B R I E F H I S T O R Y O F E N G L I S H A N D A M E R I C A N L I T E R A T U R E

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Slide 1: 1 Slide 2: 2 Slide 3: Brief History of English and American Literature Henry A. Beers Slide 4: 2Brief History of English and American Literature Books iRead http://booksiread.org http://apps.facebook.com/ireadit http://myspace.com/ireadit Author: Henry A. Beers Release Date: April 15, 2007 [eBook #21090] Language: English *START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG Slide 5: http://booksiread.org 3 EBOOK BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE* E-text prepared by Al Haines Transcriber’s note: The volume from which this e-book was prepared contains two of Beers’ books, ”An Outline Sketch of English Literature” and ”An Outline Sketch of American Literature,” which start on pages 7 and 317, respectively. Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. 99, to facilitate use of the index. They have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book. For its Index, a page number has been placed only at the start of that section. by Introduction and Supplementary Chapters on the Religious and Theological Literature of Great Britain and the United States Slide 6: 4Brief History of English and American Literature by John Fletcher Hurst New York: Eaton & Mains Cincinnati: Jennings & Pye Copyright, 1886, 1887, by Phillips & Hunt New York Copyright, 1897, by Eaton & Mains New York Slide 7: 3 INTRODUCTION. At the request of the publishers the undersigned has prepared this Introduction and two Supplementary Chapters on the Religious and Theological Literature of Great Britain and the United States. To the preacher in his preparation for the pulpit, and also to the general reader and student of religious history, the pursuit of the study of literature is a necessity. The sermon itself is a part of literature, must have its literary ﬁnish and proportions, and should give ample proof of a familiarity with the masterpieces of the English tongue. 5 Slide 8: 6Brief History of English and American Literature The world of letters presents to even the casual reader a rich and varied profusion of fascinating and luscious fruit. But to the earnest student who explores with thorough research and sympathetic mind the intellectual products of countries and times other than his own, the inﬁnite variety, so strikingly apparent to the superﬁcial observer, resolves itself into a beautiful and harmonious unity. Literature is the record of the struggles and aspirations of man in the boundless universe of thought. As in physics the correlation and conservation of force bind all the material sciences together into one, so in the world of intellect all the diverse departments of mental life and action ﬁnd their common bond in literature. Even the 4 signs and formulas of the mathematician and the chemist are but abbreviated forms of writing–the stenography of those exact sciences. The simple chron- Slide 9: http://booksiread.org 7 icles of the annalist, the ﬂowing verses of the poet, clothing his thought with winged words, the abstruse propositions of the philosopher, the smiting protests of the bold reformer, either in Church or State, the impassioned appeal of the advocate at the bar of justice, the argument of the legislator on behalf of his measures, the very cry of inarticulate pain of those who suffer under the oppression of cruelty, all have their literature. The minister of the Gospel, whose mission is to man in his highest and holiest relations, must know the best that human thought has produced if he would successfully reach and inﬂuence the thoughtful and inquiring. Per- haps our best service here will be to suggest a method of pursuing a course of study in literature, both English and American. The following work of Professor Beers touches but lightly Slide 10: 8Brief History of English and American Literature and scarcely more than opens these broad and inviting ﬁelds, which are ever growing richer and more fascinating. While man continues to think he will weave the fabric of the mental loom into inﬁnitely varied and beautiful designs. In the general outlines of a plan of literary study which is to cover the entire history of English and American literature, the following directions, it is hoped, will be of value. 1. Fix the great landmarks, the general periods– each 5 marked by some towering leader, around whom other contemporary writers may be grouped. In Great Britain the several and successive periods might thus be well designated by such authors as Geoffrey Chaucer or John Wiclif, Thomas More or Henry Howard, Edmund Spenser or Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakspere or Francis Bacon, John Milton or Jeremy Taylor, John Slide 11: http://booksiread.org 9 Dryden or John Locke, Joseph Addison or Joseph Butler, Samuel Johnson or Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper or John Wesley, Walter Scott or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth or Thomas Chalmers, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, or William Makepeace Thackeray. A similar list for American literature would place as leaders in letters: Thomas Hooker or Thomas Shepard, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Philip Freneau, Noah Webster or James Kent, James Fenimore Cooper or Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson or Edward Everett, Joseph Addison Alexander or William Ellery Channing, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, or Nathaniel Hawthorne. 2. The prosecution of the study might be carried on in one or more of several ways, according either to the purpose in view or the tastes of the student. Attention might prof- Slide 12: 10Brief History of English and American Literature itably be concentrated on the literature of a given period and worked out in detail by taking up individual authors, or by classifying all the writers of the period 6 on the basis of the character of their writings, such as poetry, history, belleslettres, theology, essays, and the like. 3. Again, the literature of a period might be studied with reference to its inﬂuence on the religious, commercial, political, or social life of the people among whom it has circulated; or as the result of certain forces which have preceded its production. It is well worth the time and effort to trace the inﬂuence of one author upon another or many others, who, while maintaining their individuality, have been either in style or method of production unconsciously molded by their -confreres- of the pen. The divisions of writers may, again, be made with reference to their opinions and associations in the different Slide 13: http://booksiread.org 11 departments of life where they have wrought their active labors, such as in politics, religion, moral reform, or educational questions. The inﬂuence of the great writers in the languages of the Continent upon the literature of England and America affords another theme of absorbing interest, and has its peculiarly good results in bringing the student into close brotherhood with the fruitful and cultured minds of every land. In fact, the possible applications of the study of literature are so many and varied that the ingenuity of any earnest student may devise such as the exigencies of his own work may require. JOHN F. HURST, -Washington-. Slide 14: 12Brief History of English and American Literature Slide 15: 7 PREFACE. In so brief a history of so rich a literature, the problem is how to get room enough to give, not an adequate impression–that is impossible–but any impression at all of the subject. To do this I have crowded out everything but -belleslettres-. Books in philosophy, history, science, etc., however important in the history of English thought, receive the merest incidental mention, or even no mention at all. Again, I have omitted the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, which is written in a language nearly as hard for a modern Englishman to read as Ger13 Slide 16: 14Brief History of English and American Literature man is, or Dutch. Caedmon and Cynewulf are no more a part of English literature than Vergil and Horace are of Italian. I have also left out 8 the vernacular literature of the Scotch before the time of Burns. Up to the date of the union Scotland was a separate kingdom, and its literature had a development independent of the English, though parallel with it. In dividing the history into periods, I have followed, with some modiﬁcations, the divisions made by Mr. Stopford Brooke in his excellent little -Primer of English Literature-. A short reading course is appended to each chapter. Slide 17: 9 CONTENTS. I. FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 10661400 . . . . . 11 II. FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER, 1400-1599 . . . . . . . 42 III. THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE, 1564-1616 . . . . . . . . . 76 IV. THE AGE OF MILTON, 1608-1674 . . . . . . . . . . 125 V. FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF POPE, 1660-1744 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 VI. FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, 1744-1789 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 VII. FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT, 1789-1832 . . . . . 15 Slide 18: 16Brief History of English and American Literature . . . . . . . . . . 222 VIII. FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT TIME, 1832-1886 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 IX. THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN GREAT BRITAIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 11 OUTLINE SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. I. FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 1066-1400. The Norman conquest of England, in the 11th century, made a break in the natural growth of the English language and literature. The old English or Anglo-Saxon had been a purely Germanic speech, with a complicated grammar and a full set of inﬂections. For three hundred years following the battle of Hastings this native tongue was driven from the king’s court and the courts of law, from parliament, school, and university. During all this time there were two languages spoken in England. Norman French Slide 19: http://booksiread.org 17 was the birth-tongue of the upper classes and English of the lower. When the latter ﬁnally got the better in the struggle, and became, about the middle of the 14th century, the national speech of all England, it was no longer the English of King Alfred. It was a new language, a grammarless tongue, almost wholly 12 stripped of its inﬂections. It had lost a half of its old words, and had ﬁlled their places with French equivalents. The Norman lawyers had introduced legal terms; the ladies and courtiers, words of dress and courtesy. The knight had imported the vocabulary of war and of the chase. The master-builders of the Norman castles and cathedrals contributed technical expressions proper to the architect and the mason. The art of cooking was French. The naming of the living animals, -ox, swine, sheep, deer,- was left to the Saxon churl who had the herding of them, while Slide 20: 18Brief History of English and American Literature the dressed meats, -beef, pork, mutton, venison,received their baptism from the table-talk of his Norman master. The four orders of begging friars, and especially the Franciscans or Gray Friars, introduced into England in 1224, became intermediaries between the high and the low. They went about preaching to the poor, and in their sermons they intermingled French with English. In their hands, too, was almost all the science of the day; their -medicine-, -botany,and -astronomy- displaced the old nomenclature of -leechdom-, -wort-cunning,- and -starcraft-. And, ﬁnally, the translators of French poems often found it easier to transfer a foreign word bodily than to seek out a native synonym, particularly when the former supplied them with a rhyme. But the innovation reached even to the commonest words in every-day use, so that -voice- drove out -steven-, -poor- drove Slide 21: http://booksiread.org 19 out -earm-, and -color-, -use-, and -place- made good their footing beside -hue,- 13 -wont-, and -stead-. A great part of the English words that were left were so changed in spelling and pronunciation as to be practically new. Chaucer stands, in date, midway between King Alfred and Alfred Tennyson, but his English differs vastly more from the former’s than from the latter’s. To Chaucer Anglo-Saxon was as much a dead language as it is to us. The classical Anglo-Saxon, moreover, had been the Wessex dialect, spoken and written at Alfred’s capital, Winchester. When the French had displaced this as the language of culture, there was no longer a ”king’s English” or any literary standard. The sources of modern standard English are to be found in the East Midland, spoken in Lincoln, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, and neighboring shires. Here the old Slide 22: 20Brief History of English and American Literature Anglian had been corrupted by the Danish settlers, and rapidly threw off its inﬂections when it became a spoken and no longer a written language, after the Conquest. The West Saxon, clinging more tenaciously to ancient forms, sunk into the position of a local dialect; while the East Midland, spreading to London, Oxford, and Cambridge, became the literary English in which Chaucer wrote. The Normans brought in also new intellectual inﬂuences and new forms of literature. They were a cosmopolitan people, and they connected England with the continent. Lanfranc and Anselm, the ﬁrst two Norman archbishops of Canterbury, were learned and splendid prelates of a 14 type quite unknown to the Anglo-Saxons. They introduced the scholastic philosophy taught at the University of Paris, and the reformed discipline of the Norman abbeys. They bound the Slide 23: http://booksiread.org 21 English Church more closely to Rome, and ofﬁcered it with Normans. English bishops were deprived of their sees for illiteracy, and French abbots were set over monasteries of Saxon monks. Down to the middle of the 14th century the learned literature of England was mostly in Latin, and the polite literature in French. English did not at any time altogether cease to be a written language, but the extant remains of the period from 1066 to 1200 are few and, with one exception, unimportant. After 1200 En- glish came more and more into written use, but mainly in translations, paraphrases, and imitations of French works. The native genius was at school, and followed awkwardly the copy set by its master. The Anglo-Saxon poetry, for example, had been rhythmical and alliterative. It was commonly written in lines containing four rhyth- Slide 24: 22Brief History of English and American Literature mical accents and with three of the accented syllables alliterating. -R-este hine tha -r-um-heort; -r-eced hlifade -G-eap and -g-old-fah, gaest inne swaef. Rested him then the great-hearted; the hall towered Roomy and gold-bright, the guest slept within. This rude energetic verse the Saxon -scophad sung to his harp or -glee-beam-, dwelling on the 15 emphatic syllables, passing swiftly over the others which were of undetermined number and position in the line. It was now displaced by the smooth metrical verse with rhymed endings, which the French introduced and which our modern poets use, a verse ﬁtted to be recited rather than sung. The old English alliterative verse continued, indeed, in occasional use to the 16th century. But it was linked to a forgotten literature and an obsolete dialect, Slide 25: http://booksiread.org 23 and was doomed to give way. Chaucer lent his great authority to the more modern verse system, and his own literary models and inspirers were all foreign, French or Italian. Literature in England began to be once more English and truly national in the hands of Chaucer and his contemporaries, but it was the literature of a nation cut off from its own past by three centuries of foreign rule. The most noteworthy English document of the 11th and 12th centuries was the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. Copies of these annals, differing somewhat among themselves, had been kept at the monasteries in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere. The yearly entries were mostly brief, dry records of passing events, though occasionally they become full and animated. The fen country of Cambridge and Lincolnshire was a region of monas- Slide 26: 24Brief History of English and American Literature teries. Here were the great abbeys of Peterborough and Croyland and Ely minster. One of the earliest English songs tells how the savage heart of the Danish 16 king Cnut was softened by the singing of the monks in Ely. Merie sungen muneches binnen Ely Tha Cnut chyning reu ther by; Roweth, cnihtes, noer the land, And here we thes muneches sang. It was among the dikes and marshes of this fen country that the bold outlaw Hereward, ”the last of the English,” held out for some years against the conqueror. And it was here, in the rich abbey of Burch or Peterborough, the ancient Medeshamstede (meadow-homestead) that the chronicle was continued for nearly a century after the Conquest, breaking off abruptly in 1154, the date of King Stephen’s death. Peterborough had received a new Norman abbot, Turold, ”a very stern man,” and the entry in Slide 27: http://booksiread.org 25 the chronicle for 1170 tells how Hereward and his gang, with his Danish backers, thereupon plundered the abbey of its treasures, which were ﬁrst removed to Ely, and then carried off by the Danish ﬂeet and sunk, lost, or squandered. The English in the later portions of this Peterborough chronicle becomes gradually more modern, and falls away more and more from the strict grammatical standards of the classical Anglo-Saxon. It is a most valuable historical monument, and some passages of it are written with great vividness, notably the sketch of William the Conqueror put down in the year of his death (1086) by one who had ”looked upon him and at another time dwelt in his court.” 