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HALLECKS'S NEW ENGLISH LITERATURE

by REUBEN POST HALLECK, M.A., LL.D.

Author of "History of English Literature" and "History of American
Literature"

PREFACE

In this New English Literature the author endeavors to preserve the qualities that have caused his former History of English Literature to be so widely used; namely, suggestiveness, clearness, organic unity, interest, and the power to awaken thought and to stimulate the student to further reading.

The book furnishes a concise account of the history and growth of English literature from the earliest times to the present day. It lays special emphasis on literary movements, on the essential qualities that differentiate one period from another, and on the spirit that animates each age. Above all, the constant purpose has been to arouse in the student an enthusiastic desire to read the works of the authors discussed. Because of the author's belief in the guide-book function of a history of literature, he has spent much time and thought in preparing the unusually detailed Suggested Readings that follow each chapter.

It was necessary for several reasons to prepare a new book. Twentieth century research has transformed the knowledge of the Elizabethan theater and has brought to light important new facts relating to the drama and to Shakespeare. The new social spirit has changed the critical viewpoint concerning authors as different as Wordsworth, Keats, Ruskin, Dickens, and Tennyson. Wordsworth's treatment of childhood, for instance, now requires an amount of space that would a short time ago have seemed disproportionate. Later Victorian writers, like Meredith, Hardy, Swinburne, and Kipling, can no longer be accorded the usual brief perfunctory treatment. Increased modern interest in contemporary life is also demanding some account of the literature already produced by the twentieth century. An entire chapter is devoted to showing how this new literature reveals the thought and ideals of this generation.

Other special features of this new work are the suggestions and references for a literary trip through England, the historical introductions to the chapters, the careful treatment of the modern drama, the latest bibliography, and the new illustrations, some of which have been specially drawn for this work, while others have been taken from original paintings in the National Portrait Gallery, London, and elsewhere. The illustrations are the result of much individual research by the author during his travels in England.

The greater part of this book was gradually fashioned in the classroom, during the long period that the author has taught this subject. Experience with his classes has proved to him the reasonableness of the modern demand that a textbook shall be definite and stimulating.

The author desires to thank the large number of teachers who have aided him by their criticism. Miss Elizabeth Howard Spaulding and Miss Sarah E. Simons deserve special mention for valuable assistance. The entire treatment of Rudyard Kipling is the work of Miss Mary Brown Humphrey. The greater part of the chapter, Twentieth-Century Literature, was prepared by Miss Anna Blanche McGill. Some of the best and most difficult parts of the book were written by the author's wife. R.P.H.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION—LITERARY ENGLAND

CHAPTERS:

I. FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066

II. FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066, TO CHAUCER'S DEATH 1400

III. FROM CHAUCER'S DEATH 1400, TO THE ACCESSION OF ELIZABETH, 1558

IV. THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 1558-1603

V. THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660

VI. FROM THE RESTORATION, 1660, TO THE PUBLICATION OF PAMELA, 1740

VII. THE SECOND FORTY YEARS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 1740-1780

VIII. THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837

IX. THE VICTORIAN AGE, 1837-1900

X. TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE

SUPPLEMENTARY LIST OF AUTHORS AND THEIR CHIEF WORKS

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS:

1. Woden. 2. Exeter Cathedral. 3. Anglo-Saxon Gleeman. (From the tapestry designed by H.A. Bone). 4. Facsimile of beginning of Cotton MS. of Beowulf.(British Museum). 5. Facsimile of Beginning of Junian MS. of Caedmon. 6. Anglo-Saxon Musicians. (From illuminated MS., British Museum). 7. The Beginning of Alfred's Laws. (From illuminated MS., British Museum). 8. The Death of Harold at Hastings. (From the Bayeux tapestry). 9. What Mandeville Saw. (From Edition of 1725). 10. John Wycliffe. (From an old print). 11. Treuthe's Pilgryme atte Plow. (From a MS. in Trinity College, Cambridge). 12. Gower Hearing the Confession of a Lover. (From Egerton MS., British Museum). 13. Geoffrey Chaucer. (From an old drawing in the MS. of Occleve's Poems, British Museum). 14. Canterbury Cathedral. 15. Pilgrims Leaving the Tabard Inn. (From Urry's Chaucer). 16. Facsimile of Lines Describing the Franklyn. (From the Cambridge University MS.). 17. Franklyn, Friar, Knight, Prioress, Squire, Clerk of Oxford. (From the Ellesmere MS.). 18. Morris Dancers. (From MS. of Chaucer's Time). 19. Henry VIII, giving Bibles to Clergy and Laity. (From frontispiece to Coverdale Bible). 20. Book Illustration, Early Fifteenth Century. (British Museum). 21. Facsimile of Caxton's Advertisement of his Books. (Bodleian Library, Oxford). 22. Malory's Morte d'Arthur. (From DeWorde's Edition, 1529). 23. Early Title Page of Robin Hood. (Copland Edition, 1550). 24. William Tyndale. (From an old print). 25. Sir Thomas Wyatt. (After Holbein). 26. Facsimile of Queen Elizabeth's Signature. 27. Sir Philip Sidney. (After the miniature by Isaac Oliver, Windsor Castle). 28. Francis Bacon. (From the painting by Van Somer, National Portrait Gallery). 29. Title page of Bacon's Essays, 1597. 30. John Donne. (From the painting by Jansen, South Kensington Museum). 31. Edmund Spenser. (From a painting in Dublin Castle). 32. Miracle Play at Coventry. (From an old print). 33. Hell Mouth in the Old Miracle Play. From a Columbia University Model. 34. Fool's Head. 35. Air-Bag Flapper and Lath Dagger. 36. Fool of the Old Play. 37. Thomas Sackville. 38. Theater in Inn Yard. (From Columbia University model). 39. Reconstructed Globe Theater, Earl's Court, London. 40. The Bankside and its Theaters. (From the Hollar engraving, about 1620). 41. Contemporary Drawing of Interior of an Elizabethan Theater. 42. Marlowe's Memorial Statue at Canterbury. 43. William Shakespeare. (From the Chandos portrait, National Portrait Gallery). 44. Shakespeare's Birthplace. Stratford-on-Avon. 45. Classroom in Stratford Grammar School. 46. Anne Hathaway's Cottage, Shottery. 47. View of Stratford-on-Avon. 48. Inscription over Shakespeare's Tomb. 49. Shakespeare—The D'Avenant Bust. (Discovered in 1845). 50. Henry Irving as Hamlet. 51. Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (From the painting by Sargent). 52. Falstaff and his Page. (From a drawing by B. Westmacott). 53. Ben Jonson. (From the portrait by Honthorst, National Portrait Gallery). 54. Ben Jonson's Tomb in Westminster Abbey. 55. Francis Beaumont. 56. John Fletcher. 57. Cromwell Dictating Dispatches to Milton. (From the painting by Ford Maddox Brown). 58. Thomas Fuller. 59. Izaak Walton. 60. Jeremy Taylor. 61. John Bunyan. (From the painting by Sadler, National Portrait Gallery). 62. Bedford Bridge, Showing Gates and Jail. (From an old print). 63. Bunyan's Dream. (From Fourth Edition Pilgrim's Progress, 1680). 64. Woodcut from the First Edition of Mr. Badman. 65. Robert Herrick. 66. John Milton. (After a drawing by W. Faithorne, at Bayfordbury). 67. John Milton, AEt. 10. 68. Milton's Visit to Galileo in 1638. (From the painting by T. Lessi). 69. Facsimile of Milton's Signature. 1663. 70. Title Page to Comus, 1637. 71. Milton's Motto from Comus, with Autograph, 1639. 72. Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to his Daughter. (From the painting by Munkacsy). 73. Samuel Butler. 74. John Dryden. (From the painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller, National Portrait Gallery). 75. Birthplace of Dryden. (From a print). 76. Daniel Defoe. (From a print by Vandergucht). 77. Jonathan Swift. (From the painting by C. Jervas, National Portrait Gallery). 78. Moor Park. (From a drawing). 79. Swift and Stella. (From the painting by Dicksee). 80. Joseph Addison. (From the painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller, National Portrait Gallery.) 81. Birthplace of Addison. 82. Richard Steele. 83. Sir Roger de Coverley in Church. (From a drawing by B. Westmacott). 84. Alexander Pope. (From the portrait by William Hoare). 85. Pope's Villa at Twickenham. (From an old print). 86. Rape of the Lock. (From a drawing by B. Westmacott). 87. Alexander Pope. (From a contemporary portrait). 88. Horace Walpole. 89. Thomas Gray. 90. Stoke Poges Churchyard. 91. A Blind Beggar Robbed of his Drink. (From a British Museum MS.) 92. Samuel Richardson. (From an original drawing). 93. Henry Fielding. (From the drawing by Hogarth). 94. Laurence Sterne. 95. Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. (From a drawing by B. Westmacott). 96. Tobias Smollett. 97. Edward Gibbon. (From the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds). 98. Edmund Burke. (From the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, National Portrait Gallery). 99. Oliver Goldsmith. (From the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, National Portrait Gallery). 100. Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson. (From a drawing by B. Westmacott). 101. Goldsmith's Lodgings, Canonbury Tower, London. 102. Dr. Primrose and his Family. (From a drawing by G. Patrick Nelson). 103. Samuel Johnson. (From the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds). 104. Samuel Johnson's Birthplace. (From an old print). 105. James Boswell. 106. Cheshire Cheese Inn To-day. 107. Robert Southey. 108. Charles Lamb. (From a drawing by Maclise). 109. Bo-Bo and Roast Pig. (From a drawing by B. Westmacott). 110. William Cowper. (From the portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence). 111. Cowper's cottage at Weston. 112. John Gilpin's Ride. (From a drawing by R. Caldecott). 113. Robert Burns. (From the painting by Nasmyth National Portrait Gallery). 114. Birthplace of Burns. 115. Burns and Highland Mary. (From the painting by James Archer). 116. Sir Walter Scott. (From the painting by William Nicholson). 117. Abbotsford, Home of Sir Walter Scott. 118. Scott's Grave in Dryburgh Abbey. 119. Loch Katrine and Ellen's Isle. 120. Walter Scott. (From a life sketch by Maclise). 121. Scott's Desk and "Elbow Chair" at Abbotsford. 122. Jane Austen. (From an original family portrait). 123. Jane Austen's Desk. 124. William Wordsworth. (From the portrait by B.R. Haydon). 125. Boy of Winander. (From the painting by H.O. Walker, Congressional Library). 126. Wordsworth's Home at Grasmere—Dove Cottage. 127. Grasmere Lake. 128. William Wordsworth. (From a sketch in Fraser's Magazine). 129. Rydal Mount near Ambleside. 130. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (From a pencil sketch by C.R. Leslie). 131. Coleridge's Cottage at Nether-Stowey. 132. Coleridge as a Young Man. (From a sketch made in Germany). 133. Lord Byron. (From a portrait by Kramer). 134. Byron at Seventeen. (From a painting). 135. Newstead Abbey, Byron's Home. 136. Castle of Chillon. 137. Byron's Home at Pisa. 138. Percy Bysshe Shelley. (From the portrait by Amelia Curran, National Portrait Gallery). 139. Shelley's Birthplace, Field Place. 140. Grave of Shelley, Protestant Cemetery, Rome. 141. Facsimile of Stanza from To a Skylark. 142. John Keats. (From the painting by Hilton, National Portrait Gallery). 143. Keats's Home, Wentworth Place. 144. Grave of Keats, Rome. 145. Facsimile of Original MS. of Endymion. 146. Endymion. (From the painting by H.O. Walker, Congressional Library). 147. Thomas de Quincy. (From the painting by Sir J.W. Gordon, National Portrait Gallery). 148. Room in Dove Cottage. 149. Charles Darwin. 150. John Tyndall. 151. Thomas Huxley. (From the painting by John Collier, National Portrait Gallery). 152. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. (From the drawing by himself, National Portrait Gallery). 153. Thomas Babington Macaulay. (From the painting by Sir. F. Grant, National Portrait Gallery). 154. Cardinal Newman. (From the painting by Emmeline Deane). 155. Thomas Carlyle. (From the painting by James McNeill Whistler). 156. Craigenputtock. 157. Mrs. Carlyle. (From a miniature portrait). 158. John Ruskin. (From a photograph). 159. Charles Dickens. (From a photograph taken in America, 1868). 160. Dicken's Home, Gads Hill. 161. Facsimile of MS. of A Christmas Carol. 162. William Makepeace Thackeray. (From the painting by Samuel Laurence, National Portrait Gallery). 163. Caricature of Thackeray by Himself. 164. Thackeray's Home where Vanity Fair was Written. 165. George Eliot. (From a drawing by Sir F.W. Burton, National Portrait Gallery). 166. George Eliot's Birthplace. 167. Robert Louis Stevenson. (From a photograph). 168. Stevenson as a Boy. 169. Edinburgh Memorial of Robert Louis Stevenson. (By St. Gaudens). 170. George Meredith. (From the painting by G.F. Watts, National Portrait Gallery). 171. Thomas Hardy. (From the painting by Winifred Thompson). 172. Max Gate. (The Home of Hardy). 173. Matthew Arnold. (From the painting by G.F. Watts, National Portrait Gallery). 174. Robert Browning. (From the painting by G.F. Watts, National Portrait Gallery). 175. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (From the painting by Field Talfourd, National Portrait Gallery). 176. Facsimile of MS. from Pippa Passes. 177. Alfred Tennyson. (From a photograph by Mayall). 178. Farringford. 179. Facsimile of MS. of Crossing the Bar. 180. Algernon Charles Swinburne. (From the painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti). 181. Rudyard Kipling. (From the painting by John Collier). 182. Mowgli and his Brothers. (From The Jungle Book). 183. The Cat That Walked. (From Kipling's drawing for Just-So Stories). 184. Joseph Conrad. 185. Arnold Bennett. 186. John Galsworthy. 187. Herbert George Wells. 188. William Butler Yeats. 189. John Masefield. 190. Alfred Noyes. 191. Henry Arthur Jones. 192. Arthur Wing Pinero. 193. George Bernard Shaw. (From the bust by Rodin). 194. James Matthew Barrie. 195. Stephen Phillips. 196. Lady Gregory. 197. John Synge.

[Illustration: LITERARY MAP OF ENGLAND]

[Illustration: LITERARY MAP OF ENGLAND]

NEW ENGLISH LITERATURE

INTRODUCTION

LITERARY ENGLAND

Some knowledge of the homes and haunts of English authors is necessary for an understanding of their work. We feel in much closer touch with Shakespeare after merely reading about Stratford-on-Avon; but we seem to share his experiences when we actually walk from Stratford-on-Avon to Shottery and Warwick. The scenery and life of the Lake Country are reflected in Wordsworth's poetry. Ayr and the surrounding country throw a flood of light on the work of Burns. The streets of London are a commentary on the novels of Dickens. A journey to Canterbury aids us in recreating the life of Chaucer's Pilgrims.

Much may be learned from a study of literary England. Whether one does or does not travel, such study is necessary. Those who hope at some time to visit England should acquire in advance as much knowledge as possible about the literary associations of the places to be visited; for when the opportunity for the trip finally comes, there is usually insufficient time for such preparation as will enable the traveler to derive the greatest enjoyment from a visit to the literary centers in which Great Britain abounds.

Whenever an author is studied, his birthplace should be located on the literary map. Baedeker's Great Britain will be indispensable in making an itinerary. The Reference List for Literary England is sufficiently comprehensive to enable any one to plan an enjoyable literary pilgrimage through Great Britain and to learn the most important facts about the places connected with English authors.

The following suggestions from the author's experience are intended to serve merely as an illustration of how to begin an itinerary. The majority of east-bound steamships call at Plymouth, a good place to disembark for a literary trip. From Plymouth, the traveler may go to Exeter (a quaint old town with a fine cathedral, the home of Exeter Book,) thence by rail to Camelford in Cornwall and by coach four miles to the fascinating Tintagel (King Arthur), where, as Tennyson says in his Idylls of the King:—

"All down the thundering shores of Bude and Bos,
There came a day as still as heaven, and then
They found a naked child upon the sands
Of dark Tintagil by the Cornish sea,
And that was Arthur."

Next, the traveler may go by coach to Bude (of which Tennyson remarked, "I hear that there are larger waves at Bude than at any other place. I must go thither and be alone with God") and to unique Clovelly and Bideford (Kingsley), by rail to Ilfracombe, by coach to Lynton (Lorna Doone), and the adjacent Lynmouth (where Shelley passed some of his happiest days and alarmed the authorities by setting afloat bottles containing his Declaration of Rights), by coach to Minehead, by rail to Watchet, driving past Alfoxden (Wordsworth) to Nether-Stowey (Coleridge) and the Quantock Hills, by motor and rail to Glastonbury (Isle of Avalon, burial place of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere), by rail to Wells (cathedral), to Bath (many literary associations), to Bristol (Chatterton, Southey), to Gloucester (fine cathedral, tomb of Edward II), and to Ross, the starting point for a remarkable all day's row down the river Wye to Tintern Abbey (Wordsworth), stopping for dinner at Monmouth (Geoffrey of Monmouth).

After a start similar to the foregoing, the traveler should begin to make an itinerary of his own. He will enjoy a trip more if he has a share in planning it. From Tintern Abbey he might proceed, for instance, to Stratford-on-Avon (Shakespeare); then to Warwick, Kenilworth, and the George Eliot Country in North Warwickshire and Staffordshire.

Far natural beauty, there is nothing in England that is more delightful than a coaching trip through Wordsworth's Lake Country (Cumberland and Westmoreland). From there it is not far to the Carlyle Country (Ecclefechan, Craigenputtock), to the Burns Country (Dumfries, Ayr), and to the Scott Country (Loch Katrine, The Trossachs, Edinburgh, and Abbotsford). In Edinburgh, William Sharp's statement about Stevenson should be remembered, "One can, in a word, outline Stevenson's own country as all the region that on a clear day one may in the heart of Edinburgh descry from the Castle walls."

If the traveler lands at Southampton, he is on the eastern edge of Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Dorchester in Dorsetshire being the center. The Jane Austen Country (Steventon, Chawton) is in Hampshire. To the east, in Surrey, is Burford Bridge near Dorking, where Keats wrote part of his Endymion, where George Meredith had his summer home, and where "the country of his poetry" is located.

In London, it is a pleasure to trace some of the greatest literary associations in the world. We may stand at the corner of Monkwell and Silver streets, on the site of a building in which Shakespeare wrote some of his greatest plays. Milton lived in the vicinity and is buried not far distant in St. Giles Church. In Westminster Abbey we find the graves of many of the greatest authors, from Chaucer to Tennyson. London is not only Dickens Land and Thackeray Land, but also the "Land" of many other writers. We may still eat in the Old Cheshire Cheese, where Johnson and Goldsmith dined.

Those interested in literary England ought to include the cathedral towns in their itinerary, so that they may visit the wonderful "poems in stone," some of which, e.g., Canterbury (Chaucer), Winchester (Izaak Walton, Jane Austen), Lichfield (Johnson), have literary associations. For this reason, all of the cathedral towns in England have been included in the literary map.

REFERENCE LIST FOR LITERARY ENGLAND:

Baedeker's Great Britain (includes England and Scotland).

Baedeker's London and its Environs.

Adcock's Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London.

Lang's Literary London.

Hutton's Literary Landmarks in London.

Lucas's A Wanderer in London.

Shelley's Literary By-Paths in Old England.

Baildon's Homes and Haunts of Famous Authors.

Bates's From Gretna Green to Land's End.

Masson's In the Footsteps of the Poets.

Wolfe's A Literary Pilgrimage among the Haunts of Famous British
Authors.

Salmon's Literary Rambles in the West of England.

Hutton's A Book of the Wye.

Headlam's Oxford (Medieval Towns Series).

Winter's Shakespeare's England.

Murray's Handbook of Warwickshire.

Lee's Stratford-on-Avon, from the Earliest Times to the Death of
Shakespeare.

Tompkins's Stratford-on-Avon (Dent's Temple Topographies).

Brassington's Shakespeare's Homeland.

Winter's Grey Days and Gold (Shakespeare).

Collingwood's The Lake Counties (Dent's County Guides).

Wordsworth's The Prelude (Books I.-V.).

Rawnsley's Literary Associations of the English Lakes.

Knight's Through the Wordsworth Country.

Bradley's Highways and Byways in the English Lakes.

Jerrold's Surrey (Dent's County Guides).

Dewar's Hampshire with Isle of Wight (Dent's County Guides).

Ward's The Canterbury Pilgrimage.

Harper's The Hardy Country.

Snell's The Blackmore Country.

Melville's The Thackeray Country.

Kitton's The Dickens Country.

Sloan's The Carlyle Country.

Dougall's The Burns Country.

Crockett's The Scott Country.

Hill's Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends.

Cook's Homes and Haunts of John Ruskin.

William Sharp's Literary Geography and Travel Sketches (Vol. IV. of Works) contains chapters on _The Country of Stevenson, The Country of George Meredith, The Country of Carlyle, The Country of George.

Eliot, The Brontë Country, Thackeray Land_, The Thames from Oxford to the Nore_.

Hutton's Literary Landmarks of Edinburgh.

Stevenson's Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh.

Loftie's Brief Account of Westminster Abbey.

Parker's Introduction to the Study of Gothic Architecture.

Stanley's Memorials of Westminster Abbey.

Kimball's An English Cathedral Journey.

Singleton's How to Visit the English Cathedrals.

Bond's The English Cathedrals (200 illustrations).

Cram's The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain (6 illustrations).

Home's What to See in England.

Boynton's London in English Literature.

GENERAL REFERENCE LIST FOR THE STUDY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE[1]:

Cambridge History of English Literature, 14 vols.

Garnett and Gosse's English Literature, 4 vols.

Morley's English Writers, 11 vols.

Jusserand's Literary History of the English People.

Taine's English Literature.

Courthope's History of English Poetry, 6 vols.

Stephens and Lee's Dictionary of National Biography (dead authors).

New International Cyclopedia (living and dead authors).

English Men of Letters Series (abbreviated reference, E.M.L.)

Great Writers' Series (abbreviated reference. G.W.).

Poole's Index (and continuation volumes for reference to critical articles in periodicals).

The United States Catalogue and Cumulative Book Index.

SELECTIONS FROM ENGLISH LITERATURE[2]:

*Pancoast and Spaeth's Early English Poems. (P. & S.)[3]

*Warren's Treasury of English Literature, Part I. (Origins to
Eleventh Century: London, One Shilling.) (Warren.)

*Ward's English Poets, 4 vols. (Ward.)

*Bronson's English Poems, 4 vols. (Bronson.)

Oxford Treasury of English Literature, Vol. I., Beowulf to Jacobean;

*Vol. II., Growth of the Drama; Vol. III., Jacobean to Victorian.
(Oxford Treasury.)

*Oxford Book of English Verse. (Oxford.)

*Craik's English Prose, 5 vols. (Craik.)

*Page's British Poets of the Nineteenth Century. (Page.)

Chambers's Cyclopedia of English Literature. (Chambers.)

Manly's English Poetry (from 1170). (Manly I.)

Manly's English Prose (from 1137). (Manly II.)

Century Readings for a Course in English Literature. (Century.)

CHAPTER I: FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066

Subject Matter and Aim.—The history of English literature traces the development of the best poetry and prose written in English by the inhabitants of the British Isles. For more than twelve hundred years the Anglo-Saxon race has been producing this great literature, which includes among its achievements the incomparable work of Shakespeare.

This literature is so great in amount that the student who approaches the study without a guide is usually bewildered. He needs a history of English literature for the same reason that a traveler in England requires a guidebook. Such a history should do more than indicate where the choicest treasures of literature may be found; it should also show the interesting stages of development; it should emphasize some of the ideals that have made the Anglo-Saxons one of the most famous races in the world; and it should inspire a love for the reading of good literature.

No satisfactory definition of "literature" has ever been framed. Milton's conception of it was "something so written to after times, as they should not willingly let it die." Shakespeare's working definition of literature was something addressed not to after times but to an eternal present, and invested with such a touch of nature as to make the whole world kin. When he says of Duncan:—

"After life's fitful fever he sleeps well,"

he touches the feelings of mortals of all times and opens the door for imaginative activity, causing us to wonder why life should be a fitful fever, followed by an incommunicable sleep. Much of what we call literature would not survive the test of Shakespeare's definition; but true literature must appeal to imagination and feeling as well as to intellect. No mere definition can take the place of what may be called a feeling for literature. Such a feeling will develop as the best English poetry and prose: are sympathetically read. Wordsworth had this feeling when he defined the poets as those:—

"Who gave us nobler loves and nobler cares."

The Mission of English Literature.—It is a pertinent question to ask, What has English literature to offer?

In the first place, to quote Ben Jonson:—

"The thirst that from the soul cloth rise
Doth ask a drink divine."

English literature is of preëminent worth in helping to supply that thirst. It brings us face to face with great ideals, which increase our sense of responsibility for the stewardship of life and tend to raise the level of our individual achievement. We have a heightened sense of the demands which life makes and a better comprehension of the "far-off divine event" toward which we move, after we have heard Swinburne's ringing call:—

"…this thing is God,
To be man with thy might,
To grow straight in the strength
of thy spirit, and live out thy life
as the light."

We feel prompted to act on the suggestion of—

"…him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on striping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things."[4]

In the second place, the various spiritual activities demanded for the interpretation of the best things in literature add to enjoyment. This pleasure, unlike that which arises from physical gratification, increases with age, and often becomes the principal source of entertainment as life advances. Shakespeare has Prospero say:—

"…my library
Was dukedom large enough."

The suggestions from great minds disclose vistas that we might never otherwise see. Browning truly says:—

"…we're made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred tunes nor cared to see."

Sometimes it is only after reading Shakespeare that we can see—

"…winking Mary buds begin
To ope their golden eyes.
With everything that pretty is."

and only after spending some time in Wordsworth's company that the common objects of our daily life become invested with—

"The glory and the freshness of a dream."

In the third place, we should emphasize the fact that one great function of English literature is to bring deliverance to souls weary with routine, despondent, or suffering the stroke of some affliction. In order to transfigure the everyday duties of life, there is need of imagination, of a vision such as the poets give. Without such a vision the tasks of life are drudgery. The dramas of the poets bring relief and incite to nobler action.

"The soul hath need of prophet and redeemer.
Her outstretched wings against her prisoning bars
She waits for truth, and truth is with the dreamer
Persistent as the myriad light of stars."[5]

We need to listen to a poet like Browning, who—

"Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, tho' right were worsted, wrong would triumph.
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake."

In the fourth place, the twentieth century is emphasizing the fact that neither happiness nor perpetuity of government is possible without the development of a spirit of service,—a truth long since taught by English literature. We may learn this lesson from Beowulf, the first English epic, from Alfred the Great, from William Langland, and from Chaucer's Parish Priest. All Shakespeare's greatest and happiest characters, all the great failures of his dramas, are sermons on this text. In The Tempest he presents Ariel, tendering his service to Prospero:—

"All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure."

