The
difficulty
was a very real one for
those who in diction and metre were slavish imitators of Chaucer.
those who in diction and metre were slavish imitators of Chaucer.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v02
228 (#246) ############################################
228
Stephen Hawes
that every poet should be a teacher; and he always presses his
own lessons home, especially the lesson to eschew sloth. In his
two long poems, he has the same didactic aim—to portray a man's
struggle to attain his ideal : moral purity in The Example of
Virtue, worldly glory in The Passetyme of Pleasure, the former
being fuller of moralising than the latter. The Passetyme, which
was composed after The Example, exhibits greater skill in treat-
ment and possesses more human interest. Both poems belong to
the same type of allegory, and are worked out on similar lines.
They have a number of incidents in common, as crossing seas to
reach the loved one, and killing a foe with three heads. Several
of the personified abstractions are the same in both, as Fortune,
Justice, Sapience or Wisdom, Grace, Perseverance, Peace, Mercy,
Charity, Contrition. In all his poems, Hawes has certain pet ideas,
which he puts forward again and again with little variation in
phraseology : as eulogies of Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate; apo-
logies for rude diction and want of poetic power ; declarations
that poets keep alive the memory of the great, and conceal moral
instruction under 'cloudy figures. '
This sameness renders it unnecessary to examine all Hawes's
poems in detail. We shall be able to appreciate the quality of his
work even though we restrict ourselves, for the most part, to
The Passetyme of Pleasure. It is an allegory of human life,
couched in the form of a chivalrous romance, with the addition
of a strong dash of scholastic learning and theology, and is in the
line of such works as the Roman de la Rose, the allegories of
Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate, Dunbar's Goldyn Targe and Dance
of the Sevin Deidlie Synnis, Douglas's King Hart, Sackville's
Induction, Googe's Cupido Conquered and Spenser's Faerie
Queene. What Hawes did was to make a new departure, and,
in working out his didactic allegory, emphasise the element of
chivalrous romance. This suited his age, for, after the collapse
of the feudal baronage in the wars of the Roses, came a revival
of chivalry, though rather of the outward show than of the inward
reality, of courtiers and carpet knights rather than of chivalrous
warriors. Later, it blazed out in the field of Cloth of Gold. The
attempted revival in Henry VII's day explains the passage in
The Passetyme, chap. XXVI, where Graund Amour is admonished to
renew the flower of chivalry now long decayed, and in the disser-
tation of king Melizius, chap. XXVIII, on the true meaning of the
chivalrous idea. Caxton, too, in The Order of Chivalry, recom-
mends the reading of Froissart, and of tales about king Arthur's
## p. 229 (#247) ############################################
The Passetyme of Pleasure
229
knights, as likely to resuscitate chivalry. Hawes, however, with all
his advocacy of knighthood, insists more on the trivium and
quadrivium, less on the training that produced the men pictured
in Chaucer's knight and squire.
The long and complicated allegory of The Passetyme is
managed with much success. The personified abstractions are
selected and fitted in with no little dexterity. But it need
cause no surprise that we feel the details tiresome and obscure :
it may be that often details which seem obscure are pictorial and
not didactic. In the construction of the poem there are curious
slips ; in fact, the design seems to have been altered while it was
being worked out. Graund Amour, chap. IV, is shown an arras
picturing his journey and adventures till he wins his lady. What
he sees does not exactly coincide with what afterwards happens.
The arras does not show the meeting of the lovers in the tower of
Music, chap. XVII. More than once, after the hero saw the arras,
he is represented as doubtful of his ultimate success, e. g. chap. XVII.
Perhaps Hawes discovered-his readers certainly discover-that
the foreknowledge of the final result removes the feeling of suspense
and spoils the interest of the story. Again, Graund Amour and
La Bel Pucell come to a perfect understanding in the garden and
plight their troth, chap. xix. Yet, later, chaps. xxix ff. , the
garden scene is entirely ignored ; and the conventional plan that
makes Venus the intermediary to persuade the lady to take pity on
her lover is employed. Nor is the allegory always consistent; but
that is a trifle, for even in The Pilgrim's Progress lynx-eyed critics
have detected inconsistencies. In The Passetyme, inconsistency
often arises from the exigency of the narrative. We recognise the
aptness of the allegory when the perfect knight has as his com-
panions the knights Truth, Courtesy, Fidelity, Justice, Fortitude,
Nurture and such like: that is, possesses the qualities symbolised
by those knights. Soon, however, they bid him farewell, not be-
cause he has lost those traits of character, but because the narrative
requires that he shall fight his battles alone. The greyhounds
Grace and Governance are, in spite of their names, conventional
figures : when stirring events are in progress they drop into the
background. Sometimes an abstraction, which has been already
employed in one connection, is reintroduced in another, and even
an incongruous, connection. Envy, for example, is one of the
giant's seven heads and is cut off by Graund Amour ; but it re-
appears as one of the contrivers of the metal monster. Like other
allegories, The Passetyme is marred by the fact that the characters
## p. 230 (#248) ############################################
230
Stephen Hawes
talk and debate too much, and act too little. And it must be
admitted that the personification of the seven sciences makes
dreary reading nowadays. Hawes himself found it difficult to
turn his expositions of learning into musical form. His stanzas on
the noun substantive, chap. v, must surely be among the most
unpoetical passages of all metrical writing. Four lines will be
sufficient to quote.
The Latyn worde whyche that is referred
Unto a thynge whych is substancyall,
For a nowne substantyre is wel averred,
And wyth a gender is declynall.
