An Outline History of English Literature PDF

AN OUTLINE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE  Other books by the author: An Introduction to the Study of Literature  Published by Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2015 7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj...

AN OUTLINE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE  Other books by the author: An Introduction to the Study of Literature  Published by Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2015 7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj New Delhi 110002 Sales Centres: Allahabad Bengaluru Chennai Hyderabad Jaipur Kathmandu Kolkata Mumbai Edition Copyright © Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. First impression 2015 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The moral right of the author has been asserted. Printed by XXXXXX This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.s  Contents Preface 1. Introductory 2. English Literature Before Chaucer (500—1340) 3. The Age of Chaucer (1340-1400) 4. From Chaucer to Tottel’s Miscellany (1400-1557) 5. Development of Drama to 1561 6. The Age of Shakespeare (1558-1625): Non-Dramatic Verse 7. The Age of Shakespeare: Drama 8. The Age of Shakespeare: Prose 9. The Age of Milton (1625-1660): Milton 10. The Age of Milton: Other Poets and Prose Writers 11. The Age of Dryden (1660-1700): Verse 12. The Age of Dryden: Prose and Drama 13. The Age of Pope (1700-1745): Verse 14. The Age of Pope: Prose and Drama 15. The Age of Johnson (1745-1798): General Prose 16. The Age of Johnson: The Novel 17. The Age of Johnson: Verse 18. The Age of Wordsworth (1798-1832): The Older Poets 19. The Age of Wordsworth: The Younger Poets 20. The Age of Wordsworth: General Prose 21. The Age of Wordsworth: The Novel 22. The Age of Tennyson (1832-1887): Verse 23. The Age of Tennyson: General Prose 24. The Age of Tennyson: The Novel 25. The Age of Hardy (1887-1928) 26. The Present Age (1930-1955)  Preface he purpose and plan of this little book may easily be gathered from the introductory chapter. Only a few words of preface, therefore, are needed. As I conceive it, a history of English literature, however brief, should still be a history of English literature in fact as well as in name; and for a history something more is required than a list of authors and their books, and even than a chronologically arranged collection of biographical sketches and critical appreciations. It is true that a nation’s literature is made up of the works of individual writers, and that for the ordinary purposes of study these writers may be detached from their surroundings and treated separately. But we cannot get a history of such literature unless and until each one has been put into his place in the sequence of things and considered with reference to that great body of literary production of which his work must now be regarded as a part. A history of English literature, then, must be interested primarily in English literature as a whole. Its chief aim should be to give a clear and systematic account, not of the achievements of successive great writers merely, as such, but of national changes and development.  This does not imply neglect of the personal factor. On the contrary, it brings the personal factor into relief; for if each writer is to be considered with reference to literature as a whole, one main subject of enquiry must be the nature and value of his particular contribution to that whole. But it does mean that, together with the personal factor, the great general movement of literature from age to age has to be investigated, and that every writer has to be interpreted in his connection with this general movement. To exhibit the interplay of the personal and the impersonal in the making of history is, indeed, one of the fundamentals of the historian’s task; and since history, properly understood, is as much concerned with the explanation of facts as with the facts themselves, it follows that a history of English literature must also include some record of the forces which, period by period, have combined in the transformation of literary standards and tastes. I have put these ideas, into different, and perhaps rather simpler language in my introductory chapter. Here, therefore, I have only to say that this Outline History represents a modest attempt towards a real history of English literature in the sense which I attach to the term. One special feature of the book may be noted. It appears to be an accepted principle with many critics that literature is produced, as it were, in a vacuum, and by men who stand outside all conditions of time and place, and that therefore it may best be studied as a thing in itself. I, on the other hand, believe that the literature of any age is necessarily shaped and coloured by all the elements which entered into the civilisation of that age. So far as the limits of my space would allow, therefore, I have tried always to suggest the vital relationship between English literature and English life. William Henry Hudson  1 Introductory 1. What Is a History of English Literature? Perhaps it seems hardly worthwhile to put this question, because the answer to it is so very obvious. A history of English literature, we reply without a moment’s hesitation, is simply a chronological account of the books which have been written in the English language, and—since we cannot think of a book without thinking also of its author—of the men who wrote them. In a rough way, this answer is all right so far as it goes. But it is too vague, and it does not go far enough. It will be well for us, therefore, to pause at the outset of our own work to consider a little closely what it is that a history of English literature, however brief, really involves. Stress may first of all be laid upon the personal element in it which our answer already recognises. We cannot, we say, think of a book without thinking also of its author. Every book, in other words, takes us back immediately to the man behind it, of whose genius it is a product, and whose thoughts and feelings it embodies. In a history of English literature, therefore, we must fix attention upon the personalities of the men by whom this literature has been made. In a short sketch we cannot, of course, examine in detail their lives, experiences, and characters. This must be left for a more extended study. But we must try nonetheless to understand the distinctive quality in the genius of each man who comes before us. The reason of this is clear. Genius means many things, but at bottom it means strength of personality and, as a consequence, what we call originality. Every great writer, it has been well said, brings one absolutely new thing into the world—himself, and it is just because he puts this one new thing into what he writes that his work bears its own special hallmark, and has something about it which makes it unlike the work done by anyone else. In the detailed study of any great writer this essential element of individuality is the chief feature to be considered, and in an historical survey, no matter how slight, it must be carefully noted too, for otherwise we cannot learn why such a writer counts as he does in the literature of his nation. A history of English literature, then, is concerned to indicate the nature and value of the particular contribution which each writer personally has made to that literature. This, however, is only a small part of its task. A mere list of authors, taken separately, and of their books, does not constitute a history of literature, for literature as a whole grows and changes from generation to generation, and in tracing this growth, history must show the place which each writer occupies in it, and his relations with those who went before, and with those who came after him. A writer of exceptionally powerful personality is certain to stamp his impress upon his age, and amongst those who follow him many will always be found who, whether they are conscious of it or not, reveal his influence in their thought and style. Moreover, the popularity obtained by any writer with a particular kind of work will naturally breed imitations, and what has once been done successfully will for a time be done again and again. In this way ‘schools’ are formed and ‘movements’ initiated, which last for a while, and then, when tastes presently change, and other ‘schools’ and ‘movements’ arise, disappear. Thus we speak of the ’school’ of Pope, meaning the whole succession of poets who wrote in the particular style which he had brought to perfection and made current; of the ‘classic’ movement in verse which, following his lead, these writers carried on; of the ‘romantic’ movement in prose fiction which owed its principal impulse to Scott’s historical novels; and so on. Such schools and movements always play a large part in the development of literature, and are often as important to the student as the individual writers themselves. It must be remembered, too, that even the most original men—the men who are most completely themselves—have their intellectual ancestry, and are often deeply indebted to others for inspiration and example. I have just spoken of Pope’s particular style; but this was not his own independent creation; and while it assumed perfection in his hands, it was really the final result of a long ‘movement’ in verse which had already found one great representative in his immediate predecessor, Dryden. Scott was educated in a ‘romantic’ school before he became in his turn a supreme master in that school. We frequently think of Shakespeare, as if he stood altogether apart in the literature of his day, but in fact, he took the drama up at the point which it had reached when he began to write for the stage, and followed the lines which his forerunners had laid down. The history of literature, then, must take account of all these things. It must bring out the relationships between writer and writer and group and group; it must trace the rise, growth, and decline of ‘schools’ and ‘movements’; and whenever any given writer had been specially prominent in their evolution, it must consider the influence he exerted in making literature either by keeping it in the old channels or in directing it into new.  