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A History of English Literature

R >> Robert Huntington Fletcher >> A History of English Literature




To the minds which were being paralyzed under this system, Greek literature
brought the inspiration for which they longed. For it was the literature of
a great and brilliant people who, far from attempting to make a divorce
within man's nature, had aimed to 'see life steadily and see it whole,'
who, giving free play to all their powers, had found in pleasure and beauty
some of the most essential constructive forces, and had embodied beauty in
works of literature and art where the significance of the whole spiritual
life was more splendidly suggested than in the achievements of any, or
almost any, other period. The enthusiasm, therefore, with which the
Italians turned to the study of Greek literature and Greek life was
boundless, and it constantly found fresh nourishment. Every year restored
from forgotten recesses of libraries or from the ruins of Roman villas
another Greek author or volume or work of art, and those which had never
been lost were reinterpreted with much deeper insight. Aristotle was again
vitalized, and Plato's noble idealistic philosophy was once more
appreciatively studied and understood. In the light of this new revelation
Latin literature, also, which had never ceased to be almost superstitiously
studied, took on a far greater human significance. Vergil and Cicero were
regarded no longer as mysterious prophets from a dimly imagined past, but
as real men of flesh and blood, speaking out of experiences remote in time
from the present but no less humanly real. The word 'human,' indeed, became
the chosen motto of the Renaissance scholars; 'humanists' was the title
which they applied to themselves as to men for whom 'nothing human was
without appeal.' New creative enthusiasm, also, and magnificent actual new
creation, followed the discovery of the old treasures, creation in
literature and all the arts; culminating particularly in the early
sixteenth century in the greatest group of painters whom any country has
ever seen, Lionardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. In Italy, to be
sure, the light of the Renaissance had its palpable shadow; in breaking
away from the medieval bondage into the unhesitating enjoyment of all
pleasure, the humanists too often overleaped all restraints and plunged
into wild excess, often into mere sensuality. Hence the Italian Renaissance
is commonly called Pagan, and hence when young English nobles began to
travel to Italy to drink at the fountain head of the new inspiration
moralists at home protested with much reason against the ideas and habits
which many of them brought back with their new clothes and flaunted as
evidences of intellectual emancipation. History, however, shows no great
progressive movement unaccompanied by exaggerations and extravagances.

The Renaissance, penetrating northward, past first from Italy to France,
but as early as the middle of the fifteenth century English students were
frequenting the Italian universities. Soon the study of Greek was
introduced into England, also, first at Oxford; and it was cultivated with
such good results that when, early in the sixteenth century, the great
Dutch student and reformer, Erasmus, unable through poverty to reach Italy,
came to Oxford instead, he found there a group of accomplished scholars and
gentlemen whose instruction and hospitable companionship aroused his
unbounded delight. One member of this group was the fine-spirited John
Colet, later Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, who was to bring new
life into the secondary education of English boys by the establishment of
St. Paul's Grammar School, based on the principle of kindness in place of
the merciless severity of the traditional English system.

Great as was the stimulus of literary culture, it was only one of several
influences that made up the Renaissance. While Greek was speaking so
powerfully to the cultivated class, other forces were contributing to
revolutionize life as a whole and all men's outlook upon it. The invention
of printing, multiplying books in unlimited quantities where before there
had been only a few manuscripts laboriously copied page by page, absolutely
transformed all the processes of knowledge and almost of thought. Not much
later began the vast expansion of the physical world through geographical
exploration. Toward the end of the fifteenth century the Portuguese sailor,
Vasco da Gama, finishing the work of Diaz, discovered the sea route to
India around the Cape of Good Hope. A few years earlier Columbus had
revealed the New World and virtually proved that the earth is round, a
proof scientifically completed a generation after him when Magellan's ship
actually circled the globe. Following close after Columbus, the Cabots,
Italian-born, but naturalized Englishmen, discovered North America, and for
a hundred years the rival ships of Spain, England, and Portugal filled the
waters of the new West and the new East. In America handfuls of Spanish
adventurers conquered great empires and despatched home annual treasure
fleets of gold and silver, which the audacious English sea-captains, half
explorers and half pirates, soon learned to intercept and plunder. The
marvels which were constantly being revealed as actual facts seemed no less
wonderful than the extravagances of medieval romance; and it was scarcely
more than a matter of course that men should search in the new strange
lands for the fountain of perpetual youth and the philosopher's stone. The
supernatural beings and events of Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' could scarcely
seem incredible to an age where incredulity was almost unknown because it
was impossible to set a bound how far any one might reasonably believe. But
the horizon of man's expanded knowledge was not to be limited even to his
own earth. About the year 1540, the Polish Copernicus opened a still
grander realm of speculation (not to be adequately possessed for several
centuries) by the announcement that our world is not the center of the
universe, but merely one of the satellites of its far-superior sun.

