PERIOD III. THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES. ABOUT 1350 TO ABOUT 1500
THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS. Of the century and
a half, from 1350 to 1500, which forms our third period, the most important
part for literature was the first fifty years, which constitutes the age of
Chaucer.
The middle of the fourteenth century was also the middle of the externally
brilliant fifty years' reign of Edward III. In 1337 Edward had begun the
terrible though often-interrupted series of campaigns in France which
historians group together as the Hundred Tears' War, and having won the
battle of Crecy against amazing odds, he had inaugurated at his court a
period of splendor and luxury. The country as a whole was really increasing
in prosperity; Edward was fostering trade, and the towns and some of the
town-merchants were becoming wealthy; but the oppressiveness of the feudal
system, now becoming outgrown, was apparent, abuses in society and state
and church were almost intolerable, and the spirit which was to create our
modern age, beginning already in Italy to move toward the Renaissance, was
felt in faint stirrings even so far to the North as England.
The towns, indeed, were achieving their freedom. Thanks to compact
organization, they were loosening the bonds of their dependence on the
lords or bishops to whom most of them paid taxes; and the alliance of their
representatives with the knights of the shire (country gentlemen) in the
House of Commons, now a separate division of Parliament, was laying the
foundation of the political power of the whole middle class. But the feudal
system continued to rest cruelly on the peasants. Still bound, most of
them, to the soil, as serfs of the land or tenants with definite and heavy
obligations of service, living in dark and filthy hovels under
indescribably unhealthy conditions, earning a wretched subsistence by
ceaseless labor, and almost altogether at the mercy of masters who regarded
them as scarcely better than beasts, their lot was indeed pitiable.
Nevertheless their spirit was not broken nor their state so hopeless as it
seemed. It was by the archers of the class of yeomen (small free-holders),
men akin in origin and interests to the peasants, that the victories in the
French wars were won, and the knowledge that this was so created in the
peasants an increased self-respect and an increased dissatisfaction. Their
groping efforts to better their condition received strong stimulus also
from the ravages of the terrible Black Death, a pestilence which, sweeping
off at its first visitation, in 1348, at least half the population, and on
two later recurrences only smaller proportions, led to a scarcity of
laborers and added strength to their demand for commutation of personal
services by money-payments and for higher wages. This demand was met by the
ruling classes with sternly repressive measures, and the socialistic
Peasants' Revolt of John Ball and Wat Tyler in 1381 was violently crushed
out in blood, but it expressed a great human cry for justice which could
not permanently be denied.
Hand in hand with the State and its institutions, in this period as before,
stood the Church. Holding in the theoretical belief of almost every one the
absolute power of all men's salvation or spiritual death, monopolizing
almost all learning and education, the Church exercised in the spiritual
sphere, and to no small extent in the temporal, a despotic tyranny, a
tyranny employed sometimes for good, sometimes for evil. As the only even
partially democratic institution of the age it attracted to itself the most
ambitious and able men of all classes. Though social and personal influence
were powerful within its doors, as always in all human organizations,
nevertheless the son of a serf for whom there was no other means of escape
from his servitude might steal to the nearest monastery and there, gaining
his freedom by a few months of concealment, might hope, if he proved his
ability, to rise to the highest position, to become abbot, bishop or
perhaps even Pope. Within the Church were many sincere and able men
unselfishly devoting their lives to the service of their fellows; but the
moral tone of the organization as a whole had suffered from its worldly
prosperity and power. In its numerous secular lordships and monastic orders
it had become possessor of more than half the land in England, a proportion
constantly increased through the legacies left by religious-minded persons
for their souls' salvation; but from its vast income, several times greater
than that of the Crown, it paid no taxes, and owing allegiance only to the
Pope it was in effect a foreign power, sometimes openly hostile to the
national government. The monasteries, though still performing important
public functions as centers of education, charity, and hospitality, had
relaxed their discipline, and the lives of the monks were often scandalous.
The Dominican and Franciscan friars, also, who had come to England in the
thirteenth century, soon after the foundation of their orders in Italy, and
who had been full at first of passionate zeal for the spiritual and
physical welfare of the poor, had now departed widely from their early
character and become selfish, luxurious, ignorant, and unprincipled. Much
the same was true of the 'secular' clergy (those not members of monastic
orders, corresponding to the entire clergy of Protestant churches). Then
there were such unworthy charlatans as the pardoners and professional
pilgrims, traveling everywhere under special privileges and fleecing the
credulous of their money with fraudulent relics and preposterous stories of
edifying adventure. All this corruption was clear enough to every
intelligent person, and we shall find it an object of constant satire by
the authors of the age, but it was too firmly established to be easily or
quickly rooted out.
