Sterne and the Novel of his Times

 

(From the  

Concise Cambridge History of English Literature,  

by George Sampson, rev. R.C. Churchill, 1972)

THE AGE OF JOHNSON, III:

STERNE AND THE NOVEL OF HIS TIMES

During the twenty years that followed the death of Richardson new elements were added to the novel, and of these the chief is "sentiment" or "sensibility", the master in that kind being Sterne. Apart from him the writers of the time fall into three groups, (1) the novelists of sentiment and reflection, typified by Henry Mackenzie, (2) the novelists of home life, typified by Fanny Burney, and (3) the novelists of "Gothick" romance, typified by Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve.

Laurence Sterne (1713-68) was born at Clonmel, Tipperary [Ireland], the son of Ensign Roger Sterne and great-grandson of the Richard Sterne who was Archbishop of York 1664-83. He was educated at Cambridge, took holy orders and was made perpetual curate of Coxwold in Yorkshire in 1760. He was not the kind of priest in whom the Anglican Church can feel any pride. Little is known about his life, and even that little is not very reputable. Our concern, however, is with the writer. The publication of Tristram Shandy was begun in 1760 (Vols. I and II), and continued at intervals until the year before the author's death. In 1762 Sterne's health broke down, and he began the travels of which A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr Yorick (1768) is the delightful literary product. Save that Sterne died in London and not abroad, it will be noticed that his life roughly follows the Fielding-Smollett pattern. The author of Tristram Shandy, cool copyst of other men as he was, must be accepted as an original and originating power in literature. He showed that there were untried possibilities in the novel. He opened new fields of of humour. He created a style more subtle and a form more flexible than any found before him. The novel, as left by Fielding and Smollett, might have settled into a chronicle of contemporary life and manners. Richardson had struck memorably into tragedy, but his one great story stood alone. Sterne invented for English literature the fantasia-novel, which could be a channel for the outporing of the author's own personality, idiosyncrasy, humours and opinions. Instead of form, there was apparently formlessness; but only apparently, for Sterne was the master of his own improvisations. Sterne may therefore be called a liberator—even the first of the "expressionists". His success left the novel the most flexible of all literary forms. 

Sterne's odd humour appears in the very title of his book, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; for it has been truly remarked that the "life" is that of the gentleman's uncle and the "opinions" those of the gentleman's father. Tristram, titular hero and narrator, remains unborn during much of the story and plays no part in the rest. The undying trio, Walter Shandy, My Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are humorous both in the narrow or Jonsonian sense, and in the larger or Shakespearean sense. My Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are variations of genius upon Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. They are on a lower plane, but the relation between them is full of beauty, as well as of humour.

Of Sterne's indecency too much can be made. That he has not the broad humour of his other master, Rabelais—that his fun in this kind provokes the snigger rather than the hearty laugh, can be at once admitted. What is unfortunate about Sterne is that much of his own personal life seems to give unpleasant point to the least pleasant parts of his writing. We should like a priest to be more priestly. But actually the most offensive quality in Sterne is the new "sensibility" or "sentimentalism". When the "spot-lights" are manipulated with design so palpable as in the death of Le Fever or in the story of the dead ass, the author goes far to defeat his own purpose; for he at once calls in question his own artistic sincerity. The pathos of Dickens is naturally poured out; the pathos of Sterne is unnaturally put on. But his artistic sins can be forgiven for the sake of an insinuating, irresistible humour in which no English writer has excelled him. His Sermons of Mr Yorick (1760-9) and Letters from Yorick to Eliza (1775) have a biographical rather than a literary importance. 

Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831) carried the eighteenth century well into the nineteenth. After the publication of The Man of Feeling in 1771, the year of Scott's birth, he was recognized as the literary leader of Edinburgh society. The novel, intrinsically unremarkable, is notewworthy as a reversion to the Coverly type invented by Addison. The story is purely episodic. It is completely without humour, and owes nothing in form or in spirit to Fielding or Smollett. Mackenzie was, as Scott called him, "the northern Addison," though he comes near to Sterne in his working of the "sentimental" vein. in his next bok, The Man of the World (1773), Mackenzie achieved both a plot and a villain, though neither can be called important. His last and best book, Julia de Roubigné (1777), strikes a wholly different note and places him in the straight line of descent from Richardson. It owes much to Clarissa, and is one of the few tragedies to be found in the early stages of the English novel.

More genuinely important is Henry Brooke (1703-83), an Irishman, whose best known book The Fool of Quality (1766) has already been mentioned (pp. 397, 412). Brooke was a man of many activities, and deserves serious study. In The Fool of Quality the "free fantasia" form of discussion, diversion and sentiment indicates a debt to Sterne; the substance of the social discourses shows clear understanding of Rousseau; and the strain of exaltation comes from Law and the mystics. It is a remarkable compound. Brooke's other novel, Juliet Greenville (1774) does not call for notice.

From the novel of sentiment to the tale that sought to five both a sense of terror and a sense of the past is a startling transition. It began with The Castle of Otranto (1765) struck off at fever heat by Horace Walpole (1719-97). Though slight and more than a little absurd, it has the importance of being the first thing of its kind in English. It was written in conscious reaction against the domesticities of Richardson, and sought both to substitute for the interest of the present the appeal of the past, and to extend the wrold of experience by the addition of the mysterious and the supernatural. The performance is bungling; but the design is original and effective. Walpole gave us the first "Gothick" romance. He was followed by Clara Reeve (1729-1807) who wrote several stories of which only one is remembered, The Champion of Virtue, A Gothic Story (1777), the foolish title of which was happily changed to The Old English Baron in the second edition (1778). When it is remembered that another of her production is called Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon, a Natural Son of Edward the Black Prince (1793), it will be seen that Clara Reeve through she had her feet firmly in the past, though, in fact, her fifteenth century conducts itself singularly like the eighteenth. Still, the attempt to recapture romance was made. If Horace Walpole and Clara Reee had done no more than claim that the boundaries of the novel might be extended to include the glamour of the past and the thrill of the supernatural, they would deserve remembrance; but their actual performances are not entirely contemptible. 

Wit hthe novels of Frances (Fanny) Burney (1752-1840) we pass into another world. Fanny was the daughter of Dr Burney, the amiable historian of music. During her youth, and until some years after the publication of her second novel, she lived in the most brilliant literary society of her day. In 1786 she was appointed second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, a post which she held for four years, to her own great discomfort, but to the delight of those who read her fascinating Diary. After her release, she married (1793) General d'Arblay, an emigrant of the Revolution, and from 1802 to 1812 she lived in France, returning only to publish her last novel, The Wanderer (1814). In Evelina Fanny Burney wrote the first English novel of home life. The motherless Evelina goes out into the world, and her adventures are related in a series of letters with a vivacity and swift succession of incidents entierely original. Her way is beset with comic characters who are new creations in English fiction and foreshadow the far-off Dickens. Jonson aptly called Burney his "little character-monger". She was the first to give flesh and blood to sheer vulgarity. Her best qualities are seen in Evelina (1778). Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796) have stiffened into something unnatural, and The Wanderer (1814) scared even Macaulay, who was not easily frightened by anything in the shape of a book. Spontaneity is among the best gifts of the novelist; and few books are more spontaneous than Fanny's first novel. The same gift appears in her Diary with its brilliant and easy succession of characters and incidents. Fanny Burney was the first writer to see that the ordinary embarrassments of a girl's life would bear to be taken for the main theme of a novel. Macaulay justly saluted her as the first English novelist of her sex; he forgot that she was the first novelist of her kind, without respect of sex.

Daiches on Sterne

—oOo—

 

British political writers of the 1790s

From The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, chapter XI:
THE PERIOD OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

I. BURKE

Edmund Burke (1729-97), the writer who used most completely the oratorical style in English prose, was a Dublin Irishman, born of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, and educated as a Protestant at Trinity College. He came to London and entered the Middle Temple in 1750, but was never called to the Bar. His first tentative excursions into literature were an ironical answer to Bolingbroke in A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) and an essay in aesthetics after Addison in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). They are not important, though we get from them intimations of Burke's personal convictions. Throughout his life, feeling, and not reason, was the power that moved him.

