In the world of politics and statecraft a nation which has once begun to
decline seldom, perhaps never, recovers itself. There are too many other
dogs about for the bone which has once been relinquished to be resumed
later on. It is luck, indeed, if there are any decent scraps to be found
on the platter when it is revisited. In the world of literature and
thought the dogs are better bred, showing each other new
hunting-grounds, and by example and precept often helping to restore a
famished comrade to sleekness and vigour. Political conditions may not
be gainsaid. A nation which has once lost its ideals cannot again
produce a fresh, strong, and manly literature. But the possibilities of
literature remain immense, and we cannot foretell in what country it may
not revive and win fresh triumphs. Hence it is that while the political
fortunes of a nation seem to move mainly along the three straight lines
of ascent, enjoyment, and fall, its literary fortunes express
themselves, when we try to generalise, in a series of curves, alternate
rises and declines, which may be repeated again and again. In English
literature out of the unknown past rose the Anglo-Saxon lyric and epic,
_Deor's Complaint_, _Beowulf_, and the poems of Caedmon and Cynewulf.
From the death-like sleep of our language which followed the Norman
Conquest rose the heights of thirteenth-century romance. From the dull
poetic pedantries of the age which succeeded Chaucer rose the glittering
pinnacles of Shakespeare and his fellows. From the coldness and
shallowness of the eighteenth century rose the rich and varied tableland
of whose occupants Burns was one of the first and Tennyson and Browning
perhaps the last. No other literature has shown such recuperative power,
a thought full of hope and consolation in these days, for those who can
take pleasure in the anticipated joys of their great-grandchildren.
If this philosophising be thought dull, we have only repaid popular
estimates in their own coin; for these sweeping generalisations, which
condemn whole centuries as periods of depression, have been largely made
for us by popular opinion, and like all generalisations, they have to be
very considerably whittled down as soon as we descend to particulars. On
a nearer view we find that the curves of literary progress have not been
rolled smooth by any steamroller, but that the great chain of hills is
connected by numberless ridges, some of which are already rising, long
ere others have touched the plain. A pleasant book by an American
professor (the _History of Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century_, by
Henry A. Beers) has helped to draw attention to many of these rising
ridges of romance in the century which most people connect only with the
name of Pope; and I hope in these few pages to show that the fifteenth
century, of which we are so contemptuous, was at least not all flat
country.
For the poor esteem into which this period has fallen we must lay some
of the blame at the door of the literary historians who have, until
recent days, placed the English Mandeville nearly half a century too
early, postponed the consideration of the dramatic productions till they
reached the middle of the sixteenth century, when they gave a meagre
summary of 'earlier attempts,' and chronicled the industry of
translators, which had been in full swing ever since about 1380, as a
special feature of the sixteenth century, helping thus to account for
the great Elizabethan outburst of original work. No poor period of
literature was ever more mercilessly or wantonly plundered to enrich its
prosperous neighbours on either side; and having thus credited to other
generations all its little claims to distinction, our literary
historians fixed their glance sternly on the court poetry, which is its
weakest feature, and made the case of Hoccleve and Lydgate more pitiful
than it need be by cruelly comparing them with Chaucer. To be
inconvenient to historians is not perhaps of itself a mark of greatness,
but Chaucer's professed lovers may take pleasure in observing how
largely he shares this characteristic with Shakespeare himself. To give
each of them a separate chapter is but a respectful subterfuge, thinly
concealing how unconscionably these two sudden elevations interfere with
that orderly progression which the historian loves. It would be much
easier to tell the story of the Elizabethan-Jacobean drama from rise to
fall if Shakespeare could be left out of it; and if there had been no
Chaucer, how gentle, how almost mathematical, would have been the
progression from the _Cursor Mundi_ and the _Handlyng Synne_ to Gower's
_Confessio Amantis_, from Gower to Lydgate and Hoccleve, and from
Lydgate and Hoccleve to Stephen Hawes! The Italian influence would have
come in for the first time with Surrey and Wyatt, and the whole sequence
would have been just what a plain man would expect. Not only by his
inconvenient possession of genius, but also by his great, if fitful
industry, and by what we can hardly call by any name but good luck,
Chaucer shoots up suddenly between Gower and his natural successors, and
thus revolutionises the standard of poetry by which the next century is
