Chapter 8

It fortuned that King Robert of Scotland was right sore aged and feeble: for he was greatly charged with the great sickness, so that there was no way for him but death. And when he felt that his end drew near, he sent for such barons and lords of his realm as he trusted best, and shewed them how there was no remedy with him, but he must needs leave this transitory life.... Then he called to him the gentle knight, Sir William Douglas, and said before all the lords, 'Sir William, my dear friend, ye know well that I have had much ado in my days to uphold and sustain the right of this realm; and when I had most ado I made a solemn vow, the which as yet I have not accomplished, whereof I am right sorry; the which was, if I might achieve and make an end of all my wars, so that I might once have brought this realm in rest and peace, then I promised in my mind to have gone and warred on Christ's enemies, adversaries to our holy Christian faith. To this purpose mine heart hath ever intended, but our Lord would not consent thereto... And sith it is so that my body can not go, nor achieve that my heart desireth, I will send the heart instead of the body, to accomplish mine avow... I will, that as soon as I am trespassed out of this world, that ye take my heart out of my body, and embalm it, and take of my treasure as ye shall think sufficient for that enterprise, both for yourself and such company as ye will take with you, and present my heart to the Holy Sepulchre, whereas our Lord lay, seeing my body can not come there. And take with you such company and purveyance as shall be appertaining to your estate. And, wheresoever ye come, let it be known how ye carry with you the heart of King Robert of Scotland, at his instance and desire to be presented to the Holy Sepulchre.' Then all the lords, that heard these words, wept for pity.

There, in the fifteenth century and early in the sixteenth, you have Malory and Berners writing beautiful English prose; prose the emotion of which (I dare to say) you must recognise if you have ears to hear. So you see that already our English prose not only achieves the 'high moment,' but seems to obey it rather and be lifted by it, until we ask ourselves, 'Who could help writing nobly, having to tell how King Arthur died or how the Bruce?' Yes, but I bid you observe that Malory and Berners are both relating what, however noble, is quite simple, quite straightforward. It is when prose attempts to _philosophise_, to _express thoughts_ as well as to relate simple sayings and doings--it is then that the trouble begins. When Malory has to philosophise death, to _think_ about it, this is as far as he attains:--

'Ah, Sir Lancelot,' said he, 'thou wert head of all Christian Knights! And now I dare say,' said Sir Ector, 'that, Sir Lancelot, there thou liest, thou were never matched of none earthly hands; and thou were the curtiest knight that ever bare shield: and thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever strood horse, and thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou were the kindest man that ever strooke with sword; and thou were the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights; and thou were the meekest man and gentlest that ever sat in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest Knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.'

Beautiful again, I grant! But note you that, eloquent as he can be on the virtues of his dead friend, when Sir Ector comes to the thought of death itself all he can accomplish is, 'And now I dare say that, Sir Lancelot, there thou liest.'

Let us make a leap in time and contrast this with Tyndale and the translators of our Bible, how they are able to make St Paul speak of death:--

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

There you have something clean beyond what Malory or Berners could compass: there you have a different kind of high moment--a high moment of philosophising: there you have emotion impregnated with thought. It was necessary that our English verse even after Chaucer, our English prose after Malory and Berners, should overcome this most difficult gap (which stands for a real intellectual difference) if it aspired to be what to-day it is--a language of the first class, comparable with Greek and certainly no whit inferior to Latin or French.

* * * * *

Let us leave prose for a moment, and see how Verse threw its bridge over the gap. If you would hear the note of Chaucer at its deepest, you will find it in the famous exquisite lines of the Prioress' Prologue:--

O moder mayde! O maydë moder fre! O bush unbrent, brenning in Moyses' sight!

in the complaint of Troilus, in the rapture of Griselda restored to her children:--

O tendre, O dere, O yongë children myne, Your woful moder wendë stedfastly That cruel houndës or some foul vermyne Hadde eten you; but God of his mercy And your benignë fader tendrely Hath doon you kept...

You will find a note quite as sincere in many a carol, many a ballad, of that time:--

He came al so still There his mother was, As dew in April That falleth on the grass.

He came al so still To his mother's bour, As dew in April That falleth on the flour.

He came al so still There his mother lay, As dew in April That falleth on the spray.

Mother and maiden Was never none but she; Well may such a lady Goddes mother be.

