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English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History.
Designed as a Manual of Instruction.
By
Henry Coppee, LL.D.,
President of the Lehigh University.
The Roman Epic abounds in moral and poetical defects; nevertheless it
remains the most complete picture of the national mind at its highest
elevation, the most precious document of national history, if the
history of an age is revealed in its ideas, no less than in its events
and incidents.--Rev. C. Merivale.
_History of the Romans under the Empire_, c. xli.
Second Edition.
Philadelphia:
Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger.
1873.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by Claxton,
Remsen & Haffelfinger, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at
Washington.
Stereotyped by J. Fagan & Son, Philadelphia.
To The Right Reverend William Bacon Stevens, D.D., LL.D., Bishop Of
Pennsylvania.
My Dear Bishop:
I desire to connect your name with whatever may be useful and valuable in
this work, to show my high appreciation of your fervent piety, varied
learning, and elegant literary accomplishments; and, also, far more than
this, to record the personal acknowledgment that no man ever had a more
constant, judicious, generous and affectionate brother, than you have been
to me, for forty years of intimate and unbroken association.
Most affectionately and faithfully yours,
Henry Coppee.
PREFACE
It is not the purpose of the author to add another to the many volumes
containing a chronological list of English authors, with brief comments
upon each. Such a statement of works, arranged according to periods, or
reigns of English monarchs, is valuable only as an abridged dictionary of
names and dates. Nor is there any logical pertinence in clustering
contemporary names about a principal author, however illustrious he may
be. The object of this work is to present prominently the historic
connections and teachings of English literature; to place great authors in
immediate relations with great events in history; and thus to propose an
important principle to students in all their reading. Thus it is that
Literature and History are reciprocal: they combine to make eras.
Merely to establish this historic principle, it would have been sufficient
to consider the greatest authors, such as Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare,
Milton, Dryden, and Pope; but it occurred to me, while keeping this
principle before me, to give also a connected view of the course of
English literature, which might, in an academic curriculum, show students
how and what to read for themselves. Any attempt beyond this in so
condensed a work must prove a failure, and so it may well happen that some
readers will fail to find a full notice, or even a mention, of some
favorite author.
English literature can only be studied in the writings of the authors here
only mentioned; but I hope that the work will be found to contain
suggestions for making such extended reading profitable; and that teachers
will find it valuable as a syllabus for fuller courses of lectures.
To those who would like to find information as to the best editions of the
authors mentioned, I can only say that I at first intended and began to
note editions: I soon saw that I could not do this with any degree of
uniformity, and therefore determined to refer all who desire this
bibliographic assistance, to _The Dictionary of Authors_, by my friend S.
Austin Allibone, LL.D., in which bibliography is a strong feature. I am
not called upon to eulogize that noble work, but I cannot help saying that
I have found it invaluable, and that whether mentioned or not, no writer
can treat of English authors without constant recurrence to its accurate
columns: it is a literary marvel of our age.
It will be observed that the remoter periods of the literature are those
in which the historic teachings are the most distinctly visible; we see
them from a vantage ground, in their full scope, and in the interrelations
of their parts. Although in the more modern periods the number of writers
is greatly increased, we are too near to discern the entire period, and
are in danger of becoming partisans, by reason of our limited view.
Especially is this true of the age in which we live. Contemporary history
is but party-chronicle: the true philosophic history can only be written
when distance and elevation give due scope to our vision.
The principle I have laid down is best illustrated by the great literary
masters. Those of less degree have been treated at less length, and many
of them will be found in the smaller print, to save space. Those who study
the book should study the small print as carefully as the other.
After a somewhat elaborate exposition of English literature, I could not
induce myself to tack on an inadequate chapter on American literature;
and, besides, I think that to treat the two subjects in one volume would
be as incongruous as to write a joint biography of Marlborough and
Washington. American literature is too great and noble, and has had too
marvelous a development to be made an appendix to English literature.
If time shall serve, I hope to prepare a separate volume, exhibiting the
stages of our literature in the Colonial period, the Revolutionary epoch,
the time of Constitutional establishment, and the present period. It will
be found to illustrate these historical divisions in a remarkable manner.
H. C.
The Lehigh University, _October_, 1872.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
THE HISTORICAL SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT.
Literature and Science--English Literature--General Principle--Celts
and Cymry--Roman Conquest--Coming of the Saxons--Danish Invasions--The
Norman Conquest--Changes in Language
CHAPTER II.
LITERATURE A TEACHER OF HISTORY. CELTIC REMAINS.
The Uses of Literature--Italy, France, England--Purpose of the
Work--Celtic Literary Remains--Druids and Druidism--Roman
Writers--Psalter of Cashel--Welsh Triads and Mabinogion--Gildas and St.
Colm
CHAPTER III.
ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE AND HISTORY.
The Lineage of the Anglo-Saxon--Earliest Saxon Poem--Metrical
Arrangement--Periphrasis and Alliteration--Beowulf--Caedmon--Other
Saxon Fragments--The Appearance of Bede
CHAPTER IV.
THE VENERABLE BEDE AND THE SAXON CHRONICLE.
Biography--Ecclesiastical History--The Recorded Miracles--Bede's
Latin--Other Writers--The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: its Value--Alfred the
Great--Effect of the Danish Invasions
CHAPTER V.
THE NORMAN CONQUEST AND ITS EARLIEST LITERATURE.
Norman Rule--Its Oppression--Its Benefits--William of
Malmesbury--Geoffrey of Monmouth--Other Latin Chronicles--Anglo-Norman
Poets--Richard Wace--Other Poets
CHAPTER VI.
THE MORNING TWILIGHT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.
Semi-Saxon Literature--Layamon--The Ormulum--Robert of
Gloucester--Langland. Piers Plowman--Piers Plowman's Creed--Sir Jean
Froissart--Sir John Mandevil
CHAPTER VII.
CHAUCER, AND THE EARLY REFORMATION.
A New Era: Chaucer--Italian Influence--Chaucer as a Founder--Earlier
Poems--The Canterbury Tales--Characters--Satire--Presentations of
Woman--The Plan Proposed
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAUCER (CONTINUED).--REFORMS IN RELIGION AND SOCIETY.
Historical Facts--Reform in Religion--The Clergy, Regular and
Secular--The Friar and the Sompnour--The Pardonere--The Poure
Persone--John Wiclif--The Translation of the Bible--The Ashes of Wiclif
CHAPTER IX.
CHAUCER (CONTINUED).--PROGRESS OF SOCIETY, AND OF LANGUAGE.
Social Life--Government--Chaucer's English--His Death--Historical
Facts--John Gower--Chaucer and Gower--Gower's Language--Other Writers
CHAPTER X.
THE BARREN PERIOD BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER.
Greek Literature--Invention of Printing. Caxton--Contemporary
History--Skelton--Wyatt--Surrey--Sir Thomas Moore--Utopia, and other
Works--Other Writers
CHAPTER XI.
SPENSER AND THE ELIZABETHAN AGE.
The Great Change--Edward VI. and Mary--Sidney--The Arcadia--Defence of
Poesy--Astrophel and Stella--Gabriel Harvey--Edmund Spenser: Shepherd's
Calendar--His Great Work
CHAPTER XII.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE HISTORY IN THE FAERIE QUEENE.
The Faerie Queene--The Plan Proposed--Illustrations of the History--The
Knight and the Lady--The Wood of Error and the Hermitage--The
Crusades--Britomartis and Sir Artegal--Elizabeth--Mary Queen of
Scots--Other Works--Spenser's Fate--Other Writers
CHAPTER XIII.
THE ENGLISH DRAMA.
Origin of the Drama--Miracle Plays--Moralities--First Comedy--Early
Tragedies--Christopher Marlowe--Other Dramatists--Playwrights and
Morals
CHAPTER XIV.
WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.
The Power of Shakspeare--Meagre Early History--Doubts of his
Identity--What is known--Marries and goes to London--"Venus" and
"Lucrece"--Retirement and Death--Literary Habitudes--Variety of the
Plays--Table of Dates and Sources
CHAPTER XV.
WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE (CONTINUED).
The Grounds of his Fame--Creation of Character--Imagination and
Fancy--Power of Expression--His Faults--Influence of
Elizabeth--Sonnets--Ireland and Collier--Concordance--Other Writers
CHAPTER XVI.
BACON, AND THE RISE OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY.
Birth and Early Life--Treatment of Essex--His Appointments--His
Fall--Writes Philosophy--Magna Instauratio--His Defects--His Fame--His
Essays
CHAPTER XVII.
THE ENGLISH BIBLE.
Early Versions--The Septuagint--The Vulgate--Wiclif;
Tyndale--Coverdale; Cranmer--Geneva; Bishop's Bible--King James's
Bible--Language of the Bible--Revision
CHAPTER XVIII.
JOHN MILTON, AND THE ENGLISH COMMONWEALTH.
Historical Facts--Charles I.--Religious Extremes--Cromwell--Birth and
Early Works--Views of Marriage--Other Prose Works--Effects of the
Restoration--Estimate of his Prose
CHAPTER XIX.
THE POETRY OF MILTON.
The Blind Poet--Paradise Lost--Milton and Dante--His
Faults--Characteristics of the Age--Paradise Regained--His
Scholarship--His Sonnets--His Death and Fame
CHAPTER XX.
COWLEY, BUTLER, AND WALTON.
Cowley and Milton--Cowley's Life and Works--His Fame--Butler's
Career--Hudibras--His Poverty and Death--Izaak Walton--The Angler; and
Lives--Other Writers
CHAPTER XXI.
DRYDEN, AND THE RESTORED STUARTS.
The Court of Charles II.--Dryden's Early Life--The Death of
Cromwell--The Restoration--Dryden's Tribute--Annus Mirabilis--Absalom
and Achitophel--The Death of Charles--Dryden's Conversion--Dryden's
Fall--His Odes
CHAPTER XXII.
THE RELIGIOUS LITERATURE OF THE GREAT REBELLION AND OF THE RESTORATION.
The English Divines--Hall--Chillingsworth--Taylor--Fuller--Sir T.
Browne--Baxter--Fox--Bunyan--South--Other Writers
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE DRAMA OF THE RESTORATION.
The License of the Age--Dryden--Wycherley--Congreve--Vanbrugh--
Farquhar--Etherege--Tragedy--Otway--Rowe--Lee--Southern
CHAPTER XXIV.
POPE, AND THE ARTIFICIAL SCHOOL.
Contemporary History--Birth and Early Life--Essay, on Criticism--Rape
of the Lock--The Messiah--The Iliad--Value of the Translation--The
Odyssey--Essay on Man--The Artificial School--Estimate of Pope--Other
Writers
CHAPTER XXV.
ADDISON, AND THE REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE.
The Character of the Age--Queen Anne--Whigs and Tories--George
I.--Addison: The Campaign--Sir Roger de Coverley--The Club--Addison's
Hymns--Person and Literary Character
CHAPTER XXVI.
STEELE AND SWIFT.
Sir Richard Steele--Periodicals--The Crisis--His Last Days--Jonathan
Swift: Poems--The Tale of a Tub--Battle of the Books--Pamphlets--M. B.
Drapier--Gulliver's Travels--Stella and Vanessa--His Character and
Death
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF MODERN FICTION.
The New Age--Daniel Defoe--Robinson Crusoe--Richardson--Pamela, and
Other Novels--Fielding--Joseph Andrews--Tom Jones--Its
Moral--Smollett--Roderick Random--Peregrine Pickle
CHAPTER XXVIII.
STERNE, GOLDSMITH, AND MACKENZIE.
The Subjective School--Sterne: Sermons--Tristram Shandy--Sentimental
Journey--Oliver Goldsmith--Poems: The Vicar--Histories, and Other
Works--Mackenzie--The Man of Feeling
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE HISTORICAL TRIAD IN THE SCEPTICAL AGE.
The Sceptical Age--David Hume--History of England--Metaphysics--Essay
on Miracles--Robertson--Histories--Gibbon--The Decline and Fall
CHAPTER XXX.
SAMUEL JOHNSON AND HIS TIMES.
Early Life and Career--London--Rambler and Idler--The Dictionary--Other
Works--Lives of the Poets--Person and Character--Style--Junius
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE LITERARY FORGERS IN THE ANTIQUARIAN AGE.
The Eighteenth Century--James Macpherson--Ossian--Thomas
Chatterton--His Poems--The Verdict--Suicide--The Cause
CHAPTER XXXII.
POETRY OF THE TRANSITION SCHOOL.
The Transition Period--James Thomson--The Seasons--The Castle of
Indolence--Mark Akenside--Pleasures of the Imagination--Thomas
Gray--The Elegy. The Bard--William Cowper--The Task--Translation of
Homer--Other Writers
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE LATER DRAMA.
The Progress of the Drama--Garrick--Foote--Cumberland--Sheridan--George
Colman--George Colman, the Younger--Other Dramatists and
Humorists--Other Writers on Various Subjects
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE NEW ROMANTIC POETRY: SCOTT.
Walter Scott--Translations and Minstrelsy--The Lay of the Last
Minstrel--Other Poems--The Waverley Novels--Particular
Mention--Pecuniary Troubles--His Manly Purpose--Powers
Overtasked--Fruitless Journey--Return and Death--His Fame
CHAPTER XXXV.
THE NEW ROMANTIC POETRY: BYRON AND MOORE.
Early Life of Byron--Childe Harold and Eastern Tales--Unhappy
Marriage--Philhellenism and Death--Estimate of his Poetry--Thomas
Moore--Anacreon--Later Fortunes--Lalla Rookh--His Diary--His Rank as
Poet
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE NEW ROMANTIC POETRY (CONTINUED).
Robert Burns--His Poems--His Career--George Crabbe--Thomas
Campbell--Samuel Rogers--P. B. Shelley--John Keats--Other Writers
CHAPTER XXXVII.
WORDSWORTH, AND THE LAKE SCHOOL.
The New School--William Wordsworth--Poetical Canons--The Excursion and
Sonnets--An Estimate--Robert Southey--His Writings--Historical
Value--S. T. Coleridge--Early Life--His Helplessness--Hartley and H. N.
Coleridge
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE REACTION IN POETRY.
Alfred Tennyson--Early Works--The Princess--Idyls of the
King--Elizabeth B. Browning--Aurora Leigh--Her Faults--Robert
Browning--Other Poets
CHAPTER XXXIX.
THE LATER HISTORIANS.
New Materials--George Grote--History of Greece--Lord Macaulay--History
of England--Its Faults--Thomas Carlyle--Life of Frederick II.--Other
Historians
CHAPTER XL.
THE LATER NOVELISTS AS SOCIAL REFORMERS.
Bulwer--Changes in Writers--Dickens's Novels--American Notes--His
Varied Powers--Second Visit to America--Thackeray--Vanity Fair--Henry
Esmond--The Newcomes--The Georges--Estimate of his Powers
CHAPTER XLI.
THE LATER WRITERS.
Charles Lamb--Thomas Hood--Thomas de Quincey--Other Novelists--Writers
on Science and Philosophy
CHAPTER XLII.
ENGLISH JOURNALISM.
Roman News Letters--The Gazette--The Civil War--Later Divisions--The
Reviews--The Monthlies--The Dailies--The London Times--Other Newspapers
Alphabetical Index of Authors
CHAPTER I.
THE HISTORICAL SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT.
Literature and Science. English Literature. General Principle. Celts
and Cymry. Roman Conquest. Coming of the Saxons. Danish Invasions. The
Norman Conquest. Changes in Language.
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.
There are two words in the English language which are now used to express
the two great divisions of mental production--_Science_ and _Literature_;
and yet, from their etymology, they have so much in common, that it has
been necessary to attach to each a technical meaning, in order that we may
employ them without confusion.
_Science_, from the participle _sciens_, of _scio, scire_, to know, would
seem to comprise all that can be known--what the Latins called the _omne
scibile_, or all-knowable.
_Literature_ is from _litera_, a letter, and probably at one remove from
_lino, litum_, to anoint or besmear, because in the earlier times a tablet
was smeared with wax, and letters were traced upon it with a graver.
Literature, in its first meaning, would, therefore, comprise all that can
be conveyed by the use of letters.
But language is impatient of retaining two words which convey the same
meaning; and although science had at first to do with the fact of knowing
and the conditions of knowledge in the abstract, while literature meant
the written record of such knowledge, a far more distinct sphere has been
given to each in later times, and special functions assigned them.
In general terms, Science now means any branch of knowledge in which men
search for principles reaching back to the ultimate, or for facts which
establish these principles, or are classified by them in a logical order.
Thus we speak of the mathematical, physical, metaphysical, and moral
sciences.
Literature, which is of later development as at present used, comprises
those subjects which have a relation to human life and human nature
through the power of the imagination and the fancy. Technically,
literature includes _history, poetry, oratory, the drama_, and _works of
fiction_, and critical productions upon any of these as themes.
Such, at least, will be a sufficiently exact division for our purpose,
although the student will find them overlapping each other's domain
occasionally, interchanging functions, and reciprocally serving for each
other's advantage. Thus it is no confusion of terms to speak of the poetry
of science and of the science of poetry; and thus the great functions of
the human mind, although scientifically distinct, co-operate in harmonious
and reciprocal relations in their diverse and manifold productions.
ENGLISH LITERATURE.--English Literature may then be considered as
comprising the progressive productions of the English mind in the paths of
imagination and taste, and is to be studied in the works of the poets,
historians, dramatists, essayists, and romancers--a long line of brilliant
names from the origin of the language to the present day.
To the general reader all that is profitable in this study dates from the
appearance of Chaucer, who has been justly styled the Father of English
Poetry; and Chaucer even requires a glossary, as a considerable portion
of his vocabulary has become obsolete and much of it has been modified;
but for the student of English literature, who wishes to understand its
philosophy and its historic relations, it becomes necessary to ascend to a
more remote period, in order to find the origin of the language in which
Chaucer wrote, and the effect produced upon him by any antecedent literary
works, in the root-languages from which the English has sprung.
GENERAL PRINCIPLE.--It may be stated, as a general principle, that to
understand a nation's literature, we must study the history of the people
and of their language; the geography of the countries from which they
came, as well as that in which they live; the concurrent historic causes
which have conspired to form and influence the literature. We shall find,
as we advance in this study, that the life and literature of a people are
reciprocally reflective.
I. CELTS AND CYMRY.--Thus, in undertaking the study of English literature,
we must begin with the history of the Celts and Cymry, the first
inhabitants of the British Islands of whom we have any record, who had
come from Asia in the first great wave of western migration; a rude,
aboriginal people, whose languages, at the beginning of the Christian era,
were included in one family, the _Celtic_, comprising the _British_ or
_Cambrian_, and the _Gadhelic_ classes. In process of time these were
subdivided thus:
The British into
_Welsh_, at present spoken in Wales.
_Cornish_, extinct only within a century.
_Armorican_, Bas Breton, spoken in French Brittany.
The Gadhelic into
_Gaelic_, still spoken in the Scottish Highlands.
_Irish_, or _Erse_, spoken in Ireland.
_Manx_, spoken in the Isle of Man.
Such are the first people and dialects to be considered as the antecedent
occupants of the country in which English literature was to have its
birth.
II. ROMAN CONQUEST.--But these Celtic peoples were conquered by the Romans
under Caesar and his successors, and kept in a state of servile thraldom
for four hundred and fifty years. There was but little amalgamation
between them and their military masters. Britain was a most valuable
northern outpost of the Roman Empire, and was occupied by large garrisons,
which employed the people in hard labors, and used them for Roman
aggrandizement, but despised them too much to attempt to elevate their
condition. Elsewhere the Romans depopulated, where they met with barbarian
resistance; they made a solitude and called it peace--for which they gave
a triumph and a cognomen to the conqueror; but in Britain, although
harassed and endangered by the insurrections of the natives, they bore
with them; they built fine cities like London and York, originally
military outposts, and transformed much of the country between the Channel
and the Tweed from pathless forest into a civilized residence.
III. COMING OF THE SAXONS.--Compelled by the increasing dangers and
troubles immediately around the city of Rome to abandon their distant
dependencies, the Roman legions evacuated Britain, and left the people,
who had become enervated, spiritless, and unaccustomed to the use of arms,
a prey to their fierce neighbors, both from Scotland and from the
continent.
The Saxons had already made frequent incursions into Britain, while rival
Roman chieftains were contesting for pre-eminence, and, as early as the
third century, had become so troublesome that the Roman emperors were
obliged to appoint a general to defend the eastern coast, known as _comes
litoris Saxonici_, or count of the Saxon shore.[1]
These Saxons, who had already tested the goodliness of the land, came when
the Romans departed, under the specious guise of protectors of the Britons
against the inroads of the Picts and Scots; but in reality to possess
themselves of the country. This was a true conquest of race--Teutons
overrunning Celts. They came first in reconnoitring bands; then in large
numbers, not simply to garrison, as the Romans had done, but to occupy
permanently. From the less attractive seats of Friesland and the basin of
the Weser, they came to establish themselves in a charming country,
already reclaimed from barbarism, to enslave or destroy the inhabitants,
and to introduce their language, religion, and social institutions. They
came as a confederated people of German race--Saxons, Angles, Jutes, and
Frisians;[2] but, as far as the results of their conquest are concerned,
there was entire unity among them.
The Celts, for a brief period protected by them from their fierce northern
neighbors, were soon enslaved and oppressed: those who resisted were
driven slowly to the Welsh mountains, or into Cornwall, or across the
Channel into French Brittany. Great numbers were destroyed. They left few
traces of their institutions and their language. Thus the Saxon was
established in its strength, and has since remained the strongest element
of English ethnography.
IV. DANISH INVASIONS.--But Saxon Britain was also to suffer from
continental incursions. The Scandinavians--inhabitants of Norway, Sweden,
and Denmark--impelled by the same spirit of piratical adventure which had
actuated the Saxons, began to leave their homes for foreign conquest.
"Impatient of a bleak climate and narrow limits, they started from the
banquet, grasped their arms, sounded their horn, ascended their ships, and
explored every coast that promised either spoil or settlement."[3] To
England they came as Danes; to France, as Northmen or Normans. They took
advantage of the Saxon wars with the British, of Saxon national feuds, and
of that enervation which luxurious living had induced in the Saxon kings
of the octarchy, and succeeded in occupying a large portion of the north
and east of England; and they have exerted in language, in physical type,
and in manners a far greater influence than has been usually conceded.
Indeed, the Danish chapter in English history has not yet been fairly
written. They were men of a singularly bold and adventurous spirit, as is
evinced by their voyages to Iceland, Greenland, and thence to the Atlantic
coast of North America, as early as the tenth and eleventh centuries. It
is more directly to our purpose to observe their character as it is
displayed in their conquest of the Frankish kingdom of Neustria, in their
facile reception and ready assimilation of the Roman language and arts
which they found in Gaul, and in their forcible occupancy, under William
the Conqueror, of Saxon England, in 1066.
V. THE NORMAN CONQUEST.--The vigor of the Normans had been trained, but
not weakened by their culture in Normandy. They maintained their supremacy
in arms against the efforts of the kings of France. They had long
cultivated intimate relations with England, and their dukes had long
hankered for its possession. William, the natural son of Duke
Robert--known to history and musical romance as Robert le Diable--was a
man of strong mind, tenacious purpose, and powerful hand. He had obtained,
by promise of Edward the Confessor, the reversion of the crown upon the
death of that monarch; and when the issue came, he availed himself of
that reversion and the Pope's sanction, and also of the disputed
succession between Harold, the son of Godwin, and the true Saxon heir,
Edgar Atheling, to make good his claim by force of arms.
Under him the Normans were united, while divisions existed in the Saxon
ranks. Tostig, the brother of Harold, and Harald Hardrada, the King of
Norway, combined against Harold, and, just before the landing of Duke
William at Pevensey, on the coast of Sussex, Harold was obliged to march
rapidly northward to Stanford bridge, to defeat Tostig and the Norwegians,
and then to return with a tired army of uncertain _morale_, to encounter
the invading Normans. Thus it appears that William conquered the land,
which would have been invincible had the leaders and the people been
united in its defence.
As the Saxons, Danes, and Normans were of the same great Teutonic family,
however modified by the different circumstances of movement and residence,
there was no new ethnic element introduced; and, paradoxical as it may
seem, the fusion of these peoples was of great benefit, in the end, to
England. Though the Saxons at first suffered from Norman oppression, the
kingdom was brought into large inter-European relations, and a far better
literary culture was introduced, more varied in subject, more developed in
point of language, and more artistic.
Thus much, in a brief historical summary, is necessary as an introduction
to our subject. From all these contests and conquests there were wrought
in the language of the country important changes, which are to be studied
in the standard works of its literature.
CHANGES IN LANGUAGE.--The changes and transformations of language may be
thus briefly stated:--In the Celtic period, before the arrival of the
Romans, the people spoke different dialects of the Celtic and Gadhelic
languages, all cognate and radically similar.
These were not much affected by the occupancy of the Romans for about four
hundred and fifty years, although, doubtless, Latin words, expressive of
things and notions of which the British had no previous knowledge, were
adopted by them, and many of the Celtic inhabitants who submitted to these
conquerors learned and used the Latin language.
When the Romans departed, and the Saxons came in numbers, in the fifth and
sixth centuries, the Saxon language, which is the foundation of English,
became the current speech of the realm; adopting few Celtic words, but
retaining a considerable number of the Celtic names of places, as it also
did of Latin terminations in names.
Before the coming of the Normans, their language, called the _Langue
d'oil_, or Norman French, had been very much favored by educated
Englishmen; and when William conquered England, he tried to supplant the
Saxon entirely. In this he was not successful; but the two languages were
interfused and amalgamated, so that in the middle of the twelfth century,
there had been thus created the _English language_, formed but still
formative. The Anglo-Saxon was the foundation, or basis; while the Norman
French is observed to be the principal modifying element.
Since the Norman conquest, numerous other elements have entered, most of
them quietly, without the concomitant of political revolution or foreign
invasion.
Thus the Latin, being used by the Church, and being the language of
literary and scientific comity throughout the world, was constantly adding
words and modes of expression to the English. The introduction of Greek
into Western Europe, at the fall of Constantinople, supplied Greek words,
and induced a habit of coining English words from the Greek. The
establishment of the Hanoverian succession, after the fall of the Stuarts,
brought in the practice and study of German, and somewhat of its
phraseology; and English conquests in the East have not failed to
introduce Indian words, and, what is far better, to open the way for a
fuller study of comparative philology and linguistics.
In a later chapter we shall reconsider the periods referred to, in an
examination of the literary works which they contain, works produced by
historical causes, and illustrative of historical events.
CHAPTER II.
LITERATURE A TEACHER OF HISTORY. CELTIC REMAINS.
The Uses of Literature. Italy, France, England. Purpose of the Work.
Celtic Literary Remains. Druids and Druidism. Roman Writers. Psalter of
Cashel. Welsh Triads and Mabinogion. Gildas and St. Colm.
THE USES OF LITERATURE.
Before examining these periods in order to find the literature produced in
them, it will be well to consider briefly what are the practical uses of
literature, and to set forth, as a theme, that particular utility which it
is the object of these pages to inculcate and apply.
The uses of literature are manifold. Its study gives wholesome food to the
mind, making it strong and systematic. It cultivates and delights the
imagination and the taste of men. It refines society by elevating the
thoughts and aspirations above what is sensual and sordid, and by checking
the grosser passions; it makes up, in part, that "multiplication of
agreeable consciousness" which Dr. Johnson calls happiness. Its
adaptations in religion, in statesmanship, in legislative and judicial
inquiry, are productive of noble and beneficent results. History shows us,
that while it has given to the individual man, in all ages, contemplative
habits, and high moral tone, it has thus also been a powerful instrument
in producing the brilliant civilization of mighty empires.
A TEACHER OF HISTORY.--But apart from these its subjective benefits, it
has its highest and most practical utility as a TEACHER OF HISTORY.
Ballads, more powerful than laws, shouted forth from a nation's heart,
have been in part the achievers, and afterward the victorious hymns, of
its new-born freedom, and have been also used in after ages to reinspire
the people with the spirit of their ancestors. Immortal epics not only
present magnificent displays of heroism for imitation, but, like the Iliad
and Odyssey, still teach the theogony, national policy, and social history
of a people, after the Bema has long been silent, the temples in ruin, and
the groves prostrate under the axe of repeated conquests.
Satires have at once exhibited and scourged social faults and national
follies, and remained to after times as most essential materials for
history.
Indeed, it was a quaint but just assertion of Hare, in his "Guesses at
Truth," that in Greek history there is nothing truer than Herodotus except
Homer.
ITALY AND FRANCE.--Passing by the classic periods, which afford abundant
illustration of the position, it would be easy to exhibit the clear and
direct historic teachings in purely literary works, by a reference to the
literature of Italy and France. The history of the age of the Guelphs and
Ghibellines is clearly revealed in the vision of Dante: the times of Louis
XIV. are amply illustrated by the pulpit of Massillon, Bourdaloue, and
Bridaine, and by the drama of Corneille, Racine, and Moliere.
ENGLISH LITERATURE THE BEST ILLUSTRATION.--But in seeking for an
illustration of the position that literature is eminently a teacher and
interpreter of history, we are fortunate in finding none more striking
than that presented by English literature itself. All the great events of
English history find complete correspondent delineation in English
literature, so that, were the purely historical record lost, we should
have in the works of poetry, fiction, and the drama, correct portraitures
of the character, habits, manners and customs, political sentiments, and
modes and forms of religious belief among the English people; in a word,
the philosophy of English history.
In the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Dryden, and Addison, are to
be found the men and women, kings, nobles, and commons, descriptions of
English nature, hints of the progress of science and advancement in art;
the conduct of government, the force of prevailing fashions--in a word,
the moving life of the time, and not its dry historic record.
"Authors," says the elder D'Israeli, "are the creators or creatures of
opinion: the great form the epoch; the many reflect the age."
Chameleon-like, most of them take the political, social, and religious
hues of the period in which they live, while a few illustrate it perhaps
quite as forcibly by violent opposition and invective.
We shall see that in Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_ and in Gower's _Vox
Clamantis_ are portrayed the political ferments and theological
controversies of the reigns of Edward III. and Richard II. Spenser decks
the history of his age in gilded mantle and flowing plumes, in his tribute
to Gloriana, The Faery Queen, who is none other than Elizabeth herself.
Literature partakes of the fierce polemic and religious enthusiasm which
mark the troublous times of the Civil War; it becomes tawdry, tinselled,
and licentious at the Restoration, and develops into numerous classes and
more serious instruction, under the constitutional reigns of the house of
Hanover, in which the kings were bad, but the nation prosperous because
the rights of the people were guaranteed.
Many of the finest works of English literature are _purely and directly
historical_; what has been said is intended to refer more particularly to
those that are not--the unconscious, undesigned teachers of history, such
as fiction, poetry, and the drama.
PURPOSE OF THE WORK.--Such, then, is the purpose of this volume--to
indicate the teachings of history in the principal productions of English
literature. Only the standard authors will be considered, and the student
will not be overburdened with statistics, which it must be a part of his
task to collect for himself. And now let us return to the early literature
embodied in those languages which have preceded the English on British
soil; or which, by their combination, have formed the English language.
For, the English language may be properly compared to a stream, which,
rising in a feeble source, receives in its seaward flow many tributaries,
large and small, until it becomes a lordly river. The works of English
literature may be considered as the ships and boats which it bears upon
its bosom: near its source the craft are small and frail; as it becomes
more navigable, statelier vessels are launched upon it, until, in its
majestic and lakelike extensions, rich navies ride, freighted with wealth
and power--the heavy ordnance of defence and attack, the products of
Eastern looms, the precious metals and jewels from distant mines--the best
exponents of the strength and prosperity of the nation through which flows
the river of speech, bearing the treasures of mind.
CELTIC LITERARY REMAINS. THE DRUIDS.--Let us take up the consideration of
literature in Britain in the order of the conquests mentioned in the first
chapter.
We recur to Britain while inhabited by the Celts, both before and after
the Roman occupation. The extent of influence exercised by the Latin
language upon the Celtic dialects cannot be determined; it seems to have
been slight, and, on the other hand, it may be safely assumed that the
Celtic did not contribute much to the world-absorbing Latin.
The chief feature, and a very powerful one, of the Celtic polity, was
_Druidism_. At its head was a priesthood, not in the present meaning of
the word, but in the more extended acceptation which it received in the
middle ages, when it embraced the whole class of men of letters. Although
we have very few literary remains, the system, wisdom, and works of the
Druids form one of the strong foundation-stones of English literature and
of English national customs, and should be studied on that account. The
_Druid_ proper was governor, judge, philosopher, expounder, and
executioner. The _ovaidd_, or _ovates_, were the priests, chiefly
concerned in the study of theology and the practice of religion. The
_bards_ were heroic poets of rare lyric power; they kept the national
traditions in trust, and claimed the second sight and the power of
prophecy. Much has been said of their human sacrifices in colossal images
of wicker-work--the "_immani magnitudine simulacra_" of Caesar--which were
filled with human victims, and which crackled and disappeared in towering
flame and columns of smoke, amid the loud chantings of the bards. The most
that can be said in palliation of this custom is, that almost always such
a scene presented the judicial execution of criminals, invested with the
solemnities of religion.
In their theology, _Esus_, the God Force--the Eternal Father--has for his
agents the personification of spiritual light, of immortality, of nature,
and of heroism; _Camul_ was the war-god; _Tarann_ the thunder-god; _Heol_,
the king of the sun, who inflames the soldier's heart, and gives vitality
to the corn and the grape.[4]
But Druidism, which left its monuments like Stonehenge, and its strong
traces in English life, now especially found in Wales and other
mountainous parts of the kingdom, has not left any written record.
ROMAN WRITERS.--Of the Roman occupancy we have Roman and Greek accounts,
many of them by those who took part in the doings of the time. Among the
principal writers are _Julius Caesar_, _Tacitus_, _Diodorus Siculus_,
_Strabo_, and _Suetonius_.
PSALTER OF CASHEL.--Of the later Celtic efforts, almost all are in Latin:
the oldest Irish work extant is called the _Psalter of Cashel_, which is a
compilation of the songs of the early bards, and of metrical legends, made
in the ninth century by _Cormac Mac Culinan_, who claimed to be King of
Munster and Bishop of Cashel.
THE WELSH TRIADS.--The next of the important Celtic remains is called _The
Welsh Triads_, an early but progressive work of the Cymbric Celts. Some of
the triads are of very early date, and others of a much later period. The
work is said to have been compiled in its present form by _Caradoc of
Nantgarvan_ and _Jevan Brecha_, in the thirteenth century. It contains a
record of "remarkable men and things which have been in the island of
Britain, and of the events which befell the race of the Cymri from the age
of ages," i.e. from the beginning. It has also numerous moral proverbs. It
is arranged in _triads_, or sets of three.
As an example, we have one triad giving "The three of the race of the
island of Britain: _Hu Gadarn_, (who first brought the race into Britain;)
_Prydain_, (who first established regal government,) and _Dynwal Moelmud_,
(who made a system of laws.)" Another triad presents "The three benevolent
tribes of Britain: the _Cymri_, (who came with Hu Gadarn from
Constantinople;) the _Lolegrwys_, (who came from the Loire,) and the
_Britons_"
Then are mentioned the tribes that came with consent and under protection,
viz., the _Caledonians_, the _Gwyddelian race_, and the men of _Galedin_,
who came from the continent "when their country was drowned;" the last
inhabited the Isle of Wight. Another mentions the three usurping tribes;
the _Coranied_, the _Gwydel-Fichti_, (from Denmark,) and the _Saxons_.
Although the _compilation_ is so modern, most of the triads date from the
sixth century.
THE MABINOGION.--Next in order of importance of the Celtic remains must be
mentioned the Mabinogion, or _Tales for Youth_, a series of romantic
tales, illustrative of early British life, some of which have been
translated from the Celtic into English. Among these the most elaborate is
the _Tale of Peredur_, a regular Romance of Arthur, entirely Welsh in
costume and character.
BRITISH BARDS.--A controversy has been fiercely carried on respecting the
authenticity of poems ascribed to _Aneurin_, _Taliesin_, _Llywarch Hen_,
and _Merdhin_, or _Merlin_, four famous British bards of the fifth and
sixth centuries, who give us the original stories respecting Arthur,
representing him not as a "miraculous character," as the later histories
do, but as a courageous warrior worthy of respect but not of wonder. The
burden of the evidence, carefully collected and sifted by Sharon
Turner,[5] seems to be in favor of the authenticity of these poems.
These works are fragmentary and legendary: they have given few elements to
the English language, but they show us the condition and culture of the
British mind in that period, and the nature of the people upon whom the
Saxons imposed their yoke. "The general spirit [of the early British
poetry] is much more Druidical than Christian,"[6] and in its mysterious
and legendary nature, while it has been not without value as a historical
representation of that early period, it has offered rare material for
romantic poetry from that day to the present time. It is on this account
especially that these works should be studied.
GILDAS.--Among the writers who must be considered as belonging to the
Celtic race, although they wrote in Latin, the most prominent is _Gildas_.
He was the son of Caw, (Alcluyd, a British king,) who was also the father
of the famous bard Aneurin. Many have supposed Gildas and Aneurin to be
the same person, so vague are the accounts of both. If not, they were
brothers. Gildas was a British bard, who, when converted to Christianity,
became a Christian priest, and a missionary among his own people. He was
born at Dumbarton in the middle of the sixth century, and was surnamed
_the Wise_. His great work, the History of the Britons, is directly
historical: his account extends from the first invasion of Britain down to
his own time.
A true Celt, he is a violent enemy of the Roman conquerors first, and then
of the Saxon invaders. He speaks of the latter as "the nefarious Saxons,
of detestable name, hated alike by God and man; ... a band of devils
breaking forth from the den of the barbarian lioness."
The history of Gildas, although not of much statistical value, sounds a
clear Celtic note against all invaders, and displays in many parts
characteristic outlines of the British people.
ST. COLUMBANUS.--St. Colm, or Columbanus, who was born in 521, was the
founder and abbot of a monastery in Iona, one of the Hebrides, which is
also called Icolmkill--the Isle of Colm's Cell. The Socrates of that
retreat, he found his Plato in the person of a successor, St. Adamnan,
whose "Vita Sancti Columbae" is an early work of curious historical
importance. St. Adamnan became abbot in 679.
A backward glance at the sparse and fragmentary annals of the Celtic
people, will satisfy us that they have but slight claims to an original
share in English literature. Some were in the Celtic dialects, others in
Latin. They have given themes, indeed, to later scholars, but have left
little trace in form and language. The common Celtic words retained in
English are exceedingly few, although their number has not been decided.
They form, in some sense, a portion of the foundation on which the
structure of our literature has been erected, without being in any manner
a part of the building itself.
CHAPTER III.
ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE AND HISTORY.
The Lineage of the Anglo-Saxon. Earliest Saxon Poem. Metrical
Arrangement. Periphrasis and Alliteration. Beowulf. Caedmon. Other
Saxon Fragments. The Appearance of Bede.
THE LINEAGE OF THE ANGLO-SAXON.
The true origin of English literature is Saxon. Anglo-Saxon is the mother
tongue of the English language, or, to state its genealogy more
distinctly, and to show its family relations at a glance, take the
following divisions and subdivisions of the
TEUTONIC CLASS.
|
.--------------------+-------------------.
| | |
High German branch. Low German branch. Scandinavian branch.
|
Dead | Languages.
.----------+--------------+-------------+------------.
| | | | |
Gothic. Old Dutch. Anglo-Saxon. Old Frisian. Old Saxon.
|
English.
Without attempting an analysis of English to find the exact proportion of
Saxon words, it must be observed that Saxon is the root-language of
English; it might with propriety be called the oldest English; it has been
manipulated, modified, and developed in its contact with other
languages--remaining, however, _radically_ the same--to become our present
spoken language.
At this period of our inquiry, we have to do with the Saxon itself,
premising, however, that it has many elements from the Dutch, and that its
Scandinavian relations are found in many Danish words. The progress and
modifications of the language in that formative process which made it the
English, will be mentioned as we proceed in our inquiries.
In speaking of the Anglo-Saxon literature, we include a consideration also
of those works written in Latin which are products of the times, and bear
a part in the progress of the people and their literature. They are
exponents of the Saxon mind, frequently of more value than the vernacular
writings.
EARLIEST SAXON POEM.--The earliest literary monument in the Saxon language
is the poem called Beowulf, the author and antiquity of which are alike
unknown. It is at once a romantic legend and an instructive portraiture of
the earliest Saxon period--"an Anglo-Saxon poetical romance," says Sharon
Turner, "true in costume and manners, but with an invented story." Before
proceeding to a consideration of this poem, let us look for a moment at
some of the characteristics of Saxon poetry. As to its subject-matter, it
is not much of a love-song, that sentiment not being one of its chief
inspirations. The Saxon imagination was inflamed chiefly by the religious
and the heroic in war. As to its handling, it abounded in metaphor and
periphrasis, suggestive images, and parables instead of direct narrative.
METRICAL ARRANGEMENT.--As to metrical arrangement, Saxon poetry differed
from our modern English as well as from the classical models, in that
their poets followed no laws of metre, but arranged their vernacular
verses without any distinct rules, but simply to please the ear. "To such
a selection and arrangement of words as produced this effect, they added
the habit of frequently omitting the usual particles, and of conveying
their meaning in short and contracted phrases. The only artifices they
used were those of inversion and transition."[7] It is difficult to give
examples to those unacquainted with the language, but the following
extract may serve to indicate our meaning: it is taken from Beowulf:
Crist waer a cennijd
Cyninga wuldor
On midne winter:
Maere theoden!
Ece almihtig!
On thij eahteothan daeg
Hael end gehaten
Heofon ricet theard.
Christ was born
King of glory
In mid-winter:
Illustrious King!
Eternal, Almighty!
On the eighth day
Saviour was called,
Of Heaven's kingdom ruler.
PERIPHRASIS.--Their periphrasis, or finding figurative names for persons
and things, is common to the Norse poetry. Thus Caedmon, in speaking of
the ark, calls it the _sea-house, the palace of the ocean, the wooden
fortress_, and by many other periphrastic names.
ALLITERATION.--The Saxons were fond of alliteration, both in prose and
verse. They used it without special rules, but simply to satisfy their
taste for harmony in having many words beginning with the same letter; and
thus sometimes making an arbitrary connection between the sentences or
clauses in a discourse, e.g.:
Firum foldan;
Frea almihtig;
The ground for men
Almighty ruler.
The nearest approach to a rule was that three words in close connection
should begin with the same letter. The habit of ellipsis and transposition
is illustrated by the following sentence in Alfred's prose: "So doth the
moon with his pale light, that the bright stars he obscures in the
heavens;" which he thus renders in poetry:
With pale light
Bright stars
Moon lesseneth.
With this brief explanation, which is only intended to be suggestive to
the student, we return to Beowulf.
THE PLOT OF BEOWULF.--The poem contains six thousand lines, in which are
told the wonderful adventures of the valiant viking Beowulf, who is
supposed to have fallen in Jutland in the year 340. The Danish king
Hrothgar, in whose great hall banquet, song, and dance are ever going on,
is subjected to the stated visits of a giant, Grendel, a descendant of
Cain, who destroys the Danish knights and people, and against whom no
protection can be found.
Beowulf, the hero of the epic, appears. He is a great chieftain, the
_heorth-geneat_ (hearth-companion, or vassal) of a king named Higelac. He
assembles his companions, goes over the road of the swans (the sea) to
Denmark, or Norway, states his purpose to Hrothgar, and advances to meet
Grendel. After an indecisive battle with the giant, and a fierce struggle
with the giant's mother, who attacks him in the guise of a sea-wolf, he
kills her, and then destroys Grendel. Upon the death of Hrothgar he
receives his reward in being made King of the Danes.
With this occurrence the original poem ends: it is the oldest epic poem in
any modern language. At a later day, new cantos were added, which,
following the fortunes of the hero, record at length that he was killed by
a dragon. A digest and running commentary of the poem may be found in
Turner's Anglo-Saxons; and no one can read it without discerning the
history shining clearly out of the mists of fable. The primitive manners,
modes of life, forms of expression, are all historically delineated. In it
the intimate relations between the _king_ and his people are portrayed.
The Saxon _cyning_ is compounded of _cyn_, people, and _ing_, a son or
descendant; and this etymology gives the true conditions of their rule:
they were popular leaders--_elected_ in the witenagemot on the death of
their predecessors.[8] We observe, too, the spirit of adventure--a rude
knight-errantry--which characterized these northern sea-kings
that with such profit and for deceitful glory
labor on the wide sea explore its bays
amid the contests of the ocean in the deep waters
there they for riches till they sleep with their elders.
We may also notice the childish wonder of a rude, primitive, but brave
people, who magnified a neighboring monarch of great skill and strength,
or perhaps a malarious fen, into a giant, and who were pleased with a poem
which caters to that heroic mythus which no civilization can root out of
the human breast, and which gives at once charm and popularity to every
epic.