Burke's public career began in 1759 when he became editor of The Annual Register and secretary to William Gerard Hamilton—"Single Speech Hamilton"—Chief Secretary for Ireland. In 1765 he entered the House of Commons and became Secretary to Lord Rockingham, then in power. Suring the short life of Rockingham's first ministry and the sixteen years of opposition that followed, Burke was the animating spirit of the Rockingham Whigs. He fought for the freedom of the House of Commons against the subsidized interests of the "King's Friends", and the freedom of the American colonies against the claims of the King's friends to tax them directly. The writings in which his views are most fully preserved are Observations on a late publication entitled "The Present State of the Nation" (1769), Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), the speech On American Taxation (1774), that On moving his Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies (1775) and A Letter . .  . to  . . . [the] Sheriffs of . . . Bristol (1777). As the American war drew to an end, Ireland and India became Burke's chief concern. By his support of Irish trade, he lost in 1780 the representation of Bristol, which his opposition to the American war had gained for him in 1774; and Two Letters . . . to Gentlemen in the City of Bristol (1778), with the Speech at the Guildhall, in Bristol, previous to the Late Election (1780), are the noble record of his courage, independence and wisdom in the hour of defeat. Burke had hiven much time to a study of Indian affairs, and in 1785 he entered the campaign against Hasting which was to occupy him for ten years. To 1785 also belongs the famous Speech on the . . . Nabob of Arcot's Private Debts. His last crusade was that against the new government in France. A crescendo of indignation swells through a rapid succession of publications: Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), A Letter . . . to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), Thoughts on French Affairs (1791), Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793), and Letters . . . on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France (1795-7). Burke died in 1797 with his last hopes for justice to Irish catholics shattered, and believing that England was about to make dishonorable peace with the enemy across the Channel.

Of the tracts named above, the first in which Burke's principles are stated with the eloquence that gives him a place in literature is that known as Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. The policy of the King and the "King's Friends" towards the Middlesex election and towards the American colonies seemed to Burke highly dangerous. There was, he felt, no safer method of government than the openly debated "pro" and "con" of party. The attempted reassertion of royal prerogative took us back to the fatal days of Charles I. No modern student of history bases any convictions about the American struggle on the mere taxation question. The great point at issue was the right way of securing the loyalty of any overseas dominion to the home government. In Burke's view, acts of state should be guided by three main principles which can be indicated in three questions: Is this expedient or worth while? Is this good for the persons most affected? Is this justified by experience? He alone seems to have understood the problem of governing and maintaining the empire which Chatham's successful wars had called into existence. Of his American speeches, the greatest, as it is the most elaborate, is the second, On Conciliation; but the first, On American Taxation, combines in a wonderful manner simplicity and directness of reasoning with ardour and splendour of eloquence. 

The obstinate stupidity which Burke deplored in the policy of George III and his ministers towards America he found undiminished in their policy towards Ireland. His Irish tracts are among the least read of his pieces, but they deserve attention, both  for the excellence of their matter and for the temperateness of their utterance. In the letters To a Peer in Ireland on the Penal Laws (1782), To Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792) and the earlier Speech at the Guildhall, in Bristol (1780) the theme is simply this: stupidity has lost us America, stupidity will lose us Ireland. Events have justified the indictment.

Burke felt strongly that India should be govverned for the good of its inhabitants, and not for the profit of the East India Company and its servants. Warren Hastings was to him the type of misrule, and against that unhappy man he directed all his power of invective. But Hastings, whatever his faults may have been, was a great ruler, and we cannot help feeling, when we read the ferocious denunciation, that Burke was engaged, not in prosecution but in persecution.

Burke's violent opposition to the French Revolution of 1789 seems unnatural, but it is not inexplicable. The eloquent champion of the American farmer and the Indian ryot appeared to have nothing to say for the French peasant. All his eloquence was reserved for the oppressors. The cause of his antagonism was twofold and was deeply inherent in his nature. He could no more believe in "the rights of man" than he could believe in the rights of kings; further, he was sure that any assertion of such rights savoured of atheism. Burke's instinct was true. The Revolution was a challenge, not only to kingship, but to all establishments. A change was coming in the way of human thought. He felt it, he feared it, he opposed it. With the Reflections should be read An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), published anonymously and written in the third person. These two pamphlets form the most complete statement of Burke's anti-revolutionary philosophy. Unsound as he seems in his veneration of mere prescription, Burke was thoroughly sound in his suspicion of "Reason" enthroned as the sovereign power. Burke's revolt against the Revolution is almost exactly parallel to Wordsworth's revolt against Godwinism. From "political justice" Wordsworth turned to the emotions and the prejudices of the peasant, and found himself a poet again. It is easy to dislike Burke on the Revolution; but it is not difficult to be warned by him  against the perpetual menace of the doctrinaire. He died before any final issue was even in sight, and there is no evidence that he foresaw the shape and course of events.

Two productions of Burke stand a part from his great crusades; they are the speech on Economical Reform (1780) and the Letter to a Noble Lord (1796). The first is the most quietly persuasive and genial of his writings; the second is a formidable piece of controversy. Burke had been granted a pension, and none had better deserved it. The grant was bitterly attacked, especially by the Duke of Bedford, who appeared to consider that any grants, pensions or places should be reserved for those who did not need them, did not deserve  them, and did not come from obscure families. Burke's Letter is not merely a great example of invective, it is a great example of a very rare thing, invective that is creative. 

Burke's eloquence belonged to a past age. The splendour of his imagery and the sonorousness of his periods link his prose with that of the great sixteenth and seventeenth century writers. He brought into politics the faults as well as the genius of a major prophet. He is at times unrestrained, unjust, unwise; nevertheless the greatness of his mind ourweighs his faults, and he remains the only orator whose speeches have secured a permanent place in English literature.


II. POLITICAL WRITERS AND SPEAKERS

In 1784 the King once more triumphed over the Whigs, and young Pitt became master of Parliament. The devotees of Fox formed the Esto Perpetua Club and began to harry the enemy. Someone hit on the happy idea of a mock review of a mock epic, and in The Morning Herald appeared a series of "Criticisms of The Rolliad". The Rolliad was a mythical epic named from John Rolle, M.P., a stolid Tory who had tried to cough down Burke. He was provided with an ancestor, the Norman Duke Rollo, whose imaginary adventures supplied matter for a burlesque of the Aeneid. The new style of skit proved very popular, and the authors did not carry it on too long. It was succeeded by another kind of burlesque, Political Eclogues, in which Pitt and his friends appeared as Virgilian shepherds. This, in its turn, was followed by a series of Probationary Odes for the laureateship, then vacant by the death of Whitehead in 1785. The poetical level of all these pieces was not very high, but at least they were more civilized than the political satires of Churchill. The only one of the authors worth mention is George Ellis, the scholar.

One outstanding figure among the verse satirists on the Whig side is "Peter Pindar", the pseudonym adopted by John Wolcot (1738-1819) at first a doctor and afterwards a clergyman,. He discovered the genius of Opie the painter, ran him as a speculation, and quarrelled with him. He imitated The Rolliad in The Lousiad (1785) and in 1787 produced another skit, Ode upon Ode, which attained great popularity. The absurdities of the yearly official odes to the King invited reprisals, and Wolcot, hampered by few convictions and fewer scruples,  found a ready market among indignant Whigs for his small scandal. He is, perhaps, the best of English caricaturists in verse. Bozzy and Piozzi (1786), the title of which explains itself, is another excellent piece of caricature. 

When Pitt boldly faced the aggressiveness of French republicanism abroad and of its partisans at home, he found a lively and trenchant ally in The Anti-Jacobin (1707-8), founded by George Canning. It remains the best thing of its kind. The deadly conviction of its attack was made more effective by its witty manner. Among the writers were the many-sided, brilliant Canning, George Ellis, by this time a fervent Tory and repentant of The Rolliad, and John Hookham Frere, country gentleman, diplomatist, traveller, translator of Aristophanes, and the first to imitate in English the satiric Italian epic. The editor was William Gifford (1756-1896), whose literary brutalities have blackened a character admirable in many ways. He was one of those luckless persons born with the instincts of scholarship in penurious circumstances that denied him a scholar's education. After a miserable boyhood he was sent to Oxford, and was able to make something of a name by his satires, The Baviad (1795) and The Maeviad (1795), directed against the ridiculous "Della Cruscan" school of poets and the small dramatic fry of the day. When The Anti-Jacobin was set on foot, his sledge-hammer style nad industry made him a suitable editor; but he was mainly concerned with its prose. He did this task well, and in 1809 became first editor of The Quarterly Review and held his post for fifteen years. He seemed to find relief for the bitterness engendered by his menial years in savage attacks upon all suspected of Liberalism. The shameful onslaught in the Quarterly upon Keats can be neither forgotten nor forgiven. The verse of The Anti-Jacobin "guys" very gaily the early revolutionary bleatings of Southey and his friends. The "Knife-Grinder" sapphics in imitation of Southey are immortal.

