The Cambridge History of English Literature

A HISTORY of English literature¹ in several large volumes, published under the auspices, and bearing the name, of Cambridge University, and edited in chief by the master of one of its oldest colleges, a man celebrated for his history of English dramatic literature, is an undertaking fitted to excite the liveliest and most hopeful anticipations. Cambridge, the nursing mother of Milton and Tennyson, should represent, with her sister Oxford, the soundest literary traditions; Cambridge, possessing some of the most precious manuscripts of the early mediæval period, should rejoice to set forth the productions of that period in the fairest light; Cambridge, which has long boasted so considerable a scholar as Skeat, the editor of a monumental edition of Chaucer, should be able to command, not only his services, and those of the Master of Peterhouse, but those of the best scholars, in England and the allied fields of Great Britain, America, the colonies, Germany, Scandinavia, and France, and of writers fitted to illustrate, if not to adorn, whatever subjects they might touch. True, it ought to be borne in mind that scholars of the eminence of Skeat and Ward are not numerous, even in England; that the possession of knowledge, and the ability to awaken and sustain interest, are not always united in the same person; and that even a renowned university may not be able, within a moderate time, to command the activity of the most capable pens. Then, too, it must be considered that many portions of English literature, and even whole tracts, have been vigorously studied for only a few decades, and not always by scholars of thorough training and enlarged minds, but in some cases by gatherers of minute and unrelated facts, or by hasty generalizes.

Another serious difficulty confronts the projectors of such an enterprise — that of defining, in their own thought, the body of readers they shall cater for. Shall they aim at the more general public of intelligent laymen, or shall they address persons who are already in some degree specialists ? If the former, they must presuppose but little; if the latter, they may take a good deal for granted. Or shall they adopt a more difficult and glorious course, marshaling facts and presenting conclusions so convincingly and agreeably as to captivate alike the professional and the general reader? It is this last conception of their office which would seem to have actuated the editor of the magnificent history of French literature, Petit de Julleville, and to have inspired his colleagues in the undertaking.

The history of French literature just mentioned is so admirable that it will serve as a convenient standard by which to test the volumes before us. Though, like its English counterpart, it is a work of collaboration, all the writers seem not only to be moved by a common purpose, but to possess in common a certain central body of knowledge, and even — perhaps because they are all educated Frenchmen, and hence all well trained in the technique of composition — a kind of corporate style, always rich in substance, unpretentious, urbane, limpid, vigorous, vivacious, yet restrained, although now this, now the other quality may be more in evidence. Hence the French work succeeds in being eminently readable — a result due in part to the masterly organization of the material; as this, again, depends in part upon the limitation of the field. For the Frenchman, though he must have been tempted to include both Latin and Provençal writings in his scope, eschews them all and confines himself strictly to literature in French. Nor does he neglect to provide good store of choice illustrations, mostly photographs of manuscripts, illuminated or otherwise, or, in the later volumes, portraits and specimens of handwriting. The writers chosen to perform a task so delicate, difficult, and honorable are among the first scholars in France in their respective fields. Finally, he who was the foremost student of mediæval French letters of his period introduced, in a score of pages, the first two volumes with a just and striking estimate of Old French literature, as the general editor was to begin the third volume with a paper summing up the characteristics of the Renaissance.

In the work which we are now considering, these features are lamentably absent, or present only in a lower degree. There is no general survey of the qualities of mediæval English literature, or of mediæval literature in general. The contributing scholars are, with several notable exceptions, not those whom all the world knows of, or all experts unite to honor. There are no facsimiles or pictorial illustrations of any kind. The field of English literature is extended to include not only Scottish literature and the Latin writers in England, but also such topics as the introduction of printing into England, and the early work of the press, English scholars of Paris, and English and Scottish education. There are as many styles as there are authors, — this it would be easy to forgive, —but few of these styles deserve unrestricted praise. And then, if the whole truth must be told, not all the contributors are persons, we will not say of ripe scholarship, but even of accurate and ordered knowledge.

A few particulars will serve to point these strictures. The want of any abstract and brief chronicle of the whole subject dealt with in these two volumes — literature in the British Isles in the Middle Ages — is a fact easily verified, as is likewise the absence of illustrations. There is a chapter devoted to Chaucer, of course, but it is signed neither by Skeat nor by Furnivall, the first of living Chaucerians; one on Alfred, and on the Latin literature before his time, but not by Plummer, or Stevenson, or Sedgefield, or Sweet; one on the writings between Alfred and the Conquest, including legends of the Holy Rood and homilies, but not by Napier. We mention only authorities living in England, but the names of American and German scholars of repute might easily be introduced to swell the list.

