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speare, or Homer, or any other of the world's great poets, a feeling of serene peacefulness, of absolute contentment, comes over us. We even lose, for a brief space, the sense of our own identity, and in so doing we are, as Wordsworth puts it,

laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul;

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things.

When such is the effect on our minds, we may rest assured that we are in the presence of a great work of

art.

Early

Caxton printed some of Chaucer's poems in 1478; a second edition was printed in 1484, illustrated with quaint woodcuts. The earliest collected printing of edition was edited by Thynne, and printed in 1532.

Chaucer's poems.

References to him by other poets are very numerous. Lydgate writes of him as his master, and as "the loadstar of our language ". Occleve addresses him

Chaucer

successors.

the books

as "Master dear and father reverend", and and his says that death itself has no power to slay his name, since his high virtue is contained in that illumine all the land. Spenser mentions him as the well of English undefiled", and in our own day Tennyson and William Morris have paid tribute to Chaucer's measures, clear and sweet and strong".

66

66

The best one-volume edition of Chaucer is the Student's Chaucer, edited by Prof. Skeat (Clarendon Press, Oxford). Excellent annotated editions of Chaucer's poems are issued from the same Press. For biography and criticism, Ward's Life (English Men of Letters series, Macmillan) and Lowell's essay in My Study Windows are recommended.

aspect of the fifteenth century.

CHAPTER III.

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

The Wars of the Roses (1453-1483) are coeval with a period of darkness in our history; and during those years General literature and learning in England can point to no great triumphs. Even in the earlier half of the century the condition of the country was unfavourable to culture. Henry IV. was mainly occupied in keeping himself on the throne he had acquired by force, and although the successes of Henry V. in France roused a certain amount of enthusiasm, it was during the minority of Henry VI. that our losses of French territory and the internal quarrels began.

Dearth of
Poets.

No poet arose to take Chaucer's place. But he was

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence.1

His spirit still lived on, and directly inspired the work of such poets as there were both in England and Scotland. Two of them, Lydgate and Occleve, particularly recorded. their vast admiration for Chaucer, and their zeal led them to imitate their master to the best of their ability.

The Paston

A collection of letters written during this century by different members of a family called Paston has come down to us. It testifies to the fact that Letters. although the period was a barren one as regards creative work, a desire for knowledge and culture was abroad, a state of affairs that helped, with other things to be considered below, to prepare the way for the great literary outburst of the sixteenth century. The letters are well written, showing signs of culture; books are mentioned and sent to and fro; a boy at Eton encloses a copy of Latin verses of his own composition. Thus we gain some idea of the state of literature and learning in England

1 George Eliot, O may I join the choir invisible.

Men

during the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV. read chiefly the poems of Chaucer, Lydgate, and Occleve, and the Arthurian romances.

To the same century belong the revival of classical learning, the invention of printing, and the discovery of the New World. Of all these we shall treat directly at some length.

I. The English Poets.

John Lydgate, "the monk of Bury", was, as he tells us himself,

Born in a village which is called Lydgate,

In olde time a famous castle town.

Lydgate.

Lydgate is in Suffolk, and from it the poet took his name. The date of his birth was about 1370. In 1389 he entered the Benedictine monastery of Bury St. Edmunds. He studied at the universities of Oxford, Paris, and Padua, and was a very learned man, well read in the literatures of France and Italy. He could turn his hand to all kinds of composition. Narrative poems, popular songs, fables, allegories, pageants, nothing came amiss to his pen. He died, an old man, some time after 1446.

Among the best known of his poems are the Story of Thebes, another Canterbury tale, and the Troy Book, a version through the French of a Latin Historia Trojana, the work of an Italian, Guido delle Colonne.

The most important of his longer works is the Falls of Princes, a poem on the same theme as Chaucer's Monk's Tale, and derived from a French version of The "Falls Boccaccio's De Casibus virorum illustrium. of Princes". Lydgate uses Chaucer's seven-lined stanza, but the poetry is seldom of a high quality. Once, indeed, in the first book he strikes a note of tenderness and pathos that reminds us of Chaucer. It is when Canace, condemned to death, asks her brother to protect her child. The mother pleads for her babe:

Lowly beseeching with all mine whole heart
For to remember specially, I pray

If it befal my little son to die,

That thou mayst after some mind on us have,
Suffer us both be buried in one grave.

But have a mind wherever that thou be,
Once on a day upon my child and me.

A mouth he has, but wordes hath he none;
Cannot complain, alas! for no outrage,
Nor grudgeth not, but lies here all alone,
Still as a lamb, most meek of his viságe.
What heart of steel could do to him damage,
Or suffer him die, beholding the manner
And look benign of his twain eyen clear!

The passage was greatly admired by the poet Gray.
Thomas Occleve, born about the same time as
Lydgate, was likewise a disciple of Chaucer.

As we

have seen, we owe to him our knowledge of Occleve. Chaucer in the habit as he lived, and in the poem, on the margin of whose manuscript the famous portrait is drawn, Occleve wrote some lines in praise of his master that are worthy of remembrance:

O master dear, and father reverent,

My master Chaucer, flower of eloquence,
Mirror of fructuous entendement !

O, universal father in science,

Alas! that thou thine excellent prudénce

In thy bed mortal mightest not bequeathë;

What ailéd death, alas! why would he sle1 thee?

O death, thou didest not harm singular,

In slaughter of him, but all this land it smarteth!
But natheless yet hast thou no powér

His name to slay, his high virtue astarteth2
Unslain from thee, which aye us lyfly3 herteth,*
With bookës of his ornate énditing,

That is to all this land enlumining.

1 slay.

2 escapes.

3 in a lifelike way.

encourages.

The poem called the Governail of Princes has little worth except for the portrait of, and reference to, Chaucer, and is a treatise on the way in which princes ought to govern their subjects. It is a riming English version of De Regimine Principium (on the duties of kings), a popular treatise of the middle ages, supposed to contain much of the wisdom of Aristotle. Occleve lived to be old, and died about the same time as Lydgate.

To this period belongs the composition of some of the famous old English ballads. A ballad1 is a spirited narrative simply told in verse, in short stanzas. Old English It should deal with the simplest human emo- ballads. tions and go straight to the heart of the reader. Such compositions usually belong to an unlettered age, and their authors are not as a rule poets by profession.

One group of them centres round a hero, Robin Hood. His name is probably a contraction of Robin of the Wood. But it is not likely that he represents any one particular personage. The popular mind likes to think of him as an outlaw, defying authority and whatever seemed to him oppression of the poor. The poems show a love of nature, of freedom, and of life in the open air.

The Battle of Otterburn, Chevy Chase, and the Nutbrown Maid belong also to the fifteenth century. The Nut-brown Maid is a dialogue between two lovers. To try her faith He tells his lady-love that he is an outlaw-

For I must to the green wood go,

Alone, a banished man;

and She answers that so long as she is not parted from him nothing matters,

For, in my mind, of all mankind

I love but you alone.

Having thus satisfied himself of her love he reveals the truth, that he is an earl's son and no outlaw, and the ballad

1 The word ballad is derived through the French from the late Latin ballare, to dance, and meant originally a song sung to the rhythmic movement of a dancing chorus, very like the modern ballet.

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