shiris ende
Of yngelond to Cauntirbury thy wende
The holy blisful martir for to seke
That them hath holpyn when they were seke
And fil in that seson on a day
In Suthwerk atte tabard as I lay
Redy to wende on my pilgremage
To Cauntirbury with deuout corage
That nyght was come in to that hosterye
Wel nyne & twenty in a companye
Of sondry folk be auenture y falle
In feleship as pilgrymys were they alle
That toward Cauntirbury wolden ryde
The chambris and the stablis were wyde
And wel were they esid atte beste
Reduced Leaf in original, 7 × 10 inches
O moral Gower
CHAUCER
This book is intituled confessio amantis / that is to saye in
englysshe the confessyon of the louer maad and compyled by Johan
Gower squyer borne in walys in the tyme of kyng richard the
second which book treteth how he was confessyd to Genyus preest
of venus vpon the causes of loue in his fyue wyttes and seuen
dedely synnes / as in thys sayd book al alonge appyereth / and
by cause there been comprysed therin dyuers hystoryes and fables
towchyng euery matere / I haue ordeyned a table here folowyng of
al suche hystoryes and fables where and in what book and leef
they stande in as here after foloweth
¶ Fyrst the prologue how johan gower in the xvi yere of kyng
rychard the second began to make thys book and dyrected to harry
of lancastre thenne erle of derby folio ¶ ii
Of thestate of the royames temporally the sayd yere folio ¶ iii
Of thestate of the clergye the tyme of robert gylbonensis namyng
hym self clemente thenne antipope folio ¶ iv
Of the estate of the comyn people folio ¶ v
How he treteth of the ymage that nabugodonosor sawe in his sleep
hauyng an heed of golde / a breste of syluer / a bely of brasse
/ legges of yron / and feet haffe yron & halfe erthe folio vi
Of thenterpretacion of the dreme / and how the world was fyrst
of golde / & after alwey werse & werse folio vii
¶ Thus endeth the prologue
¶ Here begynneth the book
And fyrst the auctor nameth thys book confessio amantis / that
is to say the shryfte of the louer / wheron alle thys book shal
shewe not onely the loue humayn / but also of alle lyuyng
beestys naturally folio ¶ ix
How cupydo smote Johan Gower with a fyry arowe and wounded hym
so that venus commysed to hym genyus hyr preest for to here hys
confessyon folio ¶ x
How Genyus beyng sette / the louer knelyng tofore hym prayeth
the sayd confessor to appose hym in his confessyon folio ¶ xi
The confessyon of the amant of two of the pryncipallist of his
fyue wyttes folio ¶ xi
How atheon for lokyng vpon Deane was turned in to an herte
folio ¶ xi
Of phorceus and hys thre doughters whiche had but one eye / &
how phorceus slewe them folio ¶ xii
How the serpente that bereth the charbuncle stoppeth his one ere
wyth hys tayle and that other wyth the erthe whan he is
enchaunted folio ¶ xii
How vlyxes escaped fro the marmaydys by stoppyng of hys eerys
folio ¶ xii
Here foloweth that there ben vii dedely synnes / of whome the
fyrste is
Reduced Leaf in original, 8.68 × 12.75 inches.
Flos regum Arthurus
JOHN OF EXETER
After that I had accomplysshed and fynysshed dyuers hystoryes as
wel of contemplacyon as of other hystoryal and worldly actes of
grete conquerours & prynces / And also certeyn bookes of
ensaumples and doctryne / Many noble and dyuers gentylmen of
thys royame of Englond camen and demaunded me many and oftymes /
wherfore that j haue not do made & enprynte the noble hystorye
of the saynt greal / and of the moost renomed crysten kyng /
Fyrst and chyef of the thre best crysten and worthy / kyng
Arthur / whyche ought moost to be remembred emonge vs englysshe
men tofore al other crysten kynges / For it is notoyrly knowen
thorugh the vnyuersal world / that there been ix worthy & the
best that euer were / That is to wete thre paynyms / thre jewes
and thre crysten men / As for the paynyms they were tofore the
jncarnacyon of Cryst / whiche were named / the fyrst Hector of
Troye / of whome thystorye is comen bothe in balade and in prose
/ The second Alysaunder the grete / & the thyrd Julyus Cezar
Emperour of Rome of whome thystoryes ben wel kno and had / And
as for the thre jewes whyche also were tofore thyncarnacyon of
our lord of whome the fyrst was Duc Josue whyche brought the
chyldren of Israhel in to the londe of byheste / The second
Dauyd kyng of Jherusalem / & the thyrd Judas Machabeus of these
thre the byble reherceth al theyr noble hystoryes & actes / And
sythe the sayd jncarnacyon haue ben thre noble crysten men
stalled and admytted thorugh the vnyuersal world in to the
nombre of the ix beste & worthy / of whome was fyrst the noble
Arthur / whos noble actes j purpose to wryte in thys present
book here folowyng / The second was Charlemayn or Charles the
grete / of whome thystorye is had in many places bothe in
frensshe and englysshe / and the thyrd and last was Godefray of
boloyn / of whos actes & lyf j made a book vnto thexcellent
prynce and kyng of noble memorye kyng Edward the fourth / the
sayd noble jentylmen jnstantly requyred me temprynte thystorye
of the sayd noble kyng and conquerour kyng Arthur / and of his
knyghtes wyth thystorye of the saynt greal / and of the deth and
endyng of the sayd Arthur / Affermyng that j ouzt rather
tenprynte his actes and noble feates / than of godefroye of
boloyne / or
Reduced Leaf in original, 7.87 × 11.25 inches.
