
Original appearance Transactions of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. 1 (1884-5), pp.84-95. The punctuation of this article has been modified in its appearance on this page, for the sake of clarity. Emphasis added.

Original appearance Transactions of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. 1 (1884-5), pp.84-95.

The punctuation of this article has been modified in its appearance on this page, for the sake of clarity. Emphasis added.

Home // 1884-5 // James Morgan Hart

The College Course in English Literature, How It May Be Improved.

The possibility of better the present curriculum in English literature will depend in great measure upon the proportion of time allowed to it. So long as the classics and mathematics retain for themselves the lion's share of time and interest, the hopes of our professors of literature will never become unduly exalted. If I may express myself with thorough frankness, the customary quota of English literature, say less than two hours per week for less than two years, is so insufficient that I cannot look upon it as capable of improvement. The study will remain perforce hurried and superficial. Now the course that I have in mind is one of two full hours (better three) throughout three entire years. It is the course which has been required since 1880 for the B. L. degree in the University of Cincinnati, viz., three years, three hours a week. The classical students are now (beginning with 1884) compelled to take two of the three years, and the Scientifics one year. Perhaps this last requirement will be hereafter raised to two years.

How is this amount of time to be best utilized? I confess that at more than one point I am in doubt; at least, my past experience is still to some extent only experimental.

1. What does not rightfully pertain to English Literature? Settling this preliminary question will help us greatly. The main question resolves itself into three: What are we to do with Logic, with Rhetoric, with English Philology (AngloSaxon and Early English)? Fortunately the Logic question is fast settling itself. The growth of this study has been so rapid of late, its drift towards mathematics and the experimental sciences so unmistakable, that no disciplined mind of the present day can look upon logic and literature as having anything in common. As to Rhetoric, the course is not so clear. There are still only too many persons of influence and culture who persist in looking upon the instructor of English literature as necessarily the instructor of rhetoric. I am unable to share this opinion. To me rhetoric is a purely formal drill, having no more connection with the literature of England than it has with the literature of Greece, Rome, France, Germany, or Arabia. The canons of the art were laid down two thousand years ago by Aristotle, and quite one thousand years before there was an English literature in any sense.

To my way of thinking, the study of English literature means the study of the great movement of English life and feeling, as it is reflected in the purest poetry and the purest prose of representative men, those men who have led their people's sympathies. Rhetoric always savors to me of the school-bench. It is, if we look into it scrutinizingly, little more than verbal jugglery. And however clever we may be at it ourselves, however quick we may be at perceiving it in others, we shall be none the wiser in understanding an author, the influences that moulded him, his peculiar mission, his hold upon us. The proper object of literary study, in one word, is to train us to read, to grasp an author's personality in all its bearings. And the less rhetoric here, the better—in my judgment. Rhetorical exercises are, of course, useful. So are the parallel bars and dumb-bells of a gymnasium. Need I push the comparison farther? [1]

In the next place, how is it with Anglo-Saxon and Early English? I think that here most of us have confounded two radically distinct matters, viz., literature and language. Literature is thought. Were, now, the connection of thought between our King Alfred of pious memory and our Queen Victoria an unbroken continuity, I could spare my time. I should say at once, unhesitatingly, that it would be our duty to master Beowulf and Elene just as the Athenians and Alexandrians mastered the Iliad and the Odyssey. But alas, the case is quite otherwise. However unpleasantly the confession may go against my own personal interest and sympathy, as a devoted specialist in AngloSaxon philology, I must confess that everything anterior to the Conquest is as foreign to our way of thinking as if it had been expressed in a foreign tongue. It is more foreign even than the thought of the Greeks and Romans. I do not see what literary culture our undergraduates can possibly derive from any English writings anterior to Chaucer's. And even Chaucer, whom I sincerely and heartily relish, is—shall I say—double-faced? He is a colossal sphinx. We look at him from one side, and his smile is sunny and inviting, and we hail him as one of ourselves, as indeed our literary father. But when, by dint of patient exploration, we have struggled around to the other side, we discover that our so-called father is the veriest enfant perdu of all the grossness, folly, superstition, and prattle that go by the name of the Middle Ages. By all means let us read our Chaucer. He is too poetical a poet to be ignored. But when we read, let us remember that he is not wholly one of us. There is a gulf between him and the meanest of the great Elizabethans.

