Amenities of Literature Part 24

"The Boke of the Governor" must now be condemned to the solitary imprisonment of the antiquary's cell, who will pick up many curious circ.u.mstances relative to the manners of the age--always an amusing subject of speculation, when we contemplate on the gradations of social life. I suspect the world owed "The Governor" to a book more famous than itself--the _Cortegiano_ of Castiglione, which appeared two years before the first edition of this work of Elyot, and to whose excellence Elyot could have been no stranger in his emba.s.sies to his holiness, and to the emperor. But of "The Governor," and "The Cortegiano," what can we now say, but that three centuries are fatal to the immortality of volumes, which, in the infancy of literature, seemed to have flattered themselves with a perpetuity of fame.

It was, however, a generous design, in an age of Latin, to attempt to delight our countrymen by "the vulgar tongue;" but these "first fruits,"

as he calls them, gave their author a taste of the bitterness of "that tree of knowledge."

In a subsequent work, "Of the Knowledge which maketh a Wise Man," Elyot has recorded how he had laid himself open to "the vulgar." In the circle of a Court there was equal peril in moralising, which was deemed to be a rebuke, as in applying rusty stories, which were considered as nothing less than disguised personalities. "The Boke" was not thankfully received. The _persifleurs_, those b.u.t.terflies who carry waspish stings, accounted Sir Thomas to be of no little presumption, that "in noting other men's vices he should correct _magnificat_." This odd neologism of "magnificat" was a mystical coinage, which circulated among these aristocratic exclusives who, as Elyot describes them, "like a galled horse abiding no plaisters, be always knapping and kicking at such examples and sentences as they do feel sharp, or do bite them." The chapters on "The Diversity of Flatterers," and similar subjects, had made many "a galled jade wince;" and in applying the salve, he got a kick for the cure. They wondered why the knight wrote at all! "Other much wiser men, and better learned than he, do forbear to write anything." They inscribed modern names to his ancient portraits. The worried author exclaims--"There be Gnathos in Spain as well as in Greece; Pasquils in England as well as in Rome, &c. If men will seek for them in England which I set in other places, I cannot let (hinder) them." But in another work--"Image of Governance," 1540--when he detailed "the monstrous living of the Emperor Heliogabalus," and contrasted that gross epicurean with Severus, such a bold and open execration of the vices of a luxurious Court could not avoid being obvious to the royal sensualist and his companions, however the character and the tale were removed to a bygone age.

In this early attempt to cultivate "the vulgar tongue," some cavilled at his strange terms. It is a striking instance of the simplicity of the critics at that early period of our language, that our author formally explains the word _maturity_--"a Latin word, which I am constrained to usurp, lacking a name in English, and which, though it be strange and dark, yet may be understood as other words late comen out of Italy and France, and made denizens among us." Augustus Caesar, it seems, had frequently in his mouth this word _matura_--do maturely! as "if he should have said, Do neither too much nor too little--too swiftly nor too slowly." Elyot would confine the figurative Latin term to a metaphysical designation of the acts of men in their most perfect state, "reserving," as he says, "the word ripeness to fruit and other things, separate from affairs, as we have now in usage." Elyot exults in having augmented the English language by the introduction of this Latin term, now made English for the first time! It has flourished as well as this other, "the _redolent_ savours of sweet herbs and flowers." But his ear was not always musical, and some of his neologisms are less graceful--"_an alective_," to wit; "_fatigate_," to fatigue; "_ostent_,"

to show, and to "_sufficate_ some disputation." Such were the first weak steps of the fathers of our language, who, however, culled for us many a flower among their c.o.c.kle.

But a murmur more prejudicial arose than the idle cavil of new and hard words; for some a.s.serted that "the Boke seemed to be overlong." Our primeval author considered that "knowledge of wisdom cannot be shortly declared." Elyot had not yet attained, by sufficient practice in authors.h.i.+p, the secret, that the volume which he had so much pleasure in writing could be over tedious in reading. "For those," he observes sarcastically, "who be well willing, it is soon learned--in good faith sooner than primero or gleek." The nation must have then consisted of young readers, when a diminutive volume in twelves was deemed to be "overlong." In this apology for his writings, he threw out an undaunted declaration of his resolution to proceed with future volumes.--"If the readers of my works, by the n.o.ble example of our most dear sovereign lord, do justly and lovingly interpret my labours, I, during the residue of my life, will now and then set forth such fruits of my study, profitable, as I trust, unto this my country, leaving malicious readers with their incurable fury." Such was the innocent criticism of our earliest writer--his pen was hardly tipped with gall.