One of the butts of the Anti-Jacobin was "Mr. Higgins of St. Mary Axe"—in real life William Godwin (1756-1836), a political philosopher and novelist, to whom harsh justice was measured in life, and to whom true justice will never now be done, because he is not quite important enough to pay for resuscitation. He is remembered as the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) and the father-in-law of Shelley; he ought to be remembered as a sincere thinker in whose character there was not a trace of self-seeking or self-display. Much conscientious, ephemeral work was done by him in history and literature; but he was brought into sudden prominence by a book of startling opinions, Political Justice, published in 1793. The influence of his book was great among the younger generation. Godwin was a born system-maker; philosophy and politics were, for him, indistinguishable, and of his views on both he was an eager advocate in public and private. So we find him writing proselytizing novels, Caleb Williams and St. Leon, which he hoped would insinuate his views in the general mind. During these years, he met and married another writer of innovating beliefs. Mary Wolltonecraft, to use her maiden name, is a far more attractive person than her placid husband. After beginning as a teacher she passed several years as a publisher's hack, till her Vindication of the Rights of Woman made her name known in 1792. It was the first blast of the trumpet in the battle for woman's freedom. Unfortunately, Mary Wollstonecraft was too consistent. She entered upon a conscientious "no-marriage" with a far from conscientious American, Gilbert Imlay, who left her with a daughter, known as Fanny Imlay, to support. Mary failed in an attempt at suicide. Soon after, she and Godwin formed an attachment, which, in accordance with their principles, was free; but they married in 1797 in order to safeguard the interest of their children. Before the end of that year, the birth of a child, the future wife of Shelley, was fatal to the mother. She had been a generous, impulsive woman, always affectionate and kind. Godwin's second choice of a wife was less fortunate and conduced to the unhappy experiences of his latter days. Always in difficulties of one kind or another, he lived out a courageous philosophical life of eighty years. William Godwin and Mary Wolltonecraft were gallant rebels of immense courage; but they were unfortunate advertisements of a new social order. They committed the crime of failure. Tragedy was bound up in the texture of their lives. Mary died just as hope and happiness seemed dawning for her. Shelley's passion for her daughter, mary, led to the suicide of his first wife. Poor Fanny Imlay committed suicide at twenty-two because she refused to be a burden upon Godwin. Claire Clairmont, daughter of the second Mrs Godwin and step-sister of the second Mary, played a dubious part in the lives of Shelley and Byron, the latter being the father of her daugher, Allegra. To exclaim with Matthew Arnold "What a set!" is tempting, but unjust. Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft rank high, and deserve to rank high, among those who have tried to solve the eternal problem "How ought man to live?" That their way was not Matthew Arnold's way does not prove they were wrong. And it was a throny path they trod.

In one respect Mary's way was quite wrong. Whether marriage is, or is not, a kind of servitude is a debating-society topic; but whether a girl is, or is not, a kind of boy is a practical question. Mary was a complete educational rebel. She wrote Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and the whole point of her argument is that a woman should be educated on equal terms with a man. This was taken to mean that a woman should have a man's education. A century and a half later, people were beginning to re-discover that a woman ought to have a woman's education, and that a good girl's school was not necessarily an exact imitation of a good boys' school. Her most famous book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is a brave piece of pioneer work, and its influence upon later reformers was powerful and creative. A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) is a footnote to Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution and should be read with that work. Mary Wollstonecraft's letters are attractive and moving. 

Godwin's An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice was a Bible to young revolutionaries like Wordsworth in the days when he could write:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.

Some of the blissful youths of that dawn, in Hazlitt's ironical sentence, lost their way in Utopia and found it in Old Sarum. But with massive placidity Godwin continued to believe in man. The weakness—and it is the fatal weakness of al the "planners") is that he believed mankind had only to be given good reasons for a better life and Utopia would follow. His faith was boundless. All that was necesasary for the success of his system was a perfect world inhabited by perfect beings. Godwin's Political Justice must not be judged by the criticisms of those who found it profitable to apostatize. Even Coleridge repented of the harshness he had dealt out to a book he once had loved. Hazlitt remained faithful, and his sketch of Godwin is still excellent. Godwin's style deserved some success. He was always clear and forcible; his sentences convey his exact meaning without effort, and display a kind of composed oratorical effect. He gained a larger audience for his novels, but the only one that can be said to survive is The Adventures of Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, published in 1794. Another, St. Leon, is memorable for its portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft. H. L. Brailsford's Shelley, Godwin and their Circle (1913) is the bes introduction to their work.

From Godwin, who, in his worst days, kept round him a tattered cloak of magnanimity, it is an abrupt change to his fellow-revolutionary, the coarse-grained, shrewd Thomas Paine (1737-1809). Yet Paine's public spirit led him to disregard all profit from his widely sold political works. He was a born pamphleteer, never happy unless he was divulging his opinions for the welfare of the human race as he conceived it. He spent all his earlier years in the struggle to make a decent livelihood, and at last emigrated to Philadelphia. In 1776 he became famous by his pamphlet, Common-Sense, which consolidated American opinion in favour of war. Peace brought him moderate rewards an a retirement which he could not endure. He returned to England and soon became involved again in politics. The French Revolution provided a new turning-point in his career. In 1791-2 he attacked Burke in the two parts of The Rights of Man. To escape arrest he fled to France, where he became a member of the Convention, and, barely escaping the guillotine because of his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI, founded the new sect of Theophilanthropists. In 1803 he went once more to America, only to find that his Age of Reason, published in 1794-5, had lost him nearly all his friends. Paine was a prince of pamphleteers, and his work rarely rises above the pamphleteering level. He was shallow, but he was shrewd; his style was always clear, and though it had no charm, it had sincerity. He was not, like Godwin, a social philosopher: nevertheless, he expounded a radical constructive policy, including parliamentary reform, old age pensions and a progressive income tax. 

The heir to the pamphleteering eminence of Paine was a much more original and memorable person. The father of William Cobbett (1762-1835) was a small farmer and innkeeper in Hampshire, and William educated himself with indomitable pluck while serving as a soldier. He went to France, learnt the language, emigrated (like Paine) to Philadelphia, and took up the pamphlet-writing trade. Under the apt pseudonym of Peter Porcupine he conducted a pro-British and anti-French campaign, until he was ruined by libel cases and obliged to return to England in 1800. He was welcomed in Government circles, and started work as a Tory free-lance. His first venture, The Porcupine, failed; but his second, Cobbett's Political Register, a weekly newspaper which he began in 1802, gained the public ear. At first Tory, then Independent, at last strongly Radical, he maintained till his death an influence of which no persecution and no folly could deprive him. Besides other publishing ventures, including Parliamentary Debates, later undertaken by Hansard, and State Trials, he combined business and pleasure as a model farmer. All went well until, in 1810, he received a sentence of two years' imprisonment on account of an invective against military flogging. Throughout the reign of George IV he was a leader of political opinion. He knew the marketable value of books combining instruction and exhortation with a strong flavour of personality, and his Advice to a Young Man (1829) and even his English Grammar (1817) are still thoroughly readable. By 1830 his fortunes were re-established; the Reform Act opened the doors of Parliament to him, and he sat in the Commons till his death in 1835.

Cobbett's enormous personal vanity must not lessen the esteem due to his outspoken criticism of public life. He was essentially a farmer and hated large towns, especially the "Great Wen" (London) and the stock-jobbing and paper-money upon which the towns throve. He not only loved the country, he knew it, and he was a master of a style in which to express his knowledge. The Rural Rides (1830), which depict the England of his day, have an assured permanence. Others might paint rural scenery; Cobbett scans the looks and manners of the labourers and considers whether they have enough to make life bearable. The autobiography he intended to write under the title The Progress of a Ploughboy to a Seat in Parliament was compiled from his writings by William Reitzel, published under that title in 1933, and reissued as The Autobiography of William Cobbett in 1947. his Register was the model and inspiration of later Radical popular journals such as Richard Carlile's Republican, Henry Hetherington's Poor Man's Guardian and John Cleave's Gazette. Paine and Cobbett together were the main inspiration behind the lives recorded in such autobiographies as Samuel Bamford's Passages in the Life of a Radical (1844), The Autobiography of a Working Man (1848) by Alexander Somerville of the Scots Greys, the Autobiography (1872) of the Chartist poet Thomas Cooper, The Life and Struggle of William Lovett (1876) by the cabinetmaker who assisted Francis Place—"The Radical tailor of Charing Cross"—to draft the people's Charter in 1838, and largely responsible for the abolition of the newspaper tax in 1855. The struggles of Cobbett and his successors against this and other government measures are recorded in Collet Dobson Collet's History of the Taxes on Knowledge (1899). 

The great tradition of parliamentary oratory was maintained by Pitt, Fox, Sheridan, Canning and Grattan; but their speeches are not now read either for enjoyment or enlightenment. Like the great actor, the great orator survives as a memory. Burke stands apart, for he did not succeed as an orator; he spoke his written compositions, and his auditors hurried out to dine.

