English Literature is, in its largest sense, the mind of the English-speaking races, expressed in successive generations by the fittest representatives of each succeeding form of thought. All conflicts of opinion through which decisive action has been reached lie, with their opposing arguments and with the passions they excited, in the books that form the literature of a people; these show for each nation, in strength and weakness, all the workings of the mind that shaped its history. Such a literature must express also the slow forward movement towards higher civilisation, coloured variously by the influences of race and climate, and brought home to us by fellow-feeling with the individualities of earnest men.
Before the English came with power into Britain there was a Celtic population of the Gael and of the Cymry, each with a literature diffused chiefly by rhythmic recitation. Many traditions of later invention, with perhaps a few snatches of the oldest song, that passed with no great change from lip to lip of generations living in some secluded home among the hills, carry the mind back to a Gaelic literature that gathered much about Fionn, Oisin, and a battle of Gabhra, said to have been fought in the year 284. In like manner we have traces of a Cymric literature, strongest in the time of battle for home and country against English invasion. Tribes of the Celts in Britain gathered their forces for a last firm stand, and were overthrown at Cattraeth; Aneurin's poem, the Gododin, which celebrates the chiefs who fell, tells us of this battle. To the battle of Cattraeth there has been a date assigned, the year 570. If King Arthur ever lived, he lived in that 6th century, and shared its struggle.
By the year 570 the settlements of English on our eastern and southern coasts had made sure their predominance. Various Low-German tribes from the other side of the North Sea (see ENGLAND) had been finding their way over to our eastern and southern coast for many years before the time of the six settlements which Bede described (449-547). Their original differences are still marked in our dialects, in differences of frame and feature, and even of character. In our literature the traces of such difference are at first very distinct, and they have at no time been altogether lost.
At first the strength of English literature was in the north. Little wealth had been drawn from the meadow-land among the mountains of Scandinavia. Its seas could be fished only by men strong to brave the waves of the Atlantic. Outward nature was alive with wonders that quickened imagination, and with necessities that called upon the energies of men. Wealth was only to be had by plunder, and a young Norseman counted for little among his neighbours until he had brought home his first shipload from a viking expedition. Such energy of Northmen from the shores of Sweden, Norway, Jutland, who were not particular as to the nationality of any strong man who sailed with them, first gave its stamp of vigour to the north of England. They came, not Christians, and were here first brought under the influence of Celtic monks and priests, who were devoted to their missionary work, and among whom women were fellow-workers. The Celtic people of the north, yielding to the new-comers the fertile land, kept their flocks and herds upon the hills. The two peoples were neighbours who had reason to respect each other. From time to time there would be intermarriages, and then began that gradual admixture of Celtic with Teutonic blood which has added a new vigour to the English race.
The fervour of the Celt brought to the conversion of the northern English a noble zeal and self-devotion. The abbess Hilda, who drew Cædmon into the fellowship of her monastery at Whitby, in which men and women worked together for the spreading of the gospel, was taught in the Columban school. The work of Cædmon was to spread among the people knowledge of the chief truths of religion, in what is now called a 'paraphrase,' that took the form of poems shaped for recitation by the people to each other upon festival occasions, and by the men who made it their vocation to chant tales of battle and adventure. It is a time of strength in any literature when men's minds are occupied by some great interest that touches the essentials of life. The strength of the old Greek literature was brought out when patriots fought for their homes against the power of Persia. In the beginning of our English literature, strength came from the spiritual war to extend the kingdom of Christ. Cædmon died about the year 680; and Bede, who tells us of him, was in the year 680 a child of seven. Aldhelm, whose English songs, familiar in King Alfred's time throughout the country, are now lost, was then a young abbot of twenty-four, who had devoted his life and fortune to a work at Malmesbury like that of the abbess Hilda at Whitby. With these monasteries were associated many forms of labour for advance of civilisation, including, of course, the formation of schools. Bede in the monastery at Jarrow became the first great teacher. He shaped, in Latin, manuals for use in education, and thus his works serve as an encyclopædia of the best knowledge of his time. He gathered also, by wide inquiry, materials that were digested into the first History of England; that was his Ecclesiastical History, finished in 731. The history of the church in those first days was inseparable from that of the people among whom it had laboured in its missionary work.
The 8th century, to which Bede's work belongs, was the golden time of our First-English or Anglo-Saxon literature. In some monastery, perhaps not far from Whitby, a monk who found delight in the old tales of the Norseman and the Dane had shaped into the language of his country what probably had come with its Teutonic settlers as a saga of the Danes. With a few short interpolations of Christian thought, this old poem, named from its hero Beowulf—its writer is unknown, and it is assigned usually to more than one—reproduces all the features of life in the north before it had been touched by Christianity. Thus our English literature begins with two great poems, one heathen, the other Christian in essence. Each of these works, the greatest that remain to us in First-English, survives only in a single MS. With few exceptions the other pieces of First-English literature have as narrowly escaped total destruction. We owe our knowledge of them to the preservation of two MS. collections; one known as the Exeter Book was presented by Bishop Leofric, near the time of the Norman Conquest, to Exeter Cathedral; the other is the Vercelli Book, which was discovered in 1822 in the cathedral at Vercelli. One poet's name is preserved—Cynewulf—interwoven by himself in runes with pieces of his verse. He wrote Elene and other church legends in verse of considerable merit, but his date is doubtful. Probably he lived in the 8th century. In that century of greatest energy of thought among the Anglo-Saxons, the empire of Charlemagne drew light from a York-shireman, Alcuin, who was appointed to do for its monasteries and their schools what might be called the work of a great minister of public instruction. He had been born in 735, the year in which Bede died, and it was in 782 that he took up his residence at Aix-la-Chapelle.
But when Alcuin died in the year 804, the simpler question of the establishment of Christianity had passed into the more complex forms of battle against heresies, of struggle to maintain full uniformity of theological opinion. At the same time advance of thought was being checked in England. There were continued attacks of the Northmen, some of whom were trying the mettle of King Alfred, at the same time that others were following Rollo up the Seine to lay the first foundation of the Norman power. Those who followed Rollo in 876 learned in Normandy the language of the women of the country from which their descendants afterwards crossed over to England to make conquest of a kindred people. In the 9th century John Scotus Erigena, born possibly in Ireland, possibly in Ayrshire, was an acute thinker established at the court of Charles the Bald. He wrote a Latin book On the Division of Nature, which, by its endeavour to bring the teaching of theology into philosophical harmony with other teaching in the schools, yet without opposition to a single dogma, laid the foundation of what is called the Scholastic Philosophy.
King Alfred was then living, and working strenuously for the revival of lost learning. Ruin of a monastery meant in those days the annihilation of a school; and the ravages of the Danes had caused such decay of learning that in re-establishing the ruined schools Alfred translated the most important books of the schools into the language of the people. For Latin could no longer be the language through which studies were pursued. Orosins, whose Universal History had been a school-book, was thus translated, with omission of whatever was not practical, and with addition of new geographical detail. Bede's History was translated. A favourite school-book for ethical training had been Boëthius On the Consolation of Philosophy. That also was translated by King Alfred. For the higher training of the clergy the king, justly named Great, turned into English Pope Gregory's book on the Pastoral Care; and to him also is ascribed the foundation of the continuous record of the annals of the country, known as the Saxon Chronicle, which now and then had afterwards an entry in verse, especially, under the year 937, a poem on the battle of Brunanburh (q.v.). The noble work of Alfred, who died in October 901, filled his kingdom of Wessex with new life, and the centre of intellectual energy was thus removed from north to south. The work of Alfred's son and grandson spread this new influence, until, in 954, the grandson, Eadred, free of the last of the under-kings, ruled over all England from the Channel to the Firth of Forth. The centre of intellectual energy was then the midland region, which included the five burghs that had been strongholds of the Danes in Mercia. But after the death of Alfred, First-English literature passed into work associated with honest endeavour to restore religion by restoring strictness of monasticism. The chief interest of this period for us is in the Homilies of Ælfric, who wrote books also to aid his work of teacher in the school at Winchester. Ælfric's Homilies were upon the series of days kept holy by the church, and thus we have in them an exposition of the doctrines of the Church of England at the end of the 10th century. The first of the two sets in which they were arranged was written in the year 990. A poem on the battle of Maldon in the year 994 tells a victory of the Danes over Byrhtnoth, who was killed in the battle. It has much of the old spirit of the poems written, as this also was, for recitation to the people. It differs, however, from the older work in being a plain record of facts, not wanting in animation, but without the play of fancy that transforms the real into the mythical by painting some strong enemy as giant or fire-breathing dragon.