inevitably judged. The effect of his sudden uprising is almost as
confusing to our judgments of his own poetry as of that of his unhappy
'successors.' Brought up, as most of us poor middle-aged critics have
been, on textbooks which grudgingly devoted a scanty thirty or forty
pages to all that happened ere Surrey and Wyatt began to write an
English which literary historians could read without taking any trouble,
we inevitably got it into our heads that with Chaucer we were at the
very beginning; that he was really, as he was called, the Father of
English Poetry, and represented the first blossoming of its spring. The
spring had come and was fast fading when Chaucer began to write. It had
come with the first blossoming of the romances, and with such lyrics as
'Lenten[1] is come with love to town,
With blossoms and with birdes rown';[2]
or as
'Blow, northern wind,
Send thou me my sweeting';
of which the lightness and spontaneity are represented in only a few
snatches in Chaucer. Other touches of the spring he has, for no man
better loved the merry month of May, and he has sung it until he has
become for ever identified with it in our minds. All the same, he
represents also a reaction which sees the humorous side of the lover's
springtide longings, and views all things very much as they are, without
illusion. Fortunately, in Chaucer's case this prosaic mood was raised
and transfigured by the revelation of Italian poetry, which enabled him
to give us in _Troilus and Cressida_, and the knight's tale of _Palamon
and Arcite_, the most perfect harmony of humour and romance English
narrative poetry has produced. No other poet of his time came under the
same influences, and to this fact, as well as to his possession of
genius, he owes his unique position.
That the worthy Lydgate and Hoccleve, without any of Chaucer's good
luck, failed to tread in his footsteps, is thus hardly surprising. They
took from him as much of his machinery as they could carry, wrote in his
metres with the aid of ears sadly confused by the rapidly weakening
pronunciation of final _-e_ and _-es_, and began the attempt, pursued
all through the century, to make up by magniloquence what they lacked in
poetry. This attempt was not confined to England. In France also there
was the same invasion of long words, and it took our fair neighbour much
longer to get rid of them. As the fifteenth century progressed and its
successor began, it became more and more the object of the poetaster to
end his lines with sounding polysyllables, and verse not written in this
style was regarded as uncourtly and undignified. When we once realise
that this particular experiment in language was one which had to be
made, and that our fifteenth-century poets made it with all their might,
we can understand how Hawes could hail Lydgate as 'the most dulcet
spring of famous rhetoric' (this new poetry being essentially
rhetorical); how Skelton, after condescendingly praising Chaucer for the
'pleasant, easy and plain' terms in which he wrote, hastened to explain
that Lydgate's efforts were 'after a higher rate'; and how the same
Skelton thought it necessary in his _Phylyp Sparowe_ to make his 'young
maid' excuse herself for her ignorance of 'polished terms' and 'English
words elect.' Every one in these days was searching anxiously for the
right word, which is indeed the most proper object of every versifier's
search. Unluckily, they only looked for it among polysyllables.
It will be gathered by this time that I hold no brief for what we must
call the court poetry of the fifteenth century, that is to say, the
compositions by which poets from Lydgate to Skelton sought to ingratiate
themselves with noble patrons and to prove their title to immortality.
When they were off their guard they wrote much better. The reminiscences
of the gay days of his youth stirred Hoccleve's muse to unwonted
vivacity. In the _London Lick-penny_ Lydgate, if Lydgate's it be, wrote
humorous satire with success. Skelton himself, though in his (much too
respectfully spoken of) play _Magnificence_ he could flounder with the
worst of his predecessors, in his light and railing rhymes was nimble
enough, and ranged easily from vigorous invective of Wolsey to pretty
panegyrics of fair ladies. Now and again also these good souls ceased
their search for polysyllables, looked at some fair face or pleasant
landscape, and came near to a natural description. Now and again, too,
when they were on their knees (it is only in prayers intended for other
people that long words seem appropriate), they got down to a phrase of
simple beauty. And meanwhile in the country in general, we may be sure,
many simple rhymesters were keeping up old traditions; and if some
diligent student would begin gleaning from the earlier miscellanies with
the industry and insight by which Mr. A.H. Bullen extracted so rich a
harvest from the Elizabethan song-books, surely he also would not go
unrewarded. That the touch which we find in the religious poems of an
earlier date in the Vernon MS. had not been wholly lost is witnessed by
some favourite lines of mine from a book called _Speculum Christiani_,
printed by Machlinia about 1485, and sometimes attributed to John
Wotton--
'Mary mother, well thou be!
