I
Two periods of our early history promise most for the future of English
literature—the end of the seventh with the eighth century; the end of
the twelfth century with the thirteenth.
In the first a flourishing vernacular poetry is secondary in importance
to the intellectual accomplishment of men like Bede and Alcuin (to name
only the greatest and the last of a line of scholars and teachers) who,
drawing their inspiration from Ireland and still more from Italy direct,
made all the knowledge of the time their own, and learned to move easily
in the disciplined forms of Latin prose.
During the second the impulse again came from without. In
twelfth-century France the creative imagination was set free. In
England, which from the beginning of the tenth century had depended more
and more on France for guidance, the nobles, clergy, and entertainers,
in whose hands lay the fortunes of literature, had a community of
interest with their French compeers that has never since been
approached. So England shared early in the break with tradition; and
during the thirteenth century the native stock is almost hidden by the
brilliant growth of a new graft.
Every activity of the mind was quickened. A luxuriant invention of forms
distinguished the Gothic style in architecture. All the decorative arts
showed a parallel enrichment. Oxford (at least to insular eyes) was
beginning to rival Paris in learning, and to contribute to the
over-production of clerks which at first extended the province of the
Church, and finally, by breaking the bounds set between ecclesiastics
and laymen, played an important part in the secularization of letters.
The friars, whose foundation was the last great reform of the mediaeval
Church, were at the height of their good fame; and one of them, the
Franciscan Roger Bacon, by his work in philosophy, criticism, and
physical science, raised the name of English thinkers to an eminence
unattained since Bede. If among the older monastic orders feverish and
sometimes extravagant reforms are symptoms of decline, the richness of
Latin chronicles like those of Matthew Paris of St. Albans is evidence
that in some of the great abbeys the monks were still learned and
eloquent. Nor was Latin the only medium in which educated Englishmen
were at home. They wrote French familiarly, and to some extent repaid
their debt to France by transcribing and preserving Continental
compositions that would else have perished.
Apart from all these activities, the manifestations of a new spirit in
English vernacular works are so important, and the break with the past
is so sharp, that the late twelfth century and the thirteenth would be
chosen with more justice than Chaucer's time as the starting-point for a
study of modern literature.
Then romance was established in English, whether we use the word to mean
the imaginative searching of dark places, or in the more general sense
of story-telling unhampered by a too strict regard for facts. Nothing is
more remarkable in pre-Conquest works than the Anglo-Saxon's dislike of
exaggeration and his devotion to plain matter of fact. Here is the
account of the whales in the far North that King Alfred received from
Ohthere (a Norseman, of course, but it is indifferent):—'they are eight
and forty ells long, and the biggest fifty ells long'. Compare with this
parsimony the full-blooded description of the griffins in
_Mandeville_:—'But o griffoun hath the body more gret, and is more
strong, þanne eight lyouns, of suche lyouns as ben o this half; and more
gret and strongere þan an hundred egles suche as we han amonges vs,
&c.', and you have a rough measure of the progress of fiction.
To take pleasure in stories is not a privilege reserved for favoured
generations: but special conditions had transformed this pleasure into a
passion. When Edward I became King in 1272, Western Europe had enjoyed a
long period of internal peace, during which national hatreds burnt low.
The breaking down of barriers between Bretons and French, Welsh and
English, brought into the main stream of European literature the Celtic
vein of idealism and delicate fancy. At the universities, in the
Crusades, in the pilgrimages to Rome or Compostella, the nations
mingled, each bringing from home some contribution to the common stock
of stories; each gaining new experiences of the outside world, fusing
them, and repeating them with embellishments. To those who stayed at
home came the minstrels in the heyday of their craft—they were freemen
of every Christian land who reported whatever was marvellous or
amusing—and at second hand the colours of the rediscovered world seemed
no less brave. It was an age greedy for entertainment that fed a rich
sense of comedy on the jostling life around it; and to serve its ideals
called up the great men of the past—Orpheus opening the way to
fairyland, the heroes of the Trojan war, Alexander; Arthur and the
Knights of the Round Table and Merlin the enchanter; Charlemagne with
his peers—or won back from the shadows not Eurydice alone, but Helen
and Criseyde, Guinevere and Ysolde, Rymenhild and Blauncheflour.
While she still claimed to direct public taste, the Church could not be
indifferent to the spread of romance. A policy of uniform repression was
no longer possible. Her real power to suppress books was ineffective to
bind busy tongues and minds; popular movements were assured of a measure
of practical tolerance when order competed with order and church with
church for the goodwill of the people; and even if the problem had been
well defined, a disciplined attitude unvarying throughout all the
divisions of the Church was not to be expected when her mantle covered
clerks ranging in character from the strictest ascetic to that older
Falstaff who passed under the name of Golias and found his own Muse in
the tavern,—
_Tales versus facio quale vinum bibo;
Nihil possum scribere nisi sumpto cibo;
Nihil valet penitus quod ieiunus scribo,—
Nasonem post calices carmine praeibo!_
So it came about that while some of the clergy denounced all minstrels
as 'ministers of Satan', others made a truce with the more honest among
them, and helped them to add to their repertories the lives of saints.
Officially 'trifles and trotevales' were still censured: but it seemed
good to mould the _chansons de geste_ to pious uses,[1] and to purify
the court of King Arthur, which popularity had led into dissolute ways,
by introducing the quest of the Graal. And if Rolle preached sound
doctrine when he ranked among the Sins of the Mouth 'to syng seculere
sanges and lufe þam', their style and music were not despised as baits
to catch the ears of the frivolous: when a singer began
Ase y me rod þis ender dai
By grene wode to seche play,
Mid herte y þohte al on a may,
Suetest of alle þinge,—
the lover of secular songs would be tempted to listen; but he would stay
to hear a song of the Joys of the Virgin, to whose cult the period owes
its best devotional poetry.
