English Literature. William J. Long

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

       ANNE HATHAWAY COTTAGE

       BIRTHPLACE OF SHAKESPEARE

       TRINITY CHURCH, STRATFORD-ON-AVON

       BEN JONSON

       JOHN MILTON

       JOHN BUNYAN

       LIBRARY AT TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

       WESTMINSTER

       JONATHAN SWIFT

       TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN

       JOSEPH ADDISON

       SAMUEL JOHNSON

       THOMAS GRAY

       CHURCH AT STOKE POGES

       OLIVER GOLDSMITH

       WILLIAM COWPER

       ROBERT BURNS

       BIRTHPLACE OF BURNS

       THE AULD BRIG, AYR (AYR BRIDGE)

       DANIEL DEFOE

       WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

       WORDSWORTH'S HOME AT RYDAL MOUNT

       SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

       ROBERT SOUTHEY

       WALTER SCOTT

       ABBOTSFORD

       GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

       PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

       CHARLES LAMB

       CHRIST'S HOSPITAL, LONDON

       THOMAS DE QUINCEY

       ROBERT BROWNING

       MRS. BROWNING

       WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

       GEORGE ELIOT

       THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

       UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

       JOHN RUSKIN

       QUADRANGLE OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD

Illustration: A LITERARY MAP OF ENGLAND A LITERARY MAP OF ENGLAND

CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION--THE MEANING OF LITERATURE

       Table of Contents

      Hold the hye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede.

       Chaucer's Truth On, on, you noblest English, … Follow your spirit. Shakespeare's Henry V

      The Shell and the Book. A child and a man were one day walking on the seashore when the child found a little shell and held it to his ear. Suddenly he heard sounds,--strange, low, melodious sounds, as if the shell were remembering and repeating to itself the murmurs of its ocean home. The child's face filled with wonder as he listened. Here in the little shell, apparently, was a voice from another world, and he listened with delight to its mystery and music. Then came the man, explaining that the child heard nothing strange; that the pearly curves of the shell simply caught a multitude of sounds too faint for human ears, and filled the glimmering hollows with the murmur of innumerable echoes. It was not a new world, but only the unnoticed harmony of the old that had aroused the child's wonder.

      Some such experience as this awaits us when we begin the study of literature, which has always two aspects, one of simple enjoyment and appreciation, the other of analysis and exact description. Let a little song appeal to the ear, or a noble book to the heart, and for the moment, at least, we discover a new world, a world so different from our own that it seems a place of dreams and magic. To enter and enjoy this new world, to love good books for their own sake, is the chief thing; to analyze and explain them is a less joyous but still an important matter. Behind every book is a man; behind the man is the race; and behind the race are the natural and social environments whose influence is unconsciously reflected. These also we must know, if the book is to speak its whole message. In a word, we have now reached a point where we wish to understand as well as to enjoy literature; and the first step, since exact definition is impossible, is to determine some of its essential qualities.

      ArtisticQualities of Literature. The first significant thing is the essentially artistic quality of all literature. All art is the expression of life in forms of truth and beauty; or rather, it is the reflection of some truth and beauty which are in the world, but which remain unnoticed until brought to our attention by some sensitive human soul, just as the delicate curves of the shell reflect sounds and harmonies too faint to be otherwise noticed. A hundred men may pass a hayfield and see only the sweaty toil and the windrows of dried grass; but here is one who pauses by a Roumanian meadow, where girls are making hay and singing as they work. He looks deeper, sees truth and beauty where we see only dead grass, and he reflects what he sees in a little poem in which the hay tells its own story:

      Yesterday's flowers am I,

       And I have drunk my last sweet draught of dew.

       Young maidens came and sang me to my death;

       The moon looks down and sees me in my shroud,

       The shroud of my last dew.

       Yesterday's flowers that are yet in me

       Must needs make way for all to-morrow's flowers.

       The maidens, too, that sang me to my death

       Must even so make way for all the maids

       That are to come.

       And as my soul, so too their soul will be

       Laden with fragrance of the days gone by.

       The maidens that to-morrow come this way

       Will not remember that I once did bloom,

       For they will only see the new-born flowers.

       Yet will my perfume-laden soul bring back,

       As a sweet memory, to women's hearts

       Their days of maidenhood.

       And then they will be sorry that they came

       To sing me to my death;

       And all the butterflies will mourn for me.

       I bear away with me

       The sunshine's dear remembrance, and the low

       Soft murmurs of the spring.

       My breath is sweet as children's prattle is;

       I drank in all the whole earth's fruitfulness,

       To make of it the fragrance of my soul

       That shall outlive my death.^[1]

      One who reads only that first exquisite line, "Yesterday's flowers am I," can never again see hay without recalling the beauty that was hidden from his eyes until the poet found it.

      In the same pleasing, surprising way, all artistic work must be a kind of revelation. Thus architecture is probably the oldest of the arts; yet we still have many builders but few architects, that is, men whose work in wood or stone suggests