Bel companhos, si dormetz o velhatz
Non dortmatz plus, qu’el jorn es apropchatz—
and set it beside a lyric of our day, written without a thought of Giraud de Borneil—
Heigh! Brother mine, art a-waking or a-sleeping:
Mind’st thou the merry moon a many summers fled?
Mind’st thou the green and the dancing and the leaping?
Mind’st thou the haycocks and the moon above them creeping? …
Or take Bernard de Ventadour’s—
Quand erba vertz, e fuelha par
E’l flor brotonon per verjan,
E’l rossinhols autet e clar
Leva sa votz e mov son chan,
Joy ai de luy, e joy ai de la flor,
Joy ai de me, e de me dons maior.
Why, it runs straight off into English verse—
When grass is green and leaves appear
With flowers in bud the meads among,
And nightingale aloft and clear
Lifts up his voice and pricks his song,
Joy, joy have I in song and flower,
Joy in myself, and in my lady more.
And that may be doggerel; yet what is it but
It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green cornfield did pass
In the springtime, the only pretty ring-time—
or
When daffodils begin to peer,
With heigh! the doxy over the dale,
Why then comes in the sweet o’ the year;
For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale.
Nay, flatter the Anglo-Saxon tradition by picking its very best—and I suppose it hard to find better than the much-admired opening of Piers Plowman, in which that tradition shot up like the flame of a dying candle:
Bote in a Mayes Morwnynge—on Malverne hulles
Me bi-fel a ferly—a Feyrie me thouhte;
I was weori of wandringe—and wente me to reste
Under a brod banke—bi a Bourne syde,
And as I lay and leonede—and lokede on the watres,
I slumberde in a slepynge—hit sownede so murie.
This is good, solid stuff, no doubt: but tame, inert, if not actually lifeless. As M. Jusserand says of Anglo-Saxon poetry in general, it is like the river Saône—one doubts which way it flows. How tame in comparison with this, for example!—
In somer, when the shawes be sheyne,
And leves be large and long,
Hit is full mery in feyre foreste
To here the foulys song:
To se the dere draw to the dale
And leve the hilles hee,
And shadow hem in the leves grene
Under the grene-wode tre.
Hit befell on Whitsontide,
Erly in a May mornyng,
The Son up feyre can shyne,
And the briddis mery can syng.
“This is a mery mornyng,” said litell John,
“Be Hym that dyed on tre;
A more mery man than I am one
Lyves not in Cristianté.
“Pluk up thi hert, my dere mayster,”
Litull John can sey,
“And thynk hit is a full fayre tyme
In a mornyng of May.”
There is no doubting which way that flows! And this vivacity, this new beat of the heart of poetry, is common to Chaucer and the humblest ballad-maker; it pulses through any book of lyrics printed yesterday, and it came straight to us out of Provence, the Roman Province. It was the Provençal Troubadour who, like the Prince in the fairy tale, broke through the hedge of briers and kissed Beauty awake again.
You will urge that he wakened Poetry not in England alone but all over Europe, in Dante before our Chaucer, in the trouvères and minnesingers as well as in our ballad-writers. To that I might easily retort, “So much the better for Europe, and the more of it the merrier, to win their way into the great comity.” But here I put in my second assertion, that we English have had above all nations lying wide of the Mediterranean, the instinct to refresh and renew ourselves at Mediterranean wells; that again and again our writers—our poets especially—have sought them as the hart panteth after the water-brooks. If you accept this assertion, and if you believe as well that our literature, surpassing Rome’s, may vie with that of Athens—if you believe that a literature which includes Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley—the Authorised Version of Holy Writ, with Browne, Bunyan, Swift, Addison, Johnson, Arnold, Newman—has entered the circle to take its seat with the first—why then, heartily believing this with you, I leave you to find some better explanation than mine if you can.
But what I content myself with asserting here you can scarcely deny. Chaucer’s initial and enormous debt to Dante and Boccaccio stands in as little dispute as Dunbar’s to Chaucer. On that favourite poet of mine, Sir Thomas Wyat, I descanted in a former lecture. He is one of your glories here, having entered St. John’s College at the age of twelve (which must have been precocious even for those days.) Anthony Wood asserts that after finishing his course here, he proceeded to Cardinal Wolsey’s new College at Oxford; but, as Christchurch was not founded until 1524, and Wyat, still precocious, had married a wife two years before that, the statement (to quote Dr. Courthope) “seems no better founded than many others advanced by that patriotic but not very scrupulous author.” It is more to the point that he went travelling, and brought home from France, Italy, afterwards Spain—always from Latin altars—the flame of lyrical poetry to England; the flame of the Petrarchists, caught from the Troubadours, clarified (so to speak) by the salt of humane letters. On what our Elizabethan literature owes to the Classical revival hundreds of volumes have been written and hundreds more will be written; I will but remind you of what Spencer talked about with Gabriel Harvey, what Daniel disputed with Campion; that
