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Table of Contents

First of all: What is Literature?

The expression of thought upon the countless phases of life and the universe as felt by the greatest intellects.

There are innumerable views to be taken of this world of ours; each of us sees it a little differently, the problem of life strikes a nation or an age or an individual in ever changing ways. Homer saw it in heroic terms, Swift, in "Gulliver's Travels," looked at it savagely and sadly, Bunyan, in the "Pilgrim's Progress," saw the religious side. These authors not only saw but felt; their feelings took possession of them, they had to write them down and give them expression. Gray, the author of the immortal "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," took seven years to perfect the expression of the feelings roused by what he saw in that secluded village nook. Poe chose every word of his "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" with the utmost care. The labor of composition was solely for the purpose of giving the reader exactly the impression and emotion desired; for the sake of clearness, force, and ease.

In the second place: Each of the great periods in history has had certain traits and has excelled in some particular field of literature. The traits and the works of an era have been molded by preceding ages and likewise have brought about the development of the periods which followed. Vergil was influenced by Homer and the whole tradition of Greek literature; Shakespeare and the rest of the Elizabethan writers are products of the fresh outburst of activity which we call the Renaissance; Kipling has profited by the work of Dickens, Poe, Milton, Chaucer, and a host of other authors. If we are to appreciate a writer, then, we must know the chief characteristics of these great literary epochs.

The Age of the Ancients. 1500 B.C.–500 A.D. From the dawn of history to the fall of the Roman Empire, all the principal forms of literary expression were developed, at least two of which, epic poetry and tragedy, have never been surpassed. Yet the world was very small then; it was merely the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Its ideals were narrow, limited by paganism and slavery. For those who wrote and those who read there was no struggle for existence, they were waited on by their slaves, they had no faith in a life after death; whether thinkers or heedless wasters, they were selfishly living for to-day and not for the morrow. The bulk of the people were ignorant, even when not enslaved. As their literature was the product of an aristocracy, leading a life of leisure, it was inevitably stately, reserved, and formal in its tone, except in the earliest productions before society had emerged completely from barbarism.

POETRY

Catullus

Cleanthes

Egyptian Lit.

Homer

Horace

Ovid

Pindar

Sappho

Theocritus

Vergil

FICTION

Æsop

Apuleius

HISTORY

Cæsar

Herodotus

Josephus

Livy

Suetonius

Tacitus

Thucydides

BIOGRAPHY

Plato

Pliny

Plutarch

DRAMA

Æschylus

Euripides

Sophocles

PHILOSOPHY

Aurelius

Cicero

Epictetus

Lucretius

Plato

Seneca

The Dark Ages. 500 A.D.–1000 A.D. Crippled by pride and selfishness Roman civilization was swept away by wave after wave of barbarian invasions. Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Huns, Lombards, and Vandals in turn swarmed over the face of Europe, spreading terror and desolation. Learning, art, industry, and government perished. But the invaders brought a love of freedom, a hatred of bondage and captivity, to offset their contempt for the progress effected by the great thinkers and rulers of antiquity.

There is but little left to us of the scanty literature produced in those dim centuries. It is all primitive, Homeric; rhythmic tales of the heroic lives and deaths of national leaders constitute the sole endeavor that has lasted. But in these is the note of freedom, for the masses of the people as well as the rulers and nobles delighted in Charlemagne and his peerless knight Roland, or in Eric, the Viking adventurer, who dared to sail far forth to Vinland. The great ruler was not a mere commander but a leader whom men of every class gladly followed with love as well as respect. Yet the ideals were low, mainly of physical prowess and sheer brute strength.

Anglo-Saxon Lit. French Lit. German Lit. Norse Lit. Spanish Lit.

The Middle Ages. 1000 A.D.–1400 A.D. However, as soon as the dread of barbarian havoc had passed and peace and government had been restored to some extent, a new and brighter era began. The thirst for learning has never been greater than at this time. Students flocked to the universities of Paris, Oxford, and Bologna in thousands, begging their way, traveling on foot for hundreds of miles. Religion seized men even more firmly, finding them active or meditative occupations either in the monasteries or in the Crusades. The aspirations of the time appear in the legends of King Arthur and the Round Table, as told in the prose of the day by Sir Thomas Malory or in the more recent verse of Tennyson's "Idylls of the King." This is the chivalric ideal of perfect knighthood. The religious feeling is shown in such hymns as the "Stabat Mater," the "Dies Iræ," or "Jerusalem the Golden." Dante, commonly reckoned the second of the world's poets, proves the zeal for learning and scholarship. The spirit of freedom gleams from the "Old English Ballads" of Robin Hood, the enemy of the oppressive nobles and the friend of the poor and the humble. It is even more evident in the work of John Wyclif, who translated the Bible into English so that the common peasant might have the advantage of hearing the Gospel message read to him in a tongue that he understood, and that he might feel that the teachings of religion were meant for him as much as for the wealthy and the learned.

