After Chaucer and Gower, English poets wandered back into the wilderness. They are most valuable to students of the development of the language, they were popular in their own time and for more than a century later. Specialists find in them some literary merits, oases in the sandy desert, but it would be false to say that they are generally entertaining and attractive.
John Lydgate, the Monk of St. Edmundsbury, would have obliged us had he written prose Memoirs of his own life, for he came in contact with some very interesting persons, and knew London and Paris as well as his cloister. Born (1370) at Lydgate near Newmarket (where good drink was hardly to be come at, he tells us), he was, before the age of 15, received into the great Edmondsbury monastery school, where he was a reluctant pupil, and, later, a not very willing monk. He proceeded to Oxford, it is thought to Gloucester Hall, now Worcester College, and, by 1397, was a priest in full orders. He speaks of Chaucer as his Master; but probably he means his master in the spirit: probably he never sat at the feet of the great poet.
In 1423 Lydgate was made prior of Hatfield Broadoak. In 1426 he was in Paris, and, by order of the Earl of Warwick, the cruel jailer of Jeanne d'Arc, he translated a French poetical pedigree by Laurence Callot, a French clerk in English service. Laurence is notorious for having called the Bishop of Beauvais a traitor, when he accepted the abjuration of Jeanne d'Arc (May, 1431), and for being very busy in the tumult which then arose. Lydgate returned to his cloister at Bury in 1434, and we last hear of him, in connexion with a pension which he held, in 1446.
The dates of his poems are not certainly known, as a rule.[Pg 111] "The Flower of Curtesie," "The Black Knight," and "The Temple of Glass," may be between 1400 and 1403. The "Troy Book," made from Dares, Dictys, Beno?t de Sainte-Maure, and, mainly Guido de Colonna, is of monstrous length, and is dated 1412-1420. This poem has some fine passages in which Lydgate, for example, when describing the penitence of Helen, seems to be translating the actual words of the Iliad. The "Story of Thebes" followed (1420), then came "The Falls of Princes," and a translation of Deguileville's "Pilgrimage of Human Life," made for the Earl of Salisbury. "The Legend of St. Edmund" was written for the devout Henry VI; the date of "Reason and Sensuality" is earlier (1406-1408).
About forty works are attributed to Lydgate, all, or almost all, being marked by "his curious flatness". His lines have, for the ordinary mind, the unpleasant peculiarity that you may read many of them several times before you discover, if you ever do, how he meant them to be scanned. It is not to be found out when he meant the final e to be sounded, and when he did not. His poems may have been badly copied, or badly printed, or both, but the bewildering result remains. When we add that Lydgate is usually a translator, and is always a copyist of all the old formul? of spring and dreams, and that he is as prolix as an Indian epic, it must be plain that he cannot be said to hold a high place in living literature. "The Book of the Duchess," a thing of Chaucer's immaturity, is not one that a young poet of the next generation would sedulously ape, yet Lydgate imitated it in "The Black Knight".
The best-known piece of Lydgate is a short satiric poem, "London Lickpenny," describing the misadventures of a poor countryman who finds that in London he can get nothing, neither law, nor food, nor any other commodity—for nothing. His hood is stolen in the crowd.
Occleve.
Occleve is not merely a less voluminous Lydgate. He is a character, or assumes to be a character not unlike the French poet, Francois Villon, but with little of Villon's genius. Occleve[Pg 112] was born about 1368; about 1387 he got a little post in the Office of the Privy Seal; in 1406, in a poem "La Male Règle," he petitions for payment of a pension: he has wasted his youth, his health is lost, and no wonder,
But twenty wintir passed continuelly
Excesse at borde hath leyd his knyf with me.
The great number of public-houses excite people to drink,
So often that man can nat wel seyn nay.
He would have drunk harder if there had been more money in his pouch: had Occleve been a richer man there would be less of the rhymes of Occleve. He liked the society of gay girls, which is expensive,
To suffre hem paie had been no courtesie.
