CHAPTER II
CHAUCER’S WORKS
When Chaucer began to write, English literature was at a low ebb. The Norman Conquest had practically killed the old alliterative poetry, and the passion and mysticism of Old English epic and lament had given way to the prim didacticism of interminable homilies in verse, or the jog-trot respectability of rhymed chronicles. “For a long time before and after 1100,” says Professor Ker, “there is a great scarcity of English production,” and the more ambitious attempts at verse which appeared in the twelfth, thirteenth, and early fourteenth centuries, are entirely lacking in the charm and dignity of pre-Conquest poetry. “The verse of Layamon’s Brut is unsteady, never to be trusted, changing its pace without warning in a most uncomfortable way.” Nor as a rule is the matter greatly superior to the manner. Such interest as is possessed by the majority of the poems of this period (apart from the definitely historical or philological point of view) arises largely from the unconscious naïveté and simplicity of their authors. What hard heart could refuse to be touched by the difficulties which that saintly hermit Richard Rolle of Hampole had evidently experienced in distinguishing the sex of a baby, or to share in the triumph with which he suggests a solution of the difficulty:—
For unethes[29] is a child born fully
That it ne beginnes to yowle and cry;
And by that cry men may know then
Whether it be man or woman,
For when it is born it cries swa;[30]
If it be man it says “a, a.”
That the first letter is of the nam(e)
Of our fore-father Adam.
And if the child a woman be,
When it is born it says “e, e,”
E is the first letter and the hede[31]
Of the name of Eve that began our dede.[32]
But delightful as this is, it is not poetry. In the middle of the fourteenth century come the notable exceptions of Sir Gawayne, The Pearl, and Piers Plowman, but by this time we are already drawing near the era of Chaucer himself. His poor Parson dismisses the popular alliterative verse of the day contemptuously enough:—
I can nat geste—rum, ram, ruf—by lettre—
but perhaps his strictures must not be taken too seriously, as he goes on to say:—
Ne, God wot, rym holde I but litel bettre—