are in pain and great penance. 'They see our body, but they see not our heart, where our solace is. If they saw that, many of them would forsake all that they have, for to follow us.' The love of God is the perfection of the religious life. 'Amore langueo. These two words are written in the book of love, that is called the song of love, or the song of songs.' The special gift of the solitary is to love God. In heaven the angels that are most burning in love are nearest God.' 24 'If thou love him mickle, mickle joy and sweetness and burning thou feelest, that is thy comfort and strength, night and day.' 25 The Form of Perfect Living is an example of Rolle's simpler prose style, the purpose of it being mainly expositional. Even here, however, there is considerable alliteration, some use of the metrical cadences of the long line, of oratorical, ejaculatory devices, in short a general tendency to fall into a dithyrambic kind of expression suited to the mood of the prose-poet. The sentences often have a fullness and roundness of phrasing which remind one of the cadences of later liturgical literature. Always one feels that Rolle's written style is merely a transference of the impassioned expression of the orator to the more permanent record of the manuscript page. More characteristic of Rolle's popular style in its admixture of prose and verse is the tract Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat.20 In general this tract is similar in method to Taystek's sermon, and is representative of a kind of preaching and writing which Wiclif expressly condemned. At times, passages can be scanned as alliterative verse, though the piece is intended in the main to be prose. It is a disquisition, a kind of rhapsody, on divine love, and naturally the subject lends itself to a more lyric treatment than the Form of Perfect Living: 24 P. 29. 25 P. 30. 26 2 Vol. I, 49-61. It "All perisches & passes bat we with eghe see. wanes in to wrechednes, be welth of pis worlde. Robes & ritches rotes in dike. Prowde payntyng slakes in to sorow. Delites & drewryse stynk sal ful sone. Paire golde & paire tresoure drawes bam til dede. Al be wikked of bis worlde drawes til a dale, þat þai may se pare sorowyng whare waa es ever stabel. Bot he may syng of solace pat lufed Jhesu Criste: be wretchesse fra wele falles in to hell." 27 The tract continues with a passage of plain exposition in a more normal prose style, until it reaches a Meditatio de passione Cristi, where it again breaks out into a kind of rimed prose. From the point of view of ingenuity of technic Rolle is without question the most effective writer of prose in the fourteenth century, though it cannot be said that hev accomplished much in the development of a practicable art of prose style. The distinction between prose and verse is not clearly maintained by him, and of prose dignified by thought and wisdom, he had no conception. Good English prose has generally appealed primarily to the reason, but Rolle's appeal is almost altogether to emotion. When his prose is normal it is least distinguished. It is only when his heart is kindled by the fire of love that a kind of vatic enthusiasm colors and exalts his expression, and at the same time lifts it into regions where only those equally inspired can follow him. writing of artistic prose This is Thomas Usk's One further experiment in the in this period must be noted. Testament of Love, 28 made about 1387, and formerly often attributed to Chaucer. The treatise is in fact based upon Chaucer's translation of Boethius, and is an attempt to 1 Vol. I, 53. ** See Skeat, Chaucerian and other Pieces, pp. 1-45. give a testament, or witness, of the divine love in relation to a symbolic Margaret, the pearl beyond all price, who stands for various ideas, the Church, the grace of God, and others. The author of the treatise endeavored to write mystically, but being without genuine mystical fervor, he succeeded merely in furnishing an instructive illustration of what must happen when an uninspired writer tries to write an inspired style. Usk comments in some detail on his own theories of style. Many men, he says, so much swallow the deliciousness of gests and of rime by quaint knitting colors,29 that they take little heed of the goodness or badness of the thought. But such craft of enditing, he continues, will not be of my acquaintance. He puts his trust in "rude wordes and boystous." Many delight in French and Latin, but Englishmen will do better to write in English, for "the understanding of Englishmen wol not strecche to the privy termes in Frenche, what-so-ever we bosten of straunge langage." 30 He frequently speaks of his 'lewdness,' and his desire to write plainly in order to be easily understood. The reader of his Testament soon realizes, however, that this is all false modesty and affectation of simplicity, for the style of the work is highly artificial and ambitious. Although there is some use of alliteration, of rime, of puns, of violent antitheses, and of ingenious figures, Usk depends mainly for his stylistic effects upon an obscure and tortuous form of expression, derived apparently by taking the crudities of word-order and of unidiomatic phrasing found in Chaucer's Boece (and due there merely to Chaucer's difficulty in rendering the text of his original) and making these inadequacies of the Boece the marks of his own distinction of style. That Usk was striving after a literary prose style is apparent. He deserves some credit for rejecting the dithyrambic 80 P. 2. 20 P. I. style of Rolle, but his own style, though different, is little better. His theme he felt to be lofty, but without a genuine or deep desire to express himself truly and lacking a model to follow, he invented a literary prose which saved itself from being merely colloquial and natural by being unidiomatic and unintelligible. II WICLIF'S CAREER-LATIN WRITINGS-THEORIES OF PROSE STYLE-ENGLISH WORKS-LITERARY TECHNIC 1 In the survey of Wiclif's life, the first feeling is one of disappointment at its seeming futility. Though he stands as the representative English scholar and thinker of the latter half of the fourteenth century, what he accomplished for his immediate generation seems very little. His life was, in Milton's phrase, "but a short blaze, soon damped and stifled." He wrote no great works, he achieved no apparent and dramatic reforms, only once or twice does he appear in the arena of the higher public life of his day. And after his death when civil and ecclesiastical authority had done its best to destroy the seeds of his teaching, it might well have seemed to a contemporary that Wiclif belonged to that class of ephemerally troublesome spirits, the Wat Tylers, the John Balls of the time, who fought their brief fight against the world and then were swallowed up by it. Only a later generation could see that the defeat was but apparent, and that at the pure flame of Wiclif's life "all the succeeding reformers more effectually lighted their tapers." 2 Wiclif received the benefit of the best intellectual training of his day. Born about the year 1320, he became in 1" Of Reformation in England," Prose Works, ed. Symmons, I, 4. 2 Ibid. |