The age of Chaucer is of peculiar interest to the student of literature,
not only because of its brilliance and productiveness but also because
of its apparent promise for the future. In this, as in other aspects,
Chaucer (c. 1340-1400) is its most notable literary figure. Beginning as
a student and imitator of the best French poetry of his day, he was for
a time, like most of his French contemporaries, little more than a
skilful maker of elegant verses, dealing with conventional material in a
conventional way, arranging in new figures the same flowers and bowers,
sunsets and song-birds, and companies of fair women and their lovers,
that had been arranged and rearranged by every poet of the court circle
for a hundred years, and celebrated in sweet phrases of almost unvarying
sameness. Even at this time, to be sure, he was not without close and
loving observation of the living creatures of the real world, and his
verses often bring us flowers dewy and fragrant and fresh of colour as
they grew in the fields and gardens about London, and birds that had
learned their music in the woods; but his poetry was still not easily
distinguishable from that of Machault, Froissart, Deschamps, Transoun
and the other "courtly makers" of France. But while he was still
striving to master perfectly the technique of this pretty art of
trifling, he became acquainted with the new literature of Italy, both
poetry and prose. Much of the new poetry moved, like that of France,
among the conventionalities and artificialities of an unreal world of
romance, but it was of wider range, of fuller tone, of far greater
emotional intensity, and, at its best, was the fabric, not of elegant
ingenuity, but of creative human passion,--in Dante, indeed, a wonderful
visionary structure in which love and hate, and pity and terror, and the
forms and countenances of men were more vivid and real than in the world
of real men and real passions. The new prose--which Chaucer knew in
several of the writings of Boccaccio--was vastly different from any that
he had ever read in a modern tongue. Here were no mere brief anecdotes
like those _exempla_ which in the middle ages illustrated vernacular as
well as Latin sermons, no cumbrous, slow-moving treatises on the Seven
Deadly Sins, no half-articulate, pious meditations, but rapid, vivid,
well-constructed narratives ranging from the sentimental beauty of
stories like Griselda and the Franklin's Tale to coarse mirth and
malodorous vulgarity equal to those of the tales told later by Chaucer's
Miller and Reeve and Summoner. All these things he studied and some he
imitated. There is scarcely a feature of the verse that has not left
some trace in his own; the prose he did not imitate as prose, but there
can be little doubt that the subject matter of Boccaccio's tales and
novels, as well as his poems, affected the direction of Chaucer's
literary development, and quickened his habit of observing and utilizing
human life, and that the narrative art of the prose was influential in
the transformation of his methods of narration.
This transformation was effected not so much through the mere
superiority of the Italian models to the French as through the stimulus
which the differences between the two gave to his reflections upon the
processes and technique of composition, for Chaucer was not a careless,
happy-go-lucky poet of divine endowment, but a conscious, reflective
artist, seeking not merely for fine words and fine sentiments, but for
the proper arrangement of events, the significant exponent of character,
the right tone, and even the appropriate background and atmosphere,--as
may be seen, for example, in the transformations he wrought in the
_Pardoner's Tale_. It is therefore in the latest and most original of
the _Canterbury Tales_ that his art is most admirable, most
distinguished by technical excellences. In these we find so many
admirable qualities that we almost forget that he had any defects. His
diction is a model of picturesqueness, of simplicity, of dignity, and of
perfect adaptation to his theme; his versification is not only correct
but musical and varied, and shows a progressive tendency towards freer
and more complex melodies; his best tales are not mere repetitions of
the ancient stories they retell, but new creations, transformed by his
own imaginative realization of them, full of figures having the
dimensions and the vivacity of real life, acting on adequate motives,
and moving in an atmosphere and against a background appropriate to
their characters and their actions. In the tales of the Pardoner, the
Franklin, the Summoner, the Squire, he is no less notable as a
consummate artist than as a poet.
Chaucer, however, was not the only writer of his day remarkable for
mastery of technique. Gower, indeed, though a man of much learning and
intelligence, was neither a poet of the first rank nor an artist.
Despite the admirable qualities of clearness, order and occasional
picturesqueness which distinguish his work, he lacked the ability which
great poets have of making their words mean more than they say, and of
stirring the emotions even beyond the bounds of this enhanced meaning;
and there is not, perhaps, in all his voluminous work in English, French
and Latin, any indication that he regarded composition as an art
requiring consideration or any care beyond that of conforming to the
chosen rhythm and finding suitable rhymes.
