drawn out by repetitions, the most minute details, garnished with references to his text, like a man who, with his eyes glued to his Aristotle and his Ovid, a slave of his musty parchments, can do nothing but copy and string his rhymes together. Scholars even in old age, they seem to believe that every truth, all wit, is in their great wood-bound books; that they have no need to find out and invent for themselves; that their whole business is to repeat; that this is, in fact, man's business. The scholastic system had enthroned the dead letter, and peopled the world with dead understandings. After Gower come Occleve and Lydgate.' 'My father Chaucer would willingly have taught me,' says Occleve, but I was dull, and learned little or nothing.' He paraphrased in verse a treatise of Egidius, on government; these are moralities. There are others, on compassion, after Augustine, and on the art of dying; then love-tales; a letter from Cupid, dated from his court in the month of May. Love and moralities, that is, abstractions and refinements, were the taste of the time; and so, in the time of Lebrun, of Esménard, at the close of contemporaneous French literature, they produced collections of didactic poems, and odes to Chloris. As for the monk Lydgate, he had some talent, some imagination, especially in high-toned descriptions: it was the last flicker of a dying literature; gold received a golden coating, precious stones were placed upon diamonds, ornaments multiplied and made fantastic; as in their dress and buildings, so in their style. Look at the costumes of Henry IV. and Henry v., monstrous heart-shaped or horn-shaped head-dresses, long sleeves covered with ridiculous designs, the plumes, and again the oratories, armorial tombs, little gaudy chapels, like conspicuous flowers under the naves of the Gothic perpendicular. When we can no more speak to the soul, we try to speak to the eyes. This is what Lydgate does, nothing more. Pageants or shows are required of him, 'disguisings' for the Company of goldsmiths; a mask before the king, a May-entertainment for the sheriffs of London, a drama of the creation for the festival of Corpus Christi, a masquerade, a Christmas show; he gives the plan and furnishes the verses. In this matter he never runs dry; two hundred and fifty-one poems are attributed to him. Poetry thus conceived becomes a manufacture; it is composed by the yard. Such was the judgment of the Abbot of St. Albans, who, having got him to translate a legend in verse, pays a hundred shillings for the whole, verse, writing, and illuminations, placing the three works on a level. 1 1420, 1430. 2 This is the title Froissart (1397) gave to his collection when presenting it to Richard II. 3 Lebrun, 1729-1807; Esménard, 1770-1812. Lydgate, The Destruction of Troy-description of Hector's chapel. Especially read the Pageants or Solemn Entries. In fact, no more thought was required for one than for the others. His three great works, The Fall of Princes, The Destruction of Troy, and The Siege of Thebes, are only translations or paraphrases, verbose, erudite, descriptive, a kind of chivalrous processions, coloured for the twentieth time, in the same manner, on the same vellum. The only point which rises above the average, at least in the first poem, is the idea of Fortune,' and the violent vicissitudes of human life. If there was a philosophy at this time, this was it. They willingly narrated horrible and tragic histories; gather them from antiquity down to their own day; they were far from the trusting and passionate piety which felt the hand of God in the government of the world; they saw that the world went blundering here and there like a drunken man. A sad and gloomy world, amused by external pleasures, oppressed with a dull misery, which suffered and feared without consolation or hope, isolated between the ancient spirit in which it had no living hope, and the modern spirit whose active science it ignored. Fortune, like a black smoke, hovers over all, and shuts out the sight of heaven. They picture it as follows: 'Her face semyng cruel and terrible And by disdaynè menacing of loke, An hundred handes she had, of eche part Which cast another in grete adversite.' They look upon the great unhappy ones, a captive king, a dethroned queen, assassinated princes, noble cities destroyed,3 lamentable spectacles as exhibited in Germany and France, and of which there will be