'MANDEVILLE'S VOYAGE.' One of the earliest literary works of the period,
however, was uninfluenced by these social and moral problems, being rather
a very complete expression of the naïve medieval delight in romantic
marvels. This is the highly entertaining 'Voyage and Travels of Sir John
Mandeville.' This clever book was actually written at Liège, in what is now
Belgium, sometime before the year 1370, and in the French language; from
which, attaining enormous popularity, it was several times translated into
Latin and English, and later into various other languages. Five centuries
had to pass before scholars succeeded in demonstrating that the asserted
author, 'Sir John Mandeville,' never existed, that the real author is
undiscoverable, and that this pretended account of his journeyings over all
the known and imagined world is a compilation from a large number of
previous works. Yet the book (the English version along with the others)
really deserved its long-continued reputation. Its tales of the Ethiopian
Prester John, of diamonds that by proper care can be made to grow, of trees
whose fruit is an odd sort of lambs, and a hundred other equally remarkable
phenomena, are narrated with skilful verisimilitude and still strongly hold
the reader's interest, even if they no longer command belief. With all his
credulity, too, the author has some odd ends of genuine science, among
others the conviction that the earth is not flat but round. In style the
English versions reflect the almost universal medieval uncertainty of
sentence structure; nevertheless they are straightforward and clear; and
the book is notable as the first example in English after the Norman
Conquest of prose used not for religious edification but for amusement
(though with the purpose also of giving instruction). 'Mandeville,'
however, is a very minor figure when compared with his great
contemporaries, especially with the chief of them, Geoffrey Chaucer.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, 1338-1400. Chaucer (the name is French and seems to have
meant originally 'shoemaker') came into the world probably in 1338, the
first important author who was born and lived in London, which with him
becomes the center of English literature. About his life, as about those of
many of our earlier writers, there remains only very fragmentary
information, which in his case is largely pieced together from scattering
entries of various kinds in such documents as court account books and
public records of state matters and of lawsuits. His father, a wine
merchant, may have helped supply the cellars of the king (Edward III) and
so have been able to bring his son to royal notice; at any rate, while
still in his teens Geoffrey became a page in the service of one of the
king's daughters-in-law. In this position his duty would be partly to
perform various humble work in the household, partly also to help amuse the
leisure of the inmates, and it is easy to suppose that he soon won favor as
a fluent story-teller. He early became acquainted with the seamy as well as
the brilliant side of courtly life; for in 1359 he was in the campaign in
France and was taken prisoner. That he was already valued appears from the
king's subscription of the equivalent of a thousand dollars of present-day
money toward his ransom; and after his release he was transferred to the
king's own service, where about 1368 he was promoted to the rank of
esquire. He was probably already married to one of the queen's
ladies-in-waiting. Chaucer was now thirty years of age, and his practical
sagacity and knowledge of men had been recognized; for from this time on he
held important public positions. He was often sent to the Continent--to
France, Flanders, and Italy--on diplomatic missions; and for eleven years
he was in charge of the London customs, where the uncongenial drudgery
occupied almost all his time until through the intercession of the queen he
was allowed to perform it by deputy. In 1386 he was a member of Parliament,
knight of the shire for Kent; but in that year his fortune turned--he lost
all his offices at the overthrow of the faction of his patron, Duke John of
Gaunt (uncle of the young king, Richard II, who had succeeded his
grandfather, Edward III, some years before). Chaucer's party and himself
were soon restored to power, but although during the remaining dozen years
of his life he received from the Court various temporary appointments and
rewards, he appears often to have been poor and in need. When Duke Henry of
Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt, deposed the king and himself assumed the
throne as Henry IV, Chaucer's prosperity seemed assured, but he lived after
this for less than a year, dying suddenly in 1400. He was buried in
Westminster Abbey, the first of the men of letters to be laid in the nook
which has since become the Poets' Corner.
Chaucer's poetry falls into three rather clearly marked periods. First is
that of French influence, when, though writing in English, he drew
inspiration from the rich French poetry of the period, which was produced
partly in France, partly in England. Chaucer experimented with the numerous
lyric forms which the French poets had brought to perfection; he also
translated, in whole or in part, the most important of medieval French
narrative poems, the thirteenth century 'Romance of the Rose' of Guillaume
de Lorris and Jean de Meung, a very clever satirical allegory, in many
thousand lines, of medieval love and medieval religion. This poem, with its
Gallic brilliancy and audacity, long exercised over Chaucer's mind the same
dominant influence which it possessed over most secular poets of the age.
Chaucer's second period, that of Italian influence, dates from his first
visit to Italy in 1372-3, where at Padua he may perhaps have met the fluent
Italian poet Petrarch, and where at any rate the revelation of Italian life
and literature must have aroused his intense enthusiasm. From this time,
and especially after his other visit to Italy, five years later, he made
much direct use of the works of Petrarch and Boccaccio and to a less degree
of those of their greater predecessor, Dante, whose severe spirit was too
unlike Chaucer's for his thorough appreciation. The longest and finest of
Chaucer's poems of this period, 'Troilus and Criseyde' is based on a work
of Boccaccio; here Chaucer details with compelling power the sentiment and
tragedy of love, and the psychology of the heroine who had become for the
Middle Ages a central figure in the tale of Troy. Chaucer's third period,
covering his last fifteen years, is called his English period, because now
at last his genius, mature and self-sufficient, worked in essential
independence. First in time among his poems of these years stands 'The
Legend of Good Women,' a series of romantic biographies of famous ladies of
classical legend and history, whom it pleases Chaucer to designate as
martyrs of love; but more important than the stories themselves is the
Prolog, where he chats with delightful frankness about his own ideas and
tastes.
