A great, indeed an inestimable influence in literature at this juncture, was that of the long-forgotten Greek language, Greek poetry, and Greek philosophy. When Erasmus, who then had little Greek, arrived in England and visited Oxford (1499), he found there Grocyn, Linacre, and Colet, who had acquired Greek on the continent; and, with Sir Thomas More, were already competent classical scholars. But their Greek learning was mainly turned into the channel of theology, the study of the sources of Christian doctrine, the New Testament, the Greek Fathers; and they were attracted by the philosophy of Plato which appeared to "utter a Christian voice" much more clearly than do the writings of the idol of the Middle Ages, Aristotle.
Greek, however, does not visibly affect the poetic literature of England much, before the date of Spenser, about 1580. The violent times of Henry VIII and Mary Tudor were not favourable to severe study and exquisite appreciation of the Greek genius, a most desirable corrective of the prolixity of mediaevalism, and of the English passion for horrors in stage plays. To most people knowledge of the contents of the Greek classics came through translations, and these translations, as in the case of the historian Thucydides, were done from French versions, while Plato was read through Italian commentators, much influenced by Plato\'s disciples in early Christian times, the Neoplatonists, dreamers of beautiful dreams concerning things that cannot be uttered.
Study produced also a very wide acquaintance with Greek mythology—Shakespeare\'s humblest characters have heard of many a Grecian fable—yet the spirit, the exquisite balance, and the[Pg 173] refinement of the Greek genius, hardly affected our authors. We may detect it in More\'s (1478-1535) "Utopia," where the adventurers carry with them to "Nowhere" a "pretty fardel," or parcel, of the cheap neat Greek books printed by Aldus. The fancied State of Utopia, with its comfortable communism and perfect freedom in religion, is derived from the "Republic" of Plato, and in religion is more liberal than, in his later work, "The Laws," he would have permitted it to be. But the "Utopia," written in Latin, was meant for the learned.
Though the "Utopia" was published in 1516, and became famous in Europe, it did not reach unlearned English readers till an English translation, by Ralph Robynson, appeared in 1551. They now had More\'s eloquent advocacy of communism before them as regulated in his imaginary state, with a Six Hours\' Day, universal training of men and women for war, and habit of assassinating the leaders of hostile nations. There is tolerance of all religions which accept a deity and the immortality of the soul: atheists are disqualified for public offices.
In his English works on religious and social controversy, which are little read, More is not only a Catholic and a Conservative, but in discussion is given to abusive and violent language which would have horrified the courteous Plato, the urbane Aristotle, and that model of a devout and ardent student, and perfect gentleman, Pico della Mirandola, whose Life More gave in English. On both sides the controversialists of the Reformation delighted in violent personal abuse, in some Greek orators they found examples of that art. The first effect of Greek in England, by producing a new Biblical criticism and an attack on the foundations of the mediaeval Church, was to "bring not peace but a sword," the wars of religion.
Elyot.
No man did more for the intelligence of Greek than Sir Thomas Elyot (1499 1546)1 author of "The Governour," a long treatise, on the education of a gentleman, and on the nature of forms of government. Elyot bubbles over with Greek, and translates such passages of Homer as he quotes into English verse,[Pg 174] the alternate lines rhyming. He is of the Greek opinion that a gentleman should be taught, if he has a taste for art, to draw, paint, and execute works in sculpture, not as a base professional artist, but as an amateur.[1] Elyot would have a boy, at 7 years old, begin with Greek, learning it through Latin, which he picks up, with French, in conversation. Grammars of Greek are now almost innumerable. Grammar, he says with much truth, "if it be made too long and exquisite to the learner, in a manner mortifieth his courage. And by that time he cometh to the most sweet and pleasant reading of old authors, the spark of fervent desire of learning is soon quenched with the burden of grammar." Elyot would start his pupil as early as possible with what will interest a child, ?sop\'s Fables in Greek, and then pass to Lucian, who is amusing as well as elegant. "But I fear me to be too long from noble Homer, from whom as from a fountain proceeded all eloquence and learning." Throughout, Elyot wishes first to interest the pupil; but where, he asks, is he to find qualified schoolmasters? They were as cruel as in the days of St. Augustine, and while Elyot\'s system of education, in sports as well as in books, is free and joyous, like that of Gargantua in Rabelais, little boys were suffering the horrors described by Agrippa d\'Aubigné in his Memoirs. Elyot translated works of Isocrates, Plutarch, and others, wrote a medical work "The Castle of Health," was clerk of the Privy Council, and went on various diplomatic missions. Elyot was not a professional instructor of youth: he was, it seems, educated privately, and of neither university; what pleases us in him is his unstaled zest for learning, his fresh enthusiasm.
