1864 Tennyson's "Enoch Arden." in Criticism." 1867-79. Freeman's "Norman Con. 1868. George Eliot's "Spanish 1870. Dickens's "Mystery of Edwin 1870. Dickens died. 1872. George Eliot's "Middle- 1873. Lytton's "Kenelm Chilling. 1873. Lytton died. 1875. Tennyson's "Queen Mary." 1877. Tennyson's "Harold." 1880. George Eliot died. 1881. Tennyson's " Poems and Bal- CHAP. XI. PERIODICALS, REVIEWS, AND ENCYCLOPÆDIAS. Pp. 443-458 INTRODUCTION. PLAN OF THE WORK-SOME HINTS ON THE STUDY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. HE present volume does not pretend to be a full record of the literary activity of our country. Not only are many writers omitted whose works are dear to those laborious pedants who speak contemptuously of the literature of our own time, but regard with admiring reverence the rubbish bequeathed to us by wretched playwrights and dreary prose writers of three or four centuries ago; not only are the names of these forgotten worthies, whose proper place is in bibliographies and biographical dictionaries, passed over, but a great number of authors whose writings are of real and permanent value, and should in nowise be neglected by those who can find time and opportunity for the thoroughgoing study of our noble literature, are either not mentioned at all, or only very slightly alluded to. The plan adopted in this book has been to deal solely with the very greatest names in the several departments of English literature-with those writers whose. works are among the most imperishable glories of Britain, and with whom it is a disgrace for even the busiest to remain unacquainted. The time which most people are able to devote to literature proper is very limited; and if second or third rate authors are read by them, the result must inevitably be that first-rate authors will be neglected. "Always in books keep the best company," wrote Sydney Smith to his son with his usual good sense. "Don't read a line of Ovid till you have mastered Virgil, nor a line of Thomson till you have exhausted Pope, nor of Massinger till you are familiar with Shakespeare." It is very obvious that those who read Pollok's "Course of Time" while remaining ignorant of Milton's "Paradise Lost," or the writings of "A. K. H. B." while neglecting Bacon's "Essays" and Addison's Spectator, are guilty of a lamentable waste of time and misexpenditure of energy. "If you should transfer the amount of your reading day by day," says Emerson, "from the newspapers to the standard authors—but who dare speak of such a thing?" To expect people to give up newspaper-reading is certainly a very Utopian speculation, nor, indeed, is it desirable in many respects that they should give it up. But it is a very easy and practicable thing to obey the rule to study the best authors first, for it may be safely laid down as a general principle that the greatest works of our literature are also the most attractive. No dramatist is so readable as Shakespeare; to no works of fiction can we return again and again with greater pleasure than to the masterpieces of Fielding and Scott; nowhere can the blood-stained story of the French Revolution be followed with keener interest than in the pages of Carlyle. Literature is a word often so loosely applied, that it may be well at the outset to define exactly what we mean by it. By people in general it is used with a very wide range of meaning. Milton's "Paradise Lost" and Buchan's “Domes tic Medicine;" Rhymer's "Foedera" and Macaulay's "History of England,” are ranked under the same all-embracing name. But literature rightly so termed is a word of much narrower signification. To entitle anything to be classed as literature, it must be so written that, apart from the meaning conveyed, its mere style shall be such as to give pleasure. Neither wealth of information nor depth of thought gives a work a right to be called literature unless the information and the thought be attractively expressed. From this it is clear that many books, otherwise of great merit, have no claim to consideration in a literary history. A plan of a country may have more practical utility than the most beautiful landscape ever painted, but as it lacks the essential element of beauty, it will not be placed in the same category. In like manner many "Society and Solitude," p. 164 (English edition). The Study of English Literature. 9 books which we could very ill afford to dispense with, being destitute of attractiveness and distinction of style, have no value viewed merely as literature. The true literary man is an artist, using his words and phrases with the same felicity and care as a painter uses his colours; and whoever aspires to win literary fame must pay the closest attention not only to what he says, but to how he says it. De Quincey, whose speculations on such subjects are always ingenious and worth attending to, if sometimes overrefined and far-fetched, in one of his essays1 lays down a distinction, first suggested by Wordsworth, which bears upon what we have been saying. As De Quincey's critical writings. are not so generally read as they should be, we may quote part of his remarks. "In that great social organ, which collectively we call literature, there may be distinguished two separate offices, that may blend, and often do so, but capable severally of a severe insulation, and naturally fitted for reciprocal repulsion. There is first the literature of knowledge, and secondly the literature of power. The function of the first is to teach; the function of the second is to move. The first is a rudder, the second an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure or sympathy. What do you learn from 'Paradise Lost?' Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery-book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery-book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power, that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, when every pulse and each separate influx is a step upwards-a step ascending as from a Jacob's ladder from 1 Originally published in North British Review for August 1848, article on Pope. earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. . . . All the literature of knowledge builds only ground nests, that are swept away by floods, or confounded by the plough; but the literature of power builds nests in aërial altitudes of temples sacred from violation, or of forests inaccessible to fraud. This is a great prerogative of the power literature; and it is a greater which lies in the mode of its influence. The knowledge literature, like the fashion of this world, passeth away. An Encyclopædia is its abstract; and, in this respect, it may be taken for its speaking symbol, that, before one generation has passed, an Encyclopædia is superannuated, for it speaks through the dead memory and unimpassioned understanding, which have not the rest of higher faculties, but are continually enlarging and varying their phylacteries." In the preceding extracts, as will be seen, De Quincey uses the phrase "literature of knowledge" to express that class of writings to which the term literature cannot, as he himself afterwards says, be with propriety applied-writings the sole aim of which is to convey information without any effort after beauty of style; and the phrase "literature of power" to express that class of writings-fiction and poetry-of which the object is, not to instruct, but to move the feelings and to give pleasure, and of which, therefore, attractiveness of style is an essential characteristic. But, as he himself says in a note, a great proportion of books-history, biography, travels, miscellaneous essays, &c.-belong strictly to neither of these two classes. Macaulay's "History of England" contains a vast amount of information, but it is not its stores of information which have attracted to it millions of readers; it is the fascinating style in which the information is conveyed, making the narrative as pleasing as a novel, and giving some passages a power of exciting the emotions which not many poems possess. And though to instruct be not the prime function of the novel or the poem, a great fund of instruction as to morals and manners is embodied in almost all good poems and novels. Shakespeare abounds in pithy aphorisms as to the conduct of life, which have become part of the moralist's stock-in-trade; |