VS y 933 ‘ha Rede Gk eS: ' Dai Sones , PRES) ¥; ea 9, Henena vai } Flint " teats a fai pa ares ie MS ta aa | haar } = eee at Wed a Hislene i ya) wasnt thas V3 94) AN tte nig WEEE eins y 5 A ra stczthies age xd ‘= briny lt baa A Has Waal 3 Pdign « a it Es Shit gee ot Ay FPF wie Return this book on or before the Latest Date stamped below. A charge is made on all overdue books. University of Illinois Library on q nnn oO * ' APR ob M32 | A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE BY WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AND ROBERT MORSS LOVETT ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS: IQII oo einen aise a 7 } / nO ear eT ee OL? 1) ete Paw ee eager ee Ge ce fs + COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS OHAPTER ‘VIL. VIII. IX. CONTENTS PAGE IPHES ANGLO-SAXON: PERIOD | Guess 00 bce le a eek THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD. .. . 2 «© « Bh THE AGE OF CHAUCER e e ® e e e e e e 35. al THE RENAISSANCE: NON-DRAMATIC LITERATURE TO THE DEATH OF SPENSER ....... 6Q0-~ THE RENAISSANCE: THE DRAMA BEFORE SHAKE- SPEARE e e ° e . ° s ® ® ® a e e e 88. = iss Si THE RENAISSANCE: SHAKESPEARE .... . 106 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: SHAKESPEARE’S CONTEMPORARIES AND SUCCESSORS IN THE DRAMA s . . J J e e s . se e . e ee 124 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: NOoON- DRAMATIC LITERATURE BEFORE THE RESTORATION. . 1389 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: THE RESTORA- TION . e . e J * es J s s s e . es . 174 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: THE REIGN OF CA SRICTSM Ge Me. 27s, (Ch NU 2 Seo i OO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: THE NOVEL . . 229 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: THE REVIVAL OF PLOAGA DET TOYS bails. eee WM airs gos les |. Wn et SOO a vii Vill CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGH XIII. Tur NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE TRIUMPH OF FROMAN DICISM sec coctha hile oe tas 0 ane eoe a itz mee oa XIV. THe NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE VICTORIAN DSO Vee LONE GE) es" Niro PIL sig eae oe, eRe RTCA SE | 18) XV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE NOVEL. . . 3538 READING GUID Ws date Gale Ee ik eee SOO INDEX e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e ° e e 413 PREFACE SEVERAL dangers lie before the writer of an elementary history of literature. He may conceive his task too ambi- tiously, and in his zeal for thoroughness may lose that clearness and simplicity of plan which is indispensable in the first presentation of a large subject. He may, on the other hand, be tempted to simplify his matter artificially, and in so doing may fail to give the student any safe sub- structure upon which to build in later study. Again, in striving to be scientific, he may be only dry; or in a _, Wholesome desire to be entertaining, he may be only gos- © sipy or nebulous. The present volume, whether or not it ~~ avoids these dangers, has been prepared with full conscious- ness of them. An attempt has here been made to present the history of English literature from the earliest times to ‘our own day, in a historical scheme simple enough to be apprehended by young students, yet accurate and sub- stantial enough to serve as a permanent basis for study, however far the subject is pursued. But within the limits ~ of this formal scheme, the fact has been held constantly in : mind that literature, being the vital and fluid thing it is, = must be taught, if at all, more by suggestion, and by stim- ‘ulation of the student’s own instinctive mental life, than by dogmatic assertion. More than any other branch of study, literature demands on the part of the teacher an attitude of respect toward the intelligence of the student; and if at any point the authors of this book may seem to have v DLQON9O5 ae Feet See ene CR a : on ie ‘sane eRe. xj Seay —— ae ee Bae vi PREFACE taken too much alertness of mind for granted, their de- fence must be that only by challenge and invitation can | any permanent result in the way of intellectual growth aa \ ve accomplished. The historian of English literature deals with the most fascinating of stories, the story of the imagi- native career of a gifted race; he is in duty bound not to ___ sheapen or to dull his theme, but, so far as in him lies, to ee give those whom he addresses a realizing sense of the mag- : Es t | i | AW nitude of our common heritage in letters. To do this, he a must work in the literary spirit, and with freedom of ap- a iat to all the latent capabilities of his reader’s mind. | | ‘The proportions of this book have been carefully con- sidered. A full half of the space has been given to the last two centuries, and much more to the nineteenth cen- - | tury than to the eighteenth. These and other apportion- | ments of space have been made, not on absolute grounds, but with the design of throwing into prominence what is most important for a student to learn upon his first ap- proach to the subject. The chief figures in each era have been set in relief, and the minor figures have been grouped _ about them, in an endeavor thus to suggest their relative _ significance. A full working bibliography, including texts, is | biography, and criticism, has been added, in the hope that it may be of assistance not only in the current work of the classroom, but also as a guide for later study. The thanks of the authors are due to Professor F. N. ‘Robinson, of Harvard University, for his kindness in criti- cising the contents of the early chapters. oe er bg Wey. VE, R. M. L. owe , ' Oe. Fe Oe ana STOR Keatee cop iii Ree ie i ut wes J ms are Mo St BR ER IEE peo (tae Oy aan {AUS i Sa PMS 9 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE fe. + aT es } Ps «Arab Sandennsen arya op i A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER I THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD I To find the beginnings of English literature we must go back to a time when the ancestors of the English people lived on the continent of Europe, and spoke a tongue which, though related in its roots to modern English, is unintelli- gible to us without special study. Anglo-Saxon, or Old¥ English, bel ongs s to the low-German family of languages, of. which Dutch is the best modern representative ; and they” men who spoke it lived, when history first discovers them; along the g the _German ocean from the mouth of the pe angto- Rhine to the peninsula of Jutland. They were S4%00 Tribes. divided into three principal branches : the Saxons, dwelling near the mouth of the Elbe; the Angles, inhabiting the southwest part of Denmark; and the Jutes, extending north of the Angles into modern J utland. How extensive these tribes were, and how far into the interior their territories reached, we do not know. That portion of them which concerns us, dwelt along ,, Home: the sea; their early poetry gives glimpses of EIT i tribal or family settlements, bounded on ae one side by wild moors and dense forests, where dwelt ‘monstrous creatures of mist and darkness, and on the other 1 | | 2 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE by the stormy northern ocean, filled likewise with shapes of shadowy fear. Whether from superstition or from the physical difficulty of the country, these shore tribes seem not to have cared to penetrate far inland. Their two ) pas- sions, war and wandering, found satisfaction i in the life of the sea. As soon as spring ‘had unlocked the harbors, their boats would push out in search of booty and adventure: sometimes to wreak blood-feud on a neighboring tribe, sometimes to harry a monastery on the coasts of Roman Gaul, or to sail along the white cliffs of England, their future home. ‘This sea-faring life, full of danger and change, was the fruitful source of early poetry, When-) ever an Anglo-Saxon poet mentions the sea his lines kin- dle. Upon it he lavishes a wealth ofimaginative epithet ; it is the “‘swan-road,” the ‘‘sealbath,” the “ path of the whales.” And the ship is treated with equal enthusiasm ; it is the ‘‘sea-steed,” the ‘‘ wave-house of warriors” ; its keel is ‘‘wreathed with foam like the neck of a swan.” The darker aspects of the sea are given with equal fervor. It is characteristic of the grim nature of the Anglo-Saxon | hat he should fill ‘with te terror and gloom ' the element which \ e most loved to inhabit. — . ‘he poetry which has come down to us from this early — period has been worked over by later hands and given a Their Ree Christian coloring. But from other sources we Bsion know what were the primitive gods of the race: Tiu, a mysterious and dreadful deity of war; Woden, father of the later dynasty of gods, and patron of seers and tray- ellers; Thor, the god of thunder; Frea, mother of the gods and giver of fruitfulness. These are commemorated in our names for the days of the week, Tuesday, Wednes day, Thursday, and Friday. The rites of Eostre, a my: terious goddess of the dawn, survive, though strangely « tered, in the Christian festival of Easter. In studying t early poetry, we must put out of our minds, as far as can, all those ideals ‘of life and conduct which. come f WwW ‘* THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD 3 Christianity, and remember that we have to do with men whose gods were only magnified images of their own wild natures: men who delighted in bloodshed and in plunder, and were much given to deep drinking in the mead-hall ; but_who nevertheless were sensitive to blame and praise, were full of rude chivalry and dignity, and were alert to the poetry of life, to its mystery and its pathos. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors had in an eminent degree also that passion which gives the first impulse to literature among a primitive people—love of glory. When the first recorded hero of the race, Beowulf, has met his death, and ‘his followers are recalling his noble nature, they say as ‘their last word that ‘“‘he was of all world-kings the most — desirous of praise,” ‘Twas net onoueh for such men ae ES that they should spend their lives in glorious adventures ; _they desired to see their names and their deeds spread among distant peoples and handed down to unborn gener- ations. _Hence the poet, who alone could insure this fame, was held in high esteem) Two classes of sing- Their ers were recognized, first the gleeman (gledman), Bit ane who did not create his own songs, but merely (like the Grok che eaTiaty Chantel shat Pete Tossed trom oth- ers; and second the scép, the poet proper, who took the « - crude material of histone Teen which tay about him, and shaped it into song. Sometimes the scép was perma- nently attached to the court of an aetheling, or lord, was granted land and treasure, and was raised by virtue of his poet-craft to the same position of honor which the other - followers of the aetheling held by virtue of their prowess in battle. Sometimes he wandered from court to court, de- pending for a hospitable reception upon the curiosity of his host concerning the stories he had to chant. Two yery ancient bits of poetry, one of them probably the oldest in our literature, tell of the fortunes of the scép. One of them deals with the wandering and the other with the stationary singer. 4 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE The first is oe fragment known as ‘‘ Widsith,” or ‘“‘ The Far-wanderer.” The poem opens, — Widsith spake, un- locked his word hoard; he who many a tribe had met on earth, who had travelled through many a folk.” Then follows a list of famous princes of the past, an enumeration of the various peoples and countries the bard has visited, and praises of those princes who have entertained him generously. He declares that he has been ‘‘ with Cesar, who had sway over the joyous cities,” and even with the Israelites, the Egyptians, and the Indians. The poem ends with a general description of the wandering singer’s life, touched at the close with the stoic melancholy which occurs so often in Anglo-Saxon poetry ; ;—‘* Thus roving, with song-devices aH the gleemen through many lands. . « « Ever north or south they find one knowing in songs and liberal of gifts, who before his court will exalt his grandeur and show his earl-ship ; until all departs, light and life together.” ‘This fragment has been held by some scholars to date, in part at least, from the fourth century. If so it is the oldest bit of verse in any modern language, and with it English literature ‘‘unlocks its word-hoard.” _ ALT SE j0ems dealing - with é the Scop i is probably not nearly so old. It iscalled * Deor’s ies Lament,” and again the scép himself speaks. His Peace: skill has been eclipsed by another singer, Heor- renda, and his lord has taken away from him his land-right and his place at court, in order to bestow them upon the suc- cessful rival. The poet comforts himself by recalling other misfortunes which men_and women in past time have lived to overcome, and ends each rude strophe with the refrain, «That he endured, this also ee I? The aa nature Widsith. <_ a est sense. THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD 9) But by far the most important work which remains to us from the pagan period of Anglo-Saxon poetry is the long poem entitled, from its hero, Beowulf. It Pg iat is something over three thousand lines in length, ye and, though the manuscript is broken here and there, these breaks are not sufficient to mar the effect of artistic com- pleteness. It perhaps existed at first in the form of short songs, which were sung among the Angles and _ Jutes, inhabiting what is now Denmark, and among the Goths, in southern Sweden. Probably as early as the sixth cen- . tury these lays had begun to coalesce, but just when the poem took its present form we do not know.* The story of the poem is as follows :— Tic thete ES oF The Werte DUNS Tas Ditto imeclt————_ near the sea a great hall, named Heorot, where he may sit with his thanes at the mead-drinking, and listen to the chanting of the gleemen. Fora while he lives in happi- ness, and is known far and wide as a splendid and liberal prince. But one night there comes from the grothgar wild march-land, the haunt of all unearthly and _ 44 Grendel. malign creatures, a terrible monster named Grendel. En- tering the mead-hall he slays thirty of the sleeping Danes, and carries their corpses away to his lair. ‘The next night the same thing is repeated. No mortal power seems able to cope with the gigantic foe. In the winter nights Grendel couches in the splendid hall, defiling all its bright ornaments. For twelve winters this scourge afflicts the West-Danes, until Hrothgar’s spirit is broken. At last the story of Grendel’s deeds crosses the sea to Gothland, where young Beowulf dwells at the court of his uncle, King Hygelac. He determines to go to Hrothgar’s assistance, With fifteen companions he embarks, ‘*‘ De- parted then over the wavy sea the foamy-necked floater, * In all probability the development of Beowulf into a complete poem took place largely on English soil, and was completed by the end of the eighth centurv, = * 6 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE most like toa bird.” At dawn of the second day the voy: agers catch sight of the promontories of Hrothgar’s land ; The Coming 20d soon, from the top of the cliffs, they behold of Beowulf. in the vale beneath them the famous hall, “rich and gold-variegated, most glorious of dwellings under the firmament.” The young heroes in their “ shining war byr- nies,” * and with their spears like a ‘‘ grey ashwood above their heads,” are ushered into the hall ‘‘where Hrothgar sits, old and hairless, amid his band of earls.” Beowulf craves permission to cleanse Heorot of its pest, and Hroth- gar consents that the Goths shall abide Grendel’s coming, in the hall that night. Meanwhile, until darkness draws on, the thanes of Hrothgar and the followers of Beowulf sit drinking mead, “the bright sweet liquor,” and listening to the songs of thegleeman. The feast draws to a close when Wealtheow, Hrothgar’s queen, after solemnly handing the mead-cup to her lord and to Beowulf, and bidding them *“‘be blithe at the beer-drinking,” goes through the hall distributing gifts among the thanes. The king, queen, and their followers then withdraw to another building for the night, while Beowulf and his men lie down, each with his armor hung on the nail above his head, to wait for the coming of Grendel. All fall asleep oN Beowulf, who ‘awaits in angry mood the battle-meeting.” The coming of the monster is described with Soy aas force. ‘‘ Then came from the moors, under the misty theFignt hills, Grendel stalking. . . Straightway he inthe Hall, yyshed on the door, fast with fire-hardened . bands. . . On the variegated floor the fiend trod; he went wroth of mood, from his eyes stood a horrid light like flame. . . Hesawin the hall many warriors sleeping, a kindred band. . . Then his heart laughed.” He seizes one of the warriors, bites his ‘‘ bone-casings,” drinks the blood from his veins, and greedily devours him-even to ‘ae hands and feet. Next he makes for Beowulf, but the * Corselets of mail. THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD | t hero, who has in his hands the strength of thirty men, seizes the fiend with such a mighty hand-grip that he is terror-stricken and turns to flee. Beowulf keeps his grip, and a fearful struggle begins. The warriors, awakened by the combat and the “ horrid lay sung by God’s denier,” try to bring help with their swords, but no mortal weapon can wound Grendel. At last the monster wrenches his own arm from its socket and flees to his lair to die, leaving Beowulf to nail the ghastly trophy in triumph above the door of Heorot. 3 In the morning there is great rejoicing. The king, with the queen and her company of maidens, come through the meadows to gaze in wonder on the huge arm and claw nailed beneath the gold roof of the hall. When the even- ing feast begins, Beowulf sits between the two sons of the king, and receives the precious gifts,—jewels, rings, and a golden necklace,—which the queen presents to him. But at night-fall, when the warriors have again lain down to sleep in the hall, Grendel’s mother comes to take vengeance for her son. She seizes one of Hrothgar’s nobles, Aes- chere, and bears him away to her watery den. Beowulf vows to seek the new foe at the bottom of her fen-pool, and there grapple with her. With Hrothgar and a band of followers he goes along the cliffs |, o. , g z e Fight and windy promontories which bound the moor _ beneath the on the seaward side, until he comes to Grendel’s lair. (It is a sea-pool, shut in by precipitous rocks, and overhung by the shaggy trunks and aged writhen boughs of a ‘‘ joyless wood.” ‘Trembling passers-by have seen fire fleeting on the waves at night, and the hart wearied by the hounds will lie down and die on these banks rather than plunge into the unholy waters. ) The pool isso deep that it is a day’s space before Beowulf reaches the bottom. ‘Snakes and beasts of the shining deep make war on him as he de- scends. At last he finds himself in a submarine cave where the ‘“‘ mere-wife ” is lurking, and a ghastly struggle begins. 