A Critical History of English Literature

A Critical History

of

English L'iterature

VOLUME I

DAVID DAICHES

A Critical History

of

English Literature

IN TWO VOLUMES

~~

VOLUME I

~~ ,

London SEeKER & WARBURG 1961

Prinud in Great BriJlJin by

Morrison & Gibb Ltd., Lrmdall alld Edillburgh

and published in Great Britain b_lI

klartin Seeker & Warhurg Ltd.

7 John Street, London

W.C.l

Copycight © J 960 by

THE RONALD PRESS COMPANY

First pllblished September 1960

Reprin ted December 1960

Reprinted February 1961

To my former students

•

on both sides of the Atlantic

pero pur va ed andanda asealta

Preface

TillS IS AN AGE of specialist .schoiars, and for one man to attempt a

complete history of English literature is now both rash and unusual.

I cannot claim to be a specialist in all the periods on which I have

written, nor, in spite of my best attempts, have I been able to keep

abreast of all new developments in English studies. But I have been

reading English literature continuously and closely ever since I be￾gan my studies at Edinburgh University in 1930, and I have long felt

the urge to describe the whole scene as I see it. This, therefore, is

one man's history of English literature; it is intended less as a work

of reference than as a. work of description, explanation, and critical

interpretation. It is not meant to be looked up, but to be read. I have

given myself generous space in dealing with major figures such as

Shakespeare and Milton, without bothering whether, in strict terms

of relative greatness, they deserve so much more than I have given

to some other writers. Indeed, ,the chapters on Shakespeare and

Milton can perhaps stand as ind~pendent critical studies, capable of

being extracted from the rest of the History and read as short books

on their Own. Nevertheless, thougb the word "critical" in my title is

important, I have tried never to lose sight of the fact that this is a

history, not a series of separate critical studies, and the appropriate

kinds of historical generalizations and the proper continuity of nar￾rative have, I hope, been maintained throughout. I may sometimes

have treated a minor writer who interests me particularly at greater

length than he deserves, or rather briefly summarized something im￾portant and well known. But I have tried to see my subject steadily

and see it whole; and I have tried to write interestingly, less as the

impersonal scholar recording facts than as the interested reader shar￾ing his knowledge and opinions.

On matters of pure scholarship I have, of course, often had to de￾pend on the researches of others. On questions of emphaSis and

v

Vl PREFACE

assessment I have done so as little as possible, although occasionally

even the most conscientious critical historian must be content to take

the word of a ~ympathetic expert about the value of an odd minor

work to which he himself has never devoted a great deal of careful

attention. Art is long and life is short, and one cannot always be

wholly original in everything. I hope, however, that the pattern

which a Single mind imposes on this vast material will make my

account more lively and suggestive than the conscientious composite

works of reference by teams of experts, from which I have myself

profited but which are not literary history in the sense that this book

is intended to be.

I have been more liberal in quotation from the works under dis￾cussion than is. usual for a literary historian; I have found that the

critical side of the work demands this. I have been deliberately in￾consistent in the lexts of my quotations. As a rule I have modernized

spelling and punctuation, though not in Middle English texts, which

lose too much by such modernization. In sixteenth-, seventeenth-,

and eighteenth-century texts I have retained the original spelling

where it is important as giving a period flavor or indicating some

historical aspects of the language or of-literary convention; otherwise

I have modernized it. My principle in this and other matters has

been maximum ease of reading compatible with sound scholarship

and intellectual responsibility.