The best English of the age and the most durable is that of Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) as we read it in the Liturgy of the Church of England, while much of the merit of King James\'s Authorized Version of the Bible rests on the foundation of Miles Coverdale\'s translation (1488-1568). How easy it is to translate the Bible into English which is not a marvel of diction and rhythm, we are too frequently reminded by the Revised Version.
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Ascham.
Roger Ascham (1515-1568) was a Yorkshire man of the middle classes, who lived by his learning, and did not find that it paid him as well as he wished. Going early to St. John\'s College, Cambridge, he was a pupil of the famous Sir John Cheke, who introduced the English way of pronouncing Greek. It is certainly wrong—no people pronounce the vowels as we do; but if Cheke resisted the pronunciation of the modern Greeks, perhaps he is not much to be blamed. Ascham obtained a Fellowship and a Readership in Greek, the Fellowship he lost when he married: he did not long retain his tutorship to the Princess Elizabeth; as secretary to an ambassador in Germany he continued to teach Greek to his chief; and in his letters, Latin or English, we find him often in straits for money and begging for assistance. Camden, writing under James I, says that he lost money at dicing, and in his attack on gambling, in his "Toxophilus," a dialogue on Archery (1545), Ascham shows a rather unholy knowledge of all the tricks on the dice-board. Probably he had paid for his education. He contemplated a work on the noble sport of cock fighting, on which, of course, there was betting, and perhaps Ascham was not in all respects so severe a Puritan as in his unworthy attacks on that noblest of romances, "The Morte d\'Arthur". Sir Lancelot is a better gentleman than many who were to be met at a cock fight. Ascham had little sympathy with the Italian influences that were so potent in Elizabethan literature. Italy was certainly profligate and luxurious,
An Englishman that is Italianate
Doth quickly prove a devil incarnate,
was an English translation of an Italian proverb. Ascham, like his contemporaries, was nothing if not patriotic. The bow of yew and the grey goose shaft had won many a victory over Scots and French, as in "Toxophilus," Ascham reminds these peoples; therefore he desired that archery should be universally practised. But the harquebus, a musket lighter than the heavy hand gun of[Pg 176] the fifteenth century, was already, in disciplined hands, more than a match for the bow.
"Toxophilus," to our age, appears pedantic. We have endless classical examples, and learn that the Trojans drew the bow-string only to the breast, not the ear (which is true), while they used iron arrow-heads as against the bronze arrow-heads of the Greeks, a fact not so certain. When he does come to practice, Ascham\'s teaching in archery is reckoned sound and good. His ideas are summed up in the prayer that the English
Through Christ, King Henry, the Book, and the Bow
May all manner of enemies quite overthrow.
In writing English, Ascham was all for plain English. Foreign words Anglicized make such a mixture "as if you put malmsey and sack, red wine and white, ale and beer, all in one pot". Yet he advocates in his "School Master," published after his death, a yet more unhallowed blend, the use of Greek measures in English verse. "Our English tongue in avoiding barbarous rhyming may as well receive right quantity of syllables as either Greek or Latin." (He means "quantity" as opposed to accent, as if one said carpenter.) As an example he quotes Mr. Watson\'s rendering of the third line of the "Odyssey" into two English hexameters
All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses,
For that he knew many men\'s manners and saw many cities.
