THE STUDY OF LITERATURE
In our age of free libraries and cheap editions of good books anyone
who has time and disposition may become not merely a reader of
literature, but a student of literature. The difference is not great,
perhaps not important; it seems to be only a matter of attitude and
method. The reader opens any book that falls in his way or to which
he is led for any reason, tries a page or two of it, and continues or
not, at pleasure. The student opens a book which he has deliberately
sought and brings to it not only the tastes and moods of the ordinary
reader, but a determination to know the book, however much or little
it may please him. He is impelled not only to know the book, with his
critical faculties more or less consciously awake, but to know the
circumstances under which the book was written, and its relation to
other books. One may read “Hamlet” ten times and know much of it by
heart and still not be a _student_ of “Hamlet,” much less a student of
Shakespeare. The student feels it necessary to know the other plays
of Shakespeare, some of the other Elizabethan dramatists, a little of
the history and biography of Shakespeare’s time, and something, too,
of the best critical literature that “Hamlet” has inspired in the
past two centuries. The study of literature implies order and method
in the selection of books, and orderly reading in turn implies enough
seriousness and willful application to turn the act of reading, in
part, from play to work.
Well, then, it is better to be a student of literature than a mere
reader. Ideally that is true; if there were years enough in a human
life we should like to be students of everything under the sun. But the
conditions of life limit the mere reader on one side and the student
on the other, and it is a question which one is ultimately richer in
mind. A mere reader will read “Hamlet” until he can almost imagine
himself standing on the stage able to speak the lines of any part. The
student of literature will read “Hamlet” thoroughly, investigate its
real or supposed relation to the rest of the Shakespearian plays, toil
through a large volume of learned notes and opinions, read fifty other
Elizabethan tragedies and a half dozen volumes on the life and works
of Shakespeare. He is on the way to becoming a student of Shakespeare.
But while he is struggling with the learned notes, the mere reader
is reading, say, Henley’s poems; while the student is reading the
lesser plays of Shakespeare, the mere reader is enjoying Browning’s
tragedies; while the student of “Hamlet” is making the acquaintance of
fifty tragedies by Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson, Marlowe,
Webster--less than ten of which are masterpieces--the idle reader is
wandering through Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,” ten modern novels, the
seventh book of “Paradise Lost” (that noble Chant of Creation), a
beautiful new edition of the poems of George Herbert, and some quite
unrelated bits of prose and verse that happen to attract his eye. Which
of the two has pursued the happier, wiser course? Each has spent his
time well, and each, if there were more time, might profitably follow
the other’s course in addition to his own. Intensive, orderly reading,
like that of the _student_, tends to make the mind methodical and
certainly furnishes it with a coherent body of related ideas on which
to meditate. Extensive reading, such as we assume the _reader’s_ will
be, seems to engender superficiality, and yet such is the nature of
books and human thought that scattered reading may disclose unexpected
and vital relations of idea. Greater effort of will is required to keep
the student on his narrower course, and effort of will is profitable
to the spirit. On the other hand, the mind is likely to have keener
appetite for what it meets on a discursive course, and it assimilates
and absorbs more exhaustively what it approaches with natural, unforced
interest. “It is better,” says Johnson, “when a man reads from
immediate inclination.”
It would be educational anarchy to depreciate orderly intensive
study of any subject, and we shall presently consider some helpful
introductions to the methodical study of literature. But I believe that
human nature and human conditions favor the unmethodical reader, and
that he, on the whole, discovers the best uses of books in the world
as it is. For in the world as it is, we have in adult life thirty,
forty, fifty years in which to read books. If we consider everything a
book from the little volume which occupies half an hour to the Bible
which cannot be read through once intelligently in under six months,
we see that three books a week is a liberal number for an assiduous
reader. So that in a lifetime one cannot expect to know more than five
or six thousand books. Five thousand, or two thousand, or one thousand
are plenty for a life of wisdom and enjoyment. The five thousand or
the one thousand books of the discursive reader are likely to be at
least as good a collection as the five thousand or the one thousand of
the student of literature. Reader and student are both restricted to
a small picking from the vineyard of books. The ordinary reader will
have spent a third of his reading hours on books that have meant little
to him. The student will have spent a third of his time in digging
through sapless, fiberless volumes. But the free wandering reader is
not disturbed by the number of books he has read in vain or by the vast
number of interesting books he has not read at all; whereas the student
of literature is lured by his ideal of exhaustive knowledge to hurry
through books that he “ought to know,” and in desperation is tempted to
insincere pretensions.
