A History of English Literature, George Saintsbury [readnow .TXT] 📗
- Author: George Saintsbury
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At the time at which our period begins (and which, though psychological epochs rarely coincide exactly with chronological, is sufficiently coincident with the accession of Elizabeth), it cannot be said with any precision that there was an English literature at all. There were eminent English writers, though perhaps one only to whom the first rank could even by the utmost complaisance be opened or allowed. But there was no literature, in the sense of a system of treating all subjects in the vernacular, according to methods more or less decidedly arranged and accepted by a considerable tradition of skilled craftsmen. Something of the kind had partially existed in the case of the Chaucerian poetic; but it was an altogether isolated something. Efforts, though hardly conscious ones, had been made in the domain of prose by romancers, such as the practically unknown Thomas Mallory, by sacred orators like Latimer, by historians like More, by a few struggling miscellaneous writers. Men like Ascham, Cheke, Wilson, and others had, perhaps with a little touch of patronage, recommended the regular cultivation of the English tongue; and immediately before the actual accession of Elizabeth the publication of Tottel's Miscellany had shown by its collection of the best poetical work of the preceding half century the extraordinary effect which a judicious xenomania (if I may, without scaring the purists of language, borrow that useful word from the late Karl Hillebrand) may produce on English. It is to the exceptional fertilising power of such influences on our stock that we owe all the marvellous accomplishments of the English tongue, which in this respect—itself at the head of the Teutonic tongues by an almost unapproachable distance—stands distinguished with its Teutonic sisters generally from the groups of languages with which it is most likely to be contrasted. Its literary power is originally less conspicuous than that of the Celtic and of the Latin stocks; the lack, notorious to this day, of one single original English folk-song of really great beauty is a rough and general fact which is perfectly borne out by all other facts. But the exquisite folk-literature of the Celts is absolutely unable either by itself or with the help of foreign admixture to arrive at complete literary perfection. And the profound sense of form which characterises the Latins is apparently accompanied by such a deficiency of originality, that when any foreign model is accepted it receives hardly any colour from the native genius, and remains a cultivated exotic. The less promising soil of Anglo-Saxon idiom waited for the foreign influences, ancient and modern, of the Renaissance to act upon it, and then it produced a crop which has dwarfed all the produce of the modern world, and has nearly, if not quite, equalled in perfection, while it has much exceeded in bulk and length of flowering time, the produce of Greece.
The rush of foreign influences on the England of Elizabeth's time, stimulated alike by the printing press, by religious movements, by the revival of ancient learning, and by the habits of travel and commerce, has not been equalled in force and volume by anything else in history. But the different influences of different languages and countries worked with very different force. To the easier and more generally known of the classical tongues must be assigned by far the largest place. This was only natural at a time when to the inherited and not yet decayed use of colloquial and familiar Latin as the vehicle of business, of literature, and of almost everything that required the committal of written words to paper, was added the scholarly study of its classical period from the strictly humanist point of view. If we could assign marks in the competition, Latin would have to receive nearly as many as all its rivals put together; but Greek would certainly not be second, though it affected, especially in the channel of the Platonic dialogues, many of the highest and most gifted souls. In the latter part of the present period there were probably scholars in England who, whether their merely philological attainments might or might not pass muster now, were far better read in the actual literature of the Greek classics than the very philologists who now disdain them. Not a few of the chief matters in Greek literature—the epical grandeur of Homer, the tragic principles of the three poets, and so forth—made themselves, at first or second hand, deeply felt. But on the whole Greek did not occupy the second place. That place was occupied by Italian. It was Italy which had touched the spring that let loose the poetry of Surrey and Wyatt; Italy was the chief resort of travelled Englishmen in the susceptible time of youth; Italy provided in Petrarch (Dante was much less read) and Boccaccio, in Ariosto and Tasso, an inexhaustible supply of models, both in prose and verse. Spain was only less influential because Spanish literature was in a much less finished condition than Italian, and perhaps also because political causes made the following of Spaniards seem almost unpatriotic. Yet the very same causes made the Spanish language itself familiar to far more Englishmen than are familiar with it now, though the direct filiation of euphuism on Spanish originals is no doubt erroneous, and though the English and Spanish dramas evolved themselves in lines rather parallel than connected.