CAEDMON.--Next in order, we find the paraphrase of Scripture by _Caedmon_,
a monk of Whitby, who died about the year 680. The period in which he
lived is especially marked by the spread of Christianity in Britain, and
by a religious zeal mingled with the popular superstitions. The belief was
universal that holy men had the power to work miracles. The Bible in its
entire canon was known to few even among the ecclesiastics: treasure-house
as it was to the more studious clerics, it was almost a sealed book to the
common people. It would naturally be expected, then, that among the
earliest literary efforts would be found translations and paraphrases of
the most interesting portions of the Scripture narrative. It was in
accordance with the spirit of the age that these productions should be
attended with something of the marvellous, to give greater effect to the
doctrine, and be couched in poetic language, the especial delight of
people in the earlier ages of their history. Thus the writings of Caedmon
are explained: he was a poor serving-brother in the monastery of Whitby,
who was, or feigned to be, unable to improvise Scripture stories and
legends of the saints as his brethren did, and had recourse to a vision
before he exhibited his fluency.
In a dream, in a stall of oxen of which he was the appointed night-guard,
an angelic stranger asked him to sing. "I cannot sing," said Caedmon.
"Sing the creation," said the mysterious visitant. Feeling himself thus
miraculously aided, Caedmon paraphrased in his dream the Bible story of
the creation, and not only remembered the verses when he awoke, but found
himself possessed of the gift of song for all his days.
Sharon Turner has observed that the paraphrase of Caedmon "exhibits much
of a Miltonic spirit; and if it were clear that Milton had been familiar
with Saxon, we should be induced to think that he owed something to
Caedmon." And the elder D'Israeli has collated and compared similar
passages in the two authors, in his "Amenities of Literature."
Another remarkable Anglo-Saxon fragment is called _Judith_, and gives the
story of Judith and Holofernes, rendered from the Apocrypha, but with
circumstances, descriptions, and speeches invented by the unknown author.
It should be observed, as of historical importance, that the manners and
characters of that Anglo-Saxon period are applied to the time of Judith,
and so we have really an Anglo-Saxon romance, marking the progress and
improvement in their poetic art.
Among the other remains of this time are the death of _Byrhtnoth_, _The
Fight of Finsborough_, and the _Chronicle of King Lear and his Daughters_,
the last of which is the foundation of an old play, upon which
Shakspeare's tragedy of Lear is based.
It should here be noticed that Saxon literature was greatly influenced by
the conversion of the realm at the close of the sixth century from the
pagan religion of Woden to Christianity. It displayed no longer the fierce
genius of the Scalds, inculcating revenge and promising the rewards of
Walhalla; in spirit it was changed by the doctrine of love, and in form it
was softened and in some degree--but only for a time--injured by the
influence of the Latin, the language of the Church. At this time, also,
there was a large adoption of Latin words into the Saxon, especially in
theology and ecclesiastical matters.
THE ADVENT OF BEDE.--The greatest literary character of the Anglo-Saxon
period, and the one who is of most value in teaching us the history of the
times, both directly and indirectly, is the man who has been honored by
his age as the _venerable Bede_ or _Beda_. He was born at Yarrow, in the
year 673; and died, after a retired but active, pious, and useful life, in
735. He wrote an Ecclesiastical history of the English, and dedicated it
to the most glorious King Ceowulph of Northumberland, one of the monarchs
of the Saxon Heptarchy. It is in matter and spirit a Saxon work in a Latin
dress; and, although his work was written in Latin, he is placed among the
Anglo-Saxon authors because it is as an Englishman that he appears to us
in his subject, in the honest pride of race and country which he
constantly manifests, and in the historical information which he has
conveyed to us concerning the Saxons in England: of a part of the history
which he relates he was an _eye-witness_; and besides, his work soon
called forth several translations into Anglo-Saxon, among which that of
Alfred the Great is the most noted, and would be taken for an original
Saxon production.
It is worthy of remark, that after the decline of the Saxon literature,
Bede remained for centuries, both in the original Latin and in the Saxon
translations, a sealed and buried book; but in the later days, students of
English literature and history began to look back with eager pleasure to
that formative period prior to the Norman conquest, when English polity
and institutions were simple and few, and when their Saxon progenitors
were masters in the land.
CHAPTER IV.
THE VENERABLE BEDE AND THE SAXON CHRONICLE.
Biography. Ecclesiastical History. The Recorded Miracles. Bede's Latin.
Other Writers. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: its Value. Alfred the Great.
Effect of the Danish Invasions.
BIOGRAPHY.
Bede was a precocious youth, whose excellent parts commended him to Bishop
Benedict. He made rapid progress in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; was a deacon
at the unusual age of nineteen, and a priest at thirty. It seems probable
that he always remained in his monastery, engaged in literary labor and
offices of devotion until his death, which happened while he was dictating
to his boy amanuensis, "Dear master," said the boy, "there is yet one
sentence not written." He answered, "Write quickly." Soon after, the boy
said, "The sentence is now written." He replied. "It is well; you have
said the truth. Receive my head into your hands, for it is a great
satisfaction to me to sit facing my holy place where I was wont to pray,
that I may also sitting, call upon my Father." "And thus, on the pavement
of his little cell, singing 'Glory be unto the Father, and unto the Son,
and unto the Holy Ghost,' when he had named the Holy Ghost he breathed his
last, and so departed to the heavenly kingdom."
HIS ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.--His ecclesiastical history opens with a
description of Britain, including what was known of Scotland and Ireland.
With a short preface concerning the Church in the earliest times, he
dwells particularly upon the period, from the arrival of St. Augustine, in
597, to the year 731, a space of one hundred and thirty-four years, during
nearly one-half of which the author lived. The principal written works
from which he drew were the natural history of Pliny, the Hormesta of the
Spanish priest _Paulus Orosius_, and the history of Gildas. His account of
the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, "being the traditions of the Kentish
people concerning Hengist and Horsa," has since proved to be fabulous, as
the Saxons are now known to have been for a long period, during the Roman
occupancy, making predatory incursions into Britain before the time of
their reputed settlement.[9]
For the materials of the principal portions of his history, Bede was
indebted to correspondence with those parts of England which he did not
visit, and to the lives of saints and contemporary documents, which
recorded the numerous miracles and wonders with which his pages are
filled.
BEDE'S RECORDED MIRACLES.--The subject of these miracles has been
considered at some length by Dr. Arnold,[10] in a very liberal spirit; but
few readers will agree with him in concluding that with regard to some
miracles, "there is no strong _a priori_ improbability in their
occurrence, but rather the contrary." One of the most striking of the
historical lessons contained in this work, is the credulity and
superstition which mark the age; and we reason justly and conclusively
from the denial of the most palpable and absurd, to the repudiation of
the lesser demands on our credulity. It is sufficient for us that both
were eagerly believed in his day, and thus complete a picture of the age
which such a view would only serve to impair, if not destroy. The theology
of the age is set forth with wonderful clearness, in the numerous
questions propounded by Augustine to Gregory I., the Bishop of Rome, and
in the judicious answers of that prelate; in which may also be found the
true relation which the Church of Rome bore to her English mission.
We have also the statement of the establishment of the archbishoprics of
Canterbury and York, the bishopric of London, and others.
The last chapter but one, the twenty-third, gives an important account "of
the present state of the English nation, or of all Britain;" and the
twenty-fourth contains a chronological recapitulation, from the beginning
of the year 731, and a list of the author's works. Bede produced, besides
his history, translations of many books in the Bible, several histories of
abbots and saints, books of hymns and epigrams, a treatise on orthography,
and one on poetry.
To point the student to Bede's works, and to indicate their historic
teachings, is all that can be here accomplished. A careful study of his
Latin History, as the great literary monument of the Anglo-Saxon period,
will disclose many important truths which lie beneath the surface, and
thus escape the cursory reader. Wars and politics, of which the
Anglo-Saxon chronicle is full, find comparatively little place in his
pages. The Church was then peaceful, and not polemic; the monasteries were
sanctuaries in which quiet, devotion, and order reigned. Another phase of
the literature shows us how the Gentiles raged and the people were
imagining a vain thing; but Bede, from his undisturbed cell, scarcely
heard the howlings of the storm, as he wrote of that kingdom which
promised peace and good-will.
BEDE'S LATIN.--To the classical student, the language of Bede offers an
interesting study. The Latin had already been corrupted, and a nice
discrimination will show the causes of this corruption--the effects of the
other living languages, the ignorance of the clergy, and the new subjects
and ideas to which it was applied.
Bede was in the main more correct than his age, and his vocabulary has few
words of barbarian origin. He arose like a luminary, and when the light of
his learning disappeared, but one other star appeared to irradiate the
gloom which followed his setting; and that was in the person and the reign
of Alfred.
OTHER WRITERS OF THIS AGE.--Among names which must pass with the mere
mention, the following are, after Bede, the most illustrious in this time.
_Aldhelm_, Abbot of Malmesbury, who died in the year 709, is noted for his
scientific computations, and for his poetry: he is said to have translated
the Psalms into Anglo-Saxon poetry.
_Alcuin_, the pride of two countries, England and France, was born in the
year of Bede's death: renowned as an Englishman for his great learning, he
was invited by Charlemagne to his court, and aided that distinguished
sovereign in the scholastic and literary efforts which render his reign so
illustrious. Alcuin died in 804.
The works of Alcuin are chiefly theological treatises, but he wrote a life
of Charlemagne, which has unfortunately been lost, and which would have
been invaluable to history in the dearth of memorials of that emperor and
his age.
_Alfric_, surnamed Grammaticus, (died 1006,) was an Archbishop of
Canterbury, in the tenth century, who wrote eighty homilies, and was, in
his opposition to Romish doctrine, one of the earliest English reformers.
_John Scotus Erigena_, who flourished at the beginning of the ninth
century, in the brightest age of Irish learning, settled in France, and is
known as a subtle and learned scholastic philosopher. His principal work
is a treatise "On the Division of Nature," Both names, _Scotus_ and
_Erigena_, indicate his Irish origin; the original _Scoti_ being
inhabitants of the North of Ireland.
_Dunstan_, (925-988,) commonly called Saint Dunstan, was a powerful and
dictatorial Archbishop of Canterbury, who used the superstitions of
monarch and people to enable him to exercise a marvellous supremacy in the
realm. He wrote commentaries on the Benedictine rule.
These writers had but a remote and indirect bearing upon the progress of
literature in England, and are mentioned rather as contemporary, than as
distinct subjects of our study.
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE.--We now reach the valuable and purely
historical compilation known as the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, which is a
chronological arrangement of events in English history, from the birth of
Christ to the year 1154, in the reign of Henry the Second. It is the most
valuable epitome of English history during that long period.
It is written in Anglo-Saxon, and was begun soon after the time of Alfred,
at least as a distinct work. In it we may trace the changes in the
language from year to year, and from century to century, as it passed from
unmixed Saxon until, as the last records are by contemporary hands, it
almost melted into modern English, which would hardly trouble an
Englishman of the present day to read.
The first part of the Chronicle is a table of events, many of them
fabulous, which had been originally jotted down by Saxon monks, abbots,
and bishops. To these partial records, King Alfred furnished additional
information, as did also, in all probability, Alfric and Dunstan. These
were collected into permanent form by Plegmund, Archbishop of Canterbury,
who brought the annals up to the year 891; from that date they were
continued in the monasteries. Of the Saxon Chronicle there are no less
than seven accredited ancient copies, of which the shortest extends to the
year 977, and the longest to 1154; the others extend to intermediate
dates.
ITS VALUE.--The value of the Chronicle as a statistic record of English
history cannot be over-estimated; it moves before the student of English
literature like a diorama, picturing the events in succession, not without
glimpses of their attendant philosophy. We learn much of the nation's
thoughts, troubles, mental, moral, and physical conditions, social laws,
and manners. As illustrations we may refer to the romantic adventures of
King Alfred; and to the conquest of Saxon England by William of
Normandy--"all as God granted them," says the pious chronicler, "for the
people's sins." And he afterward adds, "Bishop Odo and William the Earl
built castles wide throughout the nation, and poor people distressed; and
ever after it greatly grew in evil: may the end be good when God will."
Although for the most part written in prose, the annals of several years
are given in the alliterative Saxon verse.
A good English translation of Bede's history, and one of the Chronicle,
edited by Dr. Giles, have been issued together by Bohn in one volume of
his Antiquarian library. To the student of English history and of English
literature, the careful perusal of both, in conjunction, is an imperative
necessity.
ALFRED THE GREAT.--Among the best specimens of Saxon prose are the
translations and paraphrases of King _Alfred_, justly called the Great and
the Truth-teller, the noblest monarch of the Saxon period. The kingdoms of
the heptarchy, or octarchy, had been united under the dominion of Egbert,
the King of Wessex, in the year 827, and thus formed the kingdom of
England. But this union of the kingdoms was in many respects nominal
rather than really complete; as Alfred frequently subscribes himself _King
of the West Saxons_. It was a confederation to gain strength against their
enemies. On the one hand, the inhabitants of North, South, and West Wales
were constantly rising against Wessex and Mercia; and on the other, until
the accession of Alfred upon the death of his brother Ethelred, in 871,
every year of the Chronicle is marked by fierce battles with the troops
and fleets of the Danes on the eastern and southern coasts.
It redounds greatly to the fame of Alfred that he could find time and
inclination in his troubled and busy reign, so harassed with wars by land
and sea, for the establishment of wise laws, the building or rebuilding of
large cities, the pursuit of letters, and the interest of education. To
give his subjects, grown-up nobles as well as children, the benefits of
historical examples, he translated the work of Orosius, a compendious
history of the world, a work of great repute; and to enlighten the
ecclesiastics, he made versions of parts of Bede; of the Pastorale of
Gregory the First; of the Soliloquies of St. Augustine, and of the work of
Boethius, _De Consolatione Philosophiae_. Beside these principal works are
other minor efforts. In all his writings, he says he "sometimes interprets
word for word, and sometimes meaning for meaning." With Alfred went down
the last gleams of Saxon literature. Troubles were to accumulate steadily
and irresistibly upon the soil of England, and the sword took the place of
the pen.
THE DANES.--The Danes thronged into the realm in new incursions, until
850,000 of them were settled in the North and East of England. The
Danegelt or tribute, displaying at once the power of the invaders and the
cowardice and effeminacy of the Saxon monarchs, rose to a large sum, and
two millions[11] of Saxons were powerless to drive the invaders away. In
the year 1016, after the weak and wicked reign of the besotted _Ethelred_,
justly surnamed the _Unready_, who to his cowardice in paying tribute
added the cruelty of a wholesale massacre on St. Brice's Eve--since called
the Danish St. Bartholomew--the heroic Edmund Ironsides could not stay the
storm, but was content to divide the kingdom with _Knud_ (Canute) the
Great. Literary efforts were at an end. For twenty-two years the Danish
kings sat upon the throne of all England; and when the Saxon line was
restored in the person of Edward the Confessor, a monarch not calculated
to restore order and impart strength, in addition to the internal sources
of disaster, a new element of evil had sprung up in the power and cupidity
of the Normans.
Upon the death of Edward the Confessor, the claimants to the throne were
_Harold_, the son of Godwin, and _William of Normandy_, both ignoring the
claims of the Saxon heir apparent, Edgar Atheling. Harold, as has been
already said, fell a victim to the dissensions in his own ranks, as well
as to the courage and strength of William, and thus Saxon England fell
under Norman rule.
THE LITERARY PHILOSOPHY.--The literary philosophy of this period does not
lie far beneath the surface of the historic record. Saxon literature was
expiring by limitation. During the twelfth century, the Saxon language was
completely transformed into English. The intercourse of many previous
years had introduced a host of Norman French words; inflections had been
lost; new ideas, facts, and objects had sprung up, requiring new names.
The dying Saxon literature was overshadowed by the strength and growth of
the Norman, and it had no royal patron and protector since Alfred. The
superior art-culture and literary attainments of the South, had long been
silently making their impression in England; and it had been the custom to
send many of the English youth of noble families to France to be educated.
Saxon chivalry[12] was rude and unattractive in comparison with the
splendid armor, the gay tournaments, and the witching minstrelsy which
signalized French chivalry; and thus the peaceful elements of conquest
were as seductive as the force of arms was potent. A dynasty which had
ruled for more than six hundred years was overthrown; a great chapter in
English history was closed. A new order was established, and a new chapter
in England's annals was begun.
CHAPTER V.
THE NORMAN CONQUEST AND ITS EARLIEST LITERATURE.
Norman Rule. Its Oppression. Its Benefits. William of Malmesbury.
Geoffrey of Monmouth. Other Latin Chronicles. Anglo-Norman Poets.
Richard Wace. Other Poets.
NORMAN RULE.
With the conquest of England, and as one of the strongest elements of its
permanency, the feudal system was brought into England; the territory was
surveyed and apportioned to be held by military tenure; to guard against
popular insurrections, the curfew rigorously housed the Saxons at night; a
new legislature, called a parliament, or talking-ground, took the place of
the witenagemot, or assembly of the wise: it was a conquest not only in
name but in truth; everything was changed by the conqueror's right, and
the Saxons were entirely subjected.
ITS OPPRESSION.--In short, the Norman conquest, from the day of the battle
of Hastings, brought the Saxon people under a galling yoke. The Norman was
everywhere an oppressor. Besides his right as a conqueror, he felt a
contempt for the rudeness of the Saxon. He was far more able to govern and
to teach. He founded rich abbeys; schools like those of Oxford and
Cambridge he expanded into universities like that of Paris. He filled all
offices of profit and trust, and created many which the Saxons had not. In
place of the Saxon English, which, however vigorous, was greatly wanting
in what may be called the vocabulary of progress, the Norman French,
drawing constantly upon the Latin, enriched by the enactments of
Charlemagne and the tributes of Italy, even in its infancy a language of
social comity in Western Europe, was spoken at court, introduced into the
courts of law, taught in the schools, and threatened to submerge and drown
out the vernacular.[13] All inducements to composition in English were
wanting; delicious songs of Norman Trouveres chanted in the _Langue
d'oil_, and stirring tales of Troubadours in the _Langue d'oc_, carried
the taste captive away from the Saxon, as a regal banquet lures from the
plain fare of the cottage board, more wholesome but less attractive.
ITS BENEFITS.--Had this progress continued, had this grasp of power
remained without hinderance or relaxation, the result would have been the
destruction or amalgamation of the vigorous English, so as to form a
romance language similar to the French, and only different in the amount
of Northern and local words. But the Norman power, without losing its
title, was to find a limit to its encroachments. This limit was fixed,
_first_, by the innate hardihood and firmness of the Saxon character,
which, though cast down and oppressed, retained its elasticity; which
cherished its language in spite of Norman threats and sneers, and which
never lost heart while waiting for better times; _secondly_, by the
insular position of Great Britain, fortified by the winds and waves, which
enabled her to assimilate and mould anew whatever came into her borders,
to the discomfiture of further continental encroachments; constituting
her, in the words of Shakspeare,
"... that pale, that white-faced shore,
Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tides,
And coops from other lands her islanders;"
and, _thirdly_, to the Crusades, which, attracting the nobles to
adventures in Palestine, lifted the heel of Norman oppression off the
Saxon neck, and gave that opportunity, which alone was needed, to make
England in reality, if not in name--in thews, sinews, and mental strength,
if not in regal state and aristocratic privilege--Saxon-England in all its
future history. Other elements are still found, but the Saxon greatly
predominates.
The historian of that day might well bemoan the fate of the realm, as in
the Saxon Chronicle already quoted. To the philosopher of to-day, this
Norman conquest and its results were of incalculable value to England, by
bringing her into relations with the continent, by enduing her with a
weight and influence in the affairs of Europe which she could never
otherwise have attained, and by giving a new birth to a noble literature
which has had no superior in any period of the world's history.
As our subject does not require, and our space will not warrant the
consideration of the rise and progress of French literature, before its
introduction with the Normans into England, we shall begin with the first
fruits after its transplantation into British soil. But before doing so,
it becomes necessary to mention certain Latin chronicles which furnished
food for these Anglo-Norman poets and legendists.
WILLIAM OF MALMESBURY.--_William of Malmesbury_, the first Latin historian
of distinction, who is contemporary with the Norman conquest, wrote a work
called the "Heroic Deeds of the English Kings," (_Gesta Regum Anglorum_,)
which extends from the arrival of the Saxons to the year 1120; another,
"The New History," (_Historia Novella_,) brings the history down to 1142.
Notwithstanding the credulity of the age, and his own earnest recital of
numerous miracles, these works are in the main truthful, and of real value
to the historical student. In the contest between Matilda and Stephen for
the succession of the English crown, William of Malmesbury is a strong
partisan of the former, and his work thus stands side by side, for those
who would have all the arguments, with the _Gesta Stephani_, by an unknown
contemporary, which is written in the interest of Stephen.
GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH.--More famous than the monk of Malmesbury, but by no
means so truthful, stands _Geoffrey of Monmouth_, Archdeacon of Monmouth
and Bishop of St. Asaph's, a writer to whom the rhyming chronicles and
Anglo-Norman poets have owed so much. Walter, a Deacon of Oxford, it is
said, had procured from Brittany a Welsh chronicle containing a history of
the Britons from the time of one Brutus, a great-grandson of AEneas, down
to the seventh century of our era. From this, partly in translation and
partly in original creation, Geoffrey wrote his "History of the Britons."
Catering to the popular prejudice, he revived, and in part created, the
deeds of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table--fabulous heroes who
have figured in the best English poetry from that day to the present,
their best presentation having been made in the Idyls of the King,
(Arthur,) by Tennyson.
The popular philosophy of Geoffrey's work is found in the fact, that while
in Bede and in the Saxon Chronicle the Britons had not been portrayed in
such a manner as to flatter the national vanity, which seeks for remote
antecedents of greatness; under the guise of the Chronicle of Brittany,
Geoffrey undertook to do this. Polydore Virgil distinctly condemns him for
relating "many fictitious things of King Arthur and the ancient Britons,
invented by himself, and pretended to be translated by him into Latin,
which he palms on the world with the sacred name of true history;" and
this view is substantiated by the fact that the earlier writers speak of
Arthur as a prince and a warrior, of no colossal fame--"well known, but
not idolized.... That he was a courageous warrior is unquestionable; but
that he was the miraculous Mars of the British history, from whom kings
and nations shrunk in panic, is completely disproved by the temperate
encomiums of his contemporary bards."[14]
It is of great historical importance to observe the firm hold taken by
this fabulous character upon the English people, as evinced by the fact
that he has been a popular hero of the English epic ever since. Spenser
adopted him as the presiding genius of his "Fairy Queen," and Milton
projected a great epic on his times, before he decided to write the
Paradise Lost.
OTHER PRINCIPAL LATIN CHRONICLERS OF THE EARLY NORMAN PERIOD.
Ingulphus, Abbot of Croyland, 1075-1109: History of Croyland. Authenticity
disputed.
William of Poictiers, 1070: Deeds of William the Conqueror, (Gesta
Gullielmi Ducis Normannorum et Regis Anglorum.)
Ordericus Vitalis, born about 1075: general ecclesiastical history.
William of Jumieges: History of the Dukes of Normandy.
Florence of Worcester, died 1118: (Chronicon ex Chronicis,) Chronicle from
the Chronicles, from the Creation to 1118, (with two valuable additions to
1141, and to 1295.)
Matthew of Westminster, end of thirteenth century (probably a fictitious
name): Flowers of the Histories, (Flores Historiarum.)
Eadmer, died about 1124: history of his own time, (Historia Novorum, sive
sui seculi.)
Giraldus Cambrensis, born 1146, known as Girald Barry: numerous histories,
including Topographia Hiberniae, and the Norman conquest of Ireland; also
several theological works.
Henry of Huntingdon, first half of the twelfth century: History of
England.
Alured of Rievaux, 1109-66: The Battle of the Standard.
Roger de Hoveden, end of twelfth century: Annales, from the end of Bede's
history to 1202.
Matthew Paris, monk of St. Alban's, died 1259: Historia Major, from the
Norman conquest to 1259, continued by William Rishanger to 1322.
Ralph Higden, fourteenth century: Polychronicon, or Chronicle of Many
Things; translated in the fifteenth century, by John de Trevisa; printed
by Caxton in 1482, and by Wynken de Worde in 1485.
THE ANGLO-NORMAN POETS AND CHRONICLERS.--Norman literature had already
made itself a name before William conquered England. Short jingling tales
in verse, in ballad style, were popular under the name of _fabliaux_, and
fuller epics, tender, fanciful, and spirited, called Romans, or Romaunts,
were sung to the lute, in courts and camps. Of these latter, Alexander the
Great, Charlemagne, and Roland were the principal heroes.
Strange as it may seem, this _langue d'oil_, in which they were composed,
made more rapid progress in its poetical literature, in the period
immediately after the conquest, in England than at home: it flourished by
the transplantation. Its advent was with an act of heroism. Taillefer, the
standard-bearer of William at Seulac, marched in advance of the army,
struck the first blow, and met his death while chanting the song of
Roland:
Of Charlemagne and Roland,
Of Oliver and his vassals,
Who died at Roncesvalles.
De Karlemaine e de Reliant,
Et d'Olivier et des vassals,
Ki moururent en Renchevals.
Each stanza ended with the war-shout _Aoi_! and was responded to by the
cry of the Normans, _Diex aide, God to aid_. And this battle-song was the
bold manifesto of Norman poetry invading England. It found an echo
wherever William triumphed on English soil, and played an important part
in the formation of the English language and English literature. New
scenes and new victories created new inspiration in the poets; monarchs
like Henry I., called from his scholarship _Beauclerc_, practised and
cherished the poetic art, and thus it happened that the Norman poets in
England produced works of sweeter minstrelsy and greater historical value
than the _fabliaux_, _Romans_, and _Chansons de gestes_ of their brethren
on the continent. The conquest itself became a grand theme for their
muse.
RICHARD WACE.--First among the Anglo-Norman poets stands Richard Wace,
called Maistre Wace, reading clerk, (clerc lisant,) born in the island of
Jersey, about 1112, died in 1184. His works are especially to be noted for
the direct and indirect history they contain. His first work, which
appeared about 1138, is entitled _Le Brut d'Angleterre_--The English
Brutus--and is in part a paraphrase of the Latin history of Geoffrey of
Monmouth, who had presented Brutus of Troy as the first in the line of
British kings. Wace has preserved the fiction of Geoffrey, and has catered
to that characteristic of the English people which, not content with
homespun myths, sought for genealogies from the remote classic times.
Wace's _Brut_ is chiefly in octo-syllabic verse, and extends to fifteen
thousand lines.
But Wace was a courtier, as well as a poet. Not content with pleasing the
fancy of the English people with a fabulous royal lineage, he proceeded to
gratify the pride of their Norman masters by writing, in 1171, his "Roman
de Rou, et des Ducs de Normandie," an epic poem on Rollo, the first Duke
of Normandy--Rollo, called the Marcher, because he was so mighty of
stature that no horse could bear his weight. This Rollo compromised with
Charles the Simple of France by marrying his daughter, and accepting that
tract of Neustria to which he gave the name of Normandy. He was the
ancestor, at six removes, of William the Conqueror, and his mighty deeds
were a pleasant and popular subject for the poet of that day, when a
great-grandson of William, Henry II., was upon the throne of England. The
Roman de Rou contains also the history of Rollo's successors: it is in two
parts; the first extending to the beginning of the reign of the third
duke, Richard the Fearless, and the second, containing the story of the
conquest, comes down to the time of Henry II. himself. The second part he
wrote rapidly, for fear that he would be forestalled by the king's poet
_Benoit_. The first part was written in Alexandrines, but for the second
he adopted the easier measure of the octo-syllabic verse, of which this
part contains seventeen thousand lines. In this poem are discerned the
craving of the popular mind, the power of the subject chosen, and the
reflection of language and manners, which are displayed on every page.
So popular, indeed, was the subject of the Brut, indigenous as it was
considered to British soil, that Wace's poem, already taken from Geoffrey
of Monmouth, as Geoffrey had taken it, or pretended to take it from the
older chronicle, was soon again, as we shall see, to be versionized into
English.
OTHER NORMAN WRITERS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY.
_Philip de Than_, about 1130, one of the Trouveres: _Li livre de
creatures_ is a poetical study of chronology, and his _Bestiarie_ is a
sort of natural history of animals and minerals.
_Benoit_: Chroniques des Ducs de Normandie, 1160, written in thirty
thousand octo-syllabic verses, only worthy of a passing notice, because of
the appointment of the poet by the king, (Henry II.,) in order to
forestall the second part of Wace's Roman de Rou.
Geoffrey, died 1146: A miracle play of St. Catherine.
Geoffrey Gaimar, about 1150: Estorie des Engles, (History of the English.)
Luc de la Barre, blinded for his bold satires by the king (Henry I.).
Mestre Thomas, latter part of twelfth century: Roman du Roi Horn. Probably
the original of the "Geste of Kyng Horn."
Richard I., (Coeur de Lion,) died 1199, King of England: _Sirventes_ and
songs. His antiphonal song with the minstrel Blondel is said to have given
information of the place of his imprisonment, and procured his release;
but this is probably only a romantic fiction.
CHAPTER VI.
THE MORNING TWILIGHT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.
Semi-Saxon Literature. Layamon. The Ormulum. Robert of Gloucester.
Langland. Piers Plowman. Piers Plowman's Creed. Sir Jean Froissart. Sir
John Mandevil.
SEMI-SAXON LITERATURE.
Moore, in his beautiful poem, "The Light of the Harem," speaks of that
luminous pulsation which precedes the real, progressive morning:
... that earlier dawn
Whose glimpses are again withdrawn,
As if the morn had waked, and then
Shut close her lids of light again.
The simile is not inapt, as applied to the first efforts of the early
English, or Semi-Saxon literature, during the latter part of the twelfth
and the whole of the thirteenth century. That deceptive dawn, or first
glimpse of the coming day, is to be found in the work of _Layamon_. The
old Saxon had revived, but had been modified and altered by contact with
the Latin chronicles and the Anglo-Norman poetry, so as to become a
distinct language--that of the people; and in this language men of genius
and poetic taste were now to speak to the English nation.
LAYAMON.--Layamon[15] was an English priest of Worcestershire, who made a
version of Wace's _Brut_, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, so
peculiar, however, in its language, as to puzzle the philologist to fix
its exact date with even tolerable accuracy. But, notwithstanding the
resemblance, according to Mr. Ellis, to the "simple and unmixed, though
very barbarous Saxon," the character of the alphabet and the nature of the
rhythm place it at the close of the twelfth century, and present it as
perhaps the best type of the Semi-Saxon. The poem consists partly of the
Saxon alliterative lines, and partly of verses which seem to have thrown
off this trammel; so that a different decision as to its date would be
reached according as we consider these diverse parts of its structure. It
is not improbable that, like English poets of a later time, Layamon
affected a certain archaism in language, as giving greater beauty and
interest to his style. The subject of the _Brut_ was presented to him as
already treated by three authors: first, the original Celtic poem, which
has been lost; second, the Latin chronicle of Geoffrey; and, third, the
French poem of Wace. Although Layamon's work is, in the main, a
translation of that of Wace, he has modified it, and added much of his
own. His poem contains more than thirty thousand lines.
THE ORMULUM.--Next in value to the Brut of Layamon, is the Ormulum, a
series of metrical homilies, in part paraphrases of the gospels for the
day, with verbal additions and annotations. This was the work of a monk
named _Orm_ or _Ormin_, who lived in the beginning of the thirteenth
century, during the reign of King John and Henry III., and it resembles
our present English much more nearly than the poem of Layamon. In his
dedication of the work to his brother Walter, Orm says--and we give his
words as an illustration of the language in which he wrote:
Ice hafe don swa summ thu bad
Annd forthedd te thin wille
Ice hafe wennd uintill Ennglissh
Goddspelless hallghe lare
Affterr thatt little witt tatt me
Min Drihhten hafethth lenedd
I have done so as thou bade,
And performed thee thine will;
I have turned into English
Gospel's holy lore,
After that little wit that me
My lord hath lent.
The poem is written in Alexandrine verses, which may be divided into
octosyllabic lines, alternating with those of six syllables, as in the
extract given above. He is critical with regard to his orthography, as is
evinced in the following instructions which he gives to his future readers
and transcriber:
And whase willen shall this booke
Eft other sithe writen,
Him bidde ice that he't write right
Swa sum this booke him teacheth
And whoso shall wish this book
After other time to write,
Him bid I that he it write right,
So as this book him teacheth.
The critics have observed that, whereas the language of Layamon shows that
it was written in the southwest of England, that of Orm manifests an
eastern or northeastern origin. To the historical student, Orm discloses
the religious condition and needs of the people, and the teachings of the
Church. His poem is also manifestly a landmark in the history of the
English language.
ROBERT OF GLOUCESTER.--Among the rhyming chroniclers of this period,
Robert, a monk of Gloucester Abbey, is noted for his reproduction of the
history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, already presented by Wace in French, and
by Layamon in Saxon-English. But he is chiefly valuable in that he carries
the chronicle forward to the end of the reign of Henry III. Written in
West-country English, it not only contains a strong infusion of French,
but distinctly states the prevailing influence of that language in his own
day:
Vor bote a man couthe French, me tolth of him well lute
Ac lowe men holdeth to Englyss, and to her kunde speche zute.
For unless a man know French, one talketh of him little;
But _low_ men hold to English, and to their natural speech yet.
The chronicle of Robert is written in Alexandrines, and, except for the
French words incongruously interspersed, is almost as "barbarous" Saxon as
the Brut of Layamon.
LANGLAND--PIERS PLOWMAN.--The greatest of the immediate heralds of
Chaucer, whether we regard it as a work of literary art, or as an historic
reflector of the age, is "The Vision of Piers Plowman," by Robert
Langland, which appeared between 1360 and 1370. It stands between the
Semi-Saxon and the old English, in point of language, retaining the
alliterative feature of the former; and, as a teacher of history, it
displays very clearly the newly awakened spirit of religious inquiry, and
the desire for religious reform among the English people: it certainly was
among the means which aided in establishing a freedom of religious thought
in England, while as yet the continent was bound in the fetters of a
rigorous and oppressive authority.
Peter, the ploughboy, intended as a representative of the common people,
drops asleep on Malvern Hills, between Wales and England, and sees in his
dream an array of virtues and vices pass before him--such as Mercy, Truth,
Religion, Covetousness, Avarice, etc. The allegory is not unlike that of
Bunyan. By using these as the personages, in the manner of the early
dramas called the Moralities, he is enabled to attack and severely scourge
the evil lives and practices of the clergy, and the abuses which had
sprung up in the Church, and to foretell the punishment, which afterward
fell upon the monasteries in the time of Henry VIII., one hundred and
fifty years later:
And then shall the Abbot of Abingdon, and all his issue forever,
_Have a knock of a king, and incurable the wound_.
His attack is not against the Church itself, but against the clergy. It
is to be remarked, in studying history through the medium of literature,
that the works of a certain period, themselves the result of history,
often illustrate the coming age, by being prophetic, or rather, as
antecedents by suggesting consequents. Thus, this Vision of Piers Plowman
indicates the existence of a popular spirit which had been slowly but
steadily increasing--which sympathized with Henry II. and the
priest-trammelling "Constitutions of Clarendon," even while it was ready
to go on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas a Becket, the illustrious
victim of the quarrel between Henry and his clergy. And it points with no
uncertain finger to a future of greater light and popular development, for
this bold spirit of reform was strongly allied to political rights. The
clergy claimed both spiritualities and temporalities from the Pope, and,
being governed by ecclesiastical laws, were not like other English
subjects amenable to the civil code. The king's power was thus endangered;
a proud and encroaching spirit was fostered, and the clergy became
dissolute in their lives. In the words of Piers Plowman:
I found these freres, | For profit of hem selve;
All the four orders, | Closed the gospel,
Preaching the people | As hem good liked.
And again:
Ac now is Religion | And a loud buyer,
A rider, a roamer about, | A pricker on a palfrey,
A leader of love days | From manor to manor.
PIERS PLOWMAN'S CREED.--The name of Piers Plowman and the conceit of his
Vision became at once very popular. He stood as a representative of the
peasant class rising in importance and in assertion of religious rights.
An unknown follower of Wiclif wrote a poem called "Piers Plowman's Creed,"
which conveys religious truth in a formula of belief. The language and the
alliterative feature are similar to those of the Vision; and the
invective is against the clergy, and especially against the monks and
friars.
FROISSART.--Sire Jean Froissart was born about 1337. He is placed here for
the observance of chronological order: he was not an English writer, but
must receive special mention because his "Chronicles," although written in
French, treat of the English wars in France, and present splendid pictures
of English chivalry and heroism. He lived, too, for some time in England,
where he figured at court as the secretary of Philippa, queen of Edward
III. Although not always to be relied on as an historian, his work is
unique and charming, and is very truthful in its delineation of the men
and manners of that age: it was written for courtly characters, and not
for the common people. The title of his work may be translated "Chronicles
of France, England, Scotland, Spain, Brittany, Gascony, Flanders, and
surrounding places."
SIR JOHN MANDEVIL, (1300-1371.)--We also place in this general catalogue a
work which has, ever since its appearance, been considered one of the
curiosities of English literature. It is a narrative of the travels of
Mandevil in the East. He was born in 1300; became a doctor of medicine,
and journeyed in those regions of the earth for thirty-four years. A
portion of the time he was in service with a Mohammedan army; at other
times he lived in Egypt, and in China, and, returning to England an old
man, he brought such a budget of wonders--true and false--stories of
immense birds like the roc, which figure in Arabian mythology and romance,
and which could carry elephants through the air--of men with tails, which
were probably orang-outangs or gorillas.
Some of his tales, which were then entirely discredited, have been
ascertained by modern travellers to be true. His work was written by him
first in Latin, and then in French--Latin for the savans, and French for
the court--and afterward, such was the power and demand of the new
English tongue, that he presented his marvels to the world in an English
version. This was first printed by Wynken de Worde, in 1499.
Other Writers of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, Who Preceded
Chaucer.
Robert Manning, a canon of Bourne--called also Robert de Brunne:
Translated a portion of Wace's _Brut_, and also a chronicle of Piers de
Langtoft bringing the history down to the death of Edward I. (1307.) He is
also supposed to be the author of a translation of the "Manuel des Peches,"
(Handling of Sins,) the original of which is ascribed to Bishop Grostete
of Lincoln.
_The Ancren Riwle_, or _Anchoresses' Rule_, about 1200, by an unknown
writer, sets forth the duties of a monastic life for three ladies
(anchoresses) and their household in Dorsetshire.
Roger Bacon, (1214-1292,) a friar of Ilchester: He extended the area of
knowledge by his scientific experiments, but wrote his Opus Magus, or
_greater work_, in comparison with the Opus Minus, and numerous other
treatises in Latin. If he was not a writer in English, his name should be
mentioned as a great genius, whose scientific knowledge was far in advance
of his age, and who had prophetic glimpses of the future conquests of
science.
Robert Grostete, Bishop of Lincoln, died 1253, was probably the author of
the _Manuel des Peches_, and also wrote a treatise on the sphere.
Sir Michael Scott: He lived in the latter half of the thirteenth century;
was a student of the "occult sciences," and also skilled in theology and
medicine. He is referred to by Walter Scott as the "wondrous wizard,
Michael Scott."
Thomas of Ercildoun--called the Rhymer--supposed by Sir Walter Scott, but
erroneously, as is now believed, to be the author of "Sir Tristram."
_The King of Tars_ is the work of an unknown author of this period.
In thus disposing of the authors before Chaucer, no attempt has been made
at a nice subdivision and classification of the character of the works, or
the nature of the periods, further than to trace the onward movement of
the language, in its embryo state, in its birth, and in its rude but
healthy infancy.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAUCER, AND THE EARLY REFORMATION.
A New Era--Chaucer. Italian Influence. Chaucer as a Founder. Earlier
Poems. The Canterbury Tales. Characters. Satire. Presentations of
Woman. The Plan Proposed.
THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ERA.
And now it is evident, from what has been said, that we stand upon the eve
of a great movement in history and literature. Up to this time everything
had been more or less tentative, experimental, and disconnected, all
tending indeed, but with little unity of action, toward an established
order. It began to be acknowledged that though the clergy might write in
Latin, and Frenchmen in French, the English should "show their fantasyes
in such words as we learneden of our dame's tonge," and it was equally
evident that that English must be cultivated and formed into a fitting
vehicle for vigorous English thought. To do this, a master mind was
required, and such a master mind appeared in the person of Chaucer. It is
particularly fortunate for our historic theory that his works,
constituting the origin of our homogeneous English literature, furnish
forth its best and most striking demonstration.
CHAUCER'S BIRTH.--Geoffrey Chaucer was born at London about the year 1328:
as to the exact date, we waive all the discussion in which his biographers
have engaged, and consider this fixed as the most probable time. His
parentage is unknown, although Leland, the English antiquarian, declares
him to have come of a noble family, and Pitts says he was the son of a
knight. He died in the year 1400, and thus was an active and observant
contemporary of events in the most remarkable century which had thus far
rolled over Europe--the age of Edward III. and the Black Prince, of Crecy
and Poitiers, of English bills and bows, stronger than French lances; the
age of Wiclif, of reformation in religion, government, language, and
social order. Whatever his family antecedents, he was a courtier, and a
successful one; his wife was Philippa, a sister of Lady Katherine
Swinford, first the mistress and then the wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of
Lancaster.
ITALIAN INFLUENCE.--From a literary point of view, the period of his birth
was remarkable for the strong influence of Italian letters, which first
having made its entrance into France, now, in natural course of progress,
found its way into England. Dante had produced,
... in the darkness prest,
From his own soul by worldly weights, ...
the greatest poem then known to modern Europe, and the most imaginative
ever written. Thus the Italian sky was blazing with splendor, while the
West was still in the morning twilight. The Divina Commedia was written
half a century before the Canterbury Tales.
Boccaccio was then writing his _Filostrato_, which was to be Chaucer's
model in the Troilus and Creseide, and his _Decameron_, which suggested
the plan of the Canterbury Tales. His _Teseide_ is also said to be the
original of the Knight's Tale. Petrarch, "the worthy clerke" from whom
Chaucer is said to have learned a story or two in Italy for his great
work, was born in 1304, and was also a star of the first magnitude in that
Italian galaxy.
Indeed, it is here worthy of a passing remark, that from that early time
to a later period, many of the great products of English poetry have been
watered by silver rills of imaginative genius from a remote Italian
source. Chaucer's indebtedness has just been noticed. Spenser borrowed his
versification and not a little of his poetic handling in the Faery Queen
from Ariosto. Milton owes to Dante some of his conceptions of heaven and
hell in his Paradise Lost, while his Lycidas, Arcades, Allegro and
Penseroso, may be called Italian poems done into English.
In the time of Chaucer, this Italian influence marks the extended
relations of English letters; and, serving to remove the trammels of the
French, it gave to the now vigorous and growing English that opportunity
of development for which it had so long waited. Out of the serfdom and
obscurity to which it had been condemned by the Normans, it had sprung
forth in reality, as in name, the English language. Books, few at the
best, long used in Latin or French, were now demanded by English mind, and
being produced in answer to the demand.
THE FOUNDER OF THE LITERATURE.--But there was still wanted a man who could
use the elements and influences of the time--a great poet--a maker--a
creator of literature. The language needed a forming, controlling, fixing
hand. The English mind needed a leader and master, English imagination a
guide, English literature a father.
The person who answered to this call, and who was equal to all these
demands, was Chaucer. But he was something more. He claimed only to be a
poet, while he was to figure in after times as historian, philosopher, and
artist.
The scope of this work does not permit an examination of Chaucer's
writings in detail, but the position we have taken will be best
illustrated by his greatest work, the Canterbury Tales. Of the others, a
few preliminary words only need be said. Like most writers in an early
literary period, Chaucer began with translations, which were extended into
paraphrases or versions, and thus his "'prentice hand" gained the
practice and skill with which to attempt original poems.
MINOR POEMS.--His earliest attempt, doubtless, was the _Romaunt of the
Rose_, an allegorical poem in French, by William de Lorris, continued,
after his death in 1260, by Jean de Meun, who figured as a poet in the
court of Charles le Bel, of France. This poem, esteemed by the French as
the finest of their old romances, was rendered by Chaucer, with
considerable alterations and improvements, into octosyllabic verse. The
Romaunt portrays the trials which a lover meets and the obstacles he
overcomes in pursuit of his mistress, under the allegory of a rose in an
inaccessible garden. It has been variously construed--by theologians as
the yearning of man for the celestial city; by chemists as the search for
the philosopher's stone; by jurists as that for equity, and by medical men
as the attempt to produce a panacea for all human ailments.
Next in order was his _Troilus and Creseide_, a mediaeval tale, already
attempted by Boccaccio in his Filostrate, but borrowed by Chaucer,
according to his own account, from _Lollius_, a mysterious name without an
owner. The story is similar to that dramatized by Shakspeare in his
tragedy of the same title. This is in decasyllabic verse, arranged in
stanzas of seven lines each.