We have, however, to go much farther even than this. I have said that literature as a whole grows and changes from generation to generation. This means that, as each age has its own particular lines of interest and its own particular way of thinking and feeling about things, so the literature which it produces is governed by certain prevailing tastes; that these tastes last for a time only; and that the tastes of one age are sure to differ, and are often found to differ enormously, from those of every other. Near as we are to the great Victorian era—which was simply the era of our fathers—there is much in its literature which now seems as foreign to us as its fashions in dress. We all know that authors did not write and that there was no public to enjoy the same kind of poetry in Pope’s day as in Spenser’s, or in Scott’s day as in Pope’s. In Spenser’s day there was boundless enthusiasm for The Faery Queene; in Pope’s, for the Essay on Man; in Scott’s, for The Lady of the Lake. Now the great central purpose of a history of literature—the purpose to which everything else in it is secondary and subordinate—is to give a clear account of the whole transformation of literature from period to period, and so far as possible to mark out the causes which have combined to produce it. Among these causes, as I have already suggested, we have to reckon the influence of individual men; for a great writer will often create a new taste, and make a fresh departure in the literature of his time. Yet, while full weight must be given to personal initiative and example, we must be careful not to emphasise their importance to the exclusion of all other considerations. Even the greatest genius is necessarily moulded by the culture, ideals, and mental and moral tendencies of the world into which he is born, and the character of what he produces is therefore to a large extent determined by these. If a man of powerful personality stamps his impress upon his age, as I have said, he also takes the impress of his age, and the success of his work, entirely original as it may seem to be, is often due to the way in which it meets or anticipates the general taste of the public to which he appeals. In this sense we have to regard every writer as a ‘product’ of his time, and so regarding him, we have to inquire into the nature of the influences which shaped his thought, directed his taste, and helped to give a distinctive character to his work. Such inquiry, it is evident, will often lead us rather far afield. Sometimes the influences in question are purely ‘literary’; that is, they belong to the sphere of books and scholarship. Thus, for example, one of the principal forces behind the English literature of the Elizabethan era was the immense enthusiasm for the Greek and Latin classics which had come with what we call the Renaissance; our writers and readers alike were under the powerful spell of Italian literature during the same period, under that of French literature at the end of the seventeenth century, under that of German literature a hundred years later; while, to give one more illustration, the re-awakening, from about 1750 onward, of popular interest in the long-neglected art and literature of the middle ages inspired that ‘medieval revival’ which presently culminated in Coleridge and Scott. In such cases we see how literary influences introduce new currents of taste, which carry even the most independent writers along with them. But often the influences which most profoundly affect literature are not ‘literary’; they are influences which belong, not to books and scholarship, but to general life, politics, society. Whatever brings fresh interests and ideas into the life of an age, whatever tends to modify its ways of thought and feeling and to change its attitude towards men and things, must of necessity enter as a vital factor into the making of its literature. We must never think of a book as though it were written outside the conditions of time and space. We must think of it as the work of a man who, living in a certain age, was affected, according to the nature of his own personality, by the atmosphere and the movements of that age. The Reformation, Puritanism, the French Revolution, the enormous progress of science during the nineteenth century—it is enough to mention these to show the intimate connection between the history of literature and general history. We are now, I hope, in a position to realise what it is that a history of English literature should undertake to do. Its principal object is to trace the progress of English literature through all its transformations from age to age, and, in following the varying course of its development, to explain the successive changes which have taken place in its matter, form, and spirit. It has therefore to consider the influences by which these changes have been wrought, and thus it becomes a record both of individual men and their special contributions to literature and of the forces, personal and impersonal, which went to the shaping of their work. 2. English Literature and English History. This suggests one point which is so important that I trust that the reader of these pages will think about it carefully for himself. Every man belongs to his race and age, and no matter how marked his personality, the spirit of his race and age finds expression through him. A history of English literature has therefore a national as well as a personal character and interest. It is not only an account of the work done by a number of separate English writers; it is also an account of a great body of literature which in its totality is to be regarded as the production of the genius of the English people. Everything that for good or evil has entered into the making of our nation’s life has also entered into the texture of its literature. Ordinary English history is our nation’s biography; its literature is its autobiography; in the one we read the story of its actions and practical achievements; in the other the story of its intellectual and moral development. As we follow the history of our literature through all its transformations, therefore, we are brought into direct and living contact with the motive forces of the inner life of each successive generation, and learn at first hand how it looked at life and what it thought about it, what were the things in which it was most interested and by which it was most willing to be amused, by what passions it was most deeply stirred, by what standards of conduct and of taste it was governed, and what types of character it deemed most worthy of its admiration. In studying English literature according to the chronological method of history, let us always try to think of it as the progressive revelation of the mind and spirit of the English people. 3. The Periods of English Literature. We ought now to have no difficulty in understanding why the history of English literature is always divided into periods. This division is made, it is true, primarily as a matter of convenience, since for purposes of study it is necessary to break a large subject up into parts; but there is also a real justification for it. A period in the sense which we properly attach to the term, is a certain length of time during which a particular kind of taste prevails, and the literature of which is therefore marked by various common characteristics of subject- matter, thought, tone, and style. While the individual writers of such a period will of course differ immensely, one from another, in all the specific qualities of personality, these common characteristics will nonetheless be pronounced features in the work of all of them. Then with a decisive change of taste, the period in question may be said to come to a close while another period opens. We must be on our guard against treating these periods as if they were rigorously fixed and self-contained, with actual boundary-walls between each one and the next. History recognises only a continuous flow, and knows nothing of absolute endings and beginnings. Hence, in fact, age overlaps age, and in strict chronology a man’s work may begin in one and end in another. We can see at once that all proposed divisions have something arbitrary about them when we remember that Dryden was a man of forty- three when Milton died, and outlived him only twenty-six years, and that we yet always consider them not as contemporaries, but as representatives of different epochs. Still, on the whole, the periods of literature are fairly well defined, and in practice they are of the utmost value because they help us to concentrate attention upon the things which are most important in each successive stage of that great gradual transformation which, as we have learned, it is the main business of a history of literature to record. In tabulating these periods various methods may be adopted. It is very usual to label them with epithets derived from history, and to speak, for example, of the Elizabethan Age, the Age of the Restoration, the Victorian Age, and so on. But perhaps it is better to take our descriptive terms from literature itself, and to designate each period by the name of its most characteristic and representative writer. This is the course I purpose to adopt here. Leaving out of consideration for the moment literature before Chaucer and for a hundred and fifty years or so after his death, we shall thus have the Age of Chaucer, the Age of Shakespeare, the Age of Milton, the Age of Dryden, the Age of Pope, the Age of Johnson, the Age of Wordsworth, and the Age of Tennyson, as the large divisions of our study. The appended table will show the rough limits of these periods, and their relations with the periods of general history. It must be borne in mind that as this is to be a little book on a big subject, the various questions with which, as I have shown, the history of English literature has to deal, must be very briefly treated. In view of the limitations of our space, we shall also have to confine our attention almost entirely to what is commonly known as general literature. The literature of special subjects—of science, theology, philosophy, and so forth—save in exceptional cases in which there is some particular reason for mentioning it—will therefore be omitted from our survey. PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Literary Periods Approximate Historic Periods Dates Pre-Chaucerian Period 500–1340 Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman periods The Age of Chaucer 1340–1400 Middle Plantagenet (or (Chaucer, 1340–1400) Angevin) period From Chaucer to 1400–1557 Later Plantagenet Tottel’s Miscellany (Angevin) period Early Tudor period The Age of Shakespeare 1557–1625 {The Elizabethan Age The Jacobean Age (Shakespeare, 1564– (Age of Renaissance) 1616) The Age of Milton 1625–60 The Caroline Age (Milton, 1608–74) The Age of Dryden 1660–1700 The Age of Restoration (Dryden, 1631–1700) The Age of Pope 1700–45 The Queen Anne Age (The Augustan Age) Early Georgian Age (Pope, 1688–1744) The Age of Johnson 1745–98 Middle Georgian Age (Johnson, 1709–84) The Age of Wordsworth 1798–1832 Later Georgian Age or (Wordsworth, 1770– the Age of the 1850) Revolution The Age of Tennyson 1832–87 The Victorian Age (Tennyson, 1809–92) The Age of Hardy 1887–1928 (Hardy, 1840–1928) The Present Age 1930–55  2 English Literature Before Chaucer (500-1340) 4. The Place of Old English Literature in our Study. Among historians of our language it was formerly the practice to draw a sharp dividing line between what they called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and that new speech, which they distinguished as ‘English’, which after the Conquest gradually arose from the union of this Anglo-Saxon with the Norman French brought over by the Conqueror. This dividing line is not recognised by modern writers, who insist that in its foundations English is essentially a Teutonic language, that the English of the fourteenth century grew out of the Anglo-Saxon of the fifth by a regular course of evolution, and that nothing occurred at any stage to break its continuity. For this reason, the term Anglo-Saxon is now commonly dropped and ‘Old English’ used instead. A corresponding change has naturally taken place in the interpretation of the history of literature. Here, again, the idea of unbroken continuity is emphasised, and as what was once called Anglo-Saxon is regarded as an early form of English speech, so what was once called Anglo-Saxon literature is regarded as an early form of English literature. According to this conception, English literature did not begin, as used to be said, with Chaucer. It began far back with the beginnings of the history of the English people on the continent of Europe, before bands of them had settled in the little island which was presently to become the home of their race. I am not now going to question the modern scientific view; yet we may still recognise the practical convenience, if not the scientific accuracy, of the older view which it has displaced. It is true that we can trace the gradual growth of Chaucer’s language by a process of slow unbroken development out of that which Caedmon had used some seven centuries earlier. But there is still one fundamental difference between Chaucer’s English and Caedmon’s. We have to learn Caedmon’s Old English as we learn a foreign language, while though Chaucer’s Middle English is full of words and idioms which puzzle us, we rightly feel that it is only an archaic form of the same tongue that we use today. So with literary style: that of Caedmon is based on principles radically different from ours; that of Chaucer, on principles which are substantially those of our own poetry. Continuous, then, though the history of English literature is from the fifth century to the twentieth, we may still hold that literature before Chaucer constitutes a special field of study, and that it is only with Chaucer that modern English literature definitely begins. Adopting this view, here, we will merely sketch with the utmost brevity the growth of our literature prior to the middle of the fourteenth century, and take this period as the real starting-point of our narrative. 