Brief History of English and American Literature | Page 9

of shrewd humor,
the hatred of a lie, the homely English love for reality. It has little unity
of plan, but is rather a series of episodes, discourses, parables, and
scenes. It is all astir with the actual life of the time. We see the gossips
gathered in the ale-house of Betun the brewster, and the pastry cooks in
the London streets crying "Hote pies, hote! Good gees and grys. Go we
dine, go we!" Had Langland not linked his literary fortunes with an
uncouth and obsolescent verse, and had he possessed a finer artistic
sense and a higher poetic imagination, his book might have been, like
Chaucer's, among the lasting glories of our tongue. As it is, it is
forgotten by all but professional students of literature and history. Its
popularity in its own day is shown by the number of MSS. which are
extant, and by imitations, such as Piers the Plowman's Crede (1394),
and the Plowman's Tale, for a long time wrongly inserted in the
Canterbury Tales. Piers became a kind of typical figure, like the French
peasant, Jacques Bonhomme, and was {32} appealed to as such by the
Protestant reformers of the 16th century.
The attack upon the growing corruptions of the Church was made more
systematically, and from the stand-point of a theologian rather than of a
popular moralist and satirist, by John Wyclif, the rector of Lutterworth

and professor of Divinity in Baliol College, Oxford. In a series of Latin
and English tracts he made war against indulgences, pilgrimages,
images, oblations, the friars, the pope, and the doctrine of
transubstantiation. But his greatest service to England was his
translation of the Bible, the first complete version in the mother tongue.
This he made about 1380, with the help of Nicholas Hereford, and a
revision of it was made by another disciple, Purvey, some ten years
later. There was no knowledge of Hebrew or Greek in England at that
time, and the Wiclifite versions were made not from the original
tongues, but from the Latin Vulgate. In his anxiety to make his
rendering close, and mindful, perhaps, of the warning in the
Apocalypse, "If any man shall take away from the words of the book of
this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life,"
Wiclif followed the Latin order of construction so literally as to make
rather awkward English, translating, for example, Quid sibi vult hoc
somnium? by What to itself wole this sweven? Purvey's revision was
somewhat freer and more idiomatic. In the reigns of Henry IV. and V.
it was forbidden to read or to have any {33} of Wiclif's writings. Such
of them as could be seized were publicly burned. In spite of this, copies
of his Bible circulated secretly in great numbers. Forshall and Madden,
in their great edition (1850), enumerate one hundred and fifty MSS.
which had been consulted by them. Later translators, like Tyndale and
the makers of the Authorized Version, or "King James' Bible" (1611),
followed Wiclif's language in many instances; so that he was, in truth,
the first author of our biblical dialect and the founder of that great
monument of noble English which has been the main conservative
influence in the mother-tongue, holding it fast to many strong, pithy
words and idioms that would else have been lost. In 1415; some thirty
years after Wiclif's death, by decree of the Council of Constance, his
bones were dug up from the soil of Lutterworth chancel and burned,
and the ashes cast into the Swift. "The brook," says Thomas Fuller, in
his Church History, "did convey his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn;
Severn into the narrow seas; they into the main ocean. And thus the
ashes of Wiclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed
all the world over."
Although the writings thus far mentioned are of very high interest to

the student of the English language, and the historian of English
manners and culture, they cannot be said to have much importance as
mere literature. But in Geoffrey Chaucer (died 1400) we meet with a
poet of the first rank, whose works are increasingly read and {34} will
always continue to be a source of delight and refreshment to the general
reader as well as a "well of English undefiled" to the professional man
of letters. With the exception of Dante, Chaucer was the greatest of the
poets of mediaeval Europe, and he remains one of the greatest of
English poets, and certainly the foremost of English story-tellers in
verse. He was the son of a London vintner, and was in his youth in the
service of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, one of the sons of Edward III. He
made a campaign in France in 1359-60, when he was