The Norman Conquest brought a royal court in which French was familiar, while Latin was the common language of the learned throughout Europe. Friends of the Conqueror held all the places of high trust, and of those who had money to spend few would pay it for written records of the English pieces still recited to the country-people. From 1066 till about the year 1200, except in a few religious writings of no great importance, English literature speaks the thoughts of Englishmen through French or Latin. The literature in the language of the people had not ceased to be; but there was nobody who cared to put it upon record. Even where it was already written, it might be rubbed from the parchment to make a palimpsest in which English was replaced by French or Latin.
Of the English literature written in Latin after the Norman Conquest, a very large part was monastic chronicle. Every great religious house set up its chronicle, which might begin with Adam or with Hengist and Horsa, but which, wherever it began, was a compilation of no value till its record came near to the date of writing. Then it included facts yet within living memory, and became more and more valuable as a record of the past, until it became, for the occurrences of each successive year, the testimony of a living writer. From these chronicles we have our surest knowledge of the past. They were written usually by men whose sympathies were with the church and with the people, who cared little for pomp and show, but had clear notions about duty. There was strength of England in their practical simplicity. The most important of the monastic chroniclers were Ordericus Vitalis, who wrote an Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy, and William of Malmesbury, who wrote a History of English Kings. Each closed his chronicle and probably his life about the same time, 1141-42. In William of Malmesbury the arrangement of the narrative showed a chronicler who had the genius of a historian. Milton placed him next to Bede. About the year 1147 a stream of romance broke from among the hills in the History of British Kings—British as distinguished from English—by an imaginative Welsh ecclesiastic, Geoffrey of Monmouth. This Latin chronicle, enriched by its author's fancy, began with the mythical origin of Britain in Brut, a great-grandson of Æneas, and went on through tales of kings, as Gorbeduc and Lear, from which our poets afterwards drew subjects for their verse. These led to stories of King Arthur, who in this book came to life again, and became the hero of that cycle of romance in English literature which answers to the cycle of the Charlemagne romance in France and Italy. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Chronicle was abridged by Alfred of Beverley; it was turned into French verse by Geoffrey Gaimar and also by Wace, whose version supplanted Gaimar's and abides in literature as Wace's Brut. Romances of Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Tristan, were supplied abundantly as the demand for them increased. Walter Map was a man of genius, who was chaplain to Henry II. He attacked abuses of the church with witty Latin poems, that set forth a Bishop Goliath as type of the fleshliness in which the spiritual life of the church was being lost. Walter Map arranged the chief Arthurian tales into a sequence, and put soul into them by uniting them inseparably with the spiritual allegory of the Holy Grail. Thus, within forty years after they had first come into our literature, the tales of King Arthur were associated, as they still are, with the spiritual life of the English people.
After the year 1200 English regained its place in literature as the language of the country, and we have an increasing number of MSS. containing works by Englishmen written in English, as well as in French and Latin. To a date near 1205 is assigned an English poem of about 56,000 lines, in which the famous story told by Wace in French was told again by Layamon, a priest living near Bewdley by the Severn. Layamon's Brut is the first great piece of literature in Transition English, and near to it in date is a large fragment of a work named from its author, a canon of St Austin's order, Brother Orme or Ormin, the Ormulum. This was a metrical arrangement of the series of gospels appointed to be read in church throughout the year, set forth in simple narrative, each of them followed by a little homily upon it, written in like manner for pleasant recitation to the people. To this period belongs also the rise of the Robin Hood and other ballads, and the telling in English verse of metrical romances, such as those of Havelok and of King Alexander, that at first were told in French.
The foundation of the Dominicans as preaching friars for the maintenance of orthodoxy in religion, and of the Franciscans for the spread of the religious life by brotherhood with the poor, was in the beginning of the 13th century. Books being forbidden property to the Franciscans, they escaped from bondage to their records of opinion, looked straight to nature, and advanced the knowledge of the outward world. The first rector of a Franciscan house at Oxford was Robert Grosseteste, who in 1235 became Bishop of Lincoln, and made strenuous war against abuses of the Roman government of the church. He found that three times the revenue of the king of England was being paid for the support of absentee Italians, to whom the pope gave English church livings. Roger Bacon, who settled at Oxford as a Franciscan under Grosseteste, died after the year 1294, and had produced the most advanced body of scientific knowledge, the result of independent thought and experimental research, then to be found in Europe. He set it forth in his Opus Majus, Opus Minus, and Opus Tertium, all poured out in fifteen months to satisfy the pope's request for an account of what he knew. Robert of Gloucester's chronicle from the siege of Troy to the death of Henry III. in 1272 put English history into verse for diffusion among the people, still chiefly by recitation. In the reign of Henry III. appeared in October 1258 the first proclamation in English since the Conquest. There was not another in that reign. At the close of the 13th century the wisdom of the people was gathered also into the metrical Proverbs of Hendyng.
At the beginning of the 14th century the religious spirit of the people was expressed by Robert of Brunne's metrical version—as the Handlynge Synne—of a Manuel des Péchés that had been written in French by a Yorkshireman, William of Wadington. There was in the popular poem of 'The Land of Cockayne' a homely satire on the sensualism that had spread among the monks, who now had too much to live upon and too little to do. The miracle-plays that first came into use after the Conquest had developed greatly. Early in the 14th century long sequences of Bible story, then first set forth in the language of the people, were so dealt with by trade-guilds as to be a great means of bringing the Bible into the street, and vividly presenting to the people the events on which the forms of their religious faith were founded. Such sequences of miracle-plays have come down to us—the Chester, the Coventry, the Wakefield or Towneley, and the York. There are known to have been more than these, and they did not wholly go out of use until the reign of Elizabeth. Englishmen then had Bibles to read in their own tongue, and had learned to read them, so that there was no more need for the device of an Ormulum or of a sequence of miracle-plays to show what they contained.
While English literature was in such ways the voice of the nation, the genius of Dante had raised literature in Italy to its highest artistic form, the higher for close union with all that was felt to be most real in life. The year 1300 is the assumed date of the Divina Commedia. Dante, who died in 1321, was followed by Petrarch (born in 1304), and by Boccaccio (born in 1313). Petrarch and Boccaccio were the great living poets of Italy when Chaucer's genius was being shaped in England. They died nearly at the same time—Petrarch in 1374, Boccaccio in 1375, when Chaucer was in ripest manhood, and the better artist for the influence these great Italians had upon his work.
But energies of thought in care about essentials were the main cause of the strength of English literature in the 14th century. There was continued provision of monastic chronicles, also of religious poems, one of them, the Cursor Mundi, of great length. But a new mind found utterance. Decay of spiritual life in the church, as its wealth became its weakness, and caused poets and reformers to lament 'the fatal gift of Constantine,' had given cause for earnest questionings and struggles for reform. At the university of Paris, in 1324, Marsiglio of Padua had controverted the sacerdotal limits of a church, had declared only Christ the judge of heresy, and had broken with the medieval view of papal authority. In this country William of Ockham, called the invincible doctor, argued boldly against the pope's power in temporal affairs. It was he who brought the Scholastic Philosophy to a close by reasoning upon doctrine without faith in the infallibility of dogma. The great movement of the 14th century towards reform was prompted by visible corruption. Wyclif himself as a reformer looked at first mainly to discipline, with which questions of doctrine became gradually more involved. For seventy years, from 1309 to 1378, the popes were at Avignon under French influence, and this quickened English resistance to their claims. For the next forty years or more the influence of the papacy was further weakened by the rivalry of two popes, one in France and one in Italy. Thus, while John Wyclif, who died on the last day of the year 1384, having secured between 1360 and 1382 a complete translation of the Bible into English, represented in our literature of the 14th century a strenuous reform movement within the church, William Langland, in a great poem addressed to the people at large, the Vision of Piers Plowman, sought to animate men to the search for Christ, and battled vigorously with church corruptions. Five great pestilences in the 14th century—the greatest the Black Death of 1348–49—were regarded as signs of divine wrath against sin, and added much to the intensity of feeling. Langland, who wrote his Christian poem, which made love 'the triacle of heaven,' between 1362 and the close of the century, seems to have been urged to utterance by the great pestilence of 1361.