The _House of Fame_, another of his principal poems, is a curious
description--probably his first original effort--of the Temple of Fame, an
immense cage, sixty miles long, and its inhabitants the great writers of
classic times, and is chiefly valuable as showing the estimation in which
the classic writers were held in that day. This is also in octosyllabic
verses, and is further remarkable for the opulence of its imagery and its
variety of description. The poet is carried in the claws of a great eagle
into this house, and sees its distinguished occupants standing upon
columns of different kinds of metal, according to their merits. The poem
ends with the third book, very abruptly, as Chaucer awakes from his
vision.
"The Legend of Good Women" is a record of the loves and misfortunes of
celebrated women, and is supposed to have been written to make amends for
the author's other unjust portraitures of female character.
THE CANTERBURY TALES.--In order to give system to our historic inquiries,
we shall now present an outline of the Canterbury Tales, in order that we
may show--
I. The indications of a general desire in that period for a reformation
in religion.
II. The social condition of the English people.
III. The important changes in government.
IV. The condition and progress of the English language.
The Canterbury Tales were begun in 1386, when Chaucer was fifty-eight
years old, and in a period of comparative quiet, after the minority of
Richard II. was over, and before his troubles had begun. They form a
beautiful gallery of cabinet pictures of English society in all its
grades, except the very highest and the lowest; and, in this respect, they
supplement in exact lineaments and the freshest coloring those compendiums
of English history which only present to us, on the one hand, the persons
and deeds of kings and their nobles, and, on the other, the general laws
which so long oppressed the lower orders of the people, and the action of
which is illustrated by disorders among them. But in Chaucer we find the
true philosophy of English society, the principle of the guilds, or
fraternities, to which his pilgrims belong--the character and avocation of
the knight, squire, yeoman, franklin, bailiff, sompnour, reeve, etc.,
names, many of them, now obsolete. Who can find these in our compendiums?
they must be dug--and dry work it is--out of profounder histories, or
found, with greater pleasure, in poems like that of Chaucer.
CHARACTERS.--Let us consider, then, a few of his principal characters
which most truly represent the age and nation.
The Tabard inn at Southwark, then a suburb of "London borough without the
walls," was a great rendezvous for pilgrims who were journeying to the
shrine of St. Thomas a Becket, at Canterbury--that Saxon archbishop who
had been murdered by the minions of Henry II. Southwark was on the high
street, the old Roman highway from London to the southeast. A gathering of
pilgrims here is no uncommon occurrence; and thus numbers and variety make
a combination of penitence and pleasure. The host of the Tabard--doubtless
a true portraiture of the landlord of that day--counts noses, that he may
distribute the pewter plates. A substantial supper smokes upon the
old-fashioned Saxon-English board--so substantial that the pilgrims are
evidently about to lay in a good stock, in anticipation of poor fare, the
fatigue of travel, and perhaps a fast or two not set down in the calendar.
As soon as they attack the viands, ale and strong wines, hippocras,
pigment, and claret, are served in bright pewter and wood. There were
Saxon drinks for the commoner pilgrims; the claret was for the knight.
Every one drinks at his will, and the miller, as we shall see, takes a
little more than his head can decently carry.
First in the place of honor is the knight, accompanied by his son, the
young squire, and his trusty yeoman. Then, in order of social rank, a
prioress, a nun and three priests, a friar, a merchant, a poor scholar or
clerk of Oxford, a sergeant of the law, a frankelein, a haberdasher, a
weaver, a tapster, a dyer, a cook, a shipman, a doctor of physic, a wife
of Bath, a poor parson, a ploughman, a miller, a manciple or college
steward, a reeve or bailiff, a sompnour or summoner to the ecclesiastical
courts, a pardoner or seller of papal indulgences (one hundred and fifty
years before Luther)--an essentially English company of many social
grades, bound to the most popular shrine, that of a Saxon archbishop,
himself the son of a London citizen, murdered two hundred years before
with the connivance of an English king. No one can read this list without
thinking that if Chaucer be true and accurate in his descriptions of these
persons, and make them talk as they did talk, his delineations are of
inestimable value historically. He has been faithfully true. Like all
great masters of the epic art, he doubtless drew them from the life; each,
given in the outlines of the prologue, is a speaking portrait: even the
horses they ride are as true to nature as those in the pictures of Rosa
Bonheur.
And besides these historic delineations which mark the age and country,
notwithstanding the loss of local and personal satire with which, to the
reader of his day, the poem must have sparkled, and which time has
destroyed for us, the features of our common humanity are so well
portrayed, that to the latest generations will be there displayed the
"forth-showing instances" of the _Idola Tribus_ of Bacon, the besetting
sins, frailties, and oddities of the human race.
SATIRE.--His touches of satire and irony are as light as the hits of an
accomplished master of the small-sword; mere hits, but significant of deep
thrusts, at the scandals, abuses, and oppressions of the age. Like
Dickens, he employed his fiction in the way of reform, and helped to
effect it.
Let us illustrate. While sitting at the table, Chaucer makes his sketches
for the Prologue. A few of these will serve here as specimens of his
powers. Take the _Doctour of Physike_ who
Knew the cause of every maladie,
Were it of cold or hote or wet or drie;
who also knew
... the old Esculapius,
And Dioscorides and eke Rufus,
Old Hippocras, Rasis, and Avicen,
and many other classic authorities in medicine.
Of his diete mesurable was he,
And it was of no superfluite;
nor was it a gross slander to say of the many,
His studie was but litel on the Bible.
It was a suggestive satire which led him to hint that he was
... but esy of dispense;
He kepte that he wan in pestilence;
For gold in physike is a cordial;
Therefore he loved gold in special.
Chaucer deals tenderly with the lawyers; yet, granting his sergeant of the
law discretion and wisdom, a knowledge of cases even "from the time of
King Will," and fees and perquisites quite proportional, he adds,
Nowher so besy a man as he ther n' as,
And yet he seemed besier than he was.
HIS PRESENTATIONS OF WOMAN.--Woman seems to find hard judgment in this
work. Madame Eglantine, the prioress, with her nasal chanting, her
English-French, "of Stratford-atte-Bow," her legion of smalle houndes, and
her affected manner, is not a flattering type of woman's character, and
yet no doubt she is a faithful portrait of many a prioress of that day.
And the wife of Bath is still more repulsive. She tells us, in the
prologue to her story, that she has buried five husbands, and, buxom
still, is looking for the sixth. She is a jolly _compagnon de voyage_, had
been thrice to Jerusalem, and is now seeking assoil for some little sins
at Canterbury. And the host's wife, as he describes her, is not by any
means a pleasant helpmeet for an honest man. The host is out of her
hearing, or he would not be so ready to tell her character:
I have a wif, tho' that she poore be;
But of her tongue a blabbing shrew is she,
And yet she hath a heap of vices mo.
She is always getting into trouble with the neighbors; and when he will
not fight in her quarrel, she cries,
... False coward, wreak thy wif;
By corpus domini, I will have thy knife,
And thou shalt have my distaff and go spin.
The best names she has for him are milksop, coward, and ape; and so we
say, with him,
Come, let us pass away from this mattere.
THE PLAN PROPOSED.--With these suggestions of the nature of the company
assembled "for to don their pilgrimage," we come to the framework of the
story. While sitting at the table, the host proposes
That each of you, to shorten with your way,
In this viage shall tellen tales twey.
Each pilgrim should tell two stories; one on the way to Canterbury, and
one returning. As, including Chaucer and the host, there are thirty-one in
the company, this would make sixty-two stories. The one who told the best
story should have, on the return of the company to the Tabard inn, a
supper at the expense of the rest.
The host's idea was unanimously accepted; and in the morning, as they ride
forth, they begin to put it into execution. Although lots are drawn for
the order in which the stories shall be told, it is easily arranged by the
courteous host, who recognizes the difference in station among the
pilgrims, that the knight shall inaugurate the scheme, which he does by
telling that beautiful story of _Palamon and Arcite_, the plot of which is
taken from _Le Teseide_ of Boccacio. It is received with cheers by the
company, and with great delight by the host, who cries out,
So mote I gon--this goth aright,
Unbockled is the mail.
The next in order is called for, but the miller, who has replenished his
midnight potations in the morning, and is now rolling upon his horse,
swears that "he can a noble tale," and, not heeding the rebuke of the
host,
Thou art a fool, thy wit is overcome,
he shouts out a vulgar story, in all respects in direct contrast to that
of the knight. As a literary device, this rude introduction of the miller
breaks the stiffness and monotony of a succession in the order of rank;
and, as a feature of the history, it seems to tell us something of
democratic progress. The miller's story ridicules a carpenter, and the
reeve, who is a carpenter, immediately repays him by telling a tale in
which he puts a miller in a ludicrous position.
With such a start, the pilgrims proceed to tell their tales; but not all.
There is neither record of their reaching Canterbury, nor returning. Nor
is the completion of the number at all essential: for all practical
purposes, we have all that can be asked; and had the work been completed,
it would have added little to the historical stores which it now
indirectly, and perhaps unconsciously, offers. The number of the tales
(including two in prose) is twenty-four, and great additional value is
given to them by the short prologue introducing each of them.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAUCER, (CONTINUED.)--REFORMS IN RELIGION AND SOCIETY.
Historical Facts. Reform in Religion. The Clergy, Regular and Secular.
The Friar and the Sompnour. The Pardonere. The Poure Persone. John
Wiclif. The Translation of the Bible. The Ashes of Wiclif.
HISTORICAL FACTS.
Leaving the pilgrims' cavalcade for a more philosophical consideration of
the historical teachings of the subject, it may be clearly shown that the
work of Chaucer informs us of a wholesome reform in religion, or, in the
words of George Ellis,[16] "he was not only respected as the father of
English poetry, but revered as a champion of the Reformation."
Let us recur briefly to the history. With William the Conqueror a great
change had been introduced into England: under him and his immediate
successors--his son William Rufus, his nephew Henry I., the usurper
Stephen, and Henry II.,--the efforts of the "English kings of Norman race"
were directed to the establishment of their power on a strong foundation;
but they began, little by little, to see that the only foundation was that
of the unconquerable English people; so that popular rights soon began to
be considered, and the accession of Henry II., the first of the
Plantagenets, was specially grateful to the English, because he was the
first since the Conquest to represent the Saxon line, being the grandson
of Henry I., and son of _Matilda_, niece of Edgar Atheling. In the mean
time, as has been seen, the English language had been formed, the chief
element of which was Saxon. This was a strong instrument of political
rights, for community of language tended to an amalgamation of the Norman
and Saxon peoples. With regard to the Church in England, the insulation
from Rome had impaired the influence of the Papacy. The misdeeds and
arrogance of the clergy had arrayed both people and monarch against their
claims, as several of the satirical poems already mentioned have shown. As
a privileged class, who used their immunities to do evil and corrupt the
realm, the clergy became odious to the _nobles_, whose power they shared
and sometimes impaired, and to the _people_, who could now read their
faults and despise their comminations, and who were unwilling to pay
hard-earned wages to support them in idleness and vice. It was not the
doctrine, but the practice which they condemned. With the accession of the
house of Plantagenet, the people were made to feel that the Norman
monarchy was a curse, without alloy. Richard I. was a knight-errant and a
crusader, who cared little for the realm; John was an adulterer, traitor,
and coward, who roused the people's anger by first quarrelling with the
Pope, and then basely giving him the kingdom to receive it again as a
papal fief. The nation, headed by the warlike barons, had forced the great
charter of popular rights from John, and had caused it to be confirmed and
supplemented during the long reign of his son, the weak Henry III.
Edward I. was engaged in cruel wars, both in Wales and Scotland, which
wasted the people's money without any corresponding advantage.
Edward II. was deposed and murdered by his queen and her paramour
Mortimer; and, however great their crime, he was certainly unworthy and
unable to control a fierce and turbulent people, already clamorous for
their rights. These well-known facts are here stated to show the
unsettled condition of things during the period when the English were
being formed into a nation, the language established, and the earliest
literary efforts made. Materials for a better organization were at hand in
great abundance; only proper master-builders were needed. We have seen
that everything now betokened the coming of a new era, in State, Church,
and literature.
The monarch who came to the throne in 1327, one year before the birth of
Chaucer, was worthy to be the usher of this new era to England: a man of
might, of judgment, and of forecast; the first truly _English_ monarch in
sympathy and purpose who had occupied the throne since the Conquest:
liberal beyond all former precedent in religion, he sheltered Wiclif in
his bold invectives, and paved the way for the later encroachments upon
the papal supremacy. With the aid of his accomplished son, Edward the
Black Prince, he rendered England illustrious by his foreign wars, and
removed what remained of the animosity between Saxon and Norman.
REFORM IN RELIGION.--We are so accustomed to refer the Reformation to the
time of Luther in Germany, as the grand religious turning-point in modern
history, that we are apt to underrate, if not to forget, the religious
movement in this most important era of English history. Chaucer and Wiclif
wrote nearly half a century before John Huss was burned by Sigismond: it
was a century after that that Luther burned the Pope's decretals at
Wittenberg, and still later that Henry VIII. threw off the papal dominion
in England. But great crises in a nation's history never arrive without
premonition;--there are no moral earthquakes without premonitory throes,
and sometimes these are more decisive and destructive than that which
gives electric publicity. Such distinct signs appeared in the age of
Chaucer, and the later history of the Church in England cannot be
distinctly understood without a careful study of this period.
It is well known that Chaucer was an adherent of John of Gaunt; that he
and his great protector--perhaps with no very pious intents--favored the
doctrines of Wiclif; that in the politico-religious disturbances in 1382,
incident to the minority of Richard II., he was obliged to flee the
country. But if we wish to find the most striking religious history of the
age, we must seek it in the portraitures of religious characters and
events in his Canterbury Tales. In order to a proper intelligence of
these, let us look for a moment at the ecclesiastical condition of England
at that time. Connected with much in doctrine and ritual worthy to be
retained, and, indeed, still retained in the articles and liturgy of the
Anglican Church, there was much, the growth of ignorance and neglect, to
be reformed. The Church of England had never had a real affinity with
Rome. The gorgeous and sensual ceremonies which, in the indolent airs of
the Mediterranean, were imposing and attractive, palled upon the taste of
the more phlegmatic Englishmen. Institutions organized at Rome did not
flourish in that higher latitude, and abuses were currently discussed even
before any plan was considered for reforming them.
THE CLERGY.--The great monastic orders of St. Benedict, scattered
throughout Europe, were, in the early and turbulent days, a most important
aid and protection to Christianity. But by degrees, and as they were no
longer needed, they had become corrupt, because they had become idle. The
Cluniacs and Cistercians, branches of the Benedictines, are represented in
Chaucer's poem by the monk and prioress, as types of bodies which needed
reform.
The Grandmontines, a smaller branch, were widely known for their foppery:
the young monks painted their cheeks, and washed and covered their beards
at night. The cloisters became luxurious, and sheltered, and, what is
worse, sanctioned lewdness and debauchery.
There was a great difference indeed between the _regular_ clergy, or
those belonging to orders and monasteries, and the _secular_ clergy or
parish priests, who were far better; and there was a jealous feud between
them. There was a lamentable ignorance of the Scripture among the clergy,
and gross darkness over the people. The paraphrases of Caedmon, the
translations of Bede and Alfred, the rare manuscripts of the Latin Bible,
were all that cast a faint ray upon this gloom. The people could not read
Latin, even if they had books; and the Saxon versions were almost in a
foreign language. Thus, distrusting their religious teachers, thoughtful
men began to long for an English version of that Holy Book which contains
all the words of eternal life. And thus, while the people were becoming
more clamorous for instruction, and while Wiclif was meditating the great
boon of a translated Bible, which, like a noonday sun, should irradiate
the dark places and disclose the loathsome groups and filthy
manifestations of cell and cloister, Chaucer was administering the
wholesome medicine of satire and contempt. He displays the typical monk
given up to every luxury, the costly black dress with fine fur edgings,
the love-knot which fastens his hood, and his preference for pricking and
hunting the hare, over poring into a stupid book in a cloister.
THE FRIAR AND THE SOMPNOUR.--His satire extends also to the friar, who has
not even that semblance of virtue which is the tribute of the hypocrite to
our holy faith. He is not even the demure rascal conceived by Thomson in
his Castle of Indolence:
... the first amid the fry,
* * * * *
A little round, fat, oily man of God,
Who had a roguish twinkle in his eye,
When a tight maiden chanced to trippen by,
* * * * *
Which when observed, he shrunk into his mew,
And straight would recollect his piety anew.
But Chaucer's friar is a wanton and merry scoundrel, taking every
license, kissing the wives and talking love-talk to the girls in his
wanderings, as he begs for his Church and his order. His hood is stuffed
with trinkets to give them; he is worthily known as the best beggar of his
house; his eyes alight with wine, he strikes his little harp, trolls out
funny songs and love-ditties. Anon, his frolic over, he preaches to the
collected crowd violent denunciations of the parish priest, within the
very limits of his parish. The very principles upon which these mendicant
orders were established seem to be elements of evil. That they might be
better than the monks, they had no cloisters and magnificent gardens, with
little to do but enjoy them. Like our Lord, they were generally without a
place to lay their heads; they had neither purse nor scrip. But instead of
sanctifying, the itinerary was their great temptation and final ruin.
Nothing can be conceived better calculated to harden the heart and to
destroy the fierce sensibilities of our nature than to be a beggar and a
wanderer. So that in our retrospective glance, we may pity while we
condemn "the friar of orders gray." With a delicate irony in Chaucer's
picture, is combined somewhat of a liking for this "worthy limitour."[17]
In the same category of contempt for the existing ecclesiastical system,
Chaucer places the sompnour, or summoner to the Church courts. Of his
fire-red face, scattered beard, and the bilious knobs on his cheeks,
"children were sore afraid." The friar, in his tale, represents him as in
league with the devil, who carries him away. He is a drinker of strong
wines, a conniver at evil for bribes: for a good sum he would teach "a
felon"
... not to have none awe
In swiche a case of the archdeacon's curse.
To him the Church system was nothing unless he could make profit of it.
THE PARDONERE.--Nor is his picture of the pardoner, or vender of
indulgences, more flattering. He sells--to the great contempt of the
poet--a piece of the Virgin's veil, a bit of the sail of St. Peter's boat,
holy pigges' bones, and with these relics he made more money in each
parish in one day than the parson himself in two months.
Thus taking advantage of his plot to ridicule these characters, and to
make them satirize each other--as in the rival stories of the sompnour and
friar--he turns with pleasure from these betrayers of religion, to show us
that there was a leaven of pure piety and devotion left.
THE POOR PARSON.--With what eager interest does he portray the lovely
character of the _poor parson_, the true shepherd of his little flock, in
the midst of false friars and luxurious monks!--poor himself, but
Riche was he of holy thought and work,
* * * * *
That Cristes gospel truely wolde preche,
His parishers devoutly wolde teche.
* * * * *
Wide was his parish and houses fer asonder,
But he left nought for ne rain no thonder,
In sickness and in mischief to visite
The ferrest in his parish, moche and lite.
Upon his fete, and in his hand a staf,
This noble example to his shepe he yaf,
That first he wrought and afterward he taught.
Chaucer's description of the poor parson, which loses much by being
curtailed, has proved to be a model for all poets who have drawn the
likeness of an earnest pastor from that day to ours, among whom are
Herbert, Cowper, Goldsmith, and Wordsworth; but no imitation has equalled
this beautiful model. When urged by the host,
Tell us a fable anon, for cocke's bones,
he quotes St. Paul to Timothy as rebuking those who tell fables; and,
disclaiming all power in poetry, preaches them such a stirring discourse
upon penance, contrition, confession, and the seven deadly sins, with
their remedies, as must have fallen like a thunderbolt upon this careless,
motly crew; and has the additional value of giving us Chaucer's epitome of
sound doctrine in that bigoted and ignorant age: and, eminently sound and
holy as it is, it rebukes the lewdness of the other stories, and, in point
of morality, neutralizes if it does not justify the lewd teachings of the
work, or in other words, the immorality of the age. This is the parson's
own view: his story is the last which is told, and he tells us, in the
prologue to his sermon:
To knitte up all this feste, and make an ende;
And Jesu for his grace wit me sende
To showen you the way in this viage
Of thilke parfit glorious pilgrimage,
That hight Jerusalem celestial.
In an addendum to this discourse, which brings the Canterbury Tales to an
abrupt close, and which, if genuine, as the best critics think it, was
added some time after, Chaucer takes shame to himself for his lewd
stories, repudiates all his "translations and enditinges of worldly
vanitees," and only finds pleasure in his translations of Boethius, his
homilies and legends of the saints; and, with words of penitence, he hopes
that he shall be saved "atte the laste day of dome."
JOHN WICLIF.[18]--The subject of this early reformation so clearly set
forth in the stories of Chaucer, cannot be fully illustrated without a
special notice of Chaucer's great contemporary and co-worker, John Wiclif.
What Chaucer hints, or places in the mouths of his characters, with
apparently no very serious intent, Wiclif, himself a secular priest,
proclaimed boldly and as of prime importance, first from his professor's
chair at Oxford, and then from his forced retirement at Lutterworth, where
he may well have been the model of Chaucer's poor parson.
Wiclif was born in 1324, four years before Chaucer. The same abuses which
called forth the satires of Langland and Chaucer upon monk and friar, and
which, if unchecked, promised universal corruption, aroused the
martyr-zeal of Wiclif; and similar reproofs are to be found in his work
entitled "Objections to Friars," and in numerous treatises from his pen
against many of the doctrines and practices of the Church.
Noted for his learning and boldness, he was sent by Edward III. one of an
embassy to Bruges, to negotiate with the Pope's envoys concerning
benefices held in England by foreigners. There he met John of Gaunt, the
Duke of Lancaster. This prince, whose immediate descendants were to play
so prominent a part in later history, was the fourth son of Edward III. By
the death of the Black Prince, in 1376, and of Lionel, Duke of Clarence,
in 1368, he became the oldest remaining child of the king, and the father
of the man who usurped the throne of England and reigned as Henry IV. The
influence of Lancaster was equal to his station, and he extended his
protection to Wiclif. This, combined with the support of Lord Percy, the
Marshal of England, saved the reformer from the stake when he was tried
before the Bishop, of London on a charge of heresy, in 1377. He was again
brought before a synod of the clergy at Lambeth, in 1378, but such was the
favor of the populace in his behalf, and such, too, the weakness of the
papal party, on account of a schism which had resulted in the election of
two popes, that, although his opinions were declared heretical, he was not
proceeded against.
After this, although almost sick to death, he rose from what his enemies
had hoped would be his death-bed, to "again declare the evil deeds of the
friars." In 1381, he lectured openly at Oxford against the doctrine of
transubstantiation; and for this, after a presentment by the Church--and a
partial recantation, or explaining away--even the liberal king thought
proper to command that he should retire from the university. Thus, during
his latter years, he lived in retirement at his little parish of
Lutterworth, escaping the dangers of the troublous time, and dying--struck
with paralysis at his chancel--in 1384, sixteen years before Chaucer.
TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE.--The labors of Wiclif which produced the most
important results, were not his violent lectures as a reformer, but the
translation of the Bible into English, the very language of the common
people, greatly to the wrath of the hierarchy and its political upholders.
This, too, is his chief glory: as a reformer he went too fast and too far;
he struck fiercely at the root of authority, imperilling what was good, in
his attack upon what was evil. In pulling up the tares he endangered the
wheat, and from him, as a progenitor, came the Lollards, a fanatical,
violent, and revolutionary sect.
But his English Bible, the parent of the later versions, cannot be too
highly valued. For the first time, English readers could search the whole
Scriptures, and judge for themselves of doctrine and authority: there they
could learn how far the traditions and commandments of men had encrusted
and corrupted the pure word of truth. Thus the greatest impulsion was
given to a reformation in doctrine; and thus, too, the exclusiveness and
arrogance of the clergy received the first of many sledge-hammer blows
which were to result in their confusion and discomfiture.
"If," says Froude,[19] "the Black Prince had lived, or if Richard II. had
inherited the temper of the Plantagenets, the ecclesiastical system would
have been spared the misfortune of a longer reprieve."
THE ASHES OF WICLIF.--The vengeance which Wiclif escaped during his life
was wreaked upon his bones. In 1428, the Council of Constance ordered that
if his bones could be distinguished from those of other, faithful people,
they should "be taken out of the ground and thrown far off from Christian
burial." On this errand the Bishop of Lincoln came with his officials to
Lutterworth, and, finding them, burned them, and threw the ashes into the
little stream called the Swift. Fuller, in his Church History, adds: "Thus
this brook has conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into
the narrow seas, they into the main ocean; and thus the ashes of Wiclif
are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world
over;" or, in the more carefully selected words of an English laureate of
modern days,[20]
... this deed accurst,
An emblem yields to friends and enemies,
How the bold teacher's doctrine, _sanctified
By truth_, shall spread, throughout the world dispersed.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAUCER (CONTINUED.)--PROGRESS OF SOCIETY, AND OF LANGUAGES.
Social Life. Government. Chaucer's English. His Death. Historical
Facts. John Gower. Chaucer and Gower. Gower's Language. Other Writers.
SOCIAL LIFE.
A few words must suffice to suggest to the student what may be learned, as
to the condition of society in England, from the Canterbury Tales.
All the portraits are representatives of classes. But an inquiry into the
social life of the period will be more systematic, if we look first at the
nature and condition of chivalry, as it still existed, although on the eve
of departure, in England. This is found in the portraits of certain of
Chaucer's pilgrims--the knight, the squire, and the yeoman; and in the
special prologues to the various tales. The _knight_, as the
representative of European chivalry, comes to us in name at least from the
German forests with the irrepressible Teutons. _Chivalry_ in its rude
form, however, was destined to pass through a refining and modifying
process, and to obtain its name in France. Its Norman characteristic is
found in the young _ecuyer_ or squire, of Chaucer, who aspires to equal
his father in station and renown; while the English type of the
man-at-arms (_l'homme d'armes_) is found in their attendant yeoman, the
_tiers etat_ of English chivalry, whose bills and bows served Edward III.
at Cressy and Poictiers, and, a little later, made Henry V. of England
king of France in prospect, at Agincourt. Chivalry, in its palmy days,
was an institution of great merit and power; but its humanizing purpose
now accomplished, it was beginning to decline.
What a speaking picture has Chaucer drawn of the knight, brave as a lion,
prudent in counsel, but gentle as a woman. His deeds of valor had been
achieved, not at Cressy and Calais, but--what both chieftain and poet
esteemed far nobler warfare--in battle with the infidel, at Algeciras, in
Poland, in Prussia, and Russia. Thrice had he fought with sharp lances in
the lists, and thrice had he slain his foe; yet he was
Of his port as meke as is a mayde;
He never yet no vilainie ne sayde
In all his life unto ne manere wight,
He was a very parfit gentil knight.
The entire paradox of chivalry is here presented by the poet. For, though
Chaucer's knight, just returned from the wars, is going to show his
devotion to God and the saints by his pilgrimage to the hallowed shrine at
Canterbury, when he is called upon for his story, his fancy flies to the
old romantic mythology. Mars is his god of war, and Venus his mother of
loves, and, by an anachronism quite common in that day, Palamon and Arcite
are mediaeval knights trained in the school of chivalry, and aflame, in
knightly style, with the light of love and ladies' eyes. These
incongruities marked the age.
Such was the flickering brightness of chivalry in Chaucer's time, even
then growing dimmer and more fitful, and soon to "pale its ineffectual
fire" in the light of a growing civilization. Its better principles, which
were those of truth, virtue, and holiness, were to remain; but its forms,
ceremonies, and magnificence were to disappear.
It is significant of social progress, and of the levelling influence of
Christianity, that common people should do their pilgrimage with community
of interest as well as danger, and in easy, tale-telling conference with
those of higher station. The franklin, with white beard and red face, has
been lord of the sessions and knight of the shire. The merchant, with
forked beard and Flaundrish beaver hat, discourses learnedly of taxes and
ship-money, and was doubtless drawn from an existing original, the type of
a class. Several of the personages belong to the guilds which were so
famous in London, and
Were alle yclothed in o livere
Of a solempne and grete fraternite.
GOVERNMENT.--Closely connected with this social progress, was the progress
in constitutional government, the fruit of the charters of John and Henry
III. After the assassination of Edward II. by his queen and her paramour,
there opened upon England a new historic era, when the bold and energetic
Edward III. ascended the throne--an era reflected in the poem of Chaucer.
The king, with Wiclif's aid, checked the encroachments of the Church. He
increased the representation of the people in parliament, and--perhaps the
greatest reform of all--he divided that body into two houses, the peers
and the commons, giving great consequence to the latter in the conduct of
the government, and introducing that striking feature of English
legislation, that no ministry can withstand an opposition majority in the
lower house; and another quite as important, that no tax should be imposed
without its consent. The philosophy of these great facts is to be found in
the democratic spirit so manifest among the pilgrims; a spirit tempered
with loyalty, but ready, where their liberties were encroached upon, to
act with legislative vigor, as well as individual boldness.
Not so directly, but still forcibly, does Chaucer present the results of
Edward's wars in France, in the status of the knight, squire, and yeoman,
and of the English sailor, and in the changes introduced into the language
and customs of the English thereby.
CHAUCER'S ENGLISH.--But we are to observe, finally, that Chaucer is the
type of progress in the language, giving it himself the momentum which
carried it forward with only technical modifications to the days of
Spenser and the Virgin Queen. The _House of Fame_ and other minor poems
are written in the octosyllabic verse of the Trouveres, but the
_Canterbury Tales_ give us the first vigorous English handling of the
decasyllabic couplet, or iambic pentameter, which was to become so
polished an instrument afterward in the hands of Dryden and Pope. The
English of all the poems is simple and vernacular.
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 noble 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 instituted 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 constituted 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 classes, 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; constituting 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 principally 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 asserted, 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 manuscripts, 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 illustrious 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, assassinated 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 principal 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, entitled "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 classical learning came to enrich
and modify the national literatures, if it did temporarily retard 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 noble 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 multitude, 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. Schoeffer, 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, Duchess 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 titular 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 lust 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 ungodly passions 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
circumstances, 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 multitude; 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 bloody 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 principal 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 title.
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.
Historically considered, one work of Skelton is especially valuable, for
it places him among the first of English dramatists. The first effort of
the modern drama was the _miracle play_; then came the _morality_; after
that the _interlude_, which was soon merged into regular tragedy and
comedy. Skelton's "Magnyfycence," which he calls "a goodly interlude and a
merie," is, in reality, a morality play as well as an interlude, and marks
the opening of the modern drama in England.
The peculiar verse of Skelton, styled _skeltonical_, is a sort of English
anacreontic. One example has been given; take, as another, the following
lampoon of Philip of Spain and the armada:
A skeltonicall salutation
Or condigne gratulation
And just vexation
Of the Spanish nation,
That in bravado
Spent many a crusado
In setting forth an armado
England to invado.
Who but Philippus,
That seeketh to nip us,
To rob us and strip us,
And then for to whip us,
Would ever have meant
Or had intent
Or hither sent
Such strips of charge, etc., etc.
It varies from five to six syllables, with several consecutive rhymes.
His "Merie Tales" are a series of short and generally broad stories,
suited to the vulgar taste: no one can read them without being struck with
the truly historic character of the subjects and the handling, and without
moralizing upon the age which they describe. Skelton, a contemporary of
the French Rabelais, seems to us a weak English portrait of that great
author; like him a priest, a buffoon, a satirist, and a lampooner, but
unlike him in that he has given us no English _Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_
to illustrate his age.
WYATT.--The next writer who claims our attention is Sir Thomas Wyatt, the
son of Sir Henry Wyatt. He was born in 1503, and educated at Cambridge.
Early a courtier, he was imperilled by his attachment to Anne Boleyn,
conceded, if not quite Platonic, yet to have never led him to criminality.
Several of his poems were inspired by her charms. The one best known
begins--
What word is that that changeth not,
Though it be turned and made in twain?
It is mine ANNA, God it wot, etc.
That unfortunate queen--to possess whose charms Henry VIII. had repudiated
Catherine of Arragon, and who was soon to be brought to the block after
trial on the gravest charges--which we do not think substantiated--was,
however, frivolous and imprudent, and liked such impassioned
attentions--indeed, may be said to have suffered for them.
Wyatt was styled by Camden "splendide doctus," but his learning, however
honorable to him, was not of much benefit to the world; for his works are
few, and most of them amatory--"songs and sonnets"--full of love and
lovers: as a makeweight, in _foro conscientiae_, he paraphrased the
penitential Psalms. An excellent comment this on the age of Henry VIII.,
when the monarch possessed with lust attempted the reformation of the
Church. That Wyatt looked with favor upon the Reformation is indicated by
one of his remarks to the king: "Heavens! that a man cannot repent him of
his sins without the Pope's leave!" Imprisoned several times during the
reign of Henry, after that monarch's death he favored the accession of
Lady Jane Grey, and, with other of her adherents, was executed for high
treason on the 11th of April, 1554. We have spoken of the spirit of the
age. Its criticism was no better than its literature; for Wyatt, whom few
read but the literary historian, was then considered
A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme,
That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit.
The glory of Chaucer's wit remains, while Wyatt is chiefly known because
he was executed.
SURREY.--A twin star, but with a brighter lustre, was Henry Howard, Earl
of Surrey, a writer whose works are remarkable for purity of thought and
refinement of language. Surrey was a gay and wild young
fellow--distinguished in the tournament which celebrated Henry's marriage
with Anne of Cleves; now in prison for eating meat in Lent, and breaking
windows at night; again we find him the English marshal when Henry invaded
France in 1544. He led a restless life, was imperious and hot-tempered to
the king, and at length quartered the king's arms with his own, thus
assuming royal rights and imperilling the king's dignity. On this charge,
which was, however, only a pretext, he was arrested and executed for high
treason in 1547, before he was thirty years old.
Surrey is the greatest poetical name of Henry the Eighth's reign, not so
much for the substance of his poems as for their peculiar handling. He is
claimed as the introducer of blank verse--the iambic pentameter without
rhyme, occasionally broken for musical effect by a change in the place of
the caesural pause. His translation of the Fourth Book of the AEneid,
imitated perhaps from the Italian version of the Cardinal de Medici, is
said to be the first specimen of blank verse in English. How slow its
progress was is proved by Johnson's remarks upon the versification of
Milton.[23] Thus in his blank verse Surrey was the forerunner of Milton,
and in his rhymed pentameter couplet one of the heralds of Dryden and
Pope.
SIR THOMAS MORE.--In a bird's-eye view of literature, the division into
poetry and prose is really a distinction without a difference. They are
the same body in different clothing, at labor and at festivity--in the
working suit and in the court costume. With this remark we usher upon the
literary scene Thomas More, in many respects one of the most remarkable
men of his age--scholar, jurist, statesman, gentleman, and Christian; and,
withal, a martyr to his principles of justice and faith. In a better age,
he would have retained the highest honors: it is not to his discredit that
in that reign he was brought to the block.
He was born in 1480. A very precocious youth, a distinguished career was
predicted for him. He was greatly favored by Henry VIII., who constantly
visited him at Chelsea, hanging upon his neck, and professing an intensity
of friendship which, it is said, More always distrusted. He was the friend
and companion of Erasmus during the residence of that distinguished man in
England. More was gifted as an orator, and rose to the distinction of
speaker of the House of Commons; was presented with the great seal upon
the dismissal of Wolsey, and by his learning, his affability, and his
kindness, became the most popular, as he seemed to be the most prosperous
man in England. But, the test of Henry's friendship and of More's
principles came when the king desired his concurrence in the divorce of
Catherine of Arragon. He resigned the great seal rather than sign the
marriage articles of Anne Boleyn, and would not take the oath as to the
lawfulness of that marriage. Henry's kindness turned to fury, and More was
a doomed man. A devout Romanist, he would not violate his conscience by
submitting to the act of supremacy which made Henry the head of the
Church, and so he was tried for high treason, and executed on the 6th of
July, 1535. There are few scenes more pathetic than his last interview
with his daughter Margaret, in the Tower, and no death more calmly and
beautifully grand than his. He kissed the executioner and forgave him.
"Thou art," said he, "to do me the greatest benefit that I can receive:
pluck up thy spirit man, and be not afraid to do thine office."
UTOPIA.--His great work, and that which best illustrates the history of
the age, is his Utopia, ([Greek: ou topos], not a place.) Upon an island
discovered by a companion of Vespuccius, he established an imaginary
commonwealth, in which everybody was good and everybody happy. Purely
fanciful as is his Utopia, and impossible of realization as he knew it to
be while men are what they are, and not what they ought to be, it is
manifestly a satire on that age, for his republic shunned English errors,
and practised social virtues which were not the rule in England.
Although More wrote against Luther, and opposed Henry's Church
innovations, we are struck with his Utopian claim for great freedom of
inquiry on all subjects, even religion; and the bold assertion that no man
should be punished for his religion, because "a man cannot make himself
believe anything he pleases," as Henry's six bloody articles so fearfully
asserted he must. The Utopia was written in Latin, but soon translated
into English. We use the adjective _utopian_ as meaning wildly fanciful
and impossible: its true meaning is of high excellence, to be striven
for--in a word, human perfection.
OTHER WORKS.--More also wrote, in most excellent English prose, a history
of the princes, Edward V. and his brother Richard of York, who were
murdered in the Tower; and a history of their murderer and uncle, Richard
III. This Richard--and we need not doubt his accuracy of statement, for he
was born five years before Richard fell at Bosworth--is the short,
deformed youth, with his left shoulder higher than the right; crafty,
stony-hearted, and cruel, so strikingly presented by Shakspeare, who takes
More as his authority. "Not letting (sparing) to kiss whom he thought to
kill ... friend and foe was indifferent where his advantage grew; he
spared no man's death whose life withstood his purpose. He slew, with his
own hands, King Henry VI., being a prisoner in the Tower."
With the honorable name of More we leave this unproductive period, in
which there was no great growth of any kind, but which was the
planting-time, when seeds were sown that were soon to germinate and bloom
and astonish the world. The times remind us of the dark saying in the
Bible, "Out of the eater came forth meat; out of the strong came
sweetness."
The art of printing had so increased the number of books, that public
libraries began to be collected, and, what is better, to be used. The
universities enlarged their borders, new colleges were added to Cambridge
and Oxford; new foundations laid. The note of preparation betokened a
great advent; the scene was fully prepared, and the actors would not be
wanting.
Upon the death of Henry VIII., in 1547, Edward VI., his son by Jane
Seymour, ascended the throne, and during his minority a protector was
appointed in the person of his mother's brother, the Earl of Hertford,
afterward Duke of Somerset. Edward was a sickly youth of ten years old,
but his reign is noted for the progress of reform in the Church, and
especially for the issue of the _Book of Common Prayer_, which must be
considered of literary importance, as, although with decided
modifications, and an interruption in its use during the brief reign of
Mary, it has been the ritual of worship in the Anglican Church ever since.
It superseded the Latin services--of which it was mainly a translation
rearranged and modified--finally and completely, and containing, as it
does, the whole body of doctrine, it was the first clear manifesto of the
creeds and usages of that Church, and a strong bond of union among its
members.
OTHER WRITERS OF THE PERIOD.
_Thomas Tusser_, 1527-1580: published, in 1557, "A Hundreth Good Points of
Husbandrie," afterward enlarged and called, "Five Hundred Points of Good
Husbandrie, united to as many of Good Huswiferie;" especially valuable as
a picture of rural life and labor in that age.
Alexander Barklay, died 1552: translated into English poetry the _Ship of
Fools_, by Sebastian Brandt, of Basle.
Reginald Pecock, Bishop of St. Asaph and of Chichester: published, in
1449, "The Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy." He attacked the
Lollards, but was suspected of heresy himself, and deprived of his
bishopric.
John Fisher, 1459-1535: was made Bishop of Rochester in 1504; opposed the
Reformation, and refused to approve of Henry's divorce from Catherine of
Arragon; was executed by the king. The Pope sent him a cardinal's hat
while he was lying under sentence. Henry said he would not leave him a
head to put it on. Wrote principally sermons and theological treatises.
Hugh Latimer, 1472-1555: was made Bishop of Worcester in 1535. An ardent
supporter of the Reformation, who, by a rude, homely eloquence, influenced
many people. He was burned at the stake at the age of eighty-three, in
company with Ridley, Bishop of London, by Queen Mary. His memorable words
to his fellow-martyr are: "We shall this day light a candle in England
which, I trust, shall never be put out."
John Leland, or Laylonde, died 1552: an eminent antiquary, who, by order
of Henry VIII., examined, _con amore_, the records of libraries,
cathedrals, priories, abbeys, colleges, etc., and has left a vast amount
of curious antiquarian learning behind him. He became insane by reason of
the pressure of his labors.
George Cavendish, died 1557: wrote "The Negotiations of Woolsey, the Great
Cardinal of England," etc., which was republished as the "Life and Death
of Thomas Woolsey." From this, it is said, Shakspeare drew in writing his
"Henry VIII."
Roger Ascham, 1515-1568: specially famous as the successful instructor of
Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey, whom he was able to imbue with a taste for
classical learning. He wrote a treatise on the use of the bow, called
_Toxophilus_, and _The Schoolmaster_, which contains many excellent and
judicious suggestions, worthy to be carried out in modern education. It
was highly praised by Dr. Johnson. It was written for the use of the
children of Sackville, Lord Buckhurst.
CHAPTER XI.
SPENSER AND THE ELIZABETHAN AGE.
The Great Change. Edward VI. and Mary. Sidney. The Arcadia. Defence of
Poesy. Astrophel and Stella. Gabriel Harvey. Edmund Spenser--Shepherd's
Calendar. His Great Work.
THE GREAT CHANGE.
With what joy does the traveller in the desert, after a day of scorching
glow and a night of breathless heat, descry the distant trees which mark
the longed-for well-spring in the emerald oasis, which seems to beckon
with its branching palms to the converging caravans, to come and slake
their fever-thirst, and escape from the threatening sirocco!
The pilgrim arrives at the caravansery: not the long, low stone house,
unfurnished and bare, which former experience had led him to expect; but a
splendid palace. He dismounts; maidens purer and more beautiful than
fabled houris, accompanied by slaves bearing rare dishes and goblets of
crusted gold, offer him refreshments: perfumed baths, couches of down,
soft and soothing music are about him in delicious combination. Surely he
is dreaming; or if this be real, were not the burning sun and the sand of
the desert, the panting camel and the dying horse of an hour ago but a
dream?
Such is not an overwrought illustration of English literature in the long,
barren reach from Chaucer to Spenser, as compared with the freshness,
beauty, and grandeur of the geniuses which adorned Elizabeth's court, and
tended to make her reign as illustrious in history as the age of Pericles,
of Augustus, or of Louis XIV. Chief among these were Spenser and
Shakspeare. As the latter has been truly characterized as not for an age,
but for all time, the former may be more justly considered as the highest
exponent and representative of that period. The Faerie Queene, considered
only as a grand heroic poem, is unrivalled in its pictures of beautiful
women, brave men, daring deeds, and Oriental splendor; but in its
allegorical character, it is far more instructive, since it enumerates and
illustrates the cardinal virtues which should make up the moral character
of a gentleman: add to this, that it is teeming with history, and in its
manifold completeness we have, if not an oasis in the desert, more truly
the rich verge of the fertile country which bounds that desert, and which
opens a more beautiful road to the literary traveller as he comes down the
great highway: wearied and worn with the factions and barrenness of the
fifteenth century, he fairly revels with delight in the fertility and
variety of the Elizabethan age.
EDWARD AND MARY.--In pursuance of our plan, a few preliminary words will
present the historic features of that age. In the year 1547, Henry VIII.,
the royal Bluebeard, sank, full of crimes and beset with deathbed horrors,
into a dishonorable grave.[24] A poor, weak youth, his son, Edward VI.,
seemed sent by special providence on a short mission of six years, to
foster the reformed faith, and to give the land a brief rest after the
disorders and crimes of his father's reign.
After Edward came Queen Mary, in 1553--the bloody Mary, who violently
overturned the Protestant system, and avenged her mother against her
father by restoring the Papal sway and making heresy the unpardonable
sin. It may seem strange, in one breath to denounce Henry and to defend
his daughter Mary; but severe justice, untempered with sympathy, has been
meted out to her. We acknowledge all her recorded actions, but let it be
remembered that she was the child of a basely repudiated mother, Catherine
of Arragon, who, as the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, was a
Catholic of the Catholics. Mary had been declared illegitimate; she was
laboring under an incurable disease, affecting her mind as well as her
body; she was the wife of Philip II. of Spain, a monster of iniquity,
whose sole virtue--if we may so speak--was his devotion to his Church. She
inherited her bigotry from her mother, and strengthened it by her
marriage; and she thought that in persecuting heretics she was doing God
service, which would only be a perfect service when she should have burned
out the bay-tree growth of heresy and restored the ancient faith.
Such were her character and condition as displayed to the English world;
but we know, in addition, that she bore her sufferings with great
fortitude; that, an unloved wife, she was a pattern of conjugal affection
and fidelity; that she was a dupe in the hands of designing men and a
fierce propaganda; and we may infer that, under different circumstances
and with better guidance, the real elements of her character would have
made her a good monarch and presented a far more pleasing historical
portrait.
