CHAPTER III. THE BEGINNINGS OF ART. PART I.-Poetry.-The Company of Courtly Makers. WYATT, Thomas, b. 1503, d. 1542; HOWARD, Henry, Earl of Surrey, prob. b. 1517, d. 1547; GASCOIGNE, George, b. 1536, d. 1577; SACKVILLE, Thomas, Lord Buckhurst, b. 1536, d. 1608; SIDNEY, Sir Philip, b. 1544, d. 1586; WATSON, Thomas, h. about 1557, d. 1625; CONSTABLE, Henry, b. prob. 1555, d. before 1616. M. TAINE says that the "Renaissance in England was the Renaissance of the Saxon genius;" that what made the glory of the Elizabethan period was the union in its greatest men of the Teutonic earnestness and depth of thought, of Teutonic and Saxon sensibilities with the Italian and foreign susceptibility to external beauty, to beauty of form, whether physical or literary. The reader of English literature before the Renaissance may notice how absent from the Teutonic genius was this capacity for form, this appreciation of external beauty, and the gift of artistic expression. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, who had what Taine calls a very vivid and strong inward representation of the external world, had little facility in expression. Their songs and war-poems are a succession of cries and visions,—no attention is paid even to the sequence of idea and thought; and when we come to later productions of less genius, when the old warlike life, the stimulus to their finest and most heroic emotions, had passed away, and those who wrote were prompted by the crude impulses of an undeveloped national life, we have shapeless poems like Langland's Piers Plowman, impressive and sometimes beautiful by mere force of earnestness, but clumsy with their weight of solid purpose; or we have dull productions like Gower's Confessio Amantis, where the excellent Teuton, full of moral purpose, treads his French measure with elephantine step. Then at last we have Chaucer, who, as Mr. Lowell says, "shows the first result of the Roman yeast on the home-baked Saxon loaf." Chaucer, in his last and English period, gave a prophecy of what English literature might be. In the first periods of his life he had devoted himself to French and Italian models; but, like the great artist he was, he had assimilated their excellence, and, not allowing them to assimilate him or deprive him of his originality, he at last fell back on his own instincts, and produced works which give him a claim to be called " our first national artist." He did indeed "Prelude those melodious bursts which fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still." But Chaucer was much in advance of his age, and before the national mind could enter into possession of that promised land which his genius had reached, it was necessary that it should attain to that appreciation of external form, to that capacity and facility of expression, which is naturally so foreign to the Teutonic genius; that it should undergo some training in this direction; that special encouragement should be given to attention to externals. For a time exaggerated stress must be laid on grace and charm and facility of expression, before English art, whose foundation must of course be the instincts of the English genius, could flourish. And fortunately the stimulus of the Renaissance, with its revival of the classics, with its Italian literary fashions, produced a movement which immediately preceded that of the most glorious age of Elizabethan art, and was to a certain extent its cause. "The Company of Courtly Makers " in the sphere of poetry, the Euphuists in the sphere of prose, represent the school of discipline and training; their primary objects being the imitation of classic and Italian fashion, the study of externals, the worship of form. "In the latter end of Henry VIII.'s reign," says Puttenham in his Arte of English Poesie, "there sprung up a new Company of Courtly Makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, and Henry Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains, who, having travelled into Italy and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesie as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our new and homely manner of vulgar poesie from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English metre and style." To the "Company of Courtly Makers" may be said to belong Surrey, Wyatt, Vaux, Grimald, Gascoigne, Sackville, and Sidney; all writers, whose work, marked by more or less genius, is characterised by studious attention to form, and by thoughts and emotions which are more or less artificial. Sir Philip Sidney stands out from among these men partly because by him the lesson seems better learnt,-it leaves as results capabilities of expression which appear almost as instincts; partly because the larger personality of this "noble and matchless gentleman" is felt in the greater reality and truth of the emotions and the thoughts he expresses. Surrey and Wyatt, the founders of this school, are perhaps its most typical writers. As Mr. Churton