Revival: English Poetry: An unfinished history (1938)

An unfinished history

John Drinkwater

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351343794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

When a Poet writes poetry he can scarcely fail to interest. And the author of this posthumous volume was not only a poet but no mean critic too. As a result, his approach to English Poetry is not a work of merely casual interest: it is illuminating. No one could fail to be enriched and delighted by its discriminating enthusiasms, its happy quotations, and the no less happy judgements, discoveries, definitions and phrases which it gives us.

The historical portion is contained in the latter half, which deals with its subject in a discursive way from the beginnings to Elizabethan times - where the author stopped in the middle of a sentence. This premature ending is deepy regretted. But, fortunately for us, the first five chapters are devoted to general and personal observations, and are so full of references to the intervening and modern periods that we can genuinely claim to have here a fair impression of Drinkwater's view of the whole panorama of English Poetry.

VI

POETRY AND NARRATIVE (1)

THE popularity of any specific literary work is notoriously an uncertain criterion of merit, but the permanence of a literary form in popular favour cannot but indicate a basic fitness. Of all literary forms, or figures, the story has, first and last, most taken the fancy of men.

Criticism has sometimes sought, unsuccessfully I think, to identify the ejaculations of primal life in its ooze with the first expressions of lyric poetry. Within more measurable horizons of experience, the lyric appears to have waited on a later development of society than narrative. In any case, we may say with certainty that effective appeal from the poet to an audience has always been made earlier and more easily by a tale about something than by a recital of his own emotions about something. This is not to place narrative either below or above lyric in art. There is no aesthetic theory by which lyric could be shown to be less necessary to the full consummation of poetic achievement as a whole than narrative, but there is ample reason for concluding that in the long progress of literature it is the story that has been the form most generally desired. That narrative has commonly, and particularly in later times, forsaken verse for prose makes no matter.

It is therefore not surprising to find that the first work in English poetry, or English literature, to reach undoubted greatness and also to establish a lasting hold on popular favour, was a narrative poem, or rather a series of narrative poems so conceived and arranged as to make an organic whole. To say that England before The Canterbury Tales had no poetry would be a patent exaggeration, but it had none that was not written in what for us to-day is virtually a foreign tongue, and none that for the past three hundred years has had any claim to popular significance, or any appreciable influence on the practice of the poets. Chaucer changed all that at a stroke. To know nothing before Chaucer is to miss nothing essential to a broad knowledge of English poetry, but not to know Chaucer is to lack knowledge of a yet living source from which English poetry has never ceased to draw. No poet in modern times owes anything considerable to Chaucer’s predecessors, but no narrative verse in England since his time, from the heroics of Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton to William Morris’s Earthly Paradise and Mr. Masefield’s Reynard the Fox, is without clear obligation to Chaucer himself.

Nor does Chaucer’s achievement distinguish him only from his predecessors. William Langland, John Gower, and the unknown poet of Pearl were his contemporaries, and yet their work lies hardly less remotely in the background of our consciousness than the almost inaccessible cadences of Beowulf. Piers Plowman is a work of impressive merit, and we all know the bits about the Malvern Hills and the fair field full of folk. Also, as Saintsbury points out, the multiplicity of its manuscripts indicates that it was widely popular in its time. But it belongs to a world that has gone out of our familiar ken, and the reader would be rare to find to-day who has read the whole of it for delight. Pearl is yet further from our necessities. Its tender allegory, even when elucidated by Sir Israel Gollancz’s devoted if somewhat unlyrical rendering into modern English, survives in no more than a faint charm from a manner that is obsolete. As for Gower’s gigantic Confessio Amantis, a poem four times the length of Paradise Lost, it is of a texture altogether too thin to support its inordinate length. It has occasional graces that may well have charmed Richard the Second, the King for whom it was written, and may, if we persevere in our search for them, charm us still. But the whole is insupportably diffuse, and lacks any governing vitality that could induce a modern reader to explore its wilderness of fable unless he were compelled to. We rightly honour these poets, who testified honourably in their time, but we no longer turn to them naturally for the pleasures of poetry. The Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman, Confessio Amantis and Pearl all belong to the same generation, the last of the fourteenth century, but while all three poets drew largely upon the same literary elements from the past, Chaucer alone kindled from them beacons for the future.

This, perhaps, is but another way of saying that no poet in England down to his time, not even one of so generous a scope as Langland, had anything approaching Chaucer’s wealth of creative energy, of his genius in short. Langland and Gower were figures of large importance in their time, they have worthy if obscure places in English poetry, and for some years after their work was a source of literary activity, but little or nothing of any consequence in our verse is due to their direct influence. Even the poets who were their immediate or near successors knew in honouring them that Chaucer was master of them all. Thomas Hoccleve, writing at the date of Chaucer’s death, exclaimed—

She might have tarried her vengeance awhile,

Till that some man had equal to thee be !

