From Chaucer to Tennyson. Henry A. Beers

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ spoke its last genuine word. In Sir Philip Sidney the character of the knight was merged into that of the modern gentleman. And although tournaments were still held in the reign of Elizabeth, and Spenser cast his Faerie Queene into the form of a chivalry romance, these were but a ceremonial survival and literary tradition from an order of things that had passed away. How antagonistic the new classical culture was to the vanished ideal of the Middle Age may be read in Toxophilus, a treatise on archery published in 1545, by Roger Ascham, a Greek lecturer in Cambridge, and the tutor of the Princess Elizabeth and of Lady Jane Grey: "In our forefathers' time, when papistry as a standing pool covered and overflowed all England, few books were read in our tongue saving certain books of chivalry, as they said, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in monasteries by idle monks or wanton canons: as one, for example, Morte Arthure, the whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points, in open manslaughter and bold bawdry. This is good stuff for wise men to laugh at or honest men to take pleasure at. Yet I know when God's Bible was banished the court, and Morte Arthure received into the prince's chamber."

      The fashionable school of courtly allegory, first introduced into England by the translation of the Romaunt of the Rose, reached its extremity in Stephen Hawes's Passetyme of Pleasure, printed by Caxton's successor, Wynkyn de Worde, in 1517. This was a dreary and pedantic poem, in which it is told how Graunde Amoure, after a long series of adventures and instructions among such shadowy personages as Verite, Observaunce, Falshed, and Good Operacion, finally won the love of La Belle Pucel. Hawes was the last English poet of note whose culture was exclusively mediæval. His contemporary, John Skelton, mingled the old fashions with the new classical learning. In his Bowge of Courte (Court Entertainment or Dole), and in others of his earlier pieces, he used, like Hawes, Chaucer's seven-lined stanza. But his later poems were mostly written in a verse of his own invention, called after him Skeltonical. This was a sort of glorified doggerel, in short, swift, ragged lines, with occasional intermixture of French and Latin.

      Her beautye to augment.

       Dame Nature hath her lent

       A warte upon her cheke,

       Who so lyst to seke

       In her vyságe a skar

       That semyth from afar

       Lyke to the radiant star,

       All with favour fret,

       So properly it is set.

       She is the vyolet,

       The daysy delectáble,

       The columbine commendáble,

The jelofer^[13] amyáble; For this most goodly floure, This blossom of fressh coloúr, So Jupiter me succoúr, She flourysheth new and new In beaute and vertéw; Hac claritate gemina, O gloriosa femina, etc.

[13] Gilliflower.

      Skelton was a rude railing rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon; coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure, but always vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his clerical character. His Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng is a study of very low life, reminding one slightly of Burns's Jolly Beggars. His Phyllyp Sparrowe is a sportive, pretty, fantastic elegy on the death of a pet bird belonging to Mistress Joanna Scroupe, of Carowe, and has been compared to the Latin poet Catullus's elegy on Lesbia's sparrow. In Spake, Parrot, and Why Come ye not to Courte? he assailed the powerful Cardinal Wolsey with the most ferocious satire, and was, in consequence, obliged to take sanctuary at Westminster, where he died in 1529. Skelton was a classical scholar, and at one time tutor to Henry VIII. The great humanist, Erasmus, spoke of him as the "one light and ornament of British letters." Caxton asserts that he had read Vergil, Ovid, and Tully, and quaintly adds, "I suppose he hath dronken of Elycon's well."

      In refreshing contrast with the artificial court poetry of the 15th and first three quarters of the 16th century, was the folk poetry, the popular ballad literature which was handed down by oral tradition. The English and Scotch ballads were narrative songs, written in a variety of meters, but chiefly in what is known as the ballad stanza.

In somer, when the shawes^[14] be shene,^[15] And leves be large and longe, Hit is full merry in feyre forést, To here the foulys song. To se the dere draw to the dale, And leve the hillës hee,^[16] And shadow them in the levës grene, Under the grene-wode tree.

[14] Woods. [15] Bright. [16] High.

It is not possible to assign a definite date to these ballads. They lived on the lips of the people, and were seldom reduced to writing till many years after they were first composed and sung. Meanwhile they underwent repeated changes, so that we have numerous versions of the same story. They belonged to no particular author, but, like all folk-lore, were handled freely by the unknown poets, minstrels, and ballad reciters, who modernized their language, added to them, or corrupted them, and passed them along. Coming out of an uncertain past, based on some dark legend of heart-break or bloodshed, they bear no poet's name, but are ferae naturae, and have the flavor of wild game. In the form in which they are preserved, few of them are older than the 17th or the latter part of the 16th century, though many, in their original shape, are doubtless much older. A very few of the Robin Hood ballads go back to the 15th century, and to the same period is assigned the charming ballad of the Nut Brown Maid and the famous border ballad of Chevy Chase, which describes a battle between the retainers of the two great houses of Douglas and Percy. It was this song of which Sir Philip Sidney wrote, "I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas but I found myself more moved than by a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blind crouder,^[17] with no rougher voice than rude style." But the style of the ballads was not always rude. In their compressed energy of expression, in the impassioned way in which they tell their tale of grief and horror, there reside often a tragic power and art superior to any thing in English poetry between Chaucer and Spenser; superior to any thing in Chaucer and Spenser themselves, in the quality of intensity. The true home of the ballad literature was "the north country," and especially the Scotch border, where the constant forays of moss-troopers and the raids and private warfare of the lords of the marches supplied many traditions of heroism, like those celebrated in the old poem of the Battle of Otterbourne, and in the Hunting of the Cheviot, or Chevy Chase, already mentioned. Some of these are Scotch and others English; the dialect of Lowland Scotland did not, in effect, differ much from that of Northumberland and Yorkshire, both descended alike from the old Northumbrian of Anglo-Saxon times. Other ballads were shortened, popular versions of the chivalry romances, which were passing out of fashion among educated readers in the 16th century and now fell into the hands of the ballad makers. Others preserved the memory of local country-side tales, family feuds, and tragic incidents, partly historical and partly legendary, associated often with particular spots. Such are, for example, The Dowie Dens of Yarrow, Fair Helen of Kirkconnell, The Forsaken Bride, and The Twa Corbies. Others, again, have a coloring of popular superstition, like the beautiful ballad concerning Thomas of Ersyldoune, who goes in at Eildon Hill with an elf queen and spends seven years in fairy land.

СКАЧАТЬ