5. English Literature before the Conquest. A considerable body of Anglo-Saxon poetry has been preserved, including one piece of immense interest, the epic Beowulf. Of the authorship of this nothing is known, and its history is still a matter of controversy. But it is probable that it grew up in the form of ballads among the ancestors of the English in Denmark and South Sweden, that in this form it was brought by invaders to this country, and that it was here fashioned into an epic, perhaps by some Northumbrian poet, about the eighth century. Manifestly heathen in origin, it is as it stands the work of a Christian writer. It tells with rude vigour of the mighty feats of the hero whose name it bears; how, first, he fought and killed the monster Grendel, who for twelve years had wasted the land of the King of the Danes; how, next, he slew Grendel’s mother; and how at last, a very old man, he went out to destroy a fiery dragon, receiving as well as giving a mortal wound. Vivid pictures of life in war and peace among our remote forefathers add greatly to the value of a fine old poem. Apart from Beowulf, the most important surviving examples of our oldest English poetry are to be found in the works of Caedmon and Cynewulf, both of whom belong to the north, and to the period immediately following the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, which began at the end of the sixth century. Caedmon, who died about 680, was a servant attached to the monastery of Whitby in Yorkshire. According to a pretty tale told by the Venerable Bede, the power of verse came to him suddenly as a divine gift. He had never been able to sing to the harp as others did in festive gatherings in the monastery hall, and when, his turn came round, he had always been used to retire in humiliation. But one night, having gone to the stables to look after the horses of which he had charge, he fell asleep, and an angel appeared to him in a vision, and told him to sing. Then when he asked, ‘what shall I sing?’ the heavenly visitor replied, ‘Sing the beginning of created things;’ and waking, he found himself, to his astonishment, endowed with the faculty of poetry. Three free paraphrases of scripture which have come down to us in a manuscript of the tenth century, have been attributed to him; one dealing with the creation and the fall; the second, with the exodus from Egypt; the third with the history of Daniel; but it is now believed that a considerable portion of these poems, if not the whole of them, is the work not of Caedmon himself but of his imitators. They were first printed about 1650 by an acquaintance of Milton, and it has been thought, though there is no proof of this, that the great poet may have taken hints from the Genesis in writing Paradise Lost. A miraculous element also enters into the story of Cynewulf’s career. Born, it is conjectured, between 720 and 730, he was in earlier life, as he himself tells us in his Dream of the Rood, a wandering gleeman and a lover of pleasure, but converted by a vision of the cross, he dedicated himself henceforth to religious themes. His works include a poem called Christ, treating of the Incarnation, the Descent into Hell, the Ascension, and the Last Judgment; Elene, an account of the finding of the true cross, according to the legend, by Helena, the mother of Constantine; and Juliana, a tale of Christian martyrdom. While generally sacred in subject, and profoundly earnest in feeling, Anglo-Saxon poetry is full of a love of adventure and fighting, and sometimes its martial spirit bursts out into regular war poetry, as in The Battle of Brunanburh (937), of which Tennyson made a spirited translation. A fondness for the sea, ingrained in our English character, is also another striking feature of it. In form, it rests upon principles of composition radically different, as I have said, from those which govern modern English versification. In place of our rhyme (or ‘end rhyme’ as it is more strictly called) it employs ‘beginning rhyme’, or alliteration, that is, the regular and emphatic repetition of the same letter; while the lines are quite irregular in regard to the number of unaccented syllables introduced. To state the broad rule: each line of an Anglo-Saxon poem consisted of two divisions; the first of these contained two accented syllables, the second at least one; and the accented syllables in each case began with the same letter. This gives us the normal type of Anglo-Saxon verse, as in this line from Beowulf: Grendel gongan, Godes yrre baer (Grendel going God’s anger bore). Another illustration will be given later from a fourteenth century poem, in which the old alliterative system was preserved (see §13). Anglo-Saxon poetry flourished most in the north; prose developed later in the south. In general, while interesting from the linguistic and antiquarian points of view, the prose writings which have come down to us possess but little value as literature. Though hardly more than a translator, King Alfred (849-901) holds an honourable place as the first to put the vernacular to systematic use. Among the works rendered by him into ‘the language which we all understand’ (to adopt his own significant phrase) was the Latin Ecclesiastical History of the Venerable Bede, or Baeda (673-735), who wrote at Jarrow in the kingdom of Northumbria. But the greatest monument of Old English prose is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which, though it already existed before Alfred, was under his guidance transformed into a national history, and which was so continued till 1154, when it closed with the record of the death of King Stephen. 6. From the Conquest to Chaucer. From the Norman Conquest to the beginning of the thirteenth century English had a severe struggle to maintain itself as a written language, and as a consequence, English literature, which for nearly two hundred years before William’s landing had shown little sign of life, now for another period of a hundred and fifty years almost ceased to exist. Its revival began in the reign of John, by which time the long-standing hostility between the native population and the invaders had been to a large extent outgrown, and, as the famous incident of Magna Charta shows, the two elements had been welded into a single people. The loss of the French possessions of the English crown tended still further to confirm the growing unity of the nation. In these circumstances English began to assert itself beside the rival tongue, which was already losing ground, and with this English literature assumes a certain historical interest. It now becomes clear how much has been gained in the meantime by the accumulation of fresh materials from various sources. We see this in the case of the first noteworthy production of the revival, Brut, completed about 1205 by Layamon, a parish priest of Worcestershire. This enormous poem of some 30,000 lines contains the legendary history of ancient Britain, beginning with Æneas, whose descendant Brutus was the supposed ancestor of the British people, ending with Cadwallader, the last of the native kings, and including by the way, among innumerable episodes, the stories of Lear and King Arthur; but the point of special importance in connection with it is, that it is a paraphrase with additions of a versified chronicle, Brut d’Engleterre, of the Anglo-Norman poet Wace, which in its turn had been based upon the so-called History of Britain (1132) by the romancing Welsh annalist, Geoffrey of Monmouth. In Layamon’s poem, then, three streams of influence—Celtic, French, and English—run together; while, though in versification it follows the Anglo-Saxon principle of alliteration, French taste is reflected in the occasional appearance of rhyme. A little later came Ormulum (about 1215), a series of metrical homilies, in short lines without either rhyme or alliteration, by a Lincolnshire priest named Orm; and a prose treatise, the Ancren Riwle (about 1225), or Rule of Anchoresses, prepared by some unknown writer for the guidance of three ladies entering the religious life. A charming dialogue poem, The Owl and the Nightingale (about 1220), in which the two birds discuss their respective merits, is historically interesting, because it discards alliteration and adopts French end-rhyme. This is the only other piece of native thirteenth century literature which calls for mention. The principal productions of the early fourteenth century—Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne (Manual of Sins, 1303); the prose Ayenbite of Inwyt (Remorse of Conscience, 1340)—both translated from the French; and the Cursor Mundi (about 1320), a versified account of scripture history together with many legends of the saints—belong to religious rather than to general literature. 7. The Making of the English Language. The period between the Conquest and Chaucer is, however, much more important from the point of view of our language than from that of our literature. During these three hundred years, while little was being produced in prose or verse of any intrinsic value, modern English was gradually evolving out of the conflict of opposing tongues, and assuming national rank as the speech of the whole people. To trace the stages of this evolution does not, of course, fall within the scope of a primer of literary history. It is enough for us to note that the final product of it was a mixed or compound language, the grammatical structure and vocabulary of which alike were the result of Norman French influences acting upon the old Anglo-Saxon material. It was this new tongue which ultimately displaced that of the Conquerors. Norman French long continued, indeed, to be the only recognised official language and to some extent, the language of fashion. But by the beginning of the fourteenth century it had entirely lost its hold upon English life at large, and the complete triumph of English was signalised by a statute of 1362, which proclaimed that henceforth all proceedings in the law courts should be in that language instead of French. For more than a hundred years before this numerous English translations of French romances had shown the growth of a literary public among those who, as the phrase then ran, ‘had no French.' We must, however, remember that while French was thus disappearing, there was as yet no standard form of the new tongue to take its place. English was broken up into dialects. There was a Northern English, a Midland English, and a Southern English, which differed fundamentally from one another, and which were yet subdivided within themselves into numerous minor varieties. In this confusion, little by little, East Midland English tended to gain ascendancy, because it was the speech of the capital and of the two centres of learning, Oxford and Cambridge. Then when Chaucer began to write, he chose this as his vehicle, and it was largely on account of his influence that what had hitherto been only one of several provincial dialects attained the dignity of the national language. We thus come round to Chaucer, the first of our really national English poets. TABLE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE BEFORE CHAUCER Settlement of the Jutes, Saxons and Angles in Britain, 449-547 Christianity introduced into Kent by St. Augustine, 597; into Northumbria, 627—35 Caedmon’s Paraphrases, 670 —80 Cynewulf, b. between 720 and 730 Fashioning of Beowulf into an epic, ? 