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ENGLISH VERSE
BETWEEN
CHAUCER AND SURREY
English Verse
between Chaucer and Surrey
Being Examples of Conventional Secular Poetry, exclusive of Romance, Ballad, Lyric, and Drama, in the Period from Henry the
Fourth to Henry the Eighth
EDITED WITH INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES
BY
ELEANOR PRESCOTT HAMMOND, Ph.D.
To know, Rather consists in opening out a way, Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape, Than in effecting entry for a light Supposed to be without. — Browning, Paracelsus i: 733-37
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DURHAM : NORTH CAROLINA DUKESUNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON: THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1927,
COPYRIGHT 192'7 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
THE SEEMAN PRESS DURHAM, N.C.
To ARTHUR SAMPSON NAPIER
Late Merton Professor of the English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford
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PREFACE
This volume is intended primarily for the advanced student of English literary history ; and such intention has influenced both its plan and its mode of presenta- tion. No single volume can fully represent the productivity of the century-and-a- half between the death of Chaucer and the birth of Spenser, and can also offer the necessary comment upon the published texts. For barren as is the period in one sense, it is nevertheless enormously prolific, and the aspects of its expres- sion too varied for treatment in any compact anthology. The ballad and the religious drama, both of which lie partly within this tract of time, have been abun- dantly studied ; investigation of non-dramatic religious poetry is well under way; the romances have their share of attention; but the field of what I may call for convenience “formal” verse, the mass of secular production partly narrative, partly didactic, partly satiric, partly amatory, partly descriptive, verse adhering anxiously to standardized forms and stylistic devices, is still nearly untouched. It is in this field that the soil of English literature most obviously becomes ex- hausted during the fifteenth century; and the study of these works may seem to the casual observer a thankless task. Yet without such a study the survey of English literary history is arbitrarily scanted; and every worker who views litera- ture not as belles-lettres but as the expression of the national mind realizes that the functioning of that mind, like the movements of the racehorse or the boxer, is most clearly to be observed when the film is slowed. Elton has said that “the passage from older themes and styles into newer is best seen in the writers of mid- dle rank and mixed performance” ; and in this “Transition,” of all periods in our literature, that possibility of analysis is present. The rockbottom qualities which affect the currents of literature are visible not at triumphant flood but at ebb- tide. The “Transition” has much to teach the student as to the working of psychic factors and the influence of the social environment on poetic expression; more- over, principles drawn thence are valid even among the greatest. After observing the excess of standardization in Lydgate or in Hawes, we regard the lessening in Spenser, the still more marked lessening in Shakespeare, not so much as a miracle but rather as a return to the balance long prevented by formalism.
Even with this limitation, it is impossible in a single volume to cover the field. In making a choice, the editor has endeavored to illustrate the different degrees of conservatism, the admixture now of satire, now of description, now of autobiography or of the personal, in the progress towards free treatment of the individual. A mass of verse at the close of the period is excluded because of its non-formal character. Copland’s two poems, Cocke Lorel’s Bote, Colyn Blowbole’s Testament, etc., would greatly enlarge our picture of the national mind, but they are outside the scope of this volume. Much has also been omitted from considerations of expense; the Flower and the Leaf should be here, as representing a motif highly favored by the courtly poetry of the time, but it is accessible in a modern text, and has accordingly been withdrawn from this anthol-
[ vii ]
Vill ENGLISH VERSE
ogy. Gower is untouched here for the same reason. But a good deal of the con- tents of this volume is unobtainable by the student. Walton’s Boethius, Lydgate’s Dance Macabre; the translations of Orléans, Nevill, the Visions of Cavendish, and other poems, are accessible only in expensive editions if at all. And not only these poems, but most or all of those here printed are selected as illus- trating dominant motifs of the time:—the anxious curiosity about death, the Fortune-formula, the laments over extravagance, the eagerness about trade and travel, the paraded encyclopedic knowledge, the bourgeois contempt for women and the cavalier deference for women, the rising interest in the scamp, the sub- servience to patrons, the lip-respect for Chaucer. In several poems either the in- fluence of Chaucer is visible or a passage of Chaucer is illuminated, as in Bycorne and Chichevache, Canace’s letter, Walton’s Boethius, etc.
Wherever possible, the texts are printed as wholes or as portions complete in themselves. We might do as did Charles Lamb for the Elizabethan drama- tists,—select passages showing the pictorial and emotional powers of their writ- ers; but if in displaying the versifier’s control over situation we conceal his ability, or inability, to get from situation to situation, we disguise facts neces- sary for the student, and cast a false light upon our period. It is incumbent upon the literary historian or editor to lay before workers proof how didactic was the fifteenth century at the emotional moment, how clumsy in managing tran- sition, how crude in motiving action, how unable to release the subject in hand. Only from such a body of facts can we observe the irregular growth of English constructive power ; and only long continuous excerpts, if not wholes, can provide a basis for observation. Even carelessly edited texts, like those put forth by Ritson and by Halliwell, retain their place with scholars just because they make wholes available for study.
But it has been impossible, however desirable, to place the whole of each of these texts before the student. Lydgate’s Dance Macabre can be, and is, re- produced complete; the 36,000 lines of his Fall of Princes must necessarily be illustrated by extracts; nor can we refuse to make such excerpts, because a theme so important in West-European literature, a work so influential on the Continent and in England, cannot be omitted from our survey. The Garland of Laurell is printed entire; but portions only are possible of Hawes’ Pastime, of Cavendish’s Visions, of Barclay’s Ship of Fools. Yet in all these cases the editor has en- deavored to give chapters in full, to illustrate the mode of connecting chapters, to show the movement of the author’s mind among his material.
The great amount of space given to Lydgate may provoke question; but since it is our problem to study the formal expression of the age, no apology is needed. For in this one man are represented so many of the aspects of such verse in the first half of the century that its standardized expression can al- most be studied from him alone.
Criticism will also be aroused by my refusal to treat most of this verse as rhythmical composition. The work of Lydgate, for instance, has been taken very seriously by specialists; and only the inaccessibility of texts has prevented more of the verse of the period from receiving careful analysis on the model
PREFACE ix
set up by German scholars. To such treatment I am for two reasons opposed. First, because the method is itself inadequate, a handling of verse line by line only and according to the number of syllables; secondly, because analysis is wasted upon a large portion of this verse, which is, e.g. in the Libel of English Policy, in Ripley’s Compend, in Hawes’ Pastime, sheer doggerel, guiltless of rhythm and con- scious only of an approaching rime. This latter condition does not arise because of the badness of texts, for in the cases of both Hardyng and Cavendish we have the author’s own manuscript, and yet the rhythm is as awkward as any of the period We can indeed study the attempts of Lydgate and Hoccleve to use Chaucer’s pen- tameter line-flow, and we can recognize with pleasure the rhythmic command of the Orléans or of the Palladius-translator and of the writer of the Lover’s Mass. But in most of this transitional work we have to note that a failure of sense-per- ception, a stale formality of simile and of phrase, accompanies this rhythmic pov- erty as its shadow,—or its substance. The cramping of the spirit by an environ- ment which it cannot conquer through observation is at the basis of the Transition’s failure to express, or indeed of a similar failure in any age. Given a partially- educated and insensitive group, obedient to external conditions, eager for moral and intellectual credit, and if it attempts expression, be it in the twentieth cen- tury or in the fifteenth, there will appear the same respect for the didactic, the same penchant for allegory, the same imitativeness and use of formulae, and the same failure to feel rhythm.
The textual presentation is academic. The original manuscript or printed copy is followed without deviation except in a few cases where the student might be led astray; in such cases the inserted or altered word is bracketed and the actual reading given at the foot of the page. All other changes, now sug- gested or made by previous editors, are relegated to the Notes. Modern punc- tuation has not been introduced; the markings of the original are scrupulously retained. For while the page may thus lose in clarity for the general reader, it gains greatly for the student, who is then given his proper share in the editorial problem of following the medieval mind. And when examining sentence-structure thus, the worker learns far more than when accepting uncritically the conclusions of an editor. Not only can an editor, even the best of editors, hypnotize his readers into false notions of the author’s meaning, but the whole subject of Early English punctuation has been slighted and obscured because of such ac- ceptance, continued century after century. We have made it impossible to obtain information on medieval theories of pointing by refusing to print texts with their pointing undisturbed; and the reasons for our refusal are the same as those once considered valid against the reproduction of the early spelling——a matter long since settled. On all these accounts, the present editor has declined to impose modern punctuation here.
It will also be noted that the texts are not “critical”. The establishment of a critical text, deduced from comparison of all existing copies of the work, suffers, and must always suffer, under two limitations. The surviving copies may be far indeed from the fittest; and in any case, the text constructed from them, though presumably antedating them, is not conclusively the original. It
x ENGLISH VERSE
is “X”; but the identity of X with Chaucer or with Lydgate or with another cannot be asserted. Hence the labor of constructing such an hypothetical “Ur- text”, although an admirable exercise in acumen, arrives nowhither unless the number of copies be large and clearly grouped, unless moreover they be for the most part honestly executed. The present editor feels that the principle of critical text-construction is not something to be invoked “semper, ubique, et ab omnibus”, but is to be applied according to mass and character of material. Some of the texts here assembled exist in but a single copy; of some we have a copy in the author’s own hand; several are poorly preserved; and the few which survive in a number of copies, like Walton’s Boethius, have received a treatment uniform with the others; that is, one text is printed verbatim et literatim, with mention of variants in the Notes.
In nearly every case the copies have been made by the editor. For the Palladius-text the photograph of the Wentworth Wodehouse MS was used by a Bodleian copyist; the Hoccleve texts have been revised by the Keeper of Manu- scripts at the Henry E. Huntington Library, California, where the codices formerly Phillipps 8151 and Ashburnham Appendix cxxxiii now are. In this latter case errors in the Early English Text Society’s edition have thus been removed.
The number of authors here represented has made it impossible to approach each text as would a specialist in that subject. No one of these introductions is, or attempts to be, exhaustive; no biography is fully given, no debatable point re- argued. The separate bibliographies are more complete, although the titles are condensed, and minor points left to the Dictionary of National Biography or to monumental editions like that of Skelton by Dyce. Similarly, in the glossary, it is assumed that the student has the New English Dictionary at hand, is fa- miliar with Chaucer, and has a working knowledge of Early English otherwise. Etymologies are not given, nor dialectal peculiarities discussed.
I am indebted to the Press of Duke University, and especially to its editor-in- chief, Dr. Paull F. Baum, for the care and patience, the interested craftsmanship and scholarship, which they have devoted to this volume.
E. Pst
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
The Two Periods of the “Transition’—The Struggle for Equilibrium in Each— The State of the West European Nations at the Close of the Fourteenth Century— The Rise of the Bourgeoisie—Chaucer and the Contending Forces—English Libra- ries and English Education at the Opening of the Fifteenth Century—Translation and Patronage—Song—The Sense of Rhythm—Rhythm in Chaucer and the English Chaucerians—Verse-Forms—The Scottish Chaucerians—Vocabulary—Narrative- Forms: Fabliau, Saint’s Legend, Allegory, Romance—Sensuous Perception— Prose—The Approach of Equilibrium
Joun Watton: his Life and Work.
The translation of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae A. Preface, Prologue, metre 1, prose 1 2 5 B. Book ii, metre 5, The Former aoe C. Book ii, metre 7 D. Book iii, metre 12, Orpheus j E. Preface to books iv and v; book iv, prose ‘t metre 1
Tuomas Hoccteve: his Life and Work
La Male Régle .
To Somer
To Carpenter .
Three Roundels
The Dialogue with a Biriend: eae
In Praise of Chaucer, from The Regement of Bringes To Bedford
Joun Lypcate: his Life and Work
The Churl and the Bird Horns Away Bycorne and Ghieherscies j Prologue to the Siege of Thebes . The Dance Macabre : ; The French text Epithalamium for Gloucester Letter to Gloucester : ‘ The Fall of Princes: Introduction . General Prologue . Letter of Canace to Macarets, front book i Rome, Remember, final envoy to book ii Thanks to Gloucester, from prologue to book iii . The Tragedy of Caesar, book vi Octavian’s Revenge, book vi The Tragedy of Cicero, book vi . The Tragedy of Boethius, book viii . Extract from the Epilogue, book ix
ADO OO >
[ xi]
vii
102 110 113 118 124 426 142 149 150 157 164 169 174 176 179 180 185 186
xii CONTENTS
BENEDICT BURGH Letter to John Lydgate .
JoHN SHIRLEY Two Verse Tables of Contents
ANONYMOUS A Reproof to Lydgate
ANONYMOUS
A translation of Palladius on Husbandry The Prologue . : : : ; A, B, C, D, Epilogue-Stanzas
ANONYMOUS The Lover’s Mass
ANONYMOUS Translations from Charles d’Orléans, with the French
Joun HarpyNnc From the Chronicle: Henry V and the Battle of Agincourt
ANONYMOUS London Lickpenny .
ANONYMOUS The Libel of English Policy, lines 1-563
GEORGE RIPLEY The Compend of Alchemy: Preface and Prohibicio
ANONYMOUS
The Court of Sapience: extracts and summary STEPHEN Hawes
The Pastime of Pleasure: extracts and summary
Wittram NEvILL AND Ropert COPLAND
Dialogue between Nevill and Copland The Castell of Pleasure: extracts and summary
ALEXANDER BARCLAY
The Ship of Fools: extracts . 3 The Prologue to the Eclogues ; Eclogue i iv
JoHN SKELTON The Garland of Laurell
GEORGE CAVENDISH The Metrical Visions: extracts
Henry, Lorp Morey
Translation of Petrarch’s Triumph of Love, book i A “Sonnet” on the Psalms ; ‘ : :
NorTES List OF ABBREVIATIONS: SELECT REFERENCE LIstT
SELECT GLOSSARY AND FINDING List
188
191
198
202 206
207
214
233
237
240
252
258
268
287 289
298 312
342
368
383 391 392 540
553
Page 51. Page 67. Page 75. Page 101, Page 154, Page 209, Page 216, Page 260. Page 398. Page 399.
Page 400. Page 412. Page 421. Page 423. Page 451, Page 461, Page 543,
Page 561, Page 585,
ENGLISH VERSE
BETWEEN
CHAUCER AND SURREY
ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS
Line 105 belongs with preceding stanza.
The first footnote belongs with line 8 of To Carpenter.
In note on 2093, read lyf instead of lwf.
line 5 from bottom, for Peachan read Peacham.
line 7, for arblastic read arblastis.
line 14 from bottom, for 1371 read 1372.
line 19, for was run read was to run.
Above text insert [Prologue to Book 1].
Delete the note on line 24.
To note on lines 3-5 add: as in the Oxford 1911 edition.
In note on line 22, for odde read odre.
To note on line 28 add: or of Castalia on Parnassus.
In the fourth line of note on 17-22, for later read earlier.
In second line of note on 262, for To walk ungirt read To say that she walks ungirt.
To note on line 427 add: See Curry’s Chaucer and Mediaeval Science, Oxford 1926, pp. 20 ff.
line 3, for sulleness read sullenness.
to line 4 below heading of Reproof to Lydgate add: see reproduction by Brusendorff facing p. 264. To matter of second paragraph ibid. add: The Chance of the Dice was pubd. by me in EnglStud. vol. 59.
add: ExamVirtue. Hawes’ poem The Example of Virtue, for which see p. 271 here.
under dede add asterisk to Thebes 58.
under syngler add asterisk to FaPrin A 409.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
The hundred and fifty years of the English “Transition” may fairly be treated in two periods, divided politically at the battle of Bosworth Field and intellectually at the establishment of printing. In the former of these periods, from 1400 to 1485, the Crown was long in dispute, the feudal nobility absorbed in foreign and in dynastic wars, the Church weakened by its dependence on the Crown, the commonalty engaged in using its first chance at accumulation of money. A shift of class-balance was in progress as result of the divisions and weakening of the landholders, of the economic power gained by the bourgeoisie ; and English society was profoundly unsettled because of this readjustment. In the latter period, from 1485 on, the Tudor despotism established itself above a crippled aristocracy and Church, with the tacit consent of a commonalty not yet politically coherent and conscious. The education of the bourgeoisie pro- ceeded slowly, taking at first a limited and pedagogic form, while courtly ex- pression retained in large part the formulae of an earlier age.
Through the former period, ecclesiastical and chivalric standards of taste were still in force. Polite literature was formal, imitative, didactic; drama and the romance both submitted to pressure, and the traces of secular folk- expression outside the ballad are small. The numerous class of ecclesiastically- trained writers show the repressive, inhibiting power of the Church on letters; the Church contemned, as always, the human senses, contemned direct observation of any sort; it favored the symbol rather than the fact, and approved the didactic without any criticism of its quality. Its contribution to English literature was that of Christianity as a whole,—the idea of the struggle of vicious and virtuous impulses in the human heart,—an idea alien to the antique world. The Teutonic races obtained part of their intellectual discipline through the self-examination required by the Church; but the Church’s opinion of the human senses acted as an inhibition to any real study of man by man; it created as sharp a cleavage in the possible whole of mental development as existed between the adoration of the Virgin Mother and the monastic horror of woman.
The medieval synthesis, both ecclesiastical and political, held firm while ' the Western world was still politically and linguistically a unit; it relaxed as the integration of separate nations and tongues progressed, a relaxation doubtless due in part to the difficulty of intercommunication over Western Europe. Upon this slow process another factor, the economic, acted as accelerant; with the use of coined money and the rise of an international banking system, democratic de- vices furthered by the aristocratic Crusades, the anti-synthetic particularistic tendency increased. As English commerce became more important, as the trad- ing towns grew, as the dealers in wool accumulated wealth, the English bour- geoisie rose in power. Human ambition and human self-assertiveness, long denied expression to the “demos” by the rigid frame of feudalism, found opportunity ; and during the Transition, especially during the second of its two periods, the
[3]
+ ENGLISH VERSE
bourgeoisie, vigorous, pushing, unscrupulous, with little education but with wide and widening human experience, comes more and more to the center of the stage. Like all natures of high animalism, no education, and unformulated ideas, the bourgeois was iconoclastic, insensitive, and greedy of emphasis; violent emotion- alism, coarse jest, attack on all forms of the established order, appealed to him as they appeal to the new “proletariat” public today. Even at his worst, however, he was undulled by machine-service and by machine-made noise; his nature at its best is seen in the work of his hands and in his impulse to song.
As this confusion of tendencies, this strife between the overborne older order and the aggressive middle class, slowly worked to a height, it met incoming Hu- manism. A new cohesive force replaced the dissolving medieval theory. Every aspect of Humanism made for stability; a clarified expression, a standard of taste, a faith in man, were offered to a public sorely in need of them; and the concentration of interest upon the individual which characterized the Renaissance sweetened for the bourgeoisie the gift of Humanism which the Renaissance brought. It required time to train the new reading class; but as a small group of dramatic poets matured on the combined bourgeois and humanistic stimuli, the London public received the benefit in the theater, which taught through the emotions and the ear as well as the eye. To that conflict of good and evil in the human heart which was fundamental in Christian teaching, and to the human experience which the average man had acquired in the street and in the market- place there was now added the Renaissance feeling for form, the Renaissance conception of the humane and the beautiful. Ideals are again revered; and men’s imaginations, raised by such full faith in man as that of Spenser, are led to a newer and greater Romantic synthesis in Shakespeare, to a fusion not merely of human relations in a system, but of the seer with the thing seen. But in the years between Chaucer’s death and the Elizabethan florescence, before the middle class had taken form or received education, English literature was in the hands of the conservatives.
Conservatism is as fundamental a force in literature and in character as is individualism, and as necessary. The greatest moments of artistic expression, whether in peoples or in the single workman, have been those of equipoise be- tween these two forces. Such moments are brief and rare; there is usually a predominance of one element, a predominance determined often by conditions other than literary. The rigidity of the structure of feudalism, denying expres- sion to all of lower rank, maintained the force of conservatism in literature for centuries. Had the English bourgeoisie obtained the upper hand in letters as well as in life, the chaos following on the shift might have been greater.. But the incoming power of Humanism, almost coincident with the definite emergence of the bourgeoisie, equalized the thrust of individualism; and we have in the Elizabethan age one of the world’s great moments of equipoise between the two contending forces. That it manifests itself in drama and in lyric is not sur- prising; for the agreement in spirit between the citizen community of Athens and the citizen community of Elizabethan London favored in both environments that drama which in each case had germinated within the limits of the established
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 5
religion. In the outburst of individualism of our own day, accompanying the emergence of a new social class, we have an excess uncontrolled as yet by any conservative or humanistic force; and the unsettlement today of language and of morality, alongside the unsettlement and exaggeration of literary expression, are markedly parallel to the phenomena of the Transition.
Each of these social reconstructions, reconstructions which are but attempts to reach a balance, is confronted by the problem of educating a public new to power, untrained and indocile. And the psychology of human beings in the mass, of the “crowd-mind,” is in each case an additional element in the struggle towards adjustment. The crowd-mind is self-assertive, but it is also self-pro- tective, an impulse which is evident especially in the tendency to imitation, to the preservation of a standard once accepted. No matter how strong the indi- vidualistic assertion may be, it has no sooner obtained a hearing than it hardens into a creed. A process of stereotyping, insisted upon by the group, follows close upon revolt, close upon each attainment of balance; and how long its pat- tern endures will depend in great part upon external conditions. If an ecclesi- astical and feudal framework is imposed upon society, as was the case all through the Middle Ages, literature will be standardized and held rigid by that framework. Should the inhibition be less heavy, as in fourteenth-century Eng- land, there may be here and there an attainment of balance, as in Chaucer, who represents in his isolated self the adjustment between group and individual, between book-education and human experience, between what George Eliot calls “separateness” and “communication.” It is rare indeed to find a piece of literature which has not been influenced by social pressures and inhibitions, but the effect of this potent factor on the course of a nation’s expression has not yet been studied. A view of English poetry which should regard it less as an evolu- tion than as a constant struggle of the spirit against successive group-inhibitions would be of interest; nowhere would there be more material than in the period at which we are looking.
The society in which stereotypes prevail is one carefully and successfully guarded against change. It is not by chance that the two great modern social readjustments have each coincided with an expansion of the world in men’s minds. The period of sailing out upon the oceans, in the late fifteenth century, is matched in the late nineteenth by immensely increased facilities for land travel, and by the conquest of undersea and upper air yet later. Such extensions of the ordinary man’s horizon have incalculable consequences. They mean, of course, more human as well as more geographical knowledge; they mean increase of travel and commerce, exchange of ideas, enlargement of sympathies. But they bring difficulties as well as advantages. It is not that the laws of human nature, in- cluding the urge to imitate and to standardize, undergo any modification; but the speed and variability of their functioning increase enormously. In our own time the demolition of space-barriers which puts every variety of stimulus sim- ultaneously before the people, and the articulate assertiveness of all classes in a democratic society, have tangled the threads of tendency to a degree hitherto unimagined. The necessity for swift and constantly repeated adaptation, in a
6 ENGLISH VERSE
society thus exposed to multifarious stimuli, is as disintegrating to personality as to literary standards. Beside the conditions of literature today, those of the fifteenth century are simplicity itself. In that last hour before the advent of printing and before the voyage of Columbus, the forces of established con- servatism could offer to a new type, literary or religious, a resistance denser and more general than any novelty today will encounter. Looking over the history of our literature, we see that what we call periods were much longer before the invention of printing, that they shortened as commercial intercourse was facili- tated, and that with cheap newspapers, steam, and the radio, the weakening of resistance to change has reached the danger point. The physical cause of this weakening is the immensely enhanced facility of human intercourse, which not only permits but compels a choice of stimuli at every moment, weakens the power of attention, and divides the individual against himself. The reduction in personality is as marked, in a hurried huddled age, as is the confusion of standards.
