SOURCE: Pearsall, Derek A. “John Lydgate: The Critical Approach.” In John Lydgate, pp. 1-21. London: Routledge, 1970.

[In the following essay, Pearsall provides a critical overview of Lydgate's work and reputation and examines how one might answer the charges of dullness and prolixity that have been levelled at him by readers over the past five centuries.]

John Lydgate achieved an extraordinary pre-eminence in his own day. His origins were comparatively humble, and his life as a monk may seem to some an unlikely training-ground for a secular poet, yet by 1412 he was being commissioned by the Prince of Wales, later Henry V, to translate the story of Troy into English. In 1431 Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, commissioned the translation of Boccaccio's De Casibus Illustrium Virorum which was completed eight years later as the Fall of Princes. These were tasks of magnitude and high seriousness, and were regarded as such by the poet, his patron and his public, and though we may have our reservations about Henry's literary tastes, those of Humphrey are not usually held in question. Among his other noble patrons, Lydgate could count Henry VI, Queen Katherine, the earl of Salisbury, the earl of Warwick and the countess of Shrewsbury. He was, in fact if not in name, official court-poet, and a request for a poem to exalt the pedigree of Henry VI as king of France came to him as naturally as a request for a poem on his coronation. Sumptuous presentation copies of the major works were prepared, many of them splendidly illuminated, and more modest versions found their way into the homes of the gentry, where they were treasured as prize possessions and passed on as bequests and dowries.

This might seem of less significance were it not also true that his works were widely read, universally admired and assiduously imitated. The history of English poetry, and of much Scottish poetry too,¹ in the fifteenth century is as much the record of Lydgate's influence as of Chaucer's.² His contemporaries and successors—Benedict Burgh, George Ashby, Osbern Bokenham, John Metham, Henry Bradshaw, Stephen Hawes, as well as the Scots, Dunbar, Douglas and Lyndsay³—all acknowledge their debt in a series of fulsome tributes, and his name is linked with those of Gower and Chaucer in a conventional triad of praise. English poetry may have needed such a pantheon, and some of the eulogy seems automatic and conventional, but the persistence of the tradition is remarkable. By some, it is clear, Lydgate was actually considered superior to Chaucer, by Hawes, for instance, who, in his remembrance of English poets at the end of his account of Rhetoric in the Pastime of Pleasure, devotes 2 lines to Gower, 19 to Chaucer and 63 to Lydgate.⁴ We are told, what is more, that Hawes knew much of Lydgate by heart, and would recite long extracts from his work to Henry VII.⁵

The invention of printing gives us further evidence of the high regard in which Lydgate was held. Caxton printed Horse, Goose and Sheep three times, the Churl and the Bird twice, and the Temple of Glass and the Life of Our Lady once each, while Wynkyn de Worde printed the Temple of Glass three times, and the Churl and the Bird, Horse, Goose and Sheep, the Complaint of the Black Knight and the Siege of Thebes once each. These are not Lydgate's longest poems, but later Pynson undertook the Troy Book and two prints of the Fall of Princes, as well as shorter poems. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Lydgate seems to have been much in demand: the Fall was reprinted in 1554 and 1558, and the Troy Book in 1555. The Siege of Thebes, of course, because of its ‘Canterbury prologue’, continued to be printed, as Lydgate's, in the collected editions of Chaucer until 1687. Poets of the sixteenth century (George Cavendish and Alexander Barclay amongst others) were still acknowledging and demonstrating their debt to Lydgate, and a work as popular and influential as the Mirror for Magistrates was frankly conceived as a continuation of the Fall of Princes. Shakespeare's history-plays, through the Mirror and the chronicle-plays, thus bear the imprint of Lydgate's medievalism, as Troilus and Cressida does of the Troy Book.

Few discordant voices were raised among this chorus of acclaim, though Skelton, in a context of general approbation, has his doubts about Lydgate's style:

Chaucer, that famus clerke,
His termes were not darke,
But plesaunt, easy, and playne;
No worde he wrote in vayne.
Also Johnn Lydgate
Wryteth after an hyer rate;
It is dyffuse to fynde
The sentence of his mynde,
Yet wryteth he in his kynd,
No man that can amend
Those maters that he hath pende;
Yet some men fynde a faute,
And say he wryteth to haute.(6)

It is interesting, in the light of later censure, that Skelton should single out for criticism two obvious defects in Lydgate's style—the diffuseness of his syntax and the ostentation of his vocabulary—and yet still have room to admire his achievement as a whole. His attitude in the Garland of Laurel is similar. There he meets Gower, Chaucer and Lydgate arm-in-arm at the end of a procession of famous poets. Each addresses a tribute to him, Lydgate speaking in a shrewd parody of his own style, using words like regraciatory and prothonatory.⁷ There might be another dig later on, when Occupacion has a whole stanza in reply to Skelton's ‘Tell me one thing’, and the content of the whole stanza is ‘Yes?’⁸

But Lydgate's journey down the stream of reputation continued smooth until the late sixteenth century, when the difficulty of his language caused him to fall into obscurity. Chaucer suffered a similar fate: the list of ‘hard words’ in Speght's collected edition of 1602 sounds a kind of knell, and classicising commentators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries speak with patronising disdain of the roughness of his language and versification, parroting the cry of ‘Matter, but no art’ or, as one writer puts it, ‘solid sense’ but ‘mouldy words’.⁹ Similar comments had already been made about Lydgate in 1586, as we may gather from some lines appended on the fly-leaf of a late fifteenth century manuscript of the Troy Book, MS. Rawlinson poet. 144:

Owld Inglishe bookes, wher they be Ryme, or prose,
Shew littell artte, and matter suett disclose,
For Ignorance did knowledge then obscure
And wilye witts, mad darknes long Indure,
For proffe, but mark the substance of this book
In wiche this mownk such paynes hath undertook.(10)

Unlike Chaucer, Lydgate never recovered from this fall into obscurity. Gray had some kind and thoughtful things to say about him in the eighteenth century, but Ritson's outburst of dyspeptic anti-clericalism in his Bibliographia poetica of 1802 (‘this voluminous, prosaick and driveling monk’) seems to have put paid to the possibility of any cool and discriminating consideration of Lydgate's work, and in modern times strings of literary historians have vied with each other to heap ridicule upon his head. Various salvage operations have been mounted in recent years, but the discrepancy between Lydgate's general reputation in his own day, and his general reputation now, remains as startling as ever. The student of literature senses a challenge to his understanding here, the need to find some explanation of this strange state of affairs which will not be the product simply of five hundred years of accumulated ignorance.

Certain things should be admitted straightaway. One is that Lydgate is unusually prolific. Something like 145,000 lines of verse are attributed to him, twice as much as Shakespeare, three times as much as Chaucer, and there can be no sense in which this works to his advantage. No one who wrote so much can be anything but a hack, we may think, and protect ourselves from what looks like an unrewarding task by simply dismissing the man and his work as unworthy of our attention. This is a defensive reaction, and an easy one, offering plentiful opportunity for witty gibes at the poet's expense. Behind it, however, lie a whole series of unreasoned assumptions about the nature of poetry. Poetry, it is assumed, is the distillation of experience, the precious record of moments of heightened perception, moments which can, possibly, be induced in the act of poetic creation, but which are bound to be rare. There is only so much heightened perception to go round, and a handful of exquisite lyrics or a slim volume of verse are the best guarantee that a poet has had some share in it. This fastidious notion of poetry, which partially accounts for its valetudinarian state now, may be sharply contrasted with the rude health of the medieval, indeed pre-Romantic view that poetry is different only in form and style, not in kind, from other forms of discourse. Poetry must therefore be much more comprehensively defined for the Middle Ages, and for Lydgate, whom I … take … to be himself a comprehensive definition of the Middle Ages. Lydgate's work includes very little that would nowadays be accommodated in poetic form, perhaps only ‘a handful of lyrics’. For the modern equivalents of other poems, we should have to look in history-books, encyclopaedias, the Complete Family Doctor, devotional manuals, books of etiquette, souvenir programmes, collections of maxims. Above all—and this is the significant point—we should have to look in the novel, the modern ‘hold-all’. The immense bulk of Lydgate's work, therefore, is in itself significant, apart from its physically deterrent quality, only as a mark of changing fashions and attitudes to poetry.

Having said this, one is of course aware of the limitations of this kind of historical relativism. The historical approach, in this case the attempt to understand a much wider concept of poetry in the fifteenth century, is no more than an approach. It offers an explanation of literature in the light of history, but not as history; and the explanation only serves to prepare the mind for understanding. Lydgate's vast output is a historically explicable phenomenon, but it remains true that, although all of his poems engage our interest (as the ways of a man with words in poetry always command interest), some of them are more interesting than others, not because they are more ‘poetic’, but because they deal with subjects that are intrinsically more important. That Lydgate should have written a ‘Treatise for Laundresses’¹¹ is a salutary and salubrious reminder of the comprehensiveness of his range in poetry, but to give it more weight than that would be quaint antiquarianism. What one would like to establish is a picture of Lydgate as a highly professional and skilful craftsman in a wide range of related literary arts, capable of turning his hand to an epithalamion as well as an epic, an exposition of the Mass as well as a satire on women's fashions in headgear, working like a mason or a sculptor or a mural-painter, not like a poeta vates. For him, poetry is a public art, its existence conditioned and determined by outer needs and pressures, not by inner ones. In this sense, all his poetry is occasional poetry. Writing of a Romantic poet, one would be tempted to create, even if there were no extant chronological evidence, a chronological structure in which each poem was so placed as to illustrate the growth of the poet's mind, or some mythical prototype of it. The pressures would be recognised as inward, a struggle towards self-expression. Problems (such as Byron's) of which self to express, might need more sophisticated handling, but would still tend to be evaluated in terms of the accuracy and intensity of the response to inward pressures. It is not profitable to study a medieval poet like Lydgate in this way—fortunately so, for we lack much of the chronological evidence we should need. There is development in his writing, but it is a development of style, or rather the development of new styles, not of poetic personality. Lydgate's personality is a matter for curiosity only, for it is of the supremest irrelevance to the understanding of his poetry. Every mask he puts on is a well-worn medieval one, and it is well to recognise these masks for what they are, otherwise we may find ourselves interpreting poems like the Testament as personal documents. The coherence of his work as a whole is to be found, not in terms of its relation to his inner self or to any concept of the self-realising individual consciousness, but in terms of its relation to the total structure of the medieval world, that is, the world of universally received values, traditions, attitudes, as well as, and more significantly than, the world of ‘real life’.

