No More Learning

The most curious thing, however, is that the unknown author,
while making this singular blunder as to his form-a blunder
which he could only have exceeded by going directly in the teeth
of the disclaimer of alliterative rhythm in The Parson's Prologue
-is not by any means so un-Chaucerian in matter and temper.
The prologue, which is a fairly lively account of how the pilgrims
occupied themselves when they reached Canterbury, busies itself
especially with the adventures of the pardoner and his beguile-
ment by an insinuating but trcacherous 'tappestere' or barmaid.
The substance of this is not looser than that of The Miller's and
Reeve's Tales, and the narrative power is by no means incon-
siderable. As for The Second Merchant's Tale, which starts the
homeward series, it is a story (drawn from a French original) of
commercial adventure and beguilement in foreign parts which,
though rather long and complicated, by no means lacks interest or,
again, narrative power, and fully deserves the pains spent upon
it by Furnivall, Clouston and others in the Chaucer Society's
edition; indeed, it is to be regretted that it is not included in
Skeat's edition of Chaucer and Chauceriana. But Chaucer's
own it cannot possibly be any more than Gamelyn itself, which
was, possibly, its model.
The other pieces, though of various literary merit, all obey, in
measure and degree, the rules of regular metre. The least good
of them is La Belle Dame sans Merci, translated from Alain
Chartier (who, beyond all doubt, wrote the original after Chaucer's
death), and now attributed, on MS authority, to Sir Richard Ros,
who may have written it about the middle of the fifteenth century
or a little later. It is partly in rime royal, partly in octaves, and
is a heavy thing, showing the characteristic, if not the worst, faults
of that rhétoriqueur school, of which Chartier was the precursor, if
not the actual leader.
Very much better is The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, some-
times also called The Book of Cupid God of Love, which, as a
MS has the quasi-signature of 'explicit Clanvowe,' is assigned to
a certain Sir Thomas Clanvowe, a Herefordshire gentleman, of
whom we find mention in the very year after Chaucer's death
(1401), as well as seven years earlier and three later. It is, there-
fore, practically Chaucerian in date if not in authorship, being the
only one of these pieces which can be brought so close to him.
And it is, accordingly, very noteworthy as showing that all writers
of the time did not adopt the severe rime system attributed to


## p. 217 (#235) ############################################

The Cuckoo and the
Nightingale, etc. 217
Chaucer himself in the matter of the final -e, while Clanvowe's
use of that suffix within the line is also different. The poem is
one of great attractiveness-quite independently of the fact that
Milton evidently refers to it in an early sonnet. It is written in
an unusual metre-a quintet of decasyllables of rimed aabba-
which has no small harmony; and, numerous as are the pieces
which deal with May mornings and bird-songs, it may keep its
place with the best of them, while it has an additional hold on
literary history as suggesting one of the earliest of possibly original
Middle English poems--The Owl and the Nightingale. There
is some idea that it may have been written in connection with the
marriage of Henry IV to Joan of Navarre,
Of the three pieces which remain, one, The Assembly of Ladies,
was rejected by Tyrwhitt and is of considerably less literary merit
and interest than the other two, though, by some of those who are
most certain of these not being Chaucer's, it is considered to be by
the same author as The Flower and the Leaf. All three, it may
be observed, are in rime royal. The Assembly, for which we have
two MSS as well as Thynne's edition of 1532, purports, as does
The Flower and the Leaf, to be written by a woman. It is of the
allegorical type, and contains elaborate descriptions of the house
and gardens of Loyalty, with a porter Countenance, a guide
Diligence and so forth. There are references to the (Chaucerian)
stories of Phyllis and Demophoon, of Anelida and Arcite, etc.
The descriptions of dress are very full; but the poem comes to no
particular end. It has all the character of having been written
by an ardent and fairly careful student of Chaucer who possessed
no poetical gift. The rimes, the grammar and the use of the final
-e digress considerably from the standard adopted as Chaucerian.
But the fact is that, as Tyrwhitt saw, there is no reason for attri-
buting this poem to him. It is quite evidently—to anyone fairly
skilled in literary criticism proper-a school copy, and not by any
means a very good one.
The case is different with the two others, The Flower and the
Leaf and The Court of Love. To begin with, the positive external
evidence in their favour is of the weakest kind-is, indeed, next to
non-existent. Of The Flower and the Leaf we have no MS what-
soever, though one is said to have been heard of; and it was not
even admitted to the printed works till 1597—8 by Speght. The
Court of Love had been printed by Stow in 1561, and we have,
apparently, the MS which he used; but there is no other, and this
would not appear to be much older than the date of the print.


## p. 218 (#236) ############################################

218 The English Chaucerians
Yet, further, it is evident that, if either poem was written anywhere
near Chaucer's time, it must have been considerably tampered
with by scribes. In The Court of Love, particularly, there is a
remarkable jumble of archaic and modernised forms, which has
led some to think that it was forged by a writer who actually
had Thynne's Chaucer, as well as works by Lydgate and other
Chaucerians before him.
It will be observed that this is rather a dangerous argument,
because it admits the strongly Chaucerian character of the poem:
and, indeed, this may be asserted of both pieces. They are, in fact,
so good and so Chaucerian that it is not too much to say that,
between Chaucer himself and Wyatt (whose manner they do not
in the least resemble), we know of no southern English poet who
could have written either, and must place two anonymi at the
head of the actual list. But, in face of the philological difficulties
above stated, and of the fact that there is absolutely no internal
claim to Chaucerian authorship-the daughter,' who is spoken to
in The Flower, is unnamed, and the author of The Court styles
himself 'Philogenet, of Cambridge, clerk'—it is impossible to
pronounce them Chaucer's. Yet it must be pointed out that the
arguments against his authorship from the feminine attribution in
The Flower are absolutely valueless. Pushed to their legitimate
and logical conclusion, they would lead us to strike out The Wife
of Bath's Prologue, had it survived alone of The Canterbury
Tales. We do not know in whose mouth the author intended
to put the piece any more than we know who that author was.
Nor is the stress laid on description of dress much better. Was
Sir Piercie Shafton a lady, or John Chalkhill of Thealma and
Clearchus fame? It may be added that The Flower and the
Leaf is conjecturally put at about the middle of the fifteenth
century and The Court of Love at some half-century or even
three-quarters of a century later. But these dates are, admittedly,
guess-work.
What is not guess-work is the remarkable excellence of the
poems themselves, which have been too seldom considered of late
on their own merits, apart from polemical and really irrelevant
considerations. When we take The Flower and the Leaf in the
only text which we possess—not as vamped up to a possible or
impossible Chaucerian norm-we find in it more than a trace of
that curious prosodic vertigo which seems to have beset the whole
fifteenth century. There is not only uncertainty about the use of
the final -e as a syllable, and a vacillating sense of its value; but,