But science and thought had not yet startled men into recognition of the wonder round about them. Knowledge was assumed to be complete. To probe into the mysteries of nature was unholy and wicked in those days. The awakening from unseeing and unreasoning childhood to the adventuresome zest of youth and young manhood was yet to come.

POETRY

Chaucer

Dante

Old English Ballads

Petrarch

Tasso

FICTION

Boccaccio

Malory

HISTORY

Froissart

TRAVEL

Mandeville

Polo

RELIGION

Bernard, St.

Bernard of Cluny

Jacopone

à Kempis

Thomas of Celano

Wyclif

The Renaissance. 1400–1600. The gradual increase of knowledge and better government toward the close of the Middle Ages caused a desire for higher things. This hidden desire suddenly broke loose with astonishing force when the art of printing was discovered, about 1450. Information had hitherto been spread only by word of mouth or by laboriously copying a volume by hand. The process in either case was slower than we can imagine. But now new ideas, rare books, foreign teaching could be spread broadcast like wildfire.

It also happened at just this time that Constantinople was taken by the Turks (1453). The greatest treasures of Greek literature had been jealously hidden away there for centuries. Now that the scholars had to fly for their lives they let loose a store of new thought on the nations of western Europe. Taking refuge in Italy they brought with them these rich volumes. The Italian enthusiasm and the ardor with which these discoveries were published to the world spread like fire through France and Germany and England.

Everywhere mankind awoke; never before or since have people lived so strenuously. Their newly awakened curiosity drove them round the Cape of Good Hope and across the Atlantic Ocean. Exploration and adventure, the invasion of Mexico and the Americas as well as the Orient, the search for gold and for happiness went hand in hand. At the same time Luther roused northern Europe with his demand for religious reform and founded the Protestant church. In England Shakespeare and his companions had discovered a new field of literary venture and produced plays by the hundred, many of them immortal. The modern world of action and progress had at last come of age.

The passing of the old ideals, of chivalry and monkish study, is nowhere better shown than in "Don Quixote." The love of creative art hand in hand with adventure echoes through every page of Cellini's "Autobiography." Francis Bacon discovered a new method of reasoning; Montaigne did what had not been thought of for hundreds of years, and began to study his own personality, the workings of his mind, and the problems which he found in his own life within himself; Sir Thomas More also took up a subject that had not been touched for seventeen centuries and drew a wonderful picture of an ideal government in his "Utopia." Columbus and a whole squadron of others sailed the unknown seas. The Elizabethan nobles, like Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh, were poets, statesmen, courtiers, and generals all at once.

POETRY

Michelangelo

Ronsard

Shakespeare

Spenser

Villon

FICTION

Cervantes

Rabelais

HISTORY

Holinshed

Raleigh

BIOGRAPHY

Cellini

DRAMA

Jonson

Marlowe

Shakespeare

PHILOSOPHY

& SCIENCE

Ascham

Bacon

Luther

Machiavelli

Montaigne

More

Sidney

The Age of Classicism. 1600–1776. By 1600 imagination and the creative spirit were running riot. The exuberance of wonder and discovery had led to a wordy and confused style of writing. It was time for this unbalanced disorderly manner to be subjected to sound criticism and to be regulated by laws of composition.

This is precisely what happened. Enthusiasm and inventive power were wearied, and thinking men began to criticize and judge the work that was being done. It was clear to them that there was need of proportion and symmetry, that each act of a play, for example, should do its special part in the development of the plot and in the revelation of the characters. The problem in the scholar's mind was: What is the best possible form or model to follow in making a play, a song, or a speech? Wise men came to the conclusion that the classic authors of ancient literature furnished the best examples, and this is why the period is called the Age of Classicism.

It was characterized by the use of reason and judgment, rather than feeling and inspiration, by convention and law, by restraint and dignity. In fact the wilder side of nature was actually disliked; the Alps were not grand, but barbaric and odious, in the eyes of the literary men of that day. Dr. Johnson, in his famous Dictionary, defines a mountain as "a protuberance on the face of nature." The rich land-owners altered the landscapes on their great estates, smoothed out the inelegances of the meadows, cut trees down and planted others, laid out geometrically correct roads and paths, and altogether 'improved' nature until the whole scene was thoroughly artificial; very trim and neat, but very unnatural.

In literature it was much the same. Poetry, such as Pope's, seems stilted and affected to us; the plays of Racine, the opposite of Shakespeare's, are formal and long-winded, so exalted in tone and so restrained in their phrasing that they are dignity indeed, but nothing else.

Yet the movement was beneficial because it cut away the extravagances of the earlier period. It also produced a new branch of literature, the critical essay. The essays of Bacon and Montaigne had been philosophical. Those of Addison and Steele dealt with life and literature critically, using fable and fiction to give point to their verdicts in enforcement of law and convention.

