The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

There is something more pleasant than a fine narrative, and that is a collection of fine narratives, especially when the narratives are all of different colouring. This collection Chaucer gave us, and more. If over-excited, he is always graceful, polished, full of light banter, half-mockeries, somewhat gossipy. An elegant speaker, facile, every ready to smile, he makes of love not a passion but a gay feast. But if he was romantic and gay after the fashion of his age, he also had a fashion of his own. He observes characters, notes their differences, studies the coherence of their parts, brings forward living and distinct persons—a thing unheard of in his time. It is the English positive good sense and aptitude for seeing the inside of things beginning to appear. Chaucer ceases to gossip, and thinks. Each tale is suited to the teller. Instead of surrendering himself to the facility of glowing improvisation, he plans. All his tales are bound together by veritable incidents which spring from the characters of the personages, and are such as we light upon in our travels. He advanced beyond the threshold of his art, but he paused in the vestibule. He half-opens the door of the temple, but does not take his seat there; at most he sat down at intervals. His voice is like that of a boy breaking into manhood. He sets out as if to quit the middle ages; but in the end he is still there.

The Renaissance

For seventeen centuries a deep and sad thought had weighed upon the spirit of man—the idea of his impotence and decadence. Greek corruption, Roman oppression, and the dissolution of the old world had given it birth; it, in its turn, had produced a stoical resignation, an epicurean indifference, Alexandrian mysticism, and the Christian hope in the Kingdom of God. At last invention makes another start. All was renewed, America and the Indies were added to the map. The system of the universe was propounded, the experimental sciences were set on foot, art and literature shot forth like a harvest, and religion was transformed. It seems as though men had suddenly opened their eyes and seen. They attained a new and superior kind of intelligence which produced extraordinary warmth of soul, a super-abundant and splendid imagination, reveries, visions, artists, believers, founders, creators. This was Europe's grand age, and the most notable epoch of human growth. To this day we live from its sap. To vent the feelings, to set free boldly on all the roads of existence the pack of appetites and instincts, this was the craving which the manners of the time betrayed. It was "merry England," as they called it then. It was not yet stern and constrained. It extended widely, freely, and rejoiced to find itself so expanded. A few sectarians, chiefly in the towns, clung gloomily to the Bible; but the Court, and the men of the world sought their teachers and their heroes from Pagan Greece and Rome. Nearer still was another Paganism, that of Italy, and civilisation was drawn thence as from a spring. Transplanted into different races and climates, this paganism received from each a distinct character—in England it becomes English. Here Surrey—the English Petrarch—introduced a new style, a manly style, which marks a great transformation of the mind. He looks forward to the last line while writing the first, and keeps the strongest word for the last. He collects his phrases in harmonious periods, and by his inversions adds force to his ideas. Every epithet contains an idea, every metaphor a sentiment. Those who have ideas now possess in the new-born art an instrument capable of expressing them. In half a century English writers had introduced every artifice of language, period, and style.

Luxuriance and irregularity were the two features of the new literature. Sir Philip Sydney may be selected as exhibiting the greatness and the folly of the prevailing taste. How can his pastoral epic, "The Arcadia," be described? It is but a recreation, a poetical romance written in the country for the amusement of a sister, a work of fashion, a relic, but it shows the best of the general spirit, the jargon of the world of culture, fantastic imagination, excessive sentiment, a medley of events which suited men scarcely recovered from barbarism. At his period men's heads were full of tragical images, and Sydney's "Arcadia" contains enough of them to supply half a dozen epics. And Sydney was only a soldier in an army; there is a multitude about him, a multitude of poets. How happens it that when this generation was exhausted true poetry ended in England as true painting in Italy and Flanders? It was because an epoch of the mind came and passed away. These men had new ideas and no theories in their heads. Their emotions were not the same as ours. For them all things had a soul, and though they had no more beauty then than now, men found them more beautiful.

Spenser

Among all the poems of this time there is one truly divine—Spenser's "Faërie Queene." Everything in his life was calculated to lead Spenser to ideal poetry; but the heart within is the true poet. Before all, his was a soul captivated by sublime and chaste beauty. Philosophy and landscapes, ceremonies and ornaments, splendours of the country and the court, on all which he painted or thought he impressed his inward nobleness. Spenser remains calm in the fervour of invention. He is epic, that is, a narrator. No modern is more like Homer. Like Homer, he is always simple and clear; he makes no leap, he omits no argument, he preserves the natural sequence of ideas while presenting noble classical images. Like Homer, again, he is redundant, ingenuous: even childish. He says everything, and repeats without limit his ornamental epithets.