Mary mother, think on me;
Maiden and mother was never none
Together, Lady, save thee alone.
Sweet Lady, maiden clean,
Shield me from ill, shame and teen;
Out of sin, Lady, shield thou me.
And out of debt for charity.
Lady, for thy joyes five,
Get me grace in this live,
To know and keep over all thing,
Christian faith and God's bidding.
And truely win all that I need
To me and mine clothe and feed.
Help me, Lady, and all mine;
Shield me, Lady, from hell pine;
Shield me, Lady, from villainy
And from all wicked company.'
By the side of this religious verse is there any need to quote more than
a stanza from the _Nut Brown Maid_ just to remind us what the secular
poets could do?
'Be it right or wrong, these men among, on women do complain,
Affirming this, how that it is a labour spent in vain
To love them well; for never a del they love a man again;
For let a man do what he can their favour to attain,
Yet if a new to them pursue their first true lover than
Laboureth for nought and from her thought he is a banished man.'
To say that English poetry was dead when verse like this was being
written is absurd. It was not dead, but banished from court.
We may well grumble at the mischance which has preserved to us such
quantities of the verse of men like Lydgate and Hawes, with which,
despite all the blandishments of their editors, a not unwise world
refuses to concern itself, and on the other hand has permitted to
perish, or scattered seemingly beyond retrieving, the humbler poetry
which has much greater worth. In the Robin Hood Ballads which Professor
Arber has printed from an edition by Wynkyn de Worde we have at least
one piece of salvage. It must be owned, indeed, that to claim a ballad
as the product of any one century is rather rash, and that in some form
or another this cycle was probably in existence before Chaucer died. The
'Ballad of Otterburn,' again, is founded on an incident of border war
which took place in 1388 when Chaucer had just begun work on the
_Canterbury Tales_, and this also belongs to fourteenth-century
tradition. But both the one and the other, and still more certainly
'Chevy Chace,' must be reckoned in their present form to the credit of
our period, and form a notable reinforcement to it, though we must
regret that the early transcribers and printers took so little trouble
to preserve a correct text.
Christmas carols again, as likely to be handed down from mouth to mouth
in the same way as ballads, can be assigned neither to any single author
nor to any precise year or even decade of composition. But the charming
examples which I have picked out from a number transcribed by Professor
Fluegel from a Balliol College manuscript of the middle of the sixteenth
century, may all safely be attributed to a date earlier than 1500,
though perhaps not very much earlier, and in their simple tenderness and
mirth they are in strong contrast to the pretentious poetry of the
court.[3]
As with the ballads and carols, so with miracle-plays: the fact that
they were handed down from one generation to another, and in each
generation revised, altered, and added to, makes assignment of dates
almost impossible. The play of the Shearmen and Tailors from the
Coventry Gilds cycle,[4] here printed, survived in a transcript dated
1534, and it is probable that it was then copied out for the sake of
combining what must originally have been four or five different plays
into one. Some of these plays in their separate form may have been first
written in the fourteenth century; they appear to have been added to in
the fifteenth, and (as we have seen) assumed their final form in the
sixteenth. The whole of the pseudo-Coventry cycle,[5] in like manner,
seems to have been revised and largely written when it was last
transcribed in 1468. But the supreme example of fifteenth-century
addition to an older cycle is that of the Wakefield Plays, which early
in the century were taken in hand by a dramatist of extraordinary
ability, whose traceable contributions amount to over three thousand
lines, distributed among at least six, or quite probably as many as nine
different plays, of which five are homogeneous and entirely from his
hand. Among these five are the well-known _Prima_ and _Secunda
Pastorum_, the two Shepherds' Plays with which the history of English
comedy begins. The humours of the two shepherds who meet on the moor and
come to blows over the grazing of an imaginary flock of sheep are good;
the humours of the Secunda Pastorum, of Mak the sheep-stealer, his
clever wife Gyll, the sheep that was passed off as a baby, and Mak's
well-deserved blanketing,--these surely are not only good, but as good,
of their kind, as they well can be. That I have not printed this second