There were others more richly endowed as poets and more finely developed
as artists. There was the beginner of the _Piers Plowman_ cycle[1], the
author of the Prologue and first eight passus of the A-text, a man of
clear and profound observation, a poet whose imagination brought before
him with distinctness and reality visual images of the motley
individuals and masses of men of whom he wrote, an artist who knew how
to organize and direct the figures of his dream-world, the movement of
his ever-unfolding vision. There was the remarkable successor of this
man, the author of the B-text, an almost prophetic figure, a great
poetic idealist, and, helpless though he often was in the direction of
his thought, an absolute master of images and words that seize upon the
heart and haunt the memory. Besides these, an unknown writer far in the
north-west had, in _Gawayne and the Grene Knight_, transformed the
medieval romance into a thing of speed and colour, of vitality and
mystery, no less remarkable for its fluent definiteness of form than for
the delights of hall-feast and hunt, the graceful comedy of temptation,
and the lonely ride of the doomed Gawayne through the silence of the
forest and the deep snow. In the same region, by its author's power of
visual imagination, the Biblical paraphrase, so often a mere humdrum
narrative, had been transformed, in _Patience_, into a narrative so
detailed and vivid that the reader is almost ready to believe that the
author himself, rather than Jonah, went down into the sea in the belly
of the great fish, and sat humbled and rebuked beside the withered
gourd-vine. And there also, by some strange chance, blossomed, with
perhaps only a local and temporary fragrance until its rediscovery in
the 19th century, that delicate flower of loneliness and aspiration,
_Pearl_, a wonder of elaborate art as well as of touching sentiment.
All these writings are great, not only relatively, but absolutely. There
is not one of them which would not, if written in our own time,
immediately mark its author as a man of very unusual ability. But the
point of special concern to us at the present moment is not so much that
they show remarkable poetic power, as that they possess technical merits
of a very high order. And we are accustomed to believe that, although
genius is a purely personal and incommunicable element, technical gains
are a common possession; that after Marlowe had developed the technique
of blank verse, this technique was available for all; that after Pope
had mastered the heroic couplet and Gray the ode, and Poe the short
story, all men could write couplets and odes and short stories of
technical correctness; that, as Tennyson puts it,
"All can grow the flower now,
For all have got the seed."
But this was singularly untrue of the technical gains made by Chaucer
and his great contemporaries. _Pearl_ and _Patience_ were apparently
unknown to the 15th century, but _Gawayne_ and _Piers Plowman_ and
Chaucer's works were known and were influential in one way or another
throughout the century. _Gawayne_ called into existence a large number
of romances dealing with the same hero or with somewhat similar
situations, some of them written in verse suggested by the remarkable
verse of their model, but the resemblance, even in versification, is
only superficial. _Piers Plowman_ gave rise to satirical allegories
written in the alliterative long line and furnished the figures and the
machinery for many satires in other metres, but the technical excellence
of the first _Piers Plowman_ poem was soon buried for centuries under
the tremendous social significance of itself and its successors. And
Chaucer, in spite of the fact that he was praised and imitated by many
writers and definitely claimed as master by more than one, not only
transmitted to them scarcely any of the technical conquests he had made,
but seems also to have been almost without success in creating any
change in the taste of the public that read his poems so eagerly, any
demand for better literature than had been written by his predecessors.
Wide and lasting Chaucer's influence undoubtedly was. Not only was all
the court-poetry, all the poetry of writers who pretended to cultivation
and refinement, throughout the century, in England and Scotland, either
directly or indirectly imitative of his work, but even the humblest
productions of unpretentious writers show at times traces of his
influence. Scotland was fortunate in having writers of greater ability
than England had (see SCOTLAND: _Literature_). In England the three
chief followers of Chaucer known to us by name are Lydgate, Hoccleve
(see OCCLEVE) and Hawes. Because of their praise of Chaucer and their
supposed personal relations to him, Lydgate and Hoccleve are almost
inseparable in modern discussions, but 15th century readers and writers
appear not to have associated them very closely. Indeed, Hoccleve is
rarely mentioned, while Lydgate is not only mentioned continually, but
continually praised as Chaucer's equal or even superior. Hoccleve was
not, to be sure, as prolific as Lydgate, but it is difficult to
understand why his work, which compares favourably in quality with
Lydgate's, attracted so much less attention. The title of his greatest
poem, _De regimine principum_, may have repelled readers who were not
princely born, though they would have found the work full of the moral
and prudential maxims and illustrative anecdotes so dear to them; but
his attack upon Sir John Oldcastle as a heretic ought to have been
decidedly to the taste of the orthodox upper classes, while his
lamentations over his misspent youth, his tales and some of his minor
poems might have interested any one. Of a less vigorous spirit than
Lydgate, he was, in his mild way, more humorous and more original. Also
despite his sense of personal loss in Chaucer's death and his care to
transmit to posterity the likeness of his beloved master, he seems to
have been less slavish than Lydgate in imitating him. His memory is full
of Chaucer's phrases, he writes in verse-forms hallowed by the master's
use, and he tries to give to his lines the movement of Chaucer's
decasyllables, but he is comparatively free from the influence of those
early allegorical works of the Master which produced in the 15th century
so dreary a flock of imitations.
