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"The Project/ Gutenberg eBook, Brief History of English and American Literature, by Henry A. Beers, et al This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Brief History of English and American Literature Author: Henry A. Beers Release Date: April 15, 2007 Language: English [eBook #21090] Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE*** E-text prepared by Al Haines Transcriber's note: The volume from which this e-book was prepared contains two of Beers' books, "An Outline Sketch of English Literature" and "An Outline Sketch of American Literature," which start on pages 7 and 317, respectively. Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}, to facilitate use of the index. They have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book. For its Index, a page number has been placed only at the start of that section. BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE by HENRY A. BEERS Introduction and Supplementary Chapters on the Religious and Theological Literature of Great Britain and the United States by John Fletcher Hurst New York: Eaton & Mains Cincinnati: Jennings & Pye Copyright, 1886, 1887, by Phillips & Hunt New York Copyright, 1897, by Eaton & Mains New York {3} INTRODUCTION. At the request of the publishers the undersigned has prepared this Introduction and two Supplementary Chapters on the Religious and Theological Literature of Great Britain and the United States. To the preacher in his preparation for the pulpit, and also to the general reader and student of religious history, the pursuit of the study of literature is a necessity. The sermon itself is a part of literature, must have its literary finish and proportions, and should give ample proof of a familiarity with the masterpieces of the English tongue. The world of letters presents to even the casual reader a rich and varied profusion of fascinating and luscious fruit. But to the earnest student who explores with thorough research and sympathetic mind the intellectual products of countries and times other than his own, the infinite variety, so strikingly apparent to the superficial observer, resolves itself into a beautiful and harmonious unity. Literature is the record of the struggles and aspirations of man in the boundless universe of thought. As in physics the correlation and conservation of force bind all the material sciences together into one, so in the world of intellect all the diverse departments of mental life and action find their common bond in literature. Even the {4} signs and formulas of the mathematician and the chemist are but abbreviated forms of writing--the stenography of those exact sciences. The simple chronicles of the annalist, the flowing verses of the poet, clothing his thought with winged words, the abstruse propositions of the philosopher, the smiting protests of the bold reformer, either in Church or State, the impassioned appeal of the advocate at the bar of justice, the argument of the legislator on behalf of his measures, the very cry of inarticulate pain of those who suffer under the oppression of cruelty, all have their literature. The minister of the Gospel, whose mission is to man in his highest and holiest relations, must know the best that human thought has produced if he would successfully reach and influence the thoughtful and inquiring. Perhaps our best service here will be to suggest a method of pursuing a course of study in literature, both English and American. The following work of Professor Beers touches but lightly and scarcely more than opens these broad and inviting fields, which are ever growing richer and more fascinating. While man continues to think he will weave the fabric of the mental loom into infinitely varied and beautiful designs. In the general outlines of a plan of literary study which is to cover the entire history of English and American literature, the following directions, it is hoped, will be of value. 1. Fix the great landmarks, the general periods--each {5} marked by some towering leader, around whom other contemporary writers may be grouped. In Great Britain the several and successive periods might thus be well designated by such authors as Geoffrey Chaucer or John Wiclif, Thomas More or Henry Howard, Edmund Spenser or Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakspere or Francis Bacon, John Milton or Jeremy Taylor, John Dryden or John Locke, Joseph Addison or Joseph Butler, Samuel Johnson or Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper or John Wesley, Walter Scott or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth or Thomas Chalmers, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, or William Makepeace Thackeray. A similar list for American literature would place as leaders in letters: Thomas Hooker or Thomas Shepard, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Philip Freneau, Noah Webster or James Kent, James Fenimore Cooper or Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson or Edward Everett, Joseph Addison Alexander or William Ellery Channing, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, or Nathaniel Hawthorne. 2. The prosecution of the study might be carried on in one or more of several ways, according either to the purpose in view or the tastes of the student. Attention might profitably be concentrated on the literature of a given period and worked out in detail by taking up individual authors, or by classifying all the writers of the period {6} on the basis of the character of their writings, such as poetry, history, belles-lettres, theology, essays, and the like. 3. Again, the literature of a period might be studied with reference to its influence on the religious, commercial, political, or social life of the people among whom it has circulated; or as the result of certain forces which have preceded its production. It is well worth the time and effort to trace the influence of one author upon another or many others, who, while maintaining their individuality, have been either in style or method of production unconsciously molded by their _confr�res_ of the pen. The divisions of writers may, again, be made with reference to their opinions and associations in the different departments of life where they have wrought their active labors, such as in politics, religion, moral reform, or educational questions. The influence of the great writers in the languages of the Continent upon the literature of England and America affords another theme of absorbing interest, and has its peculiarly good results in bringing the student into close brotherhood with the fruitful and cultured minds of every land. In fact, the possible applications of the study of literature