A short history of modern English literature

Preface

The principal aim which I have had before me, in writing this volume, has been to show the movement of English literature. I have desired above all else to give the reader, whether familiar with the books mentioned or not, a feeling of the evolution of English literature in the primary sense of the term, the disentanglement of the skein, the slow and regular unwinding, down succeeding generations, of the threads of literary expression. To do this without relation to particular authors, and even particular works, seems to me impossible ; to attempt it would be to essay a vague disquisition on " style " in the abstract, a barren thing at best. To retain the character of an historical survey, with the introduction of the obvious names, has seemed to me essential ; but I have endeavoured to keep expression, form, technique, always before me as the central interest, rather than biography, or sociology, or mere unrelated criticism. In this way only, by the elimination of half the fascinating qualities which make literature valuable to us, could it be possible in so few pages to give anything but a gabble of facts. And the difficulties of omission have been by far the greatest that have assailed me. If any one accuses me of injustice to an author, I must acknowledge with despair that I have been *' unjust " to every one, if justice be an exhaustive statement of his claims to consideration. No critical reader can be more indignant at my summary treatment of a favourite of his

J vi PREFACE

own than I have been at having to glide so swiftly over mine. But the procession of the entire theme was the one thing that seemed essential ; whether I have in any measure been able to present it, my readers must judge.

The great pressure upon space has been relieved by dividing the history of English literature into two portions. If this series continues to receive the support of the public, it is hoped that a volume on the archaic section may bring the story down from the earliest times to Robert of Brunne and Laurence Minot. In my first three chapters I have further lightened my labour by leaving out of consideration what was written in this country in Latin or French, for, although this may be material in dealing with thought in England, it can have but a small connection with the history of expression in the English language. I make no apology for the prominence given throughout to the art of poetry, for it is in verse that style can most definitely and to greatest advantage be studied, especially in a literature like ours, where prose has mainly been written without any other aim than the naive transference of ideas or statement of facts, like the prose of M. Jourdain, while our national poetry, which is one of our main national glories, has been a consecutive chain of consciously elaborated masterpieces.

I have to acknowledge, with warm thanks, the kindness of that distinguished mediaeval scholar. Prof. W. S. McCormick, of the University of St. Andrews, w^ho has been so obliging as to read the proofs of my early chapters. For other and more general acknowledgments I must refer to my bibliographical appendix.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

i. the age of chaucer (135o-i4oo) ..... i

ii. the close of the middle ages (14oo-i560) ... 33

II The Close Of The Middle Ages

1400-1560

It is difficult to find any political or social reason for the literary decadence of the close of the Middle Ages, but the fact is patent that the reigns of the three Henries in England were marked by a strange and complete decline in the arts of composition. Not a single work of signal merit, whether in prose or verse, distinguishes the first half of the fifteenth century, and we are forced, in order to preserve the historical sequence, to record the careers and writings of men who at no other period would demand particular attention in a survey so rapid as this. In consequence, it is imperative that we should dwell a little on the productions of Occleve and Lydgate, although the original talent of these versifiers was small and their acquired skill almost contemptible. They are interesting, less from their pretensions to imagination than from this semi-official position as recognised makers of verse, carrying on the tradition of poetry, though with none of its ecstasy and charm.

That Occleve and Lydgate were so imperfect in their grasp of those principles of poetry which Chaucer had formulated as to be unable to produce verse which had a superficial resemblance to his, is the more curious when we consider that they had enjoyed, or certainly might have enjoyed, the advantage of that master's personal instruction. Each of them was evidently more than thirty when Chaucer died. Of the two, Thomas OcCLEVE may have been slightly the elder. Neither had any real conception of the aim of Chaucer's work, or of the progress in intellectual civilisation which he had made. Even to remain where Chaucer left them was too much for these feeble bards to achieve ; they crept back into the barbarism of mediocrity. They imitated with great humbleness those very Frenchmen whom Chaucer had outgrown and had left behind him, and in their timid, trembling hands English literature ceased to command the respect of Europe.

