FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER.
1400-1599.
The 15th century was a barren period in English literary history. It
was nearly two hundred years after Chaucer's death before any poet
came, whose name can be written in the same line with his. He was
followed at once by a number of imitators who caught the trick of his
language and verse, but lacked the genius to make any fine use of them.
The manner of a true poet may be learned, but his style, in the high
sense of the word, remains his own secret. Some of the poems which
have been attributed to Chaucer and printed in editions of his works,
as the _Court of Love_, the _Flower and the Leaf_, the _Cuckow and the
Nightingale_, are now regarded by many scholars as the work of later
writers. If not Chaucer's, they are of Chaucer's school, and the first
two, at least, are very pretty poems after the fashion of his minor
pieces, such as the _Boke of the Duchesse_ and the _Parlament of
Foules_.
Among his professed disciples was Thomas Occleve, a dull rhymer, who,
in his _Governail of Princes_, a didactic poem translated from the
Latin {43} about 1413, drew, or caused to be drawn, on the margin of
his MS. a colored portrait of his "maister dere and fader reverent,"
"This londes verray tresour and richesse,
Dethe by thy dethe hath harm irreparable
Unto us done; hir vengeable duresse
Dispoiled hath this londe of the swetnesse
Of Rhetoryk."
Another versifier of this same generation was John Lydgate, a
Benedictine monk, of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, a very
prolix writer, who composed, among other things, the _Story of Thebes_,
as an addition to the _Canterbury Tales_. His ballad of _London
Lyckpenny_, recounting the adventures of a countryman who goes to the
law courts at Westminster in search of justice,
"But for lack of mony I could not speede,"
is of interest for the glimpse that it gives us of London street life.
Chaucer's influence wrought more fruitfully in Scotland, whither it was
carried by James I., who had been captured by the English when a boy of
eleven, and brought up at Windsor as a prisoner of State. There he
wrote during the reign of Henry V. (1413-1422) a poem in six cantos,
entitled the _King's Quhair_ (King's Book), in Chaucer's seven lined
stanza which had been employed by Lydgate in his _Falls of Princes_
(from Boccaccio), and which was afterward called {44} the "rime royal,"
from its use by King James, The _King's Quhair_ tells how the poet, on
a May morning, looks from the window of his prison chamber into the
castle garden full of alleys, hawthorn hedges, and fair arbors set with
"The sharpe, greene, sweete juniper."
He was listening to "the little sweete nightingale," when suddenly
casting down his eyes he saw a lady walking in the garden, and at once
his "heart became her thrall." The incident is precisely like
Palamon's first sight of Emily in Chaucer's _Knight's Tale_, and almost
in the very words of Palamon, the poet addresses his lady:
"Ah, sweet, are ye a worldly creature
Or heavenly thing in likeness of nature?
Or are ye very Nature, the goddess,
That have depainted with your heavenly hand
This garden full of flowres as they stand?"
Then, after a vision in the taste of the age, in which the royal
prisoner is transported in turn to the courts of _Venus_, _Minerva_,
and _Fortune_, and receives their instruction in the duties belonging
to Love's service, he wakes from sleep and a white turtle-dove brings
to his window a spray of red gillyflowers, whose leaves are inscribed,
in golden letters, with a message of encouragement.
James I. may be reckoned among the English poets. He mentions Chaucer,
Gower, and Lydgate as his masters. His education was English, and so
was the dialect of his poem, although the {45} unique MS. of it is in
the Scotch spelling. The _King's Quhair_ is somewhat overladen with
ornament and with the fashionable allegorical devices, but it is, upon
the whole, a rich and tender love song, the best specimen of court
poetry between the time of Chaucer and the time of Spenser. The lady
who walked in the garden on that May morning was Jane Beaufort, niece
to Henry IV. She was married to her poet after his release from
captivity and became Queen of Scotland in 1424. Twelve years later
James was murdered by Sir Robert Graham and his Highlanders, and his
wife, who strove to defend him, was wounded by the assassins. The
story of the murder has been told of late by D. G. Rossetti, in his
ballad, _The King's Tragedy_.
The whole life of this princely singer was, like his poem, in the very
spirit of romance.
The effect of all this imitation of Chaucer was to fix a standard of
literary style, and to confirm the authority of the East-Midland
English in which he had written. Though the poets of the 15th century
were not overburdened with genius, they had, at least, a definite model
to follow. As in the 14th century, metrical romances continued to be
translated from the French, homilies and saints' legends and rhyming
chronicles were still manufactured. But the poems of Occleve and
Lydgate and James I. had helped to polish and refine the tongue and to
prolong the Chaucerian tradition. The literary English never again
slipped {46} back into the chaos of dialects which had prevailed before
Chaucer.
