IX. CHAUCER
Hitherto we have known scarcely anything about the lives, and usually have not even known the names, of the writers in English verse and prose. About
The Morning Star of Song who made His music heard below,
about Geoffrey Chaucer, we know more than we do of Shakespeare.
Chaucer is the earliest English poet who is still read for human pleasure, as well as by specialists in the studies of literature, language, and prosody. A few of his lines are part of the common stock of familiar quotations. Coming between two periods of literary twilight--the second saddened rather than cheered by notes more like those of the owl than of the lark and nightingale,--Chaucer is himself the sun of England during the age of the glory and decline of the Plantagenets. His "Canterbury Tales" show us the world in which he lived, or at least part of that world; his pilgrims are personages in that glorious pageant which Froissart painted--kings, ladies, nobles and knights in steel, or in velvet and cloth of gold; tournaments glitter in all the colours and devices of the heralds--while the horizon is dim with the smoke of burning towns and villages.
It is not really possible to say what conditions produce great poets: they may arise in times of peace or war; in times quiet or revolutionary; at prosperous Courts or in the clay-built cottages of peasants. At least Chaucer lived a long time in an age eagerly astir, lived through the light cast by the great victories of Edward III,--Crécy and Poitiers,--the years when London knew two captive Kings, John of France and David of Scotland; the years when Edward turned away from the all-but conquered Scotland to fight the France which he could not conquer. Chaucer knew the Court triumphant, and the Court overshadowed by the discredited old age of Edward III, the fatal malady of the Black Prince, the troubles of the minority of Richard II, and the peasant rising of Wat Tyler. He had his part in the patronage of that art-loving King, by character and fate more resembling a Stuart than a Plantagenet; and he was in friendly relations with the rising House of Lancaster. He marked the dawn of the religious and social revolution in the doctrines of Wyclif and of the Lollards, the hatred of the rich and noble, the scorn of priests and monks and friars. He felt the poetic influences of France and Italy, and, if not in Italy, certainly in France, had poetic friends. He bore arms in France: in Italy and France he fulfilled diplomatic duties; at home he held a courtly place; he sat in Parliament; he was a complete man of the world and of affairs, as well as a man of learning and of letters. He was always of open, kind, and cheerful humour; still, when nicknamed "Old Grizzle" by his friends, dipping a white beard contentedly in the Gascon wine; still "not without the lyre," not a deserter of the Muse. His portrait, as Old Grizzle, white-bearded and white-haired, a rosary in his hand, shows a face refined, kindly, and humane.
The father of the poet, John Chaucer, was a citizen of London, a prosperous vintner, or wine-merchant. The date of the poet's birth is unknown, that he died an old man in 1400 is certain. His birth year was for long given as 1328, when his father was scarcely 16, and was unmarried. The date 1328 for the poet's birth must be wrong, and the year 1340 is uncertain. In a trial of 1386, to decide whether the Scropes or Grosvenors had the better right to blazon the famous "Bend Or," Chaucer was described as "of the age of forty years and more, having borne arms for twenty-seven years". "And more" is vague, we cannot be certain that it means "just over forty years of age," though that (as far as I have observed) is the usual meaning in old records of ages of witnesses. In some cases, on the other hand, they are given most incorrectly. Chaucer's own remarks about his "eld" in late poems, tell us little; at 40 Thackeray wrote of himself as if he "lay in Methusalem's cradle".
As, in 1386, Chaucer had borne arms for twenty-seven years, that takes us back to 1359, when he went, under the standard of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, on a far from triumphant expedition of Edward III against France. He is unlikely, at that date (1359) to have been under 15 years of age; he may have been born as late as 1343, or anywhere between 1340 and 1343. The household accounts of the wife of the Duke of Clarence prove that Chaucer was a member of her household, and, in 1357, she, and Chaucer, were staying with John of Gaunt, at Hatfield, in Yorkshire.
In the campaign of 1359, when Chaucer bore arms, Edward III failed to take Rheims and Paris: he wasted the country vainly, and made peace, at Bretigny, in 1360. Somewhere and somehow Chaucer was taken prisoner by the French, whether in a skirmish, or while foraging, or when visiting his lady, or absorbed in a book, or meditating the Muse, and contending with the difficulties of rhyme. His captors thought that there was money in his case, or they would have knocked him on the head. There was money. Edward III paid, sixteen pounds, whether as the whole or as part of his ransom (1 March, 1360). The sum (equivalent to our £200) was not then insignificant for a youth not of noble birth, though, in 1368, an Esquire.
Account books show Chaucer (1367) as a valet of the Royal chamber, like Molière (and Shakespeare!) in France during the time of war in 1369; salaried by the King; a married man; pensioned by John of Gaunt in 1374, and receiving a daily pitcher of wine, commuted for money in 1378. In 1372-1373, he went on a mission to Genoa and Florence. Whether he then met the famous poet Petrarch or not, is uncertain: in his "Clerk's Tale," the Clerk says that he met Petrarch; it does not follow that Chaucer was so fortunate. In 1374 he got a good place in the Custom House, in the wool department, and, 1375-1376, had valuable gifts from the King. In 1377 he went on a mission to Flanders, and on another to France. Froissart the delightful chronicler mentions him in this connexion. In the following year he went on a mission to Visconti in Milan, and to the celebrated English commander of mercenaries, Sir John Hawkwood.
His experiences made Chaucer equally fit to sing of "the Court, the camp, the grove": his various posts in the Civil Service brought him acquainted with merchant-men, architects, all sorts and conditions of men. In 1386 he sat in Parliament for a division of Kent. Parliament made an attack on the Court, and Chaucer lost his offices, which he had for some time performed by deputy. Later he received valuable appointments, but by 1398 he needed and obtained royal protection from his creditors; probably he was never a frugal man, he was not in the best circumstances towards the end of his life, but neither Richard II or Henry IV let Old Grizzle starve. Henry was no sooner on the throne (30 September, 1399) than (3 October) he gave the poet a pension of forty marks and ratified a pension given by the ill-fated Richard five years previously. If Chaucer's wife, Philippa, was the sister of Catherine, mistress and (1396) wife of John of Gaunt, father of Henry IV, the poet had a friend in the Lancastrian party. But the fact is uncertain, unimportant, and a great cause of the spilling of ink. Chaucer died on 25 October, 1400.
We only know, as regards Chaucer's children, that he had a little boy, Lewis, whom, in his prose work on the astrolabe, he addresses in a style that makes us love him. He gives him, at his earnest prayer, an astrolabe and writes for him, in English, a little treatise on its use, "for Latin can'st thou but small, my little son". The poet, the friend of that less charming minstrel, "moral Gower," left a fragrant memory.
When we open Chaucer's works at the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," usually placed in the forefront, and when we remember the wilderness of long romances through which we have wandered, the happy change of scene, the return to actual human life, is surprising.
Chaucer is by no means free from the blemishes of "middle English" literature. If he is not to be called prolix in his narratives, "when his eye is on the object"--the main object,--he is none the less profuse in digressions. His mastery of verse was not born fully armed; he had to acquire it by effort, by experiment; he had to feel his way. An unusually large number of his poems are unfinished: some he seems to have abandoned, like the "Legend of Good Women," because he felt that he was on the wrong path; that his task was no longer pleasant to himself, and therefore certainly could not give pleasure to his readers. He was, at first, eager to impart information, as the early scops conceived it their duty to do. Gathering his materials from all sources, Latin, French, and Italian, he, in "The Book of the Duchess" (about 1369), makes the bereaved husband not only allude to many classical tales of sorrow, but actually give his authorities for each case; "And so seyth Dares Frights," or "Aurora telleth so". Even the old habit of preaching at great length, the habit of edifying, clung to Chaucer. He was a man of the world, the last man to risk martyrdom for any advanced theological ideas which he might be inclined to entertain; and not the first to suppose that any set of opinions contained the absolute truth. In his day a fierce attack was made against the wealth of the Church and the luxury into which many members of the Regulars, of the various monkish Orders, had fallen. The curse of a parson was no longer so much feared as it had been. The exhibition of saintly relics for money, the arrival of pardons "hot from Rome," could safely be derided. The friars had been the butts of the French authors of fabliaux, tales of coarse popular humour, for two centuries.
Such censures were not heterodox, they did not assail matters of faith, and the satire of Chaucer is always as good-humoured as it is humorous. To him the Pardoner and Summonour of the "Canterbury Tales," and the rest of the riff-raff of the Church are amusing knaves: he has Shakespeare's smiling tolerance for such a rogue as Parolles. He is earnestly sympathetic in his famous portrait of the good and gentle parish priest, a man of "true religion and undefiled," a man of "the Order of St. James," like the ladies in the "Ancren Riwle".
It were much more pleasant, perhaps more profitable, to linger over and lovingly enumerate the charms of Chaucer at his best, than to trace him through his early experiments to such masterpieces as the blending of old Greek romance and manners with the manners and romance of chivalry in "The Knight's Tale," and in "Troilus and Criseyde". But it is customary to trace the "making" of Chaucer, not only through his experiences of Court, and camp, and grove, and city, but through his literary work. It is certain that in youth he translated that great popular French poem, the "Roman de la Rose," for he says so in his prologue to his "Legend of Good Women". The French poem was begun by Guillaume de Lorris about a century before the birth of Chaucer, as an allegory on the refinements of the doctrine of Love, as taught in the Courts of Love. Guillaume says that he has the warrant of Macrobius, in his "Dream of Scipio," for supposing that dreams are not wholly to be neglected: so he dreams, of course in May, of how the birds sang, and how he walked beside that very stream which the author of "Pearl" borrowed, and converted into the River that sunders the living and the dead. He encounters allegorical works of art, representative of all things evil, outside the walls of a beautiful garden, within which are Love and all things good. The ideas have a sweet vernal freshness, on their first presentation, but by repetition become as artificial as those of the "Carte du Tendre," the map of Love's land which amused the "Précieuses," the affected literary ladies, in the youth of Molière (1650-1660). The dreamer desires a lovely Rose, watched by a squire "Bel Accueil" (Fair Welcome) and the adventures, and fables from Ovid, are of a kind so taking to mediaeval readers that henceforth every poet had his May dream, birds, river, Love, Venus, allegorical personages, and the rest of the "machinery". De Lorris left the lover in despair, but Jean de Meung continued the poem at enormous length, and in a spirit far from chivalrous: he introduced every kind of new heresy against the feudal ideals, and so began a controversy in which Gerson, who lived to befriend the cause of Jeanne d'Arc (1429) took up his pen in defence of Christianity and chastity.
This "Roman de la Rose," or much of it, Chaucer assuredly did translate, but on the question as to whether the "Romaunt of the Rose," printed in his works, is wholly, or only in part, or is not at all from his hand, scholars dispute endlessly. It is not possible, here, to follow the mazes of the dispute, which turns on the quality of the work, the closeness or laxity of the translation in various parts, the presence or absence of traces of the northern dialect (Chaucer wrote Midland English), the correctness or incorrectness of the rhymes, and other details. The opinion that the first 1700 lines or so are Chaucer's, that his manuscript was defective, that the later portions, some 6000 lines, were filled up from manuscripts by other hands, is not certain, but is not improbable. Many other views are defended.
Early Poems.
Though we do not often know the dates of Chaucer's poems, the development of his genius can be traced with much probability. Roughly speaking, in his first period he is mainly inspired by French influences; in his second are added Italian influences; he was always reading such Latin authors as he could procure; he was suppling his style by experiments in French measures demanding much search for rhymes; and finally, in the "Canterbury Tales," his best work is purely English in character, though he still introduces translations from other languages when it suits his purpose.
The Dethe of the Duchesse.
is of 1369-1370, for it deplores the decease of Blanche, wife of John of Gaunt (Lancaster), and the lady departed this life in 1369. Here Chaucer works in accordance with the usual formula of the "Roman de la Rose". He begins with a dream, but his sleep is a respite in a period of eight years of insomnia, described so pitifully that the passage seems autobiographical. He cannot tell, he says why he is unable to sleep,
I holdë hit be a siknesse That I have suffred this eight yere.
Perhaps his nerves were shattered by the circumstances of his capture and durance in 1360, for prisoners of war were treated with great cruelty, placed in holes under heavy stones, or locked up in wooden cages.
Unable to sleep, Chaucer has Ovid's story of Ceyx and Alcyone read to him. He says elsewhere that in youth he made a poem on this tale; now he probably utilized his old material in the poem on the Duchess. In the Ceyx tale, Alcyone prays to Juno for the grace of sleep and dream, and Chaucer, humorous always, vows that he will even risk the heresy of presenting gifts to heathen gods, Morpheus and Juno, if they will give him slumber. His prayer is heard, and this prologue is by far the best part of "The Dethe of Blanche the Duchesse". It is personal, it is touching, and the story is charmingly told.
In his sleep comes the usual dream of the chamber decorated with works of mythological art (a stock feature, as in the "Roman de la Rose"), there is a hunting scene, with French terms of venery, and then Chaucer meets a mourner, John of Gaunt, whose long plaint and narration of similar sorrows in fable, with due reference to authorities, is prolix and pedantic, to a modern taste.
This piece is in rhymed octosyllabic couplets.
Other Early Poems.
"The Compleynte unto Pite" (Pity) is the earliest of Chaucer's poems in "Rhyme Royal" (so called, some think, because James I of Scotland used it much later in "The King's Quhair," a far-fetched guess). The poet seeks Pity, and finds her dead; he adds the petition which he meant to have presented to her, that of a despairing lover. The ideas are hackneyed, and the piece is a mere exercise. The metre, later much used by Chaucer in narrative runs thus:--
This is to seyne, I wol be youres ever; Though ye me slee by Crueltee, your fo, Algate my spirit shal never dissever Fro your servyse, for any peyne or we. Sith ye be deed,--alias! that hit is so!-- Thus for your deth I may wel wepe and pleyne With herte sore and fill of besy peyne.
The "A.B.C." is a hymn of prayer to Our Lady, each stanza beginning with each successive letter of the alphabet. It is an exercise in translation from a French original; the stanzas are shorter than in the French.
"The Compleynte of Mars" tells of the wooing of a mediaeval Mars and Venus, interrupted by Apollo "with torche in honde"; the original source of the story is the song of the Phæacian minstrel in the "Odyssey," but that is humorous, while Chaucer is sympathetic; Mars asks poets not to make game of his passion,
take hit noght a-game.
The Phæacian singer did "take it a-game".
"A Compleynte to his Lady" is of the conventional kind, and an exercise in metres.
"Anelida and Arcite" is also scholar's work, but the scholar has now learned Italian, during his Italian mission of 1372; has read and in places translates the "Teseide" of Boccaccio, which he often utilized. He had also Statius, a late Latin poet, and other models, or he dealt in his own inventions. As in the "Knight's Tale," Theseus returns from conquered Scythia, with his bride, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, and her sister, Emily, the heroine of the "Knight's Tale". The unpopular tyrant, Creon, is ruling in Thebes, where Anelida loves Arcite, who is a true lover, in the "Knight's Tale," but here "double in love," a follower of Lamech, in Genesis, the first man who loved two ladies at once. His second love holds him tightly "up by the bridle," so Anelida despairs, expressing her woe in a kind of ode, strophe and anti-strophe, in stanzas of eight, and next of nine lines, with complicated rhymes, finally with rhymes in the middle as well as at the end of each line. The poem, more interesting than the previous experiments, and not without passion, is unfinished: ends abruptly.
"The Parlement of Fowls" appears to be a kind of Laureate's Ode on the marriage (January, 1382) of Richard II with Anne of Bohemia, who previously had two other wooers, a Prince of Bavaria, and the Margrave of Meissen. When the Birds hold their Parliament, the Formel Eagle represents Anne, Richard is the Royal Tercel Eagle, the two other tercels are the German wooers. Chaucer was always a most literary poet, and was still an adaptive poet. As he must begin with a dream, he versifies the contents of Cicero's "Dream of Scipio": he takes a little from Dante, a little from Claudian, the whole Pageant of Birds he borrows from Alain Delille's "Plaint of Nature," greatly improving on it, while, in the debate of the birds on St. Valentine's Day, as to which tercel shall win the formel tercel, he gives way to his own sense of humour. The verses are vers de société, designed not for our taste, but for that of the society of his time. Chaucer himself perceived the tediousness of the love-pleading of the tercels: like the Host in the "Canterbury Tales," when bored by Sir Thopas and the Monk's tragedies, the jury of birds cry to be released,
The noise of foules for to ben delivered So loude rong, "have doon and let us wende!"
In giving their verdicts the Goose is remote from sentiment, saying to the unsuccessful wooer,
But she wol love him, lat him love another!
The turtle-dove blushes, and gives her word for immortal hopeless love. The poem, in the seven line stanza, ends with a rondel, confessedly translated from the French, and the poet wakens from his dream and returns to his dear books, on the look-out for new material. He has shown his mastery of style, and his knowledge, but he has not yet "come to his kingdom".
Troilus and Criseyde.
Not to linger over other minor pieces, we may say that, in "Troilus and Criseyde," Chaucer does come to his kingdom, and proves himself a Master, granting the taste and conditions of his age, while, in many beautiful passages, he attains to what is good for universal taste, to what is universally human.
The subject is an episode in the mediaeval legend of the Siege of Troy, as it was embellished on the lines of the pseudo-Dares and the pseudo-Dictys, by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, then by Guido de Colonna, and then by Boccaccio in the "Filostrato". The last gives Chaucer his starting-point; out of 8239 lines, 2583 are reckoned to be translated from Boccaccio, while there are borrowings from Petrarch, and much moralizing is rendered out of the prose of Boëthius, whom King Alfred translated into Anglo-Saxon, and Chaucer into the prose of his own time. Chaucer uses his materials as he pleases, greatly expanding, transposing, and omitting. Almost all his own is the character of Pandarus, who, in Homer, is merely notable for having broken a solemn truce by wounding Menelaus with an arrow. Boccaccio made him a young cousin of Criseyde, who, in the mediaeval legend, stays shamefaced in Troy, while her father, Calchas, deserts to the Greeks. Troilus, scarcely mentioned by Homer, is the brother, and in battle almost the equal of Hector. Troilus, though he had scoffed at love, is smitten by the eyes of Criseyde, and is on the point of dying without avowing his passion, when Pandarus, whom Chaucer makes the uncle of Criseyde, acts vigorously as go-between, and saves the life of Troilus by bringing the pair together. Pandarus is a good-natured but the reverse of a scrupulously delicate friend and uncle. Nevertheless, a conscience he has, in his way, and lectures Troilus at length on the infamy of men who boast of their victories in love, and of men who play his own part from any lower motive than kindness and pity.
For thee am I becomen, Betwixen game and ernest, swich a mene As maken wommen unto men to comen: Al sey I nought, thou wost wel what I mene.
Pandarus has a conscience, to this extent, and it is to be presumed that he did not go beyond the mediaeval idea of what a gentleman might do to help a friend in love. Yet "he will be mocking," and his conduct is as remote from our ideas of honour, as from those of the heroic Greeks and Trojans themselves. Shakespeare has debased the Pandarus of Chaucer in his treatment of the same character in "Troilus and Cressida".
Criseyde herself, granting the ideas of Chaucer's time about love, is an honourable and most winning lady, the soul of honour (she wears widow's weeds for her father's shame), but she has not the faintest idea of marrying her lover.
In the beautiful, the magical story of "The Vigils of the Dead," in the mediaeval "Miracles of Our Lady," we meet a most devout and pious damsel, whose views are precisely those of Criseyde. No modern novelist could treat the struggle of Criseyde with her passion more psychologically and more delicately, and none so charmingly as Chaucer has done.
We all see Criseyde, so young, gay, and winning, with the eyes of Troilus; and Troilus, brave, gentle, courteous, and modest, with the eyes of Criseyde. She, learning his love from Pandarus, and deeply pitying him, sees him ride past from the battle, his helmet hewn, his shield shattered with sword strokes, the people welcoming him, and her love outruns her pity. It must be confessed that the manœuvres of Pandarus are told at very great length. The poet has all our sympathy when he cries:--
But flee we now prolixitee best is, For love of God; and lat us faste go Right to th' effect.