are so many and varied that the ingenuity of any earnest student may devise such as the exigencies of his own work may require. JOHN F. HURST, _Washington_. {7} PREFACE. In so brief a history of so rich a literature, the problem is how to get room enough to give, not an adequate impression--that is impossible--but any impression at all of the subject. To do this I have crowded out everything but _belles-lettres_. Books in philosophy, history, science, etc., however important in the history of English thought, receive the merest incidental mention, or even no mention at all. Again, I have omitted the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, which is written in a language nearly as hard for a modern Englishman to read as German is, or Dutch. Caedmon and Cynewulf are no more a part of English literature than Vergil and Horace are of Italian. I have also left out {8} the vernacular literature of the Scotch before the time of Burns. Up to the date of the union Scotland was a separate kingdom, and its literature had a development independent of the English, though parallel with it. In dividing the history into periods, I have followed, with some modifications, the divisions made by Mr. Stopford Brooke in his excellent little _Primer of English Literature_. A short reading course is appended to each chapter. HENRY A. BEERS. {9} CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. II. III. IV. V. FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 1066-1400 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER, 1400-1599 . . THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE, 1564-1616 . . . . THE AGE OF MILTON, 1608-1674 . . . . . FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF POPE, 1660-1744 . . . . . . . . . . . . VI. FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE FRENCH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 . 42 . 76 . 125 . . . . . 163 REVOLUTION, 1744-1789 . . . . . . . . . VII. FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT, 1789-1832 . . . . . . . . . . VIII. FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT TIME, 1832-1886 . . . . . . . . . . . . IX. THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN GREAT BRITAIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 . . . . . 222 . . . . . 266 . . . . . 299 {11} OUTLINE SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAPTER I. FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 1066-1400. The Norman conquest of England, in the 11th century, made a break in the natural growth of the English language and literature. The old English or Anglo-Saxon had been a purely Germanic speech, with a complicated grammar and a full set of inflections. For three hundred years following the battle of Hastings this native tongue was driven from the king's court and the courts of law, from parliament, school, and university. During all this time there were two languages spoken in England. Norman French was the birth-tongue of the upper classes and English of the lower. When the latter finally got the better in the struggle, and became, about the middle of the 14th century, the national speech of all England, it was no longer the English of King Alfred. It was a new language, a grammarless tongue, almost wholly {12} stripped of its inflections. It had lost a half of its old words, and had filled their places with French equivalents. The Norman lawyers had introduced legal terms; the ladies and courtiers, words of dress and courtesy. The knight had imported the vocabulary of war and of the chase. The master-builders of the Norman castles and cathedrals contributed technical expressions proper to the architect and the mason. The art of cooking was French. The naming of the living animals, _ox, swine, sheep, deer,_ was left to the Saxon churl who had the herding of them, while the dressed meats, _beef, pork, mutton, venison,_ received their baptism from the table-talk of his Norman master. The four orders of begging friars, and especially the Franciscans or Gray Friars, introduced into England in 1224, became intermediaries between the high and the low. They went about preaching to the poor, and in their sermons they intermingled French with English. In their hands, too, was almost all the science of the day; their _medicine_, _botany,_ and _astronomy_ displaced the old nomenclature of _leechdom_, _wort-cunning,_ and _star-craft_. And, finally, the translators of French poems often found it easier to transfer a foreign word bodily than to seek out a native synonym, particularly when the former supplied them with a rhyme. But the innovation reached even to the commonest words in every-day use, so that _voice_ drove out _steven_, _poor_ drove out _earm_, and _color_, _use_, and _place_ made good their footing beside _hue,_ {13} _wont_, and _stead_. A great part of the English words that were left were so changed in spelling and pronunciation as to be practically new. Chaucer stands, in date, midway between King Alfred and Alfred Tennyson, but his English differs vastly more from the former's than from the latter's. To Chaucer Anglo-Saxon was as much a dead language as it is to us. The classical Anglo-Saxon, moreover, had been the Wessex dialect, spoken and written at Alfred's capital, Winchester. When the French had displaced this as the language of culture, there was no longer a "king's English" or any literary standard. The sources of modern standard English are to be found in the East Midland, spoken in Lincoln, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, and neighboring shires. Here the old Anglian had been corrupted by the Danish settlers, and rapidly threw off its inflections when it became a spoken and no longer a written language, after the Conquest. The West Saxon, clinging more tenaciously to ancient forms, sunk into the position of a local dialect; while the East Midland, spreading to London, Oxford, and Cambridge, became the literary English in which Chaucer wrote. The Normans brought in also new intellectual influences and new forms of literature. They were a cosmopolitan people, and they connected England with the continent. Lanfranc and Anselm, the first two Norman archbishops of Canterbury, were learned and splendid prelates of a {14} type quite unknown to the Anglo-Saxons. They introduced the scholastic philosophy taught at the University of Paris, and the reformed discipline of the Norman abbeys. They bound the English Church more closely to Rome, and officered it with Normans. English bishops were deprived of their sees for illiteracy, and French abbots were set over monasteries of Saxon monks. Down to the middle of the 14th century the learned literature of England was mostly in Latin, and