Goldsmith or "An Author to Be Let"

 by George SHERBURN and Donald F. BOND. 

From A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh 

("The Periodicals and Oliver Goldsmith") 

London: Routledge, 1967. 1056-62.

Goldsmith or "An Author to Be Let"

Periodicals such as these here presented formed the background for the career of the foremost of hackwriters, Oliver Goldsmith.

(Note 11). Oliver Goldsmith (1730?-1774) was born in Ireland, where he received most of his education. From Trinity College, Dublin, he received the degree of B.A. in 1749. He studied medicine in Edinburgh, 1752-3, but took no degree there. He continued his medical studies at the University of Leiden, and traveled on the Continent through France, Switzerland and Italy. After his return to London in 1756 he attempted for two strenuous years to establish himself as a physician in Southwark and to augment his meager earnings by writingh reviews for the magazines. In 1759 he published his first book, An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, and by this time was launched on a busy career as a writer. By steady use of his facile pen he eventually made a good income, but he was apparently improvident, and died leaving debts amounting to about 2000 pounds. On these debts Dr. Johnson made the proud comment: "Was ever poet so trusted before?"—Goldsmith's Works (4v, 1801); ed. Sir James Prior (4v, 1837); J. W. M. Gibbs (5v, 1884-6); Plays, ed. Austin Dobson (1893, 1901); Complete Poetical Works, edd. Austin Dobson (1906); New Essays by Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Ronald S. Crane (Chicago, 1927); The Collected Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Katharine C. Balderston, The History and Sources of Percy's Memoir of Goldsmith (1848), with notes as The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith (2v, 1854): Austin Dobson, Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1888); Arthur L. Sells, Les Sources françaises de Goldsmith (Paris, 1924). For many special studies of the canon and sources of Goldsmith see CBEL. 

Bibliographies of his work indicate that in the years 1757 to 1762 Goldsmith contributed to at least ten periodicals of differing kinds. The serial miscellany that he himself wrote, The Bee (1759), ran to only eight weekly numbers, but these early years of magazine writing in general served him well. He made many friends, and in 1764, when his first signed work, The Traveller, was published, he was already one of the original members of Dr. Johnson's Club. The magazines and reviews, however, were not sufficiently lucrative, and once his reputation was established Goldsmith took to translation and compilation as a means of further income. Among the many works in which he was concerned at least as reviser may be listed and abridgment of Plutarch's Lives in five volumes (1762), a History of England (1764) in two volumes, another in four volumes (1771), The Roman History in two volumes (1769), The Beauties of English Poesy in two volumes (1767), The Grecian History in two volumes (1774) and, most extensive and perhaps most interesting of all his compilations, An History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774) in eight volumes.

(Note 12). James H. Pittman, Goldsmith's Animated Nature (New Haven, 1924); Winifred Lynskey, "The Scientific Sources of Goldsmith's Animated Nature." SP, XL (1943), 33-57.

During the fifteen years that elapsed between his first original book, his Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), and his death, Goldsmith must have either written, revised, translated, compiled, or supervised over two score volumes. No one will accept Horace Walpole's verdict that "Golsmith was an idiot, with once or twice a fit of parts"; but it is evident that he was a professional maker of books, who affords high delight from a relative few of his writings.

 

Goldsmith as an essayist

As an essayist he achieved his earliest and perhaps his greatest success.

(Note 13). The publication of Professor Ronald S. Crane's New Essays by Goldsmith (Chicago, 1927) has greatly stimulated a mass of research concerning the sources and the canon of Goldsmith's essays. This work has been done by A. J. Barnouw, H. J. Smith, A. L. Sells (pioneers in the field), and by R. W. Seitz, J. H. Warner, and Arthur Friedman. The extensive record of these researches may be found in the excellent bibliography of Goldsmith in CBEL, II. 636-50. The results of the work make it apparent that Goldsmith was capable of frequent, interesting plagiarism. Professors Crane and Friedman are preparing an edition of Goldsmith's works.

In his own days his essays could be read in the original periodicals or in three collections, to the sum of which later additions have been made. Thse collections were The Bee (not a reprint), The Citizen of the World (1762), collected from The Public Ledger, in which they had appeared serially as "Letters" (1760-61); and the Essays by Mr. Goldsmith assembled from the magazines and newspapers into a volume in 1765.

 

The Enquiry

Before these volumes appeared Goldsmith's Enquiry had helped readers to understand certain typical positions of its author. The book, to be sure, lacks the charm of the essays partly because, as Davies said, "the Doctor loved to dwell upon grievances." It is one of the long series of complaints made by writers that their art is both unappreciated and unrewarded. The mid-eighteenth century was vocal in its complaints of this sort. From another point of view the volume might seem to be a prose "progress of poesy"; for "polite learning" is here belles-lettres. Goldsmith's survey of the cultural state of the countries of Europe anticipated his Traveller, and is typically facile and moralistic. Everywhere he finds decay of the arts, and, since he thus seems an "ancient" rather than a "modern," one might think him a pessimist negating the popular belief in progress. Actually he believes in a theory of cyclic change with new achievements cmpensating for the obvious decay of parts. almost a philosophe in his devotion to finite causes of the human state, he blames the decline of the arts on faulty education (he is typically for the elegant, the humane, and opposes the technical and pedantic), on lack of patronage by the aristocrats, and, perhaps most surprisingly, on the literary critics, who discourage genius and malign all innovation. These positions, like many of Goldsmith's are easily taken and not thoroughly considered. The author himself was making an income as a critic; and such remarks as "The author who draws his quill merely to take a purse, no more deserves success than he who presents a pistol," somewhat naturally provoked sneers from his former employers on The Monthly Review. 