You get the most emotional note of the Ballad in such a stanza as this, from "The Nut-Brown Maid":--

Though it be sung of old and young That I should be to blame, Their's be the charge that speak so large In hurting of my name; For I will prove that faithful love It is devoid of shame; In your distress and heaviness To part with you the same: And sure all tho that do not so True lovers are they none: For, in my mind, of all mankind I love but you alone.

All these notes, again, you will admit to be exquisite: but they gush straight from the unsophisticated heart: they are nowise deep save in innocent emotion: they are not _thoughtful_. So when Barbour breaks out in praise of Freedom, he cries

A! Fredome is a noble thing!

And that is really as far as he gets. He goes on

Fredome mayse man to hafe liking.

(Freedom makes man to choose what he likes; that is, makes him free)

Fredome all solace to man giffis, He livis at ese that frely livis! A noble hart may haif nane ese, Na ellys nocht that may him plese, Gif fredome fail'th: for fre liking Is yharnit ouer all othir thing...

--and so on for many lines; all saying the same thing, that man yearns for Freedom and is glad when he gets it, because then he is free; all hammering out the same observed fact, but all knocking vainly on the door of thought, which never opens to explain what Freedom _is_.

Now let us take a leap as we did with prose, and 'taking off' from the Nut-Brown Maid's artless confession,

in my mind, of all mankind I love but you alone,

let us alight on a sonnet of Shakespeare's--

Thy bosom is endearéd with all hearts Which I by lacking have supposéd dead: And there reigns Love, and all Love's loving parts, And all those friends which I thought buriéd. How many a holy and obsequious tear Hath dear religious love stolen from mine eye As interest of the dead!--which now appear But things removed, that hidden in thee lie. Thou art the grave where buried love doth live, Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone, Who all their parts of me to thee did give; That due of many now is mine alone: Their images I loved I view in thee, And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.

What a new way of talking about love! Not a happier way--there is less of heart's-ease in these doubts, delicacies, subtleties--but how much more thoughtful! How has our Nut-Brown Maid eaten of the tree of knowledge!

Well, there happened a Shakespeare, to do this for English Verse: and Shakespeare was a miracle which I cheerfully leave others to rationalise for you, having, for my own part and so far as I have fared in life, found more profit in a capacity for simple wonder.

But I can tell you how the path was made straight to that miracle. The shock of the New Learning upon Europe awoke men and unsealed men's eyes--unsealed the eyes of Englishmen in particular--to discover a literature, and the finest in the world, which _habitually philosophised life_: a literature which, whether in a chorus of Sophocles or a talk reported by Plato, or in a ribald page of Aristophanes or in a knotty chapter of Thucydides, was in one guise or another for ever asking _Why?_ 'What is man doing here, and why is he doing it?' 'What is his purpose? his destiny?' 'How stands he towards those unseen powers--call them the gods, or whatever you will--that guide and thwart, provoke, madden, control him so mysteriously?' 'What are these things we call good and evil, life, love, death?'

These are questions which, once raised, haunt Man until he finds an answer--some sort of answer to satisfy him. Englishmen, hitherto content with the Church's answers but now aware of this great literature which answered so differently--and having other reasons to suspect what the Church said and did--grew aware that their literature had been as a child at play. It had never philosophised good and evil, life, love or death: it had no literary forms for doing this; it had not even the vocabulary. So our ancestors saw that to catch up their lee-way--to make their report worthy of this wonderful, alluring discovery--new literary forms had to be invented--new, that is, in English: the sonnet, the drama, the verse in which the actors were to declaim, the essay, the invented tale. Then, for the vocabulary, obviously our fathers had either to go to Greek, which had invented the A.B.C. of philosophising; or to seek in the other languages which were already ahead of English in adapting that alphabet; or to give our English Words new contents, new connotations, new meanings; or lastly, to do all three together.

Well, it was done; and in verse very fortunately done; thanks of course to many men, but thanks to two especially--to Sir Thomas Wyat, who led our poets to Italy, to study and adopt the forms in which Italy had cast its classical heritage; and to Marlowe, who impressed blank verse upon the drama. Of Marlowe I shall say nothing; for with what he achieved you are familiar enough. Of Wyat I may speak at length to you, one of these days; but here, to prepare you for what I hope to prove--that Wyat is one of the heroes of our literature--I will give you three brief reasons why we should honour his memory:--

(1) He led the way. On the value of that service I shall content myself with quoting a passage from Newman:--

When a language has been cultivated in any particular department of thought, and so far as it has been generally perfected, an existing want has been supplied, and there is no need for further workmen. In its earliest times, while it is yet unformed, to write in it at all is almost a work of genius. It is like crossing a country before roads are made communicating between place and place. The authors of that age deserve to be Classics both because of what they do and because they can do it. It requires the courage and force of great talent to compose in the language at all; and the composition, when effected, makes a permanent impression on it.