## p. 219 (#237) ############################################

The Flower and the
and the Leaf
219
though the decasyllable is not extended in the wild fashion which
we find from Lydgate downwards, it is often cut short, sometimes
to the Chaucerian, and even the Lydgatian, ‘nine'-sometimes to
a frank dimeter. But these shortcomings, most of which are, at
least possibly, scribal, do not interfere with the general smooth-
ness of the metre; nor do a few infelicities of diction (such as
the comparison of grass to 'green wool') interfere with its
attractiveness, in that respect also unusual for its time, undue
aureation and undue beggarliness being equally avoided. Still,
the great charm of the piece is a certain nameless grace of choice,
arrangement and handling of subject. The main theme, which
has some connection with the story of Rosiphele in Confessio
Amantis, and which, in another way, is anticipated by Chaucer
himself in The Legend of Good Women, is an allegory-not,
perhaps, exactly of chastity and unchastity, but of something like
the Uranian and Pandemic Venus, adjusted to medieval ideas and
personified by Diana and Flora respectively. Each of these has
her train of knights and ladies devoted to the Leaf (regarded as
something permanent), and the Flower (gay, but passing) and
wearing liveries of green and wbite. The lady who tells the tale
beholds the processions and sports of the two parties and the
small disaster, which, in the shape of a sudden squall of wind and
rain, tarnishes the finery of the Flower party, and drives them
and their queen to take shelter with the lady of the Leaf under
her greenery. The piece is not long-less than 600 lines—and
its scheme is quite common form : sleeplessness, early rising,
walk abroad and the like; but there is a singular brightness
and freshness over it all, together with a power of pre-Raphaelite
decoration and of vivid portraiture-even of such action as
there is—which is very rare. Indeed, out of Chaucer himself
and the original beginning of Guillaume de Lorris in the Roman
de la Rose, it would be difficult to find anything of the kind
better done.
For literary history, the interest of the poem is, of course,
increased by the fact that Dryden, having no doubts about its
being Chaucer's, took it for the canvas of one of his 'fable'
translations, and reproduced it with remarkable success on the
different system which he brought into play. But this neither
adds to, nor lessens, its intrinsic merit. It may, however, be added
that, though simpler and less pedantic, it has strong points of like-
ness to The Kingis Quair, and that, after a long and careful
reading, it gives the impression of having, though complete in


## p. 220 (#238) ############################################

220
The English Chaucerians
a
itself, been probably intended by its author, if not exactly as a
continuation of other pieces in a larger whole, at any rate as a
production to be taken in connection with them. This impression,
however, may be individual and arbitrary. The question of its
merit is a different one.
In The Court of Love, on the other hand, we are, at any rate
as to prosody, out of what has been called the 'period of
staggers'; and, perhaps, this is a stronger argument for a late
origin than some that have been advanced on that side—though
it opens fresh difficulties. The rime royal here is of an accomplish-
ment, an assured competence, which we do not find elsewhere
in southern English in any writer between Chaucer and Sackville.
The stanzas are frequently run on-not a common thing with this
metre, and, on the whole, not an improvement, because it destroys
the rest-effect of the final couplet. But, in themselves, and in the in-
dividual lines, there is plenty of spring and cadence. The language
is of a somewhat composite kind, showing aureation; and faults
are found with the grammar, while a great deal of indebtedness
to Lydgate has been urged. But, in fact, all these poets, and
Chaucer their master, had a community of goods in the matter of
phraseology. What is undeniable is that 'Philogenet,' if really
‘of Cambridge, clerk,' adds one to its nest of singing birds that
even the university of Spenser, Milton and Dryden cannot afford
to oust. He may be an interloper or a coiner, but his goods are
sound and his standard pretty high. The title of the piece—if the
obvious pitfall of mistaking the reference as being to the half-
fabulous, half-historical cours d'amour be avoided-speaks it
plainly enough. The poet strays to the palace of Citherea (near,
of course, the mount, instead of the isle, of 'Citheree ') finds
Alcestis and Admetus vice-king and queen there, and makes
interest with a lady of the court, one Philobone, who had been
a friend of his. She shows him over the palace, where he
beholds and rehearses at great length the statutes of love, some
of which are hard enough and, in fact, mere counsels of perfection.
He makes solemn profession, and is assigned as 'servant' to a
beautiful damsel, named Rosiall, whose heart is yet untouched
and by whom he is received with the proper mixture of cruelty and
kindness. After this he is once more consigned to Philobone to
see the rarities of the place. Various allegorical personages and
scenes pass before him: the most famous and beautiful of which is
the picture of those who have wilfully denied themselves love.
After a gap (of which there are more than one in the poem) Pity,
6