8th century. Alfred, King of Wessex, 871— Alfred’s translations, 9th 901 century Norman Conquest, 1066 John, 1199-1216 English Revival Layamon’s Brut, about 1205 Orm’s Ormulum, about 1215 The Ancren Riwle, about 1225 The Owl and the Nightingale, about 1220 Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne, 1303 Cursor Mundi, 1320-25 Edward III, 1337-77 Ayenbite of Inwyt, 1340 Chaucer, b. 1340?  3 The Age of Chaucer (1340-1400) 8. The Age of Chaucer. Geoffrey Chaucer was born in the reign of Edward III, lived through that of Richard II, and died the year after Henry IV ascended the throne. His life thus covers a period of glaring social contrasts and rapid political change. Edward’s reign marks the highest development of medieval civilisation in England. It was also the midsummer of English chivalry. The spirit of his court was that of the romantic idealism which fills Chaucer’s own Knight’s Tale, and the story of his successive wars with France, and of the famous victories of Crécy and Poictiers, as written in the Chronicles of Froissart, reads more like a brilliant novel than a piece of sober history. Strong in its newly established unity, England went forth on its career of foreign conquest in a mood of buoyant courage, and every fresh triumph served to give further stimulus to national ambition and pride. But there was another side to this picture. The king and his nobility led a very gay and debonair life. Trade expanded, and among the commercial classes wealth increased. But the masses of the people were meanwhile sunk in a condition of deplorable misery. Pestilence after pestilence ravaged the land, and then in 1348-9 came the awful epidemic called the Black Death, which in a single year swept away more than a third of the entire population, and which reappeared in 1362, 1367, and 1370. Famine followed plague; vagrants and thieves multiplied; tyrannous laws passed to regulate labour only made bad matters worse. The French wars, which had given temporary glory to the arms of Edward, were fraught with disastrous consequences for his successor. Their enormous cost had to be met by heavy burdens of taxation, which were the immediate cause of a general rising of the common folk under Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, and the unfrocked priest, John Ball. Though soon quelled, this was a sign of widespread social unrest. Political troubles also grew apace under Richard’s unwise and despotic rule, and the constitutional conflicts between the king and his subjects resulted in endless discord and confusion. The temper of the England of Chaucer’s closing years was therefore very different from that of the England into which he had been born. Much of the glamour had gone from life, and men were more conscious of its stern realities. Among the causes which greatly contributed to the increasing evils of Chaucer’s age we must also reckon the corruption of the Church. Of spiritual zeal and energy very little was now left in the country. The greater prelates heaped up wealth, and lived in a godless and worldly way; the rank and file of the clergy were ignorant and careless; the mendicant friars were notorious for their greed and profligacy. Chaucer himself, as we shall presently have to note, took little serious interest in social reform; yet the portraits which he draws for us of the fat, pleasure-loving monk, the merry and wanton friar, and that clever rogue, the pardoner, who wanders about hawking indulgences and relics, show that he was alive to the shocking state of things which existed in the religious world of his time. It is at this point that we recognise the importance of the work of John Wyclif (about 1320-84), ‘the morning star of the Reformation.’ That earnest and intrepid man gave the best of his life to the great task of reviving spiritual Christianity in England, and in the carrying out of his mission, he wrote religious pamphlets, sent his ‘poor priests’ or itinerant preachers far and wide with the message of the Gospel, and with the help of his disciples produced a complete English version of the Bible—the first translation of the scriptures into any modern vernacular tongue. Social unrest and the beginnings of a new religious movement were thus two of the chief active forces in the England of the later fourteenth century. A third influence which did much to change the current of intellectual interests, and thus affected literature very directly, came from the new learning. Thus far, scholarship had been largely the concern of the Church, and men’s thoughts and feelings about themselves and the world had been governed almost entirely by theology. Ecclesiastical ideas and the medieval habit of mind were still the controlling elements in Chaucer’s period, but their sway was now to some extent broken by the influx of a fresh and very different spirit. That spirit had arisen in Italy, chiefly from a renewed study of the literature of classical antiquity, and from the consequent awakening of enthusiasm not only for the art, but also for the moral ideas of Greece and Rome. An enormous impetus was thus given to intellectual expansion and to men’s efforts to liberate themselves from theological trammels. The leaders of this great revival were the two celebrated Italian writers, Petrarch (1304-74) and Boccaccio (1313-75), and it was through their work in the main that the influence of humanism (as the new culture came to be called) passed into England, where its effect was soon shown in the quickened sense of beauty, the delight in life, and the free secular spirit which began to appear in our literature. It is here that we mark the rise of the vast and complex movement, which was presently to culminate in the Renaissance, and of which we shall have much more to say later. We shall indeed learn that in England adverse conditions long held this movement in check, and that as in the field of religious activity, so in that of intellectual activity, this country had to wait till the sixteenth century before the promises of the fourteenth were fulfilled. But, though of little power as yet, humanism has to be included among the formative influences of the literature of Chaucer’s age. 9. Chaucer’s Life. Geoffrey Chaucer, who is so much the greatest figure in the English literature of the fourteenth century that he has thrown all his contemporaries completely into the shade, was born about 1340 in London, where his father did a flourishing business as a merchant vintner. We know practically nothing about his childhood, but it is evident from the wide and varied scholarship which characterises his writings that he must have enjoyed the advantages of a liberal education. At seventeen he received a court appointment as page to the wife of the Duke of Clarence, Edward III’s third son. In 1359 he was with the English army in France, where he was taken prisoner; but he was soon ransomed, and returned to England. Sometime after this he married, and became valet of the king’s chamber. From that time onward he was for many years closely connected with the court. He was often entrusted with diplomatic missions on the continent, two of them being to Italy. He was thus brought into direct touch with Italian culture in the days of the early Renaissance, and may even have met Petrarch and Boccaccio, to the former of whom he makes pointed reference in the Prologue to the Clerk’s Tale. During these years he received many marks of royal favour, and for a time sat in Parliament as Knight of the shire of Kent. But after the overthrow of the Lancastrian party and the banishment of his special patron, John of Gaunt, he fell on evil days, and with approaching age felt the actual pinch of poverty. Fortunately, on the accession of John of Gaunt’s son, Henry IV, things mended with him, and the grant of a royal pension at once placed him beyond want and anxiety. At Christmas, 1399, he took a long lease of a house at Westminster, which suggests that he still looked forward to many years of life. But he died before the next year was out, and was buried in that part of Westminster Abbey which afterwards came to be known as the Poets’ Corner. In studying Chaucer’s work it is important to remember that his education as a poet was two-fold. Part of it came from literature; but part of it came from life. He was a thorough student, and in one of his autobiographical passages (in The House of Fame) he tells us how after a long day over his accounts, he would go home at night and there pore over his beloved volumes till he was completely dazed. But he was not a mere bookman, nor was he in the least a visionary. Like Shakespeare and Milton, he was, on the contrary, a man of the world and of affairs. He had travelled much; he had seen life; his business at home and abroad brought him into intimate relations with people of all sorts; and with his quick insight into character and his keen eye for everything dramatic and picturesque and humorous, he was precisely the kind of poet to profit by such varied experiences. There is much that is purely bookish in his writings; but in the best of them we are always aware that he is not merely drawing upon what he has read, but that his genius is being fed by his wide and deep knowledge of life itself. 10. Chaucer’s Work in General. It is usual and convenient to divide Chaucer’s literary career into three periods, which are called his French, his Italian, and his English period, respectively. His genius was nourished, to begin with, on the French poetry and romance which formed the favourite reading of the court and cultivated society during the time of his youth. Naturally he followed the fashion, and his early work was done on French models. Thus, besides translating portions at least of the then popular Roman de la Rose, he wrote, among other quite imitative things, an allegory on the death of Blanche, John of Gaunt’s wife, which he called The Boke of the Duchesse (1369), and which is wholly in the manner of the reigning French school. Then, almost certainly as a direct result of his visits to Italy, French influences disappear, and Italian influences take their place. In this second period (1370-84), Chaucer is the disciple of the great Italian masters, for The House of Fame clearly owes much to Dante, while Troylus and Cryseyde, by far his longest single poem, is based upon, and in part translated from, Boccaccio’s Filostrato. To the close of this period the unfinished Legende of Good Women may also be referred. Finally, he ceases to be Italian as he had ceased to be French, and becomes English. This does not mean that he no longer draws freely upon French and Italian material. He continues to do this to the end. It simply means that, instead of being merely imitative, he becomes independent, relying upon himself entirely even for the use to which he puts his borrowed themes. To this last period belong, together with sundry minor poems, the Canterbury Tales, in which we have Chaucer’s most famous and most characteristic work. 11. The Canterbury Tales. These are a collection of stories fitted into a general framework which serves to hold them together. Some of them were certainly written earlier, and before the framework had been thought of; but we put the Tales as a whole into Chaucer’s third period, because it was then that most of them were composed, and that the complete design shaped itself in the poet’s mind. That design explains the title. A number of pilgrims on the eve of their departure meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, where, as it chances, Chaucer himself is also staying; and, as he too is bent on the same errand, he is easily persuaded