Collins says, they have all the spirit of the Early Renaissance, "its classicism, its harmony, its appreciation of form. . . they gave the deathblow to that rudeness, that grotesqueness, that prolixity, that diffuseness, that pedantry, which had deformed with fatal persistency the poetry of medievalism; and while they purified our language from the gallicisms of Chaucer and his followers, they fixed the permanent standard of our versification. To them we are indebted for the great reform which substituted a metrical for a rhythmical structure." Their writings, and indeed the writings of all those belonging to the same school, are animated by that chivalry of the early Elizabethan times, so ideal and so pure in the grasp of the best minds, so artificial in the grasp of the lower. This chivalry was only another development, purer and intenser, of that medieval chivalry which animated the troubadours and trouvères; of that chivalry which, regarding the two ideas-honour, and devotion to women-as the inspiration of what is best and highest in life, almost took the place of religion, becoming a strong power over conduct. The worship of love is compared in a Norman fabliau to the worship of God: "Et pour verité vous record Dieu et Amour sont d'un accord Dieu aime sens et honorance Amour ne l'a pas en viltance Dieu hait orgueil et fausseté Dieu aime honneur et courtoisie Amour ne la met pas en arrière." And Chaucer makes Troilus say : "Thanked be ye, Lord, for that I love, Of course these ideas in the grasp of weaker minds, and when they became a fashion, lost their force and their beauty, and developed into the exaggerated and insipid songs of the later troubadours and trouvères. They gave rise to weary poems like The Romance of the Rose, and became actually ridiculous in the hands of English writers, who were eager to follow a fashion which was so entirely foreign to their nature. The chivalry of Gower is but grotesque and tedious servility : : 66 And even the larger and more spiritualised chivalry of the Italian Renaissance does not always sit easily on the Courtly Makers." In Tottel's Miscellany, published in 1557, a collection of the sonnets and love-songs of writers in this school, there are many poems, some even by Wyatt and Surrey, which are purely conventional and empty and artificial. We hear so much of "raging love," of scalding and smoking sighs, of vapoured eyes; these poets with their love-sick poems make us feel how utterly grotesque and ridiculous a thing is chivalry if its spirit is forgotten. For the spirit of chivalry being so delicate and ideal, its sublimity can easily become foolishness of the most aggravated kind. The ideas of chivalry have had the fate of melodies which, "once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them wofully coarse, feeble, and out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable." Many of the Company of Courtly Makers, however, were preserved from excessive artificiality and consequent grotesqueness by their personal admiration and close imitation of Petrarch's spirit and works. In Petrarch's great and pure personality we have a good example of the spirit of chivalry at its best. The inspirer of Petrarch's life and poems was Laura, daughter of Hudibert of Noves, and wife of Hugues de Saxe, both of Avignon. Petrarch first saw her on the 6th April 1327, and she died of the plague on the 6th April 1348. For her he had that religious and enthusiastic passion "such as mystics imagine they feel for the deity, and such as Plato supposes to be the bond of union between elevated minds." In more than 300 sonnets Petrarch celebrates all the little circumstances of his attachment, and records "those precious favours which," as Sismondi says, "after an acquaintance of fifteen or twenty years, consisted at most of a kind word, a glance not altogether severe, a momentary expression of regret and tenderness at his departure, or a deeper paleness at the idea of leaving his beloved and constant friend." He has written four sonnets on the emotions he experienced on picking up her glove; and in tracing all the minutest details of this distant attachment, in employing his imagination to describe all the emotions that he felt, that he was feeling, or that he might have felt, even he becomes at times wearisome and conventional. But occasional artificiality and convention can be pardoned to one who gave a stimulus to all that was best in chivalry, to all that was so powerful in refining human life and emotion. His works embody that spirit so well understood by a modern writer : "It is my fate: your soul hath conquered mine, "And with my passionate love for evermore Nor can I this full sacrifice deplore, Though you should scorn me, whom you have subdued, Or know not what devotion I outpour. Ah! from this timeless night what boundless good Your presence hath bestowed on me! no less That I am stung with my unworthiness. "Henceforth my life shall not unearnest prove; |