Shepherds' Play here is due partly to its being easily accessible in the
Early English Text Society's edition, but chiefly to the serious
obstacles its northern dialect presents to any attempt at transcribing
it in modern English. The play of the Shearmen and Tailors of Coventry,
on the other hand, as I have noted in my preface, cries aloud for such
transcription. The fact, moreover, that in its present conglomerate
condition, it gives the whole history of the Divine Infancy from the
Annunciation to the Flight into Egypt makes it very representative, even
the humour of the Miracle Plays being exemplified, though poorly and
incongruously, in the attack of the mothers of the Innocents on Herod's
knights. The different sections of the play, the work no doubt of
different authors, have varying values, that of the Prophets, never very
successfully handled, being much the weakest. On the other hand, in the
simple gifts of the shepherds to the Holy Child we have a very fair
representation of one of the stock incidents of a Nativity Play in which
free scope was given to whatever tender and playful fancy the dramatist
possessed. It should be said that during the fifteenth century the
popularity of these plays increased enormously, records of their
performance being found in all parts of England, including Cornwall and
Wales, where they were acted in the vernacular.
Starting not very much later than the Miracle Plays, since we hear of
them at York in the middle of the fourteenth century, the Moralities
also increased greatly in popularity during our period, offering ample
opportunity for the allegorising and personifying tendency which was one
of its most prominent, and in many respects most baneful,
characteristics. Several plays of this kind of undoubted English origin
have come down to us from the fifteenth century itself, and are well
worth study. Chiefly because of the interest which has been aroused by
its recent performance, I have preferred to give that of _The Summoning
of Everyman_, which, while presenting much less variety than such plays
as _The Castle of Perseverance_, or _Mind, Will, and Understanding_, has
the merit of being in very easy English, short, impressive, and
homogeneous. It is these latter merits, quite as much as the evidence
which can be obtained by comparing the two texts, that offer the best
reason for acquiescing in the verdict that the Dutch play of
_Elckerlijk_, attributed to Petrus Dorlandus, a theological writer of
Diest, who died in 1507, has a better claim than our English version to
be considered the original. Strict adherence to propriety of form was
not a characteristic of the dramatic literature of this period, and had
the play been of native origin its uniform seriousness of tone would
almost assuredly have been broken by some humorous, or semi-humorous,
episodes. While the two plays, with the exception of the Prologue, which
is not found in the Dutch, agree speech by speech from beginning to end,
the English version is not a slavish translation; indeed, the ease and
happiness of the diction, and the freedom with which it moves, give it,
until the Dutch text is examined, the tone of an original work, and the
translator must have been a man of no small ability to achieve such a
success. It should be said that the oldest Dutch edition now extant
appears to have been printed about 1495; but the play may have been
written some years before this, though hardly as early as 'about 1477,'
the date Professor Logeman proposes, if the author was only born in
1454, for it does not read like the work of a very young man. Professor
Logeman was, perhaps, influenced in proposing this date by a desire to
get in front of the critics of English literature (including ten Brink),
who have assigned the English play to the reign of Edward IV., _i.e._
not later than 1483. As in the Miracle Plays, so in the Moralities, an
original purely didactic purpose was gradually influenced by a desire to
render the didacticism more palatable to a popular audience by the
introduction of humorous incidents. The complete absence of these from
_Everyman_ naturally caused critics to assign it the earliest possible
date, so long as it was regarded as an original work. But there is
nothing in the language which precludes it from having been written
immediately after 1495, when we know that a Dutch edition was in print,
and in judging it as a translation we may be content to assign it to the
end of the fifteenth century. It is worth noting that at that date there
must already have been considerable literary intercourse between England
and Holland, and that several popular English books had already been
printed at Antwerp for the English market.
