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.