the first name: English literature begins with Chaucer. The most
substantive and dominant element in our blood and in our language
is, it may be perfectly true, the Anglo-Saxon. But it cannot be said
that either in our blood or language this element had established its
permanent relations to other--to Celtic, Danish, Norman, immigrant,
invasive, and rebellious elements--had taken amidst these and
communicated to these a distinct direction of its own, before the
era of King Edward III. and the close of the fourteenth century. The
same (and this is much more important) may be affirmed of the English
national mind. In the age of Chaucer it may be said that the English
people, such as ever since then it has been (and such never it had
been till then), had, for good or for evil, or more truly for both,
entered in various ways--in religion, in morals, in domestic habits,
in government, in social relations, in relations to other members of
the European body--upon a definite and positive course. The position
which we still hold as a northern, part Scandinavian, part German
people, ever resisting and yet ever submitting most largely to accept
the subtle influences of Southern civilisation and refinement--our
position, too, of antagonism, in particular to the other great mixed
nation, England’s immediate neighbour, was ours in the era of the
first French wars. And the picture of all that pertains to those first
exhibitions (for good or for evil, or for both) of our English genius
and temper you may see surviving unfaded in the lively colouring of the
‘Canterbury Tales’; exhibitions, I have said, of genius and temper; of
dispositions, inclinations, tendencies, it is true, rather than of any
formed and rigidly fixed determination. It is our boyhood; but the man
in looking back to it is conscious that that boyhood was his:--folded
and compressed within the bud we detect the petals of the coming
flower, the rudiment of the future fruit. What, for example, can be
truer to permanent English likings and dislikings, what more exact to
the nation’s habitual views and preferences in life, than these lines
in the description of the monk? Let me premise that St. Maure, and St.
Benett or Benedict, St. Austin or Augustin, are the great monastic
legislators: that _wood_, as in Scotch, still means crazy, and _swink_,
as in Shakespeare, _toil_:--
The rule of Saint Maure and of Saint Benett
Because that it was old and some deal straight,
This ilkĕ monk let oldĕ thinges pace,
And held after the newĕ world the trace.
He gave not for that text a pulled hen,
That saith that hunters be not holy men.
And I say his opinion was good.
What should he studie and make himselven wood,
Upon a book in cloistre alway to pore,
Or swinken with his handes and laboure,
As Austin bid? _How shall the world be served?_
Let Austin have his swink to him reserved.
I do not think that our countrymen in this generation have lost their
distaste to devout seclusion and associate task-work, or their passion
for individual enterprise; the hearty acceptance, so only indeed they
do exist, of all existing things, good, bad, and indifferent; the
desire to grapple with common facts, and the feeling, that some way
or other the question--How shall the world be served? must receive an
answer.
Certainly we may still find in Old England ladies--I quote
Chaucer--paining themselves to counterfeit cheer of court, and be
estately of manere, and to be held worthy of reverence; busy or
busy-seeming lawyers:--
No where so busy a man as he, as he there n’was,
And yet he seemed busier than he was;
country gentlemen, great at the sessions, and greater at the dinner
table; the tried soldier, silent and unpretending; the young soldier,
much the reverse; the merchant, so discreet and stedfast,
There wistĕ no man that he was in debt;
religious and laborious parish-clergymen, and church dignitaries, not
very religious, and not at all laborious. Such is the picture given
by Chaucer of his fellow-travellers on the highway from London to
Canterbury in the year 1383, as the old tradition of the Tabard Inn in
Southwark records, as it might be any present Englishman’s description
of his in the year 1852.
From boyhood we step to early manhood; from Chaucer pass to
Shakespeare, and behold now, not temper, and tendency, and disposition,
but thought, contemplation, doubt. In language less easy far and
natural, but infinitely more pregnant, significant, and profound, in
a style abounding in faults as in beauties, we hear, not, as from
Chaucer, all that Englishmen in his time were like, but all that man
in all times may be. As on the mount of vision, from whose secret
summit were seen the kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof,
so on the elevation of his own poised intellect stood the spirit of
the Elizabethan dramatist, sweeping slowly the horizon of human will
and action--all the possible varieties of which were delivered into
its power, ‘to be or not to be.’ So shone concentrated in the being
of one man, as into the form of some irradiant star, the collective
intelligence of centuries gone by,--
the prophetic soul
Of the great world dreaming o’er things to come.
