Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 07.djvu/128

* ENGLISH LITERATURE. 106 ENGLISH LITERATURE. tunately.agreat poet was readj to ««"* fl ^3 a broad canvas the varying hues oi this lull ana ir ant We. Characteristically, Chaucer began by going to school to the French trouveres, and to the later allegorical school of which the epoch- making Roman de la Rose is the typical work; h"n he went to Italy, where the sun of the Renaissance, not yet risen in England, was al- ready calling to life manifold forms of intel- Letual and artistic activity. Dante Petrarch, and Boccaccio stimulated him to rival their own production-, and taught him to venerate the great masters of the classical ages. But his French and Italian periods were onlj periods of appren- 3 hin When he had learned his trade he threw aside imitation and stood forth boldly as an Eng- Ush p„et— a finished artist in technical niceties, as well as a great creator, who gave the final touch t.i the various literary forms which he found in cultivation, and drew from his ripe knowledge of men and things the power to stir the springs both of laughter and of tears as no one had done before him. Chaucer and Oower represent life from the aristocratic point of view, the former writing as an easv-going courtier, who simply ignores social questions, while the latter is conscious of their insurgence and stands stoutly for the old order against all tentative reforms. The other great names of the fourteenth century speak for the people and to the people. Langland is of them ; as he lies (Hi the fair green expanse of Malvern Hills in the calm May sunshine, his heart is full of the paradoxes, the injustice, the unhappiness of the time, and he reasons out, through suc- liye continuations and recastings of his work,
 * l panacea for the ills of hi- generation. This,

like the work of Wiclif. is in the main religious. Tn an age when so many things conspired to make the life of the common people hard — taxation by the Government for the endless drain of the French wars, oppression by the landlords, pes- tilence, storm — men's minds turned inevitably to on .ii a world where inequalities ild be redressed and sorrows comforted. The vision shines mere and more (dearly upon Lang- land's sight I lie more he ponders: Piers Plow- man rises from a simple honest, tiller of the soil until lie lakes on the very lineaments of the in- carnate Conqueroi "i death and bell. His thought ha- in many aspects a peculiarly modern tone — it i- Carlyle who will take it. up an. I leoeho it — but in the structure of his verse he clings to the eld rough alliterative form of the native English try. which, while it no doubl made a more direct appeal to his popular audience at the moment, unfitted him to have an influence upon He i oi i,t later i try, now definitely Quitted through I haucei in I lie assimilal ion oj i him b foi in-. lelif. though the movement which we conned with his name was a university ppcaled in the same way directly to Phi ) I... i i he place to discuss the ,.)). ice oi hi- Crusade against Ihe e-i.i-t io.ii system of his time; but by his the Bible into the tongue of the plain p. i 'J the tracts which he wrote l„ homel] 1, : 1 .I he a ffected in no . 1 of the language His Bible, in the variou of its revision. illization of a reallj yle, which al the same time, by its wide currency, it did more than any other book to fix and render uniform. From this period until the Renaissance had tardily begun its work in England, there was little creative or really significant work. Lyd- gate and Occleve and James I. of Scotland (the source of whose education entitles us to include him among English poets) were content to catch the trick of Chaucer's style, and to name him and Gower as their avowed masters. Prose, however, in this as in all literatures later in its develop- ment than verse, began to take shape which is worthy of more than a passing notice. Though the universal employment of Latin as the lan- guage of scholars discouraged attempts to write serious English prose, yet the appeal of YViclif's pamphlets and Reginald Pecock's Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy to a popular audience brought it into the controversies of the time; and in lighter literature the Yoiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundeville showed what could be done with it. This lesson was learned by a greater master of style than the anonymous translator of that marvelous traveler's tale; the statelv and beautiful, as well as natural and simple, rhythm of Malory's Morte d' Arthur, which Caxton printed in 1485, is the happiest thing in the whole of English fifteenth-century literature. In that very year Henry VII. came to the throne, and the country, so long distracted by internecine warfare, had' rest and leisure to think of intellectual culture. At last the 'new learn- ing* crossed the Channel and found a home in Enaland. Grocyn and Linacre and their fellows were busy with their Greek manuscripts. Eras- mus, the greatest scholar of the time, came to England, and with Colet and More discussed the great problems of Church and State in a temper of hopeful idealism. But More and Roger Ascham were under the spell of classical authority, and the latter actually apologizes for using the clumsy English tongue. They wrote for the cultivated elassi - : but at the same time a popular literature was growing up around the Reformation move- ment, typified in the racy, idiomatic English of Latimer's sermons. Its simple directness was partly the fruit of his acquaintance with Tyn- dale and Coverdale's vigorous and happy trans- lation of the Scriptures, a monument of pure Anglo-Saxon speech scarcely tinged with Latin- ism. The English prayer-book, which, like the Bible, has done much to mold the speech of later generations, was a compromise in language as in doctrines; one of the most characteristic fea- tures of its style is the frequent recurrence of pairs of synonyms — 'acknowledge and confess,' 'dissemble nor'eloke' — to appeal alike to the lovers of the sonorous Latin and to the plain, un- lettered folk. The lime was at last ripe for England to show the results of long and patient study and as- similation of good models, both classical and Italian. A year before Elizabeth came to the throne, these results were put forth in the publi- cation of Tottel's Miscellany, a collection of songs and sonnets, many of them no doubt writ- ten much earlier, and. according to the fashion ..I the lime, circulated in manuscript until that date. The two chief contributors were Henry Howard. Earl of Surrey, who had closed a bril- liant life mi the block ten years before, and Sir II 1.1- Uvatl. who. like 'chancer, had visited