Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/528

interest to the student, but certain anonymous poets, such as the authors of "The Flower and the Leaf" and "London Lickpenny" (formerly given to Lydgate), succeeded better than they, and the latter poem shows that Chaucer's power of social satire had not disappeared. Satire, as always in the decline after a rich imaginative period of verse, came to the front as subject-matter for verse, and later in the century the scathing verse of John Skelton (1460?-1529), though poor as art, is of interest in the light it throws upon the social life of the times. This poet and Stephen Hawes (d. 1523?), who tried in the "Pastime of Pleasure" to revive the old allegorical style, are the only English names of any note in verse in the latter part of the century. In Scotland, however, the followers of Chaucer, of whom the chief were King James I, Dunbar, Henryson, and Gawain Douglas, were producing and continued to produce poetry worthy of immortality.

Fifteenth-century prose was less barren than the poetry of the age.

John Milton
After Painting by Peter van der Plas,
National Portrait Gallery, London

Since the Conquest, nearly all serious subject-matter, with few exceptions, had been written of in Latin, but with the invention of printing, and as the power to read and write spread downwards, English prose became more widely recognized as a medium for the treatment of many varied as well as more popular kinds of matter. Four names—Pecock, Fortescue, Caxton, Malory—are recognized as leaders of this movement, but out of their work only Sir Thomas Malory's has become classic. His "Morte D'Arthur", which draws together as many stories and series of stories about King Arthur as he could lay hands upon, is a work of genius, and remains a living book. Its matter is of great intrinsic value and interest, but it is the beauty of its strange childlike style, its un-self-conscious appreciation of lovely and noble things in man and nature, and its underlying religious mysticism, which make it a book of the first order.

The medieval drama, which grew up during these centuries, was, with one or two exceptions, not the work of poets or literary artists, yet it was one of the most educative influences of the time. Beginning in connection with the liturgy of the Church, there gradually developed a whole cycle of religious plays, showing forth the history of the world from the Creation to the Last Judgment. These, acted in a series, in public places of the towns, at certain great church festivals, provided as much instruction as amusement. There is no doubt that, in spite of passages in them which may now seem to us materialistic or irreverent, these simple and rude dramatic representations, both. miracle-plays and the later developed moralities, pressed home great religious truths upon the people. From the point of view of the development of drama, we may say that English tragedy and comedy have, at least to some extent, their roots in these crude plays in doggerel verse.

Leaving the Middle Ages behind us, we come now to the threshold of the most fateful epoch in the history of the English people—the disruption of the Church, or the so-called "Reformation". This was preceded and accompanied by the earlier movement called the "Renaissance", which, having opened up fresh branches of classical learning, more especially that of Greek poetry and philosophy, awakened and stimulated the human mind both to good and to evil. In England the "New Learning" movement, in the hands of men like More and Colet tended to enlightenment and true learning. The "Utopia" of Sir Thomas More, a book of the noblest ideals, represents its spirit at the best. But the effect of the Renaissance on the manners and morals of those Englishmen who came back imbued with its intoxication from Italy, was much lamented by contemporary writers, as we find in Ascham's "Schoolmaster". Yet it is to this acquaintance with Italy and its literature that we owe the revival of English poetry after its long relapse since the death of Chaucer. In the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt and of the Earl of Surrey, young men who had studied and felt the beauty and power of the great Italian poets, we discover a new beginning, a new poetic art. It was yet uncertain of itself, experimental, hesitating, and not engaged with deep or very noble subject-matter, but, while observing certain common laws of scansion and diction which the last one hundred years had ignored, attempted new and better melodies.

The publication of Totters "Miscellany" in 1557. which contains the work of these two poets, marks an epoch in literature. It set up a standard of poetic art below which no future work could sink. The literary world of that age grew full of expectation looking for a new poet who should embody still more fully the poetic ideals of the time.

The new poet came in Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). Seldom has a young writer been so immediately recognized and acclaimed by the accredited literary judges of his own time as Spenser was. And posterity has agreed with their judgment. He forms the second great landmark in English poetry after Chaucer, from whom he received inspiration. He had been bred in the stimulating atmosphere of the new learning and was greatly influenced by classic and Italian literature, but he also appreciated earlier English literature, and the only master he openly acknowledged was Chaucer. Spenser's poetry throughout is of wonderful beauty in its art, and is marked by nobility of aim, purity of spirit, and reverence for religion. His "minor poems" are many, and as Professor Saintsbury remarks, would be "major poems" for any smaller poet. He was, for example, a satirist of no mean order and a sonneteer, but in the general judgment, and rightly, Spenser is the poet of the "Faerie Queene". All his special powers are shown there, and all his character, one might almost say all his history. The large allegorical ground-plan of the "Faerie Queene", not half completed., interesting as it is, does not form tire great attraction of the poem. That lies in the pure and appealing beauty of the versification, in the varied and glorious description, often minutely detailed, in the wealth of imagination, and in the impassioned love of everything beautiful which enthrals the reader as it did the poet. That there are flaws in the poem goes without saying, more especially as Spenser died leaving it half finished.

The complete plan of the work cannot be gathered from the poem itself. Spenser's letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, prefixed to all editions, is necessary to make it clear. "The center falls outside the circle." For Catholics, too, the historical allegory is seriously marred by the anti-Catholic bias of the poet's time.