Reflecting on the Mind

—oOo—

Cowper

From The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, by George Sampson. (Period of the French Revolution)

IV. COWPER

William Cowper (1731-1800) was a sweet, simple, instinctive poet, whom we should refuse to accept, at anybody's bidding, as the leader, or forerunner, or anticipator of something called "the romantic revolt". Only bad poets deliberately strive for dissidence and difference. What matters in poetry is, simply, poetry, not theories of poetry, even when promulgated by poets. Cowper, certainly, was not a revolutionary of any kind. His inclinations were towards the past, not towards some undiscerned "poetry of the future". He was not a "modern; his admired master was Milton, whose poems in foreign languates he has most excellently and usefully translated for less learned generations. Cowper wrote just the sort of poetry that it was natural for him to write, as Pope wrote just the sort of poetry that it was natural for him to write. Pope and Cowper did not write the same kind of poetry, because they were not interested in the same kind of things; but that difference does not require us to set one poet against the other. What matters only is the absolute worth of what they wrote. Cowper, indeed, exclaimed, "God made the country and man made the town"; but Cowper's charge against Pope was not that he was an artificial poet of the town, but that by his very excellence in verse he

Made poetry a mere mechanic art,
And every warbler has his tune by heart.

The events in the life of Cowper were few but remarkable. He was born of a good family and was sent to Westminster School, where, like Gibbon, he was unhappy. One of his masters was Vincent Bourne, whose Latin poems he translated, and one of his friends was Charles Churchill, whose satirical poems he praised. From Westminster he passed in 1750 to a study of law, and led a normal and apparently happy life. He flirted with his cousins Harriet and Theodora, the latter of whom he wanted to marry; the former was to come into his life years after. The proposed marriage was forbidden by Theodora's father, first because of the consanguinity and next because of William's disquieting tendency to morbidity. The cousins were forbidden to meet or even to correspond, and when to this disappointment in love was added the death of Cowper's father and the accidental drowning of his best friend, his mind became deranged and he attempted suicide. 

When the doors of a private asylum closed upon William Cowper at the age of thirty-two, his life in the busy world of men appeared to have come to an end; but two years later he was well enough to pass into the care of Morley Unwin, a retired clergyman, and his wife Mary. When Unwin was accidentally killed, Mary devoted herself to the delicate poet, and their long association is one of the famous frienships in literary history. Unfortunately they moved from Huntingdon to the less pleasant Olney, in order to receive the religious ministrations of the celebrated John Newton, once in the slave trade, but now a convinced Evangelical. One happy result came from the new association, namely, Cowper's collaboration with Newton in Olney Hymns (1779), a collection which included Newton's How sweet the name of Jesus and Cowper's God moves in a mysterious way. When Newton left in the next year for a London living, Cowper found himself without occupation—the poet in him lacked a stimulus for expression. But Mary encouraged him to write. His first long poem Anti-Thelyphthora (1781) has only temporary interest. Mrs Unwin next proposed as a subject the progress of error; and going eagerly to work, Cowper wrote eight satires: Table Talk, The Progress of Error, Truth, Expostulation, Hope, Charity, Conversation and Retirement. But the gentle reculse who had never lived in the world could not write bitterly, even with the unseen spirit of Newton prompting him. However, the clear, neat verses were achieved and were published in the volume called Poems by William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq. (1782), which contained as well some of the short poems by which he is generally remembered.

A new friend, Lady Austen, came into Cowper's life in 1781 and touched his spirits and his poetry to finer issues. She was a woman of the world, and knew that Cowper needed diversion, not preoccupation with moral problems; and the subject she lightly suggested for a poem was the sofa in his room—perhaps she had been reading Crébillon. Cowper gaily accepted the challenge, and the result was one of the happiest and friendliest of English poems, The Task,  in six books, The Sofa, The Time-piece, The Garden, The Winter Evening, The Winter Morning Walk and The Winter Walk at Noon, with their exquisite vignettes of landscape. Cowper's love of nature was the love that asks no questions and poses no problems. His poems are the simple artistic record of simple, genuine experience. The tendency to didacticism , natural to a man of Cowper's experience, is present in The Task, but we cheerfully accept his teaching, if only because it has been his own support in trouble. The love of man for man, the love of man for animals, for the meanest thing that lives—this is the principal moral message of The Task. Rousseau, no doubt, had said something like it before, and Rousseau was in the air. But in Cowper it is the natural underived expression of hi own tender, affectionate nature, and no English poet has given it such perfect utterance. When published in 1785, The Task was followed in the same volume by Tirocinium and The Diverting Story of John Gilpin. In Tirocinium the attack on the brutality and immorality of public schools may have been just and is certainly vigorous; but this is not the kind of poetical composition in which Cowper excelled. Of John Gilpin there is no need to speak. Everyone knows that immortal story. Later editions of his poems included the exquisitely tender lines On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture out of Norfolk. She had died when he was six years old. 

In 1786 Cowper and Mrs Unwin moved from dreary Olney to a cheerful house and neighbourhood at Weston, and enlarged their circle of acquaintances, thanks, partly, to his cousin Harriet, now Lady Hesketh. Cowper's life continued to be happy; and during these pleasant years he wrote a number of his best short poems, which were not published till after his death. His translation of Homer (1791) is a kind of protest against Pope's, which he rejected as too artificial. But Cowper, in trying to make Homer dignified made him dull. The greatest merit of his version is that it kept him for a time from the despair which was to destroy him in the end. Mrs Unwin sickened in 1791 and her life of heroic devotion drew to its close in 1796. After that Cowper was past help, past cure. Popularity, success, affection could do nothing to lighten the darkness within. His last original work is the powerful and ghastly poem called The Castaway. 

Cowper is a minor poet, but he is a poet who must be read. Not to know him is to miss a creative "character", an engaging combination of lovableness, simplicity and charm. There is no more companionable poet than Cowper. The egregious William Hayley wrote his life and first made known to English readers the treasure of Cowper's letters—Southey's later edition is much better. Like everything else about him, they are unique. They are so simple that anybody could have written them; but the fact is that nobody has written anything like them. Like a charming companion on a day's ramble he talks delightfully about anything—or nothing. his letters had a modern edition in five volumes (1904-25) by Thomas Wright of Olney; the best modern biography is David Cecil's The Stricken Deer (1929); Gilbert Thomas's William Cowper and the Eighteenth Century (1935) relates the poet to his time.

William Cowper

—oOo—

The Poetry of Spenser

(From The Short Cambridge History of English Literature, by George Sampson, 3rd ed.)

XI. THE POETRY OF SPENSER

After a lapse of almost two centuries we reach the first English major poet since Chaucer. Edmund Spenser (1552-99) was born in London, and was related to the great family of his name. At Cambridge he not only wrote his earliest sonnets, but came under three profound influences. The first was his friendship with Gabriel Harvey, a powerful and controversial scholar, to whom justice has yet to be done. The second was teh refined and cultured "Puritanism", which, like that of Milton, was a revolt from coarseness and materialism in life and in religion. The third was the study of Platonic philosophy—not the Christianized neo-Platonism of the first Reformers, but the pure Platonism of the Timaeus and the Symposium. To the imagination of Spenser this proved exceedingly congenial, and confirmed him in his allegorical habit of conception and expression. His early Hymnes, the first in honour of Love, the second in honour of Beautie, though not published till 1596 (Foure Hymnes made by Edm. Spenser), were inspired by his first experience of love, and written in the spirit of Plato.

He was brought by Harvey into the service of the Earl of Leicester, and met Philip Sidney, whose ardent imagination and lofty spirit greatly stimulated him. After toying, under Harvey's influence, with the possibilities of using in English a system of quantitative prosody (that ignis fatuus of English poets) he began to consider the forms in which he could express himself most naturally, and he turned instinctively to the pastoral and the romance, with their stock figures, the shepherd and the knight.  The pastoral, as we have seen, was a popular form, offering an abundance of models. The extent of Spenser's debt to any of these is not really important. All that matters in a poem is what it is, not what it may have come from. Upon the "XII Aeglogues proportioned to  . . . the XII monethes" forming The Shepheards Calendar (1579) the impress of a creative, originating poetic genius is clearly discernible. The book was dedicated to Sidney, who praised it highly, but objected, rather pedantically, to one of its greatest charms, namely "the olde rusticke language". Sidney, a typical figure of the Renascence, disliked Spenser's archaism, not in itself, but because it was unwarranted by classical originals. This kind of criticism was to have a long run. A more serious objection would have been that the pastoral, as Spenser wrote it, was a literary exercise with little hold on life. Spenser uses all varieties of the form, amatory, moral, religious, courtly, rustic, lyric, elegiac, and shows himself at once master of an old convention and herald of a new spirit in poetry. His language was deliberately archaic. Ben Jonson said that Spenser, in affecting the obsolete, "writ no language". The answer is that Spenser used the language in which Spenser could write. Every true poet creates his own idiom. What The Shepheards Calendar clearly reveals is the arrival of a great poet-musician, who excelled all his predecessors in a sense of the capacity of the English language in which Spenser could write. Every true poet creates his own idiom. What The Shepheards Calendar clearly reveals is the arrival of a great poet-musician, who excelled all his predecessors in a sense of the capacity of the English language for harmonious combinations of sound. To turn from the flatness of [George Gascoygne's] The Steele Glas to The Shepheards Calendar is to pass fro honest and well-meant effort into a new world of absolute mastery.