to join the party. Pilgrimages were very popular in the fourteenth century; they were often undertaken, as here, in companies, partly for the sake of society by the way, and partly because of the dangers of the roads; and, it must be admitted, their prevailing spirit was anything but severely devotional. Sometimes the pilgrims went, as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath had already done, as far afield as Rome and Jerusalem; but one of the favourite expeditions nearer home was to the shrine of the murdered St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury; and there these particular pilgrims are bound. The jolly host of the Tabard, Harry Bailly, gives them hearty welcome and a supper of his best—good victual and strong drink to match; and, after they are satisfied, he makes this proposal: that to beguile the tedium of the journey each member of the party shall tell two tales on the way to Canterbury, and two on the way back; that he himself shall be the judge; and that the one who tells the best tale shall be treated by all the rest to a supper on their return to the Tabard Inn. The suggestion is applauded, and these Canterbury Tales are the result. All this is explained in the Prologue, after which Chaucer proceeds to introduce his fellow-pilgrims. Though limited to what we may broadly call the middle classes, the company is still very comprehensive. The military profession is represented by a knight, a squire, and a yeoman; the ecclesiastical, by a prioress, a nun (her secretary), a monk, a friar, a sumnour (summoner of those charged under the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts), a pardoner (or seller of pardons), a poor parson, and a Clerk of Oxford, who is a student of divinity. Then we have a lawyer and a physician, and, running down the social scale, a number of miscellaneous characters whom one cannot well classify—a franklin (freeholder of land), a merchant, a shipman (sailor), a miller, a cook, a manciple (caterer for colleges), a reeve (land steward), a haberdasher, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer, a tapycer (tapestry maker), a ploughman (the poor parson’s brother), and a well-to-do west-country cloth- maker named Alison, who, however, is better known as the Wife of Bath. In his descriptions of the most prominent of these people Chaucer’s powers are shown at their very highest, and this Prologue is a masterpiece of insight, sureness of touch, fine discrimination, and subtle humour. All the characters are individualised, yet their thoroughly typical quality gives unique value to Chaucer’s picture of men and manners in the England of his time. As according to programme each of the pilgrims was to have told four stories, the poet’s plan was a very large one. He lived to complete a small portion only, for the work, as we have it, is merely a fragment of twenty-four tales. Yet even as it stands its interest is wonderfully varied, for Chaucer is guided by a sense of dramatic propriety, and so the tales differ in character as widely as do those by whom they are told. Thus, to take extreme examples, we have the chivalrous epic of the Knight and the Clerk’s beautiful account of the patient Griselda’s wifely devotion balanced in strange contrast by the coarse farcical stories of the Miller and the Reeve. It should be noted that in no case are the tales original in theme. Chaucer takes his raw material from many different sources, and the range of his reading and his quick eye for anything and everything which would serve his purpose wherever he found it, are shown by the fact that he lays all sorts of literature, learned and popular, Latin, French, and Italian, under contribution. But whatever he borrows he makes entirely his own, and he remains one of the most delightful of our story-tellers in verse. His finest work as a narrative poet is the Knight’s Tale, which in accordance with the law of dramatic propriety is heroic in subject, chivalrous in sentiment, and romantic in tone. Based on the Teseide of Boccaccio, it tells of two young cousins of royal blood, named Palamon and Arcite, who, when Duke Theseus makes war against their city of Thebes, are taken captive by him, and imprisoned in a tower of his palace. From their window one May morning they chance to see Emily, the beautiful sister of the Duke’s wife, walking in the garden beneath; whereupon their life-long friendship is shattered in an instant and they become rivals in love. Arcite is presently ransomed, but unable to endure banishment from Emily, returns to Athens in disguise, and finds a menial place in the Duke’s service. Then, after several years, Palamon makes his escape. The cousins meet in duel, but are surprised and interrupted by the Duke and his train as they ride out to hunt. Theseus dooms them both to death on the spot, but relenting on the petition of the ladies, spares their lives on condition that each shall collect a hundred knights, and that the case shall be decided in a great tournament, the hand o Emily being the victor’s prize. In this tournament Arcite falls, and the story ends with the nuptials of Palamon and Emily. Brilliant in itself this fine tale is also intensely interesting as the embodiment of that romantic spirit which, as we have seen, prevailed in the court circles of Chaucer’s youth. Nominally it is a tale of the heroic age of Greece, but as yet no notion existed of what we call historic truth, and everything in it—characters, sentiments, setting—is medievalised. It is in fact an idealised picture of the fastvanishing middle ages, and is steeped in the atmosphere of chivalry. Its account of the tournament, its presentation of the principles of knightly ethics, and the vividness with which it portrays the chivalrous conception of love, are among the features of it which we should specially note in studying it from the historical point of view.  12. General Characteristics of Chaucer’s Poetry. Chaucer was not in any sense a poet of the people. He was a court poet, who wrote for cultured readers and a refined society. The great vital issues of the day never inspired his verse. He made his appeal to an audience composed of the favoured few, who wanted to be amused by comedy, or touched by pathos, or moved by romantic sentiment, but who did not wish to be disturbed by painful reminders of plagues, famines, and popular discontent. Thus, though he holds the mirror up to the life of his time, the dark underside of it is nowhere reflected by him. It is significant that his only mention of the Peasants’ Revolt is in the form of a humorous reference in the Nonnes Priestes Tale of the Cock and the Fox. It is true that, as we have seen, he felt the religious corruptions of the world about him, and not only his satiric portraits of unworthy churchmen, to which I have referred, but also his beautiful companion study of the poor parson, who was indeed no hireling, but a real shepherd, show his sympathy in a general way with some of Wyclif’s ideas. But on the whole he left burning questions alone. His was an easy-going, genial, tolerant nature, and nothing of the reformer went to its composition. The serious note is indeed sometimes heard in his poetry; as when, for example, he writes: That1 thee is sent receyve in buxomnesse2 The wrastling of this world asketh a fal; Here is no hoom,3 here is but wildernesse. Forth, pilgrim, forth! forth, best4 out of thy stal! Look upon hye, and thonke God of al. But this is not its characteristic tone; its characteristic tone is that of frank pleasure in the good things of life. Chaucer’s temperament thus explains his relations with his age. Little touched by its religious or social movements, he responded readily to the influence of Italian humanism, and it is through him that its free secular spirit first expresses itself in our poetry. If Wyclif was ‘the morning star of the Reformation’, Chaucer may be called ‘the morning star of the Renaissance’. A specially charming feature of his poetry is its fresh out- of-doors atmosphere. His descriptions of the country are often indeed in the conventional manner of his time, and his garden landscape and May flowers are to some extent things of tradition only. But he has a real love of nature and particularly of the spring, and when he writes of these, as in the Prologue and the Knight’s Tale, the personal accent is unmistakable. We have already spoken of Chaucer’s importance in the history of our language. His fourteenth century (or ‘Middle') English looks very difficult at first, but only a little time and perseverance are needed to master it, and these will be amply repaid by the pleasure we are sure to find in the felicity of his diction and the melody of his verse. It will be observed that he abandons altogether the Old English irregular lines and alliteration—‘rim, ram, roff’ as he jestingly calls it—and adopts the French method of regular metre and end-rhymes. Under his influence rhyme gradually displaced alliteration in English poetry. 13. Other Poets of Chaucer’s Age. Chaucer’s chief rival in poetry was John Gower (1332?-1408). The two poets were long friends, and Chaucer’s dedication of his Troylus and Cryseyde to the ‘moral Gower’, as he calls him, and Gower’s warm reference to Chaucer towards the end of his Confessio Amantis, show their reciprocal esteem; but later on, jealousy and misunderstandings arose between them. Gower was a most industrious and well-meaning writer, and his work is extremely voluminous, learned, and careful; but he had nothing of Chaucer’s vivacity and charm, and for the most part he is hopelessly dull. Unlike Chaucer, who from the first realised the possibilities of the English tongue, he found it hard to make up his mind concerning the best medium for his poetry, and of his three long poems, one— Speculum Meditantis—is in French; another—Vox Clamantis —in Latin; the third—Confessio Amantis—in English. It is in this last named that he most distinctly challenges comparison with Chaucer, for the body of it consists of tales introduced to illustrate the evils wrought by the seven deadly sins. In temper and attitude towards life, again, the two poets differed radically. Gower took a very gloomy view of the social conditions of the time. His Vox Clamantis is largely concerned with Wat Tyler’s rebellion, and his criticism of the clergy is frequent and severe. Yet his standpoint was that of a strong conservative, and he had no more sympathy than Chaucer with the teachings of Wyclif and his followers, the Lollards. In striking contrast with both Chaucer and Gower, who, deep as were their individual differences, were alike poets of the court, stands a third writer of this age, William Langland (1330?-1400), who was essentially a poet of the people. Of the man himself we know very little. He seems to have been the son of a franklin; to have been born in the neighbourhood of Malvern; and to have lived a life of poverty and struggle. Of his character, however, we have a clear revelation in his work, The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, an enormous allegorical poem which in its final shape runs to upwards of 15,000 lines. Rambling, confused, and almost formless, the Vision has small claim to be regarded as a piece of literary art; but its defects on this side are redeemed by its vigour and moral earnestness. Under the conventional device of a dream, or more exactly a series of dreams, the poet boldly attacks the social and ecclesiastical abuses of the day, the greed and hypocrisy of the clergy, and the avarice and tyranny of those who sit in high places. It is to this Vision that we have to turn if we would complete Chaucer’s picture of fourteenth century England by putting in the dark shadows. Langland’s spirit is strikingly puritan and democratic. He was not indeed a Wyclifite, nor politically was he a revolutionist. But he was profoundly moved by the misery of the masses; he was an ardent champion of their cause; and he sought to bring English religion back to the simplicity and purity of gospel truth. It is an interesting commentary upon the character of the poem that, written expressly for the people instead of the court, its language and style are far more rustic and old-fashioned than those of Chaucer’s work. Its dialect is a mixture of Southern and Midland English, and—the last important poem to be written in this way—it adheres to the Anglo-Saxon principle of alliteration; as in the opening lines: In a sorrier seson whan soft was the same I shope me in shroudes as I a shepe were.5 One other fourteenth century poet deserves passing mention—the Scottish John Barbour (1316?