8 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Once the giantess throws Beowulf to the ground, and sitting astride his body draws out her broad short knife to despatch him ; but with a superhuman effort hc struggles up again, throws away his broken sword and seizes from a heap of arms a magic blade, forged by giants of old time ; with it he hews off the head of Grendel’s mother, and then that of Grendel, whose dead body he finds lying in the cave. So poisonous is the blood of Grendel that it melts the metal of the blade, leaving only the curved hilt in Beowulf’s hand. When he reappears with his trophies at the surface of the water, all have given him up for dead. Great is the jubilation when the hero appears with his thanes, and throws upon the floor of the mead-hall the two gigantic heads, which four men apiece can hardly carry. The second great episode of the poem is Beowulf’s fight with the Dragon of the Gold-hoard. Beowulf has been reigning as king for fifty years and is now an Beowulf ° . and ee old man, when calamity comes upon him and | his people in the shape of a monster of the serpent-kind, which flies by night enveloped in fire; and which, in revenge for the theft of a gold cup from its pre- cious hoard, burns the king’s hall. Old as he is, Beowulf fights the dragon single-handed. Heslays the monster in its lair, but himself receives his mortal hurt. The death of the old king is picturesque and touching. He bids his thane bring out from the dragon’ s den ine Death of Beo- gOld-treasure, the jewels, the curious gems,” in eo order that death may be softer to him, seeing ~ the wealth he has gained for his people. Wiglaf, entering the cave of the “‘old twilight-flier,” sees ‘‘dishes stand- ing, vessels of men of yore, footless, their ornaments fallen away ; there was many a helm old and rusty, and many armlets cunningly fastened,” and over the hoard droops a magic banner, “all golden, locked by arts of song,” from which a light is shed over the treasure. Beowulf gazes with dying eyes upon the precious things; then he asks THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD 9 that his thanes build for him a funeral barr ow ona prom- ontory of the sea, which the sailors, as they ¢‘ drive their foaming barks from afar over the mists of floods, may see and name Beowulf’s Mount.” Besides Beowulf, and the short poems Widsith and Deor’s Lament, mentioned above, two other pieces remain to us from the pagan period of Anglo-Saxon poetry.* They are both fragments. One, the EG ght at Finnsburg, full of ~~ savage vigor, throws light upon an obscure story referred to in Beowulf ; the other, Waldhere, is connected with the old German cycle of poems which were brought to- gether many centuries later as the Mebelungen Lied.) When we look at this early literature as a whole we can- not fail to be struck by its grimness. It has, to be sure, genial moments, moments even of tenderness, summary of es cncsaacentrticces 18 but for the most part the darker aspects of nat- E4ty Poetry. ire, storm and hail and mist, the wintry terror of the sea, are what the poet loves to dwell u ; and over the his friends and deadly to his foes, that is the whole dut of a man.) But a time was at hand when these fierce wor- shippers of ‘Thor and Woden were to hear a new gospel. Sweeping south westward 1 in their viking ships, they were to conquer a new home for themselves i in Britain; and there to be themselves conquered, not by arms, but i bands of eager monks who came from the seat of the Church in Rome and from Christianized. Ireland, preaching peace and goodwill. _ * It must be remembered that Beowulf is tinged with Christian color- ing, given 1 1 to ah no ‘doubt, by 1 the English monks who_ transcribed the manuscript. Still, iz. general tone it is pagan, and in origin continental. ncurses Sameer ESTES Ae I OOP ESSE 10 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE II. WHILE the literature we have just described was beginning to take form in the motherland of the Anglo-Saxon people, Englandbe- their future island-home was being made into a ences province of the Roman Empire. ‘The very earli- Invasions. — est; inhabitants of Br itain, that mysterious race which may have raised the huge circle of monoliths at Stonehenge, had given way—how early we do not know —to a Celtic-speaking people. Before the Roman con- quest this people spread over France, Spain, and all the British islands. The Celts were of an impetuous character, imaginative, curious, and quick to learn. The Roman historians tell us of their eagerness for news, of their de- light in clever speech and quick retort. Their early liter- ature shows a delicate fancy, a kind of wild grace and a love ‘of beauty y for its own sake, ‘strikingly i in contrast with the stern poetry of the Anglo-Saxon scép. But this very quickness of sympathy and of intelligence proved fatal to their national existence. When the Roman legions crossed from Gaul there was a short space of fierce resistance, and — then the Celts accepted, from curiosity as much as from compulsion, the imposing Roman civilization. Some of the more stubborn fled to the fastnesses of Wales and Scotland, and there continued even to our own day. their Celtic traditions ; but the greater part seem to have sub- mitted to the Rovian as if by a kind of fascination, even giving up their language to learn that of their conquerors. The Romans, like the English of our own day, carried wherever they went their splendid but somewhat rigid ciy- ilization, and by the end of the fourth century England was dotted with towns and villas where, amid-pillared por- ticoes, mosaic pavements, marble baths, forums and _ hip- podromes, a Roman emperor could find himself at home. This was the state of England when there began that remarkable series of movements on the part of the wild THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD fig f Germanic tribes, which we know as the “ migration.” About the end of the fourth century, urged by a common impulse, tribe after tribe swept southward ; some by sea, to harry the coasts of Gaul and Britain, some over the Alps and the Pyrenees, to batter at the gates of Rome, to plunder the rich isiands of the Mediterranean, and to found a king- dom in Africa. The Roman legions were recalled from Britain to guard the imperial city, and the Celtic ah aig! inhabitants, weakened by three centuries of civil- Saxon Inva- ized life, were left to struggle unaided against rage the pirate bands of Jutes, Saxons, and Angles, which ap- peared every spring in increasing numbers upon their coast. The Celts did not yield to these savage invaders so readily as they. had done to the polished Romans. From the time when the first band of Jutes landed on the isle of Thanet to the time when the invaders had subjugated the island and set up the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, a century and a half elapsed, during which all the monuments which Rome had left were ruined if not obliterated. During these years of struggle there began to grow up, about the person of an obscure Celtic leader, that cycle of stories which was to prove so fruitful of poetry both in France and England, —the legends of Ar thur, founder of the Round Table, and defender of the western Britons against the weakening» power of Rome and the growing fury of the barbarians. Many (¢ Celts fled, as in the times of the Roman invasion, into Wales and Scotland ; many were killed; but a great number were undoubtedly absorbed by the pring race. They communicated to that race its first leaven; they made it more sensitive and. receptive, and gave it a touch of extravagance. and. gayety, which, after being reinforced by similar elements in the temperament of the Norman- French invaders, was to blossom in the sweet humor of * Chaucer, i in the rich fancy of Spenser, and in the broad hu- - nity of Shakespeare. But this effect was not to be man- .est for along time to come. The literature which arose 12 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE in England after the Saxon conquest, shows little trace of it. The immediate influence was a religious one, and the poetry. we. shall now..consider_is..nearly all deeply colored with religious thought and feeling. The Christian teaching came into England in two differ- ent streams, one from Rome, one from. Ireland, which country had been won from heathenism several The Chris- ; : See pe of centuries before. The first stream began late in the sixth century, with the coming of Au- gustine. Little by little, after the advent of this great missionary among the Saxons in the south of England, the new creed drove out the old, winning its way by virtue of its greater ideality, and ie authority with which it spoke of man’s existence beyond the grave. This stream of religious influence which came from Rome, centred chiefly in south and central England, in the kingdom of Wessex. It produced | some schools of learning, but almost no literature. It is to the north and east, to the king- dom of Northumbria, which felt the influence of the Irish monks, that we must look for the first blossomings of Christian poetry in ‘England. Of all the monasteries which sprang up in Northumbria, in the train of the Celtic missionaries from Ireland, two are most famous because of their connection with litera- ture—Jarrow and Whitby. At Jarrow lived and died Baeda, known as the “ Venerable Bede,” a gen- tle, laborious scholar in whom all the learning of Northumbria was summed up. He wrote many books, nearly all in Latin, the most notable being the Ecclesvas- tical History of the English People (Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum), It is from a passage in this book that we know the story of Caedmon, a cowherd of Whitby, the first poet of Christian England. Bede tells us that when the inmates of the monastery were _ gathered together at the evening feast, and the harp was passed round for each to sing in bpra, Uaed mon would rise Bede. Caedmon. Pat , * ) \ THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD 15 and depart, for he was an unlettered man and knew noth- ing of the gleeman’s art. So it was for many years, until he was no longer young. One night, when he had thus left the cheerful company and gone to the stables to tend the cattle, he fell asleep and had a wonderful dream. The shining figure of the Lord appeared before him, saying, ‘*Caedmon, sing to me.” Caedmon answered, ‘‘ Behold, I ~ know not how to sing, and therefore I left the feast to- night.” ‘Still, sing now to me,” the Lord said. ‘‘ What then shall I sing?” asked Caedmon. ‘‘Sing the begin- ning of created things,” was the answer. Then in his dream Caedmon framed some verses of the Creation, which in the morning he wrote down, adding others to them. News of the wonderful gift which had been vouchsafed to the un- schooled man was carried to Hild, the abbess of the founda- tion, and she commanded portions of the Scripture to be read to him, that he might paraphrase them into verse. So it was done; and from this time on Caedmon’s life was given tobhis heaven-appomted task of turning the Old — Testament narrative into song. ae ‘The poems which have come down to us under Caed- mon’s name * consist of paraphrases of Genesis, of Exodus, and a part of Daniel. An Interesting fragment called Judith i is sometimes included in the work of the ‘‘ school of Caedmon. ” In places, especially in dealing with a war- like episode, the poet expands his matter freely, stamping it with the impress of his own mind. In /#zodus, for instance, all the interest is centred on the overwhelming of Pharaoh’s host in the Red Sea. The Egyptian and the Israelitish armies are described with a heathen scdp’s de- light in the pomp and circumstance of war, and the disas- ter which overtakes the Egyptian hosts is sung with savage force and zest. In Judith the pagan delight in battle and in blood-revenge is even more marked. ney king Holo- * The pieces traditionally ascribed to Caedmon are for the most part not accepted by modern scholarship as his work. 14 A HISTORY OF ENGUISH LITERATURE fernes is shown, like a rude viking, boisterous and wassail- ing in his mead-hall. When Judith comes to him in his, drunken sleep and hews off his head with a sword, the poet cannot restrain his exultation ; and the flight of the army of Holofernes before the men of Israel is described with grewsome vividness. If we know little of Caedmon’s life, we know still less of Oynewulf, the poet who succeeded him, and who was prob- ably the greatest of the Anglo-Saxon poets, if we except the unknown bard who gave Beowulf ' its present form. Out of very insubstantial materials a picturesque story has been made for him. He is said to have been in his youth a wandering singer, leading a wild life by sea and shore, as he plied his gleeman’s craft, now in the halls of aethelings, now in the huts of shepherds and on the village green, now on the deck of Northumbrian coasting-ships. In the midst of this free existence he sud- denly underwent some deep religious experience, which, together. with the public disasters then overtaking Nor- thumbria, completely changed the temper of his mind. He gave up the half-pagan nature-poetry which up to this time he had written, and turned to write religious poems. We have, signed with his name in runes, two lives of saints, and an epic dealing with Christ’s incarnation and ascension, and with the Day of Judgment. Other poems have.been.ascribed to him with varying degrees of probabil- ity: Andreas, a very lively and naive story of a saint’s © martyrdom and final triumph over his enemies; the Phe- nix, a richly colored description of the mythic bird and its dwelling-place, with a religious interpretation ; and finally a number of Riddles, very curious compositions, some of - which are full of fine imagination and fresh observation of Cynewulf. These last are nothing more nor less than conundrums, in which some object or phenomenon. i is described suggest- ively, and the reader is left to guess the meaning. In the THI ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD 15 hands of a mere versifier this would be the dreariest of forms, but Cynewulf (or whoever is indeed the author) not seldom enters with so much sympathy and The dramatic imagination into the life of the thing geet described, that he lifts the subject into poetry. The new moon is a young viking, sailing through the skies in his pirate ship, laden with spoils of battle, to build a burg for himself in highest Heaven ; but the sun, a greater warrior, drives him away and seizes his land, until the night con- quers the sun in turn. The iceberg shouts and laughs as it plunges through the wintry sea, eager to crush the fleet of hostile ships. The sword in its scabbard is a mailed fighter, who goes exultingly into the battle-play, and then is sad because women upbraid him for the slaughter he has done. ‘The swan and the beaver are described with an in- sight and sympathy which reminds us, in a far-off way, of Wordsworth and the modern nature-poets. Altogether these riddles are remarkable compositions, and it is pleas- ant, even if not quite scientific, to think of them as the youthful work of Cynewulf, since his is the only poet’s name that has survived from those obscure and troubled © times. The Phenix * derives a special interest from the fact that it is the only Anglo-Saxon poem of any length which shows a delight i in the soft and radiant moods of The Nature, as opposed to her fierce and grim as- —- Phenix. pects. In the land where the Phcenix dwells “the groves are all behung with blossoms . . . the boughs upon the trees are ever laden, the fruit is aye renewed through all eternity.”+ The music of the wonderful bird, as it goes aloft ‘to meet that gladsome gem, God’s candle,” is ‘‘ sweeter and more beauteous than any craft of song.” * The Phoenix and many of the Riddles are based upon Latin orig- inals, +The quotations from the Phenix are from Gollancz’s translation, Exeter Book, Early English Text Society’s publications, 1895. 16 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE When the thousand years of its life are done, it flies far away to a lonely Syrian wood, builds its own holocaust of fragrant herbs, which the Sun kindles. Out of the ball of ashes a new Phoenix is born, “‘ richly dight with plumage, as it was at first, radiantly adorned,” and flies back to its home in the enchanted land of summer. At the end, the whole poem is made into a Christian allegory of the death and resurrection of Christ, and of his ascent to heaven amid the ministering company of saints. The poem has a fervor and enthusiasm lacking to the Latin original, and whether we may or may not ascribe it to Cynewulf, it is the work of a good poet. Scholars have pointed out that the description of the bird’s dwelling-place i is influenced by the old Celtic fancy of the Land of Eternal Youth ; ; and cer- tainly it is not difficult to see, in the bright colors and happy fancy of the poem, the working of the Celtic imagi- nation, as well as the transforming touch of hope which had been brought into men’s lives by Christianity. Besides the poetry attributed to Caedmon and _his school, and_ to Cynewulf and his school, there exist a few short Short Poems Poems, lyrics, or ‘‘ dramatic lyrics,” of the great- of Sentiment. c+ interest. One of these, called <‘ The Wife’s Lament,” gives us a glimpse of one of the harsh customs of our ancestors. A wife, accused of faithlessness, has been banished from her native village, and compelled to live alone in the forest ; from her place of exile she pours out a moan to the husband who has been Le es from her by false slanderers. ‘‘ The Lover’s Message ” is a kind of companion piece to this. The speaker in the little poem is the tablet of wood upon which an absent lover has carved a message to send to his beloved. It tells her that he has now a home for her in the south, and bids her, as soon as she hears the cuckoo chanting of his sorrow in the copsewood, to take sail over the ocean pathway to her lord, who waits and longs for her. With these t two little bore begins the love-poetry of England. THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD yh 7 The longest and most perfect in form of these half-lyrical elegies or poems of sentiment. is ‘‘'The Wanderer.” It is the complaint of one who must ‘‘ traverse the watery ways, stir with his hands the rime-cold sea, and tread the paths of exile,” while he muses upon the joys and glories of a life that has passed away forever. ‘‘ Often,” he says, “it seems to him in fancy as though he clasps and kisses his great lord, and on his knees lays hand and head, even as erewhile ;”? but he soon wakes friendless, and sees before him only §* the fallow ways, sea-birds bathing and spreading their wings, falling hoar-frost and snow mingled with hail.” Rapt away again by his longing, he beholds his friends and kinsmen hovering before him in the air; he ‘‘ greets them with snatches of song, he scans them eagerly, comrades of heroes ; soon they swim away again; the sailor-souls do not bring hither many old familiar songs.”