17 ”He who was before a rich king, and lord of many a land, he had not then of all his land but a piece of seven feet. . . . Likewise he was a very stark man and a terrible, so that one durst Slide 28: 26Brief History of English and American Literature do nothing against his will. . . . Among other things is not to be forgotten the good peace that he made in this land, so that a man might fare over his kingdom with his bosom full of gold unhurt. He set up a great deer preserve, and he laid laws therewith that whoso should slay hart or hind, he should be blinded. As greatly did he love the tall deer as if he were their father.” With the discontinuance of the Peterborough annals, English history written in English prose ceased for three hundred years. The thread of the nation’s story was kept up in Latin chronicles, compiled by writers partly of English and partly of Norman descent. The earliest of these, such as Ordericus Vitalis, Simeon of Durham, Henry of Huntingdon, and William of Malmesbury, were contemporary with the later entries of the Saxon chronicle. The last of them, Matthew Slide 29: http://booksiread.org 27 of Westminster, ﬁnished his work in 1273. About 1300 Robert, a monk of Gloucester, composed a chronicle in English verse, following in the main the authority of the Latin chronicles, and he was succeeded by other rhyming chroniclers in the 14th century. In the hands of these the true history of the Saxon times was overlaid with an ever-increasing mass of fable and legend. All real knowledge of the period 18 dwindled away until in Capgrave’s -Chronicle of England, written in prose in 1463-64, hardly any thing of it is left. In history as in literature the English had forgotten their past, and had turned to foreign sources. It is noteworthy that Shakspere, who borrowed his subjects and his heroes sometimes from authentic English history, sometimes from the legendary history of ancient Britain, Denmark, and Scotland, as in Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth, ignores the Saxon period alto- Slide 30: 28Brief History of English and American Literature gether. And Spenser, who gives in his second book of the -Faerie Queene-, a -resume- of the reigns of fabulous British kings–the supposed ancestors of Queen Elizabeth, his royal patron– has nothing to say of the real kings of early England. So completely had the true record faded away that it made no appeal to the imaginations of our most patriotic poets. The Saxon Alfred had been dethroned by the British Arthur, and the conquered Welsh had imposed their ﬁctitious genealogies upon the dynasty of the conquerors. In the -Roman de Rou-, a verse chronicle of the dukes of Normandy, written by the Norman Wace, it is related that at the battle of Hastings the French -jongleur-, Taillefer, spurred out before the van of William’s army, tossing his lance in the air and chanting of ”Charlemagne and of Roland, of Oliver and the peers who died at Roncesvals.” This incident is prophetic Slide 31: http://booksiread.org 29 of the victory which Norman song, no less than Norman arms, was to win over England. The lines which Taillefer 19 sang were from the Chanson de Roland-, the oldest and best of the French hero sagas. The heathen Northmen, who had ravaged the coasts of France in the 10th century, had become in the course of one hundred and ﬁfty years, completely identiﬁed with the French. They had accepted Christianity, intermarried with the native women, and forgotten their own Norse tongue. The race thus formed was the most brilliant in Europe. The warlike, adventurous spirit of the vikings mingled in its blood with the French nimbleness of wit and fondness for display. The Normans were a nation of knights-errant, with a passion for prowess and for courtesy. Their architecture was at once strong and graceful. Their women were skilled in embroidery, a splendid Slide 32: 30Brief History of English and American Literature sample of which is preserved in the famous Bayeux tapestry, in which the conqueror’s wife, Matilda, and the ladies of her court wrought the history of the Conquest. This national taste for decoration expressed itself not only in the ceremonious pomp of feast and chase and tourney, but likewise in literature. The most characteristic contribution of the Normans to English poetry were the metrical romances or chivalry tales. These were sung or recited by the minstrels, who were among the retainers of every great feudal baron, or by the -jongleurs-, who wandered from court to castle. There is a whole literature of these -romans d’ aventure- in the Anglo-Norman dialect of French. Many of them are 20 very long– often thirty, forty, or ﬁfty thousand lines–written sometimes in a strophic form, sometimes in long Alexandrines, but commonly in the short, eight- Slide 33: http://booksiread.org 31 syllabled rhyming couplet. Numbers of them were turned into English verse in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries. The translations were usually inferior to the originals. The French -trouvere(ﬁnder or poet) told his story in a straight-forward, prosaic fashion, omitting no details in the action and unrolling endless descriptions of dresses, trappings, gardens, etc. He invented plots and situations full of ﬁne possibilities by which later poets have proﬁted, but his own handling of them was feeble and prolix. Yet there was a simplicity about the old French language and a certain elegance and delicacy in the diction of the -trouveres- which the rude, unformed English failed to catch. The heroes of these romances were of various climes: Guy of Warwick, and Richard the Lion Heart of England, Havelok the Dane, Sir Troilus of Troy, Charlemagne, and Alexander. Slide 34: 32Brief History of English and American Literature But, strangely enough, the favorite hero of English romance was that mythical Arthur of Britain, whom Welsh legend had celebrated as the most formidable enemy of the Sassenach invaders and their victor in twelve great battles. The language and literature of the ancient Cymry or Welsh had made no impression on their AngloSaxon conquerors. There are a few Welsh borrowings in the English speech, such as -bardand -druid-; but in the old Anglo-Saxon literature there are 21 no more traces of British song and story than if the two races had been sundered by the ocean instead of being borderers for over six hundred years. But the Welsh had their own national traditions, and after the Norman Conquest these were set free from the isolation of their Celtic tongue and, in an indirect form, entered into the general literature of Europe. The French came into contact with Slide 35: http://booksiread.org 33 the old British literature in two places: in the Welsh marches in England and in the province of Brittany in France, where the population is of Cymric race and spoke, and still to some extent speaks, a Cymric dialect akin to the Welsh. About 1140 Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, seemingly of Welsh descent, who lived at the court of Henry the First and became afterward bishop of St. Asaph, produced in Latin a so-called -Historia Britonum- in which it was told how Brutus, the great grandson of Aeneas, came to Britain, and founded there his kingdom called after him, and his city of New Troy (Troynovant) on the site of the later London. An air of historic gravity was given to this tissue of Welsh legends by an exact chronology and the genealogy of the British kings, and the author referred, as his authority, to an imaginary Welsh book given him, as he said, by a Slide 36: 34Brief History of English and American Literature certain Walter, archdeacon of Oxford. Here appeared that line of fabulous British princes which has become so familiar to modern readers in the plays of Shakspere and the poems of Tennyson: Lear and his 22 three daughters; Cymbeline, Gorboduc, the subject of the earliest regular English tragedy, composed by Sackville and acted in 1562; Locrine and his Queen Gwendolen, and his daughter Sabrina, who gave her name to the river Severn, was made immortal by an exquisite song in Milton’s -Comus-, and became the heroine of the tragedy of -Locrine, once attributed to Shakspere; and above all, Arthur, the son of Uther Pendragon, and the founder of the Table Round. In 1155 Wace, the author of the -Roman de Rou-, turned Geoffrey’s work into a French poem entitled -Brut d’ Angleterre-, ”brut” being a Welsh word meaning chronicle. About the year 1200 Wace’s poem Slide 37: http://booksiread.org 35 was Englished by Layamon, a priest of Arley Regis, on the border stream of Severn. Layamon’s -Brut- is in thirty thousand lines, partly alliterative and partly rhymed, but written in pure Saxon English with hardly any French words. The style is rude but vigorous, and, at times, highly imaginative. Wace had ampliﬁed Geoffrey’s chronicle somewhat, but Layamon made much larger additions, derived, no doubt, from legends current on the Welsh border. In particular the story of Arthur grew in his hands into something like fullness. He tells of the enchantments of Merlin, the wizard; of the unfaithfulness of Arthur’s queen, Guenever; and the treachery of his nephew, Modred. His narration of the last great battle between Arthur and Modred; of the wounding of the king–”ﬁfteen ﬁendly wounds he had, one might in the least 23 three gloves thrust–”; and of the little boat Slide 38: 36Brief History of English and American Literature with ”two women therein, wonderly dight,” which came to bear him away to Avalun and the Queen Argante, ”sheenest of all elves,” whence he shall come again, according to Merlin’s prophecy, to rule the Britons; all this left little, in essentials, for Tennyson to add in his -Death of Arthur-. This new material for ﬁction was eagerly seized upon by the Norman romancers. The story of Arthur drew to itself other stories which were aﬂoat. Walter Map, a gentleman of the Court of Henry II., in two French prose romances, connected with it the church legend of the Sangreal, or holy cup, from which Christ had drunk at his last supper, and which Joseph of Arimathea had afterward brought to England. Then it miraculously disappeared and became thenceforth the occasion of knightly quest, the mystic symbol of the object of the soul’s desire, an adventure only to be achieved by the maiden Slide 39: http://booksiread.org 37 knight, Galahad, the son of the great Launcelot, who in the romances had taken the place of Modred in Geoffrey’s history, as the paramour of Queen Guenever. In like manner the lovestory of Tristan and Isolde was joined by other romancers to the Arthur-Saga. This came probably from Brittany or Cornwall. Thus there grew up a great epic cycle of Arthurian romance, with a ﬁxed shape and a unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day and rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a more artistic 24 handling by such modern English poets as Tennyson in his -Idyls of the King-, by Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and many others. There were innumerable Arthur romances in prose and verse, in Anglo-Norman and continental French dialects, in English, in German, and in other tongues. But the ﬁnal form which the Saga took in mediaeval England Slide 40: 38Brief History of English and American Literature was the prose -Morte Dartur- of Sir Thomas Malory, composed at the close of the 15th century. This was a digest of the earlier romances and is Tennyson’s main authority. Beside the literature of the knight was the literature of the cloister. There is a considerable body of religious writing in early English, consisting of homilies in prose and verse, books of devotion, like the -Ancren Riwle- (Rule of Anchoresses), 1225; the -Ayenbite of Inwyt- (Remorse of Conscience), 1340, both in prose; the -Handlyng Sinne-, 1303; the -Cursor Mundi, 1320; and the -Pricke of Conscience-, 1340, in verse; metrical renderings of the Psalter, the Pater Noster, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments, the Gospels for the Day, such as the Ormulum-, or Book of Orm, 1205; legends and miracles of saints; poems in praise of virginity, on the contempt of the world, on the ﬁve Slide 41: http://booksiread.org 39 joys of the Virgin, the ﬁve wounds of Christ, the eleven pains of hell, the seven deadly sins, the ﬁfteen tokens of the coming judgment, and dialogues between the soul and the body. These were the work not only of the monks, but also of the begging friars, and in 25 smaller part of the secular or parish clergy. They are full of the ascetic piety and superstition of the Middle Age, the childish belief in the marvelous, the allegorical interpretation of Scripture texts, the grotesque material horrors of hell with its grisly ﬁends, the vileness of the human body and the loathsome details of its corruption after death. Now and then a single poem rises above the tedious and hideous barbarism of the general level of this monkish literature, either from a more intensely personal feeling in the poet, or from an occasional grace or beauty in his verse. A poem so distinguished is, for example, Slide 42: 40Brief History of English and American Literature -A Luve Ron- (A Love Counsel) by the Minorite friar, Thomas de Hales, one stanza of which recalls the French poet Villon’s -Balade of Dead Ladies-, with its refrain. ”Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?” ”Where are the snows of yester year? Where is Paris and Heleyne That weren so bright and fair of blee[1] Amadas, Tristan, and Ideyne Yseude and alle the,[2] Hector with his sharpe main, And Caesar rich in worldes fee? They beth ygliden out of the reign[3] As the shaft is of the dee.” [4] A few early English poems on secular subjects are also worthy of mention, among others, -The Owl and the Nightingale-, generally assigned to the reign of Henry III. (1216-1272), an -Estrif-, 26 or dispute, in which the owl represents the ascetic and the nightingale the aesthetic view of life. The debate is conducted with much animation and a spirited use of prover- Slide 43: http://booksiread.org bial wisdom. 