His Methods as Essayist

His essays were less querulous and more varied in tone. The bee, a periodical miscellany in octavo format, which appeared on eight Saturdays in October and November, 1759, contains some of his best small poems as well as an amusing diversity of prose—dramatic criticisms, moral tales, serious or fanciful discourses. Among the last perhaps the most famous is the Resverie ("The Fame machine"), in which he compliments The Rambler highly. Goldsmith excels in human details. In The Bee and in his other groups of essays we find interesting ideas expressed and we meet such amusing personages as the Strolling Player, who reminds us of Goldsmith himself as well as of George Primrose in the later Vicar; the Private Sentinel remind one at leas vaguely of Addison's Political Upholsterer in Tatler Nos. 155, 16y0, and 178. The methods of Addison and Goldsmith can be studied illuminatingly in these essays. The earlier writer is more definitely pointed and more brilliant in his satirical concept; the Upholsterer was a clearer comment on an age recently exposed to newspapers and their wild daily rumors. Goldsmith, on the other hand, is contentedly preoccupied with vivid and rich human detail; he creates his persons not merely as mouthpieces or as gorgeous eccentrics: strange as they are, he really likes them as people. 

He does, of course, at times use persons as topics or as mouthpieces. Mistress Quickly in the Reverie at the Boar's Head Tavern, certainly one of Goldsmith's happiest efforts, is vivaciously human, but she is obviously borrowed from Shakespeare for the purpose of avowing that it is futile to mourn over the degeneracy of the age, since "every age is the same." There is neither progress nor regress: there is compensated change always. Similarly, the figure of Asem the Man Hater merely is a personal center for a fantasy of various favorite ideas. Asem is taught the necessity of having the life of pure reason stimulated by emotion. He is taught the complementary lesson of the necessity of controlling one's rash benevolence by prudence. He illustrates the theory of cyclic change embodied in an individual life. Almost alone among the eighteenth-century descendants of Timon, Asem is cured of his misanthropy—by means of regenerated social emotions. At the end of the tale he is starting on a new cycle dominated again by benevolence; but the new round is to be an improvement; for his benevolence now is to be not rash, like Timon's but prudent.

 

 The Citizen of the World

(Note 14). The Citizen of the World, ed. Austin Dobson (1891); Hamilton J. Smith, Oliver Goldsmith's 'The Citizen of the World' (New Haven, 1926); also Martha P. Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (1908).

The Citizen of the World is perhaps Goldsmith's best sustained work. It is certainly the best example in English of the essay device so popular at the time in Europe, which made the essayist a foreign traveler (preferably Oriental; for philosophy came from the East) who wrote letters to his home country, describing and criticizing the strange customs of the lands through which he passed. The device, initiated in the late seventeenth century by G. P. Marana's L'Espion Turc and perfected in Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721), throve in France where the critics of established institutions sheltered themselves behind the pretense of being foreigners. From Montesquieu's imitator, the Marquis d'Argens, author of a series of Letytres Chinoises (1739). Goldsmith drew much inspiration and even many small plagiarized passages.

(Note 15). Ronald S. Crane and Hamilton J. Smith, "A French influence on Goldsmith's Citizen of the World," MP, XIX (1921): 83-92. A noteworthy English link between Montesquieu and Goldsmith was the Letters from a Persian in England published in 1715 by George (later Baron) Lyttleton. This youthful and undistinguished piece of writing Lyttleton revised for a fifth edition (1744). It contains intersting political and social criticism, and had obvious but not very important influence on Goldsmith. Lyttleton tried his hand at another popular type of essay in 1760 when he brought out his Dialogues of the Dead. Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu of Blue-Stocking fame contributed three dialogues to this volume. On Lyttleton's letters from a Persian, see Samuel C. Chew, "An English Precursor of Rousseau," MLN, XXXII (1917): 321-37.

Long before D'Argens such writers as Le Comte and Du Halde had started a Chinese tradition that was invaluable to both D'Argens and Goldsmith. As this tradition developed, the Chinese were made into a race of philosophers, embodiments of simple reason and common sense; people who lived in a patriarchal society or under an absolute but perfectly benevolent emperor.  They honored men of letters above conquerors and military heroes, and were in religion rationally devout, tolerant—and altogether void of bigotry and "superstition." In a word, the Chinese traveler embodied the pure light of reason, and his mind played effectively over the customs of England and of Christendom in an impartial and at times devastating fashion. To him nothing established had an absolute validity; in the Orient, as these essayists all loved to remark, polygamy was perfectly respectable; in Christendom the marriage customs were frequently shocking. All things were relative. The philosophe had quite emancipated himself from the ecclesiastical interpretation of the universe. The excellence of all customs was to be estimated according to human and common-sense standards. If Goldsmith's "Chinese Letters" are less brilliantly trenchant than  the best of his French models, it is in part due to the fact that England was, by definition almost, the land of liberty, and the English, unlike the French, did not have "God and the king to pull down"—to borrow Walpole's phrase. Goldsmith is more playful, more relaxed, more superficial, more of the literary man, less of the revolutionary.

Thus these Chinese letters are most useful in giving a picture of Goldsmith's mind and the temper of his time. From the very beginning of his career he had loved to see the qualities of one country over against the qualities of another. He is a patriot, but a patriot who is sure each nation has its individual and superlative merit—as well as a contrasting defect. Upon this concept his poem The Traveller is based. The philosophic mind, he thinks, will attempt to absorb the diverse goods of all nations. It was, then, appropriate to call the "Chinese Letters" when they were reprinted, by a title  that haunted Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World. This phrase, picturesque and cogent from the ancient moment when Dionysius put it into the mouth of Plato, had a particular appeal to the illuminated, who abhorred the parochial. Goldsmith had used the phrase in his essay on National Prejudices (1760), in his Memoirs of M. de Voltaire (1761), and in the twentieth and the twenty-third of his series of Chinese letters. This title is philosophical rather than political in implication for Goldsmith, like many another proponent of cosmopolitanism in his day, believed that one should be aware and tolerant the curious opinions and customs of strange nations, but he did not deny the duty of a local allegiance; he rather insisted that local allegiance be subordinated to allegiance to the Whole.