Obviously if we are to say "men\'s manners," making "man" in "manners" long, we must not make "vellers" in "travellers" short, as Mr. Watson does. We are reduced to
Gladly report great praise of Ulysses do the travellers.
This absurd manner of imitating Greek measures in English was upheld, twenty years later, by Gabriel Harvey, who, for a moment, nearly corrupted the practice of Spenser, the most naturally musical of poets. Ascham\'s own prose style is unaffected, not corrupted by eccentricities, but not harmonious. A new perfection, a false perfection, was to be sought later, through the antitheses, alliterations, and pedantic wit of Lyly\'s "Euphues!"
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Lyly\'s Euphues.
The prose of Ascham was clear and was plain, disdaining decoration and far-fetched gorgeous phrases. But for the gorgeous and the exotic, the taste of the Elizabethan Age was pronounced, as we see in the strange over-gaudy costumes of the period, the various ruffs, the jewelled velvets and silks, worn by men and women. A like dressing for thoughts was demanded, and the supply was provided by John Lyly, whose plays are to be mentioned later. Lyly was born a Kentish man (1554?); Magdalen, in Oxford, was his college; his plays, acted by the boys of the Chapel Royal and St. Paul\'s, are of 1584-1594. But he made his mark earlier, as a prose writer, in his "Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit" (1579), and the sequel, "Euphues and his England" (1580). The style became a fashion, a fashion which affected even those who, like Sidney, were in would-be revolt against it. Lyly, like all writers of the periods just before and after him, was copious in classical allusions. He was not the first to hunt in all directions, especially in fictitious natural history, for similes, and needless decorations; but he hunted further and more assiduously: emphatically his style is that of the unresting Bird of Paradise. Every sentence is a thing bristling with points and antitheses and alliterations. The first part of the book was a kind of novel; two friends, at Naples, woo the same woman, quarrel, write long letters, and the question of education, in the wide sense in which the Renaissance understood education, is always prominent. There is endless conversation and discussion of life, love, and learning, always in the same style of fantastic decoration and allusion: all continued when Euphues arrives in England, all conveying general information not verified by experiment. "I have read that the bull, being tied to a fig tree, loseth his strength; that a whole herd of deer stand at the gaze if they smell a sweet apple"; facts on which the cattle-breeder or the hunter would not, if well advised, rely. This was the kind of science against which Bacon uprose. But Lyly appealed, in his Dedication, and with success, "To the Ladies and Gentlewomen of England," who found in the book a kind of love-story, much philosophizing on that dear theme; and a pleasurable[Pg 178] example of a new way of being witty and romantic. Lyly was the chief cause of the difficulty in telling a plain tale plainly which besets the minor writers of the age of Elizabeth.
Before approaching the chief prose writers of Elizabeth\'s time, we must turn aside to her greatest poet, and his friend, to Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney, and to the Drama.
Sidney.
Spenser did not more surely attain immortality by his verse than Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) by his life, writings, and character. He was one of those who, as Plato says, are born good, exemplars of natural charm and excellence. He is the ideal gentleman of the type which Spenser professed to educate by the examples of his virtuous knights, brave, pious, courteous, and just. The son of Sir Henry Sidney and nephew of Elizabeth\'s Leicester, Philip Sidney was born into the Court, but was not of it; his heart was set on other things than pleasure, splendour, flattery, and promotion. Educated at Shrewsbury School, he went to Christ Church at 14, being already the friend of the noble Fulke Greville, who, however, went from Shrewsbury to Cambridge. In 1572 he was attached to the English embassy in France, and, on the night of the Bartholomew massacre was sheltered in the house of his future father-in-law, Walsingham. Till 1575 he travelled, chiefly in Germany, and made the acquaintance of his constant correspondent and adviser, Languet, whom he celebrates as a shepherd of the Ister, and as his own religious Mentor. In Venice his portrait was painted by Veronese; at Vienna he perfected himself in horsemanship under Pugliano, whose enthusiasm he describes so amusingly in his "Defence of Poesie". For a man so earnest as Sidney was, he had a fine sense of humour.
