Table Of Content

A Critical History of English L'iterature VOLUME I DAVID DAICHES A Critical History of English Literature IN TWO VOLUMES ~~ VOLUME I ~~ , London SEeKER & WARBURG 1961 Prinud in Great BriJlJin by Morrison & Gibb Ltd., Lrmdall alld Edillburgh and published in Great Britain b_lI klartin Seeker & Warhurg Ltd. 7 John Street, London W.C.l Copycight © J 960 by THE RONALD PRESS COMPANY First pllblished September 1960 Reprin ted December 1960 Reprinted February 1961 To my former students • on both sides of the Atlantic pero pur va ed andanda asealta Preface TillS IS AN AGE of specialist .schoiars, and for one man to attempt a complete history of English literature is now both rash and unusual. I cannot claim to be a specialist in all the periods on which I have written, nor, in spite of my best attempts, have I been able to keep abreast of all new developments in English studies. But I have been reading English literature continuously and closely ever since I began my studies at Edinburgh University in 1930, and I have long felt the urge to describe the whole scene as I see it. This, therefore, is one man's history of English literature; it is intended less as a work of reference than as a. work of description, explanation, and critical interpretation. It is not meant to be looked up, but to be read. I have given myself generous space in dealing with major figures such as Shakespeare and Milton, without bothering whether, in strict terms of relative greatness, they deserve so much more than I have given to some other writers. Indeed, ,the chapters on Shakespeare and Milton can perhaps stand as ind~pendent critical studies, capable of being extracted from the rest of the History and read as short books on their Own. Nevertheless, thougb the word "critical" in my title is important, I have tried never to lose sight of the fact that this is a history, not a series of separate critical studies, and the appropriate kinds of historical generalizations and the proper continuity of nar- rative have, I hope, been maintained throughout. I may sometimes have treated a minor writer who interests me particularly at greater length than he deserves, or rather briefly summarized something important and well known. But I have tried to see my subject steadily and see it whole; and I have tried to write interestingly, less as the impersonal scholar recording facts than as the interested reader shar- ing his knowledge and opinions. On matters of pure scholarship I have, of course, often had to de- pend on the researches of others. On questions of emphaSis and v Vl PREFACE assessment I have done so as little as possible, although occasionally even the most conscientious critical historian must be content to take the word of a ~ympathetic expert about the value of an odd minor work to which he himself has never devoted a great deal of careful attention. Art is long and life is short, and one cannot always be wholly original in everything. I hope, however, that the pattern which a Single mind imposes on this vast material will make my account more lively and suggestive than the conscientious composite works of reference by teams of experts, from which I have myself profited but which are not literary history in the sense that this book is intended to be. I have been more liberal in quotation from the works under dis- cussion than is. usual for a literary historian; I have found that the critical side of the work demands this. I have been deliberately in- consistent in the lexts of my quotations. As a rule I have modernized spelling and punctuation, though not in Middle English texts, which lose too much by such modernization. In sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century texts I have retained the original spelling where it is important as giving a period flavor or indicating some historical aspects of the language or of-literary convention; otherwise I have modernized it. My principle in this and other matters has been maximum ease of reading compatible with sound scholarship and intellectual responsibility. Jesus College, Cambridge February, 1960 DAVID DAICHES Contents VOLUME I CHAPTER PAGE 1 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 3 2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MIDDLE ENGLISH PROSE AND VERSE 31 3 MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE: FABLlAU, LYRIC, DREAM ALLEGORY, BALLAD 4 CHAUCER, GoWER, PIERS PLOWMAN 5 THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 6 THE EARLY TUDOR SCENE CI' • 68 89 128 146 7 SPENSER AND HIS TIME 165 8 DRAMA FROM THE MIRACLE PLAYS TO MARLOWE 208 9 SHAKESPEARE 246 10 DRAMA FROM JONSON TO THE CLOSING OF THE THEATERS 309 11 POETRY AFTER SPENSER: THE JONSONlAN AND THE META- PHYSICAL TRADITIONS 346 12 MILTON 390 13 PROSE IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTII CENTURIES 458 14 SCOTTISH LITERATUHE TO 1700 504 ( vii viii CONTENTS VOLUME II CHAPTER 1 THE RESTORATION 2 THE AUGUSTAN AGE: DEFOE, SWIFT, POPE 3 POETRY FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 4 THE NOVEL FROM RICHARDSON TO JANE AUSTEN 5 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHICAL, HISTORICAL, AND CRITICAL PROSE, AND MISCELLANEOUS WRITING 6 SCOTTISH LITERATURE FROM ALLAN RAMSAY TO WALTER SCOTT 7 THE ROMANTIC POETS I: BLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE 8 THE ROMANTIC POETS II: SHELLEY, KEATS, AND BYRON 9 F AMILlAR, CRmCAL, AND MISCELLANEOUS PROSE OF THE EARLY AND MIDDLE NINETEENTH CENTURY 10 VICTORIAN PROSE: JOHN HENRY NEWMAN TO WILLIAM MORRIS 11 THE VICTORIAN POETS 12 THE VICTORIAN NOVEL ·0.