In these "Chinese Letters" as well as elsewhere Goldsmith is also typical of his day in his praise of simplicity. Here Nature's "simple plan" (Letter III) is the catchword. To be sure, he is at times equivocal. Where wealth accumulates, men decay; but where there is no wealth, there are no arts, no graces of civilization, and these last are what the century really valued. Plain living and rigid intellectualism might easily become to Goldsmith a meager, bleak existence. He certainly tends to idealize something like an opulent patriarchal society, but even in his picture of "Sweet Authors" or of the Vicar's family at Wakefield, he forgets his dictum that "every age is the same," and shares the predilection for the simple, though not for the truly primitive.

 

 The Vicar

Goldsmith excelled in other types of writing as well as in the essay, and the mental processes seen in these essays carry over into his plays, his one novel, and even into his poems.

(Note 16). On Goldsmith's plays see Part III, ch. VI, n. 15.  [Below]

He illustrates the economic methods of the less shrewd authors of his day in his magazine work, and he also illustrates the curoius equivocal emancipation of mind typical of many men in his day. His attitude towards sentimentalism and towards "trade" are cases in point, and can be studied in The Vicar of Wakefield. 

(Note 17). Among the very many editions of the Vicar may be mentioned for their introductions and notes those by Austin Dobson (1883) and by Oswald Doughty (1928).

The plot of the Vicar is not complex: clouds gather more and more bleakly over the poor Primroses; finally when their complete misery seems assured, the sun shines out, all woes vanish, and we leave the family living happily ever afterwards. Goldsmith loved to portray simplicity, but his love of idyllic simplicity was curiously modified by economic considerations. After the South Sea Bubble a conservative reaction towards a trust in the land as the source of wealth and well-being prepared the way for the idealized farmer-philosopher. Consequently, when The Vicar of Wakefield finally appeared in 1766 (it was at least partly written four years earlier), its public was prepared for a "hero" who united in himself "the three greatest characters upon earth . . . a priest, an husbandsman, and the father of a family." There is, obviously, a connection here with sentimentalism, but the sentimental bearings of the Vicar are difficult to grasp justly.

(Note 18). F. Gallaway, "The Sentimentalism of Goldsmith," PMLA, XLVIII (1933). 1167-1181. 

Here as elsewhere—especially in the "Distresses of a Private Sentinel" (Citizen of the World, CXIX)—Goldsmith lavishly uses "distress" as material; but his attitude towards distress demands acute attention. The distresses of the Sentinel are so gross as to be absurd: they are far from moving tears, and at the end of the essay one can see the logical conculson: "Thus saying, he limped off, leaving my friend and me in admiration of his intrepidity and content; nor could we avoid acknowledging that an habitual acquaintance with misery is the truest school of fortitude and philosophy." We are not invited to weep; we are asked to admire intrepidity. Similarly we are told in the Vicar that "after a certain degree of pain, every new breach that death opens in the constitution, nature kindly covers with insensibility." Submission, intrepidity, fortitude, these are the lessons Goldmith wishes us to learn from the distresses of the virtuous. The tone of the novel is emotional and benevolist, but it must be noted that the good vicar himself is habitually caustic as to the absurdities of his socially ambitious females. The popularity of the book was and is doubtless due not to its overt moral purpose but to the author's attitude towards his material. Like his vicar, he seems "by nature an admirer of happy human faces"—preferably faces distinctly self-conscious in their happiness. One thinks of Greuze and the Accordée de Village. Both author and painter are self-conscious: their sentimentalism is intended to serve a moral or even divine purpose—not, however, quite too deep for tears.

Dr. Johnson's opinion of the Vicar was expressed to Fanny Burney. "It is very faulty; there is nothing of real life in it, and very little of nature. It is a mere fanciful performance."  This verdict is surprisingly severe, but not altogether unjust. The faults of the Vicar, like those of She Stoops to Conquer, are palpable, and yet for most people these works make still very pleasant reading. The charm is in part due to the imaginative glow that Goldsmith so effortlessly casts over the action of the Vicar (after all Daphnis and Chloe has its absurd side!), and to his flexible and easy style. 

 

Goldsmith's Prose Style

Much praise has been given to his style, which is indeed attractive. It lacks the coldness of the aristocratic manner, and it escapes the tendency of his generation to follow Johnson into excessive heaviness of diction and balanced formality of sentence structure. The unfriendly review of his Enquiry in The Monthly Review [Note 19: Monthly Review, XXI (1759), 381-389. The reviewer was William Kenrick] shows that Goldsmith's former colleagues were aware of his criteria of style—his avoidance of "the quaintness of antithesis, the prettiness of points, and the rotundity of studied periods"; and yet they proffessed to feel a "remarkable faultiness" in expression. Probably even for them Goldsmith was hardly bookish enough to be a "fine writer." It is precisely for this lack of formality and for his graceful and sensitive ease, fluency, and vividness that we value his style.

His Poems

At his death Goldsmith was commended usually for his poems; obituaries mentioned The Traveller and The Deserted Village rather more frequently than any of the prose works. Apart from these two masterpieces, and perhaps Retaliation, which is remembered for biographical rather than aesthetic reasons, his verse is interesting but unimportant. In these two poems he succeeds signally in the couplet tradition, in which most of his contemporaries were commonplace. The Traveller contains glowing statements of his cosmopolitanism, of his patriotic Toryism, and of his favorite notion of compensation; The Deserted Village presents the economic difficulties of rural life, the dangers of luxury and "trade's unfeeling train."

