personal and incommunicable element, technical gains are a common possession; that after Marlowe had developed the technique of blank verse, this technique was available for all; that after Pope had mastered the heroic couplet and Gray the ode, and Poe the short story, all men could write couplets and odes and short stories of technical correctness; that, as Tennyson puts it,
| “All can grow the flower now, For all have got the seed.” |
But this was singularly untrue of the technical gains made by Chaucer and his great contemporaries. Pearl and Patience were apparently unknown to the 15th century, but Gawayne and Piers Plowman and Chaucer’s works were known and were influential in one way or another throughout the century. Gawayne called into existence a large number of romances dealing with the same hero or with somewhat similar situations, some of them written in verse suggested by the remarkable verse of their model, but the resemblance, even in versification, is only superficial. Piers Plowman gave rise to satirical allegories written in the alliterative long line and furnished the figures and the machinery for many satires in other metres, but the technical excellence of the first Piers Plowman poem was soon buried for centuries under the tremendous social significance of itself and its successors. And Chaucer, in spite of the fact that he was praised and imitated by many writers and definitely claimed as master by more than one, not only transmitted to them scarcely any of the technical conquests he had made, but seems also to have been almost without success in creating any change in the taste of the public that read his poems so eagerly, any demand for better literature than had been written by his predecessors.
Wide and lasting Chaucer’s influence undoubtedly was. Not only was all the court-poetry, all the poetry of writers who pretended to cultivation and refinement, throughout the century, in England and Scotland, either directly or indirectly imitative of his work, but even the humblest productions of unpretentious writers show at times traces of his influence. Scotland was fortunate in having writers of greater ability than England had (see Scotland: Literature). In England the three chief followers of Chaucer known to us by name are Lydgate, Hoccleve (see Occleve) and Hawes. Because of their praise of Chaucer and their supposed personal relations to him, Lydgate and Hoccleve are almost inseparable in modern discussions, but 15th century readers and writers appear not to have associated them very closely. Indeed, Hoccleve is rarely mentioned, while Lydgate is not only mentioned continually, but continually praised as Chaucer’s equal or even superior. Hoccleve was not, to be sure, as prolific as Lydgate, but it is difficult to understand why his work, which compares favourably in quality with Lydgate’s, attracted so much less attention. The title of his greatest poem, De regimine principum, may have repelled readers who were not princely born, though they would have found the work full of the moral and prudential maxims and illustrative anecdotes so dear to them; but his attack upon Sir John Oldcastle as a heretic ought to have been decidedly to the taste of the orthodox upper classes, while his lamentations over his misspent youth, his tales and some of his minor poems might have interested any one. Of a less vigorous spirit than Lydgate, he was, in his mild way, more humorous and more original. Also despite his sense of personal loss in Chaucer’s death and his care to transmit to posterity the likeness of his beloved master, he seems to have been less slavish than Lydgate in imitating him. His memory is full of Chaucer’s phrases, he writes in verse-forms hallowed by the master’s use, and he tries to give to his lines the movement of Chaucer’s decasyllables, but he is comparatively free from the influence of those early allegorical works of the Master which produced in the 15th century so dreary a flock of imitations.
Lydgate’s productivity was enormous,—how great no man can say, for, as was the case with Chaucer also, his fame caused many masterless poems to be ascribed to him, but, after making all necessary deductions, the amount of verse that has come down to us from him is astonishing. Here it may suffice to say that his translations are predominantly epic (140,000 lines), and his original compositions predominantly allegorical love poems or didactic poems. If there is anything duller than a dull epic it is a dull allegory, and Lydgate has achieved both. This is not to deny the existence of good passages in his epics and ingenuity in his allegories, but there is no pervading, persistent life in either. His epics, like almost all the narrative verse of the time, whether epic, legend, versified chronicle or metrical romance, seem designed merely to satisfy the desire of 15th century readers for information, the craving for facts—true or fictitious—the same craving that made possible the poems on alchemy, on hunting, on manners and morals, on the duties of parish priests, on the seven liberal arts. His allegories, like most allegories of the age, are ingenious rearrangements of old figures and old machinery, they are full of what had once been imagination but had become merely memory assisted by cleverness. The great fault of all his work, as of nearly all the literature of the age, is that it is merely a more or less skilful manipulation of what the author had somewhere read or heard, and not a faithful transcript of the author’s own peculiar sense or conception of what he had seen or heard or read. The fault is not that the old is repeated, that a twice-told tale is retold, but that it is retold without being re-imagined by the teller of the tale, without taking on from his personality something that was not in it before. Style, to be sure, was a thing that Lydgate and his fellows tried to supply, and some of them supplied it abundantly according to their lights. But style meant to them external decoration, classical allusions, personifications, an inverted or even dislocated order of words, and that famous “ornate diction,” those “aureate terms,” with which they strove to surpass the melody, picturesqueness and dignity which, for all its simplicity, they somehow dimly discerned in the diction of Chaucer.
Stephen Hawes, with his allegorical treatise on the seven liberal sciences, came later than these men, only to write worse. He was a disciple of Lydgate rather than of Chaucer, and is not only lacking in the vigour and sensitiveness which Lydgate sometimes displays, but exaggerates the defects of his master. If it be a merit to have conceived the pursuit of knowledge under the form of the efforts of a knight to win the hand of his lady, it is almost the sole merit to which Hawes can lay claim. Two or three good situations, an episode of low comedy, and the epitaph of the Knight with its famous final couplet, exhaust the list of his credits. The efforts that have been made to trace through Hawes the line of Spenser’s spiritual ancestry seem not well advised. The resemblances that have been pointed out are such as arise inevitably from the allegories and from the traditional material with which both worked. There is no reason to believe that Spenser owed his general conception to Hawes, or that the Faëry Queene would have differed in even the slightest detail from its present form if the Pastime of Pleasure had never been written. The machinery of chivalric romance had already been applied to spiritual and moral themes in Spain without the aid of Hawes.
It is obvious that the fundamental lack of all these men was imaginative power, poetic ability. This is a sufficient reason for failure to write good poetry. But why did not men of better ability devote themselves to literature in this age? Was it because of the perturbed conditions arising from the prevalence of foreign and civil wars? Perhaps not, though it is clear that if Sir Thomas Malory had perished in one of the many fights through which he lived, the chivalric and literary impulses which he perhaps received from the “Fadre of Curteisy,” Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, would have gone for nothing and we should lack the Morte Darthur. But it may very well be that the wars and the tremendous industrial growth of England fixed the attention of the strongest and most original spirits among the younger men and so withdrew them from the possible attractions of literature. But, after all, whatever general truth may lie in such speculations, the way of a young man with his own life is as incalculable as any of the four things which Agur son of Jakeh declared to be past finding out; local