From the pastoral Spenser proceeded naturally to romance. In 1580 he went to ireland as secretary to the Lord Deputy, and there at Kilcolman Castle he continued his Faerie Queene, the first three books of which were published in 1590 on his return to England. As, in any creative sense, the poem shows no progress, but is at the end what it was in the beginning, some consideration of it may be given at once. The poem, as planned in twelve books, was never completed. Spenser himself has clearly stated his own intentions in the prefatory letter addressed to Ralegh, and to this the reader is referred. Like other great poets he felt himself called to teach; and desiring to set forth a picture of a perfect knight, he chose King Arthur as hero, rather than any person of his own time. Further, he desired to glorify his own dear country and its "most royal Queen". In much of his intention he was successful, but he was not completely successful. Spenser failed because he refused to follow his natural instinct for allegory and romance, the forms that most readily released his creative powers—in The Allegory of Love (1936) C. S. Lewis traced their history from Le Roman de la Rose—but turned aside to be instructive, and, in seeking to make the allegory edifying, forgot to tell the story. But if an allegory does not survive as a stroy, it does not survive as an allegory. [John Bunyan's] The Pilgrim's Progress is, first of all, an excellent story; The Faerie Queene is not. Like every great poem, The Faerie Queene is entitled to its own imaginative life; but it must continue to be true to that life. Spenser, to use a common phrase, lets us down, when we are left wondering whether the false Duessa is a poetical character, or Theological Falsehood, or Mary Queen of Scots. He tried to do too many things at once; and, in elaborating intellectually the allegorical plot he has confused the imaginative substance of the poetic narrative. Homer, says Aristotle, tells lies as he ought; that is, he makes us believe his stories. Spenser tried to tell his lies while clinging to a disabling kind of truth; and so he does not convince his readers. Thus it is neither as an allegorist nor as a narrator that the author of The Faerie Queene holds his place. He lives as an exquisite word-painter of widely differing scenes, and as supreme poet-musician using with unrivalled skill a noble stanza of his invention, unparalleled in any other language [the Spenserian stanza].

As the years advanced, Spenser seems to have felt that his conception of chivalry had little correspondence with the facts of life. Sidney was dead, and his own hopes of preferment were frustratedd. In 1591 a volume of his collected poets was published with the significant title Complaints, including such works as Tthe Ruines of Time, The Teares of the Muses and Prosopopoia or Mother Hubbard's Tale, in which the Ape and the Fox serve to satirize the customs of the court. In 1591 he returned to his exile in Ireland, and there, in the form of an allegorical pastoral, called Colin Clout Come Home Againe (1595), he gave expression to his views about the general state of manners and poetry In his Prothalamion, and still more, in his Epithalamion, he carries the lyrical style, first attempted in The Shepheards Calendar, to an unequalled height of harmony, splendour and enthusiasm. In 1595, he again came over to England, bringing with him the second part of The Faerie Queene, which was licensed for publication in January 1595-6. Finding still no place at court, he returned to Ireland in 1597; but, in a rising, Kilcolman Castle was taken and burned, and ad Spenser barely escaped with his life. His spirit was broken, and after suffering the afflictions of poverty, he died in January 1599. His posthumous prose dialogue, A Veue of the Present State of Ireland, written in 1596, is discussed in a later chapter. Spenser is the poets' poet, and his greatness cannot be diminished by the jeers of the tough-minded who find his poetic music and his poetic virtue too delicate for their manly taste.



XII. THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET

The sonnet, which was the invention of thirteenth-century Italy, was slow in winning the favour of English poets. Neither the word nor the thing reached England until the sixteenth century, when, as we have seen, the first English sonnets were written, in imitation of the Italian, by Wyatt and Surrey. But these primary efforts set no fashion. The Elizabethan sequences came long after the gentle effusion of Tottel's poets, and were not influenced by them. But when the writing of sonnets began in earnest it soon became a fashionable literary habit and no poetic aspirant between 1590 and 1600 failed to try his skill in this form. The results are not inspiring. Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare alone achieved substantial success; and their sonnets, with some rare and isolated triumphs by Drayton, Daniel, Constable and others, are the sole enduring survivals. Tottel's Miscellany contained sixty sonnets, for the most part primitive copies of Petrarch; but though the name "sonnet" is commonly used for poems in the succeeding anthologies, the actual sonnet form is rare. Gascoigne's Certayne Notes of Instruction not only described the Elizabethan sonnet accurately, but noted the general misuse of the term. It was contemporary French rather than older Italian influence that moved the Elizabethan mind to sonnet-writing. The first inspiration came from Marot (1495-1544); though the sonnet was not naturalized in France until Ronsard (1525-85) and Du Bellay (1525-60), who, with five others, formed the constellation of poets called La Pléiade, deliberately resolved to adapt to the French language the finest fruit of foreign literature. Philippe Desportes (1546-1606), a less important poet, was specially admired and imitated by the Elizabethans.

Spenser is the true father of the Elizabethan sonnet. He first appeared as a poet with the twenty-six youthful sonnets of 1569. His indebtedness to Du Bellay is declared in the title of one group of sonnets. The Visions of Bellay, and of another, The Ruines of Rome by Bellay. Another set, The Visions of Petrarch, he translates from Marot. These and the other sonnets of Spenser in Amoretti (1595) have his characteristic sweetness of versification. Spenser, it should be noted, uses the English and not the Italian form of the sonnet. Two of the sonnets in the Amoretti refer to the Platonic "Idea" of beauty which outshines any mortal embodiment. The "Idea", found also in numerous French writers, became a theme of later English sonnets, especially those of Drayton, who borrowed his very title from a sonnet-sequence by a minor French poet, Claude de Pontoux. The first Elizabethan sonneteer to make a popular reputation, however, was not Spenser, but Thomas Watson (1557-92), who was hailed as the successor of Petrarch and the English Ronsard after the appearance in 1582 of The Hekatompathia or Passionate Centurie of Love. But nearly all the hundered "Passions" are in a pleasing metre of eighteen lines (three sixes. Watson uses the norman Elizabethan form in the sixty sonnets of The Teares of Fancie, or, Love Disdained (1593). Neither these nor the "Passions" have much poetic value.

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86), who follows Watson, is a prince among Elizabethan lyric writers and sonneteers, and, Shakespeare apart, is easily the best. The collection known as Astrophel and Stella was written between 1580-4 and though widely circulated in manuscript was not published till 1591 (piratically) and 1598 (regularly). With Sideny we come to the first real English "sonnet sequence", a collection of sonnets telling a story of love, like that of Petrarch for his Laura. The "hopeless love" of the sonnets must not be taken literally. Readers sometimes fail to distinguish between the truth of a poem and the truth of an affidavit, and are too often encouraged by critics who ought to know better. The sonnets of Shakespeare and of Sidney are as "true" as Hamlet or Arcadia; they are not required to have a different kind of truth. Sideny was indebted to foreign models, though he was much more original than his contemporaries. His sonnets are real contributions to English poetry. They have grace, ease and sincerity, and a genuine character reflecting the admirable spirit of the writer.

Of the numerous sonneteers who followed Sidney few need be mentioned. Shakespeare will be considered in his own place. Henry Constable's Diana (1592) and Thomas Lodge's Phillis (1593), all of which borrowed extensively from abroad, have each contributed something to the English anthologies. Michael Drayton's Ideas Mirrour, first printed in 1595 and steadily revised in several editions till 1619, gives us, in its final form, the one sonnet of its time worthy to be set by Shakespeare's, "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part". Richard Barnfield's "If music and sweet poetry agree" deservedly survives. Barnabe Barnes, in Parthenophil and Parthenope (1593), is voluminous, but says little. Later, came two Scottish writers, Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling (1567-1640) who reaches a respectable level, and William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649) whose "For the Baptist" is the one religious sonnet which has survived as a poem. With them may be mentioned Sideny's friend, that strange genius, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554-1628), whose Caelica sequence (not all sonnets) may be held to close the story. Sonneteering fell into disrepute and perished of its own insincerity. When Milton revived the true sonnet form it took a note which cannot be heard in any of the Elizabethan collections.

Deep-brained sonnets

—oOo—

From Old English to Middle English

(From The Short Cambridge History of English Literature, by George Sampson, 3rd ed.).

XIX. CHANGES IN THE LANGUAGE TO THE DAYS OF CHAUCER

The three Germanic peoples—the Jutes from Jutland, the Angles from Schleswig and the Saxons from Holstein—who in the fifth and sixth centuries made themselves masters of southern Britain, spoke dialects so nearly allied that the y could have had little difficulty in understanding each other. There was no name for their common race and common language. The Britons called all the invaders Saxons; St Gregory had to call them Angles for the sake of his famous pun; but an emperor called the Anglian king of Northumbria rex Saxonum. Though Bede sometimes speaks of Angli sive Saxones, his name for the language is sermo anglicus. Alfred, a West Saxon, calls his language Englisc. Actually the Anglian name was appropriate, for the history of southern English is largely concerned with the spread of Anglian forms. When Camden used lingua Anglosaxonica for pre-Conquest English, he meant not a blend of Anglian and Saxon, but simply "English Saxon" as distinguished from "German Saxon". The term, tough misunderstood, tended to survive. The German philologist Jakob Grimm introduced the practice of dividing a language into its Old, Middle and Modern periods, and so the term Old English came into use. There is, of course, no precise point at which people ceased to speak "Old English" and began to speak "Middle English". The terms are merely philological conveniences. However, we may regard the form of language we call Middle English as having emerged about 1150, and as having ceased about 1500, when the printing press conquered the scriptorium.

