Read Ebook: From Chaucer to Tennyson With Twenty-Nine Portraits and Selections from Thirty Authors by Beers Henry A Henry Augustin

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LIST OF PORTRAITS.

WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

GEOFFREY CHAUCER, EDMUND SPENSER, FRANCIS BACON, JOHN MILTON

JOHN DRYDEN, JOSEPH ADDISON, ALEXANDER POPE, JONATHAN SWIFT

SAMUEL JOHNSON, OLIVER GOLDSMITH, WILLIAM COWPER, ROBERT BURNS

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, GEORGE GORDON BYRON, PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, JOHN KEATS

ROBERT SOUTHEY, SIR WALTER SCOTT, SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

THOMAS CARLYLE, JOHN RUSKIN, WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, CHARLES DICKENS

GEORGE ELIOT , JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, ROBERT BROWNING, ALFRED TENNYSON

FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER.

The classical Anglo-Saxon, moreover, had been the Wessex dialect, spoken and written at Alfred's capital, Winchester. When the French had displaced this as the language of culture, there was no longer a "king's English" or any literary standard. The sources of modern standard English are to be found in the East Midland, spoken in Lincoln, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, and neighboring shires. Here the old Anglian had been corrupted by the Danish settlers, and rapidly threw off its inflections when it became a spoken and no longer a written language, after the Conquest. The West Saxon, clinging more tenaciously to ancient forms, sank into the position of a local dialect; while the East Midland, spreading to London, Oxford, and Cambridge, became the literary English in which Chaucer wrote.

The Normans brought in also new intellectual influences and new forms of literature. They were a cosmopolitan people, and they connected England with the Continent. Lanfranc and Anselm, the first two Norman archbishops of Canterbury, were learned and splendid prelates of a type quite unknown to the Anglo-Saxons. They introduced the scholastic philosophy taught at the University of Paris, and the reformed discipline of the Norman abbeys. They bound the English Church more closely to Rome, and officered it with Normans. English bishops were deprived of their sees for illiteracy, and French abbots were set over monasteries of Saxon monks. Down to the middle of the 14th century the learned literature of England was mostly in Latin, and the polite literature in French. English did not at any time altogether cease to be a written language, but the extant remains of the period from 1066 to 1200 are few and, with one exception, unimportant. After 1200 English came more and more into written use, but mainly in translations, paraphrases, and imitations of French works. The native genius was at school, and followed awkwardly the copy set by its master.

The Anglo-Saxon poetry, for example, had been rhythmical and alliterative. It was commonly written in lines containing four rhythmical accents and with three of the accented syllables alliterating.

Rested him then the great-hearted; the hall towered Roomy and gold-bright, the guest slept within.

The most noteworthy English document of the 11th and 12th centuries was the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. Copies of these annals, differing somewhat among themselves, had been kept at the monasteries in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere. The yearly entries are mostly brief, dry records of passing events, though occasionally they become full and animated. The fen country of Cambridge and Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries. Here were the great abbeys of Peterborough and Croyland and Ely minster. One of the earliest English songs tells how the savage heart of the Danish king Cnut was softened by the singing of the monks in Ely.

Merie sungen muneches binnen Ely Tha Cnut chyning reu ther by; Roweth, cnihtes, noer the land. And here we thes muneches sang.

Merrily sung the monks in Ely When King Canute rowed by. 'Row boys, nearer the land, And let us hear these monks' song.'

It was among the dikes and marshes of this fen country that the bold outlaw Hereward, "the last of the English," held out for some years against the conqueror. And it was here, in the rich abbey of Burgh or Peterborough, the ancient Medeshamstede , that the chronicle was continued nearly a century after the Conquest, breaking off abruptly in 1154, the date of King Stephen's death. Peterborough had received a new Norman abbot, Turold, "a very stern man," and the entry in the chronicle for 1070 tells how Hereward and his gang, with his Danish backers, thereupon plundered the abbey of its treasures, which were first removed to Ely, and then carried off by the Danish fleet and sunk, lost, or squandered. The English in the later portions of this Peterborough chronicle becomes gradually more modern, and falls away more and more from the strict grammatical standards of the classical Anglo-Saxon. It is a most valuable historical monument, and some passages of it are written with great vividness, notably the sketch of William the Conquerer put down in the year of his death by one who had "looked upon him and at another time dwelt in his court." "He who was before a rich king, and lord of many a land, he had not then of all his land but a piece of seven feet....Likewise he was a very stark man and a terrible, so that one durst do nothing against his will.... Among other things is not to be forgotten the good peace that he made in this land, so that a man might fare over his kingdom with his bosom full of gold unhurt. He set up a great deer preserve, and he laid laws therewith that whoso should slay hart or hind, he should be blinded. As greatly did he love the tall deer as if he were their father."

Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan? "Where are the snows of yester year?"