* And at the close the Wanderer breaks out into a song of lamenta- tion over the departed glories of a better time: ‘‘ Where is gone the horse ? Where is gone the hero? Where is gone the giver of treasure ? Where are gone the seats of the feast ? Where are the joys of the hall ? Ah, thou bright cup! Ah, thou mailed warrior! Ah, the prince’s pride! how has the time passed away . . as if it had not been!” There is a wistful tenderness and a lyric grace in this poem which suggests once more the Celtic leaven at work in the ruder Anglo-Saxon genius. It suggests, too, | / a state of society fallen into ruin, a time of decadence and , \ disaster. Probably, before it was written, such a time had come for England, and especially for Northumbria. While the Anglo-Saxons had been settling down in England to a life of agriculture, their kinsmen who re- mained on the Continent had continued to lead The Danish their wild free-booting life of the sea. Toward !vasions. the end of the eighth century bands of Danes began to harass the English coasts. Northumbria bore the main * Gollancz’s translation of Exeter Book. 18 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE force of their attacks. The very monastery of Jarrow, in which Baeda had written his Ecclesiastical History, was plundered, and its inhabitants put to the sword. ‘The mon- astery of Whitby, where Caedmon had had his vision, was only temporarily saved by the fierce resistance of the monks. . By the middle of the ninth century the Danes had made themselves masters of Northumbria. ‘They were such men as the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons had been three hundred years before—worshippers of the old gods, ruthless uproot- ers of a religion, literature, and society which they did not understand. In Wessex, the heroism of King Alfred turned back the tide of barbarian invasion ; and from this time until the Norman conquest, two GSR later, the only literature which remains to us was produced in Wes- sex. _It is almost entirely a literature of prose; the best} of it was the work of King Alfred himself, or produced} under his immediate encouragement. As a child King Alfred had seen Rome, and had lived for a time at the great court of Charles the Bald in France ; and the spectacle of these older and richer civil- izations had filled him with a desire to give to his rude subjects something of the heritage of the past. When, after a desperate struggle, he had won peace from the Danes, he called about him learned monks from the sheltered monasteries of Ireland and Wales, and made wel- ‘come at his court all strangers who could bring him a manuscript or sing to him an old song. It was probably during his reign that the poems of Caedmon and Cynewulf, as well as the older pagan poems, were brought southward out of Northumbria and put in the West-Saxon form in which we now have them. He spurred on his priests and -bishops.to write. He himself learned a little Latin, in order that he might translate certain books which he deemed would be most useful and interesting to English- men, into the West-Saxon tongue; putting down the sense, he says, ‘‘ sometimes word for word, sometimes meaning for King Alfred. THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD 19 meaning, as I had learned it from Plegmund, my archbishop, and Asser, my bishop, and Grimbald, my mass-priest, and John, my mass-priest.” He selected for translation a philo- sophical work, the Consolations of Philosoph y of Boethius 3 a manual of history and geography by Orosius ; and a religious treatise, the Pastoral Care or ‘‘ Shepherd’s Book” of Greg- ory, copies of which he sent to all his bishops in order that they might learn to be better shepherds of their flocks. More _ important still, he translated Baeda’s Ecclesiastical His- tory, thus giving a native English dress to the,first great piece of historical-writing which had been done 1 in England. Last- ly, he caused the dry entries of the deaths of kings and the installations of bishops, which the monks were in the habit of making on the Easter rolls, to be expanded into a clear and picturesque narrative, the greatest space, of course, being taken up with the events of his own reign. This, known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, | (is the oldest monu- ment of English prosey* and is, with one exception, the most venerable piece of extended prose writing in Europe. Despite all his efforts, however, King Alfred did not succeed in creating anything like a vital native literature in Wessex. The language was changing, and Decadence of the literary spirit of the people was.almost Anglo-Saxon dead. The sermons or Homilies of the great Ke and devoted Aelfric, however, here and there rise to the rank of literature, by reason of the naive picturesqueness of some religious legend which they treat, or by the fervor of their piety. ‘The cesar Saxon Chronicle, also, which Winchester, and Ely, here and there breaks out into bu: ring verse. v One of these poetic episodes is known as the ~ Battle of Brunanburh,. and is entered under the year 937.° TO eM OPIN * Here, and earlier in this chapter, the word English is used loosely, to cover the productions of the Anglo-Saxon period. Strictly speaking, English | literature did not begin until a Sentury and a half after the Norman conquest. Sf 20 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Another, the Death of Byrhtnoth, also called the Battle of Maldon, bears date 991; it is the swan-song of Anglo- Saxon poetry. The truth is that England at the end of the tenth cen- tury was in need of new blood. ‘The Anglo-Saxon genius, _ with all its rugged grandeur and fine persistence, was lacking in many elements necessary to make a great national life ; and Anglo-Saxon poetry, looked at in the large, betrays a narrowness of theme and monotony of tone, out of which a great literature could have evolved, if at all, only slowly and with difficulty. Some new graft was needed, to give elasticity, gayety, and range; and this need was met when, in 1066, William the Conqueror landed at Hastings with his army of Norman-French knights, and marched to give battle to the forces of Harold, the last of the Saxon kings. ) CHAPTER II THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD THE Normans, or North-men, were an _ extraordinary people. A century and a half before their invasion of England, they had appeared off the coast of The Nor- France; and under their leader, Hrolf the ita Ganger (the ‘‘ Walker ”), they had pushed up the Seine in their black boats, wasting and burning to the very gates of Paris. ‘The French won peace by giving over to them broad and rich lands in the northwest, known henceforth as Normandy. Unlike the other northern peoples, they showed a marvellous power of assimilating the southern civilization. ‘They married with the French women, adopted French manners and the French tongue. Ina little over a century they had grown from a barbarous horde of sea-robbers into the most polished and brilliant people of Europe, whose power was felt in the Mediterra- nean and the far Kast. They united in a singular manner impetuous daring and cool practical sense. Without losing anything of their northern bravery in war, they managed to gather up all the southern suppleness and wit, all the southern love of splendor and art. When William advanced to meet King Harold at Hastings, a court minstrel, Taille- fer, rode before the invading army, tossing up his sword and catching it like a juggler, while he chanted the Song of Roland. He is a symbol of the Norman spirit, of its dash, its. buoyancy, its. imaginative brilliancy. The Normans brought with them to England not only the terror of the sword and the strong hand of conquest, but also the vitaliz- ing breath of song, the fr esh and youthful spirit of romance, 21 22 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE No one among the conquered people, however, could then have foreseen that the invasion was to prove the great- eaees aviv est of national blessings ; for the sternness and Norman In- energy with which the Norman king and his eae: nobles set about planting their own civilization in the island, brought with it much oppression and hard- ship. Over the length and breadth of England rose those strong castles whose gray and massive walls still frown over the pleasant English landscape. Less forbidding than these, but no less suggestive of the foreigner, splendid minsters gradually took the place of the gloomy little Sax- on churches. Forest laws of terrible harshness preserved the ‘‘ tall deer” which the king ‘‘ loved as his life ;” but when a man was found murdered, if it could be proved that he was a Saxon, no further notice was taken of the crime. The Saxon language, or ‘‘ Englisc,” as it had begun to be called in King Alfred’s time, was the badge of serfdom ; and not only in the court and camp and castle, but also in Parliament and on the justice-bench, French alone was spoken. With the one exception of.the Anglo-Saxon Chron- icle, which was_ still continued, English ‘‘ dives under- ground ”’ in 1066, and does not reappear foracentury and a half. If a prophet had arisen to ‘ell the Norman nobility of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that not French, but English, was destined to be the speech of their descendants, he would have been laughed at. But this incredible thing was to be, because of the dogged persistency of the Anglo- Saxon nature in clinging to itsown. Though no longer, written, the old tongue lived on the lips of the subjugated race, from father to son. About 1200 it began to be used again as a language of books, disputing with rude and un- certain accents a place by the side of the polished language of the conquerors. When it reappeared, however, it was a changed tongue. It was no longer Anglo-Saxon, but Eng- lish. In spite of many words now obsolete, many strange forms and spellings, the English of the early thirteenth THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD 23 century is indubitably the same language which we speak to-day. It had sloughed off its inflections, simplified its grammar, and required only to be enriched by French elements, and_ made flexible by use, to be ready for the hand of Chaucer. But to say that English was “enriched by French ele- . ments” is hardly to convey an idea of the extent to which the foreign tongue entered into the composi- he Making tion of the latiguage. What really happened °% #28ush. was that English absorbed nearly the whcie body of the French speech, or rather that the two languages gradually melted together.and became one. The Saxon, however, continued as the marrow. and bony structure of the whole. The words of French origin in our vocabulary outnumber the Saxon words three to one; but in ordinary speech, where only the common words of daily life and action are used, the Saxon words are greatly 1 in preponderance, The result of this fusion was to increase: enormously the power of the language to express thought and feeling: It has made English the most, splendid poetic language of the world, with the possible exception of the Greek alone. The fusion was accomplished in a period of about a century and a half. When English first appeared, in 1200, after its long sleep, it contained almost no French ingredients ; by the middle of the fourteenth century the process of blend- ing the two tongues was beginning to draw to a close. Chaucer, the poet. who was to complete it and fix the language in much the shape that it wears to-day, was then _ a boy in the streets of London. The literature of this century and a half of preparation is of deep interest from the historical point of view, and has not a little intrinsic charm. A large pro- pe metrical portion of it consists of efforts ina new and Romances. fascinating poetic form introduced into England by the Norman-French, the metrical ance. ‘The typical ro- mance was a ‘rambling tale of adventure, in which evil 24 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE knights, robbers, giants, Saracens, and other inimical personages, were overthrown by a wandering chevalier, in the_interest_of some distressed damsel or of holy church. It dealt in a rather desultory and unreal, but highiy enter- taining way, with the three great interests of the Middle Ages,—knightly prowess, chivalric love, and religion. It gave scope, in the description of feasts and tournaments, of ‘armor, dress, and hunting equipage, for the medizval love of pageantry and gay color; it ministered to the medieval craving after the supernatural, the extravagant, and the thrilling ; above all, it afforded an outlet to the sentiment of woman-worship, which, taking its rise in the cult of the Virgin Mary, had then been secularized by the poets of Provence, and become a vital part of the great creed of feudal chivalry. The ¢rouvéres, as the poets who composed and recited these romances were called, borrowed the material of their i richly variegated tales wherever they could find rues it. A part of it came from Italy and the Kast, and out of this they made the Troy cycle and the cycle of Alexander the Great. A part of it they~found near at hand, in the adventures of Charlemagne and his twelve peers. But the richest store-house of romance which they had to draw upon, was in the Celtic parts of England and Brittany, where for generations, probably for centuries, there had been growing up a mass of legend connected with King Arthur. A number of these Arthurian legends were gathered up, before the middle of the twelfth century, in a great Latin work, called the Historia. Br ‘etonum, by Geof- frey of Monmouth, a Welsh writer, who also added sto- ries of his own invention. This rather bare chronicle of Geoffrey’s was seized upon by the ¢rowvéres, and out of it began to branch all manner of romantic episode. The book was..translated into. French verse by Wace of Jersey, and through this channel came, about.the.year.1200, into the hands of Layamon, the first writer of romance in the crude THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD 20 English speech which was just then awaking from its cen- tury and _a half of silence. at All that we know of Layamon, and of how he came to and UTI with which the poem opens: «There was a priest in the land was named Layamon ; he was son of Leoyenath,—may God be gracious to him! He dwelt at Erniey, at a noble church upon Severn bank. It came to him in mind and in his chief thought that he would tell the noble deeds of the English ; what the men were named, and whence they came, who first had the English land after the flood. . . Layamon began to journey wide over this land, and procured the noble books which he took for authority. He took the English book that Saint Bede made ;* another he took in Latin, that Saint Albin made and the fair Austint . . 3; the third book he took . . that a French clerk made, named Wace. . . lLayamon laid these books before him and turned over the leaves ;.lovingly he beheld them— may the Lord be merciful to him! Pen he took with fingers, and ete on book-skin, and compressed the three books into one.’ The poem opens with an account of how ‘‘ Eneas the duke,” after the destruction of Troy, flees into Italy, and builds him a “great burg.” After many years his great- grandson, Brutus, sets out with all his people to find a new land in the west. They pass the Pillars of Hercules, “tall posts of strong marble stone,” where they find the mer- maidens, ‘‘ beasts of great deceit, and so sweet that many men are not able to quit them.” After further adventures in Spain and France, they come at length to the shores of England, and land ‘at Dartmouth in Totnes.” The poem has now run on for two thousand lines, and the story oe Brut. »? _ * The Anglo-Saxon version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. + Probably the original Latin version of Bede, the authorship being mistaken by Layamon., 26 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE has just begun. But leisurely as Layamon is, he is seldom tedious ; the story lures one on from page to page, until one forgets or pardons the enormous length. In treating the Arthur legends, Layamon. is not content merely to tran- scribe his predecessors. His home was near-the borders of Wales, where these legends were native; and he either gathered up or freely invented several additions of the utmost importance. The most notable of these are his story of the founding of the Round Table, and his account of the fays who are present at Arthur’s birth and who carry him after his last battle to the mystic isle of Avalon. After Layamon had shown the way to romance writing in the native tongue, other poets in rapidly increasing num- bers followed in his footsteps. Rude at first, English Imi- ‘ : tationsof their efforts gradually approached, in ease and Norman- : French = grace, those of their Norman-French teachers, though never quite rivalling the limpid trouveére verse. Almost all the English romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are free renderings from French originals. This is true not only of those which deal with con- tinental heroes, like Charlemagne and Alexander, or which tell a tale of continental origin, like Amis and Amiloun and Floris and Blancheflour ; but_also of the Arthur stories, whose source was British, and even of the stories of. purely English heroes, Bevis of Hampton, and Guy of Warwick. 'The raw material had to be refined by the cun- ning Norman-French artisans before the less skilled work- ers in the English tongue could:handle it. _But of all the Arthurian romances in. English of this period, such as. Sir Tristrem, Arthour and Merlin, Morte d’ Arthure, and. The Awentyres.