Into details of critical remark on Shakespeare I do not now purpose
to carry you. Let me but mark one point. It is impossible, I should
suppose, for any reader who does not come to the plays of Shakespeare
with a judgment overborne by the weight of authority or the force
of general sentiment--it is impossible, I should imagine, for any
ingenuous, dispassionate reader not to find himself surprised, checked,
disappointed, shocked, even revolted, by what in any other author--in
an author of modern times--he would call gross defects in point of
plot, flagrant inconsistencies of character. In ‘As You Like It,’ for
example, who is not astounded to meet in Act V. the unnatural brother
of Act I., by the rehabilitation of a most cursory _Deus-ex-machinâ_
sort of penitence, or shall I call it regret, qualified for the love,
wedlock, and happiness which honest people had been working up to
through the whole long drama? Whom does the marriage of Angelo and
Mariana leave quite easy in his mind? Whose moral sensibilities are not
a little ruffled by a strange phantasmagoria of good people becoming
bad of a sudden, and all of a sudden good again; good and happy,
too, after every sort of misconduct, after the wickedest and foulest
actions, with one touch of the wand all made right; guilt converted to
innocence, with not a stain left behind--long-suffering virtue shall
wed quick repentant vice--and all, it would seem, simply to bring the
play to a happy ending?
For the explanation of these apparent blemishes--these obvious
incongruities in the comedies (for that is their region) of our great
poet, I might refer you to M. Guizot’s criticism on Shakespeare.
One element in it consists in the fact, which we are pretty safe in
assuming, that with the story Shakespeare had little or nothing to do;
he simply took what was given him, and made of it what he could--what
he had occasion or time for. And yet that the taste of the time, and
that he himself should acquiesce in such a representation, is a matter,
I think, in some degree appertaining to that balanced, speculative
character which I attempted but now to describe, natural to the age and
characteristic of the writer.
Free and serene in youth, newly emancipated from teachers and
directors, unfettered any longer by precept or injunction of others,
unbound as yet by any self-imposed restriction, or even any formed
determination--in the richness of a reflectiveness which even now is
all but a malady, in the fulness of an almost premature maturity of
thought--in a distant preconception or presentiment wandering undecided
in the garden of the infinite choices; free as yet to select, loving
much rather as yet to forbear; with a tranquil wistfulness, with a
far-sighted consciousness, looking down those unnumbered, diverging,
far-reaching avenues of future actuality, each one of which, but, if
any _one_, then not any other, he may follow--such I venture to picture
to myself the second poet of the English series--the second and the
greatest--the creator of Othello and of Falstaff, of Hotspur and of
Hamlet.
Not uncompromised, not uncommitted any longer, self-committed,
strongly, deliberately, seriously, irreversibly committed; walking
as in the sight of God, as in the profound, almost rigid conviction
that this one, and no other of all those many paths is, or can be, for
the just and upright spirit possible, self-predestined as it were,
of his own will and foreknowledge, to a single moral and religious
aim--such, I think, are we to imagine the writer of ‘Paradise Lost’
and of ‘Samson Agonistes,’ the third of the English poets. To what
purpose these myriad phenomena, entering and traversing the field of
that mighty object-glass of the speculative intellect? Is it life to
observe? Is it a man’s service to know? As if it was a thing possible
for us to forbear to act; as though there were not in God’s world,
amidst ten thousand wrongs, one right, amidst the false choices that
offend Him, the one that is His will. And yet, though in 1623, when
the players put out the first collected edition, the first folio of
the tragedies, comedies, and histories of William Shakespeare, Milton,
aged sixteen, was translating psalms, to the second of these folios,
in 1632, were prefixed the verses by John Milton, ‘What needs my
Shakespeare.’ And among the productions of that pure protracted youth,
ending, we may say, only in his thirty-third year, and devoted to books
and letters,--though ‘Comus,’ it is true, seems prophetic of the stern
and religious virtues of the after-manhood and old age--‘L’Allegro’
meantime, ‘Il Penseroso,’ and parts of ‘Comus’ itself show lineaments
of a gentler and less positive, more natural and less merely moral
character. Is there not here in these earlier poems, lingering still,
and as yet undismissed, a little of that poetic hesitance, that
meditative reluctance to take a part which I attributed but now as his
characteristic to Shakespeare? Does not the youthful Milton, while
in this immature period, pondering, examining, testing, as it were,
upon his spiritual palate the viands of life, approximate, I will not
determine how closely, to that personal undramatic Shakespeare, who
sadly and almost remorsefully could say of himself?--
Alas! ’tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view.