We have seen that Hawes was reputed a man of wide learning,
and his writings bear this out. He was familiar with the Bible
and with theological books. The influence of the wisdom-
literature of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha is manifest
in the prominent part assigned to Wisdom and Discretion in The
Example of Virtue. The conclusion of the same poem is crowded
with saints and martyrs, while Augustine and Bernard are quoted
in The Conversion of Swearers. The exposition of the sciences in
The Passetyme, though not free from slips, of which he was himself
aware, shows that he had studied the text-books of the trivium
and quadrivium. It was not, however, the intellectual value
of those studies that appealed to him so much as their moral
influence. Rhetoric and music, he says, produce not only order
in words and harmony in sounds, but also order in man's life and
harmony in his soul. Hawes was thoroughly versed in the romantic
and allegorical writings of the preceding generations. He appeals
to Caxton's Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, and, speaking of
Arthur, he evidently refers to Malory's Morte d'Arthur as a
familiar book. Whether or not Hawes possessed the powerful
memory attributed to him, his methods, illustrations, turns of phrase,
continually remind us of the Roman de la Rose, of Chaucer-
Troilus and Criseyde for example-of Gower's Confessio Amantis,
of Lydgate-especially The Temple of Glass. His indebtedness to
these three poets he frequently acknowledges; and it may be
summarily illustrated. The prayer at the end of The Passetyme,
that the scansion may not be marred by bad printing and that
the poet's intention may be manifest, is, in idea and phrasing,
closely modelled on a passage near the conclusion of Chaucer's
Troilus. Troilus, which Hawes often cites, is also his original for
the lovers' meeting in the temple of Music and for their sorrowful
parting, chaps. XVII, XIX. Gower's Confessio supplies the fabliaux
## p. 231 (#249) ############################################
His Learning and Models
231
about Aristotle and Vergil, and the tradition that Evander's
daughter devised the principles of Latinity, chaps. XXIX, V. The
Passetyme resembles The Temple of Glass in being partly in rime
royal, partly in decasyllabic couplets. Again, the dazzling bright-
ness of the tower of Doctrine and the impossibility of gazing at it
till clouds covered the sun, chap. III, Hawes borrowed, diction and
all, from Lydgate's description of the crystal fane. The gold vine
with grapes of rubies in the roof of the same tower comes from
Mandeville. Hawes evidently had The Court of Sapience also in
his mind. The prison in the tower of Chastity, chap. XXXII, is a
distant and pale reflection of Dante's Inferno. Finally, Hawes
appears to have drawn, directly or indirectly, from Martianus
Capella's de Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, the well known
text-book of the Middle Ages.
Living though Hawes did at the opening of a new age, and
having studied abroad at the time when the study of the classics
was reviving in western Europe, he still shows the characteristic
marks of medievalism. His writings abound in long digressions,
irrelevances, debates, appeals to authority, needless repetitions,
prolix descriptions. One glaring instance of prolixity occurs in
The Passetyme, chap. XLII, where the sum and substance of a seven-
line stanza on Pride can be adequately expressed in the six words,
“Why are dust and ashes proud ? ' Hawes also exhibits want of
proportion. More than one-eighth of The Passetyme is devoted to
the exposition of Rhetoric, with two digressions. Again, he jumbles
together ideas and associations of various ages, and fails to appreciate
the difference between his own age and classical times. Anything
characteristic of an earlier age and not of his own, he transmutes,
like other medieval writers, into something of his own days that
seemed analogous. Thus, Plato is ‘the cunning and famous clerk';
Joshua is a 'duke'; the centaur-king Melizius is the founder of
feudal chivalry and is conversant with St Paul's epistles ; Minerva?
and Pallas are spoken of as distinct-the former being instructor
in arms at the court of Melizius, the latter being the goddess.
Vergil, too, is the magician. Hawes employs the familiar medieval
machinery-the May morning, Fortune and her wheel, the seven
deadly sins, astronomical lore, and he firmly believes that all poetry
is allegory. In his defence of poets, The Passetyme, chap. ix, he
maintains that it is because the revilers of poetry cannot discover
the moral under the allegory that they fail to appreciate poetry.
Equally medieval is he in holding that poets should always have
1 8o Dunbar, Goldyn Targe, 1. 78, makes Minerva and Pallas two goddesses.
6
## p. 232 (#250) ############################################
232
Stephen Hawes
6
6
a lesson to teach. So strongly does he hold this, that to those who
write without a moral he would almost deny the name of poet.
He bewails the dearth of moral poets in his own day: most
versifiers, he says, waste their time in 'vaynful vanyte,' composing
ballades of fervent love, 'gests and trifles without fruitfulness'.
Hawes never outgrew those views of poetry and never
thoroughly rid himself of the traditional conventions. Sometimes
he forgets them, and then he is at his best. His style becomes
animated or graceful; his diction shakes itself free from the
load of aureate terms. At times his fine rhetoric—'aromatyke
fume' he calls it—is very cumbrous and disfiguring: as in The
Passetyme, chap. XXXVIII,
Her redolente wordes of swete influence
Degouted vapoure moost aromatyke,
And made conversyon of complacence;
Her depured and her lusty rethoryke
My courage reformed, that was so lunatyke.
He uses also the words 'pulcritude,' 'facundious,' 'tenebrous,'
'sugratife,' 'exornate,' 'perdurable' and 'celestine. ' He fre-
quently runs riot in the rhetorical figure of epanaphora, as in The
Passetyme, chap. XXI, where each line of one stanza begins · Where
lacketh mesure,' while in another, Without mesure wo worth'
occurs seven times. In spite of pedantry, however, Hawes manages
to write passages of poetic beauty and sweet tenderness. Such
passages are found in the garden scene, where Graund Amour
woos La Bel Pucell, The Passetyme, chap. XVIII. There, allegory
disappears; and, though we meet with verbiage and stiffness, we
cannot miss the beating of human hearts, the eager passion of the
man, the coyness of the maid, coyness that ends in complete
surrender. Allegory is again dropped in the episode of Godfrey
Gobelive, The Passetyme, chaps. XXIX, XXXII. There, Hawes is a
keen observer of contemporary life, which he describes at first
hand. If the rest of the poem with its personified abstractions
may be reckoned akin to the morality plays, this episode is in
tone a comic interlude. It exhibits also a change then beginning
among the abstractions of the moralities, a change destined to
develop in comedy. Godfrey Gobelive and his ancestors, Davy
Dronken-nole, Sym Sadle-gander, Peter Pratefast, are not allegorical
shadows but living personalities. Such alliterative nicknames
are parallel to the Tom Tosspot and Cuthbert Cutpurse of the
moralities, to Tibet Talkapace and Davy Diceplayer of the comedies.