In no class of readers does the tendency to unwarranted assumptions of
knowledge show more comically than in those advanced students of books
who are called Professors of English Literature. Properly speaking,
no one is a professor of literature except the man who can produce
something worth reading. But as the term is used it defines a class
of teachers who have spent much time and study, not as writers but as
readers of books, and who then set themselves up, or are set up in
spite of individual modesty by the artificial university systems, to
“teach” literature. The professional teacher of literature can know
only a limited number of books. And while he has been reading his
kind, his unprofessional neighbors, even his students, are reading
their kind. He knows some literature that they do not; they know some
literature that he does not. The chances are that the professor and
not the lay reader will have departed the farther from the true uses
of literature. It is possible to read a number of good books while the
professor is studying what another professor says in reply to a third
professor’s opinions about what Shakespeare meant in a certain passage.
The professor of literature seems to regard Shakespeare and other poets
as inspired children who need a grown person to interpret their baby
talk; whereas the lay reader takes it for granted that Shakespeare had
more or less definite ideas about what he wished to say and succeeded
in saying it with admirable clarity.
To be sure, a professor here and there may be found who is a live and
virile reader of poetry like the rest of us, and the faults of pedantry
and pretentious authority are not inevitable faults of the profession
as a whole. There is, however, one universal fault of the professional
teacher of literature which is imposed by the conditions of employment
in our universities and is subversive of the true purpose of colleges
and the true purposes of literature. One fundamental idea of a college
is to afford a certain number of scholarly men the means of livelihood
from college endowments in order that they may have time to devote to
books. The modern professor of literature seems to have so many duties
of administration and discipline that he has little time to read for
the sake of reading--which is the chief reason for reading at all. The
old idea of a university as a place where the few educated members of
society could retire for study and intellectual communion has passed
away, and the professor of literature is rather at a disadvantage in
the modern world where there are more educated persons outside the
universities than in them, and where the cultivated person of leisure,
reading literature by himself, can easily outstrip the professor.
Professor of literature? As well might there be a professor of Life,
or a professor of Love, or a professor of Wisdom. Literature is too
vast for anyone to profess it, excepting always him who can contribute
to it. Even if our professors of literature were a more capable class
of men, they would still be anomalous members of society, for they are
trying to do an anomalous thing, maintain themselves in authority on a
subject which is open to everybody in a world of books and libraries.
And they are working under conditions not only not helpful, but
distinctly unfavorable to a true knowledge and enjoyment of literature,
as compared with the conditions of the person of equal intelligence
outside the college.
My purpose is not so much to dispraise the literary departments
of universities as to praise a world which has grown so rich in
opportunities that the universities are no longer the unique leaders
in literature or the seats of the best knowledge about it. Our masters
are on the shelves and not in the colleges. (Carlyle, Emerson, and
Ruskin all said that, and it was said before them.) Without going to
college we can become students of literature, professors of literature,
if we have the talent and the will. I do not say or mean that we
should not go to college if we can. I mean that we can stay away from
college if we must and still be as wise and happy readers of books
as those bachelors of arts who have sat for four years or more under
“professors of literature.” If my advice were sought on this point, I
should advise every boy and girl to go to college if possible, but to
take few courses in English literature and English composition. One
great advantage of a college course is that it offers four years of
comparative leisure, of freedom from the day’s work of the breadwinner;
and in those four years the student, with a good library at hand,
can read for himself. I should advise the student to take courses in
foreign languages, history, economics, and the sciences, things which
can be taught in classrooms and laboratories and are usually taught by
experts. There is no need of listening to a professor of English who
discourses about Walter Scott and Shakespeare; we can read them without
assistance. Literature is a universal possession among people of
general intelligence. It is made, fostered, and enjoyed by men who are
not professors of literature in the meaningless sense; it is written
for and addressed to people who are not professors of literature; and
it is understood and appreciated, I dare affirm, by no intelligent,
cultivated class in the world less certainly, less directly, less
profitably than by professors of literature in the modern American
college.
