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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
impossiblebut 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 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.
目錄：
PART I Outline Sketch of English Literature
CHAPTER 1
FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 001
CHAPTER 2
FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER 017
CHAPTER 3
THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE 035
CHAPTER 4
THE AGE OF MILTON 061
CHAPTER 5
FROM THE RESTORATION TO
THE DEATH OF POPE 082
CHAPTER 6
FROM THE DEATH
OF POPE TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 098
CHAPTER 7
FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO
THE DEATH OF SCOTT 113
CHAPTER 8
FROM THE DEATH
OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT TIME 136
CHAPTER 9
THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS
LITERATURE IN GREAT BRITAIN 153
PART II Outline Sketch of American Literature
CHAPTER 10
THE COLONIAL PERIOD 161
CHAPTER 11
THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD 184
CHAPTER 12
THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION 202
CHAPTER 13
THE CONCORD WRITERS 220
CHAPTER 14
THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS 240
CHAPTER 15
LITERATURE IN THE CITIES 261
CHAPTER 16
LITERATURE SINCE 1861 284
CHAPTER 17
THEOLOGICAL AND
RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN AMERICA 305
內容試閱：
CHAPTER 1
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 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 tabletalk 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, 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 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_úm-heort; r_éced hlifade
G_eáp and g_óld-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 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 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.” “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.”
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