Justice demands that we should say thus much, for even with these
qualifications, the picture of her reign is very dark and painful. After a
sad and bloody rule of five years--a reign of worse than Roman
proscription, or later French terrors--she died without leaving a child.
There was but one voice as to her successor. Delirious shouts of joy were
heard throughout the land: "God save Queen Elizabeth!" "No more burnings
at Smithfield, nor beheadings on Tower green! No more of Spanish Philip
and his pernicious bigots! Toleration, freedom, light!" The people of
England were ready for a golden age, and the golden age had come.
ELIZABETH.--And who was Elizabeth? The daughter of the dishonored Anne
Boleyn, who had been declared illegitimate, and set out of the succession;
who had been kept in ward; often and long in peril of her life; destined,
in all human foresight, to a life of sorrow, humiliation, and obscurity;
her head had been long lying "'twixt axe and crown," with more probability
of the former than the latter.
Wonderful was the change. With her began a reign the like of which the
world had never seen; a great and brilliant crisis in English history, in
which the old order passed away and the new was inaugurated. It was like a
new historic fulfilment of the prophecy of Virgil:
Magnus ... saeclorum nascitur ordo;
Jam redit et _Virgo_, redeunt Saturnia regna.
Her accession and its consequences were like the scenes in some fairy
tale. She was indeed a Faerie Queene, as she was designated in Spenser's
magnificent allegory. Around her clustered a new chivalry, whose gentle
deeds were wrought not only with the sword, but with the pen. Stout heart,
stalwart arm, and soaring imagination, all wore her colors and were amply
rewarded by her smiles; and whatever her personal faults--and they were
many--as a monarch, she was not unworthy of their allegiance.
SIDNEY.--Before proceeding to a consideration of Spenser's great poem, it
is necessary to mention two names intimately associated with him and with
his fame, and of special interest in the literary catalogue of Queen
Elizabeth's court, brilliant and numerous as that catalogue was.
Among the most striking characters of this period was Sir Philip Sidney,
whose brief history is full of romance and attraction; not so much for
what he did as for what he personally was, and gave promise of being.
Whenever we seek for an historical illustration of the _gentleman_, the
figure of Sidney rises in company with that of Bayard, and claims
distinction. He was born at Pennshurst in Kent, on the 29th of November,
1554. He was the nephew of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the chief
favorite of the queen. Precocious in grace, dignity, and learning, Sidney
was educated both at Oxford and Cambridge, and in his earliest manhood he
was a _prud' homme_, handsome, elegant, learned, and chivalrous; a
statesman, a diplomatist, a soldier, and a poet; "not only of excellent
wit, but extremely beautiful of face. Delicately chiselled Anglo-Norman
features, smooth, fair cheek, a faint moustache, blue eyes, and a mass of
amber-colored hair," distinguished him among the handsome men of a court
where handsome men were in great request.
He spent some time at the court of Charles IX. of France--which, however,
he left suddenly, shocked and disgusted by the massacre of St.
Bartholomew's Eve--and extended his travels into Germany. The queen held
him in the highest esteem--although he was disliked by the Cecils, the
constant rivals of the Dudleys; and when he was elected to the crown of
Poland, the queen refused him permission to accept, because she would not
lose "the brightest jewel of her crown--her Philip," as she called him to
distinguish him from her sister Mary's Philip, Philip II. of Spain. A few
words will finish his personal story. He went, by the queen's permission,
with his uncle Leicester to the Low Countries, then struggling, with
Elizabeth's assistance, against Philip of Spain. There he was made
governor of Flushing--the key to the navigation of the North Seas--with
the rank of general of horse. In a skirmish near Zutphen (South Fen) he
served as a volunteer; and, as he was going into action fully armed,
seeing his old friend Sir William Pelham without cuishes upon his thighs,
prompted by mistaken but chivalrous generosity, he took off his own, and
had his thigh broken by a musket-ball. This was on the 2d of October,
1586, N.S. He lingered for twenty days, and then died at Arnheim, mourned
by all. The story of his passing the untasted water to the wounded
soldier, will never become trite: "This man's necessity is greater than
mine," was an immortal speech which men like to quote.[25]
SIDNEY'S WORKS.--But it is as a literary character that we must consider
Sidney; and it is worthy of special notice that his works could not have
been produced in any other age. The principal one is the _Arcadia_. The
name, which was adopted from Sannazzaro, would indicate a pastoral--and
this was eminently the age of English pastoral--but it is in reality not
such. It presents indeed sylvan scenes, but they are in the life of a
knight. It is written in prose, interspersed with short poems, and was
inspired by and dedicated to his literary sister Mary, the Countess of
Pembroke. It was called indeed the _Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia_. There
are many scenes of great beauty and vigor; there is much which represents
the manners, of the age, but few persons can now peruse it with pleasure,
because of the peculiar affectations of style, and its overload of
ornament. There grew naturally in the atmosphere of the court of a regnant
queen, an affected, flattering, and inflated language, known to us as
_Euphuism_. Of this John Lilly has been called the father, but we really
only owe to him the name, which is taken from his two works, _Euphues,
Anatomy of Wit_, and _Euphues and his England_. The speech of the Euphuist
is hardly caricatured in Sir Walter Scott's delineation of Sir Piercie
Shafton in "The Monastery." The gallant men of that day affected this form
of address to fair ladies, and fair ladies liked to be greeted in such
language. Sidney's works have a relish of this diction, and are imbued
with the spirit which produced it.
DEFENCE OF POESIE.--The second work to be mentioned is his "Defence of
Poesie." Amid the gayety and splendor of that reign, there was a sombre
element. The Puritans took gloomy views of life: they accounted
amusements, dress, and splendor as things of the world; and would even
sweep away poetry as idle, and even wicked. Sir Philip came to its defence
with the spirit of a courtier and a poet, and the work in which he upholds
it is his best, far better in style and sense than his Arcadia. It is one
of the curiosities of literature, in itself, and in its representation of
such a social condition as could require a defence of poetry. His
_Astrophel and Stella_ is a collection of amatory poems, disclosing his
passion for Lady Rich, the sister of the Earl of Essex. Although something
must be allowed to the license of the age, in language at least, yet still
the _Astrophel and Stella_ cannot be commended for its morality. The
sentiments are far from Platonic, and have been severely censured by the
best critics. Among the young gallants of Euphuistic habitudes, Sidney was
known as _Astrophel_; and Spenser wrote a poem mourning the death of
Astrophel: _Stella_, of course, was the star of his worship.
GABRIEL HARVEY.--Among the friends of both Sidney and Spenser, was one who
had the pleasure of making them acquainted--Gabriel Harvey. He was born,
it is believed, in 1545, and lived until 1630. Much may be gathered of the
literary character and tendencies of the age by a perusal of the "three
proper and wittie familiar letters" which passed between Spenser and
himself, and the "four letters and certain sonnets," containing valuable
notices of contemporary poets. He also prefixed a poem entitled
_Hobbinol_, to the Faery Queene. But Harvey most deserves our notice
because he was the champion of the hexameter verse in English, and imbued
even Spenser with an enthusiasm for it.
Each language has its own poetic and rhythmic capacities. Actual
experiment and public taste have declared their verdict against hexameter
verse in English. The genius of the Northern languages refuses this old
heroic measure, which the Latins borrowed from the Greeks, and all the
scholarship and finish of Longfellow has not been able to establish it in
English. Harvey was a pedant so thoroughly tinctured with classical
learning, that he would trammel his own language by ancient rules, instead
of letting it grow into the assertion of its own rules.
EDMUND SPENSER--THE SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR.--Having noticed these lesser
lights of the age of Spenser, we return to a brief consideration of that
poet, who, of all others, is the highest exponent and representative of
literature in the age of Queen Elizabeth, and whose works are full of
contemporary history.
Spenser was born in the year of the accession of Queen Mary, 1553, at
London, and of what he calls "a house of ancient fame." He was educated at
Cambridge, where he early displayed poetic taste and power, and he went,
after leaving college, to reside as a tutor in the North of England. A
love affair with "a skittish female," who jilted him, was the cause of his
writing the _Shepherd's Calendar_; which he soon after took with him in
manuscript to London, as the first fruits of a genius that promised far
nobler things.
Harvey introduced him to Sidney, and a tender friendship sprang up between
them: he spent much of his time with Sidney at Pennshurst, and dedicated
to him the _Shepherd's Calendar_. He calls it "an olde name for a newe
worke." The plan of it is as follows: There are twelve parts,
corresponding to twelve months: these he calls _aeglogues_, or
goat-herde's songs, (not _eclogues_ or [Greek: eklogai]--well-chosen
words.) It is a rambling work in varied melody, interspersed and relieved
by songs and lays.
HIS ARCHAISMS.--In view of its historical character, there are several
points to be observed. It is of philological importance to notice that in
the preliminary epistle, he explains and defends his use of archaisms--for
the language of none of his poems is the current English of the day, but
always that of a former period--saying that he uses old English words
"restored as to their rightful heritage;" and it is also evident that he
makes new ones, in accordance with just principles of philology. This fact
is pointed out, lest the cursory reader should look for the current
English of the age of Elizabeth in Spenser's poems.
How much, or rather how little he thought of the poets of the day, may be
gathered from his saying that he "scorns and spews the rakebelly rout of
ragged rymers." It further displays the boldness of his English, that he
is obliged to add "a Glosse or Scholion," for the use of the reader.
Another historical point worthy of observation is his early adulation of
Elizabeth, evincing at once his own courtiership and her popularity. In
"February" (Story of the Oak and Briar) he speaks of "colours meete to
clothe a mayden queene." The whole of "April" is in her honor:
Of fair Eliza be your silver song,
That blessed wight,
The floure of virgins, may she flourish long,
In princely plight.
In "September" "he discourseth at large upon the loose living of Popish
prelates," an historical trait of the new but cautious reformation of the
Marian Church, under Elizabeth. Whether a courtier like Spenser could
expect the world to believe in the motto with which he concludes the
epilogue, "Merce non mercede," is doubtful, but the words are significant;
and it is not to his discredit that he strove for both.
HIS GREATEST WORK.--We now approach _The Faerie Queene_, the greatest of
Spenser's works, the most remarkable poem of that age, and one of the
greatest landmarks in English literature and English history. It was not
published in full until nearly all the great events of Elizabeth's reign
had transpired, and it is replete with the history of nearly half a
century in the most wonderful period of English history. To courtly
readers of that day the history was only pleasantly illustrative--to the
present age it is invaluable for itself: the poem illustrates the history.
He received, through the friendship of Sidney, the patronage of his uncle,
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester--a powerful nobleman, because, besides
his family name, and the removal of the late attainder, which had been in
itself a distinction, he was known to be the lover of the queen; for
whatever may be thought of her conduct, we know that in recommending him
as a husband to the widowed Queen of Scots, she said she would have
married him herself had she designed to marry at all; or, it may be said,
she would have married him had she dared, for that act would have ruined
her.
Spenser was a loyal and enthusiastic subject, a poet, and a scholar. From
these characteristics sprang the Faerie Queene. After submitting the first
book to the criticism of his friend and his patron, he dedicated the work
to "The most high, mighty, and magnificent empress, renowned for piety,
virtue, and all gracious government, Elizabeth, by the grace of God Queen
of England, France, and Ireland, and of Virginia."[26]
CHAPTER XII.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE HISTORY IN THE FAERIE QUEENE.
The Faerie Queene. The Plan Proposed. Illustrations of the History. The
Knight and the Lady. The Wood of Error and the Hermitage. The Crusades.
Britomartis and Sir Artegal. Elizabeth. Mary Queen of Scots. Other
Works. Spenser's Fate. Other Writers.
THE FAERIE QUEENE.
The Faerie Queene is an allegory, in many parts capable of more than one
interpretation. Some of the characters stand for two, and several of them
even for three distinct historical personages.
The general plan and scope of the poem may be found in the poet's letter
to his friend, Sir Walter Raleigh. It is designed to enumerate and
illustrate the moral virtues which should characterize a noble or gentle
person--to present "the image of a brave knight perfected in the twelve
private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised." It appears that the
author designed twelve books, but he did not accomplish his purpose. The
poem, which he left unfinished, contains but six books or legends, each of
which relates the adventures of a knight who is the patron and
representative of a special virtue.
_Book_ I. gives the adventures of St. George, the Red-Cross Knight, by
whom is intended the virtue of Holiness.
_Book_ II., those of Sir Guyon, or Temperance.
_Book_ III., Britomartis, a lady-knight, or Chastity.
_Book_ IV., Cambel and Triamond, or Friendship.
_Book_ V., Sir Artegal, or Justice.
_Book_ VI., Sir Calydore, or Courtesy.
The perfect hero of the entire poem is King Arthur, chosen "as most fitte,
for the excellency of his person, being made famous by many men's former
workes, and also furthest from the daunger of envy and suspition of
present time."
It was manifestly thus, too, that the poet solved a difficult and delicate
problem: he pleased the queen by adopting this mythic hero, for who else
was worthy of her august hand?
And in the person of the faerie queene herself Spenser informs us: "I mean
_glory_ in my general intention, but in my particular, I conceive the most
excellent and glorious person of our sovereign, the _Queene_."
Did we depend upon the poem for an explanation of Spenser's design, we
should be left in the dark, for he intended to leave the origin and
connection of the adventures for the twelfth book, which was never
written; but he has given us his plan in the same preliminary letter to
Raleigh.
THE PLAN PROPOSED.--"The beginning of my history," he says, "should be in
the twelfth booke, which is the last; where I devise that the Faerie
Queene kept her Annual Feaste XII days; uppon which XII severall days the
occasions of the XII severall adventures hapned, which being undertaken by
XII severall knights, are in these XII books handled and discoursed."
First, a tall, clownish youth falls before the queen and desires a boon,
which she might not refuse, viz. the achievement of any adventure which
might present itself. Then appears a fair lady, habited in mourning, and
riding on an ass, while behind her comes a dwarf, leading a caparisoned
war-horse, upon which was the complete armor of a knight. The lady falls
before the queen and complains that her father and mother, an ancient king
and queen, had, for many years, been shut up by a dragon in a brazen
castle, and begs that one of the knights may be allowed to deliver them.
The young clown entreats that he may take this adventure, and
notwithstanding the wonder and misgiving of all, the armor is found to fit
him well, and when he had put it on, "he seemed the goodliest man in all
the company, and was well liked by the lady, and eftsoones taking on him
knighthood, and mounting on that strounge courser, he went forth with her
on that adventure; where beginneth the First Booke."
In a similar manner, other petitions are urged, and other adventures
undertaken.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE HISTORY.--The history in this poem lies directly upon
the surface. Elizabeth was the Faery Queen herself--faery in her real
person, springing Cinderella-like from durance and danger to the most
powerful throne in Europe. Hers was a reign of faery character, popular
and august at home, after centuries of misrule and civil war; abroad
English influence and power were exerted in a magical manner. It is she
who holds a court such as no Englishman had ever seen; who had the power
to transform common men into valiant warriors, elegant courtiers, and
great statesmen; to send forth her knights upon glorious
adventures--Sidney to die at Zutphen, Raleigh to North and South America,
Frobisher--with a wave of her hand as he passes down the Thames--to try
the northwest passage to India; Effingham, Drake, and Hawkins to drive off
to the tender mercy of northern storms the Invincible Armada, and then to
point out to the coming generations the distant fields of English
enterprise.
"Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to
crumble into ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of
the old world were passing away, never to return;"[27] but this virgin
queen was the founder of a new chivalry, whose deeds were not less
valiant, and far more useful to civilization.
It is not our purpose, for it would be impossible, to interpret all the
history contained in this wonderful poem: a few of the more striking
presentations will be indicated, and thus suggest to the student how he
may continue the investigation for himself.
THE KNIGHT AND THE LADY.--In the First Book we are at once struck with the
fine portraiture of the Red Crosse Knight, the Patron of Holinesse, which
we find in the opening lines:
A gentle knight was pricking on the plain,
Ycladd in mighty arms and silver shield.
As we read we discover, without effort, that he is the St. George of
England, or the impersonation of England herself, whose red-cross banner
distinguishes her among the nations of the earth. It is a description of
Christian England with which the poet thus opens his work:
And on his brest a bloodie cross he bore,
The dear remembrance of his dying Lord,
For whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore,
And dead, as living ever, Him adored.
Upon his shield the like was also scored,
For sovereign hope which in his help he had.
Then follows his adventure--that of St. George and the Dragon. By slaying
this monster, he will give comfort and aid to a peerless lady, the
daughter of a glorious king; this fair lady, _Una_, who has come a long
distance, and to whom, as a champion, the Faery Queene has presented the
red-cross knight. Thus is presented the historic truth that the reformed
and suffering Church looked to Queen Elizabeth for succor and support, for
the Lady Una is one of several portraitures of the Church in this poem.
As we proceed in the poem, the history becomes more apparent. The Lady
Una, riding upon a lowly ass, shrouded by a veil, covered with a black
stole, "as one that inly mourned," and leading "a milk-white lamb," is the
Church. The ass is the symbol of her Master's lowliness, who made even his
triumphant entry into Jerusalem upon "a colt the foal of an ass;" the
lamb, the emblem of the innocence and of the helplessness of the "little
flock;" the black stole is meant to represent the Church's trials and
sorrows in her former history as well as in that naughty age. The dragon
is the old serpent, her constant and bitter foe, who, often discomfited,
returns again and again to the attack in hope of her overthrow.
THE WOOD OF ERROR.--The adventures of the knight and the lady take them
first into the Wood of Error, a noble and alluring grove, within which,
however, lurks a loathsome serpent. The knight rushes upon this female
monster with great boldness, but
... Wrapping up her wreathed body round,
She leaped upon his shield and her huge train
All suddenly about his body wound,
That hand and foot he strove to stir in vain.
God help the man so wrapt in Error's endless chain.
The Lady Una cries out:
... Now, now, sir knight, shew what ye bee,
_Add faith unto thy force_, and be not faint.
Strangle her, else she sure will strangle thee.
He follows her advice, makes one desperate effort, Error is slain, and the
pilgrimage resumed.
Thus it is taught that the Church has waged successful battle with Error
in all its forms--paganism, Arianism, Socinianism, infidelity; and in all
ages of her history, whether crouching in the lofty groves of the Druids,
or in the more insidious forms of later Christian heresy.
THE HERMITAGE.--On leaving the Wood of Error, the knight and Lady Una
encounter a venerable hermit, and are led into his hermitage. This is
_Archimago_, a vile magician thus disguised, and in his retreat foul
spirits personate both knight and lady, and present these false doubles to
each. Each sees what seems to be the other's fall from virtue, and,
horrified by the sight, the real persons leave the hermitage by separate
ways, and wander, in inextricable mazes lost, until fortune and faery
bring them together again and disclose the truth.
Here Spenser, who was a zealous Protestant, designs to present the
monastic system, the disfavor into which the monasteries had fallen, and
the black arts secretly studied among better arts in the cloisters,
especially in the period just succeeding the Norman conquest.
THE CRUSADES.--As another specimen of the historic interpretation, we may
trace the adventures of England in the Crusades, as presented in the
encounter of St. George with _Sansfoy_, (without faith,) or the Infidel.
From the hermitage of Archimago,
The true St. George had wandered far away,
Still flying from his thoughts and jealous fear,
Will was his guide, and grief led him astray;
At last him chanced to meet upon the way
A faithless Saracen all armed to point,
In whose great shield was writ with letters gay
SANSFOY: full large of limb, and every joint
He was, and cared not for God or man a point.
Well might the poet speak of Mohammedanism as large of limb, for it had
stretched itself like a Colossus to India, and through Northern Africa
into Spain, where it threatened Christendom, beyond the Pyrenees. It was
then that the unity of the Church, the concurrence of Europe in one form
of Christianity, made available the enthusiasm which succeeded in stemming
the torrent of Islam, and setting bounds to its conquests.
It is not our purpose to pursue the adventures of the Church, but to
indicate the meaning of the allegory and the general interpretation; it
will give greater zest to the student to make the investigation for
himself, with the all-sufficient aids of modern criticism.
Assailed in turn by error in doctrine, superstition, hypocrisy,
enchantments, lawlessness, pride, and despair, the red-cross knight
overcomes them all, and is led at last by the Lady Una into the House of
Holiness, a happy and glorious house. There, anew equipped with the shield
of Faith, the helmet of Salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, he goes
forth to greater conquests; the dragon is slain, the Lady Una triumphant,
the Church delivered, and Holiness to the Lord established as the law of
his all-subduing kingdom on earth.
BRITOMARTIS.--In the third book the further adventures of the red-cross
knight are related, but a heroine divides our attention with him.
_Britomartis_, or Chastity, finds him attacked by six lawless knights, who
try to compel him to give up his lady and serve another. Here Britomartis
represents Elizabeth, and the historic fact is the conflict of English
Protestantism carried on upon land and sea, in the Netherlands, in France,
and against the Invincible Armada of Philip. The new mistress offered him
in the place of Una is the Papal Church, and the six knights are the
nations fighting for the claims of Rome.
The valiant deeds of Britomartis represent also the power of chastity, to
which Scott alludes when he says,
She charmed at once and tamed the heart,
Incomparable Britomarte.[28]
And here the poet pays his most acceptable tribute to the Virgin Queen.
She is in love with Sir Artegal--abstract justice. She has encountered him
in fierce battle, and he has conquered her. It was the fond boast of
Elizabeth that she lived for her people, and for their sake refused to
marry. The following portraiture will be at once recognized:
And round about her face her yellow hair
Having, thro' stirring, loosed its wonted band,
Like to a golden border did appear,
Framed in goldsmith's forge with cunning hand;
Yet goldsmith's cunning could not understand
To frame such subtle wire, so shiny clear,
For it did glisten like the glowing sand,
The which Pactolus with his waters sheer,
Throws forth upon the rivage, round about him near.
This encomium upon Elizabeth's hair recalls the description of another
courtier, that it was like the last rays of the declining sun. Ill-natured
persons called it red.
SIR ARTEGAL, OR JUSTICE.--As has been already said, Artegal, or Justice,
makes conquest of Britomartis or Elizabeth. It is no earthly love that
follows, but the declaration of the queen that in her continued maidenhood
justice to her people shall be her only spouse. Such, whatever the honest
historian may think, was the poet's conceit of what would best please his
royal mistress.
It has been already stated that by Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, the poet
intended the person of Elizabeth in her regnant grandeur: Britomartis
represents her chastity. Not content with these impersonations, Spenser
introduces a third: it is Belphoebe, the abstraction of virginity; a
character for which, however, he designs a dual interpretation. Belphoebe
is also another representation of the Church; in describing her he rises
to great splendor of language:
... her birth was of the morning dew,
And her conception of the glorious prime.
We recur, as we read, to the grandeur of the Psalmist's words, as he
speaks of the coming of her Lord: "In the day of thy power shall the
people offer thee free-will offerings with a holy worship; the dew of thy
birth is of the womb of the morning."
ELIZABETH.--In the fifth book a great number of the statistics of
contemporary history are found. A cruel sultan, urged on by an abandoned
sultana, is Philip with the Spanish Church. Mercilla, a queen pursued by
the sultan and his wife, is another name for Elizabeth, for he tells us
she was
... a maiden queen of high renown;
For her great bounty knowen over all.
Artegal, assuming the armor of a pagan knight, represents justice in the
person of Solyman the Magnificent, making war against Philip of Spain. In
the ninth canto of the sixth book, the court of Elizabeth is portrayed; in
the tenth and eleventh, the war in Flanders--so brilliantly described in
Mr. Motley's history. The Lady Belge is the United Netherlands; Gerioneo,
the oppressor, is the Duke of Alva; the Inquisition appears as a horrid
but nameless monster, and minor personages occur to complete the historic
pictures.
The adventure of Sir Artegal in succor of the Lady Irena, (Erin,)
represents the proceedings of Elizabeth in Ireland, in enforcing the
Reformation, abrogating the establishments of her sister Mary, and thus
inducing Tyrone's rebellion, with the consequent humiliation of Essex.
MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS.--With one more interpretation we close. In the fifth
book, Spenser is the apologist of Elizabeth for her conduct to her cousin,
Mary Queen of Scots, and he has been very delicate in his distinctions. It
is not her high abstraction of justice, Sir Artegal, who does the
murderous deed, but his man _Talus_, retributive justice, who, like a
limehound, finds her hidden under a heap of gold, and drags her forth by
her fair locks, in such rueful plight that even Artegal pities her:
Yet for no pity would he change the course
Of justice which in Talus hand did lie,
Who rudely haled her forth without remorse,
Still holding up her suppliant hands on high,
And kneeling at his feet submissively;
But he her suppliant hands, those _hands of gold_,
And eke her feet, those feet of _silver try_,
Which sought unrighteousness and justice sold,
Chopped off and nailed on high that all might them behold.
She was a royal lady, a regnant queen: her hands held a golden sceptre,
and her feet pressed a silver footstool. She was thrown down the castle
wall, and drowned "in the dirty mud."
"But the stream washed away her guilty blood." Did it wash away
Elizabeth's bloody guilt? No. For this act she stands in history like Lady
Macbeth, ever rubbing her hands, but "the damned spot" will not out at her
bidding. Granted all that is charged against Mary, never was woman so
meanly, basely, cruelly treated as she.
What has been said is only in partial illustration of the plan and manner
of Spenser's great poem: the student is invited and encouraged to make an
analysis of the other portions himself. To the careless reader the poem is
harmonious, the pictures beautiful, and the imagery gorgeous; to the
careful student it is equally charming, and also discloses historic
pictures of great value.
It is so attractive that the critic lingers unconsciously upon it.
Spenser's tributes to the character of woman are original, beautiful, and
just, and the fame of his great work, originally popular and designed for
a contemporary purpose only, has steadily increased. Next to Milton, he is
the most learned of the British poets. Warton calls him the _serious
Spenser_. Thomson says he formed himself upon Spenser. He took the ottava
rima, or eight-lined stanza of the Italian poets, and by adding an
Alexandrine line, formed it into what has since been called the Spenserian
stanza, which has been imitated by many great poets since, and by Byron,
the greatest of them, in his Childe Harold. Of his language it has already
been said that he designedly uses the archaic, or that of Chaucer; or, as
Pope has said,
Spenser himself affects the obsolete.
The plan of the poem, neglecting the unities of an epic, is like that of a
general history, rambling and desultory, or like the transformations of a
fairy tale, as it is: his descriptions are gorgeous, his verse exceedingly
melodious, and his management of it very graceful. The Gerusalemme
Liberata of Tasso appeared while he was writing the Faery Queene, and he
imitated portions of that great epic in his own, but his imitations are
finer than the original.
HIS OTHER WORKS.--His other works need not detain us: Hymns in honor of
Love and Beauty, Prothalamion, and Epithalamion, Mother Hubbard's Tale,
Amoretti or Sonnets, The Tears of the Muses or Brittain's Ida, are little
read at the present day. His Astrophel is a tender "pastoral elegie" upon
the death of the most noble and valorous knight, Sir Philip Sidney; and is
better known for its subject than for itself. This was a favorite theme of
the friendly and sensitive poet; he has also written several elegies and
aeglogues in honor of Sidney.
SPENSER'S FATE.--The fate of Spenser is a commentary upon courtiership,
even in the reign of Elizabeth, the Faery Queene. Her requital of his
adoration was an annual pension of fifty pounds, and the ruined castle and
unprofitable estate of Kilcolman in Ireland, among a half-savage
population, in a period of insurrections and massacres, with the
requirement that he should reside upon his grant. An occasional visit from
Raleigh, then a captain in the army, a rambler along the banks of the
picturesque Mulla, and the composition and arrangement of the great poem
with the suggestions of his friend, were at once his labors and his only
recreations. He sighed after the court, and considered himself as hardly
used by the queen.
At length an insurrection broke out, and his home was set on fire: he fled
from his flaming castle, and in the confusion his infant child was left
behind and burned to death. A few months after, he died in London, on
January 16, 1598-9, broken-hearted and poor, at an humble tavern, in King
Street. Buried at the expense of the Earl of Essex, Ann Countess of Dorset
bore the expense of his monument in Westminster Abbey, in gratitude for
his noble championship of woman. Upon that are inscribed these words:
_Anglorum poetarum nostri seculi facile princeps_--truer words, great as
is the praise, than are usually found in monumental inscriptions.
Whatever our estimate of Spenser, he must be regarded as the truest
literary exponent and representative of the age of Elizabeth, almost as
much her biographer as Miss Strickland, and her historian as Hume: indeed,
neither biographer nor historian could venture to draw the lineaments of
her character without having recourse to Spenser and his literary
contemporaries.
OTHER WRITERS OF THE AGE OF SPENSER.
_Richard Hooker_, 1553-1598: educated at Oxford, he became Master of the
Temple in London, a post which he left with pleasure to take a country
parish. He wrote a famous work, entitled "A Treatise on the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity," which is remarkable for its profound learning,
powerful logic, and eloquence of style. In it he defends the position of
the Church of England, against Popery on the one hand and Calvinism on the
other.
_Robert Burton_, 1576-1639: author of "The Anatomy of Melancholie," an
amusing and instructive medley of quotations and classical anecdotes,
showing a profound erudition. In this all the causes and effects of
melancholy are set forth with varied illustrations. His _nom de plume_ was
Democritus, Jr., and he is an advocate of the laughing philosophy.
_Thomas Hobbes_, 1588-1679: tutor to Charles II., when Prince of Wales,
and author of the _Leviathan_. This is a philosophical treatise, in which
he advocates monarchical government, as based upon the fact that all men
are selfish, and that human nature, being essentially corrupt, requires an
iron control: he also wrote upon _Liberty and Necessity_, and on _Human
Nature_.
John Stow, 1525-1605: tailor and antiquary. Principally valuable for his
"Annales," "Summary of English Chronicles," and "A Survey of London." The
latter is the foundation of later topographical descriptions of the
English metropolis.
Raphael Hollinshed, or Holinshed, died about 1580: his _Chronicles of
Englande, Scotlande, and Irelande_, were a treasure-house to Shakspeare,
from which he drew materials for King Lear, Cymbeline, Macbeth, and other
plays.
Richard Hakluyt, died 1616: being greatly interested in voyages and
travels, he wrote works upon the adventures of others. Among these are,
"Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America," and "Four Voyages
unto Florida," which have been very useful in the compilation of early
American history.
Samuel Purchas, 1577-1628: like Hakluyt, he was exceedingly industrious in
collecting material, and wrote "Hakluyt's Posthumus, or Purchas, his
Pilgrimes," a history of the world "in Sea Voyages and Land Travels."
Sir Walter Raleigh, 1552-1618: a man famous for his personal strength and
comeliness, vigor of mind, valor, adventures, and sufferings. A prominent
actor in the stirring scenes of Elizabeth's reign, he was high in the
favor of the queen. Accused of high treason on the accession of James I.,
and imprisoned under sentence of death, an unsuccessful expedition to
South America in search of El Dorado, which caused complaints from the
Spanish king, led to his execution under the pending sentence. He wrote,
chiefly in prison, a History of the World, in which he was aided by his
literary friends, and which is highly commended. It extends to the end of
the second Macedonian war. Raleigh was also a poet, and wrote several
special treatises.
William Camden, 1551-1623: author of Britannia, or a chorographic
description of the most flourishing kingdoms of England, Scotland,
Ireland, and the adjacent islands, from the earliest antiquity. This work,
written in Latin, has been translated into English. He also wrote a sketch
of the reign of Elizabeth.
_George Buchanan_, 1506-1581: celebrated as a Latin writer, an historian,
a poet, and an ecclesiastical polemic. He wrote a _History of Scotland_, a
Latin version of the Psalms, and a satire called _Chamaeleon_. He was a
man of profound learning and indomitable courage; and when told, just
before his death, that the king was incensed at his treatise _De Jure
Regni_, he answered that he was not concerned at that, for he was "going
to a place where there were few kings."
Thomas Sackville, Earl Dorset, Lord Buckhurst, 1536-1608: author, or
rather originator of "The Mirror for Magistrates," showing by illustrious,
unfortunate examples, the vanity and transitory character of human
success. Of Sackville and his portion of the Mirror for Magistrates, Craik
says they "must be considered as forming the connecting link between the
Canterbury Tales and the Fairy Queen."
_Samuel Daniel_, 1562-1619: an historian and a poet. His chief work is
"The Historie of the Civile Warres between the Houses of York and
Lancaster," "a production," says Drake, "which reflects great credit on
the age in which it was written." This work is in poetical form; and,
besides it, he wrote many poems and plays, and numerous sonnets.
Michael Drayton, 1563-1631: a versatile writer, most favorably known
through his _Polyolbion_, a poem in thirty books, containing a detailed
description of the topography of England, in Alexandrine verses. His
_Barons' Wars_ describe the civil commotions during the reign of Edward
II.
Sir John Davies, 1570-1626: author of _Nosce Teipsum_ and _The Orchestra_.
The former is commended by Hallam; and another critic calls it "the best
poem, except Spenser's Faery Queen, in Queen Elizabeth's, or even, in
James VI.'s time."
John Donne, 1573-1631: a famous preacher, Dean of St. Paul's: considered
at the head of the metaphysical school of poets: author of
_Pseudo-Martyr_, _Polydoron_, and numerous sermons. He wrote seven
_satires_, which are valuable, but his style is harsh, and his ideas
far-fetched.
Joseph Hall, 1574-1656: an eminent divine, author of six books of
_satires_, of which he called the first three _toothless_, and the others
_biting_ satires. These are valuable as presenting truthful pictures of
the manners and morals of the age and of the defects in contemporary
literature.
Sir Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 1554-1628: he wrote the Life of Sidney,
and requested to have placed upon his tomb, "The friend of Sir Philip
Sidney." He was also the author of numerous treatises: "Monarchy," "Humane
Learning," "Wars," etc., and of two tragedies.
George Chapman, 1557-1634: author of a translation of Homer, in verses of
fourteen syllables. It retains much of the spirit of the original, and is
still considered one of the best among the numerous versions of the
ancient poet. He also wrote _Caesar and Pompey, Byron's Tragedy_, and other
plays.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE ENGLISH DRAMA.
Origin of the Drama. Miracle Plays. Moralities. First Comedy. Early
Tragedies. Christopher Marlowe. Other Dramatists. Playwrights and
Morals.
ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH DRAMA.
To the Elizabethan period also belongs the glory of having produced and
fostered the English drama, itself so marked a teacher of history, not
only in plays professedly historical, but also in the delineations of
national character, the indications of national taste, and the satirical
scourgings of the follies of the day. A few observations are necessary as
to its feeble beginnings. The old Greek drama indeed existed as a model,
especially in the tragedies of Euripides and the comedies of Aristophanes;
but until the fall of Constantinople, these were a dead letter to Western
Europe, and when the study of Greek was begun in England, they were only
open to men of the highest education and culture; whereas the drama
designed for the people was to cater in its earlier forms to the rude
tastes and love of the marvellous which are characteristic of an
unlettered people. And, besides, the Roman drama of Plautus and of Terence
was not suited to the comprehension of the multitude, in its form and its
preservation of the unities. To gratify the taste for shows and
excitement, the people already had the high ritual of the Church, but they
demanded something more: the Church itself acceded to this demand, and
dramatized Scripture at once for their amusement and instruction. Thus the
_mysteria_ or _miracle play_ originated, and served a double purpose.
"As in ancient Greece, generations before the rise of the great dramas of
Athens, itinerant companies wandered from village to village, carrying
their stage furniture in their little carts, and acted in their booths and
tents the grand stories of the mythology--so in England the mystery
players haunted the wakes and fairs, and in barns or taverns, taprooms, or
in the farm-house kitchen, played at saints and angels, and transacted on
their petty stage the drama of the Christian faith."[29]
THE MYSTERY, OR MIRACLE PLAY.--The subjects of these dramas were taken
from such Old Testament narratives as the creation, the lives of the
patriarchs, the deluge; or from the crucifixion, and from legends of the
saints: the plays were long, sometimes occupying portions of several days
consecutively, during seasons of religious festival. They were enacted in
monasteries, cathedrals, churches, and church-yards. The _mise en scene_
was on two stages or platforms, on the upper of which were represented the
Persons of the Trinity, and on the lower the personages of earth; while a
yawning cellar, with smoke arising from an unseen fire, represented the
infernal regions. This device is similar in character to the plan of
Dante's poem--Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.
The earliest of these mysteries was performed somewhere about the year
1300, and they held sway until 1600, being, however, slowly supplanted by
the _moralities_, which we shall presently consider. Many of these
_mysteries_ still remain in English, and notices of them may be found in
_Collier's History of Dramatic Poetry_.
A miracle play was performed to celebrate the birth of Philip II. of
Spain. They are still performed in Andalusia, and one written within a few
years for such representation, was enacted at Seville, with great pomp of
scenic effect, in the Holy Week of 1870. Similar scenes are also
witnessed by curious foreigners at the present day in the Ober-Ammergau of
Bavaria. These enable the traveller of to-day to realize the former
history.
To introduce a comic element, the devil was made to appear with horns,
hoof, and tail, to figure with grotesque malignity throughout the play,
and to be reconsigned at the close to his dark abode by the divine power.
MORALITIES.--As the people became enlightened, and especially as religious
knowledge made progress, such childish shows were no longer able to
satisfy them. The drama undertook a higher task of instruction in the form
of what was called a _morality_, or _moral play_. Instead of old stories
reproduced to please the childish fancy of the ignorant, genius invented
scenes and incidents taken indeed from common life, but the characters
were impersonal; they were the ideal virtues, _morality, hope, mercy,
frugality_, and their correlative vices. The _mystery_ had endeavored to
present similitudes; the _moralities_ were of the nature of allegory, and
evinced a decided progress in popular intelligence.
These for a time divided the interest with the mysteries, but eventually
superseded them. The impersonality of the characters enabled the author to
make hits at political circumstances and existent follies with impunity,
as the multitude received advice and reproof addressed to them abstractly,
without feeling a personal sting, and the government would not condescend
to notice such abstractions. The moralities were enacted in court-yards or
palaces, the characters generally being personated by students, or
merchants from the guilds. A great improvement was also made in the length
of the play, which was usually only an hour in performance. The public
taste was so wedded to the devil of the mysteries, that he could not be
given up in the moral plays: he kept his place; but a rival buffoon
appeared in the person of _the vice_, who tried conclusions with the
archfiend in serio-comic style until the close of the performance, when
Satan always carried the vice away in triumph, as he should do.
The moralities retained their place as legitimate drama throughout the
sixteenth century, and indeed after the modern drama appeared. It is
recorded that Queen Elizabeth, in 1601, then an old woman, witnessed one
of these plays, entitled "The Contention between Liberality and
Prodigality." This was written by Lodge and Greene, two of the regular
dramatists, after Ben Jonson had written "Every Man in his Humour," and
while Shakspeare was writing Hamlet. Thus the various progressive forms of
the drama overlapped each other, the older retaining its place until the
younger gained strength to assert its rights and supersede its rival.
THE INTERLUDE.--While the moralities were slowly dying out, another form
of the drama had appeared as a connecting link between them and the
legitimate drama of Shakspeare. This was the _interlude_, a short play, in
which the _dramatis personae_ were no longer allegorical characters, but
persons in real life, usually, however, not all bearing names even
assumed, but presented as a friar, a curate, a tapster, etc. The chief
characteristic of the interlude was, however, its satire; it was a more
outspoken reformer than the morality, scourged the evils of the age with
greater boldness, and plunged into religious controversy with the zeal of
opposing ecclesiastics. The first and principal writer of these interludes
was John Heywood, a Roman Catholic, who wrote during the reign of Henry
VIII., and, while a professed jester, was a great champion of his Church.
As in all cases of progress, literary and scientific, the lines of
demarcation cannot be very distinctly drawn, but as the morality had
superseded the mystery, and the interlude the morality, so now they were
all to give way before the regular drama. The people were becoming more
educated; the greater spread of classical knowledge had caused the
dramatists to study and assimilate the excellences of Latin and Greek
models; the power of the drama to instruct and refine, as well as to
amuse, was acknowledged, and thus its capability of improvement became
manifest. The forms it then assumed were more permanent, and indeed have
remained almost unchanged down to our own day.
What is called the _first_ comedy in the language cannot be expected to
show a very decided improvement over the last interludes or moralities,
but it bears those distinctive marks which establish its right to the
title.
THE FIRST COMEDY.--This was _Ralph Roister Doister_, which appeared in the
middle of the sixteenth century: (a printed copy of 1551 was discovered in
1818.) Its author was Nicholas Udall, the master of Eton, a clergyman, but
very severe as a pedagogue; an ultra Protestant, who is also accused of
having stolen church plate, which may perhaps mean that he took away from
the altar what he regarded as popish vessels and ornaments. He calls the
play "a comedy and interlude," but claims that it is imitated from the
Roman drama. It is regularly divided into acts and scenes, in the form of
our modern plays. The plot is simple: Ralph, a gay Lothario, courts as gay
a widow, and the by-play includes a designing servant and an intriguing
lady's-maid: these are the stock elements of a hundred comedies since.
Contemporary with this was _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, supposed to be
written, but not conclusively, by John Still, Bishop of Bath and Wells,
about 1560. The story turns upon the loss of a steel needle--a rare
instrument in that day, as it was only introduced into England from Spain
during the age of Elizabeth. This play is a coarser piece than Ralph
Roister Doister; the buffoon raises the devil to aid him in finding the
lost needle, which is at length found, by very palpable proof, to be
sticking in the seat of Goodman Hodge's breeches.
THE FIRST TRAGEDY.--Hand in hand with these first comedies came the
earliest tragedy, _Gorboduc_, by Sackville and Norton, known under another
name as _Ferrex and Porrex_; and it is curious to observe that this came
in while the moralities still occupied the stage, and before the
interludes had disappeared, as it was played before the queen at White
Hall, in 1562. It is also to be noted that it introduced a chorus like
that of the old Greek drama. Ferrex and Porrex are the sons of King
Gorboduc: the former is killed by the latter, who in turn is slain by his
own mother. Of Gorboduc, Lamb says, "The style of this old play is stiff
and cumbersome, like the dresses of the times. There may be flesh and
blood underneath, but we cannot get at it."
With the awakened interest of the people, the drama now made steady
progress. In 1568 the tragedy of _Tancred and Gismunda_, based upon one of
the stories of Boccaccio, was enacted before Elizabeth.
A license for establishing a regular theatre was got out by Burbage in
1574. Peele and Greene wrote plays in the new manner: Marlowe, the
greatest name in the English drama, except those of Shakspeare and Ben
Jonson, gave to the world his _Tragical History of the Life and Death of
Doctor Faustus_, which many do not hesitate to compare favorably with
Goethe's great drama, and his _Rich Jew of Malta_, which contains the
portraiture of Barabas, second only to the Shylock of Shakspeare. Of
Marlowe a more special mention will be made.
PLAYWRIGHTS AND MORALS.--It was to the great advantage of the English
regular drama, that the men who wrote were almost in every case highly
educated in the classics, and thus able to avail themselves of the best
models. It is equally true that, owing to the religious condition of the
times, when Puritanism launched forth its diatribes against all
amusements, they were men in the opposition, and in most cases of
irregular lives. Men of the world, they took their characters from among
the persons with whom they associated; and so we find in their plays
traces of the history of the age, in the appropriation of classical forms,
in the references to religious and political parties, and in their
delineation of the morals, manners, and follies of the period: if the
drama of the present day owes to them its origin and nurture, it also
retains as an inheritance many of the faults and deformities from which in
a more refined period it is seeking to purge itself. It is worthy of
notice, that as the drama owes everything to popular patronage, its moral
tone reflects of necessity the moral character of the people who frequent
it, and of the age which sustains it.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.--Among those who may be regarded as the immediate
forerunners and ushers of Shakspeare, and who, although they prepared the
way for his advent, have been obscured by his greater brilliance, the one
most deserving of special mention is Marlowe.
Christopher Marlowe was born at Canterbury, about the year 1564. He was a
wild, irregular genius, of bad morals and loose life, but of fine
imagination and excellent powers of expression. He wrote only tragedies.
His _Tamburlaine the Great_ is based upon the history of that _Timour
Leuk_, or _Timour the Lame_, the great Oriental conqueror of the
fourteenth century:
So large of limb, his joints so strongly knit,
Such breadth of shoulders as might mainly bear
Old Atlas' burthen.
The descriptions are overdrawn, and the style inflated, but the subject
partakes of the heroic, and was popular still, though nearly two
centuries had passed since the exploits of the historic hero.
_The Rich Jew of Malta_ is of value, as presenting to us Barabas the Jew
as he appeared to Christian suspicion and hatred in the fifteenth century.
As he sits in his country-house with heaps of gold before him, and
receives the visits of merchants who inform him of the safe arrival of his
ships, it is manifest that he gave Shakspeare the first ideal of his
Shylock, upon which the greater dramatist greatly improved.
_The Tragicall Life and Death of Doctor John Faustus_ certainly helped
Goethe in the conception and preparation of his modern drama, and contains
many passages of rare power. Charles Lamb says: "The growing horrors of
Faustus are awfully marked by the hours and half-hours which expire and
bring him nearer and nearer to the enactment of his dire compact. It is
indeed an agony and bloody sweat."