-95), who for a time was Archdeacon of Aberdeen. As the real father of Scottish poetry, he holds a certain place in literature. His fame rests on his long poem The Brus, in which the great deeds of Robert Bruce are recorded in spirited narrative. 14. Prose of Chaucer’s Age. Under this head there is little to record. Chaucer’s own few prose writings—such as his translation of Boëthius and his Treatise on the Astrolabe —are not important. Wyclif’s Bible is an interesting example of vigorous artless English, and his controversial pamphlets helped to show the capabilities of the vernacular at a time when Latin was deemed the only fitting vehicle for theological discussion. But the great prose work of this period is the singular volume which goes by the title of The Travels of Sir John Maundeville. According to the specific statement of the preface, this Maundeville was born at St. Albans, and set out on his journey in 1322; and his book purports to give a circumstantial account of what he had seen and heard during many years of wanderings in the Holy Land and the far east. It is now established, however, that no such person as the alleged author ever existed; that the work is a translation from the French of a certain Jean de Bourgogne; and that, instead of being a genuine record of travel, it is simply a compilation of fabulous stories out of Pliny, Friar Odoric, Marco Polo, and other retailers of the marvellous. The fact that the supposed Maundeville describes a bird which could carry an elephant away in its claws, a phoenix, and a weeping crocodile, a valley in which devils were jumping about like grasshoppers, and rocks of adamant which drew the nails out of passing ships, will show that his book is at least amusing; while, even though it is only a translation, it keeps its place as the first English prose classic. TABLE OF THE AGE OF CHAUCER John Barbour, b. 1316? Edward III, 1327-77 William Langland, b. 1332? Beginning of the Hundred Years’ War with France, 1338 Chaucer, b. 1340? Battle of Crécy, 1346 The Black Death, 1348-49 Battle of Poictiers, 1356 The Romaunt of the Rose, 1360-65? Boke of the Duchesse, 1369 Langland’s Vision, 1362-90 Barbour’s Brus, 1375 Richard II, 1377-99  Speculum Meditantis, 1378? Wyclif’s Bible, 1380 Troylus and Cryseyde, 1380- Wat Tyler’s Rebellion, 1381 83 Official condemnation of Vox Clamantis, 1382? Wyclif’s opinions, 1382 House of Fame, 1383-84 Legende of Good Women, 1384-85 Canterbury Tales, 1385 onward Confessio Amantis, 1393? Henry IV ascends throne, 1399 Chaucer, d. 1400 Langland, d. 1400 Maundeville’s Travels, 1400 Gower, d. 1408 1That which. 2Cheerfulness. 3Home. 4Beast. 5 arrayed myself in garments as if I were a shepherd.  4 From Chaucer to Tottel’s Miscellany (1400-1557) 15. The Fifteenth Century. With Chaucer English literature made a brilliant beginning, but it was only a beginning, and after his death we enter upon a long barren period in its history. In trying to explain the unproductiveness of the fifteenth century we have, of course, to remember that there can never in any circumstances be great books unless men are born who are capable of writing them, and that the dearth of great books for a hundred years and more after Chaucer may therefore simply be the result of a dearth of literary talent. It is perhaps noteworthy that the fifteenth century was not in England an age of great men in any field of activity. But we must also recognise that even when talent exists it depends upon favourable conditions for its expression, and in the fifteenth century conditions were the reverse of favourable. Little affected by the labours of Wyclif, religion continued to degenerate, and persecution was employed to stamp out all efforts towards reform. The free movement of thought was thus checked. The country was distracted by political conflicts, which culminated in the thirty years’ struggle for power (1455-86) between the Houses of York and Lancaster. In these Wars of the Roses many of the great nobles were killed, and the old order of feudalism severely shaken at its foundations. The low state of education has also to be emphasised. Such mental activity as still was to be found in the universities was wasted in endless and profitless controversies over the dry abstractions of medieval philosophy; while outside these centres of learning, and especially among the fast rising middle classes, a mercenary and sordid spirit prevailed, which was hostile to intellectual interests of any kind. In fifteenth century England, therefore, there was little enough to inspire, and much to repress literary genius. We shall indeed see presently that signs of new life became increasingly apparent as the century ran its course. But we may conveniently postpone the consideration of these till we come to deal with the revival of the early sixteenth century. 16. Poetry of the Fifteenth Century. The poor quality and general lifelessness of fifteenth century verse is at once suggested by the fact that the greater part of it is imitative. Nearly all the poets tried to walk in Chaucer’s footsteps and, with little of his genius, laboured to reproduce his matter and style. Here and there real sympathy of mind and a touch of genuine power gave birth to work having a distinct merit of its own, as in the beautiful The Flower and the Leaf, a poem long ascribed to Chaucer himself, but now referred to some anonymous writer of his school. But on the whole, like all merely imitative things in art, such productions are of slight permanent value. Of these Chaucerians, who were numerous, the best known are Thomas Occleve, or Hoccleve (1370?-1450?), and John Lydgate (1370?-1451), both of whom were very voluminous. Hoccleve wrote a long poem called The Governail of Princes, in Chaucer’s seven-line stanza (rhyming ababbcc) and in the prologue, in which he tells us much about himself, describes his grief on Chaucer’s death and sings his master’s praises. Among his minor poems is one entitled Moder of God, which was formerly printed with Chaucer’s own works. Lydgate, a learned Benedictine monk of Bury St. Edmunds, poured out an enormous quantity of verse, his longer productions being the Storie of Thebes (designed as a new Canterbury Tale), the Troy Boke, and the Falles of Princes—the last based on a French paraphrase of a Latin work by Boccaccio. The best poetry of the fifteenth century, however, was written in Scotland, where, though the influence of Chaucer was very marked, the spirit of originality was far stronger than in the south. There is not much originality, indeed, about The King’s Quair (quire, that is, book), a long poem in which James I of Scotland (1394-1437) tells of his love for the Lady Jane Beaufort (the Duke of Somerset’s daughter), who afterwards became his wife; but the genuineness of its personal feeling gives life to its verse. It is written in the Chaucerian seven-line stanza just referred to, which from this use of it is often called the ‘rhyme royal’. In William Dunbar (1465?-1530?), the greatest British poet between Chaucer and Spenser, the individual quality is much more apparent. His graceful allegorical poem, The Thistle and the Rose, composed to commemorate the marriage of James IV of Scotland and Margaret, daughter of Henry VII of England, is quite in the manner of Chaucer’s early poetry. But in much of his later verse, as in his satirical ballads and in his remarkable Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, there is a combination of vigour, broad humour, and homely pathos, which belongs wholly to the character of the poet and to his native soil. The true Scottish quality is also in the ascendant in Robert Henryson (1430?-1506?), who followed the Chaucerian model in his Testament of Cresseid, but also produced in Robin and Makyne a story which anticipates Burns' Duncan Gray; and in Gawain or Gavin Douglas (1474- 1522), Bishop of Dunkeld, whose Palice of Honour is full of Chaucer, while his original prologues to the successive books of his translation of the Æneid bear the stamp of the writer’s own mind and style. The treatment of nature by these Scottish poets in general is specially interesting. Chaucer’s May morning and garden landscape had become a convention which his English disciples were content to reproduce. In Scottish poetry, too, the convention reappears, but on the other hand we often find real Scotch scenery painted manifestly by men who, instead of adopting a mere literary fashion, had studied and were trying to depict the nature about them for themselves. Thus three of Douglas’s prologues, just mentioned, deal with the country in spring, in autumn, and in winter, and though there are many stereotyped details, the pictures are evidently painted directly from reality, and with wonderful care and accuracy. This faithful rendering of landscape is a characteristic which should be remembered, for, as we shall learn in due course, Scottish poets did much to bring the love of nature into later English literature. It will be seen that in speaking of these Scottish poets we have followed the Chaucerian tradition into the sixteenth century. But though they thus wrote on into a time when new ideas of poetry were beginning to arise, the general quality of their work leads us to class them with the fifteenth century men. I must add that though poetically poor in other respects, this fifteenth century seems to have been rich in a particular kind of minor verse. We cannot indeed be sure when such poems as The Battle of Otterburn, the Nut Brown Maid, and the numerous ballads of the Robin Hood cycle, first took shape; but there is good reason to believe that ballad literature in general became increasingly popular in the century after Chaucer’s death. Often rude in style, but often wonderfully direct and vigorous and full of real feeling, these ballads did much to foster a love of poetry among the English people. 17. Prose of the Fifteenth Century. Meanwhile, more promising work was being done in prose than in verse, for Englishmen were beginning to shape the rough materials of their native tongue into something like literary form for the various purposes of instruction and entertainment. Reginald Pecock (1395?-1460), Bishop of St. Asaph’s and afterwards of Chichester, who took an active part in the religious controversies of his day, without, however, satisfying either the Lollards, for whom he was too conservative, or the orthodox churchmen, for whom he was too radical, made a bold break with a tradition which Wyclif had failed to shake, when he set out his arguments in English instead of Latin, and his Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy and his Boke of Faith, must be mentioned as landmarks in the history of our prose. Some importance also attaches to the political treatise of Sir John Fortescue (1394?