The English work, though it omits a treatment of the mystery plays, is, in round numbers, one-third larger than its French predecessor, which finds a place for the mediæval drama. Nearly onefourth of the second volume is taken up with things Scottish, though of things Irish there is scarcely a trace. As to style, we too often find mere enumerations, instead of stimulating or satisfying interpretations, We can scarcely predicate style of passages like these: “ Among the sources used are Pliny, Solinus, Orosius Eutropius, Marcellinus Comes, Gildas, probably the Historia Brittonum, a Passion of St. Alban, and the Life of St. Germanus of Auxerre by Constantius ” (i, 90). “ In the third book we proceed as far as 664. In this section the chief actors are Oswald, Aidan, Fursey, Cedd, and Wilfred ” (same page). “ Among them we find Gifica (Gibicho), Breca, Finn, Hnaef, Saeferth (Sigeferth?) and Ongentheow, who have been mentioned above, as well as Attila, Eormenric, Theodric ” (i, 38). Well may one of the contributors to this volume say, “ The muse of history needs, for her highest service, the aid of the imagination.”

Occasionally we get writing as bad as this (ii, 171): “afforded, both in respect of form and of matter, excellent material tor translating for many a year until, in fact, the clipped wings had had time to grow again.” An allusive style, occasionally employed to relieve the dullness which will creep in, has its own peculiar perils: the writer last quoted thus blends two Shakespearean reminiscences near the close of the second volume: “It has been sometimes urged that the fifteenth century ... is an uninviting, barren waste, in which it were idle and unprofitable to spend one’s time when it can be fleeted carelessly in ‘ the demesnes that here (sic) adjacent lie, belonging,’” — as the writer considerately explains —“ to the stately pleasure houses of Chaucer and the Elizabethans.” There are thus styles and styles; but few among them have those conspicuous merits which are displayed in every number of The Spec tator or The Saturday Review.

Before commenting upon certain positive errors which here and there occur, we may note the careless proof-reading, especially in the first volume, extending to the references in the index. These blunders are often ludicrous, though generally of a sort to be easily corrected by the reader. Thus, for example: “ the gleemen of [or] minstrels who played on the harp ” (i, 3); “ in 1674 [674] Benedict Biscop had built the monastery of St. Peter ” (i, 98); “ the following tablet [table] . . . shows the relations of the various MSS.” (i, 123); “ had Harold won, instead-of lust [lost], the battle of Hastings” (i, 166); “ that none deserved better posterity [of posterity] than he who wrote a faithful record” (i, 180); “ Changes in Delusion ” [Declension] (i, 433, running title); “ the language in its state of translation [transition] afforded special opportunity for these irregularities (i, 390); “sayings of the philoshers ” (ii, 239).

One may pardon oddities or affectations in the language employed, such as the use of “fitt” — why not “fytte” — (i, 61), “scop” (i, 70), “Crist” (passim), and even Cristabel (i, 164), the overworking of “ aureate ” (ii, 109, and often subsequently), the use of “ horseplayful ” (ii, 207), or “erst-friar” (ii, 294). One may overlook the Johnsonian magniloquence of clauses like the following (ii, 294): “ which assumes a fundamental homogeneity in mediæval method, in most respects incongruent with the literary intention of the new learning.” One may smile at the artful aid of apt alliteration in ii, 293: “His was not the heavy-headed fancy of a moribund mediævalism.” But one must not condone blunders which a fair measure of attention would render impossible.

To be specific: John S. Westlake, M. A., Trinity College, informs us (i, 128) that Ælfric was born about 955, and that the poem entitled Judith was written about 918, or perhaps earlier (i, 158); yet he is quite capable of saying (i, 157), “It is noteworthy that Ælfric himself had written a homily on Judith. This homily must have been written earlier, and, perhaps, it influenced the writer of Judith to choose her as a national type.” This is pretty chronology: a homily written by a man born in 955 influences the author of a poem which nobody dates later than 918. The same authority tells us (i, 151) that Judith and The Battle of Maldon “ deal with the struggle against the same foe.” As the foe in the Judith is an Assyrian, and in The Battle of Maldon a Danish, army, we hesitate before accepting the statement unqualifiedly.

Nor is it much otherwise with Miss M. Bentinck Smith, M. A., Headmistress of St. Leonard’s School, St. Andrews. In discussing the poems of the Janian manuscript, she very properly records her belief (i, 50) that these poems are not all by one author. She assigns Genesis B to the second half of the ninth century (i, 51), and three others (i, 53) to the end of the ninth century. Yet she assumes the existence of a Cædmonian school (i, 69) on the hypothesis that Cædmon “ composed similar, though, perhaps, shorter pieces, which may have been worked upon later by more scholarly hands ” — the more scholarly hands which produced the poems of the Janian manuscript. It will be observed that she dates none of these poems earlier than 850. Now, Cynewulf “ wrote towards the end of the eighth century ” (i, 56). “ Yet ” — here the consecutiveness of her thinking manifests itself — “ the work of Cynewulf and his school marks an advance upon the writings of the school of Cædmon ” (i, 69), and she proceeds to show in what respects it marks such an advance. The same writer refers (i, 47) to the poem of Beowulf, “ an exhortation to do great deeds so that in Walhalla the chosen warrior may fare the better; ” but there is no mention of Walhalla in the Beowulf, — is there anywhere in Old English literature ? — and the passage in question merely reads, probably with no reference to a future life, “ Let him who may win glory ere he die; thus shall it be best for a warrior when life is past.”