Lydgate's productivity was enormous,--how great no man can say, for, as
was the case with Chaucer also, his fame caused many masterless poems to
be ascribed to him, but, after making all necessary deductions, the
amount of verse that has come down to us from him is astonishing. Here
it may suffice to say that his translations are predominantly epic
(140,000 lines), and his original compositions predominantly allegorical
love poems or didactic poems. If there is anything duller than a dull
epic it is a dull allegory, and Lydgate has achieved both. This is not
to deny the existence of good passages in his epics and ingenuity in his
allegories, but there is no pervading, persistent life in either. His
epics, like almost all the narrative verse of the time, whether epic,
legend, versified chronicle or metrical romance, seem designed merely to
satisfy the desire of 15th century readers for information, the craving
for facts--true or fictitious--the same craving that made possible the
poems on alchemy, on hunting, on manners and morals, on the duties of
parish priests, on the seven liberal arts. His allegories, like most
allegories of the age, are ingenious rearrangements of old figures and
old machinery, they are full of what had once been imagination but had
become merely memory assisted by cleverness. The great fault of all his
work, as of nearly all the literature of the age, is that it is merely a
more or less skilful manipulation of what the author had somewhere read
or heard, and not a faithful transcript of the author's own peculiar
sense or conception of what he had seen or heard or read. The fault is
not that the old is repeated, that a twice-told tale is retold, but that
it is retold without being re-imagined by the teller of the tale,
without taking on from his personality something that was not in it
before. Style, to be sure, was a thing that Lydgate and his fellows
tried to supply, and some of them supplied it abundantly according to
their lights. But style meant to them external decoration, classical
allusions, personifications, an inverted or even dislocated order of
words, and that famous "ornate diction," those "aureate terms," with
which they strove to surpass the melody, picturesqueness and dignity
which, for all its simplicity, they somehow dimly discerned in the
diction of Chaucer.
Stephen Hawes, with his allegorical treatise on the seven liberal
sciences, came later than these men, only to write worse. He was a
disciple of Lydgate rather than of Chaucer, and is not only lacking in
the vigour and sensitiveness which Lydgate sometimes displays, but
exaggerates the defects of his master. If it be a merit to have
conceived the pursuit of knowledge under the form of the efforts of a
knight to win the hand of his lady, it is almost the sole merit to which
Hawes can lay claim. Two or three good situations, an episode of low
comedy, and the epitaph of the Knight with its famous final couplet,
exhaust the list of his credits. The efforts that have been made to
trace through Hawes the line of Spenser's spiritual ancestry seem not
well advised. The resemblances that have been pointed out are such as
arise inevitably from the allegories and from the traditional material
with which both worked. There is no reason to believe that Spenser owed
his general conception to Hawes, or that the _Faery Queene_ would have
differed in even the slightest detail from its present form if the
_Pastime of Pleasure_ had never been written. The machinery of chivalric
romance had already been applied to spiritual and moral themes in Spain
without the aid of Hawes.
It is obvious that the fundamental lack of all these men was imaginative
power, poetic ability. This is a sufficient reason for failure to write
good poetry. But why did not men of better ability devote themselves to
literature in this age? Was it because of the perturbed conditions
arising from the prevalence of foreign and civil wars? Perhaps not,
though it is clear that if Sir Thomas Malory had perished in one of the
many fights through which he lived, the chivalric and literary impulses
which he perhaps received from the "Fadre of Curteisy," Richard
Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, would have gone for nothing and we should
lack the _Morte Darthur_. But it may very well be that the wars and the
tremendous industrial growth of England fixed the attention of the
strongest and most original spirits among the younger men and so
withdrew them from the possible attractions of literature. But, after
all, whatever general truth may lie in such speculations, the way of a
young man with his own life is as incalculable as any of the four things
which Agur son of Jakeh declared to be past finding out; local and
special accidents rather than general communal influences are apt to
shape the choice of boys of exceptional character, and we have many
instances of great talents turning to literature or art when war or
commerce or science was the dominant attraction of social life.
But even recognizing that the followers of Chaucer were not men of
genius, it seems strange that their imitation of Chaucer was what it
was. They not only entirely failed to see what his merits as an artist
were and how greatly superior his mature work is to his earlier in point
of technique; they even preferred the earlier and imitated it almost
exclusively. Furthermore, his mastery of verse seemed to them to consist
solely in writing verses of approximately four or five stresses and
arranging them in couplets or in stanzas of seven or eight lines. Their
preference for the early allegorical work can be explained by their lack
of taste and critical discernment and by the great vogue of allegorical
writing in England and France. Men who are just beginning to think about
the distinction between literature and ordinary writing usually feel
that it consists in making literary expression differ as widely as
possible from simple direct speech. For this reason some sort of
artificial diction is developed and some artificial word order devised.