## p. 221 (#239) ############################################

The Court of Love
22 I
who has been lying tranced in a shrine, rises and bids Rosiall be
gracious to him; and the piece, which comes a little short of
1500 lines, ends with a charming, if not entirely original, bird chorus
to the initial words of favourite psalms and passages of Scripture,
the nightingale choosing Domine labia, the eagle Venite and the
throstle cock Te deum amoris, while the peacock appropriately
delivers Dominus regnavit.
The mere descriptions here are a little less artistic, and the
atmosphere and colouring of a less dewy freshness than in The
Flower and the Leaf; but a much larger range of qualities is
brought into play. The actual narrative power, which is apt to be
wofully wanting in these allegorical poems, is not small; and there
1;
is some character both about Philogenet and about 'little Philo-
bone,' though Rosiall, naturally, has not much to do save smile or
frown in look and speech. Further, there is not a little humour, and
the whole is distinctly free from the invertebrate character of the
usual fifteenth century poem; while, if we look to the parts,
very few stanzas out of the more than two hundred lack the
salt or the sweetness which are both constantly wanting at this
time. But there is no doubt that the episode of the repentant
ascetics and the conclusion are the choicest parts of the poem;
and that neither of them ought to be absent from any full and
representative collection of specimens of English poetry. The
special quality of the stanza, its power of expressing passion and
complaint, is thoroughly well brought out in the Regrets, and it is
very noteworthy that the running-on, which was commented on
above as a mistake, is not attempted in these places. It is, how-
ever, quite certain, even from this passage, that the sole MS is not
the original.
The conclusion, besides its intrinsic beauty, has (if it actually
be late) the interest of being one of the latest examples of a habit
which began quite early in Middle English, of mixing Latin phrases,
chiefly of the Scriptural kind. This became specially popular in
the late fifteenth century just before it died out; and we have re-
markable examples of it both from Skelton and Dunbar. But in
them it usually shows itself by taking whole lines of Latin, not, as
here, by interweaving scraps. The effect of the mixture is curiously
pleasing, if a little fantastic, and gives a kind of key to the
rhetorical attraction, in prose and poetic style, of the intermixture
of words of Romance and other origin.
Taking it altogether, if The Court of Love is to be placed within
the sixteenth century, we must regard it as the latest piece of


## p. 222 (#240) ############################################

222 The English Chaucerians
a
purely English poetry which exhibits strictly medieval character-
istics in a condition either genuine or quite astonishingly imitated
-the very last echo with us, putting aside examples in Scots, of
the actual music, the very last breath of the atmosphere, of The
Romance of the Rose. That it should have been written by
Chaucer, in its present state, is philologically impossible; that, in
any form, it was his, there is no evidence whatever to show. But
that it is good enough as literature to have been his, and strangely
like him in temper and complexion, may be laid down as a critical
certainty.


## p. 223 (#241) ############################################

CHAPTER IX
STEPHEN HAWES
IN the closing years of the fifteenth century and the
opening years of the sixteenth, the English language was still
in that stage of transition in which it had been for about a
century. The final -e, influential for much that is good in Chaucer
and for much that is bad in his successors, had now fallen into
disuse in the spoken language and accentuation, especially of words
borrowed from foreign tongues, was unstable. These, and other
linguistic developments, beginning at different times in different
localities and proceeding with varying rapidity, made it a matter
of considerable difficulty for the men of Henry VII's reign to
understand the speech of another shire than their own, or the
English of an older age.
In literature, too, the age was, in England, an age of transition;
for with the end of other currents of medieval activity came the
end of what had been the main stream of medieval literature.
Popular poetry and morality plays flourished, history written in
English made tentative efforts, but the court poetry of the
Chaucerian tradition came to a stop in Stephen Hawes, who,
amid the men of the new age, stands out as a survivor of the
past, one born an age too late. He felt his solitariness, and in
his most important work, The Passetyme of Pleasure, chap. XIV,
he lamented that he remained the only faithful votary of true poetry.
And, if we bear in mind his idea of poetry as essentially allegorical
and didactic, we must allow that he had good cause for his lament.
When we omit Skelton as standing apart in a niche of his own, we
see that, though many songs and ballads of unknown authorship
and-if one view be correct those Chaucerian poems, The Flower
and the Leaf, The Assembly of Ladies, The Court of Love,
belong to this period, Hawes occupies a position of peculiar
isolation. In this dearth of poets, it need not surprise us that
* Frenchman, the blind Bernard André of Toulouse, author of
Les Douze Triomphes de Henry VII, a poem in which the


## p. 224 (#242) ############################################

224
Stephen Hawes
labours of Hercules form a framework for the king's exploits,
was created poet laureate by Henry VII, who preferred French
literature to any other.
Hawes is supposed to have been born in the county of Suffolk,
where the name was common. The date of his birth is uncertain.
In The Passetyme, he more than once identifies himself with the
hero, who, in one passage, is said to be thirty-one years old. The
poem was written, according to Wynkyn de Worde, in 1505—6;
and, if Hawes himself was then thirty-one years of age, we get
1474–5 as the date of his birth-an inference quite consistent
with our other information. He was educated at Oxford and
afterwards visited several foreign universities. His acquirements,
linguistic and literary, recommended him to Henry VII, whose
household he entered as groom of the chamber. Anthony à Wood
states that the king's favour was gained by Hawes's facetious
discourse and prodigious memory: he could repeat most of the
English poets, especially Lydgate. Entries in the public records
show that, in 1506, Hawes was paid ten shillings for'a ballet that
he gave to the king's grace. ' From Henry VIII's accounts we
learn that in January 1521 'M' Hawse' was paid £6. 138. 4d. for
a play. The play is unknown, but the writer may be Stephen
Hawes. He died before 1530, for he is mentioned as dead in a
poem belonging to that year, written by Thomas Feylde, The
Controversy between a Lover and a Jay:
Yonge Steven Hawse, whose soul God pardon,
Treated of love so clerkely and well,
To rede his workes is myne affeccyon,
Whiche he compyled of La bell Pusell,
Remembrynge storyes fruytfull and delectable.
Besides The Passetyme, Hawes wrote The Example of Virtue,
in 1503—4', as we learn from Wynkyn de Worde's edition;
The Conversion of Swearers, before 1509; A Joyful Meditation
to all England of the Coronation of Henry the Eighth, 1509;
and The Comfort of Lovers, date unknown. No manuscript of
, .
any of these seems to have been preserved. Of other works
Some have assumed that The Example of Virtue was composed after The Passetyme
of Pleasure, the date of which is given by Wynkyn de Worde as 1505—6. But we
have the same authority for dating The Example as 1503—4. See the following
extract from the copy of Wynkyn de Worde's edition of 1512, in the Pepysian library,
Cambridge.
This boke called the example of vertue was made and compyled by Stephen
bawys one of the gromes of the moost honorable chaumber of oure soverayne lorde
kynge Henry the . vii. the . xix. yere of his moost noble reyne and by bym presented to
our sayd soverayne lorde. ' (Fol. iii. )