In the history of every literature the development of prose is later
than that of verse. The latter being, by its very form, artificial, is
cultivated as a fine art, and its records preserved in an early stage
of society, when prose is simply the talk of men, and not thought
worthy of being written and kept. English prose labored under the
added disadvantage of competing with Latin, which was the cosmopolitan
tongue and the medium of communication between scholars of all
countries. Latin was the language of the Church, and in the Middle
Ages churchman and scholar were convertible terms. The word _clerk_
meant either priest or scholar. Two of the _Canterbury Tales_ are in
prose, as is also the _Testament of Love_, formerly ascribed to
Chaucer, and the style of all these is so feeble, wandering, and
unformed that it is hard to believe that they were written by the same
man who wrote the _Knight's Tale_ and the story of _Griselda_. _The
Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundeville_--the forerunner of that
great library of Oriental travel which has enriched our modern
literature--was written, according to its author, first in Latin, then
in French, and, lastly, in the year 1356, translated into English for
the behoof of "lordes and knyghtes and othere noble and worthi men,
that conne not Latyn but litylle." The author professed to have spent
over thirty years in Eastern travel, to have penetrated as far {47} as
Farther India and the "iles that ben abouten Indi," to have been in the
service of the Sultan of Babylon in his wars against the Bedouins, and,
at another time, in the employ of the Great Khan of Tartary. But there
is no copy of the Latin version of his travels extant; the French seems
to be much later than 1356, and the English MS. to belong to the early
years of the fifteenth century, and to have been made by another hand.
Recent investigations make it probable that Maundeville borrowed his
descriptions of the remoter East from many sources, and particularly
from the narrative of Odoric, a Minorite friar of Lombardy, who wrote
about 1330. Some doubt is even cast upon the existence of any such
person as Maundeville. Whoever wrote the book that passes under his
name, however, would seem to have visited the Holy Land, and the part
of the "voiage" that describes Palestine and the Levant is fairly close
to the truth. The rest of the work, so far as it is not taken from the
tales of other travelers, is a diverting tissue of fables about
gryfouns that fly away with yokes of oxen, tribes of one-legged
Ethiopians who shelter themselves from the sun by using their monstrous
feet as umbrellas, etc.
During the 15th century English prose was gradually being brought into
a shape fitting it for more serious uses. In the controversy between
the Church and the Lollards Latin was still mainly employed, but Wiclif
had written some of his tracts in English, and, in 1449, Reginald
Peacock, Bishop of {48} St. Asaph, contributed, in English, to the same
controversy, _The Represser of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy_. Sir
John Fortescue, who was chief-justice of the king's bench from
1442-1460, wrote during the reign of Edward IV. a book on the
_Difference between Absolute and Limited Monarchy_, which may be
regarded as the first treatise on political philosophy and
constitutional law in the language. But these works hardly belong to
pure literature, and are remarkable only as early, though not very
good, examples of English prose in a barren time. The 15th century was
an era of decay and change. The Middle Age was dying, Church and State
were slowly disintegrating under the new intellectual influences that
were working secretly under ground. In England the civil wars of the
Red and White Roses were breaking up the old feudal society by
decimating and impoverishing the baronage, thus preparing the way for
the centralized monarchy of the Tudors. Toward the close of that
century, and early in the next, happened the four great events, or
series of events, which freed and widened men's minds, and, in a
succession of shocks, overthrew the mediaeval system of life and
thought. These were the invention of printing, the Renascence, or
revival of classical learning, the discovery of America, and the
Protestant Reformation.
William Caxton, the first English printer, learned the art in Cologne.
In 1476 he set up his press and sign, a red pole, in the Almonry at
Westminster. Just before the introduction of printing the demand {49}
for MS. copies had grown very active, stimulated, perhaps, by the
coming into general use of linen paper instead of the more costly
parchment. The scriptoria of the monasteries were the places where the
transcribing and illuminating of MSS. went on, professional copyists
resorting to Westminster Abbey, for example, to make their copies of
books belonging to the monastic library. Caxton's choice of a spot
was, therefore, significant. His new art for multiplying copies began
to supersede the old method of transcription at the very head-quarters
of the MS. makers. The first book that bears his Westminster imprint
was the _Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers_, translated from the
French by Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, a brother-in-law of Edward
IV. The list of books printed by Caxton is interesting, as showing the
taste of the time, as he naturally selected what was most in demand.
The list shows that manuals of devotion and chivalry were still in
chief request, books like the _Order of Chivalry_, _Faits of Arms_, and
the _Golden Legend_, which last Caxton translated himself, as well as
_Reynard the Fox_, and a French version of the _Aeneid_. He also
printed, with continuations of his own, revisions of several early
chronicles, and editions of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. A translation
of _Cicero on Friendship_, made directly from the Latin, by Thomas
Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, was printed by Caxton, but no edition of a
classical author in the original. The new learning of the Renascence
had not, as {50} yet, taken much hold in England. Upon the whole, the
productions of Caxton's press were mostly of a kind that may be
described as mediaeval, and the most important of them, if we except
his edition of Chaucer, was that "noble and joyous book," as Caxton
called it, _Le Morte Darthur_, written by Sir Thomas Malory in 1469,
and printed by Caxton in 1485. This was a compilation from French
Arthur romances, and was by far the best English prose that had yet
been written. It may be doubted, indeed, whether, for purposes of
simple story telling, the picturesque charm of Malory's style has been
improved upon. The episode which lends its name to the whole romance,
the death of Arthur, is most impressively told, and Tennyson has
followed Malory's narrative closely, even to such details of the scene
as the little chapel by the sea, the moonlight, and the answer which
Sir Bedwere made the wounded king, when bidden to throw Excalibur into
the water, "'What saw thou there?' said the king. 'Sir,' he said, 'I
saw nothing but the waters wap and the waves wan.'"