These generalisations about Lydgate are aimed at medieval poetry in general, ill-advisedly, it may seem, in view of the many qualifications one would need to make in connection with Chaucer. Chaucer's personality is obviously interesting to us, and in a significant literary way, not out of mere curiosity. His playing off of real against assumed attitudes constitutes one of his characteristic signatures, and he talks about himself and provokes interest in himself far more than other medieval poets. Chaucer, in fact, as this study will make plain more than once, is not a very representative medieval poet—any more than Shakespeare is a representative Elizabethan dramatist. However, he remains a medieval poet, and the above reservations are over-scrupulous if they suggest any regard for the romantic-biographical interpretation of Chaucer's work, in which his poetry, dated or undated, may be stretched on a Procrustean bed of the ‘three periods’, and made to fit some fashionable theory as to the growth of realism or the emancipation from rhetoric. So tenacious is the hold of this literary biography that works like the Clerk's Tale, for which there is little evidence as to precise date, are assigned, because of their ‘non-realistic’ qualities, to an early period, thus completing and strengthening the circle of hypotheses.

There is one further point to make about Lydgate's prolific output. I have suggested that this needs understanding as a historical phenomenon, as a mark of the wider scope of poetry in his time, and qualified this suggestion by drawing attention to the fact that some poems will be intrinsically more interesting, by virtue of their subject-matter, than others. It is also true, obviously, that sometimes he will write less well than at others, when his attention and interest is not fully engaged. Every craftsman has his off-days, when his mind is not on his job—perhaps because he did not fancy the job in the first place. The historical approach is not intended to blanket discrimination between the better and the worse, though it should try to ensure that the discrimination is properly based. The bad poems are bad, not because of their subject, but because of what Lydgate does, or fails to do with them. The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man stretches to 26,000 lines, but fails because at no time does Lydgate attempt to shape, control or master his material; he merely goes through the motions of versifying in the most mechanical manner possible. Clearing the ground of rubbish like this will help us to see and examine what is truly representative and intrinsically worthwhile. It is on these poems that judgment must be based. The first task is to understand what Lydgate is trying to do, and for this every discipline, every kind of historical information, is relevant. Understanding can then inform judgment on the good and the less good.

Two further charges against Lydgate, apart from that of having written so much, can be considered in their wider implications in order to establish this historical reorientation. They are the two most deadly weapons in the critical armoury—that he is prolix, and that he is dull. Prolixity is certainly a characteristic feature of Lydgate's style. No poet can mark time with such profuse demonstrations of energy, can so readily make twenty words do the work of one. Sometimes it is difficult to slow down the processes of the mind to the breathless snail's pace of his verse. Yet it would be fair to recognise that prolixity (sometimes due to diffuseness of syntax) is deliberately cultivated by Lydgate. Translating the Prologue to the Fall of Princes, he says, following Laurent de Premierfait:

For a story which is nat pleynli told,
But constreynyd undir woordes fewe
For lak of trouthe, wher thei be newe or old,
Men bi report kan nat the mater shewe;
These ookis grete be nat doun ihewe
First at a stroke, but bi long processe,
Nor longe stories a woord may not expresse.(12)

Of course, like most of Lydgate's comments on style and the art of poetry, this is a formula, and one could set beside it numerous equally stereotyped formulae in which he asserts that his main design is to ‘eschewe prolixite’.¹³ Both attitudes may be traced back to the rhetoricians of the twelfth century, who set side by side their recommendations for ‘amplification’ and ‘abbreviation’.¹⁴ But in them, as in Lydgate, abbreviation is of little more than formal interest, and is totally swamped in amplification, the governing principle in medieval stylistics. In academic theory, a poem essentially provides a theme for amplification, and the prize goes to the man who can go on saying the same thing longest without repeating himself—varius sit et tamen idem.¹⁵ Academic theory is one thing, of course, and poetic practice is another. Obviously poems leap the confines of the rhetorical exercise, but the school-training in amplification which Lydgate and every other educated medieval poet would have received must have exerted a powerful and lasting influence on their style. It would not be unprofitable, for instance, to make a study of Chaucer's Troilus as an amplificatio of Boccaccio's Filostrato, paying particular attention to the use of devices such as exclamation, apostrophe and description, all listed by Geoffrey among the forms of amplification. In these and other ways Chaucer gives the story its rich and full-bodied quality, its wholeness or integritas.¹⁶ Amplification is still the basis of sixteenth century poetic, under the name of copie or copiousness,¹⁷ and Shakespeare, though he mocks copie in Touchstone,¹⁸ still uses its machinery to construct long speeches.

In Lydgate, we may assume, rhetorical precept coincided happily with a natural tendency to prolixity, and no doubt reinforced it. It is not difficult to recognise his natural verbosity in this stanza:

The rounde dropis of the smothe reyn,
Which that discende and falle from aloffte
On stonys harde, at eye as it is seyn,
Perceth ther hardnesse with ther fallyng offte,
Al-be in touchyng, water is but soffte;
The percyng causid be force nor puissaunce
But of fallyng be long contynuaunce.

(Fall, II,106-12)

But we must recognise, too, that Lydgate is consciously writing according to accepted canons of taste, and that his deliberate unfolding of ‘Constant dripping wears away a stone’ is as skilful in its own way as the aphorism itself in another way. And though Lydgate is by nature long-winded, he knows when this kind of elaborate tautology is not appropriate, and can write in a comparatively abbreviated, aphoristic style, as in the series of short moralistic poems with gnomic refrains,¹⁹ or in the fable of the Churl and the Bird. Lydgate's expansiveness clearly forms part of a deliberate poetic style.

