how to control the vicious tendencies that arose.

Langland,

aware of all, was content to point out one conspicuous danger of the minstrels' popularity:

Clerks and knights welcome king's minstrels

And for love of their lords list to them at feasts;

Much more me thinketh rich men ought

Have beggars before them, which be God's minstrels.

Chaucer let his parson point out that many a man gave to the minstrels for vainglory, "for to beren his renoun in the world." But in the House of Fame he saw

alle maner of minstrales

And gestiours that tellen talës
Both of weping and of game;

and undoubtedly, as a typical man of his age, he found delight in such society.

But Chaucer and his more prominent fellow-writers of the fourteenth century--the author of The Pearl, Gower, and Langland ---mark the beginning of a new era in poetic attitude. Lawrence Minot, in the time of Edward III., wrote as a minstrel of political events; Richard Rolle was minstrel-like in many of his religious pieces; Barbour glorified Robert Bruce in the minstrel style. was evident, however, to the clear-sighted before 1400 that the dignity of minstrelsy was doomed. In the fifteenth century it steadily degenerated, and after the invention of printing was quite out of date. Finally, in the sixteenth century, were written these

significant words:

When Jesus went to Jairus' house
(Whose daughter was about to die),
He turned the minstrels out of doors,
Among the rascal company :

Beggars they are with one consent,
And rogues by Act of Parliament.

Long, to be sure, minstrel-singing lingered in remote parts among the uneducated and obscure. Yet no more could it be

regarded seriously as art, and he who collected with so much zeal the remains on the Scottish Border, could only lament "old customs changed, old manners gone."

It is, however, more just and profitable for us to dwell on the period of the flourishing than of the decadence of the minstrel's work. How often we hear of kings who acclaim the bard for having harped away their grievous discomfort. How alluring the scene in the banquet-hall when the richly-robed singer, instrument in hand, delights the gay company before the blazing fire with his plaintive or stirring melodies. No less inspiriting is the thought of warriors marching to victory, like the Normans at Hastings, with a jongleur to lead them in triumphant song, of Crusaders and pilgrims helped by story-telling to bear the fatigues of travel, of the common folk lightened of their burdens by jovial tales that united them in fellowship. All sorts and conditions of men were made happier by the minstrels and their mirth.

The minstrel-poets of medieval England unified the people by providing them with a common fund of enjoyment, a common sort of information, a common ideal of honour and truth, a common basis of religious belief. They did more. They communicated to them the best sentiment of other nations as manifested in their conceptions of heroes and saints. They contributed abundantly, like the Church, to make the whole world kin.

IV

In a famous picture by Giorgione the chief stimulating forces of all medieval Europe seem symbolically portrayed. On either side of a pyramidal throne rising in triple stage to a high seat, where the Virgin sits with the Saviour in her arms, stand two men, St. Liberalis and St. Francis, in different attire, but with similar noble mien. The one, clad in resplendent armour and supporting the banner of the Cross, depicts the glory of chivalry; the other, in the sober costume of a monk, but with earnest eyes and pleading hands that speak out exhorta

tion and self-sacrificing zeal, depicts the ecstasy of the faith. Between yet above them, gazing with tenderness and sweet joy on her babe, the Redeemer of the world, sits the Holy Mother in serenity. She is the mistress, the friend of both. Love for her, and trust in her Son, who together beseech mercy for all at the throne of God, form the inspiration of their high endeavour. Alike, we see, the active and the contemplative life were supported by eternal aspiration. Chivalry and faith, the foundation principles most characteristic of nobility in the Middle Ages, like liberty and truth to-day, were based on a common sentiment of dutiful love. Both manifest themselves permanently in admirable art.

The Old French romances are the glory of chivalry, as Gothic cathedrals of Catholic worship. Both witness to the lofty idealism of the medieval world and embody materially its spiritual vision. Whether the knights in actual life were always as highminded as the exemplars they chose, whether the monks were always worthy of their calling, it is not for us to inquire. The ordinary run of men have always lived on a low level. But that era is not desolate when ideals are kept prominent by common consent, when it is admitted by all to be the better part to follow where they lead.

