From Chaucer to Tennyson
The 15th century was a barren period in English literary history. It was
nearly two hundred years after Chaucer's death before any poet came
whose name can be written in the same line with his. He was followed at
once by a number of imitators who caught the trick of his language and
verse, but lacked the genius to make any fine use of them. The _manner_
of a true poet may be learned, but his style, in the high sense of the
word, remains his own secret. Some of the poems which have been
attributed to Chaucer and printed in editions of his works, as the
_Court of Love_, the _Flower and the Leaf_, the _Cuckow and the
Nightingale_, are now regarded by many scholars as the work of later
writers. If not Chaucer's, they are of Chaucer's school, and the first
two, at least, are very pretty poems after the fashion of his minor
pieces, such as the _Boke of the Duchesse_ and the _Parlament of
Foules_.
Among his professed disciples was Thomas Occleve, a dull rhymer, who, in
his _Governail of Princes_, a didactic poem translated from the Latin
about 1413, drew, or caused to be drawn, on the margin of his MS. a
colored portrait of his "maister dere and fader reverent."
This londes verray tresour and richesse
Dethe by thy dethe hath harm irreparable
Unto us done; hir vengeable duresse
Dispoiled hath this londe of the swetnesse
Of Rhetoryk.
Another versifier of this same generation was John Lydgate, a
Benedictine monk of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, a very
prolix writer, who composed, among other things, the _Story of Thebes_,
as an addition to the _Canterbury Tales_. His ballad of _London
Lyckpenny_, recounting the adventures of a countryman who goes to the
law courts at Westminster in search of justice--
But for lack of mony I could not spede--
is of interest for the glimpse that it gives us of London street life.
Chaucer's influence wrought more fruitfully in Scotland, whither it was
carried by James I., who had been captured by the English when a boy of
eleven, and brought up at Windsor as a prisoner of state. There he wrote
during the reign of Henry V. (1413-1422) a poem in six cantos, entitled
the _King's Quhair_ (King's Book), in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza,
which had been employed by Lydgate in his _Falls of Princes_ (from
Boccaccio), and which was afterward called the "rime royal," from its
use by King James. The _King's Quhair_ tells how the poet, on a May
morning, looks from the window of his prison chamber into the castle
garden full of alleys, hawthorn hedges, and fair arbors set with
The sharpe, greene, sweete juniper.
He was listening to "the little sweete nightingale," when suddenly
casting down his eyes he saw a lady walking in the garden, and at once
his "heart became her thrall." The incident is precisely like Palamon's
first sight of Emily in Chaucer's _Knight's Tale_, and almost in the
very words of Palamon the poet addresses his lady:
Ah, sweet, are ye a worldly creature
Or heavenly thing in likeness of nature?
Or are ye very Nature, the goddess,
That have depainted with your heavenly hand
This garden full of flowres as they stand?
Then, after a vision in the taste of the age, in which the royal
prisoner is transported in turn to the courts of _Venus_, _Minerva_,
and _Fortune_, and receives their instruction in the duties belonging to
Love's service, he wakes from sleep and a white turtle-dove brings to
his window a spray of red gilly flowers, whose leaves are inscribed, in
golden letters, with a message of encouragement.
James I. may be reckoned among the English poets. He mentions Chaucer,
Gower, and Lydgate as his masters. His education was English, and so was
the dialect of his poem, although the unique MS. of it is in the Scotch
spelling. The _King's Quhair_ is somewhat overladen with ornament and
with the fashionable allegorical devices, but it is, upon the whole, a
rich and tender love song, the best specimen of court poetry between the
time of Chaucer and the time of Spenser. The lady who walked in the
garden on that May morning was Jane Beaufort, niece to Henry IV. She was
married to her poet after his release from captivity and became queen of
Scotland in 1424. Twelve years later James was murdered by Sir Robert
Graham and his Highlanders, and his wife, who strove to defend him, was
wounded by the assassins. The story of the murder has been told of late
by D.G. Rossetti, in his ballad, _The King's Tragedy_. The whole life of
this princely singer was, like his poem, in the very spirit of romance.
The effect of all this imitation of Chaucer was to fix a standard of
literary style, and to confirm the authority of the East-Midland English
in which he had written. Though the poets of the 15th century were not
overburdened with genius, they had, at least, a definite model to
follow. As in the 14th century, metrical romances continued to be
translated from the French, homilies and saints' legends and rhyming
chronicles were still manufactured. But the poems of Occleve and Lydgate
and James I. had helped to polish and refine the tongue and to prolong
the Chaucerian tradition. The literary English never again slipped back
into the chaos of dialects which had prevailed before Chaucer.