Shakespeare delights to show Ferdinand winning Miranda through service, and Caliban remaining an abhorred creature because he detested service. Much of modern literature is an illuminated text on the glory of service. Coleridge voiced for all the coming years what has grown to be almost an elemental feeling to the English-speaking race:—

"He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small."

The Home and Migrations of the Anglo-Saxon Race.—Just as there was a time when no English foot had touched the shores of America, so there was a period when the ancestors of the English lived far away from the British Isles. For nearly four hundred years prior to the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, Britain had been a Roman province. In 410 A.D. the Romans withdrew their legions from Britain to protect Rome herself against swarms of Teutonic invaders. About 449 a band of Teutons, called Jutes, left Denmark, landed on the Isle of Thanet (in the north-eastern part of Kent), and began the conquest of Britain. Warriors from the tribes of the Angles and the Saxons soon followed, and drove westward the original inhabitants, the Britons or Welsh, i.e. foreigners, as the Teutons styled the natives.

Before the invasion of Britain, the Teutons inhabited the central part of Europe as far south as the Rhine, a tract which in a large measure coincides with modern Germany. The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons were different tribes of Teutons. These ancestors of the English dwelt in Denmark and in the lands extending southward along the North Sea.

The Angles, an important Teutonic tribe, furnished the name for the
new home, which was called Angle-land, afterward shortened into
England. The language spoken by these tribes is generally called
Anglo-Saxon or Saxon.

The Training of the Race.—The climate is a potent factor in determining the vigor and characteristics of a race. Nature reared the Teuton like a wise but not indulgent parent. By every method known to her, she endeavored to render him fit to colonize and sway the world. Summer paid him but a brief visit. His companions were the frost, the fluttering snowflake, the stinging hail. For music, instead of the soft notes of a shepherd's pipe under blue Italian or Grecian skies, he listened to the north wind whistling among the bare branches, or to the roar of an angry northern sea upon the bleak coast.

The feeble could not withstand the rigor of such a climate, in the absence of the comforts of civilization. Only the strongest in each generation survived; and these transmitted to their children increasing vigor. Warfare was incessant not only with nature but also with the surrounding tribes. Nature kept the Teuton in such a school until he seemed fit to colonize the world and to produce a literature that would appeal to humanity in every age.

The Early Teutonic Religion.—In the early days on the continent, before the Teuton had learned of Christianity, his religious beliefs received their most pronounced coloring from the rigors of his northern climate, from the Frost Giants, the personified forces of evil, with whom he battled. The kindly, life-bringing spring and summer, which seemed to him earth's redeeming divinity, were soon slain by the arrows that came from the winter's quivers. Not even Thor, the wielder of the thunderbolt, nor Woden, the All-Father, delayed the inevitable hour when the dusk of winter came, when the voice of Baldur could no longer be heard awaking earth to a new life. The approach of the "twilight of the gods," the Götterdämmerung, was a stern reality to the Teuton.

[Illustration: WODEN.]

Although instinct with gloomy fatalism, this religion taught bravery. None but the brave were invited to Valhalla to become Woden's guest. The brave man might perish, but even then he won victory; for he was invited to sit with heroes at the table of the gods. "None but the brave deserves the fair," is merely a modern softened rendering of the old spirit.

The Christian religion, which was brought to the Teuton after he had come to England, found him already cast in a semi-heroic mold. But before he could proceed on his matchless career of world conquest, before he could produce a Shakespeare and plant his flag in the sunshine of every land, it was necessary for this new faith to develop in him the belief that a man of high ideals, working in unison with the divinity that shapes his end, may rise superior to fate and be given the strength to overcome the powers of evil and to mold the world to his will. The intensity of this faith, swaying an energetic race naturally fitted to respond to the great moral forces of the universe, has enabled the Anglo-Saxon to produce the world's greatest literature, to evolve the best government for developing human capabilities, and to make the whole world feel the effect of his ideals and force of character. At the close of the nineteenth century, a French philosopher wrote a book entitled Anglo-Saxon Superiority, In What Does it Consist? His answer was, "In self-reliance and in the happiness found in surmounting the material and moral difficulties of life." A study of the literature in which the ideals of the race are most artistically and effectively embodied will lead to much the same conclusion.

The History of Anglo-Saxon England.—The first task of the Anglo-Saxons after settling in England was to subdue the British, the race that has given King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table to English literature. By 600 A.D., after a century and a half of struggle, the Anglo-Saxons had probably occupied about half of England.

They did not build on the civilization that Rome had left when she withdrew in 410, but destroyed the towns and lived in the country. The typical Englishman still loves to dwell in a country home. The work of Anglo-Saxon England consisted chiefly in tilling the soil and in fighting.

The year 597 marks an especially important date, the coming of St.
Augustine, who brought the Christian faith to the Anglo-Saxons.
Education, literature, and art followed finding their home in the
monasteries.

For nearly 400 years after coming to England, the different tribes were not united under one ruler. Not until 830 did Egbert, king of the West Saxons, become overlord of England. Before and after this time, the Danes repeatedly plundered the land. They finally settled in the eastern part above the Thames. Alfred (849-900), the greatest of Anglo-Saxon rulers, temporarily checked them, but in the latter part of the tenth century they were more troublesome, and in 1017 they made Canute, the Dane, king of England. Fortunately the Danes were of the same race, and they easily amalgamated with the Saxons.

These invasions wasted the energies of England during more than two centuries, but this long period of struggle brought little change to the institutions or manner of life in Anglo-Saxon England. The witan, or assembly of wise men, the forerunner of the present English parliament, met in 1066 and chose Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon king.

During these six hundred rears, the Anglo-Saxons conquered the British, accepted Christianity, fought the Danes, finally amalgamating with them, brought to England a lasting representative type of government, established the fundamental customs of the race, surpassed all contemporary western European peoples in the production of literature, and were ready to receive fresh impetus from the Normans in 1066.

The Anglo-Saxon Language.—Our oldest English literature is written in the language spoken by the Angles and the Saxons. This at first sight looks like a strange tongue to one conversant with modern English only; but the language that we employ to-day has the framework, the bone and sinew, of the earlier tongue. Modern English is no more unlike Anglo-Saxon than a bearded man is unlike his former childish self. A few examples will show the likeness and the difference. "The noble queen" would in Anglo-Saxon be s=eo aeðele cw=en; "the noble queen's," ð=aere aeðelan cw=ene. S=eo is the nominative feminine singular, ð=aere the genitive, of the definite article. The adjective and the noun also change their forms with the varying cases. In its inflections, Anglo-Saxon resembles its sister language, the modern German.

After the first feeling of strangeness has passed away, it is easy to recognize many of the old words. Take, for instance, this from Beowulf:—

"…ð=y h=e ðone f=eond ofercw=om, gehn=aegde helle g=ast."

Here are eight words, apparently strange, but even a novice soon recognizes five of them: h=e, f=eond (fiend), ofercw=om (overcame), helle (hell), g=ast (ghost). The word ðone, strange as it looks, is merely the article "the."

…therefore he overcame the fiend,
Subdued the ghost of hell.

Let us take from the same poem another passage, containing the famous simile:—

"…l=eoht inne st=od, efne sw=a of hefene h=adre sc=ineð rodores candel."

Of these eleven words, seven may be recognized: l=eoht (light), inne (in), st=od (stood), of, hefene (heaven),sc=ineð (shineth), candel (candle).

…a light stood within,
Even so from heaven serenely shineth
The firmament's candle.

Some prefer to use "Old English" in place of "Anglo-Saxon" in order to emphasize the continuity of the development of the language. It is, however, sometimes convenient to employ different terms for different periods of development of the same entity. We do not insist on calling a man a "grown boy," although there may be no absolute line of demarcation between boy and man.

Earliest Anglo-Saxon Literature.—As with the Greeks and Romans, so with the Teutons, poetry afforded the first literary outlet for the feelings. The first productions were handed down by memory. Poetry is easily memorized and naturally lends itself to singing and musical accompaniment. Under such circumstances, even prose would speedily fall into metrical form. Poetry is, furthermore, the most suitable vehicle of expression for the emotions. The ancients, unlike modern writers, seldom undertook to make literature unless they felt so deeply that silence was impossible.

The Form of Anglo-Saxon Poetry.—Each line is divided Into two parts by a major pause. Because each of these parts was often printed as a complete line in old texts, Beowulf has sometimes been called a poem of 6368 lines, although it has but 3184.

A striking characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry is consonantal alliteration; that is, the repetition of the same consonant at the beginning of words in the same line:—

"Grendel gongan; Godes yrre baer."
Grendel going; God's anger bare.

The usual type of Anglo-Saxon poetry has two alliterations in the first half of the line and one in the second. The lines vary considerably in the number of syllables. The line from Beowulf quoted just above has nine syllables. The following line from the same poem has eleven:—

"Flota f=amig-heals, fugle gel=icost."
The floater foamy-necked, to a fowl most like.

This line, also from Beowulf has eight syllables:—

"N=ipende niht, and norðan wind."
Noisome night, and northern wind.

Vowel alliteration is less common. Where this is employed, the vowels are generally different, as is shown in the principal words of the following line:—

"On =ead, on =aeht, on eorcan st=an."
On wealth, on goods, on precious stone.

End rime is uncommon, but we must beware of thinking that there is no rhythm, for that is a pronounced characteristic.

Anglo-Saxon verse was intended to be sung, and hence rhythm and accent or stress are important. Stress and the length of the line are varied; but we usually find that the four most important words, two in each half of the line, are stressed on their most important syllable. Alliteration usually shows where to place three stresses. A fourth stress generally falls on a word presenting an emphatic idea near the end of the line.

[Illustration: EXETER CATHEDRAL.]

The Manuscripts that have handed down Anglo-Saxon Literature.—The earliest Anglo-Saxon poetry was transmitted by the memories of men. Finally, with the slow growth of learning, a few acquired the art of writing, and transcribed on parchment a small portion of the current songs. The introduction of Christianity ushered in prose translations and a few original compositions, which were taken down on parchment and kept in the monasteries.

The study of Anglo-Saxon literature is comparatively recent, for its treasures have not been long accessible. Its most famous poem, Beowulf, was not printed until the dawn of the nineteenth century. In 1822 Dr. Blume, a German professor of law, happened to find in a monastery at Vercelli, Italy, a large volume of Anglo-Saxon manuscript, containing a number of fine poems and twenty-two sermons. This is now known as the Vercelli Book. No one knows how it happened to reach Italy. Another large parchment volume of poems and miscellany was deposited by Bishop Leofric at the cathedral of Exeter in Devonshire, about 1050 A.D. This collection, one of the prized treasures of that cathedral, is now called the Exeter Book.

Many valuable manuscripts were destroyed at the dissolution of the monasteries in the time of Henry VIII., between 1535 and 1540. John Bale, a contemporary writer, says that "those who purchased the monasteries reserved the books, some to scour their candlesticks, some to rub their boots, some they sold to the grocers and soap sellers, and some they sent over sea to the bookbinders, not in small numbers, but at times whole ships full, to the wonder of foreign nations."

The Anglo-Saxon Scop and Gleeman.—Our earliest poetry was made current and kept fresh in memory by the singers. The kings and nobles often attached to them a scop, or maker of verses. When the warriors, after some victorious battle, were feasting at their long tables, the banquet was not complete without the songs of the scop. While the warriors ate the flesh of boar and deer, and warmed their blood with horns of foaming ale, the scop, standing where the blaze from a pile of logs disclosed to him the grizzly features of the men, sang his most stirring songs, often accompanying them with the music of a rude harp. As the feasters roused his enthusiasm with their applause, he would sometimes indulge in an outburst of eloquent extempore song. Not infrequently the imagination of some king or noble would be fired, and he would sing of his own great deeds.

We read in Beowulf that in Hrothgar's famous hall—

"…ð=aer was hearpan sw=eg, swutol sang scopes."

…there was sound of harp
Loud the singing of the scop.

In addition to the scop, who was more or less permanently attached to the royal court or hall of a noble, there was a craft of gleemen who roved from hall to hall. In the song of Widsið we catch a glimpse of the life of a gleeman:—

"Sw=a scriðende gesceapum hweorfað
gl=eomen gumena geond grunda fela."

Thus roving, with shapéd songs there wander
The gleemen of the people through many lands.

The scop was an originator of poetry, the gleeman more often a mere repeater, although this distinction in the use of the terms was not observed in later times.

The Songs of Scop and Gleeman.—The subject matter of these songs was suggested by the most common experiences of the time. These were with war, the sea, and death.

[Illustration: ANGLO-SAXON GLEEMAN. From the tapestry designed by
H.A. Bone.]

The oldest Anglo-Saxon song known, which is called Widsið or the Far Traveler, has been preserved in the Exeter Book. This song was probably composed in the older Angle-land on the continent and brought to England in the memories of the singers. The poem is an account of the wanderings of a gleeman over a great part of Europe. Such a song will mean little to us unless we can imaginatively represent the circumstances under which it was sung, the long hall with its tables of feasting, drinking warriors, the firelight throwing weird shadows among the smoky rafters. The imagination of the warriors would be roused as similar experiences of their own were suggested by these lines in Widsið's song:—

"Ful oft of ð=am h=eape hw=inende fl=eag
giellende g=ar on grome ð=eode."

Full oft from that host hissing flew
The whistling spear on the fierce folk.

The gleeman ends this song with two thoughts characteristic of the poets of the Saxon race. He shows his love fur noble deeds, and he next thinks of the shortness of life, as he sings:—

"In mortal court his deeds are not unsung,
Such as a noble man mill show to men,
Till all doth flit away, both life and light."

A greater scop, looking at life through Saxon eyes, sings:—

"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."[6]

The scop in the song called The Wanderer (Exeter Book) tells how fleeting are riches, friend, kinsman, maiden,—all the "earth-stead," and he also makes us think of Shakespeare's "insubstantial pageant faded" which leaves "not a rack behind."

Another old song, also found in the Exeter Book, is the Seafarer. We must imagine the scop recalling vivid experiences to our early ancestors with this song of the sea:—

"Hail flew in hard showers.
And nothing I heard
But the wrath of the waters,
The icy-cold way
At times the swan's song;
In the scream of the gannet
I sought for my joy,
In the moan of the sea whelp
For laughter of men,
In the song of the sea-mew
For drinking of mead."[7]

To show that love of the sea yet remains one of the characteristics of English poetry, we may quote by way of comparison a song sung more than a thousand years later, in Victoria's reign:—

"The wind is as iron that rings,
The foam heads loosen and flee;
It swells and welters and swings,
The pulse of the tide of the sea.

Let the wind shake our flag like a feather,
Like the plumes of the foam of the sea!
* * * * *
In the teeth of the hard glad a weather,
In the blown wet face of the sea."[8]

Kipling in A Song of the English says of the sea:—

"…there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead."

Another song from the Exeter Book is called The Fortunes of Men.
It gives vivid pictures of certain phases of life among the
Anglo-Saxons:—

"One shall sharp hunger slay;
One shall the storms beat down;
One be destroyed by darts,
One die in war.
Orre shall live losing
The light of his eyes,
Feel blindly with his fingers;
And one lame of foot.
With sinew-wound wearily
Wasteth away.
Musing and mourning;
With death in his mind.
* * * * *
One shall die by the dagger,
In wrath, drenched with ale,
Wild through the wine, on the mead bench
Too swift with his words
Too swift with his words;
Shall the wretched one lose."[9]

The songs that we have noted, together with Beowulf, the greatest of them all, will give a fair idea of scopic poetry.

BEOWULF

The Oldest Epic of the Teutonic Race.—The greatest monument of Anglo-Saxon poetry is called Beowulf, from the name of its hero. His character and exploits give unity and dignity to the poem and raise it to the rank of an epic.

The subject matter is partly historical and partly mythical. The deeds and character of an actual hero may have furnished the first suggestions for the songs, which were finally elaborated into Beowulf, as we now have it. The poem was probably a long time in process of evolution, and many different scops doubtless added new episodes to the song, altering it by expansion and contraction under the inspiration of different times and places. Finally, it seems probable that some one English poet gave the work its present form, making it a more unified whole, and incorporating in it Christian opinions.

We do not know when the first scop sang of Beowulf's exploits; but he probably began before the ancestors of the English came to England. We are unable to ascertain how long Beowulf was in process of evolution; but there is internal evidence for thinking that part of the poem could not have been composed before 500 A.D. Ten Brink, a great German authority, thinks that Beowulf was given its present form not far from 700 A.D. The unique manuscript in the British Museum is written in the West Saxon dialect of Alfred the Great's time (849-901).

The characters, scenery, and action of Beowulf belong to the older Angle-land on the continent of Europe; but the poem is essentially English, even though the chief action is laid in what is now known as Denmark and the southern part of Sweden. Hrothgar's hall, near which the hero performed two of his great exploits, was probably on the island of Seeland.

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF BEGINNING OF COTTON MS. OF BEOWULF.]

TRANSLATION

Lo! we, of the Gar-Danes in distant days,
The folk-kings' fame have found.
How deeds of daring the aethelings did.
Oft Scyld-Scefing from hosts of schathers,
From many men the mead seats [reft].

The student who wishes to enter into the spirit of the poem will do well to familiarize himself with the position of these coasts, and with a description of their natural features in winter as well as in summer. Heine says of the sea which Beowulf sailed:—

"Before me rolleth a waste of water … and above me go rolling the storm clouds, the formless dark gray daughters of air, which from the sea in cloudy buckets scoop up the water, ever wearied lifting and lifting, and then pour it again in the sea, a mournful, wearisome business. Over the sea, flat on his face, lies the monstrous, terrible North Wind, sighing and sinking his voice as in secret, like an old grumbler; for once in good humor, unto the ocean he talks, and he tells her wonderful stories."

Beowulf's Three Great Exploits.—The hero of the poem engaged in three great contests, all of which were prompted by unselfishness and by a desire to relieve human misery. Beowulf had much of the spirit that animates the social worker to-day. If such a hero should live in our time, he would probably be distinguished fur social service, for fighting the forces of evil which cripple or destroy so many human beings.

Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, built a hall, named Heorot, where his followers could drink mead, listen to the scop, enjoy the music of the harp, and find solace in social intercourse during the dreary winter evenings.

"So liv'd on all happy the host of the kinsmen
In game and in glee, until one night began,
A fiend out of hell-pit, the framing of evil,
And Grendel forsooth the grim guest was hight,
The mighty mark-strider the holder of moorland,
The fen and the fastness."[10]

This monster, Grendel, came from the moors and devoured thirty of the thanes. For twelve winters he visited Heorot and killed some of the guests whenever he heard the sound of festivity in the hall, until at length the young hero Beowulf, who lived a day's sail from Hrothgar, determined to rescue Heorot from this curse. The youth selected fourteen warriors and on a "foamy-necked floater, most like to a bird," he sailed to Hrothgar.

Beowulf stated his mission, and he and his companions determined to remain in Heorot all night. Grendel heard them and came.

"…he quickly laid hold of
A soldier asleep, suddenly tore him,
Bit his bone-prison, the blood drank in currents,
Swallowed in mouthfuls."[11]

Bare-handed, Beowulf grappled with the monster, and they wrestled up and down the hall, which was shaken to its foundations. This terrible contest ended when Beowulf tore away the arm and shoulder of Grendel, who escaped to the marshes to die.

In honor of the victory, Hrothgar gave to Beowulf many presents and a banquet in Heorot. After the feast, the warriors slept in the hall, but Beowulf went to the palace. He had been gone but a short time, when in rushed Grendel's mother, to avenge the death of her son. She seized a warrior, the king's dearest friend, and carried him away. In the morning, the king said to Beowulf:—

"My trusty friend AEschere is dead… The cruel hag has wreaked on him her vengeance. The country folk said there were two of them, one the semblance of a woman; the other the specter of a man. Their haunt is in the remote land, in the crags of the wolf, the wind-beaten cliffs, and untrodden bogs, where the dismal stream plunges into the drear abyss of an awful lake, overhung with a dark and grizzly wood rooted down to the water's edge, where a lurid flame plays nightly on the surface of the flood—and there lives not the man who knows its depth! So dreadful is the place that the hunted stag, hard driven by the hounds, will rather die on the bank than find a shelter there. A place of terror! When the wind rises, the waves mingle hurly-burly with the clouds, the air is stifling and rumbles with thunder. To thee alone we look for relief."[12]

Beowulf knew that a second and harder contest was at hand, but without hesitation he followed the bloody trail of Grendel's mother, until it disappeared at the edge of a terrible flood. Undaunted by the dragons and serpents that made their home within the depths, he grasped a sword and plunged beneath the waves. After sinking what seemed to him a day's space, he saw Grendel's mother, who came forward to meet him. She dragged him into her dwelling, where there was no water, and the fight began. The issue was for a time doubtful; but at last Beowulf ran her through with a gigantic sword, and she fell dead upon the floor of her dwelling. A little distance away, he saw the dead body of Grendel. The hero cut off the head of the monster and hastened away to Hrothgar's court. After receiving much praise and many presents, Beowulf and his warriors sailed to their own land, where he ruled as king for fifty years.

He engaged in his third and hardest conflict when he was old. A firedrake, angered at the loss of a part of a treasure, which he had for three hundred years been guarding in a cavern, laid waste the land in the hero's kingdom. Although Beowulf knew that this dragon breathed flames of fire and that mortal man could not long withstand such weapons, he sought the cavern which sheltered the destroyer and fought the most terrible battle of his life. He killed the dragon, but received mortal hurt from the enveloping flames. The old hero had finally fallen; but he had through life fought a good fight, and he could say as the twilight passed into the dark:—

"I have ruled the people fifty years; no folk-king was there of them that dwelt about me durst touch me with his sword or cow me through terror. I bided at home the hours of destiny, guarded well mine own, sought not feuds with guile, swore not many an oath unjustly."[13]

The poem closes with this fitting epitaph for the hero:—

"Quoth they that he was a world-king forsooth,
The mildest of all men, unto men kindest,
To his folk the most gentlest, most yearning of fame."[14]

Wherein Beowulf is Typical of the Anglo-Saxon Race.—Beowulf is by far the most important Anglo-Saxon poem, because it presents in the rough the persistent characteristics of the race. This epic shows the ideals of our ancestors, what they held most dear, the way they lived and died.

I. We note the love of liberty and law, the readiness to fight any dragon that threatened these. The English Magna Charta and Petition of Right and the American Declaration of Independence are an extension of the application of the same principles embodied in Beowulf. The old-time spirit of war still prevails in all branches of the race; but the contest is to-day directed against dragons of a different type from Grendel,—against myriad forms of industrial and social injustice and against those forces which have been securing special privileges for some and denying equal opportunity for all.

II. Beowulf is a recognition in general of the great moral forces of the universe. The poem upholds the ideals of personal manliness, bravery, loyalty, devotion to duty. The hero has the ever-present consciousness that death is preferable to dishonor. He taught his thane to sing:—

"Far better stainless death
Than life's dishonored breath."

III. In this poem, the action outweighs the words. The keynote to Beowulf is deeds. In New England, more than a thousand years later, Thoreau wrote, "Be not simply good; be good for something." In reading other literatures, for instance the Celtic, we often find that the words overbalance the action. The Celt tells us that when two bulls fought, the "sky was darkened by the turf thrown up by their feet and by the foam from their mouths. The province rang with their roar and the inhabitants hid in caves or climbed the hills."

Again, more attention is paid to the worth of the subject matter and to sincerity of utterance than to mere form or polish. The literature of this race has usually been more distinguished for the value of the thought than for artistic presentation. Prejudice is felt to-day against matter that relies mainly on art to secure effects.

IV. Repression of sentiment is a marked characteristic of Beowulf and it still remains a peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon race. Some people say vastly more than they feel. This race has been inclined to feel more than it expresses. When it was transplanted to New England, the same characteristic was prominent, the same apparent contradiction between sentiment and stern, unrelenting devotion to duty. In Snow Bound, the New England poet, Whittier, paints this portrait of a New England maiden, still Anglo-Saxon to the core:—

"A full, rich nature, free to trust,
Truthful and almost sternly just,
Impulsive, earnest, prompt to act,
And make her generous thought a fact,
Keeping with many a light disguise
The secret of self-sacrifice."

No matter what stars now shine over them, the descendants of the English are still truthful and sternly just; they still dislike to give full expression to their feelings; they still endeavor to translate thoughts into deeds, and in this world where all need so much help, they take self-sacrifice as a matter of course. The spirit of Beowulf, softened and consecrated by religion, still persists in Anglo-Saxon thought and action.

THE CAEDMONIAN CYCLE

Caedmon.—In 597 St. Augustine began to teach the Christian religion to the Anglo-Saxons. The results of this teaching were shown in the subsequent literature. In what is known as Caedmon's Paraphrase, the next great Anglo-Saxon epic, there is no decrease in the warlike spirit. Instead of Grendel, we have Satan as the arch-enemy against whom the battle rages.

Caedmon, who died in 680, was until middle life a layman attached to the monastery at Whitby, on the northeast coast of Yorkshire. Since the Paraphrase has been attributed to Caedmon on the authority of the Saxon historian Bede, born in 673, we shall quote Bede himself on the subject, from his famous Ecclesiastical History:—

"Caedmon, having lived in a secular habit until he was well advanced in years, had never learned anything of versifying; for which reason, being sometimes at entertainments, where it was agreed for the sake of mirth that all present should sing in their turns, when he saw the instrument come toward him, he rose from table and returned home.

"Having done so at a certain time, and gone out of the house where the entertainment was, to the stable, where he had to take care of the horses that night, he there composed himself to rest at the proper time; a person appeared to him in his sleep, and, saluting him by his name, said, 'Caedmon, sing some song to me.' He answered, 'I cannot sing; for that was the reason why I left the entertainment and retired to this place, because I could not sing.' The other who talked to him replied, 'However, you shall sing.' 'What shall I sing?' rejoined he. 'Sing the beginning of created beings,' said the other. Hereupon he presently began to sing verses to the praise of God."

Caedmon remembered the poetry that he had composed in his dreams, and repeated it in the morning to the inmates of the monastery. They concluded that the gift of song was divinely given and invited him to enter the monastery and devote his time to poetry.

Of Caedmon's work Bede says:—

"He sang the creation of the world, the origin of man, and all the history of Genesis: and made many verses on the departure of the children of Israel out of Egypt, and their entering into the land of promise, with many other histories from Holy Writ; the incarnation, passion, resurrection of our Lord, and his ascension into heaven; the coming of the Holy Ghost, and the preaching of the Apostles; also the terror of future judgment, the horror of the pains of hell, and the delights of heaven."

The Authorship and Subject Matter of the Caedmonian Cycle.—The first edition of the Paraphrase was published in 1655 by Junius, an acquaintance of Milton. Junius attributed the entire Paraphrase to Caedmon, on the authority of the above quotations from Bede.

