'
The thirteen shorter poems which have been ascribed to
Henryson are varied in kind and verse-form.
The thirteen shorter poems which have been ascribed to
Henryson are varied in kind and verse-form.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v02
XVIII, ababccc; chap.
XXVIII, ababbcb;
chap. XXXIV, ababbbb.
Hawes is not a creator of familiar quotations. We find in
him much sound sense, much homely wisdom, on such themes
as the fickleness of fortune, the certainty of suffering, the seven
deadly sins, the transitoriness of the world,
worldly joye and frayle prosperitie
What is it lyke, but a blast of wynde? Chap. XLV.
We meet with gnomic lines, as
Who spareth to speke he spareth to spede. Chap. XVII.
But he did not produce passages memorable for choice diction
and for harmony of sweet sounds, passages familiar as household
words; for the well-known couplet which is the earliest form,
perhaps the original form, of a favourite sixteenth century saying, is
solitary in its splendour. It occurs in Graund Amour's epitaph,
The Passetyme, chap. XLII. Death, says Hawes, is the end of
all earthly happiness; the day is followed by the dark night,
For though the day be never so longe,
At last the belles ringeth to evensonge.
And with that we may take leave of Hawes, who, as a rule and,
often, to an exaggerated extent, continues the defects of the
fifteenth century poets-confused metre, slipshod construction,
bizarre diction-defects which did not disappear from English
poetry till it was influenced by the literary masterpieces of Italy,
and of ancient Greece and Rome.
## p. 239 (#257) ############################################
CHAPTER X
THE SCOTTISH CHAUCERIANS
1
It is a critical tradition to speak of the fifteenth century in
Scotland as the time of greatest literary account, or, in familiar
phrase, "the golden age of Scottish poetry. ' It has become a
commonplace to say of the poets of that time that they, best
of all Chaucer's followers, fulfilled with understanding and felicity
the lessons of the master-craftsman; and it has long been
customary to enforce this by contrasting the skill of Lydgate,
Occleve and their contemporaries in the south, with that of
James I, Henryson, Dunbar and Gavin Douglas. The contrast
does not help us to more than a superficial estimate; it may
lead us to exaggerate the individual merits of the writers and
to neglect the consideration of such important matters as the
homogeneity of their work, and their attitude to the older popular
habit of Scottish verse1.
We must keep in mind that the work of the greater Scottish
poets of the fifteenth century represents a break with the
literary practice of the fourteenth. The alliterative tradition
dragged on, perhaps later than it did in the south, and the
chronicle-poem of the type of Barbour's Bruce or the Legends
of the Saints survived in Henry the Minstrel's patriotic tale of
Wallace and in Wyntoun's history. With James I the outlook
changes, and in the poems of Henryson, Dunbar, Douglas and
some of the minor 'makars' the manner of the earlier northern
poetry survives only in stray places. It is not that we find a revul-
sion from medieval sentiment. The main thesis of this chapter will
be that these poets are much less modern than medieval. But there
is, in the main, a change in literary method-an interest, we might
say, in other aspects of the old allegorical tradition. In other words,
the poetry of this century is a recovery, consciously made, of
much of the outworn artifice of the Middle Ages, which had not
yet reached, or hardly reached, the northern portion of the island.
The movement is artificial and experimental, in no respects more
remarkably so than in the deliberate moulding of the language to
1 See Chapter al.
## p. 240 (#258) ############################################
240
The Scottish Chaucerians
its special purpose! Though the consciousness of the effort,
chiefly in its linguistic and rhetorical bearings, may appear, at
first glance, to reveal the spirit of the renascence, it is never-
theless clear that the materials of this experiment and much of
the inspiration of the change comes from the Middle Ages. The
origin is by no means obscured, though we recognise in this
belated allegorical verse the growth of a didactic, descriptive
and, occasionally, personal, habit which is readily associated with
the renascence. We are easily misled in this matter—too easily,
if we have made up our minds to discover signs of the new
spirit at this time, when it had been acknowledged, more or
less fully, in all the other vernacular literatures of Europe. Gavin
Douglas, for example, has forced some false conclusions on recent
criticism, by his seeming modern spirit, expressed most strikingly
in the prologue to the fifth book of his translation of the Aeneid:
Bot my propyne coym fra the pres fuit hait,
Unforlatit2, not jawynfra tun to tun,
In fresche sapour new fro the berrie run.
The renascence could not have had a better motto. Yet there
should be little difficulty in showing that Douglas, our first trans-
lator of Vergil, was, perhaps, of all these fifteenth century Scots,
the gentlest of rebels against the old-world fancies of the Courts
of Love and the ritual of the Rose.
The herald of the change in Scottish literary habit is the love-
allegory of The Kingis Quair, or King's Book. The atmosphere
of this poem is that of The Romance of the Rose: in general
treatment, as well as in details, it at once appears to be modelled
upon that work, or upon one or more of the many poems directly
derived therefrom. Closer examination shows an intimacy with
Chaucer's translation of the Romance. Consideration of the
language and of the evidence as to authorship (to which we
refer elsewhere“) brings conviction that the poem was the direct
outcome of study, by some northerner, of Chaucer's Romaunt
and other works. It was fortunate for Scots literature that it
was introduced to this new genre in a poem of such literary
competence. Not only is the poem by its craftsmanship superior
to any by Chaucer's English disciples, but it is in some respects,
in happy phrasing and in the retuning of old lines, hardly inferior
to its models. Indeed, it may be claimed for the Scots author,
as for his successor, in the Testament of Cresseid, that he has,
at times, improved upon his master.
1 See Chapter 17.
fresh-drawn.
s dasbed.
• See note in Bibliography; also Chapter iv.
## p. 241 (#259) ############################################
The Kingis Quair
241
The Kingis Quair (which runs to 1379 lines, divided into
197 "Troilus' stanzas, riming ababbcc) may be described as a
dream-allegory dealing with two main topics-the 'unsekernesse'
of Fortune and the poet's happiness in love. The contradiction
of these moods has led some to consider the poem as a composite
work, written at different times : the earlier portion representing
the period of the author's dejection, real or imaginary, the
latter that of the subsequent joy which the sight of the fair
lady in the garden by his prison had brought into his life.
One writer' has expressed the opinion that the poem was begun
at a time when the poet ‘had little to speak of beyond his past
misadventures'; and, while allowing that it may have been
“afterwards partially rewritten,' he finds evidence of its frag-
mentary origin in the presence of sections which have absolutely
nothing to do with the subject. ' For these reasons, he disallows
Tytler's division (1783) of the poem into six cantos, which had held
in all editions for a full century (down to 1884), because it assumes
a unity which does not exist. This objection to the parcelling
out of the text may be readily accepted-not because it gives,
as has been assumed, a false articulation to a disconnected work,
but because it interferes unnecessarily with that very continuity
which is not the least merit of the poem. The author, early in the
work (st. 19), calls upon the muses to guide him 'to write his
torment and his joy. ' This is strong evidence by the book in its
own behalf, and it is not easily discredited by the suggestion
that the line 'may have been altered afterwards. ' If there be
any inconsistency observable in the poem, it is of the kind
inevitable in compositions where the personal element is strong.
In the earlier allegory, and in much of the later (if we think of
the Spenserian type) the individuality of the writer is merged
in the narrative: in The Kingis Quair, on the other hand, a
striking example of the later dream-poem which has a direct
lyrical or personal quality, greater inconsequence of fact and
mood is to be expected. Whether that inconsequence be admitted
or not by the modern reader, we have no warrant for the con-
clusion that the work is a mosaic.
The poet, lying in bed 'alone waking,' turns to the pages of
Boethius, but soon tires of reading. He thinks of Fortune and
recalls
In tender zouth how sche was first my fo
And eft my frende.
:
· Skeat : Kingis Quair (see bibliography).
OH. X.
E. L. II.
16
## p. 242 (#260) ############################################
242
The Scottish Chaucerians
He is roused by the matins-bell, which seems to say 'tell on, man,
quhat the befell. ' Straightway he resolves 'sum newë thing to
write,' though he has in his time spent ink and paper to small
purpose. He begins his tale of early misfortune with an elaborate
metaphor of a ship at the mercy of the elements; then narrates
how the actual ship in which he was sailing from his own country
was captured by the enemy, and how he was sent into confinement.
From his window, he looks upon a fair garden and hears the love-
song of the birds. This song, which is given as a cantus, prepares
the reader for the critical passage of the poem in which the
poet sees the lady who from that moment brings sunshine into
his life:
And there with kest I doun myn eye ageyne,
Quhare as I sawe, walking under the toure,
Full secretly new cummyn hir to pleyne,
The fairest or the freschest yong[ë] floure
That euer I sawe, me thoght, before that houre;
For quhich sodayn abate, anon astert
The blude of all my body to my hert. XL.
When the lady, unconscious of her lover's prayer, departs, she
leaves him the 'wofullest wicht,' plunged again in the misery from
which her coming had raised him. At night, tired out, he dreams
that he is carried high into the heavens to the house of Venus.
The goddess receives him graciously, but sends him with Good
Hope to Minerva for further advice. This, the learned goddess
gives, with quotations from Ecclesiastes and observations on pre-
destination; and she sends him, as he is 'wayke and feble,' to
consult Fortune. He returns to earth, and, passing by a plain,
stocked, in the conventional way, with all kinds of animals, he
meets again his guide Good Hope, who takes him to Fortune's
citadel. He finds the dame, and sees the great wheel. This
is described to him, and he is ordered to take his place
upon it.
'Fare wele,' quod sche, and by the ere me toke
So ernestly, that therewithall I woke.
Distracted by the thought that all may be but a vain dream,
he returns to the window from which he had seen the lady.
To him comes a turtle dove with a sprig of gillyflower, bearing
the tidings, inscribed in gold on the edges, that, in heaven, the
cure of all his sorrow is decreed. The poem concludes with the
lover's hymn of thanks to each and every thing which has con-
tributed to his joy, even to the castle-wall and the 'sanctis
marciall’ who had guided him into the hands of the enemy;
## p. 243 (#261) ############################################
The Kingis Quair
243
and, lastly, he commends his book to the poems ('impnis ') of
his masters Gower and Chaucer, and their souls to heaven.
A careful examination of this well-constructed poem will show
that, to the interest of the personal elements, well blended with
the conventional matter of the dream-poem, is added that of its
close acquaintance with the text of Chaucer. It is not merely that
we find that the author knew the English poet's works and made
free use of them, but that bis concern with them was, in the best
sense, literary. He has not only adopted phrases and settings,
but he has selected and retuned lines, and given them, though
reminiscent of their origin, a merit of their own. Sometimes the
comparison is in favour of the later poem, in no case more clearly
than in the fortieth stanza, quoted above, which echoes the
description, in The Knights Tale, of Palamon's beholding of
Emilie. The lines
And ther-with-al he bleynte, and cryde'a! '
As though he stongen were unto the herte,
are inferior to the Scot's concluding couplet. The literary rela-
tionship, of which many proofs will appear to the careful reader,
is shown in a remarkable way in the reference at the close
to the poems of Gower and Chaucer. This means more than the
customary homage of the fifteenth century to Chaucer and Gower,
though the indebtedness to the latter is not textually evident.
The author of The Kingis Quair and his Scottish successors
have been called the 'true disciples' of Chaucer, but often, it
must be suspected, without clear recognition of this deep literary
appreciation on which their historical position is chiefly based.
The only MS text of The Kingis Quair is preserved in the
Bodleian Library, in the composite MS marked 'Arch. Selden.
B. 24,' which has been supposed to belong to the last quarter of
the fifteenth century. It is there described in a prefatory sentence
(fol. 191) as 'Maid be King lames of scotland the first callit the
kingis quair and Maid quhen his Maiestie Wes In Ingland. ' This
is confirmed in the Latin explicit on fol. 211. The ascription to
James I, king of Scots, remains uncontroverted. A recent attempt?
to place the text later than The Court of Love, has led to a
careful sifting of all the evidence, actual and circumstantial, with
the result that the traditional view has been established more
firmly, and something beyond a suspicion raised that, if there be
any borrowing, The Court of Love is the debtor. The story of the
i Seo bibliography.