When he does come to the point it is in a scene where delicacy tempers passion.
Considered alle thinges as they stode, No wonder is, sin she dide al for gode,
trapped by Pandarus, and yielding to love and pity. Assuredly Criseyde seemed so true a lover that, like Queen Guinevere, she should have "made a good end". But as she must pass to her father in the Greek camp, being exchanged for Antenor, the end came which all the world knows, and which she foreknew.
Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende, Shal neither been y-writen nor y-songe No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende. O, rolled shal I been on many a tonge!
Destiny and Diomede prevailed, but Chaucer speaks of false Criseyde as tenderly and chivalrously as Homer speaks of Helen.
Ne me ne list this sely womman chyde Ferther than the story wol devyse. Hir name, alias! is publisshed so wyde, That, for hir gilt it oughte y-now suffyse.
Had Chaucer left to us nothing but "Troilus and Criseyde," he would have given assurance of a poet so much greater than any English predecessor that the difference is one of kind, not of degree. Chaucer is our first poet of great and various genius.
Space being limited, we can only say that "The House of Fame" (1383) is much influenced by Dante, while, even in modelling himself on Dante, Chaucer gives play to his natural jollity and humour. Dante was never jolly. The poem in rhyming couplets of eight syllables shows Chaucer borne heavenwards by an eagle, like a middle-aged Ganymede, to Jove's House of Fame. He addresses the eagle with charming banter, and the bird tells him that he is to have a holiday, for all day he sits "at his reckonings" in the Custom House, and, when he returns home
also domb as any stoon Thou sittest at another boke.
This was just before the spring of 1385, when Chaucer was allowed to have a deputy. This may have been granted at the request of the Queen, Anne of Bohemia; and, if she did not ask Chaucer to write his next work, the "Legend of Good Women," as counterbalancing the naughty Criseyde, he may have chosen the subject in gratitude. It concerns ladies who were true lovers; and this book Alcestis, who gave her life for her lord's, bids Chaucer present to the Queen. If he meant to celebrate nineteen of St. Cupid's Saints, he tired of his work, and tells only of ten, of whom Cleopatra and Medea are less than saintly. Boccaccio's book "On Famous Ladies," and Ovid, on Heroines, gave him hints and materials; he also uses Ovid's "Metamorphoses," the "Æneid," and other sources of information. He is extremely severe on male flirts.
Have at thee, Jasoun I now thyn horn is blowe!
but, far from being prolix, he merely gives the briefest summary possible of Medea's case, and leaves out almost the whole of the wonderful romance. He bids Theseus "be red for shame," as the deserter of Ariadne, but here again he is very brief, and leaves Ovid to tell the tale.
As all the stories are of man's cruelty and all the complaint of the women (who usually die forsaken), is
Oh, do not leave me!
the poet felt that the thing was like the tragedies of his monk in the "Canterbury Tales"--was becoming stereotyped, and he left off in the middle of a story. The poem is in "heroic" measure, and Chaucer's command of this practically new instrument is perhaps the main merit of the book.
The Canterbury Tales.
Chaucer's aim, in the "Canterbury Tales," in which most readers begin to study him, though a great part of the book belongs to his late maturity, was to be universal: to paint all his world, to appeal to every taste, from that of the lovers of the broadest and coarsest humour (as in the Miller's and the Reeve's Tales), to that of devout students of saintly legends (the Man of Law's, the Second Nun's, and the Prioress's Tales). In the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," and in the discourses of the Pilgrims, he is entirely English, the mirror of his own people. We are in a throng of Shakespearean variety, while their talk is dramatically appropriate; each speaks in character, though the "Wife of Bath's Tale," for example, is far more philosophic, being a reply in part to St. Jerome's praise of celibacy, than anything that we are to expect from Dame Quickly, or from Scott's Mrs. Saddletree.
The Prologue and the conversations of the pilgrims are the thoroughly English work of Chaucer, in the maturity of his genius. So are the humorous pieces, the Wife of Bath, the Reeve, and the Miller, and that striking contrast with all these, the Knight's Tale, a noble masterpiece of true chivalry, which was composed in another form, in stanzas, and was again refashioned in couplets of ten syllables, before the idea of the pilgrimage occurred to the poet.[1]
Several of the Tales had been first undertaken earlier, and were later fitted into the general scheme of Pilgrims to Canterbury telling their stories as they ride. Chaucer supplies his own criticisms, often in the rough banter of the Host, who cannot endure the sing-song romance of "Sir Thopas" (a parody of the form of many romances), or the dismal "tragedies" of the lusty Monk.
The Prologue and conversations and some tales are thus the work of the very Chaucer, in accomplished maturity of power, but he is giving examples of many tastes and fashions older in literature than his own free, humorous, and ironical view of life. He professes, in his art, to be all things to all men, he must rehearse
tales alle, be they bettre or werse,
and whosoever does not like the humour of the Reeve or the intoxicated Miller may "turn over the leaf and tell another tale".
The modern reader, for one good reason or another, may "turn over the leaf, and choose another tale," whether the Reeve, or the Monk, or the Parson, or Chaucer himself be narrating. Like all old poets he wrote for his own age, not for ours; but in him, as in all great poets, however old, much is universally human and is immortal.
The scansion, in the so-called "heroic couplet," practically Chaucer's own conquest and bequest to our literature, gives little trouble, especially if, as in the Globe edition, the final ès which are to be sounded, are marked by a dot over the letter. The spelling repels the very indolent, but no attempt hitherto made to modernize the spelling has been successful, though the task does not seem to pass the powers of man.
The device of setting stories in a kind of framework, so that the variety of each narrator, according to his kind, lends dramatic interest, is very old. Chaucer is especially happy in his idea of making thirty pilgrims, of all sorts and conditions, meet at the ancient Inn of the Tabard in Southwark and agree to journey together to the tomb of St. Thomas a Becket. This was a favourite shrine of pilgrims, the road led through a smiling landscape, the Saint had always been popular and a great worker of miracles; and the pilgrimage was dear to an England still merry. In less than a century and a half after Chaucer's death, Henry VIII seized the wealth of the Saint, the gold and jewels given by noble pilgrims, and destroyed this pleasant pilgrimage.
Chaucer's Prologue with his description of the Pilgrims, is the most kind, genial, and jocund of his works, a perfect picture of a mixed multitude of English folk of many classes, and with no awkwardness caused by a keen sense of distinction of class.
The Knight is a flower of chivalry; he has sought honour everywhere, in the dangerous crusade against the barbarians of Pruce (Prussia), against the Moors, against the Turks: he is a fighting man who speaks no evil and bears no malice. His tale is from the old Romance of Thebes and Athens, and has its root in ancient Athenian literature, though its flowers are derived from mediaeval fancy, and mainly from the Italian poem, the "Teseid," or poem of Theseus, by Boccaccio. It is written in the rhyming couplets of five feet apiece which are practically the great metrical gift of Chaucer to English poetry: he took to them late in life, about 1385-1386, and his tales in this measure were made later than his stories in stanzas.
The jolly Host of the Tabard, who directs the tale-telling of the Company, next asks, out of respect, the Monk to follow the Knight; but the rude Miller is drunk, and insists on being heard.
For I wol speke or elles go my wey.
Thus the noble tale is followed by a "churl's tale" for the sake of contrast, and Chaucer warns his readers that a coarse story it is, and that whoever does not want to hear it must turn the pages over and pass on. The Miller begins decorously enough with a description of a pretty young musical scholar of Oxford, that could read the stars and predict the weather, and lodged with an old carpenter that had a pretty young wife, and had never read Cato who would have advised him to mate with an older woman. The Miller's description of the pretty young woman is more delicate than we expect from this noisy drunkard. A parish clerk, not more godly than the scholar, is next introduced; and a peculiarly broad piece of rural pleasantry finishes the story of the Miller.
The listeners laughed at "this nice case," all but the Reeve, who was a carpenter by trade, and did not like a carpenter to be mocked. He therefore tells a tale against a Miller, a proud and dishonest Miller, who suffers loss and infinite dishonour and has his head broken, at the hands of two young Cambridge men. This tale also may be judiciously skipped: the fourth is that of the Cook, and is only a fragment: manifestly it was to be matter of rude, mirth, but Chaucer dropped it. The Host calls in The Man of Law, whose story is told in stanzas; The Man of Law was himself told it by merchants. It is an early piece of work by Chaucer, fitted into this place. He had plenty of short stories of many kinds, written by himself at various dates, and he placed them into the mouths of the pilgrims; not always quite appropriately. The Man of Law's tale of fair Constance, daughter of an Emperor of Rome, herself a pearl of beauty and goodness, persecuted by elderly ladies professing the Moslem or heathen religion, and driven from Syria to pagan Northumberland, is partly based on a widely diffused fairy-tale. It is pure and tender, and more fit for the ears of the Prioress than several of the coarse comic stories. In these days, as Chaucer would learn from the "Decameron" of Boccaccio, ladies listened to very strange narratives.
The Host next bids the Parish Priest to tell a story, and swears in a style which the good parson resents. The Host "smells a Lollard," or Puritan heretic, in a clergyman who objects to swearing, which suggests that the orthodox priests were very indulgent!
The sailor, or shipman, a rough brown man and "a good fellow," cries
heer he shal nat preche, He shal no gospel glosen heer ne teche,
he is a heretic, a sower of tares among the wheat; and, to check heresy tells a story far from creditable to the morals of a monk. This is in the "heroic" verse, rhymed couplets of ten syllables each, like the coarse stories of the Reeve and the Miller. As this measure was adopted late by Chaucer, in place of the earlier stanzas, it appears that his taste did not grow more delicate with his advance in years.
The dainty Prioress, as becomes her, now tells, in stanzas, the legend of a miracle of Our Lady: how a little boy used to sing her praises through the Jewish quarter of a town; how the Jews slew him and cast him into a pit, and how he nevertheless continued to sing his hymn like "young Hugh of Lincoln, who cursed Jews," slain also in 1255, if ever the thing occurred: it was a common fable of the Middle Ages.
The poet himself is called in next, and recites "Sir Thopas"; a parody of the rhymed romances of chivalry. It bores the Host, "No more of this," he cries, "you do nothing but waste our time," so the poet tells "a litel thing in prose," the Story of Melibeus. It is not so very "litel," and is freely translated from the French of Jean de Meung. There are about twelve thousand words in Melibeus, which is full of quotations from all sorts of learned books and moral lessons: the Host, however, thought it would have been very edifying to his ill-tempered wife, a fierce woman.
The Monk now "tells sad stories of the deaths of Kings," and of the miseries of celebrated persons from Lucifer, Adam, and Hercules to Nero, and Croesus, and Julius Cæsar. Chaucer borrowed from the Bible, Boccaccio, Boëthius, the "Romance of the Rose": in fact he seems to have begun the collection while he was young, taken it up again after his visit to Italy, and finally wearied of the long series of miseries; so he makes even the courteous Knight rebel, and cry, "Good sir, no more of this". He wants more cheerful matter. The Host is of the same mind, and calls one of the three priests that ride with the Prioress. Since the Monk is described as a jolly hunting clergyman, it is not clear why Chaucer put old work about mortal tragedies into his mouth. The Priest tells a form of the tale of the Cock, his Hens, and the Fox, which includes a ghost story, a good deal of learning and morality, and a great deal of humour and of brilliant description. The tale is in ten syllabled verse; and in Chaucer's late manner, as is the Physician's Tale, the Roman story of Virginia, (as in Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome"). Chaucer in part translates the version of Jean de Meung in the "Romance of the Rose". The tale is told with sweet pitifulness and delicacy.
The Pardoner, with his wallet
Bret-ful of pardoun come from Rome al hoot,
"pardons hot from Rome," and with a large collection of spurious relics of Saints, is an odious kind of sacred swindler, but his tale is pointed against avarice. It is derived from a very old story found in Asia as well as in Europe. The Pardoner begins by a satirical account of his profession and of his practices, his greed and lust, his spoiling of the poor, before he preaches his moral tale of the evils of greed.
For, though myself be a ful vicious man, A moral tale yet I you telle can,
and a terrible tale of murder it is. The Host himself is sickened by the cynicism of the Pardoner, but the tolerant Knight makes peace between them: in the nature of things the Knight would have ridden forward out of his odious society. It has been said that the tales "display the literary and artistic side" of Chaucer's genius; and many of them were not made for their places in the Pilgrimage, while Chaucer's "observing and dramatic genius" appears in the prologues and places where the characters converse together. These passages are often, to us, the most curious and interesting, for they are dramatic and humorous pictures of actual life and manners. But the tolerance of the Pardoner by the Knight, is almost too great a stretch of gentleness.
The rich, business-like, proud, luxurious Wife of Bath who has had as many husbands as the Woman of Samaria, begins with a long Prologue about her own past life and her distaste for the mediaeval exaltation of virginity; she prefers the example of the much married King Solomon. She boasts herself to be a worshipper of Venus and Mars, love is not more her delight than domestic broils and domineering. Her prologue and tale are in Chaucer's best later style of verse: the tale is like that of courteous Sir Gawain, and his bride, the Loathly Lady, in a romance, and the Friar, or Frere, justly says that she deals too much "in school matter of great difficulty," and in learned authorities.
The Frere and the Summoner next tell tales gibing at each other's profession. They are of the coarser sort, and are relieved by the Clerk's tale in stanzas; it is a form of the famous legend of Patient Griselda, whose patience is like that of Enid in "The Idylls of the King". The Clerk says that he learned the story from Petrarch, the great Italian poet, in Padua. The story, like most of those which are serious, is given in stanzas: Boccaccio wrote it in Italian; Petrarch in Latin. The poet would not wish wives be as meek as Griselda; there is a happy mean between her invincible patience and the tyranny of the Wife of Bath.
The Merchant's Tale continues the debate on Marriage, started by the Wife of Bath, and carried into clearer air by the modest Clerk of Oxford. Chaucer had Latin sources for the discussions, and the humorous laxity of the story of January and May is based on an old popular jest-story of which Boccaccio's version, in the "Decameron," seems nearest to the original form--the Tree, as in Asiatic versions, is enchanted. A more pleasant variety of Asiatic tale, that of the Flying Horse (as in the "Arabian Nights"), is "left half-told" by the Squire, the son of the Knight: as good a man as his father. Chaucer either never finished the story, or the conclusion was lost.
The story told by the Franklin is, after those of the Knight and the Prioress, perhaps the most poetical of all. It is a romance in which the problem of marriage and the supremacy of husband or wife is once more touched on and happily settled by the steadfast love of the knight and lady. They are separated for years, a new lover is rejected by the lady, and, to win her, makes a magician cause by "glamour" (something in the way of hypnotic suggestion) the apparent disappearance of the black rocks of Britanny. But loyalty is stronger than magic. This charming tale is based on a Breton original; but the handling is entirely Chaucer's, and is done in his best and gentlest manner.
The Second Nun's Tale is the legend of the marriage and wooing of St. Cecily; it was composed in stanzas, and is put into its place without the removal of lines which show that it was written separately before Chaucer thought of his framework. Among the latest additions are the Prologue and Tale of the Canon's Yeoman,--neither yeoman nor canon is among the original characters of the General Prologue. The story contains a satire of the golden dreams, self-deceptions, and impostures of the Alchemists, with their search for the Philosopher's Stone.
The Tale of the Manciple, or kitchen servant, is really a "Just so Story" explaining why the crow is black, and is taken from Ovid, who took it from an old Greek fable.
Finally, the honest country Parson has his chance. He announces that being a man of Southern England, he likes not rum, ram, ruf (alliterative verse), nor cares for rhyme, and he preaches in prose at very great length. His sermon is a free translation, with alterations of all sorts, from a French source, the same as the source of the "Ayenbite of Inwyt" (Remorse).
The immense variety in character of the Tales, covering all the tastes of the time, is now apparent. For the gay and the grave, the lively and severe, Chaucer has provided reading.
[1] This is manifest for (line 1201) he dismisses the story of Perithous and Theseus la Hades,
But of that story list me nat to wryte.
Chapter X
"PIERS PLOWMAN." GOWER.
Contemporary with Chaucer, and in perfect contrast with Chaucer, whom he probably never met, was the author of the alliterative "rum, ram, ruff," poem "Piers Plowman". This author is generally supposed to have been named William Langley or Langland. By piecing together many detached pieces of evidence the conjecture is reached that William first saw the light at Cleobury in Shropshire or at Wychwood in Oxfordshire, about the year 1332, was well educated, was in minor orders, and a married man. But if everything that the author of "Piers Plowman" makes his dreamer say about himself is also true of the author, he must have been a strange and unhappy character.
His poem, following the convention of dreams and allegories, is the record of dreams into which he fell, first on the Malvern hills; later, wherever he chanced to be. The poem exists in three forms (A, B, C), and, from the allusions to contemporary events (such as the peace of Bretigny, with France (1360), and a great tempest of January, 1362), the A version may have been composed in 1362. The B version, much altered and enlarged, is dated, from its allusions to events, in 1377; and the C version, also enlarged, from its references to the unpopularity of Richard II, must be later than 1392.
If the poet drew his dreamer and narrator from study of his own character, he must have been, in some ways, not unlike Mr. Thomas Carlyle. Though he had a noble appreciation of the dignity and duty of manual labour,--the honest and pious ploughman was his favourite character,--he never did toil with his hands. In reply to the remonstrances of Reason, he says:--
I am too weak to work with sickle or with scythe.
Over-education in youth has sapped his manhood: and, since his friends who paid for his schooling died, he has never joyed. He praised the country, but, as Dr. Johnson said, "hung loose upon the town," a man of a modern type.
"Ich live in Londone, and on Londone both," he writes. The instruments of his craft are not sickle and scythe, but the paternoster, the psalter, "and my seven psalms," that "I sing for men's souls". In return for such services he picks up a bare livelihood. Clerks like himself should "come of franklins and freemen," not of bondmen. The sons of serfs, he thinks, should do manual labour, and should not be admitted to Holy Orders. This was the view of the English House of Commons, under Richard II, and it may be that the poet is rather satirizing their exclusiveness, and the hand-to-mouth lazy life of poor clerks, than describing himself. The narrator, after the sermon preached at him by Reason, goes to Church in a penitent mood, and beats his breast, but does not change his course of life.
The poem (or, as some think, the series of poems by various hands) represents in the most vivid way, the unrest, discontent, and doubt which came over Western Europe towards the end of the fourteenth century. The cruel and endless wars, the brigands, the ravages of the Black Death (which caused demand for higher wages because so few were left to work) drove the poor into revolts like that of Wat Tyler. There were frightful cruelties and terrible reprisals. The wealth and licentiousness of the regular Orders of clergy caused them to be hated and despised. The people called Lollards advocated a kind of evangelical Protestantism, and something very like modern Socialism. All these things Chaucer passed by or treated lightly, but whoever wrote "Piers Plowman" threw into his picture of the age his vivid and fiery but lurid and confused genius. He paints himself as poor, discontented, powerless, and always angry.
The dreamer states that he went about London,--a tall lonely discontented man,--"loath to reverence lords and ladies," and never saluting the great, and the well clad, nor doing any courtesy, so that "folk deemed me a fool". He describes taverns full of bad company, as if he were familiar with them. He states the doubts that arise in clerkly minds. Why should the penitent thief have been allowed to go straight to Paradise? "Who was worse than David, or the Apostle Paul," when he breathed out threatenings against the earliest Christians? Beset by such questionings, and by the scepticism which haunted the Ages of Faith, clerks may curse the hour when they learned more than their creed.
The narrator seems to know a good deal about law, and despises men who draw up charters ill, and in bad Latin; he speaks as if he may have eked out his livelihood as a scrivener. He says that he dresses like a "Loller" (however they may have dressed), but he is not a Loller, which may mean either an idle loiterer or a heretical Lollard, who was apt to be a kind of evangelical socialist, entertaining advanced ideas about property.
