England's Antiphon, George MacDonald [ready to read books TXT] 📗

encroached upon the old Miracle Plays. The fresh growth was called Morals or Moral Plays. In them we see the losing victory of invention over the imagination that works with given facts. No doubt in the Moral Plays there is more exercise of intellect as well as of ingenuity; for they consist of metaphysical facts turned into individual existences by personification, and their relations then dramatized by allegory. But their poetry is greatly inferior both in character and execution to that of the Miracles. They have a religious tendency, as everything moral must have, and sometimes they go even farther, as in one, for instance, called
The Castle of Perseverance , in which we have all the cardinal virtues and all the cardinal sins contending for the possession of Humanum Genus , the Human Race being presented as a new-born child, who grows old and dies in the course of the play; but it was a great stride in art when human nature and human history began again to be exemplified after a simple human fashion, in the story, that is, of real men and women, instead of by allegorical personifications of the analysed and abstracted constituents of them. Allegory has her place, and a lofty one, in literature; but when her plants cover the garden and run to seed, Allegory herself is ashamed of her children: the loveliest among them are despised for the general obtrusiveness of the family. Imitation not only brings the thing imitated into disrepute, but tends to destroy what original faculty the imitator may have possessed.


CHAPTER IV.

INTRODUCTION TO THE ELIZABETHAN ERA.


Poets now began to write more smoothly-not a great virtue, but indicative of a growing desire for finish, which, in any art, is a great virtue. No doubt smoothness is often confounded with, and mistaken for finish; but you might have a mirror-like polish on the surface of a statue, for instance, and yet the marble be full of inanity, or vagueness, or even vulgarity of result-irrespective altogether of its idea. The influence of Italian poetry reviving once more in the country, roused such men as Wyat and Surrey to polish the sound of their verses; but smoothness, I repeat, is not melody, and where the attention paid to the outside of the form results in flatness, and, still worse, in obscurity, as is the case with both of these poets, little is gained and much is lost.

Each has paraphrased portions of Scripture, but with results of little value; and there is nothing of a religious nature I care to quote from either, except these five lines from an epistle of Sir Thomas Wyat's:

Thyself content with that is thee assigned,
And use it well that is to thee allotted;

Then seek no more out of thyself to find
The thing that thou hast sought so long before,
For thou shalt feel it sticking in thy mind.

Students of versification will allow me to remark that Sir Thomas was the first English poet, so far as I know, who used the terza rima , Dante's chief mode of rhyming: the above is too small a fragment to show that it belongs to a poem in that manner. It has never been popular in England, although to my mind it is the finest form of continuous rhyme in any language. Again, we owe his friend Surrey far more for being the first to write English blank verse, whether invented by himself or not, than for any matter he has left us in poetic shape.

This period is somewhat barren of such poetry as we want. Here is a portion of the Fifty-first Psalm, translated amongst others into English verse by John Croke, Master in Chancery, in the reign of Henry VIII.

Open my lips first to confess
My sin conceived inwardly;
And my mouth after shall express
Thy laud and praises outwardly.

If I should offer for my sin,
Or sacrifice do unto thee
Of beast or fowl, I should begin
To stir thy wrath more towards me.

Offer we must for sacrifice
A troubled mind with sorrow's smart:
Canst thou refuse? Nay, nor despise
The humble and the contrite heart.

To us of Sion that be born,
If thou thy favour wilt renew,
The broken sowle, the temple torn, threshold.
The walls and all shall be made new.

The sacrifice then shall we make
Of justice and of pure intent;
And all things else thou wilt well take
That we shall offer or present.

In the works of George Gascoigne I find one poem fit for quoting here. He is not an interesting writer, and, although his verse is very good, there is little likelihood of its ever being read more than it is now. The date of his birth is unknown, but probably he was in his teens when Surrey was beheaded in the year 1547. He is the only poet whose style reminds me of his, although the wherefore will hardly be evident from my quotation. It is equally flat, but more articulate. I need not detain my reader with remarks upon him. The fact is, I am glad to have something, if not "a cart-load of wholesome instructions," to cast into this Slough of Despond, should it be only to see it vanish. The poem is called


GASCOIGNE'S GOOD MORROW.

You that have spent the silent night
In sleep and quiet rest,
And joy to see the cheerful light
That riseth in the east;
Now clear your voice, now cheer your heart;
Come help me now to sing;
Each willing wight come bear a part,
To praise the heavenly King.

And you whom care in prison keeps,
Or sickness doth suppress,
Or secret sorrow breaks your sleeps,
Or dolours do distress;
Yet bear a part in doleful wise;
Yea, think it good accord,
And acceptable sacrifice,
Each sprite to praise the Lord.

The dreadful night with darksomeness
Had overspread the light,
And sluggish sleep with drowsiness
Had overpressed our might:
A glass wherein you may behold
Each storm that stops our breath,
Our bed the grave, our clothes like mould,
And sleep like dreadful death.

Yet as this deadly night did last
But for a little space,
And heavenly day, now night is past,
Doth shew his pleasant face;
So must we hope to see God's face
At last in heaven on high,
When we have changed this mortal place
For immortality.

This is not so bad, but it is enough. There are six stanzas more of it. I transcribe yet another, that my reader may enjoy a smile in passing. He is "moralizing" the aspects of morning:

The carrion crow, that loathsome beast,
Which cries against the rain,
Both for his hue and for the rest,
The Devil resembleth plain;
And as with guns we kill the crow,
For spoiling our relief,
The Devil so must we overthrow,
With gunshot of belief.

So fares the wit, when it walks abroad to do its business without the heart that should inspire it.

Here is one good stanza from his De Profundis:

But thou art good, and hast of mercy store;
Thou not delight'st to see a sinner fall;
Thou hearkenest first, before we come to call;
Thine ears are set wide open evermore;
Before we knock thou comest to the door.
Thou art more prest to hear a sinner cry, ready.
Than he is quick to climb to thee on high.
Thy mighty name be praised then alway:
Let faith and fear
True witness bear
How fast they stand which on thy mercy stay.

Here follow two of unknown authorship, belonging apparently to the same period.


THAT EACH THING IS HURT OF ITSELF.

Why fearest thou the outward foe,
When thou thyself thy harm dost feed?
Of grief or hurt, of pain or woe,
Within each thing is sown the seed.
So fine was never yet the cloth,
No smith so hard his iron did beat,
But th' one consuméd was with moth,
Th' other with canker all to-freate. fretted away.

The knotty oak and wainscot old
Within doth eat the silly worm;[53]
Even so a mind in envy rolled
Always within it self doth burn.
Thus every thing that nature wrought,
Within itself his hurt doth bear!
No outward harm need to be sought,
Where enemies be within so near.

Lest this poem should appear to any one hardly religious enough for the purpose of this book, I would remark that it reminds me of what our Lord says about the true source of defilement: it is what is bred in the man that denies him. Our Lord himself taught a divine morality, which is as it were the body of love, and is as different from mere morality as«the living body is from the dead.


TOTUS MUNDUS IN MALIGNO POSITUS.
The whole world lieth in the Evil One.

Complain we may; much is amiss;
Hope is nigh gone to have redress;
These days are ill, nothing sure is;
Kind heart is wrapt in heaviness.

The stern is broke, the sail is rent, helm or rudder-the
The ship is given to wind and wave; [thing to steer with.
All help is gone, the rock present,
That will be lost, what man can save? that which will be lost.

When power lacks care and forceth not, careth.
When care is feeble and may not,