The great work of the period, however, and the crowning achievement of
Chaucer's life, is 'The Canterbury Tales.' Every one is familiar with the
plan of the story (which may well have had some basis in fact): how Chaucer
finds himself one April evening with thirty other men and women, all
gathered at the Tabard Inn in Southwark (a suburb of London and just across
the Thames from the city proper), ready to start next morning, as thousands
of Englishmen did every year, on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas a
Becket at Canterbury. The travelers readily accept the proposal of Harry
Bailey, their jovial and domineering host, that he go with them as leader
and that they enliven the journey with a story-telling contest (two stories
from each pilgrim during each half of the journey) for the prize of a
dinner at his inn on their return. Next morning, therefore, the Knight
begins the series of tales and the others follow in order. This literary
form--a collection of disconnected stories bound together in a fictitious
framework--goes back almost to the beginning of literature itself; but
Chaucer may well have been directly influenced by Boccaccio's famous book
of prose tales, 'The Decameron' (Ten Days of Story-Telling). Between the
two works, however, there is a striking contrast, which has often been
pointed out. While the Italian author represents his gentlemen and ladies
as selfishly fleeing from the misery of a frightful plague in Florence to a
charming villa and a holiday of unreflecting pleasure, the gaiety of
Chaucer's pilgrims rests on a basis of serious purpose, however
conventional it may be.
Perhaps the easiest way to make clear the sources of Chaucer's power will
be by means of a rather formal summary.
1. _His Personality_. Chaucer's personality stands out in his writings
plainly and most delightfully. It must be borne in mind that, like some
others of the greatest poets, he was not a poet merely, but also a man of
practical affairs, in the eyes of his associates first and mainly a
courtier, diplomat, and government official. His wide experience of men and
things is manifest in the life-likeness and mature power of his poetry, and
it accounts in part for the broad truth of all but his earliest work, which
makes it essentially poetry not of an age but for all time. Something of
conventional medievalism still clings to Chaucer in externals, as we shall
see, but in alertness, independence of thought, and a certain directness of
utterance, he speaks for universal humanity. His practical experience helps
to explain as well why, unlike most great poets, he does not belong
primarily with the idealists. Fine feeling he did not lack; he loved
external beauty--some of his most pleasing passages voice his enthusiasm
for Nature; and down to the end of his life he never lost the zest for
fanciful romance. His mind and eye were keen, besides, for moral qualities;
he penetrated directly through all the pretenses of falsehood and
hypocrisy; while how thoroughly he understood and respected honest worth
appears in the picture of the Poor Parson in the Prolog to 'The Canterbury
Tales.' Himself quiet and self-contained, moreover, Chaucer was genial and
sympathetic toward all mankind. But all this does not declare him a
positive idealist, and in fact, rather, he was willing to accept the world
as he found it--he had no reformer's dream of 'shattering it to bits and
remoulding it nearer to the heart's desire.' His moral nature, indeed, was
easy-going; he was the appropriate poet of the Court circle, with very much
of the better courtier's point of view. At the day's tasks he worked long
and faithfully, but he also loved comfort, and he had nothing of the
martyr's instinct. To him human life was a vast procession, of boundless
interest, to be observed keenly and reproduced for the reader's enjoyment
in works of objective literary art. The countless tragedies of life he
noted with kindly pity, but he felt no impulse to dash himself against the
existing barriers of the world in the effort to assure a better future for
the coming generations. In a word, Chaucer is an artist of broad artistic
vision to whom art is its own excuse for being. And when everything is said
few readers would have it otherwise with him; for in his art he has
accomplished what no one else in his place could have done, and he has left
besides the picture of himself, very real and human across the gulf of half
a thousand years. Religion, we should add, was for him, as for so many men
of the world, a somewhat secondary and formal thing. In his early works
there is much conventional piety, no doubt sincere so far as it goes; and
he always took a strong intellectual interest in the problems of medieval
theology; but he became steadily and quietly independent in his philosophic
outlook and indeed rather skeptical of all definite dogmas.
Even in his art Chaucer's lack of the highest will-power produced one
rather conspicuous formal weakness; of his numerous long poems he really
finished scarcely one. For this, however, it is perhaps sufficient excuse
that he could write only in intervals hardly snatched from business and
sleep. In 'The Canterbury Tales' indeed, the plan is almost impossibly
ambitious; the more than twenty stories actually finished, with their
eighteen thousand lines, are only a fifth part of the intended number. Even
so, several of them do not really belong to the series; composed in stanza
forms, they are selected from his earlier poems and here pressed into
service, and on the average they are less excellent than those which he
wrote for their present places (in the rimed pentameter couplet that he
adopted from the French).
2. _His Humor_. In nothing are Chaucer's personality and his poetry
more pleasing than in the rich humor which pervades them through and
through. Sometimes, as in his treatment of the popular medieval beast-epic
material in the Nun's Priest's Tale of the Fox and the Cock, the humor
takes the form of boisterous farce; but much more often it is of the finer
intellectual sort, the sort which a careless reader may not catch, but
which touches with perfect sureness and charming lightness on all the
incongruities of life, always, too, in kindly spirit. No foible is too
trifling for Chaucer's quiet observation; while if he does not choose to
denounce the hypocrisy of the Pardoner and the worldliness of the Monk, he
has made their weaknesses sources of amusement (and indeed object-lessons
as well) for all the coming generations.