The poet himself, in the spirit of the contemporary House of Commons, denounces the foreigners who obtain benefices in England, and the Englishmen who buy them from Rome. He would not throw off all allegiance to the Pope, but the Pope ought to follow the example, not of St. Peter, a very human character, but of the divine Master of St. Peter. He hates the Friars as much as John Knox did, who called them "fiends, not freres". He denounces the lawless rapacity of "maintained," the liveried followers of great lords; in fact his poem is often an alliterative rendering of the complaints of the House of Commons preserved in the Rolls of Parliament: For Parliamentary institutions he has the highest respect and admiration, he is the warm advocate of peace with France, and opposes the idea of settling the Eastern Question by a Crusade. If he is the author of "Richard the Redeless," he gave good advice, in a severe tone, and too late, to Richard II, when that Prince set himself, like Charles II and James II, to govern England without a Parliament, and was near his fall. The dreamer, or the poet, was no friend of Revolution, but his works were quoted by John Ball, priest and agitator, who was hanged some time after Wat Tyler was done to death.
Chaucer was a poet who did not write on political, social, and ecclesiastical reform. Langley or Langland, wrote about little else: he is for reforming a world full of inequality and injustice. In his time the Revolution stirred in its sleep, as it were, like the great subterranean reptile of Australian mythology, and caused the crust of society to tremble, and the spires of the Church to rock. He professed that a reforming King is to come
And thanne shal the Abbot of Abyndoun And all his issue for evere Have a knokke of a Kynge, and Incurable the wounde.
The prediction was fulfilled by Henry VIII, but the poor, in whose interests Langland wrote, were none the better but much the worse for "The Great Pillage" of the Tudor King.
We cannot, let it be repeated, feel certain that the dreamer's description of himself, as a moody, idle, discontented clerk, spoiled for work by much study, and unable to find a market for his science; striding angrily and enviously through the London streets where he has not a friend, is the poet's description of himself, a satire on himself; or whether it is a dramatic study of an imaginary character. We cannot be certain that he has lived much at or near Malvern; where the hills, overlooking the vast plain, form the natural scene for his Vision of the "sad pageant of men's miseries"; of poverty and toil, of wealth and injustice and oppression. Of the poet we really learn nothing, even his name,--whether Langley or Langland, or neither,--is matter of conjecture. We only know that his heart burned within him at the many evils which he was impotent to cure, and that he had a kind of apocalyptic faculty for visions of good and evil. As readers usually take the narrator and preacher in the poem to be a portrait of the poet himself, he appears as a character neither happy nor the cause of happiness in others. He is not so much a poet as a prophet in the Hebrew sense of the word; the world owes to him no such gratitude and love as it owes and pays to the kind, happy Geoffrey Chaucer.
The Visions of Langland are visionary; now the dream is luminous and distinct; now it merges, as dreams do, into shadowy shapes of things half-realized. In sleep the poet first sees a vast plain; on the eastern side is a tower, westward is the den of Death. In a field full of folk some laboured; others, gaily clad, took their ease; some were hermits in cells, others were merchants, and there were minstrels who hate work, "swink not, nor sweat," but make mirth. The poet, like the author of the "Cursor Mundi," detests minstrels. There were sham hermits with their women; pilgrims with leave to lie, from Rome; pardoners who took money from men for remission of their sins; parish priests who seek gold in London as the Black Death has impoverished their people. To them all Conscience preaches at great length, denouncing idolatrous priests in the manner of John Knox. Then follows a version of the fable of "belling the cat," told with some vigour and political point.
Holy Church now appears as a stately lady, explaining that Truth dwells in the tower to the east; and she preaches at much length on the functions of Kings (which were not fulfilled in any godly sense by the aged Edward III), and on the nature of Conscience, and the duty of "having ruth on the poor". Now appears a magnificent lady, "Meed," that is Recompense. In the poet's opinion, some people get far more than their due recompense; others do not get half enough, like the poor labourers; and Meed, or Reward, on the whole, is won by bribery and corruption. Meed is to be married to Falsehood: Simony, Liar, Civil Law, and so forth, are of the wedding party, with the Count of Covetousness, the Earl of Envy, the Lord of Lechery, and the rest of them.
All this, we must remember, was written by the poet for his own age, which was insatiably fond of allegory devoid of the human merits of Bunyan's immortal dream.
How Theology forbids the banns between Falsehood and Meed; how Meed goes to town, and wins all hearts; how she is taken to Court, and offered as a bribe to Conscience, who refuses her hand; all this the poet narrates. He is very firm on the iniquity of writing the names of the donors on windows in churches: now the historian would be glad to know who the donors were.
The King, who has Meed's marriage to arrange, listens to Reason, and so ends the first Vision. How Reason, later, admonishes the narrator for this way of life, has already been described. The Deadly Sins make their confessions, and Repentance gives them good advice: as does Piers the Plowman, who describes to these rude pilgrims the nature of the road which they must tread; here there is a considerable resemblance to the "Pilgrim's Progress". Piers directs the industry of the pilgrims, aided by the Knight; and always and every day Piers preaches without stint. A realistic picture of the life of poor laborious women in cottages is drawn (C. Passus X. 1. 77):--
Al-so hem-selve suffren muche hunger, And we in winter-tyme, with wakynge a nyghtes To ryse to the ruel, to rocke the cradel, Bothe to karde and to kembe, to clouten and to washe, To rubbe and to rely, russhes to pilie, That reuthe is to rede, othere in ryme shewe The we of these women that woneth in cotes.
It is an old over-true tale, a tale not told by Chaucer. Pity for the poor, earnest, clear-sighted, not to be controlled, is the most admirable point in the nature of Langland. He returns to his complaint that men give gifts and gold to minstrels, while the poor suffer cold and hunger, and "lollers" (idle "loafers"), gain money in the abused name of Charity. Yet the poet is not so revolutionary as to attack the Game Laws! In irony or in earnest, he bids Lords to hunt every day in the week but Sunday, to hunt foxes, wolves, and other beasts. That is what Lords are fit for; it amuses them, and is of service to the farmer. Bishops are the cause of most of the mischief: "their dogs," the priests, "dare not bark". With Knox, two centuries later, the bishops themselves are the "dumb dogs".
The dream ends, another begins about Do-well, Do-better, Do-best. Do-well (good conduct) is better than Indulgences, as Luther preached later. The poet sets off on the quest of Do-well, who has a castle somewhere. The poet rather leans to heresy when he introduces the Emperor Trajan, boasting that, though a heathen, he was saved "without singing of Mass To Trajan he keeps returning. "Reason rules all beasts, but not men, and why not?" Reason declines to answer.
Finally, after giving a summary of Christian morals, the Plowman vanishes away: he returns later, but, whoever comes or goes, the sermons and the satire go on for ever with the same illustrations. The friars are drubbed from end to end, and when at length the narrator awakes, he finds things just as they were, while Conscience goes off to seek Piers Plowman.
Probably the most famous and singular part of the poem is the reappearance of Piers Plowman, or of One like him, riding on an ass, barefoot, without spurs or spear, but looking like a knight. Faith peers forth from a window, and cries, "Ah, son of David!" as heralds do when knights ride to tournaments. Jesus is to joust with Satan: then the crucifixion is described, and the terror of Satan, who calls his forces out, places his bronze guns, and orders calthrops to be thrown on the ground under the walls of his castle.[1] The idea of the guns was used by Milton, in a lapse of his genius, in "Paradise Lost".
The conclusion is that Righteousness and Peace kiss each other; the dreamer awakes, for the last time, and with Kytte his wife, and Kalote his daughter, creeps to the Cross, and gives thanks for the Resurrection.
It may be remarked that the style of "Piers Plowman" could be easily imitated; any man who chose could prolong a poem so lacking in organization and plan. Consequently, in compliance with the habit of contradicting all tradition and denying to authors the books with which they have from the first been credited, efforts are made to prove that much of "Piers Plowman" is the work of other hands; not of the author of the shortest and earliest version A. In this case critics discover "differences in diction, in metre... in power of visualizing objects and scenes presented, in topics of interest to the author and in views on social, theological, and various miscellaneous questions".[2]
The other, the usual theory, is that the author kept adding to and altering his poem through some thirty years. In that time new topics would interest him; his views on all questions would change with his moods; his alterations, meant for the better, might turn out for the worst (as in the case of Wordsworth and other poets); and his powers, of course, would not always be at the same level.
It is true that the first eight passus, or cantos, or books of version A are more distinct, better organized, more consecutive, more brilliant than the rest of the book; while passus IX-XII, are perhaps more allegorical and less orderly; more vague, more controversial, and one John But is said "to have made this end, because he meddles with verse-making". The author of B is supposed to be a new hand, working over and altering the A version of his predecessor, and often misunderstanding him, while C misunderstands B. It is quite certain that in some MSS. of the fifteenth century the whole poem is attributed to William Langland (or Langley?), and also that the whole poem at its longest, was composed between 1362 and 1392 and was very popular because it turned over and over, in every light, all the political, social, and theological problems that vexed the minds of men. Whether it is all by one hand or not' is a question of very little importance. Many men could have written various parts of it.
Most can raise the flowers now, For all have got the seed.
The poem retains an historical value which would not be diminished if much of it were cut out. In style it led nowhere; the rather careless versification, the ancient unrhymed alliterative rhythm were doomed to disappear. The moral advice was wasted on Lancastrian England, which rushed into the madness of the fifteenth century; the burning of Lollards; the attempt to conquer France--as vain as unjust,--the burning of Joan of Arc; the twenty years of defeat and disgrace which followed and avenged that crime; the fury of the Wars of the Roses, the butcheries, the murders, and, accompanying all this, the dull prolix stuff that did duty for poetry and literature.
Gower.
Chaucer's other prominent contemporary "the moral Gower," in Chaucer's own phrase, was a far more commonplace character than Langland. John Gower was entitled to write himself Esquire, and owned lands in Norfolk and Suffolk; he died in 1408, and his tomb, with his three great books under his head, exists in St. Saviour's church, in Southwark. Chaucer was a friend of Gower and, during one of his missions abroad, left Gower in charge of his affairs. At the close of "Troilus and Criseyde" he writes:--
O moral Gower, this book I directe To thee, and to the philosophical Strode, To vouchen-sauf, ther nede is, to correcte.
Strode is unknown, and we need not examine conjectures about him. Gower was not ungrateful for Chaucer's compliment, and in the earlier version of his "Lover's Confession" ("Confessio Amantis") he repaid it, very prettily. Venus bids Gower's poems greet Chaucer well "as my disciple and my poet, who, in his youth filled the land with ditties and glad songs which he made for my sake". This passage was later omitted by Gower: who, it has been suggested, was annoyed by some words in the Prologue to the Man of Law's Tale (in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales"). At the same time, Gower may have removed the compliment to Chaucer merely to make room for more matter. If not, literary people have quarrelled bitterly over smaller things than the criticism by the Man of Law.
With Gower's French and Latin poems we have little to do. His Fifty Ballades, in French, to his lady, are very pleasing examples of that old formal verse, with its difficult rhymes; and but for the grammatical liberties which the Anglo-French writer took, would secure for Gower a high place among the French versifiers of his age.
In French he wrote "Le Mirour de l'Omme," "Man's Mirror," which has a curious history.[3]
The "Mirour," in French, and the "Speculum" in Latin, deal allegorically with virtues, vices, and the way of salvation; they contain many stories from all quarters, which are retold by Gower in English, in his immense "Lover's Confession".
In his Latin "Vox Clamantis" (1381) ("The Voice of one crying") and in his "Mirour de l'Omme," but especially in the former, Gower had given his testimony against the sins of the age, and had impartially rebuked all sorts and conditions of men. He described the peasant rising, under Wat Tyler and others, of 1381, exculpating King Richard, who was only a brave boy. But, as time went on, and dissatisfaction increased, Gower turned from Richard, and, very early, to the son of John of Gaunt, later Henry IV. Gower transferred his affections so early to Henry, that it would be unfair to call him a venal turncoat: he saw no hope for English liberty except in the Lancastrian cause.
Probably about 1390, and at the suggestion of Richard II himself, Gower abandoned unmitigated sermonizing in verse: renounced the ambition to reform the world by rhyme, and mingled, as he says, pleasure with morality in the endless "Lover's Confession," the work on which his reputation as an English poet rests. He professes his desire to make a work for England's sake, and, in early versions, declares that Richard II called him into his barge on the Thames, and set him to the task. It was to be "some new thing" readable by his Majesty. After a moral prologue Gower tells how he met Venus, in May of course, and how she gave him her chaplain, Genius, as a confessor. To Genius Gower makes his confessions as a lover, and Genius preaches to him, illustrating every homily with a tale. It is by the tales, and by some pretty passages descriptive of true love, that the poem survives. Most of the stories are borrowed from Roman literature. The Greek reader is surprised to find that the Sirens had fishes' tails, a fact unknown to Homer, or to Greek art; which usually represented them as birds with the heads of women. The Trojan horse is of bronze, whereas it was notoriously of wood. The tale of Alboin and Rosamund, and the cup made of her father's skull, is told pleasantly, but the truly tragic situation is slurred over and lost; and the tale of Hercules and Deianira, and the fatal garment of Nessus the Centaur, is also far from worthy of the tragic Greet theme; of the pity and terror of the legend.
Perhaps Shakespeare admired Gower's "Pyramus and Thisbe," which the Athenian craftsmen dramatize in "A Midsummer Night's Dream". The "Jason and Medea" is one of the best tales; but Gower did not know the Greek version by Apollonius Rhodius, or the "Medea" of Euripides; and his own genius rises to no such picture of a maiden's love as Apollonius draws, to no such tragic passion as Euripides conceives, while he has little or none of the humour of Chaucer.
None the less here was a book of many thousand lines, full of the material of old romance, mediaeval or classical: here the verse ran easily, copiously, and sweetly, for Gower was a master of the rhymed octosyllabic couplets, through his knowledge of and practice in versification both French and English. Indeed his style, soon to be lost by English versifiers, is his main virtue.
At last he confesses to Venus that he knows not the true nature of Love. She gives him a black rosary of beads--like that which Chaucer holds in his portrait,--with the motto in gold, por reposer, "Take thy rest". He is to write of Love no more, no more to come to Venus's Court, so, in 1398, the foolish veteran did make love, and married Agnes Groundolf! He survived this unseasonable wooing for ten years, when Agnes came into his property.
The reputation of Gower, for long, was very high; people spoke of Chaucer and Gower as we speak of Browning and Tennyson, or of Shelley and Keats. But no longer with Chaucer is Gower "equalled in renown," and his most enduring monument is Shakespeare's introduction of him in "Pericles, Prince of Tyre".
[1] Calthrops, used at Bannockburn, were iron sets of spikes; Joan of Arc was wounded by a calthrop at the siege of Orleans.
[2] Professor Manley of Chicago, in "Cambridge History of English Literature".
[3] It was lost, but, in 1895, when Mr. G. C. Macaulay was editing Gower's enormous English poem, "Confessio Amantis" ("The Lover's Confession") he remarked to Mr. Jenkinson, Librarian of the Cambridge University Library, that if ever Gower's French "Speculum Meditantis" ("The Contemplative Man's Mirror") were found, it would probably be under the Latin name, "Speculum Hominis" ("Man's Mirror"). Now Mr. Jenkinson had just bought and presented to the Library, a French manuscript, "Mirour de l'Omme," "Man's Mirror". This was proved to be Gower's lost French poem. It had lain in some farm-house, in 1745, and had been scribbled on by a rustic hand, while a manuscript of the Ballades had been given, in 1656, by a very old man, Charles Gedde, of St. Andrews, to Lord Fairfax; at the time of the English conquest of Scotland by Cromwell.
XI. THE SUCCESSORS OF CHAUCER
After Chaucer and Gower, English poets wandered back into the wilderness. They are most valuable to students of the development of the language, they were popular in their own time and for more than a century later. Specialists find in them some literary merits, oases in the sandy desert, but it would be false to say that they are generally entertaining and attractive.
John Lydgate, the Monk of St. Edmundsbury, would have obliged us had he written prose Memoirs of his own life, for he came in contact with some very interesting persons, and knew London and Paris as well as his cloister. Born (1370) at Lydgate near Newmarket (where good drink was hardly to be come at, he tells us), he was, before the age of 15, received into the great Edmondsbury monastery school, where he was a reluctant pupil, and, later, a not very willing monk. He proceeded to Oxford, it is thought to Gloucester Hall, now Worcester College, and, by 1397, was a priest in full orders. He speaks of Chaucer as his Master; but probably he means his master in the spirit: probably he never sat at the feet of the great poet.
In 1423 Lydgate was made prior of Hatfield Broadoak. In 1426 he was in Paris, and, by order of the Earl of Warwick, the cruel jailer of Jeanne d'Arc, he translated a French poetical pedigree by Laurence Callot, a French clerk in English service. Laurence is notorious for having called the Bishop of Beauvais a traitor, when he accepted the abjuration of Jeanne d'Arc (May, 1431), and for being very busy in the tumult which then arose. Lydgate returned to his cloister at Bury in 1434, and we last hear of him, in connexion with a pension which he held, in 1446.
The dates of his poems are not certainly known, as a rule. "The Flower of Curtesie," "The Black Knight," and "The Temple of Glass," may be between 1400 and 1403. The "Troy Book," made from Dares, Dictys, Benoît de Sainte-Maure, and, mainly Guido de Colonna, is of monstrous length, and is dated 1412-1420. This poem has some fine passages in which Lydgate, for example, when describing the penitence of Helen, seems to be translating the actual words of the Iliad. The "Story of Thebes" followed (1420), then came "The Falls of Princes," and a translation of Deguileville's "Pilgrimage of Human Life," made for the Earl of Salisbury. "The Legend of St. Edmund" was written for the devout Henry VI; the date of "Reason and Sensuality" is earlier (1406-1408).
About forty works are attributed to Lydgate, all, or almost all, being marked by "his curious flatness". His lines have, for the ordinary mind, the unpleasant peculiarity that you may read many of them several times before you discover, if you ever do, how he meant them to be scanned. It is not to be found out when he meant the final e to be sounded, and when he did not. His poems may have been badly copied, or badly printed, or both, but the bewildering result remains. When we add that Lydgate is usually a translator, and is always a copyist of all the old formulæ of spring and dreams, and that he is as prolix as an Indian epic, it must be plain that he cannot be said to hold a high place in living literature. "The Book of the Duchess," a thing of Chaucer's immaturity, is not one that a young poet of the next generation would sedulously ape, yet Lydgate imitated it in "The Black Knight".
The best-known piece of Lydgate is a short satiric poem, "London Lickpenny," describing the misadventures of a poor countryman who finds that in London he can get nothing, neither law, nor food, nor any other commodity--for nothing. His hood is stolen in the crowd.
Occleve.
Occleve is not merely a less voluminous Lydgate. He is a character, or assumes to be a character not unlike the French poet, Francois Villon, but with little of Villon's genius. Occleve was born about 1368; about 1387 he got a little post in the Office of the Privy Seal; in 1406, in a poem "La Male Règle," he petitions for payment of a pension: he has wasted his youth, his health is lost, and no wonder,
But twenty wintir passed continuelly Excesse at borde hath leyd his knyf with me.
The great number of public-houses excite people to drink,
So often that man can nat wel seyn nay.
He would have drunk harder if there had been more money in his pouch: had Occleve been a richer man there would be less of the rhymes of Occleve. He liked the society of gay girls, which is expensive,
To suffre hem paie had been no courtesie.
He abstained from discourteous language,
I was so ferd with any man to fighte.
The tapsters said that Occleve was "a real gentleman," "a verray gentil man". He was too lazy to walk to his office; this indolent civil servant, he took a boat, and the oarsmen knew and flattered him. He is rather impudent and impenitent, but he seems to ask for no more than was his due in the way of money. The picture is drawn from the life, whether dramatically studied, or only too truly told of Occleve.
