Author: Will Durant
Category: Nonfiction
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Patterns in window tracery, wall paneling, and choir screens gave their names to successive architectural styles, overlapping in time and often mingled in one edifice. Geometrical Decorated Gothic (c. 1250–c. 1315) used Euclidean forms, as in Exeter Cathedral. Curvilinear Decorated Gothic (c. 1315–c. 1380) abandoned definite figures for freely flowing lines that anticipated with restraint the Flamboyant style of prance, as in the south rose window at Lincoln. Perpendicular Gothic (c. 1330–c. 1530) stressed horizontal and vertical lines within the usual Gothic ogive, as in Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey. The intense colors of thirteenth-century stained glass were now softened with lighter tints, or with silver stain or pale grisaille; and in these windows the pageant of dying chivalry competed with the legends of Christianity to let Gothic art reach its final splendor and decline.
Seldom has England known such an ecstasy of construction. Three centuries (1376–1517) labored to build the present nave of Westminster Abbey; in the long gamut of those years we may weakly sense the toil of mind and arm that went to make an unrivaled mausoleum for England’s best-behaved geniuses. Only less impressive was the reconstruction of Windsor: there Edward III rebuilt on a massive scale the great Round Tower (1344), and Edward IV began (1473) St. George’s Chapel, with its lovely choir stalls, fan vault, and stained glass. Alan de Walsingham designed in Curvilinear Gothic an exquisite Lady Chapel and “lantern” tower for Ely. Gloucester Cathedral received a central tower, a choir vault, a gorgeous east window, and spacious cloisters whose fan vaults are among the wonders of England. Winchester extended its immense nave, and dressed its new front in Perpendicular. Coventry built in that manner the cathedral that saved only its stately spire in the second World War. Peterborough raised its dizzy fan vault; York Minster completed its nave, west towers, and choir screen. Towers were the crowning glory of the age, ennobling Merton and Magdalen colleges at Oxford, Fountains Abbey, Canterbury, Glastonbury, Derby, Taunton, and a hundred other shrines. William of Wykeham used Perpendicular in designing New College, Oxford; William of Waynflete, another nonagenarian, followed suit in the Great Quadrangle at Eton; and Kings College, Cambridge, capped the age with a chapel whose windows, vault, and choir stalls might reconcile Caliban to education, and Timon of Athens to prayer.
There was a secular and matter-of-fact spirit in Perpendicular Gothic that perfectly suited the civic architecture of colleges, castles, fortresses, guild and city halls. It was in this style that the earls of Warwick, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, raised their famous castle near Leamington. The Guildhall of London, fane of the capital’s mercantile pride, was built in 1411-35, burned down in 1666, was rebuilt by Christopher Wren, and received in 1866 the new interior that succumbed to bombs in the second World War. Even the town shops took on, in their mullioned windows, a Perpendicular pattern that conspires with carved lintels, cornices, and projecting balconies to bewitch us with the charm of a departing glory.
English sculpture maintained in this age its reputation for mediocrity. The statuary made for church façades, as at Lincoln and Exeter, fell far short of the architecture it was intended to adorn. The great altar screens in Westminster Cathedral and St. Alban’s Abbey served as matrices for statues, but these are of too modest merit to add to the burden of our tale. The best sculpture was on funerary monuments. Fine figures were carved, usually in alabaster, of Edward in Gloucester Cathedral, of Dame Eleanor Percy in Beverly Minster, of Henry IV and Queen Joan at Canterbury, of Richard Beauchamp at Warwick. English sculptors were at their best in representing the flowers and foliage of their verdant land. Good carving was done in wood: the choir stalls of Winchester, Ely, Gloucester, Lincoln, Norwich stop the breath with their laborious beauty.
Painting was still a minor art in England, lagging far behind contemporary work in Flanders and France. Illumination remained a favorite devotion; Edward III paid £66 ($6,600?) for an illuminated volume of romances,44 and Robert of Ormsby presented to Norwich Cathedral an illuminated psalter which the Bodleian Library ranks as “the finest English manuscript” in its collections. After 1450 the art of the miniature declined with the rise of mural and panel painting, and in the sixteenth century it faded out before the novel miracle of print.