The Transition, defended yet awhile by the forces of feudalism against an uneducated, even if rising, middle class, is, as I have said, a simple problem compared to that of our own day. The two Transition publics and the two modes of expression, with the hybrids between them, can be traced with comparative ease. One body of production, the conservative and stereotyped, perpetuates earlier themes and forms; it draws its support from the privileged classes and accepts the dictation of a patronage which knows only traditional types of ex- pression. As the years pass, the control of this patronage weakens, the force of imitation loses strength to resist increeping bourgeois qualities, and hybrids appear, as well as clumsy satire, jest, and description. This attempted description is for the most part of human or low-life figures, exaggerated often and often as overdone in another way as were the earlier stock-pattern figures. But poor and violent though the portraiture may be, it reaches out after real life; it at- tempts to use the senses, to redress the balance so long weighed towards the stereotype. And when this excess is in its turn reduced and steadied by Hu- manism, there is a brilliant though brief period of poise.
It is with the first of these three phases, the formal literature of the Tran- sition, that we are concerned. The popular expression of the early sixteenth century is beyond our purview, as is the Renaissance. Yet though we em- phasize the stereotyping society of the earlier Transition as principal cause of its failure in literary vitality, we have not thus given all the reasons for that failure. Even though we add the isolation of England during the Hundred Years’ War, we have not fully explained her intellectual weakness then. The war indeed made itself felt on letters in the barrier which it set up between England and her nearest neighbors, in its denial of human intercommunication. If Mr. Belloc can say of Roman England that her separation from the Continent by barbarian Roman soldiers “lowered the general process of civilization in the eastern and starved into a still lower standard the isolated western part,” this was equally true of the sundering force of the French war in the fifteenth century. But neither that war nor the contest of the Roses is the sole cause of English literary
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 7
conditions at the time. The tightening of inhibitions by the small arrogant litera- ture-producing class has its effect in weakening English poetry; the break-down of the aristocracy through war, the rise of the bourgeoisie through increase of fluid wealth, account for the unsettlement of standards and the coarsening of taste; the enforced separation from the Continent delays education. But none of these, nor all taken together, tell the full story of the English Transition.
The “content” of any literary period varies in reality and power with the weight of conviction and enthusiasm behind it. Carlyle, discussing the age of Louis XV, remarked that “when the general life-element became so unspeakably phantasmal, it was difficult for any man to be real.” Morley says of Voltaire’s Henriade: “To form a long narrative of heroic adventure in animated, picturesque, above all in sincere verse, is an achievement reserved for men with a steadier glow, a firmer, simpler, more exuberant and more natural poetic feeling than was possible in that time of mean shifts, purposeless public action, and pitiful sacrifice of private self-respect.” And Santayana may also be quoted: “When chaos has penetrated into the moral being of nations, they can hardly be ex- pected to produce great men.” The new public of England was as uneducated morally and ethically as it was mentally. It brought to secular literature no high purpose, no faith in man, no sincerity; its narrow bourgeois greed, its measure- ment of life in terms of power and money, debarred it from giving out as a people any real inspiration. And the men to whom England had to look as her spokesmen were equally devoid of real inspiration; they were trained indeed to some extent, but Church-trained, set firmly in the clerical mould, and as scanted of liberal education as their public. Such writers had not either element of literature; neither they nor their readers felt high purpose, and they themselves possessed no craftsmanship. Milton’s “various style” and “holy rapture” were both lacking. There have been times in English literature when one of these elements has alone sufficed to keep a body of poetry stable. In the spiritually mea- ger age of Queen Anne, brilliancy of manipulation compensated in part for a lack of sincerity, and Pope stamped an alloy of mean intrinsic value to pass current for generations. But Lydgate, for example, had no such ability. And though without the one basis, spiritual or intellectual, a body of literature may stand, it cannot when devoid of both vital sincerity and technical excellence. The weakness of the fifteenth century is no marvel; what were marvellous were the growth of anything beautiful in verse under such conditions.
We do not endeavor, as appears from the foregoing, to explain the fifteenth century as the outcome of the fourteenth. The doctrine of “continuous entity” has value, but a mass of people moves not on the lines of the physical organ- ism. The fifteenth century is not solely a degeneration nor an inheritance from the years before it; it is not solely a period of gestation for a coming birth. The Elizabethan Renaissance is less truly an upleap than an attainment of equilib- rium after long effort at balance, an equilibrium at last made possible by the break in social inhibitions, the advance in the new public’s education, the enlarged view of the world, and a more generous ideal of life. These are all conditions
8 ENGLISH VERSE
external, in a sense, to literature; and it is now our problem to observe in more detail how such conditions formed in later medieval England.
During the ten centuries before the discovery of America the slowly in- tegrating countries of Western Europe had developed on varying economic and political lines. The long sea-coasts of Italy and Britain, with their Oriental and Dutch frontages, had stimulated sea-borne trade. In Italy the growth of the tex- tile industry was closely connected with the rise of that trade, and the two fos- tered each other. England did little weaving until the mid-fourteenth century ; with her, minerals, and above all raw wool, were the export staples. This con- dition favored a large rural and a smaller trading class; and the habit of mind which is developed by artisan-skill was of late awakening in Britain. Her turn in the world’s manufacturing economy came with the utilization of her iron and her coal, when Italy’s primacy in textile work passed from her because of her lack of the minerals so abundant farther north.
The political development of the two countries was also very different. Italy’s position on the Mediterranean Sea, the heart of ancient civilization, the seat of the Roman Empire and later of the Roman Church in her peninsula, the number and immediacy of her political contacts, the continuity of her intellectual life, made her widely different from insular, remote, untutored Britain. England’s political and mental history hardly began until she was drawn, by the Norman Conquest, into the circle of the growing nations. There she found Italy, France, and the Low Countries her far more experienced and matured sisters. Her mer- chant trade built up slowly, and for generations her intellectual dependence was directly or indirectly on France, her conqueror and teacher.
It had been the great task of France to preserve the Latin tongue and to discipline the expression of Western Europe through her schools of philosophy and dialectic. Politically her position in the fourteenth century was midway between that of Italy and that of England. She was not split, as was Italy, into a half-hundred of jealous and contentious statelets, each torn also by local party strife; but her noble class was more numerous, compared with her bour- geoisie, than in England, owing to the social system which made every French younger son of aristocratic family also noble and privileged. The untaxed wealth of the Roman Church was much greater in France than in England; and after the division of territory among the sons of King John, the quarrels among the princes thus aggrandized and the Crown became violent. So far as letters and art were concerned, the rivalry between Burgundy, Anjou, Orléans, Berri, and the Ile de France stimulated the work of chroniclers, translators, painters, carvers, and scribes, even as was the case in the Italian peninsula among the rival despots. But the mass of the French people was heavily taxed, more so than in other countries, and lacked the political consciousness so swiftly developed in smaller and less agricultural states like Athens or Florence or Flanders. There was no check upon the dominant classes, and these continued in a round of imitation, so far as literature was concerned. Where the people could receive education, as in the handicrafts, art was vital; the architecture, the glass and metal work, the tapestry of the later Middle Ages, all bear wit-
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 9
ness to this. But the exclusively aristocratic literature of France suffered from the sterility of the aristocracy and the Church.
Communal development advanced faster in the small states north of France. The territory we now know as Holland and Belgium was in the fourteenth cen- tury divided into a group of thriving counties and duchies,—Brabant, Flanders, Hainault, Seeland, Holland, etc. The coast state of Flanders, in especial, was almost independent of the Empire, and her busy cities had grown rich by the manufacture of England’s wool. During the latter fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries the French dukes of Burgundy came into possession, by marriage or by usurpation, of most of these little territories; and the marriage of Mary of Burgundy, sole heir of Charles the Bold, with Maximilian of Austria, carried the whole great Burgundian power to her grandson, the Emperor Charles the Fifth. The long years’ struggle of the gallant little states of the North with Charles’ son, Philip of Spain, is, however, no part of our history; at the period we are considering they were opulent manufacturing communities, famous for their glass, metal, and textile work, for their painters in oil, for their wealth, their growing political confidence and impatience of despotic control. Whatever their artificial dynastic bonds with France or with the Empire, the whole economic life of the Low Countries depended on England, from which they drew the wool for their weaving. And the connection of the two shores was other than commercial; the marriage of Edward III of England to Philippa of Hainault, and the constant intercourse between the English and the Burgundian courts in the next century, while Burgundy was supporting England against France, had almost as much influence on the arts and letters, the book-collecting and trans- lating of England, as the similarity in trade-interests had on the bourgeoisie of the two countries. It was from the French-speaking court of the Burgundian dukes that much of England’s fifteenth-century “culture” came; and it was from the court of a Burgundian duke and his English duchess that Caxton returned to London, carrying the Low-Country art of printing.
England’s insular freedom from European political problems had left her, during the years since her royal house had become thoroughly English, in a position to grow more evenly and healthily than any Continental country. At the middle of the fourteenth century all signs were promising. In political, in literary, in social expression, she was full of vitality. The progress of Parliament towards control of government, the assertion of the nation against the Papacy in the statutes of Provisors and Premunire, the growing prosperity of English traders, the freer intercourse with the world, seemed to mean an awakened and intelligent group-consciousness. At that moment the Biblical drama, the bal- lads, the revival of the native verse, the rise of reforming feeling and of mystical thought, the technical power of Chaucer, all gave promise of a genuine literary florescence. Just then, it may be, if political class-agreements had continued the loosening of medieval inhibitions, if intercourse with the South of Europe had left the road open for intellectual growth, we might have had a noble na- tional expression. Instead, everything conspired to check the development which seemed so certain, and to set the stage for a very different drama.
10 ENGLISH VERSE
First in the sequence of untoward events was the Black Death. How large a proportion of England’s population died in the series of epidemics which swept West Europe at intervals from 1348 on, we do not know; but it is clear that she lost so heavily from her working class that there was a sudden and a permanent shortage of labor, reflected by a rise in wages and in prices. The landowners, who largely constituted Parliament, refused to recognize the in- evitable; and that energy which had been expended by them on control of king and nobles was diverted to a class-struggle with labor. Ten years before the first great wave of the plague, also, the disastrous Hundred Years’ War with France had begun. ”
A strong and ambitious sovereign might have turned this rupture between landholders and commonalty to his own advantage. But the later years of Edward III were weak; the folly of Richard II brought him to ruin; and affairs weltered in chaos while peasants and Lollards were contending with landlords and Church. In the early fifteenth century we find England with her throne occupied by the keen and determined Lancastrians, her Church freed from Lol- lard criticism and sunk into apathy, her peasantry beaten into sullen dejection, the inhibiting feudal framework clamped again upon her literary expression, and all trace of her intellectual vigor gone with the barring of the Channel, the death of Chaucer, the death of religious freedom, the death of national unity.
All unknown to king and noblesse, however, there was building up with their sanction a power which should undermine their rule more completely than the labor unrest. Where public and private obligations could be reckoned and col- lected in money, the country availing itself of that convenience was moving towards a time when political relations would cease to depend upon tenure of land; in other words, the feudal system was about to fall before the power of the bourgeoisie. There was no protest in this case from landholders or from Church, for that payment in coin which became the basis of trading prosperity was a convenience recognized alike by crusading nobles, absentee landholders, and the tax-collectors of the Roman Church.
On this new material foundation arose the bourgeoisie, in all its impulses antagonistic to the social order which had endeavored to hold it in check,—anti- feudal, anti-chivalric, anti-clerical, impatient, iconoclastic, ribald. Whatever the shortcomings of the falling order, it had nominally professed ideals,—loyalty to God, to the sovereign, to the beloved lady. But the rising bourgeoisie, during the long ensuing struggle with moribund feudalism, served no ideals; it had no apparent motive except self-aggrandizement. There was nothing in it of the respect for the past as a Golden Age, which chivalry had felt, nothing of the modern devotion to the future of the race, to the betterment of generations yet unborn. Its deficiency in enthusiasms, in convictions, in devotions, left it unen- dowed with literary force, as it was also undisciplined by training. The renewal of the Hundred Years’ War under Henry V was no struggle against a Persian invader, a Spanish invader. Its motive was frankly lust of dominion. In speaking of the effect of the Persian war on Greece, Bury has said that in that war was illustrated “the operation of a general law which governs human so-
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 11
cieties. Pressure from without tends to produce unity within.” Fifteenth- century England, however, was not rising to defend herself; she was not even venturing, as did Tudor England, into undiscovered countries and uncharted seas. She was seeking to aggrandize herself at the expense of an equal, a neigh- bor, a sister. Whatever Henry V’s arguments of hereditary right, before his in- vasion of France in 1415, he appealed as much to the baser passions of the nation as did Bismarck. And the penalty which England paid was a spiritual one; she paid in the impoverishment of her literature, the deterioration of her Church, the delay of her emancipation and of her education. All that forming literary impulse which was just ready for the discipline of Humanism was stifled for many years. For not only did England’s intellectual resources, still limited be- cause of her belated admission to the European storehouse of thought, receive little or no food during most of the fifteenth century, but there was from decade to decade a steady loss in intellect and taste, caused by the ceaseless imitation, the starved inbreeding, of a race of ill-nurtured clerics. England in the fifteenth century, to quote Carlyle’s phrase, saw life as “a thing whereby to do day-labor and earn wages”; she saw literature as a means of “eschewing idleness”, in the current monkish phrase. And neither view ever inspired a soul to real utterance.
Both fundamental elements of a national literature were thus lacking in fifteenth-century England, the pressure of generous popular feeling and the presence of the technical artist. The previous century had felt the stirrings of high emotions, and had uttered them, often awkwardly enough, through the bal- ladists, the mystics, Wyclif, Langland. One supreme artist, one man of both genius and technique, that century had possessed in Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer had certain essentials of artistic mastery as completely in his grasp as had the Greeks from whom he differed so widely. He knew the superiority of balance over symmetry; he understood and practiced restraint in expression; he studied contrast as no man but Shakespeare, in England, has studied it; he recognized the power of the selected detail; his senses were alert and keen. But neither these essentials nor his amazing technical mastery of his material could be com- municated, and his touch was too light and shrewd to guide his followers.
In that technical mastery no comparison with his English predecessors is possible. His management of verse-flow, the vigor of his imagination, his per- fect acquaintanceship with the creatures of his art and his power of bringing his readers into their presence, his understanding of his audience, have no proto- type in England. We term such qualities “modern”; yet medieval Chaucer is as well. He used unhesitatingly and naturally many themes and forms which seem to us absurd; but by using this familiar material he kept himself understanded of the many, as Shakespeare did. In both of them was the “communication” with their fellows, and in both of them the “separateness” of genius.
And in yet another way Chaucer was a composite. He worked often with an eye on the aristocratic patron, used often aristocratic themes; but more and more, as he grows older, is the power released in him bourgeois. His kinship is with Boccaccio, with the French fabliau-makers, with Chrétien de Troyes or Jean de Meun. Like them his perceptions are quick, shrewd, amused; like them
12 ENGLISH VERSE
his study is by preference of human situation. Like them he excels in the smaller structural qualities; like them he makes little or no attempt to raise the pitch of life, as romance and allegory do, and as the bourgeois spirit never does. Yet simply and solely bourgeois, of the bourgeois ignorance of letters, the bourgeois-Philistine contempt for whatever it fails to understand, Chaucer was not. Always he is the composite, bourgeois enough to meet the bourgeoisie, courtly enough to meet the courtier, of genius sufficing to understand and to fuse both and to carry both into permanent literature. Bookman by taste and business man by profession; not deeply read but passionately addicted to reading; neither philosopher nor thinker, yet observer of everything human, interested in every- thing human, tolerant of everything human, without desire to teach or to preach; pliant to the literary customs of his time, yet understanding how to comply and to surpass with the same gesture,—Chaucer, like Shakespeare, struck a balance between individual assertion and conservative acceptance.
The century after his death saw the bourgeois and the aristocratic tenden- cies, which he had united, fall apart. Of the two publics into which England then split, publics more clearly defined after the establishment of printing, it was the aristocratic and formal which paid Chaucer deference and strove to imitate him. The group of his acknowledged followers had before them the same material, human and literary, which had lain before him; but their handling of books and of life is entirely different from his. No English “Chaucerian” looks at the written page as Chaucer had looked at it; there is only one man in the next age who is steeped in a book as was Chaucer,—Henryson in his Fables. Henryson, in his capacity of schoolmaster, must have taught and retaught Aesop until the Fox and the Wolf and the Cadger rose before him in their habit as they lived. But Lydgate, to take the most prolific of Chaucer’s English admirers, has only a superficial contact with books, even with those he translates; he does not remember obvious facts about the Canterbury Tales, great as is the admira- tion he professes for it. His eye slides off the written page, slides off the human face; his senses are not alert, his interest not alive. No evidence is before us, and none may ever be obtainable, as to the actual condition of the human senses in any poetic period. But the appeal to them in “Romantic” periods is as marked as the lack of appeal to them when literature is held in stereotyped forms. It may be a fundamental fact in the Transition that its writers were so generally without visual and auditory sensitiveness. Description is abundant, but it moves in formulae; words are abundant, but the pregnant epithet, the revealing phrase, is not there. Chaucer was not one of the word-sensitive, as was Shakespeare or Keats; he cannot speak of “ardent marigolds” or of “warmed jewels”, but nevertheless his senses are not prisoners to formula. Whether it was Lydgate’s ecclesiastical habit of mind, or the pressure on him of translation done to order, or his own temperamental sluggishness, which dulled him, we do not know; but his attention, his perception, his expression, are always blunted and diffused.
He had, however, more than many writers of his time, the access to books. The age was one of book-accumulation in England, as in Burgundy and in
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 13
France. Henry VI laid the foundations of the immense Royal collection of man- uscripts now in the British Museum, and his uncle Humphrey of Gloucester presented his books to the University of Oxford. Balliol College, Oxford, re- ceived from her son William Grey, bishop of Ely, about two hundred volumes he had! collected, three-quarters of which are still there. John Tiptoft Earl of Worcester, also a Balliol man, purchased so many books south of the Alps that he was said to have despoiled Italy in order to enrich England. He too gave books to Oxford. And at Oxford, until the dissolution of the monasteries, was the great library formed by Richard de Bury, bishop of Durham (died in 1345), an ardent amateur of books, as his friend Petrarch describes him, and ?author of the Philobiblon. Outside Oxford, too, was ample book-supply, especially in the Benedictine monasteries; and no one of these was better stocked than Lydgate’s own house of Bury St. Edmunds.
Nor were royalty and the monastic houses the only book-lovers in Eng- land. We have still to decipher and arrange the evidence afforded by coats of arms painted in the books of their owners, which may reconstruct in part for us the collections of the Percies, the Stanleys, the Sinclairs, etc. And from the bequests in wills we can sometimes trace the passing of precious volumes from Sir John Morton to the Countess of Westmoreland, sometimes the bequest of the Canterbury Tales or of “Bochas” by one plain English citizen to another. The fifteenth century in England was not poor in the number of books from which sustenance could be drawn. The vibrating body and the transmitting medium were there, as they had been in the fourteenth century; the difference was in the receiving ear. To the very verge of the age of Elizabeth there were English- men full of enthusiasm for study, full of enthusiasm for travel, acquiring books, translating ; but their efforts to express themselves can be classed as poetry only because of the accident of rime. Not all of Lord Morley’s interest in Petrarch can make his translations endurable; the five years which Osbern Bokenam spent in Italy in no wise mitigated the clumsiness of his utterance; and neither Agin- court nor his Italian travels inspired John Hardyng to one rhythmical or readable line. What Cardinal Newman called “a haziness of intellectual vision” came, in the fifteenth century, from the same cause which Newman specified for his own time,—the lack of a really good education. It was the speaker’s failure to see, to hear, to make fresh and independent comparisons, which deprived him of the power to understand or to express, which doomed his style to» weakness and muddlement. Any form of education which quickened the perceptions of the English patron and the English clerk, or which could refine the taste of the bourgeois, would have served late medieval England, and did ultimately reach it in the form of drama; but from the inherited routine of study no stimulus came.
Higher education, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was obtainable in England at the monastic schools and universities and at the Inns of Court. Something more like a “finishing-school” training was to be found in great houses like that of John of Gaunt; a youth taken as page in such a household would become a complete courtier, able to speak and write French and a little Latin,
14 ENGLISH VERSE
to touch the lute, and to gather as much more knowledge as he could draw from the foreign-born physician or astrologer or Latin secretary who was so frequently to be found in the entourage of a great noble. The university man was definitely a logician or theologian, trained to the shaping of rhetorical periods or to scholastic argument in Latin; he often divided his later years between the penning of Latin letters for diplomats and a Church post given him as reward for secretarial duty. The lawyer received a more humane education, and may have lived a fuller life. Sir John Fortescue’s classic account, although not particularized, tells us that in 1468-70, when he wrote, the training given by the Inns of Court included not only law and sacred and profane history, but singing, dancing, “and such other accomplishments as are usually practiced at Court.” If Chaucer were a member of the Inner Temple, as now seems possible, his education was neither that of the desultory courtier nor of the secretarial monk; he must have learned how to mix with men as well as how to read many books. No match for him in per- sonality came out of the Inns of Court in the fifteenth century; but whatever the determining power of Chaucer’s own genius on his growth, some part of the difference between him and Lydgate, for example, may be due to the sharpening and clarifying of the one mind, the dulling and relaxing of the other, by the mental discipline received in young manhood.