41 -The Land of Cokaygne- is an amusing little poem of some two hundred lines, belonging to the class of -fabliaux-, short humorous tales or satirical pieces in verse. It describes a lubber-land, or fool’s paradise, where the geese ﬂy down all roasted on the spit, bringing garlic in the bills for their dressing, and where there is a nunnery upon a river of sweet milk, and an abbey of white monks and gray, whose walls, like the hall of little King Pepin, are ”of pie-crust and pastry crust,” with ﬂouren cakes for the shingles and fat puddings for the pins. There are a few songs dating from about 1300, and mostly found in a single collection (Harl, MS., 2253), which are almost the only English verse before Chaucer that has any sweetness to a modern ear. They are written in French strophic forms in the southern dialect, and some- Slide 44: 42Brief History of English and American Literature times have an intermixture of French and Latin lines. They are musical, fresh, simple, and many of them very pretty. They celebrate the gladness of spring with its cuckoos and throstlecocks, its daisies and woodruff. ”When the nightingale sings the woodes waxen green Leaf and grass and blossom spring in Averil, I ween, And love is to my herte gone with a spear so keen, Night and day my blood it drinks my herte doth me tene.”[5] 27 Others are love plaints to ”Alysoun” or some other lady whose ”name is in a note of the nightingale;” whose eyes are as gray as glass, and her skin as ”red as rose on ris.” [6] Some employ a burden or refrain. ”Blow, northern wind, Blow thou me, my sweeting. Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, blow!” Others are touched with a light melancholy at the coming of winter. Slide 45: http://booksiread.org 43 ”Winter wakeneth all my care Now these leaves waxeth bare. Oft I sigh and mourne sare When it cometh in my thought Of this worldes joy, how it goeth all to nought” Some of these poems are love songs to Christ or the Virgin, composed in the warm language of earthly passion. The sentiment of chivalry united with the ecstatic reveries of the cloister had produced Mariolatry and the imagery of the Song of Solomon, in which Christ wooes the soul, had made this feeling of divine love familiar. Toward the end of the 13th century a collection of lives of saints, a sort of English Golden Legend-, was prepared at the great abbey of Gloucester for use on saints’ days. The legends were chosen partly from the hagiology of the Church Catholic, as the lives of Margaret, Christopher, and Michael; partly from the calendar of the English Church, as the 28 lives Slide 46: 44Brief History of English and American Literature of St. Thomas of Canterbury, of the Anglo- Saxons, Dunstan, Swithin–who is mentioned by Shakspere–and Kenelm, whose life is quoted by Chaucer in the -Nonne Presto’s Tale-. The verse was clumsy and the style monotonous, but an imaginative touch here and there has furnished a hint to later poets. Thus the legend of St. Brandan’s search for the earthly paradise has been treated by Matthew Arnold and William Morris. About the middle of the 14th century there was a revival of the Old English alliterative verse in romances like -William and the Werewolf, and -Sir Gawayne-, and in religious pieces such as -Clannesse- (purity), -Patience- and The Perle-, the last named a mystical poem of much beauty, in which a bereaved father sees a vision of his daughter among the gloriﬁed. Some of these employed rhyme as well as allit- Slide 47: http://booksiread.org 45 eration. They are in the West Midland dialect, although Chaucer implies that alliteration was most common in the north. ”I am a sotherne man,” says the parson in the -Canterbury Tales. ”I cannot geste rom, ram, ruf, by my letter.” But the most important of the alliterative poems was the -Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman-. In the second half of the 14th century French had ceased to be the mothertongue of any considerable part of the population of England. By a statute of Edward III., in 1362, it was displaced from the law courts. By 1386 English had taken its place in the schools. The 29 Anglo-Norman dialect had grown corrupt, and Chaucer contrasts the French of Paris with the provincial French spoken by his prioress, ”after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe.” The native English genius was also beginning to assert itself, roused in part, perhaps, by the Slide 48: 46Brief History of English and American Literature English victories in the wars of Edward III. against the French. It was the bows of the English yeomanry that won the ﬁght at Crecy, fully as much as the prowess of the Norman baronage. But at home the times were bad. Heavy taxes and the repeated visitations of the pestilence, or Black Death, pressed upon the poor and wasted the land. The Church was cor- rupt; the mendicant orders had grown enormously wealthy, and the country was eaten up by a swarm of begging friars, pardoners, and apparitors. The social discontent was fermenting among the lower classes, which ﬁnally issued in the communistic uprising of the peasantry, under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw. This state of things is reﬂected in the -Vision of Piers Plowman-, written as early as 1362, by William Langland, a tonsured clerk of the west country. It is in form an allegory, and bears some resem- Slide 49: http://booksiread.org 47 blance to the later and more famous allegory of the -Pilgrim’s Progress-. The poet falls asleep on the Malvern Hills, in Worcestershire, and has a vision of a ”fair ﬁeld full of folk,” representing the world with its various conditions of men. There were pilgrims and palmers; hermits with hooked staves, who went to Walsingham– and 30 their wenches after them–great lubbers and long that were loth to work: friars glossing the Gospel for their own proﬁt; pardoners cheating the people with relics and indulgences; parish priests who forsook their parishes–that had been poor since the pestilence time–and went to London to sing there for simony; bishops, archbishops, and deacons, who got themselves fat clerkships in the Exchequer, or King’s Bench; in short, all manner of lazy and corrupt ecclesiastics. A lady, who represents holy Church, then appears to the dreamer, explains Slide 50: 48Brief History of English and American Literature to him the meaning of his vision, and reads him a sermon the text of which is, ”When all treasure is tried, truth is the best.” A number of other allegorical ﬁgures are next introduced, Conscience, Reason, Meed, Simony, Falsehood, etc., and after a series of speeches and adventures, a second vision begins in which the seven deadly sins pass before the poet in a succession of graphic impersonations, and ﬁnally all the characters set out on a pilgrimage in search of St. Truth, ﬁnding no guide to direct them save Piers the Plowman, who stands for the simple, pious laboring man, the sound heart of the English common folk. The poem was originally in eight divisions or ”passus,” to which was added a continuation in three parts, -Vita Do Wel-, Do Bet-, and -Do Best-. About 1377 the whole was greatly enlarged by the author. -Piers Plowman- was the ﬁrst extended liter- Slide 51: http://booksiread.org 49 ary work after the Conquest which was purely English in character. It owed nothing to France but the 31 allegorical cast which the -Roman de la Rose- had made fashionable in both countries. But even here such personiﬁed abstractions as Langland’s Fair-speech and Work-whentime-is, remind us less of the Fraunchise, Belamour, and Fals-semblaunt of the French courtly allegories than of Bunyan’s Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and even of such Puritan names as PraiseGod Barebones, and Zeal-of-the-land Busy. The poem is full of English moral seriousness, of shrewd humor, the hatred of a lie, the homely English love for reality. It has little unity of plan, but is rather a series of episodes, discourses, parables, and scenes. It is all astir with the actual life of the time. We see the gossips gathered in the ale-house of Betun the brewster, and the pastry cooks in the London Slide 52: 50Brief History of English and American Literature streets crying ”Hote pies, hote! Good gees and grys. Go we dine, go we!” Had Langland not linked his literary fortunes with an uncouth and obsolescent verse, and had he possessed a ﬁner artistic sense and a higher poetic imagination, his book might have been, like Chaucer’s, among the lasting glories of our tongue. As it is, it is forgotten by all but professional students of literature and history. Its popularity in its own day is shown by the number of MSS. which are extant, and by imitations, such as -Piers the Plowman’s Crede- (1394), and the -Plowman’s Tale-, for a long time wrongly inserted in the Canterbury Tales-. Piers became a kind of typical ﬁgure, like the French peasant, -Jacques Bonhomme-, and was 32 appealed to as such by the Protestant reformers of the 16th century. The attack upon the growing corruptions of the Church was made more systematically, and Slide 53: http://booksiread.org 51 from the stand-point of a theologian rather than of a popular moralist and satirist, by John Wyclif, the rector of Lutterworth and professor of Divinity in Baliol College, Oxford. In a series of Latin and English tracts he made war against indulgences, pilgrimages, images, oblations, the friars, the pope, and the doctrine of transubstantiation. But his greatest service to Eng- land was his translation of the Bible, the ﬁrst complete version in the mother tongue. This he made about 1380, with the help of Nicholas Hereford, and a revision of it was made by another disciple, Purvey, some ten years later. There was no knowledge of Hebrew or Greek in England at that time, and the Wicliﬁte versions were made not from the original tongues, but from the Latin Vulgate. In his anxiety to make his rendering close, and mindful, perhaps, of the warning in the Apocalypse, ”If any man shall Slide 54: 52Brief History of English and American Literature take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life,” Wiclif followed the Latin order of construction so literally as to make rather awkward English, translating, for example, Quid sibi vult hoc somnium?- by -What to itself wole this sweven?- Purvey’s revision was somewhat freer and more idiomatic. In the reigns of Henry IV. and V. it was forbidden to read or to have any 33 of Wiclif’s writings. Such of them as could be seized were publicly burned. In spite of this, copies of his Bible circulated secretly in great numbers. Forshall and Madden, in their great edition (1850), enumerate one hundred and ﬁfty MSS. which had been consulted by them. Later translators, like Tyndale and the makers of the Authorized Version, or ”King James’ Bible” (1611), followed Wiclif’s language in many instances; so that he was, Slide 55: http://booksiread.org 53 in truth, the ﬁrst author of our biblical dialect and the founder of that great monument of noble English which has been the main conservative inﬂuence in the mother-tongue, holding it fast to many strong, pithy words and idioms that would else have been lost. In 1415; some thirty years after Wiclif’s death, by decree of the Council of Constance, his bones were dug up from the soil of Lutterworth chancel and burned, and the ashes cast into the Swift. ”The brook,” says Thomas Fuller, in his -Church History, ”did convey 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.” Although the writings thus far mentioned are of very high interest to the student of the English language, and the historian of English man- Slide 56: 54Brief History of English and American Literature ners and culture, they cannot be said to have much importance as mere literature. But in Geoffrey Chaucer (died 1400) we meet with a poet of the ﬁrst rank, whose works are increasingly read and 34 will always continue to be a source of delight and refreshment to the general reader as well as a ”well of English undeﬁled” to the professional man of letters. With the exception of Dante, Chaucer was the greatest of the poets of mediaeval Europe, and he remains one of the greatest of English poets, and certainly the foremost of English story-tellers in verse. He was the son of a London vintner, and was in his youth in the service of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, one of the sons of Edward III. He made a campaign in France in 1359-60, when he was taken prisoner. Afterward he was attached to the court and received numerous favors and appointments. He was sent on several Slide 57: http://booksiread.org 55 diplomatic missions by the king, three of them to Italy, where, in all probability, he made the acquaintance of the new Italian literature, the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. He was appointed at different times Comptroller of the Wool Customs, Comptroller of Petty Customs, and Clerk of the Works. He sat for Kent in Parliament, and he received pensions from three successive kings. He was a man of business as well as books, and he loved men and nature no less than study. He knew his world; he ”saw life steadily and saw it whole.” Living at the center of English social and political life, and resorting to the court of Edward III., then the most brilliant in Europe, Chaucer was an eye-witness of those feudal pomps which ﬁll the high-colored pages of his contemporary, the French chronicler, 35 Froissart. His description of a tournament in the -Knight’s Tale- is unexcelled Slide 58: 56Brief History of English and American Literature for spirit and detail. He was familiar with dances, feasts, and state ceremonies, and all the life of the baronial castle, in bower and hall, the ”trompes with the loude minstralcie,” the heralds, the ladies, and the squires, ”What hawkes sitten on the perch above, What houndes liggen on the ﬂoor adown.” But his sympathy reached no less the life of the lowly, the poor widow in her narrow cottage, and that ”trewe swynkere and a good,” the plowman whom Langland had made the hero of his vision. He is, more than all English poets, the poet of the lusty spring, of ”Aprille with her showres sweet” and the ”foules song,” of ”May with all her ﬂoures and her greene,” of the new leaves in the wood, and the meadows new powdered with the daisy, the mystic Marguerite of his -Legend of Good Women-. A fresh vernal air blows through all his pages. Slide 59: http://booksiread.org 57 In Chaucer’s earlier works, such as the translation of the -Romaunt of the Rose- (if that be his), the -Boke of the Duchesse-, the -Parlament of Foules-, the -Hous of Fame-, as well as in the -Legend of Good Women-, which was later, the inspiration of the French court poetry of the 13th and 14th centuries is manifest. He retains in them the mediaeval machinery of allegories and dreams, the elaborate descriptions of palaces, 36 temples, portraitures, etc., which had been made fashionable in France by such poems as Guillaume de Lorris’s -Roman de la Rose-, and Jean Machault’s -La Fontaine Amoureuse. In some of these the inﬂuence of Italian poetry is also perceptible. There are suggestions from Dante, for example, in the -Parlament of Foules- and the -Hous of Fame-, and -Troilus and Cresseide- is a free handling rather than a translation of Boccaccio’s -Filostrato-. In all of Slide 60: 58Brief History of English and American Literature these there are passages of great beauty and force. Had Chaucer written nothing else, he