16-2
## p. 244 (#262) ############################################
244
The Scottish Chaucerians
poem is James's capture in March 1405, his imprisonment by the
English and his wooing of Joan Beaufort. There is no reason to
doubt that the story was written by James himself, and the date of
composition may be fixed about the year 1423. During his exile
the king had found ample opportunity to study the work of the
great English poet whose name was unknown in the north, and
whose influence there might have been delayed indefinitely. This
literary intimacy enhances the autobiographic interest of The
Kingis Quair.
The influence of Chaucer is hardly recognisable in any of the
other works which have been ascribed to James, unless we accept
a recent suggestion that fragment B (11. 1706—5810) of the
Romaunt was written by him? The short piece of three stanzas,
beginning 'Sen trew Vertew encressis dignytee' is unimportant;
and the 'popular' poems Peblis to the Play and Christis Kirk
on the Grene, if really his, belong to a genre in which we
shall look in vain for traces of southern literary influence. The
contrast of these pieces with The Kingis Quair is, indeed, so
marked as to have led many to assume that James cannot be the
author of both. This is, of course, no argument; nor does the
suggestion that their tone sorts better with the genius of his royal
successor, “the Gudeman of Ballengeich,' count for much. On the
other hand, the identification of Peblis to the Play with the poem
At Beltayne, which Major ascribes to James, and the acceptance
of the statement in the Bannatyne MS that he is the author of
Christis Kirk, must be counterbalanced by the evidence of language
and prosody, which appear to point to a later origin than the first
decades of the fifteenth century.
The Kingis Quair represents the first phase of Scottish Chau-
cerianism, in which the imitation, though individualised by the
genius of its author, is deliberate and direct. Even the personal
and lyrical portions do not destroy the impression that the poem
is a true birth of the old allegory. In other words, allegory is of
the essence of the conception: it is not introduced for the sake of
its interpretation, or as a decorative aid. In the second stage,
as disclosed in the poems of Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas,
we recognise an important change. Some of the pieces appear to
have the old outlook and the old artistic purpose; yet, even in
these, the tone is academic. They are breaking away from the
stricter and more self-contained interest of the literature of the
Rose; they adapt both sentiment and style to more individual, or
i See bibliography.
· See Chapter xr.
## p. 245 (#263) ############################################
Henryson's Fables
245
national, purpose, and make them subservient to an ethical thesis.
Yet Chaucer remains the inspiring force, not merely in turns of
phrase and in fashion of verse, but in unexpected places of the
poetic fabric. Even as late as the mid-sixteenth century, in such
a sketch as Lyndsay's Squyer Meldrum, we are, at times, reminded
of the vitality of Chaucerian tradition.
Of Robert Henryson, in some respects the most original of
the Scottish Chaucerians, we know very little. He is described,
on the title-page of the earliest extant edition of his Fables (1570)
as 'scholemaister of Dunfermeling. ' His birth has been dated
about 1425. A 'Master Robert Henryson' was incorporated
in 1462 in the university of Glasgow, which had been founded
in 1451. The entry states that the candidate was already a
licentiate in arts and bachelor in decrees. It is probable, there-
fore, that his earlier university education was received abroad,
perhaps at Paris or Louvain. His mastership at the Benedictine
abbey grammar-school in Dunfermline and his notarial office (if
he be the Robert Henryson who witnesses certain deeds in 1478)
would lead us to infer that he was in lower orders. His death,
which may have taken place about 1500, is alluded to in Dunbar's
Lament for the Makarist. There are no dates to guide us in
tracing the sequence of his poems, and the internal evidence is
inconclusive. Yet we cannot be far out in naming 1450 as the
earlier limit of the period during which they were composed.
Henryson's longest and, in some ways, his best work is his
Morall Fabillis of Esope. The material of the book is drawn
from the popular jumble of tales which the Middle Ages had
fathered upon the Greek fabulist; much of it can be traced
directly to the edition of Anonymus, to Lydgate's version and
to English Reynardian literature as it appeared in Caxton's
dressing. In one sense, therefore, the book is the least original
of Henryson's works; but, in another, and the truer, it may take
precedence of even The Testament of Cresseid and Robene and
Makyne for the freshness of its treatment, notably in its adaptation
of hackneyed fabliaux to contemporary requirements. Nor does
it detract from the originality of presentation, the good spirits,
and the felicity of expression, to say that here, even more than in
his closer imitations of Chaucer, he has learnt the lesson of
Chaucer's outlook on life. Above all, he shows that fineness of
literary taste which marks off the southern poet from his
i post.
## p. 246 (#264) ############################################
246 The Scottish Chaucerians
2
contemporaries, and exercised but little influence in the north
even before that later period when the rougher popular habit
became extravagant.
The Fables, as we know them in the texts of the Charteris
print of 1571 and the Harleian MS of the same year, are thirteen
in number, with a general prologue prefixed to the tale of the
Cock and the Jewel, and another introducing that of the Lion
and the Mouse. They are written in the familiar seven-lined
stanza, riming ababbcc. From the general prologue, in which
he tells us that the book is 'ane maner of translatioun' from
Latin, done by request of a nobleman, he justifies the function
of the fable
to reprene the haill misleuing
Of man, be figure of ane uther thing.
And again he says,
The nuttis schell, thocht it be hard and teach,
Haldis the kirnell, and is delectabill.
Sa lyis thair ane doctrine wyse aneuch,
And full frute, vnder ane feinzeit fabill.
And clerkis sayis, it is richt profitabill
Amangis eirnist to ming ane mery sport,
To licht the spreit, and gar the tyme be schort.
As the didactic element is necessarily strong in the fable, little
may be said of its presence in Henryson's work, except, per-
haps, that his invariable habit of reserving all reflections for
a separate moralitas may be taken as evidence of the im-
portance attached to the lesson. Earlier English fabulists, such
as Lydgate, mixed the story and the homily, to the hurt of the
former. Henryson's separation of the two gives the narrative
greater directness and a higher artistic value. Indeed, the merit
of his Fables is that they can be enjoyed independently and found
self-satisfying, because of the contemporary freshness, the un-
failing humour, and the style which he weaves into familiar
tales. The old story of the sheep in the dog's skin has never
been told in such good spirits; nor is there so much ‘character'
in any earlier or later version of the Town and Country Mouse as
there is in The Uponlandis Mous and the Burges Mous.
In his treatment of nature he retains much of the traditional
manner, as in the processional picture of the seasons in the tale
of the Swallow and the other Birds, but, in the minor touches in
the description of his characters,' he shows an accuracy which can
come only from direct and careful observation. His mice, his
,
frog with
## p. 247 (#265) ############################################
The Testament of Cresseid
247
2
bir fronsit1 face,
Hir rankillit cheikis, and hir lippis syde”,
Hir hingand browis, and hir voce sa hace 3,
Hir logerand 4 leggis, and hir harsky5 hyde,
his chanticleer, his little birds nestling in the barn against the
storm, even his fox, are true to the life. It is, perhaps, this
realism which helps his allegory and makes it so much more
tolerable to the modern reader. There is, too, in his sketches
more than mere felicity: he discloses, again and again, that
intimacy and sympathy with nature's creatures which we find
fully expressed in Burns, and, like his great successor, gently
draws his readers to share the sentiment.
Orpheus and Eurydice, based on Boethius, may be linked
with the Fables in type, and in respect of its literary qualities
The moralitas at the close, which is irksome because of its undue
length, shows that the conception is similar: the title moralitas
fabulae sequitur indicates that the poet was unwilling to let the
story speak for itself. This, however, it does, for it is well told,
and it contains some lyrical pieces of considerable merit, notably
the lament of Orpheus in ten-lined stanzas with the musical burden
'Quhar art thow gane, my luf Erudices ? ' or 'My lady Quene and
luf, Erudices. ' Even in the processional and catalogue passages,
in which many poets have lost themselves or gone aground, he
steers a free course. When he approaches the verge of pedantic
dulness in his account of the musical technicalities which Orpheus
learnt as he journeyed amid the rolling spheres, he recovers
himself, as Chaucer would have done,
Off sik musik to wryte I do bot dote,
Tharfor at this mater a stra I lay,
For in my lyf I coud nevir syng a note.
In The Testament of Cresseid, he essays the bold part of a
continuator. Having turned, for fireside companionship on a cold
night, to the 'quair'
Writtin be worthie Chaucor glorious
Of fair Cresseid and lustie Troylus,
he meditates on Cresseid's fate, and takes up another . quair' to
'break his sleep,'
God wait, gif all that Chanceir wrait was trew.
Nor I wait nocht gif this narratioun
Be authoreist, or fenzeit of the new,
Be sum Poeit, throw his inventioun
Maid to report the Lamentatioun
1. frounced,' wrinkled.
1 wide.
* loosely banging. s rugged.
8 boarse.
## p. 248 (#266) ############################################
248
The Scottish Chaucerians
And wofull end of this lustie Cresseid;
And quhat distres scho thoillit, and quhat deid!
After this introduction, he proceeds, obviously on a hint from
Chaucer's text, to give the sequel to the Diomede episode.
Chaucer had prayed each ‘lady bright of hewe,'
That al be that Criseyde was untrowe,
That for that gilt she be not wrooth with me.
Ye may hir gilt in othere bokes see;
And gladlier I wol wryten, if yow leste,
Penelopëes trouthe and good Alceste.
Troilus, v, II. 1774-8;
and he had chivalrously passed on to the closing scene in the
tragedy of Troilus. Henryson supplements this with the tragedy
of Cresseid. Cast off by Diomede, the distressed woman retires
to an oratory and prays to Venus and Cupid, till she falls into an
ecstasy. She dreams of her judgment by Saturn, that she shall
be stricken with disease, and shall drag out her days in misery.
She awakes, to find that she is a leper. A child comes to tell her
that her father bids her to supper. She cannot go; and her
father appears by her side, and learns how Cupid has taken
his vengeance upon her. Sad at heart, he grants her wish to pass
straightway with 'cop and clapper? to the spital. There, in a
dark corner, she 'chides her dreary destiny. ' On a day there
passes Troilus and his company in triumph; and the lepers beg
for alms.
Than upon him scho kest op baith her ene,
And with ane blenk it come in to his thocht
That he sum tyme bir face befoir had sene,
Bot scho was in sic plye he knew hir nocht;
Yit than hir luik into his mynd it brocht
The sweit visage and amorous blenking
Of fair Cresseid, sumtyme his awin darling.
He trembles, and changes colour, but no one sees his suffering.
To Cresseid he throws rich alms, and passes on. The lepers
marvel at his affection for 'yone lazarous'; and Cresseid dis-
covers that her friend is Troilus. Not the least effective part of
the poem is that which contrasts the sensitiveness of the lovers;
or the concluding passage in which the penitent Cresseid makes
her testament, and a leper takes her ring from her corpse and
carries it to Troilus.
He swelt for wo, and fell doun in ane swoun;
For greit sorrow his hairt to birst was boun:
Siching full sadlie, said, 'I can no moir,
Scho was untrew, and wo is me thairfoir! '
## p. 249 (#267) ############################################
Henryson's Shorter Poems
249
The felicity of the simple style of the next stanza is unmis-
takable
Sum said he maid ane tomb of merbell gray,
And wrait hir name and superscriptioun,
And laid it on hir grave, quhair that scho lay,
In goldin letteris, conteining this ressoun:
'Lo, fair ladyis, Cresseid of Troyis toun,
Sumtyme countit the flour of womanheid,
Under this stane, late lipper, lyis deid.
