At a period when satire had not yet assumed any legitimate form, a
singular genius appeared in Skelton. His satire is peculiar, but it is
stamped by vigorous originality. The fertility of his conceptions in his
satirical or his humorous vein is thrown out in a style created by
himself. The Skeltonical short verse, contracted into five or six, and
even four syllables, is wild and airy. In the quick-returning rhymes,
the playfulness of the diction, and the pungency of new words, usually
ludicrous, often expressive, and sometimes felicitous, there is a
stirring spirit which will be best felt in an audible reading. The
velocity of his verse has a carol of its own. The chimes ring in the
ear, and the thoughts are flung about like coruscations. But the magic
of the poet is confined to his spell; at his first step out of it he
falls to the earth never to recover himself. Skelton is a great creator
only when he writes what baffles imitation, for it is his fate, when
touching more solemn strains, to betray no quality of a poet--inert in
imagination and naked in diction. Whenever his muse plunges into the
long measure of heroic verse, she is drowned in no Heliconian stream.
Skelton seems himself aware of his miserable fate, and repeatedly, with
great truth, if not with some modesty, complains of
Mine homely rudeness and dryness.
But when he returns to his own manner and his own rhyme, when he riots
in the wantonness of his prodigal genius, irresistible and daring, the
poet was not unconscious of his faculty; and truly he tells,--
Though my rime be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Rudely rain-beaten,
Rusty, moth-eaten,
If ye take well therewith,
It hath in it some pith.
Whether Skelton really adopted the measures of the old tavern-minstrelsy
used by harpers, who gave "a fit of mirth for a groat," or "carols for
Christmas," or "lascivious poems for bride-ales," as Puttenham, the
arch-critic of Elizabeth's reign, supposes; or whether in Skelton's
introduction of alternate Latin lines among his verses he caught the
Macaronic caprice of the Italians, as Warton suggests; the Skeltonical
style remains his own undisputed possession. He is a poet who has left
his name to his own verse--a verse, airy but pungent, so admirably
adapted for the popular ear that it has been frequently copied,[1] and
has led some eminent critics into singular misconceptions. The minstrel
tune of the Skeltonical rhyme is easily caught, but the invention of
style and "the pith" mock these imitators. The facility of doggrel
merely of itself could not have yielded the exuberance of his humour and
the mordacity of his satire.
This singular writer has suffered the mischance of being too original
for some of his critics; they looked on the surface, and did not always
suspect the depths they glided over: the legitimate taste of others has
revolted against the mixture of the ludicrous and the invective. A taste
for humour is a rarer faculty than most persons imagine; where it is not
indigenous, no art of man can plant it. There is no substitute for such
a volatile existence, and where even it exists in a limited degree, we
cannot enlarge its capacity for reception. A great master of humour, who
observed from his experience, has solemnly told us that "it is not in
the power of every one to taste humour, however he may wish it--it is
the gift of God; and a true feeler always brings half the entertainment
along with him."[2]
Puttenham was the first critic who prized Skelton cheaply; the
artificial and courtly critic of Elizabeth's reign could not rightly
estimate such a wild and irregular genius. The critic's fastidious ear
listens to nothing but the jar of rude rhymes, while the courtier's
delicacy shrinks from the nerve of appalling satire. "Such," says this
critic, "are the rhymes of Skelton, usurping the name of a Poet Laureat,
being indeed but a rude rayling rhimer, and all his doings
ridiculous--pleasing only the popular ear." This affected critic never
suspected "the pith" of "the ridiculous;" the grotesque humour covering
the dread invective which shook a Wolsey under his canopy. Another
Elizabethan critic, the obsequious Meres, re-echoes the dictum. These
opinions perhaps prejudiced the historian of our poetry, who seems to
have appreciated them as the echoes of the poet's contemporaries. Yet we
know how highly his contemporaries prized him, notwithstanding the host
whom he provoked. One poetical brother[3] distinguishes him as "the
Inventive Skelton," and we find the following full-length portrait of
him by another:--[4]
A poet for his art,
Whose judgment sure was high,
And had great practise of the pen,
His works they will not lie;
His termes to taunts did leane,
His talk was as he wrate,
Full quick of wit, right sharpe of wordes,
And skilful of the state;
* * * * *
And to the hateful minde,
That did disdaine his doings still,
A scorner of his kinde.