1 The Passetyme, chap. XIV.
6
6
## p. 233 (#251) ############################################
Relation to Spenser
233
eg.
So, too, Godfrey's Kentish tongue, his Kentish home, his grand-
father's voyage up the Thames in search of a wife, which give
a touch of reality to the narrative, find parallels in the moralities :
in The World and the Child, where Folly describes his
adventures in Holborn and Southwark. Godfrey has humour
of the rough type seen in Gammer Gurton's Needle: his great-
grandmother, for example, is praised for cleanliness, because, when
she had no dishclout, she wiped the dishes with her dog's tail.
The Passetyme of Pleasure and The Example of Virtue belong
to the group of allegorical poems culminating in The Faerie
Queene; and it is generally agreed that Hawes influenced Spenser.
Opinions, however, differ as to the extent of this influence. On the
one hand E. B. Browning calls The Passetyme one of the four
columnar marbles, the four allegorical poems, on whose foundation
is exalted into light the great allegorical poem of the world,
Spenser's Faery Queen. ' On the other hand, Saintsbury admits
only a faint adumbration of The Faerie Queene in The Passetyme
and The Example: 'its outline without its glorious filling-in, its
theme without its art, its intellectual reason for existence without
any of its aesthetic justification thereof. It is not improbable that
Spenser did know Hawes; but, if so, he owed him a very small
royalty. The extent of this influence, or indebtedness, is easy
to overstate and very difficult, or, rather, impossible, to prove.
Mere coincidences may readily be mistaken for borrowing. It
does not follow that, when two writers speak in very similar terms
of the seven deadly sing, one has borrowed from the other. For,
from the time of Piers the Plovoman, the seven deadly sins had
appeared again and again in allegory, in morality play and in
pageant: they are found, too, along with other miscellaneous in-
formation, in that perpetual almanac, The Kalendar of Shepherds.
It seems better, then, simply to enumerate points of resemblance
-grouped together they make a striking list-than to attempt to
define where the limit of Spenser's indebtedness to Hawes should
be fixed
Hawes's main idea is to describe the discipline a man must
undergo and the obstacles he must surmount to attain moral
purity, in The Escample, or win worldly glory, in The Passetyme.
Spenser states that his general aim is 'to fashion a gentleman or
noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline. '
Spenser follows the lead of Hawes in adopting the para-
phernalia of chivalry as allegorical symbolism. The knights of
The Faerie Queene put into practice what Melizius enunciates in
## p. 234 (#252) ############################################
234
Stephen Hawes
The Passetyme as the underlying idea of chivalry-not fighting
in every quarrel, but fighting for the truth or for the common-
weal, and helping widows and maidens in distress. Some of
Melizius's knights, as, for instance, Courtesy and Justice, appear
among Spenser's paladins.
It is after hearing a description of La Bel Pucell's surpassing
beauty and worth that Graund Amour falls in love and determines
to win his ideal. Spenser represents Arthur as having seen in a
dream or vision the Faerie Queene, with whose beauty ravished, he,
awaking, resolved to seek her out. '
Graund Amour in The Passetyme, Youth in The Example, and
Spenser's Red Cross Knight wear the same armour, the Christian
soldier's panoply described by St Paul, whose Epistle to the
Ephesians is expressly referred to in each of the three instances.
In The Example there is a dragon with three heads—the
world, the flesh and the devil-which must be defeated before
Lady Cleanness is won; and the Red Cross Knight must overcome
the same three foes before he wins Lady Una.
Lechery, in The Example, is a fair lady riding on a goat, and,
in The Faerie Queene, a man upon a bearded goat. In the former
poem, Pride is an old lady in a castle on an elephant's back, in the
latter, a lady in a coach drawn by peacocks. Hawes writes of the
park of Pride, Spenser of the garden of Pride.
When fighting with the seven-headed giant, Graund Amour leaps
aside to evade the stroke of the ponderous axe, which then crashes
into the ground three feet and more. In a similar way, Orgoglio's
club misses its mark and ploughs three yards into the ground.
Humility is warder of the castle in The Example, and porter
of Spenser's house of Holiness.
The claim asserted by Mutability in Spenser's fragmentary
seventh book resembles Fortune's claim to universal rule, as set
forth by Hawes in both his poems.
Envy, Disdain and Strangeness contrive Hawes's monster
Privy Malice; Spenser's blatant beast, Slander, is urged on by
Detraction and Envy.
The list of resemblances might be extended, but to no purpose;
and of the many verbal coincidences one must suffice. Spenser
(Book v, canto xi, stanzas 55, 56) makes Artegall say to Burbon:
Die rather than do aught that mote dishonour yield.
Fie on such forgery!
Under one hood to shadow faces twain:
Knights ought be true, and truth is one in all.
## p. 235 (#253) ############################################
Relation to Spenser
235
With this, compare three passages from The Passetyme.
Minerva exhorts Graund Amour:
And rather deye in ony maner of wyse,
To attayne honour and the lyfe dyspyse,
Than for to lyve and remayne in shame. Chap. XXVIII.
Fortune is described as a lady of pride and of perfect ex-
cellence,
But that she had two faces in one hode. Chap. XXVII.
Sir Truth says that he guards the door of the chamber of
chivalry,
That no man enter into it wrongfully,
Without me, Trouthe, for to be chivalrous. Chap. XXVIII.