Returning to England in 1575, he, like Gascoigne, was with Elizabeth at the famous pastimes at Kenilworth, now best known through Scott\'s novel, "Kenilworth". Afterwards, at the house of the Earl of Essex, he met the Earl\'s daughter, Penelope, later Lady Rich, the Stella of his sonnets. Essex desired their marriage, but fate decided otherwise. In 1577 Sidney went, a young diplomatist,[Pg 179] to the Emperor and the German Princes, and later, was obliged to attend the Court, while his mind was set on adventures beyond the Atlantic; on failing in that, he trifled with the idea of introducing Greek metres into English poetry. In 1579, he quarrelled with the Earl of Oxford in the tennis court. A duel was not permitted, but as Sidney also gave Elizabeth his opinion about her distasteful flirtation with the odious Duc d\'Anjou, the worst of the bad Valois Princes, he retired to Wilton, the house of his sister, Lady Pembroke, and there wrote the pastoral romance, "Arcadia".
He was recalled to Court, sat in Parliament for Kent, and in 1583 parried a daughter of Walsingham. He was forbidden to join Drake\'s American expedition of 1585, in fact he was always thwarted in his desire for action and for such deeds of chivalry as the conditions of his age permitted—they leaned somewhat to piracy and filibustering. At length, as Governor of Flushing, while Leicester commanded the forces engaged against Spain in the Low Countries, he fell in a cavalry charge against a superior force at Zutphen. His leg was broken by a musket bullet from the Spanish trenches: it was now that he handed the cup of water that was at his lips to the soldier whose need was greater than his. He lingered for some weeks, and died on 17 October, 1586.
The beautiful character of Sidney cannot be more strongly attested than by the agony of grief exhibited, at his death, by the handsome and wicked Master of Gray. He was about to be sent on the Scottish embassy to plead for the life of Mary Stuart, while his desire was to be fighting under Sidney\'s banner. He expresses, in a touching letter, the sudden revulsion of his nature from his wonted treacheries; and, contrary to the falsehood of tradition, he did not betray, but, to his own loss, did his best to save the Queen whose cause he had previously deserted.
As a poet, Sidney, whose works were all published after his death, is best remembered for the sonnets of Astrophel to Stella, Lady Rich. There is a controversy as to whether these are mere exercises in gallant but "platonic" love-verse, or whether they reveal a true passion, as Charles Lamb maintained. The sonnet[Pg 180] in which he says that he has found his fortune too late, and has lost what he had unwittingly won,
O punisht eyes
That I had been more foolish or more wise,
seems to set forth a truly tragic situation. Perhaps only poets can be the critics in such a case as this of Sidney.
The sonnets vary much in poetic value; some are written in Alexandrines, a metre not consonant with the traditions of the English Muse.
Sidney\'s "Defence of Poesie."
Readers who fail to find brilliant merit in English literary poetry between Chaucer and Spenser may not be ill-pleased to note that Sir Philip Sidney was strong on their side. Acquainted as he was with the poetry of Greece, Rome, Italy, and France, he could see nothing to admire in the efforts and experiments of such writers as Occleve, Lydgate, Hawes, Googe, Churchyard, and Turbervile. His "Defence of Poesie" (or, according to the title of the first edition (1595), his "Apologie for Poesie") was elicited by the unauthorized dedication to himself of Stephen Gosson\'s "School of Abuse". Gosson was a young Oxford man who had tried his hand as a playwright, and been disgusted, he says, by the disorders of the playhouses, where his comedy and morality may have been hooted. He therefore tried to make himself notorious, or he expressed his penitence, by assailing poets who deal in the silly conceits of Lyly\'s "Euphues".
