History of English Literature (Complete)

The publication of M. Taine's "History of English Literature," in 1864, and its translation into English, in 1872, mark an epoch in educational history, especially in that of America. Prior to the appearance of this work, the total knowledge of British writers gained in the school and college life of the ordinary American youth was generally derived in the form of blind memorization from one text-book. This book was a combination of minute biographical detail with the generalities and abstractions of criticism. The student, and the general reader as well, did not really study the great writers at all; he simply memorized what someone had written about them; and he tried, generally in vain, to comprehend the real concrete significance of such critical terms as "bald, nervous, sonorous," etc. But with the distribution of M. Taine's great work came the beginning of better things. It was the first step in an evolution by no means yet completed—a movement paralleled in the development of methods of scientific study during the last four decades. Forty years ago the pupil did not study oxygen, electricity, or cellulose; he simply memorized what someone had written about these elements. He never touched and rarely saw the things themselves, and he counted himself fortunate if his instructor had the energy and the facilities to perform before the wondering class a few stock experiments. But all this has been changed. It is now universally recognized that the only sound method of studying any science is the laboratory method; that is, the study of the thing itself in all its manifestations. In methods of studying literature the progress towards a true scientific, that is, a laboratory method, has been much slower, but it seems almost equally sure. We are just now in the intermediate stage, where we study "editions with notes." Our educators, as a rule, have yet to learn that to memorize biographical data and the mere generalities and negations of criticism, or to trace out obscure allusions and doubtful meanings, is not to study a writer in any broad or fruitful sense. But the movement towards a true scientific method is already well begun; and, as we have said, to M. Taine belongs the honor of taking the initial step.
With Taine's work in hand the thoughtful reader may realize to a large extent the significance of Leslie Stephen's memorable dictum: "The whole art of criticism consists in learning to know the human being who is partially revealed to us in his written and spoken words." M. Taine's pages continually attest his deep conviction that "the style is the man," in a very comprehensive sense. In his Introduction to his "History of English Literature," we find such statements as these:—"You study the document only to know the man, just as you study the fossil shell only to know the animal behind it; Genuine history is brought into existence only when the historian begins to unravel... the living man, toiling, impassioned, entrenched in his customs, with his voice and features, his gestures and dress, distinct and complete as he from whom we have just parted in the street; Twenty select phrases from Plato and Aristophanes will teach you much more than a multitude of dissertations and commentaries; The true critic is present at the drama which was enacted in the soul of the artist or the writer; the choice of a word, the brevity or length of a sentence, the nature of a metaphor, the accent of a verse, the development of an argument—everything is a symbol to him;... in short he works out its (the text's) psychology; there is a cause for ambition, for courage, for truth, as there is for muscular movement or animal heat." To put M. Taine's great and characteristic merit into a sentence, we may say that he was the first writer on English literature to apply to it the fundamental principle, patent to every person of reflection, that we necessarily think in concrete terms, and that, therefore, a treatise must be valuable just in proportion to the concreteness of its presentation.