It would have been pleasant to me, as a lover of these forerunners of
the Elizabethan drama, to have advanced from the Miracle Play and
Morality, and have given examples of the Moral-Interlude and Farce; but
these belong emphatically to the sixteenth century, and come too near
the drama itself for inclusion in a non-dramatic 'Garner.' But as a
counterpart to Professor Arber's Trial of William Thorpe for Heresy, I
have ventured to reprint here from the Transactions of the Bibliographical
Society some pleadings in a theatrical lawsuit of the reign of Henry
VIII., one of the many interesting discoveries published by Mr. Henry
Plomer. Mr. Plomer's own interest in the pleadings, and the reason which
made them suitable for publication by a Society in no wise concerned
with the history of the drama, arose from the fact that the plaintiff in
the case, John Rastell, besides being a lawyer and (it is believed) a
writer of interludes, was also a printer, details of any kind that can
be gleaned about the lives of early printers being always welcome to
bookish antiquaries. But these particular details about Rastell's stage
in his garden, the classes from which actors were drawn, the value of
the dresses they wore, the practice of hiring the dresses out, and the
rather puzzling distinction made between stage-plays and interludes,[6]
are all of considerable interest for our period of the drama, and it
seemed a good deed to give them wider publicity.
We pass now from a survey of its poetry, both non-dramatic and dramatic,
to the work done in the fifteenth century for the development of English
prose. Until quite towards the close of the fourteenth century England
can hardly be said to have possessed any prose literature not avowedly
or practically of a didactic character. To save some one's soul or to
improve some one's morals were seemingly the only motives which could
suffice to persuade an Englishman to write his native language except in
verse. The impulse towards prose-writing may perhaps be dated from about
1380, the date of the first Wyclifite translation of the Bible. Of this
the books of the Old Testament, as far as Daniel, are stated on
contemporary authority to have been rendered by Nicholas Hereford; while
historians, after salving their conscience by confessing that there is
substantially no evidence for attributing the rest of the work to
Wyclif, wherever they have afterwards to mention it, invariably connect
it with his name. A revised edition, usually assigned to Wyclif's
friend, John Purvey, was completed a few years later. It was about 1380
that Chaucer was engaged in translating Boethius's _De Consolatione
Philosophiae_, and not long afterwards Usk wrote his _Testament of Love_.
The first really secular English book of any importance, the translation
of Mandeville's _Travels_, which has come down to us in a Cotton
manuscript, was probably made about the end of the century, and was
quickly succeeded by two variant versions. John of Trevisa, an Oxford
scholar, was the first to English an important historical work, and a
book of popular science, the _Polychronicon_ of Higden and the _De
Proprietatibus Rerum_ of Bartholomew.
It was necessarily by the free use of translation that an English
secular prose literature had to be built up. All the standard works
hitherto had been written in Latin, or in a few cases in French; and now
that English had been recognised, alike at court, in the law-courts, and
in the schools, as the natural language of the inhabitants of England,
the first thing which had to be done was to provide Englishmen with the
ordinary sources of information in their own language. The need for
translation directed attention to its principles and canons, and two
interesting little essays on the subject are here printed--the one from
the preface, said to be by Purvey, to the second Wyclifite Bible, and
the other from that prefixed by Trevisa to his translation of Higden's
_Polychronicon_. I have particular pleasure in placing these two
prefaces side by side, because, as far as I know, the really striking
resemblances between them, in their grammatical remarks, in their survey
of previous attempts at an English translation of the Bible, and in
their attitude to such a translation, have never been pointed out.
Without wishing to intrude myself into controversial matters on which no
one is entitled to speak who has not made a special study of the
subject, I would fain again draw attention to the fact that whereas we
have a definite statement by Caxton[7] that the _Polychronicon_ 'was
englisshed by one Trevisa, vicarye of barkley, which atte request of one
Sir Thomas lord barkley translated the sayd book [which we have], _the
byble_, and bartylmew _de proprietatibus rerum_ [which we have] out of
latyn into englysshe,' in the case of Purvey his name was first
mentioned in connection with Bible translation in 1729 by Daniel
Waterton, who 'guessed' and 'pitched upon' him (Waterton's Works, vol.