The Jack Straw rebellion of 1381 caused John Gower, a wealthy gentleman, religious, liberal, and with distrust of Wyclif's followers, to seek the source of all ills of the land by a review in his Latin poem, Vox Clamantis, of all orders of society. In this, although an orthodox churchman warning against heresies, and one who had no sympathy with popular violence, he wrote with emphasis of the corruption of the papacy and the gross appetites of the religious orders. Gower wrote three great books, and wrote them in what still were the three languages of English literature. Of his book written in French only the name remains, Speculum Meditantis; that in Latin was the Vox Clamantis. In his English poem, the Confessio Amantis, Gower, like Chaucer, followed the lead of Boccaccio's Decameron in threading together upon a connecting narrative a series of tales. Like Chaucer's, they were told in verse. Gower's tales were moralised to illustrate the seven deadly sins, and one book dealt with a question pressed on the country by the gross misrule of Richard II., the duties of a king. Gower lived until 1408, blind during the last eight years of his life. Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400. In the Canterbury Tales, with their Prologue and the rest of the connecting thread of narrative, as well as in other writings, Chaucer shows a genius akin to Shakespeare's. Not only is there a rare dramatic power manifested clearly, though there was not yet a drama, but he had also the calm sense of highest truth, and that kindly breadth of human sympathy without which a power such as Shakespeare's cannot be. In his other poems Chaucer seems in earlier life to have been influenced by the French poets fashionable at court; but he came more and more under the influence of the great Italian masters. His Troilus and Cressida and his Knight's Tale are free versions of two of the most famous poems written by Boccaccio, and the influence of Dante was upon his later work. In the north, while Chaucer wrote, the spirit of liberty maintained by the endeavours of the kings of England to extend their sovereignty beyond the Tweed produced from John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, his poem of the Bruce, which was half-finished in 1375. Barbour wrote also a collection of church legends which were printed in 1881–82.
In the earlier half of the 15th century there were many influences adverse to the maintenance of the high standard of English literature. There were civil wars and there was foreign war of aggression, part of the endeavour of the kings of England to maintain and extend sovereignty in France. None of these wars were inspiring to the men on the south side of the Tweed. Scots and French were driven to alliance against a common danger; and in battle for their independence the Scots bred the better poets. In England at the beginning of the 15th century there were, indeed, two poets of mark, John Lydgate and Thomas Occleve or Hoccleve, each of them about thirty years old when Chaucer died. Hoccleve was a clerk in the office of the Privy Seal, who wrote in English his chief poem De Regimine Principum, on the duty of kings, that it might be humbly presented to King Henry V. as a reminder to him that Hoccleve and other clerks in the government service could not get payment of their salaries. Without disloyalty Hoccleve pointed out the evil of aggressive war. John Lydgate, an accomplished monk of Bury St Edmunds, had travelled in France and Italy before he became the most famous teacher in his time of rhetoric and poetry. He drew many to the monastery school of Bury St Edmunds, and himself wrote much good verse that was in high repute. Besides many short pieces and lives of saints, he wrote especially three larger poems—one was his Troy Book, on the siege of Troy; another was the Story of Thebes, with a pleasant introduction linking it to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; the third, his most important work, was the Falls of Princes, a version through the French verse of Laurent de Premierfait, from the Latin prose of Boccaccio's De Casibus Illustrium Virorum. James I. of Scotland, captured as a child, instructed in English manners as a prisoner at the English court, married to a cousin of Henry V., and crowned at Scene in 1424, was too manly to be made a puppet in the hands of England. His poem the King's Quhair, which celebrates his love for Jane Beaufort whom he married, is one of the best pieces written as in the school of Chaucer; and if he was also the author of a piece so homely and vigorous as Peebles to the Play, with its humorous scenes of life among the people, he had a master's breadth of power.
Wyclif's followers were rigorously persecuted in the earlier years of the 15th century. John Huss was burned in 1415 by the Council of Constance, three or four months before the battle of Agincourt. On Christmas-day in 1417 a noble-hearted gentleman, Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, who had befriended the Lollards, was hung by the middle from a gallows with an iron chain and roasted alive. That was one stage on the way from Wyclif to Luther. In 1449 Reginald Pecock was raised from the bishopric of St Asaph to that of Chichester, and on the part of the bishops undertook an answer to the complaints made by the
Lollards against the higher clergy. The Lollards were forerunners of the men called afterwards Puritans, who wished for a church with all its rites and ordinances founded upon Scripture and freed from the traditions of men. Pecock's answer to them, called the Repressor of over much Blaming of the Clergy, a large work in English prose, admitted their right to be reasoned with, and gave to reason the same place that was assigned to it long afterwards by Richard Hooker, when he opposed the Puritan view at the end of Elizabeth's reign. There are, indeed, many points of resemblance between the arguments of Pecock's Repressor and those of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity. But Pecock, because he reasoned with the people in their own tongue, instead of compelling obedience, was condemned by his own order, and imprisoned for the rest of his life in Thorney Abbey; while Hooker for like service in a later time won honour as a champion of the church. Civil as well as religious liberty was represented even in our scanty 15th-century literature by Sir John Fortescue, Chief-justice in the reign of Henry VI. Fortescue, when his king's cause was lost and he was an exile in France with the queen and the young prince who might hereafter be king in England, gave to the prince a lesson on the limits of an English king's authority, comparing it with the absolutism of the king of France. He wrote like a sound constitutional lawyer on the Difference between Absolute and Limited Monarchy, and about the year 1463 De Laudibus Legum Angliæ. By that time new powers had begun to work in Europe for the shaping of the future. The capture of Constantinople by the Turks in May 1453 drove into exile many learned Greeks, who earned their living in Italy and elsewhere by teaching. They had a ready welcome at Florence, where Cosmo de' Medici was establishing his power. There began in this way a diffusion of Greek studies, through which Plato came to life again, and his doctrines came in strong aid of the movement against fleshly corruptions of the church. A saying that arose then, Cave a Græcis, ne fias hæreticus, shows the supposed tendency of these new studies. At the same time a new force, which would quicken greatly the formation of opinion in the world at large, was coming into life through the discovery of the art of printing with movable types. In 1455 the printing of a Bible with such types was finished. The working printers, presently dispersing, carried their profitable skill to other places. There was a press at Rome in 1466, at Paris in 1469, and the new art was brought into England by Caxton about 1477. The 15th century closed with another event fruitful of great consequences—the discovery of the New World (1492).
Luther and Raphael, born in the same year, 1483, were youths of eighteen in the first year of the 16th century; Michael Angelo and Ariosto were young men of twenty-six. The intellectual predominance obtained by Italy through the free life of her republics was not immediately destroyed by the establishment of petty tyrannies as single families won mastery over their fellow-citizens. The new lords, of whom Lorenzo de' Medici (who died in 1492) was a great typical example, spent freely the money of their subjects upon luxuries of art. They led the way in encouragement of every form of intellectual life that could keep active minds busy upon other questions than those which concerned their ancient rights. At the little Italian courts every gentleman was, to the best of his power, a small artist who cultivated ingenuity in clothes, in manners, and in words. When our English youth travelled, in Henry VIII.'s time, into Italy for polish, they brought home fashions of speech and writing that developed in new form an Italian influence upon our literature. This was not, as in Chancer's time, the influence of one great writer on another, but the diffused social influence of a prevailing fashion.