Allegory is used as an elegant method of avoiding unpoetical plainness,
and is an easy means of substituting logic for imagination. The failure
to reproduce in some degree at least the melody and smoothness of
Chaucer's decasyllabic verse, and the particular form which that failure
took in Lydgate, are to be explained by the fact that Lydgate and his
fellows never knew how Chaucer's verse sounded when properly read. It is
a mistake to suppose that the disappearance of final unaccented _e_ from
many words or its instability in many others made it difficult for
Lydgate and his fellows to write melodious verse. Melodious verse has
been written since the disappearance of all these sounds, and the
possibility of a choice between a form with final _e_ and one without it
is not a hindrance but an advantage to a poet, as Goethe, Schiller,
Heine and innumerable German poets have shown by their practice. The
real difficulty with these men was that they pronounced Chaucer's verse
as if it were written in the English of their own day. As a matter of
fact all the types of verse discovered by scholars in Lydgate's poems
can be discovered in Chaucer's also if they be read with Lydgate's
pronunciation. Chaucer did not write archaic English, as some have
supposed,--that is, English of an earlier age than his own,--it would
have been impossible for him to do so with the unfailing accuracy he
shows; he did, however, write a conservative, perhaps an old-fashioned,
English, such as was spoken by the conservative members of the class of
society to which he was attached and for which he wrote. An English with
fewer final _e_'s was already in existence among the less conservative
classes, and this rapidly became standard English in consequence of the
social changes which occurred during his own life. We know that a
misunderstanding of Chaucer's verse existed from the 16th century to the
time of Thomas Tyrwhitt; it seems clear that it began even earlier, in
Chaucer's own lifetime.
There are several poems of the 15th century which were long ascribed to
Chaucer. Among them are:--the _Complaint of the Black Knight_, or
_Complaint of a Lover's Life_, now known to be Lydgate's; the _Mother of
God_, now ascribed to Hoccleve; the _Cuckoo and the Nightingale_, by
Clanvowe; _La Belle Dame sans merci_, a translation from the French of
Alain Chartier by Richard Ros; _Chaucer's Dream, or the Isle of Ladies_;
the _Assembly of Ladies_; the _Flower and the Leaf_; and the _Court of
Love_. The two poems of Lydgate and Hoccleve are as good as Chaucer's
poorest work. The _Assembly of Ladies_ and the _Flower and the Leaf_ are
perhaps better than the _Book of the Duchess_, but not so good as the
_Parliament of Fowls_. The _Flower and the Leaf_, it will be remembered,
was very dear to John Keats, who, like all his contemporaries, regarded
it as Chaucer's. An additional interest attaches to both it and the
_Assembly of Ladies_, from the fact that the author may have been a
woman; Professor Skeat is, indeed, confident that he knows who the woman
was and when she wrote. These poems, like the _Court of Love_, are
thoroughly conventional in material, all the figures and poetical
machinery may be found in dozens of other poems in England and France,
as Professor Neilson has shown for the _Court of Love_ and Mr Marsh for
the _Flower and the Leaf_; but there are a freshness of spirit and a
love of beauty in them that are not common; the conventional birds and
flowers are there, but they seem, like those of Chaucer's _Legend_, to
have some touch of life, and the conventional companies of ladies and
gentlemen ride and talk and walk with natural grace and ease. The _Court
of Love_ is usually ascribed to a very late date, as late even as the
middle of the 16th century. If this is correct, it is a notable instance
of the persistence of a Chaucerian influence. An effort has been made,
to be sure, to show that it was written by Scogan and that the writing
of it constituted the offence mentioned by Chaucer in his _Envoy to
Scogan_, but it has been clearly shown that this is impossible, both
because the language is later than Scogan's time and because nothing in
the poem resembles the offence clearly described by Chaucer.