I have expressed doubt as to the utility of Anglo-Saxon in a course of English literature. But if Anglo-Saxon be taught, let me make one suggestion. Our present method is a wrong one. We put our students into the most difficult and archaic poetry, and ignore the easy prose vernacular. This is anything but wise. Granting that Beowulf is a spirited poem, the noblest relic of ancient Germanic spirit, is it not too obscure for the non-specialist? And if, by dint of commentaries, we help the student over the hard places, have we given him the best insight into the language, which is-after all-the chief object of the study? My experience teaches me that pure Wessex prose, the language of Orosius and the pastoral, will do better service than the rather mongrel dialect of poetry. The most serious drawback to the study of Anglo-Saxon is the want of a practical grammar and corresponding dictionary. The grammar by Sievers is a monument of acumen, but, even if translated, it is too difficult for the beginner. As to Groschopp's Glossary (Grein's condensed), it is quite behind the present philological requirements, and is moreover almost useless for prose. The most available general reader is that by Sweet, which has an excellent glossary. Zupitza's reader is an admirable little book, including not only Anglo-Saxon, but Early English. If I had to restrict myself to one book, I should prefer it to all others. But the glossary is not so well put together as it should be. And if any one of the longer Anglo-Saxon poems is to be read, let me urge the substitution of Elene for Beowulf. Zupitza's latest edition leaves nothing to be desired, and the poem offers no such difficulties as those in Beowulf.

On one point, at least, I have no doubts, viz., that every teacher of our literature should have made careful study of Anglo-Saxon and Early English. There are in modern speech hundreds of linguistic survivals which the trained eye sees through at a glance, but which are a perpetual stumbling block to the empiric. How grievously even an accomplished editor may fail, from want of linguistic training, may be illustrated by the following specimens. In Dryden's MacFlicknoe, at line 65, occurs the phrase "and Barbican it hight." Mr. Hales, in his "Longer English Poems," on p.274 comments thus:

Hight = "was called." Sometimes it has a present sense, sometimes it is a participle . . . It is a later form from the Anglo-Saxon hatan (pret. hatte) which has both an active and a passive sense; so German heissen, which is of the same root; hence the double use of hight in later English both as passive participle and as a verb of active form and passive meaning . . . . There was another Anglo-Saxon verb hatan, "to command;" the preterite of which (het) is often confounded with that of hatan, "to call."

Can we imagine a worse jumble? Yes, here is one; on p.276 the word "yeoman" is thus elucidated:

This word is variously connected with Frisian gaeman, "a village;" Anglo-Saxon ge-maene, "common;" Anglo-Saxon geonge, "young;" Anglo-Saxon geongra, "a vassal;" fancifully, with yew.

Comment would be superfluous. In discussing the lines in Johnson's London:

All that at home no more can beg or steal,
Or like a gibbet better than a wheel,

Mr. Hales is so eager to ventilate the etymology of the word "gebbet" that he fails to bring out the point of Johnson's satire, viz., that the wheel was a Continental instrument of punishment, and the gibbet an English. Were Mr. Hales an ordinary editor of school-books, I should not waste words over him. But, on the contrary, he is an uncommonly well-read man, and I regard his little volume as one of the greatest helps that the teacher can find. But when he ventures on his so-called etymologies, I tremble. Nothing but a six-months drill in Sievers's grammar can cure such dilettanteism.

