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.