"I heard the ripple washing in the reeds
And the wild water lapping on the crag."
And very touching and beautiful is the oft-quoted lament of Sir Ector
over Launcelot, in Malory's final chapter: "'Ah, Launcelot,' he said,
'thou were head of all Christian knights; and now I dare say,' said Sir
Ector, 'thou, Sir Launcelot, there thou liest, that thou were never
matched of earthly {51} knight's hand; and thou were the courtiest
knight that ever bare shield; and thou were the truest friend to thy
lover that ever bestrode horse; and thou were the truest lover of a
sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou were the kindest man that
ever strake with sword; and thou were the goodliest person ever came
among press of knights; and thou were the meekest man and the gentlest
that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight
to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.'"
Equally good, as an example of English prose narrative, was the
translation made by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, of that most
brilliant of the French chroniclers, Chaucer's contemporary, Sir John
Froissart. Lord Berners was the English governor of Calais, and his
version of Froissart's _Chronicles_ was made in 1523-25, at the request
of Henry VIII. In these two books English chivalry spoke its last
genuine word. In Sir Philip Sidney the character of the knight was
merged into that of the modern gentleman. And although tournaments
were still held in the reign of Elizabeth, and Spenser cast his _Faery
Queene_ into the form of a chivalry romance, these were but a
ceremonial survival and literary tradition from an order of things that
had passed away. How antagonistic the new classical culture was to the
vanished ideal of the Middle Age may be read in _Toxophilus_, a
treatise on archery published in 1545, by Roger Ascham, a Greek
lecturer in Cambridge, and the {52} tutor of the Princess Elizabeth and
of Lady Jane Grey. "In our forefathers' time, when Papistry as a
standing pool covered and overflowed all England, few books were read
in our tongue saving certain books of chivalry, as they said, for
pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in monasteries by
idle monks or wanton canons: as one, for example, _Morte Arthure_, the
whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points, in open
manslaughter and bold bawdry. This is good stuff for wise men to laugh
at or honest men to take pleasure at. Yet I know when God's Bible was
banished the Court, and _Morte Arthure_ received into the prince's
chamber."
The fashionable school of courtly allegory, first introduced into
England by the translation of the _Romaunt of the Rose_, reached its
extremity in Stephen Hawes's _Passetyme of Pleasure_, printed by
Caxton's successor, Wynkyn de Worde, in 1517. This was a dreary and
pedantic poem, in which it is told how Graunde Amoure, after a long
series of adventures and instructions among such shadowy personages as
Verite, Observaunce, Falshed, and Good Operacion, finally won the love
of La Belle Pucel. Hawes was the last English poet of note whose
culture was exclusively mediaeval. His contemporary, John Skelton,
mingled the old fashions with the new classical learning. In his
_Bowge of Courte_ (Court Entertainment or Dole), and in others of his
earlier pieces, he used, like Hawes, Chaucer's seven-lined stanza. But
his later {53} poems were mostly written in a verse of his own
invention, called after him _Skeltonical_. This was a sort of
glorified doggerel, in short, swift, ragged lines, with occasional
intermixture of French and Latin.
"Her beautye to augment.
Dame Nature hath her lent
A warte upon her cheke,
Who so lyst to seke
In her vysage a skar,
That semyth from afar
Lyke to the radyant star,
All with favour fret,
So properly it is set.
She is the vyolet,
The daysy delectable,
The columbine commendable,
The jelofer amyable;
For this most goodly floure,
This blossom of fressh colour,
So Jupiter me succour,
She florysheth new and new
In beaute and vertew;
_Hac claritate gemina,
O gloriosa femina, etc._"
Skelton was a rude railing rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and
original poet with a buffoon; coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure,
but always vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his
profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his
clerical character. His _Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng_ is a study of
very low life, reminding one slightly of Burns's _Jolly {54} Beggars_.
His _Phyllyp Sparowe_ is a sportive, pretty, fantastic elegy on the
death of a pet bird belonging to Mistress Joanna Scroupe, of Carowe,
and has been compared to the Latin poet Catullus's elegy on Lesbia's
sparrow. In _Speke_, _Parrot_, and _Why Come ye not to Courte?_ he
assailed the powerful Cardinal Wolsey with the most ferocious satire,
and was, in consequence, obliged to take sanctuary at Westminster,
where he died in 1529. Skelton was a classical scholar, and at one
time tutor to Henry VIII. The great humanist, Erasmus, spoke of him as
the "one light and ornament of British letters." Caxton asserts that
he had read Virgil, Ovid, and Tully, and quaintly adds, "I suppose he
hath dronken of Elycon's well."
In refreshing contrast with the artificial court poetry of the 15th and
first three quarters of the 16th century, was the folk-poetry, the
popular ballad literature which was handed down by oral tradition. The
English and Scotch ballads were narrative songs, written in a variety
of meters, but chiefly in what is known as the ballad stanza.
"In somer, when the shawes[1] be sheyne,[2]
And leves be large and longe,
Hit is full merry in feyre forest
To here the foulys song.
"To se the dere draw to the dale,
And leve the hilles hee,[3]
And shadow them in the leves grene,
Under the grene-wode tree."