VI. CAXTON AND MALORY
At some unknown date in the fifteenth century a now nameless author produced the most famous of English morality plays. Everyman is an allegory whose characters are unprepossessing abstractions: Knowledge, Beauty, Five-Wits, Discretion, Strength, Goods, Good Deeds, Fellowship, Kindred, Confession, Death, Everyman, and God. In the prologue God complains that His commandments are ignored by nine men out of ten six days out of seven, and sends Death to remind the terrestrials that they must soon come to Him and give an account of their doings. In the space of a line Death descends from heaven to earth, finds Everyman meditating earnestly on women and gold, and bids him come into eternity. Everyman pleads unprepared-ness, asks for an extension of time, offers a thousand-pound bribe; but Death grants him only one mitigation—to be accompanied into eternity by some chosen friend. Everyman begs Fellowship to join him in the great adventure, but Fellowship excuses himself bravely:
If thou wilt eat, and drink, and make good cheer,
Or haunt together women’s lusty company,
I would not forsake you....
Everyman: Then bear me company in my far journey.
Fellowship: Now, in good faith, I will not that way.
But if thou wilt murder, or any man kill,
In that I will help thee with a good will.45
Everyman appeals to Kindred, his cousin, who rejects the invitation because “I have the cramp in my toe.” Everyman calls upon Goods to aid him; but Goods has been so firmly locked away that he cannot be freed to render any help. At last Everyman entreats Good Deeds; she is pleased that he has not quite forgotten her; she introduces him to Knowledge, who leads him to Confession, who shrives him clean. Then Good Deeds descends with Everyman into his grave, and angelic songs welcome the purified sinner into paradise.
The author almost, but not quite, triumphed over an ungainly dramatic form. The personification of a quality can never qualify as a person, for every man is an irritatingly complex contradiction, unique except when part of a crowd; and great art must portray the general through the unique, as through Hamlet or Quixote, Oedipus or Panurge. Experiment and ingenuity would need another century to transform the dull morality play into the living Elizabethan drama of infinitely variable man.
The great literary event in fifteenth-century England was the establishment of its first printing press. Born in Kent, William Caxton migrated to Bruges as a merchant. In his leisure he translated a collection of French romances. His friends asked for copies, which he made himself; but his hand, he tells us, became “weary and not steadfast with much writing,” and his eyes were “dimed with overmuch lokying on the whit paper.”46 On his visits to Cologne, he may have seen the printing press set up there (1466) by Ulrich Zell, who had learned the new technique in Mainz. In 1471 Colard Mansion organized a printing shop in Bruges, and Caxton resorted to it as a means of multiplying copies of his translation. In 1476 he returned to England, and a year later he installed at Westminster the fonts—perhaps the presses—that he had brought from Bruges. He was already fifty-five, and only fifteen years were left him; but in that period he printed ninety-eight books, several of them translated by himself from the Latin or the French. His choice of titles, and the quaint and charming style of his prefaces, laid a lasting mark on English literature. When he died (1491) his Alsatian associate, Wynkyn de Worde, carried on the revolution.
In 1485 Caxton edited and published one of the most lovable masterpieces of English prose—The Noble Histories of King Arthur and of Certain of His Knights. Its strange author had died, probably in prison, some sixteen years before. Sir Thomas Malory, in the Hundred Years’ War, served in the retinue of Richard de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, and represented Warwick in the Parliament of 1445. Lon
esome for the license of war, he broke into the home of Hugh Smyth, raped Hugh’s wife, extorted a hundred shillings from Margaret Kyng and William Hales, broke again into Hugh Smyth’s house, and again raped the wife. He stole seven cows, two calves, and 335 sheep, twice looted the Cistercian Abbey at Coombe, and was twice clapped into jail. It seems incredible that such a man should have written that tender swan song of English chivalry which we now call Le Morte d’Arthur; but after a century of dispute it is agreed that these delightful romances were the product of Sir Thomas Malory’s incarcerated years.47
He took most of the stories from the French forms of the Arthurian legends, arranged them in tolerable sequence, and phrased them in a style of wistful, feminine charm. To an aristocracy losing chivalry in the brutalities and treacheries of war, he appealed for a return to the high standards of Arthur’s knights, forgetting their transgressions and his own. Arthur, after outgrowing fornication and incest, settles down with his pretty but venturesome Guinevere, governs England—indeed, all Europe—from his capital a Camelot (Winchester), and requires the 150 knights of his Round Table t pledge themselves
never to do outrage nor murder... by no means to be cruel, but to give mercy unto him that asketh mercy... and always to do . . gentlewomen succour, upon pain of death.48
Love and war are the mingled themes of a book resounding with the combats of incomparable chevaliers for dames and damosels beyond compare. Tristram and Lancelot cuckold their kings, but are the soul of honor and bravery. Encountering each other armored, helmeted, and visored, and hence with their identities concealed, they fight for four hours, until their swords are incarnadined and dull.