Nay ! let be that ! She knew well that this Isle

May never man forth bringè like to thee …

and near a century later William Dunbar took up the note with—

He has done piteously devour

The noble Chaucer, of Makaris flower !

The Monk of Bury, and Gower, all three !

Timor Mortis conturbat me !

Chaucer in his age was veritably ‘ of makers flower’, and, setting the claims of scholarship aside, which are not here our concern, if we know him and no one else in English poetry until the publication of Tottel’s Miscelany in 1557 we shall do well enough. It is true that John Skelton, laureate to Henry the Eighth, expressed a lively wit with an insufficient art that to-day engages curiosity rather than admiration, though it has been much and, I think, extravagantly praised by one or two recent critics, while a sufficient familiarity with the dialect may discover in the Scottish poets, James the First, Dunbar, and Robert Henryson, a quality not to be matched by any named writer south of the border during the barren years of the fifteenth century. I say named, since if, as is most likely, the anonymous group of poetry known generically as The Ballads belong chiefly to the fifteenth century, they obviously have to be excluded from the generalization. They will be considered later.

Chaucer’s language, on which much learning has been employed, presents no serious difficulty to the unlearned reader. Hoccleve five hundred years ago saluted him as ‘ The first Finder of our fair language ’, and in all essentials he is still so near to modern usage that after a few pages we can accommodate eye and ear to his verse easily enough without special knowledge. If we choose to vex ourselves with a glossary we shall need it but seldom, and if at first an occasional line sags or clogs, these syllabic difficulties are soon forgotten. Such difference as there is between his language and our own rapidly becomes a pleasure rather than an obstacle, as though we were enjoying the satisfaction of knowing a new tongue without the labour of learning it.

If Chaucer had written nothing but Troilus and Criseyde and The Legend of Good Women, he would still have excelled his predecessors, but in The Canterbury Tales he left the rest of his achievement far behind and became the first great English poet, with no one to share his eminence until the coming of the Elizabethans two hundred years later. With these tales the living delight of English poetry begins, to be suspended as unaccountably as it had appeared, and then to rewake at the end of the sixteenth century with a splendour that it was never wholly to lose.

Two things are immediately remarkable about Chaucer’s principal poem. The first is that although it came into being unannounced by previous effort, there is nothing tentative or experimental in its character. It has all the mature assurance of those later masters, Shakespeare chief among them, whose achievement it was to give crowning expression to the genius of an age, transcending their time as clearly as they were part of it. I may be told that this view is the result merely of an ignorance of Chaucer’s sources, and that an adequate knowledge of his artistic ancestry and environment would show that he too in his mastery was a consummation no less than these others. I do not think that the objection can hold. It needs no great erudition to see what are quite simple matters of fact, which have, indeed, sometimes been obscured by pedantry. Chaucer borrowed some of his narrative conventions and some of his fables from earlier writers. This was neither to his credit nor otherwise. Shakespeare did the same thing, so conspicuously as to furnish generations of critics with ingenious occasions. But it remains a question of little more than academic interest. Shakespeare’s practice in the matter was merely an accident of his working career, and should not for a moment be confused with his supremely representative character. That depended on far weightier considerations than the chance that he borrowed material from other men and bettered the instruction. He acquired it because he was able to enrich and perfect in his own words the throbbing vitality of an age immensely rich in life, in thought, in action and in literature—particularly, it is to be noted, already in literature. He did better than any one else what many men in the preceding decade or two and in his own time had been and were doing notably well. He was recognized by his contemporaries as a master, but, even so, as a master among many masters. The surge and passion of his poetry was the apotheosis not only of a great society but also of a great literature already worthily commemorating that society. He overtopped a company of giants.

Chaucer’s was a very different case. He, like Shakespeare, made good use of borrowed material, but there the similarity ends. The term that most fitly embraces all the qualities of Shakespeare’s work is vitality, and we know the source from which his vitality was derived, or by which, perhaps, we should say, apart from its own nature it was chiefly fortified. It is not claiming equality for Chaucer with Shakespeare as a poet to say that in this cardinal virtue of vitality he was hardly less than the greater man. But from what source outside its own nature was Chaucer’s vitality notably fortified ? He grew up in a position of some small importance at the court of Edward the Third, a robust if not entirely civilizing experience, but The Canterbury Tales was written when England under Richard the Second had slender reason to be either in high spirits or proud of itself. Certainly the vitality of the poem, its clean-cut, crisp enjoyment of character for its own sake, its acute good-humour, its nervous intensity of action, and its lyric freshness rich as April buds, were no reflection of a national life rejoicing in its own abundance. Even less, if less were possible, was this excellence the culminating performance of a preva...