It looks perverse to us, though, and again, if we are not to assume some gigantic aberration on the part of the Middle Ages, it is necessary to reshape our minds to the major change of taste which has taken place in attitudes to poetry. Poetry is now admired for its economy of expression, its compression, compactness and intensity. Every line must be packed with significant imagery, every rift loaded with ore. Eliot's dedication of (The Waste Land to Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro, records his debt to the better craftsman, whose skill enabled him to unburden the poem of the conventional paraphernalia of linguistic communication, and to boil it down to its essence. Syntax itself is something of a handicap, in this view of poetry. Small wonder, then, that medieval poetry, Chaucer included, is found to be diffuse,²⁰ and that the search for fine lines is unrewarding. Any that one prises out of Chaucer—‘Singest with vois memorial in the shade’²¹—are fortuitous and uncharacteristic, and Eleanor Hammond's attempt at a florilegium of fine lines in Lydgate²² is a strange lapse of understanding and taste in a great scholar. Medieval poetry characteristically produces its effects over longer stretches, the stanza or the verse-paragraph, and the comparatively free metrical systems of alliterative verse, even Chaucer's verse, are designed to operate over longer passages, not in single lines. Associated with this tendency, are a relaxed kind of syntax and a wide use of free-running paratactic constructions which make translation of medieval verse into modern logical units so difficult.

All these features, of course, have to do with something else, as well as being the general consequences of a particular poetic theory. They are the features of verse composed for oral delivery. Amplification, tautology, diffuseness of sense and looseness of syntax, are not only acceptable but desirable to the listening audience, which has no opportunity to linger over close-packed lines, and which will welcome as well as recognise the familiar phrase.²³ Every medieval poet has a store of tags and formulae which he will use to establish this pattern of communication. Some have nothing else, perhaps, while others, like Chaucer, have such leisured control over the medium that they can afford to uncoil the formulae into new and ambiguous contexts. But for the most part the stereotyped nature of medieval poetic expression is better referred to conditions of delivery than to lack of ‘originality’, in its prevailing form a largely modern concept. It is not necessary to suggest that Lydgate's poems were habitually read aloud to a listening audience, though there is evidence in plenty in the fifteenth century for the persistence of this method of publication, alongside even more evidence for the growth of the habit of private reading.²⁴ The argument need only assume that the stylistic traditions of orally delivered verse were more tenacious than the conditions which produced them.

The revolution in reading habits produced by the invention of printing is one clue to the shift in attitude we have been discussing, and to the growth of a non-rhetorical poetic which finds Lydgate's prolixity excessively burdensome. I talked a moment ago of the difficulty of accommodating the mind to the leisurely processes of Lydgate's verse, but the mind referred to was of course an exceptional mind, the modern mind, trained to incredibly specialised kinds of short-cutting and short-circuiting of perception by generations of print-culture.²⁵ It may seem ridiculous to suggest that there might be value in training the mind to move more slowly, but a flexible attitude to the possibility is probably better than the assumption that things have never been better. Intensity is one standard of judgment for poetry, but not the only one.

Comparisons of medieval with modern poetic theory can help us with some of our problems of recovery, by illustrating to us the limited and relative application of such theories, and the inadequacy of assuming that any one of them is right, absolutely. Sometimes, though, the comparisons reveal such totally opposed points of view that one seems to be comparing not different manifestations of the same thing but different things. As has been said, poetry occupied the central literary position in the Middle Ages; it could be regarded as the highest form of discourse, but it existed also as the workaday form, the tool to which the professional craftsman naturally stretched his hand for a story, a treatise, a political pamphlet. Literary prose remained the specialised medium, though one sees its range being extended in the later fifteenth century, in the work of Malory, and Caxton's ambitious translations. The situation was already changing, and it is now changed completely. Poetry is now highly specialised, the property of an élite; the central literary position is occupied by the novel. The growth of the novel to accommodate virtually every kind of literary experience provides the major literary development of the last two centuries. Many of these kinds of experience have been taken over from poetry—historical and didactic interests, for instance—and it might be said therefore that we should be prepared to transfer to earlier poetry some of the appetites now satisfied by the novel, and in particular appetite itself. Novels are so much the staple of our literary diet that we hardly notice we are reading them, and we certainly do not find it necessary as we begin to read always to summon our faculties for a major literary experience. Some novels are more important than others, of course, but so are some medieval poems. The point is that the natural literary element in which we move is the novel, whereas in the fifteenth century it was verse. Lydgate's diffuseness and prolixity should therefore be referred, for a standard of comparison, to the diffuseness and prolixity of eighteenth and nineteenth century prose fiction, of Richardson, Scott, Dickens and Thackeray. Voluminousness is their natural condition, and to ask for them to be briefer would be to ask for them not to be. There is, admittedly, an exacting modern taste which makes precisely this demand, and which is quite prepared to leave Clarissa unread for the sake of it, but the limiting nature of this taste is so apparent that one would be quite content to allow Lydgate to profit by the analogy, and leave it at that.

The charge of dullness is more difficult to deal with, because it is mainly the product of a response, or of a failure of response, not of objective analysis. It can also cover many things, some of which can be historically argued, others of which are indefensible. The Churl and the Bird has been referred to as an example of Lydgate's more abbreviated style, but the opening seems designed to deter the casual reader:

Problemys, liknessis and figures
Which previd been fructuous of sentence,
And han auctoritees groundid on scriptures
Bi resemblaunces of notable apparence,
With moralites concludyng in prudence. …

The quotation looks unfinished, but to continue would not help, for the sentence never reaches its verb. It is a conscientious opening, but it reveals the unselectivity of Lydgate's mind, the reluctance to leave anything out, which often causes his sentences to run into the sands. The lack of selection, combined with the relentless insistence and the essentially uncurious nature of Lydgate's mind, are the ingredients of dullness here. But beginnings are Lydgate's special problem; there are so many possible things to say, the furniture of his mind is so cluttered before the removal has begun, that neither he nor the reader can force any interest, or indeed any sense out of the material. What we see is the machinery working very badly, on the verge of breakdown, and the sight is not uncommon in Lydgate.

