age is our book to be offered to children, to students, to advanced students, or to the general reader? Not to children. Literature is their affair, but the history of Literature is not. They are too near to the worlds of the imagination, and too far, as yet, from the world of Time; their need is for poetry, songs, drama, each for itself and by itself. And what we can teach them is not anything about books, but the first lesson of all, the use and delight of books. This is sometimes difficult, more often not; children naturally love beauty of words, beauty of form and colour, expressed emotion-and they love them most when given to them in concrete images or in scenes of action. Often they are nearer to poetry than they will ever be in after life; but it will take time for them to realize it as the work of individual men or the record of a community. The touch of human life will come first to them from the personality of the teacher, whose enthusiasm will arouse a similar emotion in them, as the vibration of one glass will set others ringing with the same musical note. At this stage linguistic, metric, or historical science is an impossibility; who would burden a child reading The Water Babies with notes on the derivation of Kingsley's style from that of Rabelais and his predecessors ? But the period of childhood does not last. Some day, at what age it is impossible to tell, we must leave it and enter upon the second stage of our journey, in which we shall have for guide the intellectual as well as the æsthetic sense. About the relative importance of the two and the amount of confidence which should be placed in them there will always be heart-searchings. We may believe with Meredith that humanity, "an army marching out of wilderness," owes its only hope of safety through the ages to the guiding of Reason; yet all artists and many others, even among the most reasonable, would prefer almost any human catastrophe to the perishing of the sense of beauty. Unconsciously perhaps, but unmistakably, there has for centuries been a conflict in English feeling on this point almost comparabie to a sectarian difference in religious opinion. Yet it is vain to regard with fear or prejudice the æsthetic sense, for it is in children the strongest and most natur part of their life, and their education must be largely based upon it. It is equally certain when we are dealing with Literature as a means of education that the growth of the intellect will bring with it a change, of which we must take account. Just as no one can for long devote himself even to a game without beginning to take an interest in the technique and even the history of it, so for any child who is really a reader the time will come when the technique and the history of Literature will redouble the interest of the book itself. It is fortunate that this is so, for no education, no personal growth, could satisfactorily correspond with life unless such an art as that of Literature were seen in its development and in its relation to the community. There is no reason why this desire to understand what is really the science of literature should interfere with the aesthetic appreciation of it. And it is the experience of all scholars that the two are in fact interwoven in a very close and significant manner. Instead, 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 Ican 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 Lord Macaulay James Anthony Froude John Ruskin. (Photo by F. Hollyer) Thomas Carlyle. (From the painting by Sir John Millais, R.A.) Dickens's Grave, Westminster Abbey. (Photo by Spooner) William Makepeace Thackeray. (From the painting by Samuel Laurence) George Eliot. (From a drawing by Sir Frederick Burton) Cardinal Newman. Walter Bagehot Dante Gabriel Rossetti 535 Algernon Charles Swinburne Christina Georgina Rossetti. (From the portrait by D. G. Rossetti). 543 George Meredith Robert Bridges. (From a drawing by W. Rothenstein) Thomas Hardy. (From a drawing by W. Rothenstein) Rudyard Kipling . " INTRODUCTION We may say of Literature, as Goldsmith said of poetry, that it was from the first 'consecrated to pleasure." The consecration is a double one. There is one pleasure of the writer, who in speaking out to his fellow-men delivers his own spirit. There are other pleasures of the reader: he is enjoying the new world created for him out of sound and thought, or he is responding to the intimacy of a nature greater and richer than his own, or he is joining himself to the fellowship of an old and splendid society, whose origins and development are traceable through a series of national records. His preference may be for any one of these three aspects of Literature— the aesthetic, the biographical, or the historic; or he may find in them all a mixed delight which will vary according to his own temperament. But, whatever be the mode of his pleasure, it will all be a widening and deepening of experience, all a part of the lifelong process of his education. The time has been-it is, perhaps, not wholly past-when the words "pleasure and "education " seemed to jar with one another. But modern thought is recovering for us an old and almost forgotten wisdom. We are learning to see education as the growth of the human powers, inevitable in every life, but favourable or unfavourable in proportion to the opportunities afforded for the gaining of experience —that is, for acquiring proficiency in the art of living. We see, too, or we shall soon be seeing, that the pleasures of art and science, whatever may be thought of other pleasures, are not in themselves of a kind to retard this experience, this proficiency. In reality the question does not arise at all, except by a false analogy from the grosser appetites in the life of the spirit the distinction between pleasure and pain, or ease and effort, is meaningless. Our deepest learning is unconscious, our profoundest happiness often so full of pain as to be indistinguishable from it. What is the feeling with which we see King Lear acted, or read the end of the Knight's Tale? Is it not true that though all thought, all passion, all delight are the ministers of Love, yet "the paths of Love are rougher than thoroughfares of stones"? important point is that after such experiences no human life can remain unchanged, and the lives are few that are beyond the reach of this kind of education. But by what method is it to be administered? Literature is multifarious--so is the human mind: how can they be brought into contact with the best chance of pleasure for the greatest number? This is the problem which confronts the maker of a systematic study of any national literature, and it is a real problem, interesting, complicated, even controversial. To begin with, we must decide the question of age is our book to be offered to children, to students, to advanced students, or to the general reader? Not to children. Literature is their affair, but the history of Literature is not. They are too near to the worlds of the imagination, and too far, as yet, from the world of Time; their need is for poetry, songs, drama, each for itself and by itself. And what we can teach them is not anything about books, but the first lesson of all, the use and delight of books. This is sometimes difficult, more often not; children naturally love beauty of words, beauty of form and colour, expressed emotion-and they love them most when given to them in concrete images or in scenes of action. Often they are nearer to poetry than they will ever be in after life; but it will take time for them to realize it as the work of individual men or the record of a community. The touch of human life will come first to them from the personality of the teacher, whose enthusiasm will arouse a similar emotion in them, as the vibration of one glass will set others ringing with the same musical note. At this stage linguistic, metric, or historical science is an impossibility; who would burden a child reading The Water Babies with notes on the derivation of Kingsley's style from that of Rabelais and his predecessors ? But the period of childhood does not last. Some day, at what age it is impossible to tell, we must leave it and enter upon the second stage of our journey, in which we shall have for guide the intellectual as well as the æsthetic sense. About the relative importance of the two and the amount of confidence which should be placed in them there will always be heart-searchings. We may believe with Meredith that humanity," an army marching out of wilderness," owes its only hope of safety through the ages to the guiding of Reason; yet all artists and many others, even among the most reasonable, would prefer almost any human catastrophe to the perishing of the sense of beauty. Unconsciously perhaps, but unmistakably, there has for centuries been a conflict in English feeling on this point almost comparabie to a sectarian difference in religious opinion. Yet it is vain to regard with fear or prejudice the æsthetic sense, for it is in children the strongest and most natur part of their life, and their education must be largely based upon it. It is equally certain when we are dealing with Literature as a means of education that the growth of the intellect will bring with it a change, of which we must take account. Just as no one can for long devote himself even to a game without beginning to take an interest in the technique and even the history of it, so for any child who is really a reader the time will come when the technique and the history of Literature will redouble the interest of the book itself. It is fortunate that this is so, for no education, no personal growth, could satisfactorily correspond with life unless such an art as that of Literature were seen in its development and in its relation to the community. There is no reason why this desire to understand what is really the science of literature should interfere with the æsthetic appreciation of it. And it is the experience of all scholars that the two are in fact interwoven in a very close and significant manner. Instead, |