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Outlines of English and American Literature: An Introduction to the Chief Writers of England and America, to the Books They Wrote, and to the Times in Which They Lived — John Shaqi

Outlines of English and American Literature: An Introduction to the Chief Writers of England and America, to the Books They Wrote, and to the Times in Which They LivedLong, William J. (William Joseph)

History

Outlines of English and American Literature: An Introduction to the Chief Writers of England and America, to the Books They Wrote, and to the Times in Which They Lived

Name: Outlines of English and American Literature: An Introduction to the Chief Writers of England and America, to the Books They Wrote, and to the Times in Which They Lived
Author: Long, William J. (William Joseph)

Long, William J. (William Joseph)

American literature -- History and criticism; English literature -- History and criticism

A second interesting circumstance is that this medieval age
    produced two poets, Langland and Chaucer, who were more realistic
    even than present-day writers in their portrayal of life, and who
    together gave us such a picture of English society as no other
    poets have ever equaled. Langland wrote his _Piers Plowman_ in
    the familiar Anglo-Saxon style for the common people, and pictured
    their life to the letter; while Chaucer wrote his _Canterbury
    Tales_, a poem shaped after Italian and French models,
    portraying the holiday side of the middle and upper classes.
    Langland drew a terrible picture of a degraded land, desperately in
    need of justice, of education, of reform in church and state;
    Chaucer showed a gay company of pilgrims riding through a
    prosperous country which he called his "Merrie England." Perhaps
    the one thing in common with these two poets, the early types of
    Puritan and Cavalier, was their attitude towards democracy.
    Langland preached the gospel of labor, far more powerfully than
    Carlyle ever preached it, and exalted honest work as the patent of
    nobility. Chaucer, writing for the court, mingled his characters in
    the most democratic kind of fellowship and, though a knight rode at
    the head of his procession, put into the mouth of the Wife of Bath
    his definition of a gentleman:

      Loke who that is most vertuous alway,
      Privee and apert, [1] and most entendeth aye
      To do the gentle dedes that he can,
      And take him for the grettest gentilman.

    [Footnote [1]: Secretly and openly.]

       *       *       *       *       *

GEOFFREY CHAUCER (_cir_. 1340-1400)

  "Of Chaucer truly I know not whether to marvel more, either that he in
  that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age walk
  so stumblingly after him."
                                    (Philip Sidney, _cir_. 1581)

It was the habit of Old-English chieftains to take their scops with them
into battle, to the end that the scop's poem might be true to the outer
world of fact as well as to the inner world of ideals. The search for
"local color" is, therefore, not the newest thing in fiction but the oldest
thing in poetry. Chaucer, the first in time of our great English poets, was
true to this old tradition. He was page, squire, soldier, statesman,
diplomat, traveler; and then he was a poet, who portrayed in verse the
many-colored life which he knew intimately at first hand.

[Illustration: CHAUCER]

Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.

Outlines of English and American Literature: An Introduction to the Chief Writers of England and America, to the Books They Wrote, and to the Times in Which They Lived

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