-1476?), The Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy, and to the miscellaneous writings of William Caxton, whose name will come up again directly. But the great prose production of the fifteenth century, which is indeed the one really great book of the age, is the Morte d‘arthur of Sir Thomas Malory. Of the author we know nothing for certain except that he was a knight, and that, according to Caxton’s statement, he completed his work in the ninth year of King Edward IV, that is, in 1470. This work is a compilation made from a number of French romances dealing with different portions of the vast cycle of legends which had grown up about King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, Malory’s object being to digest the scattered stories into a connected summary. To this end he treated his materials with a very free hand, selecting, rejecting, abridging, adapting, and rearranging, to suit his purpose. His narrative has little unity or proportion, yet when the immense difficulties of his task are considered, we must give him full credit for the measure of success which he certainly achieved. In an age when the medieval spirit was fast dying and the old feudal order rapidly becoming a thing of the past, Malory, a man of retrospective mind, looked back with sentimental regret, and his book is full (in Caxton’s words) of ‘the noble acts, feats of arms of chivalry, prowess, hardiness, humanity, love, courtesy, and very gentleness’, which formed at least the ideal of the ancient system of knighthood. There is a good deal in his pages, nonetheless, which shows how very different in many matters his moral standards were from our own; but his general tone is sound. The Morte d‘arthur holds a high place in literary history not only on account of its intrinsic interest, but also because it has been a well-spring of inspiration to many modern poets, such as Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, William Morris, and pre- eminently Tennyson, whose Idylls of the King are largely based upon it. In style, it is artless, for Malory pays little attention to grammar, and his sentence structure is often faulty. But he is wonderfully racy and picturesque, and on occasion he becomes really impressive. 18. The Revival of Learning. We have said that notwithstanding its literary barrenness, signs of new life became more and more apparent as the fifteenth century ran its course. To understand the place that it occupies in our literature as a period not of production but of preparation, we have to consider the growth of influences which were to contribute to the great intellectual awakening of the century following. The origin of these influences is to be sought in the Italian revival of learning. That revival began, as we have learned, with Petrarch and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, but it is with the fifteenth that we enter the great age of Italian humanism, when wealthy men, like the Florentine banker, Cosimo de’ Medici, and his grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent, became munificent patrons of scholarship and the arts, when monastic libraries were ransacked and innumerable long-forgotten treasures of Greek and Latin literature brought to light, and when a boundless enthusiasm for classic studies swept through the whole educated community. In the development of literature this revival of learning worked in two ways: it did much to emancipate thought from the bondage of medieval theology by restoring the generous spirit and ideals of pagan antiquity; and it presented writers with literary masterpieces which they might take as models for their own efforts. For these two reasons the Renaissance is rightly regarded as a chief force in the making of modern European literatures. Hence the importance of the fact that England now began to share in these new liberalising movements. English scholars crossed the Alps to study at Padua, Bologna, and Florence, bringing back with them the inspiration which they had received in these great centres of culture; and thus before the century was out, the new learning was firmly established at Oxford and Cambridge. Young Englishmen of rank considered a visit to Italy a necessary part of their education in the arts of life, and in this way another channel was opened up through which Italian humanism flowed into English soil. Nor must we forget how much the progress of the new learning and the diffusion of all the various influences which it bred, were helped by the introduction of printing, which by multiplying books, popularising knowledge, and disseminating ideas, did more than any other agency to break down the old intellectual boundaries and to change the spirit of the world. William Caxton, who, setting up his press at Westminster in 1476, became our first English printer, thus deserves recognition as one of the great forerunners of the intellectual revival of the sixteenth century.  19. Literature of the Early Renaissance in England. The results of this revival are first shown in the literature of the early Tudor period, which historically is of great significance as the prelude to that splendid outburst of creative energy which was to give glory to the age of Elizabeth. In prose we find little as yet that can be classed as general literature, though a good deal that is important in connection with the special subjects which were beginning to occupy and agitate men’s minds. William Tyndale’s English New Testament (1525), the complete English Bible of Miles Coverdale (1535), and Cromwell’s ‘Great’ Bible (1539), reflect the steady growth of popular interest in the scriptures during the years immediately preceding the Reformation, while they exerted great influence in the development of a standard English prose. The Utopia of Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) is one of the most thoroughly typical works of this time, for its description of an ideal state of society owes much, on the one hand, to Plato’s Republic, and, on the other, to the general speculations about life, government, and religion, which the intellectual awakening had naturally brought in its train; but though written in Latin in 1516, it did not enter English literature till 1551, when it was translated by Ralph Robinson.6 In Roger Ascham (1515- 68) we have one of the earliest masters of original English prose. His Toxophilus, or Schole of Shooting (1545) was, in the author’s own words, written ‘in the English tongue for English men’; his much more famous educational treatise, The Scholemaster, was published by his widow two years after his death. In the revival of English poetry, which was meanwhile the principal feature in the literature of the period, the most pronounced direct influence was that of Italy. A few poets indeed either carried on the Chaucerian tradition or struck out on independent lines for themselves; among them, Stephen Hawes (d. 1523?), whose Pastime of Pleasure followed the old allegorical mode; and John Skelton (1460?- 1528?), who began by imitating Chaucer, but later evolved a coarse, vigorous style of his own for his satiric attacks on Cardinal Wolsey. But the new movement in poetry really began at the thoroughly Italianised court of Henry VIII. In this new movement two names stand out conspicuously— those of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516?-47). Both these men were filled with the spirit of the new culture, and had drunk deep of Italian poetry, and it was under these influences that, as the early critic Puttenham phrased it, ‘they greatly pollished our rude and homely maner of vulgar [that is, vernacular] poesie, from that it had bene before.’ Together they brought from Italy the love-poetry (or ‘amourist’ poetry, as it was called) which Petrarch and his followers had made popular, and with it the form called the Sonnet; while Surrey, in imitation of Italian models, was the first English poet to use (in his translation of two books of the Æneid) the unrhymed, ten- syllabled verse, to which the name blank verse is popularly applied. Wyatt and Surrey are the chief poets represented in a collection of ‘Songs and Sonnets’ by various authors, which is commonly known, from the name of its publisher, as Tottel’s Miscellany. Published in 1557—the year before Elizabeth came to the throne—this work deserves special mention in any history of English literature, for it distinctly marks the dawn of the new age. It will be noted that thus far we have taken no account of the development of the drama during the periods which we have passed under review. We will deal with this important subject in our next chapter. TABLE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM CHAUCER TO TOTTEL‘S MISCELLANY (1400-1557)  Hoccleve’s Governail of Princes,1412 James I’s The King’s Quair, 1422 Lydgate’s Falles of Princes, Henry IV, d. 1413 1430 Pecock’s Repressor, 1449 Fortescue’s Difference between Absolute and Limited Monarchy, 1450? Malory’s Morte Darihur, 1470; Wars of the Roses, 1455-86 pub. 1485 Progress of classical studies at Oxford and Cambridge, 1475 onward Caxton’s printing press set Hawes’s Pastime of Pleasure, up, 1476 1506? Dunbar’s Dance of the Seven Battle of Bosworth, 1485 Deadly Henry VII, 1485-1509 Sins, 1507 Henry VIII, 1509-47 Douglas’ Æneid, 1513 More’s Utopia; Latin, 1516; English, 1551 Sir Thomas Wyatt, 1503-42 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, 1516-47 Tyndale’s New Testament and other portions of the Bible, 1525-36 Coverdale’s Bible, 1535 Edward VI, 1547-53 Mary, 1553-58 Tottel’s Miscellany, 1557 6The name Utopia is formed of two Greek words which mean Nowhere, and in the adjective Utopian has passed into our common speech.  5 Development of Drama to 1561 20. The Beginnings of the English Drama—Miracle Plays. The history of the English drama takes us back to the century succeeding the coming of the Normans, the earliest mention of any dramatic representation in this country referring to a performance of a Latin play in honour of St. Katherine, at Dunstable about 1110. By the time of the Norman Conquest a form of religious drama, which in the first instance had evolved out of the rich symbolic liturgy of the Church, had already established itself in France, and as a matter of course it soon found its way into England. Its purpose was directly didactic; that is, it was the work of ecclesiastical authors, who used it as a means for instructing the unlettered masses in the truths of their religion. To begin with, the Church had this drama under complete control; performances were given in the sacred buildings themselves; the priests were the actors; and the language employed was the Latin of the service. But as the mystery or miracle play,7 as it was called, increased in popularity, and on great occasions larger and larger crowds thronged about the church, it became necessary to remove the stage from the interior of the building to the porch. Later, it was taken from the porch into the churchyard, and finally from the precincts of the church altogether to the village green or the city street. Laymen at the same time began to take part in the performances, and presently they superseded the clerical actors entirely, while the vernacular tongue—first French, then English—was substituted for the original Latin. But the religious drama in England did not reach its height till the fourteenth century, from which time onward at the festival of Corpus Christi, in early summer, miracle plays were represented in nearly all our large towns in great connected sequences or cycles. Arranged to exhibit the whole history of the Fall of man and his redemption, these Corpus Christi plays, or ‘collective mysteries’, as they are sometimes called, were apportioned among the Trading Guilds of the different towns, each one of which took charge of its own particular play, and their performance occupied several days. Four of these cycles have come down to us complete: the Chester cycle of 25 plays; the Coventry, of 42; the Wakefield, of 31; and the York, of 48. Each of these begins with the creation of the world and the Fall of man, and, after dealing with such prophetic themes as the Flood, the Sacrifice of Isaac, and the Exodus from Egypt, goes on to elaborate the last scenes in the life of Christ, the Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension, and closes with the Last Judgment. In literary quality they are of course crude, but here and there they touch the note of pathos, as in the story of Abraham and Isaac, and the note of tragedy, as in the scene of the Crucifixion; while the occasional introduction of a comic element, as notably in the Shepherd plays of the Wakefield series, which are, in fact, rough country farces, only slightly connected with their context, shows even more clearly the growth of the dramatic sense. These religious performances lasted well on into the sixteenth century, and there is good reason to think that Shakespeare must have witnessed once at least those which, during his boyhood, were still being given annually at Coventry. Hamlet’s advice to the players not to ‘out-herod Herod’ recalls the ranting braggart Herod of the old miracle plays. 