'
The thirteen shorter poems which have been ascribed to
Henryson are varied in kind and verse-form. The majority are
of a reflective cast, dealing with such topics as Want of Wise Men,
Age, Youth, Death, Hasty Credence and the like-topics which
are the delight of the fifteenth century minor muse. There are
allegorical poems, such as The Bludy Serk, with the inevitable
moralitas, a religious piece on the annunciation, and A Prayer
for the Pest. Two of the poems, the pastoral dialogue of Robene
and Makyne and the burlesque Sum Practysis of Medecyne,
deserve special mention for historical reasons; the former, too, for
its individual excellence. The estrif between Robene (Robin) and
Makyne (Malkin) develops a sentiment, thus expressed in the
girl's own words,
The man that will nocht quhen he may
Sall haif nocht quhen he wald-
which is probably an echo of the pastourelles. In literary crafts-
manship, the poem excels its later and more elaborate analogue
The Nut Brown Maid. The older and simpler language, and
the ballad timbre (which runs throughout many of Henryson's
minor poems) place Robene and Makyne almost entirely outside
Chaucerian influence. This is even more obvious in Sum Prac-
tysis of Medecyne; and, for this reason, some have doubted
Henryson's authorship. The divergence is, however, no evidence
against the ascription. Taken with the pieces of the same type
which are known to be by his contemporaries, it gives us an
earlier link in the chain of popular alliterative (or neo-alliterative)
verse which resisted the Chaucerian infusion and was destined to
exert a strong influence upon later Scottish poetry. These bur-
lesque pieces in Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas and, later, in
Lyndsay (in each case a single and disconnected effort) appear
to have been of the nature of experiments or exercises in whim-
sicality, perhaps as a relief from the seriousness or more orderly
humour of the muse. The roughness in tone resembles that of
## p. 250 (#268) ############################################
250
The Scottish Chaucerians
the 'flytings,' in which it is intentional, and, in many cases,
without parallel in English literature. The persistence of this
form throughout the century, and in places least expected, may
supply an argument for James I's authorship of Peblis to the
Play and Christis Kirk on the Grene. At least, the dissimi-
larity between these and the Kingis Quair would not, did other
reasons not intervene, disprove that they came from the same pen? .
William Dunbar has held the place of honour among the Scottish
'makars. ' It may be that his reputation has been exaggerated at
the expense of his contemporaries, who (for reasons now less valid)
have not received like critical attention. Scott's statement that
he is ‘unrivalled by any which Scotland ever produced' strikes
the highest note of praise, and is, perhaps, responsible for much of
the unvaried appreciation which has followed. Russell Lowell's
criticism has arrested attention because it is exceptional, and
because it is a singular example of extravagant deprecia-
tion. It has, however, the indirect value that it prompts us to
test our judgments again, and weigh the value of such popular
epithets as 'the Scottish Chaucer' and 'the Scottish Skelton. '
There is generally a modicum of truth in easy titles of this
kind, though the essence of the epithet is too often forgotten
or misunderstood.
Of the personal history of William Dunbar, we have only a few
facts; and of the dates of his writings or of their sequence we
know too little to convince us that any account of his literary
life is more than ingenious speculation. As Dunbar appears to
have graduated bachelor of arts at St Andrews in 1477, his birth
may be dated about 1460. Internal evidence, for the most part
indirect, points to his having survived the national disaster at
Flodden, perhaps till 1520. Like Kennedy, his poetic rival in the
Flyting, Gavin Douglas and Lyndsay, and, indeed, like all the
greater poets from James I, with the exception of the school-
master of Dunfermline, he was connected with the court and,
like most of them, was of noble kin. These facts must be
kept in mind in a general estimate of the courtly school of
Scottish verse, in explaining its artificialities and in under-
standing the separation in sentiment and technique from the
more popular literature which it superseded for a time. This
consideration supplies, among other things, part of the answer
to the problem why the national or patriotic note, which is
1 See Chapter u.
## p. 251 (#269) ############################################
William Dunbar
251
strongly characteristic of later writers, is wanting at a period
when it might be expected to be prominent. In preceding
work, with the exception, perhaps, of Wallace, the appeal to
history is in very general terms; during the golden age,' when
political forces were active and Border memories might have
stirred the imagination, the poets are wholly absorbed in the
literary traditions of romance, or in the fun and the disappoint-
ments of life at court; only in the mid-sixteenth century, and,
first, most unmistakably in the French-made Complaynt of
Scotlande, do we find that perfervid Scotticism which glows in later
literature
Dunbar's kinship with the house of Dunbar did not bring him
wealth or place. After his college course he became a novice,
subject to the strict rule of the Observantines of the Franciscan
order. He appears, however, to have fretted under the restraint
of his ascetic calling. In a poem entitled How Dumbar wes
desyrd to be ane freir he makes frank confession of his diffi-
culties, and more suo describes the exhortation to him to 'refuse
the world' as the work of the devil.
This freir that did Sanct Francis thair appeir,
Ane feind he wes in liknes of ane freir;
He vaneist away with stynk and fyrie smowk;
With him me thocht all the houshend he towk,
And I awoik as wy? that wes in weir 8.
He found some relief in the roving life of a friar, and he appears
to have spent a few years in Picardy and other parts of France,
where he certainly was in 1491 with Bothwell's mission to the
French court for a bride for the young James IV. There, among
the many Scots then haunting Paris, he may have met Gavin
Douglas, Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen, Hector Boece and John
Major; but the Sorbonne, where they were to be found, had,
probably, few attractions for him. It is tempting to speculate that
the wild life of the faubourgs and the talent of Bohemians like
François Villon (whose poems had just been printed posthumously,
in 1489) had the strongest claims upon the restless friar. It has
been assumed, not without some plausibility, that there are traces
in the Scot's poems of direct French influence, in other and
deeper ways than in the choice of subjects which Villon had
made his own. By 1500, he was back in Scotland, no longer an
Observantine, but a priest at court, pensioned by the king, and
moving about as a minor official in royal business. The title
See also Chapter IL
• fear (doubt).
man.
## p. 252 (#270) ############################################
252
The Scottish Chaucerians
‘rhymer of Scotland,' in the English privy council accounts
during the sojourn in London of the Scottish embassy for the
hand of Margaret Tudor, has been taken by some to mean that,
beyond his being the poetical member of the company who
praised London in verse", he was recognised to some extent as
laureate. Of his literary life, which appears to have begun with
his association with the court in 1500, we know nothing beyond
what the poems tell us indirectly; but of the sentiment of his age,
as seen by a courtier, we have the fullest particulars.
Dunbar's poems fall into two main divisions—the allegorical
and occasional. Both show the strength of Chaucerian tradition,
the former in a more immediate way, the latter (with full allow-
ance for northern and personal characteristics) in the continuance
of the satirical, moral and religious themes of the shorter poems of
Chaucer's English followers. There is, however, a difference of
atmosphere. Dunbar's work is conditioned by the circumstance
that it was written by a courtier for the court Poetry had fallen,
as has been hinted, into close association with a small royal and
aristocratic coterie. But life at court, though it showed a political
and intellectual vigour which contrasts favourably with that
of earlier reigns, and had grown more picturesque in serving the
exuberant taste of the 'redoubted roye,' was circumscribed in
its literary interests, and, with all its alertness, added little or
nothing to the sum of poetic endeavour. The age may have been
'golden '; it was not ‘spacious. ' Literary consciousness, when it
existed, turned to the romantic past or to the old ritual of allegory,
or to the re-editing, for contemporary purposes, of plaints of empty
purses, of the fickleness of woman, of the vanity of the world and
of the lack of piety; or it was absorbed in the merely technical
task of illuminating or aureating the 'rude' vernacular? If,
however, the area was not enlarged, it was worked more fully.
From this experience, at the hands of writers of great talent,
much was gained for Scottish verse which has the appearance of
newness to the literary historian. What is, therefore, outstanding
in Dunbar, is not, as in Henryson, the creation of new genres
1 Beginning 'London, thou art of townes A per se,' and with London, thou art
the flour of Cities all,' as the burden of each stanza. The poem is, with all its con.
ventionality of phrase, of considerable historical interest.
Cf. the address to Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate in the well-known stanzas of
the Goldyn Targe (11. 253—270). There, the praise is of Chaucer's ‘anamalit termis
celicall,' and of the light which he brought to oure Inglisch' (i. e. Lowland Scots).
And the praise of Gower and Lydgate is that by their “sugarit lippis and tongis
aureate' and 'angel mouthis most mellifluate' they have illumined the language and
'our-gilt oure speche, that imperfyte stude. '
6
## p. 253 (#271) ############################################
Dunbar's Allegories 253
or fresh motives. Compared with Henryson, Dunbar shows
no advance in broad purpose and sheer originality. He is,
apart from all question of vocabulary, more artificial in the stricter
historical sense; and he might have deserved no better from
posterity than Lydgate and Occleve have deserved had he not
suppled the rhythms and added life and humour to the old matter.
Dunbar's debt to Chaucer is less intimate and spiritual than
Henryson's or king James's. He could not have given us the after-
tale of Cresseid, or caught so clearly the sentiment of the master
in a new Quair. Chaucer is, to him, the 'rose of rethoris all'
(as every poet of the century admitted), but he follows him at
a distance and, perhaps, with divided affection for the newer
French writers. Still, the Chaucerian influence is there, though the
evidence of direct drawing from the well of English is less clear.
The Goldyn Targe has the simple motif of the poet's appearance
(in a dream, on a conventional May morning) before the court of
Venus, where he endeavours to resist the arrows of dame Beauty
and her friends with the aid of Reason's 'scheld of gold so
schene. ' He is wounded near to death and taken prisoner. Then
he knows that the lady is 'lustiar of chere': when she de-
parts, he is delivered over to Heaviness. As she sails off, the
noise of the ship’s guns wake him to the enjoyment, once more, of
the May morning and the singing birds. The allegory is of the
simplest; the contemporary didacticism has hardly invaded it, and
the abstractions which the poet introduces are in closer kinship
with the persons of courtly allegory than with the personages
in the moralities of the period. A similar theme appears in
his well-known short poem, Sen that I am a presoneir (some-
times known as Beauty and the Prisoner); but there didactic
and personal elements have been added. It is probable that
criticism has been over busy in seeing references to the king,
to his liaison with Margaret Drummond and to her suspicious
death. In The Thrissil and the Rois, the intrusion of the
moralitas is at once obvious. The setting is heraldic: the
theme is the marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor. The
familiar machinery of the dream-poem is here; but the general
effect is that of an elaborate prothalamium. It is an easy stage
from this poetic type to the pageant and masque ; but in the
single example of Dunbar's 'dramatic' endeavour-in the fragment
of The Interlude of the Droichis Part of the Play—the alle-
gory is used merely to enhance the whimsicality of the design.
In Chaucer's simpler narrative manner, we have the tale of
The Freiris of Berwik, dealing with the old theme of an untrue
## p. 254 (#272) ############################################
254
The Scottish Chaucerians
wife caught in her own wiles. The ascription of this piece to
Dunbar has been doubted, but there is nothing in it unworthy
of his metrical art or his satiric talent. The Tretis of the Tua
Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, which is certainly his, echoes the
gossip of the Wife of Bath, but it speaks with a freedom from
which Chaucer would have shrunk. Its antique line and allitera-
tion connect it formally with the popular poetry which Chaucer
parodied and undid ; yet the association is remote. For it is
essentially a literary exercise, perhaps a burlesque pastiche to
satisfy the romantic fashion of the court. The art of this remark-
able poem is always conscious. In the fierce thrusts of sarcasm,
in the warping of words, uncouth and strong, we seem to see the
personal satisfaction of the craftsman in his triumph of phrase
and line.
I have ane wallidrag, ane worme, ane auld wobat carle,
A waistit walroun, na worth bot wourdis to clatter;
Ane bumbart, ane dron bee, ane bag full of flewme,
Ane skabbit skarth, ane scorpioun—
So hurtle the words in this dialogue on matrimonial risks. In
some respects, it is difficult to differentiate this tour de force from
a 'flyting'; but the husbands are not present, and may not (if they
could) meet the torrents of abuse.
In considering the satirical and occasional poems of Dunbar,
which constitute at once the greater and more important portion
of his work, it is well, in the first place, to see how far the
Chaucerian influence holds. Here, at least, it is difficult to allow
the aptness of the title 'the Scottish Chaucer,' unless it mean
nothing more than that Dunbar, by analogical compliment, has the
first place in Early and Middle Scots, as Chaucer has in Middle
English. It cannot mean that he shows Chaucer's spirit and out-
look, as Henryson has shown ; nor that Dunbar is, in these satirical
and occasional pieces, on which his wider reputation rests, a
whole-hearted pupil in the craft of verse. The title would have
appeared more fitting in his own day, when his appeal to con-
temporaries (apart from any acknowledged debt to his forerunner)
was of the same technical kind which Chaucer had made to his;
but a comparison, nowadays, has to take account of other matters.