Then at last spake Sir Lancelot and said: Knight, thou fightest wonderly well as ever I saw knight, therefore, an it please you, tell me your name. Sir, said Sir Tristram, that is me loath to tell any man my name. Truly, said Sir Lancelot, an I were required, I was never loath to tell my name. It is well said, said Sir Tristram; therefore I require you to tell me your name. Fair knight, he said, my name is Sir Lancelot du Lake. Alas, said Sir Tristram, what have I done? for ye are the man in the world that I love best. Fair knight, said Sir Lancelot, tell me your name. Truly, said he, my name is Sir Tristram de Liones. O Jesu, said Sir Lancelot, what adventure is befallen me! And therewith Sir Lancelot kneeled down and yielded him up his sword. And therewith Sir Tristram kneeled down and yielded him up his sword.... . Then they both forthwith went to the stone, and set them down upon it, and took off their helms .... and either kissed other an hundred times.49
What a leap it is from this airy realm, in which no one ever worked for a living, and all women were “gentlewomen,” to the real matter-of-fact world of the Paston Letters, those living missives that bound a scattered family together in affection and finance in the England of the fifteenth century! Here is John Paston, who practices law in London or on circuit while Margaret rears their children and manages his property at Norwich; he is all business, stern, stingy, competent; she is all submission, a humble, able, timid wife, who trembles at the thought that she has offended him;50 such were the Guineveres of the actual world. And yet here too are delicate sentiments, mutual solicitude, even romance; Margery Brews confesses to Sir John Paston II that she loves him, and mourns that the dowry she can bring him falls far below his state; “but if ye love me, as I trust verily ye do, ye will not leave me therefore”; and he, master of the Paston fortune, marries her despite the complaints of his relatives—and himself dies within two years. There were hearts tender and bruised under the hard surface of that disordered age.
VII. THE ENGLISH HUMANISTS
We must not wonder that the exuberance of classical scholarship in the Italy of Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici awoke only a timid echo in an England whose merchants cared little for letters, and whose nobles were not ashamed of illiterate wealth. Sir Thomas More, at the outset of the sixteenth century, reckoned that some 40 per cent of the English people could read.51 The Church and the universities which she controlled were as yet the sole patrons of scholars. It is to the credit of England that under these circumstances, and amid the waste and violence of war, men like Grocyn, Linacre, Latimer, and Colet were touched by the Italian fire, and brought enough of its heat and light to England to make Erasmus, Europe’s arbiter litterarum, feel at home when he came to the island in 1499. The humanists, devoted to the study of pagan as well as Christian culture, were denounced by a few ingrown “Trojans,” who feared these “Greeks” bringing gifts from Italy; but they were bravely defended and befriended by great churchmen like William of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and, later, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, Chancellor of England.
From the time when Manuel Chrysoloras visited England (1408), some young English scholars caught a fever whose only cure, they felt, was study or lechery in Italy. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, came back from Italy with a passion for manuscripts, and collected a library that afterward enriched the Bodleian. John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, studied under Guarino da Verona at Ferrara and John Argyropoulos at Florence, and returned to England with more books than morals. In 1464–67 the monk William Tilley of Selling studied at Padua, Bologna, and Rome, brought back many pagan classics, and taught Greek at Canterbury.