(Note 20). On the general background of The Deserted Village, see Julia Patton, The English Village: A Literary Study, 1750-1850 (1919). For a literary antecedent by Goldsmith in prose see Ronald S. Crane, New Essays by Oliver Goldsmith (Chicago, 1927), pp. 116-124, and the introduction. See also Howard J. Bell, Jr., "The Deserted Village and Goldsmith's Social Doctrines," PMLA, LIX (1944), 747-72.

These two are eighteenth-century masterpieces of the literature of statement: in them current ideas and attitudes are caught and are suffused sufficiently with genuine feeling to make them stir our imagination to this day. They are the work of a gifted author, happy in not too much education but richly endowed with human insight. Aesthetically he was a traditionalist; mentally he was of the Enlightement; he was too hard-headed to be a thorough sentimentalist, and too sympathetic to be an outright satirist. In spite of the pot-boiling nature of most of his books, his complex personal endowments with his especial gifts of flexible expression enabled him in several of his works to achieve fame as one of the most readable writers of his century.

 

[Goldsmith and Drama] - Opposition to Sentimental Comedy

Throughout his fifty years as playwright there had been notable objection to the sort of play called comedy by Cumberland and his admirers. Garrick himself passed jokes on the advisability of putting a steeple on the playhouse now that it was a temple of virtue, and sneered gently at "these our moral and religious days." Avowedly it was a warfare between two schools, one stressing the desire to promote morality and the other a desire to promote mirth and entertainment. But the contrast thus stated is surely too strong. If Hugh Kelly and Cumberland made obvious concessions to mirth, so Goldsmith and Sheridan, the two great writers supposed hostile to "weeping comedies," made concessions to morality. All plays, one may rashly say, were now moral, but some preached more explicitly than others. In general, also, the morality of the sentimentalists was excessively facile; from Cibber's Love's Last Shift (1696) to Cumberlland's First Love (1795) the erring are shamed into virtue with surprising—and unconvincing—esase. The situation, suggesting at times a not too sincere didacticism, is simply explained by the fact that audiences were readier to pay for tears than for laughter.

 

Goldsmith's Views

(Note 15). For treatment of Goldsmith's nondramatic works see below, ch. VII. [ABOVE] 

The subservience of the managers to their own commercial interests was what first moved Goldsmith to animosity, and his attacks on the managers in the chapter "Of the Stage" in his Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759) was not forgiven by Garrick. He declined both Goldsmith's plays for Drury Lane, and in 1768 injured the success of The Good Natur'd Man by producing in competition it Hugh Kelly's new comedy, False Delicacy. Shortly before submitting She Stoops to Conquer to public censure, Goldsmith published in The Westminster Magazine [Note 17: For January, 1773; also in his Works (ed. J. W. M. Gibbs), I. 398-402] his essay A Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy. He bluntly queries "whether the exhibition of human distress is likely to afford the mind more entertainment than that of human absurdity?" He asserts that "the distresses of the mean by no means affect us so strongly as the calamities of the great." "While we melt for Belisarius, we scarcely give halfpence to the beggar." Goldsmith thinks that the success of so-called sentimental comedies, "in which the virtues of private life are exhibited, rather than the vices exposed, and the distresses rather than the faults of mankind make our interest in the piece," may be due to novelty or to "their flattering every man in his favorite foible." But he thinks such plays deficient in vis comica, and thinks audiences likely by being "too fastidious" to banish humor from the stage.

Goldsmith's Plays

In his Good Natur'd Man Goldsmith had not been too fastidious; he had instead offensively put fine sentiments about generosity into the mouth of a low bailiff—and of that scene the exquisite auditors forced the excision. But as a partial concession to such possible critics he had combined in his hero, Young Honeywood (as he had in Beau Tibbs and the Man in Black in his essays), both sentiment and criticism of sentiment. Young Honeywood, to his uncle's disgust, "loves all the world"; and such "love" is undiscriminating. "His good-nature arises rather from his fears of offending the importunate, than his desire of making the deserving happy." Thus Goldsmith preaches, here as elsewhere, a prudent benevolism. Honeywood, like Fielding's good men, is unsuspicious and easily deceived: the play is the history of his education, and in the process Miss Richland aids more actively than most eighteenth-century heroines could have done.  The subplot resembles that of Bevil Junior and Indiana in The Conscious Lovers: it is, if anything, less carefully constructed than Steele's story. Croaker—an obviously "humorous" character of the late Elizabethan type—is used to subvert sentientality: "Ah! my dear friend," he croaks, "it is a perfect satisfaction to be miserable with you." The play got little recognition from its early audiences, since in spite of its easy dialogue the whole lacks focus and structure, and even the comic effect its author sought.