Both poets are richly endowed with humour: it is the outstanding
quality of each ; but in no respect do their differences appear
more clearly. Here, Dunbar is unlike Henryson in lacking the
gentler and more intimate fun of their master. He is a satirist in
a
the stronger sense ; more boisterous in his fun, and showing, in his
wildest frolics, an imaginative range which has no counterpart
## p. 255 (#273) ############################################
The Grotesque in Dunbar
255
in the southern poet. His satirical powers are best seen in his
Tidings from the Session, an attack on the law courts, and in his
Satire on Edinburgh, in which he denounces the filthy condition
of the capital; in his verses on his old friends the Franciscans,
and on the flying friar of Tungland who came to grief because he
had used hens' feathers; in his fiercer invectives of the General
Satire and The Epitaph on Donald Owre; and in the vision of
The Dance of the Sevin Deidlie Synnis. The last is one of the best
examples of Dunbar's realism and literary cunning in suiting the
word and line to the sense, as in the description of Sloth-
Syne Sueirnes, at the secound bidding,
Come lyk & sow out of a midding,
Full slepy wes his grunziel:
Mony sweir2 bumbarda belly-huddroun,
Mony slute daw and slepy duddroun5,
Him serwit ay with sounzie 6.
In all, but especially in the Dance, there is not a little of the
fantastic ingenuity which appears in his more purely comic
sketches. And these again, though mainly 'fooleries,' are not
without satirical intention, as in his Joustis of the Tailzeour and
the Sowtar and his Black Lady, where the fun is a covert attack
on the courtly craze for tourneys. Of all the pieces in this category,
his Ballad of Kynd Kittok best illustrates that elfin quality which
relieves his 'busteous' strain of ridicule. The waggish description
of the thirsty alewife, her journey on a snail, her arrival in
heaven and her sojourn there till, desiring a 'fresh drink,'
she wanders forth and is not allowed to return, her going back to
her ale-house and the poet's concluding request,
Frendis, I pray 30u hertfully,
Gif ze be thristy or dry,
Drink with my Guddame, as 30 ga by,
Anys for my saik-
strike a note, of which the echoes are to be often heard in later
northern verse? . There is more than an accidental likeness between
this roguish request to the reader and the close of Burns's Address
to the Deil and The Dying Words of Poor Mailie. The reach of
Dunbar's fancy is at its greatest in The Interlude. There, in
his description of Fyn, he writes-
He gat my grauntschir Gog Magog ;
Ay quhen he dansit, the warld wald schog 8;
Five thousand ellis zeid in his frog
9
Of Hieland pladdis, and mair.
i face (snout).
8 glutton. • dirty slut.
osloven.
care, attention.
7 See Chapter XI.
8 shake.
frook,' tunio.
a lazy.
## p. 256 (#274) ############################################
256
The Scottish Chaucerians
>
zit he was bot of tendir zouth;
Bot eftir he grewe mekle at fonthi,
Ellevyne myle wyde met was his mouth,
His teith was ten ell sqwair,
He wald apon his tais stand,
And tak the sternis doune with his hand
And set them in a gold garland
Above his wyfis hair.
This is a triumph of the grotesque on the grand scale which the
creator of Gargantua would have admired, and could not have
excelled. Something of the same quality is seen in his wild
picture of the birth of Antichrist in mid-air, in his Vision, which
opens with the customary dream-setting and gives no hint of
this turn in the poet's fancy.
Of lyrical, as of strictly dramatic, excellence, there is little
in Dunbar. His love poems are few and, taken as a whole,
undistinguished. His religious and moral verses, the one of the
hymn type, the other on the hackneyed themes of Good Counsel,
Vanitas vanitatum and (when he is cheery in mood) Blitheness,
deserve commendation for little beyond their metrical facility.
They are too short to be tedious to the modern reader. He uses
the old device of the 'testament' to good purpose in the comic
poem on the physician Andrew Kennedy; and, here again, his
imagination transforms the old convention. In all Goliardic
literature there is nothing to excel this stanza :
A barell bung ay at my bosum,
Of varldis gud I bad na mair;
Et corpus meum ebriosum
I leif onto the toune of Air;
In a draf mydding for ever and ay
Ut ibi sepeliri queam,
Quhar drink and draff may ilka day
Be cassyne super faciem meam.
In The Dance, already referred to, Dunbar works up the familiar
material of the Danse Macabre. In his Flyting of Dunbar and
Kennedie (his poetic rival Walter Kennedy) we have a Scottish
example of the widely-spread European genre in its extremest
form. It remains a masterpiece of scurrility. The purpose of
the combatants in this literary exercise was to outdo each other in
abuse, and yet not to quarrel. It is hard for the most catholic
modern to believe that they kept the peace, though Dunbar speaks
kindly of his 'friend' in his Lament. The indirect value of
The Flyting is great-linguistically, in its vocabulary of invective;
1 lit. "in fullness (fulth). '
9
post.
measure.
3
## p. 257 (#275) ############################################
Dunbar's Prosodic Range 257
6
biographically, for it tells us more of the poet than we derive
from any other source ; historically, in respect of its place in
the development of this favourite genre in Scots, and its testimony
to the antipathies of Celtic and Lowland civilisations in the early
sixteenth century? A like indirect interest attaches to The
Lament for the Makaris, which Dunbar wrote 'quhen he was
seik. ' It is a poem on the passing of human endeavour, a motif
which had served the purpose of scores of fifteenth century laments.
If it was written under the influence of Villon's master ballades,
praise must be allowed to Dunbar that he endenised the French-
man's art with some success. The solemn effect of the burden,
Timor mortis conturbat me, occasional happy turns, as
He takis the campioun in the stour,
The capitane closit in the tour,
The lady in bour full of bewte;
Timor Mortis conturbat me
and a sense of literary restraint give the piece distinction above
the average poem of this type. Much of its reputation nowadays
is as a historical document, which tells us nearly all that we
know of some of Dunbar's contemporaries. He names his greater
predecessors, and, properly, puts Chaucer first on the roll.
Dunbar, we have said, has been called the 'Scottish Skelton. '
There is some justice in the likening, but the reasons are not
consistent with those which give him the title of the 'Scottish
Chaucer. ' His allegiance to Chaucer is shown in literary reminis-
cence, whether of motif, or phrase, or stanza-a bookish reminis-
cence, which often helps us to distinguish the fundamental
differences in outlook. There is a spiritual antithesis ; but there
are textual bonds. With Skelton, on the other hand, who must
have been the borrower, had any contact been possible, he stands
in close analogy, in two important respects. In the first place,
both poets, in their unexpected turns of satire and in their
jugglery of words, anticipate the Rabelaisian humour in its intel-
lectual audacity and inexhaustible resource. Whether in wider
excursions of fancy, or in verbal orgies, such as in the Com-
plaint to the King-
Bot fowll, jow-jowrdane-hedit jevellis,
Cowkin-kenseis, and culroun kewellis;
Stuffettis, strekouris, and stafische strummellis;
Wyld haschbaldis, haggarbaldis, and hummellis;
Drunoartis, dysouris, dyvouris, drewellis,
Misgydit memberis of the dewellis; etc.
i See Chapter 1v.
E. L. II. CH. I.
17
<
## p. 258 (#276) ############################################
258
The Scottish Chaucerians
6
we are constantly reminded of the rector of Diss, and often of
the historian of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. In the second
place, their metrical purposes have much in common. The
prosodic variety of both is always our first impression-of Dunbar,
without parallel in range and competence in any English writer
before his time. The interest of the matter in him, as in Skelton,
is that the variety is not the effect of mere literary restlessness,
but the outcome of experiment to extend the capabilities of
English verse in counterpart to what was being done by 'aurea-
tion' and other processes for poetic diction and style. If Dunbar's
prosodic cunning were less remarkable, and if Skelton's so-called
“doggerel' were even less palatable than it is to those who
take a narrow view of this problem of English, the endeavour
of both poets, and of the Scot in particular, would lose none of
its historical value. Dunbar borrows from all quarters, chiefly
from Chaucer, but also from older popular forms, and from
French models found in that other Bohemian genius, François
Villon. Yet he is not a mere copyist: his changes in the
grouping of the lines in the stanza, his varying the length
of the verses and his grafting of one form upon another,
are evidence of the literary artist at work. It is useless to
attempt to illustrate this by selection from the hundred and one
poems which are ascribed to him, for a selection cannot disclose
his kaleidoscopic ingenuity. The remarkable range and resource
of his technique and the vitality of his imagination must redeem
his work in the eyes of the most alien modern of the charges
which have been brought against the art of Lydgate and Occleve.
His was not the heavy-headed fancy of a moribund medievalism.
The explanation of the difference may be, after all, largely personal.
Only so far is he of the renascence. The chief interest to us lies in
the old things which he has chosen and recast, as genius may
do at any time, whether the age be 'dark' or 'new. '
If no serious effort has been made to claim Dunbar as a child of
the renascence, except in respect of his restlessness, in which
he shows something of the human and individual qualities asso-
ciated with that movement, his contemporary Gavin Douglas bas
been frequently described as the embodiment the fullest and
also the first among Scottish poets, of the principles of neo-
classicism. A critic of high consideration has recently said that
‘no poet, not even Dante himself, ever drank more deeply of the
spirit of Virgil than Gavin Douglas. ' Others who consent to this
## p. 259 (#277) ############################################
Gavin Douglas
259
6
have laid stress on the fact that Douglas was the first translator of
a great verse classic into the vernacular. If this conclusion were
as just as it is, at first sight, plausible, Douglas could have no
place, or only a very minor place in this chapter, which assumes
a fundamental homogeneity in medieval method, in most respects
incongruent with the literary intention of the new learning.
Like Dunbar, Douglas was of good family, and a cleric; but he
had influence and fortune which brought him a large measure of
worldly success. He had become a dignitary of the church when
the erst-friar was riming about the court and writing complaints
on his empty purse. Unlike Dunbar, he had no call to authorship.
His literary career, if we may so speak of the years when all
his work was written, is but a part of a busy life, the early
experience of a man destined to lose his leisure in the strife
of politics. He was the third son of Archibald, fifth earl of
Angus, the 'great earl,' better known as 'Bell-the-Cat. ' He was
born a 1475, and completed his early training in 1494, when
he graduated at St Andrews. In 1501, after spending some
time in cures in Aberdeenshire and the Lothians, he became
provost of the collegiate church of St Giles in Edinburgh,
his tenure of which partly synchronised with his father's civil
provostship of the capital. Between this date and 1513 (that
defining year in all Scottish biography of this period) he did all
his literary work, The Palice of Honour, King Hart, Conscience
and the translation of the Aeneid, begun early in 1512 and printed
in 1513. Other writings have been ascribed to him-a translation
of Ovid (though, in one place, he speaks of this work as a task
for another), plays on sacred subjects and sundry Aureae
orationes ; but none are extant, and we have his testimony in
the 'Conclusion of the Aeneid), which may be accepted as valid,
that he made Vergil his last literary task.
Thus vp my pen and instrumentis full zoyr
On Virgillis post I fix for evirmore,
Nevir, from thens, syk materis to discryve:
My muse sal now be cleyn contemplatyve,
And solitar, as doith the byrd in cage;
Sen fer byworn is all my childis age,
And of my dayis neir passyt the half dait
That natur suld me grantyn, weil I wait.
His later history is exclusively political, a record of promotions
and oustings. He was bishop of Dunkeld from 1516 to 1520, when
he was deprived of his see because he had gone to the English
court for aid in the Douglas-Albany quarrels. Two years later, he
17-2
## p. 260 (#278) ############################################
260
The Scottish Chaucerians
died of plague in London, in the house of his friend lord Dacre.
Just before his death, he had sent to another friend, Polydore
Vergil, material for the latter's History, by way of correction
of Major's account, which Vergil had proposed to use.
The Palice of Honour, Douglas's earliest work, is an example,
in every essential sense, of the later type of dream-poem, already
illustrated in the Goldyn Targe. It is, however, a more ambitious
work (extending to 2166 lines); and it shows more clearly the de-
cadence of the old method, partly by its over-elaboration, partly
by the inferior art of the verse, partly by the incongruous welding
of the pictorial and moral purposes. The poem is dedicated to
James IV, who was probably expected to read between the lines
and profit from the long lesson on the triumph of virtue. The
poem opens in a 'gardyne of plesance,' and in May-time, as
of yore. The poet falls asleep, and dreams of a desert place
‘amyd a forest by a hyddeous flude, with grysly fische. ' Queen
Sapience appears with her learned company.
chap. XXXIV, ababbbb.