Gored my own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear.
Or again,--
Oh! for my sake, do you with fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds.
Or in a graver tone still,--
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful Earth,
Fooled by those rebel powers that thee array.
Upon the broad brows and in the deep eyes of Shakespeare I could
believe myself to see, during the inditing of records such as this,
a mournful expression which might pass with ease into the fixed
pure look of Milton, and could identify, under circumstances of no
violent transmutation, the lips which uttered, ‘What! because thou art
virtuous, shall there be no cakes and ale? aye, and ginger be hot in
the mouth?’ with those of him who closed _his_ drama with the sentence
that
If virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her.
But such a fleeting similarity of transition, if there were, in
the thoughtful countenance of the youthful Milton, was soon and
totally effaced. _He_ is a man of far different genius and character
whom we see in the seventeen succeeding years of his prime, from
his thirty-third to his fiftieth, teaching scholars and reforming
education; married, and deserted, and propounding a new doctrine of
divorce; taking a side in the great Civil War, joining in controversy
with bishops and archbishops, acting as secretary to a republican
government, and--
In Liberty’s defence, my noble task,
With which all Europe rings from side to side--
justifying the death of kings.
Or he again, who, blind and anon impoverished, neglected, imprisoned,
persecuted in another and concluding space of seventeen years, bated
nevertheless not one jot of heart and hope, and
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness and with danger compassed round,
found in his lowest estate his highest inspiration, and converted his
season of endurance and affliction into his period of most perfect and
permanent achievement.
The spirit of Milton, no less than the spirit of Shakespeare, still
lives and breathes in our native air; we imbibe it in the earliest and
commonest influences that environ us; it has entered, for good, for
evil, or for both, into the constituents of our national character.
Nevertheless, the proper manhood of the English nation dates,
I believe, from the generation which rejected Milton. The
Counter-Revolution of 1660 and the final Revolution of 1688 are the two
critical convulsions which restored us to our proper natural course.
It is impossible, after all, not to recognise in those seemingly
senseless acclamations which welcomed back the exiled Stuart a real and
important significance. It is impossible not to sympathise with the joy
and exultation of people at throwing off the yoke of an iron system of
morals, proved by experience not coextensive with facts, not true to
the necessary exigencies and experiences of life.
Fain to return to that larger range from which for a while we had
remained self-excluded, but incapable any longer of sustaining
ourselves upon the unsupported elevation of speculative vision; eager
again to see what in Shakespeare we had viewed, to feel ourselves
again within the circle of those infinitely various relations, but too
far engaged in actual things to be competent now of seeing merely,
of feeling only; eager, were it possible--which it no longer is--to
find satisfaction to adult impulses in the gratification of those old
boyish instincts, dispositions, tempers, tendencies, left behind so
far away as Chaucer; resolute, however, in any case, come what would
or might, to face and confront, to acknowledge and accept the facts of
that living palpable world which cannot for any long time be disowned
or evaded, with the vision of the universe departed, with innocence and
the untroubled conscience forfeited, behold us here at the close of the
seventeenth century, embarking, in whose name we know not, and profess
to ourselves that we care not, upon the seas of actual and positive
existence.