3. _He is one of the greatest of all narrative poets_. Chaucer is an
exquisite lyric poet, but only a few of his lyrics have come down to us,
and his fame must always rest largely on his narratives. Here, first, he
possesses unfailing fluency. It was with rapidity, evidently with ease, and
with masterful certainty, that he poured out his long series of vivid and
delightful tales. It is true that in his early, imitative, work he shares
the medieval faults of wordiness, digression, and abstract symbolism; and,
like most medieval writers, he chose rather to reshape material from the
great contemporary store than to invent stories of his own. But these are
really very minor matters. He has great variety, also, of narrative forms:
elaborate allegories; love stories of many kinds; romances, both religious
and secular; tales of chivalrous exploit, like that related by the Knight;
humorous extravaganzas; and jocose renderings of coarse popular
material--something, at least, in virtually every medieval type.
4. _The thorough knowledge and sure portrayal of men and women which,
belong to his mature work extend through, many various types of
character._ It is a commonplace to say that the Prolog to 'The
Canterbury Tales' presents in its twenty portraits virtually every
contemporary English class except the very lowest, made to live forever in
the finest series of character sketches preserved anywhere in literature;
and in his other work the same power appears in only less conspicuous
degree.
5. _His poetry is also essentially and thoroughly dramatic_, dealing
very vividly with life in genuine and varied action. To be sure, Chaucer
possesses all the medieval love for logical reasoning, and he takes a keen
delight in psychological analysis; but when he introduces these things
(except for the tendency to medieval diffuseness) they are true to the
situation and really serve to enhance the suspense. There is much interest
in the question often raised whether, if he had lived in an age like the
Elizabethan, when the drama was the dominant literary form, he too would
have been a dramatist.
6. _As a descriptive poet (of things as well as persons) he displays
equal skill._ Whatever his scenes or objects, he sees them with perfect
clearness and brings them in full life-likeness before the reader's eyes,
sometimes even with the minuteness of a nineteenth century novelist. And no
one understands more thoroughly the art of conveying the general impression
with perfect sureness, with a foreground where a few characteristic details
stand out in picturesque and telling clearness.
7. _Chaucer is an unerring master of poetic form._ His stanza
combinations reproduce all the well-proportioned grace of his French
models, and to the pentameter riming couplet of his later work he gives the
perfect ease and metrical variety which match the fluent thought. In all
his poetry there is probably not a single faulty line. And yet within a
hundred years after his death, such was the irony of circumstances, English
pronunciation had so greatly altered that his meter was held to be rude and
barbarous, and not until the nineteenth century were its principles again
fully understood. His language, we should add, is modern, according to the
technical classification, and is really as much like the form of our own
day as like that of a century before his time; but it is still only
_early_ modern English, and a little definitely directed study is
necessary for any present-day reader before its beauty can be adequately
recognized.
The main principles for the pronunciation of Chaucer's language, so far as
it differs from ours, are these: Every letter should be sounded, especially
the final _e_ (except when it is to be suppressed before another
vowel). A large proportion of the rimes are therefore feminine. The
following vowel sounds should be observed: Stressed _a_ like modern
_a_ in father. Stressed _e_ and _ee_ like _e_ in
_fête_ or _ea_ in breath. Stressed _i_ as in _machine_,
_oo_ like _o_ in _open_. _u_ commonly as in _push_
or like _oo_ in _spoon_, _y_ like _i_ in _machine_
or _pin_ according as it is stressed or not. _ai_, _ay_,
_ei_, and _ey_ like _ay_ in _day_. _au_ commonly
like _ou_ in _pound_, _ou_ like _oo_ in _spoon_.
_-ye_ (final) is a diphthong. _g_ (not in _ng_ and not initial)
before _e_ or _i_is like _j_.
Lowell has named in a suggestive summary the chief quality of each of the
great English poets, with Chaucer standing first in order: 'Actual life is
represented by Chaucer; imaginative life by Spenser; ideal life by
Shakspere; interior life by Milton; conventional life by Pope.' We might
add: the life of spiritual mysticism and simplicity by Wordsworth; the
completely balanced life by Tennyson; and the life of moral issues and
dramatic moments by Robert Browning.
JOHN GOWER. The three other chief writers contemporary with Chaucer
contrast strikingly both with him and with each other. Least important is
John Gower (pronounced either Go-er or Gow-er), a wealthy landowner whose
tomb, with his effigy, may still be seen in St. Savior's, Southwark, the
church of a priory to whose rebuilding he contributed and where he spent
his latter days. Gower was a confirmed conservative, and time has left him
stranded far in the rear of the forces that move and live. Unlike
Chaucer's, the bulk of his voluminous poems reflect the past and scarcely
hint of the future. The earlier and larger part of them are written in
French and Latin, and in 'Vox Clamantis' (The Voice of One Crying in the
Wilderness) he exhausts the vocabulary of exaggerated bitterness in
denouncing the common people for the insurrection in which they threatened
the privileges and authority of his own class. Later on, perhaps through
Chaucer's example, he turned to English, and in 'Confessio Amantis' (A
Lover's Confession) produced a series of renderings of traditional stories
parallel in general nature to 'The Canterbury Tales.' He is generally a
smooth and fluent versifier, but his fluency is his undoing; he wraps up
his material in too great a mass of verbiage.
