STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE.

Shannon News, 6 July 1928, Page 3

STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE.

W.E.A. LECTURE.

There excellent attendance at the Band room on Tuesday evening, when the W.E.A. class in English Literature held its first meeting. Mr . G. Bishop presided. „ , , . The lecturer, Mrs A. W. Hutchings, M.A., covered a wide field in her opening address. English Literatuie, she said, presented a many-sided study as many-sided as the' human mind—and the maker of a systematic survey of it was confronted with a very real problem —how was it to be administeied in the three aspects of the art, the aesthetic, the biographical or the historic, or in its development and relation to the community. Mr Chesterton said: A section of a long and splendid literature can be most conveniently treated in one of two ways: It can be divided as one cuts a eurrant cake or a Gruyere cheese—taking the currants or the holes as they come, or it can be divided as one cuts wood—along the grain, if . one thinks there is a. grain. But the two are never the same; the names never come in the same order in actual time as they come in any serious study of a spirit or a tendency. The eritie who wishes to move onward with the life of an epoch, must be always running backwards and forwards among its mere* dates; just as a branch bends back and forth continually, yet the grain in the branch runs true like an unbroken river. Mere chronological order, indeed, is almost, as arbitrary as alphabetical order. To deal with Darwin, Dickens, Browning, in the sequence of the birthday book would be, to forge about as real a chain as the Tacitus, Tolstoy, Tupper of a biographical dictionary. There was another point: Individual artists could not be reviewed without reference to their traditions and creeds. The previous literary life of the country had-left vigorous many old forces. Roman Britain and Mediaeval England were not only alive but lively — for real-development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root. The lecturer enumerated the outstanding landmarks of English Literature, those in the first century being .the conversion of the English to Christianity (597) and the Danish Invasion (787). Proceeding she spoke of the complexity of modern life. With guides and guide books one swept through the world, leaving little time for.one of the rarest delights of life. What had happened to merry Caucer, rare Ben Jonstn, gay Steele and Prior, to Goldsmith, Jane Austen, Charles Lamb’’

All, all are gone,- the old familiar faces.

Men and women ought to find in books, all their Jives through, a retirement from mean occupations, a well of ’refreshment, sustainment in the daily drudgery of . life, solace in calamity, an inmate of the hearth, ever sociable, rtever intrusive, to -e sought and found and dropped at will and left without any answering growl of moroseness, to be consulted again at will and found friendly. One could provide on a small scale a map of the long course of English literature as it flowed through .the English landscape. Sometimes they would require a survey of the Western world and into the main stream would How the tributaries of thought of the ancient and modern worlds. Greece, Rome; the Italian and French troubadours, the “ Renaissance the French Revolution, and Industrialism each exerted an influence upon the current. The lecturer set out the main points to be emphasised as follows: Ist.—Literature cannot be divorced from life, for example, you cannot understand Chaucer, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Shelley aright unless you have the background, unless you know the kind of men for whom they wrote and the kind of men they made speak —that is the national side.

2nd.—Literature being so personal a thing you must have some personal understanding of the writers. 3rd.—The writing and speaking of English, is a living art, to be practised and (if it may be) improved. The old English had no book learning. Their knowledge was that of the woods, the fields, and the sea. They watched the weather, and gave us most of the words we have to mark its moods. They had also names for the game they hunted and snared, and for the blossoms and trees that grew wild in the fields and the woods. Then they had their gleemen, who sang the great deeds of their mighty leaders at the mead-drinking in the Earl’s hall. Their gleeineii had learned their songs, not from books, but from the lips of older singers. Not till long afterw.rds were these rhymes put into writing.

While the vigour of Christianity in Italy, Gaulj and Spain was enhausted in a bare struggle for life, Ireland, which remained unscourged by invaders, drew from its conversion an energy such as it has never known since. Christianity had been received there with a burst of popular enthusiasm, and letters and the arts sprang up in its train. The science and Biblical knowledge which fled from the Continent, took refuge in the famous schools which made Durrow and Armagh the universities of the west. Columba at lona, Oswald of Northumbria, the missionaries at Lindisfarne, then at Cheviot and Lanimermoor, Ettrick and Teviotdale, Yarrow, and Annamvater, created centres of learning and enlightenment. At Whitby there was the Abbess Hilda, a woman of royal race, and John of Beverley, one of her scholars, but the name which threw a glory over Whitby rvas the name of a lay brother, Caedmon, from whose lips flowed the first great English song—the song of the creation of the world. The verse was accented and alliterative without conscious art or development, or the delight that springs from reflection. Swift and direct, eminently the verse of warriors, the brief passionate expression of brief passionate emotions.

