ENGLISH LITERATURE 



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ENGLISH LITERATURE 



poet Wace. But Layamon makes 

 interesting additions from Welsh 

 oral tradition. The vei-se is ap- 

 parently intended to follow the 

 Old English model, but is rapidly 

 approximating to an English re- 

 production of the French octo- 

 syllabic or four foot verse, the long 

 line falling into two parts. Even in 

 religious and didactic works of no 

 great literary merit, the Ormulum, 

 the Bestiary, etc., we can note the 

 interaction of old English form and 

 feeling with the new influences ; 

 but the full effect of French in- 

 spiration in the begetting of a new 

 literature, fresh in spirit and in 

 form, is seen in the lyrics and the 

 romances of the 13th and early 

 14th centuries. 



Early Lyrics and Romances 



The earliest English lyrics, songs 

 like Sumer is i-cumen in, Lenten is 

 come with love to town, are the 

 work of poets familiar with the 

 French lyric, its rhythms and its 

 tone, gayer than that of Old English 

 poetry/ They blend in humorous 

 fashion lines English, French, and 

 Latin. The same is true of the first 

 English romances, all probably 

 translations, even when, as in King 

 Horn, Havelok the Dane, Richard 

 Coeur de Lion, Bevis of Hampton, 

 and Guy of Warwick, they deal 

 with native legendary themes. And 

 all the varieties of French romance, 

 Carlovingian, e.g. The Sowdone of 

 Babylon ; Arthurian, e.g. Lybaeus 

 Desconus ; Oriental, e.g. King Ali- 

 saunder ; classical, e.g. The De- 

 struction of Troy ; and miscellane- 

 ous romances of adventure, e.g. 

 Ipomydon, are represented. 



All lack the courtly tone of 

 French romance, being composed 

 for popular audiences who love a 

 genially told story of adventure 

 rather than refinement of senti- 

 ment. In their diction we see 

 the shaking together of the ele- 

 ments, English, French, and 

 Scandinavian, which make up the 

 rich tongue of Shakespeare and 

 Milton ; while in the metrical, not 

 alliterative, poems, we can trace 

 the process by which the syllabic 

 rhythm of French verse was 

 adjusted to the idiosyncracies of 

 stress and cadence in English pro- 

 nunciation. Outside romance and 

 lyric, poetry of the 13th and early 

 14th centuries is didactic the Cur- 

 sor Mundi, a long paraphrase of 

 Scripture history and Church le- 

 gend ; the Pricke of Conscience, a 

 summary of theology, erroneously 

 attributed to Richard Rolle of 

 Hampole, a writer of mystical 

 works in Latin and English prose ; 

 Robert of Gloucester's verse his- 

 tories, and other works. 



The 14th century witnessed the 

 victory of English over French, in 



the schools, the law courts, parlia- 

 ment, and even the court where 

 French still to some extent held its 

 own and French poets found ad- 

 mirers and patrons. In the same 

 century appears an English poetry 

 artistically on a level with the best 

 of France and Italy. The move- 

 ment to raise the artistic level of 

 poetry took two directions. One 

 was an artificial and abortive at- 

 tempt to revive and elaborate, 

 with or without the addition of 

 rhyme, the old alliterative verse 

 a movement which produced the 

 finest of the English romances, 

 Gawain and the Green Knight ; the 

 beautiful elegiac and symbolic 

 poem, The Pearl ; and the interest- 

 ing, if inchoate, satirical, didactic, 

 and mystical poem known as The 

 Vision of Piers Plowman, attributed 

 to William Langland, of whom the 

 poem supplies a shadowy outline. 



But the future of English poetry 

 lay with those who completed the 

 naturalisation of French poetry, 

 its regular metre, its refined and 

 courtly spirit, its grace and ele- 

 gance of style. John Gower, after 

 experimenting in a satirical Latin 

 poem, and a tedious didactic poem 

 in French, composed at the close of 

 his life a long poem in English, 

 Confessio Amantis, in which he sets 

 in the framework of the confession 

 of a lover to Genius, the priest of 

 Love, a series of stories drawn from 

 many medieval and classical sources 

 and narrated in smooth, equable, 

 well-turned octosyllabic couplets. 

