The Part of the Humanists

From Legouis and Cazamian's History of English Literature (1937).

Book III - The Preparation for the Renascence (1516-78)

Chapter I - THE PART OF THE HUMANISTS

I. Special Characteristics of the English Renascence.— The Renascence showed in England almost all the characteristics which it had throughout Europe: thought was liberated and broadened so that it broke its scholastic framework; destiny and morals ceased to be the matter only of dogma and became problematical; a rebellion against the spiritual authority was first incited by the Reformation, which was soon afterwards the enemy of this ally, the Renascence; men loomed with a new wonder at the heavens and the earth as they were revealed by the discoveries of the navigators and astronomy; superior beauty was perceived in the literature of classical antiquity, particularly in the recently discovered works of ancient Greece.

At the same time, the Renascence had in England certain additional characteristics which were so special that they gave rise to a truly national literature. The difference was mainly at the time of flowering and in the quantitative mixture of elements, but it was also an outcome of the power each nation simultaneously acquired, when once it was enfranchised from the unifying Catholic discipline, of revealing its own character and of standing in opposition to other nations instead of blending with them. It was from the time of the Renascence that the various European nations began to follow the divergent paths which ended in the contrasts they now present.

The chief peculiarities of the English Renascence, as compared with the same movement in Italy and France, may be stated as follows:

The renewal affected literature later and more slowly in England than in those countries. Not because humanism was tardily introduced, for England's initiation into humanism was, if subsequent to that of Italy, yet quite as early as that of France. But humanism in England had for a long time no decided effect on poetry and prose. The national language was still immature. Prose lacked a strong tradition and glorious precedents, and the best humanists still made use of Latin. It is significant that the two books which appeared in this period attained to European fame—Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Bacon's Instauratio Magna (1620)—were both written in Latin. As for verse, it had, since Chaucer, been irregularized, and it did not definitely regain equilibrium and measure until Spenser's work began in 1579; all the preceding years of the sixteenth century show no more than a series of incomplete experiments, ground which was won and then lost. In consequence, English literature had its flowering season when the magnificent Italian literature had already entered on its decadence, when France had produced Rabelais and Ronsard and his Pleiad, and Montaigne's essays were appearing. Malherbe was nine years old when Shakespeare was born. It was therefore in a generation enriched by all the substance of France and Italy that England realized for the first time her high literary ambitions.

Secondly, the Renascence held more aloof from the plastic arts in England than in Italy or even in France. The English renascence occurred in a country which had no pictures or Renascence occurred in a country which had no pictures or statues except those bought abroad, and in which the most determined reformers were zealously protesting against images. It had therefore a more inward and moral effect than the similar movements on the Continent. It reached its triumph not before, but after, the Reformation, when the Anglican religion had spread throughout the country and was beginning, here and there, to be tinged with Calvinism. In so far as the Renascence was an aspiration to every form of beautyh and the cult of every kind of energy, it was not quite at ease in the already Puritan atmosphere breathed in this country. There were doubtless free spirits in England, but they were rebels and notorious. A morality which was sincere and natural in the majority had, on pain of obloquy, to be assumed by the others. The total result was increased seriousness, increasing pangs of conscience, less serenity, and intensified passion in the matter of faith and conduct.

On the other hand, although the spread of Protestantism all over England caused her to break with the Middle Ages more decidedly than France and Italy, her literature remained more nearly medieval than that of either of those countries. The fact is the more striking because literature in the preceding centuries had been a less direct expression of national sentiments of England than elsewhere. English literature had been almost all imported from France, had mainly consisted of translations and adaptations. It had not assumed a truly national shape. The greatest poet, Chaucer, had been essentially French. None the less, the truth remains that, although the Renascence and the Reformation beckoned to new paths. England was faithful to the cult of the past longer than the Continent. The fact is explained by the continuance of popular influences. While in France the Renascence was eminently aristocratic, in England it was always regardful of the masses. It preserved and increased the vogue of the ballads. The theatre, the home of the most magnificent product of the period, was accessible to all men, appealed to the humble as to the great. For the people follow in literature fashions derived from former days, hold to them tenaciously and do not abandon them.

A patriotism more and more intense and passionate, even aggressive and disdainful, favoured this continuity by glorifying the annals of the nation, its history, legends, traditions, and antiquities. While this patriotism gave rise to an ambition to rival the masterpieces of Greece and Rome as well as those of Italy and France, it inspired at the same time antagonism to the foreign influences which seemed to threaten the national genius. It was an obstacle to Italianism, that most potent of the infatuations of the Renascence. It is impossible to say whether in England, in this century, Italy were more the object of wonder or of scandal, of admiration or of disapproval. Increasingly England felt and wished herself to be different from the rest of Christendom.