21. Morality Plays and Interludes. A later stage in the evolution of the drama is marked by the morality play. This, like the miracle play, was didactic; but its characters, instead of being taken from sacred narrative, or the legends of the saints, were personified abstractions. The rise of this form of drama was very natural at a time when allegorical poetry was immensely popular. All sorts of mental and moral qualities thus appeared embodied in types—Science, Perseverance, Mundus, Free Will, the Five Senses, the Seven Deadly Sins (separately or together), Good and Bad Angels, Now-a-Days, Young England, Lusty Juventus, Humanum Genus, Everyman. Among such personifications (of which the foregoing are, of course, only examples), there was generally a place for the Devil, who had held a prominent position in the miracle plays. A later introduction of much importance was the so-called Vice, who was some humorous incarnation of evil taken on the comic side, and as such was the recognised fun-maker of the piece. He sometimes scored a tremendous popular success by jumping on the Devil’s back, sticking thorns into him, belabouring him with a dagger of lath, and making him roar with pain. He is specially interesting as the direct forerunner of the clown of the Elizabethan stage. As the morality play was not, like the miracle play, obliged to follow the prescribed lines of any given story, it had greater freedom in the handling both of plot and of characters. During the excitement of the Reformation period it was much used for purposes of exposition, and even of controversy by both religious parties; one of the finest extant examples, the play Everyman, for instance, being written expressly to inculcate the sacramental doctrines of the Catholic Church. Little by little, as the personified abstractions came more and more to resemble individual persons, the morality passed insensibly into comedy. What is known as the interlude was also a late product of the dramatic development of the morality play. There is indeed some confusion regarding the exact scope and proper use of this word, for many so-called interludes are only modified forms of the morality; but in its more specific sense it seems to mean any short dramatic piece of a satiric rather than of a directly religious or ethical character, and in tone and purpose far less serious than the morality proper. This form grew up early in the sixteenth century, and is rather closely associated with the name of John Heywood (1497?-1580?), who for a time was court musician and general provider of entertainments to Henry VIII. His Four Ps, a dialogue in which a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Pothecary, and a Pedlar exchange racy stories, and finally enter into competition as to which of them can tell the biggest lie, is the most amusing specimen of its class. Interludes were also used for scholastic purposes, as in the Interlude of the Four Elements; while in such a production as Thersytes, the addition of action turns the form into a sort of elementary comedy. 22. The Beginnings of Regular Comedy and Tragedy. These early experiments in play-writing are of great importance historically, because they provided a kind of ‘Dame School’ for English dramatic genius, and did much to prepare the way for the regular drama. It was, however, under the direct influence of the revival of learning that English comedy and tragedy alike passed out of these preliminary phases of their development into the forms of art. Filled with enthusiasm for everything belonging to pagan antiquity, men now went back to the classics for inspiration and example in the drama as in all other fields of literary enterprise, though it was the works of the Latin, not of the Greek playwrights, that they took as their models. At first, the comedies of Plautus and Terence, and the tragedies of Seneca were themselves acted at the universities, and on special occasions elsewhere, before audiences of scholars. Then came Latin imitations, and in due course these were followed by attempts to fashion English plays more or less precisely upon the patterns of the originals. In such attempts English writers learned many valuable lessons in the principles of dramatic construction and technique. Our first real comedy, Roister Doister, was written about 1550 by Nicholas Udall, head master of Eton, for performance by his schoolboys in place of the regular Latin play. It is composed in riming couplets, divided into acts and scenes in the Latin style, and deals in an entertaining way with the wooing of Dame Custance by the vainglorious hero, his various mis-adventures, and the pranks of Matthew Merrygreek the jester. Though greatly indebted to Plautus and Terence, it is everywhere reminiscent of the older humours of the miracle plays and the moralities. Our first real tragedy, on the other hand, is an almost pedantic effort to reproduce the forms and spirit of Senecan tragedy. It is entitled Gorboduc (or later, Ferrex and Porrex); is based upon an episode in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history (see §6); and was written by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst (1536- 1608) and Thomas Norton (1532-84) for representation before the members of the Inner Temple at their Christmas festivities of 1561. It is an interesting point that this first English tragedy was also the first of our plays to use blank verse, which, it will be remembered, had been introduced into English poetry only a few years before (see §19). TABLE OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DRAMA TO 1566 Henry I, 1110-35 First recorded dramatic performance in England, Ludus de S. Katherina, about 1110 Henry III, 1216-72 Institution of the Festival of Corpus Christi, by which a great impulse was given to the performance of miracle plays, 1264 Edward III, 1327-77 York cycle, about 1340 Chester cycle, middle of 14th century Wakefield cycle, middle of 15 th century Henry VI, 1422-71 Coventry cycle, 15th century Richard III, 1483-85 Earliest extant morality play, The Henry VII, 1485-1509 Castell of Perseverance, middle of 15th century Henry VIII, 1509-47 Interludes, early 16th century The Four Ps, about 1520 Edward VI, 1547-53 Roister Doister, about 1550 Many translations of Seneca’s tragedies, second half of 16th century Elizabeth, 1558-1603 Gorboduc, 1561 Gammer Gurton’s Needle (by John Still, second English comedy), 1566 7Attempts have been made to distinguish between ‘mysteries’ and ‘miracle plays’ on the ground that, strictly speaking, the former dealt with subjects taken from the Bible, the latter with the lives of the saints. This distinction is accepted on the Continent, but has never been established in England, where the current name for the religious drama in general has been miracle play.  6 The Age of Shakespeare (1558-1625): Non-Dramatic Verse 23. The Age of Shakespeare. We now enter what we broadly call the Shakespearean Age, by which we here mean the whole period extending from the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 to the death of James I in 1625. These 67 years fall naturally into three divisions—the first 21 years of the Queen’s reign; the 24 years between the publication of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and her death; and the 22 years of the reign of James I. We may call the first division, the time of preparation, or the springtide of Elizabethan literature; the second, its time of full fruition, or summer; the third, its time of decline, or autumn. Strictly speaking, it is of course to the first two divisions only that the term Elizabethan should be applied, while the proper designation for the third is Jacobean. But from the point of view of literary development there are good reasons why Elizabethan and Jacobean should alike be included in the general phrase which we use here—the Age of Shakespeare.  By virtue of its wonderful fertility and of the variety and splendour of its production, this period as a whole ranks as one of the greatest in the annals of the world’s literature, and its greatness was the result of many co-operating causes. As we follow the course of history, we observe that sometimes the average mood of a nation is sluggish and dull, and sometimes it is exceptionally vigorous and alert. Men who, like Spenser, Bacon and Shakespeare grew from boyhood into youth in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, and reached maturity during the closing decades of the sixteenth century, were fortunate enough to find themselves in a world in which the tides of life were at their highest. Influences were everywhere at work which tended to expand thought, stir the feelings, dilate the imagination, and by nourishing as well as stimulating genius, to give breadth and energy to the literature produced. England now felt the full effect of the revival of learning, which was no longer limited to the scholarly few at the universities and about the court, since innumerable translations carried the treasures of the classics far and wide through that large miscellaneous public to which the originals would have been sealed books. In this way, as has been well said, ‘every breeze was dusty with the pollen of Greece, Rome, and of Italy,’ and even the general atmosphere was charged with the spirit of the new learning. An appetite for literature was thus fostered, and an immense impetus given to the sense of beauty and the growing love of everything that made for the enrichment of life. While the Renaissance aroused the intellect and the aesthetic faculties, the Reformation awakened the spiritual nature; the same printing press which diffused the knowledge of the classics put the English Bible into the hands of the people; and the spread of an interest in religion was inevitably accompanied by a deepening of moral earnestness. The recent discovery of new worlds beyond the seas, and the thrilling tales brought home by daring explorers, like Hawkins, Drake, Frobisher, and Raleigh, quickened popular curiosity and the zest of adventure, kindled fresh ideas about many things, and did much to enlarge the boundaries of men’s minds. The general prosperity of the country was also increasing, and for the first time for many years it enjoyed the blessing of internal peace. England had thrown off the yoke of foreign power in the great rupture with Rome; the fierce feuds of Catholic and Protestant, by which it had long been rent, were now over; its discordant elements had been welded together into a united nation; and in the crisis in which, for the moment, its very existence was imperiled—the collision with Spain—Englishmen found themselves sinking minor differences to stand shoulder to shoulder in defence of their common country against their common foe. An intense patriotism thus became one of the outstanding features of the age, and showed itself in many ways—in a keen interest in England’s past, pride in England’s