## p. 225 (#243) ############################################

The Passetyme of Pleasure
225
attributed to Hawes, only one merits notice. Bale mentions a
Templum Chrystallinum, and Warton regards Lydgate's Temple
of Glass as by Hawes, though admitting himself puzzled because
Hawes includes it in his list of Lydgate's poems, given in The
Passetyme, chap. XIV. Hawes's writings bear out Bale's remark
that his whole life quasi virtutis exemplum fuit.
With the exception of the Gobelive episode, which is in
decasyllabic couplets, The Passetyme is in rime royal and contains
about 5800 lines, divided into forty-five chapters. The hero,
Graund Amour, is the narrator. Having entered on the way of
the active life, he met Lady Fame. She described the excellences
of La Bel Pucell, with whom he fell in love. He set off to the
tower of Doctrine, where he saw an arras portraying his future
life, and began his instruction under Lady Grammar. Here Hawes
inserts a denunciation of the sloth and gluttony of his contem-
poraries. Then Graund Amour visited Logic, and, next, Rhetoric.
Rhetoric, or the art of poetry, is elaborately discussed under
the divisions of invention, disposition, elocution, pronunciation and
memory. Hawes praises the old poets, defends allegory, attacks
ignorance and sloth and finally eulogises Chaucer, Gower and
Lydgate.
After listening to Arithmetic, Graund Amour went to Music,
with whom was La Bel Pucell. He had the ineffable happiness of
dancing with her, but lacked courage to tell his love. Advised by
Counsel, he visited the lady in her garden. A disputation'
followed, in which the commonplaces of medieval love-making are
presented with freshness and vivacity. Graund Amour won his
lady, but her friends carried her off to a distant land. Before
setting out for it, the hero was instructed by Geometry and
Astronomy. At the tower of Chivalry, he was trained in arms
by Minerva and knighted by Melizius. Then he met a foolish
dwarf, whose first words : 'when Icham in Kent Icham at home'
showed his origin. He was Godfrey Gobelive, a despiser of
women. Graund Amour and he came to a 'parliament' held by
Venus, who despatched a letter urging La Bel Pucell to be kind.
Graund Amour now encountered a giant twelve feet high,
with three heads, which he, at last, cut off. Three ladies hailed
him victor, and Perseverance brought a gracious message from
La Bel Pucell. Then he had to fight a seven-headed giant, fifteen
feet high, wielding an axe seven yards long, whom, after a fierce
conflict, he overthrew. Passing through a dismal wilderness, he
caught a glimpse of La Bel Pucell's palace on an island infested by
15
.
E, I, II, CH, IX,


## p. 226 (#244) ############################################

226
Stephen Hawes
>
the fire-breathing monster, Privy Malice. Blinded by its fire and
smoke, torn by its claws, Graund Amour was preserved by an
unguent given him by Pallas. The monster burst asunder, and
La Bel Pucell's palace became visible. The lovers were married
by Lex Ecclesiae, and lived many years in happiness. But Age
glided in, and with him Policy and Avarice. Death at last sum-
moned Graund Amour away. Then follows a pageant of allegorical
personages-Fame, Time and Eternity. In conclusion Hawes
apologises for his ignorance; prays that bad printing may not
spoil his scansion; and expresses his hope of imitating the moral
writings of Lydgate.
Much of the contents of the other poems is found in The
Passetyme in only slightly varied form.
The Conversion of Swearers contains an exhortation from
Christ to princes and lords to cease swearing by His blood,
wounds, head and heart. It is, in short, a versified sermon. The
metre is the seven-line Chaucerian stanza, except a fantastic
passage in form as follows:
Se
Ye
Be
Kind,
Again
My payne
Reteyne
In Mynde;
and so on the metre goes, increasing to lines of six syllables
and decreasing again to words of one syllable. It is an early
example of shaped verses, which, in later days, take the form of
Pan's pipes, wings, crosses, altars, pyramids, gridirons and frying-
pans, and are to be found even in the days of George Herbert's
T'emple.
A Joyful Meditation to all England of the Coronation of
Henry the Eighth, in the seven-line Chaucerian stanza, has little
to distinguish it from any other coronation poem. We may note,
however, that Hawes finds an apology for Henry VII's avarice in
the plea that he was amassing wealth to be ready for war-a view
which has been taken by modern historians. He urges the people
to be loyal and patriotic. He appeals also to Luna, as mistress of
the waves, and to the Wind-god to inspire Englishmen to chase their
enemies and—with words that anticipate Ye Mariners of England
—to sweep the sea in many a stormy 'stour. '
The Example of Virtue is written in the seven-line Chaucerian