Well, we may leave our little declaration of independence from those
who are supposed to be authorities in literature, and turning from
them not too disrespectfully, go our own way. Let us be readers
of literature. The study of literature will take care of itself.
We cannot expect to know as much about the sources of “Hamlet” as
Professor Puppendorf thinks he knows. Neither can we hope to bring as
much imagination to our reading as Lamb brought to his. But of the
two masters we shall follow Lamb, who was not a professor, nor even,
it seems, a student of literature, but only a reader. If we happen
to be interested in Professor Smith’s ideas of Milton, we can in
three or four hours read his handbook on the subject, or, better, the
other handbook from which he got his ideas. For the professors do not
keep their wisdom for their students in class; they live, in spite
of themselves, in a modern world and publish for the general reader
all the knowledge they have--and a little more. We can follow the
professors, if we choose, in the libraries. But probably there will be
more wisdom and happiness in following Lamb or Stevenson, or some other
reader who was not a professor; they tread a broader highway and never
forget what books are made for. We may well follow Dr. S. M. Crothers,
“The Gentle Reader,” who seems to have been enjoying books all his
life and still enjoys them, though he lives near a great university.
Another genial guide and counselor, whose company the younger
generation might well seek often, is Mr. Howells. He is a professor
of literature in the real sense, because he makes it. He is also a
reader whose enthusiasms are fresh and individual. Many of his recorded
impressions of contemporaneous books are buried in an obscure magazine,
and his reticence has its disadvantages in an age when too many inept
voices chatter about books. But he reads books and writes about them
because he likes them, and so his accounts of his reading are rich in
suggestion.
Most of the authentic professors of literature, that is, the men who
have produced literature, have been readers rather than students of
books. Keats, I am quite sure, had neither opportunity nor inclination
to make a formal study of books, even of the old poets from whom his
genius drew its sustenance. He seems not to have studied Homer or the
English translation by the Elizabethan poet, George Chapman. He calls
his sonnet “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.” You see, he only
read it, only “looked into” it, just like an ordinary reader. But he
was not ordinary, he was a poet, and so he could write this of his
experience as a reader:
Much have I travel’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been,
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told,
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Something like that experience ambushes the road of any reader, the
most commonplace of us. We, too, can travel in the realms of gold.
Only three or four men are born in a century who could express the
experience so finely as that. But the breathless adventure can be ours,
even if we cannot write about it.
The great writers themselves are the best guides to one another,
for they have kept the reader’s point of view--they had too much
imagination, as a rule, to descend to any other point of view.
We conjecture that Shakespeare was an omnivorous reader. And so,
certainly, were Milton, Browning, Tennyson, Shelley, Carlyle, George
Eliot, Macaulay. Nearly all the great writers have been, of course,
life-long, assiduous students of the technical characteristics of
certain kinds of literature from which they were learning their art.
The poet must study the poets; the novelist must study the novelists.
But the creative artist is usually far from being a scientific or
methodical student of literature as it is laid out (suggestive words!),
in handbooks and courses. The nature of literature and the experience
of the makers of it seem to confirm us in the belief that books are to
be read, to be understood and enjoyed as they come to one’s hands, and
not jammed into text-book diagrams of periods and cycles and schools.
The great writers of our race, those obviously who know most about
literature, seem to have taken their books as they took life, just as
they happened to come. They were wanderers, not tourists. And though we
shall never see as much by the way as they did and have not the power
to travel so far, we can roam through “many goodly states and kingdoms”
and be sure of inspiring encounters, if only a small corner of our
nature is capable of being inspired.