_Edward II._ presents in the assassination scene wonderful power and
pathos, and is regarded by Hazlitt as his best play.
Marlowe is the author of the pleasant madrigal, called by Izaak Walton
"that smooth song":
Come live with me and be my love.
The playwright, who had led a wild life, came to his end in a tavern
brawl: he had endeavored to use his dagger upon one of the waiters, who
turned it upon him, and gave him a wound in the head of which he died, in
1593.
His talents were of a higher order than those of his contemporaries; he
was next to Shakspeare in power, and was called by Phillips "a second
Shakspeare."
OTHER DRAMATIC WRITERS BEFORE SHAKSPEARE.
Thomas Lodge, 1556-1625: educated at Oxford. Wrote _The Wounds of
Civil-War_, and other tragedies. Rosalynd, a novel, from which Shakspeare
drew in his _As You Like It_. He translated _Josephus_ and _Seneca_.
Thomas Kyd, died about 1600: _The Spanish Tragedy, or, Hieronymo is Mad
Again_. This contains a few highly wrought scenes, which have been
variously attributed to Ben Jonson and to Webster.
Robert Tailor: wrote _The Hog hath Lost his Pearl_, a comedy, published in
1614. This partakes of the character of the _morality_.
John Marston: wrote _Antonio and Mellida_, 1602; _Antonio's Revenge_,
1602; _Sophonisba, a Wonder of Women_, 1606; _The Insatiate Countess_,
1603, and many other plays. Marston ranks high among the immediate
predecessors of Shakspeare, for the number, variety, and vigorous handling
of his plays.
George Peele, born about 1553: educated at Oxford. Many of his pieces are
broadly comic. The principal plays are: _The Arraignment of Paris_,
_Edward I._ and _David and Bethsabe_. The latter is overwrought and full
of sickish sentiment.
Thomas Nash, 1558-1601: a satirist and polemic, who is best known for his
controversy with Gabriel Harvey. Most of his plays were written in
conjunction with others. He was imprisoned for writing _The Isle of Dogs_,
which was played, but not published. He is very licentious in his
language.
John Lyly, born about 1553: wrote numerous smaller plays, but is chiefly
known as the author of _Euphues, Anatomy of Wit_, and _Euphues and his
England_.
Robert Greene, died 1592: educated at Cambridge. Wrote _Alphonsus, King of
Arragon_, _James IV._, _George-a-Greene_, _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_,
and other plays. After leading a profligate life, he left behind him a
pamphlet entitled, "A Groat's-worth of Wit, bought with a Million of
Repentance:" this is full of contrition, and of advice to his
fellow-actors and fellow-sinners. It is mainly remarkable for its abuse of
Shakspeare, "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers;" "Tygre's
heart wrapt in a player's hide;" "an absolute Johannes factotum, in his
own conceyt the onely _shakescene_ in the country."
Most of these dramatists wrote in copartnership with others, and many of
the plays which bear their names singly, have parts composed by
colleagues. Such was the custom of the age, and it is now very difficult
to declare the distinct authorship of many of the plays.
CHAPTER XIV.
WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.
The Power of Shakspeare. Meagre Early History. Doubts of his Identity.
What is known. Marries, and goes to London. "Venus" and "Lucrece."
Retirement and Death. Literary Habitudes. Variety of the Plays. Table
of Dates and Sources.
THE POWER OF SHAKSPEARE.
We have now reached, in our search for the historic teachings in English
literature, and in our consideration of the English drama, the greatest
name of all, the writer whose works illustrate our position most strongly,
and yet who, eminent type as he is of British culture in the age of
Elizabeth, was truly and pithily declared by his friend and contemporary,
Ben Jonson, to be "not for an age, but for all time." It is also
singularly true that, even in such a work as this, Shakspeare really
requires only brief notice at our hands, because he is so universally
known and read: his characters are among our familiar acquaintance; his
simple but thoughtful words are incorporated in our common conversation;
he is our every-day companion. To eulogize him to the reading public is
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To lend a perfume to the violet ...
The Bible and Shakspeare have been long conjoined as the two most
necessary books in a family library; and Mrs. Cowden Clarke, the author of
the Concordance to Shakspeare, has pointedly and truthfully said: "A poor
lad, possessing no other book, might on this single one make himself a
gentleman and a scholar: a poor girl, studying no other volume, might
become a lady in heart and soul."
MEAGRE EARLY HISTORY.--It is passing strange, considering the great value
of his writings, and his present fame, that of his personal history so
little is known. In the words of Steevens, one of his most successful
commentators: "All that is known, with any degree of certainty, concerning
Shakspeare, is--that he was born at Stratford upon Avon--married and had
children there--went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems
and plays--returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried."
This want of knowledge is in part due to his obscure youth, during which
no one could predict what he would afterward achieve, and therefore no one
took notes of his life: to his own apparent ignorance and carelessness of
his own merits, and to the low repute in which plays, and especially
playwrights, were then held; although they were in reality making their
age illustrious in history. The pilgrim to Stratford sees the little low
house in which he is said to have been born, purchased by the nation, and
now restored into a smart cottage: within are a few meagre relics of the
poet's time; not far distant is the foundation--recently uncovered--of his
more ambitious residence in New Place, and a mulberry-tree, which probably
grew from a slip of that which he had planted with his own hand. Opposite
is the old Falcon Inn, where he made his daily potations. Very near rises,
above elms and lime-trees, the spire of the beautiful church on the bank
of the Avon, beneath the chancel of which his remains repose, with those
of his wife and daughter, overlooked by his bust, of which no one knows
the maker or the history, except that it dates from his own time. His bust
is of life-size, and was originally painted to imitate nature--eyes of
hazel, hair and beard auburn, doublet scarlet, and sleeveless gown of
black. Covered by a false taste with white paint to imitate marble, while
it destroyed identity and age: it has since been recolored from
traditional knowledge, but it is too rude to give us the expression of his
face.
The only other probable likeness is that from an old picture, an engraving
of which, by Droeshout, is found in the first folio edition of his plays,
published in 1623, seven years after his death: it was said by Ben Jonson
to be a good likeness. We are very fortunate in having these,
unsatisfactory as they are, for it is simple truth that beyond these
places and things, there is little, if anything, to illustrate the
personal history of Shakspeare. All that we can know of the man is found
in his works.
DOUBTS OF HIS IDENTITY.--This ignorance concerning him has given rise to
numerous doubts as to his literary identity, and many efforts have been
made to find other authors for his dramas. Among the most industrious in
this deposing scheme, have been Miss Delia Bacon and Mr. Nathaniel Holmes,
who concur in attributing his best plays to Francis Bacon. That Bacon did
not acknowledge his own work, they say, is because he rated the dramatic
art too far beneath his dignity to confess any complicity with it. In
short, he and other great men of that day wrote immortal works which they
were ashamed of, and were willing to father upon the common actor and
stage-manager, one William Shakspeare!
While it is not within the scope of this volume to enter into the
controversy, it is a duty to state its existence, and to express the
judgment that these efforts have been entirely unsuccessful, but have not
been without value in that they have added a little to the meagre history
by their researches, and have established the claims of Shakspeare on a
firmer foundation than before.
WHAT IS KNOWN.--William Shakspeare (spelt _Shackspeare_ in the body of his
will, but signed _Shakspeare_) was the third of eight children, and the
eldest son of John Shakspeare and Mary Arden: he was born at the beautiful
rural town of Stratford, on the little river Avon, on the 23d of April,
1564. His father, who was of yeoman rank, was probably a dealer in wool
and leather. Aubrey, a gossiping chronicler of the next generation, says
he was a butcher, and some biographers assert that he was a glover. He may
have exercised all these crafts together, but it is more to our purpose to
know that in his best estate he was a property holder and chief burgess of
the town. Shakspeare's mother seems to have been of an older family.
Neither of them could write. Shakspeare received his education at the free
grammar-school, still a well-endowed institution in the town, where he
learned the "small Latin and less Greek" accorded to him by Ben Jonson at
a later day.
There are guesses, rather than traditions, that he was, after the age of
fifteen, a student in a law-office, that he was for a time at one of the
universities, and also that he was a teacher in the grammar-school. These
are weak inventions to account for the varied learning displayed in his
dramas. His love of Nature and his power to delineate her charms were
certainly fostered by the beautiful rural surroundings of Stratford;
beyond this it is idle to seek to penetrate the obscure processes of his
youth.
MARRIES, AND GOES TO LONDON.--Finding himself one of a numerous and poor
family, to the support of which his father's business was inadequate, he
determined, to shift for himself, and to push his fortunes in the best way
he could.
Whether he regarded matrimony as one element of success we do not know,
but the preliminary bond of marriage between himself and Anne Hathaway,
was signed on the 28th of November, 1582, when he was eighteen years old.
The woman was seven years older than himself; and it is a sad commentary
on the morality of both, that his first child, Susanna, was baptized on
the 25th of May, 1583.
Strolling bands of players, in passing through England, were in the habit
of stopping at Stratford, and setting upon wheels their rude stage with
weather-stained curtains; and these, it should be observed, were the best
dramatic companies of the time, such as the queen's company, and those in
the service of noblemen like Leicester, Warwick, and others. If he did not
see he must have heard of the great pageant in 1575, when Leicester
entertained Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth, which is so charmingly
described by Sir Walter Scott. Young Shakspeare became stage-struck, and
probably joined one of these companies, with other idle young men of the
neighborhood.
Various legends, without sufficient foundation of truth, are related of
him at this time, which indicate that he was of a frolicsome and
mischievous turn: among these is a statement that he was arraigned for
deer-poaching in the park of Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote. A satirical
reference to Sir Thomas in one of his plays,[30] leads us to think that
there is some truth in the story, although certain of his biographers have
denied it.
In February, 1584-5, he became the father of twins, Hamnet and Judith, and
in 1586, leaving his wife and children at Stratford, he went up with a
theatrical company to London, where for three years he led a hard and
obscure life. He was at first a menial at the theatre; some say he held
gentlemen's horses at the door, others that he was call-boy, prompter,
scene-shifter, minor actor. At length he began to find his true vocation
in altering and adapting plays for the stage. This earlier practice, in
every capacity, was of great value to him when he began to write plays of
his own. As an actor he never rose above mediocrity. It is said that he
played such parts as the Ghost in Hamlet, and Adam in As You Like It; but
off the stage he became known for a ready wit and convivial humor.
His ready hand for any work caused him to prosper steadily, and so in
1589 we find his name the twelfth on the list of sixteen shareholders in
the Blackfriars Theatre, one of the first play-houses built in London.
That he was steadily growing in public favor, as well as in private
fortune, might be inferred from Spenser's mention of him in the "Tears of
the Muses," published in 1591, if we were sure he was the person referred
to. If he was, this is the first great commendation he had received:
The man whom nature's self had made,
To mock herself and truth to imitate,
With kindly counter under mimic shade,
Our pleasant Willie.
There is, however, a doubt whether the reference is to him, as he had
written very little as early as 1591.
VENUS AND ADONIS.--In 1593 appeared his _Venus and Adonis_, which he now
had the social position and interest to dedicate to the Earl of
Southampton. It is a harmonious and beautiful poem, but the display of
libidinous passion in the goddess, however in keeping with her character
and with the broad taste of the age, is disgusting to the refined reader,
even while he acknowledges the great power of the poet. In the same year
was built the Globe Theatre, a hexagonal wooden structure, unroofed over
the pit, but thatched over the stage and the galleries. In this, too,
Shakspeare was a shareholder.
THE RAPE OF LUCRECE.--The _Rape of Lucrece_ was published in 1594, and was
dedicated to the same nobleman, who, after the custom of the period,
became Shakspeare's patron, and showed the value of his patronage by the
gift to the poet of a thousand pounds.
Thus in making poetical versions of classical stories, which formed the
imaginative pabulum of the age, and in readapting older plays, the poet
was gaining that skill and power which were to produce his later immortal
dramas.
These, as we shall see, he began to write as early as 1589, and continued
to produce until 1612.
RETIREMENT AND DEATH.--A few words will complete his personal history: His
fortune steadily increased; in 1602 he was the principal owner of the
Globe; then, actuated by his home feeling, which had been kept alive by
annual visits to Stratford, he determined, as soon as he could, to give up
the stage, and to take up his residence there. He had purchased, in 1597,
the New Place at Stratford, but he did not fully carry out his plan until
1612, when he finally retired with ample means and in the enjoyment of an
honorable reputation. There he exercised a generous hospitality, and led a
quiet rural life. He planted a mulberry-tree, which became a pilgrim's
shrine to numerous travellers; but a ruthless successor in the ownership
of New Place, the Reverend Francis Gastrell, annoyed by the concourse of
visitors, was Vandal enough to cut it down. Such was the anger of the
people that he was obliged to leave the place, which he did after razing
the mansion to the ground. His name is held in great detestation at
Stratford now, as every traveller is told his story.
Shakspeare's death occurred on his fifty-second birthday, April 23d, 1616.
He had been ill of a fever, from which he was slowly recovering, and his
end is said to have been the result of an over-conviviality in
entertaining Drayton and Ben Jonson, who had paid him a visit at
Stratford.
His son Hamnet had died in 1596, at the age of twelve. In 1607, his
daughter Susannah had married Dr. Hall; and in 1614 died Judith, who had
married Thomas Quiney. Shakspeare's wife survived him, and died in 1623.
LITERARY HABITUDES.--Such, in brief, is the personal history of
Shakspeare: of his literary habitudes we know nothing. The exact dates of
the appearance of his plays are, in most cases, doubtful. Many of these
had been printed singly during his life, but the first complete edition
was published in folio, in 1623. It contains _thirty-six_ plays, and is
the basis of the later editions, which contain thirty-_seven_. Many
questions arise which cannot be fully answered: Did he write all the plays
contained in the volume? Are the First Part of Henry VI., Titus
Andronicus,[31] and Pericles his work? Did he not write others not found
among these? Had he, as was not uncommon then and later, collaboration in
those which bear his name? Was he a Beaumont to some Fletcher, or a
Sackville to some Norton? Upon these questions generations of Shakspearean
scholars have expended a great amount of learned inquiry ever since his
day, and not without results: it is known that many of his dramas are
founded upon old plays, as to plots; and that he availed himself of the
labor of others in casting his plays.
But the real value of his plays, the insight into human nature, the
profound philosophy, "the myriad-soul" which they display, are
Shakspeare's only. By applying just rules of evidence, we conclude that he
did write thirty-five of the plays attributed to him, and that he did not
write, or was not the chief writer of others. It is certainly very strong
testimony on these points, that seven years after his death, and _three
years before that of Bacon_, a large folio should have been published by
his professional friends Heminge and Condell, prefaced with ardent
eulogies, claiming thirty-six plays as his, and that it did not meet with
the instant and indignant cry that his claims were false. The players of
that day were an envious and carping set, and the controversy would have
been fierce from the very first, had there been just grounds for it.
VARIETY OF PLAYS.--No attempt will be made to analyze any of the plays of
Shakspeare: that is left for the private study and enjoyment of the
student, by the use of the very numerous aids furnished by commentators
and critics. It will be found often that in their great ardor, the
dramatist has been treated like the Grecian poet:
[Shakspeare's] critics bring to view
Things which [Shakspeare] never knew.
Many of the plays are based upon well-known legends and fictional tales,
some of them already adopted in old plays: thus the story of King Lear and
his daughters is found in Holinshed's Chronicle, and had been for years
represented; from this Shakspeare has borrowed the story, but has used
only a single passage. The play is intended to represent the ancient
Celtic times in Britain, eight hundred years before Christ; and such is
its power and pathos, that we care little for its glaring anachronisms and
curious errors. In Holinshed are also found the stories of Cymbeline and
Macbeth, the former supposed to have occurred during the Roman occupancy
of Britain, and the latter during the Saxon period.
With these before us, let us observe that names, chronology, geography,
costumes, and customs are as nothing in his eyes. His aim is human
philosophy: he places his living creations before us, dressing them, as it
were, in any garments most conveniently at hand. These lose their
grotesqueness as his characters speak and act. Paternal love and weakness,
met by filial ingratitude; these are the lessons and the fearful pictures
of Lear: sad as they are, the world needed them, and they have saved many
a later Lear from expulsion and storm and death, and shamed many a Goneril
and Regan, while they have strengthened the hearts of many a Cordelia
since. Chastity and constancy shine like twin stars from the forest of
Cymbeline. And what have we in Macbeth? Mad ambition parleying with the
devil, in the guise of a woman lost to all virtue save a desire to
aggrandize her husband and herself. These have a pretence of history; but
Hamlet, with hardly that pretence, stands alone supreme in varied
excellence. Ambition, murder, resistless fate, filial love, the love of
woman, revenge, the power of conscience, paternal solicitude, infinite
jest: what a volume is this!
TABLE OF DATES AND SOURCES.--The following table, which presents the plays
in chronological order,[32] the times when they were written, as nearly as
can be known, and the sources whence they were derived, will be of more
service to the student than any discursive remarks upon the several plays.
Plays. Dates. Sources.
1. Henry VI., first part 1589 Denied to Shakspeare; attributed to
Marlowe or Kyd.
2. Pericles 1590 From the "Gesta Romanorum."
3. Henry VI., second part 1591 " an older play.
4. Henry VI., third part 1591 " " " "
5. Two Gentlemen of Verona 1591 " an old tale.
6. Comedy of Errors 1592 " a comedy of Plautus.
7. Love's Labor Lost 1592 " an Italian play.
8. Richard II. 1593 " Holinshed and other
chronicles.
9. Richard III. 1593 From an old play and Sir Thomas
More's History.
10. Midsummer Night's Dream 1594 Suggested by Palamon and Arcite,
The Knight's Tale, of Chaucer.
11. Taming of the Shrew 1596 From an older play.
12. Romeo and Juliet 1596 " " old tale. Boccaccio.
13. Merchant of Venice 1597 " Gesta Romanorum, with suggestions
from Marlowe's Jew of Malta.
14. Henry IV., part 1 1597 From an old play.
15. Henry IV., part 2 1598 " " " "
16. King John 1598 " " " "
17. All's Well that Ends Well 1598 " Boccaccio.
18. Henry V. 1599 From an older play.
19. As You Like It 1600 Suggested in part by Lodge's novel,
Rosalynd.
20. Much Ado About Nothing 1600 Source unknown.
21. Hamlet 1601 From the Latin History of Scandinavia,
by Saxo, called Grammaticus.
22. Merry Wives of Windsor 1601 Said to have been suggested by
Elizabeth.
23. Twelfth Night 1601 From an old tale.
24. Troilus and Cressida 1602 Of classical origin, through Chaucer.
25. Henry VIII. 1603 From the chronicles of the day.
26. Measure for Measure 1603 " an old tale.
27. Othello 1604 " " " "
28. King Lear 1605 " Holinshed.
29. Macbeth 1606 " "
30. Julius Caesar 1607 " Plutarch's Parallel Lives.
31. Antony and Cleopatra 1608 " " " "
32. Cymbeline 1609 " Holinshed.
33. Coriolanus 1610 " Plutarch.
34. Timon of Athens 1610 " " and other sources.
35. Winter's Tale 1611 " a novel by Greene.
36. Tempest 1612 " Italian Tale.
37. Titus Andronicus 1593 Denied to Shakspeare; probably by
Marlowe or Kyd.
CHAPTER XV.
WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE, (CONTINUED.)
The Grounds of his Fame. Creation of Character. Imagination and Fancy.
Power of Expression. His Faults. Influence of Elizabeth. Sonnets.
Ireland and Collier. Concordance. Other Writers.
THE GROUNDS OF HIS FAME.
From what has been said, it is manifest that as to his plots and
historical reproductions, Shakspeare has little merit but taste in
selection; and indeed in most cases, had he invented the stories, his
merit would not have been great: what then is the true secret of his power
and of his fame? This question is not difficult to answer.
First, these are due to his wonderful insight into human nature, and the
philosophy of human life: he dissects the human mind in all its
conditions, and by this vivisection he displays its workings as it lives
and throbs; he divines the secret impulses of all ages and
characters--childhood, boyhood, manhood, girlhood, and womanhood; men of
peace, and men of war; clowns, nobles, and kings. His large heart was
sympathetic with all, and even most so with the lowly and suffering; he
shows us to ourselves, and enables us to use that knowledge for our
profit. All the virtues are held up to our imitation and praise, and all
the vices are scourged and rendered odious in our sight. To read
Shakspeare aright is of the nature of honest self-examination, that most
difficult and most necessary of duties.
CREATION OF CHARACTER.--Second: He stands supreme in the creation of
character, which may be considered the distinguishing mark of the highest
literary genius. The men and women whom he has made are not stage-puppets
moved by hidden strings; they are real. We know them as intimately as the
friends and acquaintances who visit us, or the people whom we accost in
our daily walks.
And again, in this varied delineation of character, Shakspeare less than
any other author either obtrudes or repeats himself. Unlike Byron, he is
nowhere his own hero: unlike most modern novelists, he fashions men who,
while they have the generic human resemblance, differ from each other like
those of flesh and blood around us: he has presented a hundred phases of
love, passion, ambition, jealousy, revenge, treachery, and cruelty, and
each distinct from the others of its kind; but lest any character should
degenerate into an allegorical representation of a single virtue or vice,
he has provided it with the other lineaments necessary to produce in it a
rare human identity.
The stock company of most writers is limited, and does arduous duty in
each new play or romance; so that we detect in the comic actor, who is now
convulsing the pit with laughter, the same person who a little while ago
died heroically to slow music in the tragedy. Each character in Shakspeare
plays but one part, and plays it skilfully and well. And who has portrayed
the character of woman like Shakspeare?--the grand sorrow of the
repudiated Catharine, the incorruptible chastity of Isabella, the
cleverness of Portia, the loves of Jessica and of Juliet, the innocent
curiosity of Miranda, the broken heart and crazed brain of the fair
Ophelia.
In this connection also should be noticed his powers of grouping and
composition; which, in the words of one of his biographers, "present to us
pictures from the realms of spirits and from fairyland, which in deep
reflection and in useful maxims, yield nothing to the pages of the
philosophers, and which glow with all the poetic beauty that an
exhaustless fancy could shower upon them."
IMAGINATION AND FANCY.--And this brings us to notice, in the third place,
his rare gifts of imagination and of fancy; those instruments of the
representative faculty by which objects of sense and of mind are held up
to view in new, varied, and vivid lights. Many of his tragedies abound in
imaginative pictures, while there are not in the realm of Fancy's fairy
frostwork more exquisite representations than those found in the _Tempest_
and the _Midsummer Night's Dream_.
POWER OF EXPRESSION.--Fourth, Shakspeare is remarkable for the power and
felicity of his expression. He adapts his language to the persons who use
it, and thus we pass from the pompous grandiloquence of king and herald to
the common English and coarse conceits of clown and nurse and
grave-digger; from the bombastic speech of Glendower and the rhapsodies of
Hotspur to the slang and jests of Falstaff.
But something more is meant by felicity of expression than this. It
applies to the apt words which present pithy bits of household philosophy,
and to the beautiful words which convey the higher sentiments and flights
of fancy; to the simple words couching grand thoughts with such exquisite
aptness that they seem made for each other, so that no other words would
do as well, and to the dainty songs, like those of birds, which fill his
forests and gardens with melody. Thus it is that orators and essayists
give dignity and point to their own periods by quoting Shakspeare.
Such are a few of Shakspeare's high merits, which constitute him the
greatest poet who has ever used the English tongue--poet, moralist, and
philosopher in one.
HIS FAULTS.--If it be necessary to point out his faults, it should be
observed that most of them are those of the age and of his profession. To
both may be charged the vulgarity and lewdness of some of his
representations; which, however, err in this respect far less than the
writings of his contemporaries.
Again: in the short time allowed for the presentation of a play, before a
restless audience, as soon as the plot was fairly shadowed, the hearers
were anxious for the _denouement_. And so Shakspeare, careless of future
fame, frequently displays a singular disparity between the parts. He has
so much of detail in the first two acts, that in order to preserve the
symmetry, five or six more would be necessary. Thus conclusions are
hurried, when, as works of art, they should be the most elaborated.
He has sometimes been accused of obscurity in expression, which renders
some of his passages difficult to be understood by commentators; but this,
in most cases, is the fault of his editors. The cases are exceptional and
unimportant. His anachronisms and historical inaccuracies have already
been referred to. His greatest admirers will allow that his wit and humor
are very often forced and frequently out of place; but here, too, he
should be leniently judged. These sallies of wit were meant rather to
"tickle the ears of the groundlings" than as just subjects for criticism
by later scholars. We know that old jokes, bad puns, and innuendoes are
needed on the stage at the present day. Shakspeare used them for the same
ephemeral purpose then; and had he sent down corrected versions to
posterity, they would have been purged of these.
INFLUENCE OF ELIZABETH.--Enough has been said to show in what manner
Shakspeare represents his age, and indeed many former periods of English
history. There are numerous passages which display the influence of
Elizabeth. It was at her request that he wrote the _Merry Wives of
Windsor_, in which Falstaff is depicted as a lover: the play of Henry
VIII., criticizing the queen's father, was not produced until after her
death. His pure women, like those of Spenser, are drawn after a queenly
model. It is known that Elizabeth was very susceptible to admiration, but
did not wish to be considered so; and Shakspeare paid the most delicate
and courtly tribute to her vanity, in those exquisite lines from the
_Midsummer Night's Dream_, showing how powerless Cupid was to touch her
heart:
A certain aim he took
At a fair vestal, throned by the west;
And loos'd his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts:
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quench'd in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon;
And _the imperial votaress passed on_,
In maiden meditation, fancy free.
SHAKSPEARE'S SONNETS.--Before his time, the sonnet had been but little
used in England, the principal writers being Surrey, Sir Walter Raleigh,
Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton. Shakspeare left one hundred and fifty-four,
which exhibit rare poetical power, and which are most of them addressed to
a person unknown, perhaps an ideal personage, whose initials are W. H.
Although chiefly addressed to a man, they are of an amatory nature, and
dwell strongly upon human frailty, infidelity, and treachery, from which
he seems to have suffered: the mystery of these poems has never been
penetrated. They were printed in 1609. "Our language," says one of his
editors, "can boast no sonnets altogether worthy of being placed by the
side of Shakspeare's, except the few which Milton poured forth--so severe
and so majestic."
It need hardly be said that Shakspeare has been translated into all modern
languages, in whole or in part. In French, by Victor Hugo and Guizot, Leon
de Wailly and Alfred de Vigny; in German, by Wieland, A. W. Schlegel, and
Buerger; in Italian, by Leoni and Carcano, and in Portuguese by La Silva.
Goethe's Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister is a long and profound critique
of Hamlet; and to the Germans he is quite as familiar and intelligible as
to the English.
IRELAND: COLLIER.--The most celebrated forgery of Shakspeare was that by
Samuel Ireland, the son of a Shakspearean scholar, who was an engraver and
dealer in curiosities. He wrote two plays, called _Vortigern_ and _Henry
the Second_, which he said he had discovered; and he forged a deed with
Shakspeare's autograph. By these he imposed upon his father and many
others, but eventually confessed the forgery.
One word should be said concerning the Collier controversy. John Payne
Collier was a lawyer, born in 1789, and is known as the author of an
excellent history of _English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakspeare_
and _Annals of the Stage to the Restoration_. In the year 1849, he came
into possession of a copy of the folio edition of Shakspeare, published in
1632, _full of emendations_, by an early owner of the volume. In 1852 he
published these, and at once great enthusiasm was excited, for and against
the emendations: many thought them of great value, while others even went
so far as to accuse Mr. Collier of having made some of them himself. The
chief value of the work was that it led to new investigations, and has
thus thrown additional light upon the works of Shakspeare.
CONCORDANCE.--The student is referred to a very complete concordance of
Shakspeare, by Mrs. Mary Cowden Clarke, the labor of many years, by which
every line of Shakspeare may be found, and which is thus of incalculable
utility to the Shakspearean scholar.
OTHER DRAMATIC WRITERS OF THE AGE OF SHAKSPEARE.
Ben Jonson, 1573-1637: this great dramatist, who deserves a larger space,
was born in London; his father became a Puritan preacher, but after his
death, his mother's second husband put the boy at brick-making. His spirit
revolted at this, and he ran away, and served as a soldier in the Low
Countries. On his return he killed Gabriel Spencer, a fellow-actor, in a
duel, and was for some time imprisoned. His first play was a comedy
entitled _Every Man in his Humour_, acted in 1598. This was succeeded,
the next year, by _Every Man out of his Humour_. He wrote a great number
of both tragedies and comedies, among which the principal are _Cynthia's
Revels_, _Sejanus_, _Volpone_, _Catiline's Conspiracy_, and _The
Alchemist_. In 1616, he received a pension from the crown of one hundred
marks, which was increased by Charles I., in 1630, to one hundred pounds.
He was the friend of Shakspeare, and had many wit-encounters with him. In
these, Fuller compares Jonson to a great Spanish galleon, "built far
higher in learning, solid and slow in performance," and Shakspeare to an
"English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn
with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the
quickness of his wit and invention."
Massinger, 1548-1640: born at Salisbury. Is said to have written
thirty-eight plays, of which only eighteen remain. The chief of these is
the _Virgin Martyr_, in which he was assisted by Dekker. The best of the
others are _The City Madam_ and _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_, _The Fatal
Dowry_, _The Unnatural Combat_, and _The Duke of Milan_. _A New Way to Pay
Old Debts_ keeps its place upon the modern stage.
John Ford, born 1586: author of _The Lover's Melancholy_, _Love's
Sacrifice_, _Perkin Warbeck_, and _The Broken Heart_. He was a pathetic
delineator of love, especially of unhappy love. Some of his plots are
unnatural, and abhorrent to a refined taste.
Webster (dates unknown): this author is remarkable for his handling of
gloomy and terrible subjects. His best plays are _The Devil's Law Case_,
_Appius and Virginia_, _The Duchess of Malfy_, and _The White Devil_.
Hazlitt says "his _White Devil_ and _Duchess of Malfy_ come the nearest to
Shakspeare of anything we have upon record."
Francis Beaumont, 1586-1615, and John Fletcher, 1576-1625: joint authors
of plays, numbering fifty-two. A prolific union, in which it is difficult
to determine the exact authorship of each. Among the best plays are _The
Maid's Tragedy_, _Philaster_, and _Cupid's Revenge_. Many of the plots are
licentious, but in monologues they frequently rise to eloquence, and in
descriptions are picturesque and graphic.
Shirley, 1594-1666: delineates fashionable life with success. His best
plays are _The Maid's Revenge_, _The Politician_, and _The Lady of
Pleasure_. The last suggested to Van Brugh his character of Lady Townly,
in _The Provoked Husband_. Lamb says Shirley "was the last of a great
race, all of whom spoke the same language, and had a set of moral feelings
and notions in common. A new language and quite a new turn of tragic and
comic interest came in at the Restoration."
Thomas Dekker, died about 1638: wrote, besides numerous tracts,
twenty-eight plays. The principal are _Old Fortunatus_, _The Honest
Whore_, and _Satiro-Mastix, or, The Humorous Poet Untrussed_. In the last,
he satirized Ben Jonson, with whom he had quarrelled, and who had
ridiculed him in _The Poetaster_. In the Honest Whore are found those
beautiful lines so often quoted:
... the best of men
That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer;
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit;
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.
Extracts from the plays mentioned may be found in Charles Lamb's
"Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of
Shakspeare."
CHAPTER XVI.
BACON, AND THE RISE OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY.
Birth and Early Life. Treatment of Essex. His Appointments. His Fall.
Writes Philosophy. Magna Instauratio. His Defects. His Fame. His
Essays.
BIRTH AND EARLY LIFE OF BACON.
Contemporary with Shakspeare, and almost equal to him in English fame at
least, is Francis Bacon, the founder of the system of experimental
philosophy in the Elizabethan age. The investigations of the one in the
philosophy of human life, were emulated by those of the other in the realm
of general nature, in order to find laws to govern further progress, and
to evolve order and harmony out of chaos.
Bacon was born in London, on the 22d of January, 1560-61, to an enviable
social lot. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, was for twenty years lord
keeper of the great seal, and was eulogized by George Buchanan as "Diu
Britannici regni secundum columen." His mother was Anne Cook, a person of
remarkable acquirements in language and theology. Francis Bacon was a
delicate, attractive, and precocious child, noticed by the great, and
kindly called by the queen "her little lord keeper." Ben Jonson refers to
this when he writes, at a later day:
England's high chancellor, the destined heir
In his soft cradle to his father's chair.
Thus, in his early childhood, he became accustomed to the forms and
grandeur of political power, and the modes by which it was to be striven
for.
In his thirteenth year he was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, then,
as now, the more mathematical and scientific of the two universities. But,
like Gibbon at Oxford, he thought little of his alma mater, under whose
care he remained only three years. It is said that at an early age he
disliked the Logic of Aristotle, and began to excogitate his system of
Induction: not content with the formal recorded knowledge, he viewed the
universe as a great storehouse of facts to be educed, investigated, and
philosophically classified.
After leaving the university, he went in the suite of Sir Amyas Paulet,
the English ambassador, to France; and recorded the observations made
during his travels in a treatise _On the State of Europe_, which is
thoughtful beyond his years. The sudden death of his father, in February,
1579-80, recalled him to England, and his desire to study led him to apply
to the government for a sinecure, which would permit him to do so without
concern as to his support. It is not strange--considering his youth and
the entire ignorance of the government as to his abilities--that this was
refused. He then applied himself to the study of the law; and whatever his
real ability, the jealousy of the Cecils no doubt prompted the opinion of
the queen, that he was not very profound in the branch he had chosen, an
opinion which was fully shared by the blunt and outspoken Lord Coke, who
was his rival in love, law, and preferment. Prompted no doubt by the
coldness of Burleigh, he joined the opposition headed by the Earl of
Essex, and he found in that nobleman a powerful friend and generous
patron, who used his utmost endeavors to have Bacon appointed
attorney-general, but without success. To compensate Bacon for his
failure, Essex presented him with a beautiful villa at Twickenham on the
Thames, which was worth L2,000.
TREATMENT OF ESSEX.--Essex was of a bold, eccentric, and violent temper.
It is not to the credit of Bacon that when Essex, through his rashness and
eccentricities, found himself arraigned for treason, Bacon deserted him,
and did not simply stand aloof, but was the chief agent in his
prosecution. Nor is this all: after making a vehement and effective speech
against him, as counsel for the prosecution--a speech which led to his
conviction and execution--Bacon wrote an uncalled-for and malignant paper,
entitled "A Declaration of the Treasons of Robert, Earl of Essex."
A high-minded man would have aided his friend; a cautious man would have
remained neutral; but Bacon was extravagant, fond of show, eager for
money, and in debt: he sought only to push his own fortunes, without
regard to justice or gratitude, and he saw that he had everything to gain
from his servility to the queen, and nothing from standing by his friend.
Even those who thought Essex justly punished, regarded Bacon with aversion
and contempt, and impartial history has not reversed their opinion.
HIS APPOINTMENTS.--He strove for place, and he obtained it. In 1590 he was
appointed counsel extraordinary to the queen: such was his first reward
for this conduct, and such his first lesson in the school where thrift
followed fawning. In 1593 he was brought into parliament for Middlesex,
and there he charmed all hearers by his eloquence, which has received the
special eulogy of Ben Jonson. In his parliamentary career is found a
second instance of his truckling to power: in a speech touching the rights
of the crown, he offended the queen and her ministers; and as soon as he
found they resented it, he made a servile and unqualified apology.
At this time he began to write his _Essays_, which will be referred to
hereafter, and published two treatises, one on _The Common Law_, and one
on _The Alienation Office_.
In 1603 he was, by his own seeking, among the crowd of gentlemen knighted
by James I. on his accession; and in 1604 he added fortune to his new
dignity by marrying Alice Barnham, "a handsome maiden," the daughter of a
London alderman. He had before addressed the dowager Lady Hatton, who had
refused him and bestowed her hand upon his rival, Coke.
In 1613 he attained to the long-desired dignity of attorney-general, a
post which he filled with power and energy, but which he disgraced by the
torture of Peacham, an old clergyman, who was charged with having written
treason in a sermon which he never preached nor published. As nothing
could be extorted from him by the rack, Bacon informed the king that
Peacham "had a dumb devil." It should be some palliation of this deed,
however, that the government was quick and sharp in ferretting out
treason, and that torture was still authorized.
In 1616 he was sworn of the privy council, and in the next year inherited
his father's honors, being made lord keeper of the seal, principally
through the favor of the favorite Buckingham. His course was still upward:
in 1618 he was made lord high chancellor, and Baron Verulam, and the next
year he was created Viscount St. Albans. Such rapid and high promotion
marked his great powers, but it belonged to the period of despotism. James
had been ruling without a parliament. At length the necessities of the
government caused the king to summon a parliament, and the struggle began
which was to have a fatal issue twenty-five years later. Parliament met,
began to assert popular rights, and to examine into the conduct of
ministers and high officials; and among those who could ill bear such
scrutiny, Bacon was prominent.
HIS FALL.--The charges against him were varied and numerous, and easy of
proof. He had received bribes; he had given false judgments for money; he
had perverted justice to secure the smiles of Buckingham, the favorite;
and when a commission was appointed to examine these charges he was
convicted. With abject humility, he acknowledged his guilt, and implored
the pity of his judges. The annals of biography present no sorrier picture
than this. "Upon advised consideration of the charges," he wrote,
"descending into my own conscience, and calling my memory to account so
far as I am able, I do plainly and ingenuously confess that I am guilty of
corruption, and do renounce all defence. O my lords, spare a broken reed!"
It is useless for his defenders, among whom the chief are Mr. Basil
Montagu and Mr. Hepworth Dixon, to inform us that judges in that day were
ill paid, and that it was the custom to receive gifts. If Bacon had a
defence to make and did not make it, he was a coward or a sycophant: if
what he said is true, he was a dishonest man, an unjust judge. He was
sentenced to pay a fine of L40,000, and to be imprisoned in the Tower at
the king's pleasure; the fine was remitted, and the imprisonment lasted
but two days, a result, no doubt foreseen, of his wretched confession.
This was the end of his public career. In retirement, with a pension of
L1,200, making, with his other means, an annual income of L2,500, this
"meanest of mankind" set himself busily to work to prove to the world that
he could also be the "wisest and brightest;"[33] a duality of fame
approached by others, but never equalled. He was, in fact, two men in one:
a dishonest, truckling politician, and a large-minded and truth-seeking
philosopher.
BEGINS HIS PHILOSOPHY.--Retired in disgrace from his places at court, the
rest of his life was spent in developing his _Instauratio Magna_, that
revolution in the very principles and institutes of science--that
philosophy which, in the words of Macaulay, "began in observations, and
ended in arts." A few words will suffice to close his personal history.
While riding in his coach, he was struck with the idea that snow would
arrest animal putrefaction. He alighted, bought a fowl, and stuffed it
with snow, with his own hands. He caught cold, stopped at the Earl of
Arundel's mansion, and slept in damp sheets; fever intervened, and on
Easter Day, 1626, he died, leaving his great work unfinished, but in such
condition that the plan has been sketched for the use of the philosophers
who came after him.
He is said to have made the first sketch of the _Instauratio_ when he was
twenty-six years old, but it was much modified in later years. He fondly
called it also _Temporis Partus Maximus_, the greatest birth of Time.
After that he wrote his _Advancement of Learning in 1605_, which was to
appear in his developed scheme, under the title _De Augmentis
Scientiarum_, written in 1623. His work advanced with and was modified by
his investigations.
In 1620 he wrote the _Novum Organum_, which, when it first appeared,
called forth from James I. the profane _bon mot_ that it was like the
peace of God, "because it passeth all understanding." Thus he was
preparing the component parts, and fitting them into his system, which has
at length become quite intelligible. A clear notion of what he proposed to
himself and what he accomplished, may be found in the subjoined meagre
sketch, only designed to indicate the outline of that system, which it
will require long and patient study to master thoroughly.
THE GREAT RESTORATION, (MAGNA INSTAURATIO.)--He divided it into six parts,
bearing a logical relation to each other, and arranged in the proper order
of study.
I. Survey and extension of the sciences, (_De Augmentis Scientiarum_.)
"Gives the substance or general description of the knowledge which mankind
_at present possesses_." That is, let it be observed, not according to the
received system and divisions, but according to his own. It is a new
presentation of the existent state of knowledge, comprehending "not only
the things already invented and known, but also those omitted and wanted,"
for he says the intellectual globe, as well as the terrestrial, has its
broils and deceits.
In the branch "_De Partitione Scientiarum_," he divides all human learning
into _History_, which uses the memory; _Poetry_, which employs the
imagination; and _Philosophy_, which requires the reason: divisions too
vague and too few, and so overlapping each other as to be of little
present use. Later classifications into numerous divisions have been
necessary to the progress of scientific research.
II. Precepts for the interpretation of nature, (_Novum Organum_.) This
sets forth "the doctrine of a more perfect use of the reason, and the true
helps of the intellectual faculties, so as to raise and enlarge the powers
of the mind." "A kind of logic, by us called," he says, "the art of
interpreting nature: differing from the common logic ... in three things,
the end, the order of demonstrating, and the grounds of inquiry."
Here he discusses induction; opposes the syllogism; shows the value and
the faults of the senses--as they fail us, or deceive us--and presents in
his _idola_ the various modes and forms of deception. These _idola_, which
he calls the deepest fallacies of the human mind, are divided into four
classes: Idola Tribus, Idola Specus, Idola Fori, Idola Theatri. The first
are the errors belonging to the whole human race, or _tribe_; the
second--_of the den_--are the peculiarities of individuals; the third--_of
the market-place_--are social and conventional errors; and the
fourth--_those of the theatre_--include Partisanship, Fashion, and
Authority.
III. Phenomena of the Universe, or Natural and Experimental History, on
which to found Philosophy, (_Sylva Sylvarum_.) "Our natural history is
not designed," he says, "so much to please by vanity, or benefit by
gainful experiments, as to afford light to the discovery of causes, and
hold out the breasts of philosophy." This includes his patient search for
facts--nature _free_, as in the history of plants, minerals, animals,
etc.--nature _put to the torture_, as in the productions of art and human
industry.
IV. Ladder of the Understanding, (_Scala Intellectus_.) "Not illustrations
of rules and precepts, but perfect models, which will exemplify the second
part of this work, and represent to the eye the whole progress of the
mind, and the continued structure and order of invention, in the most
chosen subjects, after the same manner as globes and machines facilitate
the more abstruse and subtle demonstrations in mathematics."
V. Precursors or anticipations of the second philosophy, (_Prodromi sive
anticipationes philosophiae secundae_.) "These will consist of such things
as we have invented, experienced, or added by the same common use of the
understanding that others employ"--a sort of scaffolding, only of use till
the rest are finished--a set of suggestive helps to the attainment of this
second philosophy, which is the goal and completion of his system.
VI. Second Philosophy, or Active Science, (_Philosophia Secunda_.) "To
this all the rest are subservient--_to lay down that philosophy_ which
shall flow from the just, pure, and strict inquiry hitherto proposed." "To
perfect this is beyond both our abilities and our hopes; yet we shall lay
the foundations of it, and recommend the superstructure to posterity."
An examination of this scheme will show a logical procession from the
existing knowledge, and from existing defects, by right rules of reason,
and the avoidance of deceptions, with a just scale of perfected models, to
the _second philosophy_, or science in useful practical action, diffusing
light and comfort throughout the world.
In a philosophic instead of a literary work, these heads would require
great expansion in order adequately to illustrate the scheme in its six
parts. This, however, would be entirely out of our province, which is to
present a brief outline of the works of a man who occupies a prominent
place in the intellectual realm of England, as a profound philosopher, and
as a writer of English prose; only as one might introduce a great man in a
crowd: those who wish to know the extent and character of his greatness
must study his works.
They were most of them written in Latin, but they have been ably
translated and annotated, and are within the ready reach and comprehension
of students. The best edition in English, is that by Spedding, Ellis, and
Heath, which has been republished in America.
BACON'S DEFECTS.--Further than this tabular outline, neither our space nor
the scope of our work will warrant us in going; but it is important to
consider briefly the elements of Bacon's remarkable fame. His system and
his knowledge are superseded entirely. Those who have studied physics and
chemistry at the present day, know a thousand-fold more than Bacon could;
for such knowledge did not exist in his day. But he was one of those--and
the chief one--who, in that age of what is called the childhood of
experimental philosophy, helped to clear away the mists of error, and
prepare for the present sunshine of truth. "I have been laboring," says
some writer, (quoted by Bishop Whately, Pref. to Essay XIV.,) "to render
myself useless." Such was Bacon's task, and such the task of the greatest
inventors, discoverers, and benefactors of the human race.
Nor did Bacon rank high even as a natural philosopher or physicist in his
own age: he seems to have refused credence to the discoveries of
Copernicus and Galileo, which had stirred the scientific world into great
activity before his day; and his investigations in botany and vegetable
physiology are crude and full of errors.
