Prose grew up under Alfred, after he bad set up a bulwark against barbarian invasion. Like most early prose, it is written for practical pur poses—to convey instruction either in the truths of religion or in the facts of history. De trans lated from Latin the treatise of Boahius lite Conso‘alion of Philosophy, one of the favorite philosophical works of the Middle Ages; the Venerable Itede's Ece/esias/icul History, the best histiffical work that England had yet produced; the History of the 11*()rid, by ()rosins, then con sidered a standard authority; and the Pastoral rare of Saint Gregory the Great. More impor tant still is the expansion under his direction of the meagre records of the monasteries into a clear and connected narrative, the Anglo,S'axon Chron icle, which continued without a break for two generations after the Conquest. The name of ..Elfrie must be mentioned as that of a man who showed signs of a real literary spirit in the ser mons which are his principal work. But the narrow and somewhat monotonous feeling of the Anglo-Saxon race could not have continued to evolve into a really great literature without pre cisely such an admixture of other elements as was to follow the Conquest and the resultant fusion of the two nationalities.
While the process was going on, classical and theological learning made considerable progress. Monasteries were busy, and the English universi ties bad begun to crystallize around their orig inal small nucleus. Lanfranc and Anseluu, Alex ander of Hales and Duns Scotus, attained emi nence in speculative philosophy; but they wrote in Latin, as did the historians of the same period, of whom the chief were William of Malmesbury. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Giraldus Cambrensis, and Matthew Paris. The English tongue was under going such serious grammatical and phonetic changes as to unfit it for a vehicle of literary expression. The first indication of reviving life is the appearance of Iayamon's Brat just after 1200. Influenced by the mass of French romance, he essayed for the first time to give his own language something of the same character, and position in the development of the Arthurian legend is of no small importance. After he had shown the way, numbers of English romances ap peared, mostly translated or adapted from the French, though one of the most charming, ,Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, is of native workmanship.
Besides the necessary delay in the interfusion of the two languages, there was also a question for the poets to settle as to which of two widely different verse-forms should prevail. Saxon poetry had been based upon alliteration and ac cent; with its varying length of line, it was loose and flexible in structure. The French verse, on the other band, depended for its effect upon rhyme, and upon uniform line-length. and was thus exact and measured. The latter finally pre vailed, after a period of great confusion; allitera tion as a rule was dropped, to be used later only as an occasional ornament by masters of effect like Swinburne; while accent could no longer wander at will when the French prosody kept watch over it.
By the time that the language and its literary forms had accomplished their union, the life of the people also had completed a similar process. It was no longer Saxon here and Norman there. hut was beginning to stand out as a new, inde pendent, and finely molded nationality. For
tunately.agreat poet was ready to seize and fixon a broad canvas the varying Imes of this full and brillant life. Characteristically. Chaucer began by going to school to the French trouveres, and to the later allegorical school of which the epoch making Rumen tie to Rose is the typical work; then 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 lectual and artistic activity; Dante. Petrareh, and Boccaccio stimulated him to rival their own productions. and taught him to venerate the great masters of the classical ages. But his French and Italian periods were only periods of appren ticeship. When lie had learned his trade he threw aside imitation and stood forth boldly as an Eng lish poet—a finished artist in technical niceties, as well as a great creator, who gave the final touch to 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 Gower represent life from the aristocratic point of view. the former writing as an easy-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 on the fair green expanse of Malvern Hills in the calm sunshine, his heart is full of the paradoxes, the injustice, the unhappiness of the time, and he reasons out, through suc cessive continuations and recastings of his work, a panacea for the ills of his generation. This, like the work of \Viclif, is in the main religious. In 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 the consolation of a world where inequalities should he redressed and sorrows comforted. The vision shines more and more clearly upon Lang land's sight the more he ponders: Piers Plow man rises from a simple. honest tiller of the soil until he takes on the very lineaments of the in carnate Conqueror of death and hell. His thought has in many aspects a peculiarly modern tone- it is Carlyle who will take it up and rei:elm it— but in the structure of his verse he clings to the old rough alliterative form of the native English poetry, which, while it no doubt. made a more direct appeal to his popular audience at the 1110111P111, unfitted him to have an influence upon the development of later poetry, now definitely emamitted through Chaucer to the assimilation of French forms. Wit.lif. though the movement which we connect with his name was a nniversity movement, appealed in the same way directly to the masses. This is not the blase to discuss the effect r I he 0i:4 ice of his crusade against the eecle,in.tienI if his time hut translation of the Bible into the tongue of the plain people. and by the tracts which be wrote in homely, ig“milv English. he affected in ne .mall degree the development of the language.