Ruskin," are too many-sided and richly endowed men to limit their literary essays to any one type of criticism. The justification of this eclecticism of practice is found, as we have tried to show, in the nature of the essay itself. It is the most sinuous, varied, and individualized of all the forms of prose literature. The moment it begins to deal with critical theory, however, it is obliged to make its reckoning with some one or more of the processes of judgment which have been evolved in the history of the race; it tends then to become "historical," "scientific," "expository," "judicial"; it sails, as we have said, by the chart, instead of in the capricious circle of purely personal preferences. And it is in this relation of "the essay" to "the critical essay" that we discover something of the literary and social significance of essay writing. It meets a need of the individual, and performs at the same time a function for society. The individual reader turns to the essayists for delight, for stimulus, for consolation, for a fortification of the will. Cicero and Montaigne and Thoreau will talk to him about friendship and books and behavior. What more can he ask for? He finds in the essayists, as in the lyric poets, the reflection of his own moods, his own tastes, his own, varied contact with experience. In their company, as in the company of every form of art, he becomes intimately aware of the fullness and richness of life. As for society at large, the essayists-and particularly those who have occupied themselves with criticism-have aided in the establishment of standards of judgment. These standards are impersonal and relatively stable. They alter somewhat, it is true, with the progress of civilization, and with the temper of successive historical periods in each of the civilized races of the world. But for any one generation the "norm" exists. The departures from it and the returns to it constitute the æsthetic and intellectual activity of that generation. Expansion and contraction, the study of mankind followed by the study of individual men and women; then a new series of generalizations followed by another series of concrete applications of ideas to life-that is the history of 27 H. C., xxviii, 95 ff. culture. And while "the essay" has from time to time asserted the claims of liberty in all matters of the mind, "the critical essay" has with equal persistence recognized and maintained the claims of authority. One generation needs, no doubt, that its literary skirmishes should fight mainly on the side of freedom, and another generation will need no less that they should rally to the defense of law. There can be little doubt of the primary need of our own generation in America. We shall find most profit in reading those essayists who have a respect for literary standards, who are on the side of law. II. WHAT THE MIDDLE AGES READ T 1 BY PROFESSOR W. A. NEILSON HE HISTORY of English literary criticism may be said to begin with Sir Philip Sidney's "Defense of Poesy." A few treatises on rhetoric and prosody preceded it, but it was with this book that there reached England the first important influx from the main current of the Italian and French criticism of the Renaissance. In the preceding centuries men had, of course, expressed opinions about books; but these were random and personal, backed by no theory, part of no system, the casual utterances of men who merely knew what they liked. THE EVIDENCE AS TO MEDIEVAL TASTE IN LITERATURE But the taste of an age can be inferred from other sources than the formal judgments of official critics. The evidence of vogue, when it can be obtained, is more significant, for the obvious reason that a man's spending tells us more than his words of what he values. For the centuries when books circulated in manuscript only, the facts as to popularity are hard to get at, since the numbers of those that have survived are the residuum of a thousand accidents; but the introduction of printing in the latter part of the fifteenth century affords an opportunity of an exceptional kind to learn which of the works then in existence were judged most promising and most worthy of the wider publicity which the new process made possible. It is for this reason that William Caxton, the first of English printers, is really an important figure in the history of literary opinion; for not only did he preface the books he printed with quaint and ingenuous statements of his own Harvard Classics, xxvii, 7-55; and cf. Professor Bliss Perry's lecture on "Theories of Poetry" in this series. reasons for thinking them important, but the mere fact of his choosing them is a valuable evidence of their popularity as estimated by a shrewd man of business. THE PREPONDERANCE OF DIDACTIC LITERATURE As a matter of fact, this evidence coincides remarkably with the inferences that literary historians have drawn from other data. The fables which pass under the name of "Æsop," to begin with what is probably the most ancient of the works he issued, had been popular for many centuries, and the tangle of the relationships of the endless mediæval collections in various languages is one of the most puzzling problems left for the modern scholár to solve. Their value Caxton seems to take for granted, largely, we may presume, because the didactic purpose which he always looks for first lies upon the surface and did not need to be pointed out. Indeed, more than half of the publications of Caxton the Prologues and Epilogues of which are printed in The Harvard Classics are confessedly of that improving kind for which the Middle Ages had so insatiable an appetite. The "Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers" and the "Distichs" of "Cato" were collections of aphoristic wisdom, the appeal of which is apparent, not merely from the number of copies made, but also from the frequency with which we find them quoted by all kinds of medieval writers. THE GOLDEN LEGEND 5 The "Golden Legend" was more specifically pious. It is the best-known collection of those marvelous stories of saints which happily performed the double service of cultivating faith and of providing entertainment by their constant stimulation of the sense of wonder. It is only the former of those services, however, which is explicitly recognized by Caxton. "As gold is most noble above all other metals, in like wise is this legend holden most noble H. C., xxxix, 18f. H. C., xxxix, 10. H. C., xxxix, 14. above all other works," he says, and he prays "that it profit to all them that shall read or hear it read, and may increase in them virtue, and expel vice and sin, that by the example of the holy saints amend their living here in this short life." LITERATURE OF ENTERTAINMENT 6 Of Chaucer's works he prints the immortal "Canterbury Tales"; and in the "Proem" to this book he expatiates in praise of Chaucer's style and substance, both because "he comprehended his matters in short, quick, and high sentences, eschewing prolixity, casting away the chaff of superfluity, and shewing the picked grain of sentence uttered by crafty and sugared eloquence"-a characterization of the first great master of English which few of his later critics have bettered. The whole tone of this "Proem" is of a singularly noble and elevated enthusiasm, and in its evident genuineness and warmth it makes us forget that we are reading one of the earliest of English publishers' advertisements. THE TROJAN LEGEND AND THE ÆNEID The story of Troy, as everyone is aware, was unknown to the Middle Ages in the Homeric version. Two Latin prose works purporting to be derived from Greek contemporary accounts by Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan formed the basis of the medieval tradition. These were elaborated into a French metrical romance by Benoît de Sainte Maure in the twelfth century, and from him the Sicilian Guido delle Colonne derived the material for his Latin prose history of Troy. For the later Middle Ages Guido was the main source. It is to this tradition that Boccaccio's romance of "Filostrato" belongs, with Chaucer's expansion and paraphrase of it in his "Troilus." On Guido also depends that French priest Raoul le Feure,' whom Caxton translated in Bruges and Ghent, and "finished in Cologne, in the time of the troublous world," when England H. C., xxxix, 19. For examples of the "Canterbury Tales," see H. C.. xl, 11-51. H. C., xxxix, 5ff |