Being what he calls himself, Occleve wrote over 5000 lines of good moral advice to "the mad Prince," the friend of Poins and Falstaff (1411-1412). He acts as his own "awful example". He asks for money, and his poem is a compilation from various musty sources; but he is always laxly autobiographical, a loose, genial, familiar knave. Conceivably he may have met the Prince in a tavern; it is a pity that Shakespeare did not think of bringing this shuffler, in Falstaff's company, to take purses at Gadshill. He bids the Prince to burn heretics, and, in the interests of peace with France, to marry Katharine, daughter of the mad Charles VI. Henry took both pieces of advice, but the marriage brought not peace, but the sword in a Maiden's hand.
Like Villon, Occleve wrote a poem (more than one), to the Blessed Virgin: he is always very orthodox. He had an interval of darkened mind, but recovered and went on versifying, a pathetic figure, for he was a married man, and his wife must have endured things intolerable. Occleve was very human: as a poet his versification is as loose as that of Lydgate. He died about 1450.
Hawes.
Stephen Hawes was the last of the English followers of Chaucer who deserves notice. Between him and the genuine Middle Ages a great gulf exists. The art of printing is familiar to Hawes. Writing of Chaucer he says of the poet's many books
He dyd compyle, whose goodly name In printed bokes doth remayne in fame,
where the jostling vowels of "name," "remayne" and "fame" prove Hawes to be a careless author. In his own time, he says, writers "spend their time in vainful vanity, making balades of fervent amity, as gestes and trifles without fruitfulness". Hawes alone "of my Master Lydgate will follow the trace".
Hawes is all for allegory and moral instruction in his long poem, misleadingly entitled "The Passetyme of Pleasure". All the old formulæ of the Romance of the Rose are retained, and the castles of Rhetoric, Logic, and the whole curriculum of Learning are not much more joyous than the den of Bunyan's Giant Despair. Even combats with seven-headed monsters fail to excite pity and terror, for Hawes has seen, in a work of art, his own future, and we know beforehand that Grand Amour married La Bel Pucell.
Hawes was born about 1475, was over-educated at Oxford, and was Groom of the Chamber to Henry VII. He made the words of a ballet for the Court in 1506 (ten shillings) and, for Henry VIII. (1521) a play, now lost, (£6 13s. 4 d.). He also wrote "The Example of Virtue," and several poems, some of which have not been found in print or manuscript. The "Passetyme of Pleasure" is of 1506. It is in rhyme royal, with more or less humorous interludes concerning the facetious Godfrey Gobelive, a dwarf who tells tales against women, in rhyming "heroic" couplets. "The Example of Virtue," another moral and allegorical poem, is in the same measures. Spenser may have known the works of Hawes, there are coincidences in the allegorical details of both which can scarcely be all accidental. Hawes, in a sense, would "have raised the Table Round again," if he could I He knew Malory's great prose work, the "Morte d'Arthur," and would fain have restored ideal chivalry.
But chivalry died at the burning of Jeanne d'Arc, under the eyes of "the Father of Courtesy," the Earl of Warwick. The Flower of Chivalry was sacrificed like Odin, "herself to herself" (1431).
Hawes was a chaotic versifier: it is not easy to guess how he scanned many of his own lines. In the "Passetyme" the words of the hero's epitaph are probably a versified proverb,
For though the day be never so longe, At last the belles ringeth to evensonge.
Long were the poems, and long the day of the followers of Chaucer. Now for its even song the bells were rung.
XII. LATE MEDIAEVAL PROSE
As far as literature is concerned the poetry of the period which we have been considering is infinitely more important than the prose. For most prosaic purposes, Englishmen still wrote in Latin: Richard Rolle, that eccentric hermit, and Wyclif, the premature Reformer, were even more prolific in Latin than in English. Prose was used in writing of science, as in Chaucer's treatise concerning the Astrolabe; for translation out of Latin, as in Chaucer's translation of Boëthius, and Trevisa's rendering of Higden's chronicles; in sermons, and by Wyclif and his followers for their tracts against the rich; against the Friars; against the endowments of the Church (constantly threatened in Parliament); and against the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist; and for their translations from the Latin Bible.
Wyclif.
John Wyclif (born about 1329) was a man of great influence in his day; and the Reformation, when many of his ideas revived, probably found the embers of the fire which he had tended still glowing. He is said to have been born at Hipswell, near Richmond in Yorkshire, and certainly was of the Diocese of York. He was Master of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1361. In 1372 Wyclif took the degree of Doctor in Theology: he had already written not a few Latin treatises on philosophical subjects. As a philosopher he was a believer in predestination (on which much might be said), but averse to the theory of the disintegration of matter; indeed his views on this subject controlled his theory of the Eucharist. His desire to reform the Church by reducing her endowments endeared him to a political party in the State; and when he was summoned before Convocation in 1377, he was supported by John of Gaunt, uncle of Richard II.
The affair ended in a brawl; and in a later examination his ideas were not pronounced heretical. The London mob as well as some persons of high rank were on his side, and when one Pope, Urban, proclaimed a crusade against the other Pope, Clement, Wyclif opposed it in manuscript pamphlets. He had, about 1378, started a kind of order of "poor priests" who spread his doctrines, and, in regard to the unlawfulness of owning private property, went beyond him.
The Bible, not the tradition of the Church, was the centre of Wyclif's inspiration: it would be a mistake to suppose that the Bible was then generally ignored, the literature of the time is full of quotations from Scripture. There was no authorized translation of the Latin Bible, but many separate books of Scripture were circulating in English. There is much controversy as to whether or not Wyclif translated, or caused to be translated, the entire Bible, as a chronicler declares that he did: certainly he made much of it known in English tracts and sermons.
In 1382 he was suspended from teaching at Oxford; he retired to his rectory at Lutterworth, continued to write, and died on Old Year's Day, 1384.
It is impossible, here, to enter into theological details, but Wyclif anticipated many of the great multitude of ideas which flooded Western Europe at the beginning of the Reformation. If we open his sermons at random, we find him preaching on Lazarus and Dives, "how richessis be perilouse, for lightli wole a riche man use hem unto moche lust," that is, luxury. Words of Latin origin are nearly as common in his style as in that of Chaucer or Piers Plowman. In his Englishing of the Bible, Wyclif uses "And" at the beginning of many sentences, just as Mandeville does in his amusing and fabulous "Travels". The sermons have the double merit of being very short, and very plain, with no rhetorical flowers. The tracts can scarcely be called amiable: the word "stinking," for example, is not thought by Wyclif too strong to apply to "proud priests of Rome and Avignon".
All these brave and earnest men, the Wyclifite pamphleteers and "poor priests," and Piers Plowman, with their socialism and their doubts, their "New Theology," were rehearsing in mediaeval costume the drama of to-day; while Chaucer was arraying the heroes of the Fleece of Gold, of Troy, and of the Achæans, in the armour of the men who fought at Crécy and Poitiers. What remains as a gain to literature is the art of Chaucer.
Sweet reasonableness and urbane irony are not to be expected from men full of righteous indignation, and in great danger of being burned alive; for by this penalty did the Church and State suppress the preachers of doctrines which were apt to cause dangerous popular tumults. The Wyclifite Biblical translations look like a canvas later embroidered on by the authors of King James's authorized version, that immortal monument of English prose.
Chaucer's Prose Style.
It was not in the nature of these Reformers to follow the counsel of Chaucer's good Parson in the "Parson's Tale" (the spelling may here be modernized, as an example of the poet's prose).
"Certainly chiding may not come but out of a villain's heart, for after the abundance of the heart speaketh the mouth full often. And ye should understand that I Look ever when any man shall chastise another, that he beware of chiding and reproving, for truly, unless he be wary, he may full lightly kindle the fire of anger and of wrath which he should quench, and peradventure slayeth him whom he might chastise with benignity.... Lo, what saith saint Augustine, 'there is nothing so like the Devil's child as he that often chideth'. Now cometh the sin of them that sow and make discord among folk; which is a sin that Christ hateth utterly, and no wonder it is; for he died to make concord. And more sin do they to Christ, than did they that him crucified; for God loveth better that friendship be among folk than he did his own body, which he gave for unity."
Chaucer's country-priest, not the chiding Wyclifite Sons of Thunder, is the true Christian. There is more of the spirit of the Master in the caressing words of Chaucer's address to "little Louis my son... pray God save the king that is Lord of this lande, and all that him faith beareth and obeyeth, each in his degree, the more, and the less," than in torrents of bitter chiding, and a hail of unpublishable vituperation.
The English of Chaucer's treatise of "The Astrolabe," despite its difficult astronomical matter, is pellucid, and there is a charm of rhythm in his prose translations of the verses in Boëthius.
Trevisa.
The English prose of John Trevisa, a Cornish priest, educated at Oxford, and a traveller on the continent (died 1412), was entirely given to translation from the Latin. He is said, by Caxton, to have translated the Bible: he certainly made an English version of the "Polychronicon" of Ranulf Higden, the monk of Chester, which begins with the Creation, and is rich in geographical and social information.
Trevisa occasionally inserts notes of his own. His versions of Higden, and of the mythical popular science and prodigious fables contained in the "De Proprietatibus Rerum" ("Concerning the Properties of Things") of Bartholomæus the Englishman, were very popular, as their amusing nature deserved, and the "Polychronicon" was printed by Caxton. Trevisa himself tells us that in his day English boys in grammar schools were ceasing to learn French, and there was a public for English books supposed to be educational.
Mandeville.
The most famous and by far the most interesting of these adapters of foreign books is the so-called Sir John Mandeville, with his "Voiage and Travaile". The author of this book was not an Englishman, at least he did not write in English, and did write in French, at Liège, about the end of the fourteenth century. It is impossible and unnecessary to discuss here the fables about Mandeville. The author of the book declares that he himself is "Sir John to all Europe," is an Englishman born at St. Albans, that he passed the sea in 1322, that he travelled in Tartary, Persia, Armenia, Lybia, Chaldæa, the land of the Amazons, India, and so forth. In fact he resembles Widsith in the ancient Anglo-Saxon poem--he has been almost everywhere and knows almost everything. He especially writes for pilgrims to Jerusalem; he first wrote his book in Latin, then translated it into French, and finally into English. There are countries that he has not seen; and he says that he could not play a part in the deeds of arms which he beheld. Now he suffers from arthritis, "gowtes artetykes," and he amuses himself by writing his adventures in 1357.
Another version of Sir John's career is given by Jean d'Outremeuse, a writer of histories, who had the felicity of hearing from an old man with a beard in 1472, that he was the genuine Mandeville: but that the author was really Jean d'Outremeuse is not so certain. The author, whoever he was, stole from a manuscript of the time of the First Crusade, and from the book of Odoric, a Franciscan missionary, and the Itinerary of William of Boldensele, (1332-1336) from a History of the Mongols, from a forged letter of Prester John--from every source whence he could pick amusing stories. He fabled with a direct and honourable simplicity which is comparable to that of Defoe, and to the straightforward and moderate statements of Swift's Captain Lemuel Gulliver. With the spelling modernized it is thus that the good knight tells the story of the Pygmies who were known to Homer for their battles with the cranes.
"The folk be of little stature, but three span long, and they be right fair and gentle, after their quantity, both the men and the women. And they marry them when they be half a year of age, and get children. And they live not but six or seven years at the most. And he that liveth eight years, men hold him there right passing old.... And they have often war with the birds of the country that they take and eat. These little folks labour neither in lands nor in vineyards. But they have great men among them of our stature that till the land and labour amongst the vines for them. And of the men of our stature have they a great scorn and wonder as we would have among us of Giants if they were amongst us."
Mandeville speaks as calmly about the ants, known to Herodotus, which guard the hills of gold, and are as large as hounds; and of the devil's head in the valley perilous, through which the knight and his company travelled in great fear, "and therefore were we the more devout a great deal". Thence he reached an isle where men are from twenty-eight to thirty feet in stature, "and they eat more gladly men's flesh than any other flesh," being indeed the Læstrygonians who devoured the men of Odysseus, or the Mermedonians of the Anglo-Saxon poem of "St. Andreas," who meant to devour St. Matthew. Mandeville enjoyed and deserved great popularity, being a follower of Lucian's "True History," and a predecessor of Gulliver.
Pecock. "The Repressor."
A writer of English prose even more interesting, though much less popular and amusing than Mandeville, is Reginald Pecock (1395-1460), the deposed Bishop of Chichester, author of "The Repressor of overmuch blaming of the Clergy". The clergy blamed Pecock, and repressed him. This remarkable man, born shortly before the date of Chaucer's death, in North Wales, was a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford (1417), was patronized by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, obtaining the Mastership of Lord Mayor Whittington's school in London (1431), became Bishop of St. Asaph (1444), and passed his life in attempts to convert the Lollards by persuasion, not by the stake. "The clergy shall be condemned at the last day," he writes, "if by clear wit they draw not men into consent of true faith otherwise than by fire, sword and hangment; although I will not deny these second means to be lawful, provided the former be first used." In the opinion of the Lollards, nothing in ecclesiastical matters was defensible that was not positively inculcated in the Bible as interpreted by the average Christian man, however unlettered. Pecock defended Episcopacy, and even defended non-preaching Bishops, on the score that they had to discharge more important duties. Even the much abused friars he stood up for, arguing that, whatever their offences, they and the world would be worse rather than better if there were no religious orders. His arguments in support of the begging Franciscans who, in counting up money, touched it with a stick, not with the hand, are certainly even more sophistical than ingenious.
He wrote many pamphlets still in manuscript; the "Repressor" is of 1455, and is a most remarkable book in all ways. Pecock became vastly unpopular, because he was too clever, and, in his dislike of religious persecution, as well as in the nature of his arguments, was in advance, not only of his own age, but of the age of the Reformation. He was thought to give far too high authority to reason, and to the natural faculties of man in the way of developing unrevealed morality and unrevealed religion. "No virtue or governance or truth into which the judgment of man's reason may sufficiently ascend or come to, to find, learn, and know it without revelation from God, is grounded on Holy Scripture."
This conclusion arrives at the end of a sentence of thirty lines, a fair example of Pecock's logical and legal style, by him first used in English. It is not possible, here, to discuss Pecock's ideas, which are concerned with questions that still divide the Church and the world, Anglicans, Catholics, Nonconformists, and Agnostics. The "Repressor" has been described as "the earliest piece of good philosophical disquisition of which our English prose literature can boast"; it may still be read with interest, especially by students of the Reformation. Pecock was opposed to the unjust and brutal war of conquest and of disaster waged by England in France.
In 1450 he became Bishop of Chichester, and shared the unpopularity of the Duke of Suffolk, who was blamed for the disasters in France. His "Book of Faith" (1456) practically abandoned the infallibility of the Church in 1457; he was as unpopular with the clergy as with the mob; twenty-four doctors reported unfavourably on his works: he was a defender of "drowsy reason" and of "unrevealed morality": he was found guilty of heresies which were no heresies, and, with no choice except that of being burned alive, he signed a confession and abjuration of sins which he had not committed: he was consigned to close confinement in the Abbey of Thorney, was deprived of his bishopric--and of writing materials--and died obscurely.
The source of his misfortunes was this: he was not only clever but he knew it, and wrote that whatsoever man did not agree with an argument of his "is duller than any man ought to be". As few agreed, most were dull, and they did not like to be told it.
Capgrave.
John Capgrave (1393-1464), a Norfolk priest, and Augustinian canon, author of many scriptural commentaries and of a work on "Illustrious Henrys," wrote in English a "Chronicle of England," beginning with the Creation and ending in 1417. Capgrave reminds us that Adam "was made on a Friday, in the field of Damascus"; the date was unlucky. He is nearly as brief as the Anglo-Saxon "Chronicle," his account of Agincourt is no longer than the "Chronicle's" description of Hastings. Here is a sample of his style. "In the same yere III beggeres stole III childyr at Lenne, and of on thei put oute his eyne, the othir they broke his bak, and the thirde thei cut off his handis and his feet, that men schuld of pite give hem good. Long aftir the fadir of on of hem, wheech was a marchaund, cam to London, and the child knew him and cried loude 'This is my fadir.' The fadir took his child fro the beggeris and mad hem to be arrested. The childirn told alle the processe, and the beggeris were hangen, ful well worthy." Such is Capgrave's work, described by himself as "a short remembrance of old stories."
Lord Berners.
Later by two generations, John Bourchier, Lord Berners, was born about the time of Capgrave's death, and while Malory was writing his "Morte d'Arthur" (born 1467, died 1533). As Captain of Calais, the last spot of land held by England in France, Lord Berners had leisure enough, which he spent in translating Froissart, and the French romance of "Huon of Bordeaux" and Oberon the fairy king, "Arthur of Little Britain," and Guevara's Spanish "Dial for Princes," with the "Carcel de Amor" and the "Libro Aureo," books which more or less anticipate the antitheses of "Euphuism". In his translation of Froissart, Berners follows the style of the original, his language is much akin to that of Malory: in his prefaces he is more rhetorical and "aureate," and has a habit, like Sir Robert Hazlewood in "Guy Mannering," of treble-shotting his verbs. "Histories show, open, manifest, and declare to the reader by example of old antiquity, what we should inquire, desire, and follow, and also what we should eschew, avoid, and utterly fly." This mannerism is tedious, but the translation itself is in admirably simple and expressive English.
XIII. MALORY
Much the most important novelty in the literature of this period is the "Morte d'Arthur," finished by the author, Sir Thomas Malory or Maleor, in 1469, and published in 1485. Malory is believed to have been the Squire of Newbold Revell in Warwickshire, born about 1400 (?) and a retainer of that Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who was called "the Father of Courtesy" by the Emperor Sigismund, and was the cruel jailer of Jeanne d'Arc at Rouen (1430-1431), where she was burned. Malory appears to have joined the Lancastrian party in the Wars of the Roses; he, or a man of his name, was left out of a general amnesty granted by Edward IV, in 1468; he may have fled to Bruges and there made the acquaintance of Caxton, and Caxton, in his Preface to the "Morte," says that the book is printed "after a copy unto me delivered which Sir Thomas Malory did take out of certain books of French, and reduced it into English". Malory died in England, and was buried in the Grey Friars, near Newgate, in 1471.
As we have seen already, the true first sources of the immense body of Arthurian romance are obscure: the fountain-head is certainly Celtic, but the affluents are mainly French--without France the legend would have been but a small thing. Malory constantly refers to "the French book" for his statements, to what book he does not say, but the learned industry of Dr. Sommer has detected that, for the youth of Arthur, Malory used French romances of Merlin the Seer; used French authorities for the tales of Sir Tristram and Lancelot, and also freely employed an English metrical romance, "Morte Arthur," attributed to the mysterious Scot, Huchown. There are other sources, and Malory treats his authorities with much freedom, omitting, adding, and introducing confusions. His great romance has a definite beginning; it has a middle in the fatal revival of Arthurian chivalry in the search for the Holy Grail; and thence turns towards its end with the falling of Lancelot to his old sinful love of Guinevere, wife of Arthur, the decadence, the rebellion of Mordred, the passing of Arthur, and the penitence of Lancelot and Guinevere.
Malory's book may be called a work of true genius, so simple yet so noble is the prose style; so fine, loyal and chivalrous the temper, while even the confusions add to the element of mystery and to the expectation and curiosity of the reader. Malory purges away the stupid monkish fables about the birth of Merlin by a machination of a devil: he does not linger over the long dull fables of Arthur's wars against the Anglo-Saxon invaders; he gathers the flower of the chivalry of the fourteenth century, while true love is his theme, with no palliation of the guilt of sinful love. His Lancelot deserves the Douglas motto of "tender and true," though
His honour rooted in dishonour stood, And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.
Hence comes the inevitable tragedy, the greatest in romance.
"Herein," says Caxton, rising to the height of Malory's own style, men "shall find many joyous and pleasant histories, and noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness, and chivalry. For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, goodness, and sin. Do after the good, and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renommee."