Their very peculiar prosody, which offers far greater difficulty than those of Langland and Chaucer, is only intelligible if we conjecture that they never understood or early forgot the meaning of Chaucer's elaborate and scientific versification. Occleve, who h.ad been close to Chaucer, had a greater appreciation of the new smoothness and grace than John Lydgate, who had a most defective ear, and knew it. His verses are not to be scanned unless we suppose that he refused to follow Chaucer in the employment of a solid and coherent Southern prosody, but endeavoured to combine the use of rhyme and a measure of stanzaic form, with some remnant of the old national verse, retaining its strong accents and its groups of redundant syllables. Lydgate's native speech was Suffolk, and he used throughout life Saxon forms and habits of locution which were unfamiliar and even uncouth to a courtly London ear. Many critics, of whom the poet Gray was the earliest, have attempted to explain away the seeming rudeness of Lydgate, and to minimise the mean impression which he gives. But no

OCCLEVE 35

argument will make his metrical experiments appear successful, nor remove the conviction, of which he was himself conscious, that his ear was bad and tuneless.

Occleve was a frivolous, tame-spirited creature, tainted with insanity. He is fond of chatting about himself, and, among other confidences, informs us that Chaucer wished him to be properly taught, but that the pupil "was dull, and learned little or naught." Occleve speaks so humbly of his own poetical performances that it would be harsh to dwell on their tedious character. The De Reginiine Principum {The Governail of Princes) y which seems to date from 141 1; is written in Occleve's favourite rime royal, and gives us as clear an impression of the man himself, of his style, of his views regarding contemporary history, and of his attitude towards the new English language, as could be gained by a laborious study of the remainder of his long-winded, monotonous works. It is a brave spirit which tires not before the five thousand lines of the De Regimine are closed, and one wonders whether Henry V., for whose use the poem was composed, ever became familiar with its contents. The author, who represents himself as "ripe unto the pit" with the results of an unseemly life, and as so cowardly that he only backbites those whom he dislikes, had certainly not fallen into the sin of pride. We forgive much to him, because he preserved for us the coloured portrait of Chaucer.

It is no great praise of Lydgate to say that he had a brisker talent than Occleve. Although he is careful to speak of Chaucer with constant respect, he is hardly, as Occleve was, his pupil. He rather imitates, often quite servilely and as though Chaucer had never written, the great French romantic poets of the fourteenth century.

A large part of Lydgate's life was spent in the Benedictine monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, from which he made occasional excursions to Oxford and Paris. The fecundity of Lydgate was phenomenal ; Ritson, who deciphered his manuscripts until he must have hated the poet's very name, catalogued two hundred and fifty of his poems ; it is said that at his death his existing verses must have exceeded 130,000 in number. No one living has read Lydgate in his entirety, and but few of his works have yet been edited. The excessive prolixity and uniformity of his style, which never rises and cannot fall, baffles all but the most persistent reader. His Tj'oy Book is a translation from the Latin of Guido delle Colonne ; his Temple of Glass a continuation of the Hottse of Fame ; his Falls of Princes an imitation of a French paraphrase of Boccaccio, but little distinction of style can be perceived, whether the laborious epic is adapted from Italian or English or French sources. The Falls of PrinceSy printed in 1494, and accepted in the sixteenth century as a mediaeval classic, has been the most popular of the longer poems of Lydgate. It is believed to have been completed as late as 1438, and it displays in interesting ways the rapid development and modernisation of the English tongue. The student who desires to receive a favourable impression of the talent of Lydgate may be recommended to select the prologue of this enormous poem ; he will be rewarded by a conventional but pleasing eulogy of Chaucer. Lydgate, as Gray says, ^'wanted not art in raising the more tender emotions of the mind,'' and, on occasion, he can be diffusely picturesque.

