Learned Societies and English Literary Scholarship: In Great Britain and the United States 9780231885393

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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

LEARNED SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS SALES A G E N T S NEW YORK : LEMCKE & BUECHNER 30-32 WEST 27TH STREET LONDON : HUMPHREY

MILFORD

AUEN CORNER, E . C . TORONTO : HUMPHREY MILFORD 2 5 RICHMOND STREET, W .

LEARNED SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP IN GREAT BEITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES

BT

HARRISON ROSS STEEVES, PH.D. •ηΤΒϋΟΤΟΒ IN ENGLISH IN COLUMBIA UCTTSBOTT

JBeto park COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 1913 AU rights reserved

Copyright, 1913 B y COLUMBIA U N I V E R S I T Y

PRESS

Printed from type August, 1913

PRESS o r T H E N E W E R A P R I N T I N G C O M PAN V L A N C A S T E R . PA.

This Monograph has been approved by the Department of English and Comparative Literature in Columbia University as a contribution to knowledge worthy of publication. A. H. THORNDIKE, Secretary.

TO JOHN FRANCIS STEEVES AND

IMOGENE UPSON STEEVES

ΤΠ

PREFACE The following chapters were written as a dissertation for the doctorate in the Department of English, Columbia University. The work was originally planned as a bibliography, with a brief introduction covering the substance of the present volume ; but with the growth of the introductory material, it became apparent that this alone would be sufficient to satisfy the special requirement. The volume is therefore plainly limited in its scope, and more or less arbitrarily planned and presented. The writer is under obligation to Professor George Philip Krapp, Professor William Peterfield Trent, and Professor Harry Morgan Ayres, of the Department of English at Columbia, all of whom have read the manuscript and given him generous and valuable help. He owes much also to the personal kindness of Mr. Frederic W . Erb, of the Columbia Library, and Mr. C. W . Kennedy, of the British Museum, and to the courtesy of the officials of the Library of Congress and the libraries at Yale and Cornell.

ix

CONTENTS CHAPTER

I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII.

PAGI

Introduction The Field The Elizabethan Assembly of the Antiquaries.. The Seventeenth Century The Eighteenth Century Nineteenth Century Book Clubs and General Publishing Societies Philological and Text Societies American Societies and Clubs Bibliography Index

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xiii 1 5 36 60 98 138 204 218 231

INTRODUCTION It is certain that one of the most important features of modern scholarship—as, indeed, of every progressive intellectual interest of to-day—is organization. The force of specialization in modern investigative methods, which is a distinct outgrowth of collective effort, is of course too apparent to require comment. Probably few of us, however, who have mentally noted the general efficiency of the literary societies of to-day have stopped actually to measure the quantity and quality of their contributions to criticism and literary history. Originally devised to concentrate individual interests in the common purposes of study, they became eventually to a large extent the purveyors of patronage for scholarship, increasing its remuneration, moral as well as material, and hence its efficiency; and in the last half century they have created a public interest in the products of conscientious research which has literally opened the storehouse of literary antiquity. It does not seem too much to say that the greater part of the scholarly accomplishments in the field of literature during the last century was due to the activities of the learned societies. Scarcely a noted student of that period could wholly separate his success from that of the societies with which he was connected. Such bodies have made generally accessible a quantity and kind of material that could not under other conditions have reached a supporting public in anything like the same limited time. What is perhaps almost as important in the end, co-operation in these societies has given definition to method and conscience in scholarly pursuits. xiii

xiv

INTBODUCTION

The society of to-day, however, is not the result of a day's growth. The reliable and monumental products of a modern text publication society owe much of their value to the recognition of the hasty, erring, and at times unconscientious scholarship of a mid-century specialists' society; and these societies in turn represented a generally marked advance in motive and accuracy of scholarship over the aristocratic book clubs of the early part of the century. Before all of these, of course, were the inevitable beginnings in private meetings among small numbers of students, with no defined scholarly policy, and no notion of general publication. The beginnings of organized literary study, in fact, antedate any records of a self-styled literary society. It is not necessary to assume that the development of the society idea as applied to literary investigation has been constantly progressive and uninterrupted. As a matter of fact, there is really no precedent or tradition for such established cooperation before the beginning of the nineteenth century, though there are some interesting and at times important earlier instances of society activity, wholly isolated, which represent the incentives of the first generally recognized movements. The history of this important phase of nineteenth century scholarship has not been, so far, connectedly presented. Hence the following volume, which will, it is hoped, indicate with an approach to finality the historical growth of these movements and their influences upon the scholarship of their day and our own.

