Unquestionably the English minstrel worked himself freer of "the metaphysics of love" than his Gallic elder brother; he avows frankly the nature of his passion, declaring how, as In a wyndon, ther we stod, We custe use fyfty sythe, 1 and the lady in turn as frankly confesses, That I nam thyn, and thou art myn, To don al thi wille. To the Latin of the cloister touching the French of the court, with all the cross-currents of their intermingling with the vernacular, must be ascribed the macaronic nature of so many of these poems both sacred and secular. To these influences, too, must be referred both the perversion of hymns and the parodying of sacred songs by the wandering scholars as well as the retaliatory adaptation of amorous ministrelsy to sacred uses. The Franciscans especially were active in this last, enjoined as they had been by their founder, St. Francis, a trouvère in his youth, to become joculatores Domini. It has been noted that "the only two names to which religious lyrics attach themselves in the thirteenth century are both those of other minorites." There are not lacking other later examples. The martial spirit, however it permeated the age and although it produced much verse which belongs to the occasional class, has given us only one name with which indulgent criticism can link the title, lyrist. Of Law 1 How a', a window, as we stood, we kissed each other fifty times. rence Minot we know literally nothing save his name, which he attached in two places to a manuscript containing eleven poems in lyrical form dealing with the 1327-77 deeds of Edward III against the French and the Scots between 1333 and 1352. Minot is a skilful versifier, after the intricate medieval scholarly manner, and his lines are direct, vigorous, and imbued with the species of patriotism that lauds the victor and gibes the foe. I cannot feel that "the poetical value of these songs has been somewhat unduly depreciated." 1 The polite poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were surprisingly unlyrical; even Chaucer, of whom the modern spirit is so consistently affirmed, with all his marvellous range of epic and dramatic art, is reflective and elegiac, ever musical, yet rarely quite lyrical. The Book of the Duchess, The Prioress' Tale, and the lawyer's Tale of Constance, all, however, in parts disclose Chaucer lyrically, when he dips for the nonce below the rippling surface of his incomparable narrative art. "Truth," “Gentilesse," and "The Former Age" are pieces admirably reflective, and Chaucer's vers de société - "To Rosamund," for example- rings charming variations on its conventional and artificial themes. But when all has been said, there are few authentic lyrics in Chaucer. Perhaps best among them, though also on a theme well-worn, is the burst into song of the birds at the close of The Parlement of Foules: 1 See Hall, J., The Poems of Lawrence Minot, Oxford, 1889, and C. L. Thomson in Cambridge English Literature, I, p. 398. Now welcom somer, with thy sonne softe, Seynt Valentyn, that art ful hy on-lofte; Now welcom somer, with thy sonne softe, Wel han they cause for to gladen ofte, This little poem is in form a rondel, a development among the French poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of the popular dance-song (rondet or rondet de carole) and consisting of two elements, the text which varies and is sung by the leader, and the refrain, repeated in unvarying words, by the other singers. The rondel developed into several varieties from the eight-line form, commonly called a triolet, to those of thirteen or fourteen lines. The ordering of the refrain complete, one line of the text, one line of the refrain, two or more of the text, closing with the complete refrain as here, is the usual arrangement. Chaucer was fond of these difficult exotic French forms, the ballade in particular, which ordering three rimes in eight lines interwoven (a b a b b b c), repeats the stanza thrice on the three rimes and concludes with an envoy, or application, still playing on the earlier three rimes. Chaucer wrote under influences emanating from France practi cally throughout his career; they were overwhelmingly predominant in his earliest work, not only in metrical forms and titles such as the Compleynt (a love poem of mournful intent usually addressed to a pitiless lady), but in the plan and spirit of his work. And all these things continued in the poets that followed Chaucer and vowed fealty to him. But if Chaucer, with all his grace, melody, and powers of observation, is not essentially lyrical, no more lyrical is any one of his immediate disciples and successors. The trilingual moral Gower, feebly sprawling Occleve, Lydgate, biographical if not subjective in his satirical flash, "London Lyckpenny" (if the critics will allow it to be his), the author of Wallace, King James with his Kingis Quair, prolonging a plaint of love to 1400 lines-none of these is lyrical. It is not, indeed, until we reach Henryson, Dunbar, and Skelton that the lyrical note breaks forth among these learned poets; in them, with all their morality, satire, and allegory, the lyric is like a sparse and belated blossom of the gorse, otherwise of foliage harsh, dark, and thorny. To Henryson, as we have seen, we owe the earliest English pastoral poem, "Robene and Makyne," an amœbæan lyric of delightful naïveté. With Skelton and Dunbar, who was the first British poet to see his works in print, we reach a new age, and with these names to carry over we may fittingly conclude this chapter. CHAPTER III LYRICAL POETRY IN THE ENGLAND OF THE TUDORS T the opening of the sixteenth century the greatest author writing in an English tongue was the Scottish poet, William Dunbar. Dunbar's education was complete about 1480; he had meditated taking orders, but instead travelled abroad, as the scholars of the day were wont to do, visiting France and England. Some years before the opening of the new century Dunbar had become the king's poet, and his life from then on is associated with the court of James IV of Scotland, who appears to have supported him with a substantial pension towards the end of his life. There is a tradition that Dunbar fell with his master at Flodden Field; at least we hear no more of the poet after 1513. Dunbar is the greatest of the Chaucerians. As such he belongs to the older age, and modernity is not to be expected of him. Indeed the May-morning, the dream, the allegory of bird and beast, grotesqueness of imagery, even the moralizing platitude all the hackneyed conventions of the old poetry-are Dunbar's. His observation of nature-which has sometimes been praised betrays him (though perhaps here he only followed his models in Middle-English) into such generalizations as this: |