It is not probable that the entire works of Lydgate will ever be made accessible to readers, nor is it to be conceived that they would reward the labours of an editor. But

CLANV@WE 37

although it must be repeated that Lydgate is an author of inferior value, excessively prosy and long-winded, and strangely neglectful both of structure and of melody, a selection could probably be made from his writings which would do him greater justice than he does to himself in his_intolerable prolixity. He has a pleasant vein of human pity, a sympathy with suffering that leads him to say, in a sort of deprecating undertone, very gentle and gracious things. He is a storehouse of odd and valuable antiquarian notes. His Pur le Roy, for instance, is a rich and copious account of the entry of Henry VI. into London in 1422 ; better known is his curious satire of London Lackpenny, Lydgate belongs — it is vain to deny it — to a period of retrogression and decay. But he had his merits, and the way to appreciate his verses is to compare them with the wretched, tuneless stuff put forth by his pupils and followers, such as Benedict Burgh.

A poet. Sir Thomas Clanvowe, who had studied the manner of Chaucer with greater care than Lydgate, and had a more melodious native talent than Occleve, wrote about 1403 a short romance in an almost unique fiveline stanza. The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, in which the author, although ^^ old and un lusty," falls asleep by a brook-side in May and hears the birds philosophising. Even in this mellifluous piece, which flows on like the rivulet it describes, the metrical laws of Chaucer are found to be in solution. Here occurs that reference to Woodstock which long led astray those who supposed Chaucer to be the author of this poem. Longer and much later, and still less like the genuine master, is the over-sweet, tedious romance in more than two thousand octosyllabic verses, boldly called CJiaucers Dreajn, though

Chaucer is not in any way concerned in it. It is a paraphrased translation of a vague, flowery story about a pilgrimage to an island of fair ladies ; it contains a succession of pretty mediaeval pictures painted in faint, clear colours, like the illuminations in a missal, pale and delicate, in its affectation of primitive simplicity.

Of all poems of the fifteenth century, however, that which is most faithful to the tradition of Chaucer, and continues it in the most intelligent way, is the Kings Quair (or Book). The history of this work is as romantic as possible, and yet probably authentic."^ James I. of Scotland, in 1405, not being yet eleven years old, was treacherously captured by the English, in time of truce, off Flamborough Head, and had been confined, first in the Tower, then in Windsor Castle, for eighteen years, when, seeing Johanne de Beaufort walking in the garden below his prison window, he fell violently in love with her. The match pleased the English Court ; they were married early in 1424, and proceeded as King and Queen to Scotland. The poem we are now discussing was written in the spring and early summer of 1423, and it describes, in exquisitely artless art, the progress of the wooing. This poet was murdered, in conditions of heartless cruelty, in 1437. We possess no other indubitable work of his except a Scotch ballade.

The Kings Quair, in more primitive periods of our literary history, was accepted as a contribution to Scotch poetry. But Dr. Skeat was the first to point out that although the foundation of it is in the Northern dialect, it

1 In 1896 a very ingenious attempt was made by Mr. J. T. T. Brown to throw doubt on the authenticity of the King's Qitair ; but it cannot be said that any convincing evidence against the accepted tradition was produced. Mr. Brown's arguments were negative, and have been ably met by M. Jusserand.

JAMES I. 39

is carefully composed, as if in a foreign language, in the elaborate Midland or Southern dialect as used, and perhaps not a little as invented, by Chaucer. James I., indeed, is completely under the sway of his great predecessor ; no poet of the century repeats so many phrases copied from, or introduces so many allusions to, the writings of Chaucer as he does. He was immersed, it is evident, in the study and almost the idolatry of his master ; the first violent emotion of his sequestered life came upon him in that condition, and he burst into song with the language of Chaucer upon his lips. In spite of this state of pupilage, and in spite of his employment of the old French machinery of a dream, allegorical personages and supernatural conventions, the poem of James I. is a delicious one. His use of metre was highly intelligent ; he neither deviated back towards the older national prosody, like Lydgate, nor stumbled aimlessly on, like Occleve ; he perceived what it was that Chaucer had been doing, and he pursued it with great firmness, so ^'hat, in the fifty or sixty years which divided the latest of the Canterbury Tales from TJie Flower and tJie Leaf, the Kings Quair is really the only English poem in which a modern ear can take genuine pleasure.