The breaking-down of the difference between the two English publics, the beginnings of Humanism, are apparent first in the spread of secondary schools; and to this educational advance the new art of printing made early response. Caxton, with his strong personal interest in romantic narrative and his own ac- tivity as a translator, allied himself by preference with aristocratic patrons, with men of wealth. Only by such alliance, indeed, could he have published his am- bitious folios. He tells us in one of his invaluable prefaces (to the Golden Legend) that the Earl of Arundel, when ordering the work, had promised him a buck and a doe each year, and to take a “reasonable number of copies.” His issuance of Cicero’s De Senectute was at Sir John Fastolfe’s command; the Mirror of the World was printed for Hugh Brice, afterward Lord Mayor of London; and his earliest enterprise, the Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, undertaken while he was yet in Flanders, was at the command of Margaret duchess of Burgundy. The French versions used by Caxton for this last and for the Cicero had themselves been executed for ducal patrons; no man, indeed, could devote himself to such undertakings without assurance of support; and much of the formal large-scale literary production of the fifteenth century depended upon the taste of wealthy men. Caxton’s successor, de Worde, was a more practical and less intellectual man than his master; under him and Richard Pynson the character of the London press changes, and reflects the state of the open market, the spread of education, the taste of the smaller customer. Gordon Duff states that of the ca.640 books printed by de Worde between 1500 and ?1535, over two hundred were school books. De Worde’s hundred and fifty or so of poems and romances, beside this textbook production, shows how definitely a new sort of patron had appeared.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 15
But whatever increase took place in the number of schools and of school- books, in the second half of our period, the mass of the English people was still little affected by education. It was not by book-experience that they learned, but by life-experience, by enlarged discourse and enlarged intercourse among men. For this the growth of trade, of travel, and of the towns was responsible. Not that there was any marked increase in the number of pilgrims to foreign shrines, or any clear effect on English culture caused by the travel of English gentlemen and scholars to Italy. It was the many smaller and less obvious factors which counted; not the spectacular arrival of Erasmus in 1497, not the sojourn of Poggio, so much as e.g. the settlement near Winchester of Italian workers in metal and plaster. It was not so much the presence in every great house of foreign secretaries, nor even the necessity for dealing with Flemish woolbuyers and Genoese moneylenders, as it was the extending of every citizen’s horizon by enlarged buying power, repeated journeys near home, safer roads, wider acquaintance, aroused curiosity. The freer circulation of money and the increase of trade as compared with agriculture pushed the key of bourgeois life nearer to that of the privileged classes, just as the Ford car and the highway system are pushing the change today.
That change proceeded very slowly. Everything during the first half of our period combined to delay it; the distraction of England by class-quarrels, religious quarrels, dynastic quarrels, her cultural isolation by the French war, the lowering of her morale by that selfish and disastrous undertaking. With the founding of the Tudor despotism and the establishment of printing, the confusion nominally ends; but it is long indeed before the bourgeoisie becomes able either to express itself or to make itself felt in national affairs. And in the absence of any fresh creative impulse, the earlier formulae continue to endure. Long after the introduction of printing, the expression of the people is still scarcely heard; the upperclass code, with its didactics, its allegories, its translations, its verbal stereotypes, persists. However broken the aristocratic public politically, their taste regulates literary production.
Of this aristocratic literature, translation forms a large part. At the open- ing of the century John Trevisa, the protégé of Lord Berkeley, made for his pa- tron prose translations of Bartholomaeus De Proprietatibus Rerum, of Higden’s Polychronicon, and of delle Colonne’s De Regimine Principum. The Polychroni- con was printed by Caxton in 1482, emended by the editor-printer because of its “rude and old Englysshe, that is to wete certayn wordes which in these dayes be neither vsyd ne understanden.”’ The De Regimine was one of Hoccleve’s sources for his verse Regement of Princes, dedicated to Henry V while Prince of Wales; and another of his sources, the Secreta Secretorum, so widely popular in the Middle Ages, was turned into English prose by James Young for the Earl of Ormonde about 1420, and into verse by Lydgate and a pupil a generation later. It was about 1410 that John Walton made his stanzaic translation of Boethius’ De Consolatione at the command of Lord Berkeley’s daughter. Another didactic work, de Guilleville’s three-part Pilgrimage, was turned into English several times before 1500, one verse-rendering of its second part being by Lydgate to the Earl
16 ENGLISH VERSE
of Salisbury’s order. Much of Lydgate’s activity, indeed, was as translator. He went over into the romantic-epic field at the bidding of Henry V, with his Troy Book ; he may have pleasured himself with his Siege of Thebes, his Churl and Bird, his Dance Macabre; but his principal business was that of a large-scale didactic translator, from the saints’ lives done for Henry V and for Henry VI, for the Countess of March, for the Abbot of St. Albans, to his heaviest undertaking, the 36,000 lines of the Fall of Princes, executed for Humphrey of Gloucester.
Didactics mingled with narrative we find in the saints’ legends of Bokenam, Bradshaw, Capgrave, in the Assembly of Gods, the Court of Sapience, the book of La Tour Landry printed by Caxton, and so on; and didactics were abundant unmixed, as in Cato, in Peter Idle’s Instructions to his son, in Ashby’s Activa Pollecia Principis, in Barclay’s Mirror of Good Manners, in the whole group of Regements and Secrees on the one hand, of books of nurture on the other. The purpose of Hawes and of Barclay, later, is equally tutorial. Skelton translated Diodorus Siculus, Barclay translated Sallust; but into his freer work each of these men brought an air of contemporary life which we do not find in Hawes. Far more is this the case with Skelton; and beyond him, outside the limits of “formal” verse, there appears a mass of loudmouthed roughly written satire and foolery in which he too has a hand, though keeping his hold on standard subjects. Between the two extremes, hybrid forms exist; a poem like “How a Lover Praiseth his Lady” attempts to use stereotyped material, but constantly betrays a freer tone and spirit. Interest in everyday and low-class character shows itself, although the lists of beggars and knaves and drunkards are as definitely lists as was the Fall of Princes; and as far back as Hoccleve and Bokenam, in our period, the individual was talking about himself at the same time that he was writing correct and lifeless matter for publication. But all along with the increase of bourgeois feeling and with the hybrids ran the persistent stereotype. The Temple of Glass, the Black Knight, the Flower and Leaf, the Assembly of Ladies, the Court of Love, the Isle of Ladies, La Belle Dame, the Cuckoo and Nightingale,— all court poems of the Chaucerian school, are except the last, of the standard court- narrative model, conforming to French tradition. Most of the court-lyric, such as the translations of Charles d’Orléans and the anonymous love-poems of Fairfax 16, also follows copy. Features of interest, even of beauty, are presented by many of these poems; the grace of the Cuckoo and Nightingale or of the Lover’s Mass, and the superiority of verse-flow in the Orléans translations as compared e.g. with Lydgate’s work, are very marked. When the share of aristocratic writers in literary production increases, with the growing power of Humanism, the courtly lyric takes on new tones. But Wyatt and Surrey have already in their English blood a quality which they retain in the presence of the new material, and separate from it; they can most sweetly and clearly sing.
. Neither in the narrative ballad nor in the form of pure song had lyric ever failed England. In the alehouse, the harvest field, the banqueting hall, the em- brasure where ladies plied their needles, there had always been the group of singers or the solo lutist. During the fifteenth century we become aware that the individual aristocrat is writing and singing his own poems, a custom derived
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 17
perhaps from Provence and France. The Earl of Warwick, the Earl of Suffolk, later Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Earl of Surrey, Henry VIII himself, all try their hands at composition. And we recognize also the power of Church music in England, not only what the Latin hymns must have meant for the writing of English religious verse, but what choral music meant for the carols, for the quality of pure song. In the reigns of the Lancastrians the early music of England was in its bloom. Little or nothing remains of the earliest English musical compositon; but the fifteenth century saw the development of what is known as “the second English school”, of which the most eminent master was John of Dunstable. It was the first great age of counterpoint; in solo singers and in composers England outdistanced France and Flanders. Henry V, with his more military spirit, seems to have favored instrumental music; but Henry VI’s taste was for vocal, especially for religious song. His choir was famous, and compositions by the king himself are still extant. Martin le Franc, writing his Champion de Dames in 1436-44, describes the envy of Continental musicians as they listened to the English at the Court of Burgundy and despaired of rivalling such melodies. In 1442 the Privy Council! ordered Nicholas Sturgeon to “go and choose six singers of England such as the messenger that is come from the Emperor will desire for to go to the Emperor.” As far back as the beginning of the century, a Frenchman had celebrated the musicians of England,? and for gen- erations she held her power.
But the beauty of song, whether on the lips of aristocrat, of cleric, or of the wandering harpist, is not paralleled in other fifteenth-century verse by a truly rhythmic sense. Words which the medieval Englishman linked to tune often seem to have been born in a tune; but the words which he employed to carry lesson or story, which he intended to reach the intellect, have frequently no kinship with rhythm.
Of the many difficult problems in fifteenth-century verse criticism, the most persistent, are the method of analysis to be adopted and the determination of a text to be analyzed. The uncertainty which still surrounds the latter question renders inconclusive all the results which any method can at present yield. No satisfactory argument can be based on a text such as Professor Skeat offers for Chaucer; and should we turn instead to the Canterbury Tales material offered by the Chaucer Society, we have but eight, of the many MSS, from which to gen- -eralize. Of Chaucer’s minor poems we have indeed all the texts, but no estimate has yet been formed of the different scribal personalities and their modes of in- terference with a copy. For Lydgate and other fifteenth-century writers our position is far worse; we have in many cases only a single published text of each poem, giving us even less basis from which to argue. Every statement here made is therefore only a suggestion.
Hitherto the method of analysis used on e.g. Lydgatian texts has been line- by-line. This method has perhaps some basis in the classical and the early Teu- tonic line-conception of verse, a conception which the establishment of rime has
* Proceedings of the Privy Council, ed. Nicolas, v :218. * Bibl. de l’Ecole des Chartes 62:716-19.
18 ENGLISH VERSE
necessarily changed ; but a stronger reason is the coercive power of the couplet- idea so marked in English. The writer who uses complex stanzas made up of unequal lines may earn from the critic a treatment stanza-by-stanza; but the man who writes in equal lines is assumed to have thought and worked line-by-line. One reason for the long popularity of the closed couplet was its adaptation to the metrical grasp of the average Englishman. He could see rime and rhythm in its small compactness, while its usual content of wit and wisdom was within his comprehension, and just enough above his power of expression to com-— mand his admiration. There was no uncomfortable tax on his knowledge, no “threat of loveliness” to chill him.
The line-by-line method will be used here only with limitations. Were it our sole mode of analysis, it would disguise the inadequacies of Chaucer’s followers by fencing their work and his into small spaces where his power of phrase- manoeuvre cannot be seen. The way in which he surpassed the couplet-form his disciples did not recognize, nor do we if we treat him solely by line-types. The short phrase following the long breath-sweep of two lines and more, the line with less than five heavy syllables followed by the line of extra weight, the compounding of a twenty-line paragraph out of a half-dozen different sorts of line-movement adroitly interwoven, the running-over of one rime followed by pause and emphasis on the next, and the story proceeding all the while with per- fect clarity and ease, its high points exactly met by the special stresses of the verse,—here is rooted the student’s delight in Chaucer’s line-management. Of course we seek in Chaucer nothing like the emotional contrasts of phrase-length as in Shelley. Shelley may write, in the Epipsychidion,—
an antelope
In the suspended impulse of its lightness 85 Were less ethereally light; the brightness
Of her divinest presence trembles through
Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew
Embodied in the windless heaven of June
Amid the splendor-winged stars, the Moon
Burns, inextinguishably beautiful.
But although there is here, as in Chaucer, the long breath-run followed by a short phrase, although there is a light swift line such as Chaucer could on occasion write, there are things impossible to Chaucer,—the iteration of long i-sounds standing out of narrow vowels in the opening sentence, and the slow close of the passage on lingering polysyllables, after the isolated emphatic word Burns, This management of vowel-color and of tempo, like the choice of simile and of epithet and the exalted passion of the poet, are too sophisticated, too subtle for Chaucer. We can find alliteration in Chaucer, but no such subtlety as Keats’
The dreary melody of bedded reeds, (Endymion I, 239)
with its long and short e’s and its half-submerged d’s. We can find skilful phrase-handling in Chaucer, but not such as Shelley’s. Nor do we expect it. Chaucer is a master of the larger speech-unit which his narrative key requires,
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 19
and no man working in his key has ever done better. Indeed, his immediate successors failed most conspicuously in that particular.
Lydgate is the striking example of this failure, just because Lydgate brought to a study of Chaucer the uneducated and timid mind moving line by line. He picked out from his master the kinds of line which might be written, and pro- ceeded to use them without any of Chaucer’s feeling for variety, for the pattern of the whole. He was by nature repetitive to excess, as his style shows, and the poverty of ideas which he joined to an unfortunate glibness resulted in an end- less and ill-organized stream of words whenever he was commanded to speak. The verse in which he arranges those words has no structural quality outside the line; it escapes analysis as a long series of huts connected by passages escapes being called architecture. We may apply to him the five types used by Professor Schick for the classification of his verses; but it must be with the proviso that such a treatment accords only with the mind of Lydgate, and in no wise with the mind of Chaucer, that it has no validity for real poetry. One of the many like- nesses between the fifteenth century and the eighteenth is the possibility of using on the verse of both periods the ruler five feet long. But for times of freer, larger feeling that ruler does not apply.
It has been said above that Chaucer understood the shift of weight from line to line,—a phrase which must be made clearer before we can proceed. Eng- lish speech throws its major stresses upon the root-element of substantives, ad- jectives, and verbs; the iambic pentameter line has in theory five such stresses or heavy elements and five light or less important syllables, arranged alternately. In practice, an exact following of this pattern is not demanded; not only may the fall of verse-stress upon secondary syllables reduce the amount of grammatical stress in the line, and the appearance of important monosyllables in unaccented position change the balance of the line, but in all good verse this variation of the ripple, this shift of weight within the line, is sought by the artist. As Coventry Patmore says, the vital thing in English verse is “the perpetual conflict between the law of verse and the freedom of the language; each is incessantly though insignificantly violated for the purpose of giving effect to the other.” Or, as Charlton M. Lewis has said, “the actual movement of the verse does not exactly correspond with the ideal rhythmical scheme deep down in our minds; it plays about—but never wholly forsakes it.” An outward sign of a triumph of language over verse is the frequent appearance of a “‘trochee” among iambs, even of a spondee, or double heavy syllable, should the movement of thought require it; and this latter will make the line heavier just as the use of two syntactically un- important words to make up a foot will reduce the total weight of the line. When Chaucer writes
But trewely to tellen atte laste,
he has but three grammatically important syllables in a five-beat line; the verse is definitely underweighted ; and this underweighting is well adapted to the merely connective function of the line.
Being a narrator by trade, Chaucer does not use the heavy line as often for a variant as he uses the light. The addition of stress to normal means, as we
20 ENGLISH VERSE
have noted, the presence in the text of pictorial or motor-words. The descrip-~ tive writer thus naturally makes more use of the full-weighted or the heavy line, while the forward-pressing narrator tends to reduce the stress-value of his total. Speaking a language in which the inflexional -e was still a separate element, Chaucer could conform his narrative to iambic rhythm, more simply than can the modern poet; and in a full-stressed line he moves with a lighter tread. He has, normally, a high percentage of regular iambic lines, about fifty per cent of his work in each case; and heavy lines are not common. Underweighted lines which he introduces into his pentameter are not necessarily those carrying a notion of speed, such as “Or breke it at a renning with his heed,” nor are they reduced in weight because of their small value in the narrative, like the line cited in our Jast paragraph above. They most often appear because there must be variety in any verse-flow, and because the lighter line is the natural variant for a story- teller. In this respect there is a noticeable difference between Chaucer and William Morris, for instance. Comparing two passages of similar function, the opening of the Squire’s Tale and the opening of the tale of Cupid and Psyche, from the Earthly Paradise, we shall find that Chaucer has thirty normal iambic lines to Morris’ eighteen, six heavy in one foot to Morris’ fourteen; and that while Morris has a dozen or so of verses showing interior balance or compensation, i.e. a heavy and a light foot in the same line, Chaucer seeks this variant not at all. The Victorian’s love of sense-appeal is reflected in his richer heavier rhythm. It may be objected that the two passages are not strictly parallel in content. But the characteristic difference between the two poets is that Chaucer opens a ro- mantic tale and sets his stage with fewer properties; Morris produces at once his color, his draperies, and his emotions. It is the nature of the two poets which differentiates their modes of beginning, both in imagery and in rhythm.
Every poet of artistic sensibility steers a little east or west of regularity. A course in the direction of reduced line-weights gives a less obtrusive result ; free use of the heavier line, or of the line with marked rhythmic divergence, challenges attention. If the words thus made conspicuous are important words, the variant is justified. When Chaucer puts into the four-beat movement of the Book of the Duchesse the line
Blew, bright, clere was the air,
he writes a headless line, he places the adjective bright in unstressed position, and he uses two strong pauses to throw his descriptive epithets into prominence. Thus he heightens his effect both by rhythmic flow, by conflict of rhythm and language, and by marked catches in the breath-lengths. Nor does he dull the emphasis by using such an eccentric combination repeatedly or without purpose. Eccentric lines may diverge from normal either in the grouping of their stressed syllables or in the total number of their syllables. The former variant is briefly mentioned above; as regards the latter, lines may vary by excess or by deficiency. If by excess, the line may have disyllabic or “feminine” rime, it may have an extra syllable at the opening (disyllabic upbeat), and it may have an extra syllable before the verse-pause, or “epic caesura.’’ With these variants, the five-beat line may run to twelve syllables; the extra syllable elsewhere than at
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 21
the line-opening (resolved arsis) is not proven for Chaucer. If the line varies not by excess but by deficiency of syllable, this happens either at the opening of the line or at the verse-pause, and results in either the “headless” or the “broken- backed” line. An unaccented syllable is lacking in such case. Students recognize the occurrence of the first of these line-forms in Chaucer, frequently in his four-beat work, less in his pentameter as time goes on. The headless line may occur in groups in the four-beat Hous of Fame, but the small number of such cases in the Canterbury Tales seem to serve a special purpose, to be used for cataloguing or for emphasis. As for the brokenbacked line, its sanction by Chaucer is still doubtful.
The four-beat work of Chaucer and that of his contemporary Gower differ markedly as regards these variants in syllable-count. Gower does not write head- less lines. The ten per cent of them in the Hous of Fame, book 1, the approxi- mately fourteen per cent of them in book 11, have no parallel in the Confessio Amantis. Gower also represses the natural lightenings and reversals of freely flowing speech; and the amount of rhythmic variety in his long poem is so rela- tively small that an effect of monotony results, an effect which closely cor- responds to the mental tone of the Confessio. But Lydgate shows in his work far more headless lines than Chaucer permitted in his pentameter; and he adds to his large number of lines short at their beginning an equal and some- times larger number of lines short an unaccented syllable at the verse-pause,— brokenbacked. For example :—
And mony a tre,mo then I can telle Black Knight 81 Theffect of which,was as ye shal here ibid. 217
As his basis of full pentameter lines is frequently below the fifty per cent usual in Chaucer, Lydgate has, instead of Gower’s excess of normal over variant, an excess of variant over normal. And while Gower’s substance and style are con- firmed by his rhythm, Lydgate’s are in discord with it; they have none of the qualities which can justify such persistent emphasis. Now, if the thing said does not warrant the use of forceful variants, if the attention is summoned sharply to words not worth special emphasis, the effect on the listener is irritating. Lyd- gate’s heavy demands on the rhythmic ear are not justified by his matter. These divergences, these headless and brokenbacked lines, also occur repeatedly and in close proximity, so that the reader has the threefold tax of an emphatic variant unsupported by a content deserving emphasis, and aggressively recurrent. The mechanical excess and the aesthetic or intellectual deficiency in Lydgate’s verse so react upon one another that the result is more than doubly displeasing. Beside Lydgate, Hoccleve leads the list of English Chaucerians. The person- ality of this partly pious, partly dissipated government clerk, who knew Chaucer and felt real affection for his master, this writer of begging-letters, railer at himself, translator, miracle-monger, wouldbe scamp, and wooden versifier, is far more interesting than that of Lydgate. The amount of Hoccleve’s work is small as compared with that of Lydgate, and it includes no such proportion of com- missioned verse. Alongside the decorous hack-translation of the De Regimine
be ENGLISH VERSE
Principum done for Henry V, alongside a number of religious poems and a righteously indignant tongue-lashing of the heretic Oldcastle, are not a few compositions definitely autobiographical. Hoccleve’s work is all stanzaic, in penta- meter, and quite different as regards line-management from that of Lydgate. Here, as with Lydgate, there is uncertainty about the text; but so far as we can now see, Hoccleve writes very few of the lines scanted half a foot which are so common in Lydgate. His metrical characteristic is, that while holding steadily to the full ten syllables, he is not sensitive to the correspondence of syllables with verse-stress. He can write :—
And with him hir seruant to the ship wente,—
and many another such line syllable-filled and rhythm-empty. He and Lydgate had each a code; but while Lydgate erects Chaucer’s variants into types and over-uses them, Hoccleve watches the number of his syllables and hears no rhythm. As Hoccleve’s EETS editor points out, he “thwarts the run of his verse” at every turn by the prosaic arrangement of his syllables. Lydgate, on the other hand, is quite willing to write lines of less than ten syllables; but having adopted such variant-forms, his repetitive tendency overworks them to the injury of his whole.
The tendencies of later pentameter-writers in the century were determined neither by Hoccleve nor by Lydgate. Even men showing Lydgate’s influence, like Metham, or Hawes or Cavendish in the sixteenth century, do not imitate his shortbreathed line-movement; and no one has a syllable-counting tendency. In most later cases there is no visible code on which verse is constructed. Perhaps because of the bewilderment caused by the loss of inflexional -e in pronunciation while it was still irregularly written, perhaps because of the cramping and inbreed- ing which weakened the intellectual fibre of the educated further with every dec- ade, the rhythmic sense of most English writers slid to the level of doggerel. In the Libel of English Policy, an earnest plea to government for “high tariff,” in the versified handbook of alchemy by George Ripley, in the romances of Love- lich, the awkward syllable-counting of Hoccleve and the awkward over-use of emphatic line-forms by Lydgate change to a reaching-after the rime-word without regard to the number or the placing of syllables in the line. This is doggerel; it becomes in the Libel a mere slither of words; and though there is less of a collapse of rhythm in Lovelich and in Hawes, their matter is so invertebrate that it disturbs the reader more than do the Libel’s purposeful, if clumsy lines.