2. Passing from this preliminary discussion of negatives to the more positive question: How is English literature, as literature, to be taught, I wish to say a word or two upon the importance of teaching it by periods. Whatever be the amount of time at our disposal, we shall not do our whole duty by our pupils, if we neglect to impress upon their minds the observance of the great lines of division. They are only two—the first ends with the death of Milton; the second, with the death of Samuel Johnson. Of course these lines are not the hard, fixed lines of the geometrician or the statistician. They are ideal lines, merely serving to keep us within proper bounds. What does it matter that Dryden's authorship overlaps Milton's? Such juxtaposition only heightens the contrast.

Matthew Arnold has called Milton "the last of the Immortals." In general I do not subscribe to Mr. Arnold's literary dicta. But this once certainly he hit the mark. Milton is the direct successor and last survivor of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. So far as he is of any age and not for all time, he is of the great Elizabethan age. Mr. Hales says on p.214, very appositely,

In 1667 appeared Paradise Lost, in ten books. It was in that same year that Dryden brought out his Annus Mirabilis. Thus in that year the great poetic leader of the setting age and the leader of the rising age stood strikingly contrasted.

To me, the contrast is more than striking, it is overwhelming. Paradise Lost and Annus Mirabilis! I know no other such jostling in literature. With regard to the first great period, although it begins with Spenser and ends with Milton, we are to remember that its typical form is the drama, and our chief efforts should be directed towards the proper treatment of Shakespeare. For the study of Shakespeare himself there is no lack of appliances. Yet I do not believe that the great dramatist is rightly studied. He is isolated too much. We put our students into reading him before they are prepared. Thanks to Mr. Ward's excellent history of the English drama (now supplemented by Mr. Symonds on the Predecessors of Shakespeare), the teacher can give, by lecture, an adequate treatment of the origin of the English drama. But this is not enough. The student should catch the tone and temper of the pre-Shakespeareans by reading them. Just here, alas, we break down. Mr. Morley's English Plays is not only an unwieldy and expensive book, but it is wretchedly planned and swarms with errors of every kind, yet it is the only book that attempts to cover the ground. The selections made by Charles Lamb, fifty years ago, are palpably inadequate. What we need is two volumes of selections, of equal size, say corresponding to Lamb's selections, one giving the quintessence of the best pieces prior to Shakespeare (but excluding Marlowe), the other treating in like manner Ben Jonson and the others down to the reign of Charles I. I exclude Marlowe for the reason that his two leading plays, Faustus and Edward II, are now procurable in very good shape.

I have often tried to imagine to myself what results a year of this work might produce. A year that should include the first book of The Faery Queen, and some of Sidney's sonnets, selections from Gorboduc, from Lyly, Greene, Kyd, three entire plays by Shakespeare, selections from Ben Jonson, Chapman, Webster, Ford, down to Shirley, and Milton's Comus. Such a year, would make, I think, an indelible impression upon the class. The second section, beginning with Dryden and ending with Samuel Johnson, is less interesting, because less poetic, but is perhaps more directly useful. With the aid of Mr. Hales's book, Arnold's selections from Johnson's Lives, and Mr. Minto's Manual of English Prose, the teacher can scarcely fail to make his pupils understand how the founders of our modern style thought and expressed themselves.

The third section, again, is difficult, but not for lack of books or good material. The difficulty consists in knowing precisely where and how to begin. I have been for years in the habit of training my pupils to look upon Wordsworth, and especially upon his Tintern Abbey, as the starting point of our nineteenth century poetry. Even this meets with objection from some quarters, I have perceived. Yet I cannot give up the position until some one offers me a better.

But how is it with our prose? We all feel that there is a difference between the prose of to-day and that of Johnson, Gibbon, and Hume. Yet how are we to indicate the transition, and in which author are we to typify it? I am at fault. [2] Besides, a still more troublesome question haunts me. Are we not to end with the year 1860? With what Mr. Stedman would call the idyllic school of Tennyson? I cannot shake off the suspicion that we are at this moment living in a new period, which has just begun and which is slowly and unconsciously evolving something, the precise shape of which no one foresees. For this reason, I should be loath to undertake any work later than Tennyson's Idylls, or to undertake Browning at all in the classroom. Although Swinburne and Morris are attractive, they will lead me, neither they nor I know whither. The same with Browning's dramatic art. Not because of his difficulties, which have been absurdly overrated, but because of his unexpended impetus, do I regard Browning as one outside of the classroom of today. I must admit my failure to view him and the new school in all their bearings. Hence my reluctance to teach them.