In its analysis of moods of personal feeling, the King's Quair marks a distinct advance in fluent and lucid expression. The poem is full, too, of romantic beauty; the description of the garden, of the mysterious and lovely being beheld wandering in its odorous mazes, of the nightingale, ''the little sweete nightingale " on "the smale greene twistis," is more accomplished, of its kind, than what any previous poet, save always Chaucer, had achieved. The pathos of the situation, our sympathy with the gallant and spirited royal poet, the historic exactitude of the events so beautifully recorded, the curious chance by which its manuscript was preserved unknown until the end of last century — all combine to give the Kin^s Quair a unique position in English literature. Alas ! as Rossetti sings :

" Alas ! for the ivoful ihi7ig That a poet true and a frie?id of man I?i desperate days of bale and ba7i Sho2dd needs be bo?-?i a khigy

These lines remind us of the Ballads which form so large and so vague a department of our national literature. It is difficult to know where to place the romantic ballads, most of which have come down to us in a language and a metre which cannot be much earlier, at earliest, than the end of the sixteenth century. The original types of these national poems may have existed in the fifteenth century, but their antiquity is certainly a matter of speculation. Not so dubious, however, is the approximate date of the less beautiful but curious and significant ballads of the Robin Hood cycle. The latest general opinion about these is that they were brought together, in something like their present form, soon after 1400. The earliest reference to the hero is found in Pie7's Plowman ; but a Scottish chronicler, writing in 1420, gives 1283 as the date when

" Little John and Robin Hood Waythme7t were commended good ^ In Inglewood and Barnesdale They used all this time their travailJ^

We may conjecture that soon after 1300 there began to be composed ballads about a mythical yeoman who had taken to the forest in Yorkshire a generation earlier ;

f

ROBIN HOOD 41

that all through the fourteenth century these ballads continued to be made and repeated — ^' harped at feasts" — until, soon after 1400, some crowder of superior poetical skill selected the best, and composed the Geste of Robin Hood ; and that throughout the fifteenth century other Robin Hood ballads were made, less original and authoritative than those in the Geste^ and that these latest are what we principally possess at present.

In the Geste of Robin Hood, which is a long poem of 456 stanzas, we possess the earliest and most genuine version of the narrative now existing. Here we find the good yeo.man, Robin Hood, a proud and courteous outlaw, who has taken to the wood in Barnesdale. His companions are Little John, William Scarlet or Scathelocke, and Much, the miller's son. Robin lives by hunting the King's deer, and by gallantly robbing such barons, archbishops, and abbots as venture through his forest. But he is generous, and if a knight who is in trouble crosses his path, he will not let him go till they have dined together. The great enemy of Robin Hood and his men is the Sheriff of Nottingham, who represents the terrors of the common law. The proud sheriff accosts Little John, who says that his own name is Richard Greenleaf, and is accepted into the sheriff's service ; he betrays his master to Robin Hood under the forest, and the poor sheriff is bound and humiliated. It is a blow to our sentiment of romance, which has taught us since our childhood to picture Robin Hood sitting at a venison pasty, in the heart of Sherwood Forest, in company with his sweetheart and wife, Maid Marian, to learn that this lady is totally unknown to the genuine old ballads. There were ancient stories about Friar Tuck and Maid Marian, but not in connection v\'ith Robin Hood ; nor 4 were these stories, so far as we know, told in verse. The earhest ballad in which Robin Hood and Maid Marian are mentioned together is a very poor doggerel piece, probably later than the time of Shakespeare. We may notice that in the oldest ballads the scene is laid, indifferently, in Barnesdale Forest, near Pontefract, and fifty miles off in Sherwood Forest, near Nottingham. It has been conjectured that there were originally two cycles of ballads, the one a Barnesdale set, the other a Sherwood set, and that the compiler of the Geste of Robin Hood helped himself to material from each of them.