She Stoops to Conquer (1773), on the other hand, was an immediate success, and has always remained one of the half-dozen most popular comedies in English. From the start it was recognized as almost farce; but even in days when it was ill-bred to laugh loudly, this play made Horace Walpole and the other exquisites "laugh very much." All English audiences since 1773 have joined in the laughter, and in spite of defects in structure, plausibility, and characterization, its appeal has hardly waned. Enjoyment here is not much heightened by analysis. One sees the improbability of the continued misapprehansion that the Hardcastle mansion is a country inn; one can accept the comic bashfulness of Young Marlow, but not his inability to distinguish a barmaid from a young lady; one is pleased with Tony Lumpkin's ability to display his Latinity in his song on The Three Pigeons in Act I, but surprised to find him practically illiterate in Act IV (he is of course stupid or shrewd as the individual situation demands); and one finds Mrs. Hardcastle's kneeling to her own husband in her own garden and fancying herself forty miles away on Crackskull Common face to face with a highwayman—one finds this a strain on the bedazzled imagination. These defects would kill any other comedy, and yet they count as nothing in this jolliest of all plays. Whatever its absurdities, the action seems to move naturally and among natural homely people—not the artificially sensitive persons found in sentimental comedy nor the hard, brittle wits of high comedy. The characters are all easily individualized—drawn again in the "humorous" Jonsonian fashion—and they are all individuals new to the drama of their day. The historic excellence of the work lies not in the fact that it is apparently anti-sentimental or that it is obviously attempting a revival of the comedy of manners. It is sui generis, not sentimental and not overtly anti-sentimental. It has been likened to the work of Farquhar, but it is better written and is morally innocent. Like much of Goldsmith's work, it is casually rather than carefully organized; and it is not too surely prophetic of more dramatic masterpieces from Goldsmith. He died a twelve-month after its success. The play has succeeded perfectly in being what its author hoped it would be—one of the most entertaining plays in English.

She Stoops to Conquer —in social networking style

—oOo—

 

    

To be continued...

The 'Pearl' Poet

From A Literary History of England (ed. A. C. Baugh), ch. XIV, "The Alliterative Revival", by Kemp Malone and A. C. Baugh.



In the last few chapters—on the romance, the religious omnibus, the lyric, and the writings of the mystics—we have become increasingly aware of the intense literary activity that marks the whole fourteenth century, and activity that reaches its culmination for most readers today in the great narrative poetry of Chaucer. It is an activity that extends from one end of England to the other, an activity in which London and the court participate to no overwhelming extent but rather share along with many other sections of the country. The widespread distribution of the ferment that was at work is indicated perhaps nowhere more plainly than in the emergence about 1350 of the Old English alliterative tradition after it had lain hidden for nearly two hundred years.

Alliterative verse

Roughly between the years 1350 and 1400 there appeared a score of poems, ranging from a few hundred lines to several thousand, in a metre which had clearly evolved in an unbroken development from the old four-beat alliterative measure of Beowulf and Cynewulf. It is not an antiquarian revival, but the reappearance of a metrical pattern which has undergone considerable change. The line has become in most cases the unit of thought, and the alliteration is therefore not so much structural as decorative. With some poets hunting the letter becomes a passion, and the alliteration falls on three syllables in a half-line or is carried through several consecutive lines. Verse of this sort was obviously associated in Chaucer's mind with the north, as is indicated by the well-known words of the Parson:

But trusteth well, I am a Southern man,
I can not geste—rum, ram, ruf—by lettre.

And most of the poems in the alliterative revival belong to the north and to the northwest Midlands. While one of the most important—Piers Plowman—has its origin in the west Midlands, we may think of the alliterative revival as occurring in the north and more particularly the northwest of England.

Three of the earliest poems in the revival, Alexander A, Alexander B, and William of Palerne, have already been discussed in the chapters on the romance. There we have likewise treated other later romances in alliterative verse, such as The Wars of Alexander, The Destruction of Troy, the Morte Arthure, and the religious romance The Destruction of Jerusalem. It is not practicable to include them again here, where as part of the alliterative movement they would be fully entitled to a place. (NOTE 1)  We shall have to be content with this brief reference, and confine ourselves in this and the following chapter to the other classes of alliterative poetry. In the present chapter we shall treat the works of the Pearl poet and one or two poems in some ways related to his. In the chapter which follows we shall consider a group of poems concerned with social and ethical questions, of which the most important is the great social document Piers Plowman.

NOTE 1: See above, pp. 182 ff. On the later alliterative movement in Scotland see Sir William Craigie, "The Scottish Alliterative Poems," Proc. Brit. Acad. xxviii (1942): 217-236.

The Pearl Poet

Of the many unique manuscripts gathered together in the seventeenth century by the famous antiquary Sir Robert Cotton, among which are the Beowulf codex, the two texts of Layamon's Brut, the Ludus Coventriae and others less famous, one is a modest quarto volume known as Nero A. X. (NOTE 2). The contents consist of four alliterative poems in a hand of the end of the fourteenth century. Acoompanying the text are twelve illustrations of quite crude workmanship depicing episodes in some of the poems. None of the texts is accompanied by any title, but they have been named, in the order of their occurrence in the manuscript, the Pearl, Purity (or Cleanness), Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

NOTE 2. It is reproduced in facsimile in EETS, 162 [Early English Text Society series].

The Pearl (NOTE 3) is not only first in the manuscript but shares with the Gawain the first place in the interest of modern readers. In a hundred stanzas of twelve lines each (NOTE 4), ingeniously linked in groups of five by repetition and a refrain, the poet tells how a lovely pearl, smooth and white, slipped from his hands into the grass and was lost in the ground. In his grief he often visits the spot which covers his pearl, and one August day, lulled by the fragance of herbs and flowers, he falls asleep on the little mound. There as he slumbers he dreams that he is in another world, a world of crystal cliffs, bright woods, and strands pebbled with precious stones. Such sights make him forget his grief, and he wanders about in sheer delight. Finally he comes upon a stream, clear and sparkling, beyond which he thinks must be Paradise. It is backed by a crystal cliff, at the foot of which sits a child—

A gracious maiden full debonaire;
Glistening white was her robe:
I knew her well; I had seen her before.

NOTE 3. Edited by Richard Morris (2ed, 1869; EETS, I). Sir Israel Gollancz (1891; 1921) and Charles C. Osgood (1906; Belles-Lettres Ser.). A translation is included in Gollancz's edition, and there are modern renderings by G. G. Coulton (1907), Osgood (1907), Sophe Jewett (1908), and Stanley P. Chase (1932).

