Outlines of English and American Literature. William J. Long

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       that, for all the realm of France

       Would have dared to bind the bell

       about the cat's neck.

      The second selection is from Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" (cir. 1375). It was written "in the French manner" with rime and meter, for the upper classes, and shows the difference between literary English and the speech of the common people:

      In th' olde dayës of the Kyng Arthour,

       Of which that Britons speken greet honour,

       Al was this land fulfild of fayerye.

       The elf-queene with hir joly companye

       Dauncëd ful ofte in many a grene mede;

       This was the olde opinion, as I rede.

       I speke of manye hundred yeres ago;

       But now kan no man see none elves mo.

      The next two selections (written cir. 1450) show how rapidly the language was approaching modern English. The prose, from Malory's Morte d' Arthur, is the selection that Tennyson closely followed in his "Passing of Arthur." The poetry, from the ballad of "Robin Hood and the Monk," is probably a fifteenth-century version of a much older English song:

      "'Therefore,' sayd Arthur unto Syr Bedwere, 'take thou Excalybur my good swerde, and goo with it, to yonder water syde, and whan thou comest there I charge the throwe my swerde in that water, and come ageyn and telle me what thou there seest.'

      "'My lord,' sayd Bedwere, 'your commaundement shal be doon, and lyghtly brynge you worde ageyn.'

      "So Syr Bedwere departed; and by the waye he behelde that noble swerde, that the pomel and the hafte was al of precyous stones; and thenne he sayd to hym self, 'Yf I throwe this ryche swerde in the water, thereof shal never come good, but harme and losse.' And thenne Syr Bedwere hydde Excalybur under a tree."

      In somer, when the shawes be sheyne,

       And leves be large and long,

       Hit is full mery in feyr foreste

       To here the foulys song:

      To se the dere draw to the dale,

       And leve the hillës hee,

       And shadow hem in the levës grene,

       Under the grene-wode tre.

      HISTORICAL OUTLINE. The history of England during this period is largely a record of strife and confusion. The struggle of the House of Commons against the despotism of kings; the Hundred Years War with France, in which those whose fathers had been Celts, Danes, Saxons, Normans, were now fighting shoulder to shoulder as Englishmen all; the suffering of the common people, resulting in the Peasant Rebellion; the barbarity of the nobles, who were destroying one another in the Wars of the Roses; the beginning of commerce and manufacturing, following the lead of Holland, and the rise of a powerful middle class; the belated appearance of the Renaissance, welcomed by a few scholars but unnoticed by the masses of people, who remained in dense ignorance—even such a brief catalogue suggests that many books must be read before we can enter into the spirit of fourteenth-century England. We shall note here only two circumstances, which may help us to understand Chaucer and the age in which he lived.

      [Sidenote: MODERN PROBLEMS]

      The first is that the age of Chaucer, if examined carefully, shows many striking resemblances to our own. It was, for example, an age of warfare; and, as in our own age of hideous inventions, military methods were all upset by the discovery that the foot soldier with his blunderbuss was more potent than the panoplied knight on horseback. While war raged abroad, there was no end of labor troubles at home, strikes, "lockouts," assaults on imported workmen (the Flemish weavers brought in by Edward III), and no end of experimental laws to remedy the evil. The Turk came into Europe, introducing the Eastern and the Balkan questions, which have ever since troubled us. Imperialism was rampant, in Edward's claim to France, for example, or in John of Gaunt's attempt to annex Castile. Even "feminism" was in the air, and its merits were shrewdly debated by Chaucer's Wife of Bath and his Clerk of Oxenford. A dozen other "modern" examples might be given, but the sum of the matter is this: that there is hardly a social or political or economic problem of the past fifty years that was not violently agitated in the latter half of the fourteenth century. [Footnote: See Kittredge, Chaucer and his Poetry (1915), pp. 2–5.]

      [Sidenote: REALISTIC POETRY]

      A second interesting circumstance is that this medieval age produced two poets, Langland and Chaucer, who were more realistic even than present-day writers in their portrayal of life, and who together gave us such a picture of English society as no other poets have ever equaled. Langland wrote his Piers Plowman in the familiar Anglo-Saxon style for the common people, and pictured their life to the letter; while Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales, a poem shaped after Italian and French models, portraying the holiday side of the middle and upper classes. Langland drew a terrible picture of a degraded land, desperately in need of justice, of education, of reform in church and state; Chaucer showed a gay company of pilgrims riding through a prosperous country which he called his "Merrie England." Perhaps the one thing in common with these two poets, the early types of Puritan and Cavalier, was their attitude towards democracy. Langland preached the gospel of labor, far more powerfully than Carlyle ever preached it, and exalted honest work as the patent of nobility. Chaucer, writing for the court, mingled his characters in the most democratic kind of fellowship and, though a knight rode at the head of his procession, put into the mouth of the Wife of Bath his definition of a gentleman:

      Loke who that is most vertuous alway,

       Privee and apert, [1] and most entendeth aye

       To do the gentle dedes that he can,

       And take him for the grettest gentilman.

      [Footnote [1]: Secretly and openly.]

      * * * * *

      GEOFFREY CHAUCER (cir. 1340–1400)

      "Of Chaucer truly I know not whether to marvel more, either that he in

       that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age walk

       so stumblingly after him."

       (Philip Sidney, cir. 1581)

      It was the habit of Old-English chieftains to take their scops with them into battle, to the end that the scop's poem might be true to the outer world of fact as well as to the inner world of ideals. The search for "local color" is, therefore, not the newest thing in fiction but the oldest thing in poetry. Chaucer, the first in time of our great English poets, was true to this old tradition. He was page, squire, soldier, statesman, diplomat, traveler; and then he was a poet, who portrayed in verse the many-colored life which he knew intimately at first hand.

      [Illustration: CHAUCER]

      For example, Chaucer had to describe a tournament, in the Knight's Tale; but instead of using his imagination, as other romancers had always done, he drew a vivid picture of one of those gorgeous pageants of decaying chivalry with which London diverted the French king, who had been brought prisoner to the city after the victory of the Black Prince at Poitiers. So with his Tabard Inn, which is a real СКАЧАТЬ