His mind, eminently philosophic, searched for facts only to establish
principles and discover laws; and he was often impatient or obstinate in
this search, feeling that it trammelled him in his haste to reach
conclusions.
In the consideration of the reason, he unduly despised the _Organon_ of
Aristotle, which, after much indignity and misapprehension, still remains
to elucidate the universal principle of reasoning, and published his new
organon--_Novum Organum_--as a sort of substitute for it: Induction
unjustly opposed to the Syllogism. In what, then, consists that wonderful
excellence, that master-power which has made his name illustrious?
HIS FAME.--I. He labored earnestly to introduce, in the place of fanciful
and conjectural systems--careful, patient investigation: the principle of
the procurement of well-known facts, in order that, by severe induction,
philosophy might attain to general laws, and to a classification of the
sciences. The fault of the ages before him had been hasty, careless, often
neglected observation, inaccurate analysis, the want of patient successive
experiment. His great motto was experiment, and again and again
experiment; and the excellent maxims which he laid down for the proper
conduct of experimental philosophy have outlived his own facts and system
and peculiar beliefs. Thus he has fitly been compared to Moses. He led
men, marshalled in strong array, to the vantage ground from which he
showed them the land of promise, and the way to enter it; while he
himself, after all his labors, was not permitted to enjoy it. Such men
deserve the highest fame; and thus the most practical philosophers of
to-day revere the memory of him who showed them from the mountain-top,
albeit in dim vision, the land which they now occupy.
II. Again, Bacon is the most notable example among natural philosophers of
a man who worked for science and truth alone, with a singleness of purpose
and entire unconcern as to immediate and selfish rewards. Bacon the
philosopher was in the strongest contrast to Bacon the politician. He
left, he said, his labors to posterity; his name and memory to foreign
nations, and "to (his) own country, after some time is past over." His own
time could neither appreciate nor reward them. Here is an element of
greatness worthy of all imitation: he who works for popular applause, may
have his reward, but it is fleeting and unsatisfying; he who works for
truth alone, has a grand inner consequence while he works, and his name
will be honored, if for nothing else, for this loyalty to truth. After
what has been said of his servility and dishonesty, it is pleasing to
contemplate this unsullied side of his escutcheon, and to give a better
significance to the motto on his monument--_Sic sedebat_.
HIS ESSAYS.--Bacon's _Essays_, or _Counsels Civil and Moral_, are as
intelligible to the common mind as his philosophy is dry and difficult.
They are short, pithy, sententious, telling us plain truths in simple
language: he had been writing them through several years. He dedicated
them, under the title of _Essays_, to Henry, Prince of Wales, the eldest
son of King James I., a prince of rare gifts, and worthy such a
dedication, who unfortunately died in 1612. They show him to be the
greatest master of English prose in his day, and to have had a deep
insight into human nature.
Bacon is said to have been the first person who applied the word _essay_
in English to such writings: it meant, as the French word shows, a little
trial-sketch, a suggestion, a few loose thoughts--a brief of something to
be filled in by the reader. Now it means something far more--a long
composition, dissertation, disquisition. The subjects of the essays, which
number sixty-eight, are such as are of universal interest--fame, studies,
atheism, beauty, ambition, death, empire, sedition, honor, adversity, and
suchlike.
The Essays have been ably edited and annotated by Archbishop Whately, and
his work has been republished in America.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE ENGLISH BIBLE.
Early Versions. The Septuagint. The Vulgate. Wiclif; Tyndale.
Coverdale; Cranmer. Geneva; Bishop's Bible. King James's Bible.
Language of the Bible. Revision.
EARLY VERSIONS OF THE SCRIPTURES.
When we consider the very extended circulation of the English Bible in the
version made by direction of James I., we are warranted in saying that no
work in the language, viewed simply as a literary production, has had a
more powerful historic influence over the world of English-speaking
people.
Properly to understand its value as a version of the inspired writings, it
is necessary to go back to the original history, and discover through what
precedent forms they have come into English.
All the canonical books of the Old Testament were written in Hebrew. The
apocryphal books were produced either in a corrupted dialect, or in Greek.
THE SEPTUAGINT.--Limiting our inquiry to the canonical books, and
rejecting all fanciful traditions, it is known that about 286 or 285 B.C.,
Ptolemy Philadelphus, King of Egypt, probably at the instance of his
librarian, Demetrius Phalereus, caused seventy-two Jews, equally learned
in Hebrew and in Greek, to be brought to Alexandria, to prepare a Greek
version of the Hebrew Scriptures. This was for the use of the Alexandrian
Jews. The version was called the Septuagint, or translation of the
seventy. The various portions of the translation are of unequal merit,
the rendering of the Pentateuch being the best; but the completed work was
of great value, not only to the Jews dispersed in the countries where
Greek had been adopted as the national language, but it opened the way for
the coming of Christianity: the study of its prophecies prepared the minds
of men for the great Advent, and the version was used by the earlier
Christians as the historic ground of their faith.
The books of the New Testament were written in Greek, with the probable
exception of St. Matthew's Gospel, which, if written in Hebrew, or
Aramaean, was immediately translated into Greek.
Contemporary with the origin of Christianity, and the vast extension of
the Roman Empire, the Latin had become the all-absorbing tongue; and, as
might be expected, numerous versions of the whole and of parts of the
Scriptures were made in that language, and one of these complete versions,
which grew in favor, almost superseding all others, was called the _Vetus
Itala_.
THE VULGATE.--St. Jerome, a doctor of the Latin Church in the latter part
of the fourth century, undertook, with the sanction of Damasus, the Bishop
of Rome, a new Latin version upon the basis of the _Vetus Itala_, bringing
it nearer to the Septuagint in the Old Testament, and to the original
Greek of the New.
This version of Jerome, corrected from time to time, was approved by
Gregory I., (the Great,) and, since the seventh century, has been used by
the Western Church, under the name of the _Vulgate_, (from _vulgatus_--for
general or common use.) The Council of Trent, in the sixteenth century,
declared it alone to be authentic.
Throughout Western Europe this was used, and made the basis of further
translations into the national languages. It was from the Vulgate that
Aldhelm made his Anglo-Saxon version of the Psalter in 706; Bede, his
entire Saxon Bible in the same period; Alfred, his portion of the Psalms;
and other writers, fragmentary translations.
As soon as the newly formed English language was strong enough, partial
versions were attempted in it: one by an unknown hand, as early as 1290;
and one by John de Trevisa, about one hundred years later.
WICLIF: TYNDALE.--Wiclif's Bible was translated from the Latin Vulgate,
and issued about 1378. If it be asked why he did not go to the original
sources, and thus avoid the errors of successive renderings, the answer is
plain: he was not sufficiently acquainted with Hebrew and Greek to
translate from them. Wiclif's translation was eagerly sought, and was
multiplied by the hands of skilful scribes. Its popularity was very great,
as is attested by the fact that when, in the House of Lords, in the year
1390, a bill was offered to suppress it, the measure signally failed. The
first copy of Wiclif's Bible was not printed until the year 1731.
About a century after Wiclif, the Greek language and the study of Greek
literature came into England, and were of great effect in making the
forthcoming translations more accurate.
First among these new translators was William Tyndale, who was born about
the year 1477. He was educated at Oxford and Cambridge, and left England
for fear of persecution. He translated the Scriptures from the Greek, and
printed the volume at Antwerp--the first printed translation of the
Scriptures in English--in the year 1526. This work was largely circulated
in England. It was very good for a first translation, and the language is
very nearly that of King James's Bible. It met the fury of the Church, all
the copies which could be found being burned by Tonstall, Bishop of
London, at St. Paul's Cross. When Sir Thomas More asked how Tyndale
subsisted abroad, he was pithily answered that Tyndale was supported by
the Bishop of London, who sent over money to buy up his books. To the
fame of being a translator of the Scriptures, Tyndale adds that of
martyrdom. He was seized, at the instance of Henry VIII., in Antwerp, and
condemned to death by the Emperor of Germany. He was strangled in the year
1536, at Villefort, near Brussels, praying, just before his death, that
the Lord would open the King of England's eyes.
The Old Testament portion of Tyndale's Bible is principally from the
Septuagint, and has many corruptions and errors, which have been corrected
by more modern translators.
MILES COVERDALE: CRANMER'S BIBLE.--In 1535, Miles Coverdale, a co-laborer
of Tyndale, published "Biblia; The Bible, that is, the Holy Scriptures of
the Olde and New Testament, faithfully and truly translated out of the
Douche and Latyn into Englishe: Zurich." In the next year, 1536, Coverdale
issued another edition, which was dedicated to Henry VIII., who ordered a
copy to be placed in every parish church in England. This translation is
in part that of Tyndale, and is based upon it. Another edition of this
appeared in 1537, and was called Matthew's Bible, probably a pseudonym of
Coverdale. Of this, from the beginning to the end of Chronicles is
Tyndale's version. The rest of the Old Testament is Coverdale's
translation. The entire New Testament is Tyndale's. This was published by
royal license. Strange mutation! The same king who had caused Tyndale to
be strangled for publishing the English Scriptures at Antwerp, was now
spreading Tyndale's work throughout the parishes of England. Coverdale
published many editions, among which the most noted was Cranmer's Bible,
issued in 1539, so called because Cranmer wrote a preface to it. Coverdale
led an eventful life, being sometimes in exile and prisoner, and at others
in high favor. He was Bishop of Exeter, from which see he was ejected by
Mary, in 1553. He died in 1568, at the age of eighty-one.
THE GENEVAN: BISHOPS' BIBLE.--In the year 1557 he had aided those who were
driven away by Mary, in publishing a version of the Bible at Geneva. It
was much read in England, and is known as the Genevan Bible. The Great
Bible was an edition of Coverdale issued in 1562. The Bishops' Bible was
so called because, at the instance of Archbishop Parker, it was translated
by a royal commission, of whom eight were bishops. And in 1571, a canon
was passed at Canterbury, requiring a large copy of this work to be in
every parish church, and in the possession of every bishop and dignitary
among the clergy. Thus far every new edition and issue had been an
improvement on what had gone before, and all tended to the production of a
still more perfect and permanent translation. It should be mentioned that
Luther, in Germany, after ten years of labor, from 1522 to 1532, had
produced, unaided, his wonderful German version. This had helped the cause
of translations everywhere.
KING JAMES'S BIBLE.--At length, in 1603, just after the accession of James
I., a conference was held at Hampton Court, which, among other tasks,
undertook to consider what objections could be made to the Bishops' Bible.
The result was that the king ordered a new version which should supersede
all others. The number of eminent and learned divines appointed to make
the translation was fifty-four; seven of these were prevented by
disability of one kind or another. The remaining forty-seven were divided
into six classes, and the labor was thus apportioned: ten, who sat at
Westminster, translated from Genesis through Kings; eight, at Cambridge,
undertook the other historical books and the Hagiographa, including the
Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Ruth, Esther, and a few
other books; seven at Oxford, the four greater Prophets, the Lamentations
of Jeremiah, and the twelve minor Prophets; eight, also at Oxford, the
four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Revelation of St. John;
seven more at Westminster, the Epistles of St. Paul, and the remaining
canonical books; and five more at Cambridge, the Apocryphal books. The
following was the mode of translation: Each individual in one of the
classes translated himself every book confided to that class; each class
then met and compared these translations, and thus completed their task.
The work thus done was sent by each class to all the other classes; after
this, all the classes met together, and while one read the others
criticized. The translation was commenced in the year 1607, and was
finished in three years. The first public issue was in 1611, when the book
was dedicated to King James, and has since been known as King James's
Bible. It was adopted not only in the English Church, but by all the
English people, so that the other versions have fallen into entire disuse,
with the exception of the Psalms, which, according to the translation of
Cranmer's Bible, were placed in the Book of Common Prayer, where they have
since remained, constituting the Psalter. It should be observed that the
Psalter, which is taken principally from the Vulgate, is not so near the
original as the Psalms in King James's version: the language is, however,
more musical and better suited to chanting in the church service.
THE LANGUAGE OF THE BIBLE.--There have been numerous criticisms, favorable
and adverse, to the language of King James's Bible. It is said to have
been written in older English than that of its day, and Selden remarks
that "it is rather translated into English words than into English
phrase." The Hebraisms are kept, and the phraseology of that language is
retained. This leads to the opinion of Bishop Horsley, that the adherence
to the Hebrew idiom is supposed to have at once enriched and adorned our
language. Bishop Middleton says "the style is simple, it is harmonious, it
is energetic, and, which is of no small importance, use has made it
familiar, and time has rendered it sacred." That it has lasted two
hundred and fifty years without a rival, is the strongest testimony in
favor of its accuracy and the beauty of its diction. Philologically
considered, it has been of inestimable value as a strong rallying-point
for the language, keeping it from wild progress in any and every
direction. Many of our best words, which would otherwise have been lost,
have been kept in current use because they are in the Bible. The peculiar
language of the Bible expresses our most serious sentiments and our
deepest emotions. It is associated with our holiest thoughts, and gives
phraseology to our prayers. It is the language of heavenly things, but not
only so: it is interwreathed in our daily discourse, kept fresh by our
constant Christian services, and thus we are bound by ties of the same
speech to the devout men of King James's day.
REVISION.--There are some inaccuracies and flaws in the translation which
have been discerned by the superior excellence of modern learning. In the
question now mooted of a revision of the English Bible, the correction of
these should be the chief object. A version in the language of the present
day, in the course of time would be as archaic as the existing version is
now; and the private attempts which have been made, have shown us the
great danger of conflicting sectarian views.
In any event, it is to be hoped that those who authorize a new translation
will emulate the good sense and judgment of King James, by placing it in
the hands of the highest learning, most liberal scholarship, and most
devoted piety.
CHAPTER XVIII.
JOHN MILTON, AND THE ENGLISH COMMONWEALTH.
Historical Facts. Charles I. Religious Extremes. Cromwell. Birth and
Early Works. Views of Marriage. Other Prose Works. Effects of the
Restoration. Estimate of his Prose.
HISTORICAL FACTS.
It is Charles Lamb who says "Milton almost requires a solemn service to be
played before you enter upon him." Of Milton, the poet of _Paradise Lost_,
this is true; but for Milton the statesman the politician, and polemic,
this is neither necessary nor appropriate. John Milton and the
Commonwealth! Until the present age, Milton has been regarded almost
solely as a poet, and as the greatest imaginative poet England has
produced; but the translation and publication of his prose works have
identified him with the political history of England, and the discovery in
1823, of his _Treatise on Christian Doctrine_, has established him as one
of the greatest religious polemics in an age when every theological sect
was closely allied to a political party, and thus rendered the strife of
contending factions more bitter and relentless. Thus it is that the name
of John Milton, as an author, is fitly coupled with the commonwealth, as a
political condition.
It remains for us to show that in all his works he was the strongest
literary type of history in the age in which he lived. Great as he would
have been in any age, his greatness is mainly English and historical. In
his literary works may be traced every cardinal event in the history of
that period: he aided in the establishment of the Commonwealth, and of
that Commonwealth he was one of the principal characters. His pen was as
sharp and effective as the sabres of Cromwell's Ironsides.
A few words of preliminary history must introduce him to our reader. Upon
the death of Queen Elizabeth, in 1603, James I. ascended the throne with
the highest notions of kingly prerogative and of a church establishment;
but the progress of the English people in education and intelligence, the
advance in arts and letters which had been made, were vastly injurious to
the autocratic and aristocratic system which James had received from his
predecessor. His foolish arrogance and contempt for popular rights
incensed the people thus enlightened as to their own position and
importance. They soon began to feel that he was not only unjust, but
ungrateful: he had come from a rustic throne in Scotland, where he had
received L5,000 per annum, with occasional presents of fruits, grain, and
poultry, to the greatest throne in Europe; and, besides, the Stuart
family, according to Thackeray, "as regards mere lineage, were no better
than a dozen English and Scottish houses that could be named."
They resisted his illegal taxes and forced loans; they clamored against
the unconstitutional Court of High Commission; they despised his arrogant
favorites; and what they might have patiently borne from a gallant,
energetic, and handsome monarch, they found it hard to bear from a
pedantic, timid, uncouth, and rickety man, who gave them neither glory nor
comfort. His eldest son, Prince Henry, the universal favorite of the
nation, had died in 1612, before he was eighteen.
CHARLES I.--When, after a series of struggles with the parliament, which
he had reluctantly convened, James died in 1625, Charles I. came to an
inheritance of error and misfortune. Imbued with the principles of his
father, he, too, insisted upon "governing the people of England in the
seventeenth century as they had been governed in the sixteenth," while in
reality they had made a century of progress. The cloud increased in
blackness and portent; he dissolved the parliament, and ruled without one;
he imposed and collected illegal and doubtful taxes; he made forced loans,
as his father had done; he was artful, capricious, winding and doubling in
his policy; he made promises without intending to perform them; and found
himself, finally, at direct issue with his parliament and his people.
First at war with the political principles of the court, the nation soon
found itself in antagonism with the religion and morals of the court.
Before the final rupture, the two parties were well defined, as Cavaliers
and Roundheads: each party went to extremes, through the spite and fury of
mutual opposition. The Cavaliers affected a recklessness and dissoluteness
greater than they really felt to be right, in order to differ most widely
from those purists who, urged by analogous motives, decried all amusements
as evil. Each party repelled the other to the extreme of opposition.
RELIGIOUS EXTREMES.--Loyalty was opposed by radicalism, and the invectives
of both were bitter in the extreme. The system and ceremonial of a
gorgeous worship restored by Laud, and accused by its opposers of
formalism and idolatry, were attacked by a spirit of excess, which, to
religionize daily life, took the words of Scripture, and especially those
of the Old Testament, as the language of common intercourse, which issued
them from a gloomy countenance, with a nasal twang, and often with a false
interpretation.
As opposed to the genuflections of Laud and the pomp of his ritual, the
land swarmed with unauthorized preachers; then came out from among the
Presbyterians the Independents; the fifth-monarchy men, shouting for King
Jesus; the Seekers, the Antinomians, who, like Trusty Tomkins, were elect
by the fore-knowledge of God, who were not under the law but under grace,
and who might therefore gratify every lust, and give the rein to every
passion, because they were sealed to a certain salvation. Even in the army
sprang up the Levellers, who wished to abolish monarchy and aristocracy,
and to level all ranks to one. To each religious party, there was a
political character, ranging from High Church and the divine right of
kings, to absolute levellers in Church and State. This disintegrating
process threatened not only civil war, with well-defined parties, but
entire anarchy in the realm of England. It was long resisted by the
conservative men of all opinions. At length the issue came: the king was a
prisoner, without a shadow of power.
The parliament was still firm, and would have treated with the king by a
considerable majority; but Colonel Pride surrounded it with two regiments,
excluded more than two hundred of the Presbyterians and moderate men; and
the parliament, thus _purged_, appointed the High Court of Justice to try
the king for treason.
Charles I. fell before the storm. His was a losing cause from the day he
erected his standard at Nottingham, in 1642, to that on which, after his
noble bearing on the scaffold, the masked executioner held up his head and
cried out, "This is the head of a traitor."
With a fearful consistency the Commons voted soon after to abolish
monarchy and the upper house, and on their new seal inscribed, "On the
first year of freedom by God's blessing restored, 1648." The dispassionate
historian of the present day must condemn both parties; and yet, out of
this fierce travail of the nation, English constitutional liberty was
born.
CROMWELL.--The power which the parliament, under the dictation of the
army, had so furiously wielded, passed into the hands of Cromwell, a
mighty man, warrior, statesman, and fanatic, who mastered the crew, seized
the helm, and guided the ship of State as she drove furiously before the
wind. He became lord protector, a king in everything but the name. We
need not enter into an analysis of these parties: the history is better
known than any other part of the English annals, and almost every reader
becomes a partisan. Cromwell, the greatest man of his age, was still a
creature of the age, and was led by the violence of circumstances to do
many things questionable and even wicked, but with little premeditation:
like Rienzi and Napoleon, his sudden elevation fostered an ambition which
robbed him of the stern purpose and pure motives of his earlier career.
The establishment of the commonwealth seemed at first to assure the
people's liberty; but it was only in seeming, and as the sequel shows,
they liked the rule of the lord protector less than that of the
unfortunate king; for, ten years after the beheading of Charles I., they
restored the monarchy in the person of his son, Charles.
Such, very briefly and in mere outline, was the political situation. And
now to return to Milton: It is claimed that of all the elements of these
troublous times, he was the literary type, and this may be demonstrated--
I. By observing his personal characteristics and political
appointments;
II. By the study of his prose works; and
III. By analyzing his poems.
BIRTH AND EARLY WORKS.--John Milton was born on the 9th of December, 1608,
in London. His grandfather, John Mylton, was a Papist, who disinherited
his son, the poet's father, for becoming a Church-of-England man. His
mother was a gentlewoman. Milton was born just in time to grow up with the
civil troubles. When the outburst came in 1642, he was thirty-four years
old, a solemn, cold, studious, thoughtful, and dogmatic Puritan. In 1624
he entered Christ College, Cambridge, where, from his delicate and
beautiful face and shy airs, he was called the "Lady of the College." It
is said that he left the university on account of peculiar views in
theology and politics; but eight years after, in 1632, he took his degree
as master of arts. Meanwhile, in December, 1629, he had celebrated his
twenty-first birthday, when the Star of Bethlehem was coming into the
ascendant, with that pealing, organ-like hymn, "On the Eve of Christ's
Nativity"--the worthiest poetic tribute ever laid by man, along with the
gold, frankincense, and myrrh of the Eastern sages, at the feet of the
Infant God:
See how from far upon the Eastern road,
The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet;
O run, prevent them with thy humble ode,
And lay it lowly at his blessed feet;
Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet,
And join thy voice unto the angel choir,
From out his secret altar touched with hallowed fire.
Some years of travel on the Continent matured his mind, and gave full
scope to his poetic genius. At Paris he became acquainted with Grotius,
the illustrious writer upon public law; and in Rome, Genoa, Florence, and
other Italian cities, he became intimate with the leading minds of the
age. He returned to England on account of the political troubles.
MILTON'S VIEWS OF MARRIAGE.--In the consideration of Milton's personality,
we do not find in him much to arouse our heart-sympathy. His opinions
concerning marriage and divorce, as set forth in several of his prose
writings, would, if generally adopted, destroy the sacred character of
divinely appointed wedlock. His views may be found in his essay on _The
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce;_ in his _Tetrachordon, or the four
chief places in Scripture, which treat of Marriage, or Nullities in
Marriage_; in his _Colasterion_, and in his translation of Martin Bucer's
_Judgment Concerning Divorce_, addressed to the Parliament of England.
Where women were concerned he was a hard man and a stern master.
In 1643 he married Mary Powell, the daughter of a Cavalier; and, taking
her from the gay life of her father's house, he brought her into a gloom
and seclusion almost insupportable. He loved his books better than he did
his wife. He fed and sheltered her, indeed, but he gave her no tender
sympathy. Then was enacted in his household the drama of the rebellion in
miniature; and no doubt his domestic troubles had led to his extended
discussion of the question of divorce. He speaks, too, almost entirely in
the interest of husbands. With him woman is not complementary to man, but
his inferior, to be cherished if obedient, to minister to her husband's
welfare, but to have her resolute spirit broken after the manner of
Petruchio, the shrew-tamer. In all this, however, Milton was eminently a
type of the times. It was the canon law of the established Church of
England at which he aimed, and he endeavored to lead the parliament to
legislation upon the most sacred ties and relations of human life.
Happily, English morals were too strong, even in that turbulent period, to
yield to this unholy attempt. It was a day when authority was questioned,
a day for "extending the area of freedom," but he went too far even for
emancipated England; and the mysterious power of the marriage tie has
always been reverenced as one of the main bulwarks of that righteousness
which exalteth a nation.
His apology for Smectymnuus is one of his pamphlets against Episcopacy,
and receives its title from the initial letters of the names of five
Puritan ministers, who also engaged in controversy: they were Stephen
Marshall, Edward Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcome, William Spenston.
The Church of England never had a more intelligent and relentless enemy
than John Milton.
OTHER PROSE WORKS.--Milton's prose works are almost all of them of an
historical character. Appointed Latin Secretary to the Council, he wrote
foreign dispatches and treatises upon the persons and events of the day.
In 1644 he published his _Areopagitica_, a noble paper in favor of
_Unlicensed Printing_, and boldly directed against the Presbyterian party,
then in power, which had continued and even increased the restraints upon
the press. No stouter appeal for the freedom of the press was ever heard,
even in America. But in the main, his prose pen was employed against the
crown and the Church, while they still existed; against the king's memory,
after the unfortunate monarch had fallen, and in favor of the parliament
and all its acts. Milton was no trimmer; he gave forth no uncertain sound;
he was partisan to the extreme, and left himself no loop-hole of retreat
in the change that was to come.
A famous book appeared in 1649, not long after Charles's execution,
proclaimed to have been written by King Charles while in prison, and
entitled _Eikon Basilike_, or _The Kingly Image_, being the portraiture of
his majesty in his solitude and suffering. It was supposed that it might
influence the people in favor of royalty, and so Milton was employed to
answer it in a bitter invective, an unnecessary and heartless attack upon
the dead king, entitled _Eikonoklastes_, or _The Image-breaker_. The Eikon
was probably in part written by the king, and in part by Bishop Gauden,
who indeed claimed its authorship after the Restoration.
Salmasius having defended Charles in a work of dignified and moderate
tone, Milton answered in his first _Defensio pro Populo Anglicano_; in
which he traverses the whole ground of popular rights and kingly
prerogative, in a masterly and eloquent manner. This was followed by a
second _Defensio_. For the two he received L1,000, and by his own account
accelerated the disease of the eyes which ended in complete blindness.
No pen in England worked more powerfully than his in behalf of the
parliament and the protectorate, or to stay the flood tide of loyalty,
which bore upon its sweeping heart the restoration of the second Charles.
He wrote the last foreign despatches of Richard Cromwell, the weak
successor of the powerful Oliver; but nothing could now avail to check the
return of monarchy. The people were tired of turmoil and sick of blood;
they wanted rest, at any cost. The powerful hand of Cromwell was removed,
and astute Monk used his army to secure his reward. The army, concurring
with the popular sentiment, restored the Stuarts. The conduct of the
English people in bringing Charles back stamped Cromwell as a usurper, and
they have steadily ignored in their list of governors--called
monarchs--the man through whose efforts much of their liberty had been
achieved; but history asserts itself, and the benefits of the "Great
Rebellion" are gratefully acknowledged by the people, whether the
protectorate appears in the court list or not.
THE EFFECT OF THE RESTORATION.--Charles II. came back to such an
overwhelming reception, that he said, in his witty way, it must have been
his own fault to stay away so long from a people who were so glad to see
him when he did come. This restoration forced Milton into concealment: his
public day was over, and yet his remaining history is particularly
interesting. Inheriting weak eyes from his mother, he had overtasked their
powers, especially in writing the _Defensiones_, and had become entirely
blind. Although his person was included in the general amnesty, his
polemical works were burned by the hangman; and the pen that had so
powerfully battled for a party, now returned to the service of its first
love, poetry. His loss of power and place was the world's gain. In his
forced seclusion, he produced the greatest of English poems--religious,
romantic, and heroic.
ESTIMATE OF HIS PROSE.--Before considering his poems, we may briefly state
some estimate of his prose works. They comprise much that is excellent,
are full of learning, and contain passages of rarest rhetoric. He said
himself, that in prose he had only "the use of his left hand;" but it was
the left hand of a Milton. To the English scholar they are chiefly of
historical value: many of them are written in Latin, and lose much of
their terseness in a translation which retains classical peculiarities of
form and phrase.
His _History of England from the Earliest Times_ is not profound, nor
philosophical; he followed standard chronicle authorities, but made few,
if any, original investigations, and gives us little philosophy. His
tractate on _Education_ contains peculiar views of a curriculum of study,
but is charmingly written. He also wrote a treatise on _Logic_. Little
known to the great world outside of his poems, there is one prose work,
discovered only in 1823, which has been less read, but which contains the
articles of his Christian belief. It is a tractate on Christian doctrine:
no one now doubts its genuineness; and it proves him to have been a
Unitarian, or High Arian, by his own confession. This was somewhat
startling to the great orthodox world, who had taken many of their
conceptions of supernatural things from Milton's _Paradise Lost_; and yet
a careful study of that poem will disclose similar tendencies in the
poet's mind. He was a Puritan whose theology was progressive until it
issued in complete isolation: he left the Presbyterian ranks for the
Independents, and then, startled by the rise and number of sects, he
retired within himself and stood almost alone, too proud to be instructed,
and dissatisfied with the doctrines and excesses of his earlier
colleagues.
In 1653 he lost his wife, Mary Powell, who left him three daughters. He
supplied her place in 1656, by marrying Catherine Woodstock, to whom he
was greatly attached, and who also died fifteen months after. Eight years
afterward he married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, who survived him.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE POETRY OF MILTON.
The Blind Poet. Paradise Lost. Milton and Dante. His Faults.
Characteristics of the Age. Paradise Regained. His Scholarship. His
Sonnets. His Death and Fame.
THE BLIND POET.
Milton's blindness, his loneliness, and his loss of power, threw him upon
himself. His imagination, concentrated by these disasters and troubles,
was to see higher things in a clear, celestial light: there was nothing to
distract his attention, and he began that achievement which he had long
before contemplated--a great religious epic, in which the heroes should be
celestial beings and our sinless first parents, and the scenes Heaven,
Hell, and the Paradise of a yet untainted Earth. His first idea was to
write an epic on King Arthur and his knights: it is well for the world
that he changed his intention, and took as a grander subject the loss of
Paradise, full as it is of individual interest to mankind.
In a consideration of his poetry, we must now first recur to those pieces
which he had written at an earlier day. Before settling in London, he had,
as we have seen, travelled fifteen months on the Continent, and had been
particularly interested by his residence in Italy, where he visited the
blind Galileo. The poems which most clearly show the still powerful
influence of Italy in all European literature, and upon him especially,
are the _Arcades, Comus, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso_, and _Lycidas_, each
beautiful and finished, and although Italian in their taste, yet full of
true philosophy couched in charming verse.
The _Arcades_, (Arcadians,) composed in 1684, is a pastoral masque,
enacted before the Countess Dowager of Derby at Harefield, by some noble
persons of her family. The _Allegro_ is the song of Mirth, the nymph who
brings with her
Jest and youthful jollity,
Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles,
Nods and becks and wreathed smiles,
* * * * *
Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides.
The poem is like the nymph whom he addresses,
Buxom, blithe, and debonaire.
The _Penseroso_ is a tribute to tender melancholy, and is designed as a
pendant to the _Allegro_:
Pensive nun devout and pure,
Sober, steadfast, and demure,
All in a robe of darkest grain,
Flowing with majestic train.
We fall in love with each goddess in turn, and find comfort for our
varying moods from "grave to gay."
Burke said he was certain Milton composed the _Penseroso_ in the aisle of
a cloister, or in an ivy-grown abbey.
_Comus_ is a noble poem, philosophic and tender, but neither pastoral nor
dramatic, except in form; it presents the power of chastity in disarming
_Circe, Comus_, and all the libidinous sirens. _L'Allegro_ and _Il
Penseroso_ were written at Horton, about 1633.
_Lycidas_, written in 1637, is a tender monody on the loss of a friend
named King, in the Irish Channel, in that year, and is a classical
pastoral, tricked off in Italian garb. What it loses in adherence to
classic models and Italian taste, is more than made up by exquisite lines
and felicitous phrases. In it he calls fame "that last infirmity of noble
mind." Perhaps he has nowhere written finer lines than these:
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed.
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
_Flames in the forehead of the morning sky_.
Besides these, Milton wrote Latin poems with great vigor, if not with
remarkable grace; and several Italian sonnets and poems, which have been
much admired even by Italian critics. The sonnet, if not of Italian
origin, had been naturalized there when its birth was forgotten; and this
practice in the Italian gave him that power to produce them in English
which he afterward used with such effect.
PARADISE LOST.--Having thus summarily disposed of his minor poems, each of
which would have immortalized any other man, we come to that upon which
his highest fame rests; which is familiarly known by men who have never
read the others, and who are ignorant of his prose works; which is used as
a parsing exercise in many schools, and which, as we have before hinted,
has furnished Protestant pulpits with pictorial theology from that day to
this. It occupied him several years in the composition; from 1658, when
Cromwell died, through the years of retirement and obscurity until 1667.
It came forth in an evil day, for the merry monarch was on the throne, and
an irreligious court gave tone to public opinion.
The hardiest critic must approach the _Paradise Lost_ with wonder and
reverence. What an imagination, and what a compass of imagination! Now
with the lost peers in Hell, his glowing fancy projects an empire almost
as grand and glorious as that of God himself. Now with undazzled,
presumptuous gaze he stands face to face with the Almighty, and records
the words falling from His lips; words which he has dared to place in the
mouth of the Most High--words at the utterance of which
... ambrosial fragrance filled
All heaven, and in the blessed spirits elect
Sense of new joy ineffable diffused.
Little wonder that in his further flight he does not shrink from colloquy
with the Eternal Son--in his theology not the equal of His Father--or that
he does not fear to describe the fearful battle between Christ with his
angelic hosts against the kingdom of darkness:
... At his right hand victory
Sat eagle-winged: beside him hung his bow
And quiver with three-bolted thunder stored.
* * * * *
... Them unexpected joy surprised,
When the great ensign of Messiah blazed,
Aloft by angels borne his sign in heaven.
How heart-rending his story of the fall, and of the bitter sorrow of our
first parents, whose fatal act
Brought death into the world and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat.
How marvellous is the combat at Hell-gate, between Satan and Death; how
terrible the power at which "Hell itself grew darker"! How we strive to
shade our mind's eye as we enter again with him into the courts of Heaven.
How refreshingly beautiful the perennial bloom of Eden:
Picta velut primo Vere coruscat humus.
What a wonderful story of the teeming creation related to our first
parents by the lips of Raphael:
When from the Earth appeared
The tawny lion, pawing to get free
His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds,
And rampant shakes his brinded mane.
And withal, how compact the poem, how perfect the drama. It is Paradise,
perfect in beauty and holiness; attacked with devilish art; in danger;
betrayed; lost!
Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked and ate;
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe
That all was lost!
Unit-like, complete, brilliant, sublime, awful, the poem dazzles
criticism, and belittles the critic. It is the grandest poem ever written.
It almost sets up a competition with Scripture. Milton's Adam and Eve walk
before us instead of the Adam and Eve of Genesis. Milton's Satan usurps
the place of that grotesque, malignant spirit of the Bible, which, instead
of claiming our admiration, excites only our horror, as he goes about like
a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. He it is who can declare
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be?
MILTON AND DANTE.--It has been usual for the literary critic to compare
Milton and Dante; and it is certain that in the conception, at least, of
his great themes, Milton took Dante for his guide. Without an odious
comparison, and conceding the great value, principally historical, of the
_Divina Commedia_, it must be said that the palm remains with the English
poet. Take, for a single illustration, the fall of the arch-fiend. Dante's
Lucifer falls with such force that he makes a conical hole in the earth to
its centre, and forces out a hill on the other side--a physical
prediction, as the antipodes had not yet been established. The cavity is
the seat of Hell; and the mountain, that of Purgatory. So mathematical is
his fancy, that in vignette illustrations we have right-lined drawings of
these surfaces and their different circles. Science had indeed progressed
in Milton's time, but his imagination scorns its aid; everything is with
him grandly ideal, as well as rhetorically harmonious:
... Him the Almighty power,
Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal power,
Who durst defy th' Omnipotent in arms.
And when a lesser spirit falls, what a sad AEolian melody describes the
downward flight:
... How he fell
From Heaven they fabled thrown by angry Jove,
Sheer o'er the crystal battlements: from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve
A summer's day; and with the setting sun,
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star.
The heavenly colloquies to which we have alluded between the Father and
the Son, involve questions of theology, and present peculiar views--such
as the subordination of the Son, and the relative unimportance of the
third Person of the Blessed Trinity. They establish Milton's Arianism
almost as completely as his Treatise on Christian Doctrine.
HIS FAULTS.--Grand, far above all human efforts, his poems fail in these
representations. God is a spirit; he is here presented as a body, and that
by an uninspired pen. The poet has not been able to carry us up to those
infinite heights, and so his attempt only ends in a humanitarian
philosophy: he has been obliged to lower the whole heavenly hierarchy to
bring it within the scope of our objective comprehension. He blinds our
poor eyes by the dazzling effulgence of that light which is
... of the Eternal co-eternal beam.
And it must be asserted that in this attempt Milton has done injury to the
cause of religion, however much he has vindicated the power of the human
intellect and the compass of the human imagination. He has made sensuous
that which was entirely spiritual, and has attempted with finite powers to
realize the Infinite.
The fault is not so great when he delineates created intelligences,
ranging from the highest seraph to him who was only "less than archangel
ruined." We gaze, unreproved by conscience, at the rapid rise of
Pandemonium; we watch with eager interest the hellish crew as they "open
into the hill a spacious wound, and dig out ribs of gold." We admire the
fabric which springs
... like an exhalation, with the sound
Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet.
Nothing can be grander or more articulately realized than that arched
roof, from which,
Pendent by subtle magic, many a row
Of starry lamps and blazing cressets, fed
With naphtha and asphaltus, yields the light
As from a sky.
It is an illustrative criticism that while the painter's art has seized
these scenes, not one has dared to attempt his heavenly descriptions with
the pencil. Art is less bold or more reverent than poetry, and rebukes the
poet.
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AGE.--And here it is particularly to our purpose to
observe, that in this very boldness of entrance into the holy of
holies--in this attempted grasp with finite hands of infinite things,
Milton was but a sublimated type of his age, and of the Commonwealth, when
man, struggling for political freedom, went, as in the later age of the
French Illuminati, too far in the regions of spirit and of faith. As
Dante, with a powerful satire, filled his poem with the personages of the
day, assigning his enemies to the _girone_ of the Inferno, so Milton vents
his gentler spleen by placing cowls and hood and habits in the limbo of
vanity and paradise of fools:
... all these upwhirled aloft
Fly o'er the backside of the world far off,
Into a limbo large and broad, since called
The paradise of fools.
It was a setting forth of that spirit which, when the Cavaliers were many
of them formalists, and the Puritans many of them fanatics, led to the
rise of many sects, and caused rude soldiers to bellow their own riotous
fancies from the pulpit. In the suddenness of change, when the earthly
throne had been destroyed, men misconceived what was due to the heavenly;
the fancy which had been before curbed by an awe for authority, and was
too ignorant to move without it, now revelled unrebuked among the
mysteries which are not revealed to angelic vision, and thus "fools rushed
in where angels fear to tread."
The book could not fail to bring him immense fame, but personally he
received very little for it in money--less than L20.
PARADISE REGAINED.--It was Thomas Ellwood, Milton's Quaker friend, who,
after reading the _Paradise Lost_, suggested the _Paradise Regained_. This
poem will bear no comparison with its great companion. It may, without
irreverence, be called "The gospel according to John Milton." Beauties it
does contain; but the very foundation of it is false. Milton makes man
regain Paradise by the success of Christ in withstanding the Devil's
temptations in the wilderness; a new presentation of his Arian theology,
which is quite transcendental; whereas, in our opinion, the gate of
Paradise was opened only "by His precious death and burial; His glorious
resurrection and ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost." But if
it is immeasurably inferior in its conception and treatment, it is quite
equal to the _Paradise Lost_ in its execution.
A few words as to Milton's vocabulary and style must close our notice of
this greatest of English poets. With regard to the first, the Latin
element, which is so manifest in his prose works, largely predominates in
his poems, but accords better with the poetic license. In a list of
authors which Mr. Marsh has prepared, down to Milton's time, which
includes an analysis of the sixth book of the _Paradise Lost_, he is found
to employ only eighty per cent. of Anglo-Saxon words--less than any up to
that day. But his words are chosen with a delicacy of taste and ear which
astonishes and delights; his works are full of an adaptive harmony, the
suiting of sound to sense. His rhythm is perfect. We have not space for
extended illustrations, but the reader will notice this in the lady's song
in Comus--the address to
Sweet Echo, sweeter nymph that liv'st unseen
Within thy airy shell,
By slow Meander's margent green!
* * * * *
Sweet queen of parley, daughter of the sphere,
So may'st thou be translated to the skies,
And give resounding grace to all heaven's harmonies.
And again, the description of Chastity, in the same poem, is inimitable in
the language:
So dear to Heaven is saintly Chastity,
That when a soul is found sincerely so,
A thousand liveried angels lackey her.
HIS SCHOLARSHIP.--It is unnecessary to state the well-known fact, attested
by all his works, of his elegant and versatile scholarship. He was the
most learned man in England in his day. If, like J. C. Scaliger, he did
not commit Homer to memory in twenty-one days, and the whole of the Greek
poets in three months, he had all classical learning literally at his
fingers' ends, and his works are absolutely glistening with drops which
show that every one has been dipped in that Castalian fountain which, it
was fabled, changed the earthly flowers of the mind into immortal jewels.
Nor need we refer to what every one concedes, that a vein of pure but
austere morals runs through all his works; but Puritan as he was, his
myriad fancy led him into places which Puritanism abjured: the cloisters,
with their dim religious light, in _Il Penseroso_--and anon with mirth he
cries:
Come and trip it as you go,
On the light fantastic toe.
SONNETS.--His sonnets have been variously estimated: they are not as
polished as his other poems, but are crystal-like and sententious, abrupt
bursts of opinion and feeling in fourteen lines. Their masculine power it
was which caused Wordsworth, himself a prince of sonneteers, to say:
In his hand,
The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew
Soul-animating strains....
That to his dead wife, whom he saw in a vision; that to Cyriac Skinner on
his blindness, and that to the persecuted Waldenses, are the most known
and appreciated. That to Skinner is a noble assertion of heart and hope:
Cyriac, this three-years-day these eyes, though clear
To outward view, of blemish and of spot,
Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot:
Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear
Of sun, or moon, or star, throughout the year,
Or man, or woman. Yet I argue not
Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer
Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience friend to have lost them over-plied
In liberty's defence, my noble task,
Of which all Europe talks from side to side,
This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask
Content, though blind, had I no better guide.
Milton died in 1674, of gout, which had long afflicted him; and he left
his name and works to posterity. Posterity has done large but mistaken
justice to his fame. Men have not discriminated between his real merits
and his faults: all parties have conceded the former, and conspired to
conceal the latter. A just statement of both will still establish his
great fame on the immutable foundations of truth--a fame, the honest
pursuit of which caused him, throughout his long life,
To scorn delights, and live laborious days.
No writer has ever been the subject of more uncritical, ignorant, and
senseless panegyric: like Bacon, he is lauded by men who never read his
works, and are entirely ignorant of the true foundation of his fame. Nay,
more; partisanship becomes very warlike, and we are reminded in this
controversy of the Italian gentleman, who fought three duels in
maintaining that Ariosto was a better poet than Tasso: in the third he was
mortally wounded, and he confessed before dying that he had never read a
line of either. A similar logomachy has marked the course of Milton's
champions; words like sharp swords have been wielded by ignorance, and
have injured the poet's true fame.
He now stands before the world, not only as the greatest English poet,
except Shakspeare, but also as the most remarkable example and
illustration of the theory we have adopted, that literature is a very
vivid and permanent interpreter of contemporary history. To those who ask
for a philosophic summary of the age of Charles I. and Cromwell, the
answer may be justly given: "Study the works of John Milton, and you will
find it."
CHAPTER XX.
COWLEY, BUTLER, AND WALTON.
Cowley and Milton. Cowley's Life and Works. His Fame. Butler's Career.
Hudibras. His Poverty and Death. Izaak Walton. The Angler; and Lives.
Other Writers.
COWLEY AND MILTON.
In contrast with Milton, in his own age, both in political tenets and in
the character of his poetry, stood Cowley, the poetical champion of the
party of king and cavaliers during the civil war. Historically he belongs
to two periods--antecedent and consequent--that of the rebellion itself,
and that of the Restoration: the latter was a reaction from the former, in
which the masses changed their opinions, in which the Puritan leaders were
silenced, and in which the constant and consistent Cavaliers had their day
of triumph. Both parties, however, modified their views somewhat after the
whirlwind of excitement had swept by, and both deprecated the extreme
violence of their former actions. This is cleverly set forth in a charming
paper of Lord Macaulay, entitled _Cowley and Milton_. It purports to be
the report of a pleasant colloquy between the two in the spring of 1665,
"set down by a gentleman of the Middle Temple." Their principles are
courteously expressed, in a retrospective view of the great rebellion.
COWLEY'S LIFE AND WORKS.--Abraham Cowley, the posthumous son of a grocer,
was born in London, in the year 1618. He is said to have been so
precocious that he read Spenser with pleasure when he was twelve years
old; and he published a volume of poems, entitled "Poetical Blossoms,"
before he was fifteen. After a preliminary education at Westminster
school, he was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1636, and while
there he published, in 1638, two comedies, one in English, entitled
_Love's Riddle_, and one in Latin, _Naufragium Joculare, or, The Merry
Shipwreck_.