Many recent critics of Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," which is mainly derived from Malory, appear to think that Malory's "Morte d'Arthur" is a violent, brutal, licentious book, and that Tennyson invented the noble courtesy, chivalry, humanity to suit the middle-class morality of 1860. This opinion is merely stupid. "The Morte," it has been well said, "assumes the recognition of a loftier standard of justice, purity and unselfishness than its own century knew.... The motive forces are the elemental passions of love and bravery, never greed, or lust, or cruelty,"--except of course in traitors like Meliagraunce and Mordred. The knights have the strongest sense of fair play: Sir Lancelot bears no spite against Sir Palamedes, a pagan knight, who, from ignorance of the rules, deals a stroke in a tournament which the rules forbade. Their sense of honour is crystal-clear, and, as in Tennyson's Idylls, this honour and loyalty make the tragedy; the struggle between Lancelot's love of Guinevere, and his friendship for and loyalty to King Arthur. His sin brings its own punishment, he cannot win the vision of the Grail, that Holy thing: "blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God".
Arthur himself, after the wars of his youth, is but faintly drawn: it is not for the King to seek adventures, but to hear the suits of his people who come to him for help and justice. A mystery of Fate hangs over him: he is smitten by the sins of his knights, and passes away, sorely wounded but alive, as strangely as Œdipus in the tragedy of Sophocles: perhaps, who knows, to come again. "In Avalon he groweth old," in the peaceful hidden land of apples and apple-blossom.
The scenes all pass in a world where colours are magically soft and bright. There is an old song of the fourteenth century which gives the kind of colour that abounds in Malory.
Lully, lulley, lully, lulley The fawcon hath borne my mate away! He bare him up, he bare him down, He bare him into an orchard brown. In that orchard there was a hall That was hanged with purple and pall. And in that hall there was a bed, It was hung with gold so red. And in that bed there lieth a knight, His wounds bleeding day and night. By that bedside kneeleth a may, And she weepeth both night and day.
This is like a song made on some scene in the Quest for the Grail.
Malory's world is "an unsubstantial fairy place," yet there is no fairy non-morality. There is the loftiest ideal among the knights who follow the gleam and fragrance of the Holy Grail. That all do not attain to their ideal is but the failing of human nature, the ideal is among them, they aspire to reach "the spiritual City". For Guinevere, Malory has the chivalrous compassion of Homer for Helen; of Chaucer for Criseyde, but while Helen wins, with light penance, to her home by the Eurotas, and her translation to Elysium, the Avalon of Greece, it is through many years of penance that Guinevere comes to her rest. What Shelley said of the end of the Iliad may be said of the last chapters of the "Morte," they die away "in the high and solemn close of the whole bloody tale in tenderness and inexpiable sorrow".
The prose with all its simplicity has rhythm and charm. Thus, "Therefore all ye that be lovers call unto your remembrance the month of May, like as did Queen Guinevere, for whom I make here a little mention, that while she lived she was a true lover, and therefore had she a good end". The words spoken by Sir Ector over the dead body of Lancelot are one of the noblest passages in English prose.
The very titles of the chapters call us into the realm of romance, like a blast blown on Arthur's horn. "How Sir Lancelot came into the Chapel Perilous, and gat there of a dead corpse a piece of cloth and a sword." "How the damsel and Beaumains came to the siege, and came to a sycamore tree, and there Beaumains blew an horn, and then the Knight of the Red Lands came to fight him." "How Sir Lancelot, half-sleeping and half-waking, saw a sick man borne in a litter, and how he was healed with the Sangreal." Who can read the titles, and not make haste to read the chapters? The beautiful close of Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur" is merely done into verse from the fifth chapter of Malory's twenty-first book,--the casting of Excalibur into the mere, and the coming of the barge with the elfin ladies, "many fair ladies, and among them all was a Queen, and all they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur".
But for Malory, the old Arthurian romances would be known only to a few of the learned. Malory "made them common coin," his romance was neglected only in the eighteenth century. It has been the inspiration of many poets, but none can "recapture the first fine careless rapture," to which Tennyson comes nearest in the best of his "Idylls of the King," and in "Sir Galahad," and "The Lady of Shalott".
Next to Chaucer's poems, Malory's romance is the greatest thing in English literature from "Beowulf" to Spenser. To boys, and to men who retain the boy, the "Morte" is an inestimable treasure, which has not to be sought for in the seldom-visited shelves that hold the publications of learned Societies, but is within the reach of all.[1]
[1] In the Globe edition, edited by Sir Edward Strachey. Macmillan & Co.
XIV. EARLY SCOTTISH LITERATURE
For purposes of convenience the development of "Ynglis" literature north of the Tweed and Esk, may be treated in this place.
Originally the "Scots" or Scottish tongue was Gaelic, the language of the Irish Scots who, landing in Argyll about A.D. 500, finally gave a dynasty and its existing name, to "Scot" land. When the dynasty acquired the Anglicized Lothian and much of Cumberland, it adopted the English speech, consequently the writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Scotland used a form of northern English or "Ynglis," and knew not Gaelic. They called their speech "English" till the long wars with England led them to draw a distinction and patriotically style it "Scots" or "Scottis". Thus by 1562, Ninian Winzett upbraids John Knox for "knapping English" in his writings, and forgetting the "Scots" that he learned at his mother's knee. Gaelic was no longer reckoned "Scots," it was Ersch, Yrisch, or Erse. Even before the days of Edward I, the town seal of Stirling, on the Forth, describes the Gaelic-speaking men north of Forth as Scoti bruti. The Scottish writers did not know, and therefore despised Gaelic, from which they have scarcely borrowed anything. Latin and French they knew, and enriched their tongue by borrowing from these sources.
The one verse of Scottish poetry that may have survived from the end of the thirteenth century, the lines on the death of Alexander III, are charming, but, if they were written at the time, or shortly after, they must have been modernized, more or less, when Wyntoun, the rhyming chronicler, quoted them about 1420, twenty years after the death of Chaucer.
Barbour.
Setting aside the enigmatic Huchown already discussed, John Barbour, author of "The Brus," a history of King Robert Bruce in rhyming octosyllabic couplets, is the first poet of English speaking Scotland. He remains one of the most spirited and readable; the most like Sir Walter Scott, who used his book in poetry and in prose historical writing.
By 1357 Barbour was Archdeacon of Aberdeen: he was probably born at least ten years before Chaucer. In 1357 he went, with others, to study at Oxford, probably at the Scottish college, Balliol. He also visited France, for studious purposes; he held a position in the Exchequer, and, after finishing "The Brus" in 1376, received a pension from Bruce's grandson, Robert II: other pensions he received: he died in 1396. He had written other works, lost or disputable, and a romantic genealogy of the Stuarts, who were really Fitz Alans, and of ancient Breton origin, not, as was fabled, of the old Scoto-Irish dynasty. "A Buik of Alexander" (the romance of Alexander the Great), is attributed to Barbour with much probability.
Barbour possesses, unlike most of the narrative poets of the Middle Ages, one supreme advantage. He is not telling, for the twentieth time, the Tale of Troy, of Alexander the Great, of King Arthur, or of any dim mythical hero. The events in the history of Scotland which his own father witnessed, make one of the best stories in the world. Bruce was far from a faultless hero, but his adventures are picturesque facts, not inventions: though sometimes Barbour tells the same story twice, with variations. His many defeats, his wanderings in the heather, with a little company or with a single attendant; his flight over sea; his crossings of perilous lochs in frail boats; his single combats; the desperate chivalrous valour of his brother Edward; his own sagacity as a strategist and tactician; his kindness of heart; his love of the romances; the sufferings of his loyal friends, men and women; all his days of almost desperate warfare; all his escapes when surrounded in the hills of Galloway and of Argyll, are matters of historical fact, and can often be traced in English documents of the time. His "crowning mercy" Bannockburn, is as historical as Marathon or Waterloo.
When we think of the wild scenes in which Bruce warred and wandered, Loch Trool, Loch Awe, the whole of the Lennox, the uplands of Don and Dee; when we remember the blending of English armed knights, and of the plaided clans in the ranks of his enemies; his own combination of the Islesmen with "the dark impenetrable wood" of the Lowland spears; the many-hued silks of the standards; the cowled friars who prayed while the warriors fought; the fair ladies who shared the hero's dangers, we see that Barbour has a theme fresh, brilliant, and unique for his poem. He has a true story which is more thrilling than any invented romance.
Barbour notoriously, perhaps in the interests of poetic perspective, rolls up three Bruces, the grandfather, the father, and the hero himself, into one personage. Yet his statements of the numbers of the English engaged are sometimes corroborated by the English muster rolls. Before he has written three hundred lines he strikes the sonorous keynote of his narrative in that praise of Freedom which is worthy of the poet who fought at Marathon.
"Ah! freedom is a noble thing!"
In what other mediaeval romance can these lines be equalled? What wearies us in Barbour is the common defect of mediaeval poets, the occasional display of learning, references to what Cato did, or Hannibal, or Scipio, and the like, but Barbour is not tedious when, after giving a minute portrait of the good Lord James of Douglas, he compares him to Hector, though, for valour,
To Hector dare I none compare Of all that ever in world were.
The story never drags, adventure follows adventure, and there is none of the weary exaggeration of romance. Bruce does not slay his thousands, like Arthur. When he, a mounted man in armour, Ms the better of three plaided clansmen, MacNaughton, who is of the hostile party, cries
Surely, in all my time, I never heard, in song or rhyme, Tell of a man that so smartly Displayed such great chivalry.
But Bruce is soon obliged to give his horse to one of the ladies, and go on foot, like Prince Charles, living on such venison as his arrows may procure. Barbour has to invent no fanciful dangers; he knows the racing tides and dangerous shoals of Argyll--
The waves wide that breaking were, Weltered as hills, here and there.
Unlike Chaucer, Barbour has a scorn of astrology: no man ever (he says) made three correct prophecies, by knowledge of the stars! He is far from scrupulous, and does not blame Douglas when, like Achilles, he slays prisoners of war: apparently because he could not take them with him in his retreat, and secure their ransoms. Barbour has not, of course, the genius of Chaucer; but he has a touch of the genius of Scott, he has spirit, and a true sense of loyalty, chivalry, and patriotism; these, with his subject, place him beside Chaucer in so far as that he may still be read with unaffected enjoyment.
Wyntoun.
Between Barbour and the first true Scottish disciple of Chaucer, James I, comes the author of a Chronicle in rhyming octosyllabic couplets "The Orygynale Cronykil". This is Andrew Wyntoun, who was a canon of St. Andrews Cathedral, and prior of St. Serfs on a little island in Loch Leven, the loch of Queen Mary's captivity. Wyntoun appears to have been an old man when, in 1413, the first Scottish university was founded at St. Andrews, by a bull of the Anti-Pope, Pedro de la Luna. The place must, with its Augustinian canons, have been a seat of learning before 1413, but the new university was very poor, and a thing of small beginnings.
Wyntoun's book commences with Adam and Eve, and is at fifth hand and fabulous till the author approaches his own time.
Mythical as is his work when he approaches his own date he, with Fordun, the really industrious author of the prose "Scotichronicon" (died about 1384), is one of our few sources of information about Scottish affairs. Wyntoun is amusing, but does not pretend to high poetic merit.
The Kingis Quhair.
To people who only know King James I of Scotland in history, his poem, "The Kingis Quhair" (book) must be rather disappointing. Fortune was his foe, as he says in the poem, and the foe of his House.
Born in July, 1394, young James was made prisoner in March, 1405-1406, and, for about eighteen years was a captive in England, or was led with the army of Henry V against his natural ally, Charles VII, the Dauphin of Jeanne d'Arc. The ransom demanded from James when released, in 1423, was ruinous; of his hostages, noblemen, some died in England; he found his country full of anarchy and treason; the disorders he suppressed with illegal vigour; he seized earldoms to which he had no right, he made powerful enemies, and, in 1437, he was slain by Robert Graeme and a band of Highlanders, at the Black Friars' in Perth. In England he had married Joan Beaufort, daughter of the Earl of Somerset, who lived to avenge him on his murderers with unheard-of cruelties.
When a man of James's intellect, character, and experiences writes a poem on his own taking at sea by faithless foes, his own long captivity, and his own love-story, we naturally expect something of poignant personal interest. But we expect what his time, his taste, and his rank forbade him to give. Never was poetical tradition so crushing to originality as the tradition of the "Roman de la Rose".
For centuries each mediaeval poet aimed at saying just what his forerunners had said, and in much the same style: Barbour, of course, is an exception; he does not open with a sleepless night; a book read in bed; a dream of a May morning; a walk to a pretty river, a palace near the river, and all the rest of it. Barbour writes "like a man of this world".
But King James follows the fashion of allegory. He cannot sleep; he reads Boëthius in bed, Boëthius "full of moralities". He lies thinking over his sorrows when (this is original), the bell for matins rings, and
Ay me thought the bell Said to me, tell on, man, quhat the befell.
He did not think that the Voice was a real Voice, "impression of my thought causes this illusion," said he, and though he had "spent much ink and paper to little effect," he sat down, made a mark of the cross, and set to work at his tale, first comparing his life to a ship in perilous seas, and then briefly mentioning his capture when about three years past the age of innocence (which was seven, he was, when taken, four years past seven). Birds, beasts, and fishes, he says, are free, why does Fortune make me thrall? He looks out of his window into a green garden; the nightingales sing; he sees, and describes very prettily, a fair lady walking with her two maidens, and falls in love. In all probability this is a mere imitation of the first sight of Emily by Palamon and Arcite, in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale". James would meet Jeanne in society: he was not a close prisoner, we are told that he knew many English ladies, and the course of his true love ran smooth enough. But the description is charming, as is the address to the nightingale which follows.
After this long and excellent passage of true poetry, fashion compels the King to visit the Palace of Venus and see the lovers of old times, converse with Venus and with Pallas, and visit Fortune with her Wheel, and take his place on it; then he awakes not "seeing all his own mischance". A white turtle-dove brings him flowers, and a glad message in letters of gold; and he blesses birds and flowers and even his prison wall, and
the sanctis marciall That me first causit hath this accident.
The poem ends with an invocation of the shades of his "masters dear," Gower and Chaucer.
The manuscript, of about 1488, ascribes the poem to King James, so does Major or Mair, a not too trustworthy historian. The language is northern English, mixed with Scots, with many borrowings from Chaucer. The story indicated is true of James and of no one else, but the usual attempt has been made to deprive him of the authorship--wholly without success. The measure is the "rhyme royal" of Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde". The scansion is remarkably correct, and the lines have a melody not common in the works of Chaucer's followers. There is a strong moral element in the reflection and discourses.
Henryson.
Not a King like James I, nor a courtier priest, like Dunbar, his junior, but a schoolmaster of the Benedictine Abbey-school at Dunfermline, Robert Henryson had, among Scottish poets of his day, the greatest share of the spirit of their master, Chaucer. He may be the Robert Henryson who, already a Bachelor of Arts, joined the University of Glasgow in 1462, but nothing is certainly known of him. He wrote his "Morall Fabillis of Esope"
by request and precept of a lord, Of whom the name it needs not record,
to he apparently had a patron destitute of vanity, and not ambitious of publicity. Henryson regarded Æsop, the mythical Greek slave, as "a noble Clerk," and made his own use of the tales of talking beasts, birds, and fishes, which are told among savages in most wild countries, and reached him, some of them by way of India, filtered through Latin, French, and English authors.
The animals are perfectly human in character, and give to Henryson, as later to Prior and La Fontaine, the opportunity to show his own wit, humour, and tolerant gentle nature. The tales are told in the seven line stanza, rhyme royal, of Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde". Even to-day they may be read with unfeigned pleasure, for their humorous and human studies of character, for their unostentatious pictures of nature, of the little nest of the field mouse, the moors, the stubble fields, the warm storeroom of the burgess's house, where the town mouse has her hole, and for the unaffected sympathy with our wild kindred of fur and feather. The chatter of the hens, the widows of Chanticleer, when the fox, who has claimed old family friendship with the cock, flatters his vanity and carries him away, is far more pleasing than Dunbar's satire on his revolting Widow and two married women. One hen, Pertok, makes bitter moan for the cock, the common husband of them all, but Sprutok declares her intention to sing, "Was never widow so gay"; she enumerates the faults of the dear deceased; Pertok comes into her way of thinking; and Toppok speaks of the faithlessness of their late Lord. Heaven has punished Chanticleer, who, after all, cheats the fox, and returns to his harem.
"The Two Mice" is especially humorous, and as sympathetic as Burns's poem "The Twa Dogs". The tale is so vivid that we feel the keenest anxiety when Gib, or Gilbert, "our Jolly Cat," pounces on the country mouse; the town mouse knows her hole, and has fled thither. The horror of the town mouse when she has rural dainties placed before her by the country mouse, her mincing airs of patronage, are delicately touched; in short, with the Fox's confession to the priestly Wolf, and the Trial of the Fox; and the strained law which the Wolf administers to the Lamb, the fables are animated and delightful poetry in their kind: the Morals, as when the hard lot of the poor husbandmen is described, are far from contemptible. Had Henryson left nothing else we must recognize in him a true son of Chaucer.
His "Testament of Cresseyde" begins from a bitter winter night, when alone and snug in his warm room, he mends the fire, takes a drink, lays down his Chaucer, and ends the tale of fair false Cresseyde, whom Chaucer pitied. Chaucer was not the man to have created, like Thackeray, that other Cresseyde, Beatrix Esmond in her matchless bloom of triumphant beauty, and later to have drawn her as the old Baroness Bernstein. What Chaucer held his hand from,--the mediaeval tale of the punishment of false Cresseyde,--Henryson, not without a passion of pity, undertook. The gods sent on Cresseyde's beauty the plague of leprosy, a terrible malady scarcely known by name to the Greeks, but as common in the Middle Ages as in ancient Israel.
Diomede deserts Cresseyde; she becomes the common "spoil of opportunity," and returns to her father Calchas, priest of Venus. But "into the Kirk" Cresseyde is ashamed to go. In a trance she comes into the presence of Saturn, a frozen god, and of the other old deities. Saturn then condemns her. The lady awakes and sees in her glass that she is a leper. She goes to the lazar-house, she dwells and begs with the lepers: Troilus rides past, and knows her not, but, in some faint way, memory of his love for Cresseyde wakes in him, and for his lost love's sake he gives to the leper lordly alms, "a purse of gold and many a gay jewel".
And nevertheless not are are uther knew.
But another leper recognized Troilus, and Cresseyde, smitten to the heart, made her moan and her Testament, leaving to Troilus the royal ring and red ruby that he had given her long ago. So she died, and Troilus raised a tomb of marble to
Cresseid of Troyis toun, Sumtyme countit the flour of Womanheid.
In the poem of this adventure there are but 616 lines; and it contains the poignant essence of romance; all passion and pity. Nothing in the poetry of Scotland excels, perhaps nothing but here and there the cry of a ballad, or of Scott's "Proud Maisie," approaches in excellence this work of the schoolmaster of Dunfermline.
His "Robene and Makyne," or love-dialogue between a lad and lass, the girl first wooing and repulsed; then wooed and scornful, is in a charming measure, and may have imitated some ancient French pastourelle.
The "Orpheus and Eurydice," that sad and beautiful tale--told by Maoris in New Zealand, and by Iroquois in America--of the man who seeks his dead wife in Hades, has merit in Henryson's version. The passage of Orpheus to and through Hades, where his music consoles Tantalus and Theseus, and wins the grace of Persephone, is excellent; the tragic close is not successfully handled, and the long Moral is tedious. A number of moral poems do not transcend the common course of those things, and Henryson lives by his "Fables," his "Testament of Cresseid," and "Robene and Makyne".
These, with the sympathetic kindliness of his unrepining nature place him, if an individual opinion may be given, high above his more famous contemporary, Dunbar.
Dunbar.
William Dunbar, whom Scott declared to be the greatest poet of Scotland prior to Robert Burns, took the degree of Bachelor of Arts at St. Andrews in 1477. Much later, lads of seventeen or even of fourteen, graduated, so Dunbar may have been born (in East Lothian) so early as 1460. His language, with some southern English tincture, is that of the most Anglicized part of Scotland. The Earls of Dunbar were a great shifting power on the Border, and Dunbar's name, at least, was noble, he may have come of Cospatrick's line (Earls of March).