NOTE 4. The rime scheme is abababab bcbc. There are 101 stanzas, but one is considered spurious or was canceled by the author.

The longer he looks at her the better he knows her. He has an impulse to call her, but seeing her in so strange a place deters him. She is spotless, and her dress is trimmed profusely with pearls. She wears a crown, from beneath which her hair falls loosely on her shoulders. No tongue could fittingly describe the sight:

So clean was it and clear and pure,
That precious pearl where it was set.

Thus arrayed she comes down to the brink. She was nearer to me, he says, than aunt or niece. Finally she speaks to him and he then addresses her:

O Pearl, quoth I, in pearls bedight,
Art thou my pearl that I have 'plain'd,
Regretted when all alone at night?
Much longing for thee have I restrained
Since into the grass thou didst from me glide.

Grown in stature and in wisdom, she reveals to him her life as spouse of the Heavenly Bridegroom. The dreamer's pearl was not lost when it was put in a coffer so comely as is this gracious garden. Along with thousands of others she shares a most happy lot. When the poet objects that she did nothing to deserve so great a reward, since she "lived not two years in our land" and knew neither her Paternoster nor Creed, she enters upon an elaborate discourse on the part played by merit and grace in salvation and the equality of the saved before God (NOTE 5), illustrating her views at length by biblical parables. The poet is finally granted a view of her abode—the New Jerusalem—vividly adapted from the Apocalypse. His effort in trying to cross the stream and reach the heavenly city wakens him from his dream, and he rises from the mound on which he had slumbered, filled with a new spiritual strength.

NOTE 5. The orthodoxy of the poet's views was questioned by Carleton F. Brown, "The Author of The Pearl Considered in the Light of His Theological Opinions," PMLA, XIX (1904), 115-53, and defended by James Sledd, MLN, LV (1940), 381. While his attitude toward grace has been shown to be good doctrine, equality of reward appears to be stressed beyond medieval orthodoxy.

The Allegory

This beautiful and seemingly transparent allegory has been interpreted in various ways and has led to considerable controversy. The traditional view sees in the poem an elegy in which the poet grieves for the death of a two-year-old daughter and is consoled by her in a vision of a common medieval type. This view was challenged by Schofield in 1904, who denied the autobiographical interpretation and suggested that the poet was merely upholding the virtue of purity under the symbolism of a pearl, with appropriate personification (NOTE 6). While his view has not found much favor (NOTE 7) his example has led others to attempt new explanations and various modifications of the original interpretation. The Pearl has been taken as symbolizing the Eucharist (NOTE 8) and more recently as recording a state of "spiritual dryness" experienced by the poet and not unknown to religious and to mystics (NOTE 9). Still others have sought to reconcile the elegiacal and symbolical interpretations (NOTE 10). There is symbolism, to be sure, in incidental ways in the poem, and the problems of divine grace and the equality of heavenly rewards constitute the major theme for discussion, but there are too many features which are meaningless on any other assumption than that the poet mourns the loss of a real child (NOTE 11). The poem treats certain aspects of salvation in the framework of a personal elegy, employing the medieval conventions of vision and debate.

NOTE 6. W. H. Schofield, "The Nature and Fabric of The Pearl," PMLA, xix (1904). 154-215; "Symbolism, Allegory, and Autobiography in The Pearl," PMLA, xxiv (1909). 585-675.

NOTE 7. Schofield's interpretation was opposed by Coulton in MLR, ii (1907). 39-43.

NOTE 8. R. M. Garrett, The Pearl—An Interpretation (Seattle, 1918; Univ. of Wash. Pub. in English, (Vol. iv., No. 1).

NOTE 9. Sister M. Madeleva, Pearl: A Study in Spiritual Dryness (1925).

NOTE 10. Jefferson B. Fletcher, "The Allegory of the Pearl," JEGP, xx (1921). 1-21., and René Wellek, "The Pearl: An Interpretation of the Middle-English Poem," Studies in English (Charles Univ., Prague), iv (1933). 1-33. Both these papers stress the complex character of the symbolism.

NOTE 11. For an attempt to identify the child, see Oscar Cargill and Margaret Schlauch, "The Pearl and Its Jeweler," PMLA, xliii (1928), 105-123.

A personal elegy

Viewed as a personal elegy the Pearl is a poem of deep feeling, the poet's grief yielding gradually to resignation and spiritual reconciliation. In its sensuous beauty, its artistic restraint, its skilful manipulation of a complex and difficult metrical pattern, and its imaginatively beautiful descriptions of the garden, the pearl-maiden, and the New Jerusalem, it is in its best parts unsurpassed by anything in Middle English poetry.

Purity

In two respects Purity (NOTE 12), the second poem in the manuscript, resembles the Pearl—in its preoccupation with an ethical question and in its predilection for extended paraphrases of biblical incident. For here we have a discourse on purity, showing how impossible it is for one who is unclean to approach God's pure presence, and enforcing the point by the parable of the man without a wedding garment. This and other episodes such as the fall of Lucifer and the Expulsion from Paradise are merely preliminary, however, to the main purpose, which is to tell the stories of the Flood, the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the profanation of the holy vessels in Belshazzar's Feast. The homiletic purpose is plain, and at the end the poet not only reminds us that "upon thrynne wyses" he has showed the sorrow that uncleanness causes our Lord but he closes with a prayer for grace. The stories are vividly told, but the poem suffers by comparison with the Pearl through the lack of any framework or artistic motivation.

NOTE 12.  Edited by Richard Morris (2ed., 1869; EETS, i)., Robert J. Menner (1920; Yale Stud. in English, 61), and Sir Israel Gollancz (1921).

