Now critical observation at the time might survey this field with view as extensive and intensive as it could apply, and be far from satisfied with the crops produced. Deficiencies of all three. To represent the first system there was nobody but Chaucer, who, great and greatly admired as he was, was separated from the men of 1550 by a period of time almost as long as that which separates us from Pope, and by a much greater gulf of pronunciation and accent. Nobody could write like Chaucer—unless the Chaucerian Chorizontes are right in attributing The Court of Love to this time, in which case there was some one who could write very much like Chaucer indeed. There was no Langland, and nobody who could write in the least like Langland. In sheer despair, men of talent like Skelton, when they were not Chaucerising heavily, were indulging (of course with more dulcet intervals now and then) in mere wild gambades of doggerel.
But it will be said, Was there not the new Italianated style of poets of such promise as Wyatt and Surrey? There was. Yet it must be remembered that Wyatt and Surrey themselves are, after all, poets of more promise than performance; that their promise itself looks much more promising to us, seeing as we do its fulfilment in Spenser and onward, than it need have done, or indeed could do, to contemporaries; that stalwart Protestants and stout Englishmen feared and loathed the Italianation of anything English; and lastly, that even the prosody of Wyatt and Surrey is, in a very high degree, experimental, tentative, incomplete. We laugh, or are disgusted, at the twists and tortures applied by the hexametrists to our poor mother tongue; but Wyatt at least puts almost as awkward constraints on her.
It is not surprising that in the presence of these unsatisfying things, and in the nonage of catholic literary criticism, men should have turned for help to those classics which were the general teachers and helpers of the time. The temptations of Criticism in this respect. There was indeed—already published just as Ascham had attained his year of discretion—a treatise, by the greatest man of letters for some fifteen hundred years at least, which contained the germ of a warning. But it is not likely that Ascham or any of his good Cambridge friends had seen Trissino’s translation of the De Vulgari Eloquio; and, if any had, it would have been a stroke of genius to carry Dante’s generalisation from the Romance tongues further. To almost any man of the Renaissance it would have seemed half sacrilege and half madness to examine ancient and modern literatures on the same plane, and decide what was germane to each and what common to all. Greek Prosody had been good enough, with very minor alterations, for Latin; how should any of these upstart modern tongues refuse what had been good enough for both? And let it be remembered, too, that they were only half wrong. Greek and Latin did provide up to a certain point—that of the foot as distinguished from the metre—examples which, duly guarded, could be quite safely followed, which indeed could not and cannot be neglected without loss and danger for English. It was when they went further, and endeavoured to impose the classical combinations of feet on English, that they fell.
Yet even from the first they had glimpses and glimmerings of truth which might have warned them; while in their very errors they often display that combination of independence and practical spirit which is the too often undervalued glory of English criticism. Its adventurers: Ascham himself. Ascham himself—besotted as he is with wrath[[221]] against “our rude beggarly rhyming,” confident as he is that the doggerel of his old friend Bishop Watson of Lincoln—
“All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses,
For that he knew many men’s manners, and saw many cities,”—
exhibits[[222]] as “right quantitie” of syllables and true order of versifying as either Greek or Latin—yet saw[[223]] that “our English tongue doth not well receive the nature of Carmen Heroicum, because dactylus, the aptest foot for that verse, is seldom found in English.” Truly it is not; your dactyl is apt to play the “Waler”—to buck under an English rider, and either throw him altogether, or force the alteration of the pace to anapæsts. The best apparent dactylics in English—the verses of Kingsley’s Andromeda—are not really dactylic-hexameters at all, they are five-foot anapæstics, with a very strong anacrusis at the beginning, and a weak hypercatalectic syllable at the end. And with this fatal confession of Ascham (who had not a very poetical head), that of Campion, an exquisite poet and a keen though warped critic, coincides, as we shall see, a generation later. But the thing had to be done; and it was done, or at least attempted.
When the craze first took form in England we do not exactly know. Ascham observes vaguely that “this misliking of rhyming beginneth not now of any newfangle singularity, but hath been long been misliked, and that of men of greatest learning and deepest judgment.”[[224]] Watson and Drant. We all think that the persons who agree with us are men of great learning and deep judgment, so that matter may be passed over. But apparently the thing was one, and not the best, of the fruits of that study of the classics, and specially of Greek, which, beginning at Oxford, passed thence to Cambridge, and was taken up so busily in Ascham’s own college, St John’s. Thomas Watson,[[225]] the Bishop of Lincoln, above referred to, was Master of the College; Ascham himself, it is hardly necessary to say, was a fellow of it. And still descending in the collegiate hierarchy, it was an undergraduate of St John’s, Thomas Drant, who somewhat later drew up rules for Anglo-Classic versifying—rules that occupied Spenser and Harvey, with the result of producing some interesting letters and some very deplorable doggerel. Drant seems to have been the “legislator of Parnassus” to the innovators; but we have little work of his, and that little does not bear on the special subject.
Mischievous craze as it was, however,[[226]] it had the merit of turning the attention of Englishmen to really critical study of poetry, and it appears, more or less, as the motif of most of the group of critical writings, from Gascoigne’s Notes of Instruction to Daniel’s Defence of Rhyme, which we shall now discuss.
In the most interesting little treatise[[227]] which heads or initials[[228]] the now goodly roll of books in English criticism, George Gascoigne, though he was himself a Cambridge man, does not make any reference to the craze. Gascoigne. The tract was written at the request of an Italian friend, Eduardo Donati. It is exceedingly short; but as full of matter, and very good matter, as need be. In duty bound Gascoigne begins with insistence on fine invention, without which neither “thundering in rym ram ruff, quoth my master Chaucer,” nor “rolling in pleasant words,” nor “abounding in apt vocables,” will suffice. But he passes over this very swiftly, as over trite and obvious expressions,[[229]] suitableness of phrase, &c., and attacks the great literary question of the time, Prosody.