When the troubles which culminated in the civil war began to convulse
England, Cowley, who was a strong adherent of the king, was compelled to
leave Cambridge; and we find him, when the war had fairly opened, at
Oxford, where he was well received by the Royal party, in 1643. He
vindicated the justice of this reception by publishing in that year a
satire called _Puritan and Papist_. Upon the retirement of the queen to
Paris, he was one of her suite, and as secretary to Viscount St. Albans he
conducted the correspondence in cipher between the queen and her
unfortunate husband.
He remained abroad during the civil war and the protectorate, returning
with Charles II. in 1660. "The Blessed Restoration" he celebrated in an
ode with that title, and would seem to have thus established a claim to
the king's gratitude and bounty. But he was mistaken. Perhaps this led him
to write a comedy, entitled _The Cutter of Coleman Street_, in which he
severely censured the license and debaucheries of the court: this made the
arch-debauchee, the king himself, cold toward the poet, who at once issued
_A Complaint_; but neither satire nor complaint helped him to the desired
preferment. He quitted London a disappointed man, and retired to the
country, where he died on the 28th of July, 1667.
His poems bear the impress of the age in a remarkable degree. His
_Mistress, or, Love Verses_, and his other Anacreontics or paraphrases of
Anacreon's odes, were eminently to the taste of the luxurious and immoral
court of Charles II. His _Davideis_ is an heroic poem on the troubles of
King David.
His _Poem on the Late Civil War_, which was not published until 1679,
twelve years after his death, is written in the interests of the monarchy.
His varied learning gave a wide range to his pen. In 1661 appeared his
_Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy_, which was
followed in the next year by _Two Books of Plants_, which he increased to
six books afterward--devoting two to herbs, two to flowers, and two to
trees. If he does not appear in them to be profound in botanical
researches, it was justly said by Dr. Johnson that in his mind "botany
turned into poetry."
His prose pen was as ready, versatile, and charming as his poetic pencil.
He produced discourses or essays on commonplace topics of general
interest, such as _myself; the shortness of life; the uncertainty of
riches; the danger of procrastination_, etc. These are well written, in
easy-flowing language, evincing his poetic nature, and many of them are
more truly poetic than his metrical pieces.
HIS FAME.--Cowley had all his good things in his lifetime; he was the most
popular poet in England, and is the best illustration of the literary
taste of his age. His poetry is like water rippling in the sunlight,
brilliant but dazzling and painful: it bewilders with far-fetched and
witty conceits: varied but full of art, there is little of nature or real
passion to be found even in his amatory verses. He suited the taste of a
court which preferred an epigram to a proverb, and a repartee to an
apothegm; and, as a consequence, with the growth of a better culture and a
better taste, he has steadily declined in favor, so that at the present
day he is scarcely read at all. Two authoritative opinions mark the
history of this decline: Milton, in his own day, placed him with Spenser
and Shakspeare as one of the three greatest English poets; while Pope, not
much more than half a century later, asks:
Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit.
Still later, Dr. Johnson gives him the credit of having been the first to
master the Pindaric ode in English; while Cowper expresses, in his Task,
regret that his "splendid wit" should have been
Entangled in the cobwebs of the schools.
But if he is neglected in the present day as a household poet, he stands
prominently forth to the literary student as an historic personage of no
mean rank, a type and representative of his age, country, and social
conditions.
SAMUEL BUTLER.
BUTLER'S CAREER.--The author of Hudibras, a satirical poem which may as
justly be called a comic history of England as any of those written in
prose in more modern times, was born in Worcestershire, on the 8th of
February, 1612. The son of poor parents, he received his education at a
grammar school. Some, who have desired to magnify his learning, have said
that he was for a time a student at Cambridge; but the chronicler Aubrey,
who knew him well, denies this. He was learned, but this was due to the
ardor with which he pursued his studies, when he was clerk to Mr.
Jeffreys, an eminent justice of the peace, and as an inmate of the mansion
of the Countess of Kent, in whose fine library he was associated with the
accomplished Selden.
We next find him domiciled with Sir Samuel Luke, a Presbyterian and a
parliamentary soldier, in whose household he saw and noted those
characteristics of the Puritans which he afterward ridiculed so severely
in his great poem, a poem which he was quietly engaged in writing during
the protectorate of Cromwell, in hope of the coming of a day when it could
be issued to the world.
This hope was fulfilled by the Restoration. In the new order he was
appointed secretary to the Earl of Carbery, and steward of Ludlow Castle;
and he also increased his frugal fortunes by marrying a widow, Mrs.
Herbert, whose means, however, were soon lost by bad investments.
HUDIBRAS.--The only work of merit which Butler produced was _Hudibras_.
This was published in three parts: the first appeared in 1663, the second
in 1664, and the third not until 1678. Even then it was left unfinished;
but as the interest in the third part seems to flag, it is probable that
the author did not intend to complete it. His death, two years later,
however, settled the question.
The general idea of the poem is taken from Don Quixote. As in that
immortal work, there are two heroes. Sir Hudibras, corresponding to the
Don, is a Presbyterian justice of the peace, whose features are said to
have been copied from those of the poet's former employer, Sir Samuel
Luke. For this, Butler has been accused of ingratitude, but the nature of
their connection does not seem to have been such as to warrant the charge.
Ralph the squire, the humble Sancho of the poem, is a cross-grained
dogmatic Independent.
These two the poet sends forth, as a knight-errant with a squire, to
correct existing abuses of all kinds--political, religious, and
scientific. The plot is rambling and disconnected, but the author
contrives to go over the whole ground of English history in his inimitable
burlesque. Unlike Cervantes, who makes his reader always sympathize with
his foolish heroes, Butler brings his knight and squire into supreme
contempt; he lashes the two hundred religious sects of the day, and
attacks with matchless ridicule all the Puritan positions. The poem is
directly historical in its statement of events, tenets, and factions, and
in its protracted religious discussions: it is indirectly historical in
that it shows how this ridicule of the Puritans, only four years after the
death of Cromwell, delighted the merry monarch and his vicious court, and
was greatly acceptable to the large majority of the English people. This
fact marks the suddenness of the historic change from the influence of
Puritanism to that of the restored Stuarts.
Hudibras is written in octosyllabic verse, frequently not rising above
doggerel: it is full of verbal "quips and cranks and wanton wiles:" in
parts it is eminently epigrammatic, and many of its happiest couplets seem
to have been dashed off without effort. Walpole calls Butler "the Hogarth
of poetry;" and we know that Hogarth illustrated Hudibras. The comparison
is not inapt, but the pictorial element in Hudibras is not its best claim
to our praise. This is found in its string of proverbs and maxims
elucidating human nature, and set forth in such terse language that we are
inclined to use them thus in preference to any other form of expression.
Hudibras is the very prince of _burlesques_; it stands alone of its kind,
and still retains its popularity. Although there is much that belongs to
the age, and much that is of only local interest, it is still read to find
apt quotations, of which not a few have become hackneyed by constant use.
With these, pages might be filled; all readers will recognize the
following:
He speaks of the knight thus:
On either side he would dispute,
Confute, change hands, and still confute:
* * * * *
For rhetoric, he could not ope
His mouth but out there flew a trope.
Again: he refers, in speaking of religious characters, to
Such as do build their faith upon
The holy text of pike and gun,
And prove their doctrine orthodox,
By apostolic blows and knocks;
Compound for sins they are inclined to
By damning those they have no mind to.
Few persons of the present generation have patience to read Hudibras
through. Allibone says "it is a work to be studied once and gleaned
occasionally." Most are content to glean frequently, and not to study at
all.
HIS POVERTY AND DEATH.--Butler lived in great poverty, being neglected by
a monarch and a court for whose amusement he had done so much. They
laughed at the jester, and let him starve. Indeed, he seems to have had
few friends; and this is accounted for quaintly by Aubrey, who says:
"Satirical wits disoblige whom they converse with, and consequently make
to themselves many enemies, and few friends; and this was his manner and
case."
The best known of his works, after Hudibras, is the _Elephant in the
Moon_, a satire on the Royal Society.
It is significant of the popularity of Hudibras, that numerous imitations
of it have been written from his day to ours.
Butler died on the 25th of September, 1680. Sixty years after, the hand of
private friendship erected a monument to him in Westminster Abbey. The
friend was John Barber, Lord Mayor of London, whose object is thus stated:
"That he who was destitute of all things when alive, might not want a
monument when he was dead." Upon the occasion of erecting this, Samuel
Wesley wrote:
While Butler, needy wretch, was yet alive,
No generous patron would a dinner give;
See him, when starved to death and turned to dust,
Presented with a monumental bust.
The poet's fate is here in emblem shown,
He asked for bread, and he received a stone.
To his own age he was the prince of jesters; to English literature he has
given its best illustration of the burlesque in rhetoric. To the reader of
the present day he presents rare historical pictures of his day, of far
greater value than his wit or his burlesque.
IZAAK WALTON.
If men are to be measured by their permanent popularity, Walton deserves
an enthusiastic mention in literary annals, not for the greatness of his
achievements, but for his having touched a chord in the human heart which
still vibrates without hint of cessation wherever English is spoken.
Izaak Walton was born at Stafford, on the 9th of August, 1593. In his
earlier life he was a linen-draper, but he had made enough for his frugal
wants by his shop to enable him to retire from business in 1643, and then
he quietly assumed a position as _pontifex piscatorum_. His fishing-rod
was a sceptre which he swayed unrivalled for forty years. He gathered
about him in his house and on the borders of fishing streams an admiring
and congenial circle, principally of the clergy, who felt it a privilege
to honor the retired linen-draper. There must have been a peculiar charm,
a personal magnetism about him, which has also imbued his works. His first
wife was Rachel Floud, a descendant of the ill-fated Cranmer; and his
second was Anne Ken, the half-sister of the saintly Bishop Ken. Whatever
may have been his deficiencies of early education, he was so constant and
varied a reader that he made amends for these.
THE COMPLETE ANGLER.--His first and most popular work was _The Complete
Angler, or, The Contemplative Man's Recreation_. It has been the delight
of all sorts of people since, and has gone through more than forty
respectable editions in England, besides many in America. Many of these
editions are splendidly illustrated and sumptuous. The dialogues are
pleasant and natural, and his enthusiasm for the art of angling is quite
contagious.
HIS LIVES.--Nor is Walton less esteemed by a smaller but more appreciative
circle for his beautiful and finished biographies or _Lives_ of Dr.
Donne, Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Bishop Robert
Sanderson.
Here Walton has bestowed and received fame: the simple but exquisite
portraitures of these holy and worthy men have made them familiar to
posterity; and they, in turn, by the virtues which Walton's pen has made
manifest, have given distinction to the hand which portrayed them.
Walton's good life was lengthened out to fourscore and ten. He died at the
residence of his son-in-law, the Reverend William Hawkins, prebendary of
Winchester Cathedral, in 1683. Bishop Jebb has judiciously said of his
_Lives_: "They not only do ample justice to individual piety and learning,
but throw a mild and cheerful light upon the manners of an interesting
age, as well as upon the venerable features of our mother Church." Less,
however, than any of his contemporaries can Walton be appreciated by a
sketch of the man: his works must be read, and their spirit imbibed, in
order to know his worth.
OTHER WRITERS OF THE AGE.
George Wither, born in Hampshire, June 11, 1588, died May 2, 1667: he was
a voluminous and versatile writer. His chief work is _The Shepherd's
Hunting_, which, with beautiful descriptions of rural life, abounds in
those strained efforts at wit and curious conceits, which were acceptable
to the age, but which have lost their charm in a more sensible and
philosophic age. Wither was a Parliament man, and was imprisoned and
ill-treated after the Restoration. He, and most of those who follow, were
classed by Dr. Johnson as _metaphysical poets_.
Francis Quarles, 1592-1644: he was a Royalist, but belongs to the literary
school of Withers. He is best known by his collection of moral and
religious poems, called _Divine Emblems_, which were accompanied with
quaint engraved illustrations. These allegories are full of unnatural
conceits, and are many of them borrowed from an older source. He was
immensely popular as a poet in his own day, and there was truth in the
statement of Horace Walpole, that "Milton was forced to wait till the
world had done admiring Quarles."
George Herbert, 1593-1632: a man of birth and station, Herbert entered the
Church, and as the incumbent of the living at Bemerton, he illustrated in
his own piety and devotion "the beauty of holiness." Conscientious and
self-denying in his parish work, he found time to give forth those devout
breathings which in harmony of expression, fervor of piety, and simplicity
of thought, have been a goodly heritage to the Church ever since, while
they still retain some of those "poetical surprises" which mark the
literary taste of the age. His principal work is _The Temple, or, Sacred
Poems and Private Ejaculations_. The short lyrics which form the stones of
this temple are upon the rites and ceremonies of the Church and other
sacred subjects: many of them are still in great favor, and will always
be. In his portraiture of the _Good Parson_, he paints himself. He
magnifies the office, and he fulfilled all the requirements he has laid
down.
Robert Herrick, 1591-1674: like Herbert, Herrick was a clergyman, but,
unlike Herbert, he was not a holy man. He wrote Anacreontic poems, full of
wine and love, and appears to us like a reveller masking in a surplice.
Being a cavalier in sentiment, he was ejected from his vicarage in 1648,
and went to London, where he assumed the lay habit. In 1647 he published
_Hesperides_, a collection of small poems of great lyric beauty,
Anacreontic, pastoral, and amatory, but containing much that is coarse and
indelicate. In 1648 he in part atoned for these by publishing his _Noble
Numbers_, a collection of pious pieces, in the beginning of which he asks
God's forgiveness for his "unbaptized rhymes," "writ in my wild,
unhallowed times." The best comment upon his works may be found in the
words of a reviewer: "Herrick trifled in this way solely in compliment to
the age; whenever he wrote to please himself, he wrote from the heart to
the heart." His _Litanie_ is a noble and beautiful penitential petition.
Sir John Suckling, 1609-1641: a writer of love songs. That by which he is
most favorably known is his exquisite _Ballad upon a Wedding_. He was a
man of versatile talents; an officer in the army of Gustavus Adolphus, and
a captain of horse in the army of Charles I. He wrote several plays, of
which the best are _Aglaura_ and _The Discontented Colonel_. While
evidently tinctured by the spirit of the age, he exceeded his
contemporaries in the purity of his style and manliness of his expression.
His wit is not so forced as theirs.
Edmund Waller, 1605-1687: he was a cousin of John Hampden. By great care
and adroitness he seems to have trimmed between the two parties in the
civil war, but was suspected by both. His poetry was like himself,
artificial and designed to please, but has little depth of sentiment. Like
other poets, he praised Cromwell in 1654 in _A Panegyric_, and welcomed
Charles II. in 1660, upon _His Majesty's Happy Return_. His greatest
benefaction to English poetry was in refining its language and harmonizing
its versification. He has all the conceits and strained wit of the
metaphysical school.
Sir William Davenant, 1605-1668: he was the son of a vintner, but
sometimes claimed to be the natural son of Shakspeare, who was intimate
with his father and mother. An ardent Loyalist, he was imprisoned at the
beginning of the civil war, but escaped to France. He is best known by his
heroic poem _Gondibert_, founded upon the reign of King Aribert of
Lombardy, in the seventh century. The French taste which he brought back
from his exile, is shown in his own dramas, and in his efforts to restore
the theatre at the Restoration. His best plays are the _Cruel Brother_ and
_The Law against Lovers_. He was knighted by Charles I., and succeeded Ben
Jonson as poet laureate. On his monument in Westminster Abbey are these
words: "O rare Sir William Davenant."
Charles Cotton, 1630-1687: he was a wit and a poet, and is best known as
the friend of Izaak Walton. He made an addition to _Walton's Complete
Angler_, which is found in all the later editions. The companion of Walton
in his fishing excursions on the river Dove, Cotton addressed many of his
poems to his "Adopted Father." He made travesties upon Virgil and Lucian,
which are characterized by great licentiousness; and wrote a gossiping and
humorous _Voyage to Ireland_.
Henry Vaughan, 1614-1695: he was called the _Silurist_, from his residence
in Wales, the country of the Silures. He is favorably known by the _Silex
Scintillans, or, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations_. With a rigid
religious tone, he has all the attempt at rhetorical effect which mark the
metaphysical school, but his language is harsher and more rugged. He has
more heart than most of his colleagues, and extracts of great terseness
and beauty are still made from his poems. He reproves the corruptions of
the age, and while acknowledging an indebtedness, he gives us a clue to
his inspiration: "The first, that with any effectual success attempted a
diversion of this foul and overflowing stream, was that blessed man, Mr.
George Herbert, whose holy life and verse gained many pious converts, of
whom I am the least."
The Earl of Clarendon, 1608-1674: Edward Hyde, afterward the Earl of
Clarendon, played a conspicuous part in the history of England during his
life, and also wrote a history of that period, which, although in the
interests of the king's party, is an invaluable key to a knowledge of
English life during the rebellion and just after the Restoration. A
member of parliament in 1640, he rose rapidly in favor with the king, and
was knighted in 1643. He left England in charge of the Prince of Wales in
1646, and at once began his History of the Great Rebellion, which was to
occupy him for many years before its completion. After the death of
Charles I., he was the companion of his son's exile, and often without
means for himself and his royal master, he was chancellor of the
exchequer. At the Restoration in 1660, Sir Edward Hyde was created Earl of
Clarendon, and entered upon the real duties of his office. He retained his
place for seven years, but became disagreeable to Charles as a troublesome
monitor, and at the same time incurred the hatred of the people. In 1667
he was accused of high treason, and made his escape to France. Neglected
by his master, ignored by the French monarch, he wandered about in France,
from time to time petitioning his king to permit him to return and die in
England, but without success. Seven years of exile, which he reminded the
king "was a time prescribed and limited by God himself for the expiation
of some of his greatest judgments," passed by, and the ex-chancellor died
at Rouen. He had begun his history in exile as the faithful servant of a
dethroned prince; he ended it in exile, as the cast-off servant of an
ungrateful monarch. As a writer of contemporary history, Clarendon has
given us the form and color of the time. The book is in title and handling
a Royalist history. Its faults are manifest: first those of partisanship;
and secondly, those which spring from his absence, so that much of the
work was written without an observant knowledge. His delineation of
character is wonderful: the men of the times are more pictorially
displayed than in the portraits of Van Dyk. The style is somewhat too
pompous, being more that of the orator than of the historian, and
containing long and parenthetic periods. Sir Walter Scott says: "His
characters may match those of the ancient historians, and one thinks he
would know the very men if he were to meet them in society." Macaulay
concedes to him a strong sense of moral and religious obligation, a
sincere reverence for the laws of his country, and a conscientious regard
for the honor and interests of the crown; but adds that "his temper was
sour, arrogant, and impatient of opposition." No one can rightly
understand the great rebellion without reading Clarendon's history of it.
CHAPTER XXI.
DRYDEN, AND THE RESTORED STUARTS.
The Court of Charles II. Dryden's Early Life. The Death of Cromwell.
The Restoration. Dryden's Tribute. Annus Mirabilis. Absalom and
Achitophel. The Death of Charles. Dryden's Conversion. Dryden's Fall.
His Odes.
THE COURT OF CHARLES II.
The antithetic literature which takes its coloring from the great
rebellion, was now to give place to new forms not immediately connected
with it, but incident to the Restoration. Puritanism was now to be
oppressed, and the country was to be governed, under a show of
constitutional right, more arbitrarily than ever before. The moral
rebound, too, was tremendous; the debaucheries of the cavaliers of Charles
I. were as nothing in comparison with the lewdness and filth of the court
of Charles II. To say that he brought in French fashions and customs, is
to do injustice to the French: there never was a viler court in Europe
than his own. It is but in accordance with our historical theory that the
literature should partake of and represent the new condition of things;
and the most remarkable illustrations of this are to be found in the works
of Dryden.
It may indeed with truth be said that we have now reached the most
absolute of the literary types of English history. There was no great
event, political or social, which is not mirrored in his poems; no
sentiment or caprice of the age which does not there find expression; no
kingly whim which he did not prostitute his great powers to gratify; no
change of creed, political or religious, of which he was not the
recorder--few indeed, where royal favor was concerned, to which he was not
the convert. To review the life of Dryden himself, is therefore to enter
into the chronicle and philosophy of the times in which he lived. With
this view, we shall dwell at some length upon his character and works.
EARLY LIFE.--Dryden was born on the 10th of August, 1631, and died on the
1st of May, 1700. He lived, therefore, during the reign of Charles I., the
interregnum of Parliament, the protectorate of Cromwell, the restoration
and reign of Charles II., and the reign of James II.; he saw and suffered
from the accession of William and Mary--a wonderful and varied volume in
English history. And of all these Dryden was, more than any other man, the
literary type. He was of a good family, and was educated at Westminster
and Cambridge, where he gave early proofs of his literary talents.
His father, a zealous Presbyterian, had reared his children in his own
tenets; we are not therefore astonished to find that his earliest poetical
efforts are in accordance with the political conditions of the day. He
settled in London, under the protection of his kinsman, Sir Gilbert
Pickering, who was afterward one of the king's judges in 1649, and one of
the council of eight who controlled the kingdom after Charles lost his
head. As secretary to Sir Gilbert, young Dryden learned to scan the
political horizon, and to aspire to preferment.
CROMWELL'S DEATH, AND DRYDEN'S MONODY.--But those who had depended upon
Cromwell, forgot that he was not England, and that his breath was in his
nostrils. The time of his departure was at hand. He had been offered the
crown (April 9, 1656,) by a subservient parliament, and wanted it; but his
friends and family opposed his taking it; and the officers of the army,
influenced by Pride, sent such a petition against it, that he felt obliged
to refuse it. After months of mental anxiety and nervous torture--fearing
assassination, keeping arms under his pillow, never sleeping above three
nights together in the same chamber, disappointed that even after all his
achievements, and with all his cunning efforts, he had been unable to put
on the crown, and to be numbered among the English sovereigns--Cromwell
died in 1658, leaving his title as Lord Protector to his son Richard, a
weak and indolent man, who, after seven months' rule, fled the kingdom at
the Restoration, to return after a generation had passed away, a very old
man, to die in his native land. The people of Hertfordshire knew Richard
Cromwell as the excellent and benevolent Mr. Clarke.
Very soon after the death of Oliver Cromwell, Dryden, not yet foreseeing
the Restoration, presented his tribute to the Commonwealth, in the shape
of "Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell; written after his
funeral." A few stanzas will show his political principles, and are in
strange contrast with what was soon to follow:
How shall I then begin, or where conclude,
To draw a fame so truly circular?
For, in a round, what order can be showed,
Where all the parts so equal perfect are?
He made us freemen of the continent,
Whom nature did like captives treat before;
To nobler preys the English lion sent,
And taught him first in Belgian walks to roar.
His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest;
His name a great example stands, to show
How strangely high endeavors may be blest,
Where piety and valor jointly go.
THE RESTORATION.--Cromwell died in September: early in the next year these
stanzas were written. One year later was the witness of a great event,
which stirred England to its very depths, because it gave vent to
sentiments for some time past cherished but concealed. The Long Parliament
was dissolved on the 10th of March, 1660. The new parliament meets April
25th; it is almost entirely of Royalist opinions; it receives Sir John
Granville, the king's messenger, with loud acclamations; the old lords
come forth once more in velvet, ermine, and lawn. It is proclaimed that
General Monk, the representative of the army, soon to be Duke of
Albemarle, has gone from St. Albans to Dover,
To welcome home again discarded faith.
The strong are as tow, and the maker as a spark. From the house of every
citizen, lately vocal with the praises of the Protector, issues a subject
ready to welcome his king with the most enthusiastic loyalty.
Royal proclamations follow each other in rapid succession: at length the
eventful day has come--the 29th of May, 1660. All the bells of London are
ringing their merriest chimes; the streets are thronged with citizens in
holiday attire; the guilds of work and trade are out in their uniforms;
the army, late the organ of Cromwell, is drawn up on Black Heath, and is
cracking its myriad throat with cheers. In the words of Master Roger
Wildrake, "There were bonfires flaming, music playing, rumps roasting,
healths drinking; London in a blaze of light from the Strand to
Rotherhithe." At length the sound of herald trumpets is heard; the king is
coming; a cry bursts forth which the London echoes have almost forgotten:
"God save the king! The king enjoys his own again!"
It seems to the dispassionate reader almost incredible that the English
people, who shed his father's blood, who rallied round the Parliament, and
were fulsome in their praises of the Protector, should thus suddenly
change; but, allowing for "the madness of the people," we look for
strength and consistency to the men of learning and letters. We feel sure
that he who sang his eulogy of Cromwell dead, can have now no lyric burst
for the returning Stuart. We are disappointed.
DRYDEN'S TRIBUTE.--The first poetic garland thrown at the feet of the
restored king was Dryden's _Astraea Redux_, a poem on _The happy
restoration of his sacred majesty Charles II._ To give it classic force,
he quotes from the Pollio as a text.
Jam redit et virgo, redeunt saturnia regna;
thus hailing the saturnian times of James I. and Charles I. A few lines of
the poem complete the curious contrast:
While our cross stars deny us Charles his bed,
Whom our first flames and virgin love did wed,
For his long absence church and state did groan;
Madness the pulpit, faction seized the throne.
* * * * *
How great were then our Charles his woes, who thus
Was forced to suffer for himself and us.
* * * * *
Oh happy prince whom Heaven hath taught the way,
By paying vows to have more vows to pay:
Oh happy age! oh, times like those alone
By Fate reserved for great Augustus' throne,
When the joint growth of arts and arms foreshow
The world a monarch, and that monarch you!
The contrast assumes a clearer significance, if we remember that the real
time which elapsed between the publications of these two poems was less
than two years.
This is greatly to Dryden's shame, as it is to Waller's, who did the same
thing; but it must be clearly pointed out that in this the poets were
really a type of all England, for whose suffrages they wrote thus. From
this time the career of Dryden was intimately associated with that of the
restored king. He wrote an ode for the coronation in 1661, and a poetical
tribute to Clarendon, the Lord High Chancellor, the king's better self.
To Dryden, as a writer of plays, we shall recur in a later chapter, when
the other dramatists of the age will be considered.
A concurrence of unusual events in 1665, brought forth the next year the
"Annus Mirabilis," or _Wonderful Year_, in which these events are recorded
with the minuteness of a chronicle. This is indeed its chief value; for,
praised as it was at the time, it does not so well bear the analysis of
modern criticism.
ANNUS MIRABILIS.--It describes the great naval battle with the Dutch; the
fire of London; and the ravages of the plague. The detail with which these
are described, and the frequent felicity of expression, are the chief
charm of the poem. In the refreshingly simple diary of Pepy's, we find
this jotting under date of 3d February, 1666-7: "_Annus Mirabilis_. I am
very well pleased this night with reading a poem I brought home with me
last night from Westminster Hall, of Dryden's, upon the present war: a
very good poem."
Dryden's subserviency, aided by the power of his pen, gained its reward.
In 1668, on the death of Sir William Davenant, he was appointed Laureate,
and historiographer to the king, with an annual salary of L200. He soon
became the most famous literary man in England. Milton, the Puritan, was
producing his wonderful visions in darkened retirement, while at court, or
in the seat of honor on the stage, or in his sacred chair at Will's
Coffee-house in Covent Garden (near the fire-place in winter, and carried
into the balcony in summer), "Glorious John" was the observed of all
observers. Of Will's Coffee-house, Congreve says, in _Love for Love_, "Oh,
confound that Will's Coffee-house; it has ruined more young men than the
Royal Oak Lottery:" this speaks at once of the fashion and social license
of the time.
Charles II. was happy to have so fluent a pen, to lampoon or satirize his
enemies, or to make indecent comedies for his amusement; while Dryden's
aim seems to have been scarcely higher than preferment at court and
honored contemporary notoriety for his genius. But if the great majority
lauded and flattered him, he was not without his share in those quarrels
of authors, which were carried on at that day not only with goose-quills,
but with swords and bludgeons. It is recorded that he was once waylaid by
the hired ruffians of the Earl of Rochester, and beaten almost to death:
these broils generally had a political as well as a social significance.
In his quarrels with the literary men, he used the shafts of satire. His
contest with Thomas Shadwell has been preserved in his satire called
McFlecknoe. Flecknoe was an Irish priest who wrote dull plays; and in this
poem Dryden proposes Shadwell as his successor on the throne of dulness.
It was the model or suggester of Pope's _Dunciad_; but the model is by no
means equal to the copy.
ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL.--Nothing which he had yet written is so true an
index to the political history as his "Absalom and Achitophel," which he
published in 1681. The history may be given in few words. Charles II. had
a natural son by an obscure woman named Lucy Walters. This boy had been
created Duke of Monmouth. He was put forward by the designing Earl of
Shaftesbury as the head of a faction, and as a rival to the Duke of York.
To ruin the Duke was their first object; and this they attempted by
inflaming the people against his religion, which was Roman Catholic. If
they could thus have him and his heirs put out of the succession to the
throne, Monmouth might be named heir apparent; and Shaftesbury hoped to be
the power behind the throne.
Monmouth was weak, handsome, and vain, and was in truth a puppet in wicked
hands; he was engaged in the Rye-house plot, and schemed not only against
his uncle, but against the person of his father himself. To satirize and
expose these plots and plotters, Dryden (at the instance of the king, it
is said,) wrote _Absalom and Achitophel_, in which are introduced, under
Scripture names, many of the principal political characters of the day,
from the king down to Titus Oates. The number of the names is 61. Charles
is, of course, David, and Monmouth, the wayward son, is Absalom.
Shaftesbury is Achitophel, and Dr. Oates figures as Corah. The Ethnic plot
is the popish plot, and Gath is that land of exile where Charles so long
resided. Strong in his praise of David, the poet is discreet and delicate
in his handling of Absalom; his instinct is as acute as that of Falstaff:
"Beware! instinct, the lion will not touch a true prince," or touch him so
gently that the lion at least will not suffer. Thus, Monmouth is
represented as
Half loath, and half consenting to the ill,
For royal blood within him struggled still;
He thus replied: "And what pretence have I
To take up arms for public liberty?
My father governs with unquestioned right,
The faith's defender and mankind's delight;
Good, gracious, just, observant of the laws,
And heaven by wonders has espoused his cause."
But he may, and does, roundly rate Achitophel, who tempts with satanic
seductions, and proves to the youth, from the Bible, his right to the
succession, peaceably or forcibly obtained. Among those who conspired with
Monmouth were honest hearts seeking for the welfare of the realm. Chief of
these were Lord Russel and Sidney, of whom the latter was in favor of a
commonwealth; and the former, only sought the exclusion of the Roman
Catholic Duke of York, and the redress of grievances, but not the
assassination or deposition of the king. Both fell on the scaffold; but
they have both been considered martyrs in the cause of civil liberty.
And here we must pause to say that in the literary structure, language,
and rhythm of the poem, Dryden had made a great step toward that mastery
of the rhymed pentameter couplet, which is one of his greatest claims to
distinction.
DEATH OF CHARLES.--At length, in 1685, Charles II., after a sudden and
short illness, was gathered to his fathers. His life had been such that
England could not mourn: he had prostituted female honor, and almost
destroyed political virtue; sold English territory and influence to France
for beautiful strumpets; and at the last had been received, on his
death-bed, into, the Roman Catholic Church, while nominally the supreme
head of the Anglican communion. England cannot mourn, but Dryden tortures
language into crocodile tears in his _Threnodia Augustalis, sacred to the
happy memory of King Charles II_. A few lines will exhibit at once the
false statements and the absolute want of a spark of sorrow--dead,
inanimate words, words, words!
Thus long my grief has kept me drunk:
Sure there 's a lethargy in mighty woe;
Tears stand congealed, and cannot flow.
........
Tears for a stroke foreseen, afford relief;
But unprovided for a sudden blow,
Like Niobe, we marble grow,
And petrify with grief!
DRYDEN'S CONVERSION.--The Duke of York succeeded as James II.: he was an
open and bigoted Roman Catholic, who at once blazoned forth the death-bed
conversion of his brother; and who from the first only limited his hopes
to the complete restoration of the realm to popery. Dryden's course was at
once taken; but his instinct was at fault, as but three short years were
to show. He gave in his adhesion to the new king's creed; he who had been
Puritan with the commonwealth, and churchman with the Restoration, became
Roman Catholic with the accession of a popish king. He had written the
_Religio Laici_ to defend the tenets of the Church of England against the
attacks of papists and dissenters; and he now, to leave the world in no
doubt as to his reasons and his honesty, published a poem entitled the
_Hind and Panther_, which might in his earlier phraseology have been
justly styled "The Christian experience of pious John Dryden." It seems a
shameless act, but it is one exponent of the loyalty of that day. There
are some critics who believe him to have been sincere, and who insist that
such a man "is not to be sullied by suspicion that rests on what after all
might prove a fortuitous coincidence." But such frequent changes with the
government--with a reward for each change--tax too far even that charity
which "thinketh no evil." Dryden's pen was eagerly welcomed by the Roman
Catholics. He began to write at once in their interest, and thus to
further his own. Dr. Johnson says: "That conversion will always be
suspected which apparently concerns with interest. He that never finds his
error till it hinders his progress toward wealth or honor, will not be
thought to love truth only for herself."
In this long poem of 2,000 lines, we have the arguments which conducted
the poet to this change. The different beasts represent the different
churches and sects. The Church of Rome is thus represented:
A milk-white hind, immortal and unchanged,
Fed on the lawns, and in the forest ranged;
Without unspotted, innocent within,
She feared no danger, for she knew no sin.
The other beasts were united to destroy her; but she could "venture to
drink with them at the common watering-place under the protection of her
friend the kingly lion."
The Panther is the Church of England:
The Panther, sure the noblest, next the hind,
And fairest creature of the spotted kind;
Oh, could her inborn stains be washed away,
She were too good to be a beast of prey!
Then he Introduces.--
The _Bloody Bear_, an _Independent_ beast; the _Quaking Hare_, for the
_Quakers_; the _Bristled Baptist Boar_.
In this fable, quite in the style of AEsop, we find the Dame, _i.e._, the
Hind, entering into the subtle points of theology, and trying to prove her
position. The poem, as might be supposed; was well received, and perhaps
converted a few to the monarch's faith; for who were able yet to foresee
that the monarch would so abuse his power, as to be driven away from his
throne amid the execrations of his subjects.
The harmony of Dryden and the power of James could control progressive
England no longer. Like one man, the nation rose and uttered a mighty cry
to William of Orange. James, trembling, flies hither and thither, and at
length, fearing the fate of his father, he deserts his throne; the commons
call this desertion abdication, and they give the throne to his nephew
William and his daughter Mary. Such was the end of the restored Stuarts;
and we can have no regret that it is: whatever sympathy we may have had
with the sufferings of Charles I.,--and the English nation shared it, as
is proved by the restoration of his son,--we can have none with his
successors: they threw away their chances; they dissipated the most
enthusiastic loyalty; they squandered opportunities; and had no enemies,
even the bitterest, who were more fatal than themselves. And now it was
manifest that Dryden's day was over. Nor does he shrink from his fate. He
neither sings a Godspeeding ode to the runaway king, nor a salutatory to
the new comers.
DRYDEN'S FALL.--Stripped of his laureate-wreath and all his emoluments, he
does not sit down to fold his hands and repine. Sixty years of age, he
girds up his loins to work manfully for his living. He translates from the
classics; he renders Chaucer into modern English: in 1690 he produced a
play entitled Don Sebastian, which has been considered his dramatic
master-piece, and, as if to inform the world that age had not dimmed the
fire of his genius, he takes as his caption,--
... nec tarda senectus
Debilitat vires animi, mutat que vigorem.
This latter part of his life claims a true sympathy, because he is every
inch a man.
It must not be forgotten that Dryden presented Chaucer to England anew,
after centuries of neglect, almost oblivion; for which the world owes him
a debt of gratitude. This he did by modernizing several of the Canterbury
Tales, and thus leading English scholars to seek the beauties and
instructions of the original. The versions themselves are by no means well
executed, it must be said. He has lost the musical words and fresh diction
of the original, as a single comparison between the two will clearly show.
Perhaps there is no finer description of morning than is contained in
these lines of Chaucer:
The besy lark, the messager of day,
Saleweth in hir song the morwe gray;
And firy Phebus riseth up so bright
That all the orient laugheth of the sight.
How expressive the words: the _busy_ lark; the sun rising like a strong
man; _all the orient_ laughing. The following version by Dryden, loses at
once the freshness of idea and the felicity of phrase:
The morning lark, the messenger of day,
Saluted in her song the morning gray;
And soon the sun arose with beams so bright
That all the horizon laughed to see the joyous sight.
The student will find this only one of many illustrations of the manner
in which Dryden has belittled Chaucer in his versions.
ODES.--Dryden has been regarded as the first who used the heroic couplet
with entire mastery. In his hands it is bold and sometimes rugged, but
always powerful and handled with great ease: he fashioned it for Pope to
polish. Of this, his larger poems are full of proof. But there is another
verse, of irregular rhythm, in which he was even more successful,--lyric
poetry as found in the irregular ode, varying from the short line to the
"Alexandrine dragging its slow length along;" the staccato of a harp
ending in a lengthened flow of melody.
Thus long ago,
Ere heaving billows learned to blow,
While organs yet were mute;
Timotheus to his breathing flute
And sounding lyre
Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire.
When he became a Roman Catholic, St. Cecilia, "inventress of the vocal
frame," became his chief devotion; and the _Song on St. Cecilia's Day_ and
_An Ode to St. Cecilia_, are the principal illustrations of this new
power.
Gray, who was remarkable for his own lyric power, told Dr. Beattie that if
there were any excellence in his own numbers, he had learned it wholly
from Dryden.
The _Ode on St. Cecilia's Day_, also entitled "_Alexander's Feast_," in
which he portrays the power of music in inspiring that famous monarch to
love, pity, and war, has to the scholar the perfect excellence of the best
Greek lyric. It ends with a tribute to St. Cecilia.
At last divine Cecilia came,
Inventress of the vocal frame:
Now let Timotheus yield the prize,
Or both divide the crown.
He raised a mortal to the skies;
She drew an angel down,
Dryden's prose, principally in the form of prefaces and dedications, has
been admired by all critics; and one of the greatest has said, that if he
had turned his attention entirely in that direction, he would have been
_facile princeps_ among the prose writers of his day. He has, in general
terms, the merit of being the greatest refiner of the English language,
and of having given system and strength to English poetry above any writer
up to his day; but more than all, his works are a transcript of English
history--political, religious, and social--as valuable as those of any
professed historian. Dryden married Lady Elizabeth Howard, the daughter of
an earl, who, it is said, was not a congenial companion, and who
afterwards became insane. He died from a gangrene in the foot. He declared
that he died in the profession of the Roman Catholic faith; which raises a
new doubt as to his sincerity in the change. Near the monument of old
father Chaucer, in Westminster, is one erected, by the Duke of Buckingham,
to Dryden. It merely bears name and date, as his life and works were
supposed to need no eulogy.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE RELIGIOUS LITERATURE OF THE GREAT REBELLION AND OF THE RESTORATION.
The English Divines. Hall. Chillingworth. Taylor. Fuller. Sir T.
Browne. Baxter. Fox. Bunyan. South. Other Writers.
THE ENGLISH DIVINES.
Having come down, in the course of English Literature, to the reign of
William and Mary, we must look back for a brief space to consider the
religious polemics which grew out of the national troubles and
vicissitudes. We shall endeavor to classify the principal authors under
this head from the days of Milton to the time when the Protestant
succession was established on the English throne.
The Established Church had its learned doctors before the civil war, many
of whom contributed to the literature; but when the contest between king
and parliament became imminent, and during the progress of the quarrel,
these became controversialists,--most of them on the side of the
unfortunate but misguided monarch,--and suffered with his declining
fortunes.
To go over the whole range of theological literature in this extended
period, would be to study the history of the times from a theological
point of view. Our space will only permit a brief notice of the principal
writers.
HALL.--First among these was Joseph Hall, who was born in 1574. He was
educated at Cambridge, and was appointed to the See of Exeter in 1624,
and transferred to that of Norwich in 1641, the year before Charles I.
ascended the throne. The scope of his writings was quite extensive. As a
theological writer, he is known by his numerous sermons, his _Episcopacy
by Divine Right Asserted_, his _Christian Meditations_, and
various commentaries and _Contemplations_ upon the Scriptures.
He was also a poet and a satirist, and excelled in this field. His
_Satires--Virgidemiarium_--were published at the early age of
twenty-three; but they are highly praised by the critics, who rank him
also, for eloquence and learning, with Jeremy Taylor. He suffered for his
attachment to the king's cause, was driven from his see, and spent the
last portion of his life in retirement and poverty. He died in 1656.
CHILLINGWORTH.--The next in chronological order is William Chillingworth,
who was born in 1602, and is principally known as the champion of
Protestantism against Rome and Roman innovations. While a student at
Oxford, he had been won over to the Roman Catholic Church by John Perse, a
famous Jesuit; and he went at once to pursue his studies in the Jesuit
college at Douay. He was so notable for his acuteness and industry, that
every effort was made to bring him back. Archbishop Laud, his god-father,
was able to convince him of his errors, and in two months he returned to
England. A short time after this he left the Roman Catholics, and became
tenfold more a Protestant than before. He entered into controversies with
his former friends the Jesuits, and in answer to one of their treatises
entitled, _Mercy and Truth, or Charity maintained by the Roman Catholics_,
he wrote his most famous work, _The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to
Salvation_. Chillingworth was a warm adherent of Charles I.; and was
captured by the parliamentary forces in 1643. He died the next year. His
double change of faith gave him the full range of the controversial field;
and, in addition to this knowledge, the clearness of his language and the
perspicuity of his logic gave great effect to his writings. Tillotson
calls him "the glory of this age and nation."
TAYLOR.--One of the greatest names in the annals of the English Church and
of English literature is that of Jeremy Taylor. He was the son of a
barber, and was born at Cambridge in 1613. A remarkably clever youth, he
was educated at Cambridge, and soon owed his preferment to his talents,
eloquence, and learning. An adherent of the king, he was appointed
chaplain in the royal army, and was several times imprisoned. When the
king's cause went down, and during the protectorate of Cromwell, he
retired to Wales, where he kept a school, and was also chaplain to the
Earl of Carberry. The vicissitudes of fortune compelled him to leave for a
while this retreat, and he became a teacher in Ireland. The restoration of
Charles II. gave him rest and preferment: he was made Bishop of Down and
Connor. Taylor is now principally known for his learned, quaint, and
eloquent discourses, which are still read. A man of liberal feelings and
opinions, he wrote on "The liberty of prophesying, showing the
unreasonableness of prescribing to other men's faith, and the iniquity of
persecuting different opinions:" the title itself being a very liberal
discourse. He upholds the Ritual in _An Apology for fixed and set Forms of
Worship_. In this he considers the divine precepts to be contained within
narrow limits, and that beyond this everything is a matter of dispute, so
that we cannot unconditionally condemn the opinions of others.
His _Great Exemplar of Sanctity and Holy Life_, his _Rule and Exercises of
Holy Living and of Holy Dying_, and his _Golden Grove_, are devotional
works, well known to modern Christians of all denominations. He has been
praised alike by Roman Catholic divines and many Protestant Christians not
of the Anglican Church. There is in all his writings a splendor of
imagery, combined with harmony of style, and wonderful variety,
readiness, and accuracy of scholarship. His quotations from the whole
range of classic authors would furnish the Greek and Latin armory of any
modern writer. What Shakspeare is in the Drama, Spenser in the Allegory,
and Milton in the religious Epic, Taylor may claim to be in the field of
purely religious literature. He died at Lisburn, in 1667.
FULLER.--More quaint and eccentric than the writers just mentioned, but a
rare representative of his age, stands Thomas Fuller. He was born in 1608;
at the early age of twelve, he entered Cambridge, and, after completing
his education, took orders. In 1631, he was appointed prebendary of
Salisbury. Thence he removed to London in 1641, when the civil war was
about to open. When the king left London, in 1642, Fuller preached a
sermon in his favor, to the great indignation of the opposite party. Soon
after, he was appointed to a chaplaincy in the royal army, and not only
preached to the soldiers, but urged them forward in battle. In 1646 he
returned to London, where he was permitted to preach, under
_surveillance_, however. He seems to have succeeded in keeping out of
trouble until the Restoration, when he was restored to his prebend. He did
not enjoy it long, as he died in the next year, 1661. His writings are
very numerous, and some of them are still read. Among these are _Good
Thoughts in Bad Times, Good Thoughts in Worse Times_, and _Mixt
Contemplations in Better Times_. The _bad_ and _worse_ times mark the
progress of the civil war: the _better_ times he finds in the Restoration.
One of his most valuable works is _The Church History of Britain, from the
birth of Christ to 1648_, in 11 books. Criticized as it has been for its
puns and quibbles and its occasional caricatures, it contains rare
descriptions and very vivid stories of the important ecclesiastical eras
in England.
Another book containing important information is his _History of the
Worthies of England_, a posthumous work, published by his son the year
after his death. It contains accounts of eminent Englishmen in different
countries; and while there are many errors which he would perhaps have
corrected, it is full of odd and interesting information not to be found
collated in any other book.
