English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History Part 9

It is known that Dante had at first intended to compose the Divina Commedia in Latin. "But when," he said to the sympathizing Frate Ilario, "I recalled the condition of the present age, and knew that those generous men for whom, in better days, these things were written, had abandoned (_ahi dolore_) the liberal arts into vulgar hands, I threw aside the delicate lyre which armed my flank, and attuned another more befitting the ears of moderns." It seems strange that he should have thus regretted what to us seems a n.o.ble and original opportunity of double creation--poem and language. What Dante thus bewailed was his real warrant for immortality.

Had he written his great work in Latin, it would have been consigned, with the Italian latinity of the middle ages, to oblivion; while his Tuscan still delights the ear of princes and lazzaroni. Professorships of the Divina Commedia are inst.i.tuted in Italian universities, and men are considered accomplished when they know it by heart.

What Dante had done, not without murmuring, Chaucer did more cheerfully in England. Claimed by both universities as a collegian, perhaps without truth, he certainly was an educated man, and must have been sorely tempted by Latin hexameters; but he knew his mission, and felt his power. With a master hand he moulded the language. He is reproached for having introduced "a wagon-load of foreign words," i.e. Norman words, which, although frowned upon by some critics, were greatly needed, were eagerly adopted, and const.i.tuted him the "well of English undefiled," as he was called by Spenser. It is no part of our plan to consider Chaucer's language or diction, a special study which the reader can pursue for himself. Occleve, in his work "_De Regimine Principium"_ calls him "the honour of English tonge," "floure of eloquence," and "universal fadir in science," and, above all, "the firste findere of our faire language." To Lydgate he was the "Floure of Poetes throughout all Bretaine." Measured by our standard, he is not always musical, "and," in the language of Dryden, "many of his verses are lame for want of half a foot, and sometimes a whole one;" but he must be measured by the standards of his age, by the judgment of his contemporaries, and by a thorough intelligence of the language as he found it and as he left it. Edward III., a practical reformer in many things, gave additional importance to English, by restoring it in the courts of law, and administering justice to the people in their own tongue. When we read of the _English_ kings of this early period, it is curious to reflect that these monarchs, up to the time of Edward I., spoke French as their vernacular tongue, while English had only been the mixed, corrupted language of the lower cla.s.ses, which was now brought thus by king and poet into honorable consideration.

HIS DEATH.--Chaucer died on the 25th of October, 1400, in his little tenement in the garden of St. Mary's Chapel, Westminster, and left his works and his fame to an evil and unappreciative age. His monument was not erected until one hundred and fifty-six years afterward, by Nicholas Brigham. It stands in the "poets' corner" of Westminster Abbey, and has been the nucleus of that gathering-place of the sacred dust which once enclosed the great minds of England. The inscription, which justly styles him "Anglorum vates ter maximus," is not to be entirely depended upon as to the "annus Domini," or "tempora vitae," because of the turbulent and destructive reigns that had intervened--evil times for literary effort, and yet making material for literature and history, and producing that wonderful magician, the printing-press, and paper, by means of which the former things might be disseminated, and Chaucer brought nearer to us than to them.

HISTORICAL FACTS.--The year before Chaucer died, Richard II. was starved in his dungeon. Henry, the son of John of Gaunt, represented the usurpation of Lancaster, and the realm was convulsed with the revolts of rival aristocracy; and, although Prince Hal, or Henry V., warred with entire success in France, and got the throne of that kingdom away from Charles VI., (the Insane,) he died leaving to his infant son, Henry VI., an inheritance which could not be secured. The rival claimant of York, Edward IV., had a strong party in the kingdom: then came the wars of the Roses; the murders and treason of Richard III.; the sordid valor of Henry VII.; the conjugal affection of Henry VIII.; the great religious earthquake all over Europe, known as the Reformation; const.i.tuting all together an epoch too stirring and unsettled to permit literature to flourish; an epoch which gave birth to no great poet or mighty master, but which contained only the seeds of things which were to germinate and flourish in a kindlier age.

In closing this notice of Chaucer, it should be remarked that no English poet has been more successful in the varied delineation of character, or in fresh and charming pictures of Nature. Witty and humorous, sententious and didactic, solemn and pathetic, he not only pleases the fancy, but touches the heart.

JOHN GOWER.--Before entering upon the barren period from Chaucer to Spenser, however, there is one contemporary of Chaucer whom we must not omit to mention; for his works, although of little literary value, are historical signs of the times: this is _John Gower_, styled variously Sir John and Judge Gower, as he was very probably both a knight and a justice.