Struggle for independence had raised poets in Scotland, of whom there is a long list in William Dunbar's Lament for the Makers, first printed in 1508, when Andrew Millar and Walter Chepman had just set up the first press in Edinburgh. Robert Henryson, schoolmaster of Dunfermline, shrewd, homely, and religious, author of the first pastoral in our literature, Robin and Makyn, of a sequel to Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida, the Testament of Cresscid, and of translations from Æsop's fables, was then dead. William Dunbar himself, the next great poet after Chaucer, was about forty years old when he received, in the year 1500, a pension of £10 Scots from James IV., whose marriage with Henry VII.'s daughter Margaret, in 1503, he celebrated with his poem of the Thistle and the Rose. It was probably in 1501 that Gavin Douglas dedicated to James IV. his poem of the Palace of Honour. In July 1513, two months before the disaster at Flodden, Gavin Douglas finished the earliest translation of the Æneid in our literature, with verses of his own to introduce each book. Gavin Douglas, become Bishop of Dunkeld, died of the plague in 1522, a pensioner at Henry VIII.'s court. Dunbar was dead in 1530. David Lyndsay, who became Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, was associated with James V. of Scotland from his infancy, and addressed to him many admonitions on the sorrows of the people and the duty of a king. Lyndsay's Satire of the Three Estates was the most important example in our literature of the Morality Play that expressed moral teaching by the dramatic action of personified attributes and forms of life. It shadowed forth the reform wanted in the Church of Scotland; and the passing by the Estates in 1540 of what was called a friendly act of reformation was prepared for by the public acting of this satire in the presence of the king. Lyndsay's last poem, the Monarchie, was finished in 1553, and in this 'the Scottish poet of the Reformation,' as he has been called, becomes distinctly Lutheran. The vigour of these poets of the north was not equalled in the south under Henry VII., where Stephen Hawes, a gentleman of the king's chamber, wrote, among other poems, a Pastime of Pleasure, with an allegory of the course of life in knightly adventures, that show distinctly, but in form only, the advance of allegorical literature towards its crowning work in Spenser's Faerie Queene. John Skelton, who had been chosen for his scholarship to be a tutor to Henry VII.'s children, wrote in the reign of Henry VIII. satires against church corruption, in little torrents of short lines with continuities of rhyme, verse called Skeltonical. It poured out the complaints of Colin Clout, who represented the poor Englishman of country and of town, and it boldly attacked Wolsey himself in the height of his power. From Skelton, with whom he had fellow-feeling, Spenser borrowed afterwards for himself the name of Colin Clout.
Greek scholarship was still advancing, and was still associated with the free advance of thought. William Grocyn, having learned Greek in Italy, first taught it at Oxford in 1491. The physician, Thomas Linacre, who had also learned Greek in Italy, taught also at Oxford. In 1497, when Erasmus sought to learn Greek, he came from Paris to Oxford for it. John Colet, the founder of St Paul's School in 1510, and William Lily, its first headmaster, were Oxford scholars, associating their Greek studies with ideals of true life and a wise liberality of thought. Thomas More when at Oxford was inspired by these men, and his Utopia (Latin, 1516; Eng. trans. 1556) imagines a commonwealth in the New World lately discovered, and through playful wit brings thought inspired by Plato and by Plutarch into the Christian ideal of a higher policy than statecraft yet had known. More sought also to bring home the teaching of the Gospels by a Latin paraphrase. Translation of the Scriptures into the language of the people had many learned advocates who were restrained only by fear of mistranslations that would, as they thought, corrupt the Word of God.
Luther's translation of the New Testament into German appeared in 1522. Tyndale's translation into English followed in 1525. Sir Thomas More was its adverse critic, because he found Lutheran bias in the choice of words. In 1530 Tyndale finished printing his translation of the Pentateuch, made with Miles Coverdale's help. In October 1536 Tyndale was strangled and burnt near Brussels. In the same year Coverdale's completed translation of the Bible was admitted into England, and work towards the production of a translation that would satisfy all judgments was continued (see BIBLE).
From Italy there flowed new streams of literature. The Arcadia of Sannazaro, finished in 1504, was in a form of pastoral that spread to other lands. The first eclogue of mark in France was Clement Marot's Complaint on the Death of Louise of Savoy, mother of Francis I., written in 1531, and paraphrased afterwards by Spenser in the eleventh eclogue of the Shepherd's Calendar. George of Montemayor, a Portuguese, produced in 1542 a Diana Enamorada, which joined force with the Arcadia of Sannazaro as an influence on English literature. Blended with influences from the Spanish romance of chivalry, it led to Sir Philip Sidney's romance of Arcadia, first published in 1590, after Sidney's death. Of the same parentage came also a long line of French romances, which continued far into the 17th century.
The modern drama, based upon the form of Latin plays then usually acted, had its rise in Italy. Ariosto first wrote comedies about the year 1498; his earliest, I Suppositi, was based on the Eunuch of Terence, and the Captives of Plautus. Trissino's Sofonisba, dedicated to Leo X. in 1515, and first printed in 1529, was the first Italian tragedy of mark. The Italian sonnet was first imitated in Henry VIII.'s reign by Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey. Experiments in unrhymed verse by the Italian poets led to the first use of blank verse in English literature, when the Earl of Surrey used it in translating two books of the Aeneid, which had been so turned into Italian.
The great question of church reform became more passionate, and divided all Europe into two camps, which came to have their headquarters, one at Madrid, the other in London. Luther had died in 1546, when Calvin's age was thirty-three, and Calvin died at Geneva in 1564. Hugh Latimer preached before King Edward, and was burnt by Mary. John Knox, indignant against three ruling Marias, sounded from Geneva his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, just before the accession of Elizabeth. He could not make his peace with her, but, warned from England, he landed at Leith, and stirred Scotland to the heart with religious zeal. It had its aims in accord with the teaching of Geneva, but was associated by Knox with a masterly reshaping of provisions for the education of the people.
In Elizabeth's reign the struggle for all that they most prized, against Spain enriched by the wealth of the New World, lifted the hearts of men as the hearts of the old Greeks were lifted when they fought for freedom against Persia. Fashions and follies there were then as now, chiefly brought in from Italy, with an exuberance of ingenuity that touched alike the clothing of men's bodies and men's thoughts. Thus the Italian influence, which became dominant over outward forms, introduced that straining for conceits and dainty turns of speech, alliteration, and antithesis, which was so common as to need a name. It was called Enphism from Euphues, the hero of a book by John Lyly, published in 1579, and written in the fashionable manner. Lyly wrote in that manner to win hearing. His aim was to advance a view of the need and nature of true education, which had been urged by one of the best scholars of the day, Roger Ascham, in his Schoolmaster, first published in 1570, two years after its author's death.
In the twenty-one years of Elizabeth's reign before 1579 English energies were growing. In that year Edmund Spenser, aged about twenty-six, produced his first book, the Shepherd's Calendar, following Clement Marot in his way of applying pastoral images to the religious conflicts of the time, and boldly taking his place beside the disgraced Archbishop Grindal, with whose firmness in encouraging free search for Scripture truth the poet was in sympathy. In the same book Spenser paid homage to Tityrus (Chaucer) as his master. He took the style of Chaucer for his model, avoiding the false emphasis laid on tricks of thought and phrase. Spenser was Chaucer's successor, Milton's predecessor. In the great fragment of his Faerie Queene, which represents man through all his powers for good striving heavenward, and attaining only by the intervention of the grace of God—of which Prince Arthur is the bearer—all militant forces of his time have their expression. The Faerie Queene is throughout an intense utterance of the spiritual life of England under Elizabeth, in all that were then the forms of the long battle towards a higher life for man. England was full of song. Men felt proudly the rising vigour of their country. A tailor (John Stow) was inspired to write its annals. An attorney (William Warner) wrote in verse of Albion's England. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1585 removed the common danger that had knitted Englishmen together. In 1589 the Marprelate tracts against the bishops, and the replies to them, brought oppositions of opinion in the English Church into that bitter conflict of which Francis Bacon, then twenty-eight years old, pointed out the unseemliness in a paper addressed to the government on Controversies in the Church of England. Shakespeare's age was then twenty-five. He had come to London probably when twenty-two, two years before the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and at that time the English drama was but twenty-five years old.