So judiciously contrived that the wisest may exercise at once
their knowledge and devotion; its ceremonies few and innocent;
its language significant and perspicuous; most of the words and
phrases being taken out of the Holy Scriptures and the rest are
the expressions of the first and purest ages.
COMBER
THE
booke of the common praier
and administracion of the
Sacramentes, and
other rites and
ceremonies
of the
Churche: after the
vse of the Churche of
Englande.
LONDINI, _in officina Richardi Graftoni,
Regij impressoris_.
_Cum priuilegio ad imprimendum solum._
_Anno Domini._ M.D.XLIX.
_Mense Martij._
Reduced Leaf in original 7 × 10.5 inches.
The author of Piers Ploughman, no doubt, embodied in a poetic
dress just what millions felt. His poem as truly expressed the
popular sentiment on the subjects it discussed as did the
American Declaration of Independence the national thought and
feeling on the relations between the Colonies and Great Britain.
Its dialect, its tone and its poetic dress alike conspired to
secure to the Vision a wide circulation among the commonalty of
the realm, and by formulating--to use a favorite word of the
day--sentiments almost universally felt, though but dimly
apprehended, it brought them into distinct consciousness, and
thus prepared the English people for the reception of the seed
which the labors of Wycliffe and his converts were already
sowing among them.
MARSH
THE VISION
of Pierce Plowman, now
fyrste imprynted by Roberte
Crowley, dwellyng in Ely
tentes in Holburne.
Anno Domini.
1550.
Cum priuilegio ad imprimend[=u]
solum.
By far the most important of our historical records, in print,
during the time of Queen Elizabeth.
DIBDIN
1577.
THE
Firste volume of the
_Chronicles of England, Scotlande_,
and Irelande.
CONTEYNING,
The description and Chronicles of England, from the first
inhabiting vnto the conquest
The description and Chronicles of Scotland, from the first
originall of the Scottes nation, till the yeare of our Lorde.
1571.
The description and Chronicles of Yrelande, likewise from the
firste originall of that Nation, vntill the yeare. 1547.
_Faithfully gathered and set forth, by_
Raphaell Holinshed.
AT LONDON,
Imprinted for George Bishop.
God saue the Queene.
Reduced Leaf in original, 7.75 11.12 inches
Our historic plays are allowed to have been founded on the
heroic narratives in the Mirror for Magistrates; to that plan,
and to the boldness of Lord Buckhurst's new scenes, perhaps we
owe Shakespeare.
WALPOLE
¶_A MYRROVR FOR_
Magistrates.
Wherein maye be seen by
example of other, with howe greuous
plages vices are punished: and
howe frayle and vnstable werldly
prosperity is founde, even of
those whom Fortune seemeth
most highly
to fauour.
_Fælix quem faciunt aliena pericula cautum._
_Anno._ 1563.
¶_Imprinted at London in Fletestrete
nere to Saynct Dunstans Churche
by Thomas Marshe._
Two chieftaines who having travailed into Italie, and there
tasted the sweete and stately measures and stile of Italian
Poesie, as novices newly crept out of the schooles of Dante,
Arioste, and Petrarch, they greatly pollished our rude and
homely maner of vulgar Poesie, from that it had bene before, and
for that cause may justly be sayd the first reformers of our
English meetre and stile.
PUTTENHAM
¶_SONGES AND SONETTES
Written by the right honorable
Lord Henry Haward late
Earle of Surrey, and
others._
_Apud Richardum Tottell._
1567.
_Cumpriuilegio._
It is full of stately speeches, and well-sounding phrases,
clyming to the height of Seneca his stile, and as full of
notable moralitie, which it doth most delightfully teach, and so
obtayne the very end of Poesie.
SIDNEY
¶The Tragidie of Ferrex
and Porrex,
set forth without addition or alteration
but altogether as the same was shewed
on stage before the Queenes Maiestie,
about nine yeares past, _vz._ the
xviij. day of Ianuarie. 1561.
by the gentlemen of the
Inner Temple.
=Seen and allowed, &c.=
Imprinted at London by
Iohn Daye, dwelling ouer
Aldersgate.