Hawes is not a creator of familiar quotations. We find in
him much sound sense, much homely wisdom, on such themes
as the fickleness of fortune, the certainty of suffering, the seven
deadly sins, the transitoriness of the world,
worldly joye and frayle prosperitie
What is it lyke, but a blast of wynde? Chap. XLV.
We meet with gnomic lines, as
Who spareth to speke he spareth to spede. Chap. XVII.
But he did not produce passages memorable for choice diction
and for harmony of sweet sounds, passages familiar as household
words; for the well-known couplet which is the earliest form,
perhaps the original form, of a favourite sixteenth century saying, is
solitary in its splendour. It occurs in Graund Amour's epitaph,
The Passetyme, chap. XLII. Death, says Hawes, is the end of
all earthly happiness; the day is followed by the dark night,
For though the day be never so longe,
At last the belles ringeth to evensonge.
And with that we may take leave of Hawes, who, as a rule and,
often, to an exaggerated extent, continues the defects of the
fifteenth century poets-confused metre, slipshod construction,
bizarre diction-defects which did not disappear from English
poetry till it was influenced by the literary masterpieces of Italy,
and of ancient Greece and Rome.
## p. 239 (#257) ############################################
CHAPTER X
THE SCOTTISH CHAUCERIANS
1
It is a critical tradition to speak of the fifteenth century in
Scotland as the time of greatest literary account, or, in familiar
phrase, "the golden age of Scottish poetry. ' It has become a
commonplace to say of the poets of that time that they, best
of all Chaucer's followers, fulfilled with understanding and felicity
the lessons of the master-craftsman; and it has long been
customary to enforce this by contrasting the skill of Lydgate,
Occleve and their contemporaries in the south, with that of
James I, Henryson, Dunbar and Gavin Douglas. The contrast
does not help us to more than a superficial estimate; it may
lead us to exaggerate the individual merits of the writers and
to neglect the consideration of such important matters as the
homogeneity of their work, and their attitude to the older popular
habit of Scottish verse1.
We must keep in mind that the work of the greater Scottish
poets of the fifteenth century represents a break with the
literary practice of the fourteenth. The alliterative tradition
dragged on, perhaps later than it did in the south, and the
chronicle-poem of the type of Barbour's Bruce or the Legends
of the Saints survived in Henry the Minstrel's patriotic tale of
Wallace and in Wyntoun's history. With James I the outlook
changes, and in the poems of Henryson, Dunbar, Douglas and
some of the minor 'makars' the manner of the earlier northern
poetry survives only in stray places. It is not that we find a revul-
sion from medieval sentiment. The main thesis of this chapter will
be that these poets are much less modern than medieval. But there
is, in the main, a change in literary method-an interest, we might
say, in other aspects of the old allegorical tradition. In other words,
the poetry of this century is a recovery, consciously made, of
much of the outworn artifice of the Middle Ages, which had not
yet reached, or hardly reached, the northern portion of the island.
The movement is artificial and experimental, in no respects more
remarkably so than in the deliberate moulding of the language to
1 See Chapter al.
## p. 240 (#258) ############################################
240
The Scottish Chaucerians
its special purpose! Though the consciousness of the effort,
chiefly in its linguistic and rhetorical bearings, may appear, at
first glance, to reveal the spirit of the renascence, it is never-
theless clear that the materials of this experiment and much of
the inspiration of the change comes from the Middle Ages. The
origin is by no means obscured, though we recognise in this
belated allegorical verse the growth of a didactic, descriptive
and, occasionally, personal, habit which is readily associated with
the renascence. We are easily misled in this matter—too easily,
if we have made up our minds to discover signs of the new
spirit at this time, when it had been acknowledged, more or
less fully, in all the other vernacular literatures of Europe. Gavin
Douglas, for example, has forced some false conclusions on recent
criticism, by his seeming modern spirit, expressed most strikingly
in the prologue to the fifth book of his translation of the Aeneid:
Bot my propyne coym fra the pres fuit hait,
Unforlatit2, not jawynfra tun to tun,
In fresche sapour new fro the berrie run.
The renascence could not have had a better motto. Yet there
should be little difficulty in showing that Douglas, our first trans-
lator of Vergil, was, perhaps, of all these fifteenth century Scots,
the gentlest of rebels against the old-world fancies of the Courts
of Love and the ritual of the Rose.
The herald of the change in Scottish literary habit is the love-
allegory of The Kingis Quair, or King's Book. The atmosphere
of this poem is that of The Romance of the Rose: in general
treatment, as well as in details, it at once appears to be modelled
upon that work, or upon one or more of the many poems directly
derived therefrom. Closer examination shows an intimacy with
Chaucer's translation of the Romance. Consideration of the
language and of the evidence as to authorship (to which we
refer elsewhere“) brings conviction that the poem was the direct
outcome of study, by some northerner, of Chaucer's Romaunt
and other works. It was fortunate for Scots literature that it
was introduced to this new genre in a poem of such literary
competence. Not only is the poem by its craftsmanship superior
to any by Chaucer's English disciples, but it is in some respects,
in happy phrasing and in the retuning of old lines, hardly inferior
to its models. Indeed, it may be claimed for the Scots author,
as for his successor, in the Testament of Cresseid, that he has,
at times, improved upon his master.
1 See Chapter 17.
fresh-drawn.
s dasbed.
• See note in Bibliography; also Chapter iv.
## p. 241 (#259) ############################################
The Kingis Quair
241
The Kingis Quair (which runs to 1379 lines, divided into
197 "Troilus' stanzas, riming ababbcc) may be described as a
dream-allegory dealing with two main topics-the 'unsekernesse'
of Fortune and the poet's happiness in love. The contradiction
of these moods has led some to consider the poem as a composite
work, written at different times : the earlier portion representing
the period of the author's dejection, real or imaginary, the
latter that of the subsequent joy which the sight of the fair
lady in the garden by his prison had brought into his life.
One writer' has expressed the opinion that the poem was begun
at a time when the poet ‘had little to speak of beyond his past
misadventures'; and, while allowing that it may have been
“afterwards partially rewritten,' he finds evidence of its frag-
mentary origin in the presence of sections which have absolutely
nothing to do with the subject. ' For these reasons, he disallows
Tytler's division (1783) of the poem into six cantos, which had held
in all editions for a full century (down to 1884), because it assumes
a unity which does not exist. This objection to the parcelling
out of the text may be readily accepted-not because it gives,
as has been assumed, a false articulation to a disconnected work,
but because it interferes unnecessarily with that very continuity
which is not the least merit of the poem. The author, early in the
work (st. 19), calls upon the muses to guide him 'to write his
torment and his joy. ' This is strong evidence by the book in its
own behalf, and it is not easily discredited by the suggestion
that the line 'may have been altered afterwards. ' If there be
any inconsistency observable in the poem, it is of the kind
inevitable in compositions where the personal element is strong.
In the earlier allegory, and in much of the later (if we think of
the Spenserian type) the individuality of the writer is merged
in the narrative: in The Kingis Quair, on the other hand, a
striking example of the later dream-poem which has a direct
lyrical or personal quality, greater inconsequence of fact and
mood is to be expected. Whether that inconsequence be admitted
or not by the modern reader, we have no warrant for the con-
clusion that the work is a mosaic.
The poet, lying in bed 'alone waking,' turns to the pages of
Boethius, but soon tires of reading. He thinks of Fortune and
recalls
In tender zouth how sche was first my fo
And eft my frende.
:
· Skeat : Kingis Quair (see bibliography).
OH. X.
E. L. II.
16
## p. 242 (#260) ############################################
242
The Scottish Chaucerians
He is roused by the matins-bell, which seems to say 'tell on, man,
quhat the befell. ' Straightway he resolves 'sum newë thing to
write,' though he has in his time spent ink and paper to small
purpose. He begins his tale of early misfortune with an elaborate
metaphor of a ship at the mercy of the elements; then narrates
how the actual ship in which he was sailing from his own country
was captured by the enemy, and how he was sent into confinement.
From his window, he looks upon a fair garden and hears the love-
song of the birds. This song, which is given as a cantus, prepares
the reader for the critical passage of the poem in which the
poet sees the lady who from that moment brings sunshine into
his life:
And there with kest I doun myn eye ageyne,
Quhare as I sawe, walking under the toure,
Full secretly new cummyn hir to pleyne,
The fairest or the freschest yong[ë] floure
That euer I sawe, me thoght, before that houre;
For quhich sodayn abate, anon astert
The blude of all my body to my hert. XL.
When the lady, unconscious of her lover's prayer, departs, she
leaves him the 'wofullest wicht,' plunged again in the misery from
which her coming had raised him. At night, tired out, he dreams
that he is carried high into the heavens to the house of Venus.
The goddess receives him graciously, but sends him with Good
Hope to Minerva for further advice. This, the learned goddess
gives, with quotations from Ecclesiastes and observations on pre-
destination; and she sends him, as he is 'wayke and feble,' to
consult Fortune. He returns to earth, and, passing by a plain,
stocked, in the conventional way, with all kinds of animals, he
meets again his guide Good Hope, who takes him to Fortune's
citadel. He finds the dame, and sees the great wheel. This
is described to him, and he is ordered to take his place
upon it.
'Fare wele,' quod sche, and by the ere me toke
So ernestly, that therewithall I woke.
Distracted by the thought that all may be but a vain dream,
he returns to the window from which he had seen the lady.
To him comes a turtle dove with a sprig of gillyflower, bearing
the tidings, inscribed in gold on the edges, that, in heaven, the
cure of all his sorrow is decreed. The poem concludes with the
lover's hymn of thanks to each and every thing which has con-
tributed to his joy, even to the castle-wall and the 'sanctis
marciall’ who had guided him into the hands of the enemy;
## p. 243 (#261) ############################################
The Kingis Quair
243
and, lastly, he commends his book to the poems ('impnis ') of
his masters Gower and Chaucer, and their souls to heaven.
A careful examination of this well-constructed poem will show
that, to the interest of the personal elements, well blended with
the conventional matter of the dream-poem, is added that of its
close acquaintance with the text of Chaucer. It is not merely that
we find that the author knew the English poet's works and made
free use of them, but that bis concern with them was, in the best
sense, literary. He has not only adopted phrases and settings,
but he has selected and retuned lines, and given them, though
reminiscent of their origin, a merit of their own. Sometimes the
comparison is in favour of the later poem, in no case more clearly
than in the fortieth stanza, quoted above, which echoes the
description, in The Knights Tale, of Palamon's beholding of
Emilie. The lines
And ther-with-al he bleynte, and cryde'a! '
As though he stongen were unto the herte,
are inferior to the Scot's concluding couplet. The literary rela-
tionship, of which many proofs will appear to the careful reader,
is shown in a remarkable way in the reference at the close
to the poems of Gower and Chaucer. This means more than the
customary homage of the fifteenth century to Chaucer and Gower,
though the indebtedness to the latter is not textually evident.
The author of The Kingis Quair and his Scottish successors
have been called the 'true disciples' of Chaucer, but often, it
must be suspected, without clear recognition of this deep literary
appreciation on which their historical position is chiefly based.
The only MS text of The Kingis Quair is preserved in the
Bodleian Library, in the composite MS marked 'Arch. Selden.
B. 24,' which has been supposed to belong to the last quarter of
the fifteenth century. It is there described in a prefatory sentence
(fol. 191) as 'Maid be King lames of scotland the first callit the
kingis quair and Maid quhen his Maiestie Wes In Ingland. ' This
is confirmed in the Latin explicit on fol. 211. The ascription to
James I, king of Scots, remains uncontroverted. A recent attempt?
to place the text later than The Court of Love, has led to a
careful sifting of all the evidence, actual and circumstantial, with
the result that the traditional view has been established more
firmly, and something beyond a suspicion raised that, if there be
any borrowing, The Court of Love is the debtor. The story of the
i Seo bibliography.
