Читать книгу The Pageant of English Literature - Sir Edward Parrott - Страница 3

Table of Contents

The Pageant, as revived in our time, may move the historian to mirth or wrath, according to his temperament; but such a popular display, however crude in conception, however garish in presentation, may be conceded this saving grace, that it affords an opportunity of arousing a widespread interest in the great deeds and great personages of the past, and of stimulating a desire to become better acquainted with them. The unambitious aim of this book is thus exactly expressed.

The author has endeavoured to compose a series of pen-pictures revealing, he would fain hope, the great masters of our Literature as living, breathing human beings arrayed in the appropriate trappings of their time and circumstance. He sets them forth in what he conceives to be their best and most characteristic aspects, and he dwells upon all that is admirable in them and in their achievements. With such skill as he may command, he directs the attention of “the young and gracious of every age” to “the precious life-blood of master-spirits embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life,” and his simple purpose, like that of Goldsmith's Village Pastor, is to

“allure to brighter worlds and lead the way.”

“Great thanks, laud, and honour,” wrote Caxton in an imperishable passage, “ought to be given unto the clerks, poets and historiographs, that have written many noble books of wisdom, of the lives, passions, and miracles, of holy saints, of histories of noble and famous acts and feats, and of the chronicles with the beginning of the creation of the world unto this present time, by which we be daily informed and have knowledge of many things of whom we should not have known if they had not left us their monuments written.” In this age of print, when every day brings its insistent reading matter, there is a very real danger that the grand old things of literature may be submerged beneath an ever-rising flood of novelties. Not to know these “books of all time” is to suffer a deprivation which has no compensations in this life, and surely he who, however ungracefully, acts as their chamberlain in the court of letters serves an office of humble worthiness. To such a rôle does the writer of this book aspire.

A modern statesman who equally adorns the strangely diverse arenas of politics and high philosophy has complained that in the days of his youth none of his professional teachers ever thought of instilling in him a love of literature for its own sake. Modern educators have enlarged their sphere since his nonage, but still it may be doubted whether the formal studies of the schoolroom send men and women with joyous delight to browse on the “fair and wholesome pasturage of good old English reading.” Too often the formality of the teaching and the pemmican of the text-book have precisely the contrary effect. The present writer is not singular in believing that the surest way to send a young reader to a classic is to interest him in the man or woman behind the book. He therefore retells the life-stories of those who have endowed us with the priceless heritage of our literature, in the hope that the reader will turn from his pages to those of the masters, not merely whetted by curiosity, but furnished with a clue to interpretation. If one reader of this book be so inspired, the author will have good cause to rejoice in the success of his labours.

E. P.

Edinburgh

,

July 1914

.