2. The Beginnings of Humanism (1490-1578). (1) —During some thirty year, from 1490 until about 1520, when the religious quarrels began, there was in England an efflorescence of humanism which was accompanied only by a few elect spirits, but was pure, serene, and full of hope. Some young Englishmen were attracted to Italy by the desire to learn Greek, knowledge of which had been carried thither by refugees after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1493. They were eager to see the manuscripts of the masterpieces these fugitive Greeks had saved and brought with them, and in quest of this revelation they journeyed to Florence, Bologna, Padua, Venice, and Rome. Thomas Linacre (1460-1524), grammarian, physician, and translator of Galen, should be named among them, and William Grocyn (1446-1519), both of whom returned to Oxford about 1490 and there established the teaching of Greek on sound principles. John Colet (1467-1519) found in Italy, perhaps while he listeend to Savonarola, Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola, the inspiration of that enlightened and purified Christianity which he preached in London and Oxford, and founded on renewed study of the text of the New Testament and an historical examination of Saint Paul's mission. By the foundation of St. Paul's School in 1504, Colet also provided the first model for a reformed secondary school of which the teaching should be based on Latin and Greek. For this school he caused William Lily (1468-1522) to write and Erasmus to revise a Latin grammar which was to reign supreme in schools until our own day, and to become in the eighteenth century, after some rearrangement, the Eton Latin Grammar.

Such prestige did the New Learning acquire from these three masters, that Erasmus, when he resolved upon a profound study of Greek, being dissatisfied with Paris and the college of Montégut, but too poor to go to Italy, made several visits to England, from 1499 onwards, as much to complete his own education as in search of an easier life. Under Colet's influence his studies took a more religious turn, and he devoted himself for a time to the reform of Christianity, which both he and Colet would have wished to see accomplished by persuasion, knowledge, and the purification of morals, without a break in unity.

(a) THOMAS MORE.— The other side of the nature of Erasmus, his admiration for antique thought and form shown in his Adages (1500), his wit, his mockery which had free play in his Praise of Folly (1509), was better echoed by another of his English friends, Thomas More (1478-1535) (2). It was under More's roof that he wrote the Praise of Folly, and of him that he said: 'When did Nature mould a temper, more gentle, endearing and happy than the temper of Thomas More?' It was with Erasmus in his mind that More wrote his Utopia, the masterpiece of English humanism.

More was the pupil of the Oxford Hellenists and the friend of John Colet and William Lily. He was associated with Erasmus in the translation from Latin of some excerpts from Lucian. But he did not live only with books. He was a well-known lawyer and at one time a member of Parliament. In 1515 he was sent to the Continent to negotiate a commercial treaty with the Low Countries, and it was while on this mission that he began his famous book, which reveals a sagacious observer of his own times as well as the adventurous dreamer who was Plato's disciple. The other English humanists of his day were scholars and educationists. Only he of them all had the creative gift, and had he written his Utopia in his mother tongue instead of Latin, although European glory would doubtless have come to him less speedily, he would to-day be one of the leading figures in English literature. Instead he has strictly no place in it, except in right of some controversial treatises and a history of doubtful authorship.

His Utopia, which was not translated into English until 1551, cannot, however, be neglected because of the language which clothed it, for it is the true prologue of the Renascence. With most vigorous emphasis it opposes all the conceptions of the past. Better than any book it marks the new turning in the paths of thought.

The inspiration is twofold. Its frame is furnished by the recent maritime discoveries of the Portuguese and Spaniards. more particularly by the stories of Amerigo Vespucci. But fundamentally the book is derived from Plato's Republic, that Greek philosopher's dream of an ideal state, and from the impulse to react against the stiff, inert conception of society which had reigned for centuries.

More is in opposition to established ideas in almost every particular. He makes fun of scholasticism, which barred the way to thought with dialectical forms. He establishes that Greek is superior to Latin philosophy, which he considers insignificant save for some writings of Seneca and Cicero. His hero Hythloday earns a right in the gratitude of the Utopians by introducing them to the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch.