Patience
 
This is also true of its companion piece, Patience (NOTE 13), which devotes all but the first sixty of its 531 lines to the story of Jonah and the whale. But concentration upon a single subjet gives greater unity to the piece, and the poet has allowed his imagination freer rein in embellishing his theme. He shows us the activity in getting under sail, describes vividly the storm at sea, pictures with realistic detail the slimy insides of the whale, and reports dramatically Jonah's conversations with God. God's rebuke of Jonah for his impatience leads the poet to his closing reflection. He who is too hasty in tearing his clothes will often sit sewing them up. Even poverty must be borne with patience, which "is a noble point, though it displease oft." In both Purity and Patience the poet's principal indebtedness is to the Bible, and the Pearl not only draws its parables from the same source but derives its description of the New Jerusalem from the Apocalypse. Other sources in Tertullian, an eclogue of Boccaccio, and even the Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry have been suggested but with the possible exception of Boccaccio's eclogue, must be described as very doubtful. The poet refers once to Jean de Meun and his part of the Roman de la Rose, and he has drawn scattered details in Purity from Mandeville's Travels in their French form. But while the author of these poems was apparently well read, we have not been very successful in tracking down the sources of his inspiration outside of the Scriptures.

NOTE 13.  Edited by Richard Morris (as above), Hartley Bateson (Manchester, 191; 2ed., 1918), and Israel Gollancz (1913).

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

There seems to be no reason to doubt that the three poems the Pearl, Purity, and Patience are the work of one man. The fourth poem in the transcript is of such a different kind that if it were not found in association with the others we might well hesitate to attribute it to the same authorship, in spite of obvious stylistic resemblances (NOTE 14). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (NOTE 15) is a courtly romance, the finest Arthurian romance in English. Though it exemplifies the knightly virtues of courage and truth, it is in no sense a story told to enforce a moral. It is quite in the spirit of French romance, told for its own sake.

NOTE 14. Apart from the stylistic features common to all four poems, there are noteworthy parallels between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Purity. It should be remembered, however, that the romance also shows many striking parallels in phrases and lines with the Wars of Alexander.

NOTE 15. There are older editions by Sir Frederic Madden for the Bannatyne Club (1839) and Richard Morris (1864; EETS, 4); revised by I. Gollancz (1897 and 1912), but the romance is best studied in the edition of J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon (1925) or the new edition of Sir Israel Gollancz with introductory essays by Mabel Day and Mary S. Serjeantson (1940; EETS, 210). Modern renderings by Jessie L. Weston (1898), often reprinted, T. H. Banks (1929), G. H. Gerould (1934), etc. are available separately or in anthologies.

Subject Matter and Treatment

 The plot itself is so well known as to need no retelling. The main adventure is the challenge, which Gawain accepts of an exchange of blows with the Green Knight, in which he beheads the challenger but must submit to the same hazard a year later. With this is combined the adventure at Bertilak's castle, in which Gawain is tempted on three successive mornings by his host's wife and in which his only fault is concealing the magic girdle which she gives him. Both of these stories are found separately either in Celtic or in Old French romances (NOTE 16). They are first found combined in the English poem (NOTE 17), and whether we owe the combination to the English poet or to his source we must grant that it was a happy inspiration which tied the three temptations to the three blows offered Gawain at the Green Chapel and made the wound received from the third blow the result of his concealing the girdle. Accepting the supernatural as a prerogative of medieval story, we have a skilfully contrived plot (NOTE 18), a feature always worthy of remark in medieval romance. But it is only one, and that perhaps the least, of the qualities which give this remarkable poem its high place among English romances. From the beginning almost to the end it proceeds by a succession of scenes and situations full of color and movement and vivid detail. We begin with the New Year's feast, the guests exchanging greetings and gifts, the maidens laughing and making mirth till it is time to eat, then washing and seating themselves at tables. Just as the music ceases and the first course has been served the Gren Knight enters. He is fully described—stature, appearance, dress, armor, horse, trappings—as he rides straight up to the daïs. And so it goes from episode to episode like a succession of tapestries or medieval illuminations. The descriptions of the seasons as they mark the passing of the year and bring Gawain to the time when he must set out to keep his pledge are no mere literary exercises, and the hunting scenes have all the excitement and lifelikeness of first-hand experience or observation. Striking, too, is the poet's mastery of dialogue, always easy and natural, but particularly skilful in the extended conversations between Gawain and the lady of the castle, as she seeks an opening and he adroitly evades and parries each thrust. Finally, one should remark the dexterous way in which the poet keeps the various actions moving forward simultaneously, passing from the dalliance of the lady to the husband's adventures in the chase and back again to the bed chamber until all parties are brought together naturally at the end of the day. But there is no end of things to exclaim over and we can only hint at the enjoyment to be had from reading and rereading this fine romance (NOTE 19).

NOTE 16. The fullest study of the sources of the romance is George L. Kittredge, A Study of Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, Mass., 1916). The challenge or beheading game is found in an episode inown as The Champion's Bargain which closes the Irish romance (at least as old as the eleventh century) of Fled Bricrend, or Bricriu's Feast. From there it passed into French where it was embodied independently into four separate romances (the Livre de Caradoc, incorporated in the first continuation of Chrétien's Perceval, the short thirteenth-century romance La Mule sanz Frain, the prose Grail romance known as the Perlesvaus in which the adventure is attributed to Lancelot, and another thirteenth-century romance entitled Gawain et Humbaut in which the ending has been completely changed). Parallels to the temptation motif are not so close, but in one form or another it is found in the Old French Ider, in the late English Carl of Carlisle, and elsewhere.

