therefore, of taking sides in a conflict between two parties, one of which distrusts the senses and the other disparages the reason, what we have to do is to keep both spiritual activities in view and point out clearly how the advantages of both are to be secured at the same time. Teachers can do something, if they are not themselves disabled by a party bias; but many of those who are passing through this second stage of the literary pilgrimage have left their school days behind and must look out for themselves. It will be worse than useless to offer either to young or old a guide to the beauties of Literature or a handbook to literary appreciation. What can be done is to provide, as is done in this work, a conspectus or map of the long course of Literature as it flows through the English landscape, prepared by writers whose pleasure in books is of the two-sided kind, and who have the necessary restraint to praise in few words, and the necessary scholarship to give information accurately and in the right proportion. The rest must be done by the reader; nothing can help or save those who have an unhealthy appetite for facts about authors and no natural hunger for the books themselves.

But, once given the true intellectual wanderlust, a book like this may lead us far. When we have secured, for ourselves or others, a childhood of " dear Imagination's only truth," and when we have spent the first ardour of study on the literary craft and tradition of our own people, we have come only to our true starting-place, the port of embarkation for a voyage over seas that are no longer our own territorial waters. They may call us now advanced students," and our expedition a "university course or "honour school"; we shall do better for ourselves if we think in terms of "humane letters" and a philosophy of life." We have, in fact, come to the final and endless stage of our education, in which an examination" could only be an early incident, and any answers we can give are only valuable in proportion as they answer questions of our own.

"

In this voyage we are explorers. We may travel over known regions, but even in those there are discoveries to be made. The map we draw will not be one that Ian be bought even from the best professionals, because it is the record of our own observations, and traced upon the chart of which we alone have the secret and the use. It will not be a map of our own island merely, but a survey of the inhabited world; not a history of English Literature only, but a study in the Making of the Western Mind. For though we in modern Europe have not the honour due to founders and benefactors, we have the wide lands of the past for our inheritance, and our literatures are to-day main streams into which more ancient rivers of thought have flowed down as tributaries. For the perfect understanding even of our own people and their national life and expression, we need to go upstream beyond the inflow of the Voltairean criticism, the German philosophy, the turbid current of the French Revolution, the Romantic revival in poetry and the tide of Industrialism, to the upper waters of the Renaissance. We must have in view the Reformation in England and Germany, the wave of intellectual revolt in France, the dominance. and decline of Spain, the trade of the Dutch and the Elizabethans, the rise of Science

and the New Learning. Behind these again lies the country of Italian art, of the French troubadours, and of our own Chaucer, through whom we reach the world of Dante, of Boccaccio, and of the Romance of the Rose, and so back into the Middle Ages, the Feudal Empire, and the Ecumenical Church. Then across the Dark Ages of militarism, monasticism, and Mohammedanism, the decadence of Rome and the chaos of the barbarians, we shall see clearly the ancient streams of Hellenism and Hebraism passing down into twilight before the dawn of Christianity, and, even beyond these, we shall have some sense of the profound thought and poetry of India and the Far East.

It is a wonderful journey, but there are dangers by the way. Just as it is fatal in the earlier stages to make Literature a "knowledge subject," and bury the revelation of beauty under a cairn of facts, so in this later and longer part of the journey it would be fatal to fall into the error of treating Literature as a branch of history or of sociology. No study of it can be too wide or too exact, but its first and last appeal must always be æsthetic and emotional. Whatever its immediate object may be, Literature has always something of a philosophical aspect, and is great in proportion to this: "Tout génie a deux faces; l'une tournée vers le temps, l'autre vers l'éternité." It is true that great writers are for the most part apparently bent on telling us of the things of Time; but what they are really suggesting by that very quality which makes their writing Literature, is Truth, which is of all countries and all times, and Beauty, which is less than half a native of any country or of any time. Even children feel this; they become listless or impatient when informed that a compliment to Queen Elizabeth is intruded into the most beautiful scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream. So the notes to many school editions are nothing but tiresome calls to us to come back from the asphodel fields where we are listening to our contemporaries, Homer, Dante, Milton, Eschylus, Shakespeare, Meredith, Hardy, and the rest; and those who make use of a History of Literature should never cease to remember that its intention is not to involve them in the turmoil of transitory life, but to bring them to that place apart.

HENRY NEWBOLT.

THE

SECTION I

THE MAIN STREAM

[For Sources and Tributaries see Appendix.]