THE VISION CONCERNING PIERS THE PLOWMAN. The active moral impulse which
Chaucer and Gower lacked, and a consequent direct confronting of the evils
of the age, appear vigorously in the group of poems written during the last
forty years of the century and known from the title in some of the
manuscripts as 'The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman.' From
the sixteenth century, at least, until very lately this work, the various
versions of which differ greatly, has been supposed to be the single poem
of a single author, repeatedly enlarged and revised by him; and ingenious
inference has constructed for this supposed author a brief but picturesque
biography under the name of William Langland. Recent investigation,
however, has made it seem at least probable that the work grew, to its
final form through additions by several successive writers who have not
left their names and whose points of view were not altogether identical.
Like the slightly earlier poet of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,' the
authors belonged to the region of the Northwest Midland, near the Malvern
Hills, and like him, they wrote in the Anglo-Saxon verse form,
alliterative, unrimed, and in this case without stanza divisions. Their
language, too, the regular dialect of this region, differs very greatly, as
we have already implied, from that of Chaucer, with much less infusion from
the French; to the modern reader, except in translation, it seems uncouth
and unintelligible. But the poem, though in its final state prolix and
structurally formless, exhibits great power not only of moral conviction
and emotion, but also of expression--vivid, often homely, but not seldom
eloquent.
The 'first passus' begins with the sleeping author's vision of 'a field
full of folk' (the world), bounded on one side by a cliff with the tower of
Truth, and on the other by a deep vale wherein frowns the dungeon of Wrong.
Society in all its various classes and occupations is very dramatically
presented in the brief description of the 'field of folk,' with incisive
passing satire of the sins and vices of each class. 'Gluttonous wasters'
are there, lazy beggars, lying pilgrims, corrupt friars and pardoners,
venal lawyers, and, with a lively touch of realistic humour, cooks and
their 'knaves' crying, 'Hot pies!' But a sane balance is preserved--there
are also worthy people, faithful laborers, honest merchants, and sincere
priests and monks. Soon the allegory deepens. Holy Church, appearing,
instructs the author about Truth and the religion which consists in loving
God and giving help to the poor. A long portrayal of the evil done by Lady
Meed (love of money and worldly rewards) prepares for the appearance of the
hero, the sturdy plowman Piers, who later on is even identified in a hazy
way with Christ himself. Through Piers and his search for Truth is
developed the great central teaching of the poem, the Gospel of Work--the
doctrine, namely, that society is to be saved by honest labor, or in
general by the faithful service of every class in its own sphere. The Seven
Deadly Sins and their fatal fruits are emphasized, and in the later forms
of the poem the corruptions of wealth and the Church are indignantly
denounced, with earnest pleading for the religion of practical social love
to all mankind.
In its own age the influence of 'Piers the Plowman' was very great. Despite
its intended impartiality, it was inevitably adopted as a partisan document
by the poor and oppressed, and together with the revolutionary songs of
John Ball it became a powerful incentive to the Peasant's Insurrection.
Piers himself became and continued an ideal for men who longed for a less
selfish and brutal world, and a century and a half later the poem was still
cherished by the Protestants for its exposure of the vices of the Church.
Its medieval form and setting remove it hopelessly beyond the horizon of
general readers of the present time, yet it furnishes the most detailed
remaining picture of the actual social and economic conditions of its age,
and as a great landmark in the progress of moral and social thought it can
never lose its significance.
THE WICLIFITE BIBLE. A product of the same general forces which inspired
'Piers the Plowman' is the earliest in the great succession of the modern
English versions of the Bible, the one connected with the name of John
Wiclif, himself the first important English precursor of the Reformation.
Wiclif was born about 1320, a Yorkshireman of very vigorous intellect as
well as will, but in all his nature and instincts a direct representative
of the common people. During the greater part of his life he was connected
with Oxford University, as student, teacher (and therefore priest), and
college head. Early known as one of the ablest English thinkers and
philosophers, he was already opposing certain doctrines and practices of
the Church when he was led to become a chief spokesman for King Edward and
the nation in their refusal to pay the tribute which King John, a century
and a half before, had promised to the Papacy and which was now actually
demanded. As the controversies proceeded, Wiclif was brought at last to
formulate the principle, later to be basal in the whole Protestant
movement, that the final source of religious authority is not the Church,
but the Bible. One by one he was led to attack also other fundamental
doctrines and institutions of the Church--transubstantiation, the temporal
possessions of the Church, the Papacy, and at last, for their corruption,
the four orders of friars. In the outcome the Church proved too strong for
even Wiclif, and Oxford, against its will, was compelled to abandon him;
yet he could be driven no farther than to his parish of Lutterworth, where
he died undisturbed in 1384.