This Wyat did. He was a pioneer and opened up a new country to Englishmen. But he did more.

(2) Secondly, he had the instinct to perceive that the lyric, if it would philosophise life, love, and the rest, must boldly introduce the personal note: since in fact when man asks questions about his fortune or destiny he asks them most effectively in the first person. 'What am _I_ doing? Why are _we_ mortal? Why do _I_ love _thee_?'

This again Wyat did: and again he did more.

For (3) thirdly--and because of this I am surest of his genius--again and again, using new thoughts in unfamiliar forms, he wrought out the result in language so direct, economical, natural, easy, that I know to this day no one who can better Wyat's best in combining straight speech with melodious cadence. Take the lines _Is it possible?_--

Is it possible? For to turn so oft; To bring that lowest that was most aloft: And to fall highest, yet to light soft? Is it possible?

All is possible! Whoso list believe; Trust therefore first, and after preve; As men wed ladies by licence and leave, All is possible!

or again--

Forget not! O forget not this!-- How long ago hath been, and is, The mind that never meant amiss: Forget not yet!

or again (can personal note go straighter?)--

And wilt thou leave me thus? Say nay, say nay, for shame! To save thee from the blame --Of all my grief and grame. And wilt thou leave me thus? Say nay! say nay!

(Say 'nay,' say 'nay'; and don't say, 'the answer is in the negative.')

No: I have yet to mention the straightest, most natural of them all, and will read it to you in full--

What should I say? Since Faith is dead And Truth away From you is fled? Should I be led With doubleness? Nay! nay! mistress.

I promised you And you promised me To be as true As I would be: But since I see Your double heart, Farewell my part!

Thought for to take Is not my mind; But to forsake One so unkind; And as I find, So will I trust, Farewell, unjust!

Can ye say nay But that you said That I alway Should be obeyed? And--thus betrayed Or that I wist! Farewell, unkist!

I observe it noted on p. 169 of Volume iii of "The Cambridge History of English Literature" that Wyat 'was a pioneer and perfection was not to be expected of him. He has been described as a man stumbling over obstacles, continually falling but always pressing forward.' I know not to what wiseacre we owe that pronouncement: but what do you think of it, after the lyric I have just quoted? I observe, further, on p. 23 of the same volume of the same work, that the Rev. T. M. Lindsay, D.D., Principal of the Glasgow College of the United Free Church of Scotland, informs us of Wilson's "Arte of Rhetorique" that

there is little or no originality in the volume, save, perhaps, the author's condemnation of the use of French and Italian phrases and idioms, which he complains are 'counterfeiting the kinges Englishe.' The warnings of Wilson will not seem untimely if to be remembered that the earlier English poets of the period--Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, and the Earl of Surrey--drew their inspiration from Petrarch and Ariosto, that their earlier attempts at poetry were translations from Italian sonnets, and that their maturer efforts were imitations of the sweet and stately measures and style of Italian poesie. The polish which men like Wyatt and Surrey were praised for giving to our 'rude and homely manner of vulgar poesie' might have led to some degeneration.

Might it, indeed? As another Dominie would have said, 'Pro-digious.'

(Thought for to take Is not my mind; But to forsake

This Principal of the Glasgow College of the United Free Church of Scotland--

Farewell unkiss'd!)

But I have lingered too long with this favourite poet of mine and left myself room only to hand you the thread by following which you will come to the melodious philosophising of Shakespeare's Sonnets--

Let me not to the marriage of true Minds Admit impediment. Love is not love Which alters where it alteration finds Or bends with the remover to remove.

Note the Latin words 'impediment,' 'alteration,' 'remove.' We are using the language of philosophy here or, rather, the 'universal language,' which had taken over the legacy of Greek. You may trace the use of it growing as, for example, you trace it through the Elizabethan song-books: and then (as I said) comes Shakespeare, and with Shakespeare the miracle.

