their own case ben blind all day"; he would therefore resolve to suffer in silence and was even afraid to show himself out of doors. All this he writes in his Complaint. He has scarcely finished it when a friend looks in to whom he reads his composition. A Dialogue follows, in which the friend earnestly dissuades him from publishing it, arguing that people will have forgotten all about his illness, and that the Complaint will only bring it back to their recollection; moreover, if he begins to write again, his malady will certainly return. To all this Occleve turns a deaf ear, declaring his intention of publishing his Confessions, and of translating a Latin treatise, called Scito Mori. Seeing him resolved, his friend goes upon a fresh tack, and bids him, in God's name, write and publish what he will. On the poet asking him to suggest a subject, the other advises him to write a story in honour of Woman, to make amends for his Epistle to Cupid, which, however unreasonably, had given offence to the sex. Occleve assenting writes the story of Jereslaus' Wife, the original of which he found in the Gesta Romanorum; and to this he adds his translation of the Scito Mori, and (at the request of his friend) another tale, Jonathas and Fellicula, also taken from the Gesta. He thus obtains, after the example of Chaucer and Gower, a framework for his little group of stories and moralisations. Poor as his scheme is, and unworthy to be mentioned with the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, it is not altogether wanting in a vein of original invention, which, so far, raises it above the lifeless allegorical machinery of the Confessio Amantis. Through the crude and inartistic conception we can discern gleams of the dramatic spirit which gives animation to Pope's unrivalled Epistle to Arbuthnot. Generally speaking, Occleve may be described as an amiable and garrulous poet, qualified to discharge the functions of the trouvère, in so far as these consisted in stooping to amuse the great at the poet's own expense; and possessing powers of versification just sufficient to obtain him distinction and patronage, because he was fortunate enough to live in an age when those who could write the VOL. I Z English language were few, and those who were anxious to read it were many and liberal. Occleve avows that he learned the art of writing in metre from Chaucer, whom he regarded with infinite admiration as the glory of the new English tongue.1 He claims to have known the great poet better than any man, and implies that the latter did what he could to improve his verses.2 3 It is indeed evident that, like Lydgate, Occleve found as much difficulty in composing in the new English, as if it had been a foreign tongue; and he too is full of apologies to his patrons for the rudeness of his performance. He learned from his master to avoid those harsh collisions of accent which make the verses of Lydgate so unmusical; but, though his lines generally contain the correct number of syllables, this success is obtained at the expense of the accent, which is constantly thrown on weak places. In the first fifteen stanzas of The Complaynte of the Virgin Mary the following examples of this defect occur: And the tetés that gaf to sowken eek And seint Anné, my modir dere also. Eek thee to sowke on my briestés gaf I, And maketh á wrongfúl disseverance. 1 But weylaway! so is myn herte wo, That the honour of Englyssh tonge is dede, 2 My dere maistir-God his soule quyte !- 3 For Lydgate see p. 327, note 2. Bedford (Works, Furnivall, p. 57), says : Ibid. 297. Occleve, writing to the Duke of I drede lest that my maister Massy, That is of fructuous intelligence, Whan he beholdeth how unconningly My boke is metrid, how raw my sentence, How feeble eek been my colours, his prudence Shall son encombrid been of my folie. That alle folk see and beholde it may. As thow were an evil and wikked wight. Sone, if thou haddest á fadír lyvynge. That is to say, taking this poem as an average specimen, the number of lines in Occleve's poems, in which the accent falls on a weak syllable, would amount to about ten per cent. In his use of metres he follows Chaucer, but confines himself almost exclusively to two measures, namely that which was afterwards called the royal stanza, consisting of seven lines of five accents each, with the rhymes disposed as follows, a b a bbcc; and the stanza of eight lines with the following disposition of rhymes, a babbcbc. The only feature of originality he shows is in his use of dialogue in the royal stanza, and it is interesting to observe the manner in which so early a writer meets the difficulties attendant on this mode of composition. On the whole, his style exhibits a good deal of dramatic energy and vivacity, as may be judged from the following stanzas, in which his friend is remonstrating with him against publishing his Complainte : "That I shall saye shal be of gode entente: Hast thow mayde this compleynte foorth to goo Kepe all that cloos for thyn honour's sake. "How it stood with thee, layde is all aslepe,1 Let be; that rede I, for I canot find 3 2 O3 man to speke of it; in as good a kynde As thow hast stode among them on this day Standyst thow now. " 4 "A nay," quod I, "nay, nay." 1 It is all laid to sleep how it stood with thee. 2 I would not have thee touch on it. 3 One. 4 Thou standest now in as good a position as thou hast stood among men before this day. It will be observed that, like Gower, when he is writing in dialogue, Occleve naturally runs into inversions. In the foregoing passage he does so, plainly, from the difficulty of preserving the natural order of the sentences in rhyme; that is to say, he fixes his rhymes before he forms his sentence. Nevertheless it is to be remembered, as has been remarked before, that the Anglo-Saxon syntax favoured this manner of writing, which Occleve sometimes employs when there is no necessity for him to do so. For example, he writes: "A riotous person I was and forsake"; a line which would certainly have run better if the words had followed the order of the thought: "I was a riotous person and forsake"; "If that a leche curyd had me so when it was evidently open to him to write “me had curyd." 1 " 2 In a word, the syntax of Occleve, as well as the prosody of Lydgate, shows the tendency of the native Anglo-Saxon element to revolt against those foreign laws of grammar and harmony, which had been imposed on the English language by the cultivated genius of Chaucer. 2 Dialog, 85. 1 Complaint, 67. CHAPTER IX THE PROGRESS OF ALLEGORY IN ENGLISH POETRY ALLEGORY in the literature of the Middle Ages presents itself under three aspects: (1) As a philosophical method of interpreting the phenomena of nature; (2) As the abstracting process of the mind which embodies itself in the rhetorical figure of Personification; (3) As a specific form of poetry. 1. The allegorical method of interpretation is duly explained by Dante in his epistle to Can Grande conveying the dedication of the Divine Comedy. It need hardly be said that it is employed continuously through that poem, but there is a special reference to it in a speech of Beatrice, touching the abode of souls in the planets:'They show themselves here,” says his guide to the poet, "not because it is their allotted sphere, but to give a sign that they have mounted less high in the degrees of celestial life. One must speak thus to your wit, since it is only from an object of sense that it apprehends what it afterwards makes fit matter for the understanding. Hence Scripture condescends to your faculty, and attributes to God feet and hands, while it understands thereby something different; and Holy Church represents to you in the likeness of men Gabriel and Michael and that other who made Tobias whole again.' 2. From the method of abstraction, illustrated in these lines, springs naturally that multitude of allegorical 1 Paradiso, iv. 37-48. |