However, even working at the height of his powers, Lydgate is liable to incur this charge of dullness, not because he is working badly but because he is doing things that we may regard as intrinsically boring. He is, above all, incurably didactic. The stories of Troy and Thebes are for him not vehicles for the display of passion and human tragedy but storehouses of moral exempla. His whole theory of poetry is based on the idea that poets should teach by offering examples of behaviour:

Their cheeff labour is vicis to repreve
With a maner covert symylitude.

(Fall, III,3830-1)

In this, as in everything else, Lydgate was in perfect accord with the tastes of his age. If we are to judge by the marginal comments and signs added in manuscripts, what his readers valued above all in his long poems were the passages of moralising, passages which to modern taste are gratuitous and irrelevant.²⁶ We may think that the Fall of Princes carries already a heavy enough burden of moralisation, but to the fifteenth century this was the work's very reason for existence. Many MSS. contain extracts from the Fall in which the moralising envoys are written out as separate poems, as if it were the historical and human and dramatic interest that fifteenth century readers found to be otiose.²⁷ The first parts of the Fall to be printed were a series of such extracts, put out by Wynkyn de Worde under the title of ‘Proverbs of Lydgate’.²⁸ The appetite for moral instruction seems to have been insatiable. Quotation from the classics, for instance, is most often of auctoritees, scraps of moral or practical wisdom culled from florilegia, not of ‘fine lines’.²⁹ Lydgate's own praise of Chaucer clearly singles out his sententiousness as the basis of his memorableness as a poet. In the Prologue to the Thebes he speaks with admiration of his ‘many proverbe divers and unkouth’ (51), and when he has occasion to speak of specific Canterbury Tales, in the Prologue to the Fall of Princes, it is, unbelievably, to the Clerk's Tale, the Monk's Tale and the Melibeus that he refers (337-50). A twentieth-century critic like Kittredge would regard the Melibeus as a joke, and the Monk's Tale as little better, but, think what we like of the Melibeus, there is no doubt that Kittredge is wrong about it, wrong in thinking that a work of such obvious dullness needs to be explained away as part of a dramatic joke on the part of Chaucer the pilgrim. Chaucer, on the contrary, is writing, in the Melibeus and in the tales of the Clerk and the Monk, to a perfectly serious and straightforward taste. For once, he is being typical of the Middle Ages, and this is where Lydgate responds to him. It was where the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries responded to him, too. The second (1602) edition of Thomas Speght's collected Chaucer has a title page which draws attention to its more sophisticated apparatus, one feature of which (‘Sentences and Proverbs noted’) is the marginal indication of memorable lines by means of a hand with a pointing finger. A modern reader doing this in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales would tend to underline perhaps some of Chaucer's more pithy ironies, like the Prioress's ‘gretteste ooth’, or some particularly significant bit of descriptive detail, like the Pardoner's voice ‘as smal as hath a goot’. But in 1602 the taste was still for the wholesomely didactic, and these are the sort of lines signalled in the Prologue:

And shame it is, if a prest take keep,
A shiten shepherde and a clene sheep.
Wel oghte a preest ensample for to yive,
By his clennesse, how that his sheep sholde lyve.(30)

Sometimes it is less the content of the ‘sentence’ that is picked out for attention than the very formality of its introduction—‘For this ye knowen al so wel as I’ or ‘Eek Plato seith, whoso that kan hym rede’. The taste for doctrine is thus strengthened by the elevation of the sententia in medieval rhetoric as a recognised ornament of style.

The modern reader, however, whilst admitting the existence of this taste for ‘sentence’, may still consider it an unsophisticated taste. He may recall his early contacts with literature, and the commonplace-books that he filled, like Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, with laboriously copied extracts, some of them purple passages and fine lines, but most of them aphoristic or formally identifiable statements of general moral truths. Such experiences perhaps reflect an unsophisticated attitude to literature in that they suggest that that is all there is to it, but they reflect also a very basic and enduring assumption, namely, that literature exists to endorse the values of the society in which it is produced, and provides not merely pleasure and profit but also reassurance, namely that the values according to which we try to live are the best available. Romantic and post-Romantic literature of revolt and disturbance is opposed to these attitudes, but does not deny that they are powerful. Literature, in its traditional social role, is bound to embody statements of general moral truth, and nowhere would Mary Bennet have reaped a richer harvest than in Shakespeare. In Shakespeare, such statements have always a dramatic context and therefore an extra layer of significance, but they have in the first place their own significance as part of his total meaning. Polonius's advice to Laertes is rich in ‘character’ but it is not nonsense.

It would be possible to speculate further on other changes of taste that have made us see Lydgate as ‘dull’, but perhaps enough has been said to make it at least arguable that dullness is a state of mind more than anything. Our ambition should be to create in ourselves a state of mind in which we find it possible to see the literature as it appealed to its author and its audience, to regard the Cursor Mundi, for instance, as a lively, even racy rewriting of Biblical history. After all, this has been the historical process in the rediscovery of Chaucer. It is less than fifty years ago that a critic was writing of the Troilus: ‘There is no other of the world's long poems not dependent on temporary reference that is so completely wearisome.’³¹ A statement like this looks absurd now, and should be a warning of the inadequacy of critical judgment uninformed by historical understanding, for it is only the emancipation of the poem from modern expectations that has revealed it as it really is.