You will observe that in the period commencing with the Restoration
and continuing through the eighteenth century, literature, though
gaining infinitely in variety, loses in elevation; its predominant and
characteristic form is not, as hitherto, the highest, the _poetical_.
What poetry does exist is by no means of the highest order, nor
aims at the highest objects; it is rather as a source of elegant
amusement, as an efficacious means towards refinement and polish, as
an ally and auxiliary of carriage and high breeding, as an emollient
of manners and antidote to brutality, that we are taught to regard it.
What indeed the really instructive, the serious and significant form
of literature is, were hard to say: it seems even doubtful at times
whether it possesses at all any form deserving any such high-sounding
epithets; at times we cannot refrain from the belief that the whole
energy, moral, intellectual, and vital, of the nation has passed off
into the common business, the ordinary hard work of individual everyday
life; that what we see in the name of literature is but a mere dead
and mechanical repetition, an aimless and meaningless observance of
traditional habits. At times again, on the other hand, the abundance,
and the variety, and the broad substantive character of what the
Englishmen of this period wrote and have left for us, fill us with
admiration while we contrast it with the poverty, narrowness, and
uniformity of our preceding literature. The complexity of the picture
is enhanced, and the embarrassment and doubt of our judgments and
feelings aggravated, while we further observe how our national mind
and literature begin to enter more now than ever before into intimate
relations with the other great personal, national forces which have in
the last hundred years sprung up into life and vigour on the Continent.
Chaucer, it is true--and it is his praise--gave the final completion,
by copious admissions of Norman-French vocables and phrases, to the
transformation, shall I say, or new creation, of our homely, meagre,
inarticulate semi-Saxon into a civilised and living speech, fit for the
harmonious repetition to English ears of graceful Italian or classic
story, and the enduring utterance of native thought and sentiment. By
Italian cadence and rhythm Spenser tuned his docile ear, and learnt to
remodulate, after an age of disuse, the language in which Shakespeare
was to delineate the traditions of Verona and Venice, and give
immortality to Florentine romances. The soul of Milton had dieted on
‘immortal notes and Tuscan airs,’ and been imbued with Italian scenes
and Italian friendships, and had learnt in that converse to
Feed on thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers,
ere he thought them worthy to arise ‘to the height of that great
argument.’
Nevertheless, this culture in classic grace, and this schooling in
the nice accomplishment of verse which the English poets had sought
with submission and deference from the descendants of Livy and Virgil,
cannot, in any sort, be paralleled with that encounter and fusion which
is now to come to pass with a national mind, single and original as
our own, proved, chastened, and fortified by a long course of thought,
action, and suffering. The French nation, marked from its original
development, shall we say, in the era of the first and second Crusades,
by a peculiar and distinct character, mingling in a wonderful compound
the fervour of the south and the vigour of the north, heirs direct of
an older civilisation, scene of the earliest resuscitation of thought,
taking, in the later ages of religious contention, a separate and
special position between the old, as in Italy and Spain, and the new,
as in England and North Germany; with a readier understanding, with a
more rapid and more immediate and seizing intellect; working out, by
a logic of its own, conclusions, distinct from those of _any_, yet in
relation to those of _every_ European community; free-thinking from
the first in Montaigne, sceptically devout in Pascal, embellishing the
ancient faith in Bossuet, and scaling the summit of the latest doubt in
Descartes, the French nation obviously had much to communicate to its
insular neighbours--the Puritan, or all-but Puritan, English people.
Yet, on the other hand, to pass into the region of mere imitation, to
sit at the feet even of writers as great as Racine and Molière, to owe
fealty to the dicta of Boileau, to fit on the literary court-costume of
Louis XIV., and pick up the fine language of the Regency, would appear
to carry somewhat of indignity to men that
Speak the tongue
That Shakspeare spoke; the faith and morals hold
That Milton held.