16-2
## p. 244 (#262) ############################################
244
The Scottish Chaucerians
poem is James's capture in March 1405, his imprisonment by the
English and his wooing of Joan Beaufort. There is no reason to
doubt that the story was written by James himself, and the date of
composition may be fixed about the year 1423. During his exile
the king had found ample opportunity to study the work of the
great English poet whose name was unknown in the north, and
whose influence there might have been delayed indefinitely. This
literary intimacy enhances the autobiographic interest of The
Kingis Quair.
The influence of Chaucer is hardly recognisable in any of the
other works which have been ascribed to James, unless we accept
a recent suggestion that fragment B (11. 1706—5810) of the
Romaunt was written by him? The short piece of three stanzas,
beginning 'Sen trew Vertew encressis dignytee' is unimportant;
and the 'popular' poems Peblis to the Play and Christis Kirk
on the Grene, if really his, belong to a genre in which we
shall look in vain for traces of southern literary influence. The
contrast of these pieces with The Kingis Quair is, indeed, so
marked as to have led many to assume that James cannot be the
author of both. This is, of course, no argument; nor does the
suggestion that their tone sorts better with the genius of his royal
successor, “the Gudeman of Ballengeich,' count for much. On the
other hand, the identification of Peblis to the Play with the poem
At Beltayne, which Major ascribes to James, and the acceptance
of the statement in the Bannatyne MS that he is the author of
Christis Kirk, must be counterbalanced by the evidence of language
and prosody, which appear to point to a later origin than the first
decades of the fifteenth century.
The Kingis Quair represents the first phase of Scottish Chau-
cerianism, in which the imitation, though individualised by the
genius of its author, is deliberate and direct. Even the personal
and lyrical portions do not destroy the impression that the poem
is a true birth of the old allegory. In other words, allegory is of
the essence of the conception: it is not introduced for the sake of
its interpretation, or as a decorative aid. In the second stage,
as disclosed in the poems of Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas,
we recognise an important change. Some of the pieces appear to
have the old outlook and the old artistic purpose; yet, even in
these, the tone is academic. They are breaking away from the
stricter and more self-contained interest of the literature of the
Rose; they adapt both sentiment and style to more individual, or
i See bibliography.
· See Chapter xr.
## p. 245 (#263) ############################################
Henryson's Fables
245
national, purpose, and make them subservient to an ethical thesis.
Yet Chaucer remains the inspiring force, not merely in turns of
phrase and in fashion of verse, but in unexpected places of the
poetic fabric. Even as late as the mid-sixteenth century, in such
a sketch as Lyndsay's Squyer Meldrum, we are, at times, reminded
of the vitality of Chaucerian tradition.
Of Robert Henryson, in some respects the most original of
the Scottish Chaucerians, we know very little. He is described,
on the title-page of the earliest extant edition of his Fables (1570)
as 'scholemaister of Dunfermeling. ' His birth has been dated
about 1425. A 'Master Robert Henryson' was incorporated
in 1462 in the university of Glasgow, which had been founded
in 1451. The entry states that the candidate was already a
licentiate in arts and bachelor in decrees. It is probable, there-
fore, that his earlier university education was received abroad,
perhaps at Paris or Louvain. His mastership at the Benedictine
abbey grammar-school in Dunfermline and his notarial office (if
he be the Robert Henryson who witnesses certain deeds in 1478)
would lead us to infer that he was in lower orders. His death,
which may have taken place about 1500, is alluded to in Dunbar's
Lament for the Makarist. There are no dates to guide us in
tracing the sequence of his poems, and the internal evidence is
inconclusive. Yet we cannot be far out in naming 1450 as the
earlier limit of the period during which they were composed.
Henryson's longest and, in some ways, his best work is his
Morall Fabillis of Esope. The material of the book is drawn
from the popular jumble of tales which the Middle Ages had
fathered upon the Greek fabulist; much of it can be traced
directly to the edition of Anonymus, to Lydgate's version and
to English Reynardian literature as it appeared in Caxton's
dressing. In one sense, therefore, the book is the least original
of Henryson's works; but, in another, and the truer, it may take
precedence of even The Testament of Cresseid and Robene and
Makyne for the freshness of its treatment, notably in its adaptation
of hackneyed fabliaux to contemporary requirements. Nor does
it detract from the originality of presentation, the good spirits,
and the felicity of expression, to say that here, even more than in
his closer imitations of Chaucer, he has learnt the lesson of
Chaucer's outlook on life. Above all, he shows that fineness of
literary taste which marks off the southern poet from his
i post.
## p. 246 (#264) ############################################
246 The Scottish Chaucerians
2
contemporaries, and exercised but little influence in the north
even before that later period when the rougher popular habit
became extravagant.
The Fables, as we know them in the texts of the Charteris
print of 1571 and the Harleian MS of the same year, are thirteen
in number, with a general prologue prefixed to the tale of the
Cock and the Jewel, and another introducing that of the Lion
and the Mouse. They are written in the familiar seven-lined
stanza, riming ababbcc. From the general prologue, in which
he tells us that the book is 'ane maner of translatioun' from
Latin, done by request of a nobleman, he justifies the function
of the fable
to reprene the haill misleuing
Of man, be figure of ane uther thing.
And again he says,
The nuttis schell, thocht it be hard and teach,
Haldis the kirnell, and is delectabill.
Sa lyis thair ane doctrine wyse aneuch,
And full frute, vnder ane feinzeit fabill.
And clerkis sayis, it is richt profitabill
Amangis eirnist to ming ane mery sport,
To licht the spreit, and gar the tyme be schort.
As the didactic element is necessarily strong in the fable, little
may be said of its presence in Henryson's work, except, per-
haps, that his invariable habit of reserving all reflections for
a separate moralitas may be taken as evidence of the im-
portance attached to the lesson. Earlier English fabulists, such
as Lydgate, mixed the story and the homily, to the hurt of the
former. Henryson's separation of the two gives the narrative
greater directness and a higher artistic value. Indeed, the merit
of his Fables is that they can be enjoyed independently and found
self-satisfying, because of the contemporary freshness, the un-
failing humour, and the style which he weaves into familiar
tales. The old story of the sheep in the dog's skin has never
been told in such good spirits; nor is there so much ‘character'
in any earlier or later version of the Town and Country Mouse as
there is in The Uponlandis Mous and the Burges Mous.
In his treatment of nature he retains much of the traditional
manner, as in the processional picture of the seasons in the tale
of the Swallow and the other Birds, but, in the minor touches in
the description of his characters,' he shows an accuracy which can
come only from direct and careful observation. His mice, his
,
frog with
## p. 247 (#265) ############################################
The Testament of Cresseid
247
2
bir fronsit1 face,
Hir rankillit cheikis, and hir lippis syde”,
Hir hingand browis, and hir voce sa hace 3,
Hir logerand 4 leggis, and hir harsky5 hyde,
his chanticleer, his little birds nestling in the barn against the
storm, even his fox, are true to the life. It is, perhaps, this
realism which helps his allegory and makes it so much more
tolerable to the modern reader. There is, too, in his sketches
more than mere felicity: he discloses, again and again, that
intimacy and sympathy with nature's creatures which we find
fully expressed in Burns, and, like his great successor, gently
draws his readers to share the sentiment.
Orpheus and Eurydice, based on Boethius, may be linked
with the Fables in type, and in respect of its literary qualities
The moralitas at the close, which is irksome because of its undue
length, shows that the conception is similar: the title moralitas
fabulae sequitur indicates that the poet was unwilling to let the
story speak for itself. This, however, it does, for it is well told,
and it contains some lyrical pieces of considerable merit, notably
the lament of Orpheus in ten-lined stanzas with the musical burden
'Quhar art thow gane, my luf Erudices ? ' or 'My lady Quene and
luf, Erudices. ' Even in the processional and catalogue passages,
in which many poets have lost themselves or gone aground, he
steers a free course. When he approaches the verge of pedantic
dulness in his account of the musical technicalities which Orpheus
learnt as he journeyed amid the rolling spheres, he recovers
himself, as Chaucer would have done,
Off sik musik to wryte I do bot dote,
Tharfor at this mater a stra I lay,
For in my lyf I coud nevir syng a note.
In The Testament of Cresseid, he essays the bold part of a
continuator. Having turned, for fireside companionship on a cold
night, to the 'quair'
Writtin be worthie Chaucor glorious
Of fair Cresseid and lustie Troylus,
he meditates on Cresseid's fate, and takes up another . quair' to
'break his sleep,'
God wait, gif all that Chanceir wrait was trew.
Nor I wait nocht gif this narratioun
Be authoreist, or fenzeit of the new,
Be sum Poeit, throw his inventioun
Maid to report the Lamentatioun
1. frounced,' wrinkled.
1 wide.
* loosely banging. s rugged.
8 boarse.
## p. 248 (#266) ############################################
248
The Scottish Chaucerians
And wofull end of this lustie Cresseid;
And quhat distres scho thoillit, and quhat deid!
After this introduction, he proceeds, obviously on a hint from
Chaucer's text, to give the sequel to the Diomede episode.
Chaucer had prayed each ‘lady bright of hewe,'
That al be that Criseyde was untrowe,
That for that gilt she be not wrooth with me.
Ye may hir gilt in othere bokes see;
And gladlier I wol wryten, if yow leste,
Penelopëes trouthe and good Alceste.
Troilus, v, II. 1774-8;
and he had chivalrously passed on to the closing scene in the
tragedy of Troilus. Henryson supplements this with the tragedy
of Cresseid. Cast off by Diomede, the distressed woman retires
to an oratory and prays to Venus and Cupid, till she falls into an
ecstasy. She dreams of her judgment by Saturn, that she shall
be stricken with disease, and shall drag out her days in misery.
She awakes, to find that she is a leper. A child comes to tell her
that her father bids her to supper. She cannot go; and her
father appears by her side, and learns how Cupid has taken
his vengeance upon her. Sad at heart, he grants her wish to pass
straightway with 'cop and clapper? to the spital. There, in a
dark corner, she 'chides her dreary destiny. ' On a day there
passes Troilus and his company in triumph; and the lepers beg
for alms.
Than upon him scho kest op baith her ene,
And with ane blenk it come in to his thocht
That he sum tyme bir face befoir had sene,
Bot scho was in sic plye he knew hir nocht;
Yit than hir luik into his mynd it brocht
The sweit visage and amorous blenking
Of fair Cresseid, sumtyme his awin darling.
He trembles, and changes colour, but no one sees his suffering.
To Cresseid he throws rich alms, and passes on. The lepers
marvel at his affection for 'yone lazarous'; and Cresseid dis-
covers that her friend is Troilus. Not the least effective part of
the poem is that which contrasts the sensitiveness of the lovers;
or the concluding passage in which the penitent Cresseid makes
her testament, and a leper takes her ring from her corpse and
carries it to Troilus.
He swelt for wo, and fell doun in ane swoun;
For greit sorrow his hairt to birst was boun:
Siching full sadlie, said, 'I can no moir,
Scho was untrew, and wo is me thairfoir! '
## p. 249 (#267) ############################################
Henryson's Shorter Poems
249
The felicity of the simple style of the next stanza is unmis-
takable
Sum said he maid ane tomb of merbell gray,
And wrait hir name and superscriptioun,
And laid it on hir grave, quhair that scho lay,
In goldin letteris, conteining this ressoun:
'Lo, fair ladyis, Cresseid of Troyis toun,
Sumtyme countit the flour of womanheid,
Under this stane, late lipper, lyis deid.
