least helped to gain by looking at things that grieve and distress us, not only directly, but as they have been felt and rendered through noble

art.

In earlier times, the struggle which literature records is chiefly individual. We see men subduing the earth, facing their human foes, wrestling with supernatural terrors, seeking the love of women. This is the aspect of literature which has interested people most; nor will it ever needless

to say be superseded. Yet as time goes on and the race grows older, another aspect becomes more and more evident. Literature is a series of social documents. It shows the exceptional individual contending with his environment; it also shows, more and more as time goes on, in that very environment the expression of a larger life. The individual becomes the type. At first he is the type of a phase of character, as Hamlet stands for all Hamlets; later, and this is characteristic of the literature of our own day, he becomes the type of a class, or social group. The epic, the drama, and later the novel, reveal the collective experience of the nation from age to age. The lyric, with all its intimacy, gives us not only the private heart of the singer, but also the common heart of his people and his time. When the fervor of living has abated a little, so that men can pause to consider life, criticism appears, and accents, with a sharpness that no one can mistake, the characteristic qualities and defects of the general civilization around it.) In all this literature, humanity itself

is the protagonist; and its great fortunes, spiritual and material, appeal to the trained, though not to the untrained, imagination with mighty and unrivaled power.

But lit

Moreover, great books have a double value. They show life itself under various phases, and they also show the ideals which that life generates; the present, and that higher yet unrealized truth, which the present ever suggests, toward which it ever moves. They speak to us with "the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come." And so, rendering alike the actual and that ideal in the actual which spurs to the future, they lead us to gain a sense of the lines of progress to be gained in no other way. We get absorbed in the mood and passion of the moment. erature gives us mood after mood of the humar race, related, succeeding, advancing. One cannot watch the growth of conviction in any line without a certain sense of fatality, a consciousness that, while each individual thought seems to play in freedom, like each bird in the mysterious migrations of spring and autumn, there is yet an inexorable impulse carrying onward the whole flock of thoughts toward a distant land. Literature makes. us feel this totality of impulse. to form faith, action helps perhaps still more. But while in confused days both are good, it is also good to look back, and watch the tendencies manifest in those imaginative men who, as Wordsworth said, rejoice more intensely than other men in the spirit of life that is in them. As we follow from

Discussion helps

one generation to another the dreamers who are the truest prophets, we shall trace the gradual awakening of a social consciousness, bringing with it the perception of social problems and the creation of social ideals; and in this consciousness we may find a continued power of selection and of persistence from which many things concerning the future may be inferred.

This splendid witness of literature to the organic character of human experience has been too much ignored. No one book can do more than glance at the rich subject. And any book which tries to do even as much as this must practice severe selfrestraint in its choice of material. If it wishes to watch the social aspects of the literature of one country, as for instance of England, it must rigidly resist the strong temptation to draw upon the abundant illustrations and contrasts offered by the literatures of other lands: it may not even indulge in more than an occasional glimpse at the parallel growth of social ideals, a growth at once so like and so unlike that of England, in our own America. It must pass over whole periods with an allusion, and dismiss whole art-forms undiscussed. And yet even one book may show the possibilities of study. It may catch the reflection of social conditions and experiences at certain great epochs ; it may signal points of primary importance in the gradual self-realization of society through the long centuries; and, in scrutinizing the literature which lies immediately behind our generation, it may perhaps even help the more direct and strenuous

social speculation which so absorbs us in these closing years of the century, for it may try to discover the trend of thought tentatively followed by that instinct of the seeking soul which will, after all, do more than any theories of the political economists to determine the social forms of the future.

PART I

THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS

CHAPTER I

WILLIAM LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES

I

DEMOCRACY entered Great Britain with the Church of Christ. A primitive people is always aristocratic; and "Beowulf," our earliest English epic, witnesses as vividly as the Iliad, and in much the same way, to the exclusive importance of the chieftains in a half-savage society. In this precious ancient poem, through which the Teutonic race sees dimly its heroic past, a village, slightly mentioned, lies to be sure somewhere in the background, but eyes are fixed on noble Heorot Hall, gold-timbered, fiend-ravaged, where the heroes feast and brag. In battle, the common people hardly exist even to be slain; in revel, the queen herself is cup-bearer, for no vulgar hand may minister to the princely warriors. Into this society, fiercely respectful toward the fighter with a pedigree, contemptuous toward the nameless churl, the chanting monks of Augustine, and earlier yet the Celtic missionaries with a Christianity of more childlike type, introduced a new ideal. Instead