When Dr. Johnson observed that "Skelton cannot be said to have attained
great elegance of language," he tried Skelton by a test of criticism at
which Skelton would have laughed, and "jangled and wrangled." Warton
has also censured him for adopting "the familiar phraseology of the
common people." The learned editor of Johnson's "Dictionary" corrects
both our critics. "If Skelton did not attain great elegance of language,
he however possessed great knowledge of it." From his works may be drawn
an abundance of terms which were then in use among the vulgar as well as
the learned, and which no other writer of his time so obviously (and
often so wittily) illustrated. Skelton seems to have been fully aware of
the condition of our vernacular idiom when he wrote, for he has thus
described it:--
Our natural tongue is rude,
And hard to be enneude
With polished termes lusty;
Our language is so rusty,
So cankered, and so full
Of frowards, and so dull,
That if I would apply
To write ordinately,
I wot not where to find
Terms to serve my mind.
It was obviously his design to be as great a creator of words as he was
of ideas. Many of his mintage would have given strength to our idiom.
Caxton, as a contemporary, is some authority that Skelton improved the
language.
Let not the reader imagine that Skelton was only "a rude rayling
rhimer." Skelton was the tutor of Henry the Eighth; and one who knew him
well describes him as--
Seldom out of prince's grace.
Erasmus distinguished him "as the light and ornament of British
letters;" and one, he addresses the royal pupil, "who can not only
excite your studies, but complete them." Warton attests his classical
attainments--"Had not his propensity to the ridiculous induced him to
follow the whimsies of Walter Mapes, Skelton would have appeared among
the first writers of Latin poetry in England." Skelton chose to be
himself; and this is what the generality of his critics have not taken
in their view.
Skelton was an ecclesiastic who was evidently among those who had
adopted the principles of reformation before the Reformation. With equal
levity and scorn he struck at the friars from his pulpit or in his
ballad, he ridiculed the Romish ritual, and he took unto himself that
wife who was to be called a concubine. To the same feelings we may also
ascribe the declamatory invective against Cardinal Wolsey, from whose
terrible arm he flew into the sanctuary of Westminster, where he
remained protected by Abbot Islip until his death, which took place in
1529, but a few short months before the fall of Wolsey. It is supposed
that the king did not wholly dislike the levelling of the greatness of
his overgrown minister; and it is remarkable that one of the charges
subsequently brought by the council in 1529 against Wolsey--his
imperious carriage at the council-board--is precisely one of the
accusations of our poet, only divested of rhyme; whence perhaps we may
infer that Skelton was an organ of the rising party.
"Why Come you not to Court?"--that daring state-picture of an omnipotent
minister--and "The Boke of Colin Clout," where the poet pretends only to
relate what the people talk about the luxurious clergy, and seems to be
half the reformer, are the most original satires in the language. In the
days when Skelton wrote these satires there appeared a poem known by the
title of "Reade me and be not Wrothe," a voluminous invective against
the Cardinal and the Romish superstitions, which has been ascribed by
some to Skelton. The writer was WILLIAM ROY, a friar; the genius, though
not the zeal, of ROY and SKELTON are far apart--as far as the buoyancy
of racy originality is removed from the downright earnestness of grave
mediocrity. Roy had been the learned assistant of Tyndale in the first
edition of the translation of the New Testament, and it was the public
conflagration at London of that whole edition which aroused his
indignant spirit. The satire, which had been printed abroad, was
diligently suppressed by an emissary of the Cardinal purchasing up all
the copies; and few were saved from the ravage;[5] the author, however,
escaped out of the country.
In "The Crown of Lawrell" Skelton has himself furnished a catalogue of
his numerous writings, the greater number of which have not come down to
us. Literary productions were at that day printed on loose sheets, or in
small pamphlets, which the winds seem to have scattered. We learn there
of his graver labours. He composed the "Speculum Principis" for his
royal pupil--
To bear in hand, therein to read,
and he translated Diodorus Siculus--
Six volumes engrossed, it doth contain.
To have composed a manual for the education of a prince, and to have
persevered through a laborious version, are sufficient evidence that the
learned Skelton had his studious days as well as his hours of caustic
jocularity. He appears to have written various pieces for the court
entertainment; but for us exists only an account of the interlude of the
"Nigramansir," in the pages of Warton, and a single copy of the goodly
interlude of "Magnificence,"[6] in the Garrick collection. If we accept
his abstract personations merely as the names, and not the qualities of
the dramatic personages, "Magnificence" approaches to the true vein of
comedy.
Skelton was, however, probably more gratified by his own Skeltonical
style, moulding it with the wantonness of power on whatever theme, comic
or serious. In a poem remarkable for its elegant playfulness, a very
graceful maiden, whose loveliness the poet has touched with the most
vivid colouring, grieving over the fate of her sparrow from its feline
foe, chants a dirige, a paternoster, and an Ave Maria for its soul, and
the souls of all sparrows. In this discursive poem, which glides from
object to object, in the vast abundance of fancy, a general mourning of
all the birds in the air, and many allusions to the old romances,
"Philip Sparrow," for its elegance, may be placed by the side of
Lesbia's Bird, and, for its playfulness, by the Vert Vert of Gresset.