Let us leave prose for a moment, and see how Verse threw its bridge over the gap. If you would hear the note of Chaucer at its deepest, you will find it in the famous exquisite lines of the Prioress’ Prologue:—
O moder mayde! O maydë moder fre!
O bush unbrent, brenning in Moyses’ sight!
in the complaint of Troilus, in the rapture of Griselda restored to her children:—
O tendre, O dere, O yongë children myne,
Your woful moder wendë stedfastly
That cruel houndës or some foul vermyne
Hadde eten you; but God of his mercy
And your benignë fader tendrely
Hath doon you kept …
You will find a note quite as sincere in many a carol, many a ballad, of that time:—
He came al so still
There his mother was,
As dew in April
That falleth on the grass.He came al so still
To his mother’s bour,
As dew in April
That falleth on the flour.He came al so still
There his mother lay,
As dew in April
That falleth on the spray.Mother and maiden
Was never none but she;
Well may such a lady
Goddes mother be.
You get the most emotional note of the Ballad in such a stanza as this, from “The Nut-Brown Maid”:—
Though it be sung of old and young
That I should be to blame,
Their’s be the charge that speak so large
In hurting of my name;
For I will prove that faithful love
It is devoid of shame;
In your distress and heaviness
To part with you the same:
And sure all though that do not so
True lovers are they none:
For, in my mind, of all mankind
I love but you alone.
All these notes, again, you will admit to be exquisite: but they gush straight from the unsophisticated heart: they are nowise deep save in innocent emotion: they are not thoughtful. So when Barbour breaks out in praise of Freedom, he cries
A! Fredome is a noble thing!
And that is really as far as he gets. He goes on
Fredome mayse man to hafe liking.
(Freedom makes man to choose what he likes; that is, makes him free)
Fredome all solace to man giffis,
He livis at ese that frely livis!
A noble hart may haif nane ese,
Na ellys nocht that may him plese,
Gif fredome fail’th: for fre liking
Is yharnit ouer all othir thing …
—and so on for many lines; all saying the same thing, that man yearns for Freedom and is glad when he gets it, because then he is free; all hammering out the same observed fact, but all knocking vainly on the door of thought, which never opens to explain what Freedom is.
Now let us take a leap as we did with prose, and “taking off” from the Nut-Brown Maid’s artless confession,
in my mind, of all mankind
I love but you alone,
let us alight on a sonnet of Shakespeare’s—
Thy bosom is endearèd with all hearts
Which I by lacking have supposèd dead:
And there reigns Love, and all Love’s loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought burièd.
How many a holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stolen from mine eye
As interest of the dead!—which now appear
But things removed, that hidden in thee lie.
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give;
—That due of many now is mine alone:
Their images I loved I view in thee,
And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.
What a new way of talking about love! Not a happier way—there is less of heart’s-ease in these doubts, delicacies, subtleties—but how much more thoughtful! How has our Nut-Brown Maid eaten of the tree of knowledge!
Well, there happened a Shakespeare, to do this for English Verse: and Shakespeare was a miracle which I cheerfully leave others to rationalise for you, having, for my own part and so far as I have fared in life, found more profit in a capacity for simple wonder.
But I can tell you how the path was made straight to that miracle. The shock of the New Learning upon Europe awoke men and unsealed men’s eyes—unsealed the eyes of Englishmen in particular—to discover a literature, and the finest in the world, which habitually philosophised life: a literature which, whether in a chorus of Sophocles or a talk reported by Plato, or in a ribald page of Aristophanes or in a knotty chapter of Thucydides, was in one guise or another forever asking Why? “What is man doing here, and why is he doing it?” “What is his purpose? his destiny?” “How stands he towards those unseen powers—call them the gods, or whatever you will—that guide and thwart, provoke, madden, control him so mysteriously?” “What are these things we call good and evil, life, love, death?”
These are questions which, once raised, haunt Man until he finds an answer—some sort of answer to satisfy him. Englishmen, hitherto content with the Church’s answers but now aware of this great literature which answered so differently—and having other reasons to suspect what the Church said and did—grew aware that their literature had been as a child at play. It had never philosophised good and evil, life, love or death: it had no literary forms for doing this; it had not even the vocabulary. So our ancestors saw that to catch up their leeway—to make their report worthy of this wonderful, alluring discovery—new literary