Whatever may be true of the authorship of the _Assembly of Ladies_ and
the _Flower and the Leaf_, there were women writers in England in the
middle ages. Juliana of Norwich wrote her _Revelations of Divine Love_
before 1400. The much discussed Dame Juliana Berners, the supposed
compiler of the treatise on hunting in the _Book of St Albans_, may be
mythical, though there is no reason why a woman should not have written
such a book; and a shadowy figure that disappears entirely in the
sunlight is the supposed authoress of the _Nut Brown Maid_, for if
language is capable of definite meaning, the last stanza declares
unequivocally that the poem is the work of a man. But there is a poem
warning young women against entering a nunnery which may be by a woman,
and there is an interesting entry among the records of New Romney for
1463-1464, "Paid to Agnes Forde for the play of the Interlude of our
Lord's Passion, 6s. 8d.," which is apparently the earliest mention of a
woman dramatist in England. Finally, Margaret, countess of Richmond, the
mother of Henry VII., not only aided scholars and encouraged writers,
but herself translated the (spurious) fourth book of St Thomas a
Kempis's _Imitatio Christi_. Another Margaret, the duchess of Burgundy,
it will be remembered, encouraged Caxton in his translation and
printing. Women seem, indeed, to have been especially lovers of books
and patrons of writers, and Skelton, if we may believe his _Garland of
Laurel_, was surrounded by a bevy of ladies comparable to a modern
literary club; Erasmus's Suffragette Convention may correspond to no
reality, but the Learned Lady arguing against the Monk for the
usefulness and pleasure derived from books was not an unknown type.
Women were capable of many things in the middle ages. English records
show them to have been physicians, churchwardens, justices of the peace
and sheriffs, and, according to a satirist, they were also priests.
The most original and powerful poetry of the 15th century was composed
in popular forms for the ear of the common people and was apparently
written without conscious artistic purpose. Three classes of productions
deserve special attention,--songs and carols, popular ballads and
certain dramatic compositions. The songs and carols belong to a species
which may have existed in England before the Norman Conquest, but which
certainly was greatly modified by the musical and lyric forms of France.
The best of them are the direct and simple if not entirely artless
expressions of personal emotion, and even when they contain, as they
sometimes do, the description of a person, a situation, or an event,
they deal with these things so subjectively, confine themselves so
closely to the rendering of the emotional effect upon the singer, that
they lose none of their directness or simplicity. Some of them deal with
secular subjects, some with religious, and some are curious and
delightful blendings of religious worship and aspiration with earthly
tenderness for the embodiments of helpless infancy and protecting
motherhood which gave Christianity so much of its power over the
affections and imagination of the middle ages. Even those which begin as
mere expressions of joy in the Yule-tide eating and drinking and
merriment catch at moments hints of higher joys, of finer emotions, and
lift singer and hearer above the noise and stir of earth. Hundreds of
songs written and sung in the 15th century must have perished; many, no
doubt, lived only a single season and were never even written down; but
chance has preserved enough of them to make us wonder at the age which
could produce such masterpieces of tantalizing simplicity.
The lyrics which describe a situation form a logical, if not a real
transition to those which narrate an episode or an event. The most
famous of the latter, the _Nut Brown Maid_, has often been called a
ballad, and "lyrical ballad" it is in the sense established by Coleridge
and Wordsworth, but its affinities are rather with the song or carol
than with the folk-ballad, and, like Henryson's charming _Robin and
Malkin_, it is certainly the work of a man of culture and of conscious
artistic purpose and methods. Unaccompanied, as it is, by any other work
of the same author, this poem, with its remarkable technical merits, is
an even more astonishing literary phenomenon than the famous single
sonnet of Blanco White. It can hardly be doubted that the author learned
his technique from the songs and carols.
The folk-ballad, like the song or carol, belongs in some form to
immemorial antiquity. It is doubtless a mistake to suppose that any
ballad has been preserved to us that is a purely communal product, a
confection of the common knowledge, traditions and emotions of the
community wrought by subconscious processes into a song that finds
chance but inevitable utterance through one or more individuals as the
whole commune moves in its molecular dance. But it is equally a mistake
to argue that ballads are essentially metrical romances in a state of
decay. Both the matter and the manner of most of the best ballads forbid
such a supposition, and it can hardly be doubted that in some of the
folk-ballads of the 15th century are preserved not only traditions of
dateless antiquity, but formal elements and technical processes that
actually are derived from communal song and dance. By the 15th century,
however, communal habits and processes of composition had ceased, and
the traditional elements, formulae and technique had become merely
conventional aids and guides for the individual singer. Ancient as they
were, conventional as, in a sense, they also were, they exercised none
of the deadening, benumbing influence of ordinary conventions. They
furnished, one may say, a vibrant framework of emotional expression,
each tone of which moved the hearers all the more powerfully because it
had sung to them so many old, unhappy, far-off things, so many battles
and treacheries and sudden griefs; a framework which the individual
singer needed only to fill out with the simplest statement of the event
which had stirred his own imagination and passions to produce, not a
work of art, but a song of universal appeal. Not a work of art, because
there are scarcely half a dozen ballads that are really works of art,
and the greatest ballads are not among these. There is scarcely one that
is free from excrescences, from dulness, from trivialities, from
additions that would spoil their greatest situations and their greatest
lines, were it not that we resolutely shut our ears and our eyes, as we
should, to all but their greatest moments. But at their best moments the
best ballads have an almost incomparable power, and to a people sick, as
we are, of the ordinary, the usual, the very trivialities and
impertinences of the ballads only help to define and emphasize these
best moments. In histories of English literature the ballads have been
so commonly discussed in connexion with their rediscovery in the 18th
century, that we are apt to forget that some of the very best were
demonstrably composed in the 15th and that many others of uncertain date
probably belong to the same time.
