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In "Piers the Plowman" we have that grave outlook
upon life which marks the English character at its best, carried almost to excess. The author (or authors, we ought now to say, for it has been
recently proved that at least three writers must have had a hand in its making) looks upon the society of his time as a realist". He describes
the world almost entirely on its dark side, and though the remedies he offers are good (" Love is the physician of Life"), and though he never
altogether loses his belief in a Divine over-ruling order, yet there is an accent of uncertainty and sometimes of despair in his voice.
Chaucer (1340-1400), on the other hand, does not care for problems of life or dark thinking. His picture of society is, on the whole, from its
bright side, when men are out on holiday, and when over-seriousness would seem out of place. Poetically, and in its structure, "Piers the
Plowman" is much below Chaucer's work, but its forcefulness, its pathos, its sincerity, its grim humour, its realistic descriptiveness, and its
dramatic moments make it a great poem. Chaucer's work marks the full flowering of English literature in the Middle Ages, and it was he who
first raised English poetry to a European position. It is the custom of historians of literature to divide the literary life of Chaucer into a French,
an Italian, and an English period, according as his work was influenced by the manner of each national literature. This division represents a
fact if it be remembered that he carried on, all through his career, certain of the lessons he had learned from the foreign source in the earlier
time. There is little doubt that the impulse to write verse came to Chaucer from France. Old English literature was practically unknown to
him, but he was saturated with French poetry, for the literature of France was then, outside the classics, the most influential in Europe.
Among many shorter poems of this early time, the very first of which is a hymn to the Blessed Virgin, the translation (in part) of the long
French allegorical poem of the "Romance of the Rose", and his original and most interesting elegy on the "Death of Blanche the Duchess",
are the most important. It is, however, after he has come upon the literature of Italy -- Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio -- that his true genius
begins to show itself. "Troilus and Cressida", "The Parlement of Foules", "The House of Fame", and "The Legend of Good Women" (the two
last unfinished), as well as some of the "Canterbury Tales", belong to this time. They show him as a true artist, feeling his way through
experiment to greater perfection of work and developing his unique sense of humour. Then, in the later years of his life, he strikes upon the
fruitful idea of the Canterbury pilgrimage as a framework in which to show the full power of his art in his picture of the life of his own, and,
to some extent of all, time; and into this frame he fitted tales he had already written, as well as new ones. But, of it all, nothing exceeds the
power and truth of the "Prologue" to the "Tales". His picture of life and the commentary upon it comes straight out of his own observation
and character. As he saw men so he fearlessly portrays them, the good, the bad, the indifferent. A few of his tales reflect the coarseness of
the time, and it is just possible that the apology placed at the end of the manuscript of "The Parson's Tale" was written by himself at the close
of his life. But, however that may be, over all he writes he throws his own sunny humour and wide charity, and in this as in the width of his
sympathies he is not unworthy to be named with Shakespeare. He is the one supreme literary artist before Spenser, and the best brief
summary of him" and his work is given in that proverb quoted by Dryden in his criticism of Chaucer, "Here is God's plenty". The name of
John Gower (1330-1408) is linked by custom with that of Chaucer, but we recognize now what his contemporaries did not, that Gower's
lengthy books in verse are the work rather of an expert journeyman than of a genius. But we may legitimately class together the two writers
in their influence on the language. Both being widely read, they helped to make the East Midland dialect in which they wrote the literary
language of England, and by their choice or rejection of French words welded the language into greater stability and unity. The English
language, at the end of the fourteenth century, had begun to assume nearly that modern form we know. People, language, and literature had
now become wholly English. |
