A Late Beginning. Barbour's constant digressiveness, and preoccupation with abstract allegory. The Pastime dimly anticipates Spenser, and is a link between the Faerie Queene and the older English allegories deriving from the Romaunt of the Rose. But though Spenser's debts both to the Pastime and the Example are specific, the Faerie Queene, in all essentials of genius and beauty, is a thing generically different from anything that Hawes ever wrote, or could have hoped to write. His hopeless inferiority is due not only to the limitations of the period, but also to those of his own temperament and equipment. CHAPTER VII SCOTTISH POETRY The Beginnings The Scottish Chaucerians - Popular Poetry - SCOTTISH literature before the middle of the fourteenth Icentury is a thing of mere fragments, and brings to light no single author of historical standing for Thomas of Ercildoune, poet and seer, must, unfortunately, be regarded as a figure of legend. Various causes have been assigned for this strange barrenness. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Scotland was divided between various races-Pict, Scot, Anglian, Anglo-French, and Danish. The resulting multiplicity of tongues did not make for a national literature, even if any of the races had been capable of supplying one. The language commonly known as Early Scots' was spoken between the Tweed and the Forth, and in the towns along the mid-east coast. It was in reality Northern English, and was practically identical with the language spoken between the Tweed and the Humber.1 It is claimed that owing to this identity certain works actually of Scotch origin may have been attributed to the north of England. A more likely reason for the dearth, at least during the latter part of the period, lies in the terrible turmoil and peril arising out of the Scottish wars with England. During these days of storm, men's hands were devoted rather toward keeping their heads than toward the penning of verse. Yet if this warfare for the time being hindered poetry, in the end it helped and quickened it, and made it the expression of a national faith and aspiration; for the two most lengthy and important of early Scotch poems deal respectively with the two great heroes of Scottish independence. The Bruce (1376) of John Barbour (1316?-1395) is less a history of King Robert than a historical romance woven 1 See Sir James Murray, Dialects of the Southern Counties of Scotland; and Peter Giles, The Earliest Scottish Literature', Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. ii, chap. v. around his exploits and perils. Its best scenes are vivid and straightforward, and its outstanding characters the king himself, Edward Bruce, and James of Douglas-are drawn with a noble simplicity. Barbour's narrative gift is seen at its highest in his descriptions of Bannockburn, and in such other passages as that relating the king's escape from the sleuth-hound and meinie' of John of Lorne, and his subsequent flight across the moor. The struggle of the weary and overwatched hero with the three traitors in the bothie is one which Stevenson might have been proud to pen. Several other passages in the poem are hardly less good. Barbour is at times pedestrian; but he is also capable of such flights as the famous praise of liberty which is the expression, not only of the man, but of his age and country : A! fredome is a noble thing! Fredome mayss men to have liking; Certain other poems of the period have also been attributed to Barbour-notably a collection of Lives of the Saints; two fragments of a Troy-book translated from the Latin of Guido delle Colonne; and a translation from the French, entitled The Buik of Alexander. It is on his Bruce, however, that his fame depends. Nearly a century later the other hero of Scottish freedom Blind received his due in the Wallace of Blind Harry. Harry, Harry's according to the fifteenth-century scholar and historian, Wallace. John Major, was a blind minstrel, who wandered the country reciting for bread the deeds of its heroes. He claims to have based his narrative on a Latin book in which John Blair, Wallace's chaplain, had recorded his master's fights and wanderings. There may have been such a book, but we have no record of it; and Harry's easy defiance of historical fact and sequence shows that he set small store by authentic records. His treatment of history is far more loose than Barbour's, and he sometimes gives Wallace legendary powers. Unlike Barbour, he expresses the bitterest hatred of England, and his invective against her can only be paralleled by the earlier invective of Minot against Scotland. His humour, of which there is plenty, is generally grim and sarcastic. At his best, he displays fine narrative and descriptive power, though his lapses into the commonplace are more frequent and distressing than Barbour's. The Bruce is written in the octosyllabic, Wallace in the Other heroic, couplet. Blind Harry's contemporary, Richard Early Holland, or de Holand, in writing his Buke of the Howlat, Writers.. employs the alliterative rhyming stanza so greatly favoured Native and Influ ences. by the romancers of the period. Some have attempted, without much reason or success, to interpret this poem as a political allegory, dealing satirically with James II; in point of fact, it is simply what it purports to be, a fable based on the humours of various birds, who assemble in conclave to listen to the plaint of the owl against Nature. Certain tedious digressions apart, the poem is both amusing and charming. The identity and output of Huchoun of the Awle Royale together with the Scottish romances of the period, are discussed elsewhere: if, as seems possible, Huchoun be identical with Sir Hew of Eglintoun, Scotland during the fourteenth century possessed a notable writer of romances. It possessed beyond all doubt an industrious and imaginative, if not very poetic, chronicler in Andrew Wyntoun, Prior of St. Serf's in Loch Leven, and Canon Regular of St. Andrews. In his Original Chronicle, written in rhymed octosyllables, he traces the history of Scotland back to its imagined' origines' in the legendary past. The early part of this work consists largely of marvels, scriptural and other, but the later has a certain historical value. History and legend blend in the tale of Macbeth, which is related in the Sixth Book. Of the remaining chroniclers