Along with the genuine ballads dealing with a recent event or a
traditional theme there were ballads in which earlier romances are
retold in ballad style. This was doubtless inevitable in view of the
increasing epic tendency of the ballad and the interest still felt in
metrical romances, but it should not mislead us into regarding the
genuine folk-ballad as an out-growth of the metrical romance.
Besides the ordinary epic or narrative ballad, the 15th century produced
ballads in dramatic form, or, perhaps it were better to say, dramatized
some of its epic ballads. How commonly this was done we do not know,
but the scanty records of the period indicate that it was a widespread
custom, though only three plays of this character (all concerning Robin
Hood) have come down to us. These plays had, however, no further
independent development, but merely furnished elements of incident and
atmosphere to later plays of a more highly organized type. With these
ballad plays may also be mentioned the Christmas plays (usually of St
George) and the sword-dance plays, which also flourished in the 15th
century, but survive for us only as obscure elements in the masques and
plays of Ben Jonson and in such modern rustic performances as Thomas
Hardy has so charmingly described in _The Return of the Native_.
The additions which the 15th century made to the ancient cycles of
Scripture plays, the so-called Mysteries, are another instance of a
literary effort which spent itself in vain (see DRAMA). The most notable
of these are, of course, the world renowned comic scenes in the
_Towneley_ (or _Wakefield_) _Plays_, in the pageants of Cain, of Noah
and of the Shepherds. In none of these is the 15th century writer
responsible for the original comic intention; in the pageants of Cain
and of the Shepherds fragments of the work of a 14th century writer
still remain to prove the earlier existence of the comic conception, and
that it was traditional in the Noah pageant we know from the testimony
of Chaucer's Miller; but none the less the 15th century writer was a
comic dramatist of original power and of a skill in the development of
both character and situation previously unexampled in England. The
inability of Lydgate to develop a comic conception is strikingly
displayed if one compares his _Pageant for Presentation before the King
at Hereford_ with the work of this unknown artist. But in our admiration
for this man and his famous episode of Mak and the fictitious infant, we
are apt to forget the equally fine, though very different qualities
shown in some of the later pageants of the _York Plays_. Such, for
example, is the final pageant, that of the _Last Judgment_, a drama of
slow and majestic movement, to be sure, but with a large and fine
conception of the great situation, and a noble and dignified elocution
not inadequate to the theme.
The _Abraham and Isaac_ play of the Brome MS., extant as a separate play
and perhaps so performed, which has been so greatly admired for its
cumulative pathos, also belongs demonstrably to this century. It is not,
as has been supposed, an intermediate stage between French plays and the
Chester _Abraham and Isaac_, but is derived directly from the latter by
processes which comparison of the two easily reveals. Scripture plays of
a type entirely different from the well-known cyclic mysteries,
apparently confined to the Passion and Resurrection and the related
events, become known to us for the first time in the records of this
century. Such plays seem to have been confined to the towns of the
south, and, as both their location and their structure suggest, may have
been borrowed from France. In any event, the records show that they
flourished greatly and that new versions were made from time to time.
Another form of the medieval drama, the Morality Play, had its origin in
the 15th century,--or else very late in the 14th. The earliest known
examples of it in England date from about 1420. These are the _Castle of
Perseverance_ and the _Pride of Life_. Others belonging to the century
are _Mind, Will and Understanding_, _Mankind_ and Medwall's _Nature_.
There are also parts of two pageants in the _Ludus Coventriae_ (c. 1460)
that are commonly classed as Moralities, and these, together with the
existence of a few personified abstractions in other plays, have led
some critics to suppose that the Morality was derived from the Mystery
by the gradual introduction of personified abstractions in the place of
real persons. But the two kinds of plays are fundamentally different,
different in subject and in technique; and no replacement of real
persons by personifications can change a Mystery into a Morality.
Moreover, the Morality features in Mysteries are later than the origin
of the Morality itself and are due to the influence of the latter. The
Morality Play is merely a dramatized allegory, and derives its
characters and its peculiar technique from the application of the
dramatic method to the allegory, the favourite literary form of the
middle ages. None of the 15th century Moralities is literature of the
first rank, though both the _Castle of Perseverance_ and _Pride of Life_
contain passages ringing with a passionate sincerity that communicates
itself to the hearer or reader. But it was not until the beginning of
the 16th century that a Morality of permanent human interest appeared in
_Everyman_, which, after all, is a translation from the Dutch, as is
clearly proved by the fact that in the two prayers near the end of the
play the Dutch has complicated but regular stanzas, whereas the English
has only irregularly rhymed passages.