[55]
It is not possible to assign a definite date to these ballads. They
lived on the lips of the people, and were seldom reduced to writing
till many years after they were first composed and sung. Meanwhile
they underwent repeated changes, so that we have numerous versions of
the same story. They belonged to no particular author, but, like all
folk-lore, were handled freely by the unknown poets, minstrels, and
ballad reciters, who modernized their language, added to them, or
corrupted them, and passed them along. Coming out of an uncertain
past, based on some dark legend of heart-break or bloodshed, they bear
no poet's name, but are _ferae naturae_, and have the flavor of wild
game. In the forms in which they are preserved few of them are older
than the 17th century, or the latter part of the 16th century, though
many, in their original shape, are, doubtless, much older. A very few
of the Robin Hood ballads go back to the 15th century, and to the same
period is assigned the charming ballad of the _Nut Brown Maid_ and the
famous border ballad of _Chevy Chase_, which describes a battle between
the retainers of the two great houses of Douglas and Percy. It was
this song of which Sir Philip Sidney wrote, "I never heard the old song
of Percy and Douglas but I found myself more moved than by a trumpet;
and yet it is sung but by some blind crouder,[4] with no rougher voice
than rude style." But the style of the ballads was not always rude.
{56} In their compressed energy of expression, in the impassioned
abrupt, yet indirect way in which they tell their tale of grief and
horror, there reside often a tragic power and art superior to any
English poetry that had been written since Chaucer, superior even to
Chaucer in the quality of intensity. The true home of the ballad
literature was "the north country," and especially the Scotch border,
where the constant forays of moss-troopers and the raids and private
warfare of the lords of the marches supplied many traditions of
heroism, like those celebrated in the old poem of the _Battle of
Otterbourne_, and in the _Hunting of the Cheviot_, or _Chevy Chase_,
already mentioned. Some of these are Scotch and others English; the
dialect of Lowland Scotland did not, in effect, differ much from that
of Northumberland and Yorkshire, both descended alike from the old
Northumbrian of Anglo-Saxon times. Other ballads were shortened,
popular versions of the chivalry romances which were passing out of
fashion among educated readers in the 16th century, and now fell into
the hands of the ballad makers. Others preserved the memory of local
countryside tales, family feuds, and tragic incidents, partly
historical and partly legendary, associated often with particular
spots. Such are, for example, _The Dowie Dens of Yarrow_, _Fair Helen
of Kirkconnell_, _The Forsaken Bride_, and _The Twa Corbies_. Others,
again, have a coloring of popular superstition, like the beautiful
ballad concerning {57} _Thomas of Ersyldoune_, who goes in at Eldon
Hill with an Elf queen and spends seven years in fairy land.
But the most popular of all the ballads were those which cluster about
the name of that good outlaw, Robin Hood, who, with his merry men,
hunted the forest of merry Sherwood, where he killed the king's deer
and waylaid rich travelers, but was kind to poor knights and honest
workmen. Robin Hood is the true ballad hero, the darling of the common
people, as Arthur was of the nobles. The names of his Confessor, Friar
Tuck; his mistress, Maid Marian; his companions, Little John,
Scathelock, and Much, the Miller's son, were as familiar as household
words. Langland, in the 14th century, mentions "rimes of Robin Hood,"
and efforts have been made to identify him with some actual personage,
as with one of the dispossessed barons who had been adherents of Simon
de Montfort in his war against Henry III. But there seems to be
nothing historical about Robin Hood. He was a creation of the popular
fancy. The game laws under the Norman kings were very oppressive, and
there were, doubtless, dim memories still cherished among the Saxon
masses of Hereward and Edric the Wild, who had defied the power of the
Conqueror, as well as of later freebooters, who had taken to the woods
and lived by plunder. Robin Hood was a thoroughly national character.
He had the English love of fair-play, the English readiness to shake
hands and {58} make up, and keep no malice when worsted in a square
fight. He beat and plundered the rich bishops and abbots, who had more
than their share of wealth, but he was generous and hospitable to the
distressed, and lived a free and careless life in the good green wood.
He was a mighty archer, with those national weapons, the long-bow and
the cloth-yard-shaft. He tricked and baffled legal authority in the
person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby appealing to that
secret sympathy with lawlessness and adventure which marked the
free-born, vigorous yeomanry of England. And finally the scenery of
the forest gives a poetic background and a never-failing charm to the
exploits of "the old Robin Hood of England" and his merry men.
The ballads came, in time, to have certain tricks of style, such as are
apt to characterize a body of anonymous folk-poetry. Such is their use
of conventional epithets; "the red, red gold," "the good, green wood,"
"the gray goose wing." Such are certain recurring terms of phrase like,
"But out and spak their stepmother."
Such is, finally, a kind of sing-song repetition, which doubtless
helped the ballad singer to memorize his stock, as, for example,
"She had'na pu'd a double rose,
A rose but only twae."
{59}
Or again,
"And mony ane sings o' grass, o' grass,
And mony ane sings o' corn;
An mony ane sings o' Robin Hood,
Kens little whare he was born.
It was na in the ha', the ha',
Nor in the painted bower;
But it was in the gude green wood,
Amang the lily flower."
Copies of some of these old ballads were hawked about in the 16th
century, printed in black letter, "broad sides," or single sheets.