## p. 227 (#245) ############################################

The Example of Virtue
227
a
stanza, except the description of the arming of the hero, where
decasyllabic couplets are used, and it is divided into fourteen
chapters. It tells how Youth, conducted by Discretion, sailed
over the sea of Vainglory and reached a fair island ruled by four
ladies, Nature, Fortune, Courage and Wisdom. Youth and Dis-
cretion, admitted by the warder Humility into the ladies' castle,
visited them in turn. Fortune was great and glorious, but un-
stable. Courage was powerful and famous, but Death was stronger.
Wisdom had the greatest attraction for Youth, who entered her
service and received much instruction. Nature possessed great
loveliness, but, behind her, was the grim visage of Death. Youth
and Discretion were present at a disputation in which each of the
four ladies urged her claims to be considered the highest in worth.
The umpire Justice bade them cease disputing and combine to
secure man's happiness.
Wisdom advised Youth to marry Cleanness. To be worthy
of her, he must be led by Discretion, and must not give way to
frailty or vainglory. Youth then passed into a wilderness, moon-
less and sunless. There, he triumphed over the temptations of
Sensuality, a fair lady mounted on a goat, and of Pride, a pleasant
old lady on an elephant. After emerging from the maze of worldly
fashion, he met Wisdom, who, with Discretion, brought him to a
stream crossed by a bridge as narrow as the ridge of a house.
Passing over, he arrived in the land of Great Grace, where lived
the king of Love and his daughter Cleanness. Before Youth could
win his bride, he must overcome a marsh-infesting dragon with three
heads, the world, the flesh and the devil. For this conflict he was
armed with 'the whole armour of God,' described by St Paul.
After a hard-won victory, Youth, now sixty years of age, was
renamed Virtue, and was married to Cleanness by St Jerome,
while, all around, were troops of allegorical ladies—Prayer, Peni-
tence, Charity, Mercy; fathers of the church and saints such as
Bede and Ambrose ; and the heavenly hosts with Michael and
Gabriel. St Edmund the martyr-king and Edward the Confessor
led the bride to the marriage feast. Finally, after Virtue had
been shown the sufferings of the lost in hell, all the company
ascended to heaven. The poem ends with a prayer that the union
of the Red Rose and the White may grow in all purity and
virtue; and with Hawes's usual address to Chaucer, Gower and
Lydgate.
In choice of theme, in method of exposition and in mode of
expression, Hawes has a limited range. He repeatedly insists
15_2


## p. 228 (#246) ############################################

228
Stephen Hawes
that every poet should be a teacher; and he always presses his
own lessons home, especially the lesson to eschew sloth. In his
two long poems, he has the same didactic aim—to portray a man's
struggle to attain his ideal : moral purity in The Example of
Virtue, worldly glory in The Passetyme of Pleasure, the former
being fuller of moralising than the latter.
The Passetyme, which
was composed after The Example, exhibits greater skill in treat-
ment and possesses more human interest. Both poems belong to
the same type of allegory, and are worked out on similar lines.
They have a number of incidents in common, as crossing seas to
reach the loved one, and killing a foe with three heads. Several
of the personified abstractions are the same in both, as Fortune,
Justice, Sapience or Wisdom, Grace, Perseverance, Peace, Mercy,
Charity, Contrition. In all his poems, Hawes has certain pet ideas,
which he puts forward again and again with little variation in
phraseology : as eulogies of Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate; apo-
logies for rude diction and want of poetic power ; declarations
that poets keep alive the memory of the great, and conceal moral
instruction under 'cloudy figures. '
This sameness renders it unnecessary to examine all Hawes's
poems in detail. We shall be able to appreciate the quality of his
work even though we restrict ourselves, for the most part, to
The Passetyme of Pleasure. It is an allegory of human life,
couched in the form of a chivalrous romance, with the addition
of a strong dash of scholastic learning and theology, and is in the
line of such works as the Roman de la Rose, the allegories of
Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate, Dunbar's Goldyn Targe and Dance
of the Sevin Deidlie Synnis, Douglas's King Hart, Sackville's
Induction, Googe's Cupido Conquered and Spenser's Faerie
Queene. What Hawes did was to make a new departure, and,
in working out his didactic allegory, emphasise the element of
chivalrous romance. This suited his age, for, after the collapse
of the feudal baronage in the wars of the Roses, came a revival
of chivalry, though rather of the outward show than of the inward
reality, of courtiers and carpet knights rather than of chivalrous
warriors. Later, it blazed out in the field of Cloth of Gold. The
attempted revival in Henry VII's day explains the passage in
The Passetyme, chap. XXVI, where Graund Amour is admonished to
renew the flower of chivalry now long decayed, and in the disser-
tation of king Melizius, chap. XXVIII, on the true meaning of the
chivalrous idea. Caxton, too, in The Order of Chivalry, recom-
mends the reading of Froissart, and of tales about king Arthur's