He seems to owe most of his celebrity to his connection, however slight, with Chaucer; although there is no doubt of his having been held in good repute by the literary patrons and critics of his own age. His fame rests upon three works, or rather three parts of one scheme--_Speculum Meditantis_, _Vox Clamantis_, and _Confessio Amantis_. The first of these, _the mirror of one who meditates_, was in French verse, and was, in the main, a treatise upon virtue and repentance, with inculcations to conjugal fidelity much disregarded at that time. This work has been lost. The _Vox Clamantis_, or _voice of one crying in the wilderness_, is directly historical, being a chronicle, in Latin elegiacs, of the popular revolts of Wat Tyler in the time of Richard II., and a sermon on fatalism, which, while it calls for a reformation in the clergy, takes ground against Wiclif, his doctrines, and adherents. In the later books he discusses the military and the lawyers; and thus he is the voice of one crying, like the Baptist in the wilderness, against existing abuses and for the advent of a better order. The _Confessio Amantis_, now princ.i.p.ally known because it contains a eulogium of Chaucer, which in his later editions he left out, is in English verse, and was composed at the instance of Richard II. The general argument of this Lover's Confession is a dialogue between the lover and a priest of Venus, who, in the guise of a confessor, applies the breviary of the Church to the confessions of love.[21] The poem is interspersed with introductory or recapitulatory Latin verses.

CHAUCER AND GOWER.--That there was for a time a mutual admiration between Chaucer and Gower, is shown by their allusion to each other. In the penultimate stanza of the Troilus and Creseide, Chaucer calls him "O Morall Gower," an epithet repeated by Dunbar, Hawes, and other writers; while in the _Confessio Amantis_, Gower speaks of Chaucer as his disciple and poet, and alludes to his poems with great praise. That they were at any time alienated from each other has been a.s.serted, but the best commentators agree in thinking without sufficient grounds.

The historical teachings of Gower are easy to find. He states truths without parable. His moral satires are aimed at the Church corruptions of the day, and yet are conservative; and are taken, says Berthelet, in his dedication of the Confessio to Henry VIII., not only out of "poets, orators, historic writers, and philosophers, but out of the Holy Scripture"--the same Scripture so eloquently expounded by Chaucer, and translated by Wiclif. Again, Gower, with an eye to the present rather than to future fame, wrote in three languages--a tribute to the Church in his Latin, to the court in his French, and to the progressive spirit of the age in his English. The latter alone is now read, and is the basis of his fame. Besides three poems, he left, among his ma.n.u.scripts, fifty French sonnets, (cinquantes balades,) which were afterward printed by his descendant, Lord Gower, Duke of Sutherland.

GOWER'S LANGUAGE.--Like Chaucer, Gower was a reformer in language, and was accused by the "severer etymologists of having corrupted the purity of the English by affecting to introduce so many foreign words and phrases;" but he has the tribute of Sir Philip Sidney (no mean praise) that Chaucer and himself were the leaders of a movement, which others have followed, "to beautifie our mother tongue," and thus the _Confessio Amantis_ ranks as one of the formers of our language, in a day when it required much moral courage to break away from the trammels of Latin and French, and at the same time to compel them to surrender their choicest treasures to the English.

Gower was born in 1325 or 1326, and outlived Chaucer. It has been generally believed that Chaucer was his poetical pupil. The only evidence is found in the following vague expression of Gower in the Confessio Amantis:

And greet well Chaucer when ye meet As _my disciple_ and my poete.

For in the flower of his youth, In sondry wise as he well couth, Of ditties and of songes glade The which he for my sake made.

It may have been but a patronizing phrase, warranted by Gower's superior rank and station; for to the modern critic the one is the uprising sun, and the other the pale star scarcely discerned in the sky. Gower died in 1408, eight years after his more ill.u.s.trious colleague.

OTHER WRITERS OF THE PERIOD OF CHAUCER.

John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, a Scottish poet, born about 1320: wrote a poem concerning the deeds of King Robert I. in achieving the independence of Scotland. It is called _Broite_ or _Brute_, and in it, in imitation of the English, he traces the Scottish royal lineage to Brutus.

Although by no means equal to Chaucer, he is far superior to any other English poet of the time, and his language is more intelligible at the present day than that of Chaucer or Gower. Sir Walter Scott has borrowed from Barbour's poem in his "Lord of the Isles."