More is in revolt against the spirit of chivalry. As much a humanitarian as a humanist, his hatred and contempt for war are like Swift's. Soldiers are to him 'men-slayers,' and he makes little of the point of honour and of military glory, of all that made up the atmosphere of the admired romances which Caxton had lately broadcast through the land. War was, according to More, justifiable only in the last resort, and should be waged in a purely utilitarian spirit, using the tricks of espionage and treachery. Unwittingly he was taking up the same ground as Machiavelli, who at this moment was writing Il Principe.

He extols communism, forbids the acquisition of property, and, reverting to the ideas of Lycurgus, discredits gold, which he would put to the meanest uses. He would make work compulsory for all men, but only for nine hours a day. Thus theft would disappear from Utopia and there would be no occasion to apply the hard penal laws of England.

In More's mind, there is an ideal  of a life which would be easy for the whole community. He is not of those whose consolation for the miseries of this present life is a picture of the life to come, for he cites happiness as the end of existence. He protests against asceticism and the contempt of well-being and honourable pleasure. It is from him that Rabelais borrowed the doctrine of his abbey of Thélème.

Like all Utopians, More bases himself on faith in the goodness of human nature. He believes in it as did Rousseau. His disapproval of asceticism causes him to glorify the senses which reveal natural marvels and God who made nature. He is regardful of everything which pertains to the body, of bodily health, necessary to the health of the soul, and of the comfort of dwellings. The Utopians do not suffer a man to be either cruel to himself or 'unkind to nature.'

In Utopia all religions are authorized and toleration is the law. Even the Christian religion, which has been introduced thither, enjoys no privileges. No religion has anything to recommend it beyond the examples it provides.

This book should be read as the exercise of a mind giving itself free play and unconcerned with the practical application of its own theories. More wrote in Latin, not for the people but for the learned. We are brought to ask, in astonishment, whether he did not, more than once, write against his own deep convictions. For the creator of this Utopia was a fervent Christian, a submissive Catholic, and an ascetic who wore a hair shirt. This apostle of toleration was, as chancellor, a persecutor of the first Protestants and ended by dying a martyr to his faith. The contrast between his Utopia and his own life betrays a principle of unreality. The ideas of his book were on a level with his intelligence rather than deeply rooted in his conscience.

Yet this book cannot be called the unstable product of a youthful imagination. More was thirty-eight years old when he wrote it, and more than one of its pages contains reflections suggested by his practical experience as a lawyer and a member of Parliament. When he sees in the existing society 'a conspiracy of the rich against the poor,' he is not guilty of mere rhetoric. He supports his assertion by facts which are contemporary and English, the enclosures of land which were depopulating the countryside, especially in the south-east, the eviction of small tenants because rich landlords found that grazing farms were more profitable than their holdings. The lessened demand for workers on the land was causing great misery, so that 'even a beast's life seems enviable' as compared with theat of a labourer. When More attacks the barbarous penal laws he is aiming a blow at the executions with which, as a lawyer, he was too familiar in a country where twenty criminals could be seen hanging from a gallows in a reow. He is the very antithesis of the judge Fortescue, who was proud of the bravery of English robbers. When he recommends houses of 'a gorgeous and gallant sort,' well lit by glazed windows,  he is thinking of the pleasant dwellings he had seen in Holland and comparing them with the dark, inconvenient, and miserable homes of the London and England of his day.

This book is partly the work of a dreamer led by his fancy and a logician who systematizes his ideas. But it is also written by a satirist who attacks the errors and evils bequeathed by the Middle Ages. It is unlikely that More thought his conception could be realized in its entirety, but he very heartily wished to awaken the desire for certain necessary changes.

His Utopia stands alone as representing England's literary contribution to pure humanism. Ten years after he wrote it More himself was drawn into the religious controversy, and obliged, whether whe would or no, to abandon the sphere of intellectual exercises for that of narrow ecclesiastical quarrels, in which he is next found.

It is a great pity that he did not write a work of such general interest as Utopia in English. His humanist's culture is not evinced only by his Latin writings. He left behind him certain pages in English which show, no less than Utopia, the degree to which this admirer of Plato was impregnated with Socratic dialectics. The dialogue between the old prisoner Anthony and his nephew Vincent, which More wrote in his prison, to prove that he was neither more unfortunate nor more of a prisoner than the rest of mankind, is so admirable that Socrates might have approved it or envied him its authorship. And if he be indeed the author of the historical fragment on Richard III attributed to him, he must be recognized as a rival of Tacitus, so vivid is the portrait he paints, so strong his colours, so intense his attack. It is to this fragment that the atrocious, implacable figure which has remained in men's memory is due, the character on which Shakespeare founded his famous tragedy. Whether the picture conforms to reality is doubtful, but artistically it is an astonishing success. It has unity of structure and effect far beyond anything hitherto achieved by an English chronicler.