the polite literature in French. English did not at any time altogether cease to be a written language, but the extant remains of the period from 1066 to 1200 are few and, with one exception, unimportant. After 1200 English came more and more into written use, but mainly in translations, paraphrases, and imitations of French works. The native genius was at school, and followed awkwardly the copy set by its master. The Anglo-Saxon poetry, for example, had been rhythmical and alliterative. It was commonly written in lines containing four rhythmical accents and with three of the accented syllables alliterating. _R_este hine th� _r_�m-heort; _r_�ced hlifade _G_e�p and _g_�ld-f�h, g�st inne sw�f. Rested him then the great-hearted; the hall towered Roomy and gold-bright, the guest slept within. This rude energetic verse the Saxon _sc�p_ had sung to his harp or _glee-beam_, dwelling on the {15} emphatic syllables, passing swiftly over the others which were of undetermined number and position in the line. It was now displaced by the smooth metrical verse with rhymed endings, which the French introduced and which our modern poets use, a verse fitted to be recited rather than sung. The old English alliterative verse continued, indeed, in occasional use to the 16th century. But it was linked to a forgotten literature and an obsolete dialect, and was doomed to give way. Chaucer lent his great authority to the more modern verse system, and his own literary models and inspirers were all foreign, French or Italian. Literature in England began to be once more English and truly national in the hands of Chaucer and his contemporaries, but it was the literature of a nation cut off from its own past by three centuries of foreign rule. The most noteworthy English document of the 11th and 12th centuries was the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. Copies of these annals, differing somewhat among themselves, had been kept at the monasteries in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere. The yearly entries were mostly brief, dry records of passing events, though occasionally they become full and animated. The fen country of Cambridge and Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries. Here were the great abbeys of Peterborough and Croyland and Ely minster. One of the earliest English songs tells how the savage heart of the Danish {16} king Cnut was softened by the singing of the monks in Ely. Merie sungen muneches binnen Ely Tha Cnut chyning reu ther by; Roweth, cnihtes, noer the land, And here we thes muneches sang. It was among the dikes and marshes of this fen country that the bold outlaw Hereward, "the last of the English," held out for some years against the conqueror. And it was here, in the rich abbey of Burch or Peterborough, the ancient Medeshamstede (meadow-homestead) that the chronicle was continued for nearly a century after the Conquest, breaking off abruptly in 1154, the date of King Stephen's death. Peterborough had received a new Norman abbot, Turold, "a very stern man," and the entry in the chronicle for 1170 tells how Hereward and his gang, with his Danish backers, thereupon plundered the abbey of its treasures, which were first removed to Ely, and then carried off by the Danish fleet and sunk, lost, or squandered. The English in the later portions of this Peterborough chronicle becomes gradually more modern, and falls away more and more from the strict grammatical standards of the classical Anglo-Saxon. It is a most valuable historical monument, and some passages of it are written with great vividness, notably the sketch of William the Conqueror put down in the year of his death (1086) by one who had "looked upon him and at another time dwelt in his court." {17} "He who was before a rich king, and lord of many a land, he had not then of all his land but a piece of seven feet. . . . Likewise he was a very stark man and a terrible, so that one durst do nothing against his will. . . . Among other things is not to be forgotten the good peace that he made in this land, so that a man might fare over his kingdom with his bosom full of gold unhurt. He set up a great deer preserve, and he laid laws therewith that whoso should slay hart or hind, he should be blinded. As greatly did he love the tall deer as if he were their father." With the discontinuance of the Peterborough annals, English history written in English prose ceased for three hundred years. The thread of the nation's story was kept up in Latin chronicles, compiled by writers partly of English and partly of Norman descent. The earliest of these, such as Ordericus Vitalis, Simeon of Durham, Henry of Huntingdon, and William of Malmesbury, were contemporary with the later entries of the Saxon chronicle. The last of them, Matthew of Westminster, finished his work in 1273. About 1300 Robert, a monk of Gloucester, composed a chronicle in English verse, following in the main the authority of the Latin chronicles, and he was succeeded by other rhyming chroniclers in the 14th century. In the hands of these the true history of the Saxon times was overlaid with an ever-increasing mass of fable and legend. All real knowledge of the period {18} dwindled away until in Capgrave's _Chronicle of England_, written in prose in 1463-64, hardly any thing of it is left. In history as in literature the English had forgotten their past, and had turned to foreign sources. It is noteworthy that Shakspere, who borrowed his subjects and his heroes sometimes from authentic English history, sometimes from the legendary history of ancient Britain, Denmark, and Scotland, as in Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth, ignores the Saxon period altogether. And Spenser, who gives in his second book of the _Faerie Queene_, a _resum�_ of the reigns of fabulous British kings--the supposed ancestors of Queen Elizabeth, his royal patron--has nothing to say of the real kings of early England. So completely had the true record faded away that it made no appeal to the imaginations of our most patriotic poets. The Saxon Alfred had been dethroned by the British Arthur, and the conquered Welsh had imposed their fictitious genealogies upon the dynasty of the conquerors. In the _Roman de Rou_, a verse chronicle of the dukes of Normandy, written by the Norman Wace, it is related that at the battle of Hastings the French _jongleur_, Taillefer, spurred out before the van of William's army, tossing his lance in the air and chanting of "Charlemagne and of Roland, of Oliver and the peers who died at Roncesvals." This incident is prophetic of the victory which Norman song, no less than Norman arms, was to win over England. The li..."

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