In the history of every literature the development of prose is later
than that of verse. The latter being, by its very form, artificial, is
cultivated as a fine art, and its records preserved in an early stage of
society, when prose is simply the talk of men, and not thought worthy of
being written and kept. English prose labored under the added
disadvantage of competing with Latin, which was the cosmopolitan tongue
and the medium of communication between scholars of all countries. Latin
was the language of the Church, and in the Middle Ages churchman and
scholar were convertible terms. The word _clerk_ meant either priest or
scholar. Two of the _Canterbury Tales_ are in prose, as is also the
_Testament of Love_, formerly ascribed to Chaucer, and the style of all
these is so feeble, wandering, and unformed that it is hard to believe
that they were written by the same man who wrote the _Knight's Tale_ and
the story of Griselda. _The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John
Maundeville_--the forerunner of that great library of oriental travel
which has enriched our modern literature--was written, according to its
author, first in Latin, then in French, and, lastly, in the year 1356,
translated into English for the behoof of "lordes and knyghtes and
othere noble and worthi men, that conne[12] not Latyn but litylle." The
author professed to have spent over thirty years in Eastern travel, to
have penetrated as far as Farther India and the "iles that ben abouten
Indi," to have been in the service of the Sultan of Babylon in his wars
against the Bedouins, and, at another time, in the employ of the Great
Khan of Tartary. But there is no copy of the Latin version of his
travels extant; the French seems to be much later than 1356, and the
English MS. to belong to the early years of the 15th century, and to
have been made by another hand. Recent investigations make it probable
that Maundeville borrowed his descriptions of the remoter East from many
sources, and particularly from the narrative of Odoric, a Minorite
friar of Lombardy, who wrote about 1330. Some doubt is even cast upon
the existence of any such person as Maundeville. Whoever wrote the book
that passes under his name, however, would seem to have visited the Holy
Land, and the part of the "voiage" that describes Palestine and the
Levant is fairly close to the truth. The rest of the work, so far as it
is not taken from the tales of other travelers, is a diverting tissue of
fables about gryfouns that fly away with yokes of oxen, tribes of
one-legged Ethiopians who shelter themselves from the sun by using their
monstrous feet as umbrellas, etc.
[Footnote 12: Know.]
During the 15th century English prose was gradually being brought into a
shape fitting it for more serious uses. In the controversy between the
Church and the Lollards Latin was still mainly employed, but Wiclif had
written some of his tracts in English, and, in 1449, Reginald Peacock,
Bishop of St. Asaph, contributed, in English, to the same controversy,
_The Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy_. Sir John Fortescue,
who was chief-justice of the King's Bench from 1442-1460, wrote during
the reign of Edward IV. a book on the _Difference between Absolute and
Limited Monarchy_, which may be regarded as the first treatise on
political philosophy and constitutional law in the language. But these
works hardly belong to pure literature, and are remarkable only as
early, though not very good, examples of English prose in a barren time.
The 15th century was an era of decay and change. The Middle Age was
dying, Church and State were slowly disintegrating under the new
intellectual influences that were working secretly under ground. In
England the civil wars of the Red and White Roses were breaking up the
old feudal society by decimating and impoverishing the baronage, thus
preparing the way for the centralized monarchy of the Tudors. Toward the
close of that century, and early in the next, happened the four great
events, or series of events, which freed and widened men's minds, and,
in a succession of shocks, overthrew the mediaeval system of life and
thought. These were the invention of printing, the Renaissance, or
revival of classical learning, the discovery of America, and the
Protestant Reformation.
William Caxton, the first English printer, learned the art in Cologne.
In 1476 he set up his press and sign, a red pole, in the Almonry at
Westminster. Just before the introduction of printing the demand for MS.
copies had grown very active, stimulated, perhaps, by the coming into
general use of linen paper instead of the more costly parchment. The
scriptoria of the monasteries were the places where the transcribing and
illuminating of MSS. went on, professional copyists resorting to
Westminster Abbey, for example, to make their copies of books belonging
to the monastic library. Caxton's choice of a spot was, therefore,
significant. His new art for multiplying copies began to supersede the
old method of transcription at the very head-quarters of the MS. makers.
The first book that bears his Westminster imprint was the _Dictes and
Sayings of the Philosophers_, translated from the French by Anthony
Woodville, Lord Rivers, a brother-in-law of Edward IV. The list of books
printed by Caxton is interesting, as showing the taste of the time,
since he naturally selected what was most in demand. The list shows that
manuals of devotion and chivalry were still in chief request, books like
the _Order of Chivalry_, _Faits of Arms_, and the _Golden Legend_, which
last Caxton translated himself, as well as _Reynard the Fox_, and a
French version of the _Aeneid_. He also printed, with continuations of
his own, revisions of several early chronicles, and editions of Chaucer,
Gower, and Lydgate. A translation of _Cicero on Friendship_, made
directly from the Latin, by Thomas Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, was
printed by Caxton, but no edition of a classical author in the original.
The new learning of the Renaissance had not, as yet, taken much hold in
England. Upon the whole the productions of Caxton's press were mostly
of a kind that may be described as mediaeval, and the most important of
them, if we except his edition of Chaucer, was that "noble and joyous
book," as Caxton called it, _Le Morte Dartur_, written by Sir Thomas
Malory in 1469, and printed by Caxton in 1485. This was a compilation
from French Arthur romances, and was by far the best English prose that
had yet been written. It may be doubted, indeed, whether, for purposes