It will be apparent by now that it is no part of [my] argument … to suggest that Lydgate is an exciting writer. There are no thrills of recognition, no stabs of pathos or passionate self-identification, but rather good sense in its own sober garb, and the modest pleasures of conventional expectations conventionally fulfilled. It has not been denied that Lydgate is prolific, prolix and dull, but it has been argued that such judgments need such a degree of historical qualification that they are ultimately useless as judgments, and that paying too much attention to them will obscure Lydgate's real virtues from us. Lydgate is worthy of our attention because he is so useful to us, because he is so perfectly representative of the Middle Ages. In him we can see, at great length, and in slow motion, the medieval mind at its characteristic work. To understand in precise detail the mechanics of a bird's flight, biologists used film slowed down to record, frame by frame, the exact process at each stage. Lydgate provides us with something like the same sort of opportunity to understand the precise configurations and convolutions of a type of mind and of an intellectual and artistic tradition. To see the bird in flight, we can look again at Chaucer. Reading Lydgate is in fact the best possible introduction to Chaucer, for here is the soil from which Chaucer grew, and the soil to which he returned. Lydgate profited in a multitude of ways from Chaucer's example, but nevertheless in all his writing he reasserts medieval traditions and habits of mind against Chaucer's free-ranging innovations. He throws into sharp relief not only Chaucer's greatness but also his differentness.

It is for these reasons that one would question the effectiveness of the approach made in the two existing book-length studies of Lydgate, those of Schirmer and Renoir.³² The two studies differ in scope and method. Schirmer aims to give a definitive, full-length picture of Lydgate against a detailed background of his times, to deal with every aspect of his career and to mention and describe every poem. Renoir's method is more general and discursive, and he groups his material around a series of themes. But both make the same sort of case for Lydgate, that he is interesting because he reveals new and important directions in English literary tradition, towards a more distinct political consciousness, for instance, and above all, towards humanism. It would not be good policy to deny any claims that can be made on Lydgate's behalf, but it must be said that there is poor basis for these claims. Lydgate has a good many things to say about politics, about kingship, government, war and peace, but they are the platitudes of his age, of the Middle Ages, in fact, no more than was being said by a dozen anonymous pamphleteers of the time,³³ and a good deal less apt and perceptive than the political comments being made by genuinely original minor writers like George Ashby or the author of the Libel of English Policy.³⁴ As for his ‘humanism’, it is true that he does sometimes mention classical deities without disapproval, and that he does show some knowledge of classical writers. But this can hardly be called ‘humanism’, except in a sense of the term which destroys its reference and its usefulness, for there is nothing that is not typically medieval. His knowledge of classical writers is in fact a good deal narrower than it looks. He has read Ovid, and has a smattering of Virgil and Cicero, but the rest are mere names, known to him at second-hand from his immediate source-text, from anthologies or from Latin grammars.³⁵ It is true also that his attitude to antiquity is more generous in the Fall of Princes than in the Troy Book, but this is not a sign of ‘development’ in Lydgate, but a reflection of the difference between Boccaccio and Guido della Colonna. And even here it is obvious that Lydgate is happier with Guido, whose tastes and attitudes he reproduces with emphatic approval, than with Boccaccio, whose outspokenness on history and politics he tends to tone down. Looking for signs of humanism in Lydgate is an unrewarding task, because the whole direction of his mind is medieval. One of the remarkable things about fifteenth-century literary tradition, in fact, is its resistance to the new humanism, which in the end had to make its way into England through writers in Latin, not in English.

The attempt to give Lydgate a spurious respectability by associating him with a forward-looking movement, with something that we regard as new and desirable in literature, is as unhistorical and misinformed as the other attitudes we have been discussing. It is of a piece with Kittredge's well-intentioned attempt to rehabilitate the Troilus by calling it ‘the first novel, in the modern sense, that ever was written … an elaborate psychological novel’.³⁶ Psychological novels may have been all the rage when Kittredge wrote, and perhaps some of their fashionable prestige would rub off on this old poem, but even if it was good propaganda, it was bad criticism. There are no terms on which Lydgate can, in the first place, be understood, but his own terms.

Sometimes the task of undermining the assumptions on which judgment of Lydgate has been based seems a heavy one. Much of our knowledge, for instance, of fifteenth-century life and literature, its tastes and interests, its books, its culture and sub-culture, is derived from the writings of H. S. Bennett. Yet in his account of Lydgate in the standard Oxford History of English Literature,³⁷ his penetrating knowledge of the age is not permitted to inform critical judgment. Indeed, any association between the two seems to be regarded as improper, and there is an implicit but systematic distinction between the interests of the ‘student of literary history’ and those of the ‘lover of poetry’.³⁸ But it is difficult to see how the two can be divorced, how the lover of poetry can know what he is supposed to love until he understands what it is, unless he relies upon the mindless spine-chilling and skin-thrilling that Housman speaks of. Poetry cannot afford to have mind and understanding laid to sleep.

