Ephemera Critica; Or, Plain Truths About Current Literature

by John Churton Collins

[25] A Literary History of the English People from the Origins to the Renaissance. By J. J. Jusserand.

There is a breeziness and hilarity, a gay irresponsibility and abandon, about M. Jusserand which is perfectly delightful. He is the very Autolycus of History and Criticism. What more sober students, who have some conscience to trouble them, are "toiling all their lives to find" appears to be his as a sort of natural right. The fertility of his genius is such, that it seems to blossom spontaneously into erudition. Like the lilies he toils not, but unlike the lilies he spins, and very pretty gossamer too. It is impossible to take him seriously.

The truth is that M. Jusserand belongs to a class of writers which, thanks to indulgent publishers, a more indulgent public, and most indulgent reviewers, is just now greatly in the ascendant. "Encyclopædical heads," who took all knowledge for their province, probably died with Bacon, but encyclopædical heads who take all Literature or all History for their province appear to be as common as the "excellence" which, in opposition to Matthew Arnold's opinion, the American lady maintained was so abundant on both sides of the Atlantic. These are the gentlemen who complacently sit down "to edit the Literatures of the world," or "to trace the development of the human race, from its picturesque cradle in the valleys of Central Asia, to its infinite ramifications in our own day"—within "the moderate compass of an octavo volume."

M. Jusserand's first feat is to dispose of some six centuries in ninety-three pages, in a narrative which simply tells over again, though certainly after a more jaunty fashion, what Ten Brink, Henry Morley, and others have told much more seriously, and, we may add, much more effectively. The Norman Conquest and an account of the Anglo-Norman literature occupy about a hundred and ten pages, while some eighty pages more, dealing with the fusion of the races and the gradual evolution of the English people and language, bring us to Chaucer. It might have been expected that M. Jusserand would have justified his survey of a period so often reviewed before, either by tracing, with more fulness and precision than his predecessors, the successive stages in the development of our nationality and its expression in literature, or by adding to our knowledge of the characteristics and peculiarities of the literature itself. He has done neither. He has, on the contrary, obscured the first by the constant introduction of irrelevant matter, and he has apparently no notion of the relative importance of the authors on whose works he dilates or touches. Thus Richard Rolle of Hampole fills more space than Layamon, whose work is despatched in a page! Thus two lines in a note suffice for the Ormulum, two lines for Mannyng's Handlyng of Synne, a singularly interesting and significant work, ten lines for Robert of Gloucester, who is rather perplexingly described as "a distant ancestor of Gibbon and Macaulay," while four pages are accorded to Tristan and five to the Roman du Renart. How the Latin Chroniclers fare may be judged from the fact that a little more than a page serves for Geoffrey of Monmouth, a line for Ordericus Vitalis, and two for Giraldus Cambrensis. In the chapter on Chaucer M. Jusserand does more justice to his subject, and it is to be regretted for his own sake that he has not confined himself to such essays. He is never safe except when he is on the beaten path. Nothing could be more inadequate than the section on Gower. It certainly indicates that M. Jusserand is not very familiar with the Confessio Amantis. Not one word is said about the remarkable prologue, and to dismiss such a work in less than three pages, observing that "it contains a hundred and twelve short stories, two or three of which are very well told, one, the adventure of Florent, being, perhaps, related even better than in Chaucer," is not quite what we should expect in a work purporting to narrate the "literary history of the English people." M. Jusserand has not even taken the trouble to keep pace with modern investigation in his subject, but actually tells us that Gower's Speculum Meditantis is lost! If Gower's writings are not of much intrinsic value, they are of immense importance from an historical point of view. John de Trevisa, a most important name in the history of English prose, is despatched in eight lines of mere bibliographical information, without a word being said about his great services to our literature, and without any reference being made either to the remarkable preface to his great work, or to his version of the Dialogue attributed to Occam.

The only satisfactory chapter in the book is the chapter dealing with Langland and his works; but it is certainly surprising that no account should be given of the very remarkable anonymous poem entitled Piers Ploughman's Crede. Again, whole departments of literature, such as the Metrical Romances, the Laies, Fabliaux, early lyrics and ballads, are most inadequately treated, some of the most memorable and typical being not even specified. Surely Minot was not a man to be dismissed, with a flippant joke, in half a page, or King Horn and Havelok poems to be relegated to passing reference in a note.