As all subjects were equally seductive to the artless pen of a primitive author, who had yet no rivals to encounter in public, Elyot turned his useful studies to a topic very opposite to that of political ethics. He put forth "The Castle of Health," a medical treatise, which pa.s.sed through nearly as many honourable editions as "The Governor." It did not, however, abate the number, though it changed the character of his cavillers, who were now the whole corporate body of the physicians!

The author has told his amusing story in the preface to a third edition, in 1541.

"Why should I be grieved with reproaches wherewith some of my country do recompense me for my labours, taken without hope of temporal reward, only for the fervent affection which I have ever borne toward the public weal of my country? 'A worthy matter!' saith one; 'Sir Thomas Elyot has become a physician, and writeth on physic, which beseemeth not a knight; he might have been much better occupied.' Truly, if they will call him a physician who is studious of the weal of his country, let men so name me."

But there was no shame in studying this science, or setting forth any book, being--

"Thereto provoked by the n.o.ble example of my n.o.ble master King Henry VIII.; for his Highness hath not disdained to be the chief author of an introduction to grammar for the children of his subjects.

"If physicians be angry that I have written physic in English, let them remember that Greeks wrote in Greek, the Romans in Latin, and Avicenna in Arabic, which were their own proper and maternal tongues. These were paynims and Jews, but in this part of charity they far surmounted us Christians."

Several years after, when our author reverted to his "Castle of Health,"

the Castle was brightened by the beams of public favour. Its author now exulted that "It shall long preserve men, be some physicians never so angry." The work had not been intended to depreciate medical professors, but "for their commodity, by instructing the sick, and observing a good order in diet, preventing the great causes of sickness, or by which they could the sooner be cured." Our philosopher had attempted to draw aside that mystifying veil with which some affected to envelope the arcana of medicine, as if they were desirous "of writing in cypher that none but themselves could read." Our author had antic.i.p.ated that revolution in medical science which afterwards, at a distant period, has been productive of some of the ablest treatises in the vernacular languages of Europe.

The patriotic studies of Elyot did not terminate in these ethical and popular volumes, for he had taxed his daily diligence for his country's weal. This appeared in "The Dictionary of Sir Thomas Elyot, 1535," a folio, which laid the foundation of our future lexicons, "declaring Latin by English," as Elyot describes his own labour.

Elyot had suffered some disappointments as a courtier in the days of Wolsey, who lavished the royal favours on churchmen. In a letter to Lord Cromwell, he describes himself with a very narrow income, supporting his establishment, "equal to any knight in the country where I dwell who have much more to live on;" but a new office, involving considerable expense in its maintenance, to which he had been just appointed, he declares would be his ruin, having already discharged "five honest and tall personages."--"I wot not by what malice of fortune I am constrained to be in that office, whereunto is, as it were, appendent loss of money and good name, all sharpness and diligence in justice now-a-days being everywhere odious." And this was at a time when "I trusted to live quietly, and by little and little to repay my creditors, and _to reconcile myself to mine old studies_."

This letter conveys a favourable impression of the real character of this learned man; but Elyot had condescended abjectly to join with the herd in the general scramble for the monastic lands; and if he feigned poverty, the degradation is not less. There are cruel epochs in a great revolution; moments of trial which too often exhibit the lofty philosopher shrinking into one of the people. It is probable that he succeeded in his pet.i.tion, for I find his name among the commissioners appointed to make a general inquiry after lands belonging to the Church, as also to the colleges of the universities, in 1534.

But in this day of weakness Elyot sunk far lower than pet.i.tioning for suppressed lands. Elyot was suspected of inclining to Popery, and being adverse to the new order of affairs. His former close intimacy with Sir Thomas More contributed to this suspicion, and now, it is sad to relate, he renounces this ancient and honourable friends.h.i.+p! Peter denied his Master. "I beseech your good lords.h.i.+p now to lay apart the remembrance of the amity betwixt me and Sir Thomas More, which was but _usque ad aras_, as is the proverb, considering that I was never so much addicted unto him as I was unto truth and fidelity towards my sovereign lord."

Was the influence of such ill.u.s.trious friends.h.i.+ps to be confined to chimney-corners? Had Elyot not listened to the wisdom, and revered the immutable fort.i.tude, of "his great friend and crony?"--he, the stern moralist, who, in his "Governor," had written a remarkable chapter on "the constancy of friends," and had ill.u.s.trated that pa.s.sion by the romantic tale of t.i.tus and Gesippus, where the personal trials of both parties far exceed those of the Damon and Pythias of antiquity, and are so eloquently developed and so exquisitely narrated by the great Italian novelist.

The literary history of Sir THOMAS ELYOT exhibits the difficulties experienced by a primitive author in the earliest attempts to open a new path to the cultivation of a vernacular literature; and it seems to have required all the magnanimity of our author to sustain his superiority among his own circle, by disdaining their petulant criticism, and by the honest confidence he gathered as he proceeded, in the successive editions of his writings.