Again, Bennett speaks disapprovingly of fifteenth-century non-popular poetry as lacking ‘a lively contact with life’ (p. 124). Lydgate, being a monk, was worse off than anyone: ‘Life passed him by while he spent endless hours in the scriptorium turning out verses on very many subjects’ (p. 138). This represents, however, a limited view of life in the fifteenth-century monastery, and an even more limited view of poetry. In the first place, it would be a great mistake, as we shall see, to think of monasteries like Bury as being cut off from ‘real life’, even without going into the question of what is ‘real’. In the second place, poetry does not necessarily depend for its existence or its value upon the material of experience, the accumulation of ‘real’ data, except in the most obvious and uncritical sense. The demand for the concrete and the personal is the mark of a strictly local preference, to be associated with the growth of naturalism, and one strange result of it is the present status of Hoccleve. Literary history assigns to him a place more or less as an equal of Lydgate, yet on all counts he is a much less important writer. His range is narrower, his style much less sophisticated, and though he claims some of the same patrons as Lydgate—Prince Henry, for instance, and Humphrey of Gloucester³⁹—his relationship with them is clearly that of a man very much on the fringes of the world of literary patronage. One of his poems, the Regement of Princes, was frequently copied, or copied in part, in the fifteenth century, but the rest exist in only a few MSS., most of them Hoccleve's own autograph.⁴⁰ He exerted no influence on the fifteenth century, and there are very few references to him. However, he has something which endears him to modern taste, a vividly disreputable personality which he puts over with racy colloquial vigour. He enjoys nothing so much as talking about himself, about his life as a clerk in the office of the Privy Seal, and the way he would take the afternoons off to go boating on the river; elsewhere, in a more serious vein, he talks of the nervous breakdown which destroyed his health and his prospects, of his marriage, of the tedious drudgery of his job,⁴¹ all with a wry self-mockery (perhaps caught from Chaucer). But he never disguises the directness and honesty of his record of his own life and personality. It is a kind of poetry to which we respond with immediate warmth, and against which the totally different nature of Lydgate's poetry is thrown in sharp and, to us, unflattering relief. Lydgate has no personality to put over, and any mention he makes of his life is as likely to be part of a rhetorical convention as anything. Literature is closer to him than life, and the material of his poetry is experience strained through literary convention, or sometimes literary convention alone. Unlike the Wife of Bath, he prefers ‘auctoritee’ to ‘experience’, and the Middle Ages on the whole shared his preference. So the taste for the concrete and the personal is faced with poetry which is systematically abstract and impersonal; it is hard to see how the one can be judged in terms of the other.

There are other assumptions in Bennett's treatment of Lydgate—and I quote this account only because it is representative and authoritative—which are equally open to question. It is taken for granted that pace and economy are the basic requirements of narrative, yet these, as we have seen, are criteria which are irrelevant to Lydgate's narrative technique. And perhaps we may conclude with a statement Bennett makes about Lydgate's religious verse: ‘His religious lyrics have more to be said for them—especially the Testament of Dan John Lydgate—for in these his real religious fervour gives some excitement to his verse’ (p. 141). It has already been suggested that an autobiographical interpretation of the Testament as self-expression is likely to be wide of the mark, but one could add to this, accepting that some of Lydgate's religious poems are more fervent than others, that it is a matter of genre, not of poetic quality. Some of his religious writing is expository, some of it historical, some propagandist, some celebratory, and some of it, certainly, lyrical. To assess it all on the basis of the emotional expressiveness appropriate to the last-named misses this point. One could as well assess Lydgate's love-poetry in terms of its effectiveness in expressing erotic sentiment. To do so would clearly be improper as well as inappropriate. It would be salutary to remind ourselves, without necessarily committing ourselves to the same standards of judgment, of what some fifteenth century readers saw in a poem like the Temple of Glass. It was, it seems, a poem to be used, used, for instance, as a quarry by lesser rhymesters, such as the ‘Lucas’ who signs his name in MS. Sloane 1212 of Hoccleve's Regement, and adds some verses on the outer leaves:

These vellum leaves contain two passages from The Temple of Glas, ll.98-132, and ll. 736-754 with 762-3, also two poems, one of which is a cento of lines from the Temple ingeniously fitted together, the other at first sight original, but actually a mosaic of small borrowings.⁴²

Even more practical was the use it was put to by another fifteenth century reader:

Sir John Paston demanded his copy in a hurry in 1461-2, when he was wooing Anne Haute; he probably wanted it, just as Slender wanted his ‘Book of Songs and Sonnets’, to woo another Mistress Anne.⁴³

This is not quite the kind of ‘usefulness’ I was speaking of earlier, but at least it may serve to give our attitudes a jolt in the right direction.

Without too many concessions, therefore, to historical relativism, it is possible to see that Lydgate's reputation among his contemporaries and immediate successors was not a sign of some gross perversion of taste. What he was praised for, and what he has suffered for more recently, was his total acquiescence in the conventions and demands of his age. Like any competent professional, he did what was asked of him, and, working within an established literary tradition, he had neither the desire, nor the incentive, nor the creative power to make things new.⁴⁴ His claim on us, his usefulness to us, is precisely this, that he is perfectly typical of medieval literary tradition, and provides us with a series of paradigms for our reading of medieval poetry. Prince Hal no doubt enjoyed Falstaff's company more, as we enjoy Chaucer's, but he saw the value of cultivating Poins:

Thou art a blessed fellow to think as every man thinks: never a man's thought in the world keeps the roadway better than thine.⁴⁵

Notes

1. See, e.g. P. H. Nichols, ‘William Dunbar as a Scottish Lydgatian’, PMLA, XLVI (1931), 214-24.

2. See my essay on ‘The English Chaucerians’ in Chaucer and Chaucerians, ed. D. S. Brewer (London 1966), pp. 210-39.

3. For accounts of Lydgate's reputation, and lists of allusions, see The Temple of Glas, ed. J. Schick (EETS, ES60,1891), pp. cxlii-cxliv; English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey, ed. Eleanor P. Hammond (Duke Univ. Press, Durham, N. Carolina, 1927), pp. 96-8; W. F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: a Study in the Culture of the XVth century (originally published in German, 1952; English translation by Ann E. Keep, 1961), pp. 255-9.

4. Pastime of Pleasure (ed. W. E. Mead, EETS,OS 173,1928), 1317-1407.

5. Hammond, op. cit., p. 96.

6. Philip Sparrow, 800-12 (in Dyce's edition, 1843, i, 75).

7. Garland of Laurell, 428-34 (ed. in Hammond, op. cit.).

8. Garland, 715-21.

9. Samuel Cobb, in his Poetae Britannici, 1700: quoted in Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, 500 Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion (3 vols., Cambridge 1925), I,271.