But as travelers in lands of beauty and adventure may profitably spend
an hour a day in searching the guide books for facts about what they
have seen and directions for finding the most interesting places, so
the reader, without sacrificing his spirit of freedom, may well equip
himself with a few handbooks of literature. Suppose that Keats has
interested us in Chapman’s Homer. Let us find out who Chapman was and
when he lived. A fairly reliable book in which to seek for him is
Professor George Saintsbury’s “History of Elizabethan Literature.” It
is one of a series of histories in which the volume on “Early English
Literature” is by Mr. Stopford Brooke, and the volume on “English
Literature of the Eighteenth Century” is by Mr. Edmund Gosse. We find
in Saintsbury’s handbook ten pages of biography and criticism of
Chapman and extracts from his poetry. This is enough to give a little
notion of Chapman’s place in literature and to suggest to the ordinary
reader whether Chapman is a writer he will wish to know more fully. We
find among Mr. Saintsbury’s comments on Chapman the following:
“The splendid sonnet of Keats testifies to the influence which his
work long had on those Englishmen who were unable to read Homer in
the original. A fine essay of Mr. Swinburne’s has done, for the first
time, justice to his general literary powers, and a very ingenious
and, among such hazardous things, unusually probable conjecture of Mr.
Minto’s identifies him with the ‘rival poet’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
But these are adventitious claims to fame. What is not subject to
such deduction is the assertion that Chapman was a great Englishman
who, while exemplifying the traditional claim of great Englishmen to
originality, independence, and versatility of work, escaped at once
the English tendency to lack of scholarship, and to ignorance of
contemporary continental achievements, was entirely free from the fatal
Philistinism in taste and in politics, and in other matters, which has
been the curse of our race, was a Royalist, a lover, a scholar, and has
left us at once one of the most voluminous and peculiar collections of
work that stand to the credit of any literary man of his country.”
Here, in this paragraph, we stand neck-deep in the study of
literature, its exhilarating eddies of opinion, its mind-strengthening
difficulties, and also, we must confess, its harmless dangers and
absurdities. Let us run over Mr. Saintsbury’s sentences again and see
whither they take us.
Keats’s sonnet--we have just read that--which Mr. Saintsbury says,
testifies to the influence of Chapman for a long time on Englishmen who
could not read Greek, really does nothing of the sort. It testifies
only that Keats met Chapman, and the momentous meeting took place, in
point of fact, at a time when the interest in Elizabethan poetry was
reviving after a century that preferred Pope’s “Iliad” to Chapman’s.
Handbook makers sometimes go to sleep and make statements like that,
and it is just as well that they do, for their noddings tumble them
from their Olympian elevations to our level and help to make them
intelligible to the common run of mortals. The mention of Swinburne’s
essay is an interesting clue to follow. His recent death (1909) has
occasioned much talk about him, and at least his name is familiar,
and the fact that he was a great poet. It is interesting to discover
that he was also a critic of Elizabethan poetry. We are thus led to
an important modern critic and poet as a result of having struck from
a side path into a history of Elizabethan literature. Mr. Minto’s
conjecture that Chapman was the “rival poet” of Shakespeare’s sonnets
is valuable because it will take us to those sonnets, and will give us
our first taste of the great hodge-podge of conjectures and ingenious
guesses which constitute a large part of the “study of literature” and
are so delightful and stimulating to lose oneself in. After you have
read Shakespeare’s sonnets and a biography of Shakespeare and the whole
of Mr. Saintsbury’s book, you can pick out some other Elizabethan poet
and conjecture that _he_ is the rival to whom Shakespeare enigmatically
alludes. Neither you nor anyone else will ever be sure who has guessed
right. But that matters little. The value of the game, whatever
its foolish aspects, is that interest in a problem of literature
or literary biography cultivates your mind, keeps you reading, so
entangles you in books and the things relating to books that, like
Mr. Kipling’s hero, you can’t drop it if you tried. The rewards of
such an interest are lifelong and satisfying, even if the solution is
unattainable or not really worth attaining. The literary problem is a
changeful wind that keeps one forever sailing the sea of books.