Other writers, while not committing such positive errors, attribute to an author what the latter has merely drawn from some earlier source. The Blickling Homilies are credited (i, 127) with the picture of Heaven as a place where there is “youth without age; nor is there hunger nor thirst; nor wind nor storm nor rush of waters; ” but this is not original with the Blickling Homilies. Ælfric is described (i, 133) as exemplifying by Oswald the ideal English King; but the story of Oswald there told comes from Bede. The poem of the Menologium gets the credit for preserving some of the Old English names of the months, though they are found a couple of centuries earlier in Bede’s De Temporum Ratione. “ As early as 709 Aldhelm . . . had depicted the glories of the celibate life ” (i, 256); but had they never been depicted before ?

Other opinions strike one as exaggerations. “The Nut Browne Maid (in itself sufficient, in form and music and theme, to ‘make the fortune ' of any century) ” (ii, 486). “ Nowhere else [than in the Andreas] are to be found such superb descriptions of the raging storm ” (i, 59). Contradictions between various chapters will hardly surprise us. To one writer, the Ruthwell Cross is possibly of the eighth century (i, 12); to another, of the tenth (i, 62). On pages 33 and 46 of the first volume there are two different views of the orthodoxy of Iona. To Saintsbury (ii, 244) “ there is probably no period in the last seven hundred years which yields a lover of English poetry so little satisfaction as the fifteenth century; ” but he is overruled by one of the general editors, who declares (ii, 487) that this same period “ can well hold its own in the history of our literature as against the centuries that precede or follow it.” It may be objected that such differences of opinion are inevitable; but why, then, do they not appear in Petit de Julleville’s history of French literature ?

Proportion is not always observed in these volumes. Stephen Hawes manages to secure eighteen pages, while the whole history of Old and Middle English prosody get scarcely more than seven; yet “ most of his lines are inartistic and unmusical ” (ii, 268); “ his writings abound in long digressions, irrelevances, debates, appeals to authority, needless repetitions, prolix descriptions ” (ii, 263); and “ in choice of theme, in method of exposition, and in mode of expression, Hawes has a limited range” (ii, 259). He exhibits “ confused metre, slipshod construction, bizarre diction ” (it, 271). In a word, he writes like this (ii, 264): —

Yet he is honored with eighteen pages.

These and similar exceptions being taken, it is a pleasure, and it is simple justice, to declare that there is a golden face to the shield. Henry Bradley writes on changes in the language to the days of Chaucer; Ker brilliantly on metrical romances; Saintsbury competently, and always interestingly, on Chaucer. Gummere is at home in his peculiar field of the ballad; Manly, by his bold analysis, has earned his right to be heard on Piers Plowman; Macaulay, the first editor of Gower’s complete works, should know that author better than he has been known in centuries; Gregory Smith is probably as well informed as any one living on the earlier Scottish literature; Sandys’s History of Classical Scholarship guarantees his ability to describe the Latin literature of England from John of Salisbury to Richard of Bury; no one will dispute the qualifications of the Templar, Gollancz, to set forth the qualities of the various poems by the author of Sir Gawayne ; and W. Lewis Jones, in dealing with the Latin chroniclers, has the advantage of utilizing the labors of such men as Stubbs, Brewer, and Thomas Arnold. The writing of Miss Clara L. Thomson and Miss Alice D. Greenwood is quite up to the average in the two volumes, and the latter’s characterization of Malory’s Mortc d’Arthur (ii, 381-338) is one of the masterpieces of the book.

These two volumes, it need hardly be said, contain a large store of ordered, and, with rare exceptions, reliable information ; the bibliographies, though they do not sufficiently teach their own use for lack of critical estimates, are copious, and every way welcome; and the indexes, barring some inaccuracies in the first volume, are satisfactory.

What is chiefly wanting is what, in the present state of English scholarship, it would doubtless be impossible to supply — a plan rigorous in its exclusions, having regard to subjects or classes of literature, so far as might be consistent with the towering personality of certain authors, and mindful of proportion and consistency throughout; a band of scholars, with severe training and common ideals, enthusiastic, reflective, imaginative, masters of language, and loyal to the voice of a director who should represent their own intellectual conscience. It will, we fear, be a long day before this counsel of perfection shall be realized in any such measure as in Trance; and meanwhile we can only be thankful to those who have blazed the way, and who, while showing their successors some pitfalls to be avoided, have also left them much which it will be their wisdom to emulate, and, if it may be, to surpass.