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF BEGINNING OF JUNIAN MANUSCRIPT OF
CAEDMON.]

TRANSLATION

For us it is mickle right that we should praise with words, love with our hearts, the Lord of the heavens, the glorious King of the people. He is the mighty power, the chief of all exalted creatures, Lord Almighty.

The Paraphrase is really composed of three separate poems: the Genesis, the Exodus, and the Daniel; and these are probably the works of different writers. Critics are not agreed whether any of these poems in their present form can be ascribed to Caedmon. The Genesis shows internal evidence of having been composed by several different writers, but some parts of this poem may be Caedmon's own work. The Genesis, like Milton's Paradise Lost, has for its subject matter the fall of man and its consequences. The Exodus, the work of an unknown writer, is a poem of much originality, on the escape of the children of Israel from Egypt, their passage through the Red Sea, and the destruction of Pharaoh's host. The Daniel, an uninteresting poem of 765 lines, paraphrases portions of the book of Daniel relating to Nebuchadnezzar's dreams, the fiery furnace, and Belshazzar's feast.

Characteristics of the Poetry.—No matter who wrote the Paraphrase, we have the poetry, a fact which critics too often overlook. Though the narrative sometimes closely follows the Biblical account in Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, there are frequent unfettered outbursts of the imagination. The Exodus rings with the warlike notes of the victorious Teutonic race.

The Genesis possesses special interest for the student, since many of its strong passages show a marked likeness to certain parts of Milton's Paradise Lost. As some critics have concluded that Milton must have been familiar with the Caedmonian Genesis, it will be instructive to note the parallelism between the two poems. Caedmon's hell is "without light and full of flame." Milton's flames emit no light; they only make "darkness visible." The following lines are from the Genesis:—

"The Lord made anguish a reward, a home
In banishment, hell groans, hard pain, and bade
That torture house abide the joyless fall.
When with eternal night and sulphur pains,
Fullness of fire, dread cold, reek and red flames,
He knew it filled."[15]

With this description we may compare these lines from Milton:—

"A dungeon horrible, on all sides round.
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible.
…a fiery deluge, fed
With ever burning sulphur unconsumed."[16]

In Caedmon "the false Archangel and his band lay prone in liquid fire, scarce visible amid the clouds of rolling smoke." In Milton, Satan is shown lying "prone on the flood," struggling to escape "from off the tossing of these fiery waves," to a plain "void of light," except what comes from "the glimmering of these livid flames." The older poet sings with forceful simplicity:—

"Then comes, at dawn, the east wind, keen with frost."

Milton writes:—

"…the parching air Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire."[17]

When Satan rises on his wings to cross the flaming vault, the Genesis gives in one line an idea that Milton expands into two and a half:—

"Swang ðaet f=yr on tw=a f=eondes craefte."
Struck the fire asunder with fiendish craft.

"…on each hand the flames,
Driven backward, slope their pointing spires, and, rolled
In billows, leave i' th' midst a horrid vale."[18]

It is not certain that Milton ever knew of the existence of the Caedmonian Genesis; for he was blind three years before it was published. But whether he knew of it or not, it is a striking fact that the temper of the Teutonic mind during a thousand years should have changed so little toward the choice and treatment of the subject of an epic, and that the first great poem known to have been written on English soil should in so many points have anticipated the greatest epic of the English race.

THE CYNEWULF CYCLE

Cynewulf is the only great Anglo-Saxon poet who affixed his name to certain poems and thus settled the question of their authorship. We know nothing of his life except what we infer from his poetry. He was probably born near the middle of the eighth century, and it is not unlikely that he passed part of his youth as a thane of some noble. He became a man of wide learning, well skilled in "wordcraft" and in the Christian traditions of the time. Such learning could then hardly have been acquired outside of some monastery whither he may have retired.

[Illustration: ANGLO-SAXON MUSICIANS. Illuminated MS., British
Museum.]

In variety, inventiveness, and lyrical qualities, his poetry shows an advance over the Caedmonian cycle. He has a poet's love for the beauty of the sun and the moon (heofon-condelle), for the dew and the rain, for the strife of the waves (holm-ðroece), for the steeds of the sea (sund-hengestas), and for the "all-green" (eal-gr=ene) earth. "For Cynewulf," says a critic, "'earth's crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God.'"

Cynewulf has inserted his name in runic characters in four poems: Christ, Elene, Juliana, a story of a Christian martyr, and the least important, The Fates of the Apostles. The Christ, a poem on the Savior's Nativity, Ascension, and Judgment of the world at the last day, sometimes suggests Dante's Inferno or Paradiso, and Milton's Paradise Lost. We see the—

"Flame that welters up and of worms the fierce aspect,
With the bitter-biting jaws—school of burning creatures."[19]

Cynewulf closes the Christ with almost as beautiful a conception of Paradise as Dante's or Milton's,—a conception that could never have occurred to a poet of the warlike Saxon race before the introduction of Christianity:—

"…Hunger is not there nor thirst,
Sleep nor heavy sickness, nor the scorching of the Sun;
Neither cold nor care."[20]

Elene is a dramatic poem, named from its heroine, Helena, the mother of the Roman emperor Constantine. A vision of the cross bearing the inscription, "With this shalt thou conquer," appeared to Constantine before a victorious battle and caused him to send his mother to the Holy Land to discover the true cross. The story of her successful voyage is given in the poem Elene. The miraculous power of the true cross among counterfeits is shown in a way that suggests kinship with the fourteenth century miracle plays. A dead man is brought in contact with the first and the second cross, but the watchers see no divine manifestation until he touches the third cross, when he is restored to life.

Elene and the Dream of the Road, also probably written by
Cynewulf, are an Anglo-Saxon apotheosis of the cross. Some of this
Cynewulfian poetry is inscribed on the famous Ruthwell cross in
Dumfriesshire.

Andreas and Phoenix.—Cynewulf is probably the author of Andreas, an unsigned poem of special excellence and dramatic power. The poem, "a romance of the sea," describes St. Andrew's voyage to Mermedonia to deliver St. Matthew from the savages. The Savior in disguise is the Pilot. The dialogue between him and St. Andrew is specially fine. The saint has all the admiration of a Viking for his unknown Pilot, who stands at the helm in a gale and manages the vessel as he would a thought.

Although the poet tells of a voyage in eastern seas, he is describing the German ocean:—

"Then was sorely troubled,
Sorely wrought the whale-mere. Wallowed there the Horn-fish,
Glode the great deep through; and the gray-backed gull
Slaughter-greedy wheeled. Dark the storm-sun grew,
Waxed the winds up, grinded waves;
Stirred the surges, groaned the cordage,
Wet with breaking sea."[21]

Cynewulf is also the probable author of the Phoenix, which is in part an adaptation of an old Latin poem. The Phoenix is the only Saxon poem that gives us the rich scenery of the South, in place of the stern northern landscape. He thus describes the land where this fabulous bird dwells:—

"Calm and fair this glorious field, flashes there the sunny grove;
Happy is the holt of trees, never withers fruitage there.
Bright are there the blossoms…
In that home the hating foe houses not at all,
* * * * *
Neither sleep nor sadness, nor the sick man's weary bed,
Nor the winter-whirling snow…
…but the liquid streamlets,
Wonderfully beautiful, from their wells upspringing,
Softly lap the land with their lovely floods."[22]

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ANGLO-SAXON POETRY

Martial Spirit.—The love of war is very marked in Anglo-Saxon poetry. This characteristic might have been expected in the songs of a race that had withstood the well-nigh all-conquering arm of the vast Roman Empire.

Our study of Beowulf has already shown the intensity of the martial spirit in heathen times. These lines from the Fight at Finnsburg, dating from about the same time as Beowulf, have only the flash of the sword to lighten their gloom. They introduce the raven, for whom the Saxon felt it his duty to provide food on the battlefield:—

"…hraefen wandrode sweart and sealo-br=un; swurd-l=eoma st=od swylce eal Finns-buruh f=yrenu w=aere."

…the raven wandered
Swart and sallow-brown; the sword-flash stood
As if all Finnsburg were afire.

The love of war is almost as marked in the Christian poetry. There are vivid pictures of battle against the heathen and the enemies of God, as shown by the following selection from one of the poems of the Caedmonian cycle:—

"Helmeted men went from the holy burgh,
At the first reddening of dawn, to fight:
Loud stormed the din of shields.
For that rejoiced the lank wolf in the wood,
And the black raven, slaughter-greedy bird."[23]

Judith, a fragment of a religious poem, is aflame with the spirit of war. One of its lines tells how a bird of prey—

"Sang with its horny beak the song of war."

This very line aptly characterizes one of the emphatic qualities of
Anglo-Saxon poetry.

The poems often describe battle as if it were an enjoyable game. They mention the "Play of the spear" and speak of "putting to sleep with the sword," as if the din of war were in their ears a slumber melody.

One of the latest of Anglo-Saxon poems, The Battle of Brunanburh, 937, is a famous example of war poetry. We quote a few lines from Tennyson's excellent translation:—

"Grimly with swords that were sharp from the grindstone,
Fiercely we hack'd at the flyers before us.
* * * * *
Five young kings put asleep by the sword-stroke
Seven strong earls of the army of Anlaf
Fell on the war-field, numberless numbers."

Love of the Sea.—The Anglo-Saxon fondness for the sea has been noted, together with the fact that this characteristic has been transmitted to the more recent English poetry. Our forefathers rank among the best seamen that the world has ever known. Had they not loved to dare an unknown sea, English literature might not have existed, and the sun might never have risen on any English flag.

The scop sings thus of Beowulf's adventure on the North Sea:—

"Swoln were the surges, of storms 'twas the coldest,
Dark grew the night, and northern the wind,
Rattling and roaring, rough were the billows."[24]

In the Seafarer, the scop also sings:—

"My mind now is set,
My heart's thought, on wide waters,
The home of the whale;
It wanders away
Beyond limits of land.
* * * * *
And stirs the mind's longing
To travel the way that is trackless."[25]

In the Andreas, the poet speaks of the ship in one of the most charming of Saxon similes:—

"Foaming Ocean beats our steed: full of speed this boat is;
Fares along foam-throated, flieth on the wave,
Likest to a bird."[26]

Some of the most striking Saxon epithets are applied to the sea. We may instance such a compound as =ar-ge-bland (=ar, "oar"; blendan, "to blend"), which conveys the idea of the companionship of the oar with the sea. From this compound, modern poets have borrowed their "oar-disturbéd sea," "oaréd sea," "oar-blending sea," and "oar-wedded sea." The Anglo-Saxon poets call the sun rising or setting in the sea the mere-candel. In Beowulf, mere-str=aeta, "sea-streets," are spoken of as if they were the easily traversed avenues of a town.

Figures of Rhetoric.—A special characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry is the rarity of similes. In Homer they are frequent, but Anglo-Saxon verse is too abrupt and rapid in the succession of images to employ the expanded simile. The long poem of Beowulf contains only five similes, and these are of the shorter kind. Two of them, the comparison of the light in Grendel's dwelling to the beams of the sun, and of a vessel to a flying bird, have been given in the original Anglo-Saxon on pages 16, 17. Other similes compare the light from Grendel's eyes to a flame, and the nails on his fingers to steel: while the most complete simile says that the sword, when bathed in the monster's poisonous blood, melted like ice.

On the other hand, this poetry uses many direct and forcible metaphors, such as "wave-ropes" for ice, the "whale-road" or "swan-road" for the sea, the "foamy-necked floater" for a ship, the "war-adder" for an arrow, the "bone-house" for the body. The sword is said to sing a war song, the slain to be put to sleep with the sword, the sun to be a candle, the flood to boil. War is appropriately called the sword-game.

Parallelisms.—The repetition of the same ideas in slightly differing form, known as parallelism, is frequent. The author, wishing to make certain ideas emphatic, repeated them with varying phraseology. As the first sight of land is important to the sailor, the poet used four different terms for the shore that met Beowulf's eyes on his voyage to Hrothgar: land, brimclifu, beorgas, saen=aessas (land, sea-cliffs, mountains, promontories).

This passage from the Phoenix shows how repetition emphasizes the absence of disagreeable things:—

"…there may neither snow nor rain,
Nor the furious air of frost, nor the flare of fire,
Nor the headlong squall of hail, nor the hoar frost's fall,
Nor the burning of the sun, nor the bitter cold,
Nor the weather over-warm, nor the winter shower,
Do their wrong to any wight."[27]

The general absence of cold is here made emphatic by mentioning special cold things: "snow," "frost," "hail," "hoar frost," "bitter cold," "winter shower." The absence of heat is emphasized in the same way.

Saxon contrasted with Celtic Imagery.—A critic rightly says: "The gay wit of the Celt would pour into the song of a few minutes more phrases of ornament than are to be found in the whole poem of Beowulf." In three lines of an old Celtic death song, we find three similes:—

"Black as the raven was his brow;
Sharp as a razor was his spear;
White as lime was his skin."

We look in Anglo-Saxon poetry in vain for a touch like this:—

"Sweetly a bird sang on a pear tree above the head of Gwenn before they covered him with a turf."[28]

Celtic literature shows more exaggeration, more love of color, and a deeper appreciation of nature in her gentler aspects. The Celt could write:—

"More yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain."[29]

King Arthur and his romantic Knights of the Round Table are Celtic heroes. Possibly the Celtic strain persisting in many of the Scotch people inspires lines like these in more modern times:—

"The corn-craik was chirming
His sad eerie cry [30]
And the wee stars were dreaming
Their path through the sky."

In order to produce a poet able to write both A Midsummer Night's
Dream and Hamlet, the Celtic imagination must blend with the
Anglo-Saxon seriousness. As we shall see, this was accomplished by the
Norman conquest.

ANGLO-SAXON PROSE

When and where written.—We have seen that poetry normally precedes prose. The principal part of Anglo-Saxon poetry had been produced before much prose was written. The most productive poetic period was between 650 and 825. Near the close of the eighth century, the Danes began their plundering expeditions into England. By 800 they had destroyed the great northern monasteries, like the one at Whitby, where Caedmon is said to have composed the first religious song. As the home of poetry was in the north of England, these Danish inroads almost completely silenced the singers. What prose there was in the north was principally in Latin. On the other hand, the Saxon prose was produced chiefly in the south of England. The most glorious period of Anglo-Saxon prose was during Alfred's reign, 871-901.

Bede.—This famous monk (673-735) was probably the greatest teacher and the best known man of letters and scholar in all contemporary Europe. He is said to have translated the Gospel of St. John into Saxon, but the translation is lost. He wrote in Latin on a vast range of subjects, from the Scriptures to natural science, and from grammar to history. He has given a list of thirty-seven works of which he is the author. His most important work is the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which is really a history of England from Julius Caesar's invasion to 731. The quotation from Bede's work relative to Caedmon shows that Bede could relate things simply and well. He passed almost all his useful life at the monastery of Jarrow on the Tyne.

Alfred (849-901).—The deeds and thoughts of Alfred, king of the West Saxons from 871 until his death in 901, remain a strong moral influence an the world, although he died more than a thousand years ago. Posterity rightly gave him the surname of "the Great," as he is one of the comparatively few great men of all time. E.A. Freeman, the noted historian of the early English period, says of him:—

"No man recorded in history seems ever to have united so many great and good qualities… A great part of his reign was taken up with warfare with an enemy [the Danes] who threatened the national being; yet he found means personally to do more for the general enlightenment of his people than any other king in English history."

After a Danish leader had outrageously broken his oaths to Alfred, the Dane's two boys and their mother fell into Alfred's hands, and he returned them unharmed. "Let us love the man," he wrote, "but hate his sins." His revision of the legal code, known as Alfred's Laws, shows high moral aim. He does not forget the slave, who was to be freed after six years of service. His administration of the law endeavored to secure the same justice for the poor as for the rich.

Alfred's example has caused many to stop making excuses for not doing more for their kind. If any one ever had an adequate excuse for not undertaking more work than his position absolutely demanded, that man was Alfred; yet his ill health and the wars with the Danes did not keep him from trying to educate his people or from earning the title, "father of English prose." Freeman even says that England owes to Alfred's prose writing and to the encouragement that he gave to other writers the "possession of a richer early literature than any other people of western Europe" and the maintenance of the habit of writing after the Norman conquest, when English was no longer used in courtly circles.

[Illustration: THE BEGINNING OF ALFRED'S LAWS. Illuminated MS.,
British Museum.]

Although most of his works are translations from the Latin, yet he has left the stamp of his originality and sterling sense upon them all. Finding that his people needed textbooks in the native tongue, he studied Latin so that he might consult all accessible authorities and translate the most helpful works, making alterations and additions to suit his plan. For example, he found a Latin work on history and geography by Orosius, a Spanish Christian of the fifth century; but as this book contained much material that was unsuited to Alfred's purposes, he omitted some parts, changed others, and, after interviewing travelers from the far North, added much original matter. These additions, which even now are not uninteresting reading, are the best material in the book. This work is known as Alfred's Orosius.

Alfred also translated Pope Gregory's Pastoral Rule in order to show the clergy how to teach and care for their flocks. Alfred's own words at the beginning of the volume show how great was the need for the work. Speaking of the clergy, he says:—

"There were very few on this side Humber who would know how to render their services in English, or so much as translate an epistle out of Latin into English; and I ween that not many would be on the other side Humber. So few of them were there, that I cannot think of so much as a single one, south of Thames, when I took to the realm."[31]

Alfred produced a work on moral philosophy, by altering and amending the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius, a noble Roman who was brutally thrown into prison and executed about 525 A.D. In simplicity and moral power, some of Alfred's original matter in this volume was not surpassed by any English writer for several hundred years. We frequently find such thoughts as, "If it be not in a man's power to do good, let him have the good intent." "True high birth is of the mind, not of the flesh." His Prayer in the same work makes us feel that he could see the divine touch in human nature:—

"No enmity hast Thou towards anything… Thou, O Lord, bringest together heavenly souls and earthly bodies, and minglest them in this world. As they came hither from Thee, even so they also seek to go hence to Thee."

AElfric, 955?-1025?—The most famous theologian who followed Alfred's example in writing native English prose, and who took Alfred for his model, was a priest named AElfric. His chief works are his Homilies, a series of sermons, and the Lives of the Saints. Although much of his writing is a compilation or a translation from the Latin Fathers, it is often remarkably vigorous in expression and stimulating to the reader. We find such thoughts as:—

"God hath wrought many miracles, and He performs them every day, but these miracles have become much less important in the sight of men because they are very common… Spiritual miracles are greater than the physical ones."

To modern readers the most interesting of Aelfric's writings is his Colloquium, designed to teach Latin in the monastery at Winchester. The pupils were required to learn the Latin translation of his dialogues in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular. Some of these dialogues are today valuable illustrations of the social and industrial life of the time. The following is part of the conversation between the Teacher and the Plowman:—

"Teacher. What have you to say, plowman? How do you carry on your work?

"Plowman. O master, I work very hard; I go out at dawn, drive the oxen to the field, and yoke them to the plow. There is no storm so severe that I dare to hide at home, for fear of my lord, but when the oxen are yoked, and the share and coulter have been fastened to the plow, I must plow a whole acre or more every day. * * * * * "Teacher. Oh! oh! the labor must be great!

"Plowman. It is indeed great drudgery, because I am not free."[32]

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.—This is the first history of any branch of the Teutonic people in their own tongue. The Chronicle has come down to us in several different texts, according as it was compiled or copied at different monasteries. The Chronicle was probably begun in Alfred's reign. The entries relating to earlier events were copied from Bede's Ecclesiastical History and from other Latin authorities. The Chronicle contains chiefly those events which each year impressed the clerical compilers as the most important in the history of the nation. This work is a fountainhead to which writers of the history of those times must turn.

A few extracts (translated) will show its character:—

"A.D. 449. This year … Hengist and Horsa, invited by Vortigern,
King of Britons, landed in Britain, on the shore which is called
Wappidsfleet; at first in aid of the Britons, but afterwards they
fought against them."

"806. This year the moon was eclipsed on the Kalends of September;
and Eardulf, King of the Northumbrians. was driven from his
kingdom; and Eanbert, Bishop of Hexham, died."

Sometimes the narrative is extremely vivid. Those who know the difficulty of describing anything impressively in a few words will realize the excellence of this portraiture of William the Conqueror:—

"1087. If any would know what manner of man King William was, the glory that he obtained, and of how many lands he was lord; then will we describe him as we have known him… He was mild to those good men who loved God, but severe beyond measure to those withstood his will… So also was he a very stern and a wrathful man, so that none durst do anything against his will, and he kept in prison those earls who acted against his pleasure. He removed bishops from their sees, and abbots from their offices, and he imprisoned thanes, and at length he spared not his own brother. Odo… Amongst other things, the good order that William established is not to be forgotten; it was such that any man, who was himself aught, might travel over the kingdom with a bosom-full of gold, unmolested; and no man durst kill another… He made large forests for the deer, and enacted laws therewith, so that whoever killed a hart or a hind should be blinded … and he loved the tall stags as if he were their father."

SUMMARY

The Anglo-Saxons, a branch of the Teutonic race, made permanent settlements in England about the middle of the fifth century A.D. Like modern German, their language is highly inflected. The most flourishing period of Anglo-Saxon poetry was between 650 and 825 A.D. It was produced for the most part in the north of England, which was overrun by the Danes about 800. These marauders destroyed many of the monasteries and silenced the voices of the singers. The prose was written chiefly in the south of England after the greatest poetic masterpieces had been produced. The Norman Conquest of England, beginning in 1066, brought the period to a close.

Among the poems of this age, we may emphasize: (1) the shorter scopic pieces, of which the Far Traveler, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Fortunes of Men, and The Battle of Brunanburh are important examples; (2) Beowulf, the greatest Anglo-Saxon epic poem, which describes the deeds of an unselfish hero, shows how the ancestors of the English lived and died, and reveals the elemental ideals of the race; (3) the Caedmonian Cycle of scriptural paraphrases, some of which have Miltonic qualities; and (4) the Cynewulf Cycle, which has the most variety and lyrical excellence. Both of these Cycles show how the introduction of Christianity affected poetry.

The subject matter of the poetry is principally war, the sea, and religion. The martial spirit and love of the sea are typical of the nation that has raised her flag in every clime. The chief qualities of the poetry are earnestness, somberness, and strength, rather than delicacy of touch, exuberance of imagination, or artistic adornment.

The golden period of prose coincides in large measure with Alfred's reign, 871-901, and he is the greatest prose writer. His translations of Latin works to serve as textbooks for his people contain excellent additions by him. AElfric, a tenth century prose writer, has left a collection of sermons, called Homilies, and an interesting Colloquium, which throws strong lights on the social life of the time. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is an important record of contemporaneous events for the historian.

REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY

HISTORICAL

In connection with the progress of literature, students should obtain for themselves a general idea of contemporary historical events from any of the following named works:—

Gardiner's_ Students' History of England_.

Green's Short History of the English People.

Walker's Essentials in English History.

Cheney's A Short History of England.

Lingard's History of England.

Traill's Social England, Vol. I.

Ramsay's The Foundations of England.

LITERARY

Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. I.

Brooke's History of Early English Literature to the Accession of King
Alfred.

Morley's English Writers, Vols. I. and II.

Earle's Anglo-Saxon Literature.

Ten Brink's Early English Literature, Vol. I.

The Exeter Book, edited and translated, by Gollancz (Early English Text Society).

Gurteen's The Epic of the Fall of Man: A Comparative Study of
Caedmon, Dante, and Milton.

Cook's The Christ of Cynewulf. (The _Introduction of 97 pages gives a valuable account of the life and writings of Cynewulf.)

Kennedy's_ Translation of the Poems of Cynewulf_.

Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England and the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, I vol., translated by Giles in Bohn's Antiquarian
Library.

Snell's The Age of Alfred.

Pauli's Life of Alfred (Bohn's Antiquarian Library).

Gem's An Anglo-Saxon Abbot: AElfric of Eynsham.

Mabinogion (a collection of Welsh fairy tales and romances, Everyman's Library), translated by Lady Charlotte Guest.

Pancoast and Spaeth's Early English Poems (abbreviated reference)
("P & S.").

Cook and Tinker's Select Translations from Old English Poetry ("C. &
T.").

Cook & Tinker's Select Translations from Old English Prose
("C. & T. Prose").

SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

The student who is not familiar with the original Anglo-Saxon should read the translations specified below:—

Scopic Poetry.[33]—Widsið or the Far Traveler, translated in
Morley's English Writers, Vol. II, 1-11, or in C. & T.,[34] 3-8.

The Wanderer, translated in P. & S., 65-68; C. & T., 50-55; Brooke, 364-367.

The Seafarer, translated in P. & S., 68-70; C. & T., 44-49; Morley, II., 21-26; Brooke, 362, 363.

The Fortunes of Men, trans. in P. & S., 79-81; Morley, II., 32-37.

Battle of Brunanburh, Tennyson's translation.

What were the chief subjects of the songs of the scop? How do they reveal the life of the time? Is there any common quality running through them? What qualities of this verse appear in modern poetry?

Beowulf.—This important poem should be read entire in one of the following translations:

Child's Beowulf (Riverside Literature Series);

Earle's The Deeds of Beowulf, Done into Modern Prose (Clarendon
Press);

Gummere's The Oldest English Epic;

Morris and Wyatt's The Tale of Beowulf;

Hall's Beowulf, Translated into Modern Metres;

Lumsden's Beowulf, an Old English Poem, Translated into Modern
Rhymes (the most readable poetic translation).

Translations of many of the best parts of Beowulf may be found in
P. & S. 5-29; C. & T., 9-24; Morley, I. 278-310; Brooke 26-73.

Where did the exploits celebrated in the poem take place? Where was Heorot? What was the probably time of the completion of Beowulf? Describe the hero's three exploits. What analogy is there between the conflict of natural forces in the Norseland and Beowulf's fight with Grendel? What different attitude toward nature is manifest in modern poetry? What is the moral lesson of the poem? Show that its chief characteristics are typical of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Caedmonian Cycle.—Some of the strongest passages may be found in P. & S., 30-45; C. & T., 104-120; Morley, II. 81-101; Brooke, 290-340. Read at the same time from Milton's Paradise Lost, Book I., lines 44-74, 169-184, 248-263, and passim.

What evidence do we find in this cycle of the introduction of Christianity? Who takes the place of Grendel? What account of Caedmon does Bede give? What is the subject matter of this cycle?

Cynewulf Cycle.—The Poems of Cynewulf, translated by C.W. Kennedy. Translations of parts of this cycle may be found in Whitman's The Christ of Cynewulf, and The Exeter Book, translated by Gollancz. Good selections are translated in P. & S., 46-55; C. & T., 79-103; and 132-142: Morley, II., 206-241; Brooke, 371-443. For selections from the Phoenix, see P & S, 54-65; C.& T., 143-163.