Old English retained its inflectional system; but in course of time the inflections tended to be assimilated. Thus in the declension of Gothic guma, a man, there are seven distinctive forms in the eight cases of singular and plural; in the declension of Old English guma there are only three. The almost universal substitution of -es for the many Old English endings of the genitive singular and nominative and accusative plural began before the Norman Conquest; and in the fourteenth century the Engglish of educated Londoners had lost most of its Southern characteristics and had become a Midland dialect. Chaucer's plurals and genitives end in -es, the number of exceptions being hardly greater than in modern English. The dative disappeared from Midland English in the twelfth century. Southern English (Kentish and West Saxon) was much more conservative. The forms of the Old English pronouns of the third person in all dialects were very similar in pronunciation—the pairs him  and heom, hire and heora, being easily sounded alike. The ambiguity was got rid of by a process very rare in the history of languages, the adoption of foreign forms. It is from the language of the invading Danes that we get such forms as they, their, them. But the older forms persisted. Chaucer used her for their and he always has hem for them. The Old English inflections of adjectives and article, and with them the grammatical genders of nouns, disappeared early in Middle English. IN these respects Orm and Chaucer are almost alike. All these changes were once generally believed to have been brought about by the Norman Conquest; but the spoken language had travelled far towards the Middle English stage before 1066. Of course the Norman occupation had influence: the new political unity and development of intercommunication tended to diffuse grammatical simplifications; but if we except such effects as the use of of instead of a genitive inflection, and the polite substitution of plural for singular in the second person, hardly any specific influence of French upon English grammar can be traced.

As we have said in an earlier page, the runic alphabet of the heathen English was superseded, under Christian influence, by the Latin alphabet of twenty-two letters, to which were added the runic letters  ᚹ(called wynn); ᚦ (called thorn) and 𐑔 (called eth). The last two were used indifferently and did not represent voiced and unvoiced th. The vowels were sounded nearly as in modern Italian, except that y was like French u and æ like a in pat. The consonants had much the same sound as in modern English. The greatest change in the written language came after the conquest, and was chiefly a matter of spelling. Children had ceased to read and write English, and were taught to read and write French. When, later, a new generation tried to write English, the spelt in French fashion. The changes in pronunciation are too intrincate for summary. How different was the course of development in different parts of the country can be seen in the fact that the English pronunciation home and stone, and the Scottish hame an stane both derive from the Old English long a as in father. The "Zummerzet" pronunciation of initial f and s as v and z was common all over the south and is exactly recorded in the Kentish Ayenbite of Inwit (1340).

The Norman Conquest had a profound influence on vocabulary. A few French words came in before the Conquest; after that event the number steadily increased. Chaucer is quite wrongly accused of having "corrupted" English by introducing French words. It cannot be proved that he made use of any foreign word that had not already gained a place in the English vocabulary. Very sad is the total loss of many Old English words. In the first thirty lines of Aelfric's homily on St. Gregory, there are twenty-two words which had disappeared by the middle of the thirteenth century. The fourteenth century alliterative poets revived some of the ancient epic synonymous for "man" or "warrior" —bern, renk, wye, freke; but they didn not last.

Only a few peculiarities of dialect can be mentioned here. The use of a dialect, of course, did not indicate an inferior education. Writers emploted for literary purposes the language they actually spoke. Chaucer would not have found it easy to read the Kentish Ayenbite of Inwit and the North-western Sir Gawayne would have puzzled him. The diversity of the written language in the different parts of the country during the fourteenth century may be indicated briefly thus: they say = Kentish hy ziggeth, East Midland they seyn, West Midland hy (or thai) sayn, Northern thai sai; their names (in the same distribution) = hare nomen, hure nomen, hir names, hur namus, thair names. The ultimate triumph of the East Midland dialect was largely due to the fact that it was midland, i.e. midway beween hy ziggeth, and thai sai. The fact that Oxford and Cambridge were linguistically in this area had an influence. The London English of Chaucer and the not dissimilar Oxford English of Wyclif became, in fact, the literary language of England.

—oOo—

The Arthurian Legend

(From George Sampson's Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, 3rd ed.).

XII. THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND

The mystery of Arthur's end is not darker than the mystery of his beginning. While the ancient tradition is everywhere, the facts and records are nowhere. The earliest English Arthurian literature is singularly meagre and undistinguished. The romantic exploitation of "the matter of Britain" was the achievement, mainly, of French writers, and, indeed, some critics would have us attach little importance to British influence on the development of the Arthurian legend. The "matter of Britain" very quickly became international property—a vast composite body of romantic tradition, which European poets and story-tellers of every nationality drew upon and used for their own purposes. Arthur was non-political and could be idealised without offence to any ruling family. The British king himself faded more and more into the background, and became, in time, but the phantom monarch of a featureless "land of faëry". His knights quite overshadow him in the later romances; but they, in their turn, undergo the same process of denationalization, and appear as natives of some region of fantasy, moving about in a golden atmosphere of illusion. The course of the story is too obscure to be made clear in a brief summary which must necessarily ignore the hints and half-tones that count for much in the total effect, and which can take no account of French, German and Italian contributions to the legend. Old English literature, even the Chronicle, knows nothing whatever of Arthur. To find any mention of him earlier than the twelfth century we must turn to Wales, where, in a few obscure poems, a difficult prose story, and two dry Latin chronicles we find what appear to be the first written references, meagre and casual, but indicating a tradition already ancient. The earliest is in Historia Britonum, which, as we have seen (p. 9), dates from 679, though the existing recension of Nennius was made in the ninth century. The reference of Nennius to Arthur occurs in a very short account of the conflict that culminated in Mount Badon, usually dated 516, though some would put it as early as 470. Gildas, who was a youth in 516, also mentions Mount Badon; but the only hero he names is "Ambrosius Aurelianus". In Nennius the hero has become "The magnanimous Arthur", who was twelve times victorious, last of all at Mount Badon; but he is a military leader, not a king—or, perhaps, as the anthropologist Lord Raglan thinks, "a god of war".

The poems of the ancient Welsh bards have been discussed almost as fiercely as the poems of Ossian; yet there is no doubt that together with much of late and doubtful invention they contain something of indisputably ancient tradition. But the most celebrated of the early Welsh bards know nothing of Arthur. Llywarch Hên, Taliesin and Aneirin (sixth or seventh century?) never mention him; to the first to Urien, Lord of Rheged, is the most imposing figure among all the native warriors. There are, indeed, only five ancient poems that mention Arthur at all. The reference most significant to modern readers occurs in the Stanzas of the Graves contained in the Black Book of Caermarthen (twelfth century): "A grave there is for March (Mark), a grave for Gwythur, a grave for Gwgawn of the Ruddy Sword; a mystery is the grave of Arthur." Another stanza mentions both the fatal battle of Camlan and Bedwyr (Bedivere) , who shares with Kai (Kay)  pre-eminence among Arthur's followers in the primitive Welsh fragments of Arthurian fable. Another Arthurian knight, Geraint, is the hero of a poem that appears both in The Black Book of Caermarthen and in the Red Book of Hergest (fourteenth century). One of the eighteen stanzas just mentions Arthur by name. The Chair of the Sovereign in The Book of Taliesin (thirteenth century) alludes obscurely to Arthur as a "Warrior sprung from two sources". Arthur, Kai and Bedwyr appear in another poem contained in The Black Book; but the deed celebrated in the almost incomprehensible lines of this poem are the deeds of Kai and Bedwyr. Arthur recedes still further into the twilight of myth in the only other Old Welsh poem where any extended allusion is made to him, a most obscure piece of sixty lines contained in The Book of Taliesin. Here, as Matthew Arnold says, "The writer is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret". Arthur sets upon various expeditions over perilous seas in his ship Pridwen; one of them has as its object the rape of a cauldron belonging to the King of Hades. Ancient British poetry has nothing futher to tell us of this mysterious being, who is, even at a time so remote, a vague, impalpable figure of legend.