Wynkyn de Worde printed, in 1489, _A Lytell Geste of Robin Hood_, which
is a sort of digest of earlier ballads on the subject. In the 17th
century a few of the English popular ballads were collected in
miscellanies, called _Garlands_. Early in the 18th century the Scotch
poet, Allan Ramsay, published a number of Scotch ballads in the
_Evergreen_ and _Tea-Table Miscellany_. But no large and important
collection was put forth until Percy's _Reliques_, 1765, a book which
had a powerful influence upon Wordsworth and Walter Scott. In Scotland
some excellent ballads in the ancient manner were written in the 18th
century, such as Jane Elliott's _Lament for Flodden_, and the fine
ballad of Sir Patrick Spence. Walter Scott's _Proud Maisie is in the
Wood_, is a perfect reproduction of the pregnant, indirect method of
the old ballad makers.
In 1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks, {60} and many Greek
scholars, with their MSS., fled into Italy, where they began teaching
their language and literature, and especially the philosophy of Plato.
There had been little or no knowledge of Greek in western Europe during
the Middle Ages, and only a very imperfect knowledge of the Latin
classics. Ovid and Statius were widely read, and so was the late Latin
poet, Boethius, whose _De Consolatione Philosophiae_ had been
translated into English by King Alfred and by Chaucer. Little was
known of Vergil at first hand, and he was popularly supposed to have
been a mighty wizard, who made sundry works of enchantment at Rome,
such as a magic mirror and statue. Caxton's so-called translation of
the _Aeneid_ was in reality nothing but a version of a French romance
based on Vergil's epic. Of the Roman historians, orators, and
moralists, such as Livy, Tacitus, Caesar, Cicero, and Seneca, there was
an almost entire ignorance, as also of poets like Horace, Lucretius,
Juvenal, and Catullus. The gradual rediscovery of the remains of
ancient art and literature which took place in the 15th century, and
largely in Italy, worked an immense revolution in the mind of Europe.
MSS. were brought out of their hiding places, edited by scholars and
spread abroad by means of the printing-press. Statues were dug up and
placed in museums, and men became acquainted with a civilization far
more mature than that of the Middle Age, and with models of perfect
{61} workmanship in letters and the fine arts. In the latter years of
the 15th century a number of Englishmen learned Greek in Italy and
brought it back with them to England. William Grocyn and Thomas
Linacre, who had studied at Florence under the refugee, Demetrius
Chalcondylas, began teaching Greek, at Oxford, the former as early as
1491. A little later John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's and the founder of
St. Paul's School, and his friend, William Lily, the grammarian and
first master of St. Paul's (1500), also studied Greek abroad, Colet in
Italy, and Lily at Rhodes and in the city of Rome. Thomas More,
afterward the famous chancellor of Henry VIII., was among the pupils of
Grocyn and Linacre at Oxford. Thither also, in 1497, came in search of
the new knowledge, the Dutchman, Erasmus, who became the foremost
scholar of his time. From Oxford the study spread to the sister
university, where the first English Grecian of his day, Sir Jno. Cheke,
who "taught Cambridge and King Edward Greek," became the incumbent of
the new professorship founded about 1540. Among his pupils was Roger
Ascham, already mentioned, in whose time St. John's College, Cambridge,
was the chief seat of the new learning, of which Thomas Nash testifies
that it "was as an universitie within itself; having more candles light
in it, every winter morning before four of the clock, than the four of
clock bell gave strokes." Greek was not introduced at the universities
without violent {62} opposition from the conservative element, who were
nicknamed Trojans. The opposition came in part from the priests, who
feared that the new study would sow seeds of heresy. Yet many of the
most devout churchmen were friends of a more liberal culture, among
them Thomas More, whose Catholicism was undoubted and who went to the
block for his religion. Cardinal Wolsey, whom More succeeded as
chancellor, was also a munificent patron of learning and founded Christ
Church College, at Oxford. Popular education at once felt the impulse
of the new studies, and over twenty endowed grammar schools were
established in England in the first twenty years of the 16th century.
Greek became a passion even with English ladies. Ascham in his
_Schoolmaster_, a treatise on education, published in 1570, says, that
Queen Elisabeth "readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day, than
some prebendarie of this Church doth read Latin in a whole week." And
in the same book he tells how calling once upon Lady Jane Grey, at
Brodegate, in Leicestershire, he "found her in her chamber reading
_Phaedon Platonis_ in Greek, and that with as much delite as some
gentlemen would read a merry tale in _Bocase_," and when he asked her
why she had not gone hunting with the rest, she answered, "I wisse, all
their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in
Plato." Ascham's _Schoolmaster_, as well as his earlier book,
_Toxophilus_, a Platonic dialogue on archery, bristles with quotations
from the Greek and Latin {63} classics, and with that perpetual
reference to the authority of antiquity on every topic that he touches,
which remained the fashion in all serious prose down to the time of
Dryden.
