On this Gray has delivered the following observations:--"These 'long
processes,' indeed, suited wonderfully with the attention and simple
curiosity of the age in which LYDGATE lived; many a _stroke_ have he and
the best of his contemporaries spent upon _a sturdy old story_, till
they had blunted their own edge and that of their readers--at least a
modern reader will find it so: but it is a folly to judge of the
understanding and patience of those times by our own. They loved, I will
not say tediousness, but _length_ and a train of circumstances in a
narration. The vulgar do so still: it gives an air of reality to facts;
it fixes the attention; raises and keeps in suspense their expectation,
and supplies the defects of their little and lifeless imagination; and
it keeps pace with the slow motion of their own thoughts. Tell them a
story as you would tell it to a man of wit; it will appear to them as an
object seen in the night by a flash of lightning: but when you have
placed it in various lights and in various positions, they will come at
last to see and feel it as well as others. But we need not confine
ourselves to the vulgar, and to understandings beneath our own.
Circumstance ever was and ever will be the life and the essence both of
oratory and of poetry. It has in some sort the same effect upon every
mind that it has upon that of the populace; and I fear the _quickness
and delicate impatience of these polished times_ in which we live are
but the forerunners of the decline of all those beautiful arts which
depend upon the imagination. Homer, the father of _circumstance_, has
occasion for the same apology which I am making for Lydgate and for his
predecessors."[8]
At the monastery of Bury we might have listened to that Gothic monk's
"goodly tale," or "notable proverb of Aesopus" for the nonce; or saintly
legend, or "merrie balade;" or the story of "Thebes," which the scholar
took up from his master Chaucer: or that from "Bochas," and Guido
Colonna's "Troy Book:" but too numerous were the volumes to tell, and
too voluminous was many a volume. Verbose and diffuse, yet clear and
fluent, ran his page; too minutely copious were his descriptions, yet
the delineations seemed the more graphical; his verse, too long or too
short, halts in his measures till we fall into the minstrel's "metring,"
and lines break forth, beautiful as any in our day. He expands the same
image, and loses all likeness in a prolix simile, for his readers were
not so impatient as ourselves. These poets suffered or enjoyed a fatal
facility of rhyming, lost for us, from the use of polysyllabic words
from the French and the Latin accented on the last syllable, a custom
continued by the Scots; and these provided them with too ready an
abundance of poetic terminations or rhymes, tending to make their poems
voluminous. The art of selection is the art of an age less florid and
more fastidious, but not always more genial or more inventive. The
pruning-hook was not in use when planters were too eager to gather the
first fruits from the trees which their own hands had put into the
earth.
Alas! apologies only leave irremediable faults as they were! The
tediousness of Dan Lydgate remains as languid, his verse as halting, and
"Thebes" and "Troy" as desolate, as we found them!
Let us, however, be reminded, that he who wholly neglects the study of
our ancient poets must submit to the loss of knowledge which a
philosopher would value; the manners of the age, the modes of feeling,
the stream of thought, the virgin fancies, and that position which the
human character takes in distant ages--these will imbue his memory with
the genius of his country and the eternal truth of authentic nature. No
English poet should wholly resign these masses of vernacular poetry to
the lone closet of the antiquary; he who loves the gain of labour will
excavate these quarries for their marble, for we know they are marble,
since many a noble column has been raised from these shapeless and
unhewed blocks.