But writing based on the ancient classics demanded a highly educated public. Only the wealthy could obtain the education necessary. Besides, the aristocracy held that the common people should be kept in their place, that learning and scholarship were not for them. The life of thought and progress was remote from the mass of the population, just as the government was carried on without reference to their needs or wishes.

POETRY

Dryden

Goldsmith

Gray

Herbert[1] Milton[1] Pope

FICTION

Bunyan[1] Defoe Fénelon Fielding Goldsmith Johnson Le Sage Sterne Swift

HISTORY &

ORATORY

Burke

Gibbon

ESSAY &

BIOG.

Addison

Boswell

Steele

Voltaire

DRAMA

Calderon

Lessing

Molière

Racine

Sheridan

RELIGION &

PHILOSOPHY

Browne[1] Bunyan[1] Herbert[1] Kant Smith, A. Watts Wesley

The Age of Romanticism. 1776–1832. The Revolution in America, soon followed by that in France, is the historical sign of the passing of the aristocratic spirit of classicism. Freedom, equality, the destruction of the bondage that had held the common people back from education and advancement, these are the new ideas. In literature as in life a reaction broke out against the formal, stilted, unemotional style of classicism. Wordsworth and Byron in England, Rousseau in France, and Goethe and Schiller in Germany were the leaders in the intellectual activity. Their writings and their principles were directly opposed to their predecessors. Liberty, instead of convention; free expression of passion and feeling, in the place of cold reasoning; individual expression instead of imitation and studied restraint; simple words and direct, clear statement in the place of an affected and artificial style; a love for the wild and picturesque in scenery rather than for the smooth and cultivated parks of the past century. Contrast Byron with Pope, or Scott's novels with Johnson's "Rasselas" to see the radical difference in tone.

This outburst of freedom and self-expression meant progress. To increase the advance, steam and machinery came into use; just as printing accomplished marvels in the days of the Renaissance, so now there was again a blaze of creative genius and inventiveness. National education at the expense of the state and the growth of newspapers and magazines put rich and poor, noble and peasant more nearly on a level than any bloodshed or lawmaking could ever have done.

POETRY

Blake

Burns

Byron

Coleridge

Keats

Musset

Shelley

Uhland

Wordsworth

FICTION

Chateaubriand

Fouqué

Hugo

Manzoni

Scott

ESSAY

De Quincey

Hazlitt

Heine

Lamb

Richter

Southey

DRAMA

Goethe

Schiller

PHILOSOPHY

Rousseau

Schopenhauer

The Nineteenth Century. The first glow of the romantic enthusiasm soon died away and the new forces of industry and commerce took possession of Europe and America.

But the swift onrush of manufacturing and trading called for armies of accountants, skilled workers, and salesmen. These made up a new class of society; hitherto there had been aristocrats and peasants, educated and ignorant, rich and poor. The army of business employees, alert, vigorous, ready for any quantity of reading-matter that would amuse or furnish knowledge, added their countless numbers to the reading public. Fiction, at first in the novel, and later in the short story, was published as fast as it could be printed. This great middle class itself provided material for genius to work on. Dickens and George Eliot are striking examples of authors who wrote about this new middle class in order to amuse it. The influence of business life made the world more matter of fact and in consequence literature became rather more prosaic, with a tendency to present a realistic picture of everyday life and manners. Science, aided by a multitude of mechanical inventions, made unprecedented progress and assumed a more important place in the minds of men than ever before. History was treated scientifically, thought was more systematic than ever, the nineteenth century presented a union of the enthusiasm of the Renaissance, the love of system of the Classic Age, and the devotion to nature of the Romantic Period.

The following lists have been selected from the great array of nineteenth-century authors with the view of presenting those whose work has been peculiarly significant of the period.

POETRY

Arnold, M.

Browning, E. B.

Browning, R.

Bryant

Longfellow

Lowell

Morris, W.

Poe

Rossetti

Swinburne

Tennyson

Whitman

FICTION

Austen

Balzac

Dickens

Dumas

Eliot

Hardy

Harte

Hawthorne

Irving

Kipling

Poe

Stevenson

Thackeray

Tolstoi

Zola

HISTORY

Bancroft

Carlyle

Ferrero

Green

Guizot

Hodgkin

Michelet

Mommsen

Motley

Parkman

Prescott

Symonds

Taine

ESSAY

& BIOG.

Arnold, M.

Chesterton

Emerson

La Ramée

Lewes

Lockhart

Lowell

Morley

Pater

Sainte-Beuve

Stephen

Thoreau

Villari

PHILOSOPHY

& SCIENCE

Carlyle

Darwin

Emerson

Galton

Hamilton

Ruskin

Shaler

Spencer

RELIGION

Bowne

Brierley

Brooks

Channing

Robertson