The rest of Mr. Saintsbury’s remarks, those about English character,
have this significance for us: One cannot read books, or study literary
problems, without studying the people who produced them. The study of
literature is the study of national characteristics. The reason we
Americans know so much more about the English than the English know
about us, is that we have been brought up on English literature, while
the Englishman has only begun to read our literature. Mr. Saintsbury’s
reflections on the Philistinism of the English open at once to the
reader large questions, philosophic in their nature, but not too
philosophic for any ordinary person to think about, the question of
the relation of English literature to Continental literature, and the
question whether the English, who have produced the greatest of all
modern poetry, are in comparison with their neighbors a notably poetic
race. One of the best works on English literature for the student to
read and possess, that by the Frenchman Taine (the English translation
is excellent), is based on a philosophic inquiry into the nature of
the English people. There is, so far as I know, no analogous study
of American literature, though Professor Barrett Wendell’s “Literary
History of America” might have developed into such a book if the author
had taken pains to think out some of his clever, fugitive suggestions.
The best books on the literature of our country which I have seen
are Professor Charles F. Richardson’s “American Literature” and the
“Manual,” edited by Mr. Theodore Stanton for the German Tauchnitz
edition of British and American authors, and published in this country
by the Putnams.
Well, we have entered the classroom in which Mr. Saintsbury is
discoursing of Elizabethan literature, we have entered, so to speak,
by the side door. If our nature is at all shaped to receive profit and
enjoyment from the study of books, we shall be curious to see from
reading the whole of Mr. Saintsbury’s book what has led up to Chapman
and what writers succeed him. Of the various ways in which authors
may be grouped for analysis the historical is the best for the young
student; and it is on the historical scheme of division that most
studies of literature are based. A very useful series of books has been
begun under the editorship of Professor William A. Neilson in which
each volume deals with a class of literature, one with the essay, one
with the drama, one with ballads, and so on. This series, intended for
advanced students, will probably not be the best for the beginner,
though it is often true that works intended for advanced readers are
the very best for the young, and that books for young readers entirely
fail as introductions to more thorough studies. The reader who is
really interested in tracing out the relations between writers will
in good time wish to read studies of literature made on the historic
plan and also some which survey generic divisions of literature.
The two methods intersect at right angles. The main thoroughfare of
literary study which runs from the early story-tellers through Fielding
and Thackeray to Hardy and George Meredith, crosses the other great
thoroughfares: the one which follows the relations between Fielding,
Gray, Johnson, and Burke and other great men of that age; the one
which makes its way through the age of Wordsworth and passes from
Burns’s cottage to Scott’s Abbottsford; and the one through the age of
Victoria. This has been surveyed as far as George Meredith, and the
critics are busily putting up the fences and the sign posts.
In view of the limitations which mere time imposes on the number of
books which any individual may study, we shall resolve early not to
attempt the impossible, not to try to study with great intimacy the
entire range of literature. The thing to do is to select, or to allow
our natural drift of mind to select for us, one period of literature,
or one group, or one writer in a period. In ten years of leisurely but
thoughtful reading, after the day’s work is done, one can know, so
far as one’s given capacity will admit, as much about Shakespeare as
any Shakespeare scholar, that is, as much that is essential and worth
knowing. Not that ten years will exhaust Shakespeare or any other
great poet, but they will suffice for the laying of a foundation of
knowledge complete and adequate for the individual reader, and on that
foundation the individual can build his personal knowledge of the poet,
a structure in which the materials furnished by other students become
of decreasing importance.
There is a story of a French scholar who made up his mind to write a
great book on Shakespeare. In preparation he resolved to read all that
had been written about the poet. He found that the accumulation of
books on Shakespeare in the Paris libraries was a quarry which he could
not excavate in a lifetime, and more appalling still, contemporary
scholars and critics were producing books faster than he could read
them. This story should console and instruct us. We cannot read all
that has been written about Shakespeare; neither can the professional
Shakespearians. But we can all read enough. Two or three books a year
for ten years will, I am sure, put any student in possession of the
best thought of the world on Shakespeare or any other writer. The
multitude of works are repetitious, one volume repeats the best of
a hundred others, and most of them are waste matter, even for the
specialist who vainly strives to digest them.