Lancastrian prose exemplifies the same conditions of intellectual weariness and decadence which depressed Lancastrian poetry ; but the decline is less marked, because in the preceding century verse had flourished brilliantly, while prose had not flourished at all. After 1400 we begin to see the English language more freely, though scarcely more gracefully, used, and for direct purposes, not merely or mainly in the form of translations. A very active and audacious talent was employed by Reginald Pecock in confuting the errors of those disciples of Wycliffe who were styled ^^ Lollards." He brought his attacks to a climax in 1449, when he was made Bishop of Chichester, and compiled his Repressor of overmuch Blaming of the Clergy, His other main production, the Book of Faithy is of somewhat later date. His sophistical ingenuity ultimately brought him to confusion and shame. The matter of Pecock is paradoxical and casuistical reasoning on controversial points, in which he secures the sympathy neither of the new thought nor of the old. That he wrote in English to secure a wider audience, and that he is on the whole fairly simple and direct in style, are symptoms of a

CAPGRAVE 43

general advance of English as an accepted language fit for literary and yet popular exercises. Still, the fate of the brilliant Bishop of Chichester proves that the time was not ripe for the discussion in English of any but the most obvious and harmless themes. Had Pecock confined himself to the Latin language, he might have closed a splendid career at Canterbury, instead of expiring like a starved lamp under the extinguisher of his prison at Thorney.

We see Pecock bring the vernacular into the service of theological controversy, and we find another eminent divine, John Capgrave, employing it for purely historical purposes. The exact date of the composition of Capgrave's Chronicle of England is uncertain ; he was probably at work upon it through the second quarter of the century ; it closes with the year 1417. He is a much less rapid and audacious wTiter than Pecock. The attitude of Capgrave's mind is archaically mediaeval, and he possesses in large measure that blight of monotony and tameness which mars almost all Lancastrian literature. His historical importance is immense, especially if his Latin writings are taken into consideration ; but from the mere point of view of development of English style, Capgrave is negligible. Yet, so miserable is the poverty of the first half of the seventeenth century, when we have mentioned Pecock and Capgrave, there is no other prose writer to be named. English prose was still in its embryonic condition. In a familiar class, the Paston Letters^ W'hich date from 1422 onwards, offer us a precious opportunity of judging in w^hat manner ordinary people of position expressed themselves in the discussion of daily experience.

The second half of the fifteenth century was in England even more desperately barren of poetry than the first. In its absolute sterility, one solitary poem of merit demands attention, as much for its rarity as its positive charm. Some woman, whose name has not been preserved, wrote after 1450, but in close discipleship of Chaucer, the beautiful little allegorical romances of The Flozver and the Leaf and the Assembly of Ladies, She took the idea of the former from Eustache Deschamps, who' had composed three such poems, in one of which he gave the prize to the leaf, and in another to the flower ; but the English piece begins as a translation of Machault's Dit du Vergier. It is accordingly wholly French in tone and character, and, coming at the very close of the Middle Ages, lights up, with a last flicker of imitation, the indebtedness of English mediaeval poetry to France. The charm of The Flower and the L^af iSy however, very considerable ; the anonymous poetess has a singularly graceful fluency, and she does not exaggerate, as do some of her Scottish successors, the ornaments of phraseology. Her poem well sums up the eclectic mediaeval mannerism. It opens with the praise of spring. Before sunrise the writer goes into a grove, where, listening for the nightingale, she turns down a narrow path and comes to an arbour. She hears a music of sweet voices, and sees advance a troop, "a world of ladies," with one noblest figure, waving a branch of agnus castus, in the midst of them. Then there appear to her strange men-at-arms, a gorgeous cavalry, who arrive, part, and joust. When the fight is over, the ladies advance, and lead the victors to a giant laurel-tree. These people were all in white ; but as they disappear, a company in green comes strolling up, also marvellously adorned. But the sun burns the flowers, and the ladies

THE FLOWER AND THE LEAF 45

too ; and then comes down a storm of wind and rain. The white come to the succour of the green, and all pass away in company. The poetess is left to the solemn presence of Diana and of Flora, and must choose between the Flower and the Leaf. ^' Unto the Leaf I owe mine observance," she answers, and the romance is over. The strange, delicate, unsubstantial poetry of mediaeval chivalry is over, too, in these pretty and melodious exercises in rime royal, the only considerable gift to early English literature made bv a woman. It is interesting to observe that she betra3v^s the half-century of developing language which divides her from Chaucer's death by her archaistic, that is to say, no longer perfectly natural, use of metrical ornament.

