Mr. Hallam objects that “the attention fails in the school-boy stories of Thebes and Troy; but it seems probable that Lydgate would have been a better poet in satire upon his own times, or delineation of their manners—themes which would have gratified us much more than the fate of princes.”
This is relatively true—true as regards some of us, but not at all as respects Lydgate, nor the people of his age, nor the king and the princes who commanded themes congenial with their military character, and their simple tastes, romantically charming the readers of two centuries. If our critic, in the exercise of his energetic faculties, lives out of the necromancy of the old Romaunt, afar from Thebes and Troy, Thomas Warton was cradled among the children of fancy, and in his rovings had tasted their wild honey. The only works of Lydgate which attracted his attention were precisely these tedious “Fate of Princes” and “The Troy Book.”
The other modern critics—Ritson, Percy, and Ellis—had but a slight knowledge of Dan[5] Lydgate. They have generally acted on the pressure of the moment, to get up a hasty court of Pie-poudre—that fugitive tribunal held at fairs—to determine on the case of a culprit even before they could shake the dust off their feet. But time calls for an arrest of hasty judgments, or brings forward some illustrious advocate to reverse the judicial decision, or set forth the misfortunes of the accused. Two, most eminent in genius, stand by the side of the monk of Bury—Coleridge and Gray. Coleridge has left us his protest in favour of Lydgate, for he deeply regrets that in the general collection of our poets, the unpoetic editor “had not substituted the whole of Lydgate’s works from the manuscript extant, for the almost worthless Gower.”[6] Gray alone has taken an enlarged view of the state of our poetry and our language at this period. When that master-spirit abandoned the history of our poetry from his fastidious delicacy or from his learned indolence, because Warton had projected it, English literature sustained an irreparable loss.[7] In Gray surely we have lost a literary historian such as the world has not yet had; so rare is that genius who happily combines qualities apparently incompatible. In his superior learning, his subtle taste, his deeper thought, and his more vigorous sense, we should have found the elements of a more philosophical criticism, with a more searching and comprehensive intellect, than can be awarded to our old favourite, Thomas Warton. In the neglected quartos of Gray we discover that the poet had set earnestly to work on the archæology of our poetry; we also find in his works those noble versions of the northern Scalds, and the Welsh bards, which he designed to have introduced into his history; thus to have impressed on us a perfect notion of a national poetry, by poetry itself; a rare good fortune which does not enliven the toil of prosaic critics or verbal interpreters. Gray had found the manuscripts of Lydgate at Cambridge, and has made them a vehicle for the most beautiful disquisitions. On a passage in Lydgate, the poet-critic developes a curious occurrence in the history of the poetic art—namely, that proneness to minute circumstances which lengthens the strains of our elder poets, and which the impatience of modern taste rejects as tediousness; yet this will be found to be “the essence of poetry and oratory.” This topic is important; and as I can neither add nor dare to take away from this perfect criticism, I submit to the task of transcribing what I am sure will come to most of my readers in all its freshness and novelty.
Our ancient poet seems to be apologising for telling long stories, which he asserts cannot be told “in wordes few”—
| For a storye which is not plainly told, But constreyned under wordes few For lack of truth, wher they ben new or olde, Men by reporte cannot the matter shewe; These oakés greaté be not down yhewe First at a stroke, but by a long prócesse; Nor long stories a word may not expresse. Lydgate, in his “Fall of Princes.” |
On this Gray has delivered the following observations:—“These ‘long processes,’ indeed, suited wonderfully with the attention and simple curiosity of the age in which Lydgate lived; many a stroke have he and the best of his contemporaries spent upon a sturdy old story, till they had blunted their own edge and that of their readers—at least a modern reader will find it so: but it is a folly to judge of the understanding and patience of those times by our own. They loved, I will not say tediousness, but length and a train of circumstances in a narration. The vulgar do so still: it gives an air of reality to facts; it fixes the attention; raises and keeps in suspense their expectation, and supplies the defects of their little and lifeless imagination; and it keeps pace with the slow motion of their own thoughts. Tell them a story as you would tell it to a man of wit; it will appear to them as an object seen in the night by a flash of lightning: but when you have placed it in various lights and in various positions, they will come at last to see and feel it as well as others. But we need not confine ourselves to the vulgar, and to understandings beneath our own. Circumstance ever was and ever will be the life and the essence both of oratory and of poetry. It has in some sort the same effect upon every mind that it has upon that of the populace; and I fear the quickness and delicate impatience of these polished times in which we live are but the forerunners of the decline of all those beautiful arts which depend upon the imagination. Homer, the father of circumstance, has occasion for the same apology which I am making for Lydgate and for his predecessors.”[8]
At the monastery of Bury we might have listened to that Gothic monk’s “goodly tale,” or “notable proverb of Æsopus” for the nonce; or saintly legend, or “merrie balade;” or the story of “Thebes,” which the scholar took up from his master Chaucer: or that from “Bochas,” and Guido Colonna’s “Troy Book:” but too numerous were the volumes to tell, and too voluminous was many a volume. Verbose and diffuse, yet clear and fluent, ran his page; too minutely copious were his descriptions, yet the delineations seemed the more graphical; his verse, too long or too short, halts in his measures till we fall into the minstrel’s “metring,” and lines break forth, beautiful as any in our day. He expands the same image, and loses all likeness in a prolix simile, for his readers were not so impatient as ourselves. These poets suffered or enjoyed a fatal facility of rhyming, lost for us, from the use of polysyllabic words from the French and the Latin accented on the last syllable, a custom continued by the Scots; and these provided them with too ready an abundance of poetic terminations or rhymes, tending to make their poems voluminous. The art of selection is the art of an age less florid and more fastidious, but not always more genial or more inventive. The pruning-hook was not in use when planters were too eager to gather the first fruits from the trees which their own hands had put into the earth.
Alas! apologies only leave irremediable faults as they were! The tediousness of Dan Lydgate remains as languid, his verse as halting, and “Thebes” and “Troy” as desolate, as we found them!
Let us, however, be reminded, that he who wholly neglects the study of our ancient poets must submit to the loss of knowledge which a philosopher would value; the manners of the age, the modes of feeling, the stream of thought, the virgin fancies, and that position which the human character takes in distant ages—these will imbue his memory with the genius of his country and the eternal truth of authentic nature. No English poet should wholly resign these masses of vernacular poetry to the lone closet of the antiquary; he who loves the gain of labour will excavate these quarries for their marble, for we know they are marble, since many a noble column has been raised from these shapeless and unhewed blocks.