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The Passetyme of Pleasure
229
knights, as likely to resuscitate chivalry. Hawes, however, with all
his advocacy of knighthood, insists more on the trivium and
quadrivium, less on the training that produced the men pictured
in Chaucer's knight and squire.
The long and complicated allegory of The Passetyme is
managed with much success. The personified abstractions are
selected and fitted in with no little dexterity. But it need
cause no surprise that we feel the details tiresome and obscure :
it may be that often details which seem obscure are pictorial and
not didactic. In the construction of the poem there are curious
slips ; in fact, the design seems to have been altered while it was
being worked out. Graund Amour, chap. IV, is shown an arras
picturing his journey and adventures till he wins his lady. What
he sees does not exactly coincide with what afterwards happens.
The arras does not show the meeting of the lovers in the tower of
Music, chap. XVII. More than once, after the hero saw the arras,
he is represented as doubtful of his ultimate success, e. g. chap. XVII.
Perhaps Hawes discovered-his readers certainly discover-that
the foreknowledge of the final result removes the feeling of suspense
and spoils the interest of the story. Again, Graund Amour and
La Bel Pucell come to a perfect understanding in the garden and
plight their troth, chap. xix. Yet, later, chaps. xxix ff. , the
garden scene is entirely ignored ; and the conventional plan that
makes Venus the intermediary to persuade the lady to take pity on
her lover is employed. Nor is the allegory always consistent; but
that is a trifle, for even in The Pilgrim's Progress lynx-eyed critics
have detected inconsistencies. In The Passetyme, inconsistency
often arises from the exigency of the narrative. We recognise the
aptness of the allegory when the perfect knight has as his com-
panions the knights Truth, Courtesy, Fidelity, Justice, Fortitude,
Nurture and such like: that is, possesses the qualities symbolised
by those knights. Soon, however, they bid him farewell, not be-
cause he has lost those traits of character, but because the narrative
requires that he shall fight his battles alone. The greyhounds
Grace and Governance are, in spite of their names, conventional
figures : when stirring events are in progress they drop into the
background. Sometimes an abstraction, which has been already
employed in one connection, is reintroduced in another, and even
an incongruous, connection. Envy, for example, is one of the
giant's seven heads and is cut off by Graund Amour ; but it re-
appears as one of the contrivers of the metal monster. Like other
allegories, The Passetyme is marred by the fact that the characters


## p. 230 (#248) ############################################

230
Stephen Hawes
talk and debate too much, and act too little. And it must be
admitted that the personification of the seven sciences makes
dreary reading nowadays. Hawes himself found it difficult to
turn his expositions of learning into musical form. His stanzas on
the noun substantive, chap. v, must surely be among the most
unpoetical passages of all metrical writing. Four lines will be
sufficient to quote.
The Latyn worde whyche that is referred
Unto a thynge whych is substancyall,
For a nowne substantyre is wel averred,
And wyth a gender is declynall.
We have seen that Hawes was reputed a man of wide learning,
and his writings bear this out. He was familiar with the Bible
and with theological books. The influence of the wisdom-
literature of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha is manifest
in the prominent part assigned to Wisdom and Discretion in The
Example of Virtue. The conclusion of the same poem is crowded
with saints and martyrs, while Augustine and Bernard are quoted
in The Conversion of Swearers. The exposition of the sciences in
The Passetyme, though not free from slips, of which he was himself
aware, shows that he had studied the text-books of the trivium
and quadrivium. It was not, however, the intellectual value
of those studies that appealed to him so much as their moral
influence. Rhetoric and music, he says, produce not only order
in words and harmony in sounds, but also order in man's life and
harmony in his soul. Hawes was thoroughly versed in the romantic
and allegorical writings of the preceding generations. He appeals
to Caxton's Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, and, speaking of
Arthur, he evidently refers to Malory's Morte d'Arthur as a
familiar book. Whether or not Hawes possessed the powerful
memory attributed to him, his methods, illustrations, turns of phrase,
continually remind us of the Roman de la Rose, of Chaucer-
Troilus and Criseyde for example-of Gower's Confessio Amantis,
of Lydgate-especially The Temple of Glass. His indebtedness to
these three poets he frequently acknowledges; and it may be
summarily illustrated. The prayer at the end of The Passetyme,
that the scansion may not be marred by bad printing and that
the poet's intention may be manifest, is, in idea and phrasing,
closely modelled on a passage near the conclusion of Chaucer's
Troilus. Troilus, which Hawes often cites, is also his original for
the lovers' meeting in the temple of Music and for their sorrowful
parting, chaps. XVII, XIX. Gower's Confessio supplies the fabliaux


## p. 231 (#249) ############################################

His Learning and Models
231
about Aristotle and Vergil, and the tradition that Evander's
daughter devised the principles of Latinity, chaps. XXIX, V. The
Passetyme resembles The Temple of Glass in being partly in rime
royal, partly in decasyllabic couplets. Again, the dazzling bright-
ness of the tower of Doctrine and the impossibility of gazing at it
till clouds covered the sun, chap. III, Hawes borrowed, diction and
all, from Lydgate's description of the crystal fane. The gold vine
with grapes of rubies in the roof of the same tower comes from
Mandeville. Hawes evidently had The Court of Sapience also in
his mind. The prison in the tower of Chastity, chap. XXXII, is a
distant and pale reflection of Dante's Inferno. Finally, Hawes
appears to have drawn, directly or indirectly, from Martianus
Capella's de Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, the well known
text-book of the Middle Ages.
Living though Hawes did at the opening of a new age, and
having studied abroad at the time when the study of the classics
was reviving in western Europe, he still shows the characteristic
marks of medievalism. His writings abound in long digressions,
irrelevances, debates, appeals to authority, needless repetitions,
prolix descriptions. One glaring instance of prolixity occurs in
The Passetyme, chap. XLII, where the sum and substance of a seven-
line stanza on Pride can be adequately expressed in the six words,
“Why are dust and ashes proud ? ' Hawes also exhibits want of
proportion. More than one-eighth of The Passetyme is devoted to
the exposition of Rhetoric, with two digressions. Again, he jumbles
together ideas and associations of various ages, and fails to appreciate
the difference between his own age and classical times. Anything
characteristic of an earlier age and not of his own, he transmutes,
like other medieval writers, into something of his own days that
seemed analogous. Thus, Plato is ‘the cunning and famous clerk';
Joshua is a 'duke'; the centaur-king Melizius is the founder of
feudal chivalry and is conversant with St Paul's epistles ; Minerva?
and Pallas are spoken of as distinct-the former being instructor
in arms at the court of Melizius, the latter being the goddess.
Vergil, too, is the magician. Hawes employs the familiar medieval
machinery-the May morning, Fortune and her wheel, the seven
deadly sins, astronomical lore, and he firmly believes that all poetry
is allegory. In his defence of poets, The Passetyme, chap. ix, he
maintains that it is because the revilers of poetry cannot discover
the moral under the allegory that they fail to appreciate poetry.
Equally medieval is he in holding that poets should always have
1 8o Dunbar, Goldyn Targe, 1. 78, makes Minerva and Pallas two goddesses.
6