The thing for us to learn early is not to be appalled by the miles of
shelves full of books, but to regard them in a cheerful spirit, to
look at them as an interminable supply of spiritual food and drink,
a comforting abundance that shall not tempt us to be gourmands. I
am convinced that young people are often deterred from the study of
books by professional students who preside over the long shelves in
the twilight of libraries--blinking high priests of literature who
seem to say: “Ah! young seeker of knowledge, here is the mystery of
mysteries, where only a few of us after long and blinding study are
qualified to dwell. For five and forty years I have been studying
Shakespeare--whisper the name in reverence, not for him, but for
me--and I have found that in the ‘Winter’s Tale’ a certain comma has
been misplaced by preceding high priests, and the line should read
thus and so.” Well, if you go inside and open a few windows to let the
light and air in, you are likely to find, sitting in one of the airiest
recesses, an acquaintance of yours, quite an ordinary person, who has
read the “Winter’s Tale” for only five years, has not bothered his head
about that blessed comma, can tell you things about the play that the
high priest would not find out in a million years, and is using the
high priest’s latest disquisition for a paper weight.
So approach your Shakespeare, if he be the poet you select for special
study in the next ten years, in a light-hearted and confident spirit.
He _is_ a mystery, but he is not past finding out, and the elements of
mystery that baffle, that deserve respect, are those which he chose to
wrap about himself and his work. The mysteries which others have hung
about him are moth-eaten hangings or modern slazy draperies that tear
at a vigorous touch. If you hear learned literary muttering behind the
arras and plunge your sword through, you will kill, not the king, but a
commentator Polonius.
Anyone in the leisure of his evenings, or of his days, if he is
fortunate enough to have unoccupied sunlit hours, may master any poet
in the language to which we have been born. Nothing is necessary to
this study but a literate, intelligent mind, the text of the poet and
such books as one can get in the libraries or with one’s pin money.
And in selecting the books one has only to begin at random and follow
the lead of the books themselves. Any text of “Macbeth” will give
references to all the critical works that anyone needs and they in turn
will point to all the rest. You do not need a laboratory course in
philology in order to read your poet and to know him, to know him at
least as well as the philologist knows him, to know him better, if you
have a spark of poetic imagination. There is no democracy so natural,
so real, and so increasingly populous as the democracy of studious
readers. We acknowledge divinity in man, in our poet above all, and we
see flickerings of divinity in the rare reader who is a critic. But we
do not acknowledge the divine right of Shakespearian scholars or of any
other self-constituted authorities in books. In our literary state the
scholars are not our masters but our servants. We rejoice that they are
at work and now and again turn up for us a useful piece of knowledge.
But they cannot monopolize knowledge of the poets. That is open to any
of us, and it is attainable with far less labor than the scholars have
led us to believe.
The selection of a single writer for special study, a selection open to
us all, should not be made in haste. It should be a “natural selection”
determined gradually and unawares. It will not do to say: “I will now
begin to study Shakespeare for ten years.” That New Year’s resolution
will not survive the first of February. But as you browse among books
you may find yourself especially drawn to some one of the poets or
prose writers. Follow your master when you find him.
In the meantime you can get a general idea of the development of
English literature and the place of the chief writers. A good method
is to read selections from English prose and poetry grouped in
historical sequence. The volumes of prose edited by Henry Craik
and Ward’s “English Poets” afford an adequate survey of British
literature. Carpenter’s “American Prose” and Stedman’s “American
Anthology” constitute an excellent introduction to the branch of
English literature produced on this side of the water. The volumes
of selections may be accompanied by the historical handbooks already
mentioned, which deal with literary periods, or by one of the histories
which cover all the centuries of English authors, such as Saintsbury’s
“Short History,” or Stopford Brooke’s “English Literature.” The student
should guard against spending too large a portion of his time reading
about literature instead of reading the literature itself. But a
systematic review of the history of a national literature has great
value, apart from the enjoyment of literature; it is, if nothing more,
a course in history and biography. I have found that the study of a
handbook of a foreign literature in which I could not hope to read
extensively was in effect a study of the development of the foreign
nation. I never read a better history of Rome than J. W. Mackail’s
“Latin Literature.” The student who can read French will receive
pleasure and profit from Petit de Julleville’s “Littérature Française”
or from the shorter “Petit Histoire” of M. Delphine Duval.