He abstained from discourteous language,
I was so ferd with any man to fighte.
The tapsters said that Occleve was "a real gentleman," "a verray gentil man". He was too lazy to walk to his office; this indolent civil servant, he took a boat, and the oarsmen knew and flattered him. He is rather impudent and impenitent, but he seems to ask for no more than was his due in the way of money. The picture is drawn from the life, whether dramatically studied, or only too truly told of Occleve.
Being what he calls himself, Occleve wrote over 5000 lines of good moral advice to "the mad Prince," the friend of Poins and Falstaff (1411-1412). He acts as his own "awful example". He asks for money, and his poem is a compilation from various musty sources; but he is always laxly autobiographical, a loose, genial, familiar knave. Conceivably he may have met the Prince in a tavern; it is a pity that Shakespeare did not think of bringing this shuffler, in Falstaff's company, to take purses at Gadshill. He bids the Prince to burn heretics, and, in the interests of peace with France, to marry Katharine, daughter of the mad Charles VI. Henry took both pieces of advice, but the marriage brought not peace, but the sword in a Maiden's hand.
[Pg 113]
Like Villon, Occleve wrote a poem (more than one), to the Blessed Virgin: he is always very orthodox. He had an interval of darkened mind, but recovered and went on versifying, a pathetic figure, for he was a married man, and his wife must have endured things intolerable. Occleve was very human: as a poet his versification is as loose as that of Lydgate. He died about 1450.
Hawes.
Stephen Hawes was the last of the English followers of Chaucer who deserves notice. Between him and the genuine Middle Ages a great gulf exists. The art of printing is familiar to Hawes. Writing of Chaucer he says of the poet's many books
He dyd compyle, whose goodly name
In printed bokes doth remayne in fame,
where the jostling vowels of "name," "remayne" and "fame" prove Hawes to be a careless author. In his own time, he says, writers "spend their time in vainful vanity, making balades of fervent amity, as gestes and trifles without fruitfulness". Hawes alone "of my Master Lydgate will follow the trace".
Hawes is all for allegory and moral instruction in his long poem, misleadingly entitled "The Passetyme of Pleasure". All the old formul? of the Romance of the Rose are retained, and the castles of Rhetoric, Logic, and the whole curriculum of Learning are not much more joyous than the den of Bunyan's Giant Despair. Even combats with seven-headed monsters fail to excite pity and terror, for Hawes has seen, in a work of art, his own future, and we know beforehand that Grand Amour married La Bel Pucell.
Hawes was born about 1475, was over-educated at Oxford, and was Groom of the Chamber to Henry VII. He made the words of a ballet for the Court in 1506 (ten shillings) and, for Henry VIII. (1521) a play, now lost, (￡6 13s. 4 d.). He also wrote "The Example of Virtue," and several poems, some of which have not been found in print or manuscript. The "Passetyme of Pleasure" is of 1506. It is in rhyme royal, with more or less humorous interludes concerning the facetious Godfrey Gobelive, a dwarf who tells tales against women, in rhyming "heroic" couplets. "The Example of Virtue," another moral and allegorical poem, is in the same measures. Spenser may have known the works of Hawes, there are coincidences in the allegorical details of both which can scarcely be all accidental. Hawes, in a sense, would "have raised the Table Round again," if he could I He knew Malory's great prose work, the "Morte d'Arthur," and would fain have restored ideal chivalry.
But chivalry died at the burning of Jeanne d'Arc, under the eyes of "the Father of Courtesy," the Earl of Warwick. The[Pg 114] Flower of Chivalry was sacrificed like Odin, "herself to herself" (1431).
Hawes was a chaotic versifier: it is not easy to guess how he scanned many of his own lines. In the "Passetyme" the words of the hero's epitaph are probably a versified proverb,
For though the day be never so longe,
At last the belles ringeth to evensonge.
Long were the poems, and long the day of the followers of Chaucer. Now for its even song the bells were rung.