The codeless weakness of such degeneracy and the obstinately uncomprehend- ing codes of Lydgate and Hoccleve are the more marked because of a few striking examples of rhythmic sensitiveness. Conspicuous among these is the translation of Palladius’ De re rustica executed for Humphrey of Gloucester by an unnamed protégé at much the same time when Lydgate was beginning his Fall of Princes translation for the duke. I have elsewhere! commented on the re- markable smoothness and accuracy of the existing texts of this translation, and pointed out that in its first 1800 lines there are no cases of clipped lines, almost
*Modern Philology XXIII, 148.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION ' 23
no error in the scribe’s treatment of inflexional -e, and every sign of a competent user of language and rhythm. The matter of the poem is unpoetical enough, with its instructions as to bee-keeping, poultry-management, the choice of soils, the times of planting, etc.; but there is no monotony and no clumsiness in the handling of the verse. The prologue and the connectives between books have much about Gloucester, and display adroit manipulation of rhetorical devices, as the passages included in this anthology will show. And there is clever workman- ship in the stanza-variations of the Lover’s Mass. When these pieces of work were done, and when the anonymous translations of Charles d’Orléans were executed, or earlier in the Boethius of Walton, some men were still sensitive to . the relation between language and verse. But throughout the period, the incompe- tents are in the majority ; and the further we go from Chaucer the feebler the gen- eral sense of rhythm. The incapacity of Hawes, the stiffness of Barclay, the mix- ture of lowclass slapstick and upperclass stereotype in Skelton, give place to the doggerel of Morley, the puerility of Nevill, and the curious double movement of Wyatt and of Surrey. Neither of these first masters of the sonnet walks very securely in the long line. Wyatt is much given to the wrenching of accent for rhythm’s sake, a preciosity we can see in Walter’s Guiscard and Sigismonda be- fore him and in Swinburne or Rossetti after him; and Surrey’s blank verse is tentative. But both they and Skelton can sing with perfect ease and sweetness. When they sing, they turn from older and from newer formal] line-groupings and from pentameter, to shorter verses not equal in length; they find their full release by a variant other than the rhythmic, as the writer of the Lover’s Mass had found it.
But generally throughout the Transition the stereotype of form is as heavy as is that of style and subject. It was de rigueur to write pentameter, and espe- cially to write it in rime royal. The amount of seven-line stanza in the period is enormous, from Walton’s translation of Boethius (part only) through Lyd- gate’s Fall of Princes and Ripley’s Compend of Alchemy to Hawes’ Pastime of Pleasure and to Cavendish and Sackville. The romances had their own inherited strophes; but the religious, the didactic, and the occasional verse of the Transi- tion preferred the seven-line stanza. The couplet, either four-beat or five-beat, was not apparently favored even by Chaucer’s immediate followers to any such extent as was rime royal. How far this preference was the poets’ own is uncertain. For although the great bulk of the Fall of Princes, the almost 6,000 lines of the Life of Our Lady, and the 3,700 lines of St. Edmund, raise the count of Lydgate’s seven-line stanzas high over that of his eights, these are com- missioned works, the Fall of Princes and the Palladius-translation both done to Gloucester’s order at the same time in the same strophe-form. And Lydgate’s eight-line stanza, constructed as a double quatrain, carries a large number of short poems, often religious, which may have been put into that form by his own choice. Hoccleve also uses the eight-line (and nine-line) stanza in his oc- casional poems, where he speaks more independently than in the Regement of Princes or in his narrative verse. But the later writers of the century preferred rime royal. Perhaps the taste of earlier patrons, imposed on the translations
24 ENGLISH VERSE
which they ordered, took effect on subsequent versifiers; certainly both Cavendish and Sackville had the Fall of Princes in mind when writing their seven-line stanzas.
Occasionally there is variation of form within the one work. Lydgate’s Temple of Glass uses five-beat couplets and stanzas; Hawes changes from rime royal to couplet when he introduces the Godfrey Gobelive episodes into his Pas- time; Barclay’s insertion of a stanzaic Complaint into his pentameter-couplet Fourth Eclogue doubtless seemed to him very effective. But the narrow range of this variation, as compared with Chaucer in the Anelida, or with the Lover’s Mass, or with Skelton in his Garland of Laurel, shows the timidity of the English Transition code. When the Humanistic change came it came at first in form more than in subject or in style; the sonnet and blank verse are more definitely novelties in form than was Barclay’s introduction of the eclogue, and were ad- dressed to a public more in need of new verse-moulds than was the public which enjoyed Skelton’s tumbling verse. A road having been broken in one direction, the bourgeois subjects which were struggling into notice could push further for- ward. Sometimes they stumbled in the couplet, sometimes in the stanza, as either the political doggerel against Suffolk or the Hye Way to the Spyttelhous may show. And the disappearance of fourteenth-century stanzas derived from jongleur or from Latin hymns, of the complexities of strophe as in the Miracle Plays, is as marked as is the sixteenth-century appearance of humanistic forms and development of song.
Outside the stanza and couplet there is little verse-form in the Transition upon which to comment. Skeat assigns the partly terza rima Complaint to his Lady to Chaucer ; the Anelida contains a rhetorical exercise in medial rime and in echo which we find again in the Lover’s Mass and in Palladius; Skelton plays with short lines; and there are a few roundels in the period, from that at the close of the Parlement of Foules to those translated from Orléans. Some undated manuscripts contain free lyric verse which, if of the mid-sixteenth cen- tury, arrives when expected, and if of the fifteenth, is still more interesting. The Cambridge University codex Ff i, 6 is such a volume. But in general, there is less variety of verse-form, as of verse-tone, in the English post-Chaucerian period than in the Scottish.
The difference in social growth between England and Scotland in the fif- teenth century may in part account for the fact that Chaucer’s Scottish followers do not by any means suffer the rhythmic and intellectual disorder so marked in the Southern writers. English Chaucerians did over again, and botched, a work already done to admiration; but the master’s influence was really felt by Scotsmen. When the spirit of Scottish nationality asserted itself, in the four- teenth century, the Bruce of John Barbour gave it enthusiastic expression, and the tide of national poetry began to rise. It continued throughout the fifteenth century, in the popular ballads and in the popular epic of Blind Harry’s Wallace. Alongside this stream of genuine national expression, borne on the same tide of rising vitality, runs the more intellectual and formal poetry of King James the First, of Robert Henryson, of William Dunbar, and of Gavin Douglas, to alJ
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 25
of whom, except perhaps to Dunbar, Chaucer is master and model. This more lettered aspect of the Scottish florescence shows itself first in King James (died 1437), and then in Henryson, the “Schoolmaster of Dunfermline,” who died about 1506. In them and in Dunbar, who died in 1520, we find, looking at the technical side alone, a control of line and of stanza, a definiteness of purpose, and an assured ease of movement, which neither Lydgate nor Hoccleve ever at- tained. King James’s one poem, the Kingis Quair, is somewhat hampered by its allegorical machinery, but James, like Henryson, has his verse under control. Henryson, though claiming for his Fables a “morale sweit sentence” which he considers it the duty of the poet to provide, keeps his moral from encroach- ing on his narrative,—a restraint impossible to Lydgate; and in his Testament of Cresseid he goes far from the shrewd and simple humor of the Fables to strike a note of passionate pity loftier than anything written by his more versatile and vigorous compatriot Dunbar, whom criticism generally terms the greatest of the group. Dunbar, rich in a begging friar’s experience of life, is a professional poet of the stock of Skelton and the tribe of Rabelais. He tried his hand at many meters and managed all easily; he can praise the Virgin, abuse his fel- lowpoets, lash the vices of the time, and shudder at death, with equal fluency and force. And in quieter moods he can sound a note of solemn dignity in the Lament for the Makaris, and write the neat allegorical compliment of the Thrissill and the Rois. But his widemouthed boisterous vigor, the graceful sentiment of King James, and the quiet amused penetration of Henryson, all take something of their form and pressure from Chaucer; and all these poets are competent workmen.
Gavin Douglas, bishop of Dunkeld (died ca.1522), is a different personality. If Dunbar is akin to Skelton, Douglas is akin to Lydgate and to Hawes, though a much larger man than they. Certain of the conventions obeyed by them he has; his Palice of Honour is as heavily allegorical as the Court of Sapience or the Flower and Leaf; and in much of his work there is a straining for “‘aureat language” which, as in Hawes, speaks the rhetorician rather than the poet. This connects Douglas with such Frenchmen as St. Gelais and Molinet; indeed, his likeness to Octovien de St. Gelais, also bishop, rhetorician, and translator of Virgil, is marked. But wholly a pedant Douglas was not. The interesting escapes of personal expression and of nature-feeling in his prologues to the Aeneid, and his harsh but not systematically harsh treatment of the five-beat line, give him advantage over Lydgate, even over the nature-bits of the Troy Book. According to Professor Saintsbury, Douglas makes some use of the brokenbacked line; but until the relation of his verse to St. Gelais’ Aeneid-translation, made in French pentameter couplet, can be worked out, there can be no full discussion of the technique of Douglas.
Verse-modeling and style develop parallel in all these writers. With the establishment of rime in late Latin and in the West European languages, the medieval system of “colores rhetorici” received additional floriations. To the accepted modes of literary amplification, to the “digressio,” “descriptio,” and “ex- clamatio” which we see used e.g. in Chaucer’s more academic narratives, to the management of interpretation, of comparisons, and of word-play, there were added
26 ENGLISH VERSE
the effects obtainable by rime-combination. All varieties of stanza, all possi- bilities of medial rime, echo, interlace, etc., were worked by the French poet- rhetoricians, but were less favored in England. There the feeling for rime as a mode of stress might lead to its over-use by restless-minded men, but with the more sluggish-minded it led to the phrase-tag. The difference in its handling marks the difference between Skelton and Lydgate, just as its use now for empha- sis, now in formula, now partially blurred by enjambement, marks the Chaucerian control of technique. A study of rime in Chaucer or in Lydgate is scarcely begun when its purity or impurity has been noted; the subjugation of rime to poetic purpose is the root of the matter, with its various aspects of phrase lengthened over the rime, phrase-formula used for rime’s sake, shift of emphasis from rime-word to mid-line and back, etc. The second of these subjects, so far as Chaucer and Lygate are concerned, is discussed in the introductory essay on Lydgate here; but the two other aspects mentioned require far more comment than this book can give.
So with the question of vocabulary and word-usage in the Transition; the rigor mortis which held rhythm and held narrative-power pressed heavily on the treatment of the word. Something of this may be ascribed to the great amount of commanded translation in the period; but in passing the responsibility from poet to patron we do not remove it from the group. The late medieval versifier or reader had no notion of the metaphors latent but vital in words, of the power resident in the “fringe” of a verb or adjective and evocable by slightly shifting the angle of vision. There is a strong etymological interest in words, and there is abundance of abstract terminology new in English; but there is little or no development in meaning. Chaucer’s “smoky rain,’ Lydgate’s “restless stone” of Sisyphus, are rarities in Early English. Although Chaucer’s senses were far more alert, his perceptual power far higher than those of his English followers, he is no specialist in word or phrase. The characteristic action which he sees so truly he presents in lines or in brief scenes. Concentration is not a quality of the Middle Ages. And as the Middle Ages yielded to the impact of Humanism, two general tendencies become marked in the use of words by English writers. There is the riotous extravagance of Skelton, in whose texts we find the inexplicable word as well as the inexplicable local allusion; such a word is obviously either a bit of showman’s lingo or a boisterous coinage on Skelton’s part. In Hawes and Nevill is the other tendency. Their pedantry strives for “aureat language’; Hawes loads his verse with terms like depure, facundious, solacious, oblocucioun, pulchritude, etc.; but both he and Nevill also use words, especially verbs, so vaguely and insecurely that we find no mean- ing in them.1. We often do not know what Hawes intends to say by his use of exemplify or inspect or ratify; and his failure to pass on meaning is doubtless due to his own vagueness on the point. St. Gelais and the later rhétoriqueurs in France, Lyly or the seventeenth-century Latinists in England, show the same tendency, which is less a matter of chronology than of social and educational maladjustments. This attitude to language Hawes does not derive from his “master Lydgate”; Lydgate muddles his syntax badly, and employs the dead
See note on the Pastime of Pleasure, line 78.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION Ze
phrase for rime, but he rarely wanders from the essential meaning of a Latin word. His very large contribution to the English vocabulary? does not deepen or intensify language; it has no procreative power. He does not even carry it easily, as Hoccleve had carried his limited human common-sense vocabulary ; but he does provide English with a mass of useful abstract terms which he manages with accuracy, but which the pedants of the later Transition blurred.
Chaucer attained his rhythmical and critical poise in an imperfectly devel- oped and ill-adjusted age. He could not bequeath it. The power to control material can be received only by those mentally capable of receiving it; and the resettlement of the stereotype on English society just after his death, the increas- ing lack of educational opportunity of the early fifteenth century in England, smothered the growth of any such mentality. Pattern can be a relentless thing; if it encroaches on the imaginative field, the imagination either submits, or escapes only to extravagance and disordered unsymmetry. Not merely in Transitional rhythmic work and Transitional use of the formula or of the rhetorical code, does this appear, but in Transitional narrative.
At the opening of the fifteenth century the English narrator had before him as narrative-types the fabliau, the saint’s legend, the allegory, and the romance. The first was frankly bourgeois, as the second was religious; both were small- scale. Allegory and romance are oftenest large-scale narratives, and the former has at its best a sense of causality working in human affairs which makes it an important factor in the development of structural feeling. Both it and the romance are also of moment in narrative-shaping because of their mass, because the mere handling of a great quantity of material urges a workman towards structure.
For several of these story-forms the work of Chaucer offered examples. He had brought the fabliau, especially, to a high state of finish as regards econ- omy, dexterity, and single-figure portrayal; but in the eyes of his followers such tales were permissible only because their tellers were at the moment specially privileged; the presentation of such material would not only be impossible to the hand of Hoccleve or of Lydgate, but to their code. The “tragedy,” as in the Monk’s tale, or the saint’s legend, as in those of Prioress and Second Nun, seemed, however, a very fit subject to the Transition workman, who probably saw no difference in the sincerity of Chaucer’s attitude to the one and the other.
The saint’s legend ran out, as a productive vein, by the close of the fifteenth century. It was hampered by its religious character. Its protagonist possessed no human failings, and the various antagonists no redeeming features; the two great opportunities of narrative, the dilemma and the error, were rarely permitted in the legend. Suspense, except in an elementary repetitive form, and complica- tion, are absent. Visualization is infrequent; the stage is rarely set; and dia- logue, used mainly for conversion or for miracle-working, shows no conflict of motive within the individual. Capgrave’s St. Katherine endeavors to explain action and prepare for event; and in the lengthy discourses of the princess and her ministers regarding her marriage there is evident the author’s sober legal
* See the Introd. to Lydgate, pp. 87 ff. below.
28 ENGLISH VERSE
pleasure in weighing and stating a case. There is spirit in the speeches with which the proposals of the steward are rejected, in Bradshaw’s St. Werburge; but generally the legends lack the mundane vigor of utterance which had been pres- ent in the miracle-plays, and are lacking also in the dignity and the pathos which their circumstances permit. Nor does management of detail show a strong hand. Capgrave sometimes notes facial expression, or uses a fortunate homely simile; and in Bokenam there is another kind of leaning towards actuality in the author’s frank and even playful comment. But in the most prolific of all the legend-writers of the period, John Lydgate, the personal or pictorial is at the minimum, and the weak repetitive method is burdened by masses of didactic di- gression in which the narrative current almost disappears. Fifteenth-century legend-writers brought narrative no nearer to the object of study. So far as plot was concerned, the workmen striving after magnitude sought it on the method of piling like details atop of one another; the notion of bringing the figure closer to the eye, instead of increasing the size of the canvas, is outside the comprehension of most medieval narrators. Was a narrative to be more im- pressive or more heroic, it had more tortures or more combats added to it. But still more did the failure of the legend to quicken human feeling inhere in the rigidity of its conception of human character. Its attempt to raise the pitch of life was unsuccessful, while that of romance succeeded, because of its tenuous contact with reality; its structure was often feebly repetitive; and the greatest study in life, personality, could receive no furtherance from its refusal to see aught but white and black.
The two great dangers of English literary expression, formlessness and didacticism, were thus encouraged by legend-writing; and they were not com- bated by another medieval narrative type, the allegory. Allegory resembles the legend, and differs from fabliau and romance, in the rigidity of its material and in its attempt to instruct. There is little or nothing in allegory of the amused bourgeois temper which appears in the fable or the fabliau, and rarely an interest in humanity. Some advance there is over the saints’ legends in the larger plan and in the insistence upon causality; to this extent the hand of narrative is strengthened, although clumsily and impersonally. The type is Eastern in its origin and Christian in its development; in Christian literatures it is a hybrid between the narrative and the homily. It became weak or restricted in the Tran- sition; and we may query if this were not in a measure due to the new method of treating the Biblical text, if the new exegesis did not affect the popularity of the method. The necessity for an interpretation of Biblical language other than the literal or surface had been maintained especially by the great Church father Origen, followed by the greater St. Augustine in the fourth century. Such Biblical exegesis, starting from belief in verbal inspiration and determined to press the obstinate letter into harmony with Christian desire, dominated the Middle Ages, and its method extended to creative narrative. It felt in the word or in the narrative not those connotations for senses and for memory, not those recognitions of human experience, which had been pagan and which were over- borne by the Christian Church, but a set of moral and ethical precepts. The en-
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 29
cyclopedists, like Isidor or Fulgentius, give allegoric etymologies for terms and names; the treatment of pagan poets such as Virgil, Ovid, and Homer, is one of the curiosities of criticism; and the impulse goes over also into the creative field. Churchmen like Alanus de Insulis and Martianus Capella composed ex- tensive allegorical narrative, peopled by personified abstractions; Dante himself lives in spite of, not because of, the method with which he is saturated; Petrarch, and even the bourgeois Boccaccio, viewed poetry, with Dante, as “concealing truth under the beauteous veil of the fable.’ Lydgate and Hawes accept this as the function of poetry; for them fable, or story, is a “covert” for truth, is a “cloak- ing colour.”
Hawes, however, implies, and later writers confirm, a growing indifference to allegorical narrative on the part of the uncultivated public. He himself, in his Pastime of Pleasure, mixes his allegory with romantic combat and amour, with pseudo-learning, and with the farcical episode of Godfrey Gobelive,—per- haps to assure himself of a hearing with his royal patrons. In the bourgeois public, with its taste for the actual, loss of popularity for the allegory was bound to come; while from the best-educated, for another reason, there also came a limiting of the scope of allegory. The Augustinian doctrine of verbal inspiration, with its consequent desire to wrench and press the word, yielded, so far as the strongest minds were concerned, to the doctrine of historic inter- pretation held by St. Jerome, and championed in the early days of Humanism by Tyndale, by Colet, and by Erasmus.
Nevertheless, the tendency to personification, the interest in a double mean- ing or a concealment, were not eradicated by the Renaissance. Under disguise of chevalier or of censor the allegorical method persisted; Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, use the one cloak, Skelton, Dryden, Swift, the other. Pure didactic allegory had its last great treatment in Bunyan and in Comus, but the method is not dead, nor will it die. As Lipprhann has said, the will to find an implied meaning beneath an obvious is “the deepest of all stereotypes.” Our class- shift today has brought not only popular interest in riddle and puzzle, but in Shaw, in Barrie, in Capek. And although we have nominally accepted the “higher criticism,’ in thousands of pulpits the method of allegory lives on defiant.
Rigid itself, allegory links readily with those devices for expression which are rigid. The largest form in which it moves is the Pilgrimage or Quest; smaller and more static forms are the Procession or ‘“Defile,” and the Parlia- ment. The Nuptials and Battles of the more pompous Latin were never popu- lar in France or in England, although the “estrif,” as a sort of midway-type be- tween the contest and the Parliament, was favored in legally-minded France and Provence. The Pilgrimage-motive probably owed some of its popularity to its connection with reality, with that religious or chivalric taking of the road which meant so much to the medieval mind, and which, as a traveling toward the unknown, will always have fascination for humanity. These two could be forced into combination, as in the Anticlaudianus of Alanus, in Chaucer’s Hous of Fame, in Christine de Pisan’s Chemin de long Estude. And there was in
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them some chance for character-interplay, for episode, which the Procession had not. The mere line of figures “passing a given point,” and all guided by a common feeling, as in Boccaccio’s De Casibus or the Dance Macabre or the Ship of Fools, meets allegory only in so far as it uses personification, like Petrarch’s Trionfi. It was such a list, when real persons were summoned, as by Cavendish or by Sackville, that contributed solid material to the Tudor drama; and from a list of actual people, be it of Chaucer’s Prologue, or of the Ship of Fools, or of the seventeenth-century “characters,” or of Henley’s Hospital Sketches, or of the Spoon River Anthology, interest never dies out.
It was this intrusion of the real person, whether coming from past history or from contemporary life, into narrative, which most surely undermined the credit of Personification, as applied to abstractions or to qualities. After a long period of attempt to modify life, men began more correctly to report it; and any increase of human perception is in the line of human development. Conduct in narrative began to be determined not by precept but by human prob- ability or by recorded fact; that is, it underwent just the same change that had been made in Biblical interpretation. The Tudor dramatic narrative, when tragic, insisted on that Causality which allegory had helped it to realize; and it attempted something which neither fabliau nor satire ever had, but which alle- gory and romance consciously sought,—a raising of the pitch of life.
Such a raising of life above the everyday was theoretically the business of romance as well as of allegory; but many romances, both English and French, are nearly as conventional in their central figures as if they were allegories. The hero is really Courage or Loyalty or Love, whatever his appellation. It is the event which is “romantic,” the succession of ordeals to which the hero is sub- jected. In the degenerate romances the canvas is overloaded with such ordeals, with perils, deceptions, combats, even as the saint’s legend was overloaded with tortures or miracles. In both, the repetitive method, the lack of purpose and of humanity, drive the type to exhaustion. But to this summary generalization there are three great West European exceptions,—Chrétien de Troyes in the twelfth century, Jean de Meun in the thirteenth, and Sir Thomas Malory in the late fifteenth century.
The work of de Meun, despite its allegorical disguise and romantic plan, belongs rather among satires than among romances; this was clearly perceived by Christine de Pisan and her group, and by an indignant Church. Chaucer rec- ognized his intellectual kinsman, and was as well able as de Meun to use the double method, as well able as the Cock of his own Nun’s Priest. But the fif- teenth and early sixteenth centuries knew little or nothing of innuendo in satire; they used not the rapier but the bludgeon for criticism. The popularity of de Meun waned as the popularity of romantic allegory waned, not because of impa- tience with de Meun’s real intention, but because men failed to see that inten- tion through the outmoded stereotype.
Chrétien and Malory approach romantic material very differently from de Meun, and each possesses a characteristic not usually displayed in the romance- type. Malory has to a remarkable extent that sense of causality working in
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 31
human experience which is to appear more powerfully in Shakespearian tragedy. And Chrétien, while handling romantic material, does it on occasion in a spirit as bourgeois as Chaucer’s own, with as shrewdly amused a sense of human pre’ences and inconsistencies. Neither of these great qualities, the bourgeois understanding of average human nature or the tragic sense of the ills of life as self-caused, was possessed by the fifteenth century generally; but in Chaucer’s age the former was there in full and the latter in an undeveloped form. Both, for instance, are in Boccaccio, in his Decameron and in his De Casibus.
Knowledge of Chrétien on Chaucer’s part has not been demonstrated; but no student of literature can read the dialogues between Troilus and Pandarus without turning again to Chrétien’s Yvain and pondering the conversations be- tween the hesitating widow and her sprightly maid. Nor can a student refrain from drawing the spiritual comparison, whether contact between the two writers be proved or not. For if a nation’s political and social conditions are of any effect upon her writers, then similarities in those respects between two Occidental countries may produce similar results without direct borrowing. Let a narrative outline come into the hands of two keen observers of human nature, each living in a period of strong political vitality, of rising bourgeois aspirations, and of a more clearly personal view of woman than heretofore, and those writers’ handling of a human situation may well be similar. Chaucer may not have known the Decameron, he may not have read Chrétien; but he lived in a fer- ment of social conditions very like that around the Italian and the Frenchman, and towards that ferment his attitude was, as theirs, the ironic smile of the observer.