One speedy result of the new learning was fresh translations of the
Scriptures into English, out of the original tongues. In 1525 William
Tyndal printed at Cologne and Worms his version of the New Testament
from the Greek. Ten years later Miles Coverdale made, at Zurich, a
translation of the whole Bible from the German and the Latin. These
were the basis of numerous later translations, and the strong beautiful
English of Tyndal's _Testament_ is preserved for the most part in our
Authorized Version (1611). At first it was not safe to make or
distribute these early translations in England. Numbers of copies were
brought into the country, however, and did much to promote the cause of
the Reformation. After Henry VIII. had broken with the Pope the new
English Bible circulated freely among the people. Tyndal and Sir
Thomas More carried on a vigorous controversy in English upon some of
the questions at issue between the Church and the Protestants. Other
important contributions to the literature of the Reformation were the
homely sermons preached at Westminster and at Paul's Cross by Bishop
Hugh Latimer, who was burned at Oxford in the reign of Bloody Mary.
The English Book of Common Prayer was compiled in 1549-52. More was,
perhaps, the best {64} representative of a group of scholars who wished
to enlighten and reform the Church from inside, but who refused to
follow Henry VIII. in his breach with Rome. Dean Colet and John
Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, belonged to the same company, and Fisher
was beheaded in the same year (1535) with More, and for the same
offense, namely, refusing to take the oath to maintain the act
confirming the king's divorce from Catherine of Arragon and his
marriage with Anne Boleyn. More's philosophy is best reflected in his
_Utopia_, the description of an ideal commonwealth, modeled on Plato's
Republic, and printed in 1516. The name signifies "no place"
(_Outopos_), and has furnished an adjective to the language. The
_Utopia_ was in Latin, but More's _History of Edward V. and Richard
III._, written in 1513, though not printed till 1557, was in English.
It is the first example in the tongue of a history as distinguished
from a chronicle; that is, it is a reasoned and artistic presentation
of an historic period, and not a mere chronological narrative of events.
The first three quarters of the 16th century produced no great original
work of literature in England. It was a season of preparation, of
education. The storms of the Reformation interrupted and delayed the
literary renascence through the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and
Queen Mary. When Elizabeth came to the throne, in 1558, a more settled
order of things began, and a period of great national prosperity and
{65} glory. Meanwhile the English mind had been slowly assimilating
the new classical culture, which was extended to all classes of readers
by the numerous translations of Greek and Latin authors. A fresh
poetic impulse came from Italy. In 1557 appeared _Tottel's
Miscellany_, containing songs and sonnets by a "new company of courtly
makers." Most of the pieces in the volume had been written years
before, by gentlemen of Henry VIII.'s court, and circulated in MS. The
two chief contributors were Sir Thomas Wiat, at one time English
embassador to Spain, and that brilliant noble, Henry Howard, the Earl
of Surrey, who was beheaded in 1547 for quartering the king's arms with
his own. Both of them were dead long before their work was printed.
The pieces in _Tottel's Miscellany_ show very clearly the influence of
Italian poetry. We have seen that Chaucer took subjects and something
more from Boccaccio and Petrarch. But the sonnet, which Petrarch had
brought to great perfection, was first introduced into England by Wiat.
There was a great revival of sonneteering in Italy in the 16th century,
and a number of Wiat's poems were adaptations of the sonnets and
_canzoni_ of Petrarch and later poets. Others were imitations of
Horace's satires and epistles. Surrey introduced the Italian blank
verse into English in his translation of two books of the _Aeneid_.
The love poetry of _Tottel's Miscellany_ is polished and artificial,
like the models which it followed. Dante's {66} Beatrice was a child,
and so was Petrarch's Laura. Following their example, Surrey addressed
his love complaints, by way of compliment, to a little girl of the
noble Irish family of Geraldine. The Amourists, or love sonneters,
dwelt on the metaphysics of the passion with a tedious minuteness, and
the conventional nature of their sighs and complaints may often be
guessed by an experienced reader from the titles of their poems:
"Description of the restless state of a lover, with suit to his lady to
rue on his dying heart;" "Hell tormenteth not the damned ghosts so sore
as unkindness the lover;" "The lover prayeth not to be disdained,
refused, mistrusted, nor forsaken," etc. The most genuine utterance of
Surrey was his poem written while imprisoned in Windsor--a cage where
so many a song-bird has grown vocal. And Wiat's little piece of eight
lines, "Of his Return from Spain," is worth reams of his amatory
affectations. Nevertheless the writers in _Tottel's Miscellany_ were
real reformers of English poetry. They introduced new models of style
and new metrical forms, and they broke away from the mediaeval
traditions which had hitherto obtained. The language had undergone
some changes since Chaucer's time, which made his scansion obsolete.
The accent of many words of French origin, like _nature_, _courage_,
_virtue_, _matere_, had shifted to the first syllable, and the _e_ of
the final syllables _es_, _en_, _ed_, and _e_, had largely disappeared.
But the language of poetry tends {67} to keep up archaisms of this
kind, and in Stephen Hawes, who wrote a century after Chaucer, we still
find such lines as these:
"But he my strokes might right well endure,
He was so great and huge of puissance." [5]
Hawes's practice is variable in this respect, and so is his
contemporary, Skelton's. But in Wiat and Surrey, who wrote only a few
years later, the reader first feels sure that he is reading verse
pronounced quite in the modern fashion.