But it is in dealing with the literature of the fifteenth century that M. Jusserand's superficiality and, to put it plainly, incompetence for his ambitious task become most deplorably apparent. In treating the earlier periods he had trustworthy guides even in common manuals, and he could not go far wrong in accepting their generalizations and statements. Books easily attainable, and indeed in everybody's hands, could enable him to dance airily through the Anglo-Saxon literature and through the period between Layamon and Chaucer. No one can now very well go wrong in Chaucer and his contemporaries, who has at his side some half-dozen works which any library can supply. But it is otherwise with the literature of the fifteenth century. Here, as every one who happens to have paid particular attention to it knows, popular manuals and histories are most misleading guides. Deterred, no doubt, by the prolixity of the poetry and by the comparatively uninteresting nature of the prose literature, modern historians and critics have contented themselves with accepting the verdicts of Warton and his followers, who probably had as little patience as themselves; and so a kind of conventional estimate has been formed, which appears and reappears in every manual and handbook. We turned, therefore, with much curiosity to this portion of M. Jusserand's work. We had, we own, our suspicions about his first-hand knowledge of the literature through which he glided so easily in the earlier portions of his book, and here, we thought, would be the crucial test of his pretension to original scholarship. Would he do voluminous Lydgate the justice which, as the specialist knows, has so long been withheld from him? Would he point out the strong human interest of Hoccleve; the great historical interest of Hardyng; the power and beauty of the ballads; or, if he included Hawes within the century, would he show what a singularly interesting poem, intrinsically and historically, the Pastime of Pleasure really is? If, again, he included the Scotch poets, how would he deal with the problems presented by Huchown? Would he accord the proper tribute to the genius of Dunbar; would he estimate what poetry owes respectively to James I., Henry the Minstrel, Robert Henryson, and Gavin Douglas? In our prose literature, would he comment on the great importance of Pecock's memorable work, of Fortescue's two treatises, of the Paston Letters, of Caxton's various publications? How would he deal with the one "classical" work of the century, Malory's Morte d'Arthur?

Now, of Lydgate, "to enumerate whose pieces," says Warton, "would be to write the catalogue of a little library," it is not too much to say that he was one of the most richly gifted of our old poets, that as a descriptive poet he stands almost on the level of Chaucer, that his pictures of Nature are among the gems of their kind, that his pathos is often exquisite, "touching," as Gray said of him, "the very heartstrings of compassion with so masterly a hand as to merit a place among the greatest of poets." His humour is often delightful, and his pictures of contemporary life, such as his London Lickpenny and his Prologue to the Storie of Thebes, are as vivid as Chaucer's. In versatility he has no rival among his predecessors and contemporaries. Gray notices that, at times, he approaches sublimity. His style often is beautiful,—fluent, copious, and at its best eminently musical. The influence which he exercised on subsequent English and Scotch literature would alone entitle him to a prominent position in any history of English poetry. But the handbooks think otherwise, and he occupies just three pages in M. Jusserand's work, the only estimate of his work being confined to the assertion that "he was a worthy man if ever there was one, industrious and prolific," etc., and the only criticism is the remark that his "prosody was rather lax." And this is how poor Lydgate fares at our historian's hands. To Hoccleve are assigned just one page and a few lines. Hardyng figures only in the bibliography at the bottom of a page. The ballads are despatched in fifteen lines. Hawes' Pastime of Pleasure, memorable alike both for the preciseness with which it marks the transition from the poetry of mediævalism to that of the Renaissance, for its probable influence on Spenser, and for its intrinsic charm, its pathos, its picturesqueness, and its sweet and plaintive music, is curtly dismissed, as the handbooks dismiss it, as "an allegory of unendurable dulness." If M. Jusserand would throw aside the manuals and turn to the original, he would probably see reason to modify his verdict. Our author's breathless gallop through the Scotch poets, to whom he allots nine pages, can only be regarded with silent astonishment by readers who happen to known anything about those most remarkable men. Huchown is not so much as mentioned. The amazing nonsense which he writes in summing up Dunbar, we will transcribe, ut ex uno discas omnia:

"Dunbar, with never-flagging spirit, attempts every style.... 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."

Has M. Jusserand ever read The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, The Twa Maryit Wemen and the Wedo, and the minor poems of Dunbar? If he has, would he pronounce that these "flowers" are "too flowery"—these "odours" "too fragrant," or would he feel the absurdity of generalizing on ludicrously insufficient knowledge? His verdicts on the other Scotch poets are marked by the same superficiality, and we regret to add flippancy. To class Henryson among poets whose style is "florid" and whose roses are "splendid but too full-blown" is to show that M. Jusserand knows as little about him as he seems to know about Dunbar. In all Henryson's poems there are only three short passages which could by any possibility be described as florid. The prose of the fifteenth century fares even worse at his hands. Capgrave is mentioned only in the bibliography! Of the interest and importance of Pecock, historically and intrinsically, he appears to have no conception; on the real significance of the Repressor he never even touches, and how indeed could he in the less than one page which is assigned to one of the most remarkable writers in the fifteenth century? A page suffices for the Paston Letters, and four lines for Malory's Morte d'Arthur!

Now we would ask M. Jusserand, in all seriousness, what possible end can be served by a book of this kind, except the encouragement of everything that is detestable to the real scholar: superficiality, want of thoroughness, and false assumption, and what is more, the public dissemination of error, and of crude and misleading judgments. Such a work as the present, the soundness and trustworthiness of which ninety-nine readers in every hundred must necessarily take for granted, can only be justified when it proceeds from one who is a master of his immense subject, from one whose generalizations are based on amply sufficient knowledge, whose suppressions and omissions spring neither from carelessness nor from ignorance, but from discrimination, and in whose statements and judgments implicit reliance can be placed. To none of these qualifications has M. Jusserand the smallest pretension.