Where is Paris and Hel?yne That weren so bright and fair of blee Amadas, Tristan, and Id?yne Yseud? and all? the, Hector with his sharp? main, And Caesar rich in world?s fee? They beth ygliden out of the reign As the shaft is of the clee.

There are a few songs dating from about 1300, and mostly found in a single collection , which are almost the only English verse before Chaucer that has any sweetness to a modern ear. They are written in French strophic forms in the southern dialect, and sometimes have an intermixture of French and Latin lines. They are musical, fresh, simple, and many of them very pretty. They celebrate the gladness of spring with its cuckoos and throstle-cocks, its daisies and woodruff.

When the nightingal? sings the wood?s waxen green; Leaf and grass and blossom spring in Averil, I ween, And love is to my hert? gone with a spear so keen, Night and day my blood it drinks, my hert? doth me tene.

Others are love plaints to "Alysoun" or some other lady whose "name is in a note of the nightingale;" whose eyes are as gray as glass, and her skin as "red as rose on ris." Some employ a burden or refrain.

Blow, northern wind, Blow thou me my sweeting, Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, blow!

Others are touched with a light melancholy at the coming of winter.

Winter wakeneth all my care Now these leav?s waxeth bare, Oft I sigh and mourn? sare When it cometh in my thought Of this worldes joy, how it goeth all to nought.

What hawk?s sitten on the perch above, What hound?s liggen on the floor adown.

Chaucer was our first great master of laughter and of tears. His serious poetry is full of the tenderest pathos. His loosest tales are delightfully humorous and life-like. He is the kindliest of satirists. The knavery, greed, and hypocrisy of the begging friars and the sellers of indulgences are exposed by him as pitilessly as by Langland and Wiclif, though his mood is not, like theirs, one of stern, moral indignation, but rather the good-natured scorn of a man of the world. His charity is broad enough to cover even the corrupt sompnour, of whom he says,

And yet in sooth he was a good felawe.

Chaucer's English is nearly as easy for a modern reader as Shakspere's, and few of his words have become obsolete. His verse, when rightly read, is correct and melodious. The early English was, in some respects, "more sweet upon the tongue" than the modern language. The vowels had their broad Italian sounds, and the speech was full of soft gutterals and vocalic syllables, like the endings ?n, ?s, ?, which made feminine rhymes and kept the consonants from coming harshly together.

FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER.

This lond?s verray tresour and richesse Dethe by thy dethe hath harm irreparable Unto us done; hir vengeable duresse Dispoil?d hath this londe of the swetn?sse Of Rhetoryk.

But for lack of mony I could not spede--

is of interest for the glimpse that it gives us of London street life.

The sharp?, green?, sweet? juniper.

Ah, sweet, are ye a worldly cr?at?re Or heavenly thing in likeness of nat?re? Or are ye very Nature, the godd?ss, That have depainted with your heavenly hand This garden full of flowr?s as they stand?

I heard the ripple washing in the reeds And the wild water lapping on the crag.

And very touching and beautiful is the oft-quoted lament of Sir Ector over Launcelot, in Malory's final chapter: "'Ah, Launcelot,' he said, 'thou were head of all Christian knights; and now I dare say,' said Sir Ector, 'thou, Sir Launcelot, there thou liest, that thou were never matched of earthly knight's hand; and thou were the courtiest knight that ever bare shield; and thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrode horse; and thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou were the kindest man that ever strake with sword; and thou were the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights; and thou were the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.'"

In refreshing contrast with the artificial court poetry of the 15th and first three quarters of the 16th century, was the folk poetry, the popular ballad literature which was handed down by oral tradition. The English and Scotch ballads were narrative songs, written in a variety of meters, but chiefly in what is known as the ballad stanza.

In somer, when the shawes be shene, And leves be large and longe, Hit is full merry in feyre for?st, To here the foulys song.

To se the dere draw to the dale, And leve the hill?s hee, And shadow them in the lev?s grene, Under the grene-wode tree.

But out and spak their stepmother.

Such is, finally, a kind of sing-song repetition, which doubtless helped the ballad singer to memorize his stock, as, for example,

She had'na pu'd a double rose, A rose but only twae.

Or again,

And mony ane sings o' grass, o' grass, And mony ane sings o' corn; An mony ane sings o' Robin Hood, Kens little whare he was born.

It was na in the ha', the ha', Nor in the painted bower; But it was in the gude green wood, Amang the lily flower.

One speedy result of the new learning was fresh translations of the Scriptures into English out of the original tongues. In 1525 William Tyndal printed at Cologne and Worms his version of the New Testament from the Greek.

But he my strok?s might right well endure, He was so great and huge of puiss?nce.

Hawes's practice is variable in this respect, and so is his contemporary, Skelton's. But in Wiat and Surrey, who wrote only a few years later, the reader first feels sure that he is reading verse pronounced quite in the modern fashion.

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,

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