would still have been remembered as the most accomplished English poet of his time, but he would not have risen to the rank which he now occupies, as one of the greatest English poets of all time. This position he owes to his masterpiece, the -Canterbury Tales-. Here he abandoned the imitation of foreign models and the artiﬁcial literary fashions of his age, and wrote of real life from his own ripe knowledge of men and things. The -Canterbury Tales- are a collection of stories written at different times, but put together, probably, toward the close of his life. The frame-work into which they are ﬁtted is one of the happiest ever devised. A number of pilgrims who are going on horseback to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket, at Canterbury, meet Slide 61: http://booksiread.org 59 at the Tabard Inn, in Southwark, a suburb of London. The jolly host of the Tabard, Harry Bailey, proposes that on their way to Canterbury, each of the company shall tell two tales, and two more on their way back, and 37 that the one who tells the best shall have a supper at the cost of the rest when they return to the inn. He himself accompanies them as judge and ”reporter.” In the setting of the stories there is thus a constant feeling of movement and the air of all outdoors. The little ”head-links” and ”end-links” which bind them together, give incidents of the journey and glimpses of the talk of the pilgrims, sometimes amounting, as in the prologue of the -Wife of Bath-, to full and almost dramatic character-sketches. The stories, too, are dramatically suited to the narrators. The general prologue is a series of such character-sketches, the most perfect in English Slide 62: 60Brief History of English and American Literature poetry. The portraits of the pilgrims are illuminated with the soft brilliancy and the minute loving ﬁdelity of the miniatures in the old missals, and with the same quaint precision in traits of expression and in costume. The pilgrims are not all such as one would meet nowadays at an English inn. The presence of a knight, a squire, a yeoman archer, and especially of so many kinds of ecclesiastics, a nun, a friar, a monk, a pardoner, and a sompnour or apparitor, reminds us that the England of that day must have been less like Protestant England, as we know it, than like the Italy of some thirty years ago. But however the outward face of society may have changed, the Canterbury pilgrims remain, in Chaucer’s description, living and universal types of human nature. The -Canterbury Tales- are twenty-four in number. There were 38 thirty-two pilgrims, so that if ﬁnished as de- Slide 63: http://booksiread.org 61 signed the whole collection would have numbered one hundred and twenty-eight stories. Chaucer is the bright consummate ﬂower of the English Middle Age. Like many another great poet, he put the ﬁnal touch to the various literary forms that he found in cultivation. Thus his -Knight’s Tale-, based upon Boccaccio’s -Teseide-, is the best of English mediaeval romances. And yet the -Rime of Sir Thopas, who goes seeking an elf queen for his mate, and is encountered by the giant Sir Olifaunt, burlesques these same romances with their impossible adventures and their tedious rambling descriptions. The tales of the prioress and the second nun are saints’ legends. The -Monk’s Tale- is a set of dry, moral apologues in the manner of his contemporary, the ”moral Gower.” The stories told by the reeve, miller, friar, sompnour, shipman, and merchant, belong to the Slide 64: 62Brief History of English and American Literature class of -fabliaux-, a few of which existed in English, such as -Dame Siriz-, the -Lay of the Ash, and the -Land of Cokaygne-, already mentioned. The -Nonne Preste’s Tale-, likewise, which Dryden modernized with admirable humor, was of the class of -fabliaux-, and was suggested by a little poem in forty lines, -Dou Coc et Werpil-, by Marie de France, a Norman poetess of the 13th century. It belonged, like the early English poem of -The Fox and the Wolf-, to the popular animal-saga of -Reynard the Fox-. The -Franklin’s Tale-, whose scene is Brittany, and the -Wife of Baths’ 39 Tale-, which is laid in the time of the British Arthur, belong to the class of French -lais-, serious metrical tales shorter than the romance and of Breton origin, the best representatives of which are the elegant and graceful -lais- of Marie de France. Chaucer was our ﬁrst great master of laugh- Slide 65: http://booksiread.org 63 ter and of tears. His serious poetry is full of the tenderest pathos. His loosest tales are delightfully humorous and life-like. He is the kindliest of satirists. The knavery, greed, and hypocrisy of the begging friars and the sellers of indulgences are exposed by him as pitilessly as by Langland and Wiclif, though his mood is not like theirs, one of stern, moral indignation, but rather the good-natured scorn of a man of the world. His charity is broad enough to cover even the corrupt sompnour of whom he says, ”And yet in sooth he was a good felawe.” Whether he shared Wiclif’s opinions is unknown, but John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry IV., who was Chaucer’s life-long patron, was likewise Wiclif’s great upholder against the persecution of the bishops. It is, perhaps, not without signiﬁcance that the poor parson in the -Canterbury Tales-, the only Slide 66: 64Brief History of English and American Literature one of his ecclesiastical pilgrims whom Chaucer treats with respect, is suspected by the host of the Tabard to be a ”loller,” that is, a Lollard, or disciple of Wiclif, and that because he objects to the jovial inn-keeper’s swearing ”by Goddes bones.” 40 Chaucer’s English is nearly as easy for a modern reader as Shakspere’s, and few of his words have become obsolete. His verse, when rightly read, is correct and melodious. The early English was, in some respects, more ”sweet upon the tongue” than the modern language. The vowels had their broad Italian sounds, and the speech was full of soft gutturals and vocalic syllables, like the endings en, es, and e, which made feminine rhymes and kept the consonants from coming harshly together. Great poet as Chaucer was, he was not quite free from the literary weakness of his time. He Slide 67: http://booksiread.org 65 relapses sometimes into the babbling style of the old chroniclers and legend writers; cites ”auctours” and gives long catalogues of names and objects with a -naive- display of learning; and introduces vulgar details in his most exquisite passages. There is something childish about almost all the thought and art of the Middle Ages– at least outside of Italy, where classical models and traditions never quite lost their hold. But Chaucer’s artlessness is half the secret of his wonderful ease in story-telling, and is so engaging that, like a child’s sweet unconsciousness, one would not wish it otherwise. The -Canterbury Tales- had shown of what high uses the English language was capable, but the curiously trilingual condition of literature still continued. French was spoken in the proceedings of Parliament as late as the reign of Henry 41 VI. (1422-1471). Chaucer’s contem- Slide 68: 66Brief History of English and American Literature porary, John Gower, wrote his -Vox Clamantisin Latin, his -Speculum Meditantis- (a lost poem), and a number of -ballades- in Parisian French, and his -Confessio Amantis- (1393) in English. The last named is a dreary, pedantic work, in some 15,000 smooth, monotonous, eight-syllabled couplets, in which Grande Amour instructs the lover how to get the love of Bel Pucell. 1. Early English Literature. By Bernhard ten Brink. Translated from the German by H. M. Kennedy. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1883. 2. Morris and Skeat’s Specimens of Early English. (Clarendon Press Series.) Oxford. 3. Langland’s Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman. Wright’s Edition; or Skeat’s, in Early English Text Society publications. 4. Chaucer: Canterbury Tales. Tyrwhitt’s Edition; or Wright’s, in Percy Society publications. Slide 69: http://booksiread.org 67 5. Complete Writings. Morris’s Edition. 6 vols. (In Aldine Series.) [1] Hue. [2] Those. [3] Realm. [4] Bowstring. [5] Pain. [6] Branch. Slide 70: 68Brief History of English and American Literature Slide 71: 42 II. FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 1400-1599. The 15th century was a barren period in English literary history. It was nearly two hundred years after Chaucer’s death before any poet came, whose name can be written in the same line with his. He was followed at once by a number of imitators who caught the trick of his language and verse, but lacked the genius to make 69 Slide 72: 70Brief History of English and American Literature any ﬁne use of them. The manner of a true poet may be learned, but his style, in the high sense of the word, remains his own secret. Some of the poems which have been attributed to Chaucer and printed in editions of his works, as the Court of Love-, the -Flower and the Leaf-, the Cuckow and the Nightingale-, are now regarded by many scholars as the work of later writers. If not Chaucer’s, they are of Chaucer’s school, and the ﬁrst two, at least, are very pretty poems after the fashion of his minor pieces, such as the -Boke of the Duchesse- and the -Parlament of Foules-. Among his professed disciples was Thomas Occleve, a dull rhymer, who, in his -Governail of Princes-, a didactic poem translated from the Latin 43 about 1413, drew, or caused to be drawn, on the margin of his MS. a colored portrait of his ”maister dere and fader reverent,” Slide 73: http://booksiread.org 71 ”This londes verray tresour and richesse, Dethe by thy dethe hath harm irreparable Unto us done; hir vengeable duresse Dispoiled hath this londe of the swetnesse Of Rhetoryk.” Another versiﬁer of this same generation was John Lydgate, a Benedictine monk, of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, a very prolix writer, who composed, among other things, the -Story of Thebes-, as an addition to the Canterbury Tales-. His ballad of -London Lyckpenny, recounting the adventures of a countryman who goes to the law courts at Westminster in search of justice, ”But for lack of mony I could not speede,” is of interest for the glimpse that it gives us of London street life. Chaucer’s inﬂuence wrought more fruitfully in Scotland, whither it was carried by James I., who had been captured by the English when Slide 74: 72Brief History of English and American Literature a boy of eleven, and brought up at Windsor as a prisoner of State. There he wrote during the reign of Henry V. (1413-1422) a poem in six cantos, entitled the -King’s Quhair- (King’s Book), in Chaucer’s seven lined stanza which had been employed by Lydgate in his -Falls of Princes- (from Boccaccio), and which was afterward called 44 the ”rime royal,” from its use by King James, The -King’s Quhair- tells how the poet, on a May morning, looks from the window of his prison chamber into the castle garden full of alleys, hawthorn hedges, and fair arbors set with ”The sharpe, greene, sweete juniper.” He was listening to ”the little sweete nightingale,” when suddenly casting down his eyes he saw a lady walking in the garden, and at once his ”heart became her thrall.” The incident is precisely like Palamon’s ﬁrst sight of Emily in Slide 75: http://booksiread.org 73 Chaucer’s -Knight’s Tale-, and almost in the very words of Palamon, the poet addresses his lady: ”Ah, sweet, are ye a worldly creature Or heavenly thing in likeness of nature? Or are ye very Nature, the goddess, That have depainted with your heavenly hand This garden full of ﬂowres as they stand?” Then, after a vision in the taste of the age, in which the royal prisoner is transported in turn to the courts of -Venus-, -Minerva-, and -Fortune-, and receives their instruction in the duties belonging to Love’s service, he wakes from sleep and a white turtle-dove brings to his window a spray of red gillyﬂowers, whose leaves are inscribed, in golden letters, with a message of encouragement. James I. may be reckoned among the English poets. He mentions Chaucer, Gower, and Slide 76: 74Brief History of English and American Literature Lydgate as his masters. His education was English, and so was the dialect of his poem, although the 45 unique MS. of it is in the Scotch spelling. The -King’s Quhair- is somewhat overladen with ornament and with the fashionable allegorical devices, but it is, upon the whole, a rich and tender love song, the best specimen of court poetry between the time of Chaucer and the time of Spenser. The lady who walked in the garden on that May morning was Jane Beaufort, niece to Henry IV. She was married to her poet after his release from captivity and became Queen of Scotland in 1424. Twelve years later James was murdered by Sir Robert Graham and his Highlanders, and his wife, who strove to defend him, was wounded by the assassins. The story of the murder has been told of late by D. G. Rossetti, in his ballad, -The King’s Tragedy-. Slide 77: http://booksiread.org 75 The whole life of this princely singer was, like his poem, in the very spirit of romance. The effect of all this imitation of Chaucer was to ﬁx a standard of literary style, and to conﬁrm the authority of the East-Midland English in which he had written. Though the poets of the 15th century were not overburdened with genius, they had, at least, a deﬁnite model to follow. As in the 14th century, metrical romances continued to be translated from the French, homilies and saints’ legends and rhyming chronicles were still manufactured. But the poems of Occleve and Lydgate and James I. had helped to polish and reﬁne the tongue and to prolong the Chaucerian tradition. The literary English never again slipped 46 back into the chaos of dialects which had prevailed before Chaucer. In the history of every literature the development of prose is later than that of verse. The Slide 78: 76Brief History of English and American Literature latter being, by its very form, artiﬁcial, is cultivated as a ﬁne art, and its records preserved in an early stage of society, when prose is simply the talk of men, and not thought worthy of being written and kept. English prose labored under the added disadvantage of competing with Latin, which was the cosmopolitan tongue and the medium of communication between scholars of all countries. Latin was the language of the Church, and in the Middle Ages churchman and scholar were convertible terms. The word -clerk- meant either priest or scholar. Two of the -Canterbury Tales- are in prose, as is also the -Testament of Love-, formerly ascribed to Chaucer, and the style of all these is so feeble, wandering, and unformed that it is hard to believe that they were written by the same man who wrote the -Knight’s Taleand the story of -Griselda-. -The Voiage and Slide 79: http://booksiread.org 77 Travaile of Sir John Maundeville—the forerunner of that great library of Oriental travel which has enriched our modern literature–was written, according to its author, ﬁrst in Latin, then in French, and, lastly, in the year 1356, translated into English for the behoof of ”lordes and knyghtes and othere noble and worthi men, that conne not Latyn but litylle.” The author professed to have spent over thirty years in Eastern travel, to have penetrated as far 47 as Farther India and the ”iles that ben abouten Indi,” to have been in the service of the Sultan of Babylon in his wars against the Bedouins, and, at another time, in the employ of the Great Khan of Tartary. But there is no copy of the Latin version of his travels extant; the French seems to be much later than 1356, and the English MS. to belong to the early years of the ﬁfteenth century, and to have been made by another Slide 80: 78Brief History of English and American Literature hand. Recent investigations make it probable that Maundeville borrowed