SKELTON.

At a period when satire had not yet a.s.sumed any legitimate form, a singular genius appeared in Skelton. His satire is peculiar, but it is stamped by vigorous originality. The fertility of his conceptions in his satirical or his humorous vein is thrown out in a style created by himself. The Skeltonical short verse, contracted into five or six, and even four syllables, is wild and airy. In the quick-returning rhymes, the playfulness of the diction, and the pungency of new words, usually ludicrous, often expressive, and sometimes felicitous, there is a stirring spirit which will be best felt in an audible reading. The velocity of his verse has a carol of its own. The chimes ring in the ear, and the thoughts are flung about like coruscations. But the magic of the poet is confined to his spell; at his first step out of it he falls to the earth never to recover himself. Skelton is a great creator only when he writes what baffles imitation, for it is his fate, when touching more solemn strains, to betray no quality of a poet--inert in imagination and naked in diction. Whenever his muse plunges into the long measure of heroic verse, she is drowned in no Heliconian stream.

Skelton seems himself aware of his miserable fate, and repeatedly, with great truth, if not with some modesty, complains of

Mine homely rudeness and dryness.

But when he returns to his own manner and his own rhyme, when he riots in the wantonness of his prodigal genius, irresistible and daring, the poet was not unconscious of his faculty; and truly he tells,--

Though my rime be ragged, Tattered and jagged, Rudely rain-beaten, Rusty, moth-eaten, If ye take well therewith, It hath in it some pith.

Whether Skelton really adopted the measures of the old tavern-minstrelsy used by harpers, who gave "a fit of mirth for a groat," or "carols for Christmas," or "lascivious poems for bride-ales," as Puttenham, the arch-critic of Elizabeth's reign, supposes; or whether in Skelton's introduction of alternate Latin lines among his verses he caught the Macaronic caprice of the Italians, as Warton suggests; the Skeltonical style remains his own undisputed possession. He is a poet who has left his name to his own verse--a verse, airy but pungent, so admirably adapted for the popular ear that it has been frequently copied,[1] and has led some eminent critics into singular misconceptions. The minstrel tune of the Skeltonical rhyme is easily caught, but the invention of style and "the pith" mock these imitators. The facility of doggrel merely of itself could not have yielded the exuberance of his humour and the mordacity of his satire.

This singular writer has suffered the mischance of being too original for some of his critics; they looked on the surface, and did not always suspect the depths they glided over: the legitimate taste of others has revolted against the mixture of the ludicrous and the invective. A taste for humour is a rarer faculty than most persons imagine; where it is not indigenous, no art of man can plant it. There is no subst.i.tute for such a volatile existence, and where even it exists in a limited degree, we cannot enlarge its capacity for reception. A great master of humour, who observed from his experience, has solemnly told us that "it is not in the power of every one to taste humour, however he may wish it--it is the gift of G.o.d; and a true feeler always brings half the entertainment along with him."[2]

Puttenham was the first critic who prized Skelton cheaply; the artificial and courtly critic of Elizabeth's reign could not rightly estimate such a wild and irregular genius. The critic's fastidious ear listens to nothing but the jar of rude rhymes, while the courtier's delicacy shrinks from the nerve of appalling satire. "Such," says this critic, "are the rhymes of Skelton, usurping the name of a Poet Laureat, being indeed but a rude rayling rhimer, and all his doings ridiculous--pleasing only the popular ear." This affected critic never suspected "the pith" of "the ridiculous;" the grotesque humour covering the dread invective which shook a Wolsey under his canopy. Another Elizabethan critic, the obsequious Meres, re-echoes the dictum. These opinions perhaps prejudiced the historian of our poetry, who seems to have appreciated them as the echoes of the poet's contemporaries. Yet we know how highly his contemporaries prized him, notwithstanding the host whom he provoked. One poetical brother[3] distinguishes him as "the Inventive Skelton," and we find the following full-length portrait of him by another:--[4]

A poet for his art, Whose judgment sure was high, And had great practise of the pen, His works they will not lie; His termes to taunts did leane, His talk was as he wrate, Full quick of wit, right sharpe of wordes, And skilful of the state;

And to the hateful minde, That did disdaine his doings still, A scorner of his kinde.

When Dr. Johnson observed that "Skelton cannot be said to have attained great elegance of language," he tried Skelton by a test of criticism at which Skelton would have laughed, and "jangled and wrangled." Warton has also censured him for adopting "the familiar phraseology of the common people." The learned editor of Johnson's "Dictionary" corrects both our critics. "If Skelton did not attain great elegance of language, he however possessed great knowledge of it." From his works may be drawn an abundance of terms which were then in use among the vulgar as well as the learned, and which no other writer of his time so obviously (and often so wittily) ill.u.s.trated. Skelton seems to have been fully aware of the condition of our vernacular idiom when he wrote, for he has thus described it:--

Our natural tongue is rude, And hard to be enneude With polished termes l.u.s.ty; Our language is so rusty, So cankered, and so full Of frowards, and so dull, That if I would apply To write ordinately, I wot not where to find Terms to serve my mind.

