England's Antiphon. George MacDonald
men thee threw. coffin.
But grace from thy grave grew:
Thou rose up quick comfort to us. living.
For her love that this counsel knew,
So be my comfort, Christ Jesus.
Jesus, soothfast God and man,
Two kinds knit in one person,
The wonder-work that thou began
Thou hast fulfilled in flesh and bone.
Out of this world wightly thou wan, thou didst win, or make
Lifting up thyself alone; [thy way, powerfully.
For mightily thou rose and ran
Straight unto thy Father on throne.
Now dare man make no more moan—
For man it is thou wroughtest thus,
And God with man is made at one;
So be my comfort, Christ Jesus.
Jesu, my sovereign Saviour,
Almighty God, there ben no mo: there are no more—thou
Christ, thou be my governor; [art all in all.(?)
Thy faith let me not fallen fro. from
Jesu, my joy and my succour,
In my body and soul also,
God, thou be my strongest food, the rhyme fails here.
And wisse thou me when me is woe. think on me.
Lord, thou makest friend of foe,
Let me not live in languor thus,
But see my sorrow, and say now "Ho,"
And be my comfort, Christ Jesus.
Of fourteen stanzas called Richard de Castre's Prayer to Jesus, I choose five from the latter half, where the prayer passes from his own spiritual necessities, very tenderly embodied, to those of others. It does our hearts good to see the clouded sun of prayer for oneself break forth in the gladness of blessed entreaty for all men, for them that make Him angry, for saints in trouble, for the country torn by war, for the whole body of Christ and its unity. After the stanza—
Jesus, for the deadly tears
That thou sheddest for my guilt,
Hear and speed my prayérs
And spare me that I be not spilt;
the best that is in the suppliant shines out thus
Jesu, for them I thee beseech
That wrathen thee in any wise;
Withhold from them thy hand of wreche, vengeance.
And let them live in thy service.
Jesu, most comfort for to see
Of thy saintis every one,
Comfort them that careful be,
And help them that be woe-begone.
Jesu, keep them that be good,
And amend them that have grieved thee;
And send them fruits of earthly food,
As each man needeth in his degree.
Jesu, that art, withouten lees, lies.
Almighty God in trinity,
Cease these wars, and send us peace,
With lasting love and charity.
Jesu, that art the ghostly stone spiritual.
Of all holy church in middle-erde, the world.
Bring thy folds and flocks in one,
And rule them rightly with one herd.
We now approach the second revival of literature, preceded in England by the arrival of the art of printing; after which we find ourselves walking in a morning twilight, knowing something of the authors as well as of their work.
I have little more to offer from this century. There are a few religious poems by John Skelton, who was tutor to Henry VIII. But such poetry, though he was a clergyman, was not much in Skelton's manner of mind. We have far better of a similar sort already.
A new sort of dramatic representation had by this time greatly 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