Jesus College, Cambridge

February, 1960

DAVID DAICHES

Contents

VOLUME I

CHAPTER PAGE

1 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 3

2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MIDDLE ENGLISH PROSE AND

VERSE 31

3 MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE: FABLlAU, LYRIC, DREAM

ALLEGORY, BALLAD

4 CHAUCER, GoWER, PIERS PLOWMAN

5 THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES

6 THE EARLY TUDOR SCENE CI' •

68

89

128

146

7 SPENSER AND HIS TIME 165

8 DRAMA FROM THE MIRACLE PLAYS TO MARLOWE 208

9 SHAKESPEARE 246

10 DRAMA FROM JONSON TO THE CLOSING OF THE THEATERS 309

11 POETRY AFTER SPENSER: THE JONSONlAN AND THE META￾PHYSICAL TRADITIONS 346

12 MILTON 390

13 PROSE IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTII CENTURIES 458

14 SCOTTISH LITERATUHE TO 1700 504

( vii

viii CONTENTS

VOLUME II

CHAPTER

1 THE RESTORATION

2 THE AUGUSTAN AGE: DEFOE, SWIFT, POPE

3 POETRY FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE

4 THE NOVEL FROM RICHARDSON TO JANE AUSTEN

5 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHICAL, HISTORICAL, AND

CRITICAL PROSE, AND MISCELLANEOUS WRITING

6 SCOTTISH LITERATURE FROM ALLAN RAMSAY TO WALTER

SCOTT

7 THE ROMANTIC POETS I: BLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND

COLERIDGE

8 THE ROMANTIC POETS II: SHELLEY, KEATS, AND BYRON

9 F AMILlAR, CRmCAL, AND MISCELLANEOUS PROSE OF THE

EARLY AND MIDDLE NINETEENTH CENTURY

10 VICTORIAN PROSE: JOHN HENRY NEWMAN TO WILLIAM

MORRIS

11 THE VICTORIAN POETS

12 THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

·0.·

13 DRAMA FROM. THE BEGiNNING OF THE EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY ,

14 EPILOGUE: AFTER THE VICTORIANS

INDEX

PAGE

537

590

652

700

766

809 '

856

905

935

961

993

1049

1094

1113

1139

A Critical Hzstory

of

English .Literature

VOLUME I

CHAPTER ONE

Anglo-Saxon Literature

THE ANGLO-SAXON INVADERS, who came to Britain in the latter part

of the fifth century A.D. and eventually established their kingdoms

there, were the founders of what we can properly call English cul￾ture and English literature. They gave England its name, its lan￾guage, and its-links with "Germania," that great body of Teutonic

- peoples whose migrations disrupted the Roman Empire and utterly

changed the face of Europe. Some four hundred years before they

arrived in Britain, the Roman historian Tacitus had given his account

of the Germanic peoples and how they looked to his civilized Roman

eyes; and though we can see that Tacitus' Germania idealizes the

barbarians in order to hold up the noble savage as an example to de￾cadent Rome, we can nevertheless trace in his account something of

the qualities of these people as they emerge out of the mists of his￾tory and legend at a later period. To th,e Romans, whose world they

threatened and finally overcame, they were "barbarians;" appearing

out of nowhere to endanger, with their primitive vigor and alien

ways of thought, both the political structure of the ~mpire and the

ideological structure of Greco-Roman thought. After the Roman Em￾pire had become Christianized, the contrast between barbarian and

Roman was even more striking, for the former were heathen and

their life and their SOCiety reflected heroic ideals far removed from

Roman Christian theory or practice. Yet the history of much of Eu￾rope in the so-called "Dark Ages" is the story of the gradual fusion

of these two ways of life and thought, the growing together of bar￾barian and Chris";an and the grounding of both in an appropriately

modified phase of the Greco-Roman tradition.

Precisely who the invaders were whom we have for so long called

"Anglo-Saxon" is not of primary importance to the student of litera￾ture. That they belonged to the group of Teutonic peoples to which

we can appropriately give Tacitus' name of Germania is clear. Ac￾cording to Bede, writing his ecclesiastical history of England two hun￾S

