ENGLISH LITERATURE, ANTHONY BURGES-

WHAT IS LITERATURE?
The subjects we study at school can be divided roughly into two groups: the sciences and the arts. The sciences
include mathematics, geography, chemistry, physics, and so on. Among the arts are drawing, painting,
modeling, needlework, drama, music, literature.
Why are sciences and arts important? With sciences the answer is obvious: the achievements are a sort of by-
product; the things that emerge only when the scientist has performed his main task. Task is simply stated: to
be curious, to keep on asking the question “Why?” and not to be satisfied till an answer has been found.

TRUTH AND BEAUTY

Truth is a word used in many different ways. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. A scientist announces that the
truth was quite different from the appearance. The curious thing about scientific truths is that they often seem
so useless. But because a thing is useless it does not mean that it is valueless. Scientists still think it worthwhile
to pursue truth; they think it is a valuable activity to ask their eternal questions about the universe. And so we
say that truth – the thing they are looking for – is a value. A value is something added to the world of
subsistence.
Truth is one value. Another is beauty. The scientist´s concern is truth, the artist´s concern is beauty. Some
philosophers tell us that beauty and truth are the same thing. They said there is only one value, one eternal
thing which we can call “x, and that truth is the name given to it by the scientist and beauty the name given to it
by artist. It is possible to say that the scientist examines “x” in one way, the artist examines it in another. Beauty
is one aspect of “x”, truth is another. But what is “x”? Some people call it ultimate reality; other people call it
God: and they said that beauty and truth are two of the qualities of God.
Beauty could be define as the quality you find in any object which produces in your mind a special kind of
excitement, an excitement somehow tied up with a sense of discovery.

ARTISTIC EXCITEMENT/ ARTISTIC UNITY

It is what is known as a static excitement. It does not make you to do anything.
The artist takes raw material and forces or coaxes it into a pattern. Unity, order and pattern can be created in
many ways.
The excitement we derive from a work of art is mostly the excitement of seeing connections that did not exist
before, of seeing quite different aspects of life unified through a pattern. That is the highest kind of artistic
experience. The lowest kind is pure sensation.

ARTISTIC EXPRESSION
The artist finds a means of setting down our emotions; and, as it were, helps us to separate those emotions
from ourselves. Any strong emotion has to be relieved. Emotion has to be expressed.

ARTISTIC METHODS
The student of literature must always maintain a live interest also in music and painting, sculpture,
architecture, film and theatre. All the arts try to perform the same sort of task, differing only in their methods.
Methods are dictated by the sort of material used. There are spatial materials (paint, stone and clay) and there
are temporal materials (words, sounds, dance-steps, stage movements)
Music and literature have a great deal in common: they both use the temporal material of sounds. Music uses
meaningless sounds as raw material; literature uses those meaningful sounds we call words.

USE OF WORDS
Words themselves can be viewed in two different ways: the meaning that a word has in the dictionary (what is
called lexical meaning or the denotation) and the associations that the word has gained through constant use
(the connotation of the word). Connotation appeal to the feelings, denotations to the brain.
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The writer of literature is much more concerned with connotations, the ways in which he can make his words
move or excite you, the ways in which he can suggest colour or movement or character. The writer of literature
differs from the scientist or lawyer in not restricting his words. The word can carry two meanings; can suggest
two different things at the same time. It is not only the dictionary meaning that counts – it sound, suggestion of
other meanings, other words, as well as those clusters of harmonics we call connotations.
Literature may be defined as words working hard; literature is the exploitation of words.

LITERARY FORMS
Literature has different branches, and some branches do more exploiting of words than others. Poetry relies
most on the power of words, on their manifold suggestiveness, and in a sense you may say that poetry is the
most literary of all branches of literature; the most literary because it makes the greatest use of the raw
material of literature, which are words. There are other branches of literature and “near-literature”: for
example, the essay.

WHAT IS ENGLISH LITERATURE?

It is not merely the literature of England or of the British Isles, but a vast and growing body of writings made up
of the work of authors who use the English language as a natural medium of communication. In other words,
the “English” of “English literature” refers not to a nation but to a language. Literature is an art which exploits
language; English literature is an art which exploits the English language. But it is not just an English art. It is
international.

ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH

The term “English” will refer as much to the race as to the language. It is the geography of England that is
perpetually reflected in its literature, far more than the patterns of events which we call the history of a nation.
Snow and frozen ponds and bare trees are common images in English literature, but it is only by a great effort
of the imagination that the inhabitant of a perpetually warm land can bring himself to appreciate their
significance for the English poet and his English reader. The English climate is responsible for the English
character: the English are cold, temperate, active, philosophical, unkind, etc. If you can stand the English climate
you can stand anything. The English are, in fact, a curious mixture, and their literature reflects the
contradictions in their character.
The English love justice but hate laws and it is this hatred of laws which makes so much English literature seem
“mad”. A typically English writer like Shakespeare is always ready to make language do “mad” things, to invent
new words or use metaphors which take the breath away with their daring. English literature is “formless”:
seemingly without rhyme or reason, not like a controlled and organized work of art, but like a river in full spate.
English have usually preferred to invent their own forms and eventually, to have as many syllables as they
wished in a line of verse. English literature, in short, has freedom, a willingness to experiment, a hatred of rules
which has no parallel in any other literature.

ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Language means a system of sounds made by the vocal organs of a particular group of people, possessing
meaning for that group of people, and existing continuously for a given period of history. English has been
spoken continuously in England for over fifteen hundred years, but the English spoken in 1000 A.D is a
language that the Englishman of today cannot understand. The “historical phases” of a language and we use the
terms “Old English” and “Modern English”.

OLD ENGLISH AND MIDDLE ENGLISH

Old English has to be treated like any real foreign language. It has to be learnt. Old English literature is about,
roughly what kind of poetry was written by the ancestors of the English and what kind of prose. Old English
still have a certain influence on the literature of Modern English. Modern English starts as soon as we find an
old poem or prose-work which we can understand without getting out a grammar-book or a dictionary.
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Between Old English and Modern English there is a “phase of transition” when what is virtually a foreign
language is becoming like the language we use today. This phase is known as Middle English.

DIALECTS
“English” means all the different kinds of English spoken from the very moment the first speakers of the
language settled in England up to the present day. But it also means all the varying kinds of English spoken in
different places, at any given moment in time. Today in England itself a local dialect of English can be heard in
Lancashire, another in Kent, and so on. But they all have a sound claim to be regarded as “true English”, though
we find it convenient to call them English dialects. The dialect chosen is usually the one which is spoken in the
capital city, in the royal court or in the universities. The English dialect which has established itself as the most
important is that now known as Standard English, historically speaking a mixture of the old East Midland
dialect and the old Kentish dialect. In the Middle phase all the dialects of England seemed to be as good as each
other and all of them had literatures. Today English literature contains works in the many English dialects of
America, and even in the dialect of the West Indian Negro.
English literature, then, is vast, extending long in time and wide in space.