10. Lydgate's Troy Book, ed. H. Bergen, Part IV (EETS,ES 126,1935), Bibliographical Introduction, p. 52.

11. Minor Poems, ed. H. N. MacCracken, Part II (EETS,OS 192,1934), p. 723.

12. Fall of Princes, I,92-8. Lydgate is quoted, with some modification of spelling (e.g. u/v, i/j), from the standard texts cited in the Bibliography, except where otherwise stated.

13. E.g. Fall, II,2565.

14. For instance, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, in his Poetria Nova; Evrard the German, Laborintus; John of Garland, Poetria. See E. Faral, Les Arts Poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1923), pp. 218, 348, 380.

15. Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, 225: in Faral, op. cit., p. 204.

16. See G. T. Shepherd, ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ (in Chaucer and Chaucerians, ed. D. S. Brewer, pp. 65-87), pp. 77-81.

17. One of the most widely used text-books in the sixteenth century was Erasmus's De duplici copia verborum ac rerum, of which there were sixty editions between 1512 and 1536: see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (2 vols., Urbana, Ill., 1944), I,99, II,176.

18. As You Like It, V.i.52.

19. Minor Poems, ed. MacCracken, Part II, pp. 744-847.

20. See A. C. Spearing, Criticism and Medieval Poetry (London, 1964), pp. 16-18.

21. Anelida, 18, quoted by C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936), p. 201. Matthew Arnold's choice (in ‘The Study of Poetry’, Essays in Criticism, second series) is ‘O martyr souded in virginitee’, from the Prioress's Tale, CT, VII, 579.

22. English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey, pp. 81-2.

23. Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, ed. K. Sisam (Oxford, 1921), p. xxxix. The standard works on this subject are H. J. Chaytor, From Script to Print (Cambridge, 1945); Ruth Crosby, ‘Oral Delivery in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, XI (1936), 88-110, and ‘Chaucer and the Custom of Oral Delivery’, Speculum, XIII (1938), 413-32.

24. See H. S. Bennett, ‘The Author and his Public in the 14th and 15th Centuries’, Essays and Studies, XXIII (1937), 7-24.

25. There is much on this subject, and on a great many other subjects, in M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto, 1962).

26. See the Helmingham MS. and MS.Digby 230 of the Troy, as described by Bergen in Part IV of his edition, pp. 24, 29.

27. Fall, ed. Bergen, Part IV, Bibliographical Introduction, p. 105.

28. Bergen, op. cit., p. 123; Temple of Glas, ed. Schick, p. clii.

29. Hammond, Chaucer to Surrey, p. 416.

30. CT Prologue 503-6. The others are 443, 500, 563, 652, 731, 741 and 830. All quotations from Chaucer are from F. N. Robinson's second edition (Cambridge, Mass., 1957).

31. A. A. Jack, A Commentary on the Poetry of Chaucer and Spenser (Glasgow, 1920), p. 47.

32. W. F. Schirmer, John Lydgate (1952, trans. 1961); A. Renoir, The Poetry of John Lydgate (London, 1967).

33. See C. L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature in the 15th Century (Oxford 1913), chap. IX; T. Wright, Political Poems and Songs, vol. II (Rolls series, 1861).

34. Kingsford, op. cit., pp. 232-6; A. B. Ferguson, The Indian Summer of English Chivalry (Durham, N. Carolina 1960), chap. V.

35. Hammond, Chaucer to Surrey, pp. 92-3.

36. G. L. Kittredge, Chaucer and his Poetry (Harvard U.P. 1915), pp. 109, 112.

37. Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century (Oxford 1947), pp. 137-46.

38. It is made explicit on p. 155, referring to Hawes.

39. The Regement of Princes (ed. Furnivall, EETS, ES 72, 1897) is dedicated and addressed to Prince Henry (see especially 2017-2163, 5440-63), and the Tale of Jereslaus's Wife, part of the Complaint ‘Series’ (in Minor Poems, ed. Furnivall, EETS, ES 71, 1892), was written for Gloucester (see 554-623).

40. H. C. Schulz, ‘Thomas Hoccleve, Scribe’, Speculum, XII(1937),71-81; Jerome Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve (Urbana, Ill. 1968), p. 14.

41. See the Male Regle; the Complaint and Dialogue, the first two parts of the ‘Series’; and the Prologue to the Regement, the Dialogue with a Beggar.

42. Ethel Seaton, Sir Richard Roos: Lancastrian Poet (London 1961), p. 376. This book aims to establish Roos as the major poet of fifteenth-century England by assigning to him much of its anonymous poetry, as well as poems by Chaucer, Lydgate, Wyatt, and others. The ascriptions are based on the ‘discovery’ of double acrostic anagrams of unprecedented complexity, and are wholly preposterous. However, the book is full of incidental good things, and shows a wide knowledge of fifteenth-century literature and MSS. See also, for this MS., H. N. MacCracken, ‘Additional Light on the Temple of Glas’, PMLA, XXIII (1908), 128-40. But cf. J. Norton-Smith, Lydgate: Poems (Oxford 1966), p. 143.

43. Seaton, loc. cit.; see The Paston Letters, ed. J. Gairdner, no. 690 (ed. 1910, III, 37).

44. His place in English poetry is very much like that of Gray, and it is interesting that Gray should have been one of the few to try to understand him.

45. Henry IV Part 2, II.ii.63.