Периоды английской литературы. Карпова В.А - 17 стр.

between a knight and some other than human or other-world character. This
contest may be prolonged and may take many forms other than that of a direct
combat. But a combat is frequently the climax.
       After the ritual combat follows the ritual marriage. The victor marries the
goddess or queen. This goddess, the spring or earth goddess, has become in the
medieval romances the faery lady or queen.
       The Middle English romances are largely in verse, a few alliterative,
others in couplets or stanzaic forms borrowed from France. In comparison with
French romances they usually show inferior artistry, less attention to
psychological treatment, more credulity and use of grotesque, and a higher
moral tone.
       It is hard to feel, reading the current histories of English literature, that
justice has yet been done to the strength and variety of the achievement of the
fourteenth-century English literature. Chaucer, of course, has had his due; but
the alliterative tradition which has, in a sense, roots even deeper in the national
consciousness, and which produced in the North-west that highly individual
development of medieval romance, “Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight”, and in
the Midlands, “Piers Plowman”, has tended to receive the almost exclusive
attention of the philologist.
       Of William Langland, the author of “Piers Plowman”, a work in its own
kind comparable in greatness to the best of Chaucer, almost nothing is known
except what the poem itself has to tell us. Langland, in fact, was a great poet,
and the quality of his greatness throws some light upon the nature of the English
contribution to poetry. The greatest English poets have been those who have
followed the genius of the language in resisting false convention. Shakespeare
and Donne, in their day, were great poets because they freed English from the
bondage of a dead scholarship and restored to it expressiveness and idiomatic
strength. Their idiom was similar to that of Langland, whose language was
living English and the alliterative metre into which it naturally fell the vital
vehicle for it. Langland’s metre, in fact, was the natural setting of a living
language. He showed that he could handle a plain, unadorned narrative in verse,
bringing out its full implications, without interrupting its natural flow. He has
succeeded in telling us that his poem is to be a complete survey of human life
under the aspect of good and evil. Piers is the English countryman of his own
particular time and place. He lives in accordance with the simplest set of values
which enables him to pass judgements upon the world around him. Piers appears
as the expounder of Charity and the Holy Trinity, as the Good Samaritan, and
finally, by a splendid and daring transformation, as Jesus himself. It is
unnecessary to prove Langland’s close contact with rural life, for it is clear on
every page of his poem. Piers Plowman is merely a universalizing of the English
rural way of living, the life which all readers of the poem would understand and
in terms of which they could establish a common idiom with its author.
                                      Word Study

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