3. Let me now touch upon several pressing needs, of a general nature.

a. We need, first and foremost, a history of England and its people, especially adapted to literary study. I do not mean so much a text-book, to be recited upon, as a work for consultation and collateral reading. No one of my hearers will, I devoutly trust, adduce Mr. Green's Short History as a quasi-answer to such a demand. I have tried that book thoroughly in two separate classes, as a manual of history, and have found it utterly wanting. The author's style, to begin with, is rhetorical, wordy, overheated, his views are often prejudiced, and his general treatment is so vague and incoherent that it fails to make a lasting impression on the student's mind. Besides, even were the book all that its author and his coterie claimed for it, it is not the kind of book that I am after. I wish a general essay upon those social, legal, political and religious movements which have engaged and affected the cultured classes, the school and university life of England during and since Chaucer's day. If a scholar like Mr. J. Bass Mullinger, well versed in the history of England and English education, would only read through the autobiographic and satiric poetry (at least the leading pieces) of the last five centuries, noting down as he read the politics-social allusions, and would then proceed to construct his history on the lines thereby suggested, he would approximate at least to my ideal. This ideal is a clear understanding of the relations and contrasts between town and country in England, between the small towns and London, between the universities and the grammar-schools, between the aristocracy (including the landed gentry) and the bourgeoisie, between churchman and dissenters (including Roman Catholics). Consider the bearing that such questions must have on the position of Shakespeare, as against Spenser and Sidney, of Milton, of Dryden and Pope, of Gray as against Samuel Johnson, of Shelley as against Keats. How much a historian like Mullinger could teach us Americans, if we could only subject him to cross-examination.

b. We need, no less sorely, a general treatise upon the foreign relations of English literature. It has grown into a habit to speak of this literature as "insular." For one, I fail to see this assumed or conceded insularity. At what time, may I ask, has English thought held itself aloof from Continental influences? Certainly not in the past, certainly not until the full effects of the battle of Waterloo, and the withdrawal of England from continental politics made themselves felt. Tennyson is the first great English poet that I have discovered to be distinctively insular, And most of his contemporaries and younger successors range outside of his narrow pale. Under foreign influences, of course, I do not include Greco-Roman culture. I mean the culture of Italy, Spain, France, and Germany. Let me illustrate the point by a single example. What a deal of trash used to be printed on the subject of Euphuism, only clouding knowledge with words. And then, two or three years ago, a young German, Landmann, published his doctoral essay on Euphuism and showed how it could all be traced to the works of the Spaniard Guevara. In 1866, Craik, in his History of English Literature I, p.294, denied—at considerable length—any connection between Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida and Boccaccio's Filostrato. Only one year later a young German, Alfons Kissner, in preparing his doctoral dissertation, bethought him of the simple test of reading Troilus and the Filostrato side by side (a test which seems never to have occurred to Craik or his English predecessors). What was the result? A mathematical demonstration, from the recurrence of the same rhyme-words at the same intervals in both Italian and English, that the author of Troilus must have had the Filostrato before him. I do not wish to weary you with examples. Consider the Italian studies of Milton, the French tone in vogue during the times of Dryden and Pope, the connection between Le Sage and Smollett, the German speculations underlying Coleridge and Wordsworth, the cosmopolitan range of Byron. Who will venture to assert that any one of these topics has been seriously approached?