x. p. 361) as the author of the second version, partly on the ground of
his general prominence as a Wyclifite, and also because of his ownership
of a Bible in Trinity College, Dublin, which Waterland hoped would prove
to be of that version. As it happens, the text, which is only that of
the New Testament, is, apparently throughout, that of the earlier
version, with some of the Prologues of the later version to separate
books inserted. Inasmuch also as the manuscript was not completed till
1427 or later, its bearing on the question of the authorship of a
translation, which had then been in circulation for some thirty years,
does not appear to be very great. It was open to any one to combine the
different parts of the two versions in any way he pleased, and that
Purvey seems to have preferred the text of the earlier version and the
prologues of the later hardly proves that the later version is due to
him. If we must drag him in at all, it would be much more reasonable to
assign to him the completion of Nicholas of Hereford's unfinished work.
Lightly arrived at as it was, Waterland's 'guess' was adopted by
Forshall and Madden in their fine edition of the two versions published
in 1850, and as buttressed up by them with what seems to me a very weak
additional argument, has ever since been repeated as an established
fact.[8] The readiness with which the conjecture was accepted can only
be accounted for by the desire to make the work of translation centre at
Lutterworth instead of, as I believe to have been the case, at Oxford.
It seems to be considered that we shall be robbing Wyclif of his due
unless the translations are connected with him as closely as possible.
Burdened as he was in his last years with age and infirmities, it is
surely enough if he inspired others to work at this great task; we need
not insist that he must have written at least part of the first
translation with his own hands, and that the second must have begun
under his immediate eye. I would submit, indeed, that the tone of the
second translator's reference to 'the English Bible late translated' (p.
195) is quite incompatible with any such theory. We know from the
manuscript note in the Bodleian MS. that Nicholas of Hereford began the
translation of the Old Testament; and when his work was interrupted by
the necessity for flight, it is far more likely that it was taken up by
some other of Wyclif's numerous disciples at Oxford rather than by the
master himself, while the fact that it was the work of his disciples,
urged no doubt by his wish, would amply account for such references as
may be found to it under Wyclif's name. For the second translation, it
seems to me that the tone of the reference already quoted, and the
detailed account (see p. 194) which the translator gives of the method
in which he went to work, compel us to seek an independent origin, and
to look for some other translator less immediately under Wyclif's
influence. The freedom with which the Bible admittedly circulated for
many years, and the well-known allusion by Sir Thomas More to an English
translation untouched by any taint of heresy, point also in the same
direction. That the second version is really only a revision of the
first can hardly be adduced as a strong argument on the other side. The
ethics of literary acknowledgment were not appreciated in Trevisa's
days, and I believe that a very similar relation can be found on
comparison of what is known as the 'Vulgate' text of Mandeville with
that of the Cotton manuscript, which the second translator appears to
have used freely, though in this case without improving on it. At any
rate, William Caxton seems a better authority than an eighteenth-century
divine as to the authorship of a translation made only a few years
before he was born. We know that Trevisa was what we may call a
professional translator, well equipped for his task; and we find him in
the preface to the _Polychronicon_ discussing the translation of the
Bible in a strikingly similar spirit to that in which it is discussed in
the Prologue to one of the translations which have come down to us. It
is to be hoped that the subject may receive further investigation, and
that without the importation of theological bias.
We meet with the name of John Purvey once more in one of the longest and
most interesting of the pieces here printed, the Examination of William
Thorpe before Archbishop Arundel, held at Saltwood Castle in Kent in
1407. 'I know none more covetous shrews,' said the Archbishop to Thorpe
in his railing way, 'than ye are when that ye have a benefice. For, lo!
I gave to John Purvey a benefice (that of West Hythe, which Purvey held
for fourteen months from August 1401) but a mile out of this castle, and
I heard more complaints about his covetousness for tithes and other
misdoings than I did of all men that were advanced within my diocese.'
'Sir,' replied Thorpe, 'Sir, Purvey is neither with you now for the
benefice ye gave him, nor holdeth he faithfully with the learning that
he taught and writ beforetime; and thus he sheweth himself neither to be
hot nor cold; and therefore he and his fellows may sore dread that if
they turn not hastily to the way that they have forsaken, peradventure
they be put out of the number of Christ's chosen people.'
