A History of English Literature [antikvár]

PREFACE Some little while ago a number of English professors in our various universities and university colleges discovered a common indebtedness to Émile Legouis (no honorifics can improve a name now so eminent) and a common impulse to thank him ; an impulse, that is, of personal gratitude, warming and colouring the respect due to the achievement of a great scholar. Viewed dispassionately, of course, that achievement were monumental enough ; the purpose of a life time—he was bom in 1861—carved out by long and delicate labour; a large purpose, yet simple, definite, practical—to attract young Frenchmen in the great university of Paris to the study of English literature, to widen their knowledge, quicken their understanding of it, and through the immense authority of the Sorbonne to disseminate that understanding through educated France. Now so massive is our literature that the mere task of grappling with it must, for a foreigner, have been enormous, let be the task of seeing and presenting it in right proportion of parts. With what devotion he and his younger confrere, M. Cazamian, have laboured, and with what skill attained, the following pages bear witness. They would have done beneficently, too, had their success ended with their primary object. Since more than half—and more likely ninety per cent—of public wars or private quarrels spring out of misunderstanding, he does weU indeed who interprets to a quick-witted nation the best of another nation's mind. Seeing then that the best of Great Britain's mind—the true secret of its working—resides in our literature ; seeing too how much, and how often, from the days of the Breton saints and of Bede, in the story of our civilization France and Britain have borrowed from one another and Europe from both, with a mutual benefit that should dwarf all jealousy; we can scarcely overpraise MM. Legouis and Cazamian for their primary purpose here fulfilled. But they have had a secondary success, in our gain. M. Legouis says of this, too modestly, that the expectation of the authors was exceeded when their work was so favourably received in Great Britain that a translation into English was deemed desirable; that the unforeseen re.sult of the method they pursued was that the English critics found in their book a certain novelty; they considered that 'even in English it would not overlap with any other work, but would be attrac-