his descriptions of the remoter East from many sources, and particularly from the narrative of Odoric, a Minorite friar of Lombardy, who wrote about 1330. Some doubt is even cast upon the existence of any such person as Maundeville. Whoever wrote the book that passes under his name, however, would seem to have visited the Holy Land, and the part of the ”voiage” that describes Palestine and the Levant is fairly close to the truth. The rest of the work, so far as it is not taken from the tales of other travelers, is a diverting tissue of fables about gryfouns that ﬂy away with yokes of oxen, tribes of one-legged Ethiopians who shelter themselves from the sun by using their monstrous feet as umbrellas, etc. During the 15th century English prose was gradually being brought into a shape ﬁtting it Slide 81: http://booksiread.org 79 for more serious uses. In the controversy between the Church and the Lollards Latin was still mainly employed, but Wiclif had written some of his tracts in English, and, in 1449, Reginald Peacock, Bishop of 48 St. Asaph, contributed, in English, to the same controversy, The Represser of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy. Sir John Fortescue, who was chief-justice of the king’s bench from 1442-1460, wrote during the reign of Edward IV. a book on the Difference between Absolute and Limited Monarchy, which may be regarded as the ﬁrst treatise on political philosophy and constitutional law in the language. But these works hardly belong to pure literature, and are remarkable only as early, though not very good, examples of English prose in a barren time. The 15th century was an era of decay and change. The Middle Age was dying, Church and State were slowly Slide 82: 80Brief History of English and American Literature disintegrating under the new intellectual inﬂuences that were working secretly under ground. In England the civil wars of the Red and White Roses were breaking up the old feudal society by decimating and impoverishing the baronage, thus preparing the way for the centralized monarchy of the Tudors. Toward the close of that century, and early in the next, happened the four great events, or series of events, which freed and widened men’s minds, and, in a succession of shocks, overthrew the mediaeval system of life and thought. These were the invention of printing, the Renascence, or revival of classical learning, the discovery of America, and the Protestant Reformation. William Caxton, the ﬁrst English printer, learned the art in Cologne. In 1476 he set up his press and sign, a red pole, in the Almonry at Westminster. Just before the introduction of print- Slide 83: http://booksiread.org 81 ing the demand 49 for MS. copies had grown very active, stimulated, perhaps, by the coming into general use of linen paper instead of the more costly parchment. The scriptoria of the monasteries were the places where the transcribing and illuminating of MSS. went on, professional copyists resorting to Westminster Abbey, for example, to make their copies of books belonging to the monastic library. Caxton’s choice of a spot was, therefore, signiﬁcant. His new art for multiplying copies began to supersede the old method of transcription at the very headquarters of the MS. makers. The ﬁrst book that bears his Westminster imprint was the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers-, translated from the French by Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, a brother-in-law of Edward IV. The list of books printed by Caxton is interesting, as showing the taste of the time, as he naturally Slide 84: 82Brief History of English and American Literature selected what was most in demand. The list shows that manuals of devotion and chivalry were still in chief request, books like the -Order of Chivalry-, -Faits of Arms-, and the -Golden Legend-, which last Caxton translated himself, as well as -Reynard the Fox-, and a French version of the -Aeneid-. He also printed, with continuations of his own, revisions of several early chronicles, and editions of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. A translation of -Cicero on Friendship, made directly from the Latin, by Thomas Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, was printed by Caxton, but no edition of a classical author in the original. The new learning of the Renascence had not, as 50 yet, taken much hold in England. Upon the whole, the productions of Caxton’s press were mostly of a kind that may be described as mediaeval, and the most important of them, if we except his edition of Chaucer, was that Slide 85: http://booksiread.org 83 ”noble and joyous book,” as Caxton called it, Le Morte Darthur-, written by Sir Thomas Malory in 1469, and printed by Caxton in 1485. This was a compilation from French Arthur romances, and was by far the best English prose that had yet been written. It may be doubted, indeed, whether, for purposes of simple story telling, the picturesque charm of Malory’s style has been improved upon. The episode which lends its name to the whole romance, the death of Arthur, is most impressively told, and Tennyson has followed Malory’s narrative closely, even to such details of the scene as the little chapel by the sea, the moonlight, and the answer which Sir Bedwere made the wounded king, when bidden to throw Excalibur into the water, ”’What saw thou there?’ said the king. ’Sir,’ he said, ’I saw nothing but the waters wap and the waves wan.’” Slide 86: 84Brief History of English and American Literature ”I heard the ripple washing in the reeds And the wild water lapping on the crag.” And very touching and beautiful is the oftquoted lament of Sir Ector over Launcelot, in Malory’s ﬁnal chapter: ”’Ah, Launcelot,’ he said, ’thou were head of all Christian knights; and now I dare say,’ said Sir Ector, ’thou, Sir Launcelot, there thou liest, that thou were never matched of earthly 51 knight’s hand; and thou were the courtiest knight that ever bare shield; and thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrode horse; and thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou were the kindest man that ever strake with sword; and thou were the goodliest person ever came among press of knights; and thou were the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the Slide 87: http://booksiread.org rest.’” 85 Equally good, as an example of English prose narrative, was the translation made by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, of that most brilliant of the French chroniclers, Chaucer’s contemporary, Sir John Froissart. Lord Berners was the English governor of Calais, and his version of Froissart’s -Chronicles- was made in 152325, at the request of Henry VIII. In these two books English chivalry spoke its last genuine word. In Sir Philip Sidney the character of the knight was merged into that of the modern gentleman. And although tournaments were still held in the reign of Elizabeth, and Spenser cast his -Faery Queene- into the form of a chivalry romance, these were but a ceremonial survival and literary tradition from an order of things that had passed away. How antagonistic the new classical culture was to the vanished ideal Slide 88: 86Brief History of English and American Literature of the Middle Age may be read in -Toxophilus, a treatise on archery published in 1545, by Roger Ascham, a Greek lecturer in Cambridge, and the 52 tutor of the Princess Elizabeth and of Lady Jane Grey. ”In our forefathers’ time, when Papistry as a standing pool covered and overﬂowed all England, few books were read in our tongue saving certain books of chivalry, as they said, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in monasteries by idle monks or wanton canons: as one, for example, -Morte Arthure-, the whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points, in open manslaughter and bold bawdry. This is good stuff for wise men to laugh at or honest men to take pleasure at. Yet I know when God’s Bible was banished the Court, and -Morte Arthurereceived into the prince’s chamber.” The fashionable school of courtly allegory, Slide 89: http://booksiread.org 87 ﬁrst introduced into England by the translation of the -Romaunt of the Rose-, reached its extremity in Stephen Hawes’s -Passetyme of Pleasure, printed by Caxton’s successor, Wynkyn de Worde, in 1517. This was a dreary and pedantic poem, in which it is told how Graunde Amoure, after a long series of adventures and instructions among such shadowy personages as Verite, Observaunce, Falshed, and Good Operacion, ﬁnally won the love of La Belle Pucel. Hawes was the last English poet of note whose culture was exclusively mediaeval. His contemporary, John Skelton, mingled the old fashions with the new classical learning. In his -Bowge of Courte- (Court Entertainment or Dole), and in others of his earlier pieces, he used, like Hawes, Chaucer’s seven-lined stanza. But his later 53 poems were mostly written in a verse of his own invention, called after him -Skeltonical-. Slide 90: 88Brief History of English and American Literature This was a sort of gloriﬁed doggerel, in short, swift, ragged lines, with occasional intermixture of French and Latin. ”Her beautye to augment. Dame Nature hath her lent A warte upon her cheke, Who so lyst to seke In her vysage a skar, That semyth from afar Lyke to the radyant star, All with favour fret, So properly it is set. She is the vyolet, The daysy delectable, The columbine commendable, The jelofer amyable; For this most goodly ﬂoure, This blossom of fressh colour, So Jupiter me succour, She ﬂorysheth new and new In beaute and vertew; -Hac claritate gemina, O gloriosa femina, etc.-” Skelton was a rude railing rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon; coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure, but always vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his profane and scur- Slide 91: http://booksiread.org 89 rilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his clerical character. His -Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng- is a study of very low life, reminding one slightly of Burns’s -Jolly 54 Beggars. His -Phyllyp Sparowe- is a sportive, pretty, fantastic elegy on the death of a pet bird belonging to Mistress Joanna Scroupe, of Carowe, and has been compared to the Latin poet Catullus’s elegy on Lesbia’s sparrow. In -Speke, -Parrot-, and -Why Come ye not to Courte?he assailed the powerful Cardinal Wolsey with the most ferocious satire, and was, in consequence, obliged to take sanctuary at Westminster, where he died in 1529. Skelton was a classical scholar, and at one time tutor to Henry VIII. The great humanist, Erasmus, spoke of him as the ”one light and ornament of British letters.” Caxton asserts that he had read Virgil, Ovid, and Tully, and quaintly adds, ”I suppose Slide 92: 90Brief History of English and American Literature he hath dronken of Elycon’s well.” In refreshing contrast with the artiﬁcial court poetry of the 15th and ﬁrst three quarters of the 16th century, was the folk-poetry, the popular ballad literature which was handed down by oral tradition. The English and Scotch ballads were narrative songs, written in a variety of meters, but chieﬂy in what is known as the ballad stanza. ”In somer, when the shawes[1] be sheyne,[2] And leves be large and longe, Hit is full merry in feyre forest To here the foulys song. ”To se the dere draw to the dale, And leve the hilles hee,[3] And shadow them in the leves grene, Under the grene-wode tree.” [55] It is not possible to assign a deﬁnite date to these ballads. They lived on the lips of the people, and were seldom reduced to writing till Slide 93: http://booksiread.org 91 many years after they were ﬁrst composed and sung. Meanwhile they underwent repeated changes, so that we have numerous versions of the same story. They belonged to no particular author, but, like all folk-lore, were handled freely by the unknown poets, minstrels, and ballad reciters, who modernized their language, added to them, or corrupted them, and passed them along. Coming out of an uncertain past, based on some dark legend of heart-break or bloodshed, they bear no poet’s name, but are -ferae naturae-, and have the ﬂavor of wild game. In the forms in which they are preserved few of them are older than the 17th century, or the latter part of the 16th century, though many, in their original shape, are, doubtless, much older. A very few of the Robin Hood ballads go back to the 15th century, and to the same period is assigned the charming ballad of the Slide 94: 92Brief History of English and American Literature -Nut Brown Maid- and the famous border ballad of -Chevy Chase-, which describes a battle between the retainers of the two great houses of Douglas and Percy. It was this song of which Sir Philip Sidney wrote, ”I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas but I found myself more moved than by a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blind crouder,[4] with no rougher voice than rude style.” But the style of the ballads was not always rude. 56 In their com- pressed energy of expression, in the impassioned abrupt, yet indirect way in which they tell their tale of grief and horror, there reside often a tragic power and art superior to any English poetry that had been written since Chaucer, superior even to Chaucer in the quality of intensity. The true home of the ballad literature was ”the north country,” and especially the Scotch border, where the constant forays of moss-troopers Slide 95: http://booksiread.org 93 and the raids and private warfare of the lords of the marches supplied many traditions of heroism, like those celebrated in the old poem of the -Battle of Otterbourne-, and in the -Hunting of the Cheviot-, or -Chevy Chase-, already mentioned. Some of these are Scotch and others English; the dialect of Lowland Scotland did not, in effect, differ much from that of Northumberland and Yorkshire, both descended alike from the old Northumbrian of Anglo-Saxon times. Other ballads were shortened, popular versions of the chivalry romances which were passing out of fashion among educated readers in the 16th century, and now fell into the hands of the ballad makers. Others preserved the memory of local countryside tales, family feuds, and tragic incidents, partly historical and partly legendary, associated often with particular spots. Such are, for example, -The Dowie Dens of Yarrow- Slide 96: 94Brief History of English and American Literature , -Fair Helen of Kirkconnell-, -The Forsaken Bride, and -The Twa Corbies-. Others, again, have a coloring of popular superstition, like the beautiful ballad concerning 57 -Thomas of Ersyldoune, who goes in at Eldon Hill with an Elf queen and spends seven years in fairy land. But the most popular of all the ballads were those which cluster about the name of that good outlaw, Robin Hood, who, with his merry men, hunted the forest of merry Sherwood, where he killed the king’s deer and waylaid rich travelers, but was kind to poor knights and honest workmen. Robin Hood is the true ballad hero, the darling of the common people, as Arthur was of the nobles. The names of his Confessor, Friar Tuck; his mistress, Maid Marian; his companions, Little John, Scathelock, and Much, the Miller’s son, were as familiar as household words. Langland, in the 14th century, mentions ”rimes Slide 97: http://booksiread.org 95 of Robin Hood,” and efforts have been made to identify him with some actual personage, as with one of the dispossessed barons who had been adherents of Simon de Montfort in his war against Henry III. But there seems to be nothing historical about Robin Hood. He was a creation of the popular fancy. The game laws under the Norman kings were very oppressive, and there were, doubtless, dim memories still cherished among the Saxon masses of Hereward and Edric the Wild, who had deﬁed the power of the Conqueror, as well as of later freebooters, who had taken to the woods and lived by plunder. Robin Hood was a thoroughly national character. He had the English love of fair-play, the English readiness to shake hands and 58 make up, and keep no malice when worsted in a square ﬁght. He beat and plundered the rich bishops and abbots, who had more than their Slide 98: 96Brief History of English and American Literature share of wealth, but he was generous and hospitable to the distressed, and lived a free and careless life in the good green wood. He was a mighty archer, with those national weapons, the long-bow and the cloth-yard-shaft. He tricked and bafﬂed legal authority in the person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby appealing to that secret sympathy with lawlessness and adventure which marked the free-born, vigorous yeomanry of England. And ﬁnally the scenery of the forest gives a poetic background and a never-failing charm to the exploits of ”the old Robin Hood of England” and his merry men. The ballads came, in time, to have certain tricks of style, such as are apt to characterize a body of anonymous folk-poetry. Such is their use of conventional epithets; ”the red, red gold,” ”the good, green wood,” ”the gray goose wing.” Such are certain recurring terms of phrase like, Slide 99: http://booksiread.org ”But out and spak their stepmother.” 