war, the vices of certain institutions, the decay of the traditions and the discipline of the Church. But he does not give even the echo of opinion about contemporary events, and the last thing his book does is to represent the passions and ideas which, growing in force up to the end of the century, culminate in the Satire Ménippée.1 I have attempted in this chapter, by the aid of the facts of history and the concrete evidence of literature, to give a comprehensive, though a necessarily superficial, view of the collective forces acting on the imagination of Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century; and the reader is now in a position to appreciate the main intellectual motives which inspired the English poets of the age in their metrical compositions. We are entering upon a period of transition. The great social fabric of Catholicism and Feudalism, in which civil and ecclesiastical elements are so strangely blended and balanced, is still standing; an ideal of faith and morals is still before the mind pointing out the duty of man to God in the scholastic theology of the Church, and the duty of man to his neighbour in the chivalric institutions of the Holy Roman Empire. This ideal we have seen reflected in the various types of English poetry brought under review in the first volume of this History, in the Vision of Piers the Plowman, in the Confessio Amantis, and in the numerous streams of Love allegory taking their rise in the Romance of the Rose. The character of all such poetry was derived from the great principle of Universal Authority, which was its inspiring cause: it was catholic, conventional, didactic. In the poetry of Chaucer alone we observed the predominance of the new power which, in the sixteenth century, will become throughout Europe the determining motive of literary composition. But now in every European country, in various forms and under different aspects, arises the idea of liberty of thought and action, in the constitution both of the State and the Individual. All of these influences beat, like the waves of an advancing 1 Translated from Rabelais (Classiques Populaires), pp. 179, 180. Emile Gebhart, Professeur à la Faculté des Lettres de Paris. sea, upon the English imagination, and begin to break up the solid structure of traditional belief and ancient chivalry. The history of Ideas has in it something of the solemnity of tragic action. As the chant of the monks on the Capitol called up in the imagination of the historian the long drama of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, so the monuments of architecture, painting, sculpture, and poetry, record the dynastic revolutions in the march of human thought. Humiliating in many respects to our pride is the scene of waste, change, and decay, that such a retrospect discloses. Conceits and affectations elevated into the chief aims of poetry; the idols of beauty confounded with its true forms; experiments in language conducted at the expense of thought; vain though noble attempts made to reanimate exhausted ideals; admiration lavished on the shadows rather than the substance of art; such are the ruins that will encounter us in this period of our history, like the fallen temples, tombs, and aqueducts, that sadden the memories of the traveller in the Roman Campagna. Nevertheless, it is encouraging to observe that, in spite of mistakes ́ and failures, a definite advance in poetical composition is made on clearly-marked lines. Wherever there is honest and independent effort to give expression to an imaginative conception, there, however ineffectual the execution of the design may be in itself, we shall see that ground is gained for some later and more successful labourer in the same field; even the pursuit of technical trickery discovers the road to genuine beauties of style. Wyatt is the pioneer of the artistic reforms of Surrey; Euphuism, false and misleading in its own aims, contributes a valuable element to the structure of the Elizabethan drama and the refined wit of the eighteenth century; the pastoralism of the Arcadia prepares the way for As You Like It and The Winter's Tale; and the moral allegory in the Faery Queen foreshadows the religious epic in Paradise Lost. Inflieved greatly by Pitarch. CHAPTER II SIR THOMAS WYATT: ORIGINALITY OF THOUGHT: It THOMAS WYATT was the elder of the two sons of Sir 1 Me tibi conjunxit comitem gratissima Granta. Leland, Naniis in He also says that, on leaving Oxford, Wyatt travelled on the Continent, and in view of the poet's wide acquaintance with Italian literature, we may perhaps assume that he did so on leaving Cambridge. It is at any rate certain that in 1525 he was in attendance at Court, for he is found taking part there with other gentlemen in one of those splendid masquerades in which Henry VIII. so much delighted.1 Most of Wyatt's love poems were probably written between this date and 1537, when he was sent as ambassador to Spain, and was accordingly removed from the sphere in which he would naturally have employed his fancy on compositions that had procured him in England a high reputation as a graceful poet.2 How far these poems were inspired by serious feeling we have no means of knowing. The tradition is that Wyatt was in love with Anne Boleyn, and some of the more malignant writers on the Roman Catholic side, at a later period in the century, did not hesitate to spread the report that their intercourse was of an immoral nature.3 But the circumstantial story on which the scandal is based is full of improbabilities. No charge of the kind was made against Wyatt at Anne's trial, where evidence of the flimsiest kind was brought forward to criminate the Queen; it is, moreover, plain that, if the King had regarded Wyatt as in any way a rival in his wife's affections, he would never have admitted him to his confidence, or promoted him to honour. It is true that Wyatt in 1536 was sent to the Tower, but he himself, in his speech before the Privy Council in 1541, expressly ascribes his imprisonment on this occasion to 2 As early as 1527 Leland, writing to him from Paris, says— Tu nunc fac animum, rogo, Viate, 3 Nott, Memoirs of Sir T. Wyatt, pp. xviii. xix. the influence of the Duke of Suffolk, and not to the personal displeasure of the King.1 The story of his attachment to Anne Boleyn rests partly on tradition, partly on inference from expressions in his own poems. An epigram of his, in which, like Petrarch, he plays upon his mistress's name, is addressed "To His Love called Anna"; and in one of his sonnets he hints enigmatically that a royal lover has made it impossible for him to persevere in his old pursuit : Whoso list to hunt? I know where is an hind. Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, "Noli me tangere": for Cæsar's I am.2 There is no very deep feeling here; and it is quite possible, as far as Anne Boleyn is concerned, that her intercourse with Wyatt was limited to a game of gallantry, played by both parties in strict conformity with the rules of the Courts of Love, and not intended to have a serious ending. There are, indeed, as we shall presently see, many of Wyatt's love poems, in which the flame of his ardent and enthusiastic nature seems to burn in the very movement of the verse; but these may well have been inspired by some other object than the unfortunate Queen. Anne was beheaded in 1536, and Wyatt, who received the honour of knighthood in the same year, was in 1537 sent as ambassador to the Spanish Court, with the object of reviving "the old amity" between the Emperor and the King of England. The position was one of peculiar delicacy, for not only had the Emperor been bitterly offended with Henry on account of the divorce of Katharine of Arragon, his aunt, but the King was also anxious to obtain the consent of the Emperor to removing the Princess Mary from the succession to the throne. There was, further, the religious difficulty, the 1 Wyatt's Oration (Nott's edition of Works, vol. ii. p. 300). |