The education of Prose was more difficult, and went through more violent convulsions. I suppose that the most of us--if, after reading a quantity of Elizabethan prose, we had the courage to tell plain truth, undaunted by the name of a great epoch--would confess to finding the mass of it clotted in sense as well as unmusical in sound, a disappointment almost intolerable after the simple melodious clarity of Malory and Berners. I, at any rate, must own that the most of Elizabethan prose pleases me little; and I speak not of Elizabethan prose at its worst, of such stuff as disgraced the already disgraceful Martin Marprelate Controversy, but of such as a really ingenious and ingenuous man like Thomas Nashe could write at his average. For a sample:--

English Seneca read by candle-light yields many good sentences such as 'Blood is a beggar' and so forth; and if you entreat him fair on a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches.... Sufficeth them [that is, modern followers of Seneca] to bodge up a blank verse with if's and and's, and others, while for recreation after their candle-stuff, having starched their beards most curiously, to make a peripatetical path into the inner parts of the city, and spend two or three hours in turning over the French _Doudie_, where they attract more infection in one minute than they can do eloquence all the days of their life by conversing with any authors of like argument.

This may be worth studying historically, to understand the difficulties our prose had to encounter and overcome. But no one would seriously propose it as a model for those who would write well, which is our present business. I have called it 'clotted.' It is, to use a word of the time, 'farced' with conceits; it needs straining.

Its one merit consists in this, that it is struggling, fumbling, to say something: that is, to _make_ something. It is not, like modern Jargon, trying to dodge something. English prose, in short, just here is passing through a period of puberty, of green sickness: and, looking at it historically, we may own that its throes are commensurate with the stature of the grown man to be.

These throes tear it every way. On the one hand we have Ascham, pendantically enough, apologising that he writes in the English tongue (yet with a sure instinct he does it):--

If any man would blame me, either for taking such a matter in hand, or else for writing it in the English tongue, this answer I may make him, that what the best of the realm think it honest for them to use, I, one of the meanest sort, ought not to suppose it vile for me to write... And as for the Latin or Greek tongue, everything is so excellently done in them that none can do better. In the English tongue, contrary, everything in a manner so meanly, both for the matter and the handling, that no man can do worse.

On the other hand you have Euphuism with its antithetical tricks and poises, taking all prose by storm for a time: Euphuism, to be revived two hundred years later, and find a new avatar in the Johnsonian balance; Euphuism, dead now, yet alive enough in its day.

For all these writers were alive: and I tell you it is an inspiriting thing to be alive and trying to write English. All these authors were alive and trying to _do_ something. Unconsciously for the most part they were striving to philosophise the vocabulary of English prose and find a rhythm for its periods.

And then, as already had happened to our Verse, to our Prose too there befel a miracle.

You will not ask me 'What miracle?' I mean, of course, the Authorised Version of the Bible.

I grant you, to be sure, that the path to the Authorised Version was made straight by previous translators, notably by William Tyndale. I grant you that Tyndale was a man of genius, and Wyclif before him a man of genius. I grant you that the forty-seven men who produced the Authorised Version worked in the main upon Tyndale's version, taking that for their basis. Nay, if you choose to say that Tyndale was a miracle in himself, I cheerfully grant you that as well. But, in a lecture one must not multiply miracles _praeter necessitatem_; and when Tyndale has been granted you have yet to face the miracle that forty-seven men--not one of them known, outside of this performance, for any superlative talent--sat in committee and almost consistently, over a vast extent of work--improved upon what Genius had done. I give you the word of an old committee-man that this is not the way of committees--that only by miracle is it the way of any committee. Doubtless the forty-seven were all good men and godly: but doubtless also good and godly were the Dean and Chapter who dealt with Alfred Steven's tomb of the Duke of Wellington in St Paul's Cathedral; and you know what _they_ did. Individual genius such as Tyndale's or even Shakespeare's, though we cannot explain it, we may admit as occurring somehow, and not incredibly, in the course of nature. But that a large committee of forty-seven should have gone steadily through the great mass of Holy Writ, seldom interfering with genius, yet, when interfering, seldom missing to improve: that a committee of forty-seven should have captured (or even, let us say, should have retained and improved) a rhythm so personal, so constant, that our Bible has the voice of one author speaking through its many mouths: that, Gentlemen, is a wonder before which I can only stand humble and aghast.

Does it or does it not strike you as queer that the people who set you 'courses of study' in English Literature never include the Authorised Version, which not only intrinsically but historically is out and away the greatest book of English Prose. Perhaps they can pay you the silent compliment of supposing that you are perfectly acquainted with it?... I wonder. It seems as if they thought the Martin Marprelate Controversy, for example, more important somehow.

'So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality...'

'Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.'

'The king's daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is of wrought gold.'

'Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty: they shall behold the land that is very far off.'

'And a man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.'