The pages which prove More's solid classical culture represent only a part of his rich and complex personality, curious of everything in life and nature, conscious of the variety in the souls of various men. His favourite pastime was to observe the habits and instincts of animals. He had a spontaneous and most lively dramatic talent, and although he never wrote for the stage, he dramatized, in the driest controversial treatises, living and comic characters, who speak their own language or even their native dialect. His English prose abounds with humorous passages such as his predecessors lacked. It contains also many turns of familiar talk, sayings and popular expressions which he seems to have been the first to coin or circulate. One wonders if he took them from current speech, or invented them entirely. His natural gaiety, 'the kind and friendly cheerfulness with a little air of raillery' which was, Erasmus tells us, expressed on his face, season his prose, as it showed itself in his speech throughout his life and on the very scaffold. We do not know whether to praise him most for his humour or his wit.

Nevertheless, we cannot follow those who have called him the earliest of the modern English prose-writers. This humanist seems, if the doubtful case of Richard III be excerpted, to have done all his artistic work in Latin. His English prose is all improvisation, and he lets loose in it, without rule or measure, his extraordinary lawyer's flow of language. His latest critic calculates that some of his sentences are as much as four yards long, measured line by line in the original edition. He never sought to mould English prose, which then, above all things, needed to be made light and more definite. He left this task entirely to men who were much his inferiors in genius, openmindendess and liveliness of observation, men who recognized their duty of giving, on the model of the ancients, firmness and regularity to the structure of English sentences. Yet to More belongs the honour of having provoked one of the best prose works of his time, his biography by his son-in-law, William Roper, which was written about 1535 but did not appear until 1626, in Paris. This is an admirable book from every point of view. Nothing could be simpler, clearer, or more pathetic than its story of More's last moments, and it makes an impressive advance in clarity and construction on More's own writings.

(b) THE EDUCATIONISTS: ELYOT, CHEKE, WILSON, ASCHAM.—The men who were inspired by classical antiquity after More were educationists rather than imaginative writers. They have more in common with More's masters than with More himself. But they have over him the advantage that they wrote their best works in English and have not only a marginal place in English literature.

It is thus with Sir Thomas Elyot (1490-1546) (3) whose Governour appeared in 1531. This treatise on moral philosophy and education, written for those who would be called to govern their country, was founded on the Italian works of Pontano and Patrizzi and is full of the spirit of antiquity. It abound with Greek and Latin reminiscences.

The influence of the civic morals of Rome is very evident in it, although Elyot was a convinced Christian. He adapts the manner of Plutarch to English history, for instance in the scene in which he shows the prince, afterwards Henry V, obeying the judge who sends him to prison, and the king congratulating himself on a fearless magistrate and a son submissive to justice. By this scene, of which the historical truth is mot doubtful, Elyot inculcates the Roman respect for law. His prose is less of the people and less spontaneous than More's, but, on the other hand, more restrained and classical.

The humanism of a man brought up on antiquity is also the most salient characteristic of a book written against the seditious, The Hurt of Sedition, how grievous it is to a Commonwealth (4), by Sir John Cheke (1514-57), teacher of Greek at Cambridge. This good Hellenist, noted for the love of Greek which he spread around him, gave in 1549 forcible expression to English conservatism in his Hurt of Sedition. It is directed against the Norfolk rebels who were led by the tanner Kett. Already we have that hostile picture of popular risings which recurs half a century later in Shakespeare's Henry VI and Coriolanus. Cheke shows himself vigorous in argument eloquent, and occasionally homely and humorous. He has both the tone and the arguments which are heard again from the Shakespearian Menenius Agrippa.

Form was almost as important to Cheke as matter, and he made attempts to reform the English language. Sir Thomas Wilson (1525-81) (5) was concerned solely with style in his Arte of Rhetorique, published in 1553, in which this so-called English Quintilan recommends purity and simplicity of language. He reviews and derides all the verbal affectations of his time, and proscribes 'inkhorn terms', 'outlandish English,' the barbarous legal language made up of deformed Anglo-Norman words, and the abuse of archaism by the 'fine courtier' who 'wil talke nothing but Chaucer.'