 Spirit of Chaucer's Poetry 



Geoffrey Chaucer, however, did 

 more than this. Brought up at 

 court, and sent in later years on 

 mission^ o various lands, including 

 Italy, Chaucer was educated in the 

 tradition of contemporary French 

 poetry. His earliest poem, The 

 Book of the Duchess, is an elegant 

 but jejune dream allegory, a love 

 poem whose incidents are repre- 

 sented as happening in a dream, 

 the characters being personified 

 abstractions. But the majority of 

 Chaucer's extant poems were 

 written after he had made acquaint- 

 ance with the Italian poetry of 

 Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. 



The House of Fame, an in- 

 complete, ironical allegory, shows 

 the influence of Dante in style 

 and incident. The Parliament 

 of Fowls enriched its decorative 

 fabric with borrowings from Boc- 

 caccio. Chaucer's first and 

 greatest dramatic story, Troilus 

 and Criseyde, is based on the 

 same poet's Filostrato with an in- 

 cident from the Teseide. The 

 Teseide itself is the source of the 

 chivalrous story of Palamon and 

 Arcite which became the Knight's 

 Tale in The Canterbury Tales. The 



stories collected in the Legend of 

 Good Women are drawn from Ovid 

 and from a couple of Latin works 

 by Boccaccio. The charming Pro- 

 logue to the poem is Chaucer's own. 



But much as Chaucer learned 

 from Italy, the more serious and 

 idealistic spirit of Dante and Pet- 

 rarch did not pass into his poetry. 

 That transmission was reserved 

 for the 16th century. To the end 

 the spirit of Chaucer's poetry is 

 that of the French love-poetry, 

 allegoric and romantic, qualified by 

 his own bent towards a more real- 

 istic and humorous handling of 

 conventional themes. The latter 

 bent achieved its complete eman- 

 cipation in the Prologue to The 

 Canterbury Tales, with its vivid 

 and ironical pictures of all the 

 social types of the England of the 

 14th century. 



Chaucer's Successors 



Some of the tales themselves 

 are probably earlier compositions, 

 but the best are in the vein of the 

 Prologue, fabliaux, short satiric 

 tales, told with consummate dra- 

 matic and poetic art. Only in the 

 fragment of The Squire's Tale does 

 the poet reopen the well of pure 

 and enchanting romance. Chaucer 

 gave England a courtly poetry 

 superior in dramatic and poetic in- 

 terest to the poetry of France. He 

 embellished it with beauties de- 

 rived from the great Italian poets. 

 He breathed into the whole a spirit 

 entirely English, and in his hands 

 the English language attained to all 

 but the highest perfection of poeti- 

 cal diction and metrical beauty. 



Chaucer had no adequate suc- 

 cessors for nearly two centuries. 

 John Lydgate and Thomas Occleve 

 kept faintly burning the tradi- 

 tion of didactic allegory and story, 

 and handed on the lamp to its last 

 representative, Stephen Hawes, 

 author, in Henry Vll's reign, of 

 The Pastime of Pleasure. In Scot- 

 land this courtly poetry enjoyed 

 a brighter S. Martin's summer. 



The popular literature of the 

 15th century is of greater interest 

 than the courtly. The religious 

 drama, the mysteries and miracle 

 plays, reached their highest level 

 in the 14th century, and gave place 

 in the 15th to the moralities. To 

 the 15th century probably belong 

 also the oldest of the ballads which, 

 taking the place of the longer lays, 

 preserved the quintessence of the 

 old romances in a way that was to 

 quicken the romantic spirit with 

 surprising and delightful results in. 

 later English poetry. Of artistic 

 prose in Middle English, the ten- 

 tative beginnings may be best 

 studied in Chaucer's translation of. 

 Boethius. The 15th century wit- 

 nessed a fairly steady advance of 