Besides the Mysteries and Moralities, the 15th century had also Miracle
Plays, properly so called, dealing with the lives, martyrdoms and
miracles of saints. As we know these only from records of their
performance or their mere existence--no texts have been preserved to us,
except the very curious _Play of the Sacrament_--it is impossible to
speak of their literary or dramatic qualities. The Miracle Play as a
form was, of course, not confined to the 15th century. Notwithstanding
the assertions of historians of literature that it died out in England
soon after its introduction at the beginning of the 12th century, its
existence can be demonstrated from c. 1110 to the time of Shakespeare.
But records seem to indicate that it flourished especially during this
period of supposed barrenness.
What was the nature of the "Komedy of Troylous and Pandor" performed
before Henry VIII. on the 6th of January 1516 we have no means of
knowing. It is very early indeed to assume the influence of either
classical or Italian drama, and although we have no records of similar
plays from the 15th century, it must be remembered that our records are
scanty, that the middle ages applied the dramatic method to all sorts of
material, and that it is therefore not impossible that secular plays
like this were performed at court at a much earlier date. The record at
any rate does not indicate that it was a new type of play, and the
Griselda story had been dramatized in France, Italy and the Netherlands
before 1500.
That not much good prose was written in the 15th century is less
surprising than that so little good verse was written. The technique of
verse composition had been studied and mastered in the preceding age, as
we have seen, but the technique of prose had apparently received no
serious consideration. Indeed, it is doubtful if any one thought of
prose as a possible medium of artistic expression. Chaucer apparently
did not, in spite of the comparative excellence of his Preface to the
_Astrolabe_ and his occasional noteworthy successes with the
difficulties of the philosophy of Boethius; Wycliffe is usually clumsy;
and the translators of Mandeville, though they often give us passages of
great charm, obviously were plain men who merely translated as best they
could. There was, however, a comparatively large amount of prose written
in the 15th century, mainly for religious or educational purposes,
dealing with the same sorts of subjects that were dealt with in verse,
and in some cases not distinguishable from the verse by any feature but
the absence of rhyme. The vast body of this we must neglect; only five
writers need be named: John Capgrave, Reginald Pecock, Sir John
Fortescue, Caxton and Malory. Capgrave, the compiler of the first
chronicle in English prose since the Conquest, wrote by preference in
Latin; his English is a condescension to those who could not read Latin
and has the qualities which belong to the talk of an earnest and sincere
man of commonplace ability. Pecock and Fortescue are more important.
Pecock (c. 1395-c. 1460) was a man of singularly acute and logical mind.
He prided himself upon his dialectic skill and his faculty for
discovering arguments that had been overlooked by others. His writings,
therefore--or at least the _Repressor_--are excellent in general
structure and arrangement, his ideas are presented clearly and simply,
with few digressions or excrescences, and his sentences, though
sometimes too long, are more like modern prose than any others before
the age of Elizabeth. His style is lightened by frequent figures of
speech, mostly illustrative, and really illustrative, of his ideas,
while his intellectual ingenuity cannot fail to interest even those whom
his prejudices and preconceptions repel. Fortescue, like Capgrave, wrote
by preference in Latin, and, like Pecock, was philosophical and
controversial. But his principal English work, the _Difference between
an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy_, differs from Pecock's in being
rather a pleading than a logical argument, and the geniality and glowing
patriotism of its author give it a far greater human interest.
No new era in literary composition was marked by the activity of William
Caxton as translator and publisher, though the printing-press has, of
course, changed fundamentally the problem of the dissemination and
preservation of culture, and thereby ultimately affected literary
production profoundly. But neither Caxton nor the writers whose works he
printed produced anything new in form or spirit. His publications range
over the whole field of 15th century literature, and no doubt he tried,
as his quaint prefaces indicate, to direct the public taste to what was
best among the works of the past, as when he printed and reprinted the
_Canterbury Tales_, but among all his numerous publications not one is
the herald of a new era. The only book of permanent interest as
literature which he introduced to the world was the _Morte Darthur_ of
Sir Thomas Malory, and this is a compilation from older romances (see
ARTHURIAN LEGEND). It is, to be sure, the one book of permanent literary
significance produced in England in the 15th century; it glows with the
warmth and beauty of the old knight's conception of chivalry and his
love for the great deeds and great men of the visionary past, and it
continually allures the reader by its fresh and vivid diction and by a
syntax which, though sometimes faulty, has almost always a certain naive
charm; "thystorye (i.e. the history) of the sayd Arthur," as Caxton long
ago declared, "is so gloryous and shynyng, that he is stalled in the
first place of the moost noble, beste and worthyest of the Crysten men";
it is not, however, as the first of a new species, but as the final
flower of an old that this glorious and shining book retains its place
in English literature.
