Book: A History of English Literature

R >> Robert Huntington Fletcher >> A History of English Literature




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.

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