(adyentures)..of. Arthur at the Tarn Watheling (Tarn Wadling in Cumberland), the one which is of most genuine native English workmanship is the best of all, and is one of the most charming romances of the world. This is Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight. “Its date is about 1320-1330. | THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD 27 When the poem opens, King Arthur and his court are gathered in the hall at Camelot to celebrate the feast of the New Year. The king, ‘‘so busied_him his _ young blood and his wild brain,” will not eat and the@reen until some adventure has befallen, As the first “"8"* course comes in ‘‘ with cracking of trumpets,” and the ‘“noise of nakers (drums), with noble pipes,” there suddenly rushes in at the hall door a gigantic knight, clothed entirely in green, mounted on a green foal, and bearing in one hand a holly bough, in the other a great axe. He rides to the dais, and challenges any knight to give him a blow with his axe, and to abide one in turn. Gawayne, the king’s nephew, smites off the head of the Green Knight, who quietly picks it up by the hair, and holds it out toward Gawayne, until the lips speak, giving him rendezvous at the Green Chapel on the next New Year’s day. On All-hallow’s day, Gawayne sets out upon his horse Gringolet, and journeys through North Wales, past Holy- head into the wilderness of Wirral; ‘‘ sometimes with worms (serpents) he wars, with wolves and bears,” with giants and wood-satyrs, until at last on Christmas-eve he comes to a great forest of hoar oaks. He calls upon Mary, ‘‘mildest mother so dear,” to help him. Immediately he sees a fair castle standing on a hill; and asking shelter, he is courteously received by the lord of the castle and his fair young wife, and is assured that the Green Chapel is near ~ at hand. After the Christmas festivities are over, his host prepares for a great hunt, to last three days; and a jesting compact is made between them that at the end of each day they shall give each other whatever good thing they have won. While her lord is absent on the hunt, the lady of the castle tries in vain to induce Gawayne to make love to her, and bestows npon him a kiss. Anxious to fulfil his compact, he in turn gives the kiss to her lord each night when the hunt is over, and receives as a counter-gift the spoils of the 329 28 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE chase. At their last meeting the lady persuades Gawayne to take as a gift a green lace belt which will protect him from mortal harm, Thinking it ‘‘a jewel for the jeopardy ” that he is to run at the Green Chapel, he keeps the gift a secret, and thus proves false to his compact. On New Year’s morning he sets out through a storm of snow, past forests and cliffs, where ‘‘each hill had a hat and a mist-cloak,” to find the Green Chapel. It proves to be a grass-covered hollow mound, in a desert valley, “‘ the most cursed kirk,” says Gawayne, ‘‘ that ever I came in.” The Green Knight appears, and deals a blow with his axe upon Gawayne’s bent neck. But he only pierces the skin, and Gawayne, seeing the blood fall on the snow, claps on his helmet, draws his sword, and declares the compact fulfilled. The Green Knight then discloses the fact that he is the lord of the castle where Gawayne has just been entertained, that with him dwells the fairy-woman Mor- gain, who, because of her hatred of Guinevere, has sent him to frighten her at Christmas feast with the sight of a severed head talking, and who has been trying to lead Gawayne into bad faith and untruthfulness, in order that her hus- band’s axe may have power upon him. By his purity and truth Gawayne has been saved, except for the slight wound as punishment for concealing the gift of the girdle. Ga- wayne swears to wear the ‘‘ lovelace ” in remembrance of his weakness ; and ever afterward each knight of the Round Table, and every lady of Arthur’s court, wears a bright green belt for Gawayne’s sake. The picturesque and nervous language of the poem, its bright humor and fancy, and. the vivid. beauty of its descriptions, combine with its moral sweetness to make , this the. most. delightful, blossom. of. all pre-Chaucerian romance. Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight contains fair promise not only of Chaucer’s Anight’s Tale, but even of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. While the shimmeri ing tapestry and cloth of gold of THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD ys, these bright romances was being woven to beguile the tedium of castle halls, a more sombre literary fabric grew under the patient hands of monks and relig- Retigious ious enthusiasts. The Cursor Mundi, the au- Foguy: tho thor of which is unknown, deserves particular Mu2di”’ comment. ‘Though religious in aim and in matter, {t shows a wholesome secular desire to be entertaining, Ths author, in beginning, laments the absorption of the readers of his day in frivolous romance, and proposes to give them in place of these vain tales of earthly love, a tale of divine love which shall be equally thrilling, He then proceeds to tell in flowing verse the story of God’s dealings with man, from the Creation to the final redemption, following in gen- eral the biblical narrative, but adorning it with popular le- gends, both sacred and secular, and with all manner of quaint digressions. ‘The ambition of the author has really poe accomplished ; his book is indeed a “religious romance,” and must have been a respectable rival of its more worldly brothers, in catching the ear of such readers as were will« ing to be edified at the same time that they were enter. tained. Of another religious writer whose work rises to the dig- nity of literature, the name and story have fortunately been preserved. This is Richard Rolle, the pionara rone hermit.of Hampole in southern Yorkshire, who ° Hampole. was.born about.1300 and died in 1349. In his youth he went to Oxford, then at the height of its fame as a centre of scholastic learning ; but the mysticism and erratic ardor of his nature made him soon revolt against the dry intellect- uality of the scholastic teaching. He left college, made him a hermit’s shroud out of two of his sister’s gowns and his father’s hood, and began the life of a religious solitary and mystic. His cell at Hampole, near a Cistercian nunnery, was after his death visited as a miracle-working shrine, and cared for by the nuns. He wrote many canticles of divine love, some of which are of unusual intensity. His longest hy 30 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE work is the Pricke of Conscience, which deals with the life of man and the terrors of the Last Judgment. But of all the religious writings of this period, by far the most beautiful are two poems, one lyric, the other narra- The ‘Love tive, Which approach the subject of divine love Rune ”’°t from the personal side, and treat it with an inti- de Hales. § mate personal pathos. The first is the famous ‘* Love Rune” of Thomas de Hales, a monk of the Minor Friars. He tells us in the first stanza that he was besought by a maid of Christ to make her a love-song, in order that she might learn therefrom how to choose a worthy and faithful lover. ‘The monkish poet consents, but goes on to tell her how false and fleeting is all worldly love ; how all earthly lovers vanish and are forgotten. Hwer is Paris and Heleyne That weren so bryght and feyre on ble? Amadas, Tristram, and Dideyne, Yseude, and alle the? Ector, with his scharpé meyne, And Cesar rich of worldés fee? Hes beoth iglyden ut of the reyne, So the scheft is of the clee. (Where is Paris and Helen, that were so bright and fair of countenance? Amadas, Tristram, Dido, Iseult and all those ? Hector with his sharp strength, and Cesar rich with the world’s fee [wealth]? They be glided out ofthe realm, as the shaft is from the clew [bow-string} ‘‘But there is another lover,” the poet continues, who is ‘‘ richer than Henry our King, and whose dwelling is fairer than Solomon’s house of jasper and sapphire. Choose Him, and may God bring thee to His bride-chamber in Heaven.” The poem is well-nigh perfect in form, and for rich and tender melody bears comparison with the best lyrical work of Shakespeare’s age. It shines out like a gem from the mass of ruder song about it. | THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD 31 The other religious poem, which deserves to be classed with this by reason of its beauty and humanity, is much longer. Itis called The Pear]. A father falls «phe asleep on the grave of his lost daughter, whose eahy name seems to have been Margaret (¢.e., ‘‘ the pearl”). In a vision he sees her, and beholds the celestial coun- try where she dwells. He dreams that he is transport- ed to a wonderful land, through which a-:musical river flows over pearly sand, and stones that glitter like stars on a winter night. Around him are “crystal cliffs so clear of kind,” forests that gleam like silver and ring with the melody of bright-hued birds. On the other side of the river, at the foot of a gleaming cliff, he sees a maid sitting, clothed in bright raiment trimmed with pearls, and in the midst of her breast a great pearl. She © rises and comes toward him, ‘Then the father tries to cross over, but being unable, cries out to know if she is indeed his pearl, since the loss of which he has been “a joyless jew- eller.” The maiden tells him that his pearl is not really lost, gently reproves the impatience of his grief, and ex- pounds—a little too ingeniously—some of the mysteries of Heaven, where she reigns as a queen with Mary. The father begs to be taken to her abiding-place ; she tells him that he may see, but cannot enter, ‘‘ that clean clois- ter.” She bids him go along the river-bank until he comes toa hill. Arrived at the top, he sees afar off the celestial city, ‘‘ pitched upon gems,” with its walls of jasper and streets of gold. At the wonder of the sight he stands, “still as a dazed quail,” and gazing sees, ‘‘right as the mighty moon gan rise,” the Virgins walking in pro- cession with the Lamb of God. His daughter is one of them. | Then saw I there my little queen— Lord! much of mirth was that she made Among her mates. e 32 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE He strives in transport to cross over and be with her; but « it is not pleasing to God that he should come, and the dreamer awakes. The Pearl. exists in the same manuscript with two other remarkable religious poems, entitled respectively Cleanness and Patience. The first preaches the doctrine of purity of life, and enforces it with vivid transcriptions from the Bible stories of the de- struction of Sodom, the smiting of Belshazzar for pollut- ing the sacred vessels, and other like instances. The second illustrates the virtue of patience by the story of Jonah,—a little humorously, to a modern mind. ‘The descriptions are some of them extraordinarily vivid, and the language has the same nervous vigor and graphic pict- uresqueness which distinguishes that of Sir Gawayne and the Green. Kmight.. This, indeed, has come down to us in the same manuscript with the Pearl and Cleanness and Pa- tience, and many scholars believe that they.are.all four the work of one man. Ifso, he was the most considerable poet between Cynewulf and Chaucer. The flowing together of Saxon and Norman-French brought about important results in the metre as well as in Fusion of the vocabulary of the new language. ‘Saxon, Sage Metri- poetry depended for its rhythmical effect upon cal Systems. two devices, alliteration and. accent. Hach | verse-line, no matter how long, contained four accents ; ; and three (sometimes four) of these accents had to fall on syl- lables beginning with the same consonant or with a vowel. The number of sylables.in any..given line could..vary.in- definitely ; and the accents could fall anywhere in the line, provided two occurred i in the first half and one (or two) in the second half. The result, was that the rhythm of Saxon | verse was exceedingly loose and pliable. Norman-French verse depended upon two. devices quite. different from. these,—rhyme, and regular line-length ;_ the metrical BYS- tem was therefore very definite and exact. *¢ Cleanness ’”’ an *¢ Patience.’’ THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD 33 When the fusion came, there was a struggle as to which system should prevail in the new language. Some of the English poets, even as late as Langland, Chaucer’s contem- porary, stood out for the old system of accent and allitera- tion, without rhyme and without fixed line-length ; others imitated slavishly the French system of rhyme and_ uni- form line-length; still others, like the author of Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, compromised by retain- ing alliteration and introducing rhyme at fixed intervals ; still others wobbled awkwardly between the two systems, using alliteration and rhyme in a confused and haphazard way in the same poem. ‘The final outcome of the struggle, | however, was that English verse gave up regular allitera-|~ tion, retaining it only as an occasional and almost acci- | dental ornament, and adopted rhyme outright. ‘The prin- ciple of accent, however, was retained ; but, under stress of the French prosody, it was reduced to greater regularity. | Here again, as in the case of the vocabulary, the merging of Saxon and French had a most happy result. It is by reason of this merging that English is capable of more subtle and varied lyrical effects than any other modern language. Nor did the poets fail to show, even as early as the thir- teenth century, their appreciation of what an exquisite instrument. had fallen into their hands; for we possess several songs of that period and a little later, which have in them the promise of Herrick and of Shelley. They are all songs of love and of spring. The best known is perhaps the ‘Cuckoo, Song,” with its refrain of ‘‘ Londe sing Cuckoo!” but even more charming is the spring-song ‘‘ Lent is come with love to town,” and the love-song called ‘« Alisoun,” with its delightful opening : Bitwené Mersh and Averil When spray * begineth to springé, The little fowlés + have hyre ¢ will On hyré lud § to singé. * Foliage. + Birds. + Their, § Voice. 34 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE The England which finds utterance in these songs is a very different England from that which had spoken in “ THE RENAISSANCE 65 fused of the literary influences of the time, the translation of the Bible by William ‘T’yndale and Miles Coverdale (1526- 1538), of which the popular character is shown by the fact that ninety-seven per cent. of the words are Anglo- Saxon. A union between the Latin-English style of the educated classes and the simple every-day speech of the people is shown by another literary monument of the Ref- ormation, the Book of Common Prayer, prepared by Cran- mer, the Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII. and Edward VI. Here the sonorous Latin words, full of suggestion for the lover of the classics, are often followed by their Anglo-Saxon equivalents, the sentences falling with a rhythm which is in part caught from Hebrew po- etry, in part, perhaps, from the artificial style which for- eign models had introduced into England. While English prose was thus developing to express the ideas of the time on the two important subjects, culture «~ and religion, poetry was also taking its modern form. The last poet of the old school of imitators of Chaucer was J ohn Skelton. _ Toward. the. close of his life, however, he broke away from the tradition of his youth, and’ The New adopted a rough, short metre, adapted to the *°™% energy of his satire, which sounded the popular cry against abuses in. church and state. In his harshness and meagre- ness he affords a striking contrast to two poets of the close of Henry’s reign, who relieved the poverty of English verse with forms. imported. from Italy, and. thus _began modern English poetry—Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547). The career of the former illustrates particularly the value to English literature of the close connection with foreign countries, which Henry VIII.’s ambi- gi, phomas tion to take part in European affairs did much Wyatt. to restore. Wyatt was frequently abroad on diplomatic, missions ; like Chaucer_he visited Italy, and also Spain and..France. His poems are, for the most part, transla- _ 66 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE tions and imitations of forms characteristic of Italian poetry, especially the. love sonnet, of which Petrarch in his sonnets to Laura had given the chief examples. With Petrarch’s imitators the sonnet had become a merely liter- ary exercise, devoted to the expression of a love which might _ be entirely imaginary, or directed toward an imag- inary person. Wyatt’s sonnets, therefore, like those of his Italian masters, need not be regarded as having strict biographical truth, though attempts have been made to find in them the history of a personal relation, and some have guessed that they were inspired by Henry’s second queen, Anne Boleyn. At all events Wyatt’s poetry sug- gests that even a conventional form was for him the means for a sincere expression of feeling ; ; even his translations seem charged with his own temperament, and his render- ing of the Penitential Psalms is touched with personal religious emotion. Wyatt’s effort to achieve the regularity and finish of his Italian models was not always successful ; he makes bad rhymes, he fails to harmonize word aan verse accent, he stumbles in scansion. Yet such poems as ‘‘ Awake my Lute” and “ Forget not yet,” ave eminent examples of lyrical power. | Wyatt’s companion poet, Surrey, born in 1517, and beheaded in 1547, was younger than his master both in The Earlot years and in spirit. In contrast to Wyatt’s great: gravity he has all the exuberance of the age, a tee perpetual charm of youth and promise, as his brilliant fig- ure passes through the sunlight and shadow of Henry’s * court, moving gracefully and carelessly to the scaffold which awaited him. Like Wyatt he imitated the Italian: amorous poets; but more significant. than_his. love poems are those of friendship, the sonnets to Clere and to Wyatt, and the elegy on. the Duke of Richmond, which are full of feeling, intimate, personal, sincere. Often, as, for example, in the youthful poem which begins ‘‘'The soote season,”’ he shows an interest in nature, and a realism THE RENAISSANCE Or in picturing it, which are, for the time, quite extraordi- te Surrey, however, like Wyatt, rendered his chief service to English literature, by enriching _ its resources with for- eign forms, and. especially by his introduction of. blank’ verse, in his translation of two books of the Aineid. Blank verse Ri been used in ‘Italy a few years before in a trans- lation of the same work, so that Surrey did not originate the form; but the happy skill with which he adapted it, and thus ied to English | poetry its most powerful and characteristic verse form, is worthy of all praise. In- deed, Surrey’s greatness is that of artistic common-sense. He had wit to see the value of foreign forms which were applicable to the English tongue. In those which he chose he made such changes as were necessary to adapt them still further to English requirements. The English sonnet which Shakespeare used, consisting of four quatrains and a couplet, was Surrey’s adaptation. He did his work rapidly and instinctively ; ; he had no time for long labors of ex- periment, for wavering uncertainty between the merits of rival forms. He was primarily not a man of letters, but a man of action, a soldier. With singular freedom from hes- itation or misgiving, with the happy guess of a man accus- tomed to succeed, he picked out his weapon from the score which offered, fitted it to his hand, and in a few rapid passes showed his followers its use. Poetry in the age of Henry VIII. was usually intended for private. 