English Verse Between Chaucer and Surrey: Being Examples of Conventional Secular Poetry, Exclusive of Romance, Ballad, Lyric, and Drama, in the Period from Henry the Fourth to Henry the Eighth (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from English Verse Between Chaucer and Surrey: Being Examples of Conventional Secular Poetry, Exclusive of Romance, Ballad, Lyric, and Drama, in the Period From Henry the Fourth to Henry the Eighth

Through the former period, ecclesiastical and chivalric standards of taste were still in force. Polite literature was formal, imitative, didactic; drama and the romance both submitted to pressure, and the traces of secular folk expression outside the ballad are small. The numerous class of ecclesiastically trained writers Show the repressive, inhibiting power of the Church on letters; the Church contemned, as always, the human senses, contemned direct observation of any sort; it favored the symbol rather than the fact, and approved the didactic without any criticism of its quality. Its contribution to English literature was that of Christianity as a whole, -the idea of the struggle of vicious and virtuous impulses in thehuman heart, - an idea alien to the antique world. The Teutonic races obtained part of their intellectual discipline through the self-examination required by the Church; but the Church's opinion of the human senses acted as an inhibition to any real study of man by man; it created as Sharp a cleavage in the possible Whole of mental development as existed between the adoration of the Virgin Mother and the monastic horror of woman.

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