The first English comedy, Ralph Roister Doister, a version of the Miles Gloriosus of Plautus, had been written between 1534 and 1541 to be acted by Eton boys. It was a schoolmaster's chance substitution of English for Latin in a play written by him for his boys; and it was acted under conditions that would not prompt imitation. Its production, therefore, was an isolated fact. But the first tragedy, Gorboduc, by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, acted in the Inner Temple at Christmas, 1560—actually on the first of January 1561—was a substitution of English for Latin in an English play written in the manner of Seneca, that drew to itself the attention of many young men who could write. Its grave dwelling upon the need of union to keep a people strong, a truth of deep significance to England at that time, pleased Elizabeth. The play was acted again before her, by command. It set an example that was followed at court, where English plays came into request. It showed also to young wits how they might furnish themselves with money by writing English plays to be acted by those gentlemen's servants who already had formed little companies for playing Interludes. Such interludes, short entertainments in dialogue by a few servants of the house, who used their skill in mimicry for the amusement of their lord and his guests, produced a form of literature in which John Heywood excelled. But these short pieces had no developed plots. Desire grew towards the new way of showing tales in action. It was an improvement on the most dramatic recitation by a single story-teller. But in the twenty-five years from 1561 to 1586 few plays of high mark were produced. There was little more than a wide spreading of the taste for the new kind of entertainment, and a development of companies of actors. At length a civic opposition drove the actors privileged to play in London out of rooms and inn-yards in the city into buildings of their own, just outside the jurisdiction of the mayor and corporation, which they erected for sole use as theatres. These first theatres were built in 1576. Ten years afterwards Shakespeare came to London when the new conditions of the stage had made the way ready for plays of higher mark. John Lyly had produced court plays chiefly mythological. George Peele had already pleased the queen with his Arraignment of Paris. Christopher Marlowe began with Tamburlaine upon the public stage in 1586 or 1587, his short and brilliant career ending in 1593. Robert Greene, who died in 1592, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Kyd, and others maintained a poetical drama during the six, or about six, years of what may be called Shakespeare's apprenticeship. During these years he made himself generally useful, acted, and sometimes turned old plays into new. At the end of the six years this group of dramatists, the pure Elizabethan, passed away; and for the next six years, 1592 to 1598, in which Shakespeare was master, writing plays of his own, he seems to have had no strong competitors. But in or about the year 1598 many young dramatists—Ben Jonson, Dekker, Marston, Heywood, Middleton—who were to earn fame in the next reign began to write, while Shakespeare went on with his work, remaining foremost of all. Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, and Ford did not write any plays until after the death of Elizabeth. Webster wrote his two finest plays in the reign of James I., and emphasised, like others in his time, that element of terror in the drama which Aristotle had joined to pity. Webster lived into the middle of the 17th century. James Shirley, who was only nine years old when Elizabeth died, and who wrote plays chiefly in the reign of Charles I., lived until 1666, the last of those who are usually called Elizabethan dramatists. The period of highest achievement in our English poetical drama falls, then, within the first ten or twelve years of the reign of James I. But already in this best time of fruitage there are conditions of decay, which make it hard to say where ripening ends and rotting begins. The energies of struggle had developed a dramatic literature in Spain as in England. Influence of the Spanish drama, coinciding with a lower social tone in James's court, caused many of the plays of younger dramatists to find in intrigues of animal love the sole groundwork of invention. On the stage of Elizabeth's time there was no such restriction, but interest was shown in all the trials of the life of man.
The 17th century, from the accession of James I. in 1603 to the Revolution of 1689, was occupied by new forms of struggle about the limit of authority. Becket's struggle with Henry II. had been for sovereignty of the church over the king. From that time onward, Reformation movements chiefly were for war against the pope's claim of dominion. While England was in contest against Spain, Elizabeth was leader of her people. When removal of the danger from abroad gave freedom for domestic difference, the queen became unpopular. There was dread that civil war would come again after her death. The two chief heroic poems at the close of her reign, Drayton's Barons' Wars and Daniel's Civil Wars of York and Lancaster, were designed—as other poems and plays were then designed—to press on Englishmen a feeling of the ills that follow when this house is raised against this house. When James I. sought less wisely than Elizabeth to maintain and magnify the power of the sovereign, he soon made the question of the limit of authority political as well as religious, and prepared the way for civil war in the next reign.
Revolt against authority of mere tradition in the teaching of the schools had its chief leader in Francis Bacon, whose analytical mind looked in his Essays upon the nature of man himself, and in his philosophy upon the nature of the world without him. His two books of the Advancement of Learning, with which he began to lay foundations for his New Organon, were published in 1605, and his work as teacher of the right way of experimental search into nature, unimpeded by tradition, was suggested by a strong reaction against bondage to common opinion (the Idol of the Forum) or the teaching of great men who have played large parts on the stage of life (the Idols of the Theatre). Men with a bent for science began to inquire as Bacon counselled that they should, and grew in desire towards unbiased inquiry by well-planned experiments. They were searchers into nature so inspired who were incorporated in London as a Royal Society in 1662.
But James I., though Bacon's patron, knew little of the whole advance of free inquiry that Bacon represented only in one form of study. To obtain freedom of worship, English Puritans sailed for New England in the Mayflower in 1620, and added strength to the foundations of an England on the other side of the Atlantic, which had its origin in the vigour of Elizabethan navigators. Part of the region that Sir Walter Raleigh named Virginia, after the virgin queen, was granted by James I. in April 1606 to a London company, whose first settlers called their town Jamestown, in honour of the king, and who produced in Captain John Smith the author of a True Relation of Virginia, published in London at the close of the year 1608. This may be regarded as the first book in the English literature of America. The settlers in New England who had left Old England for conscience' sake, and who included many graduates, of Oxford and especially of Cambridge, brought a new strength to the New English world that is well represented in the record of the Mather family.
John Milton went to Cambridge in the year (1625) when Charles I. became king. He joined fine scholarship and the poet's temperament to strenuous endeavour towards freedom of thought. His high ideals were expressed with the power of a master poet who had subjected his mind to long and patient training. His earlier verse was pastoral, as he thought suited to a time of preparation for a higher flight; but the period of his prose works intervened between his earlier verse and the later in which he rose to the epic with Paradise Lost, published in 1667. His other epic, Paradise Regained, was published in 1671 with Samson Agonistes, his one drama, modelled on the Greek. In the controversies of the day about religion, Milton was the best representative of the first principle of the Independents. They would unite all men as fellow-Christians who built their faith upon the Bible, and would leave to each the right of joining himself to an independent congregation of the worshippers with whom he best agreed in his interpretation of the Bible. Richard Baxter was the ideal type of the Presbyterian who thought the Episcopal Church less scriptural than a church managed by presbyters and elders, but was as desirous as the ruling church to bring all Englishmen into accord with one church discipline and one form of belief. Of the church established by Elizabeth as via media between Rome and Geneva, the church of which Richard Hooker in his Ecclesiastical Polity had, at the end of Elizabeth's reign, best maintained the cause, Jeremy Taylor was in Stuart days the ablest supporter. God made us to differ that by wrestle of opinion we may win the victory for truth. Richard Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, Richard Baxter, and John Milton—who shall say which was the better Christian?
Milton's early poems were written at a time when the English drama seemed to break in its fall into a rainbow-tinted spray of song; Herrick, born lyrist, Wither, Suckling, Cartwright, Habington, Randolph, Cleveland, Lovelace, Cowley, Crashaw, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan represent the graces and the follies and the grossnesses of life, the strife of parties, and the highest aspirations towards the divine ideal. Milton's Comus, the most beautiful example of the masque, which before Milton had been best developed by Ben Jonson, was an indirect plea for the high use of the poet's art, when Prynne had just expressed the Puritan antipathy to plays, masques, dances, in his Histrionastic. Comus, acted at Ludlow in 1634, was also a setting forth of the beauty of temperance and purity, at a time when the course of fashion, aided by the readiness of the king's friends to show that they were no Puritans, was bringing sensuality into repute. Dr Thomas Browne of Norwich—not Sir Thomas till the time of Charles II.—in his Religio Medici, published in 1642, joined faith in doctrines of the church with a free, reverent spirit of inquiry. Every page of that book was rich with subtle utterance of independent thought. Milton's prose pamphlet Areopagitica in 1644 enshrined in a piece written carefully after the manner of a Greek oration the cardinal principle that for the advance of truth there is no safeguard to be relied upon but free exchange of thought. 'Let trutin and falsehood grapple,' Milton said; 'who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.'
This is the battle that runs through the history of English literature. All the prose writings of Milton in the Commonwealth time dealt essentially with the question of the limit of authority; they sought the best solution of the problem between king and people that had stirred up civil war. The Commonwealth was an experiment that failed. The Restoration was a going back to a new starting-point, and trying again for an answer to the problem. It was found at last in 1688. The argument for absolute authority had its best expression in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan appeared in 1651 as his contribution to the great controversy of the time. James Harrington's Oceana in 1656, and Richard Baxter's Holy Commonwealth, show the energies at work which have made English literature at all times a true and full expression of the people's life. They were in George Wither's verse and Andrew Marvell's satire; in Butler's Hudibras with a wide reach of wisdom in its wit that struck at everything insincere; in Paradise Lost, that shapes an epic to maintain God's love among the discord of disputes about predestination and free-will; in Paradise Regained, with its calm burden of Rest in the Lord, enforcing faith and patience in the darkest times—dark even as the times seemed to religious men who looked at the court and country in 1671—and in Samson Agonistes, which was added as a scriptural example of such faith. In all work of the best writers there was the best life of the time engaged upon its most essential problems. John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in 1678 and 1684 found its answer in the religious feeling to which it appealed, still strong throughout the body of the people. The masterpiece of John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel in 1681, and the poems that next followed, dealt altogether with those vital questions of the day which pointed to the coming revolution.