His connection with literature was an unforeseen but natural outgrowth of
his activities. Some years before his death, with characteristic energy and
zeal, he had begun to spread his doctrines by sending out 'poor priests'
and laymen who, practicing the self-denying life of the friars of earlier
days, founded the Lollard sect. [Footnote: The name, given by their
enemies, perhaps means 'tares.'] It was inevitable not only that he and his
associates should compose many tracts and sermons for the furtherance of
their views, but, considering their attitude toward the Bible, that they
should wish to put it into the hands of all the people in a form which they
would be able to understand, that is in their own vernacular English. Hence
sprang the Wiclifite translation. The usual supposition that from the
outset, before the time of Wiclif, the Church had prohibited translations
of the Bible from the Latin into the common tongues is a mistake; that
policy was a direct result of Wiclif's work. In England from Anglo-Saxon
times, as must be clear from what has here already been said, partial
English translations, literal or free, in prose or verse, had been in
circulation among the few persons who could read and wished to have them.
But Wiclif proposed to popularize the entire book, in order to make the
conscience of every man the final authority in every question of belief and
religious practice, and this the Church would not allow. It is altogether
probable that Wiclif personally directed the translation which has ever
since borne his name; but no record of the facts has come down to us, and
there is no proof that he himself was the actual author of any part of
it--that work may all have been done by others. The basis of the
translation was necessarily the Latin 'Vulgate' (Common) version, made nine
hundred years before from the original Hebrew and Greek by St. Jerome,
which still remains to-day, as in Wiclif's time, the official version of
the Roman church. The first Wiclifite translation was hasty and rather
rough, and it was soon revised and bettered by a certain John Purvey, one
of the 'Lollard' priests.
Wiclif and the men associated with him, however, were always reformers
first and writers only to that end. Their religious tracts are formless and
crude in style, and even their final version of the Bible aims chiefly at
fidelity of rendering. In general it is not elegant, the more so because
the authors usually follow the Latin idioms and sentence divisions instead
of reshaping them into the native English style. Their text, again, is
often interrupted by the insertion of brief phrases explanatory of unusual
words. The vocabulary, adapted to the unlearned readers, is more largely
Saxon than in our later versions, and the older inflected forms appear
oftener than in Chaucer; so that it is only through our knowledge of the
later versions that we to-day can read the work without frequent stumbling.
Nevertheless this version has served as the starting point for almost all
those that have come after it in English, as even a hasty reader of this
one must be conscious; and no reader can fail to admire in it the sturdy
Saxon vigor which has helped to make our own version one of the great
masterpieces of English literature.
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. With Chaucer's death in 1400 the half century of
original creative literature in which he is the main figure comes to an
end, and for a hundred and fifty years thereafter there is only a single
author of the highest rank. For this decline political confusion is the
chief cause; first, in the renewal of the Hundred Years' War, with its
sordid effort to deprive another nation of its liberty, and then in the
brutal and meaningless War of the Roses, a mere cut-throat civil butchery
of rival factions with no real principle at stake. Throughout the fifteenth
century the leading poets (of prose we will speak later) were avowed
imitators of Chaucer, and therefore at best only second-rate writers. Most
of them were Scots, and best known is the Scottish king, James I. For
tradition seems correct in naming this monarch as the author of a pretty
poem, 'The King's Quair' ('The King's Quire,' that is Book), which relates
in a medieval dream allegory of fourteen hundred lines how the captive
author sees and falls in love with a lady whom in the end Fortune promises
to bestow upon him. This may well be the poetic record of King James'
eighteen-year captivity in England and his actual marriage to a noble
English wife. In compliment to him Chaucer's stanza of seven lines (riming
_ababbcc_), which King James employs, has received the name of 'rime
royal.'
THE 'POPULAR' BALLADS. Largely to the fifteenth century, however, belong
those of the English and Scottish 'popular' ballads which the accidents of
time have not succeeded in destroying. We have already considered the
theory of the communal origin of this kind of poetry in the remote
pre-historic past, and have seen that the ballads continue to flourish
vigorously down to the later periods of civilization. The still existing
English and Scottish ballads are mostly, no doubt, the work of individual
authors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but none the less they
express the little-changing mind and emotions of the great body of the
common people who had been singing and repeating ballads for so many
thousand years. Really essentially 'popular,' too, in spirit are the more
pretentious poems of the wandering professional minstrels, which have been
handed down along with the others, just as the minstrels were accustomed to
recite both sorts indiscriminately. Such minstrel ballads are the famous
ones on the battle of Chevy Chase, or Otterburn. The production of genuine
popular ballads began to wane in the fifteenth century when the printing
press gave circulation to the output of cheap London writers and
substituted reading for the verbal memory by which the ballads had been
transmitted, portions, as it were, of a half mysterious and almost sacred
tradition. Yet the existing ballads yielded slowly, lingering on in the
remote regions, and those which have been preserved were recovered during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by collectors from simple men and
women living apart from the main currents of life, to whose hearts and lips
they were still dear. Indeed even now the ballads and ballad-making are not
altogether dead, but may still be found nourishing in such outskirts of
civilization as the cowboy plains of Texas, Rocky Mountain mining camps, or
the nooks and corners of the Southern Alleghenies.
The true 'popular' ballads have a quality peculiarly their own, which
renders them far superior to the sixteenth century imitations and which no
conscious literary artist has ever successfully reproduced. Longfellow's
'Skeleton in Armor' and Tennyson's 'Revenge' are stirring artistic ballads,
but they are altogether different in tone and effect from the authentic
'popular' ones. Some of the elements which go to make this peculiar
'popular' quality can be definitely stated.