Hawes employs the Chaucerian seven-line stanza almost ex-
clusively. Exceptions have already been noted—the fantastic
tour de force, and several passages in decasyllabic couplets. It
must be set down to his defective sense of metrical fitness that
he used rime royal so extensively. However suitable that
measure is for serious and pathetic subjects, it is less suitable for
much of Hawes's work, a great part of The Passetyme, for instance,
where a metre of superior narrative capacity is required. For
continuous narrative, Hawes found the compartment nature of
rime royal inconvenient, and, consequently, sentences often over-
flow the stanza. In one instance, a whole stanza is occupied by the
modifying parts of the sentence, while the main predicate is
pushed into the next stanza, which, because the printer, or some-
body else, blundered, happens to begin another chapter? . In
using decasyllabic couplets for the humorous Godfrey Gobelive
scenes, Hawes proves himself not wholly insensible to metrical
fitness. It is possible that he employed the two metres in the
same poem in imitation of Lydgate's Temple of Glass. If so,
he missed Lydgate's tolerably constant distinction of couplet for
narrative, stanza for lyrical parts.
When we read a passage from Hawes, we feel that his verse is
possessed of a strange hobbling gait; and when we seek to scan
the lines, we are likely to become bewildered. Some of the lines,
it is true, scan quite correctly; at times, they have a flow and
cadence which competent critics have likened to the music of
Spenser, as
I sawe come ryding in a valey farre
A goodly ladye, envyroned about
· The Passetyme, chaps. XXXIII, XXXIV.
## p. 236 (#254) ############################################
236
Stephen Hawes
With tongnes of fyre as bright as any starre,
That fyry flambes ensensed alway ont.
The Passet yme, Chap. 1;
or
Was never payne, but it had joye at last. Chap. XVII.
But we are not to expect to find in Hawes the artistic splendour
of Spenser. Indeed, most of his lines are inartistic and unmusical.
We must remember, however, that the non-existence of a critical
edition of Hawes renders it uncertain how far we may justly lay
the blame on the writer. The text is undoubtedly corrupt, and
Hawes was justified in praying that bad printing might not spoil
his scansion'. The following corrupt line does not show metre
spoiled, but is given because it can be corrected from The
Passetyme itself. We read in a stanza dealing with Gluttony,
The pomped clerkes with foles delicions, Chap. XLII,
which, in the context, is absolutely without meaning. A correction
is easily got from the line in chap. V,
The pomped carkes wyth foode dilicious.
In chap. XXXIII three riming lines end thus : 'craggy roche,'
'bye flackes,' 'tre toppes,' where the natural emendation is
'rockes,' 'flockes. ' But, even then, 'flockes,' 'toppes,' is assonance
and not rime'. Taking the text, however, as we have it,
we must conclude that Hawes possessed a very defective ear.
This must be said, even after allowance has been made for
the difficulty which Chaucer's successors had in imitating his
versification with words of changed and changing, not to say
chaotic, pronunciation.
The difficulty was a very real one for
those who in diction and metre were slavish imitators of Chaucer.
When Chaucer used an expression like 'the yonge sonne' or
‘smale fowles' with final -e sounded, he was following grammatical
usage and current pronunciation. But after these endings ceased
to be sounded, such expressions had a different metrical value.
Not knowing their rationale, Chaucer's imitators adopted the
2
1 The Passetyme, ad fin.
Made by Skeat, Specimens of Eng. Lit. p. 119 (6th ed. ).
: Another example of assonance is loked' 'toted,' chap. IIX. Other curious,
weak, or faulty rimes are slomber' 'wonder'; 'muche why' 'truly'; 'moved'
hoved' 'j-tuned'; . fooes' 'schooles'; 'carbuncles' solacious'; 'appese''suppose';
lylly' 'prety' 'body'; 'engraved' 'amased'; 'tassel' 'fayle'; “joye' waye'; 'ap-
procheth'. requireth. ' When necessary, Hawes writes 'rigorious' instead of rigorous,'
and he delights to match a word like "thing' with any termination -ing,' or 'stable'
and . fable' with '-able. '
## p. 237 (#255) ############################################
His Metre
237
.
final -e as a metrical licence, and only at haphazard did their use
of it coincide with its etymological origin. Hawes neglects the
final -e, when, for example, he rimes 'mette' with 'great,' The
Passetyme, chap. XIX; he observes it in such lines as
You can not helpë in the case I trow, Ibid. ;
and he adds it without historical justification,
A! tourë! tourë! all my joye is gone. Chap. xx.
The shifting accent is made use of, especially in words of French
origin; and we find both accentuations in the same stanza, some-
times even in the same line, as
Mesure mesureth mesure in effecte. Chap. XXI.
This line also exemplifies the alliterative repetition of allied words
or of forms of the same word. Those licences are comparatively
harmless. Others disfigure the Chaucerian decasyllabic, whether
in stanza or couplet, and tend to ruin all its harmony. Lines of
four feet are common. Some are regular octosyllabics, as
Alas! what payne and mortall wo. Chap. XXXI.
Others have an additional final syllable, as
And on my way as I was riding, Chap. XXXI;
or a trisyllabic foot, as
Whose hart ever inwardly is fret, Chap. XXXV;
or two trisyllabic feet and consequently ten syllables, as
His good is his God, with his great ryches. Chap. XLII.
Again, lines of five feet occur with an unaccented syllable omitted
at the caesura, a device which produces an awkward break, as
The minde of men chaungeth as the mone. Chap. XVIII.
Hawes may have learned this from Lydgate, in whose works
Schick says it is more used than anywhere else. The numerous
trisyllabic feet which Hawes, influenced, perhaps, by the freedom
of versification in the popular poetry of his day, introduced into
the seven-line stanza, spoil its rhythm, as
In the toure of Chyvalry I shall make me stronge. Chap. XIX.
Alexandrines are frequently found: some regular, others with one
or two trisyllabic feet, which lengthen out to thirteen or fourteen
syllables, as
The hye astronomier, that is God omnipotent. Chap. XXII.
## p. 238 (#256) ############################################
238
Stephen Hawes
Consequently, the same stanza may contain lines of different
lengths riming together. This gives the impression of jolting,
and suggests doggerel with its grotesque effect in serious poetry,
as
In my maternall tonge opprest with ignoraunce, Chap. XXV,
riming with
He shall fynde all fruytfull pleasaunoe.
Instead of seven lines, one stanza has six, chap. XVII; another
only five, chap. XVIII.