From this dangerous communion it may be said that the English mind
returned with little loss of originality, and with a large accession of
ideas and perceptions; it had offered as freely, if not as copiously,
as it had taken; in the mass of imitation the native genius is still to
be discerned, surviving and subsisting; in the prostration of ancient
tenets and habits the old character remains upright, unoverthrown
and unsubdued. One could really believe that we might have consented
to learn yet more and got no harm by it. And, reappearing strangely
disguised and metamorphosed, we shall still find the spirit of
the Elizabethan age and of the Puritan; the high functions which
Shakespeare and Milton performed will be performed in the new era less
splendidly but more effectually by smaller men and humbler agencies.
Dryden, born in 1631 and dying in 1700, and Cowper, born and dying
in the corresponding years of the following century, we may make the
limits of our new period.
After the age of Shakespeare, Milton, and the translation of the Bible,
that of Addison, Swift, and the translations of Homer and Virgil
may seem degenerate. Dryden, who heads the list, after commencing
panegyrist under Oliver Cromwell, and showing his good-will in the
same capacity under the restored Charles II., presently proceeds as
playwright, political satirist, theological controversialist, critical
essayist, classical translator. We may take him as an earnest of what
is to follow. Playwrights, in Dryden and Otway, Congreve, Vanbrugh,
Farquhar, assume first the pre-eminence. Classical translation, and
almost at the same time the Essay, aspire next to supremacy, and claim
Augustan honours in Pope and Addison. From 1740 to 1770 may be called
the culmination of the novelists: from 1750 to 1790 is the period of
the historians. The last decade of the century finds us restored to
other and different poetry in Cowper and in Bums.
The items in the list may appear somewhat trivial. Yet you cannot fail
to observe that they consist of names extremely well known; well known
not there only or here, but wherever the English language is spoken
or studied. It is to these that foreigners desirous of learning our
language most naturally recur. They constitute our ordinary standard
literature, and for models in English writing the tradition, not yet
obsolete, of our fathers refers us imperatively hither. We cannot,
with any safety, follow examples anterior to them; nor easily find any
amongst their successors. Our own age is notorious for slovenly or
misdirected habits of composition, while the seventeenth century wasted
itself in the excesses of scholastic effort. English prose, before the
age of Dryden, was in the hands, for the most part, of men who read and
preached more than they talked, and had learnt to compose Latin before
they set themselves to write the vernacular. But Latin is, by the
inherent nature of its grammar and construction, a language singularly
alien to the genius of a natural English style. French, which was the
chief reading of the English writers after the Restoration, both as a
living and as a modern language, was a far more useful auxiliary. And
at their coffee-houses and clubs, the wits of our Augustan age were,
even Addison included, fairly accustomed to lively conversation. And
the study of French tended to save from vulgarity and meanness diction
which conversational habits made thoroughly idiomatic. For manner,
and for the subtle and potent impressions conveyed by manner, you may
assuredly consult with great benefit the majority of these unpretending
items.
I may further raise your estimate of these names if I remind you
of their connection, at least in time, with workings of the human
intellect not exactly included in the name of literature. The period
of discoveries in Natural Philosophy begins with the reign of that
restored Stuart whose picture looks down still, if I mistake not, with
the title of founder on the meetings of the Royal Society. Newton’s
‘Principia’ is not, perhaps, a book pertaining to Belles Lettres; yet
Newton and his fellow-discoverers have a good deal to do with the
character of the age of Dryden. If I introduce, by the side of the
translation of Virgil, the name of Locke on the ‘Human Understanding,’
I shall add, I suppose, some specific gravity to the close of the
degenerate seventeenth century; and it will not be without some effect
that I intercalate between Thomson’s ‘Seasons’ and Richardson’s
‘Pamela,’ at the date 1736, the title of Butler’s ‘Analogy of
Religion.’ The advance of the century which presents us with the great
histories of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, gains additional seriousness
also from Hume’s philosophical as from Johnson’s moral writing. And
certainly, though the apparent results were less brilliant, our respect
and attention are claimed quite as strongly by the mental and moral as
by the natural or physical philosophy of this age.