The Archbishop's answer was to mutter threats against Purvey as a 'false
harlot'; and so the Bible-translator, if such he were, was abused on
both sides. The dialogue about him is a fair instance of the vividness
with which Thorpe's account of his trial illustrates the fortunes of
Wyclif's followers when they scattered before their persecutors without
any leader to rally them. Thorpe was accused of holding all the chief
tenets of Wyclif's which were condemned as contrary to the Church's
order and teaching, and his answers, according to the account he gives
of them, were at once bold and prudent. He seems, moreover, to have had
a real gift as a reporter, and to have exercised it impartially enough,
for not every Lollard would have put into his examiner's mouth that
remarkably happy defence of taking a bagpipe on pilgrimage, which will
be found on page 141. Thorpe, though he was sent back to prison, lived
to write this account of his trial three-and-fifty years after it took
place, but Sir John Oldcastle was burnt alive, despite all Prince Hal's
efforts to win him to recant and save himself, and the short account of
his trial, which follows that of Thorpe, has thus a more tragic
interest.
The persecution of the Lollards was but an incident in the fifteenth
century, little affecting its literature, though the burning of
Oldcastle called forth a bad poem by Hoccleve. The wasteful wars in
France, and the turmoil of the Roses, on the other hand, had a great and
most disastrous influence. After Lydgate's death about 1447, Capgrave
was our leading man of letters, and on his death in 1464 the post was
left vacant, unless Master Bennet Burgh can be considered as having held
it. The Paston Letters, which begin in 1422 and cover the rest of the
century (till 1507), offer some consolation for the lack of more formal
literature, but the lack is undeniable. Moreover, not only literature,
but the bookish arts suffered terribly from this depression. The fine
English illuminated manuscripts which at the beginning of the century
had vied with those of France, ceased to be produced after about 1430
(the siege of Orleans was raised by Jeanne Darc in 1429, and the
synchronism may be significant), and with the illuminations, the simpler
art of penmanship declined also. It was thus small wonder that the art
of printing was introduced but tardily to our country, more than twenty
years after the first printed Bible had appeared at Mainz, and that,
typographically, William Caxton, with no fine models in contemporary
English manuscripts to guide him, produced no single book that can stand
comparison with the best work of foreign printers. But if he was a poor
printer, he was a most enterprising and skilful publisher, and in his
homely way a genuine and most prolific journeyman of letters. As the
word journeyman is written, shame bids us strike out the first half of
it, lest we seem to cast a slight upon one who did so excellent a work
for English literature, whose enthusiasm was so genuine and whose
industry so great. But Caxton was always modest for himself, and we
shall serve him best by not putting his claims too high. When he
commenced author there is an ingenuity in the way he mixes his
constructions, which, though it may delight his lovers, compels some
little caution in introducing him, haply, to new readers, whom such a
paragraph as that which begins 'When I remember' on page 213 might
easily affront. But he certainly improved his style by constant
practice, and the handful of his prefaces and epilogues here printed do
not lack literary charm, while the information they give of the man, his
character, his enthusiasms, and his business can hardly fail to please
any reasonably sympathetic reader. Take, for instance, these delightful
confidences as to the fears and hopes attendant on his translation and
publication of that bulky work, the _Golden Legend_ of Jacobus de
Voragine, which might well daunt even an enterprising publisher:--
'And forasmuch as this said work was great and over chargeable to me to
accomplish, I feared me in the beginning of the translation to have
continued it, because of the long time of the translation and also in
the imprinting of the same, and in manner half desperate to have
accomplished it, was in purpose to have left it, after that I had begun
to translate it, and to have laid it apart, ne had it been at the
instance and request of the puissant, noble and virtuous Earl, my Lord
William Earl of Arundel, which desired me to proceed and continue the
said work, and promised me to take a reasonable quantity of them when
they were achieved and accomplished, and sent to me a worshipful
gentleman, a servant of his named John Stanney, which solicited me in my
lord's name that I should in no wise leave it, but accomplish it,
promising that my said lord should during his life give and grant to me
a yearly fee, that is to wit a buck in summer and a doe in winter, with
which fee I hold me well content. Then at the contemplation and
reverence of my said lord I have endeavoured me to make an end and
finish this said translation and also have imprinted it in the most best
wise that I have, could or might, and present this said book to his good
and noble lordship, as chief causer of the achieving of it, praying him
to take it in gree of me William Caxton, his poor servant, and that it
like him to remember my fee, and I shall pray unto Almighty God for his
long life and welfare, and after this short and transitory life to come
into everlasting joy in heaven, the which he send to him and to me and
unto all them that shall read and hear this said book, that for the love
and faith of whom all these holy saints hath suffered death and passion.