What new qualities does this cycle show? What is the subject matter of its most important poems? What is especially noticeable about the_ Andreas and the Phoenix_?

General Characteristics of the Verse.—What is its usual form? What most striking passages (a) in Beowulf; (b) elsewhere, show the Saxon love of war and of the sea? Instance some similes and make a list of vivid metaphors. What are the most striking parallelisms found in your readings? What conspicuous differences are there between Saxon and Celtic imagery? (See Morley, l, 165-239, or Guest's Mabinogion). What excellencies and defects seem to you most pronounced in Anglo-Saxon verse?

Prose_—The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_ and Bede's Ecclesiastical History are both translated in one volume of Bohn's Antiquarian Library. The most interesting part of Bede for the student of literature is the chapter relating to Caedmon (Chap. XXIV., pp. 217-220).

In the Chronicle, read the entries for the years 871, 878, 897, 975, 1087, and 1137.

Alfred's Orosius is translated into modern English in the volume of
Bohn's_ Antiquarian Library_ entitled, Alfred the Great, his Life and
Anglo-Saxon Works, by Pauli. Sedgefield's translation of the_
Consolations of Boethius_ distinguishes the original matter by Alfred
from the translation. Selections from Alfred's works are given in C. &
T.(Prose), 85-146, and in Earle's Anglo-Saxon Literature, 186-206.

For selections from AElfric, see C. & T. (Prose), 149-192. Read especially the Colloquies, 177-186.

What was Bede's principal work? Why has Alfred been called the "father of English prose"? What were his ideals? Mention his chief works and their object. What is the character of AElfric's work? Why are modern readers interested in his Colloquium?

Why is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle important?

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER I:

[Footnote 1: For special references to authors, movements and the history of the period, see the lists under the heading, Suggestions for Further Study, at the end of each chapter.]

[Footnote 2: School libraries should own books marked *.]

[Footnote 3: The abbreviation in parentheses after titles will be used in the Suggested Readings in place of the full title.]

[Footnote 4: Tennyson's In Memoriam.]

[Footnote 5: Florence Earls Coates's Dream the Great Dream.]

[Footnote 6: Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act IV., Scene 1.]

[Footnote 7: Morley's translation, English Writers, Vol. II., p. 21.]

[Footnote 8: Swinburne's A Song in Time of Order.]

[Footnote 9: Morley's English Writers, Vol. II., pp. 33, 34.]

[Footnote 10: Beowulf, translated by William Morris and A.J. Wyatt.]

[Footnote 11: Translated by J.L. Hall.]

[Footnote 12: Earle's Translation.]

[Footnote 13: Translated by Childs.]

[Footnote 14: Translated by Morris and Wyatt.]

[Footnote 15: Morley's translation.]

[Footnote 16: Paradise Lost, Book I., lines 61-69.]

[Footnote 17: Paradise Lost, II., 594.]

[Footnote 18: Ibid., I., 222-224.]

[Footnotes 19-22: Brooke's translation.]

[Footnote 23: Morley's translation.]

[Footnote 24: Brooke's translation.]

[Footnote 25: Morley's translation.]

[Footnotes 26-27: Brooke's translation.]

[Footnote 28: Llywarch's Lament for his Son Gwenn.]

[Footnote 29: Guest's Mabinogion.]

[Footnote 30: William Motherwell's Wearie's Well.]

[Footnote 31: Earle's translation.]

[Footnote 32: Cook and Tinker's _Select Translations from Old English
Prose.]

[Footnote 33: In his Education of the Central Nervous System, Chaps. VII.-X., the author has endeavored to give some special directions for securing definite ideas in the study of poetry.]

[Footnote 34: For full titles, see page 50.]

CHAPTER II: FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066, TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400

[Illustration: THE DEATH OF HAROLD AT HASTINGS. From the Bayeaux tapestry.]

The Norman Conquest.—The overthrow of the Saxon rule in England by William the Conqueror in 1066 was an event of vast importance to English literature. The Normans (Norsemen or Northmen), as they were called, a term which shows their northern extraction, were originally of the same blood as the English race. They settled in France in the ninth century, married French wives, and adopted the French language. In 1066 their leader, Duke William, and his army crossed the English Channel and won the battle of Hastings, in which Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon king, was killed. William thus became king of England.

Characteristics of the Normans.—The intermixture of Teutonic and French blood had given to the Normans the best qualities of both races. The Norman was nimble-witted, highly imaginative, and full of northern energy. The Saxon possessed dogged perseverance, good common sense, if he had long enough to think, and but little imagination. Some one has well said that the union of Norman with Saxon was like joining the swift spirit of the eagle to the strong body of the ox, or, again, that the Saxon furnished the dough, and the Norman the yeast. Had it not been for the blending of these necessary qualities in one race, English literature could not have become the first in the world. We see the characteristics of both the Teuton and the Norman in Shakespeare's greatest plays. A pure Saxon could not have turned from Hamlet's soliloquy to write:—

"Where the bee sucks, there suck I."[1]

Progress of the Nation, 1066-1400.—The Normans were specially successful in giving a strong central government to England. The feudal system, that custom of parceling out land in return for service, was so extended by William the Conqueror, that from king through noble to serf there was not a break in the interdependence of one human being on another. At first the Normans were the ruling classes and they looked down on the Saxons; but intermarriage and community of interests united both races into one strong nation before the close of the period.

There was great improvement in methods of administering justice. Accused persons no longer had to submit to the ordeal of the red-hot iron or to trial by combat, relying on heaven to decide their innocence. Ecclesiastical courts lost their jurisdiction over civil cases. In the reign of Henry II. (1154-1189), great grandson of William the Conqueror, judges went on circuits, and the germ of the jury system was developed.

Parliament grew more influential, and the first half of the fourteenth century saw it organized into two bodies,—the Lords and the Commons. Three kings who governed tyrannically or unwisely were curbed or deposed. King John (1199-1216) was compelled to sign the Magna Charta, which reduced to writing certain foundation rights of his subjects. Edward II. (1307-1327) and Richard II. (1377-1399) were both deposed by Parliament. One of the reasons assigned far the deposition of Richard II. was his claim that "he alone could change and frame the laws of the kingdom."

The ideals of chivalry and the Crusades left their impress on the age.
One English Monarch, Richard the Lion-Hearted (1189-1199) was the
popular hero of the Third Crusade. In Ivanhoe and The Talisman Sir
Walter Scott presents vivid pictures of knights and crusaders.

We may form some idea of the religious spirit of the Middle Ages from the Gothic cathedrals, which had the same relative position in the world's architecture as Shakespeare's work does in literature. Travelers often declare that there is to-day nothing in England better worth seeing than these cathedrals, which were erected in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries.[2]

The religious, social, and intellectual life of the time was profoundly affected by the coming of the friars (1220), who included the earnest followers of St. Francis (1182-1226), that Good Samaritan of the Middle Ages. The great philosopher and scientist, Roger Bacon (1214-1294), who was centuries in advance of his time, was a Franciscan friar. He studied at Oxford University, which had in his time become one of the great institutions of Europe.

The church fostered schools and learning, while the barons were fighting. Although William Langland, a fourteenth-century cleric, pointed out the abuses which had crept into the church, he gave this testimony in its favor:—

"For if heaven be on this earth or any ease for the soul, it is in cloister or school. For in cloister no man cometh to chide or fight, and in school there is lowliness and love and liking to learn."

The rise of the common people was slow. During all this period the tillers of the soil were legally serfs, forbidden to change their location. The Black Death (1349) and the Peasants' Revolt (1381), although seemingly barren of results, helped them in their struggle toward emancipation. Some bought their freedom with part of their wages. Others escaped to the towns where new commercial activities needed more labor. Finally, the common toiler acquired more commanding influence by overthrowing even the French knights with his long bow. This period laid the foundation for the almost complete disappearance of serfdom in the fifteenth century. France waited for the terrible Revolution of 1789 to free her serfs. England anticipated other great modern nations in producing a literature of universal appeal because her common people began to throw off their shackles earlier.

This period opens with a victorious French army in England, followed by the rule of the conquerors, who made French the language of high life. It closes with the ascendancy of English government and speech at home and with the mid-fourteenth century victories of English armies on French soil, resulting in the rapture of Calais, which remained for more than two hundred years in the possession of England.

At the close of this period we find Wycliffe, "the morning star of the
Reformation," and Chaucer, the first great singer of the welded
Anglo-Norman race. His wide interest in human beings and his knowledge
of the new Italian literature prefigure the coming to England of the
Revival of Learning in the next age.

It will now be necessary to study the changes in the language, which were so pronounced between 1066 and Chaucer's death.

THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN ENGLISH

Three Languages used in England—For three hundred years after the Norman Conquest, three languages were widely used in England. The Normans introduced French, which was the language of the court and the aristocracy. William the Conqueror brought over many Norman priests, who used Latin almost exclusively in their service. The influence of this book Latin is generally underestimated by those who do not appreciate the power of the church. The Domesday survey shows that in 1085 the church and her dependents held more than one third of some counties.

In addition to the Latin and the French (which was itself principally of Latin origin), there was, thirdly, the Anglo-Saxon, to which the middle and the lower classes of the English stubbornly adhered. The Loss of Inflections.—Anglo-Saxon was a language with changing endings, like modern German. If a Saxon wished to say, "good gifts," he had to have the proper case endings for both the adjective and the noun, and his expression was g=ode giefa. For "the good gifts," he said ð=a g=odan giefa, inflecting "the" and at the same time changing the case ending of "good."

The Norman Conquest helped to lop off these endings, which German has never entirely lost. We, however, no longer decline articles or ordinary adjectives. Instead of having our attention taken up with thinking of the proper endings, we are left free to attend to the thought rather than to the vehicle of its expression. Although our pronouns are still declined, the sole inflection of our nouns, with the exception of a few like ox, oxen, or mouse, mice, is the addition of 's, s, or es for the possessive and the plural. Modern German, on the other hand, still retains these troublesome case endings. How did English have the good fortune to lose them?

Whenever two peoples, speaking different languages, are closely associated, there is a tendency to drop the terminations and to use the stem word in all grammatical relations. If an English-speaking person, who knows only a little German, travels in Germany, he finds that he can make himself understood by using only one form of the noun or adjective. If he calls for "two large glasses of hot milk," employing the incorrect expression, zwei gross Glass heiss Milch, he will probably get the milk as quickly as if he had said correctly, zwei grosse Gläser heisse Milch. Neglect of the proper case endings may provoke a smile, but the tourist prefers that to starvation. Should the Germans and the English happen to be thrown together in nearly equal numbers on an island, the Germans would begin to drop the inflections that the English could not understand, and the German language would undergo a change.

If there were no books or newspapers to circulate a fixed form of speech, the alteration in the spoken tongue would be comparatively rapid.

Such dropping of terminations is precisely what did happen before the
Norman Conquest in those parts of England most overrun by the Danes.
There, the adjectives lost their terminations to indicate gender and
case, and the article "the" ceased to be declined.

Even if the Normans had not come to England, the dropping of the inflections would not have ceased. Many authorities think that the grammatical structure of English would, even in the absence of that event, have evolved into something like its present form. Of course the Norman Conquest hastened many grammatical changes that would ultimately have resulted from inherent causes, but it did not exercise as great an influence as was formerly ascribed to it. Philologists find it impossible to assign the exact amount of change due to the Conquest and to other causes. Let us next notice some changes other than the loss of inflections.

Change in Gender.—Before any one could speak Anglo-Saxon correctly, he had first to learn the fanciful genders that were attached to nouns: "trousers" was feminine; "childhood," masculine; "child," neuter. During this period the English gradually lost these fanciful genders which the German still retains. A critic thus illustrates the use of genders in that language: "A German gentleman writes a masculine letter of feminine love to a neuter young lady with a feminine pen and feminine ink on masculine sheets of neuter paper, and incloses it in a masculine envelope with a feminine address to his darling, though neuter, Gretchen. He has a masculine head, a feminine hand, and a neuter heart."

Prefixes, Suffixes, and Self-explaining Compounds.—The English tongue lost much of its power of using prefixes. A prefix joined to a well-known word changes its meaning and renders the coining of a new term unnecessary. The Anglo-Saxons, by the use of prefixes, formed ten compounds from their verb fl=owan, "to flow." Of these, only one survives in our "overflow." From sittan, "to sit," thirteen compounds were thus formed, but every one has perished. A larger percentage of suffixes was retained, and we still have many words like "wholesome-ness," "child-hood," "sing-er."

The power of forming self-explaining compounds was largely lost. The Saxon compounded the words for "tree," and "worker," and said tr=eow-wyrhta, "tree-wright," but we now make use of the single word "carpenter." We have replaced the Saxon b=oc-craeft, "book-art," by "literature"; =aefen-gl=om, "evening-gloom," by "twilight"; mere-sw=in, "sea-swine," by "porpoise"; =eag-wraec, "eye-rack," by "pain in the eye"; leornung-cild, "learning-child," by "pupil." The title of an old work, Ayen-bite of In-wit, "Again-bite of In-wit," was translated into "Remorse of Conscience." Grund-weall and word-hora were displaced by "foundation" and "vocabulary." The German language still retains this power and calls a glove a "hand-shoe," a thimble a "finger-hat," and rolls up such clumsy compound expressions as Unabhängigkeits-erklärung.

We might lament this loss more if we did not remember that Shakespeare found our language ample for his needs, and that a considerable number of the old compounds still survive, as home-stead, man-hood, in-sight, break-fast, house-hold, horse-back, ship-man, sea-shore, hand-work, and day-light.

Introduction of New Words and Loss of Old Ones.—Since the Normans were for some time the governing race, while many of the Saxons occupied comparatively menial positions, numerous French words indicative of rank, power, science, luxury, and fashion were introduced. Many titles were derived from a French source. English thus obtained words like "sovereign," "royalty," "duke," "marquis," "mayor," and "clerk." Many terms of government are from the French; for instance, "parliament," "peers," "commons." The language of law abounds in French terms, like "damage," "trespass," "circuit," "judge," "jury," "verdict," "sentence," "counsel," "prisoner." Many words used in war, architecture, and medicine also have a French origin. Examples are "fort," "arch," "mason," "surgery." In fact, we find words from the French in almost every field. "Uncle" and "cousin," "rabbit" and "falcon," "trot" and "stable," "money" and "soldier," "reason" and "virtue," "Bible" and "preach," are instances in point.

French words often displaced Saxon ones. Thus, the Saxon Haelend, the Healer, gave way to the French Savior, wanhope and wonstead were displaced by despair and residence. Sometimes the Saxon stubbornly kept its place beside the French term. The English language is thus especially rich in synonyms, or rather in slightly differentiated forms of expression capable of denoting the exact shade of thought and feeling. The following words are instances:—

SAXON FRENCH

body corpse folk people swine pork calf veal worth value green verdant food nourishment wrangle contend fatherly paternal workman laborer

English was enriched not only by those expressions, gained from the daily speech of the Normans, but also by words that were added from literary Latin. Thus, we have the Saxon "ask," the Norman-French "inquire" and "question," and the Latin "interrogate." "Bold," "impudent," "audacious"; "bright," "cheerful," "animated"; "earnings," "wages," "remuneration," "short," "brief," "concise," are other examples of words, largely synonymous, from the Saxon, the Norman-French, and the Latin, respectively. These facts explain why modern English has such a wealth of expression, although probably more than one half of the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary has been lost.

The Superiority of the Composite Tongue.—While we insist on the truth that Anglo-Saxon gained much of its wonderful directness and power from standing in close relations to earnest life, it is necessary to remember that many words of French origin did, by an apprenticeship at the fireside, in the field, the workshop, and the laboratory, equally fit themselves for taking their place in the language. Such words from French-Latin roots as "faith," "pray," "vein," "beast," "poor," "nurse," "flower," "taste," "state," and "fool" remain in our vocabulary because they were used in everyday life.

Pure Anglo-Saxon was a forcible language, but it lacked the wealth of expression and the flexibility necessary to respond to the most delicate touches of the master-musicians who were to come. When Shakespeare has Lear say of Cordelia:—

"Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low; an excellent thing in woman,"

we find that ten of the thirteen words are Saxon, but the other three of Romance (French) origin are as necessary as is a small amount of tin added to copper to make bronze. Two of these three words express varying shades of quality.

Lounsbury well says: "There result, indeed, from the union of the foreign and native elements, a wealth of phraseology and a many-sidedness in English, which give it in these respects a superiority over any other modern cultivated tongue. German is strictly a pure Teutonic speech, but no native speaker of it claims for it any superiority over the English as an instrument of expression, while many are willing to concede its inferiority."

The Changes Slowly Accomplished.—For over a hundred years after the Conquest, but few French words found their way into current English use. This is shown by the fact that the Brut, a poem of 32,250 lines, translated from a French original into English about 1205, has not more than a hundred words of Norman-French origin.

At first the Normans despised the tongue of the conquered Saxons, but, as time progressed, the two races intermarried, and the children could hardly escape learning some Saxon words from their mothers or nurses. On the other hand, many well-to-do Saxons, like parents in later times, probably had their children taught French because it was considered aristocratic.

Until 1204 a knowledge of French was an absolute necessity to the nobles, as they frequently went back and forth between their estates in Normandy and in England. In 1204 King John lost Normandy, and in the next reign both English and French kings decreed that no subject of the one should hold land in the territory of the other. This narrowing of the attention of English subjects down to England was a foundation stone in building up the supremacy of the English tongue.

In 1338 began the Hundred Years' War between France and England. In Edward the Third's reign (1327-1377), it was demonstrated that one Englishman could whip six Frenchmen; and the language of a hostile and partly conquered race naturally began to occupy a less high position. In 1362 Parliament enacted that English should thereafter be used in law courts, "because the laws, customs, and statutes of this realm, be not commonly known in the same realm, for that they be pleaded, shewed, and judged in the French tongue, which is much unknown in the said realm."

LITERATURE OF THE PERIOD 1066-1400

Metrical Romances.—For nearly three hundred years after the Norman Conquest the chief literary productions were metrical romances, which were in the first instance usually written by Frenchmen, but sometimes by Englishmen (e.g. Layamon) under French influence. There were four main cycles of French romance especially popular in England before the fifteenth century. These were tales of the remarkable adventures of King Arthur and his Knights, Charlemagne and his Peers, Alexander the Great, and the heroes at the siege of Troy. At the battle of Hastings a French minstrel is said to have sung the Song of Roland from the Charlemagne cycle.

These long stories in verse usually present the glory of chivalry, the religious faith, and the romantic loves of a feudal age. In Beowulf, woman plays a very minor part and there is no love story; but in these romances we often find woman and love in the ascendancy. One of them, well known today in song, Tristram and Iseult (Wagner's Tristan und Isolde), "a possession of our composite race," is almost entirely a story of romantic love.

The romances of this age that have most interest for English readers are those which relate to King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. The foundation suggestions for the most of this cycle are of British (Welsh) origin. This period would not have existed in vain, if it had given to the world nothing, but these Arthurian ideals of generosity, courage, honor, and high endeavour, which are still a potent influence. In his Idylls of the King, Tennyson calls Arthur and his Knights:—

"A glorious company, the flower of men,
To serve as model for the mighty world,
And be the fair beginning of a time."

The Quest of the Holy Grail belongs to the Arthurian cycle. Percival (Wagner's Parsifal), the hero of the earlier version and Sir Galahad of the later, show the same spirit that animated the knights in the Crusades. Tennyson introduces Sir Galahad as a knight whose strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure, undertaking "the far-quest after the divine." The American poet Lowell chose Sir Launfal, a less prominent figure in Arthurian romance, for the hero of his version of the search for the Grail, and had him find it in every sympathetic act along the common way of life.

The story of Gawayne and the Green Knight, "the jewel of English medieval literature," tells how Sir Gawayne, Arthur's favorite, fought with a giant called the Green Knight. The romance might almost be called a sermon, if it did not reveal in a more interesting way a great moral truth,—that deception weakens character and renders the deceiver vulnerable in life's contests. In preparing for the struggle, Sir Gawayne is guilty of one act of deceit. But for this, he would have emerged unscathed from the battle. One wound, which leaves a lasting scar, is the result of an apparently trivial deception. His purity and honor in all things else save him from death. This story, which reminds us of Spenser's Faerie Queene, presents in a new garb one of the oft-recurring ideals of the race, "keep troth" (truth). Chaucer sings in the same key:—

"Hold the hye wey, and let thy gost thee lede,
And trouthe shall delivere, it is no drede."

We should remember that these romances are the most characteristic literary creations of the Middle Ages, that they embody the new spirit of chivalry, religious faith, and romantic love in a feudal age, that they had a story to tell, and that some of them have never lost their influence on human ideals.

A Latin Chronicler.—One chronicler, Geoffrey of Monmouth, although he wrote in Latin, must receive some attention because of his vast influence on English poetry. He probably acquired his last name from being archdeacon of Monmouth. He was appointed Bishop of St. Asaph in 1152 and died about 1154. Unlike the majority of the monkish chroniclers, he possessed a vivid imagination, which he used in his so-called History of the Kings of Britain.

Geoffrey pretended to have found an old manuscript which related the deeds of all British kings from Brutus, the mythical founder of the kingdom of Britain, and the great-grandson of Aeneas, to Caesar. Geoffrey wrote an account of the traditionary British kings down to Cadwallader in 689 with as much minuteness and gravity as Swift employed in the Voyage to Lilliput. Other chroniclers declared that Geoffrey lied saucily and shamelessly, but his book became extremely popular. The monks could not then comprehend that the world's greatest literary works were to be products of the imagination.

In Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain we are given vivid pictures of King Lear and his daughters, of Cymbeline, of King Arthur and his Knights, of Guinevere and the rest of that company whom later poets have immortalized. It is probable that Geoffrey was not particular whether he obtained his materials from old chroniclers, Welsh bards, floating tradition, or from his own imagination. His book left its impress on the historical imagination of the Middle Ages. Had it not been for Geoffrey's History, the dramas of King Lear and Cymbeline might never have been suggested to Shakespeare.

Layamon's Brut.—About 1155 a Frenchman named Wace translated into his own language Geoffrey of Monmouth's works. This translation fell into the hands of Layamon, a priest living in Worcestershire, who proceeded to render the poem, with additions of his own, into the Southern English dialect. Wace's Brut has 15,300 lines; Layamon's, 32,250. As the matter which Layamon added is the best in the poem, he is, in so far, an original author of much imaginative power. He is certainly the greatest poet between the Conquest and Chaucer's time.

A selection from the Brut will give the student an opportunity of comparing this transition English with the language in its modern form:—

"And Ich wulle varan to Avalun: And I will fare to Avalon,
To vairest alre maidene To the fairest of all maidens,
To Argante ðere quene, To Argante the queen,
Alven swiðe sceone; Elf surpassing fair;
And heo scal mine wunden And she shall my wounds
Makien alle isunde, Make all sound,
Al hal me makien All hale me make
Mid halweige drenchen. With healing draughts.
And seoðe Ich cumen wulle And afterwards I will come
To mine kineriche To my kingdom
And wunien mid Brutten And dwell with Britons
Mid muchelere wunne." With much joy.

With this, compare the following lines from Tennyson's The Passing of
Arthur:—

"…I am going a long way
* * * * *
To the island-valley of Avilion,
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea,
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.
* * * * *
He passes to be King among the dead,
And after healing of his grievous wound
He comes again."

Layamon employed less alliteration than is found in Anglo-Saxon poetry. He also used an occasional rime, but the accent and rhythm of his verse are more Saxon than modern. When reading Tennyson's Idylls of the King, we must not forget that Layamon was the first poet to celebrate in English King Arthur's deeds. The Brut shows little trace of French influences, not more than a hundred French words being found in it.

Orm's Ormulum.—A monk named Orm wrote in the Midland dialect a metrical paraphrase of those parts of the Gospels used in the church on each service day throughout the year. After the paraphrase comes his metrical explanation and application of the Scripture.

He says:—

"Diss boc iss nemmnedd Orrmulum
Forrði ðatt Ormm itt wrohhte."

This book is named Ormulum
For that Orm it wrote.

There was no fixed spelling at this time. Orm generally doubled the consonant after a short vowel, and insisted that any one who copied his work should be careful to do the same. We shall find on counting the syllables in the two lines quoted from him that the first line has eight; the second, seven. This scheme is followed with great precision throughout the poem, which employs neither rime nor regular alliteration. Orm used even fewer French words than Layamon. The date of the Ormulum is probably somewhere between 1200 and 1215.

The Ancren Riwle.—About 1225 appeared the most notable prose work in the native tongue since the time of Alfred, if we except the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Three young ladies who had secluded themselves from the world in Dorsetshire, wished rules for guidance in their seclusion. An unknown author, to oblige them, wrote the Ancren Riwle (Rule of Anchoresses). This book not only lays down rules for their future conduct in all the affairs of life, but also offers much religious consolation.

The following selection shows some of the curious rules for the guidance of the anchoresses, and furnishes a specimen of the Southern dialect of transitional English prose in the early part of the thirteenth century:—

"ße, mine leoue sustren, ne schulen habben no best bute kat one… ße schulen beon i-dodded four siðen, iðe ßere, uorto lihten ower heaued… Of idelnesse awakeneð muchel flesshes fondunge… Iren ðet lið stille gedereð sone rust."

Ye, my beloved sisters, shall have no beast but one cat… Ye shall be cropped four times in the year for to lighten your head… Of idleness ariseth much temptation of the flesh… Iron that lieth still soon gathereth rust.

The keynote of the work is the renunciation of self. Few productions of modern literature contain finer pictures of the divine love and sympathy. The following simile affords an instance of this quality in the work:—

"De sixte kunfort is ðet ure Louerd, hwon he iðolð ðet we beoð itented, he plaieð mid us, ase ðe moder mid hire ßunge deorlinge; vlihð from him, and hut hire, and let hit sitten one, and loken ßeorne abuten, and cleopien Dame! dame! and weopen one hwule; and ðeonne mid ispredde ermes leapeð lauhwinde vorð, and cluppeð and cusseð and wipeð his eien. Riht so ure Louerd let us one iwurðen oðer hwules, and wiðdraweð his grace and his kunfort, ðet we ne ivindeð swetnesse in none ðinge ðet we wel doð, ne savor of heorte; and ðauh, iðet ilke point ne luveð he us ure leove veder never ðe lesce, auh he deð hit for muchel luve ðet he haveð to us."

The sixth comfort is that our Lord, when he suffers that we be tempted, he plays with us, as the mother with her young darling; she flees from it, and hides herself, and lets it sit alone and look anxiously about and cry "Dame! dame!" and weep awhile; and then with outspread arms leaps laughing forth and clasps and kisses it and wipes its eyes. Exactly so our Lord leaves us alone once in a while and withdraws his grace and his comfort, that we find sweetness in nothing that we do well, no relish of heart; and notwithstanding, at the same time, he, our dear Father, loves us nevertheless, but he does it for the great love that he has for us.