[Foot-note 1: For illustrations from Old French, see _Les Légendes
Épiques_ by Professor Joseph Bédier, 4 vols., Paris 1907-, a book that
maintains the easy pre-eminence of the French school in the appreciation
of mediaeval literature.]
The power of the Church to mould the early growth of vernacular
literature is so often manifested that there is a risk of
underestimating the compromises and surrenders which are the signs of
its wane. The figures of romance invaded the churches themselves,
creeping into the carvings of the portals, along the choir-stalls, and
into the historiated margins of the service books. Ecclesiastics
collected and multiplied stories to adorn their sermons or illustrate
their manuals of vices and virtues. In the lives of saints marvels
accumulated until the word 'legend' became a synonym for an untrue tale.
Though there are moments in the fourteenth century when the
preponderance of the clerical over the secular element in literature
seems as great as ever, by the end of the Middle Ages the trend of the
conflict is plain. It is the Church that draws back to attend to her own
defences, which the domestic growth of pious fictions has made
everywhere vulnerable. But imaginative literature, growing always
stronger and more confident, wins full secular liberty.
Emancipation from the bondage of fact, and to some extent from
ecclesiastical censorship, coincided with the acquisition of a new
freedom in the form of English poetry. Old English had a single
metre—the long alliterative line without rime. It was best suited to
narrative; it was unmusical in the sense that it could not be sung; it
had marked proclivities towards rant and noise; and like blank verse it
degenerated easily into mongrel prose.
Degeneration was far advanced in the eleventh century; and about the end
of the twelfth some large-scale experiments show that writers were no
longer content with the old medium. In _Layamon_, the last great poem in
this metre before the fourteenth century, internal rime and assonance
are common. Orm adopted the unrimed _septenarius_ from Latin, but
counted his syllables so faithfully as to produce an intolerable
monotony. Then French influence turned the scale swiftly and decisively
in favour of rime, so that in the extant poetry of the thirteenth
century alliteration is a secondary principle or a casual ornament, but
never takes the place of rime.
The sudden and complete eclipse of a measure so firmly rooted in
tradition is surprising enough; but the wealth and elaborateness of the
new forms that replaced it are still more matter for wonder. It is
natural to think of the poets before Chaucer as children learning their
art slowly and painfully, and often stumbling on the way. Yet in this
one point of metrical technique they seem to reach mastery at a bound.
That the development of verse forms took place outside of English is
part of the explanation. Rimed verse had its origin in Church Latin. In
the monastic schools the theory of classical and post-classical metres
was a principal study; and the practical art of chant was indispensable
for the proper conduct of the services. Under these favourable
conditions technical development was rapid, so that in such an early
example of the rimed stanza as the following, taken from a poem that
Godescalc wrote in exile about the year 845,—
_Magis mihi, miserule,
Flere libet, puerule,
Plus plorare quam cantare
Carmen tale iubes quale,
Amor care.
O, cur iubes canere?[2]—_
the arrangement of longer and shorter lines, the management of rime or
assonance, and the studied grouping of consonant sounds, give rather the
impression of too much than too little artifice.
[Foot-note 2: _Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini_, vol. iii (ed. L. Traube), p.
731.]
From Church Latin rime passed into French, and with the twelfth century
entered on a new course of development at the hands of the _trouvères_
and the minstrels. The _trouvères_, or 'makers', studied versification
and music as a profession, and competed in the weaving of ingenious
patterns. Since their living depended on pleasing their audience, those
minstrels who were not themselves composers spared no pains to sing or
recite well the compositions of others; and good execution encouraged
poets to try more difficult forms.
The varied results obtained in two such excellent schools of experience
were offered to the English poets of the thirteenth century in exchange
for the monotony of the long line; and their choice was unhesitating. In
an age of lyrical poetry they learned to sing where before they could
only declaim: and because the great age of craftsmanship had begun, the
most intricate patterns pleased them best. Chaucer was perhaps not yet
born when the over-elaboration of riming metres in English drew a
protest from Robert Mannyng:[3] and when, after a period of hesitancy,
rimed verse regained its prestige in Chaucer's prime, nameless writers
again chose or invented complex stanza forms and sustained them
throughout long poems. If _The Pearl_ stood alone it might be accounted
a literary _tour de force_: the York and Towneley plays compel the
conclusion that a high standard of metrical workmanship was appreciated
by the common people.
[Foot-note 3:
If it were made in _ryme couwee_,
Or in strangere, or _enterlacé_,
Þat rede Inglis it ere inowe
Þat couthe not haf coppled a kowe,
Þat outhere in _couwee_ or in _baston_
Som suld haf ben fordon.
(_Chronicle_, Prologue, ll. 85 ff.)]
Thus far, by way of generalization and without the _caveats_ proper to a
literary history, I have indicated some aspects of the preceding period
that are important for an understanding of the fourteenth century. But
it would be misleading to pass on without a word of reservation. There
is reason to suppose that the extant texts from the thirteenth century
give a truer reflection of the tastes of the upper classes, who were in
closest contact with the French, than of the tastes of the people. But
however this may be, they do not authorize us to speak for every part of
the country. All the significant texts come from the East or the
South—especially the western districts of the South, where an
exceptional activity is perhaps to be connected with the old preference
of the court for Winchester. In the North and the North-West a silence
of five centuries is hardly broken.