The mass of English romances is of the fourteenth century. Much of it came from France by translation, and to the student of narrative the handling of the French original by the English workman is especially interesting. The principal romances of the late Middle*Ages which allow us to compare the ex- isting French with the existing English are Partonopeus de Blois, William of Palerne, the Launfal stories, Li Biaus Desconus, and Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain—in English as Ywain and Gawain. The treatment of these stories by English translators varies from William of Palerne, which is a free paraphrase, to a somewhat close rendering as in Partonope of Blois. Of course, any medieval adapter felt himself at liberty to expand or alter plot; it is the English treatment of character, of background, which particularly interests us.
It often happens, in the better romances, that real traits of character ap- pear. The romance is not so rigid as the saint’s legend; its protagonist may make mistakes, and may even be depicted in a ridiculous situation, as in Par- tonope of Blois and in Li Biaus Desconus. The background was often ample, and with many moving figures; though the effect might be that of the shallow crowding of tapestry, though ‘“‘as in a faded tapestry, the brilliance of the dresses might outlast the flesh-color,” yet the eye of the romancer could and did move frcm one focus to another.
The romance had a freer hand than the legend to develop not only character but structure ; its manoeuvring-ground was larger than that of the fable or fabliau,
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giving room not only for the delineation of character by dialogue but for antici- pation, surprise, suspense, retard, for the management of transition. Chaucer’s strength had lain in the single scene, the Friar entering the cottage of the sick churl, the conversation between the Cock and the Fox; and in some of the ro- mances we can find larger-scale character-management. In Chrétien’s Yvain, for example, the hero is concealed by a pitying waiting-maid in the castle of a seigneur whom he has pursued and slain on the castle’s threshold, only to be trapped by the fall of the portcullis behind him. From an upper window Yvain watches the obsequies of the seigneur, and falls deeply in love with the widow. He must and will wed her ; and the waiting woman sets about the task of persuading her mistress. The scenes in which this is accomplished, the picture of the widow’s abating anger and growing coquetry, and of the embarrassed first meeting of the two lovers, are of extraordinary interest to students of narrative. This transfer of interest from the physical combat or the intellectual disputation to the conflict of human emotions is Chrétien’s principal service to storytelling. He is not alone in his occupation with it; many biblical narratives and much of Ovid before him, Boccaccio’s Filostrato and the sonnets of Petrarch after him, focussed attention upon the ebb and flow of feeling. But where Chrétien, like Boccaccio, excelled, was in his sense of time, his recognition of the need to make the change of emo- tional front gradual, of avoiding the leap from one narrative position to another. Both he and Renaud, the author of Li Biaus Desconus, were aware of the effec- tiveness of hesitation. Renaud represents his hero as sitting on the side of his bed and debating whether or not he shall go to his lady’s room; he says :—
Trai-je, ou ci remanrai?
Ma dame le m’a desfendu, Et par sanblant ai je veu Ele veut bien que je i aille.
At last he ventures. But the lady is a fairy, and as he is about to cross her thresh- old, a spell falls on him; he finds himself hanging in the air over a raging torrent. He shouts for help; but when the servants rush in with torches, the torrent dis- appears, and he seems the victim of a nightmare, to his great chagrin. Were this magical episode presented without the hero’s musing, we should treat it as mere fantasy ; but the stamp of reality is given it by the preceding very human hesitation and by the comedy-discovery. One of the few noteworthy structural or psycho- logical moments in Lydgate’s mass of narrative, we may note, is the study, in the Fall of Princes i: 4943 ff., of Althea’s hesitation over the fatal brand. Here the monk turns aside from his usual source, where the matter is dealt with in one sentence, to follow Ovid’s study of the mother’s contending feelings; and inade- quate though the English be, the choice of technique is a point in Lydgate’s favor.
Another noteworthy feature of the better romances is the attention to ad- ministrative (say) as well as to psychological transition. In the two French ro- mances just mentioned there is obvious care in the fitting of joints. And in Eger and Grine, an English story of which no French parallel is known, the knight Grine passes a lady’s castle on his way to avenge his comrade Eger; she implores him to abandon the adventure, but he is obdurate and goes on. On his
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 33
return, successful, he knocks on the door of the room where the lady is sitting in anxiety for him; and her waitingwoman, opening it cries out, ‘““O madam, now is come that knight That went hence when the day was bright.” The inferior romances would have jumped this detail, would have seen the story intermittently, would have recorded merely that the knight returned and that the lady was re- joiced. It is in this spacing-out and continued visualization of story between major events that mastery of structure is most needed. A lyrical or emotional writer may depict situation with power, but the great narrative writer must possess also the ability to get from situation to situation without loss of power. Immature or degenerate narrative betrays its weakness in lack of transitional management quite as much as in failure at the emotional nodus. Even in a man so close to Shakespeare as was Marlowe the difficulty of making transitions is evident; the poet who wrote the death-scene of Edward II wrote also the clumsy shift of the king from one favorite to another, in the same play. This power is at bottom the power of continuing to visualize while the figures move.
With such visualizing power goes often a clear view of the background. In Li Biaus Desconus is a feeling for light and darkness comparable to that of Mrs. Radcliffe or of Coleridge, to scenes in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. When the knight sits on his charger in the enchanted castle of the thousand windows and the thousand lights, with the thousand musicians clashing their instruments at him in one moment, and the whole brilliant scene plunged into utter darkness and silence at the next, the fantastic scene is made convincing to us by our own sense of the threat of darkness as a concealer. Renaud also understood, as Mrs. Radcliffe understood and as Hawthorne or Stevenson understood, the alarming and puzzling effect of sound without accompanying sight. The cries from the distance in the wood, which cause the Bel Inconnu to hurry to the rescue, throw his train into terror. Renaud never fails, either, to note the lighting of his scene; and this imparts reality even to the fantastic, as we have said. The coming-in of candles or torches is always mentioned by him, as it is in the Merchant of Venice; and moonlight is not omitted from his descriptions.
It is sensitiveness in the writer which brings the background into the story ; it is sensitiveness which works against the earlier medieval “contempt of interval,” to borrow a phrase from Leigh Hunt. And it is a failure of sensitiveness, an oppression by the stereotype, which deprives Transition narrators of the power to see and to develop motives, to see behind their characters, and even to see those characters distinctly, whether in life or in another man’s pages. The Transi- tion writer saw a list of personages, but saw not the method of portrayal; he saw a sumptuous array of trappings, for instance in the Knight’s Tale, and be- lieved, like the youthful Keats gazing into the clouds, that high romance was em- bodied in those symbols. Such poems as the Flower and the Leaf, the Assembly of Ladies, the Belle Dame sans Merci (translated), are episodes rather than nar- ratives, and are handled like tapestry. The garden, the bridge, the pavilion, the mounted knight, the coiffed and jewelled ladies, the stiffly marshalled or conven- tionally dancing courtiers, are all seen in the same focus. But even when the foreground is more fully treated, as in the Churl and the Bird or the much longer
34 ENGLISH VERSE
Troy Book, there is small gain in character-presentation. Nearest reality is the Medea of the Troy Book, a creature whom no ineptitude can wither or stale; but both there and in the Brunhilde of the Fall of Princes we must reckon with an earlier source. And we observe that when Lydgate goes outside courtly models for his material, as in the prologue to Thebes, in his Fables, in his Mumming at Hertford, we find no release of ability to draw character, not so much as in the clumsy prologue to the tale of Beryn. Nor do we find it in Hawes, when he shifts from his pedantic-romantic plot to introduce Godfrey Gobelive. And when the bourgeois spirit gets expression in character-portrayal, it has no better vision; it changes material but hardly method. Its list is of rapscallions instead of the illustrious unfortunate, the Hye Way to the Spyttelhous instead of the Fall of Princes ; but the list remains, and the lack of vision remains. The latter comes, however, from a different source, from the insensitiveness of ignorance instead of from the insensitiveness caused by a paralyzing stereotype. When the ignorance is remedied, vision is attained; a sympathy for the human being, a consciousness of his surrounding life, are felt and expressed, and not till then. There is no more sense of snow and wind in the Hye Way to the Spyttelhous than there is of salt air in the Ship of Fools, and no more intention of recognizing it. Lydgate’s rain- storms and sunrises in the Troy Book (for which we do not know his original) © and Douglas’ prefaces to the separate books of his Aeneid-translation are the best example in formal Transition verse of a natural background to narrative; but a mere touch during the course of the story, such as Nevill’s unexpected picture of evening or Henryson’s opening of the Testament of Cresseid, is of more value than set pieces.
But in the very midst of the Transition muddling of structure and blurring of vision, the Transition’s blindness to the method of Chrétien or of Renaud or of Chaucer, a greater than Henryson, in England, laid his hand upon the already stiffened mass of romantic narrative, and raised the Arthurian story to permanent life. Malory’s imagination was of far larger calibre than that possessed by Henryson; and to his sense-perception, his power of seeing, hearing, and feeling his personages, the way in which his eye holds the picture while his figures move, Malory adds a strong sense of structure. Perhaps the huge com- pilations of the latter Middle Ages brought gain to narrative in the sense of Causality which was pressed out of event by the sheer weight of material. Malory’s greatest service to English narrative is here, a greater even than his character-portrayal, than his prose. He bound the Arthurian stories together by a sense for causality, for the unescapable consequences of human conduct ; through the juxtaposed mass of separate narratives he drew the twisted thread of the three great Loyalties, to sovereign, to the beloved lady, to God; and by the shat- tering of the Round Table he showed that no man held those three in equal reverence, that no man served the Ideal, that punishment for such failure came here upon earth.
Malory works toward tragedy, as Henryson toward comedy. The actual drama of the period gains now an inch here, now an inch there, as it struggles with allegory, with biblical fact, with history. From each of its sources, ex-
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 35
cept perhaps from the saint’s legend, it received some advantage; allegory gave training in plot, the Bible-story stimulated to character-portrayal ; and when the actual historical personage appeared among the abstractions of the Morality, the step to the chronicle-play was short. But in the earlier plays of the great period which succeeded, power over character and over scene is still much more evident than power over structure; even of Marlowe this is true. The lesson of structure was slowly learned by England; not until the long period of externalized morality was past, and the moral struggle restored to its natural arena, the human heart and our present life, could the growth of drama or of narrative proceed. All through the Transition, the courtly maker and the cleric were controlled by the stereotypes of their class.
That those stereotypes held so firm was due to the limitation of education and to the power of patronage. Their dominance in verse, especially, followed from the theory that the poet must write with a moral purpose, must use the cloak of fable in order to teach. The prose workman, not so restricted, might be sup- posed to move more freely; yet this freedom was not sought. From the argu- mentation of Wyclif and from the Boethius-translation of Chaucer down to Lord Berners’ translation of Froissart, the major prose works are the encyclo- pedias of Trevisa, the travels of “Mandeville,” the treatises of Pecock and of Fortescue, the translated romances and original prefaces of Caxton, and the Arthurian compilation of Malory. Briefer things, themselves longer than Cax- ton’s prefaces, also exist, of which one of the most interesting is the Serpent of Division, presumably by Lydgate, with which may be compared the addition to the Brut, or prose chronicle of England, ascribed to him; or Bokenam’s Mappula Anglie, the Paston correspondence, the Gesta Romanorum, the Master of Game, etc. The proportion of narrative is small, and of independently-handled narra- tive even smaller.
What strikes us in most of these men is the freer stronger use of language and the partial release both of the mind and of the senses, as compared with con- temporary work in verse. Much less, too, is heard of a moral purpose,—a fact perhaps allied; and we constantly feel, even with the translator Trevisa at the opening of the century, that a personality is speaking. Already with him the Eng- lish is vigorous and racy, despite some pedantries; and “Mandeville” surpasses him. In those fantastic Travels, moreover, there is narrative movement; the story marches as no tale by Lydgate knows how to step. Pecock’s subject is of no such fascination as are the Oriental wanderings of Mandeville, and although his reason- ing interests us, as showing both his mental quality and his command of English, neither he nor Fortescue exerted such influence as did the narrators, preéminent among whom are Caxton and Malory. Caxton is far the more medieval; he is constantly conventional in choice of subject, in sentence movement, and in phrase. Like Trevisa and like Lord Berners, he favors paired terms and rhetorical pleo- nasms, and labors with involved sentences. But either his subject or his fidelity to ornate correctness pleased his public; the more medieval his work, the more editions it apparently received. His Golden Legend was a better seller than his Malory.
36 ENGLISH VERSE
Malory stands by himself in this list of prose writers, as he does among romancers. He and Mandeville are both, as narrators, concerned frankly with their story; but he alone creates an atmosphere. Mandeville can and does obtain credence as well as interest; he knows as well as Swift the value for the human mind of the trivial as proof of the tremendous. But we remain outside Mande- ville’s narrative, absorbed and delighted observers, but independent, detached. Malory removes our world and substitutes his. The integrity of his conviction, his feeling, his imagination, is such that we return from him with difficulty to that smaller and meaner life which we have called normal.
There is the same integrity in Malory’s use of English; his speech, his phras- ing, are as dignified as those of an epic, but entirely simple and sincere. He was not surpassed or equalled in English until, in 1549, the gravely simple diction and noble rhythms of the first Prayer Book were composed. Between him and it the tale of English writing, verse or prose, is a sorry one. There is no suavity, no simplicity, and no dignity in Hawes; he is hopelessly muscle-bound. There is no freedom in Barclay; although he has the wit to reach for novel forms, his touches of reality and independence are clamped down among didactic phrases. Skelton is but half free, medieval rather than humanistic, a lampooner and rebel more because he is unsuccessful than because he has ideas. George Cavendish too is but half free; with him, however, the division is between verse and prose, the former stiffly imitative, the latter honest, vigorous, alive—a real story told with a real voice. His life of his master Wolsey is almost the first of English biogra- phies, antedated only by More’s unfinished life of Richard III; and it has had few superiors in the four centuries since it was written. But while Cavendish was writ- ing it, in the group of versifying courtiers around Henry the Eighth the “mode” was supreme, whether in song or in translation. Wyatt, Surrey, Nevill, Morley, obey it, each in his own way; and although the two last-named are more woodenly subservient to pattern, the two greater men are fortunate partly because their pat- terns are fortunately chosen. In pure song, indeed, they are truly English, and truly poets. But no man rises above an original, above a standardized pattern, as Malory had, until Cavendish creates biography, until the Prayer Book is written, and until with Spenser, Shakespeare, and the King James version of the Bible, the freedom of English utterance is attained.
Removal of the pressure of the stereotype does not restore at once the long- atrophied vision; from a hundred and fifty years’ denial of perceptual power, from protracted over-assimilation of a few facts, from the exhausting effect of overworked motives and words, a national literature does not recover at a bound. With the appearance of a foreign-bred Humanism among English scholars and in a small class of aristocratic poets, the Renaissance gets under way in Eng- land. As society settles, as education spreads, as intercourse grows freer, the new modes of expression find more favor. But earlier themes and tendencies last over; and it takes a long time for Englishmen to obtain control of rhythm and of structure, two lessons which Humanism could not teach them. Yet, slow as was the process of social readjustment and education, slow as was the assimilative power of the new public, England’s attainment of balance, in the
GENERAL INTRODUCTION Sa
Elizabethan age, was on all the higher level because the sequence of events which brought her there had been just what it had been. The defeat of the Armada was a spectacular success indeed, a poweiful stimulus to English patriotic pride and to the sense of national unity. But it came after a long series of lesser in- conspicuous successes in the economic field, after a definite rise in the average of English comfort and security in private life, after the assertion of English re- ligious self-control. The sense of unity and confidence derived from resistance to an invader had a more ample national basis on which to rest, because of pre- vious partial adjustments. _ The Armada success did not, like Agincourt, en- gender forces hostile to regular growth; it was a definite and healthy phase in England’s attainment of self-poise, partly because of the social and religious resettlement which preceded it.
And so with literature. The various elements of the English change passed slowly and firmly into relation with one another. That challenge of the moral basis of life which follows on a change in social structure, that challenge of the social basis of life which accompanies a new view of morality, took effect each upon the other, and were expressed in new moulds of form. The English Renaissance is far more socially penetrative, more deeply felt on literature, more earnest and ethical than that of the Continent, because in England a bour- geois self-assertion which might, with the break-up of feudal inhibitions, have assumed a more arrogant and illiterate form, was reined in by both Humanism and the Protestant Reformation. It persisted, but it was modified. A politically homogeneous and articulate people and a national sense of conduct were growing alongside that revival of perception, that increase of experiencing power, which permitted a revival of expression. It is not surprising that the dominant literary form of this fusion and interaction should be the drama; for no other utter- ance is so definitely social, and none admits of such a variety of tones. Every vulgarity, every pedantry, every vice, every upleap of vigor, every dignity of Englishmen is poured into the alembic of Shakespeare.
38 ENGLISH VERSE
SELECT REFERENCE LIST I
The student will derive profit from Green’s Short History of the English People and from G. M. Trevelyan’s History of England, 1926; from H. W. C. Davis’ edition, Oxford, 1924, of Medieval England; from G. C. Coulton’s Chaucer’s England, and from Trevelyan’s England in the Age of Wycliffe; from H. S. Bennett’s The Pastons and their England, Cambridge, 1922; from Eileen Power’s Medieval English Nun- neries; from E. Male’s L’art réligieux de la fin du moyen-age en France, Paris, 1908, and from Male’s other work; from Ramsay’s Lancaster and York, Wylie’s Henry IV, and Cora L. Scofield’s Edward IV; from Vickers’ England in the Later Middle Ages, London, 1914; from Huizinga, Herbst des Mittelalters, Munich, 1924 (transl. London, 1924 as The Waning of the Middle Ages); from the Legacy of the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1926.
G. Le Bon, The Crowd, a Study of the Popular Mind, transl. London, 1896, from the French. Many reéditions.
Th. Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, N. Y., 1899,
G. Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, transl N. Y., 1903, from second French ed.
G. Tarde, L’Opinion et la Foule, third ed., Paris, 1910.
W. Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, N. Y., 1916.
W. Lippmann, Public Opinion, N. Y., 1922.
The Complaint to his Lady is printed in Skeat’s Oxford Chaucer, i :360.
The Black Knight, see ed. by Skeat in vol. vii of the Oxford Chaucer.
Walter’s Guiscard and Sigismonde, see Zupitza in Vierteljahrschrift fiir Kultur u. Litteratur der Renaissance, i:63-102 (1886). See diss. by Clarence Sherwood, Berlin, 1892.
“How a Lover Praiseth his Lady,” see ModPhil 21 :379-395.
The Flower and Leaf, the Assembly of Ladies, the Court of Love, La Belle Dame sans Merci, are included in Skeat vii as above.
The Isle of Ladies, see diss. by Jane Sherzer, Berlin 1905.
Hye Way to the Spyttelhous, by Robert Copland, is printed in Hazlitt’s Early Popular Poetry, 1866, vol. iv.
Travel and Travellers of the Middle Ages, ed. A. P. Newton, N. Y., 1926.
Dawn of Modern Geography, C. R. Beazley, London, 3 vols., 1897, 1906.
Mandeville’s Travels are ed. for EETS by Paul Hamelius, 2 vols., 1919, 1923. See also Sir George Warner’s ed. for the Roxburghe Club, 1889.
Le Morte Darthur of Sir Thomas Malory, Vida D. Scudder, London and N, Y., 1917.
For Lydgate’s addition to the Brut, see Robinson in Harvard Studies v.
Bokenam’s Mappula Anglie is printed by Horstmann in EnglStud 10.
The Master of Game, by Edward duke of York, is ed. Baillie-Grohman, 1904 and 1909.
Standard but special reference-works, such as Thorndike’s History of Magic or Kings- ford’s studies in the English Chronicles, will be found in the separate refer- ence lists of this volume.
JOHN WALTON’S BOETEIUS-TRANSLATION
The poem here discussed is in most of the manuscripts marked as by “Johannes Capellanus,” in one manuscript at least (the Phillipps) as by ‘“Ca- pellanus Johannes Tebaud alias Watyrbeche.” In the early and carefully- written volume belonging to Balliol College (A), the author’s name is given as “John Walton nuper canonicus de Oseneye”; and in the 1525 print of the poem an acrostic at the close not only names “Johannes Waltwnem” as author but states that his patroness was Elizabeth Berkeley. Nothing more is known of John Walton except that his work is definitely dated 1410 by a number of the MS-colophons; Elizabeth Berkeley was probably daughter to that Thomas lord Berkeley who employed Trevisa to translate various encyclopedic works, and wife to Richard earl of Warwick, himself the reputed author of a little courtly verse, and Lydgate’s patron for the Pedigree of Henry the Sixth. In such case, it was their daughter the countess of Shrewsbury who commanded of Lydgate his Guy of Warwick; and the family, with its protégés Trevisa, Walton, and Lydgate, make one of the literary “groups” of the fifteenth century. Elizabeth countess of Warwick married before May, 1399, and died in 1423. See pp. 459-60 here.
Already Thomas Warton, in his History of English Poetry (see ed. by Hazlitt iii:39-40) had identified Walton as the translator of this work; but the vagueness of “Johannes Capellanus” led various students to attribute it to John Lydgate. Such is the statement of Casley’s 1734 catalogue of the Royal MSS and of the 1838 catalogue of the Durham Cathedral MSS; also of Peiper in his 1871 ed. of Boethius’ Consolation, and of Manitius in his 1911 history of medieval Latin literature included in the Handbuch der klassischen Altertums- kunde, ix, 2. The impossibility of Lydgate’s authorship is clear, however, to any student of the matter; the direct definite advance of the translator’s mind, the absence of digression and of rime tags, the comparative freedom of the verse from eccentric lines, are completely non-Lydgatian. Indeed, although Warton dismissed our versifier summarily as “contributing no degree of improvement to our poetry or our phraseology,” this Boethius-translation deserves more at- tention and credit than it has received. It was of course a mistake on Walton’s part, as ten Brink remarked, to force the whole work into verse,—a greater tactical error than Chaucer’s reduction of the whole to prose. For thereby is lost the element of variety, the change of key from reflective to lyrical, so defi- nitely sought by Boethius; and the use of verse for the whole imposes on the major portion of the work a key more appropriate to the minor portion. A some- what similar ill-judgment may be seen in the French translation of Boccaccio’s Fall of Princes, cf. p. 151 below.