The whole of England was profoundly stirred by the Renaissance to a new and
most energetic life, but not least was this true of the Court, where for a
time literature was very largely to center. Since the old nobility had
mostly perished in the wars, both Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor line,
and his son, Henry VIII, adopted the policy of replacing it with able and
wealthy men of the middle class, who would be strongly devoted to
themselves. The court therefore became a brilliant and crowded circle of
unscrupulous but unusually adroit statesmen, and a center of lavish
entertainments and display. Under this new aristocracy the rigidity of the
feudal system was relaxed, and life became somewhat easier for all the
dependent classes. Modern comforts, too, were largely introduced, and with
them the Italian arts; Tudor architecture, in particular, exhibited the
originality and splendor of an energetic and self-confident age. Further,
both Henries, though perhaps as essentially selfish and tyrannical as
almost any of their predecessors, were politic and far-sighted, and they
took a genuine pride in the prosperity of their kingdom. They encouraged
trade; and in the peace which was their best gift the well-being of the
nation as a whole increased by leaps and bounds.

THE REFORMATION. Lastly, the literature of the sixteenth century and later
was profoundly influenced by that religious result of the Renaissance which
we know as the Reformation. While in Italy the new impulses were chiefly
turned into secular and often corrupt channels, in the Teutonic lands they
deeply stirred the Teutonic conscience. In 1517 Martin Luther, protesting
against the unprincipled and flippant practices that were disgracing
religion, began the breach between Catholicism, with its insistence on the
supremacy of the Church, and Protestantism, asserting the independence of
the individual judgment. In England Luther's action revived the spirit of
Lollardism, which had nearly been crushed out, and in spite of a minority
devoted to the older system, the nation as a whole began to move rapidly
toward change. Advocates of radical revolution thrust themselves forward in
large numbers, while cultured and thoughtful men, including the Oxford
group, indulged the too ideal hope of a gradual and peaceful reform.

The actual course of the religious movement was determined largely by the
personal and political projects of Henry VIII. Conservative at the outset,
Henry even attacked Luther in a pamphlet, which won from the Pope for
himself and his successors the title 'Defender of the Faith.' But when the
Pope finally refused Henry's demand for the divorce from Katharine of
Spain, which would make possible a marriage with Anne Boleyn, Henry angrily
threw off the papal authority and declared himself the Supreme Head of the
Church in England, thus establishing the separate English (Anglican,
Episcopal) church. In the brief reign of Henry's son, Edward VI, the
separation was made more decisive; under Edward's sister, Mary, Catholicism
was restored; but the last of Henry's children, Elizabeth, coming to the
throne in 1558, gave the final victory to the English communion. Under all
these sovereigns (to complete our summary of the movement) the more radical
Protestants, Puritans as they came to be called, were active in agitation,
undeterred by frequent cruel persecution and largely influenced by the
corresponding sects in Germany and by the Presbyterianism established by
Calvin in Geneva and later by John Knox in Scotland. Elizabeth's skilful
management long kept the majority of the Puritans within the English
Church, where they formed an important element, working for simpler
practices and introducing them in congregations which they controlled. But
toward the end of the century and of Elizabeth's reign, feeling grew
tenser, and groups of the Puritans, sometimes under persecution, definitely
separated themselves from the State Church and established various
sectarian bodies. Shortly after 1600, in particular, the Independents, or
Congregationalists, founded in Holland the church which was soon to
colonize New England. At home, under James I, the breach widened, until the
nation was divided into two hostile camps, with results most radically
decisive for literature. But for the present we must return to the early
part of the sixteenth century.

SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS 'UTOPIA.' Out of the confused and bitter strife of
churches and parties, while the outcome was still uncertain, issued a great
mass of controversial writing which does not belong to literature. A few
works, however, more or less directly connected with the religious
agitation, cannot be passed by.

One of the most attractive and finest spirits of the reign of Henry VIII
was Sir Thomas More. A member of the Oxford group in its second generation,
a close friend of Erasmus, his house a center of humanism, he became even
more conspicuous in public life. A highly successful lawyer, he was rapidly
advanced by Henry VIII in court and in national affairs, until on the fall
of Cardinal Wolsey in 1529 he was appointed, much against his will, to the
highest office open to a subject, that of Lord Chancellor (head of the
judicial system). A devoted Catholic, he took a part which must have been
revolting to himself in the torturing and burning of Protestants; but his
absolute loyalty to conscience showed itself to better purpose when in the
almost inevitable reverse of fortune he chose harsh imprisonment and death
rather than to take the formal oath of allegiance to the king in opposition
to the Pope. His quiet jests on the scaffold suggest the never-failing
sense of humor which was one sign of the completeness and perfect poise of
his character; while the hair-shirt which he wore throughout his life and
the severe penances to which he subjected himself reveal strikingly how the
expression of the deepest convictions of the best natures may be determined
by inherited and outworn modes of thought.

More's most important work was his 'Utopia,' published in 1516. The name,
which is Greek, means No-Place, and the book is one of the most famous of
that series of attempts to outline an imaginary ideal condition of society
which begins with Plato's 'Republic' and has continued to our own time.
'Utopia,' broadly considered, deals primarily with the question which is
common to most of these books and in which both ancient Greece and Europe
of the Renaissance took a special interest, namely the question of the
relation of the State and the individual. It consists of two parts. In the
first there is a vivid picture of the terrible evils which England was
suffering through war, lawlessness, the wholesale and foolish application
of the death penalty, the misery of the peasants, the absorption of the
land by the rich, and the other distressing corruptions in Church and
State. In the second part, in contrast to all this, a certain imaginary
Raphael Hythlodaye describes the customs of Utopia, a remote island in the
New World, to which chance has carried him. To some of the ideals thus set
forth More can scarcely have expected the world ever to attain; and some of
them will hardly appeal to the majority of readers of any period; but in
the main he lays down an admirable program for human progress, no small
part of which has been actually realized in the four centuries which have
since elapsed.

The controlling purpose in the life of the Utopians is to secure both the
welfare of the State and the full development of the individual under the
ascendancy of his higher faculties. The State is democratic, socialistic,
and communistic, and the will of the individual is subordinated to the
advantage of all, but the real interests of each and all are recognized as
identical. Every one is obliged to work, but not to overwork; six hours a
day make the allotted period; and the rest of the time is free, but with
plentiful provision of lectures and other aids for the education of mind
and spirit. All the citizens are taught the fundamental art, that of
agriculture, and in addition each has a particular trade or profession of
his own. There is no surfeit, excess, or ostentation. Clothing is made for
durability, and every one's garments are precisely like those of every one
else, except that there is a difference between those of men and women and
those of married and unmarried persons. The sick are carefully tended, but
the victims of hopeless or painful disease are mercifully put to death if
they so desire. Crime is naturally at a minimum, but those who persist in
it are made slaves (not executed, for why should the State be deprived of
their services?). Detesting war, the Utopians make a practice of hiring
certain barbarians who, conveniently, are their neighbors, to do whatever
fighting is necessary for their defense, and they win if possible, not by
the revolting slaughter of pitched battles, but by the assassination of
their enemies' generals. In especial, there is complete religious
toleration, except for atheism, and except for those who urge their
opinions with offensive violence.

'Utopia' was written and published in Latin; among the multitude of
translations into many languages the earliest in English, in which it is
often reprinted, is that of Ralph Robinson, made in 1551.