1. The 'popular' ballads are the simple and spontaneous expression of the
elemental emotion of the people, emotion often crude but absolutely genuine
and unaffected. Phrases are often repeated in the ballads, just as in the
talk of the common man, for the sake of emphasis, but there is neither
complexity of plot or characterization nor attempt at decorative literary
adornment--the story and the emotion which it calls forth are all in all.
It is this simple, direct fervor of feeling, the straightforward outpouring
of the authors' hearts, that gives the ballads their power and entitles
them to consideration among the far more finished works of conscious
literature. Both the emotion and the morals of the ballads, also, are
pagan, or at least pre-Christian; vengeance on one's enemies is as much a
virtue as loyalty to one's friends; the most shameful sins are cowardice
and treachery in war or love; and the love is often lawless.
2. From first to last the treatment of the themes is objective, dramatic,
and picturesque. Everything is action, simple feeling, or vivid scenes,
with no merely abstract moralizing (except in a few unusual cases); and
often much of the story or sentiment is implied rather than directly
stated. This too, of course, is the natural manner of the common man, a
manner perfectly effective either in animated conversation or in the chant
of a minstrel, where expression and gesture can do so much of the work
which the restraints of civilized society have transferred to words.
3. To this spirit and treatment correspond the subjects of the ballads.
They are such as make appeal to the underlying human instincts--brave
exploits in individual fighting or in organized war, and the romance and
pathos and tragedy of love and of the other moving situations of simple
life. From the 'popular' nature of the ballads it has resulted that many of
them are confined within no boundaries of race or nation, but, originating
one here, one there, are spread in very varying versions throughout the
whole, almost, of the world. Purely English, however, are those which deal
with Robin Hood and his 'merry men,' idealized imaginary heroes of the
Saxon common people in the dogged struggle which they maintained for
centuries against their oppressive feudal lords.
4. The characters and 'properties' of the ballads of all classes are
generally typical or traditional. There are the brave champion, whether
noble or common man, who conquers or falls against overwhelming odds; the
faithful lover of either sex; the woman whose constancy, proving stronger
than man's fickleness, wins back her lover to her side at last; the
traitorous old woman (victim of the blind and cruel prejudice which after a
century or two was often to send her to the stake as a witch); the loyal
little child; and some few others.
5. The verbal style of the ballads, like their spirit, is vigorous and
simple, generally unpolished and sometimes rough, but often powerful with
its terse dramatic suggestiveness. The usual, though not the only, poetic
form is the four-lined stanza in lines alternately of four and three
stresses and riming only in the second and fourth lines. Besides the
refrains which are perhaps a relic of communal composition and the
conventional epithets which the ballads share with epic poetry there are
numerous traditional ballad expressions--rather meaningless formulas and
line-tags used only to complete the rime or meter, the common useful
scrap-bag reserve of these unpretentious poets. The license of Anglo-Saxon
poetry in the number of the unstressed syllables still remains. But it is
evident that the existing versions of the ballads are generally more
imperfect than the original forms; they have suffered from the corruptions
of generations of oral repetition, which the scholars who have recovered
them have preserved with necessary accuracy, but which for appreciative
reading editors should so far as possible revise away.
Among the best or most representative single ballads are: The Hunting of
the Cheviot (otherwise called The Ancient Ballad of Chevy Chase--clearly of
minstrel authorship); Sir Patrick Spens; Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne;
Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudeslee; Captain Car, or
Edom o' Gordon; King Estmere (though this has been somewhat altered by
Bishop Percy, who had and destroyed the only surviving copy of it); Edward,
Edward; Young Waters; Sweet William's Ghost; Lord Thomas and Fair Annet.
Kinmont Willie is very fine, but seems to be largely the work of Sir Walter
Scott and therefore not truly 'popular.'
SIR THOMAS MALORY AND HIS 'MORTE DARTHUR.' The one fifteenth century author
of the first rank, above referred to, is Sir Thomas Malory (the _a_ is
pronounced as in _tally_). He is probably to be identified with the
Sir Thomas Malory who during the wars in France and the civil strife of the
Roses that followed was an adherent of the Earls of Warwick and who died in
1471 under sentence of outlawry by the victorious Edward IV. And some
passing observations, at least, in his book seem to indicate that if he
knew and had shared all the splendor and inspiration of the last years of
medieval chivalry, he had experienced also the disappointment and
bitterness of defeat and prolonged captivity. Further than this we know of
him only that he wrote 'Le Morte Darthur' and had finished it by 1467.