These men are good masters, sensible and sure, fashioning both mind and style by their precepts and example. But their personalities are too restrained to have made a deep imprint on their prose. Roger Ascham (1515-68) (6) had qualities which threw him more into relief. He was the most popular of the educationists of his time, and the most pungent of the group of writers—Cheke, Wilson, Sir Thomas Smith, and Watson—who about the middle of this century transferred from Oxford to Cambridge the honour of guiding England along the paths of the Renascence. Ascham was Cheke's friend, and in some degree his pupil, tutor to Elizabeth in his sixteenth year, a good Protestant, even tinged with Puritanism, yet prudent enough to be Mary Tudor's Latin secretary. He left behind him two books of which one was devoted to the physical education of the young and the other to their intellectual instruction.

The first of them, Toxophilus (1545), is intended to revive the love of archery for which Ascham felt an almost romantic passion. He even considers the bow to be a superior weapon to the cannon, and believes that the physical and moral health of his country is bound up with the practice of this obsolete sport.

His other book, The Scholemaster, was published in 1570, two years after his death, and contains his advice to masters on the teaching of Latin.

Ascham puts life into these treatises by his personal presentment of his ideas. He brings forward his own practice and experience, his memories, and interesting anecdotes related first-hand. His parentheses stimulate flagging attention. His preoccupation with Latinity does not debar him from a moral point of view. He admires the great writers of Rome of his own time. He vigorously attacks the Italianism of the English nobility, especially the dangerous sojourns in the country of licence which rich young men of wealth and fashion were wont to make. He cares less for literary beauty and refinement than for solid and healthy education.

He also has the merit of having worked assiduously to advance the progress of the English language. He is aware, he says in his preface to Toxophilus, that to write in Latin would have been 'more honest for my name,' but he decides to use English both to further 'the pleasure or commoditie of the gentlemen and yeomen of Englande,' and because everything has been written in English 'in a manner so meanly, bothe for the matter and handelynge, that no man can do worse.' Indisputably he helped to perfect the language by his use of it. His style is much laboured, penetrated with Latin turns of phrase and Latin elegancies. Numerous symmetrical, balanced, antithetical sentences, sometimes marked by alliteration, occur in his work, all that is best in the prose of the Euphuists without their eccentricity and false ornament. It is true that Ascham in his Romanized dress is a little stiff and hampered. But his faults are trifling as compared with the benefit prose derived from submitting to the discipline of the ancients, especially Cicero and Seneca, whose periodic style and nervous conciseness Ascham imitates by turns. The training which he imposed on himself and which he recommended for schoolboys had a salutary effect. He desired that a pupil should first translate a passage from Latin into English, and then, after a sufficient interval, be required to put his own English version back into Latin. By repeated use of this exercise Ascham himself acquired a relative facility of expression. The too heavy clothing of his thoughts finally became so pliable that the man, sincere, sensible and good-humoured, can be descried beneath it. He is one of the earliest writers of classical English prose.

These were the chief of the educationists, such of them as left a name behind them. The work which was being accomplished at this time cannot, however, be understood unless we add to their number all the nameless makers of the Renascence, all the unknown masters who were training their English pupils in the universities and the schools to admire and imitate the masterpieces of antiquity.

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(1) For this chapter see the general histories of literature cited at the beginning: Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. iii, Chap. I: Courthope, History of English Poetry, vol. i, Chap. V and vol. ii, Chap. I; Morley, English Writers, vol. vii; Jusserand, Histoire Littéraire du peuple anglais, livre iv, Chap. I. See also Green, A Short History of the English People, and G. Saintsbury, A History of Elizabethan Literature (1890).

(2) The English works of Sir Thomas More, published in 1557. His poems reprinted in 1906. His Utopia translated into English by R. Robynson in 1551; by Richards in 1923 (Oxford). Edition of Latin and English text published in 1895. Studies on More by H. Morley, English Writers (1891); W. H. Hutton (1895); H. Brémond (1904); and J. Delcourt, Essai sur la langue de Sir T. More (1913).

(3) Edited by Croft (1889).

(4) 1st edition 1549. Reprinted by G. Langbaine (Oxford, 1641) and in Holinshed's Chronicle.

(5) 1st edition 1553. Reprinted, Oxford, 1908.


(6) Toxophilus, 1st edition 1545; reprinted by Arber (1861). The Scholemaster, 1st edition 1570; reprinted by Arber (1870), by Aldis Wright (1904) , and in Elizabethan Critical Essays by Gregory Smith. Complete works, ed. Giles, 4 vols. (1804-5). German life by Dr. Katterfeld (1879).

English theatre 1520-1578

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