## p. 232 (#250) ############################################

232
Stephen Hawes
6
6
a lesson to teach. So strongly does he hold this, that to those who
write without a moral he would almost deny the name of poet.
He bewails the dearth of moral poets in his own day: most
versifiers, he says, waste their time in 'vaynful vanyte,' composing
ballades of fervent love, 'gests and trifles without fruitfulness'.
Hawes never outgrew those views of poetry and never
thoroughly rid himself of the traditional conventions. Sometimes
he forgets them, and then he is at his best. His style becomes
animated or graceful; his diction shakes itself free from the
load of aureate terms. At times his fine rhetoric—'aromatyke
fume' he calls it—is very cumbrous and disfiguring: as in The
Passetyme, chap. XXXVIII,
Her redolente wordes of swete influence
Degouted vapoure moost aromatyke,
And made conversyon of complacence;
Her depured and her lusty rethoryke
My courage reformed, that was so lunatyke.
He uses also the words 'pulcritude,' 'facundious,' 'tenebrous,'
'sugratife,' 'exornate,' 'perdurable' and 'celestine. ' He fre-
quently runs riot in the rhetorical figure of epanaphora, as in The
Passetyme, chap. XXI, where each line of one stanza begins · Where
lacketh mesure,' while in another, Without mesure wo worth'
occurs seven times. In spite of pedantry, however, Hawes manages
to write passages of poetic beauty and sweet tenderness. Such
passages are found in the garden scene, where Graund Amour
woos La Bel Pucell, The Passetyme, chap. XVIII. There, allegory
disappears; and, though we meet with verbiage and stiffness, we
cannot miss the beating of human hearts, the eager passion of the
man, the coyness of the maid, coyness that ends in complete
surrender. Allegory is again dropped in the episode of Godfrey
Gobelive, The Passetyme, chaps. XXIX, XXXII. There, Hawes is a
keen observer of contemporary life, which he describes at first
hand. If the rest of the poem with its personified abstractions
may be reckoned akin to the morality plays, this episode is in
tone a comic interlude. It exhibits also a change then beginning
among the abstractions of the moralities, a change destined to
develop in comedy. Godfrey Gobelive and his ancestors, Davy
Dronken-nole, Sym Sadle-gander, Peter Pratefast, are not allegorical
shadows but living personalities. Such alliterative nicknames
are parallel to the Tom Tosspot and Cuthbert Cutpurse of the
moralities, to Tibet Talkapace and Davy Diceplayer of the comedies.
1 The Passetyme, chap. XIV.
6
6


## p. 233 (#251) ############################################

Relation to Spenser
233
eg.
So, too, Godfrey's Kentish tongue, his Kentish home, his grand-
father's voyage up the Thames in search of a wife, which give
a touch of reality to the narrative, find parallels in the moralities :
in The World and the Child, where Folly describes his
adventures in Holborn and Southwark. Godfrey has humour
of the rough type seen in Gammer Gurton's Needle: his great-
grandmother, for example, is praised for cleanliness, because, when
she had no dishclout, she wiped the dishes with her dog's tail.
The Passetyme of Pleasure and The Example of Virtue belong
to the group of allegorical poems culminating in The Faerie
Queene; and it is generally agreed that Hawes influenced Spenser.
Opinions, however, differ as to the extent of this influence. On the
one hand E. B. Browning calls The Passetyme one of the four
columnar marbles, the four allegorical poems, on whose foundation
is exalted into light the great allegorical poem of the world,
Spenser's Faery Queen. ' On the other hand, Saintsbury admits
only a faint adumbration of The Faerie Queene in The Passetyme
and The Example: 'its outline without its glorious filling-in, its
theme without its art, its intellectual reason for existence without
any of its aesthetic justification thereof. It is not improbable that
Spenser did know Hawes; but, if so, he owed him a very small
royalty. The extent of this influence, or indebtedness, is easy
to overstate and very difficult, or, rather, impossible, to prove.
Mere coincidences may readily be mistaken for borrowing. It
does not follow that, when two writers speak in very similar terms
of the seven deadly sing, one has borrowed from the other. For,
from the time of Piers the Plovoman, the seven deadly sins had
appeared again and again in allegory, in morality play and in
pageant: they are found, too, along with other miscellaneous in-
formation, in that perpetual almanac, The Kalendar of Shepherds.
It seems better, then, simply to enumerate points of resemblance
-grouped together they make a striking list-than to attempt to
define where the limit of Spenser's indebtedness to Hawes should
be fixed
Hawes's main idea is to describe the discipline a man must
undergo and the obstacles he must surmount to attain moral
purity, in The Escample, or win worldly glory, in The Passetyme.
Spenser states that his general aim is 'to fashion a gentleman or
noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline. '
Spenser follows the lead of Hawes in adopting the para-
phernalia of chivalry as allegorical symbolism. The knights of
The Faerie Queene put into practice what Melizius enunciates in