4 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE

dred years and more after their arrival, they came "from three very

powerful nations of the Germans: that is, from the Saxones, Angli,

and the Iulae." We know something about the Saxons, who appear

to have come from the low country south of Denmark and east of

Holland, the modem Holstein. The Angles app'far to have lived in

modem Jutland and the neighboring islands before they appeared

in Britain, while the Jutes, whose origin is the most obscure of the

three, perhaps came from the country east of the lower Rhine and

perhaps, though less probably (the apparent similarity of names not

being the cogent argument it might appear to the modem ear), from

Jutland. In Anglo-Saxon England there were Saxon kingdoms (in

the south and southwest), Anglian kingdoms (in the east, north, and

midlands), and the lutish kingdom of Kent in the southeast. The

cultural differences between the three groups are of comparatively

little moment: their language was essentially the same, though with

important dialectical differences; and they all considered themselves

part of "Germania," that loosely associated group of peoples who in￾cluded Goths, Burgundians, Lombards, and others, and who had a

common set of heroes who might belong to any' one of these.

Of the Romanized Britons whom the invading Anglo-Saxons

pushed into western corners of England the historian of English lit￾erature has little to say. A Celtic people who had been taken into the

Roman Empire, they were left to fend for themselves when the Ro￾mans, desperately trying to hold their empire together agains! ~ar￾barian invaders, withdrew from England in A.D. 410. A prey to the

ruder Picts and Scots in the north, they soon found themselves more

seriously threatened by the invaders from across the North Sea, to

whom they were an alien J;'eople known as "Welsh," which was

simply the Germanic peoples name for foreigoers who were not part

of Germania. Only in Wales have these Cambro-Britons continu￾ously preserved their language and their traditions; their contribu￾tion to specifically English literature is sporadic and oblique, and

does not appear until long after the Anglo-Saxon period. If Arthur,

who plays such an important part in Middle English romance, was

really a historical Cambro-British character from this period-and

we have no mention of him before the ninth century except for a

passing remark by an early seventh-century Welsh poet that a cer-

. tain warrior, while hrave, "was not Arthur" -there is still no reason

for consideriog his metamorphosis into a hero of medieval romance

and a focus for a host of "Arthurian" stories as any part of a direct

and continuous heritage from Celtic Britain into later times. It was

not until the twelfth century, when English literature sought its in￾spiration from the French, that the Arthurian romances began to

ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 5

appear, and while it is true that it was an Englishman, Geoffrey of

Monmouth, who first elaborated the Arthurian story (in his Historia

Regum Britanniae) to provide rich material for these romances, the

Anglo-French development of the material is very far removed from

any Celtic origins. Whatever the origins of the Arthurian story,

therefore, we are justified in beginning the history of English litera￾ture with the Anglo-Saxons.

Of surviving Anglo-Saxon literature, that which brings us most

closely into contact with the Germanic origins of the invaders is the

heroic poetry, which still bears traces not only of the pre-Christian

heroic society of the continental Saxons and otllers, hut also of that

community of subject which linked these early English with the

wider civilization of Germania. This is written in the language we

know as Old English or Anglo-Saxon, which is essentially the English

language in an earlier stage of its development, with inflections

which have since disappeared, a relatively small vocabulary from

which many words have since been lost (though some which are lost

to standard English remain in altered form in Scots and in regional

English dialects), and significant differences between, for example,

the West Saxon dialect of the south and the Anglian dialect:of North￾umbria. The verse is alliterative and stressed, without rhyme, each

line containing four stressed syllables and a varying number un￾stressed. There is a definite pause (caesura) between the two halves

of each line, with two stresses in each half.

We geascodon Eormenrices

wylfenne gepoht; ohte wide Eole

Catena rices; prot wres grim cyning.

S",t secg monig sorgum gebunden,

wean on wenan, wyscte geneahhe

pret pres cynerices ofercumen wrere.

To the superficial eye this looks very far removed from modern Eng￾lish; and in a sense it is. (The letter p-"thorn"-has the sound of

"th.") But a literal translation helps to bring out its relation to mod￾em English:

We have learned of Eormanric's

wolfish disposition; he held wide dominion

in the reahn of the Goths. That was a cruel king.

Many a man sat bound in sorrows,

anticipating woe, often wishing

that his kingdom were overcome.