The work which Walton here translates is one of the most potent of the Middle Ages. It exerted upon. West-European letters an influence comparable only with that of the Roman de la Rose seven centuries later. Its author, An- icius Manlius Torquatus Severinus Boethius, was born about 480 A.D., and was executed by the emperor Theodoric in 525. Of good family, he was raised to the consular dignity in 510, and was holding important government office when his remonstrances against the imperial policy brought upon him the suspicion and
[39]
40 JOHN WALTON’S
wrath of Theodoric. He was thrown into prison, and there put to death. During a life of great political activity and responsibility, he had found time to translate several texts of Aristotle, with commentaries, which were the main source of later medieval knowledge of Aristotle; he also wrote on logic, and drew up manuals of arithmetic, music, geometry, etc., which were the standard for cen- turies. But the best-known and most influential of Boethius’ writings was his last, the De Consolatione Philosophiae, written while he lay in prison, and in the knowledge of approaching death. It is an interview, in Latin prose inter- spersed with verse, between the prisoner and Philosophy, who appears to him as a marvellous female figure, and discusses with him the secrets of the universe.
The Consolatio not only made a profound impression on the medieval mind, but has remained interesting to modern students, as the many translations of it show. For the French versions, etc., see Stewart as below; English renditions are still more numerous. The earliest of these is by King Alfred, latest edition by Sedgefield, Oxford, 1899; to this is appended the alliterating Old Eng. ver- sion of the metres of Boethius. Chaucer’s translation is entirely in prose, but there is a stanzaic rendering by him of one metre, the “Former Age.” Of his first book there is a reshaping which exists in one MS (see note on A 26 of our text) and which may have been known to Walton when he speaks of “diverse men’? who had preceded him. Later than Walton are:—George Colvile in 1556, ed. Bax, London, 1897; Queen Elizabeth in 1593, ed. EETS 1899, with appendix containing nine metres translated by Sir Thomas Challoner ?1563; transl. by John Bracegirdle, 1603-09, in hexameter etc., specimen printed by Fliigel in Anglia, 14:499; by “I. T.” in 1609, prose and verse, printed in the Loeb Library Boethius, 1918; the metres of books i and ii by Henry Vaughan in his Olor Tscanus, 1651; by “S. E. M.”, London, 1654; by H. Conningesby, verse, 1695; by anon., prose and verse, Oxford, 1674; by Richard lord Preston, prose and verse, 1695; by William Causton, prose and verse, London 1730; by Philip Rid- path, prose and verse, London, 1785; by R. Duncan, Edinburgh, 1789; an anon. transl. of the metres, London, 1792; by H. R. James, prose and verse, London, 1897, 1906; by W. V. Cooper, prose, London, 1902.
Walton’s notion of a translator’s duty, as stated in his preface, is more than the usual patristic one of keeping the sense, whatever may happen to the word. He attempts to be true to the word also, so far as metrical exigencies permit; and although his “liftings” from Chaucer are frequent, he is often fortunate in his phrasing, and quite as likely to render the Latin correctly as was his great predecessor. His work, despite its borrowings, has vigor and honesty. And the handling of English rhythm by Walton is so much better than by either Hoc- cleve or Lydgate that he, with the translator of Palladius and the translator of Charles d’Orléans, deserves especial attention from students of the English metre written in this bewildered period. He is frequently driven by his verse-form to pad, but avoids the barren formulae to which Lydgate is so prone. He can be dignified without being floridly rhetorical; his most deliberate ornament is allit- eration, which he employs e.g. in the first metre of the first book. The care and intelligence with which he worked can be well seen in the difficult discussion of “‘prescience” in book v, prose 4. Chaucer’s cautious progress through this material was successful, but Walton’s restatement of it in verse was a real
BOETHIUS-TRANSLATION 41
task, even with the Chaucerian text before his eyes. The mentality which could acconiplish this is of an order quite other than the mentality of Hoccleve or of Lydgate; and we may note the scanty use of Boethius by Lydgate (see p. 185 below). Whether or not Walton knew the versifying of Boethius in Troilus’ soliloquy, Book iv of Chaucer’s poem, is a point as yet uninvestigated.
Walton’s translation runs to more than 7,500 lines, in eight-line stanzas to the close of book iii, and thereafter in sevens, with a special prologue of Walton’s own composition marking the change. Four stanzas at the close return to the original construction.
Manuscripts containing the work are fairly numerous. Schtimmer as below lists fourteen, viz.:—In the British Museum, Royal 18 A xiii, Harley 43, Harley 44, and Sloane 554; in the Bodleian, Rawlinson poetry 151 and Bodley e Museo 53; in Oxford colleges, Balliol 316 A and 316 B, New College 319, and Trinity College 21; in Cambridge, Gg iv, 18 of the University Library. Other MSS in Schiimmer’s list are Lincoln Cathedral A 4, 11, Durham Cathedral v ii, 15, and the MS formerly Phillipps 1099, now (1927) in the hands of Dr. Rosenbach, the New York collector and dealer. To this list Prof. Carleton Brown, in his Register of Middle English Religious Verse, adds five MSS :—the former Chet- wode MS, now McClean 184 of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge; the So- ciety of Antiquaries 134; Christ Church Oxford 151; Bodl. Douce 100; and St. John’s College Cambridge 196. A Copenhagen MS is mentioned by J. H. Wylie in Athen. 1892, i: 600.
Walton’s poem was printed in 1525 at Tavistock Monastery in Devonshire (where was situate the second press established in England) by Thomas Rychard, at the request of Master Robert Langdon; the book is exceedingly rare. Brief extracts from the translation are given by Todd in his Illustrations of Gower and Chaucer p. xxxii (2 stanzas only); by Blades in his Caxton, ii:68; by Wiilker in his Altenglisches Lesebuch, 11 :56-59; by Stewart as below; by Skeat in his Oxford Chaucer, ii:xvi-xviii; by Fligel, Neuengl. Lesebuch, p. 99. Cos- sack and Schiimmer, as below, print much larger portions of the text. On Wal- ton see Warton’s HistEngPoetry, iii:39-40 of Hazlitt’s edition.
For my text I have used the MS Royal 18 A xiii of the British Museum, a volume used also by Wilker, by Skeat, and by Schtimmer; some variant read- ings are given as stated, usually from the MS Balliol College 316 A. The Royal volume is on vellum, of 114 leaves, 914 by 614 inches, in a very neat square conventional hand, with careful capitals to stanzas, and marginal markings of metres and proses, etc. There is no other work in the volume. The Balliol MS contains, besides Walton, two short hymns; it also is on vellum, of 108 folios, with a colophon giving Walton’s name and ecclesiastical status,—whereas the Royal’s colophon has the usual “per Capellanum Johannem.” These and other MSS are described by Schiimmer as below.
SELECT REFERENCE LIST II
Doyle, Official Baronage of England, 3 vols., London, 1886.
Warwick, Richard de Beauchamp earl of; for a virelay by him see PMLA 22:597.
Moore, Samuel, Patrons of Letters in Norfolk and Suffolk ca. 1450, ibid. 27 :188-207, 28 :79-105.
42 JOHN WALTON’S
Stewart, H. F., Boethius, an Essay, London, 1871.
Cossack, H., Ueber die altenglische metrische Bearbeitung von Boethius, de Conso- latione Philosophiae. Leipzig diss., 1889, pp. 69.
Cossack uses the 1525 print for his analysis, which is of book i only; he proves the use of Chaucer by Walton.
Fehlauer, Fr., Die englischen Uebersetzungen von Boethius’ de Consolatione Phil- osophiae, Berlin, 1909. Part pubd. as diss., K6nigsberg, 1908.
Schiimmer, K., John Waltons metrische Uebersetzung der Consolatio Philosophiae. Un-
tersuchung des handschriftlichen Verhaltnisses und Probe eines kritischen Textes, Bonner Studien 1914. Part pubd. as diss., 1912. Schiimmer’s “textproben” are book i entire, the first three sections of book iii and a selection from its latter half, the prologue to books iv and v, and part of book v. All in all, he gives over a third of the work. His apparatus of variants is printed below each stanza, and in his introd. he constructs a genealogical tree of MSS. Hittmair, R., Das Zeitwort “do” in Chaucers Prosa, Leipzig, 1923, diss., has a com- parison of the Boece with Alfred, Walton, Colville, and Queen Elizabeth. The Bodleian MS Auct. F 3, 5, which contains a prose transl. of book i of the Consolatio, is now marked Bodley 2684; see the Summary Catalogue i:492, and
Liddell in Academy 1896 1:199.
Recent studies on Chaucer’s translation are by B. L. Jefferson, Princeton, diss., 1917,
and by Koch in Anglia, 46:1-51.
[PREFACE anp PROLOGUE: METRE 1, PROSE 1]
Insuffishaunce of cunnyng & of wyt Defaut of langage & of eloquence Pis work fro me schuld haue wibholden
Zit Bot pat yowre hest hab done me violence Pat nedis most I do my diligence 5
In thing bat passith myn abilite Beseching to youre noble excellence Pat be your help it may amended be
- a
This subtile matire of boecius Heere in this book of consolacion I0 So hye it is so hard and curius fful (fer) abouen myn estimacion Pat it be noght be my translacion Defouled ne corrupt to god I praye So help me wib his inspiracion 15 Pat is of wisdom bothe lok & keye 3
As fro be text bat I ne vary noght But kepe be sentence in his trewe entent And wordes eke als neigh as may be
broght Where lawe of metir is noght resistent 20 This mater whiche pat is so excellent
12. Royal reads fair; Balliol 316 A, fer. 24. Insertion from Balliol A
And passeth both my cunnyng & my myght
So saue it lord in bi gouernement
Pat kannest reforme all bing (vn) to right
4
I haue herd spek & sumwhat haue y seyne 25
Of diuerse men bat woundir subtyllye
In metir sum & sum in prose pleyne
This book translated haue full suffishaunt- lye
In to englissh tonge word for word wel neye
Bot I most vse be wittes pat I haue 30
Pogh y may noght do so yit noght for thye
With helpe of god pe sentence schale I saue
5
To chaucer pat is floure of rethoryk
In englisshe tong & excellent poete
This wot I wel no bing may I do lyk 35 Pogh so bat I of makynge entyrmete And gower bat so craitily dop trete
33. Balliol reads was flour, etc.
BOETHIUS-TRANSLATION: A 43
As in his book of moralite Pogh I to peym in makyng am vnmete 3it most I schewe it forth pat is in me 40
6
Noght lyketh me to labowr ne to muse Vppon bese olde poysees derk ffor crystes feith suche ping schuld refuse Witnes vppon Ierom pe holy clerk Hit schold not ben a _ cristenmannes
werk 45 Tho fals goddes names to renewe ffor he pat hab reseyued cristes merk If he do so to crist he is vntrewe
7
Of bo pat crist in heuene blis schall Suche manere werkes schold ben set on
side 50 ffor certaynly it nedeb noght at all To (whette) now be dartes of cupide. Ne for to bidde bat Venus be oure gide So bat we may oure foule lustes wynne On aunter lest be same on vs betide As dede be same venus for hyre synne
And certayn I haue tasted wonder lyte As of be welles of calliope
No wonder bough I sympilly endite
Yet will I not vnto tessiphone 60 Ne to allecto ne to megare
Besechin after craft of eloquence
But pray pat god of his benignyte
My spirit enspire wip his influence
9 So bat in schenschip & confusion 65 Of all this foule worldly wrecchidnesse He help me in this occupacion In honour of pat suffrayn blisfulnesse And eke in reuerence of youre worthi- nesse This simple work as for an obseruance I schall begynne after my sympelnesse In wil to do your seruice & plesance EXPLECIT PREFACIO TRANSLATORIS
INCIPIT PROLOGUS EIUSDEM SUPER LIBRUM BOECII 10 The while bat Rome was reignyng in hir floures And of be world held all pe monarchie Sche was gouerned penne be emper- oures 75
49. Balliol A, blisse. 52. Royal wete, Balliol whette.
And was renounned wondir nobelye
Til pride had set baire hertes vppon hye Penne gan thei to vsen cruelte
And regne by rigour & by tyrannye
In sore oppressioun of be commynalte
11 For right as pouert causeth sobirnesse And febilnesse enforseth continence Right so prosperite & sikernesse Pe moder (is) of vice & necligence And pouer also causeth insolence 85 And often honour changep goode pewes Pere is none mo parelouse pestilence Pan hyhe estates gyffen vnto schrewes
WZ Of which was nero oon pe principall Pat suche manere of tyrannye began 90 pough he bare dyademe imperiall Yit was hym selfe a verry cursed man So cruelly he began to reigne ban He slowh his modir & his maistir both And myche he dide pat tellen I ne can Who so hab hit rede he (knowyth) well pe sothe 96 13 The cheef of holychirche he slowh also Seynt Paule & petir both vppon a day And after beym full many ober mo And of hym self it is I dar wel say 100 pat paule writeth pus it is no nay And seith now is be forme of wickednesse And figure right of Antechristus lay In whom schall been all manere cursed- nesse 14 For pei bat trwly techeth cristes lore 105 To maken men forletten of peire vice Antecrist will pursue peym perfore And all bis prechyng setten at no prise So was he gifen to lustes & delice In what desire bat comen to his poght He wolde it done wip outen more avise ffor no bing hereof spare wolde he noght
15 And he bat wolde agayn his vices speke Conseilyng hym his lustes to refreyne Wip outen more anon he wolde be wreke 115
78. Balliol for to wvsen, etc. Beside stanza 11, in margin, is Nota per exemplum, 84. Royal omits is; inserted from Balliol A. 93. began; Balliol gan. 96. Balliol as here; Royal knowt. 110. Balliol bt what desire pt come unto, etc.
44 JOHN WALTON’S
He wolde him put in torment & in peyne
And he bat wolde his lustes out wip seyne
He was but dede if pat he wolde appere
ffor suche a cause Boecius was slayn
Of whom this processe techeb after heere 120
16
The yeere of crist fyue hondred & fiftene Whan anastasius was Emperour
Boecius be same of whom I mene
In Rome he was a nobie senatour
Bot bo in manere of a conque(r)our 125 Theodoricus regned in ytayle
And rome he held as heed & gouernour He hadde it wonne by conquest & bataile
17
For anastasius was noght ilyke
Ne noght so strong of meyne atte lest
He was consentant pat theodorik
Scholde regne in Rome & holde it atte hest
And he wolde holde hym seluen in be este
He seide it was accordant to his hele
And for his ese in sothe he chese it meste 135
ffor romayns ben ful perelus wt to dele
18
This kyng of rome pan theodorik
Was full of malice & of cursidnesse
And for causa he was an heretyk
Pe cristen peple gan he sore to oppresse 140
Boecius wib his besynesse
Wibstode hym euere sparing none offence
And hym presente ful often tyme expresse
Reuersed (his) vnlawefull iuggementis
19
He spared noght be helbe of his estate But euer he spake ayayn his tyrannye Wherfor be kyng hym hadde sore in hate And hym exciled in to Lumbardie
To prison in pe citee of Pavie
Where ynne he was for a recreacion 150 Be twyne hym selphe & philosophie
He wrote bis book of consolacion
117 out; Balliol ought.
125. So Balliol; Royal in a manere.
132. Balliol at his heste.
141. MS Phillipps reads with all his, etc.
144. So Balliol; Royal is.
150. The MSS read was or he was; the print reads as.
20
In prose & metre enterchaungyngly Wib wordes set in colour wonder wele Of rethoryk endited craftily 155 And schewyng bat bis welbis temporele As not to be desired noght a dele
Ne worldly meschief noping for to drede Enforsyng vs be resoun naturale
To vertu fully for to taken hede 160
21
When anastasius had made his fyne
As tyme of age in to his deth him drewe
Pan after hym was emperour Iustyne
A noble knyght a feithful & a trewe
ffor cristes lawes wonder wel he knewe 165
And keped hem as a verry crysten man
And heretikes faste he gan pursewe
Pat arrians were cleped than
22
His letters in to Rome pan he sent
fforto destroyen all pat heresye 170
And fully gaf hym in comaundement
Pat bei schulde putte hem out of com panye
Theodoricus took bis wonder hyhe
for he hym self was oonly oon of tho
This message he repelled vtterlye 175
And made a vow it schold not stande so
23
And swore but if be arrians moste
Have fully pees & graunted hem ageyn
He nold not leuen oon in all pe coste
Of cristen feith bat he ne scholde be slayn 180
And pus he bade pe messangers sayn
Pat if he wold wt arrians stryve
Seie to be Emperour in wordes playn
Of cristen wil I leue noon on lyue
24
To constantinopill he sent anone 185
Of senatowres whiche bat hym self leste
And so among(es) ober pope Ione
And bad paim laboren for baire avne beste
157. Balliol beim ought to be, etc.; Harley 44
Areen, etc.
171. Balliol yaf hem.
174. Cambr. and New Coll. read holly oon.
175. One 1 of repelled is inserted with caret; Balliol repeled.
178. MS New Coll. pes ygraunted.
187. So Balliol; Royal among.
188. Balliol, owne beste.
BOETHIUS-TRANSLATION: A 45
And rufullyche bei maden pbaire requeste Pat lIustyne schold pis maundement
relees 190 ffor cristen might noght be in reste But if he graunted arrians pees
25
The emperour his malice vnderstode Benyngly he graunted hap hur bone And wel he boghte pat (pis) was as
gode 195 Pat mater for to cessen til efte sone And beter mighte it afterward be done Be good avise of wyser ordinaunce Pe arriens so he lete alone To vsen forth baire olde gouernaunce
26
These messagers to pe kynges pay Retourned noght so hastely ageyn As he desired at assigned day Wherfor in hert he had gret dysdeyne And Boece pat lay in prisoun & in
peyne 205 Exiled in be citee of Pavie In myleyne ban he made him to be sleyne In Pavie been his bones sikerlye
27 And whan these messagers at be laste Returned were in hert he gan to brenne 210 And pope Ioone in prison ban he caste All fer in to be citee of Ravenne And made him closid in a narwe denne Where he ne mighte torne him selfe ne wende 214 And sothe to seyn he went neuer benne Bot of his lyfe right bere he made an ende 28
Also be worthi noble semachus
Pat was a man full grounded all in grace Pat as in vertu was heroycus
Pere left not suche an oper as he was 220 Wib outen cause surfete or trespace
At Ravenne eke he slowe hym cruellye And afterward in bat same place
De next yere he deyde sodeynlye
29 And as seynt Gregor doth hym self write 225 As his diologe makeb mencioun Pere was pat tyme an holy heremyte 191. Balliol, be cristene.
195. Insertion from Balliol. 203. Royal assigned a day; cp. line 125.
As he was in his contemplacioun
He sawe theodorik in visioun
By twine Symachus an(d) pope Iohn Right as a beef to his dampnacioun How he was led and after pt anon
30 In be yle of vicane was he casten benne Pat full is of a fury flaumbe of hell Per in alwey in peynes forto brenne 235 And wt pe foule fendes forto dwell ffor tyrantes pat so fers been & fell Suche reward is arayed for paire mede I saye yow but as olde bookes tell Nowe to my purpose tyme is pat I spede 240 31 And euery lord or lady what (ye) be Or clerk pat likep for to rede pis Beseching lowly wib humylite Support where I haue seyde amys
Correcte only bere bat nedeful is 245 If worde & sentence be noght as hit scholde
My self I am vnsuffishaunt Iwys ffor if I couthe haue beter done I wolde
EXPLICIT PROLOGUS
INCIPIT LIBER BOECII DE CONSOLACIONE PHILOSOPHIE: METRUM PRIMUM
Carmina qui quondam studio florente
peregi
Flebiles heu mestos . cogor inire modos
Allas I wrecche bat whilon was in welthe And lusty songes vsid for to write 250 Nowe am y set (in) sorowes & vnselthe Wt mornyng nowe my myrbe I most respite Lo redyng muses techep me to endite (5) Of wo wt wepyng wetep bai my face Thus hath disese distryed all my delite And broght my blis & my bonechife all bace 33 And (pbogh) pat I (with) myschef nowe be mete Pat false fortune lourith bus on me (10) No drede fro me ne myghte bese muses lete Me for to sewe in myn aduersite 260 My ioyes pei were all in my iolite
241. Royal he; most MSS ye. 246. Balliol or sentence.
251. Balliol in; Royal omits. 253. redyng; see Notes.
257. Royal writes poght, witht.
46 JOHN WALTON’S
Of youthe that was so gladsom & so grene Nowe bai solacen my drery destine (15) And in myn age my confort nowe bei bene 34
Unwarly age cometh on me hast(e)ly Hyeng on me for harme pat | haue had And sorow his eld hap hoten to be ney Hore heris on myn hede to rathe ben sprad (20) All toome of blode my body waxep bad Myn ampty skyn begynneth to tremble &
quake 270 I knowe no cause wher of I scholde be glade But socourlese pus am I all forsake 35
A deth of men a blisful bing it were (25) If he wolde spare beym in baire lusty-
nesse
And (com) to bem pat ben of heuy chere 275
When pai him call to slaken paire dis- tresse
But out allas howe dull & deef is he Wryeng awey fro wrecches when bei clepe (30) And werneth penne wt wonder cruelnesse Pe eyen forto close bat waile & wepe
36
Bot while fortune vnfeithfull & vntrewe Of lusty lyf was to me fauorabill (34) ffull sodainly myn hede down he drewe Pe carefull oure of deth vnmerciabill But nowe pat sche so chaunging & vnstable 285 Hath turned vnto me hire cloudi face This wrecchid lyf pat is vnconfortable Wyll drawe along & tarieth nowe allas
37 Wher to (ye) frendes made ye your awaunt (41) So often tymes of my felicite 290
This worldly welthe is noght perseueraunt Ne neuere abidyng in stabilite
ffor he bat fallip out of his degre
Ye knowen wel pat stable was he noght Ne he stood neuer in full prosperite
Pat in to meschef is so lowe Ibroght 265, 275, 278. Royal writes hastly, cometh, wryng.