'
The thirteen shorter poems which have been ascribed to
Henryson are varied in kind and verse-form. The majority are
of a reflective cast, dealing with such topics as Want of Wise Men,
Age, Youth, Death, Hasty Credence and the like-topics which
are the delight of the fifteenth century minor muse. There are
allegorical poems, such as The Bludy Serk, with the inevitable
moralitas, a religious piece on the annunciation, and A Prayer
for the Pest. Two of the poems, the pastoral dialogue of Robene
and Makyne and the burlesque Sum Practysis of Medecyne,
deserve special mention for historical reasons; the former, too, for
its individual excellence. The estrif between Robene (Robin) and
Makyne (Malkin) develops a sentiment, thus expressed in the
girl's own words,
The man that will nocht quhen he may
Sall haif nocht quhen he wald-
which is probably an echo of the pastourelles. In literary crafts-
manship, the poem excels its later and more elaborate analogue
The Nut Brown Maid. The older and simpler language, and
the ballad timbre (which runs throughout many of Henryson's
minor poems) place Robene and Makyne almost entirely outside
Chaucerian influence. This is even more obvious in Sum Prac-
tysis of Medecyne; and, for this reason, some have doubted
Henryson's authorship. The divergence is, however, no evidence
against the ascription. Taken with the pieces of the same type
which are known to be by his contemporaries, it gives us an
earlier link in the chain of popular alliterative (or neo-alliterative)
verse which resisted the Chaucerian infusion and was destined to
exert a strong influence upon later Scottish poetry. These bur-
lesque pieces in Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas and, later, in
Lyndsay (in each case a single and disconnected effort) appear
to have been of the nature of experiments or exercises in whim-
sicality, perhaps as a relief from the seriousness or more orderly
humour of the muse. The roughness in tone resembles that of
## p. 250 (#268) ############################################
250
The Scottish Chaucerians
the 'flytings,' in which it is intentional, and, in many cases,
without parallel in English literature. The persistence of this
form throughout the century, and in places least expected, may
supply an argument for James I's authorship of Peblis to the
Play and Christis Kirk on the Grene. At least, the dissimi-
larity between these and the Kingis Quair would not, did other
reasons not intervene, disprove that they came from the same pen? .
William Dunbar has held the place of honour among the Scottish
'makars. ' It may be that his reputation has been exaggerated at
the expense of his contemporaries, who (for reasons now less valid)
have not received like critical attention. Scott's statement that
he is ‘unrivalled by any which Scotland ever produced' strikes
the highest note of praise, and is, perhaps, responsible for much of
the unvaried appreciation which has followed. Russell Lowell's
criticism has arrested attention because it is exceptional, and
because it is a singular example of extravagant deprecia-
tion. It has, however, the indirect value that it prompts us to
test our judgments again, and weigh the value of such popular
epithets as 'the Scottish Chaucer' and 'the Scottish Skelton. '
There is generally a modicum of truth in easy titles of this
kind, though the essence of the epithet is too often forgotten
or misunderstood.
Of the personal history of William Dunbar, we have only a few
facts; and of the dates of his writings or of their sequence we
know too little to convince us that any account of his literary
life is more than ingenious speculation. As Dunbar appears to
have graduated bachelor of arts at St Andrews in 1477, his birth
may be dated about 1460. Internal evidence, for the most part
indirect, points to his having survived the national disaster at
Flodden, perhaps till 1520. Like Kennedy, his poetic rival in the
Flyting, Gavin Douglas and Lyndsay, and, indeed, like all the
greater poets from James I, with the exception of the school-
master of Dunfermline, he was connected with the court and,
like most of them, was of noble kin. These facts must be
kept in mind in a general estimate of the courtly school of
Scottish verse, in explaining its artificialities and in under-
standing the separation in sentiment and technique from the
more popular literature which it superseded for a time. This
consideration supplies, among other things, part of the answer
to the problem why the national or patriotic note, which is
1 See Chapter u.
## p. 251 (#269) ############################################
William Dunbar
251
strongly characteristic of later writers, is wanting at a period
when it might be expected to be prominent. In preceding
work, with the exception, perhaps, of Wallace, the appeal to
history is in very general terms; during the golden age,' when
political forces were active and Border memories might have
stirred the imagination, the poets are wholly absorbed in the
literary traditions of romance, or in the fun and the disappoint-
ments of life at court; only in the mid-sixteenth century, and,
first, most unmistakably in the French-made Complaynt of
Scotlande, do we find that perfervid Scotticism which glows in later
literature
Dunbar's kinship with the house of Dunbar did not bring him
wealth or place. After his college course he became a novice,
subject to the strict rule of the Observantines of the Franciscan
order. He appears, however, to have fretted under the restraint
of his ascetic calling. In a poem entitled How Dumbar wes
desyrd to be ane freir he makes frank confession of his diffi-
culties, and more suo describes the exhortation to him to 'refuse
the world' as the work of the devil.
This freir that did Sanct Francis thair appeir,
Ane feind he wes in liknes of ane freir;
He vaneist away with stynk and fyrie smowk;
With him me thocht all the houshend he towk,
And I awoik as wy? that wes in weir 8.
He found some relief in the roving life of a friar, and he appears
to have spent a few years in Picardy and other parts of France,
where he certainly was in 1491 with Bothwell's mission to the
French court for a bride for the young James IV. There, among
the many Scots then haunting Paris, he may have met Gavin
Douglas, Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen, Hector Boece and John
Major; but the Sorbonne, where they were to be found, had,
probably, few attractions for him. It is tempting to speculate that
the wild life of the faubourgs and the talent of Bohemians like
François Villon (whose poems had just been printed posthumously,
in 1489) had the strongest claims upon the restless friar. It has
been assumed, not without some plausibility, that there are traces
in the Scot's poems of direct French influence, in other and
deeper ways than in the choice of subjects which Villon had
made his own. By 1500, he was back in Scotland, no longer an
Observantine, but a priest at court, pensioned by the king, and
moving about as a minor official in royal business. The title
See also Chapter IL
• fear (doubt).
man.
## p. 252 (#270) ############################################
252
The Scottish Chaucerians
‘rhymer of Scotland,' in the English privy council accounts
during the sojourn in London of the Scottish embassy for the
hand of Margaret Tudor, has been taken by some to mean that,
beyond his being the poetical member of the company who
praised London in verse", he was recognised to some extent as
laureate. Of his literary life, which appears to have begun with
his association with the court in 1500, we know nothing beyond
what the poems tell us indirectly; but of the sentiment of his age,
as seen by a courtier, we have the fullest particulars.
Dunbar's poems fall into two main divisions—the allegorical
and occasional. Both show the strength of Chaucerian tradition,
the former in a more immediate way, the latter (with full allow-
ance for northern and personal characteristics) in the continuance
of the satirical, moral and religious themes of the shorter poems of
Chaucer's English followers. There is, however, a difference of
atmosphere. Dunbar's work is conditioned by the circumstance
that it was written by a courtier for the court Poetry had fallen,
as has been hinted, into close association with a small royal and
aristocratic coterie. But life at court, though it showed a political
and intellectual vigour which contrasts favourably with that
of earlier reigns, and had grown more picturesque in serving the
exuberant taste of the 'redoubted roye,' was circumscribed in
its literary interests, and, with all its alertness, added little or
nothing to the sum of poetic endeavour. The age may have been
'golden '; it was not ‘spacious. ' Literary consciousness, when it
existed, turned to the romantic past or to the old ritual of allegory,
or to the re-editing, for contemporary purposes, of plaints of empty
purses, of the fickleness of woman, of the vanity of the world and
of the lack of piety; or it was absorbed in the merely technical
task of illuminating or aureating the 'rude' vernacular? If,
however, the area was not enlarged, it was worked more fully.
From this experience, at the hands of writers of great talent,
much was gained for Scottish verse which has the appearance of
newness to the literary historian. What is, therefore, outstanding
in Dunbar, is not, as in Henryson, the creation of new genres
1 Beginning 'London, thou art of townes A per se,' and with London, thou art
the flour of Cities all,' as the burden of each stanza. The poem is, with all its con.
ventionality of phrase, of considerable historical interest.
Cf. the address to Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate in the well-known stanzas of
the Goldyn Targe (11. 253—270). There, the praise is of Chaucer's ‘anamalit termis
celicall,' and of the light which he brought to oure Inglisch' (i. e. Lowland Scots).
And the praise of Gower and Lydgate is that by their “sugarit lippis and tongis
aureate' and 'angel mouthis most mellifluate' they have illumined the language and
'our-gilt oure speche, that imperfyte stude. '
6
## p. 253 (#271) ############################################
Dunbar's Allegories 253
or fresh motives. Compared with Henryson, Dunbar shows
no advance in broad purpose and sheer originality. He is,
apart from all question of vocabulary, more artificial in the stricter
historical sense; and he might have deserved no better from
posterity than Lydgate and Occleve have deserved had he not
suppled the rhythms and added life and humour to the old matter.
Dunbar's debt to Chaucer is less intimate and spiritual than
Henryson's or king James's. He could not have given us the after-
tale of Cresseid, or caught so clearly the sentiment of the master
in a new Quair. Chaucer is, to him, the 'rose of rethoris all'
(as every poet of the century admitted), but he follows him at
a distance and, perhaps, with divided affection for the newer
French writers. Still, the Chaucerian influence is there, though the
evidence of direct drawing from the well of English is less clear.
The Goldyn Targe has the simple motif of the poet's appearance
(in a dream, on a conventional May morning) before the court of
Venus, where he endeavours to resist the arrows of dame Beauty
and her friends with the aid of Reason's 'scheld of gold so
schene. ' He is wounded near to death and taken prisoner. Then
he knows that the lady is 'lustiar of chere': when she de-
parts, he is delivered over to Heaviness. As she sails off, the
noise of the ship’s guns wake him to the enjoyment, once more, of
the May morning and the singing birds. The allegory is of the
simplest; the contemporary didacticism has hardly invaded it, and
the abstractions which the poet introduces are in closer kinship
with the persons of courtly allegory than with the personages
in the moralities of the period. A similar theme appears in
his well-known short poem, Sen that I am a presoneir (some-
times known as Beauty and the Prisoner); but there didactic
and personal elements have been added. It is probable that
criticism has been over busy in seeing references to the king,
to his liaison with Margaret Drummond and to her suspicious
death. In The Thrissil and the Rois, the intrusion of the
moralitas is at once obvious. The setting is heraldic: the
theme is the marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor. The
familiar machinery of the dream-poem is here; but the general
effect is that of an elaborate prothalamium. It is an easy stage
from this poetic type to the pageant and masque ; but in the
single example of Dunbar's 'dramatic' endeavour-in the fragment
of The Interlude of the Droichis Part of the Play—the alle-
gory is used merely to enhance the whimsicality of the design.
In Chaucer's simpler narrative manner, we have the tale of
The Freiris of Berwik, dealing with the old theme of an untrue
## p. 254 (#272) ############################################
254
The Scottish Chaucerians
wife caught in her own wiles. The ascription of this piece to
Dunbar has been doubted, but there is nothing in it unworthy
of his metrical art or his satiric talent. The Tretis of the Tua
Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, which is certainly his, echoes the
gossip of the Wife of Bath, but it speaks with a freedom from
which Chaucer would have shrunk. Its antique line and allitera-
tion connect it formally with the popular poetry which Chaucer
parodied and undid ; yet the association is remote. For it is
essentially a literary exercise, perhaps a burlesque pastiche to
satisfy the romantic fashion of the court. The art of this remark-
able poem is always conscious. In the fierce thrusts of sarcasm,
in the warping of words, uncouth and strong, we seem to see the
personal satisfaction of the craftsman in his triumph of phrase
and line.
I have ane wallidrag, ane worme, ane auld wobat carle,
A waistit walroun, na worth bot wourdis to clatter;
Ane bumbart, ane dron bee, ane bag full of flewme,
Ane skabbit skarth, ane scorpioun—
So hurtle the words in this dialogue on matrimonial risks. In
some respects, it is difficult to differentiate this tour de force from
a 'flyting'; but the husbands are not present, and may not (if they
could) meet the torrents of abuse.
In considering the satirical and occasional poems of Dunbar,
which constitute at once the greater and more important portion
of his work, it is well, in the first place, to see how far the
Chaucerian influence holds. Here, at least, it is difficult to allow
the aptness of the title 'the Scottish Chaucer,' unless it mean
nothing more than that Dunbar, by analogical compliment, has the
first place in Early and Middle Scots, as Chaucer has in Middle
English. It cannot mean that he shows Chaucer's spirit and out-
look, as Henryson has shown ; nor that Dunbar is, in these satirical
and occasional pieces, on which his wider reputation rests, a
whole-hearted pupil in the craft of verse. The title would have
appeared more fitting in his own day, when his appeal to con-
temporaries (apart from any acknowledged debt to his forerunner)
was of the same technical kind which Chaucer had made to his;
but a comparison, nowadays, has to take account of other matters.