THE ENGLISH BIBLE AND BOOKS OF DEVOTION. To this century of religious
change belongs the greater part of the literary history of the English
Bible and of the ritual books of the English Church. Since the suppression
of the Wiclifite movement the circulation of the Bible in English had been
forbidden, but growing Protestantism insistently revived the demand for it.
The attitude of Henry VIII and his ministers was inconsistent and
uncertain, reflecting their own changing points of view. In 1526 William
Tyndale, a zealous Protestant controversialist then in exile in Germany,
published an excellent English translation of the New Testament. Based on
the proper authority, the Greek original, though with influence from Wiclif
and from the Latin and German (Luther's) version, this has been directly or
indirectly the starting-point for all subsequent English translations
except those of the Catholics.

Ten years later Tyndale suffered martyrdom, but in 1535 Miles Coverdale,
later bishop of Exeter, issued in Germany a translation of the whole Bible
in a more gracious style than Tyndale's, and to this the king and the
established clergy were now ready to give license and favor. Still two
years later appeared a version compounded of those of Tyndale and Coverdale
and called, from the fictitious name of its editor, the 'Matthew' Bible. In
1539, under the direction of Archbishop Cranmer, Coverdale issued a revised
edition, officially authorized for use in churches; its version of the
Psalms still stands as the Psalter of the English Church. In 1560 English
Puritan refugees at Geneva put forth the 'Geneva Bible,' especially
accurate as a translation, which long continued the accepted version for
private use among all parties and for all purposes among the Puritans, in
both Old and New England. Eight years later, under Archbishop Parker, there
was issued in large volume form and for use in churches the 'Bishops'
Bible,' so named because the majority of its thirteen editors were bishops.
This completes the list of important translations down to those of 1611 and
1881, of which we shall speak in the proper place. The Book of Common
Prayer, now used in the English Church coordinately with Bible and Psalter,
took shape out of previous primers of private devotion, litanies, and
hymns, mainly as the work of Archbishop Cranmer during the reign of Edward
VI.

Of the influence of these translations of the Bible on English literature
it is impossible to speak too strongly. They rendered the whole nation
familiar for centuries with one of the grandest and most varied of all
collections of books, which was adopted with ardent patriotic enthusiasm as
one of the chief national possessions, and which has served as an unfailing
storehouse of poetic and dramatic allusions for all later writers. Modern
English literature as a whole is permeated and enriched to an incalculable
degree with the substance and spirit of the English Bible.

WYATT AND SURREY AND THE NEW POETRY. In the literature of fine art also the
new beginning was made during the reign of Henry VIII. This was through the
introduction by Sir Thomas Wyatt of the Italian fashion of lyric poetry.
Wyatt, a man of gentle birth, entered Cambridge at the age of twelve and
received his degree of M. A. seven years later. His mature life was that of
a courtier to whom the king's favor brought high appointments, with such
vicissitudes of fortune, including occasional imprisonments, as formed at
that time a common part of the courtier's lot. Wyatt, however, was not a
merely worldly person, but a Protestant seemingly of high and somewhat
severe moral character. He died in 1542 at the age of thirty-nine of a
fever caught as he was hastening, at the king's command, to meet and
welcome the Spanish ambassador.

On one of his missions to the Continent, Wyatt, like Chaucer, had visited
Italy. Impressed with the beauty of Italian verse and the contrasting
rudeness of that of contemporary England, he determined to remodel the
latter in the style of the former. Here a brief historical retrospect is
necessary. The Italian poetry of the sixteenth century had itself been
originally an imitation, namely of the poetry of Provence in Southern
France. There, in the twelfth century, under a delightful climate and in a
region of enchanting beauty, had arisen a luxurious civilization whose
poets, the troubadours, many of them men of noble birth, had carried to the
furthest extreme the woman-worship of medieval chivalry and had enshrined
it in lyric poetry of superb and varied sweetness and beauty. In this
highly conventionalized poetry the lover is forever sighing for his lady, a
correspondingly obdurate being whose favor is to be won only by years of
the most unqualified and unreasoning devotion. From Provence, Italy had
taken up the style, and among the other forms for its expression, in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had devised the poem of a single
fourteen-line stanza which we call the sonnet. The whole movement had found
its great master in Petrarch, who, in hundreds of poems, mostly sonnets, of
perfect beauty, had sung the praises and cruelty of his nearly imaginary
Laura.

