Three Centuries of English Poetry.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER.

(1328-1400.)

NTIL the middle of the fourteenth century there cannot be said to have been at any period one distinctly national literature in these islands. At least three literatures, in three different vernaculars, in addition to that of Latin books, had had an existence in Britain before the date of Chaucer's birth; connected on account of the geographical proximity of the three races which produced them, but otherwise as mutually non-related as three travellers are who happen to take up their lodging in one inn. The Cymric literature of the Welsh, the real English or Saxon literature, and the French literature of the Anglo-Normans, must be recognised as distinct even while they were contemporary and contiguous. Welsh poetry in its early stages may be said to be about as near akin to English poetry as an English lyric is to an old Greek play. And the poetry of the Anglo-Normans, although its authors were in many cases of English birth, and among them are included some of the Norman kings of England, is regarded as alien, and as belonging more to the early literature of France than to that of this country. These pre-Chaucerian literatures are for ever distinguished from one another by essential differences of

language, of mythology and tradition, of literary forms and methods, growing out of original differences of race and history. At the same time, their mutual action and reaction have not been without important results in our later English literature, just as the inter-relations of the peoples that produced them have influenced in a thousand ways our later political and social life.

The modern period of English poetry dates from about the middle of the fourteenth century; and the first division of this period may be said to have extended through the reigns of Edward III. and Richard II. of England, and David II., Robert II., and Robert III. of Scotland. The Norman Conquest was then an event three centuries old, and people pictured that time as dimly as we do now the early years of Queen Elizabeth's reign. During those three centuries, the highest intellectual life of this nation had been every year more and more intimately affected by contact with foreigners and foreign books. The English tongue had shaken off the grip of its Teutonic grammar, and had enriched its vocabulary with words expressive of a refined and complex social life. New metres and rhyme-endings, with varieties and beauties in sound and rhythm not within reach of the older English poets, had been imported into English verse. The romance narrative form also, which has since been, and still is, one of the most popular forms in English poetry, was learnt in the first instance from the minstrels, or trouvères, of northern France. To the insatiable genius of the same race of mediæval poets, availing itself of whatever material it found at hand, we owe no small portion of the narrative matter, the very stories and legends, Celtic and other, out of which the most famous and beautiful poems in the English language have been constructed. But our obligations to our conquerors do not end here. Not the Norman forms and methods in composition, nor the great medieval Romans, the rhymed Chronicles of legendary history, and the lighter fabliaux, which served us as models when we had none, or next to none of our own, were so valuable a bequest, so pregnant a good, as was the habit which the English people acquired by contact

pleasure, of intellectual delight. This first purpose, which is at the foundation of all the highest artistic culture, had been recognised by Alfred the Great when he set himself to translate the Latin books which he believed were the most likely to prove popular among his illiterate West-Saxon subjects. But not in King Alfred's time, nor until the Norman Trouvères had constructed their verse-stories in the Romance vernacular of northern France, did there exist in Europe the material of a really popular, or lay literature. These Trouvère productions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, sufficiently refined and exquisite in matter and construction to suit the most accomplished readers of mediæval courts, and at the same time simple enough to reach the understanding and to charm the ear of the untaught crowd, constituted what may be called the first "Library of the People."

The condition of the English laity had hitherto been that of a city which possesses a library, rich in books and in dust, but closed to the public except with repelling restrictions. But, from the time the Normans came among us, these restrictions were removed. Latin was no longer the only literary tongue; and the clergy, or learned public, were no longer in sole possession of the privilege of writing and reading, which was extended, as it had never yet been, to as large a portion of the population as were capable in any sense of enjoying it. How far down into the pyramid of society this novel influence made itself felt is a problem difficult for us in the present time to solve. Before printing was introduced, a popular literature, such as we understand it, could scarcely be. But, nevertheless, there can be little doubt that, even in a modern sense, the narratives of the French poets were widely known among various classes of the English people before Chaucer's time. The process of diffusion had perhaps its central stimulus in the Court itself, within which the minstrels and poets chiefly assembled. But M. Taine has pointed out how great also was the intellectual influence of the Norman schoolmaster in England. The Normans, in 1066, found among the English people a woeful lack of both schools and teachers. English manuscripts were buried in

even the great churchmen, were illiterate and heavy-witted. The Normans overhauled the libraries, scraped the Saxon books clean of what they regarded as their contemptible contents, and re-covered the vellum with their own Latin and French compositions. In their irreverent greed for writing material they left their work of scraping in some cases so badly done that we may still decipher fragments of old English on the margins of Norman manuscripts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. But, while they thus ill-treated Saxon books, the Normans did not fail to supply us with the means of a new and more plentiful literature. From 1066 until 1200, England was but part of a dominion which stretched from the Tweed to the Garonne, and was belted across its middle by the waters of the Channel. In the reign of John, the hitherto intimate connection of England with the Continent was severed by his loss of French territories. But by this time England had secured from the connection advantages which it could never lose. And one of the chief of these was the establishment in England of the Norman system of teaching. A hundred and fifty years after the Conquest there were scattered over the land more than five hundred schools, in which the teachers were, especially in the beginning, Normans. And it is probable that not the Norman kings, nor the Archbishops themselves, were such active agents in spreading a knowledge of French and of French books as were those five hundred educated foreigners, who brought with them into the remotest districts and villages of England the latest literary gossip from the Continent, and a contagious enthusiasm for the poets of their native land. By these and other means, it is conceivable that a knowledge of popular French books did actually penetrate English educated society, and that the great French romances, or portions of them, were to some extent familiar even among what may be called the non-reading classes of mediæval England. The habit of writing and reading for the purpose of pleasing and being pleased having been once acquired, the ascent of both poet and reader to a higher enjoyment was not difficult; and in the most renowned of the old Romans,

weaving of high and graceful morals with subtle delicacies of thought and style.

The literary history of England during the three centuries which followed the Conquest is, in truth, little more than an account of how and to what degree French culture acted upon the English mind. But at length the period had arrived when English poetry, retaining in it all that it had acquired from three centuries of foreign drill and stimulus, began to show signs of inherent and native vigour; when, in fact, it was no longer seeking to be a mere pleasing echo of music from over the sea, but was beginning to assume the character of a national literature, the spontaneous expression of the sentiments and aspirations of the English people. For this end something more was needed than the imitation, however exact, of the best foreign models. The specimens which have been preserved of original imaginative poetry in English before the age of Chaucer represent the English tongue as, up to that time, existing in a number of dialects. Every district had its own peculiar local speech, and there was not one dialect in the land which was generally recognised as that of educated persons and of literature. A consequence of this broken-up condition of English was that books had only what one may term a limited circulation, confined to the districts in which they were produced; and a national literature, common to the whole people, was in the meantime an impossibility. Of the dialects into which the English tongue was distributed in the middle of the fourteenth century, the East Midland, spoken with some variation from the Humber to the Thames, was, says Mr. Morris, "perhaps the simplest in its grammatical structure, the most free from those broad provincialisms which particularised the speech of other districts, and presented the nearest approach in form and substance to the language of the present day as spoken and written by educated Englishmen." The Ormulum, of the date 1215 (King John, 1199–1216), a devotional poem by a monk named Orm or Ormin, who is supposed to have lived somewhere between London and Peterborough, is in this dialect. The Chronicle of Robert of