The Voice of England [antikvár]

PREFACE I HAVE small excuse, I know, for rehearsing the old tale herein set down, except that it is an old story, and a good one, and many are the ways of telling it. Our modern habit of viewing all things with a scientific eye, tracing their evolution, discerning their kinds and classes, pondering the influences that formed them and which they in turn put forth, a habit most fruitful in our modern scholarship, has paid for its splendid achievement with a price. While our talk is all of sources, analogues, congeners, periods, and "schools," of texts and the history of ideas, of classicism, neo-classicism, semiclassicism, realism, romanticism, idealism, of tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, we are prone to forget that, after all, literature was created by men and women. We have labelled them and accounted for them till they are reduced pretty much to disanimated exhibits. Or they are torn and mutilated athwart those rigid classifications of Prose, Poetry, Drama, Novel, Lyric, and the many increasing isms so dear to our pedagogic hearts; and their scattered members have lost all semblance of the living soul. I have tried therefore to humanize the greater figures in English Literature, at whatever cost to orthodox categories; and to portray them against the background of their times. I have, with the distinguished encouragement of Dr. Johnson, inclined to "the biographical part of literature," a leaning confirmed by many years' experience in the teaching of literature. Literature, both song and prose, has, it would seem, been growing less audible with every year of the printing-press. Yet far the most of it, certainly the greatest of it, was first conceived in the ear, and only through the ear can impart its fullest effect. I have therefore tried in what ways I could to make the reader aware of this fact, and more attentive to the Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Verse, xi