Instead of the regular rime sequence,
ababbcc, we find, chap. 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.
228
Stephen Hawes
that every poet should be a teacher; and he always presses his
own lessons home, especially the lesson to eschew sloth. In his
two long poems, he has the same didactic aim—to portray a man's
struggle to attain his ideal : moral purity in The Example of
Virtue, worldly glory in The Passetyme of Pleasure, the former
being fuller of moralising than the latter. The Passetyme, which
was composed after The Example, exhibits greater skill in treat-
ment and possesses more human interest. Both poems belong to
the same type of allegory, and are worked out on similar lines.
They have a number of incidents in common, as crossing seas to
reach the loved one, and killing a foe with three heads. Several
of the personified abstractions are the same in both, as Fortune,
Justice, Sapience or Wisdom, Grace, Perseverance, Peace, Mercy,
Charity, Contrition. In all his poems, Hawes has certain pet ideas,
which he puts forward again and again with little variation in
phraseology : as eulogies of Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate; apo-
logies for rude diction and want of poetic power ; declarations
that poets keep alive the memory of the great, and conceal moral
instruction under 'cloudy figures. '
This sameness renders it unnecessary to examine all Hawes's
poems in detail. We shall be able to appreciate the quality of his
work even though we restrict ourselves, for the most part, to
The Passetyme of Pleasure. It is an allegory of human life,
couched in the form of a chivalrous romance, with the addition
of a strong dash of scholastic learning and theology, and is in the
line of such works as the Roman de la Rose, the allegories of
Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate, Dunbar's Goldyn Targe and Dance
of the Sevin Deidlie Synnis, Douglas's King Hart, Sackville's
Induction, Googe's Cupido Conquered and Spenser's Faerie
Queene. What Hawes did was to make a new departure, and,
in working out his didactic allegory, emphasise the element of
chivalrous romance. This suited his age, for, after the collapse
of the feudal baronage in the wars of the Roses, came a revival
of chivalry, though rather of the outward show than of the inward
reality, of courtiers and carpet knights rather than of chivalrous
warriors. Later, it blazed out in the field of Cloth of Gold. The
attempted revival in Henry VII's day explains the passage in
The Passetyme, chap. XXVI, where Graund Amour is admonished to
renew the flower of chivalry now long decayed, and in the disser-
tation of king Melizius, chap. XXVIII, on the true meaning of the
chivalrous idea. Caxton, too, in The Order of Chivalry, recom-
mends the reading of Froissart, and of tales about king Arthur's
## p. 229 (#247) ############################################
The Passetyme of Pleasure
229
knights, as likely to resuscitate chivalry. Hawes, however, with all
his advocacy of knighthood, insists more on the trivium and
quadrivium, less on the training that produced the men pictured
in Chaucer's knight and squire.
The long and complicated allegory of The Passetyme is
managed with much success. The personified abstractions are
selected and fitted in with no little dexterity. But it need
cause no surprise that we feel the details tiresome and obscure :
it may be that often details which seem obscure are pictorial and
not didactic. In the construction of the poem there are curious
slips ; in fact, the design seems to have been altered while it was
being worked out. Graund Amour, chap. IV, is shown an arras
picturing his journey and adventures till he wins his lady. What
he sees does not exactly coincide with what afterwards happens.
The arras does not show the meeting of the lovers in the tower of
Music, chap. XVII. More than once, after the hero saw the arras,
he is represented as doubtful of his ultimate success, e. g. chap. XVII.
Perhaps Hawes discovered-his readers certainly discover-that
the foreknowledge of the final result removes the feeling of suspense
and spoils the interest of the story. Again, Graund Amour and
La Bel Pucell come to a perfect understanding in the garden and
plight their troth, chap. xix. Yet, later, chaps. xxix ff. , the
garden scene is entirely ignored ; and the conventional plan that
makes Venus the intermediary to persuade the lady to take pity on
her lover is employed. Nor is the allegory always consistent; but
that is a trifle, for even in The Pilgrim's Progress lynx-eyed critics
have detected inconsistencies. In The Passetyme, inconsistency
often arises from the exigency of the narrative. We recognise the
aptness of the allegory when the perfect knight has as his com-
panions the knights Truth, Courtesy, Fidelity, Justice, Fortitude,
Nurture and such like: that is, possesses the qualities symbolised
by those knights. Soon, however, they bid him farewell, not be-
cause he has lost those traits of character, but because the narrative
requires that he shall fight his battles alone. The greyhounds
Grace and Governance are, in spite of their names, conventional
figures : when stirring events are in progress they drop into the
background. Sometimes an abstraction, which has been already
employed in one connection, is reintroduced in another, and even
an incongruous, connection. Envy, for example, is one of the
giant's seven heads and is cut off by Graund Amour ; but it re-
appears as one of the contrivers of the metal monster. Like other
allegories, The Passetyme is marred by the fact that the characters
## p. 230 (#248) ############################################
230
Stephen Hawes
talk and debate too much, and act too little. And it must be
admitted that the personification of the seven sciences makes
dreary reading nowadays. Hawes himself found it difficult to
turn his expositions of learning into musical form. His stanzas on
the noun substantive, chap. v, must surely be among the most
unpoetical passages of all metrical writing. Four lines will be
sufficient to quote.
The Latyn worde whyche that is referred
Unto a thynge whych is substancyall,
For a nowne substantyre is wel averred,
And wyth a gender is declynall.
