Outlines of English and American Literature Part 4

Their stories in prose or verse were extremely fanciful, in marked contrast with the stern, somber poetry of the Anglo-Saxons.

The most notable works of the Norman-French period are: Geoffrey's _History of the Kings of Britain_, which preserved in Latin prose the native legends of King Arthur; Layamon's _Brut_, a riming chronicle or verse history in the native tongue; many metrical romances, or stories of love, chivalry, magic and religion; and various popular songs and ballads. The greatest poet of the period is the unknown author of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (a metrical romance) and probably also of "The Pearl," a beautiful elegy, which is our earliest _In Memoriam_.

SELECTIONS FOR READING. Without special study of Old English it is impossible to read our earliest literature. The beginner may, however, enter into the spirit of that literature by means of various modern versions, such as the following:

_Beowulf_. Garnett's Beowulf (Ginn and Company), a literal translation, is useful to those who study Anglo-Saxon, but is not very readable. The same may be said of Gummere's The Oldest English Epic, which follows the verse form of the original. Two of the best versions for the beginner are Child's Beowulf, in Riverside Literature Series (Houghton), and Earle's The Deeds of Beowulf (Clarendon Press).

_Anglo-Saxon Poetry_. The Seafarer, The Wanderer, The Husband's Message (or Love Letter), Deor's Lament, Riddles, Battle of Brunanburh, selections from The Christ, Andreas, Elene, Vision of the Rood, and The Phoenix,--all these are found in an excellent little volume, Cook and Tinker, Translations from Old English Poetry (Ginn and Company).

_Anglo-Saxon Prose_. Good selections in Cook and Tinker, Translations from Old English Prose (Ginn and Company). Bede's History, translated in Everyman's Library (Dutton) and in the Bohn Library (Macmillan). In the same volume of the Bohn Library is a translation of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Alfred's Orosius (with stories of early exploration) translated in Pauli's Life of Alfred.

_Norman-French Period_. Selections in Manly, English Poetry, and English Prose (Ginn and Company); also in Morris and Skeat, Specimens of Early English (Clarendon Press). The Song of Roland in Riverside Literature Series, and in King's Cla.s.sics. Selected metrical romances in Ellis, Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances (Bohn Library); also in Morley, Early English Prose Romances, and in Carisbrooke Library Series. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, modernized by Weston, in Arthurian Romances Series.

Andrew Lang, Auca.s.sin and Nicolette (Crowell). The Pearl, translated by Jewett (Crowell), and by Weir Mitch.e.l.l (Century).

Selections from Layamon's Brut in Morley, English Writers, Vol.

III. Geoffrey's History in Everyman's Library, and in King's Cla.s.sics. The Arthurian legends in The Mabinogion (Everyman's Library); also in Sidney Lanier's The Boy's King Arthur and The Boy's Mabinogion (Scribner). A good single volume containing the best of Middle-English literature, with notes, is Cook, A Literary Middle-English Reader (Ginn and Company).

BIBLIOGRAPHY. For extended works covering the entire field of English history and literature, and for a list of the best anthologies, school texts, etc., see the General Bibliography. The following works are of special interest in studying early English literature.

_HISTORY_. Allen, Anglo-Saxon Britain; Turner, History of the Anglo-Saxons; Ramsay, The Foundations of England; Freeman, Old English History; Cook, Life of Alfred; Freeman, Short History of the Norman Conquest; Jewett, Story of the Normans, in Stories of the Nations.

_LITERATURE_. Brooke, History of Early English Literature; Jusserand, Literary History of the English People, Vol. I; Ten Brink, English Literature, Vol. I; Lewis, Beginnings of English Literature; Schofield, English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer; Brother Azarias, Development of Old-English Thought; Mitch.e.l.l, From Celt to Tudor; Newell, King Arthur and the Round Table. A more advanced work on Arthur is Rhys, Studies in the Arthurian Legends.

_FICTION AND POETRY_. Kingsley, Hereward the Wake; Lytton, Harold Last of the Saxon Kings; Scott, Ivanhoe; Kipling, Puck of Pook's Hill; Jane Porter, Scottish Chiefs; Shakespeare, King John; Tennyson, Becket, and The Idylls of the King; Gray, The Bard; Bates and Coman, English History Told by English Poets.

CHAPTER III

THE AGE OF CHAUCER AND THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING (1350-1550)

For out of olde feldes, as men seith, Cometh al this newe corn fro yeer te yere; And out of olde bokes, in good feith, Cometh all this newe science that men lere.

Chaucer, "Parliament of Foules"

SPECIMENS OF THE LANGUAGE. Our first selection, from _Piers Plowman_ (_cir._ 1362), is the satire of Belling the Cat. The language is that of the common people, and the verse is in the old Saxon manner, with accent and alliteration. The scene is a council of rats and mice (common people) called to consider how best to deal with the cat (court), and it satirizes the popular agitators who declaim against the government. The speaker is a rat, "a raton of renon, most renable of tonge":

"I have y-seen segges," quod he, "in the cite of London Beren beighes ful brighte abouten here nekkes....

Were there a belle on here beighe, certes, as me thynketh, Men myghte wite where thei went, and awei renne!

And right so," quod this raton, "reson me sheweth To bugge a belle of bra.s.se or of brighte sylver, And knitten on a colere for owre comune profit, And hangen it upon the cattes hals; than hear we mowen Where he ritt or rest or renneth to playe." ...

Alle this route of ratones to this reson thei a.s.sented; Ac tho the belle was y-bought and on the beighe hanged, Ther ne was ratoun in alle the route, for alle the rewme of Fraunce, That dorst have y-bounden the belle aboute the cattis nekke.

"I have seen creatures" (dogs), quoth he, "in the city of London Bearing collars full bright around their necks....

Were there a bell on those collars, a.s.suredly, in my opinion, One might know where the dogs go, and run away from them!

And right so," quoth this rat, "reason suggests to me To buy a bell of bra.s.s or of bright silver, And tie it on a collar for our common profit, And hang it on the cat's neck; in order that we may hear Where he rides or rests or runneth to play." ...

All this rout (crowd) of rats to this reasoning a.s.sented; But when the bell was bought and hanged on the collar, There was not a rat in the crowd 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 cla.s.ses, and shows the difference between literary English and the speech of the common people:

In th' olde dayes 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 Daunced 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 "Pa.s.sing 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 n.o.ble 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 hilles hee, And shadow hem in the leves 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 n.o.bles, 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 cla.s.s; the belated appearance of the Renaissance, welcomed by a few scholars but unnoticed by the ma.s.ses 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 circ.u.mstances, 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," a.s.saults 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 circ.u.mstance 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 cla.s.ses.

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 att.i.tude towards democracy.

Langland preached the gospel of labor, far more powerfully than Carlyle ever preached it, and exalted honest work as the patent of n.o.bility. Chaucer, writing for the court, mingled his characters in the most democratic kind of fellows.h.i.+p 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 English inn, and with his Pilgrims, who are real pilgrims; and so with every other scene or character he described. His specialty was human nature, his strong point observation, his method essentially modern. And by "modern" we mean that he portrayed the men and women of his own day so well, with such sympathy and humor and wisdom, that we recognize and welcome them as friends or neighbors, who are the same in all ages. From this viewpoint Chaucer is more modern than Tennyson or Longfellow.