But Chaucer's example still continued potent. Spenser revived many of
his obsolete words, both in his pastorals and in his _Faery Queene_,
thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction, but incurring
Ben Jonson's censure, that he "writ no language." A poem that stands
midway between Spenser and late mediaeval work of Chaucer's
school--such as Hawes's _Passetyme of Pleasure_--was the _Induction_
contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, in 1563 to a
collection of narrative poems called the _Mirrour for Magistrates_.
The whole series was the work of many hands, modeled upon Lydgate's
_Falls of Princes_ (taken from Boccaccio), and was designed as a
warning to great men of the fickleness of fortune. The _Induction_ is
the only noteworthy part of it. It was an allegory, written in
Chaucer's seven-lined stanza and described with a somber imaginative
power, the figure of Sorrow, her abode {68} in the "griesly lake" of
Avernus and her attendants, Remorse, Dread, Old Age, etc. Sackville
was the author of the first regular English tragedy, _Gorboduc_, and it
was at his request that Ascham wrote the _Schoolmaster_.
Italian poetry also fed the genius of Edmund Spenser (1552-99). While
a student at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, he had translated some of the
_Visions of Petrarch_, and the _Visions of Bellay_, a French poet, but
it was only in 1579 that the publication of his _Shepheard's Calendar_
announced the coming of a great original poet, the first since Chaucer.
The _Shepheard's Calendar_ was a pastoral in twelve eclogues--one for
each month in the year. There had been a great revival of pastoral
poetry in Italy and France, but, with one or two insignificant
exceptions, Spenser's were the first bucolics in English. Two of his
eclogues were paraphrases from Clement Marot, a French Protestant poet,
whose psalms were greatly in fashion at the court of Francis I. The
pastoral machinery had been used by Vergil and by his modern imitators,
not merely to portray the loves of Strephon and Chloe, or the idyllic
charms of rustic life; but also as a vehicle of compliment, elegy,
satire, and personal allusion of many kinds. Spenser, accordingly,
alluded to his friends, Sidney and Harvey, as the shepherds, Astrophel
and Hobbinol, paid court to Queen Elizabeth as Cynthia, and introduced,
in the form of anagrams, names of the High-Church Bishop of London,
Aylmer, {69} and the Low-Church Archbishop Grindal. The conventional
pastoral is a somewhat delicate exotic in English poetry, and
represents a very unreal Arcadia. Before the end of the 17th century
the squeak of the oaten pipe had become a burden, and the only piece of
the kind which it is easy to read without some impatience is Milton's
wonderful _Lycidas_. The _Shepheard's Calendar_, however, though it
belonged to an artificial order of literature, had the unmistakable
stamp of genius in its style. There was a broad, easy mastery of the
resources of language, a grace, fluency, and music which were new to
English poetry. It was written while Spenser was in service with the
Earl of Leicester, and enjoying the friendship of his nephew, the
all-accomplished Sidney, and was, perhaps, composed at the latter's
country seat of Penshurst. In the following year Spenser went to
Ireland as private secretary to Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton, who had
just been appointed Lord Deputy of that kingdom. After filling several
clerkships in the Irish government, Spenser received a grant of the
castle and estate of Kilcolman, a part of the forfeited lands of the
rebel Earl of Desmond. Here, among landscapes richly wooded, like the
scenery of his own fairy land, "under the cooly shades of the green
alders by the Mulla's shore," Sir Walter Raleigh found him, in 1589,
busy upon his _Faery Queene_. In his poem, _Colin Clouts Come Home
Again_, Spenser tells, in pastoral language, how "the shepherd of the
{70} ocean" persuaded him to go to London, where he presented him to
the Queen, under whose patronage the first three books of his great
poem were printed, in 1590. A volume of minor poems, entitled
_Complaints_, followed in 1591, and the three remaining books of the
_Faery Queene_ in 1596. In 1595-96 he published also his _Daphnaida_,
_Prothalamion_, and the four hymns _On Love_ and _Beauty_, and _On
Heavenly Love_ and _Heavenly Beauty_. In 1598, in Tyrone's rebellion,
Kilcolman Castle was sacked and burned, and Spenser, with his family,
fled to London, where he died in January, 1599.
The _Faery Queene_ reflects, perhaps, more fully than any other English
work, the many-sided literary influences of the renascence. It was the
blossom of a richly composite culture. Its immediate models were
Ariosto's _Orlando Furioso_, the first forty cantos of which were
published in 1515, and Tasso's _Gerusalemme Liberata_, printed in 1581.
Both of these were, in subject, romances of chivalry, the first based
upon the old Charlemagne epos--Orlando being identical with the hero of
the French _Chanson de Roland_--the second upon the history of the
first Crusade, and the recovery of the Holy City from the Saracen. But
in both of them there was a splendor of diction and a wealth of
coloring quite unknown to the rude mediaeval romances. Ariosto and
Tasso wrote with the great epics of Homer and Vergil constantly in
mind, and all about them was the brilliant light of Italian art, in its
early freshness {71} and power. The _Faery Queene_, too, was a tale of
knight-errantry. Its hero was King Arthur, and its pages swarm with
the familiar adventures and figures of Gothic romance; distressed
ladies and their champions, combats with dragons and giants, enchanted
castles, magic rings, charmed wells, forest hermitages, etc. But side
by side with these appear the fictions of Greek mythology and the
personified abstractions of fashionable allegory. Knights, squires,
wizards, hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods, Idleness, Gluttony, and
Superstition jostle each other in Spenser's fairy land. Descents to
the infernal shades, in the manner of Homer and Vergil, alternate with
descriptions of the Palace of Pride in the manner of the _Romaunt of
the Rose_. But Spenser's imagination was a powerful spirit, and held
all these diverse elements in solution. He removed them to an ideal
sphere "apart from place, withholding time," where they seem all alike
equally real, the dateless conceptions of the poet's dream.