2 circulation in manuscript. form. By the middle of the century, however, there had grown up a demand on the part_of the reading public. te publishers attempted to supply. by.volumes.of miscellaneous verse. « otters The first of these collections, Tottel’s Mis- Wscelany.” a, cellany, - which. ‘contained the poems of Wyatt, Surrey,| \/ and several of their followers, appeared in 1557, a date, i which marks the. public. beginning of. modern “English| " verse. GR A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE The influence of the new poetry. is shown by a volume published _ a few years after Tottel’s Miscellany, called Thomas Sack- The Mir ror for Magistrates. This work in btet general character looks back to an older fashion, being a continuation of Lydgate’s Full of Princes ; but it contains some excellent modern poetry in the “ Induction ” and “The Complaint of the Duke of Buckingham.” These were written by Thomas Sackville (1536>1608), afterward Lord Buckhurst, who also wrote, in collabora- tion with Thomas Norton, the first regular English tragedy, Gorboduc. (see p. 96). Both in his contributions to ‘* The Mirror,” which are_in Chaucer’s seven-line stanza, and in Gerboduc, which is in blank verse, Sackville shows sur- prising mastery of his form. He has a sureness of touch and a freedom from technical errors, which put him beyond Surrey and Wyatt; and his imaginative energy is suggestive of the great poets who were to follow. Except for the three poets mentioned, however, it isa mat- ter of remark that English literature through the reign of Henry VIII. and the greater part of the reign of Elizabeth, gives little promise of the outburst which was to mark the closing years of the century. That outburst was the result vf a sudden, overwhelming enthusiasm i in which the whole nation shared. ‘The accession_of Elizabeth, in 1558, dis- persed the threatening clouds of civil and religious war The Ageot that had been gathering during the reigns of Blizabeth. Edward and Mary. The force of the Renais- sance, which had been checked for a time by national hesi- tation, manifested itself anew and more widely. Many things combined to give individual ‘distinction to character, and variety and color to life. The enlarged possibilities of the world, the new lands beyond the sea, offered unlimi : opportunity for action. The diffusion of knowledge on past, together with the freedom of thought which the Reformation had brought about, afforded opportunities as tempting for speculative enterprise and imaginative ad- THE RENAISSANCE 69 venture. Altogether there appeared to men a new, wider, richer world; and with it came a clearer consciousness of the individual personality which that world seemed made to satisfy. ‘This discovery of the new world and of man, as it has been called, coming to the nation in the time of joyful reaction from the uncer tainty and peril of Mar y's reign, set the whole mass into vibration ; but the tendencies which made for purely personal aggrandizement were both directed and kept in check by the growth of national consciousness. Elizabeth’s reign united the nation, and her personal pres- ence gave it a visible sign of unity. Under her rule England passed through an experience as dramatic as that of Athens at Marathon ; after a long period of suspense the strain was relieved by the wonderful repulse of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The national feeling, made so intense by danger and victory, shines through the literature of the time. ‘The eager, instinctive patriotism of the people found utterance in the choruses of Shakespeare’s Henry V. The more conscious political virtue, which touched with something of high purpose the lives of Sidney, of > Sackville, even of Hssex and Raleigh, is reflected in Spen- ser’s aerte Queene. is For reasons given in the next chapter, the drama was the most broadly popular and spontaneous expression of x the_many-sided life of the time. Compared with this, the natural language of the English people, the other forms of literature seem unvital. Yet it must be giizabethan remembered that many of the interests of the ‘teratue. Renaissance were not matters of direct popular feeling, butof conscious cultivation. And again, the drama was the only form in which the Elizabethan was at all sure of his art. In other kinds of writing he was_an_experimenter, a learner. T'o this fact we must attribute much of that artificiality which makes Elizabethan non-dramatic liter- ature difficult to read, especially the prose of Lyly, Sidney, and their followers. make 13 est vie A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ‘John _Lyly (1553-1606) was educated at Magdalen Col. lege, Oxford, where he seems to have gained the reputation of being a trifler—‘“the fiddlestick of Oxford,” © an enemy called him. Hissuperficial cleverness, however, enabled him to write a successful account of the culture of the one in uphues or. the Anatomy i Wit? John Lyly. slight plot serves to connect. @ succession of conversations, letters, and essays, treating such subjects as love, educa- tion, religion, and manners. It illustrates the interest of the time in intellectual development, restrained, how- ever, by the feeling that ‘vain is all learning without the taste of divine knowledge.” Still more important than its relation to private morals, was its influence as a manual of public and social conduct. It set. both a fashion of speech, and a code of manners; a dialect and an etiquette for court usage. However in- direct, wasteful, and artificial this fashion now appears, it was in its time an evidence and a cause of refinement. One of the distinguishing accomplishments of the Renais- sance was the elevation of social life into a fine art; and of this result_in England Zuphues was the chief sign. The artificial language which EKuphues and hie friends used, and which became a literary. fashion, is the charac- teristic of the book for which it is remembered to-day. Among. Lyly’s.mannerisms..the.most remarkable is the ° arrangement of words in antithesis, the con- trast being | marked by. alliteration, thus: “Al- though I have shrined thee in my heart for a ey friend, I will shunne thee hereafter as a ¢trothless foe.” Another peculiarity is his lavish use of similes drawn f1sm what passed for natural | aati as: ‘*'The milk of the Tygresse, ey the more salt vere is thrown into it the fresher it is.’ Huphuism was. Hee one form of a widely diffused tendency in Renaissance liter:‘ure re, an attempt to *¢ Ruphues.’?’ Euphuism. . } ‘ ‘THE RENAISSANCE vit here prove the artistic value of prose by giving it some of the qualities of poetry. arlier writers than Lyly, Ascham and Cranmer, had shown traces of it; and English prose did not escape from its influence until well on in the next century. In Lyly’s own generation, which was distin- guished for its interest in all sorts of artistic experiments, other forms of this tendency appeared, notably that intro- _ duced by the most charming and the most forceful of the literary dilettantes of the age, Sir Philip Sidney. Philip Sidney was born in 1564, of one of the most dis- tinguished families in England. He was sent to Shrews- bury school and to Oxford; and then spent some time abroad, in Paris, Vienna, and Italy, whence he returned to Elizabeth’s court. There he represented the more splendid and elevated political conceptions of the time. His uncle, the Earl of Leicester, was the political chief of the Puritan party, which favored committing England to a definite alliance with the Protestant states of Europe ; and in furtherance of this policy Sidney was sent on a mission to Germany in 1577. He was also eagerly in- terested in the development of English power on the sea. In 1583 he got a grant of land in America, and two years later he made an unsuccessful attempt toescape _ gir phitip from court and join Sir Francis Drake in one Siney- of his half-piratical expeditions against the Spaniards. This same year he accompanied the English army which was sent to help the Dutch Protestants against Spain ; and ‘In 1586 he fell in a skirmish at Zutphen. Sidney’s name, more than any other, stands for the x greatness of national and “personal ideals which. we tradi- tionally associate with the age of Elizabeth. It is, there- fore, somewhat disappointing to find his writing less eminent than his life. It must be remembered, however, that Sidney, like most men of: position of his age, wrote not for the public but for himself and for a few friends, His works were published first in pirated - editions, the eae 92 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Arcadva in-1590, and Astrophel and_Stellain 1591. The latter is a collection of songs and sonnets, evidently ad- dressed to one person, Lady Penelope Devereux, after- _ ‘ astropner Ward Lady Rich. Sidney and Lady Penelope and Stella.’” had been betrothed when the latter was a child. For some reason the match was broken off, and Lady Penelope married Lord Rich, with whom ghe lived for a while most unhappily. Whether Sidney actually loved her, when it was too late, or whether he wrote love sonnets as a literary exercise, addressing them to his old friend out of compliment and sympathy, it is impossible to say. On the one hand there is in his sonnets much.of.the con- ventional material of the Italian sonneteers; but on the other there are touches so apt to the situation of a man who loves too late, that one hesitates to ascribe them to mere dramatic skill. In none of the many sonnet cycles of the age, except Shakespeare’s and Spenser’s, do we find so much that has the stamp of personality upon it; surely in none except these, so much that has the accent of great poetry. Sidney’s chief literary. adventure was the Arcadia, which he began in 1580, when, in consequence of a quarrel with the Earl of Oxf Ecyhe was in temporary disgrace and banishment from court’) The writing of the Arcadia was merely a summer pastime, undertaken to please the Count- ess of Pembroke, Sidney’s sister. I'he form of the work was suggested hy romances, popular in Italy and in Spain, The “‘Arca- 10 Which the scenes.are laid in a pastoral.country~ Ste like the ancient Arcadia. The prose tale is | interrupted at intervals by passages | of verse, or eclogues, in which the shepherds sing of. love and the delights of | rural life. This form of literature had an immense charm for countries which were becoming a little weary of the activity of the early Renaissance ; and Sidney himself, in his banishment from court, doubtless felt the influence of this mood. It was, however, a passing one, for Sid: a THE RENAISSANCE 13 ney was essentially a man of action; and his story, which. begins in thoroughly pastoral fashion, quickly changes, to a kind of romance of chivalry set in an arcadian land-. scape. In his attempt at enrichment of style, Sidney worked as consciously as Lyly. He frequently uses the antithesis and other mechanical devices; but his chief resource is in prod- igality « of ornament and elaboration of figure, For example, one character is besought “to te dips, keep her speech for awhile within the paradise of api her mind.” Others are said to be ‘‘getting the pure silver of their bodies out of the ore of their garments.” This bold- ness of met aphor is characteristic of the spirit of the book. ‘Sidney spins his tale with a pure love for it, with the en- thusiasm that he might have thrown into a buccaneering expedition to the Indies, if fortune had been kind to him ; and this is the real source of such pleasure as we feel to- day in reading the Arcadia. His delight in his work is per- fect, and gives to the book its exuberance, its fulness, its color. His style is whimsical and variable, epigrammatic and exhaustive by turns; now conscientious and dull, again : full of the daring and passion of poetry. | ~ The verse passages. which divide the several books of the vari ious s classical and Ttalian forms. Sidney was, i in verse as in prose, an_ amateur. and an experimenter. He, with Sir Edward Dyer and others, formed a club called the Areopagus, of which the object was. to culti- rite vate Latin metres to the exclusion of the rhym- stews ing verse - natural - to. ‘the ‘English tongue. This attempt was in line with similar undertakings i in France and Italy, and serves to show how strong and how dangerous an influ- ence the revival of learning exerted upon the beginnings of modern literature. ‘Sidney Subsequently shook himself partly free from such artistic. vagaries. In 1579 Stephen. Gosson..published .a 74. A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE pamphlet called The School. of Abuse, in which, as a Puritan, he attacked the art of the age, especially the drama. Sidney replied with his. Defence.of Poesie in 1581. In this, one of the earliest pieces of English criticism, Sidney ‘ over the country-wench Audrey, because the gods have not made her poetical; the meditative Jacques (a first faint sketch, it has been said, of Hamlet), with his melancholy ‘compounded of many simples” ; Sir Toby Belch, cham- pion of the ancient doctrine of cakes and ale, and ginger hot in the mouth; the unspeakable Sir Andrew Ague- cheek ; the solemn prig and egotist Malvolio, smirking and pointing at his cross-garters ; Maria, ‘‘ youngest wren of nine”; and the clown Feste, with his marvellous haunt- ing songs. All these and dozens more move here in a kaleidoscope of intense life, spiritualized by an indescrib- able poetic radiance. These three comedies were written between 1598 and 1601, that is between the poet’s thirty-fourth and his thirty- Chance inthe Seventh year. The last of them, Twelfth Spirit of his Night, has been called his ‘ farewell to mirth.” Sonnets. What happened to him at this time, or whether anything external and tangible happened, we shall never know. Certain it is, however,that in eight tragedies, four of them of titanic size, and in two so-called comedies, almost more bitter and gloomy than the tragedies, he sounded ~ one after another the depths of human baseness, sin, and suffering. The only hint that we haye of the nature of that * valley and shadow thr ough’ which Shakespeare s seems to have passed, is found in his Sonnets. These were not published until 1609, after this period was over ; and we know that some of them were written before 1598, when the poet’s ° spiritual harmony, as reflected in his plays, was still undis- turbed. There is nothing, however, in either of these facts to disprove the hypothesis that those sonnets in which we see the most acute suffering expressed, may mark the beginning and progress of the period in question. They are addressed to ‘aman right fair” and ‘‘a woman colored YHE RENAISSANCE dV ill.” What the exact relations were between the three can only be guessed at. It has been plausibly conjectured that the ‘‘ Dark Lady” of the Sonnets was the evil genius of Shakespeare’s life, and that to her was chiefly due the change in his spirit and in his art. Of course it must be admitted that no such personal explanation of this change is needed. The poet’s sympathy was so all-embracing, and his outlook on life so broad, that the darker aspects of human charac- ter and destiny had sooner or later, in the natural course of things, to absorb’his attention. Whatever may be their personal bearing, however, the Sonnets are of inexhaustible interest, for the subtlety and depth of their thought, and for the curious mixture of oddity and artificiality, with tran- scendent beauty and power, in their expression. If Shake- speare had written nothing but these, he would still be a commanding figure in the literature of the English race. The plays of this period fall into three groups; the Roman plays, Julius Cesar, Antony and Cleopatra, an Coriolanus ; the so-called comedies, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida; and the tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear. Timon of Athens stands, as we shall see, somewhat apart. : In Julius Cesar, the hero is in one sense not Cesar, but Brutus, in whom the poet saw a political idealist and generous dreamer, used as a tool by selfish men, The Roman who bring overwhelming disaster upon the *#%* state by their murder of the only man strong enough to save it. In another sense, the hero is Cesar’s spirit after death, ‘‘ ranging for revenge,” and letting ‘“‘slip the dogs of war” to bring the world to ruin. In Coriolanus, the second Roman play, Shakespeare poured out his contempt for the ‘“‘ mob,” the fickle, many-headed multitude, played upon by demagogues, and working its own destruction in its hatred of those who refuse to flatter and amuse it. In Antony and Cleopatra he showed the character of a great Roman general, crumbling before the breath of Eastern 116 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE luxury and sensuality, personified in Cleopatra, the ‘“worm of old Nile.” In Measure for Measure Shakespeare struck at the hy- BePoonsy of a man high-placed in office and posing as a severe “h y moralist, who nevertheless yields to the very sin The ‘‘ Dark : : 3 and Bitter, he punishes most ruthlessly in others. In Troi- | lus and Cressida he drew a picture of faithless- ness in love, a picture so cynical, so fierce in its bitterness, that it is almost impossible to think of it as the work of the hand which drew Juliet, Portia, and Rosalind ; and