97 Such is, ﬁnally, a kind of sing-song repetition, which doubtless helped the ballad singer to memorize his stock, as, for example, ”She had’na pu’d a double rose, A rose but only twae.” 59 Or again, ”And mony ane sings o’ grass, o’ grass, And mony ane sings o’ corn; An mony ane sings o’ Robin Hood, Kens little whare he was born. It was na in the ha’, the ha’, Nor in the painted bower; But it was in the gude green wood, Amang the lily ﬂower.” Copies of some of these old ballads were hawked about in the 16th century, printed in black letter, ”broad sides,” or single sheets. Wynkyn de Worde printed, in 1489, -A Lytell Geste of Robin Hood-, which is a sort of digest of earlier bal- Slide 100: 98Brief History of English and American Literature lads on the subject. In the 17th century a few of the English popular ballads were collected in miscellanies, called -Garlands-. Early in the 18th century the Scotch poet, Allan Ramsay, published a number of Scotch ballads in the -Evergreen- and -Tea-Table Miscellany-. But no large and important collection was put forth until Percy’s -Reliques-, 1765, a book which had a powerful inﬂuence upon Wordsworth and Walter Scott. In Scotland some excellent ballads in the ancient manner were written in the 18th century, such as Jane Elliott’s -Lament for Flodden-, and the ﬁne ballad of Sir Patrick Spence. Walter Scott’s -Proud Maisie is in the Wood-, is a perfect reproduction of the pregnant, indirect method of the old ballad makers. In 1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks, 60 and many Greek scholars, with their MSS., ﬂed into Italy, where they began teach- Slide 101: http://booksiread.org 99 ing their language and literature, and especially the philosophy of Plato. There had been little or no knowledge of Greek in western Europe during the Middle Ages, and only a very imperfect knowledge of the Latin classics. Ovid and Statius were widely read, and so was the late Latin poet, Boethius, whose -De Consolatione Philosophiae- had been translated into English by King Alfred and by Chaucer. Little was known of Vergil at ﬁrst hand, and he was popularly supposed to have been a mighty wizard, who made sundry works of enchantment at Rome, such as a magic mirror and statue. Caxton’s so-called translation of the Aeneid- was in reality nothing but a version of a French romance based on Vergil’s epic. Of the Roman historians, orators, and moralists, such as Livy, Tacitus, Caesar, Cicero, and Seneca, there was an almost entire ignorance, as also Slide 102: 100Brief History of English and American Literature of poets like Horace, Lucretius, Juvenal, and Catullus. The gradual rediscovery of the re- mains of ancient art and literature which took place in the 15th century, and largely in Italy, worked an immense revolution in the mind of Europe. MSS. were brought out of their hiding places, edited by scholars and spread abroad by means of the printing-press. Statues were dug up and placed in museums, and men became acquainted with a civilization far more mature than that of the Middle Age, and with models of perfect 61 workmanship in letters and the ﬁne arts. In the latter years of the 15th century a number of Englishmen learned Greek in Italy and brought it back with them to England. William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre, who had studied at Florence under the refugee, Demetrius Chalcondylas, began teaching Greek, at Oxford, the former as early as 1491. A little Slide 103: http://booksiread.org 101 later John Colet, Dean of St. Paul’s and the founder of St. Paul’s School, and his friend, William Lily, the grammarian and ﬁrst master of St. Paul’s (1500), also studied Greek abroad, Colet in Italy, and Lily at Rhodes and in the city of Rome. Thomas More, afterward the famous chancellor of Henry VIII., was among the pupils of Grocyn and Linacre at Oxford. Thither also, in 1497, came in search of the new knowledge, the Dutchman, Erasmus, who became the foremost scholar of his time. From Oxford the study spread to the sister university, where the ﬁrst English Grecian of his day, Sir Jno. Cheke, who ”taught Cambridge and King Edward Greek,” became the incumbent of the new professorship founded about 1540. Among his pupils was Roger Ascham, already mentioned, in whose time St. John’s College, Cambridge, was the chief seat of the new learning, of which Slide 104: 102Brief History of English and American Literature Thomas Nash testiﬁes that it ”was as an universitie within itself; having more candles light in it, every winter morning before four of the clock, than the four of clock bell gave strokes.” Greek was not introduced at the universities without violent 62 opposition from the conservative element, who were nicknamed Trojans. The opposition came in part from the priests, who feared that the new study would sow seeds of heresy. Yet many of the most devout churchmen were friends of a more liberal culture, among them Thomas More, whose Catholicism was undoubted and who went to the block for his religion. Cardinal Wolsey, whom More succeeded as chancellor, was also a muniﬁcent patron of learning and founded Christ Church College, at Oxford. Popular education at once felt the impulse of the new studies, and over twenty endowed grammar schools were established in England Slide 105: http://booksiread.org 103 in the ﬁrst twenty years of the 16th century. Greek became a passion even with English ladies. Ascham in his -Schoolmaster-, a treatise on education, published in 1570, says, that Queen Elisabeth ”readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day, than some prebendarie of this Church doth read Latin in a whole week.” And in the same book he tells how calling once upon Lady Jane Grey, at Brodegate, in Leicestershire, he ”found her in her chamber reading -Phaedon Platonis- in Greek, and that with as much delite as some gentlemen would read a merry tale in -Bocase-,” and when he asked her why she had not gone hunting with the rest, she answered, ”I wisse, all their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I ﬁnd in Plato.” Ascham’s -Schoolmaster-, as well as his earlier book, -Toxophilus-, a Platonic dialogue on archery, bristles with quotations from the Greek Slide 106: 104Brief History of English and American Literature and Latin 63 classics, and with that perpetual reference to the authority of antiquity on every topic that he touches, which remained the fashion in all serious prose down to the time of Dryden. One speedy result of the new learning was fresh translations of the Scriptures into English, out of the original tongues. In 1525 William Tyndal printed at Cologne and Worms his version of the New Testament from the Greek. Ten years later Miles Coverdale made, at Zurich, a translation of the whole Bible from the German and the Latin. These were the basis of numerous later translations, and the strong beautiful English of Tyndal’s -Testament- is preserved for the most part in our Authorized Version (1611). At ﬁrst it was not safe to make or distribute these early translations in England. Numbers of copies were brought into the country, how- Slide 107: http://booksiread.org 105 ever, and did much to promote the cause of the Reformation. After Henry VIII. had bro- ken with the Pope the new English Bible circulated freely among the people. Tyndal and Sir Thomas More carried on a vigorous controversy in English upon some of the questions at issue between the Church and the Protestants. Other important contributions to the literature of the Reformation were the homely sermons preached at Westminster and at Paul’s Cross by Bishop Hugh Latimer, who was burned at Oxford in the reign of Bloody Mary. The English Book of Common Prayer was compiled in 1549-52. More was, perhaps, the best 64 representative of a group of scholars who wished to enlighten and reform the Church from inside, but who refused to follow Henry VIII. in his breach with Rome. Dean Colet and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, belonged to the Slide 108: 106Brief History of English and American Literature same company, and Fisher was beheaded in the same year (1535) with More, and for the same offense, namely, refusing to take the oath to maintain the act conﬁrming the king’s divorce from Catherine of Arragon and his marriage with Anne Boleyn. More’s philosophy is best reﬂected in his -Utopia-, the description of an ideal commonwealth, modeled on Plato’s Republic, and printed in 1516. The name signiﬁes ”no place” (-Outopos-), and has furnished an adjective to the language. The -Utopia- was in Latin, but More’s -History of Edward V. and Richard III.-, written in 1513, though not printed till 1557, was in English. It is the ﬁrst example in the tongue of a history as distinguished from a chronicle; that is, it is a reasoned and artistic presentation of an historic period, and not a mere chronological narrative of events. The ﬁrst three quarters of the 16th century Slide 109: http://booksiread.org 107 produced no great original work of literature in England. It was a season of preparation, of education. The storms of the Reformation interrupted and delayed the literary renascence through the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Queen Mary. When Elizabeth came to the throne, in 1558, a more settled order of things began, and a period of great national prosperity and 65 glory. Meanwhile the English mind had been slowly assimilating the new classical culture, which was extended to all classes of readers by the numerous translations of Greek and Latin authors. A fresh poetic impulse came from Italy. In 1557 appeared -Tottel’s Miscellany, containing songs and sonnets by a ”new company of courtly makers.” Most of the pieces in the volume had been written years before, by gentlemen of Henry VIII.’s court, and circulated in MS. The two chief contributors were Sir Thomas Slide 110: 108Brief History of English and American Literature Wiat, at one time English embassador to Spain, and that brilliant noble, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, who was beheaded in 1547 for quartering the king’s arms with his own. Both of them were dead long before their work was printed. The pieces in -Tottel’s Miscellany- show very clearly the inﬂuence of Italian poetry. We have seen that Chaucer took subjects and something more from Boccaccio and Petrarch. But the sonnet, which Petrarch had brought to great perfection, was ﬁrst introduced into England by Wiat. There was a great revival of sonneteering in Italy in the 16th century, and a number of Wiat’s poems were adaptations of the sonnets and -canzoni- of Petrarch and later poets. Others were imitations of Horace’s satires and epistles. Surrey introduced the Italian blank verse into English in his translation of two books of the -Aeneid-. The love poetry of -Tottel’s Miscellany- Slide 111: http://booksiread.org 109 is polished and artiﬁcial, like the models which it followed. Dante’s 66 Beatrice was a child, and so was Petrarch’s Laura. Following their example, Surrey addressed his love complaints, by way of compliment, to a little girl of the noble Irish family of Geraldine. The Amourists, or love sonneters, dwelt on the metaphysics of the passion with a tedious minuteness, and the conventional nature of their sighs and complaints may often be guessed by an experienced reader from the titles of their poems: ”Description of the restless state of a lover, with suit to his lady to rue on his dying heart;” ”Hell tormenteth not the damned ghosts so sore as unkindness the lover;” ”The lover prayeth not to be disdained, refused, mistrusted, nor forsaken,” etc. The most genuine utterance of Surrey was his poem written while imprisoned in Windsor–a cage where so many a song-bird has grown vocal. And Slide 112: 110Brief History of English and American Literature Wiat’s little piece of eight lines, ”Of his Return from Spain,” is worth reams of his amatory affectations. Nevertheless the writers in -Tottel’s Miscellany- were real reformers of English poetry. They introduced new models of style and new metrical forms, and they broke away from the mediaeval traditions which had hitherto obtained. The language had undergone some changes since Chaucer’s time, which made his scansion obsolete. The accent of many words of French origin, like -nature-, -courage-, -virtue, -matere-, had shifted to the ﬁrst syllable, and the -e- of the ﬁnal syllables -es-, -en-, -ed-, and -e-, had largely disappeared. But the language of poetry tends 67 to keep up archaisms of this kind, and in Stephen Hawes, who wrote a century after Chaucer, we still ﬁnd such lines as these: ”But he my strokes might right well endure, Slide 113: http://booksiread.org 111 He was so great and huge of puissance.” [5] Hawes’s practice is variable in this respect, and so is his contemporary, Skelton’s. But in Wiat and Surrey, who wrote only a few years later, the reader ﬁrst feels sure that he is reading verse pronounced quite in the modern fashion. But Chaucer’s example still continued potent. Spenser revived many of his obsolete words, both in his pastorals and in his -Faery Queene-, thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction, but incurring Ben Jonson’s censure, that he ”writ no language.” A poem that stands midway between Spenser and late mediaeval work of Chaucer’s school–such as Hawes’s -Passetyme of Pleasure—was the -Induction- contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, in 1563 to a collection of narrative poems called the -Mirrour for Magistrates-. The whole series was the work Slide 114: 112Brief History of English and American Literature of many hands, modeled upon Lydgate’s -Falls of Princes- (taken from Boccaccio), and was designed as a warning to great men of the ﬁckleness of fortune. The -Induction- is the only noteworthy part of it. It was an allegory, written in Chaucer’s seven-lined stanza and described with a somber imaginative power, the ﬁgure of Sorrow, her abode 68 in the ”griesly lake” of Avernus and her attendants, Remorse, Dread, Old Age, etc. Sackville was the author of the ﬁrst regular English tragedy, -Gorboduc-, and it was at his request that Ascham wrote the Schoolmaster-. Italian poetry also fed the genius of Edmund Spenser (1552-99). While a student at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, he had translated some of the -Visions of Petrarch-, and the -Visions of Bellay-, a French poet, but it was only in 1579 that the publication of his -Shepheard’s Slide 115: http://booksiread.org 113 Calendar- announced the coming of a great original poet, the ﬁrst since