It was this highly artificial but very beautiful poetic fashion which Wyatt
deliberately set about to introduce into England. The nature and success of
his innovation can be summarized in a few definite statements.

1. Imitating Petrarch, Wyatt nearly limits himself as regards substance to
the treatment of the artificial love-theme, lamenting the unkindness of
ladies who very probably never existed and whose favor in any case he
probably regarded very lightly; yet even so, he often strikes a manly
English note of independence, declaring that if the lady continues
obstinate he will not die for her love.

2. Historically much the most important feature of Wyatt's experiment was
the introduction of the sonnet, a very substantial service indeed; for not
only did this form, like the love-theme, become by far the most popular one
among English lyric poets of the next two generations, setting a fashion
which was carried to an astonishing excess; but it is the only artificial
form of foreign origin which has ever been really adopted and naturalized
in English, and it still remains the best instrument for the terse
expression of a single poetic thought. Wyatt, it should be observed,
generally departs from the Petrarchan rime-scheme, on the whole
unfortunately, by substituting a third quatrain for the first four lines of
the sestet. That is, while Petrarch's rime-arrangement is either _a b b a
a b b a c d c d c d_, or _a b b a a b b a c d e c d e_, Wyatt's is
usually _a b b a a b b a c d d c e e_.

3. In his attempted reformation of English metrical irregularity Wyatt, in
his sonnets, shows only the uncertain hand of a beginner. He generally
secures an equal number of syllables in each line, but he often merely
counts them off on his fingers, wrenching the accents all awry, and often
violently forcing the rimes as well. In his songs, however, which are much
more numerous than the sonnets, he attains delightful fluency and melody.
His 'My Lute, Awake,' and 'Forget Not Yet' are still counted among the
notable English lyrics.

4. A particular and characteristic part of the conventional Italian lyric
apparatus which Wyatt transplanted was the 'conceit.' A conceit may be
defined as an exaggerated figure of speech or play on words in which
intellectual cleverness figures at least as largely as real emotion and
which is often dragged out to extremely complicated lengths of literal
application. An example is Wyatt's declaration (after Petrarch) that his
love, living in his heart, advances to his face and there encamps,
displaying his banner (which merely means that the lover blushes with his
emotion). In introducing the conceit Wyatt fathered the most conspicuous of
the superficial general features which were to dominate English poetry for
a century to come.

5. Still another, minor, innovation of Wyatt was the introduction into
English verse of the Horatian 'satire' (moral poem, reflecting on current
follies) in the form of three metrical letters to friends. In these the
meter is the _terza rima_ of Dante.

Wyatt's work was continued by his poetical disciple and successor, Henry
Howard, who, as son of the Duke of Norfolk, held the courtesy title of Earl
of Surrey. A brilliant though wilful representative of Tudor chivalry, and
distinguished in war, Surrey seems to have occupied at Court almost the
same commanding position as Sir Philip Sidney in the following generation.
His career was cut short in tragically ironical fashion at the age of
thirty by the plots of his enemies and the dying bloodthirstiness of King
Henry, which together led to his execution on a trumped-up charge of
treason. It was only one of countless brutal court crimes, but it seems the
more hateful because if the king had died a single day earlier Surrey could
have been saved.

Surrey's services to poetry were two: 1. He improved on the versification
of Wyatt's sonnets, securing fluency and smoothness. 2. In a translation of
two books of Vergil's 'Æneid' he introduced, from the Italian, pentameter
blank verse, which was destined thenceforth to be the meter of English
poetic drama and of much of the greatest English non-dramatic poetry.
Further, though his poems are less numerous than those of Wyatt, his range
of subjects is somewhat broader, including some appreciative treatment of
external Nature. He seems, however, somewhat less sincere than his teacher.
In his sonnets he abandoned the form followed by Wyatt and adopted (still
from the Italian) the one which was subsequently used by Shakspere,
consisting of three independent quatrains followed, as with Wyatt, by a
couplet which sums up the thought with epigrammatic force, thus: _a b a b
c d c d e f e f g g_.

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