## p. 234 (#252) ############################################

234
Stephen Hawes
The Passetyme as the underlying idea of chivalry-not fighting
in every quarrel, but fighting for the truth or for the common-
weal, and helping widows and maidens in distress. Some of
Melizius's knights, as, for instance, Courtesy and Justice, appear
among Spenser's paladins.
It is after hearing a description of La Bel Pucell's surpassing
beauty and worth that Graund Amour falls in love and determines
to win his ideal. Spenser represents Arthur as having seen in a
dream or vision the Faerie Queene, with whose beauty ravished, he,
awaking, resolved to seek her out. '
Graund Amour in The Passetyme, Youth in The Example, and
Spenser's Red Cross Knight wear the same armour, the Christian
soldier's panoply described by St Paul, whose Epistle to the
Ephesians is expressly referred to in each of the three instances.
In The Example there is a dragon with three heads—the
world, the flesh and the devil-which must be defeated before
Lady Cleanness is won; and the Red Cross Knight must overcome
the same three foes before he wins Lady Una.
Lechery, in The Example, is a fair lady riding on a goat, and,
in The Faerie Queene, a man upon a bearded goat. In the former
poem, Pride is an old lady in a castle on an elephant's back, in the
latter, a lady in a coach drawn by peacocks. Hawes writes of the
park of Pride, Spenser of the garden of Pride.
When fighting with the seven-headed giant, Graund Amour leaps
aside to evade the stroke of the ponderous axe, which then crashes
into the ground three feet and more. In a similar way, Orgoglio's
club misses its mark and ploughs three yards into the ground.
Humility is warder of the castle in The Example, and porter
of Spenser's house of Holiness.
The claim asserted by Mutability in Spenser's fragmentary
seventh book resembles Fortune's claim to universal rule, as set
forth by Hawes in both his poems.
Envy, Disdain and Strangeness contrive Hawes's monster
Privy Malice; Spenser's blatant beast, Slander, is urged on by
Detraction and Envy.
The list of resemblances might be extended, but to no purpose;
and of the many verbal coincidences one must suffice. Spenser
(Book v, canto xi, stanzas 55, 56) makes Artegall say to Burbon:
Die rather than do aught that mote dishonour yield.
Fie on such forgery!
Under one hood to shadow faces twain:
Knights ought be true, and truth is one in all.


## p. 235 (#253) ############################################

Relation to Spenser
235
With this, compare three passages from The Passetyme.
Minerva exhorts Graund Amour:
And rather deye in ony maner of wyse,
To attayne honour and the lyfe dyspyse,
Than for to lyve and remayne in shame. Chap. XXVIII.
Fortune is described as a lady of pride and of perfect ex-
cellence,
But that she had two faces in one hode. Chap. XXVII.
Sir Truth says that he guards the door of the chamber of
chivalry,
That no man enter into it wrongfully,
Without me, Trouthe, for to be chivalrous. Chap. XXVIII.
Hawes employs the Chaucerian seven-line stanza almost ex-
clusively. Exceptions have already been noted—the fantastic
tour de force, and several passages in decasyllabic couplets. It
must be set down to his defective sense of metrical fitness that
he used rime royal so extensively. However suitable that
measure is for serious and pathetic subjects, it is less suitable for
much of Hawes's work, a great part of The Passetyme, for instance,
where a metre of superior narrative capacity is required. For
continuous narrative, Hawes found the compartment nature of
rime royal inconvenient, and, consequently, sentences often over-
flow the stanza. In one instance, a whole stanza is occupied by the
modifying parts of the sentence, while the main predicate is
pushed into the next stanza, which, because the printer, or some-
body else, blundered, happens to begin another chapter? . In
using decasyllabic couplets for the humorous Godfrey Gobelive
scenes, Hawes proves himself not wholly insensible to metrical
fitness. It is possible that he employed the two metres in the
same poem in imitation of Lydgate's Temple of Glass. If so,
he missed Lydgate's tolerably constant distinction of couplet for
narrative, stanza for lyrical parts.
When we read a passage from Hawes, we feel that his verse is
possessed of a strange hobbling gait; and when we seek to scan
the lines, we are likely to become bewildered. Some of the lines,
it is true, scan quite correctly; at times, they have a flow and
cadence which competent critics have likened to the music of
Spenser, as
I sawe come ryding in a valey farre
A goodly ladye, envyroned about
· The Passetyme, chaps. XXXIII, XXXIV.


## p. 236 (#254) ############################################

236
Stephen Hawes
With tongnes of fyre as bright as any starre,
That fyry flambes ensensed alway ont.
The Passet yme, Chap. 1;
or
Was never payne, but it had joye at last. Chap. XVII.
But we are not to expect to find in Hawes the artistic splendour
of Spenser. Indeed, most of his lines are inartistic and unmusical.
We must remember, however, that the non-existence of a critical
edition of Hawes renders it uncertain how far we may justly lay
the blame on the writer. The text is undoubtedly corrupt, and
Hawes was justified in praying that bad printing might not spoil
his scansion'. The following corrupt line does not show metre
spoiled, but is given because it can be corrected from The
Passetyme itself. We read in a stanza dealing with Gluttony,
The pomped clerkes with foles delicions, Chap. XLII,
which, in the context, is absolutely without meaning. A correction
is easily got from the line in chap. V,
The pomped carkes wyth foode dilicious.
In chap. XXXIII three riming lines end thus : 'craggy roche,'
'bye flackes,' 'tre toppes,' where the natural emendation is
'rockes,' 'flockes. ' But, even then, 'flockes,' 'toppes,' is assonance
and not rime'. Taking the text, however, as we have it,
we must conclude that Hawes possessed a very defective ear.
This must be said, even after allowance has been made for
the difficulty which Chaucer's successors had in imitating his
versification with words of changed and changing, not to say
chaotic, pronunciation. The difficulty was a very real one for
those who in diction and metre were slavish imitators of Chaucer.
When Chaucer used an expression like 'the yonge sonne' or
‘smale fowles' with final -e sounded, he was following grammatical
usage and current pronunciation. But after these endings ceased
to be sounded, such expressions had a different metrical value.