Chaucer. The -Shepheard’s Calendar- was a pastoral in twelve eclogues– one for each month in the year. There had been a great revival of pastoral poetry in Italy and France, but, with one or two insigniﬁcant exceptions, Spenser’s were the ﬁrst bucolics in English. Two of his eclogues were paraphrases from Clement Marot, a French Protestant poet, whose psalms were greatly in fashion at the court of Francis I. The pastoral machinery had been used by Vergil and by his modern imitators, not merely to portray the loves of Strephon and Chloe, or the idyllic charms of rustic life; but also as a vehicle of compliment, elegy, satire, and personal allusion of many kinds. Spenser, accordingly, alluded to his friends, Sidney and Harvey, as the shepherds, Astrophel and Hobbinol, paid court to Queen Elizabeth as Cyn- Slide 116: 114Brief History of English and American Literature thia, and introduced, in the form of anagrams, names of the High-Church Bishop of London, Aylmer, 69 and the Low-Church Archbishop Grindal. The conventional pastoral is a somewhat delicate exotic in English poetry, and represents a very unreal Arcadia. Before the end of the 17th century the squeak of the oaten pipe had become a burden, and the only piece of the kind which it is easy to read without some impatience is Milton’s wonderful -Lycidas-. The Shepheard’s Calendar-, however, though it belonged to an artiﬁcial order of literature, had the unmistakable stamp of genius in its style. There was a broad, easy mastery of the resources of language, a grace, ﬂuency, and music which were new to English poetry. It was written while Spenser was in service with the Earl of Leicester, and enjoying the friendship of his nephew, the all-accomplished Sidney, and was, perhaps, Slide 117: http://booksiread.org 115 composed at the latter’s country seat of Penshurst. In the following year Spenser went to Ireland as private secretary to Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton, who had just been appointed Lord Deputy of that kingdom. After ﬁlling several clerkships in the Irish government, Spenser received a grant of the castle and estate of Kilcolman, a part of the forfeited lands of the rebel Earl of Desmond. Here, among landscapes richly wooded, like the scenery of his own fairy land, ”under the cooly shades of the green alders by the Mulla’s shore,” Sir Walter Raleigh found him, in 1589, busy upon his -Faery Queene-. In his poem, -Colin Clouts Come Home Again-, Spenser tells, in pastoral language, how ”the shepherd of the 70 ocean” persuaded him to go to London, where he presented him to the Queen, under whose patronage the ﬁrst three books of his great poem were printed, in 1590. Slide 118: 116Brief History of English and American Literature A volume of minor poems, entitled -Complaints, followed in 1591, and the three remaining books of the -Faery Queene- in 1596. In 1595-96 he published also his -Daphnaida-, -Prothalamion, and the four hymns -On Love- and -Beauty-, and -On Heavenly Love- and -Heavenly Beauty. In 1598, in Tyrone’s rebellion, Kilcolman Castle was sacked and burned, and Spenser, with his family, ﬂed to London, where he died in January, 1599. The -Faery Queene- reﬂects, perhaps, more fully than any other English work, the manysided literary inﬂuences of the renascence. It was the blossom of a richly composite culture. Its immediate models were Ariosto’s -Orlando Furioso-, the ﬁrst forty cantos of which were published in 1515, and Tasso’s -Gerusalemme Liberata-, printed in 1581. Both of these were, in subject, romances of chivalry, the ﬁrst based Slide 119: http://booksiread.org 117 upon the old Charlemagne epos–Orlando being identical with the hero of the French -Chanson de Roland—the second upon the history of the ﬁrst Crusade, and the recovery of the Holy City from the Saracen. But in both of them there was a splendor of diction and a wealth of coloring quite unknown to the rude mediaeval romances. Ariosto and Tasso wrote with the great epics of Homer and Vergil constantly in mind, and all about them was the brilliant light of Italian art, in its early freshness 71 and power. The -Faery Queene-, too, was a tale of knighterrantry. Its hero was King Arthur, and its pages swarm with the familiar adventures and ﬁgures of Gothic romance; distressed ladies and their champions, combats with dragons and giants, enchanted castles, magic rings, charmed wells, forest hermitages, etc. But side by side with these appear the ﬁctions of Greek mythol- Slide 120: 118Brief History of English and American Literature ogy and the personiﬁed abstractions of fashionable allegory. Knights, squires, wizards, hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods, Idleness, Gluttony, and Superstition jostle each other in Spenser’s fairy land. Descents to the infernal shades, in the manner of Homer and Vergil, alternate with descriptions of the Palace of Pride in the manner of the -Romaunt of the Rose-. But Spenser’s imagination was a powerful spirit, and held all these diverse elements in solution. He removed them to an ideal sphere ”apart from place, withholding time,” where they seem all alike equally real, the dateless conceptions of the poet’s dream. The poem was to have been ”a continued allegory or dark conceit,” in twelve books, the hero of each book representing one of the twelve moral virtues. Only six books and the fragment of a seventh were written. By way of complimenting his patrons and securing contempo- Slide 121: http://booksiread.org 119 rary interest, Spenser undertook to make his allegory a double one, personal and historical, as well as moral or abstract. Thus Gloriana, the Queen of Faery, stands not only for Glory but for Elizabeth, 72 to whom the poem was dedicated. Prince Arthur is Leicester, as well as Magniﬁcence. Duessa is Falsehood, but also Mary Queen of Scots. Grantorto is Philip II. of Spain. Sir Artegal is Justice, but likewise he is Arthur Grey de Wilton. Other characters shadow forth Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, Henry IV. of France, etc.; and such public events as the revolt of the Spanish Netherlands, the Irish rebellion, the execution of Mary Stuart, and the rising of the northern Catholic houses against Elizabeth are told in parable. In this way the poem reﬂects the spiritual struggle of the time, the warfare of young England against Popery and Spain. Slide 122: 120Brief History of English and American Literature The allegory is not always easy to follow. It is kept up most carefully in the ﬁrst two books, but it sat rather lightly on Spenser’s conscience, and is not of the essence of the poem. It is an ornament put on from the outside and detachable at pleasure. The ”Spenserian stanza,” in which the -Faery Queene- was written, was adapted from the -ottava riwa- of Ariosto. Spenser changed somewhat the order of the rimes in the ﬁrst eight lines and added a ninth line of twelve syllables, thus affording more space to the copious luxuriance of his style and the long-drawn sweetness of his verse. It was his instinct to dilate and elaborate every image to the utmost, and his similes, especially–each of which usually ﬁlls a whole stanza–have the pictorial amplitude of Homer’s. Spenser was, in fact, a great painter. His poetry 73 is almost purely sensuous. The personages in the -Faery Queene- are Slide 123: http://booksiread.org 121 not characters, but richly colored ﬁgures, moving to the accompaniment of delicious music, in an atmosphere of serene remoteness from the earth. Charles Lamb said that he was the poet’s poet, that is, he appealed wholly to the artistic sense and to the love of beauty. Not until Keats did another English poet appear so ﬁlled with the passion for all outward shapes of beauty, so exquisitely alive to all impressions of the senses. Spenser was, in some respects, more an Italian than an English poet. It is said that the Venetian gondoliers still sing the stanzas of Tasso’s -Gerusalemme Liberata-. It is not easy to imagine the Thames bargees chanting passages from the -Faery Queene-. Those English poets who have taken strongest hold upon their public have done so by their profound interpretation of our common life. But Spenser escaped altogether from reality into a Slide 124: 122Brief History of English and American Literature region of pure imagination. His aerial creations resemble the blossoms of the epiphytic orchids, which have no root in the soil, but draw their nourishment from the moisture of the air. ”-Their- birth was of the womb of morning dew, And -their- conception of the glorious prime.” Among the minor poems of Spenser the most delightful were his -Prothalamion- and -Epithalamion. The ﬁrst was a ”spousal verse,” made for the double wedding of the Ladies Catherine and 74 Elizabeth Somerset, whom the poet ﬁgures as two white swans that come swimming down the Thames, whose surface the nymphs strew with lilies, till it appears ”like a bride’s chamberﬂoor.” ”Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,” is the burden of each stanza. The -Epithalamionwas Spenser’s own marriage song, written to crown his series of -Amoretti-, or love sonnets, Slide 125: http://booksiread.org 123 and is the most splendid hymn of triumphant love in the language. Hardly less beautiful than these was -Muiopotmos; or, the Fate of the Butterﬂy, an addition to the classical myth of Arachne, the spider. The four hymns in praise of -Loveand -Beauty-, -Heavenly Love- and -Heavenly Beauty-, are also stately and noble poems, but by reason of their abstractness and the Platonic mysticism which they express, are less generally pleasing than the others mentioned. Allegory and mysticism had no natural afﬁliation with Spenser’s genius. He was a seer of vi- sions, of -images- full, brilliant, and distinct, and not like Bunyan, Dante, or Hawthorne, a projector into bodily shapes of -ideas-, typical and emblematic, the shadows which haunt the conscience and the mind. 1. A First Sketch of English Literature. By Henry Morley. Slide 126: 124Brief History of English and American Literature 2. English Writers. By the same. Vol. iii. From Chaucer to Dunbar. 75 3. Skeat’s Specimens of English Literature, 1594-1579. Clarendon Press Series. 4. Morte Darthur. Globe Edition. 5. Child’s English and Scottish Ballads. 8 vols. 6. Hale’s edition of Spenser. Globe. 7. ”A Royal Poet.” Irving’s Sketch-Book. [1] Woods. [2] Bright. [3] High. [4] Fiddler. [5] Trisyllable–like -creature-, -neighebour-, etc, in Chaucer. Slide 127: 76 III. THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 1564-1616. The great age of English poetry opened with the publication of Spenser’s -Shepheard’s Calendar, in 1579, and closed with the printing of Milton’s -Samson Agonistes-, in 1671. Within this period of little less than a century English thought passed through many changes, and there were several successive phases of style in our imaginative literature. Milton, who acknowledged Spenser as his master, and who was a boy of 125 Slide 128: 126Brief History of English and American Literature eight years at Shakspere’s death, lived long enough to witness the establishment of an entirely new school of poets, in the persons of Dryden and his contemporaries. But, roughly speaking, the dates above given mark the limits of one literary epoch, which may not improperly be called the Elisabethan. In strictness the Elisabethan age ended with the queen’s death, in 1603. But the poets of the succeeding reigns inherited much of the glow and splendor which marked the diction of their forerunners; and ”the spacious times of great Elisabeth” have been, by courtesy, prolonged to the year of the Restoration (1660). There is a certain likeness 77 in the intellectual products of the whole period, a largeness of utterance, and a high imaginative cast of thought which stamp them all alike with the queen’s seal. Nor is it by any undue stretch of the royal Slide 129: http://booksiread.org 127 prerogative that the name of the monarch has attached itself to the literature of her reign and of the reigns succeeding hers. The expression ”Victorian poetry” has a rather absurd sound when one considers how little Victoria counts for in the literature of her time. But in Elisabethan poetry the maiden queen is really the central ﬁgure. She is Cynthia, she is Thetis, great queen of shepherds and of the sea; she is Spenser’s Gloriana, and even Shakspere, the most impersonal of poets, paid tribute to her in -Henry VIII-., and, in a more delicate and indirect way, in the little allegory introduced into -Midsummer Night’s Dream-. ”That very time I marked–but thou could’st not– Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took At a fair vestal throned by the west, And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow As he would Slide 130: 128Brief History of English and American Literature pierce a hundred thousand hearts. But I might see young Cupid’s ﬁery dart Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon, And the imperial votaress passed on In maiden meditation, fancy free”– an allusion to Leicester’s unsuccessful suit for Elisabeth’s hand. The praises of the queen, which sound through 78 all the poetry of her time, seem somewhat overdone to a modern reader. But they were not merely the insipid language of courtly compliment. England had never before had a female sovereign, except in the instance of the gloomy and bigoted Mary. When she was succeeded by her more brilliant sister, the gallantry of a gallant and fantastic age was poured at the latter’s feet, the sentiment of chivalry mingling itself with loyalty to the crown. The poets idealized Elisabeth. She was to Spenser, to Sidney, Slide 131: http://booksiread.org 129 and to Raleigh, not merely a woman and a virgin queen, but the champion of Protestantism, the lady of young England, the heroine of the conﬂict against popery and Spain. Moreover Elisabeth was a great woman. In spite of the vanity, caprice, and ingratitude which disﬁgured her character, and the vacillating, tortuous policy which often distinguished her government, she was at bottom a sovereign of large views, strong will, and dauntless courage. Like her father, she ”loved a -man-,” and she had the magniﬁcent tastes of the Tudors. She was a patron of the arts, passionately fond of shows and spectacles, and sensible to poetic ﬂattery. In her royal progresses through the kingdom, the universities and the nobles and the cities vied with one another in receiving her with plays, revels, masques, and triumphs, in the mythological taste of the day. ”When the queen pa- Slide 132: 130Brief History of English and American Literature raded through a country town,” says Warton, the historian of English poetry, ”almost every 79 pageant was a pantheon. When she paid a visit at the house of any of her nobility, at entering the hall she was saluted by the Penates. In the afternoon, when she condescended to walk in the garden, the lake was covered with tritons and nereids; the pages of the family were converted into wood-nymphs, who peeped from every bower; and the footmen gamboled over the lawns in the ﬁgure of satyrs. When her majesty hunted in the park she was met by Diana who, pronouncing our royal prude to be the brightest paragon of unspotted chastity, invited her to groves free from the intrusions of Acteon.” The most elaborate of these entertainments of which we have any notice, were, perhaps, the games celebrated in her honor by the Earl of Leicester, when she visited him at Ke- Slide 133: http://booksiread.org nilworth, in 1575. 131 An account of these was published by a contemporary poet, George Gascoigne, -The Princely Pleasures at the Court of Kenilworth-, and Walter Scott has made them familiar to modern readers in his novel of -Kenilworth. Sidney was present on this occasion, and, perhaps, Shakspere, then a boy of eleven, and living at Stratford, not far off, may have been taken to see the spectacle, may have seen Neptune, riding on the back of a huge dolphin in the castle lake, speak the copy of verses in which he offered his trident to the empress of the sea, and may have ”heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back, Utter such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at the sound.” 