Whatever may have been the effect of the wars and the growth of
industrial life in England in withdrawing men of the best abilities from
the pursuit of literature, neither these causes nor any other interfered
with the activity of writers of lesser powers. The amount of writing is
really astonishing, as is also its range. More than three hundred
separate works (exclusive of the large number still ascribed to Lydgate
and of the seventy printed by Caxton) have been made accessible by the
Early English Text Society and other public or private presses, and it
seems probable that an equal number remains as yet unpublished. No list
of these writings can be given here, but it may not be unprofitable to
indicate the range of interests by noting the classes of writing
represented. The classification is necessarily rough, as some writings
belong to more than one type. We may note, first, love poems,
allegorical and unallegorical, narrative, didactic, lyrical and
quasi-lyrical; poems autobiographical and exculpatory; poems of eulogy
and appeal for aid; tales of entertainment or instruction, in prose and
in verse; histories ancient and modern, and brief accounts of recent
historical events, in prose and in verse; prose romances and metrical
romances; legends and lives of saints, in prose and in verse; poems and
prose works of religious meditation, devotion and controversy; treatises
of religious instruction, in prose and in verse; ethical and
philosophical treatises, and ethical and prudential treatises; treatises
of government, of political economy, of foreign travel, of hygiene, of
surgery, of alchemy, of heraldry, of hunting and hawking and fishing, of
farming, of good manners, and of cooking and carving. Prosaic and
intended merely to serve practical uses as many of these were, verse is
the medium of expression as often as prose. Besides this large amount
and variety of English compositions, it must be remembered that much was
also written in Latin, and that Latin and French works of this and other
centuries were read by the educated classes.
Although the intellectual and spiritual movement which we call the
Italian Renaissance was not unknown in England in the 14th and 15th
centuries, it is not strange that it exercised no perceptible influence
upon English literature, except in the case of Chaucer. Chaucer was the
only English man of letters before the 16th century who knew Italian
literature. The Italians who visited England and the Englishmen who
visited Italy were interested, not in literature, but in scholarship.
Such studies as were pursued by Free, Grey, Flemming, Tilly, Gunthorpe
and others who went to Italy, made them better grammarians and
rhetoricians, and no doubt gave them a freer, wider outlook, but upon
their return to England they were immediately absorbed in administrative
cares, which left them little leisure for literary composition, even if
they had had any inclination to write. They prepared the way, however,
for the leaders of the great intellectual awakening which began in
England with Linacre, Colet, More and their fellows, and which finally
culminated in the age of Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Jonson, Gilbert,
Harvey and Harriott.
When the middle ages ceased in England it is impossible to say
definitely. Long after the new learning and culture of the Renaissance
had been introduced there, long after classical and Italian models were
eagerly chosen and followed, the epic and lyric models of the middle
ages were admired and imitated, and the ancient forms of the drama lived
side by side with the new until the time of Shakespeare himself. John
Skelton, although according to Erasmus "unum Britannicarum literarum
lumen ac decus," and although possessing great originality and vigour
both in diction and in versification when attacking his enemies or
indulging in playful rhyming, was not only a great admirer of Lydgate,
but equalled even the worst of his predecessors in aureate pedantries of
diction, in complicated impossibilities of syntax, and in meaningless
inversions of word-order whenever he wished to write elegant and
dignified literature. And not a little of the absurd diction of the
middle of the 16th century is merely a continuation of the bad ideals
and practices of the refined writers of the 15th.
In fine, the 15th century has, aside from its vigorous, though sometimes
coarse, popular productions, little that can interest the lover of
literature. It offers, however, in richest profusion problems for the
literary antiquarian and the student of the relations between social
conditions and literary productivity,--problems which have usually been
attacked only with the light weapons of irresponsible speculation, but
which may perhaps be solved by a careful comparative study of many
literatures and many periods. Moreover, although in the quality of its
literary output it is decidedly inferior to the 14th century, the amount
and the wide range of its productions indicate the gradual extension of
the habit of reading to classes of society that were previously
unlettered; and this was of great importance for the future of English
literature, just as the innumerable dramatic performances throughout
England were important in developing audiences for Marlowe and
Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher.
For bibliography see vol. ii. of the _Cambridge History of Literature_
(1909); and Brandl's _Geschichte der mittelenglischen Literatur_
(reprinted from Paul's _Grundriss der germanischen Philologie_).
Interesting general discussions may be found in the larger histories
of English Literature, such as Ten Brink's, Jusserand's, and (a little
more antiquated) Courthope's and Morley's. (J. M. Ma.)