I have a tolerable familiarity with the leading English biographies, e. g. Boswell's Johnson, Lockhart's Scott, Moore's Byron, and, of the forty-odd volumes in the English Men of Letters Series, I have glanced at most, read many carefully and studied several exhaustively. Yet nowhere do I find the slightest attempt to connect any one writer with the thought of continental Europe. This insularity—not on the part of the writers themselves, be it observed, but on the part of their biographers—is discouraging. It betrays a want of method for which the English university system is to blame. Oxford and Cambridge discourage original work in literature. They hold their prize-students rigidly to the beaten road. They have no place for investigators like Landmann and Kissner, above mentioned. I should have great difficulty in imagining works such as Hettner's great Literaturgesckichte or Brandes's Hauptstromungen the product of English university training. Those who wish to generalize upon English literature will have to sit at the feet of German masters, I fear. The office of tracing continental influence in England belongs properly to one who has made continental literature his specialty and his base of operation. Starting from Romance and German literatures, he will the quicker recognize their styles, schools, and fashions in England. And we who are chiefly interested in England can profit by his observations.

c. There is great need of a convenient hand-book of English metres, a book to be used continually by pupils, if not actually recited upon. It is not surprising, from one point of view, that no such book exists, for if any branch of modern poetic literature has been worse neglected than another, it is precisely this. Until two years ago, when the first volume of Schipper appeared, there was no work that the teacher even could consult with safety. I speak quite within bounds. Guest's History of English Rhythms, published 1838, was based upon unqualifiedly wrong conceptions of metre in general and of the connection between English and foreign metres. Guest was a blind leader of the blind for nearly half a century. How a scholar like Skeat could be induced to reprint the book simultaneously with the appearance of Schipper's work, is to me a mystery, one of those conundrums in which philological study in England abounds. Schipper's work is all that one could desire, so far as it goes. But only one volume has appeared. The second—and to us the more important, as it will deal with the Renaissance and subsequent periods—is still in manuscript. Besides, Schipper's Metrik, like Sievers' Grammatik, is not a book for the beginner, as one can see at a glance. When complete, I should like to see it reduced to a volume of not more than one hundred and fifty pages, giving specimens of every kind of verse from Chaucer down, with brief introductory remarks and notes. Such a manual, if generally used, would rid us forever of the ghosts of delusions that have haunted English criticism for three centuries. We would not have to teach our classes the absurdity of believing that Waller and Denham introduced the "heroic couplet" into England, or that the Alexandrine had anything to do with Alexandria, or combat Mr. Symond's lucubrations on the subject of English blank-verse. Is such a study idle, unprofitable? Only four weeks ago, in the Academy for November 30 (1884), Mr. Caine ventured to criticize Mr. Symonds for using in his sonnets a line of eleven syllables, adding "the use of the line of eleven syllables in the sonnet is, I think, new to me! " Whereupon, in the following number of the Academy, Mr. Waddington had to hurry to the rescue and inform a learned public "that the Italian sonneteers almost invariably use the line of eleven syllables, and that that composition of mute-sonnets with lines of ten syllables is usually restricted by them to comic subjects." Truly, one is almost forced to suspect that Mr. Caine had never heard of Petrarch, but fondly imagined that the sonnet was invented by William Shakespeare or Sir Philip Sidney. If scholars like Mr. Caine can blunder after this fashion what are we to expect of college students and newspaper reviewers? Our poets have, in this respect, always felt more than our critics have known. We can scarcely imagine a Tennyson blundering in his remarks upon metre. The study of this formal side of verse is not mere form. There is a subtle correspondence between verse-flow and thought. If any one doubt this, let him try to reconstruct In Memoriam in heroic couplets, or the Divina Commedia in blank verse. The poetic judgments of the eighteenth century are apt to be weak. But they are never weaker than when they deal with metrical form. The beau ideal of critics like Johnson was the heroic couplet. Blank verse was a puzzle to them. Why? Because, as I suspect, they never studied the evolution of blank verse, its varieties in different writers and even in the same writer. Now I can think of no more fascinating occupation than the study of the growth of our blank verse. Borrowed, as I believe from Italy early in the sixteenth century, it took its first stand in Gorboduc. From Gorboduc to Marlowe is another great leap. In Shakespeare it reached apparently its perfection. Yet Milton demonstrated that not even Shakespeare had exhausted it. Then followed a period of decline, of disintegration. Dryden is reproached for writing his dramas in rhyme. But what was the blank verse of his stage? Little more than prose counted off by ten syllables. It had lost all flow, all rhythm, and Dryden, inverting Marlowe's example, resorted to rhyme to make his verses felt as poetry. You will observe that I am indicating lines of research, rather than stating results. How are we to connect the blank verse of Wordsworth and Tennyson with the great Elizabethans? And, hardest task of all, where are we to place the blank verse of Manfred and Cain? When I first studied these poems for the class-room, I judged the metre to be halting and defective. This was probably because it had not the flow that I was used to. But subsequent, more careful reading, satisfied me that Byron's blank verse, while it might be a trifle careless here and there, had nevertheless a character, a timbre of its own, and that at its best it was inferior to nothing in Shakespeare or Milton. Does this sound heterodox? Bear in mind the circumstances amid which Cain for instance moves. Byron knew that he was writing something against the popular grain. He knew that his readers would not be willing captives. He was bent on dragging them out of their ruts of prejudice. Remembering this, let us re-read the striking passages of Cain. Observe how seldom the pauses fall full and sonorous, how the caesura seems to vacillate. Unlike Shakespeare pouring forth his passion, unlike Milton sublime in his confidence, Byron has to insinuate his doubts and cavils. And the metre sympathizes with this mood. Pray do not misunderstand me. I am not seeking to present to you Byron in the attitude of a Shaeffier. His movements are not those of an awkward bungler, a fainthearted would-be doubter. Cain was the work of Byron in his prime. But precisely because he was then in his prime and knew what he was about, Byron made his blank verse unlike any other in the language. It is, so far as my observation extends, the first signal example of the blank verse of speculation and misgiving.