Everyone will study literature in his own way, keep the attitude which
his own nature determines, and for that matter the nature of the
individual will determine whether he shall study literature at all. I
would make one last suggestion to the eager student: Let your study be
diligent and as serious as may be, but do not let it be solemn. I once
attended a lecture on literature given to a mixed audience, that is,
an audience composed mainly of ladies. The lecture was not bad in its
way; it contained a good deal of useful information, but at times it
reminded me of the discourses on “terewth” by Mr. Chadband in “Bleak
House.” It was the audience that was oppressive. The ladies were not,
so far as I could see, entertained, but they had paid their money
for a dose of light, literature and culture and they meant to have
it. So they sat with looks of solemn determination devotedly taking
in every word. Two ladies near me were not solemn; they concealed
their restiveness and maintained a respectful but not quite attentive
demeanor. As I followed them out, I heard one of them say, “Would not
Falstaff have roared to hear himself talked about that way”? I once
heard a class rebuked for laughing aloud at something funny in Chaucer.
The classroom was a serious place and the professor was working.
But Chaucer did not intend to be serious at that moment. On another
occasion the professor remarked that it was well that Chaucer had not
subjected his genius to the deadening effect of the universities of
his time, and it occurred to me then that he would have fared about as
well in a medieval university as his poems were faring in a modern one.
Of course we take literature seriously; by a kind of paradox we take
humorous literature seriously. But solemnity is seldom in place when
one is reading or studying books. The hours of hard work and deliberate
application which are necessary to a study of literature should be
joyous hours, and the only appropriate solemnity is that directly
inspired by the poets and prose writers when they are solemn.
LIST OF WORKS ON LITERATURE
_Supplementary to Chapter XII_
Below are given the titles of a few books helpful to the student of
literature and literary history.
HIRAM CORSON. _Aims of Literary Study._
FREDERIC HARRISON. _Choice of Books and Other Literary Pieces._
GEORGE EDWARD B. SAINTSBURY. _A Short History of English Literature._
STOPFORD AUGUSTUS BROOKE. _English Literature._
WILLIAM MINTO. _Manual of English Prose Literature._
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY AND ROBERT MORSS LOVETT. _History of English
Literature._
Remarkable among books for schools on account of its excellent literary
style.
HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE. _History of English Literature._
Philosophical criticism for advanced readers.
STOPFORD AUGUSTUS BROOKE. _Early English Literature._
GEORGE EDWARD B. SAINTSBURY. _Elizabethan Literature._
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. _Shakespeare’s Predecessors in the English
Drama._
GEORGE G. GREENWOOD. _The Shakespeare Problem Restated._
This work gives a trustworthy appraisal of many modern works on
Shakespeare. (See page 166 of this Guide.)
JOHN CHURTON COLLINS. _Studies in Shakespeare._
EDMUND WILLIAM GOSSE. _Jacobean Poets._ _From Shakespeare to Pope._ _A
History of Eighteenth Century Literature._
FRANCIS B. GUMMERE. _Handbook of Poetics._
THOMAS SECCOMBE. _The Age of Johnson._
WALTER BAGEHOT. _Literary Studies._
CHARLES FRANCIS RICHARDSON. _American Literature._
In one volume, in the popular edition.
THEODORE STANTON (and others). _Manual of American Literature._
EDWARD DOWDEN. _History of French Literature._
FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE. _Manual of the History of French Literature._
In the English translation.
DELPHINE DUVAL. _Petite Histoire de la Littérature Française._
In Heath’s _Modern Language Series_.
PETIT DE JULLEVILLE. _Littérature Française._
Both the foregoing works are in easy French.
RENÉ DOUMIC. _Contemporary French Novelists._
In the English translation.
HENRY JAMES. _French Poets and Novelists._
KUNO FRANCKE. _History of German Literature._
GILBERT MURRAY. _History of Ancient Greek Literature._
JOHN PENTLAND MAHAFFY. _History of Classical Greek Literature._
JOHN WILLIAM MACKAIL. _Latin Literature._