of the period, the most notable were John of Fordun and Walter Bower, who worked in succession on the long Latin compilation known as the Scotichronicon. Scottish literature, as we have hitherto described it, lacked tradition, and was a thing of beginnings: yet these beginnings Southern had their origin in a spirit of robust nationalism, which found its natural expression in martial poetry. Cognate with this was another native impulse which found utterance in poems of satire, love, and coarse and racy merriment. These songs and lampoons are written by poets of the people, and express the people's joys and hates and sorrows. They continue throughout the whole course of Scotch literature, and find their culmination in such great national singers as Fergusson and Burns. For a time, however, this native poetry was overshadowed by a more courtly and literary tradition deriving from the south, which produced some of Scotland's most exquisite poetry, and during the fifteenth century gave her the poetic mastery of England. We may deal with this at once, reserving the popular verse for later notice. Scottish It has been shown that Chaucer's English followers and Prosody. disciples went astray largely through their failure to understand the secrets of his prosody. One of the chief causes of their discomfiture had been the disintegration caused in English metre through the inflexional changes of the period, and especially through the dubious quality of the final -e. In the Scottish language of the period, which, as we have seen, differed only slightly from Northern English, there was little of this linguistic or prosodic ambiguity, for the inflexions had early become levelled under common forms, and poets were not confronted with the metrical difficulties which had discom fited Lydgate and Occleve. But the difference in quality between the English and the Scottish poetry of the time can certainly not be accounted for by mere considerations of prosody and dialectal form. The Scots poets had not only a fitter and surer medium of poetry; they had greater genius as well. Lydgate, had he lived north of the Tweed, could never have written anything so finished as the King's Quair, or so powerful as The Testament of Cresseid: and, conversely, had Dunbar or Henryson written in the English midlands, it is incredible that they could have ever sunk into the slough of The Temple of Glass. Four great poets stand out in the Scottish literature of The Scotthe period. Each of these professed direct allegiance to tish ChauChaucer and-magno intervallo, it may be imagined-to Gower cerians. and Lydgate. James I speaks of the first two of these as his 'maisteris dere': Henryson, in the homely and delightful introduction to the Testament of Cresseid, proclaims himself disciple of Chaucer glorious'. Dunbar styles Chaucer reverend', and the rose of rethoris all', and writes: O morall Gower and Lydgate laureate, Your sugarit lippis and toungis aureate Bene to our eris cause of great delight; and Gavin Douglas, the least Chaucerian of the four, cannot abstain from praising Chaucer even in the prologues to his 'Eneids'; elsewhere he hails him as A per se sans peir In his vulgair. The influence of Chaucer affects both the spirit and the form of all these men, and manifests itself in obvious and more subtle ways throughout their work. Most obviously Chaucerian are the uses made by the first James 1three of rime royal, and by all four of allegory. The King's The King's Quair, or King's Book, the first great Chaucerian poem of Quair. Scotland, is written throughout in the great seven-lined stanza beloved by the Master, and in its allegorical setting it shows a close acquaintance, not only with Chaucer's original work, but also with his translation of The Romaunt of the Rose. King James I's authorship of the poem, though it has been disputed, is now established beyond all doubt by the scholarship of M. Jusserand. It is in great part an allegory set in the form of a dream, in which the royal poet appears before Venus, and, subsequently, before Minerva and Fortune, and beseeches their help in his woful plight of love. This passage is written with freshness, delicacy, and grace, and will stand comparison with the finest allegorical passages of Chaucer himself. There is fine quality, too, in the opening stanzas of the poem, which describe how the poet tires of reading Boethius, falls into slumber after musing on Fortune, and is aroused by the matin-bell, which, as he thinks, bids him tell of his adventure. But to most readers the chief charm of the Quair lies in the scene in which the King, leaning forth from the window of the English castle which is his prison, sees The fairest or the freschest yong floure That ever I saw, methoght, before that houre, A charming passage follows in description and praise of the Thankit mot be, and fair and lufe befall, And thankit be the fair castell wall, James's rime royal moves with great smoothness, and his poem is full of graceful beauty; but there are not only beauty and Henryson grace but tragic intensity in The Testament of Cresseid, by -The Robert Henryson (1425 ?-1500?). This poem, which is in Testament rime royal, is, in effect, a continuation of Chaucer's Troilus of Cresand Criseyde; but it presents a remarkable sequence and seid. contrast of moods and motifs. It opens with a passage of intimate and homely realism, showing the poet gazing at the stars on a bitter, but beautiful, winter's night. Unable longer to bear the cold, he passes to the fire, mends it, and takes 'ane drink' his 'spreitis to comfort'. He then opens Troilus, and musing on Cressida's fate, resolves to write its sequel. First he shows her cast off by Diomede and abusing Venus and Cupid very angrily. This gives him the opportunity of introducing what may be called the pageantry of the poem-to wit, a conclave of the gods, who debate as to what shall be her punishment for her outrage against Love. This long passage contains much pride, pomp, and classical circumstance, and is admirable of its kind. The poem shifts suddenly to tragic realism, when the dreadful doom of leprosy is inflicted on Cressida by Saturn, and she is told that she must go begging from hous to hous With cop and clapper like ane lazarous. She goes to the spittal-house, and there sings a dirge for her dead happiness. Driven to beg by the road-side with her |