Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 62:245 (Jan 1905)
Article: The Indebtedness Of Later English Literature To Earlier
Author: Theodore W. Hunt

BSac 62:245 (Jan 1905) p. 90

The Indebtedness Of Later English Literature To Earlier

Prof. Theodore W. Hunt

Chronologically viewed, we mean by our “earlier “literature that portion of it lying between the “Paraphrase “of Cædmon, in the seventh century, and the Revival of Learning, in the sixteenth,—a period, in so far as time is concerned, of nine centuries, as compared with the more than three centuries that have passed since the days of Elizabeth. It is naturally divisible into the Old-English Period, from Cædmon to the Norman Conquest of 106G, or to the close of the “Chronicle,” in 1154, on through the age of Chaucer to the days of Henry the Eighth, and the opening of the reign of Elizabeth, in 1558. No careful student of what may be called, The Historical Development of English Letters, can fail at the very outset of his inquiries, to institute the question now suggested, What is the chronological and logical relation of these several centuries to each other,—the later to the earlier, the progressive and settled to the initial and formative, and to what degree in particular may the one be said to be dependent on the other?

We notice, first of all, that, a priori, there must exist this historical order, and that it must be studied as an essential factor in literary interpretation. That is but a partial and un-scholarly examination of any subject which begins midway in the series of developments that it includes. There is such a thing

BSac 62:245 (Jan 1905) p. 91

as historical unity and continuity in literature, a well-established law of sequence as vital in its place and action as in any sphere of liberal study or social and civic order. The classical ages of Pericles and Augustus cannot be rationally interpreted apart from a knowledge of antecedent Greek and Roman letters. It would not be in order to open the investigation of Italian letters with Ariosto or even with Petrarch, nor that of France and Germany with Racine and Klopstock. None the less safely can the English student begin with Spenser and Shakespeare and begin aright. The study of the Periclean and Augustan eras, representative as they were, and because representative, must be antedated by that of the eras preceding, though inferior; that of Petrarch by that of Dante and his forerunners and the influence of Arabia in Southern Europe, and that of Molière by that of the Trouvères and Troubadours and Rabelais and Ronsard. Before we study Klopstoek’s Messiah and the new classical era that he inaugurated in Germany, the Minnesänger and Meistersänger must be examined. So, in England, we must go back of Elizabeth to Edward the Third, and back of Chaucer to the “Chronicle,” and the Conquest, and back of the Anglo-Norman to the oldest English of Alfred and Cynewulf and Ælfric and...