A favourite Scottish form of verse was the "Flyting" (scolding) or humorous raillery, and Dunbar's opponent, Walter Kennedy, represented a very old Celtic clan of Galloway and Ayrshire: Dunbar banters him on his "Irish" dress and accent. Dunbar was brought up to be a Churchman, and was a novice in the Order of St. Francis, "begging with a pardon in all Kirks". From 1479 to 1491, he was travelling abroad, preaching and begging in France, far from honestly, he says:--
"I wes ay reddy all men to begyle," like Chaucer's Pardoner, but perhaps Dunbar was merely copying Chaucer. He is thought to have been attached to the Scottish Embassy in Paris, and he may have read, in print, the works of the famous burglar poet, Francois Villon. His recognized Masters, however, were Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate.
From 1500 to the great defeat of Flodden (1513) and the death of James IV, Dunbar was a priest and poet at the Court of that magnificent prince, in whose days Scotland was peaceful, comparatively rich, and addicted to letters and the arts. Her poets, a century after Chaucer, and eighty years after their Royal leader, James I, were all Chaucerians, but were confessedly more vigorous, tuneful, more original in genius, and much less prolix and pedantic than the English Chaucerians, Lydgate, Gower, and Hawes. But what Dunbar lacks in length, he more than makes up for in breadth. He made Court poems on the Royal marriage of "The Thistle and the Rose" (Margaret, the Rose, was really as prickly as the Thistle). He was but thriftily rewarded, and emitted many rhymed petitions for money. Benefice he got none.
Probably, like Dean Swift, he was thought no credit to his cloth, even in days far from respectable. As Chaucer was styled "Old Grizzle," so the Scot speaks of himself as "this gray horss, Auld Dunbar". At about 48, and in sickness, he wrote his "Lament for the Makaris," the dead "makers" or poets, including Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, with the recurring burden, Timor mortis conturbat me, "Fear of Death disturbeth me". In 1511 he was with the Queen at her reception in Aberdeen, which he celebrated, as he had already made immortal the filth and stench of Edinburgh, a town famous for its dirt till after Dr. Johnson's time. His humorous poems, his satires on society and clergy, are coarser than the English poetic attacks. His Three Wanton Wives, "Two Married Women and the Widow," is inspired by Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale," or rather by the prologue.
Historically, these poems are full of matter, with their pictures of a society not more pure than that to which Piers Plowman preached, but they have not the gentle and humane wit of Chaucer. Like all the poets following Chaucer, Dunbar shines in descriptions of gardens and woods in spring, though May, in Scotland, is not always what his fancy painted it, indeed these vernal glories are borrowed from the verse of sunny France--
The sun rises fair in France, And fair sets he, But he has tint the bonny blink He has in my ain countrie,
writes the Jacobite exile, accustomed at home, only to a "blink" or gleam of the sun through clouds. After 1520, or thereabouts, Dunbar saw no more of the sun.
Dunbar, with his satires, "flytings," Court poems, allegories of the usual kind, rhymed petitions, poems of penitence and faith, and the rest, was versatile enough, and wrote in many forms of verse, even in the old unrhymed alliterative cadences ("The tua Mariit Wumen and the Wedo"). To his glory be it said that this, his longest piece, is only of 530 lines. He also used the heroic rhymed couplet, "Riding Rhyme," and the rhymed octosyllabic couplet, strophes of various arrangements, and even the tripping French triolet.
One allegorical poem, "The Golden Targe," full of classical mythology and the usual praise of May, contains the lines
O reverend Chaucere, Rose of rethoris all, As in our tong are flour imperiall,
"rethoris," being masters of rhetoric.
Dunbar escapes from Venus and other gods, and from a crowd of allegorical people--including Danger, of course,--at the end of 278 lines. Apparently Scotland did not love the long-winded style. The "flyting" combines with rhyme copious alliteration.
For wealth of strange coarse terms of abuse Dunbar may compare with Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais. A poem to the young Queen is unspeakably nauseous. In short to be plain, it is not easy to see why Dunbar has been reckoned above James I and Henryson; while Barbour, with a chivalrous heart and a spirited story, is infinitely more agreeable and profitable than the Court-haunting priest of James IV. In Scotland, Dunbar at no time has been so popular as the poets already mentioned. He praises Chaucer, but the lesson of Chaucer he never fully learned.
Blind Harry.
Blind Harry, or "Henry the Minstrel," is a mysterious personage. Who was Harry? John Mair or Major (1469-1550) (?) is not an accurate historian; the Antiquary, in Scott's novel, calls him "a pillar of falsehood". Major says that, in his own infancy (say 1480) a man blind from his birth wrote "Schir William Wallace," and supported himself by chanting it to the nobles. The manuscript is of 1488. A few entries of small sums paid to "Blind Harry" occur in the Royal accounts, ending in 1492, and Harry was dead when (1508) Dunbar printed his Lament for poets dead and gone. Harry may have become blind, but can hardly have been blind from his birth. Though he calls himself "a borel man," an unlettered man, he had some education; he was not a ballad maker, but produced a romance of nearly 12,000 lines. He says that he had a Latin source, a narrative written by Wallace's chaplain, John Blair, of which nothing is known.
He is full of anachronisms, and tells long adventures of Wallace with Edward I and his Queen which never occurred. Tradition, already mythical, is his chief source, his Wallace is but little more historical than Grettir in the Icelandic Saga, and like him has dealings with a ghost, that of a slain man, which appears with its head in its hand. Wallace, whose wife, it is said, was slain by the English, is a very bloodthirsty hero; his manslayings and burnings of houses are many. Harry has not too high an opinion of Bruce. His hero, Wallace, has always been, thanks mainly to Harry, the most popular of Scottish heroes. Harry tells his tale with abundant energy; he hates the English infinitely more than the chivalrous Barbour did, and he is perfectly free from the influence of the "Roman de la Rose". His verse is not wholly correct; eight consecutive lines have the following rhymes,--"been, keen, saw, mean, seen, raw, knaw, teir, faw," indeed some passages have a kind of stanza formation, in the Second Book (lines 260-360).
We must not look on Harry as an unlearned maker of Border ballads. He had read Wyntoun, and Chaucer (though he does not make Chaucer his model), and he borrows from the alliterative romance of "Arthur" ascribed to the mysterious Huchown. Moreover, it has been proved, and anybody can see it, that he stole adventures of Robert Bruce from Barbour's poem, and made Wallace, not Bruce, their hero. Harry takes some of Bruce's battles and transfers them to Wallace. "Harry nearly uproots Barbour." Whereas Bruce, on the eve of Bannockburn, cut down Sir Henry Bohun, as he charged, with a blow of his axe, Harry declares that Wallace dealt this very stroke on Bruce's spear and horse's neck. To Wallace he attributes the famous campaign in which Bruce drove Edward II within the walls of York (1322).[1]
Harry is, in short, a mystery, and his book, wholly worthless as history, is a colossal perversion of Barbour "The Bruce," with other matter from pure fancy or from unknown legend, while great parts are played by men of Harry's own time, English in-evading knights of 1483.
The Buke of the Howlat.
Sir Richard Holland, or de Holand, a cleric, and a partisan of the House of Douglas during its encounters with the Crown, and its fall under James II, wrote, to please his patroness, the Countess of Moray, and to flatter the Douglas, "The Buke of the Howlat," the Owl. The poem, in stanzas of thirteen lines, rhyming and alliterative, begins with the usual dream and leads up to a kind of allegorical "Parliament of Fowls". The allegory is entangled, the poet's real desire is to glorify his patrons with their motto,
O Dowglas, O Dowglas, Tendir and Trewe!
"Trewe" they had been, to Bruce and to Scotland, but they became the allies, against king and country, of Edward IV and Henry VIII, while "tender" the Douglases never were. The most interesting passage describes the voyage of the good Lord James towards the Holy Land, with the heart of Bruce. In Spain he meets the Saracens in battle, and throws among them the Heart, in its jewelled case--
Amang the hethin men the hert hardely he slang, Said, "Wend on as thou was wont, Throw the batell in front, Ay formost in the front, Thy foes amang."
There fell the Douglas, above the heart of his king, that was rescued by Logan and Lockhart, and brought back to Scotland; a noble feat of chivalry, nobly told. Here Holland "stirs the blood like the sound of a trumpet".
It may be said of these Scottish poets that while, in initiative and in models they owe almost all to England, their long and desperate war with that country gives them a martial fire and spirit to which the English poetry of the time furnishes no rival. Laurence Minot does not stir the blood!
Gawain Douglas.
Gawain Douglas was of the family of the Red Douglases, Earls of Angus, who rose on the ruin of the turbulent Black Douglases, of the House of Bruce's good Lord James, when they failed in their alliance with England against the Crown of Scotland. The Red Douglases also rose high, and had their own feud with the Crown and alliance with or servitude to Henry VIII and the Protestant cause. Gawain was a younger son of the Earl of Angus called Bell the Cat, who hanged the artistic favourites of James III. As an old man he was present at Flodden (1513) where James IV died so gallantly, and his grandson, now Earl of Angus, married Dunbar's "Rose," Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV. Gawain himself, born about 1473 or 1474, was educated at St. Andrews University, took orders, and, being of a powerful House, received rapid clerical promotion.
His poems were written in the peaceful and prosperous years of James IV, between 1501 and 1513, the date of Flodden and of the completion of Gawain's translation of the "Æneid" of Virgil. His earlier works "The Palice of Honour" and "King Hart," are merely rhymed allegories after the manner of the unceasing "Roman de la Rose," and have no special interest. What is true about one of these belated last allegories is true of another: they are no longer to be read for mere literary pleasure. In his "Æneid," Douglas introduces original prologues to the books of the "Æneid," rather in the manner of Scott's poetical epistles between the cantos of "Marmion". He describes winter, spring, and summer in Scotland. He criticizes, not unfavourably, the theology of Virgil, whom the Middle Ages regarded, now as a magician (like Ovid among the Italian peasantry to this day), and now as an inspired prophet of the coming of Our Lord. He attacks Caxton for printing a translation of Virgil, not from the original Latin, but from a French version. His criticism of Caxton is full of detail, and severe. He himself is "bound to Virgil's text," and he does not treat it, as a rule, with the licence of Chapman when rendering Homer into English verse; but Gawain remarks, truly, that sometimes of one word he must make three, must occasionally expand in exposition, and add, in colouring.
Sum tyme I follow the text als neir I may, Sum tyme I am constreinit are uther way.
His remarks on the task of the translator show considerable reflection. On comparing the poem with the Latin it seems more close in sense to the great untranslatable original than might have been expected in an uncritical age and country. It is the first attempt in our language at the rendering of a great ancient classic, and, as such, looks forward to the new times, and to the Renaissance which, in Scotland, was mainly confined to Biblical criticism.
After Flodden, Gawain was immersed in politics, and in a long and futile struggle to obtain, through English influence, the Archbishopric of St. Andrews. For this he fought a triangular duel (nor were the weapons of the flesh unused), with Hepburn, the Prior, and Forman, a clerical diplomatist, who was successful. Gawain obtained the petty Bishopric of Dunkeld, on the Tay, and died when on a political mission to London (1522). Gawain is almost the only Scottish example of a nobleman and a Churchman, in his age, distinguished for devotion to literary scholarship. There are a number of Scots poems, of this date, such as "Christ's Kirk on the Green" and "Peebles at the Play" (the best of them), which show much command of lively metre and rude descriptive powers where rustic merriment and horseplay are to be painted. But their dialect is usually uncouth, and they are only appreciated by special students.
Sir David Lyndsay.
The most popular of the old Scottish poets was not so poetical as Henryson, but gave pleasure by his genial character, his extremely coarse humour, and his attacks on the Churchmen and on abuses in the State. This author, Sir David Lyndsay, was born, perhaps at his family place, the Mount, in Fife, about 1490. His name "Da. Lyndsay" (if it be his) appears in the register of St. Andrews University besides that of the man whom he hated so much, and attacked in verse after his murder, the great Cardinal Beaton. By 1511, Lyndsay was a page at Court, and acted in a play at Holyrood. In 1512, Lyndsay was Master of the Household, or chief attendant of the infant Prince, later James V. He was present when the apparition described in "Marmion" gave a warning, in church, to James IV, just before Flodden, and told Lyndsay of Pitscottie, the amusing chronicler, that he tried to arrest the figure "but he vanished away as if he had been a blink of the sun or a whiz of the whirlwind". Till 1522 his chief business was to teach and amuse the boy, James V;
I bore thee in mine arm Full tenderly,
and, later, told him fairy tales such as the story of the Red Etin, or disguised himself as "the grisly ghost of Guy".
About 1528 Lyndsay wrote "The Dreame" (the usual allegorical dream), in 1529 he was made chief herald, "Lord Lyon King of Arms," and as such went on many foreign embassies. In 1539-1540 his great play, "The Satire of the Three Estates," was acted before the Court; it is the only early Scottish drama that survives. There are two Parts, and three interludes full of matter wonderfully coarse. The play is all in favour of reforms, and is full of the satire of the Churchmen and pleadings for the poor which ensured its popularity. There are some seventy characters, most of them allegorical personages. The King delighted in the satire, and as Lyndsay attacked the vices of the clergy and the Pardoners, not the doctrines of the Church, he ran no risk of martyrdom. The verse is in many forms and different sorts of stanzas, in rhyming couplets of eight syllables, or of ten or more.
After James's death and the murder of Cardinal Beaton, Lyndsay wrote a poem, "The Tragedy of the Cardinal" in which his ghost accuses himself of many sins and crimes, and is sure that Boccaccio would write "my tragedie," if Boccaccio were still alive. Lyndsay died early in 1555. His most popular poem, probably, was a good-humoured romance, "Squire Meldrum," about the fighting adventures, at home and abroad, of a young Fife laird of the period. He wrote many other things, humorous or grave, admonitions to the King, and a reply to a "Flyting" or scolding, of the King against him, in verse; unluckily the Royal lampoon is lost. A Lament for James's first wife who died young; a very humorous set of verses on the King's dog; and a "Dialogue between Experience and a Courtier," with shorter pieces, grave or gay, make up Lyndsay's contribution to the literature of his country. They are full of historical hints, but, merely as poetry, are now seldom read, as Henryson may be read, for pleasure. The Reformation, breaking out in 1559, distracted men's minds from secular literature, to which, for more than a century, Scotland contributed nothing of real importance except the "History of the Reformation" by John Knox, the Reformer. This work is written in such English (not Scots) as Knox could command, for in origin it was meant to be read in England, and to justify the proceedings of the Reformers. It is partly derived from memory of the events and the memory is sometimes strangely inaccurate. Public documents are inserted at full length, in one case with some lack of candour, and actions are denied which, later, were acknowledged. The book, as history, needs to be cautiously studied, but as a picture of the men and women of the age, especially of Knox himself and Queen Mary, it is most vivacious, and may be read with interest and amusement. Knox's other works, theological, epistolary, and political, were written to meet the needs of the moment, and are of little value except to historians and students of the career and character of the author.
[1] See proofs by Mr. George Neilson, in Blind Harry's "Wallace," "Essays and Studies," by Members of the English Association, 1910.
XV. POPULAR POETRY. BALLADS
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in England and Scotland were rich in popular poetry and in ballads. We must define the meaning of "popular" and "ballad" poetry, as used in this chapter.
Much confusion and much controversy exist regarding this matter of ballads and popular poetry. To understand the subject it is necessary to be acquainted with the results of research in the orally transmitted verse of peoples in every stage of culture; for till elementary instruction in reading and writing become universal, the untaught rural classes retain, in their songs, the literary methods of the quite uncivilized races of Australia, North America, Africa, and so on.
Taking the, peoples lowest in civilization, we find that the Australian blacks and the American Red Indians have several kinds of songs, usually sung in dances, whether festive or religious or magical. They have magic chants, and even hymns, often unintelligible to those who sing them in the dance, either because the language is obsolete, or because the songs have been borrowed from tribes of alien speech. It is clear that in Europe, too, the ballad was originally a dancing song ("ballad" is from ballare, to dance), and where a story was told, that was given in recitative, while the dancers followed each line of narrative with a chorus or refrain, such as
There were three ladies lived in a bower, Oh wow! bonnie. And they went out to pu' a flower On the bonnie banks o' Fordie.
The story told in the recitative, in surviving examples, was probably, at first, composed by one author, versifying a popular tale, of unknown antiquity, or narrating some recent event. Even now in the remoter isles of the Hebrides, various singers, each in turn, improvise and chant verses, and thus a kind of ballad is made collectively. But it is plain that for each of our oldest surviving narrative ballads there must have been one original author, whether his theme was an old story or a recent occurrence,--on the Borders usually a cattle raid, the escape of a prisoner, or a battle. There would be no professional poet, as Queen Mary's ally, Bishop Leslie of Ross tells us, in his "History of Scotland," "the Borderers themselves make their own ballads, about the deeds of their ancestors, or crafty raids or forays". Such unwritten songs would be altered by every singer, as time went by, so that these ballads as they stand are thoroughly popular and "masterless," many hands have combined to bring them into their present state.
The Robin Hood ballads, or songs about Robin Hood, are mentioned by Piers Plowman as popular among the peasants at the end of the fourteenth century. They would be sung in connexion with the very ancient festivities of May Day, held in England and Scotland, when money was collected, rather roughly, from spectators and passers-by. Now Wynkyn de Worde, the successor of Caxton as a printer, published a "Lytil Geste" of Robin Hood (about 1490). But we are not obliged to suppose that the songs known to Piers Plowman were borrowed from the "long Geste" of Robin Hood; more probably the "Geste" was derived from the popular traditions and rhymes of the May Day show of Robin Hood. How far these ballads as they now exist have been organized and improved upon by a professional minstrel it is hard to say. In any case the older ballads are worthy of merry England.
The ballads of King Arthur are manifestly popularized and reduced to the simple ballad form from the long literary romances, and are probably the work of lowly professional minstrels.
The long ballad of "Flodden Field" is the work of a partisan of the Stanley family, it is far too long (over 500 lines), and too full of historical detail, for a ballad made by the Borderers themselves. "Scottish Field" (Flodden) is another piece of the same sort, in alliterative measure.
The class of ballad which was made as a narrative of current events, or a satire on contemporaries (of such ballad-satires Henry VIII complained to James V) was usually, in England, the work of a versifying journalist of the humblest sort, and was printed. John Knox tells us that ballads were made on Queen Mary's Four Maries (Mary Livingstone, Mary Fleming, Mary Beaton and Mary Seaton), and these, it is plain, were satirical. But the only survivor of these ballads, "Mary Hamilton," is romantic, and in all its many various forms transfers, to a non-existent Mary, the misfortunes of a French waiting-maid of the Queen, who, with her lover, an apothecary, was hanged for the murder of their child. In only one text is the lover an apothecary: the lady is sometimes not an apocryphal Hamilton, but a Campbell, daughter of the Duke of Argyll; or a daughter of the Duke of York, or even "Mary Mild" (or Mile) which is the name of our Lady in old carols. For the lover, the poet chooses Henry Darnley, husband of Queen Mary, or that old offender, "Sweet Willie," or any one; and this is a good example of the changes which popular ballads underwent in recitation. As they stand, the multitude has collaborated in them, reciters have altered the original in many ways.
Such ballads differ much from "Lady Bessy," with its 1080 lines, probably written by Humphrey Brereton in honour of the House of Stanley and of Lady Bessie's revenge on Richard III. Some verses are as spirited as those of "Kinmont Willie," a Border ballad to which Scott lent the vigour of the last and greatest of the Border makers, for probably the finest verses in the song are by Sir Walter himself: at all events he improved what old verses he found.
At Bosworth Field, when all is lost, Sir William Harrington says to Richard III:--
"There may no man their strokes abide, The Stanleys' dints they be so strong, Ye may come in another time; Therefore methink ye tarry too long."