· 13 DRAMA FROM. THE BEGiNNING OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY , 14 EPILOGUE: AFTER THE VICTORIANS INDEX PAGE 537 590 652 700 766 809 ' 856 905 935 961 993 1049 1094 1113 1139 A Critical Hzstory of English .Literature VOLUME I CHAPTER ONE Anglo-Saxon Literature THE ANGLO-SAXON INVADERS, who came to Britain in the latter part of the fifth century A.D. and eventually established their kingdoms there, were the founders of what we can properly call English cul- ture and English literature. They gave England its name, its language, and its-links with "Germania," that great body of Teutonic - peoples whose migrations disrupted the Roman Empire and utterly changed the face of Europe. Some four hundred years before they arrived in Britain, the Roman historian Tacitus had given his account of the Germanic peoples and how they looked to his civilized Roman eyes; and though we can see that Tacitus' Germania idealizes the barbarians in order to hold up the noble savage as an example to de- cadent Rome, we can nevertheless trace in his account something of the qualities of these people as they emerge out of the mists of history and legend at a later period. To th,e Romans, whose world they threatened and finally overcame, they were "barbarians;" appearing out of nowhere to endanger, with their primitive vigor and alien ways of thought, both the political structure of the ~mpire and the ideological structure of Greco-Roman thought. After the Roman Em- pire had become Christianized, the contrast between barbarian and Roman was even more striking, for the former were heathen and their life and their SOCiety reflected heroic ideals far removed from Roman Christian theory or practice. Yet the history of much of Eu- rope in the so-called "Dark Ages" is the story of the gradual fusion of these two ways of life and thought, the growing together of barbarian and Chris";an and the grounding of both in an appropriately modified phase of the Greco-Roman tradition. Precisely who the invaders were whom we have for so long called "Anglo-Saxon" is not of primary importance to the student of literature. That they belonged to the group of Teutonic peoples to which we can appropriately give Tacitus' name of Germania is clear. Ac- cording to Bede, writing his ecclesiastical history of England two hun- S 4 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE dred years and more after their arrival, they came "from three very powerful nations of the Germans: that is, from the Saxones, Angli, and the Iulae." We know something about the Saxons, who appear to have come from the low country south of Denmark and east of Holland, the modem Holstein. The Angles app'far to have lived in modem Jutland and the neighboring islands before they appeared in Britain, while the Jutes, whose origin is the most obscure of the three, perhaps came from the country east of the lower Rhine and perhaps, though less probably (the apparent similarity of names not being the cogent argument it might appear to the modem ear), from Jutland. In Anglo-Saxon England there were Saxon kingdoms (in the south and southwest), Anglian kingdoms (in the east, north, and midlands), and the lutish kingdom of Kent in the southeast. The cultural differences between the three groups are of comparatively little moment: their language was essentially the same, though with important dialectical differences; and they all considered themselves part of "Germania," that loosely associated group of peoples who in- cluded Goths, Burgundians, Lombards, and others, and who had a common set of heroes who might belong to any' one of these. Of the Romanized Britons whom the invading Anglo-Saxons pushed into western corners of England the historian of English literature has little to say. A Celtic people who had been taken into the Roman Empire, they were left to fend for themselves when the Ro- mans, desperately trying to hold their empire together agains! ~ar barian invaders, withdrew from England in A.D. 410. A prey to the ruder Picts and Scots in the north, they soon found themselves more seriously threatened by the invaders from across the North Sea, to whom they were an alien J;'eople known as "Welsh," which was simply the Germanic peoples name for foreigoers who were not part of Germania. Only in Wales have these Cambro-Britons continuously preserved their language and their traditions; their contribu- tion to specifically English literature is sporadic and oblique, and does not appear until long after the Anglo-Saxon period. If Arthur, who plays such an important part in Middle English romance, was really a historical Cambro-British character from this period-and we have no mention of him before the ninth century except for a passing remark by an early seventh-century Welsh poet that a cer- . tain warrior, while hrave, "was not Arthur" -there is still no reason for consideriog his metamorphosis into a hero of medieval romance and a focus for a host of "Arthurian" stories as any part of a direct and continuous heritage from Celtic Britain into later times. It was not until the twelfth century, when English literature sought its in- spiration from the French, that the Arthurian romances began to ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 5 appear, and while it is true that it was an Englishman, Geoffrey of Monmouth, who first elaborated the Arthurian story (in his Historia Regum Britanniae) to provide rich material for these romances, the Anglo-French development of the material is very far removed from any Celtic origins. Whatever the origins of the Arthurian story, therefore, we are justified in beginning the history of English literature with the Anglo-Saxons. Of surviving Anglo-Saxon literature, that which brings us most closely into contact with the Germanic origins of the invaders is the heroic poetry, which still bears traces not only of the pre-Christian heroic society of the continental Saxons and otllers, hut also of that community of subject which linked these early English with the wider civilization of Germania. This is written in the language we know as Old English or Anglo-Saxon, which is essentially the English language in an earlier stage of its development, with inflections which have since disappeared, a relatively small vocabulary from which many words have since been lost (though some which are lost to standard English remain in altered form in Scots and in regional English dialects), and significant differences between, for example, the West Saxon dialect of the south and the Anglian dialect:of North- umbria. The verse is alliterative and stressed, without rhyme, each line containing four stressed syllables and a varying number un- stressed. There is a definite pause (caesura) between the two halves of each line, with two stresses in each half. We geascodon Eormenrices wylfenne gepoht; ohte wide Eole Catena rices; prot wres grim cyning. S",t secg monig sorgum gebunden, wean on wenan, wyscte geneahhe pret pres cynerices ofercumen wrere. To the superficial eye this looks very far removed from modern Eng- lish; and in a sense it is. (The letter p-"thorn"-has the sound of "th.") But a literal translation helps to bring out its relation to modem English: We have learned of Eormanric's wolfish disposition; he held wide dominion in the reahn of the Goths. That was a cruel king. Many a man sat bound in sorrows, anticipating woe, often wishing that his kingdom were overcome.