LEARNED SOCIETIES A N D LITERARY

ENGLISH

SCHOLARSHIP

CHAPTER

I

THE FIELD Organized literary scholarship in England, like practically all phases of Renaissance intellectual activity, was a relatively late development. Indefinite as the immediate purposes of the academies of Renaissance Italy may at times seem to us, there can be no question as to the substantial value of such bodies in the development of current culture. In England, however, we find no traces of an amateur literary organization until almost the last quarter of the sixteenth century, at the moment when Italian academies were at the zenith of their popularity and effectiveness; and even then such organizations neither invited nor possessed public prominence. For this reason it is difficult to trace a continuous tradition of this sort through our most important literary period. The movement, exotic in itself, and unsupported by the general humanistic enthusiasm which gave life to the Italian academies, died almost in its birth and left no important effects to succeeding ages. What activity and interest we find in learned societies and academies, then, from the early seventeenth to the late eighteenth century, can generally be considered a reflection of such activities and interests in Continental Europe ; and the uniform failure of all such projects throughout almost two centuries can be attributed to a lack of responsible native 2 1

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SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP

enthusiasm in such movements. The function of societies of this kind during this period was in the main critical, and aspired to profound effect upon the destinies of the vernacular language and literature. For this reason the lack of vitality in academy movements in England is probably connected more or less directly with the practical failure of the well defined classical critical traditions and the theories of vernacular illustration then current on the Continent. At any rate, the two facts may be regarded as co-incident evidences of the popular temper of English literary scholarship at the time. With the greater utility and the sharper definition of purpose in the learned societies of the nineteenth century, England comes well to the front ; but before this time, we have only occasional and elusive traces of interest in the society idea. From the earliest period of their existence, the activity of so-called learned societies in the cultivation of English literary traditions, either creative or historical, is affected by a diversity of conceptions as to the function, scope, and methods of organized philological scholarship. These acknowledged differences in attitude and in forms of activity make it necessary to define the fields of interest of the many English literary learned societies. Definition and division on these grounds is not difficult, and is not necessarily arbitrary. A glance at the various early organized movements in the general direction of philological criticism and research shows three fairly well marked types of society. The first type, first in importance in its time because of its critical authority in Italy and France, is what is generally known as the "academy," the purpose of which is to establish canons of literary taste, and to facilitate and correct the growth of the vernacular. Such an established academy has never really existed in England. Even the actual incorporation of the British Academy in 1902, after

THE FIELD

3

suggestion and pressure from the Council of the Royal Society,1 though it aimed in part to represent philological scholarship in England at the meetings of the International Association of Academies, could do no more in this direction than to revive the acknowledgment that there never has been, and probably never can be, an authoritative academy of English language and letters. The many efforts to found such an academy, however, extending over a century of critical scholarship from Bolton to Swift, form interesting history.2 The second type of philological society that I have chosen to distinguish from organizations of connected interests is in its general attitude rather closely allied with the first, but differs from it importantly in the fact that its aim is primarily creative, not objectively critical. There is, as far as I know, no class name given to this type ; without compromising the dignity of these usually small unions of literary men, we might call them "authors' clubs." The first important society of this kind in England was of course the Areopagus, formed by Dyer, Greville, Harvey, Spenser and Sidney in 1579.® Other examples readily suggest themselves, as the Martinus Scriblerus Club, and Tennyson's Apostles. In this kind of organization the interest in literature is essentially personal—the interest of the artist in his own product, completed or projected. The field of literary study is the present, not the past. The obvious purpose of such a society is to outline policies of creative work; the concerns of the society are the plans of the individuals who form it ; and however these interests may extend themselves ι Proceedings of the British Academy, 1903-1904, vii-ix. 2 The recurrence of these efforts is traced by Mr. B. S. Monroe in his article, An English Academy, in Modern Philology, V I I I , 107-122 (1910). s Jefferson B. Fletcher, Areopagus and Pleiade, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, II, 429-453 (1898).

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SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITEKABY SCHOLARSHIP

into generalized theory, the bond of association is always that of the projected contact of the creative artist with his readers. Differing markedly from these two kinds of literary organization is what is generally called the "learned society" of letters. Here the objects are not creative, not individual, not didactic ; they are historical and objective ; they touch the past of literature, not the present or the future ; in a word, they imply scholarship, not a priori critical theory or the notions of literary artists. The object of such societies is to preserve literary monuments, to use them for the illumination of the national background, to cultivate historical knowledge, to concentrate it by discussion, to diffuse it through publication. All the interests that I have indicated are not necessarily to be found in all the societies of this type ; but as a point of certain distinction it is probably fair to say that few or none of the peculiar interests of the literary society are to be found in the academies or the authors' clubs. It is with the literary society, or the learned society of letters, that I propose to deal.

CHAPTER II THE ELIZABETHAN SOCIETY OF ANTIQUAEIES

The most ancient of our literary societies—and probably the most ancient of all English learned societies—was the Assembly of the Antiquaries, founded by Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1572.1 The history of this foundation has been presented in large part by a number of extended references to the society. Thomas Smith's life of Sir Robert Cotton, prefixed to his catalogue of the Cottonian Library and afterwards reprinted in a collection of biographies,2 seems to be the fountain-head of historical information on the subject. From this account Hearne secured the material for his Collection of Curious Discourses,3 which in turn was utilized by Richard Gough, the author of the introduction to the first volume of the Arch