We have seen that Hawes was reputed a man of wide learning,
and his writings bear this out. He was familiar with the Bible
and with theological books. The influence of the wisdom-
literature of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha is manifest
in the prominent part assigned to Wisdom and Discretion in The
Example of Virtue. The conclusion of the same poem is crowded
with saints and martyrs, while Augustine and Bernard are quoted
in The Conversion of Swearers. The exposition of the sciences in
The Passetyme, though not free from slips, of which he was himself
aware, shows that he had studied the text-books of the trivium
and quadrivium. It was not, however, the intellectual value
of those studies that appealed to him so much as their moral
influence. Rhetoric and music, he says, produce not only order
in words and harmony in sounds, but also order in man's life and
harmony in his soul. Hawes was thoroughly versed in the romantic
and allegorical writings of the preceding generations. He appeals
to Caxton's Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, and, speaking of
Arthur, he evidently refers to Malory's Morte d'Arthur as a
familiar book. Whether or not Hawes possessed the powerful
memory attributed to him, his methods, illustrations, turns of phrase,
continually remind us of the Roman de la Rose, of Chaucer-
Troilus and Criseyde for example-of Gower's Confessio Amantis,
of Lydgate-especially The Temple of Glass. His indebtedness to
these three poets he frequently acknowledges; and it may be
summarily illustrated. The prayer at the end of The Passetyme,
that the scansion may not be marred by bad printing and that
the poet's intention may be manifest, is, in idea and phrasing,
closely modelled on a passage near the conclusion of Chaucer's
Troilus. Troilus, which Hawes often cites, is also his original for
the lovers' meeting in the temple of Music and for their sorrowful
parting, chaps. XVII, XIX. Gower's Confessio supplies the fabliaux
## p. 231 (#249) ############################################
His Learning and Models
231
about Aristotle and Vergil, and the tradition that Evander's
daughter devised the principles of Latinity, chaps. XXIX, V. The
Passetyme resembles The Temple of Glass in being partly in rime
royal, partly in decasyllabic couplets. Again, the dazzling bright-
ness of the tower of Doctrine and the impossibility of gazing at it
till clouds covered the sun, chap. III, Hawes borrowed, diction and
all, from Lydgate's description of the crystal fane. The gold vine
with grapes of rubies in the roof of the same tower comes from
Mandeville. Hawes evidently had The Court of Sapience also in
his mind. The prison in the tower of Chastity, chap. XXXII, is a
distant and pale reflection of Dante's Inferno. Finally, Hawes
appears to have drawn, directly or indirectly, from Martianus
Capella's de Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, the well known
text-book of the Middle Ages.
Living though Hawes did at the opening of a new age, and
having studied abroad at the time when the study of the classics
was reviving in western Europe, he still shows the characteristic
marks of medievalism. His writings abound in long digressions,
irrelevances, debates, appeals to authority, needless repetitions,
prolix descriptions. One glaring instance of prolixity occurs in
The Passetyme, chap. XLII, where the sum and substance of a seven-
line stanza on Pride can be adequately expressed in the six words,
“Why are dust and ashes proud ? ' Hawes also exhibits want of
proportion. More than one-eighth of The Passetyme is devoted to
the exposition of Rhetoric, with two digressions. Again, he jumbles
together ideas and associations of various ages, and fails to appreciate
the difference between his own age and classical times. Anything
characteristic of an earlier age and not of his own, he transmutes,
like other medieval writers, into something of his own days that
seemed analogous. Thus, Plato is ‘the cunning and famous clerk';
Joshua is a 'duke'; the centaur-king Melizius is the founder of
feudal chivalry and is conversant with St Paul's epistles ; Minerva?
and Pallas are spoken of as distinct-the former being instructor
in arms at the court of Melizius, the latter being the goddess.
Vergil, too, is the magician. Hawes employs the familiar medieval
machinery-the May morning, Fortune and her wheel, the seven
deadly sins, astronomical lore, and he firmly believes that all poetry
is allegory. In his defence of poets, The Passetyme, chap. ix, he
maintains that it is because the revilers of poetry cannot discover
the moral under the allegory that they fail to appreciate poetry.
Equally medieval is he in holding that poets should always have
1 8o Dunbar, Goldyn Targe, 1. 78, makes Minerva and Pallas two goddesses.
6
## p. 232 (#250) ############################################
232
Stephen Hawes
6
6
a lesson to teach. So strongly does he hold this, that to those who
write without a moral he would almost deny the name of poet.
He bewails the dearth of moral poets in his own day: most
versifiers, he says, waste their time in 'vaynful vanyte,' composing
ballades of fervent love, 'gests and trifles without fruitfulness'.
Hawes never outgrew those views of poetry and never
thoroughly rid himself of the traditional conventions. Sometimes
he forgets them, and then he is at his best. His style becomes
animated or graceful; his diction shakes itself free from the
load of aureate terms. At times his fine rhetoric—'aromatyke
fume' he calls it—is very cumbrous and disfiguring: as in The
Passetyme, chap. XXXVIII,
Her redolente wordes of swete influence
Degouted vapoure moost aromatyke,
And made conversyon of complacence;
Her depured and her lusty rethoryke
My courage reformed, that was so lunatyke.
He uses also the words 'pulcritude,' 'facundious,' 'tenebrous,'
'sugratife,' 'exornate,' 'perdurable' and 'celestine. ' He fre-
quently runs riot in the rhetorical figure of epanaphora, as in The
Passetyme, chap. XXI, where each line of one stanza begins · Where
lacketh mesure,' while in another, Without mesure wo worth'
occurs seven times. In spite of pedantry, however, Hawes manages
to write passages of poetic beauty and sweet tenderness. Such
passages are found in the garden scene, where Graund Amour
woos La Bel Pucell, The Passetyme, chap. XVIII. There, allegory
disappears; and, though we meet with verbiage and stiffness, we
cannot miss the beating of human hearts, the eager passion of the
man, the coyness of the maid, coyness that ends in complete
surrender. Allegory is again dropped in the episode of Godfrey
Gobelive, The Passetyme, chaps. XXIX, XXXII. There, Hawes is a
keen observer of contemporary life, which he describes at first
hand. If the rest of the poem with its personified abstractions
may be reckoned akin to the morality plays, this episode is in
tone a comic interlude. It exhibits also a change then beginning
among the abstractions of the moralities, a change destined to
develop in comedy. Godfrey Gobelive and his ancestors, Davy
Dronken-nole, Sym Sadle-gander, Peter Pratefast, are not allegorical
shadows but living personalities. Such alliterative nicknames
are parallel to the Tom Tosspot and Cuthbert Cutpurse of the
moralities, to Tibet Talkapace and Davy Diceplayer of the comedies.