Professor Sweet calls the Ancren Riwle "one of the most perfect models of simple, natural, eloquent prose in our language." For its introduction of French words, this work occupies a prominent place in the development of the English language. Among the words of French origin found in it, we may instance: "dainty," "cruelty," "vestments," "comfort," "journey," "mercer."

Lyrical Poetry.—A famous British Museum manuscript, known as Harleian MS., No. 2253. which was transcribed about 1310, contains a fine anthology of English lyrics, some of which may have been composed early in the thirteenth century. The best of these are love lyrics, but they are less remarkable for an expression of the tender passion than for a genuine appreciation of nature. Some of them are full of the joy of birds and flowers and warm spring days.

A lover's song, called Alysoun, is one of the best of these lyrics:—

"Bytuene Mershe ant[3] Averil[4]
When spray biginneth to spring,
The lutel[5] foul hath hire wyl
On hyre lud[6] to synge."

A famous spring lyric beginning:—

"Lenten[7] ys come with love to toune,[8]
With blosmen ant with briddes[9] roune."[10]

is a symphony of daisies, roses, "lovesome lilies," thrushes, and "notes suete of nyhtegales."

The refrain of one love song is invigorating with the breath of the northern wind:—

"Blou, northerne wynd!
Send thou me my suetyng!
Blou norterne wynd! blou, blou, blou!"

The Cuckoo Song, which is perhaps older than any of these, is the best known of all the early lyrics:—

"Sumer is i-cumen in
Lhude sing cuccu
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springeth the wde nu.
Sing cuccu, cuccu."

Summer is a-coming in,
Loud sing cuckoo,
Groweth seed and bloometh mead,
And springeth the wood now.
Sing cuckoo, cuckoo.

A more somber note is heard in the religious lyrics:—

"Wynter wakeneth al my care,
Nou this leves waxeth bare;
Ofte I sike[11] ant mourne sare[12]
When hit cometh in my thoht
Of this worldes joie, hou hit goth al to noht."

We do not know the names of any of these singers, but they were worthy forerunners of the later lyrists of love and nature.

Robert Manning of Brunne.—We have now come to fourteenth-century literature, which begins to wear a more modern aspect. Robert Manning, generally known as Robert of Brunne, because he was born at Brunne, now called Bourn, in Lincolnshire, adapted from a Norman-French original a work entitled Handlyng Synne (Manual of Sins). This book, written in the Midland dialect in 1303, discourses of the Seven Deadly Sins and the best ways of living a godly life.

A careful inspection of the following selection from the Handlyng Synne will show that, aside from the spelling, the English is essentially modern. Most persons will be able to understand all but a few words. He was the first prominent English writer to use the modern order of words. The end rime is also modern. A beggar, seeing a beast laden with bread at the house of a rich man, asks for food. The poem says of the rich man:—

"He stouped down to seke a stone,
But, as hap was, than fonde he none.
For the stone he toke a lofe,
And at the pore man hyt drofe.
The pore man hente hyt up belyue,
And was thereof ful ferly blythe,
To hys felaws fast he ran
With the lofe, thys pore man."

He stooped down to seek a stone,
But, as chance was, then found he none.
For the stone he took a loaf,
And at the poor man it drove.
The poor man caught it up quickly,
And was thereof full strangely glad,
To his fellows fast he ran
With the loaf this poor man.

Oliphant says: "Strange it is that Dante should have been compiling his Inferno, which settled the course of Italian literature forever, in the selfsame years that Robert of Brunne was compiling the earliest pattern of well-formed New English… Almost every one of the Teutonic changes in idiom, distinguishing the New English from the Old, the speech of Queen Victoria from the speech of Hengist, is to be found in Manning's work."

Mandeville's Travels.—Sir John Mandeville, who is popularly considered the author of a very entertaining work of travels, states that he was born in St. Albans in 1300, that he left England in 1322, and traveled in the East for thirty-four years. His Travels relates what he saw and heard in his wanderings through Ethiopia, Persia, Tartary, India, and Cathay. What he tells on his own authority, he vouches for as true, but what he relates as hearsay, he leaves to the reader's judgment for belief.

[Illustration: WHAT MADEVILLE SAW. Old print from Edition of 1725.]

No such single traveler as Mandeville ever existed. The work attributed to him has been proved to be a compilation from the writings of other travelers. A French critic says wittily: "He first lost his character as a truthful writer; then out of the three versions of his book, French, English, and Latin, two were withdrawn from him, leaving him only the first. Existence has now been taken from him, and he is left with nothing at all." No matter, however, who the author was, the book exists. More manuscripts of it survive than of any other work except the Scriptures. It is the most entertaining volume of English prose that we have before 1360. The sentences are simple and direct, and they describe things vividly:—

"In Ethiope ben many dyverse folk: and Ethiope is clept[13] Cusis. In that contree ben folk, that han but o foot: and thei gon so fast, that it is marvaylle: and the foot is so large, that it schadewethe alle the body azen[14] the Sonne whanne thei wole[15] lye and reste hem."[16]

Mandeville also tells of a bird that used to amuse itself by flying away with an elephant in its talons. In the land of Prester John was a valley where Mandeville says he saw devils jumping about as thick as grasshoppers. Stories like these make the work as interesting as Gulliver's Travels.

The so-called Mandeville's Travels was one of the few works that the unlearned of that age could understand and enjoy. Consequently its popularity was so great as to bring large number of French words into familiar use. The native "againbought" is, however, used instead of the foreign "redeemed."

[Illustration: JOHN WYCLIFFE. From an old print.]

John Wycliffe.—Wycliffe (1324-1384) was born at Hipswell, near Richmond, in the northern part of Yorkshire. He became a doctor of divinity and a master of one of the colleges at Oxford. Afterward he was installed vicar of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, where he died. In history he is principally known as the first great figure in the English Reformation. He preceded the other reformers by more than a century. In literature he is best known for the first complete translation of the Bible,—a work that exerted great influence on English prose. All the translation was not made by him personally, but all was done under his direction. The translation of most of the New Testament is thought to be his own special work. He is the most important prose writer of the fourteenth century. His prose had an influence as wide as the circulation of the Bible. The fact that it was forced to circulate in manuscript, because printing had not then been invented, limited his readers; but his translation was, nevertheless, read by many. To help the cause of the Reformation, he wrote argumentative religious pamphlets, which are excellent specimens of energetic fourteenth-century prose.

Of his place in literature, Ten Brink says: "Wycliffe's literary importance lies in the fact that he extended the domain of English prose and enhanced its powers of expression. He accustomed it to terse reasoning, and perfected it as an instrument for expressing rigorous logical thought and argument; he brought it into the service of great ideas and questions of the day, and made it the medium of polemics and satire. And above all, he raised it to the dignity of the national language of the Bible."

The following is a specimen verse of Wycliffe's translation. We may note that the strong old English word "againrising" had not then been displaced by the Latin "resurrection."

"Jhesu seith to hir, I am agenrisyng and lyf; he that bileueth in me, he, if he schal be deed, schall lyue."

Piers Plowman.—The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, popularly called Piers Plowman, from its most important character, is the name of an allegorical poem, the first draft ("A" text) of which was probably composed about 1362. Later in the century two other versions, known as texts "B" and "C" appeared. Authorities differ in regard to whether these are the work of the same man. The Vision is the first and the most interesting part of a much longer work, known as Liber de Petro Plowman (The Book of Piers the Plowman).

The authorship of the poem is not certainly known, but it has long been ascribed to William Langland, born about 1322 at Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire. The author of Piers Plowman seems to have performed certain functions connected with the church, such as singing at funerals.

Piers Plowman opens on a pleasant May morning amid rural scenery. The poet falls asleep by the side of a brook and dreams. In his dream he has a vision of the world passing before his eyes, like a drama. The poem tells what he saw. Its opening lines are:—

"In a _s_omer _s_eson * whan _s_oft was the _s_onne
I _sh_ope[17] me in _sh_roudes[18] * as I a _sh_epe[19] were
In _h_abite as an _h_eremite[20] - un_h_oly of workes
_W_ent _w_yde in þis _w_orld - _w_ondres to here
Ac on a _M_ay _m_ornynge - on _M_aluerne hulles[21]
Me by_f_el a _f_erly[22] - of _f_airy me thouß te
I _w_as _w_ery for_w_andred[23] - and _w_ent me to reste
Under a _b_rode _b_ank - _b_i a _b_ornes[24] side,
And as I _l_ay and _l_ened[25] - and _l_oked in þe wateres
I _s_lombred in a _s_lepyng - it _s_weyved[26] so merye."

[Illustration: TREUTHE'S PILGRYME ATTE PLOW. From a manuscript in
Trinity College, Cambridge.]

The language of Piers Plowman is a mixture of the Southern and
Midland dialects. It should be noticed that the poem employs the old
Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter. There is no end rime. Piers Plowman
is the last great poem written in this way.

The actors in this poem are largely allegorical. Abstractions are personified. Prominent characters are Conscience, Lady Meed or Bribery, Reason, Truth, Gluttony, Hunger, and the Seven Deadly Sins. In some respects, the poem is not unlike the Pilgrim's Progress, for the battle in passing from this life to the next is well described in both; but there are more humor, satire, and descriptions of common life in Langland. Piers is at first a simple plowman, who offers to guide men to truth. He is finally identified with the Savior.

Throughout the poem, the writer displays all the old Saxon earnestness. His hatred of hypocrisy is manifest on every page. His sadness, because things are not as they ought to be, makes itself constantly felt. He cannot reconcile the contradiction between the real and the ideal. In attacking selfishness, hypocrisy, and corruption; in preaching the value of a life of good deeds; in showing how men ought to progress toward higher ideals; in teaching that "Love is the physician of life and nearest our Lord himself,—" Piers Plowman proved itself a regenerating spiritual force, a stepping-stone toward the later Reformation.

The author of this poem was also a fourteenth-century social reformer, protesting against the oppression of the poor, insisting on mutual service and "the good and loving life." In order to have a well-rounded conception of the life of the fourteenth century, we must read Piers Plowman. Chaucer was a poet for the upper classes. Piers Plowman gives valuable pictures of the life of the common people and shows them working—

"To kepe kyne In þe field, þe corne fro þe bestes,
Diken[27] or deluen[28] or dyngen[29] vppon sheues,[30]
Or helpe make mortar or here mukke a-felde."

We find in the popular poetry of Piers Plowman almost as many words of French derivation as in the work of the more aristocratic Chaucer. This fact shows how thoroughly the French element had become incorporated in the speech of all classes. The style of the author of Piers Plowman is, however, remarkable for the old Saxon sincerity and for the realistic directness of the bearer of a worthy message.

John Gower.—Gower, a very learned poet, was born about 1325 and died in 1408. As he was not sure that English would become the language of his cultivated countrymen, he tried each of the three languages used in England. His first important work, the Speculum Meditantis, was written in French; his second, the Vox Clamantis, in Latin; his third, the Confessio Amantis, in English.

[Illustration: EARLY PORTRAIT OF GOWER HEARING THE CONFESSION OF A
LOVER (CONFESSIO AMANTIS). From the Egerton MS., British Museum.]

The Confessio Amantis (Confession of a Lover) is principally a collection of one hundred and twelve short tales. An attempt to unify them is seen in the design to have the confessor relate, at the lover's request, those stories which reveal the causes tending to hinder or to further love. Gower had ability in story-telling, as is shown by the tales about Medea and the knight Florent; but he lacked Chaucer's dramatic skill and humor. Gower's influence has waned because, although he stood at the threshold of the Renaissance, his gaze was chiefly turned backward toward medievalism. His contemporary, Chaucer, as we see, was affected by the new spirit.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER, 1340?-1400.

[Illustration: GEOFFREY CHAUCER. From an old drawing in Occleve's
Poems, British Museum.]

Life.—Chaucer was born in London about 1340. His father and grandfather were vintners, who belonged to the upper class of merchants. Our first knowledge of Geoffrey Chaucer is obtained from the household accounts of the Princess Elizabeth, daughter-in-law of Edward III., in whose family Chaucer was a page. An entry shows that she bought him a fine suit of clothes, including a pair of red and black breeches. Such evidence points to the fact that he was early accustomed to associating with the nobility, and enables us to understand why he and the author of Piers Plowman regard life from different points of view.

In 1359 Chaucer accompanied the English army to France and was taken prisoner. Edward III. thought enough of the youth to pay for his ransom a sum equivalent to-day to about $1200. After his return he was made valet of the king's chamber. The duties of that office "consisted in making the royal bed, holding torches, and carrying messages." Later, Chaucer became a squire.

In 1370 he was sent to the continent on a diplomatic mission. He seems to have succeeded so well that during the next ten years he was repeatedly sent abroad in the royal service. He visited Italy twice and may thus have met the Italian poet Petrarch. These journeys inspired Chaucer with a desire to study Italian literature,—a literature that had just been enriched by the pens of Dante and Boccaccio.

We must next note that Chaucer's life was not that of a poetic dreamer, but of a stirring business man. For more than twelve years he was controller of customs for London. This office necessitated assessing duties on wools, skins, wines, and candles. Only a part of this work could be performed by deputy. He was later overseeing clerk of the king's works. The repeated selection of Chaucer for foreign and diplomatic business shows that he was considered sagacious as well as trustworthy. Had he not kept in close touch with life, he could never have become so great a poet. In this connection we may remark that England's second greatest writer, Milton, spent his prime in attending to affairs of state. Chaucer's busy life did not keep him from attaining third place on the list of England's poets.

There are many passages of autobiographical interest in his poems. He was a student of books as well as of men, as is shown by these lines from the Hous of Fame:—

"For whan thy labour doon al is,
And halt y-maad thy rekeninges,
In stede of rest and newe thinges,
Thou gost hoom to thy hous anoon,
And, also domb as any stoon,
Thou sittest at another boke,
Til fully daswed[31] is thy loke,
And livest thus as an hermyte."[32]

Chaucer was pensioned by three kings,—Edward III., Richard II., and Henry IV. Before the reign of Henry IV., Chaucer's pensions were either not always regularly paid, or they were insufficient for certain emergencies, as he complained of poverty in his old age. The pension of Henry IV. in 1399 must have been ample, however; since in that year Chaucer leased a house in the garden of a chapel at Westminster for as many of fifty-three years as he should live. He had occasion to use this house but ten months, for he died in 1400.

He may be said to have founded the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, as he was the first of the many great authors to be buried there.

Chaucer's Earlier Poems.—At the age of forty, Chaucer had probably written not more than one seventh of a total of about 35,000 lines of verse which he left at his death. Before he reached his poetic prime, he showed two periods of influence,—French and Italian.

During his first period, he studied French models. He learned much
from his partial translation of the popular French Romaunt of the
Rose. The best poem of his French period is Dethe of Blanche the
Duchesse, a tribute to the wife of John of Gaunt, the son of Edward
III.

Chaucer's journey to Italy next turned his attention to Italian models. A study of these was of especial service in helping him to acquire that skill which enabled him to produce the masterpieces of his third or English period. This study came at a specially opportune time and resulted in communicating to him something of the spirit of the early Renaissance.

The influence of Boccaccio and, sometimes, of Dante is noticeable in the principal poems of the Italian period,—the Troilus and Criseyde, Hous of Fame, and Legende of Good Women. The Troilus and Criseyde is a tale of love that was not true. The Hous of Fame, an unfinished poem, gives a vision of a vast palace of ice on which the names of the famous are carved to await the melting rays of the sun. The Legende of Good Women is a series of stories of those who, like Alcestis, are willing to give up everything for love. In A Dream of Fair Women Tennyson says:—

"'The Legend of Good Women,' long ago
Sung by the morning star of song, who made
His music heard below;
Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those melodious bursts that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still."

In this series of poems Chaucer learned how to rely less and less on an Italian crutch. He next took his immortal ride to Canterbury on an English Pegasus.

General Plan of the Canterbury Tales.—People in general have always been more interested in stories than in any other form of literature. Chaucer probably did not realize that he had such positive genius for telling tales in verse that the next five hundred years would fail to produce his superior in that branch of English literature.

[Illustration: CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL.]

All that Chaucer needed was some framework into which he could fit the stories that occurred to him, to make them something more than mere stray tales, which might soon be forgotten. Chaucer's great contemporary Italian storyteller, Boccaccio, conceived the idea of representing some of the nobility of Florence as fleeing from the plague, and telling in their retirement the tales that he used in his Decameron. It is not certain that Chaucer received from the Decameron his suggestions for the Canterbury Tales, although he was probably in Florence at the same time as Boccaccio.

In 1170 Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered at the altar. He was considered both a martyr and a saint, and his body was placed in a splendid mausoleum at the Cathedral. It was said that miracles were worked at his tomb, that the sick were cured, and that the worldly affairs of those who knelt at his shrine prospered. It became the fashion for men of all classes to go on pilgrimages to his tomb. As robbers infested the highways, the pilgrims usually waited at some inn until there was a sufficient band to resist attack. In time the journey came to be looked on as a holiday, which relieved the monotony of everyday life. About 1385 Chaucer probably went on such a pilgrimage. To furnish amusement, as the pilgrims cantered along, some of them may have told stories. The idea occurred to Chaucer to write a collection of such tales as the various pilgrims might have been supposed to tell on their journey. The result was the Canterbury Tales.

Characters in the Tales.—Chaucer's plan is superior to Boccaccio's; for only the nobility figure as story-tellers in the Decameron, while the Canterbury pilgrims represent all ranks of English life, from the knight to the sailor.

The Prologue to the Tales places these characters before us almost as distinctly as they would appear in real life. At the Tabard Inn in Southwark, just across the Thames from London, we see that merry band of pilgrims on a pleasant April day. We look first upon a manly figure who strikes us as being every inch a knight. His cassock shows the marks of his coat of mail.

"At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene.
* * * * *
And of his port as meke as is a mayde.
He never yet no vileinye ne sayde
In al his lyf, un-to no maner wight.
He was a verray parfit gentil knight."

His son, the Squire, next catches our attention. We notice his curly locks, his garments embroidered with gay flowers, and the graceful way in which he rides his horse. By his side is his servant, the Yeoman, "clad in cote and hood of grene," with a sheaf of arrows at his belt. We may even note his cropped head and his horn suspended from green belt. We next catch sight of a Nun's gracefully pleated wimple, shapely nose, small mouth, "eyes greye as glas," well-made cloak, coral beads, and brooch of gold. She is attended by a second Nun and three Priests. The Monk is a striking figure:—

"His heed was balled, that shoon as any glas,
And eek his face, as he hadde been anoint.
He was a lord ful fat and in good point."

[Illustration: PILGRIMS LEAVING THE TABARD INN. From Urry's
Chaucer.]

There follow the Friar with twinkling eyes, "the beste beggere in his hous," the Merchant with his forked beard, the Clerk (scholar) of Oxford in his threadbare garments, the Sergeant-at-Law, the Franklyn (country gentleman), Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer, Tapycer (tapestry maker), Cook, Shipman, Physician, Wife of Bath, Parish Priest, Plowman, Miller, Manciple (purchaser of provisions), Reeve (bailiff of a farm), Summoner (official of an ecclesiastical court), and Pardoner. These characters, exclusive of Baily (the host of Tabard Inn) and Chaucer himself, are alluded to in the Prologue to the Tales as—

"Wel nyne and twenty in a companye,
Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle
In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde."

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF LINES DESCRIBING THE FRANKLYN[33]. From the Cambridge University MS.]

[Illustration: THE FRANKLYN[34].]

[Illustration: THE FRIAR.]

The completeness of the picture of fourteenth century English life in the Canterbury Tales makes them absolutely necessary reading for the historian as well as for the student of literature.

Certainly no one who has ever read the Prologue to the Tales will question Chaucer's right to be considered a great original poet, no matter how much he may have owed to foreign teachers.

The Tales.—Harry Baily, the keeper of the Tabard Inn, who accompanied the pilgrims, proposed that each member of the party should tell four tales,—two going and two returning. The one who told the best story was to have a supper at the expense of the rest. The plan thus outlined was not fully executed by Chaucer, for the collection contains but twenty-four tales, all but two of which are in verse.

[Illustration: THE KNIGHT.]

[Illustration: THE PRIORESS.]

[Illustration: THE SQUIRE.]

The Knightes Tale, which is the first, is also the best. It is a very interesting story of love and chivalry. Two young Theban nobleman, Palamon and Arcite, sworn friends, are prisoners of war at Athens. Looking through the windows of their dungeon, they see walking in the garden the beautiful sister of the queen. Each one swears that he will have the princess. Arcite is finally pardoned on condition that he will leave Athens and never return, on penalty of death; but his love for Emily lures him back to the forbidden land. Reduced almost to a skeleton, he disguises himself, goes to Athens, and becomes a servant in the house of King Theseus. Finally, Palamon escapes from prison, and by chance encounters Arcite. The two men promptly fight, but are interrupted by Theseus, who at first condemns them to death, but later relents and directs them to depart and to return at the end of a year, each with a hundred brave knights. The king prescribes that each lover shall then lead his forces in mortal battle and that the victor shall wed the princess.

[Illustration: THE CLERK OF OXFORD.]

On the morning of the contest, Palamon goes before dawn to the temple of Venus to beseech her aid in winning Emily, while Arcite at the same time steals to the temple of Mars to pray for victory in war. Each deity not only promises but actually grants the suppliants precisely what they ask; for Arcite, though fatally wounded, is victorious in the battle, and Palamon in the end weds Emily. Although Boccaccio's Teseide furnished the general plot for this Knightes Tale, Chaucer's story is, as Skeat says, "to all intents, a truly original poem."

The other pilgrims tell stories in keeping with their professions and characters. Perhaps the next best tale is the merry story of Chanticleer and the Fox. This is related by the Nun's Priest. The Clerk of Oxford tells the pathetic tale of Patient Griselda, and the Nun relates a touching story of a little martyr.

Chief Qualities of Chaucer.—I. Chaucer's descriptions are unusually clear-cut and vivid. They are the work of a poet who did not shut himself in his study, but who mingled among his fellow-men and noticed them acutely. He says of the Friar:—

"His eyes twinkled in his heed aright,
As doon the sterres in the frosty night."

Our eyes and ears distinctly perceive the jolly Monk, as he canters along:—

"And, whan he rood, men might his brydel here
Ginglen in a whistling wind as clere,
And eek as loude as dooth the chapel-belle."

II. Chaucer's pervasive, sympathetic humor is especially characteristic. We can see him looking with twinkling eyes at the Miller, "tolling thrice"; at the Monk, "full fat and in good point," hunting with his greyhounds, "swift as fowl in flight," or smiling before a fat roast swan; at the Squire, keeping the nightingale company; at the Doctor, prescribing the rules of astrology. The Nun feels a touch of his humor:—

"Ful wel she song the service divyne,
Entuned in hir nose ful semely."

Of the lawyer, he says:—

"No-wher so bisy a man as he ther nas,
And yet he semed bisier than he was."

Sometimes Chaucer's humor is so delicate as to be lost on those who are not quick-witted. Lowell instances the case of the Friar, who, "before setting himself softly down, drives away the cat," and adds what is true only of those who have acute understanding: "We know, without need of more words, that he has chosen the snuggest corner."

His humor is often a graceful cloak for his serious philosophy of existence. The humor in the Prologue does not impair its worth to the student of fourteenth-century life.

III. Although Chaucer's humor and excellence in lighter vein are such marked characteristics, we must not forget his serious qualities; for he has the Saxon seriousness as well as the Norman airiness. As he looks over the struggling world, he says with a sympathetic heart:—

"Infinite been the sorwes and the teres
Of olde folk, and folk of tendre yeres."[35]

In like vein, we have:—

"This world nis but a thurghfare ful of wo,
And we ben pilgrimes, passinge to and fro;
Deeth is an ende of every worldly sore."[36]

"Her nis non hoom, her nis but wildernesse.
Forthe, pylgrime, forthe! forthe, beste out of thi stal!
Knowe thi contree, look up, thank God of al!"[37]

The finest character in the company is that of the Parish Priest, who attends to his flock like a good Samaritan:—

"But Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve,
He taughte, and first he folwed it him-selve."

IV. The largeness of his view of human nature is remarkable. Some poets, either intentionally or unintentionally, paint one type of men accurately and distort all the rest. Chaucer impartially portrays the highest as well as the lowest, and the honest man as well as the hypocrite. The pictures of the roguish Friar and the self-denying Parish Priest, the Oxford Scholar and the Miller, the Physician and the Shipman, are painted with equal fidelity to life. In the breadth and kindliness of his view of life, Chaucer is a worthy predecessor of Shakespeare. Dryden's verdict on Chaucer's poetry is: "Here is God's plenty."

V. His love of nature is noteworthy for that early age. Such lines as these manifest something more than a desire for rhetorical effect in speaking of nature's phenomena:—

"Now welcom somer, with thy sonne softe,
That hast this wintres weders over-shake,
And driven awey the longe nightes blake[38]!"[39]

His affection for the daisy has for five hundred years caused many other people to look with fonder eyes upon that flower.

VI. He stands in the front rank of those who have attempted to tell stories in melodious verse. Lowell justly says: "One of the world's three or four great story-tellers, he was also one of the best versifiers that ever made English trip and sing with a gayety that seems careless, but where every foot beats time to the tune of the thought."

[Illustration: MORRIS DANCERS.From a Manuscript of Chaucer's
Time.]

VII. He is the first great English author to feel the influence of the Renaissance, which did not until long afterward culminate in England. Gower has his lover hear tales from a confessor in cloistered quiet. Chaucer takes his Pilgrims out for jolly holidays in the April sunshine. He shows the spirit of the Renaissance in his joy in varied life, in his desire for knowledge of all classes of men as well as of books, in his humor, and in his general reaching out into new fields. He makes us feel that he lives in a merrier England, where both the Morris dancer and the Pilgrim may show their joy in life.

What Chaucer did for the English Language.—Before Chaucer's works, English was, as we have seen, a language of dialects. He wrote in the Midland dialect, and aided in making that the language of England. Lounsbury says of Chaucer's influence: "No really national language could exist until a literature had been created which would be admired and studied by all who could read, and taken as a model by all who could write. It was only a man of genius that could lift up one of these dialects into a preëminence over the rest, or could ever give to the scattered forces existing in any one of them the unity and vigor of life. This was the work that Chaucer did." For this reason he deserves to be called our first modern English poet. At first sight, his works look far harder to read than they really are, because the spelling has changed so much since Chaucer's day.

SUMMARY

The period from the Norman Conquest to 1400 is remarkable (1) for bringing into England French influence and closer contact with the continent; (2) for the development of (a) a more centralized government, (b) the feudal system and chivalry, (c) better civil courts of justice and a more representative government, Magna Charta being one of the steps in this direction; (3) for the influence of religion, the coming of the friars, the erection of unsurpassed Gothic cathedrals; (4) for the struggles of the peasants to escape their bondage, for a striking decline in the relative importance of the armored knight, and for Wycliffe's movement for a religious reformation.