The most remarkable fragment of the existing early Welsh literature about Arthur is the prose romance of Kulhwch and Olwen, assigned by most authorities to the tenth century. It is one of the stories that Lady Charlotte Guest translated from the Red Book of Hergest and published in The Mabinogion (1838). Of the twelve "Mabinogion", or stories for  the young (the word has a special meaning but is loosely used), five deal with Arthurian themes. Two, Kullwch and Olwen and The Dream of Rhonabury, are British; the other three are based on French originals. In The Dream of Rhonabury, Arthur and Kai apper, Mount Badon is mentioned, and the fatal battle of Camlan with Mordred is referred to in some detail. The Arthuro Kullwch and Olwen bears little resemblance to the mystic king of later legend, except in the magnitude of his warrior retinue, in which Kai and Bedwyr are leaders. Arthur, with his dog Cavall, joins  in the hunt for the boar Twrch Trwyth through Ireland, Wales and Cornwall, and his many adventures are clearly relics of ancient wonder-tales of bird and beast, wind and water. The wild and even monstrous Arthur of this legend is equally remote from Nennis and from Malory; but the charm of the story is someething that the long-winded Continental writers could not achieve.

The serious historian William of Malmesbury, who wrote a few years earlier than Geoffrey of Monmouth, refers to Arthur as a hero worthy to be celebrated in authentic history and not in idle fictions. He adds, "The sepulchre of Arthur is nowhere to be seen, whence ancient ballads fable that he is to come." Plainly, Arthur was already a popular tradition. The transformation of the British Arthru into a romantic hero of European renown was the result of contact between British and Norman culture. No doubt the Normans got their first knowledge of Arthurian story from Brittany; but the real contact was made in Britain itself, where the Normans had succeeded in establishing intimate relations with the Welsh. Thus the true father of the Arthurian legend is Geoffrey of Monmouth. How much he derived from ancient sources we shall probably never find out; but we can reasonably assume that he did not invent the fabric of the story, however fancifully he embroidered it. And, after all, the real point is not how much he invented, but how he used his matter, historical or legendary. Geoffrey had the art of making the improbable seem probable, and his ingenious blending of fact and fable not only gave his book a great success with readers, but made Arthur and Merlin the romantic property of literary Europe. So it has been urged thet we shoul take Geoffrey's compilation, not as a national history, but as a national epic, doing for Britain what the Aeneid did for Rome, and finding in the mythical Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas, the name-giving founder of the British state. In such a story all the legends have their natural place. Geoffrey's History is thus the first Brut—for so in time the records of early British kings with this mythical starting-point came to be called. The first few books of Historia Regum Britanniae relate the deeds of Arthur's predecessors. At the close of the sixth book the weird figure of Merlin appears on the scene, and romance begins to usurp the place of sober history. Arthur is Geoffrey's hero. He knows nothing of Tristam, Lancelot or the Holy Grail; but it was he who, in the Mordred and Guenevere episode, first sugggested the love-tragedy that was to become one of the world's imperishable romances.
In the Latin Life of Gildas written at about the time of Geoffrey's death there is a further interesting allusion. Arthur is described as being engaged in deadly feud with the King of Scotland, whom he finally kills; he subsequently comes into collision with Melwas, the wicked king of the "summer country" or Somerset, who had, unknown to him, abducted his wife Guenevere, and concealed her in the abbey of Glastonia. This seems to be the earliest appearance o the tradition which made Melwas (the Mellyagraunce of Malory) an abductor of Guenevere. Some of the Welsh traditions are used in Peacock's delightful story The Misfortunes of Elphin, Melwas and the abduction both appearing.

The value of the Arthurian story as matter for verse was first perceived in France; and the earliest surviving standard example of metrical narrative or romance derived directly or indirectly from Geoffrey is Li Romans de Brut by Wace, who, born in Jersey, lived at Caen and Bayeux, and completed his poem in 1155. Some of the matter is independent of Geoffrey's History. Thus, it is Wace, not Geoffrey, who first tells of the Round Table. The poem, 15,000 lines long, written in lightly rhyming verse and in a familiar language, was very popular. Wace's Brut, possibly in some form not now existing, or in some blend with other chronicles, provided the foundation of Layamon's Brut, the only English contrubution of any importance to Arthurian literature before the fourteenth century; for, so far, all the matter discussed is in Welsh or Latin or French. Layamon added something personal to the essntially English character of his style and matter, and he gives us as well details not to be found in Wace or Geoffrey. Thus, he amplifies the story of the Round Table and narrates the dream of Arthur, not to be found in Geoffrey or Wace, which foreshadows the treachery of Mordred and Guenevere, and disturbs the king with a sense of impending doom. Layamon's enormous and uncouth epic has the unique distinction of being the first celebration of "the matter of Britain" in the English tongue.

Not the least remarkable fact about the story of King Arthur is its rapid development as the centre of many gravitating stories, at first quite independent, but now permanently part of the great Arthurian system. Thus we have the stories of Merlin, of Gawain, of Lancelot, of Tristram, of Perceval, and of the Grail. A full account of these associated legends belongs to the history of French and German, rather than of English, literature, and is thus outside our scope. In origin Merlin may have been a Welsh wizard-bard, but he makes his first appearance in Geoffrey and quickly passes into French romance, from which he is transferred to English story. Gawain is the hero of more episodic romances than any other British knight; when he passes into French story he begins to assume his Malorian (and Tennysonian) lightness of character. He is the hero of the finest of all Middle English metrical romances, Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, and, as Gwalchmai, he plays a large part in the story called Peredur the Son of Evrawc, included in the Mabinogion. Peredur is Perceval, and the story comes from French romance. The love of Lancelot for Guenevere is now a central episode of the Arthurian tragedy, but Lancelot is actually a late-comer into the legend, and his story is told in French. The book to which Chaucer refers in The Nun's Priest's Tale and Dante in the famous passage of Inferno VI is perhaps the great prose Lancelot traditionally attributed to Walter Map (see p. 21). The Grail story is another complicated addition to the Arthurian cycle. Out of the quest for various talismans, no doubt a part of Celtic tradition, developed the story of Perceval, as told in French and German romances; and the "Grail", a primitive symbol, proved capable of semi-mystical religious interpretation, and came to be identified with the cup of the Last Supper in which Joseph of Arimathea treasured the blood that flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer. The story of Tristram and Iseult is probably the oldest of the subsidiary Arthurian legends, and we find the richest versions in fragments of French poems and fuller German compositions. The English literature of Tristram is very meagre. The whole story bears every mark of remote pagan and Celtic origin. Finally, as an example of how independent legends were caught into the great Arthurian system, let us note the Celtic fairy tale of Lanval, best known in the lay of Marie de France (c. 1175), a fascinatingly obscure personality who, possibly English, wrote in French. And as a postcript we may note that the sceptical twentieth century has nevertheless not lagged behind the Middle Ages or the Victorians in its devotion to King Arthur, as witness the Arthurian trilogy Merlin, Lancelot and Tristram (1917-27) by the American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, the reshaping of the Grail legend in John Cowper Powys's Glastonbury Romance (1933), Charles Williams's Taliessin through Logres (1938) and The Reign of the Summer Stars (1944), and T. H. White's trilogy The Once and Future King (1958), which inspired the American stage and film success Camelot.

Through all the various strains of Arthurian story we hear "the horns of Elfland faintly blowing"; and it is quite possible that, to the Celtic wonderland, with its fables of the "little people", we owe much of the fairy-lore which has, thorugh Shakespeare and poets of lower degree, enriched the literature of England. Chaucer, at any rate, seemed to have no doubt about it, for he links all that he knew, or cared to know, about the Arthurian stories with his recollections of the Fairy world:

In th' oldë dayës of the King Arthoúr,
Of which that Britons speken greet honóur,
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye;
The elf-queen with hir joy companye
Dauncëd ful ofte in many a greneë mede.

So let us believe with the poets, and leave the British Arthur in his unquestioned place as the supreme king of Romance.

La structure de La Mort le roi Artu

—oOo—

The Celts: From Camelot to Christ:

Marlowe and Kyd

Marlowe and Kyd

(From The Short Cambridge History of English Literature, by George Sampson, 1972 ed.)

Whether The Spanish Tragedy  is earlier than Tamburlaine, as some suppose, does not greatly matter, for, historically, Kyd and marlowe are not easily separable; they both attained great popularity at the same time and both fell together.