But I am straying too far. Let me return to the starting point. I want for my classes a small carefully selected volume of specimens that will illustrate every variety of metre and stanza that has been used successfully in our language. I wish to see represented not only blank-verse and the Spenserian stanza, but the songs of the Elizabethans and the Cavaliers; also the complicated French forms recently introduced or revived by Dobson, Lang, and Swinburne. Our literature is rich enough to enable the specialist to make selections that shall be at once good metre and good poetry. And I take the liberty of believing that English poetry thus studied will become more intelligible, more vivifying to our collegians than ever before.

NOTES

1. I do not wish to be understood as arguing in general against the utility of training in Rhetoric and Composition. In fact, such training seems to me an indispensable part of the school-curriculum. The above strictures are aimed solely at Rhetoric and Composition, as they are often taught in College. In my experience, college-students have a positive dislike of such drill, while they are almost invariably attracted to literature proper. It seems to me that Rhetoric, if taught at all in College, should be taught by the professor of Philosophy. It should come after the instruction in literature, should be treated in a very liberal spirit, in fact, as a national mode of envisager the subject, and especially should the instruction be of a kind to contrast ancient methods and tastes with modern, English with continental. It will be perceived that all this is very different from recitation upon Tropes, Introduction, and Arguments and from the writing of Themes. //back

2. Perhaps Scott will answer. No one, to my knowledge, has called attention to the double nature of Scott’s prose style. In temper and in personal sympathies, he is quite in accord with Wordsworth and with the Romanic movement. On the other hand, there is in his prose style a marked formalism at times, which savors strongly of the DrydenJohnson period. This is not surprising, when we remember that Scott was engaged for years in editing Dryden and Swift. At any rate, Scott will make a tolerable prelude to Lander, De Quincey, and—at a longer interval—Carlyle. //back

Banner graphic source: Print showing Scholars at a lecture ("Oxford scholars, portrayed as an assemblage of heads wearing square-topped, round cloth and felt hats and expressing varieties of boredom, listening to a reader in a lectern at lower right, his book inscribed in ink, with various squiggles, 'Datur Vacuum'") by William Hogarth. British Museum (Cc,1.120). In the public domain.