285. Royal sche is so, etc. 289. Royal and Balliol be.
38
[Prose 1]
In mornyng bus I made my complaynt And for to write my fyngres gan I folde ffor drerynesse I wax all febill & feynt Pat of my lyf almost noping I tolde 300 But vpward atte laste I gan beholde
In sothe y seie so faier a creature
I couthe hire noght discriuen bogh I
wolde So semely was hire schap & hir feture 39 Sche was so wonder reuerent of hiere chere 305
Hire colour eke so lyuely and so bright
Hire eyen brend semyng as for clere (11)
Passing full fer abouen mamis sight
As bogh sche were full fresshe & clene of might
As sche had ben full yongly of corage
Yit semed (she) to euery worldly wyght
Pat she was ouerpassid mamis age
40
’ Hire stature was of doutful Iugement
Somtyme bus of comune mannes meet And somtyme was hire stature so (extent) 315 Pat wt hire heed sche semed heuenes beet And ober while so hihe hire heed sche
geet (21) Sche persed heuene & might no more be seyne
So pat we muste be sight of hire forlete And all oure lokyng after was in veyne
41
Hire clothis wroght were of bredes smale But subtile craft of mater perdurable And wip hire hondes by hire awne tale Sche had hem wroght I trowe it be no fable Pe beaute of hem was full commend- able 325 But dusk pei were forleten as for elde As ymages bat in smook had stonden stable (31) Pat ben not wasche ne wyped not but selde
309. Balliol And pauh, etc.
311. Balliol she, Royal he.
314. Royal inserts ly after comune, with caret; the ink is different.
315. See Notes.
322. Several MSS read By subtile, etc.
BOETHIUS-TRANSLATION: A 47
42
And in (be) hem bynepben made sche had So as I couthe it knowe a grekysshe - P - And in be bordure al abouen I rad = 331 And pere also sche had made a -T-
And so by twyne pe lettres might I see Like a laddire what pat evire it mende Wher on men myght all wey fro gre to
gre Se
ffro bare byneben vpward evire ascende 43
Neuerpeles sum men by violence (41)
Had kyt pis cloth & pecis born awey Suche as bei mighte wt outen reuerence And dide bere wt as was vnto theier pay This creature of whom I gan yov say 341 In hire right hond smale bookes were
A septir also of full riche araye
In certeyn in hire oper hand sche bere
44
And when (pis) womman sawe bese muses bere 345 Vnto my beddes side approchen neye (50) Enditing wordes to my wepyng chere She gan to loke vppon hem feruentlye Who hab sche seide let in pis companye Pus wt hire song bis seek man _ to plese 350 Pat noping helpeth hym of his maladie But rather doth hym greuaunce & disese
45
Lo pese it been sche seide pat folkes feden
Wt swete venim of corrupcioun
And tendre hertes maken forto bleden
Wibe thornes of beire full affeccioun
Pei sleyn be worpi fruytes of resoun (61)
And only bryngen siknesse in vsage
This is be kynde of beire condicioun
And not at all be seknesse to aswage 360
46
Yif ye sche seide wt youre daliaunce Had fro me drawe sum foole vnprofitable
345. Balliol pis, Royal bese.
ffull lesse it wolde haue done me dis- plesaunce
I myght haue sustened pat as sufferable
ffor whi & suche a foole pat is vnable 365
Mai not be harmed of my bysenesse (70)
Bot beie pat euer in studie hath stonden stable
Schuld not be founden wip youre foly- nesse
47
Bot goo ye filthes out of my presence Youre swetnesse wolde hym bryng at an ende 370 I schall him saue wt salue of my science Pat schall be more confort to his kynde And bus bis companye away gan wende And bitterly abasched of beire blame Schewyng in sothe pe abyt of beire mynde Hangyng doon to grounde paire heed for
schame 376 48
I than pat neigh for teres sawh right noght (81)
Merueiled myche what myght bis wom- man be
I wondred also gretely in my boght
Pat so imperviall of a(u)ctorite 380
Sche made pat meigne smertly for to flee
I was abasched and heng myn hede to grounde
What sche wold done or after seie to me
Pan I abood & held me still a stound
49 Unto my bed ban gan sche me neighe nere 385 And on be corner doun hire self sche sette (90)
And sadly gan byholde vppon my chere
Pat so was wt teres al bywette
And right bus sche bygan wip oute lette
Compleynyng on my perturbacioun 390
ffor cause of meschef wher wib I was mette
Of me sche made pis lamentacioun
385. Balliol has not me.
48 JOHN WALTON’S
[BOOK II METRE 5: THE FORMER AGE]
Full wonder blisseful was bat raber age
When mortal men couthe holde hymself payed
To fede beym self wt oute suche outer- age
Wib mete pat trewe feeldes haue arrayed
Wipb acorne paire hunger was alayed 5
And so bei couthe sese paire talent
Thei had yit no queynt craft assayed
As clarry for to make ne pyment
2 To deen purpure couthe bei noght bebynke The white flees wyp venym tyryen 10
Pe rennyng ryuer yaf hem lusty drynke And holsom sleep bei took vpon be grene The pynes pat so full of braunches been Pat was baire hous to kepe vnder schade The see to kerue no schippes were bere
seen 15 Per was no man pat marchaundise made
3 Thay liked not to sailen vp & doun But kepe hem self where bei weren bred Tho was ful huscht be cruel clarioun ffor eger hate per was no blood Isched 20 Ne ber wt was non armour yit bebled ffor in bat tyme who durst haue be so wood Suche bitter woundes bat he nold haue dred Wip outen reward forto lese his blood 4
I wold oure tyme myght lerne certanly 25 And pise maneres alwey wt vs dwelle But loue of hauyng brennep feruently More fersere ban be verray fuyre of helle Allas who was pat man bat wold him
melle This gold & gemmes pat were keuered pus 30
Pat first began to myne I can not telle Bot bat he fond a parelous precious
[BOOK II METRE 7]
Who bat supposen will vnwyttyly
In renoun soueren ioyes for to be
And late hym look vp in to be heuene on hye
And so be holde vpon pat large cuntre
And after lat hym to berpe see
So narwe it is bat soore it schal hym schame
Pat in so litell space of quantite
He may it not fulfille wt his fame
2
Allas what aylen fierce men & proute
To leften vp paire nekkes so in vayn 10
This mortal yok whiche bat ye bere aboute
Schal payse it downe vnto be grounde agayn
Thogh pat youre resoun passe many a playn
And so be spred aboute be many tung
Pat of your lynage hyhe & souereyn 15
In grete honour be fame of yow be sprung
2. Balliol hemselfe. 25. Balliol turne certeynly.
3
Yit deth depayseth all youre hyhe renoun
Neiber greet ne lytell wil he none knowe
Bot bothe in lyke he layth hire hedes doun
And euene he makyth be hyhe wt be lowe 20
Lo where ben nowe pe bones as we trowe
Of brutus & fabricious be trewe
Of sterne Catoun be fame is ouerblowe
And maked now in lettres bot a fewe
4 And yit po men we (knoweth) not at all 25 Thogh pat we knowe peyre fayre names so ffor pei be deth as euery ober schall Out of be sight be passed & agoo ffor wib bis lyf when pat ye passe fro ffor to be knowen pen ye ben vnable 30 Youre worpi fame may no more doo But fleyen aboute veyne & variable
25. Royal reads knowt; see ante, A 96.
BOETHIUS-TRANSLATION: D 49
5 And if ye wene to drawe your lyf on long As be a lytell wynde of worldly fame As fooles ben ye done yow seluen wrong 35
ffor when o cruell deth yow schall atame
Al your renoum schal turnen in to grame
Whiche pat ye han purchased so wt pride
ffor after bat be styntyng of your fame
Ye must ben another deth abyde 40
[BOOK III METRE 12]
Full blisfull is pat man pt may behold pe bright welle of verray blisiulnesse And well is hym pt may hym self vnfolde ffro bondes of bis worldly wrecchidnesse The poet Orpheus wip heuynesse 5 His wyfes deth hap (weiled) wepyngly And wip his songes full of drerynesse Made wodes for to renne wonderly
2
He made stremis stonden & abyde
Pe hynde fered not of houndes fell 10 Sche lete be lyon lien by here syde
The hare also ne dred noght a dell
To see be hound hit lyked hym so well To here be songes bat so lusty were
And boldly thei dorste to gidres dwell Pat nevire a best had of ober feere
3
And when pe loue gan brennen in his brest
Of erudice moste hote & feruently
His song bat had so many a wylde best
So meke made to lyuen comynly 20
They myghte hym not conforten vtterly
Of hyhe goddes gan he to compleyn
And seide bei deden wt hym cruelly
That bei sent hym noght his wyf ageyn
4
He went ban to houses infernall 25 And faste his strenges bere dressed he And sowned out be swete songes all
Pat he had tasted of be welles thre While bat his modres dere Calliope
Pat is goddesse & chief of eloquence 30 To wordes pat moste piteous myght be As sorowe had taght hym be experience
5 And loue also pat doubleth heuynesse To helle began he his compleynt to make Askyng mercy bere wip lawnesse 35
6. Royal veiled, Balliol wayled. 9. Royal strennis.
At pilke lordes of be schades blake
And cerberus pat woned was to wake
Wib hedes thre & helle yates kepe
So hadden hym pese newe songes take
The swetnesse made hym forto falle on slepe 40
6
The fuyres pat ben vengoures of synne
And surfetoures smyteb so wt feere
ffor heuynesse pt pis man was ynne
They gan to mourne & weped many a tere
Ne bo be swift wheele had no powere 45
To torne about be heed of (Yxion)
Ne tantalus for thrist all bogh he were
fforpyned longe watire wolde he none
7 The gryp pat ete be mawe of tycius And tyred on hit longe tyme be fore 50 This song to hym was so delicius He left it of & tyred it no more And when bat orpheus had mourned sore Than seide be Iuge of helle peynes strong
Pyte me hap quyt I will restore 55 This man (his) wyf bus wonnen wt his song.
Bot with a lawe pis gift will I restreyne
Pat vnto he this bondes haue forsake
If he beholde vpon his wyf ageyne
His wyf fro hym eft sone will we take 60
Bot who to louers may a lawe make
ffor loue is rathir to hym self a lawe
When he was neygh out of be bondes blake
He turned hym & erudice he sawe
9 Allas he lost & left his wif be hynde This fable lo to yow perteyneth right ffor ye bat wolde lyften vp your mynde In to be hye blisfull souereyn light 41. fuyres; so Balliol. Read furyes.
46. Royal and Balliol, yaon, 56. Royal writes is.
50 JOHN WALTON’S
If ye eftsone turne doun youre sight In to pis foule wrecchid erthly dell 70
Lo all bat evire your labour hab you dight Ye loose it when ye loken in to hell
EXPLICIT LIBER TERCIUS BOECII DE CONSOLACIONE PHILOSOPHIE
PREFACIO TRANSLATORIS IN LIBRUM QUARTUM & QUINTUM
[Walton here inserts a preface, nine stanzas of seven lines, lyrical]
O hye & riche tresour of science
And wisdom whiche in god eternally
Conteyned is so pat his iugementes
Ne mowe not be enserched certanly
Neither be wey be knowen vtterly 5
Be whiche pis wonder worldes gouer- naunce
He kepith in suche a certayn ordy- naunce
Who wist his wit when he pis world began Or who was he pt was his conseillour When no thyng was who was pt gaf hym pan 10 To whom he is in daunger as dettour Of hym is all for he is creatour Be him it is bat all bing Is susteyned In hym is all bing kyndly conteyned 3 Lo of so hye a matre for to trete 15 As after bis myn auctowr doth pursue This wote I well my wyttes ben vnmete The sentence forto saue (in) metre trewe And not forthi I may it not eschewe Ye ben be cause why I mote don pus 20 And schewe my seluen here presumptu- ous 4 Of hap of fortune & of destine Pat marred hap full many a mannes mynde Supposyng bat oure kyndely liberte Thus to & fro must all wey turne & wende 25 So pt oure werkes to a certan ende Constreyned ben wher pt we will or noght So pat none ober wise bei may be wroght
5 To speken of divine purveaunce Pt all bing knowith or it be bygonne 30 No worldly wight may haue pat suff- saunce With all be wit & clergie pat bei konne
18, 36. Balliol &c. have in, we; Royal omits.
No more pan perce the myddes of be sonne
As wip be litell vigour of baire sight 34
Wel myche more it passeth mannes myght
6 And bat (we) stonden in oure arbitrye As fully set in verray liberte So bat we mowe chesen wilfully Bothe goode & euel bothe wel & wo to be And yit pat god in his eternyte 40 So knoweth all pt evire schall betide Who can pis two compownen & devide
It is not elles bot pat oure desire
Wolde kyndely bat conseyt comprehende Right as we seen a litel flaumb of fuyre 45 How scharp it makeb it seluen to ascende And not forpi it failleb of his ende
And is full fer from theder pat it scholde So may we penken or tell(en) what we
wolde
8 Bot fuyre right of movynge of nature 50 Behold how scharp it makep it & light And all so ferforth as it may endure How it enforceth forto stye vp right Bot we wolde haue not elles but a sight And knowe pe height of goddes priuete And will oure self all wey in erthe be
9 To be pat art the welle of sapience Almyghti lord this labour I commyt Thogh I be fer fro craft of eloquence Enforce pou my connyng & my wit 60 This mater forto treten so pat it Be to bi honour & to pi plesaunce So take it lord into thi gouernaunce
INCIPIT LIBER QUARTUS [Prose 1]
And when (my) maistresse philosophie Kepyng all wey hire sobirnesse & hire chere 65
64. Royal omits my; supplied from Balliol.
BOETHIUS-TRANSLATION: E Bl
This song had songen wonder lustilye So pat full sad all wey hire wordes were I gan to speke & seide in pis manere Noght all forgeten myn oppressioun
I made hire make an interrupcioun 70
O souereigne gidoresse of verrey light Youre resouns ben so myghti & so fyne Anon to pis & open to my sight As in baire (speculacioun) devine Whiche as ye seide for angir & for pyne 75 fforgeten was (& falle) out of my poght Bot yit beforn (byknowen) were pei not
Bot pis is most my cause of heuynesse
So good a gouernour as hauen we
How bere may be so myche wikked- nesse 80
And suffred so vnponysched to be
How wonderful is pis now deme ye
And this wel more encresep my doloures
Pat wickednesse regnep in his floures
And now not onely vertu wanteb mede Bot felons han defouled it & schent 86 And in be stede of synne & coursidhede Now vertu bereth peyne & (ponysche- ment )
Bot in be rewme of god omnipotent Pat seeth all bis & onely good he will
I may compleyne & wonder wel be skyll
Than seide sche bus a wonder ping it were
Abhomynable & verry menstruouse
If as bou feynest & supposest here
In a so well disposed lordes house 95
If vesselles bat ben riche & preciouse
Schuld so despised & defouled be
And foule vessell be made in preciouste
Bot sikerly sche seide it is noght so
ffor if tho thynges stondeth formely 100
That we before bis haue consented to
Now be be help of souereyn god on hye
Of whom here he speketh (ententifly)
Thow schalt here after fully knowe & seen
Pat good folkes all wey myghti ben —_105
And wicked folkes vnmyghti bere ageyne
Ne mede may fro vertu noght disseucre
74, 88, 103. Royal writes spectaculacioun, poyn- yschement, entiflye.
76. Royal writes was for & all out, etc.; 77, it writes we knowen. Readings from Balliol.
And pat bere is no vice wipouten peyne And good folke of welbe faillen nevire And wicked folk ben infortunat euere And myche pyng pat to byn hertes ese Availen schall and pi compleynt (appese)
Now here beforn I haue be schewed expresse As pou hast herd & seen it plenerly Whiche is be forme of verrey blisful- nesse 115 And where pou schalt it fynde verrayly Lo all bis ouerpassen now will I Whiche pat we moste over passe nede And to my purpose faste I schall me spede
Unto thi home I schall pe schewe a wey 120
And pennes schall I pycche into pi mynde
Pat it arisen into height may
Al heuynesse left & put behynde
My path I will pe lede be be hand
And cariage my self I schal be fynde 125
Al hole & sound into byn owne land
[iv, Metre 1]
Full swyft been my fetheres in paire flight
Pat stieng into hyhe heuene ariseth
And when pei be into a mynde Ipight Pe erthe ben it hatep & despiseth 130 And settep all at (noght) as he deviseth De speere of eyre he passeth all aboue Behynde his bak he seeth be cloudes houe
That mynde also be spere of fuyre trans-
cendeth That is so hoot be movynge of be heuene 135
And to pe sterred places he ascendep
Thurgh out be speres of planetes seuene
And wt be sonne his wey he ioyneb euene
So at be laste he meteb wt be old
Saturnus whos effectes ben so cold 140
So is pis sotill mynde made a knyght Of god pat is be souereyn sterre clere And (so) be cercle of be sterres bright Pe whiche ye may behold on nyghtes here Wt his recours he passeth all in fere 145 And in theire speres be holden wele
Pe manere of beire movynge euery dele
112, 131. Royal reads aplese, not. 143. Royal omits so.
52 JOHN WALTON
And well he wot bat goddes ben bai not Pe hyest heuen he leueth hym behynde Till bat he haue araysed vp his poght 150 Anone to hym pat auctour is of kynde This worpi lyght he putteb in his mynde Pat of bis round world is lord & kyng Pat kepeth & gouerne} all ping
The swyft cours of sterres meveth he Iuge of binges bright & souereyn Hym self stedfaste evire in oo degre If bis wey may reduce be ageyn
Vnto pi place pou schalt pi self seyn
Lo here it is pat I so longe haue soght 160 My cuntre & til now I knewe it noght
Fro hennes I come & in pis place right
I thynke to (abyden) & to dwell
And if pe list to cast a doun pi sight
Into pis foule derk erthly selle 165
Be holden myght bou bere tyrantes felle
Whiche bat of wrecches ben Idrede full wyde
Out of this lond exiled for bere pryde
163. Royal writes byden. 166. Royal be halden, ete.
THOMAS HOCCLEVE
Of the English followers of Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve and John Lyd- gate are best known to modern students. Both were grown men at the time of Chaucer’s death in 1400, and Hoccleve at least knew his master personally ; but there is no evidence that they knew of each other’s work or of each other’s existence. Their lives ran in different grooves.
The country-born Lydgate entered a monastery while still a boy, and so far as we know spent his life thus. Hoccleve was a Londoner by adoption if not by birth, became a clerk in the Privy Seal office when he was about twenty, and there apparently remained. From his many autobiographical allusions it seems that he was a tavern-haunter and a waster of money, that after being disappointed of a clerical post in the Church he drifted into marriage, that he suffered under a long period of mental illness or madness, and that he turned, verses in hand, from one noble patron or government official to another in the hope of money- reward to eke out the irregular payments of the Crown. He was probably born about 1368; for he gives his age as fifty-three in a poem which terms Gloucester the Lieutenant of the realm; this was in 1421-22, while Henry V was still in France. He dates his translation of the De Regimine Principum, or Regement of Princes, made for Henry V, in 1411-12, and there says that he had been for twenty-four years at his Privy Seal desk; he must accordingly have entered the office when about twenty. An allusion to Prince Edward’s tutor, in a poem addressed to Edward’s father the Duke of York, may date that poem 1446-48, when the prince was four to six years old. Thereafter we know no more of Hoc- cleve, nor have we any record of pension-payments to him for many years pre- ceding. An entry in the Close Rolls, pointed out by Professor Hulbert, shows that Richard II granted a corrody, or maintenance chargeable on a church, to Hoccleve in 1395; this the poet transferred in the first year of Henry the Fourth.
The earliest of his poems to which we can assign a date is the Letter of Cupid, translated from the French in 1402, as the writer tells us. In 1406, probably, he wrote La Male Régle, a series of self-reproaches for his irregular life, ending with a petition to the lord treasurer to pay him his overdue pension ; this annuity had been granted him by Henry IV soon after accession. In 1411-12 Hoccleve compiled the Regement of Princes, from several sources; and in 1415 he wrote a severely pious reprimand to the heretic Oldcastle. Perhaps ten years later, in the Complaint and the Dialogue with a Friend, he talks of an inter- vening illness, says he is fifty-three years old, and mentions the return of Glou- cester from France (1421). For the duke’s pleasure Hoccleve then translates and appends to the Dialogue the Gesta Romanorum story of the Innocent Persecuted Wife,—Jereslaus’ wife. His translation of the tractate Learn to Die, from Suso’s Horologium Sapientiae, also (probably) planned for Gloucester, and a second Gesta-story similarly appended, are later work. Both pairs of poems, and the Complaint which serves as introduction to the earlier, were transcribed in a sequence and sent to the Countess of Westmoreland in a copy which still exists at Durham. If this Countess was the widowed daughter of John of Gaunt, then living at the same castle of Sheriff Hutton which was later the scene of Skelton’s Garland of Laurel, she was the woman to whom Sir Thomas Morton in 1431 be-
[53]
54. THOMAS HOCCLEVE
queathed a copy of Gower’s English poem, and the same woman who after her nephew Henry V’s death applied to the Council for the return of books she had lent him.
Other poems by Hoccleve are brief, and are either devotional,—including the Mother of God so long ascribed to Chaucer,—or occasional verse often of the begging-letter type. All in all, he has left about 13,000 lines of verse, written in stanzas of seven or eight and a few of nine lines, and including four roundels. Neither this amount of productivity nor Chaucer’s 34,000 lines of verse (ex- clusive of the Romaunt-translation), looms very large beside Lydgate’s ca.140,000 lines ; but, it is needless to say, there are various factors to be considered in making a comparison.
Both Hoccleve’s production and his range of production are very much smaller than those of Lydgate. There are in his work no long romantic-epic narratives, no lives of saints, no allegories, no tapestry or fresco-poems, no courtly love-addresses, no beast-fables, no mummings. The religious-didactic is Hoc- cleve’s theme whenever he is not autobiographic; but his constant tendency to the autobiographical is the most interesting of his qualities. La Male Régle is a deliberate and frank self-confession, used as lengthy prelude to a begging- letter. The two-long tasks undertaken for Henry V and for Gloucester are each preluded by a lively piece of dialogue in explanation of their origin. In the one case it is a friend, in the other a wise old beggar, who receives Hoccleve’s laments over his muddled life and counsels him how to proceed. Where Lydgate would compose a prologue in imitation of Chaucer or in praise of the original he was translating, Hoccleve plunges awkwardly but vitally in another method. His dialogue is real dialogue, not alternating set speeches. He is limited enough in his handling; there is no setting for his two speakers, such as Chaucer or Henryson would have painted in; the voices, though lively in tone, are bodiless. And as soon as they cease, and the business of Jereslaus’ Wife or the Regement of Princes begins, Hoccleve drops into the stereotype of his period. In the prolonged didactics of the Regement of Princes there are several moments, how- ever, where the name of Chaucer breaks that spell of somnolence. Hoccleve goes out of his way to allude to his beloved master; and in one of these three short but deeply-feeling passages he says that he has had Chaucer’s likeness inserted, in order that men may not lose remembrance of him. A portrait of Chaucer does indeed appear at that point in a few MSS of the Regement, and is, with the Host’s teasing chaff in the headlink to Sir Thopas, our only real clue to Chaucer’s personal appearance.
These mentions of Chaucer, the requests to a patron or superior for money, and the religious character of many of the shorter poems, are the lines on which Hoccleve and Lydgate can be compared as regards theme. And the student who puts Hoccleve’s begging-letters beside Lydgate’s pleas to Gloucester, Hoccleve’s language about Chaucer beside Lydgate’s far more numerous allusions, Hoccleve’s autobiographical disclosures beside Lydgate’s Testament, Hoccleve’s religious lyric beside Lydgate’s, will perceive two very different men. The trappings of convention lie much more heavily on Lydgate, who has no such restless urge to . talk of himself, no such human directness of approach to other human beings, as Hoccleve had. MHoccleve is always livelier and simpler than Lydgate; and when he speaks of Chaucer it is with a true affection and regret that have sweet- ened his own memory for the after-world. He has lived more really than has
THOMAS HOCCLEVE 55
Lydgate, and the mixture in him of piety and cheap raffishness makes him a more genuine creature. Saintsbury calls him a “crimeless Villon”; and it might repay a student to follow out the likenesses and differences between the Englishman and the Frenchman. In their piety the difference is very marked; for Hoccleve is as sincerely pious as is the monk Lydgate. He cannot indeed rise to as true a passion of love for Christ crucified as Lydgate sometimes can; but on the other hand, there are in the small bulk of Hoccleve’s verse no such depths of wordy inanity as too often occur in Lydgate’s religious poetry. We may plead for Lydgate the compulsion under which he worked, a compulsion from which Hoc- cleve was free. But the vacuity remains.