NOTE 17. There are many theories accounting for this combination. Kittredge believed that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was based on a lost French romance in which the adventures were combined. J. R. Hulbert, "Syr Gawayn and the Grene Knygt," MP, XIII (1915-16). 433-462, 689-730, believes they were originally joined in a Fairy Mistress story as the conditions which the hero must fulfill. Else von Schaubert, "Der englische Ursprung von Syr Gawayn and the Grene Knygt," ESt, LVII (1923). 330-446, maintains that they were first combined by the English poet. This is also the view of Miss Day in the essay noted above. O. Löhmann, Die Sage von Gawain und dem grünen Ritter (Königsberg, 1938), likewise believes in the English origin of the romance, but argues that a Fairy Mistress story has been changed into a test of the hero.

NOTE 18. The idea that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is connected in some way with the Order of the Garter is most fully advocated in Isaac Jackson, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight considered as a 'Garter' Poem," Anglia, XXXVII (1913). 393-423, and opposed by J. R. Hulbert in the article already referred to (MP. XIII, especially pp. 710 ff.).

NOTE 19. In the absence of any objective evidence for determining the order of composition it has seemed best to treat the poems in the order in which they occur in the manuscript. Patience and Purity probably belong together, and since Purity has a number of parallels with the Gawain, it probably stands closer to the latter. On artistic grounds the Pearl and Gawain should follow the homiletic pieces, though this is not a safe criterion for pieces unlike in kind. One could argue for an order which would put the Gawain first, followed by the Pearl, the bereavement in which led the poet to the moral concerns of Purity and Patience. Such an order would have the advantage of putting Patience after Purity, to which it is superior in structure and unity.

The Author

All that we know about the author of these four poems is what can be cautiously inferred from his work, and all attempts to identify him with Huchown, Strode, or any other individual have failed. The dialect of the manuscript, which there is no reason to think differs essentially from that of the author, would indicate that he belonged to the northwest Midlands, probably south Lancashire, and this general locality is supported by the landscape and local allusions in the poems. He need not have been a priest in spite of his preoccupation with theological and moral questions, though a position as chaplain in some nobleman's household would make such an interest natural and account for his familiarity with the ways of courtly life. Naturally, however, such knowledge could be otherwise accounted for. His vocabulary contains a large French element which might result from his social status or his acquaintance with French literature. This was certainly considerable. He impresses us as a man of cosmopolitan taste whose horizon was not bounded by the limits of a provincial neighborhood. That he was at once observant and imaginative is apparent. His literary activity coincides roughly with the earlier part of Chaucer's career, and in the absence of more precise information we cannot do better than to date his work c. 1375.

St Erkenwald

Various other alliterative poems have from time to time been atrributed to the Pearl poet. Among them the one that has found most supporters is St. Erkenwald (NOTE 20), which attributes to the Old English bishop of this name a miracle not otherwise recorded. When St. Paul's in London was being rebuilt a tomb was uncovered in which was the body of a pagan judge. Since he had always been just in his awards, his body and clothing were still as fresh as at the time of his death. At Erkenwald's bidding the corpse reveals its identity, whereupon the bishop's tears fall on the body, constituting baptism and releasing the soul. Bodily decay at once sets in. The story is told in 352 clear and straightforward verses, but the present writer at least cannot accept the attribution to the Pearl poet.

NOTE 20. Edited by Horstmann, Altengliche Legenden (1881), Gollancz (1922), and Henry L. Savage (1926; Yale Stud. in English, 72).

Pistel of Swete Susan

Associated with the poems previously discussed is a short piece of twenty-eight tail-rime stanzas, each with thirteen alliterative lines, called the Pistel of Swete Susan (NOTE 21). It tells the story of Susanna and the Elders from the thirteenth chapter of Daniel (in the Vulgate), with the description of the garden embellished with details drawn from the Roman de la Rose. It is told simply and effectively, at times with the deft touches of an artist. When Susanna, allowed to speak to her husband, has avowed her innocence and fidelity to him,

Thei toke the feteres of hire feete,
And evere he kyssed that swete;
"In other world schal we mete."
     Seide he no mare. (lines 257-60)

A passage in Wyntoun's Orygynale Cronykil (c. 1420) asserts that the author was Huchown of the Awle Ryale (Royal Court), who is there credited also with the Gret Gest off Arthure and the Awyntyre off Gawane (NOTE 22). The attribution cannot be accepted, but the passage has led some to believe that Huchown was not only the Pearl poet but the author of most of the poems in the alliterative revival (NOTE 23).  Naturally such extravagant claims have not met with much favor. While the six poems discussed in the present chapter are linked together by certain features of subject matter and treatment it seems best to hold to the conservative view which limites the work of the Pearl poet to the poems preserved in the famous Cotton manuscript.

NOTE 21. Edited by Hans Köster, Huchown's Pistel of Swete Susan (Strassburg, 1895; Quellen und Forschungen, LXXVI).

NOTE 22.

He made the Gret Gest off Arthure
And the Awyntyre off Gawane
The Pystill als off Swete Swsane....

The Gret Gest off Arthure is believed to be the alliterative Morte Arthure, presumably in its fuller form (see ch. X, above). The Awyntyre off Gawane is identified by those who believe Huchown to be the Pearl poet with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by others with the Awyntyrs of Arthur (see p. 190, note 22).

NOTE 23. George Neilson, 'Huchown of the Awle Ryale', the Alliterative Poet (Glasgow, 1902), who argues that Huchown is to be identified with the "gude Sir Hew of Eglintoun" mentioned by Dunbar in his Lament for the Makaris. In spite of the extravagance of his thesis Neilson's book contains much interesting matter.

Reading Notes on Some English Classics

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