Blind Harry--name unknown: wrote the adventures of Sir William Wallace, about 1460.

James I. of Scotland, a.s.sa.s.sinated at Perth, in 1437. He wrote "The Kings Quhair," (Quire or Book,) describing the progress of his attachment to the daughter of the Earl of Somerset, while a prisoner in England, during the reign of Henry IV.

Thomas Occleve, flourished about 1420. His princ.i.p.al work is in Latin; De Regimine Principum, (concerning the government of princes.)

John Lydgate, flourished about 1430: wrote _Masks_ and _Mummeries_, and nine books of tragedies translated from Boccaccio.

Robert Henryson, flourished about 1430: Robin and Makyne, a pastoral; and a continuation of Chaucer's Troilus and Creseide, ent.i.tled "The Testament of Fair Creseide."

William Dunbar, died about 1520: the greatest of Scottish poets, called "The Chaucer of Scotland." He wrote "The Thistle and the Rose," "The Dance," and "The Golden Targe."

CHAPTER X.

THE BARREN PERIOD BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER.

Greek Literature. Invention of Printing. Caxton. Contemporary History.

Skelton. Wyatt. Surrey. Sir Thomas More. Utopia, and other Works. Other Writers.

THE STUDY OF GREEK LITERATURE.

Having thus mentioned the writers whom we regard as belonging to the period of Chaucer, although some of them, like Henryson and Dunbar, flourished at the close of the fifteenth century, we reach those of that literary epoch which may be regarded as the transition state between Chaucer and the age of Elizabeth: an epoch which, while it produced no great literary work, and is irradiated by no great name, was, however, a time of preparation for the splendid advent of Spenser and Shakspeare.

Incident to the dangers which had so long beset the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, which culminated in the fall of Constantinople--and to the gradual but steady progress of Western Europe in arts and letters, which made it a welcome refuge for the imperilled learning of the East--Greek letters came like a fertilizing flood across the Continent into England. The philosophy of Plato, the power of the Athenian drama, and the learning of the Stagyrite, were a new impulse to literature. Before the close of the fifteenth century, Greek was taught at Oxford, and men marvelled as they read that "musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy," a knowledge of which had been before entirely lost in the West. Thus was perfected what is known as the revival of letters, when cla.s.sical learning came to enrich and modify the national literatures, if it did temporarily r.e.t.a.r.d the vernacular progress. The Humanists carried the day against the Obscurantists; and, as scholarship had before consisted in a thorough knowledge of Latin, it now also included a knowledge of Greek, which presented n.o.ble works of poetry, eloquence, and philosophy, and gave us a new idiom for the terminologies of science.

INVENTION OF PRINTING.--Nor was this all. This great wealth of learning would have still remained a dead letter to the mult.i.tude, and, in the main, a useless treasure even to scholars, had it not been for a simple yet marvellous invention of the same period. In Germany, some obscure mechanics, at Harlem, at Mayence, and at Strasbourg, were at work upon a machine which, if perfected, should at once extend letters a hundred-fold, and by that process revolutionize literature. The writers before, few as they were, had been almost as numerous as the readers; hereafter the readers were to increase in a geometrical proportion, and each great writer should address millions. Movable types, first of wood and then of metal, were made, the latter as early as 1441. Schffer, Guttenberg, and Faust brought them to such perfection that books were soon printed and issued in large numbers. But so slowly did the art travel, partly on account of want of communication, and partly because it was believed to partake of necromancy, and partly, too, from the phlegmatic character of the English people, that thirty years elapsed before it was brought into England. The art of printing came in response to the demand of an age of progress: it was needed before; it was called for by the increasing number of readers, and when it came it multiplied that number largely.

WILLIAM CAXTON.--That it did at last come to England was due to William Caxton, a native of Kent, and by vocation a mercer, who imported costly continental fabrics into England, and with them some of the new books now being printed in Holland. That he was a man of some eminence is shown by his having been engaged by Edward IV. on a mission to the Duke of Burgundy, with power to negotiate a treaty of commerce; that he was a person of skill and courtesy is evinced by his being retained in the service of Margaret, d.u.c.h.ess of York, when she married Charles, Duke of Burgundy. While in her train, he studied printing on the Continent, and is said to have printed some books there. At length, when he was more than sixty years old, he returned to England; and, in 1474, he printed what is supposed to be the first book printed in England, "The Game and Playe of the Chesse." Thus it was a century after Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales that printing was introduced into England. Caxton died in 1491, but his workmen continued to print, and among them Wynken de Worde stands conspicuous. Among the earlier works printed by Caxton were the Canterbury Tales, the Book of Fame, and the Troilus and Creseide of Chaucer.

