PART III

MODERN ENGLISH PERIOD

FROM HENRY THE EIGHTH TO THE RESTORATION MORE AND TYNDALE TO MILTON

1509-1660

ALREADY in Chaucer's life and for a century and more after his death, forces were at work which were to change the character of civilization in all southern and western Europe, bringing to an end the middle ages, as we term them, and ushering in the modern world. Three things had characterized mediæval lifefeudalism, scholasticism, and the domination of the Church; and one after another these things were destined to pass. The military institution of feudalism, which rested upon the superior power of the mounted mail-clad knight and kept the masses in subjection, received its deathblow at Crecy in 1346, when the English yeomen under Edward III. proved that horses and armor were no match for their long-bows. Scholasticism which, under the guidance of theology, narrowed intellectual interests to a barren logic and philosophy, disappeared before a wave of broader humanism. In Italy the revival of learning, led by Petrarch and Boccaccio, had introduced the change, and at the period at which we have now arrived this Renaissance, or new birth, was at its height, with the Medici ruling in Florence and fostering the art and literature that flowered in the creations of men like Raphael and Michelangelo. In every direction the thoughts of people were widened. From Constantinople, captured by the Turks in 1453, Greek scholars fled, bringing with them to western Europe their precious manuscripts. Traders penetrated constantly farther eastward. Portuguese mariners, doubling the Cape of Good Hope, found a waterway to India. Columbus, seeking another route thither, found a new world. Copernicus traced the path of the earth itself on the map of the universe. Printing was invented, and the revived classical poetry and philosophy, together with the new literature, the records of travel, and the discoveries of science, were multiplied and scattered broadcast, bringing nation into touch with nation and age with age. Finally,

Luther reanimated the heresies of Wyclif, and religious new thought was added to new art, new letters, new knowledge, new hopes, and new dreams.

What all this meant to letters, how it broadened and humanized them, may be imagined. It meant that a drama was once more possible which should be as wide as life and as deep as the springs of its passions. It meant that poetry should become the full voice of the joys and aspirations of the individual, the expression of his delight in the world of reality no less than of vision. It meant that prose itself should burst its monastic bonds and grapple with questions of universal interest, with the exploration of the physical world, with the government of states, with the purposes and progress of the arts, with the regulation of domestic and private life for material comfort and well-being.

England shared in these fresh impulses, but, it must be confessed, somewhat tardily, and for a long time without giving them adequate expression in her literature. In that respect her greatness was only preparing. When in 1400 her poet-spokesman of the Middle Age was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, there were many found to do him honor but none to wear his robes. Chaucer was simply the master, whom scholars and readers looked back to in loving remembrance. He had settled, beyond the possibility of further question, that the language which the people of London used in the transaction of their business could be made to sing their joys and sorrows no less perfectly than French or Italian, Latin or Greek. But poetic genius was lacking, and for nearly a century, as we have seen, English letters passed again into a state of semi-darkness. Then came a stir that betokened dawn, though more than half a century was still to elapse before the Elizabethan day. Through this period, however, modern English was steadily emerging.