This period is also specially important because it gave to England a new language of greater flexibility and power. The old inflections, genders, formative prefixes, and capability of making self-explaining compounds were for the most part lost. To supply the places of lost words and to express those new ideas which came with the broader experiences of an emancipated, progressive nation, many new words were adopted from the French and the Latin. When the time for literature came, Chaucer found ready for his pen the strongest, sincerest, and most flexible language that ever expressed a poet's thought.

In tracing the development of the literature of this period, we have noted (1) the metrical romances; (2) Geoffrey of Monmouth's (Latin) History of the Kings of Britain, and Layamon's Brut, with their stories of Lear, Cymbeline and King Arthur; (3) the Ormulum, a metrical paraphrase of those parts of the Gospels used in church service; (4) the Ancren Riwle, remarkable for its natural eloquent prose and its noble ethics, as well as for showing the development of the language; (5) the lyrical poetry, beginning to be redolent of the odor of the blossom and resonant with the song of the bird; (6) the Handlyng Synne, in which we stand on the threshold of modern English; (7) Mandeville's Travels, with its entertaining stories; (8) Wycliffe's monumental translation of the Bible and vigorous religious prose pamphlets; (9) Piers Plowman, with its pictures of homely life, its intense desire for higher ideals and for the reformation of social and religious life; (10) Gower's Confessio Amantis, a collection of tales about love; and (11) Chaucer's poetry, which stands in the front rank for the number of vivid pictures of contemporary life, for humor, love of nature, melody, and capacity for story-telling.

REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY

HISTORICAL

An account of the history of this period may be found in either Gardiner[40], Green, Lingard, Walker, or Cheney. Volumes II. and III. of the Political History of England, edited by Hunt (Longmans), give the history in greater detail. For the social side, consult Traill, I. and II. See also Rogers's Six Centuries of Work and Wages. Freeman's William the Conqueror, Green's Henry II., and Tout's Edward I. (Twelve English Statesmen Series) are short and interesting. Kingsley's Hereward the Wake deals with the times of William the Conqueror and Scott's Ivanhoe with those of Richard the Lion-Hearted. Archer and Kingsford's The Story of the Crusades, Cutt's Parish Priests and their People in the Middle Ages in England, and Jusserand's English Wayfaring Life in the fourteenth Century are good works.

LITERARY

Cambridge History of English Literature, Vols. I. and II.

Bradley's Making of English.

Schofield's English Literature from the Conquest to Chaucer.

Ker's Epic and Romance.

Saintsbury's The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory.

Lawrence's Medieval Story (excellent).

Weston's The Romance Cycle of Charlemagne and his Peers.

Weston's King Arthur and his Knights.

Maynadier's The Arthur of the English Poets.

Nutt's The Legends of the Holy Grail.

Jusserand's Piers Plowman.

Warren's Langland's Vision of Piers the Plowman, Done into Modern
Prose.

Savage's Old English Libraries.

Schofield's Chivalry in English Literature.

Snell's The Age of Chaucer.

Root's The Poetry of Chaucer.

Tuckwell's Chaucer (96 pp.).

Pollard's Chaucer (142 pp.).

Legouis's Chaucer.

Coulton's Chaucer and his England.

Lowell's My Study Windows contains one of the best essays ever written on Chaucer.

Mackail's The Springs of Helicon (Chaucer).

SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

Romances.—The student will be interested in reading from Lawrence's Medieval Story, Chapters III., The Song of Roland; IV., The Arthurian Romances; V., The Legend of the Holy Grail; VI., The History of Reynard the Fox. Butler's The Song of Roland (Riverside Literature Series) is an English prose translation of a popular story from the Charlemagne cycle. Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight has been retold in modern English prose by J.L. Weston (London: David Nutt). A long metrical selection from this romance is given in Bronson.[41] I., 83-100, in Oxford Treasury, I., 60-81, and a prose selection in Century, 1000-1022.

Stories from the Arthurian cycle may he found in Newell's King Arthur and the Table Round. See also Maynadier's The Arthur of the English Poets, and Tennyson's The Idylls of the King.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain is translated in Giles's Six Old English Chronicles (Bohn Library).

Selections from Layamon's Brut may be found in Bronson, I.; P. & S.; and Manly, I.

What were the chief subjects of the cycles of Romance? Were they mostly of English or French origin? What new elements appear, not found in Beowulf? Which of these cycles has the most interest for English readers? How does this cycle still influence twentieth-century ideals? In what respect is the romance of Gawayne like a sermon?

What Shakespearean characters does Geoffrey of Monmouth introduce? How is Layamon's Brut related to Geoffrey's chronicle? Point out a likeness between the Brut and the work of a Victorian poet.

Ormulum, Lyrics, and Robert Manning of Brunne.—Selections may be found in P. & S.; Bronson, I.; Oxford (lyrics, pp. 1-10); Manly, I.; Morris's Specimens of Early English. Among the lyrics, read specially, "Sumer is i-cumen in," "Alysoun," "Lenten ys come with love to toune," and "Blow, Northern Wind."

What was the purpose of the Ormulum? What is its subject matter?
Does it show much French influence?

What new appreciation of nature do the thirteenth-century lyrics show?
Point out at least twelve definite concrete references to nature in
"Lenten ys come with love to toune." How many such references are
there in the Cuckoo Song?

What difference do you note between the form of Robert Manning of Brunne's Handling Synne and Anglo-Saxon poetry? Can you find an increasing number of words of French derivation in his work?

Prose.—Manly's English Prose, Morris's Specimens of Early English, Parts I. and II., Chambers, I., Craik, I., contain specimens of the best prose, including Mandeville and Wycliffe. Mandeville's Travels may be found in modern English in Cassell's National Library (15¢). Bosworth and Waring's edition of the Gospels contains the Anglo-Saxon text, together with the translations of Wycliffe and Tyndale. No. 107 of Maynard's English Classics contains selections from both Wycliffe's Bible and Mandeville's Travels.

What is the subject matter of the Ancren Riwle? What is the keynote of the work? Mention some words of French origin found in it. What is the character of Mandeville's Travels? Why was it so popular?

In what does Wycliffe's literary importance consist? Compare some verses of his translation of the Bible with the 1611 version.

Piers Plowman and Gower.—Selections are given in P. & S.; Bronson, I.; Ward, I.; Chambers, I.; and Manly, I. Skeat has edited a small edition of Piers the Plowman ("B" text) and also a larger edition, entitled The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, in Three Parallel Texts. G.C. Macaulay has a good volume of selections from Gower's Confessio Amantis.

What is the difference between the form of the verse in Piers Plowman and Handling Synne? Who is Piers? Who are some of the other characters in the poem? What type of life is specially described? In what sort of work are the laborers engaged? Why may the author of Piers Plowman be called a reformer?

Why was Gower undecided in what language to write? What is the subject matter of the Confessio Amantis?

Chaucer.—Read the Prologue and if possible also the Knightes Tale (Liddell's, or Morris-Skeat's, or Van Dyke's, or Mather's edition). Good selections may be found in Bronson, I.; Ward, I.; P. and S., and Oxford Treasury, I. Skeat's Complete Works, 6 vols., is the best edition. Skeat's Oxford Chaucer in one volume has the same text. The Globe Edition of Chaucer, edited by Pollard, is also a satisfactory single volume edition. Root's The Poetry of Chaucer, 292 pp., is a good reference work in connection with the actual study of the poetry.

Give a clear-cut description of the six of Chaucer's pilgrims that impress you most strongly. How has the Prologue added to our knowledge of life in the fourteenth century? Give examples of Chaucer's vivid pictures. What specimens of his humor does the Prologue contain? Do any of Chaucer's lines in the Prologue show that the Reformation spirit was in the air, or did Wycliffe and Langland alone among contemporary authors afford evidence of this spirit? Compare Chaucer's verse with Langland's in point of subject matter. What qualities in Chaucer save him from the charge of cynicism when he alludes to human faults? Does the Prologue attempt to portray any of the nobler sides of human nature? Is the Prologue mainly or entirely concerned with the personality of the pilgrims? Has Chaucer any philosophy of life? Are there any references to the delights of nature? Note any passages that show special powers of melody and mastery over verse. Does the poem reveal anything of Chaucer's personality? In your future reading see if you can find another English story-teller in verse who can be classed with Chaucer.

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER II:

[Footnote 1: The Tempest, V., I.]

[Footnote 2: For the location of all the English cathedral towns, see the Literary Map, p. XII.]

[Footnote 3: and.]

[Footnote 4: April.]

[Footnote 5: little.]

[Footnote 6: in her language.]

[Footnote 7: Spring.]

[Footnote 8: in its turn.]

[Footnote 9: birds.]

[Footnote 10: song.]

[Footnote 11: sigh.]

[Footnote 12: sorely.]

[Footnote 13: called.]

[Footnote 14: against.]

[Footnote 15: will.]

[Footnote 16: them.]

[Footnote 17: arrayed.]

[Footnote 18: garments.]

[Footnote 19: shepherd.]

[Footnote 20: hermit.]

[Footnote 21: hills.]

[Footnote 22: wonder.]

[Footnote 23: tired out with wandering.]

[Footnote 24: brook.]

[Footnote 25: reclined.]

[Footnote 26: sounded.]

[Footnote 27: to make dykes or ditches.]

[Footnote 28: to dig.]

[Footnote 29: to thrash (ding).]

[Footnote 30: sheaves.]

[Footnote 31: dazed.]

[Footnote 32: hermit.]

[Footnote 33: The Prologue, Lines 331-335.]

[Footnote 34: The cuts of the Pilgrims are from the Fourteenth Century
Ellesmere MS. of Canterbury Tales.]

[Footnotes 35-36: Knightes Tale.]

[Footnote 37: Truth: Balade de bon Conseyl.]

[Footnote 38: black.]

[Footnote 39: The Parlement of Foules.]

[Footnote 40: For full titles, see p. 50.]

[Footnote 41: For full titles, see p. 6.]

CHAPTER III: FROM CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400, TO THE ACCESSION OF ELIZABETH, 1558

The Course of English History.—The century and a half that followed the death of Chaucer appealed especially to Shakespeare. He wrote or helped to edit five plays that deal with this period,—Henry IV., Henry V., Henry VI., Richard III., and Henry VIII. While these plays do not give an absolutely accurate presentation of the history of the time, they show rare sympathy in catching the spirit of the age, and they leave many unusually vivid impressions.

Henry IV. (1399-1413), a descendant of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, one of the younger sons of Edward III., and therefore not in the direct line of succession, was the first English king who owed his crown entirely to Parliament. Henry's reign was disturbed by the revolt of nobles and by contests with the Welsh. Shakespeare gives a pathetic picture of the king calling in vain for sleep, "nature's tired nurse," and exclaiming:—

"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."

Henry V. (1413-1422) is one of Shakespeare's romantic characters. The young king renewed the French war, which had broken out in 1337 and which later became known as the Hundred Years' War. By his victory over the French at Agincourt (1415), he made himself a national hero. Shakespeare has him say:—

"I thought upon one pair of English legs
Did march three Frenchmen."

In the reign of Henry VI. (1422-1461), Joan of Arc appeared and saved
France.

The setting aside of the direct succession in the case of Henry IV. was a pretext for the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) to settle the royal claims of different descendants of Edward III. While this war did not greatly disturb the common people, it occupied the attention of those who might have been patrons of literature. Nearly all the nobles were killed during this prolonged contest; hence when Henry VII. (1485-1509), the first of the Tudor line of monarchs, came to the throne, there were no powerful nobles with their retainers to hold the king in check. He gave a strong centralized government to England.

The period following Chaucer's death opens with religious persecution. In 1401 the first Englishman was burned at the stake for his religious faith. From this time the expenses of burning heretics are sometimes found in the regular accounts of cities and boroughs. Henry VIII. (1509-1547) broke with the Pope, dissolved the monasteries, proclaimed himself head of the church, and allowed the laity to read the Bible, but insisted on retaining many of the old beliefs. In Germany, Martin Luther (1483-1546) was in the same age issuing his famous protests against religious abuses. Edward VI. (1547-1553) espoused the Protestant cause. An order was given to introduce into all the churches an English prayer book, which was not very different from that in use to-day in the Episcopal churches. Mary (1553-1558) sought the aid of fagots and the stake to bring the nation back to the old beliefs.

[Illustration: HENRY VIII. GIVING BIBLES TO CLERGY AND LAITY. From frontispiece to Coverdale Bible.]

While this period did not produce a single great poet or a statesman of the first rank, it witnessed the destruction of the majority of the nobility in the Wars of the Roses, the increase of the king's power, the decline of feudalism, the final overthrow of the knight by the yeoman with his long bow at Agincourt(1415), the freedom of the serf, and the growth of manufactures, especially of wool. English trading vessels began to displace even the ships of Venice.

In spite of the religious persecution with which the period began and ended, there was a remarkable change in religious belief, the dissolution of the monasteries and the subordination of church to state being striking evidences of this change. An event that had far-reaching consequences on literature and life was the act of Henry VIII. in ordering a translation of the Bible to be placed in every parish church in England. The death of Mary may in a measure be said to indicate the beginning of modern times.

Contrast between the Spirit of the Renaissance and of the Middle Ages.—One of the most important intellectual movements of the world is known as the Renaissance or Revival of Learning. This movement began in Italy about the middle of the fourteenth century and spread slowly westward. While Chaucer's travels in Italy; and his early contact with this new influence are reflected in his work, yet the Renaissance did not reach its zenith in England until the time of Shakespeare. This new epoch followed a long period, known as the Middle ages, when learning was mostly confined to the church, when thousands of the best minds retired to the cloisters, when many questions, like those of the revolution of the sun around the earth or the cause of disease, were determined, not by observation and scientific proof, but by the assertion of those in spiritual authority. Then, scientific investigators, like Roger Bacon, were thought to be in league with the devil and were thrown into prison. In 1258 Dante's tutor visited Roger Bacon, and, after seeing his experiments with the mariner's compass, wrote to an Italian friend:—

"This discovery so useful to all who travel by sea, must remain concealed until other times, because no mariner dare use it, lest he fall under imputation of being a magician, nor would sailors put to sea with one who carried an instrument so evidently constructed by the devil."

Symonds says: "During the Middle Ages, man had lived enveloped in a cowl. He had not seen the beauty of the world, or had seen it only to cross himself and turn aside, to tell his beads and pray." Before the Renaissance, the tendency was to regard with contempt mere questions of earthly progress and enjoyment, because they were considered unimportant in comparison with the eternal future of the soul. It was not believed that beauty, art, and literature might play a part in saving souls.

The Schoolmen of the Middle Ages often discussed such subjects as these: whether the finite can comprehend the infinite at any point, since the infinite can have no finite points; whether God can make a wheel revolve and be stationary at the same time; whether all children in a state of innocence are masculine. Such debates made remarkable theologians and metaphysicians, developed precision in defining terms, accuracy in applying the rules of deductive logic, and fluency in expression. As a result, later scientists were able to reason more accurately and express themselves with greater facility.

The chief fault of the studies of the Middle Ages consisted in neglecting the external world of concrete fact. The discussions of the Schoolmen would never have introduced printing or invented the mariner's compass or developed any of the sciences that have revolutionized life.

The coming of the Renaissance opened avenues of learning outside of the church, interested men in manifold questions relating to this world, caused a demand for scientific investigation and proof, and made increasing numbers seek for joy in this life as well as in that to come.

Causes and Effects of the Renaissance.—Some of the causes of this new movement were the weariness of human beings with their lack of progress, their dissatisfaction with the low estimate of the value of this life, and their yearning for fuller expansion of the soul, for more knowledge and joy on this side of the grave.

Another cause was the influence of Greek literature newly discovered in the fifteenth century by the western world. In 1423 an Italian scholar brought 238 Greek manuscripts to Italy. In 1453 the Turks captured Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and the headquarters of Grecian learning. Because of the remoteness of this capital, English literature had not been greatly influenced by Greece. When Constantinople fell, many of her scholars went to Italy, taking with them precious Grecian manuscripts. As Englishmen often visited Italy, they soon began to study Grecian masterpieces, and to fall under the spell of Homer and the Athenian dramatists.

The renewed study of Greek and Latin classics stimulated a longing for the beautiful in art and literature. Fourteenth-century Italian writers, like Petrarch and Boccaccio, found increasing interest in their work. Sixteenth-century artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, and Raphael show their magnificent response to a world that had already been born again.

Many of the other so-called causes of the Renaissance should strictly be considered its effects. The application of the modern theory of the solar system, the desire for exploration, the use of the mariner's compass, the invention and spread of printing, were more effects of the new movement than its causes.

Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), inspired by the spirit of the Renaissance, wrote in Latin a remarkable book called Utopia (1516), which presents many new social ideals. In the land of Utopia, society does not make criminals and then punish them for crime. Every one worships as he pleases. Only a few hours of work a day are necessary, and all find genuine pleasure in that. In Utopia life is given to be a joy. No advantage is taken of the weak or the unfortunate. Twentieth-century dreams of social justice are not more vivid and absorbing than Sir Thomas More's. It is pleasant to think that the Roman Catholic church in 1886 added to her list of saints this lovable man, "martyr to faith and freedom."

When the full influences of the Renaissance reached England, Shakespeare answered their call, and his own creations surpass the children of Utopia.

The Invention of Printing.—In 1344, about the time of Chaucer's birth, a Bible in manuscript cost as much as three oxen. A century later an amount equal to the wages of a workman for 266 days was paid for a manuscript Bible. At this time a book on astronomy cost as much as 800 pounds of butter. One page of a manuscript book cost the equivalent of from a dollar to a dollar and a half to-day. When a member of the Medici family in Florence desired a library, he sent for a book contractor, who secured forty-five copyists. By rigorous work for nearly two years they produced two hundred volumes.

[Illustration: BOOK ILLUSTRATION, EARLY FIFTEENTH CENTURY. British
Museum.]

One of the most powerful agencies of the Renaissance was the invention of printing, which multiplied books indefinitely and made them comparatively cheap. People were alive with newly awakened curiosity, and they read books to learn more of the expanding world.

About 1477 William Caxton, who had set up his press at the Almonry, near Westminster Abbey, printed the first book in England, The Dictes and Notable Wish Sayings of the Philosophers. Among fully a hundred different volumes that he printed were Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Malory's Morte d'Arthur, and an English translation of Vergil's AEneid.

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF CAXTON'S ADVERTISEMENT OF HIS BOOKS.
Bodleian Library, Oxford.]

Malory's Morte d'Arthur.—The greatest prose work of the fifteenth century was completed in 1470 by a man who styles himself Sir Thomas Malory, Knight. We know nothing of the author's life; but he has left as a monument a great prose epic of the deeds of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. From the various French legends concerning King Arthur, Malory selected his materials and fashioned than into the completest Arthuriad that we possess. While his work cannot be called original, he displayed rare artistic power in arranging, abridging, and selecting the various parts from different French works.

Malory's prose is remarkably simple and direct. Even in the impressive scene where Sir Bedivere throws the dying King Arthur's sword into the sea, the language tells the story simply and shows no straining after effect:—

"And then he threw the sword as far into the water as he might, and there came an arm and an hand above the water, and met it, and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water… 'Now put me into the barge,' said the king; and so he did softly. And there received him three queens with great mourning, and so they set him down, and in one of their laps King Arthur laid his head, and then that queen said, 'Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me?'"

After the dusky barge has borne Arthur away from mortal sight, Malory writes: "Here in this world he changed his life." A century before, Chaucer had with equal simplicity voiced the Saxon faith:—

"His spirit chaunged hous."[1]

Sometimes this prose narrative, in its condensation and expression of feeling, shows something of the poetic spirit. When the damsel on the white palfrey sees that her knightly lover has been killed, she cries:—

"O Balin! two bodies hast thou slain and one heart, and two hearts in one body, and two souls thou hast lost.' And therewith she took the sword from her love that lay dead, and as she took it, she fell to the ground in a swoon."

[Illustration: MALORY'S MORTE D'ARTHUR. From De Worde's Ed., 1529.]

Malory's work, rather than Layamon's Brut, has been the storehouse to which later poets have turned. Many nineteenth-century poets are indebted to Malory. Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Matthew Arnold's Death of Tristram, Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse, and William Morris's Defense of Guinevere were inspired by the Morte d'Arthur. Few English prose works have had more influence on the poetry of the Victorian age.

Scottish Poetry.—The best poetry of the fifteenth century was written in the Northern dialect, which was spoken north of the river Humber. This language was just as much English as the Midland tongue in which Chaucer wrote. Not until the sixteenth century was this dialect called Scotch.

James I. of Scotland (1406-1437) spent nineteen years of his youth as a prisoner in England. During his captivity in Windsor Castle, he fell in love with a maiden, seen at her orisons in the garden, and wrote a poem, called the King's Quair, to tell the story of his love. Although the King's Quair is suggestive of The Knightes Tale, and indeed owes much to Chaucer, it is a poetic record of genuine and successful love. These four lines from the spring song show real feeling for nature:—

"Worshippe, ye that lovers be, this May,
For of your bliss the kalends are begun,
And sing with us, 'Away, Winter, away,
Come, Summer, come, the sweet season and sun!'"

Much of this Scotch poetry is remarkable for showing in that early age a genuine love of nature. Changes are not rung on some typical landscape, copied from an Italian versifier. The Northern poet had his eye fixed on the scenery and the sky of Scotland. About the middle of the century, Robert Henryson, a teacher in Dunfermline, wrote.—

"The northin wind had purifyit the air
And sched the misty cloudis fra the sky."[2]

This may lack the magic of Shelley's rhythm, but the feeling for nature is as genuine as in the later poet's lines:—

"For after the rain when, with never a stain
The pavilion of heaven is bare."[3]

William Dunbar, the greatest poet of this group, who lived in the last half of the fifteenth century, was a loving student of the nature that greeted him in his northland. No Italian poet, as he wandered beside a brook, would have thought of a simile like this:—

"The stonés clear as stars in frosty night."[4]

Dunbar takes us with him on a fresh spring morning, where—

"Enamelled was the field with all coloúrs,
The pearly droppés shook in silver showers,"[5]

where we can hear the matin song of the birds hopping among the buds, while—

"Up rose the lark, the heaven's minstrel fine."[6]

Both Dunbar and Gawain Douglas (1474?-1522), the son of a Scotch nobleman, had keen eyes for all coloring in sky, leaf, and flower. In one line Dunbar calls our attention to these varied patches of color in a Scotch garden: "purple, azure, gold, and gulés [red]." In the verses of Douglas we see the purple streaks of the morning, the bluish-gray, blood-red, fawn-yellow, golden, and freckled red and white flowers, and—

"Some watery-hued, as the blue wavy sea."[7]

Outside the pages of Shakespeare, we shall for the next two hundred years look in vain for so genuine a love of scenery and natural phenomena as we find in fifteenth-century Scottish poetry. These poets obtained many of their images of nature at first hand, an achievement rare in any age.

[Illustration: EARLY TITLE PAGE OF ROBIN HOOD.]

"Songs for Man or Woman, of All Sizes."—When Shakespeare shows us Autolycus offering such songs at a rustic festival,[8] the great poet emphasizes the fondness for the ballad which had for a long time been developing a taste for poetry. While it is difficult to assign exact dates to the composition of many ballads, we know that they flourished in the fifteenth century. They were then as much prized as the novel is now, and like it they had a story to tell. The verse was often halting, but it succeeded in conveying to the hearer tales of love, of adventure, and of mystery. These ballads were sometimes tinged with pathos; but there was an energy in the rude lines that made the heart beat faster and often stirred listeners to find in a dance an outlet for their emotions. Even now, with all the poetry of centuries from which to choose, it is refreshing to turn to a Robin Hood ballad and look upon the greensward, hear the rustle of the leaves in Nottingham forest, and follow the adventures of the hero. We read the opening lines:—

"There are twelve months in all the year,
As I hear many say,
But the merriest month in all the year
Is the merry month of May."

"Now Robin Hood is to Nottingham gone,
With a link a down, and a day,
And there he met a silly old woman
Was weeping on the way."

Of our own accord we finish the ballad to see whether Robin Hood rescued her sons, who were condemned to death for shooting the fallow deer. The ballad of the Nut-Brown Maid has some touches that are almost Shakespearean.

Some of the carols of the fifteenth century give a foretaste of the Elizabethan song. One carol on the birth of the Christ-child contains stanzas like these, which show artistic workmanship, imaginative power, and, above all, rare lyrical beauty:—

"He cam also stylle
to his moderes bowr,
As dew in Aprille
that Fallyt on the flour."

"He cam also stylle
ther his moder lay,
As dew in Aprille
that fallyt on the spray"[9]

We saw that the English tongue during its period of exclusion from the Norman court gained strength from coming in such close contact with life. Although the higher types of poetry were for the most part wanting during the fifteenth century, yet the ballads multiplied and sang their songs to the ear of life. Critics may say that the rude stanzas seldom soar far from the ground, but we are again reminded of the invincible strength of Antaeus so long as he kept close to his mother earth. English poetry is so great because it has not withdrawn from life, because it was nurtured in such a cradle. When Shakespeare wrote his plays, he found an audience to understand and to appreciate them. Not only those who occupied the boxes, but also those who stood in the pit, listened intelligently to his dramatic stories. The ballad had played its part in teaching the humblest home to love poetry. These rude fireside songs were no mean factors in preparing the nation to welcome Shakespeare.

William Tyndale, 1490?-1536.—The Reformation was another mighty influence, working side by side with all the other forces to effect a lasting change in English history and literature. In the early part of the sixteenth century, Martin Luther was electrifying Germany with his demands for church reformation. In order to decide which religious party was in the right, there arose a desire for more knowledge of the Scriptures. The language had changed much since Wycliffe's translation of the Bible, and, besides, this was accessible only in manuscript. William Tyndale, a clergyman and an excellent linguist, who had been educated at both Oxford and Cambridge, conceived the idea of giving the English people the Bible in their own tongue. As he found that he could not translate and print the Bible with safety in England, he went to the continent, where with the help of friends he made the translation and had it printed. He was forced to move frequently from place to place, and was finally betrayed in his hiding place near Brussels. After eighteen months' imprisonment without pen or books, he was strangled and his body was burned at the stake.

Of his translation, Brooke says: "It was this Bible which, revised by Coverdale, and edited and reëdited as Cromwell's Bible, 1539, and again as Cranmer's Bible, 1540, was set up in every parish church in England. It got north into Scotland and made the Lowland English more like the London English. It passed over into the Protestant settlements in Ireland. After its revival in 1611 it went with the Puritan Fathers to New England and fixed the standard of English in America. Many millions of people now speak the English of Tyndale's Bible, and there is no other book which has had, through the Authorized Version, so great an influence on the style of English literature and on the standard of English prose."

