OUTLINES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

CHAPTER I.

PREFATORY.

THE history of English literature will be more interesting to the student who has thoughtfully read this prefatory chapter and has in mind the outlines of English history sketched in Chapter II.

A literature embodies in published writings the intellectual character of a people. Its history reveals national growth and civilization. Before the days of printing, persons who wished to publish their thoughts wandered from court to court, from festival to festival, and recited their compositions for the entertainment of the people. They were welcome visitors. In nearly all primitive literatures they appear, and are known by different names in different languages. They were the minnesingers of Germany, the troubadours of France, the scalds of Scandinavia, the gleemen of Old England.

The beginnings of literature are poetic in form, for thus imagination naturally expresses itself, and imagination excites mental activity in the childhood of persons and of races. Moreover, poetic forms, by their rhythmic, measured movement, are helpful to memory, and enable the reciter to recall the narrative more easily, while, at

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the same time, their euphony captivates the listener. Before language was written, even the lawgivers and the oracles uttered their decrees in rhythmic sentences, in order that they might be better remembered.

The Greek poets did not

observe rules of classical

Poetic forms have varied widely. use rhyme, and modern poets do not quantities. The earliest English verse found its charm in such use and abundance of alliteration as is tedious to modern taste. But in all poetry succession of cadence and pause adapts it to musical expression, and enhances the pleasure of listener or reader. In studying the history of English literature through its earlier centuries, wherever the author was seeking to please his reader we shall find him resorting to the art of the poet.

The English language did not originate in England. It displaced the Celtic speech found there by the Romans when they invaded the island in the dawn of British history. Old English was the tongue of the invaders from the northwest coasts of the European continent, who were of Teutonic or Gothic stock. According to the historian Bede, these invaders were of three tribes: Angles, who took possession of Northumbria; Saxons, who settled further south, from the Stour along the coasts of the English Channel to the Isle of Wight; and Jutes, to whom portions of Kent are assigned. These peoples are supposed to have come from Frisia, Schleswig, and Holstein, bringing various dialects. Of the three great divisions of Teutonic languages, the Low German, the High German, and the Scandinavian, the tongue of the invaders of England belonged to the first, and finds its nearest living representative in the modern Dutch.

At times, one and then another of the Teutonic dialects spoken by the invaders became the vehicle of literature. Cæd* See p. 24.

mon used the Anglian for his Paraphrase of the Scriptures; King Alfred wrote in West Saxon, calling it Englisc.* Out of this Saxon dialect modern English was developed; helped at first by the establishment of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and then by its use in Wycliffe's translation of the Bible and in Chaucer's poetry.

The oldest form of the English language is called AngloSaxon. Whether that term signifies a union of two dialects spoken in England, or was used to distinguish the Saxon of the English from the Saxon of the Continent, is not clearly determined. However that may be, the Saxon speech which tells the story of Beowulf differs from modern English even more than the French or Spanish of to-day differs from the Latin of Tacitus. The same is true of the Semi-Saxon found in Layamon's Brut of the thirteenth century, although in the inflectional forms and in the vocabulary of that poem there is perceptible progress towards our present speech. This wide difference led earlier philologists to treat the three periods of English as three distinct languages, naming them Anglo-Saxon, Semi-Saxon, and English. Later scholarship regards them as different stages of one language, and makes the following division:

1. Old English, from the dawn of the language until 1154.

2. Middle English, from 1154 until about 1491.

3. Modern English, from about 1491 until the present time.

Languages are classified, not by their vocabularies, but by their grammatical forms and idioms. The vocabularies of the * Elfred Kyning was wealhstod thisse bec, and hie of boclædene on Englisc wende. "Alfred King was commentator of this book, and it from booklanguage into English turned."

Old and the Modern English differ greatly, but their grammar is the same. The continuity of English speech is as unbroken as the descent of the English people. There is not an inflection in Modern English that has not its parent form in the so-called Anglo-Saxon. Its irregular declensions and its conjugations are of the same origin. From whatever foreign language a word is taken, as soon as it is Anglicized it adopts English inflections if inflected at all. It is true that our language receives some foreign words with their foreign terminations, as phenomenon, plural phenomena; stigma, plural stigmata; effluvium, plural effluvia; tableau, plural tableaux; but the tendency is to give such words English inflections, and to Anglicize their plurals. We write stigmas, effluvias, tableaus.

No date can be named as the time of transition from Saxon to English. Like all living tongues, our language has been, and still is, a process of growth and change. The changes were more rapid when it was the spoken language only of an illiterate people living in tempestuous times. When invasions ceased, and the English peasantry lived in peace for successive generations, sequestered from new and strange influences, their vocabulary, their pronunciation, their speech, became settled, and literature began to polish and fix the forms of our language. In its literary form, English has changed little since the days of Queen Elizabeth; in pronunciation and accent it has been perceptibly modified.

Although Old English, Middle English, and Modern English are not separated by distinct lines of division, we may distinguish their differences from each other, and may note the processes of change. Each epoch of the language culminates in an outburst of literary productiveness. Cædmon and King Alfred wrote in Old English; Middle English was the language of Chaucer and Wycliffe;