One of his fervent pupils there was Thomas Linacre. When Tilley went again to Italy (1487), Linacre accompanied him, and remained twelve years. He studied under Politian and Chalcondyles in Florence, edited Greek works for Aldus Manutius in Venice, and returned to England so accomplished in diverse fields of learning that Henry VII summoned him to tutor Arthur, Prince of Wales. At Oxford he and Grocyn and Latimer constituted almost an Oxford Movement toward the classic languages and literatures; their lectures inspired John Colet and Thomas More, and attracted Erasmus himself.52 Linacre was the most universal of the English humanists, at home in Greek and Latin, translating Galen, promoting scientific medicine, founding the Royal College of Physicians and leaving his fortune to endow chairs of medicine at Oxford and Cambridge. Through him, said Erasmus, the new learning was so established in Britain that no Englishman need any longer go to study in Italy.53
William Grocyn was already forty when he joined Linacre in Florence. Returning to England in 1492, he hired rooms in Exeter College, Oxford, and lectured daily on Greek, over the protests of conservatives who trembled lest the original text of the New Testament should upset the thousand-year-old authority of Jerome’s Vulgate Latin translation. But Grocyn was reassuringly orthodox in doctrine and rigidly upright in his moral life. English humanism never developed, as in some scholars of the Italian Renaissance, even a concealed hostility to Christianity; it treasured the Christian heritage above all intellectual refinements, and its most famous disciple found no embarrassment in being dean of St. Paul’s.
John Colet was the eldest son of Sir Henry Colet, a rich merchant who begot twenty-two children and served two terms as mayor of London. At Oxford the youth caught the humanist fervor from Linacre and Grocyn, and “eagerly devoured” Plato, Plotinus, and Cicero. In 1493 he traveled in France and Italy, met Erasmus and Budé in Paris, was strongly moved by Savonarola in Florence, and was shocked by the levity and license of cardinals and Alexander VI in Rome. On his return to England, having inherited his father’s wealth, he might have risen to high place in business or politics, but he preferred scholastic life in Oxford. Ignoring the tradition that only a priest might teach theology, he lectured on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans; he replaced Scholastic dialectic with criticism and elucidation of the Vulgate text; and his large audiences felt refreshed by the novelty of his method, and by his stress on the good life as the best theology. Erasmus, who saw him at Oxford in 1499, described him as a saint perpetually tempted to lust and luxury, but “keeping the flower of his virginity till his death,” scorning the easygoing monks of his time, and dedicating his fortune to pious uses and charity.54
He was a loyal opposition in the Church, loving her despite
her faults. Fie questioned the literal truth of Genesis, but accepted the divine inspiration of the Bible. He foreshadowed the Reformers in stressing the authority of the Scriptures as against ecclesiastical traditions and forms, in rejecting the Scholastic philosophy as an intellectual dilution of simple Christianity, in doubting the confessional powers of priests and the Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated bread, and in denouncing the worldliness of the clergy:
If the highest bishop, whom we call the pope... be a lawful bishop, he of himself does nothing, but God in him. But if he do attempt anything of himself, he is then a breeder of poison.... This has now indeed been done for many years past, and has by this time so increased as to take powerful hold on all members of the Christian Church, so that unless... Jesus lay to His hand with all speed, our most disordered Church cannot be far from death.... Oh, the abominable impiety of those miserable priests, of whom this age contains a great multitude, who fear not to rush from the bosom of some foul harlot into the temple of the Church, to the altars of Christ, to the mysteries of God! On them the vengeance of God will one day fall.55
In 1504 Colet was appointed dean of St. Paul’s. From that high pulpit he preached against the sale of bishoprics, and the evil of plural benefices held by one man. He aroused an angry opposition, but Archbishop Warham protected him. Linacre, Grocyn, and More were now established in London, free from the conservatism and scholasticism of Oxford, stimulated by the visits of Erasmus, and soon to enjoy the support of the young Henry VIII. Everything seemed prepared for an English Renaissance that would move hand in hand with a peaceful Reformation.