The poem was to have been "a continued allegory or dark conceit," in
twelve books, the hero of each book representing one of the twelve
moral virtues. Only six books and the fragment of a seventh were
written. By way of complimenting his patrons and securing contemporary
interest, Spenser undertook to make his allegory a double one, personal
and historical, as well as moral or abstract. Thus Gloriana, the Queen
of Faery, stands not only for Glory but for Elizabeth, {72} to whom the
poem was dedicated. Prince Arthur is Leicester, as well as
Magnificence. Duessa is Falsehood, but also Mary Queen of Scots.
Grantorto is Philip II. of Spain. Sir Artegal is Justice, but likewise
he is Arthur Grey de Wilton. Other characters shadow forth Sir Walter
Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, Henry IV. of France, etc.; and such public
events as the revolt of the Spanish Netherlands, the Irish rebellion,
the execution of Mary Stuart, and the rising of the northern Catholic
houses against Elizabeth are told in parable. In this way the poem
reflects the spiritual struggle of the time, the warfare of young
England against Popery and Spain.
The allegory is not always easy to follow. It is kept up most
carefully in the first two books, but it sat rather lightly on
Spenser's conscience, and is not of the essence of the poem. It is an
ornament put on from the outside and detachable at pleasure. The
"Spenserian stanza," in which the _Faery Queene_ was written, was
adapted from the _ottava riwa_ of Ariosto. Spenser changed somewhat
the order of the rimes in the first eight lines and added a ninth line
of twelve syllables, thus affording more space to the copious
luxuriance of his style and the long-drawn sweetness of his verse. It
was his instinct to dilate and elaborate every image to the utmost, and
his similes, especially--each of which usually fills a whole
stanza--have the pictorial amplitude of Homer's. Spenser was, in fact,
a great painter. His poetry {73} is almost purely sensuous. The
personages in the _Faery Queene_ are not characters, but richly colored
figures, moving to the accompaniment of delicious music, in an
atmosphere of serene remoteness from the earth. Charles Lamb said that
he was the poet's poet, that is, he appealed wholly to the artistic
sense and to the love of beauty. Not until Keats did another English
poet appear so filled with the passion for all outward shapes of
beauty, so exquisitely alive to all impressions of the senses. Spenser
was, in some respects, more an Italian than an English poet. It is
said that the Venetian gondoliers still sing the stanzas of Tasso's
_Gerusalemme Liberata_. It is not easy to imagine the Thames bargees
chanting passages from the _Faery Queene_. Those English poets who
have taken strongest hold upon their public have done so by their
profound interpretation of our common life. But Spenser escaped
altogether from reality into a region of pure imagination. His aerial
creations resemble the blossoms of the epiphytic orchids, which have no
root in the soil, but draw their nourishment from the moisture of the
air.
"_Their_ birth was of the womb of morning dew,
And _their_ conception of the glorious prime."
Among the minor poems of Spenser the most delightful were his
_Prothalamion_ and _Epithalamion_. The first was a "spousal verse,"
made for the double wedding of the Ladies Catherine and {74} Elizabeth
Somerset, whom the poet figures as two white swans that come swimming
down the Thames, whose surface the nymphs strew with lilies, till it
appears "like a bride's chamber-floor."
"Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,"
is the burden of each stanza. The _Epithalamion_ was Spenser's own
marriage song, written to crown his series of _Amoretti_, or love
sonnets, and is the most splendid hymn of triumphant love in the
language. Hardly less beautiful than these was _Muiopotmos; or, the
Fate of the Butterfly_, an addition to the classical myth of Arachne,
the spider. The four hymns in praise of _Love_ and _Beauty_, _Heavenly
Love_ and _Heavenly Beauty_, are also stately and noble poems, but by
reason of their abstractness and the Platonic mysticism which they
express, are less generally pleasing than the others mentioned.
Allegory and mysticism had no natural affiliation with Spenser's
genius. He was a seer of visions, of _images_ full, brilliant, and
distinct, and not like Bunyan, Dante, or Hawthorne, a projector into
bodily shapes of _ideas_, typical and emblematic, the shadows which
haunt the conscience and the mind.
1. A First Sketch of English Literature. By Henry Morley.
2. English Writers. By the same. Vol. iii. From Chaucer to Dunbar.
{75}
3. Skeat's Specimens of English Literature, 1594-1579. Clarendon Press
Series.
4. Morte Darthur. Globe Edition.
5. Child's English and Scottish Ballads. 8 vols.
6. Hale's edition of Spenser. Globe.
7. "A Royal Poet." Irving's Sketch-Book.
[1] Woods.
[2] Bright.
[3] High.
[4] Fiddler.
[5] Trisyllable--like _creature_, _neighebour_, etc, in Chaucer.
{76}