Amen.'
Few publishers since Caxton's days have let us so far into their
secrets, and we can but hope that his patron really took 'a reasonable
quantity' of the edition (another was published in a few years, so he
probably did), and that the bucks and the does furnished many jolly
dinners. Elsewhere in these prefaces Caxton tells us how he was induced
to take up the art of printing, narrates the trouble, in which he has
had successors, in getting a good text of Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_,
pokes fun at English ladies and at another of his patrons, the Earl of
Rivers, and sets down what is still one of the best criticisms ever
penned of Malory's _King Arthur_. With the mention of that noble work it
is well to finish this brief sketch of our fifteenth-century literature.
It is too well known, too easily accessible, for any snippets to be
quoted from it here. But with the English version of Mandeville at the
beginning of our period, and Malory's _Arthur_ completed in 1469 and
published in 1483, it is evident that we can lay claim to two
masterpieces which have not yet lost their hold on modern readers. The
simplicity and feeling of _Everyman_ has lately obtained recognition. I
hope that, when boys and girls are taught a little more of their own
language, the play of _Max the Sheepstealer_ may win even greater
popularity, for it is an ideal play for children to act. If we throw in
'Chevy Chace' and the 'Nut Brown Maid' and the 'Robin Hood Ballads,' we
shall not be lacking for poetry. For the interest which we now seek in a
realistic novel we might well go to the Paston Letters. There are not a
few nations of Europe which might be well pleased if they could show,
century by century, as good a record as this. It is only in fact the
ill-fortune which placed it midway between Chaucer and Shakespeare, and
our own perversity which persists in associating it mainly with Lydgate
and Hoccleve, that causes us to contemn this particular century as
dull.
Footnotes:
[1] Spring.
[2] Whispering.
[3] Printed by him in 1894 in a 'Festschrift' in honour of Professor
Hildebrand.
[4] To be carefully distinguished from the so-called Coventry Plays of
Cotton MS., Vespasian, D. viii., whose highly doubtful connection with
Coventry rests solely on a note of Cotton's librarian.
[5] It would be convenient if they could be called the Cotton Plays, as
the Wakefield cycle has been called after the Towneley family.
[6] See p. 316. Stage-plays were acted in the summer, interludes in the
winter, the cost of hiring dresses being apparently from three to five
times as great for a stage-play as for an interlude. My own
interpretation is that the distinction has nothing to do with the plays
acted, but solely to the place of performance, interludes being acted
indoors and stage-plays in the open air, where the dresses were exposed
to greater damage.
[7] Prohemye to _Polychronicon_, _ad fin._
[8] The argument as I understand it runs as follows:--
(i) The author of the Prologue is the author of the Translation of the
Bible (which may be granted, though not without the reservation that the
helpers to whom allusion is made may have written sections of the
Prologue, which would confuse any deductions).
(ii) The Prologue has verbal resemblances to the treatise designated
_Ecclesiae Regimen_ (the instances quoted seem to me resemblances merely
of topics, and these not uncommon ones).
(iii) The _Ecclesiae Regimen_ resembles Purvey's confession at his
recantation in 1400 (the previous criticism applies here much more
strongly).
Therefore the translation of the Bible is by the author of the _Ecclesiae
Regimen_, and the author of this is Purvey. I must repeat that the chain
seems to me lamentably weak, and that the resemblances which may be
found between Section xv. of the Prologue and Trevisa's Dialogue and
Letter to Lord Berkeley are stronger, because not arising out of quite
such common topics. That they are only to a slight extent verbal
resemblances is no drawback. We do not expect a man to repeat his own
words exactly. What is interesting is to find two translators both
interested in their own methods, and these methods similar.