As lion-hearted as his namesake Richard I, Richard III replies:--
"Give me my battle-axe in my hand, And set my crown on my head so high, For by Him that made both sea and land, King of England will I this day die.
"One foot of ground I will not flee While the strength abides my breast within," As he said so did it be, If he lost his life he died a king.
The early history of our purely romantic ballads, such as "Clerk Sanders," "The Douglas Tragedy," "The Dowie Dens o' Yarrow," "Young Beichan," "The Wife of Usher's Well," "Fair Annie," "Tamlane," and many more, is obscure. They have analogues in all European countries, from Greece to Scandinavia, and in popular tales, the oldest things in literature. Their extraordinary charm, their touch of supernatural terror, their simplicity, their recurring formulæ of words, their brevity and pathos, make them things apart. The heart of humanity is their maker, though in each country where they exist local allusions and local colour have been given to them by the singers. When such ballads have been worked over by some hack of the early Press they are often worthless; the best have been collected from oral recitation, or old written copies.
There can be no universal theory of the origin of ballads; each ballad must be examined by itself before we can say whether it is a popularized shape of a literary romance, or a versified "Märchen" worked over by many hands in many ages, or a mere mythical news-letter, like "King James and Brown"; or the work, like "Otterburne," of a humbler poet than the minstrels of the Stanleys, but a better poet; or one whose work has been improved by the modifications of later singers; or whether the thing is a dance song, contributed to by each dancer in turn; or a brief and beautiful lament like "The Bonny Earl o' Murray". The best traditional ballads have the colour and fragrance of wild flowers.
Curious and very ancient traits of popular usages may be gathered from the songs of merrymaking, for example in the songs of Ivy, the badge of the women, and of Holly, the badge of the men. Girls and lads bring ivy and holly into halls and a fight ensues, the girls are thrust out into the cold.
"Nay, nay Ivy it may not be, I wis, For Holly must have mastery, as the manner is."
The girls burned the "Holly boy" of the men, the men burned the "Ivy maid" of the girls. This ancient feud of the sexes, and of their patron birds, exists among the tribes of South-Eastern Australia, the men killing the bird of the women, the women the bird of the men, and an amorous kind of combat follows.
The old ballad of "Chevy Chace," a form of the older ballad on the battle of Otterburn (1388) was warmly praised by Sir Philip Sidney. Later Addison took delight in ballads: they began to be collected and printed in volumes towards the end of the seventeenth and early in the eighteenth century. In 1765 Bishop Percy printed many ballads and other early poems from a manuscript, the "Folio" which he found, tattered and mutilated, in the house of a friend. Percy, in his "Reliques," omitted, altered and modernized the contents of the Folio, but it was very popular. In 1803 and later Sir Walter Scott published "The Border Minstrelsy," containing many excellent old ballads, in places modified by himself, from manuscripts, recitations, and printed copies. It is in "The Minstrelsy" that we find the "classical" versions of the ballads; there are many other collections.
We have put into smaller type a short account of the probable origins and development of the ballad, because a study of these subjects is mainly based on folk-lore and on research into the unwritten poetry of backward races. The reader of poetry who is not concerned about an obscure and difficult subject, is best advised if he takes up Scott's "Border Minstrelsy" and reads it "for human pleasure". He will find endless variety of strong, simple, passionate poetry, seldom made difficult by obsolete words, for the ballads are, however old, far less Scots in language than the poems of Burns. Another good collection is the abridgement by Professor Kittredge, of the late Professor Child's vast collection of ballads in five volumes, a work indispensable to the special student.
Though it is not a ballad, the most beautiful and loyal piece of masterless poetry of this age is "The Nut Brown Maid," already old when it was published in 1502. This is a defence of woman's faithfulness in love, the maid will follow her outlawed lover to the greenwood, ay, even if he have another lady there. Her lover replies:--
Lo yet, before, ye must do more, Yf ye wyll go with me: As cut your here up by your ere, Your kyrtel by the kne; With bowe in hande, for to withstande Your enemyes, yf nede be.
Scott's song, "Greta Banks," in "Rokeby," repeats the sentiment and metre of this beautiful poem, with its music and mastery of changing refrains and various measures. Some of the carols too, such as "I sing of a Maid," are the earliest notes in the bird-like music of the lyrists under Elizabeth and Charles I.
PROFESSIONAL POETRY.
Skelton. Barclay.
Meanwhile professional poetry of society and the Court was sinking to the lowest depth. The verse of the prolific priest and scholar, John Skelton (born 1460? died 1529?), leads nowhere, and though it is full of historical and personal interest, must not detain us. Skelton had honours of a sort, as Laureate, from Oxford, Cambridge, and Louvain. He translated parts of Cicero and other classics, and, in 1500, was highly praised by the famous Erasmus, who later brought the study of the New Testament in Greek to England, and was the wittiest of scholars in the Revival of Learning and of Greek literature. Skelton had Latin enough, of Greek not much, and about 1500 was tutor of the future Henry VIII. His profuse poetry is mainly in long but lively stretches of doggerel; very short rhyming verses, generally satirical, poured from him ceaselessly. He had a "flyting" or scolding match like that of Dunbar and Kennedy, with Sir Christopher Garnesche; he lamented at terrible length the death of "Philip Sparrow," slain by "our Cat Gib"--nothing can be less like Catullus's dirge for Lesbia's sparrow, but some graceful compliments to young ladies are intermixed with the doggerel. He owed the Rectory of Diss, Norfolk, probably to his patron, Wolsey, but for some unknown reason he later pursued Wolsey with libellous satires.
In "The Bowge of Court," when he relapses into stanzas and the outworn allegorical verbiage, he satirizes Court life. In "Colyn Clout," his hero is a tramp, as vehement in attack on all sorts and conditions of men as Piers Plowman. Wolsey was attacked as a despot in "Colyn Clout," and much more bitterly assailed in "Why come ye not to Court": after writing this piece Skelton fled from his foes and creditors to sanctuary in Westminster. He wrote a long "Morality," "Magnificence," with the usual personified vices and virtues. In very bad taste he hurled doggerel at "King Jimmy," James IV, after his glorious death at Flodden, and, more deservedly, attacked the Scots who deserted the Duke of Albany and the French when the Duke wished to lead them across the Tweed.
A brief sample of Skelton when most Skeltonical is his reply to the alleged boast of the Scots that they won the battle of Flodden.
That is as true As black is blue And green is grey Whatever they say Jemmy is dead And closed in lead, That was their own king: Fie on that winning!
Even in his own country, as he admits, the execrable taste of Skelton was reproved. He had a rude kind of vigour, but his verses make it manifest that a new strain of blood, as it were, was needed in English poetry: old forms, such as the allegorical form, were outworn quite, and verse resembling the poem of Aramis, in lines of one syllable, could not endure, while Skelton's "Crown of Laurel" mixes his own blusterous humour with the stale learning, and pompous allegory of the fifteenth century; and "The Tunning of Eleanor Rummyng" (an ale-wife), in doggerel, is as offensive as the Scottish song, "There was a haggis in Dunbar," and extends to 620 lines. Very truly quoth Skelton:--
I have written too mytche Of this mad mummynge Of Elynour Rummynge.
Barclay.
Alexander Barclay (died 1552) was probably not a Scot, though his name is spelt in the Scots not the English way (Berkeley). His high praises of James IV of Scotland, however, scarcely indicate an English author, and he was very early regarded as a Scot. He was a priest, a monk of Ely; he dwelt long at St. Mary Ottery in Devon, and was a copious translator. His "Ship of Fools" (1508-1509) is from the German "Narrenschiff" of Sebastian Brandt: his "Castle of Labour," from the French of Gringore was an earlier work. His "Eclogues," in part translated, are very unlike those of Virgil, and their contents are growls in the style of "Colyn Clout".
Barclay used French and Latin versions of the "Narrenschiff," as well as the original "Dutch". He altered and added to his original as he pleased, and he prolongs the cry against abuses raised by Piers Plowman. A writer who takes all follies and vices for his theme, from the frauds of friars, the wickedness of heretics, the oppressions of knights, to the peevishness of the patient who kicks over the table on which the physic bottles stand, can never want matter, and Barclay's matter is exceeding abundant.
But the clever contemporary woodcuts that illustrate his satire are better than his two thousand irregular stanzas in rhyme royal, and if Barclay quarrelled with Skelton the affair is like a feud between Bavius and Maevius. The two writers are characteristic of their rude and chaotic age, which, as regards all but popular poetry, was the dark hour before the dawn.
XVI. RISE OF THE DRAMA
In one shape or another, the drama, acting with or without written words, is always in existence, at least in the form of pantomime, even among the rudest peoples. The Church permitted a kind of half-ritual, half-dramatic representation of sacred scenes at a very early period: but we have no earlier relic of English written plays than the very brief "Harrowing of Hell" of the first half of the fourteenth century. There are a few speeches between our Lord and Satan, and our Lord and the released Hebrew patriarchs. A good idea of the plays of the fifteenth century may be obtained from the set called the "Townley Plays" because the manuscript belonged at one time to the old Jacobite family of Townley. It is thought to have been originally the property of the Abbey of Woodkirk or Widkirk near Wakefield, and one play, the second play representing the Shepherds at the birth of Christ, contains allusions to the country scenes near Woodkirk. The plays were acted on movable wooden stages, by the members of the various trade guilds, such as the Glovers, the Barkers (Tanners, "There is brass on the target of barkened bull's hide," says Scott in "Bonnie Dundee"), the Grocers, and so forth.
The plays of one town are sometimes the basis of the plays of another town, some of those of York follow those of Wakefield, and in places Wakefield borrows from York. The authors are unknown; if they were priests, these clerics had much more of broad humour than of reverence as we understand it. No doubt the plays informed the spectators on points of the scriptural story, but the religion was highly recreative. Nothing can have been more amusing to the crowd than the spectacle of their neighbours playing all manner of highly laughable pranks by way of illustrating the gross, grumbling, reckless, impudent Cain; or the rustic waggeries of the local shepherds of Bethlehem. Even now the words of the plays make a man laugh aloud, in the comic parts, as he reads them. They are of the broadest farce, yet our mirth rises more from the character displayed than from mere practical buffoonery and clowning. The Tanners enacted the "Creation"; the Glovers, the "Death of Abel". Many Old Testament stories were played, the unaccomplished Sacrifice of Isaac, the story of Abraham, and so on, with the Birth, Crucifixion, and Ascension of our Lord, and the soliloquy and suicide of Judas, a fragment.
Whoever the authors may have been, they took pains to represent the most unearthly characters as very human, though the opening soliloquy of the Deity at the Creation is orthodox and majestic. The Cherubim then take up the tale, praising the Works, especially praising Lucifer, "He is so lovely and so bright!" Lucifer enters and, accepting the praise, proposes to be Lord of all and says that the Throne becomes him rarely, taking his seat on it! The bad Angels approve in the most colloquial style; the good dissent, and the bad, sent down below, express their lively regrets.
The slaying of Abel is introduced by Garcio, not a scriptural character, in an impudent speech; and then Cain enters, ploughing, cursing his horses, and wrangling with his boy, who offers to fight him. Abel enters, full of human kindness, but Cain insults him in the coarsest rustic manner, "Go to the Devil and say I bade". Abel insists that Cain should offer a burnt-sacrifice of a tenth of his corn, but Cain loves paying tithes no more than any other farmer. He grumbles in the true natural tone of the depressed agriculturist,
When all men's com was fair in field, There was mine not worth a held.
The weather is such, says Cain, that the farmer owes no gratitude to providence, no tithes. He selects his worst sheaves, as pay tithe he must. The Deity intervenes, but Cain treats him with the most serene insolence, kills the remonstrating Abel with the jaw-bone of some animal, and, in short, is no more edifying than Mr. Punch, whose lawless and irreverent behaviour in the popular street drama is a survival of the humour of Cain.
The "Rejoicing of the Shepherds," the second play, is much more human and various: the shepherds are full of the complaints of their condition with which Piers Plowman has made us familiar, but the provisions at their picnic are rich and various, and the adventure of Mak, the sheep stealer, is of the best comedy. Hospitably entertained by the shepherds, Mak steals a sheep, flays it, and takes it home to his wife. They put it in a cradle, and cover it with blankets, next Mak hies to the shepherds again, grumbling that his wife has a new baby. They suspect and follow him; he denies his theft, and will eat the child in the cradle, if the sheep can be found on his premises. It is found. This child, says a shepherd, has too long a snout. Mrs. Mak, with much presence of mind, admits the fact, but declares that her child is a fairy changeling: fairies stole the baby at midnight, and left this ugly substitute. The shepherds forgive Mak, for the joke's sake, after tossing him in a sheet.
The same story is told of Archy Armstrong, the border reiver and jester. When the shepherds go back to their flocks, the Angel sings Gloria in excelsis; and the shepherds criticize the music learnedly, "there was no crochet wrong," and imitate the air. The sacred part of the play, the Adoration, and offering of balls and toys to the new-born babe, is very brief. The play is a most humorous and lively representation of "our liberal shepherds," the sacred narrative merely affords a pretext for the gambol. England was merry England in the fifteenth century, in spite of defeats in France, murder and civil war at home, preachings and burnings of Lollards, and all the grievances of Piers Plowman, the cruelty of the great, and the greed and cunning of the Friars.
The play of "Lazarus," on the other hand, is not only solemn, closely following the words of the Gospel, but is as full as the Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Grave," of sepulchral horrors.
Of the costumes we may judge by that of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, in "The Digby Plays"--the Apostle is "dressed like an adventurous knight," and is mounted. In place of scene-shifting the audience shifted from one open-air stage in the street to another. There were dances between the scenes. Paul's servant has a scene of banter with an ostler. He maintains that he is a gentleman's servant, a superior person. Says the ostler: "I saw such another gentleman with you, a barrowful he bare of horse dung... and such other gear".
There are forty characters and a crowd in the play of "Mary Magdalene," and much skill in stage management must have been needed. In this play of more than two thousand lines allegorical characters abound, including the Seven Deadly Sins; much of the Gospel story of the Magdalene is introduced, with lively scenes from the unconverted career of the Lady of the Castle of Magdala, and there is a long passage of sheer romance; we have a storm at sea; the abandonment of the King's wife and child on a rock; their discovery later, alive and well--in fact the story is akin to that in Shakespeare's "Pericles".
We see that the secular entertainment, the drama of romance, is ousting its religious occasion and pretext. In "Mary Magdalene," too, we observe that the "Miracle Play" on sacred subjects, is combined with the "Morality," the drama with allegorical characters (as in the "Romance of the Rose"), presented in flesh and blood, and therefore more entertaining than they are in the endless allegorical poems. The Morality of "Everyman" has been revived with much success in our own time. In all these plays the verse takes many rhyming forms, mainly lyric. The chief collections are the Townley, York, Chester, Digby, Coventry, and a Macro (named from an owner of the manuscript). In the Macro play, "Mankind," the actors make collections of money from the audience: they must have belonged to a professional strolling company, not to an honourable and disinterested trading guild. The piece is a gross burlesque of morality, full of blatant jests and dog-Latin rhymes.
There is a scientific Morality, an "Interlude," "The Four Elements," in which Nature, Humanity, Studious Desire, Sensual Appetite, Experience, and Ignorance play their parts. Much novel information about the dimensions of the earth and meteorology is given; Studious Desire is an apt pupil, but Sensual Appetite and the Taverner offer instruction more palatable to "the Man in the Street". They introduce
little Nell A proper wench, she danceth well, And Jane with the black lace, We will have bouncing Bess also.
and Humanity slinks out of the lecture room, being more concerned
to see a pretty girl, It is a world to see her whirl Dancing in a round,
than to observe the gyrations of the terrestrial globe.
In "Hickscorner," an interlude of the same kind, the hero has been in as many places as Widsith himself, including
the land of Rumbelow Three mile out of hell.
Hickscorner and Free Will are worse roisterers than Humanity, and their rude waggeries make the mirth, though Free Will speaks of forswearing sack and living cleanly.
Heywood.
John Heywood is one of the few known authors of these things; he was of what is now Pembroke College, Dr. Johnson's College, in Oxford, and was an acquaintance of Sir Thomas More, who frankly admits that by nature he was "a giglot," a gay fellow, though, by grace, devout. Heywood was merry in mournful times, when Henry VIII began to make martyrs of Protestants, and of Catholics who were not, at any moment, of the same shade of belief as himself. The anecdotes say that Heywood saved his skin by his jests, that after Henry's death he amused Mary Tudor, who was not easily amused, and that he fled from persecution under Edward VI, and died abroad in the reign of Elizabeth.
His best-known piece is "The Four P's," a Pothecary, Pardoner, Palmer, and Pedlar. Why, asks the Pardoner, should the Palmer visit hundreds of remote shrines, while the Pardoner, at his very door, can sell him forgiveness of sins at the lowest figure? He can cleanse a thousand souls for as small a sum as the Palmer spends on one voyage. All four men are impudent rogues, and all, in the spirit of the Morality, are rapidly converted; the Pedlar becoming as pious as Piers Plowman. There is no action, and the great jest is that, in a lying competition, the Pedlar says that he has never seen "a woman out of patience". The diversion must have been derived mainly from the antics of the players on the stage.
Heywood's "Thersites" (the impudent orator in the "Iliad") was written about 1537, to make mirth for the birth feast of the Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward VI. Thersites asks Mulciber (Hephæstus) to make him a helmet (sallet) as he made the arms of Achilles. This enables Mulciber to vent many puns on salad; they look like the very first puns ever devised, and occupy two pages. The pun seems to have been a novelty in Tudor England. Thersites is a rough-hewn predecessor of Shakespeare's Pistol. There is much mockery of sacred relics and some buffoonery by way of action. Telemachus brings a letter from Ulysses (such a thing, said J. J. Rousseau, very foolishly, would have been useful in the "Odyssey") and Miles, the Knight, ends all with a pious speech.
In early Tudor England the drama had sunk many fathoms below the level of the Miracle Plays, such as that of the Shepherds. The rise of the drama, under Elizabeth, is a kind of miracle, like the sculpture of Phidias appearing after the rude art of the artists who worked at Athens before the victories of Marathon and Salamis.
In "Jack Juggler," however, we find the influence of Roman comedy faintly dawning, for the play is Plautus's comedy of "Amphitryon," "without Amphitryon," the hero, and with the mischievous and much-beaten Jack Juggler as the source of the fun.
The infant drama had wandered out of Biblical and allegorical subjects into touch with actual ancient Roman comedy, and, with Bale's "King John," was preluding to Shakespeare's Chronicle Plays. In the dawn of the Reformation, disputants on both sides addressed the people in Interludes, just as to-day a person "with a purpose" puts it into a novel, in place of writing a sober and reasonable treatise which would not be read. Among the plays with a purpose none is more absurd than the "King John" of John Bale (1495-1563). Bale, whose best work is a kind of history of English literature in Latin, was a fiery hot gospeller; he had to leave the country under Mary Tudor. In "King John" that profane and licentious but astute prince appears as a kind of Protestant martyr. Attacked by Stephen Langton, he says that the Church hates him because he does not found abbeys, and is in favour of an open Bible. So he is poisoned by the wicked priests!
In the interests of History no less than of her Church, Queen Mary issued proclamations against plays with a Protestant purpose, while Elizabeth was equally severe against Catholic Interludes.
We must think of these Interludes, whether moral, religious, scientific, or amusing, being played from the reign of Henry VIII till the middle of the reign of Elizabeth. Till 1575 or 1576 there were no theatre-houses; stages were erected in halls of palaces, castles, colleges, and in open spaces of towns. The King or Queen had Interlude players in their service, as they had musicians. Companies calling themselves "the Servants," and wearing the liveries of nobles and gentlemen, strolled about the country, protected by their more or less nominal masters, and supporting themselves by their skill in their profession. The "children," that is the boys, of various schools, especially of St. Paul's, acted under the managership of their teachers. The undergraduates of the Universities also acted, at first in Latin, before Queen Elizabeth, who did not conceal her distaste for what did not amuse her. The language of the plays was cast into all sorts of rhyming measures, and "the Vice" or lively buffoon of the Interludes was the germ of the Shakespearean Clown. There was abundance both of writers and players, but the plays had little merit as literature.
