Bearings of the chapter.
Both in the last volume and in the present Book, repeated notice has been taken of the importance, as it seems to the present writer, of the widened and catholicised study of literature during the earlier eighteenth century. Not a few of the persons who have had places of more or less honour in the foregoing chapters—the twin Swiss schoolmasters, Lessing and the Germans almost without exception, almost all the English precursors, and some, though fewer, in other countries—have owed part of their position here to their share in this literary “Voyage round the World.” Some further exposition and criticism of the way in which the exploration itself worked may be looked for in the following Interchapter. Here we may give a little space to some such explorers who, though scarcely worthy of a place among critics proper, did good work in this direction, and to the main lines and subjects on and in regard to which the explorations were conducted.
England.
The most interesting and directly important of the great literary countries in regard to this matter is undoubtedly England. Curiosity in Germany was much more widespread and much more industrious;[[326]] but in the first place the notable German explorers have already had their turn, and in the second, the width too often with them turned to indiscriminateness, and the industry to an intelligent hodman’s work. France, by providing such pioneers as Sainte-Palaye, and by starting the great Histoire Littéraire, contributed inestimably to the stimulation and equipment of foreign students; but it was some time before this work reacted directly on her own literature. We have spoken of Spain, where for a time the adherents of the older literature were, like their ancestors in the Asturias, but a handful driven to bay, instead of as in other countries an insurrectionary multitude gaining more and more ground; and the traditional Dante-and-Petrarch worship of Italy did at this time little real good. Both directly and indirectly—at home and, chiefly in the Shakespeare direction, abroad—England here deserves the chief place.
Her exercises on the subject may be advantageously considered under certain subject-headings: Shakespeare himself, Spenser, Chaucer, minor writers between the Renaissance and the Restoration, Middle English, and Anglo-Saxon. It is not necessary here to bestow special attention on Milton-study,[[327]] despite its immense influence both at home and abroad, because it was continuous. From Dryden to the present day, Milton has always been with the guests at any feast of English literature, sometimes, it is true, as a sort of skeleton, but much more often as one whom all delight more or less intelligently to honour.
The study of Shakespeare.
It is not mere fancy which has discerned a certain turning-point of importance to literature, in the fact that between the Fourth Folio and the first critical or quasi-critical edition (Rowe’s) there intervened (1685-1709) not quite a full quarter of a century. The successive editions of Rowe himself, Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, and Johnson not merely have a certain critical interest in themselves, not merely illustrate the progress of criticism in a useful manner, but bring before us, as nothing else could do, the way in which Shakespeare himself was kept before the minds of the three generations of the eighteenth century.[[328]]