320 CHAPTER X THE PROSE EXPERIMENT IN ENGLAND. - ENGLISH PROSE REGINALD THE PROSE TRADITION-CHANGE OF FUNCTION-ITS CRITICAL INTEREST We do not look in the prose of the fifteenth century for any of those niceties of style, or for that confidence of craftsmanship, which gives more modern prose its high consideration as a literary art and engine. In a period when verse is so dully imitative, but little freshness can be expected in a form in which writers engaged almost apologetically, or which tradition. they reserved for the humdrum work of annals, homilies, or domestic medicine.1 There are The prose 1 Like the Fysshinge with an Angle and other treatises of Dame Juliana Berners (b. ? 1388), the translation of La Tour Landry (1440), exceptions, like the occasional patches in Old English prose which transcend the workaday methods of the scriptorium, or like the later treatment of the novella in the hands of Boccaccio, or even of the chronicle by the poetic enthusiasm of Froissart. On the threshold of the century English prose had essayed, in the ever-delightful Mandeville, the more secular charm and romantic freedom of the Isle of Lango and the land of Ermonye. But it is true that in the main the aesthetic stigma abided. On the other hand, it is also true that in the fifteenth century there are evidences of a change of attitude, or, rather, of a change of capacity, which would inevitably affect the general purpose of authorship. And though the prose-work of the century is but an unconnected series of efforts, representing no such school of art as is recognised even in the degenerate verse, there is a sort of cumulative proof that we are no longer dealing with exceptions, but with the unorganised beginnings of a definite transformation. The common element in the best writers, as in their feeblest brethren, is still a reliance on classical models, a moulding of function. the vernaculars to the patterns supplied by monkish Latinity, or, later, to the fancies of Renaissance scholarship. As yet, prose is not the accepted medium of the popular or bourgeois spirit, which prefers to indulge its energies in the traditional Change of the various books of Courtesy and Cookery, Palladius's Husbondrie (c. 1420), Lanfranc's Cirurgie (1400), and the Prymer or Lay-Folks' Prayer-Book (c. 1420)-which have less claim than the Paston Letters to be called literature. verse-forms; just as, by contrast, the strongly aristocratic literature of the eighteenth century finds its fullest expression in prose. There is, nevertheless, a certain original and new flavour in the best prose of the fifteenth century, which we may define as a recognition of its utility and possibilities as a literary medium; and in the subject-matter there is evidence of a wider range of interest. The matters are still largely history, doctrine, and morals; but the history, as we have it in Commines and the Italian Vite, has a different timbre from that of the older Chronicle and Lives, and must have appealed to contemporaries in a new way, just as it appeals to us as something which we, as moderns, can better understand and appreciate. Moreover, the increase in the number of translations, besides having an immediate and far-reaching effect on the art of expression, necessarily tended to swell the resources of each national literature and to stimulate the imagination. Though we shall avoid the heresy that there was a break in the continuity of English prose, any more than in the verse, we shall find that our critical attitude towards the one is antithetic to that towards the other. In the case of the verse it is most natural, as well as historically useful, to relate it, in its generality, to earlier work, and to explain it in the terms of a passing tradition. Fifteenth century prose, on the other hand, has an increasingly prospective interest. Pecock is not our first prose-writer, but there is a hint in him that there is something a-work which Its critical interest prospective must transform the entire art and craft of the matter. With the poets it is otherwise; even Villon and Dunbar, however much they interest us by their promise of the new and by their individuality, are accepted as modifications of a traditional poetic, or even as 'sports' from an old and deeprooted stem. Shakespeare's art and greatness is the better understood through the perspective of his predecessors; and the secret of Burns, the apostle of a New Spirit, is historical. It may appear paradoxical to say that prose, the inferior in artistic attainment, is more individual than poetry in its evolution, less reliant on pre-existing conditions, more concerned with the realisation of certain æsthetic results than with singing the burdens of old songs or re-transmuting the abiding ideals of the human soul. The history of poetry is a re-expression, a record of fashion and mood, sometimes allegorical, Elizabethan, Augustan, Pre-Raphaelite, continually changing. Prose, on the other hand, is less concerned with schools of art. For convenience sake, it may at times be called 'ornate,' at times 'severe,' 'Euphuistic' or 'Meredithian,' and the influence of one phase may be seen in another, or in a single exponent of another; but its sole and and experi- essential continuity is the continuity of mental. the craftsman's endeavour to have the best tools, and to use them in the best way, for one or more of the many special purposes for which they may be required. As long as prose remained unacknowledged in the vernacular literatures, and was considered as the dust-bin for the second-rate fancies and the mere business of life, it is of but the basest consideration as literature — uniformly dull in following certain established canons, which it barely understood, and could not use to good purpose. English prose in the fifteenth century offers an excellent illustration of the experimental character of its beginnings. Capgrave and Fabyan 1 are the English prose. only authors of some repute who are indifferent to the struggle and pen their chronicles in a lifeless way, though in the later writer, and in the later portion of his Concordance of Histories, there is a dawning recognition of the difference between the monks' and Froissart's art of history. But Pecock and Fortescue, Caxton, Berners, and Fisher have, each and all, and in their several ways, a professional interest in the making of English prose; and Malory, who stands apart as the author of the immortal and only Arthuriad, is a master as much by the distinction of his workmanship as by the imaginative intensity of his genius or by the greatness of his subject. There are passages of good omen for English prose in minor works of the quality of Lydgate's Serpent of Division, or the translations of the De Imitatione,2 Deguileville's Second 1 John Capgrave (1393-1464); Robert Fabyan (d. 1513). Their ventures in verse also are of poor account. Capgrave's tedious Life of St Katharine was honoured by the bore Osbern of Bokenham (in his Lyvys of Seyntys), and has been edited for the E.E.T.S. by Dr Horstmann, 1893. Fabyan occasionally fell into metre in his chronicles. 2 See p. 405. The earliest English translation is printed with Atkynson's (Bks. i. -iii.) and Lady Margaret's (Bk. iv.) by the E.E.T.S. (ed. Ingram), 1893. It has been ascribed, but without proof, to Walter Hilton, author of the Scale of Perfection. |