In architecture, it is clear, the genius of the age found its most surpassing expression. There most beautifully and impressively the ideals of the time were exhibited. But the same faith, the same stirrings actuated the written monuments. The result is less satisfying only because less finished. The artists were too negligent, too impatient, too unrestrained. Their work is marred by oddities and crudities that more solicitude for perfect form might have removed. Mediæval literature lacks repose, dignity, comeliness. It is prone to exaggerations and incongruities, to repetitions and irrelevancies. And yet it is so fired by imagination, so sweetly, delightfully fresh, so elementally poetic, that it has proved a permanent awakening force.

Why, we ask, this rough incompleteness in poems when

cathedrals are so finished and fine? Perhaps the best men did not give themselves up to literature, since there were so many other ways of imaginative achievement. Intellectual giants devoted abundant energy to the construction of systems of theology, carefully reasoned and most subtle, to the successful administration of vast enterprises, to the harmonious control of masses of men. Possibly the external conditions of bookmaking also worked to the disadvantage of literary art. The slow methods of reproduction, the difficulties of rapid reading, the serial style of rendition, militated against proportion and unity. Scribes, we know, interpolated, combined, transformed at will. Redactors often "improved" until the original design was obscured. Theirs surely is the discredit of confusing many a clear narrative, of making turbid many a poet's thought. Had we medieval works as they left their writers' hands, had we all they wrote, our estimate of their merit might be quite different. Aucassin et Nicolete, Gawain and the Green Knight, The Pearl, and other conspicuously artistic works are but accidentally preserved in unique manuscripts. Very few more would be required to overthrow entirely the impression of dulness and disorder that the numerous didactic documents and the utilitarian compilations and encyclopædias so piously multiplied have left on the superficial inquirer. The existence of Beowulf has modified critical strictures on Anglo-Saxon verse. The poetic Edda glorifies the early Norse. The Mabinogion redeems the literature of the Welsh. Yet only chance has saved these precious works. And satisfaction for their preservation but intensifies our sadness for the irrevocably gone. A just estimate of medieval literature is now impossible. We generalise as best we can from insufficient evidence. We can only hope that our judgments are not far astray.

Before beginning the study of Middle English literature, the reader should set aside two wrong notions that he may perhaps have. First, that men were in the past fundamentally unlike what they are now. They were not. Their emotions, impulses,

occupations, and all else that went to make them men, were in general no more different from ours than in particular ours are from those of our fellows about us. The services of certain departed poets and critics in calling attention to the Middle Ages have been much diminished by the fantastic ideas of the epoch that they have established in people's minds. The time was not one of weird glamour and mystery, of ever-present romance and miracle. Dragons did not beset every traveller, nor enchanting damsels wait at every cross-roads to be ravished or relieved. A few who defied the Church suffered no torturepangs. Occasionally men lived humdrum lives from birth to death. In truth, we have had more than enough of foolish fancy concerning the Middle Ages. Painstaking inquiry has at last substituted fact for fiction. We see with more and more distinctness that people formerly were no happier or unhappier, no brighter or duller, than we ourselves. Life now is a variegated fabric as it was then. Only the patterns differ, and the loom is a complicated machine. More poetic, indeed, than ours, the medieval world may be called, because of its constant surprises, its bewildering contrasts, its spontaneity, its uncritical freedom. Literature reflects all this; it reflects, moreover, the credulity, the naïveté, the puerilities of the time. But it reveals men as they were, as real human beings, actuated like us by divergent motives, controlled by warring hopes and fears.

Furthermore, customs and tastes were not persistently the

same.

To most men, as Pater remarked, the age is "an allembracing confusion." Study, however, shows one century developing naturally out of another. From the barbarity of the dark ages to the affectations of the pre-Renaissance epoch is a long but steady progression. Only gradually are rude warriors transformed into chivalrous knights, and ladies exalted in influence. Only slowly does increasing luxury refine manners, travel broaden thought, enlightenment accompany progress in science and art. Literature advances only little by little in the same course. Works of the eleventh and twelfth centuries are very dissimilar