at the same time he deformed the heroic figures of Homeric le- gend with savage burlesque. In Hamlet, the first of the four great tragedies which Pt form the ‘‘ captain jewels in the carcanet” of the master’s Tf. 4 See / work, we have the spectacle of a sensitive and highly in- teilectual youth, endowed with all the gifts which make for greatness of living, suddenly confront- ed with the knowledge that his father. has been murdered, and that his mother has married the murderer. Even before the revelation comes, Hamlet feels himself to be living in an alien moral world, and is haunted by dark misgivings. When his father’s ghost appears to him, with its imperative injunction to revenge, Hamlet takes his resolution instantly. His feigned madness, an element of the drama retained by Shakespeare from the old story whence he drew the plot, is the first device which Hamlet hits upon to aid him in his dangerous duty. In spite of the endless debate con- cerning the reality of Hamlet’s madness, there is no room for question in the matter. Not only is he perfectly sane, but his handling of the difficult situation in which he finds himself is in all points swift and masterful. He gives up his love for Ophelia because he cannot take her with him into the dark pass which he is compelled to enter; and the scathing satire which he pours out upon her when he fan- cies her in league with Polonius and the king to play the Hamlet. THE RENAISSANCE Tt? spy upon him, gathers its force from the greatness of the renunciation he has made. His scheme for proving the king’s guilt beyond a peradventure, by means of the stroll- ing players, is consummated with ingenicus skill. His dealings with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are those of a gifted man of action, to whose resolute will thought is a swift minister. ‘The core of his purpose is always firm; and it is one of the ironies of circumstance that Hamlet has come to stand in most minds for a type of irresolution. This misunderstanding of the character is largely due to the exaltation of excitement in Hamlet, which causes his mind, even in the moment when he js pursuing his purpose with most intentness, to play with feverish brilliancy over the questions of man’s life and death; which makes his throbbing, white-hot imagination a meeting-place for gro- tesque and extravagant fancies; and which leads him, so to speak, to cover the solid framework of his enterprise with a wild festoonery of intellectual whim, to envelop it in fitful eloquence, swift and subtle wit, contemptuous irony, and mordant satire. Yet this is merely the by-play of his mind, the volatilized substance which escapes under the heat of excitement. In the midst of it he remains per- fectly master of himself and of his means, a supremely rational, competent, and determined being, a prince and master of men, dedicated irrevocably to ruin in the moral chaos where the “cursed spite” of his destiny has thrown him. With a miraculous art, Shakespeare has depicted this character, not fixed in outline, but changing and pal- pitant as life itself; so that it constantly eludes our defini- tion, and seems forever passing from one state of being into another, in the passion of its struggle. Othello has a certain affinity to Hamlet in that here also the hero’s soul is thrown into violent perturbation by the discovery of evil poisoning the very sources of his life. In Othello’s case the pathos and the tragedy are heightened by the fact that the evil exists **Othello.” 118 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE only in the hero’s imagination, into which we see the demon-like Iago pouring, drop by drop, the poison of sus- picion. Othello is not by nature jealous. Desdemona in answer to Emilia’s question, ‘‘ Is he not jealous ?” says, ‘Who, he? I think the sun, where he was born Drew all such humors from him,’’ and he everywhere shows himself “‘ of an open and free nat- ure,” incapable of petty suspicion. But when Iago, work- ing cautiously, with diabolic skill, has at last convinced him that Desdemona is false, the fatal rage which seizes him is an hysterical reaction from the sickening blow of disillu- sion. ‘The real centre of gravity in the play is Iago, with his ‘‘honest” manners, his blunt speech, his downright materialistic philosophy, his plausible zeal in his master’s service ; underneath all which his real nature hes coiled like a snake, waiting for a chance to sting. In Macbeth, Shakespeare depicted the passion of ambi- tion working in a nature morally weak, but endowed with an intense poetic susceptibility. Macbeth is a dreamer and a sentimentalist, capable of conceiving vividly the goal of his evil desires, but incapable either of resolute action in attaining them or of a ruthless enjoyment of them when attained. By the murder of the king, Macbeth is plunged into a series of crimes, in which he persists with a kind of faltering desperation, until he falls before the accumulated vengeance, material and ghostly, raised up to punish him. As, in Antony and Cleopatra, we are shown the slow degen- eration of the hero’s character under the slavery of sense, so here we behold the break-up of a soul under the torture of its own sick imagination. The ghost of Banquo, shaking its gory locks at Macbeth from its seat at the banquet table, is a symbol of the spiritual distemper which results from the working of a tyrannous imagination upon a nature morally unprovided. ‘The witch-hags who meet Macbeth on the heath are concrete embodiments of the powers of THE RENAISSANCE 119 evil, summoned from the four corners of the air by affinity with the evil heart of the schemer, Shakespeare did not, of course, consciously strive after symbolism in these things. It does not seem impossible, indeed, that he believed in ghosts and witches, as did the great mass of men in his day, from King James down. It is certain that he was in- terested in his story, here and elsewhere, as a piece of life rather than as a moral symbol; his work is full of types and symbols simply because life itself is full of them. Beside Macbeth Shakespeare has placed a woman who pos- sesses all the masculine qualities which the hero lacks, but who is nevertheless intensely feminine in her devotion to her lord’s interest, and in her inability to endure the strain of a criminal life after his support has been withdrawn from her, Her will, though majestic when in the prosperous service of her husband’s ambition, collapses in sudden ruin when he fails to rise to the responsibilities of their grim situation. Macbeth’s feebler moral substance crumbles piecemeal; but the firm structure of his wife’s spirit, as soon as its natural foundation is destroyed, falls by instant overthrow. King Lear is often put at the apex of Shakespeare’s achievement, and by many judges at the head of the dra- matic literature of the world. The story was “Rin as old as Geoffrey of Monmouth (see page 24), age -and, likeso many of the themes which Shakespeare handled, had already been made the subject of a play, a crude effort by some nameless playwright during the experimental stage of Elizabethan drama. Here, as was his constant custom, Shakespeare followed the main lines of the story given him, and incorporated into his grand edifice every bit of usable material from the building of his predecessor. Here too, as always in Shakespeare if we pierce to the core of his meaning, the real tragedy is a spiritual one. Lear is an imperious nature, wayward by temperament, and made more incapable of self-government by !ong indulgence of its passionate whims. At the opening of the play, we see 120 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE him striving to find a refuge from himself by surrender- ing all his wealth and power in exchange for absolute love. The heart of the old king demands love ; love is the ele- ment upon which it subsists, and age, instead of abating this hunger, has made the craving more imperious. He demands love not only in the spirit but in the letter, and thrusts his youngest daughter Cordelia from him with cruel brusqueness, when she refuses to use the terms of extravagant hyperbole to describe her affection. Shake- speare has made this same brusque and hasty spirit of the king precipitate upon his old head the enmity of his re- maining daughters, Goneril and Regan. Before he has recovered from the shock of Cordelia’s defection, this awful pair of daughters lay bare, little by little, their monstrous souls to their father’s gaze. As in Othello, the result of the revelation is to unhinge for the sufferer the very order of nature. As if in sympathy with the chaos in Lear’s soul, the elements break loose; and in the pauses of the blast we hear the noise of violent crimes, curses, heart- broken jesting, the chatter of idiocy, and the wandering tongue of madness. ‘The sentimentalist’s phrase, ‘‘ poetic justice,” has no meaning for Shakespeare. The ruin wrought in the old king’s heart and brain is irrepar- able, and the tornado which whirls him to his doom car- ries with it the just and the unjust. The little golden pause of peace, when Lear and Cordelia are united, i followed by the intolerably piercing scene in which he bears her dead body out of the prison, muttering that they have hanged his ‘‘ poor fool.” ‘The consequences of rash action, heartlessly taken advantage of, were never followed out to a grimmer end. Timon of Athens, the last play of the period we have been traversing, has little of the insight and End of Shake- speare’s ‘‘Pe-, poetic jpohene which we associate with Shake- riod of Gloom speare’s name. It has no relieving touches such as soften and humanize the tragedies just discussed. It is a THE RENAISSANCE 121 kind of summing up of the pessimistic view of life, in the person of Timon, the misanthrope, whose savage rhetoric is poured out upon the selfishness and baseness of men. The plays which mark the closing period of Shakespeare’s life are pure romances, conceived in a spirit of deep _~. , and lovely serenity, and characterized by a sil- very delicacy, a tender musing touch, which is new in the poet’s work. This is less true of Cymbe- line, the first of the group, than of A Winter’s Tale and The Tempest; but even in Cymbeline the new mood is apparent, in the exquisite picture of Imogen, and in the woodland scenes between Arviragus and the young princes. It is still more apparent in the pastoral under-play in A Winter’s Tale, where Prince Florizel woos Perdita, the wild-flower maid. It shines out full-orbed in Zhe Tempest, where Prospero sways with his magic the elements and the wills of men to his bidding, in the service of his daughter’s happiness. In this play all the powers of the master meet together; the grace that had created the fairy world of Midsummer Night’s Dream, the lyric passion that had breathed through Juliet’s lips on her bridal morning, the drollery and wit that had set the laughter of centuries billowing about Falstaff, the titanic might that had sent a world crashing on the head of Lear —all meet together here, but curbed, softened, silvered down into exquisite harmony. The Tempest is believed to have been written for the . wedding ceremonies of Princess Elizabeth, daughter of . James I., and Prince Frederick, the Elector «ne tem- \ yy nee in 1613. If this is true (and it seems Pet-”’ ‘/ now to be beyond reasonable doubt), The Tempest was Shakespeare’s farewell to his art. When scarcely fifty years of age, with his genius at its ripest, and every faculty of his mind in full play, he laid down his pen for- ever ; as Prospero, at the end, abjures his magic, breaks his wand, and drowns his book ‘‘ deeper than did ever His Last Plays. v 122 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE plummet sound.” One is tempted to indulge the fanciful parallel still further, and ‘to think of Ariel, the delicate and potent sprite whom Prospero sets free, as the spirit of Imagination, now released from its long labors in the mas- ter’s service. The common opinion that Shakespeare was unappreci- ated by his own generation, is only partly true. If other Appreciation €Vidence were lacking to prove the esteem in ausinnis Which he was held, his material prosperity ink would be sufficient to show at least his high popularity with the theatre-going public. But there is witness that his genius was in tolerable measure recognized. His great anti-type and rival, Ben Jonson, whose burly good sense was not prone to exaggeration, and who perhaps never quite conquered a feeling of jealousy toward Shake- speare, wrote for the first collective edition of the plays, published in 1623, a eulogy full.of deep, in places even passionate, admiration; and afterward said of him in a passage of moving sincerity, ‘‘I did love and honor him, on this side idolatry, as much as any.” The most signifi- cant hint we have of his personal charm is in the adjective which is constantly applied to him by his friends, “ gen- tle,” a word also often used to describe his art, in allusion evidently to its humanity and poetic grace. The awe inspired by the almost unearthly power and richness of Shakespeare’s mind is apt to be deepened by the knowledge that the noble plays to which English-speaking races point as their greatest single achievement, were thrown His Careless. L2t0 the world carelessly, and would have per- ness of Fame. ished altogether if the author of them had had his way. During his lifetime they were printed only in pirated editions, taken down by shorthand from the lips of the players, or patched up from prompter’s manuscripts dishonestly acquired. He does not mention his plays in his will. Not until seven years after his death did a col- lective edition appear (known as the First Folio), and then THE RENAISSANCE 133 only because of the piety of two of his actor-friends. Those ill-inspired persons who would ascribe the plays of Shake- speare to Francis Bacon, make this carelessness of his fame on the poet’s part a chief support of their argument. If we were compelled to explain Shakespeare’s case on prac- tical grounds, it would be easy todo so. The printing of a play while it was still actable, was disadvantageous to the company whose property it was; and Shakespeare had probably made over his plays to his company as they were produced. Notwithstanding, when all this is taken into consideration, we are yet filled with astonishment. We see in the working of the master’s spirit not only the vast liberality, but the startling carelessness of Nature, who seems with infinite loving pains to create her marvels, and then to turn listlessly away while they are given over to destruction. CHAPTER VII THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: SHAKESPEARE’S CONTEM- PORARIES AND SUCCESSORS IN THE DRAMA In the preceding chapter, we regarded Shakespeare as standing alone, in order that by isolating his work we might better see its absolute qualities. We must now turn to those playwrights who worked at the same time and in many cases side by side with him, and try to get some notion of the wonderful variety of the drama during its period of full bloom. Afterward we must trace briefly the steps by which the drama declined, both by inner de- cay and outward opposition, until, in 1642, at the begin- ning of the great Civil War, the doors of the theatres were closed, not to open again until the Restoration, eighteen years later. The most commanding figure in the group of Shake- speare’s dramatic contemporaries is Ben Jonson (1573- 1637). Although of humble birth, the son of a bricklayer, he was sent to Westminster School and possibly to Cambridge ; and he ultimately became one of the most learned men of his time. As a. young man he served a campaign with the English army in Flanders, where (as he afterward boasted) he fought a duel with a champion of the enemy in the sight of both armies, and took from him his arms, in the classic manner. The inci- dent is highly characteristic of Jonson’s rugged and domineering character. As he served the Flemish soldier, he afterward served the luckless poets and poetasters who challenged him to a war of words. After returning to England, he began to work for the theatres. His first play was Hvery Man in His Humour 124 ete Ben Jonson. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 125 (1027), in which Shakespeare is known to have acted. A series of literary quarrels followed, in the course of which he wrote several elaborate plays, The Poetaster, Cynthia’s frevels, etc., to revenge himself upon his rather puny enemies. His four masterpieces appeared between 1605 and: 1614. They are The Silent Woman, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair,—all called comedies by by him, though the ‘second is a gloomy and _ biting satire, and the last a pure farce. He also wrote two massive tragedies taken from Roman history, Seganus and Cataline. For many years after his appointment by James I. as poet. laureate, he supplied the king with court-masques, little spectacle-plays delicate in fancy and rich in lyric tracery, which were acted at Whitehall by gorgeously costumed lords and ladies, amid magnificent stage-settings contrived by the king’s architect, Inigo Jones, with the lyrics set to music by the king’s musician, Ferrabosco. Jonson’s work as a dramatist was in sharp contrast with that. of. all his” contemporaries. In the first place he set himself squarely against.the romantic tendency Jonson’s of his day, and threw the whole weight of hig “lssicism. powerful intellect, his great learning and invention, into the task of converting the drama to classicism. He took up the line of development which had been begun in Gorbodue, Ralph Royster Doyster, and other plays written . when the influence of Senecaand Plautus was at its height ; and he fought all his life long a single-handed battle against what he judged to be the ignorant preference of the public for the romantic form. Not only did he stand out for the classical ‘‘ unities” (see page 95) but he made war upon the fantastic and extravagant qualities of ro- mantic imagination, and labored to supplant them by clas- sical sanity and restraint. Anything further than Every Man in His Humour from Twelfth Night or The Tem- pest, it would be difficult to imagine. The latter are full of glancing imagination and irresponsible fancy ; the for- 126 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE mer moves in the prose light of every day, and deals with everyday London characters in a straightforward method- ical fashion. ‘The work of the two poets in historical tragedy, offerseven a stronger contrast. Shakespeare, in dealing with an epoch of the past, works with the free hand of the romanticist ; even where he keeps closest to the actual facts of history, asin Julius Cesar, he cares chiefly to create breathing men and women, and takes little trouble to give a faithful picture of the times. The historical plays of Jonson, on the other hand, are monu- ments of learning; they attempt to be scrupulously faith- ful, in historical details, to the period portrayed. Shake- speare and the romantic school fling the most riotous fun, the most farcical nonsense, into the midst of tragic action ; with Jonson and his school it is a point of honor to keep the dignity of tragic action unimpaired. by such intrusion, Another peculiarity of Jongon’s art is hinted at ‘by the title of his first play, Avery Man in His Humour. The ey word ‘‘humor’’ was a cant term in his day,* intisiu- equivalent_to “whim” or ‘foible.” He hit upon the device of endowing each one of his characters with some particular whim or affectation, some ludicrous exaggeration of manner, speech, or dress ; and of so thrusting forward this single odd trait that all others might be lost sight of. Every man, in other words, should be ‘“‘in his humor.” This working principle Jonson ex- tended afterward in his two great comedies, Volpone and The Alchemist. In. Volpone he studied, ‘not a foible or whim, but a master-passion, the passion of greed, as it affects a whole social group ;_in..The Alchemist—he- made an elaborate study of human ‘gullibility. There is doubt- less something mechanical in this method of going to work according to a set programme. Shakespeare also has devoted whole plays to the study of a master-passion,— in Othello that of jealousy, in Macbeth that of ambition. * Note Bardolph’s use of the word in Henry IV. and Henry V. ss THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 12% But he does this in a very different way from Jonson; with much more variety, surprise, and free play of life. Jonson has, as it were, a thesis_to illustrate, and.holds.up.one character after another, as a logician presents the various parts of his argument. In other words, he always, or near Ly always, lets us see the machinery. But while he thus loses in spontaneity, he gains in intellectual unity and in mas- siveness of purpose. In at least one respect the comedies of Ben Jonson are the most interesting plays in the whole Elizabethan reper- tory,—namely, in the vivid pictures they give neoath of contemporary London life. Other drama- mee tists took up the notion later, and did admirable work of the kind. Dekker, in his Shoemakers’ Holiday, and Mid- dleton in his Roaring Girl and other plays, mirrored freshly and faithfully the society immediately about them ; but Jonson seems to have been the pioneer in this Peeneat Every Man in His Humour probably antedating even Henry IV., Shakespeare’s triumphant essay in this form of realism. From Jonson’s comedies alone it would be possible to reconstruct whole areas of Elizabethan society ; a study of them is indispensable if one would know the brilliant and amusing surface of the most sociable era of English history. At least one of Jonson’s comedies, too, gives this close and realistic study of manners with a gay- ety and grace fairly rivalling Shakespeare; the Silent Woman 1 is one of the most sparkling comedies ever writ- ten, full of splendid fun, and with a bright, quick move- ment which never flags. Jonson’s lyric gift, for its delicacy and sweetness, was conspicuous even in the Elizabethan age, when almost every writer was capable of turning off a charm- ing song. The best known of his lyrics are “‘ Drink to me only with thine eyes,” and “See the chariot at hand here of love”; of both these the old-time music has fortunately reached us. Jonson was. also a critic of His Lyric Gift. 128 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE mie prose, very difforent from the elaborate and fig- urative prose-style practised by his contemporaries. His volume of short reflections. upon. life and art, entitled Tim- ber, shows in_an attractive guise the solidity, aggressive- ness, ‘and downr ight honesty of his mind. It was chiefly these qualities of aggressive decision and rugged honesty which enabled him to hold for a quarter of Teer e century his position of literary dictator, and Literary lord of the ‘‘ tavern-wits.” The tavern was for the seventeenth century what the coffee-house was for the eighteenth, a rallying place for literary men ; and Jonson is almost as typical a tavern figure as Falstaff. His *‘ mountain belly and his rocky face,” his genial, domi- neering personality, ruled by royal right the bohemian circle which gathered at ‘‘ The Mermaid ” or ‘‘ The Devil,” where the young fellows of the ‘‘ tribe of Ben” heard words ‘‘So nimble and so full of stibtle flame As if that every one from whence they came Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, And had resolved to live a fool the rest Of his dull life.” * Here took place those famous wit-combats between Jonson and Shakespeare, described by Fuller under the simile of a sea-fight ; Jonson, slow of movement and ‘‘high built in learning,” being likened to a great Spanish galleon, Shake- _ speare to an English man-of-war, swift to strike and dart away, confounding the enemy with agility and adroitness. The qualities for which Ben Jonson demands admiration aré rather of the solid than the brilliant kind. In an age of imaginative license he preached the. need_of restraint ; in an age of hasty, careless workmanship he preached the need of sound construction and good finish. He was a safe eVeriet entitled ** Master Francis Beaurront to Ben Jonson.” THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 129 guide; if the younger dramatists of his day had heeded him, the drama would not have gone on, as it did, deepen- ing in extravagance and license until it died, so to speak, of dissipation. But except for his effect upon the lyric poetry of Herrick and the Cavalier song-writers, his direct influence was small. He stood outside the great wave of romantic feeling, of which Spenser, Shakespeare, and Mil- ton mark the successive crests ; and when he died in 1637, broken down and embittered, the triumph of classicism seemed far off indeed. The movement which he had start- ed, however, went on, through indirect and often obscure channels, until its culmination in Dryden and Pope. The seeds of eighteenth century classicism are to be found in Jonson’s work. Of the life of Thomas Dekker almost nothing is known. The date of his birth is guessed to be between 1570 and 1577, and he is entirely lost sight of a few years Topas before the outbreak of the Civil War. But iter though next to nothing is known of him, his individuality is so distinctly reflected in his plays, that he seems one of the most definite figures of his time, —a sunny, light-hearted nature, full of real even if somewhat disorderly genius. The Shoemakers’ Holiday (written before 1599), perhaps his earliest play, is his best. It is a study of London apprentice life, woven about a slender but charming love- story. ‘The master-shoemaker, Simon Eyre, and his wife Margery, are drawn with a broad exuberant humor wholly captivating. Zhe Shoemakers’ Holiday has in it all the morning gladness and freshness of the Elizabethan temper. Dekker wrote one other charming play, Old Fortunatus, a dramatized fairy-tale of the wishing-hat and exhaustless purse. It is a chaotic piece of work, but its incoherence rather adds to than detracts from the dreamy nursery-tale effect. The later work of Dekker, most of it done in col- laboration with other playwrights, is much more serious. It is as if he had fallen under the shadow of gloom begin- 130 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ning to steal over poe ene, presaging the storm and stress of the Civil War. ‘Thomas..Hey.wood. is egy dramatist whose history is almost a blank. He was probably born about the same nh time as Dekker, and seems to have been alive in Heywood. 1648, His life therefore spans the whole period of the drama from Marlowe to Shirley. He was im- mensely productive, declaring. himself to have had “a whole hand or a main finger in two hundred and twenty plays.” He must in fairness be judged as a dramatic jour- nalist, in an age when the theatre tried to do what the newspaper and the lecture hall now accomplish, rather than as a dramatist in the more dignified and permanent ~ sense. In one direction, however, Heywood achieved . mastery, namely, in the drama of simple domestic life. His most famous play of this nature is A Woman Killed with Kindness. Here for once Heywood handled his sub- ject “with noble simplicity, with deep tragic effect, and with a truth and sweetness of moral tone, which justify Charles Lamb’s saying that Heywood is ‘‘a prose Shake- speare.” In the drama of domestic life mixed with ad- venture, Heywood is also successful, though in a less su- preme degree, Perhaps the best example of this type of play to be found among his works is The Fair Maid of the West, in which there are some capital vignettes of life in an English seaport town, as well as some. ik eae breezy melodramatic sea- -fighting. Thomas Middleton (1570-1627) was a man of at larger calibre. He developed slowly, but his work shows Thomas to the very last a steady gain in power and Middleton. sweetness. By his frank contact with life as it is, and by his continual effort to see life in its plainness and entirety, he attained at last to a grasp and insight which place him among the great names of the English stage. He had no university training, but was entered at Gray’s Inn in 1593. His life about the law courts gave him THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 131 an intimate knowledge of the shady side of the metropolis, which was of great service to him when he began, about 1607, to write realistic comedies. Of these the best is per- haps A Trick to Catch the Old One. His transition from comedy to ) tragedy i issmar ‘ked byt the Nery 3 inter resting play, A Fair Quarrel, in which the noble seriousness of certain scenes, and the fine dramatic ring of the verse, herald the approach of his complete maturity. It was between 1620 and his death in 1627, that is, when over fifty, that he wrote the two plays, The Changeling and Women Beware earn Both The Changeling .and..Women. Beware. Women. are unpleasant in plot, and marred by the obtrusion of crude horrors. They belong in fact to a peculiar type The “Tragedy of drama, vastly relished by Elizabethan au- °f Bloo diences but repellent to modern taste, called by nae historians the “« tragedy of blood. fg Thomas Kyd’s Spanish... Tragedy began the type, ‘Marlowe in. ‘the Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare i in Titus Andronicus, continued it. In- deed, Hamlet and Lear are really in plot ‘tragedies of blood,” though spiritualized out of all inner resemblance to the species. As we shall see later, John Webster’s two masterpieces are pure ‘‘ tragedies of blood,” making use of the element of physical terror in season and out of season. Middleton was therefore the victim of his age in this respect, as he was also in the moral violence, the selec- tion of strained and painful situations, which mar the two plays under consideration. When they were written, the decadence of the drama had set in; and Middleton was not great enough to hold his work altogether above the swift downward trend of the stage at the time. But both The Changeling and Women Beware Women, are studded with fine poetry, fine in feeling and supremely fine in ex- pression. Middleton learned, better than any of Shake- speare’s fellows, the secret of the master’s diction. With: 132 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE out imitating the Shakespearean manner, he handles language, at his best, with the same superb confidence ; and this is true of his comic prose as well as of his serious blank verse. Francis Beaumont.and John Fletcher are, in Lowell’s phrase, among “‘ the double stars of the heavens of poetry.” Beaumont ana Lletcher, the elder of the two, was the son of a eRgeCHaLs Bishop of London, through whom the young dramatist gained an unusual insight into court life. None of Fletcher’s fellows knew so well as he how to paint the hollow inside, and the exquisite outer finish, of courtly manners. Another fact contributing to form his genius, was that the official residence of his father, the episcopal palace at Fulham, lay amid beautiful river and forest scen- ery. To the country memories gathered here in boyhood he gave expression later in the pastoral play of The Faith- ful Shepherdess, as well as in the songs with which his dramas are richly interspersed. At the Mermaid tavern, among those ‘sealed of the tribe of Ben,” he met the man whose name is inseparably linked with his own. Francis Beaumont was Their i intellectual seven Years YOUNZeEr than Fletcher, being about twenty-one at the time of their meeting. After their partnership began, tradition says that they lived to- gether on the Bankside, sharing everything, even their clothing, in common. This at least represents a more essential truth, that they entered into a singularly effec- tive intellectual partnership ; one mind supplying what the other lacked, to produce a result of full and balanced beauty. The closeness with which the work of the two is intertwined, is shown by the fact that although Fletcher outlived Beaumont by nine years, and the latter had no hand at all in forty of the fifty-odd plays that go under their common name, attempts to isolate the genius of one from the other by comparison of the Fletcher plays with the Beaumont-Fletcher group, have led equally well — THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 133 equipped critics into exactly opposite conclusions, The weight of opinion, however, seems to be that Beaumont had the deeper and more serious imagination, and the greater constructive power; and that Fletcher excelled chiefly in lyric sweetness, rhetorical fluency, and many- colored sentiment. Beaumont died in the same year as Shakespeare (1616) ; his co-laborer lived until the acces- sion of Charles I., in 1625. Among the plays jointly written, the best are perhaps Philaster and The Maid’s Tragedy. The theme of Philaster is a common one in the old drama, the same, for < under the shadow of. a terrible spiritual gloom; - Preacher. and just as, in the poetry of his youth, he had seemed to feel the unrest ¢ and feverish intensity of a later generation, so in’ the sermons of his later years he seems to feel, be- fore any of his contemporaries, the dark shadow of religious terror which was beginning to steal over Puritan England. The seventeenth century was pre-eminently an age of preaching. ‘Theology was the first concern of all serious men, and it was round the pulpit that the storms which shook society chiefly raged. Of the large body of preach- ers who made the age illustrious in pulpit literature, Jere- my Taylor (1613- -1667) was the most popular ious and gracious, as Donne was the most terrible Taye and impressive. ‘Taylor, like Donne, shares in the charac- teristic melancholy of the age; but in his case it is soft- ened and tenderly poetized.' His tones are sweet and warm, woven into a rich melody that hovers at times on the verge of the sentimental and the florid. His most famous work, the Holy Living and Holy Dying (1650-1651) was written in Wales, where he lived during the troubles of the Civil * Donne was formerly thought to have borrowed his manner from these foreign sources, but he is now believed to have developed it’ independently. 146 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE War. Hazlitt says of the Holy Living and Holy Dying, «It is a divine pastoral, He writes to the faithful fol- lowers of Christ as the shepherd pipes to his flock. . . He makes life a procession to the grave, but crowns it with garlands, and rains sacrificial roses on its path.” * In Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) the seventeenth century ‘‘time-spirit” found curious but very noble ex- Sir Thomas pressio:. His mind was deeply tinged with Benes melancholy, and he shared the prevalent ten- dency toward religious mysticism, But these qualities are oddly infused with scepticism flowing from his scien- tific studies, a kind of dreamy, half-credulous scepticism, very different from Bacon’s clear-cut rational view of things, but more characteristic of an age in which medi. eval and modern ways of thought were still closely mingled together. After studying medicine at the famous schools of Montpellier in France and Padua in Italy, Browne settled as a physician at Norwich, in Norfolk, and there passed his life. In 1642 appeared his first work, Religio Medici, a confession of his own personal religious creed, It is in essence a mystical acceptance of Christianity. ‘‘ Methinks,” he says, ‘‘there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith . . I love to lose myself in a mystery ; to pursue my reason to an O Altitudo!” This sense of solemn exaltation, this losing His Character. 0: himself in a mystery and an O Altitudo, is istic Mood. Browne’s most characteristic mood. He loves to stand before the face of the Eternal and the Infinite until the shows of life fade away, and he is filled witha passionate quietude and humility. We see in him how far the temper of men had departed from the Elizabethan zest of life, from the Renaissance delight in the stir and bustle of human activity. ‘‘ Methinks,” he says, “I begin to be weary of the sun. . . The world to me is * William Hazlitt, Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Eliza- beth. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 147 but a dream and mock-show, and we all therein but panta- loons and antics, to my severer contemplations.” While the mighty struggle which Lord Clarendon depicts in his History of the Rebellion, was shaking the earth with Its “‘drums and tramplings,” Sir Thomas Browne was quietly writing his longest work, Vulgar Errors (1646), an inquiry, half-scientific and half-credulous, into various pop- ular beliefs and superstitions. ‘Twelve years later he pub- lished the Urn Burial, a short piece suggested phe «Urn by the finding of some ancient Roman funeral B¥"4!