The love of natural description, with a background of melancholy, gave its pathos to this English verse. It had the vagueness and daring of Teutonic imagination. Next came the Venerable Bede (673) whom Burke styled “Father of English learning.” Belonging to the rnonastry of Yarrow, where there was a school of 600 monks, he revived in England the tradition of the older classic culture; verses from the Aeneid broke into his narratives, and in treatises compiled as text' books he gathered all the then known treasures of astronomy, meteorology, physics, music, philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, and medicine. He translated the Gospel of St. John and was the first English historian. In Alfred (802-880) , the spirit of adventure that made him -to the last a mighty hunter and the reckless daring of his early manhood took a "raver form in constructive statesmanship. The voyage of Othere, the discoverer of the North Cape, and Wulfstan’s cruise along the coast of Esthpnia gave a great impulse to literature, though this was practical rather than literary. Alfred enriched the AngloSaxon Chronicle, the first vernacular history of any Teutonic people and the earl est and most venerable monument of Teutonic prose. The lecturer gave interesting and vivid outlines of many of the lesser writers of the period, and dealt more fully with Chaucer (1340). The son of a London vintner, he had a connection with the Court through being page to the wife of Lionel of Clarence and later John of Gaunt was his patron. A busy practical worker, he was Comptroller of Customs in 1374 and clerk of works of Westminster. Diplomatic missions took him three times to Italy, where he may have met Boccaccio and learned the story of Griselda from Petrarch. He was

. that first warbler whose sweet * breath Preluded those melodious bursts that fill , The spacious times of Great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still.

All the darker and sterner aspects of the age which followed the hundred years war between England and France, and its social revolt, its moral and religious awakening, the misery of the poor, the protest of the Lollard, were painted with a terrible fidelity in the poems of William Langland, author of “Piers. Ploughman.” Nothing brought home more vividly the social chasm which in the 14th century severed the rich from the poor than the contrast between the ‘‘Complaint of Piers Ploughman” and the “Canterbury Tales.” The world of wealth and ease and laughter through which the courtly Chaucer moved with, eyes downcast as in a pleasant dream, was a faroff world of wrong and ungodliness to the gaunt poet of the poor. His bitter poverty quickened his defiant pride. His world was the world of the poor: he dwelt on the poor man’s life,, on his hunger and toil, his rough revelry and his despair, with the narrow intensity of a man who hsrtfno outlook beyond it. It was “a pilgrimage not to Canter-bury,,-but to Truth. ” Just as Chnucei gathered the typical figures of the worldhe saw into his poem, «so Will the Dreamer gathered into his wide field the army Of traders and chafferers, of hermits and solitaries, of minstrels, “japers and jinglers, ” bidders and beggars, ploughmen that in setting and sowing toil full hard, pilgrims with their wenches, weavers and labourers, burgess and bondmen, lawyer and scrivener, court-hunting bishops, and with Peterkin the Ploughman they go forth in quest of truth. , His poems covei an age of shame and suffering such a? England had never known. He sings as a man conscious of his lonelinest and without hope. “The waster,’’ said Piers Ploughman, “that will no work but wander about, that will eat no bread but the finest wheat, nor drink but of the best and brownest a 1 ?-’ was a source of social and politico danger. “He grieveth him agains, God and grudgeth against reason, and then curseth he the King and all hi council after such law to allow lab ourers to grieve.” Dealing with the Elizabethan period the lecturer said that the jnore it wa explored, the more ■ separate and iudi vidual it was found to be. The su. roundings in which it rose had neve existed before and were never like! to exist again. Like many perhap all—great literary epochs, it was time when the spirit of the nation wa. high raised and enthusiastic —was ex (■optionally elate, self confident, am sanguine— and the -causes of this ela tion, this intensity of ardour in the spirit of the nation gave literature f. form of extraordinary fascination anc. enduring excellence. The eight evenb that led to it and influenced it Avert the fall of Constantinople, teachers in England, the revival of learning, the Reformation, the discovery of the sea route to India, the discovery of America, trade with Northern Europe, and the effect of the invention of printing. Hoav rich it Avas in genius might be gathered from the mere names of the great Elizabethans. In poetry, Sydney, Drayton, Spenser, Donne, Wither; in' prose," Lyly, Bacon, Raleigh, Stowe, Hakluyt; lyric Avriters such as Chapman, Shakespeare and Dekker; translators like North and Florio, and of the authorised version and Shakespeare amongst the dramatists. The lecture was enriched by copious illustrations from the period covered ancl Avas folloAved with the closest interest by all present.