Strain for ingenious conceits had been an Italian fashion that spread to Spain and to France as well as to England. In all three countries it became laboured, and took the form called by Samuel Johnson 'metaphysical,' in the poetry of which John Donne in the reign of James I. was the favourite writer. At the same time Marino in Italy and Gongora in Spain illustrated the same form of decay. Our days of Euphuism were represented in Spain by the school of the 'Conceptistas,' and those whom we may call our later Euphuists were represented by the school of 'Cultos.' In France reaction against this laboured extravagance had begun in the days when English royalists of the time of Charles I. were in political adversity and lived in Paris. They who afterwards in England were patrons of literature attended the salons of the Marquise de Rambouillet, and were in contact with the critics and the poets who prepared the way for the predominance of France. Boileau, the master critic of this school, began his satires about the time of the Restoration, and summed up his views in his Art Poétique in 1673. A taste for criticism now spread; even the small wits prided themselves on sense. Boileau lived until 1711. Critics who followed his teaching in the letter rather than the spirit swarmed about him and survived him. The period of Latin-English thus came in, when writers, to avoid the low association of ideas with homely words, sought their vocabulary from the Latin side of the language, and wrote sentences that they would never speak.
Boileau opposed the strain of writers for extravagant conceits—which he called the paste brilliants of Italy—by fixing attention on the simplicity that graced the highest art in Roman literature of the time of Augustus. Works of Virgil and Horace were the models through which he would have nature to be studied. This was right counsel, but many misapplied it. In England they grew blind to the art of their own best writers who were not in obvious relation with the new French school. Deaf to the music of Chaucer and Spenser, they supposed that Waller, whose earliest verse was written in the reign of Charles I., and who died, aged eighty-two, in 1687, had been the first in England who wrote smooth verses and invented the right use of rhyme. Sir John Denham's poem on the view from Cooper's Hill, first published in 1643, was exaggerated into epic dignity. Dryden described it as a work that, 'for the majesty of the style, is and ever will be the exact standard of good writing.' Dryden was then advocating the disuse of blank verse in our plays, and he used for a few years the rhymed couplets preferred in France which found their way into the heroic play of the Restoration. These heroic plays, of which the first had been Davenant's Siege of Rhodes, were sustained in popularity by Dryden himself with plays like his Tyrannic Love in 1669, and Conquest of Granada in 1670. They retained much of the extravagance against which, on behalf of good sense, Boileau made elsewhere successful war; and the Rehearsal, by the Duke of Buckingham, produced in 1671, was a burlesque meant as a plea for good sense even in the theatre. The heroic plays passed into rhetorical tragedy, of which only two pieces by Otway, Venice Preserved and the Orphan, avoiding royal heroes, were distinguished by domestic pathos. But Charles II. left Otway to starve. The rhetorical tragedies became associated with an artificial stage delivery until the time of Garrick, who went straight to nature. In the comedy of the Restoration, Sir George Etheridge's profligate young gentlemen, who call themselves men of sense and have no reason in their lives, reproduce with a light touch, a grace of gracelessness, the fashionable manners of the time. But Molière, greater than Plautus or than Terence, had raised comedy in Paris to an intellectual supremacy that was felt by the best comic dramatists in England. Wycherley, whose four comedies were produced in the reign of Charles II.; Congreve, whose plays were all written under William III.; Sir John Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, who wrote also in the reign of Anne, learned from Molière to put a larger life into their art as dramatists, and produce what has been entitled the Prose Comedy of English Manners.
Until nearly the end of the 18th century this French influence prevailed. It was maintained by the just predominance of French literature, which had reached its Augustan age; but this influence, like that of Italy, had in its strength an element of weakness that increased with years. In due time it was shaken off by one more great reaction, out of which came the forms of literature in the present day.
The 18th century in English literature shows especially the course of thought between the English Revolution of 1688, of which John Locke expressed the true ideal, and the French Revolution of 1789, that sought to establish an ideal of true citizenship. It failed, but showed the way to a success much slower of attainment, towards which the English literature of the 19th century labours in every generation with more conscious resolve. The 18th century was not an age, as Carlyle once called it, 'of shams and windy sentimentalities.' There were plenty of these; but the spirit of the century lies really in the great reaction against them. Corruptions in that section of society which usually calls itself the World, that touched religion to the quick, and put formal convention in the place of truth, had stirred resentment. Pierre Bayle, in his Dictionnaire Historique, implied in all his pictures of the lives of men a world without a God. A scepticism of earnest, honest minds grew up, that denied God because it could see no truth in his priests. The corruption of society, greater even in France than in England, great in both countries through the evil lives of men whose high social position made them leaders of the weak, made vice appear to be the sand upon which civilisation had been built. Mandeville's Fable of the Bees began, even in Queen Anne's time, the satirical expression of this doctrine, which had its highest expression afterwards in France, through the writings of Rousseau. First there was this growing conviction of wrong; then followed in France the passionate desire for remedy.
There arose in Queen Anne's reign, from the genius of Daniel Defoe, the real beginnings of the modern newspaper and of the periodical essay. Newsletters, intended to give information to one side or other in the time of civil war, had already been published before the Commonwealth. After the Restoration, Sir Roger L'Estrange, having obtained for himself the 'sole privilege of printing and publishing all narratives, advertisements, mercuries, intelligencers, diurnals, and other books of public intelligence,' produced in August 1663 the first number of his Public Intelligencer. When the plague drove the court to Oxford, he produced, in November 1665, the first number of his Oxford Gazette, which became, when the court returned to London, the London Gazette, on the 5th of
February 1666 (see GAZETTE). Other newspapers arose, which expressed opinion indirectly by representing facts in the form most agreeable to their subscribers. Daniel Defoe, having been sent to Newgate in 1703 for an ironical pamphlet against passionate attacks on the Dissenters, began, as a political prisoner, his journal, the Review, of which the first number appeared on the 19th of February 1704, and which appeared in and after 1705 three times a week until June 1713. This paper had two features which were new, and upon these the growing power of English journalism has since been based. Defoe aimed at exact truth, palatable or unpalatable, in his record of facts; and he joined to his record independent comment. Thus he became the founder of what is now known as 'the leading article.' He also added to his Review a monthly supplement that dealt wholesomely with follies and fashions of society. The notion of this was developed afterwards by Richard Steele when he established the Tatler in April 1709. Out of the Tatler came Steele and Addison's Spectator, which began on the 1st of March 1711, and opened the way to many later efforts of the same kind to better and refine the ways of men.
In the foundation also of the modern novel of real life, which displaced the French romances of Gomberville, Calprenède, and Madeleine de Scudéry, themselves due, as we have seen, to Spanish romances and Italian pastorals, Defoe led the way with his Robinson Crusoe in 1719. This did not profess to be a novel, but was, like all following novels of Defoe, written in imitation of some other form of literature that had for its chief features a true record of experience of life. Defoe's picture of a single man battling against circumstance, unflagging in the energetic use of his own resources, with unfailing trust in God, expressed so completely the new interest in the development of man, that Rousseau afterwards, in his Émile, made Robinson Crusoe the first book to be put into the hands of the ideal pupil. As the movement towards larger assertion of individual and national life advanced in Germany, imitations of Robinson Crusoe were so many as to form a group in literature that became known as the Robinsonaden.