plenty in England; and they can only regard them with a harsh resignation. Lydgate ends by reciting a commonplace of mechanical piety, by way of consolation. The reader makes the sign of the cross, yawns, and goes away. In fact, poetry and religion are no longer capable of suggesting a genuine sentiment. Authors copy, and copy again. Hawes copies the House of Fame of Chaucer, and a sort of allegorical amorous poem, after the Roman de la Rose. Barclay translates the Mirror of Good Manners and the Ship of Fools. Continually we meet with dull abstractions, used up and barren; it is the scholastic phase of poetry. If anywhere there is an accent of 5 1 See the Vision of Fortune, a gigantic figure. In this painting he shows both feeling and talent. 2 Lydgate, Fall of Princes. Warton, ii. 280. 3 The War of the Hussites, The Hundred Years' War, and The War of the Roses. About 1506. The Temple of Glass. Passetyme of Pleasure. 6 About 1500. greater originality, it is in this Ship of Fools, and in Lydgate's Dance of Death, bitter buffooneries, sad gaieties, which, in the hands of artists and poets, were having their run throughout Europe. They mock at each other, grotesquely and gloomily; poor, dull, and vulgar figures, shut up in a ship, or made to dance on their tomb to the sound of a fiddle, played by a grinning skeleton. At the end of all this mouldy talk, and amid the disgust which they have conceived for each other, a clown, a tavern Triboulet,' composer of little jeering and macaronic verses, Skelton makes his appearance, a virulent pamphleteer, who, jumbling together French, English, Latin phrases, with slang, and fashionable words, invented words, intermingled with short rhymes, fabricates a sort of literary mud, with which he bespatters Wolsey and the bishops. Style, metre, rhyme, language, art of every kind, is at an end; beneath the vain parade of official style there is only a heap of rubbish. Yet, as he says, 2 It is full of political animus, sensual liveliness, English and popular instincts; it lives. It is a coarse life, still elementary, swarming with ignoble vermin, like that which appears in a great decomposing body. It is life, nevertheless, with its two great features which it is destined to display the hatred of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which is the Reformation; the return to the senses and to natural life, which is the Renaissance. 1 The court fool in Victor Hugo's drama of Le Roi s'amuse.-TR. 2 Died 1529; Poet Laureate 1489. His Bouge of Court, his Crown of Laurel, his Elegy on the Death of the Earl of Northumberland, are well written, and belong to official poetry. BOOK II. THE RENAISSANCE. CHAPTER I. The Pagan Renaissance, 1. MANNERS OF THE TIME. L. Idea which men had formed of the world, since the dissolution of the old society-How and why human inventiveness reappears-The form of the spirit of the Renaissance-The representation of objects is imitative, characteristic, and complete. II. Why the ideal changes-Improvement of the state of man in Europe-In England - Peace Industry-Commerce - Pasturage · Agriculture Growth of public wealth — Buildings and furniture - The palace, meals and habits-Court pageantries-Celebrations under Elizabeth - Masques under James I. III. Manners of the people-Pageants-Theatres-Village feasts-Pagan develop ment. IV. Models-The ancients-Translation and study of classical authors - Sympathy for the manners and mythology of the ancients-The modernsTaste for Italian writings and ideas-Poetry and painting in Italy were pagan-The ideal is the strong and happy man, limited by the present world. 2. POETRY. I. The English Renaissance is the Renaissance of the Saxon genius. II. The forerunners-The Earl of Surrey-His feudal and chivalrous life-His English individual character-His serious and melancholy poems-His conception of intimate love. III. His style-His masters, Petrarch and Virgil-His progress, power, precocious perfection-Birth of art-Weaknesses, imitation, research-Art incomplete. IV. Growth and completion of art-Euphues and fashion-Style and spirit of the Renaissance-Copiousness and irregularity-How manners, style, and spirit correspond-Sir Philip Sydney-His education, life, character-His learning, gravity, generosity, forcible expression-The Arcadia-Exaggeration and mannerism of sentiments and style-Defence of Poesie-Eloquence and energy-His sonnets-Wherein the body and the passions of the |