CONTEMPORARY HISTORY.--It will be remembered that this was the stormy period of the Wars of the Roses. The long and troubled reign of Henry VI.

closed in sorrow in 1471. The t.i.tular crown of France had been easily taken from him by Charles VII. and Joan of Arc; and although Richard of York, the great-grandson of Edward III., had failed in his attempts upon the English throne, yet _his_ son Edward, afterward the Fourth, was successful. Then came the patricide of Clarence, the accession and cruelties of Richard III., the battle of Bosworth, and, at length, the union of the two houses in the persons of Henry VII. (Henry Tudor of Lancaster) and Elizabeth of York. Thus the strife of the succession was settled, and the realm had rest to reorganize and start anew in its historic career.

The weakening of the aristocracy by war and by execution gave to the crown a power before unknown, and made it a fearful coigne of vantage for Henry VIII., whose accession was in 1509. People and parliament were alike subservient, and gave their consent to the unjust edicts and arbitrary cruelties of this terrible tyrant.

In his reign the old English quarrel between Church and State--which during the civil war had lain dormant--again rose, and was brought to a final issue. It is not unusual to hear that the English Reformation grew out of the ambition of a libidinous monarch. This is a coincidence rather than a cause. His l.u.s.t and his marriages would have occurred had there been no question of Pope or Church; conversely, had there been a continent king upon the throne, the great political and religious events would have happened in almost the same order and manner. That "knock of a king" and "incurable wound" prophesied by Piers Plowman were to come. Henry only seized the opportunity afforded by his unG.o.dly pa.s.sions as the best pretext, where there were many, for setting the Pope at defiance; and the spirit of reformation so early displayed, and awhile dormant from circ.u.mstances, and now strengthened by the voice of Luther, burst forth in England. There was little demur to the suppression of the monasteries; the tomb of St. Thomas a Becket was desecrated amidst the insulting mummeries of the mult.i.tude; and if Henry still burned Lutherans--because he could not forget that he had in earlier days denounced Luther--if he still maintained the six b.l.o.o.d.y articles[22]--his reforming spirit is shown in the execution of Fisher and More, by the anathema which he drew upon himself from the Pope, and by Henry's retaliation upon the friends and kinsmen of Cardinal Pole, the papal legate.

Having thus briefly glanced at the history, we return to the literary products, all of which reflect more or less of the historic age, and by their paucity and poverty indicate the existence of the causes so unfavorable to literary effort. This statement will be partially understood when we mention, as the princ.i.p.al names of this period, Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, and Sir Thomas More, men whose works are scarcely known to the ordinary reader, and which are yet the best of the time.

SKELTON.--John Skelton, poet, priest, and buffoon, was born about the year 1460, and educated at what he calls "Alma parens, O Cantabrigensis." Tutor to Prince Henry, afterward Henry VIII., he could boast, "The honour of England I lernyd to spelle." That he was highly esteemed in his day we gather from the eulogium of Erasmus, then for a short time professor of Greek at Oxford: "Unum Brittanicarum literarum lumen et decus." By another contemporary he is called the "inventive Skelton." As a priest he was not very holy; for, in a day when the marriage of the clergy was worse than their incontinence, he contracted a secret marriage. He enjoyed for a time the patronage of Wolsey, but afterward joined his enemies and attacked him violently. He was _laureated_: this does not mean, as at present, that he was poet laureate of England, but that he received a degree of which that was the t.i.tle.

His works are direct delineations of the age. Among these are "monodies"

upon _Kynge Edwarde the forthe_, and the _Earle of Northumberlande_. He corrects for Caxton "The boke of the Eneydos composed by Vyrgyle." He enters heartily into numerous literary quarrels; is a reformer to the extent of exposing ecclesiastical abuses in his _Colin Clout_; and scourges the friars and bishops alike; and in this work, and his "Why come ye not to Courte?" he makes a special target of Wolsey, and the pomp and luxury of his household. He calls him "Mad Amelek, like to Mamelek"

(Mameluke), and speaks

Of his wretched original And his greasy genealogy.

He came from the sank (blood) royal That was cast out of a butcher's stall.

This was the sorest point upon which he could touch the great cardinal and prime minister of Henry VIII.