Pope, under Queen Anne, followed the critical fashion of the time, and made his mark first in 1711, with an Essay on Criticism, which was writing about writing about writing. His Rape of the Lock, in 1712-14, was, perhaps, the daintiest trifle ever written; but it was half-earnest play upon the idleness of fashion. Under George I. Pope earned money by translating Homer. But under George II. he had grown with the growth of his time, and to the full extent of his powers he dealt in his Essay on Man, his Satires and Epistles, with the deeper questions of life, and felt with the world about him that 'the proper study of mankind is man.' From the beginning of the reign of George II. our best literature expressed the growing interest in questions of the nature and the prospects of society. Swift, under Queen Anne, had followed the critical fashion of the time with his Battle of the Books, but joined to it the keen use of his wit in dealing with the dissensions about religion. That was in his Tale of a Tub. His other writings in Queen Anne's reign belonged almost without exception to those controversies of the day that shaped the course of history, and to the labour to let light into the lives of men. Under George I. Swift was Dean of St Patrick's, deep in politics of Ireland. At the end of that reign his Gulliver's Travels (1726) expressed the meanness to which life and its aims had sunk, not more contemptuously than Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728), and its sequel Polly, which placed highwaymen a little above, savages high above, the pollutions of a civilised society. In 1725 and 1726 Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd, Thomson's Winter, and Dyer's Grongar Hill sent a healthy breath into our literature, the first sign of a renewed sense of the beauty of outward nature. Thomson completed his Seasons in 1730, showing, with distinct reference to the scepticism of the time, in the world that surrounds us, God, 'parent of good.' Pope sought in his Essay on Man, in 1732-38, to reason against those who believed that man and nature replied 'No' to the question, 'Is there a just God?' Butler's Analogy was published in 1736—a triumphant effort of sheer reasoning against the same creed of despair.
The same controlling force was upon all forms of life. It touched alike the pulpit and the stage. Garrick's triumph as an actor was a triumph of natural over conventional expression. 'If this young fellow is right, we are all in the wrong,' said the old actor Quin. Even as late as 1768 and 1772, when Goldsmith's first comedies, the Good-natured Man and She Stoops to Conquer, were produced, conventional notions of dignity and traditions of false sentiment caused alarm in the breasts of managers. Sheridan's Rivals in 1775, and School for Scandal in 1777, completed the emancipation of good wit from trammels of an artificial style. Gray's poems, first collected in 1768, three years before his death, foreshadowed, with almost too exquisite art, something of the new in the forms of the old.
Good Samuel Richardson was with his time more fully than he knew when in his first novel, Pamela, in 1740, he asked his readers to care for the sorrows of a maid-servant. Henry Fielding in his novels painted life full of the spirit of the coming change. Byron afterwards described him as 'the prose Homer of human nature.' Fielding's Tom Jones, published in 1749, is a great landmark on the way from the English Revolution of 1688 to the French Revolution of 1789. Nature reasserts herself in the fresh liveliness of Smollett's novels, the last of them published in the year of his death, 1771. Fanny Burney's Evelina and Cecilia followed in 1778 and 1782; without breaking from the conventional, long-worded style, they were unconventional in substance. There was quick, fresh observation, with a grace of wit in their invention and character-painting. They were followed at the beginning of the 19th century by the works of Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen. These two women were foremost in this way of literature, until they were left behind by the superior genius of George Eliot.
Samuel Johnson died in 1784, after forty-seven years of life in London. In 1738, after his first year's struggle with poverty as a Grub Street author, he had published his London, a paraphrase of Juvenal's third satire. He won his way as a man of letters, never rich, but always firm to his own sense of right, delighting in the society of men, strong in wit combats, deeply religious, but dependent only upon God. By his character he first gave its right dignity to the position of the professional man of letters. His toast to the next resurrection of the blacks, and his interest in the negro Francis Barber, whom he took as a servant, educated and treated as a friend, in visible protest against the valuing of man by the colour of his skin, may stand among many evidences of Johnson's part in the new sense of the fellowship of man. His Rambler, in 1750-52, following the Spectator in its aim, reduced to system the critical theory of the time, that sought for dignity on the Latin side of English. But Johnson lived with his time and led his time, and the style of his Lives of the Poets, written in 1779-81, is not that of the Rambler. When in 1764, Goldsmith in his Traveller, which, according to its second title, was a 'Prospect of Society,' expressed the spirit of the time in mournful review of the nations of Europe, it was his friend Johnson who added those last lines that spoke the language of the 19th century, by showing that the solution of the great problems of life lies for each man within himself. Goldsmith's Deserted Village, in 1770, expanded a passage in the Traveller into a picture of depopulation caused by greed of wealth, and yet more strongly expressed the new sense of social inequalities. It also combined a charm of simplicity with what was really dignified and graceful in the old style that was giving way before impatience of formalism. The Vicar of Wakefield, in 1766, in substance and in manner a poet's novel, expressed even more completely the advance of time. The transition from rhetorical forms to a style founded directly upon nature is well marked in Goldsmith and in Cowper. They are on the way, to Wordsworth. A strong spirit of freedom was in them. In her old age, the daughter of his friend Lord Clare described Goldsmith, whom she had known in her youth, as 'a strong republican in principle, who would have been a very dangerous writer if he had lived to the times of the French Revolution.'
In other forms of literature there was a corresponding movement. David Hume, whose philosophy raised honest questions which put more clearly and forcibly the doubts that startled a faith based only upon traditional opinion, completed his History of England in 1761. Begun as a history of the Stuart times before the English Revolution, it became the first work in which the whole course of English history was told with an intellectual sense of sequence in the affairs of men. The first volume of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in 1776, the year of the death of David Hume. The last volume was published in 1788, the year before the fall of the Bastille. The book was suggested by the sight of Rome in ruin. Its design was, in days when modern states seemed tottering, to draw from Rome a study of the causes of decay. The scepticism of the 18th century was in Gibbon the more strongly marked by an elaborated pomp of words that contrasts with the philosophic calm and simplicity of David Hume. The year of the first volume of Gibbon's great work was the year also of the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, crown to an arch formed by a series of studies on the nature of society and on the grounds of its well-being, that had its spring in the days of Charles II. from Sir William Petty, and passed through Locke's second Essay on Civil Government to Adam Smith. The first volume of Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England appeared in 1764, and Jeremy Bentham began his career as a political economist with A Fragment on Government, being a critique on Blackstone's Commentaries, published in the same year as the Wealth of Nations (1776), the year in which Malthus was born. Thenceforward the study was continuous, and passed on to John Stuart Mill and to the writers living in our day.
The year of the publication of the Wealth of Nations was the year also of the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July by the English American colonies, which on the following 9th of September were first termed by congress the United States. When the political action of this country made such an issue likely, the eloquence of Burke was spent in the endeavour to avert the revolution. The colonists would not bear taxation for imperial purposes without representation. The English government maintained the right to tax. 'Assert the right,' said Burke, 'but do not use it.' That was, in brief, the policy of the Rockingham administration, inspired by Burke, and in association with which Burke began to devote his mind to the great questions that touched the destiny of nations. The American Declaration of Independence gave to the world another England in the New World as an independent civilising power. It was one result in the long process of evolution that has quickened the development of the whole race of man. If Burke, who seemed to be a friend to the Americans, was a bitter opponent of the French, it was because his Conservative mind, Liberal in its tendencies, sought to avert in one case the revolution that he dreaded, and sought in the other case to suppress a revolution that had broken out, and might possibly involve a struggle to secure great change by violence in his own country.
The thin volume published at Kilmarnock in 1786 revealed to the world in Robert Burns a lyrical poet and satirist of the first order, who found time later, amid the troubles of a short and stormy life, to fashion from his heart such love-songs as the world had never heard. William Cowper in his Task (published in 1784) said of the towers of the Bastille that there was not an English heart that would not leap to hear that they were fallen. When they fell hearts of young poets in England did leap. William Wordsworth—then a youth of nineteen—conceived the high ideal that was sought by many who set loose the passions of the ignorant, and hoped within the lifetime of a generation to lift to its full height the race of man. He found his way to France, even took some part in the work of revolution; grieved over its failure, because his young spirit had seen heaven where Edmund Burke saw hell: the younger and the older man being alike sincere, alike inevitably drawn by bias of their minds to their appointed sides in the great controversy. The failure of the revolution did not fill Wordsworth with despair. While still cherishing his aspiration towards what Tennyson has since called a 'crowning race of man,' he came to feel that the way to such a race was long, since no state could be better than the citizens of which it is composed. But with unbroken hope he set himself to teach through verse the strength that grows out of the simple lives of men.