It was obviously his design to be as great a creator of words as he was of ideas. Many of his mintage would have given strength to our idiom.

Caxton, as a contemporary, is some authority that Skelton improved the language.

Let not the reader imagine that Skelton was only "a rude rayling rhimer." Skelton was the tutor of Henry the Eighth; and one who knew him well describes him as--

Seldom out of prince's grace.

Erasmus distinguished him "as the light and ornament of British letters;" and one, he addresses the royal pupil, "who can not only excite your studies, but complete them." Warton attests his cla.s.sical attainments--"Had not his propensity to the ridiculous induced him to follow the whimsies of Walter Mapes, Skelton would have appeared among the first writers of Latin poetry in England." Skelton chose to be himself; and this is what the generality of his critics have not taken in their view.

Skelton was an ecclesiastic who was evidently among those who had adopted the principles of reformation before the Reformation. With equal levity and scorn he struck at the friars from his pulpit or in his ballad, he ridiculed the Romish ritual, and he took unto himself that wife who was to be called a concubine. To the same feelings we may also ascribe the declamatory invective against Cardinal Wolsey, from whose terrible arm he flew into the sanctuary of Westminster, where he remained protected by Abbot Islip until his death, which took place in 1529, but a few short months before the fall of Wolsey. It is supposed that the king did not wholly dislike the levelling of the greatness of his overgrown minister; and it is remarkable that one of the charges subsequently brought by the council in 1529 against Wolsey--his imperious carriage at the council-board--is precisely one of the accusations of our poet, only divested of rhyme; whence perhaps we may infer that Skelton was an organ of the rising party.

"Why Come you not to Court?"--that daring state-picture of an omnipotent minister--and "The Boke of Colin Clout," where the poet pretends only to relate what the people talk about the luxurious clergy, and seems to be half the reformer, are the most original satires in the language. In the days when Skelton wrote these satires there appeared a poem known by the t.i.tle of "Reade me and be not Wrothe," a voluminous invective against the Cardinal and the Romish superst.i.tions, which has been ascribed by some to Skelton. The writer was WILLIAM ROY, a friar; the genius, though not the zeal, of ROY and SKELTON are far apart--as far as the buoyancy of racy originality is removed from the downright earnestness of grave mediocrity. Roy had been the learned a.s.sistant of Tyndale in the first edition of the translation of the New Testament, and it was the public conflagration at London of that whole edition which aroused his indignant spirit. The satire, which had been printed abroad, was diligently suppressed by an emissary of the Cardinal purchasing up all the copies; and few were saved from the ravage;[5] the author, however, escaped out of the country.

In "The Crown of Lawrell" Skelton has himself furnished a catalogue of his numerous writings, the greater number of which have not come down to us. Literary productions were at that day printed on loose sheets, or in small pamphlets, which the winds seem to have scattered. We learn there of his graver labours. He composed the "Speculum Principis" for his royal pupil--

To bear in hand, therein to read,

and he translated Diodorus Siculus--

Six volumes engrossed, it doth contain.

To have composed a manual for the education of a prince, and to have persevered through a laborious version, are sufficient evidence that the learned Skelton had his studious days as well as his hours of caustic jocularity. He appears to have written various pieces for the court entertainment; but for us exists only an account of the interlude of the "Nigramansir," in the pages of Warton, and a single copy of the goodly interlude of "Magnificence,"[6] in the Garrick collection. If we accept his abstract personations merely as the names, and not the qualities of the dramatic personages, "Magnificence" approaches to the true vein of comedy.

Skelton was, however, probably more gratified by his own Skeltonical style, moulding it with the wantonness of power on whatever theme, comic or serious. In a poem remarkable for its elegant playfulness, a very graceful maiden, whose loveliness the poet has touched with the most vivid colouring, grieving over the fate of her sparrow from its feline foe, chants a dirige, a paternoster, and an Ave Maria for its soul, and the souls of all sparrows. In this discursive poem, which glides from object to object, in the vast abundance of fancy, a general mourning of all the birds in the air, and many allusions to the old romances, "Philip Sparrow," for its elegance, may be placed by the side of Lesbia's Bird, and, for its playfulness, by the Vert Vert of Gresset.

But Skelton was never more vivid than in his Ale-wife, and all

The mad mummyng Of Elynour Rummyng,--

a piece which has been more frequently reprinted than any of his works.