Amenities of Literature / Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English Literature

by Isaac Disraeli

A prudent sovereign in the seventh Henry, amid factions rather joined together than cemented, gave a semblance of repose to a turbulent land, exhausted by its convulsions. A martial rudeness still lingered among the great; and we discover by a curious conversation which the learned Pace held with some of the gentry, with whom, perhaps, he had indiscreetly remonstrated, attempting to impress on their minds the advantages of study, that his advice was indignantly rejected. Such pursuits seemed to them unmanly, and intolerable impediments in the practice of those more active arts of life which alone were worthy of one of gentle blood; their fathers had been good knights without this idling toil of reading.

Henry the Seventh, when Earl of Richmond, during his exile in France from 1471 to 1485, had become a reader of French romances, an admirer of French players, and an amateur of their peculiar architecture. After his accession we trace these new tastes in our poetry, our drama, and in a novel species of architecture which Bishop Fox called Burgundian, and which is the origin of the Tudor style.[1] A favourer of the histrionic art, he introduced a troop of French players. Wary in his pleasures as in his politics, this monarch was moderate in his patronage either of poets or players, but he was careful to encourage both. The queen participated in his tastes, and appears to have bestowed particular rewards on “players”, whose performances had afforded her unusual delight; and among the curious items of her majesty’s expenditure, we find that many of these players were foreigners—“a French player, an Italian poet, a Spanish tumbler, a Flemish tumbler, a Welshman for making a ryme, a maid that came out of Spain and danced before the queen.”

This monarch had suffered one of those royal marriages which are a tribute paid to the interests of the State. Henry had yielded with repugnance to a union with Elizabeth the Yorkist; the sullen Lancastrian long looked on his queen with the eyes of a factionist. Toward the latter years of his life this repugnance seems to have passed away, as this gentle consort largely participated in his tastes. It was probably in their sympathy that the personal prejudices of Henry melted away. This indeed was a triumph of the arts of imagination over the warped feelings of the individual; it marked the transition from barbaric arms to the amenities of literature, and the softening influence of the mimetic arts; it was the presage of the magnificence of his successor. The nation was benefited by these new tastes; the pacific reign made a revolution in our court, our manners, and our literature.

We may date from this period that happy intercourse which the learned English opened with the Continent, and more particularly with literary Italy; our learned travellers now appear in number. Colet, the founder of St. Paul’s School, not only passed over to Paris, but lingered in Italy, and returned home with the enthusiasm of classical antiquity. Grocyn, to acquire the true pronunciation of the Greek, which he first taught at Oxford, domesticated with Demetrius Chalcondyles and Angelo Politian, at Florence. Linacre, the projector of the College of Physicians, visited Rome and Florence. Lilly, the grammarian, we find at Rhodes and at Rome, and the learned Pace at Padua. We were thus early great literary travellers; and the happier Continentalists, who rarely move from their native homes, have often wondered at the restless condition of those whom they have sometimes reproached as being Insulaires; yet they may be reminded that we have done no more than the most ancient philosophers of antiquity. Our reproachers fortunately possessed the arts, and even the learning, which we were willing by travel and costs to acquire. “The Islanders” may have combined all the knowledge of all the world, a freedom and enlargement of the mind, which those, however more fortunately placed, can rarely possess, who restrict their locality and narrow their comprehension by their own home-bound limits.

The king, delighting in poetry, fostered an English muse in the learned rhyme of Stephen Hawes, who was admitted to his private chamber, for the pleasure which Henry experienced in listening to poetic recitation. It was probably the taste of his royal master which inspired this bard’s allegorical romance of chivalry, of love, and of science. This elaborate work is “The Pastime of Pleasure, or the History of Graunde Amour and la bell Pucell, containing the knowledge of the seven sciences and the course of man’s life.” At a time when sciences had no reality, they were constantly alluding to them; ignorance hardily imposed its erudition; and experimental philosophy only terminated in necromancy. The seven sciences of the accomplished gentleman were those so well known, comprised in the scholastic distich.

In the ideal hero “Graunde Amour,” is shadowed forth the education of a complete gentleman of that day. From the Tower of “Doctrine,” to the Castle of “Chivalry,” the way lies equally open, but the progress is diversified by many bye-paths, and a number of personified ideas or allegorical characters. These shadowy actors lead to shadowy places; but the abounding incidents relieve us among this troop of passionless creatures.

This fiction blends allegory with romance, and science with chivalry. At the early period of printing, it was probably the first volume which called in the graver’s art to heighten the inventions of the writer, and the accompanying wood-cuts are an evidence of the elegant taste of the author, although that morose critic of all poesy, honest Anthony à Wood, sarcastically concludes that these cuts were “to enable the reader to understand the story better.” This once courtly volume, our sage reports, “is now thought but worthy of a ballad-monger’s stall.”[2] “The Pastime of Pleasure” was even despised by that great book-collector, General Lord Fairfax, who, on the copy he possessed, has left a memorandum “that it should be changed for a better book!” The fate of books vacillates with the fancies of book-lovers, and the improvements of a later age. In the days of Fairfax, the gloom of the civil wars annihilated their imaginations.

But the gorgeousness of this romance struck the Gothic fancy of the historian of our poetry, magic, chivalry, and allegory! In the circumstantial analysis of Warton, the reader may pursue his “course of man’s life” through the windings of the labyrinth. It seems as if the patience of the critic had sought a relief amid his prolonged chronicle of obscure versifiers, in a production of imagination, the only one which had appeared since Chaucer, and which, to the contemplative poetic antiquary, showed him the infant rudiments of the future Spenser.