Thomas Campbell's Pleasures of Hope, in the last year of the 18th century, was a testament of hope left by the 18th century to the 19th. Wordsworth's Excursion in 1814, the year before Waterloo, was a poetical foreshowing of the work of individual development into which the 19th century should grow. In its own time it was little understood; but now we are abreast of it and understand it well. The tumult of the revolutionary spirit was in Byron; its pure ideal was in Shelley; its practical outcome was in Wordsworth; and a breath of health passed for the renovation of society wherever Walter Scott's novels were read. In the later days familiar to us all, it is enough to point to the continuous advance, through every form of literature, towards the raising of the people by the raising of the citizens whose lives are all in all. Open expression of the reaction against Latin-English and the diction encouraged by the period of French influence was in Wordsworth's defence by preface and appendix of the style of the Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798. He argued, and he acted upon his belief, that there is no separate book language; that the best thoughts are best expressed in a selection of the words in ordinary use. Again and again he laid stress on the word 'selection.' He was misapprehended, and gave some little cause for misapprehension by a defiant use in his poems of words and phrases which his better judgment, when the critical war was over and his cause had triumphed, led him afterwards to alter.
The impulse out of which Scott's poetry and
Scott's novels grew it is usual to term Romanticism, as its most essential element was a revolt from the severity of classical form alike in choice and treatment of subjects for poetic expression. It was a revolt from the predominance of substance over form, towards a more emotional and fearless expression of the relations of the human soul to the mystery and romance of the world around it. The vivid directness and imaginative power of Percy's Ballads (1765) gave a rude shock to the dull didactics of the 18th century, and the imitative work of the young Chatterton also revealed what influence our earlier poetry could effect upon a capable imagination. Cowper and Burns revealed the capacity for poetic expression of simple, natural language, and the earliest creations of Blake's strange spiritual genius foreshadowed a romantic revival in literature and art, which was to give us in the poetry of Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Rossetti almost the greatest poetic triumphs of the next century. Scott's romance was a direct issue of romanticism, and a host of imitators, under the mighty spell of the same impulses that made our greatest novelist, carried reverence for the past to strange ends in literature, art, and even religion. Not the least gain has been that revival of interest in the earlier English language, which has revolutionised the modern study of our tongue and created anew an audience, no longer few, for Chaucer, and even the lesser Elizabethans. Englishmen have awoke to the fact that they possess a native literature infinitely richer in quality and larger in quantity than any people in the world, and the success of such publications as the admirable reprints of Professor Arber and the Universal and National Libraries of Professor Henry Morley prove that this knowledge even already is widespread.
The past has been studied and the future battled for with independent energy. Above all things truth must be found. History stands more and more pledged to an accurate inquiry into the trustworthiness of all its facts. Every statement must be traced to its original authority; that ascertained, let each man reason on it as he would. Greek history has been restudied by Grote and Thirlwall; Roman, by Merivale; the history of the Jews and of Latin Christianity by Milman; the history of England by Macaulay, Freeman, Stubbs, Froude, Brewer, Gardiner, Green. Buckle and Lecky have studied history and theorised upon it. The Edinburgh Review (1802) and the Quarterly (1809) inaugurated a new era of criticism. Science has made wonderful advance both in knowledge and in its application, as Francis Bacon would have it applied, to enlargement of the dominion of man. It has not only abounded in results of accurate research, but has developed a large power of generalisation founded upon patient experiment, by which especially Charles Darwin has influenced 19th-century thought.
In church questions there has been the same advance of fearlessness in the inquiry after truth, and the same strenuous endeavour to make truth bear fruit within the lives of men. Every tendency of religious thought has had its faithful representative in Whately, Keble, Pusey, Newman, Dr Arnold, Maurice, Dean Stanley, Canon Liddon, Dr Martineau, and many more. The periodical press has opened a free plain for ready encounter of all forms of thought in honest grapple with each other. There is even an increasing number of magazines founded upon the plan first adopted by George Henry Lewes in 1865, when he established the Fortnightly Review, for the free conflict of opposite opinions within the lists of a single journal. This good example was followed promptly, in 1866, by the establishment of the Contemporary
Review; and the Nineteenth Century appeared in 1877. With the increase of reading power, the novel of the 19th century has taken the place occupied in the 16th by the drama. Women among the novelists have come to the front in literature as earnest helpers to a better day, and novels have been used, perhaps too much, for study of the deepest problems of the time. Mrs Somerville in science, Mrs Browning in poetry, George Eliot in fiction, have marked the advance from days when, with few exceptions, only men took part in the mind-labour of successive generations. The civilising power of the highest literature has been diffused by the energies of vigorous and earnest men, William and Robert Chambers, Charles Knight, and others who are now continuing such labour. Side by side with the free literature of England, a sister literature has grown in America which adds its forces to our own. The volume of the mighty stream of English literature has increased into an expanse that can be shown here by no more than a vague suggestion of its breadth and the direction of its flow. Our last great period in English literature is marked especially by the variety of forms in which all writers who obtain a large hearing dwell on individual fidelity to duty, in a life that is sincere and simple, as the one way to the highest possible for man. It was so in all the writings of Thomas Carlyle, of Dickens, of Thackeray, of George Eliot, and of Matthew Arnold. It was so in Alfred Tennyson, whose Idylls of the King figure King Arthur throughout as Conscience, the king within the human breast. It was so in all the writings of Robert Browning, who warns by many forms of dramatic expression against the vague ideal; and who represents the poet in his highest utterances, as he is throughout all literature, the voice of the worker when he feels most deeply the meaning of his work.
American literature is dealt with under UNITED STATES, and there are paragraphs under AUSTRALIA and CANADA on the literature of those great British colonies. There are separate articles on BIOGRAPHY, the DRAMA, LETTERS, NOVELS, NEWSPAPERS, PERIODICALS, POETRY, ROMANTICISM; and the subject of English literature may be further studied in the articles devoted to the several authors named above, and to many others whom in such a sketch it is impossible to include.
See Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry (1774-78; new ed. 4 vols. 1872); J. Payne Collier's History of Dramatic Poetry (3 vols. 1831; revised and enlarged, 1879); Henry Hallam's Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries (4 vols. 1837-39); Thomas Wright's Seventeenth Century Literaria (vol. i. Anglo-Saxon Period, 1842; vol. ii. Anglo-Norman Period, 1849); George Lillie Craik's Sketches of the History of Literature and Learning in England (1844-45), expanded in 1861 into a Compendious History of English Literature and the English Language; S. A. Allibone's Dictionary of English and American Literature (3 vols. Phila. 1859-71); Thomas Arnold's Manual of English Literature (1862); Hippolyte Taine's Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise (4 vols. 1863-64; translated by H. van Laun, 1871); William Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature (1872); A. W. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne (2 vols. 1875); T. H. Ward's English Poets (2d ed. 4 vols. 1883); Henry Morley's First Sketch of English Literature (1873; enlarged in 1886), and English Writers (10 vols. 1887-94); Stopford Brooke's Primer of English Literature (1880); Richard Wülder's Grundriss zur Geschichte der angelsächsischen Litteratur (1885); Bernhard ten Brink's Geschichte der englischen Litteratur (vol. i. 1877, translated by H. M. Kennedy, 1883; vol. ii. 1888, translated by W. Clarke Robinson, 1894); F. J. Bierbaum's History of the English Language and Literature, including the Literature of North America (Heidelberg, 1883); Perry's English Literature in the 18th Century (New York, 1883); Hettner's Englische Litteratur (6th ed. 1894); Körting's Geschichte der englischen Litteratur (1887); Scherer's Essays on English Litera- ture (trans. 1892); Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library (1874; new ed. 1892); Stopford Brooke's History of Early English Literature to the Accession of King Alfred (2 vols. 1892); George Saintsbury's Elizabethan Literature (1888), Specimens of English Prose (1885), Seventeenth-century Lyries (1892), Essays in English Literature (1891), and Nineteenth-century Literature (1896); Gosse's From Shakespeare to Pope (1885), Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1889), and Jacobean Poets (1894); Henry Morley's Library of English Literature (5 vols. 1876-82); Chambers's Cyclopædia of English Literature (2 vols. 1842; new ed. 3 vols. 1901, &c.); Ward's English Poets (4 vols. 1880); Craik's English Prose Selections (4 vols. 1892-94); Courthope's History of English Poetry (1895); Mrs Oliphant's The Victorian Age of English Literature (1893); the 'Handbooks of English Literature,' edited by Hales, and including The Age of Pope by Dennis (1894) and The Age of Dryden by Garnett (1896); Jussierand's The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare (trans. 1888), and Literary History of the English People (trans. 1895). Scottish literature is separately treated at SCOTLAND. See also GALIC LANGUAGE, IRELAND, WALES. Lists of the chief names in recent poetry and fiction are appended to the articles POETRY and NOVELS.