80 But in considering the literature of Elisabeth’s reign it will be convenient to speak ﬁrst of the prose. While following up Spenser’s ca- Slide 134: 132Brief History of English and American Literature reer to its close (1599), we have, for the sake of unity of treatment, anticipated somewhat the literary history of the twenty years preceding. In 1579 appeared a book which had a remarkable inﬂuence on English prose. This was John Lyly’s -Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit-. It was in form a romance, the history of a young Athenian who went to Naples to see the world and get an education; but it is in substance nothing but a series of dialogues on love, friendship, religion, etc., written in language which, from the title of the book, has received the name of -Euphuism-. This new English became very fashionable among the ladies, and ”that beauty in court which could not parley Euphuism,” says a writer of 1632, ”was as little regarded as she which now there speaks not French.” Walter Scott introduced a Euphuist into his novel the -Monastery-, but the peculiar jargon Slide 135: http://booksiread.org 133 which Sir Piercie Shafton is made to talk is not at all like the real Euphuism. That consisted of antithesis, alliteration, and the profuse illustration of every thought by metaphors borrowed from a kind of fabulous natural history. ”Descend into thine own conscience and consider with thyself the great difference between staring and stark-blind, wit and wisdom, love and lust; be merry, but with modesty; be sober, but not too sullen; 81 be valiant, but not too venturous.” ”I see now that, as the ﬁsh -Scolopidusin the ﬂood -Araxes- at the waxing of the moon is as white as the driven snow, and at the waning as black as the burnt coal; so Euphues, which at the ﬁrst increasing of our familiarity was very zealous, is now at the last cast become most faithless.” Besides the ﬁsh -Scolopidus, the favorite animals of Lyly’s menagerie are such as the chameleon, which, ”though he have Slide 136: 134Brief History of English and American Literature most guts draweth least breath;” the bird -Piralis, ”which sitting upon white cloth is white, upon green, green;” and the serpent -Porphirius-, which, ”though he be full of poison, yet having no teeth, hurteth none but himself.” Lyly’s style was pithy and sententious, and his sentences have the air of proverbs or epigrams. The vice of Euphuism was its monotony. On every page of the book there was something pungent, something quotable; but many pages of such writing became tiresome. Yet it did much to form the hitherto loose structure of English prose, by lending it point and polish. His carefully balanced periods were valuable lessons in rhetoric, and his book became a manual of polite conversation and introduced that fashion of witty repartee, which is evident enough in Shakspere’s comic dialogue. In 1580 appeared the second part, -Euphues and his England-, Slide 137: http://booksiread.org 135 and six editions of the whole work were printed before 1598. Lyly had many imitators. In Stephen Gosson’s -School 82 of Abuse-, a tract directed against the stage and published about four months later than the ﬁrst part of Euphues, the language is distinctly Euphuistic. The dramatist, Robert Greene, published, in 1587, his -Menaphon; Camilla’s Alarum to Slumbering Euphues-, and his -Euphues’s Censure to Philautus-. His brother dramatist, Thomas Lodge, published; in 1590, -Rosalynde: Euphues’s Golden Legacy-, from which Shakspere took the plot of -As You Like It-. Shakspere and Ben Jonson both quote from -Euphues- in their plays, and Shakspere was really writing Euphuism, when he wrote such a sentence as ”Tis true, ’tis pity; pity ’tis ’tis true.” That knightly gentleman, Philip Sidney, was a true type of the lofty aspiration and manifold activity of Elizabethan England. He was Slide 138: 136Brief History of English and American Literature scholar, poet, courtier, diplomatist, statesman, soldier, all in one. Educated at Oxford and then introduced at court by his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, he had been sent to France when a lad of eighteen, with the embassy which went to treat of the queen’s proposed marriage to the Duke of Alencon, and was in Paris at the time of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, in 1572. Afterward he had traveled through Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, had gone as embassador to the Emperor’s Court, and every-where won golden opinions. In 1580, while visiting his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, at Wilton, he wrote, for her pleasure, the -Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia-, which 83 remained in MS. till 1590. This was a pastoral romance, after the manner of the Italian -Arcadia- of Sanazzaro, and the -Diana Enamorada- of Montemayor, a Portuguese author. It was in prose, but inter- Slide 139: http://booksiread.org 137 mixed with songs and sonnets, and Sidney ﬁnished only two books and a portion of a third. It describes the adventures of two cousins, Musidorus and Pyrocles, who are wrecked on the coast of Sparta. The plot is very involved and is full of the stock episodes of romance: disguises, surprises, love intrigues, battles, jousts and single combats. Although the insurrection of the Helots against the Spartans forms a part of the story, the Arcadia is not the real Arcadia of the Hellenic Peloponnesus, but the fanciful country of pastoral romance, an unreal clime, like the Faery Land of Spenser. Sidney was our ﬁrst writer of poetic prose. The poet Drayton says that he ”did ﬁrst reduce Our tongue from Lyly’s writing, then in use, Talking of stones, stars, plants, of ﬁshes, ﬂies, Playing with words and idle similes.” Slide 140: 138Brief History of English and American Literature Sidney was certainly no Euphuist, but his style was as ”Italianated” as Lyly’s, though in a different way. His English was too pretty for prose. His ”Sidneian showers of sweet discourse” sowed every page of the -Arcadia- with those ﬂowers of conceit, those sugared fancies which his contemporaries loved, but which the taste of a severer 84 age ﬁnds insipid. This splendid vice of the Elisabethan writers appears in Sidney, chieﬂy in the form of an excessive personiﬁcation. If he describes a ﬁeld full of roses, he makes ”the roses add such a ruddy show unto it, as though the ﬁeld were bashful at his own beauty.” If he describes ladies bathing in a stream, he makes the water break into twenty bubbles, as ”not content to have the picture of their face in large upon him, but he would in each of those bubbles set forth the miniature of them.” And even a passage which Slide 141: http://booksiread.org 139 should be tragic, such as the death of his heroine, Parthenia, he embroiders with conceits like these: ”For her exceeding fair eyes having with continued weeping got a little redness about them, her round sweetly swelling lips a little trembling, as though they kissed their neighbor Death; in her cheeks the whiteness striving by little and little to get upon the rosiness of them; her neck, a neck indeed of alabaster, displaying the wound which with most dainty blood labored to drown his own beauties; so as here was a river of purest red, there an island of perfectest white,” etc. The -Arcadia-, like -Euphues-, was a lady’s book. It was the favorite court romance of its day, but it surfeits a modern reader with its sweetness, and confuses him with its tangle of adventures. The lady for whom it was written was the mother of that William Herbert, Earl Slide 142: 140Brief History of English and American Literature of Pembroke, to whom Shakspere’s sonnets are thought to have been 85 dedicated. And she was the subject of Ben Jonson’s famous epitaph. ”Underneath this sable herse Lies the subject of all verse, Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother; Death, ere thou hast slain another Learn’d and fair and good as she, Time shall throw a dart at thee.” Sidney’s -Defense of Poesy-, composed in 1581, but not printed till 1595, was written in manlier English than the -Arcadia-, and is one of the very few books of criticism belonging to a creative and uncritical time. He was also the author of a series of love sonnets, -Astrophel and Stella-, in which he paid Platonic court to the Lady Penelope Rich (with whom he was not at all in love), according to the conventional usage of the amourists. Slide 143: http://booksiread.org 141 Sidney died in 1586, from a wound received in a cavalry charge at Zutphen, where he was an ofﬁcer in the English contingent, sent to help the Dutch against Spain. The story has often been told of his giving his cup of water to a wounded soldier with the words, ”Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.” Sidney was England’s darling, and there was hardly a poet in the land from whom his death did not obtain ”the meed of some melodious tear.” Spenser’s Ruins of Time- were among the number of these funeral songs; but the best of them all was by one Matthew Royden, concerning whom little is known. 86 Another typical Englishman of Elisabeth’s reign was Walter Raleigh, who was even more versatile than Sidney, and more representative of the restless spirit of romantic adventure, mixed with cool, practical enterprise that marked the Slide 144: 142Brief History of English and American Literature times. He fought against the Queen’s enemies by land and sea in many quarters of the globe; in the Netherlands and in Ireland against Spain, with the Huguenot Army against the League in France. Raleigh was from Devonshire, the great nursery of English seamen. He was halfbrother to the famous navigator, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and cousin to another great captain, Sir Richard Grenville. He sailed with Gilbert on one of his voyages against the Spanish treasure ﬂeet, and in 1591 he published a report of the ﬁght, near the Azores, between Grenville’s ship, the Revenue, and ﬁfteen great ships of Spain, an action, said Francis Bacon, ”memorable even beyond credit, and to the height of some heroical fable.” Raleigh was active in raising a ﬂeet against the Spanish Armada of 1588. He was present in 1596 at the brilliant action in which the Earl of Essex ”singed the Spanish Slide 145: http://booksiread.org 143 king’s beard,” in the harbor of Cadiz. The year before he had sailed to Guiana, in search of the fabled El Dorado, destroying on the way the Spanish town of San Jose, in the West Indies; and on his return he published his -Discovery of the Empire of Guiana-. In 1597 he captured the town of Fayal, in the Azores. He took a prominent part in colonizing 87 Virginia, and he introduced tobacco and the potato plant into Europe. America was still a land of wonder and romance, full of rumors, nightmares, and enchantments. In 1580, when Francis Drake, ”the Devonshire Skipper,” had dropped anchor in Plymouth harbor, after his voyage around the world, the enthusiasm of England had been mightily stirred. These narratives of Raleigh, and the similar accounts of the exploits of the bold sailors, Davis, Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert, and Slide 146: 144Brief History of English and American Literature Drake; but especially the great cyclopedia of nautical travel, published by Richard Hakluyt, in 1589, -The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries made by the English Nation-, worked powerfully on the imaginations of the poets. We see the inﬂuence of this literature of travel in the -Tempest-, written undoubtedly after Shakspere had been reading the narrative of Sir George Somers’s shipwreck on the Bermudas or ”Isles of Devils.” Raleigh was not in favor with Elizabeth’s successor, James I. He was sentenced to death on a trumped-up charge of high treason. The sentence hung over him until 1618, when it was revived against him and he was beheaded. Meanwhile, during his twelve years’ imprisonment in the Tower, he had written his -magnum opus-, the -History of the World-. This is not a history, in the modern sense, but a series of learned Slide 147: http://booksiread.org 145 dissertations on law, government, theology, magic, war, etc. A chapter with such a caption as the following 88 would hardly be found in a universal history nowadays: ”Of their opinion which make Paradise as high as the moon; and of others which make it higher than the middle region of the air.” The preface and conclusion are noble examples of Elisabethan prose, and the book ends with an oft-quoted apostrophe to Death. ”O eloquent, just: and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou has persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath ﬂattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-fetched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, -hic jacet-.” Although so busy a man, Raleigh found time Slide 148: 146Brief History of English and American Literature to be a poet. Spenser calls him ”the summer’s nightingale,” and George Puttenham, in his -Art of English Poesy- (1589), ﬁnds his ”vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate.” Puttenham used -insolent- in its old sense, -uncommon-; but this description is hardly less true, if we accept the word in its modern meaning. Raleigh’s most notable verses, -The Lie-, are a challenge to the world, inspired by indignant pride and the weariness of life–the -saeva indignatio- of Swift. The same grave and caustic melancholy, the same disillusion marks his quaint poem, The Pilgrimage-. It is remarkable how many of the verses among his few poetical remains are asserted in the MSS. or by tradition to have been ”made by Sir Walter 89 Raleigh the night before he was beheaded.” Of one such poem the assertion is probably true, namely, the lines ”found in his Bible in the gate-house at West- Slide 149: http://booksiread.org minster.” 147 ”Even such is Time, that takes in trust, Our youth, our joys, our all we have, And pays as but with earth and dust; Who in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways, Shuts up the story of our days; But from this earth, this grave, this dust, My God shall raise me up, I trust!” The strictly -literary- prose of the Elisabethan period bore a small proportion to the verse. Many entire departments of prose literature were as yet undeveloped. Fiction was represented–outside of the -Arcadia- and -Euphues- already mentioned– chieﬂy by tales translated or imitated from Italian -novelle-. George Turberville’s -Tragical Tales(1566) was a collection of such stories, and William Paynter’s -Palace of Pleasure- (1576-1577) a similar collection from Boccaccio’s -Decameron- and the novels of Bandello. These translations are Slide 150: 148Brief History of English and American Literature mainly of interest, as having furnished plots to the English dramatists. Lodge’s -Rosalindand Robert Greene’s -Pandosto-, the sources respectively of Shakspere’s -As You Like It- and -Winter’s Tale-, are short pastoral romances, not without prettiness in their artiﬁcial way. The satirical pamphlets of Thomas Nash and his fellows, against ”Martin Marprelate,” an anonymous writer, or 90 company of writers, who attacked the bishops, are not wanting in wit, but are so cumbered with fantastic whimsicalities, and so bound up with personal quarrels, that oblivion has covered them. The most noteworthy of them were Nash’s -Piers Penniless’s Supplication to the Devil-, Lyly’s -Pap with a Hatchet-, and Greene’s -Groat’s Worth of Wit. Of books which were not so much literature as the material of literature, mention may be made of the -Chronicle of England-, compiled