From the miserable emptiness of English poetry after 1450, it is agreeable to turn to Scotland, where the art was cultivated in some oddity and artificiality of form, indeed, but, on the whole, with singular success. Save in the one respect of the almost idolatrous study of Chaucer, the course of poetry in Scotland seems to have run in a totally independent channel. The Scotch poets of the Renaissance are connected with the mediaeval tradition, not by any Southern links, but by certain chroniclers who closely imitated Barbour, and who are only to be distinguished from him by their more modern use of language. About 1420 Andrew of Wyxtoux, a monk of St. Serf's, on Lochleven, completed an Original Chronicle of Scotland^ in nine books of octosyllabic verse ; he treated the subject from the ''origin" of the world, Wyntoun's history is less amusing than his fabulous legends, which he tehs eagerly and gaily, with a garrulous credulity.

We pass on for some forty years, and, at the threshold of the literary poetry of Scotland, are arrested by a survivor of the old didactic chronicle-school. Blind Harry, or Henry the Minstrel, composed about 1460, in the Northern dialect, a long Acts and Deeds of Sir William JVallace^ in which, for the first time, the heroic couplet was employed by a Scotch poet. Blind Harry was therefore, no doubt, acquainted with the writings of Chaucer, who invented that form of verse, but he displays no other Southern characteristic. His Wallace is the direct descendant of the Bruce of Barbour. This minstrel shows a certain advance in the freedom of his narrative, and in the psychological treatment of the hero he exhibits an occasional liveliness which may or may not be wholly voluntary, since the exigencies of rhyme drive him occasionally to strange shifts. He is singularly prosy, and not infrequently incoherent ; yet there is an air of sincerity and good faith about the Wallace which commands respect. Blind Harry, however, has none of the moral elevation of Barbour, and is, in fact, a writer of scant importance to any but philologists and historians.

Henryson must have been writing about the same time as Blind Harry, but a century seems to divide them in literary temperament. The latter belonged to the Middle Ages ; the former was a child of the Renaissance, and its introducer into Scottish poetry. Of the Hfe of Robert Henryson little is known; it is conjectured that he was born about 1425, and died about 1506. He was notary-public, and perhaps schoolmaster, at Dunfermline, and Dunbar tells us that he died there. Allusions to the Abbey of Dunfermline, and to walks *Mown on foot by Forth," add faintly to the picture we form of a merry, philosophical bard. Every critic quotes the stanza in which Henryson describes how he

HENRYSON 47

brightens the fire, wraps himself up, ^' takes a drink his spirits to comfort," and buries himself in the qiiair or volume in which glorious w^orthy Chaucer wrote of fair Cressid and lusty Troilus. This is one of those vivid, personal pictures, so sadly rare in our early literature, in which the veil of time seems suddenly rent for a mom.ent to let us look upon the great dead masters face to face.

It would be absurd to represent Henryson as habitually lifted to such heights of felicitous expression; yet he is commonly vivid, natural, and observant to a degree beyond any predecessor save Chaucer, whom he intelligently followed. In some of his poems he is purely allegorical, in the old French way. In Orpheus and Eu7y dicey which comes down to us through a unique copy printed in 1508, a narrative in rime royal is followed by a moral in the heroic couplet, and all tends to show that Orpheus is the better spirit of man, which twitches the strings of the harp of conscience and bids our foolish appetites return heavenward. The moral nature of Henryson deems that Chaucer had dealt too tenderly with the errors of passion, and in a pitiful and dolorous Testament of Cressid he shuts the door of mercy severely upon her. In Robin and Makyne, breaking through the tradition of solemn iambics for all subjects, Henryson bursts forth into a light lyrical measure of a charming pastoral gaiety. This ballad is the Scotch counterpart of the Niitbrow7i Maidy an excellent English pastoral ballad or lyrical eclogue of doubtful date.