France and Germany were much (indeed infinitely) less influential, and the fact is from some points of view rather curious. Both were much nearer to England than Spain or Italy; there was much more frequent communication with both; there was at no time really serious hostility with either; and the genius of both languages was, the one from one side, the other from the other, closely connected with that of English. Yet in the great productions of our great period, the influence of Germany is only perceptible in some burlesque matter, such as Eulenspiegel and Grobianus, in the furnishing of a certain amount of supernatural subject-matter like the Faust legend, and in details less important still. French influence is little greater; a few allusions of "E. K." to Marot and Ronsard; a few translations and imitations by Spenser, Watson, and others; the curious sonnets of Zepheria; a slight echo of Rabelais here and there; some adapted songs to music; and a translated play or two on the Senecan model.[68]
[68] Some, like my friend Mr. Lee, would demur to this, especially as regards the sonnet. But Desportes, the chief creditor alleged, was himself an infinite borrower from the Italians. Soothern, an early but worthless sonneteer, c. 1584, did certainly imitate the French.
But France had already exercised a mighty influence upon England; and Germany had very little influence to exercise for centuries. Putting aside all pre-Chaucerian influence which may be detected, the outside guiding force of literary English literature (which was almost exclusively poetry) had been French from the end of the fourteenth century to the last survivals of the Scoto-Chaucerian school in Hawes, Skelton, and Lindsay. True, France had now something else to give; though it must be remembered that her great school coincided with rather than preceded the great school of England, that the Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française was but a few years anterior to Tottel's Miscellany, and that, except Marot and Rabelais (neither of whom was neglected, though neither exercised much formal influence), the earlier French writers of the sixteenth century had nothing to teach England. On the other hand, Germany was utterly unable to supply anything in the way of instruction in literary form; and it was instruction in literary form which was needed to set the beanstalk of English literature growing even unto the heavens. Despite the immense advantage which the English adoption of German innovations in religion gave the country of Luther, that country's backwardness made imitation impossible. Luther himself had not elaborated anything like a German style; he had simply cleared the vernacular of some of its grossest stumbling-blocks and started a good plain fashion of sentence. That was not what England wanted or was likely to want, but a far higher literary instruction, which Germany could not give her and (for the matter of that) has never been in a position to give her. The models which she sought had to be sought elsewhere, in Athens, in old Rome, in modern Tuscany.
But it would probably be unwise not to make allowance for a less commonplace and more "metaphysical" explanation. It was precisely because French and German had certain affinities with English, while Italian and Spanish, not to mention the classical tongues, were strange and exotic, that the influence of the latter group was preferred. The craving for something not familiar, for something new and strange, is well known enough in the individual; and nations are, after all, only aggregates of individuals. It was exactly because the models of the south were so utterly divided from the isolated Briton in style and character that he took so kindly to them, and that their study inspired him so well. There were not, indeed, wanting signs of what mischief might have been done if English sense had been less robust and the English genius of a less stubborn idiosyncrasy. Euphuism, the occasional practice of the Senecan drama, the preposterous and almost incredible experiments in classical metre of men not merely like Drant and Harvey, but like Sidney and Spenser, were sufficiently striking symptoms of the ferment which was going on in the literary constitution of the country. But they were only harmless heat-rashes, not malignant distempers, and the spirit of England won through them, with no loss of general health, probably with the result of the healthy excretion of many peccant humours which might have been mischievous if driven in. Even the strongest of all the foreign forces, the just admiration of the masterpieces of classical antiquity, was not in any way hurtful; and it is curious enough that it is only in what may be called the autumn and, comparatively speaking, the decadence of the period that anything that can be called pedantry is observed. It is in Milton and Browne, not in Shakespere and Hooker, that there is an appearance of undue domination and "obsession" by the classics.
The subdivisions of the period in which these purely literary influences worked in combination with those of the domestic and foreign policy of England (on which it is unnecessary here to dilate), can be drawn with tolerable precision. They are both better marked and more important in verse than in prose. For it cannot be too often asserted that the age, in the wide sense, was, despite many notable achievements in the sermo pedestris, not an age of prose but an age of poetry. The first period extends (taking literary dates) from the publication of Tottel's Miscellany to that of The Shepherd's Calendar. It is not distinguished by much production of positive value. In poetry proper the writers pursue and exercise themselves upon the track of Surrey, Wyatt, and the other authors whom Grimoald, or some other, collected; acquiring, no doubt, a certain facility in the adjustment to iambic and other measures of the altered pronunciation since Chaucer's time; practising new combinations in stanza, but inclining too much to the doggerel Alexandrines and fourteeners (more doggerel still when chance or design divided them into eights and sixes); repeating, without much variation, images and phrases directly borrowed from foreign models; and
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