Ralph Roister Doister.
Among the unforgotten of these dwellers on the threshold of the Elizabethan drama is "Ralph Roister Doister," by Nicholas Udall (1505-1556) (of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, later headmaster of Eton, and next of Westminster; he died in the reign of Mary Tudor). The Vice, so to speak, or clever buffooning parasite, of the piece is Matthew Merrygreek, who in a long rhyming prologue describes his own way of life and his intention to befool the braggart Ralph Roister Doister. Ralph enters melancholy, he is in love: he has met the lady at supper, but forgets her name. She is rich (says Matthew), a widow, and betrothed to another man. Ralph is a fatuous ass, like Malvolio, and thinks all women in love with him. Merrygreek fools him to the top of his bent, and presents the lady with a forged love-letter from Ralph, who is drubbed by the maid-servants and generally disgraced, while the true love of the heroine returns from a voyage to be happy with her. There is plenty of noise, singing, and beating, and some intrigue in the case of the genuine wooer and his suspicious jealousy.
Gammer Gurton's Needle.
The equally renowned "Gammer Gurton's Needle," was acted sixteen years after "Ralph Roister Doister," at Christ's College, Cambridge. It is usually attributed to John Still (born 1543) a member of Christ's, Master of Arts in 1565, and later Master of that College, Vice-Chancellor of the University, and finally Bishop of Bath and Wells (died 1608). As Vice-Chancellor, Still was a stickler for Latin plays at Cambridge, which were more educational but not so popular as dramas in English. The plot turns on the loss of a needle by old Gammer Gurton, the suspicion, raised by a wag, that another old woman has stolen it; the search for the needle; combats about the needle, and the final discovery of that implement in the seat of a man's breeches. A sturdy beggar, Diccon, is "the Vice," and sets Gammer Gurton and another gammer to a scolding match. Hodge, a servant, with his broad dialect, and insistent demand for the needle, that a large and unseemly hole which ventilates his breeches may instantly be patched, has perhaps the most comic part, and when somebody slaps Hodge and drives the needle (which had stuck in his breeches), into a safe part of his person, the joy of a Cambridge audience knew no limits. The play is thoroughly rustic, the language is of an amazing breadth, and no doubt the drama made abundant mirth among the Cantab wits. Members of the sister University, where poets have been rare in comparison with these glories of Cambridge, need not covet Still, unless he wrote the famous drinking song in the Second Act, "Back and Side go bare, go bare!"
The Bishop of Bath and Wells probably looked back with mingled feelings on the jolly, noisy achievement of his youth, which has made him immortal, for all have heard of "Gammer Gurton's Needle". It is written in rhyming lines of from fourteen to sixteen syllables.
"Gorboduc."
"The Gammer," though low, is lively; not so is "Gorboduc"; it is a tragedy of unspeakable dullness composed in blank verse which has no merit except that of regularity, the sense usually, though not always, ending at the close of each line. The author, Thomas Sackville, later Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset, and High Treasurer under James VI and I, was born at Buckhurst, Sussex, in 1536. His grandmother was aunt of Anne Boleyn, so he was a second cousin of Queen Elizabeth. At the Inner Temple, as a young man, he met Thomas Norton, and the pair composed "Gorboduc," which was acted in the Inner Temple in 1561. The authors were inspired by no other Muse than that of Seneca, the moral philosopher, Roman tragedian, and tutor of the Emperor Nero. The play tells how Gorboduc, a mythical King of Britain, abdicated, and, dividing his realm into two parts, gave the country north of the Humber to the younger, and the portion south of the Humber to the elder of his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex. Each had a kind of tutor, and each had a favourite. They were both discontented, the younger slew the elder son, and the mother of both avenges the elder on the younger of her children. The result was national ruin, in which "Fergus Duke of Albany" (apparently King of Scotland is meant) took an active part. There are very long speeches, no action; a messenger brings the news of the distressing occurrences, and a Chorus moralizes on them. Carried away by grief when his wife murders his surviving boy, Gorboduc pronounces the name of Eubulus with the penultimate syllable short, and expires with decency behind the scenes. Eubulus then utters a political forecast in more than a hundred lines, and the drama concludes.
"Gorboduc" was printed in 1565: translations of Seneca's plays were also being written: George Gascoigne translated a piece named "Jocasta" (the wife of Œdipus) from the Italian, and a prose comedy, "The Supposes" from Ariosto. This great Italian poet and his countrymen adapted to Italian manners the plots and characters which the ancient comic dramatists of Rome, Terence and Plautus, derived from late Greek comedy of everyday life. Thus an element of orderliness in comedy was introduced in England from adaptations of Italian adaptations of Roman copies of late Greek plays. Such stock characters as the austere father, the spendthrift son, the cunning servant, the boastful soldier, the nurse, soft of heart and loose of tongue, invaded the comedy of France, and, to a slighter degree, that of England.
Meanwhile Richard Edwards produced a curious Interlude of a classical nature, "Damon and Pythias," the characters being Greek, Sicilian and English--a dash of buffoonery is mixed with very lamentable matter. The Drama was formless, unable to attain definite shape, till some twenty-five years had passed when we reach the date of the immediate predecessors of Shakespeare, such as Marlowe, Greene, Lyly, Peele, and the other University young men about town. The influences of the old waggish or controversial Interludes, of the Senecan school of stiffness, and of translations or imitations of Italian comedies, were seething in the cauldron of the age.
XVII. WYATT AND SURREY. GASCOIGNE. SACKVILLE
The names of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), are for ever memorable in English poetry, not so much for what they actually achieved as for what they attempted. They abstained from allegory, still lingering in its unlovely dotage, and from doggerel. They wrote of themselves and their own loves, joys, and sorrows, but though their verse is concerned with their personal emotions, these are treated in a conventional way, borrowed from continental poetry. They turned to the Italian sonneteers, especially to Petrarch, and saw afar the dawning of the "Pléiade," the company of French reformers of poetic style and language, Ronsard, du Bellay, and the rest, or at least of Mellin de Saint-Gelais, their predecessor. But both Wyatt and Surrey died young, Wyatt by an unfortunate chance, Surrey as a victim of the jealous tyranny of Henry VIII. The two young poets thus live together in men's memories like the Bion and Moschus of Greece: theirs is "unfulfilled renown".
Wyatt, of a Yorkshire family, was son of Sir Henry Wyatt, of Allington in Kent, a man who had strange vicissitude of fortune in the reigns of Richard III and Henry VII. Thomas went very early to St. John's College, Cambridge, married at 17, was a glory of the Court of Henry VIII, went on diplomatic missions to Italy (Venice, Ferrara, Bologna, Florence, and Rome), studied Italian literature, was now in favour and now in prison, and made love, with more or less of earnestness, to Anne Boleyn, being fortunate in escaping from the doom of her admirers when Henry VIII took her life. Favoured by Henry's minister, Thomas Cromwell, but detested, and accused of diplomatic misdeeds by Bishop Bonner, Wyatt defended himself with a success then very rare, retired from Court and wrote satires and poems on the advantages of retirement; paraphrased the Seven Penitential Psalms, and died of a fever caught from fatigue and travel, in October, 1542, lamented in verse by Surrey.
The reader of his sonnets, the earliest in English, is amazed to find that we have travelled through so many centuries of the life of English poetry, and only reached lame lines that can scarcely be scanned. Since Chaucer the art of verse had become very dim, perhaps in consequence of the transitional state of the language, the obsolescence of the sound of the final e, and the Anglicizing of the sounds of borrowed French words by throwing back the accent (as in honour for honour, virtue for virtue). Wyatt, when he began to write sonnets, put accents in strange places, and counted syllables on his fingers, content if he could reckon ten of them, in a line. To rhyme "aggrieved" to "wearied," is like the tramp's effort to make "workhouse" rhyme with "sorrow". The young student in a novel of Henri Murger's reads only the rhymes in sonnets. If we study in that way Wyatt's sonnet "The Lover Waxeth Wiser," we find that the last words in the first eight lines are
aggrieved last past wearied buried fast haste stirred.
He usually tried to keep to the Petrarchian arrangement of rhymes in the first eight lines a b b a a b b a, but, contrary to Italian rule, his last two lines were always a rhyming couplet, as in Shakespeare's "Sonnets," in which the Petrarchian model is wholly disregarded. The sonnet thus ends with an emphatic clench, usually moral, while in the Italian sonnet the last six lines resemble the withdrawal of the wave of the first eight lines.
The sonnet, with its concision and its technical difficulties, afforded excellent practice to poets who endeavoured to bring delicacy and order into the chaos and coarseness of verse as written by Skelton and his contemporaries. But a good sonnet is among the rarest of good things, and the mere technical difficulties once overcome, men's minds may turn out sonnets of no value with the rapidity of machine work. The stock character of this kind of poetry, the Lover, with his strange far-fetched conceit in his almost metaphysical refinements, is apt to become as tedious as the old figures of allegory; however, he was a novelty. Wyatt improved with practice in sonnet-making, though such rhymes as "mount_ains_" "fount_ains_," "pl_ains_," "rem_ains_," are a stumbling-block to the modern reader. But his "And wilt thou leave me thus?" and "Forget not yet the tried intent," with their brief refrains are immortal lyrics, heralding the music of the age of Elizabeth.
His epigrams are not the stinging wasps of verse commonly called epigrams, but are brief poems in the manner of the epigrams of the Greek Anthology. The satires on the Court, based on Italian poems, and including a form of the "Town and Country Mouse," are not in Skelton's violent way, but the work of a gentle man, and the poems in rhyme royal, seven line stanzas, with six syllables to the line, are charming novelties.
The Earl of Surrey.
The date of Surrey's birth is uncertain: it was four or five years after the battle of Flodden (1513), in which his grandfather--"an auld decrepit carle in a chariot--" was victorious over the fiery James IV. The title Earl of Surrey is a courtesy title, borne by the poet as son of the Duke of Norfolk. He was at least a dozen years younger than his friend Wyatt, and was a lively young courtier, who was made a Knight of the Garter in 1541. He married very early, in 1532, and his famous passion for fair Geraldine may have been merely poetical--the usual story about Geraldine and the magic mirror is derived from a novel of 1554. About 1542 he was imprisoned for a matter of a duel, a challenge at least, and in 1543 went about London at night breaking windows with a stone-bow. He wrote a poem in which he gravely maintains that he was merely punishing the wicked city for her sins. Again released from prison he saw some fighting in France, and, returning, patronized a poet named Churchyard, who later wept unmelodiously above his early tomb. Early in 1546 Surrey had the worse of a battle with the French near Boulogne, was superseded by the Earl of Hertford, and, in January, 1547, was accused of a sort of heraldic high treason (quartering the arms of Edward the Confessor, who, of course, had never heard of armorial bearings), and executed, shortly before the death of the tyrant, Henry VIII.
Surrey's versification, especially in the sonnet, is much superior to that of Wyatt, but he is less apt to keep to the rules of rhyme, in the first eight lines; indeed he writes in the form of Shakespeare's sonnets. His "Prisoned in Windsor" is a pleasant picture of a young gallant's life, who takes his eye off the ball at Tennis to watch the ladies in the dedans: hunts, tilts, and makes friends. The moral poems in lines of fourteen feet are of no great merit, but Surrey's translation of the Second Book of the Æneid is the first English example of blank verse, borrowed from Italian practice. The lines are stiff and hard; and the main merit is the novelty, the first birth of the measure that was to become, in forty years, "Marlowe's mighty line".
Tottel's Miscellany.
The poems of Wyatt and Surrey were not published till long after the deaths of the authors, when they appeared, with many other pieces, in "Tottel's Miscellany". Other writers represented there are Nicholas Grimald, with his jog-trot metre, the "poulter's" or poulterer's measure of from twelve to fourteen syllables to the dozen--so were eggs sold by a custom of the trade. Surrey's retainer, Thomas Churchyard, a man very busy with sword and pen, was also a writer in the "Miscellany"; and indeed was a literary hack-of-all-work. There came, after the brief gleam of sunshine that fell on Wyatt and Surrey, another generation of wooden versifiers and translators, with whose names, Tusser the bucolic, Phaer, Golding, Googe, and Whetstone, it is hardly necessary to fill the page and burden the memory. They may be studied by the curious, but they wrought no deliverance. To generations which possess superabundance of versifiers and no great poets, these barren years are a kind of consolation. For reasons not to be discovered there are such periods in the literary life of all nations, as in England between Pope and Cowper.
The versifiers in "Tottel's Miscellany" keep harping unmelodiously on the strings of Surrey and Wyatt, many of their pieces are complimentary addresses to ladies, or laments on the deaths of friends. Poor conceits are twisted and tormented; there is hardly any promise of advance; we scarcely hear any of the bird-like musical notes with which the later part of the reign of Elizabeth sang so wondrously.
Gascoigne.
George Gascoigne (1525 (?)-1577) was an interesting character. He was a Cambridge man, a member of the Society of Gray's Inn, a poet who, like Scott, composed his verses in the saddle: a Member of Parliament who was opposed as "a common rhymer... noted for manslaughter... a notorious Ruffian," and even a spy, certainly he owed debts, and was disinherited by his father. He wrote on woodmanship, but was apt to forget to shoot at the deer that came within range of his cross-bow. As a captain in the Low Countries he and his command were surprised and taken by the Spaniards: he came home, published his Posies (1575) and, he says, got not a penny by the venture: he then wrote "The Steel Glass," a kind of satire, the mirror of the age, in blank verse, and next wrote in common ballad measure the long and amazingly prosaic "Complaint of Philomene".
In 1572 Gascoigne published "A Hundred Sundry Flowers, bound up in one small Posy". The long title sets forth that some of the flowers were culled in the gardens of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarch, and Ariosto, others are from English orchards. The native flowers are the sweeter and more fair. While our poets were turning into stiff measures the sonnets of Italy, Gascoigne could write so naturally and melodiously his own English, as in his "Lullaby of a Lover".
Sing lullaby, as women do, Wherewith they bring their babes to rest, And lullaby can I sing too, As womanly as can the best.
Beneath the stiff borrowed phrases and metres there was always this native and tuneful spirit of unsophisticated song.
In 1575 he was a maker of words for the Masques at Leicester's famous reception of Elizabeth at Kenilworth (see the novel of that name, where Scott calmly introduces Shakespeare as already a successful dramatist). He satirized drunkards: we have already seen that he translated a tragedy, "Jocasta," from the Italian; he wrote a love story in rhyme of a personal kind, and his brief "Instructions" is the earliest English work, in no way indebted to Aristotle, on the Art of Poetry. As he also translated, we have seen, a comedy from the Italian, and a prose tale, a kind of work later fashionable, Gascoigne may be regarded as an intrepid explorer in many fields of literature. "He first beat the path to that perfection which our best poets have aspired to since his departure," says Nash (1589). "He brake the ice for our quainter poets that now write," says Tofte (1615). But the path as trodden by this pioneer continued to be rough. Gascoigne was an example of the versatility and literary ambition which many young gentlemen displayed in the age of Elizabeth; mingling poetry and study and serious thought with their gallant adventures in love, diplomacy, war, and travel.
His "Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse in English" is a very brief pamphlet. He quotes "my master, Chaucer" against alliterative "thunder in Rym, Ram, Ruff," but mentions no other poet. Be original, he says, if you sing of a lady do not applaud her "crystal eye" or "cherry lip," which Spenser did not disdain, for these things are trite and obvious. The great matter is "to avoid the uncomely customs of common writers," says this "common rhymer". Do not use "obscure and dark phrases in a pleasant sonnet". Do not wander out of your "Poulters measure" metre into lines of thirteen syllables. Give every word its natural emphasis: do not make treasure into trea_sure._ Chaucer is to be followed as a master of prosody. You should write:--
"I understand your meaning by your eye,"
not,
"Your meaning I _under_stand by your eye",
"The more monosyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seem".
There follows advice on the caesura, and all this counsel shows that, in the early years of Elizabeth, versification was at a very low ebb.
In practice, Gascoigne did not always shine. There are few passages of interest in the stiff blank verse of his "Steel Glass" (the mirror that does not flatter). The best passage, and it is very good, describes the labourer,
Behold him, priests, and though he stink of sweat, Disdain him not, for shall I tell you what? Such climb to heaven before the shaven crowns,
because the labourers
feed with fruits of their great pains Both king and knight and priests in cloister pent.
It would be cruel to quote "Philomene," no stall-ballad creeps more tardily on a longer road than Gascoigne in his tale of her who sings, in a later poet's words,
Who hath remembered thee, who hath forgotten? They have all forgotten, oh summer swallow, But the world shall end when I forget.
Sackville.
The poetry of Thomas Sackville (1536-1608) is not to be found in his dull tragedy, "Gorboduc," but in his contributions to a vast and once popular collection, "The Mirror for Magistrates". This work is intended to admonish men in power by rhymed histories of the falls of English peers and princes. This was the plan of Chaucer's Monk, in "The Monk's Tale," which that sound critic, the Host, could not long endure. The model was Boccaccio's work on "The Falls of Princes," Englished by Lydgate. The enterprise started by Baldwin and others in 1554-1559, suggests a dread lest English verse should return to Lydgate in the den of Giant Despair, and take up with sepulchral solemnity the tale of tragedies from the darkest days of the unfortunate ancient Britons. A mammoth compilation was gradually evolved, for doleful matter was not far to seek, but Sackville's two contributions, the "Induction," and the "Complaint of Buckingham"--the Buckingham executed under Richard III,--alone concern us.
In the "Induction" the poet describes the gloom of winter, and, in the mediaeval way, dwells long on the constellations. As he muses, he is met by a very deplorable female form--
With doleful shrieks that echoed in the sky.
She proclaims herself to be Sorrow, a goddess, and guides Sackville "to the grisly lake" of Avernus, over which no fowl may fly and live. A number of rueful figures of allegory are encountered, Dread, Revenge, Misery, Care, Old Age, and Sleep, and these are drawn with abundant vigour and variety. The stanza on Sleep gives the measure of the versification, which is rapid, concise, various, sustained, and in its music heralds the arrival of Spenser.
The body's rest, the quiet of the heart, The travail's care, the still night's frere was he, And of our life on earth the better part, Reiver of sight, and yet in whom we see Things oft that tide, and oft that never be, Without respect, esteeming equally King Croesus' pomp and Irus' poverty.
One stanza in the description of the home of the dead seems to have been suggested by famous lines in the Eleventh Book of the "Odyssey".
The "Induction" ends with the appearance of the spirit of Buckingham, who not only tells his own tragedy at great length, and in full historical detail, but introduces several other ancient tragedies, those of Cyrus, Cambyses, Brutus, Cassius, Besseus, Alexander the Great, Clitus, Phalaris, Pheræus, Camillus, and Hannibal. From these fallen princes we drop to
One John Milton, Sheriff of Shropshire then,
who arrested Buckingham, and to
A man of mine, called Humphrey Banastaire,
who betrayed his master. Banastaire is then cursed in eleven stanzas. "May Banastaire live to the age of eighty, and then be tried for theft. May his eldest son expire in a pig-sty; his second son be strangled in a puddle, and his daughter be smitten by leprosy."
It cannot be denied that this tragedy, including as it does the murder of the Princes in the Tower, is rather too rich in terrible components, and does not, especially when Banastaire is being dealt with, affect us in the same measure as Dante's pictures of the Inferno. On the whole it is the manner, not the matter, of Sackville that contains more than mere promise: his management of the stanza and of the music of the line is far in advance of anything that had come from an English pen since the death of Chaucer. As for the gloom and horror, these were congenial to a people which, since the burning of the Maid of France (1431), had seen an endless sequence of violence, murder, martyrdoms, and massacres of peers, Princes, Queens, Bishops, and humble folk.