Malory's purpose was to collect in a single work the great body of
important Arthurian romance and to arrange it in the form of a continuous
history of King Arthur and his knights. He called his book 'Le Morte
Darthur,' The Death of Arthur, from the title of several popular Arthurian
romances to which, since they dealt only with Arthur's later years and
death, it was properly enough applied, and from which it seems to have
passed into general currency as a name for the entire story of Arthur's
life. [Footnote: Since the French word 'Morte' is feminine, the preceding
article was originally 'La,' but the whole name had come to be thought of
as a compound phrase and hence as masculine or neuter in gender.] Actually
to get together all the Arthurian romances was not possible for any man in
Malory's day, or in any other, but he gathered up a goodly number, most of
them, at least, written in French, and combined them, on the whole with
unusual skill, into a work of about one-tenth their original bulk, which
still ranks, with all qualifications, as one of the masterpieces of English
literature. Dealing with such miscellaneous material, he could not wholly
avoid inconsistencies, so that, for example, he sometimes introduces in
full health in a later book a knight whom a hundred pages earlier he had
killed and regularly buried; but this need not cause the reader anything
worse than mild amusement. Not Malory but his age, also, is to blame for
his sometimes hazy and puzzled treatment of the supernatural element in his
material. In the remote earliest form of the stories, as Celtic myths, this
supernatural element was no doubt frank and very large, but Malory's
authorities, the more skeptical French romancers, adapting it to their own
age, had often more or less fully rationalized it; transforming, for
instance, the black river of Death which the original heroes often had to
cross on journeys to the Celtic Other World into a rude and forbidding moat
about the hostile castle into which the romancers degraded the Other World
itself. Countless magic details, however, still remained recalcitrant to
such treatment; and they evidently troubled Malory, whose devotion to his
story was earnest and sincere. Some of them he omits, doubtless as
incredible, but others he retains, often in a form where the impossible is
merely garbled into the unintelligible. For a single instance, in his
seventh book he does not satisfactorily explain why the valiant Gareth on
his arrival at Arthur's court asks at first only for a year's food and
drink. In the original story, we can see to-day, Gareth must have been
under a witch's spell which compelled him to a season of distasteful
servitude; but this motivating bit of superstition Malory discards, or
rather, in this case, it had been lost from the story at a much earlier
stage. It results, therefore, that Malory's supernatural incidents are
often far from clear and satisfactory; yet the reader is little troubled by
this difficulty either in so thoroughly romantic a work.
Other technical faults may easily be pointed out in Malory's book. Thorough
unity, either in the whole or in the separate stories so loosely woven
together, could not be expected; in continual reading the long succession
of similar combat after combat and the constant repetition of stereotyped
phrases become monotonous for a present-day reader; and it must be
confessed that Malory has little of the modern literary craftsman's power
of close-knit style or proportion and emphasis in details. But these faults
also may be overlooked, and the work is truly great, partly because it is
an idealist's dream of chivalry, as chivalry might have been, a chivalry of
faithful knights who went about redressing human wrongs and were loyal
lovers and zealous servants of Holy Church; great also because Malory's
heart is in his stories, so that he tells them in the main well, and
invests them with a delightful atmosphere of romance which can never lose
its fascination.
The style, also, in the narrower sense, is strong and good, and does its
part to make the book, except for the Wiclif Bible, unquestionably the
greatest monument of English prose of the entire period before the
sixteenth century. There is no affectation of elegance, but rather knightly
straightforwardness which has power without lack of ease. The sentences are
often long, but always 'loose' and clear; and short ones are often used
with the instinctive skill of sincerity. Everything is picturesque and
dramatic and everywhere there is chivalrous feeling and genuine human
sympathy.
WILLIAM CAXTON AND THE INTRODUCTION OF PRINTING TO ENGLAND, 1476. Malory's
book is the first great English classic which was given to the world in
print instead of written manuscript; for it was shortly after Malory's
death that the printing press was brought to England by William Caxton. The
invention of printing, perhaps the most important event of modern times,
took place in Germany not long after the middle of the fifteenth century,
and the development of the art was rapid. Caxton, a shrewd and enterprising
Kentishman, was by first profession a cloth merchant, and having taken up
his residence across the Channel, was appointed by the king to the
important post of Governor of the English Merchants in Flanders. Employed
later in the service of the Duchess of Burgundy (sister of Edward IV), his
ardent delight in romances led him to translate into English a French
'Recueil des Histoires de Troye' (Collection of the Troy Stories). To
supply the large demand for copies he investigated and mastered the new art
by which they might be so wonderfully multiplied and about 1475, at fifty
years of age, set up a press at Bruges in the modern Belgium, where he
issued his 'Recueil,' which was thus the first English book ever put into
print. During the next year, 1476, just a century before the first theater
was to be built in London, Caxton returned to England and established his
shop in Westminster, then a London suburb. During the fifteen remaining
years of his life he labored diligently, printing an aggregate of more than
a hundred books, which together comprised over fourteen thousand pages.
Aside from Malory's romance, which he put out in 1485, the most important
of his publications was an edition of Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales.' While
laboring as a publisher Caxton himself continued to make translations, and
in spite of many difficulties he, together with his assistants, turned into
English from French no fewer than twenty-one distinct works. From every
point of view Caxton's services were great. As translator and editor his
style is careless and uncertain, but like Malory's it is sincere and manly,
and vital with energy and enthusiasm. As printer, in a time of rapid
changes in the language, when through the wars in France and her growing
influence the second great infusion of Latin-French words was coming into
the English language, he did what could be done for consistency in forms
and spelling. Partly medieval and partly modern in spirit, he may fittingly
stand at the close, or nearly at the close, of our study of the medieval
period.