[Illustration: WILLIAM TYNDALE. From an old print.]

The following verses from Tyndale's version show its simplicity directness, and similarity to the present version:—

"Jesus sayde unto her, Thy brother shall ryse agayne.

"Martha sayde unto hym, I knowe wele, he shall ryse agayne in the
resurreccion att the last day.

"Jesus sayde unto her, I am the resurreccion and lyfe; whosoever
beleveth on me, ye, though he were deed, yet shall he lyve."

Italian Influence: Wyatt and Surrey.—During the reign of Henry VIII. (1509-1547), the influence of Italian poetry made itself distinctly felt. The roots of Elizabethan poetry were watered by many fountains, one of the chief of which flowed from Italian soil. To Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and to the Earl of Surrey (1517-1547) belongs the credit of introducing from Italian sources new influences, which helped to remodel English poetry and give it a distinctly modern cast.

These poets were the first to introduce the sonnet, which Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth employed with such power in after times. Blank verse was first used in England by the Earl of Surrey, who translated a portion of Vergil's AEneid into that measure. When Shakespeare took up his pen, he found that vehicle of poetic expression ready for his use.

[Illustration: SIR THOMAS WYATT.After Holbein.]

Wyatt and Surrey adopted Italian subject matter as well as form. They introduced the poetry of the amorists, that is, verse which tells of the woes and joys of a lover. We find Shakespeare in his Sonnets turning to this subject, which he made as broad and deep as life. In 1557, the year before Elizabeth's accession, the poems of Wyatt and Surrey appeared in Tottel's Miscellany, one of the earliest printed collections of modern English poetry.

SUMMARY

The first part of the century and a half following the death of Chaucer saw war with France and the Wars of the Roses, in which most of the nobles were killed. The reign of Henry VII. and his successors in the Tudor line shows the increased influence of the crown, freed from the restraint of the powerful lords. The period witnessed the passing of serfdom and the extension of trade and manufactures.

The changes in religious views were far-reaching. Henry VIII. superseded the Pope as head of the English church, dissolved the monasteries, and placed an English translation of the Bible in the churches. Henry's son and successor Edward VI., established the Protestant form of worship, but his half-sister Mary used persecution in an endeavor to bring back the old faith.

The influences of the Renaissance, moving westward from Italy, were tending toward their culmination in the next period. The study of Greek literature, the discovery of the new world, the decline of feudalism, the overthrow of the armed knight, the extension of the use of gunpowder, the invention of printing, the increased love of learning, the demand for scientific investigation, the decline of monastic influence, shown in the new interest in this finite world and life,—all figured as causes or effects of the new influence.

The most important prose works are Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, a masterly retelling of the Arthurian legends; Sir Thomas More's Utopia, a magnificent Renaissance dream of a new social world; and Tyndale's translation of the Bible. The best poetry was written in Scotland, and this verse anticipates in some measure that love of nature which is a dominant characteristic of the last part of the eighteenth century. The age is noted for its ballads, which aided in developing among high and low a liking for poetry. At the close of the period, we find Italian influences at work, as may be seen in the verse of Wyatt and Surrey.

REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY

HISTORICAL

An account of the history of this period may be found in either Gardiner,[10] Green, Lingard, Walker, or Cheney. Vols. IV. and V. of The Political History of England, edited by Hunt (Longmans), gives the history in greater detail. For the social side, consult Traill's Social England, Vols. II. and III., also Cheney's Industrial and Social History of England, Field's Introduction to the Study of the Renaissance, Einstein's The Italian Renaissance in England, Symonds's A Short History of the Renaissance.

LITERARY

The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. II.

Snell's The Age of Transition, 1400-1580.

Morley's English Literature, Vols. VI. and VII.

Minto's Characteristics of English Poets, pp. 69-130.

Saintsbury's Short History of English Literature, pp. 157-218.

Dictionary of National Biography, articles on Malory, Caxton, Henryson, Gawain Douglas, Dunbar, Tyndale, Wyatt, and Surrey.

Veitch's The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry.

Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.

Gummere's Old English Ballads.

Child's The English and Scotch Popular Ballads.

Collins's Greek Influence on English Poetry.

Tucker's The Foreign Debt of English Literature.

SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

Malory.—Craik,[11] Century, 19-33; Swiggett's Selections from Malory; Wragg's Selections from Malory,—all contain good selections. The Globe Edition is an inexpensive single volume containing the complete text. The best edition is a reproduction of the original in three volumes with introductions by Oscar Sommer and Andrew Lang (London: David Nutt). Howard Pyle has retold Malory's best stories in simple form (Scribner).

Compare the death (or passing) of Arthur in Malory with Tennyson's The Passing of Arthur. What special dualities do you notice in the manner of Malory's telling a story? Is his work original? Why has it remained so popular? What age specially shows its influence?

More.—The English translation of the Utopia may be found entire in Everyman's Library (35¢). There are good selections in Craik, I., 162-167.

What is the etymological meaning of Utopia? What is its modern significance? Did More really give a new word to literature and speech? The Utopia should be read for an indication of the influence of the Renaissance and for comparison with twentieth-century ideas of social improvement.

Tyndale.—Bosworth and Waring's Gospels, containing the Anglo-Saxon, Wycliffe, and Tyndale versions. Specimens of Tyndale's prose are given in Chambers, I., 130; Craik, I., 185-187.

Why is Tyndale's translation of the Bible important to the student of literature? What are some special dualities of this translation?

Early Scottish Poetry.—Selections from fifteenth-century Scottish poetry may be found in Bronson, I, 170-197; Ward, I, passim; P. & S., 246-277; Oxford, 16-33.

From the King's Quair and the poems of Henryson, Dunbar, and Gawain
Douglas, select passages that show first-hand intimacy with nature.
Compare these with lines from any poet whose knowledge of nature seems
to you to be acquired from books.

Ballads.—Ward. I., passim, contains among others three excellent ballads,—Sir Patrick Spens, The Twa Corbies, Robin Hood Rescuing the Widow's Three Sons. Bronson, I., 203-254; P. & S., 282-301; Oxford, 33-51; and Maynard's English Classics, No. 96, Early English Ballads also have good selections. The best collection is Child's The English and Scotch Popular Ballads, 5 vols.

What are the chief characteristics of the old ballads? Why do they interest us today? Which of those indicated for reading has proved most interesting? What influence impossible for other forms of literature, was exerted by the ballad? What did Autolycus mean (Winter's Tale, IV., 4) when he offered "songs for man or woman, of all sizes"? Have any ballads been written in recent times?

Wyatt and Surrey.—Read two characteristic love sonnets by Wyatt and Surrey, P. & S., 313-319; Ward, I., 251, 257; Bronson, II., 1-4. A specimen of the first English blank verse employed by Surrey in translating Vergil's, AEneid is given in Bronson, II., 4, 5; in P. & S., 322, 323; and Chambers, I., 162.

Why are Wyatt and Surrey called amourists? What contributions did they make to the form of English verse? What foreign influences did they help to usher in?

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER III:

[Footnote 1: Knightes Tale.]

[Footnote 2: Testament of Cresseid.]

[Footnote 3: The Cloud.]

[Footnotes 4-6: The Golden Targe.]

[Footnote 7: Prologue to AEneid, Book XII.]

[Footnote 8: The Winter's Tale, IV., 4.]

[Footnote 9: Wright's Songs and Carols of the Fifteenth Century, p. 30.]

[Footnote 10: For full titles, see p. 50.]

[Footnote 11: For full titles, see p. 6.]

CHAPTER IV: THE AGE OF ELIZABETH, 1558-1603

The Reign of Elizabeth.—Queen Elizabeth, who ranks among the greatest of the world's rulers, was the daughter of Henry VIII. and his second wife Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth reigned as queen of England from 1558 until her death in 1603. The remarkable allowances which she made for difference of opinion showed that she felt the spirit of the Renaissance. She loved England, and her most important acts were guided, not by selfish personal motives, but by a strong desire to make England a great nation.

She had a law passed restoring the supremacy of the monarch, "as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things as temporal." The prayer book of Edward VI. was again introduced and the mass was forbidden. She was broad enough not to inquire too closely into the private religious opinions of her subjects, so long as they went to the established church. For each absence they were fined a shilling. Next to churchgoing and her country, she loved and encouraged plays.

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF ELIZABETH'S SIGNATURE TO A LICENSE
FOR THE EARL OF LEICESTER'S COMPANY OF PLAYERS, 1574.]

For more than twenty years she was worried by fear that either France or Spain would put her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, on the English throne. With masterly diplomacy, Elizabeth for a long time managed to retain the active friendship of at least one of these great powers, in order to restrain the other from interfering. She had kept Mary a prisoner for nineteen years, fearing to liberate her. At last an active conspiracy was discovered to assassinate Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne. Elizabeth accordingly had her cousin beheaded in 1587. Spain thereupon prepared her fleet, the Invincible Armada, to attack England. When this became known, the outburst of patriotic feeling was so intense among all classes in England that the queen did not hesitate to put Lord Howard, a Catholic, in command of the English fleet. The Armada was utterly defeated, and England was free to enter on her glorious period of influencing the thought and action of the world.

In brief, Elizabeth's reign was remarkable for the rise of the middle classes, for the growth of manufactures, for the appearance of English ships in almost all parts of the world, for the extension of commerce, for greater freedom of thought and action, for what the world now calls Elizabethan literature, and for the ascendancy of a great mental and moral movement to which we must next call attention.

Culmination of the Renaissance and the Reformation.—We have seen that the Renaissance began in Italy in the fourteenth century and influenced the work of Chaucer. In the same century, Wycliffe's influence helped the cause of the Reformation. Elizabethan England alone had the good fortune to experience the culmination of these two movements at one and the same time. At no other period and in no other country have two forces, like the Renaissance and the Reformation, combined at the height of their ascendancy to stimulate the human mind. One result of these two mighty influences was the work of William Shakespeare, which speaks to the ear of all time.

The Renaissance, having opened the gates of knowledge, inspired the Elizabethans with the hope of learning every secret of nature and of surmounting all difficulties. The Reformation gave man new freedom, imposed on him the gravest individual responsibilities, made him realize the importance of every act of his own will, and emphasized afresh the idea of the stewardship of this present life, for which he would be held accountable. In Elizabethan days, these two forces coöperated; in the following Puritan age they were at war.

Some Characteristics of Elizabethan Life.—It became an ambition to have as many different experiences as possible, to search for that variety craved by youth and by a youthful age. Sir Walter Raleigh was a courtier, a writer, a warden of the tin mines, a vice admiral, a captain of the guard, a colonizer, a country gentleman, and a pirate. Sir Philip Sidney, who died at the age of thirty-two, was an envoy to a foreign court, a writer of romances, an officer in the army, a poet and a courtier. Shakespeare left the little town where he was born, to plunge into the more complex life of London. The poet, Edmund Spenser, went to turbulent Ireland, where he had enough experiences to suggest the conflicts in the Faerie Queene.

The greater freedom and initiative of the individual and the remarkable extension of trade with all parts of the world naturally led to the rise of the middle class. The nobility were no longer the sole leaders in England's rapid progress. Many of Elizabeth's councilors were said to have sprung from the masses, but no reign could boast of wiser ministers. It was then customary for the various classes to mingle much more freely than they do now. There was absence of that overspecialization which today keeps people in such sharply separated groups. This mingling was further aided by the tendency to try many different pursuits and by the spirit of patriotism in the air. All classes were interested in repelling the Spanish Armada and in maintaining England's freedom. It was fortunate for Shakespeare that the Elizabethan age gave him unusual opportunity to meet and to become the spokesman of all classes of men. The audience that stood in the pit or sat in the boxes to witness the performance of his plays, comprised not only lords and wealthy merchants, but also weavers, sailors, and country folk.

Initiative and Love of Action.—The Elizabethans were distinguished for their initiative. This term implies the possession of two qualities: (1) ingenuity or fertility in ideas, and (2) ability to pass at once from an idea to its suggested action. Never did action habitually follow more quickly on the heels of thought. The age loved to translate everything into action, because the spirit of the Renaissance demanded the exercise of youthful activity to its fullest capacity in order that the power which the new knowledge promised could be acquired and enjoyed before death. As the Elizabethans felt that real life meant activity in exploring a new and interesting world, both physical and mental, they demanded that their literature should present this life of action. Hence, all their greatest poets, with the exception of Spenser, were dramatists. Even Spenser's Faerie Queene, with its abstractions, is a poem of action, for the virtues fight with the vices.

ELIZABETHAN PROSE LITERATURE

Variety in the Prose.—The imaginative spirit of the Elizabethans craved poetry, and all the greatest authors of this age, with the exception of Francis Bacon, were poets. If, however, an Elizabethan had been so peculiarly constituted as to wish to stock his library with contemporary prose only, he could have secured good works in many different fields. He could, for instance, have obtained (1) an excellent book on education, the Scholemaster of Roger Ascham (1515-1568); (2) interesting volumes of travel, such as the Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, by Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616); and The Discovery of Guiana, by Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618); (3) history, in the important Chronicles of England, Ireland, and Scotland (1578), by Raphael Holinshed; the Chronicle (Annals of England) and Survey of London, by John Stow (1525-1604); and the Brittania, by William Camden (1551-1623); (4) biography, in the excellent translation of Plutarch's Lives, by Sir Thomas North (1535-1601?); (5) criticism, in The Apologie for Poetrie, by Sir Philip Sidney; (6) essays on varied subjects by Francis Bacon; (7) works dealing with religion and faith: (a) John Foxe's (1516-1587) Book of Martyrs, which told in simple prose thrilling stories of martyrs and served as a textbook of the Reformation; (b) Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a treatise on theology; (8) fiction,[1] in John Lyly's Euphues (1579), Robert Greene's Pandosto (1588), Sir Philip Sidney's Arcardia (1590), Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde (1590), Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveler (1594), and Thomas Deloney's The Gentle Craft (1597).[2]

Shakespeare read Holinshed, North, Greene, Sidney, and Lodge and turned some of their suggestions into poetry, which we very much prefer to their prose. We are nearly certain that Shakespeare studied Lyly's Euphues, because we can trace the influence of that work in his style.

It was the misfortune of Elizabethan prose to be almost completely overshadowed by the poetry. This prose was, however, far more varied and important than that of any preceding age. The books mentioned on page 123 constitute only a small part of the prose of this period.

Lyly, Sidney, Hooker.—In 1579, when Shakespeare was fifteen years old, there appeared the first part of an influential prose work, John Lyly's (1554?-1606) Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, followed in 1580 by a second part, Euphues and his England. Much of Lyly's subject matter is borrowed, and his form reflects the artificial style then popular over Europe.

Euphues, a young Athenian, goes to Naples, where he falls in love and is jilted. This is all the action in the first part of the so-called story. The rest is moralizing. In the second part, Euphues comes to England with a friend, who falls in love twice, and finally marries; but again there is more moralizing than story. Euphues returns to Athens and retires to the mountains to muse in solitude.

In its use of a love story, Euphues prefigures the modern novel. In Euphues, however, the love story serves chiefly as a peg on which to hang discussions on fickleness, youthful follies, friendship, and divers other subjects.

Lyly aimed to produce artistic prose, which would render his meaning clear and impressive. To achieve this object, he made such excessive use of contrast, balanced words and phrases, and far-fetched comparisons, that his style seems highly artificial and affected. This quotation is typical:—

"Achilles spear could as well heal as hurt, the scorpion though he sting, yet he stints the pain, through the herb Nerius poison the sheep, yet is a remedy to man against poison… There is great difference between the standing puddle and the running stream, yet both water: great odds between the adamant and the pomice, yet both stones, a great distinction to be put between vitrum and the crystal, yet both glass: great contrariety between Lais and Lucretia, yet both women."

Although this selection shows unnatural or strained antithesis, there is also evident a commendable desire to vary the diction and to avoid the repetition of the same word. To find four different terms for nearly the same idea "difference," "odds," "distinction," and "contrariety," involves considerable painstaking. While it is true that the term "euphuism" has come to be applied to any stilted, antithetical style that pays more attention to the manner of expressing a thought than to its worth, we should remember that English prose style has advanced because some writers, like Lyly, emphasized the importance of artistic form. Shakespeare occasionally employs euphuistic contrast in an effective way. The sententious Polonius says in Hamlet:—

"Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice."

[Illustration: PHILIPPE SIDNEY. After the miniature by Isaac
Oliver, Windsor Castle.]

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) wrote for his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, a pastoral romance, entitled Arcadia (published in 1590). Unlike Lyly, Sidney did not aim at precision, emphatic contrast, and balance. For its effectiveness, the Arcadia relies on poetic language and conceptions. The characters in the romance live and love in a Utopian Arcadia, where "the morning did strow Roses and Violets in the heavenly floor against the coming of the Sun," and where the shepherd boy pipes "as though he should never be old."

Passages like the following show Sidney's poetic style and as much exuberant fancy as if they had been written by a Celt:—

"Her breath is more sweet than a gentle southwest wind, which comes creeping over flowery fields and shadowed waters in the extreme heat of summer and yet is nothing compared to the honey-flowing speech that breath doth carry."

The Arcadia furnished Shakespeare's King Lear with the auxiliary plot of Gloucester and his two sons and inspired Thomas Lodge to write his novel Rosalynde, which in turn suggested Shakespeare's As You Like It.

To Sidney belongs the credit of having written the first meritorious essay on criticism in the English language, The Apologie for Poetrie. This defends the poetic art, and shows how necessary such exercise of the imagination is to take us away from the cold, hard facts of life.

Richard Hooker's (1554?-1600) Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity shows a third aim in Elizabethan prose,—to express carefully reasoned investigation and conclusion in English that is as thoroughly elaborated and qualified as the thought. Lyly's striking contrasts and Sidney's flowery prose do not appeal to Hooker, who uses Latin inversions and parenthetical qualifications, and adds clause after clause whenever he thinks it necessary to amplify the thought or to guard against misunderstanding. Hooker's prose is as carefully wrought as Lyly's and far more rhythmical. Both were experimenting with English prose in different fields, serving to teach succeeding writers what to imitate and to avoid.

Unlike Euphues and the Arcadia, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is more valuable for its thought than for its form of expression. This work, which is still studied as an authority, is an exposition of divine law in its relations to both the world and the church. Hooker was personally a compound of sweetness and light, and his philosophy is marked by sweet reasonableness. He was a clergyman of the Church of England, but he shows a spirit of toleration toward other churches. He had much of the modern idea of growth in both government and religion, and he "accepts no system of government either in church or state as unalterable."

FRANCIS BACON, 1561-1626

[Illustration: FRANCIS BACON. From the painting by Van Somer,
National Portrait Gallery.]

Life.—A study of Bacon takes us beyond the limits of the reign of Elizabeth, but not beyond the continued influences of that reign. Francis Bacon, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Elizabeth, was born in London and grew up under the influences of the court. In order to understand some of Bacon's actions in later life, we must remember the influences that helped to fashion him in his boyhood days. Those with whom he early associated and who unconsciously molded him were not very scrupulous about the way in which they secured the favor of the court or the means which they took to outstrip an adversary. They also encouraged in him a taste for expensive luxuries. These unfortunate influences were intensified when, at the age of sixteen, he went with the English ambassador to Paris, and remained there for two and a half years, studying statecraft and diplomacy.

When Bacon was nineteen, his father died. The son, being without money, returned from Paris and appealed to his uncle, Lord Burleigh, one of Elizabeth's ministers, for some lucrative position at the court. In a letter to his uncle, Bacon says: "I confess I have as vast contemplative ends as I have moderate civil ends; for I have taken all knowledge to be my province." This statement shows the Elizabethan desire to master the entire world of the New Learning. Instead of helping his nephew, however, Lord Burleigh seems to have done all in his power to thwart him. Bacon thereupon studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1582.

Bacon entered Parliament in 1584 and distinguished himself as a speaker. Ben Jonson, the dramatist, says of him "There happened in my time one noble speaker who was full of gravity in his speaking. No man ever spoke more neatly, more presly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. His hearers could not cough or look aside from him without loss. The fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end." This speaking was valuable training for Bacon in writing the pithy sentences of his Essays. A man who uses the long, involved sentences of Hooker can never become a speaker to whom people will listen. The habit of directness and simplicity, which Bacon formed in his speaking, remained with him through Life.

Among the many charges against Bacon's personal code of ethics, two stand out conspicuously. The Earl of Essex, who had given Bacon an estate then worth £1800, was influential in having him appointed to the staff of counselors to Queen Elizabeth. When Essex was accused of treason, Bacon kept the queen's friendship by repudiating him and taking an active part in the prosecution that led to the earl's execution. After James I. had made Bacon Lord High Chancellor of England, he was accused of receiving bribes as a judge. He replied that he had accepted only the customary presents given to judges and that these made no difference in his decisions. He was tried, found guilty, fined £40,000, and sentenced to be imprisoned in the Tower during the king's pleasure. After a few days, however, the king released him, forgave the fine, and gave him an annual pension of £1200.

The question whether he wrote Shakespeare's plays needs almost as much discussion on the moral as on the intellectual side. James Spedding, after studying Bacon's life and works for thirty years, said: "I see no reason to suppose that Shakespeare did not write the plays. But if somebody else did, then I think I am in a position to say that it was not Lord Bacon."

After his release, Bacon passed the remaining five years of his life in retirement,—studying and writing. His interest in observing natural objects and experimenting with them was the cause of his death. He was riding in a snowstorm when it occurred to him to test snow as a preservative agent. He stopped at a house, procured a fowl, and stuffed it with snow. He caught cold during this experiment and, being improperly cared for, soon died.

The Essays.—The first ten of his Essays, his most popular work, appeared in the year 1597. At the time of his death, he had increased them to fifty-eight. They deal with a with range of subjects, from Studies and Nobility, On the one hand, to Marriage and Single Life and Gardens on the other. The great critic Hallam say: "It would be somewhat derogatory to a man of the slightest claim to polite letters, were he unacquainted with the Essays of Bacon. It is, indeed, little worth while to read this or any other book for reputation's, sake; but very few in our language so well repay the pains, or afford more nourishment to the thoughts."

[Illustration: TITLE PAGE OF BACON'S ESSAYS, 1597.]

The following sentence from the essay Of Studies will show some of the characteristics of his way of presenting thought:—

"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man: and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know that he doth not."

We may notice here (1) clearness, (2) conciseness, (3) breadth of thought and observation.

A shrewd Scotchman says: "It may be said that to men wishing to rise in the world by politic management of their fellowmen, Bacon's Essays are the best handbook hitherto published." In justification of this criticism, we need only quote from the essay Of Negotiating:—

"It is generally better to deal by speech than by letter… Letters are good, when a man would draw an answer by letter back again, or when it may serve, for a man's justification, afterwards to produce his own letter, or where it may he danger to be interrupted or heard by pieces. To deal in person is good, when a man's face breedeth regard, as commonly with inferiors, or in tender cases, where a man's eye upon the countenance of him with whom he speaketh may give him a direction how far to go, and generally, where a man will reserve to himself liberty either to disavow or to expound."

Scientific and Miscellaneous Works.—The Advancement of Learning is another of Bacon's great works. The title aptly expresses the purpose of the took. He insists on the necessity of close observation of nature and of making experiments with various forms of matter. He decries the habit of spinning things out of one's inner consciousness, without patiently studying the outside world to see whether the facts justify the conclusions. In other words, he insists on induction. Bacon was not the father of the inductive principle, as is sometimes wrongly stated; for prehistoric man was compelled to make inductions before he could advance one step from barbarism. The trouble was that this method was not rigorously applied. It was currently believed that our valuable garden toad is venomous and that frogs are bred from slime. For his knowledge of bees, Lyly consulted classical authors in preference to watching the insects. Bacon's writings exerted a powerful influence in the direction of exact inductive method.

Bacon had so little faith in the enduring qualities of the English language, that he wrote the most of his philosophical works in Latin. He planned a Latin work in six parts, to cover the whole field of the philosophy of natural science. The most famous of the parts completed is the Novum Organum, which deals with certain methods for searching after definite truth, and shows how to avoid some ever present tendencies toward error.

Bacon wrote an excellent History of the Reign of Henry VII., which is standard to this day. He is also the author of The New Atlantis, which may be termed a Baconian Utopia, or study of an ideal commonwealth.

General Characteristics.—In Bacon's sentences we may often find remarkable condensation of thought in few words. A modern essayist has taken seven pages to express, or rather to obscure, the ideas in these three lines from Bacon:—

"Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success."[3]

His works abound in illustrations, analogies, and striking imagery; but unlike the great Elizabethan poets, he appeals more to cold intellect than to the feelings. We are often pleased with his intellectual ingenuity, for instance, in likening the Schoolmen to spiders, spinning such stuff as webs are made of "out of no great quantity of matter."

He resembles the Elizabethans in preferring magnificent to commonplace images. It has been often noticed that if he essays to write of buildings in general, he prefers to describe palaces. His knowledge of the intellectual side of human nature is especially remarkable, but, unlike Shakespeare, Bacon never drops his plummet into the emotional depths of the soul.

THE NON-DRAMATIC POETRY—LYRICAL VERSE

A Medium of Artistic Expression.—No age has surpassed the Elizabethan in lyrical poems, those "short swallow flights of song," as Tennyson defines them. The English Renaissance, unlike the Italian, did not achieve great success in painting. The Englishman embodied in poetry his artistic expression of the beautiful. Many lyrics are merely examples of word painting. The Elizabethan poet often began his career by trying to show his skill with the ingenious and musical arrangement of words, where an Italian would have used color and drawing on an actual canvas.

We have seen that in the reign of Henry VIII. Wyatt and Surrey introduced into England from Italy the type of lyrical verse known as the sonnet. This is the most artificial of lyrics, because its rules prescribe a length of exactly fourteen lines and a definite internal structure.

The sonnet was especially popular with Elizabethan poets. In the last ten years of the sixteenth century, more than two thousand sonnets were written. Even Shakespeare served a poetic apprenticeship by writing many sonnets as well as semi-lyrical poems, like Venus and Adonis.

We should, however, remember that the sonnet is only one type of the varied lyric expression of the age. Many Elizabethan song books show that lyrics were set to music and used on the most varied occasions. There were songs for weddings, funerals, dances, banquets,—songs for the tinkers, the barbers, and other workmen. If modern readers chance to pick up an Elizabethan novel, like Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde (1590), they are surprised to find that prose will not suffice for the lover, who must "evaporate" into song like this:—

"Love in my bosom like a bee,
Doth suck his sweet.
Now with his wings he plays with me,
Now with his feet."

There are large numbers of Elizabethan lyrics apparently as spontaneous and unfettered as the song of the lark. The seeming artlessness of much of this verse should not blind us to the fact that an unusual number of poets had really studied the art of song.

Love Lyrics.—The subject of the Elizabethan sonnets is usually love. Sir Philip Sidney wrote many love sonnets, the best of which is the one beginning:—

"With how sad steps. O Moon, thou climb'st the Skies!"