The sentimentalists can no longer make a pathetic story out of Christopher Marlowe's life (1564-93). Additions to our knowledge have left us few illusions. Marlowe, son of a Canterbury shoemaker, passed from the King's School in his native city to Cambridge, where he absorbed the music and the legends of Latin poetry and indulged in some unusual reading and speculation. Though he lived as wildly as Greene and Nashe, he was never one of their fellowship. He was, in fact, a "university wit" who had made himself common, and appears to be pointed at with Nashe's finger of scorn. The facts about his life and works are as obscure as the circumstances of his death. He had become notorious for "atheism", and he was fatally stabbed in a Deptford tavern at the end of a long day spent with three men of very dubious repute. Some time before, Kyd had been arrested for "mutinous sedition", but was released after Marlowe's death, having shown that heretical papers found in his room belonged to Marlowe, whom he accused of blasphemy. There is no profit in speculating on what was behind Marlowe's death. He had lived dangerously and was such a man as could have written his plays. (The most reliable biography is The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, 1942, by the American scholar John Bakeless). His literary life begins with an undated translation of Ovid's Amores, called Elegies by the publishers. This has more merits than is usually allowed. Like Shakespeare, Marlowe set forth on his way as a poet of classical amorism, but, unlike Shakespeare, he did not immediately find his natural magic and music. Marlowe's first original work was Tamburlaine the Great, in two parts, played in 1587 or 1588 and printed anonymously in 1590. The grandeur of the style, the powerful acting of Alleyn and the superiority of the piece to the plays which had so far held the popular stage gave Tamburlaine great popularity. Yet, save in one obscure and hostile allusion by Greene, the author is nowhere named. Even Heywood, who mentions both Marlowe and Tamburlaine in his Apology for Actors, does not clearly associate them. The dramatic excesses of the play were disliked by some, but, of course, the real offence was that Marlowe succeeded. Like Swinburne he carried the young men away by the irresistible force of his style. The Tragicall History of D. Faustus, of which the first known edition is the quarto of 1604, is assumed to be his next play and is dated c. 1588; but there is good reason for refusing it a date earlier than 1592. Faustus, however, is not so complete a thing as Tamburlaine. The comic scenes are almost abjectly bad, and prove either that Marlowe's excesses of humour are worse than his excesses of tragedy, or that his play has suffered from foolish theatrical additions. Nevertheless the greatest parts of Faustus show him at the height of his poetic and dramatic magnificence. The same difficulty is presented in another play, The Jew of Malta. It is mentioned as early as 1592; but as there is no evidence that it was printed before 1633, we have a reasonable excuse for disclaiming the poorer passages as playhouse alterations. In The Troublesome Raigne and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second (printed 1593-4), Marlowe gave us the first historical play of the type which Shakespeare followed in Richard II. The Massacre at Paris and The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage complete the list of Marlowe's accepted dramas. The first known edition of the former is undated; it was acted in 1593; the earliest text of the latter belongs to the year 1594. The Massacre, badly transmitted, has fitful power. Dido, usually dismissed with undeserved contempt, bears the name of Nashe on its title as co-author; but of Nashe's hand there is little trace.

The supposed association of Marlowe with works attributed to Shakespeare or used by Shakespeare must be barely mentioned in a survey such as this. Assertions about composite authorship are easy to make and hard to establish or refute. Still, composite authorship and revision by several hands are known facts of the time. Readers should trust their own convictions and not accept attributions too readily. In Titus Andronicus and in Henry VI there is some show of argument for Marlowe's hand. The full-bodied verse of Titus and the soaring, defiant character of Aaron might be the work of the author of Tamburlaine, but might equally be the work of a young admirer. Marlowe may have had a share in Henry VI, but the nature and extent of that share (if any) cannog be discussed briefly. At this time of day it is impossible to distinguish between the verse of Marlowe and the verse of a young poet writing with Marlowe's infectious tune in his head. Arden of Feversham is one of the pseudo-Shakespearean plays in which some students have detected Marlowe's hand. The whole question is discussed in F. P. Wilson's Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare (1953).

Two other works, non-dramatic, remain for mention: Hero and Leander and Lucan's First Booke Translated Line for Line, both entered for printing in 1593. The first, unfinished, was published in 1598, afterwards with a completion by Chapman; the second appeared in 1600. The famous short poem "Come live with me and be my love" appeared first in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) and next, in a fuller form, in Englands Helicon (1600). The nearly simultaneous publication of these pieces appears to indicate an effort by friends to leave little or nothing of the poet's work unprinted. We gather, from various allusions, that Marlowe had friends and admirers in spite of his ill-repute.

The first duty of a historian is to dwell, not upon Marlowe's faults, but upon his achievements; and the fact to be recorded is that Marlowe is a prime creative force in English literature, and a creative force of a new kind. Till Marlowe's time no one had made possible and credible such daemonic figures as Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas, whose tragic doom is compelled by forves within themselves and not by mischances from without. Marlowe's heroes confront the fates; they are not the sport of destiny. Marlowe himself has the self-possession of the strong man, and could use his sources creatively. His violence is native, and the inequalities in his art are the effect of his strength, not the signs of undeveloped power. His work was finished at an age at which few poets have really begun. Edward II stands by itself among his plays. There is a temptation to overpraise it. because it is the first complete historical play of the stricter type without lapses into foolery, it is singled out as Marlowe's best dramatic effort. But it merely seems the best because it never sinks to the worst depths of Tamburlaine and Faustus. Just as certainly it never touches their greatest heights. In passion and word-music the play is inferior to the greater pieces; it lacks, too, the touch of caricature that gives them convincing vitality. Still, it is the first successful attempt we have at the interpretation of history on the stage; for a successful history-play must interpret history, it must not merely label figures with historical names. The earlier historical plays were only another form of the cautionary historical poems in A Mirror for Magistrates. After Marlowe's Edward II, Shakespeare's Richard II and its great successors became possible; but Marlowe could never have attained the all-embracing versatility of Shakespeare. Edward II showes his limitations as clearly as his powers. No one remembers its characters and scenes as one remembers the characters and scenes of Richard II.

Marlowe gave his age true tragedy. He also gave it tragedy's true instrument, great verse. Gorboduc had taught blank verse how to speak on the stage; Tamburlaine taught it how to sing. Indeed, it might be said that Marlowe's genius is operatic, and he obviously learned something of his music from Spenser. His famous passages are like great solos, superbly lyrical and appropriate, but not integrally woven into the texture of the drama. His dramatic blank verse unites the formal dignity of Gorboduc with the musical fluency of The Faerie Queene; and so it is rhythmically free and inventive, capable alike of magic and of majesty, always the master and never the slave of its metrical pattern. And though his daemonic figures may seem excessive in deed or aspiration, their poetic speech, however "mighty", is spontaneous, natural, and even simple.

 

Thomas Kyd (1558-94) appears to be the person held up to contempt by Nashe in his preface to Menaphon as an example of those who "could scarcelie latinize their necke-verse if they should have need". Kyd's great offence was that he had made an immense theatrical success with The Spanish Tragedy. The extent of Kyd's Latinity may not have been great; but though he "never ware gowne in the Universitie" he was a fellow pupil with Spenser at Merchant Taylors.' His translations from the Italian and French, which seem to have annoyed Nashe specially, are quite unimportant. The Italian work is a pamphlet, and the French a version of Robert Garnier's Cornélie under the title Pompey the Great, his fair Corneliaes Tragedie (printed 1594—there is no record of its being acted). Other works attributed to him raise too many bibliographical problems to be accepted readily. The First Part of Jeronimo, extant in a quarto of 1605, is possibly a "first part" to The Spanish Tragedie, but not very probably written by Kyd himself. The Tragedye of Solyman and Perseda (published 1592) may perhaps be his, for that is the subject of the play within the play in The Spanish Tragedie; but it is quite definitively inferior to that piece. Even the Tragedie itself is a problem. Its date is unknown. It may have been written just before 1588. By 1592 it was enjoying great popularity. Its first known quarto is dateless; but even that is described as "Newly corrected and amended of such grosse faults as passed in the first impression", so it may not be the first; the second known quarto appeared in 1594, and the third in 1599. None of them gives the least clue as to the author's name; and it is not till 1612 that "M. Kid" is named casually by Heywood, as the author, in his Apology for Actors. The play out-Senecas Seneca in its wild horrors and in the excesses of its style. But there van be observed a faint resemblance to Hamlet, not merely in details of the story, but in the halting, suffering, distracvted, self-communing character of Hieronimo, who was an entirely new kind of tragic hero. The Spanish Tragedy is the first example we possess of the Hamlet type of play.

Kyd can be easily underrated. His contribution to drama is intrinsically as well as historically important. He was the first English dramatist to discover the bearing of episode and of dramatic "movement" upon character, and the first to give the audience a hint of the development that follows from this interaction. In other words, he is the first English dramatist who writes dramatically. We have parted company with the older declamatory tragedy of the English Senecans, with the "operatic" tragedy of Marlowe, and we are nearer the manner of Shakespeare. That the young Shakespeare knew The Spanish Tragedy is evident. Was there a closer association? What are the "whole Hamlets" of "tragicall speaches" referred to by Nashe in 1589 and apparently associated with Kyd? Did Kyd write a play upon the well-known story of Hamlet? Did Shakespeare make that play the basis of his own? Does the First Quarto of Hamlet (1603) carry over some sections of an older, non-Shakespearean play? There is no certain answer to any of these questions. Perhaps in some obscure library there lies unrecognized the lost Hamlet of Kyd, or another, as the lost Fulgens and Lucres lay unrecognized till 1919. Perhaps, on the other hand, there never was such a play.

The Spanish Tragedie

La frase que lanzó mil barcos al mar

 

 

—oOo—