The prose of the late fourteenth century in England is not to the mere literary taster, with one notable exception, at all comparable in interest to the verse of the same time. For this time was in fact the beginning of English prose properly so called.Before 1350 it may be doubted whether there is a single English work in prose.
At the great turning-point, however, which, though it must have come sooner or later anyhow,was undoubtedly determined to no small extent by the concentration of English patriotic sentiment, owing to the conquests of Edward3, prose did not merely, like verse, make a fresh start, it made start almost for the first time. From the later years of Edward and the reign of richard2, date four writers prose, each noteworthy in his own way,- Chaucer the poet, Wyclif the controversialist, Trevisa the chronicler, and the shadowy personage long know,and perhaps even yet not entirely exercised, as "sir John Mandeville". All were translators in less or greater degree, but all also were originals of English prose writing.
The interest of Chaucer's prose work, the
Treatise on the Astrolabe,
the translation of Boethius, Tthe Parson's Tale, and the Tale of Melibee, is almost entirely an interest of form; and in the last that interest is minimised and almost confined to the fitful and straggling emergence of blank verse, or something like it , at the opening. So too the Parson's tale, a translation , does not advance us very much further than the prose treatises by or attributed to Hampole and his followers in the first half of the century. It is good straightforward English, but shows no attempt at style, while the well-worn and strictly prescribed common form of its matter expresses further limitations.The Boethius and the Astrolabe are superior. The version of the first, even if it were intrinsically less attractive, would inevitably invite comparison with Alfred's at the dawn of modern English prose, and the often noble,never contemptible, matter of original could not and did not fail to stimulate an artist like the Chaucer. But the most valuable point of the Boethius as an exercise for the 'metres' which, especially when rendered by such a poet as Chaucer into a language with such illimitable latent possibilities as English , must needs results far more ambitious and far more successful attempts in 'the other harmony' than had appeared.
Accordingly some of the metre passages in Chaucer's version, though quite legitimate and sound prose, attain a rhythmical as well as verbal dignity, which English prose was hardly to know again save in a few passages of Malory,Fisher, Berners, and the translators of the Bible, till late in sixteenth century.And whole shows that, if it had suited Chaucer to write more originally in prose, he might have effected a revolution there in at least as great as that which he did effect in verse, nay greater , seeing that he had practically no forerunners.