Edmund Spencer composed fifty-eight sonnets in one year to chronicle his varied emotions as a lover. We may find among Shakespeare's 154 sonnets some of the greatest love lyrics in the language, such, for instance, as CXVI., containing the lines:—

"Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds";

or, as XVIII.:—

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease bath all too short a date.
* * * * *
But thy eternal summer shall not fade."

Sonnets came to be used in much the same way as a modern love letter or valentine. In the latter part of Elizabeth's reign, sonnets were even called "merchantable ware." Michael Drayton (1563-1631), a prolific poet, author of the Ballad of Agincourt, one of England's greatest war songs, tells how he was employed by a lover to write a sonnet which won the lady. Drayton's best sonnet is, Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part.

Outside of the sonnets, we shall find love lyrics in great variety.
One of the most popular of Elizabethan songs is Ben Jonson's:—

"Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine."

The Elizabethans were called a "nest of singing birds" because such songs as the following are not unusual in the work of their minor writers:—

"Sweet air, blow soft; mount, lark, aloft
To give my love good morrow!
Winds from the wind to please her mind,
Notes from the lark I'll borrow."[4]

Pastoral Lyrics.—In Shakespeare's early youth it was the fashion to write lyrics about the delights of rustic life with sheep and shepherds. The Italians, freshly interesting in Vergil's Georgics and Bucolics, had taught the English how to write pastoral verse. The entire joyous world had become a Utopian sheep pasture, in which shepherds piped and fell in love with glorified sheperdesses. A great poet named one of his productions, Shepherd's Calendar and Sir Philip Sidney wrote in poetic prose the pastoral romance Arcadia.

Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to his Love is a typical poetic expression of the fancied delight in pastoral life:—

"…we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals."

Miscellaneous Lyrics.—As the Elizabethan age progressed, the subject matter of the lyrics became broader. Verse showing consummate mastery of turns expressed the most varied emotions. Some of the greatest lyrics of the period are the songs interspersed in the plays of the dramatists, from Lyly to Beaumont and Fletcher. The plays of Shakespeare, the greatest and most varied of Elizabethan lyrical poets, especially abound in such songs. Two of the best of these occur in his Cymbeline. One is the song—

"Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,"

and the other is the dirge beginning:—

"Fear no more the heat o' the sun."

Ariel's songs in The Tempest fascinate with the witchery of untrammeled existence. Two lines of a song from Twelfth Night give an attractive presentation of the Renaissance philosophy of the present as opposed to an elusive future:—

"What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter."

[Illustration: JOHN DONNE. From the painting ascribed to Cornelius
Jansen, South Kensington Museum.]

Two of the later Elizabethan poets, Ben Jonson and John Donne (1573-1631), specially impress us by their efforts to secure ingenious effects in verse. Ben Jonson often shows this tendency, as in trying to give a poetic definition of a kiss as something—

"So sugar'd, so melting, so soft, so delicious,"

and in showing so much ingenuity of expression in the cramping limits of an epitaph:—

"Underneath this stone doth lie
As much beauty as could die,
Which in life did harbor give
To more virtue than doth live."

The poet most famous for a display of extreme ingenuity in verse is John Donne, a traveler, courtier, and finally dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, who possessed, to quote his own phrase, an "hydroptic immoderate desire of human learning." He paid less attention to artistic form than the earlier Elizabethans, showed more cynicism, chose the abstract rather than the concrete, and preferred involved metaphysical thought to simple sensuous images. He made few references to nature and few allusions to the characters of classical mythology, but searched for obscure likenesses between things, and for conceits or far-fetched comparisons. In his poem, A Funeral Elegy, he shows these qualities in characterizing a fair young lady as:—

"One whose clear body was so pure and thin,
Because it need disguise no thought within;
'Twas but a through-light scarf her mind to enroll,
Or exhalation breathed out from her soul."

The idea in Shakespeare's simpler expression, "the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye," was expanded by Donne into:—

"Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string."

Donne does not always show so much fine-spun ingenuity, but this was the quality most imitated by a group of his successors. His claim to distinction rests on the originality and ingenuity of his verse, and perhaps still more on his influence over succeeding poets.[5]

EDMUND SPENSER, 1552-1599

[Illustration: EDMUND SPENSER.From a painting in Duplin Castle.]

Life and Minor Poems.—For one hundred and fifty-two years after
Chaucer's death, in 1400, England had no great poet until Edmund
Spenser was born in London in 1552. Spenser, who became the greatest
non-dramatic poet of the Elizabethan age, was twelve years older than
Shakespeare.

His parents were poor, but fortunately in Elizabethan times, as well as in our own days, there were generous men who found their chief pleasure in aiding others. Such a man assisted Spenser in going to Cambridge. Spenser's benefactor was sufficiently wise not to give the student enough to dwarf the growth of self-reliance. We know that Spenser was a sizar at Cambridge, that is, one of those students who, to quote Macaulay, "had to perform some menial services. They swept the court; they carried up the dinner to the fellows' table, and changed the plate and poured out the ale of the rulers of society." We know further that Spenser was handicapped by ill health during a part of his course, for we find records of allowances paid "Spenser aegrotanti."

After leaving Cambridge Spenser went to the north of England, probably in the capacity of tutor. While there, he fell in love with a young woman whom he calls Rosalind. This event colored his after life. Although she refused him, she had penetration enough to see in what his greatness consisted, and her opinion spurred him to develop his abilities as a poet. He was about twenty-five years old when he fell in love with Rosalind; and he remained single until he was forty-two, when he married an Irish maiden named Elizabeth. In honor of that event, he composed the Epithalamion, the noblest marriage song in any literature. So strong are early impressions that even in its lines he seems to be thinking of Rosalind and fancying that she is his bride.

After returning from the north, he spent some time with Sir Philip
Sidney, who helped fashion Spenser's ideals of a chivalrous gentleman.
Sidney's influence is seen in Spenser's greatest work, the Faerie
Queene. Sir Walter Raleigh was another friend who left his imprint on
Spenser.

In 1579, Spenser published the Shepherd's Calendar. This is a pastoral poem, consisting of twelve different parts, one part being assigned to each of the twelve months. Although inferior to the Faerie Queene, the Shepherd's Calendar remains one of the greatest pastoral poems in the English language.

In 1580 he was appointed secretary to Lord Gray, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. In one capacity or another, in the service of the crown, Spenser passed in Ireland almost the entire remaining eighteen years of his life. In 1591 he received in the south of Ireland a grant of three thousand acres, a part of the confiscated estate of an Irish earl. Sir Walter Raleigh was also given forty-two thousand acres near Spenser. Ireland was then in a state of continuous turmoil. In such a country Spenser lived and wrote his Faerie Queene. Of course, this environment powerfully affected the character of that poem. It has been said that to read a contemporary's account of "Raleigh's adventures with the Irish chieftains, his challenges and single combats, his escapes at fords and woods, is like reading bits of the Faerie Queene in prose."

In 1598 the Irish, infuriated by the invasion of their country and the seizure of their lands, set fire to Spenser's castle. He and his family barely escaped with their lives. He crossed to England and died the next year, according to some accounts, in want. He was buried, at the expense of Lord Essex, in Westminster Abbey, near Chaucer.

The Faerie Queene.—In 1590 Spenser published the first three books of the Faerie Queene. The original plan was to have the poem contain twelve books, like Vergil's AEneid, but only six were published. If more were written, they have been lost.

The poem is an allegory with the avowed moral purpose of fashioning "a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline." Spenser says: "I labour to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was King, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised." Twelve Knights personifying twelve Virtues were to fight with their opposing Vices, and the twelve books were to tell the story of the conflict. The Knights set out from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, in search of their enemies, and meet with divers adventures and enchantments.

The hero of the tale is Arthur, who has figured so much in English song and legend. Spenser makes him typical of all the Virtues taken together. The first book, which is really a complete poem by itself, and which is generally admitted to be the finest, contains an account of the adventures of the Red Cross Knight who represents Holiness. Other books tell of the warfare of the Knights who typify Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy.

The poem begins thus:—

"A gentle Knight was pricking[6] on the plaine,
Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine,
The cruell markes of many' a bloody fielde;
Yet armes till that time did he never wield.
* * * * *
"And on his brest a bloodie Crosse he bore,
The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,
For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore.
* * * * *
"Upon a great adventure he was bond.
That greatest Gloriana to him gave,
That greatest glorious Queene of Faerie lond."

The entire poem really typifies the aspirations of the human soul for something nobler and better than can be gained without effort. In Spenser's imaginative mind, these aspirations became real persons who set out to win laurels in a fairyland, lighted with the soft light of the moon, and presided over by the good genius that loves to uplift struggling and weary souls.

The allegory certainly becomes confused. A critic well says: "We can hardly lose our way in it, for there is no way to lose." We are not called on to understand the intricacies of the allegory, but to read between the lines, catch the noble moral lesson, and drink to our fill at the fountain of beauty and melody.

Spenser a Subjective Poet.—The subjective cast of Spenser's mind next demands attention. We feel that his is an ideal world, one that does not exist outside of the imagination. In order to understand the difference between subjective and objective, let us compare Chaucer with Spenser. No one can really be said to study literature without constantly bringing in the principle of comparison. We must notice the likeness and the difference between literary productions, or the faint impression which they make upon our minds will soon pass away.

Chaucer is objective; that is, he identifies himself with things that could have a real existence in the outside world. We find ourselves looking at the shiny bald head of Chaucer's Monk, at the lean horse and threadbare clothes of the Student of Oxford, at the brown complexion of the Shipman, at the enormous hat and large figure of the Wife of Bath, at the red face of the Summoner, at the hair of the Pardoner "yelow as wex." These are not mere figments of the imagination. We feel that they are either realities or that they could have existed.

While the adventures in the Irish wars undoubtedly gave the original suggestions for many of the contests between good and evil in the Faerie Queene, Spenser intentionally idealized these knightly struggles to uphold the right and placed them in fairyland. This great poem is the work of a mind that loved to elaborate purely subjective images. The pictures were not painted from gazing at the outside world. We feel that they are mostly creations of the imagination, and that few of them could exist in a real world. There is no bower in the bottom of the sea, "built of hollow billowes heaped hye," and no lion ever follows a lost maiden to protect her. We feel that the principal part of Shakespeare's world could have existed in reality as well as in imagination. Spenser was never able to reach this highest type of art.

The world, however, needs poets to create images of a higher type of beauty than this life can offer. These images react on our material lives and cast them in a nobler mold. Spenser's belief that the subjective has power to fashion the objective is expressed in two of the finest lines that he ever wrote:—

"For of the soule the bodie forme doth take;
For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make."[7]

Chief Characteristics of Spenser's Poetry.—We can say of Spencer's verse that it stands in the front rank for (1) melody, (2) love of the beautiful, and (3) nobility of the ideals presented. His poetry also (4) shows a preference for the subjective world, (5) exerts a remarkable influence over other poets, and (6) displays a peculiar liking for obsolete forms of expression.

Spencer's melody is noteworthy. If we read aloud correctly such lines as these, we can scarcely fail to be impressed with their harmonious flow:—

"A teme of Dolphins raunged in aray
Drew the smooth charett of sad Cymoent:
They were all taught by Triton to obay
To the long raynes at her commaundement:
As swifte as swallowes on the waves they went.
* * * * *
"Upon great Neptune's necke they softly swim,
And to her watry chamber swiftly carry him.
Deepe in the bottome of the sea her bowre
Is built of hollow billowes heaped hye."[8]

The following lines will show Spenser's love for beauty, and at the same time indicate the nobility of some of his ideal characters. He is describing Lady Una, the fair representative of true religion, who has lost through enchantment her Guardian Knight, and who is wandering disconsolate in the forest:—

"…Her angel's face,
As the great eye of heaven, shyned bright,
And made a sunshine in the shady place;
Did never mortall eye behold such heavenly grace.

"It fortuned out of the thickest wood
A ramping Lyon rushed suddeinly,
Hunting full greedy after salvage blood.
Soone as the royall virgin he did spy,
With gaping mouth at her ran greedily,
To have att once devoured her tender corse;
But to the pray when as he drew more ny,
His bloody rage aswaged with remorse,
And with the sight amazd, forgat his furious forse.

"In stead thereof he kist her wearie feet,
And lickt her lilly hands with fawning tong,
As he her wronged innocence did weet.
O, how can beautie maister the most strong,
And simple truth subdue avenging wrong!"[9]

The power of beauty has seldom been more vividly described. As we read the succeeding stanzas and see the lion following her, like a faithful dog, to shield her from harm, we feel the power of both beauty and goodness and realize that with Spenser these terms are interchangeable, Each one of the preceding selections shows his preference for the subjective and the ideal to the actual.

Spenser searched for old and obsolete words. He used "eyne" for "eyes," "fone" for "foes," "shend" for "shame." He did not hesitate to coin words when he needed them, like "mercify" and "fortunize." He even wrote "wawes" in place of "waves" because he wished it to rime with "jaws." In spite of these peculiarities, Spenser is not hard reading after the first appearance of strangeness has worn away.

A critic rightly says that Spenser repels none but the anti-poetical.
His influence upon other poets has been far-reaching. Milton, Dryden,
Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley show traces of his influence.
Spenser has been called the poet's poet, because the more poetical one
is, the more one will enjoy him.

THE ENGLISH DRAMA

The Early Religious Drama.—It is necessary to remember at the outset that the purpose of the religious drama was not to amuse, but to give a vivid presentation of scriptural truth. On the other hand, the primary aim of the later dramatist has usually been to entertain, or, in Shakespeare's exact words, "to please." Shakespeare was, however, fortunate in having an audience that was pleased to be instructed, as well as entertained.

Before the sixteenth century, England had a religious drama that made a profound impression on life and thought. The old religious plays helped to educate the public, the playwrights, and the actors for the later drama.

Any one may to-day form some idea of the rise of the religious drama, by attending the service of the Catholic church on Christmas or Easter Sunday. In many Catholic churches there may still be seen at Christmas time a representation of the manger at Bethlehem. Sometimes the figures of the infant Savior, of Joseph and Mary, of the wise men, of the sheep and cattle, are very lifelike.

The events clustering about the Crucifixion and the Resurrection
furnished the most striking material for the early religious drama.
Our earliest dramatic writers drew their inspiration from the New
Testament.

Miracle and Mystery Plays.—A Miracle play is the dramatic representation of the life of a saint and of the miracles connected with him. A Mystery play deals with gospel events which are concerned with any phase of the life of Christ, or with any Biblical event that remotely foreshadows Christ or indicates the necessity of a Redeemer. In England there were few, if any, pure Miracle plays, but the term "Miracle" is applied indiscriminately to both Miracles and Mysteries.

The first Miracle play in England was acted probably not far from 1100. In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries these plays had become so popular that they were produced in nearly every part of England. Shakespeare felt their influence. He must have had frequent opportunities in his boyhood to witness their production. They were seldom performed in England after 1600, although visitors to Germany have, every ten years, the opportunity of seeing a modern production of a Mystery in the Passion Play at Oberammergau.

The Subjects.—Four great cycles of Miracle plays have been preserved: the York, Chester, and Coventry plays, so called because they were performed in those places, and the Towneley plays, which take their name from Towneley Hall in Lancashire, where the manuscript was kept for some time. It is probable that almost every town of importance had its own collection of plays.

[Illustration: MIRACLE PLAY AT COVENTRY. From an old print]

The York cycle contains forty-eight plays. A cycle or circle of plays means a list forming a complete circle from Creation until Doomsday. The York collection begins with Creation and the fall of Lucifer and the bad angels from Heaven,—a theme which was later to inspire the pen of one of England's greatest poets. The tragedies of Eden and the Flood, scenes from the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Moses, the manger at Bethlehem, the slaughter of the Innocents, the Temptation, the resurrection of Lazarus, the Last Supper, the Trial, the Crucifixion, and the Easter triumph are a few of the Miracle plays that were acted in the city of York.

The Actors and Manner of Presentation.—At first the actors were priests who presented the plays either in the church or in its immediate vicinity on sacred ground. After a while the plays became so popular that the laity presented them. When they were at the height of their popularity, that is, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the actors were selected with great care from the members of the various trades guilds. Each guild undertook the entire responsibility for the presentation of some one play, and endeavored to surpass all the other guilds.

[Illustration: HELL MOUTH.From a Columbia University Model.]

Considerable humor was displayed in the allotment of various plays. The tanners presented the fall of Lucifer and the bad angels into the infernal regions; the ship carpenters, the play of Noah and the building of the ark; the bakers, the Last Supper; the butchers, the Crucifixion. In their prime, the Miracle plays were acted on wooden platforms mounted on wheels. There were two distinct stories in these movable stages, a lower one in which the actors dressed, and an upper one in which they played. The entrance to the lower story, known as Hell Mouth, consisted of a terrible pair of dragonlike jaws, painted red. From these jaws issued smoke, flame, and horrible outcries. From the entrance leaped red-coated devils to tempt the Savior, the saints, and men. Into it the devils would disappear with some wicked soul. They would torture it and make it roar with pain, as the smoke poured faster from the red jaws.

In York on Corpus Christi Day, which usually fell in the first week in June, the actors were ordered to be in their places on these movable theaters at half past three in the morning. Certain stations had been selected throughout the city, where each pageant should stop and, in the proper order, present its own play. In this way the enormous crowds that visited York to see these performances were more evenly scattered throughout the city.

The actors did not always remain on the stage. Herod, for example, in his magnificent robes used to ride on horseback among the people, boast of his prowess, and overdo everything. Shakespeare, who was evidently familiar with the character, speaks of out-Heroding Herod. The Devil also frequently jumped from the stage and availed himself of his license to play pranks among the audience.

Much of the acting was undoubtedly excellent. In 1476 the council at York ordained that four of the best players in the city should examine with regard to fitness all who wished to take part in the plays. So many were desirous of acting that it was much trouble to get rid of incompetents. The ordinance ran: "All such as they shall find sufficient in person and cunning, to the honor of the City and worship of the said Crafts, for to admit and able; and all other insufficient persons, either in cunning, voice, or person, to discharge, ammove and avoid." A critic says that this ordinance is "one of the steps on which the greatness of the Elizabethan stage was built, and through which its actors grew up."[10]

Introduction of the Comic Element in the Miracle Plays.—While the old drama generally confined itself to religious subjects, the comic element occasionally crept in, made its power felt, and disclosed a new path for future playwrights. In the Play of Noah's Flood, when the time for the flood has come, Noah's wife refuses to enter the ark and a domestic quarrel ensues. Finally her children pull and shove her into the ark. When she is safe on board, Noah bids her welcome. His enraged wife deals him resounding blows until he calls to her to stop, because his back is nearly broken.

The Play of the Shepherds includes a genuine comedy, the first comedy worthy of the name to appear in England. While watching their flocks on Christmas Eve, the shepherds are joined by Mak, a neighbor whose reputation for honesty is not good. Before they go to sleep, they make him lie down within their circle; but he rises when he hears them begin to snore, steals a sheep, and hastens home. His wife is alarmed, because in that day the theft of a sheep was punishable by death. She finally concludes that the best plan will be to wrap the animal in swaddling clothes and put it in the cradle. If the shepherds come to search the house, she will pretend that she has a child; and, if they approach the cradle, she will caution them against touching it for fear of waking the child and causing him to fill the house with his cries. She speedily hurries Mak away to resume his slumbers among the shepherds. When they wake, they miss the sheep, suspect Mak, and go to search his house. His wife allows them to look around thoroughly, but she keeps them away from the cradle. They leave, rather ashamed of their suspicion. As they are going out of the door, a thought strikes one of them whereby they can make partial amends. Deciding to give the child sixpence, he returns, lifts up the covering of the cradle, and discovers the sheep. Mak and his wife both declare that an elf has changed their child into a sheep. The shepherds threaten to have the pair hanged. They seize Mak, throw him on a canvas, and toss him into the air until they are exhausted. They then lie down to rest and are roused with the song of an angel from Bethlehem.

To produce this comedy required genuine inventive imagination; for there is nothing faintly resembling this incident in the sacred narrative. These early exercises of the imagination in our drama may resemble the tattering footsteps of a child; but they were necessary antecedents to the strength, beauty, and divinity of movement in Elizabethan times.

[Illustration: FOOL'S HEAD. State properties of the Vice and Fool.]

The Morality.—The next step in the development of the drama is known as the Morality play. This personified abstractions. Characters like Charity, Hope, Faith, Truth, Covetousness, Falsehood, Abominable Living, the World, the Flesh, and the Devil,—in short, all the Virtues and the Vices,—came on the stage in the guise of persons, and played the drama of life.

Critics do not agree about the precise way in which the Morality is related to the Miracle play. It is certain that the Miracle play had already introduced some abstractions.

In one very important respect, the Morality marks an advance, by giving more scope to the imagination. The Miracle plays had their general treatment absolutely predetermined by the Scriptural version of the action or by the legends of the lives of saints, although diverting incidents could be introduced, as we have seen. In the Morality, the events could take any turn which the author chose to give.

[Illustration: AIR-BAG FLAPPER. Stage properties of the Vice and
Fool.]

In spite of this advantage, the Morality is in general a synonym for what is uninteresting. The characters born of abstractions are too often bloodless, like their parents. The Morality under a changed name was current a few years ago in the average Sunday-school book. Incompetent writers of fiction today often adopt the Morality principle in making their characters unnaturally good or bad, mere puppets who do not develop along the line of their own emotional prompting, but are moved by machinery in the author's hands.

[Illustration: LATH DAGGER. Stage properties of the Vice and Fool.]

A new character, the Vice, was added as an adjunct to the Devil, to increase the interest of the audience in the Morality play. The Vice represented the leading spirit of evil in any particular play, sometimes Fraud, Covetousness, Pride, Iniquity, or Hypocrisy. It was the business of the Vice to annoy the Virtues and to be constantly playing pranks. The Vice was the predecessor of the clown and the fool upon the stage. The Vice also amused the audience by tormenting the Devil, belaboring him with a sword of lath, sticking thorns into him, and making him roar with pain. Sometimes the Devil would be kicked down Hell Mouth by the offended Virtues; but he would soon reappear with saucily curled tail, and at the end of the play he would delight the spectators by plunging into Hell Mouth with the Vice on his back.

[Illustration: FOOL OF THE OLD PLAY.]

Court Plays.—In the first part of the sixteenth century, the court and the nobility especially encouraged the production of plays whose main object was to entertain. The influence of the court in shaping the drama became much more powerful than that of the church. Wallace says of the new materials which his researches have disclosed in the twentieth century:—

"They throw into the lime-light a brilliant development of this new drama through the Chapel Royal, a development that took place primarily under the direction of the great musicians who served as masters of the children of the Chapel and as court entertainers, the first true poets-laureate, through the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth."[11]

In 1509 Henry VIII. appointed William Cornish (died 1523) to be Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal. This court institution with its choral body of men and boys not only ministered "by song to the spiritual well-being of the sovereign and his household," but also gave them "temporal" enjoyment in dances, pageants, and plays. We must not forget, however, that the Chapel Royal was originally, as its name implies, a religious body. Cornish was a capable dramatist, as well as a musician and a poet; and he, unlike the author of Everyman, wrote plays simply to amuse the court and its guests. He has even been called the founder of the secular English drama.[12]

The court of Henry VIII. became especially fond of the Interlude, which was a short play, often given in connection with a banquet or other entertainment. Any dramatic incident, such as the refusal of Noah's wife to enter the ark, or Mak's thievery in The Play of the Shepherds, might serve as an Interlude. Cornish and John Heywood (1497?—1580?), a court dramatist of much versatility, incorporated in the Interlude many of the elements of the five-act drama. The Four P's, the most famous Interlude, shows a contest between a Pardoner, Palmer, Pedlar, and Poticary, to determine who could tell the greatest lie. Wallace thinks that the best Interludes, such as The Four P's and The Pardoner and the Frere, were written by Cornish, although they are usually ascribed to Heywood.

Cornish had unusual ability as a deviser of masques and plays. One of his interludes for children has allegorical characters that remotely suggest some that appear in the modern Bluebird, by Maeterlinck. Cornish had Wind appear "in blue with drops of silver"; Rain, "in black with silver honeysuckles"; Winter, "in russet with flakes of silver snow"; Summer, "in green with gold stars"; and Spring, "in green with gold primroses." In 1522 Cornish wrote and presented before Henry VIII. and his guest, the Roman emperor, a political play, especially planned to indicate the attitude of the English monarch toward Spain and France. Under court influences, the drama enlarged its scope and was no longer chiefly the vehicle for religious instruction.

Early Comedies.—Two early comedies, divided, after the classical fashion, into acts and scenes, show close approximation to the modern form of English plays.

Ralph Royster Doyster was written not far from the middle of the sixteenth century by Nicholas Udall (1505-1556), sometime master of Eton College and, later, court poet under Queen Mary. This play, founded on a comedy of Plautus, shows the classical influence which was so powerful in England at this time. Ralph, the hero, is a conceited simpleton. He falls in love with a widow who has already promised her hand to a man infinitely Ralph's superior. Ralph, however, unable to understand why she should not want him, persists in his wooing. She makes him the butt of her jokes, and he finds himself in ridiculous positions. The comedy amuses us in this way until her lover returns and marries her. The characters of the play, which is written in rime, are of the English middle class.

Gammer Gurton's Needle, the work of William Stevenson, a little-known pre-Shakespearean writer, was acted at Christ's College, Cambridge, shortly after the middle of the sixteenth century. This play borrows hardly anything from the classical stage. Most of the characters of Gammer Gurton's Needle are from the lowest English working classes, and its language, unlike that of Ralph Royster Doyster, which has little to offend, is very coarse.

Gorboduc and the Dramatic Unities.—The tragedy of Gorboduc, the first regular English tragedy written in blank verse, was acted in 1561, three years before the birth of Shakespeare. This play is in part the work of Thomas Sackville (1536-1608), a poet and diplomat, the author of two powerful somber poems, the Induction and Complaint of the Duke of Buckingham. In spite of their heavy narrative form, these poems are in places even more dramatic than the dull tragedy of Gorboduc, which was fashioned after the classical rules of Seneca and the Greeks. Gorboduc requires little action on the stage. There is considerable bloodshed in the play; but the spectators are informed of the carnage by a messenger, as they are not permitted to witness a bloody contest on the stage.

[Illustration: THOMAS SACKVILLE.]

If Gorboduc had been taken for a model, the English drama could never have attained Shakespearean greatness. Our drama would then have been crippled by following the classical rules, which prescribed unity of place and time in the plot and the action. The ancients held that a play should not represent actions which would, in actual life, require much more than twenty-four hours for their performance. If one of the characters was a boy, he had to be represented as a boy throughout the play. The next act could not introduce him as one who had grown to manhood in the interval. The classical rules further required that the action should be performed in one place, or near it. Anything that happened at a great distance had to be related by a messenger, and not acted on the stage.