-”’ urns buried in the earth in the neighborhood of Norwich. The Urn Burial is ostensibly an inquiry into the various historic methods of disposing of the dead, but by implica- tion it isa descant upon the vanity of earthly ambition, especially in its attempt to hand on mortal memory to future ages. It is Browne’s most characteristic work, and contains perhaps the supreme examples of his style. The grandeur and solemnity of this style, at its best, is hardly to be paralleled in English prose. Like almost all the writers of his age, Browne is extremely desultory and uneven; his “purple patches” come unex- — prowne’s pectedly, but these occasional passages have Style. a@ pomp and majesty which even Milton has not surpassed, His English is full of magniloquent words and phrases coined from the Latin, and the music of his periods is deep, stately, and long-drawn, like that of an heroic funeral march or the full-stop of a cathedral organ. The opening of the last section of the Urn Burial will serve perhaps to make these comparisons clear: ‘‘ Now, since these dead bones have already outlasted the living ones of Methusaleh, and in a yard under ground, and thin walls of clay, outworn all the strong and specious buildings above it; and quietly rested under the drums and tramp- lings of three conquests: what prince can promise such diuturnity unto his reliques?” ‘The way in which his im- agination plays through his thought and flashes a sudden 148 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH !iTHRATURE illumination of beauty over his pages, may be suggested by these words, written one night when he had sat late at his desk : ‘*'T'o keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America!” A wide-spread national mood usually finds its analyst. The melancholy of the seventeenth century, its causes, its manifestations, and its cure, were exhaustively treated tio ae ene PY Richard Burton (1577-1 641) in his Anatomy ane. of, of Melancholy, a book into which he gathered ' the out-of-the-way learning and the dreamy speculation of fifty years of recluse life at Brasenose Col- lege, Oxford. So curious a mixture of pedantry, imagi- nation, and quiet brooding humor, covering in a sense the whole life and thought of man, could hardly have been produced in any other era of English literature; as, indeed, no other era would have suggested ‘‘ melancholy ” as a theme for encyclopeedic treatment. The character of an age is betrayed no more by the direct expression of its prevailing mood, than by the re- actions which occur against that mood, and by the attempts which are made to escape from its domination. Such an attempt to escape from the intense seriousness of their age we may perhaps trace in the amatory verse of Carew, The Cavalier WOVelace, and Suekling, who, from their con- Poets. nection with Charles’s court, are known as the Cavalier poets. Of the three, Carew "(1598-1638?) was the sincerest poet. His work is occasionally tinged with licentiousness ; but much of it, on the other hand, has genuine beauty and dignity. He felt the influence of goth Ben Jonson and Donne, and such a poem as “To His Mistress in Absence” has the sanity and finish of the one, mingled with the magnetic eloquence of the other. He is best known by his lighter efforts such as his “Give me more love or more disdain,” in which poem his felicity and courtly address display themselves at their height. He wrote also a striking court masque entitled Celum Brite THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 149 tanicum, which was produced in 1634 with the greatest ' magnificence, as a kind of counter-demonstration to a recent Puritan onslaught upon the theatre. Carew died in 1638, just before the bursting of the storm which was to scatter the gay society of Whitehall, and bring to poverty, exile, and death the men and women who had danced the measures in his joyous masque. Richard Lovelace (1618-1658) and John Suckling (1609- 1641) were young courtiers of wealth and great social brilliance, who practised poetry much as they practised swordsmanship ; facility in turning a sonnet or a song being still, as in the Elizabethan age, considered a part of a courtier’s education. Each of them wrote, it would seem almost by happy accident, two or three little songs ~ which are the perfection of melody, grace, and aristocratic ease. Suckling’s tone is cynical and mocking; the best songs of Lovelace, on the other hand, ‘To Lucasta on Going to the Wars,” and ‘*To Althea from Prison,” breathe a spirit of old-fashioned chivalry, of faithfulness to the ideals of love and knightly honor. Both Suckling and Lovelace met with tragic reversal of fortune; and the contrast between their careless, brilliant youth, and their wretched death, has thrown about their names a romantic glamour which has had perhaps as much to do with pre- serving their fame as the tiny sheaf of lyrics they left behind. Another form of:escape from the melancholy and the superheated atmosphere of the age, is shown by the pas- toral writers and celebrators of country life. pe pastoral Two of these, William Browne (1590-1645) and Poets: George Wither (1588-1667), were pastoral poets in the exact sense. They continued the pastoral tradition of the school of Spenser; and like Spenser they vitalized them a sincere feeling for nature, and by making them convey, under a playful disguise, a certain amount of | 150 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITE RATURS ethical and religious thought. Browne’s Brittania’s Pastorals give us the homely sights and sounds of Devon- shire, in a way which makes his pages charming in spite of their sentimentality, their false mythology, and their strained allegory. Wither’s Mistress: of Philarete is a celebration of Virtue, whom the poet personifies and praises exactly as if she were some lovely shepherdess of the plain. A kindred spirit to these simple-hearted pas- | toral poets is found in Isaac Walton (1593- raetip wit, 1683). He was'a London linen-draper, who Posts ara Spent his working days in measuring cloth and ty Lite." serving his customers over the shop counter; but who passed his holidays in quite another fashion, roaming with fishing-rod and basket along the banks of streams, and gazing with unspoiled eyes at the unspoiled peace and gayety of nature. His Complete Angler was printed in 16538, amid the fierce political and religious agitations of the Commonwealth; but a sweeter or more untroubled book has never been written. Two other mem- bers of this group of nature-poets and celebrants of coun- try life remain to be mentioned, Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell. The bulk of their work is, in the broader sense, pastoral; but they were both touched deeply at times by religious emotion, and Marvell reflects in his later poetry the strenuous political life in which he took part. Robert Herrick (1591-1674) was apprenticed in boyhood | to his uncle, a goldsmith in Cheapside. After some time spent at Cambridge, he returned to London in his thirtieth year, and lived on his wits in the literary bohemia of the Inns of Court. In 1629, having taken orders, he was presented by King Charles to the vicarage of Dean Prior, in Devonshire. Here, with no duties to perform, save the reading of a weekly sermon to a handful of sleepy parishioners, he had ample opportunity, during the next nineteen years, to develop his peculiar \\\\ Herrick. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 151 lyrical gift. His genius was of the kind which carves cherry-stones, not of the kind which hews great figures from the living rock. Left perfectly to himself, amid the flowers of his vicarage garden, with the pretty traditional ceremonies and merry-makings of country life to look at, he spent his days carving cherry-stones, indeed, but giving to them the delicate finish of cameos or of goldsmith’s work. In poem after poem he enters with extraordinary zest and folk-feeling into the small joys and pageants of rural life, —a bridal procession, a cudgel-play between two clowns on the green, a puppet-show at the fair, the hanging of holly and box at Candlemas Eve. Perhaps the most ex- quisite of all is “Corinna going a-Maying.” This little masterpiece is drenched with the pungent dews of a spring morning. As the-poet calls his “‘ sweet slug-a-bed” out of doors, and leads her through the village streets, already decked with white-thorn, toward the fields and woods where the May-day festivities are to be enacted, we feel that the poetry of old English life speaks through one who has experienced to the full its simple charm. Even the note of sadness at the end, the looking forward to that dark time when Corinna herself and all her village mates shall <‘lie drowned in endless night,” has a peasant-like sincerity of feeling. When the Parliamentary forces had gained the battle which they had been waging with the King’s men, and Herrick as a loyalist was ejected from his living, he went back to London. The year of his return (1648) he published his poems under the title of Hesperides. and Noble Numbers, the latter half of the title re- Relea ferring to the religious poems of the collection, P°° There could be no more striking sign of the immense re- ligious ferment of the time than these poems, emanating as they do from an epicurean and pagan nature, whose philosophy of life is summed up in his most famous song, ‘‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” In the wonderful 152 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE poem called ‘‘The Litany,” the masterpiece among Her- rick’s religious poems, we see how upon even his gay and sensuous nature there descended at times that dark shadow of religious terror which later found its final and appalling expression in the Grace Abounding of John Bunyan. In Herrick’s case, however, this is only a passing phase of feeling. He is to be remembered as the poet of ‘‘ Corinna going a-Maying,” the ‘‘Night-Piece to Julia,” and of a myriad other little poems in which he chronicles his de- light in nature, and_ in the exquisite surface of life as he saw it. Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) was among the first of Eng- lish poets to feel the charm of nature with romantic in- tensity, and at the same time with matter-of-fact realism. The bulk of his nature-poetry was written between his twenty-ninth and his thirty-first years, while he was living in country seclusion at Nunappleton, as tutor to the young daughter of Lord Fairfax, com- mander-in-chief of the Parliamentary forces. ‘The prin- cipal record of these two years of poetic life is a long poem entitled ‘“‘ Appleton House ;” besides this, the most beau- tiful of his country poems are perhaps ‘‘'The Garden” and ‘‘'The Mower to the Glow-worms.” In these, and in his delicate little pastoral dialogues, he links him- self with the pastoral school of Spenser; in other places, especially in the lines ‘‘T’o a Coy Mistress,” he shows the influence of Donne. In his later life Marvell served for a time as assistant to Milton, then acting as Latin secretary to Cromwell’s government. He helped Milton in his lindness, aided him to escape from his pursuers at the Restoration, and watched with mingled admiration and awe the progress of Paradise Lost, which began about 1658 to take shape, after twenty years’ delay. In the noble **Ode to Cromwell,” Marvell set an example, worthy of Milton himself, of simple dignity and classical restraint in the treatment of a political theme. Marvell. Vii THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 153 The religious excitement of the seventeenth century, which, as we have seen, found memorable expression in th prose of Donne, Taylor, and Browne, and which here an there affected the nature-poets, produced also a group of religious poets in the exclusive sense. Of these The Religious the first was Giles Fletcher (1588-1623), whose Posts ; Giles epic entitled Christ’s Voctory and Triumph on Earth and in Heaven, is, for all its quaintness of thought and phrase, no unworthy forerunner of Paradise Lost. It was published in 1610, when Milton was two years old. Signs of its influence upon Milton can be traced from his early Hymm on the Nativity to the Paradise Regained of hisoldage. The last canto, which deals with the Resur- rection and with the entrance of Christ into Heaven, is the most beautiful part of the poem. It is a great Haster hymn, expressing the joy of earthly and heavenly things over the risen Redeemer.” The sympathy with nature which it reveals is exquisite, resembling Chaucer’s in 2s childlike delight and sweetness, but filled with a religious ecstasy which was not in Chaucer’s nature. Giles Fletcher was a follower of Spenser, and the rich color and soft music of his epic constantly recall the verse of the /aerie Vueene. Three later religious poets, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan, were followers of Donne; and they carried even farther than their master that use of ‘‘ conceits,”: of strained metaphors and difficult comparisons, which caused Dr. Johnson to nickname Donne and his disciples the ‘‘ Metaphysical School,” though the ‘‘ Fantastic School” would have been a more descriptive title. But as in thé master, so in the group of religious poets who most completely felt his influence, perversities of manner Are continually redeemed by imaginative intensity and ‘deep feeling. George Herbert (1593-1632), like Donne, published little ‘or no poetry in his lifetime. After a youth spent in prep- 154 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE aration for a court career, and some years of disappointed waiting for court favors, he entered the Church. Once within the pale of the religious life, he felt the full force of that spiritual agitation and awe which sooner or later overtook all serious minds in the first half of the seventeenth century. After two years of devoted Herbert. labor as a parish priest at Bemerton, near Salisbury, he - was stricken with a mortal malady. On his deathbed he handed to Nicholas Ferrar a bundle of manuscript, asking him to read it, and then to use it or destroy it, as seemed to him fit. The volume was published the next year under the title of The Temple, mm allusion to the scriptural verse, ‘‘In His temple doth every man speak in His honor.” | It is a curious picture of the conflict which Herbert went through, while subjecting his will and his worldly ambition to the service of God. Herbert pushed even further than Donne the use of conceits. : Many of his poems are mere bundles of these oddities of metaphor, quaint and crabbed to the last de- gree. But he manages, by means of them, to express many pregnant and far-reaching thoughts. At times he shows an unusual power of direct and familiar phrasing. By means of sudden turns, emphatic pauses, lightning- like ‘‘stabs” of thought, he forces home his words into the reader’s memory, and makes his quaint and dar- ing conceitfulness interpret, rather than obscure, his meaning. The pervading atmosphere of Herbert’s poetry is one of moral earnestness and sincere piety, rather intellectual than impassioned. He is, therefore, the true poet of the Church of Bmgcnd. ichard Crashaw (1613?-1650?), on the other hand, is the poet of Catholicism. His attitude toward divine things is » 0 that of pious contemplation, but of ecstatic and mystics’ worship. His religious sense is southern rather tha» northern. The Reformation, as such, did not affect him. Crashaw. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 155 It served merely to kindle into intense flame his devotion to the older Church. This is the more curious because of the fact that Crashaw’s youth and early nurture were of an ultra-protestant sort. At the college of Peterhouse in Cambridge, however, he read deeply in the works of the early church fathers and in the lives of the saints, and he took part in the fasts and vigils of a religious brotherhood gathered about Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding, just out- side Cambridge. As the struggle between the Church of England and the Puritan dissenters grew more and more bitter, he fled for refuge to the arms of that venerable mother-church of which his nature had from the first made him amember. He was exiled by Cromwell’s gov- ernment; and after a time of bitter poverty in Paris, he was befriended by a brother poet, Abraham Cowley, and in- troduced to Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I., who had taken refuge at the court of France from the storms of civil war in England. Through her influence with a Roman Cardinal, Crashaw was given a place in the Monastery of Our Lady of Loretto, in Italy; and he died shortly after, from the effect of a pilgrimage which he made on foot in the burning heat of the Italian summer,— a fit end for a poet in whom lived again the mystical religious fervor of the Middle Ages. Crashaw’s poetry is excessively uneven. It contains the most extravagant examples of frigid conceitfulness to be found among all the followers of Donne; yet side by side with these, often in the same poem, occur passages of noble distinction. His two most characteristic poems are perhaps ‘‘ The Flaming Heart” and the ‘“‘ Hymn to Saint Theresa.” He sings the raptures of the soul visited by divine love, in terms as concrete and glowing as any human lover has ever used to celebrate an earthly passion. An ethereal music, and a kind of luminous haze, both re- minding us of Shelley’s work, are the distinguishing features of his poetry at its best. At the close of his “S156 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE poem entitled “ Description of a Religious House,” we find the lines: The self-remembering soul sweetly recovers Her kindred with the stars, and meditates her immortal way Home to the original source of light and intellectual day. This is the key to Crashaw’s imaginative world. He is like a moth fluttering in the radiance which streams from the ‘‘ source of light and intellectual day.” Henry Vaughan (1621-1695), the third poet of this group, spent his youth among the romantic glens of the valley of the Usk, in northern Wales. Here was the legendary seat of King Arthur’s court ; and here, tradition says, Shakespeare heard from the lips of the country-folk the name and doings of Puck, before writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Vaughan went up to Ox- ford in 1638, just as the quarrel between the King and the Parliament was drawing to a head. He fought for the King’s cause, and when that cause was lost, retired to his native valley in Wales, to spend the rest of his long life as an obscure country doctor. The death of his wife and his own severe illness awakened his religious nature, and under the influence of Herbert’s Zemple he wrote and published (1650) the first part of Silex Scintillans, or Sparks from a Flint-stone, that is, sparks struck by divine grace from a hard and sinful heart. Vaughan’s poetry, like Crashaw’s, is very uneven. The reader must search long before finding the things of value, but when found they are worth the search. His best poems, such as ‘‘The World,” ‘‘ Departed Friends,” and ‘