The Study of English Literature: Its Scope and Method; An Address Before the Alumni of Brown University, June 15, 1886 (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

Sinopsis

Excerpt from The Study of English Literature: Its Scope and Method; An Address Before the Alumni of Brown University, June 15, 1886

Mr. Huxley may be right in denominating classical history as a part of the palmontology of man. But so long as histo rians like Grote or Mommsen make the great classical litera ture a vital part of their histories, this never can be classified as palaeontology. If scientific nomenclature must be used, the great classics will group themselves as part of the biology of nations, since they are living and not dead things. If classical literature be dead, then the world is ready for some new definition of what life and death are.

The student of English literature must know English his tory in order to appreciate that literature, as he must know the literature in order to estimate the history. Determined by historic causes outside itself, this naturally divides into historic periods. Its great divisions into Elizabethan, Res toration, Queen Anne and Victorian periods, like the con tinents, are marked by peculiar configurations and differing characteristics. The England of Chaucer and Langland is a totally different England from that of Spenser and Shakes peare. The England of the seventeenth and that of the nine teenth century have contrasts which are more powerful than their resemblances. No man to-day can appreciate the mar vellons portraitures in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales who is ignorant of the times in which such characters as Chaucer's Knight, and Prioress, and Monk, and Clerk of Oxenford, and Wife of Bath, and Pardoner, and Sergeant of Lawe, had their actual being. Let no one think he has taken in the fulness of poetic meaning in Spenser's Fairy Queen who has not sought to penetrate the allegoric veil which covers historical personages and events then coloring and shaping English history. There were a false Duessa and an Archimago, an Ignaro and a Blatant Beast in Eng land then, and the reader of the Fairy Queen should know who and what they were.

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