Representing and chronicling the age as he does, he has perhaps more
individuality than any writer of his time, and this gives a special
interest to his works.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE.--Classed among theological writers, but not a
clergyman, Sir Thomas Browne is noted for the peculiarity of his subjects,
and his diction. He was born in 1605, and was educated at Oxford. He
studied medicine, and became a practising physician. He travelled on the
continent, and returning to England in 1633, he began to write his most
important work, _Religio Medici_, at once a transcript of his own life and
a manifesto of what the religion of a physician should be. It was kept in
manuscript for some time, but was published without his knowledge in 1642.
He then revised the work, and published several editions himself. No
description of the treatise can give the reader a just idea of it; it
requires perusal. The criticism of Dr. Johnson is terse and just: it is
remarkable, he says, for "the novelty of paradoxes, the dignity of
sentiment, the quick succession of images, the multitude of abstruse
allusions, the subtilty of disquisition, and the strength of language." As
the portraiture of an inner life, it is admirable; and the accusation of
heterodoxy brought against him on account of a few careless passages is
unjust.
Among his other works are _Essays on Vulgar Errors_ (_Pseudoxia
Epidemica_), and _Hydriotaphica_ or _Urne burial_; the latter suggested by
the exhumation of some sepulchral remains in Norfolk, which led him to
treat with great learning of the funeral rites of all nations. To this he
afterwards added _The Garden of Cyrus, or The Quincunxial Lozenge_, in
which, in the language of Coleridge, he finds quincunxes "in heaven above,
in the earth below, in the mind of man, in tones, optic nerves, in the
roots of trees, in leaves, in everything." He died in 1682.
Numerous sects, all finding doctrine and forms in the Bible, were the
issue of the religious and political controversies of the day. Without
entering into a consideration or even an enumeration of these, we now
mention a few of the principal names among them.
RICHARD BAXTER.--Among the most devout, independent, and popular of the
religious writers of the day, Richard Baxter occupies a high rank. He was
born in 1615, and was ordained a clergyman in 1638. In the civil troubles
he desired to remain neutral, and he opposed Cromwell when he was made
Protector. In 1662 he left the Church, and was soon the subject of
persecution: he was always the champion of toleration. In prison, poor,
hunted about from place to place, he was a martyr in spirit. During his
great earthly troubles he was solaced by a vision, which he embodied in
his popular work, _The Saints' Everlasting Rest_; and he wrote with great
fervor _A Call to the Unconverted_. He was a very voluminous writer; the
brutal Judge Jeffries, before whom he appeared for trial, called him "an
old knave, who had written books enough to load a cart." He wrote a
paraphrase of the New Testament, and numerous discourses. Dr. Johnson
advised Boswell, when speaking of Baxter's works: "Read any of them; they
are all good." He continued preaching until the close of his life, and
died peacefully in 1691.
GEORGE FOX.--The founder of the Society of Friends was born in 1624, in an
humble condition of life, and at an early age was apprenticed to a
shoemaker and grazier. Uneducated and unknown, he considered himself as
the subject of special religious providence, and at length as
supernaturally called of God. Suddenly abandoning his servile occupation,
he came out in 1647, at the age of twenty-three, as the founder of a new
sect; an itinerant preacher, he rebuked the multitudes which he assembled
by his fervent words. Much of his success was due to his earnestness and
self-abnegation. He preached in all parts of England, and visited the
American colonies. The name Quaker is said to have been applied to this
sect in 1650, when Fox, arraigned before Judge Bennet, told him to
"tremble at the word of the Lord." The establishment of this sect by such
a man is one of the strongest illustrations of the eager religious inquiry
of the age.
The works of Fox are a very valuable _Journal of his Life and Travels_;
_Letters and Testimonies_; _Gospel Truth Demonstrated_,--all of which form
the best statement of the origin and tenets of his sect. Fox was a solemn,
reverent, absorbed man; a great reader and fluent expounder of the
Scriptures, but fanatical and superstitious; a believer in witchcraft, and
in his power to detect witches. The sect which he founded, and which has
played so respectable a part in later history, is far more important than
the founder himself. He died in London in 1690.
WILLIAM PENN.--The fame of Fox in America has been eclipsed by that of his
chief convert William Penn. In an historical or biographical work, the
life of Penn would demand extended mention; but his name is introduced
here only as one of the theological writers of the day. He was born in
1644, and while a student at Oxford was converted to the Friends' doctrine
by the preaching of Thomas Loe, a colleague of George Fox. The son of
Admiral Sir William Penn, he was the ward of James II., and afterwards
Lord Proprietary and founder of Pennsylvania. Persecuted for his tenets,
he was frequently imprisoned for his preaching and writings. In 1668 he
wrote _Truth Exalted_ and _The Sandy Foundation_, and when imprisoned for
these, he wrote in jail his most famous work, _No Cross, no Crown_.
After the expulsion of James II., Penn was repeatedly tried and acquitted
for alleged attempts to aid the king in recovering his throne. The
malignity of Lord Macaulay has reproduced the charges, but reversed, most
unjustly, the acquittals. His record occupies a large space in American
history, and he is reverenced for having established a great colony on the
basis of brotherly love. Poor and infirm, he died in 1718.
ROBERT BARCLAY, who was born in 1648, is only mentioned in this connection
on account of his Latin apology for the Quakers, written in 1676, and
translated since into English.
JOHN BUNYAN.--Among the curious religious outcroppings of the civil war,
none is more striking and singular than John Bunyan. He produced a work of
a decidedly polemical character, setting forth his peculiar doctrines,
and--a remarkable feature in the course of English literature--a story so
interesting and vivid that it has met with universal perusal and
admiration. It is at the same time an allegory which has not its equal in
the language. Rhetoricians must always mention the Pilgrim's Progress as
the most splendid example of the allegory.
Bunyan was born in Elston, Bedfordshire, in 1628. The son of a tinker, his
childhood and early manhood were idle and vicious. A sudden and sharp
rebuke from a woman not much better than himself, for his blasphemy, set
him to thinking, and he soon became a changed man. In 1653 he joined the
Baptists, and soon, without preparation, began to preach. For this he was
thrown into jail, where he remained for more than twelve years. It was
during this period that, with no other books than the Bible and Fox's Book
of Martyrs, he excogitated his allegory. In 1672 he was released through
the influence of Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln. He immediately began to
preach, and continued to do so until 1688, when he died from a fever
brought on by exposure.
In his first work, _Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners_, he gives us
his own experience,--fearful dreams of early childhood, his sins and
warnings in the parliamentary army, with divers temptations, falls, and
struggles.
Of his great work, _The Pilgrim's Progress_, it is hardly necessary to
speak at length. The story of the Pilgrim, Christian, is known to all
English readers, large and little; how he left the City of Destruction,
and journeyed towards the Celestial City; of his thrilling adventures; of
the men and things that retarded his progress, and of those who helped him
forward. No one has ever discoursed with such vivid description and
touching pathos of the Land of Beulah, the Delectable Mountains, the
Christian's inward rapture at the glimpse of the Celestial City, and his
faith-sustaining descent into the Valley of the Shadow of Death! As a work
of art, it is inimitable; as a book of religious instruction, it is more
to be admired for sentiment than for logic; its influence upon children is
rather that of a high-wrought romance than of godly precept. It is a
curious reproduction, with a slight difference in cast, of the morality
play of an earlier time. Mercy, Piety, Christian, Hopeful, Greatheart,
Faithful, are representatives of Christian graces; and, as in the
morality, the Prince of Darkness figures as Apollyon.
Bunyan also wrote _The Holy War_, an allegory, which describes the contest
between Immanuel and Diabolus for the conquest of the city of Mansoul.
This does not by any means share the popularity of _The Pilgrim's
Progress_. The language of all his works is common and idiomatic, but
precise and strong: it is the vigorous English of an unpretending man,
without the graces of the schools, but expressing his meaning with
remarkable clearness. Like Milton's Paradise Lost, Bunyan's allegory has
been improperly placed by many persons on a par with the Bible as a body
of Christian doctrine, and for instruction in righteousness.
ROBERT SOUTH.--This eccentric clergyman was born in 1633. While king's
scholar at Dr. Busby's school in London, he led the devotions on the day
of King Charles' execution, and prayed for his majesty by name. At first a
Puritan, he became a churchman, and took orders. He was learned and
eloquent; but his sermons, which were greatly admired at the time, contain
many oddities, forced conceits, and singular anti-climaxes, which gained
for him the appellation of the witty churchman.
He is accused of having been too subservient to Charles II.; and he also
is considered as displaying not a little vindictiveness in his attacks on
his former colleagues the Puritans. He is only known to this age by his
sermons, which are still published and read.
OTHER THEOLOGICAL WRITERS.
_Isaac Barrow_, 1630-1677: a man of varied learning, a traveller in the
East, and an oriental scholar. He was appointed Professor of Greek at
Cambridge, and also lectured on Mathematics. He was a profound thinker and
a weighty writer, principally known by his courses of sermons on the
Decalogue, the Creed, and the Sacraments.
_Edward Stillingfleet_, 1635-1699: a clergyman of the Church of England,
he was appointed Bishop of Worcester. Many of his sermons have been
published. Among his treatises is one entitled, _Irenicum, a Weapon-Salve
for the Churches Wounds, or the Divine Right of Particular Forms of Church
Government Discussed and Examined_. "The argument," says Bishop Burnet,
"was managed with so much learning and skill that none of either side ever
undertook to answer it." He also wrote _Origines Sacrae, or a Rational
Account of the Christian Faith_, and various treatises in favor of
Protestantism and against the Church of Rome.
_William Sherlock_, 1678-1761: he was Dean of St. Paul's, and a writer of
numerous doctrinal discourses, among which are those on _The Trinity_, and
on _Death and the Future Judgment_. His son, Thomas Sherlock, D.D., born
1678, was also a distinguished theological writer.
_Gilbert Burnet_, 1643-1715: he was very much of a politician, and played
a prominent part in the Revolution. He was made Bishop of Salisbury in
1689. He is principally known by his _History of the Reformation_, written
in the Protestant interest, and by his greater work, the _History of my
Own Times_. Not without a decided bias, this latter work is specially
valuable as the narration of an eye-witness. The history has been
variously criticized for prejudice and inaccuracy; but it fills what would
otherwise have been a great vacuum in English historical literature.
_John Locke_, 1632-1704. In a history of philosophy, the name of this
distinguished philosopher would occupy a prominent place, and his works
would require extended notice. But it is not amiss to introduce him
briefly in this connection, because his works all have an ethical
significance. He was educated as a physician, and occupied several
official positions, in which he suffered from the vicissitudes of
political fortune, being once obliged to retreat from persecution to
Holland. His _Letters on Toleration_ is a noble effort to secure the
freedom of conscience: his _Treatises on Civil Government_ were specially
designed to refute Sir John Filmer's _Patriarcha_, and to overthrow the
principle of the _Jus Divinum_. His greatest work is an _Essay on the
Human Understanding_. This marks an era in English thought, and has done
much to invite attention to the subject of intellectual philosophy. He
derives our ideas from the two sources, _sensation_ and _reflection_; and
although many of his views have been superseded by the investigations of
later philosophers, it is due to him in some degree that their inquiries
have been possible.
DIARISTS AND ANTIQUARIANS.
_John Evelyn_, 1620-1705. Among the unintentional historians of England,
none are of more value than those who have left detailed and gossiping
diaries of the times in which they lived: among these Evelyn occupies a
prominent place. He was a gentleman of education and position, who, after
the study of law, travelled extensively, and resided several years in
France. He had varied accomplishments. His _Sylva_ is a discourse on
forest trees and on the propagation of timber in his majesty's dominions.
To this he afterwards added _Pomona_, or a treatise on fruit trees. He was
also the author of an essay on _A Parallel of the Ancient Architecture
with the Modern_. But the work by which he is now best known is his
_Diary_ from 1641 to 1705; it is a necessary companion to the study of
the history of that period; and has been largely consulted by modern
writers in making up the historic record of the time.
_Samuel Pepys_, 1637-1703. This famous diarist was the son of a London
tailor. He received a collegiate education, and became a connoisseur in
literature and art. Of a prying disposition, he saw all that he could of
the varied political, literary, and social life of England; and has
recorded what he saw in a diary so quaint, simple, and amusing, that it
has retained its popularity to the present day, and has greatly aided the
historian both in facts and philosophy. He held an official position as
secretary in the admiralty, the duties of which he discharged with great
system and skill. In addition to this _Diary_, we have also his
_Correspondence_, published after his death, which is historically of
great importance. In both diary and correspondence he has the charm of
great _naivete_,--as of a curious and gossiping observer, who never
dreamed that his writings would be made public. Men and women of social
station are painted in pre-Raphaelite style, and figure before us with
great truth and vividness.
_Elias Ashmole_, 1617-1693. This antiquarian and virtuoso is principally
known as the founder of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. He studied law,
chemistry, and natural philosophy. Besides an edition of the manuscript
works of certain English chemists, he wrote _Bennevennu_,--the description
of a Roman road mentioned in the Itinerary of Antoninus,--and a _History
of the Order of the Garter_. His _Diary_ was published nearly a century
after his death, but is by no means equal in value to those of Evelyn and
Pepys.
_John Aubrey_, 1627-1697: a man of curious mind, Aubrey investigated the
supernatural topics of the day, and presented them to the world in his
_Miscellanies_. Among these subjects it is interesting to notice "blows
invisible," and "knockings," which have been resuscitated in the present
day. He was a "perambulator," and, in the words of one of his critics,
"picked up information on the highway, and scattered it everywhere as
authentic." His most valuable contribution to history is found in his
_Letters Written by Eminent Persons in the 17th and 18th Centuries, with
Lives of Eminent Men_. The searcher for authentic material must carefully
scrutinize Aubrey's _facts_; but, with much that is doubtful, valuable
information may be obtained from his pages.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE DRAMA OF THE RESTORATION.
The License of the Age. Dryden. Wycherley. Congreve. Vanbrugh.
Farquhar. Etherege. Tragedy. Otway. Rowe. Lee. Southern.
THE LICENSE OF THE AGE.
There is no portion of the literature of this period which so fully
represents and explains the social history of the age as the drama. With
the restoration of Charles it returned to England, after a time in which
the chief faults had been too great rigor in morals. The theatres had been
closed, all amusements checked, and even poetry and the fine arts placed
under a ban. In the reign of Charles I., Prynne had written his _Histrio
Mastix_, or Scourge of the Stage, in which he not only denounced all stage
plays, but music and dancing; and also declaimed against hunting, festival
days, the celebration of Christmas, and Maypoles. For this he was indicted
in the Star Chamber for libel, and was sentenced to stand in the pillory,
to lose his ears, to pay the king a fine of L5000, and to be imprisoned
for life. For his attack there was much excuse in the license of the
former period; but when puritanism, in its turn, was brought under the
three spears, the drama was to come back tenfold more injurious and more
immoral than before.
From the stern and gloomy morals of the Commonwealth we now turn to the
debaucheries of the court,--from cropped heads and dark cloaks to plumes
and velvet, gold lace and embroidery,--to the varied fashions of every
kind for which Paris has always been renowned, and which Charles brought
back with him from his exile;--from prudish morals to indiscriminate
debauchery; from the exercisings of brewers' clerks, the expounding of
tailors, the catechizing of watermen, to the stage, which was now loudly
petitioned to supply amusement and novelty. Macaulay justly says: "The
restraints of that gloomy time were such as would have been impatiently
borne, if imposed by men who were universally believed to be saints; these
restraints became altogether insupportable when they were known to be kept
up for the profit of hypocrites! It is quite certain that if the royal
family had never returned, there would have been a great relaxation of
manners." It is equally certain, let us add, that morals would not have
been correspondingly relaxed. The revulsion was terrible. In no period of
English history was society ever so grossly immoral; and the drama, which
we now come to consider, displays this immorality and license with a
perfect delineation.
The English people had always been fond of the drama in all its forms, and
were ready to receive it even contaminated as it was by the licentious
spirit of the time. An illiterate and ignorant people cannot think for
themselves; they act upon the precepts and example of those above them in
knowledge and social station: thus it is that a dissolute monarch and a
subservient aristocracy corrupt the masses.
DRYDEN'S PLAYS.--Although Dryden's reputation is based on his other poems,
and although his dramas have conduced scarcely at all to his fame, he did
play a principal part in this department of literary work. Dryden made
haste to answer the call, and his venal muse wrote to please the town. The
names of many of his plays and personages are foreign; but their vitality
is purely English. Of his first play, _The Duke of Guise_, which was
unsuccessful, he tells us: "I undertook this as the fairest way which the
Act of Indemnity had left us, as setting forth the rise of the great
rebellion, and of exposing the villanies of it upon the stage, to
precaution posterity against the like errors;"--a rebellion the
master-spirit of which he had eulogized upon his bier!
His second play, _The Wild Gallant_, may be judged by the fact that it won
for him the favor of Charles II. and of his mistress, the Duchess of
Cleveland. Pepys saw it "well acted;" but says, "It hath little good in
it." It is not our purpose to give a list of Dryden's plays; besides their
occasional lewdness, they are very far inferior to his poems, and are now
rarely read except by the historical student. They paid him in ready
money, and he cannot ask payment from posterity in fame.
On the 13th of January, 1667-8, (we are told by Pepys,) the ladies and the
Duke of Monmouth acted _The Indian Emperour_ at court.
The same chronicler says: _The Maiden Queene_ was "mightily commended for
the regularity of it, and the strain and wit;" but of the _Ladys a la
Mode_ he says it was "so mean a thing" that, when it was announced for the
next night, the pit "fell a laughing, because the house was not a quarter
full."
But Dryden, as a playwright, does not enjoy the infamous honor of a high
rank among his fellow-dramatists. The proper representations of the drama
in that age were, in Comedy, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar;
and, in Tragedy, Otway, Rowe, and Lee.
WYCHERLEY.--Of the comedists of this period, where all were evil, William
Wycherley was the worst. In his four plays, _Love in a Wood_, _The
Gentleman Dancing-Master_, _The Country Wife_, and _The Plain Dealer_, he
outrages all decency, ridicules honesty and virtue, and makes vice always
triumphant. As a young man, profligate with pen and in his life, he was a
wicked old man; for, when sixty-four years of age, he published a
miscellany of verses of which Macaulay says: "The style and versification
are beneath criticism: the morals are those of Rochester." And yet it is
sad to be obliged to say that his characters pleased the age, because such
men and women really lived then, and acted just as he describes them. He
depicted vice to applaud and not to punish it. Wycherley was born in 1640,
and died in 1715.
CONGREVE.--William Congreve, who is of the same school of morals, is far
superior as a writer; indeed, were one name to be selected in illustration
of our subject, it would be his. He was born in 1666, and, after being
educated at Trinity College, Dublin, was a student at the Middle Temple.
His first play, _The Old Bachelor_, produced in his twenty-first year, was
a great success, and won for him the patronage of Lord Halifax. His next,
_The Double Dealer_, caused Dryden to proclaim him the equal of
Shakspeare! Perhaps his most famous comedy is _Love for Love_, which is
besides an excellent index to the morality of the age. The author was
quoted and caressed; Pope dedicated to him his Translation of the Iliad;
and Voltaire considered him the most successful English writer of comedy.
His merit consists in some degree of originality, and in the liveliness of
his colloquies. His wit is brilliant and flashing, but, in the words of
Thackeray, the world to him "seems to have had no moral at all."
How much he owed to the French school, and especially to Moliere, may be
judged from the fact that a whole scene in _Love for Love_ is borrowed
from the _Don Juan_ of Moliere. It is that in which Trapland comes to
collect his debt from Valentine Legend. Readers of Moliere will recall the
scene between Don Juan, Sganarelle and M. Dimanche, which is here, with
change of names, taken almost word for word. His men are gallants neither
from love or passion, but from the custom of the age, of which it is said,
"it would break Mr. Tattle's heart to think anybody else should be
beforehand with him;" and Mr. Tattle was the type of a thousand fine
gentlemen in the best English society of that day.
His only tragedy, _The Mourning Bride_, although far below those of
Shakspeare, is the best of that age; and Dr. Johnson says he would go to
it to find the most poetical paragraph in the range of English poetry.
Congreve died in 1729, leaving his gains to the Duchess of Marlborough,
who cherished his memory in a very original fashion. She had a statue of
him in ivory, which went by clockwork, and was daily seated at her table;
and another wax-doll imitation, whose feet she caused to be blistered and
anointed by physicians, as the poet's gouty extremities had been.
Congreve was not ashamed to vindicate the drama, licentious as it was. In
the year 1698, Jeremy Collier, a distinguished nonjuring clergyman,
published _A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage_; a very vigorous and severe criticism, containing a great deal of
wholesome but bitter truth. Congreve came to the defence of the stage, and
his example was followed by his brother dramatists. But Collier was too
strong for his enemies, and the defences were very weak. There yet existed
in England that leaven of purity which has steadily since been making its
influence felt.
VANBRUGH.--Sir John Vanbrugh (born in 1666, died in 1726) was an architect
as well as a dramatist, but not great in either role. His principal dramas
are _The Provoked Wife_, _The City Wives' Confederacy_, and _The Journey
to London_ (finished by Colley Cibber). His personages are vicious and
lewd, but quite real; and his wit is constant and flowing. _The Provoked
Wife_ is so licentious a play that it is supposed Vanbrugh afterwards
conceived and began his _Provoked Husband_ to make some amends for it.
This latter play, however, he did not complete: it was finished after his
death by Cibber, who says in the Prologue:
This play took birth from principles of truth,
To make amends for errors past of youth.
* * * * *
Though vice is natural, 't was never meant
The stage should show it but for punishment.
Warm with such thoughts, his muse once more took flame,
Resolved to bring licentious life to shame.
If Vanbrugh was not born in France, it is certain that he spent many years
there, and there acquired the taste and handling of the comic drama, which
then had its halcyon days under Moliere. His dialogue is very spirited,
and his humor is greater than that of Congreve, who, however, excelled him
in wit.
The principal architectural efforts of Vanbrugh were the design for Castle
Howard, and the palace of Blenheim, built for Marlborough by the English
nation, both of which are greater titles to enduring reputation than any
of his plays.
FARQUHAR.--George Farquhar was born in Londonderry, in 1678, and began his
studies at Trinity College, Dublin, but was soon stage-struck, and became
an actor. Not long after, he was commissioned in the army, and began to
write plays in the style and moral tone of the age. Among his nine
comedies, those which present that tone best are his _Love in a Bottle_,
_The Constant Couple_, _The Recruiting Officer_, and _The Beaux'
Stratagem_. All his productions were hastily written, but met with great
success from their gayety and clever plots, especially the last two
mentioned, which are not, besides, so immoral as the others, and which are
yet acted upon the British stage.
ETHEREGE.--Sir George Etherege, a coxcomb and a diplomatist, was born in
1636, and died in 1694. His plays are, equally with the others mentioned,
marked by the licentiousness of the age, which is rendered more insidious
by their elegance. Among them are _The Comical Revenge, or Love in a
Tub_, and _The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter_.
TRAGEDY.
The domain of tragedy, although perhaps not so attractive to the English
people as comedy, was still sufficiently so to invite the attention of the
literati. The excitement which is produced by exaggerated scenes of
distress and death has always had a charm for the multitude; and although
the principal tragedies of this period are based upon heroic stories, many
of them of classic origin, the genius of the writer displayed itself in
applying these to his own times, and in introducing that "touch of nature"
which "makes the whole world kin." Human sympathy is based upon a
community of suffering, and the sorrows of one age are similar to those of
another. Besides, tragedy served, in the period of which we are speaking,
to give variety and contrast to what would otherwise have been the gay
monotony of the comic muse.
OTWAY.--The first writer to be mentioned in this field, is Thomas Otway
(born in 1651, died in 1685). He led an irregular and wretched life, and
died, it is said, from being choked by a roll of bread which, after great
want, he was eating too ravenously.
His style is extravagant, his pathos too exacting, and his delineation of
the passions sensational and overwrought. He produced in his earlier
career _Alcibiades_ and _Don Carlos_, and, later, _The Orphan_, and _The
Soldier's Fortune_. But the piece by which his fame was secured is _Venice
Preserved_, which, based upon history, is fictional in its details. The
original story is found in the Abbe de St. Real's _Histoire de la
Conjuration du Marquis de Bedamar_, or the account of a Spanish conspiracy
in which the marquis, who was ambassador, took part. It is still put upon
the stage, with the omission, however, of the licentious comic portions
found in the original play.
NICHOLAS ROWE, who was born in 1673, a man of fortune and a government
official, produced seven tragedies, of which _The Fair Penitent_, _Lady
Jane Grey_, and _Jane Shore_ are the best. His description of the lover,
in the first, has become a current phrase: "That haughty, gallant, gay
Lothario,"--the prototype of false lovers since. The plots are too broad,
but the moral of these tragedies is in most cases good.
In _Jane Shore_, he has followed the history of the royal mistress, and
has given a moral lesson of great efficacy.
NATHANIEL LEE, 1657-1692: was a man of dissolute life, for some time
insane, and met his death in a drunken brawl. Of his ten tragedies, the
best are _The Rival Queens_, and _Theodosius, or The Force of Love_. The
rival queens of Alexander the Great--Roxana and Statira--figure in the
first, which is still presented upon the stage. It has been called, with
just critical point, "A great and glorious flight of a bold but frenzied
imagination, having as much absurdity as sublimity, and as much
extravagance as passion; the poet, the genius, the scholar are everywhere
visible."
THOMAS SOUTHERN, 1659-1746: wrote _Isabella, or The Fatal Marriage_, and
_Oronooko_. In the latter, although yielding to the corrupt taste of the
time in his comic parts, he causes his captive Indian prince to teach that
period a lesson by his pure and noble love for Imoinda. Oronooko is a
prince taken by the English at Surinam and carried captive to England.
These writers are the best representatives of those who in tragedy and
comedy form the staple of that age. Their models were copied in succeeding
years; but, with the expulsion of the Stuarts, morals were somewhat
mended; and while light, gay, and witty productions for the stage were
still in demand, the extreme licentiousness was repudiated by the public;
and the plays of Cibber, Cumberland, Colman, and Sheridan, reflecting
these better tastes, are free from much of the pollution to which we have
referred.
CHAPTER XXIV.
POPE, AND THE ARTIFICIAL SCHOOL.
Contemporary History. Birth and Early Life. Essay on Criticism. Rape of
the Lock. The Messiah. The Iliad. Value of the Translation. The
Odyssey. Essay on Man. The Artificial School. Estimate of Pope. Other
Writers.
Alexander Pope is at once one of the greatest names in English literature
and one of the most remarkable illustrations of the fact that the
literature is the interpreter of English history. He was also a man of
singular individuality, and may, in some respects, be considered a _lusus
naturae_ among the literary men of his day.
CONTEMPORARY HISTORY.--He was born in London on the 21st of May, 1688, the
year which witnessed the second and final expulsion of the Stuarts, in
direct line, and the accession of a younger branch in the persons of Mary
and her husband, William of Orange. Pope comes upon the literary scene
with the new order of political affairs. A dynasty had been overthrown,
and the power of the parliament had been established; new charters of
right had secured the people from kingly oppression; but there was still a
strong element of opposition and sedition in the Jacobite party, which had
by no means abandoned the hope of restoring the former rule. They were
kept in check, indeed, during the reign of William and Mary, but they
became bolder upon the accession of Queen Anne. They hoped to find their
efforts facilitated by the fact that she was childless; and they even
asserted that upon her death-bed she had favored the succession of the
pretender, whom they called James III.
In 1715, the year after the accession of George I., the electoral prince
of Hanover,--whose grandmother was the daughter of James I.,--they broke
out into open rebellion. The pretender landed in Scotland, and made an
abortive attempt to recover the throne. The nation was kept in a state of
excitement and turmoil until the disaster of Culloden, and the final
defeat of Charles Edward, the young pretender, in 1745, one year after the
death of Pope.
These historical facts had a direct influence upon English society: the
country was divided into factions; and political conflicts sharpened the
wits and gave vigor to the conduct of men in all ranks. Pope was an
interpreter of his age, in politics, in general culture, and in social
manners and morals. Thus he was a politician among the statesmen
Bolingbroke, Buckingham, Oxford, Sunderland, Halifax, Harley, and
Marlborough. His _Essay on Criticism_ presents to us the artificial taste
and technical rules which were established as a standard in literature.
His _Essay on Man_, his _Moral Epistles_, and his _Universal Prayer_ are
an index to the semi-Christian, semi-Grecian ethics of an age too selfish
to be orthodox, and too progressive to be intolerant. His _Rape of the
Lock_ is a striking picture of social life, sketched by the hand of a
gentle satire. His translations of Homer, and their great success, are
significant of a more extended taste for scholarship; not attended,
however, with many incentives to originality of production. The nobles
were still the patrons of literature, and they fancied old things which
were grand, in new and gaudy English dresses. The age was also marked by
rapid and uniform progress in the English language. The sonorous, but
cumbrous English of Milton had been greatly improved by Dryden; and we
have seen, also, that the terse and somewhat crude diction of Dryden's
earlier works had been polished and rendered more harmonious in his later
poems.
This harmony of language seemed to Pope and to his patrons the chief aim
of the poet, and to make it still more tuneful and melodious was the
purpose of his life.
BIRTH AND EARLY LIFE.--Pope was the son of a respectable linen-draper, who
had achieved a competency and retired to enjoy it. The mother of the poet
must have been a good one, to have retained the ardent and eulogistic
affection of her son to the close of her life, as she did. This attachment
is a marked feature in his biography, and at last finds vent in her
epitaph, in which he calls her "_mater optima, mulierum amantissima_."
Pope was a sickly, dwarfed, precocious child. His early studies in Latin
and Greek were conducted by priests of the Roman Catholic Church, to which
his parents belonged; but he soon took his education into his own hands.
Alone and unaided he pursued his classical studies, and made good progress
in French and German.
Of his early rhyming powers he says:
"I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came."
At the age of twelve, he was taken to Will's Coffee-house, to see the
great Dryden, upon whom, as a model, he had already determined to fashion
himself.
His first efforts were translations. He made English versions of the first
book of the _Thebais_ of Statius; several of the stories of Chaucer, and
one of Ovid's Epistles, all of which were produced before he was fifteen.
ESSAY ON CRITICISM.--He was not quite twenty-one when he wrote his _Essay
on Criticism_, in which he lays down the canons of just criticism, and the
causes which prevent it. In illustration, he attacks the multitude of
critics of that day, and is particularly harsh in his handling of a few
among them. He gained a name by this excellent poem, but he made many
enemies, and among them one John Dennis, whom he had satirized under the
name of Appius. Dennis was his life-long foe.
Perhaps there is no better proof of the lasting and deserved popularity of
this Essay, than the numerous quotations from it, not only in works on
rhetoric and literary criticism, but in our ordinary intercourse with men.
Couplets and lines have become household words wherever the English
language is spoken. How often do we hear the sciolist condemned in these
words:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or touch not the Pierian spring?
Irreverence and rash speculation are satirized thus:
Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead,
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
We may waive a special notice of his _Pastorals_, which, like those of
Dryden, are but clever imitations of Theocritus and anachronisms of the
Alexandrian period. Of their merits, we may judge from his own words. "If
they have any merit, it is to be attributed to some good old authors,
whose works as I had leisure to study, so I hope I have not wanted care to
imitate."
RAPE OF THE LOCK.--The poem which displays most originality of invention
is the _Rape of the Lock_. It is, perhaps, the best and most charming
specimen of the mock-heroic to be found in English; and it is specially
deserving of attention, because it depicts the social life of the period
in one of its principal phases. Miss Arabella Fermor, one of the reigning
beauties of London society, while on a pleasure party on the Thames, had a
lock of her hair surreptitiously cut off by Lord Petre. Although it was
designed as a joke, the belle was very angry; and Pope, who was a friend
of both persons, wrote this poem to assuage her wrath and to reconcile
them. It has all the system and construction of an epic. The poet
describes, with becoming delicacy, the toilet of the lady, at which she is
attended by obsequious sylphs.
The party embark upon the river, and the fair lady is described in the
splendor of her charms:
This nymph, to the destruction of mankind,
Nourished two locks, which graceful hung behind
In equal curls, and well conspired to deck,
With shining ringlets, the smooth, ivory neck.
* * * * *
Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare.
And beauty draws us by a single hair.
Surrounding sylphs protect the beauty; and one to whom the lock has been
given in charge, flutters unfortunately too near, and is clipped in two by
the scissors that cut the lock. It is a rather extravagant conclusion,
even in a mock-heroic poem, that when the strife was greatest to restore
the lock, it flew upward:
A sudden star, it shot through liquid air,
And drew behind a radiant trail of hair,
and thus, and always, it
Adds new glory to the shining sphere.
With these simple and meagre materials, Pope has constructed an harmonious
poem in which the sylphs, gnomes, and other sprites of the Rosicrucian
philosophy find appropriate place and service. It failed in its principal
purpose of reconciliation, but it has given us the best mock-heroic poem
in the language. As might have been expected, it called forth bitter
criticisms from Dennis; and there were not wanting those who saw in it a
political significance. Pope's pleasantry was aroused at this, and he
published _A Key to the Lock_, in which he further mystifies these sage
readers: Belinda becomes Great Britain; the Baron is the Earl of Oxford;
and Thalestris is the Duchess of Marlborough.
THE MESSIAH.--In 1712 there appeared in one of the numbers of _The
Spectator_, his _Messiah, a Sacred Eclogue_, written with the purpose of
harmonizing the prophecy of Isaiah and the singular oracles of the Pollio,
or Fourth Eclogue of Virgil. Elevated in thought and grand in diction, the
Messiah has kept its hold upon public favor ever since, and portions of it
are used as hymns in general worship. Among these will be recognized that
of which the opening lines are:
Rise, crowned with light, imperial Salem, rise;
Exalt thy towering head and lift thine eyes.
In 1713 he published a poem on _Windsor Forest_, and an _Ode on St.
Cecilia's Day_, in imitation of Dryden. He also furnished the beautiful
prologue to Addison's Cato.
TRANSLATION OF THE ILIAD.--He now proposed to himself a task which was to
give him more reputation and far greater emolument than anything he had
yet accomplished--a translation of the Iliad of Homer. This was a great
desideratum, and men of all parties conspired to encourage and reward him.
Chapman's Homer, excellent as it was, was not in a popular measure, and
was known only to scholars.
In the execution of this project, Pope labored for six years--writing by
day and dreaming of his work at night; translating thirty or forty lines
before rising in the morning, and jotting down portions even while on a
journey. Pope's polished pentameters, when read, are very unlike the
full-voiced hexameters of Homer; but the errors in the translation are
comparatively few and unimportant, and his own poetry is in his best vein.
The poem was published by subscription, and was a great pecuniary success.
This was in part due to the blunt importunity of Dean Swift, who said:
"The author shall not begin to print until I have a thousand guineas for
him." Parnell, one of the most accomplished Greek scholars of the day,
wrote a life of Homer, to be prefixed to the work; and many of the
critical notes were written by Broome, who had translated the Iliad into
English prose. Pope was not without poetical rivals. Tickell produced a
translation of the first book of the Iliad, which was certainly revised,
and many thought partly written, by Addison. A coolness already existing
between Pope and Addison was increased by this circumstance, which soon
led to an open rupture between them. The public, however, favored Pope's
version, while a few of the _dilettanti_ joined Addison in preferring
Tickell's.
The pecuniary results of Pope's labors were particularly gratifying. The
work was published in six quarto volumes, and had more than six hundred
subscribers, at six guineas a copy: the amount realized by Pope on the
first and subsequent issues was upwards of five thousand pounds--an
unprecedented payment of bookseller to author in that day.
VALUE OF THE TRANSLATION.--This work, in spite of the criticism of exact
scholars, has retained its popularity to the present time. Chapman's Homer
has been already referred to. Since the days of Pope numerous authors have
tried their hands upon Homer, translating the whole or a part. Among these
is a very fine poem by Cowper, in blank verse, which is praised by the
critics, but little read. Lord Derby's translation is distinguished for
its prosaic accuracy. The recent version of our venerable poet, Wm. C.
Bryant, is acknowledged to be at once scholarly, accurate, and harmonious,
and will be of permanent value and reputation. But the exquisite tinkling
of Pope's lines, the pleasant refrain they leave in the memory, like the
chiming of silver bells, will cause them to last, with undiminished favor,
unaffected by more correct rivals, as long as the language itself. "A very
pretty poem, Mr. Pope," said the great Bentley; "but pray do not call it
Homer." Despite this criticism of the Greek scholar, the world has taken
it for Homer, and knows Homer almost solely through this charming medium.
The Iliad was issued in successive years, the last two volumes appearing
in 1720. Of course it was savagely attacked by Dennis; but Pope had won
more than he had hoped for, and might laugh at his enemies.
With the means he had inherited, increased by the sale of his poem, Pope
leased a villa on the Thames, at Twickenham, which he fitted up as a
residence for life. He laid out the grounds, built a grotto, and made his
villa a famous spot.
Here he was smitten by the masculine charms of the gifted Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, who figures in many of his verses, and particularly in
the closing lines of the _Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard_. It was a singular
alliance, destined to a speedy rupture. On her return from Turkey, in
1718, where her husband had been the English ambassador, she took a home
near Pope's villa, and, at his request, sat for her portrait. When, later,
they became estranged, she laughed at the poet, and his coldness turned
into hatred.
THE ODYSSEY.--The success of his version of the Iliad led to his
translation of the Odyssey; but this he did with the collaboration of
Fenton and Broome, the former writing four and the latter six books. The
volumes appeared successively in 1725-6, and there was an appendix
containing the _Batrachomiomachia_, or Battle of the Frogs and Mice,
translated by Parnell. For this work Pope received the lion's share of
profits, his co-laborers being paid only L800.
Among his miscellaneous works must be mentioned portions of _Martinus
Scriblerus_. One of these, _Peri Bathous_, or _Art of Sinking in Poetry_,
was the germ of The Dunciad.
Like Dryden, he was attacked by the _soi-disant_ poets of the day, and
retorted in similar style and taste. In imitation of Dryden's
_MacFlecknoe_, he wrote _The Dunciad_, or epic of the Dunces, in the first
edition of which Theobald was promoted to the vacant throne. It roused a
great storm. Authors besieged the publisher to hinder him from publishing
it, while booksellers and agents were doing all in their power to procure
it. In a later edition a new book was added, deposing Theobald and
elevating Colley Cibber to the throne of Dulness. This was ill-advised, as
the ridicule, which was justly applied to Theobald, is not applicable to
Cibber.
ESSAY ON MAN.--The intercourse of the poet with the gifted but sceptical
Lord Bolingbroke is apparent in his _Essay on Man_, in which, with much
that is orthodox and excellent, the principles and influence of his
lordship are readily discerned. The first part appeared in 1732, and the
second some years later. The opinion is no longer held that Bolingbroke
wrote any part of the poem; he has only infected it. It is one of Pope's
best poems in versification and diction, and abounds with pithy proverbial
sayings, which the English world has been using ever since as current
money in conversational barter. Among many that might be selected, the
following are well known:
All are but parts of one stupendous whole
Whose body nature is, and God the soul.
Know thou thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
A wit's a feather, and a chief's a rod;
An honest man's the noblest work of God.
Among the historical teachings of Pope's works and career, and also among
the curiosities of literature, must be noticed the publication of Pope's
letters, by Curll the bookseller, without the poet's permission. They were
principally letters to Henry Cromwell, Wycherley, Congreve, Steele,
Addison, and Swift. There were not wanting those who believed that it was
a trick of the poet himself to increase his notoriety; but such an
opinion is hardly warranted. These letters form a valuable chapter in the
social and literary history of the period.
POPE'S DEATH AND CHARACTER.--On the 30th of May, 1744, Pope passed away,
after a long illness, during which he said he was "dying of a hundred good
symptoms." Indeed, so frail and weak had he always been, that it was a
wonder he lived so long. His weakness of body seems to have acted upon his
strong mind, which must account for much that is satirical and splenetic
in his writings. Very short, thin, and ill-shaped, his person wanted the
compactness necessary to stand alone, until it was encased in stays. He
needed a high chair at table, such as children use; but he was an epicure,
and a fastidious one; and despite his infirmities, his bright,
intellectual eye and his courtly manners caused him to be noted quite as
much as his defects.
THE ARTIFICIAL SCHOOL.--Pope has been set forth as the head of the
_Artificial School_. This is, perhaps, rather a convenient than an exact
designation. He had little of original genius, but was an apt imitator and
reproducer--what in painting would be an excellent copyist. His greatest
praise, however, is that he reduced to system what had gone before him;
his poems present in themselves an art of poetry, with technical canons
and illustrations, which were long after servilely obeyed, and the
influence of which is still felt to-day.
And this artificial school was in the main due to the artificial character
of the age. Nature seemed to have lost her charms; pastorals were little
more than private theatricals, enacted with straw hats and shepherd's
crook in drawing-rooms or on close-clipped lawns. Culture was confined to
court and town, and poets found little inducement to consult the heart or
to woo nature, but wrote what would please the town or court. This taste
gave character to the technical standards, to which Pope, more than any
other writer, gave system and coherence. Most of the literati were men of
the town; many were fine gentlemen with a political bias; and thus it is
that the school of poets of which Pope is the unchallenged head, has been
known as the Artificial School.
In the passage of time, and with the increase of literature, the real
merits of Pope were for some time neglected, or misrepresented. The world
is beginning to discern and recognize these again. Learned, industrious,
self-reliant, controversial, and, above all, harmonious, instead of giving
vent to the highest fancies in simple language, he has treated the
common-place--that which is of universal interest--in melodious and
splendid diction. But, above all, he stands as the representative of his
age: a wit among the comic dramatists who were going out and the essayists
who were coming in; a man of the world with Lady Mary and the gay parties
on the Thames; a polemic, who dealt keen thrusts and who liked to see them
rankle, and who yet writhed in agony when the _riposte_ came; a Roman
Catholic in faith and a latitudinarian in speech;--such was Pope as a type
of that world in which he lived.
A poet of the first rank he was not; he invented nothing; but he
established the canons of poetry, attuned to exquisite harmony the rhymed
couplet which Dryden had made so powerful an instrument, improved the
language, discerned and reconnected the discordant parts of literature;
and thus it is that he towers above all the poets of his age, and has sent
his influence through those that followed, even to the present day.
OTHER WRITERS OF THE PERIOD.
_Matthew Prior_, 1664-1721: in his early youth he was a waiter in his
uncle's tap-room, but, surmounting all difficulties, he rose to be a
distinguished poet and diplomatist. He was an envoy to France, where he
was noted for his wit and ready repartee. His love songs are somewhat
immoral, but exquisitely melodious. His chief poems are: _Alma_, a
philosophic piece in the vein of Hudibras; _Solomon_, a Scripture poem;
and, the best of all, _The City and Country Mouse_, a parody on Dryden's
_Hind and Panther_, which he wrote in conjunction with Mr. Montague. He
was imprisoned by the Whigs in 1715, and lost all his fortune. He was
distinguished by having Dr. Johnson as his biographer, in the _Lives of
the Poets_.
_John Arbuthnot_, 1667-1735: born in Scotland. He was learned, witty, and
amiable. Eminent in medicine, he was physician to the court of Queen Anne.
He is chiefly known in literature as the companion of Pope and Swift, and
as the writer with them of papers in the Martinus Scriblerus Club, which
was founded in 1714, and of which Pope, Gay, Swift, Arbuthnot, Harvey,
Atterbury, and others, were the principal members. Arbuthnot wrote a
_History of John Bull_, which was designed to render the war then carried
on by Marlborough unpopular, and certainly conduced to that end.
_John Gay_, 1688-1732: he was of humble origin, but rose by his talents,
and figured at court. He wrote several dramas in a mock-tragic vein. Among
these are _What D'ye Call It?_ and _Three Hours after Marriage_; but that
which gave him permanent reputation is his _Beggar's Opera_, of which the
hero is a highwayman, and the characters are prostitutes and Newgate
gentry. It is interspersed with gay and lyrical songs, and was rendered
particularly effective by the fine acting of Miss Elizabeth Fenton, in the
part of _Polly_. The _Shepherd's Week_, a pastoral, contains more real
delineations of rural life than any other poem of the period. Another
curious piece is entitled, _Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of
London_.
_Thomas Parnell_, 1679-1718: he was the author of numerous poems, among
which the only one which has retained popular favor is _The Hermit_, a
touching poem founded upon an older story. He wrote the life of Homer
prefixed to Pope's translation; but it was very much altered by Pope.
_Thomas Tickell_, 1686-1740: particularly known as the friend of Addison.
He wrote a translation of the First Book of Homer's Iliad, which was
corrected by Addison, and contributed several papers to _The Spectator_.
But he is best known by his _Elegy_ upon Addison, which Dr. Johnson calls
a very "elegant funeral poem."
_Isaac Watts_, 1674-1765: this great writer of hymns was born at
Southampton, and became one of the most eminent of the dissenting
ministers of England. He is principally known by his metrical versions of
the Psalms, and by a great number of original hymns, which have been
generally used by all de |
