A Literary History of the English People, from the Origins to the Renaissance

by J. J. Jusserand

With Gavin Douglas, bishop of Dunkeld, of the illustrious house of the Douglas, earls of Angus, the translator of Virgil, and with William Dunbar, a mendicant friar, favourite of James IV., sent by him on missions to London and Paris, we cross the threshold of a new century; they die in the midst of the Renaissance, but with them, nevertheless, the Chaucerian tradition is continued. Douglas writes a "Palice of Honour," imitated from Chaucer.[852] Dunbar,[853] with never flagging spirit, attempts every style; he composes sentimental allegories and coarse tales (very coarse indeed), satires, parodies, laments.[854] His fits of melancholy do not last long; he must be ill to be sad; however keen his satires, they are the work of an optimist; they end with laughter and not with tears. He is nearer to Jean des Entommeures than to William Langland.

His principal poems, "The Goldyn Targe," on the targe or shield of Reason exposed to the shafts of Love; "Thrissil and the Rois" (thistle and rose) are close imitations of the Chaucer of the "Parlement of Foules" and of the "Hous of Fame," with the same allegories, the same abstract personages, the same flowers, and the same perfumes. The "Thrissil and the Rois," written about 1503, celebrates the marriage of Margaret, rose of England, daughter of Henry VII., to James IV., thistle of Scotland, the flower with a purple crown: that famous marriage which was to result in a union of both countries under the same sceptre.

Endowed with an ever-ready mind and an unfailing power of invention, Dunbar, following his natural tastes, and wishing, at the same time, to imitate Chaucer, decks his pictures with glaring colours, and "out-Chaucers Chaucer." His flowers are too flowery, his odours too fragrant; by moments it is no longer a delight, but almost a pain. It is not sufficient that his birds should sing, they must sing among perfumes, and these perfumes are coloured; they sing

Amang the tendir odouris reid and quhyt.[855]

These are undoubted signs of decline; they are found, in different degrees, among the poets of England and of Scotland, nearly without exception. The anonymous poems, "The Flower and the Leaf," "The Court of Love," &c.,[856] imitated from Chaucer, exhibit the same symptoms. The only ones who escape are, chiefly in the region of the Scottish border, those unknown singers who derive their inspiration directly from the people, who leave books alone, and who would not be found, like Henryson, sitting by the fireside with "Troilus" on their knees. These singers remodel in their turn ballads that will be remade after them,[857] and which have come down stirring and touching; love-songs, doleful ditties, the ride of the Percy and the Douglas[858] ("Chevy Chase"), that, in spite of his classic tastes, Philip Sidney admired in the time of Elizabeth. Though declining in castles, poetry still thrills with youth along the hedges and in the copses; and the best works of poets with a name like Dunbar or Henryson are those in which are found an echo of the songs of the woods and moors. This same echo lends its charm to the music of the "Nut-brown Maid,"[859] that exquisite love-duo, a combination of popular and artistic poetry written by a nameless author, towards the end of the period, and the finest of the "disputoisons" in English literature.

But apart from the songs the wayfarer hums along the lanes, the works of the poets most appreciated at that time, Lydgate, Henryson, Dunbar, Stephen Hawes,[860] represent a dying art; they write as architects build, and their literature is a florid one; their poems are in Henry VII.'s style. Their roses are splendid, but too full-blown; they have expended all their strength, all their beauty, all their fragrance; no store of youth is left to them; they have given it all away; and what happens to such roses? They shed their leaves; of this past glory there will soon remain nothing save a stalk without petals.

III.

The end of the feudal world has come, its literature is dying out; but at the same time a double revival is preparing. The revival most difficult to follow, but not the least considerable, originated in the middle and lower classes of society. While great families destroy each other, humble ones thrive: only lately has this fact been sufficiently noticed. So long as the historian was only interested in battles and in royal quarrels, the fifteenth century in England was considered by every one, except by that keen observer, Commines, to be the time of the war of the Two Roses, of the murder of Edward's children, and nothing else. It seemed as though the blood of the youthful princes had stained the entire century, and as if the whole nation, stunned with horror, had remained aghast and immobile. Curiosity has been felt in our days as to whether this impression was a correct one, and it has been ascertained to be false. Instead of being absorbed in the contemplation of these dreadful struggles, holding its breath at the sight of the slaughter, the nation paid very little attention to them, and regarded these doings in the light of "res inter alios acta."

Feudalism was perishing, as human organisations often perish, from the very fact of its having attained its full development; feudal nobles had so long towered above the people that they were now almost completely severed from them; feudalism had pushed its principle so far that it was about to die, like the over-blown roses of Dunbar. While the nobles and their followers, that crowd of bravi that the statutes against maintenance had vainly tried to suppress, strewed the fields of Wakefield, Towton, and Tewkesbury with their corpses, the real nation, the mass of the people, stood apart and was engaged in a far different occupation. It strove to enrich itself, and was advancing by degrees towards equality between citizens. A perusal of the innumerable documents of that epoch, which have been preserved and which concern middle classes, leave a decided impression of peaceful development, of loosening of bondage, of a diffusion of comfort. The time is becoming more remote, when some sat on thrones and others on the ground; it begins to be suspected that one day perhaps there may be chairs for everybody. In the course of an examination bearing on thousands of documents, Thorold Rogers found but two allusions to the civil wars.[861] The duration of these wars must not, besides, be exaggerated; by adding one period of hostilities to another it will be found they lasted three years in all.