transfixed the public which had so long abandoned thought upon entering the theatre. This new adventure enjoyed a succès de stupeur, the precise range of which can hardly be estimated, and the force of which is clearly by no means spent.
English literature in the 20th century still preserves some of the old arrangements and some of the consecrated phrases of patronage and aristocracy; but the circumstances of its production were profoundly changed during the 19th century. By 1895 English literature had become 20th-century changes. a subject of regular instruction for a special degree at most of the universities, both in England and America. This has begun to lead to research embodied in investigations which show that what were regarded as facts in connexion with the earlier literature can be regarded so no longer. It has also brought comparative and historical treatment of a closer kind and on a larger scale to bear upon the evolution of literary types. On the other hand it has concentrated an excessive attention perhaps upon the grammar and prosody and etymology of literature, it has stereotyped the admiration of lifeless and obsolete forms, and has substituted antiquarian notes and ready-made commentary for that live enjoyment, which is essentially individual and which tends insensibly to evaporate from all literature as soon as the circumstance of it changes. It is prone, moreover, to force upon the immature mind a rapt admiration for the mirror before ever it has scanned the face of the original. A result due rather to the general educational agencies of the time is that, while in the middle of the 19th century one man could be found to write competently on a given subject, in 1910 there were fifty. Books and apparatus for reading have multiplied in proportion. The fact of a book having been done quite well in a certain way is no longer any bar whatever to its being done again without hesitation in the same way. This continual pouring of ink from one bottle into another is calculated gradually to raise the standard of all subaltern writing and compiling, and to leave fewer and fewer books securely rooted in a universal recognition of their intrinsic excellence, power and idiosyncrasy or personal charm. Even then, of what we consider first-rate in the 19th century, for instance, but a very small residuum can possibly survive. The one characteristic that seems likely to cling and to differentiate this voluble century is its curious reticence, of which the 20th century has already made uncommonly short work. The new playwrights have untaught England a shyness which came in about the time of Southey, Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott. That the best literature has survived hitherto is at best a pious opinion. As the area of experience grows it is more and more difficult to circumscribe or even to describe the supreme best, and such attempts have always been responsible for base superstition. It is clear that some limitation of the literary stock-in-trade will become increasingly urgent as time goes on, and the question may well occur as to whether we are insuring the right baggage. The enormous apparatus of literature at the present time is suitable only to a peculiar phasis and manner of existence. Some hold to the innate and essential aristocracy of literature; others that it is bound to develop on the popular and communistic side, for that at present, like machinery and other deceptive benefits, it is a luxury almost exclusively advantageous to the rich. But to predict the direction of change in literature is even more futile than to predict the direction of change in human history, for of all factors of history, literature, if one of the most permanent, is also one of the least calculable.
Bibliographical Note.—The Age of Wordsworth and The Age of Tennyson in Bell’s “Handbooks of English Literature” are of special value for this period. Prof. Dowden’s and Prof. Saintsbury’s 19th-century studies fill in interstices; and of the “Periods of European Literature,” the Romantic Revolt and Romantic Triumph are pertinent, as are the literary chapters in vols. x. and xi. of the Cambridge Modern History. Of more specific books George Brandes’s Literary Currents of the Nineteenth Century, Stedman’s Victorian Poets, Holman Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, R. H. Hutton’s Contemporary Thought (and companion volumes), Sir Leslie Stephen’s The Utilitarians, Buxton Forman’s Our Living Poets, Dawson’s Victorian Novelists, Thureau-Dangin’s Renaissance des idées catholiques en Angleterre, A. Chevrillon’s Sydney Smith et la renaissance des idées libérales en Angleterre, A. W. Benn’s History of English Thought in the Nineteenth Century, the publishing histories of Murray, Blackwood, Macvey Napier, Lockhart, &c., J. M. Robertson’s Modern Humanists, and the critical miscellanies of Lord Morley, Frederic Harrison, W. Bagehot, A. Birrell, Andrew Lang and E. Gosse, will be found, in their several degrees, illuminating. The chief literary lives are those of Scott by Lockhart, Carlyle by Froude, Macaulay by Trevelyan, Dickens by Forster and Charlotte Brontë by Mrs Gaskell. (T. Se.)
ENGLISHRY (Englescherie), a legal name given, in the reign
of William the Conqueror, to the presentment of the fact that
a person slain was an Englishman. If an unknown man was
found slain, he was presumed to be a Norman, and the hundred
was fined accordingly, unless it could be proved that he was
English. Englishry, if established, excused the hundred. Dr
W. Stubbs (Constitutional History, i. 196) says that possibly
similar measures were taken by King Canute. Englishry was
abolished in 1340.
See Select Cases from the Coroners’ Rolls, 1265–1413, ed. C. Gross, Selden Society (London, 1896).
ENGRAVING, the process or result of the action implied by
the verb “to engrave” or mark by incision, the marks (whether
for inscriptive, pictorial or decorative purposes) being produced,
not by simply staining or discolouring the material (as with paint,
pen or pencil), but by cutting into or otherwise removing a portion
of the substance. In the case of pictures, the engraved surface is
reproduced by printing; but this is only one restricted sense
of “engraving,” since the term includes seal-engraving (where
a cast is taken), and also the chased ornamentation of plate or
gems, &c.
The word itself is derived from an O. Fr. engraver (not to be confused with the same modern French word used for the running of a boat’s keel into the beach, or for the sticking of a cart’s wheels in the mud,—from grève, Provençal grava, sands of the sea or river shore; cf. Eng. “gravel”); it was at one time supposed that the Gr. γράφειν, to write, was etymologically connected, but this view is not now accepted, and (together with “grave,” meaning either to engrave, or the place where the dead are buried) the derivation is referred to a common Teutonic form signifying “to dig” (O. Eng. grafan, Ger. graben). The modern French graver, to engrave, is a later adoption. The idea of a furrow, by digging or cutting, is thus historically associated with an engraving, which may properly include the rudest marks cut into any substance. In old English literature it included carving and sculpture, from which it has become convenient to differentiate the terminology; and the ancients who chiselled their writing on slabs of stone were really “engraving.” The word is not applicable, therefore, either strictly to lithography (q.v.), nor to any of the photographic processes (see Process), except those in which the surface of the plate is actually eaten into or lowered. In the latter case, too, it is convenient to mark a distinction and to ignore the strict analogy. In modern times the term is, therefore, practically restricted—outside the spheres of gem-engraving and seal-engraving (see Gem), or the inscribing or ornamenting of stone, plate, glass, &c.—to the art of making original pictures (i.e. by the draughtsman himself, whether copies of an original painting or not), either by incised lines on metal plates (see Line-Engraving), or by the corrosion of the lines with acid (see Etching), or by the roughening of a metal surface without actual lines (see Mezzotint), or by cutting a wood surface away so as to leave lines in relief (see Wood-Engraving); the result in each case may be called generically an engraving, and in common parlance the term is applied, though incorrectly, to the printed reproduction or “print.”
Of these four varieties of engraving—line-engraving, etching, mezzotint or wood-engraving—the woodcut is historically the earliest. Line-engraving is now practically obsolete, while etching and mezzotint have recently come more and more to the front. To the draughtsman the difference in technical handling in each case has in most cases some relation to his own artistic impulse, and to his own feeling for beauty. A line engraver, as P. G. Hamerton said, will not see or think like an etcher, nor an etcher like an engraver in mezzotint. Each kind, with its own sub-varieties, has its peculiar effect and attraction.
