that corresponds with The Wanderer, or with the daintier Cuckoo-Song of the early twelfth century? In point of fact, we cannot say that even the conception of an artistic prose has occurred to English literary endeavor until long after Chaucer. King Alfred's Translations, the English Chronicle, the Homilies of Ælfric, are simple and clear enough; and, coming down later, the English Bible set forth by Wyclif and his contemporaries. Wyclif's sermons and tracts, and Mandeville's account of his travels are effective enough, each to its own end. But in all these the form is so far overridden by the direct pressing purpose, either didactic or educational, that—with exceptions I cannot now specify in favor of the Wyclif Bible—I can find none of them in which the prose seems controlled by considerations of beauty. Perhaps the most curious and interesting proof I could adduce of the obliviousness of even the most artistic Englishman in this time to the possibility of a melodious and uncloying English prose, is the prose work of Chaucer. While, so far as concerns the mere music of verse, I cannot call Chaucer a great artist, yet he was the greatest of his time; from him, therefore, we have the right to expect the best craftsmanship in words; for all fine prose depends as much upon its rhythms and correlated proportions as fine verse; and, now, since we have an art of prose, it is a perfect test of the real excellence of a poet in verse to try his corresponding excellence in prose. But in Chaucer's time there is no art of English prose. Listen, for example, to the first lines of that one of Chaucer's Canterbury series which he calls The Parson's Tale, and which is in prose throughout. It happens very pertinently to my present discussion that in the prologue to this tale some conversation occurs which reveals to us quite clearly a current idea of Chaucer's time as to the proper distinction between prose and verse—or "rym"—and as to the functions and subject-matter peculiarly belonging to each of these forms; and, for that reason, let me preface my quotation from the Parson's Tale with a bit of it. As the Canterbury Pilgrims are jogging merrily along, presently it appears that but one more tale is needed to carry out the original proposition, and so the ever-important Host calls on the Parson for it, as follows:
As we were entryng at a thropes ende,
For while our Hoost, as he was wont to gye,
As in this caas, our joly compaignye,
Seyde in this wise: "Lordyngs, everichoon,
Now lakketh us no tales moo than oon," etc.,
and turning to the Parson,
"Sir Prest," quod he, "artow a vicary?
Or arte a persoun? Say soth, by thy fey,
Be what thou be, ne breke thou nat oure pley; For every man, save thou, hath told his tale. Unbokele and schew us what is in thy male. Tel us a fable anoon, for cokkes boones!"
Whereupon the steadfast parson proceeds to assure the company that whatever he may have in his male [wallet] there is none of your light-minded and fictitious verse in it; nothing but grave and reverend prose.
This Persoun him answerede al at oones:
Thou getest fable noon i-told for me.
(And you will presently observe that "fable" in the parson's mind means very much the same with verse or poetry, and that the whole business of fiction—that same fiction which has now come to occupy such a commanding place with us moderns, and which we are to study with such reverence under its form of the novel—implies downright lying and wickedness.)
Thou getist fable noon i-told for me;
For Paul, that writeth unto Timothe,
Repreveth hem that weyveth soothfastnesse.
And tellen fables and such wrecchednesse, etc.,
For which I say, if that yow list to heere
Moralite and virtuous mateere,
(That is—as we shall presently see—prose).
And thanne that ye will geve me audience,
I wol ful fayne at Cristes reverence,
Do you pleasaunce leful, as I can;
But trusteth wel, I am a Suthern man,
I can nat geste, rum, ram, ruf, by letter,
Ne, God wot, rym hold I but litel better;
And therfor, if yow list, I wol not glose,
I wol yow telle a mery tale in prose.
Here our honest parson, (and he was honest;) I am frightfully tempted to go clean away from my path and read that heart-filling description of him which Chaucer gives in the general Prologue to the Canterbury Tales sweeps away the whole literature of verse and of fiction with the one contemptuous word "glose"—by which he seems to mean a sort of shame-faced lying all the more pitiful because done in verse—and sets up prose as the proper vehicle for "moralite and virtuous mateere."
With this idea of the function of prose, you will not be surprised to find, as I read these opening sentences of the pastor's so-called tale, that the style is rigidly sententious, and that the movement of the whole is like that of a long string of proverbs, which, of course, presently becomes intolerably droning and wearisome. The parson begins:
"Many ben the weyes espirituels that leden folk to our Lord Ihesu Crist, and to the regne of glorie; of whiche weyes ther is a ful noble wey, which may not faile to no man ne to womman, that thurgh synne hath mysgon fro the right wey of Jerusalem celestial; and this wey is cleped penitence. Of which men schulden gladly herken and enquere with al here herte, to wyte, what is penitence, and whens is cleped penitence? And in what maner and in how many maneres been the acciones or workynge of penitence, and how many speces ben of penitence, and which thinges apperteynen and byhoven to penitence and whiche thinges destourben penitence."
In reading page after page of this bagpipe-bass, one has to remember strenuously all the moral beauty of the Parson's character in order to forgive the droning ugliness of his prose. Nothing could better realize the description which Tennyson's Northern Farmer gives of his parson's manner of preaching and the effect thereof:
An' I hallus comed to t' choorch afoor my Sally wur deäd,
An' 'eerd un a bummin' awaäy loike a buzzard-clock ower my yeäd;
An' I niver knaw'd what a meäned, but I thowt a 'ad summut to saäy,
An' I thowt a said what a owt to 'a said, an' I comed awaäy.
It must be said, however, in justice to Chaucer, that he writes better prose than this when he really sets about telling a tale. What the Parson calls his "tale" turns out, to the huge disgust, I suspect, of several other pilgrims besides the host, to be nothing more than a homily or sermon, in which the propositions about penitence, with many minor heads and sub-divisions, are unsparingly developed to the bitter end. But in the Tale of Melibœus his inimitable faculty of story-telling comes to his aid, and determines his sentences to a little more variety and picturesqueness, though the sententious still predominates. Here, for example, is a bit of dialogue between Melibœus and his wife, which I selected because, over and above its application here as early prose, we will find it particularly suggestive presently when we come to compare it with some dialogue in George Eliot's Adam Bede, where the conversation is very much upon the same topic.
It seems that Melibœus, being still a young man, goes away into the fields, leaving his wife