CHAPTER I. GENERAL VIEW

HE period in which Middle English was supplanted by Modern English, and the literary forms which are still current came into general use, ready moulds for the great creative impulses of the later Renaissance, is somewhat hard to define in point of date, owing to the overlapping of tendencies; but it is a period studded with important landmarks. In religion, in the body politic, in literature, it was a time of revolutionary movements that proved temporary or incomplete. But before it were the Middle Ages; after it, though the process of change may be often imperceptible, the beginnings of a new world are clearly discerned. Only one or two of the more decisive changes need be marked here. In the past, poetry and much else had been mainly an affair of oral delivery; it was now literature in the strictest sense, a matter of books and readers. Printing merely consummated a revolution in the attitude of the literary creator which had already begun. Hingeing upon this important change was another: anonymity was succeeded by authorship. A poem, a romance, a miracle play, had hitherto stood for itself; no one asked who wrote it, as no one asked who was the architect of a cathedral, the painter of a mural picture, or the carver of a statue. Henceforth a piece of writing claimed attention as a work of a particular author. The age of tradition was passing, when stories and characters were common property, and when the person, anonymous or avowed, who put forth a new romance took pains to show, not that he was original, but that he followed the best authorities. The age of invention, of originality, of individual self-expression had begun.

HISTORICAL CONDITIONS

By the middle of the 14th century the fusion of the conquered and the conquering races was well-nigh complete. French had not yet ceased to be the ordinary medium of intercourse among the nobility, but the business of the law courts was (from 1362) carried on in English, and no more works of literature were written by Englishmen in the alien tongue. The French metrical romances, which had previously been read here in the original, were now current in numberless translations, adaptations, or imitations—a sign less of Continental influence than of the renaissance of English. The age of chivalry, though there were yet to be splendid revivals, was in its decline. Feudalism as a military system was all but gone. Constitu

tional liberty had been asserted in the claim of Parliament to control taxation, and to be consulted in the more vital decisions of State. The king could no longer make war without the concurrence of the ruling classes, or carry on the administration of the country in a way repugnant to them. Unpopular ministers were dismissed at their behest; they exercised their power even to depose a king.

When Chaucer was growing to manhood, England was at the height of glory. Crécy had been fought (1346), and Poitiers (1356). The outburst of national poetry which gave us the great aftermath of alliterative romance is discussed in the

Appendix; this was the last great product of Middle English. The war songs of Laurence Minot were likewise an outcome of its martial ardour. But the splendours of this immortal epoch were soon to go into eclipse. England was visited by the Black Death in 1348-9, in 1361-2, in 1369, and again in 1375-6; half the population disappeared, two-thirds in the congested and insanitary towns. The economic troubles that followed this wholesale destruction of the

labouring classes hastened on the process of change from serfdom to the wagesystem, and from mediæval to modern forms of tenure; and were combined with other social troubles, to which the growing unpopularity of the royal house contributed. In France the war went disastrously, involving the country in heavy expenses. New forms of impost were resorted to, the poll-tax of 1380 falling on a class that had heretofore escaped. Led by John Ball, Froissart's "mad priest of Kent," the peasantry rose to protest against the exaction and to vindicate their right to sell their labour as they pleased, which had been denied them by the Statutes of Labourers (1349-51), and to a share in the land and a lot in life better than servitude to a licentious and spendthrift noblesse. London fell into the hands of the rebels, and there was 1 See p. 628, etc.

a great burning of court-rolls; but Wat Tyler was killed, and the revolt suppressed, on the promise of Richard II. that all grievances should be redressed. The pledge of amnesty was not observed, but villeinage had received its deathblow.

Chaucer gave little heed to these troublous events. Though busied in State duties, the source of his emoluments, he lived the inner life of a man of letters, detached and aloof from the storms of the world, studying and adapting to his own uses the new art-forms of French and Italian poetry, and finally, in the Canterbury Tales, making his mature art the obedient instrument of his native genius. His contemporary Langland seems in com

parison to belong to another age and almost another race, so different was he in spirit-the voice of the poor incarnate, the voice of revolution, the chastiser of the vices, follies, and blasphemies that were rampant in the generation after Crécy. The court poet saw nothing of the crimes and oppressions that were evoking revolution; the begetter of Piers Plowman saw little else. Gower was not so silent as his friend Chaucer; he denounced the sins and follies of his contemporaries both in Latin and English, though his courtly conservatism was very different from the tone of Langland.

Another voice of spiritual protest was that of the theologian, preacher, and ecclesiastical reformer, John Wyclif, the protagonist of a religious

John Wyclif.

movement that was prophetic of the Reformation, and helped to prepare the way. At the age of forty, having a great reputation as a scholar and lecturer, he was master of Balliol College, Oxford (1360); and, through the democratic character of a medieval university, commanded an influence in the world enormously wider than that of the most accomplished modern professor. His earlier writings are philosophical lectures in Latin, and it was in Latin that he took part in the violent controversy on papal taxation, and wrote his De Veritate Sacræ Scripturæ and other doctrinal works. The works in which he set the example of a strong, homely, and persuasive English prose were his evangelical pamphlets, breathing a fervent moral and religious spirit akin to Langland's, his sermons, and his translations of the Scriptures.

Wyclif was summoned before Convocation (1377) to answer for his attacks on