"The scarab flies over many a sweet flower and lights in a cow-shard... it is the manner of swine to forsake the fair fields and wallow in the mire: and the whole practice of poets, either with fables to show their abuses, or with plain terms to unfold their mischief, discover their shame, discredit themselves, and disperse their poison through the world". Gosson chooses Virgil as one of his terrible examples, and whether he is a genuine or a hypocritical puritan, or a mere fribble in search of notoriety, he made a mistake when he thought to find a patron or a butt in Sidney, who does not advertise Gosson\'s name in the "Defence of Poesie".
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After a general defence of poetry furnished with precedents drawn from every quarter, even from the respect paid to their minstrels by the Irish, Sidney defines the final end of poetry as being "to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of...." If poetry does not always attain this end, "it is not the fault of the art, but that by few men that art can be accomplished". He quotes Aristotle\'s "Poetics" to the effect that poetry is more philosophical and more serious than philosophy. Nothing in history is so noble but that "the poet may, if he list, make it his own, beautifying it both for further teaching, and more delighting, as it please him, having all, from Dante\'s heaven to his hell, under the authority of his pen". Here Sidney seems to differ from Scott, who regarded some examples of human fortunes, for example in the case of Mary Stuart, as beyond the range of the poetic art. But Sidney, foreseeing the objection, adds, "I speak of the art, not of the artificer". Sidney then discusses the various Kinds of poetry. As to the Comedy, "naughty play-makers and stage-keepers have made it justly odious,"—so far he sides with the Puritans of his time. In speaking of the lyric, he says: "I must confess mine own barbarousness; I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas" ("Chevy Chase"), "that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet". Indeed the true spirit of poetry did dwell, disregarded by wits and courtiers, in the popular poetry and the ballads. But poetry, he knows not why, finds, in our time, a hard welcome in England: "I think the very earth laments it, and therefore decks our soil with fewer laurels than it was accustomed, for heretofore poets have in England also flourished". If poets are not esteemed it is because they do not deserve esteem, for we are "taking upon us to be poets in despite of Pallas," invita Minerva. Our would-be poets are destitute of genius—which was very true. "Chaucer undoubtedly did excellently in his \'Troilus and Cressida\': of whom truly I know not whether to marvel more either that he, in that misty time, could see so clearly, or that we, in this clear age, go so stumblingly after him."
What ailed Sidney\'s age was lack of terseness and clearness.[Pg 182] Most poets did not know what they would be at; they were confused by the tumult of religion, the loss of old ideals, the language in transition, the tyranny of the misunderstood classics, the constant effort to imitate Greece, Rome, France, and Italy. They could not yet see life and literature steadily, and see them whole. Sidney found little that "had poetical sinews," except in Chaucer; parts of "The Mirror for Magistrates," the Earl of Surrey\'s lyrics, and Spenser\'s "\'Shepherd\'s Calendar\' hath much poetry in his \'Eclogues,\' indeed worthy the reading, if. I be not deceived. That same framing of his style to an old rustic language I cannot allow..."
Sidney then banters the absurdities of the lawless stage, of the alliterative writers, of the seekers after unnatural history, like Lyly in his "Euphues," and of the love poets. "If I were a mistress never would they persuade me that they were in love, so coldly they apply fiery speeches," "swelling phrases" learned from books.
It was poetry, not the English poets of his age, that Sidney defended, and he might well marvel at our modern zeal which devotes time and scholarship to a chaos of tentative experiments by men who wished to be poets without possessing the poetic genius.
Sidney\'s best poems and his "Defence of Poesie" retain their freshness; but that book of his which was most popular suffers from the changes of time and taste. At most periods prose fiction is more welcome to human nature than poetry or criticism. Sidney\'s book "The Countess of Pembroke\'s Arcadia," is a novel, written by the author at Wilton, when, as we saw, he was neither in favour at Court nor permitted to risk himself in adventures on sea or land. The book was to Sidney what "The Faery Queen" was ............