1 The Passetyme, chap. XIV.
6
6
## p. 233 (#251) ############################################
Relation to Spenser
233
eg.
So, too, Godfrey's Kentish tongue, his Kentish home, his grand-
father's voyage up the Thames in search of a wife, which give
a touch of reality to the narrative, find parallels in the moralities :
in The World and the Child, where Folly describes his
adventures in Holborn and Southwark. Godfrey has humour
of the rough type seen in Gammer Gurton's Needle: his great-
grandmother, for example, is praised for cleanliness, because, when
she had no dishclout, she wiped the dishes with her dog's tail.
The Passetyme of Pleasure and The Example of Virtue belong
to the group of allegorical poems culminating in The Faerie
Queene; and it is generally agreed that Hawes influenced Spenser.
Opinions, however, differ as to the extent of this influence. On the
one hand E. B. Browning calls The Passetyme one of the four
columnar marbles, the four allegorical poems, on whose foundation
is exalted into light the great allegorical poem of the world,
Spenser's Faery Queen. ' On the other hand, Saintsbury admits
only a faint adumbration of The Faerie Queene in The Passetyme
and The Example: 'its outline without its glorious filling-in, its
theme without its art, its intellectual reason for existence without
any of its aesthetic justification thereof. It is not improbable that
Spenser did know Hawes; but, if so, he owed him a very small
royalty. The extent of this influence, or indebtedness, is easy
to overstate and very difficult, or, rather, impossible, to prove.
Mere coincidences may readily be mistaken for borrowing. It
does not follow that, when two writers speak in very similar terms
of the seven deadly sing, one has borrowed from the other. For,
from the time of Piers the Plovoman, the seven deadly sins had
appeared again and again in allegory, in morality play and in
pageant: they are found, too, along with other miscellaneous in-
formation, in that perpetual almanac, The Kalendar of Shepherds.
It seems better, then, simply to enumerate points of resemblance
-grouped together they make a striking list-than to attempt to
define where the limit of Spenser's indebtedness to Hawes should
be fixed
Hawes's main idea is to describe the discipline a man must
undergo and the obstacles he must surmount to attain moral
purity, in The Escample, or win worldly glory, in The Passetyme.
Spenser states that his general aim is 'to fashion a gentleman or
noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline. '
Spenser follows the lead of Hawes in adopting the para-
phernalia of chivalry as allegorical symbolism. The knights of
The Faerie Queene put into practice what Melizius enunciates in
## p. 234 (#252) ############################################
234
Stephen Hawes
The Passetyme as the underlying idea of chivalry-not fighting
in every quarrel, but fighting for the truth or for the common-
weal, and helping widows and maidens in distress. Some of
Melizius's knights, as, for instance, Courtesy and Justice, appear
among Spenser's paladins.
It is after hearing a description of La Bel Pucell's surpassing
beauty and worth that Graund Amour falls in love and determines
to win his ideal. Spenser represents Arthur as having seen in a
dream or vision the Faerie Queene, with whose beauty ravished, he,
awaking, resolved to seek her out. '
Graund Amour in The Passetyme, Youth in The Example, and
Spenser's Red Cross Knight wear the same armour, the Christian
soldier's panoply described by St Paul, whose Epistle to the
Ephesians is expressly referred to in each of the three instances.
In The Example there is a dragon with three heads—the
world, the flesh and the devil-which must be defeated before
Lady Cleanness is won; and the Red Cross Knight must overcome
the same three foes before he wins Lady Una.
Lechery, in The Example, is a fair lady riding on a goat, and,
in The Faerie Queene, a man upon a bearded goat. In the former
poem, Pride is an old lady in a castle on an elephant's back, in the
latter, a lady in a coach drawn by peacocks. Hawes writes of the
park of Pride, Spenser of the garden of Pride.
When fighting with the seven-headed giant, Graund Amour leaps
aside to evade the stroke of the ponderous axe, which then crashes
into the ground three feet and more. In a similar way, Orgoglio's
club misses its mark and ploughs three yards into the ground.
Humility is warder of the castle in The Example, and porter
of Spenser's house of Holiness.
The claim asserted by Mutability in Spenser's fragmentary
seventh book resembles Fortune's claim to universal rule, as set
forth by Hawes in both his poems.
Envy, Disdain and Strangeness contrive Hawes's monster
Privy Malice; Spenser's blatant beast, Slander, is urged on by
Detraction and Envy.
The list of resemblances might be extended, but to no purpose;
and of the many verbal coincidences one must suffice. Spenser
(Book v, canto xi, stanzas 55, 56) makes Artegall say to Burbon:
Die rather than do aught that mote dishonour yield.
Fie on such forgery!
Under one hood to shadow faces twain:
Knights ought be true, and truth is one in all.
## p. 235 (#253) ############################################
Relation to Spenser
235
With this, compare three passages from The Passetyme.
Minerva exhorts Graund Amour:
And rather deye in ony maner of wyse,
To attayne honour and the lyfe dyspyse,
Than for to lyve and remayne in shame. Chap. XXVIII.
Fortune is described as a lady of pride and of perfect ex-
cellence,
But that she had two faces in one hode. Chap. XXVII.
Sir Truth says that he guards the door of the chamber of
chivalry,
That no man enter into it wrongfully,
Without me, Trouthe, for to be chivalrous. Chap. XXVIII.
Hawes employs the Chaucerian seven-line stanza almost ex-
clusively. Exceptions have already been noted—the fantastic
tour de force, and several passages in decasyllabic couplets. It
must be set down to his defective sense of metrical fitness that
he used rime royal so extensively. However suitable that
measure is for serious and pathetic subjects, it is less suitable for
much of Hawes's work, a great part of The Passetyme, for instance,
where a metre of superior narrative capacity is required. For
continuous narrative, Hawes found the compartment nature of
rime royal inconvenient, and, consequently, sentences often over-
flow the stanza. In one instance, a whole stanza is occupied by the
modifying parts of the sentence, while the main predicate is
pushed into the next stanza, which, because the printer, or some-
body else, blundered, happens to begin another chapter? . In
using decasyllabic couplets for the humorous Godfrey Gobelive
scenes, Hawes proves himself not wholly insensible to metrical
fitness. It is possible that he employed the two metres in the
same poem in imitation of Lydgate's Temple of Glass. If so,
he missed Lydgate's tolerably constant distinction of couplet for
narrative, stanza for lyrical parts.