Both poets are richly endowed with humour: it is the outstanding
quality of each ; but in no respect do their differences appear
more clearly. Here, Dunbar is unlike Henryson in lacking the
gentler and more intimate fun of their master. He is a satirist in
a
the stronger sense ; more boisterous in his fun, and showing, in his
wildest frolics, an imaginative range which has no counterpart
## p. 255 (#273) ############################################
The Grotesque in Dunbar
255
in the southern poet. His satirical powers are best seen in his
Tidings from the Session, an attack on the law courts, and in his
Satire on Edinburgh, in which he denounces the filthy condition
of the capital; in his verses on his old friends the Franciscans,
and on the flying friar of Tungland who came to grief because he
had used hens' feathers; in his fiercer invectives of the General
Satire and The Epitaph on Donald Owre; and in the vision of
The Dance of the Sevin Deidlie Synnis. The last is one of the best
examples of Dunbar's realism and literary cunning in suiting the
word and line to the sense, as in the description of Sloth-
Syne Sueirnes, at the secound bidding,
Come lyk & sow out of a midding,
Full slepy wes his grunziel:
Mony sweir2 bumbarda belly-huddroun,
Mony slute daw and slepy duddroun5,
Him serwit ay with sounzie 6.
In all, but especially in the Dance, there is not a little of the
fantastic ingenuity which appears in his more purely comic
sketches. And these again, though mainly 'fooleries,' are not
without satirical intention, as in his Joustis of the Tailzeour and
the Sowtar and his Black Lady, where the fun is a covert attack
on the courtly craze for tourneys. Of all the pieces in this category,
his Ballad of Kynd Kittok best illustrates that elfin quality which
relieves his 'busteous' strain of ridicule. The waggish description
of the thirsty alewife, her journey on a snail, her arrival in
heaven and her sojourn there till, desiring a 'fresh drink,'
she wanders forth and is not allowed to return, her going back to
her ale-house and the poet's concluding request,
Frendis, I pray 30u hertfully,
Gif ze be thristy or dry,
Drink with my Guddame, as 30 ga by,
Anys for my saik-
strike a note, of which the echoes are to be often heard in later
northern verse? . There is more than an accidental likeness between
this roguish request to the reader and the close of Burns's Address
to the Deil and The Dying Words of Poor Mailie. The reach of
Dunbar's fancy is at its greatest in The Interlude. There, in
his description of Fyn, he writes-
He gat my grauntschir Gog Magog ;
Ay quhen he dansit, the warld wald schog 8;
Five thousand ellis zeid in his frog
9
Of Hieland pladdis, and mair.
i face (snout).
8 glutton. • dirty slut.
osloven.
care, attention.
7 See Chapter XI.
8 shake.
frook,' tunio.
a lazy.
## p. 256 (#274) ############################################
256
The Scottish Chaucerians
>
zit he was bot of tendir zouth;
Bot eftir he grewe mekle at fonthi,
Ellevyne myle wyde met was his mouth,
His teith was ten ell sqwair,
He wald apon his tais stand,
And tak the sternis doune with his hand
And set them in a gold garland
Above his wyfis hair.
This is a triumph of the grotesque on the grand scale which the
creator of Gargantua would have admired, and could not have
excelled. Something of the same quality is seen in his wild
picture of the birth of Antichrist in mid-air, in his Vision, which
opens with the customary dream-setting and gives no hint of
this turn in the poet's fancy.
Of lyrical, as of strictly dramatic, excellence, there is little
in Dunbar. His love poems are few and, taken as a whole,
undistinguished. His religious and moral verses, the one of the
hymn type, the other on the hackneyed themes of Good Counsel,
Vanitas vanitatum and (when he is cheery in mood) Blitheness,
deserve commendation for little beyond their metrical facility.
They are too short to be tedious to the modern reader. He uses
the old device of the 'testament' to good purpose in the comic
poem on the physician Andrew Kennedy; and, here again, his
imagination transforms the old convention. In all Goliardic
literature there is nothing to excel this stanza :
A barell bung ay at my bosum,
Of varldis gud I bad na mair;
Et corpus meum ebriosum
I leif onto the toune of Air;
In a draf mydding for ever and ay
Ut ibi sepeliri queam,
Quhar drink and draff may ilka day
Be cassyne super faciem meam.
In The Dance, already referred to, Dunbar works up the familiar
material of the Danse Macabre. In his Flyting of Dunbar and
Kennedie (his poetic rival Walter Kennedy) we have a Scottish
example of the widely-spread European genre in its extremest
form. It remains a masterpiece of scurrility. The purpose of
the combatants in this literary exercise was to outdo each other in
abuse, and yet not to quarrel. It is hard for the most catholic
modern to believe that they kept the peace, though Dunbar speaks
kindly of his 'friend' in his Lament. The indirect value of
The Flyting is great-linguistically, in its vocabulary of invective;
1 lit. "in fullness (fulth). '
9
post.
measure.
3
## p. 257 (#275) ############################################
Dunbar's Prosodic Range 257
6
biographically, for it tells us more of the poet than we derive
from any other source ; historically, in respect of its place in
the development of this favourite genre in Scots, and its testimony
to the antipathies of Celtic and Lowland civilisations in the early
sixteenth century? A like indirect interest attaches to The
Lament for the Makaris, which Dunbar wrote 'quhen he was
seik. ' It is a poem on the passing of human endeavour, a motif
which had served the purpose of scores of fifteenth century laments.
If it was written under the influence of Villon's master ballades,
praise must be allowed to Dunbar that he endenised the French-
man's art with some success. The solemn effect of the burden,
Timor mortis conturbat me, occasional happy turns, as
He takis the campioun in the stour,
The capitane closit in the tour,
The lady in bour full of bewte;
Timor Mortis conturbat me
and a sense of literary restraint give the piece distinction above
the average poem of this type. Much of its reputation nowadays
is as a historical document, which tells us nearly all that we
know of some of Dunbar's contemporaries. He names his greater
predecessors, and, properly, puts Chaucer first on the roll.
Dunbar, we have said, has been called the 'Scottish Skelton. '
There is some justice in the likening, but the reasons are not
consistent with those which give him the title of the 'Scottish
Chaucer. ' His allegiance to Chaucer is shown in literary reminis-
cence, whether of motif, or phrase, or stanza-a bookish reminis-
cence, which often helps us to distinguish the fundamental
differences in outlook. There is a spiritual antithesis ; but there
are textual bonds. With Skelton, on the other hand, who must
have been the borrower, had any contact been possible, he stands
in close analogy, in two important respects. In the first place,
both poets, in their unexpected turns of satire and in their
jugglery of words, anticipate the Rabelaisian humour in its intel-
lectual audacity and inexhaustible resource. Whether in wider
excursions of fancy, or in verbal orgies, such as in the Com-
plaint to the King-
Bot fowll, jow-jowrdane-hedit jevellis,
Cowkin-kenseis, and culroun kewellis;
Stuffettis, strekouris, and stafische strummellis;
Wyld haschbaldis, haggarbaldis, and hummellis;
Drunoartis, dysouris, dyvouris, drewellis,
Misgydit memberis of the dewellis; etc.
i See Chapter 1v.
E. L. II. CH. I.
17
<
## p. 258 (#276) ############################################
258
The Scottish Chaucerians
6
we are constantly reminded of the rector of Diss, and often of
the historian of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. In the second
place, their metrical purposes have much in common. The
prosodic variety of both is always our first impression-of Dunbar,
without parallel in range and competence in any English writer
before his time. The interest of the matter in him, as in Skelton,
is that the variety is not the effect of mere literary restlessness,
but the outcome of experiment to extend the capabilities of
English verse in counterpart to what was being done by 'aurea-
tion' and other processes for poetic diction and style. If Dunbar's
prosodic cunning were less remarkable, and if Skelton's so-called
“doggerel' were even less palatable than it is to those who
take a narrow view of this problem of English, the endeavour
of both poets, and of the Scot in particular, would lose none of
its historical value. Dunbar borrows from all quarters, chiefly
from Chaucer, but also from older popular forms, and from
French models found in that other Bohemian genius, François
Villon. Yet he is not a mere copyist: his changes in the
grouping of the lines in the stanza, his varying the length
of the verses and his grafting of one form upon another,
are evidence of the literary artist at work. It is useless to
attempt to illustrate this by selection from the hundred and one
poems which are ascribed to him, for a selection cannot disclose
his kaleidoscopic ingenuity. The remarkable range and resource
of his technique and the vitality of his imagination must redeem
his work in the eyes of the most alien modern of the charges
which have been brought against the art of Lydgate and Occleve.
His was not the heavy-headed fancy of a moribund medievalism.
The explanation of the difference may be, after all, largely personal.
Only so far is he of the renascence. The chief interest to us lies in
the old things which he has chosen and recast, as genius may
do at any time, whether the age be 'dark' or 'new. '
If no serious effort has been made to claim Dunbar as a child of
the renascence, except in respect of his restlessness, in which
he shows something of the human and individual qualities asso-
ciated with that movement, his contemporary Gavin Douglas bas
been frequently described as the embodiment the fullest and
also the first among Scottish poets, of the principles of neo-
classicism. A critic of high consideration has recently said that
‘no poet, not even Dante himself, ever drank more deeply of the
spirit of Virgil than Gavin Douglas. ' Others who consent to this
## p. 259 (#277) ############################################
Gavin Douglas
259
6
have laid stress on the fact that Douglas was the first translator of
a great verse classic into the vernacular. If this conclusion were
as just as it is, at first sight, plausible, Douglas could have no
place, or only a very minor place in this chapter, which assumes
a fundamental homogeneity in medieval method, in most respects
incongruent with the literary intention of the new learning.
Like Dunbar, Douglas was of good family, and a cleric; but he
had influence and fortune which brought him a large measure of
worldly success. He had become a dignitary of the church when
the erst-friar was riming about the court and writing complaints
on his empty purse. Unlike Dunbar, he had no call to authorship.
His literary career, if we may so speak of the years when all
his work was written, is but a part of a busy life, the early
experience of a man destined to lose his leisure in the strife
of politics. He was the third son of Archibald, fifth earl of
Angus, the 'great earl,' better known as 'Bell-the-Cat. ' He was
born a 1475, and completed his early training in 1494, when
he graduated at St Andrews. In 1501, after spending some
time in cures in Aberdeenshire and the Lothians, he became
provost of the collegiate church of St Giles in Edinburgh,
his tenure of which partly synchronised with his father's civil
provostship of the capital. Between this date and 1513 (that
defining year in all Scottish biography of this period) he did all
his literary work, The Palice of Honour, King Hart, Conscience
and the translation of the Aeneid, begun early in 1512 and printed
in 1513. Other writings have been ascribed to him-a translation
of Ovid (though, in one place, he speaks of this work as a task
for another), plays on sacred subjects and sundry Aureae
orationes ; but none are extant, and we have his testimony in
the 'Conclusion of the Aeneid), which may be accepted as valid,
that he made Vergil his last literary task.
Thus vp my pen and instrumentis full zoyr
On Virgillis post I fix for evirmore,
Nevir, from thens, syk materis to discryve:
My muse sal now be cleyn contemplatyve,
And solitar, as doith the byrd in cage;
Sen fer byworn is all my childis age,
And of my dayis neir passyt the half dait
That natur suld me grantyn, weil I wait.
His later history is exclusively political, a record of promotions
and oustings. He was bishop of Dunkeld from 1516 to 1520, when
he was deprived of his see because he had gone to the English
court for aid in the Douglas-Albany quarrels. Two years later, he
17-2
## p. 260 (#278) ############################################
260
The Scottish Chaucerians
died of plague in London, in the house of his friend lord Dacre.
Just before his death, he had sent to another friend, Polydore
Vergil, material for the latter's History, by way of correction
of Major's account, which Vergil had proposed to use.
The Palice of Honour, Douglas's earliest work, is an example,
in every essential sense, of the later type of dream-poem, already
illustrated in the Goldyn Targe. It is, however, a more ambitious
work (extending to 2166 lines); and it shows more clearly the de-
cadence of the old method, partly by its over-elaboration, partly
by the inferior art of the verse, partly by the incongruous welding
of the pictorial and moral purposes. The poem is dedicated to
James IV, who was probably expected to read between the lines
and profit from the long lesson on the triumph of virtue. The
poem opens in a 'gardyne of plesance,' and in May-time, as
of yore. The poet falls asleep, and dreams of a desert place
‘amyd a forest by a hyddeous flude, with grysly fische. ' Queen
Sapience appears with her learned company.