On the technical side of the two men’s work there is also a marked difference. Both men were followers of Chaucer; and Hoccleve, who knew his master per- sonally, says that Chaucer “fayn wolde han me taght, But I was dul and lerned lite or naght.’’ His verse shows, indeed, less of Chaucer metrically than does the verse of Lydgate. Hoccleve manages pentameter badly, and is insensitive to the -weave of stressed and unstressed syllables, so long as their number is constant at ten. Very many lines run as do these:
Pat me yeuest any othir than thee
Of thy soule meekly to him confesse We sholde no meryt of our feith haue And as that the preest hir soules norice 215/212 To the taast of your detestable errour 217 /293
i:5/165 i i i i Of the myghty Prince of famous honour 1:49 /3 i i i i i
711/94 713/142
Ageyn thorsday next & it nat delaye :66 /56 And shoop me him to offende no more :67 /16 Yit thy deeth gat of the feend the maistrie 268 /52 On the crois was thy skin in to blood died :69 /68 Pat our soules pat the feend waytith ay :71/126
Lydgate, on the contrary, is aware of certain rhythmic variants in Chaucer, adopts them, and abuses them. The headless line and the line brokenbacked, or short an unaccented syllable at the verse-pause, are a staple with him. He could find the former at least in Chaucer, and may have built the latter by analogy: but their occurrence is infrequent in Hoccleve, so far as we can yet say. The repetition of a single line-type by Lydgate is as marked as is Hoccleve’s un- awareness of line-type. Neither man understood Chaucer’s rhythm, but they mis- understand very differently.
They differ also in their management of the English language; and here the advantage is so much with Hoccleve that we can surmise why Chaucer should have attempted to teach him. Hoccleve has nothing of Lydgate’s uncontrollable verbosity. He does not jumble finite verbs and participles; he does not overwork the ablative absolute ; he does not leave long sequences of clauses wandering with- out a principal verb; he does not repeat himself; he uses the minimum of padding and of rime-formulae; he sees where he is going, in narrative, and goes there. _ His syntax-control and his feeling for dialogue show that he had some story-
telling faculty; and probably Chaucer recognized it. Hoccleve can toss dialogue
back and forth through a stanza in swift exchange, breaking the line or over- running it as he chooses; he does not move in monotonous half-lines or dilute into entire stanzas as does Lydgate.
56 THOMAS HOCCLEVE
But with this advantage over Lydgate in the normal movement of speech, in the more competent use of English for expression, there goes, in Hoccleve, a lack of the “high spots” that we can find in Lydgate. Despite Lydgate’s ver- bosity and tedium, there are more than a few strong lines in his work; see p. 81 here. But from Hoccleve it is not possible to glean such. He does say of his reckless habits that for many years ““Excesse at borde hath leyd his knyf with me,” and that “Ther never yet stood wys man on my feet.” His lament for Chaucer is moving. But his sense-perceptions, his feeling for nature, his imagi- nation, are not developed even as much as are those of Lydgate. The few strik- ing bits that we can cite are autobiographical and personal.
Nor does Hoccleve echo Chaucerian phrase to anything like the extent seen in Lydgate. This is partly, of course, because of his relative lack of the narration and description so definitely the business of Chaucer and of Lydgate. He alludes to the Wife of Bath in his Dialogue, line 694; and in a few passages he may de- rive from Chaucer rather than from Chaucer’s original; see the remark on a prudent workman’s method in Dialogue 638 ff., and cf. Troilus i:1065 ff.; or see the dictum in Dialogue 764-5, or the phrasing of the Regement of Princes 629. But there is no such evidence of Chaucer’s power over Hoccleve’s memory as is clear for Lydgate, despite Hoccleve’s strong personal feeling for his master. This may be in some measure due to the resistance of a lively egoist, which Hoc- cleve undoubtedly was; for his citations of any sort are a separate element in his work. He follows copy and cites copy, in his translations, but it is distinct from his own trend of thought; and although the religious emotion of many of his independent poems is deep, he turns more naturally toward himself than toward literature.
His choice of works to translate also shows a mind less literary than prac- tical and moralistic; and he had no body of patrons whose larger curiosity about books sent him afield in letters. His connection with Humphrey of Gloucester was slighter than was that of Lydgate. That some of Hoccleve’s work was popular we might argue from the number of copies of the Regement of Princes; but we must recollect that the subject was popular, by whomsoever treated, and that Hoccleve is not mentioned with Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate, by following generations. William Browne, in the seventeenth century, did indeed say of him :—‘‘There are few such swaines as he Now a dayes for harmony,’—but this critical judgment has not been endorsed by readers before or since. What recommends Hoccleve to us is his deep and genuine respect for Chaucer, the candid, even if contrite, relish with which he talks about himself, and his direct commonsense handling of his work. He has no “aureate language,” no rhetorical colors; he is too honest to delay his advance about his business by playing with words, and too clearheaded not to see the way to state that business. If Chaucer tried to teach Hoccleve to write, it was because Chaucer saw in Hoccleve the pos- sibilities which are still to be seen. In studying him we study some one who was very little of a writer, but a good deal of a man.
THOMAS HOCCLEVE 57
SELECT REFERENCE LIST AND BIBLIOGRAPHY III
Manuscripts Of the Shorter Poems en masse: HM 111 of the Huntington Library, California, formerly Phillipps 8151. Described by L. Toulmin Smith in Anglia 5:20, and by G. Mason in his ed. of six poems from it in 1796. Contents printed EETS edition, vol. i, 1892. HM 744 of the same library, formerly Ashburnham Appendix cxxxiii. Contents, except Learn to Die, are printed EETS ed., ii, 1925. Its copy of the Legend of the Virgin was ed. for the Chaucer Soc. in 1902; see my Manual, p. 444. Durham Cathedral V iii,9. Texts printed EETS ed., vol. i. Egerton 615 of the Brit. Mus. Texts printed EETS ed., iii, 1897. Of Single Shorter Poems: The Letter of Cupid. Fairfax 16, Bodley 638, Tanner 346, Digby 181, Selden B 24, all of the Bodleian Library. In Univ. Libr. Cambr., Ff. i,6. In Durham Cathedral V ii, 13, a Troilus MS; this text is unpubd., uncollated, and unmentioned either by Skeat, vii: 217, or in my Manual, p. 434. In HM 744. A late copy is in the Bannatyne MS. The poem was once in Longleat 258; see my Manual, p. 434, and p. 103 here. The Mother of God. Selden B 24 of the Bodleian; HM 111 as above; Advocates Libr., Edin- burgh, 18, 2, 8. To Henry V, for money. Fairfax 16. Text of Phillipps 8151 is printed EETS i: 62. Of the “Series” of Linked Poems, i.e., Complaint, Dialogue, two Gesta Romanorum stories, Learn to Die. Bodley 221, of the Bodleian, has the Series, Lydgate’s Dance Macabre, and the Regement of Princes. Laud 735, of the same library, has the same poems. Selden supra 53, same library, has the Regement (impf.), Series, and Dance Macabre. The lost Coventry School MS (see my Manual, p. 354) contained the Regement, the Series, the Dance Macabre, etc. Digby 185, of the Bodl. Libr. has the Regement and the two tales from the Series. Royal 17 D vi, Brit. Mus., has the Regement and part of the Series. Bodl. Eng. poet. d 4 has fragments of the two Tales of the Series. The MS formerly Phillipps 8267 (present owner unknown) has fragments of the Complaint. Of the Regement of Princes (see also under “Series” above). Alone in the codex. Brit. Mus. Arundel 38, Harley 4866, Royal 17 C xiv, Royal 17 D xviii, Royal 17 D xix, Sloane 1212, Sloane 1825.—Univ. Libr. Cambr. Gg vi, 17, Hh iv, 11, Kk i, 3; Corp. Christi Coll. 496, Queen’s Coll. 12, St. John’s Coll. 223; McClean 185.—Bodl. Ashmole 40, Douce 158, Dugdale 45, Rawlinson poe- try 10; Rawl. poetry 168—Advocates Libr., Edinb., 19, 1, 11, and Edinburgh Univ. D. b. vi. 7—Lord Amherst’s MS, now owned by Wilfrid Merton of London. The Ashburnham (paper) MS, now owned by Quaritch.
58 THOMAS HOCCLEVE
With various other works, not by Hoccleve. 3rit. Mus. Adds, 18632, Arundel 59, Phillipps 1099 (in hands of Rosenbach), Phillipps 8980, Trin. Coll. Cambr. R 3, 22. With various other works, not by Hoccleve. Brit. Mus. Harley 116, Harley 372, Harley 4826, Harley 7333 (dialogue only). Ellesmere 26 A 13, now Huntington (See JEGPh 9: 225 and MLNotes 25: 126). Soc. Antiquaries 134, McClean 182.
In the Harvard University Library, MS Eng. 532 F, is the transcript made from Harley 4866 (and Royal 17 D xix) by W. H. Black in 1843, in preparation for his projected Percy Society edition of the Regement, never carried out.
A page of Brit. Mus. Adds 18622 is reprod. in Garnett and Gosse’s English Literature i, to face p. 190, and is wrongly marked as from the Siege of Thebes, in the same MS. It is from the Regement of Princes.
A page of HM 744 (then Ashburnham MS) is reprod. EETS ed. i, to face page xxviii.
A page of Durham V iii, 9 is reprod. EETS ed. i, to face p. 242. Jbid., p. xlix, Fur- nivall decides against either the Ashburnham, the Durham, or the Phillips as an Hoccleve autograph. See also Kern’s Verslagen as below, p. 372.
A page of Durham V ii, 13 is reprod. by Root, The Manuscripts of Chaucer’s Troilus Chaucer Soc. 1914, to face p. 12; description on p. 11. The Troilus is however in a hand different from that of the Hoccleve poem.
Brit. Mus. Adds. 24062, a collection of Privy Seal documents, is in Hoccleve’s hand.
Editions
The standard edition of Hoccleve is pubd. by the EETS in 3 vols., i (1892), ii (1925), iii (1897). Vol. iii, ed. by Gollancz, is of 40 pages, and gives most of the con- tents of the then Ashburnham-Gollancz MS, now HM 744, including the 3 roundels already printed by Gollancz in Academy 1892 i: 542; the third of these is also printed EETS ed. i, page xxxviii foot. This vol. excludes the “Ash- burnham” copy of Learn to Die, because ‘fa good text” from the Durham MS is in 11:178.
George Mason pubd. in 1796 a volume entitled “Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, never before printed.” These poems, six in number, were taken from the Askew- Phillipps MS, now Huntington 111, then in Mason’s possession. Mason’s texts were used by Morley and by Wiilker as below.
The Letter of Cupid was printed with Chaucer’s works from 1532 to 1721; see my Manual p. 434. Urry’s 1721 text is repr. in Arber’s Engl. Garner iv: 54, in re- ed., iv: 13-31. The Fairfax MS text of the poem is printed EETS i:72 and Skeat vii: 217; the text of HM 744 is printed EETS ii: 20.
The Mother of God was printed with Chaucer’s works from 1532 to 1866; see my Manual, p. 438. In EETS ed. it is printed 1:52, from the then Phillipps MS.
The poem To the King—and the Knights of the Garter was printed with Chaucer’s works from 1532 to 1721; see my Manual, p. 459. It is printed EETS i: 41 and Skeat vii: 233 from HM 111, the former Phillipps MS.
The tale of Jonathas, forming part of the “Series”, as above, was incorporated by William Browne into one of his Eclogues, and printed with his Shepheard’s Pipe in 1614, repr. in Hazlitt’s ed. of Browne, 1869. Browne in a note says that all Hoccleve’s works are “perfect in my hands.” He once owned MSS Durham
THOMAS HOCCLEVE 59
V ii, 15 and 16 (Lydgate), Durham V iii, 9 (Hoccleve), Ashmole 40 (the Rege- ment of Princes), Ashmole 46 (Lydgate), Brit. Mus. Adds. 34360, Lansdowne 699, Stowe 952. The Regement of Princes, or De Regimine Principum, was printed by Thomas Wright, London, 1860, from Brit. Mus. Royal 17 D vi. It is in the EETS ed., vol. iii, from Harley 4866. An extract from the Laud text of the poem, stanzas 58-73, is printed by Furnivall in Queen Elizabeth’s Achademy, etc., EETS, pp. 105-8. The poem to the heretic Oldcastle, copied by R. James from an earlier text, was ed. by Grosart with James’ poems in 1880. It was printed from the then Phillips MS by L. Toulmin Smith in Anglia. 5:9-43; Furnivall in EETS ed: i, page xliii, notes four errors in her text. The poem is in EETS i:8, from HM 111. The story of the Virgin and her Sleeveless Garment was printed by the Chaucer Soc. 1902; see my Manual, p. 444. The poem is printed EETS ii:15, divided by the editor into two parts. In JEGPh 8:260 MacCracken prints, from MS Univ. Libr. Cambr. Kk i, 6, a religious poem in ten eight-line stanzas for which he suggests Hoccleve’s authorship. Extracts from Hoccleve are in:— Ward’s English Poets, i:124-28.—Skeat’s Specimens of English Lit. 1394-1579, pp. 13-22—Wiilker’s Altengl. Lesbuch, ii: 47-56—Morley’s Shorter Engl. Poems, pp. 57-64.—Manly’s Engl. Poetry 1170-1892, p. 47.—Neilson and Webster’s Chief British Poets, 199-207.
Studies
Aster, Das verhaltnis des altengl. gedichtes De Regimine Principum von Th. Hoccleve zu seinen Quellen. Leipzig diss., 1888.
Buchtenkirch, Der syntaktische gebrauch des infinitivs in Occleve’s De Regimine Principum. Jena diss., 1889.
Vollmer, Sprache und Reime des Londoners Hoccleve, in Anglia 21: 201 (1898).
Bock, Studien zu Th. Hoccleve’s Werken. Munich diss., 1900, pp. 68.
Haecker, Stiluntersuchungen zu Th. Hoccleve’s poetischen Werken. Marburg diss., 1914, pp. 104.
J. H. Kern, Een en ander over Th. Hoccleve en zijn werken, Amsterdam, 1915; pp. 365- 390 of Verslagen en Mededelingen der Koninkl. Akad. vy. Wetenschappen, reeks 5, vol. i.
——Zum texte einiger dichtungen Th. Hoccleve, in Anglia 39: 389-494 (1910).
Hoccleve’s Verszeile, in Anglia 40: 367-9.
——Date of Hoccleve’s Dialog, ibid., 370-73.
Der Schreiber Offorde, ibid., 374.
B. P. Kurtz, The Source of Hoccleve’s Lerne to Dye, in ModLangNotes 38 :337 (1923).
——The Prose of Hoccleve’s Lerne to Dye, ibid., 39: 56.
—The Relation of Hoccleve’s Lerne to Dye to its Source, in PMLA 40: 252-75.
Hoccleve is discussed:—Warton-Hazlitt, Hist. Eng. Poetry, iii: 42-7—Morley’s Engl. Writers, vi, chap. 5—ten Brink’s Hist. Eng. Lit., ii: 212-220.—Jusserand’s Lit. Hist. Eng. People, i: 501-3—Courthope’s Hist. Eng. Poetry, i: 333-40—Cambr.
Hist. Eng. Lit., ii, chap. 8—Garnett and Gosse’s Engl. Lit., i:192-94.—Saints- bury’s Eng. Prosody, i: 231-4.
60 THOMAS HOCCLEVE
To the comment upon Hoccleve’s verse in the EETS introd. add my paper in ModPhil 23:129 ff., on the Nine-Syllabled Pentameter Line in some Post-Chaucerian Manuscripts.
Notes on Hoccleve’s Reg. Princes text are in MLReview 4: 235.
The MS Huntington 111, formerly Phillipps 8151, was described by Lucy Toulmin Smith, Anglia 5:20-21, as a small octavo of 8% by 6% inches, containing 47 vellum leaves and bound in old dark leather stamped with the royal arms of England. It is said to have belonged to Prince Henry, son of James the First; since then, to Askew, G. Mason, Bishop Heber, and Sir Thomas Phillipps. It is a plain MS, with only two small colored initials, in a fifteenth-century hand but with headings in another and larger hand, probably contemporary. It contains 16 complete poems and a Complaint of the Virgin wrongly thrust in between two leaves of another poem; Tyrwhitt, whose letter to Mason is fastened inside the cover, suggests that this transfer was perhaps made to conceal the fact that the Complaint, once the first poem of the MS, is im- perfect at beginning.
The codex is of careful and consistent orthography, and has some marks of punc- tuation which may be noted. These are of three sorts: the inverted semicolon, used apparently as a comma; the mark of interrogation, which is like ours but reversed; and a sign somewhat similar, but with a flattened curve and tipped very much down to the right. The first sign appears in Male Régle, end of line 17, in 319 after why; in 367 after stele; in To Carpenter, line 26, after is, and in To Bedford 14, 18, after | colours, mis. The second sign is in Male Régle 37, in To Somer 22. The third is in Male Régle 265 after A; Mason here printed Ah, Furnivall As. It is also in To Carpenter, end of line 24.
For revision of the EETS texts of these poems with the MS I am indebted t the kindness of Capt. R. B. Haselden, Keeper of the Manuscripts in the Huntington Library, California.
HOCCLEVE’S MALE REGLE [MS Huntington 111, fol. 16 verso] CY ENSUYT LA MALE REGLE DE T. HOCCLEUE
1 Of ioie / and ful of seekly heuynesse 15 O precious tresor inconparable Al poore of ese / & ryche of euel fare O ground & roote of prosperitee 3 O excellent richesse commendable
porien alk, Peiecane be If bt thy fauour twynne from a wight
Smal is his ese / & greet is his greuance
Who may susteene thyn aduersitee 5 : What wight may him avante of worldly aaa / is lyf / thyn hate sleeth doum welthe
Who may compleyne thy disseuerance 20 Bettre than I pt of myn ignorance
Vn to seeknesse am knyt / thy mortel fo 2 Now can I knowe feeste fro penaunce And whil I was wt thee / kowde I nat so
But if he fully stande in grace of thee Eerthely god / piler of lyf / thow helthe
Whil thy power / and excellent vigour
As was plesant vn to thy worthynesse Regned in me / & was my gouernour Than was I wel / tho felte I no duresse Tho farsid was I with hertes gladnesse And now my body empty is & bare
4 My grief and bisy smert cotidian 25 So me labouren & tormenten sore Pt what thow art now / wel remembre I can
MALE REGLE 61
And what fruyt is in keepynge of thy lore
Had I thy power knowen or this yore
As now thy fo conpellith me to knowe 30
Nat sholde his lym han cleued to my gore
For al his aart / ne han me broght thus lowe :
But I haue herd men seye longe ago
Prosperitee is blynd / & see ne may
And verifie I can wel / it is so
For I my self put haue it in assay
Whan I was weel / kowde I considere it? nay
But what / me longed aftir nouelrie
As yeeres yonge yernen day by day
And now my smert accusith my folie 40
6 Myn vnwar yowthe kneew nat what it wroghte This woot I wel / whan fro thee twynned shee But of hir ignorance hir self shee soghte And kneew nat bt shee dwellyng was wt thee For to a wight were it greet nycetee 45 His lord or freend wityngly for toffende Lest pt the weighte of his aduersitee The fool oppresse / & make of him an ende ;
From hennes foorth wole I do reuerence
Vn to thy name / & holde of thee in cheef 50
And werre make & sharp resistence
Ageyn thy fo & myn pt cruel theef
Pt vndir foote / me halt in mescheef
So thow me to thy grace reconcyle
O now thyn help / thy socour and releef 55
And I for ay / mis reule wole exyle
8 But thy mercy excede myn offense The keene assautes of thyn aduersarie Me wole oppresse with hir violence No wondir / thogh thow be to me con-
trarie 60
My lustes blynde han causid thee to varie
Fro me / thurgh my folie & inprudence
Wherfore / I wrecche / curse may & warie
The seed and fruyt of chyldly sapience
9 As for the more paart / youthe is rebel Vn to reson / & hatith hir doctryne
Regnynge which /it may nat stande wel With yowthe / as fer as wit can ymagyne O yowthe / allas / why wilt thow nat enclyne And vn to reuled resoun bowe thee 70 Syn resoun is the verray streighte lyne Pt ledith folk / vn to felicitee 10 Ful seelde is seen / pt yowthe takith heede Of perils pt been likly for to fall For haue he take a purpos / bt moot neede 75 Been execut / no conseil wole he call His owne wit he deemeth best of all And foorth ther with / he renneth bry- dillees As he pt nat betwixt hony and gall Can iuge / ne the werre fro the pees 80
11
All othir mennes wittes he despisith They answeren no thyng to his entente His rakil wit only to him souffysith
His hy presumpcioun nat list consente To doon as pt Salomon wroot & mente 85 Pt redde men by conseil for to werke Now youthe now / thow sore shalt
repente Thy lightlees wittes dull of reson derke
12 My freendes seiden vn to me ful ofte My mis reule me cause wolde a fit 90 And redden me in esy wyse & softe A lyte and lyte to withdrawen it But pt nat mighte synke in to my wit So was the lust y rootid in myn herte And now I am so rype vn to my pit Pt scarsely I may it nat asterte
13 Who so cleer yen hath & can nat see Ful smal of ye auaillith the office / 4 Right so / syn reson youen is to me For to discerne a vertu from a vice 100 If I nat can with resoun me cheuice But wilfully fro reson me withdrawe Thogh I of hire haue no benefice No wondir / ne no fauour in hir lawe 14 Reson me bad / & redde as for the beste To ete and drynke in tyme attemprely But wilful youthe nat obeie leste Vn to pt reed / ne sette nat ther by I take haue of hem bothe outrageously
62 THOMAS HOCCLEVE
And out of tyme / nat two yeer or three LTO
But xxti wyntir past continuelly
Excesse at borde hath leyd his knyf wt me
15
The custume of my repleet abstinence My greedy mowth Receite of swich out-
rage And hondes two / as woot my negli- gence 115
Thus han me gyded / & broght in seruage Of hire pt werreieth eucry age Seeknesse y meene riotoures whippe Habundantly bt paieth me my wage
So bt me neithir daunce list ne skippe
16
The outward signe of Bachus & his lure Pt at his dore hangith day by day /
Excitith folk / to taaste of his moisture So often / pt man can nat wel seyn nay For me I seye / I was enclyned ay 125 With outen daunger thidir for to hye me But if swich charge / vp on my bak lay That I moot it forbere / as for a tyme
17
Or but I were nakidly bystad
By force of the penylees maladie