When we read a passage from Hawes, we feel that his verse is
possessed of a strange hobbling gait; and when we seek to scan
the lines, we are likely to become bewildered. Some of the lines,
it is true, scan quite correctly; at times, they have a flow and
cadence which competent critics have likened to the music of
Spenser, as
I sawe come ryding in a valey farre
A goodly ladye, envyroned about
· The Passetyme, chaps. XXXIII, XXXIV.
## p. 236 (#254) ############################################
236
Stephen Hawes
With tongnes of fyre as bright as any starre,
That fyry flambes ensensed alway ont.
The Passet yme, Chap. 1;
or
Was never payne, but it had joye at last. Chap. XVII.
But we are not to expect to find in Hawes the artistic splendour
of Spenser. Indeed, most of his lines are inartistic and unmusical.
We must remember, however, that the non-existence of a critical
edition of Hawes renders it uncertain how far we may justly lay
the blame on the writer. The text is undoubtedly corrupt, and
Hawes was justified in praying that bad printing might not spoil
his scansion'. The following corrupt line does not show metre
spoiled, but is given because it can be corrected from The
Passetyme itself. We read in a stanza dealing with Gluttony,
The pomped clerkes with foles delicions, Chap. XLII,
which, in the context, is absolutely without meaning. A correction
is easily got from the line in chap. V,
The pomped carkes wyth foode dilicious.
In chap. XXXIII three riming lines end thus : 'craggy roche,'
'bye flackes,' 'tre toppes,' where the natural emendation is
'rockes,' 'flockes. ' But, even then, 'flockes,' 'toppes,' is assonance
and not rime'. Taking the text, however, as we have it,
we must conclude that Hawes possessed a very defective ear.
This must be said, even after allowance has been made for
the difficulty which Chaucer's successors had in imitating his
versification with words of changed and changing, not to say
chaotic, pronunciation.
The difficulty was a very real one for
those who in diction and metre were slavish imitators of Chaucer.
When Chaucer used an expression like 'the yonge sonne' or
‘smale fowles' with final -e sounded, he was following grammatical
usage and current pronunciation. But after these endings ceased
to be sounded, such expressions had a different metrical value.
Not knowing their rationale, Chaucer's imitators adopted the
2
1 The Passetyme, ad fin.
Made by Skeat, Specimens of Eng. Lit. p. 119 (6th ed. ).
: Another example of assonance is loked' 'toted,' chap. IIX. Other curious,
weak, or faulty rimes are slomber' 'wonder'; 'muche why' 'truly'; 'moved'
hoved' 'j-tuned'; . fooes' 'schooles'; 'carbuncles' solacious'; 'appese''suppose';
lylly' 'prety' 'body'; 'engraved' 'amased'; 'tassel' 'fayle'; “joye' waye'; 'ap-
procheth'. requireth. ' When necessary, Hawes writes 'rigorious' instead of rigorous,'
and he delights to match a word like "thing' with any termination -ing,' or 'stable'
and . fable' with '-able. '
## p. 237 (#255) ############################################
His Metre
237
.
final -e as a metrical licence, and only at haphazard did their use
of it coincide with its etymological origin. Hawes neglects the
final -e, when, for example, he rimes 'mette' with 'great,' The
Passetyme, chap. XIX; he observes it in such lines as
You can not helpë in the case I trow, Ibid. ;
and he adds it without historical justification,
A! tourë! tourë! all my joye is gone. Chap. xx.
The shifting accent is made use of, especially in words of French
origin; and we find both accentuations in the same stanza, some-
times even in the same line, as
Mesure mesureth mesure in effecte. Chap. XXI.
This line also exemplifies the alliterative repetition of allied words
or of forms of the same word. Those licences are comparatively
harmless. Others disfigure the Chaucerian decasyllabic, whether
in stanza or couplet, and tend to ruin all its harmony. Lines of
four feet are common. Some are regular octosyllabics, as
Alas! what payne and mortall wo. Chap. XXXI.
Others have an additional final syllable, as
And on my way as I was riding, Chap. XXXI;
or a trisyllabic foot, as
Whose hart ever inwardly is fret, Chap. XXXV;
or two trisyllabic feet and consequently ten syllables, as
His good is his God, with his great ryches. Chap. XLII.
Again, lines of five feet occur with an unaccented syllable omitted
at the caesura, a device which produces an awkward break, as
The minde of men chaungeth as the mone. Chap. XVIII.
Hawes may have learned this from Lydgate, in whose works
Schick says it is more used than anywhere else. The numerous
trisyllabic feet which Hawes, influenced, perhaps, by the freedom
of versification in the popular poetry of his day, introduced into
the seven-line stanza, spoil its rhythm, as
In the toure of Chyvalry I shall make me stronge. Chap. XIX.
Alexandrines are frequently found: some regular, others with one
or two trisyllabic feet, which lengthen out to thirteen or fourteen
syllables, as
The hye astronomier, that is God omnipotent. Chap. XXII.
## p. 238 (#256) ############################################
238
Stephen Hawes
Consequently, the same stanza may contain lines of different
lengths riming together. This gives the impression of jolting,
and suggests doggerel with its grotesque effect in serious poetry,
as
In my maternall tonge opprest with ignoraunce, Chap. XXV,
riming with
He shall fynde all fruytfull pleasaunoe.
Instead of seven lines, one stanza has six, chap. XVII; another
only five, chap. XVIII.
Instead of the regular rime sequence,
ababbcc, we find, chap. 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.
